American Writers, Supplement III

SUPPLEMENT HI, Part 1 John Ashbery to Walker Percy

supplementy iii ,part 2

Philip Roth to Louis Zukofsky and Cumulative Index

AMERICAN WRITERS A Collection of Literary Biographies LEA BAECHLER A. WALTON LITZ General Editors

SUPPLEMENT III, Part I John Ashbery to Walker Percy SUPPLEMENT III, Part 2 Philip Roth to Louis Zukofsky and Cumulative Index to Volumes 1—4 and Supplements I, II, and III CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS MACMILLAN LIBRARY REFERENCE USA NEW YORK

Copyright O 1991 by Charles Scribner's Sons Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data American writers: a collection of literary biographies. Suppl. 3 edited by Lea Baechler and A. Walton Lttz. 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. 1. Henry Adams to T.S. Eliot — v. 2. Ralph Waldo Emerson to Carson McCullers — [etc.] — Supplements] — [etc.] — 3, pt I. John Ashbery to Walker Percy. 3, pt 2. Philip Roth to Louis Zukofsky. 1. American Literature — History and criticism. 2. American literature — Bio*bibiography. 3. Authors, American — Biography. I. linger, Leonard, ed. II. Baechler, Lea. III. Litz, A. Walton. IV. University of Minnesota. Pamphlets on American writers. PS129.AS5 810».9 73-1759 ISBN 0-684-19196-2 (Set) ISBN 0-684-19356-6 (Pan 1) ISBN 0484-19357-4 (Part 2) Charles Scribner's Sons 1633 Broadway New York, NY 10019

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Acknowledgment is gratefully made to those publishers and individuals who have permitted the use of the following materials in copyright. "John Ashbery" Excerpts from "A Wave," "As One Pitt Drunk into the PacketBoat," "At North Farm," "Down by the Station, Early in the Morning/' "Fantasia," "Litany," "Paradoxes and Oxymorons," "The Pursuit of Happiness," "Scheherazade," "Syringa," "Tapestry," and "Worsening Situation," from Selected Poems by John Ashbery.

Copyright © 1973, 1974, 1975, 1979, 1980, 1981, 1983, 1984 by John Ashbery. Reprinted by permission of Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Books USA Inc. and Carcanet Press, Ltd. Excerpts from "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror,** copyright O 1974 by John Ashbery, from Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror by John Ashbery; and excerpt from "The Ice Storm," from April Galleons by John Ashbery. Copyright O 1984, 1985, 1986, 1987 by John Ashbery. Used by permission of Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Books USA Inc. and from Selected Poems by John Ashbery by permission of Carcanet Press, Ltd. Excerpts from "The Instruction Manual," "The Painter,** "Some Trees,** and "Two Scenes** from Some

Trees. Copyright O 19S6 by John Ashbery. Excerpts from "Decoy," **Farm Implements and Rutabagas in a Landscape,** "Fragment," "Soonest Mended/* fromThe Double Dream of Spring. Copyright® 1970, 1969, 1967, 1966 by John Ashbery. Exceipts from "Clepsydra/* and "The Skaters** from Rivers & Mountains. Copyright © 1962 by John Ashbery. Reprinted by permission of Georges Boichaidt, Inc. for the author, and Carcanet Press, Ltd. Excerpts from "A Last World** and "Europe,** Copyright © 1962 by John Ashbery. Reprinted from The Tennis Court Oath by permission of University Press of New England. Excerpt of interview from "John Ashbery (1976),** by Richard Kostelanetz, in The Old Poetries and the New (University of Michigan, 1981), by permission of the author (P.O. Box 444, Prince Street, New York, NY 10012-0008), copyright © 1976, 1981 by Richard Kostelanetz. Quote by John Ashbery from "John Ashbery** by A. Poulin, Jr. from a prose transcription of a videotape interview in October, 1969, sponsored by the Brockport Writers Forum, Department of English, State University College, Brockport, N. Y. 14420. All rights reserved, State University of New York. Reprinted by permission of A. Poulin, Jr., and John Ashbery. "Djuna Barnes** Excerpts from "From Fifth Avenue Up** and "Suicide** from Selected Works by Djuna Barnes. © The Author's League Fund, 234 West 44th Street, New York, NY 10036 as literary executor of the Estate of Djuna Barnes. "Louise Began" Excerpts from The Blue Estuaries by Louise Began. Copyright © 1968 by Louise Bogan. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Inc. "Gwendolyn Brooks** Excerpts from "The Anniad," "The Artists* A Models* Ball,** "A Bronzeville Mother . . . , * * "The Bean Eaters,** "The Chicago Picasso,** "In Honor of David Anderson Brooks,** "The Lovers of the Poor,** Maud Martha, "The Murder,** "The Progress,*' "Riot," "Speechtothe Young,** "The Sundays of Satin Legs . . . ,""Tothe Young,** and "The Wall.'* All verse by Gwendolyn Brooks, copyright 1987. Published in Blacks by The David Company, Chicago, Illinois 60619. Reprinted by permission of the author. "William S. Burroughs** Excerpts from Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs. Copyright €> 1959 by William S. Burroughs, renewed copyright © 1987,1990 by William S. Burroughs. Used by permission of Grove Press, Inc. Excerpts from Queer by William S. Burroughs. Copyright © 1985 by William S. Burroughs. Used by permission of Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Books USA Inc. Excerpts of interview with William S. Burroughs by Conrad Knickerbocker from Writers at Work. Third Series edited by George Plimpton. Copyright © 1967 by The Paris Review. Used by permission of Viking Penguin, a Division of Penguin Books USA Inc. Excerpts of letters from William S. Burroughs m Letters to Allen Ginsberg. Copyright © 1982 by William S. Burroughs. Reprinted by permission of Wylie, Aitken & Stone, Inc. "Raymond Carver** Excerpts from "Miracle** and "On an Old Photograph of My Son" from A New Path to the Waterfall by Raymond Carver. Copyright © 1989 by the estate of Raymond Carver. Used with permission of Atlantic Monthly Press.

"Jack Kerouac** Excerpt from Mexico City Blues by Jack Kerouac. Copyright C 1959 by Jack Kerouac; copyright renewed © 1987 by Jan Kerouac. Used by permission of Grove Press, Inc. "Rimbaud** from Scattered Poems by Jack Kerouac. Copyright© 1970,1971 by The Estate of Jack Kerouac. Reprinted by permission of City Lights Books. "Galway Kinnell** "Another Night in the Ruins,** "The Bear,** "How Many Nights/* "The Last River,** and "Vapor Trail Reflected in the Frog Pond'* from Body Rags by Galway Kinnell. Copyright C 1965, 1966,1967 by Galway Kinnell. Excerpts from "The Hen Flower,** "Lastness,** "Little Sleep's-Head Harouting Hair in the Moonlight,** "The Shoes of Wandering,** and "Under the Maud Moon** from The Book of Nightmares by Galway Kinnell. Copyright © 1971 by Galway Kinnell. Excerpts from "The Feast*' from First Poems 1946-1954 in Selected Poems by Galway Kinnell. Copyright © 1982 by Galway Kinnell. Excerpts from "The Apple,** "Blackberry Eating,** "52 Oswald Street," "Flying Home," "The Last Hiding Place of Snow," "The Sadness of Brothers," "The Still Time," and "There are Things I tell to No one" from Mortal Acts, Mortal Words by Galway Kinnell. Copyright © 1980 by Galway Kinnell. Excerpts from "The Frog Pond,'* "The Past,** and "The Waking*' from The Past by Galway Kinnell. Copyright © 1985 by Galway Kinnell. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Co. Excerpts from "The River That Is East," from Flower Herding on Mount Monadnock by Galway Kinnell. Copyright © 1984 by Galway Kinnell. Excerpts from "The Avenue Bearing the Initials of Christ into the World," and "Freedom, New Hampshire" from What A Kingdom It Was by Galway Kinnell. Copyright © 1960 by Galway Kinnell. Copyright © 1988 by Galway Kinnell. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Co. and Andrew Deutsch, Ltd. Excerpt of interview with Galway Kinnell by Louis Smith Brady from New York Woman Magazine. Copyright 1990 by New York Woman Magazine. Excerpt from "Approaching Home Ground: Galway Kinnell's Mortal Acts, Mortal Words" by Lorrie Goldensohn, Massachusetts Review, Summer 1984. Reprinted from The Massachusetts Review, © 1985 The Massachusetts Review, Inc. Excerpts of interviews with Galway Kinnell by Wayne Dodd and Stanley Plumly in The Ohio Review, Fall 1972. Reprinted by permission of Wayne Dodd, Stanley Plumly, and The Ohio Review. Excerpt from "Galway Kinnell" by Charles G. Bell in Contemporary Poets, 3rd Edition, edited by James Vinson. Reprinted by permission of St. Martin's Press, Inc. Excerpts from interview with Galway Kinnell by A. Poulin Jr. and Stan S. Rubin; and excerpt of interview with Galway Kinnell by William Heyen and Gregory Fitz Gerald from a prose transcription of a videotape interview in October, 1969, sponsored by the Brockport Writers Forum, Department of English, State University College, Brockport, N. Y. 14420. All rights reserved, State University of New York. Excerpt from "A Winter Daybreak Above Vence" from This Journey by James Wright. Copyright © 1980 by Anne Wright, Executrix of the Estate of James Wright. Reprinted by permission of Random House, Inc. "Stanley Kunitz" Excerpts from "The Crystal Cage," "King of the River," "The Layers," "The Portrait," "Quinnapoxet," "River Road," "The Testing-Tree, * * * 'The Way Down'' from The Poems of Stanley Kunitz 1928-1978 by Stanley Kunitz. Copyright © 1957,1966,1968,1970, 1971, 1978, 1979 by Stanley Kunitz. Excerpts from "The Approach to Thebes," "Father and Son," "For the Word is Flesh," "No Word," "Open the Gates," "Poem," "Welcome the Wrath" from

Selected Poems, 1928-1958 by Stanley Kunitz. Copyright 1929, 1930,1944, copyright © 1957 by Stanley Kunitz. Excerpt from "Of 'Father and Son* " from A Kind cf Order, A Kind of Folly by Stanley Kunitz. By permission of Little, Brown and Company. Excerpt from 4 'The Snakes of September'* from Next-to-Last Things by Stanley Kunitz. Copyright © 1985 by Stanley Kunitz. Used by permission of Atlantic Monthly Press. Excerpt from "The Wellfleet Whale" from The Wellfleet Whale and Companion Poems by Stanley Kunitz. Copyright © 1944 by Stanley Kunitz. Reprinted by permission of the author. Excerpts from interviews with Stanley Kunitz from The Paris Review. Copyright © 1977, by The Paris Review and in 1985 by Stanley Kunitz. Reprinted by permission of The Paris Review and the author. "Denise Levertov" Excerpt from "Midnight Gladness" from A Door in the Hive. Copyright © 1984, 1987, 1988, 1989 by Denise Levertov. Excerpt from "Variations on a Theme by Rilke" from Breathing the Water. Copyright © 1984, 1985, 1986, 1987 by Denise Levertov. Excerpts from "Mass for the Day of St. Thomas Didymus" from Candles in Babylon. Copyright© 1978,1979,1980,1981,1982 by Denise Levertov. Excerpts from "Christmas 1944," "The Dogwood," "Jackson Square," "To The Snake," and "With Eyes at the Back of our Heads'* from Collected Earlier Poems 1940-1960. Copyright © 1958,1959,1960,1961,1979 by Denise Levertov. "To the Reader" and excerpts from "The Altar in the Street," "Eros at Temple Stream," "The Jacob's Ladder," "The Olga Poems," "A Place to Live," and "To Stay Alive" from Collected Poems 1968-1972. Copyright © 1958, 1959, 1960, 1961, 1962, 1963, 1964, 1965, 1966 by Denise Levertov. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation. "James Merrill" Excerpts from "Days of 1964," "Dream About Clothes," "The Emerald," and "Up and Down" from Braving the Elements; excerpt from "Lost in Translation'* from Divine Comedies; excerpts from "Another August," "The Friend of the Fourth Decade," and "Mornings in a New House,** from The Fire Screen; excerpt from a poem beginning "I must begin . . . " from First Poems; excerpt from a poem beginning "The message hardly needs . . . ," from Mirabell: Books of Number; excerpt from "The Thousand and Second Night,*' from Nights and Days; excerpt from a poem beginning "Giving up its whole . . . " from Scripts for the Pageant; excerpt from a poem beginning' * We were not tough- . . . " from The Changing Light at Sandover; excerpts from "Fire Poem," "Scenes of Childhood," "A Tenancy," and "An Urban Convalescence,** from Water Street. Reprinted by permission of James Merrill. Excerpt from a poem beginning' 'Humbly our old poets . . . * * from The Inner Room by James Merrill. Copyright © 1988 by James Merrill. Reprinted by permission of Alfred, A. Knopf, Inc. "W. S. Merwin" Excerpts from "The Approaches," "Elegy," "Homeland,** "In the Time of the Blossoms,** "Lackawana," and "Presidents** from The Carrier of Ladders. Copyright © 1967, 1968, 1969, 1970 by W. S. Merwin. Excerpts from "East of the Sun and West of the Moon* * and "Fable" from The Dancing Bears. Copyright © 1954, 1975 by W. S. Merwin. Excerpt from * 'The Portland Going Out*' from The Drunk in the Furnace. Copyright © 1956,1957,1958,1959,1960,1975 by W. S. Merwin. Excerpts from "The Animals," and "The Hydra** torn The Lice. Copyright © 1963,1964, 1965,1966, 1967 by W. S.

Merwin. Excerpts from "Anabasis (II)" and "A Poem for Dorothy" from A Mask for Janus. Copyright © 1952,1975 by W. S. Merwin. Excerpts from "The Crossroads of the World etc," "The Man Who Writes Ants," and "Recognition" from The Moving Target. Copyright © 1960, 1961, 1962, 1963 by W. S. Merwin. Excerpts from "Berryman," "A Pause by the Water," and "Talking" from Opening the Hand. Copyright © 1983 by W. S. Merwin. Excerpt from "The Silence Before Harvest" from Writings to an Unfinished Accompaniment. Copyright © 1969, 1970,1971,1972,1973 by W. S. Merwin. Reprinted by permission of Georges Borchardt Inc. for the author. Excerpts from "The Archaic Maker," "Losing a Language," "Night Above the Avenue" "Sight," "The Solstice," "Summer '82," "Term** and "West Wall," from The Rain in the Trees by W. S. Merwin. Copyright © 1988 by W. S. Merwin. Reprinted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. Quote from Ezra Pound in postcard to W. S. Merwin. Copyright © 1991 by the Ezra Pound Literary Property Trust. "Philip Roth** Excerpts from The Anatomy Lesson, copyright © 1983, 1988 by Philip Roth; The Counterlife, copyright © 1986 by Philip Roth; The Facts, copyright © 1989 by Philip Roth; The Ghost Writer, copyright © 1979 by Philip Roth; The Great American Novel, copyright © 1973 by Philip Roth; The Professor of Desire, copyright © 1977 by Philip Roth; Reading Myself and Others, copyright © 1975 by Philip Roth; Zuckerman Bound, copyright © 1979 by Philip Roth; Zuckerman Unbound, copyright © 1981 by Philip Roth. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Inc. "Susan Sontag" Excerpts from Styles of Radical Will, copyright © 1969 by Susan Sontag; A Trip to Hanoi, copyright © 1968 by Susan Sontag; and Under the Sign of Saturn, copyright © 1980 by Susan Sontag. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Inc. Excerpts from Against Interpretation, copyright © 1966 by Susan Sontag. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Inc. and Andrew Deutsch Ltd. Excerpts from Aids and Its Metaphors, copyright © 1989 by Susan Sontag; Illness as Metaphor, copyright © 1978 by Susan Sontag; On Photography, copyright 1977 by Susan Sontag; and Susan Sontag Reader, copyright © 1982 by Susan Sontag. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Inc. and Penguin Books Ltd. Excerpts of interview with Susan Sontag by Paul Brennan in London Magazine, March/April 1979. Reprinted by permission of the author and London Magazine Editions. Excerpt from "Sontag's Urbanity" by D. A. Miller in October, Vol. 49, Summer 1989. Reprinted by permission of The MTT Press and the author. Excerpts of interview with Susan Sontag by Geoffrey Movius, reprinted by permission of Geoffrey Movius from the New Boston Reveiw, 1975. Excerpts from "Radical Styles** by William Phillips first appeared in the Partisan Review, vol. 36, no. 3, 1969. Copyright © 1969 by the Partisan Review Inc. Excerpt of interview with Susan Sontag in Salmagundi, 1975. Reprinted by permission. Excerpt from article by Richard Bernstein, The New York Times, January 26, 1989. Copyright © 1989 by The New York Times Company. Reprinted by permission. Excerpt from "High Prophetess of High Fashion" by George P. Elliott, in The Times Literary Supplement. March 17, 1978. Reprinted by permission of The Times Literary Supplement. "Jean Tooroer" The lines from "Karintha," "Song of the Son,** and "Seventh Street*' are reprinted from Cane by Jean Toomer by permission of

Liveright Publishing Corporation. Copyright 1923 by Boni Liveright. Copyright renewed 1951 by Jean Toomer. From poem beginning "Above my sleep . . ." Reprinted by permission of The Estate of Jean Toomer. "Alice Walker" "Women" from Revolutionary Petunias and Other Poems, copyright © 1970 by Alice Walker, reprinted by permission of Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc. "Richard Wilbur" Excerpts from "Advice to a Prophet," "A Hole in the Floor," "Someone Talking to Himself," and "The Undead," in Advice to a Prophet and Other Poems, copyright © 1961 and renewed 1989 by Richard Wilbur; excerpts from "The Mind-Reader" in The MindReader: New Poems, copyright © 1976 by Richard Wilbur; excerpts from "The Lilacs" in Walking to Sleep, copyright © 1963 by Richard Wilbur; excerpts from "On the Marginal Way" in Walking to Sleep, copyright © 1956 by Richard Wilbur; reprinted by permission of Harcourt Bace Jovanovich, Inc. and Faber and Faber Ltd. Excerpts from "Beautiful Changes," "First Snow at Alsace," "Mind Country," "Praise in Summer," and "Water Walker" in The Beautiful Changes and Other Poems, copyright 1947 and renewed 1975 by Richard Wilbur; excerpts from "Ceremony," "Conjuration," "A glance from the Bridge," and "Pan of a Letter," in Ceremony and Other Poems, copyright 1950 and renewed 1978 by Richard Wilbur; excerpts from "Alatus," All that Is," "Hamlen Brook," "ShadTime," and "Trolling for Blues" in New and Collected Poems, copyright © 1988 by Richard Wilbur; excerpts from "A Baroque Wall-fountain in the Villa Sciarra" in Things of This World, copyright 1955 and renewed 1983 by Richard Wilbur; excerpts from "An Event" and "Love Calls Us to the Things of this World" in Things of This World, copyright © 1956 and renewed 1984 by Richard Wilbur. Reprinted by permission of Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Inc. "James Wright" Excerpts from "The Accusation," "All the Beautiful are Blameless," "At the Executed Murderer's Grave," "A Blessing," "But Only Mine," "A Christmas Greeting," "A Fit Against the Country," "A Horse," "Having Lost My sons, I Confront the Wreckage of the Moon: Christmas, 1960," "In Response to a Rumor that the

Oldest Whorehouse in Wheeling, West Virginia, Has Been Condemned," "Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy's Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota," "The Minneapolis Poem," "The Morality of Poetry," "On the Skeleton of a Hound," "An Offering for Mr. Bluehart," "Old Man Drunk," "A Poem about George Doty in the Death House," "A Song for the Middle of the Night," "to a Defeated Savior," and "To the Muse." Reprinted from Collected Poems by James Wright. © 1971 by James Wright. Wesleyan University Press, by permission of the University Press of New England. Excerpt from "The Journey" from This Journey by James Wright. Copyright © 1982 by Anne Wright, Executrix of the Estate of James Wright. Reprinted by permission of Random House, Inc. Excerpts from Above the River by James Wright. Copyright © 1990 by Anne Wright. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Inc. Excerpts from "Poem" and "To Justify My Singing" reprinted from the Winter 1990 issue of The Gettysburg Review by permission of the editor. "Louis Zukofsky" Excerpts from "A-6" and "A-12" from "A" by Louis Zukofsky. Copyright © 1979 Celia and Louis Zukofsky. Reprinted by permission of The University of California Press. Postcard from the Gotham Book Mart advertising "A"-9, reprinted by permission of the Gotham Book Mart. Excerpt from review of Paul Zukofsky, The New York Times, December 1956. Copyright © 1956 by The New York Times Company. Reprinted by permission. Excerpt of review by Michael Steinberg, The Boston Globe, 1965. Reprinted courtesy of The Boston Globe. Excerpt from "After Reading Barely and Widely" by Robert Duncan from The Opening of the Field. Copyright © 1960 by Robert Duncan. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation. Excerpt from review, " 'An Extraordinary Sensitivity': Zukofsky's 55 Poems" by William Carlos Williams. Copyright © 1991 by William Eric and Paul H. Williams. Reprired by permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation. Excerpts of letters from Ezra Pound to Harriet Monroe, and excerpt of wire from Ezra Pound to Floss Williams © 1991 by the Trustees of the Ezra Pound Literary Property Trust. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation, agents. Excerpt of letter from Harriet Monroe to Ezra Pound, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Library. Reprinted by permission of Mrs. John Arnold Howe. Excerpt of letter from H.B. Lathrop to Ezra Pound, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Library.

Introduction

encounter a thorough penetration of Carver's lifetime work. Written by recognized experts, young scholars, and poet-critics, the essays collected here also reflect the range and variety of approach exhibited in recent literary study: balancing cultural history and literary biography with thorough analyses of individual major works, these essays are characterized, where appropriate, by their engagement of literary theory, feminist and Afro-American interpretations, and the political or aesthetic ideologies of their subjects. Continuing the tradition set forth in the previous supplements, these two volumes are attentive to women writers, emphasizing both writers who have recently enjoyed revived critical and popular attention—Louise Bogan, Djuna Barnes, Gwendolyn Brooks, Susan Glaspell—and contemporary women authors who have established their reputations as writers and maintained that status with continued and significant literary output, among them Denise Levertov and Toni Morrison. Also well-represented are African American writers, including Jean Toomer, Alice Walker, and Frederick Douglass, and an impressive number of social, historical, and cultural writers and critics. In fact, Supplement III is distinguished by a table of contents that includes writers and critics as diverse as William S. Burroughs and Lionel Trilling, John McPhee and Susan Sontag, Jack Kerouac and Sam Shepard, Truman Capote and Philip Roth, Elizabeth Hardwick and Tom Wolfe, John Ashbery and James Wright. An eclectic collection, these two volumes are also

The original four volumes of American Writers: A Collection of Literary Biographies (1974) assembled the ninety-seven essays that had first appeared between 1959 and 1972 as the University of Minnesota Pamphlets on American Writers, a series of "introductory essays . . . aimed at people (general readers here and abroad, college students, etc.) . . . interested in the writers concerned, but not highly familiar with their work." Characteristically, however, the essays of the initial series and the subsequent supplementary volumes have successfully integrated criticism with biographical detail in such a way as to address and to inform both the general reader and the specialist. Like the essays in Supplement I (2 vols., 1979) and Supplement II (2 vols., 1981), the twentynine essays in this third supplement maintain the original goals of the series, each providing—for students in secondary and advanced education, librarians, scholars, critics, and teachers—a comprehensive treatment of the work and life of each author. And while the essay on Louis Zukofsky bears special mention as the first intensive examination of that poet's literary life and canon, a number of the essays in Supplement III offer the fullest biographical/critical accounts of their subjects to date. This feature of the present supplement is, to some extent, due to the volumes' responsiveness to contemporary writers who in the last several decades have clearly established the lasting import of their literary contributions. The essay on Raymond Carver is a particular case in point, for with it, in light of Carver's early death in August 1988, readers will IX

jc / INTRODUCTION notable for the number of essays devoted to poets, often contemporary ones, and their presence here reflects the richly various poetic undertakings of writers from the second half of this century. Besides those already mentioned, the poets presented in these two volumes include a number who came to maturity in the last two decades— among them Gal way Kinnell, James Merrill, W. S. Merwin, Richard Wilbur—and Stanley Kunitz, whose literary activity as both a poet and teacher for over sixty years has influenced and engaged several generations of writers and readers. As with the essays of the original series, Supplement III offers expertly conceived and informative essays on writers who portray the rich diversity of our literary heritage. These writers remind us, by their disparate yet bold endeavors

of the literary life, that the readers of each generation must continue to reevaluate the impact and influence of particular writers and their major works in order to maintain the vitality of that heritage. It is appropriate, at this point, to mention two writers who died before this work was brought to completion: the novelist Walker Percy (May 1916 - May 1990), whose novels explore universal questions within a solidly American tradition, and David Craig Austin (August 1961 — March 1991), poet and essayist, who contributed valuable editorial assistance on several Scribner reference projects, and who wrote two essays in a companion volume (Modern American Women Writers) to the series, along with the piece on James Wright in this book. LEA BAECHLER A. WALTON UTZ

Editorial Staff Managing Editor

SYLVIA K. MILLER Assistant Editor

VIDA PETRONIS Copyeditors

JONATHAN ARETAKIS MELISSA DOBSON EMILY GARLIN GRETCHEN GORDON ERIC HARALSON PATTERSON LAMB KAREN READY LUCY RINEHART ELIZABETH WILSON Proofreaders

JONATHAN ARETAKIS DEBRA FEUERBERG JERILYN FAMIGHETTI CAROL HOLMES SUSAN CONVERSE WINSLOW Indexer

ASTOR INDEXERS

Publisher

KAREN DAY

Contents Parti Introduction

vii

List of Contributors

xiii

JOHN ASHBERY John Shoptaw

1

ELIZABETH HARDWICK Janet Gray

193

JACK KEROUAC Ann Charters

217

235

DJUNA BARNES Noel Riley Fitch

31

GALWAY KINNELL Celeste Goodridge

47

STANLEY KUNITZ Grace Schulman

257

LOUISE BOGAN Wendy Hirsch GWENDOLYN BROOKS Carole K. Doreski

DENISE LEVERTOV William Doreski

271

69

WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS Vincent Passaro

91

JOHN McPHEE Norman Sims

289

TRUMAN CAPOTE Randy Malamud

111

JAMES MERRILL J. D. McClatchy

317

RAYMOND CARVER Gary Williams

135

W. S. MERWIN James Kraus

339

FREDERICK DOUGLASS Mason I. Lowance, Jr.

153

TONI MORRISON Valerie Smith

361

SUSAN GLASPELL Milton I. Levin

175

WALKER PERCY Veronica Makowsky

383

xiii

xiv I CONTENTS

Part 2 ALICE WALKER Janet Gray

517

431

RICHARD WILBUR Peter Sacks

541

567

451

TOM WOLFE Michelle Preston JAMES WRIGHT David Craig Austin

589

LOUIS ZUKOFSKY Tim Redman

609

Index

633

PHILIP ROTH Peter Cooper

401

SAM SHEPARD J. Ellen Gainor

SUSAN SONTAG Celeste Goodridge

JEAN TOOMER Brian A. Bremen

475

LIONEL TRILLING James M. Buzard

493

Contributors Noil Riley Fitch. Visiting lecturer, University of Southern California, Los Angeles. Author of Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation: A History of Literary Paris in the Twenties and Thirties; Literary Cafes of Paris; Hemingway in Paris; and numerous journal articles and chapters in books. Co-editor of Faith and Imagination. DJUNA BARNES

David Craig Austin. Poet and writer. Contributor to Scribner's Modern American Women Writers. JAMES WRIGHT Brian A. Bremen. Assistant Professor of English, University of Texas, Austin. Author of essays on James Joyce and William Carlos Williams and of conference papers on the development of ethnic identities in the twentieth century. JEAN TOOMER

J. Ellen Gainor. Assistant Professor of Theatre, Cornell University. Author of Shaw's Daughters: Dramatic and Narrative Constructions of Gender, and articles on Bernard Shaw and Susan Glaspell. SAM SHEPARD

James M. Buzard. Junior Fellow, Society of Fellows, Harvard University. Author of articles on E. M. Forster, John le Carre, Byron, and William Morris. LIONEL TRILLING Ann Charters. Professor of English, University of Connecticut. Author of Kerouac: a Biography; Olson/Melville: A Study in Affinity; and Beats & Company: Portrait of a Literary Generation. Editor of Scattered Poems by Jack Kerouac; Three Lives and Q. E. D. by Gertrude Stein; The Beats: Literary Bohemians in Postwar America; and The Story and Its Writer. JACK KEROUAC

Celeste Goodridge. Assistant Professor of English, Bowdoin College. Author of Hints and Disguises: Marianne Moore and her Contemporaries. SUSAN SONTAG; GALWAY KINNELL Janet Gray. Graduate student in English, Princeton University. ELIZABETH HARDWICK; ALICE WALKER Wendy Hirsch. Graduate student, Columbia University. Review in The American Scholar. Editorial contributor to the Prentice-Hall Twentieth-Century American Literature. LOUISE BOGAN

Peter Cooper. Examiner, Educational Testing Service. Author of Thomas Pynchon and the Contemporary World, articles, and research reports. PHILIP ROTH C. K. Doreski. Assistant Professor of English, Emmanuel College. Author of numerous articles; co-author of How to Read and Interpret Poetry. GWENDOLYN BROOKS

James Kraus. Associate Professor of English, Chaminade University. Author of The Biopoetics of Gary Snyder: A Study of the Poet as Ecologist, as well as essays and poetry in such journals as Virginia Quarterly Review; San Marcos Review; and Chaminade Literary Review. W. S. MERWIN

William Doreski. Associate Professor of English, Keene State College. Author of The Years of Our Friendship: Robert Lowell and Allen Tate, and of articles and reviews in various journals. DENISE LEVERTOV

Milton I. Levin. Professor Emeritus, English, Trenton State College. Author of Noel Coward;

xv

jcvi / CONTRIBUTORS co-author of A Student's Guide to Fifty American Plays; contributor to The Reader's Encyclopedia of World Drama. SUSAN GLASPELL Mason I. Lowance, Jr. Professor of English, University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Author of Increase Mather; Massachusetts Broadsides of the American Revolution; The Language of Canaan: Metaphor and Symbol in New England from the Puritans to the Transcendentalistst and numerous articles on American culture, 16001900. Guggenheim Fellow. FREDERICK DOUGLASS Veronica Makowsky. Associate Professor of English, Louisiana State University. Author of Caroline Gordon: A Biography, and of various articles and reviews on R. P. Blackmur, southern literature, and women's biography. Editor of R. P. Blackmur's Henry Adams and Studies in Henry James. Co-editor of The Henry James Review. WALKER PERCY Randy Malamud. Assistant Professor of English, Georgia State University. Author of The Language of Modernism. TRUMAN CAPOTE

Tim Redman. Assistant Professor of Literary Studies, School of Arts and Humanities, University of Texas, Dallas. Author of Ezra Pound and Italian Fascism, and numerous articles and papers on literature and rhetoric. Louis ZUKOFSKY Peter Sacks. Professor of English and Creative Writing, The Johns Hopkins University. Author of The English Elegy: Studies in the Genre from Spenser to Yeats; and In These Mountains and Promised Lands (both collections of poems). RICHARD WILBUR Grace Schubnan. Poet; Professor of English, Baruch College, City University of New York. Author of Burn Down the Icons and Hemspheres (both collections of poems); and of Marianne Moore: The Poetry of Engagement. Translator of T. Carmi's At the Stone of Losses; and, with Ann Zavala, of Pablo Antonio Cuadra's Songs ofCifar. Poetry Editor, The Nation; former Director, 92nd Street Y Poetry Center. STANLEY KUNITZ John Shoptaw. Assistant Professor of English, Princeton University. Author of On the Outside Looking Out: The Poetry of John Ashbery. JOHN ASHBERY

J. D. McClatchy. Visiting Lecturer, Creative Writing Program, Princeton University. Author of Scenes from Another Life; Stars Principal; The Rest of the Way; and White Paper. Editor of Anne Sexton: The Artist and Her Critics; Recitative: Prose by James Merrill; Poets on Painters; and The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Poetry. JAMES MERRILL

Norman Sims. Associate Professor of Journalism, University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Editor of The Literary Journalists and Literary Journalism in the Twentieth Century. JOHN McPHEE

Vincent Passaro. Adjunct Professor of English/ Creative Writing, Hofstra University. His fiction and criticism have appeared in Harper's; Esquire; 7 Days; and other journals. WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

Valerie Smith. Associate Professor of English, University of California, Los Angeles. Author of Self-Discovery and Authority in Afro-American Narrative; and articles on race, gender, culture, and narrative. TONI MORRISON

Michelle Preston. Writer and editor residing in Princeton, New Jersey. TOM WOLFE

Gary Williams. Professor of English, University of Idaho. RAYMOND CARVER

John Ashbery 1927-

I

relations rather than as isolated terms. In "At North Farm," the opening poem of A Wave, the relational, representative character of Ashbery's poetics is immediately apparent:

N A 1983 interview with John Koethe, John Ashbery offered the following explanation of his poetry by way of advice: "You should try to make your poem as representative as possible/9 Ashbery's own poetry is representative in several ways. First, he will choose particulars for their typical or representative quality. Ashbery told Ross Labile that The Vermont Notebook (1975), for example, was written largely "on buses traveling through New England, though not Vermont. Generally speaking I guess it's a catalogue of a number of things that could be found in the state of Vermont, as well as almost everywhere else." Second, he will use details characteristic of some literary or nonliterary convention. We need not know who the newly wed is in the opening lines of "More Pleasant Adventures" (from A Wave, 1984) in order to recognize it as oral autobiography: "The first year was like icing. / Then the cake started to show through." As the poem exclaims, "Heck, it's anybody's story." But Ashbery commonly writes of personal experiences with details drawn from other lives. In an interview with John Murphy, he described "Soonest Mended" (from The Double Dream of Spring, 1970), for instance, as "my 'One-sizefits-all confessional poem,' which is about my youth and maturing but also about anybody else's." Third, Ashbery's "concrete particulars" are representative because they function in

Somewhere someone is traveling furiously toward you, At incredible speed, traveling day and night, Through blizzards and desert heat, across torrents, through narrow passes. But will he know where to find you, Recognize you when he sees you, Give you the thing he has for you? Hardly anything grows here, Yet the granaries are bursting with meal, The sacks of meal piled to the rafters. The streams run with sweetness, fattening fish; Birds darken the sky. Is it enough That the dish of milk is set out at night, That we think of him some tines, Sometimes and always, with mixed feelings? This lucid but indeterminate poem, crowded with indefinites, may leave readers with a host of questions: Who or what is traveling toward "you"? Does "you" mean "us" or "me"? Where is "here"? What is this poem really talking about? Rather than simply maintaining that the poem means just what it says, or doesn't mean anything, we may read "At North Farm," and any Ashbery poem, by attending to terms in 1

2 / AMERICAN WRITERS their relations. The key relation in "At North Farm/' as the allusion to the postal carrier's motto ("Neither rain nor snow nor gloom of night . . .") suggests, is the postal system, requiring a messenger (or sender), a message, and a receiver. We generate different readings of "At North Farm" depending on what terms we plug into the relational system. We can read the poem self-reflexively as the advent of the poem or new book of poems, amorously as the approach of a new lover, theologically as the coming of Christ (as Santa), autobiographically as the warding off of death, and so on. But "At North Farm" sustains no single meaning throughout. At a further remove, "sacks of meal" (rather than grain) echoes "sacks of mail," "mail" being strangely absent from this postal poem. Ashbery discussed this kind of cryptic revision in an interview with Richard Jackson: "I just wrote a poem this morning in which I used the word 'borders' but changed it to 'boarders.' The original word literally had a marginal existence and isn't spoken, is perhaps what you might call a crypt word." All poets compose, consciously or unconsciously, by means of underlying "crypt words," but in Ashbery's poetry the relations between missing words and those marking their absence take on an added significance. As Ashbery maintains in Three Poems (1972), "the word that everything hinged on is buried back there. . . . It is doing the organizing, the guidelines radiate from its control." Reading Ashbery's poetry, then, involves hearing words in relation to missing words, and taking particulars in relation to the kind of thing or language they represent. Born on July 28, 1927, John Lawrence Ashbery was raised in Sodus, New York, a small town near Lake Ontario in western New York State. His father, Chester Ashbery, operated a fruit farm, where Ashbery worked for several summers canning cherries, a sticky job he does

not remember fondly. His mother, Helen Lawrence Ashbery, had taught biology in high school before she married, and it was in her father's house that Ashbery began reading literature, primarily Victorian novels. Fascinated by a 1937 article in Life on the surrealist exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art, he decided to try his own hand at the visual arts and took painting classes at the art museum in Rochester from the ages of eleven to fifteen. Some still lifes from this period survive. When Ashbery was thirteen, his nineyear-old only brother died of leukemia. At fifteen, Ashbery won a Time current-events award, selecting for his prize Louis Untermeyer's anthology of modern American poetry, which started him writing poetry. He remembers admiring the poetry of Elinor Wylie early on, but not being able to make much of either Wallace Stevens or W. H. Auden. Before he left home in 1943 for two years at Deerfield Academy, Ashbery declared his homosexuality to his mother. He published his first poems in the Deerfield Scroll, but was shocked to learn, at Harvard in 1945, that two of his poems had been stolen by a supposed friend of his at Deerfield and published in Poetry under the name Joel Michael Symington. His first credited publication of poetry, apart from poems in the Deerfield Scroll and the Harvard Advocate, would be in Furioso in 1949. At Harvard, Ashbery majored in English, and, along with Robert Creeley and John Hawkes, studied poetry with Theodore Spencer. In 1947, with the help of Kenneth Koch, Ashbery joined the editorial board of the Harvard Advocate, which published "Some Trees," among others of his poems. He collaborated with Fred Amory on a collage for one of the magazine's covers, and in his last semester at Harvard he met Frank O'Hara. In "A Reminiscence," in Homage to Frank O'Hara (1988), Ashbery recalls being struck by the uncanny similarity of their accents:

JOHN ASHBERY I 3 Though we grew up in widely separate regions of the east, . . . we both inherited the same flat, nasal twang, a hick accent so out of keeping with the roles we were trying to play that it seems to me we probably exaggerated it, later on, in hopes of making it seem intentional. Ashbery wrote his senior thesis on Auden's poetry up to The Sea and the Mirror (1944), a book that influenced his own Three Poems. He met Auden at a reading at Harvard and got to know him through a mutual friend, James Schuyler, in New York. While an undergraduate, Ashbery also heard Wallace Stevens at Harvard give one of his rare poetry readings. After he was turned down for graduate study in English at Harvard and accepted at Columbia, Ashbery moved to New York in the summer of 1949. Kenneth Koch, who had graduated the year before and was encouraging him to move, let him stay in his apartment for the summer. There he met Koch's upstairs neighbor, the painter Jane Freilicher, who became a lifelong friend. She introduced Ashbery to Larry Rivers, another friend for life, and to the world of abstract expressionism. Freilicher illustrated Ashbery's first, small collection of poetry, Turandot and Other Poems (1953). His play The Heroes (an Audenesque assemblage of Theseus, Patroclus, Achilles, Circe, and others in "a living room of an undeterminable period'9) premiered at the Living Theatre in 1952. That year, Ashbery also completed a master's thesis on the novels of Henry Green, a dialogue novelist in vogue at the time. During the same busy year, Ashbery and his constant friend James Schuyler began writing their own dialogue novel, A Nest of Ninnies, which they finished and published in 1969. In comparison with the New York school of painting, the academic school of poetry seemed tame. The tradition of Robert Lowell, John Berryman, Allen Tate, and Randall Jarrell held little interest for Ashbery. His favorite poets during

the late 1940's and early 1950's included Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Delmore Schwartz, and F. T. Prince. Ashbery didn't care for much of Auden's self-consciously colloquial American poetry (The Sea and the Mirror excepted), and his taste for T. S. Eliot would not develop until later. He also began avidly reading the nowneglected poets David Schubert, Laura Riding, John Wheelwright, and the French poet and novelist Raymond Roussel, all of whom he would showcase as "An Other Tradition" in the Charles Eliot Norton lectures he was asked to deliver at Harvard in the 1989-1990 academic year. In 1956 he and O'Hara both submitted poetry manuscripts to the Yale Younger Poets competition, judged by Auden, and both were rejected in the preliminary round. When Auden complained that he did not like any of the manuscripts submitted to him, someone (possibly Auden's companion, Chester Kallman) told him about Ashbery's and O'Hara's rejected submissions. Auden asked to see the manuscripts and chose Ashbery's Some Trees, which O'Hara, in a typically generous review, hailed as the best first volume of poems since Stevens' Harmonium (1923). Some Trees (1956), which included new work and nearly all the poems from Turandot, is as remarkable for what it excludes or slights as for what it presents. There is little detailed description of the world; few of the poems rely on close observation. New York passes unmentioned. Only "Some Trees" and the last section of "The Picture of Little J. A. in a Prospect of Flowers" employ anything like a lyric "I." Nor will the readers of Ashbery's later work find here the prosaic rhythms of speech or the cascading images of the purportedly indistinguishable "Ashbery poem." What we do find in Some Trees are poems of polished, often elevated or archaic diction, high sonic resonance, and high linear definition. Composing more by the line than by the

4 I AMERICAN WRITERS sentence and proceeding more by sound than by sense, Ashbery creates poems that disassemble into their components, each of which collapses into itself, like a self-fulfilling prophecy. Consider the opening lines of "Two Scenes":

the 1940's. Even the often-anthologized, limpid love lyric 44Some Trees," which Ashbery wrote at Harvard in 1948 to one of his male classmates, betrays the caution necessary when behavior is shadowy and unsanctioned:

We see us as we truly behave: From every corner comes a distinctive offering. The train comes bearing joy; The sparks it strikes illuminate the table. Destiny guides the water-pilot, and it is destiny. For long we hadn't heard so much news, such noise. The day was warm and pleasant. 44 We see you in your hair, Air resting around the tips of mountains."

These are amazing: each Joining a neighbor, as though speech Were a still performance. Arranging by chance

Each line echoes itself, and creates, for its duration, a distinct sonic environment. Though syntactically fragmented, the fifth line centers the Miltonic 44water-pilot" within his 4'destiny." And the tight weave of assonance and consonance in the first line submerges the idiomatic wish to "see ourselves as others see us." This folk adage or moral injunction ( 44If you could see yourself!"), however garbled, nevertheless organizes this scene of being seen. The news of who or how we are arrives by rail, sea, or over the wireless as the news and weather. But as the sonic slippage of (4so much news, such noise" suggests, these bulletins carry little more than the ring of truth. 44 But who / Knows anything about our behavior?" Ashbery will ask thirty years later in A Wave; neither in life nor in art does the mask or guard come down. Some Trees is a network of echoes, silences, secrets, ambiguous signs, defenses, and imminent revelations. 44The Grapevine," for instance, begins with a sonorously convoluted warning: 44 Of who we and all they are / You all now know." The secrecy, evasiveness, and selfprotectiveness that have become a trademark of Ashbery's poetry bear some relation to his necessarily covert homosexual lifestyle throughout

To meet as far this morning From the world as agreeing With it, you and I Are suddenly what the trees try To tell us we are: That their merely being there Means something; that soon We may touch, love, explain. Certainly this description of imminent love (such as was prophesied in "Two Scenes") is 4'anybody's story." And the brilliance of Ashbery's keeping what Charles Baudelaire called a4"forest of symbols" to the horizontal, emotional plane of correspondences amazes. Yet this love is unaccompanied by open gestures, even though by mutual agreement the lovers have retreated from the world. The joy of the poem consists in the lovers' being surrounded by the nonjudgmental presences of the trees. Even so, this still performance cannot last, and the guarded time of selfreflection resumes: Placed in a puzzling light, and moving, Our days put on such reticence These accents seem their own defense. In the early 1950's, the United States was embroiled in the Korean War and grappling with the rise of Senator Joseph McCarthy, whose truly reductive imagination equated homosexuals with Communists. It was a time of lists, purges, drafts, and raids on suspicious bars. Ashbery told Richard Kostelanetz:

JOHN ASHBERY / 5 In the early 50's, I went through a period of intense depression and doubt. I couldn't write for a couple of years. . . . It did coincide with the beginnings of the Korean War, the Rosenberg case, and McCarthyism. . . . I was jolted out of this by going with Frank O'Hara—I think it was New Year's Day, 1952—to a concert by David Tudor of John Cage's Music of Changes. With Cage's changes ringing in his ears, the young Ashbery's response to this repressive climate was neither fight nor flight but a resourceful evasive action. In "The Thinnest Shadow" the poet counsels himself (with a disturbingly paternal tone) to make himself a thin, moving target: "A face looks from the mirror / As if to say, / 'Be supple, young man, / Since you can't be gay,' " advice playing on the latent meaning of "gay" that Ashbery first learned in the mid1940's. In "A Boy," Ashbery evades both the paternal repression of gays and the patriarchal oppression of the Korean War. Written in 1951, after Ashbery saw John Huston's mangled film version of Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage, "A Boy" ends with a dire bulletin: They're throwing up behind the lines. Dry fields of lightning rise to receive The observer, the mincing flag. An unendurable age. The crypt phrase "the mincing fag" determines the conclusion. The decade of Ashbery's twenties, after World War II and during the Korean War (neither of which Ashbery fought in), was indeed unendurable. One popular poem in which the artist goes his own way is the flawless sestina "The Painter," the only other Harvard poem included in Some Trees. As in "Some Trees," the enjambed tetrameters of "The Painter" keep to an effortless syntax and a colorless vocabulary, including the poem's end words ("buildings," "portrait," "prayer," "subject," "brush," "canvas"). It

is remarkable, for instance, that the only color word appearing in "The Painter" is "white." With its fixed form and sustained irony, "The Painter" raises the issue of (lawlessness. Yet the poem relies on a productive incongruity between its formal perfection and its Romantic subject matter, the painter in sublime confrontation with the ocean. No Vincent van Gogh or Jackson Pollock, Ashbery's painter is more of a Prufrockian artist who does not think the sea will sit for him. One key model for "The Painter" (as for Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock") is Robert Browning's "Andrea del Sarto (Called 'The Faultless Painter')." With its source material in Giorgio Vasari, long verse paragraphs, and extended apostrophe, and especially with its exploration of the aesthetics and psychology of perfection, "Andrea del Sarto" is also an important model for Ashbery's "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror," for which "The Painter" becomes the preliminary sketch. Like Ashbery's "perfectly white" sestina, Browning's Andrea del Sarto painting is colorless and finished: "All is silver-gray / Placid and perfect with my art." Andrea painstakingly paints his wife, and settles for technical excellence while chafing at the flawed soulful paintings of his rivals Michelangelo and Raphael: Their works drop groundward, but themselves, I know, Reach many a time a heaven that's shut to me, Enter and take their place there sure enough, Though they come back and cannot tell the world. Ashbery literalized these dropping paintings, now thrown seaward by the rival painters, in the concluding tercet of "The Painter": They tossed him, the portrait, from the tallest of the buildings; And the sea devoured the canvas and the brush As if his subject had decided to remain a prayer.

6 I AMERICAN WRITERS The most malleable of the end words in "The Painting" is "subject," meaning subject matter, self, and subjection. To paint his "self-portrait," Ashbery's painter masters his ego (as he had his model wife) and dips his brush into the sea, subjecting his conscious perfections to his oceanic "soul." The paradoxically passive self-expression of abstract expressionism ("Imagine a painter crucified by his subject!") was already in Browning's post-Romantic reading of the Renaissance. "My soul," Ashbery's painter prays (with an implicit pun on "canvas" and "sail"), "when I paint this next portrait / Let it be you who wrecks the canvas." As though drawn on sand, the painting's ambiguous "subject" fails to survive: Finally all indications of a subject Began to fade, leaving the canvas Perfectly white. But "The Painter" succeeds by drawing the mock-heroic proportions of the subject's subjection. Along with' 4 Some Trees'' and * 'The Painter,'' the most anthologized poem in Some Trees is "The Instruction Manual," written in 1955. Unlike the collage narratives of such poems as' 'Popular Songs" or "A Long Novel," "The Instruction Manual" follows a single narrator and a single, simple story from the beginning to an abbreviated end. A harassed, dreamy functionary, under a deadline to "write the instruction manual on the uses of a new metal,'' gazes out the window and fancies he visits "dim Guadalajara! City of rose-colored flowers! / City I wanted most to see, and most did not see, in Mexico!" There is a special nostalgia, Baudelaire tells us in "Invitation to a Voyage," for the "country one does not know." But whereas Baudelaire's imaginary country is richly textured, recessed, and exotic, the "local colors" of Ashbery's Guadalajara are taken from Bishop's and Stevens' elementary palates:

Around stand the flower girls, handing out roseand lemon-colored flowers, Each attractive in her rose-and-blue striped dress (Oh! such shades of rose and blue), And nearby is the little white booth where women in green serve you green and yellow fruit. In an interview with Sue Gangle in 1977, Ashbery provides a fascinating backdrop to this travelogue: I wrote ["The Instruction Manual"] actually when I was working for a publisher [McGrawHill], writing and editing college textbooks. . . . The poem . . . is probably about the dissatisfaction with the work I was doing at the time. And my lack of success in seeing the city I wanted most to see, when I was in Mexico. The long lines in the poem were suggested by Whitman. . . . Also the French poet, Raymond Roussel, whom I later studied in France. Several things are interesting about Ashbery's retrospective sense of "The Instruction Manual." First, unlike the speaker in lyrics such as those from Lowell's Life Studies or Whitman's apostrophe to the Suez Canal, Ashbery's persona is as cartoonish as the characters he imagines ("And, as my way is, I begin to dream"). He takes the reader on a walking tour of Guadalajara, the Proustian place-name ("Here you may see one of those white houses with green trim / That are so popular here. Look—I told you!"), and in fact appears as little more than an embodiment of the discourse of a travelogue. The reduced narrator, his generic observations, the languid (more than ecstatic Whitmanian) long lines, and the pleasant confusion of narrative levels in which we never really leave the frame for the picture, or the world for the map, are all strongly reminiscent of Bishop, whom Ashbery had begun to read in the 1940's. By the time Ashbery had written "The In-

JOHN ASHBERY I 7 struction Manual/' he had received a Fulbright Fellowship to write a thesis on Raymond Roussel in France, where, with some interruptions, he would spend the next decade of his life. Although he did not fulfill his intention of writing a dissertation on Roussel, Ashbery did publish a few articles on him, and even discovered the missing first chapter to Roussel's last, unfinished novel. Not long after his arrival Ashbery met Pierre Martory, an art and music critic for Paris Match, with whom he lived for the next nine years. Ashbery dedicated his second book of poetry, The Tennis Court Oath (1962), to Martory, and—in an unusual tribute—mentions his name as the fellow viewer of Parmigianino's Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror in his best-known poem, of the same title: "Vienna where the painting is today, where / I saw it with Pierre in the summer of 1959." In 1957 Ashbery began writing art reviews for Art News, and in 1960, through the help of Frank O'Hara, Ashbery became an art reviewer for the New York Herald Tribune in Paris. The next year, Ashbery and Harry Matthews, a novelist whom he had met in France, enlisted Kenneth Koch and James Schuyler as coeditors of the Francophile literary review Locust Solus (named for one of Roussel's novels), which ran for two years. Also in 1961, John Myers coined the term "New York school of poetry." Ashbery sees more differences than similarities in the poets of this "school" (from which he was absent at the time it was named). As he explained in 1981 to A. Poulin: I think that Frank O'Hara's life was the subject of his poetry in a way that mine isn't. Although many of his poems are about things that happened to him, people that he knew, events he experienced, these were a kind of springboard for getting into something wider, more poetic. Kenneth Koch is at the opposite extreme, I think, because his work is involved much more deeply

with just words, which are the end result he's after. Really words, rather than a transcending of them, which is what I have always felt I had to do. I might stand halfway between these two, because I don't feel that words are the end of thought and yet I don't feel that experience has to be transformed by words. And Schuyler, Ashbery told Piotr Sommer, "is really much more of a classical poet, I mean he's somebody more resembling Elizabeth Bishop whose work is very clear in structure." Though there were no qualities shared by the New York school of poetry other than a spirit of experimentation, there did exist a family relation of shared experiences, attitudes (a dislike, for instance, of the academic poetry being written in the 1950's), and projects. Ashbery collaborated with Schuyler, Koch, and O'Hara on various short plays and poems. In 1962, to Ashbery's surprise, Wesleyan University Press (with Donald Hall on the board) agreed to publish a collection of his experimental poems written mostly in France, The Tennis Court Oath. The book disappointed critics, who felt shut out from its isolated words and phrases, but, significantly, this volume was singled out for praise by the "language poets" (another illfitting but adhesive label) for its relentless attack on conventional grammar, syntax, voice, and diction. Ashbery himself has expressed mixed feelings about this misshapen offspring. He told Richard Kostelanetz that much of the work was little more than an attempt to break away from the style of Some Trees: "I didn't want to write the poetry that was coming naturally to me then, . . . and I succeeded in writing something that wasn't the poetry I didn't want to write, and yet was not the poetry I wanted to write." Probably no poem of Ashbery's has sent more readers' hands into the air than his detective epic, "Europe," in which Ashbery collaged passages from a British detective novel, Beryl of the Bi-

8 I AMERICAN WRITERS plane (1917), written by William Le Queux during World War I. Le Queux's novel, set almost entirely in England, concerns the exploits of the ace pilots Ronald Pryor and his beloved, Beryl (compare "Ashtery") Gaselee, who fly "The Hornet," an experimental flying machine (like Ashbery's "Europe") equipped with a top-secret "silencer," which allows the pilots to creep up on their prey undetected. The deadly couple work not for the RAF but as undercover agents to protect England from "the enemy within." The book is filled with the mechanisms of detection: Morse and other codes, disguises, and double agents. These doublings, in which the enemy looks and acts "just like you and me," produce a paranoid atmosphere most immediately resembling the McCarthyism of the early 1950's. To see how representative this repressive paranoia is, we need only substitute "Communists," "homosexuals," "Jews," or "obscene artists" for "Germans." Though McCarthy had fallen and America was now an ocean away, Ashbery must have seen poetic possibilities both in the selfreflexively detective and in the sociopolitical dimensions of Le Queux's grim little novel: The engine had stopped, for, half the propeller being broken, the other half had embedded itself deeply into the ground. Collins came running up, half frantic with fear, but was soon reassured by the pair of intrepid aviators, who unstrapped themselves and quickly climbed out of the wreckage. Ere long a flare was lit and the broken wing carefully examined; it was soon discovered that "The Hornet" had been tampered with, one of the steel bolts having been replaced by a painted one of wood! "This is the work of the enemy!" remarked Ronnie thoughtfully. "They cannot obtain sight of the silencer, therefore there has been a dastardly plot to kill both of us. We must be a little more wary in future, dear."

Juxtaposing the above passage from page 61 of Beryl (which preserves the line breaks of the original) with a few of the 111 stanzas from "Europe" will give us an idea of Ashbery's own procedures: 104.

blaze

aviators

out

dastardly

105. We must be a little more wary in future, dear

106. she was trying to make sense of what was quick laugh hotel—cheap for them caverns the bed box of cereal Ere long a flare was lit I don't understand wreckage

107. blue smoke? It was as though She had the river above the water

The steel bolts having been replaced by a painting of one of wood! Ronnie, thoughtfully of the silencer

plot to kill both of us, dear.

pet

oh it that she was there

These stanzas from "Europe" are dotted with the representative conventions of detective fiction. We know what to make of clues such as "steel bolts" or "box of cereal," signs such as

JOHNASHBERY "a flare" or "blue smoke?/* or self-reflexive statements like "she was trying to make sense of/9 whether or not we know their source. We also find romantic conventions, such as Ronnie's unintentionally hilarious, patronizing caution to Beryl. The "wreckage" of Ronnie and Beryl's airplane becomes a figure for "Europe," another postwar wasteland. In stanza 104, the generically descriptive "aviators," "blaze," and "dastardly," along with the colorless "out," litter the open field of the poem in a mannered parody of William Carlos Williams or Charles Olson. In 107, the two-columned wreckage of the poem anticipates the long, double-columned "Litany" of As We Know (1979). On the left wing, we note that Ashbery has slightly altered Le Queux's prose to create the surrealist joke of a steel bolt being replaced by "a painting of' (rather than' "a painted") one in wood. The lines "Ronnie, thoughtfully / of the silencer" duplicate the fracturing of the original prose as determined by the left margin of the published text, whose accidental features Ashbery preserves. And the final isolated words and phrases strewn about are reminiscent both of Anton von Webern's music and the erasures and splatters of Robert Rauschenberg and Jackson Pollock. Ashbery's ungrammatical fragments exceed the always grammatical experiments in "automatic writing" undertaken by surrealists such as Andr£ Breton and Guillaume Apollinaire. The problem with "Europe" is not its obscurity but its clarity. We "get the idea" of "Europe" too quickly and completely for the poem to keep satisfying us. Still, we are fortunate that Ashbery earned his wings of sustained lyric flight with "Europe" rather than, for example, with the moving but sober and essayistic "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror." With "Europe," Ashbery carved out an immense lyric space and dispersed a universe of poetic fragments that would take years to explore and to recollect. The most ambitious and prospective poem in

I 9

The Tennis Court Oath is "A Last World," which in its mythological scope rivals The Waste Land and anticipates Ashbery's own long poem "A Wave." The expansive, consecutive lines of "A Last World" culminate what Ashbery, in an interview with Piotr Sommer, has called "the compromise style" of The Tennis Court Oath: the poem is more disjunct than the poems in Some Trees but less fragmented than poems such as "Europe." Like The Waste Land. "A Last World" diagnoses the sexual disorders of the Western world, in which "passions are locked away, and states of creation are used instead, that is to say synonyms are used." Yet this repressive modern world in which love cannot speak its name is the only one in which poetry, speaking in synonyms, is possible. "A Last World" ends with a wonderfully sentimental apocalypse: Everything is being blown away; A little horse trots up with a letter in its mouth, which is read with eagerness As we gallop into the flame. Once we recognize that the crypt word for "flame" is "sunset," the genre of the western (comically apt for a poem on the Western world) with its prairie winds, its pony express, its rocking-horse young readers, and its society of men riding off together, swings into view. Within the context of the poem, the horse is also the Trojan Horse, which leads to the burning of Troy. But Ashbery's flame is not simply destruction, or even Eliotic purgation, but the flame of desire, which renews private and fuels public life. With its scope, beauty, and intelligence, "A Last World" becomes the most important poem Ashbery had written thus far in his career. Ashbery returned to New York for good in 1965, after his father died of a heart attack. (Frank O'Hara died the following year.) Also in 1965, Ashbery became an executive editor at Art News, where one of his duties was to recruit

10 I AMERICAN WRITERS other poets to do art reviews. The following year, Ashbery published his third major volume of poems, Rivers and Mountains, which marked a return in some ways to the poetry of his first two volumes but also paved the way for many projects to come. "The Skaters/9 for instance, marks a clear advance over the austere discontinuities of 4 'Europe" and in fact has more "personality" (livelier masks) than do any of Ashbery's earlier poems. The same disquieting muses of "The Instruction Manual"—Roussel, Marcel Proust, and Bishop—watch over "The Skaters" (the desert island passage in part three seems to have influenced Bishop's "Crusoe in England" [1976]). And much of "The Skaters" is involved with Proustian places never visited, typical boyhoods never experienced. Yet in many ways "The Skaters" is a kind of farewell to the New York school, as well as to his collage poems. Other playful collages will follow, but not on this romping scale. Ashbery told Kostelanetz that with "The Skaters" he wanted to "put everything in, rather than, as in 'Europe,' leaving things out." As with "Europe," "The Skaters" reproduces passages from another book, this time a British children's book titled Three Hundred Things a Bright Boy Can Do (1911). But the splintered, mysterious lines and stanzas of * 'Europe'' have been replaced by long, easygoing lines reminiscent of "The Instruction Manual." The "instruction manual" Three Hundred Things a Bright Boy Can Do allowed Ashbery to sketch out a representative rather than a reminiscent childhood: Fire Designs.—This is very simple, amusing, and effective. Make a saturated solution of nitrate of potash (common nitre or saltpetre), by dissolving the substance in warm water, until no more will dissolve; then draw with a smooth stick of wood any design or wording on sheets of white tissue paper, let it thoroughly dry, and the drawing will become invisible. By means of a spark

from a smouldering match ignite the potassium nitrate at any part of the drawing, first laying the paper on a plate or tray in the darkened room. The fire will smoulder along the line of the invisible drawing until the design is complete. With its self-reflexive imagery of secrecy, Three Hundred Things a Bright Boy Can Do probably appealed to Ashbery for the same reasons as did Beryl of the Biplane; but the way the text is adapted in "The Skaters" is quite different: In my day we used to make "fire designs," using a saturated solution of nitrate of potash. Then we used to take a smooth stick, and using the solution as ink, draw with it on sheets of white tissue paper. Once it was thoroughly dry, the writing would be invisible. By means of a spark from a smoldering match ignite the potassium nitrate at any part of the drawing, First laying the paper on a plate or tray in a darkened room. The fire will smolder along the line of the invisible drawing until the design is complete. Ashbery does not mount or preserve this passage as a ruin of language or culture (as in "Europe" or Eliot's The Waste Land). Rather, he allows it to devour itself as a self-consuming, protean artifact. This temporal, more than spatial, "leaving-out business" produces here the sudden transformation from cliched reminiscence ("In my day") to instruction manual ("ignite the potassium nitrate"). But with its discrete stanzas (verse paragraphs, quatrains, indented lyrics) and abrupt shifts in style and persona, "The Skaters" was not really well-equipped for the seamless or fluid transformations described above. Ashbery came closer in' "Clepsydra,'' the watershed poem of Rivers and Mountains. "Clepsydra" was written in the spring of 1965, roughly a year after "The Skaters" was finished and a few months af-

JOHNASHBERY ter *'Fragment," the long poem of The Double Dream of Spring. The actual chronology of these three poems is important in charting Ashbery's progress as a poet. Before considering "Clepsydra," then, I will turn briefly to the ironically titled "Fragment" (not "Fragments" but a piece from a vaster puzzle). "Fragment" is a monumentally meditative poem, composed of fifty ten-line stanzas, or dizains, inspired by Maurice Scfcve's Delie (1544; "d61ie" is an anagram for "I'id^e" or "idea"), which apparently leaves nothing out. "Fragment" was first handsomely published by Black Sparrow Press as a volume dedicated to James Schuyler, with two dizains per page facing the "illustrations" (like the emblems of Delie) of the cool realist Alex Katz. The first dizain of "Fragment" illustrates both its limitations and its power: The last block is closed in April. You See the intrusions clouding over her face As in the memory given you of older Permissiveness which dies in the Falling back toward recondite ends, The sympathy of yellow flowers. Never mentioned in the signs of the oblong day The saw-toothed flames and point of other Space not given, and yet not withdrawn And never yet imagined: a moment's commandment. It is helpful to place this block in the context of Ashbery's personal history. This stanza was written in December 1964, soon after Ashbery's father died. The mausoleum of "Fragment" opens with its "last block" being fitted into place. With the decorous "sympathy" of flowers, the grief that clouds the face of the mother and blots the memory of her former permissiveness from the wayward "son" (compare the "saw-toothed flames" of the child's drawn daisy "sun") commanded to honor his parents is never mentioned. This "moment's monument," as Dante Gabriel

I 11

Rossetti called the sonnet form, sustains its meditative intensity for fifty stanzas, erotically extending its immediate grief with the memory of romantic separations. Yet the intensity of "Fragment" is achieved at the cost of variation. The childhood experience here is related in the same patient, ruminative language of thought as the mother's grief. Nor are the ungrieving signs of the times in the oblong daily news given in journalese. The consolatory "idea" of "Fragment," the absent yet latent moment of the past, means a lot to Ashbery. But it is difficult for the romantic momentum of "and yet not withdrawn / And never yet imagined" to overcome the inertia of "and point of other / Space not given." Or perhaps "Fragment" transcends its words and discourses too completely in its sanctuary of feelings and ideas. Ashbery's language begins to thaw and coalesce in "Clepsydra," which Ashbery himself sees as a pivotal poem. As he told Kostelanetz: After my analytic period, I wanted to get into a synthetic period. I wanted to write a new kind of poetry after my dismembering of language. Wouldn't it be nice, I said to myself, to do a long poem that would be a long extended argument, but would have the beauty of a single word? "Clepsydra" is really a meditation on how time feels as it is passing. The title means a water clock as used in ancient Greece and China. There are a lot of images of water in that poem. It's all of a piece, like a stream. This newfound style, more "synthetic" than Pablo Picasso's reconstructions, seems in fact to be one of the topics of "Clepsydra": The half-meant, half-perceived Motions of fronds out of idle depths that are Summer. And expansion into little draughts. The reply wakens easily, darting from Untruth to willed moment, scarcely called into being

12 I AMERICAN WRITERS Before it swells, the way a waterfall Drums at different levels. Each moment Of utterance is the true one; likewise none are true, Only is the bounding from air to air, a serpentine Gesture which hides the truth behind a congruent Message, the way air hides the sky, is, in fact, Tearing it limb from limb this very moment: but The sky has pleaded already and this is about As graceful a kind of non-absence as either Has a right to expect: whether it's the form of Some creator who has momentarily turned away, Marrying detachment with respect, so that the pieces Are seen as parts of a spectrum, independent Yet symbolic of their spaced-out times of arrival; Whether on the other hand all of it is to be Seen as no luck, [italics added] The cascading, serpentine sentence, descending from William Wordsworth's "Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey" and "Ode: Intimations of Immortality," from Stevens' "The Auroras of Autumn," and from Proust, has displaced the linear integrity of Some Trees and The Tennis Court Oath. In "Clepsydra" the enjambments seem "half-meant, half-perceived" pauses along the way. Only in retrospect do the end words sound their momentous ideas (cause, being, time, truth, etc.). The language of philosophical assertion and of argument takes its place alongside that of spontaneous, stream-ofconsciousness description—something that was ruled out, for example, in "The Instruction Manual." The "I," who in "The Skaters" was not ready to explain, is brimming with justifications in "Clepsydra," though the first-person "I am" is withheld for about five pages. The diction of "Clepsydra" is idiomatic ("the way," "in fact") as well as lyrical, and the tone serious. Perhaps one limitation of "Clepsydra" is that it aims too carefully at being the "Intimations Ode" of its day (Wordsworth is better known for his wis-

dom than his wit). The humor in "Clepsydra" is wry rather than coy and evasive. And the wordplay ("whether" hides "weather," which translates "les temps") is self-effacing. A water clock, the clepsydra was used to time the arguments of lawyers in court. Ashbery's "Clepsydra" is itself a monumental argument: a philosopher's system, a lawyer's case, a plot summary, and a lovers' quarrel. The case tried is a divorce: that of the past from the present, the poem from the poet, and one lover from another. The question of "Clepsydra" may be put in romantic terms: "If our love has failed, was it false or unreal?" But the possibility that he "dreamt the whole thing," made up his past and his love, is ruled out in his wakeful end: "It is not a question, then, / Of having not lived in vain." Ashbery wakes in an uneasy assurance of the outside world: that of his apartment, and his past, which is realized in his own day and poem: What is meant is that this distant Image of you, the way you really are, is the test Of how you see yourself, and regardless of whether or not You hesitate, it may be assumed that you have won, that this Wooden and external representation Returns the full echo of what you meant With nothing left over, from that circumference now alight With ex-possibilities become present fact, [. . .] In our postdeconstructive world, we may find it difficult to believe in this world poem without supplement. But at least we find it easier to understand the blind faith in the weather, the story of life in the world, to which we sooner or later return. The lyrics of The Double Dream of Spring, which include a sestina, a collage poem, a ballad, and translations, match the formal variety of Some Trees, but also exhibit a new discursive range. Consider the antic opening from the ses-

JOHN ASHBERY I 13 tina* 'Farm Implements and Rutabagas in a Landscape": The first of the undecoded messages read: 'Topeye sits in thunder, Unthought of. From that shoebox of an apartment, From livid curtain's hue, a tangram emerges: a country." Meanwhile the Sea Hag was relaxing on a green couch: "How pleasant To spend one's vacation en la casa de Popeye,'' she scratched Her cleft chin's solitary hair. She remembered spinach. [. . .] With its antic shifts in diction, "Farm Implements" is a far cry from the mannered formality of Ashbery's early sestina "The Painter." Ashbery's source for "Farm Implements" was a Spanish cartoon strip of Popeye in which the Sea Hag, like Circe, changes Swee'pea into a pig. Here the only metamorphoses are the familiar one of Popeye, sitting like a Miltonic God in thunder, whose spinach restores his omnipotence. But the Sea Hag adjusts to Popeye's mood swings: "If this is all we need fear from spinach / Then I don't mind so much." In "Soonest Mended,'' the most popular poem in The Double Dream of Spring, the antic mixtures of "Europe" and "The Skaters" are themselves mixed in with the meditative argumentation of "Fragment" and "Clepsydra" in a poem with an easygoing pathos that we will recognize as characteristic of many of Ashbery's best later poems. Consider the fatal recognition that we are only end words in someone else's wacky sestina, only dice thrown in the game: These then were some hazards of the course, Yet though we knew the course was hazards and nothing else It was still a shock when, almost a quarter of a century later,

The clarity of the rules dawned on you for the first time. They were the players, and we who had struggled at the game Were merely spectators, though subject to its vicissitudes And moving with it out of the tearful stadium, borne on shoulders, at last. The humor of this passage plays off its pathos. The counters aren't those of academic poetry, "they" and "I," the conventional world and the poet, but' 'they'' and "we," those powers that be and "we" ordinary citizens who have little to say about our destiny. Twenty years earlier, in a review of Gertrude Stem's epic poem on "them," Stanzas in Meditation, the poet in exile praised the absence of the inclusive personal pronoun: "What a pleasant change from the eternal 'we' with which so many modern poets automatically begin each sentence, and which gives the impression that the author is sharing his every sensation with some invisible Kim Novak" (Poetry, 1957). By The Double Dream of Spring the middle-aged poet, once again part of the United States, has found a new interest in writing (rather than collaging) common American language and public discourses. "Decoy," another more serious piece of resistance, begins with the "we" of the Declaration of Independence, whose own truths have divorced themselves from America's dream: We hold these truths to be self-evident: That ostracism, both political and moral, has Its place in the twentieth-century scheme of things; That urban chaos is the problem we have been seeing into and seeing into, For the factory, deadpanned by its very existence into a Descending code of values, has moved right across the road from total financial upheaval And caught regression head-on.

14 I AMERICAN WRITERS This nation under God, which still ostracizes those of different sexual orientation, has descended into its own moral chaos. Ashbery's adoption of public, nonlyrical discourse marks an important advance in the career of the repatriated American poet. This hybrid, confrontational style, which has left its mark on the language poets, makes its poetry not by reshaping the world but by reforming the cliches of its daily, official life ("looking into," "destined by its very nature to"). This democratization of language will lead to the sermonic history of Ashbery's declaration of poetic interdependence, "The System," in Three Poems. Three Poems is Ashbery's favorite book. It is also his most important book both in the sense that it continues his project of revitalizing (not parodying) ordinary languages for the purposes of prose poetry and because it spells out, hesitantly, Ashbery's "philosophy of life and writing." Three Poems marks the poet's most extended and fruitful experiments with prose poetry. There are all kinds of speech and writing going on in these 118 pages: clich6d conversation, business diction, journalese, history, philosophy, sermon, graduation poetry, and so on. Moreover, the style moves from the Proustian Romantic narratives of "The New Spirit" to the more public history and homily of "The System" and the urgent reconciliations of "The Recital." Ashbery has mentioned Arthur Rimbaud, St.-John Perse, Thomas Traherne, Auden, Proust, Giorgio de Chirico, and the later Henry James as stylistic influences on these poems. Although these authors all developed endless, protean sentences, none of their work really prepares the reader for the particular excitement and pleasure that Three Poems brings. Three Poems consists of two fifty-page works, "The New Spirit" and "The System," and a ten-page summation, "The Recital." "The New Spirit" is written in unindented prose blocks and prosaic verse, "The System" in prose blocks,

and "The Recital" in prose paragraphs. Within Three Poems itself, there are a number of nearly resolved dialectical oppositions: new and old, part and whole, present and past, private and public, and physical and spiritual love. After an initial consideration of the problem of poetic selection, "The New Spirit" moves into reflections on a love affair. This reminiscence is itself reminiscent of "Clepsydra" and "Fragment," both in style and in subject matter, but it is more successful and diverse than either poem in that it modulates its language of private thought with the languages of public communication. Near the end of "The New Spirit," these reflections coalesce into a character called "the Ram," or simply "he," who in "The System" takes the podium, or pulpit, offering a religious history of the 1960's and a sermon on living out one's destiny. In "The Recital," which begins "All right. The problem is that there is no new problem," an insistent, dark argument resolves itself: The point was the synthesis of very simple elements in a new and strong, as opposed to old and weak, relation to one another. Why hadn't this been possible in the earlier days of experimentation, of bleak, barren living that didn't seem to be leading anywhere and it couldn't have mattered less? Probably because not enough of what made it up had taken on that look of worn familiarity, like pebbles polished over and over again by the sea. . . . For Ashbery, the collages of The Tennis Court Oath perhaps announced themselves too insistently as avant-garde, to the exclusion of subsequent explorations. In Three Poems, the prosaic, demotic elements, such as the worn simile of the pebbles, are not erased but blended into Ashbery's argument so that it is impossible to separate the public from the individual spirit. The "system" of Three Poems represents the physical, political, and discursive systems that

JOHN ASHBERY / 15 determine our lives: computer systems, the solar system, the circulatory system, the traffic system, the system of government, a philosophical or religious system, and so on. Ashbery's response is not to drop out but to work and write within and against the system. The historian who opens "The System" tells us that there was a subversive principle at work: "There was, however, a residue, a kind of fiction that developed parallel to the classic truths of daily life. . . . It is this "other tradition' which we propose to explore." The oratorical turns of phrase here mark the clearest departure in style of "The System" from the personally charged reflections of "The New Spirit." But no clear and safe distinction may be drawn between the languages of the establishment and that of the non-establishment poet. "The Other Tradition" democratizes the poetry of "the Tradition." To represent the other tradition, Ashbery replaces the historian's discourse with the pastor's. Ashbery's preacher of the gospel of love makes an important distinction, virtually the only one in Ashbery's poetry, between "the frontal and the latent" forms of happiness. Frontal happiness, he tells us, "is experienced as a kind of sense of immediacy, even urgency; . . . Its sudden balm suffuses the soul without warning, as a kind of bloom or grace.'' We recognize this kind of happiness as the privileged or involuntary moments of Wordsworth or Proust. The problem with these moments is that they don't last. What follows, and what Ashbery ultimately comes to prefer, is latent happiness. If "frontal" suggests "frontal assault" or "frontal pose," "latent" seems drawn from the mysteriously autobiographical final lines of Roussel's "The View": Thanks to the intensity suddenly increased of a memory long-lived and hidden ["vivace et latent"] of a summer Already dead, already far from me, suddenly carried away.

Latent happiness means, first, the feeling that the past bliss is about to return, like summer: We all know those periods of balmy weather in early spring, sometimes even before spring has officially begun: days or even a few hours when the air seems suffused with an unearthly tenderness, as though love were about to start, now, at this moment, on an endless journey put off since the beginning of time. Ashbery in fact fell in love with David Kermani, who has remained his companion, while writing "The System." This Eliotic "mid-winter spring" may also be taken as the traces and influences of the lost moment that have permeated the text of the present. In the following tumultuous rhetorical question of "The System," Ashbery's preacher presents us with his article of faith: For they never would have been able to capture the emanations from that special point of life if they were not meant to do something with them, weave them into the pattern of the days that come after, sunlit or plunged in shadow as they may be, but each with the identifying scarlet thread that runs through the whole warp and woof of the design . . . The claim that "this second kind of happiness is merely a fleshed-out, realized version of that ideal first kind . . ."is borne out most strongly in Three Poems itself, which is a brilliantly fleshed-out version of "Clepsydra." As "the faithful reflection of the idealistic concept that started us along this path, but a reflection which is truer than the original because more suited to us, and whose shining perspectives we can feel and hold," the full-blown latent happiness points forward to Ashbery's self-portrait in the convex mirror of the globe. The superiority of this model of latent happiness, whether or not one subscribes to Proustian or Wordsworthian consolations of the past, is that it is worldly and textual,

16 I AMERICAN WRITERS rather than visionary and hyperlinguistic. Ashbery's romanticism is a means to an encompassing realism by which we make sense of ourselves in the context of the world. In 1972, after new owners took over Art News, Ashbery found himself without a job as an art critic. He took a teaching job at Brooklyn College in 1974. But the ending (or interruption) of his career as an art critic encouraged Ashbery to "realize" his art criticism into poetry. The result was his best-known long poem, "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror." The volume containing the title poem, dedicated to Kermani, won Ashbery three major poetry prizes upon its appearance in 1975—the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award—and moved Ashbery, in many people's eyes, from "the other tradition" into "the tradition." Ashbery himself does not like the poem, which he finds too conventional—the apparently clear antipodes to the apparently obscure "Europe." He began "Self-Portrait" in Provincetown in February 1973, and finished in what he told me was "three months of not very inspired writing." Nevertheless, the unemployed art critic succeeded perfectly at what he set out to accomplish. Part of Ashbery's difficulty with the poem is its pretext or premise. "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror" reads like a critical essay, a reflection on a small but remarkable painting by Parmigianino, an early mannerist whose distortions anticipated the surrealists. In his Self-portrait in a Convex Mirror (1523-1524), Parmigianino painted his reflection in a convex barber's mirror onto a ball of wood so that his head, at the virtual center of the round painting, is framed by the elongated hand in the foreground or at the circumference. As Parmigianino's painting mirrors his reflection, Ashbery's poem reflects Parmigianino's painting. When Ashbery first saw the painting in 1959, he was studying Roussel, whose long poem "La Vue" (The View), with its immensely detailed

and extended description of a convex scene depicted in the' 'ball of glass'' on a pen holder, must have encouraged Ashbery's elongated meditation on Parmigianino's ten-inch painting. Ashbery begins the poem as an art critic: As Parmigianino did it, the right hand Bigger than the head, thrust at the viewer And swerving easily away, as though to protect What it advertises. Ashbery "does it" here by eliding his grammatical subject ("[I want to do it] as Parmigianino did it. . .") in favor of an adverb, the grammatical indicator of "manner" (from "manus": hand). "As," the manner, protects the matter, the nearly erased "As[hbery]." Unlike the erasures of "Europe," this elision passes almost undetected. The poem and painting illustrate a paradox: the head moves the hand that draws the head. All the important relations in 4'SelfPortrait in a Convex Mirror" align themselves around the central head and the circumferential hand: depth and surface, matter and manner, signified and signifiers, whole and parts, past and present, present and future, and self and other. In fact, we may align more of the fluid images of "Self-Portrait" with either the head or the hand: "light [head] behind windblown fog and sand [hand]"; "The city [head] falling with its beautiful suburbs [hand]"; "There is room for one bullet [head] in the chamber [hand]." Ashbery probes the otherness, or convexity, of the self-portrait in six stanzas or globes, which cover topics deliberately, like a well-shaped essay: (1) the confining present, (2) the receding past, (3) the convex future, (4) the otherness of the painting, (5) the otherness of the city and history, (6) and the otherness of creation itself. For Ashbery, the self exists only in the convex mirror of the world, understood spatially as other people, or temporally as the history of one's frustrated projects. Each stanza break ruptures the

JOHN ASHBERY I 17 mannered world of the poem. Consider the break between the first and second globes: You will stay on, restive, serene in Your gesture which is neither embrace nor warning But which holds something of both in pure Affirmation that doesn't affirm anything. The balloon pops, the attention Turns dully away. Clouds In the puddle stir up into sawtoothed fragments. I think of the friends Who came to see me, of what yesterday Was like. [. . .] The opening stanza, which concerns the imprisonment of the self within its self-portrayals, ends with a self-reflexive doctrine of "pure poetry," that the only subject matter of a poem is itself. In An Apologie for Poetrie, Sir Philip Sidney said that the poet "never affirmeth" since he never makes the reader take his fictions for the truth. But with this negative affirmation the boredom of incomprehension sets in. With the introduction of a new subject, the seamless global stanza bursts. Ashbery here puns on "pop art," particularly that of Roy Lichtenstein, who enlarged, or "blew up," the comic strip with its balloons of speech and clouds of thought. Each stanza break, each new "subject" in "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror," means the death of the old. In this mannered, perfect world, the only changes possible are violent. In the last, longest globe, the critical patience has run out in an exasperated, impassioned recognition of the otherness of anybody's selfimage: Is there anything To be serious about beyond this otherness That gets included in the most ordinary Forms of daily activity, changing everything Slightly and profoundly, and tearing the matter

Of creation, any creation, not just artistic creation Out of our hands, to install it on some monstrous, near Peak, too close to ignore, too far For one to intervene? This otherness, this " Not-being-us " is all there is to look at In the mirror. [. . .] The adverbs of manner ("Slightly and profoundly"), one line's triplication of "creation," the pregnant end words ("otherness," "everything," "matter," "this"), the imagery ("Peak" as the hand), the wordplay ("monstrous" means "sign"), and the final response with its existential vocabulary, all charge this passage with Ashbery's tragic eloquence. Any reader skeptical of Ashbery's "merit," or convinced of his "willful obscurity," may very well be converted by "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror." Despite the monochromatic limits of its ironic and elegiac tone, the poem is capable of both power and subtlety, and succeeds in both its conceptions and its manners. While there is little formal variety in the freeverse lyrics of Self-portrait in a Convex Mirror, there is a pleasant range of styles, such as the following narrative from "Worsening Situation": One day a man called while I was out And left this message: "You got the whole thing wrong From start to finish. Luckily, there's still time To correct the situation, but you must act fast. See me at your earliest convenience. And please Tell no one of this. Much besides your life depends on it." I thought nothing of it at the time. Lately I've been looking at old-fashioned plaids, fingering Starched white collars, wondering whether there's a way To get them really white again. My wife

18 I AMERICAN Thinks I'm in Oslo—Oslo, France, that is. The coy figure skater of "The Skaters" and the explaining prophet of "The System" are both upended by this deadpan speaker, benumbed with capitalist anxiety. Deities here communicate through answering machines rather than burning bushes. The anticonfessional poet's hilarious final confession is doubly nonreferential: both "Oslo, France" and the gay poet's "wife" are off the map. This confidentiality, much like Robinson Crusoe's wish that Friday were a woman in Elizabeth Bishop's "Crusoe in England," is as good a self-portrait as anything in the volume. The opening poem of Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, "As One Put Drunk into the PacketBoat" (the title is taken from Andrew Marvell), introduces a new musical!ty into Ashbery's verse (the accents have been added; the ellipsis is Ashbery's): I tried each thing, only some were immortal and free, filsewhere we are as sitting in a pldce where sunlight Filters down, a little at a time, Waiting for someone to come. Harsh words are spoken, As the sun yellows the green of the maple tr6e. . . . The delicate interweaving of two- and three-beat measures marks a departure from the prosaic cadences of Three Poems. In fact, Ashbery's ellipses reveal that this first stanza should be read as a written fragment of this new style, as the next lines confirm: "So this was all, but obscurely / 1 felt the stirrings of new breath in the pages." This documentary distancing, which Ashbery developed in "Europe," now occurs without calling too much attention to itself. At the other stylistic extreme, "Schehera-

WRITERS zade" begins with a shorthand, gnarled scene description: Unsupported by reason's enigma Water collects in squared stone catch basins. The land is dry. Under it moves The water. Fish live in the wells. The leaves, A concerned green, are scrawled on the light. Bad Bindweed and rank ragweed somehow forget to flourish here. An inexhaustible wardrobe has been placed at the disposal Of each new occurrence. It can be itself now. Unlike the natural, seasonal music of "As One Put Drunk into the Packet-Boat," these lines are strikingly artificial. The sentences seem too short or too long for the lines. The discordant intrusion of "Bad / Bindweed and rank ragweed" registers its absence. The Audenesque allegorical abstractions ("Unsupported by reason's enigma" and "at the disposal / Of each new occurrence") and the minimalist enigma ("It can be itself now") suspend our visualization of the landscape. No luxurious fairy-tale kingdom, this scene offers meager fare for the reader's eyes and ears. Yet the messy style of these lines is more experimental and ambitious than the free-verse opening of "As One Put Drunk into the PacketBoat." Houseboat Days (1977) contains some of Ashbery's best short poems to date. "Street Musicians," which opens the book, is a moving elegy; "Wet Casements" (my own favorite) is a protest by the now-famous poet against his encroaching publicity; "The Other Tradition" supplements the history of the avant-garde given in "The System"; "Pyrography," commissioned by the U.S. Department of the Interior for its bicentennial exhibition, explores America's westward expansion, burning its way across the continent; the antic "Daffy Duck in Hollywood" sketches the cartoonlike world of American materialism;

JOHN ASHBERY I 19 "And Ut Pictura Poesis Is Her Name" (borrowing Horace's dictum that a poem is like a painting) and "What Is Poetry" respond to creativewriting students, whom Ashbery had begun to teach, who want to know what poetry is, now, and how to write it, now. "Syringa" mythologizes the origin and the loss of song. The only relative disappointment of the volume is, surprisingly, its long poem "Fantasia on 'The Nut-Brown Maid.' " Ashbery's "Fantasia" follows the fifteenth-century anonymous ballad stanza for stanza, often incorporating the language of its mannered debate. "The NutBrown Maid" is a courtly ballad in which He and She debate the legendary unfaithfulness of women by assuming the respective roles of the banished lover and his faithful nut-brown maid. The argument of "Fantasia," as in the ballad, is intricate and incremental—much like that of Ashbery's earlier amorous argument, "Fragment." It is a clear departure or retreat from the fluent mannerisms of "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror." A stanza from "Fantasia" will illustrate how little Ashbery is willing to trade on his patented fluid style: Be it right or wrong, these men among Others in the park, all those years in the cold, Are a plain kind of thing: bands Of acanthus and figpeckers. At The afternoon closing you walk out Of the dream crowding the walls and out Of life or whatever filled up Those days and seemed to be life You borrowed its colors, the drab ones That are so popular now, though only For a minute, and extracted a fashion That wasn't really there. You are Going, I from your thought rapidly To the green wood go, alone, a banished man. By the time we reach the stubborn, vaguely pornographic syllables "bands / Of acanthus and figpeckers," we know we are no longer listening

to the seductive rhythms of "Self-Portrait": "thrust at the viewer / And swerving easily away." It doesn't necessarily follow that "Fantasia" is inferior to "Self-Portrait," rather that it will not be preferred by the same readers or enjoyed for the same reasons. "Fantasia" is another world, a diversion from the relentless topicality of much contemporary poetry. Those who fancy the medieval and Renaissance subtleties of dialogue and argument will prefer "Fragment" and "Fantasia"; those who love propelled Romantic meditations will choose "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror" and "A Wave." If no readers have thus far championed "Fantasia," many have applauded the short poems of Houseboat Days. The seductively resistant "Wet Casements," for instance, attracts readers by the very force of the writer's demand for privacy. The poem begins with a rare epigraph taken from Franz Kafka's unfinished story "Wedding Preparations in the Country" (1951): "When Eduard Raban, coming along the passage, walked into the open doorway, he saw that it was raining. It was not raining much." What interests Ashbery about this "passage" is that the reader sees through Raban's eyes. This voyeuristic pleasure can turn sour when the defining gaze of another is turned on us, so that we see ourselves as merely someone else's "correct impressions" of us. Many labels—*' intentionally obscure,'' "fraudulent," "New York school poet," "canonical"—have been attached to the name Ashbery. Once an "Ashbery" poem slips out of the poet's grasp, it may be kept, read, and evaluated by any stranger who "carried that name around in his wallet / For years as the wallet crumbled and bills slid in / And out of it." Ashbery's response to this vicissitude of publication is anger and determination: I want that information very much today, Can't have it, and this makes me angry. I shall use my anger to build a bridge like that

20 I AMERICAN WRITERS Of Avignon, on which people may dance for the feeling Of dancing on a bridge. I shall at last see my complete face Reflected not in the water but in the worn stone floor of my bridge. I shall keep to myself. I shall not repeat others' comments about me. The bridge at Avignon, like Kafka's story, is unfinished. So too, the critical commentary on Ashbery will remain incomplete. For the time being, people may dance to his music. But the "complete face," still under construction, is for Ashbery's eyes alone. Even the final, seemingly confessional couplet is in the discourse of a journal resolution in which the doubled "I" remains apart from "myself and "me." "Wet Casements" covers the same territory as "SelfPortrait in a Convex Mirror" more briefly and with more power. "Syringa" (compare Pan's syrinx), arguably Ashbery's best lyric, tells the story of Orpheus in the mannered style of Ovid (or Jean Cocteau) rather than in the tragic style of Virgil. The poem begins casually: Orpheus liked the glad personal quality Of the things beneath the sky. Of course, Eurydice was a part Of this. Then one day, everything changed. He rends Rocks into fissures with lament. Gullies, hummocks Can't withstand it. The sky shudders from one horizon To the other, almost ready to give up wholeness. Then Apollo quietly told him: "Leave it all on earth. Your lute, what point? Why pick at a dull pavan few care to Follow, except a few birds of dusty feather,

Not vivid performances of the past." But why not? All other things must change too. Eurydice is taken for granted here in this seriocomic apocalypse, which reminds one that Ovid's Orpheus, who taught men how to love young boys, was the mythical inventor not only of elegy but of homosexuality. The real test is not the absence of Eurydice but the presence of Apollo, who reminds the songster of the burden of the past. Harold Bloom had used "Fragment" in The Anxiety of Influence (1973) to illustrate how the Stevens of "Le Monocle de Mon Oncle" (1918) sounded more like Ashbery than vice versa, and had placed Ashbery in his canon of "strong poets" along with Whitman, Stevens, and Hart Crane. Ashbery's response, again, is that the past—whether it is a memory or a tradition—is latent in the present. The mistake is to try to recapture the past (in the manner of Orpheus or of Proust), as either a memory or a style, since the past will soon enough capture us: Stellification Is for the few, and comes about much later When all record of these people and their lives Has disappeared into libraries, onto microfilm. A few are still interested in them. "But what about So-and-so?" is still asked on occasion. But they lie Frozen and out of touch until an arbitrary chorus Speaks of a totally different incident with a similar name In whose tale are hidden syllables Of what happened so long before that In some small town, one indifferent summer. This wonderful passage (I have quoted only a fragment) illustrates the intelligence, clarity, humor, and nostalgic mystery of Ashbery at his best. Long gone into the technologized library

JOHN ASHBERY / 21 crypts, only a few poets surface, and even then anonymously, from oblivion: "But what about / So-and-so?" As Ashbery instructs: "You can't say it that way any more." The old songs reverberate without royalties in current numbers, as Ashbery's representative summer echoes, again, the final lines of Roussel's "The View." Canonization is arbitrary (why Ashbery and not Roussel?) and for the few. But Ashbery's work is so diverse partly because he has not confined his reading (or criticism) to those on top of the charts. We should take the same approach in our reading of his own rich work. In 1978 "Syringa" was set to music by Elliott Carter, one of Ashbery's favorite composers. Ashbery's poem, sung by a female mezzosoprano, was scored along with various Greek fragments on the myth of Orpheus, sung by a male bass. The conversational, competitive simultaneity of this piece is characteristic of Carter's work, which influenced Ashbery's "Litany," the opening poem of As We Know. "Litany" runs for seventy pages in two parallel columns. The beginning stanzas illustrate the added dimensions of this parallelism: For someone like me The simple things Like having toast or Going to church are Kept in one place. Like having wine and cheese. The parents of the town Pissing elegantly escape knowledge Once and for all. The Snapdragons consumed in a wind Of fire and rage far over The streets as they end.

So this must be a hole Of cloud Mandate or trap But haze that casts The milk of enchantment Over the whole town, Its scenery, whatever Could be happening Behind tall hedges Of dark, lissome knowledge. The brown lines persist In explicit sex Matters like these No one can care

The casual purring of a donkey Rouses me from my accounts: What given, what gifts. The air Stands straight up like a tail.

about, ' 'Noone.'' That is I' ve said it Before and no one Remembers except that elf.

He spat on the flowers. The visionary obliquity of the right-hand, italicized column slants away from the upstanding, plainspoken intimacy of "someone like me" in the left column. The voices, however, soon become indistinguishable, like those of "Fantasia." The short lines of either side result in surprising, ominous pauses, as though they were running up against an invisible wall. The scene, depicted by the appearance of the poem on the page, is Main Street, U.S.A., with the town parents "pissing" (or "passing") elegantly and ritually along the middle blank space while escaping the carnal knowledge of the hedges of print on either side. The two-columned poem has various analogues or parallels: the two eyes or ears, consciousness and self-consciousness, text and commentary or translation, twin phalluses or columns of figures, newspaper or Bible columns of print, "simultaneous but independent monologues" (as Ashbery describes them in an introductory note), and so on. Ashbery told Peter Stitt, "I once half-jokingly said that my object was to direct the reader's attention to the white space between the columns." This white space at the core of the poem represents ineffable, unspeakable knowledge that keeps conversations and texts from intersecting. Following the terminology of "The System," we may think of the "hole I Of Cloud" as a frontal moment that has absconded like an "elf" (compare self) into the past but that still exerts its latent pressure. It may also mark the eclipse or absence of

22 / AMERICAN WRITERS God. Ashbery originally titled this poem "The Great Litany," after Thomas Cranmer's Episcopal service in the Book of Common Prayer, where the minister's supplications and congregational responses are printed in italic and roman type respectively. All the poems in As We Know are preoccupied with place or space. A series of one-liners, the diminutive counterpoints to "Litany," make the most of their seven-by-nine-inch pages: I HAD THOUGHT THINGS WERE GOING ALONG WELL But I was mistaken. The sobering visual and narrative humor of this poem relies on a double afterthought: that correcting one's mistaken projection about how things were going is also a mistake, since one's knowledge of "things" in the universal vacuum is so paltry that nothing can be concluded. The lyrics in As We Know are generally conducted in hushed tones that avoid the gregariousness of "Litany." There is a sense of time running out in these haunted poems that results in a minimalist domestic economy, as in these lines from the volume's title poem: The light that was shadowed then Was seen to be our lives, Everything about us that love might wish to examine, Then put away for a certain length of time, until The whole is to be reviewed, and we turned Toward each other, to each other. The way we had come was all we could see And it crept up on us, embarrassed That there is so much to tell now, really now. This intimate new style is minimal in discursive range, narration ("then," "until"), vocabulary, figure ("it crept up on us": age, a ghost), play ("reviewed" book), and revision. In this tacit manner, the smallest and commonest words take

on philosophical and religious import, such as "all" for totality, "as" and "way" for our manner of speaking and behaving, and "it" for latent presence. Aside from "As We Know," there are several endearing and fascinating poems in the volume, including "Many Wagons Ago," "Haunted Landscape," "Flowering Death," "Knocking Around," "Train Rising Out of the Sea," and "This Configuration." Although the interior mode of the poems in As We Know makes it difficult for them to rival either the ringing periods of "Clepsydra" or "Syringa," at least one poem in this volume, "Tapestry," ranks among Ashbery's best: It is difficult to separate the tapestry From the room or loom which takes precedence over it. For it must always be frontal and yet to one side. It insists on this picture of "history" In the making, because there is no way out of the punishment It proposes: sight blinded by sunlight. The seeing taken in with what is seen In an explosion of sudden awareness of its formal splendor. The best-known tapestry for depicting " 'history' in the making," the seventy-meter-long Bayeux Tapestry (ca. 1082), which Ashbery had seen in France, narrates the Norman Conquest, climaxing in the Battle of Hastings, where Harold is shown blinded by an arrow stitch to the eye. It is as difficult, now, to separate the Norman Conquest from its depiction as it is to separate the tapestry (and "Tapestry") from our responses to it—"The seeing taken in with what is seen." "Tapestry" is a dazzling display of Ashbery's ability to compose on several fronts simultaneously: self-reflexive, aesthetic, political, philosophical (Plato's cave), and personal. This twenty-two line poem, like the twentypage "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror," ex-

JOHN ASHBERY I 23 amines what art means, and only a poet who has studied and written about art for years could have written it. Ashbery resumed writing art criticism in 1979, for New York magazine, and in the early 1980's he also wrote for Newsweek. Around this time, Ashbery purchased a Victorian-era house in Hudson, a small town in his native eastern New York State. These previously inhabited rooms seem to lend their own atmosphere to his next volume, Shadow Train (1981), a boxlike sequence of fifty poems, four quatrains each. These quatrains are "frontal and yet to one side" in that, unlike the sestets of sonnet sequences, they evade closure. What was "latent happiness" now looks more like anxiety in these poems. "The Pursuit of Happiness," for instance, ominously foreshadows some event that never happens: It came about that there was no way of passing Between the twin partitions that presented A unified facade, that of a suburban shopping mall In April. One turned, as one does, to other interests Such as the tides in the Bay of Fundy. Meanwhile there was one Who all unseen came creeping at this scale of visions Like the gigantic specter of a cat towering over tiny mice About to adjourn the town meeting due to the shadow, The talismanic words of As We Know—"It came about," "way," "one"—are still in force. What is different here is the long-shot perspective, which takes in both the "gigantic specter" of the storm cloud and the "tiny" suburban Americans pursuing shelter. This perspective results in an ironically distanced narrative in which "one," rather than "we," "you," or "I," remains aloof

as the cat. The vast scale of these stanzas removes us from the intimacy of As We Know. The humor of the tale is similarly "overshadowed" by its ominousness, as is its political discourse. "The Pursuit of Happiness" is a chilling declaration of dependence, but it may move us no more than it has moved its narrator. The eerie objectivity of these minimalist building blocks can sometimes produce some fascinating special effects, as in "Paradoxes and Oxymorons": This poem is concerned with language on a very plain level. Look at it talking to you. You look out a window Or pretend to fidget. You have it but you don't have it. You miss it, it misses you. You miss each other. The poem is sad because it wants to be yours, and cannot. What's a plain level? It is that and other things, Bringing a system of them into play. Play? Well, actually, yes, but I consider play to be A deeper outside thing, a dreamed role-pattern, As in the division of grace these long August days Without proof. Open-ended. And before you know It gets lost in the stream and chatter of typewriters. It has been played once more. I think you exist only To tease me into doing it, on your level, and then you aren't there Or have adopted a different attitude. And the poem Has set me softly down beside you. The poem is

you.

It is easy to see why this wonderful poem has been frequently anthologized. Here, the mixture of discourses—pedantic, romantic, sentimental,

24 I AMERICAN WRITERS conversational—adds dimension after dimension to its plain levels. The author himself enters the poem, paradoxically, for a brief interview. What charges this poem, however, is its playful lover's discourse. A substitution of "I" or "me" for "it" will disclose "Paradoxes and Oxymorons" for the love song it is. Ashbery is often reserved and defensive, as when addressing the "critic," but he is equally persuasive and moving when dreaming of the "reader," his erotic double. Although Shadow Train is dwarfed by earlier volumes such as Three Poems or As We Know, it may be the right place to begin for the reader who wants to learn Ashbery's alphabet. In the spring of 1982 Ashbery underwent major surgery for a nearly fatal spinal infection, and for a few years afterward he walked with a cane. Around the end of that year Ashbery began "A Wave," which he finished in about two months. This long title poem helped make A Wave Ashbery's best book since Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror. Of Ashbery's long poems, "A Wave," with its surging free-verse stanzas, resembles "Self-Portrait" most closely, but it is free from the "subject matter" that, although merely a meditative pretext, confines the tone of "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror" within relatively narrow parameters. A wave is a fluid convexity ("wave" and "convex" are cognates), and that fluidity circulates through recurrent phases within the poem, from wake to wave to wait to wave again, as we see from the beginning: To pass through pain and not know it, A car door slamming in the night. To emerge on an invisible terrain. So the luck of speaking out A little too late came to be worshipped in various guises: A mute actor, a future saint intoxicated with the idea of martyrdom;

And our landscape came to be as it is today: Partially out of focus, some of it too near, the middle distance A haven of serenity and unreachable, with all kinds of nice People and plants waking and stretching, calling Attention to themselves with every artifice of which the human Genre is capable. And they called it our home. No one came to take advantage of these early Reverses, no doorbell rang; Yet each day of the week, once it had arrived, seemed the threshold Of love and desperation again. At night it sang In the black trees: My mindless, oh my mindless, oh. And it could be that it was Tuesday, with dark, restless clouds And puffs of white smoke against them, and below, the wet streets That seem so permanent, and all of a sudden the scene changes: It's another idea, a new conception, something submitted A long time ago, that only now seems about to work To destroy at last the ancient network Of letters, diaries, ads for civilization. The poem passes through a complete cycle here, with each new phase bringing a new scene and cast. The first unfinished sentence, with its Dickinsonian infinitives, presents us with the climactic end of an affair and its immediate wake. The next stanza gives us not the "morning after" but the dawn of civilization, an allegorical fair field, or landscape painting, full of folk. With the third stanza, we find ourselves in a protracted wait, along with the lover on the rebound. When the doorbell rings, however, the wave appears not as a lover but as a conceptual revolution that swamps our current ways of seeing the world. A wave may be a new (or renewed) love, a child-

JOHN ASHBERY I 25 hood crisis, a way of thinking, a brush with death, a new president, poem, or artistic movement. Ashbery did not consciously compose "A Wave" by phases, but the second-natured phases of this rapidly written poem must have allowed him to concentrate on the differences in manner that each transition brings. As we might expect, we miss the playful wit of "The Skaters" or "Litany," but we find in its place an unparalleled adventuresomeness in Ashbery's coming to terms with art, life, and love. The swelling crest of "A Wave" contains Ashbery's most moving writing since "Syringa." The best lyrics of A Wave think through American discourses and languages rather than simply parody them, as in the powerful "Down by the Station, Early in the Morning": It all wears out. I keep telling myself this, but I can never believe me, though others do. Even things do. And the things they do. Like the rasp of silk, or a certain Glottal stop in your voice as you are telling me how you Didn't have time to brush your teeth but gargled with Listerine Instead. Each is a base one might wish to touch once more. Before dying. As the only alternative to toothpaste is Listerine, there is no way out of threadbare conversations, which nevertheless may be as charged with meaning as a Proustian rasp of silk. The intimate meditative minimalism of As We Know ("It all wears out"; "And the things they do") is here enlivened by the idiomatic undertones of Three Poems. Ashbery makes the worn-out figure of touching all the bases of a topic his own with the sentimental fragment "want to touch once more" and the suddenly frank "Before dying." Like "A Wave," "Down by the Sta-

tion" (the title is from a children's train song) involves a cathartic interruption, which is also (like Listerine) a purification. The purgative third and last stanza dazzles with a moving economy: As the wrecking ball burst through the wall with the bookshelves Scattering the works of famous authors as well as those Of more obscure ones, and books with no author, letting in Space, and an extraneous babble from the street Confirming the new value the hollow core has again, the light From the lighthouse that protects as it pushes us away. The shocking rupture of the wrecking ball, after the second devastating stanza "break," upends but purifies the library with the languages of the tribe. The marker, "babble," gathers the crypt words "Babel," "bubble," "rabble," and "rubble," all of which speak their piece. The convex "hollow core," emptied by this catharsis (opening an apartment window onto the noisy street), sends out its own protective light, the "shield of a greeting," as Ashbery described Parmigianino's stylish gesture. The difficulty we have in fixing the stance of this passage—apocalyptic, moving, optimistic, and reflexive—is compounded by the split perspective of the reader / writer both inside the apartment and outside on the street. But this split perspective is characteristic of Ashbery's homey privacy. Ashbery has set us down beside him—"On the outside looking out," he says in a preceding poem ("But What is the Reader to Make of This?"). A Wave won Yale's Bollingen Prize in 1984, and the next year Ashbery received a MacArthur Prize Fellowship, which allowed him the leisure of writing for several years without teaching. Also in 1985, Ashbery published Selected Po-

26 I AMERICAN ems, retrieving from among nearly forty years of poetry the work he wished to be remembered by. Ashbery then sold a vanload of his surviving papers to the Houghton Library at Harvard, some of which were gathered from the basement of his recently deceased mother's home in Sodus. These cumulative savings, in the face of losses, helped fund Ashbery's next published volume, April Galleons (1987). Though there is no long poem in April Galleons, several of its lyrics equal those of A Wave in the pleasure they afford the reader: "April Galleons," "Finnish Rhapsody," "Vetiver," "Dreams of Adulthood," "Winter Weather Advisory," and "One Coat of Paint." In the Thoreauvian prose poem "The Ice Storm," Ashbery finds another way to make prose new. The allegory of the [p]rose at the center of this I-storm is lucidly unassuming: Today I found a rose in full bloom in the wreck of the garden, all the living and sentience but also the sententiousness drained out of it. What remained was like a small flower in the woods, too pale and sickly to notice. No, sickly isn't the right word, the thing was normal and healthy by its own standards, and thriving merrily along its allotted path toward death. Only we hold it up to some real and abject notion of what a living organism ought to be and paint it as a scarecrow that frightens birds away (presumably) but isn't able to frighten itself away. Oh, no, it's far too clever for that! But our flower, the one we saw, really had no need of us to justify its blooming where it did. So we ought to think about our own position on the path. Will it ever be anything more than that of pebble? I wonder. As the former minister Ralph Waldo Emerson said of the rhodora, "Beauty is its own excuse for being." Ashbery's message is that commentators (on roses or prose poems) are as selfreliantly transient as their subjects. This lay

WRITERS

preacher, who (as in the later poems of Auden or Eliot) has been speaking regularly in Ashbery's later poetry, has here the garrulousness and self-betraying obstinacy of "Litany," which domesticates the Proustian character of Three Poems. "Obviously," the narrator of the title poem of April Galleons concludes, "It was time to be off, in another / Direction." Since April Galleons, Ashbery has written the longest verse poem of his career, "Flowchart," and another volume's worth of short poems. He gave the Charles Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard during the 1989-1990 academic year, and also read his poetry in Japan, Sweden, and the Soviet Union. He edited an eclectic anthology of poetry, The Best American Poetry: 1988, which includes language poets alongside Iowa creative-writing graduates. Ashbery has resumed teaching, this time at Bard College, near his home in Hudson. In the prose coda to "Fantasia," Ashbery offers us one good reason for living: "Always there was something to see, something going on, for the historical past owed it to itself, our historical present." The historical present of Ashbery's ongoing work has been marked by changes. His less-popular books, The Tennis Court Oath and Shadow Train, were each followed by successful departures from their norms, Rivers and Mountains and A Wave. More significantly, Ashbery has resisted the temptation to reproduce his popular favorite, "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror." Yet nobody in American literature has written so many fine long poems. Rather than settling for an essayistic familiarity (as the later Auden often did), Ashbery has continued to experiment, and his work maintains a productive difficulty. The many changes in Ashbery's poetry, however, were not dictated merely by his own or by other poets' work. As powerfully as any poet of his generation, Ashbery has both represented and resisted postwar American history from the

JOHNASHBERY vantage point of someone on the outside look-

ing out. We owe it to ourselves, in turn, to keep reading Ashbery's prospective representations.

I 27 ited by David Bergman. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1989.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Kermani, David. John Ashbery: A Comprehensive Bibliography. New York: Garland, 1976.

Selected Bibliography MANUSCRIPT PAPERS

WORKS OF JOHN ASHBERY POETRY

Turandot and Other Poems. New York: Tibor de Nagy Gallery, 1953. Some Trees. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1956. The Tennis Court Oath. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1962. Rivers and Mountains. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1966. The Double Dream of Spring. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1970. Three Poems. New York: Viking Press, 1972. Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror. New York: Viking Press, 1975. The Vermont Notebook. Santa Barbara, Calif.: Black Sparrow Press, 1975. Houseboat Days. New York: Viking Press, 1977. As We Know. New York: Viking Press, 1979. Shadow Train. New York: Viking Press, 1981. A Wave. New York: Viking Press, 1984. Selected Poems. New York: Viking Penguin, 1985. April Galleons. New York: Viking Penguin, 1987.

OTHER WORKS

A Nest of Ninnies. With James Schuyler. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1969. Three Plays. Calais, Vt.: Z Press, 1978. The Best American Poetry, 1988. Edited by John Ashbery. New York: Macmillan, 1988. "A Reminiscence," in Homage to Frank O'Hara. Edited by Bill Berkson and Joe LeSueur. Bolinas, Calif.: Big Sky Bolinas, 1988. Reported Sightings: Art Chronicles, 1957-1987. Ed-

The Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, is currently cataloging Ashbery's manuscripts and correspondence through 1985.

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL STUDIES

Altieri, Charles. "John Ashbery: Discursive Rhetoric Within a Poetics of Thinking." In his Self and Sensibility in Contemporary American Poetry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984. Pp. 132-165. Auden, W. H. "Foreword." In Some Trees. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1956. Pp. 11-16. Biasing, Mutlu Konuk. "John Ashbery: Parodying the Paradox." In American Poetry: The Rhetoric of Its Forms. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987. Pp. 200-213. Bloom, Harold. "The Breaking of Form." In his Deconstruction &. Criticism. New York: Continuum, 1979. Pp. 1-38.

; . "Measuring the Canon: John Ashbery's 'Wet

Casements' and 'Tapestry/ " In his Agon: Towards a Theory of Revisionism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1982. Pp. 270-289. -. Modern Critical Views: John Ashbery. New York: Chelsea House, 1985. Bromwich, David. "John Ashbery." Raritan 5:36t 58 (Spring 1986). Breslin, Paul. "Warpless and Woofless Subtleties: John Ashbery and * Bourgeois Discourse/ " In his The Psycho-Political Muse: American Poetry Since the Fifties. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987. Pp. 211-235. Costello, Bonnie. "John Ashbery and the Idea of the

28 I AMERICAN WRITERS Reader." Contemporary Literature, 23:493-514 (Fall 1982). Davidson, Michael. "Languages of Post-Modernism." Chicago Review, 27:11-22 (Summer 1975). Donoghue, Denis. "John Ashbery." In his Reading America: Essays on American Literature. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987. Pp. 302-319. Fredman, Stephen. " AHe Chose to Include': John Ashbery's Three Poems." In his Poet's Prose: The Crisis in American Verse. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983. Pp. 99-133. Holden, Jonathan. "Syntax and the Poetry of John Ashbery." In his The Rhetoric of the Contemporary Lyric. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980. Pp. 98-111. Hollander, John. "The Poetry of Restitution." Yale Review, 70:161-186 (Winter 1981). Howard, Richard. "John Ashbery." In his Alone with America: Essays on the Art of Poetry in the United States Since 1950. New York: Atheneum, 1980. Pp. 25-56. Kaistone, David. "John Ashbery: 'Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror.' " In his Five Temperaments. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977. Pp. 170199. Keller, Lynn. " Thinkers without final thoughts': the continuity between Stevens and Ashbery" and " 'We must, we must be moving on': Ashbery's divergence from Stevens and modernism." In her Re-making It New: Contemporary American Poetry and the Modernist Tradition. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987. Pp. 15-78. Lehman, David, ed. Beyond Amazement: New Essays on John Ashbery. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1980. McClatchy, J. D. "Weaving and Unweaving," Poetry, 145:301-306 (February 1985). Mohanty, S. P., and Jonathan Monroe. "John Ashbery and the Articulation of the Social." Diacritics, 17:37-63 (Summer 1987). Molesworth, Charles. " 'This Leaving-Out Business': The Poetry of John Ashbery." In his The Fierce Embrace: A Study of Contemporary American Poetry. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1979. Pp. 163-183. O'Hara, Frank. "Rare Modern." Poetry, 89:307-316 (February 1957). Perkins, David. "Meditations of the Solitary Mind: John Ashbery and A. R. Ammons." In his A History of Modern Poetry: Modernism and After. Vol.

2. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, Belknap Press, 1987. Pp. 614-633. Perloff, Marjorie. " 'Mysteries of Construction': The Dream Songs of John Ashbery." In her The Poetics of Indeterminacy: Rimbaud to Cage. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981. Pp. 248-287. Ross, Andrew. "Doubting John Thomas." In his The Failure of Modernism: Symptoms of American Poetry. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986. Pp. 159-208. Shapiro, David. John Ashbery: An Introduction to the Poetry. New York: Columbia University Press, 1979. Shoptaw, John. "Saving Appearances: On John Ashbery." Temblor, no. 7:172-177 (Spring 1988). Vendler, Helen. "Making It New: A Wave." New York Review of Books, July 14, 1984. Pp. 32-35. . "John Ashbery, Louise Gluck." In her The Music of What Happens: Poems, Poets, Critics. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988. Pp. 224-261. Von Hallberg, Robert. "Robert Creeley and John Ashbery: Systems." In his American Poetry and Culture, 1945-1980. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985. Pp. 36-61. Williamson, Alan. "The Diffracting Diamond: Ashbery, Romanticism, and Anti-Art." In his Introspection and Contemporary Poetry. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984. Pp. 116148.

INTERVIEWS Bloom, Janet, and Robert Losada. "Craft Interview with John Ashbery." New York Quarterly, no. 9:11-33 (Winter 1972). Gangel, Sue. "An Interview with John Ashbery." San Francisco Review of Books, 3:12 (November 1977). Jackson, Richard. "The Imminence of a Revelation." In his Acts of Mind: Conversations with Contemporary Poets. University: University of Alabama Press, 1983. Pp. 69-76. John Ashbery and Kenneth Koch: A Conversation. Tucson, Ariz.: Interview Press, 1965. Koethe, John. "An Interview with John Ashbery." SubStance, 37-38:178-186 (1983). Kostelanetz, Richard. "How to Be a Difficult Poet."

JOHN ASHBERY I 29 New York Times Magazine, May 23, 1976. Pp. 18-22. Labrie, Ross. "John Ashbery." American Poetry Review. 13:29-33 (May-June 1984). Lehman, David. "John Ashbery: The Pleasures of Poetry." New York Times Magazine, December 16, 1984, pp. 62-92. Murphy, John. "John Ashbery." Poetry Review, 75:20-25 (August 1985). Osti, Louis. "The Craft of John Ashbery." Confrontation, 9:84-96 (Fall 1974).

Poulin, A., Jr. "John Ashbery." Michigan Quarterly Review, 20:243-255 (Summer 1981). Sommer, Piotr. "An Interview in Warsaw." In Code of Signals: Recent Writings in Poetics. Edited by Michael Palmer. Berkeley, Calif.: North Atlantic Books, 1983. Stitt, Peter. "The Art of Poetry 33: John Ashbery." Paris Review, no. 90:30-59 (Winter 1983).

—JOHN SHOPTAW

Djuna Barnes 1892-1982

TJL HE

dering hodge-podge of the obscene and virginal, of satire and wistfulness, of the grossest humor and the most delicate sadness—a book that absolutely baffles classification, but that surely is a most amazing thing to have come from a woman's hand.

HE MOST ENIGMATIC figure among the famous women who made Paris home between the world wars was a tall, angular, auburn-haired beauty with a quick wit. Djuna Barnes was a short-story writer, poet, playwright, newspaperwoman, theater columnist, portrait painter, and illustrator of her own work. Her work was not voluminous, but she has been called "a writer's writer," as if to explain why she is more revered than read. Barnes is best known for Nightwood (1936), a daring and complex poetic novel for which T. S. Eliot wrote the introduction. The difficulty of her prose, which depends upon thematic juxtaposition rather than chronological plot, as well as her black humor, fascination with the decadent, and frank discussion of female sexuality, has kept her outside the American literary mainstream. Yet the number of her serious and devoted readers continues to grow, as does the persistent legend of her eccentric, glamorous, and bisexual life abroad. When Barnes's first novel, Ryder, appeared in 1928, an acquaintance from her Greenwich Village days reviewed it in American Mercury in words that describe both Barnes and her work:

Certainly the men were amazed. Walter Winchell remarked that she could "hit a cuspidor twenty feet away"; Robert McAlmon said she was "very haughty"; Ezra Pound said she "weren't too cuddly." But in the same breath they praised her beauty, confounded by her commensurate talent. Her friend Janet Planner admired her for fearing no man. But the daring of Barnes's subject matter and style belied the shy and private woman who is portrayed in the most famous photograph of her, which is in profile, half her face hidden. Her posture is erect, making her seem formal and prim, her hat and clothes dramatic, her thin nose and high cheekbones accented by red lips and nails. One friend said that her mouth "forms an immobile ellipse, a trifle Hapsburg." Natalie Clifford Barney, one of her most important friends during the Paris years, said: Her mouth has an irresistible laugh. . . . Her appearance is most singular: she has a nose as sharply angled as an Eversharp pencil. . . . One can see in the bone structure of her large hands

Djuna Barnes has written a book that is all that she was, and must still be—vulgar, beautiful, defiant, witty, poetic, and a little mad—a bewil-

31

32 I AMERICAN WRITERS that she rides horses. . . . She is tall and slender, and her clothes fall at sharp angles against her powerful legs. As Shari Benstock has noted, Barnes was ambivalent about her physical self: extremely vain and careful about her appearance and dress, yet resentful of any notice of her looks and often posing for photographs in profile. The vulnerability and indirection are features of her literary style as well, and a central trope in Nightwood. When Robin Vote is introduced in Nightwood, she is described lying in bed at the Hotel Recamier: "In a moment of threatened consciousness she had turned her head/' Barnes was educated at home by her father, Henry Budington (who had changed his name to Wald Barnes when his parents divorced), and her paternal grandmother, Zadel Barnes Gustafson. Her mother, Elizabeth Chappell, her father's mistress, Fanny Faulkner (whom her father married in 1912), and their combined seven children lived under the same roof. Her grandmother, a powerful influence on Djuna's life, had been a journalist and had conducted a salon in London that included Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lady Wilde, mother of Oscar Wilde. This unorthodox "family" lived first in Cornwall-on-Hudson, New York, where Djuna Chappell Barnes was born on June 12, 1892, and later in Huntington Township, Long Island. These family relationships were treated in Barnes's later writings. Recent biographical research shows that at age eighteen Barnes lived for two or three months with fifty-two-year-old Percy Faulkner, the brother of her father's mistress, following an unofficial family ceremony in the farmhouse. She had many lovers in the next few years, including Courtenay Lemon, a scriptwriter with whom she lived in Greenwich Village for two years (1917-1919). By the age of twenty Barnes was in New York

City, studying at the Pratt Institute of Art and the Art Students League. Her Beardsleyesque drawings and pastels were shown in the Greenwich Village garret of Guido Bruno, the publisher of Bruno's Weekly. The following year she launched her journalistic career, contributing illustrated articles and stories to the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, the New York Morning Telegraph and the New York Herald, and later to magazines such as Theatre Guild and Vanity Fair. Barnes's early journalistic career was accelerated by economic necessity, an unorthodox family life, and youthful sexual emancipation. She learned temerity and independence. Her grandmother, after all, had covered temperance and feminist crusades for Harper's Monthly in the 1880's. Djuna showed her own daring and involvement by having herself force-fed in order to write with understanding about the British suffragists. She continued to write realistic journalism for many years, supporting her mother (now separated from Djuna's father), her three brothers, and her ill grandmother. Although Barnes later denigrated her journalistic essays as "utterly wasteful," they are perceptive and original in focus and style. In 1985 forty of her best interviews (from Coco Chanel and Billy Sunday to Alfred Stieglitz and James Joyce) and twentythree of her drawings, dating from 1913 to 1931, were published. Evident in her journalism, as in her fiction, is a criticism of American middleclass vulgarity ("mink-trimmed minds and sealedged morals") and a sense of the superiority of the artist. Though Barnes once called herself naive during this period, her writing certainly was not. Her satiric pieces occasionally focused on young girls full of illusions and vanity. Her reputation for hard and original prose and a keen mind added to the emerging legend of the young woman who dressed in a long opera cape and savored life. Her friends and associates in Greenwich Village included Edmund Wilson; Edna St.

DJUNA BARNES / 33 Vincent Millay; Peggy Guggenheim and Lawrence Vail, whose colorful and dramatic personae matched Barnes's; Mary Pyne, an actress who was her best friend; the painter Marsden Hartley; and Guido Bruno, an entrepreneur and profiteer of poetry. The work that Barnes valued was her poetry, which was characterized by its satire of middleclass values and an interest in death. Her first poems appeared in Harper's Weekly (1911). Guido Bruno published her first collection of poetry and explicit illustrations, a slip chapbook entitled The Book of Repulsive Women (1915), which revealed her interest in the grotesque. At the time it was seen as typical of a certain Greenwich Village bohemianism and decadence, though feminist critical thought now reads it as a critique of woman's place in Western society. The portrayal of women in The Book of Repulsive Women is occasionally macabre, and it implies, according to Bens toe k, a clear relationship between the physical and psychological states of women. The degeneration of age is juxtaposed with "degenerate" acts of lesbian lovemaking. The woman in "Seen from the 4L' " is "chain-stitched" and "Slipping through the stitch of virtue, / Into crime." The woman in "From Fifth Avenue Up" is described as "strangled," "leaning," and "oozing." The body of one woman in Barnes's last poem, "Suicide," is given "hurried shoves": Her body shock-abbreviated As a city cat. She lay out listlessly like some small mug Of beer gone flat. The drawings that illustrate this volume of poetry emphasize the "disjointed, grotesque, and abstract." Barnes's first short stories, or "tales," appeared in 1914 ("The Terrible Peacock") and 1915 ("Paprika Johnson"). The contrived and complicated plots that end with a twist soon gave

way to stories with a more modern and psychological focus. She continued writing short stories for fifteen years, publishing about thirty, which she revised and reissued through the years. Scholars consider the short stories "dark" and "comfortless." Louis F. Kannenstine writes that they present "the terror of the impossibility of being," James B. Scott that they "show how and why death can be the only real affirmation in a meaningless universe," Cheryl Plumb that they "set out the abundant inadequacies of life" and reveal that human consciousness is "fragile" and meaning "elusive." An excellent illustration of these themes is "A Night Among the Horses," perhaps her most famous short story and the one for which she won the O. Henry Prize in 1918. At first glance this story appears to be a social or class struggle between John, a hostler ("I like being common"), and his betrothed, Freda Buckler, a cultured and traveled woman: She spread maps, and with a long hat-pin dragging across mountains and ditches, pointed to "just where she had been." Like a dry snail the point wandered the coast, when abruptly, sticking the steel in, she cried "Borgia!" and stood there, jangling a circle of ancient keys. Freda tells him, "[I] will make you a gentleman. . . . You will rise to govenour—general— well, to inspector—." Beyond this class tension is a darker vision, for both the world of the ballroom, where John deserts Freda, and the world of horses, where he is at home, are tangled and confused, dark and deceptive. At the masked ball, with its "tipsy" revelers and a fat lady dancer "grunting in cascades of plaited tulle," he comes to "a sudden stop" on the dance floor, backs out of the French doors, and flees. Crawling under the fence in his tails and top hat, he seeks the horses, who are "tearing up the sod, galloping about as though in their own ball-room." Thinking that this world of "tangled branches" and horses with

34 I AMERICAN WRITERS "legs rising and falling like savage needles taking purposeless stitches" is the world in which he belongs, he blames Freda for changing him so that the horses do not "know him": \Vheeling, manes up, nostrils flaring, blasting out steam as they came on, they passed him in a whinnying flood, and he damned them in horror, but what he shouted was "Bitch!", and found himself swallowing fire from his heart, lying on his face, sobbing, "I can do it, damn everything, I can get on with it; I can make a mark!" The upraised hooves of the first horse missed him, second did not. Presently the horses drew apart, nibbling and swishing their tails, avoiding a patch of tall grass. With this sudden conclusion, Barnes is suggesting "the impossibility of returning to a state of innocence," says Plumb. But Barnes is also revealing the futility of self-achievement in either the indifferent natural world or the corrupt and materialistic social world. Both worlds are hostile to the human spirit. Several elements of this story are typical of Barnes's fiction. She often uses animals or insects, as she did in another excellent story, "The Rabbit" (1917), in which an Armenian suitor steals and strangles a rabbit to prove to his love that he can be a hero. The horses of "A Night Among the Horses" reflect Barnes's interest in riding, for she was an equestrian and often dreamed about animals. Placing her characters close to death, suggesting the triumph of death, and satirizing middle-class manners are other elements found throughout her fiction. During the decade in which Barnes began writing and publishing her artwork, poetic fiction, and journalism, she also wrote one-act plays, most of which appeared between 1916 and 1923. Three of these plays were staged by the Provincetown Players in 1919 and 1920, when she worked with Eugene O'Neill, who encouraged her work. Others were published in various

periodicals, including the Little Review, the Dial, Charm, and the Smart Set (the first two helped to place her name among the avant-garde; the second two puzzled their popular readership). The external action of Barnes's plays seems important only as it reveals the consciousness of her characters. Yet certain themes run throughout the plays: her concern with morality, social conformity, sexual repression, and self-deception. In At the Root of Stars (1917), The Death of Life (1916), and Kurzy of the Sea (1920), Barnes shows the artist or an outsider confronting middle-class attitudes. Occasionally she uses Irish dialect in her plays, a direct reflection of the influence of John Millington Synge (The Playboy of the Western World, 1907). "Synge first touched the Irish in me," she said. Barnes's plays were occasionally praised but not often understood. Though Heywood Broun called An Irish Triangle (1920) one of "the best of the new one-act pieces," Lawrence Langner in The Magic Curtain (1951) noted that her plays "combined a startling sense of dramatic values with an incoherence of expression that made everything she wrote exciting and baffling at the same time." After tasting the pleasures of Greenwich Village at its peak during the second decade of the twentieth century, Barnes sailed for Paris in 1920 (she later had difficulty remembering the date), presumably to report on expatriate life for McCalVs magazine. Paris had historically drawn American artists—from Benjamin Franklin to Henry James. "Writing in Paris is one of the oldest American customs," wrote Van Wyck Brooks. "It all but antedates, with Franklin, the founding of the republic." Natalie Clifford Barney had arrived in 1902, Gertrude Stein in 1903, Edith Wharton in 1906, and Sylvia Beach in 1916. During the fertile period of literature between the world wars, Paris was the cultural capital. Djuna Barnes and Ezra Pound arrived in 1920, Ernest Hemingway in

DJUNA BARNES I 35 1921; the momentum would peak at middecade. When Barnes checked into the Hotel Jacob et d'Angleterre at 44, rue Jacob, she joined many former residents of Greenwich Village, including Alfred Kreymborg, who was in the lobby when she arrived, and Harold Loeb, editor of the literary magazine Broom. She continued to support herself with journalism, using the pen name Lydia Steptoe for her most satiric pieces, which she wrote while propped up in her bed. Paris was the best address for writers of the 1920's, and Barnes's arrival coincided with a major migration of Americans to the Left Bank. Here was an international intelligentsia, the avant-garde of modernism: Pablo Picasso, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, and James Joyce. Like the other talented women of this period who had chosen the freedom and beauty of Paris (H.D. preferred Switzerland and Virginia Woolf England), Barnes savored the availability of alcohol and the leisurely caf£ life as well as the quiet of the churches: —And so it was I came to Paris, and a few hours later was leaning out of my window in the Rue Jacob, and thinking in my heart of all unknown churches, and so thinking, I put on my cloak and went to Notre Dame in the sad, falling twilight, and wandered under the trees. . . When Notre Dame left her "comparatively untouched," Barnes concluded that her neighborhood church of Saint-Germain-des-Pres was "more possible," for "here one takes one's tears, leaving them unshed, to count the thin candles that rise about the feet of the Virgin like flowers of fire." She wrote about the city in her short stories and articles. Despite the number of celebrities and eccentrics on the Left Bank, Barnes stood out. She appeared in most of the dozens of memoirs of the period, described in a solitary pose or with a group of daring women. Her work soon appeared

in all the little journals, among them Transatlantic Review, This Quarter, and transition. Although she attended the notable events of the decade, including George Antheil's riotous Ballet mecanique in 1926, she chose her friends carefully and cherished her privacy. As one journalist noted, "She met all advances with a defiant vulgarity that confused utterly." One friend she chose was another very private writer, the Irishman James Joyce. Among her interviews for Vanity Fair was one (April 1922) that emphasized Joyce the singer: There are men in Dublin who will tell you that out of Ireland a great voice has gone; and there are a few women, lost to youth, who will add: "One night he was singing and next he wasn't, and there's been no silence the like of it!" For the singing voice of James Joyce, author of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and of Ulysses, is said to have been second to none. She writes of having talked to him often, "of artists and of Ireland," particularly in the Cafe aux Deux Magots. She wisely did not ask him questions and waited through his silences. Janet Planner (Genet) claimed that Barnes was the only friend in Paris who dared to call Joyce "Jim." Although she declared when his Ulysses appeared, "I shall never write another line. Who has the nerve to after this!," she did continue to write and draw. In 1921 Barnes joined the group from Greenwich Village—which included Marsden Hartley, Berenice Abbott, Man Ray, and Robert McAlmon and his group—that moved briefly from Paris to Germany, where the dollar was stronger than in France. They were joined by Isadora Duncan and Charles Chaplin, who were in Berlin at that time. Barnes visited Budapest and Vienna, and sampled the drugs and decadence of postwar Berlin—an atmosphere that would find its way into Nightwood and foreshadow the milieu of World War II Berlin.

36 I AMERICAN WRITERS After returning from Berlin in late 1921 or early 1922, Barnes moved into an apartment at 173, boulevard Saint-Germain, just up the boulevard from the Cafe aux Deux Magots, on the same side of the boulevard as the Brasserie Lipp. She preferred the 6th arrondissement and was often seen drinking in its cafes, a pile of saucers on her table. In his column in the Paris Tribune, Harold Stearns wrote of seeing her often at Deux Magots. She dressed dramatically, kept her own counsel, and was admired for her talent, particularly after A Book (1923) appeared. A Book included three one-act plays, twelve short and sparse stories, eleven lyrical poems, and six drawings. Two of the short stories, "Cassation" (originally entitled "A Little Girl Tells a Story to a Lady") and "The Grande Malade" (published in This Quarter I as "The Little Girl Continues"), are set in Paris cafes. Their "textual shadows," according to Carolyn Allen, reveal "a fictional seduction of the older 'Madame' by the younger narrator." These two stories, as well as "The Passion," are also interpreted as dealing with the nature of the artist and her relationship to the external world. Generally, the stories reveal a restlessness and an estrangement from society that characterize the expatriate literature of the period. Barnes gained a reputation for her black humor and quotable observations. Matthew Josephson reported that she declared, "I came to Europe to get culture. Is this culture? . . . I might as well go back to Greenwich Village and rot there." One of the most memorable descriptions of Barnes came from her friend Kathryn Hulme (who would later write The Nun's Story), who remembered often seeing Barnes with her friends Janet Planner and Solita Solano drinking martinis in a cafe, each dressed in a black tailored suit and white gloves, looking like three elegant Fates. Expatriate gossip columns liked to report on her with tongue in cheek: "Djuna Barnes, who, according to her publishers, is that

legendary personality that has dominated the intellectual night-life of Europe for a century." What particularly titillated the expatriate men was that this beauty was in love with Thelma Wood, a tall silverpoint artist from St. Louis given to the consumption of alcohol and wandering the streets of Montparnasse. For several years they lived in Barnes's apartment on boulevard Saint-Germain, then in an apartment at 9, rue St.-Romain that was filled with religious paintings and objects, a decadent reversal of the moral code that must have pleased Barnes. In all, they lived together for eight sometimes stormy years (1923-1931), and maintained a relationship that would later find artistic expression in Nightwood, with Wood the prototype of Robin Vote. Barnes published "Aller et Retour" and "The Passion" in all the right expatriate little magazines. Ford Madox Ford published her work in his Transatlantic Review and held a party for her at the salon of Natalie Barney. She also appeared in transition, edited by Eugene Jolas, who trumpeted the language of the night and the subconscious. Jolas' transition is best known for its serialization of Joyce's Work in Progress, later to become Finnegans Wake. Not surprisingly, Jolas was eager to publish Barnes's "Rape and Repining," a chapter from her soon-to-bepublished first novel, Ryder, which bears the unmistakable influence of Joyce. In sharp contrast to Barnes's earlier terse/ spare prose style, Ryder is copious, fantastic, ornamental, picaresque, and symbolic. In Joycean fashion she experimented with literary styles, using a pastiche of the epic, the Bible, the fable, the epistolary novel, and the couplet. Simply explained, it is a mock-Elizabethan chronicle of the Ryder (or Barnes) family—a social satire of conformity and sexual repression, with characters called Laura Twelvetree, Molly Dance, and Lady Bertha Bridesleep. It is complex in part because Barnes ignores chronological plot development and narrative progression in favor of the-

DJUNA BARNES I 37 matic relationships. If the style is Joycean, the bleak wasteland view is T. S. Eliot's. The American Mercury called it "a piece of rubbish"; The Argonaut called it "vulgar, beautiful, witty, poetic, and a little mad"; other reviewers echoed one another with words such as "lusty," "plotless," and "amazing." Feminist critics, as well as Barnes's biographer Andrew Field, emphasize the biographical parallels—although any suggestion of a narrative line is misleading and mocks this complex tour de force. Wendell Ryder (based on Barnes's father) lives polygamously, sleeping between his wife (the religious and long-suffering Amelia) and his mistress (the fertile and indifferent KateCareless) in a two-room cabin. Amid sexual innuendos and puns (certainly his name is one), the women fight for his body and soul. Unable to reconcile them, and harassed by his neighbors, he sends his wife away, despairing of the ideal. The question "And whom should he disappoint now?" echoes throughout the final chapter. The theme of Ryder, argues James Scott, is that "disjointed and peculiar as Ryder's life appears, it is closer to nature than more conventional lives," and thus is "more spontaneous, more joyous, and far more productive of beauty." Yet Cheryl Plumb, who acknowledges Barnes's satire of middle-class sexual repressiveness, believes that Barnes intended "to present the perpetual conflict between physical nature and the human spirit in terms of the ... egotism of Wendell Ryder. '' Other recent critics see an implied attack on Ryder, whose philosophy is essentially bourgeois. Their evidence is that his actions are comic and foolish, and that Barnes's imagery connects him with indecision and death. Through O'Connor (the homosexual doctor who would later play a major role in Nightwood) Barnes provides an alternative to Ryder—that is, a balance between physical nature and the human spirit. This interpretation is bolstered by the words of Molly Dance, who says that original sin is man's, not

woman's: * 'It was an apple, surely, but man it was who snapped it up, scattering the seeds, and these he uses to this day to get his sons by." Ryder, like Gertrude Stein's The Making of Americans (1925), was accused of being a "plotless" exercise. Both women, Benstock points out, were "chastized for being significantly different from their Paris colleagues and for failing to master the Modernist enterprise." Barnes was accused of being arcane and inaccessible, Stein of being repetitious and boring. They also shared, according to Benstock, an interest in focusing their work on their female forebears,' 'exposing the ways women are made to suffer for the patriarchy." Ryder was dedicated to "T.W." (Thelma Wood), and the proceeds of the novel, together with money from McCalVs, enabled Barnes to buy a fifth-floor flat in rue Saint-Romain at the end of 1928. Here she and Wood lived in one of two new brick buildings set back from the quiet, narrow street. The imagination of the Left Bank expatriates was captured by the small book that Barnes next wrote and illustrated. Ladies Almanack (1928) is a kind of chapbook or broadsheet satirizing and celebrating the lesbians of Montpamasse—all disguised by names punning and mocking Elizabethan language. It was privately printed in a limited edition of 1,050 copies by Darantiere of Dijon, arranged and paid for by Robert McAlmon, according to Barnes. The author was identified as "a Lady of Fashion." Barnes (who had hand-colored the first fifty numbered copies) and her friends sold it in the streets of Montpamasse. It remained an underground favorite until it was reprinted in 1972. The humor and explicit sexuality of the drawings and subject matter of Ladies Almanack both shocked and satirized middle-class sensibilities. The antiquarian language enhances rather than diminishes the shock value. The book focuses on an aristocratic society of

38 I AMERICAN WRITERS women in a garden of Venus, their rituals and credos, their erotic intrigues and crusades. The central figure is Dame Evangeline Musset— Saint Musset, whose religion is love. The book is organized into twelve short monthly sections, using the almanac format and paralleling seasonal time with the stages of life. In December Musset dies peacefully and unrepentantly at the age of ninety-nine. As some on the Left Bank knew, Dame Musset was a portrait of Natalie Clifford Barney (1876-1972) and some members of her celebrated literary salon at 20, rue Jacob. Barney, originally from Dayton, Ohio, was a legendary figure in France, and the Amazon to whom R6my de Gourmont addressed his Lettres a VAmazone (1914). She wrote poetry in French, and her women lovers were many. Barney was a lesbian without ambivalence; she rejected religion, sentimentality, and monogamy, and believed that American women were born with Bibles in their mouths. For sixty years her Friday salon was an international center for leading writers and artists. In 1927 she organized the Academic des Femmes as a counterpart to the venerable male Academic Fran?aise. Barney, who did much to encourage the artistic careers of other women, was particularly fond of Barnes, with whom she had a brief affair during the younger woman's first summer in Paris. Barnes was even forgiven when she appeared drunk at one of Barney's Friday salons. Barney presented her to the French literary circle and described that evening in her Aventures de I*esprit (1929): Djuna Barnes, upright, unsullied, unpolished, grew pale at the insolence of honour being accorded her. . . . I had never introduced an author more awkward and less capable of serving her own cause. . . . Barnes possesses a candour and a sense of humour which passes through Cervantes and goes right back to Rabelais.

Barnes's wit had full play in the portrayal of the circle of Musset. Tilly Tweed-in-Blood was based, some guessed, on the English novelist Radclyffe Hall, author of the notorious lesbian work The Well of Loneliness (1929). Lady Bulkand-Balk was based on Una, Lady Troubridge. Other characters include Daisy Downpour (who has not been identified), Doll Furious (Dolly Wilde), and Patience Scalpel (the only heterosexual figure, based, in part, on Mina Loy). Nip and Tuck were based on Janet Planner and Solita Solano. These women encircle Evangeline Musset, who had developed in the womb as a boy who "came forth an Inch or so less than this." Her mission is to give sexual relief to young girls 44 for the Pursuance, the Relief and the Distraction, of such Girls as in their Hinder Parts, and their Fore Parts, and in whatsoever Parts did suffer them most. . . . " The humor of Ladies Almanack ranges from satire of middle-class ideas of sexuality to loose parody of the Left Bank lesbians and pure laughter and verbal wit for the amusement of the reader, such as the puns on penetration / understanding and on tongues. While Scott, Kannestine, and Field believe that Barnes is censuring the promiscuity of lesbianism, specifically the lesbians of the Left Bank in the 1920's, feminist critics disagree. Plumb calls Ladies Almanack "a counterpoint to Ryder," and Susan Sniader Lanser says it is a "mock epic of proselytizing." These contradictory interpretations are a result of Barnes's elliptical and ambiguous prose, yet all agree that Barnes portrays lesbianism as having the same faults as heterosexual love. Karla Jay adds that Barnes's nonprivileged economic status made her able to stand outside the circle, much as Patience Scalpel does, and to criticize; indeed, the book reveals, as in her fiction, the limitations of all physical love. Ladies Almanack argues for the place of women in society, but at the same time it laments their limitations. Barnes confirmed this bias

DJUNA BARNES I 39 when she declared, "I am writing the female Tom Jones." While some critics see the book as a celebration of lesbian pleasures, or, in Lanser's words, as "an inside joke" for Barney and her lesbian friends (Barney was very proud of the book), others—such as Jay—read harsh irony in the portrayal of Barney as a "conscienceless nymphomaniac"; Barnes, Jay claims, "bit the very hands that brought Ladies Almanack into existence." The book laments less the choice of lesbianism than "Loneliness estranged" and the "very Condition of Women so subject to Hazard, so complex, and so grievous. . . . " It portrays instead the limitations of all earthly love: jealousy, unfaithfulness, egotism, time, and decay. The garden of Venus is subject to all of these: We trouble the Earth awhile with our Fury; our Sorrow is flesh thick, and we shall not cease to eat of it until the easing Bone. Our Peace is not skin deep, but to the Marrow, we are not wise this side of rigor mortis', we go down to no River of Wisdom, but swim alone in Jordan. We have few Philosophers among us, for our Blood was stewed too thick to bear up Wisdom, which is a little Craft, and floats only when the way is prepared, and the Winds are calm. This bawdy and salacious work, with its Banesian darkness, was followed by A Night Among the Horses (1929), a collection of short stories that included three new pieces and rewritten stories from A Book. Barnes continued to write feature pieces for periodicals, focusing on decay and pretense, and on the lack of moral concern in art. She needed the journalism money, though she disparaged this work as "bottom of the barrel." Barnes's serious writing was hampered by her destructive personal life. "I am not a lesbian. I just loved Thelma," she declared. But the pain was outweighing the love. Despite their domesticity, their affair was dramatized by public scenes

(often in the middle of the night, after Barnes had gone looking for Wood in the bars and caf6s) and drunkenness. The affair was essentially over by 1928, though Thelma would visit her occasionally in Paris and during Barnes's trips to Greenwich Village between 1929 and 1931. Barnes immediately began writing a second novel she called "Bow Down" (later renamed Nightwood). When Barnes had surgery, Charles Henri Ford, a young friend she had met in Greenwich Village, moved into her apartment to care for her. Later he took her with him to Tangier (April-June 1933), where he typed a draft of her manuscript. She returned to Paris for an abortion after learning that she was pregnant by Jean Oberle, a French painter with whom she had had a brief affair. There was "nothing left but a big crowd" in Montparnasse, Barnes remarked to Wambly Bald, columnist for the Paris Tribune. Utilizing her reputation for wit, Bald wrote a humorous interview in which they "rested their heads on each other's shoulders and wept for a minute" on the demise of the Left Bank: "We agreed that it was all over.'' Perhaps it was no surprise to her friends when, in 1931 or 1932, Barnes left Paris for England with Peggy Guggenheim. Off and on for six or seven years she lived with the Guggenheim group, which included the novelists Emily Holmes Cole man, who did a great deal to help Barnes complete her next novel, and Antonia White, as well as various men, including John Holms, Guggenheim's lover. They lived in the countryside in a large rented castle (the most ornate and gloomy room was given to Barnes because it fitted her personality), Hay ford Hall, called Hangover Hall. Although Field maintains that Holms was the center of the household, Mary Lynn Broe has argued that the settlement was an ideal for the women, a "revised ideology of family" and a "domestic haven." The Guggenheim money held the castle together and

40 I AMERICAN WRITERS supported Barnes at forty dollars a month (by the time of Guggenheim's death in 1979, the monthly allowance had reached a high of three hundred dollars, where it remained until Barnes's death three years later). Her housing and the allowance from Guggenheim, together with the support of Cole man, allowed Barnes to finish Nightwood, which she dedicated "to Peggy Guggenheim and John Ferrar Holms." Nightwood, cut down to a third of its original length, was first published in England in 1936. Its title suggests the surrealistic world of night and dreams that so concerned the surrealists in Paris (among the numerous titles that used the word "night" were those of works by Louis Aragon, Philippe Soupault, Max Jacob, Robert Desnos, and Paul £luard). It also shows the influence of Barnes's association with Jolas and his journal transition, which trumpeted Jungian-inspired interest in dreams and an attack on rigid logic and linear time. Whatever happens in the novel can best be summarized by the question "How does Robin Vote affect the lives of four people whom she meets in Paris in the 1920's?" All five characters are expatriates living in Paris; four are Americans. After marrying Felix Volkbein, an alienated Austrian Jew and a baron with a false pedigree, and bearing his child, Robin leaves him for Nora Flood, an American journalist. Nora tries to remake or domesticate Robin—to catch her in patriarchal norms, say the feminist critics—and thereby loses her to Jenny Petherbridge, a "dealer in second-hand . . . emotions," who "appropriated the most passionate love that she knew, Nora's for Robin." Abandoned, Nora looks to Matthew O'Connor, a brilliant transvestite psychoanalyst. He fails to ease her suffering ("I'll never understand her—I'll always be miserable—just like this"), and their relationship brings about his own spiritual collapse. Felix reappears, now devoted to caring for his son. In the final pages of the novel, Robin

confronts Nora in a chapel at her American estate, yet they remain estranged. Place Saint-Sulpice (in the 6th arrondissement) is the setting of the chapter "La Somnambule" and part of the chapter "Go Down, Matthew." Here, on either side of the church of Saint-Sulpice, are the Hotel Rgcamier, where Robin Vote lives (and where Thelma Wood lived before she moved in with Barnes), and the Cafe de la Maine, where Matthew O'Connor drinks until he is "drunk and telling the world" of its doom: He began to scream with sobbing laughter. "Talking to me—all of them—sitting on me as heavy as a truck horse—talking! Love falling buttered side down, fate falling arse up! ... Now that you have all heard what you wanted to hear, can't you let me loose now, let me go? . . . Everything's over, and nobody knows it but me—drunk as a fiddler's bitch. . . . Now," he said, "the end—mark my words—now nothing, but wrath and weeping!" Part of the difficulty in reading Nightwood lies in its structure, which rejects linear plot development in favor of eight sections that are not related in time or place. Joseph Frank calls the structure "spatial form," another critic "tableaux." It is like viewing a family album in which the photographs are arranged by memory association, not by chronology or any law of perceivable relationship. Though the first chapter seems to be tied to historical time, with Felix's birth in 1880 and the manufactured account of his ancestry, chronology disappears in 1920, when he arrives in Paris. Henceforth the characters seem to exist in the realm of night and sleep, where rational perceptions and time end. According to Jane Marcus, even the social order is inverted by introducing outsiders: Jews, lesbians, blacks, transvestites, circus people. Robin Vote is introduced in the chapter "La Somnambule":

DJUNA BARNES I 41 Her movements were slightly headlong and sideways; slow, clumsy and yet graceful, the ample gait of the night-watch. . . . She was gracious and yet fading, like an old statue in a garden, that symbolizes the weather through which it has endured, and is not so much the work of man as the work of wind and rain and the herd of the seasons, and though formed in man's image is a figure of doom. Robin moves through the novel and through the lives of others with mystery and flux— characteristics that make her irresistible and fascinating to others. Whether or not she is physically present, her influence is felt in all actions, dialogues, and descriptions: "Robin was outside the 4human type'—a wild thing caught in a woman's skin, monstrously alone, monstrously vain," yet she is the central reality, dictating the form and poetry of the novel. She seems intangible—indeed, a mixture of two worlds: both boy and girl, "newly ancient," both innocent and depraved, both beast and human. Marcus calls her "Our Lady of the Wild Things, savage Diana the huntress with her deer and dogs, the virgin Artemis roaming the woods with her Band of Women." Biographers claim that Robin is a portrait of Thelma Wood and that the novel is for Barnes an exorcism of their relationship. Nora, the wandering expatriate from America, is drawn to Robin's perversity; Robin represents Nora's unconscious, repressed self. According to Benstock, Nora is trapped in the Puritan ethic of her past and tries to domesticate Robin. She is, in O'Connor's words, "beating her head against her heart, sprung over, her mind closing her life up like a wheel on a fan, rotten to the bone of love for Robin.'' Nora is described as "a Westerner" and "an early Christian" who "robbed herself for everyone." In the chapter "Night Watch" she is presented in the image of a tree:

She was broad and tall, and though her skin was the skin of a child, there could be seen coming, early in her life, the design that was to be the weather-beaten grain of her face, that wood in the work; the coming forward in her, an undocumented record of time. When she meets Robin, "they were so 'haunted' of each other that separation was impossible." Like Robin, Matthew O'Connor is caught between waking and dreaming and damnation and grace, and his similarity to Robin may account in part for Nora's seeking his counsel when Robin abandons her. In the chapter "Watchman, What of the Night?" he tells Nora: Well, I, Dr. Matthew-Mighty-grain-of-saltDante-O'Connor, will tell you how the day and the night are related by their division. The very constitution of twilight is a fabulous reconstruction of fear, fear bottom-out and wrong side up. Every day is thought upon and calculated, but the night is not premeditated. The Bible lies the one way, but the night-gown the other. The night, "Beware of that dark door!" Matthew is the central prophetic voice of the novel, serving as both the chorus and the androgynous Tiresias of Greek tragedy and Eliot's The Waste Land. His monologues are brilliant and "torrential." He articulates a central theme of the novel: Man was born damned and innocent from the start, and wretchedly—as he must—on those two themes—whistles his tune. The evil and the good know themselves only by giving up their secret face to face. . . . The face of the one tells the face of the other the half of the story they both forgot. The combination of beauty and barbarity, innocence and corruption, the human and the bestial, day and night, the demonic and the saintly, form the tropes of the novel, as do sexual differ-

42 I AMERICAN WRITERS ence and sameness. The central trope in Nightwood—as in Ladies Almanack and Ryder (Wendell Ryder is "much mixed . . . of woman and man")—is androgyny. To be caught between unattainable extremes of existence is a kind of hell. The short final chapter, "The Possessed," is set in America. Robin has been sleeping in the woods of upstate New York and finally moves into a decayed chapel on Nora's estate. When her dog begins to bark, Nora opens the windows and unlocks the doors of her house, sensing Robin's presence. She goes to the chapel, where she discovers a makeshift altar of lighted candles, flowers, and toys arranged before the Madonna. Robin is soon on all fours facing the dog, which she meets forehead to forehead. The dog springs back, whimpering; Robin is "grinning and whimpering," backing the dog into a corner. When the dog barks and circles her, Robin responds by "barking in a fit of laughter, obscene and touching," pursuing the dog until they are both exhausted and "lying out" flat on the floor. Failing in her final attempt at communion with something living, Robin lies fallen and bestial. Nightwood's appeal would be "primarily to readers of poetry," claimed Eliot in his introduction to the American edition of the novel. It is "so good a novel," he explains, "that only sensibilities trained on poetry can wholly appreciate it." He praises it for "the great achievement of style, the beauty of phrasing, the brilliance of wit and characterisation, and a quality of horror very nearly related to that of Elizabethan tragedy." Another poet, Dylan Thomas, was an enthusiast of Nightwood, calling it, with an unintended slur, "one of the three great prose books ever written by a woman." In style, the novel is a collage of shifting metaphors and language from the Old Testament, the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods, the metaphysical poets, early-eighteenthcentury novels, late-nineteenth-century poetry, symbolism, and surrealism. In short, its style is

baroque. Joseph Frank and Wallace Fowlie have demonstrated that the novel's structure is based upon poetic association, circular or arabesque patterns, and musical configurations such as the fugue. Though Nightwood is generally considered Barnes's best-organized and most intensely written book, scholars are unable to agree on its classification, and interpretations of its meaning differ widely. Kannenstine calls it "a distillation of the despair and estrangement of expatriation.'' Marcus refers to it as "a kind of anarchistfeminist call for freedom from fascism." Benstock insists that it presents a world in which "the patriarchal vision" has estranged women "from themselves" and "from their appetites," causing their sexuality to become depraved. The events that in part obscured the advent of this great experimental novel also drove Barnes out of England. Suffering from severe alcoholism, she had moved sometime in August 1932 from Hayford Hall to a Gothic abode in London that her friends called Nightmare Abbey. During a final trip to Paris, in 1939, she sold her apartment. When Peggy Guggenheim and Helen Joyce sent her to New York City in November 1939, the move was probably a rescue more from alcoholic oblivion than from the war in Europe. Barnes's transient life after Paris was like that of several other women expatriates, including Nancy Cunard (1896-1965), the British publisher who owned Hours Press. In the 1930's both women were without a home, physically ill, and emotionally unstable. While Cunard chose political involvement, Barnes chose retreat and obscurity. In this withdrawal she can be compared with another British fiction writer, Jean Rhys (1894-1979), who disappeared into the English countryside until she and her work were rediscovered shortly before her death. During the 1930's, when most literature was politically engaged, three important expatriate women writers insisted on writing about dreams

DJUNA BARNES I 43 and the female secret life: Barnes in Nightwood, Jean Rhys in Good Morning, Midnight (1930), and Anai's Nin (1903-1977) in her multivolume diary and in House of Incest (1947). In this novel Nin uses some of the subject matter and imagery of Nightwood, which she admired; she also uses the name Djuna for a character in several of her works, including the first novelette of the 1939 edition of The Winter of Artifice. Barnes, Rhys, and Nin—who were all international wanderers— addressed in their fiction the question of woman's relation to her body. Though these women seem extremely vulnerable and out of step with the 1930's, their fiction has been favorably reevaluated. Though they refused to address political issues directly, says Benstock, the "psychopathology of the female spirit'' that is the subject of their works "reflects a larger cultural paranoia and self-hatred." Patchin Place in Greenwich Village was the setting for the second half of Barnes's life, what she called her "Trappist" period. She lived in increasing isolation and retreat. Her drinking led to a series of ''breakdowns," as she referred to her alcoholism. E. E. Cummings, a neighbor, would occasionally call out of his window, "Are you still alive, Djuna?" Guggenheim and Barney, among others, sent her money. She wrote poetry and illustrated a brief bestiary, Creatures in an Alphabet (1982), but during this time she published only one major new work, The Antiphon (1958). The Antiphon is a verse play about a mother and daughter, victims of a cruel and sexually aggressive husband and father, working out their anger. It is set in 1940, when Germany was bombarding England, at the ancestral home, Burley Hall, whose damage symbolizes the destruction of the family and its traditions as well as hostile world conditions. The house is filled with "wasteland" artifacts and prophecies of a totalitarian world and of the destruction of civilization. During a macabre scene that takes place

during a- family reunion, two brothers, one in a pig's mask and one an ass's mask, bungle a physical attack on their sister and mother. This family of the deceased Titus Higby Hobbs is essentially the family of Wendell Ryder, humorously dramatized in Ryder: both men espouse polygamy and free love; both have mothers who conducted salons; both men break up their homes. The allusions to Barnes's life have been noted by many critics. The Antiphon's Miranda, for example, is a writer who is called "Queen of the Night" (suggesting the author of Nightwood). The Antiphon went through twenty-nine drafts before publication and is clearly Barnes's most complex work, full of archaisms, compacted syntax, obscure allusions, dualisms, and timelessness. Eliot, as senior editor of Faber & Faber, had advised her to cut scenes, including one in Act II in which the father, Titus, unable to have his daughter for himself, barters her virginity for the price of a goat, to a man three times her age. Eliot's recommendations finally reduced the play to a third of its original size, but his bewilderment was echoed by a great number of critics, who used words such as "enigma" and "encrustation." An anonymous reviewer in London's Listener claimed to be confused by what he called a ' 'very obscure play" that "reads like The Family Reunion rewritten by Christopher Fry after studying Ivy Compton-Burnett." Praise came from American poets Richard Eberhart ("her eccentric diction may be timeless") and Howard Nemerov, and from her longtime friend Edwin Muir, who had convinced Eliot of the value of publishing The Antiphon and who said that hers was "the only prose by a living writer which can be compared with that of Joyce." Muir arranged a reading of the play at Harvard. Both Barnes and Eliot attended. The reading was disappointing, but a more successful production was its 1962 premiere at the Royal Dramatic Theater of Stockholm in a translation

44 I AMERICAN WRITERS by Dag Hammarskjold and Karl Gierow. More recent critics, such as Lynda Curry, have reevaluated this work, and with the publication of Silence and Power, essays that examine Barnes's work from a sociopolitical perspective, The Antiphon is finally being fully analyzed. In 1962 Barnes issued a rewritten collection of her short stories. Although Spillway does not include the stories that treat death in A Book and A Night Among the Horses, it does include the stories about "individual integrity and human mortality." Also in 1962 the Selected Works of Djuna Barnes appeared, with some works, such as The Antiphon, extensively revised. By the mid-1970's scholarly books about Barnes's work had begun to appear. The myths about her persisted, fueled by the public's renewed interest in expatriate Paris, by rumors of her alcoholism (although she did, by the end of her life, give up drinking), by her isolation (twice she was placed, against her will, in a sanatorium and a nursing home), and by her acerbic wit and stubborn opinions. In print, others called her an "embittered relic" and an "enigmatic neo-Gothic figure." Her bitterness came in part from what she called "this flesh laid on us like a wrinkled glove," for she detested "the physical debility of old age," according to Benstock. "The red-headed bohemian" was now gray. On June 18, 1982, she died at ninety years of age. The critical assessment of Barnes's work has moved far beyond the initial praise of Eliot and the bewilderment of Pound, who said she "wrote like a baboon,'' to Field's claim that she is, along with Eliot and Joyce, "a major writer of our time" and that "Colette, Woolf, and Barnes" should be nominated for placement on Parnassus. Her admirers included Samuel Beckett, Anais Nin, and Dag Hammarskjold. This profound and complex writer was essentially moral in her struggle with the conflict between physical nature and the human spirit. Though Barnes probably abhorred both feminists

and scholars, it is the feminist critics, those conducting the closest rereadings, who are making her works more accessible and attempting to respond to the challenge posed by the prophetic lines of her poem "From Fifth Avenue Up": Someday beneath some hard Capricious star, Spreading its light a little Over far We'll know you for the woman That you are. . . .

Selected Bibliography WORKS OF DJUNA BARNES BOOKS

The Book of Repulsive Women: 8 Rhythms and 5 Drawings. New York: Bruno Chap, 1915; Yonkers, N.Y.: Alicat Bookshop, 1948. A Book. New York: Boni & Liveright, 1923; London: Faber & Faber, 1958. Ladies Almanack. Dijon: Darantifere, 1928; New York: Harper & Row, 1972. Ryder. New York: Liveright, 1928; New York: St. Martin's, 1979. A Night Among the Horses. New York: Horace Liveright, 1929. Nightwood. London: Faber & Faber, 1936; New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1937. The Antiphon: A Play. New York: Farrar, Straus & Cudahy, 1958; London: Faber & Faber, 1958. Creatures in an Alphabet. New York: Dial, 1982.

COLLECTED WORKS

The Selected Works of Djuna Barnes. New York: Farrar, Straus & Cudahy, 1962. Spillway. London: Faber & Faber, 1962; New York: Harper & Row, 1972. Smoke and Other Early Stories. Edited by Douglas

DJUNA BARNES I 45 Messerli. College Park, Md.: Sun & Moon Press, 1982. Djuna Barnes Interviews. Edited by Alyce Barry. Foreword and commentary by Douglas Messerli. College Park, Md.: Sun & Moon Press, 1985. New York—Djuna Barnes. Edited with commentary by Alyce Barry. Foreword by Douglas Messerli. Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, 1985. Cold Comfort: A Biographical Portrait of Djuna Barnes in Letters. Edited by Mary Lynn Broe and Frances McCullough. New York: Random House, forthcoming. The early one-act plays, some of which appeared in contemporary periodicals, have not yet been collected.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Messerli, Douglas. Djuna Barnes: A Bibliography. Rhinebeck, N.Y.: David Lewis, 1975. For 19751989 works see Janice Thorn and Kevin Engel's bibliography in Mary Lynn Broe, ed., Silence and Power. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1990.

MANUSCRIPT PAPERS The Djuna Barnes Papers are in the McKeldin Library, University of Maryland at College Park. Also of value are the Emily Coleman Papers, in the library of the University of Delaware at Newark, and the Natalie Clifford Barney Papers, in the Bibliotheque Litteraire Jacques Doucet, University of Paris.

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL STUDIES Allen, Carolyn. " 'Dressing the Unknowable in the Garments of the Known': The Style of Djuna Barnes' Nightwood." In Women's Language and Style. Edited by Douglas Butturff and Edmund L. Epstein. Akron, Ohio: L. & S. Books, 1978. Pp. 106-118. . "Writing Toward Nightwood: Djuna Barnes' Seduction Stories." In Silence and Power. Edited by Mary Lynn Broe. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991. Pp. 54-66.

Benstock, Shari. Women of the Left Bank: Paris, 1900-1940. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986. Blankley, Elyse Marie. "Daughters' Exile: Ren£e Vivien, Gertrude Stein, and Djuna Barnes in Paris." Ph.D. dissertation, University of California at Davis, 1984. Broe, Mary Lynn. "My Art Belongs to Daddy: Incest as Exile—The Textual Economics of Hayford Hall." In Women's Writing in Exile. Edited by Mary Lynn Broe and Angela Ingram. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989. Pp. 4186. , ed. Silence and Power: A Reevaluation of Djuna Barnes. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991. Broun, Hey wood. "Short Plays at Provincetown in Good Bill: An Irish Triangle, by Djuna Barnes, Is Best of the New York One-Act Pieces Now Presented." New York Tribune, January 15, 1920. Pp. 12. Burke, Kenneth. "Version, Con-, Per-, and In-: Thoughts on Djuna Barnes' Novel Nightwood." Southern Review, n.s. 2:329-346 (April 1966). Curry, Lynda C. "The Second Metamorphosis: A Study of the Development of The Antiphon by Djuna Barnes." Ph.D. dissertation, Miami University (Ohio), 1978. Abridged as " Tom, Take Mercy': Djuna Barnes' Drafts of The Antiphon." In Silence and Power: A Reevaluation of Djuna Barnes. Edited by Mary Lynn Broe. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991. Pp. 286299. Davis, Isabel. "The People in Djuna Barnes's Nightwood." Ph.D. dissertation, State University of New York at Stony Brook, 1978. Ferguson, Suzanne C. "Djuna Barnes's Short Stories: An Estrangement of the Heart." Southern Review, n.s. 5:26-41 (January 1969). Field, Andrew. Djuna: The Life and Times of Djuna Barnes. New York: Putnam, 1983. Rev. ed., Djuna: The Formidable Miss Barnes. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1985. Fowlie, Wallace. "Woman: Nightwood of Djuna Barnes." In his Clown's Grail: A Study of Love in Its Literary Experience. London: Dobson, 1948. Pp. 139-146. Reprinted in his Love in Literature: Studies in Symbolic Expression. Plainview, N.Y.: Books for Libraries, 1972. Pp. 139-146. Frank, Joseph. "Spatial Form in Modern Literature,

46 I AMERICAN Part II.'' SewaneeReview, 53:433-456 (1945). Reprinted in his The Widening Gyre. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1963. Pp. 25-49. Gildzen, Alex, ed. A Festschrift for Djuna Barnes on Her Eightieth Birthday. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Libraries, 1972. Greiner, Donald J. "Djuna Barnes' Nightwood and the Origins of Black Humor." Critique: Studies in Modern Fiction, 17, no. 1:41-54 (1975). Guggenheim, Peggy. Out of This Century. New York: Dial, 1946. Herring, Phillip F. Djuna Barnes: A Biography. New York: Viking, forthcoming. Hirschmann, Jack A. 'The Orchestrated Novel: A Study of Poetic Devices in the Novels of Djuna Barnes and Hermann Broch, and the Influence of the Works of James Joyce upon Them." Ph.D. dissertation, Indiana University, 1962. Jay, Karl a. "The Outsider Among the Expatriates: Djuna Barnes's Satire on the Ladies of the Almanack." In Lesbian Texts and Contexts: Radical Revisions. Edited by Karla Jay and Joanne Glasgow. New York: New York University Press, 1990. Pp. 204-216. Kannenstine, Louis F. The Art of Djuna Barnes: Duality and Damnation. New York: New York University Press, 1977. Lanser, Susan Sniader. "Speaking in Tongues: Ladies Almanack and the Language of Celebration."

WRITERS Frontiers: A Journal of Woman's Studies, 4:39-46 (Fall 1979). Marcus, Jane. "Carnival of the Animals." Women's Review of Books, 8:6-7 (May 1984). . "Laughing at Leviticus: Nightwood as Woman's Circus Epic." In Silence and Power: A Reevaluation of Djuna Barnes. Edited by Mary Lynn Broe. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991. Pp. 221-250. Plumb, Cheryl J. Fancy's Craft: Art and Identity in the Early Works of Djuna Barnes. Selinsgrove, Pa.: Susquehanna University Press, 1986. Raymont, Henry. "From the Avant-Garde of the Thirties: Djuna Barnes." New York Times, May 24, 1971, p. 24. Scott, James B. Djuna Barnes. Boston: Twayne, 1976. Thomas, Dylan. "Nightwood." Light and Dark, March 1937, pp. 27-29. Weisstein, Ulrich. "Beast, Doll, and Woman: Djuna Barnes' Human Bestiary." Renascence, 15:3-11 (Fall 1962). Williamson, Alan. "The Divided Image: The Quest for Identity in the Works of Djuna Barnes." Critique: Studies in Modern Fiction, 7:58-74 (Spring 1964). —NOEL RILEY FITCH

Louise Bogan i897-1970

M

draw correspondences between the lives and the work, but Bogan would have none of it. Bogan began her career at the outset of high modernism, publishing her first book, Body of This Death: Poems, in 1923, one year after T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land appeared. Although considered a modernist (she wrote most of her poems during the 1920's and 1930's), Bogan was unlike the other poets of her generation in a number of ways. She never created a public persona, like Dylan Thomas, for example, whose poetry readings became grand performances; she had difficulty promoting her own work, unlike Ezra Pound and Roethke, who did not hesitate to call in literary favors and made sure their work was constantly in the public eye; and she wrote little poetry, even declining to publish in volumes individual poems that had appeared in magazines. Bogan wrote poetry throughout the 1930's but refused to compromise her art in response to the political pressures of that decade, and when, in the 1940's, she turned her energies to criticism, she scorned the proponents and philosophy of New Criticism. Most of the modernists were extraordinarily conscious of being modern, while Bogan was not. A traditionalist, she had no desire to break new poetic ground; she was too busy competing with Dante. She wanted to tell the emotional truths she had gleaned from her

Y AIM," WROTE Louise Bogan in a 1937 letter to Theodore Roethke, "is to sound so pure and so liquid that travelers will take me across the desert with them." The purity and fluidity that Bogan sought in her work, and more often than not achieved, have been recognized by only a few readers, most of whom have been poets. Bogan has been, both during her career and since, a poet's poet, appealing to those attuned to her technical virtuosity and sensitive to her lyric cries. With the 1980 publication of Journey Around My Room: The Autobiography of Louise Bogan—A Mosaic, and the 1985 publication by Elizabeth Frank of Louise Bogan: A Portrait, however, readers have been captured by the intensely feeling woman portrayed in both books, and consequently have been drawn to the poetry. Bogan would have despaired over this fascination with the life and the subsequent interest in the work. If she is known for anything, it is for her reticence and control. In Journey Around My Room she writes: The poet represses the outright narrative of his life. He absorbs it, along with life itself. The repressed becomes the poem. Actually I have written down my experiences in the closest detail. But the rough and vulgar facts are not there. We thrive on "rough and vulgar facts" about one another's lives; with writers we yearn to

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48 I AMERICAN WRITERS life, and she wanted to do so in a very conventional way—through formal, metrical, rhymed verse. In the 1950's and 1960's her formal lyrics seemed out of place to a public craving looser, more open verse, and she felt her peculiarity. Yet Bogan did leave a last volume of collected work. Published in 1968, The Blue Estuaries: Poems, 1923-1968, preserves 103 of the poems she thought valuable, and the sound and consistent voice of her criticism has helped to shape our literary sensibility, if only in a small way. Despite these achievements and the numerous awards she received for her work, Bogan felt alone and odd, even in the last years before her death in 1970. Bogan was born on August 11, 1897, in Livermore Falls, Maine. She and her family moved frequently, usually from one small mill town in the Northeast to another. The Bogan family, though poor and Irish Catholic, invariably lived in the Protestant section of town. Her childhood, and that of her brother, Charles, was wildly unsteady. Her parents, May Murphy Shields and Daniel Joseph Bogan, fought frequently and violently. Her mother, who was convinced she had married beneath herself, often left the family mysteriously and reappeared just as mysteriously—calmer, kinder, for a while. Louise was haunted years later by memories of being taken to hotels by her mother and waiting in the hallway outside a man's room. In Journey Around My Room, Bogan recalls with adoration the order she found at the home of a family named Gardner, where the Bogans boarded for a few months in 1904. Everything was in its place, everything was quiet, and meals were served on time. But this was someone else's home, and the Bogans soon left. Bogan's artistic awakening is unusually clearly marked. She was visiting her mother in the hospital, she writes in Journey Around My Room, when she turned from her mother's bedside to a vase of marigolds:

Suddenly I recognized something at once simple and full of the utmost richness of design and contrast that was mine. A whole world, in a moment, opened up: a world of design and simplicity; a kind of lightness, a kind of taste and knowingness, that shot me forward. . . . The "sudden marigolds," as she calls them, shocked her into a new way of perceiving her world. She had glimpsed an internal order, truth, and beauty. She began to write poetry at the age of fourteen, when "the life-saving process" began. At this time the literary scene in America was dramatically changed by Harriet Monroe's founding of Poetry: A Magazine of Verse in Chicago in 1912. For the first time in a consistent way, contemporary poetry of high quality was being published. Eliot, Pound, Wallace Stevens, and H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) all published early work in this journal and read each other's work in it. The following year, the American art world was ripped open at the Armory Show in New York, where Marcel Duchamp and others revealed a disjunction of images in art that paralleled movements in the literary world. New possibilities in the making of literature and art and a new audience for these productions gave a twofold strength to the modernist movement. During these important moments in the life of modernism, Bogan was studying in Boston at Girls' Latin School, gaining a rigorous education in the classics, and writing steadily, piling up pages and pages of manuscript. She read Poetry from its first issue and regularly submitted poems and prose to the school's literary magazine. Bogan remarks in Journey Around My Room that by the age of eighteen she had learned "every essential of [her] trade." In large part this is true—she did not significantly vary her style or subjects throughout her career, but instead worked on refining a technical and musical skill that played itself out on a few themes. She oc-

LOUISE BOGAN / 49 casionally experimented with free verse, but mainly she perfected the metrical melodies that sustain her songs about love, grief, and, above all, time. In 1915 Bogan entered Boston University. The following year she declined a scholarship to Radcliffe in order to marry Curt Alexander, an army man whom she followed to the Panama Canal Zone in 1917. She was pregnant and miserable, having found that she had nothing in common with either the other army wives or her husband. She left him in May 1918, taking their infant daughter, Mathilde (called Maidie), to Boston. Her brother was killed in France a few months later, just before the end of World War I. She reconciled briefly with her husband in 1919, and the family lived together for a few months; then she separated from him again. He died of pneumonia in 1920. Bogan's first marriage had been a disaster, and all her romantic hopes of love and escape and enduring comfort were destroyed. In the early poem "Betrothed" (in Body of This Death), Bogan writes: What have I thought of love? I have said, "It is beauty and sorrow." I have thought that it would bring me lost delights, and splendor As wind out of old time. . . . These lines are unusual for Bogan in that they are about a specific, named experience (marriage) and are formally uncharacteristic: long, irregular, and unrhymed. They are typical, though, in that they set forth a persistent trope of paired polarities—emotions, images, or perceptions— here, beauty and sorrow. The pairing seems inevitable, as do the tensions between the two— tensions often form the basis on which the poems are structured. While coping with romantic disillusionment, Bogan was trying to make a living and raise her child. For long periods she left her daughter in

Massachusetts with her parents, visiting on weekends and living during the week in New York's Greenwich Village, where she soon became part of the literary community. In the 1910's the Village had become a bohemia where inexpensive rents and abundant housing attracted artists and writers. In 1919 Prohibition changed the residential character of the Village through the proliferation of speakeasies. By the early 1920's Bogan had met William Carlos Williams, Malcolm Cowley, Lola Ridge, John Reed, Louise Bryant, Mina Loy, and Edmund Wilson, who was one of her first friends in New York. She and Wilson kept up a long and lively friendship throughout their lives, drinking together, writing verse jointly, studying German, and discussing in late evenings and long letters the literary world and its inhabitants. A brief affair during this period with a young radical named John Coffey (a thief who claimed that he stole in order to be arrested and, at his trial, use the courtroom as a forum in which to gain attention for the plight of the poor) would disturb her in later years because she believed that the literary community was scandalized and would never forget the incident. At this time she was immersed in Village life and, according to Frank, her biographer, was reading Jules LaForgue (a major symbolist poet), as were Hart Crane, Allen Tate, Rolfe Humphries, and Yvor Winters. In 1921 her work first appeared in Poetry, which printed five of her poems. Bogan was only twenty-four. She had already published poetry in The New Republic, Others, Vanity Fair, Voices, The Measure, and several other little magazines. When Eliot shocked the literary world with the publication of The Waste Land in 1922, Bogan was writing some of the poems printed in her first book even as she was fighting bouts of depression. She began seeing a psychiatrist, and would continue to do so for much of her life. She had been working at various branches of the New

50 / AMERICAN WRITERS York Public Library, and at one of them she met Marianne Moore, with whom she later became friends. In the spring she traveled to Paris and Vienna, intending to write and study the piano for several months. Although she had completed only a few poems when she returned in September, the next year Bogan published her first book of poetry, Body of This Death. The collection was well received, although most reviewers found the poetry obscure, which was a complaint that would persist in reviews of later volumes. Mark Van Doren, in a favorable review written for The Nation, states that "one can be sure that experience of some ultimate sort is behind this writing," but he does not attempt to name the experience. A poet himself, Van Doren praises the "pure poetry" and "sheer eloquence" in Bogan's lyrics, and ventures that the book "may be a classic." The volume is brief, containing barely thirty poems, and opens, as her later volumes would, with "A Tale." In it, a young boy "cuts what holds his days together," in search of "a light that waits / Still as a lamp upon a shelf." But he will find that nothing dares To be enduring, save where, south Of hidden deserts, torn fire glares On beauty with a rusted mouth,— The youth here, and the women and other voices in the later poems, search for something innocent and lasting, yet find "beauty with a rusted mouth,— / Where something dreadful and another / Look quietly upon each other." Though the boy desires some kind of freedom and something beyond permanence, the specific object of his search remains elusive, the landscape mysterious, and the "dreadful something" enigmatic. In the silence of the poem's resolute and fearless conclusion is the first taste of disillusionment, the knowledge that what lasts is terrible and patient and sometimes beautiful. Several of the poems in the volume mention a

broken, stilled world: "a bell hung ready to strike" ("Medusa"); "yourlips, closed overall that love cannot say" ("Betrothed"). Landscapes conjure a world so still and desolate that it seems dead: "Life moves no more" (" Ad Castitatem"); "beauty breaks and falls asunder" ("Juan's Song"); "so the year broke and vanished on the screen" ("The Romantic"); "in the withered arbor, like the arrested wind" the statue stands ("Statue and Birds"); "like a thing gone dead and still" ("Men Loved Wholly Beyond Wisdom"); "she is a stem long hardened" ("The Crows"). The unnamed yet distinct landscape is a dangerous, comfortless place where not lovers, but love itself, betrays. Again and again, the failure of love and its consequent grief erupt from the pages of these poems. The question that forms the last line of "Juan's Song"— "Who is it, then, that love deceives?"—is asked and answered in remarkable variations throughout the volume. The title of the volume, which comes from Paul's cry (Romans 7:24) "Who shall deliver me from the body of this death?" points to a recurrent theme in the book. With the betrayal of love and the relentless, empty landscape, the people are left trapped and yearning for escape. In "The Alchemist," the speaker says: I burned my life, that I might find A passion wholly of the mind, Thought divorced from eye and bone, Ecstasy come to breath alone. I broke my life, to seek relief From the flawed light of love and grief. The alchemist fails, of course, and is left with "unmysterious flesh." The speaker cannot escape the body and its dangerous passions and desires. Other ways of escape are useless. Chastity is invoked in "Ad Castitatem," and the speaker is left with "beautiful futility." The almost dead voice in "Chanson un Peu Naive" asks, "What body can be ploughed, / Sown, and

LOUISE BOGAN I 51 broken yearly?" It is hers, time and time again. The speakers are left to endure in an indifferent landscape. As in "A Tale," when the youth is somewhere "south / of hidden deserts," in "Medusa" the speaker stands "like a shadow / Under the great balanced day"; in "Betrothed" she has "only the evening here, / and the sound of willows"; in "The Crows" there is "only bitter / Winter-burning in the fields"; and in "Fifteenth Farewell," there are "only / Levels of evening, now, behind a hill, / Or a late cockcrow from the darkening farms." In each case there is "only" the dreadful, independent landscape. The voices are alone and apart, each trapped in a cumbersome body and set in isolation in a world that is dark and aloof. The poems are for the most part written in short, metrical rhyming stanzas; even when Bogan ranges into free verse, the lyrics are stanzaic, resonant with internal rhyme, and tightly controlled in their rhythms. From the very first, reviews of Bogan's work have praised her technical expertise. To be sure, some have said that is all there is—technique, plus a dash of obscurity and bitterness. Adamant throughout her life that form is integral to beauty in art, Bogan aimed for formal integrity in both her poetry and her prose, and demanded it of others in her criticism. In the 1953 essay "The Pleasures of Formal Poetry," Bogan confronts the two most common objections to form—that it restricts and that it is old-fashioned and bereft of possibility. Although she acknowledges that some formal verse patterns are indeed out of date, she suggests that the modern captivation with experimental form is too exclusive and that "experimental" poets need not neglect the surprising possibilities available in formal verse. Bogan argues that the modern discomfort with form derives from moral bias; that is, some poets avoid writing formal poetry because they think there is something wrong with it, that constraints of formal verse betray the inner individual self. Bogan believed that rhythm

is inherent in nature. When she began teaching in the late 1940's, she started each of her courses by asking her students to list rhythmic tasks and activities, and, most important, bodily rhythms, pointing out that the human pulse and breath give us a sense of time. That sense of time is the point from which the pleasure of formal poetry begins. About the time Body of This Death was published, Bogan met Raymond Holden, who was to become her second husband. (Frank writes that Holden was, in fact, responsible for its publication.) He was separated from his wife and family, and soon he and Bogan began to live together. In a 1924 letter to John Peale Bishop, Edmund Wilson describes Holden as "an amiable mediocrity." Holden was from a wealthy old New York family and had studied at Princeton (where he met Wilson) before he began working as a writer, publishing poems in several magazines. He eventually wrote a novel, Chance Has a Whip (1935), which fictionalizes his early life with Bogan. In 1925 Holden, Bogan, and her daughter, Maidie, moved to Boston, where Holden had a job editing a travel magazine. On July 10 of that year they were married. The initial period of their life together was fairly quiet and productive. Bogan had days alone to write while Holden was at the office and Maidie was at school. Tensions between the two emerged, however, and the competition between two writers aggravated existing insecurities. Bogan continued producing her hard-wrought poems, and in 1926 she was invited to the Yaddo writers' colony, where she wrote "Dark Summer," which would become the title poem of her second collection. In the fall the family moved back to New York City. Holden became ill, so they traveled to Santa Fe, where he could recuperate. There they met the writers Arthur Davison Ficke, Janet Lewis, and Yvor Winters. Winters, a restrained poet and scathing critic, would later characterize Bogan as one of the rare lights among the poets of his day.

52 / AMERICAN WRITERS In 1927 the couple decided to purchase a farm in the New York countryside and in Hillsdale found a house they could refurbish. They divided their time between working on the house and on their writing. Several of Bogan's poems from their first years together (collected in Dark Summer: Poems) continue the themes of love, entrapment, and grief, and add images of hidden things. The bird in "Winter Swan" appears with its "long throat bent back, and the eyes in hiding"; in "If We Take All Gold," the gold or sorrow is "hid away / Lost under dark heaped ground"; and in "For a Marriage," the husband sees "deep-hidden, / The sullen other blade." Things are not simply closed, covered, stilled, or forgotten; here they are deliberately hidden from sight and silenced from speech. Bogan eventually had enough poems for another collection, and in 1928 she met John Hall Wheelock, who was to become the editor of her second, third, and fourth books, and a friend for the remainder of her life. Wheelock was himself a poet, and several of her letters to him reveal the strong impact he had on her work. To him she brought up the idea of writing a novel using autobiographical pieces, which was tentatively titled, with various spellings, "Laura Dailey's Story." Bogan worked intermittently on the prose work throughout her life but never completed it. Portions of it were published in The New Yorker, and several sections are collected in Journey Around My Room. Bogan wrote several short stories, most of which were published in The New Yorker and all of which remain uncollected. They are brief vignettes of searing revelation in a character's life. Little critical attention has been given to the fiction, but Bogan never claimed to be a fiction writer. She was always a poet who wrote criticism for a living and fiction when she could not write poetry. Although "the long prose thing," as she called it, never materialized, a second volume of poetry did: Dark Summer was published in 1929. The

book included only thirty-six poems, eleven of which had appeared in Body of This Death. The reviewers again praised the craft and remarked upon the obscurity of the poems. Bogan began to be compared in earnest with other women poets of the day, and gender-laden adjectives were used to describe her verse. Several reviews of this book and the others, collected in Martha Collins' Critical Essays on Louise Bogan (1984), tell as much about the period as they do about Bogan's work. Louis Untermeyer wrote of her "chastely composed pages," and Eda Lou Walton described her "immaculate spirit." Clearly these critics were uncomfortable with the declarations of love's devastation offered in controlled, precise words. It is never popular for a woman to reject love; it conflicts with central beliefs about who women are. A few critics noticed the poems' preoccupation with the passage of time, and others commented on their metaphysical quality. In a review for The New Republic, Yvor Winters singled out "The Mark," "Come, Break with Time," and "Simple Autumnal," declaring that these poems "demand—and will bear—comparison with the best songs of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries." They are songs, in the lyric sense of the word; in fact, many of the poems here and in other volumes have some version of "song" in their title. The comparison with English Renaissance verse is astute in two ways. First, Bogan's self-appointed task was to tell the truth of her existence, no matter how painful, in pure language. Second, her plain-style line resembles the style of metaphysical verse, especially that of John Donne and Ben Jonson. A tendency to use monosyllabic words prevails and greatly affects the rhythm, most often slowing the pace of the lines. In "Simple Autumnal," for example, the lines following are classic plain-style lines: "Because not last nor first, grief in its prime / Wakes in the day, and hears of life's intent." It is a complicated line to use, because the rhythm of

LOUISE BOGAN I 53 the monosyllables must be sustained and directed by their individual weights and by the rest of the words in the poem. The lines begin in regular iambics and move after the caesura to variation; "grief is thus emphasized both thematically and metrically. Following the comma after "day," the meter resumes regularity. The landscapes of Dark Summer are, by and large, the indifferent ones of Bogan's first book. In "Late," for example, the earth is "harrowed and wild," the cliff is "sterile," and the sky is "pure," "cold," and "unchanged." And, as expected, the title poem radiates the negation that pervades the volume. The storm "is not yet heard"; the shaft and flash "are not yet found"; the rite is "not for our word"; and the kisses are "not for our mouths." Summer shadows the speaker with a sense of being out of place and season. This poem appears next to "Simple Autumnal," and both evoke a world of heaviness and delay. Yet the poems are more than mere depictions of hard landscapes; there is always the presence, if not the voice, of someone grieving over what has happened or what is not to be. The cause may be unnamed, but the abiding feeling of abandonment, betrayal, and secrecy is always discernible. Emotion is at the heart of Bogan's verse, and emotional truths are the kind she struggled to understand and convey. In the haunting poem "The Cupola," for instance, we are brought inside an abandoned chamber where a mirror hangs, put there "for no reason" by a nameless "someone." The three stanzas are rich with images of drifted leaves reflected in the shuttered room, yet the poem evokes an utterly empty place, where what happens to be there does not matter. "Negligent death" is spilled randomly, yet in season, tied to some natural but foreign measure of time. The poem never specifies who was here, or why the person hung the mirror, or why death lingers, but a clear sense of abandonment is

carefully conjured by the images of negation and the illusion of specificity. When Dark Summer was published, Bogan and Holden were still dividing much of their time between New York City and Hillsdale. Bogan was regularly reviewing for The New Republic and had resumed the long process of composing poems. She visited with Edna St. Vincent Millay, who was a friend of Wilson's and was living in nearby Austerlitz. This full and productive period came to a shattering halt on the day after Christmas 1929. She and Holden had briefly been away from their home in Hillsdale when they received a phone call notifying them that it had burned down. All her manuscripts were destroyed; of them, she was able to save only a commonplace book from early school days and a journal she had written in Vienna. The family, devastated by their loss, moved back to New York City to begin again. By this time Holden was managing editor of The New Yorker and Bogan was at home, suffering from depression. She was cheered, for a time, in 1930, when she received the John Reed Memorial Prize from Poetry magazine for her first two books. Recognition did not come abundantly to Bogan, although she won several major poetry prizes near the end of her career and was respected by her limited public throughout her life. She had a difficult time accepting her ambitious self, and she most often held back from promoting herself or asking for literary favors even from close friends. In an imaginary dialogue recounted in Journey Around My Room, a nameless speaker asks, "You had ambition?" Bogan answers, "I wished to live without apology." Her ambitions were most often explicitly personal or emotional, not professional. She, who fought depression and wild emotions her entire life, wanted above all to control them enough to live in peace from day to day. Yet snatches of remarks about other writers, or asides tacked onto long letters about some-

54 I AMERICAN WRITERS thing else, reveal that Bogan did have a clear sense of her place in the poetry world. In 1936, after being plagiarized for the second time, she wrote angrily to Wheelock asking that something be done to fight the plagiarism or prevent it from being published: "I am the one poet in America, with a definite note, who is almost unknown." Her pure lyric note, which she worked at sounding all her life, was overlooked by her contemporaries. She was respected and praised, but not understood, and she knew that signaled a limited audience. She was particularly sensitive at this time to what appeared to be her "anonymity," for she was trying to remain steadfastly pure in terms of lyric focus, refusing to succumb to the rage for political literature. To Roethke, Bogan had written the previous year, in encouragement as much to herself as to him, "But if one is minor, one is minor: being good AND minor is something." She thought of herself as good and minor, not as good as Dante Alighieri, or Christina Rossetti—both of whom she wished to be like—but good and rare. Bogan saw her value in her brave fight to keep alive the uncontaminated lyric line that met truth, syllable by syllable. Her ambitions also were tempered by her ambivalent feelings about what a woman poet could and could not do: women could not write epics; women should not write sonnet sequences; women should keep "small" emotions out of their work. Emotional truths should not be sentimental or "mawkish," Bogan demanded. She excised poems (such as "A Letter") from early collections because they did not meet her increasingly severe standards for poetic utterance. Her detractors and even several of her admirers lament this delineation of emotions into the acceptable and unacceptable. The "smaller" emotions—those that might be sentimental without achieving poignancy—she banished from her poetry. Ruth Limmer, her friend and editor, wrote in her essay on Bogan printed in Collins9 Critical Essays that

Bogan's reticence "alienated the larger audience . . . and had the effect of circumscribing her talent." Her reticence probably does account for Bogan's being overlooked and out of print during part of her career, since it sometimes made her poems difficult to grasp. And there is no doubt that the range of her talent was narrow. Nonetheless, the specific emotions—love and grief—that Bogan wrote about, and the large, encompassing theme of time, which holds much of her work together, attest to her willingness to confront directly these essential matters of human life. Bogan did not think that matters of the American and European political and economic worlds were or should be within the scope of poetry. During the 1930's, when the mood of the nation swung according to the fluctuations of the Great Depression, as American economic and political structures came to be less secure, many looked to socialism and communism for an answer. When her friend Edmund Wilson, who was attracted to the hope of communism, traveled to the Soviet Union in 1935, Bogan wrote to Rolfe Humphries, "I have always thought that the pure artist had his place, and should stick right in it, being as productive as possible and as pure as hell, whatever was going on outside." Bogan, who aimed to be a pure artist and write pure poetry, scorned those who enthusiastically embraced the Communist party as if it were "the answer"; she knew there was no ready-made solution to any problem, and that emotional honesty and hard work were as close to an answer as one could get. Politics was beside the point; life and art were what mattered. Further, Bogan saw the defection of her friends and colleagues (besides Wilson, Humphries, L6onie Adams, Genevieve Taggard, and Millay all for some time turned left) as a sign of intellectual and emotional weakness. She believed that their work began to be directed outside the important inner life, and

LOUISE BOGAN I 55 that it failed in its inclination to an authority besides the self. This failure of loyalty to oneself damaged creativity by making it inauthentic and dishonest. Bogan was particularly riled by the activities and pronouncements of the poet Archibald MacLeish, who, following his move to the literary left, generated several antagonistic declamations of literary criteria. After one such speech, Bogan wrote to Humphries in 1938: "I STILL THINK THAT POETRY HAS SOMETHING TO DO WITH THE IMAGINATION; I STILL THINK IT OUGHT TO BE WELL-WRITTEN. I STILL THINK IT IS PRIVATE FEELING, NOT PUBLIC

SPEECH." Her emphasis here, as elsewhere, is on truth of feeling and its expression in wellwritten language. During the 1930's Bogan's life did change, however, in terms of her career, marriage, personal finances, and emotional health. Prompted by Wilson, Bogan began in 1931 to review poetry for The New Yorker, and she continued to do so for thirty-eight years. Aside from many short notices throughout the years, she wrote two yearly omnibus reviews on the poetry of the season, as well as several longer pieces on individual poets such as Edna St. Vincent Millay, William Butler Yeats, and Robert Penn Warren. In a letter to the editor William Shawn, written in 1941, in which she asks for a raise, she mentions W. H. Auden's praise of her work (he thought her the best critic of poetry in America), and suggests that she "did something toward keeping the flag flying . . . during the darkest days of political pressures upon writing." She did, as she notes, make the verse department "step by step, into a real influence." In her reviews, several of which are collected in A Poet's Alphabet: Reflections on the Literary Art and Vocation (1970), she details the strengths and weaknesses of the major and minor writers of the day in clear, sometimes biting prose. The job gave Bogan some financial security, since she was salaried, but the money was hardly

enough to live on. Moreover, the struggle to write the reviews came to be onerous, and she would often feel overwhelmed by the books arriving daily, demanding her attention. To be sure, Bogan ignored some verse that she did not like, and she was sparing in her reviews of women poets, but the reviews that she did write helped in some measure to shape our taste today, since those who were noticed were those who were read, and those who were read were those who were anthologized and discussed and included in classroom syllabi. For example, she did not write about Laura Riding or Gwendolyn Brooks and all but ignored May Sarton's many volumes of poetry, but she did write guarded praise of Emily Dickinson, Elizabeth Bishop, and Marianne Moore. The New Yorker became a force through the stern and flammable leadership of Harold Ross, and was transformed into a mainstream magazine with a reputation for publishing work of high quality. Reviewing gave Bogan a steady, if burdensome, outlet for articulating her critical acumen during a time when she was finding it increasingly hard to write poetry. She wrote the bulk of her fiction during the 1930's; five stories were published in The New Yorker in 1931, and eight more between 1933 and 1935. As would happen repeatedly in her life, however, positive career moves were coupled with emotional upheavals. In 1931 Bogan suffered a breakdown. She and Holden had become a popular couple, entertaining frequently in New York, often gathering writers and artists from The New Yorker as well as their old friends from the Village. At the same time, however, Bogan became convinced that Holden was having affairs, and many arguments ensued. After a visit to her family in March of that year, she suffered a breakdown in April and entered the Neurological Institute in New York. Later that month she moved to a sanatorium in Connecticut, where she managed to write "Hypocrite Swift" (collected in The Sleeping Fury:

56 / AMERICAN WRITERS Poems), and in June she returned to Holden in New York. A period of relative stability followed, and in 1932, encouraged by a friend, the writer Morton Zabel, Bogan applied for a Guggenheim Fellowship for a year of travel abroad. Reluctantly she sought supporters; Robert Frost, Monroe, Millay, and several others wrote letters of recommendation. The fellowship was awarded and Bogan sailed for Genoa in April 1933, expecting that her daughter would join her in the summer. Her journal from this time records her enthusiasm for simply seeing—Genoa, Naples, Palermo, Sicily—and she loved Italy, at first. In Rome she was bombarded with letters from Holden, who complained of his poor health and his lack of a job, and steadfastly claimed fidelity. His letters then turned ambiguous, alluding to another woman; hysterical letters from Bogan raged across the ocean in response. Bogan continued to travel and write (journal pieces and poetry), and in France she met friends from Santa Fe. She visited with John Dos Passes, Henri Matisse, and Ford Madox Ford. Her daughter came in July, and the two traveled to Italy and Austria. The value of the dollar was dropping and her funds were running out, and she was still tortured by suspicions about her husband. She and her daughter returned home in September to find her apartment rearranged by Holden's mistress. A second breakdown followed, during which Bogan again abjured romantic dreams and tried to unravel her painful life. She did separate from Holden, but not until 1934; they were divorced in 1937. Bogan's spirits were lifted in 1935, when she began an affair with Roethke, with whom (she said to Wheelock) she fell "mildly in love." Poems from this period include "Roman Fountain," "Baroque Comment," "Single Sonnet," and "Evening Star." Their amorous relationship was brief, but they subsequently exchanged letters, Bogan generally urging him to let himself

suffer and "look at things until you don't know whether you are they or they are you" if he wanted to write lyric poetry. She became a mentor of sorts to him, encouraging but refusing to coddle him. She was invited several times to lecture at the University of Michigan, where he held an appointment, and filled in for him when he was on leave. Bogan's finances toppled in 1935, and she was evicted from her apartment when Holden stopped sending the payments specified in their separation agreement. Despite spirited disclaimers to the contrary, the crisis hit Bogan hard, and she scrambled to set herself up again. She did, and then had to cope with the death of her mother in 1936. Despite personal tragedy, Bogan found the resilience to continue her work on a third collection, The Sleeping Fury, which was published in 1937. The collection, containing twenty-five poems, was dedicated to Wilson. To open the volume she used lines from Rainer Maria Rilke as an epigraph, one she would use for the rest of her books: "Wie ist das klein, womit wir ringen; / Was mit uns ringt, wie ist das gros." ("How small is that with which we struggle; / How great is that which struggles with us.") These poems were written during the period from 1930 to 1936, when her second marriage disintegrated and she suffered two emotional breakdowns. The book was well received where it was reviewed (the poet Kenneth Rexroth's review is an exception), but not all the important journals of the time gave it attention. As Martha Collins notes in the introduction to her Critical Essays, comparisons of Bogan with the metaphysical poets were frequent and the emphasis on obscurity decreased somewhat. Critics (and friends) like Zabel and Ford remarked upon Bogan's "accent and austerity of poetic truth" (Zabel) and her "authentic" poetry (Ford). Allen Tate, a poet, a critic, and a friend, gave her the peculiar compliment of praising her

LOUISE BOGAN I 57 for being "a craftsman in the masculine mode," by which, one assumes, he meant that he was impressed by her sure technique and expert control of sound and sense. Getting at the truth with a steady hand was what she wanted to do, and Bogan was pleased by the reviews, though dis appointed that the range of notice was so limited. Of any of the volumes that lose something by being collected with the others in The Blue Estuaries, The Sleeping Fury perhaps suffers the most. Its movement and integrity are experienced best in the long-out-of-print individual volume. Bogan, in a half-jesting summary in a letter to Zabel, written as she was preparing the collection for publication, says that the poems move from the period of "despair, neurosis, and alcoholism" to further despair, then to "the period of Beautiful Males (ending with 'Man Alone'). Then the spiritual side begins. . . . All ends on a note of calm: me and the landscape clasped in each other's arms." This third volume is her last full collection; later ones offer some new poems but primarily reprint older work. Formally, Bogan varies the structure of some of the poems. The metered verse appears in shorter lines (from five stresses in Dark Summer she moves to several poems with three stresses per line). The free-verse poems still appear in longer lines, but there are fewer lines in each poem. Also, The Sleeping Fury is the last vo ume for which she wrote sonnets. A standard poetic model in the tradition of Petrarch, Spenser, and Shakespeare, the sonnet as a vehicle for twentieth-century hearts and minds is a challenge not chosen by many modern poets. Yet Bogan thrives within its confines, as she exclaims in "Single Sonnet": "Bend to my will, for I must give you love: / The weight in the heart that breathes, but cannot move. . . . " This exhortation nicely glosses her prose statements on formal poetry, in that she couples form and love, and stasis and life, with the strict sonnet form and its capacity to liberate emotion.

A mature, resolute voice opens the volume and sets its tone in "Song": "It is not now I learn / To turn the heart away. . . . " She writes "the heart" and not "my heart," enlarging the poetic situation with the definite article; there is even distance between the voice and the heart, though both inhabit the same body. In the conclusion to this short poem, all in iambic trimeter, the "I" is lost or transformed into an "eye": It is not the heart that grieves. It is not the heart—the stock, The stone,—the deaf, the blind— That sees the birds in flock Steer narrowed to the wind. The presence of grief is still keenly felt, though not by the betraying heart of the first two books. Bogan gives a familiar catalog of negation in monosyllables, the regular beats of which are broken in the last line. Who it is that feels the grief is never identified, though the determined flight of the birds is precisely rendered. The deliberation and braced patterning of the birds is easily a metaphor for the construction of this volume—the poems are individually written and collectively arranged against the force of time. Time is as much a presence here as grief and love and beauty, especially since each is given shape and substance in the context of time. In "To Wine," for example, the speaker asks the cup to "Return to the vein / All that is-worth / Grief. Give that beat again." Some lost warmth or passion is missed and wanted; the voice demands the "beat" of life. "Grief" is set off, a single word beginning the last line of the poem, followed by a period. The initial repeated "g" in "grief" and "give" emphasizes the beat, and the meter insists we attend to the grief. Life is signified by movement, here as in so many of Bogan's poems, and the motion is not random, but timed and in time. And, as in so many of her poems, Bogan writes of enduring—lasting through time and

58 I AMERICAN WRITERS past heartbreak. In "Single Sonnet" she writes of bearing things for too long, and "The Sleeping Fury" confronts the scourge endured for years. In "To My Brother Killed: Haumont Wood: October, 1918," she addresses her brother directly and writes that "all things endure / . . . Save of peace alone." Most of the poem is fleshed out within the ellipsis, where the list of all the things that do endure is ultimately undercut by the last sad and sure line. This poem moved Marianne Moore so much that several times she mentioned her gratitude to Bogan for having written it. Bogan continues a habit of mind that pervades her first book, Body of This Death: the insistence on putting distance between grief and its cause. In that first volume, for example, she had collected the ironic "Fifteenth Farewell" (how many does it take?), which swears to "forget the heart that loves." Although the lover is displaced, it is not the beloved who must be forgotten but, rather, the heart that loves. The struggle is turned inward, and it is the self that betrays. In The Sleeping Fury several poems take up a tone of resolution to break off memory, connection, and imprisonment. In the most explicit, "Kept," the speaker asks, "What are these rags we twist / Our hearts upon . . . ?" and decides that it is time for "the playthings of the young" to "Get broken, as they should." The unwelcome disillusionment voiced by the youths of the earlier volumes has become transformed: the speakers in several piercing poems of the third volume deliberately set about the business of growing up, even if that means relinquishing the heart. One way of understanding the struggle that Bogan takes up again and again in her work is to look at a prominent pair of opposites in this volume: the tension between saying and not saying, between speech and silence. The lyrics themselves are of course artifacts of language; in them she does say things. But for a writer to write so often about the difficulty and danger of * 'saying"

reveals much about that writer's relationship to her own work. These poems are all the more poignant since Bogan's letters reveal (as do some of her poems—witness "The Daemon") the terrible trial she experienced in trying to (and having to) piece together words. In "To Wine" the dead are "lipless," that is, the mark of death is to be incapable of speech. In 4 'Poem in Prose'' the speaker tries to write of the beloved but says she cannot (though of course she does in this poem), and all that issues from their fight of love is silence. Here and in the exquisite "Italian Morning" she is rendered speechless by love: "(O bred to love, / Gathered to silence!)." In "Baroque Comment" she lists a movement from some primitive world to artificial structures, heaping ornate words upon themselves, and ends with "The turned eyes and opened mouth of love." In "Poem in Prose," silence is a sign of death; in the rest, silence is a sign of life—to the lover but not to the poet. The peace that Bogan described in her letter to Zabel about the sweep of this third volume is an uneasy one. In "Exhortation" (to the self), she derides the abuse of "bastard joy" and brings together the task of heart and hand: "In the cold heart, as on a page, / Spell out the gentle syllable / That puts short limit to your rage. . . ." In verse she tries both to articulate and to limit rage (or whatever emotion she is working with in a particular poem), and in her limitations and reticences we often meet silence. One wonders if the attempt to control rage in verse is one reason Bogan found it increasingly difficult to write, limiting herself to so little yet demanding so much. Her main themes of disillusionment in love and the endurance of grief were soon challenged by a happy love affair. Bogan met this unidentified man in 1937, while returning home after a renewed Guggenheim grant had enabled her to travel to Ireland, where she had been plagued by fears that the old "scandal"—as she thought of

LOUISE BOGAN I 59 it—of her affair with Coffey was buzzing in literary circles. Her fears took other shapes, and she imagined she was being followed through the streets of Dublin. She thought much about William Butler Yeats during this short trip, especially his writings on masks, something very familiar to her and an idea she had incorporated into her poetry. Terrified of Dublin and horrified by the ugliness she encountered, Bogan cut short her trip and sailed home in a desperate condition two months after arriving. In New York, an electrician befriended her and nursed her back to health. Although the two maintained their relationship for eight years, Bogan did not write of him or introduce him to her friends. She ceased a lifetime of moving from apartment to apartment when she returned to New York and found an apartment near the Neurological Institute in northern Manhattan. She had just turned forty—an age at which she had claimed there could be no new love for a woman. The 1930's were ending, and she had managed to last them out and find some stability in her personal and domestic life. Although they were divorced, she kept Holden's name on her apartment buzzer; except for a chance meeting, she never saw him again. Her daughter was living nearby and studying music at Juilliard. Bogan had for a time a steady love life, privacy, sufficient money, and peace of mind. Perhaps she had gained enough security to change her long-standing rule against personal disclosure in public. She participated in the 1939 Partisan Review symposium "The Situation in American Writing," in which authors were asked to answer questions about influence and direction in their work and the larger cultural situation. As to her acknowledged literary influences, she cited her strong classical education, her reading of the French symbolists through the translations of Arthur Symons, and her reading of the English metaphysical poets, Yeats, and the Americans Edgar Allan Poe, Henry David

Thoreau, Emily Dickinson, and Henry James. Her response to Yeats was complete: she thought he was the greatest poet of the modern period. She had been reading him seriously since 1916 and writing about him in the mid 1930's (Yeats died in 1939). For her, Yeats was the fighter who knew himself and gave his best to his art. He cared passionately and wrote exquisitely. In the essay "On the Death of Yeats" (1939) Bogan writes that his late work in particular "touched the borders where poetry becomes ultimate evocation, and the regions where religion rises from universal mystery." He was able to tap the source of the lyric cry that she claimed as her vocation. As a more personal and earlier influence, Bogan briefly discussed what it was like to be a poor Irish Catholic, especially in a Protestant town. She was slapped with the nickname "Mick" and knew that mattered more than anything else. Surely her later love for Yeats was in some way tied to her Irish ancestry and the difficulty and shame it had caused her throughout her youth. She saw that he inspired the Irish out of their "artistic inertia" and gave them a literature to glory in and a history to reclaim. Turning in the symposium to questions of generational influences, Bogan discussed the political situation of the 1930's and its detrimental effect on many writers of the time: The economic crisis occurred when that generation of young people was entering the thirties; and, instead of fighting out the personal ills attendant upon the transition from youth to middle age, they took refuge in closed systems of belief, and automatically (many of them) committed creative suicide. According to Bogan, such writers fought the Great Depression outside themselves, the political and economic Depression, and did not have the courage or maturity to confront the inner demons. Bogan's arrogance was hard won; she had

60 I AMERICAN WRITERS scraped herself off "the icy floor of the ninth circle of hell" (as she called it in a 1935 letter to Roethke) not once, but twice, yet had continued to write. The poems were "given" to Bogan less and less, though, and her next book of verse, Poems and New Poems (1941), was a collection of previously printed work with only a few new poems. Bogan was reluctant to do the volume, but, prompted by Wheelock, she did. Her friend Zabel strongly disapproved of the lighter verse she included, and berated her in private and in public for publishing the poems. The two, who quarreled often, were this time both stubborn and angry enough to keep their distance for two years. Along with the lighter verse, which introduced a new tone in Bogan's work, she rearranged earlier sequences, deleted six poems, and added sixteen, most of which had been written in 1938. Besides the lighter verse (examples are "Variation on a Sentence" and "Animal, Vegetable, and Mineral"), Bogan included two translations (from Jean-Pierre Jouve and Heinrich Heine); a two-line, one-sentence epigram ("At midnight tears / Run into your ears."); and the familiar formal verse and occasional free-verse experiment. It was harder for her to write, and she clearly was trying to broaden the range of her poetic material while remaining true to her conception of the pure lyric. Though two collected volumes would follow, this was the first to present the work Bogan wanted to preserve from two decades of writing, and it opened the way for critics to comment on her development. Were the new poems new? Marianne Moore wrote a wonderfully detailed review in The Nation and, in her typically tilted style, called Bogan's work "compactness compacted." She discussed the relation of Bogan's poems to seventeenth-century verse and called Bogan "a workman," praising her deliberate craftsmanship and saying that her "forged rhet-

oric . . . nevertheless seems inevitable." Malcolm Cowley was one of the early critics to note that Bogan often wrote poems about poetry and about the process of writing, yet in his review in The New Republic he chided her for her narrow range of expression and lamented that she did not write faster and with less inhibition. Stanley Kunitz, too, complained (in Poetry) that some of the poems seemed overworked and could do with a dose of associative freedom, though in large part he admired her elegant lyrics. The reviewers on the whole praised the work but were impatient for more and different poetry. A stirring exception was Auden, who took the occasion to discuss the problem of the artist's self-development within a demanding community and public that offered little encouragement. Writing in Partisan Review, he acknowledged "the price and reward for such a discipline," and noted that Bogan's acute insight did not come easily. He saw a gradual development of consciousness that allowed her to become more objective, not merely distant and afraid. Above all, he respected her decision to dare to "face the Furies" and remain loyal to herself, never pandering to the public. Despite these reviews, Bogan despaired that her book was all but invisible to the indifferent literary world. And, despite Auden's public declaration of "the permanent value" of her work, she knew that not enough people felt this way and that her books might well be out of print before her death—which they were. The subjects are, for the most part, the same here as in previous work: endurance, love, grief, and the difficulty of writing or speaking what matters. There are occasional glimpses of the more "objective" perspective that Auden describes, as in "Zone": We have struck the regions wherein we are keel or reef. The wind breaks over us,

LOUISE BOGAN I 61 And against high sharp angles almost splits into words, And these are of fear or grief. The last line of the poem quietly attests, "We have learned how to bear." The sharp landscape has been internalized and the unspoken but known words are "fear or grief." These words, not uttered, yet written here, are borne through time without defense or complaint. Because the context has been abstracted, what prompted the lesson is unknown, though the experience of it is strongly felt. A very different poem, but one retaining an aura of objectivity, is "Evening in the Sanitarium." It is different for Bogan because it is peculiarly modern in setting, names characters besides the self or the absent lover, and moves from line to line by means of narration. Though she originally gave it the subtitle "Imitated from Auden," Bogan dropped the acknowledgment when she realized that the poem came, in fact, primarily from her own memory. Stylistically, perhaps, its modernity of place owes something to Auden, for Bogan rarely located her poems more specifically than by reference to a natural setting, deserted room, or half-mentioned bed. The poem's prose counterpart is her unpublished story "The Long Walk," which describes the daily afternoon walk of sanatorium patients accompanied by their nurse. Although the patients at first enjoy the freedom, they are soon jarred into the searing feelings of imprisonment and loneliness that brought them to the sanatorium. No freedom or revelation happens in "Evening in the Sanitarium," in which Bogan narrates a third-person vignette about women "evening" out and dulling their hearts and minds. The women are cured of extremities: the academic's face is "blunted," the manicdepressive "levels off." The women are trapped in a moment of time, one defining moment that they cannot break out of but must learn to bear.

"The period of the wildest weeping, the fiercest delusion, is over." For Bogan, her "wildest weeping" was calmed in her last stay at the Neurological Institute, but the uncontrollable tears would return at the end of her life, some twenty years later, and send her into despair. "The Daemon," a very disturbing poem but one more formally typical of Bogan, is revealing about her poetic process, why it was so difficult for her to write and why she nevertheless struggled to do so her entire life. Her muse is not the familiar angelic figure—most often a woman— who inspires the writer to creativity. And, although Bogan would write in letters of how poems would be "given" or have "arrived," more often than not she recounts the painstaking process of culling from language its finest expression. Her muse is a tyrant, evil and insatiable in its desire to extract the utmost from the exhausted self. The poem consists of three short quatrains, rhymes regularly and simply, and is connected by the first repeated words of each stanza, "Must I . . . ?" The speaker asks, Must I tell again In the words I know For the ears of men The flesh, the blow? The words of the poem are almost entirely monosyllabic, and the lines are stressed with either two or three beats, the result of which is the pounding of the questions. The violence of the "blow," the "bruise," and the "halt," and the final quick, cruel answer, are each amplified. The speaker must tell and show and speak "to the lot / Who little bore"—again as before. To the request for abatement, the daemon relentlessly insists, "It said Why not? I It said Once more." The speaker feels compelled to reveal the blows and bruises received, yet is hesitant to do so, instead obscuring the hurt by offering the grieving or stilled heart.

62 I AMERICAN WRITERS The compulsion to write and the misgivings about doing so imperfectly suddenly collided after the publication of this fourth volume. Bogan did not know what to do next, and for seven years she could not complete a poem. She had succeeded in silencing the daemon and went about the business of writing in ways that she could. Although she was not happy about the shift in focus, she concentrated on her critical writing, which she had been steadily producing along with the poetry for several years. Her reputation as a critic was as strong as, if not stronger than, her reputation as a poet, yet she drew scant comfort from the fact and felt overlooked by the public. Poems and New Poems sold slowly, and Bogan was irritated with her publishers for not advertising the book. Her annoyance increased when her proposal for an anthology of lyrics was rejected. She, and several of her friends, had expected her book to win the Pulitzer Prize (she never did), and disappointment about that failure lingered. She had come to feel betrayed by her publishers, and so Bogan broke with Wheelock and Scribners, yet, through Wheelock's patience and loyalty, they maintained their friendship. He would later nominate her for honorary positions and write letters on her behalf to secure her place in the Academy of American Poets. For the next years Bogan wrote criticism, taught, and helped a generation of writers by judging applications for grants. From just before the publication of Poems and New Poems until 1944, Bogan worked with William Maxwell on a manuscript. She had met him through The New Yorker, where he was poetry editor. He had already published two novels, and Bogan encouraged him to turn a short story he had written into a novel of adolescence, The Folded Leaf, helping him revise it at every stage of the work. Later (in 1953) Bogan would help another writer, the poet May Sarton, and encourage her to be stern and courageous in her poetry. The two eventu-

ally collaborated on translations from Paul Valery that have never been collected but were published in various little magazines. Sarton has left a vivid memoir of Bogan from this period in A World of Light: Portraits and Celebrations. It is tinged with a trace of bitterness, however— Bogan never reviewed Sarton at length. During this period, Bogan also began to meet with critical acclaim, however limited. In 1944 she was invited to judge applications for Guggenheim poetry fellowships and was elected a Fellow in American Letters at the Library of Congress—through Archibald MacLeish, against whom she had earlier railed. The following year she was appointed Consultant in Poetry at the Library of Congress and moved to Washington, D.C., for several months (while The New Yorker held her job open) to carry out her duties. While at the Library of Congress she gave a series of readings that were taped; they capture her deep, careful voice releasing one by one, in serious measures, the words she so struggled to write. In this period she was asked to judge the Harriet Monroe Poetry Award and to give the Hopwood Lecture at the University of Michigan. "My 'ambition' is finished," she wrote in her journal at the time, as Frank relates. "Now I only ask for continued vigor, and the ability to see, interpret, and move around." And Bogan did move around—giving readings and lectures, and serving on poetry-award committees. More and more she was becoming part of the public poetry world, not simply a writer alone in her apartment turning out a few volumes of verse. She reunited with old friends like Zabel and Tate, and met Moore again after twenty years. Her affair with "the mystery man" ended, seemingly without regrets or recriminations. Although she still could not write poetry, she found some satisfaction in her professional and personal life. In 1948, as a Fellow in American Letters, Bogan met with other elected writers and came face to face with Eliot for the first time. She

LOUISE BOGAN I 63 thought him beautiful. With the other fellowsincluding L6onie Adams, Auden, Conrad Aiken, Eliot, Robert Lowell, Katherine Anne Porter, and Karl Shapiro (who objected)—she voted to award the prestigious Bollingen Prize for poetry to Ezra Pound, for The Pisan Cantos. With the war ended and Pound accused of treason, though judged unfit to stand trial, a public furor raged over the decision. Although Bogan later came to regret her vote, at the time she believed that Pound's political beliefs did not mar the work. Also in 1948 she began a project that would capture her imagination and open a new friendship. Through Auden she was introduced to Elizabeth Mayer, who was older than Bogan and who had known Rilke, whose work Bogan loved. The two collaborated on a translation of Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther (1971), which ended up, as Frank writes, more a rendering than a literal translation. Other work with Mayer followed, and together they translated Goethe's Novella (1971) and Elective Affinities (1963), as well as Ernst lunger's The Glass Bees (1960). Besides the translation projects with Mayer and Sarton, Bogan began a long stint (from the late 1940's to the early 1960's) of teaching at New York University, the University of Chicago, the University of Arkansas, and Brandeis University, among other places. Perhaps the most demanding course was one she offered at New York's 92nd Street Y in 1956—Marianne Moore, who had several books of poetry behind her and whose reputation was secure, registered for the course. Bogan had to rethink her syllabus because she regularly used one of Moore's poems to illustrate syllabic verse. Apparently Moore took copious notes and asked endless technical questions. Bogan took it in good spirits and went on to teach other classes, always emphasizing form in her analyses. In 1951 Bogan was commissioned to write a summary of American poetry, published later

that year as Achievement in American Poetry, 1900-1950. In it she does not mention herself. She discusses the first half of the century, from the strains of sentimental and genteel Victorianism to modern (midcentury) formalism and pessimism. She locates a shift of spirit with the symbolists and sees breakthroughs also occurring in Ireland with Yeats. She cites Edwin Arlington Robinson as a critical figure in American poetry and its turn from sentimentality toward modern psychological complexity and truth. In the same chapter she lauds women for keeping alive the line of poetic intensity. "Women's feeling," she writes, "at best is closely attached to the organic heart of life." She cites as an example Emily Dickinson, whose first volume was published posthumously in 1890, and whose later collections appeared at the turn of the century. According to Bogan, the real breakthrough occurred in the first years of the century, when poets were influenced by realism in fiction and painting, by the closing gap between American and European art, and by America's new selfconsciousness. Bogan discusses "the American Renaissance," its beginning marked by the founding of Poetry. For her, Vachel Lindsay, Edgar Lee Masters, Carl Sandburg, and Robert Frost are important figures in opening the range of poetic material by including subjects not usually considered poetic and by making these subjects more distinctly American. Of Eliot's work she remarks that The Waste Land is not a picture of despair, and that his early critical work was seminal in that it gave a historical perspective to modern literary criticism. Again she lists the fine women poets of the time—and is especially admiring of Elinor Wylie—this time adding an intellectual dimension to their special virtues. Noteworthy events of the 1930's that catch her eye are Hart Crane's abbreviated career, Eliot's religious conversion, Yeats's later style, and the surge of critical work on literary theory. This chapter, covering the period of political and eco-

64 I AMERICAN WRITERS nomic upheaval, is entitled * 'Ideology and Irrational ism/' She never did understand or accept the reasons that her friends were attracted, if briefly, by Marxist dreams. Although she did not write poetry between 1941 and 1948, Bogan says that poetry in general had become * 'broadly workable and capable of a variety of applications." Pound, Eliot, Auden, and others had given poetry new life, and the new formalists were producing interesting work. Younger poets she highlights are Randall Jarrell, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, and Richard Wilbur. She concludes the study with a warning, urging her contemporaries, "in a period of general pessimism, [not to] dispense with inner joy." Bogan had begun writing a few poems and sending them out once again to journals. She found a new publisher and planned a new volume, which came out in 1954 as Collected Poems, 1923-1953. In each of the three new poems included, a feeling of conclusion pervades, and allusions to death are strong. In "After the Persian" she writes, "Goodbye, goodbye! / There was so much to love, I could not love it all. . ."; in "Train Tune" the journey is backward, "Back through midnight"; the last poem is titled "Song for the Last Act," and each refrain, like "Now that I have your heart by heart, I see," gives a sense of finality and summation. Although Bogan was only in her late fifties when she published this book, poetry had become increasingly difficult for her to write, and she feared that it would probably be her last volume. Critical reception was admiring, but quieter than usual, and except for a splendidly insightful piece by Leonie Adams, the reviews offered the familiar adjectives—"skillful," "restrained," "profound." The book won a Bollingen Prize shared with Adams (1955), which pleased Bogan, since she and Adams were old friends. Although Bogan wrote a few other poems after "Song for the Last Act," it was one of her best,

and none thereafter would be as lovely or important. The refrain to the stanzas changes slightly, from "Now that I have your face by heart I look," to "Now that I have your voice by heart, I read," and finally to "Now that I have your heart by heart, I see." The progression from looking to reading to seeing focuses, at last, on the heart. The person to whom the poem is addressed is there and not there, having been incorporated into the speaker in the passage of time and the legacy of memory. Written in 1948, after her long silence, the poem illustrates that Bogan's gift was still alive, if dormant. In 1955 her first collection of criticism, Selected Criticism: Prose, Poetry, was published; subsequently it was superseded by her posthumously published collection A Poet's Alphabet. Some of her magazine pieces remain uncollected, however, including her omnibus reviews for The New Yorker. As much as her criticism helped her through periods of poetic aridity, Bogan was uncertain if it had not in fact made "the creative side rather timid," as she wrote to her editor at The New Yorker, Katharine S. White, in 1948, just as she was beginning to write poetry again. Bogan, the perfectionist who began her literary career comparing herself to Dante and throughout the years developed strict criteria for what literature should be—truthful, heartfelt, formal, and daring—felt daunted by the standards she demanded. The language in any piece of literature must be exquisite and expected, yet startling in its beauty. Her critical voice is confident and authoritative, and her record of response to modern literature still yields insight and pleasure. Bogan continued to lecture, teach, and travel through the 1950's, and in 1959 she was awarded five thousand dollars by the Academy of American Poets. Financial tensions eased late in her life, although she could never have been called affluent. She kept up her correspondence, as she had during her entire life; and her late letters,

LOUISE BOGAN I 65 as witty and spirited as the early ones, allow us to glimpse the playful, feisty side of her, which rarely comes out in her poetry. In them she records the latest literary gossip, her immediate reactions to literary works, her advice to fellow writers, and her shifting sense of despair and delight. Bogan returned to trying to write her memoirs—"the long prose thing"—and was able to recover several scenes from her childhood. She was by then spending time regularly at the MacDowell writers' colony, and pieces of memoirs and poetry surfaced. When in New York City she also continued translating and writing essays for publication and presentation. The honorary degrees she received meant much to her, since she had never earned a college degree and often felt wary of academics. Nonetheless, as Frank points out, she was adamant that criticism not be the province of specialists. In 1962 Bogan gave a lecture at Bennington College that outlines the development of her thinking on the position of the woman writer. In the 1947 essay 'The Heart and the Lyre" she had rehearsed remarks she used in Achievement in American Poetry on verse written by women in the United States, listing "the special virtues of women": Women are forced to become adult. They must soon abandon sustained play, in art or life. They are not good at abstractions and their sense of structure is not large; but they often have the direct courage to be themselves. The list continues, with the narrow range severely delineating women's potential. Bogan takes account, as she must, of the usual criticism of women's writing—that it too often lapses into romantic sentimentalities—and she challenges that notion, asserting that a woman's singular gift is her heart. Before this essay, and between it and the Bennington lecture, Bogan had made scattered state-

ments about a female aesthetic, most often in longer remarks on individual poets. She always maintained that women are different and write differently, drawing upon different strengths and fending off different weaknesses than men. Women can never write successful surrealist poetry, for example, because they are too wedded to the concrete and because their basic impulse is gentle and not given to shock effects. Bogan knew she was no feminist, and in fact was uneasy about the very word; and while she admitted to limiting the literary possibilities for women because of their limited nature, she tried to turn this by concentrating on "the special virtues" of women. In the Bennington lecture Bogan intended to talk about several important women poets throughout the ages but ended up discussing women prose writers, placing them in the context of women from antiquity on. Underneath the often humorous essay we hear rumblings of discontent that make one question her belief in just how "special" women's virtues are. She writes of how women were vital parts of civilization even before their utterances were recorded, and of how "the harsher periods of masculine power" silenced them. Moving from cultural history to literary history, Bogan cites Dorothy Richardson, author of Pilgrimage (a series of novels published 1915-1967), as a crucial transitional figure, in a way more important than James Joyce, since her novel was the first to bring stream-of-consciousness writing to literature. She notes Richardson's awkwardness, then applauds her as a woman who sensed her own worth and displayed it grandly. Bogan passes from Virginia Woolf, to whom she is not in the least generous, to Simone de Beauvoir, of whom she is deeply suspicious. Both are too angry and absolute for her tastes. The best women writers, she says, are the ones who tell their own truth, "both observed and suffered through." Her list of what women must

66 I AMERICAN not do in literature mostly includes strictures against attitude: the inclination to whine, to indulge in theatrics, and so forth. Women can, however, write about any subject and in any form (a point she had disputed in earlier days). For the next two years Bogan continued to write criticism, and in 1964 she began a year's appointment in Boston, at Brandeis University. A light class schedule gave her much time to herself, and she received a fairly high salary, a situation for which she felt guilty afterward. The classes did not go as she had hoped, nor were the students as serious as she demanded; this, and being in a place filled with memories, contributed to her diminishing spirits. Physical problems aggravated her difficulties and added to her fatigue and loneliness. Depression beset her once again, and in the early summer of 1965 she checked into the Neurological Institute for several weeks. She tried to resume her life but often felt severe panic, so she went for help to the sanatorium in White Plains where she had been in the 1930's. Months later she was home in New York City, but the depression lingered, especially in the mornings, when she would find herself crying. One of her last poems, *'Little Lobelia's Song," describes a creature who seemed to haunt her with tears. This and some new poems (most written years earlier) were included in Bogan's final volume, The Blue Estuaries. While the collection does not contain everything she ever wrote or published, it does offer the best of her work that she wanted to preserve. Praise for the volume was high, if delayed, but Bogan was not cheered. Nor did the 1967 ten-thousand-dollar lifetime award from the National Endowment for the Arts lift her spirits. A new writing block set in, and this time Bogan could not write anything, not even prose. She decided, at long last, to resign from The New Yorker in 1969 and felt immense relief after doing so. Yet the relief did not persist; once more

WRITERS the morning tears came and daytime struggles ensued. She had withdrawn from friends and spent most of her time alone, reading. Her health deteriorated and her depression would not abate. On February 4, 1970, she was discovered dead in her apartment by a friend; she had died of a heart attack. At the close of her Bennington lecture, Bogan summarized the achievement of women writers by asking what women have said throughout time. She concluded that women have asked the same questions men have asked: "Who am I? From whence did I come? Is there a design in the universe of which I am a part? Do you love me? Shall I die forever?" And these, surely, are the questions that Bogan asked in her own work: Who was she? (How did her heart, mind, and flesh make up the person who loved and suffered?) Where did she come from? (What was her childhood really like, and how did that fit into the woman she became? Who were her literary ancestors, and how was she to come to terms with them?) Was there a design in the universe to which she belonged? (How did she fit in with her contemporaries? How did she lose the God of her Catholic youth?) Was she loved? (And, if not, how would she resolve the absence or betrayal of love?) Would she die forever? (Would her books come back into print? How would she be remembered?) We remember Louise Bogan, through her writing, as an immensely complicated and compelling woman. She was rarely happy, yet sometimes joyful, and, more often than not, resolute in the face of personal trauma. She wanted to be healed, to endure whatever rakings of the heart were necessary to feel well again. In her poetry she confronted again and again her Fury, her Medusa, and her Daemon—figures no less intimidating on paper than they appeared in her nightmares. She explored her subjects—love, grief, and death—bravely and sensitively. And, for all of her writing life, she endeavored to tell the

LOUISE BOGAN I 67 truth about her life, and to tell it plainly and beautifully.

Journey Around My Room: The Autobiography of Louise Bogan—A Mosaic. Edited by Ruth Limmer. New York: Viking Press, 1980.

BIBLIOGRAPHIES

Selected Bibliography WORKS OF LOUISE BOGAN POETRY

Body of This Death: Poems. New York: Robert M. McBride, 1923. Dark Summer: Poems. New York: Scribners, 1929. The Sleeping Fury: Poems. New York: Scribners, 1937. Poems and New Poems. New York: Scribners, 1941. Collected Poems, 1923-1953. New York: Noonday Press, 1954. The Blue Estuaries: Poems, 1923-1968. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1968; Ecco Press, 1977. LITERARY CRITICISM

Achievement in American Poetry, 1900-1950. Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1951. Selected Criticism: Prose, Poetry. New York: Noonday Press, 1955. A Poet's Alphabet: Reflections on the Literary Art and Vocation. Edited by Robert Phelps and Ruth Limmer. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1970. MANUSCRIPT PAPERS

The Louise Bogan Papers are at Amherst College. Some of her correspondence is at the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters; and the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection, New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations.

CORRESPONDENCE AND MEMOIRS What the Woman Lived: Selected Letters of Louise Bogan, 1920-1970. Edited by Ruth Limmer. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973.

Couchman, Jane. "Louise Bogan: A Bibliography of Primary and Secondary Materials, 1915-1975." Bulletin of Bibliography, 33, no. 2:73-77, 104 (February-March 1976); 33, no. 3:111-126, 247 (April-June 1976); 33, no. 4:178-181 (JulySeptember 1976). Smith, William Jay. Louise Bogan: A Woman's Words. Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress, 1971.

TRANSLATED WORKS The Glass Bees. By Ernst Jiinger. New York: Noonday Press, 1960. With Elizabeth Mayer. Elective Affinities. By Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1963. With Elizabeth Mayer. The Journal of Jules Renard. New York: George Braziller, 1964. With Elizabeth Roget. The Sorrows of Young Werther and Novella. By Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. New York: Random House, 1971. With Elizabeth Mayer.

ANTHOLOGY The Golden Journey: Poems for Young People. Chicago: Reilly & Lee, 1965. Compiled with William Jay Smith.

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL STUDIES Bawer, Bruce. "Louise Bogan's Angry Solitude." New Criterion, 3:25-31 (May 1985). Bowles, Gloria. Louise Bogan s Aesthetic of Limitation. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987. Collins, Martha, ed. Critical Essays on Louise Bogan. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1984.

68 I AMERICAN WRITERS DeShazer, Mary. *' 'My Scourge, My Sister': Louise Began*s Muse." In Coming to Light: American Women Poets in the Twentieth Century. Edited by Diane Wood Middlebrook and Marilyn Yalom. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1985. Pp. 92-104. Dorian, Donna. *'Knowledge Puffeth Up." Parnassus: Poetry in Review, 12-13:144-159 (SpringWinter 1985). Review of The Blue Estuaries. Frank, Elizabeth P. Louise Bogan: A Portrait. New York: Knopf, 1985.

Novack, Michael Paul. "Love and Influence: Louise Bogan, Rolfe Humphries, and Theodore Roethke." Kenyon Review, n.s. 7:9-20 (Summer 1985). Peterson, Douglas L. "The Poetry of Louise Bogan." Southern Review, 19:73-87 (Winter 1983). Ridgeway, Jacqueline. Louise Bogan. Boston: Twayne, 1984. Sarton, May. A World of Light: Portraits and Celebrations. New York: W. W. Norton, 1976. Pp. 215-234.

—WENDY HIRSCH

Gwendolyn Brooks 1917-

ATHE AGE of seventy, with the publication

appointed to compromise an open, widestretching, unifying, empowering umbrella.

of Blacks, Gwendolyn Brooks set the terms for any and all discussion of her career as an American poet. Within a blue-black flexible binding, the volume's competing typefaces reflect the trajectory of her publishing career from the white New York world of Harper & Row to the black independent presses of Detroit and Chicago: Dudley Randall's Broadside Press; Haki Madhubuti's (Don Lee's) Third World Press; and her own Chicago-based publishing house, The David Company, which she named after her father. Dedicated to her parents, this collection of poems represents the poet's aesthetic and political response to her public life. The austere volume requires the audience to reconsider the essential Brooks and to remember that, for her, * "Blackness / is a going to essences and to unifyings" ('To Keorapetse," in Family Pictures). Those essences and unifyings inform her decision to publish her own work. As she explained in an interview with D. H. Mehlem:

The freedom of self-publishing far outweighs what Brooks sees as the "Irks": "distribution, Storage, Printers." To review her career is to recognize the consistency of her wide-stretching, empowering, "do-right" vision even as her style has contracted and relaxed to accommodate her perception of shifting audiences and social urgencies. Heir to the expectations of the Harlem Renaissance, Brooks continues to register aesthetically the racial identity crises of the African American poets who continue to marvel at Countee Cullen's "curious thing": "To make a poet black, and bid him sing!" By the late 1960's she had earned the regard of a new generation of black poets as she proclaimed, "True black writers speak as blacks, about blacks, to blacks" ("The Message of Flowers and Fire and Flowers," in Madhubuti's Say That the River Turns). Her formative years seemed to her then "years of high poet-incense; the language flowers . . . thickly sweet. Those flowers whined and begged white folks to pick them, to find them lovable. Then— the Sixties: independent fire!" Her daughter, Nora Brooks Blakely, contends that her mother "more than anything else . . . is a 'mapper' . . . delineating] and defining] the scenery of now"

Satisfactions of publishing my own work: "complete" control over design, print, paper, binding, timing, and, not least, the capitalization of the word Black. . . . The current motion to make the phrase "African American" an official identification is cold and excluding. . . . The capitalized names Black and Blacks were

69

70 I AMERICAN WRITERS ("Three-Way Mirror," in Madhubuti's Say That the River Turns). Much of that present-tense scenery has remained remarkably constant as Brooks has charted the experience of being black in Chicago, in the United States (what she would finally call the Warpland). Though Brooks saw the late 1960's as a time of political and artistic conversion—a time "to write poems that will successfully 'call' . . . all black people . . . not always to 'teach' [but] to entertain, to illumine"—a review of her early expectations suggests that she has been about this all along. Brooks grows impatient with politically aware readers who miss these urgent observations in her early work. In an interview with Claudia Tate, Brooks challenged Tate's assessment that her earlier works lacked "heightened political awareness." She explained: I'm fighting for myself a little bit here, but not overly so, because I certainly wrote no poem that sounds like Haki's [Don L. Lee's] "Don't Cry, Scream". . . . But I'm fighting for myself a little bit here because I believe it takes a little patience to sit down and find out that in 1945 I was saying what many of the young folks said in the sixties. But it's crowded back into language like this: The pasts of his ancestors lean against Him. Crowd him. Fog out his identity. Hundreds of hungers mingle with his own, Hundreds of voices advise so dextrously He quite considers his reactions his, Judges he walks most powerfully alone, That everything is—simply what it is. "The Sundays of Satin-Legs Smith" My works express rage and focus on rage. In fact much rage is "crowded back" in every gathering of Brooks's poems. And since the expression of anger, if it is righteous anger, is seldom devoid of the redemptive qualities of honor, pride, humor, or love, the absence of these correlatives is notable in Brooks's poetry.

A Gwendolyn Brooks poem offers language or voice to her imagined constituency: the "oldmarrieds" of Bronzeville who live speechless "in the crowding darkness"; De Witt Williams; Mrs. Sallie, Pepita, and Melodie Mary in the Mecca; Lincoln West; the Near-Johannesburg Boy. She is at heart a partisan making audible the silent lives of her world: lives in Chicago and, later, Africa. She lends dignity to the individuals and their experiences by giving them names, descriptions—a place. "I don't start with the landmarks," she insists. "I start with the people" (Report from Part One). Nora Brooks Blakely sees her mother's poems as "entrances to the lives of people you might, otherwise, never know." Finding a poetry suitable to aesthetic and social needs has troubled Brooks throughout her career. In competing dedication poems in "In the Mecca," "The Chicago Picasso," and "The Wall," she explores the primary tensions of her art and life not only as a black poet but also as a Chicago-based poet. Though all three are poems of commemoration, they nonetheless ask different and perhaps mutually exclusive questions of the poet. In "The Chicago Picasso," written in August 1967, the Seiji Ozawa-Mayor DaleyPicasso event forces the poet into an uncomfortable relationship with "Art": Does Man love Art? Man visits Art, but squirms. Art hurts. Art urges voyages— and it is easier to stay at home, the nice beer ready. In commonrooms we belch, or sniff, or scratch. Are raw. The monumental art at the center of this poem is set against our animal nature; rather than consoling, this art "hurts." In fact, Brooks sees the folk as subservient to this overwhelming presentation of Culture: "But we must cook ourselves

GWENDOLYN BROOKS I 71 and style ourselves for Art, who / is a requiring courtesan." In an anthropological twist, the civilized / "the cooked" devitalizes the primitive / "the raw." This dedicatory poem offers an ultimately sterile, disconnected view of music, art, and politics. Contrary to Carl Sandburg's characterization of the city as a "Hog Butcher" in his poem "Chicago" (1916), Brooks describes a world of gloss and success where art puts people in their place. "The Wall," also written in August 1967, arises organically from the voices of people not very unlike the folk population of Edgar Lee Masters or Sandburg—except for their powerful blackness. The humility inspired by The Wall supplants the artificial reverence commanded by the Chicago Picasso. Here the poet celebrates, with the rhythmic fervor of Vachel Lindsay, a community in the making, as a slum wall is transformed into an object of reverence and art (the Wall of Respect): A drumdrumdrum. Humbly we come. South of success and east of gloss and glass are sandals; flowercloth; grave hoops of wood or gold, pendant from black ears, brown ears, reddish-brown and ivory ears; Women in wool hair chant their poetry. On Forty-third and Langly

All worship the Wall. This projection makes art a vital part of a community. In a curious way, Brooks has rerouted the magi and made their journey a solipsistic one. Here the object of reverence is culturally intrinsic; it is also worthy of respect. The Wall of Respect remains for Brooks an emblem of that

historical moment when she recalled "hotbreathing hope, clean planning, and sizable black cross-reference and reliance" (interview in 7>iQuarterly). Brooks retains from those years of revolution and protest "something under-river; pride surviving, pride and self-respect surviving." In spite of the flight of many black writers to major white publishing houses, she stands firm in her commitment (born of a time of revolution and nourished in the intervening years) to write for and be published by blacks. She in fact champions a segregated literary criticism. She explained to Tate: I believe whites are going to say what they choose to say about us, whether it's right or wrong, or just say nothing. . . . We should ignore them. I can no longer decree that we must send our books to black publishers; I would like to say that. I have no intention of ever giving my books to another white publisher. But I do know black publishers are having a lot of trouble. . . . We must place an emphasis on ourselves and publish as best we can and not allow white critics to influence what we do. Although she achieved great success at the hands of what she came to regard as an enslaving culture (the Pulitzer Prize in 1950; Guggenheim Fellowships in 1946 and 1947), Brooks no longer courts the white literary establishment or those who indulge in "literary 'hair-straightening/ " Making poems into verbal analogues of the Wall of Respect has done little to ease the tension in Brooks's mind between the desired audience (her people) and her actual audience (the academics of the college classroom). Morris Clark (echoing George Kent) suggests in "Gwendolyn Brooks and a Black Aesthetic," "It is precisely because Brooks's poetry fails to appeal to the black masses that it appeals aesthetically to the 'blacks who go to college.' " The political atmosphere of the late 1960's made a poem like "Riot" a historical curiosity that

72 / AMERICAN WRITERS survives without context. As Langston Hughes knew all too well, "Politics can be the graveyard of the poet. And only poetry can be his resurrection." The monumental collection Blacks suggests that poetry has always resurrected Brooks. These poems' renewing observations of experience and people are products of "one who distills experience—strains experience" (Brooks's description of the poet). Amid stylistic shifts and historical cataclysms, Brooks keeps her look, her identity. She is a poet, unawed by wonder and comfortable with the stunning quotidian, who knows that, as she says in "The Artists' and Models' Ball": Wonders do not confuse. We call them that And close the matter there. But common things Surprise us. ... Even as her poems verbally enact what Brooks calls "brav[ing] our next small business," her life mimics her aesthetic credo: "Live in the along." This lifelong habit of attending to the available particulars was instilled during Brooks's "sparkly childhood, with two fine parents and one brother, in a plain but warmly enclosing twostory gray house" (Report from Part One). For Brooks, "Home meant a quick-walking, careful Duty-Loving mother" and a "father, with kind eyes, songs, and tense recitations" for his children. In dedicating Blacks to the memory of her "plain but warmly enclosing" parents, she paid tribute to her family as the original and sustaining force in her life. Though her parents lived in Chicago, Brooks was born in Topeka, Kansas, on June 7, 1917. Both parents were descendants of blacks who had migrated to Kansas at the end of the Civil War; her father was the son of Lucas Brooks, a runaway slave. Her mother, Keziah Corine Wims, had returned home to her native Kansas for the birth of her first child. Prior to her mar-

riage, Keziah Wims had attended Emporia State Normal School and taught fifth grade at the Monroe School in Topeka. She met David Anderson Brooks during the summer of 1914; they married in July 1916. David Brooks, a native of Atchison, Kansas, had moved to Oklahoma City at the age of nine and remained there until he finished his schooling—of the twelve children in his family, he was the only one to complete high school. He "got up at five o'clock to feed horses and to do other chores, so [he] could go to school." He attended Fisk University in hopes of a medical career but found that family obligations necessitated full-time employment. He became a janitor at the McKinley Music Publishing Company in Chicago. Gwendolyn recalled that though "not many knew of [her] father's lowly calling . . . SOMETHING . . . stamped [her] 'beyond the pale.' " In 1918, when Gwendolyn was sixteen months old, her brother, Raymond, was born. When she was three, the family moved from cramped quarters in Hyde Park to an apartment at Fifty-sixth and Lake Park Avenue. Here Gwendolyn and Raymond could play in the garden plot their mother tilled. From her father, Gwendolyn acquired a love of "fascinating poetry" and "jolly or haunting songs" that he sang; her favorite was "Asleep in the Deep." Her mother also loved music, played the piano, and was often heard singing "Brighten the Corner Where You Are." The Brooks family encouraged the familiar, the repeatable. Holidays were occasions for well-loved rituals of cooking, singing, and decoration. Giftgiving days necessitated "the bake-eve fun" of baking and wrapping. In particular, Christmas was a time when "certain things were done. Certain things were not done." One of the things "not done" in the Brooks household was Mother working outside the home. Father furnished "All the Money." Shortfalls in the family account meant that they ate beans and "would have been quite content to

GWENDOLYN BROOKS I 73 entertain a beany diet every day, if necessary . . . if there could be, continuously, the almost musical Peace [they] had most of the time." Home was nourished by her father's "special practical wisdom," which unerringly held the family together. He was a father who "really took time with his children." Childhood was a time of dancing and dreaming—and writing. School offered little in the way of sweet society. Ostracized because of her appearance (too dark), her shyness, and her inability to "sashay," Brooks retreated into her world of home and imagination. Though her mother recalls her "rhyming at seven," Brooks dates the start of her poetic activity to her eleventh year. Her natural diffidence and her distaste for school-age pastimes like "Post Office" and "Kiss the Pilla" led young Gwendolyn to a discovery of her "in-life." If Brooks's solitary childhood nurtured her writing, then her encounter with Writer's Digest fostered an alternative society as the fledgling poet discovered "oodles of other writers" who "ached for the want of the right word—reckoned with mean nouns, virtueless adjectives." When Brooks was thirteen, her father gave her a desk "with many little compartments, with long drawers at the bottom, and a removable glassprotected shelf at the top, for books." Here was a place to work, to dream, to reach. Her presiding spirit was Paul Laurence Dunbar (Langston Hughes recalled that "almost every Negro home had a copy of Dunbar"); Brooks wrote a poem every day under his portrait and studied "the Complete Paul Laurence Dunbar." In fact, Keziah Brooks predicted that Gwendolyn would become "the lady Paul Laurence Dunbar." Brooks wrote daily and read widely. Traces of John Keats and William Wordsworth coexist in her writing with the more dominant voices of the Chicago school (Sandburg, Masters) and the Harlem Renaissance (Dunbar, Hughes, and Cullen). Cullen's Caroling Dusk: An Anthology

of Verse by Negro Poets (1927) and Hughes's The Weary Blues (1926) made Brooks realize that "writing about the ordinary aspects of black life was important." After having endured the "coldness of editors, spent too much money on postage," she experienced her first publishing triumph in 1930, at the age of thirteen: American Childhood published "Eventide." Within three years the Chicago Defender was regularly accepting Brooks's poems for its column "Lights and Shadows." By 1934, the year of her high school graduation, Brooks had written to and actually met James Weldon Johnson—the meeting occurred at the insistence of her mother, secure in her belief in Gwendolyn's talent. Johnson did not recall receiving any poems from the young poet, claiming he got "so many of them." He did suggest, however, that her talent would be best served by reading the modern poets. Already secure in her understanding of Hughes and Cullen, she began to read T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and E. E. Cummings. Later that year, Keziah engineered another meeting, this time with Hughes. She "brought a whole pack of stuff" to his reading at the Metropolitan Community Church. Far from dismissing Gwendolyn, Hughes "read [her poems] right there" and declared that she "must go on writing." Though several of her teachers had urged her to continue writing so that she might, one day, be a poet, no classroom encouragement inspired her as much as did Hughes's making time for her work. Brooks's studies came to an end with her graduation from Wilson Junior College (now Kennedy-King College) in 1936, leaving her to confront the working world. As an educated woman, she was ill prepared for the harsh conditions and humiliating nature of service work. Her flight from her first job as a maid led her to the Illinois State Employment Service—and an even less tolerable position: secretary to Dr. E. N. French, a "spiritual adviser" who sold "Holy

74 I AMERICAN WRITERS Thunderbolts, charms, dusts of different kinds, love potions" from the Mecca, the once "splendid palace, a showplace of Chicago" that was now * *a great gray hulk of brick.'' Nothing in her early years had prepared Brooks for such a concentration of misery. These experiences resisted fictional treatment and continued to preoccupy her until they surfaced as the poems of In the Mecca (1968). Membership in the NAACP Youth Council offered Brooks more than a community organization, for it was during a meeting at the YWCA on Forty-sixth and South Park that "the girl who wrote" met "a fella who wrote." Brooks writes that her "first Mover' was [her] husband," Henry Lowington Blakely II. Blakely recalls "a shy brown girl . . . [with a] rich and deep [voice] . . . [whose] shining was inward . . . [and he] felt warm in that shining." On September 17, 1939, after "a nice little wedding" in her parents' home, Brooks felt "bleak when . . . taken to [her] kitchenette apartment . . . [and] the cramped dreariness of the Tyson.'' But soon that forbidding atmosphere yielded to the company and the togetherness of "mutual reading." A kitchenette was a place where a son could be "suddenly born" (as Henry Lowington Blakely III was on October 10, 1940), where that same son could "contract broncho-pneumonia," or where mice would come out of the radiators "in droves." For Brooks the kitchenette itself would become a controlling metaphor of her first collection of poems, A Street in Bronzeville (1945), as well as of her novel, Maud Martha (1953). Feeling that "marriage should get most of a wife's attention," she "scarcely put pen to paper" for a year after her son's birth. In 1940 Brooks submitted "The Ballad of Pearl May Lee" to the poetry contest of the Negro Exposition. Over the objections of Hughes, the judges awarded the prize to Melvin Tolson, considering Brooks's poem "too militant." In 1941 Brooks and Blakely attended a poetry class

at the South Side Community Art Center that was led by "socially acceptable, wealthy, protected" Inez Cunningham Stark. Stark wished to be considered "a friend who loved poetry and respected [her students'] interest in it." A reader for Poetry magazine, she gave all students a oneyear subscription to the journal and "an education in modern poetry." The apprentice poets were serious and enchanted and diligent. And though some went home crying, many learned how to revise. Stark encouraged her students to read and study poetry, to avoid the easy technical device or cliche, to shun the obvious. Her critiques were "cool, objective, frank." Several of Brooks's Bronzeville poems were written under her guidance. After winning a workshop prize (S.I. Hayakawa was a judge), as well as the 1943 Midwestern Writers' Conference poetry award, Brooks was encouraged to submit her first poetry manuscript to Emily Morison of Alfred A. Knopf (Hughes's publisher). Morison was impressed enough to counsel expanding the number of "Negro life" poems. Though Brooks took Morison's advice, she did not resubmit to Knopf but instead sent her manuscript to Harper & Brothers. There an editor showed it to the novelist Richard Wright, who applauded its genuineness and suggested expanding the collection, perhaps by adding a long poem. With the addition of "The Sundays of Satin-Legs Smith," A Street in Bronzeville was published in 1945. In many ways the book marked the end of Brooks's innocent workshop years and the beginning of her career as a poet of national standing. From the generalizing indefinite article (A) and the subtitle (Ballads and Blues) to the closing sonnet sequence ("Gay Chaps at the Bar"), the poems both carry on the "tradition" and defy it. While the poems reflect the influence of the Harlem Renaissance writers and their use of dialect, they more often than not rely upon idiomatic expressions such as one might find in Robert

GWENDOLYN BROOKS I 75 Frost. Like Frost, Brooks acts as a census-taker, recording the neighborhood's vital statistics and treating every entry with equal disinterest. It is in this professional distance that Brooks's perceived realism resides. She charts the emotions without emotional display. The collection begins with a series of kitchenette vignettes, progresses to ballads and "The Sundays of SatinLegs Smith," and ends with the sonnet sequence. More than a response to the South Side's kitchenette ethos or a continuation of the Chicago school of "folk nativist" poets (Sandburg, Masters, Edwin Arlington Robinson), A Street in Bronzeville begs for contextual examination as a 1945 reaction to a world of racial, class, and sexual tensions—and war. The black soldiers in these poems project more than masculine racial pride; they are a national challenge to racial relations. Typical Bronzeville poems foreground the victims. Some are condemned to silence and "crowding darkness" ("the old-marrieds"), while others have life prematurely wrenched from them (the unborn of "the mother"; DeWitt Williams). Brooks is often relentless in the manner in which she captures the "fact" of Bronzeville, as in "the murder": This is where poor Percy died, Short of the age of one. His brother Brucie, with a grin, Burned him up for fun. No doubt, poor Percy watched the fire Chew on his baby dress With sweet delight, enjoying too His brother's happiness. No doubt, poor Percy looked around And wondered at the heat, Was worried, wanted Mother, Who gossiped down the street. No doubt, poor shrieking Percy died Loving Brucie still,

Who could, with clean and open eye, Thoughtfully kill. Brucie has no playmates now. His mother mourns his lack. Brucie keeps on asking, "When Is Percy comin' back?" Though the poem is devoid of conventionally realistic detail, the governing impression is one of unerring fidelity to truth. As Brooks jostles us with familiar and pleasing words made terrible— "grin," "fun," "chew"—the repeated chorus of "No doubt" leaves the impression that here, in Bronzeville, this is the quotidian. Many of the poems coalesce into a sharpedged cast of acquaintances: Matthew Cole "in / The door-locked dirtiness of his room"; Sadie, who "stayed at home" while Maud "went to college" (anticipating Toni Morrison's Sula [1973]); the hunchback girl "think[ing] of heaven" (feminizing Dylan Thomas' "The Hunchback in the Park" [1942]); Mrs. Martin's Booker T., "[who] ruined Rosa Brown"; Moe Belle Jackson, whose husband "whipped her good last night" (echoing Billie Holiday's "Ain't Nobody's Business"). Still others require heroes—or antiheroes. "Queen of the Blues" not only updates Hughes's "The Weary Blues" but also reacts to an entire tradition of sorrow songs and folk seculars. "Ballad of Pearl May Lee" provides an early rationale for Brooks's 1951 essay "Why Negro Women Leave Home." Its savage narrator shares the rage and humiliation black women feel when their men "grew up with bright skins on the brain." With "Gay Chaps at the Bar," Brooks forsakes characterization for the sonnet sequence. As Cullen and Claude McKay had done before her, she finds an opportunity for argument in the form itself. The formal shift, from ballads and blues to sonnets, is not jarring; rather, it effects a kind of recessional. Questions of race, identity, and love as they trouble those "home from the front" lack

76 I AMERICAN WRITERS the resolution the narrative poems have. The volume concludes with unexpected irony: And still we wear our uniforms, follow The cracked cry of the bugles, comb and brush Our pride and prejudice . . . For even if we come out standing up How shall we smile, congratulate: and how Settle in chairs? Listen, listen. The step Of iron feet again. And again wild. Patrons of poetry, familiar with Hughes and accustomed to Frost and Stephen Vincent Ben6t and Edna St. Vincent Millay, eagerly received the Bronzeville poems. Liberal readers, "comfortable" with the racial themes, neglected the harsh commentary that was contained within what Brooks herself called a "rather folksy narrative." The New York Times Book Review (November 4, 1945) found "the idiom . . . colloquial, the language . . . universal." Poetry (December 1945) praised her "capacity to marry the special qualities of her racial tradition with the best attainments of our poetic tradition"; Saturday Review (January 19, 1945) considered the poems to be a "poignant social document"; The New Yorker (September 22, 1945) praised the freshness of "her folk poetry of the city." More important was the approbation of Brooks's peers. Cullen wrote to her on August 24, 1945, "I am glad to be able to say 'welcome' to you to that too small group of Negro poets, and to the larger group of American ones. No one can deny your place there." McKay followed with an equally congratulatory note on October 10: "[I] welcome you among the band of hard working poets who do have something to say." But it was Hughes's loving review in the Chicago Defender (September 1,1946) that must have brought Brooks the greatest joy: "This book is just about the BIGGEST little two dollars worth of intriguing reading to be found in the book-

shops these atomic days. It will give you something to talk about from now until Christmas." Critics such as Houston A. Baker, Jr., Gary Smith, and George Kent agree that many of these poems were revolutionary in the way they dealt with race and sexual relationships; they disagree on whether Brooks was seeking to universalize the plight of her subjects. In addition to the local success of A Street in Bronzeville, the book garnered numerous prizes for the poet. By the time Brooks published Annie Allen (1949), she had won the Mademoiselle Merit Award (1945), Guggenheim Fellowships (1946, 1947), the American Academy of Arts and Letters Grant for Creative Writing (1946), and Poetry's Eunice Tietjens Memorial Prize (1949). In the process she became a recognized writer and began to write reviews for the Chicago Daily News and the Chicago Sun-Times. This hometown work led to reviewing for Hoyt Fuller's Negro Digest, The New York Times, and the New York Herald Tribune. She "stopped reviewing because I decided that even a reviewer . . . should have read Everything." Brooks does recall that "while I Had At It, I was exuberant." Besides her excitement at receiving the packages of reviewer's copies, she relished the opportunity to share and support. No matter how history recalls Brooks's literary contributions to the years 1941-1949, Brooks remembers the period as her "party era," a time when "party" became a verb. Unlike her solitary childhood and adolescent years, these were times when "merry Bronzevillians" put on the spread and "conversation was our 'mary jane.' " The best parties were at 623 East Sixty-third Street, Brooks's "most exciting kitchenette." Like Hughes, Brooks found her best material when "walking or running, fighting or screaming or singing" beneath her window. And as if to commemorate this shared vision, Hughes came to Brooks's exciting kitchenette for the party of the decade. Having finished at the Lab School in

GWENDOLYN BROOKS I 77 Chicago, he chose her party for his farewell to Chicago and claimed that it was the "Best party . . . I've ever been given!" Brooks "squeezed perhaps a hundred people into our Langston Hughes two-room kitchenette party. Langston was the merriest and the most colloquial of them all. ... He enjoyed everyone; he enjoyed all the talk, all the phonograph blues, all the festivity in the crowded air." With Annie Allen, Brooks advanced beyond the loose vignettes and sonnets of the Bronzeville poems, preferring to trace the arc of a single character's life. Unable to ignore the war entirely, she dedicated the volume to Edward Bland, a friend whom she had first met in Inez Cunningham Stark's poetry class, and who had died in Germany in March 1945, and introduced it with the elegiac "Memorial to Ed Bland." The dedication and poem appear before the table of contents, as though separate from the rest of the collection. The bold captions and headline-like titles turn the contents page into a poem itself and make it clear that the poet is responding to literary as well as reportorial instincts in this collection. The opening sequence, "Notes from the Childhood and the Girlhood," though a bit more contracted than earlier poems, is familiar to readers of the Bronzeville collection. For these are poems where reality and imagination always collide. However "pinchy" the world, it "prances nevertheless with gods and fairies." The central sequence, a mock epic titled "The Anniad," contends with the literary world beyond the Chicago street noises. The hyperconscious lapidary language, the contracted lines, and the seven-line stanzas hurl Annie into an excessively ornamental and artificial world: Vaunting hands are now devoid. Hieroglyphics of her eyes Blink upon paradise Paralyzed and paranoid.

But idea and body too Clamor "Skirmishes can do. Then he will come back to you.'' Brooks, attempting a stylistic tour de force, seems to have tired of black vernacular structures and white strictures upon style and content. She succeeds on a stylistic level but overwhelms the ordinariness of her subject matter with that success. The work recovers in "Appendix to The Anniad' " and the final "Womanhood" sequences, where the narrative pulse is palpable and the style is Brooks's own. Mature Annie's laments—"People who have no children can be hard"; "What shall I give my children? who are poor?"—complement the expanded focus of these final sonnets. If Brooks expected more of her readers, she had expected much more of herself. With Annie Allen, she sought to identify herself both with and against the tradition. These conflicting needs confused reviewers. The complexity of the volume caused many readers to complain that these weren't Bronzeville poems. But Phyllis McGinley, in The New York Times Book Review (January 22, 1950), saw that as an advantage. Singling out "The Anniad" for special praise, she claimed that Brooks was best when she forgot "her social conscience and her Guggenheim scholarship," thereby "creating unbearable excitement." In spite of the mixed reception accorded the collection, it was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1950. Though Brooks was the first black writer to win a Pulitzer in any category, she did not establish a precedent, merely a referent. It would be thirty-three years before another black woman would win (Alice Walker in 1983). Some critics see Annie Allen as Brooks's first important work. Baker situates the collection in the greater swirl of modernism; in the book's echoing of Ernest Hemingway, Eliot, and Pound, it "join[ed] the mainstream of twentieth-century poetry in its treatment of the terrors of war."

78 I AMERICAN WRITERS Haki Madhubuti (Don Lee) reads its importance in a different way: Annie Allen (1949), important? Yes. Read by blacks? No. Annie Allen more so than A Street in Bronzeville seems to have been written for whites. . . . ['The Anniad"] requires unusual concentrated study. . . .This poem is probably earth-shaking to some, but leaves me completely dry. . . . There is an over-abundance of the special appeal to the world-runners. . . . By the late 1960's, Brooks would join Madhubuti in his assessment of this successful period of her career. But for the moment, the Pulitzer brought with it public recognition and a national reputation. The birth of her daughter, Nora, on September 8, 1951, convinced Brooks to leave the Kalamazoo, Michigan, home to which the family had moved in 1948. In spite of their wish to escape the racial tensions and claustrophobic conditions of inner-city life, the family returned to Chicago and by 1953 had their own home, at 7428 South Evans Avenue, near the University of Chicago. In "How I Told My Child About Race" (1951), however, Brooks recorded an unsettling experience. When she and her son were walking home, they were assaulted by stone-throwing young whites in that very "university district, mecca of basic enlightenment and progressive education. . . . The buildings, with their delicate and inspiring spires, seemed . . . to leer, to crowd us with mutterings—'Oh no, you black bodies!— no sanctuary here.' " This incident forced a mother to explain not what race is but why it is what it is. Long before Brooks would turn to the Pan-African movement for identity, she refused to drag "the subject of 'race' down for frequent examination and hammering, because [she thought] that children should be helped to view the samenesses among themselves and others." In 1953 Brooks published her "autobiograph-

ical novel," Maud Martha. Favoring the "nuanceful, allowing" form of the novel over the memoir, she nonetheless reads herself into every page. Here "fact-meat" combines with "chunks of fancy" to build a narrative familiar to readers of her earlier works. Lower-class, vignetted titles echo strategies from the Bronzeville poems and prepare us for the dailiness of the lives within. Known faces and circumstances crowd the story of Maud's coming of age and young married life. A larger cast of kitchenette folks— Binnie, Mrs. Teenie Thompson, Mr. and Mrs. Whitestripe—is "real," as are many of the heroine's adventures. The slights and daily indignities ("the self-solace"), the masculine domination of Maud's every move, prompt what Brooks later called ' 'woman rage.'' In "brotherly love,'' as she dresses a chicken, Maud's empathy is allowed to go beyond the human circumstances: But if the chicken were a man!—cold man with no head or feet and with all the little feather, hairs to be pulled, and the intestines loosened and beginning to ooze out, and the gizzard yet to be grabbed and the stench beginning to rise! And yet the chicken was a sort of person, a respectable individual, with its own kind of dignity. The difference was in the knowing. What was unreal to you, you could deal with violently. Much later, as if anticipating the animal-rights movement, Brooks would reinforce this notion of chickens as "people": "people, that is, in the sense that we conceive people to be: things of identity and response." Maud Martha received polite reviews that dismissed it with annoyance or faint praise. The New Yorker (October 10, 1953) complained that it was but a "series of sketches"; the Southern Review (October 1953) found it an "ingratiating first novel." Only the Chicago Defender (September 30, 1953) saw how the novel "struck at the twisted roots of racial antagonisms." In the wake of feminist criticism, some contemporary

GWENDOLYN BROOKS I 79 critics (particularly Mary Helen Washington and Patricia and Vernon Lattin) see it as a revolutionary work. Washington, attacking earlier views of the work as full of "optimism and faith/ 9 sees it instead as a work straining to contain its "bitterness, rage, self-hatred, and silence." Rarely in Brooks's oeuvre is there such a challenge to work against the pleasures of the narrative line and decode the savage "woman rage" just underneath. Here she uses the homey story to mask its own meanings, forcing the reader to translate not merely the black cultural context but the feminist context as well. The rest of the 1950's were mostly spent addressing the needs of Brooks's children at home—and in verse. In 1956 Bronzeville Boys and Girls was published. These poems, juvenile reductions of her "adult" poems, are serious considerations of poverty, racism, and loneliness. Though offset by the lively rhythms and sound patterns, the sober vision of this childhood world remains. Reviewers, comfortable with their Gwendolyn Brooks "slot," tended to see the poems as universal expressions, rhythmic and simple. The New York Herald Tribune Book Review (November 18, 1956) explained the secret of the book: "Because Miss Brooks is a Negro poet, she has called these Bronzeville Boys and Girls, but they are universal and will make friends anywhere, among grown-ups or among children from eight to ten." With the death of her mentor, Inez Cunningham Stark, on August 19, 1957, and of her father, on November 21, 1959, Brooks assumed greater responsibilities in her life and art. She reconsidered early experiences in the hopes of writing another novel, the tale of an unfortunate, darkskinned boy named Lincoln West. Though she published poetic versions of little Lincoln's life, she left the novel unfinished. She also hoped to tell the story of the Mecca and Dr. E. N. French but, like Lincoln's tale, this would have to await a poetic treatment. With two major collections be-

hind her, and having achieved a certain celebrity, Brooks entered a new decade, one in which she would become mentor to yet another generation. With The Bean Eaters (1960), Brooks advanced to a new level of technical and aesthetic power as well as of social conscience. Originally entitled "Bronzeville Men and Women," the collection takes seriously what Kent sees as its association with Vincent van Gogh's The Potato Eaters. The world of these poems is one of poverty, dim spirits, and truncated hopes. Rather than presenting "acceptable" vignettes of blacks, these poems "massage the hate-[she]-had" as they address the world. Much of the book's drama draws upon Brooks's father's presiding spirit, evident in the opening "In Honor of David Anderson Brooks, My Father": A dryness is upon the house My father loved and tended. Beyond his firm and sculptured door His light and lease have ended. He who was Goodness, Gentleness, And Dignity is free, Translated to public Love Old private charity. "Goodness, Gentleness, / And Dignity" abound in the life moments of The Bean Eaters, expanding upon what Stanley Kunitz praised as "the warmly and generously human" side of Annie Allen. The Bean Eaters depends less upon its cast of characters for effect and more upon the depth of social and moral decisions it gives voice to. In this collection, language pulses and despair intensifies as Brooks searches beyond Bronzeville for meaning in the black experience. The topicality of this collection does not depend upon the war, but advances to consider the civil-rights news from the South. As the opening poem, "The Explorer," suggests, the volume works "to find a still spot in the noise. . . . a satin

80 / AMERICAN WRITERS peace somewhere." But in the end the poems derive their energy from "Only spiral ing, high human voices, / the scream of nervous affairs, / Wee griefs, / Grand griefs. And choices"— choices made, choices denied, choices "that cried to be taken." For the couple in "The Bean Eaters," the choice seems to have been one of acceptance of their lot: They eat beans mostly, this old yellow pair. Dinner is a casual affair. Plain chipware on a plain and creaking wood, Tin flatware. Two who are Mostly Good. Two who have lived their day, But keep on putting on their clothes And putting things away. And remembering . . . Remembering, with twinklings and twinges, As they lean over the beans in their rented back room that is full of beads and receipts and dolls and cloths, tobacco crumbs, vases and fringes. Brooks unassumingly intensifies the couple's poverty, relying upon the choral effect of "mostly" and the "ing" of participials and gerunds. However present-tense the action, the sheer routine of the couple draws the poem into memories of the detritus of their lives. While they seem never to have had any choices in their lives, they have endured. In startling contrast to this aged pair, the young toughs of "We Real Cool" opt for pool—and early death. Unlike the voice of Hughes's "Motto" ("I play it cool / and dig all the jive / That's the reason / 1 stay alive"), Brooks's pool players "left school . . . sing sin ... thin gin ... die soon." "Say the 'We' softly," says Brooks, because "the boys have no accented sense of themselves, yet they are aware of a semi-defined personal importance" (Report from Part One). That ill-defined need for personal importance

carries over to the topical poems "A Bronzeville Mother Loiters in Mississippi. Meanwhile, a Mississippi Mother Burns Bacon" and "The Chicago Defender Sends a Man to Little Rock.'' Although Brooks had always been engaged in the race crisis in America, she found in the Emmett Till case a terrifyingly comprehensible extreme of what she had witnessed in Chicago. The Till case at first seems so horrible as to warrant a literary analogue: "From the first it had been like a / Ballad." But, pursuing the literary whiteness and blackness, Brooks sees a literary and social worldview collapse as it relates to blacks: The fun was disturbed, then all but nullified When the Dark Villain was a blackish child Of fourteen, with eyes still too young to be dirty, And a mouth too young to have lost every reminder Of its infant softness. With * 'terrifying clarity'' the Till diptych reacts to both the murder and the acquittal of the accused murderer, exposing a world of racist inversions where "white" is "black" and "grown-ups" are "bab[ies] full of tantrums." The poem itself becomes an agent of the "meddling'' North with its "pepper-words, 'bestiality,' and 'barbarism,' / and/ 'Shocking.' " As in earlier poems of "woman rage," Brooks plumbs the distortion of sexuality in the case: chivalry as an excuse for murder. A chain of empathy is forged between women as the accused murderer's wife comes to hate the circumstances of her life: Then a sickness heaved within her. Then courtroom Coca-Cola, The courtroom beer and hate and sweat and drone, Pushed like a wall against her. She wanted to bear it. But his mouth would not go away and neither would the

GWENDOLYN BROOKS I 81 Decapitated exclamation points in that Other Woman's eyes. The only poetic resolution for Brooks is to yield a severed, truncated verse—"The Last Quatrain of the Ballad of Emmett Till''—to Mrs. Till, a fellow Chicago mother: "She kisses her killed boy. / And she is sorry." As the ks collide, love, sexuality, and death seem inextricably linked. The Chicago-Mississippi connections were part of Brooks's neighborhood sensibility. The Defender, in part responsible for the Great Migration of blacks from the rural South to Chicago after World War I, had made it a policy to keep Mississippi on its front page. Lynching was a metaphor for life in the South. For white America, the Till case was the horrible exception; for Brooks and readers of the Defender, it was the rule. These connections grew in generalization in "The Chicago Defender Sends a Man to Little Rock." The reporter discovers a place of families, baseball, concerts, hymns— where evil wears a human face. Like the "ballad" of Till, the "saga" of Little Rock is a "puzzle." The reporter unearths unmentionable news: " 'They are like people everywhere.' " In an unexpectedly Audenesque conclusion, Brooks declaims, "The loveliest lynchee was our Lord." If The Bean Eaters was but a collection of "Negro poems," reviewers might have been more receptive. But in her extended poem "The Lovers of the Poor," Brooks challenges race, class, and "do-goodism." The ladies from the Ladies' Betterment League mean well but know little and care less about the root causes of the poverty and race enslavement of the "voiceless." They discover that . . . it's all so bad! and entirely too much for them. The stench; the urine, cabbage, and dead beans, Dead porridges of assorted dusty grains,

The old smoke, heavy diapers, and they're told, Something called chitterlings. The darkness. Drawn Darkness, or dirty light. The soil that stirs. They've never seen such a make-do-ness as Newspaper rugs before! More accustomed to "the nice Art Institute," the ladies seek a less distressing project. Many readers, comfortable with the Southern civil-rights poems, felt somewhat abused as Brooks turned her lyric attack toward class indifference. Unlike Hughes's "Dinner Guest: Me" ("I know I am / the Negro Problem"), Brooks's "Lovers of the Poor" are forced to visit the "Problem." Whether in the alleys and tenements of Chicago or in the red dirt roads and shacks of Mississippi, Brooks depicts a world where blacks are always at risk. Unlike many topical poems, these civil-rights pieces have survived their inspiration. Reviewers, uneasy with the book's topicality, found comfort in identifying The Bean Eaters as a collection of "social" poems, as if the category ameliorated their unease. Retrospectively, critics have marveled at the way in which Brooks turned "raw materials" into "artistry"; Baker saw the Till sequence in a psychological and political light, claiming that it was "an evocation of the blood-guiltiness of the white psyche in an age of dying colonialism"; Jean Marie Miller, in "The World of Gwendolyn Brooks," claimed that "Brooks spans rac^s in her poetry, not by reaching for a pre-existing Western universalism, but by exploring and digging deeply enough into the Black experience to touch that which is common to men everywhere." In 1972 Madhubuti saw the major weakness of the book as its "quiet confirmation of the 'Negro' as equal," failing to assess the enemies of blacks accurately. The social turbulence of the 1960's asked much of Brooks. On the one hand, she had

82 I AMERICAN WRITERS achieved fame as the most honored "Negro poetess" in America. On the other hand, the Pulitzer and Guggenheim awards came at the expense of her poems (who among her readers really heard the anger and despair?), and the success that seemed to be isolating her from her people concerned her on both a literary and a social level. As political challenges became more frequent, the media became increasingly chary in areas touching upon race. Early in 1962, Kent recounts in his biography of Brooks, New York radio station WNEW denied airtime to a musical setting of "Of De Witt Williams on His Way to Lincoln Cemetery" because of the word "black." The station's management claimed the reference would outrage "Negro" listeners. Brooks, following liberation movements in Africa, failed to believe that a word with such currency in Africa could give offense. At mid-career she saw this as an opportunity to emphasize her commitment to the greater political implications: "For seventeen years. Without ever detouring from my Business—which is being a writer. Many of the banners so brightly (and originally, they think) waved by today's youngsters I waved twenty years ago, and published sixteen years ago." Brooks's need to share her work with the young led her to the classroom, informally at first and then professionally. Invited to read at the White House in 1962, Brooks used that and other public occasions to use fame for fortune so that she could fund programs and awards in creative writing. Her teaching career began in September 1963, when Mirron Alexandroff, president of Chicago's Columbia College, invited her to run a poetry workshop: *4Do anything you want with it. ... Take it outdoors. Take it to a restaurant—run it in a restaurant, a coffee shop. Do absolutely anything you want with it. Anything!" She accepted the challenge of trying "to enjoy this thing [she] had never done before." Appearing in her "new little professor's blue

suit,'' she sought to communicate what Inez Cunningham Stark had given to her: "the knowledge, the magic, the definitions" (Report from Part One). The workshop at Columbia College led to more teaching, at Elmhurst College (Illinois), Northeastern Illinois State College, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Columbia University, and the City University of New York. She found the excitement and challenge of teaching, and the freedom to experiment, most gratifying. But after suffering a small heart-attack on Christmas Day of 1971, she bade the classroom a "final Goodbye." Though uncertain whether writing can be taught, Brooks nonetheless believed that teachers can "explain the wonders" of poetry and "oblige the writing student to write." She met students' protestations and pleas—"Can't do it. CanNOT do it"—with a refusal to reconsider her demanding assignments, "telling them they were insulting their college and their own intellects." She provided tickets to "deputized" students so that they could attend poetry readings and report back to the class. She discovered the shared secret of teaching: "Such activities . . . enabled me to enjoy a class—and when I enjoyed it, almost without exception so did my students." Teaching, coupled with the "news at home," encouraged Brooks to re-envision the work included in Selected Poems (1963). This gathering of poems cemented Brooks's critical reputation. The New York Times felt confident enough to claim that "Miss Brooks won a Pulitzer Prize in 1950 and deserved it." Reviewers in Poetry and the Saturday Review praised her idiomatic language, claiming it was the key to her ability to universalize and empathize. The praise showered on the volume overlooked the topical addition of "Riders to the Blood-Red Wrath." Written in 1963, the poem commemorated the Freedom Rides of 1961. The subject matter fairly rips at the poem's formal fabric:

GWENDOLYN BROOKS I 83 My proper prudence toward his proper probe Astonished their ancestral seemliness. It was a not-nice risk, a wrought risk, was An indelicate risk, they thought. And an excess. With Selected Poems Brooks seems to have willed a formal closure to "Part One" of her writing career. Her relationship with Harper & Row would not end until after the publication of The World of Gwendolyn Brooks (1971), but that collection would strain to contain In the Mecca. Though she could but dimly perceive the direction her career would take, Brooks knew that her poetry had already taken her far beyond what was acceptable for a "Negro" poet in America. As early as August 1962, Brooks had written to her editor at Harper & Row about her "Mecca" poem: "I can't give up on the thing; it has a grip on me." Readings, teaching, and family matters kept her from a full commitment to this nagging project. But it was not until she attended the Second Fisk University Writers' Conference in April 1967 that the requisite inspiration and political fire came to her. Used to being "loved" at readings and lectures, Brooks discovered that here, among the "New Blacks," she was "coldly Respected." Here Imamu Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) shouted, "Up against the wall, Brother! KILL 'EM ALL!" And here Brooks met blacks understood by no whites, especially "professional Negro understanders." On December 28, 1969, a tribute to Brooks at Chicago's Affro-Arts Theatre continued her induction in the world of "New Blacks" as well as provided the meeting ground for her future biographer, George Kent. Schooled now by her juniors, she "enter[ed] at least the kindergarten of new consciousness" (Report from Part One). A year before the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., these blacks recognized the imminent collapse of integration as a social idea. Brooks heard the cry of Madhubuti's "New Integrationist," who sought "integration / of / negroes / with /

black / people." What did Brooks discover? Black pride? Cultural nationalism? "You may use any label you wish," she says (quoted in Kent, A Life of Gwendolyn Brooks). "All I know is when people started talking about Blacks loving, respecting, and helping one another, that was enough for me." The passive spectatorship of the Bronzeville poems was gone for good. It was no longer enough to share through description the circumstances of being black. Madhubuti writes, "Brooks' post 1967 poetry is fat-less. Her new work resembles a man getting off meat, turning to a vegetarian diet" (Preface to Report from Part One). In the Mecca bears more than traces of the Fisk "fever." Buoyed by her poetry workshop with a Chicago street gang, the Blackstone Rangers, Brooks found the street energy necessary to complete her long-stalled "Mecca" work. The book-length poem is at once an indictment of racism and poverty symbolized by an apartment building, the "once splendid palace" at Thirtyfourth Street between State and Dearborn that had collapsed into a littered and dangerous ruin— and a mystery story. The narrative, "a mosaic of daily affairs," spins around the search for the lost Pepita, the youngest of Mrs. Sallie Smith's nine children. After a sharp-focused introduction to Mrs. Sallie's domestic sphere, the poem inches out into corridors of threat and dirt, dishonor and decay, tedium and nobility. Gangs threaten from without, poverty and craziness from within. Characters are at once particularized—we learn quickly to distinguish the voices of Loam Norton, Way-Out Morgan, Melodic Mary—and homogenized into a collective response to Mrs. Sallie's 4 'Where Pepita?'': * 'Ain seen erI ain seen erI ain seen er I Ain seen er I ain seen er I ain seen her.'' Fractured narrative lines carry the news that many Meccans, as Melodie Mary knows, are as trapped as the rats and roaches that share their space. That Pepita has in fact been killed by a tenant, Jamaican Edward, seems at once inciden-

84 I AMERICAN WRITERS tal and central to the fury and frustrations of the Mecca: * 'Hateful things sometimes befall the hateful / but the hateful are not rendered lovable thereby." How like the aborted fetuses of "the mother"—those whose "births and . . . names . . . straight baby tears . . . and games" were stolen—is this "little woman [who] lies in dust with roaches"—who "never went to kindergarten ... never learned that black is not beloved. *' The "After Mecca" section both honors heroes, past and present, and severs ties with the old consciousness. Elegies for Medgar Evers and Malcolm X are celebrations of black manhood in the light of the new black nationalism. The monument of "The Wall" towers over that of "The Chicago Picasso" in terms of black pride and aesthetic significance. "Sermons on the Warpland" confronts the essence of Ron Karenga's assertion: "The fact that we are black is our ultimate reality." Contemporary reviews reflect the ways in which Brooks's "blackening language" left many white readers uneasy and guilt-ridden. M. L. Rosenthai, in The New York Times (March 2, 1969), stunned by "the horrid predicament of real Americans whose everyday world haunts the nation's conscience intolerably," nonetheless found the poems (especially the title sequence) "overwrought." A reviewer in the Virginia Quarterly (Winter 1969) complained that Brooks was "more self-consciously a Negro than ever before. . . . It is a new manner and a new voice for Miss Brooks, better than her earlier work in its honesty, poorer in its loss of music and control." William Stafford in Poetry (March 1969) complained of excessively local references. Madhubuti saw value in this unease, claiming that '7/i the Mecca 'blacked' its way out of the National Book Award in 1968"—thereby creating a new aesthetic, a new identity, for Brooks (Preface, Report from Part One). As poet laureate of Illinois (appointed in 1968), Brooks continued her creative-writing

outreach programs for elementary and secondary students. Funding scholarships, prizes, and trips to Africa, she seemed intent upon making writing an agent of social change and black pride. In December 1969 she separated from her husband and "the hard, demanding state of marriage"; she saw the subsequent stage of her life as her "next future," in which she would write poems "that [would] somehow successfully 'call' . . . all black people: black people in taverns, black people in alleys, black people in gutters, schools, offices, factories, prisons, the consulate" (Report from Part One). Her husband, an ardent integrationist, failed to agree with "the new, young movements among blacks." A year of nightmare inversions and violence, 1968 became the vortex of aesthetic and political conversion for many American poets. While Robert Lowell retreated into history and sonnets, Adrienne Rich shrugged off all formal constraints (marriage as well as poetic conventions) in search of a language capable of articulating the time. Rage of a lifetime, distilled in a year, led Brooks away from New York and Harper & Row to Detroit and Broadside Press. The relationship with Harper & Row had always been cordial, but as Madhubuti records, "Harper's never . . . pushed the work of Gwendolyn Brooks" (Preface, Report from Part One). The World of Gwendolyn Brooks (1971) ended her association with the white publishing world. She no longer believed that blacks could afford the individual acceptance proffered by white America; black success depended upon collective association and action. Broadside Press brought the congenial editorial support of Dudley Randall as well as a radically different-looking Brooks book. Riot (1969), the dust jacket states, "is a poem in three parts . . . aris[ing] from the disturbances in Chicago after the assassination of Martin Luther King in 1968." The natural informality of the volume resides in the startling "Black Expression" frontispiece by

GWENDOLYN BROOKS / 85 Jeff Donaldson, the open typeface and relaxed page layout, the manuscript-page insert—and the jacket photo of Brooks, "a sister who kept her natural.'' Never before had Brooks been as transparently confrontational as in "Riot," a poem where black anger is unleashed upon the' 'desperate" and wealthy John Cabot. Lacking the strong narrative fabric of such class-violence poems as 4 'The Lovers of the Poor,'' 4 'Riot'' is pure revolt: But, in a thrilling announcement, on It drove and breathed on him: and touched him. In that breath the fume of pig foot, chitterling and cheap chili, malign, mocked John. And, in terrific touch, old averted doubt jerked forward decently, cried "Cabot! John! You are a desperate man, and the desperate die expansively today." John Cabot went down in the smoke and fire and broken glass and blood, and he cried "Lord! Forgive these nigguhs that know not what they do." The class polarizations of the poem intensify the rage and poverty of the "sweaty and unpretty" blacks, the disgust and wealth of "John Cabot, out of Wilma, once a Wycliffe.'' Cabot serves as more than a class symbol; for Brooks, he is a failed white aesthetic. The "lightness" he represents might as well be the lightness of the Pulitzer committee, the Guggenheim jury, the editors at Harper & Row. 44The Third Sermon on the Warpland," more deliberately topical than "Riot," seeks a local as well as a general sense of the riots. A series of sharply focused chapbooks— Family Pictures (1970), Aloneness (1971), Reckonings (1975), and Primer for Blacks (1980)—record Brooks's swiftly evolving sense of African family identity. Her trips to East Africa (1971) and West Africa (1974) were a necessary completion of her developing appreciation for her African identity. In spite of her need for

assimilation in Kenya, she recognized immediately that she came bearing her' 'own hot just-outof-the-U.S. smile." The "African Fragment" of Report from Part One (1972) charts a discovery both joyous and sad, for in Africa, Brooks encountered the fact of her lost culture: language, clothes, pride stripped away by the ''Jamestown experiment." In 1973, reunited with her husband, she traveled to England. In the summer of 1974 they visited Ghana, England, and France. As if to compensate for a heritage of deprivation, Brooks redoubled her efforts on behalf of the young. Poetry contests, scholarships, teaching about Africa and African Americans, travel grants so that the young might visit the 4 "homeland"—Brooks made history, language, poetry into a continuum of race pride. The spirit of the Fisk conference pulsed life into Brooks's rescue missions. No longer was she content to describe despair; the time had come to avert despair. Tutored by raging youths at mid-life, she discovered things urgent and life-sustaining. Now it was her turn to save the young. In "To the Young Who Want to Die," she writes: Sit down. Inhale. Exhale. The gun will wait. The lake will wait. The tall gall in the small seductive vial will wait will wait: will wait a week: will wait through April. You do not have to die this certain day. Death will abide, will pamper your postponement. I assure you death will wait. Death has a lot of time. Death can attend to you tomorrow. Or next week. Death is just down the street; is most obliging neighbor; can meet you any moment. You need not die today. Stay here—through pout or pain or pesky ness. Stay here. See what the news is going to be tomorrow.

86 I AMERICAN WRITERS Graves grow no green that you can use. Remember, green's your color. You are Spring. Many of the works dedicated to children and adolescents—Aloneness, The Tiger Who Wore White Gloves; or, What You Are, You Are (1974) Family Pictures, and Young Poet's Primer (1980)—are in fact celebrations of the black family. As she explained in her address at Madhubuti's Twentieth Anniversary Conference on Literature and Society (December 1987): I believe that writers should be writing more about the Black family. The Black family is really being hounded and hounded these days, and I feel we "ordinary" Black people shouldn't leave all the assessments of our essence to the likes of Bill Moyers, nor to Alvin Poussaint. We have tongues. We have calculating eyes. In spite of pressure from feminist critics, Brooks has held the subject of the integrity of the black family above women's rights. She explained in an interview with Ida Lewis: Relations between men and women seem disordered to me. ... I think Women's Lib is not for black women for the time being, because black men need their women beside them, supporting them in these very tempestuous days. Family Pictures offers a plausible trajectory for this life of new Pan-African imagination. For Brooks the hope begins with the individual life— even if that individual is the "Ugliest little boy / that everybody ever saw" ("The Life of Lincoln West")—and then, and only then, can it advance to heroes, young and old. Her message is consistent in "Speech to the Young": And remember: live not for the Battles Won. Live not for The-End-of-the-Song. Live in the along.

This commitment to a life of action rather than victory allows Brooks the freedom to savor the dedication of the Gwendolyn Brooks Junior High School (Elmhurst, Illinois) more than her reading at the White House. However pleasant the January 1980 reading with Robert Hayden and Stanley Kunitz, the November 1981 dedication was the very embodiment of her social program. As Madhubuti wrote, Brooks had become "a consistent monument in the real, unaware of the beauty and strength she had radiated." Honorary consultant to the Library of Congress in 1973, she served as a poetry consultant in 1985-1986. Somewhat inadvertently Brooks became a necessary reference for black and white readers. In to disembark (1981) and The NearJohannesburg Boy and Other Poems (1986) Brooks shuffled new poems in with old, providing a historical context for a younger audience. At the age of seventy her message remained quite clear: stay alive long enough to learn who you are—and, unlike the tiger who wore white gloves, learn to appreciate the fact that "what you are you are." Though she vehemently rejects the notion of "universal" elements in her work, preferring to see herself as an African poet writing for a global black audience, Brooks continues to attract a diverse readership. She also continues to draw admiration and honors from old and new audiences. The larger American literary community has come around to Madhubuti's belief that Brooks is "a Living National Treasure." In 1987 she was elected an honorary fellow of the Modern Language Association. Since compiling Blacks, she has published Gottschalk and the Grande Tarantelle (1988). The collection includes "Winnie," a tribute to Winnie and Nelson Mandela, as well as the title-sequence "snapshot" of Louis Moreau Gottschalk. In an interview with Mehlem, Brooks explained the larger significance of the poem:

GWENDOLYN BROOKS I 87 The title poem . . . does exactly what I wanted it to do. There—are—The—Slaves: you are aware of the horror of their crisis and you are aware of the fact that human beings will break away from ache to dance, to sing, to create, no matter how briefly, how intermittently.

Selected Bibliography WORKS OF GWENDOLYN BROOKS POETRY

4

In this poem Brooks sees herself as a 'reporter,'' investigating the appropriation of black culture by greedy whites: "Gottschalk, Elvis Presley, George Gershwin, Stephen Foster, etc., have molded Black exhilaration and richness into money-making forms." She provides "the scheduled insinuation that other whites have done likewise." Brooks maintains a schedule of readings, lectures, and workshops throughout the country. In addition, she is completing a book of poems about Mandela and seeing Maud Martha into a paperback edition and perhaps a film. She hopes to complete the second volume of her autobiography, Report from Part Two. In spite of current projects, Blacks remains the inevitable touchstone for Brooks's popular and academic audiences. Feminists, black and white, hear in Brooks an early voice in the struggle for gender equality. Though citing her poems of "woman rage" and female circumstance, these critics are deaf to the poet's quarrels with their ideas. Black readers regard her work as generational and historically significant in that she bridges audiences from the Harlem Renaissance to the present. And to the broader general audience, introduced to her work by anthology pieces, Brooks represents a poet genuinely engaged in the urban family and class crises of the late twentieth century. Whether readers come to Blacks from the turmoil of race relationships in the United States or discover more about that unrest from her work, they will find a poet who, at the age of seventy-two, counseled herself, "Die / in use" ("Instruction to Myself).

A Street in Bronzeville. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1945. Annie Allen. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1949. Bronzeville Boys and Girls. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1956. The Bean Eaters. New York: Harper & Row, 1960. In the Mecca. New York: Harper & Row, 1968. Riot. Detroit: Broadside Press, 1969. Black Steel: Joe Frazier and Muhammad All. Detroit: Broadside Press, 1971. Beckonings. Detroit: Broadside Press, 1975. Primer for Blacks. Chicago: Black Position Press, 1980. Black Love. Chicago: Brooks Press, 1981. to disembark. Chicago: Third World Press, 1981. Mayor Harold Washington and Chicago, the I Will City. Chicago: Brooks Press, 1983. The Near-Johannesburg Boy and Other Poems. Chicago: David Company, 1986. Gottschalk and the Grande Tarantelle. Chicago: David Company, 1988. Winnie. Chicago: David Company, 1988. PROSE Maud Martha. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1953. Report from Part One. Detroit: Broadside Press, 1972.

ESSAYS

"Poets Who Are Negroes/' Phylon, 11:312 (December 1950). "Why Negro Women Leave Home." Negro Digest, 9:26-28 (March 1951). "How I Told My Child About Race." Negro Digest, 9:29-31 (June 1951). "They Call It Bronzeville." Holiday, October 1951, pp. 60-64, 67, 112, 114, 116-117, 119-120. "Perspectives." Negro Digest, 15:49-50 (July 1966). "In Montgomery." Ebony, August 1971, pp. 42-48.

88 I AMERICAN WRITERS "Boys. Black: A Preachment." Ebony. August 1972, p. 45. "Winnie." Poetry, 151:20 (October-November 1987). "Keziah." TriQuarterly, 75:38-50 (Spring-Summer 1989). WORKS FOR CHILDREN AND ADOLESCENTS

Family Pictures. Detroit: Broadside Press, 1970. Aloneness. Detroit: Broadside Press, 1971. The Tiger Who Wore White Gloves; or, What You Are, You Are. Chicago: Third World Press, 1974. Young Poet's Primer. Chicago: Brooks Press, 1980.

COLLECTED WORKS

Selected Poems. New York: Harper & Row, 1963. The World of Gwendolyn Brooks. New York: Harper &Row, 1971. Blacks. Chicago: David Company, 1987.

EDITED WORKS A Broadside Treasury. Detroit: Broadside Press, 1971. Jump Bad: A New Chicago Anthology. Detroit: Broadside Press, 1971. A Capsule Course in Black Poetry Writing. Detroit: Broadside Press, 1975. Edited by Brooks and others.

MANUSCRIPT PAPERS The Gwendolyn Brooks Papers are at Atlanta University, Atlanta, Georgia.

BIBLIOGRAPHIES Loff, Jon N. "Gwendolyn Brooks: A Bibliography." CLA Journal, 17:21-32 (September 1973). Mahoney, Heidi L. "Selected Checklist of Material by and About Gwendolyn Brooks." Negro American Literature Forum 8:210-211. (Summer 1974).

Miller, R. Baxter. Langston Hughes and Gwendolyn Brooks: A Reference Guide. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1978.

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL STUDIES Baker, Houston A., Jr. "The Achievement of Gwendolyn Brooks." CLA Journal, 16:21-31 (September 1972). Reprinted in his Singers of Daybreak: Studies in Black American Literature. Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1974. Pp. 43-51. . Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987. Blakely, Henry. "How I Met Miss Brooks." In Say That the River Turns. Edited by Haki R. Madhubuti. Chicago: Third World Press, 1987. Pp. 4-6. Blakely, Nora Brooks. "Three-Way Mirror." In Say That the River Turns. Edited by Haki R. Madhubuti. Chicago: Third World Press, 1987. Pp. 7-9. Bloom, Harold, ed. Contemporary Poets. New York: Chelsea House, 1986. Brooks, Keziah. "The Voice" and Other Short Stones. Detroit: Harlo Press, 1975. Brown, Frank London. "Chicago's Great Lady of Poetry." Negro Digest, 10:53-57 (December 1961). Christian, Barbara. "Nuance and the Novella: A Study of Gwendolyn Brooks's Maud Martha." In her Black Feminist Criticism: Perspectives on Black Women Writers. New York: Pergamon Press, 1985. Pp. 127-241. Reprinted in A Life Distilled. Pp. 239-253. ."Trajectories of Self-Definition: Placing Contemporary Afro-American Women's Fiction." In Conjuring: Black Women, Fiction, and Literary Tradition. Edited by Majorie Pryse and Hortense J. Spillers. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985. Pp. 233-248. Clark, Norris B. "Gwendolyn Brooks and a Black Aesthetic." In A Life Distilled: Gwendolyn Brooks—Her Poetry and Fiction. Edited by Maria K. Mootry and Gary Smith. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987. Pp. 81-99. Crockett, Jacqueline. "An Essay on Gwendolyn Brooks." Negro History Bulletin, 19:37-39 (November 1955). Davis, Arthur P. "The Black-and-Tan Motif in the Poetry of Gwendolyn Brooks." CLA Journal, 6:90-97 (December 1962).

GWENDOLYN BROOKS I 89 .* 'Gwendolyn Brooks: Poet of the Unheroic.'' CIA Journal, 7:114-125 (December 1963). Fuller, James A. 4'Notes on a Poet." Negro Digest, 11:50-59 (August 1962). Garland, Phyl. "Gwendolyn Brooks, Poet Laureate." Ebony, July 1968, pp. 48-56. Gayle, Addison, Jr., "Gwendolyn Brooks, Poet of the Whirlwind." In Black Women Writers, 79507980: A Critical Evaluation. Edited by Man Evans. Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor/Doubleday, 1984. Pp. 79-87. Gould, Jean. Modern American Women Poets. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1984. Pp. 176-209. Hansell, William H. "Gwendolyn Brooks9 'In the Mecca': A Rebirth into Blackness." Negro American Literature Forum, 8:199-207 (Summer 1974). Harriott, F. "Life of a Pulitzer Poet." Negro Digest, 8:14-16 (August 1950). Hudson, Clenora F. "Racial Themes in the Poetry of Gwendolyn Brooks." CIA Journal, 17:16-20 (September 1973). Huggins, Nathan Irvin. Harlem Renaissance. New York: Oxford University Press, 1971. Johnson, James N. "Blacklisting Poets." Ramparts, December 14, 1968, pp. 48-54. Juhasz, Suzanne. " 'A Sweet Inspiration . . . of My People': The Poetry of Gwendolyn Brooks and Nikki Giovanni." In her Naked and Fiery Forms: Modern American Poetry by Women—A New Tradition. New York: Octagon Books, 1976; New York: Harper Colophon Books, 1976. Pp. 144-155. Kent, George E. Blackness and the Adventure of Western Culture. Chicago: Third World Press, 1972. Pp. 104-138. ."Gwendolyn Brooks' Poetic Realism: A Developmental Survey." In Black Women Writers, 1950-1980: A Critical Evaluation. Edited by Man Evans. Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor/Doubleday, 1984. Pp. 88-105. ~. A Life of Gwendolyn Brooks. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1990. Kunitz, Stanley. "Bronze by Gold." Poetry, 76:5256 (1950). (Review of Annie Allen.) Lattin, Patricia H., and Vernon E. Lattin. "Vision in Gwendolyn Brooks's Maud Martha." Critique, 25:180-188(1984). Levine, Lawrence W. Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977.

Madhubuti, Haki R. "Gwendolyn Brooks: Beyond the Wordmaker—The Making of an African Poet.'' In Brooks's Report from Part One. Detroit: Broadside Press, 1972. Pp. 13-30. , ed. Say That the River Turns: The Impact of Gwendolyn Brooks. Chicago: Third World Press, 1987. Mehlem, D. H. Gwendolyn Brooks: Poetry and the Heroic Voice. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1987. . Heroism in the New Black Poetry: Introductions and Interviews. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1990. Miller, Jean-Marie A. "Gwendolyn Brooks, Poet Laureate of Bronzeville U.S.A." Freedomwaysf 10:63-75 (First Quarter 1970). . "The World of Gwendolyn Brooks." Black World, January 1972, pp. 51-52. Miller, R. Baxter. "Define the Whirlwind: In the Mecca—Urban Setting, Shifting Narrator, and Redemptive Vision." Obsidian, 4:19-31 (Spring 1978). Mootry, Maria K., and Gary Smith, eds. A Life Distilled: Gwendolyn Brooks-—Her Poetry and Fiction. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987. Ostriker, Alicia Suskin. Stealing the Language: The Emergence of Women's Poetry in America. Boston: Beacon Press, 1986. Rampersad, Arnold. The Life of Langston Hughes. Vol. 2,7 Dream a World. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. Redmond, Eugene B. Drumvoices: The Mission of Afro-American Poetry. Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor/ Doubleday, 1976. Pp. 270-284. Rivers, Conrad Kent. "Poetry of Gwendolyn Brooks." Negro Digest, 13:67-69 (June 1964). Shaw, Harry B. Gwendolyn Brooks. Boston: Twayne, 1980. Smith, Gary. "Gwendolyn Brooks's A Street in Bronzeville, The Harlem Renaissance, and the Mythologies of the Black Woman." Melus, 9:33-46 (Fall 1983). Spillers, Hortense J. " 'An Order of Constancy': Notes on Brooks and the Feminine." Centennial Review, 29:223-248 (1985). Washington, Mary Helen. " Taming All That Anger Down': Rage and Silence in Gwendolyn Brooks' Maud Martha." Massachusetts Review, 24:453466(1983).

90 I AMERICAN WRITERS Williams, Gladys Margaret. "Gwendolyn Brooks's Way with the Sonnet." CLA Journal, 26:215-240 (1982). INTERVIEWS Angle, Paul M. "We Asked Gwendolyn Brooks." Chicago: Illinois Bell Telephone, 1967. Reprinted in Brooks's Report from Part One. Pp. 131-146. Brooks, Gwendolyn. "Interview." TriQuarterly, 60:405-410 (Spring-Summer 1984). Hull, Gloria T., and Posey Gallagher. "Update on Part One: An Interview with Gwendolyn Brooks." CLA Journal, 21:1£-40 (September 1977). Lewis, Ida. "Conversation: Gwendolyn Brooks and

Ida Lewis—'My People Are Black People.' " £5sence, April 1971, pp. 27-31. Reprinted in Brooks's Report from Part One. Pp. 167-182. Mehlem, D. H. "Humanism and Heroism."- In her Heroism in the New Black Poetry: Introductions and Interviews. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1990. Pp. 11-38. Stavros, George. "An Interview with Gwendolyn Brooks." Contemporary Literature, 2:1-20 (Winter 1970). Reprinted in Brooks's Report from Part One. Pp. 147-166. Tate, Claudia. "Gwendolyn Brooks." In her Black Women Writers at Work. New York: Continuum, 1983. Pp. 39-48. — CAROLE K. DORESKI

William S. Burroughs 1914-1997

E

1914. He graduated from Harvard in 1936, then did graduate work in anthropology and medicine. He had served in the military, traveled widely, and read extensively in the major disciplines when Ginsberg and Kerouac met him during their undergraduate days at Columbia in 1943 and 1944 (Kerouac had dropped out of school by that time, but maintained his Columbia connections and lived near Columbia, in Morningside Heights, between stints in the merchant marine). Certainly the three came to share in their work a common impulse to break through the barriers of literary conventions and to elevate the principle of individual freedom from the restrictions of social responsibility and traditional conformity. But while Ginsberg and Kerouac were the inheritors of an American strain of spiritual exuberance and life-affirming visions of joy traceable to Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, and Mark Twain, Burroughs' influences came from deeper underground. His literary forebears were the writers of the grisly pulp fiction of his youth, hardboiled detective writers such as Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, authors from the decidedly lowbrow science fiction genre, the melancholy fragmentations of T. S. Eliot, and the efforts toward anti-meaning undertaken by the dadaists and surrealists. Kerouac and Ginsberg, while innovative, are not nearly so challenging to read; they work within

NOUGH TIME HAS passed since the heady days of the Beat movement for its individual artists to be judged on the larger terrain of American literature. There are three writers whose names are linked with the Beat era and whose reputations, through the paring of time, critical appreciation, and, not least, commercial success, qualify them to be called major figures: Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and William Burroughs. The associations we make among them are social and historical; their works are distinctly their own. Of the three, Burroughs, in the substance of his work, its structural experimentations, its influences, and its message, stands further apart from Ginsberg and Kerouac than the latter two do from each other. Burroughs himself has objected to having his work limited to the Beat context, and has insisted that it shares little of the Beat "philosophy": "I don't associate myself with [the Beats] at all, and never have, either with their objectives or their literary style. I have some close personal friends among the Beat movement . . . but we're not doing the same thing, either in writing or in outlook." Burroughs was substantially older than the other writers in the movement. The grandson of William Seward Burroughs, inventor of the adding machine, and the son of Laura Lee and Mortimer Burroughs, William Seward Burroughs II was born in Saint Louis, Missouri, February 5,

91

92 / AMERICAN WRITERS the modes of traditional narrative and literal word-image associations, even though they sought to open up those traditions to a new vocabulary, a new sound that did justice to their original musical and lyrical sensibilities. Burroughs' writings, on the other hand, exist in the symbolic hyperreality of dreams. Indeed, much of Burroughs' work challenges the notion of language itself, trying to liberate words from their meanings and images from the words that produce them. His driving themes are bleak: death, invasion, repulsion, and control. Nevertheless, Burroughs did serve as a crucial mentor, giving the two younger writers edifying books to read at the same time he was introducing them to the carnival atmosphere of Times Square and the lurid underworld of small-time criminals and drug addicts whom he knew there. It was a connection Ginsberg, for one, may well have come to regret; Herbert Huncke (the man who introduced Burroughs to narcotics, and one of the petty thieves in Burroughs' Times Square crowd), began using Ginsberg's apartment as a drop for stolen merchandise, landing Ginsberg in jail. Ginsberg pleaded insanity and spent time at the Columbia Psychiatric Institute, where he met a fellow patient named Carl Solomon, whose uncle was the publisher A. A. Wyn. It was Solomon who published Burroughs' first novel, Junkie: Confessions of an Unredeemed Drug Addict (1953). That Burroughs, even before he was writing, had a major, even catalytic, affect on the Beat movement cannot be denied. Kerouac called Burroughs "the most intelligent man in America," and used him as a character in a number of his novels, most notably as Old Bull Lee in On the Road (1957). Burroughs also appeared as a character in John Clellon Holmes's early Beat novel, Go (1952). Ginsberg dedicated Howl (1959) to him—as well as to Kerouac and Beat fellow-traveler Neal Cassady—with the words: "William Seward Burroughs, author of Naked

Lunch, an endless novel which will drive everybody mad." Despite Burroughs' objections, he in turn owes a good deal of his success to the solidarity of the writers who made up the Beat movement. Ginsberg shepherded Junkie through the process of writing and editing, convinced Carl Solomon to bring it out as an Ace Books paperback, and promoted Burroughs to other writers. Ginsberg and Kerouac together did massive amounts of typing and editing on various revisions of Naked Lunch in 1957 and 1958, when Burroughs was attempting to pull the book together from literally thousands of pages of notes he had made during his years of drug addiction and withdrawal. Ginsberg was instrumental in getting that novel published as well, showing it to Maurice Girodias, owner of the Olympia Press, who rejected it but published a subsequent draft. Ginsberg later testified at the book's obscenity trial in the United States. In fact, the enormous success of Naked Lunch stemmed in part from Burroughs' fame as a Beat having preceded the appearance of the book. By 1962, when Naked Lunch was finally published in the United States, the popularity of Ginsberg's Howl and Kerouac's On the Road had already set the stage, providing a ready-made, fervent audience for the book. Yet, when Burroughs insists he is not a Beat writer, he is not simply being cranky. Part of the difference lies in his ambivalence toward writing at all, an attitude starkly opposed to the exuberant self-redemption Kerouac and Ginsberg found in art. For a large portion of Burroughs' adult life, including most of the early years of his friendships with Kerouac and Ginsberg, Burroughs was not a practicing writer and did not consider himself to be one. He had written a good deal as a youth, but stopped during his teens, when at the Los Alamos Ranch School for Boys (later the property of the U.S. government and the birthplace of the atomic bomb), he developed a crush on a fellow student, the emo-

WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS I 93 tional pangs of which he recorded in detail in his diary. This diary, he has written in an essay, "The Name Is Burroughs" (included in The Adding Machine, 1986), put me off writing for many years. . . . The act of writing had become embarrassing, disgusting, and above all false. It was not the sex in the diary that embarrassed me, it was the terrible falsity of the emotions expressed. . . . for years after that, the sight of my words written on a page hit me like the sharp smell of carrion when you turn over a dead dog with a stick, and this continued until 1938. I had written myself an eight-year sentence. Interestingly, Burroughs' next two writing experiences were collaborative, a fact that seems to have freed him from the dread of himself and his emotions that he associated with other literary attempts. "The curse of the diary," he writes, "was temporarily broken by the act of collaboration." The first of these respites came in 1938, when he and a fellow Harvard graduate student and St. Louis boyhood friend, Kells Elvins, "had many talks about writing and started a detective story in the Dashiell Hammett / Raymond Chandler line." Eventually they produced "Twilight's Last Gleaming," a story about "a ship captain putting on women's clothes and rushing into the first lifeboat . . . which was later used almost verbatim in Nova Express" (under the title "Gave Proof Through the Night"). It is not at all certain that the piece in Nova Express (1964) was indeed little altered from the original. Burroughs is not fully reliable on such matters—for one thing, this would have meant that by 1938 he had already invented his ubiquitous alter ego, Dr. Benway; what is more, the passage as it appears in Nova Express shows his ironic style and formal idiosyncrasies already fully developed: CAPTAIN BAIRNS was arrested today in the murder at sea of Chicago—He was The Last Great

American to see things from the front and kept laughing during the dark—Fade out S.S. America—Sea smooth as green glass— off Jersey Coast—An air-conditioned voice floats from microphones and ventilators—: "Keep your seats everyone—There is no cause for alarm—There has been a little accident in the boiler room but everything is now/" BLOOOMMM The collaboration with Kells Elvins marks the first use of an important Burroughs compositional motif—short performances he called "routines." While writing "Twilight's Last Gleamings" he and Elvins "acted out every scene and often got on laughing jags." Routines initially acted for sheer entertainment later became the source of material in Queer (written in 1952-1953 but not published until 1985), as well as of what Eric Mottram has called the "tetralogy" of novels consisting of Naked Lunch, The Soft Machine (1961, rev. ed. 1966), The Ticket That Exploded (1962, rev. ed. 1967), and Nova Express. Even in later works routines continued to be an important source. The routine demands no particular narrative groundwork nor development, which accounts for the almost arbitrary episodic quality of much of Burroughs' writing. A very good example of Burroughs' tendency to create different personae for no reason in particular is a brief, humorous routine from the early days of the Burroughs-Kerouac-Ginsberg friendship, recounted by Ted Morgan in Literary Outlaw (1988): "Burroughs gave parties on Bedford Street, emerging on one occasion from the kitchen with a plate of razor blades and light bulbs, and saying, "I've got something real nice in the way of delicacies my mother sent me this week, hmfhmfhmf.' " To the reader who knows something of Burroughs and his problematic relationship with his parents, this routine, like most of his more elaborate ones, strikes one as wildly (almost psychotically) imaginative while, at the

94 I AMERICAN WRITERS same time, being deeply revealing on an autobiographical-symbolic level. "Twilight's Last Gleaming" was, almost needless to say, rejected for publication. Burroughs did not attempt to write again until 1943, when he collaborated with Jack Kerouac on a novel based on the killing of Dave Kammerer by Lucien Carr, two men intimately involved with the Burroughs-Kerouac-Crinsberg circle. The novel was rejected by every publisher to which it was submitted, and Burroughs "Again . . . lost interest in writing." He did not take up his pen again until 1948, when he began work on the book that would become Junkie. Not having outlets for his work became as important a factor in discouraging Burroughs' writing as the earlier revulsion at his false emotions. In 1954, after Junkie had been published and Queer and The Yage Letters (1963) had not, he wrote to Kerouac that he was having "serious difficulties" with Naked Lunch: I tell you the novel form is completely inadequate to express what I have to say. I don't know if I can find a form. I am very gloomy as to prospects of publication. And I'm not like you, Jack, I need an audience. Of course, a small audience. But still I need publication for development. A writer can be ruined by too much or too little success. The revulsion at his own writing, his sense of the inadequacy of the novel, and his need for an audience all combined to develop in Burroughs a trait that clearly separates him from his fellow Beat writers: a severe distrust of language, a strong impulse to do something as a writer that is other than writing. He has even gone so far as to say, a bit disingenuously, that when he "began" to write at age thirty-five, his only reason was "boredom," that he started recording his experiences because he had "nothing else to do." What he was trying to communicate here, I suspect, was that he wanted to bring to the process

none of the writer's traditional reverence for the text. He has reused his own material time and again, revised and republished bits and pieces of his novels in new novels and smaller tracts, introduced unorthodox methods of composition, cut up his words, cut up the words of other writers and incorporated them into his own, broken up his work into interrelated columns on the page, used tape recorders and other electronic devices to cull material, and tried again and again to escape from the prison of meaning and association that words enforce on his images. He has striven, Burroughs has said, for a literature of silence, a breaking down of the control pattern in which words subjugate the reader to the text. In this sense he wishes to purify (and disempower) the process of transmitting an image from the source of its inspiration (dream, vision, newspaper story, or whatever else) to the writer, and from the writer to the reader. He has often described his goal as a writer to be merely a passive medium, a "recurrent writer's dream of picking up a book and starting to read. . . . One day the book itself will hover over the typewriter as I copy the words already written there.'' He has defined his essential identity as a messenger or even a physician, diagnosing the world and prescribing the images that cure it, as well as an autobiographer, a recorder of experience, roles that have allowed him to experiment with forms and methods in ways a purely literary writer would not dare. As such, he stands far apart from his fellow Beats, and from almost every writer of his time. It is often forgotten that Burroughs, despite his late beginnings as a writer, had completed three books by the time he began Naked Lunch—or four, if the still unpublished collaborative effort with Kerouac, "All the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks," is counted. Burroughs' first published novel was Junkie: Confessions of an Unredeemed Drug Addict, which came out under the Ace Books imprint. In

WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS I 95 many ways the original appearance of Junkie was something less than a true literary debut. As Allen Ginsberg remarks in his introduction to the unexpurgated 1977 edition, the 1953 version was "a shabby package," a drugstore pulp paperback written under the pseudonym William Lee (Lee was Burroughs9 mother's maiden name). Critic Jennie Skerl, in William S. Burroughs (1985), describes the situation in succinct detail: Because of the "drug fiend" hysteria of the times, Burroughs was asked to write a prologue about his respectable family background, and a few passages and one whole section were arbitrarily cut. [Carl] Solomon wrote a placating introduction explaining that the book should be read as a warning, and parenthetical editor's notes were inserted "to indicate where the author clearly departs from accepted medical fact or makes other unsubstantiated statements in an effort to justify his actions." Further to insulate the publisher from charges of advocating drug addiction, Junkie was piggybacked onto another book (each was upside down from the other, beginning at opposite covers), the memoirs of a righteous lawman, Maurice He 1 brant, entitled Narcotic Agent. Helbrant was a former agent of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics. Narcotic Agent had first been published in 1941 and was described in the Ace edition as "more thrilling than any fiction story"—a sales pitch that would have been more appropriate for Burroughs, who had produced a fairly straightforward (for Burroughs) autobiographical rendering of his years using drugs in New York, Texas, and Mexico. It was not until twenty-four years later, when Penguin issued the book under the title Junky (with an introduction by Ginsberg), that the novel appeared in the United States under Burroughs' own name. As Skerl points out, Junkie, although largely ignored by critics and dismissed by Burroughs

himself, lays the groundwork for many of his later themes and efforts: Burroughs' descriptions of underworld characters in Junkie show how he arrived at the characterizations of Naked Lunch and the later novels. When people are reduced and molded by need, their identities reside in their functions. . . . Junkie is a complex and ironic work, and it leaves the disturbing impression that the author has somehow tricked the reader into a realm where physical and social realities begin to shift and dissolve. The sordid and exclusive universe of Junkie also predicts what Marshall McLuhan later described in "Notes on Burroughs" (1964), referring to all of Burroughs' work, as a world in which there can be no spectators but only participants. All men are totally involved in the insides of all men. There is no privacy and no private parts. In a world in which we are all ingesting and digesting one another there can be no obscenity or pornography or decency. These themes would be much elaborated and expanded in Naked Lunch. However, two other books were written first, neither of them published until later. The first was Queer, another autobiographical account, this time of a frustrated romance with a young man Burroughs met in Mexico (Morgan's Literary Outlaw identifies him only by the name Burroughs gives him in Queer: Eugene Allerton). Queer, addressing as it does a largely unrequited homosexual love, albeit in a mature and complex way, markedly corresponds to the much-despised Los Alamos diary of Burroughs' teens. Queer was too graphic and overt in its homosexual themes for A. A. Wyn or anyone else to publish in the 1950's (Burroughs has written that Solomon "would go to jail if he ever published Queer"), but this alone does not account for the

96 I AMERICAN WRITERS book's remaining unpublished until 1985. Literary Outlaw covers the events that led up to Queer's finally being published, as part of a multi-book contract Burroughs signed in 1984. The deal caused much animosity, in that it involved Burroughs' leaving his longtime agent, Peter Matson, and his publisher, Richard Seaver, who had been his editor since the early 1960's, in favor of Andrew Wylie and Viking Penguin, respectively. Burroughs had told Seaver and others for years that Queer would never be released. It is interesting to speculate whether Burroughs' teenage misgivings, the echoes of his earlier selfhorror, may have contributed at least partially to the years of silence surrounding the book. There proved to be another very compelling reason for Queer's suppression, one Burroughs did not realize or acknowledge until 1985, when he prepared the manuscript for publication. In his introduction, he writes that the motivation to write Junky was "comparatively simple: to put down in the most accurate and simple terms my experiences as an addict." His motivations in writing Queer, however, "were more complex, and are not clear to me at the present time. Why should I wish to chronicle so carefully these extremely painful and unpleasant and lacerating memories?" A few pages later, he begins to answer the question: When I started to write this companion text to Queer, I was paralyzed with a heavy reluctance, a writer's block like a straightjacket. . . . The reason for this reluctance becomes clearer as I force myself to look: the book is motivated and formed by an event which is never mentioned, in fact is carefully avoided: the accidental shooting death of my wife, Joan, in September 1951. Burroughs describes the obsessive need of his novelistic counterpart, Lee, to score sexually with Allerton and other men. This is an effect of his withdrawal. During addiction the sex drive, he says, disappears almost completely, to return

when addiction ends. Yet, he remarks, the quest for "a suitable sex object" in Queer is "curiously systematic and unsexual.'' The contact that Lee was really looking for was "an audience," an audience that later, "as he develops as writer . . . becomes internalized." Whatever Burroughs was looking for, he was not looking for it in his wife, Joan Vollmer. According to Morgan, based on interviews with Burroughs, Ginsberg, and others, the attraction between Vollmer and Burroughs had always been intellectual. When they first began living together in New York, they were considered the most sophisticated and intelligent members of the group that included Ginsberg and Kerouac. According to those who knew her and to Burroughs himself, Vollmer, as Burroughs was coming out of his addiction in Mexico City, was distressed by his search for male sex partners and his abandonment of her—yet it is possible that the abandonment was as much intellectual as physical, a point that has not been much explored in the scanty material that addresses this crucial moment in Burroughs' life. Burroughs shot his wife on September 6, 1951, shortly after returning from a trip to South America with Allerton, during which he had tried, and failed, to obtain a hallucinogenic plant called yage, rumored to bestow telepathic powers and used by Indian brujos. This is the trip described in Queer. Burroughs, Vollmer, Allerton, and another man were drinking in the apartment of a friend, waiting to meet a buyer to whom Burroughs hoped to sell one of his guns, a .380 automatic. At one point, with no preliminaries, Burroughs picked up the gun and said to Vollmer, "Well, Joan, it's about time for our William Tell act." Vollmer put her highball glass on top of her head, and Burroughs aimed and fired. The bullet hit her in the head and killed her. Although there were reports at the time that the shooting had been a William Tell misplay,

WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS I 97 Burroughs denied it for many years, stating, as he had to the Mexican police, that he had been cleaning the gun (or "checking it over," as he says in an interview with Conrad Knickerbocker) and it had accidentally fired. It was not until the film documentary Burroughs, made by Howard Brookner and released in 1983, that Burroughs admitted publicly that the shooting had occurred as it had, the result of a stunt he called "an absolute piece of insanity." He also described the scene to Morgan, "verifying" the William Tell story. Nowhere but in the introduction to Queer, however, has Burroughs put the killing into a context that so powerfully explains his own work. Here he recognizes that the killing of his wife was the central fact out of which his subsequent writing and his theory of art emerged. In fact, the introduction to Queer is the only critical writing either by—or, more pertinently, about— Burroughs that recognizes the real impact of this crucial incident. Burroughs' critics (most of them men) have on the whole steered clear of discussing it at length or trying to see what connections or repercussions it may have had. According to Burroughs: The event towards which Lee [in Queer] feels himself inexorably driven is the death of his wife by his own hand, the knowledge of possession, a dead hand waiting to slip over his like a glove. So a smog of menace and evil rises from the pages, an evil that Lee, knowing and yet not knowing, tries to escape with frantic flights of fantasy: his routines, which set one's teeth on edge because of the ugly menace just behind or to one side of them, a presence palpable as a haze. Brion Gysin said to me in Paris: "For ugly spirit shot Joan because . . . " A bit of mediumistic message that was not completed—or was it? It doesn't need to be completed, if you read it: "ugly spirit shot Joan to be cause," that is, to

maintain a hateful parasitic occupation. My concept of possession is closer to the medieval model than to modern psychological explanations, with their dogmatic insistence that such manifestations must come from within and never, never, never from without. . . . I mean a definite possessing entity. And indeed, the psychological concept might well have been devised by the possessing entities, since nothing is more dangerous to a possessor than being seen as a separate invading creature by the host it has invaded. . . . I am forced to the appalling conclusion that I would never have become a writer but for Joan's death, and to a realization of the extent to which this event has motivated and formulated my writing. I live with the constant threat of possession, and a constant need to escape from possession, from Control. So the death of Joan brought me in contact with the invader, the Ugly Spirit, and maneuvered me into a lifelong struggle, in which I have had no choice except to write my way out. As his later writings have elaborated, this "Control" comes in many forms: invasions of the body and of the planet by forces that occupy and multiply invisibly; as addiction, whether to drugs or to power or to words; as images that multiply like viruses; words themselves, which he later came to see as actual viruses (see Odier's The Job [1970, rev. ed. 1974], The Book of Breeething [1975], The Adding Machine, and elsewhere) and whose power he subverts by employing new compositional and narrative techniques; or even as protoplasmic and violent sexuality. Such sexuality is common in Naked Lunch and the later books. An early prototype appears in Queer. Lee and Allerton went to see Cocteau's Orpheus. In the dark theater Lee could feel his body pull towards Allerton, an amoeboid protoplasmic projection, straining with a blind worm hunger to enter the other's body, to breathe with his lungs,

98 I AMERICAN WRITERS see with his eyes, learn the feel of his viscera and genitals. Allerton shifted in his seat. Queer, not published until late in his career, must be read as a seminal work, a leap toward an absolutely imaginative and original method of self-rendering, self-discovery, and self-healing that has continued to sustain him. Burroughs' next effort grew out of the search (or yage, the beginnings of which were described in the account of the trip to the Amazon jungle in Queer. Subsequent trips for the same purpose in 1953 were chronicled in a series of letters Burroughs sent to Allen Ginsberg, which, Burroughs has said,' "were typed out from handwritten notes in offices where you use a typewriter for so much per hour in Bogotd and Lima." In the fall of 1953, back in New York and prior to leaving for Tangier, where he would live until 1959, he edited the letters into an epistolary novella, "In Search of Yage." In 1963 this was published, along with a letter from Ginsberg to Burroughs written in 1960, when Ginsberg traveled to South America and tried yage himself; a letter in return from Burroughs, written in London, describing his recent experiments with the cut-up method; another statement from Ginsberg interpreting his yage experience; and a final piece from Burroughs, "I am Dying, Meester?," in which he employs the cut-up method to make a new text out of the earlier letters. This hodgepodge, which maintains a curious unity and is an essential Beat document, is titled The Yage Letters. The letters in the first part of the book are more fluid and less oppressive in tone than Queer, which dealt with the same milieu. There are the same loneliness and sexual yearning, but with somewhat more comic results, as when a boy, whom Burroughs has paid for sex, in a moment of apparent tenderness encourages Burroughs to take off his shorts—only so that he can steal them. Burroughs' and Ginsberg's yage visions differed in the atmosphere of their retell-

ing, but when combined, they form some of the best, and perhaps the earliest, writing about the hallucinogenic experience. The book was to have included a routine called "Roosevelt After Inauguration," which Burroughs refers to in one of his letters, but this was not published until 1964, as a pamphlet. It subsequently appeared in book form, with three other pieces, under the title Roosevelt After Inauguration And Other Atrocities (1979), and may have been deleted from The Yage Letters for fear of prosecution: when it first appeared, in the magazine Floating Bear in 1961, copies were seized by the Postal Service for obscenity. The routine involved a fantasy about Roosevelt and his cabinet: Immediately after the Inauguration Roosevelt appeared on the White House balcony dressed in the purple robes of a Roman Emperor and, leading a blind toothless lion on a gold chain, hogcalled his constituents to come and get their appointments. The constituents rushed up grunting and'squealing like the hogs they were. An old queen, known to the Brooklyn Police as "Jerk Off Annie," was named to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, so that the younger staff officers were subject to unspeakable indignities in the lavatories of the Pentagon, to avoid which many set up field latrines in their offices. The Burroughs "routine," first developed along fairly literal lines in Queer, was in full flower by 1953. It would become the dominant motif of his writing for the remainder of the decade, during which he gathered the material that would make up his next four novels. Naked Lunch, published in Paris in 1959 (under the title The Naked Lunch), became the subject of much discussion and renown in the United States shortly thereafter, although only small portions of it were serialized there prior to 1962. In 1958 the Chicago Review published an excerpt, but was kept from doing so a second time

WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS I 99 by University of Chicago authorities. The editors of the Review then raised money and created an independent magazine, Big Table, in order to publish the second excerpt, along with other writings from the Beats to which university trustees and administrators had objected. Issues of this magazine were seized by the Postal Service for obscenity, as were copies of the Paris edition of the book mailed to the United States. U.S. Customs also seized copies of the Paris edition. Grove Press had bought the American rights from Maurice Girodias of the Olympia Press in Paris, but could not publish the book because it was involved in defending booksellers on obscenity charges arising out of its publishing an American edition of Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer (1934). When Naked Lunch finally was published in the United States, obscenity charges quickly followed in Boston. It was cleared of the charges in 1966. In effect Naked Lunch was the last book of any literary merit to be suppressed by means of the obscenity laws, and its judicial clearance marked the end of an era of state censorship of literature. Naked Lunch is the book that made Burroughs' fame, if not his fortune (the first preceding the second by some thirty years), and it remains his most widely read work. Beyond that, it holds a position of almost mythological proportions in American literature, in part because of its narrative innovations and the mad, violent, comic despair and the countervening genius at its core, but also because of two other fascinating issues surrounding its existence: the suppression outlined above and, no less, the travails of its composition. Beginning during the period chronicled in The Yage Letters, and subsequently during the years of addiction in Tangier, roughly from 1953 to 1958, Burroughs began keeping voluminous, fragmentary notes about his addiction; his travels and his observations of life, particularly "low" life, in Mexico City, Tangier, and elsewhere;

and his various routines. Interestingly, the routines by this time had grown almost into a form of dementia. He had developed them in part as a frantic method of seduction for Allerton, the unresponsive lover in Queer, but they seem to have stayed with him and to have grown into a continuing strategy for re-creating himself long after Allerton had departed. He described them in very revealing terms in a letter to Ginsberg in April 1954: Routines like habit. Without routines my life is chronic nightmare, gray horror of midwest suburb. (When I lived in St. Louis and drove home past the bare clay of subdivided lots, here and there houses set down on platforms of concrete in the mud, play-houses of children who look happy and healthy but empty horror and panic in clear gray-blue eyes, and when I drove by the subdivisions always felt impact in stomach of final loneliness and despair. This is part of Billy Bradshinkel story. I don't know whether it is parody or not.) I have to have receiver for routine. If there is no one there to receive it, routine turns back on me and tears me apart, grows more and more insane (literal growth like cancer) and impossible, and fragmentary like berserk pinball machine and I am screaming: "Stop it! Stop it!" I am trying to write novel. Attempt to organize material is more painful than anything I ever experienced. Much of the psychic terrain of Burroughs' writing is laid out in this passage. The routine is writing, which in turn is the necessary working out of problems that infect Burroughs like a virus. But the working out, the writing itself, is also capable of becoming a virus if there is no audience, if it turns and feeds on the madness within. What Burroughs found in writing, especially in the higher plane toward which he embarked with Naked Lunch, was the extinction of personality that T. S. Eliot had made into a credo

700 / AMERICAN WRITERS of art years before (see his "Tradition and the Individual Talent/9 1919). There are fascinating corollaries between Burroughs and Eliot that will be explored in more detail below. The routines, meanwhile, were making their way into Burroughs' notes and his letters to Ginsberg. These were years of heavy addiction, and attempts to secure his writing or organize his material into novel form proved fruitless. Finally, in 1956, Burroughs traveled to London to be treated by Dr. John Yerbury Dent, who used a nonaddicting morphine derivative called apomorphine to regulate the addict's metabolism through the painful process of withdrawal. Cured of his habit (he would begin using again in the late 1970's and early 1980's, and have to undergo methadone treatment to get free), Burroughs returned to Tangier and began to put together his novel, culling through what amounted to over a thousand pages of material. The scene is described by Paul Bowles in "Burroughs in Tangier" (included in The Burroughs File, 1984): The litter on his desk and under it, on the floor, was chaotic, but it consisted only of pages of Naked Lunch, at which he was constantly working. When he read aloud from it, at random (any sheet of paper he happened to grab would do) he laughed a good deal, as well he might, since it is very funny, but from reading he would suddenly (the paper still in hand) go into a bitter conversational attack upon whatever aspect of life had prompted the passage he had just read. . . . I've never heard him mention an experience that made him more than temporarily happy. In fact, the difficulties of organizing these prodigious pages, strewn all about his room, proved to be both the challenge and, eventually, the innovative triumph of Naked Lunch. Burroughs was assisted in typing and editing the manuscript at various times in 1957 and 1958 by Kerouac, Ginsberg, Alan Ansen, and others. The book is made up almost entirely of what

in Queer, and more elaborately in The Yage Letters, had been only occasional routines. Here the routine as a method of self-examination takes over almost entirely. The routines are presented in a series of episodes arranged in no particular order—indeed, the order had been changed many times as the book was being prepared, often at random. The locale is a city called Interzone, a composite of the tawdriest and most corrupt aspects of Mexico City, Panama City (the Canal Zone), and Tangier, which until 1956 had been an "international zone" governed by a body of European powers called the Board of Control (which itself sounds like a Burroughs creation). The addict-writer Willy Lee narrates, but is a much more ephemeral presence than in the earlier books. There are naturalistic passages about Lee and his companion, Jane (the name of Paul Bowles's wife and, of course, very similar to his own wife's name, Joan), making their way from Texas to New Orleans to Mexico, re-creating the trip Burroughs and Vollmer made in 1949. Even these are tinged with a new air of unreality: Shooting PG [paregoric] is a terrible hassle, you have to burn out the alcohol first, then freeze out the camphor and draw this brown liquid off with a dropper—have to shoot it in the vein or you get an abscess, and usually end up with an abscess no matter where you shoot it. Best deal is to drink it with goof balls. . . . So we pour it in a Pernod bottle and start for New Orleans past iridescent lakes and orange gas flames, and swamps and garbage heaps, alligators crawling around in broken bottles and tin cans, neon arabesques of motels, marooned pimps scream obscenities at passing cars from islands of rubbish. . . . Lee and Jane drive into Mexico, and within a page the narrative dissolved into a routine about Bradley the Buyer, addict of power, possessor of souls, and forerunner of the evil figure of later novels, Mr. Bradley Mr. Martin:

WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS I 101 Well the Buyer comes to look more and more like a junky. He can't drink. He can't get it up. His teeth fall out. (Like pregnant women lose their teeth feeding the stranger, junkies lose their yellow fangs feeding the monkey.) He is all the time sucking on a candy bar. Baby Ruths he digs special. "It really disgust you to see the Buyer sucking on them candy bars so nasty," a cop says. The Buyer takes on an ominous grey-green color, . . . . . . a yen comes on him like a great black wind through the bones. So the Buyer hunts up a young junky and gives him a paper to make it. "Oh all right," the boy says. "So what you want to make?" "I just want to rub up against you and get fixed."

"Ugh . . . Well all right. . . . But why cancha just get physical like a human?" Later the boy is sitting in a Waldorf with two colleagues dunking pound cake. "Most distasteful thing I ever stand still for," he says. "Some way he make himself all soft like a blob of jelly and surround me so nasty. Then he gets wet all over like with green slime. So I guess he come to some kinda awful climax. . . . I come near to wigging with that green stuff all over me, and he stink like a old rotten cantaloupe." Eventually the Buyer is called in by his district supervisor and relieved of his duties: "You are lowering the entire tone of the industry. We are prepared to accept your immediate resignation." The Buyer begs for a reprieve. When the supervisor refuses, the Buyer engulfs him. He roams about the landscape, consuming junkies and agents, until finally he is "destroyed with a flame-thrower—the court of inquiry ruling that such means were justified in that the Buyer had lost his human citizenship and was, in consequence, a creature without species and a menace to the narcotics industry on all levels."

The Bradley the Buyer section is, on the one hand, a parody of the need of the narc, which equals that of the junkie, and a commentary on the corrupt motives of authority, but it is also an imaginative reconfiguration of the sexual yearnings examined in Queer. The protoplasmic element of Burroughs' sense of sexuality, rendered metaphorically in the earlier work, becomes a literal reality in Naked Lunch. An image that contains both this political satire and sexual revulsion becomes central in Naked Lunch, although Burroughs had used it earlier, in Junkie: the orgasm of the hanged man. The image is replayed endlessly in the book and becomes its own meaning, the final expression of hideous power and lust. Eventually four groups emerge, all vying for power in the world of Naked Lunch. Referring to this and the subsequent novels on the same themes, Eric Mottram writes in William Burroughs: The Algebra of Need (1971): "Burroughs presents a loveless world whose control is entirely in the hands of capitalists, doctors, psychiatrists, con men, judges, police and military, whose aim it is to perpetuate mass infantilism, apathy and dependence." The central figure in Burroughs' fiction that best fits that description is Dr. Benway, who first appears here (although according to Burroughs, as discussed earlier, Benway had emerged many years before in the routines with Kells Elvins that led to "Twilight's Last Gleaming"; for further reference to this, see the Knickerbocker interview). Benway is the satiric epitome of the modern scientist and technocrat for hire, willing to perform any abomination on assignment. Through him Burroughs reveals the psychosexual terrain on which he perceives the conflict of guilt and authority in contemporary society: Benway is a manipulator and coordinator of symbol systems, an expert on all phases of interrogation, brainwashing and control. I have not seen

702 / AMERICAN WRITERS Benway since his precipitate departure from Annexia, where his assignment had been T.D.— Total Demoralization. Benway's first act was to abolish concentration camps, mass arrest and, except under limited and special circumstances, the use of torture. "I deplore brutality," he said. "It's not efficient. On the other hand, prolonged mistreatment, short of physical violence, gives rise, when skillfully applied, to anxiety and a feeling of special guilt. . . . The subject must not realize that the mistreatment is a deliberate attack of an anti-human enemy on his personal identity. He must be made to feel that he deserves any treatment he receives because there is something (never specified) horribly wrong with him. The naked need of the control addicts must be decently covered by an arbitrary and intricate bureaucracy so that the subject cannot contact his enemy direct." There are three organized groups of such "control addicts" in Naked Lunch, and a fourth that seems to be opposed to the other three. The Liquefactionists are lead by Hassan, a figure of unspeakable evil described in "Hassan's Rumpus Room." Again we see the image of oozing possession: "(Liquefaction involves protein cleavage and reduction to liquid which is absorbed into someone else's protoplasmic being.)" The Divisionists attempt to flood the world with clones of themselves, and in this sense foreshadow the invading Nova Mob in later novels. The third group vying for power is the Senders, who attempt to tyrannize through telepathy, a theme Burroughs first explored in Queer, where Lee describes to Allerton how the Russians and Americans are researching the telepathic powers of yage in order to subjugate their citizens, and of course their enemies, more easily. In Burroughs' years in Mexico City he had studied the Mayan codices, and he came to believe that the Mayas controlled their large slave

populations through telepathy, a process he also has Lee describe in Queer. The fourth, and apparently beneficent, group is the Factualists, led by A.J, who reappears in later fiction. The Factualists are the group with whom Lee, the narrator, is aligned. As Skerl points out: The Factualists are a radical group that represents anarchic individualism. . . . Factualist agents attempt to foil the plots of the villains simply by revealing them. In a way the entire novel can be seen as such a revelation. . . . Factualist revelation is equated with the murder of a villain and with the apomorphine cure for addiction. There is a flaw in the Factualist program, however. Since all the agents are human, they are all potential addicts who may succumb at any moment: "all Agents defect and all Resisters sell out." Thus the situation is never resolved. The Factualist strategy, if there is such a thing, involves a free association of images which relieves the addictive need for narrative and which was much elaborated with Burroughs' subsequent use of the cut-up technique. In Naked Lunch he must rely on his own wandering imagination: Pictures of men and women, boys and girls, animals, fish, birds, the copulating rhythm of the universe flows through the room, a great blue tide of life. Vibrating, soundless hum of deep forest—sudden quiet of cities when the junky copes. A moment of stillness and wonder. . . . Hassan shrieks out: "This is your doing, A.J.! You poopa my party!" A.J. looks at him, face remote as limestone: "Uppa your ass, you liquifying gook." Ihab Hassan, a critic sympathetic to Burroughs' work despite the outrages committed by a character with his very name in Burroughs' fiction, points out in The Dismemberment of Orpheus (1971) that the later development of composi-

WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS / 103 tional techniques which disempower language (predicted, I believe, by the passage above with its soundlessness and silence) reveals that Burroughs' "true aim is to free man by making him bodiless and silencing his language." This is supported by the comments Burroughs makes in The Job, The Book ofBreeething, and elsewhere, on his efforts to achieve silence in literature. In The Job he takes this theory so far as to describe how film images and tape recordings of sounds can be used as a kind of voodoo to hex the people recorded, a hearkening to Native American cultures, which believed that photographs stole their souls. The Factualists' vulnerability to controlling forces, to which Skerl refers, derives from what Burroughs in the introduction to Naked Lunch calls "total need": The face of "evil" is always the face of total need. . . . In the words of total need: 'Wouldn't you?' Yes you would. You would lie, cheat, inform on your friends, steal, do anything to satisfy total need. Because you would be in a state of total sickness, total possession, and not in a position to act in any other way. This tendency toward addiction is what the forces of evil play upon in Naked Lunch and in most of the later novels. All three of the organized controlling powers in Naked Lunch are described in images associated with parasites and viruses. The escape from this virus, as we have seen in the introduction to Queer, is the central conflict of Burroughs' work. Three novels appeared in quick succession in the five years after Naked Lunch: The Soft Machine, The Ticket That Exploded, and Nova Express. In 1963 he published Dead Fingers Talk, which was not really a new work but a selection of routines from Naked Lunch and the other three novels. The material for all of these books came from the notes and manuscripts Burroughs had written in Tangier—in 1958 he moved to Paris,

where he lived in the famed Beat Hotel, and in 1960 to London, remaining there, with a few short exceptions, until 1974. Because many of the characters, images, and themes Burroughs handles in Naked Lunch are explored in the next three novels, Eric Mottram and others have said that the four books together form a tetralogy. Burroughs, however, has insisted for several important reasons that Naked Lunch is distinct from the three novels that followed, to which he refers as a trilogy. The first and most important evolution between Naked Lunch and the subsequent novels occurred as a result of Burroughs' use of the cut-up technique, which a friend, the painter and writer Brion Gysin, had discovered one day while cutting mats for his artwork. When he lifted the mats, Gysin discovered that the newspaper he had laid beneath them had been sliced into strips he could rearrange with interesting effects. Burroughs became enamored of the process and began using it in his writing. He would cut up pages of his own prose and rearrange the parts to make new sentences. He went on to cut up pieces from other writers, newspapers, magazines, and other texts and insert them into his prose. He also developed a method he called the fold-in technique, where he folded a page of writing over to achieve similar effects. He gives his best defenses of the technique in his interview with Knickerbocker: Cutups establish new connections between images, and one's range of vision consequently expands. . . . Cutups make explicit a psychosensory process that is going on all the time anyway. Somebody is reading a newspaper, and his eye follows the column in the proper Aristotelian manner, one idea and sentence at a time. But subliminally he is reading the columns on either side and is aware of the person sitting next to him. That's a cutup. . . . For exercise, when I make a trip . . . I will record this in three columns

104 I AMERICAN WRITERS in a notebook I always take with me. One column will contain simply an account of the trip, what happened. . . . the next column presents my memories: that is, what I was thinking of at the time. . . . And the third column, which I call my reading column, gives quotations from any book that I take with me. Burroughs came to believe that the cut-up, like his dreams (which he recorded in notebooks and used copiously in his fiction), could present words, images, and fragments which predicted distant or future events as well as explained old ones. I remember a cut-up I made in Paris . . . : "Raw peeled winds of hate and mischance blew the shot." And for years I thought this referred to blowing a shot of junk, when the junk squirts out the side of the syringe or dropper owing to an obstruction. Brion Gysin pointed out the actual meaning: the shot that killed Joan. Thus Burroughs believed that the cut-up, as well as dreams and other methods of nonlinear composition, such as use of tape recordings and hieroglyphs, tapped into a human unconscious capacity for space-time travel. This movement from distant past to inexplicable future became a theme as well as a technique. The three novels following Naked Lunch introduce and elaborate a series of new elements in Burroughs' cosmology, reinforcing his assertion that they are to be kept distinct as a trilogy: the Nova Mob, Nova Police, the theories of Wilhelm Reich (inventor of the orgone box and formulator of radical theories linking modern psychological, social, sexual, and emotional behaviors to viruses and cancer, among other things), Scientology, science fiction and western stories (thus, future and past), sensory deprivation, tape and film as reality (the "Reality Studio" and "biological theater"), Mayan codices and myths, and

the mythology of the medieval Persian assassins led by Hassan i Sabbah. The most important of these elements for rudimentary "plot" purposes in the trilogy is the Nova Mob, who have controlled the planet for thousands of years by taking the form of parasitic viruses that "infect" humans and make them susceptible to addiction and control. They operate through the human need for word and image, drugs, sex, and power. The Nova Police fight the Nova Mob through alleviation of addiction (to drugs via apomorphine, to word and image via silence), and are themselves susceptible to an addiction: power. Elements of this battle change from novel to novel and scene to scene, it takes place over vast expanses of time and space, and there are many characters involved on both sides, some of whom appear repeatedly, some only once. The conflict, in typical Burroughs fashion, is never resolved. However, through the fragmented narrative of the three novels, the characters and images associated with the two vying groups provide a kind of unifying mythological element. Generally, the novels are composed of nonsequential arrangements of routines, but the routines are much shorter than they were in Naked Lunch. This may be due in part to the cut-up method, which makes sustained narrative much more difficult to write and read. (For a helpful guide to the arrangement of scenes in these novels, consult Michael Goodman and Lemuel Coley's William S. Burroughs. A Reference Guide.) In the Knickerbocker interview, Burroughs lists some of the writers whose texts he took as precedents for the cut-up method and those he had plundered in using the method: Of course, when you think of it, "The Waste Land" was the first great cutup collage, and Tristan Tzara had done a bit along the same lines. Dos Passos used the same idea in "The Camera Eye" sequences in U.S.A. . . .

WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS I 105 INTERVIEWER: Nova Express is a cutup of many writers? BURROUGHS: Joyce is in there. Shakespeare, Rimbaud, some writers that people haven't heard about, someone named Jack Stern. There's Kerouac. . . . Genet, of course. . . . Also Kafka, Eliot, and one of my favorites is Joseph Conrad. My story, "They Just Fade Away" is a folding (instead of cutting, you fold) from Lord Jim. . . . Richard Hughes is another favorite of mine. And Graham Greene. Edited and reshuffled a bit, the authors listed here provide an index to the varied literary influences on Burroughs. There is a line that runs from the symbolist poets (Arthur Rimbaud and Charles Baudelaire, among others) to the surrealists (especially Tristan Tzara), to Franz Kafka and Eliot, all of whom are strikingly similar to Burroughs, not only in method but also in intention. Marshall McLuhan has explored the symbolist connection: There is no uniform and continuous character in the nonvisual modalities of space and time. The symbolists freed themselves from visual conditions into the visionary world of the iconic and the auditory. Their act, to the visually oriented man, seems haunted, magical and often incomprehensible. The surrealist connection has been developed by Eric Mottram in William Burroughs: The Algebra of Need. Mottram and McLuhan both also investigate the significance of Kafka, who exploded the logical and linear expectations of narrative and who was, like Burroughs, a seeker of silence. Dos Passos, whose technical innovations clearly influenced Burroughs' work, based a major character in U.S.A. (1925-1936) on the legendary Rockefeller publicity man Ivy Lee, who, Burroughs mentions, is a relative on his mother's side. He refers to the publicity methods his uncle developed as having "created images." Alan

Ansen has explored the influence of Pound and Eliot. Morgan, in Literary Outlaw, does a fascinating exegesis on the similarities between the scene in Naked Lunch in which Dr. Benway interrogates Carl Petersen, and the scene in Conrad's Under Western Eyes (1911) when Razumov is questioned by Councillor Mikulin. Of all of these, the connection to Eliot is perhaps the most intriguing, because of eerie similarities between the two men's biographies. Both were born and raised in St. Louis; and their respectable, bourgeois families, they discovered, held values they did not share. Both graduated from Harvard (indeed, while Burroughs was a student, Eliot delivered the Norton Lectures there, which Burroughs attended). Each pursued but did not complete graduate studies there, and drifted to Europe in search of a more congenial milieu. Eliot spent the rest of his life as an expatriate; Burroughs, a substantial portion of his. Both had significant difficulties with their wives that came to shape the fundamental images and meanings of their literature. Both even shared an obsession with cats—Eliot's Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats (1939) has a direct parallel in Burroughs' The Cat Inside (1986). Perhaps most important, like Eliot, Burroughs relied on a multitude of voices to achieve a collage effect and to convey the entire atmosphere of a situation or scene with just a few words or lines of spoken phrase. In this regard, it is particularly interesting to examine the original facsimile manuscript of The Waste Land (published in 1973), which was a very different poem before Ezra Pound got hold of it. The original title was, tellingly, "He Do the Police in Different Voices," which might well function as title for a good many sections in a good many Burroughs novels, and it is composed of a series of unmistakable routines. A few of these routines survive in much shorter form in the final version of the poem: Marie, Madame Sosostris, the pub scene (which culminates in "HURRY UP, PLEASE,

106 I AMERICAN WRITERS IT'S TIME/' a phrase that appears repeatedly in Burroughs' work), and the scene in the voice of the woman, saying "Speak, why do you not speak." There has been very little by way of extensive appraisals of these similarities. This relationship is rich fodder for critics in the making, and serious study of it could result in an elevation of Burroughs' reputation in the academy. Burroughs spent much of the later 1960's and early 1970's investigating nonliterary modes of expression: recordings, photography, film, and painting, among others. He revised or cut up many sections of his earlier work, mixed it with new, short pieces, including essays and interview material in which he expanded on his ideas, and reprinted them as small press editions and pamphlets. A good deal of these appear with artwork or photography accompanying the text. Burroughs became very interested in Dutch Schultz, the 1930's gangster whose last words, as he was lying in a Newark, New Jersey, hospital room after being shot, were taken down by a police stenographer; this monologue became famous as a kind of feverish surrealist document. Burroughs of course saw many similarities here with his own cut-up techniques and used Schultz's language to experiment with tape loops and a film script (published in book form in 1975). According to Jennie Skerl, all of these can be seen as part of a unified creative effort: Burroughs' achievement as a novelist is substantial, but to see Burroughs as a novelist only is to ignore his artistic purpose and much of his work. For Burroughs is the creator of an artwork that ignores genre distinctions. Briefly summarized, Burroughs' artwork defines art as the process of consciousness, which produces a series of fragmentary works whose goal is to change the consciousness of the reader. . . . If the reader accedes to this demand, he must, in some sense, alter his consciousness and therefore change his

life. . . . Such an aesthetic theory can never produce a masterpiece in the conventional sense because it ignores genre and craftsmanship. Meanwhile, with the appearance of The Wild Boys: A Book of the Dead in 1971, Burroughs embarked on a new narrative quest. The text still relies on some of the old mythologies, particularly Egyptian and Mayan material, and some of the characters from the world of Interzone. But the use of the cut-up is much restricted, and there is a good deal more material laid out in conventional narrative form, with particular reference to science fiction, pulp westerns, and detective stories. The Wild Boys involves a pack of young, homosexual boys who travel in time and space and take up guerrilla warfare against the standard Burroughs forces of control: In Mexico, South and Central America guerrilla units are forming an army of liberation to free the United States. . . . Despite disparate aims and personnel of its constituent members the underground is agreed on basic objectives. We intend to march on the police machine everywhere. We intend to destroy the police machine and all its records. We intend to destroy all dogmatic verbal systems. The family unit and its cancerous expansion into tribes, countries, nations we will eradicate at its vegetable roots. We don't want to hear any more family talk, mother talk, father talk, cop talk, priest talk, country talk, or party talk. To put it country simple we have heard enough bullshit. In The Wild Boyst the related Port of Saints (1975, rev. ed. 1980), and even more in the trilogy of "western" novels that followed— Cities of the Red Night (1981), The Place of Dead Roads (1983), and The Western Lands (1987)—Burroughs attempts to integrate the themes of his earlier fiction (gruesome psychosexual instruments of control, telepathy, and so on) with his new mythologies (western outlaws,

WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS I 107 pirates, and private eyes battling such forces of control). The Wild Boys and the western trilogy include an enormous amount of autobiographical material from his boyhood in St. Louis, conveyed through the character Audrey Carsons/ Kim Carsons and others. Of course, the world of sodomy, excrement, disease, and death is still present, but in a more expansive landscape and a more accessible prose. Any study of Burroughs, finally has to deal with the droll peculiarities of his personality. A well-brought-up Harvard alumnus, he failed to find a career until he was almost forty years old, and then it had to be one that did not pay. In the interim he had served as an exterminator, a store detective, and a marijuana farmer. He was a notorious drug addict and pederast; although arrested on various charges in New York, Louisiana, and Mexico, he spent little time in jail. He was discharged (honorably) from the army for psychiatric reasons: he had chopped a joint off his little finger in order to make an impression on a man with whom he was at the time morbidly in love. Despite the awful shooting of his wife, Burroughs remained a ferocious devotee of weapons, both standard and obscure. There is, in Howard Brookner's documentary film Burroughs, an amusing scene where he demonstrates a few of those he keeps in his possession, including a blowgun, various styles of truncheons, and a vicious-looking knife, all accompanied by ironic monologue (**You're having a conversation with a man and you don't like what he's saying—SWISH—right across the jugular. Cut him off in mid-sentence."). Nevertheless, in 1983, Burroughs joined the ranks of the respected, the established, and the creaking among American writers when he was invited to become a member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters in New York, a city where once he had been wanted only by the police. He accepted, and when asked to

send material that could be included in an exhibit of the work of new members, asked if they would be interested in Gun Door, an artwork created by hanging bags of paint on a plywood panel and using it for target practice. The Academy declined the offer. In fact, this and other artworks became an important source of income for Burroughs in the "punk" art craze of the 1980's. His paintings and objects were given gallery shows in New York and Europe, often selling out. "Painting is a hell of a lot easier than writing," Burroughs said. "It's the only way to go."

Selected Bibliography WORKS OF WILLIAM 5. BURROUGHS NOVELS

Junkie: Confessions of an Unredeemed Drug Addict. By "William Lee." New York: Ace Books, 1953. Bound with Narcotic Agent, by Maurice Helbrant. Reprinted with foreword by Carl Solomon. New York: Ace Books, 1964. Reissued, in an unexpurgated edition, with an introduction by Allen Ginsberg, as Junky. New York: Penguin, 1977. The Naked Lunch. Paris: Olympia, 1959. Published in the United States as Naked Lunch. New York: Grove Press, 1962,1966 (first Evergreen Black Cat ed. paperback), 1984 (Naked Lunch: Twenty-fifth Anniversary Edition, with introduction by Jennie Skerl). The Soft Machine. Paris: Olympia Press, 1961. Rev. ed., New York: Grove Press, 1966, 1967 (first Evergreen Black Cat ed.). The Ticket That Exploded. Paris: Olympia, 1962. Rev. ed. New York: Grove Press, 1967, 1968 (first Evergreen Black Cat ed.). Dead Fingers Talk. London: John Calder, 1963. Nova Express. New York: Grove Press, 1964, 1965 (first Evergreen Black Cat ed.). The Wild Boys: A Book of the Dead. New York: Grove Press, 1971.

108 I AMERICAN WRITERS Port of Saints. London: Covent Garden, 1975. Rev. ed., Berkeley, Calif.: Blue Wind, 1980. Cities of the Red Night. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1981. Three Novels. New York: Grove Press, 1981. Includes The Soft Machine, Nova Express, and The Wild Boys. The Place of Dead Roads. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1983. Queer. New York: Viking Penguin, 1985. The Western Lands. New York: Viking Penguin, 1987.

OTHER BOOKS AND PAMPHLETS/BROADSIDES

The Exterminator. With Brion Gysin. San Francisco: Auerhahn, 1960; San Francisco: Dave Haselwood Books, 1967. Minutes to Go. With Sinclair Beiles, Gregory Corso, and Brion Gysin. Paris: Two Cities, 1960. The Yage Letters. With Allen Ginsberg. San Francisco: City Lights, 1963. Roosevelt After Inauguration. New York: Fuck You Press, 1964. They Do Not Always Remember. New York: Delacorte Press, 1965. Health Bulletin: APO-33. A Metabolic Regulator. New York: Fuck You Press, 1965 (pamphlet). Time. New York: *C Press, 1965 (pamphlet). Valentine's Day Reading. New York: American Theatre for Poets, 1965 (pamphlet). APO-33: Bulletin, a Metabolic Regulator. San Francisco: City Lights, 1966. So Who Owns Death TV? With Claude P61ieu and Carl Weissner. San Francisco: Beach Books, 1967 (pamphlet). The Dead Star. San Francisco: Nova Broadcast Press, 1969 (broadside). The Job. With Daniel Odier. New York: Grove Press, 1970. Rev. and enl. ed., New York: Grove Press, 1974. Repr., New York: Penguin, 1989. Ali's Smile. Brighton, Sussex: Unicorn, 1971. Electronic Revolution. Cambridge: Blackmoor Head, 1971. Brion Gysin Let the Mice In. Edited by Jan Herman. West Glover, Vt.: Something Else Press, 1973. Includes "The Invisible Generation,'* "Word Authority More Habit Forming Than Heroin," and "Parenthetically 7 Hertz" by Burroughs. Exterminator! New York: Viking, 1973.

Mayfair Acadamy Series More or Less. Brighton, Sussex: Urgency Press Rip-Off, 1973 (pamphlet). White Subway. London: Aloes seolA, 1973. The Book of Breeething. With illustrations by Robert F. Gales. Berkeley, Calif.: Blue Wind, 1975, 1980. The Last Words of Dutch Schultz. A Fiction in the Form of a Film Script. New York: Viking/Seaver Books, 1975. Sidetripping. With photographs by Charles Gatewood. New Yoric: Strawberry Hill, 1975. Cobble Stone Gardens. Baltimore: Cherry Valley Editions, 1976. The Retreat Diaries. New York: City Moon, 1976. The Third Mind. With Brion Gysin. New York: Viking, 1978. Blade Runner: A Movie. Berkeley, Calif.: Blue Wind, 1979. Dr. Benway: A Passage from The Naked Lunch. Santa Barbara, Calif.: Bradford Morrow, 1979. Roosevelt After Inauguration And Other Atrocities. San Francisco: City Lights, 1979. Where Naked Troubadours Shoot Snooty Baboons. Northridge, Calif.: Lord John Press, 1979. Early Routines. Santa Barbara, Calif.: Cadmus, 1981. The Streets of Chance. With illustrations by Howard Buchwald. New York: Red Ozier Press, 1981. Ah Pook Is Here, and Other Texts. New York: Riverrun, 1982. Letters to Allen Ginsberg, 1953-1957. With prefaces by Burroughs and Ginsberg. New York: Full Court, 1982. Sinki's Sauna. New York: Pequod Press, 1982. A William Burroughs Reader. Edited by John Calder. London: Pan Books/Picador, 1982. The Burroughs File. San Francisco: City Lights, 1984. With introductory essays by James Grauerholz, Paul Bowles, and Alan Ansen. The Adding Machine: Selected Essays. New Yoric: Seaver Books, 1986. The Cat Inside. With eight drawings by Brion Gysin. New York: Grenfell Press, 1986. Interzone. Edited by James Grauerholz. New York: Viking, 1989. New York. Paris: Editions du Rocher, 1989. Tornado Alley. With illustrations by S. Clay Wilson. Cherry Valley, N.Y.: Cherry Valley Editions, 1989.

WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS I 109 BIBLIOGRAPHIES Goodman, Michael B. William S. Burroughs: An Annotated Bibliography of His Works and Criticism. New York: Garland, 1975. Goodman, Michael B., with Lemuel B. Coley. William S. Burroughs: A Reference Guide. New York: Garland, 1990. Maynard, Joe, and Barry Miles. William S. Burroughs: A Bibliography, 1953-73. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1978. Miles Associates. A Descriptive Catalogue of the William S. Burroughs Archive. London: Covent Garden, 1973. SkerK Jennie. "A William S. Burroughs Bibliography." Serif, 11:12-20 (Summer 1974).

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL STUDIES Ansen, Alan. "William Burroughs: A Personal View." Review of Contemporary Fiction, 4:49-55 (Spring 1984). Bryant, Jerry H. The Open Decision: The Contemporary American Novel and Its Intellectual Background. New York: The Free Press, 1970. Pp. 199228. Cook, Bruce. The Beat Generation. New York: Scribners, 1971. Pp. 165-184. Goodman, Michael Barry. Contemporary Literary Censorship: The Case History of Burroughs' Naked Lunch. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow, 1981. Gysin, Brion. "Cut-ups: A Project for Disastrous Success." Evergreen Review, 32:56-61 (AprilMay 1964). Hassan, Ihab. "The Subtracting Machine: The Work of William Burroughs." Critique, 6:4-23 (Spring 1963). . The Dismemberment of Orpheus. New York: Oxford University Press, 1971. Pp. 249-250. Kostelanetz, Richard. "From Nightmare to Serendipity: A Retrospective Look at William Burroughs." Twentieth Century Literature, 9:123-130 (1965). Lydenberg, Robin. "Beyond Good and Evil: 'How To' Read Naked Lunch.'' Review of Contemporary Fiction, 4:75-85 (Spring 1984). . Word Cultures: Radical Theory and Practice in William S. Burroughs' Fiction. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987.

Mailer, Norman. "Some Children of the Goddess." Esquire, July 1963, pp. 64-69, 105. Malin, Irving. "Flashes of Schultz." Review of Contemporary Fiction, 4:143-144 (Spring 1984). McCarthy, Mary. "Burroughs' 'Naked Lunch.' " Encounter, 20:92-98 (April 1963). . "Dejeuner sur 1'Heibe: The Naked Lunch.'9 The New York Review of Books, 1 (l):4-5 (1963). -. The Writing on the Wall. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1970. Pp. 42-53. McLuhan, Marshall. "Notes on Burroughs." Nation, 199:517-519 (December 28, 1964). McNally, Dennis. Desolate Angel: Jack Kerouac, the Beat Generation, and America. New York: Random House, 1979. Morgan, Ted. Literary Outlaw. The Life and Times of William Burroughs. New York: Henry Holt, 1988. Mottram, Eric. William Burroughs: The Algebra of Need. New York: Intrepid Press, 1971; London: Marion Boyars, 1977. Sante, Luc. "The Invisible Man." The New York Review of Books, May 10, 1984, pp. 12-15. Skerl, Jennie. "Freedom Through Fantasy in the Recent Novels of William S. Burroughs." Review of Contemporary Fiction, 4:124-130 (Spring 1984). . William S. Burroughs. Boston: Twayne, 1985. Solotaroff, Theodore. The Red Hot Vacuum, and Other Pieces on the Writing of the Sixties. New York: Atheneum, 1970. Pp. 247-253. Tanner, Tony. City of Words: American Fiction 1950-1970. New York: Harper & Row, 1971. Pp. 109-140. Tytell, John. Naked Angels: The Lives and Literature of the Beat Generation. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1976. INTERVIEWS Bockris, Victor, ed. With William Burroughs: A Report from the Bunker. New York: Seaver, 1981. Corso, Gregory, and Allen Ginsberg. "Interview with William Burroughs." Journal for the Protection of All Beings (San Francisco), no. 1:79-83 (1961). Knickerbocker, Conrad. "William Burroughs." In Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, Third Series. Edited by Alfred Kazin. New York: Viking, 1967. Pp. 141-174. Malanga, Gerard. "An Interview with William Bur-

110 I AMERICAN WRITERS roughs." In The Beat Book. Edited by Arthur Knight and Glee Knight. California, Pa.: the unspeakable visions of the individual series, 1974. Pp. 90-112. Odier, Daniel. The Job: Interviews with William S. Burroughs. New York: Grove Press, 1970. Rev. and enl. ed., New York: Grove Press, 1974. Palmer, Robert. "Rolling Stone Interview: William Burroughs." Rolling Stone, May 11, 1972.

Skerl, Jennie. "An Interview with William S. Burroughs." Modem Language Studies, 12:3-17 (Summer 1982). Tytell, John. "An Interview with William Burroughs." In The Beat Diary. Edited by Arthur Knight and Kit Knight. California, Pa.: the unspeakable visions of the individual series, 1977. Pp. 35-49.

—VINCE PASSARO

Truman Capote 1924-1984

/

ous generations questing, pioneering, creating new worlds—that American who is "us," proudly singing our self-reliance and ourselves. His findings were unsettling. Who was Capote to take this task upon himself, to present himself as an omniscient moral and cultural arbiter of twentieth-century America? When the short, effete, squeaky-voiced New Yorker arrived in Holcomb, Kansas, in the wake of the uncertain fear generated by the inexplicable murders, a few natives thought the strangelooking Capote himself might be the murderer, according to his biographer Gerald Clarke. In their eyes, said Harper Lee, "he was like someone coming off the moon." Although the Kansans he encountered first greeted Capote as little more than a flamboyant freak, later, as he worked his way into their confidence and their lives, they embraced him. Perhaps he could make right, or at least make sense of, what had happened to their world. Perhaps he was a visionary—the kind of twisted person who could explain the twisted world in which they lived.

N LATE 1959, Truman Capote came upon a brief article in The New York Times about the slaughter of a Kansas fanning family. He showed it to William Shawn, editor in chief of The New Yorker, who agreed with Capote that it would make an intriguing story. Bennett Cerf, the Random House editor who was one of Capote's literary and high-society chaperons, lined up introductions to the Kansas academic community, and Capote was off to the Midwest, with his friend Harper Lee (author of To Kill a Mockingbird) along for the adventure. The thirty-five-year-old writer, a precocious media darling and star of Manhattan's glamorous smart set, spent the next six years traveling back and forth to Kansas, working on a chronicle that became his tour de force, the best-seller In Cold Blood: A True Account of a Multiple Murder and Its Consequences, published in 1966. He became obsessed with this murder of an innocent heartland family and the characters of the killers. Capote used the event and the stories it generated as the basis for an appraisal of the American dream: In Cold Blood was a report from the front, a mid-twentieth-century update on what we were made of, on how we thought of ourselves as opposed to what we really were. Capote investigated, and reported, the state of American values and the composition of that mythicized collective figure who had spent a score of previ-

Truman Streckfus Persons was born in New Orleans on September 30, 1924. His parents' marriage was in a constant state of turmoil. Truman's father, Arch Persons, was a schemer whose plans were rarely successful. His mother, born Lillie Mae Faulk, had little use for Arch.

Ill

772 / AMERICAN WRITERS He was only minimally present while Truman was growing up; a series of his mother's lovers were more prominent. While Truman's parents were indulging in their own little affairs, the young boy was left with relatives, usually his mother's endearing family, the Faulks, in Monroe ville, Alabama. In 1931, Lillie Mae asked Arch for a divorce so that she could marry Joseph Garcia Capote, a businessman who was more stable than Arch, and whose surname Truman had taken by 1933. While Joe and Lillie Mae provided a somewhat more secure home than Truman had had as a young child, he was still to have traumatic associations with the institutions of home and family, both real and fictional, throughout his life. The Capotes lived in Greenwich, Connecticut, and New York City when Truman was an adolescent; his love affair with what he thought the most glamorous and exciting city in the world began at this time. At the age of eighteen he entered the world of contemporary belles lettres by securing a job as a copyboy at The New Yorker. Over the next few years, Capote worked to earn recognition as a rising young writer on other magazines, and to find a place for himself in New York's literary rat race. He applied himself to his writing passionately and intensively. Capote made the most of his winning social skills and the force of his personality: he was invited to write in residence at the prestigious Yaddo literary and artistic colony at the age of twenty-one, and he had indisputably arrived on the scene with a highly publicized and controversial best-seller by the time he was twenty-four. Over the next three and a half decades, Capote left his imprint across what he considered to be civilized society. Based in New York, he made extensive forays into the world's most exotic resorts. His career, begun in fiction, was similarly far-reaching in style and subject. His circle took in hundreds of the world's most famous celebrities, among whom he traveled sometimes trium-

phantly, but sometimes disastrously. His two most significant romantic associations were with the critic Newton Arvin, from 1946 until 1949, and with the writer Jack Dunphy, from 1949 until Capote's death. By the time of his death (in Joanne Carson's Los Angeles mansion) on August 23, 1984, from severe debilitation caused by drugs, alcohol, and emotional exhaustion, he had established a persona, what might be called a media presence, that linked together his eclectic written works, and at the same time somehow transcended them. Capote's pathetic decline at the end of his life— when he found himself embittered, out of control, creatively blocked—reflects the devastating personal toll his work exacted and provides an ironic counterpoint to his meteoric rise in youth. Truman Capote's writing taught Americans something about who we were. He wrote of the country's heroes (Marilyn Monroe, Marlon Brando, Humphrey Bogart) and of its common folk (the Kansans). He captured the American landscape—the Midwest, Manhattan, New Orleans—as well as the glamorous international scene—the Mediterranean, Moscow, Haiti—as they appear to the urbane American adventurer. He wrote of his childhood in the South, portraying a vivid sense of that region and its people, and at the same time offering a moving psychological portrait of modern American childhood and adolescence, with its anxiety, instability, hostility, and loneliness. Though Capote drew closely on his own childhood experiences—his unloving and abusive parents, the odd relatives he traveled among, trying to find a home—he parlayed this into a more generalized contemporary portrait of the vagaries and pain of the modern American family. He wrote of American aspirations at their most elementally capitalist and consumerist, as he looked at Tiffany's, Fifth Avenue, the Upper East Side, and the Four Seasons, and at their

TRUMAN CAPOTE I 113 most depraved and destructive, as he looked at death row, and also as he eavesdropped on what people were actually saying at the Four Seasons. He flitted within high society, entranced with the trappings of the elite and their culture, embracing them but then turning on them just as fiercely in vicious-spirited exposes of their hypocrisy and idiocy. America affirmed, during a decades-long fascination with this character, that he did indeed know where to look to find its story. The public followed him wherever he went, devouring piece by piece his idiosyncratic dissection of contemporary society. Capote's own relationship with the public was both productive and destructive: he loved the clamoring approval of the crowds, the media, the glitterati, yet he was also susceptible to frequent breakdowns, to addictive and self-destructive behavior, to the fear of failing to live up to the public's expectations. He shared with his character Holly Golightly, in Breakfast at Tiffany's (1958), frequent susceptibility to "the mean reds": "You're afraid and you sweat like hell, but you don't know what you're afraid of. Except something bad is going to happen, only you don't know what it is." He was quite capable of humiliating himself in numerous ways, coast to coast, in front of millions. Capote's success covered a realm extending from fiction to journalism, from books to magazines, from plays to musicals to movies to television documentaries, from serious literary efforts to black-tie parties that dominated the society pages. In the course of his eclectic literary and cultural career, the bizarre pervasive character of the writer himself always preceded him and infused whatever he was undertaking. Capote's mark on American letters is inseparable from the relationship of this writer-character to American culture at large—the extent to which the public trusted him (and the extent to which he was successful) at taking the American pulse, with a wider range and scope and in more mul-

tifaceted ways than any other writer, artist, or intellect had demonstrated. Capote's canvas extended to wherever Capote himself wanted to go and could get in. He was commercially motivated to a certain extent, and he took on some dubious projects because the price was right. But he was more strongly drawn to novelty—novel venues from Kansas to Kyoto, and whatever might be for him a new way of capturing those venues—and to fame. In novels, novellas, fragments of novels, nonfiction, short stories, and magazine pieces—all copiously gathered into various published collections—as well as in his films, Capote mixed freely on his canvas parties, places, failed projects (scripts and ideas that otherwise never came to fruition), and, especially, people: family, lovers, tormentors, and many alter egos, people who were real or fictional, or fictional people who were thinly disguised real people. In his final literary effort, published in 1987 as Answered Prayers: The Unfinished Novel, he retells his own adventures, as he had done in his numerous travel pieces; he shares a lifetime of accumulated gossip, as he did in smaller doses with Monroe in "A Beautiful Child" (1955) or with Brando in "The Duke in His Domain" (1957); he explores the glamorous intrigues and seamy underside of the cosmopolitan life, as he had done in Breakfast at Tiffany's and numerous stories. The glittering people who compose the worthies of the world in Capote's eyes recur throughout his work: Eudora Welty, Colette, Jackie Kennedy, Greta Garbo, Jane Bowles, Cecil Beaton. Capote, like many writers, was fond of telling the same story over and over, examining it each time from a slightly different approach or perspective, and that narrative is a strong connective force among his disparate undertakings. When he tells various versions of his life story, he always wrestles with the pervasive issue of his sexuality, its formation and development—he did this in his first published work, Other Voices,

114 I AMERICAN WRITERS Other Rooms (1948), and continually thereafter. The story that Capote retells is generated by, and is about, loneliness. It is the story of how a talented yet troubled man writes the world around him. "I'm an alcoholic. I'm a drug addict. I'm homosexual. I'm a genius," was Capote's oftrepeated self-description, as resonant a mantra as Timothy Leary's "Tune in, turn on, drop out." Capote's triumph was that he wrangled his Urstory into a fascinating spectrum of smart reports from the cutting edge of American culture that his audience watched as eagerly as they watched Capote himself. He came across as a kind of freak, but never enough so that he repelled for long. His readers felt warmly toward him, as toward a mascot, and they were always ready to take him back into their hearts, to see what adventure he was up to next. He was not a writerhero like Ernest Hemingway, Norman Mailer, or Jack Kerouac, with whom Americans vicariously identified; rather, his audience necessarily distanced themselves from him. One of his last incarnations, as the fey crime boss Lionel Twain in the tedious Neil Simon film Murder by Death, was his least dignified, his silliest; still, it only added to the mythic allure of his persona. Like Leary, and other cultural commentators such as Andy Warhol and John Lennon, Capote transcended the social stereotype of the writer-artistintellectual, achieving a prominence that was transcultural and far-reaching. Capote's far-flung aspirations translate into a career that defies simple summation. Charting the various phases, periods, genres, and manifestations of his work, his different focuses, would quickly result in a graphic confluence of arrows, overlaps, and free-floating escapades. Capote's work begins with his southern fiction: his first novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms, published when he was twenty-three, as well as The Grass Harp (1951), which he adapted as a musical, with little success, and an assortment of

short stories such as "My Side of the Matter" (indebted to Eudora Welty's "Why I Live at the P.O."), "Children on Their Birthdays," and "A Tree of Night," collected in the 1949 A Tree of Night and Other Stories. Capote's southern fiction, with its element of southern gothic and of a troubled South, is firmly in the tradition of Rannery O'Connor, Eudora Welty, Carson McCullers, and, less strikingly but still notably, of William Faulkner and Tennessee Williams. Capote's South is a land of haunting spaces and shadows. As Joel, the young protagonist of Other Voices, Other Rooms, first sees the landscape through which he will journey, he finds it "lonesome country; and here in the swamplike hollows where tiger lilies bloom the size of a man's head, there are luminous green logs that shine under the dark marsh water like drowned corpses." A thick folkloric milieu of southern ghosts and tragic seers reinforces the pervasive gothic. The settings, Noon City and Skully's Landing, symbolically accentuate the boy's "psychological journey from day into night, from the active aboveground world into the underground world of dreams," writes Clarke These dreams become nightmares as Joel settles in at Skully's Landing: Capote writes of his protagonist, "At thirteen Joel was nearer a knowledge of death than in any year to come." The Grass Harp takes its name from the eerie atmosphere described by its narrator, Collin, at the beginning of that novel: [Past] a glaring hill of bone white slabs and brown burnt flowers [in the Baptist cemetery] begins the darkness of River Woods. It must have been on one of those September days when we were there in the woods gathering roots that Dolly said: Do you hear? that is the grass harp, always telling a story—it knows the stories of all the people on the hill, of all the people who ever lived, and when we are dead it will tell ours, too.

TRUMAN CAPOTE I 115 Capote's landscapes are evocative and fecundly storied. He begins to discover in his early writing, and will violently confirm by the time he gets through Kansas, that the American landscape is hostile, exciting but dangerous; it cannot be confidently controlled or navigated. It reveals the stories of the dead and of the horror of their deaths, of the unfulfilled chaotic lives that terminate in the certain bleak closure of these deaths which powerfully dominate the landscape. Capote's gothic panorama is largely peopled by grotesques: Cousin Randolph in Other Voices, Other Rooms is the most resonant of these. Inhabiting a gaudy room of faded gold and tarnished silk that subtly sickens Joel ("It all made him feel as though he'd eaten too much candy"), Randolph lamely tries to imitate a Wildean decadent, but his actual experience is without any of the requisite trappings, except for a vague memory of an orgiastic Mardi Gras. His posturing appears hollow, even to the young Joel, and yet Randolph represents Joel's (and thus, Capote's) fate. Ihab Hassan writes, he has "all the unpredictability and perverted innocence which qualify him for becoming the mentor and lover of Joel" (Radical Innocence: Studies in the Contemporary American Novel, Princeton, N.J. [1961], p. 241). Eventually, Randolph is seen exposed, weakened, pathetically lonely. His onetime affiliation with prizefighter Pepe Alvarez provides a moment of potential greatness, a kind of homosexual (per)version of a Hemingway tableau, but Randolph's inability to connect, his uncomfortable fate as a social misfit, shatters that moment: "One night Pepe came to the house very drunk, and proceeded with the boldest abandon to a) beat Dolores [another member of a loosely organized "family" in which Randolph only temporarily belongs, whom Pepe loved as Randolph loved Pepe] with his belt, b) piss on the rug and on my paintings, c) call me horrible hurting names, d) break my nose, e and f and otherwise." Randolph's eventual incarnation is

as a feeble transvestite, dressed as Dolores and pining after Pepe. Capote's panorama of southern grotesques includes characters like Miss Roberta, who initiates Joel on his journey and points him toward Noon City: "She had long ape-like arms that were covered with dark fuzz, and there was a wart on her chin, and decorating this wart was a single antenna-like hair"; Zoo, the servant at the Noon City home, with an elongated neck that made her "almost a freak, a human giraffe," a magnet for horrific violence, knife assaults, and gang rape; a carnival freak show, with a four-legged chicken, a two-headed baby floating in a glass tank, and a Duck Boy flapping his webbed hands. In "My Side of the Matter,'' the narrator verbally assaults his wife's aunts, who have poisoned her mind against him: "Eunice is this big old fat thing with a behind that must weigh a tenth of a ton. . . . [Olivia-Ann] is a natural-born half-wit and ought really to be kept in somebody's attic. She's real pale and skinny and has a mustache." In "Children on Their Birthdays," the young protagonist Miss Bobbit lives in a boardinghouse with the alcoholic Mr. Henderson, who "would charge to the top of the stairs and bellow down to Mrs. Sawyer that there were midgets in the walls trying to get at his supply of toilet paper. They've already stolen fifteen cents' worth, he said." That story opens in the finest form of Capote's gothic grotesque: "Yesterday afternoon the six-o'clock bus ran over Miss Bobbit. I'm not sure what there is to be said about it." Capote's grotesqueries are not absolute or immutable: in the wings, there are always, providing kindness, various incarnations of the character of Sook Faulk, a much older cousin of Capote's who, though seen by her family as childlike and simple, lavished loving companionship on the young boy when no one else did. There are also families, and a degree of caring that comes from these families, tentative and sometimes twisted though they are.

116 I AMERICAN WRITERS In The Grass Harp, this "family" includes a crotchety old judge and Riley, a charismatic young man, who are drawn to comfort and protect Collin and Dolly (the characters based on Capote and Sook); yet the group can exist together only when they flee up into a tree, removing themselves from society and living, literally, above it in a tree house. The sheriff and townspeople clamor beneath trying to disrupt and sunder this family. Eventually they succeed in bursting Capote's untraditional family, which had temporarily transcended the limitations of an imperfect social setting. Since Collin and Dolly are not allowed to live in the tree house, they must subsist in the mundane real world, where Dolly cannot endure. Collin needs Dolly as Capote needed Sook; the older woman is the one who hears and sees the supernatural beauty of things, like the stories from the grass harp. (Later, in The Thanksgiving Visitor, published in 1967, Sook tells the young Capote, "Chrysanthemums . . . are like lions. Kingly characters. I always expect them to spring. To turn on me with a growl and a roar.'' And Capote writes, "It was the kind of remark that caused people to wonder about Miss Sook, though I understood that only in retrospect, for I always knew just what she meant.'') Capote badly needs this spirit, this companion. Sook saw that everyone, even young Truman, has a kind of specialness within him, the kind of specialness that materializes only up in the trees and only if there is a Dolly figure to bring it out, as she does for the Judge and Riley as well. Capote's fantasy vision in this novella approaches a surreal appraisal of what a boy must do to survive in the South. Collin's perspective sharply presents the lonely desperation of a young boy who must depend on the kindness of strangers (though Joel, like Capote himself, finds this kindness no more satisfying than did Blanche DuBois), and if not the kindness then the strangeness of strangers. Capote retains fertile memories from his southern boyhood odyssey, and his southern

world is one that scares, threatens, and represses the young boys who are trying to make sense of it, trying to discover their selves, their roles in life, amid a generally hostile or disquieting cast of characters. The hero is predominantly uncomfortable, embarrassed, awkward in this world where he does not fit. In Other Voices, Other Rooms, this sensibility is epitomized when Joel is asked, * 'Why are you so fidgety? Must you use the bathroom?" He replies, " 'Oh no.' He felt all at once as though he'd wet his pants in public. 'Oh no.' " The quintessential adolescent fear of being wrong and ridiculous permeates Capote's southern literature, and a similarly elemental fear resonates throughout his career. That fear is closely linked with loneliness, which throughout Capote's writing generates a clear sense of otherness. The "other" of Other Voices, Other Rooms represents the people and places where Capote and his characters cannot live. Capote knows that comfortingly "normal" voices and rooms exist, but his sensibility cannot reach them. Little Sunshine, a bizarre hermit in that book, whose nickname reveals that not much hope peeks through and whose creation of "a charm guarantee no tumble happenins gonna happen" inflames Joel's desire for such an amulet, stays in his swampy gothic home in an abandoned hotel because "it was hisrightfulhome. . . . If he went away, as he had once upon a time, other voices, other rooms, voices lost and clouded, strummed his dreams." William L. Nance writes in The Worlds of Truman Capote, "For Joel, as for Little Sunshine, home is a decayed and forbidding place, but it must be accepted, even if it should prove to be presided over by the devilman. '' The otherness—an alternate and more palatable reality—is dimly perceived, but can never be attained. Capote's protagonists are thus doomed to a spectrum of manifestations of lonely isolation. When Collin arrives to stay with his aunts in The Grass Harp, Dolly says, "I told Verena you

TRUMAN CAPOTE I 117 would be lonesome." In "Master Misery," Sylvia lives with her married sister, who asks her, "Doesn't it make you lonesome seeing how happy we are?" In "Shut a Final Door," "Walter was alone and very lonesome in New York." In "Miriam," Mrs. H. T. Miller's "interests were narrow, she had no friends to speak of." In Breakfast at Tiffany's, Holly Golightly receives letters from soldiers that "were always torn into strips like bookmarks. . . . Remember and miss you and rain and please write and damn and goddamn were the words that recurred most often on these slips; those, and lonesome and love." However painful, lonely, or misfitting the grotesque reality may be, it is one that is destined to endure for Capote. Not fitting, not belonging, is the tragic bane of all Capote's characters, from Joel and Collin to Holly and Perry Smith (one of the murderers from In Cold Blood). In "Shut a Final Door," Walter is the New York urbane cosmopolitan manqug; after the failure of his personal relationships and his professional aspirations, he collapses in the arms of a fellow sufferer: " "Hold me,' he said, discovering he could still cry. 'Hold me, please.' 'Poor little boy,' she said, patting his back. 'My poor little boy: we're awfully alone in this world, aren't we?' " These words might serve as an epigram to the whole of Capote's work, and to his life. "Hold me" is a plea Capote never stopped making. There were always characters in his writing and people in his life who could pat the lonely man's back and try to soothe him, but the soothing is never completely successful. Capote's heroes inescapably remain "awfully alone." Capote's world of troubled Southerners—tormented crippled misfits, always at least bordering on the grotesque— resembles McCullers' world in The Ballad of the Sad Cafe (1943), or John Kennedy Toole's in A Confederacy of Dunces (1980). His characters are not as self-expository or voluble as those in many of Williams' or Faulkner's worlds, but they

seek the same kind of communion (however tenuous and fragile) and family unity (which is somewhat achieved, but always tentatively). Other Voices, Other Rooms is a bildungsroman: Joel travels to Skully's Landing incomplete, in search of his father and trying to find himself as well; but what does he learn? From Jesus Fever and Little Sunshine he tries to learn the ways of the South, its people, its gnosis; from Idabel and Florabel he tries to learn how to play with and interact with his peers; from Randolph, Miss Amy, and his paralyzed father he tries to learn his background, his family heritage; from Zoo he tries to learn how to be cared for. From this array of characters who are themselves very unstable, Joel attempts to wrench out some sense of meaning, some human connection. He needs to learn the archetypal human endeavors: how to go on a quest, however eerily unpromising it seems; how to recognize and attain an amulet; how to commune with one's father. Joel must learn these things, however unfulfilling and even irrelevant they may seem to the world around him. This learning is never completely successful—the others are too weird and too firmly limited in their own worlds, their own inadequacies. Nevertheless, one gets what one can from what is available; Joel, like Holly Golightly, like Kansas killer Perry Smith, and like Capote himself, learns how to scrounge for scraps. Joel's adolescence is certainly not far removed from the twenty-three-year-old author's own. Capote, like Joel, was shunted around to various family members in the South as he was growing up, few of whom cared much for him or paid him much attention. Their distorted lives resembled, to a young boy, the ones he creates in his fiction. Joel's last name is changed from his father's, Sansom, to Knox, after his parents' divorce, making his search for his paternal legacy that much more difficult; this parallels Capote's name change in adolescence.

118 I AMERICAN WRITERS Adolescence, as depicted in the portrait of Joel, is certainly a scary prospect, but also, in a Joycean way, full of vast epic and artistic potential. Joel's fragmentary memories of youth are very much in the tempo of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916): He hadn't had a proper hour's rest since leaving New Orleans, for when he closed his eyes, as now, certain sickening memories slid through his mind. Of these, one in particular stood out: he was at a grocery counter, his mother waiting next to him, and outside in the street January rain was making icicles on the naked tree limbs. Together they left the store and walked silently along the wet pavement, he holding a calico umbrella above his mother, who carried a sack of tangerines. They passed a house where a piano was playing, and the music sounded sad in the grey afternoon, but his mother remarked what a pretty song. And when they reached home she was humming it, but she felt cold and went to bed, and the doctor came, and for over a month he came every day, but she was always cold, and Aunt Ellen was there, always smiling, and the doctor, always smiling, and the uneaten tangerines shriveled up in the icebox; and when it was over he went with Ellen to live in a dingy twofamily house near Ponchartrain. In spite of the dense gothic setting, and the oppressive forces of painful memory and an uncongenial present atmosphere, the adolescent sustains a degree of innocence that can lift him at least somewhat above this world; in spite of its decadence, the world is rich with character that can be potentially transmuted into art or, perhaps, repressed into art. In this bildungsroman Joel learns how to be Truman Capote when he grows up, just as the unpromising Stephen Dedalus must learn how to become James Joyce; Capote knows that this may not be a very comforting lesson, but it is one that embodies a kind of noble endurance. As he creates the characters

of Joel, Idabel, and Randolph, Capote is locating himself somewhere among them—trying to define his sense of gender and sexuality, of goals and personality and relations to others. However tenuously, Capote works out in Other Voices, Other Rooms whatever strengths he will carry into his young adult life. If the first item in Capote's oeuvre is southern fiction, item one-prime might be the author's later literature of nostalgic reminiscence. Even after Capote turned from writing about the South to writing about the chic, cosmopolitan world in which he moved as an adult, the powerful experiences of his southern childhood remained strong in his imagination. The Thanksgiving Visitor and A Christmas Memory (first published in 1956 and reissued as a boxed volume a decade later) are heavily influenced by the same southern voice of Capote's early fiction, but they are also importantly autobiographical, capturing the warmth of his relationship with his adored cousin Sook and also the anxiety of a young child who knows that he is terribly lonely and that he is fated to continue a lonely life because he does not fit in. These singular stories represent the essence of the Capote-as-character theme, which occupies much of his other work. It is a bit hard to imagine Capote as his younger self in the episodes he describes from his rural Alabama childhood in The Thanksgiving Visitor: working on the farm, rising from bed at 5:30 A.M. for a breakfast of fried squirrel, fried catfish, and hominy grits. But the relationship between Truman and Sook rings true— again, an unlikely but vital affiliation. Another character, Capote's schoolmate Odd Henderson, is also an important type in Capote's writing. Odd is a tormenting bully, an underprivileged child whom Sook forces a reluctant Capote to invite for Thanksgiving. Odd, who repays Sook's kindness by trying to steal a cameo brooch from the bureau in her bathroom, seems

TRUMAN CAPOTE I 119 much like the character of Dick Hickock, the meaner of the killers from In Cold Blood. Capote views this kind of personality as capable of enormous evil—the young Truman in The Thanksgiving Visitor has nightmares about Odd's meanness to him—but such a character nevertheless has a tender aspect: Sook tells Capote that Odd's mother views him as a tremendous help. (Hickock's parents, too, seem to have drawn strength from their son, however evil he was.) This small portion of kindness is not meant to mitigate the dominant evil of the character, but, Capote knows, it is nonetheless something he must come to terms with. People are not unilaterally composed of any single characteristic— they are confusing bundles of contradictory traits. This story demonstrates Capote's vision of the complexity of morality and personality, especially cruel personalities. Odd represents the kind of character who is not just abstractly mean but specifically oppressive to Truman, reminding the young hero of his own deficient socialization; as troubled as Odd is, society is actually more likely to accept Odd than Truman: Once, when he had me pinned against a wall, I asked him straight out what I had done to make him dislike me so much; suddenly he relaxed, let me loose and said, "You're a sissy. I'm just straightening you out." He was right, I was a sissy of sorts, and the moment he said it, I realized there was nothing I could do to alter his judgment, other than toughen myself to accept and defend the fact. Capote cannot condemn Odd for the torment he inflicts; self-debasingly, he seems to accept that the way of the world is to be subjected to such torment, given his own misfitting character. Odd speaks in the other voices from other rooms that are absolutely closed to Truman, and Truman's fascination with Odd echoes his obsession with the Kansas killers. Still, despite the confusion that surrounds the

young man, Sook is a respite. In A Christmas Memory, Capote depicts an episode of unmitigated warmth, as he tells how he and his cousin—referred to simply and touchingly only as "my friend"—collect nuts and berries in the woods and buy whiskey from the bootlegger Mr. Haha Jones for their annual ritual of making fruitcakes on a budget of $12.73 in loose change, carefully hoarded over the year. The portrait is uncharacteristically delightful: the elderly cousin and the seven-year-old boy get soused, as part of the ritual, drinking from jelly glasses the two inches of whiskey left over after the cakes are done. They distribute their thirty-one cakes in a way that reflects, again, the way Sook and Capote scrounged to form a makeshift network of "family": Who are they for? Friends. Not necessarily neighbor friends: indeed, the larger share is intended for persons we've met maybe once, perhaps not at all. People who've struck our fancy. Like President Roosevelt. Like the Reverend and Mrs. J. C. Lucey, Baptist missionaries to Borneo who lectured here last winter. Or the little knife grinder who comes through town twice a year. . . . Is it because my friend is shy with everyone except strangers that these strangers, and merest acquaintances, seem to us our truest friends? I think yes. Even the gloomy Mr. Haha Jones softens in the face of this enterprise, and donates the whiskey in exchange for a fruitcake (with an extra cup of raisins in it as a reward). The pair wonders if Eleanor Roosevelt will serve the cake they sent her at dinner. Breakfast at Tiffany's marked the beginning of Capote's literary fascination with wealth, parties, the elite, and the general atmosphere of panache that pervaded Manhattan, and it captures his equal fascination with the underside of this

720 / AMERICAN WRITERS cosmopolitan world, the failure or absence of much that it promised, to which he was never oblivious. Gore Vidal asserted that Capote 4tabducted Isherwood's Sally Bowles for Breakfast at Tiffany's"; certainly, Capote creates an updated version of Berlin's famously cosmopolitan atmosphere. In a similar vein were Capote's continuing stream of New York stories (such as * 'Miriam," about the oppressive loneliness of Manhattan, and "Shut a Final Door," about protoyuppies in Manhattan's fast lane, both in A Tree of Night) and such portraits as ' 'New York'' and "Brooklyn" in Local Color (1950); "A House on the Heights'' in The Dogs Bark: Public People and Private Places (1973); and "Hello, Stranger," which details the fascinating stories of sordid humanity that come out over cocktails at the Four Seasons, and "A Day's Work," both in Music for Chameleons (1980). Like Capote's southern writing, his cosmopolitan writing was drawn from a universe he knew intimately. While he was generally more successful in the sophisticated international world than in the South—famous and financially rewarded, more accepted, better (though certainly not perfectly) fitting—this writing retains a sense of Capote's lonely alienation and failure of human communion; perhaps this is an inescapable remnant of his youth. Holly Golightly represents a kind of transcendence for Capote's protagonists, because unlike Joel or Collin she is beautiful, gregarious, adored; she seems able to control her own life, which is filled with rich, exotic men (like the handsome Brazilian Jose Ybarra-Jaegar—intelligent, presentable, important) and the thrilling power brokers of the underworld (Sally Tomato, the crime boss who pays Holly a hundred dollars a week to visit him in Sing Sing and take back "weather reports" to his "lawyer") who seem willing to do anything for her. Money seems to materialize effortlessly for her: whatever she wants can be attained by taking a few trips to the powder room (financed

luxuriantly by her escorts). For Holly, Tiffany's is a cosmopolitan refuge, a dazzling array of consumerist allure that, she believes, transcends sordid reality: "Nothing very bad could happen to you there, not with those kind men in their nice suits, and that lovely smell of silver and alligator wallets." She dreams of waking up one morning and having breakfast at Tiffany's—then she will know she has attained her version of nirvana. Ultimately, though, Holly cannot write her own fantasy life, cannot escape her constraining past. Tiffany's is only a jewelry store—it doesn't serve breakfast, and it doesn't sell contentment. Holly's abandoned husband, Doc Golightly, materializes from Tulip, Texas, and unravels the image she has fabricated in Manhattan, showing that one cannot simply wish away one's dreary past and its responsibilities. Nor can she control the present—the Sally Tomato ploy turns out to be a conduit for drug-smuggling information, and the police catch up with Holly. After she is arrested, the media reports reflect the image Holly has created of chic cosmopolitan allure. DRUG RING EXPOSED, GLAMOUR GIRL HELD, read

the tabloid headlines, with exotic stories about "the beautiful movie starlet and cafg society celebrity . . . highly publicized girl-about-New York . . . arrested in her luxurious apartment at a swank East Side address." But Holly's neighbor, the narrator, a struggling young writer entranced by her wild life—an incarnation of Capote, of course—sets the story straight, again, like Doc, exposing the distorted unreality of Holly's cosmopolitan facade: "She was not arrested in her 'luxurious apartment.' It took place in my own bathroom. . . . 'Here she is: the wanted woman!' boomed Madame Spannela. . . . 'Look. What a whore she is.' " Holly's world does not endure, though it was certainly exciting while it lasted, tingling with erotically sensual allure (which Audrey Hepburn toned down in the popular film version to a kind of teasing adolescent playfulness). Holly snags

TRUMAN CAPOTE I 121 none of her dashing men; she cannot even sustain a relationship with her cat, which she refuses to name because that would imply responsibilities and permanence, and her life is not stable enough for that. She escapes from the law, from the clutches of society, running off to Buenos Aires in search of more rich men to sucker, but she has lost her allure, and she is far from Tiffany's; she looks more clearly like a money grubbing tramp. On the way to the airport, she abandons her cat in a rainstorm in Spanish Harlem. Having done this, though, she immediately realizes the pointlessness of leading her life as she has, with no connections. Unable to find the cat herself, she makes the narrator promise to return for it, which he does—finding it, after weeks of arduous searching, settled comfortably "in the window of a warm-looking room.'' He does not take care of the cat as he had pledged, since someone else, clearly, is already doing so. But simply by tracking down one of the loose ends Holly had left hanging, the narrator atones for at least a small part of his friend's reckless existence. Determined to ensure the cat's safety, he struggles to sustain a kind of communion and responsibility that Holly's hollow and emotionally barren cosmopolitanism did not allow. In this story, Capote reflects on his own perceptions of his world. There is just a bit of Sook in Holly, in the sometimes uncritical rapport she establishes with the young man who is very different from herself, and in the loosely familial and supportive connection the two share. Holly, for a time, calls the narrator Fred—the name of the beloved brother she had abandoned in Texas. But more important, Holly is, at various times, both alter ego and ego for Capote. Though the narrator is only in the background of Holly's life, he is forcefully present as the recording and judgmental voyeur. Her careless adventure is not exactly his, but he does here confront the troubling morality, to which Holly is oblivious, of the cosmopolitan world. Unlike Holly, he will never be

able to dispense with or repress its contradictions. Nance points to "the role of this story in Capote's gradual transition from fiction to nonfiction," writing that "he had moved from a private dream world to one that was identifiable, topical, even journalistic." Breakfast at Tiffany's does indeed embody the kind of journalism Capote takes up for the rest of his career: not because it has the same detached, objective perspective that characterizes his later style, but rather because of the author's role as a burrowing investigator out to get the story, out to expose what underlies the story he is reporting. The cosmopolitan sensibility in Breakfast at Tiffany's evokes Capote's personal, extraliterary indulgence in the cosmopolitan life, his role as a publicity hound and social climber. Capote's courting of the public eye began with his first book, Other Voices, Other Rooms, or, more precisely, with the book's dust jacket. The boyish author lies supine on a sofa, oozing sensuality; later he told Lawrence Grobel, "I guess it assumes that I'm lying on the sofa and more or less beckoning somebody to climb on top of me." This "exotic photograph," he said, was "the start of a certain notoriety that has kept close step with me these many years." Capote's audience raised its eyebrows not simply at the photo or the book, but at the combination of the two. This set a pattern that was to endure throughout Capote's career—the writer's fascinating personality was always complexly intertwined with his text. Cosmopolitanism, for Capote, manifested itself in a network of people and places. Clarke's biography meticulously describes how Capote sought out the best of these: the richest, the most socially alluring and well-connected, the most celebrated, the cutting edge. He lived in a symbiotic relationship with the people he latched onto: he traveled with them, visited their estates and retreats, flew with them on their private

722 / AMERICAN WRITERS planes and cruised on their yachts, and parlayed connection into connection. His modus operandi was to attach himself to glamorous, wealthy young women. He served as adviser and confidant; he was sensitive, understanding, nonthieatening, and they relished his companionship as a respite from the catty turmoil of their upper-class lives. Capote provided consolation, amusement, and sometimes even mentorship; he helped women improve their social skills and connections, and he had a good sense for women's fashion. Despite a calculating aspiration for social connections on Capote's part, often such attachments involved true and deep friendship as well. Sometimes Capote connected also with the husbands through the wives: the most famous example of this was his relationship with Barbara ("Babe") Paley and her husband, CBS founder William S. Paley. Other famous people in his coterie included Lee Radziwill, her sister Jaqueline Kennedy (and, through her, her husband John), Joanne Carson (who was then married to Johnny Carson), Carol Marcus Saroyan Matthau (wife of William Saroyan and, later, Walter Matthau), Oona O'Neill Chaplin (Eugene O'Neill's daughter, who was married to Charlie Chaplin). These people provided Capote with entree to the beautiful places of the world. He drew on the energy of these locations, writing numerous shorter portraits of them and using them as backdrops for his larger efforts, but also seeming to have an almost compulsive need simply to be in such settings, in case something happened, to see who else was there. His haunts included the elite restaurant and hotel scene (the Four Seasons, Sardi's, the Plaza) in the 1950's and 1960's, the Hamptons and Palm Springs in the 1960's and 1970's, and later, perhaps most obsessively, the most fashionable New York bars and discos, especially Studio 54 (and inside that disco, the place of honor, the deejay's booth, where the crfcme de la creme congregated by spe-

cial invitation), in the last frenzied years of his life. Manhattan (annexing a slice of Brooklyn Heights) was the center of the universe by Capote's cosmopolitan standards and lent him a strong dose of creative energy. He wrote as a young man in "New York": It is a myth, the city, the rooms and windows, the steam-spitting streets, for anyone, everyone, a different myth, an idol-head with traffic-light eyes winking a tender green, a cynical red . . . a place to hide, to lose or discover oneself, to make a dream wherein you prove that perhaps after all you are not an ugly duckling, but wonderful, and worthy of love. Capote had thoroughly exploited his childhood in the South for his early writing; in New York, he found a Pandora's box of new material. New York as a subject posed a bigger challenge, which later in his life often led to considerable writing blocks. The city sometimes forced him to flee, and eventually overwhelmed him, as it psychologically overwhelmed Mrs. H. T. Miller in "Miriam." That short story, about an incomprehensible young girl (or an apparition of one) who haunts an Upper East Side widow, is one of the few instances in Capote's writing in which no communion—no connection, however tentative—can be achieved. New York, at its worst, can be omnipowerfully squelching. Still, it was the site of Capote's most vivid challenges and triumphs. Even In Cold Blood, his most famous work, though a story of Middle America, was commissioned by and first published in The New Yorker; it owes as much to the city that nurtured that magazine, and that nurtured Capote, as it does to small-town Kansas. The Black and White Ball stands as a fantastic example of Capote's personal flair and his presence in the national spotlight. Capote threw the fabulously decadent affair for five hundred of his closest friends at the Plaza Hotel in November

TRUMAN CAPOTE I 123 1966. The list of invited guests, as printed in The New York Times, covered a range of celebrities including Sammy Davis, Jr., Jackie Kennedy, Mrs. W. Vincent Astor, Richard Burton, Oscar de la Renta, Noel Coward, Averell Harriman, Lillian Hellman, Christopher Isherwood, and the Baron and Baroness Guy de Rothschild, as well as some of the friends Capote had made in Hoicomb, Kansas, like Alvin Dewey, the Kansas Bureau of Investigation's lead investigator on the Clutter murder case. The party was a real-life event but one that became transformed as it entered the national media into something that looked more like a scene out of Capote's fictional world of glitz. The American public devoured the spectacle: media reports of the ball were infused with ornate accounts of manners evocative of Edith Wharton's stylish turn-of-thecentury affairs and intrigues. Those who weren't invited were crushed. Those who did come flew in from all over the country and made a tremendous commotion over their hairdos, their costumes (black was prescribed for men, black or white for women), and their masks—Halston and Adolfo were deluged with orders for personalized masks, for which they charged hundreds of dollars. Time magazine reported that Capote boasted of having spent a mere thirty-nine cents on his mask, only to be undercut by Theodore Roosevelt's eighty-twoyear-old daughter Alice Roosevelt Longworth, who had shopped around and paid thirty-five cents. As Capote's cosmopolitan connections and literary success became stronger, he broadened his scope to take on projects such as adapting works for plays, musicals, and movies; he also wrote screenplays. Neither a 1954 musical based on his short story "House of Flowers" nor a 1952 play based on The Grass Harp were well received. His film adaptation (with William Archibald) of Henry James's The Turn of the Screw, titled The Innocents (1961), was disappointing, and his

film scenario for The Great Gatsby was rejected. Film productions of Breakfast at Tiffany's and In Cold Blood were lucrative for Capote, and his publicized presence at the filming of In Cold Blood, on location in Kansas, heightened the connection between his roles as writer and media figure. Among his most successful ventures was his work on the offbeat John Huston film Beat the Devil (1954). In this film noir parody of the Graham Greene variety of spy film, Capote imbues his characters with an exotic Mediterranean flair, and Robert Morley, Humphrey Bogart, and Peter Lorre are amusingly insouciant in their roles. It was Capote's disclosure of his friendship with Bogart, dating from the production of the film, that broke the ice in his first interview with the murderer Perry Smith, who idolized the actor. An important ingredient in the hodgepodge that constitutes Capote's cosmopolitan world is his sexuality. It is difficult to determine whether Capote's homosexuality is more pertinent as a biographical or as a literary issue; probably, as with most aspects of the writer, its role is intertwined in both the personal and literary spheres, and cannot be placed neatly on either side. Capote is one of America's most important authors to be openly gay throughout his career, and while his writing is by no means purely "gay literature," Capote's sexuality infused his writing to much the same degree that it defined his life. In his southern literature, this sexuality is a bit more closeted, probably reflecting some of Capote's own uncertainty and the confused hostility that his homosexuality encountered in the South. The young Capote had experienced numerous manifestations of homosexuality in himself and around him, like Joel Knox in Other Voices, Other Rooms, who, as a young boy, "had witnessed many peculiar spectacles, . . . most puzzling of all, two grown men standing in an ugly little room kissing each other." Joel is stereo-

124 I AMERICAN WRITERS typically effeminate, as was Capote himself: "He was too pretty, too delicate and fairskinned, . . . a girlish tenderness softened his eyes, . . . his voice was uncommonly soft." Joel's relation to Cousin Randolph, who is flamboyantly gay, probably illustrates the young Capote's view of homosexuality: he sees that what he is destined to become will make him a target of scorn; he sees that gay life can be lonely and difficult, especially if one is flamboyant (as Capote must have known he would be) and surrounded by people who are already uncompassionate. While Randolph is the only person in Skully's Landing who serves as any kind of role model for Joel, he is a satirically caricatured model, and the others in the family attempt to repress Randolph's manifestations of his homosexuality in front of the boy (again, Capote knows what will be in store for him). As Randolph squeezes Joel's hand, Joel knows that if there is any communion to be gleaned in this family, it will have to involve Randolph; he accepts this communion on one level, but at the same time, "holding hands with Randolph was obscurely disagreeable, and Joel's fingers tensed with an impulse to dig his nails into the hot dry palm." Joel mirrors Capote's ambiguity about his sexuality: not about whether he is gay, of which there is no question, but about what it means to be gay. The narrator in Breakfast at Tiffany's is able to remain essentially detached from Holly's world because it is heterosexual, and he is not. Much of Capote's writing from this period embodies a muted but unapologetic homosocial sensibility. In "A Diamond Guitar," one of three short stories published with Breakfast at Tiffany's, Mr. Schaeffer is the elder statesman of a prison farm to which a young Cuban named Tico Feo is brought: Mr. Schaeffer glanced up at the boy and smiled. He smiled at him longer than he had meant to, for the boy had eyes like strips of sky. . . .Look-

ing at him, Mr. Schaeffer thought of holidays and good times. Such loaded glances are Capote's usual method of vaguely implying the love of men for men. Later in this story, Capote is more specific: Soon Tico Feo was allowed the honor of having a bed near the stove and next to Mr. Schaeffer. . . . Except that they did not combine their bodies or think to do so, though such things were not unknown at the farm, they were as lovers. In "Shut a Final Door," Walter's encounter is less kind: I was in a bookshop, and a man was standing there and we began talking: a middle-aged man, rather nice, very intelligent. When I went outside he followed, a little ways behind: I crossed the street, he crossed the street, I walked fast, he walked fast. This kept up six or seven blocks, and when I finally figured out what was going on I felt tickled, I felt like kidding him on. So I stopped at the corner and hailed a cab; then I turned around and gave this guy a long, long look, and he came rushing up, all smiles. And I jumped in the cab, and slammed the door and leaned out the window and laughed out loud: the look on his face, it was awful, it was like Christ. I can't forget it. Clearly, Walter has some kind of homosexual inclination, which he represses here. Still, Walter and Capote are aware of the suffering of the anonymous follower: he is a Christlike martyr to the world's cruelty. In nearly every one of Capote's stories can be found a moment of gay awareness, sometimes positive, often suppressed or crushed (as between Randolph and Pepe in Other Voices. Other Rooms), and, especially earlier in his career, frequently oblique (as with Vincent in "The Headless Hawk" [1946], who takes "rather female pride in his quarters").

TRUMAN CAPOTE I 125 In In Cold Blood, the sexuality of both killers is troubling. Dick Hickock is at least a potential rapist, child molester, and exhibitionist. Perry Smith seems, loosely, to have the same kind of attraction for Dick as described in Capote's early muted portraits of homosexuality; he is drawn to Dick (and frequently dreams of a life involving a strong tie with him), and jealously resentful of Dick's reckless heterosexuality. Capote himself seems to have a keen tenderness for Perry and his unresolved sexuality. Perry, on his way to the gallows, kissed Capote on the cheek and said, "Adios, amigo." Capote later reported that Perry said to him, "Good-bye. I love you and I always have." By the time he published Music for Chameleons, Capote's references to homosexuality had become forthright and explicit. In "A Beautiful Child," he describes a one-night stand he had with Errol Rynn; in "Then It All Came Down," he reports uncensored his subject's vivid description of gay sex in prison; in "Hidden Gardens," his interviewee recounts a joke—the kind of gay humor that perhaps appeals to Capote's campy persona: Jesse James storms onto a train and shouts, " 'Hands up! We're gonna rob all the women and rape all the men.' So this one fellow says: 'Haven't you got that wrong, sir? Don't you mean you're gonna rob all the men and rape all the women?' But there was this sweet little fairy on the train, and he pipes up: 'Mind your own business! Mr. James knows how to rob a train.' " In Answered Prayers Capote offers an especially unfettered portrait of homosexuality in the world of the sophisticated set. Capote was writing during a time when it was acceptable, marginally, for a gay man to discuss his sexuality, not in terms of general gay rights or acceptance, but as one eccentric artsy fag. A stereotypically capricious gay atmosphere was acceptable; the reality of the largely closeted and suppressed gay world was not. Homosexuality in Capote's writing is not very real—nor does it

reflect the chaotic tribulations of Capote's love life: he had two long-term and relatively satisfying relationships, but numerous others that generally proved difficult and uncontrollable. Rather, Capote's sexuality is parodically distanced from what is assumed to be a "normal" (heterosexual) audience. As perhaps America's most prominent openly gay celebrity of the 1950's and 1960's, Capote might be criticized as too campy, too effete, too confirmative of prejudicial stereotypes about gays. His writing was probably not very helpful to the contemporary gay community, as was, for example, James Baldwin's more socially conscious Giovanni's Room (1956), nor did it ever attempt to provide a thorough overview of some part of the gay world, as did Hubert Selby's Last Exit to Brooklyn (1964). Capote does not pave the way for other homosexual writers or readers—in his writing, homosexuality is a fact, and accepted, but in a way that relates only to Capote himself. Still, he lived his life on his own terms, and underneath the cultivated facade of quivering, limpwristed effeminacy was a core of strength that allowed him to act and be seen exactly as he wanted to be—never to mask his personality, however ridiculous it might seem. Capote worked with two important photographers, Richard Avedon and Cecil Beaton. Capote wrote the text for Avedon's 1959 collection of celebrity photographs Observations (in which he appeared himself in a puckish pose), helping the photographer capture the personalities of such figures as Isak Dinesen, Ezra Pound, and Mae West. Beaton was a longtime close friend, and some of his masterful skill at capturing people's inner personalities with a photographically objective precision seems to have rubbed off on Capote; as Capote's work matured, he relied less on the grotesquely surreal personality portrait and more heavily on closely detailing the lives, the speech, the literal behavior of his subjects.

726 / AMERICAN WRITERS Such detailing is evident in the passage on Dinesen from Observations: The Baroness, weighing a handful of feathers and fragile as a coquillage bouquet, entertains callers in a sparse, sparkling parlor sprinkled with sleeping dogs and warmed by a fireplace and a porcelain stove: a room where she, an imposing creation come forward from one of her own Gothic tales, sits bundled in bristling wolfskins and British tweeds, her feet fur-booted, her legs, thin as the thighs of an ortolan, encased in woolen hose, and her neck, round which a ring could fit, looped with frail lilac scarves. Capote was working harder, more carefully, to evoke a vision that was not simply a psychologically internalized memory, but one that could stand as a public statement—one that was still, of course, imbued with a subjectively judgmental atmosphere, but an atmosphere that was meant to be shared more widely, more accessibly. In portraits of celebrities such as Louis Armstrong, Marilyn Monroe, and Humphrey Bog art, Capote presents (with a bit of his own recasting) what these people look like, or should look like, to the world at large. His choice of subjects in Observations reflects his cosmopolitanism, and this combined with the power he saw in photography moved Capote on to another important phase of his writing, that of nonfiction prose. Two extremely successful journalistic enterprises in 1956 set the stage for Capote's bestknown work, In Cold Blood. Both The Muses Are Heard and * 'The Duke in His Domain'' were commissioned for The New Yorker. The Muses Are Heard is a meticulous account of a touring production of Porgy and Bess behind the iron curtain, the first of its kind ever undertaken by an American company. In the preface to Music for Chameleons he wrote: I conceived of the whole adventure as a short comic "non-fiction novel," the first. For several

years I had been increasingly drawn toward journalism as an art form in itself. . . . Journalism as art was almost virgin terrain, for the simple reason that very few literary artists ever wrote narrative journalism. In his description of the traveling, the rehearsals, the interpersonal relationships and squabbles of the actors, the behind-the-scenes diplomatic and theatrical arrangements, there is nothing stylistically fascinating or overwhelming. In places, Capote's prose clearly has been whipped into line by the hand of a New Yorker editor, to conform with the magazine's timelessly immutable style. But Capote's report is eloquent, careful, sharply paced. What he must have gotten out of the exercise was simply the experience of writing about real people, their characters, their interplay, their small but compelling intrigues: the discovery that there is a story sitting right out there in real life. In "The Duke in His Domain," Capote refines his journalism with an extended close focus on one character, Marlon Brando. Capote shows himself adept at getting a personally revealing interview out of an actor notorious for his unwillingness to sit for such portraits. He captures Brando as a spoiled tyrant, egotistical, rambling disconnectedly, unusually confessional ("The last eight, nine years I've been pretty mixed up, a mess pretty much"), and protectively isolated, like a duke in his domain, from the outside world. In both these reports Capote is present, somewhat more forcefully than is the background narrator in Breakfast at Tiffany's. He refines the character of author as insightful voyeur, the canny recorder who sets out for his readers, with just a small dose of guidance, the artifacts that compose whatever cultural milieu he chooses to define. In the 1950's and 1960's, he wrote nonfiction pieces in many of the same magazines in which he had earlier published short stories, thus

TRUMAN CAPOTE / 127 establishing a connection between the two kinds of writing and the different voices he used for each. He wrote essays, travel pieces, and profiles for popular magazines—Life, Harper's Bazaar, Mademoiselle, Redbook, Vogue, Esquire—that people read in beauty shops and in their living rooms, magazines that purported to capture the life and times of contemporary America and Americans. Seemingly effortlessly, he turned out the vintage portraits and insights that could come only from a man who had soaked up life as he had, and, like Hemingway and Fitzgerald, Capote could not help inscribing himself in his writing as a character somehow more interesting than anyone else he wrote about. His style is marked by a kind of subtle omniscience, a savoir faire that is almost, but not quite, pompous, elitist, cosmopolitan. It is clear to his readers that his writing could be all these things, but that it is purposely, though not condescendingly, tailored to appeal to the curiosity of the middle-class masses. In the preface to Music for Chameleons he said that writing In Cold Blood was "like playing high-stakes poker; for six nerve-shattering years I didn't know whether I had a book or not." In 1966, Capote found himself with a book that burst into the national consciousness. Two cold-blooded killers, Dick Hickock and Perry Smith, fascinated the writer and his audience in the same way that Milton's Satan fascinated Romantic readers: in their evilness, they stand out as immensely more compelling than their victims, four members of a comfortable Kansas farming family who, as Capote inspects them, end up looking like caricatures of a hackneyed ideal. Herb Clutter is a bourgeois petty tyrant, running his farm with an outdated puritanical rule. He forbids the use of tobacco, but his children sneak cigarettes; he ruthlessly fires any workers on his farm found with alcohol. Capote, himself an alcoholic and a drug addict, is drily but insistently sarcastic about what pass for Mr.

Clutter's upstanding, noble virtues. Capote exploits the dark irony of the Clutters' lives with almost comic shamelessness. He describes pillows in Nancy's room bearing the legends HAPPY? and YOU DON'T HAVE TO BE CRAZY TO LIVE HERE BUT IT HELPS; as Mr. Clutter takes out a life-insurance policy on the day he will die, Capote records the insurance agent telling him, 4 'From the looks of you, from what the medical report tells us, we're likely to have you around a couple of weeks more." Clutter makes a show of pluralist tolerance, but intrusively and domineeringly forces his daughter Nancy to ease out of her relationship with her boyfriend, Bobby Rupp, because he is Catholic. Mrs. Clutter is psychologically frail; the details are not precise, but she resembles a nineteenth-century 4 'neurasthenic," spending her days a virtual invalid in bed, while the rest of the family tiptoes around the house and tries not to jar her nerves or confront her condition. Mr. Clutter, who no longer sleeps with his wife, seems vaguely responsible for her condition. Kenyon and Nancy are ail-American kids, riding horses, active in 4-H; on the day of their deaths, Nancy takes time out from an activityfilled day to teach a younger neighbor how to bake a cherry pie; the night before, she had starred as Becky Thatcher in a student production of Tom Sawyer. They live in a home that Capote finds sterile, tacky, homogeneous, as he dissects it: spongy displays of liver-colored carpet intermittently abolishing the glare of varnished, resounding floors; an immense modernistic living-room couch covered in nubby fabric interwoven with glittery strands of silver metal; a breakfast alcove featuring a banquette upholstered in blue-andwhite plastic. This sort of furnishing was what Mr. and Mrs. Clutter liked, as did the majority of their acquaintances, whose homes, by and large, were similarly furnished.

725 / AMERICAN WRITERS As Capote inspects and reconstructs their lives, their wholesomely American sensibilities seem like a mask for a crumbling inner world. Mr. Clutter plants a grove of fruit trees on his farm, an emblem of "the paradise, the green, apple-scented Eden" that, Capote informs us, the fanner strove to create. That image sets up Capote's pervasive irony, for In Cold Blood is about the failure of this paradise, about the brutal expulsion from this Eden—for the Clutters and, symbolically, for the American audience that envisioned the Clutters as the consummate representatives of themselves. While the portrait of prelapsarian life in Holcomb is steeped in the smug comfort of 1950's America, Capote is filtering his narrative through the much more cynical perspective of the 1960's—after the Kennedy assassination, in the throes of cold war paranoia. In the postmortem that he conducts on the Clutter family, the mass murder seems almost a secondary cause of death. Primarily, the American dream has become malignant; the murders are almost a symptom, rather than the cause, of the Clutters' demise. In the early sections of the book, Capote perversely juxtaposes the lives of the Clutters and their killers. He introduces the killers by writing, "Like Mr. Clutter, the young man [Perry Smith] breakfasting in a cafe called the Little Jewel never drank coffee." With macabre insistence, Capote's narrative repeatedly jumps back and forth from the Holcomb family to the killers on their adventure to murder the Clutters. Capote forcibly conjoins their fates as he describes the central event of the story, the "four shotgun blasts that, all told, ended six human lives." His underlying thesis is that Dick and Perry are as integral a part of the American dream as are the Clutters, if not more so. In Cold Blood captured the American imagination in its methodical analysis of the disintegration of the American dream. The Clutters may surround themselves with the outward trappings of this dream, but they are

slaughtered on page 72, and Capote's story has hundreds of pages to go. The place to look for that story, Capote finds, is with the people who smashed the dream, Dick and Perry. They are, simply, more exciting than the Clutters; they are the people we must inspect to understand the future of American society, its hopes and values. Though the dream has gone bad for them, they are excellent practitioners (or perhaps victims) of some fundamental American sensibilities. They are daring, imaginative questers journeying through rough but challenging territory—across the Kansas heartland to kill the Clutters, and then all across America as they flee. The American landscape as mediated by the Clutters and their farm community is classically noble ("a white cluster of grain elevators rising as gracefully as Greek temples are visible long before a traveler reaches them"), but is brought to life only by the killers: "Until one morning in mid-November of 1959 [the day of the murders], few Americans—in fact, few Kansans—had ever heard of Holcomb." Capote writes that, in 1959, "the last seven years have been years of droughtless beneficence"; the rejoinder is implicit: seven years of lean will follow—the seven years in which the killers are caught, tried, and then await execution; the seven years in which Capote, with Dick and Perry's assistance, works on capturing their story and exploring its implications. The landscape is charged, and at its most vital, as Capote follows Dick and Perry through it, foraging for equipment for the murder and later escaping into its complex labyrinth as they flee from Kansas. Dick and Perry can read the land, can live off the land; the Clutters' physical environment is stagnant—cluttered. Time and again, the two killers demonstrate how versatile their understanding of the local country is: Dick schemes elaborately and cunningly to cash bad checks to finance their journey, playing confidence games on shopkeepers and locals; in one instance, Perry poses as a

TRUMAN CAPOTE I 129 bridegroom, with Dick as best man, to win the confidence of a clothing-store clerk—a calculating, untraditional re-creation of the American "family." The epitome of Dick and Perry's fruitful interaction with the landscape comes in a touching scene involving two hitchhikers the killers pick up while they are on the lam: a young boy and his frail grandfather, on a torturous quest of their own to find their family and a place to settle. The two "couples" join together briefly and get along well. The boy and his grandfather finance their journey as resourcefully as do Dick and Perry: they collect bottles from the roadside and redeem them for the refund money. Contrary to what one might expect of cold-blooded murderers running from the police, Dick and Perry eagerly assist and join in the search for bottles, driving slowly through the vast Texas countryside and stopping to pick up empties: Dick was amused, but he was also interested, and when next the boy commanded him to halt, he at once obeyed. The commands came so frequently that it took them an hour to travel five miles, but it was worth it. The kid had an "honest-to-God genius" for spotting, amid the roadside rocks and grassy rubble, and the brown glow of thrown-away beer bottles, the emerald daubs that had once held 7-Up and Canada Dry. Perry soon developed his own personal gift for spying out bottles. . . . It was all "pretty silly," just "kid stuff." Nevertheless, the game generated a treasure-hunt excitement, and presently [Dick], too, succumbed to the fun, the fervor of this quest for refundable empties. Capote shows in this scene the challenge of mining the landscape, and its fecundity—the quartet eventually comes up with $12.60 (coincidentally close to the $12.73 Capote and Sook scrounged in A Christmas Memory), which they split, and which provides the starving questers with a banquet at a roadside restaurant. The travelers are living off litter, the

dregs of the landscape; but with its "brown glow" and "emerald daubs," this landscape can be as evocative, as beneficent, as any nineteenthcentury transcendentalist landscape portrait. As in James Fenimore Cooper's or Walt Whitman's visions of untamed country offering up plenty and adventure, Capote's adventurers, on the margin of society, appreciate and exploit the treasures of a familiar territory that has itself become marginal. The boy teaches the murderers some scavenging tricks, just as Natty Bumppo and the Indians shared with each other the secrets of the land, and this sharing, this appreciation and understanding of nature, becomes the basis of human communion. Perry and Dick, in fact, exhaust the American landscape they have been milking: their ultimate goal is a home in Mexico. Perry fantasizes about living in Cozumel, which is, according to a magazine article he had committed to memory, "a hold-out against social, economic, and political pressure. No official pushes any private person around on this island." From his memories of John Huston's movie The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Perry has latched onto the notion of prospecting for gold in Mexico. Ironically, Perry realizes that one must forsake America if one is to attain the quintessential^ American fantasies of individualism and instant self-made wealth in the mid twentieth century. Dick and Perry have vivid hopes and dreams— unrealizable, but for that reason all the more dramatic and enthusiastic. They seek to control their own destinies through their own initiative. Their approach may be demented and evil, but Capote essentially eschews any moralistic sensibility as he probes for the archetypal American narrative he sees lurking in these events. The moral vacuum of Capote's story (perhaps a legacy of his southern gothic and grotesque vision) evoked a stunned and furious reaction on the part of some: Stanley Kauffmann wrote in The New Republic (January 22, 1966):

130 I AMERICAN WRITERS It is ridiculous in judgment and debasing to all of us to call this book literature. Are we so bankrupt, so avid for novelty that, merely because a famous writer produces an amplified magazine crime-feature, the result is automatically elevated to serious literature? Hilton Kramer, in the New Leader (January 31, 1966), wrote that the book "is not what the language of fiction, the medium of a significant art, always is: the refraction of a serious moral imagination"; this "deficiency . . . stands out on every page." But most readers devoured the story, affirming it as compelling and important without stopping to think of its moral implications. This itself is a sign that Capote was right about the devolution, or irrelevance, of American morality. Perry's mother is a full-blooded Indian, Capote notes—perhaps the author sees this story as the Indians' revenge on the white usurpers. In any event, Capote seems to imply that the American ideal is catching up with itself, destroying itself, and that a society capable of producing people like Dick and Perry deserves what it gets. Their fantasies, after all, are simply those ingrained by their society: they go on their crime and murder spree because they want a little money, a good life, a way to celebrate themselves. Perry, especially, wants family and human communion, which elude him as, Capote implies, it had eluded the Clutters. If anything, Capote seems to view Perry as more thoughtful than the Clutters, because Perry at least realizes the nature of his deprivation and takes steps to do something about it. He dreams of setting up a kind of home with a friend—at times he thinks about doing this with his sister's family or with other friends from prison, but eventually he settles on Dick. Perry is doing exactly what Capote had always had to do—to search for some sense of communion, however untraditional, to overcome the bad hand that society had dealt him.

Capote's sympathies are with Perry, who is physically deformed (from leg injuries he received in a motorcycle accident) and who feels condemned to remain a social misfit. Capote has denied many critics' suggestion that on some level he was in love with Perry, having spent years visiting and corresponding with him before his execution. "I didn't love either one of them, but I had a great understanding for both of them, and for Perry I had a tremendous amount of sympathy," Capote told Lawrence Grobel. In his reportage, Capote scrutinizes the killers' letters, diaries, and psychiatric reports, trying to get as deeply inside their minds as he can, because he knows that this is where the story is, the journalistic scoop on the state of the American dream. Capote visits the two devotedly on death row, bringing back to the world their observations and impressions and seeming to envision them as the gurus, or philosophers, of their age. The Black and White Ball of 1966, which Capote organized as a celebration of the end of his seven years of work on In Cold Blood, marks an important climax in Capote's life. He had been catapulted into the public eye, where he would remain prominently for the rest of his life, unchallenged as a public icon and with his character firmly set. At the same time, his writing never again reached the heights it had up to that point; this realization made him increasingly depressed and self-destructive, psychologically and physically, as his addictions escalated out of control. Bruce Bawer, in "Capote's Children," explains the disappointment many in the literary establishment felt about Capote's writing after In Cold Blood: The appeal of much of this work has relatively little to do with its literary merits. Capote, in his zeal to write "nonfiction novels" and "nonfiction short stories," may well have thought that he was being faithful to "what is really true," but all he was doing, in actuality, was neglecting

TRUMAN CAPOTE I 131 his obligation as a literary artist to create, to order, and thereby to serve not merely personal and superficial truths but universal ones. It is an obligation to which Capote was attentive for so long, and which he fulfilled with such distinction, that his ultimate renunciation of it (manifestly well-intentioned though it may have been) is particularly disheartening. The author of In Cold Blood became a kind of popular media expert on crime and the mind of the criminal—"Then It All Came Down," an interesting short profile of Robert Beausoleil, a member of the Manson clan, features the same kind of incisive rapport with the murderer that marked In Cold Blood. In Handcarved Coffins, collected in Music for Chameleons, Capote revisits the territory he mapped out in In Cold Blood, exploring a series of unsolved murders. The pervasive compulsion (of the criminals, and of the detectives as well) is familiar ground. These murder cases are more intriguing and complex than the Clutter case, but the detective work is less successfully captured than in Capote's masterwork. Though Handcarved Coffins is subtitled A Nonfiction Account of an American Crime, Capote errs by contriving to bring this narrative closer to the realm of mystery fiction; his crisply eerie buildup milks the suspense of the crime drama, but what Capote misses here are the much more fascinating real-life implications of murderous evil that he had earlier captured so deftly. Capote's credentials as an authority on crime were also exploited in his collaboration on a 1972 television prison drama, The Glass House, and in a documentary on capital punishment, Death Row, U.S.A., which was so grim that ABC decided not to air it. To match the success of T Cold Blood, Capote had an idea for a different sort of masterpiece, a final tour de force that would stun the American audience. What endures of this idea is a loose but provocative story, published in in-

stallments in Esquire in the 1970's and then posthumously as the unfinished novel Answered Prayers. For this undertaking, Capote turned to his favorite subject, himself—the character of the writer in the fast world of Manhattan, the New York publishing scene, and the arena of the cosmopolitan elite. Some critical opinion holds that the work would have been devastatingly and resoundingly successful. James Michener predicted that Capote would be well remembered into the twenty-first century if he ever finished the book, Clarke wrote that the fragments "contain some of the best writing he ever produced," and Max Lerner asserted in the New York Post (April 28, 1976) that Capote writes, in what appeared of the novel, "as if he were the SaintSimon of our times, writing the annals not of the Court of the Sun God at Versailles, but of New York and Paris, of the salons and hotels and the Left Bank. 'This is how it was,' he seems to be saying to later generations." What came to be published of this work are three chapters (out of a projected eight or more) and a bizarre series of publishing anecdotes reflecting Capote's diminishing grasp on his life and his talent. To placate the demands of publishers for whom Capote missed over a decade of deadlines, he offered incredible accounts of lost or stolen chapters (Joseph Fox, his editor, speculates that Capote may have destroyed drafts of some chapters), and sometimes claimed to have finished the book and handed it over to Random House. The fragments that were published, in any case, were quite enough to cause a wellpublicized furor among those members of Capote's smart set whose lives were ruthlessly exposed, parodied, and dissected in the catty and contemptuous roman a clef. Capote in fact maintained in an interview with Grobel that the stories were "not intended as any ordinary roman & clef, a form where facts are disguised as fiction. My intentions are the reverse: to remove disguises,

732 / AMERICAN WRITERS not manufacture them.'9 Many of his closest friends cut him out of their lives, never to reestablish ties. Grobel writes that they "were suddenly slapped awake with the realization that a writer among them—especially one as sharp and perceptive as Capote—was dangerous. Doors he had spent a lifetime prying open were now beginning to close on him.9' In a loose picaresque narrative focused on a very Capote-like young writer, P. B. Jones, and a glamorous society star, Kate McCloud (a composite portrait of Capote's rich confidantes), Answered Prayers presents luridly detailed and smutty stories of male prostitution, cheap sexual encounters, literary politics, international social warfare, and celebrity foibles. In the decade before his death in 1984, Capote published two more collections of essays and stories that were competent and well received: The Dogs Bark and Music for Chameleons. Both feature the standard mix of cosmopolitan atmosphere, nonfiction portraits and essays, finely worked stories, and additional snippets of Capoteana; some of these were new; more were recycled. Music for Chameleons ends with an "intervew" by Truman Capote of Truman Capote, about the personality and experiences of, naturally, Truman Capote. The writer, at the end of his career, believes more firmly than ever that he has become his most interesting creation; the character he has created embodies everything else he has written. But Capote is not oblivious to the weaknesses inherent in the self-obsession he has nurtured. The interviewer tells the subject at the end, "I love you". The subject replies, "I love you, too." And then, TC: Zzzzzzz TC: Zzzzzzzzz TC and TC: Zzzzzzzzzzz The interviewer falls asleep. The subject falls asleep. TC and TC, interviewer and subject,

merge into the composite figure of "Truman Capote." Public and private faces of the authorcharacter, conjoined finally in one unified entity, as they tended to do throughout Capote's career, drift peacefully and harmlessly off to sleep, exhaustedly out of the limelight.

Selected Bibliography WORKS OF TRUMAN CAPOTE PROSE

Other Voices, Other Rooms. New York: Random House, 1948. A Tree of Night and Other Stories. New York: Random House, 1949. Local Color. New York: Random House, 1950. The Grass Harp. New York: Random House, 1951. The Muses Are Heard. New York: Random House, 1956. Breakfast at Tiffany's: A Short Novel and Three Stories. New York: Random House, 1958. Observations: Photographs by Richard Avedon; Comments by Truman Capote. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1959. A Christmas Memory. New York: Random House, 1966. First published in 1956. In Cold Blood: A True Account of a Multiple Murder and Its Consequences. New York: Random House, 1966. The Thanksgiving Visitor. New York: Random House, 1968. First published in 1967. One Christmas. New York: Random House, 1983. Answered Prayers: The Unfinished Novel. New York: Random House, 1987. Separate chapters first published in 1975 and 1976.

ANTHOLOGIES

Selected Writings. New York: Random House, 1963. The Dogs Bark: Public People and Private Places. New York: Random House, 1973. Music for Chameleons. New York: Random House, 1980. A Capote Reader. New York: Random House, 1987.

TRUMAN CAPOTE I 133 DRAMA

The Grass Harp. New York: Random House, 1952. House of Flowers. New York: Random House, 1968. With Harold Arlen. Trilogy. New York: Macmillan, 1969. With Eleanor Perry and Frank Perry.

FILMS Beat the Devil. Columbia Pictures, 1954. Screenplay by Capote. The Innocents. 1961. Screenplay by Capote and William Archibald. Truman Capote's Trilogy. Allied Artists, 1969. Murder by Death. Columbia Pictures, 1976. Featuring Capote.

WRITING FOR TELEVISION The Glass House. CBS, February 4, 1972. Truman Capote Behind Prison Walls. ABC, December 7, 1972. Crimewatch. ABC, May 8, 1973, and June 21, 1973.

BIBLIOGRAPHIES Bryer, Jackson R. *'Truman Capote: A Bibliography." In Truman Capote's "In Cold Blood": A Critical Handbook, edited by Irving Mai in. Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth, 1968.

Stanton, Robert K. Truman Capote, A Primary and Secondary Bibliography. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1980.

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL STUDIES Bawer, Bruce. *'Capote's Children." The New Criteriont 3, no. 10:39-44 (June 1985). Clarke, Gerald. Capote: A Biography. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988. Garson, Helen S. Truman Capote. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1980. Grobel, Lawrence. Conversations with Capote. New York: New American Library, 1985. Heyne, Eric. "Toward a Theory of Literary Nonfiction." Modern Fiction Studies, 33, no. 3:479-490 (Autumn 1987). Inge, M. Thomas, ed. Truman Capote: Conversations. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1987. Malin, Irving, ed. Truman Capote's "In Cold Blood1': A Critical Handbook. Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth, 1968. Nance, William L. The Worlds of Truman Capote. New York: Stein & Day, 1970. Reed, Kenneth T. Truman Capote. Boston: Twayne, 1981. Siegle, Robert. "Capote's Handcarved Coffins and the Nonfiction Novel." Contemporary Literature, 25, no. 4:437-451 (Winter 1984).

—RANDY MALAMUD

Raymond Carver 1938-1988

A

cally as a retail clerk or waitress, but never stayed long in any one job. He recalled her taking a couple of tablespoons of "nerve medicine" every morning from a bottle stowed beneath the kitchen sink. Home was a series of little twobedroom rented houses, not all of which had indoor plumbing. Carver and his younger brother spent much of their time outdoors, fishing and hunting. This was Carver's milieu during his youth and adolescence, images that provide the core of a number of poems and early stories. In an interview with Larry McCaffery and Sinda Gregory in the mid 1980's, Carver called his childhood "fairly conventional in many respects":

. T THE TIME of his death in 1988, Raymond Carver was widely acknowledged as one of his age's finest crafters of short stories. Carver's work, which began to reach a national audience when Esquire published "Neighbors" in June 1971, was the product of a shy, sometimes selfdestructive sensibility that drew its vision from the lives of the working poor among whom Carver grew up—and whose mode of perceiving he never fully left behind, despite the comfort and acclaim he enjoyed in the last decade of his life. Raymond Carver was born May 25, 1938, in Clatskanie, Oregon, a lumber town about sixty miles downriver from Portland. His father, Clevie Raymond ("C.R.") Carver, had migrated to the Northwest from Arkansas about four years earlier and had drifted around, finding work where he could, including a stint as a laborer on the Grand Coulee Dam. In 1937 C.R. had returned to Arkansas briefly, where he married Ella Beatrice Casey. The "big, tall country girl andthefarmhand-turned-construction-worker"— eventually to be joined by all of C.R. 's extended family—returned to the Northwest for work. In 1941 the family moved across the Cascades to Yakima, Washington, a fruit-growing region and center for the timber industry, where Carver's father found work as a saw filer in the lumber mill. Carver's mother worked sporadi-

We were a poor family, didn't have a car for the longest while, but I didn't miss having a car. My parents worked and struggled and finally became what I guess you'd call lower-middle class. . . . We didn't have much of anything in the way of material goods, or spiritual goods or values either. But I didn't have to go out and work in the fields when I was ten years old or anything of that sort. Mainly I just wanted to fish and hunt and ride around in cars with other guys. Carver's father told him stories about his Arkansas ancestors and also read Zane Grey to him. When he was old enough to seek out his own reading material, Carver took pleasure from

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136 I AMERICAN WRITERS magazines such as Sports Afield, Argosy, Outdoor Life, and Field A Stream. In junior high and high school he went weekly to the public library to check out whatever struck his fancy— books on the Spanish conquistadores, historical novels, books on shipbuilding, Thomas B. Costain, Mickey Spillane, Edgar Rice Burroughs. Although it was assumed that he would work at the lumber mill after graduation, Carver dreamed early of becoming a writer. At one point he wrote a story about fishing, and his mother rented a typewriter to help him get it into shape to mail out. Although nothing came of this first effort, Carver remembered the pleasure of imagining his manuscript out in the world, being read by somebody other than his mother. In high school Carver responded to a Writer's Digest ad for the Palmer Institute of Authorship, a correspondence course that he worked on diligently for a few months. Boredom eventually set in, and he never finished the course, but he received a certificate of completion anyway after talking his parents into paying the balance of the fee. In 1956, the year Carver finished high school, his father took a job at a mill in Chester, California. Carver worked with his father for about six months before returning to Yakima to be with, and soon after to marry, his girlfriend, Maryann Burk. By the time he was twenty, Carver was the father of two children (Christine, born in 1957, and Vance, born in 1958) and had begun the phase of his life in which he "always worked some crap job or another, and my wife did the same." In the essay "Fires" (1982, included in Fires, 1983), Carver writes of this period as the real beginning of his life, at least his life as a writer: Most of what now strikes me as story ' "material" presented itself to me after I was twenty. I really don't remember much about my life before I became a parent. I really don't feel that anything

happened in my life until I was twenty and married and had the kids. Added to the difficulties of trying to provide for a family was the determination of both Carver and Maryann to get an education. Their first step toward this goal came in 1958, when they moved to California so that Carver could enroll at Chico State College. Carver's hunger for education had been intense since, while working as a delivery boy the previous year, he had caught a glimpse of the literary life in the person of * 'an alert but very elderly man" who gave him copies of Poetry and The Little Review Anthology. "Bleary from reading," Carver wrote later, "I had the distinct feeling my life was in the process of being altered in some significant and even, forgive me, magnificent way.' * It was a moment * 'when the very thing I needed most in my life—call it a polestar—was casually, generously given to me." Just as potent was the impact of one of his teachers at Chico State—John Gardner, not yet a published writer himself, but with boxes of manuscripts and a passion for nurturing young talent. Carver's essay "John Gardner: The Writer As Teacher," first published in the Georgia Review in 1983 and reprinted in Fires, is a celebration of Gardner's willingness to offer lineby-line criticism and of his insistence on honesty of expression. Then and later Carver saw himself as "the luckiest of men to have had [Gardner's] criticism and his generous encouragement." Gardner gave him books to read—Hemingway, Faulkner, Chekhov, Flaubert, Joyce, Gass, Dinesen—and Carver felt "wild with discovery." "I tell you Maryann," he wrote in a quietly ecstatic poem (' 'Highway 99E from Chico,'' reprinted in Fires), that surely took shape during an exhilarated drive home after classes at Chico State, "I am happy." With Gardner's help, Carver founded a student literary magazine called Selection, and in 1960— after Carver had transferred to Humboldt State

RAYMOND CARVER I 137 College—Selection published Carver's first story to appear in print, "The Furious Seasons" (republished in 1977, very slightly revised, as the title story in his second collection of fiction). At Humboldt, Carver worked with two other writers who recognized and encouraged his talent, Richard Day and Dennis Schmitz. They helped him found another magazine, Toyon, in which "The Father" appeared in the spring of 1961. Carver published three other stories in Toy on (made accessible by William Stull in Studies in Short Fietion in 1988)—"The Aficionados," "Poseidon and Company," and "The Hair"—but by the time they appeared he had already placed a story in a nationally circulated publication, the Western Humanities Review (Winter 1963). The story was "Pastoral," later revised as "The Cabin" in Fires. In interviews Carver frequently recalled the day he learned that "Pastoral" had been accepted (the same day he placed a poem, "The Brass Ring," in an Arizona magazine): "It was a terrific day! Maybe one of the best days ever. My wife and I drove around town and showed the letters of acceptance to all of our friends. It gave some much-needed validation to our lives." Carver graduated from Humboldt State in 1963 and, with the meager assistance of a fivehundred-dollar scholarship, enrolled in the Iowa Writers Workshop. After a year, however, he was back in California, working as a night janitor in a Sacramento hospital and trying to write during the days. "When I went home at night," he wrote later in "The Autopsy Room" in Ultramarine (1986), my wife would say, 'Sugar, it's going to be all right. We'll trade this life in for another.' But it wasn't that easy. . . . Nothing was happening. Everything was happening. Life was a stone, grinding and sharpening. These were the years Carver characterized in the essay "Fires" as "ravenous," adding that he

would rather take poison than have to relive that period. Driven to write and yet kept from it by the "ferocious" demands of parenting and the need to bring in money, Carver concluded that "if I wanted to write anything, and finish it, and if ever I wanted to take satisfaction out of finished work, I was going to have to stick to stories and poems." The work accumulated very slowly, taking form whenever Carver was able to grab an hour or two for writing, frequently in a car parked in the driveway. The first significant fruit of this period was the story "Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?," published in the Chicago-based magazine December in 1966 and selected by Martha Foley for inclusion in The Best American Short Stories 1967. That year also brought a measure of relief from years of minimum-wage drudgery: Carver landed an editing job at Science Research Associates (SRA) in Palo Alto and moved his family into a house with a converted garage, where he could occasionally escape to write. In the spring of 1968 his wife received a stipend to study in Tel Aviv, so the whole family spent six months in the Middle East, and Carver absorbed material for the poems that appear in the third section of Fires. The attention that accrued as a result of his selection for the Foley collection, coupled with the publication in 1968 of a collection of poems (Near Klamath, issued by the English Club of Sacramento State), only strengthened Carver's conviction that he was warranted in giving time to writing. Yet by 1968, almost as if in rejection of these long-sought signs of success, Carver had given himself over to a mode of behavior that would nearly kill him before he was able to control it. "Alcohol became a problem," he told Mona Simpson during an interview for the Paris Review in the summer of 1983 (included in Fires). Saddled with an old car, a rented house, and serious debt—as well as the perennial "wagonload of frustration" from having neither pri-

1 38 I AMERICAN WRITERS vacy nor leisure to write—he "more or less gave up, threw in the towel, and took to full-time drinking as a serious pursuit." A great many of Carver's stories and poems offer a view of life as experienced through an alcohol-induced haze; he is, in fact, one of the finest chroniclers of lives wrecked by booze, from the hopeless and self-deluded speaker of "Cheers" ("They don't understand; I'm fine, / just fine where I am, for any day now / 1 shall be, I shall be, I shall be . . .") to the dead-ended couple in "Gazebo," all of whose important decisions have been "figured out" while drinking ("Even when we talked about having to cut back on our drinking, we'd be sitting at the kitchen table or out at the picnic table with a six-pack or whiskey") to the hapless guzzler of cheap champagne in "Careful" who must rely on his exwife to relieve him of his earwax. There is sometimes a certain despairing humor in these portraits, but beneath it is always the feeling that real ugliness can erupt suddenly, without provocation, as it does in the stories' 'Tell the Women We're Going," "A Serious Talk," "One More Thing," "The Bridle," "Vitamins," and in such poems as "Union Street: San Francisco, Summer 1975," and "From the East, Light" from Ultramarine. One of the most clear-sighted and devastating of these narratives is "Wine," a poem from the posthumous A New Path to the Waterfall (1989) about Alexander the Great's burning of Persepolis and drunken, impulsive murder of his friend Cletus. Carver's tone is sorrowful, perplexed, yet his gaze is unblinking as Alexander rises from his bed of grief to drink himself oblivious at Cletus' funeral. Carver frequently insisted to interviewers that his work was not autobiographical in a direct sense. Yet he acknowledged in 4 Tires" that most of his stories "bear a resemblance, however faint, to certain life occurrences or situations." He also indicated to Mona Simpson his preference for work, "whether it's Tolstoi's fiction,

Chekhov, Barry Hannah, Richard Ford, Hemingway, Isaac Babel, Ann Beattie, or Anne Tyler, [that] strikes me as autobiographical to some extent. . . . Stories long or short just don't come out of thin air." Tess Gallagher, in her introduction to A New Path to the Waterfall, in several ways invites readers to consider links between Carver's life and his work—most notably by calling attention to Carver's choice of a Robert Lowell line ("Yet why not say what happened?") as the headnote to one of the book's sections, but also by referring to "the poems about his first marriage, a n d . . . the havoc it had caused." In general, in his last three collections of poetry and in several late stories assembled in Where I'm Calling From (1988), Carver seemed to embrace a directness of expression in which the line between life and artifice dwindles to invisibility—works that offer, in Greg Kuzma's memorable phrase about Ultramarine, "experience delivered smoldering like new-born calves." But in earlier work as well, particularly the narratives of alcoholism, certainly a portion of the impact derives from the authority of Carver's having "been there" and having determined to write what he knew well. In 1970, as a result of reorganization at SRA, Carver was laid off. He was able to live for nearly a year on the strength of severance pay, unemployment benefits, and a National Endowment for the Arts Discovery Award. It was a good and fruitful time: his second collection of poetry, Winter Insomnia (1970), was published by Kayak Press in Santa Cruz, and he was able, for the first time in his life, to write for long stretches of time. During this year, nearly half of the stories for Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? (1976) were drafted. During this year, too, Maryann finished her degree. Carver's growing regional reputation led in the early 1970's to a temporary teaching position at the University of California at Santa Cruz and a Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford—

RAYMOND CARVER I 139 developments that boosted his self-esteem, but continued to bemuse him. He told an interviewer, Michael Schumacher, in 1987 that never, in my wildest imaginings, could I have seen myself as a teacher. I was always the shyest kid in class—any class. I never said anything. So the idea of conducting a class or having anything to say or being able to help students was the furthest thing away from my mind. In this period, too, he re-established contact with Gordon Lish, a friend from his SRA days. Lish had worked in a textbook firm across the street from SRA before moving to New York to become fiction editor for Esquire. One of Lish's first gestures in his new job was to ask Carver for stories—a request Carver immediately responded to, only to receive them back by return mail. Lish, however, was encouraging, and eventually took one, "Neighbors," for which Carver received six hundred dollars. Soon after, James Dickey, then Esquire's poetry editor, took several of Carver's poems for the magazine, and, as Carver wrote in tribute to Lish, "nothing, it seemed to me, would ever be the same." In a certain respect, Carver later observed of the period following his ascension to national prominence, "things had never seemed better." In 1972 he won the Joseph Henry Jackson award for fiction, and in the fall of 1973 he was invited back to the Iowa Writers Workshop, not as a student but as a teacher. In each of the years from 1973 through 1975, the annual Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards included stories by Carver ("What Is It?," "Put Yourself in My Shoes," and "Are You a Doctor?"). And in 1974 Capra Press of Santa Barbara published a limited-edition chapbook of his stories, Put Yourself in My Shoes. Yet the five or six years preceding his repudiation of alcohol on June 2, 1977, also provided some of the grimmest episodes in his life, interludes that even a decade later he would discuss only obliquely. Life after

fame, he wrote in "Fires," "soon took another veering, a sharp turn, and then it came to a dead stop off on a siding.'' To Mona Simpson he said simply, "On occasion, the police were involved and emergency rooms and courtrooms. . . . It's strange. You never start out in life with the intention of becoming a bankrupt or an alcoholic or a cheat and a thief. Or a liar." His account to Simpson of the teaching experience at Iowa emphasized extracurricular activities. John Cheever and he "did nothing but drink. . . . I don't think either of us ever took the covers off our typewriters. We made trips to the liquor store twice a week in my car." Two poems in A New Path to the Waterfall preserve images of Carver's domestic life during this period. In "Miracle" a husband and wife fly from Los Angeles to San Francisco after bankruptcy proceedings against them. The couple has been "turned inside out, crucified and left / for dead, . . . dropped like so much / garbage in front of the terminal." Fortified with "doubles" in the airport lounge before they board, they strap themselves in and continue drinking until the woman, without a word, begins to hit her husband, beating him on the head until his nose bleeds. As he is pounded, the man "protects / his whiskey. Grips that plastic glass as if, yes, / it's the long-sought treasure." She stops and goes back to her own drink (because her arms are tired, the man concludes); he looks out the window and then around at the other people in the plane while blood collects in his drink napkin, picturing bloody husband and wife, both so still and pale they could be dead. But they're not, and that's part of the miracle. All this is one more giant step into the mysterious experience of their lives. The plane lands, and the two are able to "walk away from this awful fix," but with the speaker's reminder that much remains in store for

140 I AMERICAN WRITERS them—"so many fierce / surprises, such exquisite turnings." In the other poem, "On an Old Photograph of My Son/' Carver remembers family life in 1974, when his son—here described as a "petty tyrant," a "jerk," and a "bully"—terrorized the household by his demands on his mother. What's for supper, mother dear? Snap to! Hey, old lady, jump, why don't you? Speak when spoken to. I think I'll put you in a headlock to see how you like it. I like it. I want to keep you on your toes. Dance for me now. Go ahead, bag, dance. I'll show you a step or two. Let me twist your arm. Beg me to stop, beg me to be nice. Want a black eye? You got it! Though the speaker is filled with "despair and anger" so potent it threatens to send him back to the bottle, an even worse sensation is the consciousness that his former wife, on seeing this picture, will react only to her son's "youth and beauty," will weep over the image, may even "wish for those days / back again!" During the academic year 1975-1976 Carver was on appointment at the University of California at Santa Barbara, but was unable to finish the year because of his alcoholism. The next year he was in and out of alcohol rehabilitation centers— "completely out of control and in a very grave place." In May 1977 he met Fred Hills of McGraw-Hill in San Francisco to discuss a contract for a novel. Carver had been drunk for two days before the meeting and had downed a half pint of vodka before driving into the city. In the wake of this meeting—which resulted in an offer of money despite Carver's condition—Carver drove hoi'ie, kept drinking for another few days, and then stopped for good. Alcoholics Anonymous was an indispensable aid during the first weeks and months; Carver sometimes went to two meetings a day as he began to recover. Some of the sensations of this period found expression

in "Rogue River Jet-Boat Trip, Gold Beach, Oregon, July 4, 1977" in Fires. Although the work Carver had published in Esquire in the first half of the 1970's led to a certain level of national attention, the bulk of Carver's stories first appeared in little magazines such as the Chicago Review, the North American Review, and Sou'wester, read mainly by people in academic circles. During the years Carver had been, as he put it, "devoting myself to drinking," Gordon Lish had continued to promote Carver in small ways, mainly by reading his work on the radio and at writers' conferences. In 1976 Lish had collected some of the stories and given them to McGraw-Hill, which published them as Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? The following year, the book received a National Book Award nomination, and Carver's stature was secured. Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? is Carver's most eclectic collection of fiction, the stories reflecting changes in style and subject matter over a fifteen-year span. The earliest, "The Father," is a product of Carver's undergraduate days, though it is closer in manner to his mature work than to other apprentice stories. It is a spare, slight narrative: a father listens numbly to a conversation about whom his baby resembles, the talkers concluding eventually that although the baby looks like Daddy, Daddy looks like nobody. The father's face at the end, as if to confirm this unsettling perception, is "white and without expression." The collection is peopled with the characters that became Carver's trademark—waitresses, a mailman, a vacuumcleaner salesman, mill workers, a mechanic, collectors of unemployment. Although a few of the stories are explicitly set in the rural Northwest, their primary terrain is simply the generic landscape of America's lower-middle class. It is worth noting, however, that the population of Carver country includes professional people as well—such as Arnold Breit in "Are You a Doc-

RAYMOND CARVER I 141 tor?," who carries a briefcase and whose wife travels as a buyer; Myers, the writer of "Put Yourself in My Shoes"; the student who reads Rilke to his attention-starved wife in "The Student's Wife"; Harry in "How About This?," a writer-actor-musician who travels with "a volume of plays by Ghelderode" in the back seat of his car; and Marian and Ralph Wyman of the title story, teachers whose relationship began in a Chaucer class. Most of the stories conclude with an implication that things will be worse hereafter. In "They're Not Your Husband," for example, an out-of-work salesman, Earl, visits the restaurant where his wife works as a waitress and overhears two men joke about her weight. Upset in an obscure way ("the feeling started in his face and worked down into his stomach and legs"), Earl imposes a diet on her, with the result that she loses weight and energy both. At the end Earl tries to extract confirmation of Doreen's increased attractiveness from another waitress and a stranger at the restaurant's counter, but instead he himself is exposed as a "joker." Doreen's slow shake of the head and shrug of the shoulders suggest that the scales have fallen from her eyes, and Earl's frozen smile in response to everyone's stare forecasts retreat and further emotional deterioration. A similarly baleful sensation pervades the end of "Nobody Said Anything," in which the young narrator's attempt to defuse a parental argument backfires as the mother and father furiously reject the mutilated steelhead salmon he has caught in a neighborhood creek. Harry and Emily seem to recognize at the end of "How About It?" that their dream of renovating their lives by renovating an old house in the country is doomed to failure, and the prayer that closes "The Student's Wife" seems unlikely to bring the couple much respite from the weariness that afflicts their moments of closeness or the increasing distance between their emotional worlds.

The possibility of positive change is a note sounded only occasionally in these stories, yet it is heard from time to time. The waitress who narrates "Fat" seems to take on emotional substance and to become dissatisfied with the insensitivity of others after her encounter with a customer with a gargantuan appetite who refers to himself as "we." Unexpected and mysterious sources of energy become accessible to the couple who imaginatively inhabit the identities of the people across the hall in "Neighbors" and to Myers as he listens to Mr. Morgan try to provide him with "material" for his writing in "Put Yourself in My Shoes." And at the conclusion of the title story, Ralph Wyman—"marveling at the impossible changes he felt moving over him"—appears able to relinquish the jealousy and feelings of inferiority that earlier prevented him from acknowledging and embracing his wife's sensual nature. Stylistically, the stories range from the rather full, expository technique of "Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?" and "Sixty Acres" to the dialogue-driven narrative mode of "What's in Alaska?" Typically, the language of a Carver story is pared down, curtailed, reflective of the mostly inarticulate people who are his usual subjects. Richard Schetnan has described Carver's voice (which we are to assume is his own although it closely resembles that of some of his fictional characters) as one that "attempts to gather, extemporaneously, as many details of a story as possible, but [that] also refrains from assembling those details into a complete and immediately meaningful whole to avoid the emotional threats and confusion that connections and relationships between ideas may present." This mode is evident in the following passage from one of the latest stories in the book, "Collectors" (first published in 1975), in which a man expecting to "hear from up north" is unable to prevent a vacuum-cleaner salesman from demonstrating his wares or

142 I AMERICAN WRITERS eventually from leaving with a piece of the narrator's mail: He went about his business. He put another attachment on the hose, in some complicated way hooked his bottle to the new attachment. He moved slowly over the carpet, now and then releasing little streams of emerald, moving the brush back and forth over the carpet, working up patches of foam. I had said all that was on my mind. I sat on the chair in the kitchen, relaxed now, and watched him work. Once in a while I looked out the window at the rain. It had begun to get dark. He switched off the vacuum. He was in a corner near the front door. The narrator's emotional paralysis permits only direct, indifferent observation of the course of events; short syntactical units, in which the gaze moves randomly from one element of the scene to another and in which all elements remain disjunct, are the primary narrative vehicles. In 1976 and 1977 Capra Press published two other collections of Carver's work—a third gathering of poems, titled At Night the Salmon Move, and Furious Seasons and Other Stories, a handful of eight stories not included in the McGrawHill collection. With the exception of the title story, all of these stories (some extensively revised and retitled) were later included in other compilations, and in the 1983 volume Fires, Carver culled "fifty poems that I wanted to keep" from the three small-press books. In November 1977, estranged from Maryann and his children and still very fragile after five months off alcohol, Carver met the poet Tess Gallagher at a writers' conference in El Paso, Texas. The following year, after Carver had been invited to teach at the University of Texas at El Paso, the two met again while Gallagher was traveling on a Guggenheim Fellowship, and their friendship took root. Early in 1979 Gallagher moved to El Paso, and in the fall they went to-

gether to Tucson, where Gallagher taught at the University of Arizona and Carver lived on his own Guggenheim. Gradually, as his strength returned over these years, he was able to resume writing, but he later told William Stull in an interview for the Bloomsbury Review (reprinted in Living in Words, edited by Gregory McNamee) that it was gift enough simply to have his wits back: *Td been brain-dead for such a long time. And suddenly I had this other life, another chance at things. And in this new life it wasn't all that important if I wrote or not. . . . I was patient, and I simply waited to see what would come along, if anything." What in due course came along were the stories in What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (1981), a collection that pervasively reflects the influence of Gordon Lish and that caused Carver to be viewed as the country's chief practitioner of "minimalist fiction," as critics and reviewers began to call it. It is also Carver's most violence-riddled collection, an assembly of dark narratives in which murder, suicide, sudden death, domestic mayhem, and mute but volatile fury are the rule rather than the exception. Lish's influence is evident in the unprecedentedly elliptical style of the work. Carver referred to it as "a much more self-conscious book in the sense of how intentional every move was. . . . I pushed and pulled and worked with those stories before they went into the book to an extent I'd never done with any other stories." In the Bloomsbury Review interview Carver attributed this impulse to both John Gardner and Lish, but particularly to the latter: "Gardner said don't use twenty-five words to say what you can say in fifteen. This was the way Gorden felt, except Gordon believed that if you could say it in five words instead of fifteen, use five words." In the essay "On Writing" (first published in 1981 as "A Storyteller's Notebook/' included in Fires), Carver also celebrated the tension-producing value of "the things that are left out, that are

RAYMOND CARVER I 143 implied, the landscape just under the smooth (but sometimes broken and unsettled) surface of things." These characteristics are all present in "So Much Water So Close to Home/9 in which the narrator, Claire, must assimilate the fact that her husband and three buddies have discovered the naked corpse of a young girl in the river adjacent to their fishing camp, but delayed contacting the police until the end of their expedition—this, and the fact that Claire's husband waits until the morning after his return to tell her what has happened. We intuit Claire's horror not through any direct expression of it, but through the clenchedteeth tone of paragraphs like the following: I was asleep when he got home. But I woke up when I heard him in the kitchen. I found him leaning against the refrigerator with a can of beer. He put his heavy arms around me and rubbed his big hands on my back. In bed he put his hands on me again and then waited as if thinking of something else. I turned and opened my legs. Afterwards, I think he stayed awake. The grimness characteristic of this volume is also evident in the way this version of the story ends. Claire attends the girl's funeral, vaguely menaced on her drive there by a man who pulls alongside her and looks at her breasts and legs. She returns home to find her husband drinking whiskey at the kitchen table. "I think I know what you need," he assures her, and begins to unbutton her blouse. Able to hear nothing "with so much water going," she capitulates, even urges him on, finding no resources in the face of his impulse toward power except her ability to please. The version of this story published earlier in Furious Seasons is twice as long as the version in What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. What Carver believed he could eliminate were mainly passages in which Claire mentally reacts to her husband's behavior, but the two versions

differ most markedly in their endings. In the earlier version, Claire, on her return from the funeral, expresses fear, to which her husband responds first with sexual aggression and then (when she is resistant) with physical violence. Two days of alternating repentance and belligerence follow, during which Claire seems gradually to bring her husband to an understanding of the dread and revulsion she has felt. This ending is not unambiguously hopeful, by any means, but it is less ghastly than the image of Claire compelling herself into submission, newly conscious of exactly how close to home the "water" is. Other previously published stories that appear in What We Talk About When We Talk About Love underwent the same process of paring, such as * The Third Thing That Killed My Father Off'' and "Everything Stuck to Him." In addition, in this collection Carver's attitude toward the characters seems more compassionate: he appears less willing than he was in the stories in Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? to exhibit their weaknesses in order to invite scorn. In interviews Carver often disavowed interest in irony, objecting to stories in which the author establishes collusion with the audience at the expense of characters. Still, in such early pieces as "The Idea," "They're Not Your Husband," "What's in Alaska?," "What Do You Do in San Francisco?," and "Signals," it is difficult not to feel a significant gulf between the implied values of the author and those of the narrator or protagonist. In contrast, in What We Talk About When We Talk About Love the ironic impulse surfaces clearly only once, in "Sacks." There, the narrator gradually assumes more and more grotesque proportions as he shows himself incapable of responding with understanding to his father's explanation of his divorce. At the story's close, the narrator remembers that he has left behind the small gift of candy his father had given him to take home to his wife, and his dearth of ordi-

144 I AMERICAN WRITERS nary human sympathy is confirmed in his reaction: "Just as well. Mary didn't need candy, Almond Roca or anything else. That was last year. She needs it now even less." Irony is often a humor-producing mode, and in 1979, in a long review of Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?, David Boxer and Cassandra Phillips argued that "humor, irony, and glimmers of the absurd affirm [Carver's] authority." In What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, however, the mood is somber: characters are not handled as opportunities for complicity between writer and reader, but rather as emblems of the ways in which life bears down hard on all of us. These characters find themselves caught in the grip of debilitating paranoia (Dummy in "The Third Thing That Killed My Father Off"), unconscious feelings of entrapment (Jerry in "Tell the Women We're Going," Duane and Holly in "Gazebo"), fear of death (Edith and James Packer in "After the Denim," the nameless mother in "The Bath"), or alcohol-induced rage (Burt in "A Serious Talk," L.D. in "One More Thing"). What We Talk About When We Talk About Love indisputably established Carver as one of the "true contemporary masters," in Robert Towers' words. Yet in an influential review of the volume in Atlantic Monthly, James Atlas, while praising the "bleak power" afforded by Carver's masterly narrative sense and "willfully simple style," objected finally to the "lackluster manner and eschewal of feeling.''("One is left,'' he complained, "with a hunger for richness, texture, excess." This theme was taken up by a number of other commentators during the 1980's, notably by writers for The New Criterion (a conservative quarterly edited by Hilton Kramer) and by most contributors to a 1985 special double issue of the Mississippi Review devoted to the subject of minimalist fiction. The works of Carver and others such as Ann Beattie, Bobbie Ann Mason, and Jayne Anne Phillips were taken

as a signal of retreat from the effort to articulate thought and emotion in language. Some went so far as to see this fiction as symptomatic of the neoconservative political temper of the country, a rejection of complexity, intellectualism, experimentation, and "the beauties of amplitude," in Joe David Bellamy's phrase. The Carver of What We Talk About When We Talk About Love was chided for a perceived inclination to revere the banal, to relinquish moral authority in his determination to render the lives of average people realistically. By the time such discussion reached its apex, however, Carver had already cast off certain of the traits that reviewers said distinguished his most clearly "minimalist" stories. His life had assumed an entirely new stability: in 1980 he accepted a permanent position in the writing program at Syracuse University, and he and Gallagher shuttled back and forth between teaching duties in Syracuse and writing stints in Port Angeles, Washington, Gallagher's hometown. After the manuscript for What We Talk About When We Talk About Love was in his publisher's hands, Carver wrote nothing for six months. Then came, as if from another realm of experience altogether, the story "Cathedral"—"totally different in conception and execution,'' Carver told Mona Simpson, "from any stories that [had] come before." I experienced this rush and I felt, "This is what it's all about, this is the reason we do this" . . . There was an opening up when I wrote the story. I knew I'd gone as far the other way as I could or wanted to go, cutting everything down to the marrow, not just to the bone. Previously, it had taken Carver years to amass enough stories for a collection, but all of the stories for Cathedral, published in 1983, were written in an eighteen-month period. Between these and earlier stories, Carver said he "felt the difference in every one." The frequently anthologized title story is the

RAYMOND CARVER I 145 clearest illustration of the departures in tone and thematic emphasis from What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. Initially, much is similar to earlier Carver: the attitudes, speech patterns, and preoccupations of the narrator, "Bub," recall the narrators of "Mr. Coffee and Mr. Fixit" and "Gazebo" and the suspicious husband Wayne who takes his wife out to an elegant dinner in "Signals." What first distinguishes Bub from these others is his sense of humor. He is not happy about hosting a male friend of his wife's—particularly a blind one, whose blindness is a source of both intimidation and intrigue. But Bub's grouchiness expresses itself in wryly amusing ways, as in his comment that "next to writing a poem every year," sending tapes to her blind friend has been his wife's "chief means of recreation," and in his suggestion that for entertainment they all go bowling. The comic note continues in Bub's description of their approach to dinner: We dug in. We ate everything there was to eat on the table. We ate like there was no tomorrow. We didn't talk. We ate. We scarfed. We grazed that table. We were into serious eating. More to the point, however, is the turn the narrative takes after dinner and an evening of increasing sleepiness and marijuana-induced disengagement. As a television documentary about cathedrals drones in the background, Bub suddenly wonders whether the blind Robert has any conception of the scope of such structures. Determined to try to convey something of their magnificence, he begins to sketch one on a shopping bag, with Robert's hand on top of his. Momentum gathers, until Robert finally advises him to close his eyes and just keep drawing. Bub does, and what results is a splendid moment of sympathetic identification between the two: "His fingers rode my fingers as my hand went over the paper. It was like nothing else in my life up to now."

Similar moments occur in several other stories in Cathedral. Many critics have drawn attention, for example, to the conclusion of "A Small, Good Thing," a much-expanded version of "The Bath," from What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. In the Cathedral version, a grieving young couple discover that the source of several unsettling telephone calls they have received in the wake of an accident involving their son is a baker, angry because they have not picked up the cake they ordered for their son's birthday. The two drive to the shopping center in the middle of the night and furiously confront the baker with the news that Scotty has died, whereupon the baker comes to his senses, apologizes, and tries to make amends by offering them coffee and hot rolls. "Eating is a small, good thing in a time like this," he says, and the three talk on into the early morning, the horror of Scotty's death at least temporarily alleviated by their having come together in this fragile, unexpected way. Such an ending would have been inconceivable in an early Carver story and perhaps exemplifies Carver's own sense that in these narratives he was "breaking out of something I had put myself into, both personally and aesthetically." A positive spirit also informs the stories "Feathers," in which the cavorting of an ugly baby and a peacock causes the narrator to feel' 'good about almost everything in my life"; "Where I'm Calling From," in which a kiss from a female chimney sweep and a memory of a happy interlude with his wife give the narrator courage to re-establish contact with the world outside of the alcoholic drying-out facility where he has landed more than once; and "Fever,'' in which the kindness and unassuming proficiency of a grandmotherly babysitter get the protagonist through a difficult time. Not all of the stories reflect Carver's altered outlook—several, in fact, are as bleak in their vision as any in What We Talk About When We Talk About Love—but the leaven of the four or five af-

146 I AMERICAN WRITERS firmative pieces sharply distinguishes the collection from those that preceded it. The same, more expansive spirit is evident in the stories in Fires. The book's tone is established by its epigraph, from William Matthews' Flood: And isn't the past inevitable, Now that we call the little we remember of it "the past"? For Carver Fires was a book of retrievals, a gathering of pieces that deserved preservation or renewal, a paying of debts previously not fully acknowledged. Five of the seven stories appear in earlier collections, two of them ("Distance" and "So Much Water So Close To Home") in both Furious Seasons and What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. Here, however, what was excised is restored, all of the stories are substantially revised, and several are retitled. "There's not much I like better," Carver told Mona Simpson, "than to take a story I've had around the house for a while and work it over again." Carver's afterword to the Capra Press edition of the book elaborates on his passion for "messing around" with his stories. Carver regularly produced ten or twelve drafts of each piece—sometimes as many as twenty or thirty— before relinquishing it into the hands of publishers, and the textual history of the published work confirms his proclivity for revision even after a story had appeared in a collection. Most clearly in the reminiscent spirit is "The Cabin," a new version of Carver's 1962 story "Pastoral." The early influence of Hemingway is evident here in the central image of a man trying to escape some sort of unspecified trouble (why doesn't he respond to questions about his wife, Frances?) by returning to a favorite fishing spot. But in the unexpected appearance of several boys in pursuit of a deer they have wounded, the story also nods in the direction of another influence, Flannery O'Connor. Mr. Harrold's

confrontation with these menacing intruders recalls moments in a number of O'Connor stories in which a character is brought up sharply by a reminder of his mortality, often delivered in grotesque or frightening forms. The two previously uncollected stories in Fires seem somewhat like exercises, "The Pheasant" an attempt at managing three points of view in a brief space, and "Harry's Death" an experiment in conveying a story behind the story the narrator overtly tells. In the aftermath of Harry's unexpected (and unexplained) death, the narrator begins seeing Harry's girlfriend, Little Judith, one of the pleasures of whose company is the thirtytwo-foot Chris Craft boat that Harry had bought with her shortly before he died. On the first extended trip the narrator and Little Judith take, Judith ("who couldn't swim a stroke") mysteriously falls overboard in the middle of the night, her disappearance unnoticed by the narrator and the Mexican crewman until the next morning. Says the putatively grief-stricken narrator: That is the truth, so help me, and what I told the police when we put in at Guaymas a few days later. My wife, I told them—for luckily we'd married just before leaving San Francisco. The tale is told from Mazatlan, "three months later," and now the narrator just plans to "keep going until the money runs out," sure that he is "doing things the way Harry would have wanted." The fiction in Fires, however, is secondary to four prose pieces and to a small anthology of poems. In the essays are to be found most of the precepts about writing that Carver learned from John Gardner and others and then passed along to his own students: "Get in, get out. Don't linger. Go on"; Ezra Pound's injunction that "fundamental accuracy of statement is the ONE sole morality of writing"; "No tricks. Period. I hate tricks"; "A little menace is fine to have in a story." Here, too, in "John Gardner: The Writer

RAYMOND CARVER I 147 as Teacher" and "Fires" are Carver's grateful tributes to his first mentor and to Gordon Lish, as well as his poignant but markedly unsentimental account of the impact of family life on his early years as a writer. Carver's memoir of his father probes even further back, to exhume and examine not just the bare images from those days, but also the power they gave to his narrative impulse and the control they continued to exercise over his attitudes and obsessions. Many of the poems collected in Fires bear the impress of William Carlos Williams, whom Carver idolized as an undergraduate. Carver liked to tell the story of writing to Williams to request a poem for the literary magazine he had started in Chico State and being thrilled when Williams sent him a signed piece, "The Gossips." The obligation is explicitly acknowledged in "Poem for Hemingway & W. C. Williams." The more pervasive, though unstated, influence on these poems of Carver's early and middle years may be the Robert Lowell of Life Studies (1959) and For the Union Dead (1964). The second section of poems in Fires comprises a single long poem, "You Don't Know What Love Is," a tribute to Charles Bukowski, also a forceful voice for Carver in those years. The year 1983 was a watershed for Carver— two books published, first place in the O. Henry competition for "A Small, Good Thing," a front-page notice in The New York Times Book Review, an interview in the Paris Review, and, most significantly, the Mildred and Harold Strauss Living Award of thirty-five thousand dollars a year for five years from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. This award freed him from the need to teach, an enormous relief for a man who had always found that role unnerving. (The clearest picture of Carver as an instructor is Jay Mclnerney's reminiscence in the August 6, 1989, New York Times Book Review: "The idea of facing a class made him nervous every time. On the days he had to teach he

would get agitated, as if he himself were a student on the day of the final exam.") Finding it increasingly difficult to work uninterruptedly in the house he and Gallagher shared in Syracuse, Carver determined to slip out of the media spotlight by moving to Port Angeles in January 1984. The Strauss prize had been intended to free Carver to concentrate full time on the writing of fiction, but as he settled into Gallagher's recently built Sky House, he found himself moved toward poetry. He wrote at least a poem a day, and sometimes two or three, for sixty-five days, and by the time the impulse had exhausted itself, he had the manuscript for Where Water Comes Together with Other Water. "I've never had a period in my life that remotely resembles that time," Carver told Michael Schumacher in 1987. "I felt like it would have been all right, you know, simply to have died after those sixty-five days. I felt on fire." After a lecture tour in Brazil and Argentina with Gallagher, Carver wrote more poems, so that when Where Water Comes Together with Other Water appeared in 1985 under the Random House imprint, the collection that became Ultramarine (published the next year, also by Random) was complete as well. In retrospect, the whole period seemed "a great gift," and Carver allowed that he would be happy "if they simply put 'poet' on my tombstone . . . and in parentheses, 'and short story writer.' " In 1985 Carver's poems appeared in two issues of Poetry, on the strength of which he won the magazine's Levinson Prize. In a brief piece in the seventy-fifth anniversary issue, reprinted in A New Path to the Waterfall, he acknowledged the powerful impression the magazine had made on him at a crucial moment in his development; the piece also quietly testifies to the pleasure he took in recognizing himself as one of the august crowd enshrined in its pages. Carver's late poems taxed friendly reviewers to develop a rhetoric of approval that simulta-

148 I AMERICAN WRITERS neously conveyed reservation about the astonishing degree of directness and the conversational quality of the language. "But are they poems?" Dave Smith wonders in a review of Where Water Comes Together with Other Water, evidently uneasy with "a tone which has the valueless ease and unprofound quality of ordinary talk." But after acknowledging that poet Carver at his weakest could be "maudlin, sentimental, clunky," Smith takes delight in "the feel of extraordinary experience" and in Carver's "unusual talent for poems about happiness." Greg Kuzma, in a perceptive and respectful response to Ultramarine, praises a voice unassuming and yet so empowered that one comes to look at it, to listen in it, for how close it can come to the truth without shaking or breaking, . . . poems both heavy with consequence, things taken head-on at full force, and yet fragile, light, gentle in their modesty, their refusal to pretend or puff up or become selfimportant. The "tombstone" motif in Carver's comments to Schumacher about writing poetry surfaces in a number of these poems, frequently enough to make one wonder if Carver sensed that the years remaining to him were few. In Ultramarine, especially, mortality looms: many poems are about the deaths of friends and acquaintances, and many ruminate on his own death. "Before long, before anyone realizes, / I'll be gone from here,'' intones the speaker of "The Cobweb," and in "Evening" a memory of "exceptional joy" is all the more intense for the speaker's being overwhelmed by a "longing / to be back once more, before I die." The sensation of impending death appears more than once, too, in Carver's late stories, most prominently in "Whoever Was Using This Bed," in which disturbing calls late at night lead Jack and Iris into conversation about "what I'd do if something ever happened to you." Presentiment may also explain Carver's

impulse to gather the best of his previous fiction, augmented by seven uncollected stories, in 1988 under the title Where I'm Calling From: New and Selected Stories. It was, in any case, a timely gesture. In September 1987 cancer was discovered in Carver's lungs, and he underwent immediate surgery. Months of slow recovery followed, but in March 1988 the disease reappeared as a brain tumor, and in June new lesions appeared on his lungs. During intermittent periods of relief from the illness, Carver not only saw his own fiction celebrated, but was confirmed in the confidence he had expressed the previous year (in a note for the Michigan Quarterly Review) that "the resurgence of interest in the short story has done nothing less than revitalize the national literature." His role in that revitalization was recognized in his being named to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, granted an honorary doctorate from the University of Hartford, and awarded the Brandeis Medal of Excellence. During the last months of his life, Carver worked with Tess Gallagher to complete one final book, and in these labors were concentrated the affection, mutual admiration, and passionately supportive energy that had characterized their relationship for the previous eleven years. The fruits of their happy alliance included a screenplay on Dostoevsky's life (written in 1982 for director Michael Cimino, published by Capra Press with an introduction by Carver in 1985), but were more clearly evident in frequent testimonials by both writers to the profound impact each had had on the other. "She has a wonderful eye and a way of feeling herself into what I write," Carver told Mona Simpson; Gallagher called the relationship "a beautiful alchemy . . . a kind of luminous reciprocity" in which everything she gave was returned in Carver's loving attention to her own work. Shortly after the return of the cancer, in June 1988, the two flew to Reno to be married—"as if we'd found an an-

RAYMOND CARVER I 149 swer to / that question of what's left / when there's no more hope," Carver wrote in the poem "Proposal." Many of the individual pieces in A New Path to the Waterfall had been completed before the unnerving developments of fall 1987, but in the glare of "What the Doctor Said," the book assumed a new shape. Gallagher's introduction to the volume, an account of the putting-together, is the most intimate view available of the fuels by which Carver's imagination was fired and of the intensity and particularity of their collaborative zest. It also highlights an influence that became increasingly important to Carver—that of Chekhov, passages from whose stories, rendered as Carver-like poems, are woven through the book in tribute to the integral role Chekhov's stories had performed in Carver's and Gallagher's spiritual survival. This device illuminates the conclusion of Carver's last story, "Errand," an account of Chekhov's death and an imagined aftermath. As the widow instructs the young man to carry news of Chekhov's death to the mortician, she adjures him to "imagine himself as someone moving down the busy sidewalk carrying in his arms a porcelain vase of roses." Listening to her, the young man is assumed into her vision, appropriates it (a transformation signaled by a leap to the present tense in the third-to-last paragraph), and is elevated by it as he proceeds on his errand. Awe begets love, and appropriation is its proper expression. Raymond Carver died on August 2, 1988. "Every great or even every very great writer makes the world over according to his own specifications," Carver wrote in 1981. Though his humility prevented him from saying so, that is precisely what Carver did, crafting a clear and startling vision of people and circumstances that the rest of us had somehow overlooked. The best analogue for Carver's work may be Walker Evans' photographs in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941)—not James Agee's gorgeous

and pain-filled narrative (though the gorgeousness and pain are there in Carver's stories too), but those stark, uncaptioned pictures. Who that looked carefully at them would ever see life the same way again?

Selected Bibliography WORKS OF RAYMOND CARVER POETRY

Near Klamath. Sacramento: English Club of Sacramento State College, 1968. Winter Insomnia: Poems. Santa Cruz: Kayak, 1970. At Night the Salmon Move: Poems. Santa Barbara: Capra, 1976. Where Water Comes Together with Other Water: Poems. New York: Random House, 1985. Ultramarine. New York: Random House, 1986. A New Path to the Waterfall: Poems. With an introduction by Tess Gallagher. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1989. SHORT STORIES

Put Yourself in My Shoes. Santa Barbara: Capra, 1974. Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? New York: McGraw-Hill, 1976. Furious Seasons and Other Stories. Santa Barbara: Capra, 1977. What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. New York: Knopf, 1981. Cathedral: Stories. New York: Knopf, 1983. Where I'm Calling From: New and Selected Stories. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1988. SCREENPLAY

Dostoevsky: A Screenplay. With Tess Gallagher. Santa Barbara: Capra, 1985. COLLECTED WORKS

Fires: Essays, Poems, Stories. Santa Barbara: Capra, 1983; New York: Vintage, 1984.

750 / AMERICAN WRITERS Those Days: Early Writings by Raymond Carver. Edited by William Stull. Elmwood, Conn.: Raven, 1987. MANUSCRIPTS AND PAPERS

Manuscripts and letters from 1978 to 1984 are deposited at Ohio State University. Papers from 1984 on are in Tess Gallagher's keeping. BIBLIOGRAPHY Stull, William L. "Raymond Carver: A Bibliographical Checklist." American Book Collector, 8:1730(1987). BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL STUDIES Atlas, James. "Less Is Less." Atlantic Monthly, June 1981, pp. 96-98. Barth, John. "A Few Words About Minimalism." New York Times Book Review, December 28,1986, pp. 1-2, 25. Beattie, Ann. "Carver's Furious Seasons." Canto, 2:178-182(1978). Bellamy, Joe David. "Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?" Harper's Bookletter, April 26, 1976. Boxer, David, and Cassandra Phillips. "Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?: Voyeurism, Dissociation, and the Art of Raymond Carver." Iowa Review, 10:75-90(1979). Brown, Arthur A. ' 'Raymond Carver and Postmodern Humanism." Critique, 31:125-136 (1990). Bugeja, Michael. "Tarnish and Silver: An Analysis of Carver's Cathedral." South Dakota Review, 24:73-87 (1986). Chenetier, Marc. "Living On/Off the 'Reserve': Performance, Interrogation, and Negativity in the Works of Raymond Carver." In his Critical Angles: European Views of Contemporary American Literature. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1986. Pp. 164-190. Eichman, Erich. "Will Raymond Carver Please Be Quiet, Please?" New Criterion, 2:86-89 (1983). Facknitz, Mark. "Raymond Carver and the Menace of Minimalism." CEA Critic, 52:68-73 (Fall 1989-Winter 1990).

Gallagher, Tess. "European Journal." Antaeus, no. 61:165-175 (Autumn 1988). . "Raymond Carver, 1938 to 1988." Granta, 25:165-167(1988). -. Carver Country: The World of Raymond Carver. Photographs by Bob Adelman. New York: Scribners, 1990. Howe, Irving. "Stories of Our Loneliness." New York Times Book Review, September 11, 1983, pp. 1, 42-43. Johnson, Greg. "Three Contemporary Masters: Brodkey, Carver, Dubus." Georgia Review, 43:784794(1989). Kuzma, Greg. "Ultramarine: Poems That Almost Stop the Heart." Michigan Quarterly Review, 27:355-363(1988). Lonnquist, Barbara. "Narrative Displacement and Literary Faith: Raymond Carver's Inheritance from Flannery O'Connor." Since Flannery O'Connor: Essays on the Contemporary Short Story. Edited by Loren Logsdon and Charles W. Mayer. Macomb: Western Illinois University Press, 1987. Pp. 142150. Mclnerney, Jay. "Raymond Carver: A Still, Small Voice." New York Times Book Review, August 6, 1989, pp. 1,24-25. Meyer, Adam. "Now You See Him, Now You Don't, Now You Do Again: The Evolution of Raymond Carver's Minimalism." Critique, 30:239-251 (1989). Robinson, Marilynne. "Marriage and Other Astonishing Bonds.'' New York Times Book Review, May 15, 1988, pp. 1, 35,40-41. Saltzman, Arthur M. Understanding Raymond Carver. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1988. Schetnan, Richard. " 4A Way of Trying to Connect Up': The Style of Raymond Carver's 'My Father's Life.' " Cimarron Review, no. 91:83-89 (April 1990). Shute, Kathleen. "Finding the Words: The Struggle for Salvation in the Fiction of Raymond Carver." Hollins Critic, 24:1-10 (1987). Smith, Dave. Review of Where Water Comes Together with Other Water. Poetry, October 1985, pp. 38-40. Solotaroff, Ted. "Raymond Carver: Going Through the Pain." American Poetry Review, 18:47-49 (1989). Stull, William. "Raymond Carver." Dictionary of

RAYMOND CARVER I 151 American Literary Biography: 1984. Edited by Jean W. Ross. Detroit: Gale, 1985. Pp. 233-245. " Raymond Carver." Dictionary of Literary Biography Yearbook: 1988. Edited by J. M. Brook. Detroit: Gale, 1989. Pp. 199-213. . "Beyond Hopelessville: Another Side of Raymond Carver." Philological Quarterly, 64:115(1985). Towers, Robert. "Low Rent Tragedies." New York Review of Books, May 14, 1981, p. 37. Vander Weele, Michael. "Raymond Carver and the Language of Desire." Denver Quarterly, 22:108122(1987).

INTERVIEWS Alton, John. "What We Talk About When We Talk About Literature: An Interview with Raymond Carver." Chicago Review, 36:4-21 (1988). Bonetti, Kay. "Ray Carver: Keeping It Short." Saturday Review, September-October 1983, pp. 2123. McCaffery, Larry, and Sinda Gregory. "Raymond Carver." In their Alive and Writing: Interviews with American Authors of the 1980s. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987. Pp. 66-82.

McElhinny, Lisa. "Raymond Carver Speaking." Akros Review, 8/9:103-114 (1984). O'Connell, Nicholas. "Raymond Carver." In his At the Field's End: Interviews with Twenty Pacific Northwest Writers. Seattle: Madrona, 1987. Pp. 76-94, 171-173. Schumacher, Michael. "After the Fire, Into the Fire—An Interview with Raymond Carver." In his Reasons to Believe: New Voices in American Fiction. New York: St. Martin's, 1988. Pp. 1-27. Sexton, David. "David Sexton Talks to Raymond Carver." Literary Review (London) 85:36-40 (1985). Simpson, Mona. "The Art of Fiction LXXVI." Paris Review 25:192-221 (1983). Included in Writers at Work, Seventh Series. Edited by George Plimpton. New York: Viking, 1986. Stull, William "Matters of Life and Death." In Living in Words: Interviews From The Bloomsbury Review, 1981-1988. Edited by Gregory McNamee. Portland, Ore.: Breitenbush, 1988. Pp. 143-156. Stull, William, and Marshall Bruce Gentry, eds. Conversations with Raymond Carver. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1990. —GARY WILLIAMS

Frederick Douglass 1818-1895

TJLHE. HE STORY OF Frederick Douglass, an escaped

out distinction by class or religion, race or creed. This ideal was eloquently articulated, as early as 1782, by Hector St. Jean de Crfcvecoeur, who asked himself, "What is the American, the new man?" and then answered:

slave who became an abolitionist orator, newspaper editor, writer, and adviser to presidents, is paralleled by the growth of the United States from the inconsistencies of its constitutional declarations about freedom through a succession of amendments that granted civil rights to African Americans and women. With every fiber of his being Frederick Douglass opposed the central problematic incongruities in the practice of American democracy: chattel slavery and racism. In practice, American democracy was extended only to white males, and Frederick Douglass devoted his entire life to eradicating the slavery of blacks and extending the vote to both blacks and women. One of his most powerful "sermons" against the oppression of African Americans was his 18S2 Fourth of July oration—an ironic rendition of the traditional kind of speech, usually delivered by prominent orators celebrating the virtues of the new country, among them the opportunity for disenfranchised immigrants to make a new beginning. For these people, the Fourth of July signaled the celebration of their release from bondage, of their emancipation from ghettos and other more subtle forms of European class and ethnic discrimination. In the United States, by contrast, these orators claimed, the visitor could find a veritable "melting pot" of races and ethnic groups, with-

He is either an European, or the descendant of an European, hence that strange mixture of blood, which you will find in no other country. I could point out to you a family whose grandfather was an Englishman, whose wife was Dutch, whose son married a French woman, and whose present four sons have four wives of four different nations. He is an American, who leaving behind him all his ancient prejudices and manners, receives new ones from the new mode of life he has embraced, the new government he obeys, and the new rank he holds. He becomes an American by being received in the broad lap of our great Alma Mater. Here individuals of all nations are melted into a new race of men, whose labours and posterity will one day cause great changes in the world. Frederick Douglass knew better. He knew that this idealistic millennial vision of the great society had not yet been realized in the United States. Between 1845, when Douglass published the first version of his autobiography, and 1895, when he died a celebrated American hero, American democracy functioned imperfectly, denying

153

154 I AMERICAN WRITERS freedom, dignity, and citizenship to its black population. Speaking on July 5, 18S2, in Rochester, New York, Douglass delivered a jeremiad against the hypocrisy of American democracy (in Blassingame, vol. 2), articulating the sins of the nation against African Americans, many of whom were chattel slaves in the Southern states, part of a vicious system protected nationally by the Fugitive Slave Act, part of the Compromise of 1850, a reinforcement of similar legislation that dated from 1792. Douglass begins by showing that the Fourth of July is the birthday of your National Independence, and of your political freedom. This, to you, is what the Passover was to the emancipated people of God. It carries your minds back to the day, and to the act of your great deliverance; and to the signs, and to the wonders, associated with that act, and that day. But for the slave in that same America, Douglass emphasized, the Fourth of July stood as a gesture of hypocrisy and cynicism, a reminder that only whites were free—and not even the whole race, for white women were also denied the franchise. To Douglass, speaking for his race, the Fourth of July was a day that reveals to [the slave], more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are to him mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy—a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. The strongly spoken message of Douglass' oration was heard around the world. By 1852—

the year Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin brought antislavery sentiment to a feverish pitch "at the North" in the United States—Douglass was himself a hero. He had been speaking on the abolitionist lecture circuit for a decade and had published, in 1845, his autobiographical Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself. This important contribution to the abolitionist cause contained a letter and an introduction by two leading abolitionists: William Lloyd Garrison, editor of the Liberator, the newspaper of the abolitionists, and Wendell Phillips, orator and leader of the movement. Garrison had encouraged Douglass to write an account of his life as a slave and his escape to freedom in the North. The power of Douglass' narrative is repeated in the flourishes of his oratory, and both his autobiographical writings and his hundreds of speeches and tracts show him to be one of the most articulate spokesmen for human rights in the nineteenth century. He denounced America as a reformer from within, while distancing himself from its cruel hypocrisies, always—as in his Fourth of July speech—citing the audience as "you": The existence of slavery in this country brands your republicanism as a sham, your humanity as a base pretense and your Christianity as a lie. It destroys your moral power abroad; it corrupts your politicians at home. It saps the foundation of religion; it makes your name a hissing and a byeword to a mocking earth. It is the antagonistic force in your government, the only thing that seriously disturbs and endangers your Union. It fetters your progress; it is the enemy of improvement; the deadly foe of education; it fosters pride; it breeds insolence, it promotes vice; it shelters crime; it is a curse to the earth that supports it; and yet you cling to it as if it were the sheet anchor of all your hopes.

FREDERICK DOUGLASS I 155 Douglass knew that America would never be "his" until the slaves were freed and everyone, all free citizens of an egalitarian country, was a voting member of a society in which all were equal. His was a remarkable vision, given the circumstances of his birth and youth. While he did not share the belief in passive resistance held by Henry David Thoreau and Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr., after him, Douglass advocated a united society, as King later did, with all races and peoples joined together in harmony. Douglass was a Romantic idealist in the best sense of the term. He prophesied greatness for the United States on the completion of its mission, but he denounced its current social order not only for its hypocrisy, but also for interpreting the Constitution so as to allow slavery. This essay will examine episodes in the life of Douglass that contributed to his development as America's leading abolitionist orator, and will examine his three autobiographical accounts, paralleling them with examples from his speeches and writings. Frederick Douglass himself extensively chronicled his own life, first, in the 1845 Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass9, then, a decade later, in My Bondage and My Freedom; and finally, in a very comprehensive and full retrospective account, published in 1881, The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, Written by Himself. In addition, African American writers and leaders have written biographical studies, notably Charles W. Chesnutt (1899), Booker T. Washington (1907), and Benjamin Quarles (1948). But the life of the subject is best told in his own words, as he examines the past from the perspective of a former slave who is now free— the usual point of view adopted by the authors of slave narratives—or, as in the 1845 narrative, from the perspective of an escaped slave who is not yet free. The story of Frederick Douglass is truly extraordinary; it is at once a personal tale of suf-

fering and human endurance and the story of America's evolution toward social and racial equality through the turbulent years before the Civil War when the democratic experiment was being watched closely by critics not only in the United States but also in Europe. Those who had read Crfcvecoeur's and Alexis de Tocqueville's assessments of America's political experiment now also read Douglass' narratives, in order to understand firsthand America's most serious impediment to realizing its democratic ideals. In this sense, Frederick Douglass became a representative American figure, a literary ambassador. Douglass expanded his 1845 account considerably in the 1855 version; this new version elevated the subject of the biography from the status of escaped slave to a more universal figure in the shaping of American affairs. This emphasis was even more prominent in the 1881 autobiography, which, after all, was written well after Douglass had achieved international prominence and in the wake of his having been an adviser and social acquaintance of Abraham Lincoln. When Ralph Waldo Emerson remarked in his Representative Men (1850) that "there is properly no history; only biography," he meant that the lives of eminent persons comprise the only true chronicle of human events, and that dates and battle statistics and political statements have less value than the way in which an individual can embody the values and attitudes of a generation. Frederick Douglass was that kind of "representative man," and his story expresses the conflicts and triumphs of his time. His first autobiography stands as the representative nineteenth-century slave narrative. Slave narratives are, by definition, accounts of the lives of victims, tales of unendurable suffering and torment that alert the reader to a counterculture present in America. The slave story usually follows the pattern of a "before" and "after" structure. Each narrative is focused on the experience of the protagonist, who narrates from the point of

756 / AMERICAN WRITERS view of a free person looking back on the experience of slavery. This structural movement from slavery to freedom, viewed from the perspective of hindsight, gives each narrative a curiously ironic tone: the writer searches the harsh reality of his or her personal experience in order to establish the conditions of slavery from which the later portions of the narrative will illustrate a blessed deliverance. In Douglass9 1845 narrative, however, the deliverance is incomplete— and, in 1845, he has not yet attained his later greatness. Rather, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass is a deeply personal account of human suffering and endurance, of triumph over adversity of the most intensely personal kind. All three accounts should be read as an evolving narrative, not unlike Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass, which Whitman began in an 1855 version and expanded and altered until his death in 1892. Both Douglass and Whitman were truly "representative men9' in the Emersonian sense of the word, but America in the nineteenth century did not properly recognize either, although Douglass certainly received attention as a representative of the emerging group of freed slaves. Moreover, Douglass' saga is representative of a tension pervading all slave narration: the paradoxical desire to tell the whole story and the necessity to immerse the narrator's persona in the events of the past, when suffering and hardship were paramount and freedom was only a dream. Most slave narratives were composed from 1830 to 1860, the period when the abolitionists challenged the legalized institution of chattel slavery. These accounts were not only intended to recall the cruelties of the past; they were also clearly designed to reform the institution, if not to end it altogether. Like most slave narratives, Douglass' 1845 book was the product of Douglass' composition and the editing of Garrison, whose agenda for reform has been thought to have set the tone for the work. This is clearly not the case. From the outset,

the narrative is a deeply moving, personal account of ascension. Most autobiographies commence with some kind of genealogical address to the audience. Benjamin Franklin begins his Autobiography, for example, by addressing it to his "Dear Son," William Franklin, then the governor of New Jersey, Franklin then attempts to establish his family ties with the past, with England, and with tradition. The slave's attempt to establish genealogical identity, however, is often prevented by a total absence of the necessary information. The Douglass' narrative offers a stark contrast to Franklin's opening genealogy. On the first page, Douglass writes: I have no accurate knowledge of my age, never having seen any authentic record containing it. By far the larger part of the slaves know as little of their age as horses know of theirs, and it is the wish of most masters within my knowledge to keep their slaves thus ignorant. I do not remember to have ever met a slave who could tell of his birthday. . . . A want of information concerning my own was a source of unhappiness to me even during my childhood. Moreover, if the slave is the illegitimate progeny of a white owner and a slave woman, his identity may be traceable only to the mother. Douglass suffered enormously over this: My father was a white man. He was admitted to be by all I ever heard speak of my parentage. The opinion was also whispered that my master was my father; but of the correctness of this opinion, I know nothing; the means of knowing was withheld from me. "The means of knowing" was of course his mother, who might have provided the young Douglass with sufficient information about his genealogical identity. But in this case, the whole process of retrieving the self by examining the past was frustrated by his lack of access even to his mother.

FREDERICK DOUGLASS I 157 My mother and I were separated when I was but an infant—before I knew her as my mother. . . . I never saw my mother, to know her as such, more than four or five times in my life; and each of these times were very short in duration, and at night. She was hired by Mr. Stewart, who lived about twelve miles from my home. She made her journeys to see me in the night, travelling the whole distance on foot, after the performance of her days' work. She was a field hand, and a whipping is the penalty for not being in the field at sunrise. . . . I do not recollect ever seeing my mother by the light of day. She would lie down with me, and get me to sleep, but long before I waked she was gone. Very little communication ever took place between us. Death soon ended what little we could have while she lived, and with it her hardships and suffering. She died when I was about seven years old. So Frederick Douglass, who was born Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey in February 1818, began life with very powerful memories of his loving mother and complete ignorance of his absent and mysterious father. Throughout the autobiographical accounts, Douglass seems to be searching for this lost father figure, the authority and mentor in his early life who stood only as a dream and an unfulfilled wish. Like most slaves, he assumed a name; he took his from a romantic figure he admired in Sir Walter Scott's The Lady of the Lake (1810). Douglass' emergence from adolescence into manhood was marked by several harsh episodes of transition. Early in his narrative, he tells of his first realization, at the age of seven, that he and the other members of his race were slaves. Mr. Plummer—a "slave-breaker" and overseer who was "always armed with a cowskin [whip] and heavy cudgel," would "cut and slash women's heads so horribly that even master would be enraged at his cruelty, and would threaten to whip

him if he did not mind himself'—whipped Douglass' young aunt mercilessly: He would at times seem to take great pleasure in whipping a slave. I have often been awakened at the dawn of day by the most heart-rending shrieks of an aunt of mine, whom he used to tie up to a joist, and whip upon her naked back till she was literally covered with blood. No words, no tears, no prayers, from his gory victim, seemed to move his iron heart from its bloody purpose. The louder she screamed, the harder he whipped; and where the blood ran fastest, there he whipped longest. He would whip her to make her scream, and whip her to make her hush; and not until overcome by fatigue, would he cease to swing the blood-clotted cowskin. The 1845 narrative, like many slave narratives, operates on two levels simultaneously. The interior narrative, like a bildungsroman, recounts the narrator's growth from youth to adulthood as he comes to terms with the environment external to his developing self. But the narrative also addresses larger, external issues. Graphic scenes like the brutal whipping of Douglass' aunt alert the reading audience to the evils of slavery as an institution as well as recall an event in the life of the protagonist. Douglass offers a retrospective commentary on this scene, clarifying its personal and sociological purposes: I remember the first time I ever witnessed this horrible exhibition. I was quite a child, but I well remember it. I shall never forget it whilst I remember anything. It was the first of a long series of such outrages, of which I was doomed to be a witness and participant. It struck me with awful force. It was the blood-stained gate, the entrance to the hell of slavery, through which I was about to pass. It was a most terrible spectacle. I wish I could commit to paper the feelings with which I beheld it. ... I was so terrified and horrorstricken at the sight, that I hid myself in a closet,

158 I AMERICAN WRITERS and dared not venture out till long after the bloody transaction was over. I expected it would be my turn next. . . . I had never seen anything like it before. Some of the emotional force of this scene derives from the displacement of the violent and mysterious circumstances of his own conception, a connection suggested by the figure of "the bloodstained gate." An association between these traumas, between his physical birth into slavery and his spiritual and intellectual awakening to his slave condition, is thus forged by his conflation of the two events in his memory. A second crucial formative event follows the whipping of his aunt, when Douglass is well immersed in the life of the slave, belonging to the Aulds of Baltimore. He writes: Very soon after I went to live with Mr. and Mrs. Auld, she very kindly commenced to teach me the A, B, C. After I had learned this, she assisted me in learning to spell words of three or four letters. Just at this point in my progress, Mr. Auld found out what was going on, and at once forbade Mrs. Auld to instruct me further, telling her, among other things, that it was unlawful, as well as unsafe, to teach a slave to read. To use his own words, further, he said, "If you give a nigger an inch, he will take an ell ... If you teach that nigger . . . how to read, there would be no keeping him. It would forever unfit him to be a slave. He would at once become unmanageable, and of no value to his master. As to himself, it could do him no good, but a great deal of harm. It would make him discontented and unhappy." . . . I now understood what had been to me a most perplexing difficulty—to wit, the white man's power to enslave the black man. It was a grand achievement, and I prized it highly. From that moment, I understood the pathway from slavery to freedom. In these passages, we find two hallmarks of Douglass' style: first, the moment of epiphany,

when out of his life experience emerges a recognition that is universal and historic; second, the direct address to the reading audience, which clarifies the philosophical significance of the account of his life. Douglass shows clearly that the gaining of freedom is linked to achievement of literacy, because all three of his narratives—like other slave narratives—carry the burden of bearing witness to the truth, of the past through an act of writing, using language that so often is inadequate to the task. Douglass is attempting, simultaneously, to resist his past and to recapture it in a literary narrative he has had to produce without formal education and with little assistance. Indeed, the veracity and credibility of his narrative had to be reinforced in prefaces written by the white abolitionists Wendell Phillips and William Lloyd Garrison. Mr. Auld was indeed correct: Douglass' becoming literate was indeed his pathway to freedom, enabling him, in his own words, "to write [his] own pass." Toward the end of his narrative, Douglass recalls his understanding of the complex relationships between the fulfillment of the self, the achievement of freedom, and the gaining of literacy. Literacy gained through struggle is remembered even more vividly as liberation. With Douglass, the liberation of the body, the spirit, and the intellect are interconnected. For most slave narrators, the gaining of literacy was overwhelming. The humble apologias that preface antebellum slave narratives are more than conventions of style; rather, they are often sincere statements of doubt and inadequacy, statements of the powerlessness felt by the narrators in the face of their task of communicating truth to a predominantly white audience whom they wish to convince of the illegality, injustice, and brutal cruelty of chattel slavery. This frustration is coupled with the anger of the freed slaves as they recall the past "selves" from which they have been delivered. This tension compels the writers to powerful declarations of selfhood that contrast with the pat-

FREDERICK DOUGLASS I 159 terns of oppression and suffering that characterize the past. All of the slave narratives, and Douglass* narratives in particular, contain episodes illustrating the cruelty of white masters, as the narrator either witnesses or experiences torture and abuse by owners. These graphic episodes provide another characteristic of the slave narrative: the depiction of the white culture's attempts to dominate and repress the slave self through physical torture. Whippings were not merely designed to cause pain; they were also used to reduce the slave psychologically to a state of total obedience and humility. As one central purpose of autobiographical writing is to create for the reader a clear sense of the subject's identity, the slave narrators face the enormous task of relating how they have emerged from a state of abject misery into their present free and vocal state of being. Douglass' early identity was linked to a family he did not even know. Like many slaves, he had to endure the double jeopardy of being both servant and child to his master. Of the mulatto product of a white father and a black slave mother he observes: Such slaves invariably suffer greater hardships, and have more to contend with, than others. They are, in the first place, a constant offence to their mistress. She is ever disposed to find fault with them; they can seldom do anything to please her; she is never better pleased than when she sees them under the lash, especially when she suspects her husband of showing to his mulatto children favors which he withholds from his black slaves. The master is frequently compelled to sell this class of slaves, out of deference to the feelings of his white wife; and, cruel as the deed may strike anyone to be, for a man to sell his own children to human flesh-mongers, it is often the dictate of humanity for him to do so; for, unless he does this, he must not only whip them

himself, but must stand by and see one white son tie up his brother, of but a few shades darker complexion than himself, and ply the gory lash to his naked back; and if he lisp one word of disapproval, it is set down to his paternal partiality, and only makes a bad matter worse, both for himself and the slave whom he would protect and defend. This passage from the 1845 narrative exemplifies a hallmark of Douglass' writing: the universalizing of his personal circumstances. In the later versions of his autobiography, the expansion of a personal incident or moment to a universal, even philosophical, conclusion, is everywhere apparent. When still in his teens, Douglass was sent by his master, Thomas Auld, to Edward Covey, a notorious slave-breaker. Slave-breakers like Edward Covey were an essential part of the complex institution of slavery; their brutality usually exceeded that found on the plantations themselves. Operating small concentration camps for defiant slaves, they meted out punishment for disobedience and usually returned slaves to their masters externally, at least, docile and compliant, regardless of what the slaves might have actually felt. This process did not work with Douglass, and the recounting of his experience with Covey occupies a central place in each of the three autobiographies. For almost one full year, Douglass endured weekly whippings for no apparent reason and was worked mercilessly until his strength was almost entirely sapped. After one particularly brutal assault and whipping, Douglass left for his master's place, at great risk to himself, and sought refuge in his master's protection from Covey's brutal inhumanity. But Auld sided with Covey, and returned Douglass to the camp. He writes in the 1881 narrative: My last hope had been extinguished. My master, who I did not venture to hope would protect me as a man, had now refused to protect me as his

160 I AMERICAN WRITERS property, and had cast me back, covered with reproaches and bruises, into the hands of one who was a stranger to that mercy which is the soul of the religion he professed. When Douglass finally returned, Covey attacked him and tried to flog him. But Douglass did not submit. I was resolved to fight, and what was better still, I actually was hard at it. The fighting madness had come upon me, and I found my strong fingers firmly attached to the throat of the tyrant, as heedless of consequences, at the moment, as if we stood as equals before the law. The very color of the man was forgotten. There were many observers of the confrontation, and Covey called to a succession of people for assistance, including his slave woman, Caroline. All refused, and Douglass prevailed. At length (two hours had elapsed) the contest was given over. Letting go of me, puffing and blowing at a great rate, Covey said: "Now, you scoundrel, go to your work; I would not have whipped you half so hard if you had not resisted." The fact was, he had not whipped me at all. He had not in all the scuffle, drawn a single drop of blood from me. I had drawn blood from him, and should even without this satisfaction have been victorious, because my aim had not been to injure him, but to prevent his injuring me. During the whole six months I lived with Covey after this transaction, he never again laid the weight of his finger on me in anger. Again, Douglass elaborates the importance of this crucial incident in his early life in relation to his evolution as a free American and a public figure. In the 1881 Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, he views the event not in the isolation of the moment, but as the turning point in his life. With characteristic honesty and directness

he articulates the developmental significance of the confrontation, elaborating on the theme introduced in his 1845 narrative: This battle with Mr. Covey, undignified as it was and as I fear my narration of it is, was the turning-point in my "life as a slave." It rekindled in my breast the smouldering embers of liberty. It brought up my Baltimore dreams, and revived a sense of my own manhood. I was a changed being after that fight. I was nothing before—I was a man now. It recalled to life my crushed self-respect, and my self-confidence, and inspired me with a renewed determination to be a free man. A man without force is without the essential dignity of humanity. Human nature is so constituted, that it cannot honor a helpless man, though it can pity him, and even this it cannot do long if signs of power do not arise. . . . It was a resurrection from the dark and pestiferous tomb of slavery, to the heaven of comparative freedom. I was no longer a servile coward, trembling under the frown of a brother worm of the dust, but my long-cowed spirit was roused to an attitude of independence. I had reached the point at which I was not afraid to die. This spirit made me a freeman in fact, though I still remained a slave inform. When a slave cannot be flogged, he is more than half free. Douglass here universalizes the episode, compares his resurrection to Christ's, and adopts the rhetorical strategy of the Indian captivity narrative. He also associates manhood with the willingness to fight. He was to return to this theme as a central argument in support of the enlistment of black soldiers during the Civil War. In all three of Douglass' accounts, the desire for personal freedom is the informing principle of the narrative. The definition of the narrative persona is directly linked to the narrator's impulse for and movement toward personal freedom. This conflation of the desire for freedom

FREDERICK DOUGLASS I 161 and the identity of the subject pervades all slave narratives; indeed, the power of this central theme governs one of the most complex paradoxes in all slave autobiography. As William Andrews, John Sekora, Annette Niemtzow, and other critics have observed, the slave narrators are compelled to recall their former states, their former selves, even as they have reached "the promised land" of freedom and have achieved that purpose toward which the entire objective of their experience has been directed. Niemtzow writes in 'The Problematic Self in Autobiography: The Example of the Slave Narrative," 'The slave, happily ceasing to be a slave, describes his or her slave self to preserve it just as it is about to cease to be a condition under which the self lives." This tension between the narrator and the narrator's former self as it is represented in the narrative is intensified in slave narration because the "before" and "after" structure of these documents clearly shows an evolutionary development from servile humility to the power of emancipation, and it is particularly important when the narrator provides such clear examples of the moments of transformation as does Douglass in the account of his confrontation with Covey. Thus these episodes assume an epic dimension, and they give the subject mythic proportions by showing the formative development of an already established American hero. This "turning point" led to the immediate and rapid development of Douglass as the central subject. After his years with Covey, Douglass, though technically still the slave of Auld, was hired out to a succession of surrogate masters, including the relatively gentle William Freeland, William Gardner, and Walter Price, while he worked as a ship's caulker and perfected his trade. The burning urge to be free continued to intensify, as Auld pocketed the earnings of Douglass' rigorous labor. As he had earlier discovered the link between literacy and freedom, Douglass now began to understand how a man's self-esteem was

coupled with his work and the earning of wages for his labor. He wrote in The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass: To make a contented slave, you must make a thoughtless one. It is necessary to darken his moral and mental vision, and, as far as possible, to annihilate his power of reason. He must be able to detect no inconsistencies in slavery. The man who takes his earnings must be able to convince him that he has a perfect right to do so. It must not depend upon mere force—the slave must know no higher law than his master's will. The whole relationship must not only demonstrate to his mind its necessity, but its absolute rightfulness. If there be one crevice through which a single drop can fall, it will certainly rust off the slave's chain. Always the leader of his peers, Douglass developed and implemented an escape plot, departing from Baltimore, slavery, and servitude on September 3, 1838. He was assisted in his escape by Anna Murray, the free black woman he would later marry. Disguised as a sailor and carrying forged papers, Douglass took the train from Baltimore to the Susquehanna River, which he crossed by ferry to Wilmington, Delaware; from there he took a boat to Philadelphia. One day after he had left Baltimore he arrived in New York City, and he was married within the month. These details were withheld from Douglass' reading public until 1873 (when he divulged them in a Philadelphia speech) because he did not wish to endanger his allies. Technically an escaped slave, Douglass found life "at the North" also disrupted by racial prejudice. Settling in New Bedford, Massachusetts, he sought work as a ship's caulker but soon found that the other caulkers objected to working with a black man, so he performed common labor. It was at this point in his life, sometime in 1838 or 1839, that Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey changed his name to Frederick Douglass. In

762 / AMERICAN WRITERS 1841 the Douglass family moved to Lynn, Massachusetts, and then to Rochester, New York, in 1847. During this decade, Douglass joined forces with William Lloyd Garrison's abolitionist movement, made hundreds of speeches on the lecture circuit for the antislavery cause, and published his Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845). He was still a slave, but he was living in comparative freedom and enjoyed increasing prominence as a spokesman for the antislavery cause. Douglass' marriage to Anna Murray was apparently happy, and it lasted forty-four years. The union produced five children: Rosetta (born June 24, 1839); Lewis Henry (born October 9, 1840); Frederick, Jr. (born March 3,1842); Charles Remond (born October 21, 1844); and Annie (born March 22,1849). The parents' love for each other extended to the children, who enjoyed close relationships with them. But in August 1882 Anna Douglass suffered some kind of paralysis for several weeks and then died. Douglass remained close to his children and continued to help them financially. In 1884 he married Helen Pitts, his secretary, who was white. Although many objected to the marriage, for Douglass it not only was a second successful and loving relationship but represented his vision of color-blind harmony. As W. E. B. DuBois writes, "he laughingly remarked that he was quite impartial: his first wife 'was the color of my mother, and the second, the color of my father.' '' Douglass thus enjoyed two extremely happy marriages. Douglass' domestic life was tranquil and stable; his public life demanded much travel, best chronicled in the 1881 autobiography The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, Written by Himself. A life-long supporter of women's rights as well as of emancipation and racial harmony, he became one of the century's most powerful speakers and writers. On the day he died, February 20,1895, he had attended a women's rights convention.

The career of Frederick Douglass as an orator, writer, editor, and public figure commenced almost immediately after his arrival in the North in 1838. In 1841 Douglass attended a convention of the Anti-Slavery Society on Nantucket; there he not only associated with abolitionists, whose sentiments he shared, but was also able to speak to the convention, inaugurating an oratorical career that would eventually take him on a lecture tour of Great Britain from 1845 to 1847, and to the 1848 Women's Rights Convention in Seneca Falls, New York, where he spoke against slavery and against denying the vote to blacks and women. Several themes are prominent in his speeches and his writings, all of which were crafted with precision and wrought with an exactitude that he demanded not only of himself, but also of the contributors to his newspapers, The North Star (founded in 1847) and Frederick Douglass9 Paper (founded in 1851). Douglass found his most effective literary and oratorical voice in the polemic or jeremiad, a sermon form in which the speaker condemns contemporary evil and advocates change. (The term * 'jeremiad" refers to the ancient Hebrew prophet Jeremiah, who condemned the sins of Israel and advocated a return to God's moral demands.) The pervasive themes in Douglass' work include: freedom as a natural and inalienable right; the need for political activism as a means of effecting change in society; the moral offense represented by slavery in any form; the rights of women as equals under the law; and the necessity for the equality of all citizens regardless of race, religion, or gender. Douglass was at least a century ahead of his time in arguing eloquently for the civil rights that are only now being implemented as laws in our society. He stood firmly against racism in all its manifestations. He was frequently forced to accept "segregation" even in the North, and his indignation rose to heated anger in his recollection of these episodes, as in

FREDERICK DOUGLASS I 163 the following passage from The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass: My treatment in the use of public conveyances about these times was extremely rough, especially on the Eastern Railroad, from Boston to Portland. On that road, as on many others, there was a mean, dirty, and uncomfortable car set apart for colored travelers called the Jim Crow car. Regarding this as the fruit of slaveholding prejudice and being determined to fight the spirit of slavery wherever I might find it, I resolved to avoid this car, though it sometimes required some courage to do so, ... and sometimes, I was soundly beaten by conductor and brake men. It is important to note that Douglass bases his objection to the Jim Crow car not only on its physical condition but on the tradition of segregation by race, the implication that one race is essentially different from another. Proslavery racism in both the North and the South usually subscribed to the polygenetic theory of evolution, which held that the many races represented on earth were evolved from diverse original races at the time of creation. The antislavery abolitionists usually argued a monogenetic theory, which held that all races were essentially the same because the origin of the species was monogenetic rather than polygenetic. There were many variations on these basic ideas, but Douglass firmly believed in the essential social and racial equality of all and rejected as evil nonsense arguments for the racial inferiority of blacks. One such argument, curiously, came from the mouth of Abraham Lincoln, who, debating with Stephen A. Douglas during the congressional election campaign of 18S8, attempted to show that blacks and whites could not live in harmony together. Although Lincoln always opposed slavery as a moral evil, he was in direct conflict with Douglass in what he said about race relations: I am not, nor ever have been in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality

of the white and black races . . . I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race. In fairness to Lincoln, who pushed the Emancipation Proclamation through Congress in January 1863, and who was here fighting for his political life, it is important to note that he often wrote about his abhorrence of the institution of slavery, a position which Douglass endorsed. Douglass reached some of his most eloquent moments in his denunciation of racism, such assumptions about the inferiority of blacks as that endorsed by Lincoln—and, before him, by Thomas Jefferson. Douglass wrote, in the North American Review of June 1881, a stunning essay called "The Color Line," which displays his rhetorical powers fully. A philosophical treatise of high merit, "The Color Line" (in Foner, vol. 4) states the case against racism in both moral and logical terms: Few evils are less accessible to the force of reason, or more tenacious of life and power, than a long-standing prejudice. It is a moral disorder, which creates the conditions necessary to its own existence, and fortifies itself by refusing all contradiction. It paints a hateful picture according to its own diseased imagination, and distorts the features of the fancied original to suit the portrait. Douglass alerts his reader to his scholarly and learned understanding of the history of racial

164 I AMERICAN WRITERS prejudice by tracing examples from ancient and English history; however, he reserved the full force of his argument against racism for the prejudice to which African Americans were subjected: Of all the races and varieties of men which have suffered from this feeling, the colored people of this country have endured most. They can resort to no disguises which will enable them to escape its deadly aim. They carry in front the evidence which marks them for persecution. They stand at the extreme point of difference from the Caucasian race, and their African origin can be instantly recognized, though they may be several removes from the typical African race. They may remonstrate like Shylock—"Hath not a Jew eyes? hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, wanned and cooled by the same summer and winter, as a Christian is?"—but such eloquence is unavailing. They are Negroes—and that is enough, in the eye of this unreasoning prejudice, to justify indignity and violence. In nearly every department of American life they are confronted by this insidious influence. It fills the air. It meets them at the workshop and factory, when they apply for work. It meets them at the church, at the hotel, at the ballot-box, and worst of all, it meets them in the jury-box. . . . When this evil spirit is judge, jury, and prosecutor, nothing less than overwhelming evidence is sufficient to overcome the force of unfavorable presumptions. Everything against the person with the hated color is promptly taken for granted; while everything in his favor is received with suspicion and doubt. Douglass had himself experienced many forms of prejudice because of his race, from the public-conveyance problem in Boston and New England to segregated seating in houses of worship, particularly in New Bedford, where he therefore

affiliated loosely with the African Methodist Episcopal Zionist church. A deeply religious man who often quoted scripture along with Shakespeare, he attacked the institutional Christian church for its segregated practices. In "The Color Line," he devastates the opposing argument with the practiced skills of a mature debater: But is this color prejudice the natural and inevitable thing it claims to be? If it is so, then it is utterly idle to write against it, preach, pray, or legislate against it, or pass constitutional amendments against it. Nature will have her course. . . . If I could talk with all my white fellowcountrymen on this subject, I would say to them, in the language of Scripture: "Come and let us reason together." . . . There are at least seven points which candid men will be likely to admit, but which, if admitted, will prove fatal to the popular thought and practice of the times. Like Mark Antony in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, Douglass here turns the racists' own arguments against them by revealing them all to be unreasonable, even unreasoning. In Douglass' fabricated arguments we find a characteristically rich mixture of legal, moral, and evangelical rhetorical strategies. The structure is simple: seven basic lines of argument are stated, and then each is pursued and answered in a longer section. This format follows closely the Puritan sermon structure, where "reasons" and "objections" were anticipated by the minister, who would propose rhetorical questions to his congregation and then respond with fully developed answers. Douglass begins gently enough: First. If what we call prejudice against color be natural, i.e., a part of human nature itself, it follows that it must be co-extensive with human nature, and will and must manifest itself wherever the two races are brought into contact. It

FREDERICK DOUGLASS I 165 would not vary with either latitude, longitude, or altitude; but like fire and gunpowder, whenever brought together, there would be an explosion of contempt, aversion, and hatred. Second. If it can be shown that there is anywhere on the globe any considerable country where the contact of the African and the Caucasian is not distinguished by this explosion of race-wrath, there is reason to doubt that the prejudice is an ineradicable part of human nature. Determined to show that human nature and racism are not inextricably linked at the time of creation, but that racism is a product of social engineering, Douglass builds to a crescendo in his final two points, which he elaborates in great detail later in the text: Sixthly. If prejudice of race and color is only natural in the sense that ignorance, superstition, bigotry, and vice are natural, then it has no better defense than they, and should be despised and put away from human relations as an enemy to the peace, good order, and happiness of human society. Seventhly. If, still further, this aversion to the Negro arises out of the fact that he is as we see him, poor, spiritless, ignorant, and degraded, then whatever is humane, noble, and superior, in the mind of the superior and more fortunate race, will desire that all arbitrary barriers against his manhood, intelligence, and elevation shall be removed, and a fair chance in the race of life be given him. Here Douglass introduces an ironic bitterness that is more characteristic of his early style, as exemplified by the 1845 narrative. If the Puritan sermon provided the structure for many of his essays and speeches, his style was often derived from Benjamin Franklin's Poor Richard's Almanack and his Autobiography, which effectively use irony to control the reader's response to the argument.

In the long final sections of * 'The Color Line,'' Douglass argues that color prejudice is a learned condition, and that there is absolutely nothing ''natural" about it: In the abstract, there is no prejudice against color. No man shrinks from another because he is clothed in a suit of black, nor offended with his boots because they are black. . . . Aside from the curious contrast to himself, the white child feels nothing on the first sight of a colored man. Curiosity is the only feeling. The office of color in the color line is a very plain and subordinate one. It simply advertises the objects of oppression, insult, and persecution. . . . The color is innocent enough, but things with which it is coupled make it hated. Slavery, ignorance, stupidity, servility, poverty, dependence, are undesirable conditions. When these shall cease to be coupled with color, there will be no color line drawn. Douglass understood human nature extremely well, and there is no better example of his profound social reasoning than this mature essay. But his concern with racial equality may be found also in his earliest writings. After the publication of his 1845 narrative, Douglass clearly was in danger of being returned to slavery. His abolitionist friends encouraged him to leave for England and safety. He sailed on August 16, 1845, aboard the Cambria, a Cunard steamer, but was not allowed to stay in the better accommodations because of his race. He arrived in England twelve days later, having lectured on board against racism and slavery, to the distress of some of the Southern passengers. In England, he toured for the abolitionists, spreading the same message as he had in the States: that slavery as an institution was inherently evil, that racism was unnatural rather than natural, and that the Christian church was perpetuating both by refusing to interpret Scripture as God had in-

166 I AMERICAN WRITERS tended it to be read. In a speech made in 1846 (collected in Foner), he says:

newspaper, he wrote during his visit to England:

Slavery is a system of wrong, so blinding to all around, so hardening to the heart, so corrupting to the morals, so deleterious to religion, so sapping to all the principles of justice in its immediate vicinity, that the community surrounding it lacks the moral stamina necessary to its removal. It requires the humanity of Christianity, the morality of the world to remove it.

In thinking of America, I sometimes find myself admiring her ... b u t . . . when I remember that all is cursed with the infernal spirit of slaveholding, robbery and wrong,—when I remember that with the waters of her noblest rivers, the tears of my brethren are borne to the ocean, disregarded and forgotten, and that her most fertile fields drink daily of the warm blood of my outraged sisters, I am filled with unutterable loathing, and led to reproach myself that anything could fall from my lips in praise of such a land. America will not allow her children to love her.

England was something of a paradise for Douglass; he was for once freed from his role as an escaped slave and celebrated as a touring hero, despite the incident on the steamship. But he never lost the consciousness of his race and its unfortunate condition in the United States, which became in his English lectures not a "promised land" of "milk and honey" but a seriously corrupt nation of artifice and fraud. He was given a warm welcome by English reformers, who were proceeding with their own reform acts. A group of these Englishmen raised the money to purchase Douglass' freedom, an act that his abolitionist colleagues in the United States deplored, as it implied that Douglass regarded himself as someone else's property. This was not the case. Douglass was an extremely practical man, and to return to the United States with a bounty on his head was unwise. The sale was consummated. Douglass was legally a free man for the first time in his life; spiritually, he had been one for many, many years. The years in England altered his view of America considerably, intensifying his attitude toward his country's social evils. He wrote regularly to his mentor and friend William Lloyd Garrison, who as much as anyone represented the lost father figure he had sought since his childhood. (The letters are in Foner, vol. 1.) Although he would later break with Garrison over his right to publish his own abolitionist

On his return to the United States in 1847, Douglass set out to edit and publish his own newspaper, The North Star, an ambition he had held since first observing the power and influence of Garrison's paper, The Liberator. This activity instantly immersed him in political issues, and he was a speaker at the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848, the year in which the women of America united for the first time and articulated their grievances in a "Declaration of Sentiments." The year 1848 was particularly important in the midcentury era of political and social change, with the Paris Commune; The Communist Manifesto', and the Seneca Falls Convention, which signaled the emergence of women's rights as a political force in American culture, a movement that Douglass supported fully. The era witnessed an intensification of the division in American society between those who supported and those who opposed slavery as an institution, whether they lived in Atlanta or New York. The decade of the 1840's, when Douglass was beginning his paper, also saw the annexation of Texas, the Mexican War, and the protest of Thoreau against the state of Massachusetts for its support of the federal government in its annexation claims and its passage of the Compromise of 1850. The Compromise's extension of the Fu-

FREDERICK DOUGLASS I 167 gitive Slave Act gave Douglass and Harriet Beecher Stowe their most fertile ground for protest. Douglass had always held that the United States Constitution was essentially a proslavery document, defending private property and the rights of owners over the civil rights of their slaves. He engaged in the complex disputes concerning whether slavery should be permitted in the new territories and states (his writings concerning this dispute are collected in Blassingame). His position was unequivocal: slavery as an institution must come to an end. The efforts to shut the slave power out of the territories, one by one, will keep the country in a constant commotion with assassinations, incendiarisms, conspiracies, civil wars, and all manner of sickening horrors. The only true remedy for the extension of slavery is the immediate abolition of slavery. For while the monster lives, he will hunger and thirst, breathe, and expand. The true way is to put the knife into its quivering heart. Douglass was quick to defend Captain John Brown, who had led a raid on Harper's Ferry, Virginia, in October 1859, where there was a federal ammunition arsenal. Brown was condemned to death for his part in the raid, and Douglass, who had been involved in the plot, was once again a wanted man. But more than anything else, he was temporarily vilified in some quarters for his powerful rhetorical support of Brown's terrorist activity: He has attacked slavery with the weapons precisely adapted to bring it to the death. Moral considerations have long since been exhausted upon slaveholders. It is in vain to reason with them. . . . Slavery is a system of brute force. It shields itself behind might, rather than right. It must be met with its own weapons. Captain Brown has initiated a new mode of carrying on

the crusade of freedom, and his blow has sent dread and terror throughout the entire ranks of the piratical army of slavery. His daring deeds may cost him his life, but priceless as is the value of that life, the blow he has struck, will, in the end, prove to be worth its mighty cost. Douglass' idealism had a cost, but his extremely practical turn of mind led him not only to develop antislavery, antiracist, and antisegregationist arguments for society, but also to offer some very pragmatic advice to his African American brothers and sisters who sought to free themselves from poverty and degradation. Always an advocate of literacy as a means to real intellectual and spiritual freedom, he taught African American students in various schools, including several that were attacked and destroyed by white supremacists. Through his writings he urged his brethren not only to become free and literate, but also to develop skills and trades that would make them economically independent. His children were also beneficiaries of this encouragement; all of them worked on The North Star, which later became Frederick Douglass' Paper. As vice president of the first meeting of the American League of Colored Laborers in 1850, Douglass insisted that his audience recognize that industry and education were as vital as protest to their pursuit of freedom. Douglass' position on this issue was very similar to that espoused by Booker T. Washington nearly forty years later. In an essay in Frederick Douglass1 Paper for March 4, 1853 (in Foner, vol. 2), the editor did not mince words about the alternatives available to his brothers and sisters: These are the obvious alternatives sternly presented to the free colored people of the United States. It is idle, yea, even ruinous, to disguise the matter for a single hour longer; every day begins and ends with the impressive lesson that free negroes must learn trades, or die.

168 I AMERICAN WRITERS The piece continues with a full development of this central argument, and it shows that occupations formerly held by blacks exclusively, while slaves, are now being usurped by whites: The old avocations, by which colored men obtained a livelihood, are rapidly, unceasingly and inevitably passing into other hands; every hour sees the black man elbowed out of employment by some newly arrived immigrant, whose hunger and whose color are thought to give him a better title to the place; and so we believe it will continue to be until the last prop is levelled beneath us. . . .White men are becoming house-servants, cooks, and stewards on vessels, at hotels. . . . Formerly, blacks were almost the exclusive coachmen in wealthy families; this is so no longer; white men are now employed, and from aught we see, they fill their servile station with an obsequiousness as profound as that of the blacks. . . . As a black man, we say if we cannot stand up, let us fall down. We desire to be a man among men while we do live; and when we cannot, we wish to die. It is evident, painfully evident to every reflecting mind, that the means of living, for colored men, are becoming more and more precarious and limited. Employments and callings, formerly monopolized by us, are so no longer. For Douglass, education was the only remedy. He was always a teacher and a student, and he eventually served on the board of trustees of Howard University, after moving his family to Washington, D.C. In the essay's conclusion he stresses the value of educational pursuit as a means to self-development, one of the central themes in all of his writings: We, therefore, call upon the intelligent and thinking ones amongst us, to urge upon the colored people within their reach, in all seriousness, the duty and necessity of giving their children useful and lucrative trades, by which they may com-

mence the battle of life with weapons commensurate with the exigencies of the conflict. Douglass9 doctrinal differences with other abolitionists had surfaced when he decided, in 1847, to publish his own newspaper, an act that Garrison regarded as just short of betrayal. But Douglass quickly found new allies. Harriet Beecher Stowe was, like Douglass, a believer in the power of education and intellectual development to elevate the individual in society. In a letter dated March 8, 18S3 (in Foner), he argues that "the root cause" of African Americans' problems in America was slavery, accompanied by "poverty, ignorance, and degradation, three things that are notoriously true of us as a people." Douglass sought to deliver them from this triple malady, and to improve and elevate them, by which I mean to put them on an equal footing with their white fellowcountrymen in the sacred right to "Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness." I am for no fancied or artificial elevation, but only ask fair play. How shall this be obtained? I answer, first, by establishing for our use schools and colleges. . . . High schools and colleges are excellent institutions, and will, in due season, be greatly subservient to our progress; but they are the result, as well as they are the demand, of a point of progress, which we, as a people, have not yet attained. He goes on to argue for the establishment of industrial trade schools, which were a special interest of Stowe's. Douglass opposed the efforts of well-meaning supporters to engage the freed blacks in agricultural work, and the allocation of farmland in the West for their use: Agricultural pursuits are not, as I think, suited to our condition. The reason of this is not to be found so much in the occupation (for it is a noble and ennobling one) as in the people themselves. That is only a remedy, which can be applied to

FREDERICK DOUGLASS I 169 the case; and the difficulty in agricultural pursuits, as a remedy for the evils of poverty and ignorance amongst us, is that it cannot, for various reasons, be applied. We cannot apply it, because it is almost impossible to get colored men to go on the land. Here, Douglass bases his argument on a fact that Emerson and Thoreau already knew: America was changing from a Jeffersonian, agricultural economy with pastoral landscapes and gentlemen fanners to a more urbanized, industrialized country with the kinds of metropolitan scenes described in Walt Whitman's poetry. Douglass, always seeking to bring his people into the mainstream of American democratic opportunity, understood that it would be in cities and factories, rather than on rural farms, that the greatest opportunities would be: Another consideration against expending energy in this direction is our want of self-reliance. To go into the western wilderness, and there to lay the foundation of future society, requires more of that important quality than a life of slavery has left us. This may sound strange to you, coming from a colored man; but I am dealing with facts, and these never accommodate themselves to the feelings or wishes of any. . . . Therefore, I look to other means than agricultural pursuits for the elevation and improvement of colored people. Of course, I allege this of the many. There are exceptions. Individuals among us, with commendable zeal, industry, perseverance, and selfreliance, have found, and are finding, in agricultural pursuits, the means of supporting, improving, and educating their families.

use furniture; we must construct bridges as well as pass over them, before we can properly live or be respected by our fellow men. We need mechanics as well as ministers! Another problem Douglass addressed was the urging by some of his contemporaries for a program of recolonization, by which the freed blacks would be given incentives for returning to Africa. Even Thomas Jefferson had entertained a scheme by which the problem of slavery would be resolved by sending the blacks back to Africa. By the 1850's, this was being seriously considered at the highest levels. Abraham Lincoln had advocated such a plan when he was a congressman. Despite his continuous criticism of his society's failure to live up to its own ideals, Douglass believed in the American dream; he wished for nothing more than total freedom for his people and their full engagement in the opportunities represented by the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution, and for him the recolonization scheme was untenable. In his letter to Stowe, Douglass goes on to say:

But Douglass9 grand scheme for the improvement of blacks in America included mechanical and industrial colleges specifically designed for their needs:

There is little reason to hope that any considerable number of the free colored people will ever be induced to leave this country, even if such a thing were desirable. The black man—unlike the Indian—loves civilization. He does not make very great progress in civilization himself but he likes to be in the midst of it, and prefers sharing its most galling evils, to encountering barbarism. Then the love of the country, the dread of isolation, the lack of adventurous spirit, and the thought of seeming to desert their * 'brethren in bonds," are a powerful check upon all schemes of colonization which look to the removal of the colored people, without the slaves. The truth is, dear madam, we are here, and we are likely to remain. Individuals emigrate—nations never.

We must become mechanics; we must build as well as live in houses; we must make as well as

In this letter to Stowe, presented to the Colored National Convention in Rochester in July

770 / AMERICAN WRITERS 1853, Douglass held firm to his conviction that industrial and mechanical trades and skills would best enable African Americans to advance themselves: What can be done to improve the condition of the free people of color in the United States? . . . The establishment of an INDUSTRIAL COLLEGE iit which shall be taught the several branches of the mechanical arts. Like Thomas Jefferson proposing the University of Virginia, Douglass proposed an educational institution to resolve the problems of literacy, poverty, and degradation brought about by slavery. Unlike Jefferson, who himself drew up architectural plans for his university and sketched out a curriculum, Douglass confessed: Never having had a day's schooling in all my life, I may not be expected to map out the details of a plan so comprehensive as that involved in the idea of a college. . . . I leave the organization and administration to the superior wisdom of yourself. We must recall that this was presented nearly ten years before the Emancipation Proclamation. So Douglass' conclusion returns to his pervasive theme, the eradication of slavery: The most telling, the most killing refutation of slavery, is the presentation of an industrious, enterprising, thrifty, and intelligent free black population. Douglass had moved his family to Washington, D.C., in 1853, in order to be more directly involved in the political process of lobbying against slavery, by which an end to injustice and inequality might be achieved; however, he never lost the dynamic speaking and writing style so important to his early work. Several examples from the 1840's and 1850's will make this clear. In a letter (quoted in Andrews) published in The North Star on September 8,1848, after his return

from England and the purchase of his freedom, he addressed his "Old Master," Thomas Auld: I am myself, you are yourself; we are two distinct persons. What you are, I am. You are a man, and so am I. God created both, and made us separate beings. I am not by nature bound to you, or you to me. Nature does not make your existence depend upon me, or mine to depend upon yours. . . . The grim horrors of slavery rise in all their ghastly terror before me; the wails of millions pierce my heart and chill my blood. I remember the chain, the gag, the bloody whip; the deathlike gloom overshadowing the broken spirit of the fettered bondman; the appalling liability of his being torn away from wife and children, and sold like a beast in the market. Say not that this is a picture of fancy. You well know that I wear stripes on my back, inflicted by your direction, and that you, while we were brothers in the same church, caused this right hand, with which I am now penning this letter, to be closely tied to my left, and my person dragged . . . from the Bay Side to Easton, to be sold like a beast in the market, for the alleged crime of intending to escape from your possession. The direct personal attack on Auld is subsumed in the rage directed against slavery as an institution, the system that permits one person to "own" another. Throughout his career, Douglass drew this distinction precisely and repeatedly. For example, in a lecture he delivered in Rochester on December 1, 1850 (in Blassingame, vol. 2), he returned to a theme first articulated in his 1845 narrative, where he contrasted the poor of Europe—made familiar to his American readers by the writings of Charles Dickens— to the separate and unique condition of slavery. It is often said, by the opponents of the antislavery cause, that the condition of the people of Ireland is more deplorable than that of the Amer-

FREDERICK DOUGLASS I 171 lean slaves. . . . I must say that there is no analogy between the two cases. The Irishman is poor, but he is not a slave. He may be in rags, but he is not a slave. He is still master of his own body, . . . and poor as may be my opinion of the British parliament, I cannot believe that it will ever sink to such a depth of infamy as to pass a law for the recapture of fugitive Irishmen!! The lecture circuit provided Douglass with the opportunity to speak out against the institution he held in such contempt; it also honed his rhetorical skills and polished his writing style. In another lecture delivered in Rochester, on December 8, 1850, "An Antislavery Tocsin," he employed the biblical strategy of parallelism and repetition to enforce his moral argument against slavery: I have shown that slavery is wicked—wicked, in that it violates the great law of liberty, written on every human heart—wicked, in that it violates the first command of the decalogue—wicked, in that it fosters the most disgusting licentiousness—wicked, in that it mars and defaces the image of God by cruel and barbarous inflictions—wicked, in that it contravenes the laws of eternal justice, and tramples in the dust all the humane and heavenly precepts of the New Testament. The evils resulting from this huge system of iniquity are not confined to the states south of Mason and Dixon's line. Its noxious influence can be traced throughout our northern borders. Concluding this address, Douglass adopts the rhetorical style of an evangelical minister—a posture he often adopted—and warns his audience of impending doom in a jeremiad (in Blassingame, vol. 2) that would be repeated in the concluding pages of Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin: I warn the American people, by all that is just and honorable, to BEWARE!! I warn them that strong, proud, and prosperous though we be,

there is a power above us that can "bring down high looks; at the breath of whose mouth our wealth may take wings; and before whom every knee shall bow;99 . . . without appealing to any higher feeling, I would warn the American people and the American government, to be wise in their day and generation. I exhort them to remember the history of other nations . . . that the time may come when those they now despise and hate, may be needed; when those whom they now compel by oppression to be enemies, may be wanted as friends. . . . The crushed worm may yet turn under the heel of the oppressor. I warn them, then, with all solemnity, and in the name of retributive justice, to look to their ways; for in an evil hour, those sable arms that have, for the last two centuries, been engaged in cultivating and adorning the fair fields of our country, may yet become the instruments of terror, desolation, and death, throughout our borders. The coming of this Armageddon, the American Civil War, gave Douglass a new opportunity, that of witnessing an end to the system he had so long opposed. He was also a direct participant, proposed for a military commission by Lincoln and a very active recruiter of black soldiers for the Union forces. The 54th Massachusetts Regiment, celebrated in the film Glory (1989), was created by Douglass; his own sons were among the first of the nearly two hundred thousand black soldiers he helped inspire to enlist. In "Men of Color, to Arms!" (1863, in Foner, vol. 3) Douglass recalls the battle cries of Thomas Paine, whose Common Sense (1776) had aroused sentiment against Great Britain at the time of the American Revolution: Liberty won by white men would lose half its luster. "Who would be free themselves must strike the first blow." "Better even die free, than to live slaves." This is the sentiment of every brave colored man amongst us.

772 / AMERICAN WRITERS Throughout the Civil War, Douglass visited the White House many times and acted as an adviser to Abraham Lincoln. He continued to write and speak out against slavery. Perhaps his most eloquent testimony came on December 28, 1862, three days before the publication of the Emancipation Proclamation; this speech was printed as 4 'A Day for Poetry and Song" in Douglass" Monthly, in January 1863. He begins by enthusiastically noting:

Law and sword can and will in the end abolish slavery. But law and the sword cannot abolish the malignant slaveholding sentiment which has kept the slave system alive in this country during two centuries. Pride of race, prejudice against color, will raise their hateful clamor for oppression of the Negro as heretofore. The slave having ceased to be the abject slave of a single master, his enemies will endeavor to make him the slave of society at large.

This is scarcely a day for prose! . . . We stand today in the presence of a glorious prospect. . . . Among the first questions that tried the strength of my childhood mind—was first why are colored people slaves, and the next was will their slavery last forever. . . . How long! How long oh! Eternal Power of the Universe, how long shall these things be? This inquiry is to be answered on the first of January, 1863.

The rhetorical power that had long characterized Douglass9 style as a writer and speaker was in this address perhaps most effectively realized. The country was dealing with a disease, not merely an institution; for racism to be eradicated, a complete change of character would be necessary:

Douglass was, however, unrelenting in his contempt for the institution that had robbed him of life and liberty, and that continued to enslave thousands of his African American brothers and sisters, soon to be legally free citizens of the United States: This is no time for the friends of freedom to fold their hands and consider their work at an end. The price of Liberty is eternal vigilance. Even after slavery has been legally abolished, and the rebellion substantially suppressed . . . there will still remain an urgent necessity for the benevolent activity of the men and the women who have from the first opposed slavery from high moral conviction. Douglass makes a swift transition from the legalized institution of slavery to those moral and prejudicial forces in human behavior that have permitted it to exist in the first place. For Douglass, it was this malignancy of spirit that would long remain in the public psyche:

Slavery has existed in this country too long and has stamped its character too deeply and indelibly, to be blotted out in a day or a year, or even in a generation. The slave will yet remain in some sense a slave, long after the chains are taken from his limbs; and the master will retain much of the pride, the arrogance, imperiousness and conscious superiority and love of power, acquired by his former relation of master. Time, necessity, education, will be required to bring all classes into harmonious and natural relations. This final line contains Douglass* dual message: a realistic assessment of the circumstances under which black people exist in the fragmented and divided United States, and a belief in the possibility of harmonious union and racial equality. Unlike Lincoln, Douglass genuinely felt that the United States might possibly produce an egalitarian society with racial harmony at its center. He also argued the corollary: without such harmony a hostile separation of the races, leading to armed aggression between the races, would ensue. Following the Civil War, Douglass enjoyed

FREDERICK DOUGLASS I 173 the life of a celebrated American hero. He was given several governmental posts by grateful presidents. To mention only three, first Grant made him assistant secretary of the commission of inquiry sent to Santo Domingo in 1871; second, Garfield appointed him marshall and recorder of deeds for the District of Columbia in 1881; and then Harrison made him minister to Haiti in 1889, the most prestigious appointment. Douglass9 rise from the abuses of slavery to the prominence and intellectual power of his final years was an enormous achievement. But he was also a great American, one who, in the Emersonian sense, "represented" the emerging nation as it experimented with democracy and social ideals. William Andrews, in his introduction to My Bondage and My Freedom, suggests some reasons for the pervasive, immense power of the man: And the secret of his power, what is it? He is a Representative American—a type of his countrymen. . . . To the fullest extent, Frederick Douglass has passed through every gradation of rank comprised in our national make-up, and bears upon his person and upon his soul everything that is American. And he has not only full sympathy with everything American; his proclivity or bent, to active toil and visible progress, are in the strictly national direction, delighting to outstrip all creation. Douglass re-created his life in three autobiographical versions even as America was in the process of defining itself. He experienced slavery in its most brutal form, fought against the institution with his body and his soul, witnessed the dissolution of the Union and fought to preserve it, and wrote prolifically about the social and political problems of the emerging nation with a fervent belief in the possibility of America's greatness. Douglass was, with Emerson and Thoreau, also critics of the rising glory of America, one of our nation's most devoted patriots.

Selected Bibliography The author wishes to acknowledge the superb editing of John Blasingame of Yale University and Philip Foner of Columbia University, who have provided modern readers with authoritative texts of Frederick Douglass' works, as cited below.

WORKS OF FREDERICK DOUGLASS AUTOBIOGRAPHIES

Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself. Boston: The AntiSlavery Office, 1845; New York: Penguin Books, 1982. My Bondage and My Freedom. New York: Miller, Orton & Mulligan, 1855; Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987. The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, Written by Himself. Hartford: Park Publishing Company, 1881; rev. ed., 1892; New York: Bonanza Books, 1962. COLLECTED WORKS

The Frederick Douglass Papers, edited by John W. Blassingame. Series I. 3 vols. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979-1985. The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass, edited by Philip S. Foner. 5 vols. New York: International Publishers, 1950-1975. MANUSCRIPT PAPERS

The papers of Frederick Douglass are in the Yale University Library, New Haven, Connecticut. See also North Star, published in Rochester, New York, from 1847 to 1851; Frederick Douglass' Paper, published in Rochester from 1851 to 1859; and Douglass' Monthly, published in Rochester from 1859 to 1863.

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL STUDIES Andrews, William. To Tell a Free Story: The First Century of Afro-American Autobiography, 17691865. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986.

174 I AMERICAN WRITERS Baker, Houston. The Journey Back: Issues in Black Literature and Criticism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980. Bell, Bernard. The Afro-American Novel and Its Tradition. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1987. Blassingame, John. Frederick Douglass: The Clarion Voice. Washington, D.C.: National Park Service, 1976. . The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South. New York: Oxford University Press, 1972; rev. and enl. ed., 1979. Butterfield, Stephen. Black Autobiography in America. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1974. Chesnutt, Charles W. Frederick Douglass. Boston: Small & Maynard, 1899. DuBois, W. E. B. "Frederick Douglass." In Dictionary of American Biography. Vol. 3. New York: Scribners, 1930. Foner, Philip S. Frederick Douglass. New York: Citadel Press, 1964. Gates, Henry Louis. "Binary Oppositions in Chapter One of Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself." In AfroAmerican Literature: The Reconstruction of Instruction. Edited by Robert Stepto and Dexter Fisher. New York: MLA Press, 1979. Huggins, Nathan I. Slave and Citizen: The Life of Frederick Douglass. Boston: Little, Brown, 1980. Lowance, Mason. "Biography and Autobiography in Early America.'' In The Columbia Literary History of the United States. Edited by Emory Elliott et al. New York: Columbia University Press, 1988. Martin, Waldo E. The Mind of Frederick Douglass. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984.

Matlack, James. "The Autobiography of Frederick Douglass." Phylon, 40:15-28 (March 1979). Minter, David. "Conceptions of the Self in Black Slave Narratives." American Transcendental Quarterly, 24:62-68 (1974). Niemtzow, Annette. "The Problematic Self in Autobiography: The Example of the Slave Narrative." In The Art of the Slave Narrative. Edited by John Sekora and Darwin Turner. Macomb: Western Illinois University Press, 1982. Quarles, Benjamin. Frederick Douglass. Washington, D.C.: Associated Publishers, 1948. . "Abolition's Different Drummer: Frederick Douglass.' * In The Anti-Slavery Vanguard: New Essays on the Abolitionists. Edited by Martin Duberman. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965. -. "Frederick Douglass: Black Imperishable." Quarterly Journal of the Library of Congress, 29:159-161 (July 1972). Sekora, John, and Darwin Turner. The Art of the Slave Narrative: Original Essays in Criticism and Theory. Macomb: Western Illinois University Press, 1982. Stone, Albert E. "Identity and Art in Frederick Douglass' Narrative." CIA Journal 17:192-213 (December 1973). Washington, Booker T. Frederick Douglass. Philadelphia: G. W. Jacobs, 1907. Yellin, Jean Pagan. The Intricate Knot: Black Figures in American Literature, 1776-1863. New York: New York University Press, 1972. Yetman, Norman R., ed. Voices from Slavery: Selections from the Slave Narratives Collection of the Library of Congress. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1970.

—MASON LOWANCE

Susan Glaspell 1876-1948

TJl

HIS is THE mysterious law: go beyond." Vic-

works with powerful openings and vividly detailed pictures of psychological cages. The first third of the novel Norma Ashe (1942), for example, with Norma as the owner of a shabby boardinghouse, is one of Glaspell's most concrete pictures of a woman turned into an almost mindless drudge by the struggle to survive. Yet here as in many of her other novels, the dramatic introduction is unfortunately followed by awkward plotting, vague and strained philosophical passages, and a final impression of melodrama and mawkishness. In the tighter form of the play, some of these problems are minimized; nevertheless, Glaspell preferred fiction. The evolutionary ideal that appears in almost every major work from her second novel through her last is most vividly embodied in Norma Ashe, in the image of fish who, driven by some power beyond their own understanding, fling themselves onto the beach in order to become air breathers, land creatures. This idea of an evolutionary urge, certainly not Charles Darwin's, she took from George Cram Cook, her first husband and by far the greatest influence on her life, thought, and work. The Susan Glaspell work we know today was almost all written after she met Cook and is permeated with his influence. She wrote most personally about him in The Road to the Temple (1927), and she quoted one of his poems in her last novel, but more important is

tor Hugo's exhortation to writers could well have served as the motto for both Susan Glaspell's protagonists and for the writer herself. She was determined to go beyond the limited world of the the Midwest, where the expansive pioneer spirit had shrunk into jingoistic provincialism. From her earliest work for the stage, she aimed to surpass the timid conventions of the popular theater and explored a range of drama—from the concentrated, quiet realism of Trifles (1916) through the polemics of Inheritors (1921) to the expressionism of The Verge (1922). In fiction, Glaspell went from writing local-color, formulaic short stories for popular magazines to producing novels in which both form and theme stretched the limits of the familiar. Above all, in the fiction, drama, and biography she wrote, Susan Glaspell struggled to embody her commitment to an idea of evolution, to moving beyond present human limits toward some new life awareness, perhaps some new life form. Glaspell's desire to go beyond contributes both to her strengths and to her weaknesses as a writer. The urgency of such central characters as the women in The Visioning (1911), Ambrose Holt and Family (1931), and The Verge to become more than decorative wives generates powerful drives, confrontations, drama. The frustrations of her characters who feel trapped provide many

775

776 / AMERICAN WRITERS that a typical figure in her work—the teacher, guide, or mentor—is based on Cook. "Jig," as he was usually called, was also a writer, and although he did not manage to complete much successful work of his own, he inspired many others. It is Glaspell who brought his ideas to life: she was at once his disciple, his critic, and his surpasses Susan Glaspell was born on July 1, 1876, in Davenport, Iowa, the daughter of Elmer S. and Alice Keating Glaspell. (C. W.E. Bigsby has persuasively argued that her birthdate is not 1882, as some sources assert.) She attended Drake University in Des Moines, and after her graduation in 1899 became a legislative reporter for the Des Moines Daily News. She had begun writing short stories in college, and in 1901 she returned to Davenport determined to be a full-time writer. She quickly became successful as a producer of short stories for women's magazines. Many of her early stories are set in Freeport, a name invented for Davenport by a popular local author, Alice French, in stories published ten years before. Arthur Waterman says of these Freeport stories: Miss Glaspell adhered to the values held by her readers. Love and money are the most desirable things in the world, but the greater of these is love. Although social classes exist, class boundaries may be crossed by deserving individuals. Evil is usually overcome by good; suffering builds character. In 1909, her first novel, The Glory of the Conquered, followed a premise similar to that of the short stories. Even more revealing than the title is the subtitle: The Story of a Great Love. This romantic, melodramatic tale concerns a woman painter who marries a scientist; he shortly goes blind and dies young. The heroine determines to go on painting in a way that will show the glory of their love. Although Glaspell had met Cook, and his

friend Floyd Dell, in 1907, it was not until 1910, after a year of travel in Europe, that she became an enthusiastic member of the Monist Society, started in Davenport by the two men as a discussion group centering on the works of Friedrich Nietzsche. She found the discussion exhilarating, and she and Cook fell in love. Glaspell saw in Cook an idealist who combined a love of the pioneer past and unhappiness with the growing provincialism of the present, with a dynamic view of the future. He had abandoned a promising academic career to become a farmer and writer. He was dedicated both to ancient Greek literature and to avant-garde ideas. In 1913, Cook divorced his second wife, with whom he had two children, and married Glaspell; they moved to Greenwich Village, determined to succeed as writers. GlaspelFs work after 1910 is directly and indirectly a reflection of Cook's idealism and enthusiasm. Her development was profoundly influenced by Cook and their life together; even long after his death, she was still coming to terms with his ideas and ideals. The first product of this new force in her life was The Visioning, Glaspell's second novel. An awkward, often implausible story, this book sets themes that were to occupy her for most of her career. The novel's protagonist is a wealthy orphan in her early twenties, {Catherine Wayneworth Jones, and its title has multiple related meanings: Katie's realizations about her own life, her discovery of the world outside the narrow confines in which she has lived, and her visions of how she and society must change. The daughter of a distinguished general, Katie lives a life of privilege on army bases; her brother is an officer at the Rock Island Arsenal, near Chicago. At the start of the novel, Katie sees a young woman about to walk into the river to commit suicide. Katie tricks the young woman into believing that she (Katie) needs help, and takes the near-suicide home with her. Then, at first merely in a spirit of fun, Katie invents a name, Ann, for

SUSAN GLASPELL I 177 the other, then a history. Quickly, Ann accepts the role, blossoms under Katie's care, and begins to inform Katie about the world of the poor working woman. By a horrible coincidence, one of Katie's suitors is a man who was once Ann's seducer; encountering him, Ann flees. Searching for Ann, Katie discovers the narrow-minded fundamentalism of Ann's family and the spiritdestroying work open to a single woman in the city. She eventually finds Ann, ill and in despair. But Katie's brother, himself divorced and unhappy about the army, marries Ann, resigns his commission, and becomes a forest ranger. Katie meanwhile falls in love with a wise and magnetic young man who mends boats, Alan Mann. He lends her books on evolution and socialism, then astounds her by revealing that he was an enlisted man (which she considers rabble) who had been court-martialed, imprisoned, and dishonorably discharged for striking a cruel, despotic officer. Her knowledge of Alan's background tests Katie's newfound understanding and tolerance, and at first she cannot accept him. But love and awareness triumph. Foremost in this melodrama is the growth of the heroine from self-indulgence to selfawareness, from conformist to rebel, from aristocrat to socialist. Of almost equal importance is the figure of the guide—Alan Mann—the wise, loving mentor, obviously based on Cook, who seems self-sufficient yet needs her love and trust to escape the bitterness of his worldview. Many scenes, especially those set in Chicago, are vividly created, but the plot is, for all the psychological and philosophical trappings, a set of variations on the arrival of Mr. Right; Katie's brother and Alan Mann are both wonderfully noble, and all obstacles melt before the power of love. Glaspell's story and her ideas are poorly fitted.

Fidelity, a novel published in 1915, two years after Glaspell's marriage, seems nevertheless to deal with her ambivalence about her affair with

Cook. Her heroine, Ruth, yearning to escape small-town life, runs off with a married man. When she has the opportunity to marry him, however, she refuses, preferring to go to Greenwich Village and start a new life, more concerned about fidelity to herself. Told from multiple points of view, Fidelity marks an improvement in structure and plausibility, but unfortunately not in depth. The "new" women Ruth expects to meet in New York are shadowy, while the pains of ostracism and guilt are more vivid. By the time Fidelity was published, Glaspell and Cook were living in Greenwich Village. They had begun, almost accidentally, on the next chapter of their lives, the one for which both were best remembered, the creation of the Provincetown Players. Significantly named The Playwrights' Theater in its New York home, but generally referred to according to its Cape Cod origins, the Provincetown Players had a major effect on American theater, an effect out of proportion to the relatively few plays produced and the very few that have remained viable. Its importance lay in the emphasis on new American writers, particularly those working with experimental techniques and unconventional ideas. Other little theaters, such as the Washington Square Players, were more interested in introducing the new drama of Europe. Best remembered for first producing Eugene O'Neill, the Provincetown might be even better identified as the model Greenwich Village theater, fiercely non-commercial and non-traditional. Cook was the guiding force, while Glaspell was by far the most important of the playwrights after O'Neill. Ferment in the theater was not new in 1915. The little theater movement, reflecting such experimental European models as Die Freie Biihne, had been flourishing. In 1911, in Chicago, Cook and Glaspell had seen the Irish Players (a troupe from the Abbey Theatre), and that group had left a lasting impression. Still, neither of them had

178 I AMERICAN WRITERS thought of becoming a playwright, even though Cook was dedicated to Greek drama. So it was in a lighthearted, satiric spirit that they collaborated on Suppressed Desires, a one-act play, not much more than a sketch, mocking the new interest in psychoanalysis and the popular oversimplification of Freudian ideas. Earlier in 1915 they had submitted this little drama to the two-year-old Washington Square Players (later the Theatre Guild), the most advanced group of the time. It was rejected as clever but too special. Cook and Glaspell read it to friends, and in Provincetown the next summer they presented Suppressed Desires along with another short comedy, Constancy, by Neith Boyce Hapgood, at the Hapgoods' home. The program's reception was enthusiastic, and at the same time they discovered that many of their friends also had written plays. They persuaded Mary Heaton Vorse to rent them her fish house on a pier, which they used for a tiny theater to present two more plays later in the summer. The success of the first season led Cook to announce another program for the next summer that would include a play by Glaspell, one not yet written or even planned. As she described it, she sat in the theater staring at the small stage until she imagined a kitchen there, and then some characters entering. The setting suggested an incident she had known as a reporter. The result was Trifles, Glaspell's best-known and most often produced play. It was staged the next summer along with several other new plays, including one called Bound East for Cardiff, written by Provincetown resident Eugene O'Neill. The company was on its way. Trifles has the structure of a short story. (Glaspell recast it as the story "A Jury of Her Peers" in 1917.) Into the farm kitchen come the sheriff, the county attorney, and a neighbor to investigate the murder of John Wright by his wife; they are searching for the motive. Mrs. Peters, the sheriff's wife, and Mrs. Hale, the

neighbor's, come along to clean up and get some things for Mrs. Wright, now in jail. While the men search for clues, the women talk of the loneliness of farm life and notice odd traces of disturbance, among them some bits of erratic sewing and signs of a dead bird. When they point out the sewing, the men dismiss their concern over "trifles." The women come to understand how Mrs. Wright was driven to murder by her isolation and her husband's brutality, but to protect themselves from the men's laughter, and out of sympathy for Mrs. Wright, they say no more. By the end of the play, their sympathy has developed into feelings of guilt for not having helped Mrs. Wright in the loneliness with which they can identify. Glaspell uses the skill of a local-colorist, and as in many of her plays, there is little action, much discussion, and the main character is offstage. The dead bird is suggestive of August Strindberg's Miss Julie (1889); Glaspell, like O'Neill, admired Strindberg. Suppressed Desires and Trifles are the most anthologized and produced of Glaspell's plays. Although they are effective and surprisingly skillful for a neophyte playwright, they are also not very ambitious and are unrepresentative of Glaspell and of the Provincetown Players. Glaspell's distinction lies in her motivation to explore increasingly difficult and complex problems. She did, in fact, move toward newer, more expressionistic forms earlier than did O'Neill. They undoubtedly encouraged and inspired each other. Glaspell's description of the first time O'Neill read a play to the group is often quoted: Then we knew what we were for. We began in faith, and perhaps it is true that when you do that "all these things shall be added unto you." In the winter of 1916-1917 the members of the Provincetown group rented a space in Greenwich Village, which they christened the Playwrights' Theatre and where they repeated their

SUSAN GLASPELL I 179 summer programs and continued to produce new works. Under Cook's enthusiastic direction, the Provincetown Players lasted as a company in New York until 1922, although it gave up the summer productions in Provincetown after a few seasons. As the Provincetown grew in success, O'Neill was its chief attraction, but Glaspell was second in importance and popularity. While O'Neill's works would have found their way to the stage in any case, Glaspell's were completely the product of circumstances, of Cook's urging and the needs of the theater for new work. In all, Glaspell wrote seven one-act and four full-length plays while associated with the Provincetown; she also performed, to frequent acclaim, in many of the plays staged by the company. Two of Glaspell's three plays from 1917, The People and Close the Book, were thin theatrical exercises. But The Outside, her fifth play, produced in December 1917, marked a decisive move toward something new. In The Outside, Glaspell turned toward the actual setting of Provincetown and a deeper treatment of the themes of loneliness and bereavement hinted at in Trifles. The play takes place in a former Coast Guard lifesaving station that is slowly sinking into the dunes. It is now rented by a wealthy, reclusive woman, Mrs. Patrick. At the start of the play, rescuers have brought a drowned man into the building, where they try to revive him. They fail and carry him off, but not before Mrs. Patrick angrily objects to their invading her privacy. Her anger drives her servant, the otherwise silent Allie Mayo, to speech. The two argue. Mrs. Patrick, abandoned by her husband, is focused on death, watching the sand engulf the plants, even the trees. Mayo, though herself numbed by years of tragedy, rejects that vision and asserts that new growth will triumph over the sand, life winning over death. At the very least, life does not surrender to nothingness. While Mrs. Patrick remains unpersuaded, the play ends with the reawakening of Mayo and the affirmation of hope.

The Outside struggles toward a philosophical, poetic richness. The formerly silent Mayo is meant to achieve a kind of awkward, broken eloquence. Glaspell herself played Mayo in the first production, and one cannot help wondering how much she is echoing O'Neill's semiarticulate characters, like Yank in Bound East for Cardiff, a role played by Cook. The result in Glaspell's drama, as often in similar attempts by O'Neill, is more awkward than eloquent, more struggle than achievement. Furthermore, the static situation, the heavy-handed symbolism of the lifesaving situation (the men undeveloped as characters), and the vague resolution work against the play. But the two women are firmly drawn and the strain to make a statement carries its own value. After The Outside, Glaspell stayed with the one-act form two more times. Woman's Honor, produced in 1918, is a satiric sketch about a number of women who offered to provide alibis for a noble young man accused of murder. Tickless Time, which premiered later the same year, was another collaboration with Cook and revolves around an unconventional couple's failed attempt to do without a clock. On March 21, 1919, the Provincetown Players presented Glaspell's first three-act play, Bernice. Thus far in its history, only Cook's The Athenian Woman, produced a year earlier, had been fulllength. In Glaspell's play, the title character is dead when the play begins, reportedly a suicide. Believing that she died for him, in grief at his infidelity, Bernice's husband determines to change his life, to become worthy of her sacrifice. Her skeptical friend, however, learns from a servant that the death was from natural causes but that Bernice asked that it be reported as suicide. Although the work is static, and feelings and ideas are presented in abstract terms, it is noteworthy in the way it repeats Glaspell's interest in fidelity and guilt. Inheritors returns to even more familiar mo-

180 I AMERICAN WRITERS tifs: the setting again is the Midwest, where the old idealism is almost lost in greed and narrowminded provincialism, and the play foregrounds a fun-loving heroine, Madeline. Like Katie in The Vis toning, Madeline discovers herself, society's injustice, and the need to sacrifice herself for her principles. In the first act, an early settler, inspired by an exiled Hungarian revolutionary who owns a neighboring farm, decides to found a college. Acts 2 and 3 take place in the present (that is, around 1920) at the college, which is now in need of government support. The president of the college, the Hungarian's son, is attempting to placate a state senator upset by the publications of a liberal professor. The college has also had bad publicity created by students from India demonstrating for independence for their country. The president is determined that nothing must stand in the way of the college's success, while his son, a student at the college, is rabidly intolerant. The "radical" professor reluctantly agrees to silence; he needs to preserve his job and his income in order to provide for his invalid wife. Only Madeline, a descendant of both the college founder and the Hungarian, determines to stand up for the Indians and may even go to jail. To modern viewers, the play seems diagrammatic and obvious, but many in the original audience were impressed. A decade after the Provincetown Players staged this important work, Ludwig Lewisohn, one of Glaspell's greatest admirers, described its impact on the state of the American theater in 1921: It is the first American play in which a strong intellect and a ripe artistic nature grasped and set forth in human terms the central tradition and most burning problem of the national life quite justly and scrupulously, equally without acrimony and compromise. The American drama had not shown . . . anything comparable to Miss Glaspell's dramatic projection of the decadence

of the great tradition of American idealism. . . . Inheritors, moreover, was more than a stirring play; it was in its day and date, a deed of national import. Although Inheritors has not withstood the test of time, the same cannot be said of The Verge (1922), Glaspell's most ambitious stage work and one that most clearly reveals her theme of transcendence. While it is not directly autobiographical, The Verge strongly suggests some personal parallels with Glaspell's and Cook's lives at the time it was written. The heroine, Claire, is a wealthy woman obsessed with developing new plants in her greenhouse, where all the action of the play takes place. These are not merely new varieties of flowers but new life forms with highly symbolic names: the Edge Vine and Breath of Life. They are new stages of evolution. Breath of Life, her most ambitious creation, is about to bloom. Claire herself yearns to transcend her material and materialistic life. She reaches out to Tom Edge worthy, something of a mystic, another of Glaspell's guide figures. Edgeworthy is planning to go to Asia to lead the life of an ascetic; Claire persuades him to stay, but when she wishes to go beyond their understanding to a physical union, Edgeworthy retreats. In despair, Claire strangles him. At the end of the play, while her assistant is enraptured by the blooming of Breath of Life, Claire is quite insane, falteringly singing 4'Nearer My God to Thee." The Verge was written at a point when Cook (and probably Glaspell) was becoming dissatisfied with the Provincetown Players. The commercial success of O'Neill's Emperor Jones in 1920 had brought them fame and considerable financial reward, but the earlier enthusiasm and risk-taking had given way to concern over funds and the drifting away of early theater members. At the same time, no single talent other than O'Neill had strongly emerged from the group;

SUSAN GLASPELL I 181 Glaspell was certainly the most important after him, but clearly overshadowed. The Verge may have been, at some level, Glaspell's response to a fear of stultification and also an urge to move into the limelight. Like Emperor Jones, Glaspell's play was moved to Broadway, but only for a series of unsuccessful matinees. One wonders also how much the play reveals Glaspell's mixed feelings about Cook. Rachel France says: A curious omission from discussions of The Verge is the remarkable similarity between Claire and . . . Cook. Even before Glaspell began to write her play, Cook's dream for the Provincetown, his "beloved community of life-givers," was collapsing around him. Claire's reactions to an unsatisfactory reality mirror Cook's own temperament. Parallels between Edgeworthy and Cook seem even stronger; the one as eager to depart for Asia as is the other for Greece. Even more important, Edgeworthy, like so many of Glaspell's guide figures, is ultimately ineffectual and the heroine's faith in him proves unwarranted. Other provocative and disturbing elements in The Verge likewise reflect the circumstances of Glaspell's own life. One of the most powerful and painful scenes in the play involves Claire's repudiation of her daughter as one who has surrendered to conventional society. Glaspell herself had no children; she had at least two pregnancies that ended in miscarriage. Cook, however, had a son and a daughter, and these children spent considerable time with him and Glaspell. Could she be venting some anger at Cook's children and expressing pain regarding her own childlessness? A noteworthy element of The Verge is its strong echo of the character types in Nathaniel Hawthorne's "The Birthmark," only in Glaspell's play the heroine is herself both the

monomaniacal scientist and the victim of the attempt to play God. Even more outstanding is the influence of Strindberg, especially of A Dream Play (1907). In A Dream Play, the heroine is the daughter of the Vedic deity Indra, and she must ultimately leave an earth that is too stifling for the spirit. At her death, the mysterious castle flowers and burns. The expressionist form and tone, the importance of flowers, the motif of insanity, a struggle between male and female, and the blending of transcendence, escape, and destruction— all these in The Verge seem to echo Strindberg. Such mingled strains give The Verge intense interest, but as with Inheritors the form is ultimately inadequate. The symbolism of plants and names is almost cartoon is h. The characters are neither realistic nor do they resonate allegorically. The shifts from realism to expressionism are often awkward, and once again the language is in many instances abstract and vague. In 1922, Cook and Glaspell went to live in Greece. Cook had always thought of Greece as his spiritual home and intensely studied the language and the literature. When the Provincetown Players disappointed him, turning cautious and resisting his leadership, he announced that it was time to go. He and Glaspell lived there for two years, rather simply, in a small town. Cook made friends and was known as a dedicated scholar; Glaspell says little of her experience, but she was apparently writing fiction at the time, not plays. However, Glaspell did leave behind a play, Chains of Dew, that was produced after their departure but never published. Only a sense of the plot survives from reviews, but she reused the basic story later in her novel Ambrose Holt and Family. In 1924, Cook died in Delphi. Glaspell reports that he died of some infectious disease caught from a stray dog they befriended, but the details are vague. Traveling in Europe afterward, Glaspell met and married Norman Matson. To-

752 / AMERICAN WRITERS gether they wrote a short, light comedy, The Comic Artist (published in 1927 and produced in 1928), but most of GlaspelPs effort turned to The Road to the Temple, a biography of Cook. In this structurally intriguing work, Glaspell used, wherever possible, Cook's own words drawn from fragmentary diaries, letters, or simply thoughts jotted down on scraps of paper. The flavor of his thought, his dynamic personality, and his poetic sensibility all come through strongly, but there are also disturbing gaps and confusions. For example, Cook's first wife is barely mentioned, not even named, and the story of his second marriage is blurred. More serious is Glaspell's failure to probe or analyze. Cook's various shifts in career are presented but not examined. His extraordinary life in Greece appears in idyllic terms, but incompletely. Nor does she acknowledge his failures. Her own feelings are muffled. She wishes to appear little more than an editor, yet her limited appearance is odd. She gives the detailed anecdote of how she came to write Trifles, but virtually none of her other work is even mentioned, despite the powerful bond between her writing and her relationship with Cook. Figures resembling Cook appear in her fiction after his death just as they had from the time she met him. Yet there is the murder of Edgeworthy in The Verge, there was her precipitate and unsuccessful marriage after Cook's death, and great ambiguity surrounds the guide figures in Glaspell's later novels. Glaspell and Matson soon separated, and they divorced in 1931. In that same year, she won the Pulitzer Prize for her last play, Alison's House (1930), produced by the Civic Repertory Theatre. Alison's House was suggested by the life of Emily Dickinson, and the Dickinson parallels probably played some role in the play's brief success, but the center of the play is elsewhere. Once again the title character is offstage, and once again the focus is on a midwestern town

where prudishness and greed have nearly destroyed idealism. Glaspell's poet, Alison, lived in the Midwest and has been dead some years at the time of the play—significantly, the turn of the century. Alison's brother is preparing to sell the old homestead, while her surviving sister objects and also clings to some unpublished poems. Family quarrels are climaxed by the return of the brother's daughter, who had run off with a married man. When Alison's sister dies, the brother and his daughter read the secreted poems and learn of Alison's frustrated romance. They agree that she knew that true love is greater than conventional morality. The brother forgives his wayward daughter and acknowledges his own secret romance. Despite the Pulitzer Prize, Alison's House was not financially successful, and Glaspell needed to support herself economically with her work. That was certainly one reason she turned to the novel and wrote no other plays except for an unproduced work called The Big Bozo. Also, she was no longer involved with a theater group pressing her for new work. Most seriously lacking was Cook's enthusiastic direction. In any case, as her novels published between 1923 and 1945 reveal, Glaspell turned to subjects that were broader, more complex, and more reflective than she had ever attempted on stage. The novels resume the explorations of her earlier fiction. Glaspell's theater work may well have been an exciting interruption, but she apparently did not see herself as a playwright. During the years of her marriage to Matson, Glaspell published two novels in rapid succession: Brook Evans (1928) and Fugitive's Return (1929). In Brook Evans, which in 1930 was made into a Paramount Pictures film titled Right to Love, Glaspell returns to a midwestern setting and to the theme of a love thwarted and twisted but ultimately redeemed. It is Glaspell's most Hollywoodish story, with enormous jumps in

SUSAN GLASPELL I 183 time and a logic that depends on almost mystical affinities. In part 1, Naomi, daughter of poor, pious farmers, falls in love with the son of a wealthy landowner; they make love beside a rippling brook. When her lover is killed in a harvesting machine accident, Caleb Evans agrees to marry the pregnant Naomi and to move with her to another state before the child is born. In part 2, Naomi's daughter, Brook, falls in love with a local boy of mixed Indian and Italian parentage. Caleb disapproves, and when Brook bends to her father's will, Naomi tells her of her real father. Naomi then manipulates matters so that Brook can run off with her lover, but Brook is closer to Caleb and instead runs away with a neighbor woman leaving to do missionary work in the Middle East. In the last part of the novel, Brook, now a widow with a son, Evans, has been swept off her feet by Erik Helge, and she has come to understand Naomi's passion. Evans, confused by his mother's behavior, agrees to go to see his grandfather Caleb, now back in the old hometown. On his first visit to America, Evans finds his grandfather senile and the Midwest rather crude, yet he senses his roots are there, and by the rippling brook, though he does not know its role in his story, he feels at peace. Fugitive's Return is far more ambitious. At the start of the novel, Irma Schraeder intends to commit suicide; her child has died and her husband has left her. A fortuitous visit from her oldest friend results in her going to Greece, using the name and ticket of a woman whose travel plans have abruptly changed. On board ship Irma is silent, and so she remains for some time in Greece, where she takes up residence in the house of an American classical scholar who is traveling. She becomes involved in the lives of three Greek women: her dedicated servant; a dwarfish shepherd girl who had once been raped by a local man who is now in prison; and a

vibrant orphan refugee. Irma's silence is broken when she scolds some boys for tormenting animals. Soon after that the American scholar returns, and he and Irma become romantically involved. Finally, she helps the shepherd girl escape vigilantes after the girl murders her rapist—who had taken up with the refugee girl after his release from prison. In the center of the novel is a long flashback to Irma's childhood and youth in a small midwestern town, where she grew up feeling inferior to more well-to-do girls. She now realizes how, in her insecurity, she drove away her lovers, including her husband. At the novel's end, she returns to the old homestead to find peace. Glaspell's picture of Greek life is substantially different from Cook's. Her heroine, despite her sympathy for the women around her, is always the outsider. While Irma's long silence is explained by the psychological traumas of her marriage, it may well stand for Glaspell's isolation in Greece. Also, the Greek world she portrays is brutal, and the women suffer most. Even though the rapist spends some time in jail, he returns to rape again. Irma breaks her silence on Easter, and her first words contain a Christian message that stresses the sense of modern Greece as pagan and certainly not noble. As in Brook Evans, the return to home-ground provides a neat but weak closure. A highly provocative opening moves toward a vague, unfocused, ''hopeful" ending. The issues raised provide some dramatic scenes but are hardly resolved. The three Greek women, along with Irma's decisive friend, provide a range of alternative personalities and experiences, but when the novel ends they have disappeared into what Waterman aptly calls "too much strained lyricism," as in one of Irma's final thoughts: What she would be now was real—as never before. Hard though it was to leave this beauty, she knew now that to move through beauty does not

184 I AMERICAN WRITERS constitute beauty. Through truth it must come, perhaps through the reality that is service. . . . Waterman calls Fugitive's Return Glaspell's only try at the Jamesian international novel/9 with its theme of the innocent American abroad. While the novels of Henry James may have been on her mind, and Waterman points out that Cook was a James admirer, Fugitive's Return more clearly focuses on Glaspell's continuing struggle to come to terms with Greece, and by extension with Cook. Though superficially different from Brook Evans, the book also deals with the conflict between the foreign, the cosmopolitan, and the heroine's roots. Glaspell's 1931 novel Ambrose Holt and Family repeats many of these issues in a more complex, more successful way. The heroine, Henrietta (but usually called Blossom), is pampered by her wealthy parents, especially her father, and by her husband, Lincoln Holt, a poet and businessman. Lincoln is in charge of his father-in-law's cement business, and he has begun to make a reputation as a modernist poet. (Wallace Stevens comes to mind as a possible model.) He limits his writing to his study, a room apart from the rest of the house; it is situated in a kind of tower between floors. Thus he tries to keep the two aspects of his life separate, for he wishes to be a fine poet and yet have material success. When he is faced with the fact that the cement business is destroying a local forest, he sardonically accepts this as the price of success. When the inner conflict grows too intense, Lincoln goes off for solitary visits to Greenwich Village and his literary friends there. Throughout, Blossom yearns to help him and be something more than a household ornament, but Lincoln prefers to keep her on her pedestal. At the heart of Lincoln's problem is his father, Ambrose Holt, a successful newspaperman who deserted his family when his son was a boy. He has become a drifter, and Lincoln lives in fear of 44

becoming like him. When Ambrose reappears in town, Blossom is drawn to him. He is unconventional, relaxed, sage, and loving. He has only vague feelings of guilt about his abandoned family. Even his wife admits that his departure gave her the determination to prove herself, and she still loves him. Lincoln's editor arrives when he is out of town and tells Blossom that Lincoln is not fulfilling himself as a poet; he is holding back from a full emotional commitment. When Lincoln returns he is enraged by his father's reappearance and by the editor's criticism. Ambrose leaves again; he goes to a nearby town, where he commits suicide by not taking his diabetes medicine, but before he dies he sends Blossom an inspiring message. His wisdom and the sacrificial nature of his death become a release for both Lincoln and Blossom. Thus the guide figure returns to Glaspell's fiction, and his idealism triumphs over crass materialism and conformity. Still, Blossom and Lincoln will continue to live well, for there is no reason for their lives to change much. Lincoln will now write better poems and Blossom is emancipated—she even talks firmly to her father—but that denouement is wrapped in lyrical commentary. The Morning Is Near Us appeared in 1939 after a substantial hiatus in Glaspell's writing. During part of that time, she was the Midwest director for the Federal Theatre Project. While her job involved selecting plays and organizing productions, she did not, apparently, return to play writing herself. In The Morning Is Near Us, Glaspell builds her tale around a mystery, and structures the book in a highly melodramatic, cinematic way. The heroine, Lydia Chipmann, returns home after many years upon learning that her father has left her the family homestead. Her mother has been dead for many years, and Lydia had lost touch with her father and brother. In fact, she returns only after learning of the bequest by ac-

SUSAN GLASPELL I 185 cident. In her early teens, Lydia had been sent off by her parents to live with an aunt, and then her father and mother, especially her mother, found many excuses for her not to return. She never saw her mother again. She became a world-wanderer, first living off a small legacy from the aunt, and later being supported with a generous gift from a mysterious benefactor she encountered during her travels. When she returns home, she assumes, as does the reader, that her father is dead and that she is fulfilling provisions of his will; she is surprised that her father has thought of her. She brings with her two adopted children, a Greek girl and a Mexican boy, as well as a donkey. Though her brother fears that her unconventional behavior will lead to scandal and ostracism, she is soon welcome in town and settles down. Still, she wonders more than ever why, if she was sent away at her father's request, as she believes, he has left the house to her. Mysteries multiply as she discovers strange clues to her mother's origin. Neighbors comment obliquely about her parents. Then she discovers that her father is not dead, but rather is imprisoned in an asylum for the criminally insane after murdering a man for spreading vicious rumors about Lydia's mother. Lydia goes to visit her father, but he rebuffs her and denies he wants her to have and preserve the house. In despair, she plans to leave, but on her last night—a night of rain and wind—her father arrives, having escaped from the asylum, to tell the true story. She is not his child; her mother is the one who wanted her removed because Lydia was a reminder of her adultery, but always loved her deeply and wants her to stay. Exhausted by his journey and the strain of confession, the father dies. The story recalls the love of "father" and "daughter" as in Brook Evans, with extraordinary complications. When Lydia finds a heartbreaking, unsent letter written by the mother to her lost brother, she discovers that her mother

had appeared in Chipmann's life as if from nowhere as a young girl, apparently on the run from some horrendous situation. Taken in by the Chipmann family, the mother feels always that the man she eventually married is more a brother than a lover. Thus is her adultery explained and somewhat justified. Furthermore, the reader is led to deduce that Lydia's benefactor, met abroad, is her real father. The movement of the novel depends on implausibilities and withheld information. Lydia's brother, who lives in town, is exceptionally reticent. He assumes, quite illogically, that Lydia knows more than she possibly can. He also seems to represent the provincialism of the town, yet Lydia and her strange family have absolutely no trouble in becoming part of the community. Could Glaspell have been hoping for a movie sale? The exotic children, the father's midnight arrival, Lydia's determination to learn how to drive in order to find her father—these and many other details are strongly cinematic. Glaspell's novels had always featured plots that were convoluted and fantastic, depending on unlikely, even inexplicable, causalities. The Morning Is Near Us is probably the most fantastic, with theme and story line awkwardly joined. As in many of her other novels, a good deal depends on flashbacks. Incidental moments, like Lydia's discovery of her mother's letter, are sensitive and moving. On the other hand, attempts to be lyrical often result in vague, purplish passages. France, in describing some of Glaspell's plays, reflects a criticism that also fits most of the novels through The Morning Is Near Us. Her ideas are ... said to have been shrouded in murky ambiguities. In fact, it is the particular vocabulary of New Thought which pervades. . . . New Thought, an amalgam of beliefs ranging from the ancient Greeks to Eastern mysticism, postulates the unity of all things. . . . (Possibly the best known example of New

756 / AMERICAN WRITERS Thought still read today is The Prophet, 1923, by Kahlil Gibran.) In Glaspell's last two novels, Norma Ashe and JuddRankiris Daughter (1945), she surrendered little of her intensity or concern, but she chose a realistic approach that served her better than did her more ambitious and contrived tales. Both at times still depend on coincidence and slide into the vaguely rapturous, but the groundwork is more secure. World War II contributed much to this new solidity. The first third of Norma Ashe may be Glaspell's finest realistic portrait, the novelistic equivalent of Trifles. The setting is a shabby boardinghouse in a midsized Illinois city. Mrs. Utterbach, the landlady, is beset by financial problems, worried about her children, and exasperated by her unpleasant tenants. The scene is unrelievedly gloomy. Mrs. Utterbach receives a surprise visit from an old college friend, who remembers her as Norma Ashe and has come to her for help. Norma had been the wisest and most promising of a group of followers of an inspiring professor at Pioneer College; now she is dull and nearly defeated, and her former friend leaves in tears because Norma is no longer the life-affirming spirit the visitor had come to find. The novel moves into a flashback, typical of Glaspell. We follow Norma, the optimistic small-town girl who intends to go to the University of Chicago and fulfill her dream of becoming a teacher like her professor. Instead, a chance meeting leads to a romantic marriage to an ambitious and feckless businessman. They move about the country as the husband's various schemes fail. He dies in debt; the old mansion on which he held a mortgage is Norma's total inheritance, hence the boardinghouse. The narrative returns to the present: her son's financial and legal problems bring Norma to Chicago, where she finds her way to the university

and attends a lecture by one of the old group of disciples. This friend has become a demagogue, using the old teachings in a twisted way to defend his greed and power. The great teacher had emphasized the idea of a life force willing itself toward greater intelligence and freedom; now the demagogue argues a kind of social Darwinism, the survival of the fittest. Norma's argument with him leads to meetings with others of the old group and new disillusion when she learns of her teacher's suicide, but she finds a young student eager to understand her ideas. After a period of working in Chicago, Norma returns to the boardinghouse, which is now successfully operated by her daughter and son-in-law. Soon after, Norma dies feeling that she is passing on some of the hope, some of the ideas of change and development that had once been passed on to her by the professor. The teacher is one of Glaspell's clearest guide figures, in many ways another reflection of Jig Cook. A small, rural college founded by a visionary farmer and featuring a brilliant, unorthodox teacher is an echo of the situation in Inheritors and may also reflect Cook's idea of combining intellectual and rural lives. The image of willed evolution is presented in terms very like those Glaspell quotes from Cook in The Road to the Temple. Once again, like the professor in Inheritors, the guide is somewhat ineffectual, although this time the fault may lie more with the disciples than with the teacher. One of the people Norma meets again is the country boy who had been the teacher's companion and servant. He is the one who tells her that the teacher's death was a suicide, that though the teacher was kind and concerned, toward the end he had doubts about his ideas. Perhaps he even mocked the disciples for their belief, though this may be only the sardonic reflection of the survivor. At first, Norma is devastated, but ultimately she rises above her disillusionment with the consolation that while

SUSAN GLASPELL I 187 change may be slower than hoped for it is inevitable nonetheless. In the elegiac Judd Rankin's Daughter, Glaspell appears to review her own life, though the novel is not directly autobiographical. As World War II moves toward its conclusion, Frances Rankin (referred to by her maiden name throughout), who lives in New York and Provincetown, is faced with the conflict between her father's midwestern conservatism and her husband's eastern, urban liberalism. Judd Rankin, her father, has published a collection of newspaper pieces humorously but sympathetically picturing the isolationism of the Midwest. Frances' husband, a reviewer for a leftist magazine something like The Nation, rejects these ideas as anachronistic. Meanwhile, their son returns from combat in the Pacific; he is at first unwilling to come home at all, then, when he does, he quarrels with his father and allies himself with a somewhat fascist editorial enemy of his father. His grandfather's book at first reinforces his desire to lash out at the imperfect world, but eventually it helps him to bring into perspective both his idealism and the cruelties of life. He comes to feel that the war may do very little to change things. Frances remains somewhat divided in her allegiance. She is deeply disturbed by a revelation of the anti-Semitism of one of their Provincetown friends; a visit to her father reminds her of the warmth and humanity of a more rural and isolated world, but she remains in the East with husband and son. Waterman, who has written the only extended study of Glaspell, concludes that she was essentially a regionalist. One cannot fail to note how frequently the Midwest plays a major part in her work, sometimes as the major setting but more frequently as a place of origin and memory or as a vague type of haven. This soft-focus view suggests that regionalism is not a very useful label or a complete description. The Midwest Glaspell deals with is usually a region that once had a

golden age but that is now sadly diminished. Judd Rankin is the best of the contemporary Midwest, yet he refuses to travel east, even for a visit, because he recognizes that his ideas make sense only in the rural heartland; he knows himself to be an anachronism. Glaspell herself settled in the East, in Provincetown and New York. The regional label explains too little and is inadequate as a term to describe her most impressive works, those which, though usually imperfect, still breathe with intensity, with the struggle to shape a meaning. Among the plays the strongest are Trifles, The Outside, and The Verge; among the novels, The Visioning, Ambrose Holt and Family, Norma Ashe, and Judd Rankin's Daughter are the most successful. Trifles is a wonder, a neat little machine that continues to work perfectly. Its picture of women's isolation in a bleak world is finely drawn, but the strength of the play is in its solidity, in the neat unraveling of the mystery. It is of all Glaspell's work the only one where intent and achievement meet. C. W. E. Bigsby sums up his discussion of the play with the statement that "Trifles was a modest but remarkable debut, most especially in the context of a national theatre which had consistently preferred melodrama to psychological truth." The other two plays, like all of her novels, suffer from the author's struggle to find a form to contain their depth of feeling. While the form is never fully achieved as it is in Trifles, the struggle itself becomes the source of power. The Outside is the paradigm and a foreshadowing of most of the work to come. At the time it was written it most reflected Glaspell's struggle to find a voice as a playwright. Hindsight reveals that the struggle for voice was Glaspell's lifelong concern, sometimes acknowledged but more often demonstrated in the strain toward lyricism, the urge to give a philosophical veneer to melodramatic situations. In the struggle she took risks and was always experimenting. This is clearest

188 I AMERICAN WRITERS in the plays, but, despite their more conventional form, it is also true of the novels. Ironically, what first gave her a voice, Cook and the Provincetown Players, also contributed to Glaspell's problem as a writer. Starting with The Visioning, Glaspell points to Cook as mentor and illuminator, and in work after work, especially after his death, she continues to create guide figures. But the guides inevitably falter, commit suicide, turn out to be less than promised. Something similar happens with the father figures; notably in two of the works, they are not biological fathers, yet are greatly loved by the heroines. In Ambrose Holt, the two types are combined; Ambrose is the heroine's father-inlaw, but closer to her than her own businessman father, and Ambrose is of course a guide. In Judd Rankings Daughter both father and husband-mentor are in conflict for the heroine's soul. The possibility is left open that her son will reconcile the differences. Ultimately, at the core of most of the plays and novels, the heroine is on her own. The mentor or father can help only so much and may even complicate matters. Glaspell's plays and her later novels deal with themes of isolation, struggle, and rebellion. Cook also dealt with these themes in his writing, as did Glaspell's coworkers, most notably O'Neill. But in Glaspell's work the struggle at its most vivid has a special focus—the need to go beyond a life stifled by convention and dissipated by the failure to find a suitable alternative. For example, in The Verge, Claire's husband feels that growing flowers is a most appropriate activity for a woman, totally misunderstanding the significance of her obsession. Unfortunately, her only alternative is madness. Another example is Norma Ashe, carried off on a wave of romantic love into a life of material success, at first, then one of poverty. In either case, the life of the mind and spirit is lost; the struggle destroys Norma even though she finds some solace at the end. Other protagonists, like

Blossom Holt, object to the role of wife and mother defined for them, but find no other models. Despite her own independence as a writer, Glaspell most successfully pictures dependence and incompleteness. When Susan Glaspell died in Provincetown on July 27, 1948, she left behind a body of work that encompassed some four decades. In The Visioning, written before World War I, the army appears as a largely useless organization, almost feudal in nature. Katie's brother objects to devoting his time to developing new weapons of doubtful value. On the other hand, Katie's experiences in Chicago focus on social conditions and turn her toward an idealistic socialism. In Glaspell's last novel, Judd Rankin's Daughter, written toward the end of World War II, the horrors of war are well understood and a muted, cautious liberalism colors the story. In few other works, however, does Glaspell refer specifically to the changing America in which she played her part. Most of the plays and novels deal with abstract issues, the problems of love and selfdiscovery, rather than the central social ideas of her time. Glaspell's last novels are more realistic than her earlier ones, and the writing is more mature, with less strain and less "fine" writing; here and there one detects the influence of film. Still, the basic structure, the fundamental themes, and the style changed very little over the course of her career. Despite the traces in them of social criticism and the elements of feminism, the novels were never treated, even when they first appeared, as startling innovations. Critics often singled out the melodramatic elements of her fiction, and Glaspell was often scolded for vagueness. As a novelist, Glaspell is an intriguing footnote in literary history because her true strength lay elsewhere. Susan Glaspell's importance is in her theater work, which altogether occupied her for barely fifteen years if one includes Alison's House, but

SUSAN GLASPELL I 189 only seven if her work with the Provincetown Players is considered alone. It was an astonishing seven years, ranging from regionalist realism to expressionist tragedy, from satiric sketches to allegory. Her plays show surprising mastery from the first, and during those seven years were consistently experimental and daring. They were especially effective when performed for an audience eager for the new. James Agate ranked Inheritors with Henrik Ibsen's 1892 play The Master Builder (quoted by Bigsby). Most critics compared Glaspell with O'Neill, often to her advantage. Isaac Goldberg wrote in 1922, when her career as a playwright seemed only to be heading for greater heights, that

as in Sidney Kingsley's Dead End (1935) or the language of the salon as in Behrman's Biography (1932), reveals Glaspell's shortcomings, the vague lyricism and the old-fashioned hesitations and euphemisms. In an ironic turn, Glaspell now seemed the epitome of the little theater, once the model for a stage revolution, now the symbol of the amateurish. Still, as Waterman says, "It is safe to say that her work paved the way and that the Provincetown created a climate where original plays by American playwrights were acceptable to the Broadway producers and to the theatre public." Bigsby sums up her contributions as a playwright even more strongly:

Glaspell's intensity of thought . . . induces a straining toward wit, an eminently intellectual process; her humor . . . presupposes persons of sophistication. As O'Neill inclines toward the masterful man, so she leans toward the rebellious woman. Where the author of The Hairy Ape spurts out words like the gushing of a geyser, Glaspell is reticent, laconic. . . .

Without her there must be some doubt as to whether the Provincetown Players would ever have been established and certainly whether that crucial organization would have been able to sustain itself as it did. She was, without doubt, one of its two greatest discoveries; and if her plays were imperfect then so, too, were O'Neill's and for much the same reason. In her work, as in her life, she never settled for anything less than total commitment. Sometimes that took her where few others were willing or ready to follow. She chanced more than most of her contemporaries and achieved more than many of them. She deserves more than a footnote in the history of drama.

But 1922 is when she and Cook left for Greece, in part because the O'Neill experience had led the Provincetown Players away from the quieter experiments. After her return from Europe, Glaspell's plays followed more conventional models. Her earlier work quickly faded in the stronger light cast by O'Neill and the crowd of new American dramatists who had begun to appear. Elmer Rice's The Adding Machine was produced in 1923, and such playwrights as Robert Sherwood, Sherwood Anderson, Clifford Odets, and Samuel Nathaniel Behrman were dominating the scene, as were larger and more ambitious theater companies, especially the Group Theatre. The Provincetown Players had helped to show the way for a new generation of writers who took to the stage with great vigor and assurance. Their greater control of language, whether the language of the streets

In the literary ferment of the first quarter of the twentieth century, Susan Glaspell was one of many who helped to shape the modern consciousness. She is a representative figure. Her work speaks of the turmoil, the awakening to new, often disturbing, ideas in psychology, in social and political thought, and in art. As a woman and a midwesterner, she was particularly sensitive to the breakup of older values, and in much of her work there is a nostalgia for a stable, small-town society. Many of her novels, as well as such plays as Alison's House, deal with the

790 / AMERICAN WRITERS loss of security. Nonetheless, while the return to the homestead might bring repose, the struggle for the new and the finer remained the driving force, and Susan Glaspell was her own best example of the searcher for deeper understanding. She was not always successful, but always eager, exploring, moving beyond.

Selected Bibliography WORKS OF SUSAN GLASPELL PLAYS Plays. Boston: Small, Maynard & Co., 1920. Collects the one-act plays, Suppressed Desires (1915), Trifles (1916), Close the Book (1917), The Outside (1917), The People (1917), Woman's Honor (1918), and Tickless Time (1918), as well as Glaspell's first full-length play, Bernice (1919). Inheritors (1921). Boston: Small, Maynard & Co., 1921. The Verge (1921). Boston: Small, Maynard & Co., 1922. Chains of Dew. Produced in April 1922. Unpublished. The Comic Artist, with Norman Maston (1928). New York: Frederick A. Stokes Co., 1927. Alison's House (1930). New York: Samuel French, 1930. Plays by Susan Glaspell. Edited by C. W. E. Bigsby. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. Contains Trifles, The Outside, The Verge, and Inheritors along with an introduction, biographical record, bibliography, and notes. NOVELS The Glory of the Conquered. New York: Frederick A. Stokes Co., 1909. The Visioning. New York: Frederick A. Stokes Co., 1911. Fidelity. Boston: Small, Maynard & Co., 1915. Brook Evans. New York: Frederick A. Stokes Co., 1928.

Fugitive's Return. New York: Frederick A. Stokes Co., 1929. Ambrose Holt and Family. New York: Frederick A. Stokes Co., 1931. The Morning Is Near Us. New York: Frederick A. Stokes Co., 1939. Cherished and Shared of Old. New York: Julian Messner, 1940. A brief Christmas story. Norma Ashe. New York: J. B. Lippincott Co., 1942. JuddRankiris Daughter. New York: J. B. Lippincott Co., 1945. SHORT STORIES

Glaspell published forty-three short stories in a variety of periodicals. C. W. E. Bigsby, in the bibliography to Plays by Susan Glaspell, provides the complete list. MISCELLANEOUS WRITINGS

"Last Days In Greece." In Greek Coins. Poems by George Cram Cook, edited by Glaspell. New York: George H. Doran Co., 1925. The Road to the Temple. New York: Frederick A. Stokes Co., 1927.

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL STUDIES Dell, Floyd. Homecoming. New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1933. Deutsch, Helen, and Stella Hanau. The Provincetown: A Story of the Theatre. New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1931. Dickinson, Thomas H. Playwrights of the New American Theater. New York: Macmillan, 1925. France, Rachel. "Susan Glaspell." In Dictionary of Literary Biography. Edited by John MacNicholas. Vol. 7, Twentieth-Century American Dramatists. Detroit: Gale Research, 1981. Goldberg, Isaac. The Drama of Transition. Cincinnati: Stewart Kidd Co., 1922. Krutch, Joseph Wood. The American Drama Since 1918. New York: Random House, 1939. Lewisohn, Ludwig. Expression in America. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1932. Macgowan, Kenneth. Footlights Across America: Towards a National Theater. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1929.

SUSAN GLASPELL I 191 McGovern, Edythe M. "Susan Glaspell." In American Women Writers 2. Edited by Lina Mainiero. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1980. Pp. 144-146. Meserve, Walter J. "Glaspell, Susan (Keating)." In Great Writers of the English Language: Dramatists. New York: St. Martin's, 1979. Pp. 254-256. Quinn, Arthur Hobson. A History of the American Drama from the Civil War to the Present Day. New York: F. S. Crofts, 1927. . American Fiction. New York: D. AppletonCentury Co., 1936. Sayler, Oliver M. Our American Theatre. New York: Brentano's, 1923.

Sievers, W. David. Freud on Broadway: A History of Psychoanalysis and the American Drama. New York: Cooper Square, 1970. Snell, George. The Shapers of American Fiction 1798-1947. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1947. Vorse, Mary Heaton. Time and the Town: A Provincetown Chronicle. New York: Dial, 1942. Waterman, Arthur E. Susan Glaspell. New York: Twayne, 1966. —MILTON LEVIN

Elizabeth Hardwick 19l6~

IN CERTAIN WAYS, the mysterious and som-

alongside men—their husbands, lovers, friends —whose careers often overshadowed and threatened to consume their own. These men may have encouraged and supported the women, but in many cases they also used them and indulged in the destructive behavioral excesses sometimes considered the privilege of mad genius. A great mystery of Hardwick's life is her marriage of over twenty years to the poet Robert Lowell. Lowell, who suffered from a cyclic mental illness, regularly dealt emotional abuse to the wife whose nonpossessive caretaking became almost legendary. Yet Hardwick made her own literary reputation. By the 1960's she was known as a major American critic. Reviewers of her novels and essay collections have consistently praised her deft, ironic style; despite the distanced feeling, the something that remains unsaid in Hardwick's work, her sheer skillfulness bears a ferocious determination to sort, to judge, and to be heard. Limits are real, Hardwick insists, and practical effort counts. Never self-pitying and rarely confessional even in her autobiographical writings, she does not claim that her experiences and the barriers that have shaped them count. Rather the something that remains unsaid gives her sentences a pressing emotional power. The constraints on women intellectuals were not as severe as those faced by their nineteenth-

nambulistic 'difference' of being a woman has been, over 35 years, Elizabeth Hardwick's great subject," Joan Didion wrote in 1979, reviewing Hardwick9s acclaimed third novel, Sleepless Nights. Didion notes that "no one has written more acutely and poignantly about the ways in which women compensate for their relative physiological inferiority." She cites an essay on Simone de Beauvoir in which Hardwick states that "any woman who has ever had her wrist twisted by a man recognizes a fact of nature as humbling as a cyclone to a frail tree branch.'' Didion found Hardwick's assertion "at once so explicit and so obscurely shameful that it sticks like a burr in one's capacity for wishful thinking." Hardwick's insistence that women's physical differences from men amount to a determining inferiority and Joan Did ion's suggestion that to think otherwise is wishful thinking now sound antifeminist. But Hardwick wrote from her experience as a woman who built a public career as a liberal intellectual during the late 1940's through the early 1960's, when culture and politics were matters of urgent debate and women's rights were not. Retrospective looks at the personal lives of many of the women writers of her generation make the paucity of feminist discourse during those years seem painfully serious. Women carried on their intellectual labors

193

194 I AMERICAN century forebears, of whom Hardwick wrote with incisive sympathy in Seduction and Betrayal: Women and Literature (1974). Indeed, the women of Hardwick's generation are sometimes spoken of as having gained their achievements on the same footing as men. But there were differences, shaped by the pressure of attitudes from a lingering Vic tori anism. Style was crucial to women writers of her generation, as Hardwick suggests in A View of My Own: Essays in Literature and Society (1962) in an essay on Mary McCarthy, a writer who was her close friend for forty years. Much of what Hardwick wrote about McCarthy's style applies to her own: A career of candor and dissent is not an easy one for a woman; the license is jarring and the dare often forbidding. Such a person needs more than confidence and indignation. A great measure of personal attractiveness and a high degree of romantic singularity are necessary to step free of the mundane, the governessy, the threat of earnestness and dryness. . . . With Mary McCarthy the purity of style and the liniment of her wit, her gay summoning of the funny facts of everyday life, soften the scandal of the action or the courage of the opinion. Elizabeth Hardwick was born on July 27, 1916, in Lexington, Kentucky. Her father, Eugene Allen Hardwick, had a plumbing and heating business for a time, then sold oil furnaces and worked for the city as an inspector, though he preferred to fish. Her mother, Mary Ramsey Hardwick, bore nine children and engaged in the "dreadful labors" required of respectable lowerclass homemakers. Elizabeth earned a B.A. and an M.A. in English at the University of Kentucky in Lexington, then at twenty-three left home and the South. Her career as an intellectual and her marriage to Lowell took her to Europe and various parts of the United States, but she became most strongly identified with New York.

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Her longtime association with The New York Review of Books makes finding her listed in Southern Writers: A Biographical Dictionary something of a surprise. She wrote in 1976, in a letter to Inge, the author of that listing: "I feel that as a writer I have been formed by the union in myself of my Kentucky background and my skeptical intellectual temperament—what might be called 'the New York' part of my interests and themes." Fifty years after her self-imposed exile, her voice—still heard at public readings and lectures—clearly signaled her southern roots. Hardwick began the doctoral program in English at Columbia University in 1939 and quit after two years. She stayed in New York and wrote. Her first novel, The Ghostly Lover, was published in 1945, and her short stories appeared in literary magazines. Between 1945 and 1949 five of her stories were repuhJished in the annual volumes of the O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories and The Best American Short Stories, and in 1948 she received a Guggenheim grant to work on fiction. Reviews of The Ghostly Lover were mixed but offered encouragement to Hardwick, and shortly after the novel's publication Philip Rahv asked her to write for Partisan Review, of which he was an editor. Starting with the spring 1945 issue, her name regularly appeared on the cover along with those of such established writers as Hannah Arendt, Lionel Trilling, Randall Jarrell, Delmore Schwartz, Eric Bentley, Katherine Anne Porter, and Elizabeth Bishop. To write for Partisan Review, a major liberal journal, was to join a group of New York intellectuals at the heart of postwar political and cultural thought and action. In 1948 Hardwick was among thirty writers who, sparked by Mary McCarthy, signed a manifesto founding the Europe-America Groups with the aim of providing solidarity and financial aid to European intellectuals isolated 4 'in the face of the extreme polarity of Soviet and American power." Hard wick's association with

ELIZABETH HARDWICK I 195 Partisan Review also offered her the opportunity to develop her skills as an essayist. Though she continued to write fiction, she became best known for her essays, which she regards as examples of imaginative writing. Hardwick's fiction of the 1940's reflects a young woman's struggle to differentiate herself from her family, class, and region; to escape their madness and conventionality; and to establish herself as an independent intellectual, freed from the false comforts of mainstream values but finding little to replace them with other than a critical viewpoint. The Ghostly Lover follows Marian Coleman from her home in a Southern town to graduate school in New York, an autobiographical story line, though Marian's family configuration differs from Hardwick's. Marian and her homosexual brother, Albert, live with their nearly mute grandmother while their parents travel constantly, in search of work for their father, who, despite many schemes, never prospers. A likely candidate for the lover of the title is introduced on the first page: Bruce, a divorced neighbor ten years older than Marian, holds her in his gaze. But Bruce dwindles in significance as the novel progresses, though their relationship serves, through Bruce's obsessions, to introduce Marian to a world beyond her stifling home. Playing the role of Pygmalion and paying for Marian's year studying music in New York, Bruce is the agent by which the plot of escape unfolds, while the female lead remains baffled and passive. By the end of the novel it is clear that the haunting love that has shaped all Marian's relationships has been her desire for her absent "ghostly" mother. One reviewer felt this unexpected emotional focus made the book's title false advertising, but the dismantling of romantic passion and the power of the mother-daughter relationship are features that remain of great interest to readers grounded in feminism. After her grandmother's death, Marian visits her down-

at-the-heels parents. They ask to borrow the five hundred dollars she has inherited from her grandmother, and she refuses them. In New York Marian has met a new lover, Leo, whose conventional possessiveness seems to destine their relationship for marriage. But having learned that her first, filial love will never be gratified, Marian evades Leo when he comes to meet her at the station on her return to New York. Marriage seems no more possible for Hardwick's heroine than does her reabsorption into the family. At the end Marian is shut out of Eden, left with an 4 'icy ray of light," alienated but comfortlessly enlightened. With nowhere to go and nothing to do—she is too critical of her skills to pursue a music career—she will have to act beyond the novel as she has not within it, and the reader has no way of imagining what she might do. But she has five hundred dollars with which to make a start. Critical in her reviews of fiction that replayed the 1920's plot of tragic upper-class heroines drawn to the bohemian life, Hardwick gave her characters class backgrounds similar to her own. Of her prizewinning short stories of the 1940's, two are of greatest biographical interest. "The Mysteries of Eleusis" (1946) continues Hardwick's critique of love and marriage. Dreaming of the impoverished rural home she has escaped, a young woman wakes on her wedding day in her rented room in the city. Her freedom exacts a cost: "drudgery was the payment she owed to some unnamed source, her appeal to the revenge that pursued her." Unlike Marian, she is powerless to stop her marriage, compelled toward the ceremony not by any clear feeling about the groom but "by the miraculous fact" of union. Love is absent but necessary: "She dimly perceived that all this world was pitifully dependent upon the steady recurrence of the emotion into which she and the boy were drawn." "Evenings at Home" (1948) is a funny, mockgothic autobiographical story. "I am here in

796 / AMERICAN WRITERS Kentucky with my family for the first time in a number of years and, naturally, I am quite uncomfortable/ ' it begins. In unexpected ways, the selfconscious intellectual "I" is out of place in her own past. Her family, to her horror, "is entirely healthy and normal," not riddled with the hostilities that her childhood memories, filtered through readings in psychology, have led her to expect. Seeing an old boyfriend, she is humiliated to remember * 'what kind of man I first fell in love with": a "Neanderthal" who alternated between stupefaction and anarchic laughter. Her old friends are skeptical of her, not, to her relief, because of this former attachment but because of her radical politics. Packing to return to New York, "the exile for those with evil thoughts," she anticipates visiting her brother's grave, a sentimental moment the narrator undercuts with savage humor. She imagines her mother saying, " 'Sister, I hate to think of you alone in New York, away from your family. But you'll come back to us. There's a space for you next to Brother. . . . ' "The narrator concludes: "And so it is, as they say, comforting to have roots." The aspect of Hardwick's writing of the 1940's most likely to inspire resistance in contemporary readers is her portrayal of African-American characters. Marian's most active moment in The Ghostly Lover occurs when her grandmother's housekeeper, Hattie, quits without notice and Marian searches unsuccessfully for her in the black neighborhood. Both in Marian and Hattie's relationship and in "The People on the Roller Coaster," a 1945 short story, southern white women of modest means expect an intimacy with the black women who work for them. Hardwick undermines these historically rooted fantasies: the maternal qualities of those relationships are illusory—something is changing. Hardwick suggests that southern blacks are rejecting servitude; yet her descriptions of black characters are stereotypical in ways we are apt to find objectionable.

Reviewing Richard Wright's Black Boy for Partisan Review in 1945, Hardwick praises Wright's characterizations in contrast to the narrow portrayal of blacks by white liberals. "Where the sympathetic white writers felt compelled to deal only with lovable, suffering Negroes, Richard Wright tackled the problem of a full human being subject to fantastic terrors and desires." Hardwick praises Wright for overcoming both the rhetoric of communism and the need to speak for "the black millions," a difficult role which, she felt, "accounts for the appalling naivete of such writers as Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen." Stressing "literary" qualities universalized across racial lines, she finds no value in the aesthetic concerns that arose from the cultural politics of the Harlem Renaissance. In 1948, reviewing William Faulkner's Intruder in the Dust, Hardwick sympathizes with Faulkner's wish to preserve the autonomy of the South. The novel's plot highlights "the South's appalled recognition of its sins" toward African Americans, the need of white Southerners to "save the Negro" in order to expiate their guilt, and "the moral superiority" that suffering has given the victims of oppression. Hardwick insists that Faulkner's vision of "the final emancipation of the Negro" is a "real and historical" fact that "only Stalinists and certain liberals" perversely underestimate. Reading this passage now, after the decades of the civil rights struggle and the subsequent erosion of gains, one might be struck by Hardwick's failure to understand slavery's persistent legacy or to foresee the difficulties that lay ahead. Her resistance to a more pessimistic view of the future of race relations is conditioned by the agenda urgently expressed throughout Partisan Review during this period: a critical attack on totalitarianism, particularly Stalinism, a focus that made the Partisan Review's assessment of the problems within American society less than rigorous.

ELIZABETH HARDWICK I 197 When Partisan Review was founded in 1935, its editorial statement promised opposition to war, fascism, decadent culture, and sectarianism, and defense of the USSR. While representing typical positions of the American Communist party, the Review editors, Philip Rahv and William Phillips, resisted the Stalinist line that art should serve as political propaganda, a position they believed debased writing and creativity. In 1936 Rahv and Phillips stopped publication of the Partisan Review; the next year they started it again with a new, thoroughly antiStalinist policy, opposing both the aesthetics and politics of the party. When Stalin signed a pact with Hitler in 1939 and, later, as revelations concerning the bloody oppression of Stalin's regime reached the United States, the American Communist party was weakened. Some refused to believe the evidence against Stalin, while others struggled to maintain belief in leftist principles while recognizing that the Soviet example had failed; some veered away from the Left. The editors of Partisan Review used the printed page to identify and condemn, sometimes with more fervor than discrimination, signs of collaboration with communism among writers who had formerly been their political allies. Hardwick brought to Partisan Review her credentials as a "reformed Stalinist," having engaged in radical politics in college. The anticommunist agenda, as well as other aspects of the traumatized leftist conscience, entered her reviews. In the Partisan Review (Summer 1946), she praised The Bitter Box, a first novel by Eleanor Clark, describing it as an "answer to those people who pride themselves upon never having taken an interest in politics simply because, by their apathy, they were spared disillusionment." Reviewing Paul Goodman's The State of Nature, she commented on the intellectual apathy of most writers, the dullness of Goodman's committed writing, and the tendency of social critics to denounce bad taste as vigorously as they denounce

totalitarianism. Of the books Hardwick reviewed (in the July-August 1947 issue) Vladimir Nabokov's Bend Sinister came closest to transforming an account of totalitarianism into authentic art, but the achievement called into question such traditional literary values as realism and heroism: "Perhaps the totalitarian truth of the Hitler and Stalin governments is, when translated into art, unconvincing, farcically exaggerated beyond belief and purpose. . . . " By 1948 Hardwick had gained a reputation as a fearsome critic. Her reviews were witty, often biting, and usually negative; she panned established and new writers alike, making frequent disparaging remarks about the general condition of contemporary letters. Elizabeth Bishop, learning that Robert Lowell's stay at the Yaddo artist colony in Saratoga Springs, New York, in the fall would overlap Hardwick's summer stay by a few days, wrote to Lowell: "I forgot to comment on Elizabeth Hardwick's arrival—take care." Instead Lowell cultivated Hard wick's company. He urged her to return to Yaddo and she did, in the winter. Yaddo had recently been investigated by the FBI, and one of its occasional guests, writer Agnes Smedley, was suspected of being a spy. She was cleared, but the national hysteria that would launch Senator Joseph McCarthy's infamous anticommunist campaign two years later was rising. Lowell became convinced that the Yaddo director, Mrs. Ames, was a sinister figure and, supported by the other guests, including Hardwick, he presented to the board a case for firing Ames. The board refused, recognizing what Hardwick had missed, that Lowell was suffering from paranoia. His mental condition deteriorating, Lowell visited Allen Tate in Chicago, who wrote to Hardwick warning her that Lowell was homicidal. When Lowell's family put him in a Massachusetts mental hospital in April, however, Hardwick stayed near the hospital for two weeks in June of 1949 and visited

798 / AMERICAN WRITERS him often. On July 6 he wrote: "How would you like to be engaged? Like a debutant. WILL YOU?" (This and subsequent correspondence is quoted in Hamilton, Robert Lowell.) Hardwick agreed, and they were married three weeks later at Lowell's parents' house in Boston. Hardwick wore a fashionable black hat that Mary McCarthy loaned her. Lowell sank into another depression shortly afterward and was hospitalized again. That the author of The Ghostly Lover and "The Mysteries of Eleusis" might have begun married life in a more conventional way is hardly imaginable. "He certainly needs someone, but if I were you I wouldn't do it," Lowell's doctor had told Hardwick. Lowell's father, dubious about the forthcoming marriage, had written to his son: "I do feel that both you and she, should clearly understand, that if she does marry you, that she is responsible for you." Hardwick sustained this responsibility with exhaustive faithfulness. By January 1950 Lowell was well enough to take a teaching position at the University of Iowa, and he and Hardwick settled into a tiny apartment in Iowa City for the spring semester. They left for a shoestring stay in Europe the next fall, settling in Florence for seven months. Hardwick began writing a novel based on a sensational murder trial she had followed closely in Iowa City, but several years would pass before she could finish it. In the summer of 1951 Lowell, increasingly anxious and weary of Italy, sent Hardwick to Amsterdam to find them a place to live in a country he felt would be closer to his Protestant New England background. While the move prevented Lowell from developing a fullscale manic episode, Hardwick found Holland "a nightmare," and she was delighted when Lowell accepted an invitation to teach at a summer seminar in American studies in Salzburg, Austria. In the spring of 1952 they took in operas and art museums in Brussels, London, Paris, and Vienna, then in July moved on to the eighteenth-

century castle where the seminar was held. Exhausted and manic, Lowell became involved with a young music student, Giovanna Madonia; adultery would accompany his manic phases for many years to come. Near the end of the seminar he barricaded himself in his room and American military police were called to get him out. Hardwick accompanied him to a hospital in Munich, then a sanatorium in Switzerland, where he quickly improved. A year of productive calm followed. Lowell taught at Iowa again, then accepted a position at the University of Cincinnati for the spring of 1954. As the semester began, his mother suffered a stroke and Lowell immediately flew to Italy. She died before he arrived. After discovering that Giovanna Madonia was still obsessed with him, he announced upon his return to Cincinnati that he and Hardwick were separating so that he could marry Madonia. Hardwick moved back to New York, a little relieved until Lowell's long, abusive phone calls convinced her he was ill again. His colleagues at Cincinnati, caught up in his passion, impeded her intervening on his behalf until his behavior—including an incoherent lecture on Hitler—became clearly psychotic. In April Hardwick went with a friend to Cincinnati; once again the police were called and Lowell was hospitalized. Emotionally exhausted, Hardwick wrote to a friend: I knew the possibility of this when I married him, and I have always felt that the joy of his "normal" periods, the lovely times we had, all I've learned from him, the immeasurable things I've derived from our marriage made up for the bad periods. I consider it all gain of the most precious kind. But he has torn down this time everything we've built up. ... Now everyone knows that Cal goes off, says anything degrading he pleases about me, then comes to and I'm to nurse him back to health. There is nothing petty in my resentment of this. . . .

ELIZABETH HARDWICK I 199 In September Hardwick and Lowell moved to Boston, where Hardwick finished her second novel, noting in a February 1955 letter to a friend that Lowell was "his old self again." Reviews of The Simple Truth (1955) as with Hardwick's first novel, were mixed. Surprisingly for a murder story, the plot is minimal. A wealthy student, Betty Jane Henderson, is dead of asphyxiation and her lower-class boyfriend, Rudy Peck, is on trial for her murder. The solution to the mystery of how the victim died is delivered whole by the accused at the story's end, not pieced together by a forensic mind. Some reviewers saw the novel as a character study of the two obsessive observers of the trial, Joe Parks and Anita Mitchell; others saw the characterization as subordinate to ideas. Parks and Mitchell represent not so much ideas as sensibilities associated with different strains of modern thought. Parks, a vaguely Marxist would-be writer, blames the murder on class conflict, while Mitchell, a faculty wife preoccupied with psychoanalysis, suspects Henderson's self-destructiveness drove her to her fate. The two observers agree on nothing but that Peck should be freed and that the townspeople lack the intellectual sophistication to judge him fairly. Both are let down when the jury simply accepts Peck's explanation that Henderson died by accident; the observers' analyses of the event required a murder to have taken place. The malaise of the liberal intellect continues and Hardwick again attempts to bare it: the university's rejection of the town's morality masks a deeper reliance on mainstream values to preserve order. One reviewer found Peck's testimony hard to believe. But to believe it, particularly in relation to Hardwick's life, suggests that the chilling "simple truth" she found behind the Iowa City trial was the extraordinary fragility of the female throat. Without consciously intending her any harm, a man can stop a woman's voice and choke out her life.

In the fall of 1955 Hardwick and Lowell bought a house in Boston. Earlier that year Lowell's cousin Harriet Winslow had given them the use of her summer home in Castine, Maine, which she would leave to Hardwick on her death. Lowell began teaching at Boston University in 1956, and on January 4, 1957, Hardwick gave birth to a daughter, Harriet Winslow Lowell. More settled than they had ever been, they took pleasure in entertaining literary guests. "I do like them," Marianne Moore wrote to Elizabeth Bishop after a tea, "heartfelt, generous, genial, initiate and so prepossessing." Lowell was writing a great deal, changing his style, and Hardwick gave extensive editorial advice on his prose pieces. In December 1957 Lowell threw an impromptu bash at their house. Seventy-two hours later he was still manically awake, and once again Hardwick had to call the police to restrain him. Again he fell in love, this time with a college student doing field work at the hospital, and was convinced that nothing was wrong with him that divorce and remarriage would not cure. By March, however, Hardwick reported that Lowell was "pretty much himself." She planned a trip to Europe the following spring, but the cycle of Lowell's illness continued, and in April 1959 he was back in the hospital. "I do not know the answer to the moral problems posed by a deranged person," Hardwick wrote to Allen Tate after ten years of marriage, "but the dreadful fact is that in purely personal terms this deranged person does a lot of harm. . . . I feel a deep loyalty and commitment to him; and yet at the same time I don't know exactly what sort of bearable status quo I can establish with him." For reasons that cannot be blamed entirely on the city, Hardwick and Lowell tired of Boston. In January 1961 they bought an apartment on West Sixty-seventh Street in Manhattan, but by February Lowell was "speeding up" and in love again. His new psychiatrist, taking an existential

200 / AMERICAN WRITERS approach, encouraged his delusions. After six weeks in a hospital, Lowell announced to Hardwick that he was going to live with his new love, a young poet named Sandra Hochman. Hardwick returned to Boston, more depressed by this episode than by any previous one. Lowell soon left Hochman and called his doctor saying, "I want to go home." He spent the summer in Castine with Hardwick and their daughter and in October 1961 the family finally settled in New York. Hardwick continued her own literary work, and one of her projects in 1961, a volume of William James's correspondence for a great letters series, prompted Lowell to weave quotations from James into his poem "For the Union Dead." Throughout the 1950's Hardwick's essays had appeared in Partisan Review as well as Harper's Magazine, The New Republic, The New York Times Book Review, Kenyon Review, and The New Yorker. In 1962, she published a selection from over a decade's work, her style in these essays less analytical than exploratory. As in The Simple Truth, the ideas presented in A View of My Own are borne along by sensibilities, and specific subjects take on generalized significance. One reviewer, in doubt about the long-term worth of many of the essays in A View of My Own, most enjoyed Hardwick's "hatchet job" on sociologist David Riesman. Concluding that essay, Hardwick takes a swipe at all of sociology: I have come to the belief that there is not merely an accidental relationship between bad writing and routine sociological research, but a wonderfully pure, integral relationship; the awkwardness is necessary and inevitable. . . . It is the extreme fragility of the insights that leads to the debasement of language; the need to turn merely interesting and temporary observations into general theory and large application seems to be the source of the trouble with these incredible compositions.

Written in 1954 with a postscript in 1961, the essay is now of value for its coverage of the transition in social atmosphere between the complacent 1950's and the frightened early 1960's, when the proliferation of nuclear weapons caught the attention of social critics. Hardwick is impatient with Riesman's shifting views; a need for firm critical judgments seems to haunt her essays. William James and Bernard Berenson, humanistic thinkers for whom critical valuations were problematic in different ways, serve as representative figures. In the James essay, reprinted from her introduction to the letters, Hardwick finds James so perfectly liberal that exact thought was repugnant to him. The Berenson memoir recalls Hardwick's and Lowell's visits with him when they lived in Florence. An expatriate American, Berenson had used his extensive knowledge of art for commercial purposes, and a reputation, however undeserved, for dishonest valuations clung to him. As the title suggests in its echo of Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own, the book has a feminist cast: for a woman to have formed her own critical opinions about culture and society in spite of the constraints under which she labors is an achievement. One reviewer, Melvin Maddocks of the Chicago Sunday Tribune, saw in Hardwick's essays a "purified balance of sympathy" that may be "the special function of the woman writer." Astonishing now, after feminist thought has become a complex established fact, is the vehemence with which Hardwick attacks Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex. De Beauvoir lists the physiological differences between men and women, but claims "they are insufficient for setting up a hierarchy of the sexes . . . they do not condemn her to remain in a subordinate role forever." Hardwick disagrees, in the essay that Didion found so startling; because of their physical inferiority, "women are 'doomed' to situations that promise reasonable safety against the more hazardous possibilities of nature

ELIZABETH HARDWICK I 201 which they are too weak and easily fatigued to endure. . . . Any woman who has ever had her arm twisted by a man"—and who can doubt that Hardwick speaks from experience—"recognizes a fact of nature as humbling as a cyclone to a frail tree branch. How can anything be more important than this?" Women are restricted from experiencing adventure, war, politics, even depravity because of their weaker bodies and, as a result, they make poorer artists. Experiences such as bearing children and nursing the ill, which Hardwick shared with other women, do not make her list of the experiential materials of art. Even in writing, where women have excelled, common opinion holds that no female author has matched the greatest male authors, and again Hardwick comes down on the side of established judgment, however anxious it may make her as a woman writer. De Beauvoir's writing on artistic women and the traps that limit them is "brilliant," Hardwick concedes, though not enough is made "of how "natural9 and inevitable their literary limitations are." She closed with a grim panorama: Coquettes, mothers, prostitutes and 'minor' writers—one sees these faces, defiant or resigned, still standing at the Last Judgment. They are all a little sad, like the Chinese lyric: Why do I heave deep sighs? It is natural, a matter of course, all creatures have their laws. Hardwick's autobiographical concerns are submerged in the essays but come through indirectly, sometimes in surprising ways. In her gripping critique of the complicity of Dylan Thomas' American colleagues in his self-destruction, written in 1956, one hears the authority of the woman who had rescued another mad poet from his worshipers in Cincinnati two years earlier. The essay already most famous before the book came out

was "Boston," first published in Harper's Magazine in 1959. Hardwick declares the legendary culture of old Boston long dead: the heirs to its past glory, she writes, are weak amateurs; the real Boston is commercial, shabby, and full of bad restaurants. Its most unforgivable fault, one senses, is that it is not New York. Hardwick's fierce satiric spirit is infectious and thorough. But for a moment at the end, she redeems Lowell's birthplace, the city they would wait another two years to leave: The weight of the Boston legend, the tedium of its largely fraudulent posture of traditionalism, the disillusionment of the Boston present as a cultural force makes quick minds hesitate to embrace a region too deeply compromised. They are on their guard against falling for it, but meanwhile they can enjoy its very defects, its backwardness, its slowness, its position as one of the large, possible cities on the Eastern seacoast, its private, residential charm. They speak of going to New York and yet another season finds them holding back, positively enjoying the Boston life. . . . In the summer of 1962, traveling in South America, Lowell again "sped up" and was hospitalized. The exhausting cycle continued. But the move to New York, Hardwick said, "saved my life." When a long newspaper strike shut down The New York Times Book Review, a group of writers, including Hardwick, founded The New York Review of Books early in 1963. The Review would become a leading, controversial intellectual journal. The need, as the founders saw it, was not just for another journal, but for a different kind of journal. In "The Decline of Book Reviewing," which she wrote in 1959 for a Harper's special supplement, "Writing in America," Hardwick outlined the background that would shape the new publication. A survey of book reviews showed that 51 percent were positive, only 4.7

202 / AMERICAN WRITERS percent were negative, and a startling 44.3 percent were noncommittal. "Sweet, bland commendations fall everywhere upon the scene; a universal, if somewhat lobotomized, accommodation reigns," Hardwick wrote. "A book is born into a puddle of treacle; the brine of hostile criticism is only a memory." The commercial interests of the book trade could not, Hardwick felt, be blamed for the indiscriminate distribution of praise; publicity, not reviews, sold books. Editors lacking literary knowledge had replaced the 4 'drama of opinion" with a blandly democratic idea of "coverage," and reviews lacked the "involvement, passion, character, eccentricity" that constitute literary style. Reviewers for the London Times Literary Supplement, in contrast, were intellectually secure, unconcerned that the majority of English citizens might not share their interests. Hard wick's vision for the literary journal is frankly elitist: The communication of the delight and importance of books, ideas, culture itself, is the very least one would expect from a journal devoted to reviewing of new and old works. Beyond that beginning, the interest of the mind of the individual reviewer is everything. Book reviewing is a form of writing. . . . It does matter what an unusual mind, capable of presenting fresh ideas in a vivid and original and interesting manner, thinks of books as they appear. Hardwick granted that superficial literary comment may have its place in small-town papers, but "for the great metropolitan publications, the unusual, the difficult, the lengthy, the intransigent, and above all, the interesting, should expect to find their audience." The first issue of The New York Review of Books, pasted up in Hardwick's dining room and financed with a four-thousand-dollar bank loan, was published in February 1963. A roster of forty-four distinguished writers—among them

Norman Mailer, Mary McCarthy, Susan Sontag, Gore Vidal, and Robert Penn Warren—appeared under the masthead. Hardwick and Lowell were on the board of directors with the publisher, A. Whitney Ellsworth; Barbara Epstein and Robert Silvers were the coeditors; also included was Epstein's husband Jason. Hardwick was the advisory editor. Over forty thousand copies sold, a phenomenal reception for a little-publicized new "highbrow" publication, and the founders received more than a thousand letters encouraging its continuation. In the following months they sold stock to investors, and published a second special issue in June. Regular biweekly publication began with the third issue, September 26, 1963. Within three years the Review was running in the black and its circulation topped eighty thousand in 1968. Despite its impressive list of associates, the Review's early issues suffered from a shortage of reviewers, and a core group—most of them former Partisan Review colleagues—found themselves evaluating one another's books, sometimes with discomfiting consequences. On successive pages R. W. Flint reviewed Adrienne Rich's poems, Rich reviewed Paul Goodman's, and Goodman reported on Toronto. Xavier Prynne lampooned both Mary McCarthy and Norman Mailer, and Mailer panned McCarthy's now best-known novel, The Group. Learning that Xavier Prynne was actually Elizabeth Hardwick, McCarthy felt betrayed. The editors, searching for additional talent, turned to Great Britain; the low pay that the Review could afford to offer was worth more in London than in New York. By the fifth issue the names of such distinguished British intellectuals as A. J. P. Taylor, V. S. Naipaul, A. Alvarez, and Stephen Spender had begun to appear in the table of contents. Even in the grief-filled Kennedy memorial issue devoted to "the present crisis in America," the Review from 1963 to 1964 expressed guarded

ELIZABETH HARDWICK I 203 optimism: social progress was seen as genuine, if imperfect; and angry, bitter voices such as James were criticized for potentially inciting violence. But a period of massive change had begun, and the multitude of social problems that would make the late 1960's tumultuous found increasing coverage in The New York Review of Books. Hardwick visited Selma, Alabama, in 1965 and reported on a civil rights demonstration. An uneasiness about how to evaluate the civil rights movement edges her essay "The Charms of Goodness" (collected in Bartleby in Manhattan and Other Essays, 1983), revealing some of the cognitive dissonance that liberal New York intellectuals faced in articulating the issues at stake in the social change of the decade. The intellectual life in New York and the radical tone of the Thirties are the worst possible preparation for Alabama at this stage of the Civil Rights Movement. In truth it must be said that the demonstrators are an embarrassment of love and brotherhood and hymns offered up in Jesus' name and evening services after that. Intellectual pride is out of place, theory is simple and practical, action is exuberant and communal. . . . Articles on Vietnam, civil rights, and student protest increased through 1965 and 1966, and by 1967 every issue reflected the urgency of political and social concerns. At Hardwick's insistence, the Review sent Mary McCarthy to Vietnam; her reports began appearing in April 1967. A new split among liberals was widening over Vietnam: the moderate position advocated negotiations for South Vietnamese selfdetermination but claimed public demonstrations and draft resistance in the United States would "comfort" the enemy, while the radical position advocated such public activism, refusing to take an anticommunist stance. A similar division occurred with relation to the civil rights movement. Its pages full of the drama of opinion, The New

York Review of Books moved toward the radical position. The most divisive issue, published on August 24, 1967, included an article by Andrew Kopkind critical of Martin Luther King's pacifism and one by Tom Hayden sympathetic to the frustration in the Newark ghetto that had erupted into riots in July. On the cover was a schematic of a Molotov cocktail. Hardwick contended that the cover was a statement against violence, but its irony was lost on many readers. Some liberals viewed the drawing, in combination with the articles, as editorial support for revolutionary violence. To some the elegantly drawn homemade bomb meant that radicalism had become fashionable and the intelligentsia were keeping step with the times. Journalist Tom Wolfe would describe The New York Review of Books as "the chief theoretical organ of radical chic." Advertising for subscribers, the Review traded on its controversial reputation. The ad copy under a photograph of a Roman statue thumbing its nose read: "The New York Review of Books has been called cliquish, intellectual, opinionated, and snobbish. For $7.50 a year you can be too." In 1968 the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy called on the Review to eulogize two leaders who had been criticized in its pages for not being sufficiently radical. Hardwick attended the memorial march for King in Memphis, Tennessee, and his funeral in Atlanta. "The political non-violence of Martin Luther King was an act of brilliant intellectual conviction, very sophisticated and yet perfectly consistent with evangelical religion," she wrote in "The Apotheosis of Martin Luther King" (in Bartleby in Manhattan), countering the August 1967 writer's denigration of King's pacifism. His death inspired an outpouring of legislative and financial support for civil rights, and also eruptions of mass rage: "In 125 cities there was burning and looting." A new, militant rhetoric, "probably a lasting repudiation of empty cour-

204 I AMERICAN WRITERS tesy and bureaucratic euphemism,1* was replacing King's style of practical exhortation based on a tradition of spiritual simplicity. Hardwick's conclusion brings to mind her position on the South in the 1948 review of Faulkner: perhaps, she suggests, the funeral in Atlanta marked "the waning of the slow, sweet dream" that southern Christianity could save "the Negro masses'9 from oppression. Over the next two years radical pieces were overbalanced by cautionary analyses in The New York Review of Books: revolutionary disruption in the United States would bring on martial law, structural institutional change was needed, violence would not do. In a 1973 interview with Philip Nobile about the Review's politics (in Intellectual Sky writing), Hardwick answered "The politics are very sensible. They're violently antiwar, and that's about it. We all stand for the same thing—civilization." Many of Hardwick's essays for The New York Review of Books are collected in Seduction and Betrayal and Bartleby in Manhattan. She also wrote film and book reviews for Vogue during this period, and in 1967 she became the first woman to receive the George Jean Nathan Award for drama criticism. Read in the context of the compelling social concerns that preoccupied The New York Review of Books, her theater pieces are stunning for their insistence that a production, whether of an old or a new play, should confront its audience with problems of the historical meaning of the present. Her high standards were rarely met. An April 2, 1964, article lambasting the new Repertory Theater at Lincoln Center concluded, with high wit: "Do not take hope. . . . The gods, parceling out their gifts, clearly do not mean for America to be purged of pity and terror by drama. For that, destiny has sent us TV." For the 1965-1966 season the Repertory Theater chose several difficult political plays. Hardwick commended their effort but lamented, "That the company suffered from a peculiar lit-

eralness was a great sadness." Hardwick's reviews drew out of the plays the effects that the stagings had failed to produce. Writing for the Review on The Condemned ofAltona, Jean-Paul Sartre's play on German post-holocaust guilt, Hardwick found chilling parallels to the contemporary American conscience: Our century . . . seems to be leading us to a true meeting with guilt, leading us to suffering, to acquaintance with the sorrows and mysteries and miseries to which hubris and power have led other nations. . . . It appears that we do not— neither director nor actor, neither audience nor critic—understand what is happening here. . . . As the 1966-1967 season opened, Hardwick attacked the opinion-shaping power of the drama critics of daily newspapers, noting particularly that Walter Kerr of the Times disliked experimental theater. The need for theater to challenge the conventions of commercial culture runs through Hardwick's reviews of the season. She found naturalistic acting—playing to the audience's emotions—is inadequate for a drama of historical horrors such as Peter Weiss's The Investigation, based on testimony about the Auschwitz death camp, which Hardwick reviewed in November of 1966. In December she attacked sentimentality, which infected even protest dramas. The immediate antidote she found was Kill for Peace, a "wildly funny" performance by the protest-rock group the Fugs. How, she wondered, could a Broadway lyricist such as Alan Lerner carry on after the Fugs's "My Baby Done Left Me and I Feel Like Home-Made Shit" had aired? At the end of the season she praised twenty-three-yearold Sam Shepherd's La Turista—both play and production—which she attended despite the company's unconventional refusal to extend formal invitations to drama critics. The sense of order one used to expect from high culture, Hardwick reflected, no longer had a place among serious writers. Order was now a property of commercial

ELIZABETH HARDWICK I 205 culture; what one found in the best experimental work was a disarrayed wealth of'"despair and humor." Hardwick did not cover the 1967-1968 drama season in New York, but in February she reviewed a production in Washington, D.C., of Howard Sadder's The Great White Hope, a play based on the life of the black fighter, Jack Johnson, whose winning of the 1908 World Heavyweight Championship humiliated white boxing fans. Real life, old and new theatricality, could not be separated in the boxing world, and the director had "consciously—and that is the art of it—been contented to leave it all there, corrupted, sentimentalized, full of the shabbiest folklore." Hardwick's "New York part" looked to Europe for models of high culture, and to this side of her, The Great White Hope was puzzling "in the somehow sweet acceptance of the grossest artistic deformations of our immediate past.'' But she felt that "a longing to see the reality of American experience on the stage attends . . . every entrance into a theater," and this play satisfied that longing. Writing the review brought out her Kentucky side; she was deeply interested in the play's revitalization of the "moribund" materials of popular American culture. Visiting Lexington a year later, she wrote "Going Home in America," an essay she later transformed for her third novel. Erasing the years of exile, "This was, is, truly home to me, not just a birthplace," she began. In the anguish of divisive social turmoil, America, with Hardwick, was searching for itself. Hardwick was losing interest in drama criticism. Looking back on the season, she wrote in June 1968 in an essay, "Notes on the New Theater," "The most interesting works are not interesting to write about: they are bits and pieces of scene and action. Criticism lives on plot, character, and theme." Avant-garde theater, "rooted in Hippydom—innocent nudity, ingratiating obscenity, charming poverty"—was hard put to

keep up with "the far reaches of tragedy and farce" being played out in real life. The theater of alienation was too austere and intellectual for "Hippydom"; instead the new theater worked for audience participation, "a substitution for a loss we are all trying to forget," the loss of coherence in both art and life. Beard, a farce on sexual liberation in which Jean Harlow and Billy the Kid meet in the afterlife, "chained in repetition, their minds in eternity fixed on F...ing," Hardwick notes as one of the season's highlights. "In the play's prison of everlasting sex, there is an appallingly genuine metaphysical conception. 'If we don't do what we want, we're not divine,' Billy the Kid says.'' She also attended two shows in which several roles were played in drag, When Queens Collide and Conquest of the Universe, and found the staging, acting, and costuming brilliantly imaginative: "The texts are fantastic parodies of politics, drama, history, sex, films and the entertainments have, in the end, the profoundest authenticity." Of traditional theater she wrote simply, "no relief in sight." Hardwick's marriage continued along much the same pattern as before. Hospitalized shortly after the assassination of President Kennedy, Lowell confided to friends that President Johnson had appointed him to the cabinet. A messy affair with a dancer accompanied a manic episode in January 1965. Again, Lowell's psychiatrist indulged his infatuation. Hardwick resigned herself to his leaving her, but when he wanted to come home she welcomed him. In December he fell in love again, but this time his object was the safely inaccessible Jacqueline Kennedy. There were hospitalizations in January and December 1966. Lithium carbonate, a new treatment for manic-depression, became available in 1967, and it kept Lowell out of the hospital for four years. When Lowell took a position at Oxford University in the spring of 1970, Hardwick resigned from her teaching position at Barnard College and waited in New York for him to settle their

206 / AMERICAN WRITERS living arrangements. Learning in June that Lowell was living with Lady Caroline Blackwood, Hardwick did not reserve her anger. She sent him stinging cables and letters full of contempt. Lowell was hospitalized in July, and Hardwick, hearing that the conditions at the hospital were poor, flew to London. Finding the hospital satisfactory, she returned to New York, leaving Lowell a note: "If you need me, I'll always be there, if you don't, I'll not be there." Over the fall Lowell's letters vacillated from "I don't think I can go back to you" to "I wonder if we couldn't make it up." Hardwick by year's end was certain: the split was final. On September 28, 1971, Caroline Blackwood bore a son, Sheridan Lowell. Hardwick and Lowell divorced in October 1972 and Lowell married Blackwood. In July 1973 three books of Lowell's poetry, History, For Lizzie and Harriet, and The Dolphin, were published. In some of the poems, Lowell had appropriated and rephrased passages from letters Hardwick had written him during their breakup. "The inclusion of the letter poems stands as one of the most vindictive and mean-spirited acts in the history of poetry," Adrienne Rich, by this time radically feminist, wrote for American Poetry Review. Hardwick was deeply hurt by the poems' publication. She told Lowell she never wanted to hear from him again and denounced his publishers. Read in connection with Hard wick's life, Seduction and Betrayal, a selection of her essays for The New York Review of Books from 1970 to 1974, takes on multiple meanings. As a contribution to the growing body of literary criticism associated with the women's movement, the essays lack the polemical focus of such feminists as Adrienne Rich and Kate Millett. The difference is partly one of style: although anger is everywhere present, it is channeled through Hardwick's oblique and resonant sentences— direct ideological argument is rare. The essays explore the experiences of literary women and

heroines, experiences so often resembling Hardwick's own that sentences leap off the page, charged with double entendre. That the book was reprinted as late as 1990 is significant: by then the urgency for a polemical agenda in feminist criticism had lessened and more feminist critics were turning instead to the effort of constructing the history of women as writers and thinkers. Seduction and Betrayal enters that history doubly, both as an account of historical and fictional women and as the work of a woman who had built her intellectual career before feminism began to be institutionalized as an academic discipline. The book is also, irresistibly, a piece of imaginative writing with its author's own journey mapped between the lines. "The sisters seized upon the development of their talents as an honorable way of life and in this they were heroic," Hardwick concludes of the Brontes. Compared with the little that the "real world" offered serious, impoverished women, their confined lives had a kind of freedom which they turned, by a "practical, industrious, ambitious cast of mind," into literary careers. "To be female: What does it mean?" Hardwick finds Henrik Ibsen posing this problem and uses his female characters to discuss women's relations with men. Nora Helmer of A Doll's House (1879) is practical and independent, despite her domesticity, taking pride "in having assumed responsibility for her husband's life." Thea inHedda Gabler(lS90) finds "purpose for her own intellectual possibilities" by playing nursemaid to the "damaged artist," Lovborg. In Rosmersholm (1886) Rebecca West, desperate for both a home and a cause worthy of her highminded intelligence, lights on a married man. The outcome is sordid, exposing "the pathetic false hopes of the heroines that by possession and appropriation they would possess themselves." The wife, Beata, dead of suicide before the play begins, is an omnipresent moral force in Hardwick's essay. She condemns the adulterous

ELIZABETH HARDWICK I 207 lovers with finality: "nothing will turn out to have been worth the destruction of others and of oneself." "Living as a sort of twin, as husband and wife, or brother and sister, is a way of survival," Hardwick writes of Zelda Fitzgerald. In the case of artists these intense relations are curiously ambivalent, undefined collaborations —the two share in perceptions, temperament, in the struggle for creation, for the powers descending downward from art, for reputation, achievement, stability, for their own uniqueness—that especially. Still, only one of the twins is real as an artist, as a person with a special claim upon the world, upon the indulgence of society. F. Scott Fitzgerald appropriated letters and journals of Zelda's in his writing, and William Wordsworth used his sister Dorothy's journals. Hardwick does not condemn these incursions outright because the women in these unbalanced partnerships could never, she claims, have been great artists: Zelda was an inferior talent despite her strong creative drives, which were pitiably suppressed, and Dorothy's dependency held back her capacity to make meaning of her perceptions, a task her brother executed with brilliance. But the "illusion" of collaborating with William offered Dorothy fulfillments that one should not, Hardwick cautions, downplay. In the marriage of Jane and Thomas Carlyle, "a collaboration of superior, tortured souls," Jane undertook "an original adventure for which credit was due her." The unhappiness of her last years came from her husband's ungrateful neglect: "In the long run wives are to be paid in a peculiar coin— consideration for their feelings. And it usually turns out this is an enormous, unthinkable inflation few men will remit, or if they will, only with a sense of being overcharged." The last essay in the collection, "Seduction and Betrayal," is a catalog of tragic heroines and an elegy for virtues that are no longer required.

Hester Prynne is exemplary for "the striking skepticism of her mind, the moral distance she sets between herself and the hysterias of the time." Bourgeois fiction asks of the heroine a stoicism more complex than passion: "a sense of reality, a curious sort of independence and honor, an acceptance of consequence that puts courage to the most searing test.'' Her purity is not sexual but "a lack of mean calculations, of vindictiveness, of self-abasing weakness." Female heroism can act as a reproach; when her moving virtues "are called upon, it is usual for the heroine to overshadow the man who is the origin of her torment." Sexual cause-and-effect is the origin of her suffering, and biology is destiny only for girls; "the men do not really believe in consequence for themselves." Today, Hardwick claims, innocence is no longer a value, and contraceptive technology has removed the inevitability of the consequences of sex. Long-suffering heroism "hurts and no one easily consents to be under its rule," Hardwick writes. Stoicism still has its uses, but "improvisation is better, more economical, faster, more promising." Hardwick's own long-suffering, heroic loyalty has been given its place in literary history by Lowell's critics and biographers. One after another they pause from their scholarly tasks to register incredulity that Hardwick stayed with him for so long. Jeffrey Meyers in Manic Power: Robert Lowell and His Circle, offers a range of speculations: "Hardwick's surpassing love, frenetic fidelity, devotion merging into martyrdom, humiliating masochism, unlimited capacity for suffering and endurance made her the tragic heroine of his life." But one might take Seduction and Betrayal as a caution not to underestimate the rewards of Hardwick's "collaboration" with the troubled poet to whom she devoted so much care. The mystery of Hardwick's relationship with Lowell did not end with their divorce. By the

208 / AMERICAN WRITERS spring of 1976 they were on speaking terms. When Lowell suffered congestive heart failure in January 1977, Hard wick visited him in the hospital. Although Lowell returned to Caroline Blackwood over Easter, he decided their marriage should end. In July he and Hardwick traveled to Moscow as members of an American delegation to the Union of Soviet Writers. They spent the rest of the summer together in Castine, which over the years had become the favored summer retreat of many of their old friends. Visiting Blackwood in early September, Lowell became restless and phoned Hardwick to say he was returning to New York. He died in the taxi from the airport to the apartment on West Sixtyseventh Street. From its first sentences, Hardwick's third novel, Sleepless Nights, shows her continued working out of the changing values she wrote about in Seduction and Betrayal. The novel begins on a note of improvisation: "It is June. This is what I have decided to do with my life just now. I will do this work of transformed and even distorted memory and lead this life, the one I am leading today." Virtually all of the critical ideas about change in literary form that Hardwick had developed during the twenty-five-year interim since the publication of her second novel are synthesized in her third. If plot was a weakness in The Ghostly Lover and The Simple Truth, the repudiation of plot is the strength of Sleepless Nights. Carol Simpson Stern suggests that the earlier novels "show a niggling regret on the author's part that the story is not a little more important," but in Sleepless Nights "ordinary experience needs no apology." Hardwick's disagreement with Simone de Beauvoir over the limits of female experience remains firm, except that now—as in Seduction and Betrayal—that rich experience is worth recording, and the abolition of the conventions of fictional narrative frees writing for the purpose. "Can it be that I am the subject?" Hardwick

(or her narrator, Elizabeth) writes, a little astonished. "True, with the weak something is always happening: improvisation, surprise, suspense, injustice, manipulation, hypochondria, secret drinking, jealousy, lying, crying, hiding in the garden, driving off in the middle of the night. The weak have the purest sense of history. Anything can happen." Books, places, and the people for whom Elizabeth has a "prying sympathy" constitute her experience, which lacks the drama of an adventure on the high seas, "But after all, T am a woman." Critics have puzzled over how to classify Sleepless Nights, at once experimental in form and as stylistically controlled as any of Hardwick's other writing. It is fiction so transparently autobiographical that the category of fiction falls away, replaced by memory, so that the novel resembles a series of personal essays. Although Elizabeth tells her own story only peripherally, she is everywhere in the production of the sentences, much as Hardwick's presence in her essays comes through not from self-description but from her observations, judgments, and arrangements of words. Whereas in Hardwick's critical work self-reflexivity generates double meanings, in Sleepless Nights the reflexivity is explicit. Sleeplessly writing to "those whom I dare not ring up until morning and yet must talk to throughout the night," Elizabeth exposes the vulnerabilities behind Hardwick's polished style. She observes that the drunken Canadians who have recently shared a train car with her are not prosperous: "I am sure of that from my unworthy calculations based on the arithmetic of snobbery and shame.'' The emotional stratum of style is shame: " * Shame is inventive,' Nietzsche said. And that is scarcely the half of it. From shame I have paid attention to clothes, shoes, rings, watches, accents, teeth, points of deportment, turns of speech." But the emotional stratum of style is also grief. At the end of the novel Elizabeth writes to M., identified with Mary Me-

ELIZABETH HARDWICK I 209 Carthy through the novel's dedication: "Why is it that we cannot keep the note of irony, the jangle of carelessness at a distance? Sentences in which I have tried for a certain light tone—many of those have to do with events, upheavals, destructions that caused me to weep like a child." Should Sleepless Nights read as biography? Hardwick seems to offer the novel as a counterpoise to the known events of her life, the story that can be garnered from, say, an index to Lowell's biography or a scholarly guide to the events behind his letter poems. Through Elizabeth, she writes: "Sometimes I resent the glossary, the concordance of truth, many have about my real life, have like an extra pair of spectacles. I mean that such fact is to me a hindrance to memory." The book's episodes fill in the textures of different times and places that are part of Hardwick's life, without quite allowing the reader to treat these details as fact. Yet no plot, no message— nothing other than their air of authenticity and the urgency with which Elizabeth tells them— justifies their presence in the book. It is as if Hardwick not only abolishes the convention of plot but also complicates the convention of a persona, a fictional narrator who is not the author, by making her narrator difficult to distinguish from herself. She seems to have used such displacement techniques—identified with postmodern writing—to speak directly while maintaining uncertainty about what the truth is, both preserving and protecting the details of her own life that had not become famous because of her association with Lowell. In Lexington, a mother with "fateful fertility," assertive in her profound acceptance of nature's dominance, is utterly indifferent to the past. Many brothers and sisters slip in late,' 'each one gorged on a petty vanity, the fantasies of being an orphan." About the Kentucky Derby, thoroughbreds, gambling, and Dostoyevsky, Elizabeth notes, "It is true that only one out of a hundred wins, but what is that to me?" An older

man, the one Bruce in The Ghostly Lover is based on, introduces Elizabeth to " 'experience,' and gathered that what is meant is an attraction to something contrary to oneself, usually a being or habit lower, more dangerous, risky." In college, two members of the Communist party in Cincinnati visit Lexington to observe organizing in the South. Elizabeth has read all the pamphlets. A poor Scotch-Irish family from Appalachia replaces all the usual passions with politics, their invalid son swimming in communist texts. In New York Elizabeth wakes up longing for her mother. She lives with a gay friend from home in the sleazy Hotel Schuyler and together they haunt clubs, watching Billie Holiday's "luminous selfdestruction" up close. She says to herself during these years: In my heart I was weasel-like, hungry, hunting with blazing eyes for innocent contradictions, given to predatory chewings on the difference between theory and practice. That is what I had brought from home in Kentucky to New York, this large bounty of polemicism, stored away behind light, limp Southern hair and not-quite-blue eyes. Sex is "evangelical," to be had, not enjoyed. There is an abortion performed by a cheerful, cigar-smoking practitioner who also runs a funeral home. In Amsterdam couples combine, separate, and recombine under each other's noses because there is nowhere else to go. An elderly roue remarks of his shrewish wife, "They don't forgive you after all. They have their revenge." Back in Castine, Ida hauls the laundry of the summer residents to her bungalow on a hill. She also takes in Herman, a ne'er-do-well who eventually robs her. Elizabeth writes: "A few hours ago I made the journey to Ida's house, knocked on the latched screen door and felt something close to fright coming over me. Oh, God, there she is, homely, homely, scabby with a terrible

270 / AMERICAN WRITERS skin rash. . . . Her large, muscled arms hold me for a moment in a pounding embrace." In the present, Elizabeth greets a bag lady who used to be her neighbor. Phone conversations, visits, parties: * 'Divorces and separation—that is the way to get attention.'' Three hundred or more photographs lie in desks, in chests, in marked envelopes, bearing witness to the form of marriage. Sleepless Nights earned superlative reviews and a National Book Critics Circle Award nomination. To account for the novel's unusual form, Joan Didion described "The method of the T " as "that of the anthropologist, of the traveler on watch for the revealing detail: we are provided precise observations of strangers met in the course of the journey, close studies of their rituals." Didion compared Sleepless Nights to Claude L6vi-Strauss's Tristes Tropiques, an apt comparison reinforced by Hardwick's having written about L£vi-Strauss in "Sad Brazil," a 1974 essay she revised for Bartleby in Manhattan. To Hardwick Tristes Tropiques is as much a journey of self-discovery as a record of observations. The observable facts, even in remote, primitive parts of the New World, have an air of deterioration, shattered bonds, loss. L6vi-Strauss self-critically questions the coherence and validity of his own position as an investigator, a reflexivity that, like Elizabeth's, is filled with sadness. Another piece in Bartleby in Manhattan that supplies critical background to Sleepless Nights is "The Sense of the Present," a series of very short essays exploring the changing formal, psychological, and critical issues that define postmodern fiction. She finds that paranoia has replaced guilt as a central character feature, events accumulate randomly with little deference to the conventions of genre, a "strict ear for banalities" connects the extreme and the ordinary to form a kind of history. Though we may be happier reading classic nineteenth-century novels, Hardwick writes, "It is important to con-

cede the honor, the nerve, the ambition" of writers such as Kurt Vonnegut, Donald Barthelme, Renata Adler, and Thomas Pynchon. What is honorable in their works "is the intelligence that questions the shape of life at every point." The twenty-four essays in Bartleby in Manhattan serve as a retrospective of the literary and social concerns—always joined—that Hardwick articulated over the twenty-year span from the founding of The New York Review of Books to their publication in book form. The book opens with Hardwick's 1965 and 1968 essays on Sel~ ma, Alabama, and on Martin Luther King for the Review and includes a selection of her drama criticism. In 1971, at the peak of conservative and moderate attacks on the Review, Hardwick wrote "Militant Nudes," an omnibus film review that should have discredited any charges that the Review's attitude toward chic radicalism was uncritical: Professor Theodor W. Adorno, at the University of Frankfurt, was, not long before his death, the audience for—or the object of—a striking bit of symbolic action. Adorno, a distinguished philosopher and the teacher of many leftist students, had come to be worried about student zeal for immediate action, about spontaneity, random rebellion, and, of course, the possibility of repressive actions by the government. And how was the sacred old father rebuked? A girl got up in the classroom and took off her clothes. Hardwick uses the incident to frame her dialectical critique of radical sexuality and militancy. Sexuality has become a political abstraction, the young body "a class moving into the forefront of history," while militant rhetoric has become a mystical and coercive apocalyptic "program" that kills "the uses of reality. . . . " Like GFs weary of waiting to be sent to Vietnam, young radicals take up compulsive sex and violent activism as "tours of active duty at last," only to compound their alienation. The consequence is

ELIZABETH HARDWICK I 211 moral numbness and indifference to pain.' 'There is death everywhere," Hardwick writes of Gimme Shelter, the documentary film about the Rolling Stones concert at Altamont Speedway, where violence ended the benign dreams of the 1960's counterculture. Something pitiless and pathological has seeped into youth's love of itself, its body, its politics. . . . You feel a transcendental joke links us all together; some sordid synthesis hangs out there in the heavy air. No explanation—the nuclear bomb, the Vietnam war, the paralyzing waste of problems and vices that our lives and even the virtues of our best efforts have led us to—explains. Yet it would be dishonorable to try to separate our selves from our deforming history and from the depressing dreams being acted out in its name. Hardwick vindicated the Review's immersion in contemporary culture: however anguished and inexplicable the historic moment, criticism must not repudiate it but participate. 4 'Casualties of every spiritual and personal nature lay about us as the legacy of the sixties," Hardwick wrote as the following decade waned. "Domestic Manners," like "Militant Nudes," a strongly dialectical essay, describes the 1970's retreat into intimacy and narcissism, ego validation in private relationships and schemes for selfimprovement, in search of "remission of aches of the mind and psyche.'' The anarchic sexuality of the 1960's had been transformed into a sexual information business whose purpose was to enhance family life, to support, not oppose, social stability. But the family is a meaningless generalization, Hardwick points out, namely "because the classes are so far apart in the scenery in which daily life takes place." In the cities poverty breeds a "dangerous criminal insanity" that randomly victimizes mainly the poor; "a vibrant, ferocious, active, heartbreaking insanity is as much a part of the seventies as intimacy, retreat

to the private." And family life has been changing for several decades; the women's movement crystallized the corresponding changes that had occurred both in the inner lives of women and in the roles society needed them to play. The movement's positions on economic equality should be welcomed by a society in which "the wife economy is as obsolete as the slave economy." The "more devastating" challenge to custom is the great critical potential of feminism. Hardwick concludes "Domestic Manners" stating, The women's movement is above all a critique. And almost nothing, it turns out, will remain outside its relevance. It is the disorienting extension of the intrinsic meaning of women's liberation, much of it unexpected, that sets the movement apart. It is a psychic and social migration, leaving behind an altered landscape. "Wives and Mistresses" extends the concerns of Seduction and Betrayal and has the same neartransparent quality of being drawn acutely from Hardwick's own life. As in Sleepless Nights, the biographer searching for the facts and themes of the life of her subject is caught in selfconsciousness: embedded in Hardwick's texts are critical reflections on the problems of producing biography. She opens "Wives and Mistresses" with an epigraph from Boris Pasternak's Zhivago Poems: For who are we, and where from, If after all these years Gossip alone still lives on While we no longer live? Hardwick does not shrink from relating the gossip: Countess Tolstoy's campaign to defend herself against her husband's humiliating representations of her, Lady Byron's lifelong campaign to smear a husband of one year, Olga Ivinskaya's restless idealization of Pasternak—in none of these examples does the woman's actions give her an appeal independent of the man's

2/2 / AMERICAN WRITERS greatness. Yet Hard wick excavates these cases in an attempt to understand the significance of how wives and mistresses are the * 'footnotes'' of great men's lives, selecting women with whom she has in common a central experience, then sorting through the anguishes, dangers, and downfalls of different manifestations of that experience. The essay has a double ending. In the first, Hardwick tells of Nadezha Mandelstam, wife of the Soviet poet Osip Mandelstam, who was murdered in prison. Nadezha writes to him just before she learns of his death: "In my last dream I was buying food for you in a filthy hotel restaurant. . . . When I had bought it, I realized I did not know where to take it, because I do not know where you are. When I woke up, I said to Shura, 'Osia is dead.' . . . It's me, Nadia. Where are you? Farewell." Mandelstam, her memoirs a brilliant "battle against tyranny and death," is more than an exemplary case; her letter supplies Hardwick's essay with a release of grief. But another end follows the letter, a brief postscript on husbands' memoirs of great women—banal, self-serving, no better than most of the female "footnotes" had been. The emotional clarity of Mandelstam's letter draws attention to the complexity of feeling throughout this powerful essay, inviting an imaginative reading. As usual—to the bafflement of some reviewers—Hardwick does not argue and conclude; the interplay of epigrammatic examples, impressions, and valuations that structure her criticism more often resembles the method of a prose poem or story than an academic essay. Marriage, conflicted and inauthentic feeling, death and mourning, then recomplication: women cannot come into their own by publicizing their suffering in intimacy with great men, nor can they, great themselves, expect men to do justice to their memory; what matters is authenticity of feeling and a critical practice of one's own. While it would be a disservice to reduce any of Hardwick's writing merely to encoded

tellings of her own life, in "Wives and Mistresses" she seems to have recorded the difficulties she herself faced in marriage, to have grieved, and to have distinguished herself from the "footnotes," preempting autobiography with critical thought. Though Elizabeth Hardwick has written infrequently since the early 1980's for The New York Review of Books she has remained an advisory editor. When The Best American Essays series was founded in 1986, Hardwick was suitably chosen as the editor of the first volume. Her introduction defines the essay form, ancient, prolific, but not quite legitimate, characterized by epigram, comparison, and example. The form differs from journalism in that information is not the object: "We consent to watch a mind at work, without agreement often, but only for pleasure. Knowledge hereby attained, great indeed, is again wanted for the pleasure of itself." The essayist shares with poets and fiction writers a compulsion "to animate the stones of an idea, the clods of research, the uncertainty of memory," but must do this magic without rhyme or assonance, character or plot. And while "the usual miserable battering of the sense of self" is enough to supply the content of a story or poem, the essay requires a mind full of diverse knowledge, particularly of the history of the essay form itself. In "essayistic" writing, an author takes liberties for the sake of expression—"freedoms illicit in the minds of some readers, freedoms not so much exercised as seized over the border." An essayist aggressively assumes "the authority to speak in one's own voice," Hardwick writes. The authority to express oneself is self-justifying, in that a writer earns it by a career of exercising it. In contemporary essays, Hardwick writes, authority divides against itself: buried in the sentences "is an intelligence uncomfortable with dogmatism, wanting to make allowances for the otherwise case, the emendation." Use of the first

ELIZABETH HARDWICK I 213 person is one way writers retract their authority to make room for the reader's participation. Style is another way. As Hardwick suggested of Mary McCarthy, writing that promotes controversial ideas risks being rejected by its audience, a risk that style mitigates: "The mastery of expository prose, the rhythm of sentences, the pacing, the sudden flash of unexpected vocabulary, redeem polemic, and, in any case, no one is obliged to agree." But stylistic mastery selects its audience, who must match the writer's mind in sophistication: "Wit, the abrupt reversal, needs to strike a receptive ear or eye or else the surprise is erased, struck down." Here is the "above all interesting" —to quote Hardwick's re-excitement of a tired word—paradox at the heart of a career such as hers that blends feminism into lifelong liberal intellectualism: to publish essays is to cultivate an audience that shares your privileged knowledge of history, culture, and ideas, to constitute an elite. The aggressiveness of the essay form is imperialistic insofar as that elite imposes itself on others it labels its inferiors; subversive insofar as the properties of culture and intellect stand as a critique informing an unjust society that it is wrong and need not remain that way, insofar as it is subversive for women to have taken up the historically patriarchal equipment of criticism. "Often we read something unexpected by writers whose work we know," Hardwick writes in the introduction to The Best American Essays 1986. "Each month, somewhere, one or another will have written about subjects we had not thought to connect them with." For readers who know Hardwick for her novels and criticism, her pieces for Architectural Digest and House & Garden in the 1980's are likely to be those unexpected finds. These are garden pieces in a particularly New York way, essays about the remnants of Eden's wake as they are represented in large, beautiful books about the histories of

gardens in different countries, in an urban museum's exhibition of garden paintings, in the city dweller's summer pilgrimages to the country. While the subject matter may be a surprising one for Hardwick, the concerns are familiar, though here richly framed with color photographs. Concepts that she often worked with as a literary critic turn out to illuminate not only literature but also artistic arrangements and representations of flowers. She applies her understanding of modernity to photographs of Claude Monet's garden in Giverny: "Internationalism and eclecticism are, in landscaping as elsewhere, the definition of a modern sensibility.'' The rendering of a portrait of a plant is, like poetry or drama, "imbued with cultural history and the drift of each period's changing conception of itself." Paintings of garden scenes also offer her opportunities to take up the themes she wrote about in Seduction and Betrayal, the physical constraints on women and the imbalance in women's relationships with male artists. "What a lot of clothes the women are dragging around in these rich-toned landscapes," she remarks. "Hats, sleeves, petticoats, ties at the neck, parasols—a shroud of protection, giving a somewhat fatigued femininity to these lost summer days." In a landscape by John Singer Sargent, a man paints while his companion, a woman, "is reading in a hat like a haystack, a dark skirt, and holding an inevitable lacy umbrella, a thing of no apparent utility unless it be a weapon against a change of his mood there in the erotic sleepiness of a full summer afternoon." Hard wick's essay on a summer retreat to Castine, Maine, "Puritanical Pleasures," is austere and elegiac. To a reader practiced in searching her prose for its multiple levels, the following passage from early in the essay seems to contain the major themes of Hardwick's life, the emotional strains that accompanied her intellectual career: stoicism and loss, a slightly distanced expressiveness, a man who takes off on an adven-

214 I AMERICAN ture and ultimately does not come back alive, a young woman who leaves for the big city and becomes a part of it. The splendor of the region always retains a pristine frugality in its messages, a puritanical remnant in its pleasures. Like the blossoms, you are reminded that you can wait—and also you can do without. A lonesome pine, country music drift in the air, long-lost sentiments. He'll never return from the sea (the Merchant Marine) and the blue-eyed girl has gone to the office desks of Connecticut, never to look back.

Selected Bibliography WORKS OF ELIZABETH

HARDWICK

NOVELS

The Ghostly Lover. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1945. The Simple Truth. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1955; Ecco Press, 1982. Sleepless Nights. New York: Random House, 1979. CRITICISM A View of My Own: Essays in Literature and Society. New York: Farrar Straus, 1962. Seduction and Betrayal: Women and Literature. New York: Random House, 1974. SHORT STORIES 4

'The People on the Roller Coaster/' In O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1945. Edited by Herschel Brickell. New York: Doubleday, 1945. "The Mysteries of Eleusis." In The Best American Short Stories 1946. Edited by Martha Foley. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1946. ''Evenings at Home." In The Best American Short Stories 1949. Edited by Martha Foley. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1949.

ESSAYS

"The Decline of Book Reviewing." Harper's Magazine, 219:138-143 (November 1959).

WRITERS

"Going Home in America: Lexington, Kentucky." Harper's Magazine, 239:78-82 (July 1969). Bartleby in Manhattan and Other Essays. New York: Random House, 1983. "Gardens of the World." Architectural Digest, 42:264 (October 1985). "Puritanical Pleasures." House & Garden, 158:9699 (August 1986). "Introduction." The Best American Essays 1986. New York: Ticknor and Fields, 1986. "The Heart of the Seasons." House & Garden, 159:125-128; 230-231 (May 1987). REVIEWS

"Artist and Spokesman." Partisan Review, 12:406407 (Summer 1945). "Fiction Chronicle." Partisan Review, 13:384-393 (Summer 1946). "Fiction Chronicle." Partisan Review, 14:196-200 (March-April 1947). "Fiction Chronicle." Partisan Review, 14:427-431 (July-August 1947). "Faulkner and the South Today." Partisan Review, 15:1130-1135 (October 1948). "The Disaster at Lincoln Center." The New York Review of Books, 2:1-3 (April 2, 1964). "Sartre's The Condemned ofAltona at Lincoln Center." The New York Review of Books, 6:6-7 (March 3, 1966). "Report on the New York Theater." The New York Review of Books, 6:8-9 (April 28, 1966). "The Investigation by Peter Weiss." The New York Review of Books, 7:5 (November 3, 1966). "New York Theater." The New York Review of Books, 7:14 (December 15, 1966). "New York Theater." The New York Review of Books, 8:6, 8 (April 6, 1967). "The Great White Hope by Howard Sadder." The New York Review of Books, 10:4 (February 1, 1968). "Notes on the New Theater." The New York Review of Books, 10:5-6 (June 20, 1968). BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL STUDIES Aaron, Daniel. Writers on the Left. New York: Avon, 1965. Branin, Joseph J. "Elizabeth Hardwick." In Dictionary of Literary Biography. Vol. 6, American Nov-

ELIZABETH HARDWICK I 215 elists Since World War II. Second series. Edited by James E. Kibler. Detroit: Gale, 1980. Pp. 133-136. Didion, Joan. "Meditation on a Life." New York Times Book Review, April 29, 1979, pp. 1, 60. Gelderman, Carol W. Mary McCarthy: A Life. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1988. Hamilton, Ian. Robert Lowell: A Biography. New York: Random House, 1982. Inge, M. Thomas. "Elizabeth Hardwick." In Southern Writers: A Biographical Dictionary. Edited by Robert Bain, Joseph Flora, and Louis Rubin. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University, 1979. Maddocks, Melvin. Review of A View of My Own.

Chicago Sunday Tribune, September 9, 1962. Meyers, Jeffrey. Manic Power: Robert Lowell and His Circle. New York: Arbor House, 1987. Nobile, Philip. Intellectual Skywriting: Literary Politics and The New York Review of Books. New York: Charterhouse, 1974. Stern, Carol Simpson. "Elizabeth Hardwick." In Contemporary Novelists. Edited by James Vinson. London and Chicago: St. James Press, 1986.

With thanks to Harvey Teres. —JANET GRAY

Jack Kerouac 1922-1969

R EGARDED AS THE authentic voice of the Beat

William Burroughs, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and Gary Snyder, he was singularly unskilled at giving interviews to the press, partly because he was met with undisguised hostility but mostly because he did not feel he had to justify what he was doing. Since Kerouac's death on October 21, 1969, the influence of his individual approach to language has been acknowledged by writers as dissimilar as Ken Kesey, who tried to follow in Kerouac's footsteps, and Thomas Pynchon, who went in a different direction as a writer but remembers Kerouac's prose as having been an "exciting, liberating, strongly positive" influence on him. University students in creativewriting programs still read Kerouac and try their own spontaneous prose experiments. Outside the university, Kerouac's works continue to be read by young people, who respond to him as a counterculture hero, a Beat rebel, the archetypal outsider. In the words of the French-Canadian critic Victor-Levy Beaulieu, "Jack became a hero . . . a wise man who showed you that illumination could reach you only when you broke with the old habits." Literary historians conventionally attribute the roots of Kerouac's alienation as a Beat writer to the massive changes and dislocations of the postwar society reflected in his autobiographical novels. He himself defined "Beat Generation" for the Random House Dictionary as "members of

Generation in twentieth-century American literature, Jack Kerouac considered himself a storyteller and experimental writer in the literary tradition of Marcel Proust and James Joyce, creating a method of writing that he called "spontaneous prose" and that he was confident would become the prose of the future. Contrary to his expectations, his technique was not taken up by later writers of fiction. In fact, recent decades have shown that his narrative style ran counter to the spirit of his time, as expressed in the ironic "metafictions" of his contemporaries William Burroughs, John Earth, Thomas Pynchon, and other postmodernists. Yet Kerouac's style and the stories he told in the 1950's of his own adventures and those of his friends had a different kind of influence, one that he had never intended and later disowned. When his books were first published, they were so compelling that their description of an alternative lifestyle contributed to the cultural revolution that swept America and Europe in the late 1960's. In the process, the larger intent and design of Kerouac's literary achievement was obscured by the notoriety associated with his popular status as "the king of the Beats."

Kerouac protested in vain that he was a serious writer. Unlike his friends Allen Ginsberg,

277

278 / AMERICAN WRITERS the generation that came of age after World War II who, supposedly as a result of disillusionment stemming from the Cold War, espouse mystical detachment and relaxation of social and sexual tensions." But as time distances Kerouac's readers from the cold-war society of the 1950's, and as our cultural awareness broadens to encompass a closer examination of the experiences of minority and immigrant groups in America, his books also tell another, equally powerful story. Kerouac's autobiographical writings are among the most complete, dramatic, and devastating accounts in our country's literature of the high cost of acculturation paid by a sensitive and ambitious first-generation native son. Kerouac's self-description as "a French Canadian Iroquois American aristocrat Breton Cornish democrat" in his book Desolation Angels (1965) suggests his heightened awareness of his family background and the complex, uneasy psychological balance in which he held the different parts of his heritage. Kerouac, never completely assimilated into American life, was a writer deeply marked by the different cultural experience of his French-Canadian family. He developed his unique style of writing to create a highly personal language and method of narration that allowed him to capture the emotional experience he had while writing about the events and people in his life. The layers of memories and associations he evoked in the process of creating "fictions" left a record of his consciousness in twenty published books, including what he called the "vast books" comprising his autobiography, "The Legend of Duluoz." Because the books chronicling the ten-year Beat period in his life are the best known, the larger design of what he considered his major work and the influence of his early French-Canadian immigrant background on all of his writing are usually overlooked. Considering himself "an outsider American genius Canuck," Kerouac knew from early

childhood the feeling of belonging to a different cultural group. His roots were solidly planted in working-class immigrant soil. Kerouac's grandparents first emigrated from Quebec to New Hampshire, members of that population of nearly a million impoverished people who left the farms of French Canada for the factories of New England between 1840 and 1930. In 1891 the French-Canadian chronicler Pfcre Hamon described the background of a typical poor Catholic immigrant family who had left Canada with the hope of finding a better life in America: A "habitant," poor in goods and land but rich in children, decides to emigrate to the States. The family arrives in a manufacturing center, Lowell, Holyoke, Worcester, for example; along with the father and mother there are eight or ten children of different ages. . . .Everyone wears clothes made of homespun, that is fabric woven by the housewife. Their "butin," the word the Canadians use to designate their possessions, is wrapped up in bundles that the father distributes to the biggest of his sons while he keeps for himself the "poche" which contains what he considers to be his most precious possessions. They arrive at the station. . . . The Americans are there, impassively watching this spectacle with which, however, they are beginning to become familiar. Perhaps they are thinking to themselves: "Here comes some new personnel for our factories. They're solid and full of life. Who knows, maybe in fifty years the sons of these people might even replace the wornout impoverished Puritan race here in New England?" Pere Hamon's prophecy about "the sons of these people" came true in a way he could hardly have expected: sixty years after Hamon's description, Kerouac wrote On the Rood, and after its publication in 1957 the "wornout impoverished Puritan" literary culture of America was never quite the same. Kerouac's father, Leo, was born in New

JACK KEROUAC I 219 Hampshire. His mother, Gabrielle L'Evesque, had emigrated there from Quebec. Before Kerouac's birth his parents moved to Lowell, Massachusetts, a thriving mill town dependent on the labor of generations of immigrant factory workers. Determined to succeed in American life, they kept their family small, just three children: Gerard, Caroline, and Jack, or Ti Jean, as his mother always called him, born Jean-Louis on March 12, 1922. During the Great Depression his parents struggled to make a living: Leo's printing shop failed and Gabrielle worked long hours in a shoe factory. Along with his family's economic hardships, Kerouac inherited an environment of social marginalization common to the other immigrant groups in Lowell, the Irish and the Greeks. The most tangible asset of the French-Canadian immigrants was their sense of belonging to a large, tightly knit community sharing a different language and religion, the joual (Quebecois language) spoken at home by Kerouac's parents, and the Catholicism practiced by his devout mother. Joual was Kerouac's first language, and he did not learn English until he started parochial school at the age of six. Although Leo and Gabrielle Kerouac were members of a poor immigrant community, they told their children that the family possessed an aristocratic heritage. Years later, when Kerouac summarized his background in an author's statement introducing his book Lonesome Traveler (1960), he wrote that his nationality was FrancoAmerican and that his people go back to Breton France, first North American ancestor Baron Alexandra Louis Lebris de Kfrouac of Cornwall, Brittany, 1750 or so, was granted land along the Rivi&re du Loup after victory of Wolfe over Montcalm; his descendants married Indians (Mohawk and Caughnawaga) and became potato farmers. . . .My father's mother a Bernier related to explorer

Bernier—all Bretons on father's side—my mother has a Norman name, L'Evesque. Through his family's pride in their history, language, and religion, Kerouac's immigrant background made such a profound psychological impression on him that some French-Canadian critics have argued that he can be considered a Quebec writer. If, as the Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood maintains, the test of a Quebec writer is not birthplace but whether he or she is obsessed with the question, What goes on in the coffin? then Kerouac indeed deserves such consideration. The coffin entered his consciousness with the death of his older brother, Gerard, in 1926, when Kerouac was four years old. Nearly thirty years later, in his book Visions of Gerard (1963), he wrote that he regarded his brother's death as the most significant emotional event of his childhood. Ecstatically describing Gerard's funeral in that book, Kerouac was transported back to his earliest memories and most vivid dreams, connecting the funeral with the "Pure Land" of death accessible only to someone in a coffin. The whole reason why I ever wrote at all and drew breath to bite in vain with pen of ink, great gad with indefensible usable pencil, because of Gerard, the idealism, Gerard the religious hero— "Write in honour of his death" (ficrivez pour 1'amour de son mort) (as one would say, write for the love of God. . . .) The philosophical riddle of death—why are we born but to die?—was the original riddle Kerouac inherited in childhood. All his life he wrote for the love of God (which he associated with what he regarded as his brother's Christlike martyrdom), so that in this sense all his writing is religious, emanating from Gerard's beloved coffin, "Gerard the religious hero." Kerouac was also obsessed with a second riddle, the question of suffering—how can we love a God who causes

220 / AMERICAN WRITERS His innocent creatures pain? Stubbornly he tried to answer this riddle throughout his life, later augmenting his Catholicism with the philosophical consolations of Buddhism during the time he was closely associated with the Beat writers. In its description of Kerouac's boyhood after the death of his brother, Gerard, the second novel in the Duluoz chronology, Doctor Sax (1959), following Visions of Gerard, is the most dramatic account of the acculturation process that shaped his personality. As Beaulieu writes, this is a novel ''which provides the best documentation we possess on Franco-American life in the 1920s and 30s. I was struck by the large number of monsters, idiots, neurotics and depraved people Jack describes in it. (The lot of all societies in the process of losing their culture . . . ) . " The narrative gains its power from Kerouac's memories of the emotional effects of his mother's Catholicism reflected in his extraordinary childhood fantasies. In this book Kerouac's basic mythological source is the popular religion of Quebec, not the official Catholicism practiced in the churches of Lowell. His family's heritage of folk religion, seen in his mother's devout practice of Catholicism in their home, is marked by vivid fears and symbols of "the night-side of human existence." These instinctive fears are associated with shadows. Louis Rousseau, in his analysis of Kerouac's Catholicism in Moody Street Irregulars, points out that in the Kerouac family home these shadows "are impossible to seize; and they come to one unexpectedly. 'Qui a farmez ma porte?' ('Who slammed my door?')—'Nobody' is the answer in Doctor Sax." When Kerouac wrote Doctor Sax, he mingled his boyhood fear of the shadows associated with the religious objects in his home, his mother's stories about martyrs and saints, and his memory of the characters and plots in the pulp magazines that he took as the basis of his own fantasies in the games he played alone and with friends. This amalgam resulted in a rich mixture of cultural

influences, but it also contributed some confusion at the end of the book. Rousseau was the first to identify the problem. The folk heritage from which Kerouac drew in his novel contains images relating to death, but as Rousseau points out, the outcome in the popular Quebec legends is never tragic. By ruse, intelligence, and trickery the Quebec legendary figure always wins, and the devil, shadow, or demon always loses. In contrast, Kerouac's boyhood hero, Doctor Sax, is uncloaked at the end of the book and revealed as an ineffectual poseur, a loser. Kerouac lamely concludes his battle between Sax and the villain snake by having the universe step in to absorb its own evil; Sax cannot accomplish this miracle. The weak ending is an example of the tug-of-war between the Franco-American influences in Kerouac's background and his love of American popular culture. Shortly before concluding the writing of Doctor Sax in Mexico City in 1952, Kerouac saw the film The Wizard ofOz (1939). He based the ending of his book on the denouement of that film, rather than remaining consistent to the spirit of the popular Quebec religious legends. Kerouac wrote a third book about growing up as a French Canadian in Lowell, Maggie Cassidy (1959), a novel about his success in his senior year of high school as a football player and track star, and his hopeless infatuation with his first girlfriend, the young Irish beauty who his mother fears will trap him into an early marriage. Here we see Kerouac beginning to break free, though still susceptible to his parents' traditional values, afraid that if he marries Maggie instead of going on to college he will jeopardize his future. In the novel he trudges miles from Lowell's FrenchCanadian neighborhood of Pawtucketville to v^sit Maggie at her home in the Irish section of town, only to have her mock his lack of sexual experience and his obedience to his mother's command that he act like a "good boy" and respect her virtue.

JACK KEROUAC I 221 The rich, surrealistic prose of Doctor Sax gives way in Maggie Cassidy to a simpler, almost stilted romantic style. Joual is absent from Kerouac's writing in this book, almost as if he were struggling to find a language to describe the world outside his home. The emotional legacy of his mother's religious practice and the mystery of his boyhood fantasies about good and evil permeate Visions of Gerard and Doctor Sax, but with his adolescent love affair in Maggie Cassidy Kerouac tries to take a step away from the Franco-American community. Stung by a sense of failure after Maggie takes another boyfriend, Kerouac goes back to his mother. He is left with a dark sense that her description of the hardships endured by the family in Lowell will be a prophecy of his own future. In Maggie Cassidy his mother bluntly sums up the family's experience: "We try to manage and it turns out shit." The turning point that marked Kerouac's unsuccessful attempt to enter mainstream American life is recorded at the end of Maggie Cassidy and at the beginning of the next book in the chronology, Vanity of Duluoz (1968). Here Kerouac wrote about his departure from Lowell after his high-school graduation to study in New York City, first at the Horace Mann School and then at Columbia College. When Kerouac first left home, his ancestral heritage presented him with a third riddle, the difficult one of social assimilation, the question of how to belong to two different and sometimes radically opposed cultures. In this matter Kerouac tried to follow the example of his father, who stubbornly believed that he could escape the marginality inherent in his immigrant status, or, in the words of Beaulieu, "attain American comfort without leaving the old French-Canadian heritage behind." Beaulieu's theory clarifies much of Kerouac's life and work. Neither of Kerouac's parents was concerned about the survival of French-Canadian culture in America; like most immigrants they chose to retain their identity only within their

own home, realizing that there was no high social status inherent in their heritage. Struggling to survive and to support their family in the worst years of the Great Depression, Leo and Gabrielle Kerouac knew where they stood in America, and they passed on their awareness of their marginal status to their son. It was inconceivable to them to try to interest others outside the FrancoAmerican community in the importance of their own language and religious customs. Uneducated members of the working class, they knew that, for Jack, a college education and assimilation into mainstream culture was the safest road to economic success. As a teenager he dreamed of being a college football star, a wealthy businessman, and a Nobel Prize-winning author—of satisfying the ambitions that his parents had for him. Kerouac carried the burden of his parents' dreams as well as the legacy of an immigrant culture that opposed the assimilation process. In his autobiographical writings he returns almost compulsively to a troubled period of his life: his brief career as a football player at Columbia and his behavior under stress a short time later as a young navy recruit during the early years of World War II. When Kerouac wrote about this experience in Vanity of Duluoz, near the end of his life, he said that he was constitutionally unable to handle navy discipline, so he managed to secure a psychiatric discharge, apparently with his father's approval. Leo Kerouac held traditional isolationist opinions during World War II, exhibiting the Quebec distrust of wars fought for distant causes in foreign countries. Did twenty-year-old Jack Kerouac share his father's immigrant ideology in 1942? He did not say. Yet when he wrote Vanity of Duluoz twenty years later, he said that he saw his "dream of being a real American man" receding from his window in the navy psychiatric ward. As a first-generation American, Kerouac was both witness to and victim of the heat of the

222 / AMERICAN WRITERS melting pot, the difficult assimilation of the different backgrounds of immigrants and their families into a shared, if elusive, national identity. At the end of World War II, in which Kerouac had participated as a merchant seaman in the North Atlantic, he disappointed his parents by telling them he wanted to be a writer instead of returning to college. Leo Kerouac was dying of cancer. Jack took care of his father at home while his mother worked her factory job, but he spent whatever free time he had with new friends in Manhattan. In 1944 Kerouac met Allen Ginsberg and Lucien Carr through his girlfriend Edie Parker, who had been introduced to Jack by a friend he had made during his year at the Horace Mann School. Edie Parker became his first wife in a marriage that lasted only a few months. Both Ginsberg and Carr were students at Columbia College, and with them Kerouac shared his enthusiasm for literature. Ginsberg and Carr had been introduced to the poetry of Arthur Rimbaud by their friend William Burroughs and idolized Rimbaud for what they called his "New Vision" of life. Kerouac resisted their enthusiasm for the "New Vision" in Rimbaud's poetry. Since he spoke joual at home he did not think that his fluency in French was an intellectual achievement, and he put down what he called his friends' "tedious intellectualness" when he described this period of his life a few years later in On the Road. As he said of himself in Vanity of Duluoz, "My saving grace in their eyes . . . was the materialistic Canuck taciturn cold skepticism all the picked-up Idealism in the world of books couldn't hide." Another member of the early Beat group, Carl Solomon, told me about "down-to-earth" Jack at this time: "He was very American when a lot of us were rather Frenchified." While Solomon and the others steeped themselves in the European cultural tradition, excited by the discovery of existential philosophy, classical music, and

modernist French poetry, Kerouac, still loyal to his working-class immigrant origins, wrestled with the riddle of cultural assimilation. He espoused American popular culture, championing big-band swing music and bebop jazz, Frank Sinatra, and the novels of Thomas Wolfe, which he came to admire after putting aside earlier enthusiasms for the fiction of William Saroyan and Ernest Hemingway. Yet, at the same time as Kerouac was playing the role of the hard-boiled "Canuck" to impress his new friends, he had great aspirations as a writer. After his father's death in 1946, he worked for two years on a manuscript, imitating Wolfe in an attempt to write the great American novel. After the publication of The Town and the City in 1950, Kerouac acknowledged that the novel had been conceived according to the techniques that Professor Mark Van Doren had been trying to teach his freshmen English class at Columbia. Although Kerouac disguised his FrancoAmerican background in that thinly veiled autobiographical work, recent French-Canadian literary critics have analyzed deeper textual patterns in The Town and the City and found a recurrent image of "true North" that is the source of his unfulfilled longing for home in this and subsequent books. Kerouac's immigrant background also adds a deeper resonance to his next novel, On the Road (1957), begun and completed in a three-week burst in April 1951, after he had struggled for years to free himself from the influence of Wolfe in order to find his own voice. Read as autobiography instead of fiction, On the Road fits into the larger "Legend of Duluoz" chronology after Vanity of Duluoz. Taking the books sequentially, one finds On the Road only a partial description of Kerouac's life, but this is also true of earlier books, such as Visions of Gerard and Doctor Sax. Because the Jack Kerouac who describes his boyhood in these books is a grown man relying on memory for the events of his past, one

JACK KEROUAC I 223 can accept a more poetic recollection of his life. In On the Road Kerouac puts himself on the sidelines in the story of his own life, concentrating on the personality of his friend Neal Cassady, who introduced him to life on the road. KerouacJ s French-Canadian identity is completely submerged in the book, as is his identity as an ambitious writer struggling to finish The Town and the City and find a publisher for it between his trips with Cassady. The books Kerouac wrote about his own life are more fiction than autobiography. The "fiction" results not because Kerouac made up characters or events that never existed, but because his point of view as narrator of his life story is so emotionally charged that he makes all the characters and events a reflection of his own feelings. He later said that he wrote On the Road to describe his adventures with Cassady to his second wife, Joan Haverty, and that his French Canadian background had nothing to do with the story. Writing On the Road, Kerouac finally found his true subject—the story of his own life as an outsider searching for a place in America. On the Road can be read as a quest undertaken by the narrator, Sal Paradise, who sets out to test the reality of the American dream by trying to pin down its promise of unlimited freedom and opportunity. Dean Moriarty (Neal Cassady) is as much on the margins of society as Sal Paradise, but he has no illusions about his future. Envisioning it, he tells the credulous Sal: You spend a whole life of non-interference with the wishes of others . . . and nobody bothers you and you cut along and make it your own way. . . .What's your road, man?—holyboy road, madman road, rainbow road, guppy road, any road. It's an anywhere road for anybody anyhow. Where body how? For Sal Paradise, his friend Moriarty is "Beat— the root, the soul of Beatific," in possession of

the key to unlock the door to the mysterious possibilities and richness of experience itself. Kerouac's description of Dean Moriarty is so compelling that most readers of the novel do not dwell on the fact that the frantic cross-country trips leave Sal exhausted, strung out, penniless, and deserted at the end of the road. The rushing optimism of their search for Dean's father leads nowhere, and their comradery on the highway does not last long after they have parked their battered cars on the streets of San Francisco, New Orleans, and Manhattan. The vitality of Kerouac's descriptions of America and his openhearted belief that the dream he and Dean are chasing will appear just ahead at the end of the road are underscored by Kerouac's poignant sense of their shared mortality. As Sal says at the conclusion of the novel, "Nobody knows what's going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old." Kerouac's presentation of the rush of events and chaos of personal encounters in On the Road moves so swiftly that emotions are bypassed and short-circuited, submerged in Sal's feelings as he narrates his story. The effect on the reader is exhilarating because Sal is so swept up in his presentation of what is happening that one thing follows another without reflection or explanation. Sal chases the dream back and forth on the highways between the east and west coasts, and finds that it has little reality; it is merely a "sad paradise" when he finally catches up with it in New Orleans, Denver, San Francisco, Chicago, and New York. On the Road has become a classic because Kerouac, feeling himself on the margins of society, stripped himself of his past and confronted the riddle of the American dream, dramatizing the lure of its elusive promise and its failure to live up to his expectations. Like The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Great Gatsby, Kerouac's novel has a particular appeal for young readers, who can easily emphathize with the narrator's disillusionment, sympathiz-

224 I AMERICAN ing with his dreams and sharing his position outside the mainstream. Kerouac was nearly thirty when he wrote On the Road in April 1951. The previous year his first published novel, The Town and the City, had received polite reviews but had had only negligible sales, and his mother continued to work at her factory job. Kerouac knew he always had a home with her, whenever he tired of the company of his New York friends or ran out of money on his trips across the country with Cassady. Encouraged to write as he pleased by Ginsberg and Burroughs, he felt he had nothing to lose by going his own way as a writer. He had been dissatisfied with the way he wrote his first published novel as an imitation of Wolfe, because he wanted to find a prose style that expressed his own sense of language. Writing On the Road in a three-week burst on a roll of teletype paper had been an experiment designed to capture the quality of his road trips with Cassady. In that experiment Kerouac had dropped his * 'literary" language and used the style of the letters he was exchanging with Cassady after their trips together, in particular one long letter from Cassady he called "the Joan Anderson letter." Several thousand words in length, it described Cassady's sexual adventures with one of his girlfriends in Denver. Kerouac still was not satisfied that he had discovered what he was searching for as an artist. He was looking for an approach to writing he called "deep form," which would capture the emotional essence of his subject. Six months later he began to experiment with language in a different way, developing a method of "sketching" with words on paper, trying to attain "deep form" like a painter or the bebop jazz musicians he admired. French-Canadian literary critics have argued that after years of writing straightforward narrative in the various versions and revisions of The Town and the City and On the Rood, Kerouac's discovery of his

WRITERS

method of spontaneous prose in October 1951 freed him to begin exploring his FrenchCanadian heritage. For example, he found that this method of writing was a way to deal with his bilingualism—the dilemma of how to incorporate the sense of his first and most spontaneous language, joual, into the development of a colloquial, American prose style. The Quebec critic Maurice Poteet writes: The spontaneity of Doctor Sax ("don't stop to think," baroque phrasing and form, word-play, bilingual texts, film-book comparisons) permits Kerouac to build bridges to and from a number of inner and local realities which otherwise might not "become" American at all. In other words, "spontaneous" writing and effect are one answer, at least, to an ethnic situation that in many ways resembles the "double bind" of psychology: if a writer cannot be himself in his work (a minority background) he is lost; if he becomes an "ethnic" writer, he is off on a tangent. Also, "spontaneous" writing, as a technique, reflects a cultural set of values which pins hopes upon the individual ("I had a dream") who can come up with something original and new. [Translation provided by Poteet.] "Sketching" spontaneous prose, Kerouac felt he had found his own voice as a writer at last. Confident he was on the right track, he decided to write experimental books using his unique approach to language as his distinctive literary style. This decision was temperamentally suited to Kerouac's stubborn sense that he could not fit into the mainstream of American society; since he left his second wife after completing On the Road and continued to make his home with his mother, he did not have to try. Kerouac's new prose method left him free to write about anything that excited him. Typically an image in his mind would trigger a spontaneous rush of emotional associations, prompting a flow of language that he could jot down in his

JACK KEROUAC I 225 notebook to capture his poignant sense of the ephemeral nature of his existence. The most humble details triggered an intense emotional response, such as a lunchroom close to his mother's home in Long Island, described in Visions of Cody: The smell is always of boiling water mixed with beef, boiling beef, like the smell of the great kitchens of parochial boarding schools or old hospitals, the brown basement kitchens9 smell— the smell is curiously the hungriest in America— it is FOODY insteady of just spicy, or—it's like dishwater soap just washed a pan of hamburg— nameless—memoried—sincere—makes the guts of men curl in October. From 1951 to 1957, in a burst of creative energy, Kerouac swam in the heady seas of his own prose, now captured in more than a dozen works. Some would eventually be published, and others are known to have been left in manuscript at his death in 1969; they include, in order of composition (see the bibliography for publication dates): Visions of Cody (1951-1952), Doctor Sax (1952), "October in the Railroad Earth" (1952), Book of Dreams (1952-1960), Maggie Cassidy (1953), The Subterraneans (1953), "San Francisco Blues" (1954), Some of the Dharma (1954, not published), Mexico City Blues (1955), Tristessa (1955-1956), Visions of Gerard (1956), and Desolation Angels (1956). Six of these books (Doctor Sax, Maggie Cassidy, The Subterraneans, Tristessa, Visions of Gerard, and Desolation Angels) were conceived as autobiographical novels that would fit chronologically into his larger scheme of what Kerouac called "The Legend of Duluoz." Others were experimental prose in their initial concept (Visions of Cody, "October in the Railroad Earth," Book of Dreams), books of poetry ("San Francisco Blues," Mexico City Blues), or translations from French Buddhist texts and meditations ("Some of the Dharma"). All were examples of

Spontaneous "sketching." In most of these works Kerouac's immersion in the torrents of language released by his prose method and the various drugs he used to fuel his inspiration resulted in language that overspills and effervesces on the page. During the years when he explored his new prose method, Kerouac wrote nearly constantly, keeping notebooks and pencil with him at all times; he even tied them to his bed at home so he could turn on the light at night and record his dreams. Riding a freight train on the California coast in December 1951, for example, he dug a little dime-store notebook out of his jacket pocket to transcribe what he saw and thought. His observations became a sentence in Lonesome Traveler: Ole Jack you are now actually riding in a caboose and going along the surf on the spectrallest railroad you'd ever in your wildest little dreams wanta ride, like a kid's dream, why is it you cant lift your head and look out there and appreciate the feathery shore of California the last land being feathered by fine powdery skeel of doorstop sills of doorstep water weaving in from every Orient and bay boom shroud from here to Catteras Flapperas Voldivious and Gratteras, boy. The linguistic inventiveness and playfulness in Kerouac's books from this period were unprecedented. No prose like this had ever been written in English by a writer in America hoping to earn a living from his work. As expatriates, Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, and Ezra Pound had experimented with language in a similar manner while they lived in France or Italy, but English was not the language of the surrounding culture. Steeped in his Franco-American identity, Kerouac, too, regarded his written language as being different from the everyday language of common discourse. Writing his books in the bedroom or the

226 / AMERICAN WRITERS kitchen of his mother's house, speaking joual all the time he was with her, he shaped his prose style on the page to the rhythms and sounds of the language he heard in his mind. These were the words closest to his heart, closest to the language he shared with his mother. With the discovery of his method of spontaneous prose, Kerouac found not only a way to write his books but also a literary method that justified his sense of isolation. His audience was primarily himself; unlike a bop soloist, he did not perform with other musicians, although he regarded Ginsberg, Burroughs, and a few other sympathetic artists as his "band." In the early months of practicing the new method, he jotted down his impressions, thinking of them as part of one vast book, what he called a "bookmovie," capturing the rushing line of his verbal consciousness in words on the page. The book that was posthumously published as Visions of Cody—Kerouac had titled it "Visions of Neal"—collects the separate prose experiments from the period 1951-1952. This is a series of sketches of varying lengths loosely connected around his impressions of Cassady but without a formal plot linking the sections into a chronological narrative. Written during the first months of his prose experiment, Kerouac considered it his second version of On the Road. (He liked it so much better than the original version that he read a section of it years later on Steve Allen's television show as if it were the actual published version of On the Road.) Stein eliminated plot in her experimental prose, but Kerouac was essentially a storyteller. In July 1952, several months into his "sketching" method, he started Doctor Sax, deciding to abandon his use of Cassady as the central figure in his writing and instead telling the story of his own boyhood. Nevertheless, Kerouac started Doctor Sax after having read a few manuscript pages of Cassady's own attempt to write a book about growing up in Denver; in that sense Ker-

ouac was still influenced by Cassady, but once he embarked on Doctor Sax Kerouac realized that it would be his own life story. His FrenchCanadian past was as irresistible to him as his practice of spontaneous prose. While living in Cassady's house in San Francisco, both combined in his dreams, as described in the opening words of Doctor Sax: The other night I had a dream that I was sitting on the sidewalk on Moody Street, Pawtucketville, Lowell, Mass., with a pencil and paper in my hand saying to myself "Describe the wrinkly tar of this sidewalk, also the iron pickets of Textile Institute, or the doorway where Lousy and you and G. J. 's always sittin and dont stop to think of words when you do stop, just stop to think of the picture better—and let your mind off yourself in this work." Kerouac's work from this period records his daily activities working on the railroad in California and living with the Cassadys or in a skidrow San Francisco hotel; his memories of trips with Neal and of his boyhood in Lowell; and his dreams, captured in writing only moments after waking up. Dreams and visions were important to Kerouac as pictures leading to an emotional response; when he wrote, he was more interested in his feelings than in his ideas. As his friend John Clellon Holmes understood, Kerouac's intent as a writer encompassed more than a simple chronicle of the events of his life. Holmes explains in Gone in October that From the beginning, Kerouac wrote about the double evolution of a consciousness, a consciousness that was evolving in the Past the books describe, and is evolving in the Present of their composition. As a result "The Legend of Duluoz" constitutes a prolonged search for a lost identity, for that singleness of vision, that sense of wholeness, that the uprootings of modern life have all but obliterated.

JACK KEROVAC I 227 In the summer of 1953, back on Long Island, living with his mother after trips to California to see Cassady and Mexico City to visit Burroughs, Kerouac tried his hand at what he thought of as a more commercial writing project. Kerouac envisioned Maggie Cassidy as following Doctor Sax in the chronology of his autobiography. Love was his theme in this and three subsequent books, The Subterraneans, Tristessa, and Visions of Gerard. Kerouac did not plan them in any sequence, just as he did not systematically outline a series of books to chronicle all the years of his life in the larger book he called "The Legend of Duluoz"—"Duluoz," his pseudonym, humorously suggesting his view of himself as "the Louse." Kerouac conceived his books as spontaneously as he wrote them, but typically he composed them in pairs: he considered "Visions of Neal" (reissued as Visions of Cody) to be an in-depth version of On the Road; Doctor Sax was his response to Cassady's boyhood memoir, titled The First Third; and Maggie Cassidy became a warmup for The Subterraneans a few weeks later, the story of a brief but tumultuous love affair he had with an African-American woman in Greenwich Village during the summer of 1953. Just as "Visions of Neal" was a "spontaneous" rewriting of On the Road, Kerouac returned to his spontaneous style in The Subterraneans after trying to write the stiff "commercial" prose of Maggie Cassidy. Like "October in the Railroad Earth," The Subterraneans is one of Kerouac's purest examples of spontaneous prose. With the help of the amphetamine Benzedrine, he wrote it in his room in his mother's apartment during three nights in October 1953. In the narrative, Kerouac weaves together past and present thoughts as they enter his mind, almost as if he were delivering a pep talk to himself as both star athlete and coach, urging himself on to greater heights as a writer:

In other words this is the story of an unselfconfident man, at the same time of an egomaniac, naturally facetious won't do—just to start at the beginning and let the truth seep out, that's what I'll do—. It began on a warm summernight—ah, she was sitting on a fender with Julian Alexander, who is. ... Sympathetic critics like Warren Tall man, in his early essay "Kerouac's Sound," understood that Kerouac's method of composition in The Subterraneans was as much his subject as was the love affair that constitutes the book's plot. The structure and sound of the individual sentences run on like a bop riff, starting with a simple idea and taking off to follow emotional associations as they occur in the writing process. Past narrative and present circumstances mix together in a rich tonality, spun out and returning to the central narrative idea. Angels, bear with me—I'm not even looking at the page but straight ahead into the sadglint of my wallroom and at a Sarah Vaughan Gerry Mulligan Radio KROW show on the desk in the form of a radio, in other words, they were sitting on the fender of a car in front of the Black Mask bar on Montgomery Street. Writing about his love affair with Mardou gave Kerouac more pleasure than the affair itself. As he told Ginsberg and Burroughs, who read the manuscript of The Subterraneans, writing prose was a form of sexual activity for him. Kerouac's friends asked him to clarify what he meant, so he wrote down what he called "Essentials of Spontaneous Prose,'' a short description of his method from start to finish, the most extensive aesthetic statement he ever made: SET-UP The object is to set before the mind, either in reality, as in sketching (before a landscape or teacup or old face) or is set in the

225 / AMERICAN WRITERS memory wherein it becomes the sketching from memory of a definitive image-object.

of consciousness." Come from within, out—to relaxed and said.

PROCEDURE Time being of the essence in the purity of speech, sketching language is undisturbed flow from the mind of personal secret idea-words, blowing (as per jazz musician) on subject of image.

Despite his prohibition on revision, Kerouac did revise when preparing his work for publication. Typically he wrote his novels in small notebooks using the real names of his friends; when he typed these novels for publication, he changed the names so that he would not be sued for libel, and with The Subterraneans he also changed the setting of the novel from Greenwich Village to San Francisco as a further precaution against a lawsuit, should the woman he portrays in the book try to sue him. Changes of names and settings did nothing to diminish the "honesty" of his account, in Kerouac's view. His method was to present the actual events of his life from his own point of view, softening any unpleasant reality in the process of dramatizing his innocence as a spectator; for example, if a girlfriend couldn't have children after an illegal abortion, Kerouac left out the details of the abortion and merely mentioned in passing that she was sad because she could not conceive. In a note written for the Norwegian edition of The Subterraneans years later, he said it was

METHOD No periods separating sentencestructures already arbitrarily riddled by false colons and timid usually needless commas—but the vigorous space dash separating rhetorical breathing (as jazz musician drawing breath between outblown phrases)—"measured pauses which are the essentials of our speech"—"divisions of the sounds we hear"—"time and how to note it down." (William Carlos Williams) SCOPING Not "selectivity" of expression but following free deviation (association) of mind into limitless blow-on-subject seas of thought. . . . Blow as deep as you want—write as deeply, fish as far down as you want, satisfy yourself first, then reader cannot fail to receive telepathic shock and meaning-excitement by same laws operating in his own human mind. Kerouac hoped for a mystical connection with his reader through what he envisioned as the total spontaneity of his words on the page. His distrust of intellectuality led him to explicitly forbid revision—"no revisions (except obvious rational mistakes, such as names or calculated insertions in act of not writing but inserting)." For him, spontaneous prose was validated because it was "confessional"—associated with the act of confession in church and therefore holy. At the same time, it was also sexual release: write excitedly, swiftly, with writing-or-typing cramps, in accordance (as from center to periphery) with laws of orgasm, Reich's "beclouding

a full confession of one's most wretched and hidden agonies after an affair of any kind. The prose is what I believe to be the prose of the future, from both the conscious top and the unconscious bottom of the mind, limited only by the limitations of time flying by as our mind flies by with it. The writer Henry Miller, whose introduction to The Subterraneans was included in some editions of the book, observed that Kerouac's prose is as striking as the confession of his inadequacies as a lover. Kerouac's insecurity is naked on the page in The Subterraneans; his persona in his books is as innocent as his literary method. His genius as a writer was that his persona was so compelling he could simultaneously write spon-

JACK KEROUAC I 229 taneous prose and keep the reader interested in the story he was telling. Maggie Cassidy and The Subterraneans can be read as two accounts of physical love in the Duluoz chronology. Tristessa and Visions of Gerard, his next two novels, explore the theme of spiritual love, although they were not conceived schematically, just as Kerouac did not consciously balance every book written about his Beat life with one describing his FrenchCanadian origins. All his books were conceived as part of "The Legend of Duluoz," and they were also motivated by events occurring at the time: Tristessa, set in Mexico City, is the story of his relationship in 1955 with a prostitute who was a morphine addict; Visions of Gerard, written a year later, chronicles Kerouac's love for his brother, who died in Lowell in 1926. Kerouac continued pairing experiences from his past with adventures in the present, always presenting his adult self as homeless, out of place, and alone. When Kerouac began Tristessa, he was living in Mexico City, and the experience of writing in a Spanish-speaking country enforced the sense of freedom he felt while using English in his manuscript notebooks. His prose in Tristessa and in Visions of Gerard also includes Buddhist terminology; he had begun studying and translating Buddhist texts the year before. Despite Tristessa's addiction and her prostitution, Kerouac viewed her as a saint who shared with him the belief that, as she says, "Tomorrar we may be die, and so we are nothing." In Mexico City during the late summer and early fall of 1955, Kerouac's daily practice of his prose technique also led him to compose poetry. Experimenting with various drugs—he explicitly refers to scotch for the composition of Tristessa, Benzedrine for The Subterraneans, and wine for "October in the Railroad Earth"—he used morphine while creating a long poem based on the idea of a jazz musician blowing a series of solo variations, each notebook page the limit of each

poem, as formally structured as the lyric of a blues piece. Mexico City Blues is one of Kerouac's most extraordinary productions. Meant to be read aloud with jazz accompaniment, it is a uniquely successful experiment in jazz poetry. The recordings of Kerouac reading excerpts from the poem give a sense of the work, but true appreciation of Mexico City Blues requires a full reading of the 242 choruses. Kerouac writes in tribute to jazz musicians and people close to him, like Ginsberg in the 213th chorus and his mother in the 149th chorus: I keep falling in love with my mother, I don't want to hurt her —Of all people to hurt. Every time I see her she's grown older But her uniform always amazes me For its Dutch simplicity And the Doll she is, The doll-like way she stands Bowlegged in my dreams Waiting to serve me. And I am only an Apache Smoking Hashi In old Cabashy By the lamp At this time of his life, Kerouac was pushing the limits of what his writing could do. Thinking of himself as a stylist similar to James Joyce in his prose experiments, he started "an endless automatic writing piece" titled "Old Angel Midnight" (1959) that is the most radical of his works, a transcription of his stream of consciousness, taking his own mind as raw material. Without question his practice of Buddhist meditation contributed to the idea for this long poem. Although he had been reared as a Roman Catholic, Kerouac's subsequent involvement with Buddhism not only offered a new direction for his religious feelings but also helped him to practice his craft, since he used meditation techniques to

230 I AMERICAN WRITERS help free his mind for spontaneous composition experiments. Kerouac employed the Buddhist technique of "letting go" in the composition of 44 Old Angel Midnight," annotating the stream of words that ran through his consciousness as he responded to the auditory stimuli around him. The full text of the "Old Angel Midnight" manuscript is in the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library, and these notebooks attest to Kerouac's dedication to his experiment. Often he lit candles and sat quietly transcribing sounds outside the window before turning within to scribble down his mental images. Since he made no attempt to tell a story in "Old Angel Midnight," he was not held by any narrative line. His associations moved freely through thoughts to images to pure sounds to emptiness. The intense bursts of writing that produced a dozen books in the years between 1951 and 1957, along with the physical demands of his lifestyle, began to take their toll on Kerouac's health. By the time On the Road was published in the fall of 1957, Kerouac was beginning to tire. This was also the period when he was closest to the other writers of the Beat Generation: Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Gregory Corso, and John Clellon Holmes in New York City; Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gary Snyder, Michael McClure, Philip Lamantia, and Philip Whalen in San Francisco. It was with their encouragement that he immersed himself in his prose experiments, but the book that chronicles his adventures with them, Desolation Angels, is one of his thinnest. In 1960, three years after the publication of On the Road, Kerouac rallied again to create a great spontaneous-prose novel, Big Sur (1962), the story of his alcoholic breakdown in Ferlinghetti's cabin on the California coast. Kerouac had gone there with a literary project in mind, a transcription of the sounds of the Pacific Ocean, which he included as a series of poems at the end of the book. In this work he mixed joual with English at the height of his delirium. Big Sur was

Kerouac's rueful farewell to his adventures as a Beat wanderer. He abandoned any hope of sustaining a life on his own when he returned to his mother's home and the Catholicism that he shared with her. In Big Sur Kerouac humorously acknowledges the difference between the person he actually was and the "legend" he had become to the readers of his best-selling books. Resting comfortably on the California Zephyr train on his way to California, his rucksack packed by his mother with supplies (like a sewing kit for emergencies while he was away from her), he thinks: all over America highschool and college kids thinking * Jack Duluoz is 26 years old and on the road all the time hitch hiking' while there I am almost 40 years old, bored and jaded in a roomette bunk crashin across that Salt Flat. Nevertheless, today Kerouac is still best known as the author of three books of Beat adventures— On the Rood, The Subterraneans, and The Dharma Bums—which are permeated by a sense of his reverence for life and have remained in print continuously for more than thirty years. Read as autobiography, all three of the books are psychologically motivated by Kerouac's sense of alienation from mainstream American life, but read as fiction, the books are a prescription for adventure. As Beaulieu comments: A whole generation took it up, young men and girls bought sleeping bags and blue jeans and went hitchhiking all along the American roads, beginning Jack's trip again in their fashion, ending up like him in Mexico or Frisco. On the Road has become an American classic. Kerouac created a living character in Dean Moriarty, the outsider, the essential drifter—or, in the poet Gary Snyder's term, "the cowboy crashing" after the closure of the western frontier. Kerouac's hero was his spiritual brother because, as Sal Paradise admits, "The only people for me

JACK KEROVAC I 231 are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time." Two years after this revelation, Kerouac portrayed himself as one of "the mad ones" in The Subterraneans. The restless, off-balance rush of his spontaneous-prose style is a superb reflection of his own emotional conflicts. The fact that he admits his lack of romantic success is not a deterrent to his readers' view of the pleasures and risks of bohemian promiscuity, because he describes his ideal "JOY of being and will and fearlessness" so compellingly that the failure of a love affair seems an acceptable risk. The third book in the trilogy of Beat life, The Dharma Bums, dramatizes Kerouac's adventures in California in 1955, two years after the events in The Subterraneans. Kerouac wrote The Dharma Bums shortly after the publication of On the Road, on the advice of Malcolm Cowley, his editor at the Viking Press, who patronizingly suggested that he try for another best-seller by keeping his prose simple and writing a book describing his adventures with another of his colorful friends. Kerouac chose the poet Gary Snyder, whom he had met in Berkeley a few years before, as his hero in a book he later dismissed as a "potboiler." Snyder is the character Japhy Ryder in The Dharma Bums, and Kerouac describes him as' 'a great new hero of American culture." Snyder represents an alternative to what Kerouac felt was the banality and repression of conventional middle-class American life, with a lifestyle that would be defined as "counterculture" in the 1960's. Kerouac masked his French-Canadian identity in his three best-selling books, but when he described his Beat life in articles after the success of On the Road, memories of his FrancoAmerican heritage would enter his thoughts. For example, in "The Origins of the Beat Generation," which he wrote for Playboy magazine in 1959, he pointed out that as spokesman of the Beat Generation—"I am the originator of the

term, and around it the term and the generation have taken shape"—he knew its true origins: "It should be pointed out that all this 'Beat' guts therefore goes back to my ancestors who were Bretons who were the most independent group of nobles in all old Europe." Kerouac claimed that the spirit of the Beat Generation could also be traced "back to the wild parties my father used to have at home in the 1920's and 1930's in New England that were so fantastically loud nobody could sleep for blocks around and when the cops came they always had a drink." He idealized his memories of the French-Canadian community in his old neighborhood in Lowell because he felt it was the prototype of his vision of a community of Beat friends. In the 1960's, the last decade of his life, Kerouac made his home with his mother, who refused to let him continue his old friendships with Ginsberg and Burroughs but tolerated his alcoholism. His income from his books was modest but steady. His short-lived second marriage in 1951, to Joan Haverty, resulted in the birth of a daughter, Jan Kerouac, whom he did not acknowledge or support as his child. Living with his mother, Kerouac delved more deeply into the European French traditions that were part of his FrancoAmerican heritage. Most notably, he returned to France to trace his ancestors, a trip short-circuited by his alcoholism; his stumbling adventures are humorously chronicled in Satori in Paris (1966). In France he had hoped to complete his sound poem of the voice of the Pacific Ocean begun in California at Big Sur, by transcribing the Atlantic waves off the coast of Brittany, but he was physically unable to complete the project. Kerouac returned to the United States and then, from his new home in Saint Petersburg, Florida, journeyed north to Montreal to do a television interview in joual. There he said that he belonged to the international community of writers who wrote in French, in addition to the community of Beat writers usually associated with his name.

232 I AMERICAN Again Kerouac confronted the complex riddle of cultural identification in his own stubbornly independent way. He wrote his books in English, with occasional recourse tojoual French, but he claimed his ambition was to be considered a storyteller like Honore de Balzac and Marcel Proust—or, as he phrased it in "Belief and Technique for Modern Prose" in 1959, advising other writers to follow his method of spontaneous prose, "Like Proust be an old teahead of time." In 1960 Kerouac published, in the magazine Yugen, his poem "Rimbaud," an exuberant tribute to the French writer admired fifteen years before by his friends at Columbia. The tone of this poem is intimate, as if Kerouac were bantering with Rimbaud as a member of his own family or as another Beat poet, brilliantly summarizing the events of the French poet's brief, tragic lifetime: Arthur! On t'appela pas Jean! Born in 1854 cursing in Charleville thus paving the way for the abominable murderousnesses of Ardennes. Kerouac characterizes Rimbaud as a "mad cat" in this poem, a jazz term used there to refer to Rimbaud's impetuosity, which Kerouac admired as a form of spontaneity, along with his independence, his poetic visions, and his language experiments. The poem is stubbornly, humorously anti-intellectual. Kerouac addresses Rimbaud as an equal while sounding at the same time himself "like a peasant writing well." The poem ends, inevitably, with another of Kerouac's Quebec coffin visions: So, poets, rest awhile & shut up: Nothing ever came of nothing.

WRITERS

In 1964 Kerouac published "Letter on Celine" in The Paris Review. This essay is the best glimpse of his view of the French literary tradition, to which he responded in a very personal way. He read his own major theme as a writer— the idea that all life is suffering—into the work of Louis-Ferdinand Celine. He found the process of reading Celine to be like that of watching a movie, a reference to Kerouac's concept of his novels as "bookmovies," a term related to his theory and practice of spontaneous prose. Toward the end of "Letter on Celine," Kerouac referred to the complex issue of politically committed literature versus uncommitted (that is, apolitical) literature. He concluded by stating his own position on the matter, which was in opposition to that held by Albert Camus. Apolitical, Kerouac ignored the issue of Celine's antiSemitism and sympathy for the fascists. His letter helps explain his refusal to join the other Beat writers in protest against America's repressive foreign policy in the 1960's. On this issue Kerouac found himself once again an outsider, describing himself as "a bippie in the middle" in a syndicated newspaper article written in the fall of 1969, shortly before his death. There he said he supported America's participation in the Vietnam War because he was grateful the country had taken in his FrenchCanadian ancestors. If he had any reservations about his decision, he brushed them off by insisting that writers had better things to do than take sides in political controversy. Throughout his life he remained alienated from both the mainstream and the fringes of American politics. On a rare incursion into the subject in Maggie Cassidy, he tosses off something he remembered his father saying during an election campaign in Lowell in the years before World War II: "Get those Democrats outa there before this country goes to hell." Kerouac died at the age of forty-seven, in a hospital in Saint Petersburg, of a massive ab-

JACK KEROUAC I 233 dominal hemorrhage brought on by his alcoholism. With him was his third wife, Stella Sampas, whom he had known earlier in Lowell and had married in 1966 after his mother suffered a stroke that left her bedridden. Buried in the Edson Cemetery in Lowell, Kerouac was later honored by his hometown as a 4 "native son,'9 with a handsome memorial in downtown Lowell containing sculptures on which are inscribed eloquent passages from his work. The words on his memorial are proof that Kerouac remained close to his roots. His mem ory of his family life in Lowell, his religion, and his love forjoual caused him ultimately to resist complete assimilation into the American mainstream. Every descendant of American immigrants confronts difficult riddles of cultural assimilation, and Kerouac was no exception. He resolved these enigmas more or less successfully but always on his own terms, without compromise. Most readers think of him as a nonconformist, a modern-day Thoreau, the quintessential Beat. Perhaps the final riddle of Kerouac's life lies in his books; they reveal him as an American writer whose life and work commemorate both the vitality and persistence of an ancestral heritage, and the psychological toll this heritage exacted from him as he honored it.

The Subterraneans. New York: Grove, 1958. Doctor Sax: Faust Part Three. New York: Grove, 1959. Maggie Cassidy. New York: Avon, 1959. Excerpts from Visions of Cody. New York: New Directions, 1960. Tristessa. New York: Avon, 1960. Book of Dreams. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1961. Pull My Daisy. New York: Grove, 1961. Film script and narration. Big Sur. New York: Farrar, Straus & Cudahy, 1962. Visions of Gerard. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1963. Desolation Angels. New York: Coward-McCann, 1965. Satori in Paris. New York: Grove, 1966. Vanity ofDuluoz: An Adventurous Education, 193546. New York: Coward-McCann, 1968. Pic. New York: Grove, 1971. Visions of Cody. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1972. POETRY

Mexico City Blues. New York: Grove, 1959. "Old Angel Midnight." Big Table, 1:7-42 (Spring 1959). Rimbaud. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1960. The Scripture of the Golden Eternity. New York: Totem Press / Corinth, 1960. Scattered Poems. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1971. Trip Trap: Haiku Along the Road from San Francisco to New York, 1959. With Albeit Saijo and Lew Welch. Bolinas, Calif.: Grey Fox Press, 1973. ESSAYS

Selected Bibliography WORKS OF JACK KEROUAC PROSE

The Town and the City. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1950. On the Road. New York: Viking, 1957. The Dharma Bums. New York: Viking, 1958.

"Essentials of Spontaneous Prose." Black Mountain Review, 7:226-228 (Autumn 1957). "October in the Railroad Earth." Black Mountain Review, 7:30-37 (Autumn 1957). "Belief and Technique for Modern Prose." Evergreen Review, 2:57 (Spring 1959). "The Origins of the Beat Generation." Playboy, 6:31-32, 42, 79 (June 1959). "Letter from Jack Kerouac on C61ine." Paris Review, 31:136 (Winter-Spring 1964). AUTOBIOGRAPHY

Lonesome Traveler. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1960.

234 I AMERICAN WRITERS BIBLIOGRAPHIES Charters, Ann. A Bibliography of Works by Jack Kerouac, 1939-1975. New York: Phoenix Book Shop, 1975. Milewski, J. Jack Kerouac: An Annotated Bibliography of Secondary Sources, 1944-1979. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1981.

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL STUDIES Beaulieu, Victor-L6vy. Jack Kerouac: A ChickenEssay. Translated by Sheila Fischman. Toronto: Coach House Press, 1975. Berrigan, Ted. "The Art of Fiction, XLI." Interview with Jack Kerouac. Paris Review, 43:60-105 (Summer 1968). Challis, Chris. Quest for Kerouac. London: Faber & Faber, 1984. Charters, Ann. Kerouac: A Biography. San Francisco: Straight Arrow, 1973. . "Kerouac's Literary Method and Experiments: The Evidence of the Manuscript Notebooks in the Berg Collection." Bulletin of Research in the Humanities, 84, no. 4:431-450 (Winter 1981). -, ed. "The Beats: Literary Bohemians in Postwar America." Parts I and II. Dictionary of Literary Biography. Vol. 16. Detroit: Gale Research, 1983. Clark, Tom. Jack Kerouac. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984. Cook, Bruce. The Beat Generation. New York: Scribners, 1971. Donaldson, Scott, ed. On the Road: Text and Criticism. New York: Viking, 1979. Eaton, V. J., ed. Catching Up with Kerouac: Getting Boulder on the Road. Warren, Ohio: 1984. Feied, Frederick. No Pie in the Sky: The Hobo as American Cultural Hero in the Works of Jack London, John Dos Passes, and Jack Kerouac. New York: Citadel, 1964. French, Warren. Jack Kerouac: Novelist of the Beat Generation. Boston: Twayne, 1986.

Gifford, Barry. Kerouac's Town. Berkeley, Calif.: Creative Arts, 1977. Gifford, Barry, and Lawrence Lee. Jack's Book: An Oral Biography of Jack Kerouac. New York: St. Martin's, 1978. Hipkiss, Robert A. Jack Kerouac: Prophet of the New Romanticism. Lawrence, Kans.: Regents Press of Kansas, 1976. Holmes, John Clellon. Nothing More to Declare. New York: Dutton, 1967. . Gone in October: Last Reflections on Jack Kerouac. Hailey, Idaho: Limberlost Press, 1985. Hunt, Tim. Kerouac's Crooked Road: Development of a Fiction. Hamden, Conn.: Archon, 1981. Johnson, Joyce. Minor Characters. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1983. McNally, Dennis. Desolate Angel: Jack Kerouac, the Beat Generation, and America. New York: Random House, 1979. Montgomery, John. The Kerouac We Knew: Unposed Portraits, Action Shots. San Anselmo, Calif.: Pels & Firn Press, 1982. Nicosia, Gerald. Memory Babe: A Critical Biography of Jack Kerouac. New York: Grove, 1983. Parkinson, Thomas, ed. A Casebook on the Beat. New York: Crowell, 1961. Poteet, Maurice. Textes de Vexode: Recueil de textes sur I'emigration des Quebecois aux £tats-Unis, XIXe etXXe sitcles. Montreal, Quebec: Guerin litterature, 1987. . "Le Devoir Dossier on Kerouac." Moody Street Irregulars. Spring-Summer 1982, pp. 1416. Tallman, Warren. " Kerouac's Sound." In Parkinson. Tytell, John. Naked Angels: The Lives and Literature of the Beat Generation. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1976. Walsh, Joy, ed. Jack Kerouac: Statement in Brown. Clarence Center, N. Y.: Textile Bridge Press, 1984. Weinreich, Regina. The Spontaneous Poetics of Jack Kerouac: A Study of the Fiction. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1987. Ziavras, Charles E. Visions of Kerouac. Lowell, Mass.: Ithaca Press, 1974.

—ANN CHARTERS

Galway Kinnell 1927imagination. "When you translate a poet," Kinnell remarked in a 1971 interview with Mary Jane Fortunato, "you invite or dare that poet to influence you." Kinnell's translations include Ren£ Hardy's novel Bitter Victory (1956), The Poems of Francois Villon (1965, and a second version in 1977), Yves Bonnefoy's On the Motion and Immobility ofDouve (1968), and Yvan Coil's Lackawanna Elegy (1970). In addition, he has published one novel, Black Light (1966); a selection of interviews, Walking Down the Stairs (1978); and a children's book, How the Alligator Missed Breakfast (1982). Applauded as one of the most vibrant voices in contemporary American poetry, Kinnell has received major recognition for his work: the Pulitzer Prize (1983) for his Selected Poems, an award from the National Institute of Arts and Letters (1962), two Guggenheim Fellowships (1961-1962,1974-1975), Fulbright teaching appointments, two Rockefeller Foundation grants (1962-1963, 1968), the Brandeis Creative Arts Award (1969), the Shelley Prize of the Poetry Society of America (1974), the Medal of Merit from the National Institute of Arts and Letters (1975), the Harold L. Landon Translation Prize (1979), the American Book Award (shared with Charles Wright, 1983), and a Mac Arthur Foundation grant (1984). While Kinnell's awards and honors might suggest that he has relied on the safety and

. . . we are not really at home in our interpreted world. . . . (Rilke, The Duino Elegies, 4 'The First Elegy") . . . But listen to the voice of the wind and the ceaseless message that forms itself out of silence. (Rilke, The Duino Elegies, 4 The First Elegy")

p1 o

GET, NOVELIST, TRANSLATOR, and occasional poet-critic and writer of children's literature, Gal way Kinnell has been called "a kind of evangelist of the physical world," "dishearteningly prolix," "a shamanist, rather than a historicist, of the imagination," and a poet whose "risks are so great, his very lapses seem preferable to the limited successes of many other poets." He has published nine volumes of poetry: What a Kingdom It Was (1960), Flower Herding on Mount Monadnock (1964), Body Rags (1968), First Poems 1946-1954 (1971), The Book of Nightmares (1971), The Avenue Bearing the Initial of Christ into the New World: Poems 1946-64 (1974), Mortal Acts, Mortal Words (1980), Selected Poems (1982), and The Past (1985). He has also, like many of his contemporaries, translated the work of artists who captured his

235

236 I AMERICAN WRITERS security of the academy, his numerous temporary academic appointments, extensive traveling, and political activities suggest otherwise. Kinnell received his first tenured position in 1985, when he became the Samuel F. B. Morse Professor of Arts and Science at New York University. Before that, he held temporary appointments in the United States, in Europe, and in Australia. He also had been politically active, particularly during the 1960's, when he took part in anti-Vietnam War poetry readings, and in the 1980's, when he became involved in the antinuclear movement. In addition, he was president of P.E.N. during 1983-1984. Some of Kinnell's poems refer to his political activities; "The Last River," for example, which appeared in Body Rags (1968), chronicles the time he spent in Louisiana in 1963, working in the voter registration campaign for the Congress of Racial Equality, and the week he was jailed there for his activities. It also points up Kinnell's increasing need to personalize his politics, to transcend the historical moment: Through the crisscross of bars at the tiny window I could see the swallows that were darting in the last light, late-flying creatures that surpass us in plain view . . . bits of blurred flesh . . . wavy lines . . . Nothing's there now but a few stars brightening under the ice-winds of the emptiness. . . Isn't it strange that all love, all granting of respect, has no face for its passing expressions but yours, Death? Kinnell's meditation in jail does not ground him in the particular moment; instead, he focuses on how such moments are necessarily absorbed by

the emptiness around us. The shadow of our mortality is ever present. This posture looks forward to The Book of Nightmares and Mortal Acts, Mortal Words. Given Kinnell's prolific canon, made up of some exquisitely compressed short lyrics and some long poems that revitalize the use of rhythm, the short line, and the sentence, it is striking how little his concerns and preoccupations have changed over the decades. Reading through his poems, we encounter, albeit in different poetic forms, the same issues: the poet in a state of exile, "the comfort of darkness," "the sadness of joy," emptiness and silence as a plenitude, the purification afforded by flames, ruins, and ashes, song as redemptive, the inextricable relationship between eros and loss, the search for "the sublime" in an American landscape, a Stevensian celebration of "death [as] the mother of beauty," and a loving attentiveness to, as Kinnell notes, "the things and creatures that share the earth with us." Thus, the question we are tempted, even compelled, to ask of most artists' work—"Does the aesthetic and poetic vision change and evolve over time?"—must be abandoned. As Lee Zimmerman points out, "Like Yeats, his early master, Kinnell spends his career working the same set of insights, but, predicated on changing experience, these are refashioned at every point." It is the continual refashioning of self, then, in a changing constellation of new and unexpected experiences that we must attend to in Kinnell's work. Though only occasionally linked with James Merrill, Kinnell shares Merrill's early poetic preoccupation with the "need to make some kind of house / Out of the life lived, out of the love spent" ("An Urban Convalescence"). But, unlike Merrill, Kinnell starts from the premise that he is in a state of exile, "seeking home" but seldom finding such a resting place. For Kinnell the journey, composed of crossings

GALWAY KINNELL I 237 and transitions, is everything. "And yet I can rejoice / that everything changes, that / we go from life/into life" ("Lost Loves"). It is these changes that his poetic project maps and that this essay will trace. Born in Providence, Rhode Island, on February 1, 1927 (the same year as James Wright, John Ashbery, and W. S. Merwin), Galway Kinnell was the youngest of four children. Both of his parents were immigrants: his mother, from Ireland, and his father, a carpenter and teacher of woodworking, from Scotland. In "The Sadness of Brothers" (in Mortal Acts, Mortal Words), Kinnell remembers them, highlighting their differences: . . . the sereneseeming, sea-going gait which took him down Oswald Street in dark of each morning and up Oswald Street in dark of each night . . . this small, well-wandered Scotsman who appears now in memory's memory, in light of last days, jiggling his knees as he used to do— get out of here, I knew they were telling him, get out of here, Scotty— control he couldn't control thwarting his desires down into knees which could only jiggle the one bit of advice least useful to this man who had dragged himself to the earth's ends so he could end up in the ravaged ending-earth of Pawtucket, Rhode Island; where the Irish wife willed the bourgeois illusion all of us dreamed we lived, even he, who disgorged divine capitalist law out of his starved craw that we might succeed though he had failed at every enterprise but war. . . .

His father, "who had dragged himself to the earth's ends," is an outcast from life's feast, while his mother, more wedded to her dreams, "willed the bourgeois illusion all of us dreamed / we lived." In a 1990 interview published in New York Woman, Kinnell described his childhood to Lois Smith Brady as "almost unbearably lonely." As a child his reading and desire to write gave him access to a private world of his own. He alludes to this in a 1971 interview with A. Poulin, Jr., and Stan Sanvel Rubin: As for the impulses that set me writing, I remember I lived a kind of double life: my "public" life with everyone I knew—brother, sisters, parents, friends, and so on—and my secret life with the poems I would read late at night. I found my most intimate feelings were shared in those poems more fully than in the relationships I had in the world. In 1932 the family moved to Pawtucket, Rhode Island, where Kinnell attended public schools until his senior year of high school, when he was awarded a scholarship to Wilbraham Academy in Massachusetts. In this setting he was encouraged to write and probably was steered toward Princeton, which he entered, along with W. S. Merwin, in 1944. When asked by Wayne Dodd and Stanley Plumly in a 1972 interview if he and Merwin had written poems while at Princeton and shared them with one another, Kinnell replied: Yes, we showed each other poems—though mine, by comparison, were crude. Even at nineteen Merwin was writing poems of extraordinary skill and grace. His sense of the richness of English, his ear for its music, were then, and remain now even in his leaner poems, superior to anyone's. During his junior year Kinnell studied with Charles Bell, who took his early efforts quite

258 / AMERICAN WRITERS seriously; that summer he went to Black Mountain College, where Bell was lecturing. Bell fondly recalls one of their first encounters: In the winter of 1946-47, when I was teaching at Princeton University, a dark-shocked student, looking more like a prize fighter than a literary man, showed me a poem, maybe his first. I remember it as a Wordsworthian sonnet, not what the avant-garde of Princeton, Blackmur or Berry man, would have taken to—old diction, no modern flair. But the last couplet had a romantic fierceness that amazed me. The man who had done that could go beyond any poetic limits to be assigned. I was reckless enough to tell him so. At Merwin's insistence, Kinnell began reading Yeats. He frequently alludes to the significance of this influence; for instance, we know from the interview with Dodd and Plumly that Yeats influenced Kinnell's structuring of poems: In my early twenties I thought Yeats was not only the greatest of all poets, but also in a manner of speaking, poetry itself. In everything I wrote I tried to reproduce his voice. If my poems didn't sound like Yeats, I thought they weren't poetry. . . . Yeats became a more useful mentor when I began to see his limitations, I think my interest in the poem made of sections, of elements that don't come together until the end, probably derives from Yeats, from poems like "Among Schoolchildren." I've always loved how all the materials of that poem come back woven together and transformed. This remark looks forward to a poem like "Freedom, New Hampshire," which appeared in What a Kingdom It Was. The poem is an elegy to Kinnell's older brother, Deny, who died in a car crash when Kinnell was thirty. The poem's first sections, which include memories of their time together on a farm in New Hampshire, contain images of death—"We came to visit the cow / Dying of fever," and "We found a

cowskull once; we thought it was / From one of the asses in the Bible. . ."—as well as their vision of birth, a vision that pays homage to the darkness from which we come and to which we return: That night passing Towle's Barn We saw lights. Towle had lassoed a calf By its hind legs, and he tugged against the grip Of the darkness. The cow stood by chewing millet. Deny and I took hold, too, and hauled. It was sopping with darkness when it came free. In the last section, Kinnell moves from the past to a present that acknowledges and makes audible "the abruptly decaying sounds" around us. While he recognizes that at the moment of death "only flesh dies, and spirit flowers without stop," he also realizes that his brother's death, and everyone's, encompasses a certain finality: "When he is dead the grass / Heals what he suffered, but he remains dead, / And the few who loved him know this until they die." The pathos of this impersonal generalization is mitigated a bit by the more personal and particular recognition that only Kinnell, and "the few who loved" Deny, can preserve his memory. As Zimmerman maintains: "Later in his career, Kinnell comes closer to James Merrill's complex but comforting proposition that 'nothing either lasts or ends,' but here his sense of temporariness is fierce. . . ." After graduating from Princeton in 1948, Kinnell attended the University of Rochester, where he received an M.A. in English in 1949. This was the end of his formal education. After two years as an instructor at Alfred University, Kinnell moved to Chicago, where, between 1951 and 1954, he supervised the liberal arts program at the downtown campus of the University of Chicago. Kinnell's First Poems 1946-1954, those composed at Princeton and during the early 1950's,

GALWAY KINNELL I 239 address "the comfort of darkness" and its relationship to "the feast" of life. In "The Feast," (1954), for example, Kinnell anticipates his 1971 essay "The Poetics of the Physical World," in which, following Rainer Maria Rilke, Wallace Stevens, and Elizabeth Bishop, he makes a virtue of Stevens9 assertion in "Peter Quince at the Clavier": "The body dies; the body's beauty lives. / So evenings die, in their green going." "That we last only for a time," Kinnell asserts, " . . . that we know this, radiates a thrilling, tragic light on all our loves, all our relationships, even on those moments when the world, through its poetry, becomes almost capable of spurning time and death." In "The Feast," Kinnell also flirts with the possibility of "spurning time and death": The sand turns cold—or the body warms. If love had not smiled we would never grieve. But on every earthly place its turning crown Flashes and fades. We will feast on love again In the purple light, and rise again and leave Our two shapes dying in each other's arms. Most of Kinnell's early poems display their indebtedness to his precursors, particularly Yeats, Robert Frost, William Carlos Williams, and Theodore Roethke; the more compelling influences of Walt Whitman and Rainer Maria Rilke come later. In a 1977 Partisan Review piece, Alan Helms finds First Poems 1946-1954 "most remarkable for the unassimilated debts Kinnell incurs"; he also points out that "in What a Kingdom It Was (1960) Kinnell pays off some of his debts; [while] in Flower Herding on Mount Monadnock (1964) he's in the black, writing his own good poetry, especially in Part II of that book." Certain poems in What a Kingdom It Was are memorable for what they portend in Kinnell's canon: "First Song," with its realization that song can lead to a "fall" into "darkness and into

the sadness of joy"; "Freedom, New Hampshire," Kinnell's elegy to his brother, which anticipates ' 'Another Night in the Ruins,'' in which the poet imagines a world where there is no phoenix but, rather, "the cow / of nothingness, mooing / down the bones"; and "The Supper After the Last," which announces that it is desirable to give up the "Lech for transcendence" in favor of "Intricate and simple things / As you are, created / In the image of nothing." What a Kingdom It Was is significant, however, because of the long poem that comprises Part IV: "The Avenue Bearing the Initial of Christ into the New World." This poem, which many of Kinnell's critics feel is only partially successful, grew out of his experience of living on Avenue C on the Lower East Side of New York from 1957 to 1959. The thirty-year-old Kinnell was one of several poets who took up residence in this neighborhood during the 1950's. According to Lois Smith Brady, "Denise Levertov lived in his building; Allen Ginsberg lived within walking distance; Robert Bly used to come over in the afternoons." In this same interview Kinnell comments on the relationship between this setting and his poetic project, and on Whitman's influence. He began reading Whitman seriously while teaching at the University of Grenoble in 1956-1957, just before he moved to Avenue C. In those days the Lower East Side was a terribly vivid and active exotic world. I had just discovered Whitman, who wandered around New York with his notebook, looking into butcher shops and blacksmith shops and taking notes, so I did the same. Gradually, I realized I wanted to write a little hymn to this part of the world, and that turned out to be "The Avenue Bearing the Initial of Christ into the New World." An interview with Ken McCullough in 1976

240 I AMERICAN WRITERS sheds additional light on Kinnell's project. In it he points out an important distinction between his vision and Whitman's: "'Much of Whitman's poetry is devoted to celebrating ordinary sights and sounds and in this respect the "Avenue C' poem probably does follow Whitman. But in my poem, time and progress appear as enemies, as they never do in Whitman." Despite this important difference in focus, it is clear that Whitman had a profound influence on the form of KinnelFs poem. Thirty years after the poem was written, in the introduction to The Essential Whitman (1987), Kinnell described the change that took place in his poetry when he discovered Whitman: ''Under Whitman's spell I stopped writing in rhyme and meter and in rectangular stanzas and turned to long-lined, loosely cadenced verse; and at once I felt immensely liberated." Morris Dickstein claims that Kinnell's "little hymn" to Avenue C "is less a poem than a vast poetic notebook that enabled [him]—by a discipline of attention to the world around him—to slough off the artificialities and tired literary devices of the old style." Paul Mariani also maintains that Kinnell's subject allowed him to abandon "earlier formalist techniques" and to pursue new rhetorical models, to see what he could do, for example, with the Whitmanian catalogue, the language of the image, and—unlike Whitman but very much like Villon—with the suppression of a poetic self in favor of allowing the mirror world on the other side of the poet's window to reveal something of the interiority of the human condition. We can also see Kinnell's kinship with Villon when he identifies with the marginal individual— the transgressor, who might at any time be banished from society. This identification emerges in Kinnell's vision of "the wiped-out lives —punks, lushes, / Panhandlers, pushers, rumsoaks . . ."on Avenue C.

Even though the influence of Whitman's catalogs, speech rhythms, and readiness to make observations lurks behind Kinnell's aesthetic and form in the poem, the voice is Kinnell's, perhaps for the first time. It is Kinnell's close observation of the life and energies surrounding these "wiped-out lives" that vitalizes the poem. Section 6, for example, focuses on "the pushcart market, on Sunday," where vegetables display a subterranean energy, giving us a vision of how all life comes into the light from darkness: A crate of lemons discharges light like a battery. Icicle-shaped carrots that through black soil Wove away lie like flames in the sun. Onions with their shirts ripped seek sunlight On green skins. The sun beats On beets dirty as boulders in cowfieIds, On turnips pinched and gibbous From budging rocks. . . . And in section 11 Kinnell describes the fishmarket with its "Fishes [which] do not die exactly, it is more / That they go out of themselves. . . ."He allows us to see the fish in their otherness; they are laid out to be sold, but he banishes the consumer by taking us in after hours. The fishmarket closed, the fishes gone into flesh. The smelts draped on each other, fat with roe, The marble cod hacked < into chunks on the counter, Butterfishes mouths still open, still trying to eat, Porgies with receding jaws hinged apart In a grimace of dejection, as if like cows They had died under the sledgehammer, perches In grass-green armor, spotted squeteagues In the melting ice meek-faced and croaking no more, . . . two-tone flounders After the long contortion of pushing both eyes To the brown side that they might look up,

GALWAY KINNELL I 241 Brown side down, like a mass laying-on of hands, Or the oath-taking of an army. Kinnell's metaphors at the end of this section remind us of his own poetic enterprise in the poem. His observations, like Whitman's in "Song of Myself," become a kind of faith healing—"a mass laying-on of hands." Perhaps Kinnell wishes to heal himself: seeing with the inclusiveness of Whitman and cataloging the images around him become means toward redemption, means of temporarily forgetting the historical moment and those "enemies": "time and progress." But it takes a leap of faith to see such a project as politically viable at this time in our history. As Cary Nelson perceptively points out: Kinnell's verbal motives require not deftly managed synecdoche but a sense of broad inclusiveness established through accumulated detail. So long as the details are American, the method is patently Whitmanesque, and by now culturally approved and politically safe. Yet our history has soured us for such projects. . . . We can now see with Whitman's eyes; the vast poem of America founders all about us. Visually, we can cross the continent in a minute. If the trip takes longer, the poem of community succumbs to the obvious visual evidence of violence and greed. In Flower Herding on Mount Monadnock, Kinnell asks us to make still another leap of faith by beginning with "The River That Is East." We might expect him in this poem, which focuses on the East River rather than the Mississippi, to write off the American dream; instead, Kinnell finds a way, reminiscent of Nick Carraway's vision at the end of Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, to reinscribe its potency even in the face of the wonderless river "Which drags the things we love, / Processions of debris like floating lamps, / Towards the radiance in which they go out?"

The first section pays homage to the movement of things on the river: the clanging buoys, the tugs, the carfloat, and the "white-winged gulls which shriek / And flap from the water. ..." Traveling along this working river, we see its shores and the Williamsburg Bridge "That hangs facedown from its strings / Over which the Jamaica Local crawls." In section 2 Kinnell moves from this concrete and particular perspective, shifting our attention to a boy sitting by the river and trying to conjure up some romance of his own. The poet wonders if the young boy can be linked to others in American literature who had their unrealized, though no less potent, dreams. In this context Kinnell offers a meditation on the male twentieth-century American romance tradition of questing. Orson Welles, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Wolfe, and Theodore Dreiser define this tradition. Taking us out of the present moment of section 1, Kinnell, a diehard romantic, looks back at these cultural "heroes": On his deathbed Kane remembered the abrupt, missed Grail Called Rosebud, Gatsby must have thought back On his days digging clams in Little Girl Bay In Minnesota, Nick fished in dreamy Michigan, Gant had his memories, Griffiths, those Who went baying after the immaterial And whiffed its strange dazzle in a blonde In a canary convertible, who died Thinking of the Huck Finns of themselves On the old afternoons, themselves like this boy. . . . Section 3 focuses on "a man," rather than "a boy," who "has long since stopped wishing his heart were full / Or his life dear to him." Yet despite this disavowal, he still thinks, when he sees * 'the dirty water,'' of the possibility of some transcendent moment: "If I were a gull I would be one with white wings, / 1 would fly out over the water, explode, and / Be beautiful snow hitting the dirty water." This conditional conjee-

242 I AMERICAN WRITERS ture prepares us for the Nick Carraway-like sentiments in section 4: And thou, River of Tomorrow, flowing . . . We stand on the shore, which is mist beneath us, And regard the onflowing river. Sometimes It seems the river stops and the shore Flows into the past. Nevertheless, its leaked promises Hopping in the bloodstream, we strain for the future, Sometimes even glimpse it, a vague, scummed thing We dare not recognize, and peer again At the cabled shroud out of which it came, We who have no roots but the shifts of our pain, No flowering but our own strange lives. What begins as a critique of why this "River of Tomorrow" is inseparable from "the past" of "leaked promises" turns into a reaffirmation of the Emersonian mythology of "self-reliance"; Emerson's mythology celebrates the possibility of knowing "No flowering but [one's] own strange [life]" and of denying historical contingencies: knowing "no roots but the shifts of [one's] pain." This particular type of "selffashioning" obviously serves to take us back to Kinnell's allusions to Kane, Gatsby, Nick Adams, Eugene Gant, and Clyde Griffiths in section 2. Most important, it signals Kinnell's increasing concern with being true to "the shifts of [his own] pain" and the "flowering [of his] own strange [life]." Without being confessional in the sense that Merrill and Robert Lowell are, Kinnell turns again and again in his poems to the shape and texture of his life, to the trajectories of the journeys he has taken and will take. When he moves from the cityscapes in Part I of Flower Herding on Mount Monadnock to the rural landscapes of Part II, Kinnell's relationship to the life he is living begins to change as he confronts his own mortality. Charles Moles worth points this out when he maintains that "it is only

when Kinnell escapes the city for the country that the possibilities of mortality become positive rather than negative." This impulse is played out in Kinnell's embrace of the darkness and in his Rilkean realization that "we are not really at home in / our interpreted world. . . . " Some lines from "Middle of the Way," a poem about an actual journey through a particular landscape, whose signs cannot be deciphered, illustrate the point: "I love the earth, and always / In its darknesses I am a stranger"; "All I see is we float out / Into the emptiness, among the great stars, / On this little vessel without lights"; "But I know I live half alive in the world, / 1 know half my life belongs to the wild darkness." The final poem of the collection, "Flower Herding on Mount Monadnock," is striking in its evocation of Rilke's knowledge of "Things, / which live by perishing . . . " (The Duino Elegies, "The Ninth Elegy"). The poet realizes as he looks at this flower that "Its drift is to be nothing." Dropping out of sight in the final endstopped lines of the poem, Kinnell gives the flower its autonomy, allowing its finitude a visibility and prominence: "The appeal to heaven breaks off. / The petals begin to fall, in selfforgiveness. / It is a flower. On this mountainside it is dying." This relinquishing of the poetic I, but not the poetic eye, is an unfamiliar posture in Kinnell's canon up to this point. More often, he is like Frost's speaker at the beginning of "The Most of It," who "thought he kept the universe alone." Kinnell's desire, like his precursor's, is to have "original response" from his surroundings rather than "copy speech" in return for his efforts to connect to the things of this world. In 1965, the year Kinnell's translation of Villon was published, he took part in an antiVietnam War reading at Town Hall in New York City. During the 1960's Kinnell was an active presence at such readings. "Vapor Trail Reflected in the Frog Pond," which appeared in

GALWAY KINNELL I 243 Body Rags, captures his virulent antiwar, and by extension anti-American, feelings at this time. In the poem, which some critics have described as a parody of Whitman's "I Hear America Singing," Kinnell listens to the "varied carols" America now sings; he hears the dissonance of crack of deputies' rifles practicing their aim on stray dogs at night, sput of cattleprod, TV groaning at the smells of the human body, curses of the soldier as he poisons, burns, grinds, and stabs the rice of the world, with open mouth, crying strong, hysterical curses. Kinnell mirrors the dissonance of the "singing" in his seemingly arbitrary line lengths and in his convoluted syntax. While we might expect to see the soldier's tortured body language—"open mouth, crying strong, hysterical curses"— before his violent actions, Kinnell disorients us by delaying the description. In 1965 Kinnell married In£s Delgado de Torres. A year later their daughter, Maud, was born and his novel, Black Light, was published. Black Light, which Kinnell describes as "closer to a fable than to a novel," grew out of the year he spent in Iran (1959) as a lecturer for six months at the University of Tehran and then as a journalist for an English-language edition of a Tehran newspaper. While working for the newspaper, he traveled around the country, "sometimes with friends who knew Iran very well, more often alone. . . . " Black Light anticipates Body Rags, his third volume of poetry, in dealing with how exile can be empowering. The protagonist, a carpet mender named Jamshid, commits a murder; the circumstances surrounding this action lack a fundamental meaning or logic. We are asked instead to focus on the consequences of this action: Jamshid is forced to leave his village, to wander

somewhat aimlessly, and to redefine his relations with others and his past. Paradoxically, he can begin to reconstruct his history only in the moment that he appears most cut off from it. By giving up the possibility of repairing or restoring the rug on which he has been working so that it will be whole again, he can begin to know the painful fragments—a vision of the dissonances— that constitute his life: He had spent all those years in Meshed weaving closed the gaps, as if he had thought that if you perfected a surface what it was laid upon no longer had to be reckoned with. Now that he had broken through the surface, it seemed he had no choice anymore but to die into the essential foulness of things. It is no coincidence that two of the poets Kinnell translated—Villon (1965) and Yvan Goll (1970)—also experienced the feeling of being exiled and explored the implications of this state in their work. Villon, who was repeatedly arrested (for street fights and thefts), was finally banished from Paris for ten years. When asked in an interview with Mary Jane Fortunate about his translations of Villon, Kinnell maintained that "When you translate a poet, you invite or dare that poet to influence you. In my case I think one can see Bonnefoy in Flower Herding and possibly shades of Villon in Body Rags.9' Although Kinnell's interest in Coil's work looks forward to his own poetic vision in The Book of Nightmares, it also may be seen as integral to his aesthetic in Body Rags, where, like Goll, Kinnell moves steadily toward a recognition of "the permanence of his [own] solitude." Goll, whose French poems captivated Kinnell, left France during World War II and resided in New York City until after the war. In his preface to his translation of the Lackawanna Elegy, Kinnell links Coil's creative project to his state of feeling exiled: "The permanence of his solitude was the terrible discovery of his exile: knowing

244 I AMERICAN WRITERS finally that he belonged nowhere. Out of this solitude he wrote this masterpiece, the grave and beautiful poems of the Lackawanna Elegy." Body Rags, Kinnell's third volume of poems, appeared in 1968, the year his son, Finn Fergus, was born. It moves away from the somewhat pastoral forays of Flower Herding on Mount Monadnock toward "the cold, savage thumpings of a heart" ("Going Home by Last Night") that knows the cost of spending "Another Night in the Ruins." As Richard Howard points out, " . . . life for Galway Kinnell [in Body Rags] becomes a matter of sacred vestiges, remnants, husks." In a state of perpetual exile—"terrified, seeking home, / and among flowers / 1 have come to myself empty" ("The Porcupine")— Kinnell tries to see what still remains, what is not lost, what can be recovered from the ruins. In "The Fossils," for example, his survey of prehistoric plant and animal life leads him to affirm: "Over the least fossil / day breaks in gold, frankincense, and myrrh." Kinnell learns in Body Rags what Frost's ovenbird "frames in all but words'':4'what to make of a diminished thing.'' Body Rags is probably best known for Kinnell's concluding poems, "The Porcupine" and "The Bear." Many critics have pointed to the poet's need to identify with these animals. The identification is particularly acute in "The Bear": The poet eats a bear "turd sopped in blood," then climbs inside the dead bear's carcass: I hack a ravine in his thigh, and eat and drink, and tear him down his whole length and open him and climb in and close him up after me, against the wind, and sleep. At this point in the poem, the poet's existence is likened to the bear's; like the bear he lumbers "flatfooted / over the tundra, / stabbed twice from within." And as he absorbs the "ill-

digested bear blood" and "the ordinary, wretched odor of bear," he is recalled, momentarily, to the possibility of hearing "a song / or screech, until I think I must rise up / and dance." But this poet's/bear's dance only enables him to wander, wonder, and question, knowing only the certainty of hunger and loneliness. And one hairy-soiled trudge stuck out before me, the next groaned out, the next, the next, the rest of my days I spend wandering: wondering what, anyway, was that sticky infusion, that rank flavor of blood, that poetry, by which I lived?

The poet's dance and song have been replaced by "that rank flavor of blood." Associated with the pain of being wounded and hunted, poetry, or the project of writing—finding what will suffice—becomes that "sticky infusion," pulled out of his guts. This dream / descent prepares us for the nourishing nightmares in The Book of Nightmares. Many of the best poems in Body Rags, particularly the short lyrics, focus on those moments in which the speaker gains knowledge that allows him to reimagine both his existence and his poetic project. In "Another Night in the Ruins" the poet remembers his brother, Deny, who "used to tell [him]": "What good is the day? On some hill of despair the bonfire you kindle can light the great sky— though it's true, of course, to make it burn you have to throw yourself in . . ." By the end of the poem Kinnell finds a way to embrace these words, but first he must confront

GALWAY KINNELL I 245 "the eaves of [his] ruins." He must know "the cow / of nothingness, mooing / down the bones" and the rooster who "thrashes in the snow / for a grain. Finds / it. Rips / it into / flames." Kinnell must become the rooster who "Flaps. Crows. / Flames / bursting out of his brow" before he can give up the image of the phoenix: How many nights must it take one such as me to learn that we aren't, after all, made from that bird which flies out of its ashes, that for a man as he goes up in flames, his one work is to open himself, to be the flames? Richard Howard provides a useful frame for Kinnell's purification rite: The poetry of Galway Kinnell . . . is an Ordeal by Fire. It is fire which he invokes to set forth his plight, to enact his ordeal, and to restore himself to reality. It is fire—in its constant transformations, its endless resurrection—which is reality, for Kinnell as for Heraclitus. . . . The agony of that knowledge—the knowledge or at least the conviction that all must be consumed in order to be reborn, must be reduced to ash in order to be redeemed—gives Galway Kinnell's poetry its astonishing resonance. . . . The notion of purification is reconfigured in different terms in "Lost Loves," in which Kinnell likens his existence, in the face of both "ashes of old volcanoes" and his body's "deathward flesh in the sun," to "the tadpole, his time come, tumbling toward the / slime." In Body Rags, Kinnell repeatedly looks for ways of living without the phoenix. In "How Many Nights," for example, he finds peace in "the frozen world" from an unlikely source:

How many nights have I lain in terror, 0 Creator Spirit, Maker of night and day, only to walk out the next morning over the frozen world hearing under the creaking of snow faint, peaceful breaths . . . snake, bear, earthworm, ant ... and above me a wild crow crying 'yaw yaw yaw' from a branch nothing cried from ever in my life. When asked about the crow in a 1969 interview with William Heyen and Gregory Fitz Gerald, Kinnell responded with a poem that provides an interpretation of the last two lines of' 'How Many Nights": 1 know the line about that crow is puzzling. In fact, when the poem was first published, some friends telephoned me, to ask whether I'd thought of the crow as benign or as an unwelcome presence. I wrote this bit of verse to explicate those last lines. It's called "The Mind." Suppose it's true that from the beginning, a bird has been perched in the silence of each branch. It is this to have lived— that when night comes, every one of them will have sung, or be singing. I was thinking of those diagrams—I still don't know if they are of the nervous system or of the blood vessels—that show the brain in the shape of a tree. At moments of full consciousness all the birds would be singing. Whether or not the crow's cry is beautiful mattered less to me than that this hitherto mute region comes into consciousness. Kinnell might have settled for the "faint, peaceful breaths" of the hibernating creatures

246 I AMERICAN WRITERS under the snow. Instead, in a moment reminiscent of Stevens' speaker in "Autumn Refrain," who hears "some skreaking and skrittering residuum" of grackles now gone, Kinnell looks up at a single wild crow, who cries "from a branch nothing cried from ever in my life." Like Stevens, Kinnell will never hear the nightingale. But, unlike Stevens, Kinnell finds nothing "desolate" in the sound of his wild crow. This crow does not change "the frozen world," but it does begin to affect Kinnell's inner landscape. The crow restores him, in a way that the "Creator-Spirit" cannot, to a part of his existence. This unexpected restoration is a kind of grace. Kinnell's next volume of poetry, The Book of Nightmares (1971), is less concerned with such moments of earth-born grace. If possible, Kinnell's journey is still darker and more probing of those "mute region[s]" of the self/soul. The most ambitious and most successful of Kinnell's work to date, the poem took four years to write. "A lot of that time," Kinnell notes in a 1972 interview with James J. McKenzie, "I worked on it day after day." When asked about the genesis of the poem, Kinnell replied: I began it as a single ten-part sequence. I had been rather immersed in the Duino Elegies. In the Ninth Elegy, Rilke says, in effect, "Don't try to tell the angels about the glory of your feelings, or how splendid your soul is; they know all about that. Tell them something they'd be more interested in, something that you know better than they, tell them about the things of the world." So it came to me to write a poem called "The Things." Like the Elegies it would be a poem without plot, yet with a close relationship among the parts, and a development from beginning to end. . . . The poem has moved far from its original intention to be about things and now probably does try to tell the angels about the glory of my feelings!

In this long poem modeled upon Rilke' s Duino Elegies, made up of ten sections of seven parts each, Kinnell confronts death's "two aspects— the extinction, which we fear, and the flowing away into the universe, which we desire. . . . " The epigraph from Rilke, which appears underneath the dedication to Kinnell's children, Maud and Fergus, further illuminates his emphasis on death in the poem: But this, though: death, the whole of death,—even before life's begun, to hold it also gently, and be good: this is beyond description! In the 1972 interview with Dodd and Plumly, Kinnell provides a useful commentary on the relationship between the epigraph and the dedication, one that serves to illuminate the poem's concerns as a whole: This passage appears after the dedication to Maud and Fergus. From one point of view, the book is nothing but an effort to face death and live with death. Children have all that effort in their future. They have glimpses of death through fatigue, sleep, cuts and bruises, warnings, etc., and also through their memory of the nonexistence they so recently came from. They seem to understand death surprisingly clearly. But now time passes slowly for them. It hardly exists. They live with death almost as animals do. This natural trust in life's rhythms, infantile as it is, provides the model for the trust they may struggle to learn later on. The Book of Nightmares is my own effort to find the trust again. I invoke Maud and Fergus not merely to instruct them, but also to get help from them. In the first section of the poem, "Under the Maud Moon," Kinnell's description of the birth process as a cutting of Maud's "tie to the darkness" magnificently captures how close children are to death—to the memory of "the nonexistence they so recently came from."

GALWAY KINNELL I 247 . . . And as they cut her tie to the darkness she dies a moment, turns blue as a coal, the limbs shaking as the memories rush out of them. . . . At the end of this section Kinnell looks toward a future that no longer includes his protective presence and hopes that his book of nightmares, drawing "from everything that dies," will comfort his daughter, who thus far is more familiar with the darkness from which she came: And in the days when you find yourself orphaned, emptied of all wind-singing, of light, the pieces of cursed bread on your tongue, may there come back to you a voice spectral, calling you sister! from everything that dies. And then you shall open this book, even if it is the book of nightmares. Kinnell also draws inspiration from Maud in section VII—"Little Sleep's-Head Sprouting Hair in the Moonlight"—when he makes a list of things he might do to protect her from the finality of death that he embraces. I would blow the flame out of your silver cup, I would suck the rot from your fingernail, I would brush your sprouting hair of the dying light, I would scrape the rust off your ivory bones, I would help death escape through the little ribs of your body, I would alchemize the ashes of your cradle back into wood, I would let nothing of you go, ever. . . .

Later in the same section he encourages Maud to see the relationship between "enduring love" and "the still undanced cadence of vanishing." When she is most sure of the permanence of love, she will "learn to reach deeper / into the sorrows / to come. . . . " If Kinnell is instructing Maud, and later Fergus, he is also preparing himself for "the mercy of darkness" and "the sorrows / to come." In section II, "The Hen Flower," he thinks in a moment of almost mystical union: . . .—if only we could let go like her, throw ourselves on the mercy of darkness, like the hen, tuck our head under a wing, hold ourselves still a few moments, as she falls out into her little trance in the witchgrass, or turn over and be stroked with a finger . . . until the fatted thing woozes off, head thrown back on the chopping block, longing onlyv to die. In a 1976 interview with Margaret Edwards, Kinnell comments on his "fascination with hens." Explaining that his family had "had a henhouse" when he was growing up, he remarked: Though not very personable, hens have an unusual psychic dimension, due, I like to think, to the suppression of their capacity to fly. When you hold their heads under their wings they slump into a strange coma. You might think they think it is the night, except that they do the same thing if you turn them on their backs and stroke their throats.

248 I AMERICAN WRITERS In "The Hen Flower" Kinnell seems to identify with "the suppression of their capacity to fly": "—and unable / to fly, / and waiting, therefore, / for the sweet, eventual blaze in the genes, / that one day, according to gospel, shall carry [them] back / into pink skies. . . . " He also waits for a future in which he might "let go." Yet the only certainty he has for now is that "these feathers freed from their wings forever / are afraid." In section HI, "The Shoes of Wandering," Kinnell wonders if our wandering "is the last trace in us / of wings?" He returns to the hen who cannot fly: And is it the hen's nightmare, or her secret dream, to scratch the ground forever eating the minutes out of the grains of sand?

Kinnell desires the certainty of "the great wanderers, who lighted / their steps by the lamp / of pure hunger and pure thirst," but must settle instead for "the Crone's" words: You live under the Sign of the Bear, who flounders through chaos in his starry blubber: poor fool, poor forked branch ofapplewood, you will feel all your bones break over the holy waters you will never drink. In the final section of the poem, "Lastness," Kinnell makes his peace with his journey toward his own death. In the first section, he had lit "a small fire in the rain." This fire is now "somewhere behind me": Somewhere behind me a small fire goes on flaring in the rain, in the desolate ashes. No matter, now, whom it was built for,

it keeps its flames, it warms everyone who might wander into its radiance, a tree, a lost animal, the stones, because in the dying world it was set burning. As in section I, Kinnell is still the black bear sitting alone; this time, however, the image leads him to imagine his own death: . . . a death-creature watches from the fringe of the trees, finally he understands I am no longer here, he himself from the fringe of the trees watches a black bear get up, eat a few flowers, trudge away, all his fur glistening in the rain. This image of the bear frames Maud's birth in section I; in "Lastness" it frames Fergus' birth. The mother and maternal nurturing are curiously absent in both sections of the poem. Kinnell puts the spotlight on himself as father and receiver of life. When he [Fergus] came wholly forth I took him up in my hands and bent over and smelled the black, glistening fur of his head, as empty space must have bent over the newborn planet and smelled the grasslands and the ferns. We next see the poet "walking toward the cliff. . . . " From this vantage point he calls out to "the stone," which "calls back, its voice hunting among the rubble / for my ears." Conjuring up his echo/presence leads him to imagine his death/absence—a world "where the voice calling from stone / no longer answers, / turns into stone, and nothing comes back." Kinnell finds himself back in "the old shoes / flowed

GALWAY KINNELL I 249 over by rainbows of hen-oil," "the whole foot trying / to dissolve into the future/9 And he asks an old question: "Is it true / the earth is all there is, and the earth does not last?" The answer is implicit in the end-stopped lines, which strive for a sense of closure in a poem that usually denies such a possibility: "Stop. / Stop here. / Living brings you to death, there is no other road." As Robert Langbaum perceptively points out: * 'Stated so baldly, these seem rather banal observations." The lines are certainly anticlimactic, if not banal, at this point in the poem, though the case could be made that they are the unsaid chant underlying each section of the poem. Finally the poem celebrates the poet's struggle to make the "earthward gesture" while still trying to be "the sky-diver"—to be the hen who has forgotten what it might mean to fly: This poem if we shall call it that, or conceit of one divided among himself, this earthward gesture of the sky-diver, the worms on his back still spinning forth and already gnawing away the silks of his loves, who could have saved him, this free floating of one opening his arms into the attitude of flight, as he obeys the necessity and falls. . . . If the poem had ended here, it might seem like the last poem Kinnell would need to write; it ends, however, with some rather flip advice for his son. On the body, On the blued flesh, when it is laid out, see if you can find the one flea which is laughing. The stark image of the "blued flesh" is muted, or undermined, by the image of one flea laughing. We might, more appropriately, have been

given an image of the ghastly "flesh-fly," "starved for the soul," from Kinnell's poem "The Fly," which appeared in Body Rags. KinneU's next volume of poetry, Mortal Acts, Mortal Words, did not appear until 1980. In 1977 his revised version of The Poems of Franfois Villon was published. In 1979 he received the Harold L. London Translation Prize. In the fall of 1978 he held a Fulbright lectureship in France at the University of Nice. That same year, Walking Down the Stairs: Selections from Interviews was published, providing his readers with new insights into his aesthetic. In 1979 Kinnell was a visiting writer in Sydney, Australia, at MacQuarie University. He spent the next two years teaching in Hawaii; in 1980, the year Mortal Acts was published, Kinnell returned to New York briefly to visit James Wright, who was dying of lung cancer. Anne Wright describes their last meeting: Galway came straight from the airport to the hospital. As soon as he saw James he leaned over his bed and hugged him, tubes and all. James couldn't talk but he wrote notes to Galway on a yellow-lined pad. During that visit James was alert, a little bit stronger, well aware his friend was there. Galway returned in March. When he came to the hospital I had a photocopy of James's manuscript, This Journey, for him. Galway had always gone over manuscripts with James and, sick as he was, James urged me to have his latest one ready for Galway. In "A Winter Daybreak at Vence," the poem Kinnell suggested should complete This Journey, Wright remembers the time he and Anne spent with the Kinnells in southern France: I turn, and somehow Impossibly hovering in the air over everything, The Mediterranean, nearer to the moon Than this mountain is,

250 / AMERICAN WRITERS Shines. A voice clearly Tells me to snap out of it. Galway Mutters out of the house and up the stone stairs To start the motor. The moon and the stars Suddenly flicker out, and the whole mountain Appears, pale as a shell. In Mortal Acts, Kinnell turns away from the dark nightmares of The Book of Nightmares and Body Rags toward "the singing / of mortal lives, waves of spent existence" ("There Are Things I Tell to No One"). He renews his belief that song can heal: "for those who can groan / to sing, / for those who can sing to heal themselves" ("The Still Time"). He explores, as he had in previous volumes, the inexorable relationship between eros and loss, as the following lines from "The Apple" illustrate: No one easily survives love; neither the love one has, nor the love one has not; each breaks down in the red smoke blown up of the day when all love will have gone on. Kinnell has not traveled very far from the sentiment expressed in his early poem "The Feast": "If love had not smiled we would never grieve.'' Nevertheless, there is a kind of faith, absent from his early poems, that he can make the journey "from night / into day, from transcending union always forward into difficult day" ("Flying Home"). Mortal Acts includes some delightfully selfcontained lyrics, particularly in Part II, where we find "Daybreak," "The Gray Heron," and "Blackberry Eating." These poems celebrate in uncomplicated ways the things and creatures of the earth. In "Daybreak," Kinnell likens "dozens of starfishes" to "enormous, imperfect stars." As the starfishes sink into the mud, they become invisible, like "the true stars at daybreak." Kinnell sustains his simile without

reaching after anything grander than his analogy. In "The Gray Heron" he watches a heron that moves out of sight; he then encounters a threefoot-long lizard whose head reminds him of "a fieldstone with an eye / in it." Still watching, he suddenly realizes he is being watched. The shift in perspective is highlighted by the final lines, in which the possibility emerges that in being watched, he may change shape or evolve into some other form of life: the lizard "was watching me / to see if I would go / or change into something else." And in "Blackberry Eating" finding language to describe the blackberries is as sensuous as the process of devouring the berries: lifting the stalks to my mouth, the ripest berries fall almost unbidden to my tongue, as words sometimes do, certain peculiar words like strengths or squinched, many-lettered, one-syllabled lumps, which I squeeze, squinch open, and splurge well in the silent, startled, icy, black language of blackberry-eating in late September. For Kinnell grace comes in moments like this when he finds "certain peculiar words" with which to embrace the things of this world. Mortal Acts is the most autobiographical of Kinnell's works. In "Wait," Kinnell asserts that "the need / for the new love is faithfulness to the old." He might have said that going forward requires turning back to the past, to remembering, to reconstructing, to making new stories out of the old. "Distrust everything if you have to. / But trust the hours. Haven't they / carried you everywhere, up to now?" "Time," as Zimmerman points out, is a "palpable presence" in this volume: "Kinnell's efforts 4to reach a new place' in his poetry . . . repeatedly lead, in Mortal Acts, to the old places, to the subject and substance of memory." Perhaps in homage to the final section of The Book of Nightmares, Mortal Acts begins appro-

GALWAY KINNELL I 251 priately with a poem about Fergus' need "to get out of the shadow" "of this father"; such a perspective leads naturally to his "fall" toward "the blued flesh." Sitting on a branch of a white pine, Fergus sees Bruce Pond in the distance for the first time; "its oldness" and "its old place in the valley" make him feel "heavier suddenly / in his bones / the way fledglings do just before they fly." At this point the branch cracks, Fergus falls, and the poet hears his cry "as though he [Fergus] were attacked." "His face went gray, his eyes fluttered closed a frightening moment. . . . " The pond initiates Fergus into a world where things and people are "gone." Kinnell may also be drawing on the Celtic myth of Fergus, who, in Yeats's poem "Fergus and the Druid," wants to abandon his kingdom for "the dreaming wisdom that is" the Druid's. In this sense Fergus' fall in Kinnell's poem may be a movement away from the possibilities afforded by poetic language or by dreaming. Kinnell's need to witness his son's fall, reminiscent of his need to attend to people, particularly family members, who are gone, requires a different vision of how the past impinges on the present than that found in The Book of Nightmares. Kinnell in a sense gives up "the dreaming wisdom" of his previous volume. In Part III of Mortal Acts, Kinnell writes about his family, finding a language to stress both the connections he feels with them and those he missed. In "52 Oswald Street," he announces that life is "unrepeatable." He also positions himself in the family as one of three "who have survived the lives / and deaths in the old house / on Oswald Street. . . . " Placing himself in the family configuration, rather than beside it, he hopes to find a language to talk about "bodies of mother and father / and three children, and a fourth, / sleeping, quite long ago." Kinnell's brother, Deny, who appears in Kinnell's poems "Freedom, New Hampshire" and "Another Night in the Ruins," is the initial fo-

cus of * The Sadness of Brothers,'' the first poem in Part III of Mortal Acts. In Part 1 of the poem, Kinnell starts from the premise that he can no longer call Derry up from the depths of memory: He comes to me like a mouth speaking from under several inches of water. I can no longer understand what he is saying. He has become one who never belonged among us, someone it is useless to think about or remember. Then suddenly, "this morning," "twenty-one years too late," he begins to recover his brother; the recovery is about repositioning himself in relation to his brother. He imagines an exchange with his brother and finds that the reaching backward to him is a way of reaching forward: But this morning, I don't know why, twenty-one years too late, I imagine him back: his beauty of feature wastreled down to chin and wattles, his eyes ratty, liver-lighted, he stands at the door, and we face each other, each of us suddenly knowing the lost brother. In Part 2, Kinnell alludes to his brother's dream of being a pilot—a dream he held "until pilot training, 1943, / when original fear / washed out / all theflyingnessin him. . . . " Unmoored from himself, Derry wanders: a man who only wandered from then on; on roads which ended twelve years later in Wyoming, when he raced his big car through the desert night, under the Dipper or Great Windshield Wiper which, turning, squeegee-ed existence everywhere, even in Wyoming, of its damaged dream life. . . .

252 / AMERICAN WRITERS Derry's wandering gives Kinnell access, in Part 3 of the poem, to their father, who also was 44 well-wandered." A connection between brothers leads to a web of familial connections and divisions. Finally, in Part 5 Kinnell returns to his brother, imagining an embrace between them now—in the present: We embrace in the doorway, in the frailty of large, fifty-odd-year-old bodies of brothers only one of whom has imagined those we love, who go away, among them this brother. . . . Conjuring up his brother here, in the present, allows the poet to return to "the memory that came to me this day / of a man twenty-one years strange to me." But this gap is not divisive; rather, it is binding: "we hold each other, friends to reality, / knowing the ordinary sadness of brothers." The adjective 4'ordinary" is important; for Kinnell "ordinary sadness" is a luxury because it is 4 "commonplace" and4'normal" and occurs in the daylight of today. In contrast, at the beginning of the poem his sadness was subterranean, hard to see, and thus his brother was' "one / who never belonged among us." In 44The Last Hiding Places of Snow," Kinnell attempts to recover some 4'ordinary sadness" about not being with his mother when she died. 44 I was not at her bedside / that final day, I did not grant her ancient, / huge-knuckled hand / its last wish. . . . " Calling up her love—44its light / like sunlight"—Kinnell feels his mother has empowered him to 44wander anywhere, / among any foulnesses, any contagions." Yet what follows is a curiously disturbing and threatening image of his mother as a devourer/ destroyer: My mother did not want me to be born; afterwards, all her life, she needed me to return.

When this more-than-love flowed toward me, it brought darkness; she wanted me as burial earth wants—to heap itself gently upon but also to annihilate— and I knew, whenever I felt longings to go back, that is what wanting to die is. That is why dread lives in me, dread which comes when what gives life beckons toward death, dread which throws through me waves of utter strangeness, which wash the entire world empty. This passage in the poem might remind us of Maud's birth—her cutting of "the tie to darkness"—in The Book of Nightmares, though Kinnell does not in that instance invoke the presence of her mother as an active agent in the birth process. Here, in contrast, the image of Kinnell's "tie to the darkness" is swallowed up by the image of his mother, who rapaciously wills his return to the womb, an image more than a little offensive. As Lome Goldensohn points out: In this stance, Kinnell is not Antaeus, deriving strength from a reaffirmation of the ground of earth which is his being. While the lines depend on a basic identification of woman as earthmother, they also follow the traditional misogynist conflation of womb/tomb, where the chthonic female is not muse, but instead the fixedly mortal part: the dread mother who in giving life beckons toward death. Kinnell avoids confronting his own missed past connection with his mother by focusing instead on a future link he might have with his own children: I would know myself lucky if my own children could be at my deathbed, to take my hand in theirs and with theirs

GALWAY KINNELL I 253 to bless me back into the world as I leave, with smoothness pressed into roughness. . . . By imagining this bond with his own children, he can look back again—this time with a renewed sense of his complicated relation to his mother: in an imaginary daybreak, I see her, and for that moment I am still her son and I am in the holy land and twice in the holy land, remembered within her, and remembered in the memory her old body slowly executes into the earth. These lines are as close as Kinnell can come to expressing * 'ordinary sadness" about his mother, a sadness safely placed in the burial ground and consumed by the earth. Kinnell's Selected Poems (1982) contains a generous selection of pieces from all six of his previous collections, spanning his career from 1946 to 1980, when Mortal Acts, Mortal Words appeared. Selected Poems gives us insights into KinnelFs evolution as a poet; while some of his early derivative poems seem haunted by the influences of Yeats, Roethke, or Frost, the poems from Body Rags and The Book of Nightmares pay homage to the influences of Villon, Whitman, and Rilke in ways that heighten Kinnell's distinctive and individual poetic voice. Gathering these poems together takes a certain courage and conviction about one's project over time. As Liz Rosenberg notes in a review of Selected Poems: "These early poems indicate influences that a poet is later smart enough to hide, or outgrow." Kinnell chooses to show his readers something about the process of outgrowing these influences. The year Selected Poems appeared, Kinnell published a children's book, How the Alligator Missed Breakfast. Nancy Tuten maintains that while the book "was written to entertain children, it reflects themes common to Kinnell's

other works. For example, when the animal characters . . . endeavor to be something they are not, by nature, meant to be, Kinnell alludes to his disgust with twentieth-century technological man's false sense of dominion over nature." In 1982 Kinnell helped organize an antinuclear reading, "Poets Against the End of the World," at Town Hall in New York City. His poem "The Fundamental Project of Technology," which appeared in The Past (1985), probably dates from this time. Beginning with a reference to the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945—"A flash! A white flash sparkled!"—Kinnell takes us inside the Nagasaki museum: Under glass: glass dishes which changed in color; pieces of transformed beer bottles; a household iron; bundles of wire become solid lumps of iron; a pair of pliers; a ring of skullbone fused to the inside of a helmet; a pair of eyeglasses taken off the eyes of an eyewitness, without glass, which vanished, when a white flash sparkled. But such a repository for the visible signs of destruction is no safeguard against future annihilation. Each stanza ends with an image of "a white flash," as if the dropping of the atomic bomb is bound to be repeated. And the poem itself ends on an apocalyptic note; archives, museums, and guardians of "history" are a thing of the past: "no one lives / to look back and say, a flash, a white flash sparkled." In 1985 Kinnell and his wife, In£s, divorced and Kinnell took a permanent position on the faculty of New York University. In a 1990 interview with Lois Smith Brady, Kinnell mused that "Marriage is like throwing yourself out of an airplane. . . . There's something irrevocable about it. You just sail on forever. You can't say let's stop, as you can in most things. Even after you get divorced, it's irrevocable."

254 I AMERICAN WRITERS The Past (1985), a collection of new poems written between 1980 and 1985, is a disappointment. There is a falling off of energy, an exhaustion and weariness; old concerns seem old. For the first time Kinnell does not find a way formally or thematically to energize the familiar insights of previous poems. 'The Road Between Here and There," for example, employs a Whitmanesque catalog to arrive at some links between "here"—this place—and the past events in the landscape. The place has not changed—a slightly romantic posture in the late twentieth century—but the poet has. There is something self-indulgent and monotonous about the list of past activities and the prosaic, endstopped lines: Here I abandoned the car because of a clonk in the motor and hitchhiked (which in those days in Vermont meant walking the whole way with a limp) all the way to a garage where I passed the afternoon with exloggers who had stopped by to oil the joints of their artificial limbs. As in previous work, Kinnell looks back at himself and his family in two of the poems, but "The Man Splitting Wood in the Daybreak" and "The Frog Pond" are not in any sense autobiographical. They are not about Kinnell's desire to recover a story—untold or told—about his connection to his wife or his children. Rather, in both poems, place is the anchor. In "The Frog Pond," for example, Kinnell describes his particular relation to the pond: "In those first years I came down / often to the frog pond." Then "the frog pond became the beaver pond"; "A few years after I got here, the beavers came." When the family is introduced—"the four / of us would oar, pole, and bale out"—the poet becomes a man sitting on the bank who watches the four people in the boat. The family becomes every family: "the man seems happy, / the two children laugh and splash, / a slight shadow

crosses the woman's face." Suddenly, we shift from the past to a future in which Kinnell imagines himself alone—though he is still "the man"—without his children and with "true love broken." The only constant here is his memory of the pond: The man who lies propped up on an elbow, scribbling in a notebook or loafing and thinking, will be older and will remember this place held a pond once, writhing with leeches and overflown by the straight blue bodies of dragonflies, and will think of smallest children grown up and of true love broken and will sit up abruptly and swat the hard-biting deer fly on his head, crushing it into his hair, as he has done before. Although Kinnell seems to be saying, "So you see, / to reach the past is easy. A snap" ("The Past"), the past is most accessible in the moments when Kinnell lives at a distance from himself. This signals a departure from his earlier poems. In "The Past" Kinnell wants to be in "the ordinary day the ordinary world / providentially provides" ("The Waking"), but he seems to have lost his way. Looking back at Mortal Acts, Mortal Words and The Past, we see a poet who has moved away from the emotional expenditures, the lyric grace, and the search for a mythology that we find in Body Rags and The Book of Nightmares. Nevertheless, Kinnell continues to be a poet whose vision and risks matter. As his new poems appear, they will be read with care; his ear and eye will be measured against both his past accomplishments and his future writings. Few contemporary American poets are guaranteed this attention, for, as Harold Bloom maintains, Kinnell is "a poet who cannot be dismissed, because he seems destined still to accomplish the auguries of his grand beginnings."

GALWAY K1NNELL I 255

Selected Bibliography WORKS OF GALWAY

KINNELL

Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1978. All of the interviews quoted in this essay are collected in this volume. How the Alligator Missed Breakfast. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1982. Children's book. Introduction to The Essential Whitman. New York: Ecco, 1987.

POETRY

What a Kingdom It Was. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1960. Flower Herding on Mount Monadnock. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1964. Body Rags. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1968. First Poems 1946-1954. Mt. Horeb, Wis.: Perishable Press, 1970. The Book of Nightmares. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1971. The Avenue Bearing the Initial of Christ into the New World: Poems 1946-1964. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974. Mortal Acts, Mortal Words. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1980. Selected Poems. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1982. The Past. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1985. TRANSLATIONS

Bitter Victory, by Ren6 Hardy. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1956. Novel. The Poems of Francois Villon. New York: New American Library, 1965. Rev. ed., Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977. On the Motion and Immobility of Douve, by Yves Bonnefoy. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1968. Poems. Lackawanna Elegy, by Yvan Goll. Fremont, Mich.: Sumac, 1970. Poems. PROSE 4

'Only Meaning Is Truly Interesting/' Beloit Poetry Journal 4:1-3 (Fall 1953). Black Light. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1966. Rev. ed., San Francisco: North Point, 1980. Novel. ' The Poetics of the Physical World.'' Iowa Review 2: 113-126 (Summer 1971). 4 'Poetry, Personality, and Death." Field, no. 4: 5677 (Spring 1971). "Whitman's Indicative Words." American Poetry Review 2:9-11 (March/April 1973). Walking Down the Stairs: Selections from Interviews.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Galway Kinnell: A Bibliography and Index of His Published Works and Criticism of Them. Potsdam, N.Y.: State University College, 1968.

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL STUDIES Altieri, Charles. Self and Sensibility in Contemporary American Poetry. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984. Bell, Charles G. "Galway Kinnell." In Contemporary Poets, 3rd ed., edited by James Vinson. New York: St. Martin's, 1980. Pp. 835-837. Bloom, Harold. "Straight Forth out of Self: Mortal Acts, Mortal Words." New York Times Book Review, June 22, 1980, p. 13. Brady, Lois Smith. "Poet About Town." New York Woman, April 1990, pp. 98-100. Davie, Donald. "Slogging for the Absolute." Parnassus 3:9-22 (Fall/Winter 1974). Dickey, James. Babel to Byzantium: Poets and Poetry Now. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1961, 1968; New York: Ecco, 1981. Dickstein, Morris. "Intact and Triumphant." New York Times Book Review, September 19, 1982, pp. 12, 33. Review of Selected Poems. Gallagher,Tess. "The Poem as a Reservoir for Grief." American Poetry Review 13:7-11 (July/ August 1984). Goldensohn, Lome. "Approaching Home Ground: Galway Kinnell's Mortal Acts, Mortal Words." Massachusetts Review 25:303-321 (Summer 1984). Guimond, James. Seeing and Healing: The Poetry of Galway Kinnell. Port Washington, N.Y.: Associated Faculty Press, 1986. Hall, Donald. "A Luminous Receptiveness." Nation, 213:377-378 (October 18, 1971). Review of The Book of Nightmares.

256 / AMERICAN . "Text as Test: Notes on and Around Carruth and Kinnell." American Poetry Review 12:27-32 (November/December 1983). Helms, Alan. "Two Poets." Partisan Review 44, no. 2:284-293 (1977). Review of The Avenue Bearing the Initials of Christ and Book of Nightmares, pp. 288-293. Howard, Richard. Alone with America: Essays on the Art of Poetry Since 1950. New York: Atheneum, 1969. . "Changes." Partisan Review 38:484-490 (Winter 1971-1972). Langbaum, Robert. "Galway Kinnell's The Book of Nightmares.9' American Poetry Review 8:30-31 (March/April 1979). Mariani, Paul. "Kinnell's Legacy: On 'The Avenue Bearing the Initial of Christ into the New World.' '' In On the Poetry ofGalway Kinnell: The Wages of Dying. Edited by Howard Nelson. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1987. Molesworth, Charles. The Fierce Embrace: A Study of Contemporary American Poetry. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1979. Nelson, Gary. Our Last First Poets: Vision and History in Contemporary American Poetry. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1981. Nelson, Howard, ed. On the Poetry of Galway Kinnell: The Wages of Dying. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1987.

WRITERS

Perloff, Maijorie. "Poetry Chronicle: 1970-71." Contemporary Literature 14:97-131 (Winter 1973). Review of Nightmares, pp. 123-125. Ricks, Christopher. "In the Direct Line of Whitman, the Indirect Line of Eliot." New York Times Book Review, January 12, 1975, p. 2. Rosenberg, Liz. "A Poet with the Flame of Greatness." Philadelphia Inquirer, February 13, 1983, p. R-06. Review of Selected Poems. Tuten, Nancy Lewis. "Galway Kinnell." Dictionary of Literary Biography Yearbook 1987. Pp. 257264. Detroit, Mich.: Gale Research, 1987. Weston, Susan B. "Kinnell's Walking Down the Stairs.'' Iowa Review 10, no. 1:95-98 (1979). Williamson, Alan. Introspection and Contemporary Poetry. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984. Wright, Anne. "Sitting on Top of the Sunlight." In On the Poetry of Galway Kinnell: The Wages of Dying. Edited by Howard Nelson. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1987. Yenser, Stephen. "Recent Poetry: Five Poets." Yale Review 70:105-128 (Autumn 1980). Review of Mortal Acts, Mortal Words, pp. 123-128. Zimmerman, Lee. Intricate and Simple Things: The Poetry of Galway Kinnell. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987. —CELESTE

GOODRIDGE

Stanley Kunitz 1905-

"T AH

Age has not diminished his zeal for writing, lecturing, and traveling to read his poems to large audiences. At his home on West Twelfth Street in Manhattan, where he lives with his wife, the painter Elise Asher, Stanley Kunitz is visited frequently by artists, writers, and former students. Many of the student callers were in his classes at Columbia University, from which he has retired as senior professor in the writing program. He is a mentor to painters as well. Even before his marriage to Asher, in 1958, he was drawn to the visual arts, an attraction he traces to his childhood in Massachusetts, where, he told me in 1990, "the Worcester Art Museum was a refuge for me." He mused: "In another life, I would like to be freed of the angst which the visual artist escapes, liberated by the externality of the medium. Gardening is my substitute. I work at it just as I would sculpture or painting." Kunitz has had close friendships with many innovative New York artists, including Mark Rothko, Robert Motherwell, Willem de Kooning, and Franz Kline. In his essay "Remembering Guston," included in Next-to-Last Things: New Poems and Essays (1985), he recalls Philip Guston's admiration for the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins. Dore Ashton, art critic and historian, wrote of his affinities to visual artists in "Kunitz and the Painters," collected in A Cele-

HE ONLY ADVANTAGE of celebrity that I can think of is that it puts one in a position to help others," Stanley Kunitz told Chris Busa in a 1977 Paris Review interview (collected in Nextto-Last Things: New Poems and Essays, 1985). By 1990, working on a new collection of his poems, Kunitz had become one of America's most celebrated poets. Five years earlier, in 1985, even before he was named poet laureate of New York State, his eightieth birthday was commemorated by a series of festivals in New York City; Worcester, Massachusetts, his birthplace; and Provincetown, Massachusetts, where he is a founder of the Fine Arts Work Center, a resident community of emerging writers and visual artists, and where plans are being made to dedicate a building to him. In 1986, poets as diverse as Yehuda Amichai and Kenneth Koch were represented in A Celebration/or Stanley Kunitz on His Eightieth Birthday, a book of poems, essays, and letters edited by Stanley Moss. The author of numerous books of poetry, essays, and translations, Kunitz has been the winner of a Pulitzer Prize, a Brandeis University Medal of Achievement, a Senior Fellowship of the National Endowment for the Arts, and a Bollingen Prize. He is a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a former consultant in poetry to the Library of Congress.

257

258 I AMERICAN brationfor Stanley Kunitz: "[The visual artists] . . . were committed to a point of view of existence—an esthetic—that assumed that their place was in a universe created by art and, of necessity, moral." And in 1978 The Nation published his poem "The Crystal Cage" (collected in The Poems of Stanley Kunitz, 1928-1978, 1979), dedicated to the artist Joseph Cornell. The poem embodies images and concerns that have been prominent throughout Kunitz' work: the stairway, the ascent, the artist's amazement at the natural world. It begins: To climb the belltower, step after step, in the grainy light, without breathing harder; to spy on each landing a basket of gifts, a snowbox of wonders: pressed flowers, pieces of colored glass, a postcard from Niagara Falls, agates, cut-outs of birds, and dozing in the pile, in faded mezzotint, Child Mozart at the Clavichord. Including the poem in A Joseph Cornell Album, which she edited, Dore Ashton commissioned Kunitz to create a visual work to accompany the poem. His composition consists of the poem in his handwriting, flanked by a collage that contains a tiny cat, a staircase, children's heads. Another of Kunitz' pieces, exhibited in his apartment, is a wooden box whose compartments contain found objects, each having to do with an image in his poems: stone fossils; a wooden insect; a picture of Celia, the Kunitzes' cat, that appears in the poem "Route Six"; a waltzing mouse that resembles the rodent in "The Waltzer in the House"; and a clock that reads five minutes to twelve. The timepiece is a whimsical comment on his poem "The Science

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of the Night," which ends: "Each cell within my body holds a heart / And all my hearts in unison strike twelve." The Kunitzes live part of the year in Provincetown, where he tends his flowering terraces as he would a sculpture. When I asked him why he lives in the city at all, he spoke of Elise, as well as of his attachments to friends, to the cultural world, and to teaching. "Apart from that," he said, "the city is not my habitat. I'm always longing for the seaside life. I'm not a nature poet, but I am a poet of the natural world. In writing about what I am, I find the most accurate metaphors in what is called nature." Kunitz' identification with the natural world is central to the poems. That profound intimacy is found in "The Snakes of September," a late poem that appeared in Antaeus and was collected in Next-to-Last Things. It ends with a unification of poet and nature: I put out my hand and stroke the fine, dry grit of their skins. After all, we are partners in this land, co-signers of a covenant. At my touch the wild braid of creation trembles. His impact on student writers is widely acknowledged. In A Celebration for Stanley Kunitz, Marie Howe, who studied with him in the writing division of Columbia University's School of the Arts, attests to his influence: Stanley has managed to do what many of us fear is impossible. He is a poet and he is sane. He is of this world and from there he speaks. And he shines even as he turns into dark and deeper dark. When I write, it is his courage and his luminosity that I conjure as much as his poems, which seem born from both rock and water.

STANLEY KUN1TZ I 259 When I asked him whether the absence of a father in his youth—the dark motif of the early poems—had anything to do with the generous teacher he became, he replied: "I suppose I've wanted to become the father I never had, and that has been one of the motivations in my life." The poet was born Stanley Jasspon Kunitz on July 29, 1905, in Worcester, Massachusetts, the only son among three children born to Yetta Helen Jasspon Kunitz. His mother was an immigrant from Lithuania who worked as an operator in the sweatshops of New York's Lower East Side before she moved to Worcester to marry. Her husband, Solomon, Stanley's father, committed suicide some months before Stanley was born. When the boy was eight, his mother remarried. That, too, ended in sadness: her second husband, Mark Dine, died five years later. After his death, Yetta, then forty, opened a dry goods store to support her children. Eventually she became a dress designer and developed a substantial manufacturing enterprise. For many years, Kunitz remembered his mother as being remote, and as having little time for affectionate contact with her family. He was later to recognize her insight and courage. "She was a woman of formidable will, staunch heart, and razor-sharp intelligence,'' he recalls in a prefatory note to "My Mother's Story," a memoir included in Next-to-Last Things. In it he writes: "She must have been one of the first women to run a large-scale business in this country." An early source of his concern for human suffering, his mother was conversant with left-wing thought. In the same prefatory note to his memoir of her, he describes Yetta, who died in 1952 at the age of eighty-five, as having been "articulate to the last on the errors of capitalism and the tragedy of existence." A talented violinist, young Stanley was deeply moved by books in his parents' library, including complete sets of Dickens, Shakespeare, and Tolstoy; the Bible; and an edition of Goethe. He

recalls with special delight an edition of Wordsworth's Collected Poems. He remembers being attracted to an edition of Dante's Inferno with Gustave Dor6 illustrations. The book inspired his reading of Dante, which led him later to the metaphysical poets, especially John Donne and George Herbert. Kunitz graduated from Harvard summa cum laude, having won the Garrison Medal for Poetry, among other important prizes. He had majored in English and philosophy. He stayed on to earn an M. A. with the thought of teaching there, but was rejected. To his humiliation and rage, he was told that the English faculty had denied him the position because "Anglo-Saxons would resent being taught English by a Jew." Thereafter, he struggled for years to find a means of survival that would still permit him to write. After working as a staff reporter for the Worcester Telegram, he became assistant Sunday editor, writing a literary column and feature articles. One of his assignments was to report on the aftermath of the guilty verdict in the SaccoVanzetti trial of 1927 that resulted in the notorious execution of the two anarchists. He told Chris Busa, in the 1977 Paris Review interview: I soon saw that a terrible injustice was being perpetrated. My particular assignment was to cover the judge, Judge Webster Thayer, a mean little frightened man who hated the guts of these "anarchistic bastards." He could not conceivably give them a fair trial. I was so vehement about this miscarriage of justice, so filled with it, that around the newspaper office they used to call me "Sacco." After the execution of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, Kunitz left for New York, having received permission to submit Vanzetti's eloquent letters for publication. Although he took them to many publishers, editors declined, fearful of political implications. The letters appeared only years later, edited by Felix Frankfurter.

260 / AMERICAN WRITERS At twenty-three, Kunitz, penniless in New York, landed a job with the H. W. Wilson Company, a publishing firm, and founded a reference series for contemporary authors. Working in cramped quarters for forty-two dollars a week, at a time when there was little information about living writers, Kunitz initiated the Wilson Library Bulletin and the Authors Biographical Series. He was to continue editing standard literary reference works, eventually on a free-lance basis, for more than forty years. In 1930 Kunitz married Helen Pearce, a poet, and with the first five hundred dollars he saved after coming to New York, he bought a hundred-acre farm on Wormwood Hill in Mansfield Center, Connecticut, which included an eighteenth-century house with a gambrel roof. In the Connecticut home, he fulfilled his love for woodworking and repair by mending or actually installing the heating, running water, and electricity. Although the marriage ended in divorce in 1937, Kunitz enjoyed rural life in Connecticut and, later, in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, where he cultivated acres of ground and felt at peace with the living creatures around him. The Bucks County location was the setting of his poem "River Road," which was collected in The Testing-Tree in 1971. Here the poet uses imagery of the natural world to tell of survival; the speaker, a fanner, establishes himself firmly in a fresh, green landscape: That year of the cloud, when my marriage failed, I paced up and down the bottom-fields, tamping the mud-puddled nurslings in with a sharp blow of the heel timed to the chop-chop of the hoe: red pine and white, larch, balsam fir, one stride apart, two hundred to the row, until I heard from Rossiter's woods the downward spiral of a veery's song unwinding on the eve of war.

There, as in many of his poems of the period, personal disaster is used metaphorically to embody the public tragedy of war. It was a method he shared with several of the Russian poets he translated in the 1960's and 1970's, notably Anna Akhmatova and Andrei Voznesensky. In keeping with his later poems, the images of earth and trees are more benign than in the earlier work. Here their harmony is in sharp contrast to human discord. That treatment of nature is significant, for the development of primary images from desolation to joy is continuous in the poetry of Stanley Kunitz. In 1930, the year of his marriage to Pearce, Kunitz' first collection of poetry, Intellectual Things, was published by Doubleday, Doran, and reviewed favorably by Eda Lou Walton in The Nation, Morton Dauwen Zabel in Poetry, and William Rose Ben£t in the Saturday Review of Literature. Its title is from the line, "For the tear is an intellectual thing," in William Blake's poem "The Grey Monk." In the poem Blake unifies human emotion with its apparent opposite, conceptual thought, just as Kunitz, in his first book, presents the juxtaposition of feeling and idea. In the mid 1930's, there began an abiding friendship between Kunitz and his fellow poet Theodore Roethke. Kunitz remembers that their first meeting took place when Roethke visited him in his Pennsylvania home, unannounced, and disclosed his intimate knowledge of Kunitz' first published poems. The two men had similar backgrounds: both were poets haunted by lost fathers and renewed by the garden world; both were committed to the act of seeing in darkness. Both had, as well, a certain innocent simplicity that originated in their attachments to nature. Roethke's "I stay up half the night / To see the land I love" ("Night Journey") is close in tonality to Kunitz' wondrous affirmations (for example, " . . . every stone on the road / precious to me," from "The Layers").

STANLEY KUNITZ I 261 Apart from being a safe harbor in the gale of Kunitz' emotional and financial crises, the friendship led to his first teaching position, at Bennington College, which he held from 1946 to 1949. It began when he succeeded Roethke, who was ill and insisted that Kunitz replace him. After that, Kunitz was poet-in-residence at the University of Washington and at Queens College. By the time he accepted the position at Columbia University, he had established his role as mentor to young poets. In 1939, two years after his divorce from Pearce, he married Eleanor Evans, the mother of his child, Gretchen, who was born in 1950. When he was nearly thirty-eight, in 1943, he was drafted as a nonaffiliated pacifist with moral scruples against using weapons. Although his understanding with the draft board was that he would be assigned to a service unit, such as the medical corps, that agreement was not honored. Consequently, he went through several sessions of basic training. In one camp he edited and distributed, on his own time, a publication that won an all-army prize, and led to his being assigned to the air transport command headquarters in Washington, D.C. Serving until 1945, declining commission, he was a staff sergeant by the end of World War II. Under that grim cloud, his second book, Passport to the War, was published by Holt in 1944. Although it was reviewed favorably by A. J. M. Smith in Poetry, the book was out of print one year later. Moreover, it would be fourteen years before the appearance of Selected Poems, 19281958, which was rejected by numerous publishers before it was accepted by Atlantic-Little, Brown and then went on to win the Pulitzer Prize. That ambivalent response is characteristic to Kunitz' critical reception to this day: in his poems, the blend of naturalness and heightened intensity, the mixture of idea and sensuous detail, are often misunderstood. Nevertheless, they are factors that contribute to his major achievement.

Although many of the poems in Passport to the War were composed before he entered the army, the book's tone is one of rage. The poet is horrified by the violence and greed of his time, as "Welcome the Wrath" attests: Wrath has come down from the hills to enlist Me surely in his brindled generation, The race of the tiger; come down at last Has wrath to build a bonfire of these rags With one wet match and all man's desolation. Anger of that kind pervades the collection, but does not constitute the book's essential impact. To embody this rage in art, the poet constructed a persona and a network of images that would serve as a structure for his pain and terror. That structure, as it evolves in the work, is the basis for any study of the poems of Stanley Kunitz. "If you understand a poet's images, you have a clue to the understanding of his whole work," Kunitz said in the Paris Review interview of 1977, expressing an idea he developed in another of the later essays, * 'From Feathers to Iron'' (collected in Next-to-Last Things): One of my convictions is that at the center of every poetic imagination is a cluster of key images that go back to the poet's childhood and that are usually associated with pivotal experiences, not necessarily traumatic. . . . That cluster of key images is the purest concentration of the self, the individuating node, the place where the persona starts. When fresh thoughts and sensations enter the mind, some of them are drawn into the gravitational field of the old life and cohere to it. Out of these combining elements, the more resistant the better, poetry happens. In his work, repeated images—water, earth, home, scar, name, sphere, star—change as they are perceived. However vivid those figures are, their function is not to portray the man in his growth. Instead, they are used as the building

262 / AMERICAN WRITERS blocks of a persona that is dramatized, at times mythologized, to recount the events and emotions of the poems. The method is akin to one he analyzed in the essay "At the Tomb of Walt Whitman" (collected in Next-to-Last Things). He spoke of it as the "process of transformation" by which the earlier poet transcends the self. "This is the supreme and imperative act of the poetic imagination: to create the person who will write the poems," Kunitz asserts. In a conversation with me he described that process, and the change it involves, as being central to his work: "The self is not a finished thing. It must be renewed through change. I'm talking about process as opposed to stasis, becoming as opposed to being. Becomings are rivers that flow into the sea. Being is the sea, and that's everchanging." Kunitz' early poems are shadowed by dark, dank watery images associated with the father lost to suicide before the poet's birth. In actuality, the poet's father died neither in water nor of drowning, but in a public park, by poisoning himself with carbolic acid. Only in late middle age did the poet discover the exact cause of his father's death, on a certificate in Worcester's city hall. Nevertheless, the water images are linked to that loss. For example, in a poem called "Father and Son," collected in 1944 in Passport to the War but composed some time before, he envisions "Him, steeped in the odor of ponds, whose indomitable love / Kept me in chains," and implores the father to * * 'teach me how to work and keep me kind.' " In "Of 'Father and Son,' " an essay collected in A Kind of Order, A Kind of Folly: Essays and Conversations (1975), he writes that the origin of the poem, along with that of another poem, "Goose Pond," was a small, reputedly bottomless waterhole that I frequented in Quinapoxet [actually Quinnapoxet,

as in the poem of that title], outside Worcester, and my memory of it is alive with snakes and pickerel and snapping turtles and pond lilies. . . . As far as I am concerned, the pond in Quinapoxet, Poe's "dank tarn of Auber," and the mere in which Beowulf fights for his life with Grendel and the water-hag are one and the same. It is the pond where I am never surprised to find demons, murderers, parents, poets. Did my father really die there? No, he never even saw it; and I was the one who came closest to drowning. Characteristically, the pond of "Father and Son" is set against the house, another of the poet's key images. Throughout the work, water recurs in the form of ponds, rivers, reservoirs, slime, ice, and snow. So, too, the house obsession recurs in the guise of doors, windows, halls, walls, attics, gates, and lintels. It is as though the poet is building artistic enclosures to compensate for life's domestic chaos. An earlier poem, "For the Word Is Flesh," in Intellectual Things, typifies the language, manner, and thematic concern of Kunitz' beginnings. Though dense and allusive, it contains those basic figures that indicate clearly "the place where the persona starts." It begins: O ruined father dead, long sweetly rotten Under the dial, the time-dissolving urn, Beware a second perishing, forgotten, Heap fallen leaves of memory to burn On the slippery rock, the black eroding heart, Before the wedged frost splits it clean apart. In the one long, sweeping sentence, the speaker warns the dead father that only a life in memory can avert a second death. The speaker's admonition, though, falls back on the writer— the literary persona indicated by "fallen leaves of memory." Images of the "slippery rock" and the "wedged frost" are characteristic of the wet chilly pictures Kunitz uses for the lost parent. The final verb, "splits," describing the frost's

STANLEY KUNITZ / 263 action, is consistent with the poet's early language of division: "Parting" and "The Separation" are titles in the first book, and in the second is the plaintive line "Heart against mouth is singing out of tune" ("The Guilty Man"). The cumulative effect of such words and phrases is to amplify the central figure's dark self that strives for completion without the father. In that early poem, decay is, paradoxically, what binds the dead father to the living son who has of him "no syllable to keep, / Only the deep rock crumbling in the deep." The son, pursuing "deeds ephemeral" and "dazzling words," finding in Christian myth a metaphor for the father's abandonment, exclaims, "I hear the fierce / Wild cry of Jesus on the holy tree." The poet's early theme of father as teacher appears here in the final couplet: "Let sons learn from their lipless fathers how / Man enters hell without a golden bough." And, apart from the subject matter that recurs in the early work, 4 Tor the Word Is Flesh" has the tone and rhythm of its period: passion strains against the set form, in this case six-line rhymed stanzas in iambic pentameter. Just as the father of the early poems is presented in images of rot and wetness, the mother is shown as a destructive force linked to a natural world that is cruel and without mercy. "Poem," in Intellectual Things, which consists of an address to the heart about a dream, is built on that cold maternal image: In the year of my mother's blood, when I was born, She buried my innocent head in a field, because the earth Was sleepy with the winter. As though the poet wished to allay the early fears by coming to terms with them, later poems embody the idea of mother either more gently or in more explicit detail. In "No Word," a poem

from Passport to the War, the maternal image is milder: the poet writes of "the mothering dark, / Whose benediction calms the sea." "The Portrait," included in The Testing-Tree, contains the tragic facts of the father's suicide in a public park and of the mother who "locked his name / in her deepest cabinet." As for the watery images of the father, they are considerably softer in the later poems. Gentleness increases throughout the work, and in "The Way Down," from Selected Poems: 19281958, the speaker perceives the awakening of animals sunk "in moss and slime" and cries, "Hail, dark stream!" He calls to a father-god: "Receive your dazzling child / Drunk with the morning-dew." The realization of love for the absent father continues, often in the form of water images that are safe or actually comforting. After 1970, water figures bring forth renewal: water is home to the salmon swimming upstream in "King of the River" (The Testing-Tree, 1971); the sea is a refuge for the titular creature of "The Wellfleet Whale" (The Wellfleet Whale and Companion Poems, 1983). And in "Quinnapoxet," collected in The Poems of Stanley Kunitz: 1928-1978 (1979), the speaker, who is fishing "in the abandoned reservoir," tenderly acknowledges a man who accompanies a woman in mourning: I touched my forehead with my swollen thumb and splayed my fingers out— in deaf-mute country the sign for father. Here the stale water of the early poems is seen as a place where life can flourish, and the cut flesh—another of the central images that soften in the later work—is hardly dangerous. Indeed, it is no barrier to the fisherman's silent gesture of peace. Stanley Kunitz is by no means the only American writer who has focused on the welter of

264 I AMERICAN WRITERS emotions surrounding a father's suicide. In the twentieth century alone, John Berryman and Ernest Hemingway are among the major writers who were offspring of such fathers. While those two authors themselves died of suicide, however, Kunitz survived—and that grim, arduous resolve to embrace life is enacted in the poems. "I dance, for the joy of surviving, / on the edge of the road/9 cries the fatherless Solomon Levi of "An Old Cracked Tune," a poem from The Testing-Tree. That frenzied dance of life over a precipice is an emblem of Kunitz' valorous struggle. It is, in fact, the basic story of his poems. In Stanley Kunitz: An Introduction to the Poetry, Gregory Orr has written that any study of Kunitz' poems depends on the understanding that the term "father" embodies "the fusion of the pain of the beloved stepfather's sudden death with the imagery and mystery of the biological father's suicide." Qrr maintains: "They [the two fathers] are also, and this point is critical, perceived as being actual or potential allies in Kunitz' quest for identity and his related effort to break free of the power of the maternal." That search for a new image of self is the source of Kunitz' process for transforming personal reality in an effort to call the poems into being. The quest is dramatized in "Open the Gates." Collected in Passport to the War, the poem indicates just how the process of selftranscendence—or, in Kunitz' terms, the creation of "the person who will write the poems"—contributes to the power of the later work. A pivotal poem of the early middle period, it remains one of his favorites, according to his assessment in 1990. Here it is given in full: Within the city of the burning cloud, Dragging my life behind me in a sack, Naked I prowl, scourged by the black Temptation of the blood grown proud. Here at the monumental door, Carved with the curious legend of my youth,

I brandish the great bone of my death, Beat once therewith and beat no more. The hinges groan: a rush of forms Shivers my name, wrenched out of me. I stand on the terrible threshold, and I see The end and the beginning in each other's arms. The tone is everything here, and it is Kunitz' unique combination of conversational directness and plangent resonance. It is found here and elsewhere at this stage in his career, and emerges when the passionate diction strains against the form of rhymed quatrains in iambic pentameter. The title, figuratively "the monumental door" of "the terrible threshold," signifies a terrifying entrance that is, at the same time, a place of discovery. It stands among the mysterious, threatening doorways of Passport to the War— "a hundred doors by which to leave," for example, in "The Harsh Judgment," and "the gates of mystery" in "The Tutored Child." It is a variation on the ominous entrances of the earlier Intellectual Things, such as, for instance, the entrance to hell at the end of "For the Word Is Flesh." A door of promise here, it predicts the slightly open doors of Selected Poems as well as the marvelous doorways of triumph in the later work, such as the gate that leads to heaven for the "nameless painter" of "Words for the Unknown Makers'' (collected in The Poems of Stanley Kunitz). In "Open the Gates," the great door groans open for the passage of a new identity: "A rush of forms / Shivers my name, wrenched out of me." Actually, "Open the Gates" is a translation from Hebrew of the ne'ila (closing) prayer of the Yom Kippur service, the twilight observance of the Jewish Day of Atonement, for Jews the holiest day of the year. At dusk the gates close, signifying the closing of the temple and of the heavenly gates. The event marks the end of a cycle, and the prayer to stay the closure is an especially poignant one. In 1990 Kunitz told me

STANLEY KUNITZ I 265 that he had been unaware of the allusion. Judaism is, however, in his background, and I suspect the knowledge was deeply ingrained—or at least that the naked, prowling "I" of the poem intoned the prayer regularly, even if the author did not. In any case, the central figure of the poem is presented as moving toward a new self in a way that resonates with the new cycle of the year, as in the Jewish ritual. He is shown as accepting the burden of his past and confronting the "curious legend" of his early tragedy. At the same time, "Open the Gates" is a heightened love poem: in an erotic moment marked by the words "in each other's arms," the speaker has a revelation of "the end and the beginning." Essentially, it is a poem about poetry, for "the end and the beginning" emerges as a metaphor for the artist's vision of continuous time. The self, transcendent now, is no longer bound by static, conventional time, with its sense of endings—separation, loss—as it is in the early poems, with their painful lessons of death and of division. Instead, it is on the way to a new unification. In addition, "Open the Gates" has a new sonority that recurs in the later work: the bold, ringing tone of "Shivers my name . . . ," in which the speaker's identity is found, recurs for many years in concert with the same image. A notable example is "Passing Through" (collected in Next-to-Last Things), a poem composed on the occasion of Kunitz' seventy-ninth birthday, in which the speaker declares: "nothing is truly mine / except my name." Selected Poems appeared in 1958, the year that Stanley and Eleanor Evans Kunitz were divorced. In that year he married Elise Asher. The book that won him a Pulitzer Prize in 1959 and changed the course of his critical reception, Selected Poems appeared after a hiatus of fourteen years, containing only thirty-two new poems. Those pieces, which appear under the section

title "This Garland, Danger," suggest that the apparently less productive years actually were years of intense change. In the new period, the figure of the beloved woman looms as the person with whom the artist identifies in the search for a unified and transcendent self. The section title "This Garland, Danger" is from one of the new poems, "Green Ways," in which the speaker turns to "lift this garland, Danger from her throat / To blaze it in the foundries of the night." The wearer of the endangered wreath, "the moon-breasted sybilline,' ' is one of the exalted images of the beloved woman that appear throughout this group of poems. She becomes, in "The Science of the Night," the "mistress" of "far Magellans"; in "Sotto Voce," the "Huntress of nerves"; and in "The Unwithered Garland," the sufferer "on a distant star." Through the beloved, there is a softening of those figures Kunitz refers to as "key images": even in a domestic quarrel, the "slammed and final door" of "Foreign Affairs" shows signs of giving way. The stagnant water images of the early poems yield to "the liquid language of the moon" in "The Science of the Night." The dangerous earth images become joyful and multiply: "flowers have flowers" in "As Flowers Are." Stars, recurrent also, are associated with remote human beings in the earlier work; here, they are radiant, happy figures, as in "She Wept, She Railed": "And we went out into the night / Where all the constellations shine." Representing another stage in the transformation of the self, the poems of * 'This Garland, Danger" embody the Kunitz persona as an active, hopeful counterpart of the earlier man. "The Approach to Thebes," an amazing poem, is also typical of the poet's rhythm. It is freer than the earlier poems, cast in a more varied iambic pentameter, and the approximate rhymes (' 'pearled' V 'gold''; "scorned' '/''ordained") are more commensurate with passionate tonality. Here the poet presents

266 / AMERICAN WRITERS the beloved, "who was all music's tongue," as an altering, agile version of the sphinx: Of shifting shape, half jungle-cat, half-dancer, Night's woman-petaled, lion-scented rose, To whom I gave, out of a hero's need, The dolor of my thrust, my riddling answer, Whose force no lesser mortal knows. . . . The woman is dangerous to the speaker; he is a modern Oedipus who is seen by "nervous oracles" to have her for his destiny. She possesses an enchantment that causes him to dim his rational restraint, and brings him freedom that ends in tragedy. The speaker is shattered to the center of his being. In the powerful ending, "Blinded and old, exiled, diseased, and scorned," he is determined to assume responsibility for his fate: . . . On the royal road to Thebes I had my luck, I met a lovely monster, And the story's this: I made the monster me. The self is an active force now, boldly risking destruction, unwilling to accept a bitter destiny without a vigorous struggle. The speaker knows he is the source of his own turmoil, for he has identified with the sphinx, bringer of "art or magic," and has traded complacency for "the secret taste of her." Moreover, he declares at the climax of this poem that he is "tied to life"— determined to survive in a world of tragic conflict—and this fierce choice is a major theme in Kunitz' later poetry. The poem is a turning point in the work as a whole. After the fusion of speaker and beloved, the wish to survive is asserted more frequently, often in plangent tones. The persona is more defiant. Along with a more vital image of the self, there is a mellowing of those recurrent images such as water, earth, house, and wound. Of that mellowing, Kunitz remarked to me: "I became aware of the tragic circumstances of my early life in the very act of unfolding [the harsh images] in my work. There is a triumph in being

able to speak of them, to absorb them into the creative process, although they still remain dark in their origin." Kunitz' debts to Freud and Jung are, of course, evident. A Freudian reading of "The Approach to Thebes" would have Kunitz-Oedipus as the narrator, spurned by the mother-beloved; a Jungian approach would argue the spiritual nature of the quest. Both are viable, both true. Further, Kunitz' images are archetypal, in the Jungian sense of a collective unconscious. At the same time, they are individual. Their power is in that combination of universality and uniqueness. Kunitz, who was never analyzed himself but who did absorb most of the writings of Freud and Jung, assimilated some of their principles into his aesthetic renewal of self-defining images. That varying of images is at the heart of "The Layers," a poem that appeared in the American Poetry Review and was collected in The Poems of Stanley Kunitz. In it, a voice in a dream directs the speaker to " 'Live in the layers, / not on the litter.' " The poem concludes: Though I lack the art to decipher it, no doubt the next chapter in my book of transformations is already written. I am not done with my changes. In a later essay called "The Layers: Some Notes on 'The Abduction' " (collected in Nextto-Last Things), Kunitz asserts that the concept of "layering" consists of dredging the memory and artistically mounting "thought on thought, event on event, image on image, time on time." Those images, mined from consciousness, their changes traced, are elements that emerge in and for the poem. The created poem, then, contains "the occult and passionate grammar of a life." Commenting on the last line of "The Layers," Kunitz said to me:' 'I'm always reinventing those images to find out what they are trying to say to

STANLEY KUNITZ I 267 me. The greatest miracle is how the whole baggage of memory is incorporated into one's whole structure of being. The lost souls are those who try to get rid of that baggage." The last line of "The Layers," "I am not done with my changes," is a wry, subtle affirmation of the poet's life-sustaining process of metamorphosis. He said to Chris Busa in 1977: Anybody who remains a poet throughout a lifetime, who is still a poet let us say at sixty, has a terrible will to survive. He has already died a million times and at a certain age he faces this imperative need to be reborn. . . . He's capable of perpetuation, he turns up again in new shapes. Kunitz' archetypal images are just such agents of change. They gather strength as they are transformed, changing, in the course of the work, from tragic resignation to tragic joy. And it is the mysterious gift of this poet to shape those images in such a way as to make them resound in the consciousness of all people. His later poems epitomize this mastery of the art of endurance. "King of the River," in The Testing-Tree, is an account of a dying salmon's journey upstream, slapping, thrashing, tumbling over the rocks till you paint them with your belly's blood. . . . It has an incantatory force, largely the result of the conditional tense and the suspended main clause: "If the water were clear enough /. . . you would see yourself." Its tone of combined naturalness and passion is typical of Kunitz' late work. The poem reflects the author's turn, in the mid 1950's, from set forms to the adoption of a line that has, normally, three heavy stresses and a varying number of light syllables. The wording is spare, its energy concentrated in nouns and verbs. In the first two stanzas of "King of the River,''

the poet establishes so close an identification with the salmon that his intimate address, "you," refers to the fish, to himself, and, beyond that, to all human beings unwillingly changing toward death. The bruised salmon is also seen as being intensely human and mortal: A dry fire eats you. Fat drips from your bones. The flutes of your gills discolor. You have become a ship for parasites. The salmon image illuminates man's active role in his own destiny. The theme was born in "Open the Gates," developed in "The Approach to Thebes," and is apparent throughout the later poems. Here the speaker admonishes the salmon—and himself—to accept mortality. Fighting it would be inappropriate as well as futile, for as the wind tells the creature: You have tasted the fire on your tongue till it is swollen black with a prophetic joy: "Burn with me! The only music is time, The only dance is love." Kunitz' "key images" here are presented as pictures of undefeated life even in the face of death. The water is life to the bleeding fish; the doorway, confining in early poems and hopeful in the middle period, here becomes "the threshold / of the last mystery," when you have looked into the eyes of your creature self, which are glazed with madness, and you say he is not broken but endures, limber and firm in the state of his shining, forever inheriting his salt kingdom, from which he is banished forever.

268 I AMERICAN WRITERS In this, one of the great poems of his later years, Kunitz celebrates the drive to endure despite the inevitable process of decay. It is the light that amplifies the endurance: "the state of his shining." That illumination, predicted by tantalizing but subdued moon images of the middle years, is seen frequently in the later poems, as in the "glittering world*' in "Journal for My Daughter" (in The Testing-Tree) and in the light-kissed roses that lift the writer in "The Round" (in Next-to-Last Things). Here, in "King of the River," it consecrates an indomitable life force.

In the 1960's, many American poets translated the work of Russians and Eastern Europeans. Besides admiring the poems, our poets shared the national optimism about peace between the United States and the Soviet Union. Stanley Kunitz, with only rudimentary Russian, rose to the challenge of translation. In the 1960's and 1970's, he worked with Russian scholars to create English versions of poems by Anna Akhmatova, Andrei Voznesensky, and Osip Mandelstam. In the 1980's and into the 1990's, he collaborated in translating other Eastern European poems. To support translation possibilities for other writers, he served on the executive board of the Translation Center, Columbia University. His work as a translator is second only to his teaching as a vital supplement to his own work. When Kunitz read his Yevgeny Yevtushenko translations in Madison Square Garden, he and the other poets danced on the platform for a curtain call. On June 21,1967, at Philharmonic Hall in New York, he read his translations in "A Tribute to Andrei Voznesensky," sponsored by the Poetry Center of the Ninety-second Street YM-YWHA. Robert Lowell and William Jay Smith read their versions as well. Because Voznesensky's government did not approve his

visit, a vacant chair was placed on the platform and stagehands played a Columbia LP recording of the poet reading in Russian. To an enormous, hushed audience, Kunitz read seven translations of Voznesensky's poems. He also read his versions of Mandelstam's "Tristia," Akhmatova's "Boris Pasternak," and Bella Akhmadulina's "Silence." Those three versions appear in Kunitz' Poems: 1928-1978. At a time when the new wave captured many readers, Kunitz was a leading translator. He was one of seven who rendered the English versions of poems in Antiworlds (1966), a book that won public acclaim. It was a bold experiment in its day. Editors Patricia Blake and Max Hayward provided rough literal translations and read the poems aloud in Russian to Kunitz, W. H. Auden, Jean Garrigue, Max Hayward, Stanley Moss, William Jay Smith, and Richard Wilbur. In the essay "On Translating Akhmatova" (collected in A Kind of Order, A Kind of Folly), Kunitz points out that the act of translating the poems of others can stimulate the poet's own work: Poets are attracted to translation because it is a way of paying their debt to the tradition, of restoring life to shades, of widening the company of their peers. It is also a means of self-renewal, of entering the skin and adventuring through the body of another's imagination. In the act of translation one becomes more like that other, and is fortified by that other's power. After the decade of the 1960's, the translation of poetry from languages less known to English readers lost some of its immense appeal. Nevertheless, Kunitz continued his work on Eastern European versions. Notable among the later efforts is his translation of the poems of Ivan Drach; for Orchard Lamps, published by Sheep Meadow in 1978, he worked with the Ukrainian

STANLEY KUNITZ I 269 language, collaborating with Bohdan Boychuk and others. His most consequential volume of translations is The Poems of Anna Akhmatova, which he rendered from the Russian with Max Hay ward. The book was published by Atlantic-Little, Brown in 1973 and since then has been in popular demand. In a 1982 conversation with Daniel Weissbort, Kunitz said that his own poems grew in the process of translating Akhmatova's work, which kept him alive to the possibility of translating human situations, conflicts, disturbances into poems that go beyond the personal, that can be read as existential metaphors. She confirmed my image of the poet as witness to history, particularly to the crimes of history In that interview, collected in Translating Poetry: The Double Labyrinth and edited by Weissbort, Kunitz said that he learned specifically "something about transparency of diction, directness of approach to a theme, the possibility of equating personal emotion with historical passion." That equation is fundamental to the poetry of Kunitz as well. The two poets also share a progression throughout their work to freer rhythms, with differences in their methods: Kunitz changed dramatically from received forms to freer cadences; Akhmatova, on the other hand, continued to write in fixed forms, but in verse that was less regular. Both, however, changed in the direction of rhythmic fluidity, and that development was in league with their increasing fusion of personal and public passions. Kunitz' genius for linking domestic turmoil with human suffering deepens in the later poems. There exists in them simultaneously a reverence for art and a public sensibility, and the successful integration of those concerns is rare in modern poetry. Over and over again he dramatizes the

bond between an individual's sadness and a nation's disaster, as in "The Testing-Tree": In a murderous time the heart breaks and breaks and lives by breaking. Stanley Kunitz is a poet of experience. He has responded to large events of the century, and has played an active role in the lives of students, friends, and colleagues. Nevertheless, in his poetry of this world, a startled innocence prevails and is his mark. It is an untainted purity, a trusting to "the better angels of our nature," as he writes of the president in "The Lincoln Relics." In Kunitz' poems, that quality of innocence is joined to his affinity with natural things. His very personal sense of oneness with living creatures paradoxically gives his work a public authority. That innocence is the tone of "The Wellfleet Whale," a major poem of the later years. With childlike awe, he presents the creature, immense and exalted, stranded on the beach. He writes also of the people who observe its dying. In wonder, the poet exclaims: You prowled down the continental shelf, guided by the sun and stars and the taste of alluvial silt on your way southward to the warm lagoons, the tropic of desire, where the lovers lie belly to belly in the rub and nuzzle of their sporting; and you turned, like a god in exile, out of your wide primeval element, delivered to the mercy of time. Master of the whale-roads, let the white wings of the gulls spread out their cover. You have become like us, disgraced and mortal.

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Selected Bibliography WORKS OF STANLEY KUNITZ POETRY AND PROSE

Intellectual Things. Garden City, New York: Doubleday, Doran, 1930. Passport to the War. New York: Holt, 1944. Selected Poems, 1928-1958. Boston: Atlantic-Little, Brown, 1958. The Testing-Tree. Boston: Atlantic-Little, Brown, 1971. The Coat Without a Seam: Sixty Poems, 1930-1972. With illustrations by Leonard Baskin. Northampton, Mass.: Gehenna, 1974. The Terrible Threshold: Selected Poems, 1940-1970. London: Seeker and Warburg, 1974. A Kind of Order, A Kind of Folly: Essays and Conversations. Boston: Atlantic-Little, Brown, 1975. The Poems of Stanley Kunitz: 1928-1978. Boston: Atlantic-Little, Brown, 1979. The Wellfleet Whale and Companion Poems. New York: Sheep Meadow, 1983. Next-to-Last Things: New Poems and Essays. Boston, New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1985. EDITED OR TRANSLATED WORKS Poems of John Keats. Edited by Kunitz. New York: Crowell, 1964. Antiworlds, by Andrei Voznesensky. Translated by Kunitz and others. New York: Basic Books, 1966. Antiworlds & The Fifth Ace: A Bilingual Edition, by Andrei Voznesensky. Translated by Kunitz and others. New York: Schocken, 1967. The Poems of Anna Akhmatova. Translated by Kunitz with Max Hayward. Boston: Atlantic-Little, Brown, 1973. Story Under Full Sail, by Andrei Voznesensky. Translated by Kunitz with others. New York: Doubleday, 1974. Orchard Lamps, by Ivan Drach. Translated by Kunitz with Bohdan Boychuk and others. New York: Sheep Meadow, 1978. The Essential Blake. Edited by Kunitz. New York: Ecco, 1987.

WRITERS

EDITED REFERENCE

WORKS

Living Authors: A Book of Biographies. New York: H. W. Wilson, 1933. Authors Today and Yesterday: A Companion Volume to Living Authors. New York: H. W. Wilson, 1933. With Howard Haycraft and Wilbur Hadden. The Junior Book of Authors. New York: H. W. Wilson, 1934. With Howard Haycraft. British Authors of the Nineteenth Century. New York: H. W. Wilson, 1936. With Howani Haycraft. Twentieth-Century Authors. New York: H. W. Wilson, 1942. With Howard Haycraft. British Authors Before 1800. New York: H. W. Wilson, 1952. With Howard Haycraft. Twentieth-Century Authors: First Supplement. New York: H. W. Wilson, 1955. With Vineta Colby. European Authors, 1000-1900. New York: H. W. Wilson, 1967. With Vineta Colby.

INTERVIEWS Busa, Chris, ed. 4Table Talk." Paris Review, 83 (Spring 1982). Reprinted with minor changes in Next-to-Last Things. Pp. 83-118. Weissbort, Daniel, ed. "Translating Anna Akhmatova." In his Translating Poetry: The Double Labyrinth. London: Macmillan, 1989. Pp. 107-124. BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL STUDIES Arnold, Edmund R. Stanley Kunitz: A Bibliography and Index. Potsdam, N.Y.: State University College Library, 1967. Hdnault, Marie. Stanley Kunitz. Boston: Twayne, 1980. "Stanley Kunitz Issue." Antaeus, 37 (Spring 1980). Moss, Stanley, ed. A Celebration for Stanley Kunitz on His Eightieth Birthday. Riverdale-on-Hudson, New York: Sheep Meadow, 1986. Essays by Dore Ashton, Roger Skill ings, Daniel Halpern, Mark Rudman, and others. Orr, Gregory, Stanley Kunitz: An Introduction to the Poetry. New York: Columbia University Press, 1985. —GRACE SCHULMAN

Denise Levertov 1923-

D

times receiving mixed reviews, has earned her a reputation as one of the finest contemporary American poets and almost certainly the best of those committed to the formal ideas of William Carlos Williams and Charles Olson. Kenneth Rexroth in 1961 called her 4kincomparably the best poet of what is getting to be known as the new avant garde," and in 1970 said, "She . . . resembles Mallarme or Pierre Reverdy, except that she is easily understood." Her work has developed and varied its focus over the five decades of her career, notably providing some of the most controversial public poetry of our time, but her characteristic techniques and concerns give it a consistency and tone peculiarly her own. Most important is Levertov's aesthetic requirement that the poem form a coherent, cohesive whole, rejecting or reinterpreting the fragmentation and loose association of the poetry of her mentors, William Carlos Williams and Charles Olson. James F. Mersmann points out that "Levertov tries to give her poems the shape and pattern she discovers outside the poem." Perhaps because of this poetic animism, this desire to imitate in the poem the form of its subject, she focuses entirely on the short poem, or on brief sequences of short lyrics, and avoids the largerscale enterprise of Williams' Paterson, Ezra Pound's The Cantos, or Olson's The Maximus Poems. But rather than limiting her subject mat-

ENISE LEVERTOV HAS earned praise for her mastery of free verse and other nonmetrical forms, and for her urgent and powerful attempt through her poetry to conflate private and public languages in the grave, calm texture of myth. Though she has been described as more interested in the psychology of the poet than in the resulting poem, most of her admirers consider her commitment to craft and preoccupation with language to be the heart of her poetics. For her, perception is inseparable from the act of making poetry. In The Poet in the World (1973), she argues that the poet does not see and then begin to search for words to say what he sees: he begins to see and at once begins to say or to sing, and only in the action of verbalization does he see further. His language is not more dependent on his vision than his vision is upon his language. This organic view of the creative process so closely links the psychology of perception with the impulse to make a poem—arguing, in fact, that for a poet, making a poem is perception— that they become inseparable. This view also reflects her conviction that the form and the content of a poem must coincide as fully as possible. Levertov's understanding and articulation of her own poetic has given her a deservedly high reputation as a critic. Her poetry, while some-

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272 / AMERICAN WRITERS ter, her aesthetic program makes available a wide range of content. The search for poetry of an inner harmony, a harmony of form and content that by 1965 Levertov would call "organic poetry," coincides with her desire for a poetic that would be flexible enough to admit both polemical responses to political and social concerns and the larger abstractions that the imagism of the modernist period generally prohibited. The formal cohesion of the poem, derived from the cohesion of individual perception, makes available any subject of genuine interest to the perceiving mind of the poet. "Organic poetry," she writes in her 1965 essay "Some Notes on Organic Form" "is a method of apperception, i.e., of recognizing what we perceive, and is based on an intuition of an order, a form beyond forms, in which forms partake, and of which man's creative works are analogies, resemblances, natural allegories." Only under the pressure of realized poetic form can these varied perceptions fully cohere and harmonize. Her recognition that poetic form and language tend to allegorize natural imagery has directed Levertov toward myth: not, until recent years, toward the inclusive, narrative mythology of the Bible and the classical period, but rather to a sense of the power of language to transcend the banalities of actuality and to embody, in some small degree, an otherwise elusive ideal or ineffable sense of the presence of spiritual mystery. To Levertov the primary task of the language of poetry is to give voice to the potential myth of natural landscape and the quotidian by asserting the strangeness, the otherness, of the familiar, as in "Matins" (The Jacob's Ladder): "The cow's breath / not forgotten in the mist, in the / words." She describes that process of languagediscovery, one that actively engages the reader in the making of myth, in "To the Reader," the brief ars poetica that opens her 1961 volume, The Jacob's Ladder.

As you read, a white bear leisurely pees, dyeing the snow saffron, and as you read, many gods lie among lianas: eyes of obsidian are watching the generations of leaves, and as you read the sea is turning its dark pages, turning its dark pages. What is happening in this little poem? What sort of questions does it respond to, given that Levertov (in The Poet in the World) argues that "what the poet is called upon to clarify is not answers but the existence and nature of questions?" Its most obvious response is to the question, "What happens when we read?" Rather than a direct answer the poem offers a group of mysterious images and directs us toward the source of myth and the process of making it out of nature. The white bear that "leisurely / pees" may seem a slightly satiric figure of the writer, who inscribes the white absence (the blank page) with the effluvia of the mind. But it is also a fairy-tale figure rendered in actual terms, a mysterious white animal (white animals are usually magical) that functions with physiological verisimilitude. This illustrates what Richard Pevear has identified in a review of Footprints in the Hudson Review (1973) as "a natural piety that tends toward animism," and suggests that for the poet the natural world is not entirely objective but in some way is caught up with our inner lives. Linking the half-concealed life in nature with the inner world of the self is a primal task for the writer. The critic Northrop Frye has identified this project as the "final cause" of art. But this poem gives the reader the responsibility of making that link, equating reading with the greater temporal process of vegetative succession ("gen-

DENISE LEVERTOV I 273 erations of leaves") and the evolution of order out of chaos, turning the pages of the book as the sea turns its dark pages. The shape of the poem, an unfolding that turns, finally, on the word * "turning/9 mimes with mostly enjambed freeverse lines the larger act of turning pages. The figure of the reader, according to Leveitov's 1968 lecture "Origins of a Poem" (in The Poet in the World), is half of a dialogue of the artist with herself. She approvingly quotes Ernst Barlach, a German playwright and sculptor, who argues that "Every art needs two—one who makes it, and one who needs it," then extends the argument by postulating a reader within one's self. This reader will respond "with the innocence you bring to a poem by someone unknown to you." Thus the reader-self is a critical buffer between the poet-maker and the unknown, anonymous reader out there somewhere.' To the Reader" then addresses both the self, carrying on that inner colloquy Levertov finds at the heart of many of her poems, and the traditional reader. Levertov's poetics of organic order and natural piety inform even her stridently antiwar poems of the late 1960's and early 1970's. This poetic may derive in part not only from the early influence of Herbert Read and the other British neo-Romantics popular in her youth and from the objectivism learned from Robert Duncan, Robert Creeley, and Charles Olson, but also from her complex family background. Doris Earnshaw argues that as "granddaughter on her father's side of a Russian Hasidic Jew and on her mother's of a Welsh mystic," Levertov "was fitted by birth and political destiny to voice the terrors and pleasures of the twentieth century." Because Levertov so often derives her poems from the immediate or the past events of her life, her biography can usefully inform responses to her poetry. Levertov's father was a Russian Jew who had immigrated to England and become an Anglican minister. Denise Levertov was born there

on October 24, 1923, and grew up in suburban Ilford, Essex. (Sources conflict over whether her city of birth was actually London or Ilford.) Her father, who spelled his name Levertoff, descended from the founder of Habad Hasidism. Some of the characteristics of this sect seem to survive in Levertov's poetry, since she describes it as embodying both "a very great strain of asceticism" and "a recognition and joy in the physical world" (quoted in Wagner, Denise Levertov: In Her Own Province). This seems to describe perfectly a great deal of her own work, though it also suggests that Levertov has chosen to understand this sect on her own terms. Her mother was Welsh and, like Levertov's father, was descended from a religious figure, the preacher-tailor Angel Jones of Mold. Though Levertov's poetry, even her later overtly Christian work, is more pantheistic than conventionally religious in the Judeo-Christian tradition, it is infused with this strongly religious family background. Levertov did not receive a good deal of formal education (she attended neither grammar school nor a university), but her schooling at home was thoroughly literary. Her mother introduced her to the work of the great Victorian writers, particularly Tennyson, of whom she later said, "I had him practically stuck under my armpit for several years of my childhood" (quoted in Wagner, In Her Own Province). Through reading at home, through the formal study of ballet, and through exposure to the refugees, artists, and eccentrics her father befriended, she came early in life to believe in the importance of art and its place in her own life. As Levertov recounts in the introduction to her Collected Earlier Poems, at the age of twelve she sent some poems to T. S. Eliot, who responded some months later with a lengthy letter "full of advice." She then recalls that at sixteen she met Herbert Read, whose ideas on art and culture are a major influence on her poetry to the

274 I AMERICAN WRITERS present day. By the time she was nineteen her work was appearing in journals such as Poetry Quarterly. Outposts, and Voices. During the war Levertov served as a civilian nurse in St. Luke's Hospital in Fitzroy Square, London. There she wrote most of the poems in her first book, The Double Image, published in 1946 by the Cresset Press. To achieve this publication, Levertov by her own account walked naively into the office (mistakenly entering through the stockroom) and handed her * 'ill-typed manuscript" to an editor. Though doubtful, the editor passed the manuscript on to John Hay ward, the director of the press, who decided to publish it. Critics have usually described the poems in The Double Image as characteristic of the neoRomantic mood of British poetry at the time. However, the best poems already display a tendency to defamiliarize the domestic and natural world and emphasize the essentially private way the individual is forced to confront otherness. The second half of "Christmas 1944" illustrates the mixture of Georgian imagery and startling and effective personification ("a dark excited tree," "hearing hatred crackle in the coal") that defines her work of the 1940's: A painted bird or boat above the fire, a fire in the hearth, a candle in the dark, a dark excited tree, fresh from the forest, are all that stands between us and the wind. The wind has many tales to tell of sea and city, a plague on many houses, fear knocking on the doors; how venom trickles from the open mouth of death, and trees are white with rage of alien battles. Who can be happy while the wind recounts its long sagas of sorrow? Though we are safe in a flickering circle of winter festival we dare not laugh; or if we laugh, we lie, hearing hatred crackle in the coal, the voice of reason, the voice of love.

The free verse is almost as measured as blank verse, and the orderly, fluent syntax and manifest faith in natural epiphany characterize her work at this time. The faith in epiphany is Wordsworthian and will remain with her through a long, productive career, so that even late work like "The day longs for the evening" from Breathing the Water (1987) can ask of an almost wholly personified landscape "What is that promised evening?" and find the illumination of faith in natural occurrence. The poems of The Double Image embody a recurring sense of loss, which in the context of Levertov's natural piety requires the ritualizing of death. To defer the bottomless mystery of death, Levertov in "To Death" addresses it directly and offers its personified form the honors due a god. But the poem also invites death to play a role, to be an image rather than an actuality, a sign instead of a referent. "Enter with riches. Let your image wear / brocade of fantasy, and bear your part / with all the actor's art and arrogance." If death does this (that is, if it accepts the role of image and actor) it "will receive, deserve due ritual," and the speaker will be able to address this fictional version of death as "eloquent, just, and mighty one"—praise that otherwise, except for the last modifier, actual death hardly deserves. This Romantic personification of death typifies the early Levertov's withdrawal from the modernist urban imagery of Eliot and Auden and the avoidance of the horrors of the just-concluded war. Later, although retaining the concern with myth making, the devices of personification and apostrophe, the natural piety and idealism, Levertov would move sharply in the other direction, embracing the mundane horror of modern war in a language that if anything was too nakedly eager to confront its subject matter. But in doing so she demonstrated how flexible an instrument her early poetic was, and proved that her commitment to an expressive,

DENISE LEVERTOV I 275 Romantic aesthetic by no means limited her range. Levertov first appeared in an American publication in 1949 in Kenneth Rexroth's anthology New British Poetry. By then she had married Mitchell Goodman, an American soldier, novelist, and poet, had moved to New York City, and had produced a son, Nikolai. Sometime during her first few years in New York, Levertov began to read William Carlos Williams, whose influence transformed her poetry and gave her a new idiom that amalgamated her early romanticism with a more hard-edged language of immediate perception. Her interest in two other younger poets confirmed her sense of the importance of Williams. Robert Creeley, who published her work in Black Mountain Review and Origin, and Robert Duncan became her friends in the early 1950's. Both poets taught at Black Mountain College, under the direction of Charles Olson, and through them Levertov became known as a "Black Mountain" poet. But her poetry cannot be assigned to any school, and while she admires Duncan and Creeley she has always considered her work distinct from theirs. Williams is the common denominator. Though the full effect of exposure to Williams appeared gradually, by 1957 when her second book, Here and Now, appeared, the shift from her rich but somewhat Georgian early poetry was complete. This second book and the third, Overland to the Islands (1958), have interesting and overlapping histories. They are so linked that Levertov now thinks they should have appeared as a single volume. Weldon Kees, Levertov reports, had solicited a collection of her work for a small press he planned to start with a friend. Unfortunately for Levertov and American poetry, Kees shortly thereafter leapt from the Golden Gate Bridge. The following year, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who had obtained the manuscript material in Kees's possession, offered to publish a book, and after sifting through available poems produced Here

and Now. The following year, Jonathan Williams published Overland to the Islands, which according to Levertov consisted of the "rejects" from the earlier volume, and a few more recent poems. In her introduction to Collected Earlier Poems Levertov comments that "poems that should really have been in a single book together because of their interrelationships were arbitrarily divided between Here and Now and Overland to the Islands.'9 Further, Robert Duncan suggested that both books suffered from a lack of clear ordering. Levertov points out that "to compose a book is preferable to randomly gathering one." Whatever the problems with the ordering of these books, the individual poems display a firmness of imagery, a clarity of language, and the first signs of Levertov's mastery of the "variable foot" of Williams, which would become central to her theory of rhythm and the organic unity of her poetic. In an interview with Walter Sutton (in Poet in the World), Levertov describes the source of the variable foot as "a sense of pulse, a pulse in behind the words, a pulse that is actually sort of tapped out by a drum in the poem.'' She considers this form distinct from free verse, believing that verse requires a regularity, and rejects the "breath-spaced" line as well on the grounds that it attempts to imitate speech, while the poem should reflect an "inner voice" that may not be reproducible in speech. This "inner voice," she argues, "is not necessarily identical with [the poet's] literal speaking voice, nor is his inner vocabulary identical with that which he uses in conversation.'' By rejecting an easy identification of poetry with speech Levertov distinguishes herself from the less thoughtful imitators of Williams and retains the Romantic-expressive core of her poetic. Despite or perhaps because of her animism there can be no perfect clarity in the relationship between the natural world and the language in which she describes it. The clarity of her rhythms, however, would brilliantly outline that mystery and help give her poems a structural

276 I AMERICAN firmness that would more than make up for slack language and occasional vagaries of metaphor. Levertov's early, pre-Williams poems have the virtues of conventional form as well as a flair for unexpected phrasing. Her primary weakness is an overreliance on symbolic convention and predictably poetic subject matter. By Here and Now, though, the example of Williams had begun to free her from conventions, both of form and content, and her poems open themselves to the domestic and commonplace, while embracing a paradoxical sense of both the otherness and the spiritual congeniality of the natural world—a paradox that by the period of The Jacob's Ladder would give her poems a rich mythic texture. The poems of Here and Now are sometimes too insistently joyful, their language often too decorative, but the grasp of Williams' rhythmic principles lends them a drive and energy that the poems of The Double Image lacked. "Jackson Square" illustrates the strengths and weakness of her mid-1950's idiom: Bravo! the brave sunshine. A triangle of green green contains the sleek and various pigeons the starving inventors and all who sit on benches in the morning, to sun tenacious hopes—indeed a gay morning for hope to feed on greedy as the green and gray and purple-preening birds . . . The repetition of "green," the typographical insistence on the colors of the birds, the poem's tendency toward self-explication ("to sun tenacious hopes . . . a gay morning for hope") echo Williams' weaker mannerisms, but the adroit flexing of syntax against the loose but regular rhythms imposed by the line-breaks shows how well Levertov has grasped his rhythmic principles. If the language of Here and Now sometimes is

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too ornately pictorial, Overland to the Islands, although supposedly made up of rejects from the previous book, often displays a more concentrated focus on the everyday world, less tendency to rhapsodize. The most interesting poems focus on domestic concerns in a fresh, colloquial voice, as in "The Dogwood": The sink is full of dishes. Oh well. Ten o'clock, there's no hot water. The kitchen floor is unswept, the broom has been shedding straws. Oh well. This poem illustrates another lesson well learned from Williams: the clearly defined, colloquial speaking voice gives a necessary life to things not by imposing abstractions upon them but by acknowledging them for what they are. Williams learned this from his early reading of Keats, so it is a lesson perfectly compatible with Levertov's Romantic faith in the sufficiency of the world. Levertov's next book would be her first by a major publisher. Rexroth, she believes, brought her work to the attention of James Laughlin, and in 1960 New Directions published With Eyes at the Back of Our Heads. The title directs the reader to Levertov's concern with indirection, with finding what one wants by avoiding looking directly for it, and her belief that what we see with the physical eye is less essential than what we see with the mind's eye, the unconscious back-of-the-head eye directed by a mind alert to myth. This is the topic of her title poem: With eyes at the back of our heads we see a mountain not obstructed with woods but laced here and there with feathery groves. Unlike real mountains, which tend to be obstructed with woods, this one, the sheer bulk of the mythic world available to the imagination, with its "feathery groves" is the background

DENISE LEVERTOV I 277 against which we can construct more personal fantasies. The personal fantasy of this poem revolves about a house, perhaps a facade, that is both shelter and garment. Architect and knitter, two functionaries of the imagination, combine their talents to render the house accessible so that we may pass through it and reach the mountain beyond: When the doors widen when the sleeves admit us the way to the mountain will be clear, the mountain we see with eyes at the back of our heads, mountain green, mountain cut of limestone, echoing with hidden rivers, mountain of short grass and subtle shadows. The imagination, here embodied in the arts of knitting and architecture, bridges the gap between the mind and the exterior world. The house, though only a facade—something that like a sweater we "wear" to define ourselves better—gives admittance to the natural world beyond. Both the created and the natural world in this poem are products of imagination, but art, not their mutual source in the mind, links them. The pleasure Levertov takes in the poetic function, the power of joining self and nature in the common medium of mythic language, shapes this book and gives it an affirmative tone distinct from the ironic, cool, witty, or learned tones of contemporaries such as Creeley, Lowell, Rich, or Olson. "To the Snake" most clearly points to the source of that joy, the pleasure in working through natural symbol to produce a synthesis between the self and the world. By hanging the green snake around her throat the poet assumes the power of the goddess (the subject of another poem in this volume). She also takes a risk— snakes tempt, lie, and bite—but the poet is willing to assume the full weight of the symbol, and

by avoiding the illusion that myth is necessarily either positive or negative she experiences a richer sense of its place in the world: Green Snake—I swore to my companions that certainly you were harmless! But truly I had no certainty, and no hope, only desiring to hold you, for that joy, which left a long wake of pleasure, as the leaves moved and you faded into the pattern of grass and shadow, and I returned smiling and haunted, to a dark morning. This implied definition of the poet's task, to assume the mantle of myth and risk losing one's self in the larger patterns of the natural world, would be refined in The Jacob's Ladder (1961), in which Levertov turned to the problem of the proper language of poetry. The first poem (after the poem "To the Reader"), "A Common Ground," sites the poet's work in the "common ground" of agriculture, which is "here and there gritty with pebbles / yet elsewhere 'fine and mellow—/uncommon fine for ploughing.' " The poem's second section turns to the issue of the place of both poetry and nature in the contemporary world of New York's Central Park where "the girls / laugh at the sun, men / in business suits awkwardly / recline" and poetry occupies a secretive, almost subversive role: "Poems stirred / into paper coffee-cups, eaten / with petals on rye in the / sun. . . . " The third section turns to the question of language: "Not 'common speech' / a dead level / but the uncommon speech of paradise," she argues, "a language / excelling itself to be itself." This book refines that language through the dictates of a more sophisticated and compelling sense of rhythm. "Six Variations" catalogs some of the rhythmic possibilities available to the organic poem with its unified field of imag-

278 / AMERICAN WRITERS ery. One kind of rhythm (in the third variation) is onomatopoeic in origin: Shulp, shulp, the dog as it laps up water makes intelligent music . . . Another section (fourth variation) in the manner of Alexander Pope manipulates vowels to slow the line in imitation of its subject: when your answers come slowly, dragging their feet But the title poem reminds us that poetry isn't entirely a matter of craft. 'The Jacob's Ladder" argues that the humility of the religious supplicant is also a necessary aspect of poetry (its visionary aspect) and argues that whatever the poem envisions it experiences as real: A stairway of sharp angles, solidly built one sees that the angels must spring down from one step to the next, giving a little lilt of the wings: and a man climbing must scrape his knees, and bring the grip of his hands into play. The cut stone consoles his groping feet. Wings brush past him. The poem ascends. This poem demonstrates how Levertov's neoRomantic tendencies have given way to a more vividly mystic aspiration, perhaps derived in part from the work of Robert Duncan and surely linked to the Hasidic tradition of her early years. The idiom of William Carlos Williams, though, helps ground this mysticism in a feeling for actuality. Rather than ecstatic revelation, these poems make ritual encounters with concrete particulars of na-

ture the basis of the relationship between the speaker and the subjects of the poems. Though vague spirit-figures prowl on the fringes, the source of mystery seems to lie in the human ability to bond through imagination the self and the exterior world. This sense of mystery as something rooted in us haunts Levertov's work to the present. The failure to realize or to respect this essential link with otherness disappoints or even enrages her. The difficulty in effectively directing her frustration with the narrow, unimaginative, inhumane vision of establishment politics is one of the causes of the aesthetic failures of some of her Vietnam War-era poems. She sometimes forgets her own injunction (in Poet in the World) that "Insofar as poetry has a social function it is to awaken sleepers by other means than shock." But even in those difficult times her poetry, as we will see, retains its organic ideals of form and rhythm, its faith in individual vision, and its trust in nature as the source of metaphorical and spiritual significance. The Jacob's Ladder and the two books that followed confirmed Levertov as a distinct, unique, and powerful voice in American poetry. In reviewing The Jacob's Ladder, James Wright called her "one of the best living poets in America," and other reviewers, if not always so effusive, accorded her the respect due an important writer. O Taste and See (1964) is a more sensuous book, with more imagery of the body, sex, childbirth, and marriage. But the domesticity of the subject matter does not exclude the mystic vision central to The Jacob's Ladder. "Eros at Temple Stream" typifies the language of bodily pleasure that permeates this book, and it also demonstrates how these poems work toward transcendence through, not despite, the body and the other material things of this world: The river in its abundance many-voiced

DEMISE LEVERTOV I 279 all about us as we stood on a warm rock to wash slowly smoothing in long sliding strokes our soapy hands along each other's slippery cool bodies The poem retains this sensuous materiality but introduces a visionary note as the hands become flames and the entire body becomes * 'sleek and / on fire." Linking flesh to fire is a way of asserting the immortality of the spirit as something derived from the vitality of the body itself. As nature inspirits language in Levertov's world, so the body now inspirits the soul and will continue doing so through her future work. In 1965, the year after the publication of O Taste and See, Levertov's important essay "Some Notes on Organic Form" appeared in Poetry magazine. This is her clearest and most prescriptive comment on her art and has been reprinted several times, most influentially in Stephen Berg and Robert Mezey's anthology Naked Poetry (1969). Her description of the poetic process is so concrete and so aptly applies to her own work that it is hard to remember that for other poets the writing experience may be quite different: "I think it's like this: First there must be an experience, a sequence or constellation of perceptions of sufficient interest, felt by the poet intensely enough to demand of him their equivalence in words: he is brought to speech." Like Wordsworth, she places the origin of poetry in individual experience and gives less importance to the larger, cultural experience that like language itself makes poetry possible. Arguing from the amalgamation (a "constellation") of perceptions, as Eliot does for the metaphysical poets, she makes the poem entirely a product of sense perception and emotion. Though not completely original, her assertion that organic poetry is self-formative, that instead

of refusing form it creates a fresh form with every effort, had great appeal and influenced many other poets, particularly those coming to maturity in the 1960's. By 1965 the Vietnam War was a dominant political and moral issue in American life. Levertov became one of the most outspoken opponents of the war, which contravened her belief in the central!ty of nature and the imagination. The war violated nature and betrayed the imagination, denied the spirit and degraded the body. One of her best books, The Sorrow Dance (1967), describes in eight carefully arranged sections her growing commitment to political action. The transition from celebration of the natural world of love to poems of social protest was triggered in part by the terrible spectacle of Vietnam (which in many of the poems of The Sorrow Dance is represented by the depiction of peace- and nature-loving Buddhists assuming activist roles) and partly by the death of her sister Olga, who had been more committed to political activism than Levertov herself was at this point. The elegiac sequence entitled "The Olga Poems" is one of Levertov's strongest poems. Levertov depicts her closeness to her sister in the language of nature, as if Olga in death had entered the very being of the world: Now as if smoke or sweetness were blown my way I inhale a sense of her livingness in that instant, feeling, dreaming, hoping, knowing boredom and zest like anyone else— a young girl in the garden, the same alchemical square I grew in. Yet perhaps because she was so attuned to nature, Olga was willing to oppose its inertia and stasis and consequently set herself to impossible tasks:

280 I AMERICAN WRITERS . . . To change, to change the course of the river! What rage for order disordered her pilgrimage—so that for years at a time she would hide among strangers, waiting to rearrange all mysteries in a new light. Levertov had begun to realize that praising nature is not enough to shape adequate human ideals. Because the natural order of things does not necessarily correspond to the most desirable human order, one must sometimes "change the course of the river" and place one's self in opposition to impossible forces. Olga would become her model for such opposition, but so would the Buddhists of Southeast Asia and the young people of America who in the late 1960's looked to nature, farming, communal living, and the utter rejection of war as they attempted to make new metaphors for the human community. By 1961 Buddhist protestors in Vietnam had demonstrated the necessity, the beauty, and the consequences of such opposition. In "The Altars in the Street" Levertov acknowledges their heroism in terms that pit nature against the city, the innocence of natural religion against the spiritual corruption of repressive violence. Children begin at green dawn nimbly to build topheavy altars, overweighted with prayers . . . by noon the whole city in all its corruption, all its shed blood the monsoon cannot wash away, has become a temple, fragile, insolent, absolute. The next to last section of The Sorrow Dance, which includes "The Altars in the Street," is called "Life At War" and contains a poem prophetically entitled "Didactic Poem." The title indicates the direction that much of Levertov's

work would take during the next few years. The poems Levertov wrote in the late 1960's reflected her own involvement in protest and the sacrifices she and her husband made on behalf of the peace movement. She traveled to Hanoi, participated in peace rallies as a featured speaker, and joined with Robert Bly, Galway Kinnell, and other poets in organizing readings against the war. Mitchell Goodman's involvement was even deeper, and eventually he was tried with Benjamin Spock on charges of conspiracy to incite resistance to the draft. The poems concurrent with these activities often are journalistic, fragmentary, apparently disordered. Most of the reviewers of Renaming the Alphabet (1970) and To Stay Alive (1971) objected to her rhetoric of protest, finding it an inflexible use of language that discouraged the play of imagery that informed her best work, though some of those reviewers were also sympathetic to the aesthetic as well as the moral necessity behind these poems. Marie Borroff, writing in the Yale Review, commented of Levertov that "the timehonored impulse to celebrate, to wonder, to sing is basic in her, and this impulse is, literally, disturbed by the knowledge that an unassimilable evil exists which must be hated and which must be fought on the level of action." Most reviewers seemed aware of and sympathetic to the pressure Levertov felt from what she took to be the forces of evil, the war and its supporters and profiteers. But the resultant poetry discouraged even many of Levertov's previous supporters. Maijorie Perloff s review of To Stay Alive typifies the negative reaction to both the strong rhetorical stance and the dubious formal characteristics of the poems of this period: "Her anti-Vietnam War poems, written in casual diary form, sound rather like a versified New York Review of Books—the same righteous indignation, the same uncompromising moral zeal and self-important tone. It is difficult to believe that the poet who, as one of the most promising heirs of William

DENISE LEVERTOV I 281 Carlos Williams, wrote 'The world is / not with us enough / O taste and see/ should now resort to the flat abstractions, the facile polemics, and the careless rhythms of To Stay Alive/' To Stay Alive opens by reprinting "The Olga Poems," and the high quality of those elegies contrasts starkly with the rambling, inefficient journal-poems gathered under the title "Staying Alive": Chuck Matthei travels the country a harbinger. (He's 20. His golden beard was pulled and clipped by a Wyoming sheriff, but no doubt has grown again though he can't grow knocked-out teeth. He wears sneakers even in winter, to avoid animal-hide; etc.) One might feel that the journal-world signified by "etc." could continue indefinitely. But worse than the rambling and seemingly disorganized, decidedly inorganic quality of the verse is the trite sentiment that crops up in place of the crisp epiphanies that empowered her earlier poems: But Chuck has found in it a message for all who resist war, disdain to kill, try to equate 'human' with 'humane.' In recent years, however, more scholarly approaches to these poems have partly rehabilitated them. Richard Jackson finds that their journal aesthetic constitutes an interesting problem in the way a text manipulates its subject matter and temporal framework. Nancy J. Sisko finds merit even in the disorderliness of many of the poems, arguing that "when Levertov accurately records her own struggle she in turn mirrors the struggle

of others like her during that era." And Bonnie Costello comments that "Relearning the Alphabet was Levertov's most successful effort of identification [empathy with victims], for it showed how history had turned the very tools of the poet—language and imagination—into cruel weapons of distortion." With distance these poems have acquired some of the charm history confers on the artifact, but also they seem more clearly now to reveal beneath the sometimes shrill rhetoric Levertov's respect for life as the subtext of her rage. Footprints, her 1972 volume, returned to her old concerns, but many of the poems seem exhausted and unraveled. Levertov's faith in organic form no longer engenders tightly knit poems like those in The Jacob's Ladder and O Taste and See. Instead, a looser kind of association and tone of elegiac uncertainty mark the poems of her next few books.' 'A Place to Live'' exemplifies both the style and the ethos of her changed voice: Honeydew seeds: on impulse strewn in a pot of earth. Now, (the green vines) wandering down over the pot's edges: certainly no room here to lay the egg of a big, pale, green-fleshed melon. Wondering where the hell to go. Where indeed? Levertov's antiwar poems opened up new possibilities, looser structures, more journalistic ideas of form, but she had not yet found a way to link her evolving formal ideas to her earlier concern with mythmaking and vision. In The Freeing of the Dust (1975) the thematic concern with Vietnam continues with poems about her visit to North Vietnam in 1972, about a trip to Moscow, and about lost, misdirected, or

282 I AMERICAN WRITERS failed personal relationships. In North Vietnam she visited the Bach Mai Hospital and was moved to write poems like "Weeping Woman" as well as the important essay "Glimpses of Vietnamese Life" in The Poet in the World (1973). Meanwhile, at home in America, her marriage was dissolving, and the book that resulted, by conflating essentially private grief with a public outrage over Vietnamese war casualties, seems unwittingly to equate these markedly distinct sources of pain. Though Levertov carefully divided The Freeing of the Dust into nine well-considered sections to give it a clearly autobiographical shape that would help justify the inclusion of such different kinds of poems, the impression remains of a poet still somewhat at odds with herself. More journal-like poems ("Conversation in Moscow," "Modes of Being") alternate with poignant though sometimes bathetic brief lyrics of suffering and loss. Strong antiwar poems such as "The Pilots," which attempts to deal with her complex feelings about the participants in the war (and is frank about her sense of moral and class superiority to these American prisoners of war), stand beside poems that lapse into the preachy abstractions of To Stay Alive. The best poems in this book, however, such as "Room," call for a renewal of the poetry and aesthetic of celebration. Harry Marten's comment that "the lyrics in The Freeing of the Dust . . . represent an expansion of Levertov's range of experience" is correct, but the match between her essentially mystical, visionary sensibility and public and political subject matter remains an uneasy one. Life in the Forest (1978) is a book of healthy metaphorical vision, of poems in which most personal emotions find objective correlatives, though its more historical or public poems still display a flaccid, sometimes sentimental rhetoric. In its best poems—and this is a book with many fine poems—the dominant sense is of private experience opening into metaphor, and

through that language process, of emotion finding correlation in the natural world. Instead of the abstraction into which the weaker poems in The Freeing of the Dust lapsed, here imagery shapes the argument of the poems. Partly this is the result of rejecting some aspects of the autobiographical voice as she had established it. In her introduction, Levertov says she wanted to "try to avoid overuse of the autobiographical, the dominant first-person singular of so much of the American poetry—good and bad—of recent years." Many of the poems are, in fact, written in the first person, and many use highly personal subject matter, but her statement may be an indirect way of acknowledging her desire to escape the tendency to moralize and draw abstract conclusions. As Bonnie Costello argues in a long review, "When Levertov makes myth serve humanity— that idol of prophets and politicians—it is sluggish in its duties. She is a dreamer at heart, and her best moments are stolen, solitary ones, glimpses of a landscape at one A.M. when 'humanity' has long since gone to bed." Her public myths tend toward the polemic, her private ones achieve the luminosity of real vision. For this reason, moralizing for Levertov may be the most anti-autobiographical of acts. If she came to recognize this it would explain why most of Life in the Forest breaks so cleanly with the weaker work of her recent past. Also in her introduction, Levertov points to her poems that imitate the manner of Italian poet Cesare Pavese. His poems are actually much like many of those in Levertov's early volumes, so it is not surprising that her discovery of his work prompted a renewal of her own strongest mode. Though Life in the Forest uses a variety of voices and strategies, and includes discursive long-lined poems, brief intense imagistic lyrics, and some looser journallike poems, she brings to all of this variety a greater sureness, a keener sense of language and the poetic line, and most important, a greater

DENISE LEVERTOV I 283 faith in imagery and metaphor than her poetry had displayed since The Sorrow Dance. Levertov has often worked with poets whose sensibilities are compatible with her own and whose work in some way points toward her current thematic or structural concerns. The strategy of drawing upon translations to complement and illuminate her own work began with her important, separately published translation of Eugene Guillevic's Selected Poems (1969). Guillevic's loosely strung, vaguely political sequence '"Interrogation" points toward the journal-poems Levertov would write in protest of the war, while Rilke's mystic vision became in a later work a model for her growing inwardness, her attempts to reconcile the visionary spirit with the limitations and pleasures of the flesh. "Variations on a Theme by Rilke," derived from a poem in his Book of the Hours, is one of a pair of translations that frame Breathing the Water (1987). Part two of this poem makes explicit Levertov's resignation to contextual human limitations:

mysterious otherness of the world. It is utterly frank in acknowledging her inability to link the known to the unknowable and her new inclination to refuse the didacticism and arrogant tone of the poetry of the war years:

There will never be that stillness. Within the pulse of flesh, in the dust of being, where we trudge, turning our hungry gaze this way and that, the wings of the morning brush through our blood as cloud-shadows brush the land. What we desire travels with us. We must breathe time as fishes breathe water. God's flight circles us.

This nature is similar to us in sensibility, so that our attempt to impose order through the word (an attempt she would soon repudiate) bears at least some analogy to the larger order of things:

But resignation to mortality is not the only mood in Levertov's recent work. A renewed sense of harmony between self and nature, language and feeling, pervades her four books of the 1980's. As her invocation of Rilke suggests, to a great extent this is due to a renewal of her religious and mystical sensibility. Her six-part sequence, "Mass for the Day of St. Thomas Didymus," from Candles in Babylon (1982), most fully represents this new awakening to the

This renewed sense of contact with visionary mystery, and further, an enlarged sense of privilege in sensing or touching such cosmic matters, informs the best poems of Candles in Babylon, Oblique Prayers (1984), Breathing the Water, and A Door in the Hive (1989). One of the dominant notes in these books is submission to natural order, which is not an entirely new idea but one that would be more insistently presented after her profession of Christianity in

We live in terror of what we do not know, in terror of not knowing, of the limitless, through which freefailing forever, our dread sinks and sinks, or of the violent closure of it all. But the poem takes its consolation where Levertov first found it, in a pantheistic but now increasingly Christian sense of the order of nature: The name of the spirit is written in woodgrain, windripple, crystal, in crystals of snow, in petal, leaf, moss and moon, fossil and feather . . .

blood, bone, song, silence, very word of very word. flesh and vision.

284 I AMERICAN WRITERS the early 1980's. This new submissiveness does not represent a repudiation of her rage at the perversion of natura1 and social order represented by war, but another, more oblique way of approaching the same problem. The rage remains, with its attendant problems of rhetoric and didacticism, as "El Salvador: Requiem and Invocation" in A Door in the Hive demonstrates. But the political note no longer dominates. Nor does the raised voice of the revolutionary calling for overt action. Instead the most compelling voice of her recent work argues that the important task is to submit to nature and learn from it, learn not to attempt to force or reshape it to our will (to "interpret" it). This is illustrated by "The Absentee" (from Breathing the Water): Uninterpreted, the days are falling. The spring wind is shaking and shaking the trees. A nest of eggs, a nest of deaths. Falling abandoned. The palms rattle, the eucalypts shed bark and blossom. Uninterpreted. If we heed this call for the acceptance of death and a meditative refusal of the intellect's urge to imposed order, what will we gain? The answer, unsurprisingly, is faith. Levertov in "A Poet's View" (1984) describes her own coming to faith as "not inevitable" but nearly so, a function of her very existence as a poet, a person dependent on the imagination. It must therefore be by the exercise of that faculty [the imagination] that one moves toward faith, and possibly by its failure that one rejects it as delusion. Poems present their testimony as

circumstantial evidences, not as closing arguments. Where Wallace Stevens says, "God and the imagination are one," I would say that the imagination, which synergizes intellect, emotion and instinct, is the perceptive organ through which it is possible, though not inevitable, to experience God. Through the imagination one may experience God and so come to faith. But that faith, though hard earned, is difficult to maintain against the human will to entropy and the relentless numbing routine of the ordinary. And as "The Love of Morning," in Levertov's A Door in the Hive, warns us, it is easy to accept God's love on mornings of birdsong when "sunlight's gossamer lifts in its net / the weight of all that is solid," but harder to realize "on gray mornings" when "all incident... is hard to love again" and "we resent a summons / that disregards our sloth, and this / calls us, calls us." This is the test. But Christianity may be a resting place for the imagination, not a stimulus. That God should call us to the love of things when in exhaustion and depression we find little love in ourselves is neither a fresh nor unnoticed problem, and some of these late poems, instead of reaching for the sudden epiphany of a well-turned image, settle for rehashing familiar Christian themes. In such poems the imagery, like "sunlight's gossamer," lacks the vitality of the unexpected yet telling phrase. On the other hand, poems like "Flying High," "Ikon: The Harrowing of Hell," "Midnight Gladness," and "Praise of a Palmtree," all from A Door in the Hive, demonstrate that Levertov remains capable of writing in language of rich ambiguity and producing poems in which rhythmic harmony and sensuous imagery generate convincing visions of the spiritual endowment of the world of things. "Midnight Gladness" exemplifies this unity of vision and imagery with its quiet but dramatic enactment of the act of perception:

DENISE LEVERTOV I 285 The pleated lampshade, slightly askew, dust a silverish muting of the lamp's fake brass. My sock-monkey on the pillow, tail and limbs asprawl, weary after a day of watching sunlight prowl the house like a wolf. Gleams of water in my bedside glass. Miraculous water, so peacefully waiting to be consumed. Though in the sixth decade of her career she has become a professed Christian, Levertov in her most alert poetic mode fixes her gaze not on the abstract ideal of paradise but on the things of this world and the embodied spirit that moves them—a spirit that like the transcendentalist world-soul is analogous to our own. Her mythmaking now assumes distinctly biblical overtones, but the organic sense of the oneness of language and perception still endows her work with a feeling of wholeness and completion. Public and academic regard for her poetry remains high. A steady flow of scholarly articles testifies to a continuing interest in and respect for her work, and through her readings and teaching she still exerts considerable influence on younger poets. In her most recent books her poems remain clear and satisfying, their aesthetic and rhythmic integrity perfectly in tune with her evolving spiritual vision and admirably principled life.

Selected Bibliography WORKS OF DENISE LEVERTOV POETRY

The Double Image. London: Cresset, 1946. Here and Now. San Francisco: City Lights, 1957. Overland to the Islands. Highlands, North Carolina: Jargon, 1958.

With Eyes at the Back of Our Heads. New York: New Directions, 1960. The Jacob's Ladder. New York: New Directions, 1961. O Taste and See. New York: New Directions, 1964. The Sorrow Dance. New York: New Directions, 1967. Relearning the Alphabet. New York: New Directions, 1970. To Stay Alive. New York: New Directions, 1971. Footprints. New York: New Directions, 1972. The Freeing of the Dust. New York: New Directions, 1975. Life in the Forest. New York: New Directions, 1978. Collected Earlier Poems 1940-1960. New York: New Directions, 1979. Candles in Babylon. New York: New Directions, 1982. Poems 1960-1967. New York: New Directions, 1983. Oblique Prayers. New York: New Directions, 1984. Poems 1968-1972. New York: New Directions, 1987. Breathing the Water. New York: New Directions, 1987. A Door in the Hive. New York: New Directions, 1989. PROSE The Poet in the World. New York: New Directions, 1973. Includes her 1965 essay, "Some Notes on Organic Form." Light Up the Cave. New York: New Directions, 1981. TRANSLATIONS

In Praise of Krishna: Songs from the Bengali. Translated by Edward C. Dimock, Jr., and Denise Levertov. Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1967. Selected Poems, by Eugene Guillevic. With an introduction by Denise Levertov. New York: New Directions, 1969. Black Iris, by Jean Joubert. Port Townshend, Wa.: Copper Canyon Press, 1988. UNCOLLECTED PROSE

Untitled statement. In The New American Poetry, edited by Donald M. Allen. New York: Grove Press, 1960. Pp. 411-412. 4 'Foreword." In Where Silence Reigns: Selected Prose by Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by G. Craig Houston. New York: New Directions, 1978. Pp. iv-vi.

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"The Ideas in the Things." In Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams: The University of Pennsylvania Conference Papers, edited by Daniel Hoffman. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983. Pp. 313-342. "Remembering Kenneth Rexroth." American Poetry Review, 12, no. 1:18-19 (January-February 1983). "A Poet's View." Religion and Intellectual Life, 1:46-53 (Summer 1984). "On Williams' Triadic Line: or How to Dance on Variable Feet." Ironwood, 12:95-102 (Fall 1984). "Horses with Wings." In What Is a Poet?, edited by Hank Lazer. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1987. Pp. 124-134.

INTERVIEWS Atchity, Kenneth John. "An Interview with Denise Levertov.'' San Francisco Review of Books, March 1979, pp. 5-8. Estes, Sybill. Interview with Denise Levertov. In American Poetry Observed: Poets on Their Work, edited by Joel Bellamy. Urbana: University of Illinois, 1984. Pp. 255-267. Hallisey, Joan. " 'Invocations of Humanity/ Denise Levertov's Poetry of Emotion and Belief." Sojourners, February 1986, pp. 32-36. Ossman, David, ed. "Denise Levertov." In The Sullen Art. New York: Corinth, 1963. Pp. 73-76. Packard, Vance. "Craft Interview with Denise Levertov/' In his The Craft of Poetry. New York: Doubleday, 1974. Pp. 79-100. Reid, Ian. " * Every man's Land': Ian Reid Interviews Denise Levertov." Southern Review (Australia), 5:231-236(1972). Smith, Lome. "An Interview with Denise Levertov." Michigan Quarterly Review, 24, no. 4:596-604(1985). Sutton, Walter. "A Conversation with Denise Levertov." Minnesota Review, 5:322-338 (December 1965). ARCHIVES AND BIBLIOGRAPHIES

Lockwood Memorial Library Poetry Collection, State University of New York at Buffalo, Buffalo, N. Y. Microfilms of Levertov's worksheets.

Sakelliou-Schultz, Liana. Denise Levertov: An Annotated Primary and Secondary Bibliography. New York: Garland, 1988. Wilson, Robert A. A Bibliography of Denise Levertov. New York: Phoenix Book Shop, 1972. Yale University Library, American Literature Collection, New Haven, Conn. Letters from Levertov to William Carlos Williams. BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL STUDIES

Altieri, Charles. "Denise Levertov and the Limits of the Aesthetics of Praise." Enlarging the Temple: New Directions in American Poetry During the 1960s. Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 1979. Pp. 225-244. Borroff, Marie. "New Books in Review." Yale Review, 62, no. 1:81-83 (Autumn 1972). Bresiin, James E. B. From Modern to Contemporary: American Poetry, 1945-1965. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984. Carruth, Hayden. "What 'Organic' Means?" Sagetrieb, 4, no. 1:145-146 (Spring 1985). Costello, Bonnie. " 'Flooded with Otherness.' " Parnassus, 8, no. 1:198-212 (Fall/Winter 1979). Dargan, Joan. "Poetic and Political Consciousness in Denise Levertov and Carolyn Forche." CEA Critic, 48, no. 3:58-67(1986). Earnshaw, Doris. Review of Levertov's Collected Earlier Poems 1940-1960. World Literature Today, 55, no. 1:109-110 (Winter 1981). Elder, John. Imagining the Earth: Poetry and the Vision of Nature. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985. Felstiner, John. "Poetry and Political Experience: Denise Levertov." In Coming to Light: American Women Poets in the Twentieth Century, edited by Diane Wood Middlebrook and Marilyn Yalom. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1985. Pp. 138-144. Gilbert, Sandra M. "Revolutionary Love: Denise Levertov and the Poetics of Politics." Parnassus, 1213, nos. 2-1:335-351 (Spring-Winter 1985). Glitzen, Julian. "From Reverence to Attention: The Poetry of Denise Levertov." Midwest Quarterly, 16:325-341 (1975). Hallisey, Jane. "Denise Levertov's 'Illustrious Ancestors': The Hassidic Influence." Melus, 9, no. 4:5-11 (Winter II 1982).

DENISE LEVERTOV I 287 . "Denise Levertov '. . . Forever a Stranger and a Pilgrim.' " Centennial Review, 30, no. 2:281-291 (Spring 1986). Harris, Victoria. "The Incorporative Consciousness: Levertov's Journey from Discretion to Unity." Exploration, 4, no. 1:33-48 (December 1976). Jackson, Richard. "A Common Time: The Poetry of Denise Levertov." Sagetrieb, 5, no. 2:5-46 (Fall 1986). Juhasz, Suzanne. Naked and Fiery Forms: Modern American Poetry by Women: A New Tradition. New York: Haiper's, 1976. Lacey, Paul A. "The Poetry of Political Anguish." Sagetrieb, 4, no. 1:61-71 (Spring 1985). Marten, Harry. "Exploring the Human Community: The Poetry of Denise Levertov and Muriel Rukeyser." Sagetrieb, 3, no. 3:51-61 (Winter 1984). . Understanding Denise Levertov. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1988. Mersmann, James F. "Denise Levertov: Piercing In." Out of the Vietnam Vortex: A Study of Poets and Poetry Against the War. Lawrence, Kans.: University Press of Kansas, 1974. Pp. 77-112. Middleton, Peter. Revelation and Revolution in the Poetry of Denise Levertov. London: Binnacle, 1981. Mills, Ralph J., Jr. Contemporary American Poetry. New York: Random House, 1965. Pp. 176-196. . Cry of the Human: Essays on Contemporary American Poetry. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1975. Ostriker, Alicia Suskin. Stealing the Language: The Emergence of Women's Poetry in America. Boston: Beacon Press, 1986. Perloff, Marjorie. "Poetry Chronicle: 1970-71."

Contemporary Literature, 14, no. 1:97-131 (Winter 1973). Pope, Deborah. "Homespun and Crazy Feathers: The Split-Self in the Poems of Denise Levertov." In A Separate Vision: Isolation in Contemporary Women's Poetry. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1984. Pp. 84-115. Rexroth, Kenneth. "Denise Levertov." In Assays. New York: New Directions, 1961. Pp. 231-235. . "Poetry in the Sixties." In With Eye and Ear. New York: Herder & Herder, 1970. Pp. 69-77. Sisko, Nancy. "To Stay Alive: Levertov's Search for a Revolutionary Poetry." Sagetrieb, 5, no. 2:4760 (Fall 1986). Smith, Lome. "Songs of Experience: Denise Levertov's Political Poetry." Contemporary Literature, 27, no. 2:213-232 (Summer 1986). Surman, Diana. "Inside and Outside in the Poetry of Denise Levertov." Critical Quarterly, 22, no. 1:57-70 (Spring 1980). Wagner, Linda Welshimer. Denise Levertov. New York: Twayne, 1967. . "Levertov and Rich: The Later Poems." South Carolina Review, 11, no. 2:18-27 (Spring 1979). , ed. Denise Levertov: In Her Own Province. With an introduction by Wagner. New York: New Directions, 1979. Wright, James. "Gravity and Incantation." The Minnesota Review, 2:424-427 (Spring 1962). Younkins, Ronald. "Denise Levertov and the Hasidic Tradition." Descant, 19, no. 1:40-48 (Fall 1974). —WILLIAM DORESKI

John McPhee 1931-

TJL HE

rocks and descriptions but short on characters. His triumph has been in making all those effects interesting and artistic. Benjamin DeMott commented after McPhee's thirteenth book, "There is not a bad book among them, seldom indeed a laxly composed page. In short, John McPhee . . . has become the name of a standard by which ambitious magazine journalism is now judged." The same could be said after twenty-one books. McPhee has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1965. Almost every word in his books was originally published in that magazine. Remarkably, all his books remain in print. Tight narrative control has shaped McPhee's prose. He uses an elaborate method of organizing his material and structuring his narratives before he starts writing. This method permits him to range over an unprecedented variety of subjects: basketball and tennis, art and airplanes, the New Jersey Pine Barrens and the wilderness of Alaska, atomic energy and birchbark canoes, oranges and farmers, the Swiss Army and the United States Merchant Marine, the control of nature and the scientific revolution in plate tectonics that created modern geology. "If you make a list of all the work I've ever done," McPhee said during an interview, "and put a little mark beside things that relate to activities and interests I had before I was twenty, you'd have a little mark beside well over 90 per-

HE WORLD WE experience through John McPhee's books can seem odd. In a Georgia wilderness we encounter a dragline operator using an enormous piece of equipment with unexpected delicacy while "reaming a river" and killing snakes. We watch as the Alaskan wilderness meets the largest bulldozer made by Caterpillar, operated by two bush pilots who rearrange another stream to benefit their placer mining operation. McPhee maintains an extraordinary control over his narratives, yet he refuses to tell the reader how to think about the people who work on these huge yellow machines. "A well-written editorial is a good thing—but it's not what I'm out to do," McPhee remarked in an interview for Sierra magazine. "I don't want to look at a topic from just one perspective." John McPhee's career demands a statement that could somehow incorporate the subjects of twenty-one books, a distinctive perspective on reporting and literature, and his connections to his subjects. McPhee would want to start with one simple fact: he writes nonfiction about real people in real places. His books reach beyond the traditional boundaries of informational nonfiction. McPhee is counted among the modern masters of literary journalism. McPhee loves narrative and characterization. Yet his longest work takes on the world's slowest narrative subject, geology, which is full of

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290 / AMERICAN WRITERS cent of the pieces of writing." Before the age of twenty, McPhee actively participated in sports, developed a desire to write, went to canoe camp in Vermont, and attended Princeton University. The relationship with Princeton has continued. He teaches there, prefers to write in his office at the university, and sometimes allows the work of other professors to spark a story idea. John McPhee's father, Harry, a doctor with a specialty in sports medicine, was bom in 1895. For twenty years, he served as the United States physician at the Pan-American Games and the winter and summer Olympics. After a stay at Iowa State University, during which McPhee's brother, Roemer, and his sister, Laura Anne, were born, the family moved to Princeton. His father was the physician for the university athletic teams and a member of the faculty. He died in 1984. McPhee's mother, Mary Ziegler, born in 1897, had been a French teacher in Cleveland before the marriage. "When I was a child," McPhee said, "I was forever mouthing words, saying them just because they sounded good. Even the name of a commercial product, a proper name, if it had some flavor that appealed to me, I'd repeat over and over again, sometimes out loud. My brother and sister would make fun of me for that." This verbal strain might be attributed to his mother's side of the family—her father had been the editor of a book-publishing firm in Philadelphia—but McPhee thinks it derived from his father's Scottish heritage. He remembers his father driving every summer to the Keewaydin canoe camp in Vermont and mumbling words just because he liked the sound of them. McPhee's paternal great-grandparents had married in Scotland in 1858 shortly before they immigrated to the coal mining country of Ohio, and although they had signed the marriage registry with an X, McPhee said, "they could certainly talk." He believes the family's Celtic verbality came with them

from Scotland. "There's not so much difference between the Scots and the Irish," McPhee said, "except that the Scots are responsible." John Angus McPhee was born on March 8, 1931, in Princeton, New Jersey, then a small town of about seven thousand. His parents' house sat on the edge of town with fields and woods beyond it. Today the site is close to the middle of Princeton, grown to thirty thousand with suburbia filling in the open spaces. McPhee spent his childhood biking around campus and attending football and basketball practices with his father. When he was eight and nine years old, he wore a Princeton football shirt and ran around at the games retrieving the ball after extra points and serving as the team mascot. When older, he practiced with the Princeton basketball team. "I grew up among the various sports," McPhee said. "That's all I cared about until I finished high school." His longtime jogging partner William Howarth, a professor of English at Princeton, says that McPhee's relationship to the community and the university is deeply rooted. "In the fall his whole family would be at the football games. The president of the university probably knew Johnny McPhee by name. It's remarkable to jog along through town and listen to McPhee. Almost every foot awakens a new story about the town." The elementary school at 185 Nassau Street, for instance, which he attended through eighth grade, was later purchased by the university and now houses the creative writing program in which McPhee teaches. World War II arrived when he was ten. There were blackouts, recycling drives, and ration stamps, but McPhee's contribution was as an air spotter. He took his training at the university; the silhouettes of airplanes were flashed on a screen for one second after which he had to write down the name of the plane. He watched the skies from a little hut on high ground and phoned in the sightings to New

JOHN MCPHEE I 291 York: "I knew every airplane that flew in anybody's sky in the world. It wasn't difficult to know that then. I knew them all. It was like some kids with cars, only with me it was airplanes .'' McPhee remains characteristically modest. He typically says he flunked kindergarten, where he stayed for two years, rather than mentioning that he skipped a grade in elementary school and graduated from Princeton High School when he was barely seventeen. His mother complained that McPhee did not work hard enough in high school, and he agrees. Rather than doing homework after dinner, he shot baskets in the backyard "out of the sheer love of it." The homework got done in school, which must have required real speed because his English teacher for three years, Olive McKee, assigned three pieces of writing a week. "I feel a large and considerable debt to her," he said. "Every piece of writing you turned in had to have a piece of paper on top of it showing the structure. In her case it was roman numerals and that kind of thing.'' As Ferris Professor at Princeton, teaching one writing course a year, he has adopted her techniques. "When I assign structural outlines with my students, it can be a drawing, but they have to show that they have an idea of the internal structure of the piece." Olive McKee frequently had her students read aloud to the class. Today, before McPhee publishes any piece of writing in The New Yorker, he reads it aloud to his wife, Yolanda. In an interview with the author, he said: In hearing that come across my tongue, I not only pick up her reaction but I pick up my own reaction. You start listening more. It certainly was true in Olive McKee's class. Some of the things were entertaining, maybe, and you wanted to get up and hear the other kids laugh or jeer or whatever. It was fun. Of all the possibilities in nonfiction writing— the different subjects, the characters, the artistic

opportunities—McPhee has been most drawn to the complexities in a planned structure. He calls it "the single most important thing for me, other than the final writing itself." Each of McPhee's books is held together by an architectonic plan; internally each book has a design that would impress Olive McKee. McPhee has an athletic build on a five-footseven frame. He has silky brown hair, thinning in back, and wears a grizzled, salt-and-pepper beard. Weathered crow's-feet crinkle behind brown-rimmed glasses. Encounters with McPhee tend to be casual, relaxed, friendly, even when he stares through his glasses directly into your eyes. He answers questions in grammatically correct, carefully worded sentences that can intimidate those who are less articulate. He dislikes interviews because his wording cannot be revised and rewritten. Even so, he allowed me two interviews that are the source of most of his comments quoted in this essay. Sitting one day in his office in the East Pyne Building at Princeton, McPhee explained the progression of his profiles during the early years at The New Yorker. The first was "A Sense of Where You Are" (1965), about the Princeton All-American basketball player Bill Bradley, who would later play for the NBA champion New York Knicks and become a United States senator from New Jersey. Then came "The Headmaster" (1966), a profile of Frank L. Boyden, headmaster of Deerfield Academy, followed by " A Roomful of Hovings" (1967), focused on Thomas Hoving, director-elect of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Along the way, McPhee wrote about other individuals, including Euell Gibbons, an expert on edible wild foods and the author of Stalking the Wild Asparagus, and Robert Twynam, who grew the grass on tennis courts at Wimbledon. These profiles had complex inner structures, but they were focused on a single person. The characters took shape on the page from material surrounding them—the overlapping an-

292 / AMERICAN WRITERS ecdotes told by old schoolteachers, coaches, parents, and archenemies. 44 What developed in my mind for a long while was, 'What if you did the same thing with two people?' If you found two people and did all that for each of them, then things would start going back and forth in there." McPhee drew on a blank piece of paper the structural pattern he was thinking about. There were the two individuals, each surrounded by dots representing the satellite figures in their lives. He drew lines rebounding back and forth among the dots, and said: One plus one just might add up to more than two. I had this in my mind and I wondered just who these people might be. An architect and his client? An actor and a director? A pitcher and a manager? One day I was watching television, and there were Arthur Ashe and Clark Graebner in the semifinals of the first United States Open Tennis Championship at Forest Hills. Each twenty-five years old. Each an American. So they'd have to know each other very well because you could put all the good tennis players in the country in this room. McPhee sat down with Ashe and Graebner and watched a film of the match over and over as each of them described his thoughts and feelings. The result was Levels of the Game (1969), a profile of two men, filled with portraits of their parents and coaches, and multiple viewpoints on their development as players. 44 When Levels of the Game worked out," McPhee said, 44 I got ambitious and thought, 'Well, if it works for two, how about more?' " He put a diagram on his wall that looked like this:

ABC D The plan was to let one person, D, relate to the other three. "This is not a promising way to develop a piece of writing," McPhee said:

You don't do it backwards. This is an exception. I had no idea what the basic subject would be here, when this was already up on my bulletin board. But I'm interested in outdoor things and the conservation movement was starting up— this was in 1968. I went to Washington for two weeks, and went around talking to people in conservation organizations and to their 4 t natural enemies," as I put it eventually. That's how Encounters with the Archdruid [1971] started out. The central figure in McPhee's structural plan became David Brower, head of a conservation group called Friends of the Earth and former executive director of the Sierra Club. Brower's natural enemies were Charles Park, a geologist and mineral engineer who wanted to open a copper mine in the Glacier Peak Wilderness; Charles Fraser, a land developer with plans for a resort on Cumberland Island, Georgia; and Floyd Dominy, Commissioner of Reclamation, who wanted dams built in the Grand Canyon. McPhee wrote in Encounters with the Archdruid: In the view of conservationists, there is something special about dams, something—as conservation problems go—that is disproportionately and metaphysically sinister. The outermost circle of the Devil's world seems to be a moat filled mainly with DDT. Next to it is a moat of burning gasoline. Within that is a ring of pinheads each covered with a million people—and so on past phalanxed bulldozers and bicuspid chain saws into the absolute epicenter of Hell on earth, where stands a dam. The tensions between these men were balanced by McPhee's even-tempered, objective portrayal of their opinions. Brower goes hiking with Park. He stays on Eraser's yacht off Cumberland Island and helps him review environmentally sensitive development plans. He rides a raft down the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon with Dominy.

JOHNMCPHEE

McPhee launched the participants on those encounters so he would have a narrative and something to describe. "Participation is a way of finding a narrative," he said, "a way to find something more interesting to report than a Playboy interview/9 In his narrow office filled with momentos from recent writing projects, McPhee took out another piece of paper with a complex structure that had once been pinned to the cork above his desk. On it was drawn a swirling line, something like a lowercase e. This was the internal structure of "Travels in Georgia" (collected in Pieces of the Frame [1975]). McPhee traveled eleven hundred miles in the company of Carol Ruckdeschel, a field zoologist who worked for the Georgia Natural Areas Council taking inventory of wild places worth preserving in the state. She also collected the pelts of animals for the state university: weasels, rattlesnakes, mountain lions, snapping turtles, whatever she found dead on the road during her travels. Rather than waste the meat, she ate it. This practice demanded a structural innovation. As with all of McPhee's structural plans, it arose from the material itself. In our first interview he explained: There's an immediate problem when you begin to consider such material. The editor of The New Yorker [then William Shawn] is practically a vegetarian. That served a purpose, pondering what a general reader's reaction would be. When people think of animals killed on the road, there's an immediate putrid whiff that goes by them. The image is pretty automatic—smelly and repulsive. These things we were picking up off the road were not repulsive. They had not been mangled up. They were not bloody. They'd been freshly killed. So I had to get this story off the ground without offending the sensibilities of the reader and the editor. One of the creatures that was found actually

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dying on the road was a snapping turtle. We ate the snapping turtle later on. The Campbell Soup Company cans snapping turtles. They make soup out of them. The snapping turtle was a whole lot more acceptable than the weasel, the muskrat, the rattlesnake. Also, it was an amusing and interesting scene: the snapping turtle where she was about to lay her eggs, and a cop whipping out his pistol and trying to shoot the thing at point-blank range, and missing. McPhee began in medias res at that point. Next they went to a stream channelization project, where Chap Causey was sitting on his dragline, a natural riverbed stretching out in front of him and a stripped, barren channel behind. Chap liked to kill water moccasins and leave the snakes on the dragline as a warning. He quietly showed off for Carol, who wasn't afraid of snakes at all. McPhee then digresses from that scene. He spins a marvelously long, rambling background sketch about Carol, and eventually ends up back at the riverbank. McPhee said: One naturally wonders who this person is who's cleaning up this snapping turtle and taking its eggs and talking this way and dealing with the stream channelization man, so it's a time to cut back to Atlanta, where her home is, and tell about what she does, how she got there, what she studied and what her place looks like with all those wounded and battered animals that she's fixing up. After going through all that we still haven't had a weasel. Now, we're two-fifths of the way through the piece. If you've read this far, now we can risk some of these animals. After all, this has either proved itself or not by now as a piece of writing. We then go back to the beginning of the journey—the journey that on page one we were in the middle of—and there's a fresh-killed weasel lying in the middle of the road. And the muskrat follows. When we come to the snapping turtle and the stream channelization project, we just jump over them and keep right on going in

294 I AMERICAN WRITERS the form the journey had. The journey itself became the structure, broken up chronologically in this manner. Structure has been a creative tool in McPhee's hands. While he stops short of the kind of invention that only fiction can support, he believes that narrative, dialogue, character sketching, and metaphor are "absolutely legitimate" tools in nonfiction. His internal structures—the lowercase e in "Travels in Georgia," the articulated Y of "A Roomful of Hovings," and the other drawings that have been pinned to his bulletin board during composition—permit creative solutions to the erratic twists that any nonfictionwriting project can take. In Levels of the Game and Encounters with the Archdruid he created the external structures before he reported the real events. He visualized the work, then went out and found Graebner and Ashe, and Brower and his ''natural enemies." In the same way a fiction writer can select any setting for a novel, McPhee has freedom of choice. He is writing about real people in real places and is limited by the demands of nonfiction form, but he selects the events and sometimes, as in sending David Brower down the Colorado River with Floyd Dominy, he creates the events as well. The real people are out there, but McPhee must turn nature to literature before we can read about them. McPhee was accepted by Princeton University—the only place he applied—after high school. Because he was so young and had grown up in the same town, his parents sent him to Deerfield Academy for an additional year of study before he entered college. He met excellent teachers there: Mrs. Helen Boyden in chemistry, Frank Conklin in geology, and Robert McGlynn in English ("He got me excited about reading in a way I'd never been before"). He also discovered Frank Boyden, who would become the subject of The Headmaster. The book

had a sentimental tone, appropriate for a former Deerfield boy writing about the headmaster at age eighty-six. It was polished but not critical, in part because it lacked a character who would voice any criticisms. In Boyden, McPhee found a person similar to Bill Bradley. Boyden was a strong personality who had a firm, "straight arrow" moral code, was perhaps the best in the country at what he did, and was a local hero who operated on a national level. Boyden left his mark on the boys in the form of ethical standards, not academics. "His first-hand relationship with his boys has always been extraordinary," McPhee wrote, "and Deerfield students for sixty years have been characterized by the high degree of ethical sensitivity that he has been able to awaken in them." Boyden's ethics seem to have stuck to McPhee. He loved his year at Deerfield, played on the basketball, lightweight football, and lacrosse teams, and completed all the academic assignments. Boyden "believed in wearing the boys out," McPhee wrote, which created an invigorating atmosphere for his year there, but McPhee is not sure he could have stood it any longer. For one thing, attendance was checked seventeen times a day. At Princeton with the class of 1953, McPhee entered the creative writing program headed by Richard Blackmur, a maverick who had dropped out of high school in Boston and attended so many classes at Harvard, without ever enrolling or even applying, that he could have earned several degrees. McPhee spent his sophomore and junior years in the program, studying with Blackmur, Randall Jarrell, and Tom Riggs. He proposed to write a novel for his senior thesis. "I was an English major and they wouldn't hear of it. I argued all over the place and they finally let me do it." Having decided at an early age to be a writer, and wanting from the age of eighteen to write for The New Yorker, McPhee was not completely satisfied with the fiction program. He recalled:

JOHN MCPHEE I 295 If you go back into the years when I was writing a novel for a senior thesis, I was also writing factual articles every week. Princeton had a feast of undergraduate publications, and any young writer ought to know that when you're in college you have an unparalleled opportunity to publish things, see yourself in print, see what it's like, grow in it. That's going to stop dead as a doornail the day you graduate. McPhee worked for the Nassau Sovereign, the Daily Princetonian, the Princeton Tiger, and the Nassau Literary Magazine. In his senior year he wrote a one-page essay every week for the Princeton Alumni Weekly and was paid for it. He remembers it as "the single best piece of training I had as an undergraduate." The Princeton Tiger was a humor magazine that had previously been edited by Booth Tarkington and F. Scott Fitzgerald. When McPhee became editor, he transformed it into an imitation of The New Yorker, complete with a front section called "Spires and Gargoyles" that looked like "Talk of the Town." This change caught the eye of a New York Times Magazine editor, who asked McPhee for an article about college humor publications. Thus his first professional piece of writing, full of adolescent barbs at the other humor magazines, ran in The New York Times Magazine in 1952 alongside a response by the Yale humor editor. After graduation, McPhee began a long experimentation with several forms of writing. "Being out of school at last and knowing you never wanted to do anything but be a writer is a perplexing and bewildering time in life," McPhee recalled. "Saying you want to be a writer isn't the same as being in a training program as an investment broker or something tangible. How the hell do you become a writer? What do you do?" First, he went to Cambridge University for a year of postgraduate study in English, and while

there he played basketball and worked as a stringer for Time magazine. Returning to New York, he tried free-lancing and wrote short stories. One day he had an opportunity to watch rehearsals for a live television show in a warehouse on the Upper West Side. Without pay, McPhee watched weeks of rehearsals for "Robert Montgomery Presents," read old scripts, and began writing his own one-hour television plays. "Things went pretty well," he said. "I wrote five plays in one year, of which three were bought and two were produced." But he was frustrated watching his compositions evolve away from him as the plays were produced. He wanted to be more in control. For a while he wrote speeches for W. R. Grace & Company, a Wall Street firm, and did articles for the company magazine. Still dedicated to his dream of becoming a New Yorker writer, McPhee steadily submitted articles. All were rejected. He interviewed for a position as a "Talk of the Town" reporter, one of the few salaried jobs for a writer at the magazine. "It was a way to get young writers started," McPhee said. "Not very many. They hired a couple every ten years. They had me write six trial Talk' pieces, not for publication. I gave them to them and heard nothing for six months. Nothing at all." In the meantime, he took a job at Time-Life, writing for a mimeographed house organ called FYI. This was a trial—get a job at a company magazine within a year or you were gone. He got a four-week trial at Time, writing in the "Hemisphere" section about Canada, and was hired at the end of the period. From 1957 through 1964 McPhee wrote "back of the book" articles for Time—articles about people, art, show business, religion, education, books. He wrote nine cover stories, including profiles of Joan Baez, Richard Burton, Jackie Gleason, Jean Kerr, Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe, Sophia Loren, Mort Sahl, and Barbra Streisand, as well as the cover story on the

296 / AMERICAN WRITERS 1964 New York World's Fair. The "front of the book" was the political and foreign news. "I did not want to work in the front/' McPhee said, 4 'and turned down an opportunity when it came to me. I was invited to go into 'National Affairs.' I said I didn't want to do it, which in effect said, 'I don't want to work here indefinitely, or don't want to be an editor here.' Which I didn't." He wrote short stories that were published in Playboy, Reporter magazine, and the Transatlantic Review. He wrote articles, poetry, and short stories in his free time. One day he had a cup of hot chocolate with Harold Hayes, editor of Esquire. They agreed McPhee would write an article about playing basketball in England during his postgraduate year at Cambridge. "I wrote the piece and sent it to him. He said he didn't want it. He was sorry but it disappointed him. I thought, 4Hoooo!' " McPhee said, waving his arm in the air as if to banish the memory. "I was so depressed. Then . . . The New Yorker bought it"—his first piece in that magazine. "Basketball and Beefeaters" appeared in 1963. "It didn't make any difference," McPhee said. "I went on working at Time. It was the Bradley piece that changed my life." The book on Bill Bradley started one winter day in 1962 when McPhee's father called him in New York. "There's a freshman basketball player down here who is the best basketball player who has ever been near here and may be one of the best ever," Dr. McPhee said. "You ought to come down and see him.'' This was rare praise from the Princeton team physician. When John McPhee showed up for the freshman game against Pennsylvania the next night, the stands were filled and his father was holding a seat for him. Three years later, "A Sense of Where You Are" appeared in The New Yorker. By the end of 1965, Bradley, a six-foot-five player from Crystal City, Missouri, had been named an AllAmerican, had led his Ivy League team into the Final Four of the NCAA (National Collegiate

Athletic Association) tournament, had been named most valuable player in the tournament, and had been the number one draft choice of the Knicks, turning down their lucrative offer in favor of a Rhodes Scholarship. He had also, apparently, restored a writer's faith in the game. In the article on Bradley, McPhee wrote: My own feeling for basketball had faded almost to nothing over the years because the game seemed to me to have lost its balance, as players became taller and more powerful, and scores increased until it was rare when a professional team hit less than a hundred points, win or lose; it impressed me as a glut of scoring, with few patterns of attack and almost no defense any more. His devotion to the game, nurtured in high school and Deerfield, by a freshman season at Princeton and another at Cambridge, was rekindled while watching Bradley work out the fundamental possibilities of play. In his profile, McPhee built the image of a superior basketball player through a series of incidents that demonstrated Bradley's natural abilities, his effort, and the reactions seen in players and fans. Bradley showed McPhee that the seemingly impossible—shooting without looking at the basket—was only a matter of practice, something Bradley had seen Oscar Robertson and Jerry West do many times. Bradley tossed the ball into the basket while looking McPhee in the eye, and then did it again. "The shot has the essential characteristics of a wild accident," McPhee wrote, "which is what many people stubbornly think they have witnessed until they see him do it for the third time in a row." After you've played the game a while, Bradley explained, "You develop a sense of where you are." McPhee said Bradley's passing ability, not to mention his knack for making baskets while looking away from the hoop, had given him a

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reputation for seeing out of the back of his head. McPhee asked a Princeton ophthalmologist to measure Bradley's total field of vision. As a boy in Crystal City, Bradley had tried to expand his view, by window-shopping while looking straight down the sidewalk, for example, although the doctor doubted this would have much effect. His peripheral vision, however, measured fifteen degrees wider on the horizontal, five degrees more straight down, and a full twenty-three degrees more looking upward than the medical profession considered perfect. Bradley was a deadly shot. He made three-quarters of his field goals in his last NCAA tournament game and scored fifty-eight points. Once when he was warming up before a tournament game in Philadelphia, his standard pregame set shots, jump shots, whirling reverse moves, and hook shots with either hand so impressed the crowd that they were * 'applauding like an audience at an opera." This was before the game began, in a neutral stadium. McPhee took a measurement of his own: Last summer, the floor of the Princeton gym was being resurfaced, so Bradley had to put in several practice sessions at the Lawrenceville School. His first afternoon at Lawrenceville, he began by shooting fourteen-foot jump shots from the right side. He got off to a bad start, and he kept missing them. Six in a row hit the back rim of the basket and bounced out. He stopped, looking discomfited, and seemed to be making an adjustment in his mind. Then he went up for another jump shot from the same spot and hit it cleanly. Four more shots went in without a miss, and then he paused and said, "You want to know something? That basket is about an inch and a half low." Some weeks later, I went back to Lawrenceville with a steel tape, borrowed a stepladder, and measured the height of the basket. It was nine feet ten and seven-eighths inches above the floor, or one and one-eighth inches too low.

Literary critic Kathy Smith has analyzed the devices McPhee used to create a view of Bradley as a superior player. As she noted in "John McPhee Balances the Act," one device was the way McPhee backed up his assessments with facts. First he said Bradley had extraordinary eyesight, then he asked a doctor to measure Bradley's field of vision. Smith wrote: It appears that these astute observations have led to the "discovery" of the new fact of Bradley's supernormal field of sight, without which the comment that Bradley "can read the defense as if he were reading Braille" would be merely a pretty metaphor. The focus is on verification; only after the trip to the doctor, and only after having all the collected material and notes at his disposal, does McPhee construct this specific image system. McPhee did the same in the example quoted above concerning the height of the basket at Lawrenceville School. Bradley's "remarkable sixth sense," Smith writes, gives him a degree of infallibility that is verified by McPhee's tape measure: Neither objective data nor opinion alone suffices to satisfy McPhee's desire for complete coverage of a situation or subject, so he provides both. But by linking point of view so intimately with observed data, and thereby rendering a type of "proof," McPhee avoids inviting the kind of scrutiny that accompanies the literary journalist's writing adventure when point of view and perspective becomes "too" subjective. This strategy works continuously throughout McPhee's piece. It is repeated as a kind of balancing act, an inconspicuous weighing and meting out of perspective and fact so that the thing itself seems to supply narrative structure and value. Nonfiction has one steady advantage over fiction, according to Smith: "The match between image and representation tends to be regarded as

298 I AMERICAN WRITERS natural and true." Readers assume a level of realism, which in turn "protects authorial license in acts of representation." Character does not form naturally on a page. It is selected, organized, created by an author. Backed by the testimony of an eye doctor and a steel tape, McPhee's representations of Bradley's abilities ward off any doubt in the reader's mind. By 1965 McPhee's writing had achieved the grace and fluidity that he described in Bradley's basketball game. He was knowledgeable and connected, yet as a narrator he remained softspoken. Although he preferred to stand in the shadows as a narrator, McPhee still had a distinctive voice and total control over his narrative. These traits may have appealed to William Shawn, editor of The New Yorker, because after "A Sense of Where You Are" appeared in the magazine, McPhee was named a staff writer. The New Yorker gives him the freedom to write about whatever interests him but pays only for what it publishes. At the end of the year, he gets a 1099 tax form, not a W-2 form; this arrangement is like an institutionalized free-lance position. It provides what he calls "the financial security of a farmer." McPhee had achieved his lifetime goal; his apprenticeship was ended. Years later, in his living room in Princeton, McPhee thought back to the rush of energy that followed his arrival at The New Yorker: "The next thing I did was to get up some ideas. I actually started work on three or four things lined up in a row. One was The Headmaster, one was Oranges, one was The Pine Barrens." For McPhee, Oranges (1967) became a grandfather tree, one of those huge rain forest trees that falls down and becomes a seedbed for generations of new trees. The shoots that grew out of the idea for Oranges became The Pine Barrens (1968), Coming into the Country (1977), and his recent geology books. In an interview for this essay, McPhee noted the following:

Oranges was a whim, the result of a machine at Pennsylvania Station in New York where I went every day when I was commuting. I drank this orange juice and I noticed weird things. Fresh orange juice changes color across the winter. I saw an ad in a magazine that showed four or five identical-looking oranges with different names: Parson Brown, Hamlin, Valencia. I thought, "That's interesting. Maybe it would make a good short piece—go down there for four or five days, talk to growers and nurserymen and go home. Write a little piece." What made Oranges longer was when I stumbled into the Citrus Experiment Station at Lake Alfred, where they had forty-four thousand items in their library— books and papers about oranges—and they had men and women in white coats walking around who had Ph.D.'s in oranges. One had a heartlung machine with oranges breathing in and out of it. I discovered the history of citrus, migrating westward along with the migrations of humankind itself. I scarcely suspected I would learn anything like that. But when I did, it was interesting and I went into it, so it was a longish article. The research he did at the experiment station resulted in a short book loaded with information, a classic McPhee work. If journalism is in one sense an informational form and in another sense a literary form, Oranges combines both. Some writers avoid topics burdened with information, preferring instead a powerful story line drawn from a murder or a historic event. McPhee can structure an interesting narrative about something as commonplace as oranges. His opening in Oranges makes information fun. We learn how street vendors in Trinidad and Tobago slice oranges and sprinkle salt on them, that Spain exports more oranges—including blood oranges—than the United States, that Irish kids eat them at the movies, and that orange trees bear fruit in Icelandic greenhouses

JOHNMCPHEE

and in the Bronx soil of the New York Botanical Garden. One device that carries information in a narrative McPhee calls a "set piece". In Oranges, for of a tractor, and two pages later the reader is off on a set piece about the history of oranges, starting with the evolution of citrus in the Malay Archipelago about twenty million years ago. It is a stylish prose trip, there on the back of the tractor, but it is set apart as a digression from the narrative. We learn about the name "orange," evolving from Sanskrit into French and eventually into Orange, New Jersey, an unlikely place for oranges. They have a history as a medical product, a food, and an additive to alcoholic beverages. Mistaken assumptions about the history of oranges led the master painters of the Italian Renaissance to portray oranges on the tables at the Last Supper, although, McPhee wrote, "in the time of Christ there were no orange trees in or near the Holy Land." Eventually, each set piece in the book returns to the original narrative, but along the way we learn about the history of oranges in Florida, the great frosts that wipe out the trees every so often, the grafting of certain species like Parson Brown and Valencia onto Rough Lemon or Sour Orange rootstock, and the regional culture that has grown up in the orangegrowing districts of Florida. The central narrative itself revolves around a search. McPhee drives into the state hoping to find a delicious glass of fresh-squeezed juice. Instead, he discovers an industry in love with concentrate. The science of orange juice concentrate leads him to the experiment station and its library. He goes to a plant where fresh juice is reduced to concentrate. "When the evaporators are finished with the juice, it has a nice orange color and seems promising, but if it is reconstituted into 'orange juice' it tastes like a glass of water with two teaspoons of sugar and one aspirin dissolved in it." McPhee finally gets his glass

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of fresh orange juice from a conveyor belt moments before high-season Valencia juice enters an evaporator. His plan to spend four or five days in Florida turned into four weeks. He returned to Princeton with boxes of photocopied information and books from the University of Florida in Gainesville. His miniature portrait grew into a "broad canvas" containing a wealth of scientific research, historical sweep, character studies, and personal narrative. A reviewer in Harper's (March 1967) wrote: You may come to the end of it and say to yourself, "But I can't have read a whole book about orangesl" But the chances are you will have done so, for Mr. McPhee takes this one simple fruit and makes a compote out of it. He writes like a charm, and without being cute, gimmicky, or in any way dull, he just tells you a lot about oranges. The idea of a broader canvas grew to regional proportions when McPhee turned to the Pine Barrens, a wild, sandy area encompassing hundreds of square miles of New Jersey that is famous for its abundant water supply and fabled residents. The Pineys were once considered mental defectives, a slanderous label assigned when the psychological sciences were themselves a bit defective. McPhee had grown up in New Jersey and heard the stories. He wanted to investigate, but he had never taken on a region as his subject matter. In an interview he told me, "I wandered around talking to all kinds of people and I had no idea what to make of it. I hadn't done it before.'' Pointing to the yard outside his living room windows, McPhee said: I spent two weeks on a picnic table right outside the window here lying on my back in agony and despair, staring up into the trees. I had no idea how I was going to tell the story of the Pine

300 I AMERICAN WRITERS Barrens. I had miscellaneous stuff, sketches of people. Nowadays I would have an idea what to do with it. He opened The Pine Barrens with his first visit to Fred Brown, resident of Hog Wallow. Fred Brown had no phone, no electricity. His yard was littered with eight cars, old vacuum cleaners, radios, cranberry boxes, "and maybe a thousand other things." He cooked McPhee a pork chop on a gas stove. McPhee wrote: He asked where I was going, and I said that I had no particular destination, explaining that I was in the pines because I found it hard to believe that so much unbroken forest could still exist so near the big Eastern cities, and I wanted to see it while it was still there. "Is that so?" he said, three times. Like many people in the pines, he often says things three times. "Is that so? Is that so?" McPhee asked Fred Brown's permission to fill his jerry can at the pump in the front yard. " 'Hell, yes,' he said. 'That isn't my water. That's God's water. That's God's water. That right, Bill?' " Bill Wasovwich, Brown's friend and neighbor, was also sitting in the kitchen at the time, although he was such a shy person you might not notice him. "I guess so," Bill said, without looking up. "It's good water, I can tell you that." "That's God's water," Fred said again. "Take all you want." Fred and Bill became McPhee's guides and informants as to the history and geography of the Pine Barrens. He drove the region with them, crisscrossing the sandy terrain on unpaved, unmarked roads past the former towns that had dotted the Pine Barrens and had now receded into nature. McPhee constantly scribbled in his notebook, recording everything but not sure where it would all lead. One time McPhee was driving

and Fred Brown said something interesting. McPhee slammed on the brakes and started writing in his notebook. "Fred," McPhee asked, "do you know what I'm doing?" "No," Fred said, "and I don't think you do either." McPhee's hosts came to symbolize the native Pineys, a shy, self-sufficient, and maligned people. Never one to editorialize, McPhee nevertheless left his position clear in The Pine Barrens: They are apparently a tolerant people, with an attractive spirit of live and let live. They seem to like hard work, if not steady work, and they like to brag about working hard. When they say they will do something, they do it. They seem shy, like the people who went before them, but when they get to know an outsider they are not shy and will generously share their tables, which often include new-potato stews and cranberry potpies. There was much more to the Pine Barrens than its people. McPhee presented set pieces on the vernacular of the region, its folktales, how foxhounds are used in a hunt, the history of the region, and some of the mysteries of the dwarf pines, cranberries, and blueberries that grow there. He explained the fires that continually sweep the Pines, using dramatic and informative language that prefigured descriptions of the great Yellowstone National Park fire of 1988. Toward the end of the book, McPhee wandered into politics, an unusual topic for him. A proposal was afoot to build a supersonic jetport in the Pines, complete with a city in the wilderness. McPhee traveled through the woods with a planner, Herbert Smith, who could visualize this development laid out in imaginary streets and runways on the sand. McPhee allowed Smith to make his best case; he is treated fairly, objectively, but he doesn't have a chance. Before we get to Smith, we have learned the history of the Pine Barrens, met some natives, learned about its natural wonders, and we love it as it stands

JOHN MCPHEE I 301 Smith's jetport seems outrageous. Later research would convince Americans that the supersonic jet itself was a hazard to the ozone layer, and it would be abandoned along with the jetport plans for the Pines. But McPhee ends with the opinion that the Pine Barrens "seem to be headed slowly toward extinction." The region was not threatened by a jetport so much as by a lack of legislation to preserve it. "At the rate of a few hundred yards or even a mile or so each year, the perimeter of the pines contracts." By 1974, at least three patterns had taken shape in McPhee's writing career. First, he played out a string of profiles that included Bill Bradley and Thomas Moving, and then took a wild structural leap forward. Levels of the Game presented two persons with their satellite characters, and Encounters with the Archdruid associated one controversial character with three of his natural enemies. After that, McPhee rarely focused on a single character. One exception was The Curve of Binding Energy (1974), which was about physicist Theodore Taylor, a former atomic bomb designer who feared that terrorists could steal weapons-grade nuclear material from private industry and build a bomb in their basement. McPhee used Taylor as a vehicle to explore a complex scientific subject, and he does not consider the book a profile. Another exception was The Survival of the Bark Canoe (1975), featuring Henri Vaillancourt, an artist and craftsman who builds authentic birchbark canoes. Oranges opened two other patterns. At one level, McPhee created a portrait of the orangegrowing regions of Florida, as he would do later in The Pine Barrens. "Each a broad canvas, lots of people, lots of history and science," he said, describing the two books. The Pine Barrens, with its regional focus, became the progenitor of his best-selling book about Alaska, Coming into the Country. At another level, Oranges began a series of books dominated by scientific concerns,

including his geology books. There was considerable overlap between the categories, of course. Nothing illustrates the trend toward regional portraits better than The Crofter and the Laird (1970), which is among McPhee's finest and least-known works. He reports on the culture, history, and mythology of the residents of Colonsay, one of the Hebrides islands off Scotland and home to McPhee's ancestors. Unromantically, he shows the conditions of life among the crofters, or small fanners. The laird is the Baron Strathcona, who owns the whole island and its houses, all of which he rents out in a nearly feudal arrangement with the crofters. The laird plays only a small role in the book. He is royalty, an "incomer" in the vernacular of the place. McPhee is more interested in the commoners. Colonsay was like the village of Wiltshire that W. H. Hudson described from an earlier era, where a resident at one end of town might cut his foot with an axe and the tidings of the accident would fly from mouth to mouth to every other resident almost instantly. The islanders were connected to generation upon generation and had lived on the same rock since the clans began in the eleventh century. McPhee said Colonsay was "less like a small town than like a large lifeboat." As he does in The Pine Barrens, McPhee first draws readers into an unknown world and then forcefully expands their knowledge of it until they leave with a deep appreciation. Novelists do the same with their imaginary worlds. That Colonsay actually exists only complicates the problem of bringing its residents and history to life on paper. Describing the islanders who play the bagpipes, McPhee wrote in The Crofter and the Laird: Pipers have genealogies, lines of pedagogical ancestry, that are as important to them as bloodlines may be to others. A piper schooled in

302 I AMERICAN WRITERS classical piobaireachd—or ceol mort the purest expression of Highland bagpipe music—can listen to another piper and say accurately who his teachers were and who, in turn, taught the teachers. Much the same is true of literary journalists, although the signatures of the teachers are more disguised. Two schools among literary journalists have been described by literary critic David Eason. In 'The New Journalism and the ImageWorld/' he labels them "realist" and "modernist." In nonfiction, the realist group includes John McPhee, Tom Wolfe, Tracy Kidder, and other writers who attempt to represent a real world for the reader. Eason wrote: Realist reports reflect faith in the capability of traditional models of interpretation and expression, particularly the story form, to reveal the teal. Although the reports acknowledge cultural relativism in their attention to the various symbolic worlds of their subjects, this awareness is not extended to the process of reporting, which is treated as a natural process. Referring to the other group of writers including Norman Mailer and Joan Didion, Eason continues, "Modernist reports call attention to reporting as a way of joining together writer and reader in the creation of reality. Narrative techniques call attention to storytelling as a cultural practice for making a common world." These two schools reach as far back as Daniel Defoe, whose realist accounts of the plague in London may have been the first literary journalism in the English language. Like the music of the pipers on Colonsay, McPhee's reporting has a genealogy that includes Defoe, Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, and in this century such writers as Hemingway, George Orwell, A. J. Liebling, John Mersey, and Lillian Ross. Henry David Thoreau belongs on that list, as McPhee recognized in Survival of the Bark Canoe. Tho-

reau took notes on scratch paper when he was in the Maine woods: Weeks later, when he returned home to Concord, he composed his journal of the trip, slyly using the diary form, and writing at times in the present tense, to gain immediacy, to create the illusion of paragraphs written—as it is generally supposed they were written—virtually in the moments described. With the advantage of retrospect, he reconstructed the story to reveal a kind of significance that the notes do not reveal. Something new in journalism. McPhee has used increasingly complicated structures in his work while retaining a strict regard for realist assumptions about journalism. Ronald Weber, whose scholarly work has examined literary journalism from Hemingway to the New Journalists of the 1960's, writes of McPhee's Coming into the Country, "The book's roots lie not so much in the effort to emulate the novel as in the attempt to extend the range of journalism while remaining within journalistic forms." Indeed, McPhee was convinced to pursue nonfiction, as opposed to fiction or pi ay writing, because it has so many interesting literary possibilities. In one interview for this essay he explained: Remember the possibilities in nonfiction writing, the character sketching that stops well short of illegitimate invention. There's plenty of room for invention, for "creativity," stopping well short of invading a number of things that only fiction can do. You can use fictional techniques: narrative, dialogue, character sketching, description, metaphor. Above all metaphor. Things that are cheap and tawdry in fiction work beautifully in nonfiction because they are true. That's why you should be careful not to abridge it, because it's the fundamental power you're dealing with. You arrange it and present

JOHN MCPHEE I 303 it. There's lots of artistry. But you don't make it up. Nobody's making rules that cover everybody. The nonfiction writer is communicating with the reader about real people in real places. So if those people talk, you say what those people said. You don't say what the writer decides they said. I get prickly if someone suggests there's dialogue in my pieces that I didn't get from the source. You don't make up dialogue. You don't make a composite character. Where I came from, a composite character was fiction. So when somebody makes a nonfiction character out of three people who are real, that is a fictional character in my opinion. And you don't get inside their heads and think for them. You can't interview the dead. You could make a list of the things you don't do. Where writers abridge that, they hitchhike on the credibility of writers who don't.

In the mid 1970's, when McPhee began making extended visits to Alaska, he was preparing for a regional portrait of epic proportions. Coming into the Country, which actually told three separate stories, was published in The New Yorker in eight parts and became his most financially successful work. The first story told of a canoe and kayak trip in arctic Alaska on the Salmon and Kobuk rivers. In the second story, McPhee accompanied a commission looking for a site for a new Alaskan capital. He went to Alaska for the first time in the summer and early fall of 197S, during which time he conducted the research for the first two stories. The third took longer. He went back to Alaska in the spring of 1976 at breakup time and stayed into the summer in the towns of Eagle, Circle, and Central, Alaska, in the Upper Yukon country northeast of Fairbanks. He returned during the winter of 1977. That portion of the book, itself titled "Coming into the Country," became

the longest single piece of writing that McPhee has published. Coming into the Country sealed McPhee's reputation as one of the premier nature and cultural writers in America. That's fast company, even if limited to living writers. Writing in The New York Times, John Leonard said the book left him enchanted, dreaming of seal oil, caribou, the Yukon River, and grizzly bears: The time may come when nobody goes outside, when every American stays home in his "living center," his computerized cocoon, a bionic junkie with programmed dreams. And if it ever occurs to this sloth to wonder about the outside, about what the outside was like when there was an outside, why, all he will have to do is plug a cartridge into his communications console and read, if he can read, a book on his wraparound television screen. The book could be by John McPhee, or Edward Hoagland, or Edward Abbey, or Josephine Johnson—one of the people, anyway, who do our living for us. Remember, the book will say, when there were seasons? Edward Hoagland called Coming into the Country a "masterpiece." He said McPhee must have been looking for a "big, long, permanent book, written while he was still in the midst of life and could go after it, because in peripatetic journalism such as McPhee's there is an adventurous, fortuitous element: where the writer gets himself and what he stumbles on." It began with months of research in the country itself, followed by an enormous amount of time spent discovering the history of the state, its natives, the settlement by whites, the gold discoveries, and the oil boom. Then came the task of structuring all that material into three separate narratives. A reviewer in Time said, "Rather than stepping smartly from A to Z, his plots tend to pick up casually with N and then meander back around to M. The appar-

304 I AMERICAN WRITERS ent informality is a ruse." Far from informal, the plan to circle from N back to M had been on McPhee's mind throughout the writing of the first section of the book. Called "The Encircled River," the narrative follows McPhee and four companions from a governmental study team as they travel by canoe and kayak. The story opens on the Salmon River of the Brooks Range above the Arctic Circle. McPhee dips his bandanna into the forty-six-degree water and ties it around his head to fight the blazing sun. It was N. They follow the Salmon and Kobuk rivers as McPhee describes his companions and delivers information about the enormous state of Alaska. At the end of Book I, the narrative circles back around to M, and McPhee removes the bandanna from his head and trails it in the river. Ronald Weber felt Coming into the Country was "a distinguished work of literary nonfiction," a book that endowed "the particular with resonant meanings.'' The structure, as Weber explained in The Literature of Fact, was in part responsible for the effects in Book I: The return to the opening image echoes the circuitous direction of the river journey. A helicopter had taken McPhee and his companions from the village of Kiana a hundred water miles to the upper Salmon River, from where they had drifted to the juncture of the Kobuk River, and then down to Kiana—"closing a circuit," McPhee notes—from where they will be flown out by plane. The return to Kiana takes place less than midway through the ninety-page section, and from the return McPhee smoothly shifts the account back in time to describe the helicopter journey and the arrival on the headwaters of the Salmon in "the most isolated wilderness I would ever see." From this point the river journey is again recounted until the reader is brought back nearly to where he began, the bandanna being cooled again in the water.

Back in his office at Princeton University several years later, McPhee drew a circle on a piece of notepaper representing the structure of "The Encircled River." At the point where the narrative begins and ends, where he dips his bandanna in the water, McPhee bisected the circle with a line. The top half of the circle represented the last part of the actual trip. That portion of the text was written in the present tense. A little over halfway around the diagram, he placed another mark. This was near the start of the actual journey but over halfway through the piece of writing. The mark represented an encounter with a bear eating blueberries. The narrative continued, in past tense, toward its starting point. Just before the circle rejoined itself, he encountered another grizzly, four hundred pounds of bear fishing in the river out of sight, sound, and smell of the travelers: "He picked up a salmon, roughly ten pounds of fish, and, holding it with one paw, he began to whirl it around his head. Apparently, he was not hungry, and this was a form of play. He played sling-the-salmon." The bear ambled toward the flotilla of boats. One of them struck a small snag in the river and snapped a stick. The bear froze. He could smell nothing. At first his nearsighted vision failed to reveal the boats on the river. McPhee has a deep-seated fear of grizzly bears. Grizzlies are massive, legendary for their unpredictability, one of the wildest creatures on earth. They are rarely seen, as dramatic as they are dangerous. "At last, we arrived in his focus. If we were looking at something we had rarely seen before, God help him so was he." The bear changed course into a copse of willow. In the next paragraph the boaters entered a flat section of river and McPhee trailed his bandanna in the water. McPhee had started the narrative moments after this event and circled back around to the same place in order to locate the nearsighted grizzly bear at the end of the story, where his dignity, playfulness, and awesome size could symbolize

JOHN MCPHEE I 305 the wilderness through which they were traveling. He also structured a change of tense into the story, moving from present to past in cyclical form. "When you circle back, you go into the past tense and you stay there/9 he said. In the third section of the book, "Coming into the Country," McPhee lived among the residents of the Upper Yukon country. Individualists who find civilization too constricting still migrate to Alaska, looking for land to homestead, a place to build a cabin, gold in the creeks, and the challenge of survival in a cold, hard land. In most cases, the conditions and the weather drive them away. Ed and Ginny Gelvin, who raised four children in the country near Central, Alaska, population twenty, are the kind of enterprising people who have taken their existence from Alaska in the modern age. Flying above the wilderness in their bush planes and studying old mining records, Ed and his son Stanley located a stream that might contain a placer deposit of gold. Gold erodes out of the mountains and washes down the streams until it collects in alluvial or glacial deposits. Run that gravel through your own sluicebox and you can extract the flakes of gold. The Gelvins wanted to move thousands of tons of gravel, so they drove the largest bulldozer Caterpillar makes, the turbocharged D9, into the wilderness. They choked the stream and created a reservoir, which in turn produced a pressurized stream of water. They bulldozed forty thousand cubic yards of gold-bearing gravels into a metal sluicebox and washed it through using the plume of water. This ecological disturbance was witnessed by McPhee the conservationist: Am I disgusted? Manifestly not. Not from here, from now, from this perspective. I am too warmly, too subjectively caught up in what the Gelvins are doing. In the ecomilitia, bust me to private. This mine is a cork on the sea. Meanwhile (and, possibly, more seriously), the rela-

tionship between this father and son is as attractive as anything I have seen in Alaska— both of them self-reliant beyond the usual reach of the term, the characteristic formed by this country. Whatever they are doing, whether it is mining or something else, they do for themselves what no one else is here to do for them. Their kind is more endangered every year. Balance that against the nick they are making in this land. Only an easygoing extremist would preserve every bit of the country. And extremists alone would exploit it all. Everyone else has to think the matter through—choose a point of tolerance, however much the point might tend to one side. For myself, I am closer to the preserving side— that is, the side that would preserve the Gelvins. To be sure, I would preserve plenty of land as well. My own margin of tolerance would not include some faceless corporation "responsible" to a hundred thousand stockholders, making a crater you could see from the moon. McPhee located modern-day miners and trappers who inhabit the wilderness, living in the country, ten miles up this or that stream, on a subsistence diet of homegrown vegetables, moose, and fish. Their lives challenged some of McPhee's personal values and his ideals about wilderness. Dick Cook and Donna Kneeland were living in one such cabin. Dick was an expert in the survival skills needed for backwoods life. He and Donna had divided up their responsibilities in a manner that pioneer families would recognize, but modern women would abhor. McPhee, father of four daughters from his first marriage, heard Donna say, "I'm helping Dick, not doing these things for the sake of being like a man. I can't be like a man. I couldn't haul a soaked moosehide out of the river. It's too heavy. But I haul fish. I cut and sew caribou socks. I train the puppies to pull a sled. Are we going to start planting the garden today?"

306 I AMERICAN WRITERS "I'll decide that this afternoon/' Dick replied. Dick and Donna took McPhee to their cabin. They left the door open when they were gone so grizzlies would make less of a mess getting into the place. "Bears are on my mind today," McPhee wrote, because the next day he had to hike out alone to the Yukon River, where he would be picked up by a boat. He had been 4 'strongly counselled" not to go into the woods without a gun. "Having never hunted, I have almost no knowledge of guns,'9 he wrote, and turned down the offer of a gun. On the hike into the cabin, the group passed bear scat. "Maybe we'll get a bear!" Donna exclaimed. "It can happen anytime." Dick Cook checked his rifle. Every bear story McPhee had ever heard rushed through his mind: Here I am about to walk through the woods the distance merely from Times Square to LaGuardia Airport and I am ionized with anticipation— catastrophic anticipation. I may never resolve my question of bears—the extent to which I exaggerate the danger, the extent of the foolishness of those who go unarmed. The effect of it all, for the moment, is a slight but detectable migration of my internal affections from the sneaker toward the bazooka, from the National Wildlife Federation toward the National Rifle Association—an annoying touch of panic in a bright and blazing day. Dick Cook does not help McPhee's confidence when he tells him to remember that "the woods are composed of who's killing whom. Life is forever building from death. Life and death are not a duality." McPhee begins his two-hour hike to the Yukon River through closed-in willow thickets and soft muskeg. He thinks as he reaches the river safely: I can't accept anymore the rationale of the few who go unarmed, yet I am equally loath to use guns. If bears were no longer in the country, I

would not have come. I am here, in a sense, because they survive. So I am sorry—truly rueful and perplexed—that without a means of killing them I cannot feel at ease. Grizzly bears fishing in distant streams, placer mines gouged in the wilderness, gardens planted with "grass" and rhubarb, a dogsled sounding over dry snow like "the rumbling cars of a long freight," the sun shining at 11:00 P.M., these things are the real Alaska and emblematic at the same time. They are the things McPhee chose to represent the reality he experienced and the symbols that created Alaska for his readers. Donald Hall, writing in National Review (March 31, 1978), said: It makes no difference what McPhee writes about; his subjects are irrelevant; we love him for his form. Oh, how he can shift his feet! Transitions are the niftiest things he does, moving from past into present, from present into past, shifting abruptly from one scene or set of characters to another. McPhee says he spends a lot of time not writing those graceful transitions; instead he allows his structures to juxtapose elements that need no bridges to link them together. "Two parts of a piece of writing, merely by lying side-by-side, can comment on each other without a word spoken." McPhee became friends with several of his subjects in Alaska. In standard reporting, a friendship with a subject can be as troubling as a bribe in a police department. City hall reporters are frequently transferred to other assignments so they will not become too familiar with the politicians whose lives and professional conduct they must examine. McPhee's journalism differs. He cannot spend months living in Eagle, Alaska, without admiring some residents and becoming friends with many. Had he avoided such attach-

JOHNMCPHEE ments, his writing would be shallow and devoid of feeling. McPhee has written about only three people whom he knew before they became subjects for his journalism. They were Tom Moving, director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art; Alan Lieb, a chef; and Frank Boyden, headmaster of Deerfield Academy. "With few exceptions, I meet people for the first time when I seek them out to write about them," McPhee said. "Then, some have become good friends—15 percent or something." He listed Ted Taylor, the bomb designer; Bill Bradley, who asked McPhee to be the godfather of his daughter; Sam Candler in Georgia; and several people in Alaska. He told me in an interview: The relationship doesn't begin as someone casually met. It's a relationship with someone with an open notebook. The people know in a general way what I'm going to do. I tell them. You don't get into a "friendship" situation and then run into the bathroom to make notes. If you're there a number of months, yes, friendships do form. But they're forming in a context. People can never read a text with a single interpretation. Some of the people McPhee wrote about in Scotland thought he "abused their friendship" in The Crofter and the Laird. "Maybe I did," he said to me, adding: But one thing is for sure. They knew what I was doing and when they spoke to me I had an open notebook in front of them. They knew where the notes were going. Somebody I lionized decided the thing was bad. Somebody I satirized thought it was good. There's no way to predict the reactions. Knowing that, you don't worry about it. If you can't predict the outcome, you're not going to try to shape it. The article that generated the most controversy in the press was about Alan Lieb, a chef who owned a small restaurant in Pennsylvania.

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McPhee said the chef had prepared the best meals he had ever eaten. Since he knew him beforehand, and because Lieb did not want to be swamped by crowds from New York City, McPhee promised to keep his name and the restaurant's location a secret. Lieb became "Otto" in the article, "Brigade de Cuisine.'' Otto proved as admirable in the kitchen as Bradley was on the basketball court. The tantalizing mystery—how could a world-class chef be working within a hundred miles of New York City and remain unknown to the restaurant reviewers?—provoked a manhunt. There was another provocative aspect to the article. McPhee and Otto had dined at Lutfece, a fine restaurant in New York. Otto said he guessed the turbot he ate there had been frozen. Owner Andr£ Soltner said that was a fact error—he never served frozen fish—and demanded an apology from The New Yorker. New York Times food critic Mimi Sheraton and wine critic Frank J. Prial tracked Otto down in Shohola, Pennsylvania, and ate at his restaurant. Sheraton called the main course disappointing and the appetizers so-so; Prial thought the wine list "somewhat amateurish." That was it. Behind the minor furor that flashed in the columns of The New York Times, Time, Newsweek, and The Nation was the suggestion that McPhee had failed to get his facts right. William Shawn, editor of The New Yorker, permitted McPhee to keep Otto's identity secret. Shawn said it was the first piece in the magazine's history that was not verified in detail by fact checkers. Actually, the fact checkers restricted their inquiries to matters outside Pennsylvania, leaving McPhee to verify facts with the chef. McPhee quoted Lieb as saying he guessed the turbot was frozen. When McPhee reprinted the article in Giving Good Weight (1979), after Otto's remark about the turbot he put a footnote that said: "Otto guessed wrong." It was an accurate quote, but a false accusation. The most obvious fact error in the whole affair was made by Prial and Sheraton in

308 I AMERICAN WRITERS their article for the Times: they misspelled Alan Lieb's name. Henri Vaillancourt, the central figure in The Survival of the Bark Canoe, felt McPhee misrepresented his character in the book. Vaillancourt builds canoes using only a few tools and the methods the Indians discovered. McPhee and Vaillancourt took two of the canoes and three friends on a ten-day trip on the West Branch of the Penobscot River in northern Maine, passing through Chesuncook Lake, Umbazooksus Lake, windswept Chamberlain Lake, Churchill Lake, Allagash Stream and Allagash Lake, and ending at the spot in Caucomgomoc Lake where the Keewaydin canoe camp began its life. Before the trip started, Vaillancourt insisted on discarding much of the gear his companions had brought along, including the maps. Out on the water, trouble started. "A canoe trip is a society so small and isolated that its factions—and everything else about it—can magnify to stunning size. When trouble comes on a canoe trip, it comes from the inside, from fast-growing hatreds among the friends who started," McPhee wrote. Vaillancourt, who McPhee lauded as the best birchbark canoe builder in the country, seemed less of an expert in the woods. The paddlers encountered strong winds that whipped the lakes into heavy chop. The boats took on water. Little headway could be made against the weather. "A suspicion that has been growing comes out in the wind," McPhee wrote. "Henri's expertise stops in 'the yard'; out here he is as green as his jerky." It is one of the few negative character portrayals found in McPhee's work. "I could see his character did not mesh very well with mine," Vaillancourt said of McPhee. 4 'I was anxious for the trip to end." Afterward, Vaillancourt became uncooperative and discouraged further interviews. Today, he feels McPhee took ethical liberties in quoting his comments about other birchbark canoe builders—of the ones he had seen, his were the best—remarks

which he feels made him seem immodest, and which he said were "off the record." "With McPhee the story is the thing," Vaillancourt said in an interview for this essay: I had the feeling from his line of questioning that he came with a preconceived idea of how he would develop me as a character, and how the story would go. He wanted to develop the eccentric artist-craftsman. I don't think it reflects what I'm about. I'm eccentric in my own way, but I'm not as obsessed as he portrayed me. When you're writing about real people, you have an obligation to represent them as they are, rather than to portray them as you would like them to be. "Henri is now a different person than the one I went with," McPhee responded. "I did have a preconception of Henri before I met him: as a man about seventy-five years old. He was twenty-three then. I was surprised. That's the one and only preconception I had. The term 'off the record' never came up between us. I don't think he even knew the term then." For a writer who came to national prominence in the New Journalism era of the 1960's, McPhee has been extraordinarily shy. He has never relished a public literary controversy. His immersion reporting should have made him a charter member of the New Journalism group. But he could not step in front of the cameras to promote his books—literally. His photograph has never appeared on a dust jacket. So he is rarely mentioned in the context of the New Journalism. The controversies of his career involve frozen turbot and the portrayal of a birchbark canoe builder, all of which McPhee takes very seriously. But these episodes pale in comparison to those involving the New Journalists, who were sometimes accused of making things up and who certainly rode controversy for all it was worth. McPhee gets the facts right, an enormous task in itself.

JOHNMCPHEE The longest-running project in McPhee's career has been his four books on the geology of North America. The books grew naturally from his earliest interests, including the geomorphology—the study of the surface features of the earth—he learned from Frank Conklin at Deerfield Academy, and from Oranges, The Pine Barrens, and Coming into the Country. In an interview with me he said: I was writing about the gold fields of Alaska up there near the Klondike strike. It suddenly occurred to me: I had no idea how the gold got there. I well understood why it was in the streams. The mountains break apart and there's the gold. Geomorphology, right? But how did the gold get into the mountains in the first place? McPhee called a Princeton geologist, Ken Deffeyes, who explained thermal hot springs and mineral deposits, and a few lines on the subject appeared in Coming into the Country. As McPhee told me, another short phone call to Deffeyes later resulted in a whole series of books on geology: I called him up and asked if he'd like to find a road cut outside New York City and describe what the world looked like when that rock formed. I meant to do a "Talk of the Town" piece. We could look at the blast-exposed face of the rock, read its history, and tell it in the firstperson plural. We planned that, and then I asked, 4 "What if we went north, from road cut to road cut, up the Northway through the Adirondacks?" He said, "Not on this continent. If you want to do that sort of thing on this continent, go west— go across the structure." Then I got this weird idea of going all the way across the continent, all growing out of that "Talk" piece, which was never written. All this happened in three or four days, and the next thing I know I'm in a pickup with Deffeyes in Nevada.

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The project deals with one of the most fascinating scientific revolutions of the twentieth century, the theory of plate tectonics and continental drift. Between 1959 and 1967, geologists pieced together the theory of rigid plates moving across the earth, riding over or diving under each other, and in certain places spreading apart. "It was a huge scientific revolution, a first-order scientific revolution, and is, in fact, why I got into the whole thing," McPhee said. "Ten years after plate tectonics came along, it was still very much controversial. I wanted to see how this science had settled down with its new theory." After his talk with Deffeyes, McPhee envisioned a book about the geology of North America, using road cuts of Interstate 80 as windows into the rock. After a year of research, he had organized the narrative, which jumps around. "It starts in New Jersey and leaps to Nevada because the tectonics in New Jersey two hundred million years ago were much the same as the tectonics in Nevada today." After a year, he realized the project was going to take ten or fifteen years to complete. Instead of one book, it would be four. The first geology book, Basin and Range (1981), presents the theory of plate tectonics, and is a primer in the modern geological sciences. The second book, In Suspect Terrain (1983), turns to Anita Harris, a geologist "who's clawing at the theory—not totally disbelieving but irritated with the gross extrapolations onto the continent of plate tectonic ideas to a point where they become, in her view, almost imaginative. " In the third book, Rising from the Plains (1986), McPhee concentrates on Wyoming and the dean of Rocky Mountain geology, David Love. The scientific focus is on the story of the building, burial, and exhumation of the Rocky Mountains. Love struggles with controversial topics in environmental geology and the economics of minerals, oil, gas, and uranium until, in McPhee's view, he becomes a one-man Encounters with the Archdruid. The human focus is on

310 I AMERICAN Love and his mother, a woman who had arrived from the East three-quarters of a century earlier. She had kept a journal in an articulate voice, and Love permitted McPhee to quote extensively from it in Rising from the Plains. The human characters here seem a match for the monumental geology. The fourth book in the series is about California, "the only place where this continent has a plate boundary on dry land." As McPhee said this, his right arm was immobilized in a sling. He had dislocated it a couple of weeks earlier while cross-country skiing in the Sierra Nevada, a slight detour from a trip up and down the San Andreas fault. McPhee's best-selling books have been Coming into the Country and The Control of Nature (1989). Next in line are the geology books. They have been widely adopted in college courses because they clarify a murky subject. Most readers, according to McPhee, are not students or trained scientists, and they do not necessarily have scientific interests. But they can absorb a scientific narrative and appreciate it. The reviewers fall into two camps: some feel geology is large and difficult enough to be worthy of McPhee's talents; others are simply bored. Evan Connell wrote a review of Rising from the Plains in which he appreciated McPhee's characters and natural description, but then concluded, "You need not have passed Geology 101 to enjoy 'Rising From the Plains,' but it might help." Herbert Mitgang, writing in The New York Times (November 10, 1986), marveled at McPhee's handling of complex material: It would almost be unfair to make notes while reading one of John McPhee's fascinating books that explore some out-of-the-way corner of the American landscape and its inhabitants. They are comparable to Joseph Mitchell's model writing on the Mohawk Indians or the bottom of New York Harbor or any other subject that he has mined for nuggets of information. Among pro-

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fessional writers, there is an added pleasure in watching how authors in their class construct their factual narratives. By covering New York and America like some foreign country, they set a very high standard of originality for writers and readers. Reviewing In Suspect Terrain, Michiko Kakutani wrote, "However gracefully he stitches together his facts, selectivity occasionally gives way to an impulse to be thorough and precise, and the reader's interest begins to numb." While dismayed by some reviews, McPhee understands his readers. He explained to me: People sometimes jump all over me for writing about geology. They're bored with it. They say, "I like your work but I don't like the geology." That used to disturb me more than it does now. The curious thing I note is that it doesn't bore everybody and that there's a bigger audience out there for geology than for most of my work. Geology as a subject presented unexpected difficulties and apprehensions for McPhee: One of the frustrations in it is that a writer who seeks the multiple possibilities in a piece of nonfiction writing—character sketching and narrative and dialogue and description—is not well served by a subject like geology, which is extraordinarily demanding in one principal area: description. The pressure, the weight, and the opportunity in description are just out of proportion with everything else. This permits sentences to march along in ways that would seem inappropriate in other forms of writing, but are appropriate to the earth itself. Something has held McPhee to his original plan, something that seems larger than just completing a task or accomplishing a goal. What has been driving him through the only negative criticism he has received, through a project spanning a dozen years, and through mazes of

JOHNMCPHEE scientific details and descriptions? His oldest daughter, Laura, said the geology has had a powerful influence on McPhee. "The geology made him think about his own mortality and how brief human life is in relation to the earth/' "It's the only piece of ground that we're ever going to inhabit," McPhee said simply. "I know that my own reflections on living and on being here changed considerably in the past few years. It's a perspective on our own position as a species with respect to space and time." McPhee looked up at the world geologic map on his wall for a moment. "Dammit, it's the only house we're ever going to have," he said emphatically. "It is some interesting thing, this earth and how it works. I could be somewhat evangelical about ideas in geology. I am permitted to talk about it at home ten minutes a day and no more. That's pretty rigid." Evangelical feelings or not, a topic as complex as geology has been too great a challenge for most literary journalists. It comes laden with scientific detail and description, lacks enough characters to satisfy most writers, and demands a fifteen-year commitment. "The world's slowest narrative subject meets America's best journalist"—that was how another literary journalist, Mark Kramer, described to me McPhee's books on geology.

McPhee's perspective on natural forces comes through even more clearly in The Control of Nature. If most people are unaware of the vast geologic history of the planet, they are better able to appreciate rivers, volcanoes, and mountains. When the forces of nature come in conflict with our plans, we try to control them. Three such efforts formed McPhee's text. The chapters presented efforts to control the Mississippi River, volcanoes in Iceland and Hawaii, and the erosion of the San Gabriel Mountains near Los Angeles. The opening chapter

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unfolds like The River, a Depression-era documentary film by Pare Lorentz. McPhee begins at a single point, the site 300 miles up the river from New Orleans where a distributary called the Atchafalaya River draws off 30 percent of the water from the master stream. The Mississippi River continues from that point down toward New Orleans, through the "American Ruhr," an industrial district of great importance to the nation. The Atchafalaya, however, reaches the Gulf in only 145 miles and has a steeper gradient than the main river. The distributary is poised to change the course of the Mississippi, as has happened many times during the formation of the southern portion of Louisiana, but this time human industry hangs in the balance. In 1963, the Army Corps of Engineers opened a structure called Old River whose job was to maintain a constant 30 percent flow into the Atchafalaya and to guarantee that the main river would continue flowing toward New Orleans. Controlling the Mississippi River would prove difficult. Like Lorentz, McPhee follows the river until his readers grasp the whole system of control on the Mississippi from the first levee the river encounters down to the control structure at Old River. The reader also understands that the river made Louisiana and knows, as do the Cajuns who operate the structure, that the river is stronger than we are. Somewhere along the way readers almost start wishing for a flood to wash away humanity's hubris, all the while guiltily aware of what a disaster that would be for the American Ruhr, and for poor Morgan City, Louisiana, sitting in a subsiding landscape beside the Atchafalaya like a tumbler in a sink. The conflict seems inevitable. Nature will keep trying to take the shortest route to the Gulf, and the Corps of Engineers will keep trying to hold back the river. At the hands of a flood like the ones in 1927, 1937, or 1973, or when the hundred-year flood hits—the "design flood" engineers expect would destroy the works—the change will be made.

372 / AMERICAN WRITERS Three million cubic feet of water per second will have its way. Or maybe not. McPhee comes close to prediction, but keeps one step away. Maybe the Corps of Engineers will win a few more battles in this war. The residents of Los Angeles who have moved up into the San Gabriel Mountains have a similar fight on their hands. The San Gabriels are one of the most shattered, most rapidly rising, and most rapidly eroding mountain ranges on earth. Natural cycles conspire to create cataclysmic events. During the dry season, chaparral grows in tangled thickets. When it burns, the ground beneath is seared and becomes impenetrable to water. Then the winter rains bring five or ten inches of water in a deluge. Broken rock from the mountains washes down in huge, destructive debris flows. The flows rampage through suburban neighborhoods, many of them newly built. Residents expect the city to protect them. The city and nature do battle. 4 'Strung out along the San Gabriel front are at least a hundred and twenty bowl-shaped excavations that resemble football stadiums and are often as large," McPhee wrote. These basins catch the debris flows coming off the mountains, and generally they work. Fleets of trucks empty the basins as they fill. Once in a while, they overflow, sending rock rivers into suburbia. Because the flows are separated by several years, new residents bask in a false sense of security. New houses go up. Almost no one was around when the last debris flow came roaring down that section of the mountains. The cycle sometimes takes twenty or forty years to repeat. Geologic time meets human time. McPhee wrote in The Control of Nature: House on Bubbling Well, Glendora, $167,000. Mud and flood? Alosta Realty: "No, no. Oh, years and years ago we had a big flood. They built that dam, and there's no problem there at all.'9

Silent Ranch Estates, shake-roofed or tilecovered castles,' 'individually built,'' in the fourhundred-thousand-to-one-million-dollar range. Possible debris-flow problems? Realtor: "There are a couple of houses which I would not touch. The others—I don't think so. I haven't heard anything to that effect. Every house you'd see, we'd have to take that into account." Terrace View Estates, gated community, all view lots, up to one and a half acres at roughly $135,000 an acre. Debris flows? 4 'No. We went through the whole winter there. We had some very heavy rains and there were no problems." McPhee calls these lists of voices "gossip ladders." In The Control of Nature they illustrate the hopeful blindness that sets in. The San Gabriels sit above the smog with beautiful views and a wildness that seems impossible so close to Los Angeles. Believing the debris catch basins will protect them, new owners keep coming. Problems? "I don't know. I don't think they have that problem there." "There was a problem years ago. They have a channel there now." "It's always possible, but that place is not on enough of a hill." "Not that I know of." "That I don't know. You have to check with the City of Los Angeles." The Corps of Engineers trying to defeat the Atchafalaya's capture of the Mississippi River and the City of Los Angeles trying to hold back the San Gabriel Mountains possess the same symbolism. In a later work, "Looking for a Ship," McPhee quoted Captain Paul Washburn of the United States Merchant Marine, who said it best: "Anywhere in the world, if you fool with Mother Nature she's going to get you. This is not

JOHN MCPHEE I 313

a political statement. It is just a fact/' The Control of Nature deals with the geomorphology McPhee learned at Deerfield Academy, the generally uncontrollable forces that have shaped the surface of the earth. Crustal plates drift about the globe. California suburbanites, living near a plate boundary, try to keep debris slides out of their bedrooms. As McPhee shifts his narrative from plate tectonics to geomorphology, a certain edginess creeps into his voice. McPhee's life has been strongly rooted. He built a modernist, rambling, two-story house in an isolated corner of Princeton township in 1963, while working at Time magazine, and still lives there today. During his first marriage, with four daughters in the house, he kept his office in the garage. There was a divorce—his first wife, Pryde Brown, said they were i4 victims of the late Sixties social revolution among the middleclass." In 1972 McPhee married Yolanda Whitman, who had four children by her first marriage. Evidence of the children is everywhere in the house, including stunning photographs of Iceland taken by Laura, who was attracted to the landscape during a trip with her father. Maps of the St. John-Allagash Wilderness and Alaska, an Eastern coyote pelt from Maine, a chart of the structures associated with colliding crustal plates, and hundreds of books fill the walls. The house is surrounded by open land that once was owned by Princeton University but is now slated for development. McPhee often sees deer and even wild turkeys in his backyard. This piece of the New York-Philadelphia megapel is, he noted in Survival of the Bark Canoe, has one of the densest concentrations of deer in North America—fifty per square mile, compared to five per square mile in Maine. Some of his neighbors have erected fences to keep them out, but McPhee does not put his garden above nature. His life as a professional writer has institutional connections that many writers would envy:

ties to The New Yorker, more than twenty books in print, requests for appearances. Above all, he told me, he wants to keep writing: Writing is like a river meandering along. It won't through time stay in the same banks. It cuts out new things and fills in other places. Sometimes it jumps across its own meanders. You wonder what you're going to be doing ten or fifteen years hence. You might say my ambition is to write—as little as possible! My daughter Jenny tells me I overdo the negative aspects. I grunt and groan about how horrible it is and how difficult the whole process is without talking about the good parts. In general, I do not wish to be writing anything different in genre than what I'm writing now. It's not my ambition to win awards. My ambition is to keep on writing. The conversation turned to symbolic realities, and how nonfiction sometimes creates surfaces that are more deeply meaningful than mere information. McPhee brought up Henri Vaillancourt, the main character in The Survival of the Bark Canoe: I have this set of priorities. The surface of a piece of writing should be very clear water. A young man is making a canoe. The canoe is very beautiful. He is totally and compulsively dedicated to making these canoes. He doesn't use nails, rivets, hammers. He uses four instruments and these canoes don't have a bit of metal in them. That's the surface. There are layers and layers beneath the surface. I mean, what does Henri stand for? He's got high standards, doesn't he? He's completely devoted to one thing. He's a monomaniac, a fantastic craftsman, an artist. His temperament is the artist's temperament. Can you excuse somebody who is an artist? What kind of a discount do you give him? You're off into various levels and channels in many themes that are brought up by the surface. These extra

314 I AMERICAN WRITERS dimensions are what literature is made of and what life is made of. They imply huge complexity. They're ever so important. But in a piece of writing, if they are the surface, the raison d'Stre, I think you have something stillborn. I want these other things to be there in layers under a clear surface. McPhee ran his hand across a granite countertop in his kitchen. The granite was darkly colored like an old oaken desk. The slab had been quarried from the Canadian shield. It was three billion years old, McPhee said, "and still granite." He spoke with some awe at the stability in that part of the shield. Most rocks of such age have been ground up, melted, transformed into something else. McPhee's hand stroked the granite with a craftsman's feel. The granite connects to the piece of North American geology— Chicago to Cheyenne—left out of his geology books, and he plans a "chaser" on the Precambrian basement buried under more recent rocks in Illinois, Iowa, and Nebraska. He seemed to have a reverential attachment to that piece of granite, a stone so permanent that it brought to mind McPhee's life in Princeton. He was born there in 1931 and acquired his desire to become a writer very early in life. His writing has grown and matured, perhaps in part because it has such bedrock beneath it. "I'm still here," he said, "which my daughters think is funny. They think I'm very provincial, and I guess they're right. But I get around a lot."

Selected Bibliography WORKS OF JOHN MCPHEE ESSAYS

A Sense of Where You Are: A Profile of William Warren Bradley. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1965.

The Headmaster: Frank L. Boyden ofDeerfield. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1966. Oranges. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1967. The Pine Barrens. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1968. A Roomful ofHovings and Other Profiles. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1968. Levels of the Game. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969. The Crofter and the Laird. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1970. Encounters with the Archdruid. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1971. The Deltoid Pumpkin Seed. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1973. The Curve of Binding Energy. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1974. Pieces of the Frame. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1975. The Survival of the Bark Canoe. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1975. Coming into the Country. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977. Giving Good Weight. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1979. Basin and Range. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1981. In Suspect Terrain. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1983. La Place de la Concorde Suisse. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1984. Table of Contents. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1985. Rising from the Plains. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1986. The Control of Nature. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1989. Looking for a Ship. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1990. "TALK OF THE TOWN" STORIES FROM THE NEW YORKER

"Big Plane." February 19, 1966, 28. Two Commissioners" (Thomas Moving). March 5, 1966, 33. "Coliseum Hour." March 12, 1966, 44. "Beauty and Horror." May 28, 1966, 28. "Girl in a Paper Dress." June 25, 1966, 20. "On the Way to Gladstone." July 9, 1966, 17. "Ms and FeMs at the Biltmore." July 12, 1966. "The License Plates of Burning Tree." January 30, 1971,20. 4

JOHN MCPHEE I 315 "Three Gatherings" (Americans). December 25, 1971, 25. "The Conching Rooms." May 13, 1972, 32. "Sullen Gold." March 25, 1974, 32. "Flavors & Fragrances." April 8, 1974, 35. "Police Story." July 15, 1974, 27. " Time' Covers, NR." October 28, 1974, 40. "The P-1800." February 10, 1975, 30. "In Virgin Forest." July 6, 1987, 21-23. "Release." September 28, 1987, 28-32. "Altimeter Man." September 25, 1989, 48-50. OTHER NONFICTION

"It's Collegiate—but Is It Humor?" New York Times Magazine, May 25, 1952, 17, 58. "The People of New Jersey's Pine Barrens." National Geographic, January 1974, 52-77. "The Upper 1." Vogue, April 1979, 248, 315. REPRINTED MATERIALS

Wimbledon: A Celebration. New York: Viking, 1972. The John McPhee Reader. Edited and with an introduction by William L. Howarth. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1976. The Pine Barrens Illustrated. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1981. Alaska: Images of the Country. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1981. Outcroppings. Introduction and text by John McPhee, edited by Christopher Merrill. Layton, Utah: Gibbs Smith, 1988. SHORT FICTION

"The Fair of San Gennaro." Transatlantic Review, Winter 1961, 117-128. Reprinted in Stories from the Transatlantic Review. Edited by Joseph F. McCrindle. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970. Pp. 223-232. "Eucalyptus Trees." Reporter, October 19, 1967, 36-39. "Ruth, the Sun is Shining." Playboy, April 1968, 114-116, 126, 186. BIBLIOGRAPHY Clark, Joanne K. "The Writings of John Angus McPhee: A Selected Bibliography." Bulletin of Bibliography: 45-51 (January-March 1981).

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL STUDIES Baker, John F. "John McPhee." Publishers Weekly, January 3, 1977, 12-13. Beem, Edgar Allen. "John McPhee on Maine: Conversation with the Archjournalist." Maine Times, November 1, 1985, 14-16. Brown, Spencer. "The Odor of Durability." Sewanee Review: 146-152 (Winter 1978). DeMott, Benjamin. "Two Reporters: At Peace and War." The Atlantic, January 1978, 91-93. Devouring a Small Country Inn." Time, March 12, 1979, 70. Drabelle, Dennis. "Conversations with John McPhee." Sierra, October-November-December 1978, 61-63. Dunkel, Tom. "Pieces of McPhee." New Jersey Monthly, August 1986, 37-39, 41-51. Eason, David. "The New Journalism and the ImageWorld." In Literary Journalism in the Twentieth Century. Edited by Norman Sims. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990. Hall, Donald. "Johnny Can Write." National Review, March 31, 1978: 412-13. Hamilton, Joan. "An Encounter with John McPhee." Sierra, May-June 1990, 50-55, 92, 96. Hoagland, Edward. "Where Life Begins Over." New York Times Book Review, November 27, 1977: 1, 48-49. Howarth, William. Introduction to The John McPhee Reader. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1976. . "Itinerant Passages; Recent American Essays." Sewanee Review: 633-644 (Fall 1988). Leonard, John. "Books of The Times." New York Times, November 25, 1977, sec. 3,23. Lounsberry, Barbara. "John McPhee's Levels of the Earth." In The Art of Fact: Contemporary Artists of Nonfiction. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1990. Schwartz, Tony. "Establishing the Levels of the Game." More, July-August 1976, 38-42. Shenker, Israel. "The Annals of McPhee." New York Times, January 11, 1976, sec. 11, 20-21. Sims, Norman. "The Literary Journalists." Introduction to The Literary Journalists. New York: Ballantine, 1984. Pp. 3-25. Singular, Stephen. "Talk with John McPhee." New York Times Book Review. November 27, 1977, 1, 50-51.

316 I AMERICAN WRITERS Smith, Kathy. "John McPhee Balances the Act." In Literary Journalism in the Twentieth Century, edited by Norman Sims. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990. Smyth, Jeannette. "John McPhee of The New Yorker." Washington Post, March 19, 1978, LI, L5-6.

Weber, Ronald. "Letting Subjects Grow: Literary Nonfiction from The New Yorker." Antioch Review, 486-499 (Fall 1978). Reprinted in Ronald Weber, The Literature of Fact: Literary Nonfiction in American Writing. Athens Ohio University Press, 1980.

—NORMAN SIMS

James Merrill 1926-1995

L

1947, having written his undergraduate thesis on Proust. He taught at Bard College in 1948, and at various later times has taught briefly at Amherst, the University of Wisconsin, Washington University in St. Louis, and Yale University. Merrill was elected to the American Institute of Arts and Letters in 1971, and raised to the more exclusive Academy in 1989. He has been awarded honorary degrees from Amherst and Yale, and in 1986 was named Poet Laureate of Connecticut. In 1954, he moved with his companion David Jackson to Stonington, Connecticut, a picturesque seacoast village; they purchased a building on Water Street, restored its upper floors, and have lived there ever since. For two decades starting in 1964, Merrill and Jackson spent part of each year in Greece; since 1979 they have wintered in Key West. His different homes, and the displacements and discoveries of his travels, are the subject of many poems. But the domestic focus of his work has at its heart—in ways both overt and implicit, descriptive and symbolic—the wrenching upheaval of his adolescence: the divorce. It would be absurd to reduce Merrill's genius to any formula. In fact, if any word describes his temperament, it is "mercurial." If any word describes the shape of his career, it is "surprising." Few readers would have anticipated that the author of Merrill's early books, with their exquisite, highly wrought lyrics, would have

N 1939, WHEN James Merrill was thirteen, his parents divorced. Because his father was a powerful financier, the co-founder of the famous brokerage house of Merrill, Lynch, and the man who had turned down President Roosevelt's request that he become secretary of the treasury, the divorce trial was front-page news, even in The New York Times. Its effect on the child was sad but not extraordinary—except insofar as it came to shape one of the most imaginative and esteemed poetic minds in American literature. James Merrill was born in New York City on March 3, 1926, the son of Charles E. Merrill and his second wife, Hellen Ingram. His privileged childhood was passed in a city brownstone and a Long Island estate. "It strikes me now maybe," he told me in an interview (collected in Recitative) in 1982, "that during much of my childhood I found it difficult to believe in the way my parents lived. They seemed so utterly taken up with engagements, obligations, ceremonies. . . . The excitement, the emotional quickening / felt in those years came usually through animals or nature, or through the servants in the house— Colette knew all about that—whose lives seemed by contrast to make such perfect sense.'' He was sent to St. Bernard's and Lawrenceville, and then enrolled at Amherst College, his father's alma mater. During college, he took a year off to serve in the Army, and graduated with the class of

317

318 I AMERICAN WRITERS come to write The Changing Light at Sandover (1982), a gigantic and unnerving epic poem. But both those early lyrics and that late epic—along with the narratives and meditations of his middle period—resolve to a phrase used about Merrill's work by Mirabel 1, one of the characters in the poet's Ouija board trilogy. The strange voice wants to usurp Merrill's, but promises to return him to his 4 'CHRONICLES OF LOVE & LOSS. '' There is no better description of Merrill's achievement than that, not least because it stresses the autobiographical and narrative thrust of Merrill's work, his sense of a life lived and understood over time, and also because it links this poet's two great themes, love and loss. Love is not fully itself until it is lost, until it becomes memory, becomes art. Again and again, in small poems and large, Merrill returns to the greatest loss of love in his life—that occasioned by his parents' divorce. It is as if that split threw into stronger relief a personality split in the poet himself. Certainly his mind prefers doubled perspectives, prefers to be "of two minds" about all matters. And the elegant tensions in his work derive from characteristics we may as well call paternal and maternal. Merrill is as much his mother's boy as he is his father's son, as much the heir to Father Time as to Mother Nature. Mind and style, reason and sensation, idea and fact, America and Europe, Connecticut and Athens, German and French, verse and language, legend and realism—the list could be extended through nearly every impulse in the poems, which tingle with such opposition. But Merrill's ambition is not merely to display the two aspects of his personality, but to reconcile them, as the child's fantasy is to reconcile his waning parents. Merrill's own image for this is the Broken Home, and the truest energies of his work derive from his efforts—and they extend from the delicacies of metaphor to the creation of an entire cosmological mythology—to unite or harmonize the sides of his life those

opposing tendencies represent. Plato says that Love's child is the son of Need and Resource; just so, both the obsessions and inventions at the heart of Merrill's poetry must be attended to. The poet's homosexuality, which is at times his subject and always an influence on his work, may likewise be viewed as a kind of ambivalence, both a need and a resource. But this is to leap ahead. Little of this was apparent at the start of Merrill's career—or it is apparent only in retrospect. His First Poems (1951) were only jeweled examples of the period style; the poet had not yet found his distinctive voice. On the back of First Poem's dust jacket, the publisher advertised recent books by three of its other authors: John Crowe Ransom, Elinor Wylie, and Wallace Stevens. In retrospect, it does not seem an accidental grouping; though not his most important models and certainly not his most enduring, each of these poets did have a crucial bearing on Merrill's early work. In the late 1940's Ransom was the courtly dean of the New Critics, who insisted that a poem represented an action, that its dramatic effects were extensions of its voice, that it unfolded its meanings not by way of discursive logic but by way of an expressive complex of images. The sort of poem that Ransom favored, indeed that was of the prevailing fashion in which Merrill was schooled, most nearly resembled the creative mind itself: sedulous, self-reflective, allusively cultured, having an aloof integrity and an evident, though not necessarily apparent, continuity between its manifold surfaces and its unconscious depths or motives. What was clear from the start and has remained a hallmark of Merrill's career is the sensuous allure of his work's textures, the lapidary brilliance of its imagery, the fluent, refined eloquence of its tone—qualities that complement its thought-provoking designs. This is a side, a decorum of his poetry for whose source Merrill himself has pointed to Elinor Wylie, the first of

JAMES MERRILL I 319 his maternal muses and models. Rather than her sentimental temperament, it was the glazed perfection of her technique that attracted the young Merrill—the miniaturist's adroit prosodic skill, the variety of her gleaming lyric forms. He may even have acquired from Wylie's many expert examples his own enthusiasm for the sonnet form, prominent in his work from his fledgling efforts to the virtuosic instances throughout the trilogy, entitled The Changing Light at Sandover (1982). Whatever his individual success with the form, his most interesting use of it is the sonnet sequences that make up longer single poems. Among them are several of his pivotal poems, "The Broken Home" and "Matinees" from Nights and Days (1966) and The Fire Screen (1969) respectively, and it is curious to note that Merrill returns to the sonnet when dealing with his own childhood, as if he associated the form with its ability both to release and control his autobiographical impulses. The influence of Wallace Stevens is more difficult to summarize because it is more extensive and profound. Stevens endowed Merrill with the joint legacy of Emerson and the symbolists, along with a vocabulary by turns playful and severe, gaudy and abstract, by means of which a poem might seem both charged with thought and absolved from it. That vocabulary, and the exotic or painterly particulars it attended, gave shape to a world Merrill quickly found himself at home in, a world in which the distinction between idea and image is dissolved in metaphor. Without embarrassment or swagger, Stevens had made the creative acts of the imagination the central subject of art; and throughout his career Merrill, too, has turned to the formalities of art and the dreamy play of language, to the mind and the "theater of trope," as types of what George Santayana called "the primary tendencies of our nature and the ultimate possibilities of our soul." The title First Poems is neither as straightfor-

ward nor as modest as it seems. In fact, the book was Merrill's third. The first, privately printed at his father's expense in 1942, was Jim's Book— fifteen poems, eight stories and sketches, an essay on Wylie, and two translations of Baudelaire. The work is remarkably precocious for an author just sixteen, displaying a felicity of diction and conceit. If his range is narrow, usually limited to the Great Themes, that is compensated for by a delicate and winning sophistication. Four years later his second book, The Black Swan, was privately published in Athens. Five of its twelve poems were reprinted a few years later in First Poems, and they are the first manifestation of Merrill's adult voice. There is here a fresh wit that gives a poem surprising depth, but his elaborately devised metrical schemes and the topheavy momentum of glittering details tend to obscure the motives and meaning of the poems. Still, there is a confidence and polish and intelligence at work that are remarkable for a poet not yet out of college, and several features of the book anticipate Merrill's later interests. The contrast between the perceived and reflected worlds is one recurrent theme. And when the speaker of these poems is not invoking a beloved or lost lyrical "you," he usually addresses a child. It is a role Merrill will himself often assume later, and a figure that fascinates him all along. Here the child stands in for a number of possibilities: the innocent soul, the as-yet-unrealized or idealized self, an image of power, a type of the artist, and the agent of love itself, as Eros. The Black Swan's attention is directed mainly at love and its aftermath: on the necessity and impossibility of love, and on the passage of love into memory and art. Clearly, Merrill chose, or had been chosen by, his principal themes from the beginning. As a title, then, First Poems is a misleading description. But it was never meant to be merely that. Instead, it pays homage by way of allusion, an intentionally doubled echo of Rainer Maria Rilke's Erste Gedichte and St6phane Mai lamp's

320 I AMERICAN WRITERS Premiers Potmes. Characteristically, Merrill is turning toward an older heritage and singling out both a French and a German affinity. Temperamentally, Merrill cannot be identified with either of his predecessors. His wry wit has forestalled the stark exaltation of Rilke's "Aufsingen"; his sociable irony and critical intelligence have kept him from assuming a role as ascetic, even as sacerdotal, as Mallarmg's. The type of poem Merrill first wrote declares his marked preference for—to borrow a distinction from W. H. Auden—"mythological" rather than "occasional" poetry; that is, for poems whose overt subjects are universal and impersonal, and whose personal or historical occasions are latent. Of course, throughout his career, Merrill has been drawn to traditional or local myths, indeed, has been obsessed by certain of them; in his later work he has discovered or devised the archetypal dimensions of his past, and in the trilogy he has elaborated a grand mythology for the life of his mind and heart. But in the literal sense of Auden's term, a "mythological" poetry is a wise preference for the young poet especially, whose private feelings and ideas lack the significance that years of living will earn. The myths Merrill sought in Mallarmg and Rilke—the myth of The Word, and the myth of Experience, the one a transformation of the world into art, the other a transumption of an by the world— together constitute the economy of suffering and wisdom, of loss and transcendence that characterizes First Poems. Undoubtedly too Merrill was drawn to Rilke's powers of concentration on the immanent significance of unlikely humble details; it is a quality Merrill later picks out for praise in the work of Eugenio Montale and Elizabeth Bishop. And he learned from Mallarmg's array of exquisite images how to evoke rather than explain: things are known by their essences (as Merrill puts it later, an image is that dram of essence distilled from the flowering field of experience), but defined by their effects. It is evi-

dent, too, from the most ambitious of these First Poems that he had studied Mallarml's ait of blocking poems into episodes of tone and rhythm on the analogy of musical composition. And although it is more apparent later on—in the hermeticism of Nights and Days and Braving the Elements (1972), where the world becomes text—even in First Poems Merrill fashions a poetic language on the principle that words create rather than record their subject, that poems are suggestive networks of elliptical but complementary images. Among the most appealing poems in the book are a series of emblematic meditations on the poet's lot: "The Black Swan," "The Parrot," "The Pelican," and "The Peacock." "Transfigured Bird" has the last word on the matter. The poem is a series of four fables, done in terza rima. In the first, a "child fond of natural things"—a literalist, one might call him— discovers "the eggshell of appearance," broken but glowing, pearly within and blue (the imagination's color) without. In the second section, an older child's microscope examines the fertile yolk's "point of blood," which hatches a "throbbing legend" in his mind. These two planes, the discernible and the unseen, the literal and imaginary, are brought together, sharply and unsettlingly, in the long third section with the introduction of Philippa, a "belle dame sans merci"; her beauty is a thoughtless, regressive power: . . . I must begin To tell her of this music in my touch: Of God who like a little boy with a pin Shall prick a hole in either end of the sky And blow it clean away, the thing within, Away, before it waste, or hatching fly Out of his reach in noisy solitude, Or kill him with the oracle of its eye; Blow all away, the yolk with its X of blood.

JAMES MERRILL I 321 The shelves of jewels away, this drowsing girl At whose hand, away, the shapely animals fed; Till the egg is void of all but pearl-on-pearl Reflections and their gay meanderings; Shall, tiring, burst the shell, let the fragments whirl. "Transfigured Bird" argues that the world imagined is the ultimate good. That argument, however, is neither justified by much practical testimony nor proposed with any absolute conviction. In part, Merrill has not yet discovered the true scope of its exigencies and cost, and certainly not explored its often wrenching autobiographical entanglements. The majority of poems in this first book, by their very protocols, are designed to inhibit such discoveries. Still, the tensions tell. And the two best poems in this volume, "Variations: White Stag, Black Bear" (a poem dedicated to the poet's father) and "Variations: The air is sweetest that a thistle guards," succeed largely because Merrill loosens his metrical grip and allows himself more leeway to develop the implications of his subject. These are more restless and ambitious poems, and wander closer to psychic currents that churn beneath the surface of First Poems. Eight years elapsed between First Poems and the publication of The Country of a Thousand Years of Peace (1959), the longest interval between any two of his collections. During that time, Merrill both traveled around the world (and introduced exotic observations into poems) and settled into Stonington, Connecticut, a small coastal village that prompted a more domestic focus in his poems. He had also written a novel and two plays, and this experience helped him toward a more fluent and inflected line, a more credible and versatile address. The poems in this volume translate the play of mind into the feints of a voice now talking to itself, now explaining to a sympathetic listener. Some of the energy and props of fiction support his new work as well. A

superior narrative skill braces these poems; rhetorical questions, private jokes, lapses and leaps are combined into episodic, knowing accounts that rely on the quirks of character and events, instead of image and hypothesis, to catch up the poem's thematic intentions. There is a technical advance as well in The Country of a Thousand Years of Peace, more sparkle and salt, the mercurial play of mind that comes with technical control. There is a corresponding obliquity too; many of the poems are darkly inspired and unyielding. Not until Water Street (1962) do his poems show a clear-eyed understanding and ironic appreciation of themselves. But here he seems to hesitate before the new and surprising depths he has discovered. Despite their alluring or even learned trappings, many poems in this book pursue what one of them calls "the inner adventure." "Fire Poem" is one. It takes up the conflict between passion and intelligence, between ardor and ashes, the song of once-burned innocence and twice-shy experience. At one point the fire itself speaks: If as I am you know me bright and warm, It is while matter bears, which I live by, For very heart the furnace of its form: By likeness and from likeness in my storm Sheltered, can all things change and changing be The rare bird bedded at the heart of harm. Merrill is writing here about the symbolic function of language to reclaim and transform phenomena, a point he also makes in "The Doodler," whose speaker idly sketches a world of figures on the page's white void. The fullest version of this presiding theme is to be found in the several poems that deal with "glassen surfaces." In "The Octopus," for example, the "vision asleep in the eye's tight trans1 ucence" is compared to an octopus behind an aquarium's plate glass. In another poem, "Some

522 / AMERICAN WRITERS Negatives: X. at the Chateau," the eye is replaced by a camera lens and its 4 'images of images/9 On the other side of the looking glass, the life beneath the life is deeply ambivalent and disturbing, a sometimes threatening source of psychological and emotional engulfment. "In the Hall of Mirrors" takes up the problem of reproduction, and the mirror as the Edenic, silvery version of the self. But the book's best-known poem, "Mirror," is Merrill's fullest account of the dilemma. The poem is a dramatic monologue in the voice of a tall standing mirror, addressed to the wide-open window opposite. It can be read as a debate between the reflective mind and the perceiving eye, or between a perfected but stale art and natural, generational life. But the poem is too astute to deal exclusively with such standard contrasts. Instead, it is a brooding study of frustration and transfiguration. Instead of taking Merrill's preferred role of vulnerable child or artist, the mirror's disembodied voice is that of a surrogate parent, growing old "under an intensity / Of questioning looks." The question is ' 'how to live''—how to come to life, as well as how rightly to live. Between its moralizing prologue and epilogue is a compressed, novelistic account of the mirror's "children," who stand before it with their secrets. As time slowly blisters away the mirror's backing—making it into a sort of window—it yields to a higher power, "a faceless will, / Echo of mine." The self accepts determinism and exaltation, experience and language. It is increasingly characteristic of Merrill's work, here as in later, more accomplished poems, to work not with a set of opposites but with a series of dissolves. The reader is invited to watch the poem's subject through a constantly shifting framework. Some critics take Water Street to be Merrill's decisive collection, the first evidence of his mature style. That distinction more likely belongs to his next book, Nights and Days, but the best poems in Water Street brilliantly predict the sub-

sequent shift. Like Marcel Proust, this book's presiding mentor, Merrill here seeks in childhood, in family or domestic scenes, the sources of his poetic strength. There is a new attention to motivation, the use of involuntary memories, a heightened awareness of the imperfection of the present and the transience of the past. Water Street is in some ways a slighter book than The Country of a Thousand Years of Peace, but its strongest work—"An Urban Convalescence," "A Tenancy," and "Scenes of Childhood"— have an autobiographical emphasis and circumstantial intimacy unlike anything he had written before. The best of his earlier style—its brio, its lavish textures and paradoxes—remains in Water Street, but the poet is now less content with intellectual conceits and more dependent on vivid phenomenal details. The poems tend to question their own assumptions, to revise their attitudes toward the very experience they recount. The effect, for all the opportunities it gives the poet to vary a poem's pace and to manipulate a reader's responses, is one of emotional honesty, an openness that belies the very artistry used to achieve it. This becomes a hallmark of Merrill's best work from here on, and his most affecting poems succeed not because of how they expose or suppress the facts of his life, but because they rely on an intellectual scrupulosity while searching out the truths of the heart. "An Urban Convalescence" finds the poet out for a recuperative walk during which the city becomes an image of his own past: Out for a walk, after a week in bed, I find them tearing up part of my block And, chilled through, dazed and lonely, join the dozen In meek attitudes, watching a huge crane Fumble luxuriously in the filth of years. The speaker broods on the uncaring ravages of time and of a discontented civilization. That theme with its attendant images of demolition

JAMES MERRILL I 323 and fragmentation, of convulsive change and wasting, is the theme of modern poetry itself. But Merrill next introduces a series of ghostly images—a building, an engraving, a woman in Paris—to explore how the world becomes internalized and spiritualized for us. The woman is the embodiment of an idealized city, a dreamy Paris of temps perdu, so unlike the clangorous brutality of New York. Merrill wants to test in this poem how private experience is shaped by myth, an impulse nowhere more apparent (and resolving) than in the last stanzas, where the underworld of memory yields a rueful wisdom, and the past shelters the present: . . . back into my imagination The city glides, like cities seen from the air, Mere smoke and sparkle to the passenger Having in mind another destination Which now is not that honey-slow descent Of the Champs-Elys^es, her hand in his, But the dull need to make some kind of house Out of the life lived, out of the love spent. 4

'An Urban Convalescence'' is not a poem of the Broken Home, whose theme is dispossession, but of the Missing Home, whose theme is selfpossession. From "The House" in First Poems through "18 West llth Street" in Braving the Elements to "The House in Athens" in The Changing Light at Sandover, this series of poems addresses the question of how art stabilizes the passage of time. Style, they tell us, is finally an instrument of discovery and freedom, of reconciliation. Other poems in Water Street orbit these themes. "A Tenancy" is about the poet's occupancy of the house in Stonington. Again, a few casual details prompt a deepening recollection until the reverie emerges into a moralizing resolution. But it seems a more elliptical poem than "An Urban Convalescence." The poet strikes a Faustian deal with himself:

That given a few years more (Seven or ten or, what seemed vast, fifteen) To spend in love, in a country not at war, I would give in return All I had. All? A little sun Rose in my throat. The lease was drawn. That "little sun" is not a child, but a poem, an effective symbol both of the dawning of poetic song and also of the isolation and sacrifice demanded of that gift. The unborn child dominates another poem, "Childlessness," as well. "Scenes of Childhood," though, is superior for its keen understanding of its own disclosures and equivocations. The family romance is at its troubled heart. The poet and his mother are watching home movies of themselves thirty years before, introjected scenes that reveal to the poet past connections and his present relationships, a tiny oedipal melodrama enacted and witnessed by its protagonists. The man's Shadow afflicts us both. Her voice behind me says It might go slower. I work the dials, the film jams. Our headstrong old projector Glares at the scene which promptly Catches fire. Other poems in Water Str*** sceK to house the past and to identify the enclosing shelter of memory with poetry itself. "Scenes of Childhood" is a more private attempt to do the same thing, substituting heroic for domestic images. And the poem introduces a series of dilemmas Merrill confronts in later books with increasing confidence but persistent anxiety. When Nights and Days was given the 1967 National Book Award, the judges (W. H. Auden, James Dickey, and Howard Nemerov) cited Merrill for "his scrupulous and uncompromising cultivation of the poetic art, evidenced in his

324 I AMERICAN WRITERS refusal to settle for any easy or profitable stance; for his insistence on taking the kind of tough, poetic chances which make the difference between esthetic success or failure." Indeed the book displays a range and depth altogether new, and everywhere convincing. It is not a long book; there are only eighteen poems. Five of them remain among his very best. Two of them, "The Thousand and Second Night" and "From the Cupola," are long, demanding, even experimental poems that express the two sides of Merrill's temperament. The first of them is set in Istanbul and Athens, the old world, exotic, seductive, masculine, and at the same time threatening and bracing. The second poem is set in an imagined Connecticut, a world of women and weather, at once demanding, sympathetic, and authoritative. Like "An Urban Convalescence," "The Thousand and Second Night" opens with an illness. It is "the creative malady" familiar from Proust—and here, in the poet's imagined diary entry, it is a kind of facial paralysis that sends him out into the city in search of a cure. What he finds are other versions of the self—each mosque's dome or hamam's marble cell is another "transcendental skull." This is a poem not so much about faces (though it deals with many sides of the notion of facade, of losing face, of masks and styles) as it is a poem about flesh. Or better, about the flesh and the spirit—an old philosophical bone, and abiding poetic theme. Merrill takes the story of the cruel Sultan and his story-telling slave Scheherazade to be a version of the relationship between flesh and spirit: And when the long adventure reached its end, I saw the Sultan in a glass, grown old, While she, his fair wife still, her tales all told, Smiled at him fondly. "O my dearest friend," Said she, "and lord and master from the first, Release me now. Your servant would refresh Her soul in that cold fountain which the flesh

Knows not. Grant this, for I am faint with thirst." And he: "But it is I who am your slave. Free me, I pray, to go in search of joys Unembroidered by your high, soft voice, Along that stony path the senses pave." But this is the poem's end, by which time it is also apparent that the pair are types of the poet's own parents, set apart and reconciled within the poem's own myth. But this image is more dramatically pursued in a later poem, "Lost in Translation" (in Divine Comedies [1976]). In "The Thousand and Second Night," Merrill moves—in a brilliant series of maneuvers that vary prose, crisp quatrains, and free-verse rambles—through a lively meditation of the "mind-body problem." Which is master of the self? Which is the god in masquerade? Anecdotes about a meeting with a stranger in an Athens park, or fanning a stack of old pornographic postcards, or lecturing a class of undergraduates speed the poet through perspectives on the question. The poem's "long adventure," like the soul's in flesh, takes to the seas; structures he had previously looked to for shelter, here become a means of transport: Voyages, I bless you for sore Limbs and mouth kissed, face bronzed and lined, An earth held up, a text not wholly undermined By fluent passages of metaphor. The poet's distrust here of his own powers bespeaks a desire present throughout Nights and Days and perhaps linked with Merrill's having bought a house in Athens, and living in a culture and language foreign to him. It is the desire for unmediated experience, prior to language, or beyond it. This same longing is at the heart of the book's other long, and exceptionally difficult, poem, "From the Cupola." The poem draws on another myth about storytelling, that of Psyche and Eros (as first told by Apuleius). Again, it is

JAMES MERRILL I 325 a story about a divorced couple, but Merrill's focus here is on the nature of desire. His Psyche is a young New England woman, who lives with her two sisters, Gertrude and Alice, all of them originally from the South. Details from Merrill's own life overlap with this imaginary (or projected) history, and the poet has said that the poem took its start from some mysterious letters he began receiving from an admiring reader. The poem, with its eerie incarnations and vatic messages, is the clearest foreshadowing of Merrill's Ouija board epic. "The history of our loves," Santayana once wrote, "is the record of our divine conversations, of our intercourse with heaven." Sexual ecstasy, like the literary sublime, is a metaphor for this sort of possession. It is also helpful to read this poem as a dialogue between the id (or Eros), ego (or Psyche), and superego (the poet himself, who intervenes in the course of things to address his heroine). No poem in the book—and not many in his entire output—is so extreme, so entirely a landscape of phrases. Other poems in Nights and Days take up the same themes, but in more conventional ways. "Time" is one, a disquisition on the concept played out within a sequence of interconnected metaphors (a game of solitaire, mountain climbing, record spinning). Still easier to read, and more heartbreaking, is "Days of 1964" (the first of a series of "Days of" poems that thread through different books, all of them deriving from Constantine Cavafy's erotic poems of Alexandrian life with that formulaic title). The narrative is clear and compelling enough. The poet, enraptured by a new lover, one day finds his devoted housekeeper Kleo dressed and working as a whore. Shaken, he returns to his own lover, but questions now the role of illusion in love, only to have his question stopped by a kiss: I had gone so long without loving, I hardly knew what I was thinking.

Where I hid my face, your touch, quick, merciful, Blindfolded me. A god breathed from my lips, If that was illusion, I wanted it to last long; To dwell, for its daily pittance, with us there, Cleaning and watering, sighing with love or pain. Again a version of the Psyche and Eros story, "Days of 1964" is a poem of consummate narrative skill, its characters and tone vivid, its reflections complex but lightly sketched, wise and surprising. Nights and Days also includes one of Merrill's signature poems, "The Broken Home," a varied sequence of seven sonnets that tells directly the archetypal story that animates all of Merrill's work: "Father Time and Mother Earth, / A marriage on the rocks." One sonnet characterizes each; others comment on their stormy marriage; still others try to calculate the effect of their lives on the child-poet's own. I see those two hearts, I'm afraid, Still. Cool here in the graveyard of good and evil, They are even so to be honored and obeyed. The process of affiliation—of making himself both "time's child" and "earth's no less"—is meant to function as "the unstiflement of the entire story." By making the pain of experience over into art, by distancing his real parents to myth, Merrill again makes a shelter out of the love spent. The Fire Screen is one of Merrill's overlooked books. With a few exceptions, it seems his most occasional collection. But like the others, it shows him of two minds about matters. The long (156 stanzas) ballad that anchors the book, "The Summer People," though set in a fictional Maine seacoast town (called Caustic!), is based on village life in Merrill's Stonington. (He returns to the ballad form, and even more successfully, in "Days of 1935" in his next book, Braving the

326 / AMERICAN WRITERS Elements [1972], and he may have been inspired to write these poems by the example of Elizabeth Bishop's ballad, "The Burglar of Babylon.") 4 'Figures in a ballad," the poem comments, "Lend themselves to acts / Passionate and simple." But that is precisely what Merrill does not do. He uses the "primitive" form to handle sophisticated subject matter—domestic tangles (including a suicide) among a group of six villagers that is part E. F. Benson, part Lady Murasaki. If "The Summer People" is set in America, most of the book transpires in Greece. The selfconscious, virtuosic ballad is offset by poems that celebrate the life of the senses. "To My Greek," for instance, a witty tribute to both language and lovers, longs for Those depths the surfacer Lives, when he does, alone to sound and sound. The barest word be what I say in you. "Sound" here means both to versify and to know. What Merrill wants is, as he has said, meaning relieved of sense. It is to sensuality he looks for that; there are tortured love poems in this volume—"An Abdication," "The Envoys," "Remora." But he also looks to the vitality of the unexamined life, in such poems as the dramatic monologue "Kostas Tympakianakis," or "Ouzo for Robin" (addressed to the poet's nephew Robin Magowan). The most exquisite of these poems is the short lyric "Another August." It is in three sections—the first in prose, the second in free verse, and the third, an envoi, a rhymed quatrain. The effect is musical, like a recitative, arioso, and cabaletta. The poem is Proustian, and takes as its text the old catchphrase "One swallow doesn't make a summer," in order to explore how things change in order to remain the same. The poem opens with a return, to Greece, to "so much former strangeness" the "glaze of custom" by now has made home. The second section remembers a wrenching love af-

fair, but then turns to the self, seeking to efface pain by memory: Open the shutters. Let variation abandon the swallows one by one. How many summer dusks were needed to make that single skimming form! The very firefly kindles to its type. Here is each evening's lesson. First the hour, the setting. Only then the human being, his white shirtsleeve chalked among tree trunks, round a waist, or lifted in an entrance. Look for him. Be him. Having receded into nature, become an unfeeling "type," he can afford the envoi's farewell, spoken to the lover: Whom you saw mannerless and dull of heart, Easy to fool, impossible to hurt, I wore that fiction like a fine white shirt And asked no favor but to play the part. Playing a part, the whole sense that life is fiction in disguise, has fascinated Merrill throughout his career. The mythologies of the self dramatized by Proust or Sigmund Freud make sense of these poems, though they cannot be reduced to their formulas. Merrill's poems instinctively recognize the limited repertory of drives we are motivated by, and the roles our emotions assume. It is why the opera has always seemed to him, and been used by him as, a sure model of the inner life—melodramatic, intense, at times ridiculous, at times sublime. Two magical poems about the opera are center stage in The Fire Screen. "The Opera Company" concerns the goings-on in another house, especially the professional rivalry of two sopranos, whose voices now, on memory's scratchy old recording, "soar and mix, will not be told apart." Opera for Merrill is a feminine world, a stagy one of outsize "counterfeit emotions," and also of heartbreaking gestures of renunciation for love,

JAMES MERRILL I 327 and of self-sacrifice. "Matinees," a sequence of eight sonnets, is an enchanting poem about the way a young boy's morals are corrupted by opera—that is to say, brought to maturity by art. It is art that helps us to our emotions, both to have and understand them.

tioned, along with their advice on how to manage one's boredom with life. One suggests soaking the messages off all his old postcards— the images remain, language is washed away. When the poet tries this with a card from his mother, it does not work:

The point thereafter was to arrange for one's Own chills and fever, passions and betrayals, Chiefly in order to make song of them.

Chances are it was Some simple matter of what ink she used,

He is led to these revelations in the poem not just by the performers, but by his mother and a society dowager, Mrs. Livingston, to whose opera box he was invited. There are other maternal muse figures in this book, among them Maria Mitsotdki, the subject of "Words for Maria," and later a central character in the Sandover trilogy. But the crucial poem in The Fire Screen, and the source of the book's title, is "Mornings in a New House." Like the earlier "Scenes of Childhood," the poem projects the psychic outlines of a mother-and-son relationship, at once operatic (with its overtones of Briinnhilde) and autobiographical. The screen here is no longer a movie screen, but the fire screen on which the poet's mother had stitched her mother's house. He stands there . . . Still vaguely chilled, Guessing how even then her eight Years had foreknown him, nursed him, all, Sewn his first dress, sung to him, let him fall, Howled when his face chipped like a plate. This is what Freud would call a "dream screen," the projection of other, fearsome memories. What he most fears is what he seems to celebrate about the opera: the foreknown, the overdetermined. This fear is the subtext of The Fire Screen's other strong poem, "The Friend of the Fourth Decade," another sonnet sequence, this time in couplets. The titular friend is, of course, the poet himself—though other friends are men-

And yet her message remained legible, The memories it stirred did not elude me. I put my postcards back upon the shelf. Certain things die only with oneself. This sense Merrill cultivates pf being the vessel of experience, of having been imprinted, is important to any understanding of his work. The most obvious instance of it is the Ouija board trilogy, in which the poet literally receives messages, and in which atoms and angels are identical. This kind of wise passivity resonates everywhere, and nowhere more mysteriously than in his most hermetic book, Braving the Elements. Rather than attempt any stylistic change, as other poets might (Robert Lowell, say, or James Wright), Merrill has always sought new experience in order to give his work both new material and direction. The landscape of the American Southwest and the ghostly presence of a new lover there loom in this book like the giant rock formations in Monument Valley—"the crazy shapes things take," as the poet puts it in his poem (a rather Frostian parable) about that place. Many of the poems in this collection are private, resolute, abstract, heraldic; they resist the intelligence almost successfully, as Wallace Stevens said. The natural history of America, above all a violent one, manifests itself in Merrill's references to the political terrorism of the 1%0's. Loss dominates the book. These poems rise from the ashes; they recount experience "after the fire.'' Those fires are oedipal or passional, erotic or psychic, and from each the poet with-

325 / AMERICAN WRITERS draws, most often into style itself, the screen of language. The volume's dedicatory poem is "Log," a prayer that things be brought to light. The next poem is "After the Fire," and recounts a fire in the poet's house in Athens (as another poem in the book, "18 West llth Street," concerns the bombing of the poet's childhood home). "After the Fire" indicates the start of a new book, of course, after The Fire Screen (other of Merrill's book titles are elemental), but the poem also revisits the scene and characters of an earlier poem, "Days of 1964." Merrill's poems do this continually, enacting his basic impulse to revise or reconstitute the past. Again we are introduced to Kleo the housemaid, and now to her aging mother and wastrel son, a sleazy character who, it turns out, during a tryst set fire to the poet's house. As Kleo is a type of the long-suffering mother, her son is a skewed version of the poet himself. Under the guise of a Chekhovian comedy, Merrill can once again explore his themes of love's enriching blindness and knowledge's merciless hindsight. The snuffed-out candle-ends grow tall and shine, Dead flames encircle us, which cannot harm, The table's spread, she croons, and I Am kneeling pressed to her old burning frame. Other poems take up old, burned-out loves. "Strata in Plaster" and "Days of 1971" do so humorously; "Fldche d'Or" (the title is that of a train, but also a homonym for "flesh door") does so eerily. A current, diffident lover seems to have been the inspiration behind those poems set in the Southwest: "Under Libra: Weights and Measures," "In Nine Sleep Valley," and the first part of "Up and Down." These and other poems such as "The Black Mesa," where the landscape itself speaks, are as difficult a group of poems as Merrill has ever written, recessed and encoded. He drives his style hard here; its intensities and harmonies are thrilling, and not a little

dizzying. The final poem in the book, "Syrinx," can stand in here for a hermeticism that suffuses the book. Syrinx was the nymph pursued by Pan, and turned by Zeus into reeds, from which Pan fashioned his pipe. In Merrill's extraordinary poem she is turned into other things as well, including a mathematical equation and the solfege scale ("Who puts his mouth to me / Draws out the scale of love and dread— / O ramify, sole antidote!"). Pan here is "the great god Pain," and his panpipes become a flute (Debussy's, no doubt, who wrote a solo with the same title) Whose silvery breath-tarnished tones No longer rivet bone and star in place Or keep from shriveling, leather round a stone, The sunbather's precocious apricot Or stop the four winds racing overhead Nought Waste Eased Sought There are, of course, less demanding poems in the book. "Days of 1935," for example, is a bravura ballad about an imaginary kidnapping, another example, as well, of Merrill's circling the oedipal drama. A more direct, and rather more sentimental, version of it occurs in the second section of "Up and Down," called "The Emerald." The poet and his mother descend to her bank vault, where she presents him with a ring. " 'Here, take it for—/For when you marry.' " But, looking at the emerald, the poet thinks Indeed this green room's mine, my very life. We are each other's; there will be no wife; The little feet that patter here are metrical. And he slips the ring onto her finger. "Wear it for me," the poet silently tells her, "Until— until the time comes. Our eyes meet. / The world beneath the world is brightening." "Dreams

JAMES MERRILL I 329 About Clothes" is likewise about an inheritance, and deals with the father (here disguised as a dry cleaner named Art). The poet's dream-plea is at once a boast about his preference for "the immaterial/' and a confession of his doubts: Tell me something, Art. You know what it's like Awake in your dry hell Of volatile synthetic solvents. Won't you help us brave the elements Once more, of terror, anger, love? Seeing there's no end to wear and tear Upon the lawless heart, Won't you as well forgive Whoever settles for the immaterial? Don't you care how we live? The peace the poet tries to make here with his parents, with his past, is a tentative, wary one. But the project Merrill next, and unwittingly, embarks on, finally makes that peace by taking his past up into a grand mythology of memory, a high romance of reconciliation. Divine Comedies, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1977, may be the single most resplendent of Merrill's individual collections. Its verse combines the conversational fluency of The Fire Screen with the oracular density of Braving the Elements. The major poems in the volume's first part bring to perfection his preference for the poem of middle length, between one hundred and three hundred lines, with an elegant maze of narrative, a metrical array, and daunting range of allusions. The four preeminent poems in this first part of Divine Comedies—"Lost in Translation," "Chimes for Yahya," "Yfcmina," and "Verse for Urania"—are all reminiscences or reveries, their narratives shuttling between past event and present meditation. Their tone is one of autumnal resignation, rather like that of Shakespeare's late harmonic romances. (The publication of Divine Comedies coincided with the poet's fiftieth birthday.) Each of the poems

involves some sort of trip, literal or figurative, so that their recurring plot is the voyage of selfdiscovery, during which the poet tours his own past, in settings local or exotic. "Chimes for Yahya" opens and closes in Merrill's Athens home, but opens out to and closes in on a recuperative stay in Esfahan, Iran, decades earlier, with a chieftain prince. The poem can be read as a mock nativity ode whose playful epiphany becomes an emblem of "the pain so long forgiven / It might as well be pleasure I rise in.'' The prince in this poem is a mild, beneficent counterpart to the tyrant Ali Pasha in "Y&inina," both of them types of the father. Screened by metaphors of dream, shadow play, and magician's tent, "Y£nnina" reconstructs the shifting images of feminine and masculine, each split between the destructive and the seductive. That split informs the broken-home theme, which again is the setting for "Lost in Translation," likely destined to be Merrill's signature poem. The jigsaw puzzle which the young Merrill and his governess piece together—during a time when "A summer without parents is the puzzle / Or should be"—is a tableau of yet another "Sheik with beard / And flashing sword hilt," attended by "a dark-eyed woman veiled in mauve." The child wonders . . . whom to serve And what his duties are, and where his feet, And if we'll find, as some before us did, That piece of Distance deep in which lies hid Your tiny apex sugary with sun, Eternal Triangle, Great Pyramid! The way we translate life to art, art to life, as if they were each a language indifferently learned but unhesitatingly spoken, is the animating energy behind this brilliant, affecting work, which resolves itself in language—a scene of instruction in which Rilke puzzles out a translation of Paul Val&y's "Palme," sacrificing felicity for sense:

330 I AMERICAN WRITERS But nothing's lost. Or else: all is translation And every bit of us is lost in it (Or found—I wander through the ruin of S Now and then, wondering at the peacefulness) And in that loss a self-effacing tree, Color of context, imperceptibly Rustling with its angel, turns the waste To shade and fiber, milk and memory. The subject of "Lost in Translation," the poet's relationship to his own past, is slightly deflected in "Verse for Urania" but only in order to provide a still more penetrating and embracing meditation on time. The poem is addressed to the infant daughter of his Greek-born, tooAmericanized tenants in Stonington on the occasion of her baptism. She is the poet's godchild, perhaps even a type of the Divine Child that Jung considered the most constant and potent symbol of the self in fullest potentiality, and thus a poignant reminder of one's unfulfilled desires. That this child's name is also that of the muse of astronomy and cosmologicaJ poetry allows the poet to roam to other details, both abstruse and homely. Since "the first myth was Measure," the very rhythms of life, like those of verse, "Prevail, it might be felt, at the expense / Of meaning, but as well create, survive it." All things pass—"Such is the test of time that all things pass"—only to return upon themselves, and Merrill would hold with Friedrich Nietzsche that he "who consents to his own return participates in the divinity of the world.'' That is what this poem finally celebrates. We are the time we pass through, in a measured design greater than either, as Merrill tells his godchild: It was late And early. I had seen you through shut eyes. Our bond was sacred, being secular: In time embedded, it in us, near, far, Flooding both levels with the same sunrise.

The second half of Divine Comedies is entirely taken up with "The Book of Ephraim," a poem of nearly one hundred pages, arranged into twenty-six abecedarian sections to match the letters of the Ouija board. For two decades, Merrill and his companion David Jackson had been sitting down to the Ouija board, enthralled by their conversations with the dead, and especially with their contact or medium, Ephraim, a Greek Jew, born in Asia Minor in A.D. 8, later a favorite of Tiberius on Capri, and killed by the imperial guard at age twenty-eight for having loved the monstrous Caligula. There are precedents among poets for this sort of spiritualism—one recalls Victor Hugo's sessions at the table parlante or Yeats's correspondence with his familiar spirit Leo Africanus—but it is a risky subject. Throughout, Merrill incorporates his own sceptical doubts, in order to forestall a reader's. Did Merrill himself "believe" in these voices—or not voices actually, but messages, spelled out letter by letter with a teacup's handle? At one point he is told (in the upper case that transcribes a message)"ALL / THESE OUR CONVERSATIONS COME FROM MEMORY & WORD BANKS / TAPPD IN U." And to an interviewer Merrill once explained: Well, don't you think there comes a time when everyone, not just a poet, wants to get beyond the self? To reach, if you like, the "god" within you? The board, in however clumsy or absurd a way, allows for precisely that. Or if it's still yourself that you're drawing upon, then that self is much stranger and freer and more farseeing than the one you thought you knew. Merrill was not aware, when he wrote "The Book of Ephraim," that it was only the first part of a much longer encounter with the spirit world, and that subsequent demands on his credulity and imagination (and on his reader's) would be much greater. Merrill had hinted at his interest in the Ouija

JAMES MERRILL I 331 board before, in such early poems as "Voices from the Other World" (in The Country of a Thousand Years of Peace), perhaps "From the Cupola," in his short story "Driver" (1962), and most notably in a long episode in his 1957 novel The Seraglio. But in "The Book of Ephraim" we have the whole story. Its telling transpires over the course of a year (1974) which includes both the events of the composition itself and the odd coincidences of a novel, now lost, that Merrill had planned to write—as well as the revelations Merrill and Jackson entertained throughout the twenty years that they used the board. The story began in 1955, when "We had each other for communication / And all the rest. The stage was set for Ephraim." Slowly the formula of the Other World is divulged, a scheme not dissimilar to Orphic, Platonic, or Vedic analogues. This formula holds that, while alive, each of us is the representative of a patron beyond, who attends to us only when, after death, we are recycled into other lives—"the quick seamless change of body-stocking"—which recurs until we are sufficiently purged of life to begin the divine nine-stage ascent, where we assume the age "AT WHICH IT FIRST SEEMS CREDIBLE TO DIE" and, patrons now ourselves, rise in station through degrees of "PEACE FROM REPRESENTATION." None of this becomes dogmatic, as Ephraim tells them, "U ARE SO QUICK MES CHERS I FEEL WE HAVE / SKIPPING THE DULL CLASSROOM DONE IT ALL / AT THE SALON LEVEL.'' In fact, though his gossip about the greats, from Mozart to Montezuma, is always engagingly witty, Ephraim spells out his answers to guide his devotees toward an understanding of themselves, to prompt them in their parts on the world's stage. For Merrill and Jackson, their life with Ephraim (a psychiatrist in the poem terms it their folie d deux) parallels their life with each other—gradually domesticated in two villages (Stonington and Athens), on Grand Tours (for

which long passages of the poem provide beautifully detailed views), undergoing the difficult dynamics of intimacy, disillusion, and endurance. Ephraim begins as tour guide, and eventually becomes friend and co-conspirator. We were not toughOr literal-minded, or unduly patient With those who were. Hadn't—from books, from living— The profusion dawned on us, of "languages" Any one of which, to who could read it, Lit up the system it conceived?—bird-flight, Hallucinogen, chorale and horoscope: Each its own world, hypnotic, many-sided Facet of the universal gem. Ephraim's revelations—we had them For comfort, thrills and chills, "material." He didn't cavil. He was the revelation (Or if we had created him, then we were). The point—one twinkling point by now of thousands— Was never to forego, in favor of Plain dull proof, the marvelous nightly pudding. Two references within the poem are important glosses on the significance of "belief." At one point, Merrill reminds us that Stevens imagined the imagination And God as one; the imagination, also As that which presses back, in parlous times, Against "the pressure of reality." But Stevens actually posits the imaginer as God, which might encourage us to read the poem as an intricately displaced hymn of praise to the creative power—at an abstract level, of the imagination itself, and at an autobiographical level, of Merrill's own. The other reference draws us still closer to the poem's deeper purposes. Later in the poem Merrill echoes the earlier citation: Jung says—or if he doesn't, all but does— That God and the Unconscious are one. Hm.

332 I AMERICAN WRITERS The lapse tides us over, hither, yon; Tide that laps us home away from home. Among the many prospective patrons for this poem—Plato, Dante, Proust, Stevens, Auden— it is Carl Jung who presides, especially the later sage of Answer to Job and Memories, Dreams, Reflections. Again, Merrill has obscured his source's qualification, for Jung himself says that "strictly speaking, the God-image does not coincide with the unconscious as such, but with a special content of it, namely the archetype of the self." Jung thought of us all as "representatives" of the collective unconscious—what the ancients called the "sympathy of all things" and what Ephraim calls "the surround of the living"—personified in the anima-figure who communicates with consciousness through primordial images that reveal as much of life as has ever been lived or imagined. To that extent, each of us contains and transmits "another world"— the dead living in us. Lost paradises, said Proust, are the only true ones. Compared with its two massive successors, Mirabell: Books of Number (1978) and Scripts for the Pageant (1980), "The Book of Ephraim" may be seen as merely a prelude. The sheer delight the poem affords is overbalanced by the sublime instructions of the two subsequent panels of The Changing Light of Sandover, which complete the trilogy. But its tone, its verse schemes, its cast of characters, make it the most immediately appealing of the three. The title of the volume, Divine Comedies, points to Dante, though the poem's tone often recalls the Pope of the Dunciad, the romantic exuberance of a Byron or Auden. The theme of "The Book of Ephraim," says Merrill at the start, is "the incarnation and withdrawal of / A god.'' The main prop or stage for this process is a Ouija board (its arc of letters a trope for language itself) and a mirror (a trope for the self)- Out of such instruments of the imagination, Merrill has made a

whole world that alludes to this one, like Plato's definition of time as "a moving image of eternity." No discussion of this poem, or of the entire trilogy, can do justice to its parquetry and prosody. At one point, Merrill compares the give-and-take between realism, ours and Theirs, to the texture of verse itself: the enlightened power of art's own second nature like "rod upon mild silver rod." Auden's The Sea and the Mirror comes to mind as a similar, though less ambitious (Merrill's trilogy, after all, comes to seventeen thousand lines), example of a long poem whose cumulative impact derives, in part, from its dramatic variety of styles and verse forms. Blank verse, odes, sonnets, terza rima, couplets, canzones—the trilogy is a virtual anthology of received and invented forms. Merrill's particular genius lies in his use of metrics and darting rhymes to explicate his elaborate syntax, of puns or enjambment to create an enriching lexical ambivalence. His timing, his poise, his instinct for allowing experience to discover itself in language are impeccable. In a review of Divine Comedies, the critic Harold Bloom said (in a New Republic review) that "Ephraim" could not be overpraised, "as nothing since the greatest writers of our century equals it in daemonic force," and he predicted that the poetic results of Merrill's occult journey, "should they equal or go beyond The Book of Ephraim,' will make him the strangest, the most unnerving of all this country's poets." But few readers could have anticipated—the poet himself did not—what came next. Merrill's association with the occult intensified; unexpected encounters at the Ouija board followed the publication of "Ephraim"; new powers were both revealed to and granted the poet. At two-year intervals, further installments of his epic poem appeared. First came Mirabell, its subtitle, Books of Number, an indication of its format which, instead of the board's letters, takes its numerals to organize the poem's ten major divisions. The poem is

JAMES MERRILL I 333 twice as long as "Ephraim," and more than twice as complex. Numbers play a further role in its complications. Two new major characters are introduced: the shades of Auden and Maria Mitsotdki (a friend to Merrill and Jackson in Athens), a pair easily seen as a parental couple. The sessions at the Ouija board are hijacked by fourteen creatures, who appear to the dead as hideous batlike beings and are subsequently revealed to be subatomic particles. One of their number, whom we know as 741, replaces Ephraim as interlocutor, and conducts his listeners, living and dead (the five of them now engaged in what is called their "V WORK"), through a series of seminars on matters that range from creations previous to ours and the chemical composition of humankind, to the nature of the atom, the universe, the fall, the soul, heaven, hell, and earth. Explanations are dense, sometimes contradictory, always astonishing. As a cosmogony, Merrill's far outdoes Milton's and Dante's. He, or his informants, are intent to reveal nothing less than the "FORMULAS GOVERNING HUMAN LIFE." The book is an account of these formulas, and of the receiving and ordering of them by the poet during 1976. That is to say, the poem includes his reluctance, resistance, skepticism, and wonder, thereby making of otherworldly revelation a human drama. And when the discussion comes around to manners, there is a remarkable transformation: 741 turns into a peacock, and is given the name Mirabell by his human friends. There follows another set of lessons on the nature of life and the elements. (Each of the five main characters has assumed the attributes of an element: JM is air, DJ is nature, WHA is earth, MM is water, and 741 is fire.) To demonstrate there is "NO ACCIDENT," but that everything is part of God Biology's scheme, examples are brought forward of various relationships (cause to effect, for instance) and phenomena (DNA, say, or dreamwork). These lessons are as much masque as seminar, and instruction is mingled

with villanelle or ode. The poem concludes with ten more revelations, their splendor rising as (in the Stonington house where this all takes place) a hurricane rages—until, at the very end, a strange new and powerful voice commands our attention, and clearly anticipates the next installment. "Why should we fear to be crushed by savage elements," Emerson asked in his 1852 essay "Fate," "we who are made up of the same elements? Let us build to the Beautiful Necessity, which . . . educates . . . to the perception that there are no contingencies." Nature is Merrill's concern in Mirabell, as history was in "Ephraim," and mind will be in Scripts. And contingency is his text in Mirabell, as power is in "Ephraim," and sense is in Scripts. But it may be fairer to say that power drives all three poems. In a literary translation, we are talking about the poet's ascent to the sublime: his encounter with imaginative power at its most uncanny; in Emerson's phrase, "the deep power" that is the soul's own final, enormous claim. This power can be daemonic or divine; it may sometimes be internalized or idealized, and thereby involve the self's compensatory response to loss, as it does throughout Merrill's trilogy—his greatest effort to reconcile, to bring his parental forces back together again. The stillness of the dictees, the occult panoply and scared precincts, passages of dread, distortions of time and space, the solemnity of ''GREAT ORIGINAL IDEAS"—these all give the trilogy a faintly gothic air, and provide critical moments when the poet is, as he says, imbued with otherness. At the very end of Mirabell, for example, after the refrains of doubt and fear, the life-and-death issues, the poem rises to an eerie quiet that modulates from suspense to surrender. There has been a daylong vigil for an angel. In the final minutes of that "hour when Hell shall render what it owes," the sun is about to set, and an emblematic gull rises over the waters.

334 I AMERICAN WRITERS The message hardly needs decoding, so Sheer the text, so innocent and fleet These overlapping pandemonia: Birdlife, leaf play, rockface, waterglow Lending us their being, till the given Moment comes to render what we owe. The book might have ended here, its final word an echo of the word that had opened the poem ("Oh very well, then"), but it does not. The shapeliness of the poem is broken, and a new voice—a voice whose long, imperious lines we learn belong to the archangel Michael— commandeers the poem, replaces the voice of the poet with an *4epic" voice totally other than Merrill's, and ends the book on an unprecedented high note of its own: GOD IS THE ACCUMULATED, INTELLIGENCE IN CELLS SINCE THE DEATH OF THE FIRST DISTANT CELL. WE RESIDE IN THAT INTELLIGENCE I AM MICHAEL I HAVE ESTABLISHED YOUR ACQUAINTANCE & ACCEPT YOU LOOK! LOOK INTO THE RED EYE OF YOUR GOD! This is one of what Wordsworth named the "extraordinary calls" of the sublime. And it could be added that the Ouija board considered as a terrain—and it is by Merrill, who even maps it—is the most compelling trope for the sublime since the rugged mountain heights of Romantic landscape, an occult sublime having replaced a "natural" sublime. This ascent to the upper case of higher meaning, this access to power, comes at a price: the sublimation of the self. At the end of Mirabell, Merrill first surrenders himself to the symbolic scene's sheer text, and then surrenders his voice, or poetic control. Such moments of obliteration

and exaltation, of withdrawal and incarnation, are deeply ambivalent for this poet. They are both cultivated and resisted. Power terrifies and charges. Merrill's uneasiness helps shape the trilogy. Often the telling of the poem, both its plot and its style, depends on tones that counter the sublime, that evade or undermine it. The whole domestic side of the poem does so. When the poem's mythical undertones or divine injunctions elevate the planchette into a holier-than-thou grail, we are quickly reminded of two human hands on a dime-store teacup. Another of these inhibiting tones is the poem's psychological realism, its exhaustions, anxieties, or skepticism. And a third is the beautiful. In Merrill's case, this is synonymous with style itself, with his language's imagistic resistance to "some holy flash past words." His style is willing to try on anything that fits—allusive, witty, ironic, tender; rhetorically intricate and metrically ingenious; extremely composed and sociable—that is to say, always aware of itself addressing a subject, being attended to by an audience. The opposite, in other words, of the egotistical (or narcissistic) sublime; it is a style happier with sensuous detail than with abstract discourse or hieratic utterance. Merrill can describe his own poem (as he does late in "Ephraim") as continually drawing him toward, and insulating him from, the absolute, or sublime mode. In a sense, then, Merrill's trilogy is of two minds about itself—the poet's and the poem's. When told of his affinities with the element of air in Mirabell, Merrill is further reminded that his true vocation is for MIND & ABSTRACTION—THE REGION OF STARRY THOUGHT COOLER THAN SWIFTER THAN LIGHTER THAN EARTH. Yet throughout the trilogy he refuses, or wants to refuse, such a calling. His temperamental diffidence in "Ephraim" grows into a nagging reluctance in the face of the sublime task in Mirabell,

JAMES MERRILL I 335 until finally resistance itself becomes the subject of Scripts for the Pageant—indeed, its very format, YES & NO. Those two responses, plus the ampersand that both separates and joins them, are the remaining characters on the homemade Ouija board Merrill had been using all along. They provided him with the basis for a final poem, an exploration of themes of acceptance ("Oui-ja," after all, is an amalgam of the French and German affirmatives), resistance, and ambivalence. Scripts for the Pageant is by far the longest of the trilogy's three parts, and the most resplendent. Its cast is larger, its ambitions ampler, its verse richer. The interlocutors now are the four archangels: Michael, the Angel of Light; Emmanuel, the Water Angel; Raphael, the Earth Angel; and their dark, menacing brother Gabriel, the Angel of Fire and Death. They are in service to the final parents in Merrill's evolving private mythology of the Broken Home—God Biology (known as God B) and his twin, Mother Nature, also known as Psyche and Chaos. The supporting cast includes the nine Muses, Akhnaton, Homer, Montezuma, Nefertiti, Plato, Jesus, Gautama, Mohammed, and Mercury, plus two more recently deceased friends of Merrill's, George Cotzias (a scientist) and Robert Morse (a dilettantish neighbor). And there are cameo appearances by the likes of Maria Callas, Robert Lowell, Gertrude Stein, and W. B. Yeats. Ephraim and Mirabell return, and are joined by a new creature, a unicorn named Unice. The poem, in other words, is dizzyingly crowded, and Merrill as stage manager maneuvers his cast with authority. Again, the thrust of the poem is one of initiation. A series of schoolroom seminars, and then a trial— sides taken, pleas entered and argued—argue the case for humankind, and seek to explain some of our most enduring, intractable ideas. The two main questions are put by Michael and Gabriel. Michael's is this riddling proposition: "THE MOST INNOCENT OF IDEAS IS THE IDEA

THAT INNOCENCE IS DESTROYED BY IDEAS." Gabriel, in his turn, speaks for the "BLACK BEYOND BLACK/' and announces: "MY THEME IS TIME, MY TEXT: / OF ALL DESTRUCTIVE IDEAS THE MOST DESTRUCTIVE IS THE IDEA OF DESTRUCTION." It is Merrill's task to "MAKE SENSE OF IT"—that is, both to understand the gnomic revelations and to embody them in images and meanings his readers can understand. At the very end, masks pulled off (so that we learn Ephraim all along was a disguise for Michael, and that Maria and Wystan have returned to earth as elements), there is a ceremony of farewell. A mirror is broken into a bowl of water. Giving up its whole Lifetime of images, the mirror utters A little treble shriek and rides the flood Or tinkling mini-waterfall through wet Blossoms to lie—and look, the sun has set— In splinters apt, from now on, to draw blood, Each with its scimitar or bird-beak shape Able, days hence, aglitter in the boughs Or face-down, black on soil beneath, to rouse From its deep swoon the undestroyed heartscape —Then silence. The champagne. And should elsewhere Broad wings revolve a horselike form into One Creature upward-shining brief as dew, Swifter than bubbles in wine, through evening air Up, far up, O whirling point of Light—: In 1982, the three poems were combined into a single long work, now called The Changing Light of Sandover. This collected edition was awarded the National Book Critics Circle Prize for that year. To the existing long poems was added a thirty-page coda called "The Higher Keys," a poem that continues and (again) revises the revelations, adds five ceremonies of

336 I AMERICAN WRITERS rebirth for one character, and concludes with an extraordinary section in which the characters all gather to hear the poet read aloud his now completed epic. That all this transpires in "the old ballroom of the Broken Home" is a tribute to the autobiographical impulses that underlie Merrill's vast poem. His effort all along has been less to explain than to reconcile—contending powers, conflicting views. Also in 1982, Merrill's publisher issued a collection of selected poems, From the First Nine: Poems 1946-1976, so that it was possible to see, in the nine hundred pages of these two books, the thematic consistency and stylistic bravura of an entire career. Since then, Merrill has published two more collections. Late Settings (1985) seems a little overshadowed by the trilogy. It gathers together a number of smaller poems Merrill had written before and during the trilogy's composition, and adds several longish poems to them; but much of the work is devoted to the same concerns the poet had been exploring over the Ouija board. Poems of reminiscence, such as "The School Play" and "Days of 1941 and '44," have an autumnal plangency. Other poems—"Trees Listening to Bach," "A Day on the Connecticut River," or "An Upset"—put on display his hard-edged, gem-bright flair for invention. The major poems in the book, however, are its three longer ones: "Clearing the Title," "Bronze," and "Santorini: Stopping the Leak." The first of these, taken up with the purchase of a house in Key West (as a sort of domestic and emotional exchange for the one in Athens), can be linked with earlier poems about tenancy, or entitlement. "Bronze," another voyage of discovery and recovery, was occasioned by a visit with a former lover to the great bronze statues at Riace, Italy, and ends with a look at a bronze head made of the poet himself as a child. Images of the self, hardening with age or in art, are given a more fluent context in "Santorini: Stopping the Leak." It is a poem that returns to Greece, and

involves a disorder (a plantar wart, troublesome old memories) that leads the poet on through dreamy divagations and temporary solutions. Awarded the prestigious Bobbitt Prize for Poetry by the Library of Congress in 1990, The Inner Room (1988) includes a small play (for puppets), and a prose memoir (with haiku) called "Prose for Departure." It deals in part with the death of a friend, the critic David Kalstone—the same friend memorialized in other poems in the book, "Investiture at Cecconi's" and "Farewell Performance." There is a sense in which the huge Sandover trilogy is an anti-elegy; the death of friends, like the waning of affections, is elided by the Ouija board trope: they are all reborn as voices, and the poetic medium itself overcomes any loss. "Farewell Performance" is a more realistic account of the poet's feelings. Written in sapphics, the poem opens with one of Merrill's favorite settings, a theater. We are at a ballet performance—one of Kalstone's favorite pastimes. The fairy-tale transformation of the straw of experience into the gold of art informs this first section, which begins with a truism to be tested: Art. It cures affliction. As lights go down and Maestro lifts his wand, the unfailing sea change starts within us. Limber alembics once more make of the common lot a pure brief gold. At the end our bravos call them back, sweat-soldered and leotarded, back, again back—anything not to face the fact that it's over. The ghosts of these memories return to haunt another sort of ceremony. When the poet describes scattering his friend's ashes at sea, he notices "the gruel of selfhood / taking manlike shape for one last jete on / ghostly—wait, ah!— point into darkness vanished." And when the poem returns at the end to its opening conceit, the tone has changed. The very distance at which

JAMES MERRILL I 337 art keeps us from the stark realities of loss is abruptly foreshortened, and the poem concludes on a rare, stricken note: Back they come. How you would have loved it. We in turn have risen. Pity and terror done with, programs furled, lips parted, we jostle forward eager to hail them, more, to join the troupe—will a friend enroll us one fine day? Strange, though. For up close their magic self-destructs. Pale, dripping, with downcast eyes they've seen where it led you. This sense of loss is offset elsewhere in the collection by poems of new love and travel. "A Room at the Heart of Things," for instance, and 44 Walks in Rome" lightly or mysteriously take up the burden of 44actor and lover." Merrill's verse here demonstrates an easy mastery, but he continues to place new demands upon it, "Raw luster, rendering its human guise." 44Morning Glory" and 4'Losing the Marbles" are further examples of Merrill's specialty, the diversified poem of middle length. The first has to do with renewal, the second with age. Though he mocks here his own decline ( 44 Long work of knowing and hard play of wit / Take their toll like any virus."), Merrill has all along been celebrating his losses, turning their leaden echo into poetic gold. One section of "Losing the Marble" offers us the sapphic fragments of a poem left out in the rain, and effaced by the storm. Two sections later, the poem is restored, surprisingly different from what we might have expected it to be. Its conclusion, though, comes as no surprise to the reader attentive to Merrill's abiding themes: Humbly our old poets knew to make wanderings into

homecomings of a sort—harbor, palace, temple, all having been quarried out of those blue foothills no further off, these last clear autumn days, than infancy.

Selected Bibliography WORKS OF JAMES MERRILL POETRY

Jim's Book: A Collection of Poems and Short Stories. New York: privately printed, 1942. The Black Swan. Athens: Icaros, 1946. First Poems. New York: Knopf, 1951. The Country of a Thousand Years of Peace. New York: Knopf, 1959; rev. ed., New York: Atheneum, 1970. Water Street. New York: Atheneum, 1962. Nights and Days. New York: Atheneum, 1966. The Fire Screen. New York: Atheneum, 1969. Braving the Elements. New York: Atheneum, 1972. The Yellow Pages. Cambridge, Mass.: Temple Bar Bookshop, 1974. Divine Comedies. New York: Atheneum, 1976. Mirabell: Books of Number. New York: Atheneum, 1978. Scripts for the Pageant. New York: Atheneum, 1980. The Changing Light at Sandover. New York: Atheneum, 1982. From the First Nine: Poems 1946-1976. New York: Atheneum, 1982. Late Settings: Poems. New York: Atheneum, 1985. The Inner Room. New York: Knopf, 1988. NOVELS

The Seraglio. New York: Knopf, 1957. The (Diblos) Notebook. New York: Atheneum, 1965. PLAYS The Immortal Husband. In Play book: Five Plays for a New Theatre. New York: New Directions, 1956. First produced in New York in 1955.

338 I AMERICAN WRITERS

The Bait. In Artists' Theatre: Four Plays. Edited by Herbert Machiz. New York: Grove Press, I960. First produced in New York in 1953. PROSE Recitative. Edited and with an introduction by J. D. McClatchy. San Francisco: North Point Press, 1986. Essays, interviews, and short stories, including "Driver."

BIBLIOGRAPHIES Hagstrom, Jack W. C., and George Bixby. "James Merrill: A Bibliographical Checklist." American Book Collector, NS, 4:34-47 (November/ December 1983). Hall, Holly. James Merrill, Poet. St. Louis, Mo.: Washington University, 1985. Catalog of exhibit drawn from the extensive collection of Merrill papers and manuscripts in the Modern Literature Collection of Washington University Libraries. BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL STUDIES

Baird, James. "James Merrill's Sound of Feeling: Language and Music." Southwest Review, 74:361377 (Summer 1989). Bloom, Harold, ed. James Merrill. New York: Chelsea House, 1985. Gardner, Thomas. Discovering Ourselves in Whitman: The Contemporary American Long Poem. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989. Howard, Richard: "James Merrill." In his Alone with America, rev. ed. New York: Atheneum, 1980. Keller, Lynn. Re-making It New: Contemporary American Poetry and the Modernist Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. Labrie, Ross. James Merrill. Boston: Twayne, 1982.

. "James Merrill at Home: An Interview," Arizona Quarterly, 38:19-36 (Spring 1982). Lehman, David, and Charles Berger, eds. James Merrill: Essays in Criticism. Ithaca, N. Y.: Cornell University Press, 1983. Materer, Timothy. "Death and Alchemical Transformation in James Merrill's The Changing Light at Sandover." Contemporary Literature, 29:82-104 (Spring 1988). McManus, Kevin and Bruce Hainley, eds. James Merrill Special Issue, Verse, 5 (July 1988). Essays by George Bradley, Amy Clampitt, Alfred Com, Richard A. Grusin, J. D. McClatchy, Robert Polito, and Stephen Sandy. Moffett, Judith. James Merrill: An Introduction to the Poetry. New York: Columbia University Press, 1984. Perkins, David. "The Achievement of James Merrill." In his A History of Modern Poetry: Modernism and After. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987. Sloss, Henry. "James Merrill's The Book of Ephraim." Shenandoah, 27:63-91 (Summer 1976), and 28:83-110 (Fall 1976). Spiegelman, Willard. "The Sacred Books of James Merrill." In his The Didactic Muse: Scenes of Instruction in Contemporary American Poetry. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989. Vendler, Helen. "James Merrill." In her Part of Nature, Part of Us: Modern American Poets. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980. . 4 'James Merrill.'' In The Music of What Happens: Poems, Poets, Critics. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988. Yenser, Stephen. The Consuming Myth: The Work of James Merrill. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987. Zimmerman, Lee. "Against Apocalypse: Politics and James Merrill's The Changing Light at Sandover.'' Contemporary Literature, 30:370-386 (Fall 1989).

—j. D. MCCLATCHY

W. S. Merwin 1927-

ALTHOUGH W. S. MERWIN has written suc-

larly written nonfiction prose for leading American periodicals, including The New Yorker and The Nation. He graduated from Princeton University in 1948, where, as a student, he became acquainted with R. P. Blackmur, his mentor, and John Berryman, who also taught there. During the same period, he visited Ezra Pound at St. Elizabeth's Hospital in Washington, D.C. Merwin was barely twenty at the time, and Pound advised him to translate. Afterward, Pound wrote Merwin postcards, saying in one, * 'Read seeds, not twigs" (in Hirsch, "W. S. Merwin XXXVIII"). While at Princeton, he also met Galway Kinnell and William Arrowsmith. Through most of his career, Merwin has stayed away from work in academic institutions, giving his attention to translation and the production of poetry and essays. Merwin's best poetry is that which is driven by the combination of a desire for wisdom and a broad-based emotional force, both of which are at times historical and political in their scope. His poetry of the late 1960's and early 1970's, namely in The Lice (1967) and The Carrier of Ladders, responds to the horrors of the Vietnam War as well as to the historical and emotional assumptions about American culture that are rooted in the nineteenth century. Then, in the late 1980's, after Merwin had lived in Hawaii for more than ten years, a similar theme, embodied

cessfully in several genres, he has published more than twelve volumes of poetry, the first of which, A Mask for Janus (1952), was chosen for the Yale Younger Poets series. The Carrier of Ladders (1970), his seventh book of poetry, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1971. Merwin's poetry is rooted in both American history and American literary tradition, and in it his readers have discovered a profound expression of the post-World War II literary imagination. While readers have often written approvingly of Merwin's pessimism, they have also found satisfaction in the way he has advanced and modified the concerns of literary modernism by advancing the freeverse line while asserting a more personal, at times autobiographical, level of imagery. Like T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, he has spent a significant part of his life in Europe. As a translator, he has contributed much to the internationalization of literature by translating from several other traditions into English, counting among his favorite poets Frangois Villon and Dante. Besides his poetry, Merwin has written several books of prose, which are a mix of fable, parable, fairy tale, and autobiography, and several plays. He has also translated over eleven volumes, mostly from the French or Spanish. All told he has published well over thirty volumes. In addition, throughout his career he has regu-

339

340 I AMERICAN WRITERS in a somewhat different tone, returns to his work as he bears witness to the destruction of Hawaii's native culture in The Rain in the Trees (1988). In much of his poetry, readers have found an elegiac sensibility tempered by a vision of what poet Richard Howard has called the "via negativa." Although pessimism is dominant in Merwin's tone, his poetry reveals a considerable capacity for wonder and a reverence for language that seeks to approach, even if it can never accurately render, the dark unknown. Much can be made of Merwin's inverse relation to Walt Whitman, to the optimism of Whitman's "Song of Myself." Merwin has said that he simply does not like Whitman and has never been able to sustain an interest in him. It is clear that Merwin refers to the Whitman whose optimism correlates to progress and the idea that civilization in America, characterized by westward movement and by the consumption of wilderness, is destined to overcome and subdue the native. Merwin stands in firm opposition to Whitman's notions of American optimism and progress. He aligns himself instead with Henry David Thoreau, and in many ways the wilderness ethic embodied in Merwin's writing can be seen as paralleling Thoreau's. Both writers are grounded in the deep recognition of humankind's dependence on the natural world and in the importance of wilderness. An early poem, "The Wilderness," from Green with Beasts (1956), illustrates a number of themes that form a consistent pattern throughout Merwin's career: Remoteness is its own secret. Not holiness, Though, nor the huge spirit miraculously avoiding The way's dissemblings, and undue distraction or drowning At the watercourses, has found us this place, But merely surviving all that is not here,

Till the moment that looks up, almost by chance, and sees Perhaps hands, feet, but not ourselves; a few stunted juniper trees And the horizon's virginity. We are where we always were. The secret becomes no less itself for our presence In the midst of it; as the lizard's gold-eyed Mystery is no more lucid for being near. And famine is all about us, but not here; For from the very hunger to look, we feed Unawares, as at the beaks of ravens. By defining wilderness as remote and secret, Merwin requires a reading that is concerned both with the physical part of nature, which is being consumed by human progress, and with the abstraction of the human mind, perceiving fragments of the present and hungering for a glimpse of the "secret." This view of wilderness as being neither "holy" nor "miraculous," in contrast to the philosophy claiming that God resides in the wilderness, renders a kind of counterexistence, capable, perhaps, of perceiving fragments—say, hands or feet—but not a totality of the type which would suggest God. If one could assert, as Whitman seems to, that self emerges as the summation of physical reality, Merwin might counter by asserting that at best one can perceive only fragments of physical reality, and that in hungering for totality, one is hungering for the revelation of self. It is this hunger which defines a sort of counterexistence. In a relative sense, our relationship to the counterexistence is static, for wherever we are, we are always surrounded by where we are not. Thus, absence for Merwin could be called the not-self, and it finds value to the extent that it is sought out, yet remains unknown. When Merwin points to "a few stunted juniper trees / And the horizon's virginity," he concludes that our relation-

W. S. MERW1N I 341 ship to this remote and secret counterexistence is essentially static—"We are where we always were." The counterexistence is neither diminished nor revealed; the self hungers for revelation, yet in its inevitable absence, Merwin seems to say, perceiving "famine . . . all about," the self feeds anyway, as if on hunger itself. In the foreword to Asian Figures, his 1973 collection of translations of proverbs, aphorisms, and riddles from Korean, Burmese, Japanese, Philippine, Chinese, Malay, and Lao cultures, Merwin approaches the tenuous matter of defining poetry. Although he focuses primarily on those aspects of poetry that are exemplified by short, Asian literary forms, one can extract his notion of what poetry in general embodies: "an urge to finality of utterance . . . to be selfcontained, to be whole . . . related to the irreversibility in the words that is a mark of poetry.' * Merwin has also said that poetry should center on a concern for the spoken idiom rather than the conventions of writing. This idea goes far in explaining the deemphasis of syntactic convention in Merwin's poetry. To be truly singular and irreducible, a poem may need to be marginally free from the traditions of grammar and punctuation; in this way it can be truer to the idiosyncrasies of spoken language. William Stanley Merwin was born in New York City on September 30, 1927. Growing up he lived in Union City, New Jersey, and Scranton, Pennsylvania. Merwin recollects his childhood, which he has described as repressed, in Unframed Originals: Recollections (1982). His father, a Presbyterian minister, seems to be the subject of numerous poems written in an autobiographical tone, most notably in the first section of Opening the Hand (1983). After completing an undergraduate degree in English at Princeton, Merwin did graduate work there in the department of modern languages. Over thirty years later, writing about Blackmur

and his Princeton years, Merwin describes himself as having been "busy being Shelley . . . and a bit of Beethoven, in ill-fitting pieces of discarded army uniform" that had been given to him by his father, who was an army chaplain. Merwin knew he wanted to be a poet and was advised by Anne Fleck, the proprietor of the Parnassus Bookshop on Nassau Street in Princeton, to send some poems to Blackmur. Although Merwin never took a formal course from Blackmur, the two became friends. In a poem about Berryman included in Opening the Hand, the older poet advises Merwin, don't lose your arrogance yet you can do that when you're older lose it too soon and you may merely replace it with vanity About publishing, Berry man advised Merwin to cover his wall with rejection slips. After one year at Princeton Graduate School, Merwin left America for Spain and Portugal, where he worked as a tutor: during this period he tutored Robert Graves's son in Majorca. By 1951, Merwin was living in London, writing radio scripts for the British Broadcasting Corporation, including Rumpelstiltskin, Pageant of Cain, Huckleberry Finn, and Robert the Devil. The BBC also produced Merwin's translation of the anonymous fourteenth-century French drama Robert the Devil, as well as his translations of two plays by Lope de Vega. It is during this period that A Mask for Janus was published. W. H. Auden wrote in the preface to A Mask for Janus that Merwin seems to present the reader with the "collapse of civilization." Yet, as Auden asserts, for Merwin "this collapse is not final" for "on the other side of disaster, there will be some kind of rebirth, though we cannot imagine its nature." Jarold Ramsey writes in "The Continuities of W. S. Merwin" that in The Lice Merwin's vision is one of the continuity of life,

342 I AMERICAN WRITERS specifically of Merwin's own life as a poet and more broadly of humanity in general. In books that follow The Lice, this sense of continuity becomes more expansive and considerably less anthropocentric, as life is seen in more fundamentally biological terms. And while any vision of the collapse of civilization must be seen as essentially pessimistic, Merwin's rendering of this collapse becomes more generally lifeaffirming as his career progresses. Whereas in his early work the "other side of disaster" is most often characterized by considerable ambiguity, images of shadow, blackness, and silence, in The Rain in the Trees the poet focuses more on the continuity of life, even though such continuity may exclude human civilization. Merwin offers his first glimpse of this in A Mask for Janus, where images of regeneration seem to emerge at the end of 4 'Cancion y Glosa,'' with its emphasis on speech, breath, sight, and anonymity; an image of composing, "dry leaves in my hand," suggests that perhaps it is the regenerative process of the earth itself that closes the gaps between pain, desperation, hope, desire, pleasure, and regeneration. This process continues in "A Poem for Dorothy," suggesting the ambiguous peace of death, which contains the past. Remembering the past is an act of regeneration which Merwin associates closely with the fundamental pleasure of kissing. Sitting on stones we kiss to please Some stilled remembrance that shares our blood, And warmth whose shape and name were dead From ruin moving amends our peace. In the earliest poems of his first book, Merwin establishes a clear relationship with another of his central themes—the nature of selfhood. In "Anabasis (I)" one finds the transformative self, shrouded in negation, always in proximity to elemental, physical nature. The poem reveals the self as tenuous, "estranged almost beyond response," yet clinging, through thought,

dream, and memory, to time, to eternity. The "exhausted leaves" of poplars and beeches, perhaps emblems of selfhood surviving the transformations of time, might be burned, but would remain "unconsumed, / The flame perduring, the still / Smoke eternal in the mind." The self emerges as a shadow in a realm where both philosophical belief and religious faith are uncertain and unsatisfying. The aged man, "stroked always by / The vague extremities of sleep," is entangled in the physical and governed "by euphory and the leaves' dictions." Ironically, the self passes toward its grave "blessed, among the many mansions." In "Anabasis (II)" Merwin asserts the theme of selfhood directly: We survived the selves that we remembered; We have dozed on gradual seas where slowly The hours changed on the silence, and a word, Falling, expired in the sufficient day. Here Merwin explores the fullness of a questioning not-self, caught between dream and "the monstrous fixities of innocence." This is selfhood exiled from dreams of its own certainty; even though the dreams provide "rumors" of self-understanding, the self is like water that has "slipped from an escaping land / all night." Because the self vigorously seeks transformation, it plunges into the poet's metaphor, declaring, "we are tidal and obey." In this context, language itself is a small thing, failing to account adequately for experience in which finally "mind and body lose / The uncertain continent of a name." Negation, in its relationship to melancholy, figures strongly in much of Merwin's early work. In his concern with the inability of language to reveal truth accurately, his tone is elegiac. In A Mask for Janus, this tone emerges obviously in "Ballad of John Cable and Three Gentlemen" and "Dictum: For a Masque of Deluge." In the latter, the narrator of the poem observes the

W. S. MERWIN beasts walking "beside their shadows"; rather than coming in pairs, they are observed as "wrought for singularity." As emblems of negation, shadows are the animals' "lean progeny." After the deluge, when the land reappears, the solitary man, unlike the habitue of Plato's cave, must recover speech out of its negation, silence; thus he "moves in an amazement of resurrection, / Solitary, impoverished, renewed." Yet whatever glimmer of hope this might provide is itself negated by "the gestures of time" and "a low portent of rain." "Tower," the first poem in The Dancing Bears (1954), points toward both disillusionment and astonishment at the pain of separation; for example, the separation of head from body: I saw my body As a smooth alien On stones and water walking Headless, not noticing Decapitation finally leads to ironic discovery: rather than leaves of birches or apple trees, the speaker of the poem sees green light while life's untruths are revealed in the song of the mindless magpie, mouthing the cliche, " 'Love, love, oh lover, / Oh King live forever.' " The conclusion of the poem suggests the poet's frustrations with worn-out beliefs, grounded in superstition or religion, regarding immortality. Ultimately it is the poet's careful observation of the natural world that leads him toward self-discovery. Out of this grows a fascination with mirrors and the color white, moonlight, and blindness as in "The Lady with the Heron": And my eyes thirst On the birdless air; Blindness I learned At the feet of the heron. Yet it is a blindness teased with amazement and light, and finally, as in "When I Came from Colchis," a question:

I 343 A stranger up from the sunned Sea of your eyes, lady, What fable should 1 tell them, That they should believe me?

Thus, in the early poems of the book, begins a major theme that dominates the remainder of the book—the transformative power of language to encompass "breath and knowledge" and the "grammar of return," shot through with "the long light of wonder," as in "You, Genoese Mariner." Merwin, here and in much of his writing during this part of his career, seems in awe of the discoveries that language can lead to, but at the same time he increasingly questions the fundamental truths which language has led to in the past. In "Fable" Merwin's language assumes an almost penitential tone while the narrator considers two heartless lovers. A somewhat questing tone is revealed in which the pilgrim prays "for" folly, as though the journey to wisdom could be navigated by witnessing the grievous weeping of heartless ghosts. In the end, the pilgrim seems to realize the futility of his quest: I am a sullen unseemly man— Pray now no more for folly— Who in the bleak and tolling hour Walk like a chime without a tower, Rending a story, and complain Heartless and foolishly. The recognition that the quest for wisdom is futile seems to lead to self-discovery, in large part because the poet experiences pain. This pain may result from an unfulfilled quest or from losing something or someone once held close. In "The Passion" Merwin suggests that it is pain which characterizes the common, shared element of experience; the poem concludes by asserting that pain "consumes us by / Dividing infinitely" and suggesting that in the scriptural rendering of Christ's passion one might find eternal truth. Although Merwin here explores the redemptive as-

344 I AMERICAN WRITERS pects of spiritual pain, the nature of his allusions to Christianity changes dramatically as his poetic career progresses. "East of the Sun and West of the Moon," Merwin's longest poem at over five hundred lines, follows five "songs" in The Dancing Bears. The songs seem to reach out toward hopefulness, but the smiles that might signify hope in "Song of Three Smiles" are rendered as the triumph of pain. In "East of the Sun and West of the Moon" Merwin retells a Norwegian folktale, exploring the self through a consideration of the nature of metaphor: What is a man That a man may recognize, unless the inhuman Sun and moon, wearing the masks of a man, Weave before him such a tale as he —Finding his own face in the strange story— Mistakes by metaphor and calls his own, Smiling, as on a familiar mystery? Later, the moon reveals a white bear, who marries the youngest daughter of a peasant. At night the bear turns into a man who explains she must not see him in the light. After she lights a candle and is overcome with the man's beauty, she kisses him. When drops of tallow from her candle fall on him, he awakes and says that he must depart. She begins a quest for the palace that lies east of the sun and west of the moon, for it is there she will find the prince. When she finally arrives at the castle, she finds that the prince is betrothed to another. The prince then requires that his wife-to-be prove herself by washing the tallow stains out of a white shirt; the peasant's daughter accomplishes this and says, "How should I not, since all pallor is mine." In the final stanzas of the poem, the moon muses about her own existence, diffused as it is among thousands of mirrors. She recognizes that she is merely "a trick of light, and tropically." Because she is a trick, she finds her existence questionable: "unless I go in a mask / How shall I

know myself among my faces?" Her magic, she declares, is metaphor, and she acknowledges that the story itself, though "an improvisation," defines the continuum of her own being. Finally, she sings out to the sun to save her from her mirrors, to turn into a white bear and marry her, for she is the daughter of a peasant. The moon's plea contains an air of futility, though. Although the reader could assume that after washing the prince's shirt, the peasant's daughter would marry the prince, the poem stops short of describing the union. For such a union would go against the central proposition of the poem. It is the futility of the moon's desire for the sun that provides the impetus for the turning of the world. The poem concludes by declaring the moon an ultimate trope, or final metaphor, who in her turning creates a world of images. The closing sequence of the book, a group of three poems, each titled "Canso," extends the book's central theme, the transformational power of language, sounding occasionally like Eliot's Four Quartets ("The idiom of order is celebration, / An elegance to redeem the graceless years") and Wallace Stevens' Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction ("Fictive, among real familiars, or / Real but immortal among the figurative / But dying"). Containing a strong sense of the futility and painfulness of man's attempts to overcome desire, Merwin's vision here is considerably less hopeful than that in either of these works. In Green with Beasts Merwin shifts in style— there are fewer mythographic poems, the poems are shorter, and in general a more lyric than narrative presentation of themes is demonstrated —yet his themes are much the same as in his first two books of poetry. Concern with nature, language, and self-identity seems to dominate much of the book. Many poems contain names of animals, as the title suggests. "Leviathan," possibly Merwin's most anthologized poem, is the first poem of the collection. The animals of the

W. S. MERWIN I 345 book are largely threatening and destructive, as Leviathan is chaos itself, like the sea in a storm before creation. The animals occupy a place that Merwin strives to locate in "The Wilderness"— a place that is remote and secret, even if one is near it. Yet it is also a place that is immediate and present, as well as a place that is shared with others. "Leviathan" has something of the quality of a riddle, though the riddle's answer is the poem's title. The images of death that dominate much of the first two books become in Green with Beasts images of the unknown, and the device that Merwin uses to approach this realm is the negative. While much of Merwin's development suggests a movement from cool, abstract perception toward a warm and more concrete engagement of the natural world, a counter-movement is just as notable, as the more direct description of the concrete, natural world leads to frustration with the failures of the abstract world. In his earlier work, one can easily see Merwin's identification of language with concrete experience, thus his early experiments with style and traditional poetic forms. In his later work, especially in The Rain in the Trees, one can clearly see a more direct engagement with the world of biological experience; that is, the specifics of trees and animals become more concrete. But as this happens, the poet's sense of the inadequacy of human language becomes more pronounced. This linguistic sensibility is described in "Learning a Dead Language," from Green with Beasts. The entire poem revolves around the act of learning a dead language, of remembering it by attempting to perceive "the whole grammar in all its accidence" and of ultimately finding "the passion that composed it." Thus, the imagery of the poem is exclusively abstract. In Merwin's examination of "the other side of disaster" the poet makes a considerable point of describing the tenuousness of existence— partially portentous, partially elegiac—which is

characterized by the imminence of disaster; it might be said that Merwin writes much about the side of disaster that is inherent in the human spirit. Although his is a poetry of life that is at times joyous, the poems' tendency toward the muting of desire emphasizes the premonitory and elegiac. Such an approach deemphasizes the present and the immediate perception of self and allows the poet to reach toward the future while grieving for the past. It might be added here that this approach also suggests how the self is aligned with the idea of the concrete moment of experience having a locus defined by the not-self of past and future. This at times prescient tone creates the impression that the poems are foretelling a disaster as inevitable as life itself. This tone characterizes the entire sequence of sea poems that includes Part Three of Green with Beasts and the first twelve poems of The Drunk in the Furnace (1960). For example, in "Odysseus," from The Drunk in the Furnace, Merwin extends this sense of the inevitable in the figure of Odysseus, who finds himself in a constant state of departure because The knowledge of all that he betrayed grew till it was the same whether he stayed Or went. Therefore he went. Images of a sea voyage seem to define much of the early part of the book; the mariner is always willing to confront the unknown. In "The Iceberg," the second poem from The Drunk in the Furnace, the landscape of desolation, "the terror / That cannot be charted," finally dissolves into a prescience of apple trees. Although it does not dissolve, "Deception Island" is almost as illusory as an iceberg, "filled with silence," a landscape of the lonely imagination of the sea-weary sailor longing for a place to anchor. Characteristically expressed as negative potential, the landscape is "barren / Of all the vegetation of desire"; thus desire is posited as the immediate relative of absence and mem-

346 I AMERICAN WRITERS ory. In "The Portland Going Out" the conversion of absence and memory becomes premonitory, "beyond reckoning," when the narrator remembers the last time a doomed ship was seen before it disappeared in a winter storm: Yet we keep asking How it happened, how, and why Blanchard sailed, Miscalculating the storm's course. But what We cannot even find questions for Is how near we were: brushed by the same snow, Lifted by her wake as she passed. We could Have spoken, we swear, with anyone on her deck, And not had to raise our voices, if we Had known anything to say. And now In no time at all, she has put All of disaster between us: a gulf Beyond reckoning. It begins where we are. The sequence of marine poems in which the two mentioned above are included begins in Part Three of Green with Beasts. Here the sea is seen as consuming, as in "The Fisherman," where those who "carry the ends of our hungers out to drop them / To wait swaying in a dark place we could never have chosen" are depicted. As it is inevitable that the sea consumes the fisherman, it is inevitable that the tone of the poem is elegiac in its evocation of transience (the laying of wreaths on the water) and permanence (the commemoration the poem becomes): "We lay wreaths on the sea when it has drowned them." Although most of Merwin's books contain sea poems of one type of another, beginning with "Anabasis I" and "Anabasis II," the first two poems of Merwin's first book, the sea in this later sequence is itself the subject, uncertain with fog and foreboding, yet, as in "The Shipwreck" full of "elemental violence" and a wisdom so intense that it is associated with death. It is the physical embodiment of wildness, yet in its chaos

it is "without / Accident" and "in its rage" it is "without Error." Following the sea poems, The Drunk in the Furnace can be divided into two parts. The first part, beginning with "The Highway" and ending with "The Gleaners," is considerably more concrete than poems in his earlier books. The last part of the book, beginning with "Pool Room in the Lions Club," represents a set of strong autobiographical poems. The book concludes with "The Drunk in the Furnace," which describes how a derelict artifact from the past, possibly part of an old still, can occasionally be rejuvenated. While the mysterious drunk bellows away in the junk heap, the "witless offspring" of the overly pious townspeople "flock like piped rats to its siren." The poet explains the irony of this regeneration in the last lines, as the children, "agape on the crumbling ridge," gather and "stand in a row and learn." After marrying Dido Milroy, Merwin and his wife collaborated on the verse play Darkling Child, which was produced in London in 1956. While living in Boston, the Merwins became acquainted with Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. The Merwins returned to England, and in 1960, Plath and Hughes also moved, and the Merwins helped them find a place to live. Later Merwin loaned them the use of his study while he and Dido were at their farm near Lot, France. From 1961 to 1963, Merwin served as Poetry Editor of The Nation. Merwin's poetry, translations, reviews, and journalism were published with astonishing regularity in The Nation, as well as many other major and minor periodicals in America. For Merwin's poetry, the decade of the 1960's was a time of great transformation. Richard Howard observes how the poetry that characterizes The Moving Target (1963), The Lice, and The Carrier of Ladders is foreshadowed by Merwin's earlier work as dramatist and translator. Merwin's dramas of this earlier period (Darkling Child and Favor Island, produced in Cambridge,

W. S. MERWIN I 347 Massachusetts, in 1957) and his translations (Robert the Devil, an anonymous fourteenthcentury French play produced by the BBC in 1954; Punishment Without Vengeance and The Dog in the Manger, both by Lope de Vega, produced by the BBC in 1954; The Poem of the Cid, published in 1959, The Satires ofPersius, published in 1961; and Spanish Ballads, published in 1961) indicate the character of Merwin's vision of human experience and of his metric. The "spooky stoicism," Howard says, of the "relaxed octosyllabics" of the verse epilogue of Favor Island is hardened by the emphasis put on the sea, "its never-ending finality, its irreversible otherness." According to Howard, finality and otherness characterize Merwin's work during this period and become the embodiment of "Merwin's capacity to moralize his surround, to win from the not-self an appropriate emblem of what the self intends." In The Moving Target, Merwin's investigation of selfhood seems to operate on two somewhat contrary levels. First is the level of the isolated image, which is increasingly realistic, made up of animals; the natural world is revealed through sensory experience. Second is the level of the psyche, concerned in large part with memory and grief. The essential tension of the poems arises from the conflict between the two levels, which finds expression most often (as many of his earlier poems do) in somewhat of a Keatsian negative capability, as in "Recognition": I came home as a web to its spider, To teach the flies of my household Their songs. I walked In on the mirrors scarred as match-boxes, The gaze of the frames and the ticking In the beams. The shadows Had grown a lot and they clung To the skirts of the lamps. Nothing Remembered who I was.

Here is an active nothingness, a silence pregnant with unrealized memory; the poet registers a moment of recognition when the self is revealed momentarily, not as sensory experience, not as the spider itself, not as light, not as hope for the future, but as a premonition of the future projected onto the past: "Tomorrow / Marches on the old walls." The recognition coincides with the imminent arrival of memory, a "coat full of darkness." By removing the future to the past and shrouding the result in darkness, Merwin emerges as one of this century's great poets of melancholy. It is, however, a melancholy considerably more removed from beauty and desire than that of Keats (although no less aimed at the truth of the imagination) and increasingly more apocalyptic than his own writing of the 1950's. Although explicit in the prose ' 'Letter from Aldermaston'' he wrote for The Nation about a nuclear disarmament protest march, the imagery of the poems, beginning with The Moving Target, increasingly reveals a grim prospect for human survival. In * 'The Crossroads of the World Etc.'' Merwin accomplishes a transformation of style, especially of diction and syntax, and the book as a whole finds its culmination in this poem. It is at this point in The Moving Target that the poet drops all punctuation, a practice that he continues to employ in his later books and that no doubt contributes to the frequent observation by critics that his work is enigmatic. Whether or not the practice is responsible for this criticism, it has become one of the chief identifiers of Merwin's poetic style. The bare appearance of the lines on the page suggests that a barren, perhaps desolate psychic landscape cannot be far removed. By removing the convention of punctuation, the poet reveals a landscape of woe, where syntactic repetition becomes the funeral march of time. Commenting in 1969 about the nature of poetic form in "On Open Form" from the anthology The New Naked Poetry: Recent American

348 I AMERICAN WRITERS Poetry in Open Forms, Merwin said it is "the setting down of a way of hearing how poetry happens in words. The words themselves do not make it. At the same time it is testimony of a way of hearing how life happens in time." Thus, in poems like "The Crossroads of the World Etc." time exists only in the dominion of memory, where "In the mirrors the star called Nothing / Cuts us off." Time is a desolate metropolis, being ruined as its inhabitant prepares an elegy for the future: Ruin My city Oh wreck of the future out of which The future rises What is your name as we fall Occasionally during his career, Merwin has put great emphasis on animals in his poetry, having planned to publish a bestiary some day. With the publication of The Lice in 1967, Merwin discloses his identification of animals with language, particularly insects, which take on the unlikely shape of hope. "The Animals" reflects a rare affirmation of hope in Merwin's entire corpus: All these years behind windows With blind crosses sweeping the tables And myself tracking over empty ground Animals I never saw I with no voice Remembering names to invent for them Will any come back will one Saying yes Saying look carefully yes We will meet again It is, of course, a tentative affirmation, for one could deduce that since the animals have never been seen, it is unlikely that the poet will meet an

actual animal, rather only its deceptive name. This poem and others appearing late in The Moving Target and early in The Lice seem to correlate to the relationship between language and human emotion; language disguises emotion, attempting to freeze it in time, to objectify that which is entirely subjective. Although the language that Merwin evokes is tempted by personification, it finds its central force in its effort to bypass the portion of sensory experience associated with sight and transfer what energy, or meaning, one would find there to silence and the pregnant emptiness of listening. This is evident in "The Man Who Writes Ants" from The Moving Target: Called By what trumpet He leaves my eyes he climbs my graves I pass the names He is not followed I am not following him no Today the day of the water With ink for my remote purpose with my pockets full of black With no one in sight I am walking in silence I am walking in silence I am walking In single file listening for a trumpet Merwin's poetry in its entirety, but especially in The Lice, is part of a tradition of writing about the natural world that echoes back to Carolus Linnaeus, the eighteenth-century Swedish botanist who began systematizing the naming and classification of plants. Particularly during the post-Darwinian era it becomes plausible for the popular mind to conceive of humankind not as the highest form of life and the friendly steward of the life of the planet, but as the destroyer of life. Keenly aware of the part both Linnaeus and

W. S. MERWIN I 349 Charles Darwin played in shaping twentiethcentury attitudes toward the natural world, Merwin shapes, especially from The Lice onward, a kind of misanthropy that becomes increasingly pervasive. By the time he writes The Rain in the Trees, he is able to assert that insects are wiser than humans. In The Lice the naming of animals, along with the searching out of them, becomes a primary concern, a concern that in the Edenic tradition is closely associated with the origins of language. Merwin extends this tradition by attempting to remember "names to invent for them," by trying to recover a wisdom associated with the primal creativity of the garden. Yet such wisdom must inevitably confront disaster. In "The Hydra" the notion of naming is associated with death, as though human language, the naming of the natural world, is an attempt to keep that world from dying: As the grass had its own language Now I forget where the difference falls One thing about the living sometimes a piece of us Can stop dying for a moment But you the dead Once you go into those names you go on you never Hesitate You go on Merwin suggests that wisdom is always receding, like a riddle with an irrational answer, that it is some sort of deity, outside of time and outside of language. If the poems of The Lice seem cryptic or enigmatic to some, it is because Merwin locates the poems in a realm where the words appear to have died. The poet's illusion here is that, although he cannot literally make the words vanish, he can present them in such ambiguous

contexts that conventional notions of their meanings seem inappropriate. In "I Live Up Here," the poet adopts the tone of a displaced magician, a fugitive from conventional meaning and from life itself, leaning heavily on an irony that is built out of heightened cliches—"It's perfectly fair . . . I give what I can . . . It's worth it"—to parody a view of the world that is above politics and above the actual pain and suffering of the living: Oh down there down there Every time The glass knights lie by their gloves of blood In the pans of the scales the helmets Brim over with water It's perfectly fair Although this ironic tone runs through much of Merwin's work, a related irony—not condescending or aloof, but one thoroughly engaging the theme of the opposition of self and other— emerges in "My Brothers the Silent.'' The reader may identify stars, blackness, shepherds, and animals, specifically sheep, with the brothers. Including time and "the invisible," the family of possible associations to the brothers of the title is so far-reaching that it is best described as generalized other. Additionally, the two words, "brother" and "other," are linked by a degree of common spelling and meaning. It is because the speaker of the poem believes so much in words that he can claim an inheritance, although one that he cannot have: What an uncharitable family My brothers shepherds older than birth What are you afraid of since I was born I cannot touch the inheritance what is my age to you I am not sure I would know what to ask for I do not know what my hands are for I do not know what my wars are deciding

350 I AMERICAN WRITERS It is an "uncharitable family" to which the speaker of the poem claims lineage. The brothers in this poem are emblems of the knowable unknown. Thus, the poem revolves around the ironic notion that while the self finds meaning by establishing relationship to the unknown, wisdom, a kind of inheritance, cannot actually be touched. Finally, in the degree to which it employs negative statement, the poem as a whole seems shot through with the general feelings of isolation and loneliness. Perhaps the poet says, ironically, that like unrequited love for a cold family, the pursuit of self-knowledge is a oneway affair. In The Carrier of Ladders, Merwin continues to use animals as guides to the deepest levels of experience; at the same time one sees the reemergence of his early mythographic style in "The Judgment of Paris" and of a beautiful elegiac tone in "Psalm: Our Fathers." When he reviewed The Carrier of Ladders, Richard Howard commented on its intimacy, but claimed that it remains successfully impersonal. To appreciate the poems, according to Howard, is to proceed along the "via negativa," which is the way of the visionary, although a way characterized by negative perception of one's surroundings: in this manner, the self is defined by what the self is not. If Whitman's project was to take in, to encompass history, to make it part of the self, Merwin's is precisely the opposite; however, in order to empty the self, as Ed Folsom explains in "I Have Been a Long Time in a Strange Country," one must first recognize the elements of history which make up the self. In Merwin's work these are autobiography and mythography. It is the mythographic in "The Judgment of Paris" through which the reader is able to witness that Paris is innocent of the historical consequences of his judgment; in turn, the reader is able to judge Paris. The central sequence of poems in The Carrier

of Ladders is one that Folsom has aptly called the American sequence, comparing it to Theodore Roethke's "North American Sequence," Hart Crane's The Bridge, Gary Snyder's Turtle Island, and William Carlos Williams' In the American Grain. The sequence begins with "The Approaches" and ends with "The Removal." In "The Approaches" Merwin begins his recovery of American history. He sets off for the promised land, knowing that there is fighting going on there and that the ruins are still warm. So used to writing about the ancient past, the poet suggests the relatively recent "removal" of Native Americans. The entire sequence emphasizes the tragedy of their treatment, underlined by the irony that as civilization marches west, the promised land is being destroyed: no one to guide me afraid to the warm ruins Canaan where the fighting is In terms of the evolution of Merwin's style, one of the most significant poems in the sequence is "Lackawanna." Here he merges recollection of his Pennsylvania boyhood with the developing theme of the sequence, the difficulty of finding one's self in the context of history. Identifying the river with the place the dead drift off to, and thus with history, the narrator remembers its blackness and as a child being "told to be afraid / obedient." Yet the child knows that the river is more than history; it is the truth about history, about the passing of the dead into the past: you flowed from under and through the night the dead drifted down you all the dead what was found later no one could recognize From the autobiographical tone of "Lackawanna," the sequence moves forward into bi-

W. S. MERWIN I 351 ography, with references to William Bartram, the eighteenth-century naturalist who wrote about the American wilderness, and John Wesley Powell, who with one arm led the geologic survey that mapped much of the western American wilderness in the late nineteenth century. It is a mark of Merwin's imagination to make much of absences, and so it is in "The Gardens of Zuni" that Powell's missing arm "groped on / for the virgin land / and found where it had been." In "Homeland/9 Merwin transforms the western landscape itself into a curse on Andrew Jackson, the American president known for killing Native Americans: The sky goes on living it goes on living the sky with all the barbed wire of the west in its veins and the sun goes down driving a stake through the black heart of Andrew Jackson In "Presidents" Merwin writes one of his most vicious attacks on the forces that pushed the American frontier forward. Standing also as a good example of how the poet is able to turn a surrealistic tone to political ends (as is Pablo Neruda, many of whose poems Merwin translated), "Presidents" abandons logic in favor of dagger-sharp invective: the president of lies quotes the voice of God as last counted the president of loyalty recommends blindness to the blind oh oh applause like the heels of the hanged he walks on eyes until they break In "The Removal," which is dedicated "to the endless tribe," Merwin shifts to a more elegiac tone. Here the river takes on a lethean form,

and the sense of loss extends to the "lost languages," so that the tongue itself "comes walking / shuffling like breath." Shadows and mourners go in on one side of the river, hoping to be healed; then on the other side "ribbons come out / invisible." Immediately following the American sequence, Merwin resumes an autobiographical tone, but it is not until much later in the book, in "The Thread," that the theme of history and the search for self emerges again. Here, the black thread is a song that covers the period of time's beginning to "beyond your dead." Along the way one encounters touchstones of physical identity, the soles of shoes "standing / out in the air you breathe" and ' 'bodies / stacked before them like bottles / generation upon / generation." To be sure, in this collection Merwin seems to eschew elegy, "The Removal" and several other poems notwithstanding, by locating one of the shortest poems in the English language, "Elegy," in the position next to last. Here is "Elegy" in its entirety: "Who would I show it to." In his exhaustive treatment of the poem's seven words, Robert Scholes in his essay "Reading Merwin Semiotically" (collected in W. S. Merwin: Essays on the Poetry) describes the poem as an anti-elegy. Because the preceding poem ends with "The darkness is cold / because the stars do not believe in each other," one can read "Elegy" as doubly ironic, as likely anti-elegiac as it is elegiac. So much of Merwin's writing plays on opposites, as though his works reflect one another, usually canceling one another out, pointing to a vision that is at least marginally solipsistic. If Merwin's work seems dark to many, perhaps it is because the alienated self— and for that matter the poem itself—often seems so rarefied that it stands alone at the center of a universe of its own making. Nevertheless, like many of Merwin's books, The Carrier of Ladders ends with a small ray of hope, in that the poet is able to call out through

352 / AMERICAN WRITERS history for a response. "In the Time of the Blossoms" reconciles, for a brief time, life with the forces of darkness: Ash tree sacred to her who sails in from the one sea all over you leaf skeletons fine as sparrow bones stream out motionless on white heaven staves of one unbreathed music Sing to me Charles Altieri explains in "Situating Merwin's Poetry Since 1970" (collected in W. S. Merwin: Essays on the Poetry) that in such reconciliation "the fullness of life is never far from the realities of death and judgment." "In the Time of the Blossoms" returns to a myth-time out of which the poet wishes to invoke the "great language" that held the ash tree to be sacred and that is large enough to describe how closely "death participates even in the fullest moments of natural blossoming." Merwin's next book, Writings to an Unfinished Accompaniment (1973), begins with a sequence of lyrics, some of which can be read as answers to the "Sing to me" of the closing poem of The Carrier of Ladders. "The Silence Before Harvest" contains the idealized sound suggested in "In the Time of Blossoms" by "staves of one / unbreathed music"; as a harvest poem, it, too, reaches back into myth-time, depicting sounds received from "somewhere else." It suggests that the reconciliation of opposites is possible— the sound arrives as light, while the hands that play the harp are dark: The harps the harps standing in fields standing

and dark hands playing somewhere else the sound sound will arrive light from a star Charles Molesworth in "W. S. Merwin: Style, Vision, Influence," however, reading the opening sequence of the book as a "self-contained and self-glossing set of texts," has characterized Merwin's poetic as one "that inevitably turns one emotion into its opposite and then is left with only absence to celebrate." Molesworth finds, for example, in "Looking Back," reference to such an immense frame of time—from "before the first cell"—the poem "renders details insignificant and turns hope into something furtive and numbing." He points to "Words" and "The Unwritten," later in the book, as further examples of "an aesthetic dead end," citing "Words" as a version of Frost's "Fire and Ice." What Molesworth objects to is Merwin's movement toward unbounded generalization. In "Words," the "pain of the world finds words" that "sound like joy." And in "The Unwritten," the tension of "words that have never been written" crouching "inside this pencil" gives way to the supposition "that there's only one word / and it's all we need" and finally "every pencil in the world / is like this." On the other hand, some critics, notably Gary Nelson and Ed Folsom, editors of the important collection W. S. Merwin: Essays on the Poetry (1987), suggest that readers not look at the books as self-contained units; rather, they should look at the larger movement of style and theme. For example, Nelson says, "All the poems from The Moving Target to Writings to an Unfinished Accompaniment may be read as though they were written simultaneously—in the winter of an eternal present." For many readers Merwin's poems

W. S. MERWIN I 353 seem to represent problems of interpretation because the poet maintains a considerable distance from conventional diction and syntax; however, in the broad view of his writings over several decades, he succeeds in establishing a poetic that is, as he described it in "On Open Form," "something that would be like an echo except that it is repeating no sound." The poem should communicate "something which always belonged to it: its sense and its conformation before it entered words." While Merwin's next two books, The Compass Flower (1977) and Finding the Islands (1982), are in many ways the ones in which the poet comes closest to the aesthetic he admires in Thoreau, they are also the books in which he seems to elude many of his critics. Contrary to his earlier books, these replace the "rhetoric of absence" with a pastoralism that celebrates the presence of landscape. In this way, Merwin, like Thoreau, meticulously observes the quality of his day-to-day experience in the context of a profound participation in the life of the place in which he lives. When it appeared in his earlier work, Merwin's pastoralism was often qualified by a subtle misanthropy; however, in these books human companionship and an energetic eroticism mediate the pastoral, contributing to the tone of affirmation. Altieri explains that as Merwin moves away from the rhetoric of absence and the "taut surreal logic" that characterize his earlier work, his lyrics "become less moments of discovery than examples of a faith." In this way, Altieri says, they fail to provide a necessary level of dramatic immediacy. It needs to be said, however, that through the late 1970's Merwin was becoming increasingly interested in Zen Buddhism and that Altieri's criticism is part of a common Western response to Zen-inspired art. To appreciate fully the intensity of observation that these delicate poems show, one must remember the tradition of Japanese haiku. Dating from the fifteenth century,

hokku, as it was originally called, is a form made up of seventeen syllables that aims at the direct presentation of experience itself. In its early use, the form introduced a series of linked short poems. Although Merwin makes it clear in his 1984 interview with David L. Eliot that the short poems of Finding the Islands are not intended to be haiku, it seems evident that the poems represent the same sort of union of aesthetic and spiritual experience that the early haiku writers cultivated. Merwin's attraction to Zen may be related to something that is fundamental to his aesthetic: the rendering of an appropriate interaction with nature. This interaction is in some respects different from that defined by American romanticism, which sometimes failed to register objections to the nature-destroying capacities of industrialization. Nonetheless, the ethic of utilitarian simplicity and harmony with the forces of nature that Thoreau describes is one that Merwin obviously emulates. A similar ethic can be found in the writings of Muso Soseki, the twelfth-century Zen teacher whose poetry Merwin has translated in collaboration with Soiku Shigematsu. In his introduction to that volume of translations, titled Sun at Midnight (1989), Merwin writes of Muso's accomplishments as a builder of gardens. In describing the garden at Tenryuji, which Muso planned, Merwin observes a combination of "a great sweep of landscape and a feeling of space with one of intimacy and simplicity." In all his teaching Muso emphasized a "vision of emptiness" that comes out of his ability to balance, as Merwin puts it, "convention and control, on the one hand, and spontaneity on the other." In Opening the Hand, Merwin moves back toward the "rhetoric of absence" that characterizes so much of his work before Compass Flower and Finding the Islands; by restoring this source of tension in his poetry, Merwin makes an important contribution to his active examination of

354 I AMERICAN WRITERS humankind's relationship to the natural world. This is especially true if Opening the Hand is seen in conjunction with The Rain in the Trees, the book that follows it. In addition, Opening the Hand introduces a technical device, the variable caesura, and it contains an important sequence of autobiographically oriented poems. As Edward Brunner has pointed out in "Opening the Hand: The Variable Caesura and the Family Poems," Merwin's use of the device seems related to, yet distinct from, the caesura found in works that he has translated, specifically medieval Spanish and French poetry. Among Merwin's contemporaries, the caesura is also found in the work of James Dickey and Adrienne Rich, although, as Brunner points out, Dickey uses it to slow the line down and Rich uses it for punctuation. Instead, Merwin uses the open space of the caesura to create lines with patterns of hesitation. As Merwin himself has explained regarding the line generally in the interview " Tact Has Two Faces/ " "it's making a continuity of movement and making a rhythm within a continuity. It's doing these two things at the same time." It is, in a sense, creating a line within a line, along with the feeling of ambiguity and at times contradiction. In the first section of Opening the Hand, Merwin presents a set of poems centered for the most part on the theme of the father. This sequence is especially significant because it provides a commentary on the qualities of relationship between father and child that contribute to a sense of the poetic imagination, as in "A Pause by the Water": After the days of walking alone in the mountains between cities and after the nights again under dripping trees coming down I kept seeing in my mind the ocean

though I knew it would not be I imagined

like anything

after hearing of the old man's dying and after the burial between rainy morning and rainy evening the start of a cold summer coming down the misted path alone I kept finding

in my thought the ocean though I told myself step by step that it could never be at all like that Thus, it is the child's sense of wonder at the interaction of his imaginings and the actual world outside that moves the poem forward. The caesura causes the reader to feel the hesitation and uncertainty that attend the child's movement toward the conclusion of the final line. In "The Houses," the father scolds his son when the child reports seeing two houses in the woods; even as he later sees similar houses, the son passes through a period of denying both the reality of his original sighting and his own imagination. However, all the while it seems inevitable that the son's vision will triumph, and "after the father / is dead the son sees the two houses." "The Houses" points to a theme that is central to all autobiography, the simultaneity of memory and experience. Later in the section, in "Talking," Merwin addresses the theme explicitly: Whatever I talk about is yesterday by the time I see anything it is gone the only way I can see today is as yesterday

I tell parts of a story that once occurred and I laugh with surprise at what disappeared though I remember it so well The middle section of Opening the Hand is decidedly focused on an urban landscape, al-

W. S. MERWIN I 355 though it occasionally comments on a deteriorating Hawaiian landscape, for example in "Questions to Tourists Stopped by a Pineapple Field." The contradiction between the urban and the rural, which this particular poem centers on, foreshadows the movement of the last section of the book in which poems like "The Palm" and "The Black Jewel" point to the major theme of The Rain in the Trees. Both poems describe a source of knowledge and truth that resides in nature; it is a knowledge of which humanity for the most part is oblivious. Merwin's 1988 collection, The Rain in the Trees, uses plants and insects as its central metaphors. But the book is about language, especially the failure of language to transcend direct sensory experience. Early in the book, "West Wall" establishes a major motif, absence, in describing the disappearance of shadows and branches of a tree while leaves and apricots become more vivid. In the second stanza, the apricots themselves vanish as the experience of eating transforms them into taste, the taste of apricots then transforming into the taste of the sun: I might have stood in orchards forever without beholding the day in the apricots or knowing the ripeness of the lucid air or touching the apricots in your skin or tasting in your mouth the sun in the apricots. This sense of transformation makes up an important part of Merwin's rhetoric of absence because the transformation results in leaving something behind. Consequently, this process often becomes elegy, and as such is the occasion for a celebration of the fundamental tension between hope and despair. Much of the poetry in The Rain in the Trees carries this elegiac sense. For example, "Night Above the Avenue" links "the point of birth" and "the point of death" in an abstract "somebody" surrounded "in pain and in hope." The poem suggests that everybody

plays a part in some vast transformative dialectic that defines the terms of being. The first-person speaker of the poem, sounding a bit like Eliot's J. Alfred Prufrock, sits up late at night and becomes like an antenna receiving the paired messages that make up the news: and I have sat up late at the kitchen window knowing the news watching the paired red lights recede from under the windows down the avenue toward the tunnel under the river and the white lights from the park rushing toward us through the sirens and the music and I have wakened in a wind of messages The early poems in the book operate with an autobiographical style characterized by a firstperson speaker who at times is in dialogue with father and mother. In "Native Trees" and "Touching the Tree" the parental figures are agents of negation when they forget the names of trees and stop the speaker from entering the magical world of the tree. In other poems it is the urban world generally that is associated with negation and the destruction of nature, as in the sequence beginning with "Touching the Tree" and ending with "Shadow Passing." In some ways these poems recall the negativity of The Lice (of special note is the relation between "Shadow Passing" and "The Last One"), yet the later poems suggest occasional movements toward hope as the poems shift from an emphasis on urban landscape to rural, more pastoral settings. For example, in "Summer of '82" the speaker and a companion move away from the dirty streets of the city: and in the evening we alone took the streetcar to the rain forest

356 / AMERICAN WRITERS followed the green ridge in the dusk got off to walk home through the ancient trees Throughout the book trees become the enduring figures for that wisdom which the urban world either destroys or ignores. The poems represent a seeking out of this wisdom, while rain and wind become metaphors of the process that includes the acquiring of knowledge and the use of language. The poems occasionally call out to a muse that is in some ways omniscient, yet always close to language, to forgetfulness, and to primal origins. In 'The Sound of Light'9 the speaker simultaneously hears the sounds of a pastoral world and forgets those of the urban world. In "Sight" the speaker personifies a one-cell organism, which is the first to perceive light and therefore the first to create sight. Then transforming into bird, goat, and fish, the first-person narrator of the poem finally becomes a generalized "I" seeking relationship with "you": I look at you in the first light of the morning for as long as I can

In later poems, the speaker seeks to displace time by emphasizing a longing for human companionship, as in "The Solstice": at the thought of the months I reach for your hand it is not something one is supposed to say we watch the bright birds in the morning we hope for the quiet daytime together the year turns into air In this and in poems like "Coming to the Morning," it is as if the speaker strives to give himself

totally to otherness, so that creation itself is the result of listening and remembering: "and our ears / are formed of the sea as we listen." The idea of listening also recalls Merwin's work as a translator of medieval poetry engaged in the remembering of language that much of modern culture has neglected. When Merwin writes "After the Alphabets," in which he is "trying to decipher the language of insects," he describes a paradigm for language that cuts through all abstraction, language that is not limited by time or grammar, and that points toward a grim human future, for after all, the insects "are the tongues of the future." Much of the remainder of The Rain in the Trees moves as an elegy for a lost Hawaiian culture. "Strangers from the Horizon" establishes the point of view of Hawaiians meeting the first European ships. "Chord" parallels Keats's life with the removal of sandalwood forests in the Hawaiian Islands; as the trees are removed the Hawaiian language itself is lost. "Losing a Language" depicts the slow, almost imperceptible destruction of the native language: when there is a voice at the door it is foreign everywhere instead of a name there is a lie nobody has seen it happening nobody remembers In "Term" Merwin brings a similar sensibility to bear on a protest against the proposed closing of an old road to make way for a development. The developers, of course, are not Hawaiian, and Merwin remains pessimistic, as he had been much earlier when writing about the destruction of Native American culture in The Carrier of Ladders: where the thorny kiawe trees smelling of honey dance in their shadows along the sand

W. S. MERWIN I 357 the road will die and turn into money at last as the developers themselves hope to do In the closing poems of the book Merwin writes as if he were seeing through the eyes of a botanist. He is searching for the ancient wisdom of the natural world by engaging in the recovery of that which is dying the fastest. In Merwin's poems the act of raising plants seems to cohere with the act of writing, as well as the acts of remembering the past and creating the future, as in "The Archaic Maker": But here is ancient today itself the air the living air the still water In general terms W. S. Merwin's career can be divided into at least three periods. During the first period, delineated by his first four books, his interest in medieval poetry and in a certain rhetorical firmness emphasizes a search for selfhood. For much of this part of his career, Merwin lived in Europe, making a living by tutoring and translating, as well as writing radio scripts and book reviews. Although his tone never approached the confessional style characteristic of many poets of the period, Merwin began writing sequences of poems that are autobiographical. With the publication of The Moving Target in 1963, Merwin broke with his earlier inclination toward formalism and began writing free verse characterized by the absence of all punctuation and the use of irregular meter. The generally negative sensibility of his earlier poetry continued to expand as the subjects of his poems shifted from mythographic to political. During this second period Merwin lived in New York City, on a farm near Lot, France, and in Mexico. He became more politically active, participating in protests against the Vietnam War and writing

poems critical of that part of American culture associated with progress and the destruction of the primitive. In a statement printed in The New York Review of Books following the announcement that he had been awarded the 1971 Pulitzer Prize for The Carrier of Ladders, Merwin said: I am too conscious of being an American to accept public congratulations with good grace, or to welcome it except as an occasion for expressing openly a shame which many Americans feel, day after day, helplessly and in silence. He asked that the prize money be given to Alan Blanc hard, a painter in Berkeley, California, who had been blinded by a police weapon, and to the Draft Resistance. The third period of his career began roughly with the publication of The Compass Flower in 1977. As had been the case throughout his career, Merwin traveled throughout the United States giving poetry readings. By 1978, after several visits to Hawaii, he decided to live at Haiku on the island of Maui. During this period Merwin began to study Buddhism seriously, and The Compass Flower and Finding the Islands (1982) develop a more affirmative aesthetic, which seems related to his religious studies. In the late 1980's and early 1990's Merwin increasingly withdrew from a life of travel, prefering instead to work at his home in Hawaii. Throughout the 1980's and into the 1990's, Merwin campaigned vigorously for the preservation of native Hawaiian flora and fauna. His poetry recovered some of the "rhetoric of absence" that had fueled his writing during the 1960's and early 1970's. The absence, as it had been in some poems of the earlier periods, is his own past, and this is reflected in the return to an autobiographical mode. However, the absence in these later poems is also associated with environmental degradation.

555 / AMERICAN WRITERS

Selected Bibliography WORKS OF W. S. MERWIN POETRY

A Mask for Janus. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1952. The Dancing Bears. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1954. Green with Beasts. New York: Knopf, 1956. The Drunk in the Furnace. New York: Macmillan, 1960. The Moving Target. New York: Atheneum, 1963. The Lice. New York: Atheneum, 1967. The Carrier of Ladders. New York: Atheneum, 1970. Writings to an Unfinished Accompaniment. New York: Atheneum, 1973. The First Four Books of Poems. New York: Atheneum, 1975. Collects A Mask for Janus, The Dancing Bears, Green with Beasts, and The Drunk in the Furnace. The Compass Flower. New York: Atheneum, 1977. Finding the Islands. San Francisco: North Point Press, 1982. Opening the Hand. New York: Atheneum, 1983. The Rain in the Trees. New York: Knopf, 1988. Selected Poems. New York: Atheneum, 1988. PROSE The Miner's Pale Children. New York: Atheneum, 1970. A New Right Arm. Albuquerque, N. Mex.: Road Runner Press, 1970. * 'On Being Awarded the Pulitzer Prize.'' In New York Review of Books, 16:41 (June 3, 1971). 4 'On Open Form." In The New Naked Poetry. Edited by Stephen Berg and Robert Mezey. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1976. Pp. 276-278. Also in Regions of Memory: Uncollected Prose, 1949-1982. Edited by Ed Folsom and Gary Nelson. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987. Pp. 298-300. Houses and Travellers. New York: Atheneum, 1977. Unframed Originals: Recollections. New York: Atheneum, 1982. Regions of Memory: Uncollected Prose, 1949-1982. Edited by Ed Folsom and Gary Nelson. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987.

DRAMA Rumpelstiltskin. BBC television production, 1951. Pageant of Cain. BBC Third Programme, 1952. Huckleberry Finn. BBC television production, 1953. Darkling Child. Arts Theatre production, London, England, 1956. Favor Island. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Poets' Theater production, 1957. BBC Third Programme, 1958. Act I appears in New World Writing, 12:154. (1957). The Guilded West. Coventry, England: Belgrade Theatre production, 1961.

TRANSLATED WORKS

Robert the Devil. BBC Third Programme, 1954; Iowa City, Iowa: Windhover Press, 1981. Punishment Without Vengeance [Lope de Vega]. BBC production, 1954. The Dog in the Manger [Lope de Vega]. BBC production, 1954. The Poem of the Cid [El poema del mio Cid]. New York: Las Americas, 1959; New York: New American Library, 1962, 1975. The Satires ofPersius. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1961; Port Washington, New York: Kennikat Press, 1973. Spanish Ballads. New York: Doubleday, 1961. The Life of Lazarillo de Tormes: His Fortunes and Adversities. New York: Doubleday, 1962. The Song of Roland. In Medieval Epics. New York: Modern Library, 1963; Vintage, 1970. Yerma [Federico Garcia Lorca]. Lincoln Center production, New York, 1966. Selected Translations J 948-1968. New York: Atheneum, 1969. Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair [Pablo Neruda]. London: Cape, 1969; New York: Grossman, 1969; Penguin, 1976. Products of the Perfected Civilization: Selected Writings ofChamfort [Sebastien-Roch-Nicholas Chamfort]. New York: Macmillan, 1969; San Francisco: North Point Press, 1984. Voices [Antonio Porchia]. Chicago: Follett, 1969. Transparence of the World: Poems by Jean Follain. New York: Atheneum, 1969. Asian Figures. New York: Atheneum, 1973. Proverbs, aphorisms, and riddles from various Asian cultures. Osip Mandelstam: Selected Poems. New York: Ath-

W. S. MERWIN / 359 eneum, 1974. Translated with Clarence Brown. Sanskrit Love Poetry. New York: Columbia University Press, 1977. Translated with J. Moussaieff Masson. Reprinted as The Peacock's Egg: Love Poems from Ancient India. San Francisco: North Point Press, 1981. Vertical Poetry [Robert Juarroz]. Santa Cruz, Calif.: Kayak, 1977. Euripides: Iphigeneia at Aulis. New York: Oxford University Press, 1978. Translated with George E. Dimock, Jr. Selected Translations 1968-1978. New York: Atheneum, 1979. Four French Plays. New York: Atheneum, 1985. Includes Robert the Devil; Alain-Rene Lesage's The Rival of His Master and Turcaret; and Pierre de Marivaux's The False Confessions. From the Spanish Morning. New York: Atheneum, 1985. Includes Spanish Ballads; Lope de Rueda's Eufemia; and The Life ofLazarillo de Tormes. Soseki, Muso. Sun at Midnight: Poems and Sermons. San Francisco: North Point Press, 1989. Translated with Soiku Shigematsu.

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL STUDIES Altieri, Charles. 4'Situating Merwin's Poetry Since 1970." In W. S. Merwin: Essays on the Poetry. Edited by Cary Nelson and Ed Folsom. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987. Pp. 159-197. Brunner, Edward. "Opening the Hand: The Variable Caesura and the Family Poems." In W. S. Merwin: Essays on the Poetry. Edited by Cary Nelson and Ed Folsom. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987. Pp. 276-295. Christhilf, Mark. W. S. Merwin the Mythmaker. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1986. Clark, Tom. The Great Naropa Poetry Wars. Santa Barbara, Calif.: Cadmus Editions, 1980. Davis, Cheri. W. S. Merwin. Boston: Twayne, 1981. Folsom, Ed. 4 4 4 I Have Been a Long Time in a Strange Country': W. S. Merwin and America." In W. S. Merwin: Essays on the Poetry. Edited by Cary Nelson and Ed Folsom. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987. Pp. 224-249. Howard, Richard. "W. S. Merwin." In his Alone with America. Enlarged edition. New York: Atheneum, 1980. Pp. 412-449. Molesworth, Charles. 4 4 W. S. Merwin: Style, Vision,

Influence." In W. S. Merwin: Essays on Poetry. Edited by Cary Nelson and Ed Folsom. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987. Pp. 145-158. Nelson, Cary. "The Resources of Failure: W. S. Merwin's Deconstructive Career." Boundary, 2:573598. (Winter 1977). Revised version in W. S. Merwin: Essays on the Poetry. Edited by Cary Nelson and Ed Folsom. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987. Nelson, Cary, and Ed Folsom, eds. W. S. Merwin: Essays on the Poetry. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987. This volume contains an extensive bibliography of Merwin's collected and uncollected works through 1985 and an excellent summary of the contents of the W. S. Merwin Archive at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Ramsey, Jarold. 44The Continuities of W. S. Merwin: 4 What Has Escaped Us We bring with Us.' " Massachusetts Review, 14:569-590 (1973). Also in W. S. Merwin: Essays on the Poetry. Edited by Cary Nelson and Ed Folsom. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Scholes, Robert. 44Semiotics of the Poetic Text." In his Semiotics and Interpretation. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982. Pp. 37-56. Also in W. S. Merwin: Essays on the Poetry. Edited by Cary Nelson and Ed Folsom. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987.

INTERVIEWS 44

A Conversation with W. S. Merwin." Audience, 4:4-6(1956). Clifton, Michael. 44 W. S. Merwin: An Interview." American Poetry Review, 12:17-22 (July/August 1983). Eliot, David L. 4 4 An Interview with W. S. Merwin." Contemporary Literature, 29:1-25 (Spring 1988). A 1984 interview. Folsom, Ed, and Cary Nelson. * 4 Tact Has Two Faces': Interview." In W. S. Merwin, Regions of Memory: Uncollected Prose. Edited by Cary Nelson and Ed Folsom. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987. Pp. 320-361. Gerber, Philip L., and Robert J. Gemmett. 4 4 Tireless Quest': A Conversation with W. S. Merwin." English Record, 19:9-18 (February 1969). Hirsch, Edward. 44 The Art of Poetry XXXVIII: W. S.

360 I AMERICAN

Merwin." The Paris Review, 29:56-81 (Spring 1987). Jackson, Richard. "Unnaming the Myths." In his Acts of Mind: Conversations with Contemporary Poets. University of Alabama Press, 1983. Pp. 4852. MacShane, Frank. "A Portrait of W. S. Merwin." Shenandoah, 21:3-14 (Winter 1970).

WRITERS

Myers, Jack, and Michael Simms. "Possibilities of the Unknown: Conversations with W. S. Merwin." Southwest Review, 68:164-180 (Spring 1983). Ossman, David. 4t W. S. Merwin." In his The Sullen Art. New York: Corinth Books, 1967. Pp. 65-72. Pettit, Michael. "W. S. Merwin: An Interview." Black Warrior Review, 8:7-20 (Spring 1982). —JIM KRAUS

Toni Morrison 1931-

T

jfONl IONI MORRISON WAS born Chloe Anthony Wofford on February 18, 1931, in the poor, multiracial steel town of Lorain, Ohio. She was one of four children of Ramah Willis Wofford, a homemaker who sang in the church choir, and of George Wofford, who held a variety of jobs, including car washer, steel mill welder, and road construction and shipyard worker. From her parents and grandparents Morrison received a legacy of resistance to oppression and exploitation as well as an appreciation of African American folklore and cultural practices. Her maternal grandparents emigrated from Alabama to Ohio in hopes of leaving racism and poverty behind and finding greater opportunities for their children. Her father likewise left Georgia to escape the racial violence that was rampant there. Morrison often tells the story of her mother's letter to Franklin D. Roosevelt protesting the maggot-infested flour that was given to her family during a time when they received public assistance. Despite these struggles, Morrison recalls the ubiquitousness of African American cultural rituals in her childhood and adolescence; the music, folklore, ghost stories, dreams, signs, and visitations that are so vividly evoked in her fiction have been prevalent and empowering forces throughout her life.

The influence of these presences in her early life informs Morrison's commitment to inscribing the characteristics of modes of black cultural expression in her prose. In an essay titled "Rootedness: The Ancestor as Foundation," she describes the importance of orality and call-andresponse in her fiction: [Literature] should try deliberately to make you stand up and make you feel something profoundly in the same way that a black preacher requires his congregation to speak, to join him in the sermon, to behave in a certain way, to stand up and to weep and to cry and to accede or to change and to modify to expand on the sermon that is being delivered. In the same way that a musician's music is enhanced when there is a response from the audience. Now in a book, which closes, after all—it's of some importance to me to try to make that connection— to try to make that happen also. And, having at my disposal only the letters of the alphabet and some punctuation, I have to provide the places and spaces so that the reader can participate. Because it is the affective and participatory relationship between the artist or the speaker and the audience that is of primary importance, as it is in these other art forms I have described.

361

362 / AMERICAN WRITERS In addition to the tropes and forms of African American cultural expression, the geography of her childhood years figures centrally in Morrison's work. In an interview with Claudia Tate she remarks: Only The Bluest Eye, my first book, is set in Lorain, Ohio. . . . I am from the Midwest so I have a special affection for it. My beginnings are always there. No matter what I write, I begin there. . . . The northern part of [Ohio] had underground railroad stations and a history of black people escaping into Canada, but the southern part of the state is as much Kentucky as there is, complete with cross burnings. Ohio is a curious juxtaposition of what was ideal in this country and what was base. It was also a Mecca for black people; they came to the mills and plants because Ohio offered the possibility of a good life, the possibility of freedom, even though there were some terrible obstacles. Ohio also offers an escape from stereotyped black settings. It is neither plantation nor ghetto. Literature was an important presence in Morrison's childhood and youth. She was the only child in her first grade class who knew how to read when she entered school. As an adolescent she read widely in a variety of literary traditions, counting the classic Russian novelists, Flaubert, and Jane Austen among her favorites. However, she was not exposed to the work of previous generations of black women writers until adulthood. Her delayed introduction to the work of those earlier writers does not, to her mind, mean that she writes outside that tradition. Rather, the connections between her work and theirs confirms her notion that African American women writers represent their characters and landscapes in certain specific, identifiable ways. She remarked in a conversation with Gloria Naylor: [People] who are trying to show certain kinds of connections between myself and Zora Neale Hur-

ston are always dismayed and disappointed in me because I hadn't read Zora Neale Hurstonexcept for one little short story before I began to write. I hadn't read her until after I had written. . . . [The] fact that I had never read Zora Neale Hurston and wrote The Bluest Eye and Sula anyway means that the tradition really exists. You know, if I had read her, then you could say that I consciously was following in the footsteps of her, but the fact that I never read her and still there may be whatever they're finding, similarities and dissimilarities, whatever such critics do, makes the cheese more binding, not less, because it means that the world as perceived by black women at certain times does exist, however they treat it and whatever they select out of it to record, there is that. Susan L. Blake quotes Morrison's remark that although the books she read in her youth "were not written for a little black girl in Lorain, Ohio . . . they spoke to me out of their own specificity." During those years Morrison had hopes of becoming a dancer; nevertheless, her early reading later inspired her "to capture that same specificity about the nature and feeling of the culture I grew up in." After graduating with honors from Lorain High School, Morrison attended Howard University, from which she graduated in 1953 with a major in English and a minor in classics. She describes the Howard years, during which she changed her name to Toni, with some measure of ambivalence. Evidently she was disappointed with the atmosphere at the university, which, she has said, "was about getting married, buying clothes and going to parties. It was also about being cool, loving Sarah Vaughan (who only moved her hand a little when she sang) and MJQ [the Modern Jazz Quartet]." To offset the influence of these sorts of preoccupations, she became involved in the Howard University Players and traveled with a student-faculty repertory

TONl MORRISON I 363 troupe that took plays on tour throughout the South during the summers. As Blake suggests, these trips illustrated for Morrison the stories of injustice her maternal grandparents told about their lives in Alabama. In 1955 Morrison received an M.A. from Cornell University, where she wrote a thesis on the theme of suicide in the works of William Faulkner and Virginia Woolf. She then taught English at Texas Southern University from 1955 to 1957 and at Howard from 1957 to 1964. At Howard she met and married Harold Morrison, a Jamaican architect; they had two sons, Harold Ford and Slade Kevin. Morrison says little about her marriage but has remarked upon the sense of frustration she experienced during that period: 44 It was as though I had no judgment, no perspective, no power, no authority, no self—just this brutal sense of irony, melancholy and a trembling respect for words." During this time she joined a writers' group and wrote a story about a young black girl who wanted blue eyes. From that story came The Bluest Eye, her first novel. Morrison divorced her husband around the time she left Howard. With her two young sons she returned to Lorain for eighteen months and subsequently began to work in publishing, first ap an editor at L. W. Singer, the textbook subsidiary of Random House in Syracuse, New York, and then as senior editor at Random House's headquarters in New York City. While living in Syracuse she worked on the manuscript of what was to become The Bluest Eye. In her conversation with Gloria Naylor, she suggests that she resumed work on this novel almost as if to write herself back into existence: And so it looked as though the world was going by and I was not in that world. I used to live in this world, I mean really lived in it. I knew it. I used to really belong here. And at some point I didn't belong here anymore. I was somebody's parent, somebody's this, somebody's that, but

there was no me in this world. And I was looking for that dead girl and I thought I might talk about that dead girl, if for no other reason than to have it, somewhere in the world, in a drawer. There was such a person. I had written this little story earlier just for some friends, so I took it out and I began to work it up. And all of those people were me. I was Pecola, Claudia. . . . I was everybody. And as I began to do it, I began to pick up scraps of things I had seen or felt, or didn't see or didn't feel, but imagined. And speculated about and wondered about. And I fell in love with myself. I reclaimed myself and the world—a real revelation. I named it. I described it. I listed it. I identified it. I recreated it. She sent part of a draft to an editor, who liked it enough to suggest that she finish it. The Bluest Eye was published in 1970. Although Morrison was not familiar with much writing by other African American writers when she began her first novel, she has had a profound impact upon the careers of a range of other black authors. As senior editor at Random House, Morrison brought a number of black writers to that publisher's list, including Toni Cade Bambara, Angela Davis, Henry Dumas, and Gayl Jones. Gloria Naylor eloquently describes the impact that Morrison's work had on her as a young author: The presence of [The Bluest Eye] served two vital purposes at that moment in my life. It said to a young poet, struggling to break into prose, that the barriers were flexible; at the core of it all is language, and if you're skilled enough with that, you can create your own genre. And it said to a young black woman, struggling to find a mirror of her worth in this society, not only is your story worth telling but it can be told in words so painstakingly eloquent that it becomes a song. From 1967 until 1988 Morrison taught at colleges and universities including Yale, Bard, the

364 I AMERICAN WRITERS State University of New York at Purchase, and the State University of New York at Albany. Since 1988 she has held the Robert F. Goheen Professorship of the Humanities at Princeton University. As of 1990 Morrison has published five novels, each of which has enjoyed critical acclaim and sustained scholarly attention. In addition to The Bluest Eye, her work includes Sula (1973); Song of Solomon (1977), which received the National Book Critics' Circle Award in 1978; Tar Baby (1981), a best-seller; and Beloved (1987), which won the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. In each of her novels Morrison boldly reveals the silences and undermines the presuppositions, assumptions, hierarchies, and oppositions upon which Western, hegemonic discourse depends and which legitimate the oppression of people of color, women, and the poor. Her prose simultaneously invokes the lyrical and the historical, the supernatural and the ideological; she seeks to show the place of "enchantment" for people like the ones among whom she grew up, even as she explores the complex social circumstances within which they live out their lives. She said in an interview with Christina Davis: My own use of enchantment simply comes because that's the way the world was for me and for the black people that I knew. In addition to the very shrewd, down-to-earth, efficient way in which they did things and survived things, there was this other knowledge or perception, always discredited but nevertheless there, which informed their sensibilities and clarified their activities. . . . I grew up in a house in which people talked about their dreams with the same authority that they talked about what "really" happened. They had visitations and did not find that fact shocking and they had some sweet, intimate connection with things that were not empirically verifiable. . . . Without that, I think I would have

been quite bereft because I would have been dependent on so-called scientific data to explain hopelessly unscientific things and also I would have relied on information that even subsequent objectivity has proved to be fraudulent. . . . The Bluest Eye centers on a young black girl, Pecola Breedlove, who goes mad because of the combined weight of her feeling of ugliness (confirmed by her family, neighbors, and schoolmates) and the experience of being raped by her father. Narrated for the most part by her friend Claudia MacTeer, the novel illustrates the destructive potential of a culture overinvested in rigid conceptions of beauty, propriety, and morality. The novel specifically addresses the psychological and political implications of black people's commitment to a standard of beauty (the blond-haired, blue-eyed ideal) and order (the life described in the Dick and Jane primer) that is unattainable. It also might be seen as a meditation upon the nature of desire itself, directed as it always is to a goal that can never be achieved. The novel begins with a passage from the familiar Dick and Jane primer by means of which many of us learn to read. The passage teaches simple vocabulary as well as a normative vision of the nuclear family and capital accumulation. In the context of the novel the reader is made aware that even this basic text is ideologically coded. The passage is then repeated twice; in the first repetition the account is single-spaced and lacks capital letters. In the second repetition the space between lines is even further compressed and the spaces between words have disappeared. This linguistic degeneration into pandemonium reflects the fragility of the Dick and Jane story and anticipates the chaos of Pecola's family that the novel goes on to describe. The structure of The Bluest Eye underscores the proliferation of stories and of narrative voices within the novel. The body of the text is divided into four chapters that are, in turn, subdivided.

TON1 MORRISON I 365 Each begins with an episode, usually involving Pecola, told from the point of view of Claudia the child but shaped by her adult reflections and rhetoric. Claudia's stories then yield to one or two stories told by an apparently objective, omniscient narrator. This narrator usually recalls information to which Claudia would not have had access: she tells stories from Pecola's life that involve other characters and weaves flashbacks from these other lives into Pecola's story. In addition, in each chapter several garbled lines from the primer separate Claudia's voice from that of the omniscient narrator and foreshadow the tensions contained within the story that follows. The chapters counterpoise a past before the narrative present, the eternal present of the primer, and the narrative present of Pecola's story as told by Claudia. The different narratives in each chapter provide variations on a specific theme; these stories address with splendid and various obliquity the consequences of desiring qualities and possessions that are inevitably inaccessible. By using this technique of repetition with a difference, Morrison reveals the interconnectedness of past and present and the myriad ways in which human beings are implicated in each other's circumstances. The form implies that the meaning of Pecola's story may be understood only in relation to broad social practices and beliefs. "Winter," the second chapter, illustrates the interplay of the three narrative voices that both elaborates upon a particular theme and reveals the links between discrete moments in time. At the beginning of "Winter," Claudia recalls the images of security that she and her family associate with that season. Her memories invoke the presence of her father and the home remedies that kept the threat of cold away: Wolf killer turned hawk fighter, he worked night and day to keep one from the door and the other from under the windowsills. A Vulcan guarding

the flames, he gives us instructions about which doors to keep closed or opened for proper distribution of heat, lays kindling by, discusses qualities of coal, and teaches us how to rake, feed, and bank the fire. . . . Winter tightened our heads with a band of cold and melted our eyes. We put pepper in the feet of our stockings, Vaseline on our faces, and stared through dark icebox mornings at four stewed prunes, slippery lumps of oatmeal, and cocoa with a roof of skin. Ironically, the events Claudia and the omniscient narrator present in this chapter recall pneumonia weather—warmth that turns abruptly cold—rather more fully than these characteristics of winter. Claudia describes a day on which she is doubly disappointed; the omniscient narrator tells of the way in which Pecola is wounded by a woman she admires. Their triumph over a gang of bullies briefly binds the MacTeer sisters, Pecola, and Maureen Peal together. Their camaraderie is striking, since Claudia and Frieda MacTeer usually scorn Maureen, "the high-yellow dream child with long brown hair." True to form, shortly after they bond, the girls begin to fight with each other. The MacTeer sisters cannot forgive Maureen the possessions and characteristics they envy: her wealth, worldliness, long hair, and fair skin. And when they begin to taunt her, she makes explicit her contempt for their dark skin: "I am cute! And you ugly! Black and ugly black e mos. I am cute!" The MacTeer girls arrive home that afternoon and are cheered by their parents' boarder, Mr. Henry, who gives them money for candy and ice cream. For the second time that day their delight turns to sadness, however, for they discover that Mr. Henry has sent them off not out of generosity but out of self-interest: he wants to be free to entertain a pair of prostitutes. Both incidents reveal the potential for cruelty and insensitivity

366 I AMERICAN WRITERS that underlies even the most appealing and inviting facades. In this chapter the omniscient narrator describes Pecola's encounter with Junior, one of her black middle-class schoolmates, and his mother, Geraldine. The episode centers on Geraldine, who, like Maureen and Mr. Henry, represents a false spring. The section begins with the narrator's description of Geraldine's upbringing as a young girl in the South; she is raised to be meticulous, religious, sexless, and unemotional: These particular brown girls from Mobile and Aiken are not like some of their sisters. They are not fretful, nervous, or shrill; they do not have lovely black necks that stretch as though against an invisible collar; their eyes do not bite. These sugar-brown Mobile girls move through the streets without a stir. They are as sweet and plain as buttercake. Slim ankles; long, narrow feet. They wash themselves with orange-colored Lifebuoy soap, dust themselves with Cashmere Bouquet talc, soften their skin with Jergens Lotion. They smell like wood, newspapers, and vanilla. The narrator describes Geraldine as if she were a type, not an individual, in order to emphasize the extent of her assimilation; she is so thoroughly socialized and commodified that nothing unique remains. The ensuing flashback from Geraldine's point of view explains the vehemence with which she throws Pecola out of her house. Geraldine's adulthood has been a slow process of eradicating 44 the funk," the kind of disorder that blackness exemplifies for her. In Pecola's face she confronts the image of all she has tried to escape, and feels as if her private territory has been invaded. She had seen this little girl all of her life. Hanging out of windows over saloons in Mobile, crawling over the porches of shotgun houses on

the edge of town, sitting in bus stations holding paper bags and crying to mothers who kept saying "Shet up!" Hair uncombed, dresses falling apart, shoes untied and caked with din. They had stared at her with great uncomprehending eyes. Eyes that questioned nothing and asked everything. Unblinking and unabashed, they stared up at her. The end of the world lay in their eyes, and the beginning, and all the waste in between. They were everywhere. . . . And this one had settled in her house. The garbled version of the primer separates Claudia's story from that of the omniscient narrator. Here, as in each of the chapters, these lines comment ironically on the content of the chapter. In 4<Winter" we read: "SEETHECATITGOESMEOWMEOWCOMEANDPLAYCOMEPLAYWITHJANETHEKITTENWILLNOTPLAYPLAYPLA." The correctly punctuated version of these lines might evoke the clich6 of the coy household pet too finicky to play. But the scenario at Geraldine's house to which the lines refer is as jumbled as the lines are themselves. For one thing, as the narrator tells us, the cat has replaced both Geraldine's husband and her son in her affections. Moreover, the cat is central to the episode the chapter describes. Junior lures Pecola into his house by promising to let her play with his cat. He tortures and perhaps kills the cat when he finds that it and Pecola are drawn to each other. So if Geraldine's cat will not play, it may well be because it is dead. This chapter thus shows some of the forms that overinvestment in an alien cultural standard may take. Like Pecola, Maureen and Geraldine yearn to be white. Pecola's aspirations are entirely unattainable, since they take the form of a desire for blue eyes. Maureen and Geraldine aspire to intermediate goals that are more easily accessible. But their desires spring from a hatred of what they are that is as profound as Pecola's. By juxtaposing these and other stories to Peco-

TONI MORRISON I 367 la's, Morrison displays the dimensions of her protagonist's condition. In her interview with Claudia Tate, Morrison says that she knew she was a writer when she wrote Sulat her second novel: I've said I wrote The Bluest Eye after a period of depression, but the words "lonely, depressed, melancholy" don't really mean the obvious. They simply represent a different state. It's an unbusy state, when I am more aware of myself than of others. The best words for making that state clear to other people are those words. It's not necessarily an unhappy feeling; it's just a different one. I think now I know better what that state is. Sometimes when I'm in mourning, for example, after my father died, there's a period when I'm not fighting day-to-day battles, a period when I can't fight or don't fight, and I am very passive, like a vessel. When I'm in this state, I can hear things. . . . Ideas can't come to me while I'm preoccupied. . . . It happened after my father died, thus the association with depression. It happened after my divorce. It has happened other times, but not so much because I was unhappy or happy. It was that I was unengaged, and in that situation of disengagement with the day-to-day rush, something positive happened. I've never had sense enough to deliberately put myself in a situation like that before. At that time I had to be put into it. Now I know how to bring it about without going through the actual event. Deborah E. McDowell describes Sula as a work that questions the existence and construction of a unitary self defined in opposition to an "other." Indeed, at every turn in the text, Morrison interrogates the ground upon which individual and collective identity are constructed. The novel begins with a brief account of The Bottom, the community within which the novel is set. The narrator establishes that the novel is set during the moment in the life of the town

when it was animated by black people's music, stories, dance, and rituals. That time is now gone; places such as the Time and a Half Pool Hall, Irene's Palace of Cosmetology, and Reba's Grill have been leveled to make room for the Medallion City Golf Course and the suburbs. Sula is thus situated in a place associated with change and loss. The narrator goes on to describe the way in which the hill community ironically called The Bottom received its name. The story is, in her words, "a nigger joke." A white farmer promises his slave freedom and a piece of bottomland in exchange for his doing some very difficult chores. When the time comes for the farmer to make good on his word, he tricks the slave into believing that by "bottomland" he meant land in the hills. That land may be high up from a human perspective, the fanner says, but from God's perspective it is "the bottom of heaven." The narrator remarks that the land in The Bottom was really quite beautiful; so much so, in fact, that some people wonder if it really is the bottom of heaven. As a tale that white people tell about black people and blacks tell about themselves, the story comments upon the history of oppression and the strategies of resistance that inflect the conditions under which African Americans have lived. It suggests the ways in which blacks have made meaning from practices that seek to disenfranchise and oppress them. Indeed, it anticipates an observation that Morrison makes in an interview with Bessie W. Jones about the place of irony in her writing. Morrison here indicates that irony defines the quality of blackness in her work: Any irony is the mainstay [for black people]. Other people call it humor. It's not really that. It's not sort of laughing away one's troubles. And laughter itself for black people has nothing to do with what's funny at all. And taking that which is peripheral, or violent or doomed or

368 I AMERICAN WRITERS something that nobody else can see any value in and making value out of it or having a psychological attitude about duress is part of what made us stay alive and fairly coherent, and irony is a part of that—being able to see the underside of something as well. In addition to emphasizing the place of irony in African American cultural practice, the account of The Bottom introduces the issue of the instability of meanings that is central to the text as a whole. This introductory section is followed by the story of Shadrack, a mad World War I veteran who has lost his ability to live with the unexpected aspects of life after seeing fellow soldiers shot in battle. He conquers his fears only by creating National Suicide Day, the day of the year devoted to death to keep everyone safe the rest of the time. The relationship between Shadrack's story and Sula's is not immediately evident. Indeed, the title character does not appear in the novel until it is almost one-third over. That her story is deferred until the reader is introduced to the town, to Shadrack, to her good friend Nel and Nel's family, as well as to Sula's own family, suggests that, like Pecola's story, Sula's is at once individual and collective, part of the fabric of the communal lore of The Bottom. Nel and Sula are constructed as complementary opposites. Of the two, Nel is the more restrained and conservative, Sula the more adventurous. Early in their friendship, the two enjoy an intense closeness that might be read as eroticized. However, the novel suggests that the world in which they live cannot sustain their intimacy; Sula leaves town to make her own way, while Nel chooses the safe haven of marriage and family. Both options separate Nel and Sula from each other. Nel's marriage to Jude and her friendship with Sula are destroyed by Jude's infidelity with Sula; Sula's attempts to define the terms of her

life outside of communal standards of women's behavior are unproductive, and she dies at a young age. Years after Sula's death, Nel realizes that the sense of longing which has characterized her life after Jude's departure is really a response to losing Sula. By showing the complementarity of the two women's identities, Morrison explores the creative possibilities of women's friendship. She problematizes the spectrum by means of which communities assess human action, suggesting that distinctions between socially acceptable and socially unacceptable practices are arbitrary. Additionally, she undermines the centrality of the myth of heterosexual romantic love. Song of Solomon tells the story of Milkman Dead's unwitting search for identity. Milkman appears to be destined for a life of self-alienation and isolation because of his commitment to the materialism and the linear conception of time that are part of the legacy from his father, Macon Dead. However, during a trip to his ancestral home, Milkman comes to understand his place in an emotional and familial community and to appreciate the value of conceiving of time as a cyclical process. The Deads exemplify the patriarchal, nuclear family that has traditionally been a stable and critical feature not only of American society but also of Western civilization in general. The primary institution for the reproduction and maintenance of children, ideally it provides individuals with the means for understanding their place in the world. The degeneration of the Dead family and the destructiveness of Macon's rugged individualism symbolize the invalidity of American—indeed, Western—values. Morrison's depiction of this family demonstrates the incompatibility of received assumptions with the texture and demands of life in black American communities. Pilate Dead, Macon's younger sister, provides a marked contrast to her brother and his family.

TONI MORRISON I 369 While Macon's love of property and money determines the nature and quality of his relationships, Pilate's disregard for status, occupation, hygiene, and manners enables her to affirm spiritual values such as compassion, respect, loyalty, and generosity. Pilate introduces a quality of 4 'enchantment" into the novel. The circumstances of her birth make her a character of supernatural proportions. She delivered herself at birth and was born without a navel. Her smooth stomach isolates her from society. Moreover, her physical condition symbolizes her thorough independence from others. Her self-sufficiency and isolation prevent her from being trapped or destroyed by the decaying values that threaten her brother's life. Before Milkman leaves his home in Michigan, he perceives the world in materialistic, selfish, unyielding terms that recall his father's behavior. Indeed, the search for gold that sends him to Virginia reveals his belief that escaping from his past and responsibilities, and finding material treasure, will guarantee him a sense of his own identity. Milkman's assumption that his trip south holds the key to his liberation is correct, although it is not gold that saves him. In his ancestors' world, communal and mythical values prevail over individualism and materialism; when he adopts their assumptions in place of his own, he arrives at a more complete understanding of what his experience means. Milkman's development rests partly on his comprehending the ways in which his life is bound up with the experiences of others, and partly on his establishing an intimate connection with the land for which his grandfather died. These accomplishments attend his greater achievement: learning to complete, understand, and sing the song that contains the history of his family. Milkman comes to know fully who he is when he can supply the lyrics to the song Pilate has only partially known. The song, which draws

on African and African American stories of blacks who escaped slavery by flying back to Africa, explains Milkman's lifelong fascination with flight. When Milkman learns the whole song and can sing it to Pilate as she has sung it to others, he assumes his destiny. He understands his yearning toward flight as a way in which his ancestral past makes itself known and felt to him. Milkman's sense of identity emerges when he allows himself to accept his personal and familial past. His quest critiques the faith in selfsufficiency for which his father stands. Through his story Morrison discards Western, individualistic notions of selfhood in favor of more complex, fluid constructions of identity. Song of Solomon was enthusiastically received and widely reviewed. Its publication catapulted Morrison into the ranks of the most revered contemporary writers. In addition to the National Book Critics' Circle Award, this novel received an American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Award. In 1980 President Jimmy Carter appointed Morrison to the National Council on the Arts, and in 1981 she was elected to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. The title of Tar Baby invokes the African American folktale that, with some variation, is told and retold in African communities and throughout American black communities, and was popularized among nonblacks by Joel Chandler Harris and Walt Disney. In the classic tar baby story, a trickster figure such as Brer Rabbit meets a tar baby that has been placed on the road by a white fanner or by other animals. Brer Rabbit greets the tar baby, and when it fails to respond, he strikes it and then becomes stuck to it. Brer Rabbit escapes when he convinces his captors that he is terrified of being thrown in the briar patch, which is really his home. He is able to free himself by playing on their underestimation of his character and runs away, taunting them.

370 I AMERICAN WRITERS This novel addresses the kinds of deceptions in which human beings participate to maintain the illusion of harmony and psychological tranquillity. Craig H. Werner argues that in Tar Baby, Morrison explores the variety of ways in which characters understand and use myths in their lives. Two characters in particular, Son and Jadine, are represented in terms of the tar baby story. For Morrison, Werner demonstrates, the myth of safety, by which characters seek to protect themselves from the complexities of human interaction, becomes a trap from which they cannot escape. The novel opens in the household of Valerian and Margaret Street on the Caribbean island of Isle des Chevaliers. The larger community is inhabited primarily by wealthy white Americans and the indigenous blacks whose labor they exploit. The Street household is composed of the Streets; their longtime, devoted black servants, Sydney and Ondine Childs; and occasionally by Jadine Childs, the Streets' protegee and Sydney's niece. One Christmas season the tranquillity of their paradise is interrupted when Son Green, an African American fugitive, is discovered hiding in Margaret's bedroom closet. The Streets and the Childses are repelled by him, but they cannot avoid his touch; his presence forces them to confront secrets they had previously ignored. Once they acknowledge the silences upon which their complacency depends, they can no longer deny them. Valerian has taken early retirement from his family's candy business in Philadelphia so that he can enjoy a simple and self-indulgent life on the island. Margaret, twenty years his junior and a former beauty queen, is unwilling to share his self-imposed exile, spending six months of each year in the United States and urging him to return there to live. Sydney and Ondine are self-styled "Philadelphia Negroes," a term coined by W. E. B. DuBois that celebrates their class background and aspirations.

They have reconciled themselves to the peacefulness of the island, and value their security and Valerian's generosity to them and to Jadine. Orphaned at the age of twelve, Jadine is a fashion model, a student of art history, and the object of many men's desires. When the novel opens, the family awaits the homecoming of Michael, the Streets' son, at Christmas. They find themselves entertaining Son Green instead. His presence is profoundly disruptive. Margaret's terror reflects the extent to which the myth of the black rapist has invaded her imaginative life, notwithstanding her longstanding, ostensibly cordial relationship with Sydney. Valerian's graciousness toward Son— he entertains him royally and allows him to sleep upstairs in the guest room—prompts Sydney and Ondine to recognize the ways in which Valerian has condescended to them. Son does his best to placate Sydney, Ondine, and Margaret, and to establish an intimate relationship with Jadine. However, when Michael and all the other guests fail to appear at the fateful Christmas dinner, the collective submerged anger erupts. In anticipation of Michael's long-awaited visit, Margaret disturbs the organization of her household in order to construct an ideal family holiday. Although she entirely lacks culinary skills, she insists on fixing a traditional Christmas meal. Ondine is angry at being displaced from her kitchen and having surreptitiously to fix a dinner to replace Margaret's unfinished one. Sydney and Ondine become enraged when they learn that Valerian has fired Gideon and Theitse, the two local people who assist with gardening and household tasks, for stealing, rightly feeling that his high-handed insensitivity reflects the contempt with which he sees them. The accusations intensify until Ondine reveals the secret upon which the Street family life is built, that Margaret abused Michael when he was a child. In the wake of this revelation, Valerian agonizes over the vision of his son's suffering, and Mar-

TONI MORRISON I 371 garet admits the extremes to which she was driven by her own boredom. Son might therefore be read as a tar baby to the extent that the other characters cannot escape his touch and are transformed by it. But he refers to Jadine as a tar baby as well, a figure created by white men's institutions to trap black men. Despite, or perhaps because of, their differences, Son and Jadine find themselves in a passionate affair; the very differences that would seem to divide them bear an erotic charge in their respective imaginations. Son is seduced by Jadine's cosmopolitan beauty and sophistication; Jadine is compelled by his earthy sensuality. Yet when they escape the turmoil of life on Isle des Chevaliers and move back to the United States together, each is threatened by the other's world. Son cannot fit into Jadine's life in New York: He needed the blood-clot heads of the bougainvillea, the simple green rage of the avocado, the fruit of the banana trees puffed up and stiff like the fingers of gouty kings. Here prestressed concrete and steel contained anger, folded it back on itself to become a craving for things rather than vengeance. Jadine feels reproached by the communal mores of black people she meets in Son's hometown of Eloe, Florida. Her discomfort with them is made especially evident by the fact that when she is left on her own, she cannot sustain a conversation with them. She can relate to them only by photographing them, commodifying these people who are ostensibly her own in much the same way that she, as a model, is commodified by professional photographers: Jadine was squatting down in the middle of the road, the afternoon sun at her back. The children were happy to pose, and so were some of the younger women. Only the old folks refused to smile and glared into her camera as though looking at hell with the lid off. The men were enjoy-

ing the crease in her behind so clearly defined in the sunlight, click, click. Jadine had remembered her camera just before she thought she would go nuts, trying to keep a conversation going with Ellen and the neighbor women who came in to see Son's Northern girl. They looked at her with outright admiration, each one saying, "I was in Baltimore once," or "My cousin she live in New York." They did not ask her what they really wanted to know: where did she know Son from and how much did her boots cost. Jadine smiled, drank glasses of water and tried to talk "down home" like Ondine. But their worshipful stares and nonconversation made Son's absence seem much too long. She was getting annoyed when she remembered her camera. Now she was having a ball photographing everybody. Soldier's yard was full. "Beautiful," she said. "Fantastic. Now over here," click click. "Hey, what'd you say your name was? Okay, Beatrice, could you lean up against the tree?" click, click. "This way. Beautiful. Hold it. Hooooold it. Heaven," click click click. Moreover, in Eloe, Jadine is haunted by the specter of the Caribbean and Southern black women who are constructed in the novel as being more female than their cosmopolitan counterparts. After a night of lovemaking with Son, she dreams that a group of significant black women from her own and Son's past challenge her with their sexuality: [They] each pulled out a breast and showed it to her. Jadine started to tremble. They stood around in the room, jostling each other gently, gently— there wasn't much room—revealing one breast and then two and Jadine was shocked. . . . "I have breasts too," she said or thought or willed, "I have breasts too." But they didn't believe her. They just held their own higher and pushed their own farther out and looked at her. All of them revealing both their breasts except the woman in yellow. She did something more

572 / AMERICAN WRITERS shocking—she stretched out a long arm and showed Jadine her three big eggs. It scared her so, she began to cry. Shortly thereafter, Jadine and Son return to New York, where Jadine hopes to convince Son to get an education and become a professional. Her efforts to change him are no more successful than his attempts to have her fit in at Eloe; Jadine flees first to Isle des Chevaliers and then to Paris. In the Street household Valerian and Margaret seem to have reached a tentative accord with each other and with the Childses. At the end of the novel, Son arrives on the island in pursuit of Jadine, although it remains unclear whether any reconciliation between them is possible. The novel exposes the nature of the safe havens people create for each other and the consequences of willed ignorance. It explores the variant meanings and constructions of blackness. Moreover, it considers the consequences of the mythicizing or exoticizing of blackness in which whites and African Americans alike participate. Beloved is Morrison's most celebrated work to date. Based on the true story of Margaret Garner, a slave woman who killed her own child rather than sell her into slavery, Beloved is one of a number of contemporary novels by African American authors that retell the story of slavery. As is the case with works such as Jubilee (1966) by Margaret Walker, Flight to Canada (1976) by Ishmael Reed, Kindred (1979) by Octavia Butler, The Chaneysville Incident (1981) by David Bradley, Oxherding Tale (1982) and Middle Passage (1990) by Charles R. Johnson, and Dessa Rose (1986) by Sherley Anne Williams, Morrison's novel explores the implications of representing slavery both for the former slaves and for their cultural descendants. In addition, like these other works, Beloved explores the ways in which both the documentary materials of history and the free play of the imagination are

necessary to capture the unspeakable horrors of slavery. Beloved reflects Morrison's interest in recovering the slave's experience, given the paucity of available materials from the slave's own perspective. Her sensitivity to the relationship between history and fiction is evident throughout her fiction: to name but two examples, the experience of World War I shapes the life of Shadrack in Sula, and the legacy of slavery and the civil rights movement informs the world of Song of Solomon. Morrison remarks in an interview with Marsha Darling that the process of writing the book required her to complement historical research with the craft of fiction writing; only then could she get at the story of the infanticide of a slave child from the child's perspective: I did research about a lot of things in this book in order to narrow it, to make it narrow and deep, but I did not do much research on Margaret Garner other than the obvious stuff, because I wanted to invent her life, which is a way of saying I wanted to be accessible to anything the characters had to say about it. Recording her life as lived would not interest me, and would not make me available to anything that might be pertinent. I got to a point where in asking myself who could judge Sethe adequately, since I couldn't, and nobody else that knew her could, really, I felt the only person who could judge her would be the daughter she killed. Although Beloved is based on a real-life incident, Morrison altered the original account in order to make a political point. Her protagonist left her husband in slavery, escaped to freedom, and remained free with her living children. In the original, however, Morrison said to Marsha Darling: Margaret Garner escaped with her husband and two other men and was returned to slavery. . . . [Garner] wasn't tried for killing her child. She

TON1 MORRISON I 373 was tried for a real crime, which was running away—although the abolitionists were trying very hard to get her tried for murder because they wanted the Fugitive Slave Law to be unconstitutional. They did not want her tried on those grounds, so they tried to switch it to murder as a kind of success story. They thought that they could make it impossible for Ohio, as a free state, to acknowledge the right of a slave-owner to come get those people. In fact, the sanctuary movement now is exactly the same. But they all went back to Boone County and apparently the man who took them back—the man she was going to kill herself and her children to get away from—he sold her down river, which was as bad as was being separated from each other. But apparently the boat hit a sandbar or something, and she fell or jumped with her daughter, her baby, into the water. It is not clear whether she fell or jumped, but they rescued her and I guess she went on down to New Orleans and I don't know. Set in Cincinnati in 1873, eight years after the end of the Civil War, Beloved is nevertheless a novel about slavery. The characters have been so profoundly affected by the experience of slavery that time cannot separate them from its horrors or undo its effects. Indeed, by setting the novel during Reconstruction, Morrison invokes the inescapability of slavery, for the very name of the period calls to mind the havoc and destruction wrought during the antebellum period. A complex novel such as this one does not lend itself easily to summary. It is a work that explores, among other topics, the workings and the power of memory; to represent the inescapability of the past, Morrison eschews linear plot development for a multidirectional narrative in which the past breaks in unexpectedly to disrupt the movement forward in time. The novel begins at 124 Bluestone Road, in the household that Sethe, a former slave, shares with her daughter, Denver, and the ghost of the daughter she killed.

Number 124 had once been home also to Baby Suggs, Sethe's mother-in-law, and to Howard and Buglar, Sethe's two sons; but Baby Suggs has died and the two boys have run away from the baby ghost. The trajectory of the plot begins when Paul D, one of Sethe's friends from the Sweet Home plantation, arrives unexpectedly at her home. They quickly renew their friendship, become lovers, and decide to live together. Paul D attempts to rid the house of the presence of the baby ghost, but his attempt at exorcism triggers her return in another form, as a ghost made flesh in the form of a young woman. Sethe and Paul D are both haunted by memories of slavery that they wish to avoid. Sethe tries to block out the experience of being whipped and having her breast milk stolen by the nephews (or sons?) of Schoolteacher (her master's cruel brother-in-law); of killing her daughter to prevent her from being taken back into slavery; and of exchanging sex for the engraving on that same daughter's tombstone. Paul D wants desperately to forget having seen the physical and psychological destruction of his fellow Sweet Home men; having been forced to wear a bit; and having endured the hardships of the chain gang. The former slaves' desire for forgetfulness notwithstanding, the past will not be kept at bay. The slightest sensation triggers memories that overwhelm them. Moreover, the novel turns on the embodiment and appearance of Beloved, the daughter Sethe killed in order to prevent her return to slavery. In the intensity of their connections with each other, and in their various encounters and engagements with Beloved, the characters explore what it means for them to confront the history of their suffering, and learn to move beyond that past. Additionally, through the use of the incarnate ghost, the novel considers the place of black bodies in the construction of narratives of slavery. Early in her life in freedom, Baby Suggs be-

374 I AMERICAN WRITERS comes a preacher—unchurched, uncalled, unrobed, and unanointed—one who brings a message of salvation to the black fugitives and former slaves outside Cincinnati. Her message, which transforms the Christian message of selfabnegation and deliverance after death, is meant to heal the broken and suffering bodies of those who endured slavery. As she herself—with legs, back, head, eyes, hands, kidneys, womb, and tongue broken by slavery—has resolved to use her heart in the service of her vast congregation, she preaches to restore the bodies of those battered by their enslavement: "Here," [Baby Suggs] said, "in this here place, we flesh; flesh that weeps, laughs; flesh that dances on bare feet in grass. Love it. Love it hard. Yonder they do not love your flesh. They despise it. They don't love your eyes; they'd just as soon pick em out. No more do they love the skin on your back. . . . So love your neck; put a hand on it, grace it, stroke it and hold it up. And all your inside parts that they'd just as soon slop for hogs, you got to love them. The dark, dark liver—love it, love it, and the beat and beating heart, love that too. More than eyes or feet. More than lungs that have yet to draw free air. More than your life-holding womb and your life-giving private parts, hear me now, love your heart. For this is the prize." Readers may be inclined to read Baby Suggs's use of the word "heart" metaphorically, to assume that by "heart" she means compassion. But in the context of this litany of broken body parts, one is reminded that the word "heart" refers to an organ as well as to an emotional capacity. In this context it becomes more difficult to make the leap from the corporeal referent to the metaphysical; such an erasure of the corporeal may be read as analogous to the expendability of black bodies under slavery. The variety of meanings that attach to Baby

Suggs's use of the word "heart" questions the familiar distinction between body and spirit. This process of interrogation, by which the body is reclaimed and sanctified, is of profound importance within a text that responds to the meanings of slavery. It first reflects the suspicion of received hierarchies and dichotomies that characterizes most of Morrison's writing. Moreover, it critiques the hierarchical system of racial differentiation in which blacks are associated with bodily labor; whites, with spiritual and intellectual gifts. Thus, by questioning the dichotomy between spirit and flesh, the novel also interrogates the basis of the system of slavery. The focus on bodies in the novel is clear both in the predominance of scenes of physical suffering and scarred bodies and in the characters' sensory experience of their past. During their lives as slaves, Sethe, Paul D, and Baby Suggs know psychological and emotional humiliation. For instance, Paul D is shamed by the knowledge that the barnyard rooster possesses more autonomy than he does. Sethe is deeply threatened by the research that Schoolteacher does on her own and her fellow slaves' racial characteristics. And Sethe and Baby Suggs are acutely sensitive to the power that slavery has over the bonds between kin. Yet despite the recognition of these sorts of philosophical and emotional deprivations, Beloved seems especially engaged with the havoc wrought upon black bodies under slavery: the circular scar under Sethe's mother's breast and the bit in her mouth; the bit in Paul D's mouth; Sethe's stolen breast milk and the scars on her back; the roasting body of Sixo, one of the Sweet Home men, to name but a few. Despite her attempts to forget her enslavement, Sethe's memories come to her through her body; sensory perceptions set flashbacks in motion. When washing some stinging chamomile sap off her legs, the scent and the sensation propel her back into the past:

TONI MORRISON I 375 The plash of water, the sight of her shoes and stockings awry on the path where she had flung them; or Here Boy lapping in the puddle near her feet, and suddenly there was Sweet Home rolling, rolling, rolling out before her eyes, and although there was not a leaf on that farm that did not make her want to scream, it rolled itself out before her in shameless beauty.

him the more his blood, frozen like an ice pond for twenty years, began thawing, breaking into pieces that, once melted, had no choice but to swirl and eddy.

Sethe's body is also linked to the past by virtue of the hieroglyphic nature of the scars on her back. She wears on her body the signs of her greatest ordeal at the Sweet Home plantation. The story of the brutal handling she endured under slavery—the stealing of her breast milk and the beating that ensued—are encoded in the scars on her back. Their symbolic power is evident in the variety of ways that others attempt to read them. For Baby Suggs, the imprint from Sethe's back on the sheets looks like roses of blood. And Paul D, who cannot read the words of the newspaper story about Sethe's act of infanticide, reads her back as a piece of sculpture: "the decorative work of an ironsmith too passionate for display.'' Paul D further reads the suffering on her body with his own body:

Insofar as the characters feel suffering through their bodies, they are healed through the body as well. Sethe is three times cured by healing hands: first by those of Amy Denver (the young white woman who helps deliver Denver), then by those of Baby Suggs, and finally by those of Paul D. Indeed, one might read Beloved's sexual relations with Paul D as a bodily cure. Paul D refuses to speak too fully the pain of his suffering in slavery. This refusal reflects his sense that his secrets are located in what remains of his heart: 44 in that tobacco tin buried in his chest where a red heart used to be. Its lid rusted shut." However, when Beloved, ghost made flesh, compels him to have sexual relations with her—in other words, to encounter her physically—she tells him, in language that recalls Baby Suggs's earlier speech, "to touch her on the inside part." The description of this scene suggests that the act of intercourse with Beloved restores Paul D to himself, restores his heart to him:

He nibbed his cheek on her back and learned that way her sorrow, the roots of it; its wide trunk and intricate branches. . . . [He] would tolerate no peace until he had touched every ridge and leaf of it with his mouth, none of which Sethe could feel because her back skin had been dead for years.

She moved closer with a footfall he didn't hear and he didn't hear the whisper that the flakes of rust made either as they fell away from the seams of his tobacco tin. So when the lid gave he didn't know it. What he knew was that when he reached the inside part he was saying, "Red heart. Red heart," over and over again.

Paul D registers in an incessant trembling the humiliation he felt before Brother, the rooster, and the indignity of being forced to wear leg irons and handcuffs. No one knew he was trembling, the narrator tells us, "because it began inside:" A flutter of a kind, in the chest then the shoulder blades. It felt like rippling—gentle at first and then wild. As though the further south they led

In a number of ways, then, Morrison calls attention to the suffering that bodies endured under slavery. The project of the novel, much like Baby Suggs's project, seems to be to reclaim those bodies, to find a way to tell the story of the slave body in pain. In "Unspeakable Things Unspoken," Morrison writes that she hoped that from the opening lines of Beloved her readers' experience of the

376 I AMERICAN WRITERS novel would approximate the slaves' sense of dislocation. Of course, however evocatively Morrison renders human suffering in Beloved, ultimately the reader experiences only narrative representations of human suffering and pain. To speak what is necessarily and essentially and inescapably unspoken is not to speak the unspoken; it is only to speak a narrative or speakable version of that event or thing. Beloved thus indicates a paradox central to any attempt to represent the body in pain; one can never escape narrative. The figure of Beloved herself most obviously calls into question the relationship between narrative and the body. As a ghost made flesh, she is literally the story of the past embodied. Sethe and Denver and Paul D therefore encounter not only the story of her sorrow and theirs; they engage with its incarnation. Beloved's presence allows the generally reticent Sethe to tell stories from her past. Once Sethe realizes that the stranger called Beloved and her baby Beloved are one and the same, she gives herself over fully to the past, and to Beloved's demand for comfort and curing. Indeed, so complete are her attempts to make things right with Beloved that she is almost consumed by her. Without Denver's and her neighbors' and Paul D's interventions pulling her back into the present, she would have been annihilated. The very name "beloved" interrogates a number of oppositions. Simultaneously adjective and noun, the word troubles the distinction between the characteristics of a thing and the thing itself. To the extent that the title of the book is an unaccompanied modifier, it calls attention to the absence of the thing being modified. Additionally, the word * 'beloved" names not only the girl baby returned; in the funeral service the word addresses the mourners of the dead. The word thus names at once that which is past and present, she who is absent and those who are present. Finally, the word * 'beloved" calls attention to the space between written and oral, for until read-

ers know the context from which her name comes, they do not know how to speak that name: with three syllables or two. In the terms the novel offers, Beloved might be understood to exemplify what Sethe calls "rememory," something that is gone, yet remains. Recalling both "remember" and "memory," "rememory" is both verb and noun; it names the process of remembering and the thing remembered. The reader confronts the unnarratability— indeed, the inadequacy of language—perhaps most powerfully in the passages of interior monologue told from Sethe's, Denver's, and Beloved's points of view. After telling Paul D about Sethe's murder of her daughter, Stamp Paid, the man who conveyed the family to freedom, is turned away from 124 Bluestone Road by the "undecipherable language . . . of the black and angry dead." Mixed with those voices are the thoughts of Sethe, Denver, and Beloved— "unspeakable thoughts, unspoken." In the four sections that follow, we read the unspeakable and unspoken thoughts of the three women, first separately, then interwoven. Here, from Sethe's perspective, are her memories of killing her daughter, of being beaten, of being abandoned by her mother. Largely addressed to Beloved, Sethe's words convey recollections she could never utter to another. Likewise, in her section, Denver expresses her fear of her mother and her yearning to be rescued by her father—anxieties that, for the most part, had been hidden in the novel. Beloved's is the most riveting and most obscure of the monologues. In it is represented the preconscious subjectivity of a victim of infanticide. The words that convey the recollections and desires of someone who is at once in and out of time, alive and dead, are richly allusive. The linguistic units in this section—be they sentences, phrases, or individual words—are separated by spaces, not by marks of punctuation. Only the first-person pronoun and the first letter

TON! MORRISON I 377 of each paragraph are capitalized. This arrangement places all the moments of Beloved's sensation and recollection in a continuous and eternal present. From the grave Beloved yearns to be reunited with her mother: "her face is my own and I want to be there in the place where her face is and to be looking at it too." But, in addition to her feelings and desires from the grave, Beloved seems to have become one, in death, with the black and angry dead who suffered through the Middle Passage: "In the beginning the women are away from the men and the men are away from the women—storms rock us and mix the men into the women and the women into the men." In the body of Beloved, then, individual and collective pasts and memories seem to have become united and inseparable. By representing the inaccessibility of the suffering of former slaves, Morrison reveals the limits of hegemonic, authoritarian systems of knowledge. The novel challenges readers to use their interpretive skills, but finally turns them back upon themselves. By representing the inexpressibility of its subject, the novel asserts and reasserts the subjectivity of the former slaves and the depth of their suffering. It reminds us that, our critical acumen and narrative capacities notwithstanding, we can never know what they endured. We can never enjoy a complacent understanding of lives lived under slavery. To the extent that Beloved returns the slaves to themselves, the novel humbles contemporary readers before the unknown, and finally unknowable, horrors the slaves endured. The story of Beloved reflects Morrison's commitment to representing some measure of the range of atrocities slaves underwent: separation from loved ones, physical abuse, murder, and so on. Moreover, by giving voice to a victim of infanticide, the novel reveals Morrison's concern to make evident what seems inaccessible. In a profoundly persuasive and influential essay pub-

lished shortly after Beloved, "Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Literature," Morrison addresses analogous issues within a literary critical context. Here, she explores the significance of silence around the topic of race in the construction of American literary history. Morrison begins by posing a series of questions about what a canon is or ought to be, and interrogates the presupposition of whiteness that the American canon inscribes. She considers the notion that in recent debates about the canon of American literature, arguments about the exclusion of black writers on the basis of race are often resisted because race remains an unspeakable topic in American culture: For three hundred years black Americans insisted that "race" was no usefully distinguishing factor in human relationships. During those same three centuries every academic discipline, including theology, history, and natural science, insisted "race" was the determining factor in human development. When blacks discovered they had shaped or become a culturally formed race, and that it had specific and revered difference, suddenly they were told there is no such thing as "race," biological or cultural, that matters and that genuinely intellectual exchange cannot accommodate it. To Morrison, the custodians of the canon retreat into specious arguments about quality and the irrelevance of ideology when defending the critical status quo against charges of being exclusionary. She is, however, skeptical about arguments based on the notion of critical quality, since the term is so frequently self-justifying and fully contested. Those who defend the canon seek to dismiss those who would challenge it by arguing that "the destabilizing forces" operate from political, rather than aesthetic, motives, all the while failing to acknowledge that their own positions are politically motivated.

378 I AMERICAN WRITERS Morrison then considers the ways that recent approaches to African American literary study respond to critical opinions that delegitimate black literary traditions. In response to those who deny that African American art exists, African Americanist critics have rediscovered texts that have long been suppressed or ignored, have sought to make places for African American writing within the canon, and have developed ways of interpreting these works. Morrison argues that those who would argue that African American art is inferior—"imitative, excessive, sensational, mimetic . . . and unintellectual, though very often 'moving,' "passionate/ 'naturalistic,' 'realistic' or sociologically 'revealing' "—often lack the acumen or commitment to understand the work's complexity. In response to these labels, African Americanist critics have devised such strategies as applying recent literary theories to black literature so that these noncanonical texts can participate in the formation of current critical discourse and debate. Morrison problematizes most fully those who condescend to African American art by calling superior those works which coincide with the universal criteria of Western art. She argues that such comparisons neutralize the significance of cultural difference, thereby sustaining the power of hegemonic culture. Moreover, critics of African American works who conceive of them exclusively in terms of their relation to Eurocentric criteria fail to do justice to the indigenous qualities of the texts and the tradition of which they are a pan. In response to these ways of marginalizing African American art and literature, Morrison describes three subversive strategies. To counteract such assaults, she first proposes that critics develop a theory of literature which responds to the tradition's indigenous qualities: "one that is based on its culture, its history, and the artistic strategies the works employ to negotiate the world it inhabits." Second, she suggests that the

canon of classic, nineteenth-century literature must be reexamined to reveal the ways in which the African American cultural presence makes itself felt in these ostensibly white texts. Third, she argues that contemporary mainstream and minority literary texts must be studied for evidence of this presence. Morrison's essay centers on the second and third strategies because of her apparent fascination with the meaningfulness of absence. She eloquently writes (in terms that resonate for our understanding of Beloved as well): We can agree, I think, that invisible things are not necessarily "not-there"; that a void may be empty, but it is not a vacuum. In addition, certain absences are so stressed, so ornate, so planned, they call attention to themselves; arrest us with intentionality and purpose, like neighborhoods that are defined by the population held away from them. Looking at the scope of American literature, I can't help thinking that the question should never have been "Why am I, an Afro-American, absent from it?" It is not a particularly interesting query anyway. The spectacularly interesting question is "What intellectual feats had to be performed by the author or his critic to erase me from a society seething with my presence, and what effect has that performance had on the work?" What are the strategies of escape from knowledge? Of willful oblivion? Morrison's incisive reading of Herman Melville's Moby Dick as a critique of the ideological power of whiteness exemplifies the second strategy she describes and indicates the subtext around the discourse of race in that classic text that critics have long ignored. She then discusses the opening of each of her novels to show the kinds of ways in which African American culture inscribes itself in black texts. Morrison's analyses of her own prose reverberate and shimmer. They reveal anew the resonance and texture of her narrative prose; moreover, they

TONI MORRISON I 379 display the acuity of her critical sensibility. Whether describing the intimacy of 4'Quiet as it's kept" (The Bluest Eye), the "seductive safe harbor" of the first sentence of Sula, the mock journalistic style of the opening lines of Song of Solomon, or the tentativeness in the meaning of safety in the first words of Tar Baby, Morrison indicates the care with which her prose is constructed. Her analyses show how the opening words of each work capture the myriad levels of tone and meaning that pervade the work as a whole. Morrison's analysis of the beginning of Beloved is perhaps most thrilling, for here she shows how much meaning of her representation of slavery is contained in the two sentences with which the novel opens: "124 was spiteful. Full of a baby's venom." Morrison writes that by beginning with numbers she allows her characters—former slaves—to lay claim to an address. This technique also introduces the aural quality of her written language. Perhaps most powerfully, it allows her to pull the reader violently into the text: [The opening] is abrupt, and should appear so. No native informant here. The reader is snatched, yanked, thrown into an environment completely foreign, and I want it as the first stroke of the shared experience that might be possible between the reader and the novel's population. Snatched just as the slaves were from one place to another, from any place to another, without preparation and without defense. No lobby, no door, no entrance—a gangplank, perhaps (but a very short one). And the house into which this snatching— this kidnapping—propels one, changes from spiteful to loud to quiet, as the sounds in the body of the ship itself may have changed. As Morrison demonstrates in this essay, in a variety of ways the historical ideological relations that play themselves out in African American lives find artistic expression in the language

of her fiction. By her own example she seeks to set up a dynamic relationship between reader and text, for the enterprises of critics and of writers are deeply linked: For an author, regarding canons, it is very simple: in fifty, a hundred or more years his or her work may be relished for its beauty or its insight or its power; or it may be condemned for its vacuousness and pretension—and junked. Or in fifty or a hundred years the critic (as canon builder) may be applauded for his or her intelligent scholarship and powers of critical inquiry. Or laughed at for ignorance and shabbily disguised assertions of power—and junked. It's possible that the reputations of both will thrive, or that both will decay. In any case, as far as the future is concerned, when one writes, as critic or as author, all necks are on the line. Whether as novelist, critic, professor, editor, or mentor to other writers, Toni Morrison has had a profound impact upon the literature and culture of the twentieth century, both in the United States and around the world. Her narratives of loss and rediscovery, longing and renewal, make visible stories that might otherwise have been lost, and eloquently represent the complex workings of oppression, resistance, and enchantment in African American communities past and present.

Selected Bibliography WORKS OF TONI MORRISON NOVELS

The Bluest Eye. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970. Sula. New York: Knopf, 1973.

380 I AMERICAN WRITERS Song of Solomon. New York: Knopf, 1977. Tar Baby. New York: Knopf, 1981. Beloved. New York: Knopf, 1987. ARTICLES, ESSAYS. AND REVIEWS

•'What the Black Woman Thinks About Women's Lib." New York Times Magazine, August 22, 1971, pp. 14-15, 63-64, 66. *'Cooking Out." New York Times Book Review, June 10, 1973, pp. 4, 16. "Behind the Making of The Black Book:9 Black World, February 23, 1974, pp. 86-90. "Rediscovering Black History." New York Times Magazine, August 11, 1974, pp. 14, 16, 18, 20, 22, 24. "Reading. Toni Morrison on a Book She Loves: Gayle Jones' Corregidora." Mademoiselle, 81:14 (May 1975). "Slow Walk of Trees (as Grandmother Would Say) Hopeless (as Grandfather Would Say)." New York Times Magazine, July 4, 1976, pp. 104, 150, 152, 160, 162, 164. "Memory, Creation, and Writing." Thought, 59:385-391 (December 1984). "Rootedness: The Ancestor as Foundation." In Black Women Writers (1950-1980): A Critical Evaluation. Edited by Mari Evans. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1984. Pp. 339-345. "Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Literature.'' Michigan Quarterly Review, 28:1-34 (Winter 1989). BIBLIOGRAPHIES Fikes, Robert, Jr. "Echoes from Small Town Ohio: A Toni Morrison Bibliography." Obsidian, 5:142148 (Spring-Summer 1979). Martin, Curtis. "A Bibliography of Writings by Toni Morrison." In Contemporary American Women Writers: Narrative Strategies. Edited by Catherine Rainwater and William J. Scheick. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1985. Pp. 205-207. BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL STUDIES Awkward, Michael. Inspiriting Influences: Tradition, Revision, and Afro-American Women's Novels. New York: Columbia University Press, 1989.

Bischoff, Joan. "The Novels of Toni Morrison: Studies in Thwarted Sensitivity." Studies in Black Literature, 6:21-23(1976). Blake, Susan L. "Toni Morrison." In Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 33. Edited by Thadious M. Davis and Trudier Harris. Detroit: Gale Research, 1984. Pp. 187-199. Butler-Evans, Elliott. Race, Gender, and Desire: Narrative Strategies in the Fiction of Toni Cade Bambara, Toni Morrison, and Alice Walker. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989. Christian, Barbara. Black Women Novelists: The Development of a Tradition, 1892-1976. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1980. Darling, Marsha, and Toni Morrison. "In the Realm of Responsibility: A Conversation with Toni Morrison." The Women's Review of Books, 5:5-6 (March 1988). Pick, Thomas H. "Toni Morrison's 'Allegory of the Cave': Movies, Consumption, and Platonic Realism in The Bluest Eye." Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association, 22:10-22 (Spring 1989). Holloway, Karla, and Stephanie Dematrakopoulos. New Dimensions of Spirituality: A Biracial and Bicultural Reading of the Novels of Toni Morrison. New York: Greenwood, 1987. Homans, Margaret. " 'Her Very Own Howl': The Ambiguities of Representation in Recent Women's Fiction." Signs, 9:186-205 (1983). Jones, Bessie W., and Audrey L. Vinson. The World of Toni Morrison: Explorations in Literary Criticism. Dubuque, Iowa: Kendall/Hunt, 1985. Lee, Dorothy H. "The Quest for Self: Triumph and Failure in the Works of Toni Morrison." In Black Women Writers (1950-1980): A Critical Evaluation. Edited by Mari Evans. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1984. Pp. 346-360. Lubiano, Wahneema. Messing with the Machine: Four Afro-American Novels and the Nexus of Vernacular, Historical Constraint, and Narrative Strategy. Ph.D. dissertation, Stanford University, 1987. Ann Arbor: UMI, 1987. No. 8800980. McDowell, Deborah E. " 'The Self and the Other': Reading Toni Morrison's Sula and the Black Female Text." In Critical Essays on Toni Morrison. Edited by Nellie Y. McKay. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1988. Pp. 77-90. McKay, Nellie Y., ed. Critical Essays on Toni Morrison. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1988.

TONI MORRISON I 381 Miner, Madonne M. "Lady No Longer Sings the Blues: Rape, Madness, and Silence in The Bluest Eye.'9 In Conjuring: Black Women, Fiction, and Literary Tradition. Edited by Marjorie Pryse and Hortense Spillers. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985. Pp. 176-189. Mobley, Marilyn E. "Narrative Dilemma: Jadine as Cultural Orphan in Toni Morrison's Tar Baby." Southern Review, n.s. 23:761-770 (Autumn 1987). Smith, Valerie. "The Quest for and Discovery of Identity in Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon." Southern Review, n.s. 21:721-732 (July 1985). Stepto, Robert. '* 'Intimate Things in Place': A Conversation with Toni Morrison." Massachusetts Review, 18:473-489 (Autumn 1977). Tate, Claudia, ed. Black Women Writers at Work. New York: Continuum, 1983.

Werner, Craig. "The Briar Patch as Modernist Myth; Morrison, Barthes and Tar Baby As-Is." In Critical Essays on Toni Morrison. Edited by Nellie Y. McKay. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1988. Pp. 150-167. Willis, Susan. Specifying: Black Women Writing the American Experience. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987.

INTERVIEWS Davis, Christina. "Interview with Toni Morrison." Presence africaine, 145:141-150(1988). Naylor, Gloria, and Toni Morrison. **A Conversation." Southern Review, n.s. 21:567-593 (July 1985).

—VALERIE SMITH

Walker Percy 1916-1990

"A

called, however, with the suicide of his father on July 9, 1929, when Walker was thirteen, and the move of the widow and her three sons to Greenville in 1931 after a brief residence in Athens. There, as if stalked by Southern Furies, the family was once more struck by tragedy when Walker's mother was killed in an automobile accident on April 2, 1932. In interviews, Percy said very little about these painful events, but they surfaced in modified form in his fiction. The protagonists' mothers are dead or marginalized, leaving the sons to confront the legacy of what Percy called in his novel The Second Coming (1980) the ''death-dealing" father. In The Last Gentleman, young Will Barrett must overcome his amnesiac lapses and confront the memory of his father's suicide, but not until he is middle-aged, in The Second Coming, does Will realize that his father wanted him to accompany him in death. Will must decide whether to follow his father's example or find a new way. Like the elder Barrett, the father of Binx Boiling in The Moviegoer (1961) cannot face the fallen condition of the modern world and also seeks his death, in this instance through becoming a casualty of war. A central theme of Percy's fiction is the son's attempt not only to reject the father's way of death but also to establish his own meaningful way of life. When Percy and his brothers moved to Green-

GOOD DEAL of my energy as a nov-

elist comes from malice—the desire to attack things in our culture, both North and South/' Walker Percy told Ashley Brown in a 1967 interview (collected in Conversations with Walker Percy). Although Percy's courteous Southern manner and the antic charm of his six novels would seem to belie his confession, a closer look demonstrates that his work is indeed fueled by anger, the wrath of a latter-day prophet exhorting a deaf and recalcitrant postmodern society through satire. What Percy failed to mention, though, is the importance of love, however tentative and vulnerable, in his fiction. Good Catholic writer that he was, his works follow the biblical motion from the Old Testament's anger, judgment, and retribution to the New Testament's faith, hope, and charity. Percy's background would seem to belong to a writer of neo-Faulknerian tragedies rather than of Christian comedies. He was born in Birmingham, Alabama, on May 28, 1916, the eldest of the three children of LeRoy Pratt Percy, a lawyer, and Martha Susan Phinizy. Through both parents, he was the scion of old Southern families: the Phinizys of Athens, Georgia, and the Percys of Greenville, Mississippi. He spent his youth in the New South of Birmingham, which he would comically invoke in his novel The Last Gentleman (1966). The doom-laden Old South

383

384 I AMERICAN WRITERS ville, he was faced with the Southern legacy and legend of the Percys. Colonel William Alexander Percy (1834-1888), known as the Gray Eagle of the Delta, was a planter and Confederate war hero. Colonel Percy's son LeRoy (1860-1929), Walker's great uncle, was a lawyer and a United States senator renowned for his courage in fighting the Ku Klux Klan, despite attempts on his life, and for his persistence in battling nature by obtaining and maintaining a reliable levee system along the Mississippi River. Percy says little about this Southern heritage in interviews and essays, but it, like the deaths of his parents, permeates his fiction. The title character of his novel Lancelot (1977) sits in a restored plantation house, losing himself in drink and television, and muses about his ancestors: "We lived from one great event to another, tragic events, triumphant events, with years of melancholy in between." The Percy protagonist, trapped in the banality of the postmodern world, cannot look forward to the external stimulation of great events to lift him out of his melancholy, but must learn to live a mundane life without despair. After the death of his mother, Percy and his brothers, LeRoy and Phinizy, were adopted and raised in Greenville by their cousin William Alexander Percy (1885-1942), son of Senator LeRoy Percy. "Uncle Will" provided Walker with a means of ameliorating, if not eliminating, the burden of his Southern past by introducing him to art. In addition to practicing law, William Alexander Percy was a noted poet who is better known today as the author of a classic Southern autobiography, Lanterns on the Levee (1941). He shared with his three orphaned cousins his passion for the literature of Shakespeare and Keats and for the music of Beethoven, Brahms, and Mozart. In The Last Gentleman and The Second Coming, such music is found wanting as a way of providing meaning for life, because in both novels it is associated with the suicide of the protagonist's father.

Despite an active civic and literary life, William Alexander Percy suffered from a sense of belatedness, a feeling that the great days of the past were gone forever. Walker Percy has characterized his cousin's philosophy as a Southern variety of "Greco-Roman Stoicism, in which a man doesn't expect much in the world and does the best he can and tries to make one place a little better and . . . knows that he'll probably be defeated in the end." In The Moviegoer, Binx's aunt Emily is the Boiling family's Stoic standardbearer when she tells him that although this civilization has "enshrined mediocrity as its national ideal," the Boilings "live by our lights, die by our lights, and whoever the high gods may be, we'll look them in the eye without apology." As she speaks, Aunt Emily waves a swordshaped letter opener that she has taken from a miniature knight on her desk; Percy's sense of Southern stoicism as a dead end is evident as he repeatedly notes that the tip of the blade she brandishes is bent and blunted. Another aspect of Percy's heritage came from a friend of his uncle Will's, the great Mississippi novelist William Faulkner: the sense of a Southern literary tradition. Percy denies the importance to himself of that tradition; as he told Ashley Brown,' 'I didn't care about this so-called Southern thing, the myths, the story-telling, the complex family situations . . ."; but he protests too much. As a college freshman, he was seduced by Faulkner's style, as he told Ashley Brown in 1967: "I took the qualifying English test in Faulknerian style (I had been reading The Sound and the Fury). I wrote one long paragraph without punctuation. The result of that was that I was put in a retarded English class." In a 1974 interview with Barbara King, collected in Conversations with Walker Percy, he commented that Faulkner "was a great writer but he's also been a great burden." In an attempt to resist this anxiety of influence, the young Percy went so far as to avoid meeting Faulkner by remaining in the

WALKER PERCY I 385 car while a friend visited the novelist at his home. Although Percy's novels are permeated by 44 the myths, the story-telling, the complex family situations," Percy is accurate in denying Faulkner as a primary influence, except in the sense that he noted Faulkner's themes in order to transform them. As he had rejected his uncle Will's stoicism, so he rejected Faulkner's tragic vision. In Conversations with Walker Percy, he told Jo Gulledge in 1984, "I would like to think of starting where Faulkner left off, of starting with the Quentin Compson [of Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury] who didn't commit suicide. Suicide is easy. Keeping Quentin Compson alive is something else." The story of Percy's young manhood, like that of his fictional protagonists, is not only a rejection of the past's fatal attraction to resignation and death but also a quest to find a positive means of staying alive spiritually as well as physically. In high school Percy toyed with letters, poetry as well as the high school gossip column. In college he explored his fascination with movies as the popular art of the day in that they became almost a substitute for religion as a way of providing role models and firm beliefs. In a 1935 article for Carolina Magazine, "The Movie Magazine: A Low 'Slick,' " (quoted in Coles), he wrote of movie magazines as a kind of Bible: "Every movie interview and feature embodies one or all of three motives: to reconcile the peculiarities and weaknesses of a movie star with the ideal held by the fans, to trace the star from his honkytonk days to his Hollywood pinnacle, and to give the world the star's philosophy of life." In The Moviegoer, Percy sympathetically mocked this use of the movies to avoid the self through Binx Boiling, who can act only when he envisions himself as one of his favorite movie stars. As a young man, Percy was also seeking certainty in less nebulous areas than an. Although he was well-to-do and would inherit more upon his uncle Will's death, he followed the Percy

family tradition of learning and working at a profession. Unlike the Percys, however, he chose medicine instead of law and majored in chemistry at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. After graduating in 1937, he went north to New York City, where he obtained his M.D. from Columbia University in 1941. In Walker Percy: An American Search, Robert Coles quotes the mature Percy about his fascination with science: "It was a religion for me; I believed that any problem, anything wrong, could be solved by one or another of the sciences.'' In his novels Love in the Ruins: The Adventures of a Bad Catholic at a Time near the End of the World (1971) and The Thanatos Syndrome (1987), Percy characterizes such beliefs as Faustian overreaching, through the comic pratfalls of his protagonist, Dr. Thomas More, who futilely tries to find a scientific cure for the human condition. For three years in New York Percy also sought mental certainty and surcease through the "science" of Freudian psychoanalysis. He later evaluated his analysis as negatively as his interest in physical science: "There's a tendency in this culture to treat psychiatry as a religion—thrilling that you can get your salvation from it, that the answer is there if you can just find the right analyst, the right group, react to the right group dynamics." In The Last Gentleman, displaced Southerner Will Barrett tries years of analysis in New York City, only to find that his analyst, Dr. Gamow,t4served his patients best as artificer and shaper, receiving the raw stuff of their misery and handing it back in a public and acceptable form." After his analysis Will is right back where he began, "alone in the world, cut adrift from Dr. Gamow, a father of sorts, and from his alma mater, sweet mother psychoanalysis." Percy's sense of physical and psychic "disease" took tangible form upon the death of William Alexander Percy on January 21, 1942 and his own contraction of tuberculosis in that same year, from performing autopsies while an

386 I AMERICAN WRITERS intern at Bellevue Hospital. He spent the next three years in sanatoriums, first in the Adirondacks, then, after a relapse, in Connecticut. He had lost his young man's faith in his own immortality, his belief in science, and "a father of sorts" through his uncle Will's death. In his essay "The Delta Factor" (collected in The Message in the Bottle, 1975) he later wrote: Science cannot utter a single word about an individual molecule, thing, or creature in so far as it is an individual but only in so far as it is like other individuals. . . . It comes to pass then that the denizen of a scientific-technological society finds himself in the strangest of predicaments: he lives in a cocoon of dead silence, in which no one can speak to him nor can he reply. During the seclusion his illness required, Percy broke through that silence by his intensive reading of existentialist authors, particularly the novelists Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Albert Camus, and the philosophers Gabriel-Honor^ Marcel, Martin Heidegger, Karl Jaspers, and S0ren Kierkegaard. From them, he learned that a sense of dis-ease was not unacceptable in man, something that had to be cured by the right medicine or psychological theory; instead, it was an intrinsic part of the human condition. They challenged him to accept a feeling of alienation as a part of being human; as opposed to an endless questing for panaceas, they posited a commitment to a way of life. This interpretation of life would become central to all of Percy's novels. After his physical cure in 1945, Percy left the crowded Northeast and the practice of medicine for the desert of New Mexico, where he lived on a ranch for several months with his Greenville friend Shelby Foote, who later became a great Civil War historian. The brevity of their stay suggests that the sojourn in the wilderness was not a complete success. In The Last Gentleman Percy uses the New Mexican desert's almost terrifying emptiness as the setting for failed physi-

cian Sutter Vaught's attempted suicide and his tempting of his dying brother Jamie and the questing Will Barrett to follow his example. Sutter is too disillusioned to commit himself to anything and risk further hurt, so he ends up anesthetized by the endless process of television watching in The Second Coming. Percy returned to Greenville, where he began a series of commitments to life. On November 7, 1946, he married Mary Bernice ("Bunt") Townsend, a nurse whom he had met on an earlier vacation in Greenville. They moved to the summer place at Sewanee, Tennessee, that Walker had inherited from William Alexander Percy. After intensive reading and thought, they converted to Catholicism and moved to New Orleans in 1947; from there they moved in 1950 to Covington, Louisiana, where they raised two daughters and where Percy resided until his death on May 10, 1990. The protagonists of Percy's novels, despite many wrong turns and backslidings, follow a similar pattern of alienation, solitude, and wandering that ends in commitments, however tentative, to a person or persons, to a place, and to God. Percy did not become a published novelist until 1961, when he was forty-five years old. In the preceding decade, he neither practiced medicine nor led the active civic life of his Percy forebears. Since his inheritance freed him from the burden of earning a living, he was able to prepare for his work as a novelist, and Percy was the type of novelist who particularly needed such preparation. Not only did he have the usual apprentice task of refining his craft, but since he was a didactic novelist in the best sense of the term, he needed to formulate his message in a series of published essays. To Percy, postmodern man's central problem is alienation, an "impoverishment and loss of sovereignty." Our bodies follow the rut of our routines, our eyes are so inured to what is before them that they really see nothing, and our minds are co-

WALKER PERCY I 387 opted by the theories and definitions of society so that we do not really think. Although Percy's philosophical fathers are the European existentialists, in his concern with man's loss of sovereignty he is the heir of the nineteenth-century New England transcendentalists. In his essay 4 'Nature," Ralph Waldo Emerson, the seminal transcendental thinker, wrote, "The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe?" He further asserted, * 'The invariable mark of wisdom is to see the miraculous in the common." Like Emerson, Percy wanted to perceive the divine in the mundane but, unlike Emerson, he did not believe man can do so through his own strength or self-reliance, but only with God's help. In his essays of the 1950's, some of which were collected in The Message in the Bottle, Percy defined postmodern man's problem and proposed solutions. He also experimented with terms and situations that would recur in his fiction. In "The Loss of the Creature," he presents a tourist gazing at the natural wonder of the Grand Canyon, but the tourist's response is not wonder, nor is it a response to the natural. He does not really see the Grand Canyon: "The highest point, the term of the sightseer's satisfaction, is not the sovereign discovery of the thing before him; it is rather the measuring up of the thing to the criterion of the preformed symbolic complex." He may respond with exclamations of ostensible delight, such as "This is it" and "Now we are really living," but all these phrases merely mean "that now at last we are having the acceptable experience." The Moviegoer's Binx Boiling finds himself plunged into "a deep melancholy" in a similar situation when he is at a campfire with a group of couples. The young men so anxiously comment, " 'How about this, Binx? This is really it, isn't it, boy?', that they were practically looking up from their girls to say this."

In his essay "The Man on the Train" (collected in The Message in the Bottle), Percy explores the two ways that people often attempt to escape this plight. He borrows the terms "rotation" and "repetition" from Kierkegaard, but uses them to illumine the condition of postmodern man. Percy defines rotation as "the quest for the new as the new, the reposing of all hope in what may lie around the bend"—Don Quixote moves on to the next adventure; the bored homemaker turns the page of another prepackaged romance novel. Percy's fiction is filled with latterday knights-errant questing for the new, moviegoers who seek rotation vicariously, and even those who, like Dr. Thomas More in Love in the Ruins, use a series of women for rotations. Needless to say, rotation is only a temporary solution; the new becomes old, and ennui once again sets in. Repetition at first seems more promising than rotation, since the quester in this instance "voyages into his own past in the search for himself.'' If his repetition is merely "aesthetic," he is simply enjoying the experience in a frivolous way, as does The Moviegoer's Binx Boiling when he sits in the same seat of the same theater and sees the same movie he saw years before. In an existential repetition, one really asks about the meaning of the past, as does Will Barrett in The Last Gentleman and The Second Coming. Though neither rotation nor repetition provides ultimate solutions, an existential repetition at least involves a serious questioning that furthers the search. The plight of postmodern man is further complicated by the fact that not only situations but words have become worn-out, devoid of meaning. As Emerson wrote in "Nature," "The corruption of man is followed by the corruption of language." In his essay "Metaphor as Mistake" (collected in The Message in the Bottle), Percy explores this problem by citing the poet Thomas Nash's somewhat obscure line "Brightness falls

388 I AMERICAN WRITERS from the air." If Nash had written "Brightness falls from the hair," his meaning would be clearer, yet the line would be less satisfactory because "in the presence of the lovely but obscure metaphor, I exist in the mode of hope, hope that the poet may mean such and such, and joy at any further evidence that he does.'' In The Second Coming, when Allison Huger, a recovering amnesiac, hears many common cliches, they sound as fresh and interesting to her as Nash's metaphor because the language is new to her, not a series of hackneyed phrases. Unusual metaphors also provide a measure of relief from what Percy, following Heidegger, calls "everydayness." Unfortunately, rotation, repetition, evocative metaphors, and other devices can provide only temporary respite from everydayness. In his essay, "The Message in the Bottle," Percy proposes what he considers the only relevant response to man's loss of sovereignty over life and language. Following Heidegger, Percy sees man as a castaway on an island remote from his true spiritual home. The castaway seeks news of that home, but true news must meet certain criteria: it must be relevant to the castaway's predicament, its bearer must have the proper credentials, and the news must be possible. For Percy, Christ's news of salvation is the message in the bottle that the castaway needs. The language of salvation is meaningful because it is relevant to the human situation, the credentials of the bearer are impeccable, and the news can be considered possible only through a Kierkegaardian leap of faith beyond the scientific. Receiving this news does not make earth a paradise, but it does render a human being's life more authentic: He should be a castaway and not pretend to be at home on the island. To be a castaway is to be in a grave predicament and this is not a happy state of affairs. But it is very much happier than being a castaway and pretending one is not.

Percy sees his protagonists and readers as such castaways; the novelist does not usurp the role of Christ as message bearer, but tries to bring the message to the attention of the castaways. The novelist is like the priest in The Last Gentleman who baptizes the dying Jamie Vaught and answers his questions by saying, "It is true because God Himself revealed it as the truth. . . . If it were not true, . . . then I would not be here. That is why I am here, to tell you." As Percy formulated his philosophy through his essays of the 1950's, he also refined his technique. He had to learn such basic lessons as showing rather than telling as a hallmark of good fiction. He sent the lengthy manuscript of his first novel, The Charterhouse, to his fellow Southern novelist and Catholic convert Caroline Gordon, an experienced teacher of creative writing, who responded with thirty pages of singlespaced commentary. The Charterhouse was never published, but slowly, through another unpublished novel, Percy mastered the techniques of fiction. Percy did, however, face a problem that many novice writers do not: since he was a didactic novelist, how was he to convey his message without alienating his readers by delivering a sermon or boring them by endlessly repeating the same message? Although Percy's critics differ about the degree to which he overcame this handicap, Percy himself was aware of the challenge from the beginning of his writing career; indeed, it was one of the reasons he became a novelist, rather than writing solely as a philosophical essayist. A didactic writer must have an audience, and, as he commented to Judith Serebnick in 1961,4 'people would rather read a novel than an article." He also wanted to avoid becoming like a modern scientist who cannot speak to the individual because he can only generalize; instead Percy wanted to speak to individuals about an individual. In a 1968 interview with Carlton Cremeens (collected in Conversations with Walker

WALKER PERCY I 389 Percy), he stated that his first novel, The Moviegoer, "was conceived by putting a young man in a certain situation." The Moviegoer's protagonist and narrator, John Bickerson ("Binx") Boiling, appears to be a young man in the conventional situation of rebellion against family values. Instead of living with his distinguished paternal relations in the aristocratic Garden District of New Orleans and following a respected profession like law or medicine, Binx chooses to live in the bland suburb of Gentilly and run a branch office of a brokerage firm. He seems firmly ensconced in his mundane existence; as he puts it, 'Tor years now I have had no Mends. I spend my entire time working, making money, going to movies and seeking the company of women." Binx does not see himself as mired in the quotidian, for he believes he is pursuing a "horizontal search," in which "what is important is what I shall find when I leave my room and wander in the neighborhood/' He asserts that the horizontal search is better than the "vertical search" that he had tried earlier, in which "[he] stood outside the universe and sought to understand it." Whether questing in the realm of the details of daily life or the abstractions of books, the goal of Binx's search is the avoidance of the "malaise," what Percy calls man's "loss of sovereignty" and Binx defines as "the pain of loss. The world is lost to you, the world and the people in it.'' Although Binx believes he is pursuing a search, he is really avoiding coming to terms with himself and his place in the world. He uses "working, making money, going to movies and seeking the company of women" as rotations. Each new deal, new film, or new secretary holds the promise of novelty but soon becomes wornout, and the malaise once again descends. In the early part of the novel, Binx plays with aesthetic repetitions but avoids an existential repetition's true examination of his past. Unlike Percy, Binx refuses to acknowledge

his anger at a postmodern society in which, as he puts it, "all the friendly and likable people seem dead to me; only the haters seem alive." After hearing some saccharine professions of faith on a maudlin radio program called "This I Believe," Binx is moved to send in his own credo: "I believe in a good kick in the ass." Such expressions of disgusted wrath are rare for Binx, who usually maintains his facade of the slightly muddled but sweet Southern gentleman. At the end of Mardi Gras, however, Binx has a series of experiences that jolt him out of his complacency and into self-examination and penance appropriate to the Lenten season. Binx's subconscious seems to be telling him that it is time to wake up when he has a dream about his being wounded in the Korean War and observes that "what are generally considered to be the best times are for me the worst times, and that worst of times was one of the best." He remembers that "six inches from my nose a dung beetle was scratching around under the leaves. As I watched, there awoke in me an immense curiosity." His proximity to death startled Binx into regaining sovereignty for a moment and actually seeing what was before him. This is an example of the extreme sort of rotation, from wars or hurricanes or automobile wrecks, that Percy favors to push his characters out of the malaise. Any rotation, however, dissipates, and so even in the "best times," as in Binx's city where "the good times roll," the malaise redescends. Binx needs an existential repetition, a true examination of his past, before he can change his life in a meaningful way. For him, such a repetition involves coming to terms with memories of his dead father. The elder Boiling, a physician, seemed to be on an eternal vertical search; Binx concludes, "That's what killed my father, English romanticism, that and 1930 science." The elder Boiling went from scientific fad to scientific fad, from taking his rest on sleeping porches

390 I AMERICAN WRITERS to taking long hikes on the levee, but to no avail; he became so uninterested in life that he could bring himself to eat only when fed by his wife, who distracted him by reading aloud a murder mystery's pseudo-meaningful events. After a while he could no longer eat, but was saved by World War II, which gave him the opportunity to envision himself as the English poet Rupert Brooke and die in the "wine dark sea." Binx may think he understands his father, but that understanding means nothing until he realizes that to his father he was just one more rotation; he thus alleviates his guilt about his father's despair. On a trip to Chicago, Binx experiences an existential rotation when he remembers a childhood journey there with his father: I turned and saw what he required of me . . .he staking his everything this time on a perfect comradeship—and I, seeing in his eyes the terrible request, requiring from me his very life; I, through a child's cool perversity or some atavistic recoil from an intimacy too intimate, turned him down, turned away, refused him what I knew I could not give. On the one hand, Binx knows that his father was asking too much from him, a perfect relationship impossible in a fallen world. On the other hand, the memory makes Binx see how he has spent most of his life avoiding intimacy or commitment, a seemingly nice guy whom no one— family, friends, or lovers—can ever pin down. What saves Binx from his father's romantic belief in earthly perfection and his ultimate despair is his heritage from his mother, an earthy Cajun nurse whom the Boilings regard as beneath them. Here Percy is directly in the Southern literary tradition in which character is often determined by bloodlines. Binx's mother tells him, "You know, you've got a little of my papa in you—you're easy-going and you like to eat and you like the girls." She has remarried into

what the Boilings would regard as her class and is raising a large, mass-attending Catholic family. As Binx notes, the Smiths "would never dream of speaking of religion," but they believe, and they practice their faith. The oldest surviving Smith child is Lonnie, a fourteen-year-old confined to a wheelchair by an illness that eventually will kill him. Because he daily confronts the possibility of death, he retains sovereignty over his life. No malaise lurks in his consciousness, and Percy uses him as an example of someone for whom words as well as events have retained their meaning. Binx comments, "I have only to hear the word God and a curtain comes down in my head," but Lonnie can discuss his faith with sincerity and without embarrassment. Lonnie also provides Binx with the important example of someone who can express his feelings, particularly love, without selfconsciousness or anxiety about the beloved's response. He keeps this ability alive in Binx, who observes that Lonnie's "words are not worn out. It is like a code tapped through a wall. Sometimes he asks me straight out: do you love me? and it is possible to tap back: yes, I love you." The most important person with whom Binx must come to terms, however, is Kate Cutrer, his aunt Emily's stepdaughter. Percy's major women characters usually serve as complementary opposites for the protagonists or as exaggerated doubles. Kate belongs in the latter category. Her life as debutante, parade queen, and dutiful daughter has been so trite that she has turned to psychoanalysis, drink, and drugs. Her fianc£ was killed in an automobile accident in which she was a passenger, and she informs Binx, "it gave me my life. That's my secret, just as the war is your secret." She also tells him, "You're like me, but worse. Much worse." Considering the tragedy, pathos, and boredom of Kate's life, her statement seems surprising. In the context of the novel, though, Kate is correct. Percy's epigraph for The Moviegoer is from Kierkegaard's The

WALKER PERCY I 391 Sickness unto Death:". . . the specific character of despair is precisely this: it is unaware of being despair." Kate indicates in her statement Binx's refusal to acknowledge his own plight. Kate also perceives one aspect of the solution to Binx's predicament. She suggests, "It is possible, you know, that you are overlooking something, the most obvious thing of all." She has the wisdom to refrain from identifying it for him because he could not yet recognize or act upon it; as Kate tells him, "you would not know it if you fell over it." Kate is referring to love, in particular the love for her that Binx is afraid to acknowledge. In his desire to avoid feeling and worn-out words, his first proposal to her sounds like a business proposition about running a service station: "We could stay on here at Mrs. Schexnaydre's [his landlady's]. It is very comfortable. I may even run the station myself. You could come sit with me at night, if you liked. Did you know you can net over fifteen thousand a year on a good station?" In a backhanded way, Binx is acknowledging his love for Kate, since he does not demean her by spouting the romantic cliches he uses on his secretaries: "You and your sweet lips. Sweetheart, before God I can't think about anything in the world but putting my arms around you and kissing your sweet lips.'' Binx is also subconsciously realizing that he is still putting the distractions of pleasure "before God." As Ash Wednesday and Binx's thirtieth birthday approach, he is forced to recognize his despair. On a business trip to Chicago with Kate, their attempt to have a solely sexual relationship, like those he has had (imaginatively, anyway) with his secretaries, fails miserably because "flesh poor flesh now at this moment summoned all at once to be all and everything, end all and be all, the last and only hope—quails and fails." Upon their return to New Orleans, Binx's aunt Emily, the representative of Southern stoicism, upbraids Binx for his failure to maintain the family values, particularly those of Southern chiv-

alry, in his relationship with Kate. She asks Binx, "What do you love? What do you live by?" He has no answer and remains silent. Binx finally realizes the depth of his despair on his birthday: "Now in the thirty-first year of my dark pilgrimage on this earth . . . knowing less than I ever knew before, having learned only to recognize merde when I see it." As he sits on a bench near a Catholic church and watches a man come out with ashes on his forehead, he remembers that it is Ash Wednesday and that the faithful are acknowledging that they come from dust (or from merde) and they will return to dust. Unlike his father, Binx does not seek death as surcease from despair over the human condition. Instead, as is fitting on the first day of Lent, he makes a resolution: "There is only one thing I can do: listen to people, see how they stick themselves into the world, hand them along a ways in their dark journey and be handed along, and for good and selfish reasons." Binx's resolution is also appropriately small and possible; he has rejected the megalomania of horizontal and vertical searches and the inflated sense of selfimportance that led to his father's death. In the epilogue to The Moviegoer Binx, a little over a year later, has continued on the path of helping others and himself in the small, everyday ways that make life bearable. He is attending medical school. He has married Kate, who depends on him for the direction that alleviates her despair. In the novel's final scene, he and Kate are outside the hospital where Lonnie is dying. Binx is able to find words that are not worn-out to answer his stepsiblings' questions about death directly and sincerely. He seems to have reached what Marcel would call "intersubjectivity," in that he recognizes human beings as individuals, not as parts of categories, and so can interact with them on a meaningful basis. The last lines of the novel are suitably understated since intersubjectivity is as difficult to maintain as to obtain in the dehumanizing postmodern world. Binx

392 I AMERICAN WRITERS sees Kate, and comments, "I watch her walk toward St Charles, cape jasmine held against her cheek, until my brothers and sisters call out behind me/' The Moviegoer was the surprise winner of the 1962 National Book Award for fiction. Percy's late-blooming career as a novelist was off to a remarkable start. His later novels would become popular as well as critical successes, often appearing on the best-seller lists. Percy's second novel, The Last Gentleman, is different from The Moviegoer in a number of ways. Instead of the concentrated time, place, and cast of characters of the first book, Percy created a sprawling picaresque novel in which his protagonist, Will Barrett, journeys throughout the country and provides Percy with innumerable targets for satire. Percy also exchanged focused, first-person narration for the detached, ironic voice of an omniscient third-person narrator. The reason for this choice is evident. Unlike Binx Boiling, Will Barrett can neither define nor articulate his plight. He has fled north to New York City, where he lives a homogenized life in the YMCA and works as a "humidification engineer" at Macy's. He suffers from bouts of amnesia. Because he has not come to terms with his personal, family, and regional pasts, he has no real identity. He is a chameleon, an Ohioan with Ohioans, a conservative Southerner with conservative Southerners, and the perfect analysand for his psychoanalyst. Although he suffers from the existential predicament of malaise, which he calls "noxious particles," he believes that science can provide a cure. He vows, "I shall engineer the future of my life according to the scientific principles and the self-knowledge I have so arduously gained from five years of analysis." A catalyst for Will's development is provided by the Vaught family, "Yankee sort of Southerners" who are the prosperous denizens of the New South. Each of the four children and one

former spouse represent a possible way of life for Will. The youngest, Jamie, doomed by disease, seems to represent Will's present in that he is an unformed character always restlessly traveling in an attempt to find happiness before his death. Kitty, as her name suggests, is a diminished version of The Moviegoer's Kate. She wants the mindless world of sororities and the house in the suburbs that plunged Kate into despair. If Will marries her, he will live a clichg, as he indicates by his repeated desire to "hold her charms in his arms." Jamie and Kitty's older sister, Val, has become a nun who teaches language to deprived black children in Georgia. Although she has the excitement of watching those for whom language is not worn-out, like Percy himself she keeps her animus against postmodern society; she describes herself as "a good hater." Rita, the ex-wife of the eldest son, Sutler, is a secular humanist who spouts platitudes about living a life of beauty and joy. Sutter is the most significant Vaught for Will Barrett because his old-fashioned clothes and his suicide attempt remind Will of his own father and his suicide. Sutter is a pathologist; as he phrases it, "I study the lesions of the dead." Only one letter separates "lesions" from "legions," and indeed Sutter is obsessed with diagnosing a dead society; but the dead are beyond cure and he has given up on himself as well. Will, though, keeps turning to Sutter for advice, as if he could replace his father; the irony is that both Sutter and Will's father knew only how to die, not how to live. Through Will's travels with all or some of the Vaughts, Percy takes aim at what he sees as the foibles of the 1960's. He encounters the significantly named Mort Prince, who writes books with more orgasm counts than plots. In Levittown, Pennsylvania, Yankees who claim not to be bigoted start to riot when they think a black might buy a house on their block. The New South appears to be "happy, victorious, Christian,

WALKER PERCY I 393 rich, patriotic and Republican," but Will sees arrested civil rights workers detained in an old Civil War fort and is knocked unconscious in a campus riot reminiscent of the one that occurred when James Meredith became the first black student at the University of Mississippi. At the end of The Last Gentleman, Will's status is ambiguous, as befits his location in the New Mexican desert, the "locus of pure possibility." On the positive side, he resists Sutter's invitation to join him in suicide, possibly because in his travels he has confronted the memory of his father's suicide. The other evidence is less hopeful, however. Although he hears a priest give the sacraments to the dying Jamie, he does not seem to have received the message of salvation himself. He cares enough about another human being to try to prevent Sutter's suicide, but his words to Sutler, "don't leave me," are those he futilely addressed to his father before his suicide. When Sutter decides to stop his car and pick up Will, the last line of the novel suggests that Will may still be following his father's and Sutter's way of death: "The Edsel waited for him." For Percy, the allure of death is typical of the postmodern world. In an essay entitled "Notes foraNovel About the End of the World" (19671968, collected in The Message in the Bottle), he writes, "The hero of the postmodern novel is a man who has forgotten his bad memories and conquered his present ills and who finds himself in the victorious secular city. His only problem now is to keep from blowing his brains out.1' Mankind suffers from "angelism-bestialism," and is "divided into two classes: the consumer long since anesthetized and lost to himself in the rounds of consumership [bestialism], and the stranded objectivized consciousness, a ghost of a man who wanders the earth like Ishmael [angelism]." The protagonist of Percy's third novel, Love in the Ruins, is suicidal, despite what seems like an

ideal secular life-style, and suffers from angelism-bestialism. Dr. Thomas More is representative of his time and place, the southern United States near the close of the twentieth century. He lives in the ironically named Paradise Estates with scientists and Christians, but beyond that enclave, the society is in disarray or, as Dr. More says of it, alluding to William Butler Yeats's poem "The Second Coming," the "center did not hold." Beyond Paradise Estates lies Fedvilie, where the scientists watch couples' sexual relations in the Love Clinic and advocate euthanasia for oldsters in the Geriatrics Center. Social dropouts, such as black "Bantu guerrillas" and hippies, dwell in the Honey Island Swamp. The shopping center, the heart of the materialistic society, was burned down by the Bantu guerrillas in a Christmas riot five years before, and the Rotary Club "banner is rent, top to bottom, like the temple veil." In a Faulknerian passage, Percy, through Dr. More, blames the state of the South, which God had provided as a "new Eden," on the failure of one test: "here's a helpless man in Africa, all you have to do is not violate him." Spiritual life is equally moribund. St. Michael's Church stands empty, and Catholicism has divided itself into three: the American Catholic church, which celebrates Property Rights Sunday; the Dutch schismatics, "who believe in relevance but not God"; and a small number of old-style Catholics. As his physician's title combined with his saint's name suggests, Dr. Thomas More believes he can provide not only physical but spiritual healing for this sick society. It is, however, more a case of "physician, heal thyself," for Dr. More is just as susceptible as the next man. He states, "I believe in God and the whole business but I love women best, music and science next, whiskey next, God fourth, and my fellowman hardly at all." His bestialism is particularly evidenced by his need for three women, Lola,

394 I AMERICAN WRITERS Moira, and Ellen, whom he treats as interchangeable parts but who represent possible lives for him. Lola suggests a phony return to the values of the Old South with her imitation Tara and her belief that "the only thing we can be sure of is the land." Moira, who works at the Love Clinic, represents the secular values of the New South glossed over by a nostalgia for a false past. Ellen is his necessary complement because she does not believe in God but in her fellow human beings, the Golden Rule, and doing right. Dr. More blames his lapses on the death of his only child, Samantha, from a neuroblastoma, and the subsequent desertion and death of his wife, a dabbler in spiritual trends. His favorite whiskey, Early Times, indicates the intoxicating nature of his nostalgia. The reader knows that he is rationalizing, because, as he himself indicates, he had failed to follow the Golden Rule even before these tragic events. He recalls receiving communion and "rejoicing afterwards, caring nought for my fellow Catholics but only for myself and Samantha and Christ swallowed, remembering what he promised me for eating him." Dr. More's angelism verges on megalomania. He considers himself a latter-day Christ. After his suicide attempt, he sees himself as "crucified" on his hospital bed. In the mirror over a bar, he later perceives his reflection as "the new Christ, the spotted Christ, the maculate Christ, the sinful Christ. . . . [who] shall reconcile man with his sins." In reality, Dr. More is more Faust than Christ. He has invented a device called a lapsometer, which, as its name suggests, can diagnose the degree of a person's fall into angelism-bestialism, but he is not satisfied. He wants to cure the human condition, so that "man could reenter paradise, so to speak, and live there both as man and spirit, whole and intact manspirit." He meets his Mephistopheles in the diabolic Ait Immelmann, who has an attachment that makes the lapsometer work, and Dr. More signs his contract, or pact, with the devil.

When Dr. More realizes that the Bantus are about to attack again and that Immelmann will use his device to set off a deadly heavy sodium reaction as the president of the United States is delivering a Fourth of July address nearby, he tries to get the lapsometer back in a series of antic adventures. After he is captured by the Bantus, who imprison him in the rectory of St. Michael's Church, he seizes a sword from a statue of St. Michael. Unlike the letter-opener sword of Binx's aunt Emily in The Moviegoer, this blade is not bent, and Dr. More uses it to unscrew the grate of an air-conditioning duct and escape. The duct is described as a "cave of winds, black as the womb," foreshadowing his rebirth. Dr. More cannot achieve this new life until he renounces his hubristic independence; as an old friend has asked him, "You never did like anybody to help you, did you, Doc?'' In the moment of peril, when Immelmann's victory seems imminent, Dr. More swallows his pride and prays to his ancestor Saint Thomas More, who had resisted the lure of secular power at the price of his life. Dr. More and his society are saved. Five years later, the Bantus have won and taken over Paradise Estates, while Dr. More lives in the old slave quarters: the patterns of life seem virtually the same; only the players have switched roles. Dr. More has married the virtuous Ellen, and they have two children. In the sacrament of penance, he has confessed to the sin of "loving myself better than God and other men." Dr. More has certainly improved but, as Percy shows us, as a man he remains a denizen of a fallen world and can always lapse into old sins. Dr. More still indulges in his Early Times and asserts, "I still believe my lapsometer can save the world." The last scene of the novel provides some hope, for it occurs on Christmas Eve, suggesting that Christ's birth provides the means of rebirth for people, however many times they fall.

WALKER PERCY I 395 For many of Percy's characters, hate seems preferable to the anesthetized, mindless content of the postmodern consumer, and so it seems to Lancelot Lamar, the narrator and protagonist of Percy's fourth novel, Lancelot. The scion of an old Louisiana family and heir to their plantation house, Belle Isle, Lance has fallen into the deceptively beautiful insularity of reading detective novels, drinking, and watching the evening news in the "pigeonnier," a miniature Belle Isle separated from the life of the main house. He learns that no man is an island when, as he says, "I discovered my wife's infidelity and five hours later I discovered my own life.'' This sounds like the typical Percy plot in which a discovery or rotation propels the protagonist into a more authentic existence. Lance appears to find a new life as he attempts to prove his wife's infidelity, but in reality he is merely following his obsessions with sex and violence to their logical conclusion in death. Lance always regarded life in terms of strict, mutually exclusive categories: men are saints or scoundrels; women are ladies or whores. He is unable to accept the ambiguity, the highs and lows of mankind in a fallen world. Because his father had taken a kickback, Lance thinks of him as a total failure. If his mother really did have an affair, to Lance she would be a whore. Lance's first wife was the ethereal Lucy, the emblem of Southern ladyhood, and so Lance seems to want to fit Margot, his second and current wife, into the opposite category. In Lance, Dr. Thomas More's comic hubris reaches its tragic extreme: playing on his name as belonging to one of King Arthur's Round Table knights, he considers himself, in an ironic inversion, a * 'Knight of the Unholy Grail" on a "quest for true sin." Dr. More's reliance on the technology of the lapsometer is like Lance's dependence on hidden cameras to spy on Margot. He believes he is a latter-day Philip Marlowe, Raymond Chandler's detective hero, righting

wrongs, so he cannot recognize that Margot's sin is less than his own in that he turns sex into sacrament: "my communion . . . that sweet dark sanctuary guarded by the heavy gold columns of her thighs, the ark of her covenant." He thinks he has the godlike power to execute a death sentence, and therefore slits the throat of his wife's lover and blows up Belle Isle. At the beginning of the novel, after the violence at Belle Isle, which is revealed through flashbacks, Lance is in an institution, talking to his old friend Percival, a priest too doubtful of his vocation to wear clerical garb. As Percival encourages Lance to talk through his memories, Lance remains unrepentant. He refuses to see himself as a sinner among sinners, preferring to believe that he is a sort of messiah who will bring about a new world order because, as he pridefully puts it, he and his followers "will not tolerate this age." His attitude toward women has not changed either; he tells Percival that the "New Woman" will "be free to be a lady or a whore" and that "God's secret design for man is that man's happiness lies for men in men practicing violence upon women and that woman's happiness lies in submitting to it." He is even surprised when Anna, the rape victim in the next room, refuses to accompany him to his new order in Virginia. Lancelot is by far Percy's darkest vision of life in the postmodern world, but even the satanically proud Lancelot is offered a ray of hope. As Lancelot speaks, his childhood friend Percival, the true Grail knight, claims his identity as Father John, associated with the evangelist of the gospel of love, and opposes his old friend's doctrine of hate. Father John dons his clerical collar and reaffirms his commitment to take a mundane parish in Alabama: no Third Revolution for him. In one of Percy's most fascinating narrative techniques, the reader is dependent on Lance's monologue for news of Percival's appearance and questions; we do not hear Father John speak until

396 I AMERICAN WRITERS the end of the novel, when he has asserted his vocation. In the novel's final pages, to Lance's many questions he can answer yes and counter Lance's horrific negativity. If Lance listens to what Father John tells him, there will be hope for him, too. Lance asks, "Is there anything you wish to tell me before I leave?" and in the last line of the novel, Father John replies, "Yes." This sense of final affirmation also lingers in The Second Coming. In this, his fifth novel, Percy brings his characteristic themes to fruition while eschewing the relatively spare prose of his early works and providing a dense texture, rich with allusions to William Shakespeare, Carson McCullers, Flanneiy O'Connor, Vladimir Nabokov, William Blake, Dylan Thomas, and many others. The primary allusion, however, is to Yeats's "The Second Coming." Although the novel's title refers to the reappearance of The Last Gentleman's Will Barrett as a wealthy, middle-aged widower, it also points to the world Will now inhabits, where, in Yeats's words, "The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity," and the new Messiah, the Second Coming, could be a "rough beast" which "Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born." Faulkner's presence also permeates the novel, in that The Second Coming seems to be a direct response to the Faulknerian theme of the burden of the past, or the sins of the fathers, leading to the death of the sons. Even the language of Will's stream of consciousness is reminiscent of Faulkner, as he addresses his dead father: Ever since your death, all I ever wanted from you was out, out from you and from the Mississippi twilight, and from the shotguns thundering in musty attics and racketing through funksmelling Georgia swamps, out from the ancient hatred and allegiances, allegiances unto death and love of war and rumors of war and under it all death and your secret love of death, yes that was your secret.

Instead of allowing the doom-laden past to overwhelm him, Will confronts the memory of his father's suicide attempt in a Georgia swamp, and "the meaning of his present life became clear to him." When he further realizes that his father meant to kill him as well, in order to spare him life in a diminished world, Will renounces his dependency on his father, and his father's avatar Sutter Vaught, because of "the total failure, fecklessness, and assholedness of people in general and in particular just those people I had looked to." Will Barrett is certainly no Quentin Compson, but when he rejects Quentin's fatalistic acquiescence, he ricochets to the other extreme, that of hubristic action. Will decides that suicide is necessary, but that his suicide, unlike that of his father, will not be "wasted." Like Dr. Thomas More attempting to cure the human condition or Lancelot Lamar seeking the Unholy Grail, Will Barrett designs what he calls a "scientific experiment." He will enter a local cave, take some sleeping pills, and, as he states in a letter to Sutter, wait for God to give a sign. If no sign is forthcoming I shall die. But people will know why I died: because there is no sign. The cause of my death will be either his nonexistence or his refusal to manifest himself, which comes to the same thing as far as we are concerned. His arrogance gets its comic comeuppance when he staggers from the cave, vanquished not by demons but by toothache and nausea, intimations of his human frailty. He does receive a sign, though, in the sense that his weakened condition causes him to fall into a greenhouse occupied by his perfect complement, Allison Huger, the daughter of his former sweetheart Kitty Vaught and Kitty's husband, a fiercely smiling dentist. Allie, an escapee from a mental institution, has little memory left after her shock treatments—in con-

WALKER PERCY I 397 trast with Will, who is plagued by remembrance of everything. She has learned to hoist heavy equipment into her greenhouse and can exercise her new skill on Will, who keeps falling down. Words are worn-out for Will, but Allie, like a child learning language, plays with words; she says of their relationship, "A fit by chance is romance." Allie is attempting to evade her rapacious parents, who want to have her declared mentally incompetent so they can control the valuable real estate she has recently inherited. Will's increasing involvement in helping her leads to love, and this love calls him back from the brink of two more suicide attempts. Earlier, Will had confused the message bearer with the message when, intent on self-destruction, he seemed uninterested in a trendy chaplain's comment that he had discovered God "in other people.'' After finding Allie, Will, like The Moviegoer's Binx Boiling, can resolve to "take care of people who need taking care of." Will is no longer the megalomaniac who waited in a cave for a sign exclusively for him, and he can now accept the message despite the human foibles of the messenger. In the last lines of the novel, he looks at Allie and a feeble old priest, the aptly named Father Weatherbee, and meditates, "Is she a gift and therefore a sign of the giver? Could it be that the Lord is here, masquerading behind this simple silly holy face? Am I crazy to want both, her and Him? No, not want, must have. And will have." With these words, Will decisively rejects the "death-dealing" Southern past of his father and affirms life, in this world and the next. Although Percy's first five novels are eminently accessible, his next two works strive to convey his ideas about the plight of postmodern man in popular forms that verge on parody. Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book (1983) attempts to present the complicated philosophical and semiotic ideas of The Message in the

Bottle to the general reader. As its title suggests, Percy does so through the use of a best-selling genre that appeals to the American obsession with self-reliance. He includes a "TwentyQuestion Multiple-Choice Self-Help Quiz," a space odyssey, and an antic version of the Phil Donahue show. Percy's ideas are more readily comprehensible in the humorous Lost in the Cosmos than in the serious The Message in the Bottle, but at the risk of seeming to deprecate his audience as well as its predicament. Ostensibly a thriller or adventure story, The Thanatos Syndrome, Percy's sixth novel, represents a second coming for Dr. Thomas More. At the end of Love in the Ruins, the diagnosis for Dr. More was ambiguous: he was still drinking and thinking of his lapsometer even though he was happily at home with his family on Christmas Eve. At the beginning of The Thanatos Syndrome, Dr. More, the narrator, seems to have lapsed badly. After serving time for selling drugs at a truck stop, he has returned home to find his wife, Ellen, obsessed with bridge but signaling her despair in her sleep by mentioning the Azazel convention, a distress signal in bridge. His children, Tommy and Margaret, treat him like "a certain presence in the house which one takes account of, steps around, like a hole in the floor." The children's baby-sitter tells him, "You too much up in your head. You don't even pay attention to folks when they talking to you." He has started sipping his whiskey again, and avoids St. Michael's Church and his saintly friend Father Rinaldo Smith. The status of his medical license, probationary, seems to mirror the precarious state of his soul. Dr. More remains far from perfect, but he does seem to have learned from his errors. In Love in the Ruins he had confessed to loving his fellow men "hardly at all," but in The Thanatos Syndrome he remarks, "I still don't know what to make of God, don't give Him, Her, It a second thought, but I make a good deal of people, give

398 I AMERICAN WRITERS them considerable thought." He has renounced his Faustian reliance on technology because he now considers his patients more than stimulusresponse organisms: 'Time was when I'd have tested their neurones with my lapsometer. But there's more to it than neurones. There's such a thing as the psyche, I discovered. I became a psyche-iatrist, . . . a doctor of the soul." Although Dr. More sounds as if he believes he has the power to cure the soul, his description of his method shows that he no longer considers physicians godlike: "Long ago I discovered that the best way to get in touch with withdrawn patients is to ask their help." Dr. More certainly needs to be as improved as possible because the world he confronts seems to have deteriorated during his spell in prison. In The Thanatos Syndrome, Percy returns to the broad social satire of the futuristic Love in the Ruins, but the comedy is blacker, the humor more desperate. Dr. More seems to be describing Percy's method when he mentions "the trick of Louisiana civility" in which "one doesn't launch tirades over bourbon in the locker room. One vents dislikes by jokes." Dr. More's world is far from likable. Fedville is continuing its role in "gereuthanasia," and has now added the killing of malformed or diseased infants, "pedeuthanasia," because the Supreme Court has set the age of personhood above eighteen months. Dr. More's women patients seem content but exhibit sexual behavior more characteristic of primates than of humans and have lost the ability to use language contextually. AIDS patients are quarantined like lepers of old. Crime has mysteriously declined in Feliciana Parish, particularly the slums of Baton Rouge, and people no longer approach Dr. More with their old depressions, terrors, and anxieties, yet everyone seems strangely vacant. Dr. More ponders, "They're not on medication. They are not hurting, they are not worrying the same old bone, but there is something missing, not merely

the old terrors, but a sense in each of her—her what? her self." In his investigations, Dr. More discovers that people are losing not only their predicaments as human beings but their very humanity because a maverick scientist at Fedville has dosed most of the parish's water supply with heavy sodium. Through a series of adventures in which Percy continues his social satire, Dr. More foils the Fedville thought controllers; gets a clinic for the terminally ill, the very old, and sick or crippled infants; and disbands a group of child abusers, high on heavy sodium, at the school his children attend. In the process, he must resist his personal temptations as well—the seductive charms of his cousin, "the sweet heavy incubus" Lucy Lipscomb, and the bribe of a high-paying job at Fedville. By the end of The Thanatos Syndrome, Dr. More has restored the selves or humanity of his Feliciana neighbors, but the state of his own soul remains in doubt. His family relations have improved, but he seems unable to relate to Ellen's newfound born-again Christianity or her desire to send the children to a creationist academy. When Father Rinaldo Smith exhorts the community to "keep hope and have a loving heart and do not secretly wish for the death of others" so that "the Great Prince Satan will not succeed in destroying the world," Dr. More wonders if he is suffering from "presenile dementia." Father Smith keeps luring Dr. More to serve mass for him when he supposedly cannot get others to do so, but Dr. More's motivation seems more philanthropic than devout. The last words of the novel are Dr. More's "Well well well," which can be interpreted as either a hopeful sign or the sounds one utters when one does not know what to make of something or someone. Percy's fiction is usually criticized on two grounds: that the novels offer no resolution and that the plots and themes are repetitive. These ostensible failings are inextricable from Percy's

WALKER PERCY I 399 view of the human condition. About the conclusions of his novels, Percy told Charles E. Claffey, "A novelist can't come out with pat answers, with everything resolved, the search resolved." For a Catholic, no resolution is possible in this imperfect world. To the charge that Percy's novels are repetitious, in that his protagonists follow the same search and often lapse to search once more, the words of Dr. Thomas More in The Thanatos Syndrome seem to provide a reply: "It looks as if real failure is unspeakable. TV has screwed up millions of people with their little rounded-off stories. Because that is not the way life is. Life is fits and starts, mostly fits. Life doesn't have to stop with failure." The novelist's task is to make us aware of our human predicament, not to provide what Percy would regard as spurious temporal solutions, for "the search is the normal condition."

Selected Bibliography WORKS OF WALKER PERCY NOVELS

The Moviegoer. New York: Knopf, 1961. The Last Gentleman. New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 1966. Love in the Ruins: The Adventures of a Bad Catholic at a Time near the End of the World. New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 1971. Lancelot. New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 1977. Bourbon. Winston-Salem, N.C.: Palaemon, 1979. The Second Coming. New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 1980. The Thanatos Syndrome. New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 1987. COLLECTED ESSAYS

The Message in the Bottle: How Queer Man Is, How Queer Language Is, and What One Has to Do with

the Other. New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 1975. Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book. New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 1983. BIBLIOGRAPHIES Dana, Carol G. "Walker Percy." In Andrew Lytle, Walker Percy, Peter Taylor: A Reference Guide. By Victor A. Kramer, Patricia A. Bailey, Carol G. Dana, and Carl H. Griffin. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1983. Hobson, Linda Whitney. Walker Percy: A Comprehensive Descriptive Bibliography. Introduction by Walker Percy. New Orleans: Faust, 1988. Wright, Stuart T. Walker Percy, a Bibliography, 1930-1984. Westport, Conn.: Meckler, 1986. BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL STUDIES Allen, William Rodney. Walker Percy: A Southern Wayfarer. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1986. Baker, Lewis. The Percys of Mississippi: Politics and Literature in the New South. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1983. Bloom, Harold, ed. Walker Percy: Modern Critical Views. New York: Chelsea House, 1986. Brinkmeyer, Robert H., Jr. Three Catholic Writers of the Modern South. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1985. Broughton, Panthea Reid, ed. The Art of Walker Percy: Stratagems for Being. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1979. Claffey, Charles E. "Walker Percy: The Novelist as Searcher."' Boston Sunday Globe, January 22, 1984, p. A27. Coles, Robert. Walker Percy: An American Search. Boston: Little, Brown, 1978, Hardy, John Edward. The Fiction of Walker Percy. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987. Hawkins, Peter S. The Language of Grace: Flannery O'Connor, Walker Percy, and Iris Murdoch. Cambridge, Mass.: Cowley, 1983. Hobson, Linda Whitney. Understanding Walker Percy. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1988.

400 I AMERICAN WRITERS Lawson, Lewis A. Following Percy: Essays on Walker Percy's Work. Troy, N.Y.: Whitston, 1988. Luschei, Martin. The Sovereign Wayfarer: Walker Percy's Diagnosis of the Malaise. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1972. Poteat, Patricia Lewis. Walker Percy and the Old Modern Age: Reflections on Language, Argument, and the Telling of Stories. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1985. Spivey, Ted R. The Writer as Shaman: The Pilgrimages of Conrad Aiken and Walker Percy. Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 1986. Sweeney, Mary K. Walker Percy and the Postmodern World. Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1987.

Taylor, Jerome. In Search of Self: Life, Death and Walker Percy. Cambridge, Mass.: Cowley, 1986. Tharpe, Jac. Walker Percy. Boston: Twayne, 1983. , ed. Walker Percy: Art and Ethics. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1980.

INTERVIEW Conversations with Walker Percy. Edited by Lewis A. Lawson and Victor A. Kramer. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 198S.

—VERONICA MAKOWSKY

Philip Roth 1933-

T

JL H H E EPIGRAPH TO Philip Roth's The Facts: A Novelist's Autobiography (1988) is courtesy of Nathan Zuckerman, the narrative persona of much of Roth's later fiction: "And as he spoke I was thinking, the kind of stories that people turn life into, the kinds of lives that people turn stories into.'' The epigraph, Roth's decision to use a fictional character who is himself a fiction writer to introduce his autobiography, and the whole body of Roth's work testify to the dynamic interrelationship, sometimes symbiotic and sometimes problematic, between the author's life and his art. Roth has identified this cross-fertilization as his chief artistic concern, what he calls "the relationship between the written and the unwritten world." Particularly in his fiction from the mid 1970's on, starting with My Life as a Man (1974), he examines how the "unwritten world" of life experiences becomes transformed in literature and how the "written world" of literature can affect courses of action taken in life. Given this preoccupation, it is not surprising that Roth's stories often treat writers whose stories—both their personal histories and the fictions created from them—resemble his own in many ways. It is tempting, but dangerous, to read his work as thinly veiled autobiography. True, Roth has assiduously mined his life and background for ore-bearing material, but, he admits, he has "looked only for what could be

transformed" by "turning the flame up under my life and smelting stories out of all I've known." Rather than autobiographical confession, the works should be seen as what Tony Tanner, borrowing a phrase from William Carlos Williams, terms "fictionalized recall." The events thus recalled typically document the struggle of the self to realize autonomy in some restrictive environment, often by trying to frame an account of its own history and development. In the novella "Goodbye, Columbus," this account takes the form of Neil Klugman's post mortem examination of his first serious love affair; in Portnoy's Complaint, it takes the form of a logorrheic outburst to a psychoanalyst; in My Life as a Man and the Zuckerman novels, it takes the form of a writer's attempt to compose himself through the act of writing—to exorcise demons from his life, or to impart some sense to it, by putting it into literary form. In these works especially, strategies for narrative expression become strategies for self-discovery and selfdefinition. Since the characters' strivings parallel the author's, Roth produces a literature that is both psychologically and aesthetically selfconscious. Roth and his protagonists, most of all his writer-characters, face the dilemma of choosing between two antithetical styles of personality and narrative expression: that of the polished, high-minded, restrained, and responsible intel-

401

402 I AMERICAN WRITERS lectual, whom he calls "the nice Jewish boy/' and that of the brash, crude, and rebellious iconoclast, whom he dubs "the Jewboy." As the terms suggest, the conflicting impulses behind the personal and artistic choices derive from Roth's history as a Jew growing up in midtwentieth-century America. Philip Milton Roth was born on March 19,1933, to Herman and Bess Finkel Roth in Newark, New Jersey. His mother came from a native Jewish-American family; his father, whose parents had emigrated from Austria-Hungary, was an insurance salesman for Metropolitan Life whose career prospects, Roth feels, were limited because he was Jewish. The Roths lived in the Weequahic section of Newark, then an almost entirely Jewish neighborhood. Roth has remarked that this milieu accounts not only for the material but also for the manner and even the motive in much of his writing. Of his long, uncensored interchanges with boyhood friends he says, "I associate that amalgam of mimicry, reporting, kibbitzing, disputation, satire, and legendizing from which we drew so much sustenance with the work I now do. ... Also, those millions of words were the means by which we either took vengeance on or tried to hold at bay the cultural forces that were shaping us." Thus, early on, there emerges a dominant theme in Roth's life and writings: a need for personal freedom and autonomy as well as a wariness of, at times a hostility toward, conditioning forces. And, significantly, young Roth sees linguistic self-expression as the means of asserting his independence against those forces. To complicate matters, these forces were often loving ones toward which he felt the deepest of loyalties: a cohesive community and a nurturing family. Roth recalls, "In our lore, the Jewish family was an inviolate haven against every form of menace, from personal isolation to gentile hostility. . . .Hear, O Israel, the family is God, the family is One. Family indivisibility, the first commandment." Any act of self-assertion that

threatened the family's solidarity or harmony— indeed, any act of exploration that ventured beyond the bounds of family values—could arouse a deep sense of guilt. If anything about his father weighed on him, Roth explains, it was "his limitless pride in me. When I tried not to disappoint him, or my mother, it was never out of fear of the mailed fist or the punitive decree, but of the broken heart." Roth would later represent the conflict he felt between filial loyalty and personal or artistic selfrealization in the portraits of Gabe Wallach, Alexander Portnoy, David Kepesh, Peter Tarnopol, Nathan Zuckerman, and the child narrator of "Looking at Kafka," who wonders, "Can it possibly be true (and can I possibly admit) that I am coming to hate [my father] for loving me so?" As a boy, though, Roth generally vented his rebellious impulses in conversation with his friends; everywhere else he was, as he describes it, "a good, responsible, well-behaved boy, controlled (rather willingly) by the social regulations of the self-conscious and orderly lower-middleclass neighborhood where I had been raised, and mildly constrained still by the taboos that had filtered down to me, in attenuated form, from the religious orthodoxy of my immigrant grandparents.' ' But although he says he submitted to these controls "rather willingly," Roth also speaks of his high-school years as time served in a 44 minimum-security institution.'' After graduating from Weequahic High School in January 1950, Roth worked as a stock clerk in a Newark department store until he enrolled that September as a prelaw student at Newark Colleges of Rutgers, the "unprestigious little downtown branch of the state university" that Neil Klugman attended. Despite the appeal of the urban heterogeneity of the student body to his "liberal democratic spirit," Roth was chafing under the yoke of parental supervision and aching to get away from home, determined not "to become encased in somebody else's idea of what I

PHILIP ROTH I 403 should be." He transferred to Bucknell University as a sophomore in September 1951. Although he had the chance to pledge the predominantly gentile Theta Chi fraternity, he joined Sigma Alpha Mu, a Jewish fraternity, because he felt less constrained among students whose "style was familiar." For him and the other "Sammies," assimilation was not an issue, nor was the observance of Jewish holidays and dietary laws. "The Jews were together," Roth says, "because they were profoundly different but otherwise like everyone else." During this time, Roth was becoming seriously interested in literature. His first published story, "Philosophy, Or Something Like That," appeared in 1952 in Et Cetera, the college literary magazine he helped to found. In the winter of 1952 he resigned from Sigma Alpha Mu to devote his extracurricular energies to editing and writing fiction for it. Despite entertaining friends with mimicry and anecdotes of characters from his boyhood, Roth at this early stage never thought of turning the familiar material into literature: "How could Art be rooted in a parochial Jewish Newark neighborhood having nothing to do with the enigma of time and space or good and evil or appearance and reality?" His writing was doggedly "sensitive" and "serious," intended to demonstrate his compassionate understanding that life was a sad and serious business. There were no Jews, and there was no comedy: "the last thing I wanted to do was to hand anybody a laugh in literature." But, as in his boyhood, Roth had to give expression to the other side of his nature: soon the reviews and editorial columns of Et Cetera revealed his penchant for satire and what he calls "a flash of talent for comic destruction." In his last two years at Bucknell, he wrote nearly as much satire as fiction. Roth was gaining sexual as well as literary experience that he would draw upon for characters and situations in his novels. His attempt to

carry on an affair without the knowledge of a moralistic landlady gives rise to a central episode in When She Was Good. Also, for about six weeks in the spring of 1954, Roth and his girlfriend believed that she was pregnant. He was resigned to marrying her, giving up his dreams of graduate school as a Fulbright or Marshall scholar, and staying on at Bucknell as a salaried teaching assistant. In the great relief of learning that there was no pregnancy, Roth forswore the "encumbering responsibilities" of monogamy in favor of the freedom to pursue adventures, erotic and otherwise. But the episode stayed with him: the voluntary, self-sacrificing bondage he envisioned for himself and his sense of the disappointment it would have brought is rendered in the Herz marriage in Letting Go\ his passion for personal freedom and his conscious decision to renounce obligations in favor of exploits prefigure numerous protagonists, especially the young David Kepesh in The Professor of Desire. Roth graduated magna cum laude from Bucknell in 1954 with a B.A. in English and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. He then entered the graduate program at the University of Chicago, where he received an M.A. in 1955 and formed a neophyte's devotion to Henry James, Gustave Flaubert, and the masters of psychological realism. While there, he published "The Contest for Aaron Gold" in Epoch; the story was later selected for inclusion in The Best American Short Stories of 1956. Roth next enlisted in the army and worked for the public information officer of Walter Reed Army Hospital in Washington, D.C. Within a year he was discharged because of a back injury suffered during basic training, an episode that served as a source for "Novotny's Pain." In 1956 he returned to the University of Chicago as a Ph.D. candidate and instructor of English. During the next three years, he published reviews, satire, and fiction, including the stories collected in Goodbye, Columbus. An event occurred in the fall of 1956 that had

404 I AMERICAN greater impact on Roth's life, and literature: he met Margaret Martinson Williams, a divorced ex-waitress four years his senior whose two children lived with their father in Arizona. Her difficult life, hard-bitten self-reliance, and troubled family history would furnish Roth with raw materials for the characters Martha Reganhart, Lucy Nelson, Maureen Johnson Tarnopol, and others. The woman also fascinated the sheltered and impressionable young man because she was so different from all he had known. At the time he was attached to someone very like Brenda Patimkin in "Goodbye, Columbus." But just as Nathan Zuckerman in Peter Tarnopol's "useful fiction" chooses Lydia Ketterer over Sharon Shatzky, and his author Tarnopol forsakes Dina Dornbusch for "his angry nemesis" Maureen, so Roth rejected the Jewish girl from suburban north Jersey for Margaret. And just as the characters spurn the girl who represents a life too easy and undemanding, a selling short of one's destiny, so Roth severed the connection that "had inevitably to resolve into a marriage linking me with the safe enclosure of Jewish New Jersey. I wanted a harder test, to work at life under more difficult conditions." Like Zuckerman and Tarnopol, he got the chance. After Margaret had an abortion in early 1957, the relationship deteriorated into acrimonious feuding. Roth spent the summer of 1958 traveling alone in Europe. Rather than return to Chicago and finish his degree, he moved to New York City and lived off the first payment of the fellowship Houghton Mifflin had awarded him for the manuscript of Goodbye, Columbus. He took up again with Margaret, who had moved to Manhattan and begun working at Esquire. Soon afterward, she told Roth that she was pregnant. He disbelieved her, but she presented what appeared to be medical proof. According to Roth, the way Maureen in My Life as a Man tricks Peter into believing that she is pregnant almost exactly parallels the deception Margaret prac-

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ticed on him in February of 1959: "Those scenes represent one of the few occasions when I haven't spontaneously set out to improve on actuality." Maureen bought a urine specimen from a pregnant woman and submitted it for a pregnancy test. Philip Roth and Margaret Williams were married on February 22, 1959. While his personal life was foundering, Roth's literary career was being launched in spectacular fashion in 1959. A Guggenheim Fellowship and a National Institute of Arts and Letters grant followed the fellowship from Houghton Mifflin. Roth won the Paris Review's Aga Khan Award for "Epstein," and "The Conversion of the Jews" was chosen for The Best Short Stories of 1959. Goodbye, Columbus, Roth's first collection of short stories, was published in May 1959 and won the Jewish Book Council of America's Daroff Award; in 1960 it received the National Book Award. Also in 1960, "Defender of the Faith" appeared in The Best Short Stories of I960 and The O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1960. That year Roth joined the faculty of the Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa. In 1962 Letting Go was published, with the dedication "For Maggie," and Roth received a Ford Foundation grant to write plays. He and Margaret moved back to New Jersey, where Roth was writer-in-residence at Princeton from 1962 to 1964. By the end of 1962, Roth was legally separated from his wife and had moved from Princeton to New York City. Margaret refused to grant him a divorce and continued to live in Princeton, receiving about half of his income in alimony. Roth entered a period of "intense psychoanalysis" that provided "a model for reckless narrative disclosure of a kind I hadn't learned from H'enry James," one he would later draw on for Portnoy's Complaint. He also began a romantic relationship of "mutual convalescence" with a tender, quieter, more gentile gentile whose character can be seen in the later novels. The year

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1967 saw the publication of When She Was Good, which Roth based on Margaret's account of her upbringing. The book, he says, became a means "to look backward and discover the origins of that deranged hypermorality" by which he felt Margaret had ensnared and exploited him. The fictional catastrophe was to seem eerily fatidic: Margaret was killed on May 19, 1968, in a car accident in Central Park. Roth said that, on hearing the news, he was "transfixed at first by the uncanny overlapping of the book's ending with the actual event." As Tarnopol does later, he felt disbelief, even suspicion that it was a trick by his wife, and then an "immeasurable relief." The morning after the funeral, Roth chillingly recounts in his autobiography: I walked over to Central Park and tried to find the spot where the car was said to have crashed and killed her. It was a splendid spring morning and I sat on the grass nearby for about an hour, my head raised to take the sun full in my face. Like it or not, that's what I did: gloried in the sunshine on my living flesh. "She died and you didn't," and that to me summed it up. I'd always understood that one of us would have to die for the damn thing ever to be over. But for Roth it was not over so easily. After Margaret, the idea of being married, or of being bound to anyone, became intolerable. In his work it took him years of "hapless experimentation" to purge himself of his rage. My Life as a Man (1974) was largely an attempt to purge his feelings by converting them into literature. The numerous false starts and re workings, Roth has admitted, almost broke his will: "The only experience worse than writing it ... would have been for me to have endured that marriage without afterward having been able to find ways of reimagining it into a fiction with a persuasive existence independent of myself." The years since Margaret's death, however, have been relatively peaceful ones. Roth and the

British actress Claire Bloom have lived together since 1975 and share a rather quiet private life in a 200-year-old Connecticut farmhouse. The period since the mid 1970's has been one of great productivity—stories, novels, novellas, a book of essays and interviews, general editorship of Penguin Books' "Writers from the Other Europe" series, and an autobiography. His life, however, has not been without trial. In the summer of 1989 Roth underwent quintuple-bypass heart surgery. Worse, in the spring of 1987, at the height of his creative powers, he had suffered what he still terms "a breakdown." Painful complications from knee surgery led to despondency and insomnia. He began taking Halcion, a sleeping pill, and Xanax, a tranquilizer, but his mental state rapidly worsened. Unknown to him and his doctors, the drugs were interacting to produce hallucinations, panic, and even thoughts of suicide. Roth believed that he was going mad, and even after the cause of his distress was discovered, he continued for months to feel a "helpless confusion" about the course and meaning of his life. In order to recover the clarity, energy, and direction he had lost, he began retracing his steps, reviewing his personal history in The Facts. Significantly, The Facts ends with Roth at thirty-five, just released from the psychic and financial burdens of a catastrophic marriage, sensing the end of his thralldom to his literary masters and the achievement of his own narrative voice in Portnoy's Complaint, restlessly anticipating the future, and yet looking twelve years into the past: back to the time when he felt the "exhilarating, adventurous sense of personal freedom" and artistic awakening—back to the time when he was about to meet Margaret and was beginning to write the stories of Goodbye, Columbus. For those early stories, Roth drew largely on the memories, experiences, characters, and neighborhood folklore of his Newark boyhood. He also shows the devotion of a young writer to

406 I AMERICAN WRITERS literary heroes. Believing "fiction writing to be something like a religious calling, and literature a kind of sacrament," he follows the high priests of realism, the great exemplars of morally serious fiction—Henry James, Gustave Flaubert, Leo Tolstoy, and T. S. Eliot. Among more recent Americans, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Saul Bellow, Isaac Bashevis Singer, and Bernard Malamud are apparent as models. The need for personal freedom and the suspicion of normative controls that Roth felt as a youth inform the five short stories in Goodbye, Columbus. Each is built around a morally significant action that a character decides to undertake in the face of social or institutional opposition. As in James, the characters define themselves by their brave decisions and their willingness to live with the consequences. As Roth explains it, each of the central figures "is seen making a conscious, deliberate, even willful choice beyond the boundary lines of his life, and just so as to give expression to what in his spirit will not be grimly determined, by others, or even by what he had himself taken to be his own nature." The collection is rather uneven; the budding author was criticized by Alfred Kazin, Leslie Fiedler, Irving Howe, and others for hammering home his moral points too urgently and emphatically. Still, the chronological order of the stories9 first publication dates suggests Roth's rapid development as a writer, for it is also the order of the pieces from least to most accomplished. The earliest and weakest of the stories is "You Can't Tell a Man by the Song He Sings." The impress of J. D. Salinger is obvious in this brief tale of a sensitive adolescent's discovery of hypocrisy in the adult world. The good and dutiful boy who submits to authority is punished for a fight; his reform-school acquaintances flee the scene. Further, he learns that the episode will become a permanent part of his record. Concluding that the school is less interested in doing justice than in maintaining appearances and finding scapegoats,

he recognizes the disparity between espoused ideals and actual practice. "The Conversion of the Jews" also takes up the theme of freedom versus conformity, especially unthinking acquiescence to authority. The opponents are schematically drawn, and named, in the inquisitive young Ozzie Freedman and the dogmatic yeshiva teacher Rabbi Binder. Ozzie's curiosity leads him to question the religious orthodoxy, complacency, and xenophobia of his family and community. In particular, he is unconvinced by the rabbi's claim that the Virgin Birth was biologically impossible: If God could make the world in six days, Ozzie argues, He could make a woman have a baby without intercourse. Ozzie's reward for freethinking is a slap in the face from his mother at home and one from the rabbi at the yeshiva. Angry and humiliated, Ozzie goes to the roof of the building. When he realizes the power he has over the terrified adults below, he forces them all to kneel and proclaim their belief in Jesus. After rebuking his mother and the rabbi, "You should never hit anybody about God," he makes an exultant leap into the firemen's net. Although marred by a simplistic treatment of good and bad, a strained resolution, and a heavy-handed underscoring of "message,'' the story presents issues that pervade the later work. The lone individual is again pitted against the community's morality, if not theology, in "Epstein." Here the rebellious maverick is not a yeshiva boy but a despondent man of fifty-nine who, after a lifetime of hard work and dutiful service to his family, finds his life empty. Making what Roth calls "a final struggle" against "exhaustion, decay, and disappointment," Epstein begins an adulterous affair with a widow across the street. Unfortunatelya, their attachment comes to light, as does a rash around Epstein's genitals. After being comically and humiliatingly exposed before his family, Epstein seeks solace at the widow's. There he suffers a heart attack in

PHILIP ROTH I 407 the midst of her ministrations. The story ends as Epstein is taken off in an ambulance with his wife, who feels vindicated by this judgment upon him, and a doctor, who assures her that he can treat the rash "so it'll never come back." By implication, neither will Epstein's chance for vital existence. Roth based the work on a tale of neighborhood adultery that his father recounted one evening when Roth was about fourteen. What aroused his sympathy was the plight of an individual in conflict not just with his family and community, but also with himself. Epstein's adultery, Roth has said, does not "square with the man's own conception of himself." Having offended against his own self-image as well as against community standards, the hero complains, "I don't even feel any more like Lou Epstein.'' Roth's use of sex as the means of rebellion and the grounds for comedy looks forward to Portnoy, where once again the attempt at rebellion only intensifies the sense of guilty entrapment. In "Defender of the Faith," conflict with an antagonist catalyzes the central character's conflict with himself. The story is set on a stateside army base in 1945, when the horrors of the Holocaust were just becoming known and the appeals for Jewish solidarity were all but irresistible. Battle worn Sergeant Nathan Marx, trying to recover his emotional equilibrium after two years of fighting in Europe, must decide how to deal with Private Sheldon Grossbart, a fellow Jew for whom he feels a personal aversion. Grossbart, by appealing to their common Jewish identity, constantly pressures Marx to give him and two other Jewish privates special favors. Marx makes a few exceptions that seem harmless. Discovering that Marx is vulnerable, Grossbart pushes for more and more special treatment, which Marx finds hard to deny. But when Grossbart uses information he received from Marx to change his orders from an assignment in the Pacific theater to one at Fort Monmouth, New Jer-

sey, Marx employs a deception of his own to ensure that the original assignment stands. To Marx, Grossbart's exploitation of his Jewishness is dangerous as well as contemptible because it feeds anti-Semitic stereotypes. Ironically, he defends the faith by denying appeals to Jewish bonds he had been conditioned to honor. Ironically, too, Roth's story prompted the same outraged accusations of betrayal from the Jewish community that Marx's action drew from Grossbart. Throughout his career, Roth has been attacked for self-hatred, anti-Semitism, or, at the very least, breaking ranks. He has portrayed Jewish characters who are greedy, lustful, manipulative, self-serving, and neurotic—not because they are Jews but because they are human. He also has drawn Jewish characters who are conscientious, intelligent, sensitive, and caring—not because they are Jews but because they are human. His most successfully realized characters are all these at once, and wrestle with themselves to achieve some delicate balance. The conflict between secular assimilationism and devout orthodoxy is central to "Eli, the Fanatic." In fact, the conflict becomes centered in Eli Peck. When a yeshiva of displaced German Jews moves into Woodenton, an affluent suburb in mid-century America, the acculturated Jews there are embarrassed by the black garb of the 4 'fanatics" and also fearful of the gentile community's reaction. The Americanized Jews deputize Eli, a successful attorney, to make the orthodox Jews conform to the ways of Woodenton or leave. Eli is at first willing to serve as their ambassador, but contact with the yeshiva precipitates a crisis of identity that leads twice to "what his neighbors forgivingly referred to as 'a nervous breakdown.' " In his negotiations with Leo Tzuref ("trouble" in Yiddish), Eli begins to sense a previously unrealized need for something beyond the spiritual emptiness and cultural rootlessness of his community. He tries to hold out against these feelings and finally prevails upon one of the

408 I AMERICAN "greenhorns" to give up his religious garb for Eli's new suit. Later, Eli finds the man's black clothes on his doorstep. On the day his son is born, he dons the black garb of his forefathers and walks through the town to the hospital. Eli's adoption of the black clothing does not signal a religious conversion so much as an acceptance of the suffering and separateness, the persecutions borne for the sake of an identity, that are part of his heritage. At the hospital it is assumed that Eli has had another breakdown. He is seized at the nursery window and given a sedative shot. The story ends: 4 'The drug calmed his soul, but did not touch it down where the blackness had reached." The novella "Goodbye, Columbus" also treats the lure of affluent assimilation and the strains caused by class differences among Jews. Although Brenda was a girl when the Patimkins moved from Newark to Short Hills, the chasm between her background and Neil Klugman's looms large, "as though the hundred and eighty feet that the suburbs rose in altitude above Newark brought one closer to heaven." Even the mundane expressions of value are telling. His Aunt Gladys, with whom Neil lives, pushes canned fruit so that it won't go to waste. Mr. Patimkin consumes fresh fruit ravenously and always has a conspicuous abundance on hand. When Brenda's little sister, Julie finds Neil helping himself to fruit, she accuses him of stealing, as if he has been caught trespassing in a world where he does not belong. Neil, like Fitzgerald's Gatsby before him, sees the woman as embodying life's richest possibilities, the American dream of wealth and status. But, unlike Gatsby, he recognizes her deficiencies and understands that her allure depends in part on what she symbolizes to him. He feels deep ambivalence about Brenda and the world she represents. Undeniably drawn to it, cowed by it, he also resents it—and her. He resents her offhand, disparaging remarks about Newark. He resents her nose job. He resents the fact that she

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asks him nothing about himself until her mother wants information. Most of all, he resents the way that she and her family unthinkingly treat him as they do their maid. Part of Neil's desire to possess Brenda is the desire to settle a score. He beds her for the first time on the night that he is left baby-sitting Julie. "How can I describe loving Brenda? It was so sweet, as though I'd finally scored that twenty-first point." Brenda, for her part, uses sex with Neil as a form of rebellion against her mother. From their first meeting at poolside, when Brenda has Neil hold her glasses so she can dive, he associates her with water and tropical settings. She is "a sailor's dream of a Polynesian maiden," and Short Hills at dusk is "rosecolored, like a Gauguin stream." His susceptibility to such images and his sense that they represent a world closed to him cause him to feel an affinity with the little black boy who comes from the ghetto to the Newark Public Library where Neil works to stare at Gauguin prints in art books. In a prophetic dream, he and the boy are the only crew members on a ship anchored off a tropical island. Suddenly the ship begins to drift out to sea, and as they try futilely to stop it, the native women on shore keep calling out "Goodbye, Columbus . . . " Neil had heard the phrase on Ron Patimkin's record bidding farewell to Ohio State. In his dream it portends his loss of Brenda and of the American dream he pursued in her. Whenever he senses Brenda slipping away, Neil tries to bind her to him. Afraid of losing her when she returns to Radcliffe and afraid of proposing marriage, Neil pressures her into getting a diaphragm as a token of commitment to him. Brenda, fearful of the implication, balks at first but then assents. When she leaves it at home, her mother finds it. Her parents' disapproval makes Brenda feel that she must break off with Neil. Faced with the choice between his world and theirs, she predictably chooses theirs. After a final confrontation in Boston, Neil

PHILIP ROTH I 409 stands before Lamont Library at Harvard, wishing he could see inside his reflection in a window and know what it was "that had turned pursuit and clutching into love, and then turned it inside out again." Neil has, in a sense, been left outside looking in, but he is trying to look into himself as well. He is both James Gatz of The Great Gatsby, drawn to the "service of a vast, vulgar, and meretricious beauty," and Nick Carraway, who tells the story, reflecting on its meaning and looking for direction. And like Nick, Neil ends up between two worlds, a part of neither. Letting Go (1962), Roth's first novel, treats the lives of four unmoored characters who drift together, apart, together, and apart again as the tide of circumstance carries them. Roth has said that for them "it isn't a matter of sinking or swimming—they have, as it were, to invent the crawl." Gabe Wallach, Paul and Libby Herz, and Martha Reganhart are struggling desperately not to sink, but they are not sure how best to stay afloat: by holding on to someone who may pull them under, or by letting go. Weighty epigraphs from Thomas Mann, Simone Weil, and Wallace Stevens clarify the problem at issue: that we expect more of people then they will be able to give us, while each of us, acting from "the unalterable necessity / Of being the unalterable animal," frustrates the needs and expectations of others. Gabe and Paul represent two main types of response. The novel opens with a letter that Gabe's mother had written to him on her deathbed. In it, she confesses to using the guise of beneficence to control and manipulate people, especially Gabe's father: "I was always doing things for another's good. The rest of my life I could push and pull at people with a clear conscience." After reading the letter, Gabe vows not to interfere in others' lives, or let them interfere in his. His distrust of involvement causes him to drift into other people's lives until they begin to need him; then he tries to withdraw.

In this way, Gabe becomes involved in the marital problems of Paul and Libby Herz. Libby is the embodiment of "agonized yearning" for a happiness that she does not know how to find. Paul justifiably feels both oppressed by and responsible for Libby's unmet needs. They come to see Gabe as an "agent of deliverance" who will take Libby away and make her happy. Gabe has encouraged such fantasies by revealing his attraction to Libby and at one point kissing her; but when deeper commitment looms, he retreats. He then gravitates into a relationship with Martha, a divorced waitress and mother of two. She is for him "the escape hatch" through which he flees from his emotionally dependent father and Libby; at the same time, she uses him to avoid Sid Jaffee, a persistent suitor whose demands for a permanent tie frighten her. At first, at least sexually, Gabe and Martha seem well suited. But when the difference in their backgrounds begins to show and Martha starts having expectations of Gabe, he starts looking to Sid the way Paul had looked to him. Despite bouts of escapism, Paul, like Gabe, embraces obligation and responsibility, somewhat as a martyr embraces the rack. He marries Libby in part because he can thus "make himself a better man." His joyless commitment is a source of pain for Libby, who was hoping for love and happiness. Paul tells her, "If I can't feel what I have to, I do what I have to." When she asks him how he can, he replies, "I force myself.'' He begins to crack under the weight of his and Libby's unfulfillable expectations. On the pretext of seeing his dying father, who had cut him off when he married a gentile, Paul goes to New York. There, swayed by his Uncle Asher, who presents the extreme case for letting go— "Nobody owes nobody nothing"—he decides to leave Libby. At his father's burial Paul has an epiphanic vision of life as sacrifice, beyond human understanding of order and justice. He returns to

410 I AMERICAN WRITERS Libby, and they resolve to adopt a baby. At this point, most of the principals have had enough of drifting and resolve at least to be resolved. Paul wants to love Libby. Martha wants to make a conventional home for her children, and she tells Gabe that she will marry Sid. And Gabe, with the former threats to his independence looking for sustenance elsewhere, wants "something to hang on—to hang on to." Fired by a wish to be of service, he becomes involved in the Herzes' attempt to buy a baby from an ignorant and impoverished couple. He has the ulterior motive of proving his worth and good intentions: "he did not want it said by others—or by himself to himself—that he had gone less than all the way once again." But when the success of his enterprise is threatened, Gabe rashly takes the baby and forces a confrontation with the parents. The result is that the Herzes almost lose the child and Gabe suffers a breakdown. The novel closes with another letter of farewell and confession, this time one in which Gabe admits to Libby that he has used people for his own ends while ostensibly acting on their behalf. "I can't bring myself yet to ask forgiveness," he tells her. "If you've lived for a long while as an indecisive man, you can't simply forget, obliterate, bury, your one decisive moment. . . . You see, I thought at the time that I was sacrificing myself." The Jamesian overtones here are unmistakable, but not unexpected, for as graduate students both Gabe and Roth cherished the James who was a "lover and interpreter of the fine amenities of brave decisions." Roth has remarked that the serious, ruminative tone and balanced sentences are "the language of a preoccupation with conscience, responsibility, and rectitude rather grindingly at the center of Letting Go.'' Characters often apprehend one another through some nuance of manners, a revealing action, or a telling detail. Jamesian structural and narrative devices are evident in ficelles such

as the Horvitzes and in the shifting, imperfect centers of consciousness. In Letting Go, Roth makes particular use of The Portrait of a Lady. Gabe and Libby discuss their situation indirectly by commenting on the novel. Clearly, its main story is relevant: Isabel Archer's quest for freedom leads to its restriction and the mature recognition that one must live with the binding consequences of uninformed decisions. Libby is critical at first of Isabel's desire "to alter what can't be altered" and to push and pull people "with an absolutely clear conscience." Hearing this phrase, Gabe realizes that Libby has read his mother's letter, which he had left in the book, and he uses the example of Isabel to chide her about Paul: "She shows herself to have a lot of guts in the end. It's one thing marrying the wrong person for the wrong reasons; it's another sticking it out with them." Ironically, the courage to make a commitment and keep it is precisely what Gabe lacks and Libby works toward. Letting Go displays a greater sense of moral ambiguity and mixed natures than do Roth's previous works, a less rigorous division into sheep and goats, in part because the people it presents are deeply ambivalent about the claims of conscience and interpersonal responsibility. But for Lucy Nelson of When She Was Good (1967), nothing is morally ambiguous, no natures are mixed, and no claim admits of ambivalence. The book takes its title from "The Little Girl with a Curl": "When she was good she was very, very good / And when she was bad she was horrid." In Lucy's eyes, as in the example of the little girl in the nursery rhyme, there is no middle ground: people are either very, very good or horrid— period. The ironic twist is that Lucy herself becomes horrid, as well as pitiable, in her grim determination to be very, very good, and to make everyone around her cleave to the same standard. The novel, set in Protestant, Midwestern, small-town America and taking a lower-middle-

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class girl as its center of interest, seems anomalous; Roth, in fact, once described it as his "book with no Jews." But the preoccupation with what is good and who sets the standards links it closely with his other fiction: "the question of who or what shall have influence and jurisdiction over one's life has been a concern in much of my work. From whom shall one receive the Commandments? The Patimkins? Lucy Nelson?" Presuming their own goodness or lightness, the characters attempt to remake others in their own image, as, in their various ways, Brenda does with Neil, Gabe's mother does with his father, Lucy does with Roy Bassart, and Sophie Portnoy does with little Alex. Roth portrays Lucy as a victimizer but also as a victim of the incongruities between her family environment and the values of the larger society. In particular, he examines the destructive effects of traditional sex roles, with man as the authoritative protector and woman as the submissive helpmate. Sadly for Lucy, she accepts the model unconditionally and is driven to self-righteous desperation, violent anger, and finally death by her frustration at living among people who refuse to play their assigned parts. Faced with a weak, self-effacing grandfather and a reckless, self-pitying father, Lucy learns from an early age to do everything for herself. Seeking a protective and prescriptive moral order, she becomes involved with Roman Catholicism as an adolescent and dedicates herself to St. Teresa of Lisieux's example of "submission, humility, silence and suffering." But one night when Lucy is fifteen, her father comes home drunk and creates a scene. She calls upon St. Teresa and Jesus for help in making him stop. When she gets no reply, she calls the police, who arrest her father. She is not visibly moved by the episode, prompting him to call her' 'Stone! Pure stone!''—but she is deeply scarred and humiliated. She decides then that she "hates suffering as much as she hated those who made her suffer."

Lucy becomes obsessed with moral rectitude and loses the capacity for sympathy; in fact, she sees mercy as reprehensible, a failure to combat evil. At this point, she begins to show signs of real psychological disturbance. She sees slights, threats, or injustices to herself everywhere. She becomes involved with the dreamy and unmotivated Roy Bassart because he is the first boy who has taken a real interest in her, because as an ex-soldier he seems mature, and because his more affluent, conventional family represents the kind of life she has missed. Soon, though, she begins to despise him as a younger version of her father. Just as she is about to escape her family and begin an independent life at a nearby college, she learns that she is "in trouble." Rather than undergo the abortion that she wants, she forces Roy to "do his duty" and marry her. The marriage goes from terrible to worse. Lucy sees herself as the only force for decency in a depraved world of "fiends and monsters" conspiring against her. News that her father has been jailed for theft sends her into a rage in which she confuses Roy and her father, or at least unleashes her fury at her father against Roy. Terrified at her insane outburst, Roy flees with their son to his Uncle Julian's. Lucy follows, and in a vicious confrontation that accelerates from verbal to physical violence, she collapses. She escapes from her grandfather's house, where she is recovering, and wanders delirious in the snow, hallucinating scenes from her earlier life and plotting to steal her son back. She is found frozen to death by the spot where Roy had first seduced her, clutching to her cheek a letter that her father had written to her mother, begging forgiveness. If "Goodbye, Columbus" recalls Fitzgerald and Letting Go invokes James, When She Was Good echoes Madame Bovary, Flaubert's tale of a provincial woman chafing under a drab life, surrounded by weak men, caught and destroyed by her own illusions as much as by circumstances. It

412amwerican writers also resembles the naturalistic fiction of Theodore Dreiser, Frank Norris, and Stephen Crane. In seeking to rise above the 4'coarse and banal" life around her, Lucy is doomed to failure by hereditary and environmental factors; these initiate a downward spiral that, once set in motion, feeds on itself and accelerates. Every attempt to escape her fate only hastens it. Lucy vows while giving birth that "her child would never know what life was like in a fatherless house," but her fanatical devotion to making Roy the man her father wasn't emasculates him and precipitates the catastrophe that will cause the child to grow up in a motherless house. Roth even conveys the mood of entrapment by using unrelievedly conventional, hackneyed, cliche-ridden prose to present the characters' thought and actions, thus suggesting the stunted possibilities and spent alternatives of the world Lucy struggles to transcend. Ironically, the town where she lives and dies is Liberty Center. When She Was Good marks the end of the first phase of Roth's literary career, one in which he rather self-consciously wrote "complicated fictions of moral anguish" of the sort that also appealed to the young Peter Tarnopol. But the weightiness and oppressive atmosphere of his first two novels began to weigh on Roth—the fun was missing from his fiction, and from the act of writing. The five years between Letting Go and When She Was Good is the longest hiatus of his career; the latter novel required eight drafts and thousands of pages of revisions, a task so draining that Roth even talked of giving up writing. Moreover, the reviews of the final product were disappointing and often misdirected. Many declared the book "irrelevant" to the social upheavals of the late 1960's, whereas Roth felt that an examination of the destructive power of selfrighteous conviction was quite pertinent to Vietnam-era America. Many saw the change of venue as an ill-advised attempt by Roth to abandon what he did best in order to demonstrate his

versatility, whereas Roth was trying to extend his examination of guilt and goodness, freedom and duty. After the arduous years spent on his "gloomy" first two novels, Roth was "aching to write something freewheeling and funny," to "get in touch with another side of [his] talent." That side—anarchic, irreverent, satiric—was allowed to play now and then in "Epstein," the depiction of Leo Patimkin, and the scenes with Asher Herz, but was largely suppressed in favor of the high seriousness of James and Flaubert. Yet while he was laboring over the tortured tale of Lucy Nelson, Roth was also, as a sort of antidote, making "abortive forays" into what emerged later as Portnoy's Complaint (1969). These included an untitled scatological slide show (begun in 1966); "The Jewboy" (begun in 1962), a bit of folkloric fantasy; The Nice Jewish Boy (begun in 1964), a realistic play; and an autobiographical "Portrait of an Artist" (begun in 1966). The general subject, Roth explains, was "the argument between the Abel and Cain of my own respectable middle-class background." But Portnoy is "a novel in the guise of a confession," not "a confession in the guise of a novel." Roth depicts not himself but a character torn between two powerful impulses contained within "the range of Jewish possibilities." The book has "less to do with 'freeing' me from my Jewishness or my family," he says, "than with liberating me from an apprentice's literary models." Actually, Roth discovered a voice more distinctively his own by broadening his range of models to include complementary types, the raucous and unrestrained as well as the high-minded and morally serious. Drawing on Philip Rahv's terms, Roth identifies the first type as "redskins" and the second as "palefaces." He neatly characterizes himself as a "redface": "fundamentally ill at ease in, and at odds with, both worlds"—a sort of literary analogue to Neil

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Klugman. But Roth experiences the tension as artistically invigorating. Now he can draw on Henny Youngman as well as Henry James, on Arnold G. and Jake the Snake of his Newark boyhood as well as Flaubert, on native American humorists as well as Tolstoy and Conrad: "being a redface accounts as much as anything for the self-conscious and deliberate zigzag that my own career has taken, each book veering sharply away from the one before." Portnoy's Complaint seems to mark an exceedingly sharp zig after the zag of When She Was Good. But, as Roth points out, both dramatize "the problematic nature of moral authority," especially as incarnated in a dominating female. Both show a passion for freedom from the past leading the protagonist into "a bondage more gruesome and ultimately insupportable." Both show emotionally troubled adult children who are oppressed less by their parents than by their rage against them. The difference, of course, is that Roth radically alters the setting, voice, tone, and treatment of his theme: "not until I had got hold of g u i l t . . . as a comic idea, did I begin to feel myself lifting free and clear of my last book." Despite surface similarities to the nightclub routines of Mort Sahl or Lenny Bruce, Roth's dark comedy was influenced not so much by stand-up comics as by "a sit-down comic named Franz Kafka and a very funny bit he does called 'The Metamorphosis/ " Roth also draws on Kafka's "Letter to His Father," which he asked his students at Penn to use as a model for an imaginary letter to their parents; "I took the assignment on myself," he recalls, "and wrote a novel." Kafka's is a comedy of guilt, proscription, blockage, and entrapment—of absurd worlds where authority is unreasoning and strategies for contending with it are self-defeating. Similarly, Portnoy tightens the cords that bind him by flailing about trying to get loose. As Roth explains it, "Portnoy's pains arise out of his refusal to be

bound any longer by taboos which, rightly or wrongly, he experiences as diminishing and unmanning. The joke on Portnoy is that for him breaking the taboo turns out to be as unmanning in the end as honoring it. Some joke." At first the taboos were unclear. As a little boy, Alex inhabited a Kafkaesque world of punishment without crime, guilt without apparent offense. He recalls his mother locking him out of the apartment for being bad; as he hammered on the door, begging to be let back in and promising to reform, he wondered, "But what is it I have done?" He only knew that pleasurable things were proscribed for unfathomable reasons. After watching a snowstorm he turned from the window and asked hopefully, "Momma, do we believe in winter?" As Alex gets older, he discovers that the taboos pertain mostly to food and sex, which become linked in his mind as means of rebellion. After his mother browbeats him into promising never again to eat hamburgers and french fries, he races to the bathroom in a fit of defiant fury to "grab that battered battering ram to freedom"; on another occasion he masturbates with a piece of liver that becomes the family dinner. As an adult, Portnoy substitutes shickses for nonkosher foods and masturbation as the tools of revolt; they represent the polar opposite of the ingrained Jewish standards of restraint and renunciation. This campaign for liberation proves just as self-thwarting as the earlier ones. The more inhibited Portnoy feels by the guilt his parents have instilled in him, the more he strikes back through obscenity and sexual profligacy; doing so only makes him feel more guilty, which makes him strike back more. And so the cycle intensifies until it culminates in the wordless "pure howl" that ends his diatribe to his analyst, Dr. Spielvogel. Spielvogel's "punchline" reply—"Now vee may perhaps to begin Yes?"—indicates the viciously circular nature of Portnoy's complaint. The patient laments being "torn by desires that

414 I AMERICAN are repugnant to my conscience, and a conscience repugnant to my desires/' Portnoy's erotic life receives a triple-whammy in Israel. There the tormented soul finds taboos aplenty; a dearth of shickses, against whom he uses sex as a way of "settling [ethnic] scores"; and a strapping young woman named Naomi who closely resembles his mother at that age. He tries to force himself on her, but he proves impotent and she overpowers him. Humiliated, Portnoy submits to a tongue-lashing for being a perverse "self-hating Jew" who hides behind satiric humor. Here Roth is having some fun with his critics; he had faced these charges himself, and would again for Portnoy. In "On the Air" (1970) talent scout Milton Lippman says that a talent scout must be attuned to "the strange"—"he doesn't make things happen, he only points them out!" In the essay "Writing American Fiction" (1960) Roth claims a similar role for the contemporary fictionist, who "has his hands full in trying to understand, describe, and then make credible much of American reality." When he tries in Our Gang (1971) not simply to understand and describe Richard Nixon, but to satirize him, he really has to exert himself. In conversations with Random House executives, he began answering charges of distortion and bad taste even before the book was published. There is, as he noted, a long tradition of American political satire that relies on shocking, tasteless distortion, the "dye dropped onto the specimen to make vivid traits and qualities otherwise only faintly visible to the naked eye." To criticism that the satire might prove ineffectual, Roth argued that writing satire is "a literary, not a political act." It is "moral rage transformed into comic art" and should be judged as such, not according to its power to bring about change. But, judged as art, the satire is decidedly uneven. Roth does display a wonderful gift of

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mimicry, capturing Nixon's speech patterns, intonations, obsequious modesty, and self-serving casuistry; he also expands the target to include the mind set of "Tricky Dixon's" gang as well as the gullibility and self-importance of the news media. Sensing political opportunity in the abortion issue, Tricky professes his belief in "the sanctity of human life" and "the rights of the unborn." When Lt. William Galley is convicted in the slaughter of unarmed Vietnamese villagers, Tricky finds the soldier's actions consistent with a belief in the sanctity of human life: none of the women was known to be pregnant at the time of her death. Another crisis erupts when the Boy Scouts protest that if Tricky supports the rights of the unborn, he must be in favor of sex. Tricky and his gang devise a plan to massacre the demonstrating scouts and blame the entire episode on Curt Flood, a black baseball player who threatened the American way pf life by being the first to sue for free agency. Before his schemes, which include the invasion of Denmark, can come to fruition, Tricky is assassinated by being stuffed fetuslike into a large, fluid-filled plastic bag. Nearly everyone confesses to the crime. When last seen, Tricky is "on the comeback trail" in hell, running a smear campaign against Satan for the office of Devil. But despite some undeniably funny moments and direct hits, Our Gang often suffers from being strained, unmeasured, and heavy-handed—from Roth's not knowing what to cut and when to leave off. Baseball becomes the main vehicle in The Great American Novel (1973) for comic attacks on institutionalized greed, bureaucratic ineptitude, xenophobia, racism, promotional schemes, anti-Communist paranoia, and just about any feature of the mid-century American landscape that illustrates the disparity between espoused ideals and actual practice. The progression from Portnoy's Complaint to Our Gang to The Great American Novel marks what Roth described as

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"my increased responsiveness to, and respect for, what is unsocialized in me." As the focus broadens from personal to impersonal, from the neurotic individual to the particular administration to the nation's "mythic sense of itself," the humor becomes less satiric and, says Roth, more "satyric": "The comedy in The Great American Novel exists for the sake of no higher value than comedy itself; the redeeming value is not social or cultural reform, or moral instruction, but comic inventiveness. Destructive, or lawless, playfulness—and for the fun of it." The book demonstrates Roth's tremendous range and willingness to take risks. The votary of Flaubert and James here abandons the vows of the paleface priesthood for the barbaric—even obscene—yawp of the redskins. The raucous and ribald laughter, as Bernard Rodgers observes, has its roots in the oral storytelling traditions of the old Southwest that Roth studied at Chicago with Napier Wilt and Walter Blair, pioneer scholars in native American humor. Apparent in Roth's novel are the use of crude vernacular; the emphasis on masculine pastimes; the comic exploitation of physical discomfort and scatology; the hyperbole and mythologizing, especially about feats of physical prowess; the anecdotal style and episodic structure; the lack of psychological depth in character development; and the use of the frame-tale setting. That setting is the most interesting pan of the book. "Call me Smitty," the Prologue begins. Smitty is Word Smith, a foul-mouthed, funny, possibly paranoid and senile eighty-seven-yearold sportswriter with a love of verbal gymnastics that matches his love of baseball. Like a latterday Ishmael, he has survived to tell the tale of the defunct Patriot League, supposedly an equal partner with the National and American Leagues until the end of World War II. The historical existence of the league is being covered up through a sort of universal—or national—tacit agreement, because to chronicle its destruction

would be to expose the forces of corruption, cynicism, and expediency that belie the national myth. The story of the extinction of the Patriot League, then, is the story of a dying America. The Prologue, in which Smitty tries to justify his undertaking, is enlivened by his earthy, exuberant play with language and his engaging parodies of Hawthorne, Melville, Twain, Hemingway, and others who might be considered contenders for the title "Great American Novelist." Smitty goes on to recount the trials of the Ruppert Mundys, a team owned in its glory days by Glorious Mundy. After his death, the warprofiteering new owners lease the home stadium to the government and force the Mundys to leave Port Ruppert (named for the park in Newark where Philip and his dad watched baseball) and wander like the ancient Israelites in the wilderness of foreign fields. Soon Glorious's Mundys are sick of transit and give over to assorted dissipations. Despite the biblical parallels and mythic overtones lent by such players' names as Red Kronos, Gil Gamesh, and Deacon Demeter, the third-person narrative loses much of the stylistic verve and energy of the first-person prologue. Roth, or Smitty, tries to compensate with a frantic heightening of the action, relating events so farfetched that the reader can no longer credit them. Moreover, it is not clear how the extreme implausibilities—on the field or off—are to be taken, for Roth fails to establish whether Smitty is intentionally writing a fiction or distractedly spinning out a paranoid fantasy that he takes for history. Like Melville and Hawthorne, whom he calls "my precursors, my kinsmen," Smitty attempts, in Roth's words, "to imagine a myth of an ailing America"; Roth says that his own attempt has been "to imagine a book about imagining that American myth." In grounding Smitty's fabrications in historical events, by mixing actual players and commissioners with invented ones, he tries to establish "a continuum between the

416 american writgers credible incredible and the incredible credible." In The Breast (1972), Roth posits an incredible event that the reader and the protagonist must accept as reality. Professor David Kepesh has, unaccountably, been transformed into a disembodied 155-pound female breast. Although published before The Great American Novel, The Breast was written after it. The focus shifts back from public to private life. Roth also returns to his most characteristic narrative strategy, one that he dropped with mixed results in the previous two works: encouraging the reader to identify with a central character by showing the world as it looks and feels to that person. Kepesh is another of those characters "whose moorings have been cut, and who are swept away from their native shores and out to sea/' His predicament, Roth notes, is similar to that of earlier characters, but "with a difference: his unmooring can't be traced (much to his dismay, too) to psychological, social, or historical causes." Not that Kepesh doesn't try. A rational humanist, he even feels an "intellectual responsibility" to uncover the cause and meaning of his metamorphosis; thus he considers and rejects a number of explanations for his predicament. He even entertains the notion that fiction is to blame, that his condition is really a hallucination inspired by his teaching of Gogol's "The Nose" and Kafka's "The Metamorphosis." Ironically, he appreciates the absurd and inexplicable in literature but cannot abide it in life: insisting on a plausible answer, he convinces himself very rationally that he is insane. Ultimately, Kepesh discounts this hypothesis as well. He reasons too coherently to be crazy. In searching his character for clues to his fate, Kepesh recognizes what Roth has described as "the struggle to accommodate warring (or, at least, contending) impulses and desires, to negotiate some kind of inner peace or balance of power . . . between the ethical and social yearnings and the implacable, singular lusts for the flesh and its pleasures." In this way he recalls

Lou Epstein and Alexander Portnoy while anticipating Peter Tarnopol and Nathan Zuckerman. On the one hand, he realizes that "the social constraint practiced by and large by the educated classes provided me with genuine aesthetic and ethical satisfactions." On the other hand, he acknowledges his need to indulge the lustful Dionysian side of his nature. In fact, in the months preceding his metamorphosis, he was troubled by the waning of his desire for Claire, a lovely and tender young woman who had made his life "orderly and stable" for the first time since his disastrous marriage. He hits upon the notion that his transformation results from the "trauma" of undeserved happiness—"my guilt!" Roth is parodying the all-purpose diagnosis of Portnoy's complaint. It does not finally strike Kepesh as very persuasive, either. He comes to accept the reality of his condition, which includes his inability to understand it. As Roth says, "To try to unravel the mystery of 'meaning' here is really to participate to some degree in Kepesh's struggle—and to be defeated, as he is." And yet in defeat Kepesh is what the author calls his "first heroic character." Kepesh's victory, or consolation prize, is learning to take responsibility for the management of his inner self, regardless of outer circumstances. He closes his account with a line from Rainer Maria Rilke: " . . . You must change your life." Roth has said that he envisions Wallach, Portnoy, and Kepesh as three stages of a single explosive projectile that is fired into the barrier that forms the boundary of the individual's identity and experience: that barrier of personal inhibition, ethical conviction and plain, old monumental fear beyond which lies the moral and psychological unknown. Gabe Wallach crashes up against the wall and collapses; Portnoy proceeds on through the fractured mortar, only to become lodged there, half in, half out. It remains for Kepesh to pass

PHILIP ROTH I 417 right on through the bloodied hole, and out the other end, into no-man's-land. With Peter Tarnopol of My Life as a Man (1974), Roth first presents a character who tries to orient himself in no-man's-land—to understand and shape the chaos of his life—through the act of writing about it. Tarnopol has a compulsion to tell and retell the story of how he squandered his manhood and youthful promise by marrying Maureen Johnson, a disturbed and destructive woman about five years his senior. He first offers two "Useful Fictions" as attempts to objectify his experience and then the autobiographical "My True Story." For the fictions he created an alter ego named Nathan Zuckerman, himself an author whose life in many particulars resembles Tarnopol's—and Roth's. In "Salad Days," the first "Useful Fiction," a third-person narrator relates from an "amused, Olympian point of view" the early personal history of Zuckerman: his protected Jewish childhood; his precocity in school; his inflated sense of himself in college, where he attains moral seriousness and literary ambitions; his erotic adventures with Sharon Shatzky, a cruder and more carnal Brenda Patimkin; and his brief stint in the peacetime army. But near the end of this tale of youthful self-absorption he writes, "He would begin to pay . . . for the contradictions: the stinging tongue and the tender hide, the spiritual aspirations and the lewd desires, the soft boyish needs and the manly, the magisterial ambitions." Zuckerman suffers from the same duality as many of Roth's characters, including Tarnopol, who is, after all, writing autobiographical fiction. Sensing the inadequacy of the voice in "Salad Days" to recount the horrors to come, Tarnopol switches to a "grave and pensive" first-person account in "Courting Disaster," the second "Useful Fiction." There Zuckerman tells of his tortured relationship with Lydia Ketterer,

which parallels Tarnopol's with Maureen and Roth's with Margaret. Zuckerman chooses Lydia over Sharon because she appeals to his literary sensibilities; having survived a sordid upbringing invests her with enormous moral "glamor." Also, somewhat like Paul Herz, he invests himself with moral glamor by dutifully assuming responsibility for her. As if to prove himself to himself, he embraces a woman who has become repugnant to him. The marriage ends in Lydia's suicide and Zuckerman's flight to Italy with her semiliterate daughter, now his mistress. Tarnopol indicates through Zuckerman's disappointment with the narrative that his fiction, too, has failed to purge, placate, or even illuminate his demons. In a statement that remarkably anticipates Roth's rationale for The Facts, Tarnopol determines "to forsake the art of fiction for a while and embark upon an autobiographical narrative." Roth employs various stratagems to make Peter seem real. As Zuckerman's creator and the author of the two fictions, he, like his history, appears genuine by comparison. His embarrassed confession that he married Maureen because he was influenced by great literature seems to be the "real-world" antecedent for Zuckerman's comparable blunder; it also seems to distinguish TarnopoFs life from literary invention. As an added structural twist, Roth has Tarnopol have Zuckerman make himself seem real by complaining that his life would be more richly patterned and clearly meaningful if it were fiction. Although biographical parallels and structural ploys encourage one to regard Tarnopol's "True Story" as true, it is another of Roth's useful fictions—an attempt to master personal experience by ruminating on it and reshaping it as art. Roth reveals Tarnopol's fictionality by making him a patient of Dr. Spielvogel, Portnoy's analyst—a neat little bit of intertextuality that subverts some of the trompe 1'oeil. A more telling distinction is that Tarnopol's experiences ren-

418 I AMERICAN WRITERS der him impotent for years as both a writer and a man, whereas Roth continues to publish prolifically. The crucial similarity between Roth and Tarnopol is not in the overlapping details of their marriages but in their need to reexamine, redirect, or even regain themselves through writing about the trauma. Roth's description of Tarnopol's endeavor reveals the key link between them: the presentation or description of himself is what is most problematical—and what remains unsolved . . . Tarnopol's attempt to realize himself with the right words . . . is what's at the heart of the book, and accounts for my joining his fictions about his life with his autobiography. When the novel is considered in its entirety, I hope it will be understood as Tarnopol's struggle to achieve a description. Of course, it is also Roth's, as well as a chance to stand at one remove, exploring the relationship between life and artistic representation. At the end of My Life as a Man, Tarnopol sees himself as fated to repeat old patterns: although released from Maureen by a car accident, he is still trapped in himself: "This me who is me being me and none other!" That sense of what Roth calls "characterological enslavement" pervades The Professor of Desire (1977), the story of David Kepesh before his metamorphosis. His inability to alter his character or his fate is underscored by our knowledge of what happens to him, but, as Roth says, the book does not "bear a necessary relationship to The Breast." Rather, he imagines "the details that had formed the realistic underpinnings of a very surreal story." Until the conclusion, there is little foreshadowing of Kepesh's transformation. Kepesh's complaint is a familiar one: an internecine warfare between "the measured self" and "the insatiable self." The failure to achieve an inner peace, though, is rendered more poignantly here than in any of Roth's previous work.

Kepesh is acutely sensitive to the pain and disorientation caused by his dual nature. His account begins,4 'Temptation comes to me first in the conspicuous personage of Herbie Bratasky," a coarse, outrageous young comic and master of ceremonies at his parents' Catskills resort hotel whom David idolizes as a boy. Yet while he acknowledges the call of the wild, he tries to resist it, here through the formality of his language. His bouts of frantic self-indulgence typically elicit self-recrimination, expiatory gestures, and pledges to make amends. At college, literature gives him the means to rationalize, if not to reconcile, his opposing natures: he takes Macaulay's description of Steele—"A rake among scholars, a scholar among rakes"—along with selected bits of Byron's poetry and Kierkegaard's EitherI Or as guides for action. Kepesh often sees the alternatives represented in pairs of people. When he is a boy, there is his dutiful and responsible father to match Herbie. When he is in London on a fellowship, there are the voracious, hedonistic Birgitta and the tender, sensitive, conscience-stricken Elisabeth. In his professional life, there are the raunchy, uninhibited poet Ralph Baumgarten and the fastidious, elegantly restrained Arthur Schonbrunn. Most important, there are the lustful, shallow, adventurous Helen, whom he marries and divorces, and the calm, orderly, tender Claire, with whom he tries to rebuild his life after bouts with Helen have left him an impotent analysand of Dr. Frederick Klinger. Birgitta and Helen stimulated and shared his impetuous craving for ever more of the exciting, the unknown, the forbidden; Claire offers him hope of peace from the consuming appetites he fears as "inimical to [his] overall interests"—"No more more.1' Kepesh also sees the scholar as protection against the rake. Afraid of losing himself in a life of excess with Birgitta, he retreats into the academic rigors of graduate school. Later he uses scholarly pursuits to buffer himself against Helen,

PHILIP ROTH I 419 although he realizes that these may in part be "evasions" and laments, "Oh, why must it be Helen and Birgitta at one extreme or life with a lemon at the other?" He alludes here to Kafka, one of his literary heroes, who epitomized selfdenial in claiming that "the only fit food for a man is half a lemon." Kepesh addresses the same issues in his literary criticism that obsess him in his life—Kafka's "preoccupation with spiritual starvation," for example. In the "sexual despair" induced by his dichotomous nature, he sees an analogue to Kafka's blocked, thwarted K's "banging their heads against invisible walls." A literary Portnoy whose conscience and desires are mutually repugnant, Kepesh understands that the walls are internal. Even in his aesthetic tastes, he is drawn to different poles: not only Kafka's surrealistic fables of obstruction, guilt, and punishment but also Chekhov's muted, realistic stories of romantic disillusionment. He also focuses on what confounds him in life; he is writing "an essay on license and restraint in Chekhov's world," with particular attention to Chekhov's "perverse pessimism" about the chances for achieving 44 personal freedom.'' For a time it seems as if Kepesh finds in literature and in Claire the means to integrate his contending selves. When they travel to Europe together, he works on lectures that show how his emotional life and his readings have informed each other; he becomes a "professor of desire." But in Venice he decides to conceal from Claire his adventures there with Birgitta some ten years earlier, whereupon Birgitta becomes all he can think of. The two visit Kafka's grave, in Prague, as Roth did in 1972. In this new setting, just when he thinks he has quelled his old demons, Kepesh dreams that he is led by Herbie Bratasky to visit Kafka's aged whore. She asks him through Herbie whether he "would like to inspect her pussy . . . She submits that it might hold some literary interest for you." The grotesque incongruity here reveals that in Kepesh's

psyche, the scholar and the rake remain unreconciled. And the dream association of Kafka's grave with Kafka's whore indicates that Kepesh still links sexuality with the death of his better self. David and Claire return to an idyllic farmhouse in the Catskills where, for a time, he enjoys the balm of her placid tenderness. His father and a friend, a survivor of the death camps, come for a visit, and Claire is wonderfully sensitive to their emotional needs. A surprise visit from Helen, unhappy in her outwardly perfect new marriage and still craving more, triggers the same response in him: he feels "the lovely blandness of a life with Claire" begin "to cloy, to pall," and he knows that soon the complacent scholar "will give way to Herbie's pupil, Birgitta's accomplice, Helen's suitor, yes, to Baumgarten's sidekick . . . to the would-be wayward son and all he hungers for." The novel ends in the early morning with David, after a night of bad dreams, reaching out for Claire and pressing his lips "in a desperate frenzy" to her breast, knowing that his humanity and wholeness depend on fixing his desire in her, and yet sensing it slip away into "fear of transformations yet to come." Despite the adumbration of Kepesh's metamorphosis and echoes of Kafka's story, the tone and treatment in the last section of the book are Chekhovian. Roth infuses the late-summer retreat with the pathos of the dying season, and of dying love. More than anywhere before, he shows a compassionate understanding of the poignancy of longing and loss; a sense of the passing of all things before they are realized; "a feel," as Kepesh says of Chekhov, "for the disillusioning moment and for the processes wherein actuality pounces upon even our most harmless illusions, not to mention the grand dreams of fulfillment and adventure." David Kepesh is finally unable to integrate the polar extremes of his nature. Similarly, Roth says of himself, "one of my continuing problems as a

420 I AMERICAN WRITERS writer has been to find the means to be true to these seemingly inimical realms of experience that I am strongly attached to by temperament and training." Previously, he had tended to objectify this artistic problem as a personal dilemma for his characters. With The Ghost Writer (1979), he treats the artistic problem directly. Nathan Zuckerman, sans Tarnopol, looks back more than twenty years to the time when he, like Roth, was twenty-three and writing the stories that would be collected in his first book. Nathan has had a falling out with his father, a Newark chiropodist whose loving pride and high expectations have become a burden. In Victor Zuckerman's opinion, "Higher Education," Nathan's most ambitious story, presents a disparaging picture of Jews. The father enlists the prestigious Judge Leopold Wapter to influence the son to suppress his story and redirect his imagination. Nathan hears the same criticisms that Roth did after publishing "Defender of the Faith"; and among the questions Judge Wapter poses is essentially the same one that Roth had to field at Yeshiva University in 1962: "If you had been living in Nazi Germany in the thirties, would you have written such a story?" A self-styled "Nathan Dedalus," Zuckerman vows to fly past the nets of family, church, and state on wings of his own making. Somewhat ironically, his flight takes him "off and away seeking patriarchal validation elsewhere." As in The Professor of Desire, the alternatives are embodied in a pair of contrasting characters: Felix Abravanel, a larger-than-life, self-publicizing, self-indulgent Maileresque author aloft "in the egosphere"; and E. I. Lonoff, a composite figure with elements of Bernard Malamud, Isaac Bashevis Singer, and Isaac Babel, whose characters are "masters of renunciation" and whose fictions are dour "visions of terminal restraint." Nathan had met Abravanel three years earlier, but feeling certain that the literary lion was "not in the market for a twenty-three-yearold son," he mailed his four published stories to

Lonoff and received an invitation to visit "the most famous literary ascetic in America" at home in the Berkshires. As the novel opens, young Nathan, "already contemplating [his] own massive Bildungsroman,'' arrives to submit himself "for candidacy as nothing less than E. I. Lonoff s spiritual son." He looks around at the austerity and seclusion, everything reserved for the "transcendent calling," and thinks, "This is how I will live." What Roth identifies as a central question in his works, "who or what shall have influence and jurisdiction over one's life," here becomes primarily an aesthetic issue. The impressionable Nathan is ready to embrace Lonoff uncritically as his mentor, but Lonoff realizes that his way of resigned disillusionment, patience, and selfdenial may not be Nathan's way: "an unruly personal life will probably better serve a writer like Nathan. . . . His work has turbulence—that should be nourished." Lonoff has read Nathan well. Nathan is also drawn to Amy Bellette, a beautiful and mysterious young woman he meets at Lonoff s. Is she a student, another disciple, a mistress—or all three? At night he fantasizes about her and masturbates on the daybed in Lonoff's study. To expiate his sin, he reads "The Middle Years," a story by Henry James about a dying novelist who narrowly missed greatness. The man's deathbed utterance he recognizes as the quotation pinned above Lonoff's desk: "Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art." Hearing Lonoff's and Amy's voices in the room above, Zuckerman stands on the thick volume of James to facilitate eavesdropping. Amy is tempting Lonoff, but Lonoff, himself a master of renunciation, returns to his wife's room. Zuckerman is astonished, and like young Roth in "Writing American Fiction," chagrined at the thinness of his own imagination: "If only I could invent as presumptuously as real life! . . . But," he won-

PHILIP ROTH I 421 ders, "if I ever did, what then would they think of me, my father and his judge? How would my elders hold up against that? And if they couldn't . . . just how well would I hold up against being hated and reviled and disowned?" To answer the challenge to his imagination posed by "real life/' and to answer his elders, Nathan invents another fantasy about Amy: she is Anne Frank alive. This useful fiction provides him with a morally unassailable precedent for placing his art ahead of his family and vindicates him before the court of Wapter, who had advised him to raise his Jewish consciousness by seeing the Broadway production of The Diary of Anne Frank and to present Jews favorably in his fiction. In Nathan's reverie, Amy-Anne writes, as he does, not to present a representative sampling of Jews or to improve their public image but to "educate herself." Like Nathan Dedalus, she declares to the family and the world at large, '7 don't feel in the least bit responsible for any of you." After escaping death and immigrating to America, she learns that her father has survived to publish her work. Realizing that it will have far greater impact if she is believed dead, she decides not to be reunited "with the loving father who must be relinquished for the sake of his child's art." The next morning, Nathan is "continually drawn back into the fiction" he has spun about Amy. He even imagines marrying her and thus being exonerated before his elders, for who would accuse the husband of Anne Frank of antiSemitism? Nathan's musings are disrupted by Hope Lonoff's sudden outburst. Amy's presence, and thirty-five years of sacrificing herself to the closed, brooding Lonoff's needs, finally prove too much. To Amy as she leaves, Hope says: "There is his religion of art, my young successor: rejecting life! Not living is what he makes his beautiful fiction out of! And you will now be the person he is not living with!" As Lonoff calmly prepares to go out and retrieve Hope, he directs

Nathan to paper for making notes on what he has witnessed. "It could be an interesting story. You're not so nice and polite in your fiction. . . . You're a different person." "Am I?" Nathan asks. Lonoff, as though administering confirmatory rites, gravely shakes the young writer's hand and says, "I should hope so." Over the morning mail from assorted selfseekers and cranks, Lonoff had said to Hope, "Let Nathan see what it is to be lifted from obscurity. Let him not come hammering at our door to tell us that he wasn't warned." His remark becomes the epigraph for Zuckerman Unbound (1981). It and his comment on Nathan's niceness prove prophetic. Thirteen years have passed, and Nathan has achieved notoriety along with his first commercial success, Carnovsky, his Portnoy's Complaint. He has taken a page, as it were, from Abravanel as well as from Lonoff. As Zuckerman has zigzagged, so has Roth: the shift from the modulated, reflective tone of The Ghost Writer to the manic edginess of this book befits the sudden disruptions in the life of the new literary celebrity. Gossip columnists invent affairs for him, television personalities make jokes about him, marginal types and perverts insult and proposition him through his answering service, and someone threatens to kidnap his mother. He is followed by one Alvin Pepler, an embittered former quiz-show contestant who believes he was the victim of an anti-Semitic conspiracy to install a WASP as champion. Like Smitty, Pepler wants to write a book that shows "in detail, step by step, the decline of every decent American thing into liars and lies." Of course, he could use Zuckerman's help. Moreover, Zuckerman has lost his "levelheaded Laura," another of Roth's orderly, practical, generous women with whom life begins to get dull. She tells him, "having written a book like that, you had to go. That's what writing it was all about." What was a personal dilemma for David Kepesh becomes a personal and artistic dilemma

422 I AMERICAN WRITERS for Nathan Zuckerman, because the question of what kind of books he will write is bound up with the question of what kind of husband or son he will be. Aside from outraging the Jewish community, Carnovsky deeply wounds Zuckerman's mother, whom even old friends take for Mrs. Carnovsky, and it effectively destroys his relationship with his brother and father. Dr. Zuckerman's dying word to Nathan is—"Bastard." When Nathan later tries to comfort and advise his miserable brother, who is sinking under the burden of an unhappy marriage and the legacy of paternal expectations, Henry curses him for sacrificing their parents to write a "liberating" book. Nathan admits inwardly that "he'd known it all along. . . . But he'd written it anyway." The novel ends with Nathan being driven by an armed chauffeur through the wreckage of what was once his family's Newark neighborhood. In fighting to free himself from the constraints of his past, he has succeeded all too well: there seems nothing left of it for him to hold on to. Zuckerman unbound is also Zuckerman unmoored. The author of Carnovsky is shown in the process of learning lessons that the author of Zuckerman Unbound has absorbed. One is self-doubt. The mock heroic title implicitly satirizes authorial self-importance. Zuckerman is no Prometheus, willingly bearing the god's wrath for giving fire, civilization, and the arts to man. He must question whether his gifts, the stories, are worth the pain he suffers, and causes. Another is self-discipline, for the written world imposes a set of constraints as restrictive as the unwritten world's: "It may look to outsiders like a life of freedom. . . . But once one's writing it's all limits," says Zuckerman bound. "Bound to a subject. Bound to make sense of it. Bound to make a book of it." And bound to be misread, the harshest lesson. Zuckerman is dismayed that a great portion of the reading public "cannot distinguish between the illusion and the illusionist.'' Roth experienced the

same vexation when Portnoy's complaint was taken for his, but he can now be playful: in making the point through Zuckerman he simultaneously unmakes it by encouraging readers to identify his situation with the character's. In defending "Epstein," Roth explained that he was "interested in how—and why and when—a man acts counter to what he considers to be his 'best self,' or what others assume it to be, or would like it to be." This collision between the individual and a set of unmanageable expectations is the central conflict in Roth, one that often triggers a crisis of identity in which the main character must reexamine his or her own motives, methods, and values in redefining the self. The Anatomy Lesson (1983) finds Zuckerman four years older and in the throes of just such a crisis. He has not been able to complete "a page worth keeping" since his father's deathbed rebuke. "What he'd made his fiction from was gone. . . . Without a father and a mother and a homeland, he was no longer a novelist. No longer a son, no longer a writer." According to critic Milton Appel, he never was much of one. Appel's hatchet job on Zuckerman in Inquiry is, for all practical purposes, Irving Howe's "Philip Roth Reconsidered" in the December 1972 Commentary, an indictment of the author on charges of vulgarity, mediocrity, shallowness, and cultural treason. Appel vents, in the voice of the Jewish intellectual community, the anger and disappointment of Nathan's father. Just as Howe asked, "but who can doubt that Portnoy's cry ... speaks in some sense for Roth?" so Appel contends that the difference between characters and their authors is not what "grown-ups" pretend to their students. Although Zuckerman fights back, Appel's attack hurts all the more deeply because it echoes his own doubts: "But suppose he's right. . . . What if twenty years of writing has just been so much helplessness before a ... lowly, inconsequential compulsion that I've dignified with all my prin-

PHILIP ROTH I 423 ciples." Worse, one for which he loses a brother and a father, and hurts his mother deeply. He knows that she died not blaming him, but not understanding. Zuckerman's complaint involves physical as well as psychological distress: for a year and a half he has suffered from debilitating neck and shoulder pain, undiagnosable like Novotny's. And, like Portnoy "locked up in self," he becomes "ensnared by the selfness" of his agony. Also feeling Kepesh's need to account for his affliction, he considers and rejects undischarged filial anger or guilt over Carnovsky as an explanation. Perhaps, he thinks, the pain is a message from his buried self to "escape the clutches of self-justification . . . learn to lead a wholly indefensible, unjustifiable life—and learn to like it." To Zuckerman, this translates into giving up writing, which the bodily pain, the father's curse, and the lack of subject make impossible anyway. Zuckerman comes to believe that, aside from damaging and exploiting other people's lives, his writing has prevented him from living his own. He attempts to pursue the unjustifiable life and escape his pain through drugs, sex, and alcohol, but to no avail. In his "search for the release from self," he hits upon the idea of becoming a doctor: "So busy diagnosing everybody else there's no time to overdiagnose yourself." As if to undo a spell, he travels back to Chicago, the site of his graduate-school initiation into the coven of writers, and tries to enlist the help of an old roommate, now a physician, in getting into medical school. On a visit to a Jewish cemetery with the friend's father, a drunken and deranged Nathan tries to assault the old man, whom he sees as "the last of the fathers demanding to be pleased." He falls on a gravestone, severely injures his mouth, and winds up in the hospital. There he likes to accompany the interns on their rounds and contemplate sharing in their "indispensable work . . . . as though he still believed that he could unchain himself from a future as a

man apart and escape the corpus that was his." So the novel ends, with another image of "characterological enslavement": Zuckerman bound to his corpus—both his body and his writings— and thus to their identity: author. Zuckerman Bound (1985) becomes the title for the Zuckerman trilogy and "Epilogue: The Prague Orgy," a paranoid vision of the spiritual depravity that results from the suppression of freedoms. The story, in the form of entries from Zuckerman's notebooks, is a variation of James's "The Aspern Papers" by way of Kafka. At the request of Zdenek Sisovsky, a Czech writer he meets in New York, Zuckerman travels to Prague to recover the unpublished Yiddish stories of Sisovsky pere. "This," the son assures him, "is not the Yiddish of Sholem Aleichem. This is the Yiddish of Flaubert." Unfortunately, the son's wife, Olga, has the stories and, out of hatred for the man who abandoned her, intends to keep them. The only way to get them, Sisovsky believes, is for Zuckerman to seduce her. In Prague, Zuckerman finds himself in a grotesque "comedy of manners" that the artists and intellectuals have fashioned out of their oppression. He is the Jamesian character, "only ears—and plans, an American gentleman abroad, with the bracing if old fashioned illusion that he is playing a worthwhile, dignified, and honorable role." Zuckerman comes to question his own motives in the affair. Is he trying to prove his literary idealism, show solidarity with European Jewry, play the good son by proxy and expiate sins against the father? Perhaps he, like Olga, is motivated only by touha, a longing for "the absent thing." And what if the stories aren't any good? Olga, too embittered and apathetic to require payment or seduction, gives them to Zuckerman. They are confiscated by the authorities before he can get them out of the country. With the degeneration of his mission into "a personal fiasco," Zuckerman concludes: "No, one's story isn't a skin to be shed—it's inescapable. . . . the

424 I AMERICAN WRITERS ever-recurring story that's at once your invention and the invention of you." The possibility of reinventing your story and yourself, and the touha for a new mode of life, are at the heart of The Counterlife (1986), a sort of Menippean satire in which Roth, and Zuckerman, create characters who express a range of viewpoints in a running debate on the writer's enterprise. Every perspective is opposed, or at least qualified, by others, and none is finally proved authoritative, for the different stories that make up the book expose one another as fictions and challenge one another's validity as representations of reality. Roth masterfully combines traditional psychological realism and a poststructuralist fascination with interlocking, selfsubverting structures. As a result the authenticity of each compellingly presented account is undercut until the reader, like the main characters, is certain of little aside from the transforming power of fiction. Point of view shifts from story to story, and sometimes within a story. "Basel" is a thirdperson narrative in which Henry has fallen in love with a Swiss woman, Maria. He has inherited from his father not only heart disease but a sense of duty that requires him to reject her for his unloved wife and their children. The dual legacy proves fatal. Henry's heart condition worsens from the emotional strain of his decision, and the drugs he takes for it make him impotent. For the sake of a compensatory affair, he risks dangerous surgery that would get him off the drugs, and dies. Nathan, guilty over not having tried to stop his brother, takes notes he made from Henry's outpourings to him and begins to transform them into "a puzzle for his imagination to solve"—a story. In the first-person "Judea," Henry is physically recovered and ethnically reborn. On vacation in the Holy Land, he experiences a sudden, overpowering conversion to Judaism, as a heritage more than as a religion. He leaves his family

and takes up life in the mountains with a band of militant Zionists. Nathan, married to an Englishwoman named Maria who is expecting their first child, visits Henry as the ambassador from home and is generally derided as the epitome of all that is wrong with the diaspora Jew. In particular, Henry disdain's Nathan's self-absorbed, selfdeprecating fictions about oppression by Momma and Poppa, whereas Nathan sees Henry's action as a belated rebellion against their father—one that ironically subjugates him to a patriarchal code even more rigid. Henry stands for the patriot's "certainty" that he learned in the hills, Nathan for the artist's "doubt" that he learned in Lonoff's study. Nathan realizes that his motives for the visit are not pure: The writer in him wants to exploit what is "far and away Henry's most provocative incarnation.'' "Aloft" finds Nathan flying back to Maria and writing Henry a long letter in which he opines that for European Jews, Zionism is "the construction of a counterlife that is one's own antimyth," a reflection of "the will to remake reality" and the "urge to self-renovation." He also writes to an Israeli friend who had urged him in the name of Jewish interests not to use his Middle East adventures as the basis for satire; Nathan replies that social concerns do not warrant curbing free artistic expression. At this point, he is accosted by a character from "Judea" who pursues self-liberation by enacting the wildest, most anarchic impulses in Carnovsky. Claiming Nathan as a father figure, "Jimmy" Lustig attempts to hijack the plane as part of a manic jest and is brutally overpowered, possibly killed, by Israeli security, who seize Nathan as an accomplice. He concedes to himself that sometimes social welfare does justify even violent censorship of the unchecked imagination. "Gloucestershire" opens in the first person with Nathan facing Henry's dilemma in "Basel.'' Nathan, however, contemplates the potency-

PHILIP ROTH I 425 restoring heart surgery as a way into marriage and fatherhood. Maria tries to talk him out of it, because she is suspicious—that he is confusing love with longing for the absent thing, that he will put her in a book (as someone obviously does), that he is already fictionalizing her in the "unwritten world" (which "Gloucestershire" of course is not) by making her into something she isn't. But he, like the Zionists, has envisioned a counterlife and will not be denied. The narrative switches to the third person with Henry as the center of consciousness. Nathan has died without their having made up after their father's death. In Nathan's apartment, he finds Draft #2 of an untitled book with an untitled chapter corresponding to "Aloft" and other chapters called "Basel," "Judea," and "Christendom"; this last appears to be Nathan's "dream of escape" into a new life. Henry is enraged to see his marital woes recounted, and appalled to see that Nathan's pregnant wife is given the name of his Maria. He leaves "Christendom" but discards most of the rest in a trash can off the New Jersey Turnpike. Next Nathan's Maria is heard answering questions posed by an unidentified voice. She has read "Christendom"; like Henry she sees the longing for a new life, and like Henry she resents the way Nathan distorted her and her family to work through his obsessions. Her resentment, though, is softened by love and insight. She identifies the voice as Nathan's ghost's and speaks movingly of the vacancy he has left in her life. She will keep him a presence by talking with him, as they used to when he was impotent and conversation was their only form of eros. She tells him, "It's my turn now to invent you." "Christendom," told in the first person, has Nathan returning to Maria after leaving Henry in Judea and making notes on the encounter during a quiet flight home; in other words, "Judea," discarded in "Gloucestershire," is now presented as the unwritten world's raw material for Nathan's "narrative factory, where there is no

clear demarcation dividing actual happenings eventually consigned to the imagination from imaginings that are treated as having actually occurred." But Nathan is as sick of reprocessing the same old personal history as he was in The Anatomy Lesson; he has conceived a counterlife with Maria and their child. Unfortunately, antiSemitism in the family—subtle in her mother, blatant in her sister—and a display of British bigotry in a restaurant ignite an argument between Nathan and Maria that uncovers all the tensions stemming from their different ages, temperaments, and backgrounds—"the unevadable past." Nathan fears that she will leave him "completely otherless and reabsorbed within," alone with no voices but his own "ventriloquizing." Reflexively, his imagination takes over and composes her farewell letter. There she cleverly presents herself not as the woman who is leaving his life but as the character who is leaving his fiction. She critiques him as an author and a man for the way he has used others and supports her point by citing an appropriate page reference from "Judea," the story supposedly on the same plane of reality as "Christendom." She says that she had expected more from his counterlife—not that he would "reenact the dead past"; but that he would rebel against his author and remake his life. Nathan's letter of reply presents a new twist on "characterological enslavement": one cannot escape being a character, but can exert some shaping influence. Because "one invents one's meanings, along with impersonating one's selves," he tells her, they two can be authors who help to write their own story; the story admits of variation, but from their fate—to be part of a fiction—there is no escaping. And so, Roth tells us, it is in the unwritten world: we are characters in a story shaped by our families, our experiences, our society, history—and by our own attempts to impersonate viable selves. We cannot withdraw from the condition of being in-

a426american writerss scribed. We should not withdraw from the struggle to help write the inscription. The Facts (1988) begins with a letter to Zuckerman in which Roth explains his reasons for writing an autobiography. He needs to rediscover himself by taking a new approach. "Until now," he writes, "I have always used the past as the basis for transformation . . . a kind of intricate explanation to myself of my world." That attempt at explanation is his fiction. But just as Nathan becomes sick of "cultivating hypothetical Zuckerman's . . . to decipher his existence," so Roth in 1987 became "sick of fictionalizing myself further" and undertook The Facts as his "counterlife." He closes the letter by asking Zuckerman whether he should publish it. Roth, of course, recognizes that he can never present "the facts" unshaped by his imagination and unreliable memory, free from subjective bias in the selection and treatment of materials. To call his autobiography The Facts is begging the question, and he admits that he could have been "both less ironic and more ironic by calling it Begging the Question." One also suspects that The Facts does not present the plain, unvarnished truth because it is so highly varnished. The prose, with its studiously precise and even recondite diction, rather stuffy tone, and carefully balanced hypotactic constructions, suggests that Roth is often as interested in building elaborate verbal structures, or in achieving calculated effects, as in recapturing how something happened and felt. The Facts closes with Zuckerman's reply to Roth. His advice: "Don't publish—you are far better off writing about me than 'accurately' reporting your life." He points out that Roth can be both more interesting and more truthful in fiction, where he is less constrained by filial respect and the unwritten world's code of decency, discretion, and decorum. In particular, he distrusts the treatment of Roth's family life: where is the conflict that explains the development of an artist where a dentist or a lawyer should have

been? What spurred Portnoy's complaint, or Zuckerman's counterlife? Roth has left out the facts that account for the fiction. As a novelist himself, Zuckerman declares: "you, Roth, are the least completely rendered of all your protagonists." Roth reached a similar conclusion when trying to write Portnoy: "the more I stuck to the actual and the strictly autobiographical, the less resonant and revealing the narrative became." Zuckerman ends by admitting that he and Maria are very worried about what is coming next. He is aware of his absurd position: on the one hand, arguing that Roth should use him as the best means of "self-confrontation" is selfinterested pleading for his own existence; on the other hand, that existence would be an ordeal fraught with heightened, fantastical versions of Roth's unresolved traumas, complexes, and conflicts. Nathan had told Maria at the end of The Counterlife that the pastoral was not his genre, and he knows better than anyone that it is not Roth's either. Without the conflict—the struggle to discover and define oneself in the face of redoubtable opposition—there can be no Zuckerman the author/character, for there can be no Roth the character/author. With the exchange of letters, the real subject of The Facts becomes, as in most of the fiction, not Roth's life so much as the interrelationship between life and literature. The movement back and forth between Roth and Zuckerman, facts and imaginative reconstruction, replicates the movement that produced the stories, the novels, the essays, and the autobiography—a movement between "the written and the unwritten world" that promises more of fictional distillations and factual models from Philip Roth. Deception (1990) purposely confounds the models and distillations. The title refers not only to the deception inherent in any illicit love affair, and in any work of fiction, but also to the elaborate hide-and-seek game that Roth plays with his readers. He presents a series of contrapuntal

PHILIP ROTH I 427 dialogues between unidentified voices, chiefly those of an American novelist named Philip— who has created characters named "Portnoy," "Lucy Nelson," "Maureen Tarnopol," "E. I. Lonoff," and "Nathan Zuckerman"—and an English woman with whom he is having an adulterous affair. Roth says he wanted to capture the "peculiar intimacy which is unlike any other, having to do with hiding," and to present talking and listening as the essence of that intimacy. Philip says of himself, "I listen. I'm an ecouteur—an audiophiliac. I'm a talk fetishist." His lover replies, "Ummm. It is erotic, you just sitting there listening." Their affair draws energy from verbal as well as sexual play: the lovers play "reality shift" by changing positions, as when the woman pretends to be biographer interviewing a friend (played by Philip) of the late Nathan Zuckerman. Roth has said he plays such games with Claire Bloom to get ideas for how to handle scenes or bits of dialogue. The question of what is real and what is fiction gets a new twist when Philip's wife finds a notebook with the dialogues as entries. She contends that Philip is having an affair with the woman who served as the model for Maria; Philip maintains that the woman exists only as a character in his imagination. His wife asks if he would then save her from embarrassment by changing the name "Philip" to "Nathan" for publication. He replies, "Would I? No. It's not Nathan Zuckerman. . . . The novel is Zuckerman. The notebook is me." "You just told me it's not you," she counters. He responds, "No, I told you it is me, imagining." After he storms out, defending himself on the grounds of artistic rather than sexual freedom, he has another conversation with the woman—their first in over two years; his novel has been published, and they discuss the relation between their real and fictionalized affairs. Philip playfully warns her that their conversation could become part of his next novel, as it apparently does. All this

suggests that the woman is real—at least in Philip's life—but to an imagination as playful as his, or Roth's, the final conversation could be just a final deception. Philip's wife is understandably frustrated by his insistent confounding of fact and fiction, and some of Roth's critics are similarly vexed. The New York Times reviewer (March 11, 1990) commented that Roth's audience "must surely be growing impatient for the author to stop analyzing his imagination and start exercising it, if he hasn't dissected it beyond repair by now." But this kind of analysis and dissection is Philip Roth's preferred form of imaginative exercise. Having published Patrimony, a book of nonfiction about his father, in 1991, he plans a novel on a subject yet to be specified, in which, no doubt, he will continue to explore the boundary between the written and the unwritten world.

Selected Bibliography WORKS OF PHILIP ROTH BOOKS

Goodbye, Columbus. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1959. Letting Go. New York: Random House, 1962. When She Was Good. New York: Random House, 1967. Portnoy's Complaint. New York: Random House, 1969. Our Gang. New York: Random House, 1971. The Breast. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1972. The Great American Novel. New York, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1973. My Life as a Man. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1974. Reading Myself and Others. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1975.

428 I AMERICAN WRITERS The Professor of Desire. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977. The Ghost Writer. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1979. A Philip Roth Reader. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1980. Zuckerman Unbound. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1981. The Anatomy Lesson. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1983. Zuckerman Bound: A Trilogy and Epilogue. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1985. The Counterlife. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1986. The Facts: A Novelist's Autobiography. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1988. Deception. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990. Patrimony: A True Story. Simon and Schuster, 1991. UNCOLLECTED STORIES

"Philosophy, Or Something Like That." Et Cetera, May 1952, pp. 5, 16. 'The Box of Truths." Et Cetera, October 1952, pp. 10-12. "The Fence." Et Cetera, May 1953, pp. 18-23. "Armando and the Fraud." Et Cetera, October 1953, pp. 21-32. "The Final Delivery of Mr. Thorn." Et Cetera, May 1954, pp. 20-28. "The Day It Snowed." Chicago Review 8:34-45. "The Contest for Aaron Gold." Epoch 5-6:37-51 (Fall 1955). "Heard Melodies Are Sweeter." Esquire, August 1958, p. 58. "Expect the Vandals." Esquire, December 1958, pp. 208-228. "The Love Vessel." Dial I 1:41-68 (Fall 1959). "Good Girl." Cosmopolitan, May 1960, pp. 98103. "The Mistaken." American Judaism 10:10 (Fall 1960). "Novotny's Pain." New Yorker, October 27, 1962, pp. 45-56. Revised and reprinted in The Philip Roth Reader. "Philip Roth Papers." Quarterly Journal of the Library of Congress 27:343-344 (1970). "Psychoanalytic Special." Esquire, November 1963, p. 106. "On the Air." New American Review 10:7-49 (August 1970).

MANUSCRIPT PAPERS

The major collection of Roth's manuscripts and correspondence is at the Library of Congress.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Rodgers, Bernard F. Philip Roth: A Bibliography. 2nd ed. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1984.

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL STUDIES BOOKS

Baumgarten, Murray, and Barbara Gottfried. Understanding Philip Roth. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1990. Bloom, Harold, ed. Philip Roth: Modern Critical Views. New York: Chelsea House, 1986. Jones, Judith P., and Guinevera A. Nance. Philip Roth. New York: Ungar, 1981. Lee, Hermione. Philip Roth. London and New York: Methuen, 1982. McDaniel, John N. The Fiction of Philip Roth. Haddonfield, N.J.: Haddonfield House, 1974. Meeter, Glenn. Philip Roth and Bernard Malamud: A Critical Essay. Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans, 1968. Milbauer, Asher Z., and Donald G. Watson, eds. Reading Philip Roth. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Macmillan, 1988. Pinsker, Sanford. The Comedy That "Hoits": An Essay on the Fiction of Philip Roth. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1975. , ed. Critical Essays on Philip Roth. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1982. Rodgers, Bernard F., Jr., Philip Roth. Boston: Twayne, 1978. Searles, George J. The Fiction of Philip Roth and John Updike. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1985. ARTICLES OR BOOK SECTIONS

Allen, Mary. "Philip Roth: When She Was Good She Was Horrid." In her The Necessary Blankness: Women in Major American Fiction of the Sixties. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1976. Pp. 7096. (Reprinted in Bloom.) Bettelheim, Bruno. "Portnoy Psychoanalyzed."Midstream 15:3-10 (June-July 1969). Reprinted in Bloom.

PHIUP ROTH I 429 Detweiler, Robert. "Philip Roth and the Test of the Dialogic Life." In Four Spiritual Crises in MidCentury American Fiction. University of Florida Monographs no. 14. Gainesville: University of Florida, 1963. Pp. 25-35. Donaldson, Scott. "Philip Roth: The Meanings of Letting Go." Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature 11:21-35 (Winter 1970). Fiedler, Leslie A. "Jewish-Americans Go Home." In his "Waiting for the End. New York: Stein and Day, 1964. Pp. 89-103. Guttman, Allen. "Philip Roth and the Rabbis." In his The Jewish Writer in America: Assimilation and the Crisis of Identity. New York: Oxford University Press, 1971. Pp. 64-76. Reprinted in Bloom. Howe, Irving. "Philip Roth Reconsidered." Commentary, December 1972, pp. 69-77. Reprinted in Bloom. Isaac, Dan. "In Defense of Philip Roth." Chicago Review 17, no. 2-3:84-96 (1964). Kazin, Alfred. "The Earthly City of the Jews." In his Bright Book of Life: American Novelists and Storytellers from Hemingway to Mailer. Boston: Little, Brown, 1973. Pp. 144-149. Olderman, Raymond M. Beyond the Waste Land: The American Novel in the Nineteen-Sixties. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972. Pp. 2-3.

Podhoretz, Norman. "Laureate of the New Class." Commentary 54:4,7 (December 1972). Raban, Jonathan. "The New Philip Roth." Novel 2:153-163 (Winter 1969). Shechner, Marie. "Philip Roth." Partisan Review, 41, no. 3:410-427(1974). Siegel, Ben. "The Myths of Summer: Philip Roth's The Great American Novel.'' Contemporary Literature 17:171-190 (Spring 1976). Solotaroff, Theodore. "Philip Roth and the Jewish Moralists." Chicago Review 13:87-99. (Winter 1959). Tanner, Tony. "Fictionalized Recall—or 'The Settling of Scores! The Pursuit of Dreams!' " In his City of Words: American Fiction 1950-1970. New York: Harper & Row, 1971. Pp. 295-321. Reprinted in Bloom. Trachtenberg, Stanley. "The Hero in Stasis." Critique 7:5-17. (Winter 1964/1965). Reprinted in Bloom. Wisse, Ruth. "Requiem in Several Voices." In her The Schlemiel as Modern Hero. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971. Pp. 108-124; see 118121. Wolff, Geoffrey. "Beyond Portnoy." Newsweek, August 3, 1970, p. 66.

—PETER L. COOPER

Sam Shepard 1943-

S

teenage years. This dual exposure—to the culture of urban California and to western agricultural life—would have a lasting influence on the dramatist, whose fascination with popular images of the West as well as those of the southern California life-style animates many of his works. After graduating from high school, Shepard spent three semesters at Mount San Antonio Junior College in Walnut, California, with the notion of becoming a veterinarian. While studying education and agricultural science, he drifted into theater, acting in campus productions of Mary Chase's Harvey and Thornton Wilder's The Skin of Our Teeth. He was introduced to Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, and was struck by its freedom from conventional theatrical form and language, although he maintains he did not understand the play. When a touring group, the Bishop's Company Repertory Players, advertised local auditions, Shepard took advantage of the opportunity to explore theater as an alternative to the stable yet stultifying small-town life he knew. While traveling throughout New England with the Players, he changed his name from Steve Rogers to Sam Shepard, thereby crystallizing the new identity he was creating apart from his family traditions. The process of self-discovery and self-fashioning later became a central motif in his work, one often connected with an artist figure trying to find an identity within society.

AMSHWERTR

about individuals' attempts to gain or exert power over one another physically, emotionally, spiritually, psychologically. He seems to have embraced the age-old precept that all drama arises from conflict and has made it the central device in his dramaturgy. Yet Shepard also intuits the centrality of power as an informing principle of American culture, and thus integrates this essential struggle for dominance with cultural icons of power: mythic figures, material objects, historical characters, and social and cultural institutions. Using the stage and, later, film, as his media, he has gravitated to the genres that, in turn, have the greatest power for an audience—the immediate, proximal force of theatrical performance and the larger-than-life potency of the screen. Samuel ("Steve") Shepard Rogers III was born on November 5, 1943, in Fort Sheridan, Illinois—an army base where his mother, Jane Elaine Schook Rogers, was living while his father, an army pilot, was serving in Italy. The eldest of three children, Steve moved with his family often, residing in South Dakota, Utah, Florida, and Guam before his father left the army, and the family finally settled in southern California. After spending some time in South Pasadena, a suburb of Los Angeles, they moved to an avocado ranch in Duarte, where Shepard spent his

431

432 I AMERICAN WRITERS Shepard left the Players to go to New York City, where he became involved with the downtown art scene, especially music. Through an old friend from California, Charles Mingus, Jr. (son of the jazz musician), he found a job at the Village Gate, a jazz club in Greenwich Village. There Shepard met Ralph Cook, the founder of Theater Genesis, who produced his first two plays, Cowboys and The Rock Garden, in 1964. Although they were roundly panned by the uptown critics, Shepard's plays were championed by Village Voice critic Michael Smith, who established Shepard as a new, exciting talent. Buoyed by Smith's support, Shepard began churning out plays for the growing number of off-off-Broadway theaters emerging at the time, garnering three Obies (annual awards for excellence in off-off- and off-Broadway theater) by 1966. Between 1964 and 1971, nearly twenty Shepard dramas opened in New York, and small theaters around the country began to produce his plays as well. He also attracted the attention of filmmakers, including Michelangelo Antonioni, who commissioned Shepard to work on the screenplay for Zabriskie Point (1970), based on Antonioni's original story outline. In 1969, Shepard married actress O-Lan Johnson, with whom he had a son, Jesse Mojo, in 1970. In the words of Shepard's biographer Don Shewey, "By May 1971 Sam Shepard had been in New York slightly less than eight years. He'd gotten about as much out of it as a twenty-seven-year-old playwriting college dropout from small-town California could ever have dreamed." But New York had also taken its toll on the playwright, who had become heavily involved in drugs, had had an affair with the rock musician Patti Smith, and had begun to succumb to the impersonality and materialism of the city. Shepard decided to leave New York, and took his wife and son to England, where they lived for four years. While living abroad, Shepard began to think

carefully about his work and his life as an artist, exploring particularly closely his attitudes toward America and American culture. In an important interview conducted in England in 1974 with director Kenneth Chubb and the editors of Theatre Quarterly, which is reprinted in American Dreams: The Imagination of Sam Shepard, edited by Bonnie Marranca, he explained, "It wasn't until I came to England that I found out what it means to be an American. Nothing really makes sense when you're there, but the more distant you are from it, the more the implications of what you grew up with start to emerge." Living outside of London, Shepard wrote The Tooth of Crime (1972; dates are of first production), a play that brings together his view of growing up in America and his grasp of American violence and competitiveness, all filtered through the dominant cultural force of rock music. Shepard later claimed that one of his motives for going to England was to fulfill a lifelong ambition of becoming a rock and roll star, but this dream did not materialize. Instead, Shepard broadened his theatrical capabilities, writing and directing his play Geography of a Horse Dreamer (1974); this experience helped him to understand the nuances of working with actors and adjusting scripts for them. In the Theatre Quarterly interview, Shepard expressed the desire "to try a whole different way of writing now, which is very stark and not so flashy and not full of a lot of mythic figures and everything, and try to scrape it down to the bone as much as possible." This new form— which he admitted "could be called realism, but not the kind of realism where husbands and wives squabble and that kind of stuff"—subsequently dominated his work for both stage and screen. Shepard and his family returned from England in 1974 and settled in California, where he formed an association with the Magic Theater in San Francisco—a group that would premiere many of his works, including Angel City (1976),

SAM SHEPARD I 433 Buried Child (1978), and True West (1980). Shortly after his return, he received a telephone call from the musician Bob Dylan, who wanted Shepard to write the screenplay for the film of his upcoming Rolling Thunder tour. Shepard agreed, but his involvement with the tour proved to be a lesson in the idiosyncrasies of fickle star personalities. Shepard kept a journal of the tour, which he later published as the Rolling Thunder Logbook (1977). The film, Renaldo and Clara, was eventually released in 1978, with Shepard appearing intermittently. Although the experience probably turned Shepard away from his rock-star fantasies forever, it ironically led to his movie career; the director Terrence Malick learned of his work on the Dylan film, and after meeting him decided to cast him in one of three starring roles in the film Days of Heaven (1978). As Ross Wetzsteon points out in his introduction to Shepard's collection Fool for Love and Other Plays (1984), "It's a peculiarly American irony that this playwright who has so frequently dealt with the captivity of the artist by commerce, who has so often shown how our myths have been corrupted by our media, should at last come to widespread public attention as a movie star/9 Shepard has appeared in a number of successful Hollywood movies, including Resurrection (1980), Raggedy Man (1981), Frances (1982), Country (1984), and the screen version of his play Fool for Love (1985), among others, and received an Academy Award nomination for his portrayal of Chuck Yeager in The Right Stuff (1983). Frances and Country starred Jessica Lange, for whom Shepard left and later divorced his wife O-Lan. After returning from England, Shepard turned his creative energies toward the family. He wrote a series of obliquely autobiographical dramas about American families, starting with Curse of the Starving Class (1977) and culminating in the last drama he wrote on this theme, A Lie of the Mind (1985). In 1979, Shepard received the Pu-

litzer Prize for his play Buried Child. Family themes are further explored in Far North (1989), the first film Shepard both wrote and directed. Since 1978, he also collaborated with the actor and director Joseph Chaikin on a series of performance pieces on themes of love and hate, life and death, including Tongues (1978), Savage! Love (1979) and The War in Heaven (1985). Following the production of A Lie of the Mind, Shepard's attention was directed predominantly toward film. Having grown up strongly influenced by film, Shepard in his stage work always reflected a cinematic sensibility, particularly in terms of his scenic structure and his use of striking visual images. The transition to film, through the roles of screenwriter, actor, and then director, was thus a natural development for him. Far North displays remarkable continuity with his later plays, and indicates his potential to affect this medium in the years to come, as he has influenced American theater over the past quarter century. After Michael Smith's groundbreaking review of Shepard appeared in The Village Voice in 1964, theater critics began to pay increasing attention to the prolific young dramatist. By the late 1960's theater periodicals such as Yale/ Theatre were featuring the first analytical views of his work, and by the late 1970's academic journals such as Modern Drama were including pieces on the plays. In 1981 the first book devoted to the study of Shepard was published: American Dreams: The Imagination of Sam Shepard, a collection of critical essays and personal commentary. This work, and the various longer studies and individual scholarly essays that began to appear subsequently, helped to establish a positive critical reputation for the author as well as to introduce a wider readership to his plays, most of which have been published. Common to many of these pieces, however, is an admission of bafflement on the part of critics. Ross Wetzsteon, for example, recalls in the in-

434 I AMERICAN WRITERS troduction to Fool for Love and Other Plays, 4 'The first moment I was stunned by Shepard's stagecraft—the final image of La Turista, the American Place Theater, 1967. ... in the theater we instinctively ask 'what is the playwright trying to say?9 and, in spite of my increasing enchantment, I didn't have the vaguest idea what it was." Scholars have long grappled with Shepard's dramaturgy, trying to explain it, to account for it in a logical, coherent, and orderly way. As Richard Oilman notes in his introduction to the Shepard collection Seven Plays (1981), "most critics find it hard clearly to extract . . . ideas from Shepard's plays, many of which are ... extraordinarily resistant to thematic exegesis." The work continually eludes them, perhaps for the simple reason that Shepard's plays intentionally eschew logic, cohesion, and order. Unlike the work of other writers, Shepard's dramas cannot be neatly categorized by genre, style, or authorial technique. In fact, critics even directly contradict each other in their efforts to explain the trajectory of his career. Oilman writes, "More than that of any important playwright I know, Shepard's work resists division into periods, stages of growth or development"; by contrast, Wetzsteon assures us that "Shepard's work can be roughly divided into three periods." Wetzsteon's sense of three periods, or genres, of plays (roughly corresponding to the years 1964 to the late 1960's: the early 1970's to 1976; and 1977 to the mid 1980's) offers a starting point for analysis, however. He identifies these divisions as the early one-acts (the "abstract collages"), the plays concerned with artist figures, and the family plays. Lynda Hart's acute observation in Sam Shepard's Metaphorical Stages that Shepard's dramaturgy inverts the historical development of modern drama, by moving from postmodernism and absurdism through expressionism to modified realism, also provides a generic framework to help contextualize the dramas.

Scholars and critics alike have noted the recurring motifs, character types, and action sequences that thread through Shepard's plays. In response to a question posed by Kenneth Chubb in the 1974 Theatre Quarterly interview, Shepard remarked, "You accumulate the experience of having written all those other plays, so they're all in you somewhere. But sometimes it gets in the way—you sit down and you find yourself writing the same play, which is a drag. Terrible feeling when you suddenly find yourself doing the same thing over and over again." Yet these repetitions can disclose what is compelling for an author—what he has not fully exorcized or expressed and so must confront in new or slightly different ways. Having produced over forty plays in the United States and abroad, and having received numerous prestigious awards for his writing, Shepard holds a very prominent position among American playwrights. Yet his plays remain extremely controversial, not only for their style, which originally departed radically from the tradition of American realism, but for several key areas of their content. Shepard has always focused on the "Anglo male American," and audiences and critics have had difficulty with the brutality of the American men he portrays, as well as with his depiction of minorities and women. In his interview with Chubb, Shepard comments on one of his earliest produced, but unpublished plays: "Dog [1965] was about a black guy—which later I found out it was uncool for a white to write about in America. It was about a black guy on a park bench, a sort of Zoo Story [Edward Albee]-type play." Shepard also ran into difficulties with the initial production of Operation Sidewinder, which had been optioned by the Yale Repertory Theatre for its 1968-1969 season. According to Don Shewey, the play kicked off a full-blown campus crisis when a committee of the six black students at the Yale

SAM SHEPARD I 435 Drama School demanded it be canceled because "the play is full of stereotypes about black men." (The original version of the play, published in Esquire in May 1969, had the black revolutionaries sitting in an orange Cadillac watching a black-power speech by Stokely Carmichael on TV.)

they still appear tied to men and centered on their domestic lives. When Shepard started writing plays in the early 1960's, he had had little formal theatrical experience and minimal contact with dramatic literature. In the 1974 Theatre Quarterly interview he explains:

Shewey reports that Shepard withdrew the play 4 'not because he agreed with their assessment but because he declined to have his play become the scapegoat for grievances between the black students and the university faculty." A number of Shepard's critics have also observed the limited, stereotyped portrayal of women in his plays. Doris Auerbach in Sam Shepard, Arthur Kopit, and the Off Broadway Theater asserts that "the female characters . . . are mere macho fantasies of familiar female stereotypes, castrating mothers and devouring sex goddesses." Bonnie Marranca, in a section of her introduction to American Dreams subtitled "The Zero Gravity of Women," states:

I didn't really have any references for the theatre, except for the few plays that I'd acted in. But in a way I think that was better for me, because I didn't have any idea about how to shape an action into what is seen—so the socalled originality of the early work just comes from ignorance. I just didn't know.

One of the most problematic aspects of the plays is Shepard's consistent refusal or inability, whichever ever the case may be, to create female characters whose imaginative range matches that of the males. Women are the background of the plays: they hang out and make themselves useful for chores while the men make the decisions, take risks, face challenges, experience existential crises. Women are frequently abused, and always treated as subservient to men, their potential for growth and change restricted. For a young man Shepard's portrayal of women is as outdated as the frontier ethic he celebrates. These problems of race and gender persist in Shepard's later work. His family plays dramatize only the lives of white rural Americans, and although the 1985 play A Lie of the Mind and the 1988 screenplay Far North attempt to depict women with greater breadth and complexity,

However, Shepard acknowledges here as elsewhere a number of authors whose work he admires, or whose style he has imitated in some way. In addition to recounting the story of reading Beckett's Waiting for Godot, he confesses to having written a bad Tennessee Williams imitation while in college, and claims Bertolt Brecht as his favorite playwright. Richard Oilman in his introduction to Seven Plays "sometimes suspects Shepard of wanting to be thought sui generis, a self-creation," but believes he "must . . . have been influenced by Jack Gelber's 1959 play The Connection, . . . by [Harold] Pinter and, more recently, by Edward Bond," although "he has never mentioned" these individuals. With the appearance of additional interviews and the recent publication of Shepard's correspondence with Joseph Chaikin, the eclectic breadth of his reading and artistic exploration begins to emerge, revealing a surprising array of influential figures, including Jack Kerouac, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Edward Albee, the beat poets, the French symbolist poets, Carlos Castaneda, Werner Herzog, and Fyodor Dostoyevski. Shepard is unique among major dramatists for his accession to prominence with a series of oneact plays—a form he continued to use regularly until he began to write his family plays, all of

436 I AMERICAN WRITERS which have two or more acts. In a short essay, "Time" (1975), reprinted in American Dreams, he comments bitterly on the professional conflicts that that intuitive choice of form presents: In the realm of experimental writing for the theatre, a young writer is gradually persuaded that the "one act" form is a stepping stone toward the creation of "full-length" plays . . . [that] alone can serve as proof of his literary value to the public. . . . The cultural machine that encourages young writers to experiment, in the same breath encourages them to quickly grow out of it and start producing "major works." . . . Another part of this syndrome is the difficulty a playwright has in returning to attempts at shorter works after having "accomplished" one or two longer plays. . . . Rarely is it seen for what it is—a part of the gradually unfolding process of a playwright's total work. When considering Shepard's plays, then, we must adjust our preconceived notions of "important' ' drama and examine the total impact of each piece in the theater, not using a predetermined guide for measuring greatness by length or scope. Shepard's observations about the way he writes plays appear closely related to the form and content of the plays themselves. In the Theatre Quarterly interview with Chubb, Shepard remarked that in his early plays, he "wasn't really trying to shape it [the "stuff," or content] or make it into any big thing." He explained: "I would have like a picture, and just start from there. A picture of a guy in a bathtub [Chicago], or of two guys on stage with a sign blinking [Cowboys #2]." In an essay entitled "Language, Visualization and the Inner Library" (1977), reprinted in American Dreams, Shepard recalls, "I can't even count how many times I've heard the line, 'Where did the idea for this play come from?' I never can answer it because it seems totally back-ass ward. Ideas emerge from plays—not the other way around." He goes on

to describe the process of writing as being something like watching a movie: The picture is moving in the mind and being allowed to move more and more freely as you follow it. ... I'm taking notes in as much detail as possible on an event that's happening somewhere inside me. The extent to which I can actually follow the picture and not intervene with my own two-cents worth is where inspiration and craftsmanship hold their real meaning. If I find myself pushing the character in a certain direction, it's almost always a sure sign that I've fallen back on technique and lost the real thread of the thing. Shepard creates his characters by a similar process of observation: "In my experience the character is visualized, he appears out of nowhere in three dimensions and speaks. He doesn't speak to me because I'm not in the play. I'm watching it. He speaks to something or someone else, or even to himself, or even to no one." Yet, somewhat contradictorily, he also believes in the close connection between his playwriting and acting: "The similarity between the actor's art and the playwright's is a lot closer than most people suspect. In fact the playwright is the only actor who gets to play all the parts." Shepard's views of acting were undoubtedly shaped in part through his association beginning in the mid 1960's with the Open Theater director and writer Joseph Chaikin. Don Shewey notes that Chaikin's influence, direct or indirect, on offoff-Broadway playwrights—what they wrote and how it was performed—in the early sixties equaled the effect that Lee Strasberg's gospel of Method acting had a decade before on Broadway drama, to which the Open Theater was in part an innovative response. Chaikin trained actors in workshops devoted to what Shewey calls "sound-and-movement im-

SAM SHEPARD I 437 provi sations/' These exercises, known as "transformations/9 were designed to help the actor express "the emotional undercurrents that accompany everyday behavior." According to Richard Oilman, "a transformation exercise was an improvised scene—a birthday party, survivors in a lifeboat, etc.—in which after a while, and suddenly, the actors were asked to switch immediately to a new scene and therefore to wholly new characters." The call for these abrupt transitions could come from an external source (the teacher/director), or an internal source (an actor already within the scene or just entering the scene). Shepard incorporated the concept of transformation scenes directly into such plays as Cowboys #2 (1967), The Holy Ghostly (1969), Mad Dog Blues (1971), and Back Bog Beast Bait (1971). In Cowboys #2, two young men dressed all in black, Chet and Stu, transform themselves into two old men, Clem and Mel. The action begins with an offstage voice (external source): MAN NUMBER ONE: [Off left] It's going to rain. STU: Do you think so? CHET: What? STU: Uh, rain? CHET: Oh ... sure. Maybe. STU: . . . Why don't you go over there and see if you can see any cloud formations? (internal source) [He points downstage. Chet gets up and crosses downstage like an old man. He stands center and looks up at the sky, then speaks like an old man. ] CHET: Well, well, well, well. I tell ya, boy. I tell ya. Them's some dark ones, Mel. Them's really some dark ones. STU: [Talking like an old man] Dark, eh? How long's it been since ya seen 'em dark as that? After playing old men for a while, the characters change back again, this time resorting to a Beckettian sequence to pass the time:

[Chet sits abruptly. There is a pause, then Stu starts doing jumping calisthenics, clapping his hands over his head. He faces Chet as he does this.] STU: Clap, clap, clap. Clapping, clapping. Clap. CHET: What are you doing? STU: This? CHET: That. STU: Oh. Well, you remember yesterday? CHET: Yesterday what? STU: Remember yesterday when I was sitting and my feet fell asleep? CHET: Yeah. STU: Well, this is for that. As the young men alternate roles, they not only transform but playact within the roles, imagining a cowboys-and-Indians battle of the sort little boys create or that crops up in B-grade westerns: [They make gun noises and fire at imaginary Indians.] STU: Fire! CHET: Fire! STU: Damn! Look like Apaches! CHET: Some of 'em's Comanches, Clem! STU: Fire! CHET: Atta baby! [Stu grabs his shoulder, screams and falls back. Chet stands and yells out at the audience, firing his rifle.] You lousy redskinned punks! Think you can injure my buddy? Lousy red assholes! Come back and fight! In the intensity of this imaginary scene, Chet loses his old-man's voice, calling our attention to the fluidity of these roles and their ephemerality: the actors pass easily from one to the next and add them on or discard them at will. In The Holy Ghostly, father and son characters named Pop and Ice are enmeshed in a quintes-

438 I AMERICAN WRITERS sential generational conflict that gets acted out with similar role-playing: Pop takes on the voice of an old rancher, Ice that of a tough young cowboy. Mad Dog Blues features two friends, Kosmo and Yahoodi, who move around "an open, bare stage," yet pretend, in a series of "visions," that they are in San Francisco, in the jungle, on a pirate ship on the ocean, and on an island with buried treasure. They play with such mythic and cultural figures as Marlene Dietrich, Mae West, Paul Bunyan, Jesse James, and Captain Kidd, while simultaneously struggling with their own love/hate relationship—a problem they share with many other Shepard personae: KOSMO: Get away from me! Get out of here! Go on! Take your trip! Go as far away as you can! Get out of my sight! [Yahoodi fakes off. . .] No! Yahoodi! Fm sorry! Come back! I need you! We're brothers! Yahoodi! I love you. Back Bog Beast Bait also incorporates one of the central improvisatory sequences in transformation exercises: the transition from human character to animal character. Two hired guns, Slim and Shadow, have been retained to kill a mysterious and elusive monster that has been terrorizing the bayou swamp country. The power struggle that ensues involves the transformative force of the monster, who seems to be able to drive the human characters mad; they turn into various animals—a coyote, a bull, a wildcat, an owl, and an alligator—all perhaps latent elements of their human identities, elements that are metaphorically indicative of their fundamental natures. In his 1977 essay * 'Language, Visualization and the Inner Library" (collected in American Dreams), Shepard explains, "The reason I began writing plays was the hope of extending the sensation of play (as in 'kid') on into adult life. If 'play' becomes 'labor,' why play?" The oneact collages Cowboys #2 and Mad Dog Blues

perfectly exemplify this quality of play, as the characters romp around the stage in different roles, pretending to be in faraway places. Shepard claims these early dramas evolved from his own play with his friend Charles Mingus, Jr., in their assumed roles of urban cowboys in New York. Yet this extension of life into work does not fully explain the form of expression Shepard selected. In the 1974 Theatre Quarterly interview Shepard clarifies this point: "I always like the idea that plays happened in three dimensions, that here was something that came to life in space rather than in a book." What is crucial here, of course, is Shepard's selection of the dramatic form not only for its playfulness and multivocal potential, but also because of its realization on stage, with all the techniques and potential for audience impact that the theater holds. Shepard talks frequently about other art forms, especially music and the visual arts, and he has incorporated these into his work in numerous ways—creating characters based on rock stars, integrating music into the plays, writing a drama (unpublished and unproduced) about the painter Jackson Pollock. The stage seems the natural home for Shepard's work, as it is the best medium by which he can employ many art forms simultaneously, to their full effect. In a brief note on "American Experimental Theatre" written for Performing Arts Journal in 1977 (collected in American Dreams), Shepard remarks that the only thing which still remains and still persists as the single most important idea [after the turbulent 1960's] is the idea of consciousness. How does this idea become applicable to the theatre? For some time now it's become generally accepted that the other art forms are dealing with this idea to one degree or another. That the subject of painting is seeing. That the subject of music is hearing. That the subject of sculpture is space. But what is the subject of theater which includes all of these and more? It may be that the

SAM SHEPARD I 439 territory available to a theatrical event is so vast that it has to be narrowed down to ingredients like plot, character, set, costume, lights, etc., in order to fit it into our idea of what we know. Consequently, anything outside these domains is called "experimental." Shepard's inventive use of the stage, which called on these various art forms as well as on more conventional theatrical devices, catapulted him to prominence among avant-garde playwrights of the late 1960's. In Fourteen Hundred Thousand (1966), a couple, Tom and Donna, are building a bookcase to hold her extensive collection (the number in the title) of books, with the intermittent help of their friend Ed. With tools, lumber, and sawdust scattered about the stage, Tom perches on a stool putting shelves in place. At first a seemingly naturalistic environment, the stage suddenly becomes a surreal space as the lights change quickly from blue to white and the shelves mysteriously fall. To the accompaniment of the repeated slamming of the one door in the back wall, the lights change, two other characters (Mom and Pop) arrive with armfuls of books that they place in piles around the stage and then sit on, and the three other characters attempt to carry on a "normal" conversation about what Ed's cabin in the woods is like, how Donna got the books, and how the construction is progressing. Finishing the bookcase becomes an obsession for Tom, as the shelves keep falling and Ed waffles on his offer to help complete it. Donna and Tom subsequently lose their tempers and start dueling with each other, using large paintbrushes to splatter each other with white paint. The stark stage environment, the striking use of lighting and special effects, and the visceral action of the paint fight combine to make Fourteen Hundred Thousand an intriguing yet estranging play—one to which the audience responds primarily on a sensory level. Exploiting ideas developed by the "found art"

movement, Shepard also invokes the notion of "stage pictures" to create striking visual tableaux with his scenic descriptions. The Unseen Hand (1969) features "an old '51 Chevrolet convertible, badly bashed and dented, no tires and the top torn to shreds" center stage, while 4-H Club (1965) plays in a kitchen set "littered with paper, cans and various trash." And, as noted earlier, Shepard's mental image of "a guy in a bathtub" led to the creation of Chicago (1965), a play which takes place around Stu in his bathtub, as his girlfriend Joy and their friends come and go and finally arrive with fishing gear that they dangle off the edge of the stage. Shepard seemed to revel in the pure theatricality the stage allows, especially during the 1970's, before his transition to the family plays. Operation Sidewinder, a show so large in scope that it could not be produced by off-Broadway theaters, opened at Lincoln Center in 1970 to mixed reviews, but audiences marveled at the six-foot-long mechanical sidewinder snake constructed for the production, with its blinking eyes, undulating body, and mean rattle. In Forensic and the Navigators (1967), two exterminators arrive "dressed like California Highway Patrolmen, with gold helmets, gas masks, khaki pants and shirts, badges, boots, gloves, and pistols. They carry large tanks on their backs with hose and nozzle attachments." At the end of the play, in the course of which the exterminators attempt to foil an anarchist plot, the stage directions indicate that blue smoke starts drifting onto the stage. It keeps up until the stage is completely covered and all you can hear are the voices of the actors. It gradually pours over into the audience and fills up the entire theater. . . . It could change colors in the course of filling the place up, from blue to pink to yellow to green. Some critics, like Ellen Oumano (Sam Shepard: The Life and Work of an American

440 I AMERICAN WRITERS Dreamer), feel that such endings fail to resolve the action, but this complaint may well spring from a traditional desire for narrative closure. Since Shepard rejected narrative in his early work, instead approaching the stage on a more visceral, sensory level, the final images he envisioned have the potential for even greater impact than that effected by a satisfactorily neat plot resolution. In "Visual Histrionics: Shepard's Theatre of the First Wall," Toby Silverman Zinman analyzes the endings of Shepard's plays by comparing them to the concept of the "silhouette" described by Peter Brook at the end of his influential theoretical book, The Empty Space (1968): I know of one acid test in the theatre. . . . When a performance is over, what remains? Fun can be forgotten, but powerful emotion also disappears and good arguments lose their thread. When emotion and argument are harnessed to a wish from the audience to see more clearly into itself—then something in the mind burns. The event scorches on to the memory an outline, a taste, a trace, a smell—a picture. It is the play's central image that remains, its silhouette, and if the elements are rightly blended this silhouette will be its meaning, this shape will be the essence of what it has to say. Shepard seems intuitively to have grasped the power of the silhouette and to have employed it, usually at the end of his plays, to make a lasting impression on his audience. Red Cross (1966) takes place in a totally white environment, a motel cabin with two twin beds with white linens. Carol and Jim recount, in monologues (already a central element of Shepard's dramaturgy), events in their lives. Early in the play, Carol tells about a skiing accident she once had and her memory of one spot of blood in the snow. After she leaves to get groceries, Jim discovers he is infested with crab lice and worries about Carol's reaction. At the end of the play Carol returns, having realized

she has crabs and thinking she caught them in the motel. As she expresses her extreme distress Jim turns to face her, and we see "a stream of blood running down his forehead." This striking final visual image, linked to Carol's verbal narrative of the accident, creates a kind of unity for the play and becomes the silhouette that makes this piece memorable. Zinman discusses the silhouette in La Turista, the same final picture that convinced Ross Wetzsteon of Shepard's dramatic power. In this, his first two-act play, Shepard uses a setting similar to that of Red Cross: two twin beds in a motel room, this time in Mexico. In act 1, Salem and Kent (note the cultural resonance of their "brand" names), two American tourists, are suffering from dysentery, also known as "la turista." A Mexican boy brings help in the person of the local doctor and his son, who perform bizarre witch-doctor and voodoo routines to cure their patients. Act 2, which chronologically precedes act 1, finds Salem and Kent in an American hotel room, preparing for their trip to Mexico. Kent is suffering from a psychological disorder this time, and the doctor arrives dressed in a Civil War uniform. The temporal disjunction leads to an elemental conflict between doctor and patient, as Kent tries desperately to escape the physician's medical machinations. He grabs hold of a rope and swings across the stage over the doctor's head. "He lands on the ramp behind DOC and runs straight toward the upstage wall of the set and leaps right through it, leaving a cut-out silhouette of his body in the wall. The lights dim out as the other three stare at the wall." This remarkable ending left the audience awed; they did not understand it, but the impact of the final image was undeniably powerful. Shepard's striking use of visual images may well be matched by his incorporation of arresting musical sequences. Many of Shepard's plays feature music, often performed live, as in Melodrama Play (1967), for which he envisioned the

5AM SHEPARD I 441 band "suspended from the ceiling in a cage over the audience's head," and in A Lie of the Mind, in which the contributions of the bluegrass group the Red Clay Ramblers, "structuring bridges between scenes, underscoring certain monologues, and developing musical "themes' to open and close the acts" convinced Shepard "that this play needs music. Live music. Music with an American backbone" (A Lie of the Mind). In 1977 Shepard told Kenneth Chubb that "music's really important, especially in plays and theatre—it adds a whole different kind of perspective, it immediately brings the audience to terms with an emotional reality. Because nothing communicates emotions better than music, not even the greatest play in the world." Shepard9s interest in music dates back to his childhood, when his father used to listen to Dixieland jazz and play in an amateur band. Shepard soon surpassed his father's skill as a drummer, and for several years he performed in New York with the Holy Modal Rounders, a folk-rock group. His intensive exposure to jazz through his work at the Village Gate and his cognizance of the centrality of rock music to American youth culture in the 1960's may account for his incorporation of music as a theme, a structuring device, and as a live (or recorded) presence in his plays. Mad Dog Blues, Melodrama Play, and Cowboy Mouth (1971) all feature rock musicians as central characters and explore the pressures and conflicts in the life of a rock star. Shepard describes Kosmo in Mad Dog Blues as a "rockand-roll star. Dressed in a green velvet satin cape with tight blue velvet pants, teased hair and no shirt. He carries a conga drum.'' Kosmo explains his first "vision" to his friend Yahoodi: "It came to me in music. It was like ole rhythm-and-blues and gospel, a cappella, sort of like The Persuasions but with this bitchin' lead line. Like a Hendrix lead line. Like a living Hendrix lead line right through the middle of it." Shepard's set description for Melodrama Play

calls for two large posters upstage, one of Robert Goulet, the other of Bob Dylan, both with no eyes. Duke Durgens has had an overnight success with his song "Prisoners, Get Up out of Your Homemade Beds." But Duke's manager is pressuring him for a follow-up hit and has locked him in a room to force him to compose. Duke's brother Drake, and his companion Cisco, hired by the manager, show up to help Duke. It turns out that, unknown to anyone, Duke had stolen the hit tune from his brother Drake, passing it off as his own. Shepard adds a menacing bodyguard, fraternal conflict, and rock interludes as Brechtian disruptions to the action, creating a piece whose thematic and characterological resonances recur in many later plays, including The Tooth of Crime (1972) and True West (1980). Cowboy Mouth, possibly the best known of Shepard's early plays, is notorious not so much for its content per se as for the story of its composition and production. In 1970 Shepard had met the poet/musician Patti Smith through his work with the Holy Modal Rounders and they embarked on a highly publicized affair. Don Shewey maintains that "allowing for some poetic exaggeration, the play provides a documentary account of their life together." Shewey quotes Shepard as explaining, "I'd never written a play with somebody before, and we literally shoved the typewriter back and forth across the table," each writing his or her own dialogue. The American Place Theatre's production of the work was short-lived, however, for Shepard "realized [he] didn't want to exhibit [himself] like that, playing [his] life onstage." In the play, Slim (Shepard) has been kidnapped by Cavale (Smith) who sees in him the potential to be "a rock-and-roll Jesus with a cowboy mouth." The two play out a love/hate struggle, Cavale holding Slim captive in her chaotic apartment while he cries, "You've stolen me away from my baby's cradle! . . . I have a wife and a life of my own! Why don't you let me go!

442 I AMERICAN I ain't no rock-and-roll star. That's your fantasy." Cavale, whose idols are the French symbolist poets Gerard de Nerval and Fran§ois Villon, tries to explain her vision of a savior for their generation: People want a street angel. . . . Somebody to get off on when they can't get off on themselves. I think that's what Mick Jagger is trying to do . . . what Bob Dylan seemed to be for a while. . . . It's like . . . well, in the old days people had Jesus and those guys to embrace. . . . But it's too hard now . . . and the old God is just too far away. He don't represent our pain no more. His words don't shake through us no more. Any great motherfucker rock-n'-roll song can raise me higher than all of Revelations. We created rockn'-roll from our own image. . . . It's like . . . the rock-n'-roll star in his highest state of grace will be the new savior . . . rocking to Bethlehem to be born. [Note the somewhat confused and perhaps ironic final allusion to William Butler Yeats's poem "The Second Coming"]. Despite Shepard/Slim's protestations that he is not the "rock-and-roll Jesus with the cowboy mouth," the notion of becoming a rock star still intrigued Shepard, and, as mentioned earlier, this fascination is part of what motivated him to go to England, where he wrote what some critics believe is his strongest creative effort, The Tooth of Crime. In many ways The Tooth of Crime is an outgrowth of Cowboy Mouth, particularly in the characterization of the rock star Hoss, a fading rock-and-roll Jesus, and the allusion to symbolist poetry in the titular reference to the poem "Anguish" (1887) by St^phane Mallarme (in Poems [1951], translated by Roger Fry): For Vice, having gnawed by nobleness inborn, Has marked me like you with its sterility, But whilst in your breast of stone there is dwelling A heart that the tooth of no crime can wound,

WRITERS

I fly, pale, undone, and by my shroud haunted, And fearing to die if I but sleep alone. The Tooth of Crime brings together two rockstar characters, Hoss and Crow, in an elemental struggle for dominance that also invokes transitions in American youth culture between the early 1960's and the mid 1970's, the isolation of the artist, and the inherent violence in our society. Doris Auerbach in 5am Shepard, Arthur Kopit, and the Off Broadway Theater reads this play as Shepard's most Brechtian work, not only for its quintessential use of song to comment on the action, but also for its clear link to Brecht's early drama In The Jungle of Cities (1922), a play subtitled "The Fight Between Two Men in the Gigantic City of Chicago." Attracted to Brecht's sense of American capitalism as combative, Shepard transforms the conflict between Brecht's central characters Garga and Shlink into the struggle for power between Hoss and Crow. Hoss, "in black rocker gear with silver studs and black kid gloves," enters a stage empty except for "an evil-looking black chair with silver studs and a very high back," the "throne," a metonymic signifier for the power struggle at the heart of the play. He performs a song which is to sound "like 'Heroin' by the Velvet Underground." Throughout act 1, Hoss, isolated with his entourage to determine when the time is right for his next hit (a word which takes on double meaning as both a musical success and a violent attack), nervously evaluates his current status. He consults his astrologer, Star-Man, a science fiction-like character who "shouldn't look like Star Trek, more contemporary silver." Star-Man advises against a move, because of the precarious astral balance. Angered, Hoss demands information about his competition. STAR-MAN: . . . Mojo Rootforce is the only one close enough to even worry about. HOSS: Mojo? That fruit? What'd he knock over?

SAM SHEPARD I 443 STAR-MAN: Vegas, Hoss. He rolled the big one. HOSS: Vegas! He can't take Vegas, that's my mark! That's against the code! Just a few minutes into the play, the audience realizes the diction of these characters is distinctive; they speak a slang dialect all their own, and the audience is forced to understand by context what this language means. Hoss next calls on the disc jockey Galactic Jack, whose Billboard-type charts can pinpoint Hoss's position. By describing him as "dressed like a 42nd Street pimp," Shepard evokes a strong association between financial exploitation and the music industry, expanding on his rudimentary development of the same theme in Melodrama Play. Hoss at one point announces, "They're all countin' on me. The bookies, the agents, the Keepers. I'm a fucking industry. I even affect the stocks and bonds." Reveling in his belief in his own omniscience, Galactic Jack presents himself as "heavy duty and on the whim. Back flappin', side tracking finger poppin', reelin' rockin' with the tips on the picks in the great killer race," and predicts, "A shootin' star, baby. High flyin' and no jivin'. You is off to number nine." But Hoss's sidekick and gun moll Becky arrives and changes the situation as she announces, "Eyes sussed somebody's marked you. . . . One a' the Gypsies"—a reference to those who operate as renegades outside "the code," the rules which control the game that Hoss is playing for dear life. Hoss spends the rest of act 1 preparing for the arrival of this "Gypsy marker"—this outside threat—by practicing knife-fight maneuvers with a dummy that bleeds at each hit. He calls on Doc to administer a drug dose, and sardonically remarks to Doc and Becky, Look at me now. Impotent. Can't strike a kill unless the charts are right. Stuck in my image. . . . Waiting for a kid who's probably just

like me. Just like I was then. . . . And I gotta off him. . . . We're fightin s ourselves. . . . Suicide, man. . . . Blow your fuckin' brains out. . . . Stick a gun in your fuckin' mouth and pull the trigger. . . . Jimmy Dean was right. Drive the fuckin' Spider till it stings ya' to death. Crack up your soul! Jackson Pollock! Duane Allman! Break it open! Pull the trigger! One of Shepard's central themes in this play, integral to his exploration of the artist figure (as well as later in his analysis of the individual in the family), is the artificiality and ephemerality of the self—of one's individual identity. Shepard posits the self here as a superficial construct, like the onion that Ibsen's titular character Peer Gynt peels away layer oy layer to reveal an empty core. Hoss remarks to Becky, "Ya' know, you'd be O.K., Becky, if you had a self. So would I. Something to fall back on in a moment of doubt or terror or even surprise." At the opening of act 2, Crow enters, picking up on this theme in his first song: "But I believe in my mask—The man I made up is me / And I believe in my dance—And my destiny." Crow "looks just like Keith Richard. He wears highheeled green rock and roll boots, tight greasy blue jeans, a tight yellow t-shirt, a green velvet coat, a shark tooth earring, a silver swastika hanging from his neck and a black eye-patch covering the left eye." His dialect is even more imagistic: "Got the molar chomps. Eyes stitched. You can vision what's sittin'. Very razor to cop z's sussin' me to be on the far end of the spectrum." Again nodding to Brecht and his passion for the elemental theatricality of the boxing ring, Shepard stages the battle between Hoss and Crow as a boxing match in three rounds, complete with bells and a referee. Shepard wrote some of his greatest poetic dialogue for this scene, matching diction and rhythm perfectly with the characters and their strengths. In round 1, Crow succeeds in

444 I AMERICAN WRITERS painting a fallacious picture of Hoss as a weak, maladjusted youth: Pants down. The moon show. Ass out the window. Belt lash. Whip lash. Side slash to the kid with a lisp. The dumb kid. The loser. The runt. The mutt. The shame kid. Kid on his belly. Belly to the blacktop. Slide on the rooftop. Slide through the parkin' lot. Slide kid. Shame kid. Slide. Slide. In round 2, Hoss tries to make a comeback, slipping into a black/country voice (continuing Shepaid's technique of role play and transformation), exposing the weakness in Crow's musical style: You could use a little cow flop on yer shoes, boy. Yo' music's in yo' head. You a blind minstrel with a phoney shuffle. You got a wound gapin' 'tween the chords and the pickin'. Chuck Berry can't even mend you up. You doin' a pantomime in the eye of a hurricane. . . . You lost the barrelhouse, you lost the honkey-tonk. You lost your feelings in a suburban country club the first time they ask you to play "Risin' River Blues" for the debutante ball. You ripped your own self off and now all you got is yo' poison to call yo' gift. You a punk chump with a sequin nose and you'll need more'n a Les Paul Gibson to bring you home. But the referee calls the round a draw, and they move on to round 3. Here, Crow goes for the kill, exposing Hoss's inability to find a style, a musical persona of his own: Can't get it sideways walkin' the dog. Tries trainin' his voice to sound like a grog. Sound like a Dylan, sound like a Jagger, sound like an earthquake all over the Fender. Wearin' a shag now, looks like a fag now. Can't get it together with chicks in the mag. Can't get it together for all of his tryin'. Can't get it together for fear that he's dyin'. Fear that he's crackin' busted in two.

Busted in three parts. Busted in four. Busted and dyin' and cryin' for more. Busted and bleedin' all over the floor. All bleedin' and wasted and tryin' to score. After the Ref calls it "a T.K.O.," Hoss tries to salvage his career, asking Crow to help him become a Gypsy: "Just help me into the style. I'll develop my own image. I'm an original man. . . . I just need some help." But Hoss cannot take on a style, cannot change personas like the chameleon Crow, who acknowledges, "The image is my survival kit." With what he believes is the only possible authentic, original gesture, Hoss finally shoots himself, leaving Crow behind to try to sustain his new position of prominence before succumbing to a similar fate: "Now the power shifts and sits till a bigger wind blows." The Tooth of Crime, in addition to its depiction of the music world as comprised of electric, life-on-the-fast-track action, reveals Shepard's ambivalent nostalgia for the America of his youth—the era of the 1950's and early 1960's, captured more innocently in films like American Graffiti (1973). Through the character of Hoss, Shepard recounts a story based on his own experiences as a youth: We all went out to Bob's Big Boy in Pasadena to cruise the chicks and this time we got spotted by some jocks from our High School. . . . There were eight of 'em, all crew cut and hot for blood. This was the old days ya' know. So they started in on Cruise 'cause he was the skinniest. Smackin'him around and pushin'him into the car. . . . Moose told 'em to ease off but they kept it up. ... Girls and dates started gathering around until we was right in the center of a huge crowd a' kids. Then I saw it. This was a class war. These were rich white kids from Arcadia who got T-birds and deuce coupes for Xmas from Mommy and Daddy. All them cardigan sweaters and chicks with ponytails and pedal pushers and

5AM SHEPARD I 445 bubble hairdo's. Soon as I saw that I flipped out. I found my strength. I started kickin' shit, man. . . . Moose and Cruise went right into action. It was like John Wayne, Robert Mitchum and Kirk Douglas all in one movie. . . . We had all eight of 'em bleedin' and cryin' for Ma right there in the parking lot at Bob's Big Boy. The combination of American dialect and icons with raw violence and energy epitomizes Shepard's sense of his culture. In a 1985 interview conducted by Wetzsteon for The Village Voice (reprinted in File on Shepard), Shepard explained, "I felt it was important that an American playwright speak with an American tongue, not only in a vernacular sense, but that he should inhabit the stage with American being. The American playwright should snarl and spit, not whimper and whine." The violence that inheres in many of his plays is likewise integral to his concept of America. He said in a New York Times interview in 1984 (reprinted in File on Shepard): I think there's something about American violence that to me is very touching. In full force it's very ugly, but there's also something very moving about it, because it has to do with humiliation. There's some hidden, deeply-rooted thing in the Anglo male American that has to do with inferiority, that has to do with not being a man, and always, continually having to act out some idea of manhood that invariably is violent. This sense of failure runs very deep—maybe it has to do with the frontier being systematically taken away, with the guilt of having gotten this country by wiping out a native race of people, with the whole Protestant work ethic. I can't put my finger on it, but it's the source of a lot of intrigue for me. As several critics have astutely observed, many of Shepard's images (American and other) come straight from film, rather than from original literary or historical sources. Don Shewey

notes that the playwright has " loved the movies" ever since his childhood. However, Shepard's stints as a screenwriter on various projects helped him to realize clearly his distaste for Hollywood and the movie industry and to explode this American icon from the inside out. In Motel Chronicles (1982), one of Shepard's two collections of poetry and short prose pieces (the other is Hawk Moon [1973]), he includes a poem dated "Hollywood, 1981," which opens with the line, "they ooze and call each other 'darlings.' " In Angel City (1976), a play indebted to Eugene lonesco's Rhinoceros, Rabbit Brown, a screenplay "doctor," arrives in Hollywood to consult on a new major disaster movie, but finds himself trapped by the studio executives (much like the musicians in Melodrama Play). All the creative staff are working feverishly to come up with a blockbuster before a mysterious disease, threatening the entire city, converts them all to lizards. Shepard's metaphor here, of course, is the corrupting, transformative power of the movie industry. Through the character Miss Scoons, he voices his disquieting realization about the relation of his work to this quintessentially American industry: "The urge to create works of art is essentially one of ambition. The ambition behind the urge to create is no different from any other ambition. To kill. To win. To get on top." A few years later, Shepard made this same kind of ambition part of the central conflict in True West, between the brothers Austin and Lee, each of whom is trying to write a Hollywood screenplay. The movie memories, the car culture, the conflict, and the period images of dress and attitude all coalesce in a picture of a quintessentially Shepardian American environment. He had experimented with this atmosphere earlier in The Unseen Hand, set in Azusa ("Everything from 4 A' to 4 Z' in the USA), California. Blue Morphan, a magically immortal cowboy, draws the connection between the 1950's era and the ethos of the mythic American West: "A car's like a

446 I AMERICAN WRITERS good horse. You take care a' it and it takes care a' you." The latter-day cowboys must preserve that former America, as strong men with a mission. Yet in play after play, that mission runs up against the dark, apocalyptic aura hanging over Shepard's dramaturgy. The trajectory of numerous characters' stories, like Carol's in Red Cross, starts on a jubilant note but plummets to a violent, destructive conclusion. This is the overall arc of Icarus's Mother (1965), a play that begins bucolically, with four friends relaxing after a Fourth of July picnic, waiting for the evening fireworks. The pastoral American scene is disrupted, however, by the arrival of an airplane flying low overhead, which the characters interpret as the pilot's desire to communicate with them. While Pat and Jill go off for a walk, Howard and Bill try sending smoke signals to the pilot, via the barbecue. The pilot skywrites "E = MC2," but then inexplicably crashes into the water below. In an extended monologue, Frank describes in graphic detail the plane's descent: Heading straight for the top of the flat blue water. Almost touching in slow motion and blowing itself up six inches above sea level to the dismay of ducks bobbing along. And lighting up the air with a gold tint and a yellow tint and smacking the water so that waves go up to five hundred feet in silver white and blue. Exploding the water for a hundred miles in diameter around itself. Sending a wake to Japan. An eruption of froth and smoke and flame blowing itself up over and over again. . . . The water goes up to fifteen hundred feet and smashes the trees, and the firemen come. The beach sinks below the surface. The seagulls drown in flocks of ten thousand. . . . And the pilot bobbing in the very center of a ring of fire that's closing in. His white helmet bobbing up and bobbing down. His hand reaching for his other hand and the fire moves in and covers him up.

This nuclear vision, clearly linked to the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, proves fascinating entertainment for the holiday spectators. This same menacing atmosphere hangs over Action, staged in a post-apocalyptic setting with characters camping out in a cabin after some form of holocaust. As a small Christmas tree blinks continuously at the rear of an almost bare stage, the characters consume a holiday dinner consisting only of the turkey that they have managed to raise and kill. This juxtaposition of Americana—fireworks, Christmas trees, and holiday turkeys—to a sense of barren foreboding and destruction reveals the complexity of Shepard's feelings about his country. For all his interest in America, unlike many dramatists of the 1960's, Shepard is rarely discussed as a political playwright. His work is often distinguished from that of his contemporaries at the Living Theatre, which produced Paradise Now in 1968, or his colleagues at the Open Theatre, who produced Megan Terry's Viet Rock in 1966, both patently political. Yet the mood and tone of plays like Icarus's Mother suggest a political consciousness at work that, if not always overtly exercised in Shepard's drama, nevertheless seems integral to his identity as an American author. Shepard's most obviously political speech appears in Operation Sidewinder, a play written in 1968 and reflecting the anarchist energy of the time. The Young Man, hired by a group of Black Panther-like characters to capture the sidewinder snake/computer for their revolutionary plot, speaks of his alienation from America's political leaders, their rhetoric, and their actions: It was like all that oppression from the month before had suddenly cracked open and left me in space. The election oppression: Nixon, Wallace, Humphrey. The headline oppression every morning with one of their names on it. ... And I was all set to watch "Mission: Impossible" when

SAM SHEPARD Humphrey's flabby face shows up for another hour's alienation session. Oh please say something kind to us, something soft, something human, something different, something real, something—so we can believe again. His squirmy little voice answers me, "You can't always have everything your way." And the oppression of my fellow students becoming depressed . . . "We're not going to win. There's nothing we can do to win." This is how it begins, I see. We become so depressed we don't fight anymore. We're only losing a little, we say. It could be so much worse. The soldiers are dying, the Blacks are dying, the children are dying. ... Everything must be considered in light of the political situation. No getting around it. The political content of Shepard's drama has a broader and more pervasive scope than Operation Sidewinder demonstrates, however. Recently, in both his stage and film work (especially in Country), he has focused on the economic plight of American farmers, whose barren lives in America's heartland reflect their long struggle against poverty. He shares with Brecht a general mistrust of the capitalist system, epitomized by his exposes of the music and film industries. Curse of the Starving Class, Buried Child, True West, Fool for Love (1983), and A Lie of the Mind comprise the one universally recognized unit in Shepard's dramaturgy, the family plays. Family themes, however, run throughout the Shepard canon, from his first produced play, The Rock Garden (the final scene from which was included in the long-running Broadway revue Oh! Calcutta!), through The Holy Ghostly, The Tooth of Crime and the unpublished work Little Ocean (1974), which explores pregnancy through the experiences of three women. Critics had long noted Shepard's avoidance of traditional American realist drama, much of which is family-centered (Eugene O'Neill's

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Long Day's Journey into Night and Tennessee Williams's Cat on a Hot Tin Roof are just two examples); in a November 1988 interview in Esquire he comments on why he came to these plays later in his career: "I always did feel a part of that tradition but hated it. I couldn't stand those plays that were all about the 'turmoil' of the family. And then all of a sudden I realized, well that was very much a part of my life, and maybe that has to do with being a playwright, that you're somehow snared beyond yourself." Yet these later plays rarely display the theatrical conventions we associate with "kitchen sink" and "dining room table" dramaturgy. Shepard's families are rural, often agriculturally sustained, but the emphasis in the plays is more on the strange psychology of the family relations, especially those of the father(s) and the children, than on the particular geographical setting or financial wherewithal of the characters. Curse of the Starving Class, Buried Child, True West, and Fool for Love have been called a "family tetralogy"— works thematically linked by their exploration of various facets of family dynamics. These plays, although complete and often extremely successful works in their own right, also seem to be rehearsals for A Lie of the Mind—a drama that initially ran over four hours in performance and seems to try to pull together all the familial images and characters of the other four pieces. Stanley Kauffmann's review of Curse of the Starving Class in The New Republic (April 8, 1978, reprinted in American Dreams) finds that the play "starts as sweaty, cartoon-character comedy—people living wildly and uncaringly in a poverty they . . . don't take very seriously," but "ends as a paean to agrarian values, to those who love Nature and Space and Simple Things and who are being forced off their land by exploitative commercial combines." He believes that the "ending is simply not in the play's beginning"; but the drama nevertheless merits serious attention, despite the dramaturgic flaws

448 I AMERICAN Kauffmann exposes. In the play, Shepard shows that he can transpose his creative, poetic style to a domestic milieu, weaving motifs of hunger and familial inheritance throughout the action. The parents, Ella and Wesley, each make feeble efforts to sustain their children, Emma and Weston, but finally give up and try to sell the family farm behind each other's backs. Shepard elucidates his sense of family identity here, significantly through the voice of the son, Weston: "It was good to be connected by blood like that. That a family wasn't just a social thing. It was an animal thing. It was a reason of nature that we were all together under the same roof. Not that we had to be but that we were supposed to be." Buried Child, winner of the 1979 Pulitzer Prize for drama, solidified and refined the style and tone of Shepard's familial environment. The aging alcoholic patriarch, the vague, ineffective mother, and the estranged, psychologically and/ or physically wounded children all come together in a sordid world of incest, abuse, and neglect. Shelley, a visitor (and therefore a more "objective" outsider through whose eyes we can understand and evaluate the familial machinations) at the home of her boyfriend Vince, at first believes the house is "like a Norman Rockwell cover or something," but the external facade of idealized American family life soon gives way. The mystery of the titular buried child in the backyard—whose it is, what happened to it, and what it symbolizes for Vince's family, and, by analogy, the American family—is interwoven with Shepard's portrait of home life in the heartland, which inevitably betrays its Rockwellian exterior. True West, by many accounts Shepard's most commercially popular and accessible play, narrows the focus to examine in depth the fraternal bond. Austin, an Ivy League-educated writer, and Lee, a drifter and petty criminal, confront each other at their childhood home, where Austin is house-sitting while their mother vacations in

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Alaska (one of the possible "true wests" of the title). True West stands out among Shepard plays both for its humor and for its crystallization of the theme of the split self—a motif that pervades Shepard's work. In one of the funniest scenes in contemporary drama, Austin, who wants to change places in life with his brother Lee, has stolen every toaster in the neighborhood—just to prove he can do it—and proceeds to set every one to work, popping bread all over the stage: "There's gonna' be a general lack of toast in the neighborhood this morning. Many, many unhappy, bewildered breakfast faces. I guess it's best not to even think of the victims. Not to even entertain it." The two brothers, in classic doppelganger fashion, are two halves of a whole—each the inverse of the other. They battle for supremacy, for the embodiment of a unified identity. This same struggle defines Fool for Love, but the equation shifts in the latter play to operate on a sexual scale, as two lovers, May and Eddie, who have discovered they may be half brother and half sister, spar with each other in a "can't-livewith, can't-live-without" relationship. In addition, the four family plays revolve around the father/son dynamic, which is always fraught with conflict, but which also shows the inescapability of familial resemblance. Fraternal doubling, love/hate relationships, and attempts to come to grips with the father all swirl together in A Lie of the Mind. With so many themes to develop, so many character bonds to explore, Shepard for the first time uses two families onstage simultaneously, linked by the marriage of one's daughter, Beth, with the other's son, Jake. Each family occupies a slightly raised platform space, one stage right, one stage left. In between, the "stage is wide open, bare, and left at floor level. The impression should be of infinite space, going off to nowhere." This region comes to represent not only a geographical distance between the families, but the vast

SAM SHEPARD I 449 gulf between individuals, even those joined as closely as a married couple. As we come to understand each character's misconceptions, preconceived notions, and fantasies—their "lies of the mind"—we also see them trying to grapple with their fundamental identities, defined, to a large extent, by their family roles as wife/mother, husband/father, son/brother, daughter/sister. A basic inability to understand themselves and to communicate with each other dooms these individuals, however, to lives that will always be lies. The impossibility of family communication finds its most graphic illustration in A Lie of the Mind in the character of Beth, who has been severely beaten and left for dead by her husband, Jake. The manifestation of Beth's injury, which resembles aphasia, renders her unable to speak coherently, yet she desperately tries to communicate, using garbled or disjointed phrases, cries, and oblique images. The irony here is that Beth's brain damage renders her better able than the rest of the characters to understand others and express her emotions. She explains to her brotherin-law Frankie, whom she mistakes for her husband: This—this is my father. He's given up love. Love is dead for him. My mother is dead for him. Things live for him to be killed. Only death counts for him. Nothing else. This—this . . . This is me. This is me now. The way I am. Now. This. All. Different. I—I live inside this. Remember. Remembering. You. You—were one. I know you. I know—love. I know what love is. I can never forget. That. Never. The power with which Shepard commands language may well be his greatest strength as a dramatist. Each of his characters has a distinctive voice, diction, idiolect. In "Language, Visualization and the Inner Library" (collected in American Dreams), Shepard defines words "as

tools of imagery in motion." He believes that the power of words for me isn't so much in the delineation of a character's social circumstances as it is in the capacity to evoke visions in the eye of the audience. . . . Words as living incantations and not as symbols. Taken in this way, the organization of living, breathing words as they hit the air between the actor and the audience actually possesses the power to change our chemistry. . . . I have a feeling that the cultural environment one is raised in predetermines a rhythmical relationship to the use of words. In this sense, I can't be anything other than an American writer.

Selected Bibliography WORKS OF SAM SHEPARD PLAY COLLECTIONS

Seven Plays (1981), Fool For Love and Other Plays (1984), and The Unseen Hand and Other Plays (1986), all in Bantam editions, contain most of Shepard' s dramas published to date. The exceptions are Shaved Splits, which is included in the 1971 edition of The Unseen Hand; The Sad Lament ofPecos Bill on the Eve of Killing His Wife, published along with the 1983 edition of Fool for Love; and A Lie of the Mind and The War in Heaven, which were published together in 1987. Five Plays. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1967. The Unseen Hand and Other Plays. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1971. Mad Dog Blues and Other Plays. With an introduction by Michael McClure. New York: Winter House, 1972. The Tooth of Crime and Geography of a Horse Dreamer. New York: Grove Press, 1974. Angel City and Other Plays. With an introduction by Jack Gelber. New York: Urizen Books, 1976. Buried Child and Seduced and Suicide in B^. New York: Urizen Books, 1979.

450 I AMERICAN WRITERS Four Two-Act Plays. New York: Urizen Books, 1980. Seven Plays. With an introduction by Richard Oilman. New York: Bantam, 1981. Chicago and Other Plays. New York: Urizen Books, 1981. Fool For Love and The Sad Lament ofPecos Bill on the Eve of Killing his Wife. San Francisco: City Lights, 1983. Fool For Love and Other Plays. With an introduction by Ross Wetzsteon. New York: Bantam, 1984. The Unseen Hand and Other Plays. With an introduction by Shepard. New York: Bantam, 1986. A Lie of the Mind and The War in Heaven: Angel's Monologue. New York: New American Library, 1987. (The War in Heaven written with Joseph Chaikin.) OTHER WRITINGS

Hawk Moon: A Book of Short Stories, Poems, and Monologues. Los Angeles: Black Sparrow Press, 1973; New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1981. Rolling Thunder Logbook. New York: Viking, 1977. Motel Chronicles. San Francisco: City Lights, 1982. Prose and poetry. Joseph Chaikin and Sam Shepard: Letters and Texts, 1972-1984. Edited by Barry Daniels. New York: New American Library, 1989.

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL STUDIES Auerbach, Doris. Sam Shepard, Arthur Kopit, and the Off Broadway Theater. Boston: Twayne, 1982. Bigsby, C. W. E. A Critical Introduction to Twentieth-Century American Drama. Vol. 3. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. Chubb, Kenneth, et al. *'Metaphors, Mad Dogs, and Old Time Cowboys." Theatre Quarterly 4, no. 15:3-16(1974). Dungan, John, ed. File on Shepard. Portsmouth, N.H.: HEB, 1989. Erben, Rudolf. "Women and Other Men in Sam

Shepard's Plays." Studies in American Drama, 1945-Present, 2:29-41 (1987). Falk, Florence. "The Role of Performance in Sam Shepard's Plays." Theatre Journal, 33:182-198 (May 1981). Hart, Lynda. 5am Shepard's Metaphorical Stages. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1987. King, Kimball, ed. Sam Shepard: A Casebook. New York: Garland, 1988. Londre, Felicia Hardison. "Sam Shepard Works Out: The Masculinization of America." Studies in American Drama, 1945-Present, 2:19-21 (1987). Marranca, Bonnie, ed. American Dreams: The Imagination of Sam Shepard. New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1981. Mottram, Ron. Inner Landscapes: The Theater of Sam Shepard. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1984. Oumano, Ellen. Sam Shepard: The Life and Work of an American Dreamer. New York: St. Martin's, 1986. Parker, Dorothy, ed. Essays on Modern American Drama: Williams, Miller, Albee, and Shepard. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987. Rabillard, Sheila. "Sam Shepard: Theatrical Power and American Dreams." Modern Drama, 30:5871 (March 1987). Savran, David. "Sam Shepard's Conceptual Prison: Action and The Unseen Hand.'' Theatre Journal, 36:57-73 (March 1984). Shewey, Don. 5am Shepard. New York: Dell, 1985. Whiting, Charles. "Digging Up Buried Child." Modern Drama, 31:548-556 (December 1988). Wilcox, Leonard. "Modernism vs. Postmodernism: Shepard's The Tooth of Crime and the Discourses of Popular Culture." Modern Drama, 30:560-573 (December 1987). Zinman, Toby Silverman. "Sam Shepard and SuperRealism." Modern Drama, 29:423-430 (September 1986). . "Visual Histrionics: Shepard's Theatre of the First Wall." Theatre Journal, 40:509-518 (December 1988).

—7. ELLEN GAINOR

Susan Sontag 1933Barthes," in Under the Sign of Saturn) might describe her own writing enterprise:

Writing is a mysterious activity. One has to be, at different stages of conception and execution, in a state of extreme alertness and consciousness and in a state of great naivete and ignorance. (Sontag, interview with Geoffrey Movius, 1975)

It was not a question of knowledge (he couldn't have known much about some of the subjects he wrote about) but of alertness, a fastidious transcription of what could be thought about something, once it swam into the stream of attention.

Writing criticism has proved to be an act of intellectual disburdenment as much as of intellectual self-expression. (Sontag, Against Interpretation, 1966)

A random sampling of Sontag's subjects over the period since the mid 1960's will begin to convey the voracity of her attention and the intensity with which she casts her eye/I around her surroundings. Often writing on topics jealously guarded or defensively spurned by traditional academics, Sontag has considered Camp, Ingmar Bergman, Walter Benjamin, Antonin Artaud, Roland Barthes, happenings, Nazi propaganda art, Diane Arbus, pornography, Albert Camus, Georg Lukacs, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jean Genet, Vietnam, Israel, cancer, and AIDS. The sheer volume of her collected canon may startle and dismay those who simply cannot believe anyone could write so much so quickly. Since the 1960's Sontag has published four collections of essays—Against Interpretation (1966), Styles of Radical Will (1969), On Photography (1977), and Under the Sign of Saturn (1980); two novels—The Benefactor (1963) and Death Kit (1967); a collection of short stories—

More than any other writer today, Susan Sontag has suffered from bad criticism and good publicity. (William Phillips, Partisan Review, 1969)

£

ESSAYIST, CRITIC, reviewer, sometimes educator, editor, novelist, short-story writer, screenwriter, and director of films, Susan Sontag has been called "the Dark Lady of American letters." She has suffered at the hands of critics who are mystified and dismayed by her maverick range of reference, her unruly yet intensely focused attention on so many different topics. Sontag wants to be alert, at any cost, to what is happening around her; her description of what Roland Barthes is up to (from "Remembering

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452 I AMERICAN WRITERS /, etcetera (1978) and two extended essaymeditations on cancer and AIDS—Illness as Metaphor (1978) and AIDS and Its Metaphors (1989). She also has written and directed four films: Duet for Cannibals (1969), Brother Carl (1971), Promised Lands (1974)—a documentary on the Yom Kippur War of 1973—and Unguided Tour (1983). Embattled and conciliatory, courting kt intellectual disburdenment" as well as **intellectual self-expression/' Sontag flirts with a position she felt Georg Lukacs achieved: "the difficult feat of being both marginal and central in a society which makes the position of the marginal intellectual almost intolerable." Like Claude L6vi-Strauss, the subject of her 1963 essay "The Anthropologist as Hero," Sontag is "in control of, and even consciously exploiting, [her] own intellectual alienation." For her, alienation, detachment, even revulsion can be empowering because these stances create a necessary distance between herself and her subjects; this ambivalence becomes the enabling fiction of her critical enterprise. Positioned on the margin, Sontag earns the right to be "central" and to see her "subjects" with dispassionate clarity and acuity. This tension is played out in Son tag's canon as she moves from viewing art as autonomous in the 1960's—divorced from the historical forces that produced it—to a belief in the 1970's that art can never be severed from its politics. In her work of the late 1970's, she moves toward a lyrical, elegiac "intellectual self-expression"—one that focuses on the life spent, the life lived. Sontag's journey from the margin to the center enables her to claim the more personal and less guarded voice we begin to hear in Under the Sign of Saturn, particularly when she writes about Walter Benjamin, Antonin Artaud, and Roland Barthes. Like Benjamin, one of her favorite writers, Sontag is herself "under the sign of Saturn"—a phrase she uses to describe Benjamin's temperament in the title essay:

The mark of the Saturnine temperament is the self-conscious and unforgiving relation to the self, which can never be taken for granted. The self is a text—it has to be deciphered. (Hence, this is an apt temperament for intellectuals.) The self is a project, something to be built. (Hence, this is an apt temperament for artists and martyrs, those who court "the purity and beauty of a failure,'' as Benjamin says of Kafka.) And the process of building a self and its works is always too slow. One is always in arrears to oneself. A comparatist whose literary performances in her essays link her to Michel de Montaigne, Robert Burton, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Barthes, Sontag asserted in a 1989 interview with Kenny Fries that AIDS and Its Metaphors was "a literary performance," having "more to do with Emerson than Randy Shi Its." Though said in a defensive moment, this statement is telling for what it reveals about Sontag's larger project of "building [or inventing] a self" in her essays and in the public arena. In a 1975 interview with Geoffrey Movius, she confided: My life is my capital, the capital of my imagination. I like to colonize. . . . There is only so much revealing one can do. For every selfrevelation, there has to be a self-concealment. A life-long commitment to writing involves a balancing of these incompatible needs. Like her predecessors, Sontag balances her economy of self-disclosure—her public selffashioning—with that of keeping her private self inviolate. Sontag is committed to a "poetics of thinking," a phrase she uses to describe Barthes. We experience a mind in the process of approaching its subject; although she sometimes gives the impression of having had the last word on a given topic, her discourse is, in fact, expansively openended. Her syntheses, rather than her extended

SUSAN SONTAG I 453 arguments, convey a quick, omnivorous, and inventive mind—one that resists the safety of closure. Sontag invites her readers to try to follow the often slippery trajectory toward her subjects— the threads toward and around them. Not particularly interested in sustaining an extended argument, Sontag's exposition seems to stop and start. Many of her essays might be called * 'Notes Toward an Argument.'9 Extended comparisons and examples bring us close to her subjects and then, sometimes, paradoxically distance us from them. Sontag's comparisons between writers force them into competition with one another or into a new and startling relation. For example, in her essay "The Literary Criticism of Georg Lukics," Sontag compares Lukacs and Benjamin only to expose the gap between them: The notion about allegory in the first essay is based on ideas of the late Walter Benjamin, and the quotations from Benjamin's essay on allegory leap off the page as examples of a type of writing and reasoning much finer than that of Lukacs. . . . Benjamin shows us what Lukdcs as a literary critic might have been. Sontag also positions her subjects in triangular configurations that allow her to call into question linear presentations of literary or cultural history, the notion that literary "influence" is traceable to a particular historical lineage. Influences and connections are mediated in strange ways—and by unexpected forces. Dispensing with simple "cause and effect" paradigms, Sontag questions how we recognize connections between writers, sensibilities, and centuries. For example, in her introduction to A Roland Barthes Reader (1982), Sontag positions Barthes in relation to Andre Gide and Jean-Paul Sartre—two writers who, at first glance, could not be more opposed: Gide and Sartre were, of course, the two most influential writer-moralists of this century in

France, and the work of these two sons of French Protestant culture suggests quite opposed moral and aesthetic choices. But it is just this kind of polarization that Barthes, another Protestant in revolt against Protestant moral ism, seeks to avoid. Supple Gidean that he is, Barthes is eager to acknowledge the model of Sartre as well. While a quarrel with Sartre's view of literature lies at the heart of his first book, Writing Degree Zero . . . , an agreement with Sartre's view of the imagination, and its obsessional energies, surfaces in Barthes's last book, Camera Lucida. Valorizing the distance between Gide and Sartre, while showing us that in Barthes this gap becomes fused as he, the "supple Gidean," embraces Sartre, Sontag subverts conventional connections and illustrates how the gaps and dissonances become links. Gide and Sartre thus become two versions of Barthes while remaining in competition with one another. Of course, Sontag's orchestration of this competition, as the composer/conductor, allows her momentarily to upstage both of them. In these moments, Sontag's presence as "critic" competes with her subjects, threatening to eclipse their autonomy. Sontag makes a similar move in her 1963 essay "Sartre's Saint Genet": Thus the whole discussion of Genet may be read as a dark travesty on Hegel's analysis of the relations between self and other. Sartre speaks of the works of Genet as being, each one of them, small editions of The Phenomenology of Mind. Absurd as it sounds, Sartre is correct. But it is also true that all of Sartre's writings as well are versions, editions, commentaries, satires on Hegel's great book. This is the bizarre point of connection between Sartre and Genet; two more different human beings it would be hard to imagine. Sartre's whole discussion of Genet—the very grounds for his writing about Genet—is thus me-

454 I AMERICAN diated by G. W. F. Hegel, whose presence in both their canons makes the encounter possible and inevitable. In Sontag's work we see a mind deftly concentrating on the moment of encounter with the subject at hand, yet firmly rooted in a Western tradition of learning at the end of the twentieth century—"one that presumes an endless discourse anterior to itself," another phrase she uses to describe Barthes. As William Phillips aptly pointed out in a 1969 review of Sontag's work for Partisan Review: All Susan Sontag's writing has these two sides: a skeptical mind steeped in the unsolved problems that make up the history of thought and a strong, almost willed, feeling for change and discovery, and for new ideas that are attractive because they cannot be insured by history. Born on January 16, 1933, in New York City, the eldest daughter in a family of Polish Jewish heritage, Sontag describes herself in a 1988 profile for Time magazine as "a psychologically abandoned child." She and her younger sister were taken care of by aunts while her father, who was a fur trader, and her mother, who was a teacher, traveled in China. Her father died of tuberculosis on one of these trips; in her 1987 autobiographical story "Pilgrimage," which appeared in The New Yorker, Sontag recalls that her "hard-to-imagine" father died "exotically elsewhere." She pays homage to this world elsewhere and the father she never knew in her short story "Project for a Trip to China": After M. returned to the United States from China in early 1939, it took several months for her to tell me my father wasn't coming back. I was nearly through the first grade, where my classmates believed I had been born in China. When Sontag was six, her mother took the family to Tucson, Arizona, where it was hoped Susan would find some relief from her asthma.

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In 1945 her mother remarried; Sontag would later describe her stepfather as "a handsome, bemedalled and beshrapnelled Army Air Forces ace who'd been sent to the healing desert to cap a year-long hospitalization (he'd been shot down five days after D Day)." A year later the family moved to Los Angeles, where Sontag remained until she graduated from high school in 1948, at the age of fifteen. A reserved, independent, and solitary child, Sontag maintains that she was "a demon reader from earliest childhood." Upon arriving in Los Angeles, she notes in "Pilgrimage," "I tracked down a real bookstore . . . where I went every few days after school to read on my feet through some more of world literature—buying when I could and stealing when I dared." Books clearly provided her an escape from the quotidian; she called them her "household deities," her "spaceships." Her passion for collecting books continues: her personal library is said to contain many thousands of volumes. Sontag also sought out the best journals of the time; at the age of thirteen, she frequented "an international newsstand where militant browsing yielded Partisan Review, Kenyan Review, Sewanee Review, Politics, Accent, Tiger's Eye, [and] Horizon." Around this time, she began keeping a journal and even tried her hand at what she later selfconsciously called "imitation stories." Precocious, wildly brilliant, and perhaps deprived of a traditional childhood, Sontag had a passion for foreign movies and concerts. She and her gifted peers, she later claimed, "debated the merits of the Busch and the Budapest Quartets . . . ; discussed whether it would be immoral, given what I'd heard . . . about Gieseking's Nazi past, to buy his Debussy recordings; tried to convince ourselves that we had liked the pieces played on the prepared piano by John Cage . . . ; and talked about how many years to give Stravinsky." "Pilgrimage" serves to fuse Sontag's early

SUSAN SONTAG I 455 childhood interests in European literature and contemporary film and music with her adult critical concerns. Much like Henry James's memoir, A Small Boy and Others (1913), Sontag's invites us to entertain a connection between her temperament and her critical and artistic sensibilities. The memoir implies that her own writing career was inevitable because of the sort of childhood she had—because she was a "fervid, literatureintoxicated child." After graduating from high school in 1948, Sontag spent a year at the University of California at Berkeley, then transferred to the University of Chicago, where she received her B.A. in 1951. In 1950 she met Philip Rieff, whom she married after knowing him for ten days. In 1952 their son, David, was born. During the mid 1950's Sontag was at Harvard and Reiff at Brandeis; she completed an M.A. in English in 1954, one in philosophy the following year, and finished her doctoral exams in philosophy (although she never in fact completed her doctorate). During their time in the Boston area, Sontag and Rieff collaborated on Freud: The Mind of the Moralist; the book, published in 1959, the year Sontag and Rieff were divorced, has Rieff as the only author. By all accounts this arrangement was by mutual consent. In 1957 Sontag received a grant from the American Association of University Women that enabled her to spend a year in France, where she studied at the University of Paris. When she returned home, she worked briefly as an editor of Commentary in New York (where she has made her permanent home). She also was a lecturer in philosophy at City College and Sarah Lawrence College. Between 1960 and 1964 Sontag was an instructor in the religion department at Columbia University; she also spent the academic year 1964-1965 as writer-in-residence at Rutgers University. This appointment came on the heels of her first novel, The Benefactor. When asked in a 1979 interview with Paul Brennan about

"the university life she left behind," Sontag replied: "I got tired of the academic world. I thought I would just repeat myself." Ironically, some of Sontag's critics might feel more comfortable if she did repeat herself occasionally. Sontag began writing essays, reviews, and fiction at the age of twenty-eight; since the early 1960's her essays and stories, collected and uncollected, have appeared consistently and rapidly in periodicals such as The New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, Partisan Review, Harper's, New York Review of Books, Commentary, Nation, American Review, Esquire, and Playboy. Sontag was only thirty-one when "Notes on *Camp' " appeared in Partisan Review in 1964. This essay, along with "Against Interpretation," of the same year, made her something of a celebrity overnight. In 1974, Louis D. Rubin noted that Sontag's "utterances" on "Camp" "were . . . greeted with the kind of adulation previously reserved for such critics and sages as W. H. Auden, Marianne Moore, Simone de Beauvoir, and Norman Mailer." Two weeks after the essay appeared, an edited version of it was published in Time magazine. Although this second publication undoubtedly put Sontag in the limelight, she made clear in her interview with Paul Brennan that she had nothing to do with this reprinting: I wrote it for a small literary magazine. I was astonished to discover that two weeks later it was an article in Time magazine. But I didn't do it. I never co-operated with any of the digests or amplifications. Yet it got reprinted, discussed and digested and misquoted and I was represented as having written a manifesto or even having invented it, which wasn't true at all. Sontag's anatomy of "Camp" begins in an expository mode, replete with definitions and examples, but soon becomes "the form of jottings, rather than an essay." We are told that "the essence of Camp is its love of the unnatural: of

456 I AMERICAN WRITERS artifice and exaggeration." In this canon Sontag includes Tiffany lamps, Swan Lake, Bellini's operas, and "certain turn-of-the-century picture postcards." Her concerns in the 1960's with 44 'style' over 'content' " and 4 < 'aesthetics' over 'morality' " emerge as she defends camp's ability to turn "its back on the good-bad axis of ordinary aesthetic judgment." As an aesthetic phenomenon, camp is "disengaged, depotiticized—or at least apolitical." We also see that Sontag needs to set herself up as a privileged, and necessarily disengaged, observer of this sensibility—"one who is strongly drawn to Camp, and almost as strongly offended by it." This cultivated ambivalence entitles Sontag to bring this taste to the foreground of American culture: For no one who wholeheartedly shares in a given sensibility can analyze it; he can only, whatever his intention, exhibit it. To name a sensibility, to draw its contours and to recount its history, requires a deep sympathy modified by revulsion. Sontag is thus empowered by her marginality and her alienated position. These become the conditions of her willingness to take on subsequent subjects in her essays. "Notes on 'Camp' " also appears in Son tag's first collection of essays, Against Interpretation (1966), which contains twenty-six essays written between 1961 and 1965. Her subjects serve to predict the concerns of her work over the next twenty-five years. Sontag's interest in European writers and issues emerges in this collection, in which she takes on the work of Simone Weil, Albert Camus, Michel Leiris, L6vi-Strauss, Luk£cs, Sartre, Genet, and Nathalie Sarraute. Her longtime interest in film also comes to the foreground in her pieces about Robert Bresson, Jean-Luc Godard, Alain Resnais, science fiction film, and Jack Smith's Flaming Creatures—a film she places in the tradition of "the poetic cinema of shock." Smith's film, she acknowl-

edges, has been received with "indifference," "squeamishness," and "downright hostility" "by almost everyone in the mature intellectual and artistic community." Sontag numbers herself with its supporters: "a loyal coterie of filmmakers, poets, and young 'Villagers.' " By the mid 1960's Sontag's interest in films and filmmaking was well defined. In 1967 she was one of the judges at the Venice Film Festival, and that same year she participated in the selection of films for the New York Film Festival. In 1968 she began working on her first film, Duet for Cannibals. Made in Sweden, the film was screened in 1969 at both the Cannes Film Festival and the New York Film Festival. Against Interpretation also includes essays on theater and performance art; Sontag wrote about Eugene lonesco, Lionel Abel's Metatheatre: A New View of Dramatic Form, Artaud, and * 'happenings''—improvised spectacles/performances she called "a cross between art exhibit and theatrical performance." Always alert to the intertexts and links between artistic projects and aesthetics, Sontag links these "happenings" to Artaud's "theatre of cruelty": What goes on in the Happenings merely follows Artaud's prescription for a spectacle which will eliminate the stage, that is, the distance between spectators and performers, and "will physically envelop the spectator." In the Happening this scapegoat is the audience. An essay such as "Happenings: An Art of Radical Juxtaposition" reminds us how much Sontag in the early 1960's promoted, defined, and made visible avant-garde art that is now acknowledged by the academy and mainstream culture. Perhaps the most famous and controversial essays in the collection are "Against Interpretation" and "On Style." They are also the most useful for defining Sontag's privileging of aesthetics over morality and for her belief at this time that art could somehow be divorced from its

SUSAN SONTAG I 457 social and historical circumstances of production. Arguing from a defensive, seemingly antiintellectual, and probably anti-academic position, Sontag becomes an advocate for a shockingly conservative ' 'formalism" that looks at times like an aestheticism akin to the "impressionism" of Oscar Wilde, Algernon Swinburne, or Arthur Symons or the "practical" criticism of T. S. Eliot and his followers. Oddly, in Sontag's scheme these two forms of criticism do not clash. In "Against Interpretation" Sontag argues that we need to dismantle the well-ingrained split between "form" and "content." At the moment, she maintains, all we focus on is "content"—an impulse that we soon learn makes it impossible for us to see the work at hand. Sontag attributes the all too pervasive dichotomy between "form" and "content" to "the Greek theory of art as mimesis or representation":

the literal one. The modern style of interpretation excavates, and as it excavates, destroys; it digs "behind" the text, to find a sub-text which is the true one. The most celebrated and influential modern doctrines, those of Marx and Freud, actually amount to elaborate systems of hermeneutics, aggressive and impious theories of interpretation.

It is through this theory that art as such . . . becomes problematic, in need of defense. And it is the defense of art which gives birth to the odd vision by which something we have learned to call "form" is separated off from something we have learned to call "content," and to the wellintentioned move which makes content essential and form accessory.

Sontag calls instead for a "criticism" that would pay homage to the work itself: "Equally valuable would be acts of criticism which would supply a really accurate, sharp, loving description of the appearance of a work of art.'' She concludes, "In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art." While we might understand Sontag's rightful indignation toward academics who seem to have forgotten how to see art, the implications of her own way of seeing need to be taken up. "On Style," published in 1965, continues the debate set up in "Against Interpretation" and serves to highlight some of the ways in which Sontag's position, both as critic and cultural historian, seems slippery and downright dangerous in its avoidance of historical context. In "On Style" Sontag argues that "art is not only about something; it is something." Calling for the autonomy of the work of art, she asserts: "A work of art is a thing in the world, not just a text or commentary on the world." Although Sontag is advocating that we know art through our experience of it, she comes close to asking us

Interpretation thus becomes a colonizing of the text—an imperialist translation that, in good structuralist terms, robs the "work" of its autonomy: "Plucking a set of elements . . . from the whole work, . . . the interpreter, without actually erasing or rewriting the text, is altering it. But he can't admit to doing this. He claims to be only making it intelligible, by disclosing its true meaning." Older versions of this impulse are less troubling to Sontag; we discover that her real quarrel is with academics in the 1960's, particularly structuralists in literature departments: The old style of interpretation was insistent, but respectful; it erected another meaning on top of

Interpretation thus becomes the philistine's "revenge of the intellect upon art." This revenge, Sontag implies, is motivated by fear of the unknown, the untamable, the unmanageable: Real art has the capacity to make us nervous. By reducing the work of art to its content and then interpreting that, one tames the work of art. Interpretation makes art manageable, conformable.

458 I AMERICAN WRITERS to divorce our experience from the historical moment in which we have our appreciation. She also is willing to ignore the historical nexus of forces surrounding its production. A case in point is her defense of Leni Riefenstahl: To call Leni Riefenstahl's The Triumph of The Will and The Olympiad masterpieces is not to gloss over Nazi propaganda with aesthetic lenience. The Nazi propaganda is there. But something else is there, too, which we reject at our loss. Because they project the complex movements of intelligence and grace and sensuousness, these two films of Riefenstahl (unique among works of Nazi artists) transcend the categories of propaganda or even reportage. And we find ourselves—to be sure, rather uncomfortably—seeing "Hitler" and not Hitler, the "1936 Olympics" and not the 1936 Olympics. Through Riefenstahl's genius as a filmmaker, the "content" has—let us even assume, against her intentions—come to play a purely formal role. Sontag's embrace of Riefenstahl's "style" over her "content" seems irresponsible, amoral, and a way of retreating to "the Ivory Tower" so defended by some of Riefenstahl's contemporaries in the 1930's. It is also a position Sontag would revise in the 1970's when she reconsidered Riefenstahl in "Fascinating Fascism" (1974, in Under the Sign of Saturn). Given her subsequent critique of Riefenstahl and her incisive indictment of Diane Arbus in On Photography, Sontag's advocacy here seems naive or hollow: "A work of art, so far as it is a work of art, cannot—whatever the artist's personal intentions—advocate anything at all. The greatest artists attain a sublime neutrality." What is most troubling here is the extent to which Sontag wants to have it both ways; after calling for "neutrality" and "the autonomy of art," she concludes that this position "does not preclude but rather invites the examination of works of art as

historically specifiable phenomena." Historicizing, however, occurs through an examination of the relationship between "stylistic decisions" and "historical development." Content is still not factored into her scheme. Sontag also manages to argue for the primacy of "the autonomy of the aesthetic" and for a division between our moral responses to "something in art" and those we have to "an act in real life." Yet, a few pages later, she maintains that "the qualities which are intrinsic to the aesthetic experience (disinterestedness, contemplativeness, attentiveness, the awakening of the feelings) and to the aesthetic object (grace, intelligence, expressiveness, energy, sensuousness) are also fundamental constituents of a moral response to life." Finally, although Sontag claims, in contrast with Jose Ortega y Gasset, that we should not isolate "aesthetic from moral response," her own responses to Riefenstahl seem to do just this. Sontag wants the roar of art, and its silence, to come in and out of the Ivory Tower at will: To become involved with a work of art entails, to be sure, the experience of detaching oneself from the world. But the work of art itself is also a vibrant, magical, and exemplary object which returns us to the world in some way more open and enriched. "Against Interpretation" and "On Style" lay the groundwork for Sontag's embrace and defense of avant-garde art in the 1960's. Her persona—marginal, detached from the mainstream—allows her to champion works that most people would not acknowledge, let alone study in the academy. Later, she would abandon this need and position, as she confided in the interview with Paul Brennan: Avant-garde has become institutionalized. It is official high culture. It is supported by museums and foundations. It doesn't need defending the

SUSAN SONTAG I 459 way it did ten or fifteen years ago. It has also exhibited its real limits. Dead ends. Just doing things for the sake of doing them. . . . When I was much younger I thought the word experimental or avant-garde or formalist had more meaning than I think now. Now I'm interested in getting away from those labels. Sontag's second collection of essays, Styles of Radical Will, appeared in 1969. Comprising eight essays written between 1966 and 1968, the volume addresses the function of "art" and philosophy as spiritual markers in an age burdened by "an almost insupportable burden of selfconsciousness." Sontag also takes on the relationship between film and theater, Ingmar Bergman's Persona and Godard, and she offers us an insight into her politics during the late 1960's. At the end of "On Style," Sontag had addressed "the presence of the inexpressible" in art, concluding that "the most potent elements in a work of art are, often, its silences." These "silences" are taken up again in "The Aesthetics of Silence" (1967), the first essay in Styles of Radical Will. Sontag begins the essay with a simple, seemingly axiomatic, declaration: "Every era has to reinvent the project of 'spirituality' for itself." The rest of the essay seeks to map the trajectory of this reinvention and its relationship to the artist's quest for transcendence. "In our time," the artist becomes the mystic who must seek "self-estrangement" or "disburdenment": As the activity of the mystic must end in a via negativa, a theology of God's absence, a craving for the cloud of unknowing beyond knowledge and for the silence beyond speech, so art must tend toward anti-art, the elimination of the "subject" (the "object," "the image"), the substitution of chance for intention, and the pursuit of silence. Silence, however, is actually a presence: "a full void, an enriching emptiness, a resonating or el-

oquent silence." The artist's insistence on achieving this "enriching emptiness" becomes a kind of spiritual disburdenment; and only through this process can the artist achieve "transcendence." Since art replaces the mystery of religion, Sontag believes that the artist's "strategies of impoverishment"—his willed silences—must be seen as "an energetic secular blasphemy: the wish to attain the unfettered, unselective, total consciousness of 'God/ " The artist in Sontag's scheme is in flight from "impure," "contaminated," "exhausted" language—hence the embrace of silence. Language is "fallen," and thus undesirable. Sontag's artist is also in flight from history: Behind the appeals for silence lies the wish for a perceptual and cultural clean slate. And, in its most hortatory and ambitious version, the advocacy of silence expresses a mythic project of total liberation. What's envisaged is nothing less than the liberation of the artist from himself, of art from the particular artwork, of art from history, of spirit from matter, of the mind from its perceptual and intellectual limitations. Here Sontag entertains the possibility of a world in which an artist "compensate^] for [his] ignominious enslavement to history . . . [by] exalt[ing] himself with the dream of a wholly ahistorical, and therefore unalienated, art." While such a dream might have seemed possible in the 1960's, by the 1990's such a sentiment probably sounds hollow even to Sontag. Sontag's essay on the Romanian philosopher Emil M. Cioran, " Thinking Against Oneself: Reflections on Cioran" (1967), also takes up the "burden of self-consciousness": "Ours is a time in which every intellectual or artistic or moral event is absorbed by a predatory embrace of consciousness: historicizing." The tendency to place every artistic event in a historical/linear contin-

460 I AMERICAN WRITERS uum, Sontag contends, makes us blind to the intrinsic value of the events themselves: The human mind possesses now, almost as second nature, a perspective on its own achievements that fatally undermines their value and their claim to truth. For over a century, this historicizing perspective has occupied the very heart of our ability to understand anything at all. Perhaps once a marginal tic of consciousness, it's now a gigantic, uncontrollable gesture—the gesture whereby man indefatigably patronizes himself. Sontag attributes this excessive concern with historicizing to the downfall in the early part of the nineteenth century of the age-old project of philosophical system-building. We are, she maintains, "standing in the ruins of thought and on the verge of the ruins of history and of man himself." After Hegel, Sontag suggests, we have two responses to our fallen condition. We have "the rise of ideologies—aggressively antiphilosophical systems of thought, taking the form of various 'positive' or descriptive sciences of man." In this camp we find Marx and Freud. In addition, Sontag identifies "a new kind of philosophizing: personal (even autobiographical), aphoristic, lyrical, anti-systematic," typified by S0ren Kierkegaard and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Identifying Cioran as a twentieth-century version of Nietzsche, Sontag points out that for him, because we are in a fallen state, "there is no return, no going back to innocence." This leads Cioran in his meditations to pursue "impossible states of being, unthinkable thoughts," to look toward "the end of thought." Cioran, we are told, rages against history, but, like Nietzsche, "doesn't reject historical thinking because it is false. On the contrary, it must be rejected because it is true—a debilitating truth that has to be overthrown to allow a more inclusive orientation for human consciousness."

At the end of the essay Sontag compares Cioran to the avant-garde composer John Cage, who, unlike Cioran, was "able to jettison far more of the inherited anguish and complexity of this civilization." This comparison takes us back to Son tag's endorsement of the aesthetic of silence, as Cage is held up as someone who is able to transcend the agonies of civilization. Ironically, in the two final essays of the collection, "What's Happening in America" (1966) and "Trip to Hanoi" (1968), Sontag demonstrates her own need to come to terms with "the inherited anguish and complexity of this civilization." The commentary at the beginning of her essay about Cioran aptly describes her own project: More and more, the shrewdest thinkers and artists are precocious archaeologists of these ruins-in-the-making, indignant or stoical diagnosticians of defeat, enigmatic choreographers of the complex spiritual movements useful for individual survival in an era of permanent apocalypse. "What's Happening in America" (1966) is Son tag's response to a questionnaire sent to her and others by the editors of Partisan Review. Her response is a biting, stinging indictment of American foreign policy, American "power," and American "life." A few quotations will set the tone: "Everything that one feels about this country is, or ought to be, conditioned by the awareness of American power: of America as the archimperium of the planet, holding man's biological as well as his historical future in its King Kong paws." Or "America was founded on a genocide, on the unquestioned assumption of the right of white Europeans to exterminate a resident, technologically backward, colored population in order to take over the continent." America, in short, is a "violent, ugly, and unhappy country." Perhaps the most poignant critique of white/

SUSAN SONTAG I 461 Western imperialism occurs in Son tag's by now well-known statement in "What's Happening in America" (1966): The white race is the cancer of human history; it is the white race and it alone—its ideologies and inventions—which eradicates autonomous civilizations wherever it spreads, which has upset the ecological balance of the planet, which now threatens the very existence of life itself. While we might be tempted to applaud her metaphor—a metaphor she would exhaustively critique in Illness as Metaphor—for its illumination of something unspeakable in a code we all understand, it has dangerous implications. As George P. Elliott pointed out in 1978: There is only one thing to do about a cancer, right? Destroy it. Destroy or be destroyed. That is implicit in the metaphor. If Hitler or Idi Amin had said this, one would know how to take it, but since it was the High Priestess of the New Sensibility, one is supposed to think she did not really mean it at all. Son tag's politics in the 1960's were colored by this burden of seeing "the white race" as "the cancer of human history." Indeed, her trip to Vietnam in 1968 is saturated with the angst of this inheritance. "Trip to Hanoi" embodies in its very form—preamble, followed by journal entries, followed by commentary—the tension between Son tag's Eurocentric perspective and her need to see the "signs" of Vietnam as "other" and inaccessible before imagining their authenticity. Sontag believes that she must disburden herself of her American "identity" in order to see her surroundings, yet, as the essay demonstrates, this proves impossible. The Vietnam that, before my trip to Hanoi, I supposed myself imaginatively connected with, proved when I was there to have lacked reality. During these last years, Vietnam has been sta-

tioned inside my consciousness as a quintessential image of the suffering and heroism of "the weak." But it was really America "the strong" that obsessed me—the contours of American power, of American cruelty, of American selfrighteousness. In order eventually to encounter what was there in Vietnam, I had to forget about America; even more ambitiously, to push against the boundaries of the overall Western sensibility from which my American one derives. But I always knew I hadn't made more than a brief, amateurish foray into the Vietnamese reality. And anything really serious I'd gotten from my trip would return me to my starting point: the dilemmas of being an American, an unaffiliated radical American, an American writer. Sontag's description of her initial dislocation, discomfort, and ignorance establish her as someone who fiercely wants to read the Vietnamese; and like a Puritan, who does "good works" in the hope of being granted salvation, she will earn the right to have a glimpse of this culture and its gestures. Here we see Sontag exploiting and politicizing her alienation, finding a way in precisely because she has been on the outside. What Sontag begins to see with great clarity is that the Vietnamese do not suffer from the Western burden of experiencing "the isolation of a 'private self.' " They are not prey to "thinking against [themselves]." Gary Nelson points out that Sontag needs to be vicariously released from the burden of her own selfhood: "In the course of the essay's 'interior journey,' Vietnam 'becomes an ideal other' not only because it 'offered the key to a systematic criticism of America' but also because it offered an otherness inimical to the very notion of selfhood." By the end of the essay, however, Sontag is recalled to her Western selfhood and its possibilities; she also displays an exuberant optimism: "An event that makes new feelings conscious is always the most important experience a person

462 I AMERICAN WRITERS can have." Sontag writes from the margin to the center, recording with great self-consciousness and confidence her journey toward the belief that "unfocussed unhappiness in modern Western culture could be the beginning of real knowledge—by which I mean the knowing that leads simultaneously to action and to selftranscendence, the knowing that would lead to a new version of human nature in this part of the world." Sontag's politics here allow her to embrace a kind of humanism—one that might account for the confusion over her politics in the 1980's. When Sontag denounced communism— particularly the Soviet version—as * 'fascism with a human face" in a 1982 speech in New York, leftists felt betrayed and viewed this position as a repudiation of her sympathies with Cuba and Vietnam in the 1960's. Sontag addressed this public outcry some years later when she was quoted on the subject in a 1989 New York Times article by Richard Bernstein: "I couldn't believe that that was taken as a kind of mea culpa," she said of her 1982 speech. Like many others in the mid-1960's, she said, she had hoped that "some of the small countries, like Cuba and Vietnam, could evolve toward socialism in a non-Stalinist way." A careful reading of Sontag's earlier writing might also serve as a good corrective, for Sontag did not wholly embrace the aims and methods of these revolutions. In "Trip to Hanoi," for example, when she thought about the Cuban revolution and her three-month Cuban stay in 1960, she concluded: "Almost all my comparisons turn out favorable to the Cubans, unfavorable to the Vietnamese—by the standard of what's useful, instructive, imitable, relevant to American radicalism." As president of the American Center of PEN, the international writers' organization (19881989), Sontag continued to be outspoken against fascist repression of intellectuals and writers.

When Salman Rushdie received a death threat from the Ayatollah Khomeini for publishing his novel The Satanic Verses, Sontag testified on March 8, 1989, before a subcommittee of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Severely critical of President Bush's lack of formal response to this threat, in a Freedom-to-Write Bulletin (PEN, 1989) Sontag attacked the priorities of U.S. foreign policy and its implications for freedom of expression in America and all over the world: Some "chilling effect" seems inevitable. At least for a while, there is likely to be a great deal of self-censorship—certainly on matters relating to the Islamic religion, and probably on a host of other topics which can provoke strong, and potentially violent, reaction. Most of these decisions—the book not written; the manuscript rejected; the book order not made, by individual or school or library—will be hidden from public view. Sontag's response to Rushdie is of a piece with her responses in the 1970's to writers, such as the Cuban poet Heberto Padilla, who have been imprisoned or threatened for their activities. In the 1970's Sontag moved away from the belief that art operates in a realm separate from ethics and moral action. She no longer sees art as autonomous, divorced from a political and social nexus of forces. This concern surfaces in Sontag's collection of essays On Photography, which appeared in 1977 and includes seven essays published between 1973 and 1977 in The New York Review of Books. A best-seller, On Photography won the 1977 National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism. Sontag sets the tone for her indictment/ examination of photography, the photographer, and those who view the medium in her preface: "It all started with one essay—about some of the problems, aesthetic and moral, posed by the omnipresence of photographed images." In these

SUSAN SONTAG I 463 essays it becomes clear that the slippery separation between the realms of the aesthetic and the moral (real and implied) that Sontag endorsed in Against Interpretation and Styles of Radical Will is no longer desirable or possible. Calling photography "an ethics of seeing/9 Sontag asks us to reimagine our relationship—a relationship at once intimate and distant—to the proliferation of "images" around us. Photographs (looking at them and taking them) alter our way of appropriating knowledge about the world: "The most grandiose result of the photographic enterprise is to give us the sense that we can hold the whole world in our heads—as an anthology of images.'' Collecting photographs—assembling an archive—becomes a kind of consumerism, in keeping with a phase of late capitalism. "To photograph," Sontag maintains "is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge—and, therefore, like power." Photographs can also empower their owners, particularly when they function as secondhand agents of surveillance; photography—the possibility of a record of someone's transgression— confers power on institutions, such as prisons, mental institutions, and police forces, that hope to control, curtail, punish, or survey a particular population. "Starting with their use by the Paris police in the murderous roundup of Communards in June 1871," Sontag notes in a moment of analysis reminiscent of Foucault, "photographs become a useful tool of modern states in the surveillance and control of their increasingly mobile populations." Sontag's prescience has been borne out by the function of video cameras and news crews today; the very concept of "undercover activity" has been destroyed by the ubiquitous presence of the anchor person. For Sontag, photography becomes a kind of colonizing or imperialism in its assumption that everything is worth capturing: "There is an aggression implicit in every use of the camera. . . .

From its start, photography implied the capture of the largest possible number of subjects. Painting never had so imperial a scope." Photography is equally pernicious as a force that democratizes or ignores distinctions between subjects: "Taking photographs has set up a chronic voyeuristic relation to the world which levels the meaning of all events." Photographs also invite us to entertain the illusion that we can possess the past as well as certain areas of space: "As photographs give people an imaginary possession of a past that is unreal, they also help people to take possession of space in which they are insecure." Photographs allow us to document our journeys and, paradoxically, distance us from them: "A way of certifying experience, taking photographs is also a way of reusing it—by limiting experience to a search for the photogenic, by converting experience into an image, a souvenir." The desire to document one's life, Sontag suggests, is particularly important for people who have lost a sense of connection to their past: People robbed of their past seem to make the most fervent picture takers, at home and abroad. Everyone who lives in an industrialized society is obliged gradually to give up the past, but in certain countries, such as the United States and Japan, the break with the past has been particularly traumatic. While photography seems to promise access to a "whole" and linear view of events, it in fact privileges the fragment and the gap between things and events: Photography reinforces a nominalist view of social reality as consisting of small units of an apparently infinite number—as the number of photographs that could be taken of anything is unlimited. Through photographs, the world becomes a series of unrelated, freestanding particles; and history, past and present, a set of

464 I AMERICAN anecdotes and fails divers. The camera makes reality atomic, manageable, and opaque. Without an accompanying narrative/narrator, however, there can be no real record of the past; photography can only "actively promote nostalgia," for it is "an elegiac art, a twilight art." Sontag is also interested in the political implications of contemporary photojournalism: "Photographs cannot create a moral position, but they can reinforce one." The "record" of what happens does not implicitly include a "reading" of its significance. In fact, the act of making the record is about nonintervention—about a refusal to make one's allegiance to a particular ideology visible. Part of the horror of such memorable coups of contemporary photojournalism as the pictures of a Vietnamese bonze reaching for the gasoline can, of a Bengali guerrilla in the act of bayoneting a trussed-up collaborator, comes from the awareness of how plausible it has become, in situations where the photographer has the choice between a photograph and a life, to choose the photograph. The person who intervenes cannot record; the person who is recording cannot intervene. A political consciousness must name, describe, and interpret an event before "photographic evidence" can serve to enforce or illuminate a moral position: There can be no evidence, photographic or otherwise, of an event until the event itself has been named and characterized. . . . Without a politics, photographs of the slaughter-bench of history will most likely be experienced as, simply, unreal or as a demoralizing emotional blow. Repeated exposure to photographs of certain atrocities can in fact make us numb to the moral and political implications of an event we once understood: "The vast photographic catalogue of

WRITERS

misery and injustice throughout the world has given everyone a certain familiarity with atrocity, making the horrible seem more ordinary— making it appear familiar, remote. . . , inevitable." Sontag explores the implications of her contention that "photographic knowledge of the world . . . can, finally, never be ethical or political knowledge" in her extended discussion of the aesthetic and moral problems raised by Diane Arbus' photographs. In "America, Seen Through Photographs, Darkly" Sontag documents how American photographs and photographers, beginning with Alfred Stieglitz and his work, have "moved from affirmation to erosion to, finally, a parody of Whitman's program." Whitman's program called for a democratization of experience and people. In her discussion of Edward Steichen's 1955 exhibit "Family of Man," and Diane Arbus' 1972 retrospective, Sontag critiques the Whitmanesque implications of their respective desires to level the human condition—to deny historical and social differences in their subjects. Steichen's collection of photographs, she points out, attempts "to prove that humanity is 'one' and that human beings, for all their flaws and villainies, are attractive creatures." Arbus, on the other hand, photographs only "assorted monsters and borderline cases." Her work "does not invite viewers to identify with the pariahs and miserable-looking people she photographed. Humanity is not 'one.' " Sontag concludes that despite their different subjects, both shows "rule out a historical understanding of reality": . . . "The Family of Man" denies the determining weight of history—of genuine and historically embedded differences, injustices, and conflicts. Arbus's photographs undercut politics just as decisively, by suggesting a world in which everybody is an alien, hopelessly isolated, immobilized in mechanical, crippled identities and

SUSAN SONTAG I 465 relationships. The pious uplift of Steichen's photograph anthology and the cool dejection of the Arbus retrospective both render history and politics irrelevant. Sontag implicitly calls for a poetics that has a discernible politics. In "On Style" she had argued for the artist's right to achieve "a sublime neutrality"; a decade later, Arbus' desire for neutrality is untenable. Sontag also had maintained that works of art do not advocate a political or moral position. In the 1970's she suggested that artistic projects and productions must be seen in relation to the historical and political circumstances of their production. Sontag's new position may be attributed, or so she argues in "Fascinating Fascism" (1974), to the shift from an elite's reception for these works to a mass culture's: Art that seemed eminently worth defending ten years ago, as a minority or adversary taste, no longer seems defensible today, because the ethical and cultural issues it raises have become serious, even dangerous, in a way they were not then. The hard truth is that what may be acceptable in elite culture may not be acceptable in mass culture, that tastes which pose only innocuous ethical issues as the property of a minority become corrupting when they become more established. Taste is context, and the context has changed. In "On Style" Sontag had defended the "style" or "form" of Leni Riefenstahl's films Triumph of the Will and The Olympiad, arguing that these two films "transcend the categories of propaganda or even reportage." Nearly a decade later, she makes the opposite argument as she examines the "fascist longings in our midst." Sontag can no longer separate the content of these films from their form; she also insists that we recover their historical perspective and the circumstances of their production. Riefenstahl

made four of her six films for the Nazi government; she was a close friend of Hitler and of Goebbels. Her films were financed by the Nazi government. Sontag is clearly concerned with the implications of the "current de-Nazification" of Riefenstahl and the claim that she is an "indomitable priestess of the beautiful." Sontag, who once championed "the complex movements of intelligence and grace and sensuousness" in Riefenstahl's work, in the mid 1970's faults the public for not seeing "the continuity [between Riefenstahl's] political and aesthetic ideas"—a continuity she once saw fit to ignore: The force of her work being precisely in the continuity of its political and aesthetic ideas, what is interesting is that this was once seen so much more clearly than it seems to be now, when people claim to be drawn to Riefenstahl's images for their beauty of composition. . . . Somewhere, of course, everyone knows that more than beauty is at stake in art like Riefenstahl's. Sontag concludes her discussion of Riefenstahl by saying she hopes the current attraction to the themes of a fascist aesthetic will pass. Finally, however, she is not sanguine: "Fascism may be merely fashionable, and perhaps fashion with its irrepressible promiscuity of taste will save us. But the judgments of taste themselves seem less innocent." When questioned about her two assessments of Riefenstahl in a 1975 interview with Robert Boyers and Maxine Bernstein for Salmagundi, Sontag argued that her two positions were not incompatible: My point in 1965 was about the formal implications of content, while the recent essay examines the content implicit in certain ideas of form. . . . The paragraph about Riefenstahl in "On Style" is correct—as far as it goes. It just doesn't go very far. While it is true that her films in some sense "transcend" the propaganda for which

466 I AMERICAN WRITERS they are the vehicle, their specific qualities show how their aestheticizing conception is itself identical with a certain brand of propaganda. Sontag's maneuvering here is slippery; instead of addressing the implications of her reversal on Nazi propaganda art, she argues (unconvincingly) for a consistency to her thinking on the subject of aesthetics and politics: "I would still argue that a work of art, qua work of art, cannot advocate anything. But since no work of art is in fact only a work of art, it's often more complicated than that." Arguing that she never really separated an aesthetic response from a moral one, Sontag begs the issue of the separation by noting: "Though I continue to be as besotted an aesthete and as obsessed a moralist as I ever was, I've come to appreciate the limitations—and the indiscretion—of generalizing either the aesthete's or the moralists's view of the world without a much denser notion of historical context." In 1977 Sontag was diagnosed with breast cancer. In the wake of a subsequent mastectomy and chemotherapy treatments, she wrote Illness as Metaphor, a critique of the metaphors surrounding cancer and other diseases. Not concerned with "what it is really like to emigrate to the kingdom of the ill and live there," Sontag wants, instead, to examine the mythologies surrounding the cancer patient and the disease itself. Comparing cancer to tuberculosis, the Romantic's malady, Sontag notes: Both the myth about TB and the current myth about cancer propose that one is responsible for one's disease. But the cancer imagery is far more punishing. . . . The view of cancer as a disease of the failure of expressiveness condemns the cancer patient; it expresses pity but also conveys contempt. In Illness as Metaphor, Sontag makes her thesis known immediately; having done this, she

displays a Renaissance habit of mind, taking a pronounced pleasure in the play of orchestrating literary allusions to support her extended comparison between the discourse surrounding tuberculosis and that associated with cancer. Her literary map is wide-reaching: Charles Dickens, John Keats, Franz Kafka, Leo Tolstoy, William Blake, Mikhail Lermontov, Thucydides, and W. H. Auden are among those she cites. In Illness as Metaphor Sontag critiques the implications of treating cancer patients as victims. The myths surrounding the disease are well known: patients are responsible for developing cancer; certain character types are predisposed to the illness; and patients are certainly to blame if they do not recover. Cancer metaphors, Sontag contends, contribute to this assignment of blame. The language surrounding cancer, she maintains, is that of military warfare. One's body is under "siege." Cancer cells are "invasive." They "colonize." The body must draw on its "defenses," must "mobilize" against the "enemies." Having called "the white race . . . the cancer of human history" when raging against American involvement in Vietnam, Sontag is sensitive a decade later to the continual abuse of this metaphor in political discourse. The cancer metaphor, she notes, is "implicitly genocidal." Moreover, it is a metaphor that is necessarily reductive: "Only in the most limited sense is any historical event or problem like an illness. And the cancer metaphor is particularly crass. It is invariably an encouragement to simplify what is complex and an invitation to self-righteousness, if not to fanaticism." A decade later, Sontag published AIDS and Its Metaphors, which was reissued in a single volume with Illness as Metaphor in 1990. Sontag believes that AIDS may be seen as a sequel to cancer in the public's imagination: "In recent years some of the onus of cancer has been lifted by the emergence of a disease whose charge of

SUSAN SONTAG I 467 stigmatization, whose capacity to create spoiled identity, is far greater." The military metaphors associated with AIDS, Sontag points out, have a different resonance than those used to describe cancer because they address causality: "In the description of AIDS the enemy is what causes the disease, an infectious agent that comes from the outside." Like cancer, AIDS is described as "an invasion." However, "when the focus is transmission of the disease, an older metaphor, reminiscent of syphilis, is invoked: pollution." While cancer is "a disease of the body's geography," AIDS, by definition, "depends on constructing a temporal sequence of stages." Sontag also asserts that while the cancer patient may say "Why me?" the person who tests positive for the HIV virus rarely wonders "Why me?" Although she wants to make the point that AIDS "is linked to an imputation of guilt"—and those who have the virus know how they got it—she runs the risk of being greatly insensitive to those who may still wonder why they have been "condemned" to an early death. She also assumes that everyone who contracts the virus is "educated"—that is, knows how it is transmitted. This Eurocentric elitist stance does not take into account large numbers of people here in the United States and in Third World countries who really may not know what "safe sex" is or why they should practice it. This same population also may not know that the HIV virus can be spread through intravenous drug use. In short, her stance assumes that the largest population— actual and potential—of people with AIDS in this country and other parts of the world, such as Africa, know the various ways the virus is transmitted. Son tag's local reading, presented under the guise of a global perspective, verges on the offensive. Sontag does not greatly enhance our knowledge of AIDS as "a medical condition, whose consequences are a spectrum of illnesses." But she does suggest that the discourse surrounding

AIDS forces us to revise the myth that we can fashion ourselves in the moment: The fear of AIDS imposes on an act whose ideal is an experience of pure presentness (and a creation of the future) a relation to the past to be ignored at one's peril. Sex no longer withdraws its partners, if only for a moment, from the social. It cannot be considered just a coupling; it is a chain, a chain of transmission, from the past. In her 1986 short story "The Way We Live Now," Sontag conveys the image of the chain in her long opening sentence—a sentence, made up of embedded clauses, that brings an ill "he" into focus, with an unnamed illness, only to surround him with the speculations of his well and concerned friends in the chain: At first he was just losing weight, he felt only a little ill, Max said to Ellen, and he didn't call for an appointment with his doctor, according to Greg, because he was managing to keep on working at more or less the same rhythm, but he did stop smoking, Tanya pointed out, which suggests he was frightened, but also that he wanted, even more than he knew, to be healthy, or healthier, or maybe just to gain back a few pounds, said Orson, for he told her, Tanya went on, that he expected to be climbing the walls (isn't that what people say?) and found, to his surprise, that he didn't miss cigarettes at all and revelled in the sensation of his lungs' being ache-free for the first time in years. "The Way We Live Now" turns out to be about "learning how to die": * "Sexuality is a chain that links each of us to many others, unknown others, and now the great chain of being has become a chain of death as well." But Sontag's chain of death is one that suggests connection as well as separation. Her poignant and powerful inscription of loss and stillness in "The Way We Live Now" must be seen in the context of her style of telling the story—a style that insists on linking

468 I AMERICAN WRITERS the living and the dead, that slowly circles around the community's reactions to those about to die. In AIDS and Its Metaphors, Sontag implicitly addresses the chain of death when she considers 44 the amplitude of the fantasies of doom that AIDS has inspired." AIDS, she concludes "may be extending the propensity for becoming inured to vistas of global annihilation which the stocking and brandishing of nuclear arms has already promoted." Finally, at the end of the book she asks that we abandon the use of military imagery and metaphors to describe AIDS and its consequences: "About the metaphor, the military one, I would say, if I may paraphrase Lucretius: Give it back to the war-makers." D. A. Miller, in a 1989 review essay entitled "Sontag's Urbanity," attacks her for advocating this position: Unwilling to specify which war metaphors are particularly demoralizing to people with AIDS, Sontag characteristically rejects them all, as all contributing equally powerfully to "the excommunication and stigmatizing of the ill." . . . In doing so, she forgets how well one such military metaphor—the one conveyed in the word "polemic" . . . served her as a cancer patient, beset by debilitating myths of "responsibility" and "predisposition." She also overlooks how vital another such metaphor—the one conveyed in the word . . . militancy . . .—is proving to people with AIDS and to the AIDS activism of which they stand at the center. To date, Sontag's essays have received more critical acclaim than her fiction. This is not surprising, for while Sontag has written several stunning short stories—"Debriefing" and "The Way We Live Now" come to mind—her novels, The Benefactor and Death Kit, are less compelling. Her critics have been particularly harsh about her novels. Jay Parini, for example, called The Benefactor a * 'stiff, almost unreadable novel.'' He was equally critical of Sontag's second attempt to

write a novel: "One marvels at Sontag's willingness to type out such a novel." The protagonists in her two novels turn inward in quest of an escape from this world; solipsistically self-absorbed, they relish their nihilism. Her characters may embody, in part, her own need for isolation and alienation, but in her novels, unlike her essays, these postures do not lead to any heightened desire or ability for self-expression. Hippolyte, the protagonist/narrator of The Benefactor, and Diddy, the protagonist of Death Kit, are in flight from themselves, from the world around them, and from consciousness itself. Courting Sontag's own flirtation with "disburdenment" and "silence," they both, to quote Sontag on Cioran, engage in "thinking against [themselves]." Hippolyte, in his early sixties, is in an undetermined European city, writing his autobiography. He narrates a series of dreams that become a blueprint of his life as he attempts to act them out. "I am surprised," Hippolyte asserts, "dreams are not outlawed. What a promise the dream is! How delightful! How private! And one needs no partner. . . . Dreams are the onanism of the spirit." As Hippolyte moves between his dreams and their fulfillment in his life, The Benefactor chronicles his search for silence, stillness, and disengagement from the life around him. The novel ends with an endorsement of stasis and a view of Hippolyte's paralysis, though in Sontag's vision, there are no regrets: I shall conclude not by describing an act, nor with one of my favorite ideas, but with a posture. Not with words, but with silence. With a photograph of myself, myself as I sit here after finishing this page. It is winter. You may imagine me in a bare room, my feet near the stove, bundled up in many sweaters, my black hair turned grey, enjoying the waning tribulations of subjectivity and the repose of a privacy that is genuine. In Death Kit, Diddy also is caught between living in his dreams or fantasies and living in this

SUSAN SONTAG I 469 world. The novel involves his frantic need to know if he killed a workman in a train tunnel; Diddy, who is on a train to a conference, imagines that when the train stalls, he has left it and murdered a workman he meets in the tunnel. When he turns to Hester, a blind woman he has met on the train, to ask "Did he?" she assures him he has not left the train compartment. The rest of the novel shows him becoming progressively more locked into himself—unable to separate his actions from his fantasies. Although Sontag claimed in a 1968 interview with James Toback that Death Kit "could have been called Why Are We in Vietnam? because it gets into the kind of senseless brutality and self-destructiveness that is ruining America/9 it is hard to imagine Diddy's dilemma as an objective correlative for America's involvement in Vietnam in the 1960's. The novel seems mired in the personal, regressive, solipsistic world of the protagonist. In 1978, the year Illness as Metaphor appeared, Sontag published her first collection of short stories, /, etcetera, which contains eight stories written between 1963 and 1977 and published in the pages of American Review, The Atlantic, Harper's Bazaar, The New Yorker, Partisan Review, and Playboy. Although some of these stories were written at the time she was composing her two novels, they need to be differentiated from The Benefactor and Death Kit. Unlike the characters in her novels, those in her short stories make efforts to connect with their surroundings. Even when they are most distant from this world, one senses that this estrangement is not desirable or acceptable. The stories in /, etcetera may best be described as meditative, parodic, and autobiographical. Some flirt with plots and become parodic, such as "Doctor Jekyll," which Michael Wood maintains is a cousin of Henry James's "The Beast in the Jungle" with its emphasis on "the unlived life." "The Dummy" imitates a science fiction story,

as the narrator makes a dummy/double who will live his life for him. "American Spirits" critiques the Emersonian myth that one can fashion oneself in the moment and the American myth that one can "light out for the territory." Two of the most powerful stories in the collection—"Project for a Trip to China" and "Debriefing"—seem to address, if obliquely, Sontag's own experiences. In "Project for a Trip to China," Sontag collects notes about her upcoming trip to China—her preparations for the journey take her back in time through family history. Her father had died in China; his invisibility becomes a palpable presence: My father keeps getting younger. (I don't know where he's buried. M. says she's forgotten.) An unfinished pain that might, just might, get lost in the endless Chinese smile.

He died so far away. By visiting my father's death, I make him heavier. I will bury him myself. Her own decipherment of the "signs" of China becomes her way to achieve disburdenment: "How impatient I am to leave for China! Yet even before leaving, part of me has already made the long trip that brings me to its border, traveled about the country, and come out again." In "Debriefing," Sontag also confronts a death, that of a friend who committed suicide by jumping into the Hudson River: How I groaned under the burden of our friendship. But your death is heavier. Why you went under while others, equally absent from their lives, survive is a mystery to me. Sontag cannot answer this mystery; but she does not retreat into silence and stillness, as she would have her protagonists do in her novels.

470 I AMERICAN WRITERS Two years after /, etcetera appeared, Sontag published another collection of essays: Under the Sign of Saturn. These seven essays, written between 1972 and 1980, represent a departure from her earlier collections of essays, not so much in subject as in treatment. Although the two bestknown essays are those on the German filmmakers Leni Riefenstahl and Hans-Jiirgen Syberberg, the other five—literary portraits with a deeply elegiac cast to them—seem curiously personal, unguarded, openly lyrical, less polemical and combative. These essays do not defend; they quietly celebrate. As biography, Son tag's portraits (of Antonin Artaud, Walter Benjamin, and Elias Canetti) and her farewells (to Paul Goodman and Roland Barthes) move delicately between the facts of the life lived and the public offerings of this life. In her obituary of Goodman (1972, in Under the Sign of Saturn), for example, Sontag notes: I admired his courage, which showed itself in so many ways—one of the most admirable being his honesty about his homosexuality in Five Years, for which he was much criticized by his straight friends in the New York intellectual world; that was six years ago, before the advent of Gay Liberation made coming out of the closet chic. . . . Like Andrew Breton, to whom he could be compared in many ways, Paul Goodman was a connoisseur of freedom, joy, pleasure. I learned a great deal about those three things from reading him. In Son tag's portraits, one senses her complicated attachment to these figures. As Elizabeth Hardwick points out in her introduction to A Susan Sontag Reader: The labyrinthine perfectionism, the pathos of a 4 'dissatisfied" spirit like Walter Benjamin came to her, I think, as a model, and certainly as an object of love, the word in no way out of bounds. It is love that makes her start her essay on Ben-

jamin by looking at a few scattered photographs. . . . The wish to find Benjamin as a face is touching, subjective, venerating. And this is the mood of much of her recent work, particularly the majestic honoring of Barthes and the homage to Canetti, himself a great and complicated * 'admirer" of his own chosen instances of genius. Son tag's tribute to Benjamin, "Under the Sign of Saturn," (1978) is loving and gentle; it is also incisive and astute in its comprehensive analysis of the relationship between his temperament and his work. She gives us a clear sense of how his style illuminates the way his mind works, how he is someone who has lived with his work and habit of mind for a long time: His sentences do not seem to be generated in the usual way; they do not entail. Each sentence is written as if it were the first, or the last. . . . Mental and historical processes are rendered as conceptual tableaux; ideas are transcribed in extremis and the intellectual perspectives are vertiginous. His style of thinking and writing, incorrectly called aphoristic, might better be called freeze-frame baroque. This style was torture to execute. It was as if each sentence had to say everything, before the inward gaze of total concentration dissolved the subject before his eyes. Benjamin was probably not exaggerating when he told Adorno that each idea in his book on Baudelaire and nineteenth-century Paris "had to be wrested away from a realm in which madness lies." Son tag's affinity with Benjamin begins to explain why she is also so drawn to Artaud (see "Approaching Artaud," 1973, in Under the Sign of Saturn). As she approaches their lives and writings, their projects seem curiously similar: Some of Artaud's accounts of his Passion of thought are almost too painful to read. He elaborates little on his emotions—panic, confusion,

SUSAN SONTAG I 471 rage, dread. His gift was not for psychological understanding . . . but for a more original mode of description, a kind of physiological phenomenology of his unending desolation. Artaud's claim in The Nerve Meter that no one has ever so accurately charted his "intimate" self is not an exaggeration. Nowhere in the entire history of writing in the first person is there as tireless and detailed a record of the microstructure of mental pain. Sontag's obituary of Barthes also pays homage to his life by charting his various selftranscriptions. Barthes's self-fashioning, like Artaud's, is connected, in part, to the influence that theater exerted on him: "In his youth, he founded a university theater group, reviewed plays. And something of the theater, a profound love of appearances, colors his work when he began to exercise, at full strength, his vocation as a writer." Sontag's own concerns with selffashioning—with her economy of self-disclosure—implicitly emerge when she describes Barthes's work, in "Remembering Barthes" (1980, in Under the Sign of Saturn), as "an immensely complex enterprise of self-description": His sense of privacy was expressed exhibitionistically. Writing about himself, he often used the third person, as if he treated himself as a fiction. The later work contains much fastidious selfrevelation, but always in a speculative form (no anecdote about the self which does not come bearing an idea between its teeth), and dainty meditation on the personal; the last article he published was about keeping a journal. Son tag, whose next work is a novel and a new collection of short fiction, is also engaged in "fastidious self-revelation." No longer interested in writing essays, she confided to Helen Benedict: "I feel I can make better use of my talents writing in a freer, more emotionally direct

way. There must be some puritanism in me that has lashed me to the essay for so long; I find essays extremely difficult to write." Sontag's disclosures in her memoir may be "speculative" like Barthes's self-revelations, or they may be veiled and indirect, like some of Henry James's pronouncements in his memoirs. What is certain is that they will be eagerly greeted by those anxious for the latest instructions from this formidable presence in American letters on how to approach her life and work.

Selected Bibliography PRIMARY WORKS FICTION

The Benefactor. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1963. Death Kit. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1967. /, etcetera. New York: Farrar, Straus Giroux, 1978. "The Way We Live Now," New Yorker, November 24, 1986, pp. 42-51. ESSAYS

Against Interpretation. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1966. Trip to Hanoi. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1968. Styles of Radical Will. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1969. On Photography. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1977. Illness as Metaphor. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1978. Under the Sign of Saturn. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1980. A Susan Sontag Reader, With introduction by Elizabeth Hardwick. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1982. AIDS and Its Metaphors. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1989.

472 I AMERICAN WRITERS MEMOIR

"Pilgrimage." New Yorker, December 21, 1987, pp. 38-54. FILM SCRIPTS

Duetfor Cannibals: A Screenplay. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1970. Brother Carl: A Filmscript. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1974. FILMS Duet for Cannibals. (1969). Written and directed by Sontag. Black and white, 105 minutes. Brother Carl. (1971). Written and directed by Sontag. Black and white, 97 minutes. Promised Lands. (1974). Written and directed by Sontag. Color, 87 minutes. Vnguided Tour. (1983). Written and directed by Sontag. Color, 72 minutes. EDITIONS Artaud, Antonin. Selected Writings. Edited with an introduction by Susan Sontag. Translated by Helen Weaver. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1976. Barthes, Roland. A Roland Barthes Reader. Edited with an introduction by Susan Sontag. New York: Hill & Wang, 1981. COLLECTED WORKS

A Susan Sontag Reader. With introduction by Elizabeth Hardwick. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1982.

Elliott, George P. "High Prophetess of High Fashion." Times Literary Supplement, March 17, 1978, p. 304. Review of On Photography. Gilman, Richard. "Susan Sontag and the Question of the New." New Republic, May 3, 1969, pp. 2326. Review of Styles of Radical Will. Holdsworth, Elizabeth McCaffrey. "Susan Sontag: Writer-Filmmaker." Ph.D. diss., Ohio University, 1981. Kendrick, Walter. "Eminent Victorian." The Village Voice, October 15-21, 1980, pp. 44-46. Review of Under the Sign of Saturn. Lacayo, Richard. "Profile of Susan Sontag." Time, October 24, 1988, pp. 86-88. Miller, D. A. "Sontag's Urbanity." October, 49:91101 (Summer 1989). Nelson, Cary. "Soliciting Self-Knowledge: The Rhetoric of Susan Sontag's Criticism." Critical Inquiry, 6:707-726 (Summer 1980). Ostriker, Alicia. "Anti-Critic." Commentary, 41: 83-84 (June 1966). Review of Against Interpretation. Parini, Jay. "Reading the Readers: Barthes and Sontag." The Hudson Review, 36:411-410 (Summer 1983). Rubin, Louis D., Jr. "Susan Sontag and the Camp Followers." Sewanee Review, 82:503-510 (Summer 1974). Sayres, Sohnya. Susan Sontag: The Elegiac Modernist. New York: Routledge, 1990. Wood, Michael. '"This Is Not the End of the World.' " New York Review of Books, January 25, 1979, pp. 28-31. Young, Vernon. '*Socialist Camp: A Style of Radical Wistfulness." The Hudson Review, 22:513-520 (Autumn 1969).

SECONDARY WORKS INTERVIEWS

INTERVIEWS

Benedict, Helen. "The Passionate Mind." New York Woman, 3 (November 1988). Bernstein, Richard. "Susan Sontag, as Image and as Herself." New York Times, January 26, 1989, p. C17. Braudy, Leo. "A Genealogy of Mind." New Republic, 29 November 1980, pp. 43-46. Review of Under the Sign of Saturn. Brooks, Peter, "Death of/as Metaphor." Partisan Review, 46:438-444 (1979).

Boyers, Robert, and Maxine Bernstein. "Women, the Arts, & the Politics of Culture. An Interview with Susan Sontag." Salmagundi, no. 31-32:29-48 (Fall 1975-Winter 1976). Brennan, Paul. "Sontag in Greenwich Village: An Interview." London Magazine, 19:93-102 (AprilMay 1979). Cott, Jonathan. "Susan Sontag: The Rolling Stone Interview." Rolling Stone, October 4, 1979, pp. 46-53.

SUSAN SONTAG I 473 Fries, Kenny. "AIDS and Its Metaphors: A Conversation with Susan Sontag." Coming Up!, March 1989. Movius, Geoffrey, "Susan Sontag, an Interview with Geoffrey Movius." New Boston Review, 1:12-13 (June 1975). Simmons, Charles. "Sontag Talking." New York

Times Book Review, 18:7, 31, 33 (December 1977). Toback, James. "Whatever You'd Like Susan Sontag to Think, She Doesn't." Esquire, July 1968, pp. 58-61, 114-116. —CELESTE GOODRIDGE

Jean Toomer 1894-196^ IN 1923,

JEAN TOOMER published Cane, an enigmatic, lyrical work that mixed prose with poetry and intertwined the African-American folk culture of the South with the bourgeois, urban rhythms of the North. Hailed as emblematic of the "New Negro" in America, Cane was the product of a generation that was, in the words of black scholar and critic Alain Locke, "vibrant with a new psychology" and interested in the "development of a more positive self-respect and self-reliance." As quoted in the Norton Critical Edition, Sherwood Anderson once told Toomer, "Your work is of special significance to me because it is the first negro work I have seen that strikes me as being really negro." Anderson wrote that he considered Toomer to be "the only negro . . . who seems really to have consciously the artist's impulse." In 1925, Locke listed Toomer among a "vivid galaxy of young Negro poets," writers who "have now stopped speaking for the Negro—they speak as Negroes," and William Stanley Braithwaite called Toomer "the very first artist of the race, who . . . can write about the Negro without the surrender or compromise of the artist's vision." With Cane, Toomer seemed to have gained a prominent position among those influential black writers who were a part of the phenomenon later known as the Harlem Renaissance.

Shortly after Cane was published, however, Toomer dropped out of the literary scene to become a disciple of the mystic G. I. Gurdjieff. More importantly, Toomer's own ambivalent attitude toward both his African-American heritage and the question of race in general separated him from that group of writers with whom he is most frequently linked—black writers like Countee Cullen, Alain Locke, Zora Neale Hurston, and Langston Hughes—who were all deeply involved in the expression of an African-American art. Toomer is quoted by Kerman and Eldridge (1987) as having said he considered himself "of no particular race. I am of the human race, a man at large in the human world, preparing a new race." As such, he was eager to distance himself from the New Negro movement, though he willingly allowed "racial factors" to be used in order to promote the publication of Cane, and he frequently stressed the vital part that black folk culture had played in creating a sense of spiritual wholeness within him during his stay in rural Georgia in the early 1920's. But it is just this complex reaction to race that makes Toomer such an interesting and important figure in the history of American writing. Both Toomer's own attitude toward his mixed racial heritage and the ways in which race is represented in his works expose the complex, often

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476 I AMERICAN contradictory, feelings and thoughts that make up an individual's racial consciousness. Even more importantly, the ways in which Toomer's work and career have been critically revised and reconstructed reflect the efforts of AfricanAmerican critics to forge their own notions of racial tradition and identity. Toomer's career as a literary artist was a relatively short-lived one, though he continued to write philosophical, instructive tracts throughout most of his life. After Cane only "Blue Meridian" (1936) and a handful of other works merit serious critical attention. Still, the ways in which Toomer has figured in the development of an African-American literary tradition—from the work of the New Negro movement of the 1920's to the efforts of contemporary critics like Houston Baker, Nellie McKay, and Henry Louis Gates, Jr.—coupled with the delicacy, complexity, and force of his portrayals of African-American culture, have secured his position among the most influential writers of twentieth-century American literature. The history of Jean Toomer's relationship to race begins with his maternal grandfather's place in the history of the United States as the first black governor of any state in the Union. Pinckney Benton Steward Pinchback was born in Macon, Georgia, in 1837, the free son of Major William Pinchback, a white plantation owner, and his mulatto former slave, Eliza Stewart. Stewart bore William ten children in all, though only two survived into adulthood. According to Toomer, Stewart was of English, Scotch, Welsh, German, African, and Indian descent, and she and her children were maintained separately from William Pinchback's legal wife and family. This support ended in 1848 with Major Pinchback's death, when the twelve-year-old Pinckney was forced to fend for himself, eventually working on cargo boats on the Mississippi and earning a reputation as a gambler. In New Orleans, in 1860, Pinckney married

WRITERS

Nina Emily Hethorn, whom Toomer describes as a **white Creole" with no Negro blood, though this description has been disputed by some of Toomer's biographers. At best, we can say that both Pinckney and Nina Pinchback could be considered black according to the definitions then prevalent in American society, though both were also sufficiently light-complected to allow them to "pass" in either black or white society. Kerman and Eldridge cite an 1863 letter—kept by Toomer in a tin box with other private possessions—Pinchback's sister Addie wrote to him saying, "If I were you Pink I would not let my ambition die. I would seek to rise and not in that class either but I would take my position in the world as a white man as you are and let the other go for be assured of this as the other you will never get your rights." Pinchback had been involved in recruiting blacks for the Union army in 1862 and had planned to see Lincoln for permission to raise black troops in Ohio and Indiana shortly before the war ended. By the time of Addie's letter, he had already appeared in public to speak out against the treatment the newly freed blacks were receiving in the South. Pinchback's ambition told him to stay with' "that other class,'' and soon after Congress passed the Reconstruction Acts in 1867, Pinchback organized the Fourth Ward Republican Club in Louisiana. P. B. S. Pinchback was a forceful, shrewd, domineering politician, and his fortunes, both political and monetary, rose quickly as he became a state senator, a commission merchant, the owner of a semi-weekly newspaper, and the director of the New Orleans schools. In 1871 he was narrowly elected lieutenant governor, replacing a reputedly incorruptible black man who had died unexpectedly. Pinchback battled openly with Governor Henry Clay Warmoth, each seeking greater control of the state senate, until Pinchback, as president of the senate, held a predawn ceremony to swear in all of the newly elected Republican members, many of whose

JEAN TOOMER I 477 senate seats were contested by Democrats who supported the governor. The new senate quickly impeached Warmoth on charges of corruption and bribery, and Pinchback served as the governor of Louisiana for the remaining month and a half of Warmoth's term. After his short term as governor, the legislature elected Pinchback a senator from Louisiana, but the seat was contested by, and ultimately lost to, a Democrat. Spending the next three years trying to regain his senate position, Pinchback spoke out against election fraud in Louisiana as well as in Cinncinnati, Indianapolis, and Memphis, earning the attention and support of Frederick Douglass. His rise to prominence and wealth continued during these years, as Pinchback served as a delegate to both the national and state Republican conventions, and he continued to receive a variety of political appointments, most notably as an internal revenue agent and a surveyor of customs for the Port of New Orleans. However, according to Arna Bontemps in 700 Years of Negro Freedom, Pinchback felt betrayed by his own party "on account of his race," and with the sometimes violent return to power of white Democrats in the South, Pinchback's political career in Louisiana was effectively over by 1879. Still, Pinchback's rise had been considerable, and he was described in a newspaper article in 1887, quoted in Kerman and Eldridge, as a "prudent economical financier" earning "about $10,000 a year from stocks and bonds." He raised his family as part of the southern aristocracy, owning a mansion staffed by servants in New Orleans and traveling often for speaking engagements and vacations in Washington, D.C., and Saratoga Springs. He left Louisiana in 1892, building a substantial, three-story house in a semirural section of Washington. Here Toomer's mother, Nina, and her two brothers (Pinchback's oldest son, Pinckney, was already on his own in Philadelphia) were raised in a style

befitting the man whom many still called "Governor." Lavish entertainers, the Pinchbacks lived in a swirl of social engagements, attending balls and playing host to the elite of Washington. But Pinchback's control over his family was strict; he groomed all of his children as if, Toomer later wrote, they were part of a plan to establish some "new political dynasty." Pinckney, the oldest son, was a pharmacist who had studied at the College of Pharmacy in Philadelphia. Bismarck, the next oldest and an influential model for Toomer, was sent to Yale in order to become a doctor, but he never completed his study there. Nina was sent to finishing school in preparation for an appropriate match to be overseen by Pinchback, and Walter, the youngest, was sent to Andover Academy in order to study law in college, though he too returned to Washington before finishing his studies. In fact, with the exception of Pinckney, all of his children were to defy their father's desires for them and disappoint their own best expectations in a way that was later to become the pattern of Toomer's life as well. Bismarck graduated from Howard University with an interest in the arts, an interest Pinchback strongly disapproved of. He sent his son to Mississippi to practice medicine, but Bismarck hated it there. He got his son a Civil Service appointment to an Indian reservation, but Bismarck once again returned unhappy. Finally, living at home in his thirties, Bismarck took a minor job in the government and spent his free time lounging in bed, reading, and writing. This literary life of leisure was a source of inspiration for the young Toomer and a constant irritant to Pinchback. The youngest, Walter, also disappointed his demanding father by abandoning his studies and ending up at home, working for the government and serving briefly in Cuba during the Spanish-American War. Pinchback's sharpest disappointment, however, came from Toomer's mother, who, perhaps in defiance of Pinchback's strict management of

478 I AMERICAN WRITERS her life, married the flamboyant Nathan Toomer —a man twenty-seven years older than she, who seemingly came out of nowhere onto the Washington social scene in 1894. Kerman and Eldridge cite Toomer's notebooks, which record that his father was of English, Dutch, and Spanish descent, the son of a wealthy Georgia planter. Nathan Toomer's mother was "of mixed blood, including Negro and Indian," but Nathan "lived with both white and colored people. The rigid division of white and Negro did not apply in his case." Both Nathan and Nina described themselves as "colored" on their marriage license. In both background and style, as well as in age, Nathan Toomer was a great deal like Pinchback. He bought a house in Washington shortly after the marriage, paying for it in cash, and seemed to promise for Nina a continued life of elegance, flair, and protection. Three months after they were married, however, Nathan left her pregnant and with little support to run the house. Claiming that he had to return south to take care of his finances, Nathan left for Georgia, coming back to Washington only briefly to see the birth of his son, Nathan Pinchback Toomer, on December 26, 1894. He visited his wife and child sporadically during the course of the next year and abandoned the family completely in October of 1895. Nina moved back in with her father in 1896 after having lived with a friend and rented out her house for a short time. Pinchback quickly demanded that the baby's name be changed if they were to live under his roof, and while she opposed any legal changes, Nina finally agreed informally to call her son Eugene Pinchback, though she continued to refer to him as Eugene Toomer. Toomer later remarked in The Wayward and the Seeking: A Collection of Writings by Jean Toomer (1980), that he found both names displeasing and that he thought "the names we human beings attach to ourselves are among the most ridiculous features of our existence.'' From

his notebooks we learn that he decided to call himself Jean Toomer at the age of twenty-five because it was a name that sounded more like "a poet, a man of letters, a philosopher," and at forty-five he called himself Nathan Jean Toomer in the hopes that his "final name till death" would mark "a radical sharp rise upwards into a new being, a new consciousness, a new birth." This shifting of names and identities, brought about by his father's deserting the family and his grandfather's need for strict control over his household, marked the beginnings of a personal and spiritual insecurity that haunted Toomer throughout his life. As Toomer's biographers, Cynthia Kerman and Richard Eldridge, point out, this insecurity is made clear in an undated poem found in the same tin box that contained his great-aunt Addie's letter to his grandfather: Above my sleep Tortured in deprival Stripped of the warmth of a name My life breaks madly. . . . Breaks against the world Like a pale moth breaking Against sun. This insecurity manifested itself in a pattern of behavior that Toomer followed throughout his life. Either Toomer had to be the acknowledged leader of whatever activity he was involved in, or he withdrew into his own private, inner world. In The Wayward and the Seeking, Toomer recalls that "I was a good fighter. In fact I was the leader of our, as it were, gang. I could lick any boy my size in the neighborhood." Toomer lived to be outdoors with his friends, running freely through the "glorious playground" of Washington at the turn of the century. But this happiness was relatively short-lived. In what Toomer called the "Dark Summer" of 1905, in his "Outline of an Autobiography," quoted in The Wayward and the Seeking, his mother became increasingly distant from the family, and when an illness con-

JEAN TOOMER I 479 fined him indoors for several months, he withdrew from his "gang," entering a stage where "inner things [were] more real and interesting than outer [things]." When his mother remarried in 1906, moving first to Brooklyn and then to New Rochelle, New York, Toomer found solace for his insecurity in Arthurian romances, calling himself "The Black Prince Toomer." Nina's second marriage was little better than her first, and Toomer saw Archibald Combes, his white stepfather, as his mother's inferior in every regard. Then in 1909, Nina fell ill with appendicitis, and because of delays in getting an operation, she died unexpectedly that summer. Toomer wrote that he "came to meet life with [his] mind'' and withdrew even further into his inner world, giving the impression of indifference to the devastating events around him. He moved back with his grandparents, who had moved to live with his Uncle Bismarck in Washington, and for the first time was immersed in a predominantly black culture. In an essay called "On Being an American," collected in The Wayward and the Seeking, Toomer described these new conditions: In the Washington of those days . . . there was a flowering of a natural but transient aristocracy, thrown up by the, for them, creative conditions of the post-war period. These people, whose racial strains were mixed and for the most part unknown, happened to find themselves in the colored group. Like his grandfather, Toomer's ambition led him to desire a place among the "aristocracy," and he considered his new environment to be more vibrant and alive than the predominantly white neighborhoods he had lived in. Unlike Pinchback, however, Toomer was uncomfortable among the "colored group." He had wanted to attend prep school for a year before entering college in order to counter what he expected would be the detrimental effect of having at-

tended a black high school, but his grandfather's resources were severely reduced by this time. Instead, Toomer listed himself as white and was admitted to the agricultural program at the University of Wisconsin in 1914, envisioning himself as becoming part of the landed gentry—a role that combined his grandfather's early treatment of him as "the scion of some great family" and his father's supposed position as a wealthy Georgia planter. For the first time, Toomer confronted the problem of his race in his own life and resolved that if he were forced to explain his background, he would represent himself as an American, a mixture of several bloodlines. Toomer felt that Pinchback had misrepresented his racial background in order to further his political career, and that as a category, race in America should be meaningless since all Americans, he argued, were a combination of a variety of backgrounds. His time at Wisconsin began well enough—he was extremely popular and decided to run for freshman class president—but when it became apparent that he would not win the election, he gradually lost interest in school and withdrew shortly after Christmas vacation. Toomer tells us in The Wayward and the Seeking that during the next four years, he drifted from school to school, "unconsciously seeking—as all men must seek—an intelligible scheme of things, a sort of whole into which everything fits, or seems to fit, a body of ideals which holds a consistent view of life and which enables one to see and understand as one does when he sees a map." At first Toomer enrolled in the Massachusetts School of Agriculture in Amherst, but when troubles arose over the transfer of grades from Wisconsin, he left. Next, in 1916, Toomer sought this "consistent view of life" in a rigid, physical discipline, and he enrolled in the American College of Physical Training in Chicago, where he became an outstanding athlete and something of an expert in anatomy.

480 I AMERICAN WRITERS After attending public lectures on naturalism and atheism, however, he began reading widely in the literature of sociology and soon became an advocate of socialism. Toomer added Herbert Spencer, Ernst Haeckel, and Victor Hugo to his list of revered authors and began giving his own somewhat eclectic lectures on evolution, economics, philosophy, and the origins of the universe. A disastrously condescending lecture on "The Intelligence of Women" ended Toomer's weekly talks, but not his enthusiasm. He left Chicago to take a summer course in sociology at New York University, now dreaming of a life in academics. He later enrolled in a history course at City College and began reading George Bernard Shaw and Henrik Ibsen. But Toomer soon grew dissatisfied with his studies, and after having been rejected as a volunteer for the army—he wrote that he was opposed to war but attracted to soldiering—he drifted back to Chicago and taught physical education for a short while in Milwaukee. From 1917 to 1919 he continued to "bum around" New York, Baltimore, and Washington, much to his grandfather's frustration, still sure that he was meant to fulfill some "superior destiny" but with no idea about the means by which he would reach it. Working briefly as a fitter in the New Jersey shipyards toward the end of 1919, Toomer tried to win the workers over to socialism but found them only interested in "playing craps and sleeping with women." Socialism, he concluded was "a pipe dream possible only to those who had never really experienced the proletariat," and he returned to New York, where he discovered the work of Walt Whitman and, most importantly, Goethe's WilhelmMeister. Toomer writes in The Wayward and the Seeking: It seemed to gather all the scattered parts of myself. I was lifted into and shown my real world. It was the world of the aristocrat—but not the

social aristocrat; the aristocrat of culture, of spirit and character, of ideas, of true nobility. . . . I resolved to devote myself to making of myself such a person as I caught glimpses of in the pages of Wilhelm Meister. For my specialized work, I would write. Living in New York's Greenwich Village, Toomer quickly came into contact with several of the literary world's leading young figures, among them Lola Ridge, Edwin Arlington Robinson, Hart Crane, Van Wyck Brooks, and Waldo Frank. Frank and Toomer developed a close friendship, with the more experienced Frank drawing Toomer into his mystical vision of democratic America. Theodore Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, and Sherwood Anderson were included with Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and Gustave Flaubert among his pantheon of revered writers, and he read heavily in Eastern mysticism, Buddhism, and theosophy. Toomer wrote "essays, articles, poems, short stories, reviews, and a long piece somewhere between a novel and a play . . . a trunk full of manuscripts," but he never attempted to publish any of them. Then, Toomer recalls in The Wayward and the Seeking, "after several years of work, suddenly, it was as if a door opened and I knew without a doubt that I was inside. I knew literature! And that was my joy!" Despite this insight into literature, Toomer had yet to find a sense of internal harmony that would enable him to order his experience in a style and manner he could find acceptable. Continued conflicts with his grandfather, with whom he had returned to live in 1920 and whose failing health required constant attention, became "a struggle for life." He had written a long poem called "The First American" during the winter of 1920-1921, and the effort had left him exhausted. The following summer, however, Toomer was offered a position by the principal of a rural, black agricultural and industrial school

JEAN TOOMER I 481 near Sparta, Georgia, and, putting his grandfather in a hospital and hiring someone to look after his grandmother, Toomer sought an end to his frustrations by going South. Toomer had long been curious abut the black folk culture and his own ties, through his father, to the rural experiences of African Americans. Living in a shack in the backwoods of Georgia, hearing folk songs and spirituals for the first time in his life, Toomer felt that sense of spiritual and emotional harmony that had eluded him for so long. In "Why I Entered the Gurdjieff Work," quoted in McKay, Toomer writes: I had seen and met people of all kinds. I had never before met with a folk. I had never before lived in the midst of a people gathered together by a group spirit. Here they were. They worked and lived close to the earth, close to each other. They worked and loved and hated and got into trouble and felt a great weight on them. . . . And what I saw and felt and shared entered me, so that my people-life was uncased from the rest of myself. The roots of my people-life went out to those folk, and found purchase in them, and the people became people of beauty and sorrow. But to Toomer, these folk songs were an elegy to a way of life that was already passing. As Toomer notes in The Wayward and the Seeking, despite the "rich and sad and joyous and beautiful" sounds of these spirituals, "the Negroes of the town objected to them. They called them 'shouting.' They had victrolas and playerpianos. . . . The folk-spirit was walking in to die on the modern desert. That spirit was so beautiful. Its death was so tragic." Still, Toomer identified with his folk spirit so intensely that he lost his own identity to it. Despite the lack of refinement, the oppressive poverty, and the stings of racial hatred, these people had a primal dignity about them that Toomer both admired and felt compelled to record. He sent off a poem, "Geor-

gia Night," to Claude McKay at the Liberator the day before he left Sparta, and on the train ride back to Washington he began to write the prose sections that would make up the first part of Cane. In December of 1921, the month after Toomer returned, his grandfather died, and Toomer accompanied the body back to New Orleans for burial. With only his grandmother to look after, Toomer wrote clearly and quickly. "Kabnis," for example, "sprang up almost in a day," and "Fern" was composed with nearly no revisions. By April of 1922, he records, almost all of the pieces that made up Cane had been completed. He had reunited with Waldo Frank by this time and developed a close working relationship with him. Kerman and Eldridge note that Toomer found in Frank "a deeply intuitive and sympathetic mind," and the two traveled south together to Spartan burg, South Carolina, for a week in order to experience "the bite and crudity of pure Negro : White southern life." Instrumental in helping Toomer compile and revise his pieces into the coherent whole of Cane, Frank recommended the work to his own publisher, Boni and Liveright. Toomer had also developed a correspondence with Sherwood Anderson at this time, and he had visited the home of Alain Locke—a Howard University professor who was soon to be a central figure in the New Negro movement—where he met, among others, Countee Cullen. He wrote again to Claude McKay, who this time published "Carma," "Reapers," and "Becky"—later collected in Cane—in the Liberator. He contacted Lola Ridge of Broom, and Jane Heap of the Little Review. He also wrote to DuBose Heyward, author ofPorgy, in order to join the South Carolina poetry society that Hey ward headed. In all of this correspondence, Toomer seems to have had two purposes: to promote himself as a new writer and to explain (often in contradictory ways) his treatment of race in Cane. As noted in

482 I AMERICAN WRITERS the Norton Critical Edition of that novel, Toomer proposed with Sherwood Anderson, for example, the creation of a new magazine that would concentrate on the "contributions of the Negro to the western world" and wrote that he hoped that his own art would "aid in giving the Negro to himself." Kerman and Eldridge note that Toomer wrote to Hay ward that "in no instance am I concerned primarily with race; always I drive straight for my own spiritual reality, and for the spiritual truth of the South." "The only time I think 'Negro,' '' he wrote to Waldo Frank, "is when I want a particular emotion which is associated with his name." Still, with the publication of Cane in 1923, Toomer was greeted by Locke as "a bright morning star of a new day of the race in literature." Kerman and Eldridge point out that Horace Liveright, his publisher, saw the opportunity to promote Toomer as part of an emerging scene of African-American literature and referred to him as "a colored genius," and leading black writers such as W. E. B. Du Bois, Countee Cullen, and William Stanley Braithwaite urged Toomer to continue in his "race contribution." Cane represented for these writers the voice of the African American made audible, an objective evocation of the black experience. "What stirs inarticulately in the masses is already vocal upon the lips of the talented few," Alain Locke wrote, "and the future listens, however the present may shut its ears." Cane opens with this voice, taken from the oral tradition of spirituals and the blues, in a four-line hymn to his first female avatar of the South, Karintha: Her skin is like dusk on the eastern horizon O cant you see it, O cant you see it, Her skin is like dusk on the eastern horizon . . . When the sun goes down. In the sixteen pieces that make up this first section, Toomer intertwines verse with narrative,

connecting brief prose sketches of six women with pairs of poems, blending poetry and prose in both the first and the last sketch. Toomer continues to experiment with form throughout Cane, unifying his work in both its focus on black experience and its movement from the folk culture of Georgia to the urban North, to return again to the South in a dramatic narrative that centers on the reconciliation of Ralph Kabnis—possibly the narrator of all three sections and a clear figure of Toomer himself—with his own southern heritage. In the original version of Cane, Toomer emphasized this continuity between sections by putting two rising arcs before each of the first two sections and beginning the third with two arcs mirroring each other. Set in rural Georgia, the scene of the first section of Cane is the valley in Sparta that Toomer had lived in, "with smoke-wreaths during the day and mist at night." Impressionistic and, at times, even surreal, Toomer's narrative records the daily hardships, desires, and conflicts of a people oppressed by poverty and racial hatred. Privileging no single voice or perspective, Toomer moves from distanced narration to firstperson retelling, mixing lyricism, sensuality, and innocence with harsh violence and numbing indifference. Throughout each of these pieces, however, there remains a sense of loss, a sense of falling off from the "race memories of king and caravan" to the sterile industrialization that is gradually invading the land. As Toomer writes in "Carma," "the Dixie Pike has grown from a goat path in Africa." In "Song of the Son," a poem that appears midway in this first section, Toomer makes clear his elegiac purpose in this section: In time, for though the sun is setting on A song-lit race of slaves, it has not set; Though late, O soil, it is not too late yet To catch thy plaintive soul, leaving, soon gone, Leaving, to catch thy plaintive soul soon gone.

JEAN TOOMER I 483 Toomer exemplifies this fading spirit in the lives of the women he portrays and in his identification of them with the land they grew up on. Each of these six women, though in a sense indomitable, is worn down by prejudice and separation—they become desirable possessions whose spirituality is broken by racial and sexual domination. FromKarintha—who carries "beauty, perfect as dusk when the sun goes down" and is made into a prostitute by men who "do not know that the soul of her was a growing thing ripened too soon"—to Carma—"in overalls, and strong as any man"—to Becky—"the white woman who had two Negro sons"—each of these women is alienated from both society and self, made victim by a violence beyond her control. This violence is best expressed in the section's final vignette, "Blood-Burning Moon." Here Louisa, a young black woman, is the lover of both Bob Stone, the son of the white people she works for, and a black man named Tom Burwell, who refuses to share her with anyone. Allowing each character's consciousness to dominate the three parts that make up the story, Toomer begins with Louisa's dreamy thoughts of the two men who "had won her," as she sings "softly at the evil face of the full moon": Red nigger moon. Sinner! Blood-burning moon. Sinner! Come out that fact'ry door. In Tom's section, Toomer records both Burwell's anger at the rumors about Louisa and Stone and his gentle helplessness in confronting Louisa about the rumors. "An next year if ole Stone'll trust me," he promises her, "I'll have a farm. My own. My bales will buy yo what y gets from white folks now." Stone's section opens with his violent confusion over his attraction to Louisa and the need to sneak about in order to see her. "His family had lost ground." In the old days he would have

"went in as a master should and [taken] her." Refusing to share "his girl" with a black man and ashamed that "Bob Stone, of the old Stone family" had to get "in a scrap with a nigger over a nigger girl," he confronts Burwell, pulls out a knife, and has his throat slashed by Burwell in a fight. Stone staggers into town, telling a group of white men Burwell's name, and in the story's final scene, Tom is burned alive at the old factory while Louisa sings insanely to the full moon. "Blood-Burning Moon" brings to a fitting close the complex structure of feeling that makes up Toomer's Georgia. Ultimately helpless against the brutal forces of white, industrial society, the inhabitants of Toomer's fictitious town of Sempter maintain what dignity they can by clinging to the mysterious spirit of place that winds through these stories like the smell of boiling cane syrup. Alternately tough and lyrical, ironic and sentimental, humorous and violent, Toomer's narrative and poems pay an honest tribute to the fading folk culture of the South. The second section of Cane opens with the jangling, jazz-like, urban rhythms of "Seventh Street" in Washington, D.C., in a song very different from the folk spirituals of Georgia: Money burns the pocket, pocket hurts, Bootleggers in silken shirts, Ballooned, zooming Cadillacs, Whizzing, whizzing down the street-car tracks. The seven narratives and five poems that make up this middle section concentrate on the stifled lives of northern blacks, with only one poem, "Harvest Song," recalling the close relationship to the land that characterized the first part of the book. Middle-class respectability, the aftereffects of World War I and Prohibition, and the tensions between races alienate the figures here from their surroundings as well as from each other. The stories in this section are more closely autobiographical, combining incidents from Toomer's days at Wisconsin, his vacations at

484 I AMERICAN Harper's Ferry, and his relationship with a young white woman in Chicago in 1916. Toomer focuses on both men and women in these narratives, showing how both have altered their behavior to fit a white world from which they are excluded. The North had promised blacks economic opportunity and an escape from racial oppression, but as Dan Moore, the main character in "Box Seat," has learned, blacks are no more than "a baboon from the zoo" to most northerners, and the lack of jobs and continued oppression lead him to a maddening violence. Separated from the folk spirit of the South and of their past, the black people of Toomer's North lack those connections that can heal them. As Toomer writes in "Calling Jesus": Her soul is like a little thrust-tailed dog, that follows her, whimpering. I've seen it tagging on behind her, up streets where chestnut trees flowered, where dusty asphalt had been freshly sprinkled with clean water. Up alleys where niggers sat on low door-steps before tumbled shanties and sang and loved. At night, when she comes home, the little dog is left in the vestibule, nosing the crack beneath the big storm door, filled with chills till morning. Some one . . . eoho Jesus ... soft as the bare feet of Christ moving across bales of southern cotton, will steal in and cover it that it need not shiver, and carry it to where she sleeps: cradled in dream-fluted cane. North and South combine in the book's final section, a six-part, dramatic narrative called "Kabnis." As Toomer wrote to Waldo Frank, "Kabnis is me," and with the figure of Ralph Kabnis, Toomer relates his teaching experience in the South and his desire to record the fading song he heard there. He also exposes the internal contradictions and sense of alienation that dominate the previous two sections. Kabnis' ancestors are "Southern blue bloods," but as he learns in Georgia,' 'Ain't much difference between blue

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and black." Several characters here are of a mixed racial background, and the problems of reconciling their African-American heritage in a violent world of white, middle-class values provides the subject for most of the dialogue. "Nigger's a nigger down this way, Professor," one character tells Kabnis, "An only two dividins: good an bad. An even they aint permanent categories. They sometimes mixes um up when it comes to lynchin." Kabnis dreams of being an orator and a poet, a prophet "shapin words after a design that branded . . . my soul." But no one character here occupies this privileged position. Instead, all of the characters in "Kabnis" merge to describe the "twisted awful thing" that Kabnis hopes to capture. Still, Kabnis does recognize that "th only sin is whats done against the soul. The whole world is a conspiracy to sin, especially in America, an against me. I'm the victim of their sin. I'm what sin is." Toomer's vision ends with Kabnis leaving Sempter in sunrise and "birth-song," leaving some hope for redemption in the life that Cane celebrates. Between 1921 and 1923, Toomer also finished three other works focusing on black life that deserve some brief comment. Balo and Natalie Mann (published posthumously, in The Wayward and the Seeking [1980]), use widely differing styles to explore racial conditions in America. Balo was performed in 1923-1924 by the Howard University Players, and it was later anthologized by Alain Locke and Montgomery Gregory in Plays of Negro Life (1927). A realistic play that focuses on the strengths of the common black family, Balo presents both the black family and the black folk community as strong, viable, sustaining structures in its characters' lives. Natalie Mann is an expressionistic work in the vein of Eugene O'Neill that joins Cane in its condemnation of middle-class values and American materialism. Using a woman as the play's protagonist, Toomer explores the

JEAN TOOMER I 485 kinds of social, economic, and sexual pressures that destroy the human spirit. Through the sad, short life of his own mother and the submissive role his grandmother was forced to occupy, Toomer was intensely aware of the painful position women held in modern society, and this play, though never staged or published during Toomer's lifetime, is a testament to their strength. Toomer also wrote the short story "Withered Skins of Berries" during this period. Here he examines the kinds of pressures and conflicts that lead someone to "pass" for white. The story combines the lyricism of Cane with the brutality of racial hatred, mixing images of "John Brown's body" an "African Guardian of Souls," and "the Georgia canefields" with a modern, northern office in downtown Washington. Toomer reveals the complex feelings of envy and self-loathing that motivate his protagonist, a mulatto secretary, to gain a position in the white world. The story was rejected by the Little Review in 1923, and its subject was to haunt Toomer throughout his life. About the time that Toomer had finished Cane, he came across the work of P. D. Ouspensky, a disciple of the Greek-Armenian mystic George Ivanovich Gurdjieff. Along with Hart Crane, Gorham Munson, and Waldo Frank, Toomer shared an enthusiasm for Ouspensky's ideas about an invisible, "noumenal world" that could be apprehended through the development of a "cosmic consciousness." These ideas fit in well with the "organic, mystic Whole" that he and Frank had envisioned for the new American culture, and the teachings of Ouspensky and Gurdjieff represented a view of experience that unified the physical, spiritual, and emotional elements that Toomer had explored in Cane. As Cynthia Kerman and Richard Eldridge point out, "while others may have read Cane to see how a man could fit his human view into his blackness, [Toomer] was trying to fit the blackness that was

a part of him into a more comprehensive human view." In the writings of Gurdjieff, Toomer thought he had at last found that "intelligible scheme of things" that he had been looking for since he started college. Moreover, by attaining "higher consciousness," Toomer would become a true "aristocrat of the spirit," and he resolved to follow philosophy and become a teacher of Gurdjieff's system. Gurdjieff had established the Institute for Harmonious Development of Man in Fontainebleau, near Paris, and in 1924 Toomer joined the flock of disciples who studied with him there. Gurdjieffs "Fourth Way" combined rigid discipline with hard physical labor in a series of exercises that were designed to break a person out of the mechanical behavior that warped his essential being. The goal was to reach a state of selfdetachment by gradually learning to control the physical, spiritual, and emotional centers of one's being. Gurdjieff's system codified many of the beliefs and desires that Toomer had been developing since adolescence, and he verified in Toomer that sense that he was meant to fulfill some special destiny as a leader among men. Also, Gurdjieff's teachings affirmed Toomer's feelings, evident in his notes, that attributes such as race are merely "prejudices" and not "realities"—that "one should not be dependent upon externality for what happens to one, that this is shameful. And in this way [one] rubs against the Negro, his positions and attitudes, in a white world." Toomer had fallen out with Waldo Frank over his relationship, probably romantic, with Frank's wife, Margaret Naumburg, and he gradually separated from the rest of the writers he knew in New York, especially those associated with the New Negro movement. His growing dissatisfaction with writing fiction led to an eventual break from the literary life and circles he had been a part of, though he continued to write. In 1925 he sent a manuscript entitled "Values and Fictions"

486 I AMERICAN to Liveright, but the work was very different from Cane and Natalie Mann. A long, introspective, psychological statement written in the second person, " Values and Fictions" was meant to document Toomer's own growth in Gurdjieffs teachings and help others on their own path to greater self-consciousness. Toomer expected it to be rejected, and it was. A short story called "Easter" appeared in the Little Review in the spring of 1925, and this work too reflected the Gurdjieffian belief that people exist as static "types" and that traditional religions hold no keys to enlightenment. Studying the Gurdjieff system with A. R. Orage in New York, Toomer was asked to establish his own group, first in Harlem and later in Chicago. In Harlem, the changed author of Cane was greeted with some reserve. Langston Hughes, in his Big Sea (1940), describes Toomer as having "an evolved soul," one that "made him feel that nothing mattered, not even writing." The Harlem group initially attracted several members of the local intelligentsia, including Wallace Thurman, Dorothy Peterson, Aaron Douglas, Nella Larsen, and Harold Jackman. Toomer also became acquainted with Mabel Dodge Luhan, a wealthy patronness of the arts and political activist, while he was in Harlem, but his New York group eventually broke up because few of its members could afford the time or money needed to devote themselves to Gurdjieff's teachings. In Chicago, however, Toomer met with some success as a group leader, and he taught there from 1926 to 1932. During this time he continued to write, though his work was designed almost exclusively to promote the ideas contained in Gurdjieff's teachings. In 1928, two short stories, "Mr. Costyve Duditch" and "Winter on Earth" were published, and the novella "York Beach" was published in The Second American Caravan the next year. All three works stress the mechanical nature of modern existence and

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the ways in which we separate ourselves from true spiritual being. Two other manuscripts completed in 1929—"Transatlantic" and "Essentials"—share in Toomer's representation of himself as "a member of a new race, produced from a blending of bloods which existed in recognized races," as he says in "Transatlantic." An essay entitled "Race Problems and Modern Society," published in 1929, similarly stressed that "problems of race . . . exist in the human psyche and nowhere else." The only worthwhile activity, Toomer exhorts, is the attainment of higher consciousness by waking out of our sleeping bodies and recognizing our collective identity both with and within the universe. Essentials: A Philosophy of Life in Three Hundred Definitions and Aphorisms was printed privately by a press that Toomer had established with Chaunce Dupee in 1931, and, as its title suggests, it too was marred by the dry, egocentric, philosophical pronouncements that had come to dominate Toomer's style—one that he had borrowed in imitation of Gurdjieff himself. During this time, Toomer's personal relationship with the master had become severely strained over financial matters, and he began to think about forming his own institute, modeled after the one at Fontainebleau. In 1932, he led a group of his own in Portage, Wisconsin, where he met and later married Margery Latimer, a novelist and feminist who worshiped Toomer and eagerly sought his control and advice. Within a year, however, Latimer had died giving birth to a daughter, and Toomer spent the next two years in relative isolation, trying to organize and publish Latimer's letters. Toomer stayed briefly with Georgia O'Keefe at Alfred Stieglitz' family home in Lake George, New York, and he published an essay entitled "The Hill" in Waldo Frank's America and Alfred Stieglitz (1934), in which he praised Stieglitz and his work. Through O'Keefe, Toomer met Maijorie Content, a wealthy, artistic New Yorker who had earlier

JEAN TOOMER I 487 been married to Harold Loeb. The two fell in love immediately and were married in 1934, moving to a farm in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, where Toomer lived until his death in 1967. Marjorie Content Toomer was a stabilizing force in Toomer's life, and her father, a successful financier, provided the couple with much of their income. Toomer was still writing daily and continued to teach according to the Gurdjieff method, though he had broken all ties with Gurdjieff himself in March of 1935. The symbols and ideas of the "Fourth Way" continued to dominate Toomer's writing throughout this time, and he focused his attention on writing long, autobiographical pieces designed to explain and illustrate his own growth in cosmic consciousness. Excerpts from these works were collected by Darwin Turner in 1980 and published under the title The Wayward and the Seeking: A Collection of Writings by Jean Toomer. Turner's book takes its name from a collection of poems that Toomer had been writing throughout the 1930's, and the best work he produced at this time was a long poem entitled "Blue Meridian," which was published in The New Caravan in 1936. The work had its origins in the poem "The First American," written in 1920, and it represented a fusion of Toomer's own ideas about race with the mystical idealism of Gurdjieff in a project modeled after Waldo Frank's desire to revitalize and replace the myths and symbols of American culture:' 4a new America, / To be spiritualized by each new American." In a voice that borrows heavily from Whitman, Toomer sings the praises of an America where "Growth, Transformation, Love" will lead to the creation of a new brotherhood of man that will break through the boundaries of race to form a "human nation" made up of "the human race." Paralleling the Mississippi with the Ganges, Toomer mixes imagery and icons from Judaism, Christianity, Buddhism, African lore, and

the teachings of Gurdjieff to celebrate his ideal of America in cosmic unity with the "Radiant Incorporeal." The poem is a fitting culmination of much of Toomer's thought at the time, and it was his last "literary" work to be published. In 1938, Toomer began attending Quaker meetings in Doylestown, and after a disastrous trip to India in 1939 in search of spiritual harmony, Toomer became an active Quaker, writing several pamphlets and tracts for the church over the course of the next decade. One such work—taken from an address Toomer gave at the Yearly Meeting in Philadelphia in 1949 and published as The Flavor of Man—shows how Quaker thought blended with Toomer's earlier beliefs: "The primary ingredient of man's substance is love, love of God, love of man, and through love, a sense of unity with all creation. . . . The alternatives, I am convinced, are starkly these: Transcendence or extinction." But Quakerism was not the last stop in Toomer's search for spiritual fulfillment. He studied the works of Carl Jung in the late 1940's and began Jungian analysis in 1949. The next year, according to Kerman and Eldridge, he read L. Ron Hubbard's Dianetics, and he entered into a course of study that he hoped would allow him both to "contact the painful root of my racial conflict" and to become a teacher of Scientology. But during this time, Toomer's health was failing rapidly. As early as the mid 1930's he had experienced pain and exhaustion, but he considered these ailments to be signs of his spiritual disabilities. In the 1940's he underwent surgery for a kidney ailment, and his eyesight began to fail him. Considering the importance that Toomer had attached to physical activity, this time of failing health only exacerbated his spiritual and emotional decay. Jean Toomer spent the final years of his life in a nursing home, where he died of arteriosclerosis on March 30, 1967.

488 I AMERICAN Toomer's career was rescued from complete obscurity by Arna Bontemps, who had met Toomer in New York in the 1920's. An author in his own right, a compiler of anthologies of black literature, and a librarian at Fisk University, Bontemps contacted Toomer in 1960 after a fellow faculty member saw one of Toomer's Quaker pamphlets, and the wife of another member of the faculty said that she knew Toomer well through the Young Friends Society. Bontemps purchased over fifteen cartons of Toomer's papers for the Fisk collection, among them manuscripts of several unpublished poems, plays, short stories, and novels, and volumes of autobiographical pieces. Bontemps also resurrected interest in Toomer's work when he published "The Negro Renaissance: Jean Toomer and the Harlem Writers of the 1920's," an essay that was included in Herbert Hill's 1966 collection Anger and Beyond: The Negro Writer in the United States. The essay lauded Toomer for heralding "an awakening of artistic expression for Negroes," but criticized him for being a "voluntary Negro" in affirming his blackness when it suited his purposes but denying his heritage when it presented him with problems. As Bontemps writes: The elusiveness of Jean Toomer in the face of complexities like these can well stand for the elusiveness of Negro writers from Charles W. Chesnutt to Frank Yerby. What Toomer was trying to indicate to us by the course he took still intrigues, but I suspect he realizes by now that there is no further need to signify. The secrets are out. As the song says, "There's no hiding place down here." Alice Walker perhaps best sums up Toomer's situation regarding both Cane and his identity as an African American, when she writes in "The Divided Life of Jean Toomer" that Toomer meant Cane' 'to memorialize a culture he thought was dying, whose folk spirit he considered beau-

WRITERS

tiful, but he was also saying good-bye to the 'Negro' he felt dying in himself." By turning away from the problems of race, even for his dream of a universal, American race of human beings, Toomer left the fertile soil that had produced his greatest work to explore the ideal realm of an inner, spiritual world. The drive to be like Goethe's Wilhelm Meister, the desire to be an aristocrat of the spirit, both commited Toomer to writing in the first place and frustrated the more democratic impulses of his life and fiction. A curious record of racial contradictions, Toomer remains an enigmatic, if not somewhat sad, figure in American literature.

Selected Bibliography WORKS OF JEAN TOOMER NOVEL

Cane. Foreword by Waldo Frank. New York: Boni and Liveright, 1923; University Place Press, 1967, introduction by Arna Bontemps; Harper and Row, 1969, introduction by Darwin T. Turner; Liveright, 1976; Norton, 1988. PROSE

Essentials: A Philosophy of Life in Three Hundred Definitions and Aphorisms. Privately published. Chicago: H. Dupee, 1931. The Flavor of Man. William Penn Lecture, 1949. Published as a pamphlet by Young Friends Meeting of Philadelphia, 1949, 1974, and 1979. POETRY

"As the Eagle Soars." Crisis, 41:116 (April 1932). "Banking Coal." Crisis, 24:65 (June 1922). "Blue Meridian." In The New Caravan. Edited by Alfred Kreymborg, Lewis Mumford, and Paul Rosenfeld. New York: Norton, 1936. Pp. 633-654.

JEAN TOOMER I 489 "Brown River Smile/' Pagany, 3:29-33 (Winter 1932). "White Arrow/' Dial, 86:596 (July 1929).

ited by Darwin T. Turner. Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1980. Pp. 15-133. ESSAYS

PLAYS

Balo. In Plays of Negro Life. Edited by Alain Locke and Montgomery Gregory. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1927. Pp. 269-286. Natalie Mann. In The Wayward and the Seeking: A Collection of Writings by Jean Toomer. Edited by Darwin T. Turner. Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1980. Pp. 243-325. The Sacred Factory. In The Wayward and the Seeking: A Collection of Writings by Jean Toomer. Edited by Darwin T. Turner. Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1980. Pp. 327-410. SHORT STORIES

"Easter." Little Review, 11:3-7 (Spring 1925). "A Certain November." Dubuque Dial, 4:107-112 (November 1, 1935). "Mr. Costyve Duditch." Dial, 85:460-476 (1928). Reprinted in The Wayward and the Seeking: A Collection of Writings by Jean Toomer. Edited by Darwin T. Turner. Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1980. "Winter on Earth." In The Second American Caravan: A Yearbook of American Literature. Edited by Alfred Kreymborg, Lewis Mumford, and Paul Rosenfeld. New York: Macaulay, 1928. Pp. 694715. Reprinted in The Wayward and the Seeking: A Collection of Writings by Jean Toomer. Edited by Darwin T. Turner. Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1980. "York Beach." In The New American Caravan. Edited by Alfred Kreymborg, Lewis Mumford, and Paul Rosenfeld. New York: Macaulay, 1929. Pp. 12-83. AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL WRITING

Chapters from "Earth-Being." Black Scholar, 2:314 (January 1971). A Fiction and Some Facts. Privately published. Doylestown, Pa.: n.p., ca. 1937. Selections from "Earth-Being," "Incredible Journey," "On Being an American," and "Outline of an Autobiography.'' In The Wayward and the Seeking: A Collection of Writings by Jean Toomer. Ed-

"The Hill." In America and Alfred Stieglitz: A Collective Portrait. Edited by Waldo Frank et al. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday 1934. Pp. 295-302. "A New Force for Cooperation." Adelphi, 9:25-31 (October 1934). "Oxen Cart and Warfare." Little Review, 10:44-48. (Autumn/Winter 1924-1925). "Race Problems and Modern Society." In Problems of Civilization. Edited by Baker Brownell. New York: Van Nostrand, 1929. Pp. 67-111. UNPUBLISHED NOVELS

"The Angel Begoria" (1940). Jean Toomer Papers. Collection of American Literature. The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven, Conn. "Caromb" (1932). Jean Toomer Papers. "The Gallonwerps" (1927; revised 1928). Originally written as a play, revised as a novel. Jean Toomer Papers. "Transatlantic" (1929; revised as "Eight Day World," 1933; revised, 1934). Jean Toomer Papers. UNPUBLISHED PLAYS

"A Drama of the Southwest" (unfinished, 1926). Jean Toomer Papers. "The Gallonwerps" (1927). Jean Toomer Papers. UNPUBLISHED STORIES

"Drachman" (1928). "Fronts" (date uncertain). "Love on a Train" (1928). "Lump" (ca. 1936). Jean Toomer Papers. "Mr. Limph Krok's Famous 4 L' Ride" (1930). "Pure Pleasure" (date uncertain). "Two Professors" (1930). COLLECTED WORKS

The Wayward and the Seeking: A Collection of Writings by Jean Toomer. Edited by Darwin T. Turner, Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1980.

490 I AMERICAN WRITERS The Collected Poems of Jean Toomer. Edited by Robert B. Jones and Margery Toomer Latimer. Introduction and textual notes by Robert B. Jones. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988. MANUSCRIPTS AND PAPERS

The Armistad Research Collection. Will W. Alexander Library, Dillard University, New Orleans, La. Jean Toomer Papers. Collection of American Literature. The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven, Conn. Jean Toomer Special Collection. Cravath Memorial Library, Fisk University, Nashville, Tenn.

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL STUDIES Band, 2 (May 1972). Fisk University Library; Special Collections issue on Jean Toomer. Baker, Houston. "Journey Toward Black Art: Jean Toomer's Cane." In his Singers of Daybreak: Studies in Black American Literature. Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1974. Pp. 53-80. Bell, Bernard W. "Portrait of the Artist as High Priest of Soul: Jean Toomer's Cane." Black World, 23:419, 92-97 (September 1974). . "Jean Toomer's 'Blue Meridian': The Poet as Prophet of a New Order Man." Black American Literature Forum, 14:77-80 (Summer 1980). Benson, Brian Joseph, and Mabel Mayle Dillard. Jean Toomer. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1980. Bontemps, Arna. "The Harlem Renaissance." Saturday Review, 30:12-13, 44 (March 22, 1947). . "The Negro Renaissance: Jean Toomer and the Harlem Writers of the 1920s." In Anger and Beyond: The Negro Writer in the United States. Edited by Herbert Hill. New York: Harper and Row, 1966. Pp. 20-36. . 100 Years of Negro Freedom. New York: Dodd, Mead Co., 1961. -. Introduction to Cane. New York: Harper and Row, 1969. Bowen, Barbara E. "Untroubled Voice: Call-andResponse in Cane" Black American Literature Forum, 16:12-18 (Spring 1982). Bradley, David. "Looking Behind Cane." The Southern Review, 21:682-694 (Summer 1985). Braithwaite, William Stanley. "The Negro in Amer-

ican Literature." Crisis, 28:204-210 (September 1924). Bus, Heiner. "Jean Toomer and the Black Heritage." In History and Tradition in Afro-American Culture. Edited by Gunter H. Lenz. Frankfurt: Campus, 1984. Byrd, Rudolf P. "Jean Toomer and the AfroAmerican Literary Tradition." Callaloo, 8:310319 (Spring/Summer 1985). Christensen, Peter. "Sexuality and Liberation in Jean Toomer's * Withered Skin of Berries.' " Callaloo, 11:616-626 (Summer 1988). DuBois, W. E. B., and Alain Locke, "The Younger Literary Movement." Crisis, 27:161-163 (1924). Durham, Frank, ed. Studies in "Cane." Columbus: Merrill, 1971. Frank, Waldo. Foreword to Cane. New York: Boni and Liveright, 1923. Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. Hill, Herbert, ed. Anger and Beyond: The Negro Writer in the United States. New York: Harper and Row, 1966. Huggins, Nathan Irvin. Harlem Renaissance. New York: Knopf, 1979. Kerman, Cynthia Earl, and Richard Eldridge. The Lives of Jean Toomer: A Hunger for Wholeness. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987. This work brings together much of Toomer's unpublished work and archival materials in an excellent study. Locke, Alain, ed. The New Negro: An Interpretation. New York: Albert and Charles Boni, 1925. McKay, Nellie Y. Jean Toomer, Artist: A Study of His Literary Life and Work, 1894-1936. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984. Munro, C. Lynn. "Jean Toomer: A Bibliography of Secondary Sources.'' In Black American Literature Forum, 21:275-287 (Fall 1987). Rosenfeld, Paul. "Jean Toomer." In his Men Seen. New York: Dial Press, 1925. Pp. 227-236; Freeport, N.Y.: Books for Libraries Press, 1967. Rusch, Frederik L. "Jean Toomer's Early Identification: The Two Black Plays.'' MELUS, 13:115-124 (Spring/Summer 1986). Turner, Darwin T. "Jean Toomer: Exile." In his In a Minor Chord: Three Afro-American Writers and Their Search for Identity. Carbondale, 111.: Southern Illinois University Press, 1971. Pp. 1-59.

JEAN TOOMER I 491 . "An Intersection of Paths: Correspondence between Jean Toomer and Sherwood Anderson." College Language Association Journal, 17:455467 (June 1974). -. Introduction to Cane. New York: Liveright, 1975.—BRIANA.BREMEN

Walker, Alice. "The Divided Life of Jean Toomer." In her In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Wornanist Prose. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983.

–BRIAN A. BREMEN

Lionel Trilling 1905-1975 B BY THE TIME of his death on November 5,

when they are handled in an academic context and by academic methods tends to be acquired at the expense of the power of those works as direct experiences. And that literature should remain a powerful, emotional, heuristic experience Trilling always insisted. "There are moments," Trilling confessed in the introduction to his anthology The Experience of Literature (1967), "when it seems . . . that all the discourse that goes on in the classroom and in essays and books is beside the point, that all this secondary activity is obtruding itself upon the primary activity of reading literature. . . ." Looking back on his career in 1971 Trilling remarked in "Some Notes for an Autobiographical Lecture" (in The Last Decade) that "I am always surprised when I hear myself referred to as a critic. After some thirty years of having been called by that name, the role and function it designates seem odd to me." If Trilling's view of himself as a professional literary critic and teacher was marked by ambivalence, so too was his perspective on himself as a Jewish intellectual. The product of a traditional Jewish household in New York and a resident of that city for all but a few years of his life, Trilling was ill at ease with the "positive" and pervasive Jewishness of the metropolis and much of its intellectual life. This unease was with him even during the period between 1925 and 1931 when he was associated with The Menorah Journal, a

1975, Lionel Trilling's preeminence as a critic and teacher of literature was undisputed. He had taught at Columbia University in New York City since 1932, ascending steadily through the various professional levels, from the instructorship he had held during his graduate student days through the stages of tenured and chaired professorships, capping his academic career with the University Professorship, Columbia's highest faculty distinction. He was the author of eight books and over 250 articles, as well as the editor of numerous other works. He had been the recipient of honorary degrees from a number of universities in the United States and Britain. He had been George Eastman Visiting Professor at Oxford, Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard, and a Visiting Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford. The National Endowment for the Humanities had chosen him to receive its first Thomas Jefferson Award in 1972. No more central a figure in literary criticism or the academic study of the humanities can be imagined. Yet Trilling's attitude about professional literary criticism, scholarship, and instruction in general, and about his own position within the academic establishment, was never a wholly comfortable one. A repeated theme in his writings, particularly of the later years, is that the very institutional status accorded literary works

493

494 I AMERICAN WRITERS bimonthly devoted to Jewish-American social and cultural concerns. At the conclusion of an impatient review of what he referred to as "Another Jewish Problem Novel" (published in The Menorah Journal in 1929 and later collected in Speaking of Literature and Society, 1980), Trilling asserted that only when the Jewish problem is included in a rich sweep of life, a life which would be important and momentous even without the problem of Jewishness, but a life to which the problem of Jewishness adds further import and moment, will a good Jewish novel have been written and something said about the problem. Trilling's own "Jewish problems"—his Jewish identity problem—was subordinated to the "rich sweep" of the mainstream culture of Europe and America that he studied and mastered. Responding to a 1944 symposium on "American Literature and the Younger Generation of American Jews" (Contemporary Jewish Record, February 1944; reprinted as "Under Forty" in Speaking of Literature and Society), he was willing to admit that' 'my existence as a Jew is one of the shaping conditions of my temperament," but he then added that I cannot discover anything in professional intellectual life which I can specifically trace back to my Jewish birth and rearing. I do not think of myself as a "Jewish writer." I do not have it in mind to serve by my writing any Jewish purpose. I should resent it if a critic of my work were to discover in it either faults or virtues which he called Jewish. The acceptance of a specifically Jewish dimension or direction would have amounted, for Trilling, to the sin he laid at the doors of the leading Jewish writers of his youth: the sin of "a willingness to accept exclusion and even to intensify it, a willingness to be provincial and parochial." Trilling would never accept that fate. In the tra-

dition of the great nineteenth-century novels he so admired, he may have imagined himself as the young man from the provinces—the ethnic provinces—who would storm the cultural capital of the West, making himself its greatest authority. In the process, however, a minimal but intransigent Jewish identity would serve one vital, if negative, purpose: it would preserve the distance between Trilling and that great gentile culture he mastered, thus preserving the sense of the self's conquest over alien material. To perform that function, Jewish identity could boil down to no more than the "feeling that I would not, even if I could, deny or escape being Jewish. Surely it is at once clear how minimal such a position is—how much it hangs on only a resistance (and even only a passive one)." To some extent bound up with this conflicted attitude about his Jewishness was Trilling's view of his political identity, which took shape in the 1930's and 1940's, the period during which he also came into his full powers as an intellectual. Here again one sees Trilling taking up a cautious stance bottvinside and outside of what he took to be established, organized positions. One such position for New York intellectuals was that offered by the American Communist Party and its affiliates. It was the period of the "fellow travelers"—liberal intellectuals drawn leftward into sympathy with Moscow by the economic depression in America and by the specter of fascism in Europe—and during those early depression years that saw growing support among American intellectuals for the policies and supposed moral leadership of the Soviet Union, Trilling identified himself with the radical cause, though his allegiance to Soviet-sponsored agencies was brief and he was never a member of a communist organization. In the years that followed, appalled by the treacheries of Stalin—the Moscow purge trails, the debacle of the Spanish Civil War, the crowning ignominy of the NaziSoviet pact—Trilling was yet more dismayed by

LIONEL TRILLING I 495 the evident willingness of fellow travelers in the West to discount damning reports or to appeal to "exigencies" that justified Stalin's actions. But Trilling's response was characteristic. He did not flee to the political right to seek a resting place for a troubled conscience: Whittaker Chambers, an old acquaintance, had done just that, and he furnished Trilling with a living example of the "tragic comedian" of twentiethcentury politics—the man who exchanges one extreme political investment for its opposite; Trilling depicted Chambers' guilt-ridden political shift in his 1947 novel The Middle of the Journey. Neither did Trilling turn to embrace Trotskyism, as a significant number of disaffected American Communists were to do. Instead, he moved toward another ambivalence. Establishing himself within the great Western liberal humanist tradition, he defined himself throughout his works as a dogged internal opponent of liberalism's cherished complacencies. He was fond of repeating John Stuart Mill's exhortation to his fellow liberals that they should study the conservative Samuel Taylor Coleridge: with Mill, he argued (in the essay "Kipling" in The Liberal Imagination, 1950) that "we should pray to have enemies who make us worthy of ourselves" because they strengthen our resources, while unworthy allies tempt liberals "to be content with easy victories of right feeling and with moral self-congratulation.'' The title of Trilling's most influential book, The Liberal Imagination, serves to identify its author with that imagination, but the book's essays carry out a determined critique of liberal temptations and pieties. Ambivalence, then, represented a key element in Trilling's sense of himself in his several defining relationships—with the academy and cultural life, with Jewishness, with liberal politics and culture. We are accustomed to regarding the trait as a weakness, an indecision, but it may actually account for Trilling's unique personal authority as a critic of culture and society for

some thirty-five years. In both politics and aesthetics, Trilling's was a principled ambivalence, a resistance to system and theory in their tendencies to transcend the given reality. His writings have their distinctive themes and tones, but these have the merit of stemming from an apparent refusal to validate the claims of any movement or school for the sake of solidarity alone. Trilling is certainly open to many criticisms, but the response he made to one charge in particular should be kept in mind. Richard Sennett writes he once accused Trilling, "You have no position; you are always in between," and that the answer he received was "Between is the only honest place to be." Throughout his career, Trilling identified with figures (real or fictional) who had inhabited the force field of "dialectical tension" between the great contending pressures of their ages or between the great contending pressures of any age, those contrary pulls toward social stability and conformity on the one hand and selfrealization on the other. His imagination responded to the "tragic" conviction that life in civilization is always conflicted, compromised, even painful for the selves who jostle against each other seeking fulfillment. His understanding of the relationship between culture and society, his notion of the role of art within social and individual life, always bore the marks of this commitment to tension. "A culture," he wrote in 1940 (see "Reality in America" in The Liberal Imagination), "is not a flow, nor even a confluence: the form of its existence is struggle, or at least debate—it is nothing if not a dialectic." And Trilling continued, speaking of nineteenth-century American writers in terms that apply equally well to himself: And in any culture there are likely to be certain artists who contain a large part of the dialectic within themselves, their meaning and power lying in their contradictions; they contain within themselves, it may be said, the very essence of

496 I AMERICAN WRITERS the culture, and the sign of this is that they do not submit to serve the ends of any one ideological group or tendency. Some such perspective is required for an appreciation of Trilling's career, which is not to be summed up by reference to the narrow conventional meaning of "critic," let alone "literary critic." What "critic" came to mean through Trilling's performance of that role is much closer to the meaning given above to "artist," and many of Trilling's remarks about literary artists he favored resonate with self-defining reverberations. He sought to occupy a central place in the traditional literary culture of his country and Europe, and so made his field of study broad enough to encompass the "yes and no" of Western culture in their many avatars; at the same time he sought to remain independent of mind, nimble in judgment. A phrase he had come across while researching his doctoral dissertation on Matthew Arnold in the 1930's—a phrase Arnold himself had quoted from Michel de Montaigne— provided Trilling with a lasting intellectual ideal: the best critic and the best artist were to him "ondoyant et divers"—"undulating and diverse"; that phrase is especially applicable to the novel, the capacious and variegated genre which always formed a point of reference in his thinking. As a critic, Trilling sought to be what in his 1943 book on E. M. Forster he described the novelist as being: "the agent of a moral intention which can only be carried out by the mind ondoyant et divers of which Montaigne spoke." Lionel Trilling was born in New York City on July 4, 1905, the only son of David and Fannie Cohen Trilling. His father had emigrated as a young man from Bialystok in Lithuania (now Poland); his mother had been born in London's East End. There she had acquired a lasting Anglophilia that was to have its effects on her son, as was her prodigious reading, particularly in nineteenth-century English and continental fic-

tion. Lionel was four or five years old when Fannie began reading Victorian novels to him, and she informed him at about the same time that she envisioned an Oxford doctorate for him in the future. These readings and goals made a foundation for the persona Trilling later exhibited at Columbia, both in his student and his teaching days. His evident fascination with the complex and nuanced pictures of society offered by the Victorian novel led Alfred Kazin to charge, in New York Jew (1978), that Trilling had made Victorian England his "intellectual motherland" and that the "extraordinarily accomplished son of an immigrant tailor was so passionate about England and the great world of the English nineteenth-century novel that his image of this literature turned England into a personal dream." In later years, Trilling's demeanor was often considered refined and mannerly, to the point that Irving Howe would remark of him (in an interview collected in French, Three Honest Men), "this extraordinarily suave, elegant, dapper man didn't look or behave quite as if he were descended from the Byalistok [sic] Trillings." Edward Shoben notes that the family name, though authentic, "suggests one conferred by immigration authorities . . . [at] Ellis Island"; Diana Trilling, Lionel's widow, writing in "A Jew at Columbia," an appendix to Speaking of Literature, doubts whether Trilling's freedom to build either his career or his public persona would have been the same "had his name been that of his maternal grandfather, Israel Cohen." The Trilling household was conservative in its religious practices, though stress was laid on the cultural value of maintaining Jewish tradition rather than on devoutness. The family kept kosher at home, but ignored the guidelines outside the house—David was an aficionado of ham and shellfish. Lionel remembered a childhood free of conflicts between the Jewish circle clustered around the local synagogue and the groups he encountered through public school and the rest of

UONEL TRILLING I 497 the community. He studied for his bar mitzvah* which eventually took place at the Jewish Theological Seminary, but he was clearly uninspired by the entire process. He would later claim never to have mastered Hebrew. David Trilling's work as a custom tailor earned a reasonably comfortable life for the family, but there was disappointment in his past and there would be more in later years. It was said that David had effectively been banished from Bialystok as a result of some obscure shame surrounding his bar mitzvah. When he decided to abandon tailoring for the wholesale fur business, he dreamed of great successes based on an unlikely scheme, which now seems sadly comic— for the production of winter fur coats for the chauffeurs of well-to-do families; but the day of the open car had already passed. David's failure in business placed an extra financial and emotional strain on Lionel during those early Depression years when he was beginning his academic career. Graduating from a city high school in 1921, Trilling entered Columbia College at the age of sixteen, beginning an association with the school that would last, with only brief interruptions, until his death over fifty years later. His first years at Columbia were fitful and undistinguished, but once he entered the orbit of John Erskine's General Honors program he seemed to have found his place. Erskine was nothing less than a missionary in the cause of general humanistic education, and he had persuaded the skeptical college authorities that a curriculum of Western classics from Homer to the twentieth century would have the effect of rounding the student into the **whole man" which Matthew Arnold had described as the desired result of education and culture. Specialization and philological scholarship were to give way to a broad inquisitive intelligence; the students, who were given no secondary materials to aid them in their confrontation with the texts they read, were guided

through small-group discussions that focused on the apparently universal questions of philosophy and morality raised by the texts. Stemming from the ideals of Arnold, Erskine's courses are clearly the forerunners of the "Great Books" programs still thriving at Columbia, the University of Chicago, and St. John's College; and they had a decisive influence in shaping Lionel Trilling's goal of becoming a critic and teacher of literature. In "Some Notes for an Autobiographical Lecturer" (1971), Trilling spoke of Erskine's curriculum as an adaptation for democratic society of the Renaissance ideals of humanistic education: Erskine believed, as had Sir Philip Sidney, that men who were in any degree responsible for the welfare of the polity and for the quality of life that characterized it must be large-minded men, committed to great ends, devoted to virtue, assured of the dignity of the human estate and dedicated to enhancing and preserving it; and that great works of the imagination could foster and even institute this large-mindedness, this magnanimity. But to remember that by the early 1920's Erskine and Columbia were operating in a city that for several decades had been the beachhead for the great immigrant waves from Europe is to recognize the practical importance, the ideological character, of Columbia humanism. For firstgeneration Americans like Trilling, the value of the Erskine program was to be found in its attempt to bring students of different cultural backgrounds into one cultural fold, showing young men how they might escape from the limitations of their middle-class or their lower-middle-class upbringings by putting before them great models of thought, feeling, and imagination, and great issues which suggested the close interrelation of the private and personal life with the public life, with life in society.

498 I AMERICAN WRITERS The Erskine courses were thus Trilling's road out of parochial or provincial life in America, and the focus on the relationship between personal and political concerns would become a distinctive feature of his own work. The influences of the program and its projected aims can also be registered in other facets of Trilling's career. As a critic and teacher, Trilling remained decidedly a nonspecialist, ranging across the broad terrain of Western literary and philosophical works. He made no secret of his great preference for undergraduate teaching over the more technical instruction of graduate students. His own intransigent humanism militated against what he regarded as the various airless systems and methods that would have their day of fashion in academic circles—at the end of his career he was attacking structuralism as he had attacked New Criticism years earlier. To treat a work of literature in a human manner meant to Trilling to avoid treating it as primarily an affair of structure, as a piece of architecture, the delicate balances and tensions of which could be minutely examined and decorously appreciated; literature, he always insisted, dealt in ideas, by which he did not mean prefabricated "pellets of intellection" borrowed from philosophy or theology and given "treatment" in literary works. In "The Meaning of a Literary Idea," the final essay in The Liberal Imagination, Trilling suggest that great literature gave great ideas fully rounded life, brought them into living relationship with readers; it was "in competition with philosophy, theology, and science . . . [and sought] to match them in comprehensiveness and power and seriousness." And to Trilling's mind the literary masterpiece would usually win this contest by virtue of its fullness in bodying forth ideas and emotions together, for "the ultimate questions of conscious and rational thought about the nature of man and his destiny match easily in the literary mind with the dark unconscious and with the most primitive human relationships."

Trilling graduated from Columbia College in 1925 and took a master's degree in English the following year. During the 1926-1927 academic year he taught in the experimental college created by Alexander Meiklejohn at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. The vast American Midwest was both fascinating and troubling to the inveterate young New Yorker: the complacencies of a homogeneous Christian culture alarmed him and made him reconsider his status as a Jew. In a short story describing this period, "Notes on a Departure" (collected in Of This Time, Of That Place), Trilling indicated some of the anxiety he felt at the prospect of being absorbed into gentile American life and the urge toward that necessary distance that an acknowledgement of his Jewishness would procure. Of his protagonist, Trilling writes, Once he had felt that the town was going to make him do things which he must not do. It sought to include him in a life into which he must not go. To prevent this he had made use of a hitherto useless fact. He had said, "I am a Jew," and immediately he was free. Back in New York, Trilling put this hitherto useless aspect of himself to work as an editor and contributor to The Menorah Journal, to which he had been introduced as an undergraduate. The journal promoted a frank and informed acknowledgment of Jewish cultural identity, seeking to free modern American Jews of the habit of regarding their origins as a stigma or burden. Between 1925 and 1931, Trilling published twentyfive articles, reviews, and stories in the journal, but his critical distance from the program of advancing a specifically Jewish self-awareness should not be underestimated. Most of Trilling's contributions were reviews of current "Jewish fiction," which he was apt to judge according to the standards of the best British or continental novels. Elinor Joan Grumet argues that Trilling used these occasions "to exorcise his ethnic hab-

LIONEL TRILLING I 499 its of mind, by making those reflexes the subject of literary contemplation." In 1929 Trilling married Diana Rubin and was teaching part-time at Hunter College while continuing to work on The Menorah Journal and studying at Columbia toward a Ph.D. The Wall Street crash meant that both Lionel's parents and the Rubins needed his assistance, so Trilling undertook a heavy burden of part-time teaching and book reviewing to make ends meet. The situation worsened when Diana became seriously ill with hyperthyroidism and required continual care and attention. In 1932 the English department at Columbia granted Trilling an instructorship paying $2,400—and entailing a considerable teaching load—but he still needed to supplement that income by what he could earn from his other labors. Not surprisingly, progress on his doctoral dissertation was slowed to a crawl, and Trilling's confidence, and the confidence of the department in him, waned. In 1936 he was informed that his instructorship would not be renewed. The department's action has been the subject of much adverse comment, not only because of Trilling's subsequent reputation, but also because the action is embroiled in the issue of antiSemitism in the American university system. Diana Trilling wrote in "A Jew at Columbia," her appendix to Speaking of Literature, that "the departmental spokesman said he would not be reappointed for a next year because 'as a Freudian, a Marxist, and a Jew' he was not happy there." There is little question that Columbia, like most major American universities, was just then accustoming itself to the idea of Jewish faculty members—they numbered a handful during Trilling's student days—and some disciplines were more resistant than others. English literature was one such field, as Trilling knew. Elliot Cohen, The Menorah Journal's managing editor, had been a brilliant student of literature at Yale, but he had decided that, for Jews, the obstacles to an academic career in the field were

still too great. (Cohen is best known today as the founding editor of the journal Commentary.) In retrospect, Trilling would write in "A Novel of the Thirties" (collected in The Last Decade) that "when I decided to go into academic life, my friends thought me naive to the point of absurdity, nor were they wholly wrong. . . . " His initial appointment had been something of a test case for the department, perhaps facilitated by his polished manner and the fact that his name did not sound "too Jewish." His interests in Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud— and he was no doctrinaire Marxist or Freudian— were almost inevitable for up-to-date young intellectuals in the 1930's, but these were "downtown," Greenwich Village interests that had no foothold in the conservative and gentlemanly corridors of the university; besides, Marx and Freud were considered "Jewish" thinkers whose theories aimed at the disintegration of traditional society. Still, Trilling was unquestionably overextended in his commitments and had made no discernible progress on his dissertation. In any case, the incident somehow instilled in him the determination he had been lacking. He called on senior faculty members in the department and persuaded them to reverse their decision, arguing, according to Diana Trilling in "A Jew at Columbia," that "they were getting rid of a person who would one day bring great distinction to their department." His earnest appeal worked, and he progressed steadily on his dissertation from then on. After it was completed and published, Trilling was appointed Assistant Professor at Columbia, the first Jew to become a regular member of the English faculty. That priority is worth mentioning because Columbia President Nicholas Murray Butler had a direct hand in Trilling's hiring and a clear polemical point to make through his intervention. As part of a scholar-exchange program, Butler had proposed to send philosopher Felix Adler to Berlin

500 / AMERICAN WRITERS University—it was 1939—but the chancellor there had written back to protest the sending of a Jew. At a gathering where Trilling and the chairman of the English Department were present, Butler recounted the story and pointedly referred to his response—"At Columbia, sir, we recognize merit, not race." That summer Trilling had his assistant professorship. The subject of Trilling's dissertation has to be seen as part of Trilling's problem in completing it. Trilling had decided on an intellectual biography of Matthew Arnold, a topic unlikely to inspire much enthusiasm among the orthodox scholars, especially since Trilling was determined to seek a wider audience, to de-emphasize archival scholarship in favor of a broad critical analysis of Victorian thought. To be sure, this commitment was not in Trilling's mind from the start. "It did not occur to me until I was pretty well into it," he later wrote in "Some Notes for an Autobiographical Lecture," "that I had chosen for my subject a man who touched almost every problematical aspect of a great and complex cultural epoch." Initially thinking of Arnold as an interesting but second-tier poet of melancholy temperament, Trilling discovered qualities in Arnold that were to serve as the basis for his own critical principles and style. Arnold, Trilling came to recognize, "had pitted himself against the culture, . . . had tried to understand the culture for the purpose of shaping it"; he was perhaps "the first literary intellectual in the English-speaking world." Not least among Arnold's attractions was that he shared the impulse to broaden the audience for cultural debate—he was the first Oxford Professor of Poetry to deliver his inaugural address in English, eschewing the dons' Latin. Matthew Arnold, which was published in 1939, is an impressive debut, nothing less than a cultural and intellectual history of the nineteenth century with Arnold at its center, confronting the dialectical tensions of the age with his own "sub-

tle critical dialectic." It is a long—by far the longest of Trilling's books—and occasionally digressive volume; one reviewer thought it was three aspiring books in one. It is also a constructive "misreading" of Arnold to the extent that it defines Arnold in such a way as to make him particularly of use to Trilling and his milieu. At the root of Arnold's shifting, often contradictory cultural thought, Trilling found a fundamental devotion to "ambivalence"—in the sense of undogmatic openmindedness—toward the rapidly changing society of his day; and Trilling recognized parallels between Arnold's England, with its obsessive concern over the effects of democratization and the waning of religious authority, and his own era, with its international spectacle of fascism and communism, warring ideologies that proclaimed the death of liberal democracy. Arnold had sought a revision of liberalism in his day, recognizing that the liberating force of individualism in the Protestant Reformation had given way to utilitarian theories that seemed nothing more than rationalizations of the factory owners' economic interests. And in light of the broad political enfranchisement effected by the 1867 Reform Bill, liberal individualism needed a safeguard against the tyranny of the "unenlightened" majority. Arnold tried to find it in "culture," which he considered the nurturing of the "best self" within every individual, that part of the self not ruled by class interests but by humane reason. The problem for Arnold was that Englishmen of his day had not yet developed their best selves, so the state, the only presence in society in which Arnold could recognize impartiality, would remain in absolute authority as regent until that time. Arnold called himself "a liberal of the future" and took up the phrase "Force till right is ready" as a motto for his conviction that challenges to state authority could not be brooked, that they could justifiably be suppressed, because the state acted in the best interests of the entire nation and preserved the

UONEL TRILLING I 501 ideal of that future society in which men could truly choose the right. Trilling's critics have been troubled by what they take to be his endorsement of Arnold's cultural politics, though in fact he is highly critical of many of Arnold's views. But it is clear that the several years' engagement with Arnold's thought during Trilling's apprenticeship had their decisive effects. One of the reasons the book took so long to write, it seems, is that it forced Trilling to reconsider the basis of his own early- 1930's radicalism. The philosopher Sidney Hook, who informally supervised the project from 1931, recalled that Trilling's original purpose had been to subject Arnold to a rigorous Marxist-dialectical analysis; as Trilling worked, however, he established a more respectful critical relationship with Arnold, and the Marxist theoretical apparatus dropped out in favor of what Trilling perceived as Arnold's own version of the dialectic. In the context of the 1930's, this constituted a shift of allegiances from a rigid system—the Marxist— which claimed to possess the key to all history, to an ambivalent individualism capable of meeting distinct historical changes with different responses. Trilling admired Arnold for his freedom from a party-line interpretation of events. For example, as Trilling poses in the introductory note, how did Arnold feel about the French Revolution? Was he a partisan of the Revolution or its vigorous opponent? We might show by quotation that he was either or both, but actually he was neither; his feeling about the Revolution was determined, first, by his notion of the historical context in which it had occurred and, second, by the particular historical moment in which he was writing. What determined him to speak for or against the Revolution at any particular time was his conception of how much of the Revolutionary principle England at that time required.

A passage like this one obliges us to read it as also a statement about Trilling and his relations with Arnold and Marxism in the 1930's. Trilling's shift toward Arnold was a response to his conception of how much of the Arnoldian antidote American intellectuals at his time required. The move established Trilling as an heir to the nineteenth-century tradition of "anti-mechanical" social criticism, which objected to the unrestricted, machine-like operations of laissezfaire capitalism; Trilling's perception was that the monolithic Soviet Marxism of his time was functioning in just as mechanical a fashion to direct the political and cultural judgments of sympathizers in the West. Nor was Trilling alone in this view. In 1937 he had begun publishing pieces in the Partisan Review, a cultural journal newly reconstituted after a period spent following the lead of the Communist International; the editors, Philip Rahv and William Phillips, had broken with Stalinist communism and had taken up a Trotskyite position respecting the relative independence of art and literature from political exigencies. They were strong supporters of literary modernism, contrasting its radical styles and forms with the stodgy, narrow-minded socialist realism that had become the cultural policy of communism, adopted by the First Congress of Soviet Writers in 1934. In Partisan Review Trilling found a venue for many of the essays he would write over the next decades, the essays that were to be his primary form of expression and that were to establish his critical reputation. The years from 1939 to 1950 make up the key decade in Trilling's development. During this period he articulated his insider's critique of modern liberalism in a book-length study of E. M. Forster, in a novel and several short stories, and in the essays that make up his 1950 volume, The Liberal Imagination. His position, insofar as a single one can be discerned, can be summed up in a description he applied to Nathaniel Hawthorne in 1940. Hawthorne, Trilling says,

502 / AMERICAN WRITERS 4

'could dissent from the orthodoxies of dissent"; Trilling considers this a stance on both literature and politics. The phrase appears in the opening essay of The Liberal Imagination, "Reality in America/' a brilliant piece in which Trilling takes the liberal intellectuals to task for their addiction to a literary realism based on a simpleminded conception of "reality" as "always material reality, hard, resistant, unformed, impenetrable, and unpleasant." Reality thus conceived is numbingly simple, elemental, and impervious to the mind and will and the moral complexities in which they are entangled. Wellmeaning liberals are swayed into dumb submission, into orthodoxy, claims Trilling, whenever they see signs that a writer has broken through to this level of "reality"; they suspect and stand aloof from actual moral intelligence; they prefer Theodore Dreiser to Henry James. In politics this means that they are in thrall to movements addressing the Common Man, the myth of the completely nonintellectual being who purportedly lives at a more authentic angle to "reality" than do intellectuals with their abstract ideas. But do intellect, perspicacity, subtlety, and the appreciation of complexity really have no place in reality, Trilling asks? Over against the crude literary and political materialism he diagnoses, Trilling establishes, in essays on James's The Princess Casamassima (1948) and on "Manners, Morals, and the Novel" (1948, in The Liberal Imagination), his conception of moral realism as the defining characteristic of the great, large-canvass nineteenth-century novels that embrace the societies they describe in their totality, dramatizing the prevailing conflicts and tensions in all their variousness. Looking at the contemporary American cultural scene in the late 1940's, Trilling writes in "Manners, Morals, and the Novel," Perhaps at no other time has the enterprise of moral realism ever been so much needed, for at

no other time have so many people committed themselves to moral righteousness. We have the books that point out the bad conditions, that praise us for taking progressive attitudes. We have no books that raise questions in our minds not only about conditions but about ourselves, that lead us to refine our motives and ask what might lie behind our good impulses. Trilling understood that, for intellectuals, politics can be a means of expressing or compensating for hidden desires and frustrations. His customary manner of cultural analysis would become the investigation, mainly by means of literary-critical articles with their own local agendas, of the personal motivations behind the impulses of the American intellectuals. But personal motivation should not be given a narrow interpretation here. By considering what unstated fulfillments liberal intellectuals were seeking, Trilling was writing a psychological analysis of his culture, and, to that end, he employed the theories of Freud in an unprecedented and influential way. Several of Trilling's essays of the 1940's discuss the advantages and disadvantages, the strengths and weaknesses, of Freud's ideas for cultural analysis—the essays "Freud and Literature" (1940) and "Art and Neurosis" (1945) are classic accounts of Freud's shortcomings as an interpreter of literature and art, emphasizing instead the value of Freud's overall conception of mind for an appreciation of the place of art in psychic and public life. A major concern of Trilling's is to show that Freud's notions treat art as a " normal'' function of mind theoretically open to everyone, not as the activity of specially endowed, "mad" artists as much of Western tradition conceives of them. Other essays, such as the one on James's The Princess Casamassima or that on Wordworth's "Immortality Ode" (1941), draw vital inspiration from specific Freudian insights and show the potential of a nonmechanical psychoanalytic criticism. At a more basic level, Trilling's assumption,

UONEL TRILLING I 503 shared with the Freud of Civilization and Its Discontents, was that the cost of life in civilization, in culture, was a restriction on the self's desire for absolute autonomy and gratification. In "The Princess Casamassima" Trilling argues that the protagonist of James's novel recognizes what very few people wish to admit, that civilization has a price, and a high one. Civilizations differ from one another as much in what they give up as in what they acquire; but all civilizations are alike in that they renounce something for something else. We do right to protest this in any given case that comes under our notice and we do right to get as much as possible for as little as possible; but we can never get everything for nothing. The Freudian idea informing this passage supplied Trilling with a lasting framework for his critique of the liberal imagination: it wants everything for nothing. In the fellow travelers and their descendents Trilling sees the intellectual sin of dreaming of a society without psychic restraint and conflict, along with the delusion of imagining such a society could be planned, once and for all, by rational intellect. Politics is not really politics for the intellectuals; it is self-hatred (in the idealization of the nonintellectual) and the will to power (in the desire to build society anew by rational intellect) projected onto external life. The attraction of Marx and the USSR was that they seemed to promise an end to all the conflict and frustration that make us hate the ordinary politics of continual struggle and inevitable compromise. In his essay "The Sense of the Past" (1942), included in The Liberal Imagination, Trilling claimed that Marx had given voice to what has come to be a secret hope of our time, that man's life in politics, which is to say, man's life in history, shall come to an end. . . . With all the passion of a desire kept secret even from

ourselves, we yearn to elect a way of life which shall be satisfactory once and for all. ... Trilling's attack on the dream of an end to history, and his shift of allegiance from Marx to Freud, has made him, in turn, the subject of numerous attacks, at least some of which warrant serious consideration. By endorsing Freud's notion that some "renunciation" of psychic desire is always a precondition for life in society, Trilling often appears to suggest that any criticism of the status quo is a bad-faith manifestation of the self's desire for what he calls "unconditioned" or limitless being. Because his discussions remain so general, his occasional disclaimers do not dispel this overall appearance. On the other hand, it is certainly worth considering whether intellectual discourse about culture and politics really has cultural or political ends in view, or whether it is primarily a means of self-protection and self-congratulation, a way of demonstrating purity of intention, for those with little directly at risk in the results of the positions they take. Especially worthy of criticism is the intellectuals' tendency, in spite of their capacity to comprehend moral complexity, to treat political and cultural matters in terms of simple binary oppositions, with "good" on our side and "bad" on the other. This habit of thought, or of the appearance of thought, licenses the idea that all of our problems and sufferings are ascribable to power wielded against us from outside; this in turn leads us to believe that if we can cast down the holders of that power, we will live without problems or suffering. In literature, such convictions, as Trilling saw it, had built the vogue of proletarian novels and all expos6 fiction "that point[s] out the bad conditions, that praisefs] us for taking progressive attitudes" ("Manners, Morals, and the Novel," in The Liberal Imagination). In his 1943 book on E. M. Forster, Trilling used the English novelist's work as a counterexample to the bad realism

504 I AMERICAN WRITERS he saw all around him in America. Trilling praised Forster's "unremitting concern with moral realism, . . . which is not the awareness of morality itself but of the contradictions, paradoxes and dangers of living the moral life"; rather than showing life as offering the simple alternatives of Good and Evil in his novels, Forster had a fundamental perception of "the inextricable tangle" of "good-and-evil." Not surprisingly, Trilling finds Forster's 1910 novel Howards End, with its story of the entangled involvement of the well-meaning, intellectual Schlegel sisters with the wealthy businessman Henry Wilcox and the lower-middle-class Leonard Bast, to be the novelist's masterpiece, for it eschews the temptation that is inherent in its dramatis personae—the temptation to vilify Wilcox and exalt Bast. The willingness to insist that life is morally complicated and is likely to remain so earns Forster Trilling's esteem as a liberal who is "at war with the liberal imagination." Apart from its literary objective, to shame the American novel back toward moral realism, Trilling's E. M. Forster is a polemical act for other reasons as well. To celebrate complication, good and evil, and being at war with the liberal imagination in 1943, when the Western allies are themselves at war against an obvious external "evil," is to exhibit the depth of one's commitment to a morally complex universe. As Trilling was aware, Forster was engaged during the war in the effort to protect civil liberties against the repressive enforcement of the Defense of the Realm Act; without such vigilance on behalf of democratic freedoms, Forster would argue, the allied powers would reduce themselves to the level of the fascists. Trilling evinced a similar conviction in his work of the 1940's. "To the simple mind," he writes in E. M. Forster, "the mention of complication looks like a kind of malice, and to the mind under great stress the suggestion of something 'behind' the apparent fact looks like a call to quietism, like mere shilly-

shallying." But in the preface to The Liberal Imagination Trilling asserted that "a criticism which has at heart the interests of liberalism might find its most useful work not in confirming liberalism in its sense of general lightness but rather in putting under some degree of pressure the liberal ideas and assumptions of the present time." Trilling's campaign to put the ideas and assumptions of liberalism under pressure was also carried out in works of fiction written in the 1940's. From the beginning of his career, Trilling had wanted to write fiction, and he had produced several short stories during the 1920's; in the 1950's he was still entertaining the idea of further projects, which he never completed. But in the 1940's Trilling published his one novel, The Middle of the Journey, as well as a few stories. The novel has some real power, and at least one of the stories ("Of This Time, Of That Place" [1943]) manages a delicate pathos, but the works are all limited by their author's apparent desire to produce a fiction of "ideas": characters tend to occupy fixed ideological positions, from which they perform fairly predictable actions and utter fairly predictable, all-too-polished platform statements. But the fictions are, at any rate, continuations of Trilling's cultural-political arguments by other means. The story "The Other Margaret" (1945; collected in Of This Time, Of That Place), for example, debunks the liberal assumption that all personal defects are the result of society: Margaret, the protagonist's thirteenyear-old daughter, excuses the repeated bad behavior of "the other Margaret," the family's maid, "because she's colored. She has to struggle so hard—against prejudice. It's so hard for her." But the first Margaret begins to learn a hard lesson of her own when the maid deliberately breaks a small sculpture the girl has made, forcing the realization that personal responsibility still exists, in spite of the convenient fiction that society is always to blame. "She meant to

UONEL TRILLING I 505 do it/ 9 the girl keeps repeating in amazement, when she sees the fragments of her sculpture. In The Middle of the Journey, the Grooms, an intellectual, fellow-traveling couple in the 1930's, similarly forgive the regular lapses of their hired man, Duck Caldwell, because Duck is "so real," as Nancy Groom says, using "reality" in just the manner Trilling analyzed in his article "Reality in America." The protagonist, John Laskell, is able to see that Duck is in fact a manipulative, self-indulgent, and violent man—his being a member of the working class is no excuse. It is not only that personal responsibility is voided when the liberal holds society always to blame, according to Trilling. The acknowledgment of responsibility is the recognition that life—individual life—has real value, because actual consequences attend the decisions of a single person. It is a form of homage to personal existence; Marxism and the other great ideologies (including religion) negate the value of personal being by casting all action in terms of historical necessity or class consciousness or eschatology. And here we approach an important theme raised in the fiction of the 1940's, one that helps connect it to Trilling's work of the 1950's: the proper appreciation of living is bound up with a keen awareness of human mortality. A sentence Trilling was fond of quoting was E. M. Forster's statement (in Howards End) that "Death destroys a man, but the idea of death saves him." In "The Other Margaret," the protagonist, Stephen El win, arrives at the meaning of a random sentence he has been turning over in his mind all day: it is Hazlitt's claim that "No young man believes he shall ever die." Listening to his daughter's rationalizations of the other Margaret's actions and recognizing that he has often committed similar liberal gestures, El win experiences a sudden enlightenment: it is the failure to believe in the reality of death that robs human beings of their reverence for personal life and responsibility. Conversely, the acceptance of the

burden of responsibility entails an acceptance of the ultimate burden of death, but only by being thus burdened can one's life have any "weight." John Laskell shares this perspective in The Middle of the Journey. Before the action of the novel opens, death has claimed the woman he loved, and Laskell has nearly died himself, suffering a dangerous case of scarlet fever. During the weeks of his convalescence, Laskell had found himself awestruck by the raw fact of "being"—staring for hours at a rose, pondering the simple difference between what exists and what does not—and he has consequently acquired that reverence for life that is founded on a long, hard look at death. He longs to share his vision with others, but the forward-thinking Grooms show their unwillingness to dwell on such morbid subjects, as if they thought that death were "a negation of the future and of the hope it holds out for a society of reason and virtue," as if death were "reactionary." The novel works its way around to a denouement that forces the Grooms to acknowledge death, in a manner that cuts to the heart of their political illusions: Duck Caldwell, drunk, kills his daughter when he strikes her in raucous anger. In fact, Duck did not know that the girl's heart was weak, and the blows he administered were not hard, but they were sufficient to cause heart failure. At the end of the novel, when they have learned that Duck will be freed from jail because the death has been ruled accidental, Trilling's main characters debate the question of responsibility in the specific case. The Grooms are still fighting off the idea that Duck is to blame, speaking of "social causes, environment, education or lack of education," and so forth; and yet Nancy Groom must admit that she does not want Duck to return to his job, for "I can't stand the idea of having him around me." From this account of his novelistic assault on liberal pieties, it may seem that Trilling had indeed swung to the political right, but another

506 / AMERICAN WRITERS major character in The Middle of the Journey is set in place to make us aware that John Laskell actually occupies that tense "in-between" position Trilling himself inhabited. Gifford Maxim, the character Trilling based on Whittaker Chambers, has changed from devoted communist to harshest Christian moralist almost overnight, and his argument about Duck is simply that the killer is "wholly responsible . . . for eternity, for everlasting." But Maxim, like the Crooms, is addicted to a future in which all will be made well—a future that, in LaskelFs and Trilling's estimation, negates the present. Maxim thinks that there is divine judgment and mercy awaiting us all in that future, just as he had once believed in the eventual dictatorship of the proletariat leading to the withering away of the state. Only Laskell grasps what the novel presents as the lesson of "maturity," that "the future and the present were brought together, that you lived your life now instead of preparing and committing yourself to some better day to come." To an extent, Trilling's developing theme of reverent acceptance of "being" and the present can be related to the existentialist movements of the 1940's and 1950's, although Trilling never addressed that affinity directly and had little of good to say about existentialists like Jean-Paul Sartre when they entered his purview. The foundation he would always return to was the "tragic humanism" of Freud, and in The Opposing Self (1955), his major essay-collection of the 1950's, Trilling rings the changes on the Freudian conclusion that an acceptance of human life entails an acceptance of limited or "conditioned" existence, a renunciation of the psyche's dreams of total gratification. But Trilling is deeply contradictory in the essays of this period, and it has been suggested that in the new conformity of the Cold War era, which saw the intellectuals' repudiation of Stalinism, he was for some time adrift, not yet sure of how to respond to the new conditions. And it is important to recognize, as Mark

Krupnick has observed, that Trilling was operating in two very different modes in his writings of the decade. In the longer essays of The Opposing Self, Trilling figures as an opposing self, a voice in the wilderness, wandering through intricate loops of argument and association to carry out an obscure spiritual quest on behalf of American culture; but Trilling's other volume, A Gathering of Fugitives (1956), consisting mainly of short pieces written for two influential book clubs, presents an author who has made his peace with establishment culture, who adopts a calm, droll, confiding tone in order to introduce books of interest to his culturally ambitious middle-class readers. Trilling's characteristic ambivalence begins to grow somewhat out of control in The Opposing Self. His Freudian and Arnoldian loyalties seem to come into conflict. The nineteenth-century English tradition to which Arnold contributed formulated "culture" as a compensatory field for the development of the self's emotional and imaginative capacities; material society organized according to utilitarian principles denied such development. But Freud had convinced Trilling that life in any form of civilization (and in this context "culture" is often used interchangeably with "civilization") imposed limits on the self, that the urge to seek compensatory fulfillment in dreams, in neuroses, and in art would be always with us. So Trilling is caught between two views of the "alienation" of the self, one specific to certain historical and political conditions, the other a supposed universal truth of the human condition. On the one hand, The Opposing Self announced itself in its preface as a book about "the modern self," the sense of selfhood dating from the late eighteenth century and identified by its "intense and adverse imagination of the culture in which it has its being." In "The Poet as Hero: Keats in His Letters," Trilling writes admiringly of the "heroism" of John Keats, who recognized that "Soul-making"

LIONEL TRILLING I 507 or self-affirmation could proceed only in the face of a powerful, resisting, often painful external force. The modern self makes itself by its opposition to some self-denying power. Yet Keats's perception is presented as yielding a universal fact of life, not a new *'modern" phenomenon; and it is never fully clear whether that selfdenying power comes from the restrictions that civilization places on the self, or from the natural or "biological" truths of age and pain and mortality. Still, Trilling celebrates the boldness of Keats's will to maintain the self in spite of his deep vision of that-which-denies: [Keats] canvasses the possibilities of amelioration of the human fate and concludes that our life even at its conceivable best can be nothing but tragic, the very elements and laws of nature being hostile to man. Then, having stated as extremely as this the case of human misery, he breaks out with sudden contempt for those who call the world a vale of tears. The courage of this tragic affirmation is a dialectical courage: the self opposes what limits it, but acknowledges that limiting power as the necessary opposite against which the self constructs itself. Essay after essay in The Opposing Self speaks of the need to attain a similar affirmation and of the quality in modern culture that militates against that effort. In our world and in our literature, Trilling argues, we have become so accustomed to the self-denying aspects of life—to "evil"—that our imagination succumbs to the temptation to imagine the self completely overcome by them, completely disintegrated; in the wake of Auschwitz, we are used to despair. Modern culture begins with the conviction that "we must, in our time, confront circumstances which are so terrible that the soul, far from being defined and developed by them, can only be destroyed by them." The danger is that we have come to valorize evil and terrible power, to make

the nihilistic assumption that only evil is real. Our culture has even come to confer what Trilling describes in "Wordsworth and the Rabbis" as "spiritual prestige" on whatever exhibits "some form of aggressive action directed outward upon the world, or inward upon ourselves." Trilling, who had tried to correct an earlier view of "reality in America," now tries to correct this other. We need, he believes, to recover a view of some resistant core of * 'being" on which to build such affirmations as Keats could manage. Writing on William Wordsworth, Leo Tolstoy, William Dean Howells, and George Orwell, Trilling repeatedly makes the point: we need to overcome our "hyperaesthesia" with an open appreciation of what Trilling variously calls "the elemental given of biology" or "the sentiment of Being," which is to say, the overwhelmingly simple fact of our, and others', existence as biological creatures. This appreciation was at the basis of Wordsworth's celebrations of common life in the figures of the Old Cumberland Beggar or the Leech-Gatherer of "Resolution and Independence"; looking at these isolated figures— poor, rootless, bearing almost no relationship to civilization—Wordsworth sees them as possessing that authentic kernel of being which is to be found and cherished in all humanity as the basis of the moral community of the world. In similar fashion, Trilling argues, writers like Tolstoy, Howells, and Orwell offer their visions of the life-affirming value residing even, or especially, in the trivial details of bourgeois domestic life. Like the "common life" of Wordsworth's poetry, the unrefined, the undazzling, the mediocre is worthy of affectionate interest in the works of these authors. An aspidistra—"ugly, stubborn, organic emblem of survival"—is in one of Orwell's novels a symbol of the "biological-social heroism" of a man persisting with life at its most unpicturesque and finding a "stubborn joy" therein. Howells flies in the face of our yearning for the drama of un-

508 I AMERICAN WRITERS conditioned spirit with his insistence on the small 4 'smiling aspects of life/9 In the essay "Anna Karenina" Tolstoy earns praise for perceiving that "to comprehend unconditioned spirit is not so very hard, but there is no knowledge rarer than the understanding of spirit as it exists in the inescapable conditions which the actual and the trivial make for it.'' Howells and Orwell are even prized for not being "geniuses/9 but rather common, honest men capable of loving the commonplace. I have already noted the charge brought against Trilling for his tendency to elide what in human life is of natural cause and what is of social cause—the latter theoretically changeable by human effort, the former impervious to it; and his sympathy with those affirmations of what is "given99 in life certainly seems liable to such a charge. But we should observe that Trilling's intention was to establish "biological faith99 as a means by which the self can resist—oppose—the pressures brought to bear on it by culture or civilization or society. Indeed, in order to preserve this space "beyond culture,99 Trilling mounted a longstanding assault on post-Freudian analysts like Karen Homey, Erich Fromm, and Harry Stack Sullivan, who de-emphasized the biological or instinctual roots of behavior in favor of culturally specific sources like family structure. Trilling's argument here has clear affinities with his earlier opposition to Stalinism. As Trilling explained in "Freud: Within and Beyond Culture,99 a 1955 lecture delivered to the members of the new York Psychoanalytical Society (collected in Beyond Culture, 1965), biological fact has a fundamental place in Freud's thinking: over against the broad vistas of possible socialengineering "reforms99 glimpsed by neoFreudian theory, Freud demands that we recognize the human being's recalcitrance to plans to redesign society in hopes of eliminating psychic conflict. Trilling fears the hubris of the Utopian social planners who may follow the neo-

Freudians; he believes that coerced conformity, not liberation, is likely to be the result of their blueprints for humanity. Regardless of whether Freud is wrong or right about the role of biology in human fate, we must stop to consider whether this emphasis on biology . . . is not so far from being a reactionary idea that it is actually a liberating idea. It proposes to us that culture is not all-powerful. It suggests that there is a residue of human quality beyond the reach of cultural control, and that this residue of human quality, elemental as it may be, serves to bring culture itself under criticism and keeps it from being absolute. Freud's and Trilling's "biologism99 is usually offered as evidence of a reactionary view of human possibility, but Trilling's concern is that a theoretical limit be placed on the role of culture in determining individual life. Ironically, the argument bears a resemblance to those advanced by the Frankfurt-School Marxists Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer in the 1940's, in their attacks on the "totally administered society" of American consumer capitalism. Idiosyncratic dialecticians just as Trilling was, they too regarded the "totalizing" tendency of culture with suspicion and dread. In the decade between 1955 and 1965 Trilling attempted to understand the relationship between the opposing selves he had described in his 1955 essay collection—Wordsworth, Keats, and others—and the conformist modern culture that now seemed to be closing in around the individual. Trilling was divided about the extent to which those original opposing selves represented the beginning of a continuous tradition of modern selfhood or a lost form of selfhood which we no longer apprehend. He often stressed the degree to which they stand apart from us—we who are the twentieth-century heirs to their tradition. In the back of Trilling's mind is Friedrich Nietzsche's famous distinction from The Birth of

LIONEL TRILLING I 509 Tragedy: they managed to maintain the balance and tension between Apollonian and Dionysian principles, while we hunger only for the terrible Dionysian aesthetics of self-disintegration. We scorn the simple idea of "pleasure" or "joy," with which the romantic poets were able to celebrate being. But there are also similarities. Modern literature, says Trilling—thinking of Feodor Dostoevsky, Franz Kafka, Thomas Mann, D. H. Lawrence, and others—is characterized by its adversary intention, [its] actually subversive intention, . . . its clear purpose of detaching the reader from the habits of thought and feeling that the larger culture imposes, of giving him a ground and a vantage point from which to judge and condemn, and perhaps revise, the culture that produced him. This is Trilling writing in 1965, in the preface to his collection Beyond Culture. As this passage suggests, modern literature does continue the "opposing self" tradition insofar as it seeks to counteract the conformist pressures of the civilization or "culture." Its ferocity of opposition is a new feature, but its main bearing toward culture is the same. The real difference, then, between our forerunners and ourselves does not result from an essentially new quality in selfhood, but rather from the scale on which the model of the opposing self has been accepted within the culture at large. Through a variety of means, we have arrived at a very large scale of acceptance of that idea. From the opposing self, we have evolved the unprecedented phenomenon of what Trilling calls "the adversary culture." Since about the first quarter of the twentieth century, he argues, there has emerged in American society a substantial group that is attuned to the dynamics of oppositional selfhood and its demonstration in art; the group's development can be correlated to

the growth of the American university as an arbiter of taste. Trilling is responding, of course, to a shift that exactly correlates with his own career as well. When he first entered into the academic study of literature, he had been aware that the main body of intellectuals who commented on the general current or recent cultural scene was not affiliated with universities—Edmund Wilson, literary editor of The New Republic, may stand as the best example of the old breed. But by the 1950's and 1960's there were few "nonprofessionals" left. The professionalization of criticism also followed on and was facilitated by the efflorescence of modern literature from Dostoevsky to Joseph Conrad, William Butler Yeats, and Kafka. Academic literary study grew in absorbing and canonizing the modernist works. This has meant that the audience for modern literature has grown from the tiny readerships of the little magazines of the 1920's and 1930's to the burgeoning student body in the universities across America. At the same time, however, the canonization, the institutionalization of modern literature has put its adversary capacities very much in question. What happens when a large part of the establishment culture has learned to accept the subversive, opposing-self imagination of modern literature and art? Many of the essays in Beyond Culture try to address this question in the looselystructured, associative manner increasingly characteristic of Trilling's later work. Significantly, Trilling begins and ends the volume with essays on the teaching of literature in universities. The 1961 essay "On the Teaching of Modern Literature" is an extended rumination that reveals his frustrations in the attempt to make modern writing's subversive force hit home to the very college students who had requested that the course be offered. After detailing his carefully planned syllabus of challenging, provocative works, Trilling characterizes the students'

570 / AMERICAN WRITERS habitual response to the "strong dose" he was offering them: they exhibit a baffling readiness . . . to engage in the process that we might call the socialization of the anti-social, or the acculturation of the anti-cultural, or the legitimation of the subversive. When the termessays come in, it is plain to me that almost none of the students have been taken aback by what they have read: they have wholly contained the attack. The unshockability of his students amounts, for Trilling, to evidence that the modernists' oppositional stance—their spurning of the culture that surrounded them, their passionately spiritual rejection of the "specious goods" that bourgeois culture cast before them as objects of desire— has become part of an easily mimicked set of styles for conveying defiance of the general culture. The adversary culture is a parody of the original primal violence and power of literary modernism. We have evolved a conformity of nonconformity, or what Trilling refers to in "The Fate of Pleasure" as "an accredited subversiveness, an established moral radicalism, a respectable violence." The closing essay in Beyond Culture speaks in troubled tones of "The Two Environments" open to students of literature when they leave their universities: one is philistia, very much as it was in Matthew Arnold's time; the other the equally established adversary culture, which "shows the essential traits of any cultural environment: firm presuppositions, received ideas, approved attitudes, and a system of rewards and punishments." Like any culture, the adversary culture rewards conformist behavior: it delivers what Trilling calls "spiritual prestige" to those who can make the proper gestures betokening intransigence to cultural determination. Beneath Trilling's provocative generalizations in Beyond Culture and his other late works was an awareness of what is usually called the 4 'coun-

terculture" of the 1960's, and his apparent exposure of the inner mechanisms of the anticultural culture invites comparisons with his attacks on the bad faith of the 1930's fellow travelers. In the 1960's and 1970's, neoconservative disciples like Norman Podhoretz, exploiting this analogy, attempted to lure Trilling into alliance with their movement; in a 1974 Commentary discussion, Podhoretz urged Trilling to comply with his view that the cultural critic's best function ought then to be "to stand in an adversary relation to the adversary culture itself." It is true that Trilling had looked with little favor on the campus uprisings of the late 1960's, the most notorious of which occurred at Columbia; but it is also notable that he refused any such endorsements as Podhoretz urged him to make. And the idea of adversary culture surely contains its own measure of radical insight which we ought not overlook: it suggests the possibility that bourgeois society has protected itself by producing a safe alternative to itself within itself, where truly adversary sentiments may be purged away in symbolic, self-congratulatory actions. Furthermore, in keeping with its highly general nature, Trilling's concept of the adversary culture has other objects in view than specific political alignments and events. It implicitly addresses itself to the large cultural phenomenon now commonly called postmodernism and raises new questions about the possible role of art in a society in which the adversary culture has become entrenched. In a note in his final book, Sincerity and Authenticity (1972), originally the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard University, Trilling summed up the postmodern cultural scene as follows: At the present moment, art cannot be said to make exigent demands upon the audience. That segment of our culture which is at all responsive to contemporary art is wholly permeable by it. The situation no longer obtains in which the ex-

LIONEL TRILLING I 511 perience of a contemporary work begins in resistance and proceeds by relatively slow stages to a comprehending or submissive admiration. The artist now can make scarcely anything which will . . . outrage [the audience's] habitual sensibility. The postmodern is the vicious circle of consumer unshockability—since the consumer needs the prestige of demonstrated appreciation of the 4 'adversarial"—and ever more futilely outrageous artistic attempts to shock. Trilling, having spent some forty years deeply involved with literature and art, is now posing the question whether they still have any capacity to contribute to the formation of actually autonomous individuals. He was forced to admit in the preface to Beyond Culture that "art does not always tell the truth or the best kind of truth and does not always point out the right way, that it can even generate falsehood and habituate us to it. . . ." In one of the essays in Beyond Culture, Trilling reminds us that Dostoevsky's Underground Man, the classic example of the furious modern "opposing self,'' had hissed out his venom at the establishment with the words "I have more life in me than you have." It was an appeal to the biological again, the self-professedly "authentic" core of being that resists the encroachment of culture. In the rhetoric of the adversary culture, however, members construct a myth of their moral or spiritual superiority to the primary culture on the basis of such appeals to authenticity. Where was the self seeking actual, and not spurious, selfhood to go from here? Trilling had no prescriptive answer, but turned, in his final book, to an examination of what he now envisioned as the four-hundred-year history of modern selfhood. Sincerity and Authenticity begins by arguing that sincerity, the ideal of being "true to oneself' in order to uphold a communal standard of morality, emerged in Renaissance Europe as a response to the Machiavellian nature of court life; it is in Polonius' advice to Laertes, "to thine

own self be true," which we view as simplistic or platitudinous only because we are now so far from the ideal's original power. Implying a frank relationship between inner self and outer culture, sincerity was still viable in the Romantic period, when Wordsworth could describe the poet as simply "a man speaking to men." Eventually, however, sincerity lost its authority over us. Alongside it had grown, since the middle of the eighteenth century, the counterideal of authenticity, in which the self is conceived of as wholly private, resistant to culture's authority and resentful of it—the self of the Underground Man. By the latter part of the twentieth century, the ideal of authenticity has carried the day; it is clear that Trilling regards it as the driving force beneath the adversary culture. Between those two poles Trilling hangs no conventional argument—though his sympathies plainly rest with the old, degraded sincerity—but rather an astonishing series of reflections on examples drawn from the literature, philosophy, and psychology of the past four centuries. The core of Trilling's contentions is familiar: the modern, post-sincerity self seeks its fulfillment, as G. W. F, Hegel had described, through the very alienation from its culture that would seem to negate it. Met with culture's limiting force, this self strives to be free of all limitation. But again, Trilling believes we are witnessing the institutionalization or domestication of such an alienated self: alienation from an "inauthentic" bourgeois culture is only indoctrination into adversary culture, where one learns what Theodor Adorno called "the jargon of authenticity" and competes for its peculiar rewards. By turns brilliant and murky—ondoyant et divers to an almost maddening degree—Sincerity and Authenticity truly defies summary. Interpretations of Hegel, Freud, Denis Diderot, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Conrad, and JeanJacques Rousseau consort with references to Sartre, Jane Austen, Moliere, Marx, Henry James,

572 / AMERICAN WRITERS Maximilian Robespierre, James Joyce, Herbert Marcuse, and many others. And because Trilling will allow himself neither hope nor nostalgia, sees no way forward or back, this plethora of references never fully coheres. But the force of Trilling's attack on the cult of authenticity commands respect. The book concludes with attacks on the contemporary psychologists, such as R. D. Laing and David Cooper, who had taken the ideal of authenticity to the point of asserting that insanity was a righteous and appropriate reponse to a false society. If society is nothing but corrupt power, they imagine, then what it defines as "rationality" is only another coercive, corrupting force; some protest this coercion by opting out of "reason" altogether. Trilling's rejoinder to the intellectual vogue that "madness is health, that madness is liberation and authenticity" is profound and stirring, a powerful blow struck in Trilling's longstanding war with the intellectuals. In "The Authentic Unconscious" Trilling writes, many among us find it gratifying to entertain the thought that alienation is to be overcome only by the completeness of alienation, and that alienation completed is not a deprivation or deficiency but a potency. . . . The falsities of an alienated social reality are rejected in favour of an upward psychopathic mobility to the point of divinity, each one of us a Christ. . . . The end result of our devotion to authenticity is the deification of psychosis and the spurning of all community; the adversary culture becomes an economy of its own, in which we may all strive for "upward psychopathic mobility" by showing how pure and how wronged we are. There had been a large dialectic at work in Lionel Trilling's writings for many years; by the 1960's and 1970's Trilling was cutting back against the grain of his earlier thought. Nineteenth-century critics like Mill and Arnold had seen the arts as a necessary response to the

inhuman "rationality" of utilitarian capitalism, and for a time the effects of that response had been salutary. "The literature of the nineteenth century," Trilling wrote in "The Leavis-Snow Controversy" in Beyond Culture, "never wearied . . . of decrying the fatigue and dessication of spirit which results from an allegiance to mind that excludes impulse and will, desire and preference." But the valorization of the nonrational had gone to such extremes that a dose of * 'mind'' or reason once again seemed in order. Trilling's last essays, including his 1973 Jefferson Award address, "Mind in the Modern World," repeatedly circled back to this point. To some extent it was an attempt to resuscitate a lost aspect of Matthew Arnold, the demand for "disinterest" and the "best self" that can rise above immediate self-interest; self-interest had proved itself capable of working irrationally. But the calls for a return of reason are tentative, as if Trilling were aware that his time for correcting the culture had already passed. And there is another Arnoldian aspect that had grown in Trilling's work in the later years: a willingness to take seriously Arnold's suggestion that culture could replace religion in guiding morality—though, as the case of the adversary culture made clear, culture might not always be guiding a form of morality we would welcome. For years, Trilling himself had clearly been engaged in a cultural-spiritual quest of his own. But he had nowhere he could honestly turn for "resolution"—not to the adversary culture, not to the cultural conservatives, not to religious faith—so he remained irresolute, ambivalent to the end. He had made mistakes and was guilty of ambiguities. But as he had written years earlier about another critic, F. R. Leavis ("Dr. Leavis and the Moral Tradition," collected in A Gathering of Fugitives), It isn't by his freedom from error that we properly judge a critic's value but by the integrity and

LIONEL TRILLING I 513 point of his whole critical impulse, which, if it is personal and committed in the demands it makes upon life and literature, will be as instructive in its errors as in its correct judgments. The passage gives us a standard of measurement well suited to its author. Trilling's works amount to an argument that criticism can be worldly and timely without being merely topical; they also combat the facile wish-fulfillment dream that each and every experience of conflict or pain in human beings can be attributed to—blamed on— wholly external factors. While acknowledging the sometimes justified criticisms of Trilling that his writing lacked a sufficiently specific historical or political dimension, we should nevertheless give weight to Trilling's contention that it is the liberal fellowtraveler or the member of the adversary culture who seeks to do away with politics—politics, that is, as they actually exist in a contentious democracy—in order to arrive at a state of "unconditioned spirit" or "absolute authenticity." Trilling had indeed made great demands of life and literature: he had tried to make life honest by using literature as Matthew Arnold had said it should be used, as "a criticism of life." And Trilling had been committed to making his own work, his criticism, continually reach "beyond" mere literary criticism and beyond cultural criticism, to set literary and cultural observations in the fullest context of a criticism of life. If the broad scope of that commitment is the cause of his faults, it is also the cause of his strengths and the condition of his unique authority.

Selected Bibliography WORKS OF LIONEL TRILLING CRITICAL STUDIES

Matthew Arnold. New York: W. W. Norton, 1939. E. M. Forster. New York: New Directions, 1943.

ESSAYS AND LECTURES

The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society. New York: Viking, 1950. The Opposing Self: Nine Essays in Criticism. New York: Viking, 1955. Freud and the Crisis of Our Culture. Boston: Beacon, 1955. A Gathering of Fugitives. Boston: Beacon, 1956. Beyond Culture: Essays on Literature and Learning. New York: Viking, 1965. Sincerity and Authenticity. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1972. Mind in the Modern World. New Yoric: Viking, 1973.

NOVEL

The Middle of the Journey. New York: Viking, 1947.

COLLECTED WORKS

The Works of Lionel Trilling. Uniform Edition. 12 vols. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1978-1980. Includes Matthew Arnold, E. M. Forster, The Middle of the Journey, The Liberal Imagination, The Opposing Self, A Gathering of Fugitives, Beyond Culture, Sincerity and Authenticity, Of This Time, Of That Place (selected short stories, including "Of This Time, Of That Place" and 'The Other Margaret"), Prefaces to the Experience of Literature (commentaries from Trilling's 1967 anthology), Speaking of Literature and Society (previously uncollected essays, 1924-1964), and The Last Decade (essays, 1965-1975).

MANUSCRIPTS

Archive in Rare Book and Manuscript Division of Columbia University Library, New York.

514 I AMERICAN WRITERS EDITED WORKS

The Portable Matthew Arnold. Edited and with an introduction by Lionel Trilling. New York: Viking, 1949. The Selected Letters of John Keats. Edited and with an introduction by Lionel Trilling. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Young, 1951. The Experience of Literature: A Reader with Commentaries. Edited and with commentaries by Lionel Trilling. Garden City, N. Y.: Doubleday, 1967. Anthology. The Life and Work ofSigmund Freud. Edited by Lionel Trilling and Steven Marcus. With an introduction by Lionel Trilling. New York: Basic Books, 1970. A one-volume abridgment of Ernest Jones's three-volume biography. Literary Criticism: An Introductory Reader. Edited and with an introduction by Lionel Trilling. New York: Holt, Rinehart, & Winston, 1970. Anthology. The Oxford Anthology of English Literature. 2 vols. Coedited by Lionel Trilling. New York: Oxford University Press, 1973. BIBLIOGRAPHIES Barnaby, Marianne Gilbert. "Lionel Trilling: A Bibliography, 1926-1972." Bulletin of Bibliography, 31:37-44 (January-March 1974). Robinson, Jeffrey. "Lionel Trilling: A Bibliographic Essay.'' Resources for American Literary Study, 8: 131-156(1987). BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL STUDIES Aaron, Daniel. Writers on the Left: Episodes in American Literary Communism. New York: Harcourt, Brace, & World, 1961. Anderson, Quentin, Stephen Donadio, and Steven Marcus, ed. Art, Politics, and Will: Essays in Honor of Lionet Trilling. New York: Basic Books, 1977. Barnaby, Marianne Gilbert. "Lionel Trilling: Modulations of Arnoldian Criticism at the Present Time." Ph.D. dissertation, University of Connecticut, 1975. Barzun, Jacques. "Remembering Lionel Trilling." Encounter, 47:82-88 (September 1976).

Bloom, Alexander. Prodigal Sons: The New York Intellectuals and Their World. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. Boyers, Robert. Lionel Trilling: Negative Capability and the Wisdom of Avoidance. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1977. Chace, William M. Lionel Trilling: Criticism and Politics. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1980. Donoghue, Denis. "Trilling, Mind, and Society." Sewanee Review, 86:161-186 (1978). Frank, Joseph. "Lionel Trilling and the Conservative Imagination." Sewanee Review, 64:296-309 (Spring 1956). Reprinted in Joseph Frank, The Widening Gyre: Crisis and Mastery in Modern Literature. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1963. Reprinted with appendix in Salmagundi, 41:33-54 (Spring 1978). French, Philip, ed. Three Honest Men: A Critical Mosaic: Edmund Wilson, F. R. Leavis, Lionel Trilling. Manchester, England: Carcanet New Press, 1980. Radio interviews about the three subjects. Grumet, Elinor Joan. "The Menorah Idea and the Apprenticeship of Lionel Trilling." Ph.D. dissertation, University of Iowa, 1979. Krupnick, Mark. Lionel Trilling and the Fate of Cultural Criticism. Evanston, 111.: Northwestern University Press, 1986. Kubal, David. "Lionel Trilling: The Mind and Its Discontents.'' Hudson Review, 31:279-295 (19781979). Langbaum, Robert. "The Importance of The Liberal Imagination." Salmagundi, 41:55-65 (Spring 1978). O'Hara, Daniel T. Lionel Trilling: The Work of Liberation. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988. Podhoretz, Norman. "Culture and the Present Moment: A Round-Table Discussion." Commentary, 58:41 (December, 1974). Robinson, Jeffrey. "Lionel Trilling and the Romantic Tradition." Massachusetts Review, 20:211-236 (1979). Samet, Tom. "The Modulated Vision: Lionel Trilling's 'Larger Naturalism.' " Critical Inquiry, 4:539-557(1977-1978). . "Trilling, Arnold and the Anxieties of the Modern." Southern Quarterly, 16:191-209 (19771978).

UONEL TRILLING I 515 . "Lionel Trilling and the Social Imagination." Centennial Review, 23:159-184 (1979). Scott, Nathan A., Jr. Three American Moralists: Mailer, Bellow, Trilling. Notre Dame, Ind.r University of Notre Dame Press, 1973. Sennett, Richard. 44On Lionel Trilling." New Politics, Novembers, 1979, 209. Shechner, Mark. "Psychoanalysis and Liberalism: The Case of Lionel Trilling." Salmagundi, 41:322 (Spring 1978). Shoben, Edward Joseph, Jr. Lionel Trilling: Mind and Character. New York: Ungar, 1981. Tanner, Stephen L. Lionel Trilling. Boston: Twayne, 1988.

Trilling, Diana. "Lionel Trilling: A Jew at Columbia." In Lionel Trilling, Speaking of Literature and Society. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1980. Wald, Alan M. The New York Intellectuals: The Rise andDecline of the Anti-Stalinist Left from the 1930s to the 1980s. Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1987. West, Cornel. "Lionel Trilling: Godfather of NeoConservatism." New Politics, n.s. 1, no. 1: 233242 (Summer 1986).

—JAMES BUZARD

Alice

Walker

1944-

"B, !

essarily harsh and brutal. To some critics Walker's extensive collaboration with the producers of the film represented an African American woman's collaboration with the white male establishment to perpetuate the racist stereotype of black men as dangerously violent. Novelist Ishmael Reed called both the film and the novel a "Nazi conspiracy." On his television show columnist Tony Brown hosted a largely hostile panel on The Color Purple, calling the program "Purple Rage." In print and on the "Donahue" show, Brown denounced the film as "the most racist depiction of black men since The Birth of a Nation." Critical attacks by African American men on the film and on Walker proliferated in major newspapers and magazines in 1986, while African American women writers defended Walker and her novel—rather than the film— mainly in small journals. The media's focus on the gender conflict that arose over The Color Purple tended to frame the controversy as a problem between African American men and women and to oversimplify the range of critical responses to the film. Actually, negative and positive evaluations were not split strictly along lines of either gender or race. The first reviews of the film in newspapers across the country were, with a few exceptions, overwhelmingly positive. Some critics objected to

LACK WOMEN SHOULD not be sacrificed for Black men's pride. Let the film roll/' This was the edict of an African American viewer of The Color Purple when a New York Times reporter interviewed her in January 1986, shortly after the film's release. Alice Walker, on whose novel the film was based, had published two other novels, four books of poetry, two shortstory collections, a biography of Langston Hughes for children, a book of essays, and an edition of Zora Neale Hurston's writing, and had frequently contributed to Ms. and other periodicals before the film was made. The novel The Color Purple, published in 1982, won both a Pulitzer Prize and an American Book Award in 1983. But it was the film version and the controversy it sparked that carried Walker's name far beyond literary circles to a mass audience unaware of her full career. The most publicized aspect of the controversy concerned the film's representations of African American men. Faithful to the novel in its basic plot, the film covers forty years in the life of Celie, a woman in the rural South whose bonds with other women give her the sense of worth to survive her stepfather's and her husband's abuse and to transform her environment. A frequent and vehement criticism of the film was that the portrayal of Mister, Celie's husband, was unnec-

577

5/5 / AMERICAN Steven Spielberg's direction and pointed out problems that were later discussed in depth in intellectual journals. Leftist publications criticized the film for failing to examine social class and for misrepresenting the economic conditions of its characters. Walker contradicted this criticism, setting her own knowledge of the rural South in which she grew up against the critics' theoretical understanding of the economic conditions of the people she had written about: poor as they were, she insisted, they owned property and engaged in commerce. The most damning criticism was that the film stereotyped not just men but African American people generally, perpetuating the * 'exotic primitive" cliche, as old as colonialism, that the film industry had exploited in its representations of black people through decades of socially sanctioned racism. Some critics believed this image could be especially harmful during the Reagan era, when the legislative and economic gains African Americans had made during the civil rights struggle were being eroded. Yet many black viewers, particularly black women, did not see the film this way. The woman interviewed by the New York Times had known "many Celies," she said; her female relatives had all been brutalized by their husbands. To two women in Tony Brown's studio audience, the film was not a commentary on the black race but on a "social reality." The one panelist who praised the film, Armand White, insisted: "It's a fable, it's a fantasy. . . . It is more about the oppression of black women than about black people." How were African American women able to identify with a film that so many intellectual leaders deplored? Film scholar Jacqueline Bobo made this question the basis of a doctoral dissertation and several articles (to which the above paragraphs are indebted). Bobo analyzed the controversy according to several social theories and conducted interviews with African American

WRITERS

women viewers. The women she interviewed were deeply moved by Celie's triumph. "The lady was a strong lady," one interviewee said, "and she hung in there and she overcame." To say that black women's appreciation of the film represented a "false consciousness"—an unthinking cooperation with racist oppression—is too simple, Bobo argues, since black women are well aware of racism. Watching The Color Purple, they were also aware that the mainstream media had never before so nearly represented them; here were images of black women based on the constructions and experience of a black woman rather than of a white or a black man. Bobo discusses the sources in film history— The Birth of a Nation (1915), Hallelujah! (1929), and Cabin in the Sky (1943)—from which Spielberg derived the "exotic primitive" stereotypes in The Color Purple. Nonwhite audiences are accustomed to the media's mythmaking about them, Bobo argues, and can choose either to avoid mass-media entertainment altogether or to watch resistantly, sorting through the images to derive meanings different from the message designed to produce a commercial success. Bobo concludes that viewers of The Color Purple who watched the film in this way found it progressive and useful. For many, the film was an introduction not only to Alice Walker's writing but also to a whole cultural movement, a renaissance of African American women writers that began in the 1970's. As creative writers African American women had been producing fiction and poetry that attracted national attention more often than ever before; as scholars they were rediscovering a tradition of African American women writers dating back to the mid nineteenth century and earlier. To Bobo, the furor over The Color Purple should be understood as part of a much broader confrontation between this emergence of African American women as cultural workers and an older set of concepts associated with Black

ALICE WALKER I 519 Power. In the 1960's the Black Power movement gave unity among blacks against a racist society the highest priority on its political agenda, but that unity was achieved under male leadership, often at the cost of silencing women. The Afncan American women's renaissance began as women artists broke this silence to criticize the relationships within black families and communities, to expose problems in African American life that needed change before African Americans could strengthen their social and political effectiveness. The stakes in this confrontation are extremely high: Can African American women have a distinct public voice? If the truths they tell and the fables they make out of their own experience are not valued and understood on their own terms, but are seen as merely serving white racism, the answer is "no." Alice Malsenior Walker was born in Eaton ton, Georgia, on February 9, 1944, the eighth and last child of Willie Lee and Minnie Tallulah Grant Walker. Among her ancestors she counts a woman born into slavery who lived over 120 years, a Cherokee great-grandmother, and a slaveowner who raped her great-great-grandmother when she was only eleven. Like most Southern rural African American families in the first half of this century, Walker's family was caught up in the sharecropping system, which strongly resembled its antecedent, slavery. Parents and children worked the fields or dairy of a white landlord in exchange for a portion of the crop (usually subsistence level), cramped and battered housing, a few hundred dollars a year. For the adults in the community where Walker grew up, education was a route of escape from poverty that they could provide for the next generation. When Walker was eight years old, a pellet one of her brothers shot from a BB gun accidentally struck her in the right eye, blinding it and leaving a large white scar. Humiliated by other people's reactions to the disfigurement, Walker withdrew

into negative fantasies. Her school performance deteriorated, but on her own she read and wrote poems. At fourteen she spent the summer babysitting for a brother who lived in Boston. Understanding her feelings of shame, he and his wife paid for simple surgery that removed the scar, leaving only a small bluish crater. Her schoolwork immediately improved, and she graduated valedictorian of her high school class. With a rehabilitation scholarship for which her blind eye qualified her and seventy-five dollars collected by neighbors, she entered S pel man College in Atlanta at the age of seventeen. S pel man, the country's oldest college for black women, devoted its educational program to refining the students according to traditional standards of Southern womanhood. During the years 1961-1963, when Walker attended Spelman, civil rights organizers worked hard in Atlanta, drawing Walker and other students into a kind of political activism that contrasted sharply with the college's conservative mission. Frustrated by Spelman's limitations, Walker transferred to Sarah Lawrence, an elite, mostly white women's college in Bronxville, New York. The summer before her senior year she visited Kenya and Uganda on an educational grant. She returned to college pregnant and suicidal. A friend arranged an abortion and, emerging from her despair, Walker wrote poems steadily for a week, slipping each finished poem under the door of the poet Muriel Rukeyser, then writer-in-residence at Sarah Lawrence. With Rukeyser's help, the poems were later published as Walker's first book, Once, in 1968. After graduating in 1965, Walker briefly worked for the New York City Welfare Department. She had resolved to become a writer. Her first publication, an essay on the civil rights movement, won The American Scholar's essay contest in 1966. That summer she attended the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference in Vermont, and in 1967 she received both a Merrill Writing Pel-

520 / AMERICAN WRITERS lowship and a McDowell Colony Fellowship. She married Melvyn Leventhal, a civil rights attorney and conscientious objector to the Vietnam war, in 1967, and they moved to Mississippi. Walker worked on voter registration drives, taught black history to Head Start teachers, and served as writer-in-residence at Jackson State College (1968-1969) and Tougaloo College (1969-1970). A National Endowment for the Arts grant in 1969 supported her work on her first novel, The Third Life of Grange Copeland, into which she incorporated some aspects of her own family's history as sharecroppers. She finished writing the novel days before her daughter, Rebecca Grant Rosen thai, was born. After the publication of her novel, Walker left the South with a Radcliffe Institute Fellowship to teach courses on black women writers—among the earliest such courses—at the University of Massachusetts at Boston (1971-1972) and Wellesley College (1972-1973). Her second collection of poems, Revolutionary Petunias (1973), received a National Book Award nomination and won the Lillian Smith Award of the Southern Regional Council. The following year her first collection of short stories, In Love and Trouble (1973), received the Rosenthal Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Both volumes draw on Walker's years with the civil rights movement, taking a critical view of sexism within both conventional black communities and revolutionary groups, as well as of revolutionaries' contempt for people whose acts of resistance or strivings for fulfillment are theoretically incorrect. In 1974 her tribute to the poet Langston Hughes, a biography for children, was published. Walker moved to Brooklyn, New York, in 1974, and became a contributing editor of Ms. the following year. In her second novel, Meridian (1976), she continued to weave the themes of revolution, sexism, and the traditions of black communities, using autobiographical material

particularly in portraying a Southern black women's college and the civil rights movement's change into the militant Black Power movement. Told in patchworked episodes that double back in time, Meridian is the story of a woman who leaves her home in the rural South to join the civil rights movement and enter college. Meridian's guilt over rejecting the traditional values of motherhood and her ambivalence about revolutionary violence once the movement turns militant give her an almost mystical physical illness and a saintly dedication to advancing her people. Her methods are anachronistic; virtually alone, she carries out spontaneous nonviolent organizing efforts in a small community. Her eccentricity serves as a critique of the elitism, sexism, and militancy of the Black Power movement long after it has lost its strength, and she offers hope that nonviolent change is still possible. She and Leventhal were divorced in 1977. A second McDowell Colony Fellowship and a Guggenheim grant supported her literary work from 1977 to 1978. Finding New York an unsuitably urban place to work on her next novel, which was to be set in the rural Georgia of her childhood, Walker moved to northern California in 1979. Before completing this novel, she published her edition of Zora Neale Hurston's writings (1979); her third book of poems, Good Night, Willie Lee, I'll See You in the Morning (1979); and her second collection of stories, You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down (1981). The Color Purple was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award when it was published in 1982 and, the following year, received both the Pulitzer Prize and the American Book Award. Walker was named distinguished writer in Afro-American studies at the University of California, Berkeley, in the spring of 1982 and taught at Brandeis University as the Fannie Hurst Professor of Literature in the fall. Her important first collection of "womanist" essays, In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens, was published

ALICE WALKER I 521 in 1983. Throughout the 1980's Walker traveled extensively, lecturing and reading her work at universities and conferences and joining delegations of writers to other countries. She also appeared and spoke at political gatherings, such as Nelson and Winnie Mandela's visit to San Francisco in 1990. Her fourth book of poems, Horses Make a Landscape More Beautiful (1984), and her second volume of essays, Living by the Word (1988), reflect the extension of her political commitments to the environment, animal rights, and antinuclear protest; the stretching of her selfdefinition as an African American to make interracial and international connections; and the sights, sounds, and smells of her rural home near Navarro, California. Her fourth novel, The Temple of My Familiar (1989), reaches far corners of the earth and weaves together the voices of characters of different cultures, economic classes, and historical eras. While biographical information on living authors can be difficult to find, this is not true of Alice Walker. Most of the above information is available in numerous reference volumes; and her two collections of essays, a kind of patchwork autobiography, enrich the picture of the various parts of her life. The common heritage of black Southern writers, Walker wrote in "The Black Writer and the Southern Experience" (1970, in In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens), is "a sense of community," of "solidarity and sharing," as well as a compassion for the earth, a trust in humanity beyond our knowledge of evil, and an abiding love of justice. We inherit a great responsibility as well, for we must give voice to centuries not only of silent bitterness and hate but also of neighborly kindness and sustaining love. Houses and churches in these communities were set back in woods and fields, invisible from the road. "The daily dramas that evolve in such a

private world are pure gold," the stuff of storytelling, made more valuable as part of a writer's double vision of "a strictly private and hidden existence" and "the larger world that surrounds and suppresses" it. Both of Walker's parents were superb storytellers. One of her mother's favorite stories recounted an experience of the Depression. On a day when Minnie Walker took governmentissued vouchers to the Red Cross center in town to get a winter's supply of flour, she dressed in good used clothes that a sister in the North had sent to her. The white woman passing out flour angrily refused to give her any—judging that anyone who had the gall to dress better than she did not need assistance. Community and resourcefulness saw the family through the winter: they traded the corn they grew for flour. Walker's mother concluded the story with a moral about the workings of divine justice. In old age the white woman became senile and badly crippled. Turning the story to fiction in the early 1970's ("The Revenge of Hannah Kemhuff," in In Love and Trouble), Walker speculated: What if this woman's deterioration were a punishment willed by the recipient of her insensitivity and brought about by the folk craft of voodoo? Black folklore had been appropriated and distorted by a white resident of Eatonton, Joel Chandler Harris, and further alienated from its sources by Walt Disney in the film Uncle Remus. Looking for a black collector of folk culture, Walker discovered Zora Neale Hurston's Mules and Men (1935), * 'all the black folklore I could ever use.'' Minnie Walker, though married at seventeen, as was expected, never pressured her daughters to marry. She and her sisters were strong, hardworking women who did not regard gender as a barrier to any kind of labor. "It is because of them, I know women can do anything," Walker has said. Slow to anger, Minnie Walker would explode at landlords who tried to persuade her to interrupt her children's education and send them

522 / AMERICAN WRITERS into the fields full-time. "In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens" takes its title from Minnie Walker's artistry with flowers, her producing brilliant, original, life-filled gardens in "whatever rocky soil she landed on." Her gardens were also practical; she patched the walls of the family's cabins with sunflowers. By making creativity a part of their daily lives, Walker writes, women like her mother "handed down respect for the possibilities—and the will to grasp them." They exerted their resourcefulness to prepare their children for a world larger than they had known. She writes of them in the section "Women" of the poem "In These Dissenting Times" (in Revolutionary Petunias): They were women then My mama's generation Husky of voice—Stout of Step With fists as well as Hands How they battered down Doors And ironed Starched white Shirts How they led Armies Headragged Generals Across mined Fields Booby-trapped Ditches To discover books Desks A place for us How they knew what we Must know Without knowing a page Of it Themselves. Walker's relationship with her father was more difficult, fraught with anger. A poem in Once

describes him beating her on Election Day. Writing about him in 1984, she remembered only one beating, probably not on Election Day, though the rage of the early poem accurately matched his unkindness to his child because of his political frustration. Walker's involvement in the black and women's movements gave her the ideological tools to understand her father's colorism and sexism as his absorption of the dominant white culture's values and to forgive him for his failures as an adult model. "Actually, my father was two fathers," Walker writes in "Father" (1985, in Living by the Word). His older children knew him when he was healthy and had faith in politics and education. In the 1930's he was one of the first black men to vote in their town, having organized a group of sharecroppers to exercise their rights. As his younger children knew him, he was " 'dragging-around' sick" with diabetes and high blood pressure, disillusioned, fearful, and resentful. Little had changed in the power structure of his world, and "education merely seemed to make his children more critical of him." But even in his last years, "he would come out with one of those startlingly intelligent comments about world affairs," reminding Walker of the father she did not know. As a small child Alice was her father's favorite, a status she partly lost after her disfiguring eye injury and partly rejected to take sides with another daughter whom he mistreated because she resembled his mother, who had been killed by a lover when her son was young. Walker has images of a jolly, affectionate man that she thought were early memories of her father but learned were of a brother who left the South when she was very young. Her generation was raised to leave the South in search of better opportunities. Her five brothers moved to Boston, worked hard, and bought homes in pleasant neighborhoods. Her sisters, too, left the South, and she was expected to do likewise. She wrote in an essay in 1972 (collected in In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens): "It is part of the black Southern sensibility that we treasure memories;

ALICE WALKER I 523 for such a long time, that is all of our homeland those of us who at one time or another were forced away from it have been allowed to have.'' Walker's family and community took southern segregation for granted until civil rights activities began in the late 1950's. In 1960 her mother bought a television set, and after school Walker watched news reports of two black students integrating the University of Georgia with the support of the National Guard. Then Martin Luther King, Jr., appeared in the news, providing a charismatic focus for resistance to segregation. She writes in her tribute to King (1973, in In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens) that he, in urging African Americans to stay in the South and work to change it, "gave us continuity of place, without which community is ephemeral. He gave us home." When Walker got on the bus to Atlanta and college at seventeen with a sewing machine, a typewriter, and a suitcase that her mother provided, a class barrier divided her from her roots. But the move also enabled her to join efforts to change the South, to connect the struggles of her community with worldwide struggles, and to tell the hidden stories of her forebears. There were civil rights demonstrations every Saturday morning in downtown Atlanta. Walker idolized the young members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee who led the movement. She wrote of this time (in an essay collected in In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens): "We—young and bursting with fear and determination to change our world—thought beyond our fervid singing, of death." In the summer of 1962 Walker joined a group of Spelman students, funded by Atlanta churchwomen, who attended the World Youth Peace Festival in Helsinki, Finland. A member of the Cuban delegation gave Walker a copy of Fidel Castro's History Will Absolve Me, which Walker read, weeping as she recognized the familiar themes of oppression and resistance. For the rest of the summer she stayed with relatives in Boston and worked. The next summer she took a

train to join the March on Washington in August and heard Martin Luther King, Jr., deliver his great "I Have a Dream" speech. Though racial issues permeated public life, few black authors were part of the academic curriculum at either of the colleges Walker attended. At Spelman in her sophomore year, Walker voraciously read Russian novels. The poets she read in college who influenced her style were Ovid, Catullus, Li Po, Emily Dickinson, William Carlos Williams, E. E. Cummings, and Robert Graves. During her senior year, she read Friedrich Nietzsche and Albert Camus, favorite philosophers of student activists dealing with the paradoxical isolation of working collectively for change. In the midst of the suicidal feelings she experienced that year, she learned that an elderly neighbor, Mr. Sweet, had died. Mr. Sweet played the guitar and sang the blues and was much beloved by children. Partly to celebrate her own survival of despair, Walker wrote a short story, "To Hell With Dying," in which she fictionalized the love between Mr. Sweet and the children as a power that overcame death. Muriel Rukeyser sent the story to Langston Hughes, who published it in Best Short Stories by Negro Writers: An Anthology from 1899 to the Present (1967). When Walker met Hughes shortly before his death in 1967, she saw in him another Mr. Sweet: Aging and battered, full of pain, but writing poetry, and laughing, too, and always making other people feel better. It was as if my love for one great old man down in the poor and beautiful and simple South had magically, in the new world of college and literature and poets and publishing and New York, led me to another. Colorism marked Walker's social life at Sarah Lawrence; she and her African roommate dated white men, because black men preferred black women with lighter skin. She and Mel Leventhal lived together in New York while he was a law student, then married to legalize their bond before joining the civil rights struggle in Missis-

524 I AMERICAN WRITERS sippi. Their interracial marriage was illegal in Mississippi, where miscegenation laws were still in place, and until their last year there, when integration had taken effect enough to reduce overt racial violence, Walker and Leventhal had to be careful where they appeared in public together. Black Power advocates, too, disapproved of mixed marriage, and Walker has said that during the 1960's black critics often judged her writing on the basis of her interracial "life-style" and not on its merits. Leventhal handled school integration cases in Jackson and pressed suits against racist real estate agents. Walker went to Mississippi to "tirelessly observe it," to collect stories. As a technique for teaching black history to Head Start teachers with little education, Walker had the women write their autobiographies. Her search for black women writers arose from this experience. She had discovered the flaws in her Eurocentric college education and begun to fill in the gaps with the "college of reading," committed to preserving the heritage of black literature. Even in a course on black authors, taught by the poet Margaret Walker, that she audited at Jackson State, women authors were appended to the reading list like a footnote. But it was in this course that she learned of Zora Neale Hurston and set about correcting dismissive critical opinions of her. In 1968 Walker and Leventhal marched at Martin Luther King's funeral. Shortly afterward Walker suffered a miscarriage. She became pregnant again the following year. Their reasons for wanting a child were not the best, Walker has written—partly curiosity, largely a wish to keep Leventhal from being drafted, since his draft board had rejected his application for conscientious objector status. Walker had written a preliminary version of her first novel in which the heroine, Ruth, was a civil rights lawyer. But while the civil rights movement was in the news every day, the lives of "ordinary" black people were still unobserved, and Walker shifted the

focus of her novel to Ruth's forebears. Worried that motherhood would interfere with her writing, fearful for the safety of her husband, and anguished about the political worth of her writing and her pacifism, Walker again became depressed and suicidal. Her "salvation" during her last year in Jackson was a black woman psychiatrist, who helped her become aware "that I was holding myself responsible for the condition of black people in America" (In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens). Unable to act out violently, she wrote. Her art would probably change nothing, "And yet I felt it was the privilege of my life to observe and 'save' for the future some extraordinary lives." Confronting the myths she had inherited about what motherhood should be, Walker worked through her guilt about leaving her small daughter in order to write, and came to celebrate motherhood. She began the five-year project of writing Meridian, in which maternal guilt is a major theme, along with pacifism and an overwhelming sense of responsibility for a community. In Boston, as a Radcliffe Institute Fellow, she shared an office with feminist scholar Patricia Meyer Spacks, who was researching women's creativity. Walker tried to make Spacks aware of black women writers, but Spacks's The Female Imagination (1975) dealt only with white writers. Walker speculated in a 1979 essay that white feminists have difficulty thinking of black women as women because they prefer to avoid the guilt that accompanies an awareness of the racial barriers that grant their own children privileges denied to black women's children. Black women, on the other hand, were resisting feminism. At the Radcliffe Institute in 1973, Walker read her essay "In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens" and received a standing ovation. Later, at a panel discussion, she and June Jordan expressed their concern about the high rate of suicide among young women of color, who were under tremendous pressure to conform to differ-

ALICE WALKER I 525 ent, conflicting social standards. One of the panelists insisted, "The responsibility of the black woman is to support the black man; whatever he does/9 Frustrated by the inadequacy of this response, Walker burst into tears. Though the Institute participants were not prepared to consider a feminist perspective on black women's lives, the experience confirmed Walker's commitment to recovering and interpreting the heritage of black women. In Zora Neale Hurston, Walker saw a woman whose nonconformity—her just being herself—was revolutionary, and whose work reflected racial health. Walker made a pilgrimage to Hurston's hometown, Eatonville, Florida, in 1973, found Hurston's unmarked grave in an overgrown field, and ordered an engraved tombstone commemorating "A Genius of the South." Walker's father died in 1973. She wrote about standing aside, tearless, at his funeral while all but one of her siblings wept. Her relationship with her father improved spiritually after his death, she wrote in 1984, as her adult experiences helped her to understand him. One of these experiences was a trip to Cuba with a delegation of African American artists selected by the editors of Black Scholar and the Cuban Institute for Friendship Among People. There she met a man who reminded her of her father. Pablo Diaz, formerly a peasant, had become an official historian of the revolution, a change of social roles that was not possible for Willie Lee Walker despite his intelligence—but a transformation his daughter made, thereby placing a barrier between them. Walker visited the South in 1976 to attend the March for Jobs in Atlanta. She had been living for two years in New York, where her husband continued to press civil rights suits against landlords and realtors. Since 1970, unemployment had led to the deterioration of black neighborhoods in Northern cities, and many people who had gone North in search of opportunities, including Walker's brothers and sisters, were mov-

ing back to the South. Though Walker enjoyed being close to "a multiethnic conglomerate of peacemakers" in New York, she admitted to her Southern friends that for the first time she feared other black people, whose communal bonds were shattered in Northern cities. There was a lull in political activism; the president and Congress seemed indifferent to the demands of poor and black people; and the FBI had revealed its extensive surveillance of the civil rights movement, which it was using to discredit Martin Luther King, Jr., years after his death. At the march, Walker's voice choked as she tried to sing the old rallying songs. The purest singing voice belonged to a young man who was obviously on drugs. She reflects in her essay "Lulls" (1977, in In Search of Our Mothers9 Gardens): "What does this mean, I'd wondered, clutching my handbag tightly, annoyed at this reflex action even as I gazed with sorrow at his sensitive, though lost, dark face; aware it might not be long before I knew.'' Walker has written several essays about The Color Purple. In "Writing The Color Purple" (1982, in In Search of Our Mothers9 Gardens) she remembers when the germ of the story came to her: she and her sister Ruth were discussing a love triangle. Ruth said, "And you know, one day The Wife asked The Other Woman for a pair of her drawers." This personal, sensual moment, rather than any grand public event, was to be the center of a historical novel. Obeying the demands of the characters that formed in her imagination, Walker moved west with her lover, Robert Allen (formerly an editor of Black Scholar), located a rustic house to rent, gave up travel engagements, and suspended her work for Ms. The sale of You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down provided enough money for her to live on for a year. When Walker's daughter, Rebecca, arrived after a stay with her father, "My characters adored her. They saw she spoke her mind in no uncertain terms and would fight back when attacked. . . . Celie . . . began to reappraise her own condition.

526 / AMERICAN WRITERS Rebecca gave her courage." Walker grieved for the characters on the day she finished the novel, but afterward she dreamed her ancestors visited her to thank her for writing it. In 1984, when The Color Purple was selling rapidly, an Oakland mother asked the school system to ban it because she objected to her daughter's being exposed to it. Although she had not read the book, she believed that it was too sexually explicit and that it stereotyped blacks and degraded black people by using folk language. The integrated committee formed to study the book exonerated it, but the same questions arose again and again. A black women's magazine to which Walker had initially sent The Color Purple also objected to Celie's language. "Black people don't talk like that," the editors insisted. In "Coming in From the Cold" (1984, in Living by the Word), a talk she presented to two writers' groups, Walker defended the realism of Celie's language and its importance to the raising up of the marginalized, almost lost histories of people like her. For Celie's speech pattern and Celie's words reveal not only an intelligence that transforms illiterate speech into something that is, at times, very beautiful, as well as effective in conveying her sense of her world, but also what has been done to her by a racist and sexist system, and her intelligent blossoming as a human being despite her oppression demonstrates why her oppressors persist even today in trying to keep her down. For if and when Celie rises to her rightful, earned place in society across the planet, the world will be a different place, I can tell you. The hostile reaction of some black men to the film The Color Purple saddened and disappointed Walker. Black men such as Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr., had modeled the struggle for freedom, and yet many black men were unable to empathize with women's suffering under sexism. Celie's submissiveness is as

much an illness as Mister's brutality, Walker wrote, and in the novel both are healed. The psychic illness of African Americans has to do with their inheriting attitudes and genes not only from black slaves but also from rapacious white slaveowners; Walker wrote of her efforts to come to terms with her own white great-greatgrandfather. She charged critics of the film who attack its violent representations of black men with hypocrisy: What about films in which black people are CIA agents and spies, representatives of organizations that destabilize Third World countries? Of the critics' concern about what white people think of the film's representations of blacks, she writes in "In the Closet of the Soul" (1987, in Living by the Word): "Since 'white people' are to a large extent responsible for so much of our worst behavior, which is really their behavior copied slavishly, it is an insult to black people's experience in America to make a pretense of caring what they think." Writing about her international travel during the 1980's, Walker drew connections between the themes of her work and social concerns elsewhere in the world. In 1983 she was part of a group of twelve American women writers who visited China. An editor in Shanghai told her The Color Purple was being translated into Chinese and remarked, "It is a very Chinese story." Walker reflected: What interests me is how many of the things I've written about women certainly do, in China, look Chinese: the impact of poverty, forced sex and childbearing, domination as a race and a caste . . . ; the struggle to affirm solidarity with women, as women, and the struggle to attain political, social, and economic equality with men. In 1984, with Rebecca and Robert Allen, Walker visited Jamaica and made a pilgrimage to the memorial to Bob Marley in the tiny village of Nine Miles. She had discovered Marley's music

ALICE WALKER I 527 while drafting the screenplay for the movie version of The Color Purple and considered him a brother. She writes in "Journey to Nine Miles" (1986, in Living by the Word): "Here was the radical peasant class, working-class consciousness that fearlessly denounced the Wasichus (the greedy and destructive) and did it with such grace you could dance to it." In 1987 they went to Bali. While noting in her journal the political violence in Bali's past, it was a Balinese chicken that became the subject of an essay, "Why Did the Balinese Chicken Cross the Road?" (1988, in Living by the Word), in which she considered vegetarianism and human kinship with animals. The Balinese chicken crossed the road, she wrote, "to get both of us to the other side"—to change human attitudes of domination over other creatures. In the 1970's Walker had written to make white feminists aware of race and blacks aware of women's concerns; in the 1980's the crossovers among the political issues with which she dealt became yet more complex. Writing of nuclear proliferation in 1982, she quoted a long and thorough curse from the folklore Zora Neale Hurston collected. She speculated that at the heart of the resistance of people of color to the antinuclear movement is a desire for white men to be cosmically punished for their "crimes against humanity." Walker concludes her 1982 review of Helen Caldicott's book Nuclear Madness (in In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens): "The good news may be that Nature is phasing out the white man, but the bad news is that's who She thinks we all are." Walker's environmentalism converged with her interest in Native American folkways. In "Everything Is a Human Being" (1984, in Living by the Word), she wrote of the oppressed spirits of plants, animals, and the earth, using the Oglala Sioux word "Wasichu" to refer to their greedy exploiters. In a 1987 essay, "All the Bearded Irises of Life: Confessions of a Homospiritual" (in Living by the Word), Walker

memorialized the spontaneity and outrageousness of the gay Castro district in San Francisco before the AIDS epidemic struck, drawing connections to other cultural losses: "So many cultures have died it is hard to contemplate the possible loss or dulling over of another one, or to accept the fact that once again those who can appreciate all the bearded irises of life will be visually, spiritually, and emotionally deprived." In her notes for The Temple of My Familiar (the journal entry for June 17, 1987, in Living by the Word), Walker wrote of her sense of kinship, as an African American whose ancestors were slaves and peasants, with the poor of Latin America: ' 7 am Nicaraguan; I am Salvadorean; I am Grenadian; I am Caribbean; and I am Central American/' Introducing Seeing Red, a film on the history of the American Communist party in 1984 ("On Seeing Red," inLiving by the Word), Walker spoke of "the parallel America we are constantly constructing alongside the one that is beginning to topple over, from its distortions and lies," revealing both Walker the Southern black writer and the great distance she has come. Her community is no longer an Eatonton, hidden off the roads, whose residents struggle against the boundaries of poverty and racism, but an interracial community of "alternative Americans" who share intimate journeys of self-discovery and global political concerns. Walker's novels can be read as an ongoing narrative of an African American woman's emergence from the voiceless obscurity of poverty and racial and sexual victimization to become a reshaper of culture and tradition. It is a two-part narrative, with The Color Purple and The Temple of My Familiar revising the history told in The Third Life of Grange Copeland and Meridian. In her first novel Walker adapted the realism and naturalism of such classic modern African American novels as Richard Wright's Native Son

528 / AMERICAN WRITERS (1940) and Black Boy (1945) in which a black man makes the northward flight that in slave narratives was a flight to freedom, only to find freedom elusive. Frustrated, disillusioned, and still powerless, he acts out violently. Walker turns this story inside out: the Northern sojourn is Grange Cope land's second life, the one about which we learn the least in her novel. While Grange, like Wright's Bigger Thomas, "kills" a white woman, Walker mitigates his responsibility for her death, in that he simply fails to help a distraught woman who rejects his help out of racism. Thus Walker can treat this event not as an evil act on Grange's part but as a release of revolutionary anger enabling Grange to change. In his first life, trapped in poverty, he abuses his wife and son; in his third life, freed from self-loathing, he establishes a Utopian community of two with his granddaughter, Ruth, which will release her from the cycle of violence and despair from which he came. Together, Grange and his son, Brownfield, Ruth's father, delineate a divided father figure much as Walker described her own father, one a nurturing enabler, the other lost to the values of the oppressive society. The cost to the older generation of black women of the events leading up to Ruth's emergence is enormous: her grandmother kills herself and her infant, her mother forsakes her education and career and is killed by Brownfield, and Grange can establish a haven for Ruth only by exploiting the "Blues woman," his second wife, Josie. Ruth will begin her new life in isolation, her "good father" Grange having sacrificed his life to save her from her "bad father." By rejecting her first plan to make Ruth a civil rights attorney, Walker not only gained historical depth but also connected her first novel to the black fiction that was best known in the late 1960's, novels by men with male protagonists. Having reshaped the narrative she inherited to make room for a heroine, she continued the

emergent woman's narrative with Meridian Hill. With a female protagonist, Walker had a new problem of literary revision to take up—What happens to a woman who bears a child? Traditional narratives of rape, seduction, or courtship silence their heroines through death or marriage. Meridian has a recurring dream: "She dreamed she was a character in a novel and that her existence presented an insoluble problem, one that would be solved only by her death at the end." Walker avoids this end for Meridian by having her reject motherhood, stripping her femininity, and making her a worker for social change; but Meridian cannot unambivalently embrace the revolutionary violence that was healing to Grange Copeland. If the traditional female narrative is wrong for Meridian, the male-centered narrative Walker had devised is not a possibility either. Though Meridian emerges as an actor rather than a victim, she is isolated, like the young civil rights activists Walker recalls who favored Nietzschian and existentialist philosophy. Meridian critiques the relationships among black men and women but, as in The Third Life of Grange Copeland, the bonds between women are extremely troubled: sometimes sympathetic and supportive, often tortured with misunderstanding and harsh judgment. Meridian inherits her most cherished values—history and spirituality—from her father and refuses her mother's tradition. By the time Walker wrote The Color Purple, the female communities to which she belonged had strengthened. Mainstream feminism was becoming increasingly aware of racial issues, and black women were creating feminist-womanist analyses of black literature and life that challenged the notion of uncritical loyalty to black men whatever the cost. Walker rewrote the history of obscure, "ordinary" black people during the time period covered in The Third Life of Grange Copeland, the era of her parents' generation. This time a female character was at the

ALICE WALKER I 529 center, telling her own story, as if Walker were insisting that black women had always had a voice, one that only needed discovering by a sympathetic reader. The difficulty of making such a discovery, the risk that Celie's voice might have been lost forever, is structured into Walker's variation on the epistolary novel: most of the letters are addressed to God, not any person, and the ones addressed to people are long delayed from reaching their destinations. Walker's solution to Celie's difficult early life is to create a female community for her, a fantasy solution through which Walker builds a Utopia on contemporary feminist themes, affirming the folk traditions of black women while removing them from victimization. No longer the pathetic, exploited figure she was in The Third Life of Grange Copeland, the "Blues woman" has become the unconventional, "womanish" agent of other women's spiritual regeneration and selffulfillment: Shug. While many critics have objected to this kind of fantasy solution, it seems entirely consistent with the practical artistry of a woman's everyday life that Walker describes in "In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens": intervening in history, she patches its broken walls with flowers. This second version of Walker's narrative of the emergence of the African-American woman as a cultural maker is much more engaged with romance and less with realism than the first version. She describes The Temple of My Familiar as "a romance of the last 500,000 years." Like her earlier novels, it is episodic in structure, but it shows the new influence of such Latin American authors as Isabel Allende in its sprawling use of multiple narratives focused on personal lives with political events as a backdrop and its threading together of different systems of spiritual belief. The story of two couples saving their relationships by making unconventional adjustments serves as a frame for a collection of wondrous and exemplary tales that take place

throughout the world, history, and prehistory. Among them are continuing news of the characters in The Color Purple. The greatest storyteller is Miss Lissie, an elderly black woman who dies in the course of the novel. Because she remembers all her past lives, Miss Lissie embodies the ancestry of the present generation. She even remembers being Adam—a memory that revises the creation myth, placing African women rather than white men at the center of cosmogony. Adam is the first white man, not the first human, and his matriarchal community expels him because of his mutated skin color. Political action and social change for racial and sexual justice, important in Walker's first two novels, are insufficient alterations in the world, according to the later two novels. The very center and source of how we conceptualize humanity must be overturned. Immensely ambitious, The Temple of My Familiar has been regarded by reviewers as a mixed success. It will take time for critics to work out the elaborate literary issues that have been considered in relationship to Walker's earlier novels. For now, readers who value Walker as an author who created room in the traditions of narrative for voices unheard earlier because of sex, class, and race are likely to be disappointed by a novel near the end of which a sexual-spiritual breakthrough takes place in a San Francisco Bay area hot tub. But in the future, perhaps not. The first African American woman to win a Pulitzer Prize, Alice Walker attracted the attention of high school and college curriculum planners. By 1984 The Color Purple was on required reading lists across the country. Students were enthusiastic about Walker's work but frustrated by the difficulty of finding secondary sources about her. Two academic teams of a librarian and a professor identified this problem at the same time, and each team assembled a booklength annotated bibliography on Walker. How-

530 / AMERICAN WRITERS ever, still many teachers are not aware that an extensive body of literary criticism has been written about Walker's work. The aim of this section is to direct teachers, librarians, and students to those resources and to give the reader an idea of the creative and scholarly context in which Walker has become recognized as a great American author. For Walker's writing and the critical response up to early 1987, two bibliographies—Louis H. Pratt and Darnell D. Pratt's Alice Malsenior Walker: An Annotated Bibliography (1988) and Erma Davis Banks and Keith Byerman's Alice Walker: An Annotated Bibliography, 1968-1986 (1989)—are equally useful research tools. The secondary history that they tell is a slice of the African American women's renaissance. It begins with a few positive reviews of Walker's first book, Once, a collection of poems she wrote during her last year in college. The reviewers note her sharp, minimalist style. More than a dozen popular and scholarly periodicals took note of Walker's first novel, The Third Life of Grange Copeland. The clear message of the novel is that African Americans must take responsibility for their own liberation. Walker's story concentrates on the torments her characters inflict on each other rather than the oppressiveness of white society; she focuses on the men's response to their powerlessness and despair by lashing out against their wives and children. The reviewers disagreed on whether the novel was true to life or bore "little resemblance to reality," and on whether political ideology impaired the book, but in 1971 critic Sam Cornish called it "one of the most important black novels we have." The first extensive interview with Walker appeared in Publishers' Weekly soon after the novel was published. By 1972 Walker was one of very few African American women identified with women's liberation, and she took part in a forum on the women's movement published in The American

Scholar. In 1973 her second volume of poetry, Revolutionary Petunias, was published. Reviewed less broadly than her novel, Revolutionary Petunias received more unqualified praise than Once, although one critic considered her poetry not as good as her fiction, a judgment that has been generally held. The simplicity and directness of Walker's poems do not inspire lengthy critical analysis, but many critics have used them to illuminate discussions of her themes. The poems in the second collection denounce black militancy and look to the past for a tradition of endurance and triumph. We remember our ancestors, the first poem's epigraph states, "because it is an easy thing to forget: that we are not the first to suffer, rebel, fight, love and die." Biographical and bibliographical sketches of Walker began to appear in standard reference works in 1973, the year her first book of short stores, In Love and Trouble: Stories of Black Women, was published. The reviews show that both Walker's career and the literary renaissance of which she was a part were well under way. Two of the reviewers, Mary Helen Washington and Barbara Smith, are African American scholars who have since continued to write about Walker. In Black World, Washington associated Walker with other emerging African American women writers. Mel Watkins, a New York Times reviewer, connected Walker to Zora Neale Hurston, who became known as the precursor of current African American women writers. In Ms. (1974), Smith praised Walker's truth-telling about the inner lives of women for whom violence is an everyday occasion. Efforts to burst the myths surrounding black women's experience, Smith wrote, are "so pitifully rare in black, feminist, or American writing that each shred of truth about these experiences constitutes a breakthrough." In 1974 and 1975 library and educational journals noted Walker's biography of Langston

ALICE WALKER I 531 Hughes for children. John O'Brien's Interviews with Black Writers, published in 1973, included a lengthy interview with Walker. Reconsiderations of Walker's work had begun to appear in academic books and journals. The first piece about Walker by Trudier Harris, another African American feminist scholar who would become one of her frequent critics, was a journal article on The Third Life of Grange Copeland, published in 1975. William Peden praised In Love and Trouble as a major collection in The American Short Story: Continuity and Change, 19401975 (1975). When Walker's second novel, Meridian, was published in 1976, it was reviewed in over two dozen major newspapers, magazines, and scholarly journals. Again, Walker's reviews were polarized. Some hailed the novel's power, while others criticized aspects of her technique: the uncentered episodic structure, the symbolism, the characterization, the ambiguous end. Two reviews noted a historical continuity between The Third Life of Grange Copeland, which closes with Grange's granddaughter, Ruth, escaping the cycle of poverty as the civil rights movement begins, and Meridian. After Meridian's publication several periodicals published interviews with Walker exploring the relationship between her writing and her life, and the reference series Contemporary Literary Criticism ran the first of many digests of the critical response to her work. In 1977 Black American Literature Forum published two scholarly essays on Walker, one by Trudier Harris exploring Walker's uses of folklore and one by Mary Helen Washington suggesting a thematic scheme for studying African American women writers along three historic dimensions: creative suspension, assimilation, and, since the late 1960's, emergence. Jeanne Noble contributed Beautiful, Also, Are the Souls of My Black Sisters (1978) to the project of creating a history of African American women. In the chapter on

"Black Women Writers of the New Renaissance," she identifies Walker's special contribution as exposing problems in male-female partnerships. Anne Z. Mickelson studied Walker's stories and Meridian in a cross-race context in her book Reaching Out: Sensitivity and Order in Recent American Fiction by Women (1979). Walker published two books in 1979, an edition of Zora Neale Hurston's writings and a third collection of her own poetry, Good Night, Willie Lee, I'll See You in the Morning. Both were sparsely but appreciatively reviewed. In the New York Times Book Review Randall Kennedy noted that the Zora Neale Hurston edition marked the coincident emergence of feminist criticism and of sophisticated approaches to African American literature. The same convergence produced Sturdy Black Bridges: Visions of Black Women in Literature (1979), edited by Roseann P. Bell, Bettye J. Parker, and Beverly Guy-Sheftall, which includes two essays on Walker. In 1980 A. Robert Lee edited Black Fiction: New Studies in the Afro-American Novel Since 1945, with sections on Meridian and several of Walker's stories. That same year Barbara Christian, probably the first professor to teach a course solely on Alice Walker's writings, published Black Women Novelists: The Development of a Tradition 7592-7976, with a discussion of the movement from private experience to community in The Third Life of Grange Copeland and Meridian. The second collection of Walker's short stories, You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down, was reviewed as widely as Meridian but with less enthusiasm. Some reviewers praised her use of fiction as social criticism while others disparaged her didacticism. To Barbara Christian the new stories represented black women's triumphant assertions, a positive complement to the despair of In Love and Trouble. More essays on Walker's earlier work appeared in 1981 and 1982 in academic periodicals and in books that added to the growing body of scholarly work on African

532 I AMERICAN WRITERS American literature, among them, Trudier Harris's From Mammies to Militants: Domestics in Black American Literature (1982), and All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, but Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women's Studies, edited by Gloria T. Hull, Patricia Bell Scott, and Barbara Smith (1982). Critics probed the philosophical issues in Walker's novels, the development of her characters in relationship to black folk tradition, and the remedies she saw for black women's victimization by black men. When Black Scholar surveyed African American writers in 1981, asking what the best books of the 1970's were, The Third Life of Grange Copeland, Meridian, In Love and Trouble, said I Love Myself When I Am Laughing . . . all appeared on the respondents' lists. Several waves of newspaper and magazine coverage followed publication of The Color Purple in 1982: dozens of reviews, reports on Walker's winning several Georgia book prizes as well as the Pulitzer Prize and the American Book Award, and another round of considerations of the novel after the film was made. The reviewers generally agreed that Walker's greatest achievement in The Color Purple was creating Celie's voice—converting oral folk language into an expressive, poignant literary form that draws the reader into intimacy with Celie. Nettie's letters, written in standard English, provide parallels in colonialism and tribal tradition to the racism and sexism that oppress Celie, but many critics found Nettie's letters weak because of their less absorbing style. A few criticisms of problems in structure and historical accuracy were raised even by enthusiastic reviewers. A small number of critics found fault with Walker again having given her fiction a clearly ideological orientation and with the lesbian relationship between Celie and Shug A very, but far more praised the novel in the highest terms, finding in it a significance that made its stylistic flaws minor. Mel Watkins (1982) was

one of several reviewers who saw Walker's previous theme of the estrangement and violence in the relationship between black men and women consolidated in The Color Purple. "No writer has made the intimate hurt of racism more palpable," Dinitia Smith wrote in The Nation (1982). In The New York Review of Books (1982), Robert Towers wrote that The Color Purple "exposes us to a way of life that for the most part existed beyond or below the reach of fiction, . . . the life of poor, rural Southern blacks as it was experienced by their womenfolk." To Newsweek reviewer Peter Prescott, The Color Purple was "an American novel of permanent importance" (1982). In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens, published as reviews of The Color Purple continued to appear, gave critics new ways of discussing both Walker's writings and the literary movement of African American women. Many of the essays are about Walker's childhood and her development as an artist and activist. One reviewer characterized this book as an autobiography, and another pointed to its value in providing background for understanding The Color Purple. Reviewed almost as broadly as The Color Purple, In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens drew a similar mixed response, with some praising Walker's contribution to the uplifting of African American women and others criticizing her analysis of social issues as subjective and individualistic. The most influential parts of the book have been the title essay, first published in Ms. in 1974, and the opening epigraph, a definition of "womanist." "In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens" finds a heritage of art, connected with everyday endurance and "a respect for the possibilities," in the quiltmaking and gardening of forebears whose creativity was otherwise suspended. The coined word "womanist" connects with this heritage. Walker defines the word first as "A black feminist or feminist of color," deriving it from

ALICE WALKER I 533 4

'womanish/' meaning willfully interested in knowing, taking charge, and acting beyond conventionally drawn boundaries. Second, Walker defines '"womanish" as a woman who makes bonds, sexual or nonsexual, with other women but is * "committed to survival and wholeness of entire people, male and female." Many critics quickly picked up the term "womanist," and Mary Helen Washington drew on In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens for an essay about African American women whose mothers nurtured their creativity that she published in Mothering the Mind: Twelve Studies of Writers and Their Silent Partners (1984), edited by Ruth Perry and Martine Watson Brownley. Walker's third book of poems, Horses Make the Landscape Look More Beautiful, received only slight critical notice. Meanwhile, scholarly publications about Walker and mentions of her work proliferated as the attention The Color Purple was receiving stimulated broader interest in her earlier fiction, and as the body of African American literary criticism rapidly grew. Trudier Harris published another book in 1984, Exorcising Blackness: Historical and Literary Lynching and Burning Rituals, in which she placed The Third Life of Grange Copeland in the context of a tradition of black literature about the emasculating effects of racist exploitation. Meridian's themes were explored and connected to both feminist and African American themes: women's ambivalence about self-expression, complex relationships between mothers and daughters, the conflicting demands of radicalism and tradition, social action as a form of self-punishment, and a spirituality that transcends guilt and produces life-affirming political action. Gloria Wade-Gayles wrote about character development in Walker's first two novels in No Crystal Stair: Visions of Race and Sex in Black Women's Fiction (1984). Thadious M. Davis traced a pattern linking contemporary intellectual concerns to the generationally structured experi-

ences of rural, poor Southern blacks throughout Walker's writing in an essay included in Women Writers of the Contemporary South (1984), edited by Peggy Whitman Prenshaw. Black Women Writers (1950-1980): A Critical Evaluation, edited by Man Evans, included essays on Walker by Bettye J. Parker-Smith and Barbara Christian. Claudia Tate published an interview with Walker among a series of interviews, Black Women Writers at Work (1983). Review of The Color Purple continued to appear in 1984 as more in-depth essays explored the book's theology, its commonalities with the traditional American theme of the self's emergence from a dehumanized environment, and its introduction of healing through female bonding into the literature of domestic violence. Gloria Steinem included her 1982 profile of Walker for Ms. in her collected essays, Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions (1984). Steinem's essay gives an overview of Walker's career and claims that her themes have universal significance, a level of meaning male critics deny to women and black writers alike. As if anticipating the public controversy that would erupt over the film of Walker's novel, Steinem writes that hurtful, negative reviews of Walker's work have come mostly from black men "reviewing their own conviction that black men should have everything white men have had, including dominance over women: or their fear that black women's truth-telling will be misused in a racist society." Yet in 1984 a negative appraisal of The Color Purple came from a surprising source: Trudier Harris, one of the African American feminist critics most attentive to Walker's career. Harris found Steinem's article condescending and deplored the morality Steinem praised in Walker's novel: "What kind of morality is it that espouses that all human degradation is justified if the individual somehow survives all the tortures and ugliness heaped upon her?" The process of triumph depicted in the novel was unrealistic, res-

534 I AMERICAN WRITERS urrecting an old myth that black women survive by passive endurance, Harris wrote; and the novel's worst effect is that it gives fresh life to popular racist stereotypes of African American pathologies. Harris acknowledged that, because the book's unequaled popularity led to its being taken as the representative black woman's novel and Walker as a spokeswoman for all black women, 4 'to complain about the novel is to commit treason against black women writers," but she believed that the uncritical reverence the novel received made complaint all the more necessary. In 1985 and 1986 the popular media covered the filming of The Color Purple, its being nominated for eleven Oscars and winning none, and the recirculation of polarized opinions about both the novel and the film. At the same time new reviews of Walker's earlier books appeared and the scholarly literature grew. W. Lawrence Hogue included an essay on The Third Life of Grange Copeland as a feminist discourse in his book Discourse and the Other: The Production of the African-American Text (1986). Black American Literature Forum published articles on The Third Life of Grange Copeland and Meridian. Barbara Christian discussed Meridian and In Love and Trouble in her book Black Feminist Criticism: Perspectives on Black Women Writers (1985). Dozens of articles on The Color Purple appeared in scholarly books and journals, some taking up the public controversy, while others dealt with fictional technique and structure. A new journal, Catalyst, published three essays defending The Color Purple in its first issue (1986). Trudier Harris held to her opinion that Celie reincarnated old stereotypes in an essay for Studies in American Fiction (1986). Philip M. Royster in Black American Literature Forum (1986), and George Stade in Partisan Review (1985), launched scathing attacks on Walker, while Richard Wesley wrote an article for My. (1986) objecting to "tribunals" against black women writers. In English Journal (1985)

Pepper Worthington offered high school English teachers answers they could give to parents who objected to the novel. In Contemporary American Women Writers (1985), edited by Catherine Rainwater and W. J. Scheick, Liz Fifer defended Nettie's letters by saying the contrast between Celie's and Nettie's diction increases the reader's appreciation of Celie's cultural predicament. In her book Women Writing About Men (1986), Jane Miller pointed out that The Color Purple offers men the possibility of redemption. Houston A. Baker, Jr., and Charlotte Pierce-Baker suggested in Southern Review that Walker's story about a family's quilts, "Everyday Use," could serve as an introduction to The Color Purple: Walker as a novelist worked like a quiltmaker, using scraps of marginal humanity in a process of "sacred creation" that gives function a higher value than art. Many critics discussed the novels' deconstruction of patriarchy and Walker's commitment to the cultural heritage of black women. More books of scholarship and criticism drawing connections among the writings of African American women appeared in 1985 and 1986. Susan Willis discussed community, journey, and sensuality in the work of Walker and three other African American novelists in an essay for Making a Difference: Feminist Literary Criticism (1985), edited by Gayle Green and Coppelia Kahn. Keith E. Byerman discussed Walker's mixture of folklore and ideology in a chapter of his book Fingering the Jagged Grain: Tradition and Form in Recent Black Fiction (1985). Marjorie Pryse and Hortense J. Spillers included four essays that deal with Walker's work in an anthology of criticism, Conjuring: Black Women, Fiction, and Literary Tradition (1985). The coverage of the bibliographic volumes on Walker by Pratt and Pratt and by Banks and Byerman ends in mid 1987, as African American scholarship and black feminist criticism increased in richness, sophistication, and productivity, having become established fields of study

ALICE WALKER I 535 with their own sets of definitions and terms of discussion. At the same time scholars worked at rethinking the nature of the American tradition, integrating the study of American literature to include writers who had been omitted because of race and gender. In recent years those who have written about Walker have been black and white, female and male; the works of African American women writers are treated less and less as a special interest of African American critics and more as an important part of the diversity of contemporary culture. Walker remains a controversial figure; but despite some critics' continuing objections to her portrayals of black men and other aspects of her writing, Walker's place as a central figure in American literature is secure. Much of the most complex and interesting criticism about her works has been written since 1987. She also has published two books since then, Living by the Word and The Temple of My Familiar. Little other than reviews has been written about these books; scholarly criticism will absorb them over the next few years. J. Charles Washington helped to put to rest the controversy over Walker's portraits of black men with an essay on positive black male images in her short stories, published in Obsidian (1988). Washington recapitulates Trudier Harris's response to Gloria Steinem's essay and other objections to Walker's work, and says that the negative critics ignore positive images of men in her fiction. "Positive" should not mean "perfect" but "capable of growth and change," Washington insists, and such men exist throughout Walker's fiction. He points out that patriarchal definitions of gender roles limit both men and women in Walker's stories. Committed to a practical, politically functional art, Walker concentrates on the most oppressed group, African American women, which leaves her less time and energy for the common causes of men and women, Washington explains.

At the same time Washington's essay appeared, Modern Fiction Studies published a special issue on modern black fiction with essays on Meridian and The Color Purple, and Black American Literature Forum published essays on The Third Life of Grange Copeland and The Color Purple. In The Hollins Critic (October 1988) James Robert Saunders compared Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God and Walker's The Color Purple—a comparison critics have made again and again from various points of view, always with new insights. Callaloo published a special Alice Walker section in its second 1989 issue, with a selected bibliography following four essays, including one by Jacqueline Bobo on the controversy over the film, and one each on The Third Life of Grange Copeland, Meridian, and some of the stories. The single most useful new book for those researching criticism on Walker is Alice Walker, published by Chelsea House in 1989. Edited by Harold Bloom, the selection emphasizes literary inheritance and family issues. Several of the essays have not been published elsewhere; among them is an assessment of The Color Purple by Bell Hooks. According to Hooks, the magic of the novel is that it fulfills important wishes of our time by skillfully combining fantasy and realism. Radical didacticism gives the book depth, but the fantasy resolutions arise from a conservative "narrative universe," shunting aside rather than resolving the contradictions between revolutionary change and middle-class values. Referring to In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens, Hooks points out that Walker has warned against fantasy resolutions but that she nevertheless grants them in her own fiction, desiring better conditions for her oppressed creations. "I liberated Celie from her own history," Walker says of the Utopian aspects of The Color Purple; "I wanted her to be happy." New books on African American women writers and black feminism are continually appear-

536 / AMERICAN WRITERS ing. In Specifying: Black Women Writing the American Experience (1987), Susan Willis shows how several writers use black folk traditions of storytelling in their novels—for example, the brief anecdotes from which Walker's novels are built follow what Willis calls the 4 'four-page formula," different from postmodern fragmentation in that each anecdote has its own closure. Specifying is a form of storytelling in which the speaker confronts and criticizes someone, calling him or her names as the community witnesses. To Willis, the confrontational approach to history taken by Walker and other black women novelists is a kind of specifying. In Black Feminist Criticism and Critical Theory (1988), edited by Joe Weixlmann and Houston A. Baker, Jr., Missy Dehn Kubitschek gives The Color Purple as an example of an African American author's writing realistically about rape, whereas most Euro-American authors have used rape as a symbol. Abena P. B. Busia, writing about novels of the African diaspora, refers to "In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens" and The Color Purple in discussing the centrality of art of any kind to women's self-preservation under conditions of exile and obscurity. Race, Gender, and Desire: Narrative Strategies in the Fiction of Toni Cade Bambara, Toni Morrison, and Alice Walker (1989), by Elliott Butler-Evans, offers complex analysis of the ways Walker enters, displaces, and disrupts black history in order to create room for the empowerment of women in her first three novels. In Inspiriting Influences: Tradition, Revision, and African-American Women's Novels (1989), Michael Awkward describes "In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens" as the most influential early effort to connect pieces of African American women's expressive tradition. He emphasizes Zora Neale Hurston's importance as an "inspiriting" influence providing current black women authors with a sense of le-

gitimacy, and describes The Color Purple as Walker's repayment of a literary debt to Hurston. Bernard W. Bell's The Afro-American Novel and Its Tradition (1987) is a comprehensive history and categorization of the types of novels that African American authors have written. Bell credits Walker with having spearheaded the reassessment of Zora Neale Hurston's literary significance and uses her term "womanism" in describing the primary concerns of black women novelists: the influences of racism, classism, and sexism on the development of love, power, autonomy, creativity, manhood, and womanhood in the black family and community. He classifies Walker as a neorealist, continuing the traditions of realism but displacing the individual ambivalence and the sense of social absurdity associated with realism to create a new order based on selfdetermination, community, and human rights. Summarizing The Third Life of Grange Copeland, Meridian, and The Color Purple, Bell points out that a new social order is achieved only in the last novel, where critical realism is tailored to folk romance in order to fit the themes of contemporary black feminism into a historical novel. An essay on Walker and Hurston by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., is included in his The Signifying Monkey (1988). Gates's close analysis of the ways Walker adopted and revised Hurston's narrative technique leads him to describe the writing of The Color Purple as a loving act of "signifying" on Hurston, or of "literary bonding quite unlike anything that has ever happened within the Afro-American tradition." Shug Avery, the "blues woman" who helps Celie find sexual fulfillment as well as a religious faith free of a white male God, stands in for Hurston in Walker's novel, according to Gates. He sees The Color Purple as a breakthrough in contemporary African American fiction, in that Walker turns to black literature for a foundation of both form and

ALICE WALKER I 537 content rather than putting black content into a form borrowed from white literary tradition. Gushing Strout places a discussion of Meridian at the end of a book based on the reading lists he uses in teaching American literature, Making American Tradition: Visions and Revisions from Ben Franklin to Alice Walker (1990). Throughout the American tradition, the social condition of blacks is a test of the principles of freedom and equality, according to Strout, and he sees Meridian's ending as reflecting the fear that those ideals will not be realized. Strout begins this essay with one of the first scholarly discussions of Living by the Word, which he uses to create a composite portrait of Walker—a portrait that might be largely unrecognizable to anyone who knew only her work up to The Color Purple and who categorized Walker strictly as a Southern rural black woman writer, though it is quite consistent with the many-sided point of view in The Temple of My Familiar. Besides her well-known feminism-womanism, Walker's current themes are environmentalism, socialism, counterculture, vegetarianism, and New Age occultism. Her politics are sometimes hyperbolic, sometimes sentimental, Strout says, but are strengthened by humor, self-irony, a willingness to notice contradictions inherent in being politically correct, and a deep feeling for tradition. Connecting the "new" Alice Walker with the author of Meridian, Strout points out that Walker has always shown more interest in black American than in black African cultural ancestry, and that this heritage is multiracial—including Native Americans, white slaveowners, and others, in addition to the African exiles.

Selected Bibliography WORKS OF ALICE WALKER POETRY

Once: Poems. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World. 1968. Revolutionary Petunias and Other Poems. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973. Good Night, Willie Lee, I'll See You in the Morning. New York: Dial, 1979. Horses Make a Landscape Look More Beautiful. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984. FICTION The Third Life of Grange Copeland. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970. In Love and Trouble: Stories of Black Women. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973. Meridian. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976. Your Can't Keep a Good Woman Down: Stories. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1981. The Color Purple. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982. The Temple of My Familiar. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1989.

CHILDREN'S LITERATURE

Langston Hughes, American Poet. Illustrated by Don Miller. New York: Crowell, 1974.

EDITED ANTHOLOGY

/ Love Myself When I Am Laughing. . . . and Then Again When I Am Looking Mean and Impressive: A Zora Neale Hurston Reader. Old Westbury, N.Y.: Feminist Press, 1979.

ESSAYS

In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983. Living by the Word: Selected Writings, 1973-1987. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1988.

538 I AMERICAN WRITERS BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL STUDIES Allen, Robert. "Best Books of the '70s." Black Scholar, March-April 1981, p. 80. Awkward, Michael. Inspiriting Influences: Tradition, Revision, and African-American Women's Novels. New York: Columbia University Press, 1989. Babb, Valerie. "The Color Purple: Writing to Undo What Writing Has Done." Phylon, 47:107-116 (June 1986). Baker, Houston A., Jr., and Charlotte Pierce-Baker. "Patches: Quilts and Community in Alice Walker's 'Everyday Use.' " Southern Review, n.s. 21:706720 (Summer 1985). Bannon, Barbara A. "Authors and Editors." Publishers' Weekly, August 31, 1970, pp. 195-197. Bell, Bernard W. The Afro-American Novel and Its Tradition. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1987. Bell, Roseann P., Bettye J. Parker, and Beverly GuySheftall, eds. Sturdy Black Bridges: Visions of Black Women in Literature. Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor/Doubleday, 1979. Berlant, Lauren. "Race, Gender, and Nation in The Color Purple." Critical Inquiry, 14:831-859 (Summer 1988). Bloom, Harold, Ed. Alice Walker. New York: Chelsea House, 1989. Includes essay by Bell Hooks. Bobo, Jacqueline. "The Color Purple: Black Women as Cultural Readers." in Female Spectators: Looking at Film and Television. Edited by E. Deirdre Pribram. London and New York: Verso, 1988. Pp. 90-109. .The Color Purple: Black Women's Responses." Jump Cut, 33:43-51 (February 1988). . "Sifting Through the Controversy: Reading The Color Purple." Callaloo, 12, no. 2:332-342 (1989). Brown, Joseph A., S. J." 'All Saints Should Walk Away': The Mystical Pilgrimage of Meridian." Callaloo, 12, no. 2:310-320 (Spring 1989). Burnett, Zaron W. "The Color Purple: Personal Reaction." Catalyst, 1:43-44 (Fall 1986). Busia, Abena P. B. "Words Whispered over Voids: A Context for Black Women's Rebellious Voices in the Novel of the African Diaspora." In Black Feminist Criticism and Critical Theory. Edited by

Joe Weixlmann and Houston A. Baker, Jr. Greenwood, Fla.: Penkeville, 1988. Pp. 1-42. Butler, Robert James. "Making a Way out of No Way: The Open Journey in Alice Walker's The Third Life of Grange Copeland.'' Black American Literature Forum, 22:65-79 (Spring 1988). Butler-Evans, Elliott. Race, Gender, and Desire: Narrative Strategies in the Fiction of Toni Cade Bambara, Toni Morrison, and Alice Walker. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989. Byerman, Keith, "Women's Blues: The Fiction of Toni Cade Bambara and Alice Walker." In his Fingering the Jagged Grain: Tradition and Form in Recent Black Fiction. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1985. Pp. 129-170. Christian, Barbara. Black Women Novelists: The Development of a Tradition, 1892-1976. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1980. . Black Feminist Criticism: Perspectives on Black Women Writers. New York: Pergamon Press, 1985. Cornish, Sam. "Review of The Third Life of Grange Copeland." Essence, April 1971, p. 2. Davis, Thadious, "Alice Walker's Celebration of Self in Southern Generations." Southern Quarterly, 21:39-53 (Summer 1983). Early, Gerald. "The Color Purple as Everybody's Protest Art." Antioch Review, 44:261-275 (Summer 1986). Erickson, Peter. " 'Cast Out Alone/To Heal/And Recreate Ourselves.' " Family-Based Identity in the Work of Alice Walker." CLA Journal, 23:71-94 (September 1979). Evans, Mari, ed. Black Women Writers (1950-1980): A Critical Evaluation. New York: Anchor/ Doubleday, 1984. Includes essays by Bettye J. Parker-Smith and Barbara Christian. Fifer, Elizabeth, "Alice Walker: "The Dialect & Letters of The Color Purple.'' In Contemporary American Women Writers: Narrative Strategies. Edited by Catherine Rainwater and William J. Scheick. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1985. Pp. 155-171. Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. "Color Me Zora: Alice Walker's (Re)Writing of the Speakerly Text." In his The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. Pp. 239-258. Harris, Jessica, "An Interview with Alice Walker." Essence. July 1976, p. 33.

ALICE WALKER I 539 Harris, Trudier. "Violence in The Third Life of Grange Copeland." CLA Journal, 19:238-247 (December 1975). . "Folklore in the Fiction of Alice Walker: A Perpetuation of Historical and Literary Traditions. '' Black American Literature Forum, 11:3-8 (Spring 1977). . From Mammies to Militants: Domestics in Black American Literature. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1982. . Exorcising Blackness: Historical and Literary Lynching and Burning Rituals. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984. . "On The Color Purple, Stereotypes, and Silence." Black American Literature Forum, 18:155-161 (Winter 1984). . "From Victimization to Free Enterprise: Alice Walker's The Color Purple." Studies in American Fiction, 14:1-17 (Spring 1986). Hogue, W. Lawrence. "History, the Feminist Discourse, and Alice Walker's The Third Life of Grange Copeland." MELUS 12:45-62 (Summer 1985). Hull, Gloria T., Patricia Bell Scott, and Barbara Smith, eds. All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, but Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women's Studies. Old Westbury, N.Y.: Feminist Press, 1982. Kennedy, Randall. "Looking for Zora." New York Times Book Review. December 30, 1979, pp. 8, 17. Kubitschek, Missy Dehn. "Subjugated Knowledge: Toward a Feminist Exploration of Rape in AfricanAmerican Fiction." In Black Feminist Criticism and Critical Theory. Edited by Joe Weixlmann and Houston A. Baker, Jr. Greenwood, Fla.: Penkeville, 1988. Pp. 43-56. Lee, A. Robert, ed. Black Fiction: New Studies in the Afro-American Novel Since 1945. London: Vision, 1980. McDowell, Deborah E. " 'The Changing Same'. Generational Connections and Black Women Novelists." New Literary History, 18:281-302 (Winter 1987). Mickelson, Anne Z. Reaching Out: Sensitivity and Order in Recent American Fiction by Women. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1979. Miller, Jane. Women Writing about Men. London: Virago, 1986. Mullen, Harryette. "Daughters in Search of Mothers

or a Girl Child in a Family of Men." Catalyst, 1:45-49 (Fall 1986). Noble, Jeanne. "Black Women Writers of the New Renaissance." In her Beautiful, Also, Are the Souls of My Black Sisters: A History of the Black Woman in America. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1978. O'Brien, John. "Alice Walker." In Interviews with Black Writers. Edited by John O'Brien. New York: Liveright, 1973. Pp. 185-212. Reprinted in part as "From an Interview." In Alice Walker, In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens. Peden, William. "The Black Explosion: 'I Mean, with All things Considered. The Field Is Opening up More and More. . . Ya Know—Bein' Black and MeanirT It. We're in Vogue These Days.' " In his The American Short Story: Continuity and Change, 1940-1975. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1975. Prenshaw, Peggy Whitman, ed. Women Writers of the Contemporary South. Oxford: University Press of Mississippi, 1984. Prescott, Peter S. "A Long Road to Liberation." Newsweekr June 21, 1982, pp. 67-68. Pryse, Marjorie, and Hortense J. Spillers, eds. Conjuring: Black Women, Fiction, and Literary Tradition. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985. Ross, Daniel W. "Celie in the Looking Glass: The Desire for Selfhood in The Color Purple.'' Modern Fiction Studies, 34:6^-84 (Spring 1988). Royster, Philip M. "In Search of Our Fathers' Arms: Alice Walker's Persona of the Alienated Darling." Black American Literature Forum, 20:347-370 (Winter 1986). Sadoff, Diane F. "Black Matrilineage: The Case of Alice Walker and Zora Neale Hurston." Signs, 11:4-26 (Autumn 1985). Saunders, James Robert. "Womanism as the Key to Understanding Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God and Alice Walker's The Color Purple." The Hollins Critic, 25:1-11 (October 1988). Smith, Barbara. "The Souls of Black Women." Ms., February 1974, pp. 42-43, 78. Smith, Dinitia. " 'Celie, You a Tree.' " The Nation. September 4, 1982, p. 181-183. Stade, George. "Womanist Fiction and Male Characters." Partisan Review, 52, no. 3:264-270 (1985). Steinem, Gloria. "Do You Know This Woman? She Knows You—A Profile of Alice Walker." Ms.,

540 I AMERICAN WRITERS June 1982, pp. 35, 37, 89-94. Reprinted in her Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1983. p. 259275. Strout, Gushing. Making American Tradition: Visions and Revisions from Ben Franklin To Alice Walker. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1990. Tate, Claudia. t4Alice Walker." In her Black Women Writers at Work. New York: Continuum, 1983. Pp. 175-187. Towers, Robert. "Good Men Are Hard to Find." New York Review of Books. August 12, 1982, pp. 35-36. Tucker, Lindsey. "Alice Walker's The Color Purple: Emergent Woman, Emergent Text." Black American Literature Forum, 22:81-95 (Spring 1988). Wade-Gayles, Gloria. No Crystal Stair: Visions of Race and Sex in Black Women's Fiction. New York: Pilgrim Press, 1984. Pp. 102-114. . "Anatomy of an Error: The Color Purple Controversy." Catalyst, 1:50-53 (Fall 1986). Washington, J. Charles. "Positive Black Male Images in Alice Walker's Fiction." Obsidian II, 3:23-48 (Spring 1988). Washington, Mary Helen. "Teaching Black-Eyed Susans: An Approach to the Study of Black Women Writers." Black American Literature Forum, 11:20-24 (Spring 1977). . "An Essay on Alice Walker." In Sturdy Black Bridges: Visions of Black Women in Liter alure. Edited by Roseann P. Bell, Bettye J. Parker, and Beverly Guy-Sheftall. Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor/Doubleday, 1979. Pp. 133-149. . "I Sign My Mother's Name: Alice Walker, Dorothy West. Paule Marshall." In Mothering the Mind: Twelve Studies of Writers and Their Silent Partners. Edited by Ruth Perry and Martine Watson Brownley. New York: Holmes & Meier, 1984. Pp. 142-163.

Watkins, Mel. "In Love and Trouble." New York times Book Review. March 17, 1974, p. 40. . "Some Letters Went to God." New York Times Book Review, July 25, 1982, p. 7. Wesley, Richard. "The Color Purple Debate: Reading Between the Lines." Ms., September 1986, pp. 62,90-92. Weston, Ruth D. "Black Woman Writers: Taking a Critical Perspective." In Making a Difference: Feminist Literary Criticism. Edited by Gayle Greene and Coppelia Kahn. London and New York: Methuen, 1985. Pp. 211-231. . Specifying: Black Women Writing the American Experience. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987. Worthington, Pepper. "Writing a Rationale for a Controversial Common Reading Book: Alice Walker's The Color Purple." English Journal, 74:48-52 (January 1985).

BIBLIOGRAPHIES Banks, Erma Davis, and Keith Byerman. Alice Walker, an Annotated Bibliography. New York: Garland, 1989. Byerman, Keith, and Erma Davis Banks. "Alice Walker: A Selected Bibliography, 1968-1988." Callaloo, 12, no. 2:343-345 (1989). Kirschner, Susan. "Alice Walker's Nonfictional Prose: A Checklist, 1966-1984." Black American Literature Forum, 18:162-163 (Winter 1984). Pratt, Louis H., and Darnell D. Pratt. Alice Malsenior Walker: An Annotated Bibliography, 1968-1986. Westport, Conn.: Meckler, 1988. Werner, Craig. "Alice Walker." In Black American Women Novelists: An Annotated Bibliography. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 1989. Pp. 238-258.

—JANET GRAY

Richard Wilbur 1921-

R.ICHARD WILBUR'S PLACE among preemi-

than those which (primarily New Critical) readers saw as having been so gracefully resolved. Slightly younger than the first generation of poets whose work began to be published during or after World War II—John Berryman, Randall Jarrell, Elizabeth Bishop, and Robert Lowell were born between 1911 and 1919—Wilbur is one of a larger group born during the 1920's: among them are Howard Nemerov, Anthony Hecht, Louis Simpson, Denise Levertov, James Dickey, Donald Justice, James Merrill, W. D. Snodgrass, Allen Ginsberg, A. R. Ammons, James Wright, John Ashbery, W. S. Merwin, Galway Kinnell, Philip Levine, John Hollander, and Adrienne Rich. Of all these postwar writers, he has hewn most closely and consistently to the grain of one of the most dominant kinds of poetry to emerge in the wake of the earlier modernists. Wilbur wrote in "On My Own Work" (1966, collected in Responses: Prose Pieces 1953-1976):

nent contemporary American poets is uncontested. And yet, despite broad confirmations (the poet laureateship, the Pulitzer and Bollingen prizes, among many other awards), this place has been somewhat more narrowly delimited than it should have been. This study will therefore attempt to augment the standard perception of Wilbur as the quintessentially refined New Critical poet whose musical and metaphorical wizardry has conjured some of the most dazzling yet suavely balanced and self-reconciliatory lyric poems of our time. During a mid century less given to contained forms of serious affirmation than to a barbarous history and its irregular songs of hurt or counterprovocation, Wilbur's art has been identified as fair-minded and masterful, a white magic devoted more to restorative and celebratory acts than to the darker perturbations of the agonized or the wild at heart. Wilbur has been regarded by some as lacking a "saving vulgarity"—too much Prospero, too little Caliban. While recognizing a degree of accuracy in that definition, one should also be alive to what challenges even the most admiring of its terms. Not only should one see how elements of Wilbur's later work have cracked the definition that had crystallized around his first two or three books; one should read the early work itself as having addressed more powerful incongruities

Most American poets of my generation were taught to admire the English Metaphysical poets of the seventeenth century and such contemporary masters of irony as John Crowe Ransom. We were led by our teachers and by the critics whom we read to feel that the most adequate and convincing poetry is that which accommodates mixed feelings, clashing ideas, and incongruous

541

542 I AMERICAN WRITERS images. Poetry could not be honest, we thought, unless it began by acknowledging the full discordancy of modern life and consciousness. I still believe that to be a true view of poetry. Wilbur was referring to the tenets of New Criticism, developed after T. S. Eliot by such theorists and practitioners as I. A. Richards, John Crowe Ransom, Alan Tate, Robert Penn Warren, and Cleanth Brooks. Less revolutionary than the modernists, the New Critics shrank from what they viewed as certain excesses in the ambitions of modernism, associated as these were with the harsh polarities of totalitarianism and chaos. More interested in forms of provisional restabilization rather than of further ground breaking or system building, New Critics also were initially skeptical about the modernist long poem, as well as about the poet's use of grand cultural or political designs. Hence they held a preference for brief, tense, formally balanced lyrics that stressed the artifice of textual autonomy and inner symmetries rather than overt biographical or historical referents. If the latter were evoked, they appeared less in their own "right" than as elements in a rhetorical composition; and if there were potentially dramatic or dynamic forces at work, these were carefully wrought into the counterpoise of art: Wilbur said in his "The Genie in the Bottle" (published in John Ciardi's Mid-Century American Poets): The use of strict poetic forms, traditional or invented, is like the use of framing and composition in painting: both serve to limit the work of art, and to declare its artificiality: they say, "This is not the world, but a pattern imposed upon the world or found in it; this is a partial and provisional attempt to establish relations between things." There had, of course, been other schools of postwar American poetry, one of the most notable being that derived from Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams (whom Wilbur has consistently

admired), and Charles Olson. And, following the late 1950's, most of Wilbur's initially likeminded contemporaries broke from the enclosures of New Criticism toward more open poetic forms, or toward the admission (in some cases confession) of apparently less artificial and less controllable material, whether autobiographical, historical, mythic, or surreal. Against these departures, Wilbur's career appears less volatile; and the equable tone of his work has reinforced the appearance of stable consistency, as if the entire oeuvre were itself a New Critical poem. Yet beneath its composed surfaces, Wilbur's poetry has, despite great coherence, developed and altered considerably. And in many respects these developments have underscored the least tractable (and most valuable) features of the earlier work—features that, like the subsequent developments, have seldom been fully measured either by Wilbur's few detractors or by many of his insightful admirers. By exploring the entire range of his work one can hope to gain a better sense not only of the superb array of "bottles," to use his metaphor for craft and container, but also of the often dark and uncanny genie moving within and between them. Richard Wilbur was born in New York City on March 1, 1921. His mother, Helen Purdy Wilbur, "came of a Baltimore family with a tradition of newspaper-editing"—hence Wilbur's inherited commonsensical allegiance to pragmatic, communicative language, an allegiance that would long outlast his editorship of The Amherst Student', his father, Lawrence L. Wilbur, was a portrait painter—hence Wilbur's "busy eye" and painterly sense of composition. In an autobiographical sketch (1974, in Conversations with Richard Wilbur), Wilbur told his interviewer, Philip Dacey: I am not yet feeble enough to be interested in genealogy, but it may as well be said that I am of

RICHARD WILBUR I 543 the llth generation from Samuel Wildbore, and am descended from settlers of Massachusetts and Rhode Island. The fact does not seem definitive to me. ... In a time of ethnic and racial selfconsciousness, it is of no particular advantage to a writer that he belongs to the Anglo-Saxon minority, which is now felt to lack decided characteristics, and about which, significantly, no jokes are told. Robert Lowell is the only writer of recent years to make much use of such ancestry, and it is by and large people of other provenance who now claim to represent some version of "the American experience.'' Beyond Wilbur's blend of modesty and assurance, the statement points to his lack of the ancestral or ethnic agons by which many American poets most readily weld their private psyches to that of the nation. This accounts for the relative absence of inflation in Wilbur's work—the language and tone are those of a biographically reticent New Englander, whose half-rueful centrality neutralizes the means for various selfamplifications while also depriving him of the outsider's (or, in Lowell's case, rebellious insider's) leverage on which much poetry has depended for its contestatory weight or edge. In addition, one may perceive an ancestral element in Wilbur's apparent impartiality and ethnically unburdened buoyancy as a poet, as well as in his uninflected access to the standard English that has flowed with deliberate clarity since Tudor times, passing through such poets as Robert Herrick and John Dryden, eventually to reach A. E. Housman and Philip Larkin. To this, Wilbur has brought his own exuberant inventiveness, as well as a leaven of American usage, cross-grained with the semantic wit of one who knows how to evoke the Latin or Romance echoes still layering so many English words: In those lapped roars And souring resonance he heard as well

Hoarse trains that highball down the world's ravines . . . sick thrills Of transit and forsaking. The result is a wide-ranging play of vocabulary, but one that seems to move outward from a core of plainness, just as many of Wilbur's lyrics themselves—for all the acts of persuasion in their rhetoric and form—seem to issue from a serenely centered voice, free of bias or special pleading. Indeed, the resulting freedom of the reader, the absence of obvious solicitations, may be the most difficult of gifts to receive. When reading lyric poems, we are more accustomed to being led by prosecution or defense than to hearing the more evenhanded accents of a judge or expert witness, seemingly impartial, however urgently engaged: while admiring its "brilliant negative," Wilbur's poem "Cottage Street, 1953" regards and, indeed, judges Sylvia Plath's work as "helpless and unjust." In a postwar culture unnerved by continuing abuses of power, we often withhold assent from poems that (however outraged) do not patently and with immediate pathos situate themselves in the unbalanced field offeree where power, justice, or centrality itself is a matter of dispute. Moving to what was still rural New Jersey in 1923, Wilbur's family settled "at modest rental in a pre-Revolutionary stone house on the estate of an English millionaire." (This and subsequent recollections can be found in Conversations.) On these "four-hundred-odd acres in North Caldwell. . . transformed into the Platonic idea of an English gentleman's farm," Wilbur absorbed the "decent, attractive, civilized" temper of this "spontaneous English colony": "all was tea, bowls, tennis, Episcopalianism, gardening, music, and bridge, with agriculture and commerce in the middle distance and background." There, invigorating this gently mocked gentility, he developed his abiding regard for the natural world—"it comes natural to me to use, in par-

544 I AMERICAN WRITERS ticular, botanical materials"—especially where a mild wildness abuts or partially submits to forms of cultivation. A similar, contrastive vigor characterized his "ridingthe rails and hitchhiking all over America" during vacations from Amherst; and it marks his poetry's sensitivity to what evades even the most ingenious of forms. At Amherst (1938-1942) Wilbur found a ' 'superior English department," at that time riding the high tide of New Criticism. "Converted . . . to disciplined reading," he became inclined toward what for some time promised to be a career as a literary scholar and critic. Although he had published a few poems while still an undergraduate, the jarring motive for becoming a poet in earnest came after graduation. Shortly after marrying Charlotte Hayes Ward in June 1942, Wilbur joined the 36th Infantry Division and served at Monte Cassino at Anzio, in the invasion of southern France, and on through the Siegfried Line. Wilbur has spoken (1975) of his wartime experience in ways that connect it directly to his writing: I began to write rather constantly once I got abroad in the service. It was one of the few things one could do, under what were chiefly boring circumstances, to keep sane. . . . I think it was a question of confusion, or a desire to make order of confusion, to give words to one's fears and uncertainties and so tame them a little. . . . You have to have some experience of danger, lostness and mess. The bottom has to fall out of your thoughts periodically before you feel the need to be clear and orderly in words. The above statement deepens our reading of Wilbur's early and subsequent work, as does his account of his reading experience during the war—especially his reading of Edgar Allan Poe (along with James Joyce, Dylan Thomas, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Alfred Lord Tennyson): I can remember that during one long week in which I scarcely got out of my foxhole at Monte

Cassino, I read that whole paperback of Poe. For the first time I began to have a sense that there was something besides spookery in Poe, that there might be some kind of allegorical depth to his fiction. . . . Perhaps it was because under circumstances where one did very little save sleep and wake, one's attention was drawn to all of the semi-states which lie between full waking and deep slumber. I began to perceive that in Poe's fiction some effort was being made to represent the stages or stations of the mind. We will soon measure the extent of Wilbur's self-described "public quarrel with the aesthetics of Edgar Allan Poe.'' But it is worth recognizing how many of Wilbur's own poems cross and recross the semistates along the borders of sleep and wakefulness (among them "Clearness," 4 'The Pardon," "Merlin Enthralled," "Marginalia," "Love Calls Us to the Things of This World," "Walking to Sleep," and "In Limbo"), as well as how many of them take for their deeper subjects the "stages or stations of the mind." In the light of these reflections on fear, boredom, and loss, as well as on the disorientation and attempted reordering of the world and the mind, we can now turn to Wilbur's first collection. While at war he was sending poems home to his wife and a few friends; after his return to graduate school at Harvard the poems were brought to the attention of the publishers Reynal & Hitchcock, who published them with some newer work as The Beautiful Changes (1947). Several features of Wilbur's first book were immediately praised by Louise Bogan: He has a remarkable variety of interest and mood, and he can contemplate his subjects without nervousness, explore them with care, and then let them drop at the exact moment that the organization of a poem is complete. This ease of pace, this seemingly effortless advance to a resolute conclusion, is rare at his age; the young

RICHARD WILBUR I 545 usually yield to tempting inflation and elaboration. Equally striking is the extraordinary freshness with which Wilbur re-perceives his world. This is partly a matter of tone and music, but for the moment let us notice the salient devices of simile and metaphor, and ask what makes Wilbur's use of them so distinctive. First, some early examples: Slicing open a potato is "like breaching a strangely refreshing tomb" (4'Potato"); "The snow came down last night like moths / Burned on the moon" ("First Snow in Alsace"); twilight / Glides like a giant bass" ("The Peace of Cities"); "Then your love looked as simple and entire / As that picked pear you tossed me" ("June Light"). In each case the comparison creates something new, and the shock of that creation does much to provide the energy of Wilbur's poetry. But, unlike many metaphorists, Wilbur channels and ramifies that energy onward through the poem—by maintaining a modulated speaking voice and by integrating the comparison into larger currents of syntax, cadence, or stanzaic form. The effects and possible motives for this are several, and it is worth dwelling on them for a moment, because they lie near the heart of Wilbur's entire work. Certainly the shock of refreshment is prolonged and shaped—becoming more a wave than an explosion; but beyond the pleasing athletic dexterity and vitality of this shaping, Wilbur is extending another effect of the metaphor itself: the sense of connectedness. Since one of his "motives for metaphor" is the creation of relatedness (Wilbur has spoken of the religious element in this enterprise), it is no coincidence that his comparisons are seldom left to shine alone but are invariably woven into a larger verbal scheme. This larger scheme is also that of a courteous conversationalist (perhaps a social analogue and instrument for the poem's creations of cooperative relatedness), whose interest is in

keeping the discourse moving fluently along rather than stopping its flow with some arresting brilliance. In both these regards, Wilbur may be drawing on his admiration for seventeenthcentury prose—and it is this, as much as his flair for compound description and allegory, that lies at the root of his early affinity with Marianne Moore. A virtuoso syntactician, careful to draw otherwise unassimilable curiosities of fact or figure into an unflappable conversational pursuit, Moore praised such authors as Donne, Francis Bacon, and Thomas Browne in the following terms: "Suggesting conversation and strengthened by etymology there is a kind of effortless compactness which precludes ornateness, a 'fearful felicity,' in which like the pig in the churn, imagination seems to provide its own propulsiveness." The propulsiveness and fluency with which Wilbur integrates his metaphors may have yet further motives, at which the word "fearful" could hint. Indeed, the early poem "Objects" ends with the speaker self-described as "fearfully free." Bearing in mind that much of his early poetry emerged from the war, one notices that Wilbur's comparisons often register an estrangement that is as threatening as it is thrilling: the potato as tomb, the twilight as predator; even the lovely pear becomes "more fatal fleshed." In "First Snow in Alsace," the opening line ("The snow came down last night like moths") is pleasantly poetic; but the discomforting enjambment and extension of the simile to "Burned on the moon" brings an abrupt and mortal change. Characteristically, Wilbur moves beyond a possible fixation on this strangeness, pausing only for a caesural semicolon before calmly resuming, "it fell till dawn, / Covered the town with simple cloths." Like the syntax, the simplicity absorbs and recovers from the strangeness, even as the metaphoric play has now eased onward from burned moths to simple cloths. Similarly, the poetic form crystallizes

546 I AMERICAN WRITERS quietly into the first of a series of interlaced stanzas of terza rima. In such ways the poem rehearses the experience of uncovering and recovering from the shock of estrangement. Estrangement of a violent kind is clearly at the thematic core of the poem, which continues thus: shellbursts scattered and deranged, Entangled railings, crevassed lawn. As if it did not know they'd changed, Snow smoothly clasps the roofs of homes Fear-gutted, trustless and estranged. ''Deranged," "changed," "estranged": from the first, Wilbur's readers should have measured the toll in this persistant rhyme. (The later poem "Praise in Summer" again rhymes "derange" and "strange," and variants of "strange" recur in numerous others.) Clearly the brio of perceived resemblance has its disjunctive underside— comparison as crisis, not just delight—and the composures of phrasing and rhyme have compensatory as well as celebratory designs. Indeed, Wilbur's achievement makes these oppositions almost indistinguishable. Continuing "First Snow in Alsace," one cannot think now of snow without also envisioning burned moths, wrecked homes, and such scenes of death as the poem goes on to describe: "beyond the town a mile / Or two, this snowfall fills the eyes / Of soldiers dead a little while.'' While calm, the hush is also that of desolation. And although the apparently amenable diction of "a mile / Or two" or "a little while" may lessen the horror, it renders such diction either limited or yet more menacing—as if a half-echo of Robert Frost's "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" were introduced only to make the familiar voice of Frost himself now seem either naively inadequate to this foreign enormity or still more disquieting from within its provinciality. Yes, "frost makes marvelous designs," as the poem goes on to concede; but Wilbur weighs

such marvels of natural design against the ghastly mess or yet more hideous design of war. Wilbur's line may thus evoke the darker and more pertinent Frost of "Design," which also rhymed "cloth" with a victim "moth" as part of its remorseless etching of "death and blight." However deftly en passant, Wilbur may thus have relayed both the genial and the vigilant nature of his inheritance from Frost—who has remained one of his principal influences. In the same vein, Wilbur concludes by measuring the self-warming innocence of youth ("Tenfirst-snowsback in thought. . . [the night guard] was the first to see the snow") against the chill of the dead, or of soldiers aged by the experience of last things. How much is a residual innocence now worth? The question has no obvious answer. On the one hand, boyish boastings of priority are ironized by subsequent warfare, and may even involve the competitive impulses that lead to war. On the other, such warmth and recollected freshness of perception, however marred, may revive an otherwise lethal freezing of the night guard's sensibility. Without it, the eyes of the survivors may be as snow-blinded as those of the dead. "First Snow" ends, noteworthily, by representing the consciousness of a night guard. Having noticed that the refreshing power of Wilbur's similitudes is inseparable from a perception of threatening otherness and change, like that of war, we may now add that his alertness is likewise inextricable from a kind of vigilance. In fact, several poems in Wilbur's first book adopt overt or implied attitudes of guardedness. "Objects" enjoins us to "Guard and gild what's common," while the soldiers of "Mined Country" must unlearn their trust in the natural world so as to guard against concealed land mines. Like the homes in Alsace, "trustless and estranged," these pastures and woods, as well as the men "Stepping with care and listening / Hard for hid metal's cry," are

RICHARD WILBUR I 547 so mixed up With earliest trusts, you have to pick back Far past all you have learned, to go Disinherit the dumb child. Part of the trust fund lost to estrangement is thus an innocent infancy, as well as an early pastoral language. History's invasion of pastoral is an old story, going back past Edmund Spenser to Virgil; but the invasion and suffering are always renewed, as is the demand for an appropriate language to be used by those who guard the flocks: "Shepherds must learn a new language; this / Isn't going to be quickly solved." In many ways this threatening necessity, balanced by an implied originality, serves as a manifesto for a young poet breaking or guarding the ground of his own career. And while Wilbur's poetry will track man's historical or conceptual violations of the natural world, it will also guard against quick poetic solutions. Like many poems to come, 4 'Mined Country" proposes a recovered wildness rather than an inner or outer region mined by our impositions: Tell him to trust things alike and never to stop Emptying things, but not let them lack Love in some manner restored; to be Sure the whole world's wild. As "in some manner" betrays, however, the restoration of wildness is a paradoxical goal, compromised by the manners of language as much as by the necessary technology of a mine detector— a latter-day shepherd's crook. For Wilbur, whose brilliant mind and manners always shape the very wildness they would restore or praise, this further problem, too, will not be "quickly solved." It remains one of the most fascinating elements of his entire career. This sensitivity to wildness suggests yet another motive for the distinctive fluency with which Wilbur tends to surpass even the most inspired of his comparisons. To the accommo-

dated recognition of strangeness, and to the ductility of civil address, we can add Wilbur's skepticism about imposing upon or deludedly trying to apprehend a "wild" reality that evades even the most ingenious of our figures. "Objects" speaks of "a net which catches nothing," and it urges us to "forget / Uses and prices and names; have objects speak." The net recurs in "An Event," where Wilbur supersedes one simile for flocking birds ("As if a cast of grain leapt back to the hand") with another ("They roll / Like a drunken fingerprint across the sky!")— only to reject that last superb comparison: Or so I give their image to my soul Until, as if refusing to be caught In any singular vision of my eye Or in the nets and cages of my thought, They tower up, shatter, and madden space With their divergences, are each alone Swallowed from sight, and leave me in this place Shaping images to make them stay: . . . Even the refutation of his figures of speech requires yet further metaphors (nets, cages, tower, madden, swallowed), as if to confess that language itself, particularly its figurative element, is unavoidably mined with that which it would sweep clear. And so the vigilance spoken of earlier extends as much to Wilbur's craft and medium as to his subjects—even when the subject is that very need for vigilance. One way to measure the course of Wilbur's development—extending to as late a poem as "Lying"—is to follow the deepening skepticism of that vigilance, associated as it is with more than merely epistemological concerns. Wilbur's "Praise in Summer" confronts the distortion that inheres in any refreshing use of metaphor—but here it suggests something like a compulsion in the poet's malpractice: And then I wondered why this mad instead Perverts our praise to uncreation, why

548 I AMERICAN WRITERS Such savor's in this wrenching things awry. Does sense so stale that it must needs derange The world to know it? ... The sonnet is bound by such urgent words as "must needs," "mad," and "awry" ("Mined Country" had worried that "Some scheme's gone awry"); "perverts" and "wrenching" dramatize the turning of figuration. Clearly, such rhetoric admits more than a decorative compunction for its abuses. But if we expect a purgative return to literal truths, the poem concludes: To a praiseful eye Should it not be enough of fresh and strange That trees grow green, and moles can course in clay, And sparrows sweep the ceiling of our day? Not only is the question rhetorical, its rhetoricity is stressed by the return to metaphoric play within the final line. The question answers itself by the very language with which it has been posed. With a deepened sense of Wilbur's necessary rather than merely willed estrangements, we should turn back to several other early poems that portray the estranger himself.' 'Water Walker" is the most remarkable of these. Here the very means of self-portrayal is inherently metaphorical and estranging, since the speaker's self is presented only via the multiple figures of the caddis fly and of the apostle Saul/Paul—each of which is subject to metamorphosis. Like the fly and the convert, the poet may be condemned (by a force somewhere between biological and spiritual necessity) to exist in a state of betweenness, waterborne yet in flight, a convert Roman preaching to Greeks, an uneasy foreigner who, like metaphor or poetic language itself, keeps crossing the borderline of his own otherness, "Always alike and unlike." To the radically converted survivor of war, the world will obviously seem other than what it was. To such a survivor who is also a poet, a maker of metaphoric con-

versions, his own identity will have become that of a "Stranger to both" sides of the several divisions between literal and figurative, or familiar and unfamiliar, worlds. Unable to dwell in a world whose otherness he has noted and augmented, he discovers "Heaven and hell in the poise / Betwixt 'inhabit' and 'know' "—a discovery that evokes ultimate judgment. And, as the poem concludes, "justice" is somehow the heart of the matter: Who learns How hid the trick is of justice, cannot go home, nor can leave, But the dilemma, cherished, tyrannical, While he despairs and burns Da capo da capo returns. Those lines serve a writ on Wilbur's entire career—its musically recapitulated cherishing of a need to do justice to the changing world. The need is tyrannical, and the poet is its main victim and disciple, repeatedly compelled to a task that can have no resolution. The presence of tyranny confirms that Wilbur's estrangements were suffered rather than merely administered, and it sharpens the "dilemma" noticed in the poet's testing of his own words. While such a perception moves beyond New Critical claims of poetic resolution, it also points to how many of Wilbur's other poems wrestle with the very matter of justice—a justice often directed beyond the supposed limits of the poem. Thus "On the Eyes of an SS Officer" both diagnoses the selfblinding injustice of fanatics and calls down an actual judgment on the worst of such would-be purifiers: "I ask my makeshift God of this / My opulent bric-a-brac earth to damn his eyes." Similarly, other poems adjudicate between the possessiveness of a collector and the work of a painter like Pieter de Hooch, whose way of doing justice to "A Dutch Courtyard" makes the scene immune to consumption; or between the

RICHARD WILBUR / 549 narrowly honor-bound Percy or Hal and the roundly life-affirming Falstaff ("Up, Jack"); or between the "small strict shape" of the costumed performing dancer and her unmeshed return to "a little wilderness of flesh" ("L'Etoile"). Meanwhile, to forestall his own errors of perceptual judgment, Wilbur conjures the baffling and fluent variegations of a sycamore so that his eye "will never know the dry disease / Of thinking things no more than what he sees" ("Poplar, Sycamore"). In each case, Wilbur's fidelity is to a world beyond strict apprehension or even comprehension. The book's first poem, "Cicadas" (called "Cigales" in The Beautiful Changes), celebrates a "thin uncomprehended song [that] springs healing questions into binding air." Like that song, although far from thin, Wilbur's own poems reserve a teasing element—either of incomprehensible music or of contradiction—that pledges the world which "darts without the word." As we now recognize, that pledge marks a restless fidelity to what changes. Like the visions of Paul, this "troubles" us by enforcing a loss of the familiar world or self, and by pointing to our own mortality. One cannot embrace change without also accepting mortal loss; and it is this mature renunciation, deeper than its aesthetic or conceptual counterparts, that gives Wilbur's work its early and lasting depth, as well as its unusual balance of calm and celebration. This is what allows him to "choose / To welcome love in the lively wasting sun" ("Sunlight Is Imagination"), and to write the extraordinary philosophical love poem that titles and concludes the book. "The Beautiful Changes" meditates on how beauty (and, by implication, poetic metaphor) alters, both reflexively and as an agent that quickens us to see things as yet more strangely other than they once appeared—less our own, and yet by loss released to that mysterious stirring beyond recognition or selfhood that lies at the heart of wonder:

One wading a Fall meadow finds on all sides The Queen Anne's Lace lying like lilies On water; it glides So from the walker, it turns Dry grass to a lake, as the slightest shade of you Valleys my mind in fabulous blue Lucernes. The beautiful changes as a forest is changed By a chameleon's tuning his skin to it; As a mantis, arranged On a green leaf, grows Into it, makes the leaf leafier, and proves Any greenness is deeper than anyone knows. Your hands hold roses always in a way that says They are not only yours; the beautiful changes In such kind ways, Wishing ever to sunder Things and things' selves for a second finding, to lose For a moment all that it touches back to wonder. The Beautiful Changes appeared while Wilbur was studying English literature at Harvard Graduate School. After studying for a year on the G.I. Bill, and receiving an M.A. degree (1947), he began three years as a junior fellow at Harvard's Society of Fellows. During this time he continued his study of Poe—a study that yielded ground-breaking essays and lectures on Poe's work. While marking the limits of Poe's exclusionary poetry ("with few exceptions . . . what brilliance they have is like that of a Fourth of July rocket destroying itself in the void"), Wilbur reveals the allegories of otherworldly disengagement that work like "undercurrents" through the fiction. A true poet-critic, he applies a far from disinterested edge to these studies of such works as "Ligeia," The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, and the detective stories. As in a Poe narrative, where (according to Wilbur's insight) two characters may represent divergent parts of a single soul, Wilbur draws critically close to his subject in order to clarify and per-

550 / AMERICAN WRITERS haps exorcise Poe's remorseless drive for demateriaJization. Although fascinated by Poe's dream exploration of shifting borders of consciousness, and by his "estranging" spirituality, Wilbur makes of Poe a "road not taken"—one that covers similar psychic territory but leads in a direction whose very oppositeness dramatizes Wilbur's intended celebration of the "things of this world.'' That celebration becomes one of the main objects of Wilbur's second collection of poems, Ceremony and Other Poems (1950). If Poe sought the absolute and the timeless, the poems of Ceremony necessarily embrace the temporal world. Even more intensely than had been true of his earlier registry of change, Wilbur's espousal of incarnate, material existence ("A World Without Objects Is a Sensible Emptiness") commits him to "a most material loss" and to a "lament for grace's early term" ("Lament"). And whereas a chief element and agent of estrangement in The Beautiful Changes had been war, it is now time and a more general sense of mortality that (in' 'The Beautiful Changes") "sunder[s] / Things and things' selves for a second finding"—if, indeed, such recoveries are possible. This last doubt troubles such poems as "The Pardon" and "The Death of a Toad." In the former, the speaker is haunted by the dog whose death he had once evaded ("I could not forgive the sad or strange / In beast or man"). Now the dog returns, if not for redemption ("I dreamt the past was never past redeeming: / But whether this was false or honest dreaming"), then for an acknowledgment that would humbly extend the limits of kindness to encompass the strangeness of death ("I beg death's pardon now. And mourn the dead.") Similarly—as Randall Jarrell failed to see—"The Death of a Toad" incriminates its own idealizing compensations ("ebullient seas . . . Amphibia's emperies") with a final, unflinching regard for what is lost. If "A World Without Objects" deliberately blurs its poetic

lampshine in "the steam of beasts," these two poems about dead beasts modulate such "light incarnate" from the glowing "fierce and mortal green" of "The Pardon" to the "haggard daylight" of "The Death of a Toad." Wilbur's prismatic images or phrases thus render something more than poetic luminosity itself. And the ceremonies suggested by the volume's title are often designed to humble the human and the poetic will—partly by urging it to tend the mortal rather than the mental flower ("La Rose des Vents"), and partly by warning it against solipsism ("The Terrace") or the infernal insistence on autonomy ("A Problem from Milton"). These and other poems caution against versions of a "Thiile of the mind's worst vanity" ("Clearness"); as in "Grasse: The Olive Trees," they point out the dangers and futilities of attempting to possess or to bring near any idealized state of paradise, be it Eden ("Castles and Distances"), or a purchased love ("March£ aux Oiseaux"), or a realized, rather than a projected, linguistic sufficiency ("Games Two"). It would be wrong, however, to suppose that Wilbur's sense of limits and of renunciations leads to an inertly resigned poetry. The opposite is true, for various reasons. By exploiting the genre of argument or meditational debate, several poems give free rein to an impulse of spirit, imagination, or desire before checking that impulse by exposing its futility or cost. The poems thus not only enjoy a measure of dramatic complexity and dynamism; they also actually exercise rather than suppress the drives they seek to curb. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that Wilbur's poems redirect their spiritual, questlike energies into their celebrations of the given world. This world is consequently perceived with an unusual vibrancy that inheres as much in the mobility and the textures of Wilbur's subjects as in the embodiments of such qualities in his craft. Both world and poem come to share an interanimating "scintillant embrace," in

RICHARD WILBUR I 551 which the network of mind, senses, and language seems to mesh with the reticulated vitality of its objects. Three examples follow, from "A Glance from the Bridge," "Conjuration," and "Part of a Utter": [Gulls] rise and braid their glidings, white and spare, Or sweep the hemmed-in river up and down, Making a litheness in the barriered air, . . . Backtrack of sea, the baywater goes; flats Bubble in sunlight, running with herringbone streams; Sea-lettuce lies in oily mats On sand mislaid; stranded Are slug, stone, and shell, as dreams Drain into morning shine, and the cheat is ended. Easy as cove-water rustles its pebbles and shells In the slosh, spread, seethe, and the backsliding Wallop and tuck of the wave, and just that cheerful, Tables and earth were riding Back and forth in the minting shades of the trees. Such writing is clearly buoyed by an intense participatory relish; and despite Wilbur's caution that "never noun / Found what it named," his poems constantly exceed mere acts of denomination. Perhaps not since Gerard Manley Hopkins (but here without a sacrificial drive) has a poet so brilliantly and empathetically deployed the more than denotative resources of lyric poetry to celebrate the "ingenerate grain" of the world. In this participatory sense, whereby unnatural artifice accentuates the stress and play of natural energy, Wilbur's title poem declares that "ceremony never did conceal, / Save to the silly eye, which all allows, / How much we are the woods we wander in." This poem (on a painting by Bazille) self-reflexively concludes: What's lightly hid is deepest understood, And when with social smile and formal dress

She teaches leaves to curtsy and quadrille, I think there are most tigers in the wood. Imagining tigers, the mind's eye recalls the "striped blouse" of the painted woman; but instead of assimilating the animals to artifice and fashion, it detects how artifice and fashion reveal their own and the woman's element of wildness. "We are the woods we wander in" recovers the old association of woods with wilds, and of "wood" with human wildness (the lovers in A Midsummer Night's Dream became "wood within the wood"). Thus, at the heart of human artifice Wilbur stresses a hunting restlessness, a quality that inhabits the sculptured figures in one of Ceremony's finest poems, "Giacometti." Rejecting inert stone statues that freeze the human image and the hum** will, Wilbur honors Giacometti's art for ite mobility, its truth to moments when "we ourselves are strange / To what we were," its portrayal of a stripped-down pilgrim, anonymous and "unspeakably alone." This fully present but radically incomplete "starless walker, who cannot guess / His will" becomes Wilbur's Everyman, "in whose guise we make / Our grim departures now, walking to find / What railleries of rock, what palisades?" Like his wood wanderer or his earlier water walker or night guard, Wilbur's anonymous pilgrim may be one of the most uneasy but most authentic figures for his own poetic vocation and career. Beneath the "formal dress" of his work we may imagine "the single form we can assume," a roughened, shuffling creature "made / Of infinite farewells," a migrant figure "pruned of every gesture, saving only / The habit of coming and going." The genie of Wilbur's career certainly seems to have been "walking, walking" during the years following the publication of Ceremony. Despite his position as Briggs-Copeland assistant

552 / AMERICAN WRITERS professor of English composition at Harvard (1950-1955), Wilbur spent long periods away from Cambridge, first as a Guggenheim Fellow in New Mexico (1952-1953), then as a Prix de Rome Fellow in Italy (1954-1955), before accepting an appointment as associate professor at Wellesley College (1955-1957), from which he moved again to become a professor of English at Wesleyan University (1957-1977). These years also brought further departures as a writer—an early attempt to write a verse drama, a highly successful verse translation of Molifcre's The Misanthrope, the award-winning short story "A Game of Catch," the compilation A Bestiary (poems and prose, illustrated by Alexander Calder), and a sequence of lyrics for a Broadway version of Voltaire's Candide in collaboration with Lillian Hellman and Leonard Bernstein. At the same time, Wilbur continued to write lyric poetry, publishing his third collection, Things of This World, in 1956. Although the poems of Things of This World have much in common with Wilbur's earlier work, they move with greater freedom and authority, and the elegant build of his poems now seems to have taken on further muscle and robustness. Certain themes have gained in cogency and range of application, while the manner of their presentation has become both more relaxed and more high-spirited. One such theme, emphasized by the title, is the poet's continuing devotion to "things of this world"; and the signature poem, "Love Calls Us to the Things of This World," suggests how strongly that devotion now defines the poet's very "calling": The eyes open to a cry of pulleys, And spirited from sleep, the astounded soul Hangs for a moment bodiless and simple As false dawn. Outside the open window The morning air is all awash with angels.

Some are in bed-sheets, some are in blouses, Some are in smocks: but truly there they are. Now they are rising together in calm swells Of halcyon feeling, filling whatever they wear With the deep joy of their impersonal breathing; Now they are flying in place, conveying The terrible speed of their omnipresence, moving And staying like white water; and now of a sudden They swoon down into so rapt a quiet That nobody seems to be there. The soul shrinks From all that it is about to remember, From the punctual rape of every blessed day, And cries, "Oh, let there be nothing on earth but laundry, Nothing but rosy hands in the rising steam And clear dances done in the sight of heaven." Yet, as the sun acknowledges With a warm look the world's hunks and colors, The soul descends once more in bitter love To accept the waking body, saying now In a changed voice as the man yawns and rises, "Bring them down from their ruddy gallows; Let there be clean linen for the backs of thieves; Let lovers go fresh and sweet to be undone, And the heaviest nuns walk in a pure floating Of dark habits, keeping their difficult balance." With an exuberant play of high and low diction, direct speech, and variously indented lines of differing length, Wilbur gives fresh, accessible force to the old debate of body and soul— here capturing the moments of transition through which the soul chooses to acknowledge both the waking body and the world. Crossing Poe's ter-

RICHARD WILBUR I 553 ritory in reverse, the poem turns from sleep and the shapings of pure spirit, to embrace the "hunks and colors" of daily life; but even its initial phantasm of angels inhabits such ordinary stuff as laundry—indeed, depends on laundry for its manifestation. Wilbur himself admits, "I don't really want to have much truck with angels who aren't in the laundry, who aren't involved in the everyday world. It's a poem against dissociated and abstracted spirituality." While the intention of the poem is clearly expressed, its theme is not merely argued in the abstract but, rather, exemplified by its own "embodiment" within both a narrated action (the story of an awakening) and a dramatized turn of direct speech. Whereas the beautifully entranced fantasia of angels ends with the suspicion that "nobody seems to be there," the poem itself ends within the presence of a direct speaker: the embodied soul, whose "changed voice" marks its journey from a momentary shrinkage to a full acceptance of incarnation. The laundry may now serve as a garment for the body, rather than only as a fabric for angels or the "angelic imagination." And the final stanza ("Bring them down . . . Let there be . . .") leads the descendental impulse home with nothing less than a redemptive and creative authority. Saving the laundry (and angels) from the gallows, and hence rejecting any notion that martyrdom must be the price of spirituality, the soul also uses the language of divine creative fiat as it brings a world into being—a balanced world occupied not only by thieves and heavy nuns but also by the continuing possibility of finding angels in the wash. A descendental impulse invigorates many other poems in Things of This World. Most literally, there is the slow downward dance of "Piazza de Spagna, Early Morning"—a poem that moves from a "sleepy pirouette" to a "calledfor falling glide and whirl," as if this were again a figure of vocation; or the "down again" speaker in "A Voice from Under the Table"; or

the brilliantly registered descents of water in "A Baroque Wall-Fountain in the Villa Sciarra." Blending description and debate, this last poem sets the "saecular ecstasy" of an earthly "faunmenage" against the vertical "water-saints" outside St. Peter's. The poem's life is in the engaged virtuosity of its water portraits: Sweet water brims a cockle and braids down Past spattered mosses, breaks On the tipped edge of a second shell, and fills The massive third below. It spills In threads then from the scalloped rim, and makes A scrim or summery tent For a faun-menage and their familiar goose. Happy in all that ragged, loose Collapse of water, its effortless descent

Before St. Peter's—the main jet Struggling aloft until it seems at rest In the act of rising, until The very wish of water is reversed, That heaviness borne up to burst In a clear, high, cavorting head, to fill With blaze, and then in gauze Delays, in a gnatlike shimmering, in a fine Illumined version of itself, decline, And patter on the stones its own applause? Although Wilbur prefers the fauns "at rest in fullness of desire / For what is given," his conclusion points to the residual spirituality of this preference; for the baroque sculpture figures a perfectly fulfilled unfulfillment from which we ourselves remain separate, and to which we can at best aspire with Franciscan devotion—a "dreamt land / Toward which all hungers leap, all pleasures pass." In addition to being called down to the things of this world, we are thus committed to a "humble

554 I AMERICAN WRITERS insatiety," a state explored with growing frequency in Wilbur's work. Whether in the drunken phrases of "A Voice from Under the Table" ("The end of thirst exceeds experience . . .Well I am down again, but not yet out. / O sweet frustrations, I shall be back for more"), or in the thoughtful essay on Emily Dickinson's "Sumptuous Destitution" (1959), Wilbur urges that privation may be our paradoxically enriching fate. The creature of appetite (whether insect or human) pursues satisfaction, and strives to possess the object in itself; it cannot imagine the vaster economy of desire, in which the pain of abstinence is justified by moments of infinite joy, and the object is spiritually possessed, not merely for itself, but more truly as an index of the All. Wilbur's metaphorical unifications may thus be not only an imitation of the world's own single braid but also an expressive procedure and product of "the vaster economy of desire" that unifies things by virtue of its "profound perspective." Perhaps another name for this is love—the love that calls us to the things of this world, that relishes the light incarnate or the play of falling water, that moves Bruna Sandoval "For love and in all weathers" to keep the church of San Ysidro ("A Plain Song for Comadre"), and that enables the poet's eye to perceive angel feathers in the stained suds of Bruna's scrub water. Such love is at the far-from-complacent center of Wilbur's work, whose very intricate craft, no less than its metaphorical leaps, may well be the sign of its strenuous desire. Desire can be kept sharp only by its perpetual defeat. Hence a deepening of Wilbur's early stress on the related insufficiency of language itself. Even metaphor must fail to apprehend its object, as in "Mind" or "An Event"—the challenge being to keep that failure a "graceful error." So, too, the mind should never relinquish its own dreaming, for it is precisely the "vain attempt" of imagination and metaphor that pro-

vides one of the "cross-purposes" by which "the world is dreamt." The cautionary fable "Merlin Enthralled" exposes the impoverished world of fact that survives after the enchanter's power is gone; and it is from "the blue unbroken reveries / Of the building dead" that even such an admittedly pragmatic structure as a railway station may arise (* 'For the New Railway Station in Rome"). Clearly, if love calls us to the things of this world, the answer to that call is what we make of such things—and therefore what we add to them: "What is our praise or pride But to imagine excellence, and try to make it? What does it say over the door of Heaven But homo fecit?" It is at this high pitch of wit and confidence, with a strongly reinforced faith in the purpose and craft of his vocation—even to the point of supposing the fabrication of heaven—that Wilbur concludes his third book. Things of This World received the National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize, and the Edna St. Vincent Millay Memorial Prize. In 1957, Poems 1943-1956 was published in London by Faber and Faber, and Wilbur was elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters. While a professor of English at Wesley an, he became general editor of the Laurel Poetry Series, was elected chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, and visited the Soviet Union as a cultural representative of the United States. In short, the years between Wilbur's third and fourth books of poetry—Advice to a Prophet and Other Poems appeared in 1961—brought not only great recognition but also a broadening of Wilbur's cultural presence as a poet. And the effects of this appear in the new poems. Almost half of them are spoken by a communal "we," and many of them assume the authority of deliberate instruction (as "advice" suggests). In some respects, Wilbur's poetic stance has thus widened to include a more

RICHARD WILBUR I 555 social basis while also moving from states of responsiveness to exercises of responsibility. To be sure, Wilbur remains very much a lyric poet; but it is worth noticing his achievement of a socially tempered lyricism (marked by a more direct conversational style, greatly reinforced by his work in verse drama), and his unusual reclamation of the lyric's potential for a discreet and valuable didacticism. These achievements were especially rare in American poetry after the late 1950's. Just as the descendental impulse in Things of This World (an impulse shared by many writers of the time, particularly after Lowell's Life Studies) was unfashionably braced by Wilbur's dramatic spiritual impulse and affirmative demeanor, so the personal accents of Wilbur's lyric speech paradoxically stand out through their supple inclusions of social address and by their potentially communal as well as communicable nature. During a decade in which lyric poetry became either increasingly introverted and private, on the one hand, or asocially oriented toward objectivism, myth, or "deep image," on the other, Wilbur's work thus attained a distinction that should not be overlooked. This socially tempered (often first person plural) lyricism, and a regained capacity for lyric didacticism, should be counted among Wilbur's contributions to the poetry of his time. Confirming the importance of verse drama to Wilbur's development of a more immediate conversational address, Advice to a Prophet includes an excerpt from Moliere's Tartuffe (a segment that nicely negotiates the demands of rhymed couplets and of rapid dialogue). The volume opens with a debate in direct speech, "Two Voices in a Meadow,'' matched later by * 'The Aspen and the Stream." In the former, an apparent divergence between the floating milkweed and the unmoving stone is mediated by their shared (and symmetrically phrased) submission to their own natures, and thereby to their place in a shared scheme both of nature and of divinity. Emblematic of Wilbur's

new work, this debate both sharpens dramatically assertive individual voices ("As casual as cowdung / Under the crib of God, / 1 lie where chance would have me, / Up to the ears in sod''), and sketches the "yielding]" of such voices to a greater common design. "Advice to a Prophet" focuses precisely on communicative strategy, here the attuning of prophetic utterance to its audience. Maintaining a dramatic intensity, the poem is spoken not by the isolated prophet but, rather, by one of the civic community ("When you come, as you soon must, to the streets of our city"). This crucial strategic move suggests an important element of Wilbur's own evolving stance—here designed to mediate, as if from within the social sphere, between the isolated knowledge or sensibility of the prophet and the communal need of a society. The need for this kind of mediating (rather than "mad-eyed") speaker is urgently historical—as is the content of his speech, which is also personal, since it focuses on how we may affectively (hence effectively) be made to experience the abstract threat of nuclear war. This public lyric is therefore designed to enhance our fear and our belief, to make our emotions capable of registering what otherwise leaves us dangerously numb. And the emphasis pursues a distinctly lyric turn from the obvious facts to a more subjective, indeed poetic, truth regarding our dependence on the natural world for images of our best selves. To threaten nature is to threaten the mirror and language by which we figure forth our courage, our love, and our spiritual identity: Ask us, prophet, how we shall call Our natures forth when that live tongue is all Dispelled, that glass obscured or broken In which we have said the rose of our love and the clean Horse of our courage, in which beheld The singing locust of the soul unshelled, And all we mean or wish to mean.

556 / AMERICAN WRITERS Countering several forms of dangerous isolation, "Advice to a Prophet" thus reforges links between the citizen and the prophet, the human and the natural world, as well as between a personal and a historical domain. It is an integrative poem against selfishness—or, rather, a poem that reveals how even self-interest requires the safeguarding of otherness. In this respect the poem advances Wilbur's thematic and stylistic concerns; and several other poems in Advice to a Prophet similarly set examples of interdependence and cooperation against kinds of blind selfishness. "The Undead" is one such poem, a portrait of demonic vampires whose possessive fear of life and loss has dispossessed them of both selfhood and vitality, leaving them in the condition of mere predators forever isolated from their prey. But the poem's didactic intent, well balanced by the vivid and amusing gothicism of its vampire lore, goes beyond condemnation. By calling on our sympathy, it seeks to avoid our potentially self-isolating or predatory attitude toward the undead. We must go beyond merely using them for our own edification: Nevertheless, their pain is real, And requires our pity. Think how sad it must be To thirst always for a scorned elixir, The salt quotidian blood Which, if mistrusted, has no savor; To prey on life forever and not possess it, As rock-hollows, tide after tide, Glassily strand the sea. The sympathy of this appeal is intriguing, particularly when viewed alongside other poems in which Wilbur points to the inherent "insatiety" of both language and human desire—their inability to possess their objects. ("The Undead" appeared in The New Yorker just two months after* 'Ballade for the Duke of Orleans,'' whose refrain varies the line '7 die of thirst,

here at the fountain-side.") Perhaps the demons of "The Undead" are uneasily close to those of poetry itself, even while the poem explores the very danger that Wilbur's current development seeks to avoid. Not unlike earlier rebuttals of abstract spirituality, "The Undead" summons in order to acknowledge as well as to exorcise. If its stylizations, rhetoric, and voice make a dominant element of the lyric poem inherently self-isolating and self-regarding (whether as New Critical icon or as confessional cry), Wilbur's strength is to point the lyric away from the dangers of "utter selfconcern." Once noticed, the positive motif of selfyielding emerges in such diverse poems as "October Maples, Portland," "A Fire-Truck," "The Aspen and the Stream," the inventively parabolic "Shame," and the haunting "Fall in Corrales." The communal speaker of the last comes to "Stand in the wind and, bowing to this time, / Practise the candor of our bones." Beyond the play of bone whiteness and truth, Wilbur speaks of a more-than-intellectual practice—a submission not just to forces beyond us but also to other than merely rational powers or susceptibilities within the self. This may lead to the uncanny or surreal underworlds glimpsed in "Stop," "Junk," and "A Hole in the Floor" (the last quoted below): For God's sake, what am I after? Some treasure, or tiny garden? Or that untrodden place, The house's very soul, Where time has stored our footbeats And the long skein of our voices? Not these, but the buried strangeness Which nourishes the known: That spring from which the floor-lamp Drinks now a wilder bloom, Inflaming the damask love-seat And the whole dangerous room.

RICHARD WILBUR / 557 Here Wilbur returns to that domain of estrangement noticed since his earliest work. This is the idiosyncratic vision, however adjusted between the singular "I" and the "long skein of our voices,'9 that lurks as a crucial presence below what might otherwise have been the too secure floorboards of Wilbur's poetry. Beneath either domesticity or sociability, this nourishing genie also bewilders, inflames, and endangers. In its curious light, we may now recognize how even the carefully public "Advice to a Prophet" depends on reckoning the right degree of strangeness in order to conjure "an undreamt thing." And (despite the book's conclusion with the communal and reconciliatory "A Christmas Hymn") no reading of Advice to a Prophet, or of Wilbur's increasingly complex work at large, can afford to slight this haunting and nearly unassimilable element—hushed and resistant in "Another Voice," hideously threatening in "Someone Talking to Himself": Off in the fathomless dark Beyond the verge of love I saw blind fishes move, And under a stone shelf Rode the recusant shark— Cold, waiting, himself. The commingling of a direct, instructive address with an element of strangeness or psychological exploration marks the title poem and several others in Walking to Sleep (1969). And Wilbur's experimental widening of his own repertoire beyond the New Critical lyric argumentpoem now extends to several narrative works, including "The Agent," a disturbing story in blank verse. So, too, he further diversifies his own voice by means of almost a dozen translations, each of which displays Wilbur's characteristic humility, fidelity, and virtuosity as a translator while also allowing him to write in a manner sometimes very different from his own. Clearly, Wilbur's talent is restlessly continu-

ing to test and extend itself. Matching or driving these changes, there is also a deepening of vision. Walking to Sleep not only ranges more widely to encompass the perspectives of geology, astronomy, and myth; such rangings frequently respond to various intensified states of alarm—fear, insomnia, anxiety. Although still generally affirmative, this is a more troubled book, and Wilbur's capacity for cheer or comfort preserves itself only by the most arduous endeavor. The opening poem, "The Lilacs," warns of what will come. Set in the insistent, alliterative pattern of Old English verse, but with the lines broken, like the lilacs, . . . stark, spindly, and in staggered file, Like walking wounded from the dead of winter the poem dwells with great violence on the lilacs' return to blossom: Out of present pain and from past terror Their bullet-shaped buds came quick and bursting, As if they aimed to be open with us! What is fascinating here is not only the emphatic torment and near-military threat but also the gathering focus on the act of disclosure. As the poem continues, it suggests a reference both to a return to poetry (underscored by the poem's placement) and to the way Wilbur's poems themselves may ask to be read. In this regard, "Lilacs" may be both an act of reopening and a manifesto, especially to those readers whose superficial response to Wilbur's elegance or reticence has prevented them from recognizing how such effects not only may derive from but also may essentialize or transfigure states of unease, silence, or perceived mortality:

555 / AMERICAN WRITERS These lacquered leaves where the light paddles And the big blooms buzzing among them Have kept their counsel, conveying nothing Of their mortal message, unless one should measure The depth and dumbness of death's kingdom By the pure power of this perfume. We may ask why Wilbur's admission of torment or threat has deepened in this new book. The second poem, "On the Marginal Way," offers one significant answer: It is "the time's fright within me which distracts / Least fancies into violence." Accounting for a sudden fall into fantasies of holocaustal violence (he is viewing boulders strewn along a beach), the speaker implies an era of both nuclear threat and intensifying conventional warfare that must have revived his own memories of mass violence ("The Agent" returns to World War II). This is the decade of Hecht's The Hard Hours and Lowell's For the Union Dead; and Wilbur soon wrote "A Miltonic Sonnet" to castigate President Lyndon Johnson for the crassness and brutal imperialism that were imposing their "cattle-brand" on the American psyche as much as upon the victimized small nations. As one might expect, Wilbur attempts to press back against "the time's fright within me." Apart from the rather uncharacteristic political satire of 4 'A Miltonic Sonnet,'' his strategy involves a vigorous turn to a world beyond either the individual self or the human domain. Thus "On the Marginal Way" moves to "take cover in the facts," although this means turning away from a fantasy based on historical fact (* 'Auschwitz' final kill") to a different order of fact—the actual rocks on the beach, and their geological history. By a dramatic lengthening of perspective beyond that of human

history, Wilbur reaches a vision of creation by which to offset the nightmare of human destruction, and in which to resituate and renew our human origins. The strewn boulders now seem "Comely as Eve and Adam, near a sea / Transfigured by the sun's return"; and this regenerative news may now counterpoise the "tidings of some dirty war." Pointedly, this perspective requires the kind of imaginative selfyielding noticed in Advice to a Prophet. Now the intent has become more purgatorial, and its earnest perfection and joy are carefully framed by prayer: Though, high above the shore On someone's porch, spread wings of newsprint flap The tidings of some dirty war, It is a perfect day: the waters clap Their hands and kindle, and the gull in flight Loses himself at moments, white in white, And like a breaking thought Joy for a moment floods into the mind, Blurting that all things shall be brought To the full state and stature of their kind, By what has found the manhood of this stone. May that vast motive wash and wash our own. In addition to internalized historical fear, there is an increasingly intimate attention in Wilbur's new work to threats of aging and death, on both a personal and a planetary scale. And here again, Wilbur's resistant equilibrium depends on a depth of perspective that "takes cover" in the facts of botanical or astronomical time. In this way his work expands to the far-reaching movements of "Fern-Beds in Hampshire Country," "In the Field," "Seed Leaves," and "Under Cygnus" while also doing justice to the intimate losses and fears of "For Dudley" and "Running."

RICHARD WILBUR I 559 * 'I am part of that great going, / Though I stroll now, and am watchful." These lines, from the third section of * 'Running'' ("Dodwells Road''), with their echo of Hardy's' 'The Going'' and their matured version of Wilbur's own original vigilance, characterize much of Wilbur's work from this time forward. They introduce a somber meditation on inevitable exhaustions and losses, from which Wilbur shakes free only by turning once again with a benedictory offering to the world beyond him and to the generation that will survive him. The direct, colloquial language—Wilbur now grafting his dramatic skills onto the heart of the lyric—is part of that urgent breakthrough: But why in the hell spoil it? I make a clean gift of my young running To the two boys who break into view. . . . "Walking to Sleep" is by no means directly autobiographical. Instructing an insomniac on the art of falling asleep, the speaker refers more to his addressee than to himself; and his own position is the purportedly impersonal and controlled stance of the teacher. Yet the poem's psychological focus gives it an introverted cast, while the speaker's generously elaborated knowledge—complete with the kinds of fear and watchfulness found in adjacent poems—does seem to derive from personal experience. The instructional stance, like the poem's wit and expatiatory largess, may itself be a compensation, a version and attempted self-application of the suggested cure. Perhaps this instructor is speaking to himself. The lesson is couched in a suave and ample blank verse, which promotes the careful relaxation, the fluent transitions, and the sense of surfeit conducive to sleep. And yet, despite its humor, the poem is shot through with images of violence and horror, sleep being at one point wooed as the "kind assassin [who] will draw a bead / And blow your brains out." We are still within the region of "On the Marginal Way," but the angle of presentation has grown more

inwardly acute and the fears more persecutor/— to the point of near-paranoia. One is trapped in the remorseless self-gaze of the insomniac; there is no easy access to the "cover" of external fact. Rather, the path to sleep must lead to an uncovering of "your dearest horror," for only by bringing such horrors to consciousness can the mind undo the defensiveness that keeps it awake. The poem cannot end without leading its supposed addressee to the "crossroads and its laden gallows tree," where he must "lift your gaze and stare your brother down, / Though the swart crows have pecked his sockets hollow." Though he craves sleep, perhaps this is what the insomniac most fears: to hang suspended, eyeless, dead to the world. For a poet as wakeful and visually observant as Wilbur (we may think back to the night guard of "First Snow in Alsace," whose open eyes oppose the snow-filled eyes of the dead), this figure might be especially haunting. Horribly twinned to the insomniac, he might indeed be a demon relative of the dark genie that haunts and perhaps even motivates Wilbur's generally bright work. Inseparable from Wilbur's celebratory "wit and wakefulness." the unease of this farfrom-calm agent may thus be fathomed moving not only throughout "Walking to Sleep" but also beneath the composed surface of the poem's destination—"a pool / On whose calm face all images whatever / Lay clear, unfathomed, taken as they came." In another formal departure, "The Agent" extends Wilbur's mastery of blank verse to a narrative about an American agent dropped behind enemy lines during World War II. Sent to prepare the destruction of a European town, he carries out his mission with deft professionalism. The story is told with unfussed and vivid detail; but what gives the poem its luster, and its menace, is the complex way in which the apparent detachment of the third-person narrative nevertheless allows the entire event to unfold from the agent's point of view. Hence the distance be-

560 / AMERICAN tween agent and narrator is reduced—a reduction intensified by the portrait of the agent's nearpoetic gifts: his linguistic skill attuned to dialectal nuance, his finely honed senses, his creative ability to forge a self (as Wilbur now forges the identity of the agent). This is not to suggest that the poem is a self-portrait but, rather, to explore what investment Wilbur might have had in writing this unique narrative. In a crucial phrase, the agent is said to * 'savor and betray." Since few would question Wilbur's savoring fidelities, perhaps the agent fascinates by his antithetical nature—he is the faithful poet's nightmare. But what if there were a yet more intimate fascination? What if Wilbur were still haunted by his early insight that even the most faithful celebration, if cast in a poetry as rich in metaphor as his own, betrays its literal subject? "Praise in Summer" had asked "why this mad instead I Perverts our praise to uncreation, why / Such savor's in this wrenching things awry." How is that "uncreation" different from destruction?—a question Wallace Stevens also faced. Is Wilbur wrestling, however obliquely, with the demon that accuses those writers who most strongly savor this world, but who have nevertheless crossed what Seamus Heaney has called "the frontier of writing"? In a similar vein, we may read more intimately into the poem's final portrait not only of betrayal ("a pure impostor / Faithless to everything") but also of the agent's irremediable exile between worlds (recall the early "Water Walker") and his selfpunitive fantasy of execution by his own side. However literally remote from Wilbur, the agent's work and fate thus take on a minatory fascination—one that marks "The MindReader," just as versions of its enmeshments exercise the canny and uncanny "Lying." Walking to Sleep includes a section of translations; and while the task of translation may provoke its own anxieties about fidelity and betrayal, Wilbur's versions of poems by Jorge Luis

WRITERS

Borges, Andrei Voznesensky, Francois Villon, and others are scrupulously faithful without sacrificing an equivalent fluency or formal rigor within his own language. Unlike Lowell's "Imitations," Wilbur's translations follow his preference elsewhere for honoring a world beyond the ego, as well as for tempering his private voice to accommodate a shareable speech. Still, his selections are motivated; and it is probably that the feverish surreality of Voznesensky and the earthy valedictions of Villon will allow Wilbur both to speak in ways that his own more equable and decorous temperament seldom allows, and to continue to stretch the limits of his own work. Wilbur has said of his translations of Moliere and Racine, "It can help you to broaden your expressive range. . . . Translating drama involves impersonation, the imitation of attitudes and emotions. There's undoubtedly some transference from such practice to one's own work; more of oneself becomes articulate." Broadening his expressive range, Wilbur's continuing translations of Moli&re have further sharpened the dramatic as well as the social edge of his own lyrics, while also providing a vehicle for his comedic war against rigidities of all kinds. These prize-winning and popular works (The Misanthrope, Tartuffe, Candide, The Learned Ladies) are among the few successful verse dramas to be performed in our time. Accompanied by Wilbur's illuminating prefaces, they have much to tell us of both the original dramatist and the translator. The 1970's brought Wilbur further acclaim: several poetry awards, honorary degrees, the presidency and then successive chancellorships of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Such recognition increased through the 1980's, culminating in his appointment as second poet laureate of the United States. Yet his work shows no sign of resting on such laurels, either in theme or in method. On the contrary, The Mind-Reader

RICHARD WILBUR I 561 (1976) includes the unprecedented long dramatic monologue of the title poem, as well as several works of a newly autobiographical nature—the mordant narrative in quatrains ("Piccola Cornmedia"), poems addressed to members of his family ("The Writer" and "A Wedding Toast"), a haiku on sleeplessness ("Sleepless at Crown Point"), and the poem "In Limbo," which brings a more private urgency to Wilbur's fascination with states of disorientation, selfloss, imposture, homeless borderings between the worlds of sleeping and waking, spirit and flesh. With such innovations, Wilbur follows the example of the trees in "A Black Birch in Winter": New wood, new life, new compass, greater girth, And this is all their wisdom and their art— To grow, stretch, crack, and not yet come apart. No matter how autobiographical, Wilbur's poems never approximate the confessional verse of many of his contemporaries. Avoiding the unprotected immediacies of Lowell, Berryman, or Plath (he explicitly distances himself from Plath, however sympathetically, in "Cottage Street, 1953"), he joins such masters of oblique or mediated disclosure as Elizabeth Bishop, James Merrill, and Anthony Hecht. While poems like "Walking to Sleep," "The Agent," and "The Mind-Reader" objectify certain issues that interest him, the exact nature and degree of that interest cannot be narrowly specified. At least three advantages result: a rewarding complexity, a portrayal of traits or dilemmas shared by persons other than the poet, and a certain largess and buoyancy in the independent detailing and mood of the work. Even when penetrating psychological depths, Wilbur's commitment is always to a world "Not governed by me only." "The Mind-Reader" is one of Wilbur's most suave and beguiling works—although such qualities, associated with his own charms as a poet, are now ironically displayed as part of the dubi-

ous wares of a somewhat seedy and perhaps alcoholic telepathist. In an effortlessly sinuous blank verse, so caressing and flexible that it seems to be telepathically attuned to the listener's mind, the speaker confesses the origins and practice of his work. He opens with a mesmerizing fugue on the subject of loss: Some things are truly lost. Think of a sun-hat Laid for the moment on a parapet While three young women—one, perhaps, in mourning— Talk in the crenellate shade. A slight wind plucks And budges it; it scuffs to the edge and cartwheels Into a giant view of some description: Haggard escarpments, if you like, plunge down Through mica shimmer to a moss of pines Amidst which, here or there, a half-seen river Lobs up a blink of light. The sun-hat falls, With what free flirts and stoops you can imagine, Down through that reeling vista or another, Unseen by any, even by you or me. It is as when a pipe-wrench, catapulted From the jounced back of a pick-up truck, dives headlong Into a bushy culvert; or a book Whose reader is asleep, garbling the story, Glides from beneath a steamer chair and yields Its flurried pages to the printless sea. This luxuriously ravishing passage, whose every amenability is a carefully manipulated solicitation, binds the listener to a doubly motivated account: the speaker is in love with such losses, and these "truly lost" objects contrastively introduce those which his powers can retrieve. By an irony that is surely relevant to the poet, the most uncanny and, hence, powerful aspect of the mind reader's gift is precisely what disempowers and entraps him. It is this terrible dispossession, even more than the subsequent confessions of occasional charlatanism, that make Wilbur's poem one of the most arresting among other typ-

562 / AMERICAN WRITERS ically postmodern ironizations of the ancient topos of inspiration: I tell you this Because you know that I have the gift, the burden. Whether or not I put my mind to it, The world usurps me ceaselessly; my sixth And never-resting sense is a cheap room Black with the anger of insomnia, Whose wall-boards vibrate with the mutters, plaints, And flushings of the race. "Black with the anger of insomnia." Hence, as in "Walking to Sleep," a longing for release—figured as the place where "the book is drowned." And, like Prospero requesting that his audience's "indulgence set me free," the speaker solicits (telepathically of course—"Ah, you have read my mind") another mezzo-litro to bring him closer to oblivion. This last ploy shrewdly extends the speaker's self-subversions to the reader: if the mind reader is the victim of his compulsions, are we (who have now come to share a version of his gift: to obey his solicitations, and to support his habit) any less addicted in our listenings? If the mind reader is a figure for the tyrannical aspects of a poet's genie, what kind of grip does he have on our own need for uncanny retrievals and prophecies? If habitual readers of poetry are any less addicted than the poets, it may be only a matter of degree. The closing words of this "studious" drinker are "Grazie, professore." "The Writer" also attends to a painfully compelled travail; and by a characteristic selfrevision (itself evincing the kind of work he describes), Wilbur surpasses his metaphor-wish that his daughter have a "lucky passage" in the craft of her art. Recalling a trapped starling that had battered itself "humped and bloody" before managing to escape through a window, he acknowledges, "It is always a matter, my darling, /

Of life or death, as I had forgotten. I wish / What I wished you before, but harder." The blend of tact, patience, and passion is typically Wilbur's, as is the arduously engaged spiritual dimension of the poem, linked as it is to the writer's quest: "our spirits rose" on seeing the bird "clearing the sill of the world." New and Collected Poems (1988) breaks yet further ground. It does so in at least three directions. First, there is the adventurous experiment "On Freedom's Ground," a cantata in celebration of the Statue of Liberty. Here Wilbur's gift for writing a communal lyric utterance tests itself against the challenges of a musical setting and the hazards of potential simplicity or sentimentality. The poem succeeds by its formal versatility, its graceful (and democratic) interweaving of ceremonial and colloquial language, and its related modulations among retrospect, praise, critique, mourning, and continuing aspiration. A second departure, "Lying," takes Wilbur's blank verse into the realm of the meditative essay while furthering his long and frank exploration of some of the more troubling motives and premises of poetry's ineradicably fictive nature. Since the early "Praise in Summer," the issue has teased or haunted a number of poems; now it reaches its most rewarding trial, crossed as it is with Wilbur's equally challenging fascination with fidelity. The poem ends with the paradoxical proof that even the great images of fidelity, like that of Roland, are the work of fiction, or have been shaped by the benign infidelity of the image maker. Whether lying to enliven a dead party—a resurrective act, depending on its own genetic fiat (of an unseen bird)—or resorting to lies about art's tempering of brutality (Chiron teaching Achilles the art of the lyre), or fabricating the scene of our own origins and fall, poetry has always been an uncanny and ungrounded trick of deception. At times the duplicity of words, exaggerated as it is by the medium of poetry itself, would seem to be the original dou-

RICHARD WILBUR I 563 ble agent, the liar in the lyre, the faker in the inscription homo fecit over the door of heaven. Finally, Wilbur broaches a new response to the pressures of time and mortality. Several new poems continue to celebrate acts of self-yielding, but do so now with a consistent stress on the generative nature of such acts. The figures of the milkweed and the aspen had offered early versions of this; but now—as if against the threat or limit of individual mortality—Wilbur offers images of finite creatures giving up their bound identities, thereby prolonging or transforming their life force into further incarnations. A dominant new figure is that of dissemination. In "All That Is": Under some clipped euonymus, a mushroom, Bred of an old and deep mycelium As hidden as the webwork of the world, Strews on the shifty night-wind, rising now, A cast of spores as many as the stars. Hence a different mode of release: instead of the escape into oblivion, an invigorating dispersal toward new life and to a renewed weaving of the webs of creation and of language—this poem is largely an ode to crossword puzzles, which, like poems, provide a "rite of finitude" by which to conjure and braid a world beyond the puzzle. The disseminative image of strewn spores matches that of the "loose change" in "leanurn Mare," or the "sifting" of the fire bush in "Alatus," or of the shadblow in' 'Shad-Time,'' where once again the links are made to the mind and to an art associated with poetry: The shadblow's white racemes Burst here or there at random, scaled with red, As when the spitting fuse of dreams Lights in a vacant head, Or as the Thracian strings, Descending past the bedrock's muted staves, Picked out the signatures of things Even in death's own caves.

"Rites of finitude" would be a good term for Wilbur's poems, provided that one recognizes both their air of spontaneous improvisation and their homage to what lies infinitely beyond them. Despite their maturity, these late poems are in many ways his most youthful, charged with the joyful and rejuvenating participation in a morethan-finite life force. With an astonishing litheness that marks their "wide-deploying motives of delight," these poems seem to imitate the transformative fluencies of a subject that "Instant by instant chooses to / Affirm itself and flow." Just as such affirmations go beyond the finite self, so they require a more than cognitive or merely aesthetic faculty and motive. Wilbur seems to have found a way to suggest a combination of physical thrust and intuitive surmise. In the brilliant, death-tinged "Alatus," he writes: See how the fire-bush, circled By a crimson verge Of its own sifting, Bristles aloft its every Naked stem, lifting Beyond the faint sun, Toward the hid pulse of things, its Winged skeleton. Such resurrective bristling thus comes as much from the bone as from the mind. Or from the deepest region of the mind, beneath intellection. Giving up certainty, being caught into a more than individual identity—this is the "rite / Or masque, or long charade / Where we, like these, / Had blundered into grand / Identities" ("Leaving"). Just as it is the true catch in "Trolling for Blues," where the bluefish breaks free from its first metaphoric identity to pull the fisherman toward a revision of his own: He is a type of coolest intellect, Or is so to the mind's blue eye until He strikes and runs unseen beneath the rip,

564 I AMERICAN WRITERS Yanking imagination back and down Past recognition to the unlit deep Of the glass sponges, of chiasmodon, Of the old darkness of Devonian dream, Phase of a meditation not our own, That long melee where selves were not, that life Merciless, painless, sleepless, unaware, From which, in time, unthinkably we rose. In their own striking and running to the long melee past recognition, and in their bringing of language itself into a disseminating flow of vitality—as if the words themselves were racemes, spores, or strewn stars—Wilbur's most recent poems thus seem to challenge any confident definition of the limits and artificiality of poetry. They may be rites of finitude, but the enactment of their rituals summons or joins for a moment something unlimited and wild. And if there must remain a border between their closed (because manifest) identities and the unassimilable multiplicity of life beyond them, that border works more as a lure than as an aesthetic device. Along with his darker genie, it is this bright margin and lure that will no doubt keep drawing Wilbur to his remarkably joyful and unappeased pursuit. As he asks in "Hamlen Brook":

Ceremony and Other Poems. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1950. Things of This World. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1956. Poems 1943-1956. London: Faber & Faber, 1957. Advice to a Prophet and Other Poems. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1961. Loudmouse. New York: Crowell-Collier, 1963. The Poems of Richard Wilbur. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1963. Walking to Sleep: New Poems and Translations. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1969. Digging for China: A Poem. Garden City, N. Y.: Doubleday, 1970. Opposites. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973. Seed Leaves: Homage to R. F. Boston: David Godine, 1974. The Mind-Reader: New Poems. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976. Seven Poems. Omaha: Abattoir Editions, 1981. New and Collected Poems. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1988. PROSE Responses: Prose Pieces 1953-1976. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976. Elizabeth Bishop: A Memorial Tribute. New York: Albondocani Press, 1982. "Advice from the Muse." Deerfield, Conn.: The Deerfield Press, 1981.

How shall I drink all this? Joy's trick is to supply Dry lips with what can cool and slake, Leaving them dumbstruck also with an ache Nothing can satisfy.

Selected Bibliography WORKS OF RICHARD WILBUR POETRY

The Beautiful Changes and Other Poems. New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1947.

TRANSLATED WORKS The Misanthrope, by Moliere. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1955. Candide, by Voltaire. Translated with others. New York: Random House, 1957. Tartuffe, by Moliere. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World,1963. The School for Wives, by Molifcre. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971. The Learned Ladies, by Moli&re. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978. Moliere: Four Comedies. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982. The Whale and Other Uncollected Translations. Brockport, N.Y.: BOA Editions, 1982.

RICHARD WILBUR I 565 Phaedra, by Racine. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986.

MANUSCRIPT PAPERS Apart from some early manuscripts in the Poetry Collection, Lockwood Memorial Library, State University of New York at Buffalo, the primary archive of Wilbur's papers is in the Robert Frost Library, Amherst College. This extensive collection includes poetry, translations and adaptations, and miscellaneous papers.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Field, John P. Richard Wilbur: A Bibliographical Checklist. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1971. Lists both primary and secondary works.

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL STUDIES: BOOKS

Butts, William, ed. Conversations with Richard Wilbur. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1990. An indispensable collection of interviews (1962-1988) with a biographical chronology. Hill, Donald L. Richard Wilbur. New York: Twayne, 1967. Poulin, A., Jr., ed. Contemporary American Poetry. 2nded. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1975. Pp. 391405. Salinger, Wendy, ed. Richard Wilbur's Creation. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1983. A collection of reviews and essays that includes a bibliography of secondary works. Wallace, Robert. Writing Poems. Boston: Little, Brown, 1982. Pp. 302-309. ARTICLES

Bogan, Louise. "Verse." The New Yorker, November 15, 1947, pp. 130, 133-134.

Ciardi, John. "Our Most Melodic Poet." The Saturday Review, August 18, 1956, pp. 18-19. Farrell, John P. "The Beautiful Changes in Richard Wilbur's Poetry.'' Contemporary Literature 12:74-87 (Winter 1971). Hall, Donald. "Claims on the Poet." Poetry 88:398403 (September 1956). Hecht, Anthony. "The Motions of the Mind." Times Literary Supplement no. 3923:602 (May 20, 1977). . "Master of Metaphor." The New Republic, May 16,1988, pp. 25, 27-30, 32. Jarrell, Randall. "A View of Three Poets." Partisan Review 18:691-700 (November/December 1951). . "Fifty Years of American Poetry."Prairie Schooner 37:1-27 (Spring 1963). Jensen, Ejner J. "Encounters with Experience: The Poems of Richard Wilbur." New England Review 2:594-613 (Summer 1980). Leithauser, Brad. "Reconsideration: Richard Wilbur. America's Master of Formal Verse." The New Republic, March 24,1982, pp. 28-31. McClatchy, J. D. "Dialects of the Tribe." Poetry 130:41-53 (April 1977). Includes a review of Wilbur's Mind-Reader. Mills, Ralph J., Jr. "The Lyricism of Richard Wilbur." Modern Age 6:436-440 (Fall 1962). Nemerov, Howard. "What Was Modern Poetry? Three Lectures." In his Figures of Thought: Speculations on the Meaning of Poetry and Other Essays. Boston: David Godine, 1978. See Lecture 3, "What Will Suffice," pp. 183-198. Oliver, Raymond. "Verse Translation and Richard Wilbur." The Southern Review (Baton Rouge) 11:318-330 (April 1975). Sayre, Robert F. "A Case for Richard Wilbur as a Nature Poet.'' Moderna Spraak 61:114-122 (1967). Taylor, Henry. "Two Worlds Taken as They Come: Richard Wilbur's 'Walking to Sleep/ " The Hollins Critic 6:1-12 (July 1969). Weatherhead, A. K. "Richard Wilbur: Poetry of Things."EL// 35:606-617 (1968).

—PETER SACKS

Tom Wolfe 1931I

of newspaper and magazine journalism and in making nonfiction a significant literary form of the time. Thomas Kennedy Wolfe, Jr., was born in Richmond, Virginia, on March 2,1931, to Helen Hughes and Thomas Kennerly Wolfe. His father was a professor of agronomy at Virginia Polytechnic University and the editor of the journal Southern Planter. Wolfe's childhood, which seems to have been comfortable and fairly uneventful, was spent entirely in Richmond, where he attended a private school, St. Christopher's. From an early age, he demonstrated an interest in writing. At St. Christopher's, he was the coeditor of the school newspaper; at home, he entertained himself by composing new versions of Arthurian legends. On one occasion, inspired by having read a book about Napoleon, he composed his own "biography" of the emperor. As a teenager, he read widely in American literature, progressing from the popular novels of James T. Farrell and James M. Cain to works by Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, John Steinbeck, and Thomas Wolfe (to whom he was not related). By the time he matriculated at Washington and Lee University in 1947, Wolfe had decided to become a writer. He majored in English, took creative-writing classes, and was one of the three

N THE WORLD of American letters in the late twentieth century, there have been few more colorful and controversial figures than Tom Wolfe. Emerging in the mid 1960's from the milieu of newspaper Sunday supplements and glossy general-interest magazines, he became a prominent practitioner and spokesman for the New Journalism, a hybrid form of nonfiction in which novelistic techniques were applied to factual material. He has fashioned himself into a complex, paradoxical persona—a kind of icon for the times in which he lives. Dressed in hand-tailored white suits with functioning buttons at the cuffs, wearing shirts with high starched white collars, he has immersed himself in the lives of stock-car racers, New York social climbers, striptease artists, astronauts, and gamblers in Las Vegas, reporting on even the least dandified areas of popular culture in a style that simultaneously celebrates and satirizes its subjects. In addition to his work in nonfiction, Wolfe has published fiction and numerous satirical drawings. He has attacked what he characterizes as the pretensions of the literary establishment, and in return has sometimes been labeled a relentless selfpromoter whose works have no intellectual and very little literary merit. Yet Wolfe's groundbreaking works of nonfiction have been extremely influential, both in affecting the practices

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568 I AMERICAN WRITERS founding editors of Shenandoah, a literary magazine with national circulation. He contributed short stories to the magazine's first two issues, which were published in 1950. He dressed somewhat eccentrically, often wearing dark shirts with his suits and never failing to go out without a hat and an umbrella. He also participated in a number of less writerly extracurricular activities, serving as sports editor of the college newspaper and pitching on the varsity baseball team. Wolfe had ability enough as a pitcher that when he graduated from college, he played semiprofessional baseball and tried out for the major leagues. He quickly found out that he was not talented enough to become a professional ballplayer, and he decided instead to go to graduate school. He entered the American Studies program at Yale University and spent the next five years reading widely. He delved into Elizabethan rhetoric and studied the sociology of religion. He also discovered the works of some Russian avantgarde writers—the Serapion Brothers group, Yevgeni Zamyatin, Boris Pilnyak, Aleksei Remizov, and Andrei Sobol—who had used symbolist techniques to write fiction about the Russian Revolution. Acknowledging that human thought often lacked the finish attributed to it in the conventions of nineteenth-century novels, they broke up their representations of characters' thoughts with odd punctuation. When Wolfe later began to write experimental journalism, he borrowed these techniques, and he has often claimed that the Serapion group, Zamyatin, and their postrevolutionary cohorts were more influential on his writing than anything else that he encountered in graduate school. Ultimately, Wolfe wrote a dissertation titled "The League of American Writers: Communist Organizational Activity Among American Writers 1929-1942" and received a doctorate. Despite his Ph.D., he did not pursue an academic career. Instead, he decided to try to find work on a newspaper. His decision was self-consciously

literary. The pantheon of American literature seemed to consist of men who had apprenticed themselves to the art of fiction by working first as reporters. By going to work for a paper, Wolfe determined to place himself squarely within a tradition of great American novelists that included Herman Melville, Mark Twain, Stephen Crane, and Ernest Hemingway. Wolfe traveled to New York City, hoping to find a job. After four months there, he still had received no offers of employment, and he decided to look for work in other parts of the country. Eventually, he took the only job that was offered to him—on the Springfield Union, in Massachusetts. He remained there from 1956 until 1959, when he was hired by the Washington Post. At the Post, Wolfe's first assignment was to cover local news of the District of Columbia, a beat that he found more interesting than one as a political correspondent on Capitol Hill. Soon, however, he was given the more important job of Latin-American correspondent, and his coverage of Cuba in 1960 won a Washington Newspaper Guild Award. Nevertheless, he felt limited by the rigid stylistic requirement of the straight news reporting that he was doing for the Post, so he sent a portfolio of his clips to the New York Herald Tribune, a paper that he felt would be more sympathetic to his talents and disposition as a writer. Wolfe went to work for the Herald Tribune early in 1962. The Herald Tribune was a venerable American paper, having been founded by Horace Greeley in the nineteenth century. For almost twenty-five years, however, the publication had suffered financial difficulties. In an effort to save the paper from bankruptcy, its editors were experimenting with both its format and its news style. The Herald Tribune placed a greater emphasis on feature reporting than did The New York Times, for example, and writers were instructed to bring out the emotional truth—the

TOM WOLFE I 569 human interest—of events in as many stories as they could. Headlines were short and to some degree sensationalistic. The result was a journalism that was usually livelier than stories published in The New York Times, but that was sometimes thought to be biased and irresponsible. Wolfe was assigned to the city desk, where he functioned essentially as a feature writer. He reported on such topics as a rent strike staged by students at New York University and the disappearance of a reputed Mafia boss from Fort Lee, New Jersey. He filled his articles with minute, atmospheric details that would have seemed irrelevant in more conventional journalism. By the end of the year, New York City newspapers had been shut down by a printers' strike; the Herald Tribune did not go to press again for 114 days. During the break in the newspaper's publication, Wolfe approached the editors of Esquire magazine and proposed several articles to them, including one on the world of custom cars, a subject that he had treated, but in his opinion not done justice to, in an article for the Herald Tribune. Esquire sent him to the West Coast, where he gathered information about a subculture that was foreign to sophisticated East Coast readers. When Wolfe returned to New York, he found himself unable to write the article. He felt stymied in his efforts to organize and interpret the material, which seemed to lie outside the bounds of subject matter considered appropriate for cultural analysis. The editors of Esquire had reserved space for the article in an issue that would soon be going to press. They had also locked a two-page color illustration onto the printing press. The cost of canceling Wolfe's piece would be enormous, but Wolfe continued to be blocked. Finally, in exasperation, the magazine's editor, Byron Dobell, asked Wolfe simply to submit his typed notes to the magazine, so that a staff member could patch them together into an article.

Wolfe went home and began to type: "Dear Byron, The first good look I had at customized cars was at an event called a 'Teen Fair,' held in Burbank, a suburb of Los Angeles beyond Hollywood. . . ." As he typed, his thoughts began to flow freely into prose. By the middle of the night, Wolfe found himself writing furiously; by morning, his memo to Dobell had ballooned to forty-nine pages. He delivered the manuscript to Esquire at 9:30 A.M., and by 4 P.M., Dobell had called to say that the magazine would run the memo as Wolfe had submitted it, simply striking out the words "Dear Byron." The piece appeared in the November 1963 issue under the title "There Goes (Varoom! Varoom!) That Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby." Wolfe later described the drafting of the memo to Dobell as a kind of epiphany—a moment when he both saw his subject matter clearly for the first time and realized ways to break free of the standardized formulas of newspaper writing, to go beyond conventional journalism to a form that more fully captured the reality he observed. His subject was the creation of style by members of the American middle class, particularly teenagers, as the result of the money poured into the American economy after World War II. In the introduction to his 1965 collection The KandyKolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby, he writes, Suddenly classes of people whose styles of life had been practically invisible had the money to build monuments to their own styles. Among teen-agers, this took the form of custom cars, the twist, the jerk, the monkey, the shake, rock music generally, stretch pants, decal eyes—and all these things, these teen-age styles of life, like Inigo Jones' classicism, have started having an influence on the life of the whole country. "There Goes (Varoom! Varoom!) That Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline

570 / AMERICAN WRITERS Baby" was a loosely structured, somewhat rambling account of Wolfe's visit to the Teen Fair and his subsequent investigation of the subculture of custom-car builders. Its tone was casual, and Wolfe thrust himself as first-person narrator right into the middle of the action as a participating observer with some admitted weaknesses. He acknowledged his capacity to become distracted, admitted possible engagement in "inchoate leching" at the sight of teenage girls, and said that he had harbored prejudiced or stereotypical notions of what the owners of custom cars are like: "probably skinny little hoods who wear T shirts and carry their cigarette packs by winding them around in the T shirt up near the shoulder." Unlike the standard newspaper story, which uses a pyramidal structure to arrange facts in descending order of importance, * 'The KandyKolored Tangerine Flake Streamline Baby" proceeded almost by free association, mixing description of the car show and biographical treatments of two customizers with frequent digressions to discuss the relationship of the custom-car subculture to the history of Western art. The piece treated a number of themes that became central to the bulk of Wolfe's work. He portrayed the young men's fascination with their fast machines both as a way of defining social status and as a kind of substitute religion. He also articulated a thesis that would prove to be recurrent: despite the cultural establishment's consensus that custom cars were tacky, there was no intrinsic difference between them and great modern art. He thus implied that the determination of artistic gestures has more to do with social fashion than with intrinsic beauty and worth. Although the stylistic innovations of "There Goes (Varoom! Varoom!) That Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby" were striking, they were nothing compared to what soon followed. Wolfe's trip to California to cover the custom-car show initiated a period of intense journalistic activity. When the printers' strike

ended in April 1963, he returned to the city desk at the Herald Tribune, and his stories began to be displayed more prominently. The strike, however, had left the paper in the worst financial condition it had yet experienced, and the Herald Tribune's future seemed imperiled. As part of a final effort to save the paper, its editors started a new Sunday supplement, called New York, which contained stylishly written stories of life in the city. The magazine made its debut in September 1963, and Wolfe was assigned to write a weekly article for it. Although each of these weekly pieces was supposed to be 1,500 words long, Wolfe's stories usually ran from twice to four times that length. During the nine succeeding months, Wolfe published twenty articles in New York. He also contributed three more stories to Esquire. He wrote about demolition derbies on Long Island, stock-car racing in North Carolina, rock-music impresarios, and the Women's House of Detention in Greenwich Village. He composed character sketches of Cassius Clay, Gary Grant, and Huntington Hartford, the heir to the A&P tea company fortune. He described the comings and goings of the wealthy New Yorkers who spent their Saturdays shopping for fine art in the expensive galleries of Manhattan's Upper East Side. He revealed the tyranny that nannies exerted over the families for whom they worked, intimidating their employers into buying expensive British prams and serving champagne at children's birthday parties. The assignments almost blurred into one another. In the introductory essay to his The New Journalism (1973), Wolfe described the experience in characteristically vivid terms: I can remember flying to Las Vegas on my two regular days off from the Herald Tribune to do a story for Esquire—*4Las Vegas!!!!''—and winding up sitting on the edge of a white satin bed in a Hog-Stomping Baroque suite in a hotel on the

TOM WOLFE I 571 Strip—in the decor known as Hog-Stomping Baroque there are 400-pound cut-glass chandeliers in the bathrooms—and picking up the phone and dictating to the stenograhic battery on the Trib city desk the last third of a story on demolition derbies in Long Island for New York—"Clean Fun at Riverhead"—hoping to finish in time to meet a psychiatrist in a black silk mohair suit with brass buttons and a shawl collar, no lapels, one of the only two psychiatrists in Las Vegas County at that time, to take me to see the casualties of the Strip in the state mental ward out Charleston Boulevard. Wolfe's style developed rapidly. He elaborated on the techniques of "There Goes (Varoom! Varoom!) That Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby," creating an exuberant and copious style. He embraced the brand names and jargon of a burgeoning consumer culture and celebrated them in a breathless, syncopated prose. He pursued specificity relentlessly, multiplying details far beyond both necessity and the previous limits of journalistic decorum. He cannibalized his own metaphors, and with each rearticulation, his tropes seemed pushed to further expenses of factual and imagined detail. In "There Goes (Varoom! Varoom!) That Kandy-Kolored Tangerine Flake Streamline Baby," for example, he had described the skin-tight pants then fashionable among teenage girls by writing that "well, skintight does not get the idea across; it's more the conformation than how tight the slacks are. It's as if some lecherous old tailor with a gluteusmaximus fixation designed them, striation by striation." In "The Peppermint Lounge Revisited," which he wrote for New York in December 1963, he described the same kind of pants again. That piece begins: All right, girls, into your stretch nylon denims! You know the ones—the ones that look like they were designed by some leering, knuckle-rubbing old tailor with a case of workbench back who

spent five years, like Da Vinci, studying nothing but the ischia, the gemelli and the glutei maximi. Wolfe exploited newfound freedom in the relationship between author and journalistic material, developing a series of techniques to radically dislocate the journalistic narrator from his conventionally neutral, objective stance. He began "The Voices of Village Square," a story written for New York about the Women's House of Detention in Greenwich Village, by writing Hai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-aiai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-aiai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-aireeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee! O, dear sweet, Harry, with your French gangster-movie bangs, your Ski Shop turtleneck sweater and your Army-Navy Store blue denim shirt over it, with your Bloombury corduroy pants you saw in the Manchester Guardian airmail edition and sent away for and your sly intellectual pigeon-toed libido roaming in Greenwich Village—that siren call really for you? Hai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-aiaireeeeeeeeee! Obviously Harry thinks so. The most immediately surprising thing about the passage, of course, is its typographic and onomatopoeic extravagance—the repetition of "ai-" forty-eight times in the first paragraph and twelve in the third to create the illusion of a manic female prisoner calling the name "Harry" at the top of her lungs. Beyond its immediate visual eccentricity, the piece makes an even more radical departure from standard journalistic practice. As Wolfe puts it in his essay "The New Journalism," he as narrator here "hectors" his subject—directly addressing him in a sarcastic tone, making fun of his clothes, his haircut, his quasi-intellectual attitude, his awkward sexuality. By the beginning of the fourth paragraph, the narrator has shifted direction and is addressing

572 / AMERICAN WRITERS the reader in an intimate, confiding tone, suggesting by the phrase "Obviously Harry thinks so" that the truth of his judgments of Harry are also obvious to the reader. As often as Wolfe adopted an adversarial stance toward his subject, he merged the subject's voice with his own, creating a version of style indirect libre that he later called ' 'the downstage voice." Often his modulation into the perspective of one of his characters was only fleeting and momentary, but occasionally he based entire passages on it. For example, he began "The First Tycoon of Teen," a piece for New York about the rock-music impresario Phil Spector, by entering Specter's mind as he sat in a plane awaiting takeoff: All these raindrops are high or something. They don't roll down the window, they come straight back, toward the tail, wobbling, like all those Mr. Cool snow heads walking on mattresses. The plane is taxiing out toward the runway to take off, and this stupid infarcted water wobbles, sideways, across the window. Phil Spector, twenty-three years old, the rock and roll magnate, producer of Philles Records, America's first teen-age tycoon watches . . . this watery pathology. . . . It is sick, fatal. While not as flamboyant as the "hectoring narrator" that began "The Voices of Village Square," passages such as this one, which verges on stream of consciousness, were in many ways more revolutionary and problematic. Wolfe claimed that the passage described what actually went on in the mind of Phil Spector as he sat in the plane just before take-off. He argued that his stream-of-consciousness technique made it possible to record this truth—a higher truth than either conventional reporting or fiction could do. Yet no matter how thorough and accurate Wolfe's reporting, or how detailed Spector's description of what he was thinking at a particular time, it was impossible for Wolfe ever really to know

what was going on inside the mind of another person. To write from a perspective within the subjective experience of another person thus required an epistemological leap more comfortably undertaken by a writer of fiction than of fact. Wolfe's arguments for the higher-truth content of his writing were belied somewhat by the tendency of his stream-of-consciousness passages to all sound fairly similar to one another, no matter which subject's voice was being adopted. Wolfe's stance toward his subjects was consistently irreverent, even satiric. He made fim of the people he wrote about by giving tremendous importance to the trivial details of their lives, revealing, through this breach of journalistic decorum, that both his subjects and his readers were enraptured by triviality. His satire had a conventional, even puritanical aspect. Wolfe frequently implied that the neon lights, capri pants, decal eyes, and other accoutrements of life in the 1960's were but a thin veneer applied to cover up inexorably rotting flesh, particularly female flesh. In the Esquire piece "Las Vegas (What?) Las Vegas (Can't Hear You! Too Noisy) Las Vegas!!!!" for example, he balanced his descriptions of the "buttocks d£colletage" pants that prostitutes and other young women wore with the image of four old people from Albuquerque, New Mexico, "up all night, squinting at the sun, belching from a surfeit of tall drinks at eight o'clock Sunday morning and—marvelous!—there is no one around to snigger at what an old babe with decaying haunches looks like in Capri pants with her heels jocked up on decorated wedgies." By 1965, Wolfe had become a much-discussed figure on the literary scene. His prose had seized the public's attention, and the satirical drawings that he had been producing since his days on the Springfield Union had become well enough regarded to be given an exhibition at a New York gallery. Wolfe had also acquired the reputation of a dandy, notorious for the white suit that he seemed always to wear. He had had the suit made

TOM WOLFE I 573 in 1962, his first year in New York. It was made of silk tweed. He had intended to wear it during the summer, as men in his native Virginia did, but he found that the material he had chosen was too heavy to wear in hot weather. So he wore the suit in the fall and winter, and quickly found that that gesture infuriated people. This encouraged him to wear the suit all the more. He maintained that his bizarre outfit distanced him from the people whom he interviewed and thus freed him to ask naive questions. He also admitted that he enjoyed the notoriety that his costume brought him. Early in 1965, Wolfe became the center of a literary scandal resulting from the publication in New York on April 11 and 18 of a two-part series of articles about The New Yorker magazine. The New Yorker was the most respected generalcirculation magazine in America, and its reputation was almost sacred. Over its forty-year history, it had regularly published the writing of James Thurber, E. B. White, and Edmund Wilson, among others, and had become famous for publishing long, ground-breaking works of nonfiction. Nevertheless, to Wolfe and to his editor at New Yorkf Clay Felker, The New Yorker seemed to have grown long-winded and dull—a fair target for critical attack. In addition, the editorial staff of The New Yorker were notoriously reticent, even secretive, about the place where they worked, thus making the magazine an alluring subject for a reporter. Wolfe set out to write a profile of the magazine and its editor, William Shawn, but Shawn and most of his staff refused interviews. Wolfe wrote and published the two articles anyway. The first of these he titled "Tiny Mummies! The True Story of the Ruler of 43rd Street's Land of the Walking Dead!" In the article Wolfe, using many of his newly developed techniques, painted a withering portrait of Shawn as a pathologically shy preserver of the legacy left by Harold Ross, the magazine's founding editor. He argued that

Shawn's obsessively curatorial attitude toward Ross's magazine extended as far as not allowing anyone who came to work at the magazine after Ross's death to put pictures on the walls of their offices. In the second of the two articles, "Lost in the Whichy Thicket," Wolfe made even more damning charges. The New Yorker's prose, he argued, was enervated by a bevy of editors and fact checkers who, acting without the knowledge or consent of the writers themselves, riddled originally taut prose with scores of long and tedious subordinate clauses. The response was as immediate as it was outraged. Shawn approached the Herald Tribune's owner and asked that the pieces not be published. After his plea went unheeded and the pieces appeared in print, a number of New Yorker writers wrote letters to the editor of the newspaper, condemning Wolfe for his malicious attack and pointing out that the pieces were riddled with factual inaccuracies. Wolfe later argued that the articles were misconstrued. He claimed that he had intended them as zjeu d'esprit—a kind of parody that, while based on some facts, ought to have been recognized as obvious fantasy. To most of his readers, however, the parody was not recognizable. The piece, from its title on, claimed that it was the true story of The New Yorker. And furthermore, the piece by implication argued that these "true" facts about Shawn and the magazine's editorial offices somehow invalidated the journalism that was being produced there, a journalism that was renowned for its factual accuracy. The scandal created by Wolfe's articles about The New Yorker remained very much on the public 's mind several weeks later, in June 1965, when a collection of many of the pieces that Wolfe had written for Esquire and New York was published as The Kandy-Kolored TangerineFlake Streamline Baby. The book became an immediate best-seller and received generally favorable reviews. The most influential review

574 I AMERICAN of the collection, however, was overwhelmingly negative. Dwight Macdonald, a renowned commentator on culture and a frequent contributor to The New Yorker, wrote two articles for The New York Review of Books in which he eviscerated Wolfe's style in both The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby and the articles about The New Yorker. Macdonald derisively described Wolfe's brand of writing as "parajournalism": "a bastard form, having it both ways, exploiting the factual authority of journalism and the atmospheric license of fiction." Macdonald charged Wolfe with abandoning the traditional mission of the journalist—to convey information—and replacing it with a baser goal—the creation of entertainment. He further argued that Wolfe filled his pieces with both factual inaccuracies and uncheckable facts, and that the distortions created by his radical style prevented the reader from knowing anything about the reality that Wolfe was purporting to describe. Although it was possible to construe these quasi-factual statements as versions of the "knowing details" that fiction writers used to give their works verisimilitude, Macdonald argued, Wolfe's details were not arranged into a meaningful fictional pattern. His pieces themselves were uninteresting unless the facts were really true. And if The New Yorker articles were any indications, Wolfe's facts tended not to be. In the second of his two articles, Macdonald painstakingly went through Wolfe's send-up of The New Yorker and picked it apart factual inaccuracy by factual inaccuracy. Although part of Macdonald's animus against Wolfe undoubtedly resulted from anger on behalf of a magazine that employed him, some of his aggressiveness in attacking Wolfe's writing also came from his belief that "parajournalism" had become a widespread and pernicious form of writing. And indeed, by 1965, people had begun to talk about a "new journalism," in which reporters approached their material as writers of

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fiction would, using novelistic techniques to reveal the inner experiences of their subjects and a deeper truth than the objectively verifiable one typical of most journalistic articles. This talk took place amid a growing sense that the novel had died—that novelists, having run up such blind alleys as metafiction and fabulism, had in fact killed the genre by exhausting its power to describe life. If the novel did not continue to serve its traditional role as the chronicler of society's manners and morals, then the New Journalism would. Within the next several years, a number of important book-length works of literary nonfiction were published. Truman Capote's In Cold Blood was published in 1966 as a book after having been serialized in The New Yorker, and Capote claimed that the work initiated a new genre, the "nonfiction novel." Whether or not his claim was true, In Cold Blood was soon followed by other works, such as Norman Mailer's The Armies of the Night (1968), which staked similarly ambitious claims for the literary importance of nonfiction. Meanwhile, the ranks of journalists who applied fictional techniques to the pieces they wrote for newspapers and magazines continued to grow. They soon included writers such as Hunter Thompson and Joan Didion. Wolfe continued to write short articles similar to those in The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby, primarily for New York. He returned to California, where he chronicled the lives of surfers and stripteasers. He profiled celebrities as diverse as Hugh Hefner and Marshall McLuhan. He saw, however, that literary nonfiction was becoming a prominent and prestigious form of writing, and he began to search for a topic for a more ambitious piece of writing. Henry Robbins, Wolfe's editor at the publishing house of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, showed Wolfe copies of some letters that the novelist Ken Kesey had written to Larry McMurtry, another novelist, from Mexico, where he was in

TOM WOLFE I 575 hiding as a fugitive from drug charges in the United States. Wolfe found the letters intriguing and decided to fly to Mexico to interview Kesey and write a story about the life of a fugitive. Before he could get there, however, Kesey had reentered the United States and been arrested by the FBI. Wolfe flew instead to San Francisco, where Kesey was in jail. He talked to Kesey and met his followers, a group of oddly dressed men and women who referred to themselves as the Merry Pranksters. Wolfe remained in California interviewing his subjects for a month. His story of Kesey, the Pranksters, and their experiments with LSD first appeared as a three-part series in New York. Originally, Wolfe intended to edit the three articles into a single, fairly short piece that he would include in his next anthology. But as he revised the articles, the subject grew to such an extent that he decided to write a book instead. On a single day in 1968, Wolfe staked his claim to importance in the new literary tradition that had so recently and quickly emerged. He published two books: The Pump House Gang, a collection of short pieces similar in subject and style to those that had been collected in The Kandy-Kolored TangerineFlake Streamline Baby and composed during the ten months following the publication of that volume, and The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Wolfe's book-length, novelistic account of Kesey and his followers. The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test staked Wolfe's claim to the generic importance of literary nonfiction. In both The Kandy-Kolored TangerineFlake Streamline Baby and The Pump House Gang, Wolfe had shied away from the major events of the 1960s—the war in Vietnam, the Kennedy assassination, the civil rights movement—in favor of the description of what were coming to be known as "life-styles"—the ways in which people defined themselves through their pursuit of leisure and their disposal of discretion-

ary income. In The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, he took on one of the major developments of the decade—the emergence of the drug culture and the "hippie" movement—and treated it in a way that resonated with the classic themes of American literature. The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test is in many ways a tale of the frontier. Kesey is a "horny-nailed son of the Western sod," a native of Oregon, the son of a man who moved West in order to seek his fortune. The West in which Kesey grows up, however, is a tamed one— territory swept by "the incredible postwar American electro-pastel surge into the suburbs." This closed, commercialized frontier is the setting for the exploration of the psychological wilderness created by hallucinogenic drugs, particularly LSD. The structure of The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test is punctuated by two journeys. In the first of these, Kesey and the Pranksters drive a converted school bus painted in psychedelic colors to the New York World's Fair. The journey is aimless and fitful, full of stops and starts. Although the Pranksters ultimately reach New York, they never seem TO get to the World's Fair. The goal of the journey becomes simply, as a sign on the front of the bus reads, Furthur. The Pranksters drop acid and make movies of themselves, hoping to achieve a breakthrough in spontaneous communication. They invert the classic pattern of a pattern voyage, substituting a psychological and cognitive frontier for a geographic one as they travel back toward the region from which the pioneers originally came. They also parody the "journey to the East" that often symbolizes the path toward mystical enlightenment. Despite the claims attached to the taking of LSD, the experimentation with drugs on the trip brings dissension, paranoia, and in some cases, insanity, rather than heightened awareness. The second significant journey of the book, Kesey's flight into Mexico to avoid arrest on drug charges, describes, much more straightfor-

576 / AMERICAN WRITERS wardly, travel through an actual physical wilderness. The Mexico of his exile is a land of "scrub cactus, brown dung dust and bloated corpses, dogs, coyotes, armadillos, a cow, all gas-bellied and dead, swollen and dead." Kesey lapses into paranoia; his presence in the landscape, which results from the souring of the LSD experience, comes to symbolize psychedelic consciousness gone bad. The story of Kesey in Mexico bears a striking resemblance to the tales of desperadoes that filled volumes of pulp fiction—a similarity that Wolfe said attracted him to the story. In The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Wolfe pushed the shifting points of view and typographical approximations of thought that he had begun to use in The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby even further than he had in that book. At times, he advanced the narrative through doggerel poetry, and he made more extensive use of stream of consciousness than he had previously. He opens his account of Kesey in Mexico, for example, by entering Kesey's mind as he imagines the police breaking into his hideout to arrest him: Haul ass, Kesey. Move. Scram. Split flee hide vanish disintegrate. Like run. Rtmuiiiiiiiiiimiiev revrevrevrevrevrevrevrevrev or are we gonna have just a late Mexican re-run of the scene on the rooftop in San Francisco and sit here with the motor spinning and watch with fascination while the cops they climb up once again to come git you— THEY JUST OPENED THE DOOR DOWN BELOW. ROTOR ROOTER, so YOU HAVE MAYBE 45 SECONDS ASSUMING THEY BE SLOW AND SNEAKY AND SURE ABOUT IT. It was more difficult in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test than in his previous writing for Wolfe to penetrate to the subjective reality of his characters. The passage quoted above is atypical in that Kesey's thoughts, although paranoid and de-

luded, are at least coherent. In contrast the Pranksters' experience is generally ecstatic, irrational, essentially resistant to language. They fill the audio and video tapes that they constantly make with rhyming, playful, but ultimately nonsensical language. This language surrounds them, pouring forth from the sound equipment that they bring with them everywhere. When Wolfe meets Kesey at the Pranksters' warehouse after Kesey's release from jail, for example, his observations are accompanied by the sound of an enigmatic message being played on a tape recorder: "the blissful counterstroke . . . through workhorse and intercourse . . . the blood that was available to him in intercourse . . . made us believe he was in the apple sauce for twenty years." The Pranksters develop a kind of theoretical justification for their babbling talk. They divide subjective reality neatly into two categories—the enlightenment of the drug experience and the proliferating viewpoints that dominate at other times. Only the enlightened can create and interpret Prankster language; others remain bound by what Kesey refers to as "fantasies." Wolfe borrows vocabulary from the sociology of religion to describe the Pranksters' view of the world. He writes, "The world was simply and sheerly divided into 'the aware,' those who had had the experience of being vessels of the divine, and a great mass of 'the unaware,' 'the unmusical,' 'the unattuned.' " More than had any essay in The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test raises the epistemological issue of whether any writer can enter the mind of his characters in prose and claim that the resulting work is nonfiction. In the author's note to the book, Wolfe presents his sources as evidence that his recreation of the Prankster's "mental atmosphere" was solidly based in fact: "All the events, details and dialogue I have recorded are either what I saw and heard myself or were told to me by people who were there themselves or were recorded on tapes

TOM WOLFE I 577 or film or in writing/' He credits the articulateness of Kesey, who had not only talked to him but allowed him access to letters written from Mexico. He also cites the abundance of tapes, letters, diaries, photographs, and film in the Prankster archives. The text, however, disputes the author's implicit claim that these materials embody an unmediated and fully describable reality. Wolfe repeatedly shows the Pranksters jockeying for control over editing the tapes, resisting what some of them consider Kesey's attempts to manipulate both the events that they record and their own recording of them. The *'documentary" archives that Wolfe celebrates, in other words, are themselves shaped by minds battling toward power rather than knowledge; they are testaments primarily to the evasiveness of truth and the limitations of individual human perspective. Despite its claims to capture reality more truly and fully than conventional journalism, even New Journalism is at two removes from subjective experience. The subject chooses what to tell the reporter, and a complex of motives both conscious and unconscious determines that choice. The reporter then selects out material from what the subject has told him, and shapes it. In an ideal world the reporter would shape this material in such a way as to reveal the truth beneath what the subject has presented, but in the real world of journalistic transactions, the reporter's own limited consciousness simply rearranges the utterances of his subjects. The style of The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test is in many ways an acknowledgement of this epistemological problem. Although Wolfe goes further toward stream of consciousness than he had in The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby, his style— with its turns into narrative poetry, its repetitions, its typographic renderings—seems even more obviously imposed upon the subject than it had in the first book. With the publication of The Electric Kool-

Aid Acid Test, Wolfe's interests seemed to shift toward what others considered the central issues of the 1960s. His next book, Radical Chic & Mau-mauing the Flak Catchers, appeared in 1970 and deals with manifestations of the racial unrest then besetting the United States. Radical Chic & Mau-mauing the Flak Catchers is a more blatantly political book than Wolfe had written previously. The book pairs two pieces: "Radical Chic" is an account of a party given by Felicia Bernstein and her husband, New York Philharmonic conductor Leonard Bernstein, to benefit two members of the Black Panther party who had been charged with attempting to blow up the Bronx Botanical Garden. "Mau-mauing the Flak Catchers" describes poor blacks and ethnic minorities in Oakland manipulating the welfare bureaucracy. "Radical Chic" contains perhaps the most acute social satire that Wolfe ever wrote. After discovering an invitation to the party on another reporter's desk, Wolfe went to the Bernstein's with a notebook in hand. He thought that he was taking notes for a novel that he hoped to write about New York society. He recorded conversations and noted the minute details of both the Bernsteins' apartment and the clothing worn by those in attendance. When he had gathered his material, he decided that it was too good not to publish immediately, so he wrote an article for New York. Radical Chic & Mau-mauing the Flak Catchers contains a revised version of this article. The piece casts doubts on the guests' motives for attending the benefit and mocks them brilliantly for being unable to break out of their socially privileged frame of reference. Wolfe adopts the voice of a posited guest: Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm. These are nice. Little Roquefort cheese morsels rolled in crushed nuts. Very tasty. Very subtle. It's the way the dry sackiness of the nuts tiptoes up against the

578 I AMERICAN WRITERS dour savor of the cheese that is so nice, so subtle. Wonder what the Black Panthers eat here on the hors d'oeuvre trail? Do the Panthers like little Roquefort cheese morsels rolled in crushed nuts this way, and asparagus tips in mayonnaise dabs, and meatballs petites au Coq Hardi, all of which are at this very moment being offered to them on gadrooned silver platters by maids in black uniforms with hand-ironed white aprons . . . The butler will bring them their drinks . . . Deny it if you wish to, but such are the pensees metaphysiques that rush through one's head on these Radical Chic evenings just now in New York. The passage, with its excessive musing on the quality of the hors d'oeuvres, accentuated by the repetition of "little Roquefort cheese morsels," seems to represent the skewed and inappropriate priorities brought to the party by those who attended. Wolfe dismissed the party as an example of nostalgic de la boue, or "nostalgia for the mud"—the tendency of members of an aristocracy to imitate the manners of the peasant class in order to avoid being confused with the bourgeoisie—which, being only one step removed from the lower classes, cannot afford to imitate peasants, even if only for fun. The theme was a favorite of his. He had treated it earlier in "Tom Wolfe's Guide to Etiquette," which had appeared in The Pump House Gang, and he had mentioned the phrase in passing in several other of his works, but in "Radical Chic" he gives the concept its fullest analysis. He makes fun of the damning paradox implicit in giving a benefit party for the Black Panthers while employing retinues of servants. He also establishes ironic parallels between the "sincere concern" that the partygoers had for the blacks, and their equally deep concern "for maintaining a proper East Side life-style in New York Society"—for having a summer home to which one can escape from "daddies from Long Island

in balloon-seat Bermuda shorts bought at the Times Square Store in Oceanside and fat mommies with white belled pants stretching over their lower bellies and crinkling up in the crotch like some kind of Dacron-polyester labia." But departing from his strategy in most of his earlier work, in "Radical Chic," Wolfe does not let the satiric narrative speak for itself. He supports his description of the party at the Bernsteins' with lengthy passages of fairly straightforward sociological analysis and exposition of the historical context, occasionally allowing a "downstage voice" to comment on the commentary. The tension between sharp, satirical narrative and nonsatirical analysis ultimately weakens "Radical Chic." Wolfe seems unable to bridge these two modes, and the piece trails off at its end into a discussion of how The New York Times reported on the party and a description of developing tensions between blacks and the Jewish Defense League over the issue of black anti-Semitism. Whatever the weaknesses of "Radical Chic," the title phrase quickly became a byword. The piece also thrust Wolfe into the center of another literary furor. The critical debate surrounding the article centered primarily not on how well Wolfe had satirized the Bernsteins and their guests, but on whether he had any right to satirize such an event at all. Even this far into Wolfe's career, some major critics, most notably Jason Epstein in The New York Review of Books, identified the voice of the article with the political opinions of Wolfe himself. Epstein argued that Wolfe had not given the partygoers enough credit for being serious in their political commitments. He pointed out that it was in fact impossible for Wolfe to know just what "pensees metaphysiques" might have been running through the minds of the Bernsteins and their guests, and he charged that Wolfe's supposed satire was in fact a projection of his own resentment of the wealthy and powerful onto a set of admirable, if slightly naive, white liberals.

TOM WOLFE I 579 During the early 1970's, Wolfe made use of his ever-growing notoriety to advance the cause of the New Journalism. Wearing his white suit, he traveled the lecture circuit, describing and advocating the techniques that he and other practitioners of the form used. He seemed like a postpsychedelic Mark Twain. At the same time, Wolfe wrote articles about the New Journalism and the death of the novel for New York and Esquire. He also joined with E. W. Johnson to edit an anthology of the new writing. The book, published in 1973, was titled simply, The New Journalism. In his introduction to The New Journalism, Wolfe sketches out the historical and theoretical contexts for the literary nonfiction writing of the 1960's. He places the development of that kind of journalistic writing among a group of newspaper writers who, like Wolfe, had become journalists as a way of biding time until they could 4 4work the fat off their writing'' and 4 'escape'' to life as novelists. He describes the life of a newspaper reporter in romantic terms that resemble stereotypes from the movies more than they do reality. Wolfe locates the birth of the New Journalism in the literary milieu of the mid 1960's, when writers began to realize that they could apply many of the techniques of realistic fiction to nonfiction writing—that there was, in other words, no need to "escape" into fiction from a career as a newspaper reporter. He describes how this realization came at a time in which writers and critics were debating the death of the novel and important novelists, among them John Barth, Donald Barthelme, and Thomas Pynchon, were choosing not to write social realism just when society had seemed to become more interesting and problematic than it had been in years. Wolfe describes the history of the New Journalism with metaphors that cast journalists such as himself into the role of barbarians at the gate, storming the "civilized" empires of conventional journalism and fiction writing. He de-

scribes such journalists as unschooled and to a large extent unintellectual, stumbling across the techniques of realism instinctively and accidentally rather than learning them through the study of past masters. "For the gluttonous Goths there is still only the outlaw's rule regarding technique," he writes. "Take, use, improvise." These metaphors, however, exist in tension with the bulk of the essay's argument and with the learning that Wolfe brings to bear on that argument. Wolfe stakes out elaborate claims for the "new" literary nonfiction as a genre. He traces out a number of historical parallels between the development of the novel and the development of the New Journalism, citing the works of Henry Fielding, Tobias Smollett Honore de Balzac, Charles Dickens, and Nikolay Gogol as models of realistic writing. The most important and revolutionary aspect of the New Journalism, he says, was the way in which its practitioners realized the "aesthetic dimension" of reporting and found ways to ferret out the real story behind the official version of any event. In Wolfe's view, the New Journalists were a kind of epistemological elite, perceiving and representing truths that most other reporters missed. Once they had obtained this "real story," the New Journalists shaped it by applying what Wolfe describes as the four standard techniques of realistic fiction: scene-by-scene construction, full recording of dialogue, third-person point of view, and the copious use of details that reveal what he calls the "status life" of the subject being written about. The result of this hybridization, Wolfe writes, is a form that is not merely like a novel. It consumes devices that happen to have originated with the novel and mixes them with every other device known to prose. And all the while, quite beyond matters of technique, it enjoys an advantage so obvious, so built-in, one almost forgets

580 I AMERICAN WRITERS what a power it has: the simple fact that the reader knows all this actually happened. The disclaimers have been erased. The screen is gone. The writer is one step closer to the absolute involvement of the reader that Henry James and James Joyce dreamed of and never achieved. Wolfe rests his argument on the presupposition that realism was not just a technique but a sine qua non of modern literature, a technological advance analogous to the development of electric power. Without realism, he claims, no literary genius can express itself. He overstates his claims for realism, perhaps deliberately. His celebration of the New Journalism's verisimilitude masks the fact that turning to factual writing had been as much an abandonment of realistic fiction as the move to fabulist novels had been. He leaves unacknowledged his own borrowings from the techniques of the avant-garde. Despite the broad opposition that Wolfe draws between his own work and the experimental fiction of the 1960's, the two forms of writing share a common epistemological stance, both emphasizing, as John Hellman has pointed out, the ways in which human consciousness alters the reality it perceives. It has been argued that by thus overstating his case, Wolfe hoped to create outrage and thereby publicize his own work. Whatever the reasons for the particular shape of the argument, Wolfe's position was not a fleeting one. During the years following the publication of The New Journalism, Wolfe continued his attack on modernism, extending it to the realms of the visual arts and architecture. He published two books, The Painted Word (1975) and From Bauhaus to Our House (1981), both of which lambasted the avant-garde and held up earlier styles as appropriate models for modern an. Wolfe had written about the art world since the beginning of his career. In essays such as "The Saturday Route" and "The New Art Gal-

lery Society," which were published in The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby and "Bob and Spike," which had appeared in The Pump House Gang, he had satirized the tendency of wealthy New Yorkers to view modern art as "the center of social rectitude"—as a necessary taste for those wishing to climb the social ladder. His success in these early pieces had resulted from the keenness with which he had observed and recorded the pretensions of living, breathing art patrons. In The Painted Word, Wolfe gives a synoptic history of modern art, structured according to the socioeconomic paradigm that had been implicit in his earlier, shorter essays. He argues that avant-garde artists live and work with a divided sensibility. They owe half their allegiance to the Romantic notion of the artist as rebel, producing works that shock the bourgeoisie; the other half they owe to the prevailing aristocracy, with whom they live in a kind of symbiosis. From the aristocracy, the artist receives his money, his prestige, his fame; from the avant-garde artist, the member of high society receives what Wolfe refers to as a peculiarly modern reward . . . namely, . . . the feeling that he may be from the middle class but he is no longer in i t . . . the feeling that he is a fellow soldier, or at least an aide-de-camp or an honorary cong guerilla in the vanguard march through the land of the philistines. Collecting modern art, like supporting the Black Panthers, is no more and no less than a strategic maneuver in a class war. The result of this sociological arrangement, according to Wolfe, is an art that does not present any obvious visual rewards. It thus gives rise to the secondary institution of art theory, which becomes necessary in order to bestow at least an intellectual interest on works that are not intrinsically appealing. To illustrate this theory, he discussed the writings of three art critics who

TOM WOLFE I 581 championed the various movements of modern art—Clement Greenberg, Harold Rosenberg, and Leo Steinberg. Although The Painted Word was the first book that Wolfe published after The New Journalism, in it he used fewer of the techniques of the New Journalism than at any other time in his career. Despite his celebration of the art of reporting, The Painted Word and From Bauhaus to Our House are more essayistic than reportorial. This seeming paradox has several possible explanations. Both pieces were written for Harper's, a magazine that nurtured the essay much more than did either New York or Esquire. The change in style may also have resulted from a desire on Wolfe's part to develop from a journalist into a man of letters. Critics generally agreed that Wolfe's ideas were thin and trivial, and that they could not stand up without the reportage that had enlivened his earlier work. The Painted Word and From Bauhaus to Our House revealed that Wolfe's aesthetic tastes, like his political tastes, were reactionary. At the same time that Wolfe was publishing The Painted Word and receiving criticism such as this, he was involved in the most sustained work of reporting in his career. Throughout most of the 1970's, he was involved in the research that would lead to his writing The Right Stuff (1979), arguably his greatest work. The Right Stuff began in January 1973 as a four-part series in Rolling Stone magazine on the occasion of the launch of the Apollo 17—the last flight to the moon. Wolfe delivered a chatty, ultimately unsuccessful history of the U.S. space program, written in the putative voice of the "astronauts' collective unspoken." He seemed to delight in his creation of the raunchy, chummy, macho style that he used to express this voice, and his pursuit of this style interfered with the construction of a successful narrative. Originally, Wolfe intended quickly to rewrite the four articles and publish them in book form

in 1973. He soon discovered, however, that he in fact knew very little about the space program, and he spent the following six years traveling across the country, interviewing the astronauts and other participants in the American exploration of space. Some of his subjects were recalcitrant: a few of the astronauts, notably Alan Shepard and Neil Armstrong, refused to be interviewed, and others were either reluctant or unable to describe their emotional states at important historical moments. Wolfe's reporting was also impeded by historical distance: some of the events he described took place as early as 19S9, and his subjects simply could not remember what they had said or thought at particular times. To supplement his interviews, Wolfe studied NASA's archives of the program, which had recently been declassified. He made particularly heavy use of the agency's postflight debriefings of the astronauts, during which the astronauts had been asked to describe the particulars of their flights in minute detail. During the six years that he spent researching The Right Stuff, Wolfe continued to write and publish short magazine articles. Some of these were published in Mauve Gloves & Madmen, Clutter & Vine (1976), a collection of pieces and drawings dating from as early as 1967. Most of the pieces are in the same mode as the essays in The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby and The Pump House Gang. They include "The Me Decade and the Third Great Awakening," in which Wolfe wrote about the growing trend toward self-actualization movements, programs in which bored and anxious members of the middle class tried to discover and come to terms with their "real" selves. His phrase "the Me Decade" gained wide currency and came to be a kind of tag that defined the 1970's. "The Truest Sport: Jousting with Sam and Charlie," another of the essays in Mauve Gloves & Madmen, Clutter & Vine, was Wolfe's first and only treatment of the Vietnam war, pub-

582 I AMERICAN WRITERS lished after the United States had withdrawn its troops. Wolfe celebrated, in strikingly apolitical terms, the bravery of two particular Navy fighter pilots flying missions over North Vietnam from the aircraft carrier Coral Sea. The pilots, John Dowd and Garth Flint, are celebrated as heroes not because they endured the suffering imposed on soldiers by politicians carrying out an unjust war, nor because they were brave protectors of Americans from the Communist threat, but because they had the grace to operate complicated, dangerous machinery under the pressure of battle. "The Truest Sport: Jousting With Sam and Charlie" was in many ways a sketch for The Right Stuff. In his foreword to the 1983 paperback edition of that book, Wolfe wrote that, following his Rolling Stone articles on the space program, he became fascinated by "the psychological mystery" of why military pilots were willing to take the enormous risks they did in "an era literary people had long since characterized as the age of the anti-hero." He located his topic within a specific literary tradition, contrasting his treatment of pilots' work with novels such as Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front (1929) and Louis-Ferdinand C6line's Journey to the End of the Night (1934), in which the main character was the lowly foot soldier, portrayed as a victim rather than a hero of war. Instead of following his antiheroic convention, Wolfe wrote a traditional heroic tale of daring exploits. He argued that he was therein resuscitating a genre that had been relegated to pulp magazines. In the course of reworking his articles from Rolling Stone, Wolfe narrowed the scope of his coverage: instead of writing about the entire space program, he concentrated on the seven Mercury astronauts, the first Americans to be launched into orbit around the Earth. Of all those who participated in the space program, the Mercury astronauts were perhaps the purest versions of the American hero. Viewed as enormously

brave men who had risked their lives in order to help the United States catch up to and then surpass the Soviet Union in space, they had been lionized by the American public—made the recipients of ticker-tape parades and the subjects of frequent, adulatory articles in the press, particularly in Life magazine, which had exclusive rights to the personal histories of the astronauts and which cast them into the one-dimensional role of apple-pie, all-American heroes. In The Right Stuff, Wolfe refutes this popular conception of the astronauts' heroism. Once again, as he had in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, he fits his story into the pattern of the frontier narrative. Unlike the psychological territories that he had described in The Electric KoolAid Acid Test, however, space is a literal wilderness, and its exploration yielded at least superficially a tale of conventional heroism, of men risking great physical danger to explore the unknown for the sake of their country. This heroism, which the astronauts themselves were loath to describe, Wolfe refers to simply as "the Right Stuff,'' the idea that more than simply being willing to die, a man should have the ability to go up in a hurtling piece of machinery and put his hide on the line and then have the moxie, the reflexes, the experience, the coolness, to pull it back in the last yawning moment—and then to go up the next day, and the next day, and every next day, even if the series should prove infinite—and, ultimately, in its best expression, do so in a cause that means something to thousands, to a people, a nation, to humanity, to God. Yet as it is described in Wolfe's narrative, the astronauts' heroism is something considerably more complex. Inevitably, perhaps, Wolfe places the story of the astronauts' accomplishments within the context of a struggle for status. The status system governing the astronauts' conduct is defined by the exploits of test pilots, who rou-

TOM WOLFE I 583 tinely risk death in order to push airplanes through the sound barrier and out of the earth's atmosphere. By repeated demonstrations of daring and mastery of complicated machinery, pilots separate themselves from the ranks of the less expert and join ever-smaller confraternities of pilots with the Right Stuff. Wolfe refers to this process as "climbing the ziggurat." The goal of every pilot is to reside alone at the top of that imaginary pyramid. Near the opening of The Right Stuff, Wolfe draws a portrait of the man who rested atop the pyramid in the days just before the beginning of the space program. Chuck Yeager, the first pilot to break the sound barrier, presides over the fraternity of fliers. Tight-lipped and toughened, he builds feats of heroism out of recklessly daring pranks. He breaks the sound barrier, for example, two days after cracking several of his ribs in a drunken midnight horseback ride across the desert. For the astronauts to define their heroism against these standards proves problematic. As Yeager himself is quick to point out, the astronauts serve as passengers rather than pilots of their spacecraft and seem to have been chosen for their ability to stay calm in situations that force the relinquishing of control. They are subjected to degrading medical examinations and forced to perform dull, repetitive tasks. The running joke among the astronauts is that they are being trained for a job that could just as easily be accomplished by a chimpanzee. The astronauts achieve the top of the pyramid in two ways: by gradually asserting their power and prowess, taking control within the bounds of the program, and by having the title of hero bestowed on them from without, by an adoring American public. The Right Stuff examines both these aspects of their success, and it becomes as much a study of how Americans form their cultural icons as a description of how individuals rise to the top of whatever status system they

belong to. Wolfe satirizes the wholesome image in which Life cloaks the astronauts and shows that the status system defining the world of the pilots and astronauts bears only the slenderest relationship to the status system prevailing in the United States at large. He plays upon the disharmony between the astronauts' successful ascent of the ziggurat and their almost aggressive tackiness—their Ban-Ion shirts, their relish of such "low rent" pastimes as hard drinking, drag racing, and womanizing. For Wolfe, this dissonance is the defining characteristic of the astronauts' lives, but it is covered up by a press "determined that in all matters of national importance the proper emotion, the seemly sentiment, the fitting moral tone should be established and should prevail; and all information that muddied the tone and weakened the feeling should simply be thrown down the memory hole." Wolfe refers to this press as "the consummate hypocritical Victorian gent." Wolfe's own style in The Right Stuff is simpler and perhaps closer to the fictional models he espoused in The New Journalism than it had been previously in his career. The language is freer of experimental techniques than it had been, for example, in The Electric Kool-AidAcid Test. Wolfe used an omniscient point of view to narrate the book, frequently modulating into a downstage voice that was considerably more restrained than it had been in the Rolling Stone articles. The characters are presented almost as caricatures, flattened into assemblages of a few salient characteristics that are then repeated almost as epic epithets. John Glenn is the "good Presbyterian," the one astronaut who turned his back on the rowdy behavior of his colleagues and "seemed to enjoy shocking people with his clean living." Alan Shepard switches between two personas— that of the "Icy Commander," a stern and correct career Navy officer, and "Smilin' Al of the Cape," whose eyes glow at the sight of Corvettes and nubile young women. Phrases such as

584 I AMERICAN WRITERS these delimit Wolfe's characterization of the astronauts, defining their conflicts with each other and their grappling with the demands of the Mercury program. Through this flattened style, Wolfe mimicked the form of Life magazine's pop heroism while undermining its presuppositions. The cartoonlike quality of his characterizations is a response to the epistemological issues raised by the book's subject. As Chris Anderson has pointed out, The Right Stuff, like The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, ultimately concerns itself with the difficulty, if not the impossibility, of capturing reality in words. Reticence is central to the code of pilot conduct. As Wolfe puts it, "The very words death, danger, bravery, fear were not to be uttered except in the occasional specific instance or for ironic effect." Instead, the subjects of bravery and death were to be "adumbrated in code or by example." The reticence that governs the pilots' conduct also dictates Wolfe's flattened style. To violate that reticence with complex explications of psychology and motive would have been to falsify the nature of the astronauts' experience. The Right Stuff was the most critically and commercially successful book that Wolfe had yet published. It won both the American Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award for nonfiction in 1980, and it was later made into a Hollywood film. During the years immediately following the publication of the book, Wolfe maintained a steady literary output, but his reportorial activity once again seemed to slow. In 1979 and 1980, he published a series of satiric cartoons with text in Harper's, under the title 4 4In Our Time.'' The pieces, although amusing, were frivolous, taking on the all-too-familiar questions of status and style without further developing his ideas on those subjects. Wolfe nevertheless republished the series in 1980, along with some other fugitive magazine pieces, as a book which also bore the title In Our Time. In 1981, he published From Bauhaus to Our House,

his sequel, as it were, to The Painted Word. The following year, The Purple Decades, an anthology of his best and best-known pieces, was released. From very early in his career, Wolfe had publicly announced his intention to write a novel. On several occasions, Wolfe had even said that he was currently at work on one. His descriptions of this work varied somewhat in their particulars. At some times, he announced that he was writing a novel about teenagers. At others, he claimed to be writing a book called "Vanity Fair" which he said would describe all of life in New York. He vacillated on the question of whether that book was fiction or nonfiction. He said, however, that he wanted to write a book that was about New York City in the same way that Balzac's and Zola's works had been about Paris and Dickens' and Thackeray's had been about London. "Radical Chic" had started out as a kind of working paper for this enterprise. For years, nothing materialized. But in the summer of 1984, Rolling Stone magazine published the first installment of a serialized novel by Wolfe, called The Bonfire of the Vanities. The enterprise seemed perhaps more appropriate to Victorian England than to an American rock-androll magazine in the 1980's. It was, however, in keeping with the pattern of The Electric KoolAid Acid Test and The Right Stuff, each of which was first published serially in a magazine and then, significantly revised, published as books. Wolfe wrote to deadline each week, publishing each chapter or group of chapters before the following ones were written. His topic, as he had promised, was New York City, and he "reported" the story in much the same manner and to much the same extent as he had reported his works of nonfiction. The plot centered on the downfall of Sherman McCoy, a wealthy white Manhattanite who, while driving with his mistress, gets lost in the South Bronx and mortally injures a poor black teenager named Henry Lamb

TOM WOLFE I 585 in a hit-and-run automobile accident. To write the story, Wolfe rode the subways back and forth to the Bronx, making detailed observations of the other passengers. He investigated the Bronx criminal court system. And he drew upon his long exposure to the life of wealthy New Yorkers—the world he had described in such pieces as "Radical Chic"—to fashion the character and the environment of McCoy. The serialization of Wolfe's novel proved to be something of an education in fiction writing carried out in public. Between the time that The Bonfire of the Vanities appeared in Rolling Stone and its publication as a book in 1987, Wolfe made significant revisions to the text. He renamed some of his characters, altered significant details of the plot, tightened the dialogue and description, and redrew the character of Sherman McCoy. In the Rolling Stone series, Wolfe had cast McCoy as a best-selling author and selfmade man, the son of a very middle-class "quality-control engineer" for a General Electric plant in Springfield, Massachusetts. In the story's serial version, McCoy lives in an enormous Park Avenue apartment with a marble foyer, and he frequents the dinner parties of the haul monde. While the McCoy of the final version lives in the same apartment and goes to the same dinner parties, his profession and family background have been changed, so that the faintly autobiographical but unconvincing portrait of the magazine series has been revised into a coherent and convincing character. The revised Sherman McCoy is a Yale-educated millionaire bond trader on Wall Street, the son of a blueblooded WASP lawyer. McCoy is ultimately brought down not by his own moral flaw but by the coincidence of other people's ambitions, charted through the conventionally intricate plotting of a Victorian novel. McCoy's accident becomes a cause c61ebre for each member of an enormous cast of characters, including a militant black minister from Harlem,

a Bronx district attorney running for reelection in a racially troubled city, and a dissipated British reporter for a tabloid newspaper, who hopes to resuscitate a dying career by covering the scandalous crime. Each of these characters cynically adopts the comatose Henry Lamb as an emblem of industrious black youth trying to escape a life of crime in the ghetto. Each likewise makes McCoy a scapegoat for all the crimes that powerful white New York has ever inflicted on the black underclass. Wolfe's revision of the character of McCoy gives a topical edge to the satire, anchoring the fiction more firmly in the apocalyptically greedy New York of the 1980's. It also allows Wolfe to draw an extensive allusion to The Great Gatsby, as Nicholas Lemann pointed out in his review of the novel in The Atlantic magazine. In both novels, an automobile accident in which a rich man, accompanied by his mistress, kills someone who is economically and socially downtrodden leads to the wealthy man's downfall. Wolfe inverts the socioeconomic pattern of F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel: whereas Jay Gatsby is a member of the nouveau riche who is betrayed by his aristocratic friends Daisy and Tom Buchanan, in Wolfe's novel, it is McCoy the blueblood who is done in by the treachery of the new rich. For all its narrative sweep and its resonance with classic American literature, The Bonfire of the Vanities is not without its flaws. No one character, not even McCoy, is sufficiently rounded to elicit much sympathy from the reader. As Lemann argued, for all the novel's resemblance to The Great Gatsby, it lacks that work's elegiac tone and ultimately seems rather hollow. The Bonfire of the Vanities nevertheless enjoyed enormous popular success. Because of its stylistic conservatism, some critics dismissed it as simply a popular novel. It is too soon to know whether the novel, despite its flaws, will come to be viewed as a serious work of literature, but

586 I AMERICAN WRITERS since the publication of the book, Wolfe has created another literary uproar by attempting to formulate a theoretical justification for the kind of conventional fiction that he wrote. In an essay for Harper's titled "Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast: A Literary Manifesto for the New Social Novel/' Wolfe returns to the territory that he had last explored in his introduction to The New Journalism. He approaches the question of realism in literature from the perspective of a fiction writer rather than a journalist, in some sense fulfilling the prediction that he had made in the essay opening the 1973 book that "there is a tremendous future for a sort of novel that will be called the journalist novel or perhaps documentary novel, novels of intense social realism based upon the same painstaking reporting that goes into the New Journalism." Once again, he takes issue with the absurdist, magical realist, and neofabulist writers of the 1960's and 1970's, arguing that realism is not simply one of a large variety of stylistic devices available to the writer, but a kind of technological advance, "like the introduction of electricity into engineering." And once again, he claims that "the petis fails vrais that create verisimilitude and make a novel gripping or absorbing . . . are essential for the very greatest effects literature can achieve." In the early 1990's, Tom Wolfe was at work on another novel. Regardless of the directions his career takes, his journalistic work and his interpretations of that work have deeply influenced the writing of nonfiction and helped to accord a literary status to that kind of writing. Whatever the merits and defects of his work, his career seems a testament to a prescription that he himself issued in "Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast": "America today, in a headlong rush of her own, may or may not truly need a literature worthy of her vastness. But American novelists, without any doubt, truly need, in this neurasthenic hour, the spirit to go along for that wild ride."

Selected Bibliography WORKS OF TOM WOLFE The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1965. "Lost in the Whichy Thicket: The New Yorker—II." New York, April 18, 1965, pp. 16-24, 44. ' Tiny Mummies! The True Story of the Ruler of 43rd Street's Land of the Walking Dead!" New York, April 11, 1965, pp. 7-9, 24-27. "How You Can Be As Well-informed As Tom Wolfe." Esquire, November 1967, pp. 138, 212. "The Author's Story." The New York Times Book Review, August 18, 1968, pp. 2, 40-41. The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1968. The Pump House Gang. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1968. Radical Chic & Mail-mailing the Flak Catchers. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1970. "The Birth of the New Journalism: Eyewitness Report by Tom Wolfe." New York, February 14, 1972, pp. 30-45. "The New Journalism: A la Recherche des Whichy Thickets." New York, February 21, 1972, pp. 3948. "Why They Aren't Writing the Great American Novel Anymore." Esquire, December 1972. The New Journalism. New York: Harper & Row, 1973. With an anthology edited by Tom Wolfe and E. W. Johnson. The Painted Word. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1975. Mauve Gloves & Madmen, Clutter & Vine. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1976. The Right Stuff. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1979; Bantam, 1983. In Our Time. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1980. From Bauhaus to Our House. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1981. The Purple Decades. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1982. The Bonfire of the Vanities. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1987. 4 'Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast: A Literary Man-

TOM WOLFE I 587 ifesto for the New Social Novel.*' Harper's, November 1989, pp. 45-56.

INTERVIEWS Bellamy, Joe David. "Tom Wolfe." In his The New Fiction: Interviews with Innovative American Writers. Urbana, 111.: University of Illinois Press, 1974. Pp. 75-96. Hayman, Ronald. "Tom Wolfe in Interview." Books and Bookmen. 25:2^-31 (November 1979). Monaghan, Charles. "Portrait of a Man Reading." Washington Post Book World, September 1, 1968, p. 2. Scura, Dorothy M., ed. Conversations with Tom Wolfe. Jackson, Miss., and London: University Press of Mississippi, 1990.

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL STUDIES Anderson, Chris. Style As Argument: Contemporary American Nonfiction. Carbondale, 111., and Edwardsville, 111.: Southern Illinois University Press, 1987. Booker, Christopher. "Inside the Bubble: Re-reading Tom Wolfe." Encounter, September 1977, pp. 7277. Bredahl, A. Carl. "An Exploration of Power: Tom Wolfe's Acid Test." Critique, 23:67-84 (Winter 1981-1982). Buckley, William F., Jr. "Mau-mauing Wolfe." National Review, January 12, 1971, p. 51. Cohen, Ed. "Tom Wolfe and the Truth Monitors: A Historical Fable." Clio, 16:1-11 (Fall 1986). Compton, Neil. "Hijinks Journalism." Commentary, 47:76-78 (February 1969). Coyne, John R., Jr. "Sketchbook of Snobs." National Review, January 26, 1971, pp. 90-91. Dickstein, Morris. "The Working Press, the Literary Culture, and the New Journalism." Georgia Review, 30:855-877 (Winter 1976). Dunne, John Gregory. "Hog Heaven." The New York Review of Books, November 8, 1979, pp. 912. Eason, David L. "Telling Stories and Making Sense." Journal of Popular Culture 15:125-129 (Fall, 1981).

. "New Journalism, Metaphor, and Culture." Journal of Popular Culture, 15:142-149 (Spring 1982). Edwards, Thomas R. "The Electric Indian." Partisan Review, 36:535-544 (1969). . "Low Expectation^." The New York Review of Books. February 4,1988, pp. 8-9. Epstein, Jason. "Journal du Voyeur." The New York Review of Books, December 17, 1970, pp. 3-6. Epstein, Joseph. "Tom Wolfe's Vanities." New Criterion. 6:5-16 (February 1988). Fishwick, Marshall, ed. "The New Journalism." Journal of Popular Culture, 9:95-249 (Summer 1975). Gareffa, Peter M., and Mary V. McLeod. "Wolfe, Thomas Kennedy, Jr." In Contemporary Authors. New Revision Series. Detroit, Mich.: Gale Research Company, 1983. Garrett, George. "Ladies in Boston Have Their Hats: Notes on WASP Humor." In Comic Relief: Humor in Contemporary American Literature. Edited by Sarah Blacher Cohen. Urbana, 111.: University of Illinois Press, 1978. Hartshorne, Thomas L. "Tom Wolfe on the 1960's." Midwest Quarterly, 23:144-163 (1982). Hellman, John. Fables of Fact: The New Journalism as New Fiction. Urbana, 111.: University of Illinois Press, 1981. Hersey, John. "The Legend on the License." Yale Review, 70:1-25(1980). Hollowell, John. Fact and Fiction: The New Journalism and the Nonfiction Novel. Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1977. Ivester, Stan. "The Latest from the Human Lapsometer." Chicago Review, 31:39-45 (Spring 1980). Johnson, Michael L. The New Journalism: The Underground Press, the Artists of Nonfiction, and Changes in the Established Media. Lawrence, Kans.: University Press of Kansas, 1971. Johnston, George Sim. "Manhattan Cut in Slices." The American Spectator, March 1985, pp. 25-27. Kalian, Richard A. 4'Style and the New Journalism: A Rhetorical Analysis of Tom Wolfe." Communication Monographs, 46:52-62 (March 1979). Kluger, Richard. The Paper: The Life and Death of the New York "Herald Tribune." New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1986. Lemann, Nicholas. "New York in the Eighties." The Atlantic Monthly, December 1987, pp. 104-107. Letters to the Editor. Harper's, February 1990, 4-13.

588 I AMERICAN WRITERS Lewin, Leonard C. "Is Fact Necessary?" Columbia Journalism Review, Winter 1966, pp. 29-34. Lounsberry, Barbara. 'Tom Wolfe's Negative Vision." South Dakota Review 20:15-31 (Summer 1982). Macdonald, Dwight. "Parajournalism, or Tom Wolfe and his Magic Writing Machine." The New York Review of Books, August 26, 1965, pp. 3-5. . 4t Parajournalism II: Wolfe and The New Yorker.'' The New York Review of Books, February 3, 1966, pp. 18-24. Powers, Thomas. "The Lives of Writers." Commonweal, March 3, 1978, pp. 142-143, 147-148. . "Wolfe in Orbit: Our Mercurial Interests." Commonweal, October 12, 1979, pp. 551-552. Rafferty, Terence. "The Man Who Knew Too Much." The New Yorker, February 1, 1988, pp. 88-92. Richardson, Jack. "New Fundamentalist Movement." The New Republic, September 28, 1968, pp. 30-35. Rose, Barbara. "Wolfeburg." The New York Review of Books, June 26, 1975, pp. 26-8. Ross, Charles S. "The Rhetoric of the Right Stuff." The Journal of General Education, 33:113-122 (1981). Sheed, Wilfrid. "A Fun-House Mirror." The New York Times Book Review, December 3, 1972, pp. 2, 10-12. Sommer, Robert. "Tom Wolfe on Modern Architecture: Further Comparisons of New Journalism and Social Science." Journal of Popular Culture 18:111-115 (Fall 1984).

Stone, Laurie. "Spaced Out." The Village Voice, September 10, 1979, pp. 71, 73, 76. Tanner, Tony. City of Words: American Fiction 1950-1970. New York: Harper & Row, 1971. Trachtenberg, Alan. "What's New?" Partisan Review, 41:296-302(1974). Tuchman, Mitch. "The Writings of Tom Wolfe: The Manchurian Candidate." The New Republic, October 25, 1975, pp. 21-24. Vigilante, Richard. "The Truth About Tom Wolfe." National Review, December 18, 1987, pp. 46, 48^49. Weber, Ronald, ed. The Reporter as Artist: A Look at the New Journalism Controversy. New York: Hastings House, 1974. Weber, Ronald. "Tom Wolfe's Happiness Explosion." Journal of Popular Culture, 8:71-79 (Summer 1974). . The Literature of Fact: Literary Nonfiction in American Writings. Athens, Ohio: University of Ohio Press, 1980. 'Staying Power." Virginia Quarterly Review, 59:548-552(1983). Wills, Garry. "Imprisoned in the Sixties." The New York Review of Books, January 20, 1977, pp. 2223. Yagoda, Ben. "Astronauts and Other Icons of Pop Culture." Books and Arts, September 28, 1979, pp. 14-15. Zavarzadeh, Mas'ud. The Mythopoetic Reality: The Postwar American Nonfiction Novel. Urbana, 111.: University of Illinois Press, 1976. —MICHELLE PRESTON

James Wright 1927-1980 I

HAVE WASTED my life," James Wright confesses in the last line of his best-known poem, 4 'Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy's Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota." At once imperative and despairing, Wright's confession seems a plea that life be taken on its own terms; that life is more than the sum of days. A later prose poem, "Honey" (collected in Above the River), returns to similar emotional terrain. "My father died a good death," Wright concludes. "To die a good death means to live one's life. I don't say a good life. I say a life." It is Wright's contention that a good life would be somewhat limiting. Where would we be without loss, without even a brief acquaintance with despair? James Wright's is a poetry that cannot answer such a question. It takes a long, hard look at loss, finding among such pains some few rewards, and the occasional epiphany that life is worth living. Born December 13, 1927, James Arlington Wright was the middle son of Dudley and Jesse Lyons Wright. That he was born in Martins Ferry, Ohio, in an area of the United States known for its mills and factories, for the frequent poverty of its citizens, is perhaps a fact more significant to Wright's work than the date of his birth. The poetry of place, of remembered or newly encountered towns and cities, would become in many ways Wright's stock-in-trade. In a

brief essay titled "Childhood Sketch" he writes: I was born . . . on Union Street. I don't know why I should cling to that particular useless detail. It may have something to do with the frequency of my family's moving. By the time I was ten years old we had lived in at least half a dozen houses, which were scattered apart from one another about as widely as possible in a small town of 16,000 inhabitants. . . . I love the variety of Martins Ferry, a skinny place stretched out along the river between the railroad and the abrupt hills. Dudley and Jesse Wright were members of the working class. "My father worked as a die-setter at the Hazel-Atlas Glass Company. . . . He was a handsome man of great physical strength and the greatest human strength of all, an enduring gentleness in the presence of the hardship that the Great Depression brought to everyone," Wright remembered in "Childhood Sketch." "My mother's family came from West Virginia, and they were honest-to-God hillbillies to farethee-well." Theirs was an impoverished dignity. It is not hard to imagine the Wrights deeply and profoundly affected by the Depression, to imagine the young boy and his mother walking the nearby railroad tracks looking for stray lumps of coal fallen from passing trains. Although we can-

559

590 / AMERICAN WRITERS not say with any certainty that such an incident ever happened, Wright's early childhood, its commonplace disadvantages, were a continual influence upon his life and his work. His parents, his native Ohio, the mills and factories comprising his first neighborhoods, the Ohio River: all recur throughout the body of his poetry. Educated in public schools, James Wright began to write at an early age, his first inspirations the poems of James Whitcomb Riley and Lord Byron. Those early poems that survive seem at once sentimental and bitter, without the benefit of experience. His biographer Peter Stitt does however inform us that Wright "suffered a nervous breakdown" in his sixteenth year, a fact that might account for the somewhat maudlin tone of his early lyrics. A selection of these poems, published in the Gettysburg Review in 1990, reveals an adolescent's fascination with the self, and with romantic notions of art. In "To Justify My Singing," for example, the youthful Wright asserts: I am in love with poetry And she my love has been, For she has let me revel free In the sea of things unseen. However naive, these early poems are technically sophisticated, employing a knowledge of form and meter well advanced for a young man. Nor does their relative immaturity belie a certain wit. The lines above are little if not filled with assonance ("poetry," "she," "me," "free"); yet, this heavy-handedness leads naturally into the wordplay of "sea" and "unseen." After high school, Wright joined the army. The year was 1946: World War II had recently ended, and Wright found himself stationed in Occupied Japan, where he worked as a typist and continued to write poems. One ("Poem," reprinted in Stitt's selection in the Gettysburg Review) reveals a greater sense of emotional as well as technical control:

. . .tonight I heard the whirring Of crickets that disturbs your pompom whores Stirring in their beds on barren floors, And I could smell, not see, a stink stirring Through the night air; and suddenly I knew I was not dreaming of Japan, I was alive Hearing and smelling what the Japanese poets could not give. I sat amazed, while the nightwind blew. Wright goes on to exclaim, "To hell with poetry." Here, in some sense, are the beginnings of his attraction to harsher realities. "A human whore is a human whore / With a human face and a living, beating heart." His refusal, though, to indulge in "abstraction" is less an acceptance, an embracing of life's difficult truths, than it is a refusal of metaphor. "I knew her," he writes, "and no more." It is a youthful denial of poetry's transformative powers, powers that characterize Wright's mature work. Shortly after his discharge from the army, Wright entered Kenyon College on the G. I. Bill. Because of his military enlistment after high school, Wright was older and more experienced than most other incoming freshman. Among his classmates was E. L. Doctorow, who enrolled at Kenyon fresh from the Bronx High School of Science. In a memoir of their years at Kenyon, Doctorow describes Wright as he appeared when they first met. He was a hulking fellow, not particularly tall but built like a wrestler, with sloping shoulders and a size eighteen neck. . . . He had a round face with particularly small features—small mouth, and small eyes encircled with a pair of colorless plastic G.I. glasses which he regularly adjusted because his small nose had not a sufficient bridge to keep them up where they belonged. Doctorow recalls Wright's appearance as seeming at odds with his intellectual capabilities, his

JAMES WRIGHT I 591 talent for recitation of poems from memory. The novelist also notes Wright's "cultivation and celebration of the outcasts and pariahs of the college." It is clear that, from early on, Wright's intellectual allegiances lay with the high and the classical, and his emotional allegiances with the low, with the offbeat and the dispirited. He was carrying within him such enormous contradictions—this dirt poor Ohioan set down in the intellectual park of an historic, private college, this poet alive in the constitution of a football lineman, this irremediably Midwestern American in unslakeable thirst for the language and culture of Europe. Among Wright's teachers was the poet John Crowe Ransom, who had joined the faculty of Kenyon College in 1937. Ransom, an influential member of the Agrarians, a proponent of New Criticism, and the founder of the literary quarterly Kenyon Review, had earlier taught Kenyon graduates Robert Lowell and Peter Taylor. In an interview with Dave Smith, Wright credited Ransom with having taught him of "the Horatian ideal" in poetry: "the attempt finally to write a poem that will be put together so carefully that it ... produce[s] a single unifying effect." Wright's poems first appeared nationally in the Kenyon Review, and Ransom was primarily responsible for Wright's receiving that magazine's poetry fellowship some years later, in 1958. During his senior year at Kenyon, Wright completed an honors thesis on Thomas Hardy, and he graduated in the winter of 1952. Shortly after graduation, he married his high-school sweetheart, Liberty Kardules. The couple traveled the states from Ohio to Texas, and when Wright received a Fulbright fellowship to the University of Vienna, they went abroad to Austria. From Vienna, the Wrights returned to the United States, their newborn son Franz in tow. Wright then en-

rolled in the master's program at the University of Washington in Seattle, where he studied with Theodore Roethke and Stanley Kuntiz. After completing his master's degree, Wright entered the school's Ph.D. program, which he completed in 1959 with a dissertation titled "The Comic Imagination of the Young Dickens." Wright's first book of poems, The Green Wall, was selected by W. H. Auden for the Yale Series of Younger Poets and published in 1957. In his foreword, Auden notes a theme that became a characteristic of Wright's work as a whole: a celebration of the outcast, to paraphrase E. L. Doctorow: "aside from love poems and poems addressed to relatives, the persons who have stimulated Mr. Wright's imagination include a lunatic, a man who has failed to rescue a boy from drowning, a murderer, a lesbian, a prostitute, a police informer, and some children, one of them dead." The Green Wall comprises five sections: "Scenes and Laments," "To Troubled Friends," "Loves," "Stories and Voices," and an untitled final section. It opens with the poem "A Fit Against the Country," from which the volume takes its title. The wall, which appears in the poem's final stanza, seems an ivied partition (or fence), or a verdant hedge separating one weather, one season from another. To climb over "the green wall" is to leave behind a "vacant paradise" in which nature's usual suspects appear "bright" but somehow menacing. The first three stanzas of "A Fit Against the Country" (octaves ending in off-rhymed couplets) meld present description with past memory, the tense changing in the final lines. Here is the first stanza: The stone turns over slowly, Under the side one sees The pale flint covered wholly With whorls and prints of leaf. After the moss rubs off It gleams beneath the trees,

592 / AMERICAN WRITERS Till all the birds lie down. Hand, you have held that stone. The birds occupying the second and third stanzas, sparrow and tanager, become in their respective final lines remembered song and color: "Ear, you have heard that song" and "Eye, you have seen that bright color." Hand, ear, eye, give way to nose and mouth, which have known "the dark tang of earth." The "watered mouth," acquainted with soil, seems almost sexual, if not vaguely Freudian: the son who tastes his mother's flesh. In the last stanza, the body made whole again is advised to "hold [its] humor / Away from the tempting tree." The only tree mentioned in the poem so far is an apple, and it is the fruit and not the tree itself to which Wright alludes. * 'Odor of fallen apple / Met you across the air," he writes. The "fallen apple," the knowledge already won (at what cost?), signifies Wright's awareness of exile. The apple is the remembered fruit of a paradise ("the tempting tree, / The grass, the luring summer / That summon the flesh to fall") vacated not by nature but by man and woman. The fall to which the flesh is summoned is the loss of a prelapsarian innocence, though innocence seems ultimately too coy a word for Wright's well-honed sensibilities. We would do better to speak of a nostalgia, an affection, gone sour. The weight of biblical allusion might seem heavy if a reader considers such reference an invocation of Judeo-Christian religion. But an expression of religious faith, questioned or unquestioned, is not Wright's aim. Wright's poetry seems almost decidedly agnostic. (He was raised a nonpracticing Protestant.) Rather, such allusions seem references to a common history, a shared mythology, sometimes subtle (as in "A Fit Against the Country") and sometimes overt. The epigram to "The Horse" (". . . the glory of his nostrils is terrible") is taken from Job 39:20.

19. thou 20. per?

Hast thou given the horse strength? hast clothed his neck with thunder? Canst thou make him afraid as a grasshopthe glory of his nostrils is terrible.

The horse's temerity is thrown into relief by the grasshopper's uncourageousness, as is the rider ("some young foolhardy dweller of the barrows") by the thrown (the wife, "whose saddle rocked her as a cradled child"). The wife is thrown, resuscitated, made to rise again. What Wright asks us to believe is that he "knew she would never rest again." The statement seems overly portentous, unlikely if considered as the result of this one accident. The failure to "rest again" thus becomes a more universalized injury to "the cradled child." It is another fall, of sorts, that threatens irrevocable exile from experience. I knew that she would never rest again, For the colts of the dusk rear back their hooves And paw us down, the mares of dawn stampede Across the cobbled hills till the lights are dead. Though the poet is not Job, the final lines echo Job's acquiescence, his repentance in dust and ashes: Run to the rocks where horses cannot climb, Stable the daemon back to shaken earth, Warm your hands at the comfortable fire, Cough in a dish beside a wrinkled bed. Neither faith nor reward results from the poet's accident-won humility. The fire might comfort, the bed offer welcome, safety; still, the cough, the sputum-filled dish, remind us of our human frailty, our grasshopper-like limitations. Much has been made of Wright's intention to "write poems [that] say something humanly important instead of just showing off in language" and of his claim that Robert Frost and Edwin Arlington Robinson were important early influences on his work. (Both remarks appear on the dustjacket of The Green Wall.) In retrospect,

JAMES WRIGHT I 593 these claims seem shortsighted: Wright would try to escape their reverberations for the rest of his career. Of the first, he would later say in an interview with the Southern Humanities Review, 44 That was a sort of Puritanical statement, wasn't it? There's a certain pompousness about it. ... Like beating against the sand, or being virtuous." Much has been made of Frost himself, while Robinson has become a largely neglected figure on the literary landscape. Robinson's life and career, which spanned the years following the Civil War to the years just prior to World War II, were marked by great success, including three Pulitzer Prizes. His work is populated with character studies ("Miniver Cheevy," "Richard Cory," "Captain Craig") and descended from nineteenth-century transcendentalism, though a particularly individual, often dark, brand of that philosophy. Here is section 15 from Robinson's "Octaves," an early poem: We lack the courage to be where we are: We love too much to travel on old roads, To triumph on old fields; we love too much To consecrate the magic of dead things, And yieldingly to linger by long walls Of ruin, where the ruinous moonlight That sheds a lying glory on old stones Befriends us with a wizard's enmity. Except for the fanciful wizard of the final image, these lines might have been written by Wright himself; fancy was not a quality to which Wright was predisposed at this stage in his literary development. Rather, he absorbed Robinson's often acrimonious views of human nature and of the world. The world is often cruel, men and women its unwitting victims. Violence destroys what it cannot control: the beautiful, the feminine, the other. In Wright's vision, animals, too, are subject to the world's malevolence. In "On the Skeleton of

a Hound," the poet circles the bones of a dead animal. Flies would love to leap Between his eyes and hum away the space Between the ears, the hollow where a hare Could hide The skeleton prompts Wright to conjure an almost pagan image of women dancing around a fire. The idyll is interrupted when the poet "scatter[s] this hulk about the dampened ground" and "throw[s]" / The ribs and spine out of their perfect shape." What prompts an act that seems, at first, disrespectful? The poet's belief that earth, not man, should care for the dead; that moles, earthworms, "honest bees," are better keepers of their own. They transform bone and flesh into usefulness again. The bees make of the hound's skull a hive: an image initially repulsive, then oddly comforting. Aware that he has little use for the hound anymore, the poet hastens the skeleton's return to earth. He hopes, we can imagine, that someone will one day do the same for his own remains. The hope is reinforced in "Three Steps to the Graveyard," at the end of which "a skinny old woman" is scrubbing a tombstone, an image of human grief, and human folly. Folly gives way to grief in the volume's next half-dozen or so poems. Wright mourns friends, laments a younger brother's wasted life, bemoans a ' 'defeated savior.'' It has been remarked that The Green Wall is filled with women and men who would save one another, but cannot. "To a Defeated Savior" is concerned with the death by drowning of a "skinny swimmer" and how that death haunts the sleep of the one who tried to save him. Wright's brother, Ted, once watched helplessly from a small boat on the Ohio River as another boy drowned nearby. "He held his fishing pole out to the kid," Wright remembered, discussing the poem with Southern Humanities Review, "and the kid tried to get hold of it but missed it, and sank." The haunting, the

594 / AMERICAN WRITERS memory itself, becomes an end to life. Wright consoles, or means to console, his brother— though all that he can do is gently to echo his brother's failure. You would have raised him, flesh and soul, Had you been strong enough to dare; You would have lifted him to breathe, Believing your good hands would keep His body clear of your own death: This dream, this drowning in your sleep. Dragging rivers and lakes for the drowned is a particularly American literary motif, one that Wright makes his own. The drowned appear throughout Wright's poetry, as though water itself were murderous. In 'To a Defeated Savior," what seems peculiar to Wright is the poem's focus not on the dead swimmer but on the troubled sleep of his would-be rescuer. Sleep takes on the strains of defeat and resignation in "A Song for the Middle of the Night," Wright's explanation to his son of a curse by Eustace Deschamps: "Happy is he who has no children; for babies bring nothing but crying and stench." The poem, however, is less an explanation of Deschamps' curse than it is a nursery rhyme of child abuse (in the guise of discipline) over generations: . . . my father once Laid me across his knee And solved the trouble when he beat The yowling out of me. He rocked me on his shoulder Where razor straps were vain: Legs up, la la, legs down, la la, Back to sleep again. So roll upon your belly, boy And bother being cursed. You turn the household upside down, But you are not the first. Wright's love poems are frequently tales of violence, as though love were some misguided

action. "A Poem About George Doty in the Death House" is based on an incident in which, Wright explained to Dave Smith, "a taxi driver named George Doty from Bellaire [Ohio] drove a girl out in the country and made a pass at her, which she resisted, so he banged her in the head with a tree branch and killed her." While the poem is concerned with violence, it is an emotional violence, not the murder itself, that the poem takes as its subject. It is a poem "about George Doty" and only tangentially about his victim. Written in relaxed though formal octaves, the poem succeeds—until its hyperbolic final stanza—because its form carries and plays against its subject matter. The dark sweetness of Wright's language means to instruct. Beside his cell, I am told, Hardy perennial bums Complain till twilight comes For hunger and for cold. They hardly know of a day That saw their hunger pass. Bred to the dark, their flesh Peacefully withers away. The lesson to be learned from the bums, from Doty as he stares into "the shaving mirror / Pinned to the barren wall," is "simple, easy terror." This very simplicity, however, is made to seem grandiose at the poem's conclusion. The ease of terror, its common quality, is transformed by Wright into a weight that "no man ever bore." The singularity of Doty's burden, exaggerated or real, rings false—but leads us to accept Wright's explanation of his subversive interest in the murderer. Now, as he grips the chain And holds the wall, to bear What no man ever bore, He hears the bums complain; But I mourn no soul but his, Not even the bums who die,

JAMES WRIGHT I 595 Nor the homely girl whose cry Crumbled his pleading kiss. Wright understands, as well as anyone might, the nature of crime, explaining in the Smith interview: "[Doty] stumbled into something evil. . . . He was just a dumb guy who was suddenly thrust into the middle of the problem of evil and was not able to handle it." Wright returned to Doty for another poem, "At the Executed Murderer's Grave," which became the watershed of his 1959 collection, Saint Judas. In "Sappho," Wright adopts the voice of a lesbian who briefly comforts a married woman. We assume that it is Sappho who speaks, though it is the felicity of her voice and not the details of her tale which convince us so. The love Wright's speaker describes is gentle but, not unlike Doty's violent attraction to his victim, ends in retribution and solitude. "Her husband came to pluck her like an apple," the voice of the poem remembers, as she remembers the cruel graffiti that neighborhood children "chalk / Against my house and down the garden walls." Still, from out of solitude, she asserts: They cannot tear the garden out of me, Nor smear my love with names. Love is a cliff, A clear, cold curve of stone, mottled by stars, Smirched by the morning, carved by the dark sea Till stars and dawn and waves can slash no more, Till the rock's heart is found and shaped again. The poem's final image is that of the phoenix rising from ashes and flame. Sappho refuses the world's incendiary judgments of her love for other women: "There is a fire that burns beyond the names / Of sludge and filth of which this world is made." Sappho's transcendence is accomplished through a steadfast refusal to become like those who "sow the world with child." Hers is not a transcendence of the body but through the body, an idea to which Wright would eventually return.

Many of the poems that Auden suggested Wright omit from The Green Wall found their way into his second volume, Saint Judas (1959), which Wright once called his favorite book. Similar to its predecessor in form, though darker in tone, Saint Judas—despite its retrieval of poems intended for the first collection—seems more of a whole than The Green Wall and is ultimately the more mature work. Divided into three sections ("Lunar Changes," "A Sequence of Love Poems," and "The Part Nearest Home"), it too sheds light on outcasts and misfits. That they are now seen at less of a remove from the speaker allows for a greater depth of human feeling: pity, remorse, terror, complicity, love. In an interview with the Paris Review, Wright explained the collection as an attempt "to come to terms . . . with what I felt to be the truth of my own life, which is that of a man who wants very much to be happy, but who is not happy. I do not have the talent for happiness." Unhappy living and teaching in Minnesota, unhappier still with the growing dissolution of his marriage, Wright transformed his unhappiness into poetry in which the most common refrain is a fear of growing old. He describes watching his subject in "Old Man Drunk," "I will see him sit / Under the vacant clock, till I grow old," observes flatly in 4 'The Accusation,'' "Now you are dead, and I grow old," and says in "But Only Mine," "I knew / Somewhere above me boughs were burning gold, / And women's frocks were loose, and men grew old." Although Wright was only in his early thirties when Saint Judas appeared, this sense of impending age (and so death) suggests less of a physical deterioration than it does an emotional fatigue: a fatigue with his life and his work. It was about this time that Wright began a long struggle with alcohol. Although Wright was by no means the notorious drinker that his colleague and fellow poet, John Berry man, was known to be, his alcoholism, nonetheless, contributed to his sense of defeat.

596 / AMERICAN WRITERS Berry man once visited Wright in the hospital, where he had been admitted after suffering a nervous breakdown, with an offer to teach Wright's classes until he got well again. The most telling, though discreet, prose account of Wright's addiction appears in the short memoir, "On the Occasion of a Poem: Richard Hugo," in his Collected Prose, which recounts a number of fishing trips the two poets took together. "Serious fishermen who stay overnight always run out of beer," Wright observes. Hugo's memoir of Wright records their mutual alcoholism in greater, less jovial, detail. Overall, little has been written of Wright's alcoholism, and perhaps rightly so. Despite such poems as "Two Hangovers" (in the 1963 volume The Branch Will Not Break), alcoholism bore only an indirect influence upon his poetry. One exception to Wright's complaints of age in Saint Judas is "An Offering for Mr. Bluehart." The poet remembers an orchard, Mr. Bluehart's, from which he and "two or three good friends" stole the old man's apples. Characteristically, the foolish and the mean figures in Wright's poetry are often thin, or "skinny" (as in "Three Steps to the Graveyard" and "To a [Defeated Savior"), and here Mr. Bluehart, whose name may be read as a pun, is described as "lean" and "satanic."

comes to understand. The poet's own rancor is suggested subtly in the tense change, from past to present, at the end of the first stanza. The "angry" sparrows that once chided the youthful thieves now "limp along the wind and die." The apples "are all eaten now." The final stanza is an attempt at reparation: Sorry for him, or any man Who lost his labored wealth to thieves, Today I mourn him, as I can, By leaving in their golden leaves Some luscious apples overhead. Now may my abstinence restore Peace to the orchard and the dead. We shall not nag them anymore.

Behind the orchard, past one hill The lean satanic owner lay And threatened us with murder till We stole his riches all away. He caught us in the act one day And damned us to the laughing bone, And fired his gun across the gray Autumn where now his life is done.

"If old Mr. Bluehart is listening," Wright once prefaced a reading of the poem,'(I enjoyed those apples very much." Coherence and lucidity are the subjects of "The Morality of Poetry." "What I meant [by that title] was that there are different kinds of forms in poetry which are possible and to try to write any of them well is a good thing," Wright once explained. The poem begins with an epigraph from Walt Whitman: "Would you the undulation of one wave, its trick to me transfer.'9 Like Whitman, Wright stands before the "complicated sea." From a flock of gulls, "a single naked gull" captures his eye, and so his imagination. The gull calls to mind "a single human word for love of air" (inspiration?), which "gathers the tangled discords up to song." The bones of a poem, like the bones of the gull, are 4 'clean and spare.'' They must be "starvefd]. . . in darkness.'' Then the moon appears, a feminine muse, dashing the poet's "careful rules of song":

The apples are a temptation for the boys to commit theft, as the threat of gunfire is an invitation for them to risk their not yet embittered lives. The boys' daring stands in direct contrast to the old man's rancor, which the poet only later

Openly she soars, A miracle out of all gray sounds, the moon, Deepening and rifting swell and formal sky. Woman or bird, she plumes the ashening sound, Flaunting to nothingness the rules I made.

JAMES WRIGHT I 597 The sea, the gull, the moon, the poet: all these combine and recombine to fashion and undo the poem. All that remains, all that Wright can offer to replace his "careful rules," are forms that convey the morality, the good, of any poem. That good is not the starved lesson of the gull nor the opulent lesson of the moon. Rather, "the morality" of any poem is its singularity, its uniqueness, its representations of exterior and interior worlds. If in "The Morality of Poetry" Wright made of the sea a discordant music, in "At the Slackening of the Tide" and "All the Beautiful Are Blameless" discord and song seem to exist as one another's natural opposites. A mother watches "her child . . . floating in oil" in "At the Slackening of the Tide"; while two men, "two stupid harley-charlies," take a young girl out on a lake to rape and murder her in "All the Beautiful Are Blameless." Ultimately, the former is the more successful poem, not for what Wright records of the scene, but for what the scene provokes in him. Here are the fourth and the seventh stanzas: I would so anything to drag myself Out of this place: Root up a seaweed from the water, To stuff it in my mouth, or deafen me, Free me from all the force of human speech; Go drown, almost. Abstract with terror of the shell, I stared Over the waters where God brooded for the living all one day. Lonely for weeping, starved for a sound of mourning, I bowed my head, and heard the sea far off Washing its hands. In lines such as these, Wright's poetry begins to come into its own. They are once concerned with the violence of the world and the difficult redemption of the self.

The self Wright presents in "At the Executed Murderer's Grave" is outwardly less observant and certainly less compassionate than the self he had presented in "A Poem About George Doty in the Death House." Impatient with the sympathies Doty's case continues to provoke in him, Wright pleads to be let alone. Impatient with the artifice of the earlier poem, Wright's voice breaks. "Doty, you make me sick," he writes. "I am not dead. / 1 croon my tears at fifty cents per line." A price is paid for poems: the emotional expense of the poet, and the price "per line" offered by the magazines and journals to which the poems are sold. The poet's defense, his attempt to assuage the pain of empathizing with the lost and the damned, is mercenary, at best. Wright described to Dave Smith how the poem came to be written: "The previous version . . . was very, very overblown and rhetorical. . . . When I came to try and put it into Saint Judas I was completely dissatisfied with it, so I sent it to [James] Dickey. He and I had had a misunderstanding and a disagreement earlier, followed very rapidly by an exchange of letters. . . . [The poem] was a mess, full of mythological and biblical references and . . . very Victorian." The disagreement arose from Dickey's criticism that Wright's work was "ploddingly 'sincere' " and "difficult to care about." Angered at first, Wright eventually came to see that Dickey's reaction held some validity. On a train ride from Seattle (where Wright had gone to defend his dissertation) to Minneapolis, he found himself without Dickey's comments and rewrote the poem from scratch. "[I] rewrote it as straight and direct and Robinsonian as I could make it." Earlier drafts of the poem center on Wright's complicity with his subject. Father and citizen, I killed this man, This man who killed another who might kill Another who might slay another still.

598 / AMERICAN WRITERS The poem's final version opens with an epigraph from Freud, which some critics have perceived as a condemnation of capital punishment. ' 'Why should we do this? What good is this to us? Above all, how can we do such a thing? How can it possibly be done?" The questions are taken from The Future of an Illusion. "He is referring," Wright once explained, "to the idea we call The Golden Rule," the idea that a man should behave toward others as he would have them behave toward himself (Matthew 7:12). In this light, the epigraph is a threefold judgement: of Doty for the murder, of Ohio for its sanctioned though no less brutal justice, and of Wright himself. It is of Wright's self-judgment, by and large, that the poem is fashioned. "My name is James A. Wright," the poem begins, "and I was born / Twenty-five miles from this infected grave." The statement establishes a shared sense of place for both the poet and his subject; it establishes as well the divergent paths each followed from their common beginnings. Wright ran "away before [his] time," while "Ohio caught George Doty." Rather, Wright believes that he has escaped his past, its landscapes, only to realize just how much a part of him Ohio, and George Doty, have become. "I pity myself, because a man is dead," he writes. "If Belmont County killed him, what of me?" That Wright repeats and repeats his own name (as well as Doty's) seems a sort of futile whistling in the dark. He longs to separate himself from the violence the grave suggests, as keenly as he longs to separate himself from the "quicklime hole of . . . defeat and shame" that is death. I hear the last sea in the Ohio grass, Heaving a tide of gray disastrousness. Wrinkles of winter ditch the rotted face Of Doty, killer, imbecile, and thief: Dirt of my flesh, defeated, underground. It is a separation that can never be ("dirt of my flesh") wholly accomplished.

In "Saint Judas," the title poem, Wright provides an apocryphal tale of Christ's betrayer. Having marked Christ for capture by the Romans, Judas flees in order to kill himself. "I've always been strongly moved by his hanging himself," Wright observed in the interview with Southern Humanities Review. "Why did he do it? You would think he'd be a completely cold person. And yet, he couldn't have been to experience such complete despair." The theological definition of despair is the state of living without hope of redemption; certainly, Judas' act would bring him to such a state. Yet, Wright offers him one final chance. When I went out to kill myself, I caught A pack of hoodlums beating up a man. Running to spare his suffering, I forgot My name, my number, how my day began. A sonnet, "Saint Judas" succeeds not because it focuses on the betrayal—his despair, and our knowledge of his actions, are givens—but rather because it focuses on Judas being moved to intervene and save the beaten man. That the man's assailants are dressed in uniforms suggests that they are Romans. Judas now ignores such men, with whom he had earlier bargained for blood money. "Flayed without hope," he confesses, "I held the man for nothing in my arms." Some critics have read (or misread) this line as ambiguous; they infer that Judas held the man for no obvious reason. A stronger argument can be made that Judas went to the man and held him without hope of recompense. No silver rewards this act. His only hope is clearly stated, three lines into the poem: to spare the man's suffering. That redemption seems possible, even for Judas, is Wright's vision of the damned finding if not salvation then some sort of peace. Closing a book that has all along argued "the desolation of the spirit," Wright tells us finally that the spirit might be healed. Wright's next collection, The Branch Will Not

JAMES WRIGHT I 599 Break, was not published until 1963. In the years following the publication of Saint Judas, Wright's personal life suffered continued upheavals. He was divorced in 1962. The University of Minnesota denied him tenure in 1963. And, as numerous interviews reveal, he felt that he had arrived at the end of where his earlier poetic style might lead him. "After I finished [Saint Judas] I had finished with poetry forever," he told the Paris Review. "I truly believed that I had said what I had to say as clearly and directly as I could, and that I had no more to do with this art." In a letter to his editor at Wesley an University Press, Wright vowed that he was "finished with what [he] was doing in that book"— both formally and thematically. Wright's spiritual desolation had, for the time being, silenced him. The story of how Wright met the poet Robert Bly during this period is a famous one. Having read in the Fifties, a journal for which Bly served as coeditor, a translation from Georg Trakl, Wright wrote a letter ("sixteen pages long and single spaced") to which Bly responded succinctly, "Come on out to the farm." The two poets began work together on translations of the works of such poets as Jorge Gui116n, Pablo Neruda, and Cesar Vallejo, among others. "[Bly] reminded me that poetry is a possibility, that, although all poetry is formal, there are many forms, just as there are many forms of feeling." The Branch Will Not Break reflects the changes, the difficulties and rewards, of the preceding years. Largely gone are the mannered stanzaic forms of Wright's earlier work, replaced by free-verse experiments with image and form. The poem "Goodbye to the Poetry of Calcium," its title referring to the hardened element whose name derives from the Latin calx, meaning "limestone," is a farewell to the poetry that Auden once favored. Other poets—Robert Lowell, Adrienne Rich, and Anne Sexton among them—

had undergone similar formal changes, but to call Wright's new poetry free verse should not imply the loose carelessness too often wrongly associated with that genre, especially with the poetry of that time, the 1960's. Wright's new poems are carefully formed, not by received ideas of meter and structure, but by the logic of thought, by the constantly expanding education of the heart. "The writer's real enemy," he remarked to Dave Smith, is his own glibness, his own facility; the writer constantly should try to discover what difficulties there truly are inherent in a subject or in his own language and come to terms with these difficulties. If he does that, then he might be able to discover something in his own mind or in the language which is imaginative. The poems are as firmly rooted to place, to Wright's native Ohio, as are his earlier poems. Frequently, neir titles are their most visible roots. Now i nger and more explicit, the titles provide the reader with not place alone but often time and circumstance as well. "Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio" (a meditation on football and the violence of pride) and "Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy's Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota" are two examples. The titles thus grounded, Wright allows the poems themselves a greater fluency of thought. They are at once wholly concerned with both exterior and interior worlds. The "I" of these poems seems less forced, less of a poetic construct than, say, the "I" employed in "The Morality of Poetry." Wright's poetic metamorphoses, like Rich's and Lowell's before him, was widely though not universally praised. Sexton, with whom Wright has more in common, bore the brunt of a criticism that was often mean-spirited and based upon the fact that she was a woman. Wright's poems from this period frequently have been labeled "surrealistic," a charge that he actively dis-

600 / AMERICAN WRITERS puted, emphasizing the humor of true surrealism and the essential seriousness of his own work. The most dramatic case in point is "Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy's Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota": Over my head, I see a bronze butterfly, Asleep on the black trunk, Blowing like a life in green shadow. Down to the ravine behind the empty house, The cowbells follow one another Into the distances of the afternoon. To my right, In a field of sunlight between two pines, the droppings of last year's horses Blaze up into golden stones. I lean back, as the evening darkens and comes on. A chicken hawk floats over, looking for home. I have wasted my life. The final line enraged some critics, who felt that its assertion of a wasted life was unfounded, unsupported by anything preceding it. Wright argued that the line was not intended to act as a moral (though it does have some of the moral's quality of summation), that it was instead merely a statement of feeling—a "spot of time," as Wordsworth might have observed. The poem seems to skirt the edges of a criticism of poetry: that poetry is sometimes neither sustenance nor protection against life—which is also the subject of "Depressed by a Book of Bad Poetry, I Walk Toward an Unused Pasture and Invite the Insects to Join Me." Wright, in Southern Humanities Review, describes its genesis: "Someone asked me to review a certain anthology and the poems in it seemed to me to be so bad, so trite in their hysteria that I just got sick of them. I didn't want to expose my mind to those bone-crushing banalities anymore. I wanted to hear the cricket." The insects become the poet's muse, the grasshoppers' "burdened" thighs the music of the

pasture. "I want to hear them," he writes, "they have clear sounds to make." Wright appears in many of these poems as a solitary figure, the word "alone" almost a refrain. In one poem, "Having Lost My Sons, I Confront the Wreckage of the Moon: Christmas, 1960," he is alone "after daik, / near the South Dakota Border." (Wright "lost" his sonsMarshall was born in 1958—while separated from his wife and permanently when they divorced.) From image to image, the poem proceeds, guided by moonlight: The moon is out hunting, everywhere, Delivering fire, And walking down hallways Of a diamond. Behind a tree, It lights on the ruins Of a white city: Frost, frost. The moon delivers "inhuman fire," traversing ice, then settles on a city in which everything is frozen—as Christmas at the South Dakota border would be snow-covered. Note the wordplay of "lights": the moon both illuminates and lands upon the ruins. The landscape seems lunar. From warmth to cold, the progression is reminiscent of Emily Dickinson's poem #341, in which "freezing persons recollect the snow." Unlike Dickinson's speaker, who ends her poem by "letting go," Wright goes on "living, alone, alone." He passes the graves of natives (Chippewas) and immigrants (Norwegians), as if to say that everyone in this country is doomed. The graves are hidden, the headstone-like silos nearby are "charred." (By the moon's "fire"?) In the end, everything is dead ("dead riches, dead hands"), even the country itself ("the beautiful white ruins / Of America"). In direct contrast to such despair stands "A Blessing," a poem that Wright has somewhat

JAMES WRIGHT I 601 disingenuously called "just a description." The poem is his return to the idea of a transcendence through the body. With''A Fit Against the Country" and "An Offering for Mr. Bluehart," "A Blessing" joins Wright's poems in which to cross a wall or boundary leads to some lesson. Again, Wright stands before a midwestern landscape. He and an unnamed friend are welcomed into a pasture by two horses, their guides toward "happiness." The horses "love each other," and yet, "there is no loneliness like theirs." That loneliness and love might coexist moves Wright to tenderness. I would like to hold the slenderer one in my arms, For she has walked over to me And nuzzled my left hand. The horse, a symbol of power and violence in "The Horse," is here an image of gentle acceptance. The mare's gesture, returned by Wright in kind, seems the "blessing" that allows him a transcendence, a release into nature: Suddenly I realize That if I stepped out of my body I would break Into blossom. Having been denied tenure at the University of Minnesota, Wright spent two years teaching at Macalester College in St. Paul. He received a Guggenheim fellowship in 1965 and then, in 1966, moved to New York City, where he took a position at Hunter College. The move to New York proved to be a renewal of sorts. He met and married his second wife, Anne, not long afterward. Yet the poems of this period—which were collected in the 1968 volume Shall We Gather at the River—seem obsessed with the past; with the landscapes of Ohio and Minnesota; with deathtinged rivers and memories of Jenny, an early love to whom the book is dedicated. "I was trying to move from death to resurrection and death again. . . . I was trying to write about a girl I

was in love with who [had] been dead for a long time," he told the Paris Review. "I tried to sing with her in that book. Not to recreate her; you can't recreate anybody, at least I can't." The river of the book's title is not Jordan but the river of memory and death; it is not Lethe but Styx, as in "To the Muse": Come up to me, love, Out of the river, or I will Come down to you. The book opens with "A Christmas Greeting," a poem in heroic couplets (Wright never completely abandoned traditional forms) about an antihero: a drunk named Charlie "who died because [he] could not bear to live." This is the book's first death, which Wright seems both to fear and to long for: I'm afraid to die, It hurts to die, although the lucky do. Charlie, I don't know what to say to you Except Good Evening, Greetings, and Good Night, God Bless Us Everyone. The line borrowed from A Christmas Carol reminds the reader of Wright's early affection for Charles Dickens, for whom he held a lifelong reverence, and also of that story's trinity of ghosts: past, present, and future. We might say that the same ghosts haunt Wright in this and the next poem, "The Minneapolis Poem." Comprising seven sections, "The Minneapolis Poem" allows Wright's freer, more discursive style both room enough and opportunity to become more than epigrammatic. Here again is his cast of characters: murderous Native Americans, "split-lipped homosexuals," river suicides, "Negro girls" who work Chicago streets as prostitutes. The landscape is no more inviting: The legless beggars are gone, carried away By white birds.

602 / AMERICAN WRITERS The Artificial Limbs Exchange is gutted And sown with lime. Even the maimed have nowhere to go, now that Minneapolis has become a city of "men . . . who labor dawn after dawn" selling death. I want to be lifted up By some great white bird unknown to the police, And soar for a thousand miles and be carefully hidden Modest and golden as one last corn grain, Stored with the secrets of the wheat and the mysterious lives Of the unnamed poor. "In Response to a Rumor that the Oldest Whorehouse in Wheeling, West Virginia, Has Been Condemned" returns Wright to the banks of the Ohio River—"by the vinegar works"— where he recalls a vision of women walking headlong into the water. The women repeat this ritual nightly. They seem descendants of Mary Magdalene, sinners searching for grace. They must be searching for grace, Wright concludes, not because they have sinned but because the landscape has sinned against them: For the river at Wheeling, West Virginia, Has only two shores: The one in hell, the other In Bridgeport, Ohio. And nobody would commit suicide, only To find beyond death Bridgeport, Ohio. Though Wright declaims with his usual seriousness, there is something of the punch line in the final lines off this poem. He acts as both straight man and comic, setting the scene, the joke, and then revealing the deadpan absurdity of it all. Comedy, or black comedy, proves in Wright's hands to be tragedy, his heroines' tragic flaw the fact of their birthplace.

Over the next few years, Wright received a number of awards: a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation and a fellowship from the Ingram Merrill Foundation, both in 1969; the Brandeis University Creative Arts Citation in Poetry, the fellowship of The Academy of American Poets, and the Pulitzer Prize, all in 1972. Although the critical response to Collected Poems (1971) was largely favorable, the section titled "New Poems" presaged a temporary slackening of Wright's powers. A notable exception is "Many of Our Waters: Variations on a Poem by a Black Child," a long poem in seven sections that was delivered as the Phi Beta Kappa poem at the College of William and Mary in December 1969. Like Wright's other work from this period, "Many of Our Waters" is more discursive than not. Constructed around a remark made to Wright by a young black boy named Garnie, the poem touches upon the urban desolation of New York City and the rural desolation of the Ohio River valley; it also speaks to Wright's beliefs about the nature of poetry. "The kind of poetry I want to write," he says, "is / The poetry of a grown man." Wright's portrait of a grown man is typically bleak: "He shuts up. / He dies. / He grows." But he is redeemed by the "pure clear word" and by "the beautiful language of my friends." True poetry, Wright seems to believe, is born of union, of woman and man, of man and child. In the early 1970's, the Wrights began to spend extended periods of time abroad, traveling through Europe for months at a time. These travels make up a large part of Two Citizens (1973) and To a Blossoming Pear Tree (1977). Wright's European poems, including a chapbook of prose poems, Moments of the Italian Summer (1976), stand in direct contrast to his poems of this period from America. The European poems seem light-filled, finding the poet at peace with himself, while the American poems are often filled with despair and can be painful, at times, to read.

JAMES WRIGHT I 603 Romantic love and bitter disappointment are his themes in these books, although Wright finds occasional consolation in poetry and art—not so much "the poetry of a grown man," but the classical, Horatian poetry praised in Two Citizens as * 'Prayer to the Good Poet.'' Perhaps they are one and the same. Wright's "Good Poet" is Quintus Horatius Flaccus, to whom the prayer is addressed, but the subject of the poem is Wright's relationship to his father (who died in 1973, while Wright was traveling through Italy) and to his son Franz. Wright finds himself at the apex of this family continuum, and discovers that he "can go on living." There is a gentle loneliness about the poem and its "quick and lonely / Metrical crystals of February," which are "just snow." As with much of Wright's work from this period, the strongest, most resonant poems are those informed by thought, are those poems more introspective than declarative. In too many others, naked feeling falls unmitigated across the page. The poems generally are also more discursive than ever before. "Hell, I ain't got nothing," he writes in "Ars Poetica: Some Recent Criticism." "Ah, you bastards, / / How I hate you.'' The bastards are a gang of boys who once tried to stone a goat to death; but they are also made to serve as symbols for other dissatisfactions with "America, / Which I loved when I was young." As such, the boys' actions do not justify the poet's anger; the occasion cannot bear the weight Wright lays across its shoulders. Some years after its publication, Wright admitted that he found Two Citizens "badly written." "Obscure and self-indulgent," he went on to remark, "it talks around subjects rather than coming to terms with them." Many of the poems in Two Citizens are addressed by the speaker to an unnamed other, a "you" who would appear to be Anne Wright, who seems a better muse for the poet than his long-dead Jenny. On the dustjacket, he com-

mented that the book was "most of all a book of love poems. The two citizens are Annie and I." The two women, Anne and Jenny, stand at opposite ends of Wright's emotional spectrum, which was deteriorating from alcohol and renewed hospitalizations. Some months after Wright's father died, his mother passed away. Shortly thereafter, Wright joined Alcoholics Anonymous (in the spring of 1975), surely prompted to do so by John Berryman's wellpublicized membership with that group. Joining A A led Wright for a short while back to health, a move that is reflected in To a Blossoming Pear Tree. The collection opens with "Redwings," a meditation on the harsh and transitory nature of our lives. "Somebody is on the wing, somebody / Is wondering right at this moment / How to get rid of us." Birds and women may be killed, the earth made absolutely clean, but there are often small acts of human decency that raise us from the muck of our lives. The poem ends with the memory of having received "a nickel and a potato" from one of the hoboes by the Ohio. The act is quietly set down, allowed to speak for itself. The detail of many of these new poems allows Wright's more visionary poems a stronger grasp on reality, as in "One Last Look at the Adige: Verona in the Rain." The poem is largely a prayer against death: In the middle of my own life I woke up and found myself Dying, fair enough, still Alive in the friendly city Of my body, my secret Verona, Milky and green, My moving jewel, the last Pure vein left to me. The poems go back and forth between Europe and America, between free verse and prose poems, between the past and the present. One poem remembers W. H. Auden as "kind." In-

604 I AMERICAN WRITERS deed, Wright seems kinder himself, no longer quite so inclined to sweeping damnations of others and of America. The obsessive "I" that flawed much of Two Citizens is here less selfabsorbed and more representative. Not changed is Wright's affection for stories from his past. "Hook" tells of a winter encounter between the speaker and a young Sioux at a bus shelter in Minneapolis. The Sioux, whose hand has been replaced by a hook, asks Wright if he has "enough money / To get home on" and then hands him sixty-five cents. Startled into acceptance by the fact that the coins were so freely given, Wright wonders: Did you ever feel a man hold Sixty-five cents In a hook, And place it Gently In your freezing hand? With the hobo's gift of a potato and a nickel, the Sioux's gift frames (coming as it does near the book's end) the rest of the poems in To a Blossoming Pear Tree. With the title poem, Wright achieves a kind of balance between the vehemence and cruelty of human emotion and the "unburdened" beauty of the natural world. The poem opens with an address to the pear tree. From a distance, the pear blossoms move Wright to envy, precisely because they hang beyond his reach. To have beauty within reach is to risk the knowledge that men and women are often less than beautiful, the realization that there is almost always an element of pain in even the most fleeting of unions. Wright illustrates this hard truth with a homosexual vignette, curiously free of prejudice or blame, the emotion too raw for such easy reprisals: An old man Appeared to me once

In the unendurable snow. He had a singe of white Beard on his face. He paused on a street in Minneapolis And stroked my face. Give it to me, he begged. I'll pay you anything. I flinched. Both terrified, We slunk away, Each of us in his own way dodging The cruel darts of cold. Wright's understanding of human sexuality, in poetry that reaches all the way back to "Sappho,'' is harsh and yet not harsh at all. He recognizes all too well the drives that bring bodies together, the urgencies of carnal need. He recognizes, too, that the act itself is often less violent than are the emotions the act both creates and destroys. The desperation of a man who would pay another man "anything" for sex, that he would beg, is what causes Wright to flinch—not that the meeting should have homosexual overtones. The speaker, having silently refused the man's plea, is nonetheless pained by the sight of a man "so near death / He was willing to take / Any love he could get." The "singed" remains of his passion play themselves out against the frigid and "unendurable" landscape, while Wright wonders how the pear tree 4 'could . . . possibly / Worry or bother or care" for the players in such a misalliance. It cannot; it is made of blossoms and dew only. But Wright finds that he cares; he knows well the other's despair. Placed side by side, "Hook" and "To a Blossoming Pear Tree" form a diptych. The Sioux's gift of sixty-five cents and the old man's offer to pay anything, both acts that disguise emotion as commercial exchange, are two halves of the portrait that is human loneliness. "I was trying to say that I am committed to the beauty of nature which I love very much," Wright remarked in an interview with Bruce Henricksen, "but that com-

JAMES WRIGHT I 605 mitment. . . has to be qualified by my returning to my own responsibility as a human being. And the life of a human being is more complicated than the blossoming of a pear tree. It's full of pain." In 1978, after the publication of To a Blossoming Pear Tree, Wright received a second Guggenheim fellowship and returned with his wife to Europe, where he wrote many of the poems that would make up his final collection, This Journey, published posthumously in 1982. Like its predecessor, This Journey comprises equal parts free-verse and prose poems, memories of Ohio and Minneapolis, and travelogues from Italy and France. In addition, a handful of poems are set on the Atlantic in Rhode Island and on the Pacific in Hawaii. Also like its predecessor, it continues Wright's move away from the bitterness that marred the poems of the early 1970's. It would seem that he was finally more at peace with himself. The peace would not last long. While traveling in Europe, Wright's health began to fail, and, shortly after his return to New York, he was diagnosed with cancer of the tongue. A course of surgery and radiation therapy was planned. "I will emerge from the surgery," he wrote to Leslie Marmon Silko, a poet and writer with whom he had recently established a correspondence, "with diminished capacity to speak, and this will create a problem, since I make my living by speaking. But there is a good chance that I will continue teaching." In the hospital, Wright made a preliminary attempt to construct a new manuscript from his recent poems. A week or so before he died, he prepared a copy of the manuscript for his friend the poet Galway Kinnell, with a note reading, "I think the book is more or less done.'' He died on March 25, 1980. This Journey did not appear until two years later, after a number of his fellow poets, at the request of Anne Wright, edited the volume for publication. Wright's travels, and the love he felt for his

wife and for Europe, helped to assuage many of his long-standing angers; they also helped to lessen his bonds to Martins Ferry. "Wherever Home Is," a poem that appears early in This Journey, takes for its point of departure a statue of Leonardo da Vinci, "haggard in basalt stone," his sculpted face covered by dying wisteria blossoms. Suddenly, a lizard appears "between Leonardo's thumb and his palette," bestowing on both the statue and the poet "the whole spring." Even amid the decaying stone and the "gray" blossoms, Wright finds an occasion to celebrate life—and to wonder that home is less geography than it is desire, the need to place oneself wherever one finds peace or happiness. To find such a place requires that one let go of the past. Goodbye to Leonardo, good riddance To decaying madmen who cannot keep alive The wanderers among trees. I am going home with the lizard, Wherever home is, And lie beside him unguarded In the clear sunlight. We will lift our faces even if it rains. We will both turn green. One must let go of the past to embrace the present, and, to embrace the present, one must remain "unguarded" against its chameleon-like changes. Both the poet and the lizard-muse will "turn green": the color of spring and of life, of the wanderers' trees, but also the color of stone corrupted by air and vegetation. The acceptance of life and death, the idea that a good death requires us to live our lives fully, runs like a thread throughout the collection. "The Journey," from which the book's title derives, finds Wright in the Italian hill town of Anghiari, washing the dust of roads from his face. Although Wright had not yet been diagnosed with cancer, there is a strong sense of impending death in the poem, in the spider's nest

606 I AMERICAN WRITERS he finds heavy with "mounds and cemeteries" of dust. As with the lizard of "Wherever Home Is," and the horses of "A Blessing," the poet is led to a sort of epiphany through his confrontations with animals and the natural world—but an epiphany that has less to do with nature itself than with the lives of men and women. The secret Of this journey is to let the wind Blow its dust all over your body, To let it go on blowing, to step lightly, lightly All the way through your ruins, and not to lose Any sleep over the dead, who surely Will bury their own, don't worry. Though Wright's poetry as a whole suffers from periods of slackened control, his work includes individual poems and groups of poems that stand among the finest lyric poetry of the second half of the twentieth century. Certainly, among his contemporaries—Bly, Sexton, Kinnell, John Logan, and others—Wright stands out for the singularity of his vision, his ambitious pursuit of the Horatian ideal. It is still too soon to assess fully his impact on future generations of American poets, let alone his achievement. The 1990 edition of his "complete" poems, Above the River, lets the leader follow Wright along on his sometimes uneven, uneasy journey from apprenticeship to mastery. Given time, the weaker poems will fall away and the stronger remain. Only then will we clearly see how this midcentury man with no "talent for happiness" made of his private sorrows a poetry that demands its readers not waste their lives.

Selected Bibliography WORKS OF JAMES WRIGHT POETRY

The Green Wall. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1957. Saint Judas. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1959. The Branch Will Not Break. Middletown, Conn.: Welseyan University Press, 1963. Shall We Gather at the River. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1968. Collected Poems. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1971. Two Citizens. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1973. Moments of the Italian Summer. Washington, D.C.: Dryad Press, 1976. To a Blossoming Pear Tree. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977. This Journey. New York: Random House, 1982. Above the River: The Complete Poems. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1990. PROSE Collected Prose. Edited by Anne Wright. Ann Arbor, Mich.: University of Michigan Press, 1983. Includes "Childhood Sketch." The Delicacy and Strength of Lace: Letters. Edited and with an introduction by Anne Wright. Saint Paul, Minn.; Graywolf Press, 1986. Correspondence with Leslie Marmon Silko. TRANSLATED WORKS

Twenty Poems of Georg Iraki. With Robert Bly. Madison, Minn.: Sixties Press, 1961. Twenty Poems of Cesar Vallejo. With John Knoepfle and Robert Bly. Madison, Minn.: Sixties Press, 1962. The Rider on the White Horse. By Theodor Storm. New York: Signet, 1964. Twenty Poems of Pablo Neruda. With Robert Bly. Madison, Minn.: Sixties Press, 1968. Poems. By Hermann Hesse. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1970.

JAMES WRIGHT I 607 Wandering: Notes and Sketches. By Hermann Hesse. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1972.

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL STUDIES Ely, Carol. "James Wright's Visits to Odin House/' Ironwood, 10:33-37(1977). Butscher, Edward. "The Rise and Fall of James Wright." Georgia Review, 28:257-268 (1974). Costello, Bonnie, "James Wright: Returning to the Heartland." New Boston Review, 5:12-14 (August-September 1980). Crunk [Robert Bly]. "The Work of James Wright." The Sixties, no. 8:52-78 (1966). Doctorow, E. L. "James Wright at Kenyon." Gettysburg Review, 3, No. 1 (Winter 1990). Hass, Robert, "James Wright." Ironwood, 10:74-96 (1977). Hugo, Richard, "James Wright." In his The Real West Marginal Way: A Poet's Autobiography. (New York: Norton, 1986). Matthews, William. "The Continuity of James Wright's Poems." Ohio Review, 18:44-57 (Spring-Summer 1977). Smith, Dave, ed. The Pure Clear Word: Essays on the Poetry of James Wright. Urbana, 111.: University of Illinois Press, 1982. Stitt, Peter. "The Poetry of James Wright." Minnesota Review, 12:13-32 (Winter 1972). . "James Wright: The Quest Motif in The Branch Will Not Break.'' In The Pure Clear Word: Essays on the Poetry of James Wright. Edited by Dave Smith. Urbana, 111.: University of Illinois Press, 1982. . "An Introduction to the Poet James Wright." Gettysburg Review, 3, no. 1 (Winter 1990). . "James Wright's Earliest Poems: A Selection." Gettysburg Review, 3, no. 1 (Winter 1990). Stitt, Peter, and Frank Graziano, eds. James Wright: The Heart of the Light. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1990.

Wright, Anne. "A Horse Grazes in My Long Shadow: A Short Biography of James Wright." Envoy, Spring-Summer 1981, 1-5. Wright, Franz. "Some Thoughts on My Father." Poets and Writers, 15:20-21 (January-February 1987). Yenser, Stephen. "Open Secrets." Parnassus, 6:125-142(1978). Zweig, Paul. "Making and Unmaking." Partisan Review, 40:268-279(1973). BIBLIOGRAPHIES McMaster, Belle M. "James Arlington Wright: A Checklist." Bulletin of Bibliography, 31:71-82 (1974). Smith, Dave, "Selected Bibliography." In his The Pure Clear Word: Essays on the Poetry of James Wright. Urbana, 111.: University of Illinois Press, 1982. INTERVIEWS Andre, Michael. "An Interview with James Wright." Unmuzzled Ox, 1:3-18 (February 1972). Included in Wright's Collected Prose. Henricksen, Bruce. "Poetry Must Think." New Orleans Review, 6:201-207 (1978). Included in Wright's Collected Prose. Heyen, William, and Jerome Mazzaro. "Something to Be Said for the Light." Edited by Joseph R. McElrath, Jr. Southern Humanities Review, 6:134153 (Spring 1972). Included in Wright's Collected Prose. Smith, Dave. "The Pure Clear Word." American Poetry Review, 9:19-30 (1980). Reprinted in his The Pure Clear Word. Stitt, Peter. "The Art of Poetry XIX." Paris Review, 62:34-61 (Summer 1975). —DAVID CRAIG AUSTIN

Louis Zukofsky 1904-19J8

A

. FTER THE DEATH of Ezra Pound, so the story goes, a young journalist wished to find out who was the greatest living American poet. She made preliminary inquiries and contacted the leading candidates, asking their opinion. For the most part each one replied, in various ways, "I am." Seeing that she was getting nowhere, she took another approach. "Who," she asked, "is the second-greatest living American poet?" They all replied, "Zukofsky." Whatever reputation the poet Louis Zukofsky continues to enjoy comes from the undeniable fact that three generations of poets have found his work to have compelling force. His "Objectivists" movement of the early 1930's, his intensely concentrated shorter poetry, and his life's work, the long poem "A," have all compelled the admiration of other poets. But for sixty years he labored at his craft in almost complete obscurity, and he has yet to attract a significant readership among academics, let alone among a larger public. Louis' father, Pinchos Zukofsky, and his mother, Ghana Pruss, were from a town called Most in the province of Kovna in what later was Lithuania. Ghana and Pinchos were married in 1887 and had five children in Most, of whom three survived infancy: two daughters, born in 1888 and 1890, and a son born in 1892. Like many in search of a better life, Pinchos

came to the United States in 1898. He worked as a night watchman and as a pants presser in a men's clothing factory, and by 1903 he was able to send back enough money to bring his family to the United States. Pinchos and Ghana's youngest child, Louis, was born on Chrystie Street in New York City on January 23, 1904. Since his parents spoke only Yiddish, young Louis Zukofsky learned English on the streets of the Lower East Side, among the tenements where English was no one's native language, but the only language the various immigrant groups had in common. The conditions were squalid and crowded, but people were friendly. One of his earliest memories, from when he was about five years old, was of the "wealthy" Karchemsky family next door, from Odessa, where a visitor could get tea and matzos all year round. Pinchos was no less hospitable: he pressed visitors to stay to dinner, whether or not Ghana had bought enough food for company. Zukofsky was a precocious child, learning a Yiddish translation of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's "Hiawatha" by heart when he was five. The neighborhood Italian children would corner him until he agreed to recite it, whereupon they would toss him pennies. He went to public elementary school and to Stuyvesant High School, at that time a school for students wanting to become engineers. An excellent student, he

609

610 I AMERICAN WRITERS received all A's, but since his parents could not read the English of his report card it did not seem to make much difference. He signed the card for them. Zukofsky was a gifted student. His family had moved to East 111th Street in East Harlem when he was ten or eleven, so that when Zukofsky entered Columbia at the age of fifteen, he could walk to the university. His closest friend there was Whittaker Chambers, who once took him to a Communist Party meeting. Whittaker's brother, Richard Chambers, later committed suicide ("Ricky" 's death is movingly recounted in "A"-3). Zukofsky finished at Columbia in 1923, shortly after his nineteenth birthday. Zukofsky started writing poetry seriously when he was at Columbia. Some of early poems, never reprinted, were published in the Columbia College magazine the Morningside. In 1920 he was reading Hilda Doolittle (H.D.) and the Imagists. His first submission to Poetry magazine in Chicago was, appropriately enough, a translation of a poem by "Yehoash," Solomon Bloomgarden, the Yiddish poet who had translated (and "improved") such poems as "Hiawatha" and Edward FitzGerald's "The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayam." Harriet Monroe, though she knew no Yiddish, knew poetry and penciled "poor translation" on the letter Zukofsky sent accompanying the poems, sending him a polite letter of rejection. He persevered, and Poetry published his work, a sonnet entitled "Of Dying Beauty," for the first time in January of 1924, just before his twentieth birthday. Containing lines such as "Where fading splendor grays to powdered earth," the sonnet mercifully was never reprinted. Zukofsky may have read the Imagists, but their lessons had not yet registered. Poetry identified the new contributor only as "from New York City." Pinchos Zukofsky was a pious Jew who attended Tifereth Jerusalem Synagogue on East Broadway in Manhattan, a few blocks south of

Houston Street. Louis Zukofsky's wife later told Carroll Terrell that Zukofsky barely knew his father, who worked until close to midnight at a men's clothing factory, where he was the presser, and then got up early in the morning to go to synagogue for morning prayers. Thus Zukofsky's mother was the chief influence on him as a young man. His family was close-knit; only his brother spoke English. Zukofsky had ambitions to become an engineer, but a philosophy instructor at Columbia interested him in the humanities, which seemed less demanding. Later in life, he would occasionally regret his decision. He also had an early and abiding interest in music. Despite his father's piety, by the time he was twelve years old Zukofsky had abandoned his family's Judaism, although he did undergo a perfunctory bar mitzvah. He had a part-time job at the post office but was fired for refusing to come to work on Yom Kippur, though he had no intention of going to synagogue. Zukofsky also worked for a time as a part-time soda jerk at Nedicker's. His first job after leaving Columbia was as a private tutor of English as a second language. If a student did not show up, Louis did not get paid. Like many great twentieth-century writers, Zukofsky came to the attention of Ezra Pound, then living in the Italian village of Rapallo and editing the Exile. In 1926 Zukofsky had written "Poem Beginning The,' " the first clear evidence he gave of having an important talent. He sent the piece to Pound who agreed to publish it in Exile's spring 1928 issue. Pound wrote to Zukofsky on March 5, 1928, insisting that the young poet go down to Rutherford, New Jersey, to look up an old friend: "Do go down an' stir up ole Bill Willyums . . . and tell him I tole you so. He is still the best human value on my murkn. visiting list." Zukofsky visited William Carlos Williams one Sunday and returned many, many times; they became lifelong friends.

LOUIS ZUKOFSKY I 611 "The" shows that Zukofsky had rapidly absorbed the Modernist revolution in literature taking place in Europe among English-speaking writers. The poem is most remarkable for its range of tone, though a self-ironic voice prevails, and for its quick uptake of (and take-off on) the art of obscure allusion being foisted on an unsuspecting public by James Joyce, Pound, and T. S. Eliot. "The" even has a modernist pseudoapparatus, identifying the sources of some of the lines in unhelpful notes preceding the poem. In the "Fifth Movement: Autobiography" Zukofsky speaks of his situation as a first-generation American: 251 Assimilation is not hard, 252 And once the Faith's askew 253 I might as well look Shagetz just as much as Jew. 254 I'll read their Donne as mine, 255 And leopard in their spots 256 I'll do what says their Coleridge, 257 Twist red hot pokers into knots. 258 The villainy they teach me I will execute 259 And it shall go hard with them, 260 For I'll better the instruction, 261 Having learned, so to speak, in their colleges. Apart from its frequent satiric, ironic, and comic episodes, "The" contains many heartfelt passages about his parents' early life in Russia, along with beautiful sections adapted from Yehoash. Publication of "The" was not the only help Pound gave to the young poet. Zukofsky sent him a group of earlier poems, asking if they were of any value. Without seeking further permission, Pound wrote to Harriet Monroe, enclosing them and urging her to use them. Pound also suggested she use Zukofsky as a reviewer for Poetry. Hearing of Zukofsky's impecunious state, Pound sent him a check for five dollars (five times the cost of a very good meal in New

York in those days), but Zukofsky, as ever correct, sent it back with thanks. Harriet Monroe valued Pound's advice, and she published Zukofsky's poems, seven separate lyrical sections titled "Siren and Signal," in Poetry for June 1929. Zukofsky later reprinted two of them in the 1941 volume 55 Poems. This time Poetry's "News Notes" took more notice: "Louis Zukofsky's work has appeared in The New Criterion, Exile, Transition, and The Dial." Apart from promoting Zukofsky's work, Pound was also practical. He wrote to Harriet on November 1, 1928, even before the work appeared: "Do sent Zukofsky his chq. as soon as convenient. I think he can use it." In fact, he could. He was without a job. Hearing that the editorship of Connecticut Industry was open, Zukofsky traveled to Hartford to interview for the position, but without result. While in Hartford he tried to see Wallace Stevens, but Stevens was away on business. For a time Zukofsky worked for the National Industrial Conference Board, writing and editing reports on such topics as industrial cafeterias and employee savings plans. He was grateful to receive a check for twenty-five dollars from Harriet Monroe in advance of publication of the poems she had accepted. Thanking her, he sent along some more, which she refused. In 1928 he finished the first four movements of "A," a poem whose outline he had already sketched out in twenty-four movements. "A"-l has as its occasion a performance of Johann Sebastian Bach's St. Matthew Passion that Zukofsky attended that year, and shows the influence of both Dante and Pound. Bach, who recurs throughout "A," appears again in "A"-2 in which the young poet clarifies his aesthetic principles in a dialogue with a disagreeing "Kay." "A"-3 is an elegy for "Ricky" Chambers, while "A"-4 treats the conflict between Zukofsky's Jewish ancestry and his American upbringing. The poetry, which seems accessible now, was

672 / AMERICAN WRITERS at the time very avant-garde. Zukofsky sent the first two movements to Marianne Moore at the Dial, she found them interesting but inappropriate. Still, with Pound's backing, Zukofsky's life was becoming more exciting and his vocation as poet seemed more possible. Pound's father invited Zukofsky to visit him in Wyncote, Pennsylvania; visitors from Europe started to look him up, saying that Ezra Pound told them that he was the only intelligent man in the country. The first section of "Siren and Signal" (not one he reprinted), "He Came Also Still," was awarded honorable mention by the editors in the November issue of Poetry. Zukofsky reciprocated Pound's attention, and wrote a long and perceptive essay in 1929 titled "Ezra Pound: His Cantos," praising Pound's work. Edmund Wilson liked the essay, but rejected it as being too specialized for his magazine, the New Republic. The essay was later published in 1930 in the shortlived French literary journal ^changes. Zukofsky was still casting about for a job. With Pound's support, he applied for a Guggenheim Fellowship but was turned down. He also applied for a teaching assistantship at the University of Wisconsin. H. B. Lathrop of the university wrote to Pound for an estimate of the young poet's abilities; on the basis of Pound's enthusiastic recommendation, Zukofsky was given an assistant's position in English and comparative literature at Madison for the academic year 1930-1931. Lathrop wrote to Pound on June 17, 1930: I feel sorry and rather ashamed that a man of his evident talent should be willing to take such an unimportant place and work for so little money, but he thinks he is coming away from the tumult and anxiety of the metropolis to a place of quiet. Madison was quiet indeed compared to New York City, but with the economic situation of the nation steadily worsening since the stock market

crash of 1929, a secure job of any kind must have seemed desirable. In 1930 he also finished "A"-5, -6, and -7. "A"-5 continues the dialogue with Kay, which resolves itself: "You write a strange speech." "This." One song Of many voices. "A"-5 is an amalgam of Bach, New York City, self-reflection, and imagist precision, still under the influence of Eliot For I have seen self-taunt tracked down in the mirror, And besides it, asleep, the face open, Edges of no one like it: Everlasting. and Pound And one afternoon: a field, Two windows spacing a wall, A heavy bulk move back of the windows In "A"-6 Zukofsky comes into his own voice. As long as all of "A"-1-5 put together, it is a record of a trip across the United States, which concludes the first quarter of the poem in twentyfour movements by returning to many of "A" 's earlier subjects: Bach, Kay, and Ricky. It exhibits the strong interest in politics and a sympathy for workers that became Zukofsky's focus during his leftist years in the 1930's. Louis "modernizes / His lute" by quoting Henry Ford at the outset of the Great Depression: " 'Many people are too busy to be unemployed,' says Henry. / (Especially those who have their own factories to take care of.)" "A"-7 is the first of Zukofsky's bravura technical performances (which have no equal in twentieth-century English-language poetry), a series of seven sonnets in which the last (or penultimate) word in four of the sonnets is included in the first line of the subsequent sonnet. He limits himself to repeating the same words a

LOUIS ZUKOFSKY I 613 number of times throughout the sequence; this remarkably restrained use of vocabulary gives "A"-7 the feel of a closely interwoven musical composition. While skillfully executed, these formal devices draw readers' attention to the artifice of the poetry, at the expense of its meaning, a move that was increasingly characteristic of Zukofsky's poetry for the rest of his career. This move was intentional; Zukofsky's exploration of every dimension of language except the referential came to dominate his poetic practice. Zukofsky chose only "A"-7 for inclusion in the "Objectivists" issue of Poetry he later edited, describing it to Harriet Monroe as "a rondeau or a fugue within the fugue of the entire poem." The other six movements appeared in the New Review, Pagany, and An "Objectivists" Anthology; ten years later, Zukofsky revised them all. Pound continued to hector Harriet Monroe (and seemingly everyone else) on Zukofsky's behalf. Recognizing the young man's genius, Pound promoted his poetry and his criticism with friends at the Criterion and the Hound and Horn. The latter serialized Zukofsky's essay on Henry Adams, a revision of his thesis at Columbia. Zukofsky, Pound wrote to Monroe on September 26, 1930, was "one of the very few people making any advance in criticism. He ought to appear regularly in 'Poetry.' " Drawing on an almost twenty-year friendship, Pound pulled out all stops in the letter: Hang it all.—you printed my "Don'ts" & Ford's essay in Poetry in 1913 etc. & they set a date. you ought not to let the magazine drift into being a mere passive spectator of undefined & undefinable events. . . . You could get back in the ring, if you wd. print a number containing only people McKenzie believes in & that Zukofsky is ready to treat with serious criticism. Must make one no. of Poet, different from

another if you want to preserve life as distinct from mere continuity. C'mon you ain't ossified yet. Zukofsky was fortunate to have found such an ally. When he wrote again to Harriet Monroe, he asked if he could trouble her to write a letter of recommendation for him for a Guggenheim Fellowship. His project, he wrote on the application form, was to write a long poem and develop a poetics. Yes, she wrote back, she would be glad to recommend him, and, by the way, would he care to edit a special number of Poetry, to be devoted to those poets whom members of his generation respected and read? Such an opportunity comes rarely. He responded with alacrity, but also with his characteristic modesty: he had no group to put across, just work that he would like to see in print, William Carlos Williams for one. He was unsure about suggesting his own poetry for inclusion, although perhaps "A"-7, a crown of sonnets, would be appropriate—he would let Harriet Monroe be the judge. When Pound heard the news from Monroe, he wrote back immediately: "in a few days it wd. have been a birfday present. . . . waal waaal my deah Harriet, I sho iz glad you let these young scrubs have the show to thei selves, and ah does hope they dust out your office." His only reservation, Pound said in the letter of October 24, 1930, was that Zukofsky "will be just too Goddam prewdent." Zukofsky, in Madison, residing at the University Club, threw himself into the project. He had new responsibilities as a graduate student and two-thirds teaching assistant. His modest salary of one thousand dollars for the nine-month academic year was quickly depleted. He sent twenty-five dollars home each month, twentyfour dollars a month went to his rent, ten dollars for a weekly meal ticket, and four dollars and forty cents for club dues. Only about fifteen dol-

614 I AMERICAN WRITERS lars remained each month for miscellaneous expenses such as laundry, postage, and books. Zukofsky taught seven hours a week: one section of advanced first-year English, and two sections of a survey of English literature. Later, one of those sections was replaced by another class, 4 "Introduction to English Literature," in which he taught poetics. He declared his intention of pursuing graduate work toward a Ph.D. thesis. He took graduate courses: a tutorial on Thomas Jefferson and a course on Provencal, undoubtedly on the recommendation of Pound. Zukofsky was hard at work on his issue of Poetry. He asked for contributions from Robert McAlmon, S. Theodore Hecht, George Oppen, William Carlos Williams, and Carl Rakosi, a poet whom he thought possessed genius, though Rakosi had stopped writing in 1925. He also planned to include some of his own work. During this same busy period he prepared two critical essays on the poetry of William Carlos Williams that appeared in the January 1931 issues of Symposium and Hound and Horn. Zukofsky was unhappy in the small city of Madison, so different from his beloved New York. The closest large city was Chicago, and his connection with Poetry gave him the excuse he was looking for to go there. He took the bus down to Chicago for the weekend of November 22 and 23, 1930, and met with Harriet Monroe and her assistant editor Morton Zabel. He showed them his "find," the poems of Rakosi, and took time to see the display of Impressionist paintings at the Art Institute. He and Rakosi had developed a warm friendship through their correspondence. Rakosi, admiring "The" and the beginning of' 'A/' invited his correspondent to visit New Orleans over his Christmas break, but Zukofsky was scheduled to visit his family in New York. In his letters, Zukofsky reported his height as 5 feet 10 inches and weight at 125 pounds (close to a lifetime high), his favorite poet as John Donne, and his

character as sane. He also registered a growing dissatisfaction with life in the Midwest, though he found a friend in one of his female students. Zukofsky was unhappy with his lodgings at the University Club with its strict rules about female visitors, so he prepared to move to the scandalous (by the standards of the time) Irving Apartments. He signed a lease in late October for one room with a private bath and, all-important, a private entrance. He borrowed the first month's rent, $32.50, from Rene Taupin. Zukofsky knew that depression-era America was not conducive to literary experimentation. He considered quitting writing and learning to drive a car instead. His strong left-wing tendencies were appropriate for the difficult times; the country seemed on the verge of a left-wing revolution. Despite misgivings, he did manage to articulate a common program for the contributors to his issue of Poetry. It was a combination of propaganda and criticism; it had both rhetorical intent and personal despair built in. He realized that by being daring, he might arouse the curiosity of both critics and the sedate audience of Poetry. The February "Objectivists" issue of Poetry stirred up some controversy, as he had imagined it might. It represented the birth of a genuine American avant-garde artistic movement, but at a time little favorable for such a development. Although some critics have disputed whether or not the "Objectivists" were a genuine poetic movement at all, at the very least it gathered, in Harriet Monroe's words, "a group of writers interested in experiment in poetic form and method," a group that was filtered through the discerning critical intelligence of one individual. Reaction to the 4 4 Object! vists" issue was mixed. Horace Gregory sent a letter to Poetry congratulating everyone concerned but warning that the '* 'Objectivists' will die for lack of oxygen if they ignore the panorama of strictly American life, including the class struggle."

LOUIS ZUKOFSKY I 615 Gregory objected to the difficult style of the group and their apparent unconcern for the pressing social issues of the day. Stanley Burnshaw sent a long letter to Poetry about the lack of precision in the stated aims of the movement, to which Zukofsky replied at length. Pound was delighted with the issue and wrote on February 12, 1931, to order four more copies, telling Harriet Monroe: "This is a number I can show my friends. If you can do another eleven as lively you will put the mag. on its feet." Both Pound and Williams thought Zukofsky's editing distinguished and his essay on Charles Reznikoff outstanding. Pound wrote: "The same authors badly edited wd. not have the same effect." Wrote Williams: "The boy has a flair for knowing what he wants." Monroe had her doubts, and Pound wrote to bolster her again on March 27, 1931: Although most of the contents was average, the MODE of presentation was good editing. The zoning of different states of mind so that one can see what they are, is good editing. . . . there has been a development in American verse during 20 years and the messy britons have not kept up with it. Zukofsky continued to be disappointed with life in Madison. He applied for another Guggenheim; with the twenty-five hundred dollars he planned on going to Europe. His senior colleagues mistook his shy silence for arrogance. Although his move to the Irving Apartments meant he could entertain female visitors undisturbed, mostly he found little to do except work. Sometimes he would walk to the square or into the black section of town to eat at cheap restaurants where the food always upset his stomach; occasionally he bought a bottle of illegal whiskey at four dollars for a pint. He thought of going to Mexico over the summer with Rene Taupin; if he did not get the Guggenheim (he did not) he was going to move back East, unless the school

promoted him to instructor at five hundred dollars more per year. His assistantship was renewed at the University of Wisconsin, but he determined not to accept it and planned on returning to New York when the school year ended. By mid June he had found a room at 50 Morton Street in New York City, but work was scarce and job hunting difficult; he went out every day with only spare carfare in his pocket. He still wrote, though poverty made it difficult. Zukofsky and Williams considered a volume in homage to Pound, and Samuel Putnam was interested in publishing it, but the project was changed to an anthology of the "Objectivists." Zukofsky did receive some recognition; in mid August he lectured at the Gotham Book Mart on "Recencies in Poetry" (reprinted in 1932 in An "Objectivists" Anthology). He thought to make his new movement comprehensible, but felt that the audienci did not understand him. His disappointment regarding the unsympathetic reception to his new movement in poetry, combined with his continuing depression over his lack of financial prospects, did not prevent him from keeping up an energetic correspondence nor from continuing his efforts on behalf of his contemporaries. Zukofsky was a truly brilliant and generous critic of other poets, going over material sent to him word by word and giving very specific advice. In a letter to Rakosi on October 19, 1931, he observed that his own work was too far in advance of its time to gain a wide audience. Putnam dropped the Objectivisms project, but it was taken up by another publisher. The new publisher was called TO Publishers; it was owned by George Oppen, and Zukofsky served as its editor. The two poets planned to issue six books a year in a six-by-eight-inch paperback format of 125 to 150 pages each. The first books were projected to be: (1) a novelette and other prose by William Carlos Williams; (2) "Prolegomena, Section 1" by Ezra Pound (the

616 I AMERICAN WRITERS collected prose); (3) Tre croce (Three Crosses), by Tozzi, translated by Basil Banting; (4) prose or poetry by Zukofsky; (5) "My country Tis of Thee," or other prose or poetry by Charles Reznikoff; (6) "Prolegomena, Section 2" by Pound. These books were to be called the "Discrete Series," and were to be priced at seventyfive cents each. To save costs, they were to be published in France. The enigmatic name of the new publisher was meant to suggest a noun in the dative case, to TO or for TO; although the word was treated as a noun, it was pronounced just like the preposition. Zukofsky was paid for his work as editor by George Oppen. He had another source of revenue as well. Early in 1932, Taupin arranged to pay him fifty dollars a month for six months to collaborate on a book about Guillaume Apollinaire. Taupin taught at Columbia and had received a leave of absence and full pay from the university to do the book but was occupied with other things. Zukofsky wrote the entire book, which he finished in 1932 and titled "The Writing of Apollinaire." Taupin's translation of it appeared in France in 1934 as Le style Apollinaire. Zukofsky's connection to the experimental French poet is an important reason for the later interest of the «L = A = N = G = U = A = G = E" poets in his work. In March the Guggenheim Foundation turned him down again. Taupin was in Europe but was due back by April 5, when he and Zukofsky were scheduled to take a trip to the West Coast. Zukofsky left for San Francisco on April 21, taking a southern route that led him through Juarez, Mexico, and Phoenix, Arizona. He apparently also went up to Canada, because he wrote to Harriet Monroe on May 2, 1932, from San Francisco that he was deported from Canada when he told them that his job was editor for TO Publishers. He was back in New York on June 21, 1932. About this time he was editing an issue of

Contempo about the "Objectivist" poets, but its editor, Milton Abernethy, later canceled his plans for it. TO published the "Objectivists" Anthology in September 1932 and then suspended publishing indefinitely, leaving Zukofsky again unemployed. He found a new apartment, at 39 Sidney Place in Brooklyn, and by collecting money that people owed him was able to afford the twenty-dollars-per-month rent, subsisting on fifteen-cent breakfasts and twentycent lunches. However, as he wrote to Carl Rakosi on October 13, 1932, he was not so completely desperate about employment that he would consider teaching in the public high schools. In early November 1932 he again wrote to Rakosi, taking the fact that William Carlos Williams was preparing to vote for Roosevelt as evidence of an imminent left-wing revolution. Zukofsky stayed afloat financially, in part, by selling his personal library book by book. Zukofsky could not even afford Poetry and offered a poem to pay for a subscription. Kind Harriet Monroe returned the poem but gave him a subscription anyway. In correspondence with Pound, discussing whether to have him return as foreign editor of Poetry, she expressed doubts about Zukofsky's ability as a poet (and Pound's ability as a critic): "You think a lot of Zukofsky, for example, while I think he is no poet at all, his 'objectivist' theories seem to be absurd, and his prose style abominable." Zukofsky's mood, like that of the nation, was at an all-time low. The year 1933 was his least productive, although he did begin what would become his most extensive correspondence: on March 21, 1933, he wrote to the poet Lorine Niedecker, a close friend from his Madison days, about his disenchantment with objectivism. In response to the economic situation, Zukofsky was promoting the formation of a writers' union to publish the work of deserving younger writers. He wrote to Rakosi on April 18, 1933, that he had secured the cooperation of Pound,

LOUIS ZUKOFSKY I 617 Williams, and Reznikoff, and that he was working through them to recruit Joyce, Ford Madox Ford, T. S. Eliot, Wyndham Lewis, Hemingway, and Yeats. He was also looking for financial backers and had secured pledges for two hundred dollars each from Tibor Serly and Rene Taupin. The union, at first called "Writers Extant," became the Objectivist Press. Zukofsky did make some money from the Apollinaire\ he also received some money from the inclusion of some of his poetry in Pound's Active Anthology. Pound, ever generous, was promoting a Zukofsky trip to Europe. He gave Zukofsky one thousand francs; another friend, the violist and composer Tibor Serly, apparently lent or gave Zukofsky the remaining money necessary, since by June the trip had been entirely arranged. Zukofsky left New York on the Majestic on June 30, 1933, arriving in Cherbourg on July 6. He stayed for a couple of weeks in Paris, at the Hotel du Perigord. While there he saw Hilaire Hiler, Fernand L6ger, Constantin Brancusi, and De Massot, all, it seems, at Pound's recommendation. Zukofsky left Paris to spend some time in Budapest, arriving on July 29, and then he went on to Rapallo, arriving on August 12. In Rapallo, he stayed with Ezra Pound's parents, Homer and Isabel Pound (in William Butler Yeats's old apartment), taking his meals with Ezra and Dorothy Shakespear Pound, and attending the "Ezuversity." Zukofsky later recalled Homer Pound's hospitality fondly; Homer, familiar with the impecunious condition of young poets, would force Zukofsky to take tea with them each day, saying that out West, people who turned down an invitation were shot as strangers. He left Rapallo at the beginning of September, and by the 15th, he was back in New York, living at 151 Remsen Street in Brooklyn, and again looking for a job to pay his fourteendollars-per-month rent. The Objectivist Press was soon under way,

with plans to start with the collected poems of William Carlos Williams followed by a volume of work by Charles Reznikoff. Williams and Reznikoff were each to contribute financially to the publication of their volumes, Williams $100 and Reznikoff the $147 it would cost to cover all printing and some overhead costs. Pound's "Ezuversity" clearly had some influence on Zukofsky, since he began to talk about economics and credit in some of his correspondence. He wrote to Carl Rakosi on November 9, 1933, of his intent to write a canzone with economics as its principal theme. He later accomplished his goal with the first half of "A"-9. The influence of his Italian sojourn would also show in his adoption of the sestina form for his brilliant poem "Mantis," written the following year. "Mantis" and its companion poem " 'Mantis,' An Interpretation" are together an extended consideration of the plight of the poor in the distressed economic times of the Great Depression. The poem was occasioned by Zukofsky's observation of a praying mantis lost, imploring, and helpless in a New York subway. The poet's own inability to help the insect to recover its place in the natural green world reinforces his sense of powerlessness in the face of the hardships and indignities suffered by the "armies of the poor." He implores the mantis to take flight, to stir up the poor "like leaves." The poem ends with the moving, half-strangled cry to the mantis to "build the new world in your eyes, Save it!" The companion poem explains the incident in the subway that provided the initial inspiration for the sestina. It records the first, false steps in its writing, and Zukofsky's search for the proper form in which to capture his emotion, not just at seeing the insect, but at all the thoughts that it awakes: That this thoughts' torsion Is really a sestina

618 I AMERICAN WRITERS Carrying subconsciously Many intellectual and sensual properties of the forgetting and remembering Head One human's intuitive Head. Alluding to Dante Alighieri's discovery of his love for Beatrice, "Incipit vita nova" (the new life begins), Zukofsky combines a discussion about the genesis of an appropriate poetic form from the felt emotion (instead of a form imposed, "a Victorian / Stuffing like upholstery," upon material unsuited for it) with his personal and political concern for the poor in the United States: The mantis, then, Is a small incident of one's physical vision Which is the poor's helplessness The poor's separateness Bringing self disgust. The two poems are among Zukofsky's most successful work, combining genuine emotion, powerful imagery, and both experimental and traditional verse forms into a moving personal and political vision of a man aware of the causes of great injustice yet powerless to do anything to remedy them. Like so many of his generation, Louis survived for the next eight years by working for the Works Progress Administration at jobs created by Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal. He started on January 19, 1934, at a Columbia University project, taking exams to verify the results of an adult education program, studying Russian as part of the same program, preparing a series of poetry exams, and selecting quotations from world poetry that would serve as touchstones for study and comparison (this work was expanded and published by Zukofsky in 1948 as A Test of Poetry). He was later transferred to another Columbia project (and promised a three-dollar-perweek raise) that involved rewriting and editing a study of children's socially useful work. He

worked there until March 1935, when he began work for the New York City Arts Project, another WPA program, in support of WNYC public radio. In January 1936 he transferred to the Federal Arts Project, supervising a group working on the Index of American Design. That work, involving a comprehensive survey of the history of American arts and crafts, continued until July 1939. From September 1939 until April 1942, except for a brief hiatus working for La France en Liberte, he again worked for the New York City Arts Project, producing radio scripts. By April 1935 he had moved to 149 East 37th Street in Manhattan. He was bothered by an attack on him that appeared in the Stalinist review, The New Masses. The attack, by a writer identified as "Mr. Macleod," was apparently motivated by Zukofsky's association with Pound, who was vocal in his support of Benito Mussolini. He protested the attack in a letter to Carl Rakosi on April 17, 1935, pointing out that although he was not a member of the Communist Party, his poetry had expressed political awareness for a decade, and that in fact his work approached communist thought more closely than the work of the young English leftist poets Auden and Spender. The attack so incensed him that on April 6, 1935, he had written to the editors of the New Masses, complaining that Macleod's comments were filled with the same nazism that he was accusing Zukofsky of harboring. One of Macleod's statements in particular caused exasperation: "The Jews are a fact. Mr. Zukofsky has not emphasized the phenomenon.'' Zukofsky could only complain, justifiably, that Macleod showed no knowledge of "The" or of the fourth, fifth, and sixth movements of "A." In 1935 Zukofsky and Jerry Reisman wrote a 132-page screenplay based on James Joyce's Ulysses, which they hoped to sell to Hollywood. On July 18, 1935, Zukofsky wrote to Joyce in Paris, offering the screenplay for sale. Joyce

LOUIS ZUKOFSKY I 619 liked the screenplay and, knowing the film The Informer, hoped that John Ford might direct. A few years later, on February 17, 1941, when the Modern Library edition of Ulysses appeared, Zukofsky wrote to John Ford, trying to interest him in the screenplay, but to no avail. Zukofsky had read Ulysses in Madison, word for word, aloud in his room with one of his pupils, Frank Heineman, and greatly admired it. His interest in film came from Charlie Chaplin, whose work he greatly prized, especially Modern Times. He would later admire the films of Jean Cocteau. Zukofsky had first met the woman he would later marry, a young musician and composer named Celia Thaew, in 1934, when he supervised a WPA project on which she worked. By 1936 or 1937 they had become steady companions. Their first date was to hear Leonard Bernstein play a piano piece by Aaron Copland at Town Hall. He introduced her to Tibor Serly, a former student of Bartok who at the time played in the Philadelphia Symphony Orchestra, commuting from Manhattan. Zukofsky was passionate about music, particularly the music of Bach. He believed that in previous lives, if such existed, he had been a seventeenth century poet and a student of Bach. In 1936, Zukofsky wrote Arise, Arise, a short play in two acts. It was based on his mother's death, after a lengthy bout with a lung infection, on his birthday in 1927. The title is from John Donne's "Holy Sonnet VII," which the character of the son reads at the play's beginning:

a playwright had anyone taken notice. He exhibits a good ear for dialogue and a remarkably contemporary sensibility in his use of a second, "Dream" curtain behind the regular theater curtain, in his careful directions for a sparse set, and in his insistence that the actors should all be dancers. The play's only weakness is that it does not sufficiently establish audience sympathy for the characters: Zukofsky, personally close to the dramatic situation, assumes that his audience is too. In 1937 he completed "A"-8. A very long movement, it is Zukofsky's closest approximation to the Cantos of Ezra Pound, written at a time of Pound's greatest influence on him. The figure of Bach reappears, but the chief focus of 44 A"-8 is on the thinking of Karl Marx and its applicability to the troubled decade of the 1930's. This political focus is especially apparent at the beginning of the movement, in which Zukofsky recasts his earlier "Nature as creator . . . Nature as created" of <4 A"-6 into: And of labor: Light lights in air, on streets, on earth, in earth— Obvious as that horses eats oats— Labor as creator, Labor as creature, To right praise. 4<

A"-8 also contains a revolutionary song, the first stanza of which is:

At the round earth's imagined corners, blow Your trumpets, angels, and arise, arise From death, you numberless infinities Of souls, and to your scattered bodies go.

Railways and highways have tied Blood of farmland and town And the chains Speed wheat to machine This is May The poor's armies veining the earth!

Although it was not published until 1962, it is an excellent first play, containing elements of both naturalistic and expressionistic drama, and Zukofsky would have had a promising career as

The distinct features of 44 A"-8 are the unique musicality of its beginning and magnificent close, and Zukof sky's handling of twentiethcentury science. In that, he went beyond Pound,

620 / AMERICAN WRITERS whose mechanical notions of causation are derived directly from late nineteenth-century classical physics and never proceed beyond them. Zukofsky, in his reading and writing in physics, had absorbed completely the quantum and relativistic theories of the twentieth century. Zukofsky's life had settled into a fairly comfortable routine by the late 1930's. His work on the WPA project in 1937 took only a couple of hours a day; he checked in at the office occasionally, but did most of his work, unsupervised, at the New York Public Library, essentially as he pleased. He availed himself of the lively New York cultural scene, going to the May Day parade in 1937; attending a lecture by Leo Frobenius; going to see Tsar to Lenin, a collection of newsreel films from before World War I through the Bolshevik Revolution, edited by Max Eastman; and viewing D. W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation. New York attracted poets. Basil Bunting, whom he had finally met in Rapallo earlier in the decade, visited him in May 1938. Zukofsky found both the time and the technical skill to write the canzone about economics that he had projected several years earlier. He began work on what would become the first half of "A"-9 in 1938; the foreword to his privately printed First Half of "A "-9 is dated November 24, 1939. It is a reworking of Guido Cavalcanti's canzone "Donna mi prega," the most difficult poem in Italian. Pound had tried to translate it three separate times, over a period of twenty years, without conspicuous success. In the first half of "A"-9 Zukofsky accomplishes a nearly impossible feat, using the precise rhyme scheme of the original canzone to write an original poem on Marxist economics. Cavalcanti's canzone form is incredibly circumscribed; more than a third of the syllables in each stanza rhyme, and the rhymes occur in the same place in each of the subsequent stanzas. Zukofsky brilliantly had decided to recast the extremely technical, scholastic, philosophical

vocabulary of the original in an equally difficult Marxist philosophical vocabulary, bringing the canzone up to date. And, as his notes reveal, he did not feel challenged sufficiently, so he decided on a further technical constraint: the distribution of the two consonants r and n would be governed by a mathematical formula for a conic surface:

tan 6 where 0 = arc tan

Zukofsky was working simultaneously on a Brooklynese translation of the same canzone, the first three lines of which read: A foin lass bodders me I gotta tell her Of a fact surely, so unrurly, often' 'R't comes 'tcan't soften it's proud neck's called love mm. . Zukofsky believed that he had captured some unnoticed element of humor in Cavalcanti's original language by rendering the poem in this way. Although there is no such humor in "Donna me prega," the rendering is interesting, and the prowess needed to carry it off in English demonstrates Zukofsky as rare among poets in sheer technical capacity. Besides, Zukofsky could be very funny. The completion of that piece and his marriage to Celia Thaew marked a distinct break in his life, a turn away from the political to the familial. Likewise, his poetry became increasingly concerned with family matters. Zukofsky was manifestly happy with his newfound domesticity, and it afforded him the energy necessary to finish "A" despite the scant attention given to his work (considering its importance) throughout most of his life. The Zukofskys had been married in a civil ceremony on August 20, 1939, in Wilmington,

LOUIS ZUKOFSKY I 621 Delaware. They did not have a honeymoon but returned to Manhattan, to Louis's new apartment on l l l t h Street where they stayed for a few months until they found a more desirable place opposite a Bronx park. Celia was musically inclined, a capable composer and accomplished pianist. Zukofsky's work on his life's project continued. He wrote to Carl Rakosi on August 6, 1940, that "A"-10 was to be published in La France en Liberte. Intended as the review of free France, that publication's editorial board consisted of Rene Taupin and Ivan Goll for the French section and Louis Zukofsky for the English section. Albert Einstein accepted Taupin's invitation to join the advisory board. Although it seemed that the review had sufficient funds for a year's publication, the project quickly folded. "A"-10 is one of the least successful movements in *VL" Its cliched propagandists ploys and Marxist resentment may have appealed to the imagined audience of La France en Liberte, but they seem glaringly out of place in the rest of the work. Celia helped Zukofsky by typing the movement and running off fifty-five copies (a few spoiled) for the limited edition of that remarkable work, the first half of 44A"-9. It was finished early in December 1940. The postcard from the Gotham Book Mart advertising Zukofsky's amazing technical achievement read as follows: Zukofsky has spent five years on the first half of the ninth movement of his long poem "A." He uses the canzone form which, according to Dante, embraced the whole of poetry. The form appears only once before [sic] in literature, in Guido Cavalcanti's Donna mi Prega. Intent on "the whole art of poetry," "A"-9 places the canzone in the thought of our time. The poet's notes, showing the development of his poem, are included in this volume and will not be reprinted in any complete edition of "A." Strictly limited to 55 autographed copies num-

bers 16 to 55 for sale Quarto, oaktag covers, 41pp. mimeographed. Very few of the mimeographed edition sold. Louis wrote to Rakosi on October 15, 1941 with the observation that it was easiest to publish with a commercial publishing house to avoid disappointment. Zukofsky's Marxist rendering of the canzone had been appropriate, for he had not lost his political sympathies. But he was cautious with whom he shared his views. Late in the war he told a banker who employed him that, as a Confucian, he did not see the need for a profit motive. In fall 1941, Zukofsky tried once again for a Guggenheim, but was once again turned down, despite the recommendation of George Dillon, the new editor of Poetry, who had recently accepted some of his work. More encouraging was the publication (by James A. Decker) of his book 55 Poems. In his review of them in the September 1942 Poetry, "An Extraordinary Sensitivity: Zukofsky's 55 Poems," William Carlos Williams wrote of the necessary obscurity of those doing superlative work in the arts: 'There is a kind of monkhood in excellence." He continued: The poems are uneven. They try a difficult approach to the reader's attention, a very difficult approach, so that there are many factors involved in their failure—even tho' their successes are of superlative quality when achieved. Privately, on October 20, 1941, he gave Zukofsky good advice: This is a dangerous sort of writing for if it doesn't click, if it doesn't do the magic and arouse the reader or doesn't find one who is serious enough, trained enough and ready enough to place himself exactly in tune with it—or if, in writing it, the writer isn't instructed by deep enough feeling (as it sometimes happens here) it becomes a mere

622 / AMERICAN WRITERS jargon and a reaching. . . . When sense, even ploddingly, cannot solve a sentence because of lack of its parts—the fault cannot be said to lie with the reader. But to fly, we require a certain lightness and wings. HERE, at their best, we have them. In both his strictures and his praise, Williams had reached the heart of the problems and the successes of Zukofsky's poetry. Zukofsky finished work for the WPA in April 1942, but instead of finding another job, he spent the summer and early fall of 1942 with Celia in Diamond Point, Lake George, New York. When they returned to New York City, they found an apartment at 202 Columbia Heights in Brooklyn. Zukofsky renewed his old substitute license and tried teaching English for $8.50 a day in the high schools, but found the discipline problems discomfiting. He found work instead as a laboratory assistant in physics at Brooklyn Technical High School. The job paid a dollar less a day, but it was nearby, he liked both students and staff, and he did not have to teach, only set up lab demonstrations. Nevertheless, he decided he was not cut out for high school employment. He then found work as a technical writer and editor: at Hazeltine Electronics between June 1943 and October 1944, at Jordanoff Aviation between October 1944 and March 1946, and at Techlit Consultants between March 1946 and January 1947. Family life suited Zukofsky well. Celia was an ideal mate, and they were very close. The poet Robert Creeley later remarked that if one of them left the room, the other seemed to disappear. He and Celia bought a house in Brooklyn. Their son, Paul, was born on October 22, 1943. When he was little more than five years old, he was learning to play a quarter-sized violin at the Mannes School, where he was enrolled, and Celia bought him a full-sized violin of his own. The Zukofskys had a piano, and Celia would play and compose music for poems by Louis and oc-

casionally for poems by Williams (the two families were good friends and visited each other often). After another month or so of substitute teaching again at Brooklyn Technical High School, Zukofsky found a job that became permanent, within walking distance of his home. With so many returning soldiers going to college on the G.I. bill, instructors were in demand and in February 1947, Zukofsky found a post at the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn; he taught English there for roughly the next twenty years, rising from instructor to associate professor. In the same year, he began a long critical and philosophical work, Bottom: On Shakespeare', the project took him more than a decade to complete and was not published until 1963. During this same period the Zukofskys briefly owned a small country home in Old Lyme, Connecticut, where they hoped to escape a polio epidemic. The epidemic was soon over, and plagued by the cottage's bad plumbing and the high tides flooding its backyard, they quickly put it up for sale again. Zukofsky's Test of Poetry was published in October 1948. He wrote to Pound, then under indictment for treason and confined to St. Elizabeths in Washington, D. C., for permission to include selections from the Cantos and from "Homage to Sextus Propertius," from "Dieu qu'il la fait," and from his translation of the Cavalcanti canzone. When neither Pound nor Dorothy responded to his letters, Zukofsky left the material out. The estate of Emily Dickinson wanted twenty-five dollars for the poems of hers that he planned to include, so he left them out as well. Aside from those omissions, the volume was as he wanted. The print run was small, and sales were disappointing. But he did use the book to support a promotion to assistant professor effective September 1, 1949, at a salary of $4,200 per year. The decade of the 1940's was one of scant poetic activity for Zukofsky, understandable because of his new responsibilities, but by the end

LOUIS ZUKOFSKY I 623 of the decade, with his son older and his job situation finally settled, he returned to poetry. He finished "A"-9 on August 22, 1950, only two days after his eleventh wedding anniversary, the date when he had hoped to finish. The first half of the diptych, written at the close of the 1930's had Marxist economics as its subject; the second half of the diptych, written at the close of the 1940's, celebrated the mysteries of love. Thus "A"-9 represents Zukofsky's personal journey from the Marxism of his Columbia days and the 1930's through his eleven years of marriage and love for Celia. In 1950 Zukofsky wrote "A"-ll, a ballata based on Cavalcanti's: "Perch'io non spero di tornar giammai." Again, it is a bravura technical performance in a very constrained rhymed form, made even more difficult by Zukofsky in that he ends each stanza with the word "honor." The words "love," "honor," "song," and "light" are repeated constantly throughout the ballata, with hypnotic effect. Knowing that Pound would appreciate what he was doing, he sent a copy to St. Elizabeths. He also submitted "A"-ll to the new editor of Poetry, Karl Shapiro, who rejected it. In "A"-11 he introduces his family; the constrained poetic form and the repetition of key words tend to remove the poem from the realm of public reference toward a private, familial realm, though its musicality can be readily appreciated. Zukofsky's father took suddenly ill, was operated on, and died of a heart attack early in April 1950. When Zukofsky and Celia visited him in the hospital, Pinchos had been worried that some money he had set aside for the synagogue would not get there. After he died they looked in his room and found what he had left— three dollars and less than a dollar in pennies. Zukofsky wrote to Niedecker on 12 April of the affection for his father that was expressed by many at the funeral. "A"-12 is an affectionate and affecting por-

trayal of Zukofsky's father and his family. It is longer than the sum of all eleven of the previous movements and is the most emotional of any: The miracle of his first job On the lower East Side: Six years night watchman In a men's shop Where by day he pressed pants Every crease a blade The irons weighed At least twenty pounds But moved both of them Six days a week From six in the morning To nine, sometimes eleven at night, Or midnight; Except Fridays When he left, enough time before sunset Margolis begrudged. His own business My father told Margolis Is to keep Sabbath. A father himself, Louis could empathize with his father's heavy responsibilities, and he could also begin to understand his father's profound religious feeling. "A"-12 was begun in 1950 and completed in 1951. Having reached the midpoint of his projected work, Zukofsky set it aside until 1960. Paul, demonstrating remarkable gifts as a musician, started formal lessons. Around 1951, Celia arranged, after persistent effort with the Board of Education, to take over his education at home so he could practice in the morning fresh and rested. In the summer of 1952 he attended Meadowmount, in Elizabethtown, New York, where the family rented an apartment. Father and son read Shakespeare together, the elder Zukofsky reading aloud a Cambridge edition; Paul followed in an Oxford one, checking every variant. On election day in November the Zukofskys voted for Stevenson; their son Paul was furious

624 I AMERICAN WRITERS because he liked Ike. After voting, they went to see Chaplin's Limelight. Zukofsky's admiration for Chaplin, evident in his 1936 essay "Modern Times," had not diminished. On September 25, 1955, Zukofsky was promoted to associate professor at Poly, though he felt obligated to return the first year of his twohundred-dollars-per-year raise to the building fund celebrating Poly's centennial. He was continuing work on his most ambitious prose piece, Bottom: On Shakespeare, an early version of which had appeared in 1953 in New Directions 14. Although his poetry was read and admired by the Black Mountain poets, he felt underappreciated. Charles Olson's influential essay "Projective Verse" had appeared in 1951 and was making quite a stir. In a letter to the poet Edward Dahlberg on July 11, 1954, Zukofsky claimed that Olson's essay was taken, in large part, from his "Objectivists" issue of Poetry, twenty years before, and that Olson had misinterpreted it. Zukofsky's letters of the time reveal that Celia was having health problems in August of 1955 (she had an ulcer and was down to eighty-eight pounds), and the Zukofskys were having problems with the bank about renewing the ten-year mortgage on their home in Brooklyn. Such financial pressures led them to try to sell the house. Zukofsky wrote to Edward Dahlberg on February 7, 1956 that the prospect of showing the house to potential buyers and moving to an apartment was unappealing. The Zukofsky's had a number of visitors, both family and friends coming to stay, and the work of keeping up the home fell entirely on Celia, who began to believe that the greatest line in modern poetry was "Do not make my house your inn." When it became too much for her, they sold the house and moved into an apartment at 135 Willow Street, where Zukofsky was only a ten-minute walk from Poly. Zukofsky had finished the first section of Bottom and was ready to start on the second section,

"An Alphabet of Subjects." The third section was to be Celia's musical setting of Shakespeare's Pericles. Zukofsky offered the new editor of Poetry, Henry Rago, the second half of "A"-9, but since a part of it had appeared in the Montevallo Review, Poetry would not take it: they used only unpublished material. Rago suggested, instead, that Zukofsky excerpt a fiveto ten-page selection from "A"-12. Zukofsky made a careful selection of exactly three hundred lines, but Rago turned it down. Paul Zukofsky's career was taking off, and his parents were busy with plans for this first Carnegie Hall recital. The program described the thirteen-year-old violinist as "a scholarship student at the Julliard School of Music working with Ivan Galamian." The New York Times reviewed the concert: A deadpan bundle of talent made his debut last night in Carnegie Hall. . . . There was, indeed, something almost frightening about the serious way the boy went through the music. . . . The playing was remarkably accurate and remarkably lifeless. . . . Despite this clich&l response to a prodigy, both the Times review and the much shorter Herald Tribune review were quite favorable. The Zukofskys managed a trip to Europe in the summer of 1957, arriving in Plymouth, England, on June 25 and leaving from Le Havre, France, on September 10. They traveled from Plymouth to Worcester to see Gael Turnbull, to Newcastle to see Basil Bunting, and then to London where they saw Herbert Read and met T. S. Eliot. In France, arriving around July 16 in Calais, they went through Normandy down to Poitiers, Limoges, and Provence, then through northern Italy, and back north through Switzerland to spend their last week in Paris. In Florence they met Cid Gorman, whose friendship would develop into one of the most remarkable and fortunate of this period of Zukofsky's life, one that

LOUIS ZUKOFSKY I 625 would be almost as productive for his poetry as his friendship with Pound had been. In February 1958, continuing to work on Bottom, he reported to Gorman that for relief he had turned to translating Catullus, with Celia acting as Latinist, providing Zukofsky with a line-by-line crib for each of the 116 poems. Paul was preparing for another Carnegie Hall recital, scheduled for February 1959. In May 1958 Louis received some further recognition for his work in the form of an offer from San Francisco State College to teach a summer course in poetry for fifteen hundred dollars. The family left for San Francisco on June 10, arriving by train on June 20 by way of Chicago, Denver, Salt Lake City, and a two-anda-half-day side trip to Yellowstone. The lively San Francisco poetry community welcomed him, and the Zukofskys spent time with Robert Duncan, the Patchens, and the Rexroths. Shortly after their return, Zukofsky mentioned to Celia that his recent group of twelve poems would make a nice book. She took the initiative and signed a contract to print a limited, facsimile edition of them. Although initially he disapproved of the expenditure, he liked the new volume. The Zukofskys sent copies to Cid Gorman and to Robert Duncan, who wrote the beautiful tribute "After Reading Barely and Widely" (included in his The Opening of the Field): Will you give yourself airs from that lute of Zukofsky? In comely pairs the words courteously dancing, to lose the sense, thus, and return, thus, in time to see

"God is "but one's deepest conviction— "your art, its use" so the text says. These lines show once again that Zukofsky's best readers and most sensitive critics have been poets.

Zukofsky's difficulty in attracting a wider audience stemmed in part from the fact that he published his work in limited editions, often privately, that went rapidly out of print. Celia sent out two hundred postcards announcing the publication of Barely and Widely, but there was scant interest. In a letter to Gorman of 19 November 1958, Zukofsky spoke of the pain of neglect after giving a reading that ended with selections from his book; everyone had listened attentively, but no one had bought a copy. Bitterness and disappointment continued to grow in Zukof sky's later years. He was a gentle and kind man who lived a life of complete integrity and devotion to his work. He had long since given up on any large audience for his poetry, but he knew his work was appreciated by a coterie of poets. With the financial pressures of launching their son Paul's concert career, and with Gelia spending so much time and taking the initiative of bringing out her husband's work, the Zukofskys had some reason to hope for small support. To see even those hopes shattered must have been painful indeed. The Zukofskys moved again in March 1959, but only one flight up at 135 Willow. The new apartment had a more spacious layout, more like their former house. Paul's February recital at Carnegie Hall had received favorable reviews from the critics, though not enough to please his father. Although Pound was no longer corresponding with Louis, he did carry on an intermittent correspondence with Paul, who had played the Jannequin Canto for him on the lawn of St. Elizabeths. Pound followed Paul's career after that, publicizing him and giving him advice. Pound told Paul that he had stopped writing to his father because Zukofsky would not rightly examine his ideas. Pound did contact Zukofsky by postcard in September, suggesting that the Pound-Zukofsky correspondence contained a great deal of important criticism and would make

626 / AMERICAN WRITERS a good book, asking if he wanted to do it. Zukofsky, discouraged about the chances of ever getting a publisher, declined. Celia had started a publicity campaign designed to attract a major publisher's notice to Zukofsky's work. A press release she prepared, entitled "A MAJOR POET IN MINOR PUBLICATIONS?" contained critical praise of Zukofsky's work by William Carlos Williams, Kenneth Rexroth, Marianne Moore, Mark Van Doren, Robert Duncan, Cid Gorman, Robert Creeley, Babette Deutsch, Sir Herbert Read, and Ezra Pound. Rexroth was quoted twice; his second statement was: "To speak as a literateur— what are the 'influences,' the antecedents? Pound, Williams, Stein, Zukofsky." The release closes: "enquiries to Celia Zukofsky" with their Willow Street address. Louis Zukofsky's correspondence with Cid Gorman was to have more result than Celia's press release. Gorman asked how much the Zukofskys could afford to contribute toward publishing an edition of the complete "A"-1-12. Although obviously excited by the prospect, Zukofsky, with his characteristic kindness and gentility, repeatedly told Cid not to deprive himself of time to do his own work by publishing "A" and not to neglect his own interests by doing so. After almost thirty years' absence, George Oppen—from Zukofsky's "Objectivists" days —turned up in Brooklyn in late June 1959 and asked the Zukofskys to drive back with him to his home in Mexico City. They left on June 29 and flew back on Eastern Airlines on July 16. The car trip took seven days. They saw the preAztec pyramids of Teotihuacan and traveled as far south as Cuernavaca. Zukofsky's favorite part of the trip was the airplane flight back, a new experience for him. He reported to Cid Gorman on July 20, 1959, that he was worried about the creeping Americanization of Mexican culture. Zukofsky was trying to finish Bottom in the

fall of 1959, but the academic year began before he could complete the "Definition" section. His duties at school were beginning to wear on him, and he longed for retirement so he could get on with his own work full time. He reported to Gorman on November 18, 1959 that writing brought in next to no income, only twenty-five dollars for all of that year. The Zukofskys' plan was to move eventually into a smaller apartment and live from Social Security and Louis's tiny pension from Poly. A few days before Christmas 1959 copies of "A"-l-12 arrived from Cid Gorman in Japan. Zukofsky was tremendously excited, and rightly so. Since it had appeared only in bits and pieces in various small magazines, there had been no way to get an impression of the work as a whole until Gorman published it in one volume. Zukofsky's enthusiasm was charmingly childlike. He looked at the volume again and again. It is not far-fetched to conclude that the energy Zukofsky received from seeing the first half of "A" in print allowed him to finish the second half, and for that thanks is due to Cid Gorman. Bottom: On Shakespeare was finally completed on May 11, 1960. In it Zukofsky announces his intention to treat all the items in Shakespeare's "canon as one work, sometimes poor, sometimes good, sometimes great." His overall attempt is to consider Shakespeare's definition of love, a parallel to which he believed to have found in Baruch Spinoza. He summarizes Shakespeare on love using a mathematical ratio:—love is to reason as eyes are to mind— and he ranges through the entire Shakespearean corpus to find various instances of that relation. He concludes that Shakespeare's concept was that "when reason judges with eyes, love and mind are one." The philosophical range of Bottom: On Shakespeare is extraordinary, and includes both Charles Sanders Peirce, the seminal American philosopher of language, and Ludwig Wittgen-

LOUIS ZUKOFSKY / 627 stein (the early Wittgenstein of the 1921 Tractates). There is something in the nature of a commonplace book to Bottom, a collection of quotations from his readings with commentary. Its extended exploration of epistemology is not very compelling; Zukofsky's metaphysics are rather old-fashioned. Yet Zukofsky does have some importance to contemporary linguistic philosophy because of his extended experimentation with nonreferential language, one of the widestranging demonstrations of the problem of reference that exists. His poetry is philosophically interesting; Bottom: On Shakespeare is not. Zukofsky was in his mid fifties, and his pace was gradually slowing down. His lifelong tendency toward hypochondria seems even more pronounced in his correspondence of this period, and he complained about the difficulties of getting published. In light of the reception that his efforts of the last thirty years had received, such complaints seem justified. Zukofsky had fully embarked on his translation of Catullus. His approach was unique; he was very conscious of the breath required for each Latin word, and he was attempting to rebreath the lines. Meanwhile, he was also at work on 44 A"-13, which he finished in 1960. Titled 4 'partita" and written in five sections, it consists largely of advice and concern for his son and is as a whole successful. It appeared in the journal Origin, which Gorman published from Kyoto, Japan. Zukofsky felt uncomfortable at the visits of younger poets, though he was generous with his time and advice. He believed that his work told them what they needed from him, and he wished to add nothing to it. The epigraphs from his taciturn Autobiography repeat his belief: "I too have been charged with obscurity, tho it's a case of listeners wanting to know too much about me, more than the words say.—Little," and "As a poet I have always felt that the work says all there needs to be said of one's life." Of course,

his work was difficult to find. He wrote to Corman on December 3, 1960, that he was less and less inclined to pursue publishers and prizes. Nevertheless, he surely had been thinking about awards: Marianne Moore had made great efforts to get "A"-1-12 the National Book Award for poetry, but it did not qualify because it had been printed abroad, a bitter turn of events given that no American publisher had paid any attention to Zukofsky. In the 1960's some recognition finally started to arrive. The Library of Congress acquired a recording of Zukofsky reading from his poetry for its Archive of Recorded Poetry, and the Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin bought his manuscripts and books from 1923 to 1960, creating the Louis Zukofsky Manuscript Collection. The Longview Foundation awarded a prize of three hundred dollars to Bottom, announced in the December issue of Poetry. The money was probably needed, since Paul Zukofsky was scheduled for his third Carnegie Hall recital in February 1961. The Zukofskys publicized the event and offered free tickets to their close friends, who sometimes paid anyway. Young poets being an impoverished lot, the bolder ones occasionally asked for free tickets. Celia, the practical Zukofsky and the one who had to handle the budget, exploded in one instance about Allen Ginsberg's request for two free tickets. Zukofsky's reaction to his wife's outburst was to make a note for possible use in a future "A." On June 26, 1961, Celia finished her section of Bottom, the score for Pericles. Her music is suited to the era in which the play was written and the piece could be performed in about two hours. She deliberately makes the music simple; the piece was probably meant for a small, intimate audience. Not an oratorio, but meant to be staged, Pericles shows clearly that Celia Zukofsky had ability as a composer. Louis Zukofsky,

628 I AMERICAN WRITERS though, was not yet finished: he had twenty more pages to go on his index to the book, an index that he called a guide to reading. Paul left for a summer music camp, his first extended absence, and Zukofsky missed him a great deal. His work on Catullus progressed. He started on poem thirty at the end of June 1961 and was on poem thirty-one by mid-July. However, unaccustomed to Paul's absence, it was difficult for him to concentrate on his translations. Public appreciation, even when it came by way of a successful reading he did in early August, seemed to give him no joy. Renting a cabin on Lake Champlain, near Paul and his friends, gave him a great deal more happiness. On November 30, 1961, he announced to Corman that because of a rent increase, he and Celia were moving again, to a sunnier apartment only a block way with a southeast view of the harbor rather than a northeast view of the city. The new address, really an old one for the Zukofskys, who had lived on the street before, was 160 Columbia Heights. His book After I's, published in 1964 and containing poetry from 1961 to 1964, contains the appropriate poem "THE OLD POET MOVES TO A NEW APARTMENT 14 TIMES."

Despite the attention that had turned toward him in 1961, Zukofsky had almost stopped caring about recognition. All of his books were out of print, and he and Celia no longer made much effort to publicize his work. However, there was increased attention to the "Objectivists" during this time; Reznikoff and Oppen in particular published books that almost overshadowed Zukofsky 's key role, causing further resentment on his part. Reznikoff sent an inscribed copy of his book, and Oppen's sister June called to ask the Zukofskys to a cocktail party honoring the authors. Zukofsky refused, but a formal invitation arrived anyway, accompanied by a flyer that, as he complained to Gorman on September 27, 1962, described the Objectivists without mentioning his role in the movement.

William Carlos Williams died in his sleep during the early morning of March 4, 1963. Pound wired to Floss Williams: "He fought a good fight for you, & he was the best poet-friend I ever had." Zukofsky was saddened by the death of one of his poetic fathers. When Henry Rago, the editor of Poetry, wrote to Zukofsky requesting an excerpt of some length from a work in progress, the poet jumped ahead of sequence to complete "A"-17, numbered to honor Williams' September 17 birthday. A May 21, 1963, letter to Rago indicates that the jump from "A"-13 to "A"-17 was not unusual, that some of the other movements of "A" were written outside of chronological sequence. <4 A"-17, titled "A CORONAL / for Floss" was accepted by Poetry. "A"-16, a movement consisting of four words, was also completed in 1963, as was "A"20 (which appeared in Agenda), a list of musical pieces two pages long with a concluding short lyric. Perhaps the poet tired. "A"-16 does present an interesting question: How can a fourword phrase

An inequality

wind flower be said to constitute one twenty-fourth of an eight-hundred page poem? It appeared in Origin. At the last minute, Paul Zukofsky was invited to represent the United States in the Paganini festival in Genoa, and he left on September 30, 1963. His performance there was a tremendous success; he won fourth place, behind two musicians from Russia and one from Japan. The award resulted in an invitation to the Thibaud

LOUIS ZUKOFSKY I 629 competition in Paris. In 1965, Paul moved to his own apartment in the same building as his parents. A review that year by Michael Steinberg from the Boston Globe of his performance (along with pianist Gilbert Kalish) of Charles Ives's second, third, and fourth sonatas for violin and piano shows that Paul's career had started: The intelligent, thinking performer in America today is in the youngest generation represented at his most impressive by Paul Zukofsky. In the most familiar and traditional sense of what virtuosity means, he has no superiority among living string players. In intelligence, intellectual penetration, and musicianship, Zukofsky, who is barely into his twenties, goes far in his accomplishments beyond those of most of the big name players. When the pair recorded all four of the sonatas, the reviews were equally positive. Zukofsky was very proud of his son, and with Paul's growing independence, he felt that he could retire to a full-time pursuit of his real work. During the last fifteen years of his life, Zukofsky increasingly received a portion of the recognition to which he was entitled. W. W. Norton published the first volume of ALL, The Collected Shorter Poems, 7923-7955, in 1965. Henry Rago, at Poetry, recognized the value of Zukofsky's achievement, and in 1964 published portions of his Catullus translation, his review of the work of William Blake in the form of a short play, and "A"-14. The latter, a consideration of the poet's life and Bach's, is written in a rather odd form: (1) the first stanza has six one-word lines, (2) the next three stanzas have ten oneword lines, followed by (3) three-line stanzas consisting of first two-word lines (the first eighteen pages), then three-word lines (the next twenty-six pages), until the end when (4) three two-word lines are used for the antepenultimate stanza, closing with (5) a six-line stanza with one word in each line and (6) a final ten-line

stanza, also with one word in each line. 4i A"15, treating, in part, the assassination of John F. Kennedy, along with selections from Edward Gibbon's The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, was also completed in 1964, and it appeared in Poetry. Good news also came in August 1965: Henry Rago was going to devote the entire October issue of Poetry to Louis Zukofsky. Consisting of "A"-14 in its entirety, the issue also contained appreciative reviews of the first volume of ALL by Robert Creeley: "I can think of no man more useful to learn from than Zukofsky" and Thomas Clark: 4'Zukofsky's understanding / feeling of existence as shape (melody) at least gives us words as emotionally active as substance, existence, itself." A review of After I's and Bottom: On Shakespeare by Gerard Malanga does justice to Celia Zukofsky's music for Pericles: "Vocally, the fabric and texture of Pericles, consistently lucid and tasteful, is flawlessly spun out to display the composer's superb stylistic assimilation and limitless melodic gift." The issue also announces the first production of Zukof sky's Arise, Arise, on August 19, 1965, by A New / Kinda Theatre Company at the Cinematheque East Theatre in New York. The year 1965 was a gratifying one for the Zukof sky s, but recognition so long delayed caused bitterness. Zukofsky had retired from Poly in August 1965. He and Celia then visited old friends in Saratoga Springs, New York, and together they finished the Catullus, finally, after ten years. Typeset with the Latin and English on facing pages, the Zukof sky s' Catullus saw publication in 1969. After retiring the Zukof sky s moved from Brooklyn to Manhattan. Later they moved again, to Port Jefferson, New York. Zukofsky wrote to Carl Rakosi in December 1965 that he would write only if specifically commissioned to do so. His exasperation had become final. Nevertheless, he achieved more recognition in this period than ever before. In 1966, Norton pub-

630 I AMERICAN WRITERS iished a second volume ALL, The Collected Short Poems 1956-1964, and Prepositions: The Collected Critical Essays of Louis Zukofsky was published in 1967. "A"-18 and -19 were written in the period 1964-1966. "A"-18 contains numerous references to the war in Vietnam and to Zukofsky's own life; it won a National Endowment for the Arts award for its author and for Poetry. * 4 A " -19 begins with Stephane Mallarme (Zukofsky has often been referred to as the American Mallarme) and then proceeds to an account of the Paganini competition in Genoa in a series of thirteen-line stanzas with two words to the line (three to the last line in each stanza). Neither are particularly striking, though in the story of the miraculous fish of the Quang Nam pond, Zukofsky may have found a perfect representation of the Vietnam War. Both appeared in Poetry. "A"-21, from 1967, is a free-form version of the comedy Rudens by Plautus. The first three acts appeared in Poetry. As with his translation of Catullus, a chief force of Zukofsky's "translation" of the Roman comedian is to drive the reader to the original (or to other translations). In this movement, he first experiments with his fiveword line, which he later uses so successfully in "A"-22 and -23. Zukofsky's important fiction works, Ferdinand and It Was, were published together in 1968. "A"-24, which concludes his long work, was also completed in 1968. Titled "L.Z. Masque," it is as much Celia Zukof sky's work as her husband's and forms a fitting ending to "A." The movement is a five-part score, with one voice consisting of music from Handel, and the other four voices consisting of arrangements of Zukofsky's work: "Thought" is from Prepositions, "'Drama" isfromArae, Arise, "Story" is from It Was, and "Poem'' is from ' 'A.'' "A"24 was meant to be performed, so is difficult to evaluate. It is divided into two acts, with five scenes in the first act and four in the second. In

act 1, the scenes are labeled as follows: (1) Cousin: Lesson, (2) Nurse: Prelude & Allegro, (3) Father: Suite, (4) Girl: Fantasia, (5) Attendants: Chaconne, and in act 2: (1) Mother: Sonata, (2) Doctor: Capriccio, (3) Aunt: Passacaille, and (4) Son: Fugues. The titles denote characters and musical forms. Zukofsky was feted at the International Poetry Festival at Austin, Texas, November 20-22, 1969, along with nine other poets including Jorge Luis Borges, Octavio Paz, Czeslaw Milosz, Robert Creeley, and Robert Duncan. He considered his most important work at the time the completion of "A." He was at work on 44A"-22 during the period 1970-1973, and "A"-23 from 1973 to 1974. They represent his most difficult sustained work and show Zukofsky at his most experimental. Employing throughout his five-word line, "A"-22 and "A"-23—the first movement a hymn to Nature and the second to just polity— are mostly made up of five line stanzas, whose language avoids all usual collocation. Since we have as yet no poetics adequate to describe fully what Zukofsky is doing in these two movements (published as a volume in 1975), we are thrown back on his own definition, which he gave in "A"-12: I'll tell you. About my poetics— music speech An integral Lower limit speech Upper limit music No?

"A"-22 and -23 can be read with pleasure for their sound; in them we are approaching the upper limit of his poetics. Of necessity, then, does "A"-24 consist of words set to music, the appropriate completion of the infinite summation that is Zukofsky's poetics.

LOUIS ZUKOFSKY I 631 When Pound died on November 1, 1972, Zukofsky lost his first poetic father. He grieved in his own way, seeking to commune with his lost friend by taking down Pound's poetry and reading it once again. In his last years, after the move to Port Jefferson, where Louis and Celia kept a garden, Zukofsky was working on his experimental work, 80 Flowers. It was to have been published on his 80th birthday. He also contemplated a further work, 90 Trees, for his 90th birthday. Louis Zukofsky died unexpectedly on May 12, 1978, while his complete "A" was being prepared for publication. He was a gentle man much hurt by the world, but one who had found great solace in his family and friends. He dedicated his life to his art with an integrity and singleness of purpose that have seldom been equaled, but he achieved no commensurate recognition in his lifetime. Zukofsky loved to tell a joke about a young Talmudic scholar in Russia, about to be drafted. He went to the rabbi for wisdom. 'There are two possibilities," said the rabbi. "You go to war; you don't go to war. If you go to war, well, not great. Still, two possibilities. You train with Jews; you train with strangers. If with strangers, not great. Still two possibilities. You're sent to the front; you remain behind the lines. If the front, still two possibilities: you're killed or you live. But if you're killed, there are still two possibilities. You may be buried with the faithful, or you may not be. And if you are not buried with the faithful, are you properly buried?" Will Zukofsky himself be properly buried? The question remains one of the canon, which poets are read and which die. If, as one might argue, poets ultimately decide what the canon will be, then Louis Zukofsky's work will truly live, for poets most appreciate the risks taken in dedication to art. Robert Duncan recognized the risks that Zukofsky took in "After Reading Barely and Widely":

He who writes a touching line dares overmuch. He does not observe the intimate boundaries of natural speech —then we in hearing must have reserve. Poetry, that must touch the string for music's service is of violence and obedience a delicate balancing.

Selected Bibliography WORKS OF LOUIS ZUKOFSKY An "Objectivists" Anthology. Le Beausset, Var, France, and New York: TO, 1932; Folcroft Library Editions, 1975. Ferdinand, Including It Was. London: Jonathan Cape, 1968. Catullus (Gai Valeri Catulli Veronensis Liber). Translated by Celia and Louis Zukofsky. London and New York: Cape Goliard Press and Grossman Publishers, 1969. Autobiography. New York: Grossman Publishers, 1970. Little: For Careenagers. New York: Grossman, 1970. Arise, Arise. New York: Grossman Publishers, 1973. 80 Flowers. New York: C.Z. Publications, 1978. "A". Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 1978. Prepositions: The Collected Critical Essays. Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1981. Bottom: On Shakespeare, Vol. I. Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 1987. Pound I Zukofsky: Selected Letters of Ezra Pound and Louis Zukofsky. Edited by Barry Ahearn. New York: New Directions, 1987.

COLLECTED WORKS ALL: The Collected Short Poems. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1971.

632 I AMERICAN WRITERS Collected Fiction. With an afterword by Paul Zukofsky. Elmwood Park, 111.: Dalkey Archive, 1990. Complete Short Poetry. With a Foreword by Robert Creeley. Baltimore, Md.: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991. MANUSCRIPTS

AND PAPERS

The Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin contains the Zukofsky Archive. The Beinecke Library at Yale University contains a large Zukofsky holding. The Lilly Library at Indiana University contains the Poetry archive after 1961 and other Zukofsky material. The Regenstein Library at the University of Chicago contains the Poetry archive from 1912 to 1961. A significant amount of other material is housed at Bellarmine College, Louisville; Columbia University; Kent State University; State University of New York at Buffalo; University of California, Los Angeles; University of California, San Diego; University of Delaware; University of Maryland; Washington University, St. Louis.

BOOK-LENGTH BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL STUDIES Ahearn, Barry. Zukofsky's "A": An Introduction. Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1983. Lang, Warren Paul. Zukofsky's Conception of Poetry and a Reading of his Poem of Life "A." Ann Arbor, Michigan: Xerox University Microfilms, 1974 (University of Indiana Ph.D. diss., 1974). Leggott, Michele J. Reading Zukofsky's "80 Flowers." Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989. Mandell, Stephen Roy. The Finer Mathematician: An Introduction to the Work of Louis Zukofsky. Ann Arbor, Michigan: Xerox University Microfilms, 1975 (Temple University Ph.D. diss., 1975). Terrell, Carroll F. Louis Zukofsky: Man and Poet. Orono, Maine: National Poetry Foundation, n.d. Tomas, John. Zukofsky in the Twenties. University of Chicago Ph.D. diss., 1991. —TIM REDMAN

SUPPLEMENT III Cumulative Index

Index Arabic numbers printed in bold-face type refer to extended treatment of a subject.

"A " (Zukof sky), Supp. Ill, Part 2,611, 612, 614, 617, 619, 620, 621, 622, 623,624,626,627,628,629,630,631 A. Bronson Alcott: His Life and Philosophy (Sanborn and Hams), Supp. I, Part 1,46 A la Recherche du Temps Perdu (Proust), IV, 428 Aaron (biblical person), IV, 152 Aaron,Daniel,II,23;IV,307,429,448; Supp. I, Part 2,647,650 Aaron's Rod (Lawrence), Supp.I, Part 1,255 Abbott, Edith, Supp. I, Part 1* 5 Abbott, George, III, 406 Abbott, Grace, Supp. I, Part 1,5 Abbott, Jacob, Supp. I, Part 1,38,39 Abbott, Lyman, III, 293 ABC of Color, An: Selections from Over a Half Century of Writings (Du Bois), Supp. II, Part 1,186 ABCo//te0d//ig(Pound),m,468,474475 "Abdication, An" (Merrill), Supp. in, Part 1, 326 Abel (biblical person), ID, 5-6, 10; IV, 56 Abel, Lionel, 1, 449 Abelard,Peter,I,14,22 Abercrombie, Lascelles, III, 471 Abernathy, Milton, Supp. Ill, Part 2, 616 Abhau, Anna, see Mencken, Mrs. August (Anna Abhau) "Ability" (Emerson), II, 6 Abolitionism, Supp. I, Part 2,405, 418, 587, 588, 590, 682, 683, 685-690, 692,703 "Abortion, The" (Sexton), Supp. II, Part 2, 682

About the House (Auden), Supp. II, Part 1,24 Above the River (Wright), Supp. in, Part 2> 589,606 Abraham (biblical person), 1,551; IV, 137; Supp. I, Part 1,101, Part 2,432 "Abraham" (Schwartz), Supp. II, Part £663 "Abraham Davenport" (Whhtier), Supp. I, Part 2,699 "Abraham Lincoln" (Emerson), II, 13 Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years (Sandburg), III, 580,587-589,590 Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years and the War Years (Sandburg), III, 588,590 Abraham Lincoln: The War Years (Sandburg), III, 588,589-590 "Abraham Lincoln Walks at Midnight" (Lindsay), Supp. I, Part 2, 390-391 " Abram Morrison" (Whittier), Supp. I, Part 2,699 Absalom, Absalom (Faulkner), II, 64, 65-67,72,223; IV, 207 "Absent Thee from Felicity Awhile" (Wylie), Supp. I, Part 2,727,729 "Absentee, The" (Levertov), Supp. Ill, Part 1,284 Absentee Ownership (Veblen), Supp. I, Part 2,642 Absolutism, 1,389; III, 306 Abstractionism, 1,162,185; IV, 420 Absurdism, 1,71,82,94,163,211,428, 429,434; III, 281,286,338 Abysmal Brute, The (London), II, 467 >lcc*w/(publication),in,337-338;IV, 485 "Accountability" (Dunbar), Supp. D, Part 1,197,204

635

"Accusation of the Inward Man, The" (Taylor), IV, 156 "Accusation,The" (Wright), Supp. Ill, Part 2,595 Achievement in American Poetry (Bogan), Supp. Ill, Part 1,63-64 "Achilles in Left Field" (Podhoretz), Supp. I, Part 2,453 "Acknowledgment" (Lanier), Supp. I, Part 1,364 "Acquainted with the Night" (Frost), 11,155 Across Spoon River (Masters), Supp. I, Part 2, 455, 457, 459, 460, 466, 474-475,476 Across the River and into the Trees (Hemingway),I,491;n, 255-256,261 "Actfive" (MacLeish), III, 18-19,22 Act five and Other Poems (MacLeish), 01,3,17-19,21 Action (Shepard),Supp.m,Part2,446 Active Anthology (Pound), Supp. Ill, Part 2,617 Active Service (Crane), 1,409 "Ad Castitatem" (Bogan), Supp. Ill, Part 1,50 "Ada" (Stein), IV, 43 Ada; or Ardor (Nabokov), III, 247 " Adagia" (Stevens), IV, 78,80,88,92 Adam(bibiicalperson),I,551,552;II, 12,47,134,162,215,541,552; 111,56,10,11,19,20,199,302,441; IV, 149,225,291,371; Supp. I, Part 1, 107,113,120 "Adam and Eve" (Shapiro), Supp. II, Part 2,708,712 Adam Bede (Eliot), II, 181 Adams, Agatha Boyd, IV, 473 Adams, Althea, see Thurber, Mrs. James (Althea Adams)

ADAM-AFRO / 636 Adams, Annie, see Fields, Mrs. James T. (Annie Adams) Adams, Brooks, Supp. I, Part 2,484 Adams, Charles, Supp. I, Part 2,644 Adams, Charles Francis, 1,1,4; Supp* I, Part 2,484 Adams, Charles M., n, 390 Adams, Franklin Pierce, Supp. I, Part ^653 Adams, Henry, 1,1-24, 111, 243,258; D, 278,542; ffl, 396,504; IV, 191, 349; Supp. I, Part 1, 299-300,301, 314, Part 2,417,492,543,644; Supp. II, Part 1,93-94,105; Supp. m,Part 2,613 Adams, Henry B., Supp. I, Part 1,369 Adams, J.Donald, IV, 438 Adams, James Truslow, 1,24; Supp. I, Part 2,481,484,486 Adams, John, 1,1; H, 103,301; III, 17, 473; Supp. I, Part 2,483,506,507, 509,510,511,517,518,520,524 Adams, John Quincy, 1,1, 3,16-17; Supp. I, Part 2,685,686 Adams, John R., Supp. I, Part 2,601 Adams, Llonie, Supp. I, Part 2,707 Adams, Luella, Supp. I, Part 2,652 Adams, Mrs. Henry (Marian Hooper), 1,1,5,10,17-18 Adams, Percy G., Supp. I, Part 1,251 Adams, Randolph G., D, 124 Adams, Richard P., 1,119 Adams, Robert M., IV, 448 Adams, Samuel, Supp. I, Part 2,516, 525 Adams family, III, 475 Adcock, St. John, IV, 376 Addams, Jane, Supp. I, Part 1,1-26 Addams, John Huy, Supp. I, Part 1,2 Adding Machine, The (Rice), 1,479 Adding Machine, The: Selected Essays (Burroughs), Supp. ID, Part 1,93, 97 Addison, Joseph, I, 8,105,106-107, 108,114,131,300,304; HI, 430 " Address to My Soul" (Wylie), Supp. I, Part 2,729 Address to the Government of the United States on the Cession of Louisiana to the French, An (Brown), Supp. I, Part 1,146 "Address to the Scholars of New England" (Ransom), III, 491 " Addressed to a Political Shrimp, or,

Fly upon the Wheel" (Freneau), Supp. II, Part 1,267 Adkins, Nelson R, D, 20,23 Adler, Alfred, 1,248 Adler, Betty, HI, 103,121 Adler, George J., Ill, 81 Adler, Jacob H., Supp. I, Part 1,297 Admiral of the Ocean Sea: A Life of Christopher Columbus (Morison), Supp. I, Part 2,486-488 " Adonais" (Shelley), II, 516,540 Adorno,Theodor,Supp.I,Part2,645, 650 "Adrienne Rich: The Poetics of Change" (Gelpi), Supp. I, Part 2, 554 Adrift Among Geniuses: Robert McAlmon (Smoller), Supp. I, Part 1,275 "Adulation and the Artist" (Lee), Supp. I, Part 2,402 Adventure (London), II, 466 Adventures in Value (Cummings), I, 430 "Adventures of a Book Reviewer" (Cowley), Supp.II, Part 1,137,142 Adventures of a Young Man (Dos Passes), 1,488,489,492 Adventures of Augie March, The (Bellow), 1,144,147,149,150,151, 152-153, 154, 155, 157, 158-159, 164 Adventures of Captain Bonneville (Irving), II, 312 Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Twain), 1,307,506; II, 26,72,262, 266-268,290,418,430;m,101,112113,357,554,558,577;IV, 198,201204,207 Adventures of Roderick Random, The (Smollett), 1,134 " Adventures of the Young Man: An Approach to Charles Brockden Brown" (Berthoff), Supp. I, Part 1, 148 Adventures of Tom Sawyer, The (Twain), II, 26; III, 223,572,577; IV, 199-200,203,204 Adventures While Preaching the Gospel of Beauty (Lindsay), Supp. I, Part 2,374,376,381,382-384,389, 399 Advertisements for Myself (Mailer), III, 27,35-38,41-42,45,46

"Advertisements for Myself on the Way Out" (Mailer), III, 37 "Advice to a Prophet" (Wilbur), Supp. Ill, Part 2,555-557 Advice to a Prophet and Other Poems (Wilbur),Supp.m, Part 2,554-558 "Advice to a Raven in Russia" (Barlow), Supp. D, Part 1,65, 74, 80,83 Advice to the Privileged Orders, Part I (Barlow), Supp. II, Part 1,80 Advocate (publication), I, 26, 28; II, 536; HI, 28 "Aeneas at Washington" (Tate), IV, 129 Aeneid (trans. Humphries), HI, 124 >i*m?jW(Vergil),I,396;II,542;IH,124 Aeneus Tacticus, 1,136 Aeschylus, 1,274,433; 111,398; IV, 358, 368,370; Supp. I, Part 2,458,494 Aesop, 1,387; 0,154,169,302; III, 587 Aesthetic (Croce), III, 610 Aestheticism, 1,384,447; III, 8,481 "Aesthetics" (Mumford), Supp. II, Part 2,476 "Aesthetics of Silence,The" (Sontag), Supp. Ill, Part 2,459 "Affair at Coulter's Notch, The" (Bierce),I,202 "Affair of Outposts, An" (Bierce), I, 202 Affluent Society, The (Galbraith), Supp. I, Part 2,648 "Aficionados, The" (Carver), Supp. HI, Part 1,137 AfloatandAshore(CoopcT), 1,351,355 Africa, Its Geography, People, and Products (Du Bois), Supp. II, Part 1,179 Africa, Its Place in Modern History (Du Bois), Supp. II, Part 1,179 "African Book" (Hemingway), II, 259 "African Chief, The" (Bryant), Supp. I, Part 1,168 "African Fragment" (Brooks), Supp. ffl, Part 1,85 "African Roots of War, The" (Du Bois), Supp. n, Part 1,174 African Treasury, An (ed. Hughes), Supp. I, Part 1,344 " Afrika Revolution" (Baraka), Supp. II, Part 1,53 "AFRO-AMERICAN LYRIC" (Baraka), Supp. II, Part 1,59

AFTE-ALDR / 637 "After Hearing a Waltz by Bart6k" (Lowell), II, 522 "After Holbein ' (Wharton), IV, 325 4/ter/'.y(Zukofsky),Supp.III,Part2, 628,629 "After Reading Barely and Widely9 (Zukofsky), Supp. Ill, Part 2, 625, 631 After Strange Gods (Eliot), 1, 588 "After the Alphabets" (Merwin), Supp. Ill, Part 1,356 "After the Burial" (Lowell), Supp. I, Part 2, 409 "After the Curfew" (Holmes), Supp. I, Part 1,308 "After the Death of John Brown" (Thoreau),IV,185 "After the Denim" (Carver), Supp. Ill, Part 1, 144 After the Fall (Miller), III, 148,149,156,

161,162,163-165,166 "After the Fire" (Merrill), Supp. Ill, Part 1,328 After the Genteel Tradition (Cowley), Supp. II, Part 1, 143 "After the Persian" (Bogan), Supp. Ell, Part 1, 64 "After the Pleasure Party" (Melville), 111,93 "After the Surprising Conversions" (Lowell), 1, 544, 545; II, 550 "After theTranquilized Fifties: Notes on Sylvia Plath and James Baldwin" (Cox and Jones), Supp. I, Part 1, 69, Part 2, 548 "After Twenty Years" (Rich), Supp. I, Part 2, 559-560 "After-image" (Caldwell), 1, 309 Aftermath (Longfellow), II, 490 "Aftermath" (Longfellow), II, 498 "Afternoon" (Ellison), Supp. II, Part 1,238 "Afternoon Miracle, An" (O. Henry), Supp. II, Part 1, 390 "Afternoon of a Playwright" (Thurber), Supp. I, Part 2, 620 Afternoon of an Author: A Selection of Vncollected Stories and Essays (Fitzgerald), II, 94 " Afterwake,The" (Rich), Supp. I, Part 2,553 Against Interpretation (Sontag),Supp. Ill, Part 2, 451, 455 "Against Interpretation" (Sontag), Supp. HI, Part 2, 456-458, 463

Agapida, Fray Antonio (pseudonym), see Irving, Washington "Agassiz" (Lowell), Supp. I, Part 2, 414,416 Agassiz, Louis, D, 343; Supp. I, Part 1, 312 AgeofAnxiety, 77ie(Auden),Supp.U, Part 1,2,19,21 Age of Innocence, The( Wharton), IV, 320-322,327-328 Age of Longing, 77ii(Koestler),I,258 Age of Reason, The (Paine), Supp. I, Part 2,503,515-517,520 Agee, Emma, 1,26 Agee, Hugh James, 1,25 Agee, James, 1,25-47,293; IV, 215 Agee, Mrs. Hugh James, 1,25-26 "Agent, The"(Wilbur),Supp.ni,Part 2,557-561 "Ages, The" (Bryant), Supp. I, Part 1, 152,155,166,167 " Aging" (Jarrell), II, 388 "Agitato ma non Troppo" (Ransom), 111,493 Agnes of Sorrento (Stowe), Supp. I, Part 2,592,595-596 Agrarian Justice (Paine), Supp. I, Part 2,517-518 Agricultural Advertising (publication), 1,100 Ah Sin (Harte), Supp. II, Part 1,354355 "Ah! Sun-flower" (Blake), III, 19 Ah, Wilderness! (O'Neill), HI, 400-401 Ahmed Arabi Pasha, 1,453 Ahnebrink, Lars, III, 328,336 AIDS and Its Metaphors (Sontag), Supp. Ill, Part 2,452,466-468 Aids to Reflection (Coleridge), II, 10 Aiken, Conrad, 1,48-70,190,211,243, 473; O, 55, 530, 533, 542; HI, 458, 460; Supp. I, Part 2,402 Aiken, Mrs. William, 1,48 Aiken, William, 1,48 Ainsworth, William, III, 423 "Air Plant, The" (Crane), 1,401 Air Raid: A Verse Play for Radio (MacLeish),III,21 Air-Conditioned Nightmare, The (Miller), III, 186 Aird, Eileen M., Supp. I, Part 2,548 Airways, Inc. (Dos Passos), 1,482 Aitken, Robert, Supp. I, Part 2,504 Akhmadulina, Bella, Supp. Ill, Part 1, 268

Akhmatova, Anna, Supp. Ill, Part 1, 268,269 "Al Aaraaf' (Poe), III, 426-^27 AlAaraaf, Tamerlane, and Minor Poems (Poe), III, 410 "Alastor" (Shelley), Supp. I, Part 2, 728 "Alatus" (Wilbur), Supp. HI, Part 2, 563 Albany Daily Advertiser (newspaper), 1,346 Albany Evening Journal (newspaper), 11,128 Albee, Edward, 1,71-96,113; 0,558, 591; HI, 281,387; IV, 4,230 Albee, Mrs. Reed, 1,71 Albee, Reed, 1,71 Albertini, V. R., Supp. I, Part 2,626 Albright, Margery, Supp. I, Part 2,613 "Album, The" (Morris), III, 220 Alcestiad, The (Wilder), IV, 357,374 "Alchemist, The" (Bogan), Supp. Ill, Part 1,50 "Alcmena" (Winters), Supp. II, Part 2,801 Alcott family, IV, 177,178 Alcott, Abba, see Alcott, Mrs. Amos Bronson (Abigail May) Alcott, Amos Bronson, D, 7,225; IV, 172,173,184;Supp.I,Partl, 28,2932,35,39,41,45 Alcott, Anna, see Pratt, Anna Alcott, Bronson, Supp. II, Part 1,290 Alcott, Louisa May, IV, 172; Supp. I, Part 1,28-46 Alcott, May, Supp. I, Part 1,41 Alcott, Mrs. Amos Bronson (Abigail May),IV,184;Supp.I,Part 1,29,30, 31,32,35 Alcottsas 1 Knew Them, T/ie(Gowing), Supp. I, Part 1,46 Alcuin:A Dialogue (Brown), Supp. I, Part 1,126-127,133 Alden, Hortense, see Farrell, Mrs. James T. (Hortense Alden) Alden, John, 1,471; 0,502-503 Aldington, Richard, 0,517,533; III, 458,459,465,472; Supp. I, Part 1, 257-262,270 Aldington, Mrs. Richard, see Doolittle, Hilda Aldington, Perdita, Supp. I, Part 1, 258 Aldrich,Thomas Bailey, 11,400; Supp. II, Part 1,192

ALDR-AMBR / 638 Aldrich, Tom, Supp. I, Part 2, 415 Aldrich family, H, 403, 404 Aldridge, Alfred Owen, 1, 564; D, 125 Aldridge, John W., D, 52; ID, 47, 243, 384; IV, 118, 284; Supp. I, Part 1, 1%, 198 Aleck Maury Sportsman (Gordon), II, 197,200,203-204 Aleichem, Sholom, IV, 3, 10 Alexander, Charlotte A., Supp. I, Part 1,69 Alexander, Doris M., Ill, 408 Alexander, George, n, 331 Alexander, Jean, HI, 431 " AlexanderCrummell—Dead" (Dunbar), Supp. n, Part 1, 207, 208-209 Alexander the Great, IV, 322 Alexander's Bridge (Gather), I, 313, 314,316-317,326 Alexander's Weekly Messenger (newspaper), III, 420 Algren, Nelson, 1, 211 Alhambra, The (Irving), II, 310-311 "Alice Doane's Appeal" (Hawthorne),II,227 Alice in Wonderland (Carroll), Supp. I, Part 2, 622 Alison, Archibald, Supp. I, Part 1, 151 , 159 Alison's House (Glaspell), Supp. ID, Part 1, 182, 188, 189 ALL: The Collected Poems, 1956-1964 (Zukofsky), Supp. Ill, Part 2, 630 ALL: The Collected Short Poems, 1923-1958 (Zukofsky), Supp. ID, Part 2, 629 All at Sea (Lardner), II, 427 All God's Chillun Got Wings (O'Neill), 111,387,391,393-394 "ALL IN THE STREET" (Baraka), Supp. II, Part 1,53 "All Mountains" (Doolittle), Supp. I, Part 1,271 All My Pretty Ones (Sexton), Supp. II, Part 2, 678, 679-683 "All My Pretty Ones" (Sexton), Supp. II, Part 2, 681-682

"ALLREACTIONIS DOOMED!!!" "Alligators, The" (Updike), IV, 219 (Baraka), Supp. II, Part 1,59 Allport, Gordon, 0,363-364,365 44 All Revelation" (Frost), II, 160-162 Allsop, Kenneth, HI, 169 "All Souls" (Wharton), IV, 315-316 "All-Star Literary Vaudeville" (Wil"All ThatIs"(Wilbur),Supp.m, Part son), IV, 434-435 2,563 Allston, Washington, D, 298 44 All the Bearded Irises of Life: Con- "Alone" (Singer), IV, 15 fessions of a Homospiritual" "Alone" (Winters), Supp. II, Part 2, 786,811 (Walker), Supp. Ill, Part 2,527 "All the Beautiful Are Blameless" Aloneness (Brooks), Supp. Ill, Part 1, 85,86 (Wright), Supp. 01, Part 2,597 "All the Dead Dears" (Plath),Supp.I, "Along the Color Line" (Du Bois), Part 2,537 Supp. n, Part 1,173 All the Good People I've Left Behind Along the Illinois (Masters), Supp. I, (Oates), Supp. II, Part 2,510,522, Part 2,472 523 "Alpine Christ, The" (Jeffers), Supp. "All the Hippos Were Boiled in Their II, Part 2,415,419 Tanks" (Burroughs and Kerouac), Alpine Christ and Other Poems, The Supp. Ill, Part 1,94 (Jeffers), Supp. II, Part 2,419 All the King's Men (Warren), 1,489; IV, "Alpine Idyll, An" (Hemingway), H, 249 Alsop, Joseph, D, 579 243,248-249,252 All the Sad Young Men (Fitzgerald), D, Aha California (newspaper), IV, 196 94 "Altar, The" (MacLeish), III, 4 "Altars in the Street, The" (Levertov), Allan, Frances, III, 410,413 Allan, John, III, 410,411 Supp. ID, Part 1,280 Allegory, 1,354,355; 0,199,243,281, Alter, Robert, 1,165; III, 47; Supp. I, 591; HI, 78, 82, 94, 239, 447, 522, Part 2,452 523; IV, 153 Altgeld, John Peter, Supp. I, Part 2, 382,455 "Allegory and Typology "Embrace and Greet': Anne Bradstreet's Con- Althea (Masters), Supp. I, Part 2,455, 459 templations" (Irvin), Supp. I, Part Altick, Richard, Supp. I, Part 2,423 1,123 Allen, Alexander V. G., 1,564 Alvarez, A., Supp. I, Part 2,526,527, Allen, Charles G., Ill, 455 548; Supp. II, Part 1,99 Alvarez, Alfred, 1,404; n, 557 Allen, Don Cameron, 1,542 Allen, E.L.,OI, 312 Always the Young Strangers (SandAllen, Evie Allison, IV, 354 burg), III, 577-578,579 Amacher, Richard E., D, 124,125 Allen, Francis H., IV, 188 Allen, Frederick Lewis, Supp. I, Part Amaranth (Robinson), III, 509, 510, 2,655,681 512,513,522,523 Allen, Gay Wilson, II, 365; III, 598; IV, Ambassadors, The (James), II, 320, 333-334,600; III, 517; IV, 322 352,354;Supp.I,Partl,173,Part2, 418 Ambelain, Robert, Supp. I, Part 1, Allen, Hervey, III, 431 260,273,274,275 44 Allen, Michael, III, 431 Ambition Bird, The" (Sexton), Supp. II, Part 2,693 Allen, Shirley S., Supp. I, Part 1,69 Allen, Walter, 1,505; HI, 243,352; IV, Ambler, Eric, HI, 57 All My Sons (Miller), III, 148,149,150, 71,142 Ambrose Holt and Family (Glaspell), 151-153, 154, 155, 156, 158, 159, Allen, Woody, Supp. I, Part 2, 607, Supp. Ill, Part 1,175,181,184,187, 160, 164, 166 188 623 "All Night, All Night" (Schwartz), "Alleret Retour" (Barnes), Supp. Ill, "Ambrose Seyffert" (Masters), Supp. Part 1,36 Supp. II, Part 2, 665 I, Part 2,464 Aller Retour New York (Miller), III, 44Ambrose" stories, see Lost in the All Night Long (Caldwell), 1, 297 Funhouse (Barth) 178,182,183 All Over (Albee), 1, 91-94

AMEN-AMER / 639 Amen Corner, The (Baldwin),Supp.I, Part 1,48,51,54,55,56 "America" (Ginsberg), Supp. II, Part 1,58-59,317 "America" (song), IV, 410 "America Aglow" (Ozick), Supp. I, Part 1,199 "America, America!" (poem) (Schwartz), Supp. II, Part 2,665 "America! America!" (story) (Schwartz), Supp. O, Part 2, 640, 658-659,660 America and Americans (Steinbeck), IV, 52 America as a Civilization (Lerner), III, 60 "America Independent" (Freneau), Supp. II, Part 1,261 "America, Seen Through Photographs, Darkly" (Sontag), Supp. Ill, Part 2,464 America: The Story of a Free People (Commager and Nevins), 1,253 America Was Promises (MacLeish), III, 16,17 American, The (James), 1,226; II, 326327,328,331,334; IV, 318 American Adam, The (Lewis), II, 457458 American Almanac (Leeds), II, 110 A merican Annual Registerfor the Year 1796, Supp. I, Part 2,507 American Blues (Williams), IV, 381, 383 American Caravan: A Yearbook of American Literature (ed. Mumford), Supp. II, Part 2,482 American Cause, The (MacLeish), III, 3 American Claimant, The (Twain), IV, 194,198-199 American Crist*/(Paine),Supp.I,Part 2,508 American Crisis II (Paine), Supp. I, Part 2,508 A merican Crisis XIII (Paine), Supp. I, Part 2,509 "American Critic,The" (Spingarn), I, 266 American Democrat, The (Cooper), I, 343,346,347,353 American Diary (Webb), Supp. I, Part 15 American Drama since World War II (Weaies),IV,385

American Dream, An (Mailer), HI, 27,33-34,35,39,41,43,44 American Dream, The (Albee), 1,7476,77,89,94 American Earth (Caldwell),I,290,308 American Exodus, An (Lange and Taylor), 1,293 American Experience, The (Parkes), Supp. I, Part 2,617-618 "American Fear of Literature, The" (Lewis), II, 451 "American Financier, The" (Dreiser), 11,428 American Folkways (book series), I, 290 American Heritage (magazine), Supp. I, Part 2,493 American Heroine: The Life and Legend of Jane Addams (Davis), Supp. I, Part 1,1,27 American Historical Novel, The (Leisy), Supp. II, Part 1,125 American Humor (Rourke), IV, 339, 352 American Humorist, The (Yates), Supp. I, Part 2,626 "American in England, An" (Wylie), Supp. I, Part 2,707 American Jitters, The: A Year of the Slump (Wilson), IV, 427,428 American Journal (Hayden), Supp. II, Part 1,367 American Journal of Education (publication), II, 465 American Landscape, The, Supp. I, Part 1,157 American Language, The (Mencken), H, 289,430; III, 100,104,105,108, 111,119-120 American Language, The: Supplement One (Mencken), III, 111 American Language, The: Supplement Two (Mencken), III, 111 "American Letter" (MacLeish), HI, 13 "American Liberty" (Freneau), Supp. II, Part 1,257 American Literature (publication), Supp. I, Part 1,372 American Literature: Essays and Opinions (Pavese), Supp. I, Part 2, 478 American Magazine, Supp. I, Part 2, 380 American Manufacturer (newspaper), Supp. I, Part 2,684

American Mercury (magazine), 1,115; n, 449; HI, 106-107,108,110; Supp. I, Part 2,473 American Mercury (newspaper), Supp. II, Part 1,69 American Mind, The (Commager), Supp. I, Part 2,650 American Museum (publication), III, 412 American Negro, The (Thomas), Supp. II, Part 1,168 "American Negro in Search of Identity, The" (Marcus), Supp. I, Part 1, 70 American Notebooks, The (Hawthorne), II, 226 American Novel and Its Tradition, The (Chase), Supp. I, Part 1,148 "American Poet" (Shapiro), Supp. II, Part 2,701 American Poetry from the Puritans to the Present (Waggoner), Supp. I, Part 1,173, Part 2,478 American Poetry Since 1900 (Untermeyer), Supp. I, Part 2,730 American Poets: From the Puritans to the Present (Waggoner), Supp. I, Part 2,706 American Primer, An (Boorstin), I, 253 American Primer, An (Whitman), IV, 348 American Prosody (Allen), Supp. I, Part 1,173 American Quarterly (publication), Supp. I, Part 2,649 "American Realist Playwrights, The" (McCarthy), II, 562 American Register, or General Repository of History, Politics, and Science, The (ed. Brown), Supp. I, Part 1,146 American Renaissance (Matthiessen), 1,259-260; III, 310 American Revolution, The: Explorations in the History of American Radicalism (ed. Young), Supp. I, Part 2,525 American Scene, The (James), II, 336; 111,460 American Scenes (ed. Kozlenko), IV, 378 "American Scholar, The" (Emerson), 1,239; 0,8,12-13; Supp. I, Part 1, 147, Part 2,420

AMER-ANGE / 640 American Scholar (publication), III, 268,292 American Short Story, The: Front Line in the National Defense of Literature (Peden), Supp. I, Part 1,199 " American Soldier, The" (Freneau), Supp. II, Part 1,269 American Songbag, The (Sandburg), 111,583 "American Student in Paris, An" (Farrell),II,45 "American Sublime, The" (Stevens), IV,74 American Tragedy, An (Dreiser), I, 497, 498, 499, 501, 502, 503, 511515,517,518,519; III, 251; IV, 35, 484 "American Use for German Ideals" (Bourne), 1,228 American Vernacular Poetry (Greasley), Supp. I, Part 2,478 "American Village, The" (Freneau), Supp. II, Part 1,256 American Village, The (Freneau), Supp. H, Part 1,256,257 Americana (publication), IV, 287 America's Coming-of-Age (Brooks), I, 228,230,240,245,258; IV, 427 America's Literary Revolt (Yatron), Supp. I, Part 2,402,478 Ames, Fisher, Supp. I, Part 2,486 Ames, Lois, Supp. I, Part 2,541,547 Ames, Van Meter, Supp. I, Part 2,402 Ames, William, IV, 158 Amiable Autocrat: A Biography of Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes (Tilton), Supp. I, Part 1,319 Amiel, Henri F., 1,241,243,250 Amis, Kingsley, IV, 430 Ammons, A. R., Supp. Ill, Part 2,541 Among My Books (Lowell), Supp. I, Part 2,407 "Among School Children" (Yeats), 111,249 "Among the Hills" (Whittier), Supp. I, Part 2,703 "Amoral Moralist, The" (White), Supp. I, Part 2,648 Amory, Cleveland, Supp. I, Part 1,316 Amory, Fred, Supp. Ill, Part 1,2 Amos (biblical person), Supp. I, Part 2,689 Amos (biblical book), II, 166 " AM/TRAK" (Baraka),Supp.II,Part 1,60

Amy (Gould), Supp. I, Part 1,275 Amy Lowell, A Critical Appreciation (Bryher), Supp. I, Part 1,275 Amy Lowell: A Chronicle (Damon), Supp. I, Part 1,275 "Amy Lowell of Brookline, Mass." (Scott), II, 512 Amy Lowell: Portrait of the Poet in Her Time (Gregory), II, 512 "Amy Wentworth" (Whittier), Supp. I, Part 2,694,696 "An Alphabet of Subjects" (Zukofsky), Supp. DI, Part 2,624 "An trentiesme de mon Eage, Lf" (MacLeish),III,9 Anabase (Perse), III, 12 "Anabasis (I)" (Merwin), Supp. Ill, Part 1,342,346 "Anabasis (II)" (Merwin), Supp. Ill, Part 1,342,346 Analectic Magazine, D, 303,304 Analects, The (trans. Pound), III, 472 Analogy (Butler) JI,& "Analysis of a Theme" (Stevens), IV, 81 Anarchiad, The, A Poem on the Restoration of Chaos and Substantial Night, in Twenty Four Books (Barlow), Supp. II, Part 1,70 Anatomy Lesson, The (Roth), Supp. Ill, Part 2,422-423,425 Anatomy of Melancholy (Burton), ID, 78 Anatomy of Nonsense, The( Winters), Supp. II, Part 2,811,812 "Ancestors, The" (Tate), IV, 128 Ancient Law, The (Glasgow), II, 179180,192 & (And) (Cummings), 1,429,431,432, 437,445,446,448 "And Hickman Arrives" (Ellison), Supp. II, Part 1,248 —And I Worked at the Writer's Trade (Cowley),Supp. II, Part 1,137,139, 141,143,147,148 And in the Hanging Gardens (Aiken), 1,63 "And the Sea Shall Give up Its Dead" (Wilder), IV, 358 "And Then Came Baldwin" (Mayfield), Supp. I, Part 1,70 "And Ut Pictura Poesis Is Her Name" (Ashbery), Supp. Ill, Part 1,19 Andersen, Hans Christian, I, 441; Supp. I, Part 2,622

Anderson, Carter A., IV, 307 Anderson, Charles R., 1,473; III, 96; IV, 189; Supp. I, Part 1, 356,360, 368,371,372 Anderson, Clara, see Sandburg, Mrs. August (Clara Anderson) Anderson, David D., 1,119,120 Anderson, Frances, 1,231 Anderson, Henry J., Supp. I, Part 1, 156 Anderson, Irwin M., 1,98-99 Anderson, Judith, HI, 399 Anderson, Karl, 1,99,103 Anderson, Margaret, 1,103; III, 471 Anderson, Margaret Bartlett, III, 171 Anderson, Mary Jane, see Lanier, Mrs. Robert Sampson (Mary Jane Anderson) Anderson, Maxwell, III, 159,217 Anderson, Mrs. Irwin M., 1,98-99 Anderson, Mrs. Sherwood (Tennessee Mitchell), 1,100; Supp. I, Part 2, 459,460 Anderson, Robert, Supp. I, Part 1, 277 Anderson, Sherwood, 1,97-120,211, 374, 375, 384, 405, 423, 445, 480, 487,495,506,518; 0,27,38,44,55, 56,68,250-251,263,271,289,451, 456-457; HI, 220, 224, 241, 382383,453,483,545,576,579; IV, 27, 40,46,190,207,433,451,482;Supp. I, Part 2,378,430,459,472,613 Anderson, Stanley P., n, 292 Anderssen, A., HI, 252 Andral, Gabriel, Supp. I, Part 1,302 "Andrew Jackson" (Masters), Supp. I, Part 2,472 Andrews, Kenneth R., IV, 212 Andrews, Wayne, IV, 310,329 Andreyev, Leonid Nikolaevich, 1,53; 11,425 Andria (Terence), IV, 363 "Anecdote of the Jar" (Stevens), IV, 83-84 "Angel at the Grave,The" (Wharton), IV, 310 Angel City (Shepard), Supp. Ill, Part 2,432,445 "Angel Is My Watermark!, The" (Miller), III, 180 "Angel Levine" (Malamud), Supp. I, Part 2,431,432,433-434,437 Angel of Bethesda, The (Mather), Supp. II, Part 2,464

ANGE-APPE / 641 " Angelof theBridge,The" (Cheever), Supp. I, Part 1,186-187 "Angel of the Odd, The" (Poe), III, 425 "Angel on the Porch, An" (Wolfe), IV, 451 "Angel Surrounded by Paysans" (Stevens), IV, 93 Angel That Troubled the Waters, The (Wilder), IV, 356,357-358 "Angel, The" (Buck), Supp. II, Part 1, 127 Angell, Carol, Supp. I, Part 2,655 Angell, Katharine Sergeant,see White, Mrs. E. B. (Katharine Sergeant Angell) Angell, Roger, Supp. I, Part 2,655 Angels and Earthly Creatures (Wylie), Supp. I, Part 2,709,713,724-730 "Angels of the Love Affair" (Sexton), Supp. II, Part 2,692 Angle of Ascent (Hayden), Supp. II, Part 1,363,367,370 Angle, Paul M.,HI, 597 Anglo-Saxon Century, The (Dos Passos), 1,474-475,483 Angoff, Charles, 1,262; HI, 107,121, 408; IV, 23 "Angola Question Mark" (Hughes), Supp. I, Part 1,344 Angry Wife, The (Sedges), Supp. II, Part 1,125 "Angst and Animism in the Poetry of Sylvia Plath" (Perloff), Supp. I, Part 2,548 Angus, D. and S., Ill, 240 "Animal, Vegetable, and Mineral" (Bogan), Supp. Ill, Part 1,66 Animal and Vegetable Physiology Considered with Reference to Natural Theology (Roget), Supp. I, Part 1,312 "Animals, The" (Merwin), Supp. Ill, Part 1,348 Ankor Wat (Ginsberg), Supp. II, Part 1,323 "Ann Garner" (Agee), 1,27 Ann Vickers (Lewis), II, 453 Anna Christie (O'Neill), III, 386,389, 390 Anna Karenina (Tolstoi), 1,10; II, 290 "Anna Karenina" (Trilling), Supp. DI, Part 2,508 "Anna Who Was Mad" (Sexton), Supp. II, Part 2,692 Anne, Queen, D, 524; IV, 145

Anne Brads treet(PieTcy),Supp.l,Purt 1,123 Anne Bradstreet: uThe Tenth Muse" (White), Supp. I, Part 1,123 Anne Bradstreet: The Worldly Puritan (Stanford), Supp. I, Part 1,123 "Anne Bradstreet's 'Contemplations': Patterns of Form and Meaning" (Rosenfeld), Supp. I, Part 1,123 "Anne Bradstreet's Poetic Voices" (Requa), Supp. I, Part 1,107,123 "Anniad, The" (Brooks), Supp. Ill, Part 1,77,78 Annie Allen (Brooks), Supp. Ill, Part 1,76-79 Annie Kilburn, a Novel (Howells), II, 275,286,287 "Another August" (Merrill), Supp. ID, Part 1,326 Another Country (Baldwin), Supp. I, Part L 51, 52, 56-58, 63, 67, 337; Supp. II, Part 1,40 "Another Country, Another Time" (Strandley), Supp. I, Part 1,71 "Another Country: Baldwin's New York Novel" (Thelwell), Supp. I, Part 1,71 "Another Night in the Ruins" (Kinnell),Supp.III,Part 1,239,251 Another Part of the Forest (Hellman), Supp. I, Part 1,282-283,297 Another Time (Auden), Supp. II, Part It 15 "Another upon the Same" (Taylor), IV, 161 "Another Voice" (Wilbur), Supp. DI, Part 2,557 "Another Wife" (Anderson), 1,114 Anouilh, Jean, Supp. I, Part 1, 286288,297 Ansky,S.,IV,6 "Answer,The" (Jeffers), Supp. n, Part 2,423 Answered Prayers: The Unfinished Novel (Capote), Supp. Ill, Part t 113,125,131-132 Antaeus (Wolfe), IV, 461 "Ante-Bellum Sermon, An" (Dunbar), Supp. II, Part 1,203-204 Antheil, George, III, 471,472; IV, 404 Anthology of Twentieth-Century Brazilian Poetry (eds. Bishop and Brasil), Supp. I, Part 1,94 Anthon,Kate,I,452 Anthony, Katharine, Supp. I, Part 1, 46

Anthony, Saint, III, 395 "Anthropologist as Hero, The" (Sontag), Supp. Ill, Part 2,451 Anthropos: The Future of Art (Cummings),I,430 Antichrist (Nietzsche), III, 176 "Anti-Feminist Woman,The" (Rich), Supp. I, Part 2,550 Antigone (Sophocles), Supp. I, Part 1, 284 Antiphon, The (Barnes), Supp. Ill, Part 1,43-44 "Antiquities" (Mather), Supp. II, Part 2,452 "Antiquity of Freedom, The" (Bryant), Supp. I, Part 1,168 "Antislavery Tocsin, An" (Douglass), Supp. HI, Part 1,171 Antoine, Andre, III, 387 Antony and Cleopatra (Shakespeare), 1,285 "Antony on Behalf of the Play" (Burke), 1,284 "Anywhere Out of This World" (Baudelaire), II, 552 Apollinaire, Guillaume, 1,432; II, 529; III, 196; IV, 80 Apologies to thelroquois (Wilson), IV, 429 "Apology, An" (Malamud), Supp. I, Part 2,435,437 "Apology for Bad Dreams" (Jeffers), Supp. II, Part 2,427,438 "Apology for Crudity, An" (Anderson), 1,109 Apology for Poetry (Sidney), Supp. II, Part 1,105 "Apostle of the Tules, An" (Harte), Supp. II, Part 1,356 "Apostrophe to a Pram Rider" (White), Supp. I, Part 2,678 "Apostrophe to Man (on reflecting that the world is ready to go to war again)" (Millay), III, 127 "Apostrophe to Vincentine, The" (Stevens), IV, 90 "Apotheosis of Martin Luther King, The" (Hardwick),Supp.in, Part 1, 203-204 "Appeal to Progressives, An" (Wilson), IV, 429 Appeal to Reason (Paine), 1,490 Appeal to the World, An (Du Bois), Supp. II, Part 1,184 Appearance and Reality (Bradley), I, 572

APPEL-ARVI / 642 Appel, Alfred, Jr., OI, 266; IV, 284 "Appendix to 'The Anniad'" (Brooks), Supp. HI, Part 1,77 "Apple,The" (Kinnell), Supp. ffl, Part 1,250 Applegarth, Mabel, D, 465,478 Appleseed, Johnny (pseudonym),see Chapman, John (Johnny Appleseed) Appleton, Frances, see Longfellow, Mrs. Henry Wadsworth (Frances Appleton) Appleton, Nathan, 0,488 Appleton, Thomas Gold, Supp. I, Part 1,306, Part 2,415 "Applicant,The" (Plath), Supp. I, Part 2,535,544,545 Appointment in Samarra (O'Hara),m, 361, 363-364, 365-367, 371, 374, 375,383 "Approach to Thebes, The" (Kunitz), Supp. in, Part 1,265-267 "Approaches, The" (Merwin), Supp. Ill, Part 1,350 "Approaching Artaud" (Sontag), Supp. Ill, Part 2,470-471 "Apres-midi d'un faune, L"' (Mallarm6),III,8 "April" (Winters), Supp. II, Part 2, 788 April Galleons (Ashbery), Supp. Ill, Part 1,26 "April Galleons" (Ashbery), Supp. HI, Part 1,26 April Hopes (Howells), II, 285,289 "April Lovers" (Ransom), ffl, 489-490 "April Today Main Street" (Olson), Supp. II, Part 2,581 April Twilights (Gather), 1,313 Aptheker, Herbert, IV, 118 Aquinas, Saint Thomas, 1,13,14,265, 267; HI, 270 Arabian Nights, I, 204; D, 8; Supp. I, Part 2,584,599 "Araby"(Joyce),I,174 Aragon, Louis, 1,429; III, 471 Arbuthnott, John (pseudonym), see Henry, O. Archaeologist of Morning (Olson), Supp. II, Part 2,557 "Archaic Maker, The" (Merwin), Supp. Ill, Part 1,357 "Archaically New" (Moore), Supp. I, Part 1,97 Archer, William, IV, 131

"Archibald Higbie" (Masters), Supp. I, Part 2,461 "Architect, The" (Bourne), 1,223 "Architecture of Walter Mitty's Secret Life, The" (Sundell), Supp. I, Part 2,627 Archives of Maryland, 1,131 "Are You a Doctor?" (Carver), Supp. IH, Part 1,139-141 Arena (publication), 1,407 Arendt, Hannah, D, 390,544; Supp. I, Part 2,570 Arensberg, Walter, IV, 408 A reopagitica (Milton), Supp. I, Part 2, 422 Argonaut (publication), 1,1% "Argonautsof'49,California'sGolden Age" (Harte), Supp. H, Part 1,353, 355 Aria da Capo (Millay), III, 137-138 Ariel (Plath), Supp. I, Part 2,526,539, 541 "Ariel" (Plath), Supp. I, Part 2, 542, 546 "Ariel Poems" (Eliot), 1,579 Arise, Arise (Zukofsky), Supp. Ill, Part 2,619,629 Aristides the Just, D, 9 "Aristocracy" (Emerson), II, 6 Aristocracy and Justice (More), 1,223 Aristophanes, 1,436; D, 577; Supp. I, Part 2,406 Aristotle, 1,58,265,280,527; H, 9,12, 198,536; III, 20,115,145,157,362, 422,423;IV,10,18,74-75,89; Supp. I, Part 1,104,296, Part 2,423 Arkin, Alan, D, 588 "Armadillo, The" (Bishop), Supp. I, Part 1,93 "Armageddon" (Ransom), III, 489, 492 Armies of the Night, The (Mailer), III, 39-40,41,42,44,45,46 Arminius, Jacobus, 1,557 Armored A ttack (film), Supp. I, Part 1, 281 Arms, George T., 0,293,294,509 Arms, George W., Supp. I, Part 1,173, 225,319, Part 2,416-417,426,706 Armstrong, A. Joseph, Supp. I, Part 2, 402 Armstrong, George, Supp. I, Part 2, 386 Arnavon, Cyrille, Supp. I, Part 1,226 Arner, Robert, Supp. I, Part 1,226

Arnett, Carroll, ffl, 550 Arnett, Wiliard E., HI, 622 Arnold family, n, 404 Arnold, George W., Supp. I, Part 2, 411 Arnold, Matthew, 1,222,228,275; D, 20,110,338,541; III, 604; IV, 349; Supp. I, Part 2,416,417,419,529, 552,602 Arnold, Olga, Supp. I, Part 2,626 Arnold, Thurman, Supp. I, Part 2,645 Around about America (Caldwell), I, 290 Arrowsmith (Lewis), I, 362; II, 445446,449 Arrowsmith, William, HI, 289 "Ars Poetica" (MacLeish), HI, 9-10 " Ars Poetica: Some Recent Criticism" (Wright), Supp. HI, Part 2,603 "Art" (Emerson), II, 13 "Art and Neurosis" (Trilling), Supp. Ill, Part 2,502 Art and Technics (Mumford), Supp. II, Part 2,483 Art as Experience (Dewey), 1,266 Art by Subtraction (Reid), IV, 41 Art de toucher le Clavecin, U (Couperin),III,464 Art of James Thurber, The (Tobias), Supp. I, Part 2,626 Art of Sylvia Plath, The (Newman), Supp. I, Part 2,527,548 Art of the Moving Picture, The (Lindsay), Supp. I, Part 2,376,391-392, 394 "Art of Theodore Dreiser, The" (Bourne), 1,235 Arte of English Poesie (Puttenham), Supp. I, Part 1,113 Arthur Mervyn; or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 (Brown), Supp. I, Part 1, 137-140,144 "Artificial Nigger, The" (O'Connor), 111,343,351,356,358 Artist, The, a Drama without Words (Mencken), III, 104 "Artistic Conscience of Vachel Lindsay, The" (Massa),Supp.I,Part2,402 "Artistry of Whittier's Margaret Smith's Journal, The" (Ringe), Supp. I, Part 2,706 "Artists' and Models' Ball, The" (Brooks), Supp. HI, Part 1,72 Arvin, Newton, 1,259; 0,23,245,508, 509; III, 96

AS-AUGU / 643 " As Flowers Are" (Kunitz), Supp. Ill, Part 1,265 "As I Ebb'd with the Ocean of Life" (Whitman), IV, 342,345-346 As I Lay Dying (Faulkner), II, 60-61, 69,73,74; IV, 100 "As I Lay with My Head in Your Lap, Camerado" (Whitman), IV, 347 "As I Walked Out One Evening" (Auden), Supp. II, Part 1,13 "As I Went Down by Havre de Grace" (Wylie), Supp. I, Part 2,723 "As One Put Drunk into the PacketBoat" (Ashbery),Supp.III,Part 1, 18 As We Know (Ashbery), Supp. Ill, Part 1,9,21-25 "As We Know" (Ashbery), Supp. Ill, Part 1,21-22 "As Weary Pilgrim" (Bradstreet), Supp. I, Part 1,103,109,122 "As You Like It" (Chopin), Supp. I, Part 1,217 As You Like It (Shakespeare), Supp. I, Part 1,308 Ascent of F6, The (Auden), Supp. II, Part 1,11,13 Asch, Sholem, IV, 1,4,9,11 "Ash Can" school, IV, 409 Ash, Lee, IV, 23 Ash Wednesday (Eliot), I, 570, 574575,578-579,580,582,584,585 Ashbery, John, Supp. I, Part 1, 96; Supp. Ill, Part \ 1-29, Part 2,541 "Ashes of the Beacon" (Bierce),!, 209 Ashford, Deborah, Supp. I, Part 2,548 Ashford, Margaret Mary (Daisy), II, 426 Ashmore, Jerome, III, 622 Asian Figures (Merwin), Supp. HI, Part 1,341 Asinof, Eliot, 11,424 Ask Me Tomorrow (Cozzens), 1,365367,379 Ask Your Mama (Hughes), Supp. I, Part 1,339,341-342 "Aspen and the Stream, The" (Wilbur), Supp. in, Part 2,555,556 "Asphodel" (Welty), IV, 265,271 Assassins, The (Oates), Supp. II, Part 2,512,517-519 "Assault" (Millay), III, 130-131 Asselineau, Roger, 1,119; IV, 212,354 Asselnian, Roger, III, 408

"Assemblage of Husbands and Wives, An" (Lewis), II, 455-456 Assembly (O'Hara), III, 361 Assistant, The (Malamud), Supp. I, Part 2,427,428,429,431,435,441445,451 Assommoir, L'(Zola), II, 291; III, 318 ^550ft^Pro5e(Updike),IV,215-216, 218 Astorfamily,IV,311 Astoria, or, Anecdotes of an Enterprise beyond the Rocky Mountains (Irving), II, 312 44 Astounding News by Electric Express via Norfolk! The Atlantic Crossed in Three Days—Signal Triumph of Mr. Monck's Flying-Machine..." (Poe), III, 413, 420 Astraea (Holmes), III, 82 Astre, Georges- Albert, 1, 496 Astro, Richard, Supp. I, Part 2, 429, 445,452 44 Astrological Fricassee" (Miller),IH, 187 Aswell, Edward C, IV, 458, 459, 461 "At a Bar in Charlotte Amalie" (Updike), IV, 214 "At Cheniere Caminada" (Chopin), Supp. I, Part 1,220 44 At Chinese Checkers" (Berryman), 1,182 At Fault (Chopin), Supp. I, Part 1, 207, 209-211,220 At Heaven's Gate (Warren), IV, 243, 247-248,251 At Liberty (Williams), IV, 378 44 At Melville's Tomb" (Crane), 1, 393 At Night the Salmon Move (Carver), Supp. Ill, Part 1,142 "At North Farm" (Ashbery), Supp. Ill, Part 1, 1-2 44 At Sea" (Hemingway), II, 258 44 At Shaft 11" (Dunbar), Supp. D, Part 1,212 At Sundown (Whittier), Supp. I, Part 2,704 "At the Birth of an Age" (Jeffers), Supp. H, Part 2, 432 "At the End of War" (Eberhart), I, 522-523 44 At the Executed Murderer's Grave" (Wright), Supp. Ill, Part 2,595,597 44 At the Fishhouses" (Bishop), Supp. I, Part 1,90, 92

"At the Landing" (Welty), IV, 265266 At the Root of Stars (Barnes), Supp. Ill, Part 1,34 "At the Slackening of the Tide" (Wright), Supp. Ill, Part 2,597 "At the Tomb of Walt Whitman" (Kunitz), Supp. DI, Part 1,262 "Atavism of John Tom Little Bear, The" (O. Henry), Supp. II, Part 1, 410 Atheism Refuted: in a Discourse to Prove the Existence of God (Paine), Supp. I, Part 2,517 Athenaeum (publication), 1,336; 11,302 "Ath£naise" (Chopin), Supp. I, Part 1,219-220 Atherton, Gertrude, 1,199,207-208 Atkinson, Brooks, IV, 189,288 Atkinson, Clinton J., IV, 425 Atlantic (magazine), Supp. I, Part 1, 174, 225, 300, 306, 312, 313, 350, 357,362, Part 2,406,414,418,419, 421,490,530,593 Atlantic Monthly (magazine), I, 214, 217,218,228,229,230,358,458; D, 273, 274-275, 277, 322, 324, 328, 329, 345, 397-398, 400, 401, 402, 406,407,408,409,410,465; III, 5455,64,91-92,292,461;IV,195,199, 374,375; see also Atlantic Attitudes toward History (Burke), I, 274 44 Au Bai Musette" (Van Vechten), Supp. II, Part 2,735 44 Au Jardin" (Pound), III, 465-466 44 Au Vieux Jardin" (Aldington), Supp. I, Part 1,257 Auchincloss, Louis, 1,24,375; D, 413, 584; ni, 66,72,384; IV, 329 "Auction, The" (Crane), 1,411 Auden, W. H., 1,71,381,539; n, 171, 367,368,371,376,586; HI, 17,134, 217, 269, 271, 292, 476-477, 504, 527,530,542,615; IV, 48,136,138, 240,430; Supp. I, Part 1,270, Part 2, 552,610,626; Supp. II, Part 1,1-28; Supp. Ill, Part 1,2,3,14,26,27,60, 61,64,341, Part 2,591,595 Audubon, John James, III, 210; IV, 265 Auerbach, Eric, III, 453 Auerbach, Nina, Supp. I, Part 1,40,46 "August" (Rich), Supp. I, Part 2,564

AUGU-BACT / 644 " August 1968" (Auden),Supp. II, Part 1,25 Augustine, Saint, 1,279,290; D, 537; III, 259,270,292,300; IV, 69,126 "Aunt Cynthy Dallett" (Jewett), II, 393 "Aunt Imogen*9 (Robinson), III, 521 "Aunt Jemima of the Ocean Waves" (Hayden),Supp.II,Part 1,368,379 Aunt Jo's Scrapbooks (Alcott), Supp. I, Part 1,43 "Aunt Mary" (Stowe), Supp. I, Part 2, 587 "Aunt Sarah" (Lowell), II, 554 "Aurorasof Autumn,The" (Stevens), Supp. Ill, Parti, 12 Auser, Cortland P., Supp. I, Part 1,198 "Auspex" (Lowell), Supp. I, Part 2, 424 "Austen and Alcott on Matriarchy" (Auerbach), Supp. I, Part 1,46 Austen, Jane, 1,130,339,375,378; O, 272,278,287,56&-569,577; IV, 8; Supp. I, Part 1,267, Part 2,656,715 Austin, George L., n, 509 Austin, NealF.,IV, 473 Austin, Samuel, 1,564 "Authentic Unconscious, The" (Trilling), Supp. Ill, Part 2,512 "Author at Sixty, The" (Wilson), IV, 426 "Author to Her Book, The" (Bradstreet), Supp. I, Part 1,119 "Auto Wreck" (Shapiro), Supp. D, Part 2,706 "Autobiographic Chapter, An" (Bourne), 1,236 "Autobiographical Note" (Miller), HI, 174-175 "Autobiographical Notes" (Baldwin), Supp. I, Part 1,54 "Autobiographical Notes" (Holmes), Supp. I, Part 1,301 Autobiography (Cournos), Supp. I, Part 1,275 Autobiography (Franklin), n, 102,103, 108,121-122,302 Autobiography (James), 1,462 "Autobiography" (MacLeish), III, 20 Autobiography (Van Buren), III, 473 Autobiography (Williams), Supp. I, Part 1,254,275 Autobiography (Zukofsky), Supp. Ill, Part 2,627

Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, The (Stein), IV, 26,30,35,43 Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, The (Johnson), Supp. II, Part 1,33, 194 Autobiography of Malcolm X (Little), Supp. I, Part 1,66 Autobiography of Mark Twain, The (Twain), IV, 209 Autobiography of Mark Van Doren, The (Van Doren), Supp. I, Part 2, 626 Autobiography ofW. E. B. Du Bois, The (Du Bois), Supp. II, Part 1, 159,186 Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table, The (Holmes), Supp. I, Part 1,306-307 "Automotive Passacaglia" (Miller), 111,186 "Autopsy Room,The" (Carver), Supp. Ill, Part 1,137 "Autre Temps" (Wharton), IV, 320, 324 "Autumn Afternoon" (Farrell), II, 45 "Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio" (Wright), Supp. Ill, Part 2, 599 "Autumn Courtship, An" (Caldwell), 1,309 Autumn Garden, The (Hellman), Supp. I, Part 1,285-286,290 "Autumn Garden, The: Mechanics and Dialectics" (Felheim),Supp.I, Part 1,297 "Autumn Holiday, An" (Jewett), II, 391 "Autumn Musings" (Harte),Supp.II, Part 1,336 "Autumn Within" (Longfellow), II, 499 "Autumn Woods" (Bryant), Supp. I, Part 1,164 "Autumnal" (Eberhart), 1,540-541 " Aux Imagistes" (Williams), Supp. I, Part 1,266 Avedon, Richard, Supp. I, Part 1,58 Avenue Bearing the Initial of Christ into the New World: Poems 19461964 (Kinnell), Supp. HI, Part 1, 235,239-241 Avery, John, Supp. I, Part 1,153 Avon's Harvest (Robinson), III, 510 Awake and Sing/ (Odets), Supp. II, Part 2,530,531,536-538,550

Awakening, The (Chopin), Supp. I, Part 1,200,201,202,211,220-225 Awful Rowing To ward God, The(Sexton), Supp. II, Part 2,694-696 Awkward Age, The (James), II, 332 Axel's Castle: A Study in the Imaginative Literature of 1870 to 1930 (Wilson),I,185;n,577;IV,428,431, 438,439,443 Axthelm, Peter M., 1,165 B. F. 's Daughter (Marquand), III, 59, 65,68,69 Babbitt (Lewis), II, 442,443-445,446, 447,449; III, 63-64,394; IV, 326 Babbitt, Irving, 1,247; D, 456; III, 315, 461, 613; IV, 439; Supp. I, Part 2, 423 Babcock, Elisha, Supp. II, Part 1,69 Babel, Isaac, IV, 1 Babeuf, Francois, Supp. I, Part 2,518 Bo^Do//(Wiiliams),rV,383,386,387, 389,395 "Baby Face" (Sandburg), III, 584 "Babylon Revisited" (Fitzgerald), II, 95 "Baccalaureate" (MacLeish), 111,4 Bach, Johann Sebastian, Supp. I, Part l,363;Supp. Ill, Part 2,611,612,619 Bache, Richard, Supp. I, Part 2,504 Bachelard, Gaston, III, 431 Bachofen, J. J., Supp. I, Part 2,560,567 Back Bog Beast Bait (Shepard), Supp. HI, Part 2,437,438 Back to Methuselah (Shaw), IV, 64 "Background with Revolutionaries** (MacLeish), III, 14-15 "Backgrounds of Lowell's Satire in 'The Bigelow Papers' " (Voss), Supp. I, Part 2,426 "Backlash Blues, The" (Hughes), Supp. I, Part 1,343 Backman, Melvin, D, 76 "Backwacking" (Ellison), Supp. II, Part 1,248 "Backward Glance o'er Travel'd Roads, A" (Whitman), IV, 348 Bacon, Francis, O,l, 8,11,15-16,111; III, 284; Supp. I, Part 1,310,388 Bacon, Leonard, n, 530 Bacon, Roger, IV, 69 "Bacterial War, The" (Nemerov), HI, 272

BAD-BARN / 645 "Bad Music, The" (Jarrell), II, 369 "Badger" (Clare), II, 387 Badger, A. G., Supp. I, Part 1,356 Baender, Paul, D, 125 "Bah£*u'll£h in the Garden of Ridwan" (Hayden),Supp.II,Partl, 370,378 Bailey, Gamaliel, Supp. I, Part 2,587, 590 Bailyn, Bernard, Supp. I, Part 2,484, 506,525 Baird,Peggy,I,385,401 Bakan, David, 1,59 Baker, Carlos, D, 259, 270; IV, 425; Supp. I, Part 1,198 Baker, George Pierce, ffl, 387; IV,453, 455 Baker, Samuel Bernard, Supp. I, Part 2,626 Baker, Sheridan, D, 270 Bakunin, Mikhail Aleksandrovich, IV, 429 Balakian,Nona, 11,608; 111,48-49; IV, 118 Balch, Emily Greene, Supp. I, Part 1, 25 Balcony, The (Genet), 1,84 Bald Soprano, The (lonesco), 1,74 Baldanza, Frank, D, 607 Baldwin, Alice, Supp. I, Part 2,626 Baldwin, David, Supp. I, Part 1,47,48, 49,50,51,54,65,66 Baldwin, James, III, 47; IV, 496; Supp. I, Part 1,47-71,337,341; Supp. II, Part 1,40; Supp. HI, Part 1,125 Baldwin, Mrs. David (Emma Berdis Jones), Supp.I, Part 1,47,48,49,65 Baldwin, Roger, Supp. I, Part 1,12 Baldwin, Samuel, Supp. I, Part 1,48 "Baldwin's Autobiographical Essays: The Problem of Negro Identity" (Lee), Supp. I, Part 1,70 "Ballad: Between the Box Cars" (Warren), IV, 245 "Ballad of Billie Potts, The" (Warren), IV, 241-242,243,253 "Ballad of Carmilhan, The" (Longfellow), II, 505 "Ballad of Jesus of Nazareth, A" (Masters), Supp. I, Part 2,459 "Ballad of John Cable and Three Gentlemen" (Merwin), Supp. Ill, Part 1,342 "Ballad of NatTurner,The" (Hayden), Supp. II, Part 1,378

"Ballad of Pearl May Lee, The" (Brooks), Supp. Ill, Part 1,74,75 Ballad of Remembrance, A (Hayden), Supp. II, Part 1,367 "Ballad of Remembrance, A" (Hayden), Supp. II, Part 1368,372,373 "Ballad of Sue Ellen Westerfield,The" (Hayden), Supp. II, Part 1,364 "Ballad of the Children of the Czar, The" (Schwartz), Supp. II, Part 2, 649 "Ballad of the Goodly Fere," III, 458 "Ballad of the Harp-Weaver" (Millay), 111,135 "Ballad of the Sad Caf6, The" (McCullers), II, 586,587,588,592, 595,596-600,604,605,606 "Ballad of Trees and the Master, A" (Lamer), Supp. I, Part 1,370 "Ballade" (MacLeish), III, 4 "Ballade for the Duke of Orleans" (Wilbur), Supp. HI, Part 2,556 "Ballade of Broken Flutes, The" (Robinson), III, 505 "Ballade of Meaty Inversions" (White), Supp. I, Part 2,676 Ballads and Other Poems (Longfellow), II, 489; III, 412,422 Ballads for Sale (Lowell), II, 527 "Ballads of Lenin" (Hughes), Supp. I, Part 1,331 "Ballet of a Buffoon, The" (Sexton), Supp. II, Part 2,693 "Ballet of the Fifth Year, The" (Schwartz), Supp. II, Part 2,650 Ballew, Leighton M., 1,95 Balliett,Carl,Jr.,IV,376 "Balloon Hoax, The" (Poe), III, 413, 420 Ballou, Robert O., 0,365 Balo (Toomer), Supp. Ill, Part 2,484 Balsan, Consuelo, IV, 313-314 Baltimore Afro-American (newspaper), Supp. I, Part 1,326,331 Baltimore Evening Sun (newspaper), HI, 104,105,106,110,116 Baltimore Herald (newspaper), HI, 102 Baltimore, Lord, 1,132 Baltimore Saturday Visitor (newspaper), III, 411 Baltimore Sun (newspaper), III, 102, 103,104,105,110; Supp. I, Part 1, 365

Balzac, Honor* de, 1, 103, 123, 339, 376, 474, 485, 499, 509, 518; D, 307, 322, 324, 328, 336, 337; III, 61, 174, 184, 320, 382; IV, 192; Supp. I, Part 2, 647 Bancal, Jean, Supp. I, Part 2, 514 Bancroft, George, 1, 544; Supp. I, Part

2,479

Band of Angels (Warren), IV,245,254-

255 Banfield, Raffaello de, IV, 400 Bang the Drum Slowly (Harris), II, 424-425 "Banjo Song, A" (Dunbar), Supp. II, Part 1,197 "Bank of England Restriction, The" (Adams), 1, 4 Bankhead, Tallulah, IV, 357 Banta, Martha, D, 292 Baptism, TTie (Baraka), Supp. II, Part 1,40,41-42,43 Baraka, Imamu Amiri (LeRoi Jones), Supp. I, Part 1, 63; Supp. II, Part 1, 29^^3,247,250; Supp. Ill, Part 1,83 "Barbara Frietchie" ( Whittier), Supp. I, Part 2, 695-6% "Barbarian Status of Women, The" ( Veblen), Supp. I, Part 2, 636-637

Barbary Shore (miller),III,27,28,30-

31,33,35,36,40,44 "Barclay of Ury" (Whittier), Supp. I, Part 2, 693 Bard of Savagery, The: Thorstein Veblen and Modern Social Theory (Diggins), Supp. I, Part 2, 650 Bare Hills, The (Winters), Supp. II, Part 2, 786, 788 "Bare Hills,The" (Winters), Supp. II, Part 2, 790 "BarefootBoy,The" (Whittier), Supp. I, Part 2, 691, 699-700 Barely and Widely (Zukofsky), Supp. Ill, Part 2, 627, 628, 635 Barfield, Owen, ffl, 274, 279 "Bargain Lost, The" (Poe), III, 411 Barker, George, 1, 47 Barksdale, Richard, Supp. I, Part 1, 69,341,346 Barlow, Joel, Supp. I, Part 1, 124, Part 2,51 l,515,521;Supp.II,Part 1,6586,268 Barlow, Ruth Baldwin (Mrs. Joel Barlow), Supp. fl, Part 1, 69 "Barn Burning" (Faulkner), II, 72,73

BARN-BECK / 646 Barnaby Rudge (Dickens), III, 421 Barnard, Ellsworth, HI, 525 Barnard, Frederick, Supp. I, Part 2, 684 Barnes, Djuna, Supp. Ill, Part 1,31-46 Barnes, John S., IV, 472 Barnett, Samuel, Supp. I, Part 1,2 Barnouw, Erik, m, 167 Barnstone, Willis, Supp. I, Part 2,458, 477 Barnum, P. T., Supp. I, Part 2,703 Baroja,Pio,I,478 "Baroque Comment " (Bogan),Supp. ID, Part 1,56,58 "Baroque Wall-Fountain in the Villa Sciarra, A*' (Wilbur), Supp. Ill, Part 2,553 Barr, Robert, 1,409,424 Barren Ground (Glasgow), D, 174,175, 178, 179, 184-185, 186, 187, 188, 189,191,192,193,194 Barres, Auguste M., 1,228 Barrett, Ralph, Supp. I, Part 2,462 Barrow, John, H, 18 Barrus, Clara, 1,220 Bartas, Seigneur du, IV, 157 Earth, John, 1,121-143; Supp. I, Part 1, 100; Supp. Ill, Part 1,217 Barth, Karl, III, 40,258,291,303,309; IV, 225 Bartholomay, Julia, III, 289 Bartleby In Manhattan and Other Essays (Hardwick), Supp. HI, Part 1, 204,210 "Bartleby, the Scrivener; A Story of Wall-Street" (Melville), III, 88-89 Bartlet,Phebe,I,562 Bartlett, John, H, 171 Barton, Bruce, HI, 14 Barton, Priscilla, see Morison, Mrs. Samuel Eliot (Priscilla Barton) Bartram, John, Supp. I, Part 1,244 Bartram, William, H, 313 Barzun, Jacques, n, 556 "Base of All Metaphysics, The*' (Whitman), IV, 348 Basin and Range (McPhee), Supp. Ill, Part 1,309 "Basket, The" (Lowell), II, 522 "Basketball and Beefeaters" (McPhee), Supp. m, Part 1,2% Basler,RoyP.,ni,598 Bassan, Maurice, 1,424,426 Bastard, The (Caldwell), I, 291, 292, 308

"Batard" (London), II, 468-469 Bate, W.J., 0,531 Bates, Sylvia Chatfield, D, 586 "Bath, The" (Carver), Supp. Ill, Part 1,144,145 "Batter my heart, three person'd God" (Donne), Supp. I, Part 2,726 Battle and the Books, The (Stone), Supp. I, Part 2,626 "Battle Hymn of the Republic" (Sandburg), III, 585 "Battle Hymn of the Republic, The" (Howe), III, 505 Battle of Angels (Williams), IV, 380, 381,383,385,386,387 "Battle of Lovell's Pond, The" (Longfellow), II, 493 Battle of the Atlantic, The (Morison), Supp. I, Part 2,490 "Battle of the Baltic,The" (Campbell), Supp. I, Part 1,309 Battle-Ground, The (Glasgow), D, 175, 176,177,178,193 Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War (Melville), II, 53&-539; III, 92; IV, 350 "Battler, The" (Hemingway), II, 248 "Baudelaire" (Schwartz), Supp. II, Part 2,663 Baudelaire, Charles P., 1,58,63,384, 389,420,569; H, 543,544-545,552; III, 137,141-142,143,144,409,417, 418,421,428,432,448,466,474;IV, 74,79,80,87,211,286;Supp.I,Part 1, 271; Supp. Ill, Part 1,4,6,105 Baum, Catherine B., fl, 221 Baum, L. Frank, Supp. I, Part 2,621 Baum,S.V.,I,449 Baumann, Walter, III, 478 Baumbach, Jonathan, 1,165; III, 242, 243, 360; IV, 118; Supp. I, Part 2, 452 Baxandall, Lee, 1,95 Baxter, Annette, III, 192 Baxter, Richard, III, 199; IV, 151,153; Supp. I, Part 2,683 Bay Psalm Book, Supp. I, Part 1,106 Baylies, William, Supp. I, Part 1,153 Bayou Folk (Chopin), Supp. I, Part 1, 200,216,218 Bazalgette, Leon, IV, 189 Be Angry at the Sun (Jeffers),Supp.II, Part 2,434 Be Glad You're Neurotic (Bisch), Supp. I, Part 2,608

Beach, Joseph Warren, 1,70,119,309, 311,500,520; 0,27,52,341;III, 72, 319; IV, 71,473 Beach, Leonard, n, 318 Beach, Sylvia, IV, 404 Bean Eaters, The (Brooks), Supp. Ill, Part 1,79-81 Bean, Robert Bennett, Supp. II, Part 1,170 "Beanstalk Country, The" (Williams), IV,383 "Bear, The" (Faulkner), II, 71-72,73, 228; IV, 203 "Bear, The" (Kinnell), Supp. in, Part 1,244 Beard, Charles, 1,214; IV, 429; Supp. I, Part 2, 481, 490, 492, 632, 640, 643,647 Beard, James, 1,341,356 Beard, Mary, Supp. I, Part 2,481 "Bearded Oaks" (Warren), IV, 240 Beardsley, Aubrey, 0,56; IV, 77 Beast in Me, The (Thurber), Supp. I, Part 2,615 "Beast in the Jungle, The" (James), I, 570; H, 335 "Beat! Beat! Drums!" (Whitman), 111,585 Beatty, General Sam, 1,193 Beatty, Richard Croom, II, 221; Supp. I, Part 2,425 Beaumont, Francis, Supp. I, Part 2, 422 "Beauties of Santa Cruz, The" (Freneau), Supp. II, Part 1,260 Beautiful and the Damned, The (Fitzgerald), II, 88,89-91,93,263 Beautiful Changes, The (Wilbur), Supp. Ill, Part 2,544-550 "Beautiful Changes, The" (Wilbur), Supp. Ill, Part 2,549,550 "Beautiful Child, A" (Capote), Supp. Ill, Part 1,113,125 "Beauty" (Emerson), II, 2,5 "Beauty" (Wylie), Supp. I, Part 2,710 "Beauty and the Beast," IV, 266 Beauvoir, Simone de, IV, 477; Supp. I, Part 1, 51; Supp. Ill, Part 1, 200201,208 Beaver, Joseph, Supp. I, Part 1,373 Bech: A Book (Updike), IV, 214 Beck, Dave, 1,493 Beck, Warren, H, 76; Supp. I, Part 2, 681 Becker, Carl, Supp. I, Part 2,492,493

BECK-BERD / 647 Becker, Paula, see Modersohn, Mrs. Otto (Paula Becker) Beckett, Samuel, I, 71, 91, 142, 298, 461; in, 387; IV, 95 Beckford, William, 1,204 Beckoning* (Brooks), Supp. Ill, Part 1,85 "Becky" (Toomer), Supp. Ill, Part 2, 481,483 Beddoes, Thomas Lovell, III, 469 "Bee Hunt, The" (Irving), II, 313 "Bee, The" (Lanier), Supp. I, Part 1, 364 Beebe, Maurice, D, 76; IV, 472 Beecher, Catharine, Supp. I, Part 2, 581, 582-583, 584, 586, 588, 589, 591,599 Beecher, Charles, Supp. I, Part 2,588, 589 Beecher, Edward, Supp. I, Part 2,581, 582,583,584,588,591 Beecher, Harriet, see Stowe, Harriet Beecher Beecher, Henry Ward, II, 275; Supp. I, Part 2,581 Beecher, Lyman, Supp. I, Part 2,580581,582,583,587,588,599 Beecher, Mrs. Lyman (Roxanna Foote), Supp. I, Part 2, 580-581, 582,588,599 Beer, Thomas, 1,405,426 Beerbohm, Max, HI, 472; IV, 436; Supp. I, Part 2,714 Beethoven, Ludwig van, n, 536; III, 118; IV, 274, 358; Supp. I, Part 1, 363 Befo' de War: Echoes in Negro Dialect (Gordon), Supp. II, Part 1,201 Before Adam (London), II, 466 Before Disaster (Winters), Supp. n, Part 2,786,800 "Before Disaster" (Winters), Supp. II, Part 2,801,815 "BeforeIKnocked"(Thomas),ffl,534 "Before March" (MacLeish), III, 15 "Before the Altar" (Lowell), II, 516 "Before the Birth of one of her children" (Bradstreet), Supp. I, Part 1, 118 "Begat" (Sexton),Supp. II, Part 2,693 Beggar on Horseback (Kaufman and Connelly), III, 394 "Beggar SaidSo,The" (Singer),IV, 12 Beggar's Opera, The (Gay), Supp. I, Part 2,523

"Beginning and the End, The" (Jeffers), Supp. II, Part 2,420-421, 424 "Beginning of Decadence, The" (Jeffers), Supp. II, Part 2,420 Beginning of Wisdom, The (Ben6t) I, 358 "Behavior" (Emerson), II, 2,4 Behind a Mask (Alcott), Supp. I, Part 1,36-37,43-44 "Behind a Wall" (Lowell), II, 516 "Behind Spoon River" (Van Doren), Supp. I, Part 2,478 "Behold the Key" (Malamud), Supp. I, Part 2,437 Beiliss, Mendel, Supp. I, Part 2,427, 446,447,448 Belcher, William R, III, 574 "Beleaguered City, The" (Longfellow), II, 498 Belfrey Owl (magazine), Supp. I, Part 1,320 Belfry of Bruges and Other Poems, The (Longfellow), II, 489 Belkind,Alan,I,496 Bell, Arthur, IV, 401 Bell, Clive, IV, 87 Bell, Daniel, Supp. I, Part 2,648 Bell, George E., Supp. I, Part 1,69 Bell Jar, The (Plath), Supp. I, Part 2, 526, 527, 529, 531-536, 539, 540, 541,542,544 Bell, Michael D., Supp. I, Part 1,148 Bell,Millicent,IV,329 Bell, Quentin, Supp. I, Part 2,636 "Bell Tower, The" (Melville), III, 91 Bell,Vereen,IV,234 Bell, WhitfieldJ., Jr., 11,123 Bellamy, Edward, II, 276; Supp. I, Part 2,641 Bellamy, Gladys C, IV, 213 "Belle Dollinger" (Masters), Supp. I, Part 2,463 "Belle Zoraide, La" (Chopin), Supp. I, Part 1,215-216 Belleforest, Francois de, IV, 370 Belloc, Hilary, III, 176; IV, 432 Bellow, Saul, 1,113,138-139,144-166, 375,517; 0,579; III, 40; IV, 3,19, 22,217,340;Supp.I,Part 2,428,451; Supp. II, Part 1,109 "Bells, The" (Poe), III, 593; Supp. I, Part 2,388 "Bells,The"(Sexton),Supp.II,Part2, 673

"Bells for John Whiteside's Daughter" (Ransom), III, 490 "Bellsof Lynn,The" (Longfellow), II, 498 "Bells of San Blas,The" (Longfellow), D, 490-491,493,498 Beloved (Morrison), Supp. in, Part 1, 364,372-379 Beloved Lady: A History of Jane Addams* Ideas on Reform and Peace (Farrell), Supp. I, Part 1,24, 27 Ben Franklin's Wit and Wisdom (Franklin), II, 111 Benchley, Nathaniel, Supp. I, Part 2, 626 Benchley,Robert,I,48,482;n,435;in, 53 Bend Sinister (Nabokov), ID, 253-254 Benedetti, Anna, 1,70 Benefactor, The (Sontag), Supp. in, Part 2,451,455,468,469 "Benefit Performance" (Malamud), Supp. I, Part 2,431 Ben6t, Rosemary, Supp. I, Part 2,626 Benlt, Stephen Vincent, 1,358; II, 177; 01,22,24; IV, 129; Supp. I, Part 2, 626 Bendt, William Rose, 0,530; Supp. I, Part 2,626,709,730 Benito Cereno (Lowell), II, 546 "Benito Cereno" (Melville), III, 91 Benjamin Franklin (Van Doren), Supp. I, Part 2,486 "Benjamin Pantier" (Masters), Supp. I, Part 2,461 Bennett, Anne Virginia, H, 184 Bennett, Arnold, 1,103; D, 337 Bennett, George N., 0,294 Bennett, John C., Ill, 313 Bennett, Mildred R., 1,333 Bennett, Whitman, Supp. I, Part 2,705 Benson, A. C, n, 340 Benson, Ivan, IV, 213 Benson, Jackson J., n, 270 Bentham, Jeremy, 1,279; Supp. I, Part 2,635 Bentley, Eric, Supp. I, Part 1,297 Bentley, Eric R., HI, 407; IV, 258,396 Bentley, Richard, III, 79,86 Benton, Richard P., HI, 432 Beowulf, Supp. II, Part 1,6 Bercovitch, Sacvan, Supp. I, Part 1,99, Part 2,659 Berdyaev, Nikolai, 1,494; III, 292

BERE-BIBL / 648 "Berenice" (Poe), III, 415,416,425 Berenice (Racine), II, 573 Berger, Thomas, DI, 258 Bergman, Ingmar, 1,291 Bergson,Henri,I,224;n,163,165,166, 359; HI, 8,9,488,619; IV, 86,122, 466,467 BergstrSsser, Arnold, IV, 376 Berkeley, George, n, 10,349,357,480, 554 Berland, Alwyn, IV, 142 Berlyne, Daniel £., Supp. I, Part 2,672 Bernard Clare (FarreU), II, 38,39 Bernard Malamud (Richman), Supp* I, Part 2,453 Bernard Malamud: A Collection of Critical Essays (eds. Field and Field), Supp. I, Part 2,452,453 Bernard Malamud: An Annotated C/i<»c*Ltff(Kosofsky),Supp.I,Part 2,452 Bernard Malamud and the Critics (eds. Field and Field), Supp. I, Part 2, 453 "Bernard Malamud and the Jewish Literary Tradition" (Rovit), Supp. I, Part 2,453 "Bernard Malamud and the New Life" (Tanner), Supp. I, Part 2,453 "Bernard Malamud: The Magic and the Dread" (Kazin), Supp. I, Part 2,453 "Bernard Malamud: The Sadness of Goodness" (Klein), Supp. I, Part 2, 453 "Bernard Malamud's Fiction:The Old and the New" (Solotaroff), Supp. I, Part 2,453 Bernard, F. V., Supp. I, Part 2,626 Bernard, Saint, n, 538 Bernard of Clairvaux, Saint, 1,22 Berneis, Peter, IV, 383 Bernhardt, Sarah, 1,484 Bernice (Glaspell), Supp. Ill, Part 1, 179 "Bernice BobsHer Hair" (Fitzgerald), D,88 Bernstein, Aline, IV, 455,456 Bernstein, Burton, Supp. I, Part 2,626 Bernstein, John, m, 97 Bernstein, Leonard, 1,28; Supp. I, Part 1,288,289 "Berry" (Hughes),Supp.I9Part 1,329, 330 Berry, Edmund G., D, 23

Berry, Walter, IV, 313-314,326 Berryman, John, 1,167-189,405,426, 441-442,521; H, 148,390,554; III, 273,289; IV, 138,430; Supp. I, Part 2,546; Supp. II, Part 1,109; Supp. ID, Part 2,541,561,595,596,603 Berryman, John Angus McAlpin, I, 167-168 Berryman, Mrs. John Angus McAlpin, 1,167-168 Berryman, Mrs. John, 1,168-169 Berryman's Sonnets (Berryman), I, 168,175-178 Bersani, Leo, III, 47 Berthoff, Warner, 1,426; 11,413; 111,97; IV, 448; Supp. I, Part 1,133,148, Part 2,477 Berti, Luigi, Supp. I, Part 1,275 "Bertrand Hume" (Masters), Supp. I, Part 2,463-464 Best American Poetry, The: 1988 (ed. Ashbery), Supp. Ill, Part 1,26 Best American Short Stories, 1,174; D, 587; III, 443 Best Short Plays, The (Mayorga), IV, 381 Best Short Stories by Negro Writers, The (ed. Hughes), Supp. I, Part 1, 345 Best Short Stories, The (ed. O'Brien), 1,289 Best Times, The: An Informal Memoir (DosPassos),I,475,482 Bestiaire, Le (Apollinaire), IV, 80 Bestiary, A (Wilbur), Supp. Ill, Part 2, 552 "BETANCOURT" (Baraka), Supp. II, Part 1,33,34 Bete humaine, La (Zola), III, 316,318 "Bethe" (Hellman), Supp. I, Part 1, 293 Bethel Merriday (Lewis), II, 455 Bethune, Mary McLeod, Supp. I, Part 1,333

Bethurum, Dorothy, IV, 121 "Betrayal" (Lanier), Supp. I, Part 1, 364 "Betrothed" (Bogan), Supp. Ill, Part 1,49-51 Bettelheim, Bruno, Supp. I, Part 2, 622 Better Sort, The (James), II, 335 Betty Leicester (Jewett), II, 406 Betty Leicester's Christmas (Jewett), 11,406

Between Myth and Morning: Women Awakening (Janeway), Supp. I, Part 1,46 "Between the Porch and the Altar" (Lowell), U, 540-541 "Between the World and Me" (Wright), Supp. II, Part 1,228 Between Time and Timbuktu (Vonnegut), Supp. II, Part 2,753, 759 Beum, Robert, IV, 425 Bevis, Howard L., Supp. I, Part 2,611 Bevis, John, Supp. I, Part 2,503 "Bewitched" (Wharton), IV, 316 Bewley,Marius,I,286,336,357;n,245; Supp. I, Part 1,251 Beyle, Marie Henri, see Stendhal "Beyond Charles River to the Acheron" (Lowell), II, 541 Beyond Criticism (Shapiro), Supp. II, Part 2,703,711 Beyond Culture (Trilling), Supp. Ill, Part 2,508-512 Beyond Desire (Anderson), I, 111 "Beyond the Alps" (Lowell), II, 547, 550 "Beyond the Bayou" (Chopin), Supp. I, Part 1,215 Beyond the Horizon (O'Neill), III, 389 Beyond Tragedy (Niebuhr), III, 300303 Bezanson,W.E.,III,95 Bhagavad Gita, III, 566; IV, 183 "Biafra: A People Betrayed" (Vonnegut), Supp. D, Part i 760 Bianchi, Martha Dickinson, I, 470, 472 Bible,!, 191,280,414,421,490,506; D, 6,12,15,17,108,231,237,238,252, 267,302; III, 28,199,308-309,341, 343, 350, 356, 402, 492, 519, 565, 577; IV, 11,13,42,57,60,67,152, 153, 154, 155, 164, 165, 2%, 337, 341,367,369,370,371,438; Supp. I,Part 1,4,6,63,101,104,105,113, 193,369, Part 2,388,433,494,515, 516, 517, 583, 584, 587, 589, 653, 689,690,691; see also New Testament; Old Testament; names of biblical books Biblia Americana (Mather), Supp. II, Part 2,442 Bibliography of James Russell Lowell, A (Cooke), Supp. I, Part 2,425

BIBL-BLAC / 649 Bibliography of John Greenleaf Whittier, A (Currier), Supp. I, Part 2,705 Bibliography of Oliver Wendell Holmes, A (Currier), Supp. I, Part 1,319 Bibliography of the First Editions in Book Form of James Russell Lowell, A (Livingston), Supp. I9 Part 2, 425 Bibliography of William Cullen Bryant and His Critics, 1808-1972, A (Phair), Supp. I, Part 1,173 Bid Me to Live (Doolittle), Supp. I, Part 1,258,260,268,269,270 Biencourt, M anus, III, 336 Bier, Jesse, III, 384 Bierce, Albert, 1,191,209 Bierce, Ambrose, 1,190-213,419; H, 74, 264,271; IV, 350 Bierce, Day, 1,195,199 Bierce, General Lucius Verus, 1,191 Bierce, Helen, 1,210 Bierce, Leigh, 1,195,198,208 Bierce, Marcus, 1,190,191 Bierce, Mrs. Ambrose, 1,194-195,199 Bierce, Mrs. Marcus, 1,190,191 Big Bozo, The (Glaspell), Supp. ffl, Part 1,182 Big Knife, The (Odets), Supp. II, Part 2,546,547,548 BigKnockover, 77n(Hammett),Supp. I, Part 1,292 Big Laugh, The (O'Hara), III, 362, 373-375 Big Money, The (Dos Passos), 1,482, 483,486-487,489; Supp. I, Part 2, 646,647 Big Sea, The (Hughes), Supp. I, Parti, 322,332,333; Supp. II, Part 1,233234 Big Sur (Kerouac), Supp. Ill, Part 1, 230 Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymous Bosch (Miller), HI, 189190 Big Town, The (Lardner), II, 426,429 "Big Two-Hearted River" (Hemingway), II, 249 "Big Wind" (Roethke), III, 531 Bigelow, Charles C, n, 22 Bigelow, Jacob, Supp. I, Part 1,302 Bigelow, John, Supp. I, Part 1,173 Bigelow Papers, Second Series, The (Lowell), Supp. I, Part 2,406,415416

Bigelow Papers, The (Lowell), Supp. I, Part 2,406, 407, 408, 410, 411412,415,417,424 Bigsby,C.W.E.,I,95;Supp.I,Partl,

69

-Bar (Winters), Supp. II, Part 2,792 "Bill, The" (Malamud), Supp. I, Part 2,427,430,434 Bill of Rites, a Bill of Wrongs, a Bill of Goods, A (Morris), III, 237 Billings, Gladys, see Brooks, Mrs. VanWyck Billy Budd, Sailor (Melville), III, 40, 93-95; IV, 105 "Bimini" (Hemingway), II, 258 Bingham, June, HI, 312 Bingham, Millicent Todd, 1,470,472, 473 "Binsey Poplars" (Hopkins), Supp. I, Part 1,94 Bio-Bibliography of Langston Hughes, 1902-1967, A (Dickinson),Supp. I, Part 1,348 Biographic Literaria (Coleridge), n, 10 Biography and Poetical Remains of the Late Margaret Miller Davidson (Irving), II, 314 Biography of William Cullen Bryant, with Extracts from His Private Correspondence, A (Godwin), Supp. I, Part 1,173 "BirchbrookMill" (Whittier), Supp. I, Part 2,699 "Birches" (Frost), II, 154 Bird, Alan, Supp. I, Part 1,260 Bird, Robert M., Ill, 423 Birdoff, Harry, Supp. I, Part 2,601 Birds of America (McCarthy), II, 579583 "Bird-Witted" (Moore), III, 214 Birkhead, L.M.JIM 16 "Birmingham Sunday" (Hughes), Supp. I, Part 1,343 Birney, James G., Supp. I, Part 2,587, 588 Birth of a Nation, The (film), Supp. I, Part 1,66 "BirthofVenus,The"(Botticelli),IV, 410 "Birthday Cake for Lionel, A" (Wylie), Supp. I, Part 2,721 "Birthday Present, A" (Plath), Supp. I, Part 2,531 "Birthmark, The" (Ellison), Supp. D, Part 1,237-238 Bisch, Louis E., Supp. I, Part 2,608

Bishop, Elizabeth, D, 390; HI, 217; Supp. I, Part 1, 7SMT7; Supp. Ill, Part 1,6,7,10,18,64,239,320,326, Part 2,541,561 Bishop, Ferman, D, 413 Bishop, JohnPeale,!, 119,432,440; II, 81,85,86-S7,91,209;m,384;IV,35, 140,427; Supp. I, Part 2,709 Bishop, John W., Supp. I, Part 1,83 Bishop,Morris,Supp.I,Part 2,676,681 Bishop, William Thomas, Supp. I, Part 1,83 Bismark, Otto von, Supp. I, Part 2,643 "Bitter Drink, The" (Dos Passos), Supp. I, Part 2,647 "Bitter Farce, A" (Schwartz),Supp.II, Part 2,640,657-658 Bitter Victory (Hardy, trans. Kinnell), Supp. Ill, Part 1,235 Bittner, William, III, 432 Bixby, Horace, IV, 194 Bjornson, Bjornstjerne, n, 275 Black, Jeanette,s*eNorris, Mrs. Frank (Jeanette Black) Black, John, IV, 353 Black, Stephen A., Supp. I, Part 2,626 "Black Aesthetic in White America, The" (Daniels), Supp. I, Part 1,70 Black Armour (Wylie), Supp. I, Part 2,708,709,712-714,729 "Black Art" (Baraka), Supp. II, Part 1,49,50-51,59,60 "Black Art, The" (Sexton), Supp. II, Part 2,682 Black Arts Movement, Supp. II, Part 1,34,53 BlackBeetlesinAmber(&ieTce),l,2M, 209 "Black Birch in Winter, A" (Wilbur), Supp. Ill, Part 2,561 Black Boy (Wright), IV, 477,478,479, 480-482,488,489,494;Supp.n,Part 1,235-236 "Black Boys and Native Sons" (Howe), Supp. I, Part 1,70 Black Cargo, 77i«?(Marquand),III,55, 60 Black Cargoes: A History of the Atlantic Slave Trade (Cowley), Supp. II, Part 1,140 Black Cat (publication), II, 465,479 "Black Cat, The" (Poe), III, 413,414, 415 "BLACK DADA NIHILISMUS" (Baraka), Supp. II, Part 1,39,41 "Black Earth" (Moore), III, 197,212

BLAC-BLUE / 650 Black Fire: An Anthology of AfroAmerican Writing (ed. Baraka), Supp.H, Part 1,53 Black Flame, 77t*(Du Bois), Supp. II, Part 1,159,185-186 Black Folk, Then and Now: An Essay in the History and Sociology of the Negro Race (Du Bois), Supp. II, Part 1,159,178,183,185 "Black Fox, The" (Whittier), Supp. I, Part 2,692 "Black Gang," IV, 406-407 Black Image in the White Mind, The (Fredrickson), Supp. I, Part 2,589, 601 "Black Is My Favorite Color" (Malamud), Supp. I, Part 2,437 "Black Jewel, The" (Merwin), Supp. III, Part 1,355 Black Light (Kinnell), Supp. Ill, Part 1,235,243 Black Magic, A Pictorial History of the Negro in American Entertainment (Hughes), Supp. I, Part 1,345 Black Magic: Collected Poetry 19611967 (Baraka), Supp. II, Part 1,45, 49-50 Black Mass, A (Baraka), Supp. II, Part 1,46,48-49,56,57 "BlackMesa,The"(Memll),Supp.in, Part 1,328 Black Metropolis (Cayton and Drake), IV, 475,486,488 Black Misery (Hughes), Supp. I, Part 1,336 Black Mountain School, Supp. II, Part 1,30 Black Music (Baraka), Supp. II, Part 1,47,51 Black Power (Wright), IV, 478, 488, 494 Black Reconstruction (Du Bois), Supp. II, Part 1,159,162,171,182 Black Renaissance, Supp. II, Part 1, 173 Black Riders and Other Lines, The (Crane), 1,406,419 "Black Rook in Rainy Weather" (Plath), Supp. I, Part 2,543,544 Black Spear, The (Hayden), Supp. II, Part 1,375 Bfoc*SpriVig(Miller),m, 170,175,178, 180-182,183,184 "Black Swan, The" (Jarrell), II, 382 Black Swan, The (Merrill), Supp. Ill, Part 1,319,320

"Black Tambourine" (Crane), 1,387388; D, 371 Black Troubadour: Langston Hughes (Rollins), Supp. I, Part 1,348 Black Voices (Chapman), IV, 485 "Black Wedding, The" (Singer), IV, 12-13 "Black Writer and the Southern Experience, The" (Walker), Supp. HI, Part 2,521 "Black Writers' Role, The: James Baldwin" (Neal),Supp. I, Part 1,70 Blackall, Jean Franz, n, 148 "Blackberry Eating" (Kinnell), Supp. Ill, Part 1,250 Blackberry Winter (Warren), IV, 243, 251,252 Blackburn, Philip C, 1,357 Blackburn, William, IV, 100,117 "Blacklist and the Cold War, The" (Kramer), Supp. I, Part 1,295,298 Blackmur, Helen Dickson (Mrs. R. P. Blackmur), Supp. II, Part 1,90 Blackmur, Richard P., 1,24,50,63,67, 70,280,282,386,404,449,455,472, 473; II, 320,340,537; III, 194,208, 217,462,478,497; IV, 95,143,424; Supp. II, Part 1,87-112,136, Part 2, 543,643 Blacks (Brooks), Supp. Ill, Part 1,69, 72,86,87 Blackwood's (publication), II, 310 Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Supp. I, Part 1,155 Blaine, Anita McCormick, Supp. I, Part 1,5 Blair, Hugh, D, 8,17; Supp. I, Part 2, 422 Blair, Robert, Supp. I, Part 1,150 Blair, Walter, 0,20,23; IV, 212,213; Supp. I, Part 2,426,626 Blake, William, 1,381,383,389,390, 398,447,476,525,526,533; 0,321; 111,5,19,22,195,196,197,205,485, 528,540,544-545,567,572; IV, 129; Supp. I, Part 1,80, Part 2,385,514, 517,539,552,708 Blamires, Harry, 1,590 Blanc-Bentzon, Mme. Thlrfese, 11,405 Blanck, Jacob, n, 148,294; Supp. I, Part 1,173 "'Blandula, Tenulla, Vagula'" (Pound), III, 463 Blankenship, Tom, IV, 193 Blanshard, Rufus A., 1,67,70 Blast (publication), 1,384; III, 465

Blavatsky, Elena Petrovna, III, 176 Bleak House (Dickens), II, 291 Blechman, Burt, Supp. I, Part 1,290 "Blessed Isthe Man" (Moore), HI, 215 "Blessed Man of Boston, My Grandmother's Thimble, and FanningIsland,The"(Updike),IV, 219 "Blessing,A"(Wright),Supp.m,Part 2,600,606 Bleufarb, Sam III, 242 Bligh,S.M.,I,226 Blind Bow-Boy, The (Van Vechten), Supp. II, Part 2,737,740-742 "Blind Man's Holiday" (O. Henry), Supp. II, Part 1,401 "Blind Poet, The: Sidney Lanier" (Warren), Supp. I, Part 1,371,373 Blithedale Romance, The (Hawthorne), II, 225,231,239,241-242, 271,282,290; IV, 194; Supp. I, Part 2,579; Supp. II, Part 1,280 Blitzstein, Marc, Supp. I, Part 1,277 Blix (Norris), III, 314, 322,327, 328, 333 "Blizzard in Cambridge" (Lowell), II, 554 Block, Anita, HI, 407 Block, Maxine, III, 455 Blocker,Joel,IV,23 Blok, Aleksandr Aleksandrovich, IV, 443 "Blood" (Singer), IV, 15,19 Blood for a Stranger (Jarrell), II, 367, 368-369,370-371,375,377 "Blood of the Lamb, The" (hymn), Supp. I, Part 2,385 Blood of the Martyr (Crane), 1,422 Blood of the Prophets, The (Masters), Supp. I, Part 2,458,459,461 Blood on the Forge (Attaway), Supp. II, Part 1,234-235 "Blood-Burning Moon" (Toomer), Supp. HI, Part 2,483 Bloom, Harold, Supp. I, Part 1,96 Bloom, Leopold, 1,27,150; HI, 10 Bloomfield, Leonard, 1,64 Bloomfield Citizen (newspaper), I, 225 Blotner, Joseph, 0,75; HI, 47,574 "BiueBattalions,The"(Crane),I,419420 Blue Estuaries, The: Poems, 1923-1968 (Bogan), Supp. Ill, Part 1,48,57, 66 Blue Guide,Ul9 504

BLUE-BOST / 651 "BlueHotel,The" (Crane),!, 34,415416,423 "Blue Juniata" (Cowley), Supp. II, Part 1,144 Blue Juniata: Collected Poems (Cowley), Supp. II, Part L, 140 44 Blue Meridian"(Toomer), Supp. ID, Part 2,476,487 -Blue Moles" (Plath), Supp. I, Part 2, 539 Blue Swallows, The (Nemerov), III, 269, 270, 271, 274-275, 278, 284, 286-288 Blue Voyage (Aiken), 1,53,56 "Bluebeard" (Millay), III, 130 Blues (publication), II, 26 Blues for Mister Charlie (Baldwin), Supp. I, Part 1,48,61-62,63 Blues People: Negro Music in White America (Baraka),Supp.II, Part 1, 30,31,33-35,37,41,42,53 "Blues Poetry of Langston Hughes, The" (Waldron), Supp. I, Part 1, 348 Bluest Eye, The (Morrison), Supp. Ill, Part 1,362,363-367,379 Bluestone, George, 1,47 Blum, Morgan, 1,169,189; 0,221 Blum, W. C. (pseudonym),**? Watson, James Sibley, Jr. Blunt, Wilfrid Scawen, HI, 459 Bly,Robert,I,291;Supp.ffl,Part2,599 Blythe, LeGette, IV, 473 Boarding House Blues (Farrell), D, 30, 43,45 Boas, Franz, 1,214; Supp. I, Part 2,641 "Boat, The" (Sexton), Supp. H, Part 2, 692 "Bob and Spike" (Wolfe), Supp. Ill, Part 2,580 Boccaccio, Giovanni, HI, 283,411; IV, 230 Bode, Carl, 1,449; IV, 188 Bodenheim, Maxwell, n, 42,530; Supp. I, Part 1,257 "Bodies" (Oates), Supp. II, Part 2, 520 Bodley Head Jack London (London), 11,483 Body of This Death: Poems (Bogan), Supp. Ill, Part 1,47,49-52,58 Body Rags (Kinnell), Supp. Ill, Part t 235,236,243-245,250,253,254 Boehme,Jakob,I,10 Bogan, Louise, 1,169,185,189, 543;

IH, 144,217,289,550; Supp. I, Part 2,707,726; Supp. Ill, Part 1,47-68 Bogan, Major Benjamin Lewis, IV, 120 Bogard, Travis, EH, 407 Bogan, Humphrey, Supp. I, Part 2, 623 Bogle, Donald, Supp. I, Part L, 69 "Bohemian, The" (Harte), Supp. II, Part 1,339 "Bohemian Hymn, The" (Emerson), 0,19 Bohn, William £., Supp. I, Part 2,626 Boissevain, Eugen, III, 124 "Bold Words at the Bridge" (Jewett), 11,394 Boleyn, Anne, Supp. I, Part 2,461 Bolivar, Simon, Supp. I, Part 1, 283, 284,285 Bolognese, Don, D, 75 Bolton, Guy, Supp. I, Part 1,281 Bolts of Melody: New Poems of Emily Dickinson (eds. Todd and Bingham),I,470 Bombs Away (Steinbeck), IV, 51-52 Bonaparte, Marie, ffl, 418,432 "Bon-Bon" (Poe), III, 425 "Bones of a House" (Cowley), see "Blue Juniata" Bonfire of the Vanities, The (Wolfe), Supp. Ill, Part 2,584-586 Bonifacius (Mather), Supp. II, Part 2, 461,464 Bonnefoy, Yves, Supp. Ill, Part 1,235, 243 Bonneville, Mme. Marguerite, Supp. I, Part 2,520,521 Bonneville, Nicolas de, Supp. I, Part 2, 511,518,519 Bontemps, Arna, IV, 497; Supp. I, Part 1325 £0oA:,v4 (Barnes), Supp.III,Part 1,36, 39,44 Book about Myself, A (Dreiser), I, 515 BookofBreeething, The (Burroughs), Supp. Ill, Part 1,97,103 Book of Burlesques, A (Mencken), III, 104 Book of Dreams (Kerouac), Supp. Ill, Part 1,225 "Book of Ephraim, The" (Merrill), Supp. HI, Part 1,330-334 Book of Folly, The (Sexton), Supp. II, Part 2,691,692-694

"Book of Hours of Sister Clotilde, The" (Lowell), II, 522 Book of Negro Folklore, The (ed. Hughes), Supp. I, Part 1,345 Book of Nightmares, The (Kinnell), Supp. ffl, Part 1,235,236,243,244, 246-254 Book of Prefaces, A (Mencken), III, 99-100,105 Book of Repulsive Women, The (Barnes), Supp. ffl, Part 1,33 Book of Roses, The (Parkman), Supp. 0, Part 2,597,598 "Book of the Grotesque, The" (Anderson), 1,106 Book of Verses, A (Masters), Supp. I, Part 2,458 "Books Considered" (Bloom), Supp. 1, Part 1,96 BooksinMyLife, The (Miller), ffl, 176, 189 "Boom" (Nemerov), III, 278 Boom! (Williams), IV, 383 Boom Town (Wolfe), IV, 456 "Boom Town" (Wolfe), IV, 469 Boone,Daniel,n,207;ffl,444;IV,192, 193 Boorstin, Daniel, 1,253 Booth, Bradford, III, 431 Booth, Charles, Supp. I, Part 1,13 Booth, General William, Supp. 1, Part 2,384,386 Booth, John E., IV, 401 Booth, John Wilkes, HI, 588 Booth, Philip, 1,522,542,543; 0,390 Booth, Wayne C., Ill, 243 Borah, William, III, 475 Borden, Lizzie, 0,591 Borel,Petrus,III,320 Borges, Jorge Luis, 1,123,135,138,140, 142; Supp. Ill, Part 2,560 Borroff,Marie,IV,95 "Boston" (Hardwick),Supp.III, Part 1,201 Boston Advertiser (newspaper), n, 274 "Boston Common" (Berry man), 1,172 Boston Evening Transcript (newspaper), 1,570; II, 449; III, 53 Boston Globe (newspaper), Supp. Ill, Part 2,629 "Boston Hymn" (Emerson), II, 13,19 "Boston Nativity, The" (Lowell), II, 538 Boston News Letter (newspaper), II, 103; IV, 149

BOST-BRAV / 652 Boy, A (Ashbery), Supp. Ill, Part 1,5 "Boy in France, A" (Salinger), III, 552-553 Boyce, Horace, 0,136 Boyd, Blanche, Supp. I, Part 2,578 Boyd, Ernest Augustus, HI, 121 Boyd, James, 1,119 Boyd, Nancy (pseudonym), see Millay, Edna St. Vincent Boyd, Thomas, 1,99; IV, 427 Boyesen, H. H., n, 289 "Boyhood" (Farrell), II, 28 Boyle, Kay, HI, 289; IV, 404 Boynton, Henry W., 1,357 Boynton, Percy H., 0,533; HI, 72 Boynton, Percy Holmes, Supp. I, Part 4415 Boy 5 Froissart, The (Lanier), Supp. I, Part 1,361 Boy's King Arthur, The (Lanier), Supp. I, Part 1,361 Boy's Mabinogion, The (Lanier), Supp. I, Part 1,361 "Boys of '29, The" (Holmes), Supp. I, Part 1,308 Boys of 76, The (Coffin), III, 577 Boy's Percy, The (Lanier), Supp. I, Part

98-123, Part 2,300,484,485,4%, 546,705 Bradstreet, Elizabeth, Supp. I, Part 1, 108,122 Bradstreet, Mrs. Simon, see Bradstreet, Anne Bradstreet, Simon,!, 178; Supp. I, Part 1,98,103,110,116 Brady, Alice, ffl, 399 Brady, Charles, Supp. I, Part 2,626 Brady, Charles A., Ill, 72 "Bragdowdy and the Busybody,The" (Thurber), Supp. I, Part 2,617 "Brahma" (Emerson), II, 19,20 "Brahmin Dons Homespun, A" (Blair), Supp. I, Part 2,426 Brahms, Johannes, III, 118,448 "Brain and Brawn, Broadway in Review" (Gilder), Supp. I, Part 2,627 "Brain and the Mind, The" (James), 11,346 Brancaccio, Patrick, Supp. I, Part 1, 148 Branch, Edgar M., 0,52; IV, 213 Branch Will Not Break, The (Wright), Supp. Ill, Part 2,596,598-601 Brancusi, Constantin, III, 201 Brand New Life, A (Farrell), II, 46,48 1,361 Boy's Town (Howells), 1,418 Brande, Dorothea, Supp. I, Part 2,608 Boy's Will, A (Frost),II, 152,153,155- Brando, Marlon, D, 588 156,159,164,166 Brandon, Henry, HI, 169; Supp. I, Part 2,604,612,618,626 Bozrah (biblical person), IV, 152 Bracebridge Hall, or, The Humorists Brandriff, Welles T., IV, 118 (Irving),!, 339,341;II,308-309,313 Brandt, Alice, Supp. I, Part 1,92 Bracher, Frederick, 1,378,380; Supp. Branscomb, Lewis, Supp. I, Part 2,626 Brant, Sebastian, HI, 447,448 I, Part 1,185,198 Brackenridge, Hugh Henry, Supp. I, Brantley,J.D.,I,496 Part 1,124,127,145; Supp. II, Part Braque, Georges, III, 197; IV, 24 1,65 Brashear,M.M.,IV,213 Bradbury, David L., Supp. I, Part 2, Brasil, Emanuel, Supp. I, Part 1,94 402 "Brasilia" (Plath), Supp. I, Part 2,544, 1,5 545 Bradbury, John M.,1,142,288-289; n, Bowen, Merlin, III, 97 221; III, 502; IV, 130,135,142,258 "Brass Ring, The" (Carver), Supp. Ill, Bowers, Claude G., D, 317 "Bowl of Blood, The" (Jeffers), Supp. Bradbury, Ray,Supp. I, Part 2,621-622 Part 1,137 Braddon, Mary E., Supp. I, Part 1,35, "Brass Spittoons" (Hughes), Supp. I, II, Part 2,434 36 Bowles, Jane, D, 586 Part 1,326-327 Bowles, Paul, 1,211; D, 586; Supp. II, Bradford, Gamaliel, 1,248,250 Braswell, William, III, 97; IV, 472 Part 1,17 Bradford, William, Supp. I, Part 1, Braudy, Leo, 111,47 Bowles, Samuel, 1,454,457 110,112, Part 2,486,494 Braunlich, Phyllis, Supp. I, Part 2,626 Bradley, Francis Herbert, 1,59,567- Brautigan, Richard, III, 174 "Bowls" (Moore), III, 196 Bowman, James, 1,193 568,572,573 Brave New World (Huxley), II, 454 Box and Quotations from Chairman Bradley, William A., Supp. I, Part 1, "Brave New World" (MacLeish), III, Mao 7*r-/wng(Albee),I,89-91,94 173 18 "Box Seat" (Toomer), Supp. in, Part Bradstreet, Anne, 1,178-179,180,181, Bravery of Earth, A (Eberhart), 1,522, 2,484 182,184; III, 505; Supp. I, Part 1, 524,525,526,530

Boston Sunday Herald (newspaper), Supp. I, Part 2,529 Bostonians, The (James), 1,9; II, 282; IV, 202 Boswell, James, IV, 431; Supp. I, Part 2,656 Botticelli, Sandro, IV, 410 "Bottle of Perrier, A" (Wharton), IV, 316 Bottom: On Shakespeare (Zukofsky), Supp. Ill, Part 2,622,624,625,626, 627,629 "Boulot and Boulette" (Chopin), Supp. I, Part 1,211 Boulton, Agnes, ffl, 403,407 Bound Eastfor Cardiff(O'Neill), HI, 388 "Bouquet, The" (Stevens), IV, 90 "Bouquet of Roses in Sunlight" (Stevens), IV, 93 Bourdin, Henri L., Supp. I, Part 1,251 Bourgeois Poet, The (Shapiro), Supp. II, Part 2,701,703,704,713,714716 Bourget, James, IV, 319 Bourget,Paul,II,325,338;IV,311,315 Bourjaily, Vance, III, 43; IV, 118 Bourke-White, Margaret, see Caldwell, Mrs. Erskine Bourne, Charles Rogers 1,215 Bourne, Mrs. Charles Rogers, 1,215 Bourne, Randolph, I, 214-238, 243, 245,246-247,251,259; Supp. I, Part £524 Boutroux, Emile, DL 365 Bowditch, Nathaniel, Supp. I, Part 2, 482 Bowen, Croswell, HI, 407 Bowen, Francis, Supp. I, Part 2,413 Bowen, Louise de Koven, Supp. I, Part

BRAV-BROO / 653 Braving the Elements (Merrill), Supp. HI, Part 1,320,323,325-327,329 Bravo, The (Cooper), 1,345-346,348 Brawley, Benjamin, Supp. I, Part 1, 327,332 Brawne, Fanny, 1,284; D, 531 Brazil (Bishop), Supp. I, Part 1,92 "Bread Alone" (Wylie), Supp. I, Part ^727 Breadofldleness, The (Masters), Supp. I, Part 2,460 "Break, The" (Sexton), Supp. II, Part 2,689 Breakfast at Tiffany's (Capote), Supp. HI, Part 1,113,117,119-121,124, 126 Breakfast of Champions (Vonnegut), Supp. II, Part 2,755,759,769,770, 777-778 "Breaking Up of the Winships, The" (Thurber), Supp. I, Part 2,616 Breast, The (Roth), Supp. Ill, Part 2, 416,418 "Breast, The" (Sexton), Supp. D, Part 2,687 Breathing the Water (Levertov), Supp. Ill, Part 1,274,283,284 Brecht, Bertolt, 1,60,96,301; III, 161, 162; IV, 394; Supp. I, Part 1, 292; Supp. II, Part 1,10,26,56 Breen, Joseph I., IV, 390 Breit, Harvey, 1,47,433,449; DI, 47, 72,242,384,575;Supp.I,Partl,69, 198 Bremer, Fredrika, Supp. I, Part 1,407 Brenner, Gerry, IV, 234 Brentano, Franz, n, 350 Breslin, James E., IV, 424 Bretall, Robert W., 111,313 Breton, Andr6, III, 425 Brett, George, D, 466 Brevoort, Henry, D, 298 "Brewing of Soma, The" (Whittier), Supp. I, Part 2,704 Brewsie and Willie (Stein), IV, 27 Brewster, Martha, Supp. I, Part 1,114 "Briar Patch, The" (Warren), IV, 237 "Briar Rose (SleepingBeauty)" (Sexton), Supp. II, Part 2,690 Brice, Fanny, 11,427 "Brick Layer's Lunch Hour, The" (Ginsberg), Supp. II, Part 1,318 Brickell,Herschel,m,72 "Bridal Ballad, The" (Poe), III, 428

"Bride Comes to Yellow Sky, The" (Crane), 1,34,415,416,423 "Bride in the 30's, A" (Auden), Supp. II, Part 1,9 Bride of Lammermoor (Scott), II, 291 Bride of the Innisfallen, The (Welty), IV, 261,275-279 "Bride of the Innisfallen, The" (Welty), IV, 278-279 Brides of the South Wind: Poems 29171922 (Jeffers), Supp. D, Part 2,419 Bridge, Horatio, D, 226,245 "BRIDGE,THE" (Baraka),Supp.H, Part 1,32,36 Bridge, The (Crane), I, 62,109, 266, 385, 386, 387, 395-399, 400, 402; IV, 123,341,418,419,420 "Bridge Burners, The" (Van Vechten), Supp. II, Part 2,733 Bridge of San Luis Rey, The (Wilder), I, 360; IV, 356,357,36O-363,365,366 Bridges, Harry, 1,493 Bridges, Robert, II, 537; III, 527; Supp. I, Part 2,721; Supp. II, Part 1,21 Bridgman,P.W.,I,278 Bridgman, Richard, Supp. I, Part 2, 477 "Bridle, The" (Carver), Supp. OI, Part 1,138 "Brief D6but of Tildy, The" (O. Henry), Supp. D, Part 1,408 "Brief Encounters on the Inland Waterway" (Vonnegut),Supp.II, Part 2,760 Briffault, Robert, Supp. I, Part 2,560, 567 "BrigadedeCuisine" (McPhee),Supp. III, Part 1,307-308 Brigadier and the Golf Widow, The (Cheever),Supp. I, Part 1,184-185, 192 Briggs, Austin, n, 148 Bnggs, Charles F., Supp. I, Part 2,411 "Bright and Morning Star" (Wright), IV, 488 Bright Book of Life (Kazin), Supp. I, Part 1,198 Bright Procession (Sedges), Supp. II, Part 1,125 Bngnano, Russell, IV, 4% "Brilliant Leaves" (Gordon), II, 199 "Bring the Day!" (Roethke), III, 536 Brinnin, John Malcolm, 1,189; IV, 26, 27,28,42,46,47

Brissot, Jacques Pierre, Supp. I, Part 2,511 "Britain's Negro Problem in Sierra Leone" (Du Bois), Supp. II, Part 1, 176 "British Poets, The" (Holmes), Supp. I, Part 1,306 "British Prison Ship,The" (Freneau), Supp. II, Part 1,261 Brittain, Joan, III, 360 Britten, Benjamin, n, 586; Supp. II, Part 1,17 Broadwater, Bowden, n, 562 Broadway Journal(pub\ication), 111,413 Broadway Magazine, 1,501 "Broadway Sights" (Whitman), IV, 350 Brodtkorb, Paul, Jr., HI, 97 "Broken Balance, The" (Jeffers), Supp. II, Part 2,426 "Broken Home,The" (Merrill), Supp. Ill, Part 1,319,325 "Broken Promise" (MacLeish),DI, 15 Broken Span, 77ie(Williams), IV, 419 "BrokenTower,The" (Crane), 1,385, 386,400,401-402 Bromfield, Louis, IV, 380 "BronchoThat Would Not Be Broken, The" (Lindsay), Supp. I, Part 2,383 Bronte, Branwell, 1,462 Brontg, Charlotte, 1,458; H, 175 Bronte, Emily, 1,458 "Bronze" (Merrill), Supp. Ill, Part 1, 336 "Bronze Buckaroo, The" (Baraka), Supp. II, Part 1,49 "BronzeHorses,The"(Lowell),n,524 "Bronze Tablets" (Lowell), II, 523 Bronzeville Boys and Girls (Brooks), Supp. Ill, Part 1,79 "Bronzeville Mother Loiters in Mississippi, A. Meanwhile, a Mississippi Mother Burns Bacon" (Brooks), Supp. OI, Part 1,80 "Brooch, The" (Singer), IV, 20 Brook Evans (Glaspell), Supp. DI, Part 1,182-185 Brooke, Rupert, D, 82; III, 3 Brooklyn Eagle (newspaper), IV, 334 Brooklyn Times, IV, 341 Brooks, Cleanth, I, 280, 282; D, 76, 390; HI, 217,517; IV, 236,258,279, 284; Supp. I, Part 2,423; Supp. Ill, Part 2,542

BROO-BUIC / 654 Brooks, Gwendolyn, Supp. Ill, Part 1, 69-90 Brooks, Mrs. Van Wyck (Eleanor Kenyon Stimson), 1,240,245,250, 252 Brooks, Mrs. Van Wyck (Gladys Billings),I,258,262 Brooks, Phillips, n, 542 Brooks, Van Wyck, 1,24,106,117,119, 213, 215, 222, 228, 230, 231, 233, 236,237,23<«63,266,480; 0,30, 195, 271, 285, 294, 309, 318, 337, 341,482,533; HI, 394,606; IV, 171, 189,213,312,330,427,433; Supp. I, Part 2,423,424,426,650; Supp* II, Part 1,137 Broom (periodical), Supp. II, Part 1, 138 Brosnan, Jim, 0,424-425 Brother Carl (Sontag), Supp. Ill, Part 2,452 "Brother Death" (Anderson), 1,114 Brother to Dragons: A Tale in Verse and Voices (Warren), IV, 243-244, 245,246,251,252,254,257 "Brothers" (Anderson), 1,114 Brothers Ashkenazi, The (Singer), IV, 2 Brothers Karamazov, The (Dostoevski), II, 60; III, 146,150,283 Broughton,Rhoda,n,174;IV,309,310 Broun, Heywood, 1,478; H, 417; IV, 432 Broussais, Francois, Supp. I, Part 1, 302 Broussard, Louis, HI, 432 Browder, Earl, 1,515 Brower, Brock, D, 584 Brower, Reuben A., n, 172 Brown, Alice, D, 523 Brown, Ashley, II, 221; IV, 95; Supp. I, Part 1,79,80,82,84,92,96 Brown, C.H., III, 47 Brown, Charles Brockden, 1,54,211, 335; D, 74,267,298; ffl, 415; Supp. I, Part 1,124-149; Supp. II, Part 1, 65,292 Brown, Charles H., Supp. I, Part 1,173 Brown, Clarence, Supp. I, Part 2,477 Brown, E. K., 1,333; IV, 376,448 Brown, Elijah, Supp. I, Part 1,125 Brown, George Douglas, III, 473 Brown, Herbert Ross, Supp. I, Part 2, 601

Brown, John, 0,13; IV, 125,126,172, 237,249,254; Supp. I, Part 1,345 Brown, John Mason, DI, 407; IV, 376 Brown, Mary Armitt, Supp. I, Part 1, 125 Brown, Merle E., 1,287 Brown, Mrs. Charles Brockden (Elizabeth Linn), Supp. I, Part 1, 145,146 Brown, Pefcy, D, 20,23 Brown, Slater, IV, 123 Brown, Solyman, Supp. I, Part 1,156 Brown, Susan Jenkins, 1,403 Brown, W.C., IV, 166 Brown Decades, The (Mumford), Supp. II, Part 2,475,478,491-492 "Brown Dwarf of Riigen, The" (Whittier), Supp. I, Part 2,696 Browne, Charles Farrar, D, 289; IV, 193,1% Browne, E.K., IV, 330 Browne, E. Martin, 1,590 Browne, Nina E., D, 245 Browne, R. B., Ill, 241-242 Browne, Sir Thomas,II, 15-16,304; m, 77,78,198,487; IV, 147 Browne, William, Supp. I, Part 1,98 Brownell,W.C,n,14;Supp.I,Part2, 426 Brownies'Book, The (Hughes), Supp. I, Part 1,321 Browning, Elizabeth, 1,458,459 Browning, Robert, 1,50,66,103,458, 460,468; D, 338,478,522; III, 5,8, 467, 469, 484, 511, 521, 524, 606, 609; IV, 135,245,366,416; Supp. I, Part 1,2,6,79,311,Part 2,416,468, 622; Supp. HI, Part 1,5,6 Brownstone Eclogues and Other Po~ <m*(Aiken),I,65,67 Broyard, Anatole, Supp. I, Part 1,198 Bruccoli, Matthew J., D, 100 Brueghel, Pieter, 1,174,189; Supp. I, Part 2,475 Brunner, Emil, III, 291,303,313 Bruno's Bohemia (publication),1,384 Bruno's Weekly (publication), 1,384 Brustein, Robert, 1,95; III, 407 Brutus, IV, 373,374; Supp. I, Part 2, 471 "Brutus and Antony" (Masters), Supp. I, Part 2,472 "Bryan, Bryan, Bryan, Bryan" (Lindsay), Supp. I, Part 2,394,395,398

Bryan, Katharine, see O'Hara, Mrs. John (Katharine Bryan) Bryan, William Jennings, 1,483; IV, 124; Supp. I, Part 2,385,395-396, 455,456 Bryant, Austin, Supp. I, Part 1,152,153 Bryant, Frances, Supp. I, Part 1,153 Bryant, Jerry H., Supp. I, Part 1,69 Bryant, Mrs. William Cullen (Frances Fairchild), Supp. I, Part 1,153,169 Bryant, Peter, Supp. I, Part 1,150,151, 152,153 Bryant, William Cullen, 1,335,458; H, 311; ffl, 81; IV, 309; Supp. I, Part 1, 150-173,312, 362, Part 2,413, 416, 420 Bryant, William Cullen, II, Supp. I, Part 1,154 Bryer, Jackson R., 1,119,142; D, 100; HI, 406; IV, 95,472 Bryher, Jackson R. (pseudonym), see Ellerman, Winifred Brylowski, Walter, 0,76 Buber,Martin,n,228; III, 45,308,528; IV, 11; Supp. I, Part 1,83,88 Buccaneers, The (Wharton), IV, 327 Buchan,A.M.,O,413 Buchen, Irving, IV, 23 Buck, Dudley, Supp. I, Part 1,362 Buck, Gene, 0,427 Buck,PearlS.,Supp.II,Part 1,113-134 Buck, Philo Melvin, Jr., Ill, 407 "Buck in the Snow,The" (Millay), III, 135 Bucke,R.M.,IV,353 Buckingham, Willis J., 1,564 Buckley, Tom, IV, 401 Buckminster, Joseph, Supp. II, Part 1, 66-67,69 £wa>/ics(Auden),Supp.II,Part 1,21, 24 Budd, Louis J., IV, 210,213 Budd, Nelson H., Supp. I, Part 2, 626 Buddha, 1,136; 0,1; III, 173,179,239, 567; Supp. I, Part 1,363, Part 2,397 Buechner, Frederick, III, 310 "Buffalo Bill," see Cody, William Buffalo Express (publication), II, 465 "Buffalo, The" (Moore), III, 215 Buffington, Robert, III, 502 Buffon, Comte de, 0,101 "Buick" (Shapiro), Supp. n, Part 2, 705

BUIL-BYRO / 655 Builders, The (Glasgow), II, 183-184, 193 Builders of the Bay Colony (Morison), Supp. I, Part 1,123, Part 2,484-485 "Builders of the Bridge, The" (Mumford), Supp. II, Part 2,475 "Building of the Ship, The" (Longfellow), II, 498 Building of Uncle Tom's Cabin, The (Kirkham), Supp. I, Part 2,601 Bukowski, Charles, Supp. Ill, Part 1, 147 "Bulgarian Poetess, The" (Updike), IV, 215,227 Bulkin, Elly, Supp. I, Part 2,578 Bull, 01e,H, 504 Bullet Park (Cheever), Supp. I, Part 1, 185,187-193,194,195 Bullins, Ed, Supp. II, Part 1,34,42 Bultmann, Rudolf, III, 309 Bulwark, The (Dreiser), I, 497, 506, 516-517 Bulwer-Lytton, Edward George,IV,350 Bunche, Ralph, Supp. I, Part 1,343 "Bunner Sisters, The" (Wharton), IV, 317 Bunting, Basil, Supp. Ill, Part 2,616, 620,624 Buftuel, Luis, III, 184 Bunyan, John, 1,445,0,15,104,228; IV, 80,84,156,437; Supp. I, Part 1, 32 Buranelli, Vincent, III, 432 Burbank, Luther, 1,483 Burbank, Rex, 1,119,120; IV, 363,376 Burchard, Rachael C, IV, 234 Burchfield, Alice, Supp. I, Part 2,652,

Burke, Kenneth, 1,264-287,291,311; HI, 217,289,497,499,546,550; IV, 48, 123, 408, 424; Supp. I, Part 2, 630; Supp. II, Part 1,136 Burke, Paine, and the Rights of Man: A Difference of Political Opinions (Fennessy), Supp. I, Part 2,525 Burks, Mary Fair, Supp. I, Part 1,69 "Burly Fading One, The" (Hayden), Supp. n, Part 1,366 Burnett, Frances Hodgson, Supp. I, Part 1,44

Burnett, Hallie S., HI, 573 Burnett, Whit, III, 551,573 Burnham, James, IV, 142; Supp. I, Part 2,648 Burnham, John Chynoweth, 1,59 Burnham, Philip E., IV, 188 "Burning, The" (Welty), IV, 277-278 BMrw>fgBrig/if(Steinbeck),IV,51,6162 Burning Daylight (London), II, 474, 481 "Burning of Paper Instead of Children, The" (Rich), Supp. I, Part 2,558 Burns, David, HI, 165-166 Burns,Robert,n,150,306;in,592;IV, 453; Supp. I, Part 1,158, Part 2,410, 455,683,685,691,692 Burnshaw, Stanley, Supp. Ill, Part 2, 615 Burnt Norton (Eliot), 1,575,580-581, 582,584,585; ffl, 10 Burr, Aaron, 1,7,549,550; 0,300; IV, 264; Supp. I, Part 2,461,483 Burr Oaks (Eberhart), 1,533,535 Burroughs, John, 1,220,236,506; IV, 660 346 Burger, Gottfried August, n, 306 Burroughs, William, III, 45,174,258; Supp. II, Part 1,320,328 Burgess, Anthony, HI, 47; IV, 234 Burgess, Charles E., Supp. I, Part 2, Burroughs, William S., Supp. Ill, Part 477 1,91-110,217,226 Burgh, James, Supp. I, Part 2,522 Burrow, Trigant, Supp. II, Part 1,6 "Burglar of Babylon, The" (Bishop), Burrows, David, D, 293 Supp. I, Part 1,93 Burt, Struthers, Supp. I, Part 1,198 Burgum, E. B., IV, 469,470 Burton, Robert, n, 535; III, 77, 78; Burhans, Clinton S., Jr., Supp. I, Part Supp. I, Part 1,349 1,198 Burton, William Evans, III, 412 Buried Child (Shepard), Supp. HI, Burton's Gentleman's Magazine, III, Part 2,433,447,448 412 "Buried Lake, The" (Tate), IV, 136 Bury the Dead (Shaw), IV, 381 Burke, Edmund, 1,9; HI, 310; Supp. I, "Burying Ground by the Ties" (MacLcish), 111,14 Part2,496,511,512,513,523;Supp. II, Part 1,80 Busch, Arthur J., HI, 242

Bush, Douglas, Supp. I, Part 1, 268, 275 Bush, Warren V., ffl, 25 "Busher Comes Back, The" (Lardner),II,422 "Busher's Letters Home, A" (Lardner),H, 418-419,421 Bushman, Richard L., 1,564 "Business Deal" (West), IV, 287 "But Only Mine" (Wright), Supp. Ill, Part 2,595 "But What Is the Reader to Make of This?" (Ashbery), Supp. HI, Part 1,25 Butler, Benjamin, 1,457 Butler, Dorothy, see Farrell, Mrs. James T. (Dorothy Butler) Butler, E. M, Supp. I, Part 1,275 Butler, Elizabeth, Supp. I, Part 1,260 Butler, Joseph, n, 8,9 Butler, Maud, see Falkner, Mrs. Murray C. (Maud Butler) Butler, Nicholas Murray, 1,223; Supp. I, Part 1,23; Supp. Ill, Part 2,499 Butler, Samuel, n, 82,86; IV, 121,440 Butscher, Edward, Supp. I, Part 2,526, 548 Butterfield, R. W., 1,386,404 Butterfield, Roger, III, 72 Butterfield 8 (O'Hara), III, 361 Buttrick, George, III, 301 "Buzz" (Alcott), Supp. I, Part 1,43 By Avon River (Doolittle), Supp. I, Part 1,272 "By Disposition of Angels" (Moore), 111,214 By Land and by Sea (Morison), Supp. I, Part 1,492 By Love Possessed (Cozzens), 1,358, 365,372-374,375,376,377,378,379 By the North Gate (Oates), Supp. n, Part 2,504 By Way of Orbit (O'Neill), III, 405 By-Line: Ernest Hemingway (Hemingway), II, 257-258 Bynner, Witter, D, 513,527 Byrd, Cecil K., Supp. I, Part 1,401 Byrne, Donn, IV, 67 Byron, George Gordon, Lord, 1,343, 568,577; II, 135,193,296,301,303, 310,315,331,566; HI, 82,137,170, 409, 410, 412, 469; IV, 245, 435; Supp. I, Part 1,150,312,349, Part 2, 580,591,683,685,719

C33-CANN / 656 "C33" (Crane), 1,384 Cabala, The (Wilder), IV, 356, 358360,369,374 Cabbages and Kings (O. Henry), Supp. II, Part 1,394,409 Cabell, James Branch, D, 42,195; HI, 394;IV,67,359,360;Supp.I,Part2, 613,714,718,721,730 "Cabin, The" (Carver), Supp. in, Part \ 137,146 Cable, George Washington, D, 289; Supp. I, Part 1, 200; Supp. II, Part 1,198 Cabot, James, n, 14,23; IV, 173 Cabot, John, Supp. I, Part 2,496,497 "Caddy's Diary, A" (Lardner),H,421422 "Cadillac Flamte" (Ellison), Supp. II, Part 1,248 Cadle, Dean, Supp. I, Part 2,429,452 Cady,EdwinH.,I,426,564;n,272,292, 294; Supp. I, Part 2,402 Caesar, Julius,n, 12,502,561-562; IV, 372,373 "Cage and the Prairie: Two Notes on Symbolism, The'* (Bewley),Supp. I, Part 1,251 Cain (biblicalperson),III,5-6; IV,56, 57,371,483; Supp. I, Part 1,120 Cain, James, HI, 99 Cairns, Huntington, III, 103,108,114, 119,121 Cairo!Shanghai! Bombay/ (Williams and Shapiro), IV, 380 Cakes and Ale (Maugham), III, 64 "Calamus" (Whitman), IV, 342-343 Calder-Marshall, Arthur, n, '484 Caldwell, Erskine, 1,97,211,288-311; IV, 286 Caldwell, Mrs. Erskine (Helen Lannegan),I,289 Caldwell, Mrs. Erskine (Margaret Bourke-White), I, 290, 293-295, 297,311 Caldwell, Mrs. Erskine (Virginia Fletcher), 1,290 Caldwell, Reverend Ira Sylvester, I, 289,305 Caleb Williams (Godwin), III, 415 Calhoun, John C, 1,8; in, 309 California and Oregon Trail, The (Parkman), Supp. I, Part 2,486 "California Oaks, The" (Winters), Supp. II, Part 2,798

Californian (publication), 1,194; IV, 1% Ca/t/or/iia/i5(Je£fers),Supp.n9Part29 415,418,420 "Caligula" (Lowell), II, 554 Call It Experience (Caldwell), 1,290291,297 Ca//M*/5/imae/(Olson),Supp.II,Part £556 Call of the Gospel, The (Mather), Supp. H, Part 2,448 CalloftheWild, The (London), II, 466, 470-471,472,481 "Call to Arms" (Mumford), Supp. II, Part 2,479 Callaghan, Morley E., n, 100 Callahan, North, in, 598 Calley, Captain William, 0,579 Calligrammes (Apollinaire), 1,432 "Calling Jesus" (Toomer), Supp. ID, Part 2,484 Callow, James T., Supp. I, Part 1,173 "Galloway's Code" (O. Henry), Supp. n, Part 1,404 Calvert, George H., Supp. I, Part 1, 361 Calvin, John, 0,342; IV, 160,490 Calvinism, 1,215; 0,491,495; HI, 82, 390,396,522,602; IV,145,149,155, 156,158,159; Supp. I, Part 1, 38, 151,228,229,301,302,315, Part 2, 502,580,593,596,683,699 Cambon, Glauco, 1,404,473; 0,557; IV, 424 "Cambridge Thirty Years Ago" (Lowell), Supp. I, Part 2,419 "Camellia Sabina" (Moore), III, 208, 215 Camera Obscura (Nabokov), III, 255 Cameron, Elizabeth, 1,10,17 Cameron, Kenneth W., n, 16,23 Camerson, Don, 1,10,17 Cflmi/i0/tea/(Williams),IV,382,385, 386,387,388,391,392,395,398 Camdes, Luiz Vaz de, n, 133 Camp, Helen, n, 460 "Camp in the Prussian Forest, A" (Jarrell),II,375 Camp, Walter, 0,423 Campbell, Alexander, Supp. I, Part 2, 381,395 Campbell, Harry M., 0,76 Campbell, James Edwin, Supp. II, Part 1,202

Campbell, Joseph,!, 135; IV, 369,370, 376 Campbell, Killis, HI, 431,432 Campbell, Lewis, III, 476 Campbell, Louise, 1,520 Campbell, Thomas, D, 8,303,314; HI, 410; Supp. I, Part 1,309,310 Campion, Thomas, 1,439 Camus, Albert, 1,53,61,292,294,494; n, 57,244; HI, 292,306,453; IV, 6, 211,236,442,487; Supp. I, Part 2, 621 "Can a Good Wife Be a Good Sport?" (Williams), IV, 380 Can Grande's Castle (Lowell),II, 518, 524 Can Such Things Be? (Bierce), 1,203, 204,205,209 "CanYouCarryMe"(0'Hara),m,369 "Canadians and Pottawatomies" (Sandburg), III, 592-593 "Canal The: A Poem on the Application of Physical Science to Political Economy" (Barlow), Supp. U, Part 1,73 Canary in a Cat House (Vonnegut), Supp. H, Part 2,758 Canby, Henry Seidel, 1,356; H, 533; IV, 65,189,354,363 "Candon y Glosa" (Merwin), Supp. m, Part 1,342 Candide (Hellman), 1,28; Supp. I, Part 1,288-289,292 Candide (Molifere, trans. Wilbur), Supp. HI, Part 2,560 Candide (Voltaire), Supp. I, Part 1, 288-289 Candle in the Cabin, The (Lindsay), Supp. I, Part 2,398,400 Candles in Baby Ion (Levertov),Supp. HI, Part 1,283 Candles in the Sun (Williams), IV, 381 "Candy-Man Beechum" (Caldwell), 1,309 Cane (Toomer), Supp. Ill, Part 2,475, 481-486,488 "Cane in the Corridor, The" (Thurber), Supp. I, Part 2,616 Cane, Melvin H., n, 460 Canfield, Cass, Supp. I, Part 2,668 Cannery Row (Steinbeck), IV, 50,51, 64-65,66,68 Cannibals and Christians (Mailer), HI, 38-39,40,42

CANN-CAT / 657 Canning, George, 1,7,8 Cannon, Jimmy, n, 424 Canny, James R., Ill, 431 "Canso" (Merwin), Supp. Ill, Part 1, 344 Canterbury Tales (Chaucer), II, 504; m,411;IV,65 "Canto Amor" (Berryman), 1,173 Canto I (Pound), III, 469,470 Canto II (Pound), III, 470 Canto III (Pound), III, 470 Canto IV (Pound), HI, 470 Canto VIII (Pound), III, 472 Canto IX (Pound), III, 472 Canto X (Pound), III, 472 Canto XIII (Pound), III, 472 Canto XXXIX (Pound), HI, 468 Canto LXXXI (Pound), III, 459 Cantos (Pound), 1,482; III, 13-14,17, 457, 462, 463, 466, 467, 469-470, 472-473,474,475,476,492; Supp. I, Part 1,272; Supp. II, Part 1,5, Part 2,420,557,564,644 "Cantus Planis" (Pound), III, 466 Cantwell, Robert, 1,311; IV, 448 Canzoneri, Robert, IV, 114,116,118 "Cape Breton" (Bishop), Supp. I, Part 1,92 Cape Cod (Thoreau), II, 540 Capek, Milk, 11,365 Capote, Truman, Supp. I, Part 1,291, 292; Supp. Ill, Part 1,111-133, Part 2,574 Capouya, Emile, Supp. I, Part 1,50 Capps,Jack,I,473 "Captain Carpenter" (Ransom), III, 491 "Capt Christopher Levett (of York)" (Olson), Supp. nf Part 2, 576,577 Captain Craig (Robinson), III, 508, 523; Supp. n, Part 1,192 "Captain Jim's Friend" (Harte), Supp. n, Part 1,337 "Captain Jones's Invitation" (Freneau), Supp. n, Part 1,261 "Captivity of the Fly" (MacLeish), ID, 19 "Captured Goddess, The" (Lowell), 11,520 Card, Antha E., Supp. I, Part 2,496 Careful and Strict Enquiry into the Modern Prevailing Notions of That Freedom of Will, Which Is Supposed to be Essential to Moral Agency», Vertue and Vice, Reward

and Punishment, Praise and Blame, A (Edwards), 1,549,557,558,562 "Careful" (Carver), Supp. Ill, Part 1, 138 Carew, Thomas, IV, 453 Carey, Julian C, Supp. I, Part 2,348 Cargill,Oscar,I,262,520;m,336,407, 598; IV, 472,473; Supp. II, Part 1, 117 Caribbean as Columbus Saw It (Morison and Obregon), Supp. I, Part 2,488 Carl, K. A, HI, 475 Carl Sandburg (Golden), III, 579 Carleton Miscellany (magazine), III, 268 Carlisle, Olga, HI, 169 Carlotta (empress of Mexico), Supp. I, Part 2,457 Carlson, Eric W., Ill, 432 Carlyle, Thomas, 1,103,279; D, 5,7, 11,15-16,17,20,22,145,315;m,82, 84, 85, 87; IV, 169,182, 338, 350; Supp. I, Part 1,2,349, Part 2,410, 422,482,485,552 "Carma" (Toomer), Supp. Ill, Part 2, 481-483 "Carmen de Boheme" (Crane), 1,384 Carmen Jones (film), Supp. I, Part 1, 66 Carne-Ross, D. S., Supp. I, Part 1,268, 269,275 Carnegie, Andrew, I, 483; IV, 192; Supp. I, Part 2,639,644 Carnegie, Dale, Supp. I, Part 2,608 "Carnegie Hall: Rescued" (Moore), 111,215 Carnell, Edward J., HI, 312 "Carnival with Spectres" (Ben6t), Supp. I, Part 2,626 Carnovsky, Morris, III, 154 "Carol of Occupations" (Whitman), I, 486 "Carpe Noctem, if You Can" (Thurber), Supp. I, Part 2,620 Carpenter, Frederic L, D, 20,23; HI, 243,407 Carpenter, George Rice, Supp. I, Part 2,706 Carpentered Hen and Other Tame Creatures, The (Updike), IV, 214 Carpet-Bag (magazine), IV, 193 Carrel, Alexis, IV, 240 "Carriage from Sweden, A" (Moore),

HI, 212

Carrier of Ladders (Merwin), Supp. HI, Part 1,339,346,35O-352,356, 357 Carrington, Carroll, 1,199 Carrington, George C, Jr., II, 293,294 Carroll, Charles, Supp. I, Part 2,525 Carroll, Lewis, 1,432; H, 431; III, 181; Supp. I, Part 1,44, Part 2,622,656 Carroll, Paul, IV, 47 "Carrousel, The" (Riike), III, 558 Carruth, Hayden, 1,189; HI, 289 Carse, James, 1,564 Carson, Edward Russell, HI, 384 Carter, Elliott, Supp. Ill, Part 1,21 Carter, Everett, H, 148,294 Carter, Jimmy, Supp. I, Part 2,638 Cartier, Jacques, Supp. I, Part 2,496, 497 "Cartographies of Silence" (Rich), Supp. I, Part 2,571-572 Carver, Raymond, Supp. Ill, Part 1, 135-151 Cary, Richard, H, 413 "Casabianca" (Bishop), Supp. I, Part 1,86 Case of the Crushed Petunias, The (Williams), IV, 381 Case of the Officers of Excise (Paine), Supp. I, Part 2,503-504 Casements (magazine), IV, 286 "Cask of Amontillado, The" (Poe),II, 475: IH, 413 Casper, Leonard, IV, 258 Cass Timberlane (Lewis), II, 455-456 Cassady, Neal, Supp. n, Part 1, 309, 311 "Cassandra Southwick" (Whittier), Supp. I, Part 2,693 Cassirer, Ernst, 1,265; IV, 87,89 Cast a Cold Eye (McCarthy), II, 566 Castaway (Cozzens), 1,363,370,374, 375,379 "Caste in America" (Du Bois), Supp. II, Part 1,169 Castiglione, Baldassare, 1,279; 111,282 "Castilian" (Wylie), Supp. I, Part 2, 714 Castle Sinister (Marquand), III, 58 "Castles and Distances" (Wilbur), Supp. HI, Part 2,550 Castro, Fidel, 0,261,434 "Casual Incident, A" (Hemingway),

n,44

Cat Inside, The (Burroughs), Supp. HI, Part 1,105

CAT-CHAN / 658 Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (Williams), II, 190; IV, 380,382,383,386,387,389, 390,391,394,395,397-398 "Catbird Seat,The" (Thurbcr), Supp. I, Part 2,623 Catcher in the Rye, The (Salinger), I, 493;III,551,552,553-558,567,571; Supp. I, Part 2,535 Catch-22 (Heller), III, 558 Cater, Harold Dean, 1,24; 0,317 Catharine Beecher: A Study in American Domesticity (Sklar), Supp. I, Part 2,601 Cathay (Pound), II, 527 Cathcart, Wallace H., 0,245 Cathedral (Carver), Supp. Ill, Part 1, 144-146 "Cathedral" (Carver), Supp. in, Part 1,144-145 Cathedral, 77i
Cavalier and Yankee: The Old South and American National Character (Taylor), Supp. I, Part 2,601 "Cavalry Crossing the Ford" (Whitman), IV, 347 Cave, The (Warren), IV, 255-256 Cavender's House (Robinson^m.SlQ "Cawdor" (Jeffers), Supp. II, Part 2, 431 Caxton, William, ID, 486 Cayton, Horace, IV, 475,488,496,497 Cazamian, Louis, n, 529 Cazemajou, Jean, 1,426,427 "Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calavcras County, The" (Twain), IV, 1% Celebrated Jumping Frog ofCalaveras County, The, and Other Sketches (Twain), IV, 197 "Celery" (Stein), IV, 43 "Celestial Globe" (Nemerov), in, 288 "Celestial Railroad, The" (Hawthorne), Supp. I, Part 1,188 "Census of the Works of Charles Brockden Brown, A" (Krause), Supp. I, Part 1,148 Centaur, The (Updike), IV, 214,216, 217,218,219-221,222 Centennial History of the Associated Reformed Presbyterian Church, I, 305 "Centennial Meditation of Columbia, The" (Lanier), Supp. I, Part 1,362 Centeno, Agusto, IV, 375 "Central Park" (Lowell), II, 552 Century (magazine),!, 101;II,289,408, 466; III, 434; IV, 201; Supp. I, Part 2; 418,709,717 Ceremony (Wilbur), Supp. Ill, Part 2, 550-551 Ceremony in Lone Tree (Morris), III, 229-230,232,238,558 Cerf, Bennett, III, 405; IV, 288 Certain Noble Plays of Japan (Pound), 111,458 "Certain Poets" (MacLeish), III, 4 Certificate, The (Singer), IV, 1 Cervantes, Miguel de, 1,130,134; II, 8, 272,273,276,289,302,310,315;III, 113, 614; IV, 367; Supp. I, Part 2, 406 Cezanne, Paul, 0,576; III, 210; IV, 24, 26,31,407 Chaboseau, Jean, Supp. I, Part 1,260

Chaikin, Joseph, Supp. Ill, Part 2,433, 436-437 Chainbearer, The (Cooper), I, 351, 352-353 Chains of Dew (Glaspell), Supp. in, Part 1,181 Challacombe, Robert Hamilton, III, 176 Chalmers, George, Supp. I, Part 2, 514,521 Chambers, Richard, Supp. Ill, Part 2, 610,611,612 Chambers, Whittaker, Supp. Ill, Part 2,610 Chamber Music (Joyce), III, 16 "Chambered Nautilus, The" (Holmes), Supp. I, Part 1,254, Part 2,307,312-313,314 Chamberlain, John, Supp. I, Part 2, 647 Chamberlain, Neville, H, 589; Supp. I, Part 2,664 Chametzky, Jules, IV, 23 "Champion" (Lardner), II, 420-421, 428,430 Champion, Myra, IV, 473 Champollion-Figeac, Jean Jacques, IV, 426 "Chance" (Doolittle), Supp. I, Part 1, 271 Chance Acquaintance, A (Howells), II, 278 Chance, Frank, H, 418 Chandler, Raymond, Supp. Ill, Part 1, 91 Chancy, "Professor" W.H., 11,463-464 "Change Is Always for the Worse" (Segal), Supp. I, Part 1,199 Change of World, A (Rich), Supp. I, Part 2,551,552 "Change, The: Kyoto-Tokyo Express" (Ginsberg), Supp. II, Part 1, 313,329 "Changeling, The" (Lowell), Supp. I, Part 2,409 "Changeling, The" (Whittier), Supp. I, Part 2,697 Changing Light at Sandover, The (Merrill),Supp.ffl, Part 1,318,319, 323,327,332,335-336 "Changing Same, The" (Baraka), Supp. H, Part 1,47,51,53 Chanler, Mrs. Winthrop, 1,22,24; IV, 325

CHAN-CHES / 659 "Channel X: Two Plays on the Race Conflict'* (Roth), Supp. I, Part 1, 70-71 Channing, Carol, IV, 357 Channing, Edward, Supp* I, Part 2, 479-480 Channing, Edward Tyrrel, Supp. I, Part 1,155, Part 2,422 Channing, William Ellery (the elder), I,336;II,224,495;IV, 172,173,176, 177,189;Supp.I,Partl,103,Part2, 589 Channing, William Henry, IV, 178; Supp. II, Part 1,280,285 Chanson de Roland, 1,13 "Chanson un Peu Naive" (Bogan), Supp. HI, Part 1,50-51 "Chant for May Day" (Hughes), Supp. I, Part 1,331 "Chaperone, The" (Van Vechten), Supp. II, Part 2,728 Chaplin, Charles Spencer, 1,27,32,43, 386, 447; III, 403; Supp. I, Part 2, 607 Chapman, Abraham, IV, 485 Chapman, Edward M., D, 413 Chapman, George, Supp. I, Part 2, 422 Chapman, Harmon M., D, 365 Chapman, John (Johnny Appleseed), Supp. I, Part 2,397 Chapman, John Jay, IV, 436 "Chapter VI" (Hemingway), II, 252 Chapters in a Mythology: The Poetry of Sylvia Plath (Kroll), Supp. I, Part 2,541-543,548 Chapters on Erie (Adams and Adams), Supp. I, Part 2,644 "Character" (Emerson), II, 6 "Character of Socrates, The" (Emerson), II, 8-9 "Characters in Fiction" (McCarthy), 11,562 Charlatan, The (Singer), IV, 1 "Charles Brockden Brown" (Ringe), Supp. I, Part 1,148 Charles Brockden Brown (Ringe), Supp. I, Part 1,148 Charles Brockden Brown: American Gothic Novelist (Warfel), Supp. I, Part 1,148 "Charles Brockden Brown, America's First Important Novelist: A Checklist of Biography and Criticism"

(Hemenway and Keller), Supp. I, Part 1,147 "Charles Brockden Brown and the Culture of Contradictions" (Hedges), Supp. I, Part 1,148 "Charles Brockden Brown as a Novelist of Ideas" (Hirsh), Supp. I, Part 1,148 "Charles Brockden Brown: A Bibliographical Essay" (Witherton), Supp. I, Part 1,148 Charles Brockden Brown: Pioneer Voice of America (Clark), Supp. I, Part 1,148 Charles Brockden Brown: A Study of Early American Fiction (Vilas), Supp. I, Part 1,148 "Charles Brockden Brown's Historical 'Sketches': A Consideration" (Berthoff), Supp. I, Part 1,148 Charles I, King, H, 146; IV, 145 Charles II, King, II, 120; IV, 145; Supp. I, Part 1,110, 111, Part 2,552 Charles X, King, 1,345 Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, 111,487 Charleville, Victoria Verdon, Supp. I, Part 1,200-201,205,206,210 Charley's Aunt (Thomas), II, 138 Charlotte: A Tale of Truth (Rowson), Supp. I, Part 1,128 Charlotte's Web (White),Supp.I,Part 2,655,656,658,667,670 Charmed Life, A (McCarthy), II, 571574 Charnel Rose, The (Aiken), 1,50,57, 62 Charney, Maurice, Supp. I, Part 1,69 Charterhouse, The (Percy), Supp. DI, Part 1,388 Charvat, William, II, 244; Supp. I, Part 1,148 Chase, Cleveland B., 1,119 Chase, Mary Ellen, D, 413 Chase,Richard,I,473;III,97,336;IV, 202,354,443,448; Supp. I, Part 1, 148 Chase, Salmon P., Supp. I, Part 2,584 Chase, Stuart, Supp. I, Part 2,609 Chase, The (Foote), Supp. I, Part 1, 281 "Chaste Land, The" (Tate), IV, 122 Chattanooga News (newspaper), II, 197

Chatterbox (publication), III, 101 Chatterton, Thomas, Supp. I, Part 1, 349, Part 2,410,716 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 1,131; D, 11,504, 516,542,543;III, 283,411,473,492, 521; Supp. I, Part 1, 356,363, Part 2,422,617 Chauncy, Charles, 1,546-547,565; IV, 147 "Checklist of the Melcher Lindsay Collection" (Byrd), Supp. I, Part 2,401 "Cheers" (Carver), Supp. Ill, Part 1, 138 Cheetham, James, Supp. I, Part 2,521 Cheever, Benjamin Hale, Supp. I, Part 1,175 Cheever, David W., Supp. I, Part 1, 304 Cheever, Ezekiei, Supp. I, Part 1,174, 193 Cheever, Federico, Supp. I, Part 1,175 Cheever, Fred, Supp. I, Part 1,174 Cheever, Frederick L., Supp. I, Part 1, 174 Cheever, John, Supp. I, Part 1, 174 199 Cheever, Mary Liley, Supp. I, Part 1, 174 Cheever, Mrs. John (Mary Winternitz), Supp. I, Part 1,175 Cheever, Susan, see Cowley, Susan Cheever (Susan Cheever) "Cheever's Inferno" (Warnke), Supp. I, Part 1,199 "Cheever's Triumph" (demons), Supp. I, Part 1,198 "Cheever's Use of Mythology in The Enormous Radio' " (Kendle), Supp. I, Part 1,199 Chekhov, Anton, 1,52,90; 0,27,38, 44,49,198,542; 111,362,467; IV, 17, 53, 359, 446; Supp. I, Part 1,1%; Supp. II, Part 1,6 "Chemin de Per" (Bishop), Supp. I, Part 1,80,85,86 Ch6netier, Marc, Supp. I, Part 2,402 Cheney, Brainard, D, 221 Cheney, Ednah D., Supp. I, Part 1, 46 Chernyshevski, Nikolai, III, 261,262, 263 Cherry, Conrad, 1,565 Cherry Orchard, The (Chekhov), IV, 359,426 Cheslock, Louis, III, 99,118,119,121

CHES-CHRI / 660 Chesnutt, Charles Waddeil, Supp. II, "Child Margaret" (Sandburg), m, 584 "Child of Courts, The" (Jarrell), II, Part 1,174,193,211 378,379,381 Chessman, Caryl, Supp* I, Part 2,446 "CHILD OF THE THIRTIES" Chester, Alfred, 1,95; IV, 234 (Baraka), Supp. II, Part 1,60 Chesterfield, Lord, H, 36 Chesterton, Gilbert Keith, 1,226; IV, "Child on Top of a Greenhouse" (Roethke),III,531 432 "Chicago" (Sandburg), III, 581,592, Child Savers, The: The Invention of 5%; Supp. HI, Part 1,71 Delinquency (Platt), Supp. I, Part 1,27 Chicago (Shepard), Supp. ID, Part 2, "Childhood" (Wilder), IV, 375 439 Chicago Chronicle (newspaper),Supp. "ChOdhood Sketch" (Wright), Supp. Ill, Part 2,589 I, Part 2,455 Chicago Daily Globe (newspaper), I, "Childless Woman" (Plath), Supp. I, Part 2,544 499 Chicago Daily News (newspaper), in, "Childlessness" (Merrill), Supp. DI, Part 1,323 580 Chicago Daily World (newspaper), III, "Children" (Stowe), Supp. I, Part 2, 587 580 Chicago Defender (publication), Supp. Children and Others (Cozzens), 1,374 I, Part 1,336 "Children of Adam" (Whitman), IV, 342 "Chicago Defender Sends a Man to Little Rock, The" (Brooks), Supp. Children of Light and the Children of Darkness, The (Niebuhr), III, 292, m, Part 1,80-81 306,310 Chicago Evening Post (newspaper), ChildrenoftheFrost(London),U94699 Supp. I, Part 2,379 483 Chicago Examiner (newspaper), II, Children of the Market Place (Masters), 417 Supp. I, Part 2,471 "Chicago Hamlet, A" (Anderson), I, "Children on Their Birthdays" 112 Chicago Inter-Ocean (newspaper), II, (Capote),Supp.m, Part 1,114,115 417 "Children Selecting Books in a Li"Chicago Picasso, The" (Brooks), brary" (Jarrell), II, 371 Supp. ID, Part 1,70-71,84 Children, 77i*(Wharton),IV,321,326 Chicago Poems (Sandburg), III, 579, Children's Hour, 77ie(Hellman),Supp. I, Part 1,276-277,281,286,297 581-583,586 Chicago Renaissance in American "Children's Rhymes" (Hughes), Supp. I, Part 1,340 Letters, The: A Critical History (Duffey), Supp. I, Part 2,402,478 "Child's Reminiscence, A" (WhitChicago Renaissance: The Literary Life man), IV, 344 in the Midwest, 1900-1930 (Kra- Childwold (Oates), Supp. II, Part 2, 519-520 mer), Supp. I, Part 2,402,478 Chicago Times-Herald (newspaper), Chills and Fever (Ransom), III, 490, Supp. I, Part 1,200 491-492,493 Chicago Tribune (newspaper), II, 417; "Chimes for Yahya" (Merrill), Supp. Supp. I, Part 2,490,606 HI, Part 1,329 "Chickamauga" (Bierce), 1,201 Chinese Classics (Legge), III, 472 "Chickamauga" (Wolfe), IV, 460 Chinese Materia Medica (Smith), III, "Chiefly about War Matters" (Haw572 thorne), n, 227 "Chinese Nightingale,The" (Lindsay), "Child" (Plath), Supp. I, Part 2,544 Supp. I, Part 2,392-393,394 "Child byTiger,The"(Wolfe),IV, 451 Chinese Nightingale and Other Poems, 77u? (Lindsay), Supp. I, Part 2, "Child Is the Meaning of This Life, The" (Schwartz), Supp. II, Part 2, 392 659^660 "Chinoiseries" (Lowell), II, 524-525

Chirico, Giorgio de, Supp. Ill, Part 1, 14 "Chiron" (Winters), Supp. II, Part 2, 801 Chodorov, Jerome, IV, 274 "Choice of Profession, A" (Malamud), Supp. I, Part 2,437 Chomei, Kamo-No, IV, 170,171,184 Chopin, Felix, Supp. I, Part 1,202 Chopin, Fr6d£ric, Supp. I, Part 1,363 Chopin, Jean, Supp. I, Part 1,206 Chopin, Kate, n, 276; Supp. I, Part 1, 200-226 Chopin, Mrs. Oscar, see Chopin, Kate Chopin, Oscar, Supp. I, Part 1, 206207 "Chord" (Merwin), Supp. ffl, Part 1, 356 Choruses from Iphigenia in Aulis (trans. Doolittle), Supp. I, Part 1, 257,268,269 Chosen Country (Dos Passos), 1,475, 490-491 Choson (Lowell), II, 513 Chovteau,ManeTh6r&se,Supp.I,Part 1,205 "Christ for Sale" (Lowell), II, 538 Christian Century (publication), III, 297 Christian Dictionary, A (Wilson), IV, 153 "Christian Minister, The" (Emerson), D,10 Christian Philosopher, The (Mather), Supp. n, Part 2,463-464 Christian Realism and Practical Problems (Niebuhr), HI, 292,308 Christian Register (publication), 1,471472 "Christian Roommates, The" (Updike), IV, 226-227 Christian Science Monitor (newspaper), Supp. I, Part 2,530 Christianity and Crisis (publication), HI, 292 Christianity and Power Politics (Niebuhr), III, 292,303 Christiansen, Carrie, 1,210 Christie, Francis A., 1,564 Christman, Henry M., IV, 354 "Christmas Banquet, The" (Hawthorne), II, 227 Christmas Carol, A (Dickens), Supp. I, Part 2,409-410 "Christmas Eve in the Time of War: A

CHRI-CLEM / 661 Capitalist Meditates by a Civil War Monument" (Lowell), II, 538 "Christmas Eve under Hooker's Statue" (Lowell), II, 539-540 "Christinas Gift" (Warren), IV,252-253 "Christmas Greeting, A" (Wright), Supp. Ill, Part 2,601 "Christmas Hymn, A" (Wilbur), Supp. Ill, Part 2,557 Christmas Memory, A (Capote), Supp. HI, Part 1,118,119,129 "Christmas 1944" (Levertov), Supp. III, Part 1,274 "Christmas, or the Good Fairy" (Stowe), Supp. I, Part 2,586 Christmas Story (Mencken), III, 111 Christographia (Taylor), IV, 164-165 Christopher Columbus, Mariner (Morison), Supp. I, Part 2,488 Christus:A Mystery (Longfellow), II, 490,493,495,505-507 "Chronicle of Race Relations, A" (Du Bois), Supp. n, Part 1,182 Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada (Irving), II, 310 Chronologies of the Life and Writings of William Cullen Bryant . . . (Sturges), Supp. I, Part 1,173 "Chrysanthemums, The" (Steinbeck), IV, 53 "Chrysaor" (Longfellow), II, 498 Church, Margaret, IV, 466 "Church Porch, The" (Herbert), IV, 153 Church Psalmody, Selected from Dr. Watts and Other Authors (ed. Mason and Greene), 1,458 Churchill, Winston, 1,9,490; Supp. I, Part 2,491 Ciannic, Saint, H, 215 Ciano,Edda,IV,249 Ciardi, John, 1,169,179,189,535,542; ID, 268,289; IV, 424 "Cicadas" (Wilbur), Supp. ID, Part 2, 549 Cicero, I, 279; O, 8, 14-15; III, 23; Supp. I, Part 2,405 "Cigales" (Wilbur), Supp. Ill, Part 2, 549 "Cimetiere Marin, Le" (Vatery), IV, 91-92 "Cinderella" (Jarrell), II, 386 "Cinderella" (Perrault), IV, 266,267 "Cinderella" (Sexton), Supp. II, Part 2,691

Cinthio,IV,370 CIOPW (Cummings), 1,429 "Circle in the Fire, A" (O'Connor), 111,344-345,349-350,351,353,354 "Circles" (Emerson), 1,455,460 "Circles" (Lowell), II, 554 "Circus, The" (Porter), III, 443,445 "Circus Animals' Desertion" (Yeats), 1,389 "Circus in the Attic" (Warren), IV, 253 Circus in the Attic, The (Warren), IV, 243,251-253 "Circus in Three Rings" (Plath),Supp. I, Part 2,536 "Cirque d'Hiver" (Bishop), Supp. I, Part 1,85 Cities of the Red Night (Burroughs), Supp. Ill, Part 1,106 "Citizen Cain" (Baraka), Supp. II, Part 1,49 "Citizen of the World" (Goldsmith), 11,299 City in History, The (Mumford), Supp. II, Part 2,495 "City in the Sea, The" (Poe), III, 411 City of Discontent (Harris), Supp. I, Part 2,402 City of God, The (St. Augustine), IV, 126 "City on a Hill" (Lowell), II, 552 City Without Walls (Auden), Supp. II, Part 1,24 Civil Disobedience (Thoreau), IV, 185; Supp. I, Part 2,507 "Civil Rights" (Lanier), Supp. I, Part 1,357 Civilization in the United States (Stearns), 1,245 Claiborne, William, 1,132 Clancy's Wake, At (Crane), 1,422 Clara Howard; or, The Enthusiasm of Love (Brown), Supp. I, Part 1,145 Clara's Ole Man (Bullins), Supp. n, Part 1,42 dare, John, 0,387; III, 528 Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land (Melville), III, 92-93 Clarissa (Richardson), II, 111; Supp. I, Part 2,714 Clark, Barrett H., Ill, 406-407 Clark, Charles, 1,470 Clark, David Lee, Supp. I, Part 1,148 Clark, Eleanor, see Warren, Mrs. Robert Penn (Eleanor Clark)

Clark, Francis Edward, n, 9 Clark, Harry Hayden, Supp. I, Part 1, 319, Part 2,423,426,525 Clark, John Bates, Supp. I, Part 2, 633 Clark, Thomas, Supp. Ill, Part 2,629 dark, William, HI, 14; IV, 179,283 Clark, Willis Gaylord, Supp. I, Part 2, 684 Clarke, James Freeman, Supp. II, Part 1,280 Clarke, John H., IV, 118,119 Clarke, John J., HI, 356 Clarke, Samuel, D, 108 Clash by Night (Odets), Supp. II, Part 2, 531,538,544-546,550,551 "CLASS STRUGGLE" (Baraka), Supp. II, Part 1,55 Classical Tradition, The (Highet), Supp. I, Part 1,268 ChssicalWorldofH. D., ITie(Swann), Supp. I, Part 1,275 Classics and Commercials: A Literary Chronicle of the Forties (Wilson), IV, 433 Claudel,Paul,I,60 Claudelle Inglish (Caldwell), 1,304 Clavel, Marcel, 1,343,357 "Claw of the Sea-Puss, The: James Thurber's Sense of Experience" (Black), Supp. I, Part 2,626 "CLAY" (Baraka), Supp. II, Part 1, 54 Clay, Cassius, see Muhammad Ali Clay, Henry, 1,8; Supp. I, Part 2,684, 686 Clayton, John J., 1,165 "Clear Days" (White), Supp. I, Part 2, 664,665 "Clear, with Light Variable Winds" (Lowell), II, 522 "Clearing the Title" (Merrill), Supp. Ill, Part 1,336 "Clearness" (Wilbur), Supp. Ill, Part 2,544,550 Clemenceau, Georges, 1,490 Clemens, Clara, IV, 213 Clemens, Jane, 1,247 Clemens, John Marshall, IV, 193 Clemens, Mrs. John Marshall (Jane Lampton),IV,193 Clemens, Mrs. Samuel Langhorne (Olivia Langdon), 1,197,208;Supp. I, Part 2,457 Clemens, Olivia, 1,247

CLEM-COLL / 662 Clemens, Orion, IV, 193,195 Clemens, Samuel Langhorne, see Twain, Mark Clemens, Susie, IV, 208 Clemm, Mrs., Ill, 411,412,429 Clemm, Virginia, see Poe, Mrs. Edgar Allan (Virginia Clemm) demons, Walter, Supp. I, Part 1,198 Cleopatra, IH, 44; IV, 373; Supp. I, Parti, 114 "Clepsydra" (Ashbery), Supp. Ill, Part 1,10-15 "Clerks,The"(Robinson),ffl,517-518 Cleveland, Grover, 0,126,128,129, 130,137,138; Supp. I, Part 2,486 Clift, Montgomery, III, 161 Cline family, HI, 337 Cline, Regina L.,see O'Connor, Mrs. Edward R, Jr. (Regina L Cline) Clinton, De Witt, 1,338 "Clipped Wings"(Miller),m,176-177 Clive, Robert, Supp. I, Part 2,505 Clock Without Hands (McCuilers), II, 587-588,604-606 Clocks of Columbus, The (Holmes), Supp. I, Part 2,626 Clorindy (Cook), Supp. II, Part 1,199 Close the Book (Glaspell), Supp. Ill, Part 1,179 "Close the Book" (Lowell), II, 554 Closer Look atAriel, A (Steiner),Supp. I, Part 2,549 "Cloud and Fame" (Berryman), 1,173 "Cloud on the Way, The" (Bryant), Supp. I, Part 1,171 "Cloud, The" (Shelley), Supp. I, Part 2,720 Clough, Arthur, D, 22 "Clover" (Lanier), Supp. I, Part 1, 362-364 Clover and Other Poems (Lanier), Supp. I, Part 1,362 Cluck, Julia, Supp. I, Part 2,728,730 Cluny,Hugo,IV,290 Clurman, Harold, 1,93; IV, 381,385 Clyme,W.B.,n,171 "Coal: Beginning and End" (Winters), Supp. II, Part 2,791 "Coast Guard's Cottage, The" (Wylie), Supp. I, Part 2,723 "Coast-Range Christ, The" (Jeffers), Supp. II, Part 2,414,419 "Coast-Road, The" (Jeffers), Supp. D, Part 2,425 Coates, Robert, I, 54; IV, 298, 307; Supp. I, Part 2,626

Cobb,LeeJ.,III,153 Cobb, Palmer, III, 432 Cobb,Ty,III,227,229 Cobbett, William, Supp. I, Part 2,517 "CobblerKeezar*sVision"(Whittier), Supp. I, Part 2,699 "Cobweb, The" (Carver), Supp. m, Part 1,148 Cobwebs From an Empty Skull (Bierce),I,195 Cock Pit (Cozzens), 1,359,378,379 "Cock-a-Doodle-Doo!" (Melville), 111,89 "Cockayne" (Emerson), II, 6 "Cock-Crow" (Gordon), II, 219 Cocke, Frances, see Pain, Mrs. Joseph (Frances Cocke) Cocktail Party, The (Eliot), 1,571,582583; 111,21 Cocteau, Jean, HI, 471 Codman, Florence, Supp. II, Part 1, 92,93 Cody, William ("Buffalo Bill"), 1,440; 111,584 Coffey, Warren, HI, 358 Coffin, Charles, III, 577 Coffin, R. P. T., Ill, 525 Coffman, Stanley K., Supp. I, Part 1, 275 Coffman,StanleyK.,Jr.,n,533;IV,424 Coghill, Nevill, Supp. II, Part 1,4 Cohan, George M., D, 427; III, 401 Cohen, Arthur, IV, 307 Cohen, Hennig, n, 365 Cohen, Hettie, Supp. II, Part 1,30 Cohen, I. Bernard, D, 124 Cohn, Ruby, 1,96 Coindreau, Maurice, III, 339 "Coitus" (Pound), III, 466 "Cold, The" (Winters), Supp. II, Part 2,790-791,809,811 Cold War and the Income Tax, The (Wilson), IV, 430 "Cold-blooded Creatures" (Wylie), Supp. I, Part 2,729 Colden, Cadwallader, Supp. I, Part 1, 250 "Colder the Air,The" (Bishop), Supp. I, Part 1,86 Cole, Goody, Supp. I, Part 2,696-697 Cole, Thomas, Supp. I, Part 1, 156, 158,171 Coleman, D. C, 1,95 Coleridge, Mrs. Samuel T., 1,283,284 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 1,283,284, 447, 522; D, 7,10,11,19, 71,169,

273,301,502,516,549; III, 77,8384,424,461,488, 523; IV, 74,173, 250, 349, 453; Supp. I, Part 1,31, 311,349, Part 2,376,393,422 Coles, Robert, III, 243; Supp. I, Part 1, 69 "Coliseum, The" (Poe), III, 411 "Collapse of Tomorrow, The" (Mumford), Supp. II, Part 2,482 Collected Earlier Poems 1940-1960 (Levertov),Supp.m, Part 1,273,275 Collected Essays (Tate), IV, 133-134 Collected Letters (Lawrence), Supp. I, Part 1,275 Collected Plays (Miller), III, 158 Collected Poems (Aiken), 1,50 Collected Poems (Burke), 1,269 Collected Poems (Cummings), 1,430, 439,441 Collected Poems (Doolittle), Supp. I, Part 1,264-267,269 Collected Poems (Lindsay), Supp. I, Part 2,380,387,392,396-397,400 Collected Poems (Moore), III, 194, 215 Collected Poems, The (Stevens), III, 273; IV, 75,76,87,93 Collected Poems (Williams), IV, 415 Collected Poems (Winters), Supp. II, Part 2,791,810 Collected Poems (Wright), Supp. HI, Part 2,602 Collected Poems 1909-1935(Eliot),!, 580 Collected Poems 1909-1962 (Eliot), I, 583 Collected Poems 1917-1952 (MacLeish),III,3,4,19 Collected Poems, 1923-1953 (Bogan), Supp. Ill, Part 1,64 Collected Poems 1930-1960 (Eberhart), 1,522,525-526,540,541 Collected Poems: 7 940-7975 (Shapiro), Supp. II, Part 2,703,717 Collected Poems of Hart Crane, The, I, 399-402 Collected Poems of James Agee, The (ed. Fitzgerald), 1,27-28 Collected Poems of James T. Farrell, 7/ie,n,45 Collected Poetry (Auden), Supp. II, Part 1,18 Collected Prose (Wright), Supp. Ill, Part 2,596 Collected Sonnets (Millay), III, 136137

COLL-COMP / 663 Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter, III, 454 Collected Stories of William Faulkner, 11,72 Collected Works (Bierce), 1,204,208210 Collection of Epigrams, n, 111 Collection of Poems, on American Affairs, and a Variety of Other Subjects ... (Freneau), Supp. II, Part 1,274 Collection of Select Aphorisms and Maxims (Palmer), II, 111 "Collectors" (Carver), Supp. Ill, Part 1,141-142 Collier's (magazine), II, 433,467; III, 54,58,552,591 Collingwood, R. G., 1,278 Collins, Carvel, 1,311; n, 75; III, 336; IV, 188 Collins, Eddie, 0,416 Collins, John, D, 104,105 Collins, Seward, 1,262 Collins, Wilkie, Supp. I, Part 1,35,36 Collins, William, Supp. I, Part 2,714 Collinson, Peter, D, 114 Colloquial Style in America, The (Bridgman), Supp. I, Part 2,477 "Colloquy in Black Rock" (Lowell), 11,539 "Colloquy of Monos and Una, The" (Poe),IH,412 Color and Democracy: Colonies and Peace (Du Bois), Supp. II, Part 1, 184,185 Color Curtain, 7M Wright), IV,478,488 Color Line, The (Smith), Supp. II, Part 1,168 "Color Line, The" (Douglass), Supp. Ill, Part 1,163-165 Color Purple, The( Walker), Supp. HI, Part 2,517,518,520,525-529,532537 "Colored Americans" (Dunbar), Supp. II, Part 1,197 Colossus of Maroussi, The (Miller), III, 178,185-186 Colossus, 77ie(Plath),Supp.I,Part2, 529,531,536,538,540 Colum, Mary, I, 246, 252, 256, 262; Supp. I, Part 2,708,709,730 Columbia Monthly (publication), I, 216,217,223,224 Columbiad, The (Barlow), Supp. II, Part 1,67,72,73,74,75-77,79

Columbian Magazine, Supp. I, Part 1, 125 "Columbian Ode" (Dunbar), Supp. II, Part 1,199 Columbus, Christopher, 1,253; n, 6, 310; 01,8; Supp. I, Part 2,397,479, 480, 483, 486-488, 491, 495, 497, 498 Columbus Dispatch (newspaper), Supp. I, Part 2,606,613 "Columbus to Ferdinand" (Freneau), Supp. II, Part 1,255 Colvert, James B., 1,426,427 "Come, Break With Time" (Bogan), Supp. Ill, Part 1,52 "Come out the Wilderness" (Baldwin), Supp. I, Part 1,63 "Comedian as the Letter C, The" (Stevens), IV, 84-85,88 "Comedy Cop" (Farrell), II, 45 "Comedy of Exiles, A" (Munson), Supp. I, Part 2,478 "Comedy's Greatest Era" (Agee), 1,31 Comer, Cornelia, 1,214 Comerchero, Victor, IV, 307 "Comforts of Home, The" (O'Connor), III, 349,351,355 Comic Artist, The (Glaspell and Mat son), Supp. Ill, Part 1,182 Comic Imagination in American Literature (ed. Rubin), Supp. I, Part 2, 681 "Comic Imagination of the Young Dickens, The" (Wright), Supp. Ill, Part 2,591 Comic rragedjes(Aleott),Supp.I,Part 1,33 Coming Forth by Day of Osiris Jones, The (Aiken), 1,59 "Comingin From the Cold" (Walker), Supp. Ill, Part 2,526 Coming into the Country (McPhee), Supp. Ill, Part 1,298,301-306,309, 310 "Coming to the Morning" (Merwin), Supp. Ill, Part 1,356 Comiskey, Charles, n, 422 Commager, Henry Steele, 1,253; Supp. I, Part 1,372, Part 2,484,647,650 "Command of Human Destiny as Exemplified in Two Plays: Lillian Hellman's The Little Foxes and Lorraine Hansbeny's A Raisin in the Sun" (Phillips), Supp. I, Part 1, 298

Command the Morning (Buck), Supp. II, Part 1,129 "Commencement Day Address, The" (Schwartz), Supp. II, Part 2,660 "Comment on Curb" (Hughes), Supp. I, Part 1,340 Commentaries (Caesar), II, 502,561 "Commentary" (Auden), Supp. II, Part 1,13 Commentary (publication), III, 452453; Supp. I, Part 1,51 "Committed Writer, The: James Baldwin as Dramatist" (Bigsby), Supp. I, Part 1,69 Commodity of Dreams, A, & Other Stories (Nemerov), III, 268^269, 285 Common Ground (publication),Supp. I, Part 1,334 "Common Ground, A" (Levertov), Supp. Ill, Part 1,277 "Common Sense" (Bailyn), Supp. I, Part 2,525 Common Sense (Paine), II, 117; Supp. I, Part 1,231, Part 2,505,506-508, 509,513,516,517,521 Commons, John, Supp. I, Part 2,645 Commonweal (publication), III, 358 Communism, 1,505,515; D, 26,38-39, 40,41,454,562 Communist Manifesto, The (Marx), II, 463 Communities of Women (Auerbach), Supp. I, Part 1,46 "Companions, The" (Nemerov), III, 269,278,287 Company She Keeps, The (McCarthy), 0,562,563-566 Compass Flower, 77i£ (Merwin),Supp. III, Part 1,353,357 "Compassionate Friendship" (Doolittle), Supp. I, Part 1,257,258,259, 260,271 "Complete Destruction" (Williams), IV, 413 "Complete Life of John Hopkins, The" (O. Henry), Supp. II, Part 1, 405 Complete Poems (Frost), II, 155,164 Complete Poems (Sandburg), III, 590592,594,596 Complete Poems, The (Ashbery), Supp. I, Part 1,96 Complete Poems, The (Bishop), Supp. I, Part 1,72,82,94

COMP-CONT / 664 Confession de Claude, La (Zola), I, 411 Confession of Jereboam O. Beauchamp, The (pamphlet), IV, 253 Confessional Poets, The (Phillips), Supp. I, Part 2,548 Confessions (Augustine), 1,279 Confessions (Rousseau), 1,226 Confessions of Nat Turner, The (Styron), IV, 98,99,105,113-117 Confidence (James), II, 327,328 Confidence Man, The (Melville), 111,91 Confidence Man, The (Van Vechten), Supp. II, Part 2,737 Confident Years, 1885-1915, The (Brooks), 1,257,259; Supp. I, Part 2,650 Confidential Clerk, The (Eliot), 1,570, 571-572,583,584 Confucianism, III, 456,475 Confucius, n, 1; III, 456,475 Confusion (Cozzens), 1,358,359,377, 378 "Congo, The" (Lindsay), Supp. I, Part 2,388-389,392,395 Congo and Other Poems, The (Lindsay), Supp. I, Part 2,379,382,389, 390,391 Congreve, William, III, 195 Coningsby (Disraeli), II, 127 "Conjuration" (Wilbur), Supp. Ill, Part 2,551 Conjure Woman, The (Chesnutt), Supp. II, Part 1,193 Conklin, Grof, Supp. I, Part 2,672 Conkling, Hilda, H, 530 Conkling, Roscoe, III, 506 Conlin, Matthew T., Ill, 408 "Connecticut Lad, A" (White), Supp. I, Part 2,677 "Connecticut Valley" (Cowley), Supp. II, Part 1,141-142 Connecticut Industry (publication), Supp. Ill, Part 2,611 ConnecticutWits, The (Howard), Supp. I, Part 1,148 Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, A (Twain),I,209;II,276;IV, 205 Connell, Norreys (pseudonym), see O'Riordan, Conal Holmes O'Connell Connelly, Kenneth, 1,189 Connelly, Marc, III, 394; Supp. I, Part 5,8 2; 679 Conduct of Life, The (Mumford), Supp. II, Part 2,485,496-^97 Conner, Paul W., 0,125

Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, The (ed. Johnson), 1,470 Complete Poetical Works (Hu\mc),Ul, 464 Complete Poetical Works (Lowell), II, 512,516-517 Complete Works of Kate Chopin, The (ed. Seyersted), Supp. I, Part 1, 212,225 "Complicated Thoughts About a Small Son9* (White), Supp. I, Part 2,678 "Compliments of the Season" (CX Henry), Supp. H, Part 1,392,399 "Compline" (Auden), Supp. II, Part 1,23 Composition as Explanation (Stein), IV, 32,33,38 "Composition as Explanation" (Stein), IV, 27,28 "Compounding of Consciousness'* (James), II, 358-359 Comprehensive Bibliography (Hanneman),II,259 Compton, C H., 0,366 Compton-Burnett, Ivy, 1,93; D, 580 Comus (Milton) JI, 12; Supp. I, Part 2, 622 Conarroe, Joel O., IV, 424 Concept of Dread, The (Kierkegaard), 111,305 Conceptions of Reality in Modern American Poetry (Dembo), Supp. I, Part 1,272,275 Concerning the End Which God Created the World (Edwards), 1,549, 557,559 Conchologist's First Book, 77te(Poe), 111,412 Conclusive Evidence (Nabokov), III, 247-250,252 "Concord Hymn** (Emerson), II, 19 "Concrete Universal, The: Observations on the Understanding of Poetry** (Ransom), III, 480 Condensed Novels and Other Papers (Harte), Supp. II, Part 1,342 Condition of Man, The (Mumford), Supp. II, Part 2,483,484,486,495496,498 Condorcet, Marquis de, Supp. I, Part £511 ConductofLife, The (Emerson), 11,1-

"Connoisseurof Chaos" (Stevens),FV, 89 Connor, Frederick W., Supp. I, Part 1, 173 Connors, Elizabeth,5ee Lindsay, Mrs. Vachel (Elizabeth Connors) Conover, Roger, Supp. I, Part 1,95 Conquest of Canaan (Dwight), Supp. I, Part 1,124 Conquistador(MacLcish), 111,2,3,1314,15 Conrad, Alfred H., Supp. I, Part 2,552 Conrad, David, Supp. I, Part 2,552 Conrad, Jacob, Supp. I, Part 2,552 Conrad, Joseph, 1,123,343,394,405, 409, 415, 421, 485, 506, 575-576, 578; 0,58,73,74,91,92,144,263, 320,338,595; HI, 28,102,106,328, 464,467,491,512; IV, 476; Supp. I, Part 1,292, Part 2,621,622 Conrad, Paul, Supp. I, Part 2,552 "Conrad Aiken: From Savannah to Emerson" (Cowley), Supp. II, Part 1,143 Conscience with the Power and Cases thereof (Ames), IV, 158 "Conscientious Objector, The" (Shapiro), Supp. II, Part 2,710 "Conscription Camp" (Shapiro), Supp. II, Part 2,705 "Considerations by the Way*' (Emerson), II, 2,5 Considine, Bob, D, 424 Conspiracy of Kings, The (Barlow), Supp. II, Part 1,80 Conspiracy of Pontiac, 77n(Parkman), Supp. II, Part 2,590,595,596,599600 "Constructive Work" (Du Bois), Supp. II, Part 1,172 "Consumption" (Bryant), Supp.I, Part 1,169-170 Contact (publication), IV, 287,304 "Contagiousness of Puerperal Fever, The" (Holmes), Supp. I, Part 1, 303-304 "Contemplations" (Bradstreet), Supp. I, Part 1,112,113,119-122 Contempo (publication), IV, 286,287, 288 "Contentment" (Holmes), Supp. I, Part 1,307 "Contest for Aaron Gold, The" (Roth), Supp. m, Part 2,403 Continental Monthly (magazine), II, 322

CONT-COUR / 665 Continuity of American Poetry, The (Pearce), Supp. I, Part 1, 111, 173, 373, Part 2,475,478,706 "Contract" (Lardner), II, 432 Control of Nature, The (McPhee), Supp. ffl, Part 1,310-313 Conversation (Aiken), 1,54 Conversation atMidnight(Mi\\ay), HI, 138 "Conversation Galante" (Eliot), 1,569 "Conversation of Eiros and Charmion, The"(Poe),III,412 "Conversation on Conversation" (Stowe), Supp. I, Part 2,587 "Conversations in Moscow" (Levertov), Supp. in, Part 1,282 Conversations on Some of the Old Poets (Lowell), Supp. I, Part 2,405 Conversations with Richard Wilbur (Wilbur), Supp. HI, Part 2, 542543 "Conversion of the Jews, The"(Roth), Supp. Ill, Part 2,404,406 Conway, Jill, Supp. I, Part 1,19,27 Coode,John,I,132 Cook, Albert, IV, 424 Cook, Captain James, 1,2 Cook, Don L.,H, 292 Cook, Elizabeth Christine, II, 106,125 Cook, Reginald L., IV, 189 Cooke, Alistair, III, 113,119,120 Cooke, Delmar G., D, 271,294 Cooke, G. W., Supp. I, Part 2,425 Cooke, Philip Pendleton, III, 420 Cooke, Rose Terry, n, 401 Cool Million, A (West), III, 425; IV, 287,288,297-299,300 "Cool Tombs" (Sandburg), III, 584 Coolbrith,Ina,I,193,196 Coolidge, Calvin, 1,498; II, 95; Supp. I, Part 2,647 Coon, Ross, IV, 1% "CoonHunt" (White), Supp. I, Part 2, 669 Cooper, James Fenimore, 1,211,257, 33S-357; 0,74,277,295-296,302, 306,309,313,314; III, 51; IV, 205, 333; Supp. I, Part 1,141,147,155, 156,158,171,372, Part 2,413,495, 579,585,652,660 Cooper, Mrs. James Fenimore (Susan A. De Lancey), 1,338,351,354 Cooper, Mrs. William, 1,337 Cooper, Susan Fenimore, 1,337,354, 356

Cooper, William, 1,337-338,351 Cooperman, Stanley, III, 336 Copland, Aaron, 11,586; Supp. I, Part 1,281; Supp. HI, Part 2,619 Coplas de Don Jorge Manrique (trans. Longfellow), II, 488,492 Coppde, Frangois Edouard Joachim, 0,325 Copperhead, The (Frederic), II, 134135 "Cora Unashamed" (Hughes), Supp. I, Part 1,329,330 "Coral Ring, The" (Stowe), Supp. I, Part 2,586 Corbett, Gentlemen Jim, H, 416 Corbifere, Jean Antoine, n, 384-385, 528 Corelli, Marie, III, 579 Corey, Lewis, Supp. I, Part 2,645 Corinthian, The (publication),III, 337 "Coriolan"(Eliot),I,580 "Coriolanus and His Mother" (Schwartz), Supp. D, Part 2, 643, 644-645 Corke, Hilary, Supp. I, Part 1,198 Corkum,Gerald,I,37 Corman, Cid, IV, 425; Supp. Ill, Part 2,624,625,626,627,628 "Corn" (Lanier), Supp. I, Part 1,352, 353,354,356-361,364,366 "Corn-Planting, The" (Anderson), I, 114 Corneille, Pierre, Supp. I, Part 2,716 Cornell, Esther, 1,231 Cornell, Katherine, IV, 356 Cornell 5w/i (newspaper), Supp. I, Part 2,652 Cornhuskers (Sandburg), III, 583-585 "Corpse Plant, The" (Rich), Supp. I, Part 2,555 Corrector (publication), II, 298 "Correspondences" (Baudelaire), 1,63 Corrigan, Robert W., Ill, 169; IV, 376 Corrington,J.W.,III,47 Corso, Gregory, Supp. II, Part 1,30 "Cortege for Rosenbloom" (Stevens), IV, 81 Cortez, Hernando, HI, 2 Cory, Daniel, HI, 621,622 Coser, Lewis, Supp. I, Part 2,650 Cosmic Optimism: A Study of the Interpretation of Evolution by American Poets from Emerson to Robinson (Conner), Supp. I, Part 1,173

Cosmological Eye, The (Miller), III, 174,184 "CosmologicalEye,The"(Miller),III, 183 Cosmopolitan (magazine), 1,200,208, 407; 0,430; HI, 54,62 "Cost of Living, The" (Malamud), Supp. I, Part 2,429,437 Cott, Jonathan, 1,189 "Cottage Street, 1953" (Wilbur), Supp. Ill, Part 2,543,561 Cotton, John, Supp. I, Part 1,98,101, 110,111,116 Cotton, Seaborn, Supp. I, Part 1,101 "Council of State, A" (Dunbar), Supp. II, Part 1,211,213 Count Frontenac and New France Under Louis XIV (Parkman),Supp. II, Part 2,607,609-610 Count of Monte Cristot The (Dumas), 111,386,396 Counterlife, The (Roth), Supp. ffl, Part 2,424-426 Counter-Statement (Burke), I, 270272; IV, 431 "Countess, The" (Whittier), Supp. I, Part 2,691,694 "Country Boy in Boston, The" (Howells),II,285 Country By-Ways (Jewett), II, 402 Country Doctor, A (Jewett), II, 391, 392,396,404-405 "Country Full of Swedes" (Caldwell), 1,297,309 Country Girl, The (Odets), Supp. II, Part 2,546,547,548-549 "Country Husband, The" (Cheever), Supp. I, Part 1,184,189 Country of a Thousand Years of Peace, r^(Merrill),Supp. III,Part 1,321, 322,331 "Country of Elusion,The" (O. Henry), Supp. II, Part 1,407 Country of the Pointed Firs, The (Jewett), II, 392,399,405,409-411 "Country Printer, The" (Freneau), Supp. II, Part 1,269 "Coup de Gr£ce,The" (Bierce), 1,202 Couperin, Francois, III, 464 "Couple of Hamburgers, A" (Thurber), Supp. I, Part 2,616 Couples (Updike), IV, 214, 215,216, 217,227,229-230 Cournos, John, III, 465; Supp. I, Part 1,258,275

COUR-CRIT / 666 Courtier, The (Castiglione), III, 282 "Cburtin\The"(Loweil),Supp.I,Part 2,415 Courtship of Miles Standish, The (Longfellow), II, 489,502-503 "Cowin Apple Time, The" (Frost),II, 154 "Cow Wandering in the Bare Field, The" (Jan-ell), II, 371,388 Cowan, Lester, HI, 148 Cowan,Louise,n,221;ffl,502;IV, 120, 125,142,258 Cowan, Michael H., D, 23; HI, 47 Coward, Noel, I, 95; Supp. I, Part 1, 332 Cowboy Mouth (Shepard), Supp. ID, Part 2,441-442 Cowboys (Shepard), Supp. Ill, Part 2, 432 Cowboys #2 (Shepard), Supp. Ill, Part 2,437,438 Cowie, Alexander, IV, 70,71 Cowl, Jane, IV, 357 Cowley, Abraham, ID, 508; IV, 158; Supp. I, Part 1,357 Cowley, Malcolm, I, 120, 246, 253, 254,255,256, 257, 262, 263,283, 334,385,404; II, 26,57,76,94,99, 456; III, 606; IV, 119, 123, 143, 258,354,376; Supp. I, Part 1,174, Part 2, 609, 610, 620, 626, 627, 647, 654, 678; Supp. II, Part 1, 103,135-156 Cowley, Marguerite Frances Baird (Mrs. Malcolm Cowley), Supp. I, Part 2, 615; Supp. II, Part 1, 138, 139 Cowley, Muriel Maurer (Mrs. Malcolm Cowley), Supp. II, Part I, 139 Cowley, Susan Cheever (Susan Cheever), Supp. I, Part 1,175,198 Cowper, William, 0,17,304; III, 508, 511; Supp. I, Part 1,150,151,152, Part 2,539 Cox, C. B., Supp. I, Part 1,69, Part 2, 548 Cox, James M., IV, 213 Cox, James T., 1,426 Cox, Sidney, 0,171-172 Coxe, Louis, III, 525 Coxey, Jacob, D, 464 Cozzens, James Gould, 1,358-380; O, 459

Crabbe, George, D, 304; III, 469,508, 511,521 Crabtree, Arthur B., 1,565 "Cracked Looking-Glass,The" (Porter), III, 434,435,446 "Crack-Up, The" (Fitzgerald), 1,509 Crack-Up, The (Fitzgerald), II, 80; in, 35,45 "Crack-up of American Optimism, The: Vachel Lindsay, the Dante of the Fundamentalists" (Viereck), Supp. I, Part 2,403 Cradle Will Rock, The (Blitzstein), Supp. I, Part 1,277,278 CraftofFiction, r/te(Lubbock),I,504 Craftsmanship of Lowell, The: Revisions in 'The Cathedral'" (Tanselle), Supp. I, Part 2,426 Craig, Gordon, III, 394 Cram, Ralph Adams, 1,19 Crandall, Reuben, Supp. I, Part 2,686 Crane, Agnes, 1,406 Crane, Edmund, 1,407 Crane, Hart,I,61,62,97,109,116,119, 266,381^404; n, 133,215,306,368, 371,536,542;III,260,276,453,485, 521;IV, 122,123-124,127,128,129, 135, 139, 140, 141, 341, 380, 418, 419; Supp. I, Part 1, 86; Supp. II, Part 1,89,152; Supp. HI, Part 1,20, 63,350 Crane, Jonathan, Jr., 1,407 Crane, Jonathan Townley, 1,406 Crane, Luther, 1,406 Crane, Mrs. Jonathan Townley, 1,406 Crane, Nellie, 1,407 Crane, R. S., Supp. I, Part 2,423 Crane, Stephen, 1,34,169-170,189, 201,207,211,405-427,477,506, 519; II, 58, 144, 148, 198, 262, 263, 264, 276, 289, 290, 291; III, 314,317,334,335,454,505,585; IV, 207,208,256,350,475; Supp. I, Part 1, 314; Supp. Ill, Part 2, 412 Crane, Verner W., 0,124,125 Crane, William, 1,407 Crashaw, William, IV, 145,150,151, 165 Crater, The (Cooper), 1,354,355 Cratylus (Plato), II, 10 "Craven Street Gazette" (Franklin), 11,119 Crawford, Bill, III, 121 Crawford, Eva, 1,199

Crawford, F. Marion, HI, 320 Crawford, Joan, Supp. I, Part 1,67 Crawford, Kathleen, 1,289 Crayon Miscellany, The (Irving), II, 312-313 "Crazy Cock" (Miller), III, 177 "Creation of Anguish" (Nemerov), m, 269 "Creative and Cultural Lag" (Ellison), Supp. II, Part 1,229 Creative Criticism (Spingarn), 1,266 Creatures in an Alphabet (illus. Barnes), Supp. m, Part 1,43 "Credences of Summer" (Stevens), IV, 93-94 "Credo" (Du Bois), Supp. II, Part 1, 169 "Credo" (Jeffers), Supp. n, Part 2,424 " Credos and Curios" (Thurber), Supp. I, Part 2,606,613 "Creed of a Beggar, The" (Lindsay), Supp. I, Part 2,379 Creekmore, Hubert, D, 586 Creeley, Robert, Supp. II, Part 1,30; Supp.III,Partl,2,Part2,622,626, 629 "Cremona Violin,The" (Lowell),n,523 "Cressy" (Harte), Supp. II, Part 1, 354,356 "Cretan Woman, The" (Jeffers), Supp. II, Part 2,435 Crews, Frederick C., 0,245 Crfcvecoeur, Michel-Guillaume Jean de, 1,229; Supp. I, Part 1,227-252 Cr&vecoeur, Robert de, Supp. I, Part 1,252 Crevecoeur 's Eighteenth• Century Travels in Pennsylvania and New York (Adams), Supp. I, Part 1, 251 "Crevecoeur's Letters and the Beginning of an American Literature" (Stone),Supp.I,Parti, 252 Crime and Punishment (Dostoevski), 0,60,130; IV, 484 Crisis (periodical), Supp. II, Part 1, 157, 158, 170, 173-174, 175, 181; Supp. I, Part 1,321,322,323,325, 326,327 Crisis papers (Paine), Supp. I, Part 2, 508-509,510 "Criteria of Negro Arts" (Du Bois), Supp. II, Part 1,181 Criterion (publication), 1,568; Supp. II, Part 1,12

CRIT-CUT- / 667 "Critiad, The" (Winters), Supp. II, Part 2,794,799 "Critic Who Does Not Exist, The" (Wilson), IV, 431 Critical Fable, A (Lowell), II, 511512,527,529-530 Critical Guide to Leaves of Grass, A (Miller), IV, 352 Criticism and Fiction (Howells), II, 288 "Criticism as Science" (Robertson), Supp. I, Part 2,426 "Critics and Connoisseurs" (Moore), 111,209 Critique Philosophique (publication), D, 346,350 Croce, Arlene, 1,47 Croce, Benedetto, 1,58,255,265,273, 281; III, 610 Crockett, Davy, II, 307; III, 227; IV, 266; Supp. I, Part 2,411 Crofter and the Laird, The (McPhee), Supp. Ill, Part 1,301-302,307 Croly,Herbert,I,229,231,235;IV,436 Cromwell, Oliver, IV, 145, 146,156; Supp. I, Part 1,111 Cronin, Dr. Archibald, III, 578 Crooke, Dr. Helkiah, Supp. I, Part 1, 98,104 Crosby, Caresse, III, 473 Crosby, Harry, 1,385 Crosby, Mrs. Harry, 1,385 "Cross" (Hughes),Supp. I, Part 1,325 "Cross Country Snow" (Hemingway), 11,249 "Cross of Snow, The" (Longfellow), 11,490 "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" (Whitman), IV, 333,340,341 Crossing the Water (Plath), Supp. I, Part 2,526,538 "Cross-Roads, The" (Lowell), II, 523 "Crossroads of the World Etc." (Merwin), Supp. Ill, Part 1, 347, 348 Cross-Section (Seaver), IV, 485 Crouse, Russel, HI, 284 "Crow Jane" (Baraka), Supp. II, Part 138 "Crowded Street, The" (Bryant), Supp. I, Part 1,168 Crowninshield, Frank, III, 123 "Crows, The" (Bogan), Supp. Ill, Part 1,50,51 Crozier, Alice C, Supp. I, Part 2,601

Crucible, The (Miller), III, 147,148, 155,156-158,159,166 "Crucifix in the Filing Cabinet" (Shapiro), Supp. II, Part 2,712 "Cruel and Barbarous Treatment" (McCarthy), II, 562,563 Cruise of the Dazzler, The (London), 11,465 Cruise of the Snark, The (London), II, 476-477 14 'Crumbling Idols' by Hamlin Garland" (Chopin), Supp. I, Part 1, 217 "Crusade of the Excelsior, The" (Harte), Supp. II, Part 1,336,354 "Crusoe in England" (Bishop), Supp. I, Part 1,93,95,96; Supp. Ill, Part 1,10,18 CryingofLot49,77ie(Pynchon),Supp. II, Part 2,618,619,621,630-633 "Crystal, The" (Aiken), 1,60 "Crystal, The" (Lanier), Supp. I, Part 1,364,370 "Crystal Cage, The" (Kunitz), Supp. III, Part 1,258 "Cuba" (Hemingway), II, 258 "Cuba Libre" (Baraka), Supp. II, Part 1,33 Cubism, I, 91, 435, 436; IV, 32, 407, 409,410,411,415 Cudlipp, Thelma, 1,501 Cudworth, Ralph, D, 9,10 Cullen, Countee, Supp. I, Part 1,49, 325; Supp. HI, Part 1,73,75,76 Cullen, John B.,H, 76 Culler, Jonathan D., 1,47 Culley, Margaret, Supp. I, Part 1,226 "CultoftheBest,The"(Arnold),I,223 "Cultivation of Christmas Trees,The" (Eliot), 1,579 "Cultural Exchange" (Hughes), Supp. I, Part 1,341 Cultural History of the American Revolution, A (Silverman), Supp. I, Part 1,149 Cultural Life of the New Nation, 17761830, The (Nye), Supp. I, Part 1, 149 "Culture" (Emerson), II, 2,4 Culture of Cities, The (Mumford), Supp. II, Part 2,492,494-495 Cummings, E. E., I, 44, 48, 64, 105, 176,428-450,475,477,482,526;III, 20,1%, 476; IV, 384,402,415,427,

433; Supp. I, Part 2,622,678; Supp. Ill, Part 1,73 Cummings, Mrs. E. E. (Marion Morehouse),I,430,439 Cummings, Mrs. Edward, 1,428-429 Cummings, Reverend Edward, 1,428429 Cunard, Lady, III, 459 Cunningham, Mary E., 1,357 Cup of Gold (Steinbeck), IV, 51,53, 61-454,67 "Cupola, The" (Bogan), Supp. Ill, Part 1,53 Cure de Tours, Le (Balzac), 1,509 Curie,Marie,IV,420,421;Supp.I,Part 2,569 Curie, Pierre, IV, 420 Curiosa Americana (Mather), Supp. II, Part 2,463 Curley, Thomas F., D, 53 Current Biography (publication), Supp. I, Part 2,429 Current-Garcia, E., Ill, 455 "Currents and Counter-Currents in Medical Science" (Holmes), Supp. I, Part 1,305 "Curried Cow" (Bierce), 1,200 Currier, Thomas Franklin, Supp. I, Part 1,319, Part 2,705 Curry, Professor W. C., IV, 122 Curse of the Starving Class (Shepard), Supp. Ill, Part 2,433,447-448 Curtain of Green, A (Welty), IV, 261264,268,283 "Curtain of Green, A" (Welty), IV, 263-264 "Curtain Raiser, A" (Stein), IV, 43,44 Curti, Merle, Supp. I, Part 1,27 Curtis, George William, Supp. I, Part 1,307 Curve of Binding Energy, The (McPhee), Supp. HI, Part 1,301 Curzon, Mary, III, 52 Cushing, Caleb, Supp. I, Part 2, 684, 686 Cushman, Howard, Supp. I, Part 2, 652 Custer, General George, 1,489,491 "Custom House, The" (Hawthorne), 11,223 Custom of the Country, The (Wharton),IV,318 "Cut-Glass Bowl, The" (Fitzgerald), D,88

CUTT-DAVE / 668 Cutting, Bronson, III, 600 "Cuttings, later" (Roethke), III, 532 Cynic's Word Book, The (Bicrcc), I, 197,205,208,209,210 D. H. Lawrence, The Man and His Work (Delavaney), Supp. I, Part 1, 275 Da Vinci, Leonardo, 1,274; II, 536; III, 210 Dacier, Andr6, D, 10 Dadaism, 1,33,105; D, 435; IV, 241; Supp. I, Part 1,369 "Daddy" (Plath), Supp. I, Part 2,529, 542,545,546; Supp. II, Part 2,688 "Daemon, The" (Bogan), Supp. HI, Part 1,58,61 "Daffy Duck in Hollywood" (Ashbery), Supp. HI, Part 1,18 Dagonet family, IV, 318 Dahlberg, Edward, I, 119, 231, 237; Supp. in, Part 2,624 Daiches, David, 1,333; III, 289; Supp. I, Part 2,536 Daily Running Horse (newspaper),IV, 302 Daily Worker (newspaper), IV, 476; Supp. II, Part 1,10 "Daisy" (Gates), Supp. D, Part 2,523 "Daisy Miller" (James), II, 325,326, 327,329; IV, 316 Dali, Salvador, n, 586 Dalibard, Thomas-Francois, n, 117 "Dalliance of Eagles, The" (Whitman), IV, 348 Daly, John, H, 25,26 Daly, Julia Brown, D, 25,26 "Dalyrimple Goes Wrong" (Fitzgerald), II, 88 Dameron, J. Lesley, III, 431 Damnation of Theron Ware, The (Frederic), II, 140-143, 144, 146, 147 "Damned Thing, The" (Bierce), I, 206 Damon, S. Foster, 1,26; D, 512,514, 515,533; Supp. I, Part 1,275 Dana, H. W. L., 1,229; D, 509 Dana, Richard Henry, 1,339,351; III, 241;Supp. I, Part 1,103,154,155, Part 2,414,420 Dana, Richard Henry, Jr., Ill, 81 "Dance, The" (Crane), 1,109 "Dance, The" (Roethke), III, 541

Dance of Death, The (Auden), Supp. II, Part MO Dance of Death, The (Bierce and Harcourt),I,196 Dance, Daryl G, Supp. I, Part 1,70 Dancing Bears, The (Merwin), Supp. ffl, Part 1,343-344 "Dancing the Jig" (Sexton), Supp. II, Part 2,692 "Dandy Frightening the Squatters, The" (Twain), IV, 193-194 Dane, G.Ezra, IV, 212 "Dangerous Road Before Martin Luther King" (Baldwin), Supp. I, Part 1,52 "Dangerous Summer, The" (Hemingway), II, 261 "Dangersof Authorship, The" (Blackmur), Supp. II, Part 1,147 Dangling Man (Bellow), 1,144,145, 146, 147, 148, 150-151, 153-154, 158,160,161,162,163 Daniel (biblical person), III,347;Supp. I, Part 1,106 Daniel (biblical book), Supp. I, Part 1, 105 Daniel, Arnaut, III, 467 Daniel, Robert W., UI, 76 Daniel, Samuel, Supp. I, Part 1,369 Daniel Deronda (Eliot), 1,458 Daniels, Jonathan, IV, 473 Daniels, Mark R., Supp. I, Part 1,70 D'Annunzio, Gabriele, D, 515 Danny O'Neill pentalogy (Farrell), II, 35-41 Dans I'ombre des cathedrales (Ambelain), Supp. I, Part 1,273,275 "Dans le Restaurant" (Eliot), 1,578, 584 "Danse Russe" (Williams), IV, 412413 Dante Alighieri, 1,103,136,138,250, 384, 433, 445; D, 8, 274, 278, 289, 490, 492, 493, 494, 495, 504, 508, 524,552; III, 13,77,124,182,259, 278, 448, 453, 467, 525, 533, 607, 609,610-612,613; IV, 50,134,137, 138,139,247,437,438; Supp. I, Part \256,363, Part 2,422,494; Supp. III, Part 2,611,618,621 "Dante of Suburbia" (Gilman), Supp. I, Part 1,198 Danziger, Adolphe, 1,199-200 Dar (Nabokov), III, 246,255 "Dare's Gift" (Glasgow), II, 190

Dark Angel, The (Bolton), Supp. I, Part 1,281 "Dark Angel: The Writings of James Baldwin" (MacInnes),Supp.I, Part 1,70 "Dark Funnel, The: A Reading of Sylvia Plath" (Phillips), Supp. I, Part 2,548 "Dark Hills,The" (Robinson), HI, 523 Dar£Laug/ifer(Anderson),I,lll,116; n, 250-251 Dark Night of the Soul, The (St. John of the Cross), 1,1,585 Dark Princess: A Romance (Du Bois), Supp. II, Part 1,179,181-182 Dark Room, The (Williams), IV, 381 "Dark Summer" (Bogan), Supp. in, Part 1,51,53 Dark Summer: Poems (Bogan), Supp. m, Part 1,52-53,57 Darkling Child (Merwin and Milroy), Supp. Ill, Part 1,346 "Darkling Summer, Ominous Dusk, Rumorous Rain" (Schwartz), Supp. II, Part 2,661 Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil (Du Bois), Supp. II, Part 1, 178, 180,183 Darreu, Robert Donaldson, Supp. II, Part 1,89,98,102 Darrow, Clarence, Supp. I, Part 1,5, Part 2,455 Darwin, Charles, 1,457; H, 323,462, 481;III,226,231;IV,69,304;Supp. I, Part 1,368,373 Darwinism, II, 143, 345, 350, 361, 416,463,483; III, 227,315,326; IV, 441; Supp. I, Part 1,313,314, Part 2,640 "DASKAPITAL''(Baraka),Supp.n, Part 1,55 Daudet, Alphonse, n, 325,338 Daugert, Stanley, Supp. I, Part 2, '49 Daugherty, George H., 1,120 Daugherty, James, III, 597 "Daughter of Donne" (Gorman), Supp. I, Part 2,730 Daughter of the Snows, A (London), 0,465,469-470 "Daughter" (Caldwell), 1,309 "Daughters" (Anderson), 1,114 Daumier, Honorl, IV, 412 Davenport, Abraham, Supp. I, Part 2, 699 Davenport, Gary, IV, 425

DAVE-DEAT / 669 Davenport, Herbert J., Supp. I, Part 2, 642 Davenport, James, 1,546 Daves, £. G., Supp. I, Part 1,369 David Copperfield (Dickens), 1,458; 11,290 David Harum (Westcott), 1,216 Davideis (Cowley), IV, 158 Davidson, Donald, I, 294; III, 495, 496;IV, 121,122,124,125,142,143, 236; Supp. II, Part 1,139 Davidson, Edward, III, 144 Davidson, Edward H., 1,565; D, 245; 111,432 Davie, Donald, III, 478 Davies, Arthur, III, 273 Davies,D.R.,III,312 Davies, Sir John, HI, 541 Davis, Allen F., Supp. I, Part 1,1,7,27 Davis, Allison, Supp. I, Part 1,327 Davis, Angela, Supp. I, Part 1,66 Davis, Arthur, Supp. I, Part 1,348 Davis, Bette, 1,78; Supp. I, Part 1,67 Davis, Charles T., HI, 525 Davis, Elizabeth Gould, Supp. I, Part 2,567 Davis, Elmer, IV, 376 Davis, George, n, 586 Davis, Harry R., Ill, 312 Davis, Jefferson, 0,206; IV, 122,125, 126 Davis, Merrell R., HI, 96,97 Davis, Rebecca Harding, Supp. I, Part MS Davis, Richard Harding, III, 328; Supp. II, Part 1,393 Davis, Robert Gorham, II, 51; IV, 108, 118 Davis, Stuart, IV, 409 Davis, William V., 1,449 Davy, Francis X., D, 125 Dawn (Dreiser), 1,498,499,503,509, 515,519 "Dawnbreaker" (Hayden), Supp. II, Part 1,370 Dawson, Edward, IV, 151 Dawson, Emma, 1,199 Day, Dorothy, D, 215; Supp. I, Part 2, 524 Day, Georgiana, Supp. I, Part 2,585 Day, Mary, see Lamer, Mrs. Sidney (Mary Day) "Day for Poetry and Song, A" (Douglass), Supp. Ill, Part 1,172 "Day longs for the evening, The" (Levertov), Supp. Ill, Part 1,274

"Day of Days, A" (James), Hf 322 Day of Doom (Wigglesworth),IV, 147, 155,156 Day of the Locust, The (Pynchon), Supp. II, Part 2,626 Day of the Locust, The (West), 1,298; IV, 288,299-306 "Day on the Big Branch, A" (Nemerov), HI, 275-276 "Day on the Connecticut River, A" (Merrill), Supp. OI, Part 1,336 "Day the Presidential Candidate Came to Ciudad Tamaulipas, The" (Caldwell),I,309 "Day with Conrad Green, A" (Lardner), II, 428-429,430 "Daybreak" (Kinnell), Supp. ID, Part 1,250 "Daybreak in Alabama" (Hughes), Supp. I, Part 1,344 "Day-Dream, A" (Bryant), Supp. I, Part 1,160 "Days" (Emerson), II, 19,20 Days Before, The (Porter), III, 433, 453 Days of Mars, The (Bryher), Supp. I, Part 1,275 "Days of 1935" (Merrill), Supp. Ill, Part 1,325,328 "Daysof 1941 and *44N (Merrill), Supp. m, Part 1,336 "Days of 1964" (Merrill), Supp. HI, Part 1,328,352 "Days of 1971" (Merrill), Supp. Ill, Part 1,328 Days of the Phoenix (Brooks), 1,266 Days to Come (Hellman), Supp. I, Part 1,276,277-278 Days without End (O'Neill), III, 385, 391,397 "Day's Work, A" (Capote), Supp. HI, Part 1,120 "Day's Work, A" (Porter), III, 443, 446 De Bellis, Jack, Supp. I, Part 1,366, 368,372,373 De Bosis, Lauro, IV, 372 De Cameos, Luis, Supp. I, Part 1,94 De Chiara, Ann, see Malamud, Mrs. Bernard (Ann de Chiara) "De Daumier-Smith's Blue Period" (Salinger), III, 560-561 De Forest, John William, D, 275,280, 288,289; IV, 350 DeLaMare,Walter,m,429;Supp.II, Part 1,4

De Lancey, James, 1,338 De Lancey, Mrs. James (Anne Heathcote),I,338 De Lancey, Susan A., see Cooper, Mrs. James Fenimore De Lancey, William Heathcote, 1,338, 353 De I'education d'un homme sauvage (Itard), Supp. I, Part 2,564 De Reilhe, Catherine, Supp. I, Part 1, 202 DeRerum Natura (Lucretius), II, 162 "De Rerum Virtute" (Jeffers), Supp. II, Part 2,424 De Rioja, Francisco, Supp. I, Part 1, 166 De Schloezer, Doris, HI, 474 De Selincourt, Basil, IV, 354 De Voto, Bernard, 1,247,248; 0,446; III, 72; IV, 212,213 De Vries, Peter, Supp. I, Part 2,604, 627 De Young, Charles, 1,194 "Deacon's Masterpiece, The" (Holmes), Supp. I, Part 1,302,307 "Dead, The" (Joyce), 1,285; III, 343 Dead End (Kingsley), Supp. I, Part L, 277,281 "Dead Fiddler, The" (Singer), IV, 20 Dead Fingers Talk (Burroughs), Supp. Ill, Part 1,103 DeadLecturer, 77ie(Baraka),Supp.n, Part 1,31,33,35-37,49 Dead Souls (Gogol), 1,296 "Dead Wingman,The" (Jarrell), 11,374 Deadline at Dawn (Odets), Supp. II, Part 2,546 Dean, James, 1,493 Dean, Man Mountain, n, 589 Deane, Silas, Supp. I, Part 2,509,524 "Dear Judas" (Jeffers), Supp. II, Part 2,431-432,433 Dear Lovely Death (Hughes), Supp. I, Part 1,328 "Death" (Lowell), II, 536 "Death" (Mailer), III, 38 "Death" (West), IV, 286 "Death and the Child" (Crane), 1,414 "Death by Water" (Eliot), I, 395, 578 Death Comes for the Archbishop (Gather), 1,314,327,32&-330 Death in the Afternoon (Hemingway), D, 253; IV, 35 Death in the Family, A (Agee), 1,25, 29,42,45

DEAT-DEMO / 670 "Death in the Woods" (Anderson), I, 114,115 Death in the Woods and Other Stories (Anderson), 1,112,114,115 Death in Venice (Mann), III, 231 Death Kit (Sontag), Supp. ID, Part 2, 451,468-469 Death Notebooks, The (Sexton), Supp. II, Part 2,691,694,695 "Death of a Pig" (White), Supp. I, Part 2,665-668 Death of a Salesman (Miller), 1,81; ID, 148, 149, 150, 153-154, 156, 157, 158,159,160,163,164,166; IV, 389 "Death of a Soldier, The" (Wilson), IV, 427,445 "DeathofaToad"(Wilbur),Supp.III, Part 2,550 "Death of a Traveling Salesman" (Welty),IV,261 Death of Bessie Smith, The (Albee), I, 76-77,92 "Death of General Wolfe, The" (Paine), Supp. I, Part 2,504 "Death of Halpin Frayser, The" (Bierce),I,205 "Death of Justina, The" (Cheever), Supp. I, Part 1,184-185 Death of Life, The (Barnes), Supp. EH, Part 1,34 Death of Malcolm X, The (Baraka), Supp. II, Part 1,47 "Death of Me,The" (Malamud),Supp. I, Part 2,437 "Death of Slavery, The" (Bryant), Supp. I, Part 1,168-169 "Death of the Ball Turret Gunner, The"(Jarrell),n,36£-370,372,374, 375,376,378 "Death of the Fathers, The" (Sexton), Supp. II, Part 2,692 "Deathof the Flowers,The" (Bryant), Supp. I, Part 1,170 "Death of the Hired Man, The" (Frost), III, 523 "Death on All Fronts" (Ginsberg), Supp. II, Part 1,326 Death the Proud Brother (Wolfe), IV, 456 "Death Throes of Romanticism, The: The Poetry of SylviaPlath" (Gates), Supp. I, Part 2,548 "Death to Van Gogh's Ear!" (Ginsberg), Supp. II, Part 1, 320, 322, 323 Debacle, La (Zola), III, 316

"Debate with the Rabbi" (Nemerov), 111,272 "Debriefing" (Sontag), Supp. ID, Part 2,468-470 Debs, Eugene, I, 483, 493; HI, 580, 581; Supp. I, Part 2,524 Debusscher, Gilbert, 1,95 "Ddbuts du roman rlaliste amlricain et Tinfluence franchise, Les" (Arnavon), Supp. I, Part 1,226 Decameron (Boccaccio), III, 283,411 DeCasseres, Benjamin, III, 121 "December Eclogue" (Winters), Supp. II, Part 2,794 Deception (Roth), Supp. Ill, Part 2, 426-427 Decker, James A., Supp. Ill, Part 2, 621 "Decided Loss, A" (Poe), III, 411 Declaration of Gentlemen and Merchants and Inhabitants of Boston, and the Country Adjacent, A (Mather), Supp. II, Part 2,450 "Declaration of Paris, The" (Adams), 1,4 Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, Supp. I, Part 2, 513, 519 Declaration of Universal Peace and Liberty (Paine), Supp. I, Part 2, 512 Decline and Fall(Wau$\),Supp.l,P*rt 4607 Decline and Fall of the English System of Finance, The (Paine), Supp. I, Part 2,518 Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, The (Gibbons), Supp. ETC, Part 2,629 "Decline of Book Reviewing, The" (Hardwick), Supp. Ill, Part 1,201202 Decline of the West, The (Spengler), I, 270; IV, 125 "Decoration Day" (Jewett), II, 412 Decoration of Houses, TTie(Wharton), IV, 308 "Decoy" (Ashbery), Supp. Ill, Part 1, 13-14 "Dedication Day" (Agee), 1,34 "Dedication for a Book of Criticism" (Winters), Supp. II, Part 2,801 "Dedication in Postscript, A" (Winters), Supp. II, Part 2,801 "Dedication to My Wife, A" (Eliot), I, 583

Deep Sleep, The (Morris), 10,224-225 Deep South (Caldwell), I, 305, 309, 310 "Deep Water" (Marquand), III, 56 "Deep Woods" (Nemerov), III, 272273,275 Deephaven (Jewett), II, 398-399,400, 401,410,411 DeerPark, 77ie (Mailer), 1,292; in, 27, 31-33,35-36,37,39,40,42,43,44 Deerslayer, The (Cooper), 1,341,349, 350,355; Supp. I, Part 1,251 "Defence of Poetry" (Longfellow), II, 493-494 "Defender of the Faith" (Roth), Supp. Ill, Part 2,404,407,420 Defense, The (Nabokov), III, 251-252 "Defense of James Baldwin, A" (Gayle), Supp. I, Part 1,70 Defiant Ones, The (film), Supp. I, Part 1,67 Defoe, Daniel, 1,204; 0,104,105,159, 304-305;m,113,423;IV,180;Supp. I, Part 2,523 Degler, Carl, Supp. I, Part 2,496,500 Deism, Supp. I, Part 2,503,515,516, 520,521,717,718 "Dejection" (Coleridge), II, 97 DeJong, David Cornel, 1,35,47 Delacroix, Henri, 1,227 Delakas, Daniel L., IV, 473 Delano, Amasa, III, 90 Delattre, Roland A., 1,558,565 Delavaney, Emile, Supp. I, Part 1,275 Delicate Balance, A (Albee), 1,86-89, 91,93,94 Delie (Scfcve), Supp. HI, Part 1,11 Delineator (publication), 1,501,509 Deliverance, The (Glasgow), II, 175, 176,177-178,181 Dell, Floyd, 1,103,105; Supp. I, Part 2, 379 "Delta Autumn" (Faulkner), II, 71 "DeltaFactor,The"(Percy),Supp.m, Part 1,386 Delta Wedding (Welty), IV, 261,268271,273,281 Delusions (Berryman), 1,170 Dembo,L.S.,I,386,391,396,397,398, 402,404; HI, 266,478; Supp. I, Part 1,272,275 Democracy (Adams), 1,9-10,20 "Democracy" (Lowell), Supp. I, Part 2,419 Democracy and Education (Dewey), 1,232

DEMO-DICK / 671 Democracy and Other Addresses (Lowell), Supp. I, Part 2, 407 Democracy and Social Ethics (Addams), Supp. I, Part 1, £-11 Democratic Review (publication), IV, 335 Democratic Vistas (Whitman), IV, 333, 336,348-349,351,469;Supp.I,Part 2,456 Democritus, I, 480-481; n, 157; m, 606 "Demon Lover, The" (Rich), Supp. I, Part 2,556 "Demonstrators, The" (Welty), IV, 280 DeMott, Benjamin, Supp. I, Part 1, 198 Dempsey, David, IV, 118 Demuth, Charles, IV, 404 Denney, Joseph Villiers, Supp. I, Part 2,605 Dennie, Joseph, H, 298; Supp. I, Part 1,125 Denny, Reuel, 1,70 "Departure" (Plath), Supp. I, Part 2, 537 "Departure, The" (Freneau), Supp. II, Part 1,264 "Depressed by a Book of Bad Poetry, I Walk Toward an Unused Pasture and Invite the Insects to Join Me" (Wright), Supp. HI, Part 2,600 Derleth, August, Supp. I, Part 2,465, 472,477 Deronda, Daniel, II, 179 Derry, John, Supp. I, Part 2,525 Der Wilde lager (Bttrger), II, 306 Des Imagistes (Pound), II, 513; Supp. I, Part 1,257,261,262 Descartes, Ren6,1,255; HI, 618-619; IV, 133 Descendents, The (Glasgow), II, 173, 174-175,176 "Descent into the Maelstrom, A" (Poe), III, 411,414,416,424 Descent of Man, The (Wharton), IV, 311 "Description of the great Bones dug up at Clavarack on the Banks of Hudsons River A.D. 1705, The" (Taylor), IV, 163,164 Desert Music (Williams), IV, 422 "Desert Places" (Frost), II, 159 DesertedVillage, The (Goldsmith), II, 304 "Design" (Frost), II, 158,163

Desire under the Elms (O'Neill), III, 387,390 "D£sireVs Baby" (Chopin), Supp. I, Part 1,213-215 "Desolation, A" (Ginsberg), Supp. II, Part 1,313 Desolation Angels (Kerouac), Supp. m, Part 1,218,225,230 "Desolation Is a Delicate Thing" (Wylie), Supp. I, Part 2,729 Desperate Faith: A Study of Bellow, Salinger, Mailer, Baldwin, and Updike (Harper), Supp. I, Part 1, 70 "Destruction of Kreschev, The" (Singer), IV, 13 Detmold, John, Supp. I, Part 2,670 Detweiler, Robert, 1,165; IV, 234 Deuteronomy (biblical book), II, 166 Deutsch, Babette, 1,47,450; III, 550; IV, 424; Supp. I, Part 1,328,341 Deutsch, Helen, III, 406 "Development of the Modern English Novel, The" (Lanier), Supp. I, Part 1,370-371 DeVeriante (Herbert of Cherbury), II, 108 "Devil and Daniel Webster, The" (Bena),III,22 "Devil and Tom Walker, The" (Irving), II, 309-310 Devil Finds Work, The (Baldwin), Supp. I, Part 1,48,52,66-67 "Devil in Manuscript, The" (Hawthorne), II, 226 Devil in Paradise, A (Miller), III, 190 "Devil in the Belfrey, The" (Poe), III, 425 Devil'sDictionary, 77ie(Bierce),I,l%, 197,205,208,209,210,213 Dewey,John,I,214,224,228,232,233, 266,267; n, 20,23,27,34,52,229, 361,365;III,112,294-295,296,303, 309-310,599,605,622; IV, 27,429; Supp. I, Part 1,3,5,7,10,11,12,24, Part 2,493,641,647,677 Dewey, Thomas, IV, 161 Deyo, C. L., Supp. I, Part 1, 226 DharmaBums, The (Kerouac), Supp. Ill, Part 1,230,231 D'Houdetot, Madame, Supp. I, Part 1, 250 Diaghilev, Sergei, Supp. I, Part 1, 257 Dw/(publication), 1,58,109,115,116, 215,231,233,245,261,384,429; D, 8, 430; III, 194, 470, 471, 485; IV,

122,171,427; Supp. I, Part 2,642, 643,647; Supp. II, Part 1,168,279, 291, Part 2,474; Supp. Ill, Part 2, 611 "Dialectic of 'The Fire Next Time/ The" (Gayle), Supp. I, Part 1,70 Dialectical materialism, 1,275,279 "Dialogue" (Rich), Supp. I, Part 2, 560 Dialogue, A (Baldwin and Giovanni), Supp. I, Part 1,66 "Dialogue Between Franklin and the Gout" (Franklin), II, 121 "Dialogue Between General Wolfe and General Gage in a Wood near Boston, A" (Paine), Supp. I, Part 2, 504 "Dialogue between Old England and New" (Bradstreet), Supp. I, Part 1, 105-106,110-111,116 "Dialogue between the Writer and a Maypole Dresser, A" (Taylor), IV, 155 Dialogues (ed. Bush), III, 4 Dialogues in Limbo (Santayana), III, 606 "Diamond as Big as the Ritz, The" (Fitzgerald), II, 88-S9 Diamond Cutters and Other Poems, 77ie(Rich),Supp.I,Part2,551,552, 553 "Diamond Guitar, A" (Capote), Supp. Ill, Part 1,124 "Diana and Persis" (Alcott), Supp. I, Part 1,32,41 Diary of "Helena Morley," The (trans. Bishop), Supp. I, Part 1,92 Dias del Castillo, Bernal, III, 13,14 "Dick Whittington and His Cat," Supp. I, Part 2,656 Dickens, Charles,!, 152,198,505; II, 98, 179, 186, 192, 271, 273-274, 288, 290, 297, 301, 307, 316, 322, 559, 561,563,577,582; 111,146,247,325, 368, 411, 421, 426, 572, 577, 613614,616; IV, 21,192,194,211,429; Supp. I, Part 1,13,34,35,36,41,49, Part 2,409,523,579,590,622,675 Dickey, James, 1,29,450,535,542; n, 390;m,268,289,525,550;Supp.ffl, Part 1,354, Part 2,541,597 Dickinson, Donald C., Supp. I, Part 1, 348 Dickinson, Edward, 1,451-452,453 Dickinson,Emily,I,384,419,433,451473; II, 272, 276, 277, 530; III, 19,

DICK-DOCT / 672 Dillman, Bradford, III, 403 Dillon, George, ffl, 141,144,217; Supp. Ill, Part 2,621 Dilthey,Wilhelm,I,58 "Dimout in Harlim" (Hughes), Supp. I,Parti, 333 Dinesen, Isak, IV, 279,284 "Dinner at , A" (O. Henry), Supp. n, Part 1,402 Dinner Bridge (Lardner), II, 435 Dionysis in Doubt (Robinson), III, 510 DiPrima, Diane, Supp. II, Part 1, 30 "Directive" (Frost), III, 287 "Dirge" (Dunbar), Supp. II, Part 1, 199 "Dirge without Music" (Millay), III, 126 "Dirty Word,The" (Shapiro), Supp. D, Part 2,710 Discerning the Signs of the Times (Niebuhr), III, 300-301,307-308 "Discordants" (Aiken), 1,65 Discourse on Method (Descartes), I, 255 "Discovery" (Freneau), Supp. II, Part 1,258 Discovery No. 1 (publication), IV, 104 "Discovery of What It Means to Be an American, The" (Baldwin), Supp. I, Part 1,54-55 "Discrete Series," (Zukofsky), Supp. Ill, Part 2,616 Disenchanted, The (Schulberg), II, 98 Diser, Philip E., 1,143 Disney, Walt, III, 275,426 111,560 Dienstfrey, Harris, III, 47 "Displaced Person, The" (O'Connor), "Dies Irae" (Lowell), II, 553 01,343-344,350,352,356 "Difficulties of a Statesman" (Eliot), Dispossessed, 77ie(Berryman),I,170, 172,173,174,175,176,178 1,580 "Difficulties of Modernism and the "Disquieting Muses, The" (Plath), Modernism of Difficulty"(Poirier), Supp. I, Part 2,538 Disraeli, Benjamin, 0,127 Supp. II, Part 1*136 Different (O'Neill), III, 389 Dissent (magazine), III, 35 Diggins, John P., Supp. I, Part 2,650 Dissent in Three American Wars Dijkstra, Abraham, IV, 424 (Morison, Merk, and Freidel), "Dilemma of Determinism, The" Supp. I, Part 2,495 (James), II, 347-348,352 "Dissenting Opinion on Kafka, A" "Dilemma of Love in Go Tell It on the (Wilson), IV, 437-438 Mountain and Giovanni's Room, Dissertation on Liberty and Necessity, The" (Bell), Supp. I, Part 1,69 Pleasure and Pain, A (Franklin), II, "Dilettante, The"(Wharton),IV,311, 108 313 Dissertations on Government; the Af"Dilettante, The: A Modern Type" fairs of the Bank: and Paper Money (Dunbar), Supp. II, Part 1,199 (Paine), Supp. I, Part 2,510

Dickinson (cont.) 194,196, 214,493, 505,508,556,572,576;IV, 134,135, 331,444;Supp.I, Part 1,29,79,188, 372, Part 2,375,546,609,682,691, 705; Supp. II, Part 1,4; Supp. Ill, Part 1, 63, Part 2,600,622 Dickinson, Gilbert, 1,469 Dickinson, Lavinia Norcross, I, 451, 453,462,470 Dickinson, Mrs. Edward, 1,451,453 Dickinson, Mrs. William A. (Susan Gilbert), 1,452,453,456,469,470 Dickinson, William Austin, 1,451,453, 469 Dickson, Helen, see Blackmur, Helen Dickson Dickstein, Morris, Supp. I, Part 1,70 "DICTATORSHIP OF THE PROLETARIAT, THE" (Baraka), Supp. II, Parti, 54 Dictionary of American Biography, Supp. I, Part 2,486 Dictionary of Modern English Usage, A (Fowler), Supp. I, Part 2,660 "Dictum: For a Masque of Deluge" (Merwin),Supp.m,Partl,342-343 "Did You Ever Dream Lucky?" (Ellison), Supp. II, Part 1,246 "Didactic Poem" (Levertov), Supp. Ill, Part 1,280 Didacticism, 1,275,350,424; HI, 425 Diderot, Denis, D, 535; IV, 440 Didion, Joan, Supp. I, Part I,196,197, 198; Supp. ffl, Part 1,302 Dido, 1,81 Die Zeit Ohne Beispiel, (Goebbels),

"Distance" (Carver), Supp. ID, Part 1, 146 Distinguished Women Writers (Moore), Supp. I, Part 2,730 "Distrest Shepherdess, The" (Freneau), Supp. n, Part L, 258 District of Columbia (Dos Passos), I, 478,489-490,492 Disturber of the Peace (Manchester),

m, 103

"Diver, The" (Hayden), Supp. D, Part 1,368,372,373 "Divided Life of Jean Toomer, The" (Toomer), Supp. Ill, Part 2,488 Divina Commedia (trans. Longfellow), 0,490,492,493 Divine Comedies (Merrill), Supp. Ill, Part 1,324,329-332 Divine Comedy (Dante), 1,137, 265, 400,446; D, 215,335,490,492,493; 111,13,448,453 Divine Pilgrim, The (Aiken), 1,50,55 Divine Tragedy, The (Longfellow), II, 490,500,505,506,507 Divine Weekes and Workes (tr. Sylvester), Supp. I, Part 1,104 Divine Weeks (DuBartas),IV, 157-158 "Diving into the Wreck: Poems 19711972 (Rich), Supp. I, Part 2, 550, 559-565,569 "Divinity School Address" (Emerson), II, 12-13 Dixon, Thomas, Jr., Supp. II, Part 1, 169,171,177 "Do We Understand Each Other?" (Ginsberg), Supp. II, Part 1,311 Do with Me What You Will (Oates), Supp. II, Part 2,506,515-517 "Doaksology, The" (Wolfe), IV, 459 Dobriansky, Lev, Supp. I, Part 2,648, 650 "Dock Rats" (Moore), III, 213 "Doctor and the Doctor's Wife, The" (Hemingway), II, 248 "Dr. Bergen's Belief (Schwartz), Supp. II, Part 2,650 Doctor Breen's Practice, a Novel (Howells),I,282 Doctor Faustus (Mann), III, 283 "Dr. Holmes: A Reinterpretation" (Clark), Supp. I, Part 1,319 "Doctor Jekyll" (Sontag), Supp. HI, Part 2,469 "Doctor Leavis and the Moral Tradition" (Trilling), Supp. Ill, Part 2, 512-513

DOCT-DOUG / 67? Doctor Martino and Other Stories (Faulkner), II, 72 "Doctor of the Heart, The" (Sexton), Supp. II, Part 2,692 Doctor Sax (Kerouac), Supp.III, Part 1,220-222,224-227 Doctor Zhivago (Pasternak), IV, 434, 438,443 Doctorow,E. L., Supp. Ill, Part 2,590, 591 "Doctors' Row" (Aiken), 1,67 Doctor's Son and Other Stories, The (0'Hara),III,361 Dodd, Wayne, Supp. I, Part 2,578 Dodds, Elisabeth D., 1,564 Dodson, Owen, Supp. I, Part 1,54 Dodsworth (Lewis), II, 442,449-450, 453,456 Doenitz, Karl, Supp. 1, Part 2,491 Does Civilization Need Religion? (Niebuhr), III, 293-294 "Does 'Consciousness' Exist?" (James), II, 356 "Does Education Pay?" (Du Bois), Supp. II, Parti, 159 Dog (Shepard), Supp. Ill, Part 2,434 "Dog and the Playlet, The" (O. Henry), Supp. II, Part 1,399 Dog Beneath the Skin, The (Auden), Supp. II, Part 1,10 Dog in the Manger, The (Vega, trans. Merwin),Supp. Ill, Part 1,341,347 Dogs Bark, The: Public People and Private Places (Capote), Supp. Ill, Part 1,120,132 "Dogwood, The" (Levertov), Supp. m, Part 1,276 "DogwoodTree,The"(Updike),IV,218 Dolci, Carlo, III, 474-475 Dole, Nathan H., Ill, 431 DoWs House, A (Ibsen), III, 523; IV, 357 Dolmetsch, Arnold, III, 464 "Dolph Heyliger" (Irving), II, 309 Dome of Many-Coloured Glass, A (Lowell), II, 515,516-517 Domesday Book (Masters), Supp. I, Part 2,465,466-469,471,473,476 "Domestic Manners" (Hardwick), Supp. Ill, Part 1,211 "Domestication, Domesticity and the Otherworldly" (Vendler), Supp. I, Part 1,97 Dommergues, Pierre, III, 243 "DON JUAN IN HELL" (Baraka), Supp. II, Part 1,33

Don Quixote (Cervantes), 1,134; II, 291,434; III, 113,614; Supp. I, Part 4422 Dona Perfecta (Gald6s), II, 290 Donahue, Francis, IV, 401 Donahue, H.E.F., IV, 425 Donaldson, Scott, Supp. I, Part 1,198 "Done Made Us Leave Our Home: Langston Hughes's Nor Without Laughter—Unifying Image and Three Dimensions" (Miller), Supp. I, Part 1,348 Doner, Dean, IV, 234 Donn-Byrne, Brian Oswald, see Byrne, Donn "Donna mi Prega," (Cavalcanti), Supp. Ill, Part 2,620,621,622 Donne, John, I, 358-359, 384, 389, 522,586; H, 254; III, 493; IV, 83,88, 135, 141, 144, 145, 151, 156, 165, 331, 333; Supp. I, Part 1, 80, 364, 367, Part 2,421,424,467,725,726, 730; Supp. Ill, Part 2,614,619 Donoghue, Denis, I, 165, 473, 537, 542; 0,390; IV, 424 Don 'tAsk Questions (Marquand), Ifl, 58 Don't You Want to Be Free? (Hughes), Supp. I, Part 1,339 "Doodler, The" (Merrill), Supp. HI, Part 1,321 Dooley,D.J.,D,460 Doolittle, Charles Leander, Supp. I, Part 1,253,254 Doolittle, Hilda, D, 517,520-521; III, 194,195-196,217,457,465;IV,404, 406;Supp.I,Part 1,253-275, Parti, 707; Supp. Ill, Part 1, 48, Part 2, 610 Doolittle, Mrs. Charles Leander (Helen Eugenia Wolle), Supp. I, Part 1,253,254 Doolittle, Thomas, IV, 150 "Door, The" (White), Supp. I, Part 2, 651,675-676 "Door in the Dark, The" (Frost), II, 156 Door in the Hive, A (Levertov), Supp. Ill, Part 1,283,284 "Door of the Trap, The" (Anderson), 1,112 "'Door, The,' 'The Professor,' 'My Friend the Poet (Deceased)'" (Steinhoff), Supp. I, Part 2,681 "Doors, Doors, Doors" (Sexton), Supp. II, Part 2,681

Dorfman, Joseph, Supp. I, Part 2,631, 647,650 Dos Passos, John, 1,99,288,374,379, 474-4%, 517,519; 0,74,87,89,98; III, 2,28,29,70,172,382-383; IV, 340,427,433; Supp. I, Part 2,646; Supp. m, Part 1,104,105 Dos Passos, John Randolph, I, 474475 "Dos Passos: Poet Against the World" (Cowley), Supp. II, Part 1,143,145 Dostoevski, Fedor, 1,53,103,211,468; n, 60,130,275,320,587; III, 37,61, 155, 174, 176, 188, 189, 267, 272, 283, 286, 354, 357, 358, 359, 467, 571,572; IV, 1,7,8,17,21,50,59, 106, 110, 128, 134, 285, 289, 476, 485,491; Supp. I, Part 1,49, Part 2, 445,466 Double Agent, 77te(Blackmur),Supp. II, Part 1,90,108,146 Double Axe, The (Jeffers), Supp. II, Part 2,416,434 Double Dream of Spring, The (Ashbery), Supp. HI, Part 1,11-13 Double Image, The (Levertov), Supp. III, Part 1,274,276 "Double Image,The" (Sexton), Supp. II, Part 2,671,677-678 Double Man, The (Auden), Supp. II, Part 1,16 Double-Dealer (magazine), II, 56; IV, 122 "Double-Headed Snake of Newbury, The" (Whittier), Supp. I, Part 2, 698 '"Double-Tongued Deceiver, The': Sincerity and Duplicity in the Novels of Charles Brockden Brown" (Bell), Supp. I, Part 1,148 Doubleday, Frank, 1, 500, 502, 515, 517; III, 327 Doubleday, Mrs. Frank, 1,500 Douglas, Aaron, Supp. I, Part 1,326 Douglas, Claire, III, 552 Douglas, George (pseudonym), see Brown, George Douglas Douglas, Lloyd, IV, 434 Douglas, Paul, HI, 294 Douglas, Stephen A., Ill, 577, 588589; Supp. I, Part 2,456,471 Douglas, William O., Ill, 581 Douglass Pilot, The (ed. Baldwin), Supp. I, Part 1,49 Douglass, Frederick, Supp. I, Part 1, 51,345, Part 2,591; Supp. II, Parti,

DOVE-DUDL / 674 Douglass (cont.) 157, 195, 196, 292, 378; Supp. Ill, Part 1,153-174 Dove, Belle, 1,451 Dow, Lorenzo, IV, 265 Dowd, Douglas, Supp. I9 Part 2,645, 650 Dowling, Eddie, IV, 394 "Down at the Cross" (Baldwin), Supp. I, Part 1,60,61 "Down at the Dinghy9* (Salinger), III, 559,563 "Down by the Station, Early in the Morning** (Ashbery), Supp. ID, Part 1,25 "Down East Humor (1830-1867)*' (Blair), Supp. I, Part 2,426 "Down in Alabam'* (Bierce), 1,193 "Down Where I Am*' (Hughes), Supp. I, Part 1,344 Downer, Alan S., 1,95; III, 407 Downey, Jean, n, 509 Downing, Major Jack (pseudonym), see Smith, Seba "Downward Path to Wisdom, The" (Porter), III, 442,443,446 Dowson, Ernest C, 1,384 Doyle,C.W.,I,199 Drach, Ivan, Supp. Ill, Part 1,268 "Draft Lyrics for Candide" (Agee), I, 28 Draft of XVI Cantos, A (Pound), III, 472 Draft ofXXX Cantos, A (Pound), III, 1% Dragon Country (Williams), IV, 383 Dragon Seed (Buck), Supp. II, Part 1, 124 Drake, Benjamin, Supp. I, Part 2,584 Drake, Daniel, Supp. I, Part 2,584 Drake, Sir Francis, Supp. I, Part 2, 497 Drake, St. Clair, IV, 475,496 Dramatic Duologues (Masters), Supp. I, Part 2,461 "Draught** (Cowley), Supp. II, Part 1, 141,142 Drayton, Michael, IV, 135 "Dream, A" (Ginsberg), Supp. II, Part 1,312 "Dream, A" (Tate), IV, 129 "Dream, The'* (Hayden), Supp. II, Part 1,368,377 "Dream Boogie** (Hughes), Supp. I, Part 1,339-340 "Dream Interpreted, The" (Paine), Supp. I, Part 2,505

Dream Keeper, The (Hughes), Supp. I, Part 1,328,332,333,334 Dream Life of BalsoSnell, 77i«?(West), IV, 286,287,28&-290,291,297 Dream of a Common Language, Poems 1974-77, The (Rich), Supp. I, Part 2,551,554,569-576 Dream of Arcadia: American Writers and Artists in Italy (Brooks), I, 254 "Dream of Italy, A" (Masters), Supp. I, Part 2,458 Dream of the Golden Mountains, The (Cowley),Supp. n, Part 1,139,141, 142,144 "Dream Pang, A" (Frost), II, 153 "Dream Variations" (Hughes), Supp. I, Part 1,323 "Dreaming the Breasts" (Sexton), Supp. II, Part 2,692 "Dreams About Clothes" (Merrill), Supp. Ill, Part 1,328-329 "Dreams of Adulthood" (Ashbery), Supp. Ill, Part 1,26 Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp (Stowe), Supp. I, Part 2, 592 Dreiser, Al, 1,498 Dreiser, Claire, 1,499 Dreiser, Ed, 1,499 Dreiser, Emma, 1,498,502,504 Dreiser, John Paul, 1,49&-499,503 Dreiser, Mame, 1,498,504 Dreiser, Mrs. Theodore (Sara White), 1,500,501 Dreiser, Paul, 1,498,500,503,517 Dreiser, Rome, 1,498 Dreiser, Sara, 1,510,511-512,515 Dreiser, Sara Maria Schanab, 1,498, 499,503,504 Dreiser, Sylvia, 1,498 Dreiser, Theodore, 1,59,97,109,116, 119,355,374,375,475,482,497-520; D, 26,27,29,34,38,44,74, 89,93, 180, 276, 283, 428, 444, 451, 456457,467-468; III, 40,103,106,251, 314,319,327,335,453,576,582; IV, 29,35,40,135, 208,237,475,482, 484; Supp. 1^8111,320, Part 2,461, 468; Supp. Ill, Part 2,412 Dreiser, Theresa, 1,498 Dresser, Paul, see Dreiser, Paul Drew, Elizabeth, 1,590 Dreyfus, Alfred, Supp. I, Part 2,446 Drift and Mastery (Lippmann), 1,222223

"Drinker, The" (Lowell), II, 535,550 "Driver** (Merrill), Supp. ffl, Part 1, 331 "Drowsy Day, A" (Dunbar), Supp. II, Part 1,198 "Drug Store" (Shapiro), Supp. II, Part 4705 Drugiye Berega (Nabokov), III, 247250,252 Drum (magazine), Supp. I, Part 1, 344 "Drumlin Woodchuck, A" (Frost),II, 159-160 Drummond, William, Supp. I, Part 1, 369 Drum-Taps (Whitman), IV, 346,347, 444 Drunk in the Furnace, The (Merwin), Supp. Ill, Part 1,345-346 "Drunk in the Furnace, The" (Merwin), Supp. Ill, Part 1,346 Drunkard's Holiday, The (Fitzgerald),

0,93

"Drunken Fisherman, The" (Lowell), H,534,550 "Drunken Sisters, The" (Wilder), IV, 374 Dry Salvages, The (Eliot), 1,581 "Dry September" (Faulkner), II, 72,73 Dryden, Edgar A., Ill, 97 Dryden,John, 11,111,542,556; 111,15; IV, 145; Supp. I, Part 1,150, Part 2, 422 Du Bartas, Guillaume, Supp. I, Part 1, 98,104,111,118,119 Du Bois, Nina Corner (Mrs. W. E. B. Du Bois), Supp. II, Part 1,158 Du Bois, Shirley Craham (Mrs. W. E. B. Du Bois), Supp. II, Part 1, 186 Du Bois, W. E. B., 1,260; Supp. I, Part 1,5,345; Supp. II, Part 1,33,56,61, 157-189,195 Du Maurier family, H, 404 Dualism, 1,460,527; H, 21 Duberman, Martin, Supp. I, Part 2, 408,409,425 "Dubin's Lives" (Malamud), Supp. I, Part 2,451 Dubliners (Joyce), 1,130,480; III, 471 Duchamp, Marcel, IV, 408 DuchessofMalfi, 77K?(Webster),IV,131 Dudley, Anne, see Bradstreet, Anne Dudley, Joseph, III, 52 Dudley, Thomas, III, 52; Supp. I, Part 1,98,99,110,116

DUET-ECOL / 675 Duet for Cannibals (Sontag), Supp. HI, Part 2,452,456 "Duet of Cheevers, A" (Cowley), Supp. I, Part 1,198 Duffey, Bernard, 1,119,120; Supp. I, Part 1,173, Part 2,402, 458, 471, 478 Duffus, R. L., Supp. I, Part 2,650 Dufy, Raoul, 1,115; IV, 80 Dujardin, Edouard, 1,53 "Duke de T Omelette, The" (Poe), ID, 411,425 "Duke in His Domain,The" (Capote), Supp. Ill, Part 1,113,126 Duke of Deception, The( Wolff), Supp. II, Part 1,97 Dukore, Bernard F., 1,95 "Dulham Ladies, The" (Jewett), II, 407,408 Dumas, Alexandra, III, 386 "Dummy, The" (Sontag), Supp. Ill, Part 2,469 Dunbar, Alice Moore (Mrs. Paul Laurence Dunbar), Supp. II, Part 1,195,200,217 Dunbar, Paul Laurence, Supp. I, Part l,320;Supp.II,Part 1,174,191-219; Supp. Ill, Part 1,73 Duncan, Bowie, III, 289 Duncan, Isadora, 1,483 Duncan,Robert,Supp.III,Part 2,625, 626,630,631 Dunciad, The (Pope), 1,204 Dunlap, Leslie W., Ill, 598 Dunlap, William, Supp. I, Part 1,126, 130,137,141,145,148 Dunne, Finley Peter, II, 432 "Dunnet Shepherdess, A" (Jewett), 0,392-393 Dunning, William Archibald, Supp. II, Part 1,170 Dunnock, Mildred, III, 153 Dunster, Henry, Supp. I, Part 2,485 Dupee, F. W., 1,254,263,449; 0,341, 548; III, 266; Supp. I, Part 2,452 Durand, Asher, B., Supp. I, Part 1, 156,157 DUrer,Albrecht,III,212 "During Fever" (Lowell), II, 547 Durkheim, Emile, 1,227; Supp. I, Part 2, 637,638 Durrell, Lawrence, III, 184,190,191, 192; IV, 430 Duse, Eleonora, H, 515,528 Dusk of Dawn: An Essay Toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept

(Du Bois), Supp. II, Part 1, 159, 183,186 "Dust of Snow" (Frost), II, 154 "Dutch Nick Massacre,The" (Twain), IV, 195 Dutchman (Baraka), Supp. II, Part 1, 38,40,42-44,54,55 Dutton, Robert R., 1,165 Duyckinck, Evert, HI, 77,81,83,85; Supp. I, Part 1,122,317 Duyckinck, George, Supp. I, Part 1, 122 Dwight, Sereno E., 1,547,564 Dwight, Timothy, Supp. I, Part 1,124, Part 2,516,580;Supp. II, Part 1,65, 69 Dybbuk, The (Ansky), IV, 6 Dyer, Henry Hopper, n, 53 "Dying Elm, The" (Freneau), Supp. D, Part 1,258 "Dying Indian,The" (Freneau), Supp. II, Part 1,262 "Dying Man, The" (Roethke), DI, 540, 542,543-545 "Dylan Thomas on Edgar Lee Masters" (Thomas), Supp. I, Part 2, 478 Dynamo (O'Neill), HI, 396 "E. B. W." (Thurber), Supp. I, Part 2, 681 "E. B. White" (Beck), Supp. I, Part 2, 681 E. B. White (Sampson), Supp. I, Part 2, 681 "E. B. White on the Exercycle" (Hall), Supp. I, Part 2,681 E. E. Cummings (Marks), 1,438 E. E. Cummings: A Miscellany (Cummings), 1,429,441 E. E. Cummings: A Miscellany, Revised (Cummings), 1,429 E. L. Masters (Simone), Supp. I, Part 2,478 E. M. /wster(Trilling),Supp.III,Part 2,496,501,504 "Each and All" (Emerson), II, 19 "Eagle, The" (Tate), IV, 128 "Eagle and the Mole, The" (Wylie), Supp. I, Part 2,710,711,713,714, 729 "Eagle That Is Forgotten, The" (Lindsay), Supp. I, Part 2,382,387 Eagleson, Harvey, IV, 48 Eames,Roscoe,D,476

"Early Adventures of Ralph Ringwood, The" (Irving), II, 314 Early Lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson, The (Emerson), II, 11 "Early Plays of Edgar Lee Masters, The" (Hartley),Supp.I,Part2,478 "Early Thurber" (White), Supp. I, Part 2,627 Earnest, Ernest, D, 148 "Earth" (Bryant), Supp. I, Part 1,157, 164,167 "Earth, The" (Sexton), Supp. II, Part 2,696 "Earthly Care a Heavenly Discipline" (Stowe), Supp. I, Part 2,586 "Earth'sHolocaust"(Hawthorne),II, 226,231,232,242; HI, 82 East Coker (Eliot), I, 580, 581, 582, 585,587 East Lynne (Wood), Supp. I, Part 1, 35,36, Part 2,459,462 East of Eden (Steinbeck), IV, 51,5657,59 "East of the Sun and West of the Moon" (Merwin), Supp. ffl, Part 1,344 East Wind (Lowell), II, 527 East Wind: West Wind (Buck), Supp. II, Part 1,114-115 "Easter" (Toomer), Supp. EH, Part 2, 486 "Easter, an Ode" (Lowell), II, 536 "Easter Ode, An" (Dunbar), Supp. II, Part 1,196 Eastman, Max, 1,496; Supp. 1, Part 2, 626; Supp. Ill, Part 2,620 Eaton, Peggy, Supp. I, Part 2,461 "EbbandFlow,The"(Taylor),IV,161 Eben Holden (Bacheller), 1,216 Eberhart, Mrs., 1,521-522,530 Eberhart, Richard, 1,189,521-543; O, 535-536,557; III, 289,527; IV, 416; Supp. I, Part 1,83 Eble, Kenneth E., II, 100,294; Supp. I, Part 1,201,226 Eccentricities of a Nightingale, The (Williams), IV, 382,385,397,398 Ecclesiastica Historia In teg ram Ecclesiae (Taylor), IV, 163 ^changes (publication), Supp. Ill, Part 2,612 Eckler, A. Ross, Supp. I, Part 2,627 Eckman, Fern Marja, Supp. I, Part 1, 69 Eclecticism, HI, 511,521 "Ecologue"(Ginsberg),Supp.II,Part 1,326

ECOL-ELEC / 676 "Ecologues of These States 19691971" (Ginsberg), Supp. II, Part 1, 325 "EconomicTheoryofWomen'sDress, The" (Veblcn),Supp. I, Part 2,636 "Economics of Negro Emancipation in the United States, The" (Du Bois), Supp. n, Part 1,174 "Economy of Love, The: The Novels of Bernard Malamud" (Baumbach), Supp. I, Part 2,452 Eddy, Mary Baker, 1,583; III, 506 Edel,Leon,I,20,333;II,293,338-339, 340,341; IV, 330 Edelstein,J.M.,IV,376 Edelstein, Sanford, IV, 425 Edgar Huntly; or, Memoirs of a SleepWalker (Brown), Supp. I, Part 1, 140-144,145 "Edgar Lee Masters" (Powys), Supp. I, Part 2,478 Edgar Lee Masters: A Centenary Memoir-Anthology (Masters), Supp. I, Part 2,478 "Edgar Lee Masters and the Chinese" (Hartley), Supp. I, Part 2,478 "Edgar Lee Masters—Biographerand Historian" (Hartley), Supp. I, Part 2,478 "Edgar Lee Masters Centenary Exhibition: Catalogue and Checklist of Books" (Robinson), Supp. I, Part 2,478 "Edgar Lee Masters Collection, The: Sixty Years of Literary History" (Robinson), Supp. I, Part 2,478 "Edgar Lee Masters—Political Essayist" (Hartley), Supp. I, Part 2, 478 Edgar Lee Masters: The Spoon River Poet and His Critics (Flanagan), Supp. I, Part 2,478 Edge, Mary E.,n, 316 "Edge" (Plath), Supp. I, Part 2,527, 547 Edgell,D.P.,IV,376 Edgeworth, Maria, n, 8 "Edict by the King of Prussia, An" (Franklin), II, 120 Edison,ThomasA.,I,483;Supp.I,Part 2,392 "Editor and the Schoolma'am, The" (Frederic), II, 130 "Editor Whedon" (Masters), Supp. I, Part 2,463

"Editor's Easy Chair" (Howells), II, 276 "Editor's Study, The" (Howells), II, 275,276,285 Edman, Irwin, HI, 605,621 Edsel (Shapiro), Supp. II, Part 2,703, 704,717-719 "Educated American Woman, An" (Cheever), Supp. I, Part 1,194 Education and Living (Bourne), 1,252 Education of Black People, The (Du Bois), Supp. n, Part 1,186 Education of Henry Adams, The (Adams),!, 1,5,6,11,14,15-18,19, 20-21, 111; 0,276; HI, 504 "Education of Jane Addams, The" (Phillips), Supp. I, Part 1,27 Education sentimen tale (Flaubert), HI, 315 Edward IV, King, 0,379; IV, 200 Edwards, Davis, Supp. I, Part 2,402 Edwards, Esther, 1,545 Edwards, John, 1,478 Edwards,Jonathan,I,544-566;II,432; Supp. I, Part 1, 301, 302, Part 2, 552,594,700 Edwards, Sarah, 1,545 Edwards, Timothy, 1,545 "Edwin Arlington Robinson" (Cowley), Supp. II, Part 1,144 Edwin Arlington Robinson (Winters), Supp. II, Part 2,812 "Efforts of Affection" (Moore), III, 214 "Egg, The" (Anderson), 1,113,114 Egoist, The (Meredith), II, 186 Egoist, The (publication), 1,384,568; III, 194,197, 471; Supp. I, Part 1, 257,262 "Egotism, or the Bosom Sergent" (Hawthorne), II, 227,239 "Egyptian Pulled Glass Bottle in the Shape of a Fish, An" (Moore), III, 195,213 Ehrenpreis, Irvin, n, 557 Eichelberger, Clayton, n, 413 "Eidolon" (Warren), IV, 239 Eight Cousins (Alcott), Supp. I, Part 1,29,38,42,43 Eight Harvard Poets: E. Estlin Cummings, S. Foster Damon, J. R. Dos Passos, Robert Hillyer, R. S. Mitchell, William A. Norris, Dudley Poore, Cuthbert Wright, 1,429,475 Eight Men (Wright), IV, 478,488,494

"ISWestllthStreer (Merrill),Supp. Ill, Part 1,323,328 "Eighth Air Force" (Jarrell), II, 373374,377 "Eighth Ditch, The" (Baraka), Supp. II, Part 1,40 £0F/0H>e/?(Zukofsky),Supp.m,Part 2,631 Eileen (Masters), Supp. I, Part 2,460 Eimi (Cummings), I, 429, 433, 434, 439-440 Einstein, Albert, 1,493; HI, 8,10,21, 161;IV,69,375,410,411,421;Supp. I, Part 2,609,643; Supp. Ill, Part 2, 621 "Einstein" (MacLeish), III, 5,8,1011,18-19 Eiseley, Loren, HI, 227-228 Eisenberg,J.A.,IV,23 Eisenhower, Dwight D., 1,136,376; II, 548; III, 215; IV, 75; Supp. I, Part 1, 291; Supp. HI, Part 2,624 Eisenstein, Sergei, 1,481 Eisinger, Chester E., 1,165,302; D, 221, 604,607; III, 47,72,243 Eissenstat, Martha Turnquist, HI, 168 El Greco, 1,387; III, 212 "El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz" (Hayden), Supp. II, Part 1,379 "El Salvador: Requiem and Invocation" (Levertov), Supp. m, Part 1, 284 Elbert, Sarah, Supp. I, Part 1,34,41, 46 Elder, Donald, 0,417,426,435,437, 438 Elder Statesman, The (Eliot), I, 572, 573,583 Eldridge, Florence, III, 154,403; IV, 357 Eleanor of Aquitaine, III, 470 Eleanor of Guienne, 1,14 Elective Affinities (Goethe, trans. Bogan and Mayer), Supp. m, Part 163 Electro (Euripides), III, 398 Electro (Sophocles), III, 398; IV, 370 "Electra on Azalea Path" (Plath), Supp. I, Part 2,538 Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, The (Wolfe),Supp.III,Part 2,575-577, 582-584 "Electrical Storm" (Bishop), Supp. I, Part 1,93 "Electrical Storm" (Hayden), Supp. II, Part 1,370

ELEG-EMER / 677 Elegant Extracts (Knox), II, 8 "Elegies for Paradise Valley" (Hayden), Supp. II, Part 1,363 "Elegy" (Merwin), Supp. Ill, Part 1, 351 "Elegy" (Tate), IV, 128 "Elegy, for the U.S.N. Dirigible, Macon, An" (Winters), Supp. D, Part 2,810 "Elegy of Last Resort" (Nemerov), 111,271 Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard (Gray), 1,68 "Elementary Scene,The" (Jarrell),!!, 387,388,389 Elements of Style, 77u? (St run k), Supp. I, Part 2,670 "Eleonora"(Poe),III,412 Eleothriambos (Lee), IV, 158 "Elephants" (Moore), III, 203 "Elevator Boy" (Hughes), Supp. I, Part 1,326 Eleven Essays in the European Novel (Blackmur), Supp. II, Part 1, 91, 111 Eleven Poems on the Same Theme (Warren), IV, 239-241 Eli (biblical person), Supp. I, Part 2, 690 "Eli, the Fanatic" (Roth), Supp. Ill, Part 2,407-408 Elias,RobertH.,I,520;Supp.I,Part2, 627 Elijah (biblical person), III, 347 Elinor Wylie (Gray), Supp. I, Part 2, 730 "Elinor Wylie: Heroic Mask" (Kohler), Supp. I, Part 2,730 "Elinor Wylie: The Glass Chimaera and the Minotaur" (Wright), Supp. I, Part 2,730 Elinor Wylie: The Portrait of an Unknown Lady (Hoyt), Supp. I, Part 2,730 "Elinor Wylie's Poetry" (Tate),Supp. I, Part 2,730 "Elinor Wylie's Shelley Obsession" (Cluck), Supp. I, Part 2,730 Eliot, Charles W., 1,5; D, 345; Supp. I, Part 2,479 Eliot, CharlotteChampeStearns,I,567 Eliot, George, I, 375, 458, 459, 461, 467;D, 179,181,191-192,275,319, 324,338,577; IV, 311,322; Supp. I, Part 1,370, Part 2,559,579 Eliot, Henry Ware, 1,567

Eliot, John, Supp. I, Part 2,484,485 Eliot, Mrs. T. S. (Valerie Fletcher), I, 568,583 Eliot, Mrs. T. S. (Vivicnne Haigh Haigh-Wood),I,568 Eliot, Samuel, Supp. I, Part 2,479 Eliot, T. S., 1,48,49,52,59,60,64,66, 68,105,107,215-216,236,243,256, 259, 261, 266, 384, 386, 395, 396, 399, 403, 430, 433, 441, 446, 475, 478, 479, 482, 521, 522, 527, 507SW; n, 65, 96,158,168, 316, 371, 376, 386, 529, 530, 532, 537, 542, 545; HI, 1,4,5,6,7-S, 9,10,11,14, 17,20,21,23,26,34,174,194,1951%, 205-206, 216, 217, 220, 236, 239, 269, 270-271, 277-278, 301, 409, 428, 432, 435, 436, 453, 456457, 459-460, 461-^62, 464, 466, 471, 476, 478, 485, 488, 492, 493, 498, 504, 509, 511, 517, 524, 527, 539, 572, 575, 586, 591, 594, 600, 613; IV, 27,74,82,83,95,122,123, 127, 129, 134, 138, 140, 141, 143, 191, 201, 213, 237, 331, 379, 402, 403, 418, 419, 420, 430, 431, 439, 442,491; Supp. I, Part 1,257,264, 268,270,274,275,299, Part 2,387, 423, 455, 536, 554, 624, 659, 721; Supp. II,Part 1,1,4,8,20,30,91,98, 103,136, 314; Supp. Ill, Part 1, 9, 10,26,31,37,41,43,44,48,62-64, 73,91,99-100,105-106,273,Part2, 541,611,612,617,624 Elisha (biblical person), III, 347 "Elizabeth" (Longfellow), 1,502 Elizabeth Appleton (O'Hara), HI, 362, 364,375-377 "Elizabeth Bishop," Supp. I, Part 1,96 Elizabeth Bishop (Stevenson), Supp. I, Parti, 97 "Elizabeth Bishop in Brazil" (Brown), Supp. I, Part 1,96 "Elizabeth Bishop, or the Power of Reticence" (Paz), Supp. I, Part 1, 97 "Elizabeth Bishop's 'Natural Heroism'" (Spiegelman), Supp. I, Part 1,97 Elizabeth I, Queen, I, 284; H, 139; Supp. I, Part 1,100, 111, 114,115, 116,118 "Elizabeth Gone" (Sexton), Supp. II, Part 2,674,681 Elizabeth Lloyd and the Whittiers (ed. Currier), Supp. I, Part 2,705

Elizabethan literature, 1,177,384,569; D, 14-15, 18, 74; III, 77, 83,145, 152,397; IV, 155,309; Supp. I, Part 1,365, Part 2,719 Ellen Rogers (Farrell), II, 42-43 Eller, Ernest, Supp. I, Part 2,497 Eilerman, Winifred, D, 533; Supp. I, Part 1, 258-259, 275; see also McAlmon, Mrs. Robert (Winifred Eilerman) Elliott, George B., HI, 47,289,478 Elliott, Karin, 111,407 Ellis, Charles, Supp. I, Part 1,99 Ellis, Havelock,0,276 Ellis,John Harvard, Supp. I, Part 1,103 Ellis, Katherine, IV, 114 Ellison, Fanny McConnell (Mrs. Ralph Ellison), Supp. II, Part 1,241 Ellison,Ralph,I,426;IV,250,493,496; Supp. II, Part 1,33,221-252 Eilmann, Richard, IV, 424 Elman, Richard M., IV, 23 Elmer Gantry (Lewis), I, 26, 364; II, 447-449,450,455 Elmer the Great (Lardner), II, 427 "Eloquence of Grief, An" (Crane), I, 411 "Elsa Wertman" (Masters), Supp. I, Part 2,462-463 Elsasser, Henry, 1,226 Elsie Venner (Holmes), Supp. I, Part 1,243, Part 2,315-316 Eluard, Paul, HI, 528 Elvins, Kells, Supp. HI, Part 1,93,101 Elwood, Douglas J., 1,565 Ely, Richard T., Supp. I, Part 1, 5, Part 2,640,645 "Emancipation: A Life Fable" (Chopin), Supp. I, Part 1,207-208 "Emancipation in the British West Indies" (Emerson), II, 13 "Emancipation Proclamation, The" (Emerson), II, 13 Emanuel, James, Supp. I, Part 1,346, 348 Embargo, The (Bryant), Supp. I, Part 1,152-153 "Embarrassment of Riches, An: Baldwin's Going to Meet the Man" (Moore), Supp. I, Part 1,70 Embree, Lester E., n, 366 "Emerald, The" (Merrill), Supp. Ill, Part 1,328 Emerson, Donald, fl, 697 Emerson, Edward Waldo, D, 22,23; IV, 189

EMER-EPIT / 678 Emerson, Ellen, Supp. I, Part 1,33 Emerson, Everett, IV, 166 Emerson, Mary Moody, D, 7, 8; IV, 172 Emerson, Mrs. Ralph Waldo (Ellen Tucker), II, 7,11 Emerson, Mrs. Ralph Waldo (Lydia Jackson), II, 7; IV, 171,177 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, I, 98, 217, 220, 222, 224, 228, 239, 246, 251, 252, 253, 257, 260, 261, 283, 386, 397, 402, 424, 433, 444, 447, 455, 458,460-^61,463,464,485,561; O, 1-24, 49, 92, 127-128, 169, 170, 226, 233, 237, 273-274, 275, 278, 289, 295, 301, 313, 315, 336, 338, 344,402,491,503; III, 53,82,171, 174, 260, 277, 409, 424, 428, 453, 454,507,576-577,606,614; IV, 60, 167, 169, 170, 171, 172, 173-174, 176, 178, 183, 186, 187, 192, 201, 202, 211, 335, 338, 340, 342, 350; Supp. I, Parti, 2,28-29,31,33,147, 188, 299, 308-309, 317, 358, 365, 366,368,373, Part 2,374,383,393, 407, 413, 416, 420, 422, 474, 482, 580, 582, 602, 659, 679; Supp. II, Part 1,280,288; Supp. Ill, Part 1, 387 Emerson, Reverend William (father), 0,7 Emerson, William (brother), II, 7 Emerson family, IV, 177,178 "Emerson the Lecturer" (Lowell), Supp. I, Part 2,420,422 Emery, Clark, HI, 478 Eminent Victorians (Strachey), Supp. I, Part 2,485 "Emma and Eginhard" (Longfellow), 11,505 Emperor]ones, The (O'Neill), II, 278; 111,391,392 Emperor of Haiti (Hughes), Supp. I, Part 1,339 "Emperor of Ice Cream, The" (Stevens), IV, 76,80-81 "Emperor's New Clothes, The" (Anderson), 1,441 "Empire Builders" (MacLeish), III, 14 "Emporium" (Shapiro),Supp.II, Part 2,705 Empson, William, 1,522,533; D, 536, III, 286,497,498,499; IV, 136,431 "Empty Hills, The" (Winters), Supp. II, Part 2,792,793,7%

English Hours (James), II, 337 English Notebooks, The (Hawthorne), n, 226,227-228 English Novel, The (Lanier), Supp. I, Part 1,371 English Poets, The:Lessing, Rousseau (Lowell), Supp. I, Part 2,407 English Prosody and Modern Poetry (Shapiro), Supp. II, Part 2,710 English Traits (Emerson), II, 1,5,6-7, 8 "English Writers on America" (Irving), II, 308 Englishmen of Letters (James), II, 327 Engstrand, Stuart, Supp. I, Part 1,51 Enjoyment of Laughter (Eastman), Supp. I, Part 2,626 "Enormous Radio, The" (Cheever), Supp. I, Part 1,175-177,195 Enormous Radio and Other Stories, r/K?(Cheever),Supp.I,Part 1,175177 Enormous Room, 77ie(Cummings),I, 429,434,440,445,477 "Enough for a Lifetime" (Buck), Supp. II, Part 1,127 Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (Godwin), Supp. I, Part 1,126,146 Enright,D.J.,IV,234 111,8 "Entropy" (Pynchon), Supp. II, Part Endecottand the Red Cross (Lowell), 2,619,621 11,545 "Envoys, The" (Merrill), Supp. in, Endor (Nemerov), III, 269,270,279 Part 1,326 "Enduring Chill, The" (O'Connor), "Eolian Harp,The" (Coleridge), 1,284 111,349,351,357 "Ephemera, The" (Franklin), II, 121 Endymion (Keats), IV, 405 Ephesians (biblical book), Supp. I, Part 1,117 Enemies—A Love Story (Singer), IV, 1 Epictetus, III, 566 Enemy of the People, An (adapt. Epicurus, 1,59 Miller), III, 154-156 "Epigram" (Lowell), II, 550 Enemy, The: Time (Williams), IV, 391 "Epimanes" (Poe), III, 411 "Energy Vampire" (Ginsberg), Supp. "Epimetheus" (Longfellow), II, 494 II, Part 1,326 "Epipsychidion" (Shelley), Supp. I, "Enforcement of the Slave Trade Part 2,718 Laws, The" (Du Bois), Supp. D, Episode in Palmetto (Ca Id well), 1,297, Part 1,161 307 Engel, Bernard F., 1,532,542; III, 217 Epistle to a Godson (Auden), Supp. II, Engel,EdwinA.,III,407 Part 1,24 Engels, Friedrich, IV, 429, 443-444; "Epistle to Be Left in the Earth" Supp. I, Part 1,13 (MacLeish), HI, 13 Engels, John, IV, 423,424 "Epistle to George William Curtis" Engineers and the Price System, The (Lowell), Supp. I, Part 2,416 (Veblen), 1,475-476; Supp. I, Part "Epistle to L6on-Paul Fargue" 4638,642,648 (MacLeish), III, 15 "England" (Moore), III, 203,207,214 "Epitaph for Fire and Flower" (Plath), Engle, Paul, II, 171; III, 542 Supp. I, Part 2,537

Empty Mirror, Early Poems (Ginsberg), Supp. II, Part 1, 308, 311, 313-314,319,329 "Empty Room" (Hughes), Supp. I, Part 1,337 "Empty Threat, An" (Frost), II, 159 "Encantadas, The" (Melville), III, 89 Enck, John, 1,143,165; IV, 95 "Encomium Twenty Years Later" (Tate),I,381 "Encounter, The" (Pound), III, 466 Encounters with the Archdruid (McPhee), Supp. Ill, Part 1,292294,301 Encyclopaedia Britannica, The, IV, 91, 440 "End of Season" (Warren), IV, 239240 "End of Something, The" (Hemingway), II, 248 "End of the Line" (Geismar), Supp. I, Part 1,198 "End of the Line, The" (Jarrell), III, 527 "End of the Rainbow, The" (Jarrell), 11,386 End of the Road, The (Earth), 1,121, 122,126-131 "End of the World, The" (MacLeish),

EPIT-EVER / 679 "Epitaph for the Race of Man" (Millay), III, 127-128 "Epithaiamium"(Auden), Supp. II, Part 1,15 "Epstein" (Roth), Supp. Ill, Part 2, 404,406-407,412,422 "Equal in Paris** (Baldwin), Supp. I, Part 1,52 u Equilibrists,The'' (Ransom), HI, 490, 494 "Erat Hora" (Pound), III, 463 "Ere Sleep Comes Down to Soothe the Weary Eyes" (Dunbar), Supp. II, Part 1,199,207-208 Erikson, Erik, 1,58,214,218 "Ernest: or Parent for a Day" (Bourne), 1,232 "Eros at Temple Stream" (Levertov), Supp. Ill, Part 1,278-279 "Eros Turannos" (Robinson), 111,510, 512,513-516,517,518 "Errand" (Carver), Supp. Ill, Part 1, 149 Erskine, Albert, IV, 261 Erskine, John, 1,223 "Escape" (MacLeish), HI, 4 Espey, John, III, 463,468,478 Esprit (publication), III, 352,355,356, 358 Esquire (magazine), 1,139; II, 78,97, 98, 591; III, 38, 351; IV, 97, 461; Supp. I, Part 1,50,295,329, Part 2, 664 Essais (Renouvier), II, 344-345 Essay Concerning Human Understanding, An (Locke), 1,554; II, 8, 348-349 Essay on American Poetry (Brown), Supp. I, Part 1,156 "Essay on Aristocracy" (Paine), Supp. I, Part 2,515 Essay on Man (Pope), II, 111; Supp. I, Part 2,516 Essay on Our Changing Order ( Veblen), Supp. I, Part 2,629,642 Essay on Projects (Defoe), II, 104 Essay on Rime (Shapiro), 1,430; Supp. II, Part 2,702,703,708-711 "Essay on the Character of Robespierre" (Paine), Supp. I, Part 2,515 Essay on the Chinese Written Character (Fenollosa), III, 474 "Essay Toward a Point of View, An" (Brooks), 1,244 Essays (Emerson), II, 1, 7, 8,12-13, 15,21

Essays in Anglo-Saxon Law, 1,5 Essays in London (James), II, 336 Essays in Radical Empiricism (James), 0,356-357,359 Essays on the Nature and Principles of Taste (Alison), Supp. I, Part 1,151 Essays to Do Good (Mather), II, 104; Supp. II, Part 2,461,467 "Essential oils are wrung" (Dickinson), 1,471 "Essentials" (Toomer), Supp. IH, Part 2,486 Essentials: A Philosophy of Life in Three Hundred Definitions and Aphorisms (Toomer), Supp. HI, Part 2,486 "Essentials of Spontaneous Prose" (Kerouac), Supp. ID, Part 1,227228 Essex Gazette (newspaper), Supp. I, Part 2,683,684 Esslin,Martin,I,95 Esther (Adams), 1,9-10,20 "Esth6tique du Mai" (Stevens), IV, 79 "Estrangement, Betrayal & Atonement: The Political Theory of James Baldwin" (Daniels), Supp.1, Part 1,70 Esty, William, HI, 358; Supp. I, Part 1, 198 "Etching, An" (Masters), Supp. I, Part 2,458 Eternal Adam and the New World Garden, The (Noble), Supp. I, Part 1,70 "Eternal Goodness, The" (Whittier), Supp. I, Part 2,704 "Eternity Is Now" (Roethke),HI,544545 "Ethan Brand" (Hawthorne), II, 227 Ethan Frome (Wharton), IV, 316-317, 327

Ethics (Spinoza), IV, 12 Euclid, D, 6; III, 620 "Euclid Alone Has Looked on Beauty Bare" (Millay), III, 133 Eugene Onegin (Pushkin), HI, 246,263 Eugdnie, Empress, IV, 309 Eugenie Grandet (Balzac), II, 328 Eureka (Poe), III, 409,424,428-429 Euripides, I,325;II, 8,282,543;III,22, 145, 398; IV, 370; Supp. I, Part 1, 268,269,270, Part 2,482 "Euripides—a Playwright" (West), IV, 286 "Euripides and Professor Murray" (Eliot), Supp. I, Part 1,268

"Europe" (Ashbery), Supp. IH, Part 1,7-10,13,18 "Europe! Europe!" (Ginsberg), Supp. II, Part 1,320,322 Europe without Baedeker (Wilson), IV, 429 European Discovery of America, The: The Northern Voyages (Morison), Supp. I, Part 2,496-497 European Discovery of America, The: The Southern Voyages. (Morison), Supp. I, Part 2,497 Europeans, The (James), I, 452; II, 327,328 Eustace, Saint, 11,215 "Euthanasia" (Tate), IV, 122 Evangeline (Longfellow), II, 489,501502; Supp. I, Part 2,586 Evans, Arthur, 1,189 Evans, Catherine, 1,189 Evans, Mary Ann, see Eliot, George Evans, Oliver, D, 608 Evans, Robert I., HI, 169 Evans, Walker, 1,36,38,47,293 Eve (biblical person), I, 551; II, 47, 134,215; III, 19,199,224-225,441; IV, 149,225,291,371;Supp.I,Part 1,113,120, Part 2,567 Eve of Saint Agnes, 77ie(Keats),II,82, 531 "Evening" (Carver),Siq>p.m,Part 1,148 "Evening in Nuevo Leon, An" (Caldweil),I,309 "Evening in the Sanitarium** (Bogan), Supp. Ill, Part 1,61 Evening Post, The: A Century of Journalism (Nevins), Supp. I, Part 1,173 "Evening Star** (Bogan), Supp. Ill, Part 1,56 "Evening Wind,The" (Bryant), Supp. I, Part 1,164 "Evenings at Home" (Hardwick), Supp. HI, Part 1,195-196 "Evening's at Seven,The" (Thurber), Supp. I, Part 2,616 "Event, An" (Wilbur), Supp. IH, Part 2,547,554 "Eventide" (Brooks), Supp. IH, Part 1,73 Events Leading up to the Comedy (Nugent), Supp. I, Part 2,626 Everett, Alexander Hill, Supp. I, Part 1,152 Evers, Medgar, IV, 280; Supp. I, Part 1,52,65

EVER-FAIR / 680 Every Saturday (publication), Supp.I, Part 1,365 Every Soul ha Circus (Lindsay), Supp. I, Part 2,384,394,399 "Everybody's Protest Novel" (Baldwin), Supp. I, Part 1,50,51 "Everyday Use" (Walker), Supp. in, Part 2,534 "Everything Is a Human Being" (Walker), Supp. Ill, Part 2,527 "Everything Stuck to Him" (Carver), Supp. in, Part 1,143 Everything That Rises Must Converge (0'Connor),m,339,348-349,350351 "Everything That Rises Must Converge" (O'Connor), III, 349,352, 357 Eve's Diary (Twain), IV, 208-209 "EvilSeekers,The"(Sexton),Supp.n, Part 2,696 Ev'ry Month (publication), 1,500 Ewings, 77u>(O'Hara),III,383 "Ex Parte" (Lardner), II, 432 "ExcavationofTroy"(MacLeish),DI, 18 Excellent Becomes the Permanent, The (Addams), Supp. I, Part 1,25 "Excess of Charity" (Wylie), Supp. I, Part 2,720 Excursions (Thoreau), IV, 188 "Exhortation "(Began), Supp. ID, Part 1,58 "Exile" (Oates), Supp. II, Part 2,523 Exile, (publication), Supp. EH, Part 2, 610,611 Exile, The (Buck), Supp. II, Part 1, 119,131 "Exiles, The" (Whittier), Supp. I,Part 4692-693 Exiles and Fabrications (Scott), II, 512 Exile's Daughter, The (Spencer), Supp. II, Part 1,121 "Exile's Departure, The" (Whittier), Supp. I, Part 2,683 Exile's Return (Cowley), Supp. n, Part 1,136,138,140,141,144,147,148 "Exile'sReturn,The"(LowcU),n,539 Existentialism,I,123,128,206,294;n, 244,373;III,35,37-38,39,267,283, 339,388,418,448; IV, 3,5,11,115117, 246, 477, 483, 484, 487, 488, 491,493,495,496 "Exit Vachel Lindsay—Enter Ernest Hemingway" (Kreymborg), Supp. I, Part 2,402

Exodus (biblical book), IV, 300 "Exorcism, An" (Malamud), Supp. I, Part 2,435 Exorcist, 77ie(film),Supp. I, Part 1,66 "Expectant Father Compares His Wife to a Rabbit, An" (White), Supp. I, Part 2,678 "Expelled" (Cheever), Supp. I, Part 1, 174,186 ExpenseofGreatness, 7fe(Blackmur), Supp. II, Part 1,90,107 Expensive People (Oates), Supp. n, Part 2,509,510-511 "Experience and the Objects of Knowledge in the Philosophy of F. H. Bradley" (Eliot), 1,572 Experience of Literature, The (Trilling), Supp. Ill, Part 2,493 "Experiences and Principles of an Historian" (Morison),Supp.I,Part 2,492 "Experiment in Misery, An" (Crane), 1,411 Experimental Death Unit*! (Baraka), Supp. II, Part 1,46 "Experimental Life, The" (Bourne), 1,217,220 Experiments and Observations on Electricity (Franklin), II, 102,114115 "Explanation" (Stevens), IV, 79 "Exploit" (Wharton), IV, 324 "Explorer, The" (Brooks), Supp. Ill, Part 1,79-80 "Exploring the Magalloway" (Parkman), Supp. II, Part 2,591 Expositor's Bible, The (Smith), HI, 199 "Exquisites, The" (Kazin), Supp. I, Part 2,730 Extract from Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven (Twain), IV, 209-210 Extracts from Adam's Diary (Twain), IV, 208-209 "Exulting, The" (Roethke), III, 544 Eye, The (Nabokov), III, 251 "Eye of Paris, The" (Miller), III, 183184 "Eye of the Story, The" (Porter), IV, 279 "Eyes, The" (Wharton), IV, 315 "Eyes to See" (Cozzens), 1,374 Ezekiel (biblical book), II, 541 Ezekiel (biblical person), III, 347 Ezekiel, Mordecai, Supp. I, Part 2,645 "Ezra Pound: His Cantos" (Zukofsky), Supp. Ill, Part 2,612,619,622

Ezra Pound's Mauberley (Espey),in, 463 "Ezra Pound's Very Useful Labors" (Schwartz), Supp. II, Part 2,644 "Fable" (Merwin), Supp. Ill, Part 1, 343 "Fable" (Wylie), Supp. I, Part 2, 714 Fable, A (Faulkner), II, 55, 73 "Fable, The" (Winters),Supp. II, Part 2, 792, 793, 796 Fable for Critics, A (Lowell), Supp. I, Part 2, 406, 407-408, 409, 412-413, 416,420,422 "Fabieof the War, A" (Nemerov),III, 272 Fablesfor Our Time (Thurber), Supp. 1, Part 2, 610 Fables of La Fontaine, The (Moore), HI, 194, 215 "Fables of the Moscow Subway" (Nemerov), 111,271 Fabre, Michel, IV, 496 Fabricius, Johannes, 1, 590 Face of Time, The (Farrell), II, 28, 34, 35,39 "Facing West from California's Shores" (Jeffers), Supp. II, Part 2, 437-438 Fackre, Gabriel J., Ill, 312 " Tact' as Style: The Americanization of Sylvia" (Ostriker), Supp. I, Part 2, 548 "Fact in Fiction,The" (McCarthy), II, 562 "Facts, The" (Lardner), II, 431 Facts, The: A Novelist's Autobiography (Roth), Supp. Ill, Part 2, 401, 405,417,426 "Facts and Traditions Respecting the Existence of Indigenous Intermittent Fever in New England" (Holmes), Supp. I, Part 1, 303 "Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar, The" (Poe), III, 416 Fadiman, Clifton, 1, 213; H, 430, 431, 443, 591-592; IK, 384 Faerie Queen, The (Spencer), HI, 487; IV, 253 Fagin, N. Bryllion, III, 432 Faint Perfume (Gale), Supp. I, Part 2, 613 Fairchild, Frances, see Bryant, Mrs. William Cullen (Frances Fairchild)

FAIR-FATO / 681 Fairfield, Flora (pseudonym), see Alcott, Louisa May Faith and History (Niebuhr), III, 308 Faith for Living (Mumford), Supp. II, Part 2,479-480 "Faith of an Historian" (Morison), Supp. I, Part 2,492 Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Works of God in the Conversion of Many Hundred Souls in Northampton, and the Neighboring Towns and Villages of New-Hampshire in New-England, A (Edwards),!, 545, 562 "Falcon of Ser Federigo, The" (Longfellow), II, 505 Falconer (Cheever), Supp. I, Part 1, 176,193-195,196 "Falconer" (Didion), Supp. I, Part 1, 198 Falk, Doris V., HI, 407,408; Supp. I, Part 1,297 Falk, Signi Lenea, HI, 25; IV, 401 Falkner, Dean, n, 55 Falkner, John, 11,55 Falkner, Mrs. Murray C. (Maud Butler), II, 55 Falkner, Murray, D, 55 Falkner, Murray C, H, 55,76 Falkner, William C.,H, 55 "Fall in Corrales" (Wilbur), Supp. Ill, Part 2,556 "Fall 1961" (Lowell), II, 550 Fall of America, The:l 965-1971 (Ginsberg), Supp. II, Part 1,323, 325, 327 Fall of the City, The: A Verse Play for Radio (MacLeish), III, 20 "Fall of the House of Usher, The" (Poe), III, 412,414,415,419 "Falling Asleep over the Aeneid" (Lowell), II, 542 "Familiar Epistle to a Friend, A" (Lowell), Supp. I, Part 2,416 "Family" (Wilson), IV, 426 Family Moskat, The (Singer), IV, 1,46,17,20 Family Party, A (O'Hara), III, 362 Family Pictures (Brooks), Supp. Ill, Part 1,69,85,86 Family Reunion, The (Eliot), 1,570571,572,581,584,588 "Family Way,The" (Hardwick),Supp. I, Part 1,198 Famous American Negroes (Hughes), Supp. I, Part 1,345

"Famous Gilson Bequest, The" (Bierce),I,204 Famous Negro Music Makers (Hughes), Supp. I, Part 1,345 "FamousNew YorkTrials" (Ellison), Supp. H, Part 1,230 Fanatics, TTie(Dunbar), Supp. II, Part 1,213-214 "Fancy and Imagination" (Poe), III, 421 "Fancy'sShowBox" (Hawthorne), II, 238 Fanshawe (Hawthorne), II, 223-224 "Fantasia on 'The Nut-Brown Maid'" (Ashbery), Supp. Ill, Part 1,19, "Fantastic Fables" (Bierce), 1,209 "Far Field, The" (Roethke), III, 537, 540 Far Field, The (Roethke), III, 528, 529,539,545,547-548 Far from the Madding Crowd (Hardy), 11,291 Far North (Shepard),Supp.III,Part2, 433,435 " Far Rockaway''( Schwartz), Supp. II, Part 2,649 Faraday, Michael, 1,480-481 "Farewell" (Emerson), II, 13 "Farewell,MyLovely!"(White),Supp. I, Part 2,661-663,665 "Farewell Performance" (Merrill), Supp. HI, Part 1,336-337 Farewell—Sermon Preached at the First Precinct in Northampton, after the People's Publick Rejection of their Minister, A (Edwards), I, 548,562 "Farewell Sweet Dust" (Wylie), Supp. I, Part 2,727-728 Farewell to Arms, A (Hemingway), I, 212,421,476,477; O, 6S-69, 24&249,252-253,254,255,262,265 "Farewell to Miles" (Berryman),!, 173 Farewell to Reform (Chamberlain), Supp. I, Part 2,647 Fans, Athlnaise Charleville, Supp. I, Part 1,204 Paris, Eliza, see O 'Flaherty, Mrs. Thomas (Eliza Fans) Farley, Abbie, 1,458 "Farm Implements and Rutabagas in a Landscape" (Ashbery), Supp. in, Part 1,13 FarmersHotel, The (O'Hara),III,361 "Farmer's Wife, The" (Sexton), Supp. II, Part 2,676

Farnham, James F., HI, 360 Farnol, Jeffrey, Supp. I, Part 2,653 Farrand, Max, 0,122,124 Farrar, John, n, 191 Farrell, James Francis, n, 25,26 Farrell, James T., 1,97,288,475,508, 517,519; II, 2S-53,416,424; HI, 28, 114,116,118,119,317,382; IV,211, 286; Supp. I, Part 2,679 Parrell, John, 11,26 Farrell, John C., Supp. I, Part 1,24, 27 Farrell, Kevin, D, 26 Farrell, Mary, 0,25 Farrell, Mrs. James T. (Dorothy Butler), II, 26 Farrell, Mrs. James T. (Hortense Alden),II,26,27,45,48 "FascinatingFascism" (Sontag),Supp. Ill, Part 2,465 "Fascination of Cities, The" (Hughes), Supp. I, Part 1,325 Fascism, 1,172,588; D, 44,454,480 Fast, Howard, Supp. I, Part 1,295 "Fastest Runner on Sixty-first Street, The" (Farrell), II, 45 "Fat" (Carver), Supp. ffl, Part 1,141 Fatal Interview (Millay),III, 128-129, 130 "Fate" (Emerson), II, 2-3,4,16 "Fate of Pleasure, The" (Trilling), Supp. Ill, Part 2,510 Fate of the Jury, The (Masters), Supp. I, Part 2,466,468,469 "Father" (Walker), Supp. Ill, Part 2, 522 "Father, The" (Carver), Supp. ID, Part 1,137,140 "Father and Daughter" (Eberhart), I, 539 "Father and Son" (Eberhart), 1,539 Father and Son (Farrell), II, 34, 35, 290,291 "Father and Son" (Hughes), Supp. I, Part 1,329,339 "Father and Son" (Kunitz), Supp. Ill, Part 1,262 "Father and Son" (Schwartz), Supp. II, Part 2,650 Father Bombo's Pilgrimage to Mecca (Freneau), Supp. II, Part 1,254 Fathers, The (Tate), IV, 120,127,130, 131-133,134,141 "Fathers and Sons" (Hemingway), II, 249,265-266 Fatout, Paul, 1,213

FAUL-FIFT / 652 Faulkner, Mrs. William (Estelle Oldham),II,57 Faulkner, William, I, 54, 97, 99,105, 106, 115, 117, 118, 119, 120, 123, 190, 204-205, 211, 288, 289, 291, 292, 297, 305, 324, 374, 378, 423, 480,517; 0,28,51,54^76,131,174, 194, 217, 223, 228, 230, 259, 301, 306, 431, 458-459, 542, 594, 606; HI, 45,70,108,164,218,220,222, 236-237, 244, 292, 334, 350, 382, 418,453,454,482,483; IV, 2,4,33, 49, 97, 98,100,101,120,131, 203, 207, 211, 217, 237, 257, 260, 261, 279,280,352,461,463; Supp. I, Part 1,68,196,197,242,372, Part 2,450, 621; Supp. Ill, Part 1,384-385,396 Faulkner at Nagano (ed. Jelliffe), I, 289; 0,63,65 Faulkner-Cowley File, The (Cowley), Supp. II, Part 1,140,141 "Faun" (Plath), Supp. I, Part 2,537 "Fauna" (Jeffers),Supp.II,Part2,415 Fauset, Jessie, Supp. I, Part 1,321,325 Fausset, Hugh I'Anson, IV, 354 Faust, Clarence H., 1,564,565; II, 20, 23 FflM5/(Goethe),I,396;II,489;in,395; Supp. H, Part 1,16 Faute de VAbbe Mouret, La (Zola), 111,322 Favor Island (Merwin), Supp. Ill, Part 1,346,347 Fay, Bernard, IV, 41 "Feast, The" (Kinnell), Supp. Ill, Part 1,239,250 "Featherbed for Critics, A" (Blackmur), Supp. II, Part 1,93,151 "Feathers" (Carver), Supp. Ill, Part t 145 F«i//iers(VanVechten),Supp.II,Part 2,736,749 "February" (Ellison), Supp. II, Part 1, 229 Fechner,Gustav,II,344,355,358,359, 363,364 Feder, Lillian, IV, 136,142 Federal Arts Project, Supp. Ill, Part 2, 618 Federalist, The, n, 8 Federigo, or, The Power of Love (Nemerov), III, 268,276,282,283284,285 "Fedora" (Chopin), Supp. I, Part 1, 220 Feeley, Sister Kathleen, 0,221

"Feeling and Precision" (Moore), III, 206 "Feeling of Effort, The" (James), II, 349 Feibleman, James K., 1,119-120 Feidelson, Charles, Jr., 0,23,245 Feied, Frederick, 0,484 Fein, Richard, D, 390 Feldman, Irving, IV, 23 Felheim, Marvin, Supp. I, Part 1,297 Felheim, Melvin, fl, 608 "FellowCitizens"(Sandburg),m,583 Fellows, John, Supp. I, Part 2,520 "Felo de Se" (Wylie), Supp. I, Part 2, 727,729 "Female Frailty" (Freneau),Supp.II, Part 1,258 Female Imagination, The (Spacks), Supp. I, Part 1,46 "Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses" (Twain), IV, 204-205 Fennessy, R. R., Supp. I, Part 2,525 Fenollosa, Ernest, III, 458,465, 466, 474,475,477 Fenollosa, Mrs. Ernest, III, 458 Fenton, Charles A., n, 270 Ferdinand: Including "It Was" (Zukofsky), Supp. HI, Part 2,630 Ferenczi, Sandor, n, 365 "Fergus" (Bourne), 1,229 Ferguson, Alfred Riggs, n, 23 Ferguson, J. DeLancey, IV, 213 Ferguson, James, Supp. I, Part 2,503 Fergusson, Francis, I, 265, 286, 440, 450; III, 408; IV, 143,376 Ferment of Realism, The (Berthoff), Supp. I, Part 2,477 "Fern"(Toomer),Supp.m,Part2,481 "Fern Hill" (Thomas), IV, 93 "Fern-Beds in Hampshire Country" (Wilbur), Supp. Ill, Part 2,558 Feron, James, III, 169 Ferreo, Guglielmo, Supp. I, Part 2,481 Ferres,JohnH.,I,120 Ferris, Sumner J., Ill, 360 Fessenden, Thomas Green, D, 300 "Festival Aspect,The" (Olson),Supp. II, Part 2,585 F§tes galantes (Verlaine), IV, 79 "Fever" (Carver), Supp. in, Part 1, 145 "Fever 103°" (Plath), Supp. I, Part 2, 541 "Few Don'ts by an Imagiste, A" (Pound), in, 465; Supp. I, Part L, 261-262

Fiction of the Fifties: A Decade of American Writing (ed. Gold), Supp. I, Part 1,198 Fiction of the Forties (Eisinger), 1,302; 11,604 "Fiction Writer and His Country, The" (O'Connor), ID, 342; Supp. II, Part 1,148 Fidelity (Glaspell), Supp. Ill, Part 1, 177 Fiedler, Leslie A., 1,143,165; D, 27, 390;m,218,243,432;IV,258;Supp. I, Part 2,453,601; Supp. II, Part 1, 87 Field, Andrew, HI, 266 Field, Eugene, Supp. II, Part 1,197 Field, John, IV, 179 Field, Joyce W., Supp. I, Part 2, 452, 453 Field, Leslie A., IV, 472,473; Supp. I, Part 2,452,453 FieldofVision, The (Morris), in, 226228,229,232,233,238 Fielding, Henry, 1,134; 0,302, 304305; III, 61; Supp. I, Part 2,421,422, 656 "Field-larks and Blackbirds" (Lanier), Supp. I, Part 1,355 Fields, Annie, see Fields, Mrs. James T. Fields, James T., 0,274,279,402-403; Supp. I, Part 1,317 Fields, Joseph, IV, 274 Fields, Mrs. James T. (Annie Adams), n, 401,402,403-404,406,412,413; IV, 177; Supp. I, Part 1,317 Fields, W. C, D, 427; IV, 335 Fields of Wonder (Hughes), Supp. I, Part 1,333-334 Fields Were Green, The(Arms), Supp. I, Part 1,173,319, Part 2,426,706 Fiene, Donald F., Ill, 574 "Fifteenth Farewell" (Bogan), Supp. Ill, Part 1,51,58 "Fifth Avenue, Uptown" (Baldwin), Supp. I, Part 1,52 Fifth Column, The (Hemingway), II, 254,258 "Fifth Movement: Autobiography" (Zukofsky), Supp. Ill, Part 2,611 Fifty Best American Short Stories (O'Brien), III, 56 "Fifty Grand" (Hemingway), II, 250, 424 50 Poems (Cummings), I, 430, 440, 442-443,444-445,446

FIFT-FISK / 683 "Fifty Years Among the Black Folk" (Du Bois), Supp. II, Part 1,169 55 Poems (Zukofsky), Supp. Ill, Part 2,611,621 "52 Oswald Street" (Kinnell), Supp. m, Part 1,251 Figaro (publication), 1,195 Fight for Freedom (Hughes), Supp. I, Part 1,345 Fighting Angel (Buck), Supp. D, Part 1,119,131 "Figlia che Piange, La" (Eliot), 1,570, 584; III, 9 "Figures in the Clock, The" (McCarthy), II, 561-562 Figures of Time (Hayden), Supp. II, Part 1,367 Filler, Louis, 1,237 Fillmore,Millard,III,101 "Fin de Saison—Palm Beach" (White), Supp. I, Part 2,673 "Final Fear" (Hughes), Supp. I, Part 1,338 Final Harvest: Emily Dickinson's Poems (ed. Johnson), 1,470,471 "Finale"(Longfellow),n,505,506-507 Financier, The (Dreiser), I, 497, 501, 507,509 "Finding of Zach, The" (Dunbar), Supp. II, Part 1,212 Finding the Islands (Merwin), Supp. Ill, Part 1,353,357 Findings and Keepings: Analects for an Autobiography (Mumford), 481, Supp. II, Part 2,483 Fine Clothes to the Jew (Hughes), Supp. I, Part 1,326-328 Finer Grain, The (James), II, 335 Fink, Mike, IV, 266 Finkelstein, Dorothee, III, 97 Finley, John H.,H, 418 Finn, James, Supp. I, Part 1,70 Finnegans Wake (Joyce), III, 7,12,14, 261; IV, 182, 369-370, 418, 421; Supp. I, Part 2,620; Supp. II, Part 1, 2 "Finnish Rhapsody" (Ashbery),Supp. ID, Part 1,26 Firbank, Ronald, IV, 77,436 "Fire" (Hughes), Supp. I, Part 1,327 Fire (publication), Supp. I, Part 1,326 "Fire and Cloud" (Wright), IV, 488 "Fire and Ice" (Frost), II, 154 "Fireand the Hearth,The" (Faulkner),

n,7i

Fire Next Time, The (Baldwin), Supp. I, Part 1,48,49,52,60-61 "Fire of Driftwood" (Longfellow), II, 499 "Fire of Life" (McCullers), II, 585 "Fire Poem" (Merrill), Supp. HI, Part 1,321 Fire Screen, The (Merrill), Supp. DI, Part 1,319,325-329 "Fire Sequence" (Winters), Supp. II, Part 2,791,796,800 Fire Sermon (Morris), III, 238-239 Fire Under the Andes (Sergeant), Supp. I, Part 2,730 Firebaugh, Joseph J., IV, 376 "Fireborn Are at Home in Fire, The" (Sandburg), III, 591 Firecrackers (Van Vechten), Supp. II, Part 2,740,742-744,749 "Fires"(Carver),Supp.m,Part 1,136139,147 Fires: Essays, Poems, Stories (Carver), Supp. Ill, Part 1,136,140,142,146147 Fireside Travels (Lowell), Supp. I, Part 2,407,419-420 "Fire-Truck, A" (Wilbur), Supp. Ill, Part 2,556 "Fireworks" (Shapiro), Supp. II, Part 2,707 Fir-Flower Tablets (Lowell), II, 512, 526-527 Firkins, Oscar W., D, 23,271,294 Firmage, George J., 1,449 "Firmament, The" (Bryant), Supp. I, Part 1,162 "First American, The" (Toomer), Supp. Ill, Part 2,480,487 First Book of Africa, The (Hughes), Supp. I, Part 1,344-345 First Book of Jazz, The (Hughes), Supp. I, Part 1,345 First Book of Negroes, The (Hughes), Supp. I, Part 1,345 FirstBookof Rhythms, The (Hughes), Supp. I, Part 1,345 First Book of the West Indies, The (Hughes), Supp. I, Part 1,345 First Century of New England Verse, The (Jantz), Supp. I, Part 1,123 "First Death in Nova Scotia" (Bishop), Supp. I, Part 1,73 "1st Letter on Georges" (Olson),Supp. II, Part 2,578 "First Love" (Welty), IV, 264

First Man, The (O'Neill), HI, 390 "First Meditation" (Roethke), III, 545-546 "First Passover" (Longfellow), II, 500501 First Poems (Merrill), Supp. in, Part 1,318-321,323 First Poems 2946-1954 (Kinnell), Supp. HI, Part 1,235,238-239 First Principles (Spencer), Supp. I, Part 1,368 "First Seven Years, The" (Malamud), Supp. I, Part 2,431 "First Snow in Alsace" (Wilbur), Supp. Ill, Part 2,545,546,559 "First Song" (Kinnell), Supp. Ill, Part 1,239 "First Things First" (Auden), Supp. II, Part 1,13 "First Thought, Best Thought" (Ginsberg), Supp. H, Part 1,327 "First Travels of Max" (Ransom), III, 490-491 "First Tycoon of Teen, The" (Wolfe), Supp. Ill, Part 2,572 "First Views of the Enemy" (Gates), Supp. II, Part 2,508 "First Wife,The" (Buck), Supp. II, Part 1,127 "First World War" (White), Supp. I, Part 2,665 Firth, John, Supp. I, Part 1,198 Fischer, Russell G., Supp. I, Part 1, 70 Fish, Robert L.,0,484 "Fish, The" (Moore), III, 195, 197,

209,211,213-214

"Fish and Shadow" (Pound), III, 466 "Fish in the unruffled lakes" (Auden), Supp. II, Part 1,8-9 Fisher, Alexander Metcalf, Supp. I, Part 2,582 Fisher, Dorothy Canfield, Supp. II, Part 1,117 Fisher, G.M.,H, 364 Fisher, Mary, Supp. I, Part 2,455 Fisher, Rudolph, Supp. I, Part 1,325 Fisher, William J., Ill, 407 "Fisherman,The" (Merwin), Supp. ffl, Part 1,346 "Fisherman and His Wife, The" (Welty), IV, 266 Fisk, James, 1,4,474 Fiske, John, Supp. I, Part 1,314, Part 2,493

FTT-FOCU / 684 "Fit Against the Country, A" (Wright), Supp. HI, Part 2,591-592,601 Fitch, Elizabeth, see Taylor, Mrs. Edward (Elizabeth Fitch) Fitch, James, IV, 147 Fitts, Dudley, 1,169,173,189; HI, 289; Supp. I, Part 1,342,345 FitzGerald, Edward, Supp. I, Part 2, 416; Supp. HI, Part 2,610 Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 1,107,117,118, 123, 188, 221, 263, 288, 289, 358, 367, 374-375, 382, 423, 476, 482, 487,495,509,511; H, 77-100,257, 263, 272, 283, 415, 416, 417-418, 420, 425, 427, 430, 431, 432, 433, 434, 436, 437, 438, 450, 458-459, 482,560; in, 2,26,35,45,36,37,40, 44,69,106,244,284,334,350-351, 453,454,471,551,552,572; IV, 27, 49,97,101,126,140,191,222,223, 287,297,427,471; Supp. I, Part 1, 1%, 197, Part 2,622;Supp.III,Part 2,409,411,585 Fitzgerald, Mrs. F. Scott (Zelda Sayre), 1,482; 0,77,79,82-85,88,90-91, 93,95 Fitzgerald, Robert, 1,27-28,47; H, 390; III, 338,348,359,360; IV, 142 Fitzgerald, Sally, HI, 338 "Fitzgerald: The Romance of Money" (Cowley), Supp. II, Part 1,143 "Five Awakenings of Edna Pontellier, The" (Wheeler), Supp. I, Part 1, 226 Five Black Writers: Essays on Wright, Ellison, Baldwin, Hughes and Le Roi Jones (Gibson), Supp.I, Part 1* 348 Five Came Back (West), IV, 287 Five 7V/ttperam£/i&(Kalstone),Supp. I, Part 1,97 Five Young American Poets, 1,170; n, 367 Fixer, 77te(Malamud),Supp.I,Part2, 428,435,445,446-448,450,451 Fixler, Michael, IV, 23 Flacius, Matthias, IV, 163 Flag of Our Union, The (publication), 11,397 Flagons and Apples (Jeffers), Supp. II, Part 2,413,414,417-418 Flaherty, Joe, m, 48 Flammarion, Camille, Supp. I, Part 1, 260 Flanagan, John T., HI, 598; Supp. I, Part 2,402,464,465,468,478

Flanagan, William, 1,95 "Flannery O'Connor: Poet to the Outcast" (Sister Rose Alice), HI, 348 Flappers and Philosophers (Fitzgerald), II, 88 Flasch, Mrs. Harold A., 1,95 Flaubert, Gustave, 1,66,123,130,272, 312, 314, 315, 477, 504, 506, 513, 514; n, 182,185,194,198-199,205, 209, 221, 230, 289, 311, 316, 319, 325,337,392,401,577,594; 111,1%, 207,251,315,461,467,511,564;IV, 4,29,31,37,40,134,285,428; Supp. HI, Part 2,411,412 Flavor of Man, The (Toomer), Supp. in, Part 2,487 Flavoring of New England, The (Brooks), 1,253,256 Flaxman, Josiah, Supp. I, Part 2,716 "HfcchedW'(Merrill),Supp.III,Part 1,328 Flecker, James Elroy, Supp. I, Part 1, 257 "Flee on Your Donkey" (Sexton), Supp. II, Part 2,683,685 Fleming, Thomas, n, 125 Flender, Harold, IV, 23 Fletcher, H.D.,n, 517,529 Fletcher, John, Supp. I, Part 2,422 Fletcher, John Gould, 1,243; D, 517, 529; III, 458; Supp. I, Part 1,263, 275,373 Fletcher, Marie, n, 221; Supp. I, Part 1,226 Fletcher, Phineas, Supp. I, Part 1,369 Fletcher, Valerie, see Eliot, Mrs. T. S. (Valerie Fletcher) Fletcher, Virginia, see Caldwell, Mrs. Erskine (Virginia Fletcher) Fleurs du Mai, Les (trans. Millay and Dillon), III, 141-142 "Flight" (Updike), IV, 218,222,224 "Flight, The" (Roethke), III, 537-538 Flight of the Rocket, The (Fitzgerald), D,89 Flint, F. Cudworth, IV, 142,258 Flint, F. S., n, 517; III, 459,464,465; Supp. I, Part 1,261,262 Flint, R. W., D, 390; III, 289 Floating Bear (periodical), Supp. II, Part 1,30 Floating Opera, The (Earth), 1,121, 122-126,127,129,130,131 "Floating Poem, Unnumbered, The" (Rich), Supp. I, Part 2,572-573

Flood (Warren), IV, 252,256-257 "Flood of Years,The" (Bryant), Supp. I, Part 1,159,170,171, Part 2,416 "Floral Decorations for Bananas" (Stevens), IV, 8 "Florida Sunday, A" (Lanier), Supp. I, Part 1,364,366 "Flossie Cabanis" (Masters), Supp. I, Part 2,461-462 Flournoy, Theodore, H, 365 "Flowchart" (Ashbery),Supp.ffl, Part 1,26 Flower Fables (Alcott), Supp. I, Part 1,33 "Flower Herding on Mount Monadnock" (Kinnell), Supp. Ill, Part 1, 242 Flower Herding on Mount Monadnock (Kinnell), Supp. in, Part 1, 235,239,241-244 "Flowering Death" (Ashbery), Supp. Ill, Part 1,22 "Flowering Dream,The" (McCullers), 11,591 "Flowering Judas" (Porter), III, 434, 435-436, 438, 441, 445, 446, 450451 Flowering Judas and Other Stories (Porter), III, 433,434 Flowering of New England, The (Brooks), IV, 171-172; Supp.I, Part 2,426 FloweringoftheRod (Doolittle), Supp. I, Part 1,272 Flowering Peach, The (Odets), Supp. II, Part 2,533,547,549-550 Flower-de-Luce (Longfellow), II, 490 "Flower-Fed Buffaloes, The" (Lindsay), Supp. I, Part 2,398 "Flower-gathering" (Frost), II, 153 "Flowers for Maijorie" (Welty), IV, 262 "Fly,The"(Kinnell),Supp.ffl,Partl, 249 "Fly, The" (Shapiro), Supp. II, Part 2, 705 Flye, Father James Harold, 1,25,26, 35-36,37,42,46; IV, 215 "Flying High" (Levertov), Supp. Ill, Part 1,284 "Flying Home" (Ellison), Supp. II, Part 1,235,238-239 "Flying Home" (Kinnell), Supp. Ill, Part 1,250 Focillon, Henri, IV, 90 Focus (Miller), III, 150-151,156

FOER-FORS / 685 Foerster, Norman, 1,222,263; 0,23; III, 432; Supp. I, Part 2,423,424, 426 "Fog" (Sandburg), III, 586 Fogle, Richard H.,D, 245 Folded Leaf, The (Maxwell), Supp. DI, Part 1,62 Folcy, Martha, 1,188; D, 587; III, 573 Folk of Southern Fiction, TTii(Skaggs), Supp. I, Part 1,226 Folks from Dixie (Dunbar), Supp. II, Part 1,211-212 Folkways (Sumner), III, 102 Follett, Wilson, 1,405,425 Following the Equator (Twain),D,434; IV, 208 Folsom, Charles, Supp. I, Part 1,156 Folsom, James K., Ill, 336 Fonda, Henry, Supp. I, Part 1,67 Fonda, Jane, III, 284 Foner, Eric, Supp. I, Part 2,523 Foner, Philip S.D, 484 Fontanne, Lynn, III, 397 Fool for Love (Shepard), Supp. Ill, Part 2,433,447,448 "Foot Fault" (pseudonym), seeThurber, James Foote, Horton, Supp. I, Part 1,281 Foote, Roxanna, see Beecher, Mrs. Lyman (Roxanna Foote) Foote, Samuel, Supp. I, Part 2,584 "Footing up a Total" (Lowell), II, 528 "Footnote to Howl" (Ginsberg),Supp. II, Part 1,316-317 Footprints (Levertov), Supp. Ill, Part 1,272,281 "Footsteps of Angels" (Longfellow), 0,496 "For a Dead Lady" (Robinson), III, 508,513,517 "For a Lamb" (Eberhart), 1,523,530, 531 "For a Marriage" (Bogan), Supp. Ill, Part 1,52 "For an Emigrant" (Jarrell), II, 371 "For Anna Akmatova" (Lowell), II, 544 "For Annie" (Poe), HI, 427 "For Dudley" (Wilbur), Supp. ffl, Part 2,558 "For Elizabeth Bishop" (Lowell), Supp. I, Part 1,97 "For Esm6—with Love and Squalor" (Salinger), III, 560 "For George Santayana" (Lowell), II, 547

"FOR HETTIE" (Baraka), Supp. II, Part 1,32 "FOR HETTIE IN HER FIFTH MONTH" (Baraka),Supp.n,Part 1,32,38 "For John, Who Begs Me not to Enquire Further" (Sexton), Supp. II, Part 2,676 "For Johnny Pole on the Forgotten Beach" (Sexton), Supp. D, Part 2, 675 "For Malamud It's Story" (Shenker), Supp. I, Part 2,453 "For Mr. Death Who Stands with His Door Open" (Sexton), Supp. II, Part 2,695 "For My Lover, Returning to His Wife" (Sexton), Supp. H, Part 2, 688 "ForOnce,Then,Something" (Frost), 0,156-157 "For Radicals" (Bourne), 1,221 For Spacious Skies (Buck), Supp. II, Part 1,131 "For the Ahkoond" (Bierce), 1,209 "For the Dedication of the New City Library, Boston" (Holmes), Supp. I, Part 1,308 "For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen" (Crane), I, 395-3%, 399, 402 "For the Meeting of the National Sanitary Association, 1860" (Holmes), Supp. I, Part 1,307 "For the New Railway Station in Rome" (Wilbur), Supp. Ill, Part 2, 554 "FOR THE REVOLUTIONARY OUTBURST BY BLACK PEOPLE" (Barak a), Supp. II, Part

IP 55 For the Time Being (Auden), Supp. D, Part 1,2,17,18 "For the Union Dead" (Lowell), II, 551 For the Union Dead (Lowell), II, 543, 550-551,554,555 "For the Word Is Flesh" (Kunitz), Supp. Ill, Part 1,262-264 "For Theodore Roethke: 1908-1963" (Lowell), II, 554 For Whom the Bell Tolls (Hemingway), II, 249,254-255,261; III, 18, 363 Forbes, Waldo Emerson, D, 22; IV, 189

Ford, Ford Madox, I, 288, 405, 409, 417,421,423; 0,58,144,198,221, 222,257,263,265,517,536;III,458, 464-465,470-471,472,476; IV, 27, 126,261; Supp. II, Parti, 107; Supp. Ill, Part 2,617 Ford, Henry, 1,295,480-481; HI, 292, 293; Supp. I, Part 1,21, Part 2,644; Supp. Ill, Part 2,612,613 Ford, John, Supp. I, Part 2,422; Supp. Ill, Part 2,619 Ford, Newell F., IV, 259 Ford, Paul Leicester, n, 124 Ford, Webster (pseudonym),*le Masters, Edgar Lee Ford, Worthington C, 1,24 "Ford Madox Ford" (Lowell), II, 547 Fordyce, David, n, 113 Foregone Conclusion, A (Howells), 0,278-279,282 "Foreign Affairs" (Kunitz), Supp. Ill, Part 1,265 "Foreigner, The" (Jewett),II, 409-410 Forensic and the Navigators (Shepard), Supp. Ill, Part 2,439 "Forest Hymn, A" (Bryant), Supp. I, Part 1,156,162,163,164,165,170 "Forest of the South, The" (Gordon), H, 199,201 Forest of the South, The (Gordon), II, 197 Forester's Letters (Paine), Supp. I, Part 2,508 "Forgotten Novel, A: Kate Chopin's The Awakening" (Eble), Supp. I, Part 1,226 ForgottenVillage, The (Steinbeck), IV, 51 Forgue, Guy J., Ill, 118,119,121 "Forlorn Hope of Sidney Lanier,The" (Leary), Supp. I, Part 1,373 "Form Is Emptiness" (Baraka), Supp. II, Part 1,51 "Formal Elegy" (Berryman), 1,170 "Formalist Criticism: Its Principles and Limits" (Burke), 1,282 Forms of Discovery (Winters), Supp. II, Part 2,812,813 Forrestal, James, 1,491; Supp. I, Part 2,489 Forrey, Carolyn, Supp. I, Part 1,226 "Forsaken Merman" (Arnold), Supp. I, Part 2,529 Forster, E. M., 1,292; IV, 201; Supp. III, Part 2,503 Forster, John, n, 315

FORT-FRED / 686 Fort, Paul, D, 518,528,529 Fortnightly Review (publication), III, 466 "Fortress, The" (Sexton), Supp. II, Part 2,682 Fortune, T. Thomas, Supp. II, Part 1, 159 Fortune (magazine), 1,25,26,30,3536,37,38; ffl, 2 XLl Poems (Cummings), 1,429,432, 440,443 42nd Parallel, The (Dos Passos), I, 482,484-485 45 Mercy Street (Sexton), Supp. II, Part 2,694,695,697 Foscolo,Ugo,H,543 Foss, Sam Walter, Supp. II, Part 1,197 "Fossils, The" (Kinnell),Supp.ni,Pait 1,244 Fossum, Robert H., IV, 118 Foster, Charles H., Supp. I, Part 2,601 Foster, David E., Supp. I, Part 1,70 Foster, Elizabeth, III, 95 Foster, Emily, D, 309 Foster, Frank Hugh, 1,565 Foster, Richard, III, 48,289; IV, 142 Foster, Ruel E., D, 76 Foster, Stephen, Supp. I, Part 1,100101, Part 2,699 Founding of Harvard College, The (Morison), Supp. I, Part 2,485 "Fountain, The" (Bryant), Supp. I, Part 1,157,165,166,168 Fountain, The (O'Neill), III, 391 Fountain and Other Poems, The (Bryant), Supp. I, Part 1,157 "Four Ages of Man,The" (Bradstreet), Supp. I, Part 1,111,115 "Four Beasts in One; the HomoCameleopard" (Poe), III, 425 Four Black Revolutionary Plays (Baraka), Supp. II, Part 1,45 "Four Brothers, The" (Sandburg), ID, 585 "Fourfor Sir John Davies" (Roethke), 111,540,541 4-H Club (Shepard), Supp. Ill, Part 2, 439 "Four Lakes' Days" (Eberhart), 1,525 "Four Meetings" (James), II, 327 Four Million, The (O. Henry), Supp. II, Part 1,394,408 "Four Monarchyes" (Bradstreet), Supp. I, Part 1,105,106,116 Four of a Kind (Marquand), III, 54,55

"Four Poems" (Bishop), Supp. I, Part 192 "Four Preludes on Playthings of the Wind" (Sandburg), III, 586 Four Quartets (Eliot), 1,570,576,58O582,585,587;II,537;III,539;Supp. II, Part 1,1 Four Saints in Three Acts (Stein), IV, 30,31,33,43,44-45 "Four Seasons" (Bradstreet),Supp.I, Part 1,112-113 Fourier, Charles, II, 342 Fourteen Hundred Thousand (Shepard), Supp. Ill, Part 2,439 "14 Men Stage Head Winter 1624/25" (Olson), Supp. II, Part 2,574 Fourteen Stories (Buck), Supp. II, Part 1,126 "Fourteenth Ward, The" (Miller), in, 175 "Fourth Down" (Marquand), III, 56 "Fourth of July in Maine" (Lowell), 0,535,552-553 Fowler, Henry Watson, Supp. I, Part 2,660 Fowlie, Wallace, III, 217 Fox, Dixon Ryan, 1,337 Fox, Ruth, Supp. I, Part 2,619 "Fox of Peapack,The" (White),Supp. I, Part 2,677 FoxofPeapack, The(White), Supp. I, Part 2,676,677-678 Fraenkel, Michael, III, 178,183,191 "Fragment" (Ashbery), Supp. Ill, Part 1,11,13,14,19,20 "Fragment" (Lowell), II, 516 "Fragment of a Meditation" (Tate), IV, 129 "Fragment of a Prologue" (Eliot), I, 579-580 "Fragment of an Agon" (Eliot ),I,57£580 "Fragment of New York, 1929" (Eberhart), 1,536-537 "Fragments" (Emerson), II, 19 Fragonard, Jean Honor6, III, 275; IV, 79 France, Anatole, IV, 444; Supp. I, Part 2,631 France and England in North America (Parkman), Supp. II, Part 2, 5%, 600-605,607,613-614 Franchere, Hoyt C, n, 131 Francis I, King, 1,12 Francis of Assisi, Saint, III, 543; IV,

69, 375, 410; Supp. I, Part 2, 394, 397,441,442,443 Franco, Francisco, n, 261 "Franconia" tales (Abbott), Supp. I, Part 1,38 Frank, Charles P., IV, 448 Frank, Gerold, D, 100 Frank, Jerome, Supp. I, Part 2,645 Frank, Joseph, fl, 587; IV, 259 Frank, M.Z.,IV, 23 Frank, Waldo, I, 106, 109, 117, 119, 120,229,236,245,259,400,403,404 Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper (periodical), Supp. I, Part 1,35 Frankel, Charles, III, 291 Frankel, Haskel, Supp. I, Part 2,448, 453 Frankenberg, Lloyd, 1,436,437,445, 446,450; HI, 194,217 Frankfurter, Felix, 1,489 Franklin, Benjamin, D, 6,8,92,101125,127,295,296,302,306; HI, 74, 90; IV, 73,193; Supp. I, Part 1,306, Part 2,411,503,504,506,507,510, 516,518,522,524,579,639 Franklin, H.Bruce, III, 97 Franklin, R.W., 1,473 Franklin, Sarah, n, 122 Franklin, Temple, 0,122 Franklin, William, II, 122; Supp. I, Part 2,504 "Franny" (Salinger), in, 564,565-566 Frannyand Zooey (Salinger), ID, 552, 564-567; IV, 216 Fraser,Joe,III,46 Frazee, E. S., Supp. I, Part 2,381 Frazee, Esther Catherine, see Lindsay, Mrs. Vachel Thomas (Esther Catherine Frazee) Frazer, Sir James G., 1,135; II, 204; III, 6-7; IV, 70; Supp. I, Part 1,18, Part 2,541 Frazier, David L., 0,294 "Freak Show, The" (Sexton), Supp. II, Part 2,695 Frederic, Harold, I, 409; H, 126-149, 175,276,289 Frederick the Great, D, 103; Supp. I, Part 2,433 "Frederick Douglass" (Dunbar), Supp. II, Part 1,197,199 "Frederick Douglass" (Hayden), Supp. II, Part 1,363 Fredrickson, George M., Supp. I, Part 2,589,601

FREE-PROS / 687 "Free" (O'Hara), III, 369 Free Air (Lewis), II, 441 "Free Fantasia: Tiger Flowers" (Hayden),Supp.II, Part 1,363,366 "Free Lance, The" (Mencken), III, 104,105 "Free Man" (Hughes), Supp. I, Part 1, 333 "Free Man's Worship, A" (Russell), Supp. I, Part 2,522 Freedman, William, Supp. I9 Part 2, 453 "Freedom" (White), Supp. I, Part 2, 659 Freedom Is the Right to Choose: An Inquiry into the Battle for the American Future (MacLeish), III, 3 "Freedom, New Hampshire" (Kinnell), Supp. HI, Part 1, 238, 239, 251 "Freedom's Plow" (Hughes), Supp. I, Part 1,346 Freeing of the Dust, The (Levertov), Supp. ffl, Part 1,281-282 Freeman, Douglas Southall, Supp. I, Part 2,486,493 Freeman, Joseph, n, 26; Supp. I, Part 2,610 Freeman, Lucy, IV, 401 Freeman, Mary E. Wilkins, D, 401 Freeman, The (publication), 1,245 Freeman *s Journal (periodical), Supp. II, Part 1,260,261 Fremont, John Charles, Supp. I, Part 2,486 Fremstad,Olive,I,319 French, Warren, III, 574; IV, 71 French Poets and Novelists (James), 11,336 French Ways and Their Meaning (Wharton),IV,319 Freneau, Eleanor Forman (Mrs. Philip Freneau), Supp. II, Part L, 266 Freneau, Philip M., I, 335; O, 295; Supp. I, Part 1,124,125,127,145; Supp. II, Part 1,65,253-277 Frenz, Horst, 1,95; IH, 408 Frescoes for Mr. Rockefeller's City (MacLeish), III, 14-15 Freud, Sigmund, 1,55,58, 59,66, 67, 135,241,242,244,247,248,283; D, 27,365,370,546-547; HI, 134,390, 400, 418, 488; IV, 7, 70, 138, 295; Supp. I,Part 1,13,43,253,254,259, 260,265,270,315, Part 2,493,527, 616,643,647,649

"Freud and Literature" (Trilling), Supp. m, Part 2,502-503 Freud: The Mind of the Moralist (Sontag and Rieff), Supp. Ill, Part 2,455 "Freud: Within and Beyond Culture" (Trilling), Supp. Ill, Part 2,508 Freudian Psychology and Veblen's Social Theory, The (Schneider), Supp. I, Part 2,650 Freudian Wish and Its Place in Ethics, 77i
"From an Old House in America" (Rich), Supp. I, Part 2, 551, 565567 From Bauhaus to Our House (Wolfe), Supp. Ill, Part 2,580,581,5g4 "From Bernard Malamud, with Discipline and Love" (Freedman), Supp. I, Part 2,453 "From Chicago" (Anderson), 1,108109 From Death to Morning (Wolfe), IV, 450,456,458 "From Feathers to Iron" (Kunitz), Supp. m, Part 1,261 "From Fifth Avenue Up" (Barnes), Supp. HI, Part 1,33,44 "From Grand Canyon to Burbank" (Miller), III, 186 From Here to Eternity (Jones), 1,477 From Jordan's Delight (Blackmur), Supp. II, Part 1,91 From Morn to MiVfriig/i/(Kaiser), 1,479 From Ritual to Romance (Weston), II, 540; HI, 12; Supp. I, Part 2,439 "From the Antigone" (Yeats), ID, 459 "From the Corpse Woodpiles, From the Ashes" (Hayden),Supp. n, Part 1,370 "From the Country to the City" (Bishop), Supp. I, Part 1,85,86 "From the Cupola" (Merrill), Supp. Ill, Part 1,324-325,331 "From the Dark Side of the Earth" (Oates), Supp. n, Part 2,510 "From the Diary of One Not Born" (Singer), IV, 9 "From the East,Light" (Carver), Supp. in, Part 1,138 From the First Nine: Poems 1946-1976 (Merrill), Supp. DI, Part 1,336 "From the Flats" (Lanier), Supp. I, Part 1,364 From the Heart of Europe (Matthiessen),III,310 From the Terrace (O'Hara), III, 362 Fromm, Erich, 1,58 "Front, A" (Jarrell), II, 374 Front, The (film), Supp. I, Part 1,295 Frost, Isabelle Moodie, 0,150,151 Frost, Jeanie, 11,151 Frost, John Eldridge, D, 413 Frost, Mrs. Robert (Elinor White), II, 151,152 Frost, Robert, 1,26,27,60,63,64,171, 229,303,311,326,418;II,23,55,58, 150-172, 276, 289, 388, 391, 471,

FROS-GARD / 688 Frost (cont.) 523,527,529,535; HI, 5, 23,67,269,271,272,275,287,453, 510,523,536,575,581,591;IV,140, 190,415; Supp. I, Part 180, 242, 263,264, Part 2,387,461,699,705; Supp. n, Part 1,4,19,26,103; Supp. m, Part I63,74-75,239,253, Part 2,546,592,593 Frost, William Prescott, H, 150-151 "Frost: A Dissenting Opinion" (Cowley), Supp. II, Part 1,143 Frothingham, Nathaniel, 1,3 Frothingham, Octavius B., IV, 173 "Frozen City, The" (Nemerov), III, 270 "Fruit Garden Path, The" (Lowell), 0,516 Fruit of the Tree, The (Wharton), IV, 314-315 "Fruit of Travel Long Ago" (Melville), 111,93 Fruman, Norman, III, 574 Fry, Christopher, Supp. I, Part 1,270 Fryckstedt, Olov W., 1,426; 0,294 Frye, Northrop, 1,473, 590; Supp. I, Part 2,539; Supp. II, Part 1,101 Fuchs, Daniel, IV, 95 Fugitive, The (magazine), HI, 485,491; IV, 121,122,127,236,238 Fugitive Group, The (Cowan), IV, 120 Fugitive Kind, The (Williams), IV, 381, 383 "Fugitive Slave Law,The" (Emerson),

n,i3

Fugitives, the (group), IV, 122, 124, 125,131,237,238 Fugitives, The: A Critical Account (Bradbury), IV, 130 Fugitive *s Return (Glaspell), Supp. Ill, Part 1,182-184 "Full Fathom Five" (Plath), Supp. I, Part 2,538 "FullMoon" (Hayden), Supp. II, Part 1,370 "Full Moon: New Guinea" (Shapiro), Supp. II, Part 2,707 Fuller, B. A. G., HI, 605 Fuller, Edmund, IV, 376 Fuller, J. W., Supp. I, Part 2,681 Fuller, Margaret, 1,261; 0,7,276; HI, 52; IV, 172; Supp. I, Part 2, 524; Supp. II, Part 1,279-306 Fuller, Thomas, H, 111,112 Fulton, A. R., IV, 376

Fulton, Robert, Supp. I, Part 2,519; Supp. H, Part 1,73 Fun (publication), 1,195 Function of Criticism, The (Winters), Supp. II, Part 2,812,813 "Fundamental Project of Technology, The" (Kinnell), Supp. Ill, Part 1, 253 "Fundamentalism" (Tate), IV, 125 Funke, Lewis, IV, 401 "Funnel" (Sexton), Supp. II, Part 2, 675 Furious Passage of James Baldwin, The (Eckman), Supp. I, Part 1,69 "Furious Seasons, The" (Carver), Supp. m, Part 1,137 Furious Seasons and Other Stories (Carver), Supp. Ill, Part 1, 142, 143,146 Furioso (magazine), III, 268 Furness, William, H, 22 "Furnished Room, The" (Hayden), Supp. II, Part 1,386-387,394,397, 399,406,408 Further Fables for Our Time (Thurber), Supp. I, Part 2,612 "Further in Summer than the Birds" (Dickinson), 1,471 Further Range, A (Frost), II, 155 "Fury of Aerial Bombardment, The" (Eberhart), 1,535-536 "Fury of Flowers and Worms, The" (Sexton), Supp. II, Part 2,694 "Fury of Rain Storms, The" (Sexton), Supp. II, Part 2,695 Fussell, Edwin, 1,120; III, 525 "Future, if Any, of Comedy, The" (Thurber), Supp. I, Part 2,620 "Future Life, The" (Bryant), Supp. I, Part 1,170 Future Punishment oftheWicked, The (Edwards), 1,546 Futurism, Supp. I, Part 1,257

Galantifere, Lewis, 1,119 Galbraith, John Kenneth, Supp. I, Part % 648,650 Gald6s, Benito P6rez, see P£rez Galdds,Benito Gale, Zona, Supp. I, Part 2,613 "Gale in April" (Jeffers), Supp. II, Part 2,423 Galignani, Giovanni Antonio, n, 315 Galileo, 1,480-481 Gallatin, Albert, 1,5 "Gallery of Real Creatures, A" (Thurber), Supp. I, Part 2,619 Galloway,DavidD.,I,165;IV,118,234 Gallup, Donald, 1,590; HI, 404,478; IV,47 Galsworthy, John, III, 70,153,382 "Gambler, the Nun and the Radio, The" (Hemingway), II, 250 "Gambler's Wife, The" (Dunbar), Supp. II, Part 1,196 "Game at Salzburg, A" (Jarrell), II, 384,389 "Game of Catch, A" (Wilbur), Supp. HI, Part 2,552 "Games Two" (Wilbur), Supp. EH, Part 2,550 Gandhi, Mahatma, III, 179,296-297; IV, 170,185,367 Gansevoort, Guert, HI, 94 Gansevoort, Peter, HI, 92 Gansevoort family, III, 75 Garbage Man, The (Dos Passos), I, 478,479,481,493 Garbo, Greta, Supp. I, Part 2,616 "Garden" (Marvell), IV, 161 "Garden by Moonlight, The" (Lowell), 0,524 "Garden Lodge,The" (Gather), 1,316, 317 Garden of Adonis, The (Gordon), II, 196,204-205,209 Gardenof Earthly Delights, A (Oates), Supp. II, Part 2,504,507-509 "Garden of Eden" (Hemingway), II, 259 Gable, Clark, HI, 161 "Gabriel" (Rich), Supp. I, Part 2,557 "Gardens of Zuni, The" (Merwin), Gabriel, Ralph H., Supp. I, Part 1,251 Supp. Ill, Part 1,351 Gabriel Conroy (Harte), Supp. II, Part Gardiner,HaroldC.,n,53,509;in,72 1,354 Gardner, Helen, 1,590 Gaer, Joseph, H, 484 Gardner, Isabella, IV, 127 Gardner, John, Supp. I, Part 1,193, Gagey, Edmond M., Ill, 407 195,1%, 198; Supp. Ill, Part 1,136, Gaines,Jim,IV,401 Galamain, Ivan, Supp. Ill, Part 2,624 142,146

GARI-GERT / 689 Garibaldi, Giuseppe, 1,4; n, 284 Garis, Robert, 1,143 Garland, Hamlin, 1,407; 0,276,289; III, 576; Supp. I, Part 1,217 Garner, Stanton, n, 148 Garnett, Edward, 1,405,409,417,426; 111,27 Garrett, George, Supp. I, Part 1,196, 198 Garrett, George P., HI, 243 Garrigue, Jean, IV, 424 Garrison, Fielding, III, 105 Garrison, William, Lloyd, Supp. I, Part 2, 524,588,683,685,686,687 "Garrison of Cape Ann, The" (Whittier), Supp. I, Part 2,691,694 "Garter Motif (White), Supp. I, Part 2,673 Garvey, Marcus, Supp. II, Part 1,175, 180 Gary Schools, The (publication), I, 232 Gas (Kaiser), 1,479 Gas-House McGinty (Farrell), II, 4142 Gaskell, Elizabeth, D, 192; Supp. I, Part 2,580 Gass,W.H.,IV,48 Gassner, John, III, 169,407; IV, 376, 381,401; Supp. I, Part 1,284,292 Gates, Elmer, 1,515-516 Gates, Lewis E., Ill, 315,330 Gates of Wrath, The; Rhymed Poems (Ginsberg), Supp. II, Part 1,311, 319 Gathering of Fugitives, A (Trilling), Supp. Ill, Part 2,506,512 Gaudier-Brzeska, Henri, III, 459,464, 465,477 Gauguin, Paul, 1,34; IV, 290 Gaunt, Marcia E., Supp. I, Part 1,198 Gauss, Christian, n, 82; IV, 427,439440,444 Gaustad, Edwin Scott, 1,565 Gautier, Th^ophile, n, 543;>III, 466, 467; Supp. I, Part 1,277 G ay, John, 0, 111; Supp. I, Part 2,523 Gay, Peter, 1,560,565 Gay, Sydney Howard, Supp. I, Part 1, 158 Gay, Walter, IV, 317 "Gay Chaps at the Bar" (Brooks), Supp. Ill, Part 1,74,75 Gayatri Prayer, The, 111,572 Gay le, Addison, Jr., Supp. I, Part 1,70

Gaylord, Winfield R., Ill, 579-580 "Gazebo" (Carver), Supp. Ill, Part 1, 138,144,145 Gazzo, Michael V., Ill, 155 Geddes, Virgil, HI, 407; Supp. I, Part 2,627 Gefvert, Constance J., IV, 166 "Gegenwart" (Goethe), Supp. II, Part 1,26 Gehman, Richard B., IV, 307 Gcismar.Maxwell, 1,119,333,426,520; II, 178,195,431,438,484; III, 71,72, 336;IV,71,118,213,472,473;Supp. I, Part 1,198 Gelb, Arthur, III, 407; IV, 380,401 Gelb, Philip, III, 169 Gelfant, Blanche H., 1,496; D, 27,41, 53 Gellhorn, Martha, see Hemingway, Mrs. Ernest (Martha Gellhorn) Gelpi, Albert, 1,473; Supp. I, Part 2, 552,554,560 Gelpi, Barbara, Supp. I, Part 2,560 "General Aims and Theories" (Crane), 1,389 General Died at Dawn, The (Odets), Supp. II, Part 2,546 "General Gage's Confession" (Freneau), Supp. D, Part 1,257 "General Gage's Soliloquy" (Freneau), Supp. n, Part 1,257 "General William Booth Enters into Heaven" (Lindsay), Supp. I, Part 2,374,382,384,385-388,389,392, 399 General William Booth Enters into Heaven and Other Poems (Lindsay), Supp. I, Part 2,379,381,382, 387-388,391 Genesis (biblical book), 1,279; II, 540 Genesis: Book One (Schwartz), Supp. II, Part 2,640,651-655 Genet, Jean, 1,71,82,83,84 "Genial Host, The" (McCarthy), II, 564 "Genie in the Bottle, The" (Wilbur), Supp. Ill, Part 2,542 "Genius," The (Dreiser), 1,497,501, 509-511,519 "Genius, The" (MacLeish), III, 19 "Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy, The" (Santayana), I, 222 Gentle Crofter, The (O. Henry), Supp. II, Part 1,410

"Gentle Lena,The" (Stein), IV, 37,40 Gentleman Caller, The (Williams), IV, 383 "Gentleman from Cracow, The" (Singer), IV, 9 "Gentleman of Bayou TSche, A" (Chopin), Supp. I, Part 1,211-212 "Gentleman of Shalott, The" (Bishop), Supp. I, Part 1,85,86 Gentleman's Agreement (Hobson), in, 151 Gentleman's Magazine, D, 114 "Genuine Man,The" (Emerson), n, 10 "Geode" (Frost), II, 161 Geographical History of America, The (Stein), IV, 31,45 Geography and Plays (Stein), IV, 2930,32,43,44 Geography of a Horse Dreamer (Shepard), Supp. Ill, Part 2,432 Geography III (Bishop), Supp. I, Part 1,72,73,76,82,93,94,95 George Bernard Shaw: His Plays (Mencken), III, 102 George II, King, 1,352,547 George III, King, D, 120; Supp. I, Part 1102, Part 2,404,504,506,507 George V, King, D, 337 George, Henry, II, 276; Supp. I, Part 2, 518 "George Thurston" (Bierce), 1,202 George's Mother (Crane), 1,408 Georgia Boy (Caldwell), 1,288,305306,308,309,310 "Georgia: Invisible Empire State" (Du Bois), Supp. II, Part 1,179 "Georgia Night" (Toomer), Supp. HI, Part 2,481 Georgia Scenes (Longstreet), II, 70, 313; Supp. I, Part 1,352 G£rando, Joseph Marie de, D, 10 "German Girls! The German Girls!, The" (MacLeish), III, 16 "German Refugee,The" (Malamud), Supp. I, Part 2,436,437 "Germany's Reichswehr" (Agee), 1,35 Germer, Rudolf, 1,590 Germinal (Zola), III, 318,322 "Gerontian" (Eliot), 1,569,574,577, 578,585,588; III, 9,435,436 Gerry, Elbridge, Supp. I, Part 2,486 Gershwin, Ira, Supp. I, Part 1,281 Gerstenberger, Donna, III, 289 Gerstner, John H., 1,565 Gertrude Stein (Sprigge), IV, 31

GERT-GLIM / 690 "Gift of the Magi, The" (O. Henry), Girl of the Golden West, The (Puccini), Supp. II, Part 1,394,406,408 111,139 "Gift Outright, The" (Frost), II, 152 "Girl on the Baggage Truck, The" Gtf£&i5(LeSage),II,290 (O'Hara), III, 371-372 Gilbert, Susan, see Dickinson, Mrs. "Girls at the Sphinx, The" (Farrell), William A. n,45 GUdedAge, The (Twain), III, 504; IV, Girodias, Maurice, III, 171 198 Gissing, George, n, 138,144 Gilder, Richard Watson, Supp. I, Part Gittings, Robert, 0,531 2,418 "Give Us Back Our Country" (MasGilder, Rosamond, IV, 376; Supp. I, ters), Supp. I, Part 2,472 Part 2,627 "Give Way, Ye Gates" (Roethke), Gildersleeve, Basil, Supp. I, Part 1, 111,536 369 "Give Your Heart to the Hawks" Giles, Barbara, D, 195 (Jeffers), Supp. II, Part 2,433 Giles Corey of the Salem Farms "Giving Blood" (Updike), IV, 226 (Longfellow), II, 505,506 Giving Good Weight (McPhee), Supp. Giles Goat-Boy (Barth), 1,121,122III, Part 1,307 123,129,130,134,135-138 Gladden, Washington, HI, 293; Supp. I, Part 1,5 Gilkes, Lillian, 1,426; 0,148 Gill, Brendan, Supp. I, Part 2,626,659, Gladstone, William Ewart, Supp. I, 660,681 Part 2,419 Gillette, Chester, 1,512 "Glance at German 'Kultur,' A" Gillikin,DureJ.,n,390 (Bourne), 1,228 Gillis,Jim,IV,196 "Glance at Lowell's Classical Reading, Gillis, Steve, IV, 195 A"(Pritchard),Supp.I,Part2,426 Oilman, Charlotte Perkins, Supp. I, "Glance from the Bridge, A" (Wilbur), Part 2,637 Supp. Ill, Part 2,551 Gilman, Daniel Coit, Supp. I, Part 1, Glanville, Brian, IV, 23 361,368,370 Glasgow, Gary, 0,173,182 Gilman, Richard, IV, 115, 118, 235; Glasgow,Ellen,I,333;II,ro-195; IV, 328 Supp. I, Part 1,198 Gilman, William H., 0,22; ffl, 96,97 Glaspell, Susan, Supp. Ill, Part 1,175Gilmore, Eddy, Supp. I, Part 2,618 191 Gilpin, Charles, III, 392 Glass Bees, The (lunger, trans. Bogan Gimbel, Peter, Supp. I, Part 2,525 and Mayer), Supp. HI, Part 1,63 "Glass Blower of Venice" (Malamud), Gibson, Donald B., I, 426; Supp. I, "Gimpel the Fool" (Singer), IV, 14 Part 1,348 Gimpel the Fool and Other Stories Supp. I, Part 2,450 (Singer), IV, 1,7-9,10,12 Glass Menagerie, The( Williams), 1,81; Gibson, William M., D, 293,294; IV, Gingrich, Arnold, III, 573 IV, 378,379,380,382,383,385,386, 212 "GIBSON" (Baraka),Supp.n,Part 1,54 Ginsberg, Allen, 1,183; Supp. II, Part 387, 388, 389, 390, 391, 392, 393\ 30, 32, 58, 307-333; Supp. Ill, 394,395,398 Gide, Andrd, 1,271, 290; D, 581; III, Part 1,91,96,98,100,222,226, Part Glatstein, Jacob, IV, 23 210; IV, 53,289; Supp. I, Part 1,51 2,541,627 Gideon Planish (Lewis), II, 455 "Gleaners, The" (Merwin), Supp. Ill, Giorgi, Amedeo, D, 365 Part 1,346 Gielgud,John,I,82 Giotto, Supp. I, Part 2,438 Gleanings in Europe (Cooper), 1,346 Gierow, Dr. Karl Ragnar, ID, 404 "Gift, The" (Doolittle), Supp. I, Part Giovanni, Nikki, Supp. I, Part 1, 66; Glebe (magazine), HI, 465 1,267 Supp. II, Part 1,54 Gleckner, Robert F., 1,427 Gift, The (Nabokov), III, 246, 255, Giovanni's Room (Baldwin), Supp. I, Glenn, Eunice, IV, 284 Part 1,51,52,55-56,57,60,63,67; Click, Nathan, III, 72 261-263 Supp. Ill, Part 1,125 "Gift of God, The" (Robinson), III, Glicklich, Martha, IV, 22 512,517,518-521,524 Giovannitti, Arturo, 1,476 Glicksberg, Charles I., I, 263; D, 53; Gift of the Black Folk, The: The Ne- Giraldi, Giovanni Battista,5ie Cinthio III, 48; IV, 117 groes in the Making of America "Girl from Red Lion, P. A., A" Glimpses of the Moon, The( Wharton), (Mencken), III, 111 (Du Bois), Supp. II, Part 1,179 0,189-190; IV, 322-323

Gertrude Stein: A Biography of Her Work (Sutherland), IV, 38 Gesell, Silvio, DI, 473 "GettingThcre" (Plath), Supp.I, Part 2,539,542 Gettysburg, Manila, Acoma (Masters), Supp.I, Part 2,471 "Ghazals: Homage to Ghalib" (Rich), Supp.I, Part 2,557 Ghost, The (Crane), 1,409,421 "Ghost of the Buffaloes, The" (Lindsay), Supp. I, Part 2,393 Ghost Writer, The (Roth), Supp. Ill, Part 2,420-421 "Ghostlier Demarcations, Keener Sounds" (Vendler), Supp. I, Part 2, 565 "Ghostly Father, I Confess" (McCarthy), II, 565-566 Ghostly Lover, 77ie(Hardwick),Supp. Ill, Part 1,194-196,208,209 Ghosts (Ibsen), III, 152 Ghosts (Wharton), IV, 316,327 "Giacometti" (Wilbur), Supp. HI, Part 2,551 Giacomo, Padre, D, 278-279 Giant Weapon, The (Winters), Supp. II, Part 2,810 "Giant Woman, The" (Oates), Supp. II, Part 2,523 Gibbon, Edward, I, 4, 378; IV, 126; Supp. I, Part 2,503; Supp. Ill, Part 2,629 Gibbons, Richard, Supp. I, Part 1,107 Gibbs, Wolcott, Supp. I, Part 2,604, 618

GLIM-GOLD / 691 "Glimpses of Vietnamese Life" (Levertov), Supp. HI, Part 1,282 Gloria Mundi (Frederic), II, 144-145 Glory of Hera, The (Gordon), II, 196197,198,199,217-220 Glory of the Conquered, The (Glaspell), Supp. m9 Part 1,176 Glover, William, IV, 401 Gluck, Christoph Willibald, n, 210, 211 "Glutton, The" (Shapiro), Supp. II, Part 2,705 GnddigesFraulein, The( Williams), IV, 382,395,398 Gnomes and Occasions (Nemerov), 111,269 Gnomologia (Fuller), II, 111 "Gnothis Seauton" (Emerson), II, 11, 18-19 "Go Down, Moses" (Faulkner), II, 71-72 Go Down, Moses (Hayden), Supp. II, Part 1,365 Go Down, Moses and Other Stories (Faulkner), II, 71 Go Tell It on the Mountain (Baldwin), Supp. I, Part 1, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53-54,55,56,57,59,61,63,64,67; Supp. II, Part 1,170 "Go to the Devil and Shake Yourself" (song), Supp. I, Part 2,580 "Go to the Shine That's on a Tree" (Eberhart),I,523 "Goal of Intellectual Men, The" (Eberhart), 1,529-530 Go-Between, The (Hartley), Supp. I, Part 1,293 God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater (Vonnegut), Supp. II, Part 2, 758, 767, 768-769,771,772 "God is a distant-stately Lover" (Dickinson), 1,471 God of His Fathers, The (London), II, 469 God of Vengeance (Asch), IV, 11 "God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen" (Hemingway), IV, 122 "God Save the Rights of Man" (Freneau), Supp. II, Part 1,268 God without Thunder (Ransom), III, 495-496,499 God's Country and My People (Morris), III, 238 God's Little Acre (Caldwell), I, 288,

289, 290, 297, 298-302, 305-306, 309,310 God's Man: A Novel in Wood Cuts (Ward), 1,31 "God's Peace in November" (Jeffers), Supp. II, Part 2,420 God's Trombones (Johnson), Supp. II, Part 1,201 God-Seeker, The (Lewis), II, 456 Godard, Jean-Luc, Supp. I, Part 2,558 Godbey (Masters), Supp. I, Part 2,472 Goddess Abides, The (Buck), Supp. II, Part 1,129,131-132 Godkin,E.I.,O,274 Gods Arrive, T/ie(Wharton),IV,326327 Gods Determinations touching his Elect: and the Elects Combat in their Conversion, and Coming up to God in Christ together with the Comfortable Effectsthereof(Taylor),IV, 155-160,165 Godwin, Parke, Supp. I, Part 1,173 Godwin, William, O, 304; III, 415; Supp. I, Part 1,126,146, Part 2,512, 513-514,522,709,719 Goebbels, Josef, III, 560 Goen,CC,I,560,564,565 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 1,181, 396,587-588; D, 5,6,320,344,488, 489,492,502,556;III,395,453,607, 612,616; IV, 50,64,173,326; Supp. I, Part 2,423,457; Supp. II, Part 1, 26; Supp. Ill, Part 1,63 Gogol, Nikolai, 1,296; IV, 1,4 "Going Home by Last Night" (Kinnell), Supp. Ill, Part 1,244 "Going Home in America" (Hardwick), Supp. HI, Part 1,205 Going South (Lardner and Buck), II, 427 Going to Meet the Man (Baldwin), Supp. I, Part 1,60,62-63 "Going to Meet the Man" (Baldwin), Supp. I, Part 1,62-63 "Going to Naples" (Welty), IV, 278 "Going to Shrewsbury" (Jewett), II, 393 "Goingto the Bakery" (Bishop), Supp. I, Part 1,93 Going-to-the-Stars (Lindsay), Supp. I, Part 2,398 Going-to-the-Sun (Lindsay), Supp. I, Part 2,397-398

Gold, Herbert, Supp. I, Part 1,198 Gold, Michael, D, 26; IV, 363, 364, 365,376; Supp. I, Part 1,331, Part 2, 609 Gold (O'Neill), III, 391 "Gold Bug, The" (Poe), III, 410,413, 419,420 Goldberg, Isaac, III, 121 Golde, Miss, (Mencken's Secretary), HI, 104,107 Golden, Harry, HI, 579,581,598 G0/ige(pub]ication),Supp.I,Part 1,361 GoldenApples, The(Welty),IV,261, 271-274,281,293 Golden Book of Springfield, The (Lindsay), Supp. I, Part 2,376,379, 395,396 Golden Bough, The (Frazer), II, 204, 549; III, 6-7; Supp. I, Part 1,18 GoldenBowl, The (James), H, 320,333, 335 Golden Boy (Odets), Supp. II, Part 2, 538,539,540-541,546,551 Golden Day, 77te(Mumford),Supp.II, Part 2,471,475,477,483,484,488489,493 Golden Era (newspaper), IV, 196; Supp. II, Part 1,338,339,341 "Golden Heifer, The" (Wylie), Supp. I, Part 2,707 "Golden Honeymoon, The" (Lardner), II, 429-430,431 "Golden Lads" (Marquand), III, 56 Golden Legend, The (Longfellow), II, 489,490,495,505,506,507 Golden Mean and Other Poems, The (Tate and Wills), IV, 122 Golden Whales of California and Other Rhymes in the American Language, r/u?(Lindsay),Supp.I,Part 2,394395,396 Goldhurst, William, D, 100 Golding, Arthur, HI, 467,468 Goldini, Carlo, II, 274 Goldman, Emma, III, 176,177; Supp. I, Part 2,524 Goldman, Sherli Evans, D, 584 Goldring, Douglas, III, 458 Goldschmidt, Eva M., Ill, 25 Goldsmith, Oliver, H, 273, 282, 299, 304,308,314,315,514;Supp.I,Part 1,310, Part 2,503,714,716 Goldwater, Barry, 1,376; III, 38

GOLD-GRAY / 692 Goldwyn, Samuel, Supp. I, Part 1,281 Golem, The (Leivick), IV, 6 Goll, Ivan, Supp. Ill, Part 1,235,243244, Part 2,621 Goncourt, Edmond de, H, 325,328 Goncourt, Jules de, D, 328 Goncourt brothers, HI, 315,317-318, 321 Cone with the Wind (Mitchell), II, 177 Gongora y Argote, Luis de, n, 552 Good, Roberta, III, 312 "Good Anna, The" (Stein), IV,37,40, 43 "Good Country People" (O'Connor), 111,343,350,351,352,358 Good Earth, The (Buck), Supp.1, Part 1,49; Supp. II, Part 1,115-117,118, 125,132 Good European, The (Blackmur), Supp. II, Part 1,91 Good Housekeeping (magazine), II, 174 Good Man Is Hard to Find, A (O'Connor), III, 339,343-345 "Good Man Is Hard to Find, A" (O'Connor), III, 339,344,353 Good Morning, America (Sandburg), 111,592-593 "Good Morning, Major" (Marquand), 111,56 Good Morning, Midnight (Rhys), Supp. Ill, Part 1,43 "Good News from New-England" (Johnson), Supp. I, Part 1,115 Good Might, Willie Lee, I'll See You in the Morning (Walker), Supp. DI, Part 2,520,531 "Good Word for Winter, A" (Lowell), Supp. I, Part 2,420 "Good-bye" (Emerson), II, 19 Goodbye, Columbus (Roth), Supp. m, Part 2,403-406 "Goodbye, Columbus" (Roth), Supp. m, Part 2,401,404,408-409,411 "Goodbye, My Brother" (Cheever), Supp. I, Part 1,175,177,193 "Good-Bye My Fancy" (Whitman), IV, 348 Goodbye to All That (Graves), 1,477 "Good-Bye to the Mezzogiorno" (Auden), Supp. II, Part 1,19 "Goodbye to the Poetry of Calcium" (Wright), Supp. Ill, Part 2,599 Goode, Gerald, III, 24 Goode, James, III, 169

Goodheart, Eugene, IV, 23 Goodman, Henry, 1,95 Goodman, Paul, I, 218, 261; III, 39; Supp. I, Part 2,524 Goodman, Philip, III, 105,108 Goodman, Randolph, IV, 400 Goodrich, Samuel G., Supp. I, Part 1, 38 Goodwin, K. L, III, 478 "Goose Fish, The" (Nemerov), III, 272,284 "Goose Pond" (Kunitz),Supp. m, Part 1,262 Gordan, John D., 1,426 Gordon, A. R., Ill, 199 Gordon, Andrew, HI, 48 Gordon, Caroline, O, 196-222, 536, 537;III,360,454,482;IV, 123,126127,139,142,282; Supp. II, Part 1, 139 Gordon, Charles G., 1,454 Gordon, Eugene, Supp. II, Part 1,170 Gordon, James Morris, D, 197 Gordon, Ruth, IV, 357 Gordon, William A., HI, 191,192 Gorey, Edward, IV, 430,436 Gorki, Maxim, 1,478; 0,49; III, 402; IV, 299; Supp. I, Part 1,5,51 Gorman, Herbert S., D, 509; Supp. I, Part 2,730 "Gospel of Beauty, The" (Lindsay), Supp. I, Part 2,380,382,384,385, 391,3% Gosse, Edmund, D, 538; IV, 350 Gossett, Louise Y., 1,311; III, 360; IV, 119 Gottlieb, Elaine, IV, 22,23 Gottschalkand the Grande Tarantelle (Brooks), Supp. Ill, Part 1,86 "Gottschalk and the Grande Tarantelle" (Brooks), Supp. Ill, Part 1,86-87 Gould, Edward Sherman, 1,346 Gould, Jay, 1,4 Gould, Jean, I, 95; Supp. I, Part 1, 275 Gourmont, R6my de, I, 270, 272; O, 528,529; III, 457,467-^68,477 Gowing, Clara, Supp. I, Part 1,46 Grabo, Norman S., IV, 165,166 Grady, Henry W., Supp. I, Part 1,370 Graham, Billy, 1,308 Graham, Phillip, Supp. I, Part 1,373 Graham, Sheilah, n, 94,100 Graham, Shirley, Supp. I, Part 1,51

Graham, Stephen, Supp. I, Part 2,397, 402 Graham, Tom (pseudonym), see Lewis, Sinclair Graham's Magazine,Ill, 412-413,420 Grainger, Percy, Supp. I, Part 2,386 Gramar (Lowth), II, 8 Grammarof Motives, A (Burke),!, 272, 275,276-278,283,284 Cranberry, Edwin, 1,288 Grand Design, The (Dos Passos), I, 489-490 "Grand Inquisitor" (Dostoevski), IV, 106 "Grande Malade, The" (Barnes), Supp. Ill, Part 1,36 Grandissimes (Cable), II, 291 "Grandpa and the Statue" (Miller), III, 147 "Grandparents" (Lowell), II, 550 Grange, Red, 0,416 Granger, Bruce, n, 124,125 Grant, Annette, Supp. I, Part 1,198 Grant, Madison, Supp. II, Part 1,170 Grant, Ulysses S., 1,4,15; 0,542; III, 506,584; IV, 348,446; Supp. I, Part 2,418 Grapes of Wrath, The (Steinbeck), I, 301; III, 589; IV, 51,53-55,59,63, 65,67,68,69 "Grapevine, The" (Ashbery), Supp. Ill, Part 1,4 "Grass" (Sandburg), III, 584 Grass Harp, The (Capote), Supp. Ill, Part 1,114-117,123 Grass Still Grows, The (Miller), HI, 146 "Grasse: The Olive Trees" (Wilbur), Supp. Ill, Part 2,550 Grattan, C Hartley, 1,213; H, 53,341 "Grave,A"(Moore),m,195,202,208, 213 "Grave Piece" (Eberhart), 1,533 Grave, The (Blair), Supp. I, Part 1,150 "Grave, The" (Porter), III, 433,443, 445-446 "Grave, The" (Winters), Supp. 11, Part 2,795,796 "Graven Image" (O'Hara), III, 320 Graves, Billy, Supp. I, Part 2,607 Graves, Rean, Supp. I, Part 1,326 Graves, Robert, 1,437,450,477,523; II, 171; IV, 448; Supp. I, Part 2,541 Gravity's Rainbow (Pynchon), Supp. II, Part 2, 617, 618-619, 621-625, 627,630,633-636

GRAY-GRUN / 693 Gray, Cecil, Supp. I, Part 1,258 Gray, James, III, 72,207; Supp. I, Part 4410 Gray, Thomas, 1,68; IV, 114; Supp. I, Part 1,150, Part 2,422,716 Gray, Thomas A., Supp. I, Part 2,710, 730 "Gray Heron, The" (Kinnell), Supp. III, Part 1,250 Greasley, Philip, Supp. I, Part 2,478 "Great Adventure of Max Breuck, The" (Lowell), II, 522 Great American Novel, The (Roth), Supp. Ill, Part 2,414-416 Great Battles of the World (Crane), I, 415 Great Christian Doctrine of Original Sin Defended, The... (Edwards),!, 549,557,559 Great Circle (Aiken), 1,53,55,57 Great Days, The (Dos Passos), 1,491 Great Digest (trans. Pound), III, 472 Great Expectations (Dickens\lll,24T, Supp. I, Part 1,35 "Great Figure, The" (Williams), IV, 414 Great Gatsbyt The (Fitzgerald), 1,107, 375,514;!!, 77,79,83,84,85,87,9193,94,96,98; III, 244,260,372,572; IV, 124,297; Supp. II, Part 2,626; Supp. Ill, Part 2,585 Great God Brown, The (O'Neill), III, 165,391,394-395 Great Goodness of Life: A Coon Show (Baraka), Supp. II, Part 1,47 Great Inclination, The (Wharton), IV, 310 "Great Lawsuit, The" (Fuller), Supp. II, Part 1,292 "Great Men and Their Environment" (James), II, 347 "Great Mississippi Bubble, The" (Irving), II, 314 Great Valley, The (Masters), Supp. I, Part 2,465 "Greater Torment,The" (Blackmur), Supp. II, Part 1,92 Grebstein, Sheldon Norman, n, 460; 111,384 "Greek Boy, The" (Bryant), Supp. I, Part 1,168 "Greek Partisan, The" (Bryant), Supp. I, Part 1,168 Greeley, Horace, 1,119; 0,7; IV, 197, 286-287

Green, A. Wigfall, 11,76 Green, Charles B., n, 171 Green, David Bonnell, n, 413 Green, Henry, IV, 279; Supp. Ill, Part 1,3 Green, Martin, III, 48; Supp. I, Part 1, 299 "Green Automobile,The" (Ginsberg), Supp. II, Part 1,322 Green Centuries (Gordon), II, 196, 197-207,209 "GreenDoor,The"(O.Henry),Supp. II, Part 1,395 Green Hills of Africa (Hemingway), 0,253 Green Memories (Mumford), Supp. II, Part 2,474,475,479,480-481 Green Pastures, The (Connelly), Supp. II, Part 1,223 "Green River" (Bryant), Supp. I, Part 1,155,164 Green Wall, The (Wright), Supp. in, Part 2,591,593,595 "Green Ways" (Kunitz), Supp. Ill, Part 1,265 Green with Beasts (Merwin), Supp. III, Part 1,340,344-346 Greenberg, Eliezer, Supp. I, Part 2, 432 Greenberg, Samuel, 1,393 Greene, Beatrice, Supp. I, Part 1,198 Greene, David, 1,458 Greene, E.J.H., 1,590 Greene, Elizabeth Shaw, see Morison, Mrs. Samuel Eliot (Elizabeth Shaw Greene) Greene, George, III, 72 Greene, Graham, 1,480; II, 62,320; III, 57,556; Supp. I, Part 1,280 Greene, Nathanael, Supp. I, Part 2, 508 Greene, Richard Tobias, III, 76 "Greene-ing of the Portables, The" (Cowley), Supp. II, Part 1,140 Greenfeld, Josh, III, 169,364 Greenfield, Stanley B., 1,426 Greenlaw, Edwin A., IV, 453 "Greenleaf'(O'Connor),in,350,351 Greenman, Walter F., 1,217,222 Greenslet, Ferris, 1,19; n, 533 Greer, Germaine, III, 48 Gregory, Alyse, 1,119,221,226,227,231 Gregory, Horace, 1,47; II, 53,512,533; III, 144,217; IV, 95; Supp. Ill, Part 2,614,615

Gregory, Lady, III, 458 Grenander, M. £., 1,213 Gretta (Caldwell), 1,301,302 Greuze, Jean Baptiste, Supp. I, Part 2, 714 Griffin, Alice, III, 169 Griffin, Bartholomew, Supp. I, Part 1, 369 Griffin, John, III, 169 Griffith, Clark, 1,473 Griffith, David Wark, 1,31,481-482 Griffiths, Clyde, 1,511 Grile, Dod (pseudonym), see Bierce, Ambrose Grimm, Herman, n, 17,22 Grimm brothers, D, 378; III, 101,491, 492; IV, 266; Supp. I, Part 2,596, 622 Gris, Juan, 1,442 Griscom, Joan, 0,221 Griswold,RufusWilmot,m,409,429, 431 Gronlund, Laurence, n, 276 Grosart, Alexander B., 1,564 Gross, A. H., IV, 21 Gross, Barry, Supp. I, Part 1,70 Gross, Harvey, III, 550 Gross, John J., Ill, 72 Gross, Seymour I., D, 245; IV, 284 Gross, Theodore L., 1,166; Supp. I, Part 1,70 Grossman, James, 1,47,357 Grosz, George, HI, 172; IV, 438 "Groundhog, The" (Eberhart), 1,523, 530-532,533 Group, The (McCarthy), II, 570,574578 "Group of Two, A" (Jarrell), II, 368 Group Theatre, Supp. II, Part 2,529530,543,547-548 Group Theatre of London, Supp. II, Part 1,10 Groves of Academe, The (McCarthy), n,56&-571 "Growing Season, The" (Caldwell), I, 309 "Growth" (Lowell), II, 554 Growth of the American Republic, The (Morison and Commager), Supp. I, Part 2,484 Gruen,John,IV,401 Gruen, Joseph, III, 169 Gruenberg, Louis, III, 392 Grumbach, Doris, D, 560,584 Grunwald, Henry Anatole, III, 574

GUAR-HAND / 694 "H.D.: A Preliminary Checklist" (Bryher and Roblyer), Supp. I, Part 1,275 "H.D.'s 'Hermetic Definition* " (Quinn), Supp. I, Part 1,275 H. L. Mencken, a Portrait from Memory (Angoff), III, 107 "H. L. Mencken Meets a Poet in the West Side Y.M.C.A." (White), Supp. I, Part 2,677 H. L. Mencken: The American Scene (Cairns), III, 119 H. M. Pulham, Esquire (Marquand), H, 482-483; III, 58,59,65,68-69 Haardt, Sara, see Mencken, Mrs. H. L. (SaraHaardt) Haas, Robert B., IV, 47 Habakkuk (Hebrew prophet and biblical book), III, 200,347 "Habit" (James), II, 351 Hackett, Francis, 1,120; Supp. I, Part 2,626 Haeckel, Ernst Heinrich, D, 480 Hagedorn, Hermann, III, 525 Hagemann, E. R., 1,425 Hagen, Beulah, Supp. I, Part 2,679 Hager, Philip E., Ill, 574 Haggard, Rider, III, 189 Hagopian, John V., Supp. I, Part 1,70 Hagoromo (play), III, 466 Haigh-Wood, Vivienne Haigh, see Eliot, Mrs. T. S. (Vivienne Haigh Haigh-Wood) Haines, George, IV, 1,444,450; IV, 48 Haines, Paul, D, 148 "Hair, The" (Carver), Supp. Ill, Part 1,137 "Haircut" (Lardner), II, 430,436 //iiiry>lpe,r/ie(O'Neill),III,391,392, 393 "Haita the Shepherd" (Bierce), 1,203 Haldeman, Anna, Supp. I, Part 1,2 Hale, Edward Everett, Supp.I, Part 2, 425,584 Hale, John Parker, Supp. I, Part 2, 685 Hale, Nathan G., Jr., 0,365 Hale family, III, 52 Haley, Alex, Supp. I, Part 1,47,66 "Half a Century Gone" (Lowell), II, 554 Half-Century of Conflict, A (ParkH.D.,see Doolittle, Hilda man), Supp. II, Part 2,600,607,610 "H.D.: A Note on Her Critical Repu- "Half Deity" (Moore), III, 210, 214, tation" (Bryher), Supp. I, Part 1, 215 275 "Halfway" (Rich), Supp. I, Part 2,553

Guard of Honor (Cozzens), I, 370372,375,376-377,378,379 Guardian Angel, The (Holmes), Supp. I, Part 1,315-316 Gu6rin, Maurice de, 1,241 "Guerrilla Handbook, A" (Baraka), Supp. II, Part 1,36 Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (film), Supp. I, Part 1,67 "GuestsofMrs.Timms,The"(Jewett), 11,408 Guide in the Wilderness, A (Cooper), 1,337 Guide to Kulchur (Pound), III, 475 Guide to the Ruins (Nemerov), HI, 269, 270-271,272 Guillen, Nicolas, Supp. I, Part 1,345 Guillevic,Eugene,Supp.m,Part 1,283 "Guilty Man, The" (Kunitz), Supp. HI, Part 1,263 Guimond, James, IV, 424 Gulistan (Saadi), II, 19 Gullason, Thomas A., 1,425,426 Gullible's Travels (Lardner), II, 426, 427 Gulliver's Travels (Swift), 1,209,348, 366; n, 301; Supp. I, Part 2, 656 "Gulls" (Hayden), Supp. II, Part 1, 367 "Gulls, The" (Nemerov), III, 272 G underode: A Translation from the German (Fuller), Supp. II, Part 1, 293 Gungnck, Arnold, 0,99 "Guns as Keys; and the Great Gate Swings" (Lowell), II, 524 Gunter, Richard, 1,450 Gurko, Leo, III, 62,72,384 Gurwitsch, Aron, D, 366 Gussow,Mel,I,95;IV,401 Gutenberg, Johann, Supp. I, Part 2, 392 Guthrie, Ramon, tt, 460 Guthrie, Tyrone, IV, 376 Gutman, Herbert, Supp. I, Part 1,47 Guttmann, Allen, 1,166 Guy Domville (James), II, 331 Gwynn, Frederick I., 0,75; III, 574 Gypsy Ballads (trans. Hughes), Supp. I, Part 1,345

Haiiburton, Thomas Chandler, II, 301; IV, 193; Supp. I, Part 2,411 Halifax, Lord, O, 111 Hall, Donald, 1,542,567; III, 194,217; Supp. I, Part 2,681,706 Hall,James,I,542;II,313;Supp.I,Part ^584,585 Hall, Max, H, 125 Halleck, Fitz-Greene, Supp. I, Part 1, 156,158 Haller, Robert S.,FV, 95 Hallock, Rev. Moses, Supp. I, Part 1, 153 Hallwas, John £., Supp. I, Part 2,402, 454,478 Hamburger, Philip, III, 72 Hamerik, Asger, Supp. I, Part 1,356 Hamilton, Alexander, 1,485; Supp. I, Part 2,456,483,509 Hamilton, Alice, IV, 235; Supp. I, Part 1,5 Hamilton, Hamish, Supp. I, Part 2,617 Hamilton, Kenneth, 1,95; HI, 574; IV, 235 Hamilton, Lady Emma, D, 524 Hamilton, Walton Supp. I, Part 2,632 "Hamien Brook" (Wilbur), Supp. in, Part 2,564 "Hamlet" (Laforgue), 1,573; III, 11 //am/e/(MillerandFraenkel),ni, 178, 183 Hamlet (Shakespeare), 1,53,183,205, 377,586-587; D, 158,531; III, 7,11, 12,183; IV, 116,131,227; Supp. I, Part 1,369, Part 2,422,457,471 Hamlet, The (Faulkner), II, 69-71,73, 74; IV, 131 "Hamlet and His Problems" (Eliot), I, 586-587 Hamlet of A. MacLeish, The (MacLeish),III,ll-12,14,15,18 Hammar, George, III, 312 Hammett, Dashiell, IV, 286; Supp. I, Part 1, 286,289,291,292,293,294, 295; Supp. Ill, Part 1,91 Hampshire Ga&tffe,Supp. I, Part 1,152 Hampson, Alfred Leete, 1,472 "Hamrick's Polar Bear" (Caldwell), I, 309-310 Hams, William T., Supp. I, Part 1,46 Hamsun, Knut, IV, 22 Hanau, Stella, III, 406 Hancock, John, Supp. I, Part 2,524 Handcarved Coffins: A Nonfiction Account of an American Crime (Capote), Supp. Ill, Part 1,131

HAND-HARV / 695 "Hard Times in Elfland, The" (Lanier), Supp. I, Part 1,365 "Hardcastle Crags" (Plath), Supp. I, Part 2,537 Hardie, Kier, Supp. I, Part 1,5 Harding, Walter, D, 23; IV, 177,178, 188,189 Harding, Warren G., I, 486; D, 253, 433; Supp. I, Part 1,24 Hardwick, Elizabeth, Supp. I, Part 1, 1%, 198; Supp. HI, Part 1,193-215. Seealso Lowell, Mrs. Robert (Elizabeth Hardwick) Hardy, Barbara, Supp. I, Part 2,527, 548 Hardy, John E., IV, 284 Hardy, Oliver, Supp. I, Part 2,607 Hardy, Ren6, Supp. Ill, Part 1,235 Hardy, Thomas, I, 59, 70, 103, 292, 317, 377; II, 181, 184-185, 196, 191-192, 271, 275, 372, 523, 542; HI, 32,453,485,502,508,524; IV, 83,135,136; Supp. I, Part 1,217, Part 2,429,512; Supp. II, Part 1,4, 26 Harland, Gordon, III, 312-313 "Harlem" (Hughes), Supp. I, Part 1, 340 Harlem (publication), Supp. I, Part 1, 328 Harlem Renaissance, Supp. II, Part 2, 739 "Harlequin of Dreams,The" (Lanier), Supp. I, Part 1,365 Harlow,Jean,IV,256 Harmer, J. B., Supp. I, Part 1,275 Harmonium (Stevens), m, 196; IV,76, 77,78,82,87,89,92 m, 15-16 "Harmony of the Gospels" (Taylor), Happy Marriage and Other Poems, IV, 149 The (MacLeish), HI, 4 Haroutunian, Joseph, 1,565,566 "Hapworth 16,1924" (Salinger), III, Harper, Frances E. Watkins, Supp. II, 552,571-572 Part 1,201-202 Harbert, Earl N.,0,125 Harper, Gordon Lloyd, 1,166 Harcourt,Alfred,II,191,451-452;III, Harper, Howard M., Jr., 1,166; III, 48; 587 IV, 235; Supp. I, Part 1,70 Harcourt, T. A., 1,196 Harper, William Rainey, Supp. I, Part Hard Candy, a Book of Stories (Wil2,631 liams), IV, 383 Harper's (magazine), I, 409; II, 271, Hard Facts (Baraka), Supp. II, Part 1, 275,276,285,401,406; III, 59,89, 54,55,58 90,91,292;Supp.I,Part 2,530,654, "Hard Kind of Courage, The" 655 (Baldwin), Supp. I, Part 1,52 Harper's Young People (magazine), Hard Times (Dickens), Supp. I, Part 2, Supp. I, Part 1,211 675 "Harriet" (Lowell), II, 554

Handel, Georg Friedrich, HI, 210; IV, 369 "Handfuls" (Sandburg), III, 584 "Hands" (Anderson), 1,106,107 Handy Guidefor Beggars, A (Lindsay), Supp. I, Part 2,376-378,380,382, 399 "Hangman, The" (Sexton), Supp. II, Part 2,680,691 Hankiss,Elem6r,I,95 Hanks, Lucy, HI, 587 Hanks, Nancy, see Lincoln, Mrs. Thomas (Nancy Hanks) Hanna, Mark, Supp. I, Part 2,395 "Hannah Armstrong" (Masters), Supp. I, Part 2,461 Hanneman, Audre, 0,259,270 Hanoi (McCarthy), II, 579 Hansel and Crete/, Supp. I, Part 2,597 Hansen, Harry, 1,119; IV, 366,376 "Happenings: An Art of Radical Juxtaposition" (Sontag), Supp. Ill, Part 2,456 Happersberger, Lucien, Supp. I, Part 151 "Happiest I've Been,The" (Updike), IV, 219 "Happiness" (Sandburg), 10,582-583 Happy Birthday, Wanda June (Vonnegut), Supp. II, Part 2,759, 776-777 Happy Days, 1880—1892 (Mencken), m, 100, 111, 120 "Happy Failure, The" (Melville), III, 90 "Happy Journey to Trenton and Camden, The (Wilder), IV, 366 "Happy Marriage, The" (MacLeish),

Harriet BeecherStowe (Adams), Supp. I, Part 2,601 Harrigan, Edward, 0,276; III, 14 Harrington, Michael, 1,306 Harris, George, D, 70 Harris, Joel Chandler, III, 338; Supp. I, Part 1,352; Supp. II, Part 1,192, 201 Harris, Julie, D, 587,601 Harris, Mark, Supp. I, Part 2,402 Harris, Wendell V., 1,95 Harrison, James A., Ill, 431 Harrison, Oliver (pseudonym), see Smith, Harrison "Harry's Death" (Carver), Supp. ID, Part 1,146 "Harsh Judgment, The" (Kunitz), Supp. Ill, Part 1,264 Hart, Albert Bushnell, Supp. I, Part 2, 479,480,481 Hart, Bernard, I, 241, 242, 248-250, 256 Hart, Henry, 1,286 Hart, J., 1,450 Hart, James D., HI, 335 Hart, Jane, HI, 360 Hart, Lorenz, III, 361 "Hart Crane" (Tate), 1,381 Harte, Anna Griswold, Supp. II, Part 1,341 Harte, Bret, 1,193,195,203; II, 289; IV, 196; Supp. II, Part 1,335-359,399 Harte, Walter Blackburn, 1,199 Hartford Courant (newspaper), II, 405 Hartford Wits, Supp. II, Part 1,65,69, 268 Hartley, David, III, 77 Hartley, L. P., Supp. I, Part 1,293 Hartley, Lodowick, HI, 455 Hartley, Lois, Supp. I, Part 2,459,464465,478 Hartley, Marsden, IV, 409,413 Hartman, Carl, D, 222 Harum, David, n, 102 "Harvard" (Lowell), II, 554 Harvard Advocate, I, 475, 567, 569; IV, 76 Harvard College in the Seventeenth Century (Morison), Supp. I, Part 2, 485 Harvard Guide to American History, Supp. I, Part 2,493 "Harvest Song" (Toomer), Supp. Ill, Part 2,483 Harvey, Robert D., Ill, 289

HASC-HEDG / 696 Hascom, Leslie, HI, 169 Hasley, Louis, Supp. I, Part 2,627,681 Hassan, Ihab, 1,166; H, 608; III, 48, 192,243;IV,99-100,115,119; Supp. I, Parti, 198 Hasty-Pudding, The (Barlow), Supp. n, Part 1,74,77-40 Hatfield, James T.,fl, 509 Hatfield,Ruth,n,53 Hatful of Rain, A (Gazzo), III, 155 Hathorne, Captain Nathaniel, D, 223 Hathorne, Elizabeth Manning, II, 223, 224 Hathorne family, D, 223,225 "Haunted Landscape'* (Ashbery), Supp. Ill, Part 1,22 "Haunted Mind, The" (Hawthorne), n, 230-231 "HauntedOak,The"(Dunbar),Supp. II, Part 1,207,208 "Haunted Palace,The" (Poe),ffl,421 "Haunted Valley,The" (Bierce), 1,200 Hauptmann, Gerhart, III, 472 Haven's End (Marquand), III, 55,56, 63,68 Havighurst, Walter, Supp. I, Part 2, 478 "Having Lost My Sons, I Confront the Wreckage of the Moon: Christmas, 1960" (Wright), Supp. Ill, Part 2, 600 "Having Snow" (Schwartz), Supp. II, Part 2,652 Hawkin the Rain, The (Hughes), Supp. I, Part 2,537,540 Hawk Moon (Shepard), Supp. ID, Part 2,445 Hawke, David Freeman, Supp. I, Part 2,511,516 Hawkes, John, 1,113; HI, 360; Supp. m, Part 1,2 Hawkins, William, D, 587 Hawk'sWeU, The( Yeats), HI, 459-460 Hawley, Joseph, 1,546 Hawley, Michael, Supp. I, Part 2,627 Hawthorne (James), II, 372-378 "Hawthorne" (Lowell), II, 550 "Hawthorne in Solitude" (Cowley), Supp. II, Part 1,143 Hawthorne, Julian, D, 225,245; Supp. I, Part 1,38 Hawthorne, Manning, D, 509 Hawthorne, Mrs. Nathaniel (Sophia Peabody), II, 224,244,245; III, 75, 86

Hawthorne,Nathaniel, 1,106,204,211, 340,355,363,384,413,458,561-562; H, 7,8,40,60,63,74,89,127-128, 138,142,198,22^-246,255,259,264, 267,272,274,277,281,282,295,307, 309,311,313,322,324,326,340,402, 408,446,501,545;III,51,81-82,83, 84,85,87,88,91,92,113,316,359, 412,415,421,438,453,454,507,565, 572;IV,2,4,167,172,179,194,333, 345,453;Supp.I, Part 1,38,147,188, 197,317,372, Part 2,420,421,545, 579,580,582, 587, 595, 5%; Supp. Ill, Part 2,501 Hawthorne, Rose, H, 225 Hawthorne, Una, 0,225 Hay, John, 1,1,10,12,14-15; Supp. I, Part 1,352 Hay, Mrs. John, 1,14 Hayakawa, S. I., 1,448; Supp. I, Part 1, 315 Hayashi,Tetsumaro, III, 168 Hayden, Robert, Supp. II, Part 1,361383 Haydn, Hiram, IV, 100,358 Haydock,J.,n,484 Hayes, Rutherford B., Supp. I, Part 2, 419 Hayford, Harrison, III, 95, % Hayman, Ronald, III, 169 Hayne, Paul Hamilton, Supp. I, Part 1, 352,354,355,360,372 Haywood,Bill,I,483 Hazard, Grace, H, 530 Hazardof New Fortunes, A (Howells), 0,275,276,286-287,290 Hazel, Robert, 1,311 Hazen, General W. B., 1,192,193 Hazlitt, William, 1,58,378; 0,315 Hazo, Samuel, 1,386,404 "He" (Porter), III, 434,435 "He Came Also Still" (Zukofsky), Supp. Ill, Part 2,612 He Who Gets Slapped (Andreyev), II, 425 "Head-Hunter, The" (O. Henry), Supp. II, Part 1,403 Headings, Philip R., 1,590 "Headless Hawk, The" (Capote), Supp. Ill, Part 1,124 Headlines (Williams), IV, 381 Headlong Halt (Peacock),Supp.l.Part 1,307 Headmaster, 77u>(McPhee),Supp.III, Part 1,291,294,298

Headsman, The (Cooper), 1,345-346 Heal, Edith, IV, 423 Healy, Tim, 11,129,137 "Hear the Nightingale Sing" (Gordon), II, 200 Hearn, Lafcadio, 1,211; 0,311 Hearst, William Randolph, 1,198,207, 208; IV, 298 Hearst's International (publication), II, 87 "Heart and the Lyre, The" (Bogan), Supp. Ill, Part 1,65 Heart for the Gods of Mexico, A (Aiken),I,54 Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, The(McC\Alere), II, 586,588-593,604,605 "Heart of Darkness" (Conrad), 1,575, 578; n, 595 Heart of Happy Hollow, The (Dunbar), Supp. II, Part 1,214 Heartofthe West(O. Henry), Supp. II, Part 1,410 Heart to Artemis, 77ie(Bryher),Supp. I, Part 1,259,275 Heartland, The: Ohio, Indiana, Illinois (Havighurst), Supp. I, Part 2, 478 Heartman, Charles F., HI, 431 "Hearts and Heads" (Ransom), Supp. I, Part 1,373 "Hearts' and Flowers'" (MacLeish),

m,8

Heart's Needle (Snodgrass), 1,400 Heart-Shape in the Dust (Hayden), Supp. II, Part L, 365,366 Heathcote, Anne, see De Lancey, Mrs. James "Heathen Chinee, The" (Harte), Supp. II, Part 1,350-351,352 Heathen Days, 1890-1936 (Mencken), 01,100,111 Heavenly Conversation, The (Mather), Supp. II, Part 2,460 "Heavy Bear Who Goes with Me,The" (Schwartz), Supp. II, Part 2,646 Hecht, Anthony, IV, 138,143; Supp. III, Part 2,541,561 Hecht, Ben, 1,103; II, 42; Supp. I, Part 2,646 Hecht, S. Theodore, Supp. Ill, Part 2, 614 Heckewelder, John, n, 503 "Hedge Island" (Lowell), II, 524 Hedges, William, Supp. I, Part 1,148 Hedges, William I., 0,311-312,318

HEDY-HERM / 697 Hedylus (Doolittle), Supp. I, Part 1, 259,270 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, I, 265; 0,358; III, 262,308-309,480, 481,487,607;IV,86,333,453;Supp. I, Part 2,633,635,640,645 "HEGEL" (Baraka), Supp. D, Part I, 53 "Hegemony of Race,The"(DuBois), Supp. II, Part 1,181 Hegger, Grace Livingston, see Lewis, Mrs. Sinclair (Grace Livingston Hegger) Heidegger, Martin, O, 362, 363; HI, 292; IV, 491 Heidenmauer, The (Cooper), 1,345346 "Height of the Ridiculous, The" (Holmes), Supp. I, Part 1,302 Heilbroner, Robert, Supp. I, Part 2, 644,648,650 Heilman, Robert B., 0,222; IV, 425 Heimert, Alan, 1,565,566; III, 312 Heine, Heinrich, 0,272,273,277,281, 282,387,544; IV, 5 Heineman, Frank, Supp. Ill, Part 2, 619 Heinz, Helen, see Tate, Mrs. Allen (Helen Heinz) Helburn, Theresa, III, 407; IV, 381 "Helen" (Lowell), II, 544 "Helen I Love You" (Farrell), II, 28, 45 Helen in Egypt (Doolittle), Supp. I, Part 1,260,272,273,274 Helen Keller: Sketch for a Portrait (Brooks), 1,254 "Helen of Tyre" (Longfellow), II, 4% Heliodora (Doolittle), Supp. I, Part 1, 266 Hellbox (O'Hara), III, 361 Heller, Joseph, D, 221; III, 2,258; IV, 98; Supp. I, Part 1,196 Heilman, George S., n, 317 Heilman, Lillian, 1,28; III, 28; Supp. I, Part 1,276-298 Hello Dolly! (musical play), IV, 357 "Hello, Stranger" (Capote), Supp. in, Part 1,120 Hellyer, John, Supp. I, Part 2,468 Helmcke,Hans,IV,473 "Helmsman, The" (Doolittle), Supp. I, Part 1,266 "Help"(Barth),I,139

Hemenway, Robert E., Supp. I, Part 1, 147 Hemingway, Dr. Clarence Edwards, D, 248,259 Hemingway, Ernest, 1,28,64,97,99, 105, 107, 117,150, 162, 190, 211, 221, 288, 289, 295, 367, 374, 378, 421, 423, 445, 476, 477, 478, 482, 484-485, 487, 488, 489, 491, 495, 504,517;!!, 27,44,51,58,68-^9,78, 90,97,100,127,206,247-270,289, 424, 431, 456, 457, 458-459, 482, 560,600; III, 2,18,20,35,36,37,40, 61,108,220,334,363,364,382,453, 454, 471-472, 476, 551, 575, 576, 584;IV,27,28,33,34,35,42,49,97, 108, 122, 126, 138, 190, 191, 201, 216, 217, 257, 297, 363, 404, 427, 433,451; Supp. I, Part 2,621,658, 678; Supp. II, Part 1,221; Supp. HI, Part 1,146, Part 2,617 Hemingway, Leicester, D, 270 Hemingway, Mrs. Ernest (Hadley Richardson), II, 257,260,263 Hemingway, Mrs. Ernest (Martha Gellhorn),II,260 Hemingway, Mrs. Ernest (Mary Welsh), II, 257,260 Hemingway, Mrs. Ernest (Pauline Pfeiffer),II,260 "Hemingway: The Old Lion" (Cowley), Supp. II, Part 1,143 "Hemingway in Paris" (Cowley), Supp. II, Part 1,144 Hemley,Cecil,IV,22,23 "Hen Flower, The" (Kinnell), Supp. Ill, Part 1,247-248 "Henchman,The"(Whittier),Supp.I, Part 2,696 Henderson, Alice Corbin, Supp. I, Part 2,387 Henderson, Archibald and Barbara, 11,365 Henderson, F.C., III, 121 Henderson the Rain King (Bellow), I, 144, 147, 148, 152, 153, 154, 155, 158,160,161,162-163 Hendin, Josephine, III, 360 Hendricks, King, D, 484 Henfrey, Norman, III, 622 Henle, James, 0,26,30,38,41 Henri,Robert,IV,411;Supp.I,Part2, 376 Henry VI, King, D, 379

Henry VIII, King, 1,12; III, 101; IV, 201; Supp. I, Part 2,461 Henry, Arthur, 1,515 Henry, O. (pseudonym), see Porter, William Sydney Henry IV (Shakespeare) III, 166 "Henry James, Jr." (Howells), II, 289 Henry Miller Reader, 77ti(ed.Durrell), III, 175,190 "Henry's Confession" (Berryman), I, 186 Henson, Josiah, Supp. I, Part 2,589 Hentz, Caroline Lee, Supp. I, Part 2, 584 Henze, Hans Werner, Supp. II, Part 1, 24 "HerKind"(Sexton),Supp.II,Part2, 687 "Her Own People" (Warren), IV, 253 "Her Quaint Honour" (Gordon), II, 196,199,200 Heraclitus, 11,1,163; IV, 86 Herakles:A Play in Verse (MacLeish), 111,21,22 Herberg, Will, III, 291 Herbert, Edward, D, 11; III, 408 Herbert, Francis (pseudonym), see Bryant, William Cullen Herbert, George, D, 12; IV, 141,145, 146,151,153,156,165; Supp. I, Part 1,80,107,108,122 Herbert of Cherbury, Lord, D, 108 Herbst, Josephine, 1,119; III, 455 Here and Now (Levertov), Supp. Ill, Part 1,275,276 HereattheNew Former (Gill), Supp. I, Part 2,626,681 Herford, Reverend Brooke, 1,471 Hergesheimer, Joseph,Supp. I,Part 2, 620 Herman, Florence,$ee Williams, Mrs. William Carlos (Florence Herman) Herman, William (pseudonym), see Bierce, Ambrose "Herman Melville" (Auden), Supp. II, Part 1,14 Herman Melville (Mumford), Supp. II, Part 2,471,476,489-491 "Hermes of the Ways" (Doolittle), Supp. I, Part 1,266 Hermetic Definition(Doo\itt\e),Supp. I, Part 1,271,272,273,274 Hermit and the Wild Woman, The (Wharton),IV,315

HERM-HIST / 698 "Hermit of Saba, The" (Freneau), Supp. II, Part 1,259 Herne, James A., II, 276; Supp. II, Part 1,198 "Hero, The" (Moore), III, 200, 211, 212 Hero, The (Raglan), 1,135 Hero in America, The (Van Doren), 11,103 Herod, King, III, 353; IV, 138 Herodiade (Mallarml), 1,66 Herodotus, Supp. I, Part 2,405 Heroes, 77i*(Ashbery), Supp. ID, Part 1,3 Heroic Ideal in American Literature, The (Gross), Supp. I, Part 1,70 Herold, David, Supp. I, Part 2,500 "Heron, The" (Roethke), III, 540541 Herrick, Robert, D, 11,18, 444, 484; III, 463,592; IV, 453; Supp. I, Part 4646 Herring, Paul D., Ill, 241 Herron, George, Supp. I, Part 1,7 Herron, Ima Honaker, Supp. I, Part 2, 478 Herschel, Sir John, Supp. I, Part 1,314 Hersey, John, IV, 4; Supp. I, Part 1, 1%, 198 Herzog (Bellow), 1,144,147,149,150, 152, 153, 154, 155, 156, 157, 158, 159-160 Heseltine,H.P.,IV,259 Hetherington, H. W., Ill, 97 Hewitt, Bernard, IV, 376 Hewlett, Maurice, 1,359 "Hey! Hey!" (Hughes), Supp. I, Part 1,327-328 HeyRub-a-Dub-Dub (Dreiser), 1,515;

n,26

Hiatt, David F.,0,294 Hiawatha (Longfellow), Supp. I, Part 1, 79; Supp. Ill, Part 2,609,610 Hichborn, Mrs. Philip, see Wylie, Elinor Hichborn, Philip, Supp. I, Part 2,707, 708 Hicks, Granville, 1,254,259,374,380, 520; n, 26; HI, 72, 240, 241, 242, 336,342,355,359,360,407,452; IV, 448; Supp. I, Part 1,198,361, Part 2, 453,609 "Hidden Gardens" (Capote), Supp. Ill, Part 1,125

"Hidden Name and Complex Fate" (Ellison), Supp. II, Part 1,245 Higgins,David,I,473 Higginson, Thomas Wentworth, I, 451-452, 453, 454, 456, 458, 459, 463,464,465,470,472; II, 509; Supp. I, Part 1,307,371 "High Tide" (Marquand), III, 56 "Higher Keys, The" (Merrill), Supp. HI, Part 1,335-336 Higher Learning in America, The (Veblen), Supp. I, Part 2,630,631, 641,642 Highet, Gilbert, Supp. I, Part 1,268 "Highway, The" (Menvin), Supp. HI, Part 1,346 "Highway 99E from Chico" (Carver), Supp. Ill, Part 1,136 Hike and the Aeroplane (Lewis), II, 440-441 Hilda Doolittle (H.D.) (Quinn),Supp. I, Part 1,275 Hildebrand,Al,III,118 Hilen, Andrew, 0,509 Hiler, Hilaire, Supp. HI, Part 2,617 Hilfer, Anthony Channell, 1,95 Hiil,Hamlin,IV,212,213 Hill, Herbert, IV, 496 Hill, James J., Supp. I, Part 2,644 Hill, Joe, 1,493 Hill,Patti,I,289 Hill, Vernon, Supp. I, Part 2,397 "Hill, The" (Toomer), Supp. Ill, Part 2,486 "Hill Wife, The" (Frost), II, 154 "Hillcrest" (Robinson), III, 504 Hiller, Hilaire, III, 191 Hiller, Wendy, III, 404 Hillman, Sidney, Supp. I, Part 1,5 Hills, L. Rust, HI, 573 Hills Beyond, The (Wolfe), IV, 450, 451,460,461 "Hills Beyond, The" (Wolfe), IV, 460 "Hill-Top View, A" (Jeffers), Supp. II, Part 2,417 Hillway,Tyrus,III,97 Hillyer, Robert, 1,475 "Hilton's Holiday, The" (Jewett), II, 391 Him (Cummings), 1,429,434-435 Himes, Chester, Supp. I, Part 1, 51, 325 Hindemith,Paul,IV,357 Hindus, Milton, 1,286; IV, 23

Hippolytus (Euripides), II, 543; Supp. I, Part 1,270 Hippolytus Temporizes (Doolittle), Supp. I, Part 1,270 Hirsch, Sidney, see Mttrbn-Hirsch, Sidney Hirsh, David H., Supp. I, Part 1,148 "His Bride of the Tomb" (Dunbar), Supp. II, Part 1,196 "His Chest of Drawers" (Anderson), 1,113,114 "His Hopes on the Human Heart" (Hicks), Supp. I, Part 2,453 "His Shield" (Moore), III, 211 His Thought Made Pockets & the Plane Buckt (Berryman), 1,170 His Toy, His Dream, His Rest (Berryman), 1,169,170,183,184-186 "His Words" (Roethke), III, 544 Histoire comparee des syst£mes de philosophic (G6rando), II, 10 Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution (Wollstonecr aft), Supp. I, Part 1,126 "Historical Conceptualization" (Huizinga),I,255 "Historical Interpretation of Literature, The" (Wilson), IV, 431,433, 445 "Historical Value of Crfcvecoeur's Voyage...," (Adams), Supp. I, Part 1,251 "History" (Emerson), II, 13,15 "History" (Hughes), Supp. I, Part 1, 344 "History among the Rocks" (Warren), IV,252 History as a Literary An (Morison), Supp. I, Part 2,493 "History is the Memory of Time" (Olson), Supp. II, Part 2,574 "History of a Literary Movement" (Nemerov),III,270 "History of a Literary Radical, The" (Bourne), 1,215,235,236 History of a Radical: Essays by Randolph Bourne (Brooks), 1,245 History of American Graphic Humor, A (Murrell), Supp. I, Part 2,626 History of English Literature (Taine), 111,323 History ofFortus, The (Emerson), II, 8

HIST-HOME / 699 History of Henry Esmond, The (Thackeray), II, 91,130 History of Modem Poetry, A (Perkins), Supp. I, Part 2,475,478 History of New York, from the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty, A (Irving), 11,300303,304,310 History of Pendennis, The (Thackeray), II, 291 History ofRoxbury town (Ellis), Supp. I, Part 1,99 History of the Conquest of Peru (ed. Morison), Supp. I, Part 2,494 History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus, A (Irving), 0,310,314 History of the Navy of the United States of America (Cooper), 1,347 History of the United States of America during the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison (Adams), 1,6-9,10,20,21 History of the Work of Redemption, A (Edwards), 1,560 History of United States Naval Operations in World War //(Morison), Supp. I, Part 2,490-492 "History Through a Beard" (Morison), Supp. I, Part 2,490 "History Without a Beard" (Degler), Supp. I, Part 2,500 Hitchcock, Ada, see MacLeish, Mrs. Archibald (Ada Hitchcock) Hitchcock, Alfred, IV, 357 "Hitch-Hikers, The" (Welty),IV,262 Hitler, Adolf, 1,261,290,492; D, 146, 454,561,565,592; III, 2,3,110,115, 140,156,246,298,446; IV, 5,17,18, 298,372; Supp. I, Part 2,431,436, 446,664 "Hoarder, The" (Sexton), Supp. II, Part 2,692 Hobb, Gormley, 1,203 Hobbes, Thomas, 1,277; D, 9,10,540; III, 306; IV, 88 Hobson,J.A.,I,232 Hobson, John A., Supp. I, Part 2,650 Hobson, Laura Z., Ill, 151 Hochman, Baruch, D, 557; IV, 23 Hocking, William Ernest, III, 303 Hodgson, Captain Joseph, HI, 328 Hoeltje, Hubert, D, 23,245 Hoffa,Jimmy,I,493

Hdffding, Harold, n, 364 Hoffman, Daniel G., 1,405,426,542; 0,246,307,318; HI, 432 Hoffman, Frederick J., I, 60, 67, 70, 120; 0,76,100,195, 222, 443; III, 48,217; IV, 71,113,119,424 Hoffman, Josiah Ogden, 0,297,300 Hoffman, Louise M., D, 318 Hoffman, Matilda, D, 300,314 Hoffman, Michael J., IV, 48 Hoffmann, E. T. A., Ill, 415 Hofmann, Hans, III, 313 Hogan, Charles Beecher, III, 525 Hogg, James, 1,53; Supp. I, Part 1,349 Hojoki (Chomei), IV, 170 Hokusai,III,597 Holbrook,Clyde,I,564 Holbrook, David, Supp. I, Part 2, 526-527,546,548 Holcroft, Thomas, Supp. I, Part 2,514 Holder, Alan, 1,47,143 Holding the Mirror Up to Nature" (Nemerov),III,275,276 "Hole in the Floor, A" (Wilbur), Supp. Ill, Part 2,556-557 Holiday, Billie, Supp. I, Part 1,80 Holiday (magazine), III, 350 "Holiday" (Porter), III, 454 Holinshed, Raphael, IV, 370 Holland, Josiah, Supp. I, Part 2,420 Holland, Laura Virginia, 1,286 Holland, Mrs. Theodore, 1,453,455, 465 Holland, Theodore, 1,453 Holland, William, IV, 381 Hollander, John, 1,450; Supp. I, Part 1,96; Supp. Ill, Part 2,541 Hollis, Thomas Brand, Supp. I, Part 2, 514 Hollow Men, The (Eliot), 1,574,575, 578-579,580,585; III, 586 Holloway, Emory, IV, 353,354 Hollywood on Trial (film), Supp. I, Part 1,295 Holman, C. Hugh, IV, 472,473 Holmes, Abiel, Supp. I, Part 1, 300, 301,302,310 Holmes, Charles, Supp. I, Part 2,626 Holmes,John,I,169,189;Supp.n,Part 1,87 Holmes, Mrs. Abiel (Sarah Wendell), Supp. I, Part 1,300 Holmes, Mrs. Oliver Wendell (Amelia Jackson), Supp. I, Part 1,303

Holmes, Oliver Wendell, I, 487; O, 225,273-274,402,403; HI, 81-82, 590,591-592; IV, 429,436; Supp. I, Part 1,103,243,254,299-319, Part 2,405,414,415,420,593,704,705 Holmes, Oliver Wendell, Jr., 1,3,19 Holmes of the Breakfast-Table (Howe), Supp. I, Part 1,319 Holt, Edwin E., 1,59; 0,365 Holt, Felix, n, 179 Holt, Henry, 0,348; III, 587 Holtby, Winifred, Supp. I, Part 2,720 Holy Ghostly, The (Shepard), Supp. III, Part 2,437-438,447 "Holy Innocents, The" (Lowell), II, 539 Holy Sonnets (Donne), IV, 145; Supp. I, Part 1,367; Supp. Ill, Part 2,619 "Holy Terror, A" (Bierce), 1,203 Holy War, The (Bunyan), IV, 156 Homage to Clio (Auden), Supp. II, Part 1,24 "Homage to Elizabeth Bishop" (ed. Ivask), Supp. I, Part 1,96 Homage to Frank O 'Hara (Ashbery), Supp. Ill, Part 1,2-3 "Homage to Hemingway" (Bishop), IV, 35 Homage to Mistress Bradstreet (Berryman), 1,168,169,170-171, 172,174,175,178-183,184,186 "Homage to Sextus Propertius" (Pound), III, 462, 476; Supp. Ill, Part 2,622 "Homage to Shakespeare" (Cheever), Supp. I, Part 1,180 "Homage to the Empress of the Blues" (Hayden), Supp. II, Part 1,379 Homage to Theodore Dreiser (Warren), 1,517 "Home" (Hughes), Supp. I, Part 1, 329,330 "Home after Three Months Away" (Lowell), II, 547 Home as Found (Cooper), 1,348,349, 350,351 Home Magazine (publication), 1,313; D,465 Home on the Range (Baraka), Supp. II, Part 1,47 Home Place, The (Morris), III, 221, 222,232 Home: Social Essays (Baraka), Supp. II, Part 1,45,61

HOME-HOUS / 700 Homecoming Game, 77i*(Neinerov), 111,268,282,284-285 "Homeland" (Merwin), Supp. m, Part 1,351 Homer, 1, 312, 433; H, 6, 8, 133, 302, 543, 544, 552; III, 14, 21, 278, 453, 457, 473, 567; IV, 54, 371; Supp. I, Part 1, 158, 283, Part 2, 494 "Homesick Blues" (Hughes), Supp. I, Part 1,327 Homeward Bound (Cooper), 1, 348 "Homily" (Tate), IV, 121-122 "Homme Moyen Sensuel, L'"(Pound), 111,462 Homme revoke, V (Camus), III, 306 Homo Ludens (Huizinga), 416-417, 425 "Homoeopathy and Its Kindred Delusions" (Holmes), Supp. I, Part 1, 303-304,305 "Homosexual Villain, The" (Mailer), 111,36 "Honey" (Wright), Supp. Ill, Part 2, 589 Honey and Salt (Sandburg), III, 594596 "Honey and Salt" (Sandburg), in, 594 "Honey Babe" (Hughes), Supp. I, Part 1,334 "Honey, We'll Be Brave" (Farrell).II, 45 Honig, Edwin, 1, 450; IV, 424 "Honky Tonk in Cleveland, Ohio" (Sandburg), HI, 585 "Honkytonk" (Shapiro), Supp. II, Part 2,705 Hood, Tom, 1, 195 "Hook" (Wright),Supp.m,Part2,604 Hook, Sidney, 1, 265, 287; D, 365 Hooker, Adelaide,5eiMarquand, Mrs. John P. (Adelaide Hooker) Hooker, Samuel, IV, 162, 165 Hooker, Thomas, n, 15-16; IV, 162 Hooper, Marian, see Adams, Mrs. Henry (Marian Hooper) Hoover, Herbert, Supp. I, Part 2, 638 "Hope"(Jarrell),II,389 Hope, Lynn, Supp. II, Part 1, 38 Hope of Heaven (O'Hara), III, 361 Hopkins, Anne Yale, Supp. I, Part 1, 100,102,113 Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 1, 171, 179, 397, 401, 522, 525, 533; 0, 537; III,

197,209,523; IV, 129,135,141,421; Supp. I, Part 1,79,81,94; Supp. Ill, Part 2,551 Hopkins, L. A., 1,502 Hopkins, Lemuel, Supp. II, Part 1,70 Hopkins, Miriam, IV, 381; Supp. I, Part 1,281 Hopkins, Samuel, 1,547,549,564 Hopkins, Vivian, H, 20,23 Hopkinson, Francis, Supp. I, Part 2, 504 Hopper, Edward, IV, 411,413 Hopper, Stanley R., IV, 377 Horace, D, 8,154,169,543,552,568; III, 15; IV, 89; Supp. I, Part 2,423 Horae Canonicae (Auden), Supp. II, Part 1,21 "Horatian Ode" (Marvell), IV, 135 Horizon (periodical), Supp. D, Part 1, 172,176 Horkheimer, Max, Supp. I, Part 2,645 Horn, Mother, Supp. I, Part 1,49,54 "Horn of Plenty" (Hughes), Supp. I, Part 1,342 Hornberger, Theodore, 1,565 Homer, George F., D, 125 "Horse,The"(Wright),Supp.m,Part 2,592,601 Horse Sense in American Humor (Blair), Supp. I, Part 2,626 "Horse Thief (Caldwell), 1,310 Horses and Men (Anderson), 1,112113,114 "Horses and Men in Rain" (Sandburg), 111,584 Horses Make a Landscape More Beautiful (Walker), Supp.Ill, Part 2,521,533 Horsford, Howard C, III, 96 Horton, Philip, I, 383, 386, 387, 393, 404,441,450 Hosea (biblical book), II, 166 Hoskins, {Catherine, IV, 424 Hosmer family, IV, 177 Hospital Sketches (Alcott), Supp. I, Part 1,34,35 "Hot Times in the Catbird Seat" (Braunlich), Supp. I, Part 2,626 Houdini, Harry, IV, 437 Hough, Robert L., D, 294 Houghton, Frederick, III, 72 Hound and Horn (publication), III, 434; Supp. I, Part 1,174; Supp. Ill, Part 2,613,614

"Hour in Chartres, An" (Bourne), I, 228 "Hours before Eternity" (Caldwell), 1,291 House, Edward, Supp. I, Part 2,643 House, Kay S., 1,357 "House,The" (Merrill), Supp. HI, Part 1,323 House Divided, A (Buck), Supp. D, Part 1,118 "House Guest" (Bishop), Supp. I, Part 1,93 "House in Athens, The" (Merrill), Supp. in, Part 1,323 House in the Uplands, A (Caldwell), I, 297,301,306 House of Dust, The: A Symphony (Aiken),I,50 House of Earth trilogy (Buck), Supp. II, Part 1,118,123 House of Fiction, The: An Anthology of the Short Story (Gordon and Tate), II, 221 "House of Flowers" (Capote), Supp. III, Part 1,123 House of Incest (Nin), Supp. Ill, Part 1,43 HouseofMirth, 7%* (Wharton), 11,180, 193;IV,311-313,314,316,318,323, 327 "House of Night, The" (Freneau), Supp. II, Part 1,259,260 Houseof the Far and Lost, 77u?(Wolfe), IV,456 House of the Seven Gables (Hawthorne), 1,106; 0,60,224,225,231,237,239, 240-241,243,244;Supp.I,Part 2,579 "House on the Heights, A" (Capote), Supp. Ill, Part 1,120 "House on the Hill, The" (Robinson), 111,505,524 "House Unroofed by the Gale" (Tu Fu),II,526 "House Where MarkTwain Was Bora, The" (Masters), Supp. I, Part 2,472 Houseboat Days (Ashbery), Supp. Ill, Part 1,18-20 Housebreaker of Shady Hill and Other Stories, 77i*(Cheever)Supp.I,Part 1, 184 "Housekeeping for Men" (Bourne), 1,231 "Houses, The" (Merwin), Supp. HI, Part 1,354

HOUS-HUMA / 701 "Housewife" (Sexton), Supp. II, Part £682 Housman, A. E., HI, 15,136,606; Supp. II, Part 1,4 Hovey, Richard B., H, 270 "How About This?" (Carver), Supp. m, Part 1,141 "How Annandale Went Out" (Robinson), HI, 513 "How I Told My Child About Race" (Brooks), Supp. HI, Part 1,78 "How I Went to the Mines" (Harte), Supp. II, Part 1,336 "How I Write" (Welty), IV, 279,280 "How Many Nights" (Kinnell), Supp. m, Part 1,245-246 //owMuc/t.?(Blechman),Supp.I,Part 1,290 "How Soon Hath Time" (Ransom), IV, 123 How the Alligator Missed Breakfast (Kinnell), Supp. Ill, Part 1, 235, 253 How the Other Half Lives (Rns),l,293 "How the Women Went from Dover" (Whittier),Supp.I, Part 2,694,696, 697 How to Develop Your Personality (Shellow), Supp. I, Part 2,608 HowtoReadaNovel(GoTdon),U, 198 "How to Study Poetry" (Pound), HI, 474 How to Win Friends and Influence People (Carnegie), Supp. I, Part 2, 608 How to Worry Successfully (Seabury), Supp. I, Part 2,608 How to Write (Stein), IV, 32,34,35 "How to Write a Blackwood Article" (Poe),III,425 "How to Write a Memoir Like This" (Oates), Supp. II, Part 2,509 "How to Write Like Somebody Else" (Roethke),III,540 How to Write Short Stories (Lardner), D, 430,431 "How We Danced" (Sexton), Supp. II, Part 2,692 "How You Sound??" (Baraka), Supp. II, Part 1,30 Howard, Jane, 1,189; IV, 235 Howard, Leon, 1,564; III, 97; Supp. I, Part 1,148, Part 2,408, 422, 423, 426

Howarth, Cora, 1,408,409 Howarth, Herbert, 1,590 Howe,E.W.,I,106 Howe, Irving, 1,119,120;II, 53,76;III, 289; IV, 10, 23, 448, 497; Supp. I, Part 1,70, Part 2,432; Supp. II, Part 1,99 Howe, James Wong, Supp. I, Part 1* 281 Howe, Julia Ward, HI, 505 Howe, M. A. De Wolfe, 1,258; D, 406, 413; Supp. I, Part 1,319 Howe, Samuel, Supp. I, Part 1,153 Howell, James, D, 111 Howells, Margaret, D, 271 Howells, Mildred, H,294 Howells, Mrs. William Dean (Elinor Mead), II, 273 Howells, William C, 0,273 Howells, William Dean, 1,109,192, 204, 210, 211, 254, 355, 407, 411, 418,459,469; 0,127-128,130,131, 136, 137, 138, 140, 271-2H 322, 331-332, 338, 397-398, 400, 415, 444,451,556; 111,51,118,314,327328,336,461,576,607;IV, 192,202, 213,342,349; Supp. I, Part 1,306, 318,357,360,368, Part 2,414,420, 645-646; Supp. II, Part 1,198,352 Howells, Winifred, D, 271 Howells: His Life and World (Broods), 1,254 Howgate, George W., Ill, 622 Howl (Ginsberg), Supp. Ill, Part 1, 92 "Howl" (Ginsberg), 1,183; Supp. II, Part 1,31,307,308,311,315-317, 319,321-322,327, Part 2,713,716 Howl and Other Poems (Ginsberg), Supp. II, Part 1,308,317-318,319 Hoyer, Linda Grace (pseudonym),*** Updike, Mrs. Wesley Hoyle, James F., Supp. I, Part 2,548 Hoyt, Charles A., Supp. I, Part 1,148 Hoyt, Constance, Supp. I, Part 2,707 Hoyt, Elinor Morton,*** Wylie, Elinor Hoyt, Henry (father), Supp. I, Part 2, 707 Hoyt,Henry(son),Supp.I,Part2,708 Hoyt, Henry Martyn, Supp. I, Part 2, 707 Hoyt, Nancy, Supp. I, Part 2,730 Hubbard, Elbert, 1,98,383 Hubbell,G.S.,D,23

Hubbell, Jay B., HI, 431; Supp. I, Part IP 372 Huber, Francois, D, 6 Huckleberry Finn (Twain), Supp. I, Part 1,247 Hudson, Henry, 1,230 Hudson River Bracketed (Wharton), IV, 326-327 Huebsch,B.W.,HI,110 Hueffer, Ford Madox, Supp. I, Part 1, 257,262;***flfco,Ford,FordMadox Huftel, Sheila, itt, 169 Huge Season, The (Morris), HI, 225226,227,230,232,233,238 "Hugh Selwyn Mauberley" (Pound), 1,66,476; HI, 9,462-463,465,468 Hughes, Catharine R., IV, 23 Hughes, Frieda, Supp. I, Part 2,540, 541 Hughes, Glenn, II, 533; Supp. I, Part 1, 255,275 Hughes, James Nathaniel, Supp. I, Part 1,321,332 Hughes, Langston, Supp. I, Part 1, 320-348;Supp.II,Part 1,31,33,61, 170, 173, 181, 227, 228, 233, 361; Supp. HI, Part 1,72-77 Hughes, Mrs. Ted, see Plath, Sylvia Hughes, Nicholas, Supp. I, Part 2,541 Hughes, Ted, IV, 3,23; Supp. I, Part 2, 536,537,538,539,540,541,548 Hughes, Thomas, Supp. I, Part 2,406 Hughie (O'Neill), III, 385,401,405 Hugo, Victor, H, 290,490,543 Hui-neng,IH,567 Huizinga, Johan, I, 225; D, 416-417, 418,425 Hull-House Maps and Papers, Supp. I, Part 1,7 Hull-House Settlement,Supp.I,Partl, 1,2,3,4,7,11,12,16,17,19,21,22 Hulme, Thomas E., 1,68,69,475; III, 196, 209, 463-464, 465; IV, 122; Supp. I, Part 1,261,262 "Human Culture" (Emerson), II, 1112 "Human Immortality" (James), II, 353-354 "Human Life" (Emerson), II, 11-12 "Human Things" (Nemerov), HI, 279 Human Universe (Olson), Supp. II, Part 2,571 "Human Universe" (Olson), Supp. II, Part 2,565,567

HUMA-INEE / 702 Humanism,I,577;II,542; 111,231,600, Hurston, Zora Neale, Supp. I, Part 1, 613;IV,117,165,435,437,438,439, 325,326,332; Supp. II, Part 1,33 474,491 Husserl, Edmund, O, 362, 363, 366; IV, 491 Humble Inquiry into the Rules of the Word of God, An, concerning the Huston, John, 1,30,31,33,35,47; n, 588; III, 161 Qualifications Requisite to a Complete Standing and Full Commun- "Huswifery" (Taylor), IV, 161; Supp. I, Part 2,386 ion in the Visible Christian Church Hutcheson, Francis, 1,559 (Edwards), 1,548 Humboldt, Alexander von, HI, 428 Hutchins, John K., Ill, 242 Hume, David, 1,125; D, 349,357,480; Hutchins, Patricia, III, 478 Hutchinson, Abigail, 1,562 111,618 "Hummingbirds, The" (Welty), IV, Hutchinson, Anne, Supp. I, Part 1, 273 100,101,113, Part 2,484 Humphreys, David, Supp. II, Part 1, Hutchison, E. R., Ill, 192 65,69,70,268 Huxley, Aldous, H, 454; III, 281,428, Humphries, Rolfe, III, 124,144 429-430,432; IV, 77,435; Supp. I, Part 2,714 Huneker, James, HI, 102 "Hunger...." (Rich), Supp. I, Part 2, Huxley, Thomas, III, 102,108, 113, 281 571 "Hungerfield"(Jeffers),Supp.II9Part Huxley, Thomas Henry, Supp. I, Part 1,368,373 2,416-417,436 Hungerfield and Other Poems Huysmans, Joris Karl (Charles Marie Georges), 1,66; III, 315; IV, 286 (letters), Supp. II, Part 2,422 Hungerford, Edward B., 1,543; II, 390; "Hydras, The" (Merwin), Supp. Ill, Part 1,349 111,289 Hungry Ghosts, The (Gates), Supp. D, Hyman, Stanley Edgar, I, 129, 143, Part 2,504,510 264,286,287,363,377,379,380; III, Hunt, John W., Jr., Ill, 243 360;IV,23,235,448;Supp.I,Partl, 198 Hunt, Leigh, D, 515-516 Hymen (Doolittle), Supp. I, Part 1, Hunt, Richard Morris, IV, 312 266 Hunt, William, 0,343 "Hunt in the Black Forest, The" "Hymie's Bull" (Ellison), Supp. II, Part 1,229 (Jarrell), II, 379-380 "Hymn Books" (Emerson), II, 10 Hunter, Dr. Joseph, n, 217 "HYMN FOR LANIE POO" Hunter, Kim, Supp. I, Part 1,286 (Baraka), Supp. II, Part 1,31,37 "Hunter of the West, The" (Bryant), Supp. I, Part 1,155 "Hymn from a Watermelon Pavilion" (Stevens), IV, 81 "Hunters in the Snow" (Brueghel), I, 174 "Hymn of the Sea, A" (Bryant), Supp. "Hunter's Vision, The" (Bryant), I, Part 1,157,163,165 "Hymn to Death" (Bryant), Supp. I, Supp. I, Parti, 160 Part 1,169,170 "Hunting Is Not Those Heads on the Wall"(Baraka),Supp.n,Partl, 45 "HymntoEarth"(Wylie),Supp.I,Part 2,727-729 Huntington, Collis P., 1,198,207 Huntley, Jobe, Supp. I, Part 1,339 "Hymn to the Night" (Longfellow), Hurrell,JohnD.,IV,401 Supp. I, Part 2,409 "Hurricane, The" (Crane), 1,401 "Hymns of the Marshes" (Lanier), Supp. I, Part 1,364 "Hurricane, The" (Freneau), Supp. II, Hynes,Sam,lV,259 Part 1,262 "Hurry Kane" (Lardner), II, 425,426, Hyperion: A Romance (Longfellow), 427 n, 488,489,491-492,4% "Hurry up Please It'sTime" (Sexton), "Hypocrite Auteur" (MacLeish), III, 19 Supp. II, Part 2,694,695

"Hypocrite Swift" (Bogan), Supp. Ill, Part 1,55

Hyslop, Francis E., Jr., HI, 432 Hyslop, Lois, III, 432 "Hysteria" (Eliot), 1,570

"'I Am Cherry Alive,' the Little Girl Sang" (Schwartz), Supp. D, Part 2, 663 "I am Dying, Meester?" (Burroughs), Supp. Ill, Part 1,98 I Am! Says the Lamb (Roethke), HI, 545 "I and My Chimney" (Melville), III, 91 land Thou (Buber), III, 308 "I Cannot Forget with What Fervid Devotion" (Bryant), Supp. I, Part 1,154 '7 Cry, Love/ Lover (Roethke), III, 539-540 I Don't Need You Any More (Miller), III, 165 "I Dream I'm the Death of Orpheus" (Rich), Supp. I, Part 2,557-558 /, etcetera (Sontag), Supp. Ill, Part 2, 451-452,469 / Gaspiri (Lardner), II, 435 / Got the Blues (Odets), Supp. II, Part 2,530 "I Had Eight Birds Hatcht in One Nest" (Bradstreet), Supp. I, Part 1, 102,115,117,119 "I Have Increased Power" (Ginsberg), Supp. H, Part 1,313 "I Have Seen Black Hands" (Wright), Supp. II, Part 1,228 "I Hear an Army" (Joyce), Supp. I, Part 1,262 "I Hear It Was Charged against Me" (Whitman), IV, 343 "I Heard Immanuel Singing" (Lindsay), Supp. I, Part 2,379 "ILiveUpHere"(Merwin),Supp.III, Part 1,349 I Love Myself When I Am Laughing...: A Zora Neale Hurston Reader (Walker), Supp. HI, Part 2,531,532 "I May, I Might, I Must" (Moore), III, 215 "I Need, I Need" (Roethke), HI, 535536

IONL-IMIT / 703 "I Only Am Escaped Alone to Tell Thee" (Nemerov), III, 272, 273274 / Promessi Sposi (Manzoni), II, 291 "I Remember" (Sexton), Supp.II, Part 2,680 I Remember America (Bohn),Supp.I, Part 2,626 "I saw in Louisiana a Live-Oak Growing" (Whitman), 1,220 / Shall Spit on Your Graves (film), Supp. I, Part 1,67 LSixNonlectures (Cummings),I,430, 433,434 / Stole a Million (West), IV, 287 / Thought of Daisy (Wilson), IV, 428, 434,435 "I,Too" (Hughes),Supp.I,Part 1,320 "I Want to Know Why" (Anderson), 1,114,115,116; H, 263 I Wonder As I Wander (Hughes), Supp. I, Part 1,329,332-333 "I years had been from home" (Dickinson), 1,471 777 Take My Stand ("Twelve Southerners"), II, 196; III, 496; IV, 125, 237 "I'm a Fool" (Anderson), 1,113,114, 116; Supp. I, Part 2,430 "I'm Crazy" (Salinger), III, 553 "I'm Here" (Roethke), III, 547 Ibsen, Henrik, O, 27, 276, 280, 291292; III, 118,145,148,149,150,151, 152, 154-155, 156, 161, 162, 165, 167,511,523; IV, 397 "Icarium Mare" (Wilbur) Supp. Ill, Part 2,563 "Icarus at St. Botolphs: A Descent to 'Unwonted Otherness'" (Greene), Supp. I, Part 1,198 Icarus's Mother (Shepard), Supp. Ill, Part 2,446 "Ice House, The" (Gordon), II, 201 "Ice Palace, The" (Fitzgerald), II, 83, 88 "Ice Storm, The" (Ashbery), Supp. Ill, Part 1,26 "Iceberg, The" (Merwin), Supp. Ill, Part 1,345 Iceman Cometh, The (O'Neill), 1,81; III, 151,385,386,401,402-403 "Ichabod" (Whittier), Supp. I, Part 2, 687,689-690 Ickes, Harold, Supp. I, Part 1,5

"Icon and the Portrait,The" (Auden), Supp. I, Part 2,626 "Icosaphere, The" (Moore), III, 213 Ida (Stein), IV, 43,45 "Idea of Order at Key West, The" (Stevens), IV, 89-90 "Idea, The" (Carver), Supp. m, Part 1,143 Ideal Husband (Wilde), II, 515 Idealism, 1,206,220,241,243,244,246; 0,353; III, 295,304,308-309,373, 484,601-602,612; IV, 173 "Identity of lames Baldwin, The" (Finn), Supp. I, Part 1,70 Ides of March, The (Wilder), IV, 357, 372 "Idiot, The" (Crane), 1,401 Idiot, The (Dostoevski), 1,468 "Idiots First" (Mala mud), Supp. I, Part 2,434-435,437,440-441 Idle Man, The (publication), Supp. I, Part 1,155 IdyllsoftheKing(Tennyson),IU,487; Supp. I, Parti 410 IfBeale Street Could Talk (Baldwin), Supp. I, Part 1,48,59-60,67 "If Beale Street Could Talk" (McClusky), Supp. I, Part 1,70 "If I Could Only Live at the Pitch That Is Near Madness" (Eberhart), I, 523,526-527 If It Die (Gide), 1,290 "If There Is No Human Comedy, It Will Be Necessary to Create One" (Benchley), Supp. I, Part 2,626 "If We Take All Gold" (Bogan), Supp. Ill, Part 1,52 "Ignis Fatuus" (Tate), IV, 128 "Ikon: The Harrowing of Hell" (Levertov), Supp. Ill, Part 1,284 He (O'Neill), III, 388 Iliad (Homer), II, 470 Iliad (trans. Bryant), Supp. I, Part 1, 158 Iliad (trans. Pope), Supp. I, Part 1,152 "Illinois" (Masters), Supp. I, Part 2, 458 Illinois Poems (Masters), Supp. I, Part 2,412 "Illinois Village, The" (Lindsay), Supp. I, Part 2,381 Illness as Metaphor (Sontag), Supp. HI, Part 2,452,461,466 Illumination (Frederic), II, 141

"Illusion of Eternity,The" (Eberhart), 1,541 "Illusions" (Emerson), II, 2,5,14,16 Illustrated London News (newspaper), 111,203 Illustrations of Political Economy (Martineau), Supp. II, Part 1,288 Image and Idea (Rahv), Supp. n, Part 1,146 "Image and Idea in Wielandand Edgar Huntly" (Witherington), Supp. I, Part 1,148 Image and the Law, The (Nemerov), 111,268,269-271,272 "Images for Godard" (Rich), Supp. I, Part 2,558 "Images of Walt Whitman" (Fiedler), IV, 352 "Imaginary Iceberg, The" (Bishop), Supp. I, Part 1,86,88 "Imaginary Jew, The" (Berry man), I, 174-175 Imaginary Letters (Pound),IR,473-474 Imagination and Fancy; or, Selections from the English Poets, illustrative of those first requisites of their art; with markings of the best passages, critical notices of the writers, and an essay in answer to the question 'What is Poetry?'(Hunt), II, 515-516 "Imagination and Reality in the Fiction of (Catherine Anne Porter and John Cheever" (Gaunt), Supp. I, Part 1, 198 "Imagination of James Thurber, The" (MacLean), Supp. I, Part 2,627 "Imagine Kissing Pete" (O'Hara), III, 372 "Imagining How It Would Be to Be Dead" (Eberhart), 1,533 "Imagining Jews" (Roth), Supp. I, Part 4453 Imagism (Coffman), Supp. I, Part 1, 275 Imagism and the Imagists (Hughes), Supp. I, Part 1,275 Imagismo (Berti), Supp. I, Part 1,275 Imagistes, Des: An Anthology of the Imagists (ed. Pound), III, 465,471 "Imago" (Stevens), IV, 74,89 Imitations (Lowell), II, 543,544-545, 550,555 "Imitations of Drowning" (Sexton), Supp. II, Part 2,684,686

IMMA-IN / 704

"Immanence of Dostoevsky, The" (Bourne), 1,235 ImmobileWind, The (Winters), Supp. II, Part 2,786 "Immobile Wind, The" (Winters), Supp. II, Part 2,788,811 "Immortal Autumn" (MacLeish), ID, 13 "Immortal Woman, The" (Tate), IV, 130,131,137 "Immortality Ode" (Nemerov), DI, 87 /mmorta/i(y0de(Wordsworth),Supp. I, Part 2,673 "Immortality Ode" (Wordsworth),!!, 17 "Imp of the Perverse, The" (Poe), III, 414-415 "Impasse" (Hughes), Supp. I, Part 1, 343 Imperative Duty, An, a Novel (Howells), II, 286 Imperial Germany and the Industrial Revolution (Veblen), Supp. I, Part 2,642,643 "Implosions" (Rich), Supp. I, Part 2, 556 "Importance of Point of View in Brockden Brown's Wieland ,The" (Manly), Supp. I, Part 1,148 Impressionism,I,51,170,336,389,405, 475,476; D, 276; III, 2,464; IV, 407 "Impressions of a European Tour" (Bourne), 1,225 "Impressions of Europe, 1913-1914" (Bourne), 1,225 "In a DarkTime" (Roethke), 111,539, 547,548 "In a Garden" (Lowell), II, 513 "In a Hard Intellectual Light" (Eberhart),I,523 "In a Hollow of the Hills" (Harte), Supp. II, Part 1,354 "In a Station of the Metro" (Pound), Supp. I, Part 1,265 "In a Strange Town" (Anderson), I, 114,115 "In Absence" (Lanier), Supp. I, Part 1,364 "In Amicitia" (Ransom), IV, 141 "In and Out of Books" (Breit), Supp. I, Part 1,198 "In Another Country" (Hemingway), 1,484-485; 0,249 In Battle for Peace: The Story of My

83rd Birthday (Du Bois), Supp. II, Part 1,185 "In Celebration of My Uterus" (Sexton), Supp. II, Part 2,689 In Cold Blood: A True Account of a Multiple Murder and Its Consequences (Capote), Supp. I, Part 1, 292; Supp. Ill, Part 1,111,117,119, 122,123,125-131, Part 2,574 "In Cold Hell, in Thicket" (Olson), Supp. II, Part 2,558,563-564,566, 572,580 In Cold Hell, in Thicket (Olson), Supp. II, Part 2,571 In Defense of Ignorance (Shapiro), Supp. II, Part 2,703,704,713-714 In Defense of Reason (Winters), Supp. I, Part 1,268,275 In Defense of Women (Mencken), III, 109 "In Distrust of Merits" (Moore), III, 201,214 In Dreams Begin Responsibilities (Schwartz), Supp. D, Part 2, 642, 645-650 "In Dreams Begin Responsibilities" (Schwartz), Supp. D, Part 2, 641, 649,654 In Dubious Battle (Steinbeck), IV, 51, 55-56,59,63 "In Football Season" (Updike), IV, 219 "In Honor of David Anderson Brooks, My Father" (Brooks), Supp. Ill, Part 1,79 "In Limbo" (Wilbur), Supp. ID, Part 2,544,561 In Love and Trouble: Stories of Black Women (Walker), Supp. Ill, Part 2,520,521,530,531,532 "In Memoriam" (Emerson), II, 13 In Memoriam (Tennyson), Supp. I, Part 2,416 "In Memory of Arthur Winslow" (Lowell), II, 541,547,550 "InMemoryofElinorWylie"(Wilson and Colum), Supp. I, Part 2,730 /flAfo//*y(Bierce),I,209 In My Father's Court (Singer), IV, 1617 "InNinc Sleep Valley" (Merrill), Supp. III, Part 1,328 In Old Plantation Days (Dunbar), Supp. II, Part 1,214

In Ole Virginia (Page), Supp. D, Part 1,201 In Orbit (Morris), III, 236 In Our Terribleness (Some elements and meaning in black style) (Baraka), Supp. D, Part 1,52,53 In Our Time (Hemingway), 1,117; II, 68,247,252,263; IV, 42 "In OurTime" (Wolfe), Supp. ni, Part 2,584 "In Plaster" (Plath), Supp. I, Part 2, 540 "In Praise of Johnny Appleseed" (Lindsay), Supp. I, Part 2,397 "In Praise of Limestone" (Auden), Supp. II, Part 1,20-21 In Reckless Ecstasy (Sandburg), III, 579 "In Retirement" (Malamud),Supp.I, Part 2,437 In Russia (Miller), III, 165 "In Sabine" (Chopin), Supp. I, Part 1, 213 "In School-Days" (Whittier), Supp. I, Part 2,699-700 In Search ofBisco (Caldwell), 1,296 In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens (Walker),Supp.ni,Part 2,520-523, 524,525,527,532-533,535 "In Search of Our Mothers* Gardens" (Walker),Supp.m,Part 2,522,524, 529,532-533,536 "In Search of Yage" (Burroughs), Supp. Ill, Part 1,98 "In Shadow" (Crane), 1,386 "In Sickness and in Health" (Auden), Supp. II, Part 1,15 In SuspectTerrain (McPhee),Supp.III, Part 1,309,310 "In Tall Grass" (Sandburg), III, 585 In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel (Williams), IV, 382,386,387,391,393 "In the Black Museum" (Nemerov), 111,275 "In the Cage" (James), II, 332 IntheClearing(FTOst),II, 153,155,164 "In the Closet of the Soul" (Walker), Supp. HI, Part 2,526 "In the Confidence of a Story-Teller" (Chopin), Supp. I, Part 1,217 "In the Days of Prismatic Colour" (Moore), III, 205,213 "IntheField"(Wilbur),Supp.in,Part 2,558

IN-INTE / 705 "In the Footsteps of Gutenberg" (Mencken), III, 101 "In the Forties" (Lowell), II, 554 In the Garret (Van Vechten), Supp. II, Part 2,735 "In the Hall of Mirrors" (Merrill), Supp. Ill, Part 1,322 In the Harbor (Longfellow), II, 491 "In the Heart of the Valley: Bernard Malamud's A New Life" (Astro), Supp. I, Part 2,452 In the Heat of the Night (film), Supp. I, Part 1,67 In the Mecca (Brooks), Supp. Ill, Part 1,74 "In the Mecca" (Brooks), Supp. Ill, Part 1,70,83-84 In theMidstofLife(BieTce), 1,200-203, 204,206,208,212 "In the Naked Bed, in Plato's Cave" (Schwartz), Supp. II, Part 2,646649 "In the Old World" (Gates), Supp. II, Part 2,503,504 "In the Region of Ice" (Gates), Supp. II, Part 2,520 "In the Shadow of Gabriel, A.D. 1550" (Frederic), II, 139 "In the Time of the Blossoms" (Merwin), Supp. Ill, Part 1,352 In the Valley (Frederic), II, 133-134, 136,137 "In the Village" (Bishop),Supp.I, Part 1,73,74-75,76,77,78,88 "In the Waiting Room" (Bishop), Supp. I, Part 1,81,94,95 "In the Ward: The Sacred Wood" (Jarrell),II,376,377 IntheWinterofCties(Wmams),TV,3& In the Zone (O'Neill), III, 388 "In These Dissenting Times" (Walker), Supp. m, Part 2,522 In This Our Life (Glasgow), II, 175, 178,189 In This, Our Life (film), Supp. I, Part 1,67

"In Those Days" (Jarrell), II, 387-388 "In Time of War" (Auden), Supp. II, Part 1,8,13 Inchbald, Elizabeth, H, 8 Inchiquin, the Jesuit's Letters (Ingersoll),I,344 Incidental Vichy (Miller),m, 165,166 Incidental Numbers (Wylie), Supp. I, Part 2,708

Incidentals (Sandburg), III, 579 "Incipience" (Rich), Supp. I, Part 2, 559 "Incomparable Light, The" (Eberhart),I,541 Independent, The (magazine), II, 397, 401; Supp. I, Part 2,380 "Independent Candidate, The, a Story of Today" (Howeils), II, 277 Index of American Design, Supp. Ill, Part 2,618 "Indian at the Burial-Place of His Fathers, An" (Bryant), Supp. I, Part 1,155-156,167-168 "Indian Burying Ground, The" (Freneau),Supp. II, Part 1,264,266 "Indian Camp" (Hemingway), D, 247248,263 "Indian Student, The" (Freneau), Supp. II, Part 1,264 Indian Summer (Howe\\s),U,275,279281,282 "Indignations of a Senior Citizen" (Updike), Supp. I, Part 2,627 "Individual and the State, The" (Emerson), II, 10 "Individualism,"n,471,478;in,467,483 Individualism, Old and New (Dewey), Supp. I, Part 2,677 "Inevitable Trial, The" (Holmes), Supp. I, Part 1,318 "Infancy" (Wilder), IV, 375 "Infant Boy at Midcentuiy" (Warren), IV, 244-245,252 Inferno (Dante), IV, 139 "Infiltration of the Universe" (MacLeish),III,19 "Infinite Reason, The" (MacLeish), 111,19 "Infirmity" (Lowell), II, 554 "Infirmity" (Roethke), III, 548 Informer, The (film), Supp. Ill, Part 2, 619 Inge, William, IV, 400 Ingersoll, Charles J., 1,344 Ingersoll, Robert Green, Supp. II, Part 1,198 Ingram, John H., Ill, 431 Inhabitants, The (Morris), HI, 221-222 Inheritors (Glaspell), Supp. Ill, Part 1, 175,179-181,186,189 "Inhumanist,The" (Jeffers), Supp. D, Part 2,423,426 "Injudicious Gardening" (Moore), III, 198

Inner Room, The (Merrill), Supp. Ill, Part 1,336 Innocents, The: A Story for Lovers (Lewis), II, 441 Innocents Abroad, The; or, The New Pilgrim's Progress (Twain), II, 275, 434; IV, 191,196,197-198 Innocents at Cedro, The: A Memoir of Thorstein Veblen and Some Others (Duffus), Supp. I, Part 2,650 Inquiry into the Nature of Peace, An (Vebien), Supp. I, Part 2,642 "Inscription for the Entrance to a Wood" (Bryant), Supp. I, Part 1, 154,155,161-162 Inside His Mind (Miller), III, 154 "Insomnia" (Bishop), Supp. I, Part 1, 92 "Insomniac" (Plath), Supp. I, Part 2, 539 "Inspiration for Greatness" (Caldwell),I,291 Instinct of Workmanship and the State of the Industrial Arts, TTie(Veblen), Supp. I, Part 2,642 Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War, The (Trotter), 1,249 Institute (Calvin), IV, 158,160 Instructed Vision, The: Scottish Common Sense Philosophy and the Origins of American Fiction (Martin), Supp. I, Part 1,148-149 "Instruction Manual, The" (Ashbery), Supp. Ill, Part 1,6-7,10,12 "Instruction to Myself (Brooks), Supp. Ill, Part 1,87 Instrument, The (O'Hara), III, 362, 364 Insurgent Mexico (Reed), 1,476 Intellectual Origins of American Radicalism (Lynd), Supp. I, Part 2, 525 "Intellectual Pre-Eminence of Jews in Modern Europe, The" (Veblen), Supp. I, Part 2,643-644 Intellectual Things (Kumtz\Supp.m, Part 1,260,262-264 Intellectual versus the City, The (White), 1,258 Interest of Great Britain Considered, with Regard to Her Colonies and the Acquisition of Canada and Guadeloupe, The (Franklin), 11,119 "International Episode, An" (James), 11,327

INTE-IZVE / 706 International Socialist Review (publication), III, 580,581; Supp. I, Part 2,645 Interpretation of Christian Ethics, An (Niebuhr), III, 298-300,301,302 Interpretation of Music of the XVIIth and XVlIIth Centuries, The (Dolmetsch),m,464 InterpretationsandForecasts:1922-1972 (Mumford), Supp. II9 Part 2,481 Interpretations of Poetry and Religion (Santayana),III,611 Interpreters and Interpretations (Van Vechten),Supp.II9Part 2,729,733734 "Interrogate the Stones" (MacLeish), 111,9 "Interrupted Conversation, An" (Van Vechten), Supp. II, Part 2,735 "Interview, The" (Thurber), Supp. I, Part 2,616 "Interview With a Lemming" (Thurber), Supp. I, Part 2,603 "Interview with Adrienne Rich, An" (Boyd), Supp. I, Part 2,578 "Interview with Adrienne Rich, An" (Bulkin), Supp. I, Part 2,578 "Interview with Adrienne Rich, An" (Shaw and Plotz), Supp. I, Part 2, 578 "Interview with Bernard Malamud" (Frankel), Supp. I, Part 2,453 "Into My Own" (Frost), II, 153 "Into the Night Life..." (Miller), III, 180,184 "Intrigue" (Crane), 1,419 Introductio adPrudentiam (Fuller), D, 111 Introitus (Longfellow), II, 505, 506507 Intruder, The (Maeterlinck), 1,91 Intruder in the Dust (Faulkner), II, 71, 72 "InvertedForest,The"(Salinger),m, 552,572 "Investigations of a Dog" (Kafka), FV,438 "Investiture at Cecconi's" (Merrill), Supp. Ill, Part 1,336 Invisible Man (Ellison), IV, 493; Supp. H, Part 1,40,170,221,224,226-227, 230,231-232,235,236,241-245 Invisible Swords (Fanrell), II, 27,46, 4&-49

Invitation to a Beheading (Nabokov), III, 252-253,254,257-258 "Invitation to the Country, An" (Bryant), Supp. I, Part 1,160 "Invocation to the Social Muse" (MacLeish), III, 15 Ion (Plato), 1,523 Ion (trans. Doolittle), Supp. I, Part 1, 269,274 "lone" (Dunbar), Supp. II, Part 1,199 lonesco, Eugene, 1,71,74,75,84,295; 11,435 "Irenicon" (Shapiro), Supp. II, Part 2, 704 Irish Triangle, An (Barnes), Supp. Ill, Part 1,34 "Iron Characters, The" (Nemerov), 111,279,282 "Iron Hans" (Sexton), Supp. H, Part 2,691 Iron Heel, The (London), II, 466,480 Irony of American History, The (Niebuhr), III, 292,306-307,308 Irvin, William J., Supp. I, Part 1,123 Irving, Ebenezer, D, 296 Irving, John Treat, 0,2% Irving, Peter, II, 296,297,298,299,300, 303 Irving, Pierre M., D, 317 Irving, Sir Henry, IV, 350 Irving, Washington, I, 211, 335, 336, 339,343; 0,295-318,488,495; HI, 113;IV,309;Supp.I,Part 1,155,157, 158,317, Part 2,377,487,585;Supp. II, Part 1,335 Irving, William, 0,296 Irving, William, Jr., O, 296,297,298, 299,303 Irwin, William Henry, Supp. II, Part 1, 192 Is 5 (Cummings), 1,429,430,434,435, 440,445,446,447 "IsitTrue?"(Hughes),Supp.I,Partl, 342 Is Sex Necessary? (Thurber and White), Supp. I, Part 2, 607, 612, 614,653 "Is Verse a Dying Technique?" (Wilson), IV, 431 Isaac (biblical person), IV, 152,296 "Isaac and Archibald" (Robinson), ID, 511,521,523 Isaacs, Edith J. R., HI, 408 Isaacs, Harold, IV, 497

Isaiah (biblical person), Supp. I, Part 1,20-21, Part 2,689 Isaiah (biblical book), Supp. I, Part 1, 236, Part 2,516 "Isaiah Beethoven" (Masters), Supp. I, Part 2,461 Isherwood, Christopher, D, 586; IV, 259; Supp. II, Part 1,10,11,13 "Island" (Hughes), Supp. I, Part 1,340 Island Holiday, An (Henry), 1,515 "Island of the Fay, The" (Poe), III, 412,417 "Islands,The"(Hayden),Supp.n,Part 1,373 Islands in the Stream (Hemingway), 11,258 "Isolation of Modern Poetry, The" (Schwartz), Supp. II, Part 2,644 Israel Potter, or Fifty Years of Exile (Melville), III, 90 "Israfel"(Poe),III,411 "It Always Breaks Out" (Ellison), Supp. II, Part 1,248 It Can't Happen Here (Lewis), II, 454 It Has Come to Pass (Farrell), II, 26 "It Is a Strange Country" (Ellison), Supp. II, Part 1,238 "ItMust Be Abstract" (Stevens), IV, 95 // Was (Zukofsky), Supp. OI, Part 2, 630 // Way the Nightingale (Ford), III, 470471 It's Loaded, Mr. Bauer (Marquand), 111,59 It's Nation Time (Baraka), Supp. II, Part 1,52,53 "It's Nation Time" (Baraka), Supp. n, Part 1,53 Italian Hours (James), 1,12; II, 337 Italian Journeys (Howells), II, 274 "Italian Morning" (Bogan), Supp. Ill, Part 1,58 Italian Villas and Their Gardens (Wharton),IV,308 Itard, Jean-Marc Gaspard, Supp. I, Part 2,564 Ivanhoe (Scott), 1,216; Supp. I, Part 2, 410 Ivask, Ivar, Supp. I, Part 1,96 Ivens, Joris, 1,488 Ives, George H., Supp. I, Part 1,153 Ivory Tower, The (James), II, 337-338 Izvestia (publication), Supp. I, Part 1, 329

J.B.-JAME / 707 /. B.:A Play in Verse (MacLeish), II, 163,228; III, 3,21-22,23 " Jachid and Jechidah" (Singer), IV, 15 Jack and Jill (Alcott), Supp. I, Part 1, 42 Jack Kelso (Masters), Supp. I, Part 2, 456,471-472 Jack Tier (Cooper), 1,354,355 Jackpot (Caldwell), 1,304 Jackson, Amelia, see Holmes, Mrs. Oliver Wendell (Amelia Jackson) Jackson, Andrew, 1,7,20; HI, 473; IV, 192,248,298,334,348;Supp.I,Part 4 456,461,473,474,493,695 Jackson, Biyden, Supp. I, Part 1,337, 348 Jackson, Charles, Supp. I, Part 1,303 Jackson, Esther M., IV, 401 Jackson, George, Supp. I, Part 1,66 Jackson, Helen Hunt, 1,459,470 Jackson, J.O.,m, 213 Jackson, James, Supp. I, Part 1,302, 303 Jackson, Joe, Supp. I, Part 2,441 Jackson, Lydta, see Emerson, Mrs. Ralph Waldo (Lydia Jackson) Jackson, Richard, 0,119 Jackson, Thomas J. ("Stonewall"), IV, 125,126 "Jackson Square" (Levertov), Supp. Ill, Part 1,276 Jacob (biblical person), II, 284: IV, 13, 152; Supp. I, Part 2,594 "Jacob" (Schwartz), Supp. II, Part 2, 663

Jacobs, Robert D., 1,311; D, 222 Jacob's Ladder, The (Levertov), Supp. HI, Part 1,272,276-278,281 "Jacob's Ladder, The" (Levertov), Supp. in, Part 1,278 Jacobson, Dan, IV, 23; Supp. I, Part 1, 70 "Jacquerie, The" (Lanier), Supp. I, Part 1,355,356,360,364,370 Jade Mountain, The (Bynner), II, 527 Jailbird (Vonnegut), Supp. II, Part 2, 760,779-780 "James Baldwin: A Bibliography, 1947-1962" (Fischer), Supp. I, Part 1,70 "James Baldwin: A Checklist, 19471962" (Kindt), Supp. I, Part 1,70 "James Baldwin: A Checklist, 19631967" (Strandley), Supp. I, Part 1, 71

James Baldwin: A Collection of Critical Essays (ed. Kinnamon), Supp. I, Part 1,69 James Baldwin: A Critical Evaluation (O'Daniel), Supp. I, Part 1,69 James Baldwin: A Critical Study (Macebuh), Supp. I, Part 1,69 "James Baldwin: A Question of Identity" (Klein), Supp. I, Part 1,70 "James Baldwin and the 'Literary Ghetto'" (Pratt), Supp. I, Part I,70 "James Baldwin and the Negro Conundrum" (Simmons), Supp. I, Part 1,71 "James Baldwin and Two Footnotes" (Breit), Supp. I, Part 1,69 "James Baldwin as Spokesman" (Jacobson), Supp. I, Part 1,70 "James Baldwin Back Home" (Coles), Supp. I, Part 1,69 "James Baldwin: Caliban to Prospero" (Lee), Supp. I, Part 1,70 "James Baldwin—I Know His Name" (Leaks), Supp. I, Part 1,70 "James Baldwin: The Artist as Incorrigible Disturber of the Peace" (Strandley), Supp. I, Part 1,71 "James Baldwin: The Black and the Red-White-and-Blue" (Hagopian), Supp. I, Part 1,70 "James Baldwin: The Crucial Situation" (Strandley), Supp. I, Part 1, 71 "James Baldwin: The View from Another Country" (McCarthy), Supp. I, Part 1,70 "James Baldwin: Voice of a Revolution" (Spender), Supp. I, Part L, 71 "James Baldwin's 'Agony Way'" (Meserve), Supp. I, Part 1,70 James Baldwin's Go Tell It on the Mountain and Another Country, The Fire Next Time, Giovanni's Room, Notes of a Native Son (Alexander), Supp. I, Part 1,69 "James Baldwin's Other Country" (Sayre), Supp. I, Part 1,71 "James Baldwin's Protest Novel: If Beale Street Could Talk" (Burks), Supp. I, Part 1,69 "James Baldwin's Quarrel with Richard Wright" (Charney), Supp. I, Part 1,69 James I, King, Supp. I, Part 1,116 James II, King, IV, 145

James, Alice, 1,454; 0,365 James, C. L. R., Ill, 97 James, George W., D, 484 James, Henry, 1,4,5,9,10,12,15,16, 20, 52, 93,109, 211, 226, 228,244, 246, 251, 255, 258, 259, 263, 336, 363, 374, 375, 379, 384, 409, 429, 436, 439, 452, 454, 459, 461-462, 463, 464, 485, 500, 504, 513, 514, 517-518,571; n, 38,58,60,73,74, 95,138,140,144,147,196,198,199, 221, 228, 230, 234, 243, 245, 259, 267, 271, 272, 275, 276, 278, 281, 282, 283, 284, 285, 286, 287, 288, 290, 293, 306, 309, 316, 319-341, 365, 398, 404, 410, 415, 427, 444, 542,544,547-548,556,600; III, 44, 51,136,194-195,199,206,208,218, 228-229, 237, 281, 319, 325, 326, 334, 409, 453, 454, 457, 460, 461, 464,511,522,576,607; IV, 8,27,34, 37,40,53,58,73,74,134,168,172, 182, 198, 202, 285, 308, 309, 310, 311, 314, 316, 317, 318, 319, 321, 322, 323, 324, 328, 330, 347, 352, 359,433,439,476; Supp. I, Part 1, 35,38,43,68, Part 2,414,426,454, 608, 609, 612-613, 618, 620, 646; Supp. II, Part 1,94-95; Supp. Ill, Part 1,14,200, Part 2,410,412 James, Henry (father), II, 7,275,321, 337, 342-344, 364, 365; IV, 174; Supp. I, Part 1,300 James, Henry (nephew), II, 360,365 James, William, 1,104,220,224,227, 228,255,454;II, 20,23,27,165,166, 276,321,337,342-366,411;ni,303, 309,509,599,600,605,606,612; IV, 26,27,28-29,31,32,34,36,37,43, 46,291,486,496; Supp. I, Part 1,3, 7,11,20 James, William (grandfather), II, 342 James, William (nephew), II, 365 James Russell Lowell and His Friends (Hale), Supp. I, Part 2,425 James Russell Lowell (Beatty), Supp. I, Part 2,425 James Russell Lowell (Duberman), Supp. I, Part 2,425 "James Russell Lowell" (James), Supp. I, Part 2,426 James Russell Lowell (McGlinchee), Supp. I, Part 2,426 "James Russell Lowell" (Rees), Supp. I, Part 2,425

JAME-JESU / 708 James Russell Lowell (Scudder), Supp. I, Part 2,426 James Russell Lowell- Portrait of a Many-Sided Man (Wagenknecht), Supp. I, Part 2,426 James Thurber (Morsberger), Supp. I, Part 2, 626 -James Thurber" (Pollard), Supp. I, Part 2,468,626 "James Thurber" (White), Supp. I, Part 2,627 "James Thurber: A Critical Study" (Friedrich), Supp. I, Part 2,627 "James Thurber—a Portrait of the Dog-Artist" (MacLean), Supp. I, Part 2,627 "James Thurber and Oral History at Ohio State University" (Branscomb), Supp. I, Part 2,626 "James Thurber and the Short Story" (Albertini), Supp. I, Part 2,626 "James Thurber, Aphorist for an Anxious Age,*' Supp. I, Part 2, 627 "James Thurber: Artist in Humor" (Hasley), Supp. I, Part 2,627 "James Thurber as a Shakespeare Critic" (Soellner), Supp. I, Part 2, 627 James Thurber: His Masquerades, A Critical Study (Black), Supp. I, Part 2,626 "JamesThurber, Humorist" (Arnold), Supp. I, Part 2,626 "James Thurber of Columbus" (Nugent), Supp. I, Part 2,627 "James Thurber: The Columbus Years" (Baker), Supp. I, Part 2, 626 "JamesThurber: The Comic Prufrock" (De Vries), Supp. I, Part 2,627 "James Thurber: The Primitive, the Innocent, and the Individual" (Elias), Supp. I, Part 2,627 u James Thurber's Compounds" (Baldwin), Supp. I, Part 2,626 "James Thurber's Dream Book" (Cowley), Supp. I, Part 2,627 "James Whitcomb Riley (From a Westerner's Point of View)" (Dunbar), Supp. II, Part 1,198 Jameson, Sir Leander Starr, III, 327 Jamison, A. Leland, 1,566 Jammes, Francis, n, 528

"Jan, the Son of Thomas" (Sandburg), III, 593-594 Jane Addams: A Biography (Linn), Supp. I, Part 1,27 "Jane Addams: An American Heroine" (Conway), Supp. I, Part 1,27 "Jane Addams and the Future" (MacLeish), Supp. I, Part 1,27 Jane Addams and the Liberal Tradition (Levine), Supp. I, Part 1,27 "Jane Addams and the Radical Impulse" (Lynd), Supp. I, Part 1,27 "Jane Addams on Human Nature" (Curti), Supp. I, Part 1,27 Jane TalbotA Novel (Brown), Supp. L Part 1,145-146 Janet, Pierre, 1,248,249,252 "Janet Waking" (Ransom), III, 490, 491 Janeway, Elizabeth, Supp. I, Part 1, 46,198 Jantz, Harold S., Supp. I, Part 1,112, 123 Jarrell, Mrs. Randall (Mary von Schrader),II,368,385 Jarrell, Randall, 1,167,169,173,180, 189; fl, 367-590,539-540; III, 134, 194,213,217,268,289,527; IV, 352, 411,422,423,424; Supp. I, Part 1, 89,96, Part 2,552; Supp. II, Part 1, 109,135; Supp. Ill, Part 1,64, Part i541,550 Jarvis, John Wesley, Supp. I, Part 2, 501,520 "Jason" (MacLeish), III, 4 Jaspers, Karl, III, 292; IV; 491 Jay, William, 1,338 "Jazz Age Clerk, A" (Farrell), II, 45 "Jazz Fantasia" (Sandburg), III, 585 "Jazzonia" (Hughes), Supp. I, Part 1, 324 "Jazztet Muted" (Hughes), Supp. I, Part 1,342 "Jeff Briggs's Love Story" (Harte), Supp. II, Part 1,355 Jeffers, Robinson, 1,66; III, 134; Supp. II, Part 2,413-440 Jeffers, Una Call Kuster (Mrs. Robinson Jeff ers), Supp. II, Part 2, 414 Jefferson, Thomas, 1,1,2,5,6-8,14, 485; H, 5,6,134,217,300,301,437; 111,3,17,18,294-295,306,310,473, 608; IV, 133, 243, 249, 334, 348;

Supp. I, Part 1,146,152,153,229, 230,234,235, Part 2,389,399,456, 474, 475, 482, 507, 509, 510, 511, 516,518-519,520,522 "Jefferson Davis as a Representative American" (Du Bois), Supp. II, Part 1,161 Jeffersonian Magazine, Supp. I, Part 2,455 Jelliffe, Robert A., 11,75 J-E-L-L-O (Baraka), Supp. II, Part 1, 47 "Jelly-Bean, The" (Fitzgerald), II, 88 "Jellyfish, A" (Moore), III, 215 Jemie, Onwuchekwa, Supp. I, Part 1, 343,348 Jenkins, J. L., 1,456 Jenkins, Kathleen, III, 403 Jenkins, Susan, IV, 123 Jennie Gerhardt (Dreiser), 1,497,499, 500,501,504-505,506,507,519 "Jennie M'Grew" (Masters), Supp. I, Part 2,468 Jennifer Lorn (Wylie), Supp. I, Part 2, 709,714-717,718,721,724 "Jenny Garrow's Lover" (Jewett), II, 397 "Jerboa, The" (Moore), III, 203,207, 209,211-212 "Jericho" (Lowell), II, 536 Jerome, Judson, III, 289 "Jersey City Gendarmerie, JeT'aime" (Lardner),II,433 "Jesse B. Semple: Negro American" (Davis), Supp. I, Part 1,348 "Jesse B. Semple Revisited and Revised" (Carey), Supp. I, Part 1,348 Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century, The (Parkman), Supp. n, Part 2,597,603-605 Jesus, 1,27,34,68,89,136,552,560, n, 1,16,197,198, 214, 215, 216,218, 219, 239, 373, 377, 379, 537, 538, 539,549,569,585,591,592; HI, 39, 173, 179, 270, 291, 296-297, 300, 303, 305, 307, 311, 339, 340, 341, 342, 344, 345, 346, 347, 348, 352, 353, 354, 355, 436, 451, 489, 534, 564, 566, 567, 582; IV, 51, 69, 86, 107,109, 117, 137, 138, 141, 144, 147, 149, 150, 151, 152, 155, 156, 157,158, 159, 163, 164, 232, 241, 289, 293, 294, 296, 331, 364, 392, 396,418,430; Supp. I, Part 1,2,54,

JESU-JOHN / 709 104, 107, 108, 109, 121, 267, 371, Part 2,379,386,458,515,580,582, 583,587,588,683 "Jesus Asleep*' (Sexton), Supp.II, Part 2; 693 "Jesus Papers, The" (Sexton), Supp. II, Part 2,693 "Jesus Raises Up the Harlot" (Sexton), Supp. II, Part 2,693 "Jeune Parque, La" (Vatery), IV, 92 "Jewbird, The" (Malamud), Supp. I, Part 2,435 "Jewboy,The" (Roth), Supp. Ill, Part 2,412 Jewett, Caroline, 0,396 Jewett, Dr. Theodore Herman,II,396397,402 Jewett, Mary, H, 396,403 Jewett, Mrs. Theodore Furber (Sarah Orne),II,395 Jewett, Sarah Orne, 1,313; II, 391-414; Supp. I, Part 2,495 Jewett, Theodore Furber, D, 395 Jewett family, 11,391 Jewish Daily Forward (newspaper), IV, 2 Jews ofShklov (Schneour), IV, 11 Jig of Forslin, The: A Symphony (Aiken), 1,50,51,57,62,66 "Jilting of Granny Weatherall, The" (Porter), III, 434,435,438 Jim's Book: A Collection of Poems and Short Stories (Merrill), Supp. III, Part 1,319 Joan of Arc, IV, 241; Supp. I, Part 1, 286-288, Part 2,469 Joan, Pope, IV, 165 Job (biblical person), Supp. I, Part 2, 458,722 Job (biblical book), II, 165,166-167, 168; III, 21,199, 512; IV, 13,158; Supp. I, Part 1,125 Job, 77u? (Burroughs and Odier), Supp. Ill, Part 1,97,103 Job, The: An American Novel (Lewis), 11,441 Johannes in Eremo (Mather), Supp. II, Part 2,453 John of the Cross, Saint, 1,585 John the Baptist, 1,389; D, 537,591 John XXIII, Pope, Supp. I, Part 2,492 John (biblical book), 1,68 John Addington Symonds: A Biographical Study (Brooks), I, 240, 241

John Barleycorn (London), II, 467, 481 John Brown (Du Bois), Supp. II, Part ]»171-172 "John Brown" (Emerson), II, 13 "JohnBrown"(Lindsay),Supp.I,Part i393 John Brown: The Making of a Martyr (Warren), IV, 236 John Brown's Body (Benlt), II, 177 John Bull in America; or, The New Munchausen (Paulding), 1,344 "John Burke" (Olson), Supp. II, Part 2,579,580 "John Burns of Gettysburg" (Harte), Supp. II, Part 1,343 "John Carter" (Agee), 1,27 "John Cheever: A Vision of the World" (Bracher), Supp. I, Part 1, 198 "John Cheever and Comedy" (Bracher), Supp. I, Part L, 198 "John Cheever and the Broken World" (Wink), Supp. I, Part 1,199 "John Cheever and the Charms of Innocence: The Craft of The Wapshot Scandal" (Garrett), Supp. I, Part 1,198 "John Cheever and the Grave of Social Coherence" (Burhans), Supp. I, Part 1,198 "John Cheever and the Soft Sell of Disaster" (Aldridge), Supp. I, Part 1,198 "John Cheever: The Art of Fiction LXII" (Grant), Supp. I, Part 1,198 "John Cheever: The Dual Vision of His Art" (Valhouli), Supp. I, Part 1,199 "John Cheever: The Upshot of Wapshot" (Rupp), Supp. I, Part 1, 199 "John Cheever's Country" (Scott), Supp. I, Part 1,199 "John Cheever's Golden Egg" (Hyman), Supp. I, Part 1,198 "John Cheever's Myth of Men and Time: The Swimmer' " (Auser), Supp. I, Part 1,198 "John Cheever's Photograph Album" (Malcolm), Supp. I, Part 1,199 "John Cheever's Sense of Drama" (Burt), Supp. I, Part 1,198 "John Cheever's Stories" (Kees), Supp. I, Part 1,199

"John Coltrane: Where Does Art Come From?" (Baraka), Supp. II, Part 1,60 John Deth: A Metaphysical Legend and Other Poems (Aiken), 1,61 John Endicott (Longfellow), II, 505, 506 "John Evereldown" (Robinson), HI, 524 John G. Whittier: A Profile in Pictures (Wright), Supp. I, Part 2,706 John G. Whittier: The Poet of Freedom (Kennedy),Supp.I,Part 2,705-706 "John Gardner: The Writer As Teacher" (Carver), Supp. Ill, Part 1,136,146-147 John Greenleaf Whittier (Carpenter), Supp. I, Part 2,706 "John Greenleaf Whittier" (Keller), Supp. I, Part 2,705 John GreenleafWhittier(Leary),Suw. I, Part 2,706 John Greenleaf Whittier: A Portrait in Paradox (Wagenknecht), Supp. I, Part 2,706 John Greenleaf Whittier: A Sketch of His Life (Perry), Supp. I, Part 2, 706 John Greenleaf Whittier: An Introduction and Interpretation (Pickard), Supp. I, Part 2,706 John GreenleafWhittier: Friend of Man (Pollard), Supp. I, Part 2,706 John Greenleaf Whittier's Poetry: An Appraisal and a Selection (Warren), Supp. I, Part 2,706 John Keats (Lowell), II, 530-531 "John L. Sullivan" (Lindsay), Supp. I, Part 2,394,395 "John Marr" (Melville), III, 93 John Marr and Other Sailors (Melville), III, 93 John Paul Jones: A Sailor's Biography (Morison), Supp. I, Part 2,494-495 John Sloan: A Painter's Life (Brooks), 1,254 "John Smith Liberator" (Bierce),I,209 "John Steinbeck: No Grapes ofWrath" (Waldmeir), Supp. I, Part 2,478 "John Sutler" (Winters), Supp. n, Part 2,810 "John,John Chinaman" (Buck), Supp. II, Part 1,128 Johnny Appleseed and Other Poems (Lindsay), Supp. I, Part 2,397

JOHN-JUDE / 710 44

Johnny Bear" (Steinbeck), IV, 67 Johnson, Alvin, 1,236 Johnson, Carl L., n, 509 Johnson, Charles, Supp. I, Part 1,325 Johnson, Curtiss S., Supp. I, Part 1, 173 Johnson, Eastman, IV, 321 Johnson, Edward, rV, 157; Supp. I, Part 1, 110,115 Johnson, Elmer D., IV, 472 Johnson, George W., D, 148 Johnson, Gerald W., Ill, 121 Johnson, J.W., HI, 455 Johnson, James Weldon, Supp. I, Part \ 324,325; Supp. II, Part 1,33,194, 200, 202-203, 206-207; Supp. Ill, Part 1,73 Johnson, Lyndon B., 1,254; II, 553,582 Johnson, Martin, D, 484 Johnson, Merle, IV, 212 Johnson, Pamela Hansford, IV, 469, 473 Johnson, Rafer, Supp. I, Part 1,271 Johnson, Richard Colles, 1,120 Johnson,Samuel,n,295;III,491,503; IV, 452; Supp. I, Part 1,33, Part 2, 422,498,503,523,656 Johnson, Thomas H., 1,470-471,473, 564,565; D, 125,533; IV, 144,158, 165 Johnson, W.R., III, 289 Johnson, Walter, H, 422 Johnsrud, Harold, D, 562 Johnston, Mary, D, 194 Johnston, Robert M., Supp. I, Part 1, 369 "Jolly Corner, The" (James), 1,571 Jonah (biblical person), III, 347,348; IV, 152; Supp. I, Part 2,555 44 Jonah" (Lowell), II, 536 44 Jonathan Edwards'* (Holmes), Supp. I, Part 1,302,315 44 Jonathan Edwards in Western Massachusetts" (Lowell), II, 550 Jones, A. R., Supp. I, Part 1,69, Part 2, 548 Jones, Claude E., Ill, 431 Jones, David E., 1,590 Jones, E. Stanley, HI, 297 Jones, Edith Newbold, see Wharton, Edith Jones, Emma Berdis,jrce Baldwin, Mrs. David (Emma Berdis Jones) Jones, Ernest, D, 365

Jones, Everett LeRoi, see Baraka, Amiri Jones, Genesius, 1,590 Jones, George Frederic, IV, 309 Jones, Harry, Supp. I, Part 1,337 Jones, Howard Mumford, 1,119,263, 353,357;!!, 509; Supp. I,Part 2,706 Jones, James, HI, 40; IV, 98,118 Jones, John Paul, D, 405-406; Supp. I, Part 2,479,480,494-495 Jones, Lucretia Stevens Rhinelander, IV, 309 Jones, Major (pseudonym), see Thompson, William T. Jones, Robert Edmond, III, 387,391, 394,399 Jones, Rufus, Supp. I, Part 2,706 Jones family, IV, 311 44 Jones's Private Argyment" (Lanier), Supp. I, Part 1,352 Jonson, Ben, 1,58,358; 0,11,16,17, 18, 436, 556; III, 3, 463, 575-576; IV, 395,453; Supp. I, Part 2,423 Jordy, William H., 1,24 Jo's Boys (Alcott), Supp. I, Part 1,32, 35,40-41,42 Joselyn, Sister M., Ill, 360 Joseph (biblical person), IV, 152 Joseph, Gerhard, 1,143 44 Josephine Has Her Day" (Thurber), Supp. I, Part 2,606 Josephson, Matthew, 1,259 "Jose"s Country" (Winters), Supp. II, Part 2,789,790 Joshua (biblical book), Supp. I, Part 2, 515 Journal (Emerson), Supp. I, Part 1, 309 Journal (Thoreau), IV, 175 44 Journal for My Daughter" (Kunitz), Supp. Ill, Part 1,268 "Journal of a Solitary Man, The" (Hawthorne), II, 226 Journal of American Sociology (publication), Supp. I, Part 2,629 Journal of Political Economy (publication), Supp. I, Part 2,629 Journal of Speculative Philosophy (publication), II, 345,349 Journal of the Fictive Life (Nemerov), III, 267, 268, 269, 272, 273, 274, 280-281,284-285,286,287 Journal of the Plague Year, A (Defoe), 111,423

Journals (Thoreau), Supp. I, Part 1, 299 Journals and Other Documents on the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (ed. Morison), Supp. I, Part 2,494 Journals ofBronson Alcott, The (ed. Shepard), Supp. I, Part 1,46 Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson, The (Emerson), II, 8,17,21 "Journey, The" (Winters), Supp. II, Part 2,795 "Journey, The" (Wright), Supp. Ill, Part 2,605-606 Journey and Other Poems, The (Winters), Supp. II, Part 2,786,794,795, 7%, 799,800,801 Journey Around My Room: The Autobiography of Louise Bogan—A Mosaic (Bogan), Supp. Ill, Part 1, 47,48,52,53 Journey Down, The (Bernstein), IV, 455 Journey too War(Auden-Isherwood), Supp. II, Part 1,13 Journey to Love (Williams), IV, 422 "Journey to Nine Miles" (Walker), Supp. Ill, Part 2,527 Journeyman (Caldwell), I, 297, 302304,307,309 "Joy" (Singer), IV, 9 Joyce, James, 1,53,105,108,130,174, 256, 285, 377, 395, 475-476, 478, 480,483,576; D, 27,42,58,73,74, 198,209,264,320,569; 111,7,16,2627,45,174,181,184,261,273,277, 343,396,398,465,471,474; IV, 32, 73, 85, 95,103,171,182, 211, 286, 370, 412, 418, 419, 428, 434, 456; Supp. I, Part 1,257,262,270, Part 2,437,546,613,620; Supp. II, Part 1,136; Supp. Ill, Part 1,35,36,65, 225,229; Part 2,611,617,618 "Juan'sSong" (Bogan), Supp. ID, Part 1,50 Jubilee (publication), III, 358 Judas (biblical person), II, 449; IV, 66, 357 Judas Maccabeus (Longfellow), 11,506 Judd, Sylvester, II, 290; Supp. I, Part 2, 420 Judd Rankin's Daughter (Glaspell), Supp. Ill, Part 1,186-188 Jude the Obscure (Hardy), Supp. I, Part 1,217

JUDG-KEAT / 711 "Judgement Day" (O'Connor), III, 349,350 "Judgement Marked by a Cellar: The American Negro Writer and the Dialecticof Despair" (Scott), Supp. I, Part 1,71 Judgment Day (Farrell), II, 29,31,32, 34,39 "Judgment of Paris, The" (Merwin), Supp. Ill, Part 1,350 "Judgment of the Sage, The" (Crane), 1,420 Judith (Farrell), II, 46,48 "Jug of Sirup, A" (Bierce), 1,206 "Jugurtha" (Longfellow), II, 499 "Julia" (Hellman), Supp. I, Part 1, 280,293 "Julia Miller" (Masters), Supp. I, Part 2,461 Julius Caesar (Shakespeare), 1,284 "July Midnight" (Lowell), II, 521 Jumel, Madame, Supp. I, Part 2,461 "June Light" (Wilbur), Supp. IE, Part 2,545 June Moon (Lardner and Kaufman), 11,427 "June Recital" (Welty),IV, 272-273 "Juneteenth" (Ellison), Supp. II, Part 1,248 Jung, Carl, I, 58, 135, 241, 248, 252, 402; III, 400,534,543; Supp. I, Part 2,439 Junger, Ernst, Supp. Ill, Part 1,63 Jungle, The (Sinclair), III, 580 "Junior Addict" (Hughes), Supp. I, Part 1,343 "Junk"(Wilbur),Supp.III,Part2,556 Junkie: Confessions of an Unredeemed Drug Addict (Burroughs), Supp. m, Part 1,92,94-96,101 "Jupiter Doke, Brigadier General" (Bierce), 1,204 Jurgen (Cabell),m,394;IV,286;Supp. I, Part 2,718 Jusserand, Jules, D, 338 Just and the Unjust, The (Cozzens), I, 367-370,372,375,377,378,379 "Just Before the War with the Eskimos" (Salinger), III, 559 "Just Boys" (Farrell), II, 45 Just Wild About Harry (Miller), III, 190 Justice, Donald, Supp. Ill, Part 2,541 "Justice" (Hughes), Supp. I, Part 1, 331

Justice and Expediency (Whitter), Supp.I,Part2,686 "Justice Denied in Massachusetts" (Millay),IIL140 Justice of Gold in the Damnation of Sinners, The (Edwards), 1, 559 Juvenal, D, 8, 169, 552

"K, The" (Olson), Supp. II, Part 2, 558,563,569 "Kabnis" (Toomer),Supp.III,Part2, 481,484 Kachel, Elsie, see Stevens, Mrs. Wallace (Elsie Kachel) "Kaddish" (Ginsberg), Supp. II, Part 1,319,327 Kaddish and Other Poems, 1958-1960 (Ginsberg), Supp. II, Part 1,309, 319-320 Kafka, Franz, D, 244,565,569; HI, 51, 253,418,566, 572; IV, 2,113,218, 437-439,442; Supp. I, Part 1,197; Supp. Ill, Part 1,105, Part 2,413 Kahane, Jack, m, 171,178 Kahn,Otto,I,385;IV,123 Kaiser, Georg, 1,479 Kaiser, Henry, Supp. I, Part 2,644 Kalevala (Finnish national poem), II, 503,504 Kallen, Horace, 1,229; 0,365; Supp. I, Part 2,643 Kallman,Chester,n,586;Supp.n,Part 1,15,17,24,26 "Kallundborg Church" (Whittier), Supp. I, Part 2,696 Kalstone, David, Supp. I, Part 1,97, Part 2,578 Kamera Obskura (Nabokov), III, 255 Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby, The (Wolfe), Supp. Ill, Part 2,569,573-576,580, 581 Kane, Patricia, n, 148-149 Kansas City Star (newspaper), II, 259 "Kansas Emigrants, The" (Whittier), Supp. I, Part 2,687 Kant, Immanuel, 1,61,277,278; II, 1011,362,480,580-581,582,583; III, 300,480,481,488,612; IV,90;Supp. I, Part 2,640 Kanter,Hal,IV,383 Kapital, Das (Marx), III, 580 Kaplan, Abraham, 1,277,287

Kaplan, Charles, III, 455 Kaplan, Justin, 1,247-248; IV, 213 Karl Shapiro's America (film), Supp. II, Part 2,703 "Kate Chopin" (Schuyler), Supp. I, Part 1,226 Kate Chopin: A Critical Biography (Seyersted), Supp. I, Part 1, 225, 226 Kate Chopin and Edith Wharton: An Annotated Bibliographical Guide to Secondary Sources (Springer), Supp. I, Part 1,225 Kate Chopin and Her Creole Stories (Rankin), Supp. I, Part 1,200,225, 226 "Kate Chopin's Ironic Vision" (Rocks), Supp. I, Part 1,226 "Kate Chopin's Realism: *At the 'Cadian Ball' and 'The Storm' " (Arner), Supp. I, Part 1,226 "Kate Chopin's The Awakening: A Partial Dissent" (Spangler), Supp. I, Part 1,226 "Kate Chopin's The Awakening in the Perspective of Her Literary Career" (Arms), Supp. I, Part 1,225 "Kathleen" (Whittier), Supp. I, Part 2,693 Katz, Joseph, 1,424,425,426 Kauffmann, Stanley, HI, 452; IV, 119; Supp. I, Part 2,391 Kaufman, George S., H, 427,435,437; 111,62,71-72,394 Kaufmann, Donald L., Ill, 48 Kaufmann, R. J., IV, 448-449 tovanag/i (Longfellow),!, 458; 11,489, 491; Supp. I, Part 2,420 Kazan, Eiia, III, 153, 163; IV, 383; Supp. I, Part 1,66,295 Kazin, Alfred, 1,47,166,248,333,417, 419,426,496,517,520; D, 53,100, 177,195,390,459,584; III, 48, 72, 336,384; IV, 23,71,236,259,330; Supp. I, Part 1,195,1%, 198,294, 295,296,297, Part 2,453,536,631, 647,650, 678,679, 719, 730; Supp. II, Part 1,143 Keane, Sarah, Supp. I, Part 1,100 Kearns, Francis, Supp. I, Part 1,348 Keaton, Buster, 1,31; Supp. I, Part 2, 607

Keats, John, 1,34,103,284,314,317318,385,401,448; II, 82,88,97,214, 368, 512, 516, 53O-531, 540, 593;

KEEL-KIPL / 772 Keats (cont.) HI, 4,10,45,122,133- Kenyan Review (publication), 1,170, 174; D, 536-537; HI, 497,498; IV, 134, 179, 214, 237, 272, 275, 469, 141 485,523; IV, 360,405,416; Supp. I, Part 1,82,183, 266,267,312,349, Keokuk Evening Post (newspaper), IV, 194 362,363,365, Part 2,410,422,424, 539, 552, 675, 719, 720; Supp. Ill, Kepler, Johannes, in, 484; IV, 18 Part 1,73 Keppel, Frederick P., 1,214 "Keela, the Outcast Indian Maiden" "K^ramos" (Longfellow), II, 494 Keramosand Other Poems (Long-fel(Welty),IV,263 low), II, 490 "Keep A-Inchin* Along" (Van Vechten), Supp. II, Part 2,744 Kermode, Frank, IV, 95,133,143,449 "KeepingInformed in D.C" (Nemer- Kern, Jerome, n, 427 ov), III, 287 Kerner, David, 1,143 "'Keeping Their World Large'" Kerouac, Jack, HI, 174; Supp. II, Part 1,31,307,309,318,328; Supp. HI, (Moore), III, 201-202 Part 1,91-94,96,100,217-234 Kees, Weldon, Supp. I, Part 1,199 Kerr, Orpheus C. (pseudonym), see Kegley, Charles W., HI, 313 Newell, Henry Keith, Minor C, 1,483 Kerr, Walter, in, 407 Keller, A. G.,m, 108 Kesey, Ken, III, 558; Supp. Ill, Part 1, Keller, Dean H., Supp. I, Part 1,147 217 Keller, Helen, 1,254,258 Kessler,Jascha,I,189 Keller, Karl, Supp. I, Part 2,705 Kelley, Florence, Supp. I, Part 1,5,7 "Key, The" (Welty), IV, 262 Kellogg, Paul U., Supp. I, Part 1,5,7, Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin, A (Stowe), Supp. I, Part 2,580 12 Kellogg, Reverend Edwin H., HI, 200 "Key West" (Crane), 1,400 Kelly, n, 464 Key West: An Island Sheaf (Crane), I, 385,399-402 Kemble, Gouverneur, n, 298 Khrushchev, Nikita, 1,136 Kemble, Peter, n, 298 Kid, 77ie(Aiken),I,61 Kemler, Edgar, HI, 121 Kempton- Wace Letters, The (London Kid, The (Chaplin), 1,386 Kidder, Tracy, Supp. Ill, Part 1,302 and Strunsky), II, 465 Kiely, Benedict, 1,143 Kendle, Burton, Supp. I, Part 1,199 Kieran, John, n, 417 Kennard, Jean E., 1,143 Kennedy, Albert J., Supp. I, Part 1,19, Kierkegaard, Sdren Aabye, H, 229; HI, 27 292,305,309,572; IV, 438,491 Kieseritsky, L., Ill, 252 Kennedy, Arthur, HI, 153 Kennedy, John F., 1,136,170; 0,49, "Killed at Resaca" (Bierce), 1,202 152-153; m, 38, 41, 42, 234, 411, "Killers, The" (Hemingway), II, 249 415, 581; HI, 229; Supp. I, Part 1, Killing of Sister George, 77i*(Marcus), Supp. I, Part 1,277 291, Part 2,4% Kilmer, Joyce, Supp. I, Part 2,387 Kennedy, John Pendleton, n, 313 Kennedy, Mrs. John F., 1,136 Kim, Kichung, Supp. I, Part 1,70 Kimball, Arthur, Supp. I, Part 1,148 Kennedy, Raymond A., IV, 425 Kennedy, Richard S., IV, 472,473 "Kin" (Welty), IV, 277 Kennedy, Robert F., I, 294; Supp. I, Kind of Order, A Kind of Folly, A: Part 1,52 Essays and Conversations (Kunilz), Kennedy, William Sloane, Supp. I, Part Supp. Ill, Part 1,262,268 4705 "Kind Sir: These Woods" (Sexton), Kenner,Hugh,I,590;ni,217,475,478; Supp. II, Part 2,673 IV, 412,424,425; Supp. I, Part 1, Kindred Spirits: Knickerbocker Writ255,275 ers and American Artists, 1807-1855 Kent, Charles W., Supp. I, Part 1,373 (Callow), Supp. I, Part L, 173 Kent, Rockwell, III, 96 Kindt, Kathleen A., Supp. I, Part 1,70 Kenton, Edna, 1,263; n, 340 Kinfolk (Buck), Supp. II, Part 1,126

King, Alexander, IV, 287 King, Clarence, 1,1 King, Ernest, Supp. I, Part 2,491 King, Fisher, n, 425 King, Lawrence T., 0,222 King, Martin Luther, Supp. I, Part 1, 52,60,65 King, Starr, Supp. II, Part 1,341,342 King Coffin (Aiken), 1,53-54,57 King Jasper (Robinson), III, 523 King Lear (Shakespeare), I, 538; II, 540,551 King Leopold's Soliloquy (Twain),IV, 208 "King of Folly Island" (Jewett), II, 394 "King of the Bingo Game" (Ellison), Supp. II, Part 1,235,238,240-241 "King of the Clock Tower" (Yeats), 111,473 "King of the Desert, The" (O'Hara), 111,369 "Kingof the River" (Kunitz),Supp. m, Part 1,263,267-268 "King of the Sea" (Marquand), III, 60 "King over the Water" (Blackmur), Supp. n, Part 1,107 "King Pandar" (Blackmur), Supp. II, Part 1,92,102 King, Queen, Knave (Nabokov), HI, 251 "King Volmer and Elsie" (Whittier), Supp. I, Part 2,696 KingdomofEarth(Wimams)JlV93S2, 386,387,388,391,393,398 "Kingdom of Earth,The" (Williams), IV, 384 "Kingfishers, The" (Olson), Supp. II, Part 2,557,558-563,582 King's Henchman, The (Millay), III, 138-139 "King's Missive, The" (Whittier), Supp. I, Part 2,694 Kingsblood Royal (Lewis), II, 456 Kingsbury, John, Supp. I, Part 1,8 Kingsley, Sidney, Supp. I, Part 1,277, 281 Kinmont, Alexander, Supp. I, Part 2, 588-589 Kinnamon, Kenneth, Supp. I, Part 1, 69 Kinnell, Galway, Supp. Ill, Part 1, 235-256, Part 2,541 Kinsey, Alfred, IV, 230 "Kipling" (Trilling), Supp. in, Part 2, 495

KIPL-LADI / 713 Kipling, Rudyard, 1,421,587-588; O, 271,338,404,439; III, 55,328,508, 511,521,524,579; IV, 429 Kirk, Clara M., D, 292,293,294 Kirk, Rudolf, 0,292,293,294 Kirk, Russell, 1,590 Kirkham, Edwin Bruce, Supp. I, Part 2,601 Kirkland,Jack,I,297 Kirstein, Lincoln, Supp. II, Part 1,90, 97 "Kiss,The"(Sexton),Supp.II,Part2, 687 Kisslinger, Margaret V., H, 390 Kit Brandon: A Portrait (Anderson), 1,111 Kit O 'Brien (Masters), Supp. I, Part 2, 471 Kittredge, Charmian,£ie London, Mrs. Jack (Charmian Kittredge) "Kitty Hawk" (Frost), II, 164 Kizer, Carolyn, III, 289 Klausner,S.Z.,I,286 Klein, Marcus, 1,166; III, 243; Supp. I, Part 1,70, Part 2,432,453 Klein, Roger, IV, 22 Kleinerman-Goldstein, Channah, IV, 22 Klotman, Phillis, Supp. I, Part 1,348 Klotz, Marvin, IV, 119 Knapp,EdgarH.,I,143 Knapp, Friedrich, III, 100 Knapp, Samuel, 1,336 Kneel to the Rising Sun (Caldwell), I, 304,309 Knepler, Henry, 1,95 Knickerbocker Magazine, D, 314 Knight, Karl F., Ill, 502 "Knight in Disguise, The" (Lindsay), Supp. I, Part 2,390 Knightly Quest, The (Williams), IV, 383 Knight's Gambit (Faulkner), II, 72 "Knights in Disguise: Lindsay and Maiakovski as Poets of the People" (Chlnetier), Supp. I, Part 2,402 Knock, Stanley, F., Jr., HI, 289 "Knocking Around" (Ashbery),Supp. HI, Part 1,22 Knoll, Robert E., 1,590 Knopf, Alfred, III, 99,105,106,107; Supp. I, Part 1,324,325,327 Knopf, Blanche, Supp. I, Part 1,324, 325,327,328,332,341 "Knot, The" (Rich), Supp. I, Part 2, 555

Knox, Frank, Supp. I, Part 2,488,489 Knox, George, 1,287 Knox, Vicesimus, D, 8 Knoxville: Summer of 1915,1,42-46 Kober, Arthur, Supp. I, Part 1,292 Koch, Frederick, IV, 453 Koch, Vivienne, 0,222; m, 194,217; IV, 136,140,143,424 "Kodachromes of the Island" (Hayden),Supp.II,Part 1,367,380 Koestler, Arthur, 1,258; Supp. I, Part 2,671 Kohler, David, IV, 377 Kohler, Dayton, 1,263; D, 608; Supp. I, Part 2,730 Kolbenheyer, Dr. Frederick, Supp. I, Part 1,207 Kon-Tiki (Heyerdahl), II, 477 Konvitz, Milton, n, 23 Kora and Ka (Doolittle), Supp. I, Part 1,270 Koretz,Gene,I,404 Korges, James, 1,311 Kosofsky, Rita Nathalie, Supp. I, Part 2,452 "Kostas Tympakianakis" (Merrill), Supp. Ill, Part 1,326 Kostelanetz, Richard, 1,95,189; III, 47 Kozlenko, William, III, 167; IV, 378, 381,400 Kramer,Dale,Supp.I,Part2,402,478, 626,669,681 Kramer, Hilton, III, 537,550; Supp. I, Part 1,295,296,298 Kramer, Stanley, D, 421,587 Krapp *s Last Tape (Beckett), 1,71; ID, 387 Krause, Sydney J., II, 53; IV, 213; Supp. I, Part 1,148 Kreitman, Esther, IV, 2 Kreitman, Morris, IV, 22 Kreymborg,Alfred,n,530;in,465;IV, 76,95; Supp. I, Part 2,402 Kriegel, Leonard, IV, 449 Kroll, Judith, Supp. I, Part 2,541-543, 544,546,548 Kroner, Richard, III, 313 Kropotkin, Peter, 1,493; Supp. I, Part 1,5 Kruif, Paul de,n, 446 Krutch, Joseph Wood, 1,120; 0,459; III, 407,425,432; IV, 70,175,189; Supp. I, Part 2,627,681 Kublai Khan, III, 395 Kuehl, John, H, 100; III, 242 Kukachin, Princess, III, 395

Kunitz, Stanley, I, 70,179,180,181, 182,189,521; H, 390,545,557; HI, 242,289,550;Supp.III,Part 1,257270 Kuntz, Paul Grimley, HI, 621 Kuropatkin, General Aleksei Nikolaevich, m, 247-248 Kurzy of the Sea (Barnes), Supp. Ill, Part 1,34 Kussy, Bella, IV, 468 La Bruy&re, Jean de, 1,58 La Farge, John, 1,1,2,20; 0,322,338 La Follette, Robert, 1,483,485,492; 111,580 La Fontaine, Jean de, D, 154; HI, 194; IV,80 La France, Marston, 1,426 La France en Liberte" (publication), Supp. in, Part 2,618,621 La Hood, Marvin J., D, 100 La kabbale pratique (Ambelain), Supp. I, Part 1,273,275 La Motte-Fouque*, Friedrich Heinrich Karl, III, 77,78 La Rochefoucauld, Francois de, 1,279; 11,111 "La Rose des Vents" (Wilbur), Supp. Ill, Part 2,550 La Salle and the Discovery of the Great West (Parkman), Supp. II, Part 2, 595,598,605-607 La Terre (Zola), III, 316,322 "La Tigresse" (Van Vechten), Supp. II, Part 2,735,738 La Traviata, (Verdi), III, 139 La Turista (Shepard), Supp. Ill, Part 2,440 Labaree, Leonard, H, 123 "Labours of Hercules, The" (Moore), 111,201 Lachaise, Gaston, 1,434 "Lackawanna" (Merwin), Supp. ID, Part 1,350 Lackawanna Elegy (Goll, trans. Kinnell),Supp.m, Part 1,235,243244 Lacl&de, Pierre, Supp. I, Part 1,205 "Lacquer Prints" (Lowell), H, 524-525 Ladies Almanack (Barnes), Supp. Ill, Part 1,37-39,42 Ladies' Home Journal (magazine), HI, 54,491; Supp. I, Part 2,530 "Ladies in Spring" (Welty) IV, 276277

LADY-LARG / 714 LadyAudley'sSecret(Braddon),Suw I, Part 1,35,36 "Lady Bates" (Jarrell), II, 38O-381 Lady Chatterley's Lover (Lawrence), III, 170; IV, 434 "Lady from Redhorse, A" (Bierce), I, 203 Lady Is Cold, The (White), Supp. I, Part 2,653 "Lady Lazarus'* (Plath), Supp. I, Part 2,529,535,542,545 LadyofAroostook, 77ii?(Howells),II, 280 "Lady of the Lake, The" (Malamud), Supp. I, Part 2,437 Lady Sings the Blues (film), Supp. I, Part 1,67 "Lady Wentworth" (Longfellow), II, 505 "Lady with theHeron, The" (Merwin), Supp. Ill, Part 1,343 "Lady's Maid's Bell,The" (Wharton), IV, 316 Lafayette, Marquis de, 1,344,345; O, 405-406; Supp. I, Part 2,510,511, 683 Laforgue, Jules, 1,386,569,570,572573,575,576; n, 528; HI, 8,11,466; IV, 37,79,80,122 "Lager Beer" (Dunbar), Supp. II, Part 1,193 Laing, R. D., Supp. I, Part 2,527 Laird, CO., 0,318 L'Alouette (Anouilh), Supp. I, Part 1, 286-288 Lamb, Charles, HI, 111, 207 Lambert, Mary, see Paine, Mrs. Thomas (Mary Lambert) "Lame Shall Enter First, The" (0'Connor),m,348,351,352,355, 356-357,358 "Lament" (Wilbur), Supp. m, Part 2, 550 "Lament for Saul and Jonathan" (Bradstreet), Supp. I, Part 1, 111 "Lament of a New England Mother, The"(Eberhart),I,539 Lamia (Keats), II, 512; III, 523 Lamm, Martin, III, 407 Lament, Corliss, D, 52 LampforNlghtfaHA (Caldwell),I,297 Lampoon (publication), III, 52,600; IV, 218 Lampton, Jane, see Clemens, Mrs. John Marshall (Jane Lampton)

Lancelot (Percy), Supp. ID, Part 1, 384,395-396 Lancelot (Robinson), III, 513,522 "Land" (Emerson), II, 6 "Land beyond the Blow, The" (Bierce), 1,209 Landofthe Free— U.S.A. (MacLeish), 1,293; HI, 16-17 LandofUnlikeness (Lowell), II, 537538,539,547 Landess, Thomas H., H, 222 Landlord at Lion's Head, The (Howells), II, 276,287-288 Landon, Harold R., in, 313 Landor, Walter Savage, HI, 15, 469; Supp. I, Part 2,422 "Landscape as a Nude" (MacLeish), 111,14 "Landscape Chamber, The" (Jewett), 11,408-409 "Landscape Painter, A" (James), H 322 "Landscape Symbolism in Kate Chopin's4AtFault'"(Arner),Supp. I, Part 1,226 "Landscape: The Eastern Shore" (Barth),I,122 Lane, Cornelia, see Anderson, Mrs. Sherwood Lane, Homer, Supp. II, Part 1,6 Lane, R.W.,D, 484 Langdon, Olivia, see Clemens, Mrs. Samuel Langhorne (Olivia Langdon) Lange, Carl Georg, D, 350 Lange, Dorothy, 1,293 Langland, Joseph, III, 542 Langner, Lawrence, HI, 407 Langston Hughes (Emanuel),Supp.I, Part 1,348 Langston Hughes, a Biography (Meltzer), Supp. I, Part 1,348 Langston Hughes, American Poet (Walker), Supp. m, Part 2,530-531 Langston Hughes, an Introduction to His Poetry (Jemie), Supp. I, Part 1, 348 "Langston Hughes as Playwright" (Turner), Supp. I, Part 1,348 Langston Hughes, Black Genius (O'Daniel), Supp. I, Part 1,348 "Langston Hughes, Cool Poet" (Hughes), Supp. I, Part 1,348 "Langston Hughes, His Style and His Optimism" (Spencer), Supp. I, Part 1,348

Langston Hughes Reader, The (Hughes), Supp. I, Part 1,345 "Langston Hughes's Jesse B. Semple and the Blues" (Klotman), Supp. I, Part 1,348 Language As Gesture (Blackmur), Supp. II, Part 1,108 Language asSymbolicAction (Burke), 1,275,282,285 Language in Thought and Action (Hayakawa),I,448 "Language, Visualization and the Inner Library" (Shepard), Supp. Ill, Part 2,436,438,449 Lanier, Clifford, Supp. I, Part 1,349, 350,353,355,356,371 Lanier, James F. D., Supp. I, Part 1, 350 Lanier, Mrs. Robert Sampson (Mary Jane Anderson), Supp. I, Part 1, 349 Lanier, Mrs. Sidney (Mary Day), Supp. I, Part 1, 351, 355, 357, 361, 362, 364,370,371 Lanier, Robert Sampson, Supp. I, Part 1,349,351,355,356,361 Lanier, Sidney, IV, 444; Supp. I, Part 1,349-373, Part 2,416 "Lanier as Poet" (Parks), Supp. I, Part 1,373 "Lanier's Reading" (Graham), Supp. I, Part 1,373 "Lanier's Use of Science for Poetic Imagery" (Beaver), Supp. I, Part 1, 373 Lannegan, Helen, see Caldwell, Mrs. Erskine Lannin, Paul, 11,427 Lansner, Kermit, 1,287 Lanthenas, Francois, Supp. I, Part 2, 515 Lao-tse, HI, 173,189,567 "Lapis Lazuli" (Yeats), 1,532; III, 40 Laplace, Pierre Simon de, III, 428 Lapouge, M. G., Supp. I, Part 2,633 Lapsiey, Gaiilard, IV, 329 Larbaud, Vatery, IV, 404 Lardner, John, D, 437 Lardner, Ring, 1,487; D, 44, 91,259, 263,415-438;III,566,572;rV,433; Supp. I, Part 2,609 "Lardner, Shakespeare and Chekhov" (Matthews), II, 430 "Large Bad Picture" (Bishop), Supp. I, Part 1,73,8O-82,85,86,89,90

LARG-LE / 775 "Large Coffee" (Lardner), II, 437 Largo (Handel), IV, 369 Lark, The (Heilman), Supp. I, Part 1, 286-288,297 Larkin, Philip, Supp. I, Part 2,536 Larsen, Erling, 1,47 Larsen, Nella, Supp. I, Part 1,325,326 "Larval Stage of a Bookworm" (Mencken), III, 101 "Las Vegas (What?) Las Vegas (Can't Hear You! Too Noisy) Las Vegas!! !!" (Wolfe), Supp. Ill, Part 2, 572 Lasch, Christopher, 1,237,259; Supp. I, Part 1,27 Laser, Marvin, III, 574 Lask, Thomas, III, 576 Laski,Harold,Supp.I,Part 2,632,643 Laskowsky, Henry J., 1,565 Lassalle, Ferdinand, IV, 429 Last Adam, TTie(Cozzens), 1,362-363, 364,368,375,377,378,379 LastAnalysis, The (Bellow), 1,152,160, 161 Last and Lost Poems of Delmore Schwartz (ed. Phillips), Supp. II, Part 2,661,665 "Last Day in the Field,The" (Gordon), 11,200 "Last Day of the Last Furlough" (Salinger), III, 552-553 "Last Days of Alice" (Tate), IV, 129 "Last Days of John Brown, The" (Thoreau),IV,185 Last Decade, The (Trilling), Supp. Ill, Part 2,493,499 "Last Demon, The" (Singer), IV, 15, 21 Last Exit to Brooklyn (Selby), Supp. Ill, Part 1,125 Last Flower, The (Thurber), Supp. I, Part 2,610 Last Gentleman, The (Percy), Supp. III, Part 1,383-388,392-393 "Last Good Country, The" (Hemingway), II, 258-259 "Last Hiding Places of Snow, The" (Kinnell), Supp. Ill, Part 1,252 Last Laugh, Mr. Moto (Marquand), 111,57 "Last Leaf, The" (Holmes), Supp. I, Part 1,302,309 "Last Leaf, The" (Porter), III, 444 "Last Look at the LUacs" (Stevens), IV, 74

"Last Mohican, The" (Malamud), Supp. I, Part 2,437-438,450,451 Last Night of Summer, r/u?(Caldwell), 1,292-293 Last of the Mohicans, The (Cooper), I, 341,342,349 "Last of the Valerii,The" (James), II, 327 "Last One, The" (Merwin), Supp. Ill, Part 1,355 Last Puritan, 77u?(Santayana),in,64, 600,604,607,612,615-617 "Last Ride Together, The" (Browning), 1,468 "Last River, The" (Kinnell), Supp. fll, Part 1,236 Last Tycoon, The (Fitzgerald), II, 84, 98 "Lastness" (Kinnell), Supp. Ill, Part 1, 248-249 "Late" (Bogan), Supp. Ill, Part 1,53 "Late Air" (Bishop), Supp. I, Part 1, 89 "Late Encounter with the Enemy, A" (O'Connor), III, 345 Late George Apley, The (Marquand), n, 482-483; III, 50, 51, 52, 56-57, 58,62-64,65,66 Late George Apley, The (Marquand and Kaufman), III, 62 Late Settings (Merrill), Supp. Ill, Part 1,336 "Late Sidney Lanier,The" (Stedman), Supp. I, Part 1,373 "Late Subterfuge" (Warren), IV, 257 "Late Walk, A" (Frost), II, 153 Latest Literary Essays and Addresses (Lowell), Supp. I, Part 2,407 Latham, Aaron, II, 100 Latham, Edyth, 1,289 Lathrop, G. P., n, 245 Lathrop, George Parsons, Supp. I, Part 1,365 Lathrop, H. B., Supp. Ill, Part 2,612 Lathrop, Julia, Supp. I9 Part 1,5 Lathrop, Rose, H, 245 Latierede Trianon, La (Wekerlin),!!, 515 Latimer, Hugh, D, 15 "Latter-Day Warnings" (Holmes), Supp. I, Part 1,307 Laud, Archbishop, D, 158 "Lauds" (Auden), Supp. II, Part 1,23 "Laughing Man, The" (Salinger), III, 559

Laughing to Keep From Crying (Hughes), Supp. I, Part 1,329-330 Laughlin, J. Laurence, Supp. I, Part 2, 641 Laughlin, James, HI, 171,242 Laughlin, Jay, Supp. II, Part 1,94 Laughter in the Dark (Nabokov), III, 255-258 "Launcelot" (Lewis), II, 439-440 "Laura Dailey's Story" (Bogan), Supp. Ill, Part 1,52 Laurel, Stan, Supp. I, Part 2,607 Laurence, Dan H., D, 338-339 Laurens, John, Supp. I, Part 2,509 Lauter,Paul,I,449 Lautr£amont, Comte de, III, 174 "Law Lane" (Jewett), II, 407 Lawd Today (Wright), IV, 478,492 Lawrence, D. H., 1,291,336,357,377, 522,523;!!, 78,84,98,102,264,517, 523,532,594,595; III, 27,33,40,44, 46,172,173,174,178,184,229,261, 423, 429, 432, 458, 546-547; IV, 138,339,342,351,380;Supp.I,Part 1,227,230,243,252,255,257,258, 263,275,329, Part 2,546,613,728; Supp. II, Part 1,1,9,20,89 Lawrence, Rhoda, Supp. I, Part 1,45 Lawrence, Seymour, 1,70 Lawrence family, D, 513 Lawrence of Arabia (Aldington), Supp. I, Part 1,259 Lawrence of Arabia (film), Supp. I, Part 1,67 Lawry,JonS.,I,120 Lawson, John Howard, 1,479,482 Lawton Girl, The (Frederic), II, 132133,144 "Lay Preacher" (Dennie), Supp. I, Part 1,125 "Layers, The" (Kunitz), Supp. in, Part 1,260,266-267 "Layers, The: Some Notes on The Abduction'" (Kunitz), Supp. Ill, Part 1,266 "Lay-mans Lamentation, The" (Taylor), IV, 162-163 Laiarillo de Tormes (Mendoza), III, 182 Lazarus Laughed (O'Neill), III, 391, 395-3% Le Bien Informe (newspaper), Supp. I, Part 2,518 Le Clair, Robert C, n, 365 Le Conte, Joseph, 11,479; 111,227-228

LE-LETT / 776 Le c ourant abolitionist e dans la Iitteratureamericainedel808dl861 (Rivifcre), Supp. I, Part 2,426 Le cultivateur americain: £tude sur Voeuvre de Saint John de Crevecoeur (Rice), Supp. I, Part 1, 252 Le Style ApoUinaire(Zxkof*ky),Supp. Ill, Part 2,616 "Lemaraisducygne"(Whittier),Supp. I, Part 2,687 Lea, Luke, IV, 248 "LEADBELLY GIVES AN AUTOGRAPH" (Baraka), Supp. II, Part 1,49 Leaflets (Rich), Supp. I, Part 2,551, 556-557 "League of American Writers, The: Communist Organizational Activity Among American Writers 19291942" (Wolfe),SuppJn, Part 2,568 League of Brightened Philistines and Other Papers, The (Farrell), II, 49 Leaks, Sylvester, Supp. I, Part 1,70 Leaning Tower and Other Stories, The (Porter), III, 433,442,443-447 "Leaning Tower, The" (Porter), III, 442,443,446-447 Lear, Edward, HI, 428,536 Learned Ladies, The (Moli&re, trans. Wilbur), Supp. Ill, Part 2,560 "Learning a Dead Language" (Merwin), Supp. Ill, Part 1,345 "Learning to Read" (Harper), Supp. II, Part 1,201-202 Leary, Lewis, 1,263; III, 478; IV, 212, 213; Supp. I, Part 1,226,319,373, Part 2,706 Leather-Stocking Tales, The (Cooper), 1,335 LeatherwoodGod, 77M?(Howells),II, 276,277,288 Leavesfrom the Notebook of a Tamed Cynic (Niebuhr), III, 293 Leaves of Crass (Whitman), II, 8; IV, 331, 332, 333, 334, 335, 336, 340, 341-342,348,350,405,464;Supp. I, Part 1,365, Part 2,416,579; Supp. III, Part 1,156 "Leavesof Grass" (Whitman), IV, 463 Leaves of the Tree, The (Masters), Supp. I, Part 2,460 "Leaving" (Wilbur), Supp. ffl, Part 2, 563

Leavis, F. R., 1,263,522; III, 462-463, 475,478; Supp. I, Part 2,536 "Leavis-Snow Controversy, The" (Trilling), Supp. Ill, Part 2,512 Leavitt, Jonathan, 1,564 Lechlitner, Ruth, IV, 424 "Lecture, The" (Singer), IV, 21 "LECTURE PAST DEAD CATS" (Baraka), Supp. II, Part 1,52 Lectures in America (Stein), IV, 27, 32,33,35,36,41,42 "Lectures on Poetry" (Bryant), Supp. I, Part 1,159,161 Lectures on Rhetoric (Blair), II, 8 "Leda and the Swan" (Yeats), III, 347 Lee, Brian, Supp. I, Part 1,70 Lee, C. P., Supp. I, Part 2,402 Lee, Charlotte I, III, 550 Lee, Don L.,see Madhubuti, Haki R. Lee, Gypsy Rose, 0,586; III, 161 Lee, James W., Ill, 574 Lee, Robert E., 0,150,206; IV, 126; Supp. I, Part 2,471,486 Lee, Samuel, IV, 158 Lee (Masters), Supp. I, Part 2,471 Leeds, Barry, H., Ill, 48 Leeds, Daniel, D, 110 Leeds, Titan, D, 110, 111 "Leesof Happiness,The" (Fitzgerald), 0,88 LeFevre, Louis, D, 318 Left Front Anvil (publication), IV, 476 Legacy of Fear, A (Farrell), II, 39 Legacy of the Civil War, The: Meditations on the Centennial (Warren), IV,236 "Legal Tender Act, The" (Adams), I, 5 "Legend of Duluoz, The" (Kerouac), Supp. Ill, Part 1,218,226,227,229 "Legend of Lillian Hellman, The" (Kazin), Supp. I, Part 1,297 "Legend of Monte del Diablo, The" (Harte), Supp. D, Part 1,339 "Legend of Sammtstadt, A" (Harte), Supp. II, Part 1,355 "Legend of Sleepy Hollow, The" (Irving), II, 306-308 "Legendary Mr. Thurber, The" (Walker), Supp. I, Part 2,627 Legends (Lowell), II, 525-526 Legends of New England (Whittier), Supp. I, Part 2,684,692 Legends of the West (Hall), II, 313

Legge, James, III, 472 Leggett, William, Supp. I, Part 1,157 Lehan, Richard, 1,520; fl, 100 Lehmann, Paul, III, 311,313 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm von, D, 103; ffl, 428 Leibowitz, Herbert A., 1,386,404; IV, 23 Leisy, E. E., H, 318 Leivick,H.,IV,6 Lekachman, Robert, Supp. I, Part 2, 648 Leland, Charles, Supp. II, Part 1,193 Leland, Charles Godfrey, 1,257 Lemay, J. A. Leo, 0,125 Lenin, V. I., 1,366,439,440; III, 14-15, 262, 475; IV, 429, 436, 443-444; Supp. I, Part 2,647 "Lenore"(Poe),III,411 Leonidas, King, n, 121 "Leopard Man's Story, The" (London), II, 475 Leopardi, Giacomo, D, 543 Lerner, Arthur, 1,70 Lerner, Max, I, 237; III, 60; Supp. I, Part 2,629,630,631,647,650,654 Les Miserables (Hugo), II, 179; Supp. I, Part 1,280 Leskov, Nikolai, IV, 299 Lessing, Gotthold, Supp. I, Part 2,422 "Lesson,The" (Dunbar), Supp. II, Part 1,199 Lesson of the Masters: An Anthology of the Novel from Cervantes to Hemingway (ed. Cowley-Hugo), Supp. II, Part 1,140 "Lesson on Concealment, A" (Brown), Supp. I, Part 1,133 "'Lesson on Concealment, A': Brockden Brown's Method in Fiction" (Berthoff), Supp. I, Part 1,148 "Let America Be America Again" (Hughes), Supp. I, Part 1,331 "Let No Charitable Hope" (Wylie), Supp. I, Part 2,713-714,729 Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (Agee and Evans), 1,25,27,35,36-39,42, 45,293 Let Your Mind Alone/ (Thurber), Supp. I, Part 2,608 L6targeez,J.,IV,259 Letter (publication), 1,206 "Letter..." (Whittier), Supp. I, Part 2, 687

LETT-LIBR / 777 "Letter, A" (Bogan), Supp. Ill, Part 1, 54 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), Supp. II, Part 1,80, 81 "Letter, The" (Malamud), Supp. I, Part 2,435-436 "Letter about Money, Love, or Other Comfort, If Any, The'* (Warren), IV, 245 "Letter from a Region in My Mind" (Baldwin),,**?* "Down at the Cross" "Letterfrom Aldermaston" (Merwin), Supp. Ill, Part 1,347 Letterfrom Li Pot A (Aiken), 1,68 "Letter from Vachel Lindsay, A" (Aiken), Supp. I, Part 2,402 "Letter, May 2,1959" (Olson), Supp. II, Part 2,579,580 "Letter on Celine" (Kerouac), Supp. III, Part 1,232 "Letter to Abb6 Raynal" (Paine), Supp. I, Part 2,510 "Letter to American Teachers of History, A" (Adams), 1,19 "Letter to E. Franklin Frazier" (Baraka), Supp. II, Part 1,49 "Letter to Elaine Feinstein" (Olson), Supp. II, Part 2,561 "Letter to George Washington" (Paine), Supp. I, Part 2,517 "Letter to His Brother" (Berryman), 1,172,173 Letter to His Countrymen, A (Cooper), 1,346,347,349 Letter to Lord Byron (Auden), Supp. II, Part 1,11 "Letter to Lord Byron" (Mumford), Supp. II, Part 2,494 "Letter to Mr. " (Poe), III, 411 "Letter to the Rising Generation, A" (Comer), 1,214 "Letter Writer, The" (Singer), IV, 2021 Letter* (Cato), II, 114 Letters (Landor), Supp. I, Part 2,422 Letters (Pound), Supp. I, Part 1,275 Letters (White), Supp. I, Part 2, 651, 653,675,680 Letters (Wolfe), IV, 462

Letters and Leadership (Brooks), I, 228,240,245,246 Letters from an American Farmer (Crfcvecoeur), Supp. I, Part 1,227251 Letters from the Earth (Twain), IV, 209 Letters from the East (Bryant), Supp. I, Part 1,158 Letters of a Traveller (Bryant), Supp. I, Part 1,158 Letters of a Traveller, Second Series (Bryant), Supp. I, Part 1,158 Letters of Emily Dickinson, The (eds. Johnson and Ward), 1,470 Letters of Nicholas Vachel Lindsay to A. Joseph Armstrong (ed. Armstrong), Supp, I, Part 2,402 Letters of William James (ed. Henry James), II, 362 Letters on Various Interesting and Important Subjects... (Freneau), Supp. II, Part 1,272 Letters to a Niece (Adams), 1,22 "Letters to Dead Imagists" (Sandburg), 1,421 "Letters Written on a Ferry While Crossing Long Island Sound" (Sexton), Supp. II, Part 2,683 "Letting Down of the Hair, The" (Sexton), Supp. II, Part 2,692 Letting Go (Roth), Supp. Ill, Part 2, 403,404,409-412 Levels of the Game (McPhee), Supp. Ill, Part 1,292,294,301 Levenson, J. C, 1,24 Levertov, Denise, Supp. HI, Part 1, 271-287, Part 2,541 "Leviathan" (Lowell), II, 537,538 "Leviathan" (Merwin), Supp. Ill, Part 1,345 Levin, David, 1,565; Supp. I, Part 1,70 Levin, Harry, D, 246; Supp. I, Part 2, 647 Levine, Daniel, Supp. I, Part 1,27 Levine, Philip, Supp. Ill, Part 2,541 Le Violde Lucrece (Obey), IV, 356 L£vi-Strauss, Claude, Supp. I, Part 2, 636 Leviten, David, IV, 425 Levitt, Helen, 1,47 Levy, G. Rachel, Supp. I, Part 2,567 Levy Mayer and the New Industrial Era (Masters), Supp. I, Part 2,473

Lewes, George Henry, D, 569 Lewis, Allan, 1,95 Lewis, C. Day, D, 171; III, 527 Lewis, Dr. Claude, 0,442 Lewis, Edith, 1,313,333 Lewis, Edwin, J., n, 439,442 Lewis, Grace Hegger, 0,460 Lewis, John L., 1,493 Lewis, Lilburn, IV, 243 Lewis, Lucy, IV, 243 Lewis, Meriwether, 0,217; III, 14; IV, 179,243,283 Lewis, Michael, D, 451,452 Lewis, Mrs. Sinclair (Dorothy Thompson), II, 449-450,451,453, 461 Lewis, Mrs. Sinclair (Grace Livingston Hegger), II, 441 Lewis, R. W. B., 1,386,404,561,566; D, 246,457-158; IV, 72,354; Supp. I, Part 1,233 Lewis, Sinclair, 1,116, 212, 348, 355, 362,374,378,487,495; II, 27,34,74, 79,271,277,306,439-461, 474; III, 28,40,51,60,61,63-64,66,70,71, 106,394,462,572,606; IV, 53,326, 366,455,468,475,482; Supp. I, Part 2,378,613,709 Lewis, Wyndham, III, 458, 462, 465, 470; Supp. Ill, Part 2,617 Lexicon Tetraglotton (Howell),II, 111 Leyda,Jay,I,473;III,97 Leyte (Morison), Supp. I, Part 2,491 Li T'ai-po, 11,526 "Liar, The" (Baraka), Supp. O, Part 1, 36 "Liars, The" (Sandburg), III, 586 Libation Bearers, The(Aeschylus), III, 398 Liber Brunenesis (yearbook), IV, 286 Libera, Padre, H, 278 Liberal Imagination, The (Trilling), HI, 308; Supp. II, Part 1,146; Supp. Ill, Part 2,495,498,501-504 "Liberation" (Winters), Supp. D, Part 2,791 L&erator (publication), IV, 427; Supp. I, Part 1,321, Part 2,588,688 "Liberty Tree" (Paine), Supp. I, Part 2,505 "Library of Law, A" (MacLeish), III, 4 Library of Poetry and Song, The, Supp. I, Part 1,158

LICE-LINO / 718 Lice, The (Merwin), Supp. Ill, Part 1, 339,341-342,346,348,349,355 Lichtenstein, Roy, Supp. I, Part 2,665 Lie Down in Darkness (Styron), IV, 98,99,100-104,105,111 Lie of the Mind, A (Shepard), Supp. Ill, Part 2,433,435,441,447-449 Liebestod (Wagner), 1,284,395 Liebling,A.J.,IV,290,307 Lies Like Truth (durman), IV, 385 Life (magazine), 1,296; Supp. I, Part 2, 676 Life and Gabriella (Glasgow), II, 175, 176,182-183,184,189 Life and Letters of Harrison Gray Otis, Federalist, 1765-1848, The (Morison), Supp. I, Part 2,480-481 Life and Letters of John Greenleaf Whittier (Pickard), Supp. I, Part 2, 706 Life and Letters of Oliver Wendell //o/m«?5(Morse),Supp.I,Part 1,319 Life and the Dream (Colum), Supp. I, Part 2,730 Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, Writtenby Himself, The (Douglass), Supp. Ill, Part 1,155,159-163 "Life as a Visionary Spirit" (Eberhart), 1,540,541 Life at Happy Knoll (Marquand), III, 50,61 "Life Cycle of Common Man" (Nemerov),III,278 Life for Life's Sake (Aldington), Supp. I, Part 1,256,275 Life in the Forest (Levertov), Supp.ID, Part 1,282-283 "Life Is Fine" (Hughes), Supp. I, Part 1,334,338 "Life Is Motion" (Stevens), IV, 74 Life Is My Song (Fletcher), Supp. I, Part 1,275 Life of Albert Gallatin, The (Adams), 1,6,14 "Life of Charles Brockden Brown" (Prescott), Supp. I, Part 1,148 Life of Charles Brockden Brown, The (Dunlap), Supp. I, Part 1,148 Life of Forms, The (Fociilon), IV, 90 Life of George Cabot Lodge, The (Adams), 1,21 Life of George Washington (Irving), II, 314,315-316 "Life of Irony, The" (Bourne), 1,219

"Life of John Greenleaf Whittier,The" (Woodwell), Supp. I, Part 2,706 "LifeofUncolnWest,The''(Brooks), Supp. Ill, Part 1,86 Life of Michelangelo (Grimm), II, Life of Oliver Goldsmith, The, with Selections from His Writings (Irving), II, 315 Life ofPhips (Mather), Supp. II, Part 2> 451,452,459 Life of Samuel Johnson (Boswe 11), Supp. I, Part 2,656 Life of Savage (Johnson), Supp. I, Part 1523 Life of the Drama, The (Bentley), IV, 3% Life of Thomas Paine, author of Rights of Men, With a Defence of his Writings (Chalmers), Supp. I, Part £514 Life of Thomas Paine, The( Cob belt), Supp. I, Part 2, 517 Lif eon the Mississippi (Twain), 1, 209; IV, 198, 199; Supp. I, Part 2, 440 Life Story (Baker), II, 259 Life Studies (Lowell), I, 400; II, 384, 386,543,546-550,551,555;Supp.I, Part 2, 543 "Life That Is, The" (Bryant), Supp. I, Part 1,169 "Life You Save May Be Your Own, The" (O'Connor), HI, 344,350,354 "Lifeguard" (Updike), IV, 226 "Ligeia" (Poe), III, 412, 414 Light, James F., IV, 290, 306, 307 "Light Comes Brighter, The" (Roethkc), HI, 529^530 "Light from Above" (Eberhart), 1, 541 Light in August (Faulkner), II, 63-64, 65, 74; IV, 207 "Light Man, A" (James), II, 322 "Light of the World, The" (Hemingway), II, 249 "LightningRodMan,The" (Melville), 111,90 Lijegren, S. R., IV, 213 "Like Decorations in a Nigger Cemetery" (Stevens), IV, 74, 79 "LIKE,THIS IS WHAT I MEANT!" (Baraka), Supp. II, Part 1, 59 Li'lAbner (Capp), IV, 198 "Lilacs" (Lowell), II, 527 "Ulacs,The" (Wilbur), Supp. Ill, Part 2,557-558

Lillian Hellman (Adler), Supp. I, Part 1,297 Lillian Hellman (Falk), Supp. I, Part 1,297 "Lillian Hellman on her Plays" (Stern), Supp. I, Part 1,298 Lillian Hellman: Playwright (Moody), Supp. I, Part 1,280,298 Liilo, George, 0,111,112 "Lily Daw and the Three Ladies" (Welty),IV,262 Lima, Agnes de, 1,231,232 "Limits" (Emerson), II, 19 Lincoln, Abraham, 1,1,4,30; II, 8,13, 135,273,555,576;m,576,577,580, 584, 587-590, 591; IV, 192, 195, 298,347,350,444; Supp. I, Part 1, 2,8,26,309,321, Part 2,379,380, 382, 385, 390, 397, 399, 418, 424, 454, 456, 471, 472, 473, 474, 483, 579,687 Lincoln, Mrs. Thomas (Nancy Hanks), 111,587 Lincoln, Thomas, III, 587 Lincoln: The Man (Masters), Supp. I, Part 2,471,473-474 "Lincoln Relics, The" (Kunitz), Supp. HI, Part 1,269 "Lincoln's Man of Letters" (O'Daniel), Supp. I, Part 1,348 Lind, Use, 11,341 Lindbergh, Charles A., 1,482 Linden, Stanton J., Ill, 242 "Linden Branch, The" (MacLeish),

01,19,20

Lindner, Carl M., Supp. I, Part 2,627 Lindsay, Howard, III, 284 Lindsay, John, Supp. I, Part 2,374 Lindsay, Mrs. Vachel (Elizabeth Connors), Supp. I, Part 2,398,399,473 Lindsay, Mrs. Vachel Thomas (Esther Catherine Frazee), Supp. I, Part 2, 374,375,384-385,398 Lindsay,Olive,Supp.I,Part 2,374,375, 392 Lindsay, Vachel, I, 384; D, 263, 276, 530; ffl, 5,505; Supp. I, Part 1,324, Part 2,374-403,454,473,474; Supp. Ill, Part 1,63,71 Lindsay, Vachel Thomas, Supp. I, Part 2,374,375 "Lindsay and the Blood of the Lamb" (Orel), Supp. I, Part 2,402 "Lindsay/Masters/Sandburg: Criticism

LIND-LITT / 779 from 1950-75" (White), Supp. I, Part 2,401 "Lindsay's General William Booth: A Bibliographical and Textual Note'* (Tanselle), Supp. I, Part 2,402 "Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey" (Wordsworth), Supp. Ill, Part 1,12 "Lines for an Interment" (MacLeish),

in, 15

"Lines from Israel" (Lowell), II, 554 "Lines on Revisiting the Country" (Bryant), Supp. I, Part L, 164 "Lines Suggested by a Tennessee Song"(Agee),I,28 "Lines Written at Port Royal" (Freneau), Supp. II, Part 1, 264 L "influence du symbolismefranc, ais sur la poesie americaine (Taupin), Supp. I, Part 1,275 Linn, Elizabeth, see Brown, Mrs. Charles Brockden (Elizabeth Linn) Linn, James Weber, Supp. I, Part 1,27 Linn, John Blair, Supp. I, Part 1,145 Linnaeus, Carolus, H, 6; Supp. I, Part 1,245 Linschoten,Hans,n,362,363,364,365 "Lion and Honeycomb" (Nemerov), 111,275,278,280 Lion and the Archer, The (Hayden), Supp. II, Part 1,366,367 Lion and the Honeycomb, The (Blackmur), Supp. II, Part 1,91 "LionforReal,The"(Ginsberg),Supp. II, Part 1,320 Lionel Lincoln (Cooper), 1,339,342 "Lionizing" (Poe), III, 411,425 "Lions and Lemmings, Toads and Tigers" (Cowley),Supp.I,Part 2,627 "Lions, Harts, and Leaping Does" (Powers), III, 356 "Lions in Sweden" (Stevens), IV, 7980 Lippincott, Lillian, III, 525 Lippincott's Magazine, 1,409; Supp. I, Part 1,357,361,362,364,365 Lippmann,Walter,I,48,222-223,225; III, 291,598,600; IV, 429; Supp. I, Part 2,609,643 Lisca,Peter,IV,72 Liss, Joseph, III, 167 "Listeners and Readers: The Unforgetting of Vachel Lindsay" (Trombly), Supp. I, Part 2,403 Liston, Sonny, III, 38,42

"Litany" (Ashbery), Supp. ID, Part 1, 21-22,25,26 "Litany" (Sandburg), III, 593 "Litany of the Heroes" (Lindsay), Supp. I, Part 2,397 "Litany of Washington Street, The" (Lindsay),Supp.I,Part 2,376,398399 Literary and Scientific Repository, The (publication), 1,341 "Literary Criticism of Georg Lukacs, The" (Sontag), Supp. Ill, Part 2, 453 Literary Friends and Acquaintance (Howells), Supp. I, Part 1,318 Literary History of the United States (ed. Spiller et al), Supp. I, Part 1, 104,148, Part 2,601 Literary History of the United States (Spiller), Supp. II, Part 1,95 "Literary Horizons: Cheever and Others" (Hicks), Supp. I, Part 1, 198 "Literary Importation" (Freneau), Supp. II, Part 1,264 "Literary Life of America, The" (Brooks), 1,245 Literary Magazine and American Register, The, Supp. I, Part 1,132,146 "Literary Opinions of Charles Brockden Brown, The" (Marchand), Supp. I, Part 1,148 Literary Picture Gallery (periodical), 11,298 Literary Situation, The (Cowley), Supp. I, Part 2,626; Supp. II, Part 1, 135,140,144,146,147,148 Literary Women: The Great Writers (Moers), Supp. I, Part 1,46 "Literary Worker's Polonius, The" (Wilson), IV, 431,432 Literary World (publication), ID, 77,82 "Literature" (Emerson), II, 6 Literature and American Life (Boynton), Supp. I, Part 2,415 Literature and Morality (Farrell), EL, 49 "Literature as a Symptom" (Warren), IV, 237 Little, George T., D, 509 "Little Brown Baby" (Dunbar), Supp. II, Part 1,206 "Little Brown Jug" (Baraka), Supp. II, Part 1,51 "Little Dog" (Hughes), Supp. I, Part 1,329

Little Dorrit (Dickens), Supp. I, Part 135 "Little Edward" (S towe), Supp. I, Part 2,587 Little Foxes, The (Hellman), Supp. I, Part 1,276,278-279,281,283,297 "Little Fred, the Canal Boy" (Stowe), Supp. I, Part 2,587 "Little FrenchMary"(Jewett),II, 400 LittleFriend, Little Friend (Jamil),II, 367,372,375-376 Little Gidding (Eliot), 1,582,588; II, 539 "Little Girl Tells a Story to a Lady, A" (Barnes), Supp. HI, Part 1,36 "Little Girl, My Stringbean, My Lovely Woman" (Sexton), Supp. II, Part 2,686 "Little Goose Girl, The" (Grimm), IV, 266 Little Ham (Hughes), Supp. I, Part 1, 328,339 Little Lady of the Big House, The (London), II, 481-482 "Little Lobelia'sSong" (Bogan),Supp. Ill, Part 1,66 "LittleLocalColor,A"(Henry),Supp. II, Part 1,399 "Little Lyric" (Hughes), Supp. I, Part 1,334 Little Man, Little Man (Baldwin), Supp. I, Part 1,67 Little Men (Alcott), Supp. I, Part 1,32, 39,40 "Little MorningMusic,A" (Schwartz), Supp. II, Part 2,662-663 Little Ocean (Shepard), Supp. HI, Part 2,447 "Little Old Spy" (Hughes), Supp. I, Part 1,329 "Little Peasant,The" (Sexton), Supp. II, Part 2,690 Little Regiment and Other Episodes of the American Civil War, The (Crane), 1,408 Little Review, The (publication), 1,103, 106,384; II, 68; III, 194,471; Supp. I, Part 1,256,257 "Little Sleep's-Head Sprouting Hair in the Moonlight" (Kinnell), Supp. HI, Part 1,247 "LittleSnowWhite"(Grimm),IV,266 "Little Testament of Bernard Martin, Aet. 30" (Mumford), Supp. II, Part 2,472,473,474

UTT-LOOK / 720 Little Tour in France (James), II, 337 Little Women (Alcott), Supp. I, Part 1, 28,29,32,35,37,38,39-40,41,43,44 "Liu Ch'e" (Pound), III, 466 "Live" (Sexton), Supp. II, Part 2,684, 686 Live or Die (Sexton), Supp. II, Part 2, 670,683-687 Liveright, Horace, Supp. I, Part 2,464 Lives (Plutarch), II, 5,104 "Lives in a Cell9' (McPherson), Supp. I, Part 1,199 Lives of Distinguished American Naval Officers (Cooper), 1,347 "Lives of Gulls and Children, The" (Nemerov),III,271,272 Lives of the Artists (Vasari), Supp. I, Part 2,450 Living by the Word (Walker), Supp. HI, Part 2,521,522,526,527,535 "Living in the Present: American Fiction Since 1945" (Rupp),Supp. I, Part 1,199 Living Novel, The (Hicks), III, 342 Living Reed, The (Buck), Supp. n, Part \ 129-130 Living with a Peacock" (O'Connor), HI, 350 Livingston, Luther S., n, 509; Supp. I, Part 2,425 Livingston family, IV, 311 "Liwie"(Welty),IV,265 Livy,II,8 Lloyd, F.V.,H, 318 Lloyd, Henry Demarest, Supp. I, Part 1,5 Lloyd George, Harold, 1,490 "Loam" (Sandburg), III, 584-585 "Loan, The" (Malamud), Supp. I, Part 2,427,428,431,437 Local Color (Capote), Supp. ID, Part 1,120 "Local Color" (London), II, 475 "Local Color in The Awakening" (May), Supp. I, Part 1,226 "Locating Langston Hughes" (Patterson), Supp. I, Part 1,348 Lock,R.H.,IV,319 Locke, Alain, Supp. I, Part 1,323,325, 341; Supp. II, Part 1,53,176,182, 228,247 Locke, John, 1,554-555,557,566; H, 15-16,113-114,348-349,480; III, 294-295; IV, 149; Supp. I, Part 1, 130,229,230, Part 2,523

Locke, Sondra, D, 588 Locket, 77t* (Masters), Supp. I, Parti, 460 Lockwood Concern, The (O'Hara), 111,362,364,377-382 "Locus" (Hayden), Supp. II, Part 1, 361-362,381 Loden, Barbara, HI, 163 Lodge, David, HI, 48 Lodge, Henry Cabot, 1,11-12,21 Lodge,Mrs. Henry Cabot,I,ll-12,19 Lodge, Thomas, IV, 370 Loeb, Jacques, 1,513; Supp. I, Part 2, 641 "Log" (Merrill), Supp. ID, Part 1,328 Logan, Rayford W., Supp. II, Part 1, 171,194 Loggins, Vernon, n, 245 Lohengrin (Wagner), 1,216 Lohf, Kenneth A., 1,119; ID, 216,336 Lohrfmck, Rosalind, III, 107,117 Lolita (Nabokov), III, 246, 247, 255, 258-261 London, Eliza, n, 465 London, Jack, 1,209; H, 264,440,444, 451,462-485; III, 314,580 London, Joan, H, 484 London, John, D, 464,465 London, Mrs. Jack (Bessie Maddern), 0,465,466,473,478 London, Mrs. Jack (Charmian Kittredge), II, 466, 468, 473, 476, 478,481,484 London Daily Mail (newspaper), I, 296 London Magazine (Plath), Supp. I, Part 2,541

LondonSpectator(pubUcation)jU,3l4 London Times (newspaper), III, 354 London Times Literary Supplement (publication), 1,68 Lonely for the Future (Farrell), II, 46, 47 "Lonely Street, The" (Williams), IV, 413 Lonergan, Wayne, Supp. I, Part 1,51 Lonesome Traveler (Kerouac), Supp. Ill, Part 1,219,225 Long, E.H.,IV, 212 Long, Huey, 1,489; 0,454; IV, 249 Long, Ray, n, 430; III, 54 Long Christmas Dinner and Other Plays (Wilder), IV, 365-366 "Long Christmas Dinner, The" (Wilder), IV, 357,365

Long Day's Journey into Night (O'Neill), III, 385,401,403-404 Long Dream, The (Wright), IV, 478, 488,494 Long Gay Book, A (Stein), IV, 42 Long Goodbye, The (Williams), IV, 381 Long Love, The (Sedges), Supp. II, Part 1,125 Long March, 77i
577; IV, 309, 371; Supp. I, Part 1, 158,299,306,317,362,368, Part 2, 405, 406, 408, 409, 414, 416, 420, 586,587,602,699,704;Supp.n,Part 1,291,353; Supp. Ill, Part 2,609 Longfellow, Mrs. Henry Wadsworth (Frances Appleton), II, 488, 489, 491 Longfellow, Mrs. Henry Wadsworth (Mary Storer Potter), II, 488 Longfellow, Mrs. Stephen, n, 486 Longfellow, Samuel, n, 509 Longfellow, Stephen, D, 486 Longfellow family, n, 486 Longinus, Dionysius Cassius, 1,279 Longstreet, Augustus B., D, 70,313; Supp. I, Part 1,352 "Look at the Movies by Baldwin, A" (Bogle), Supp. I, Part 1,69 Look Homeward, Angel (Wolfe), II; 457,IV,450,452,453,454,455-456, 461,462,463,464,468,471 Look, Stranger/ (Auden), Supp. II, Part 1,11

LOOK-LOWE / 721 "Looking at Kafka" (Roth), Supp.HI, Part 2,402 "Looking Back" (Merwin),Supp. Ill, Part 1,352 Looking BacfcHwtf (Bellamy), II, 276; Supp. I, Part 2,641 "Looking for a Ship" (McPhee),Supp. HI, Part 1,312-313 Lorca,FedericoGarcfa,IV,380;Supp. I, Part 1,345 Lord, Judge Otis P., 1,454,457,458, 470 Lord Jim (Conrad), 1,422; 0,26; Siipp. I, Part 2,623 Lord Timothy Dexter of Newburyport, Mass. (Marquand),III,55 Lord Weary's Castle (Lowell), II, 538, 542-551 Lorde, Audre, Supp. I, Part 2,550,571 Lords of the Housetops (Van Vechten), Supp. II, Part 2,736 Lord's Prayer, 1,579 "Lorelei" (Plath), Supp. I, Part 2,538 Lorimer, George Horace, n, 430 Losey, Joseph, IV, 383 "Losing a Language'* (Merwin), Supp. HI, Part 1,356 Losing Battles (Welty), IV, 261,281282 "Losing the Marbles" (Merrill), Supp. Ill, Part 1,337 "Loss of Breath" (Poe), III, 425-426 "Loss of the Creature, The" (Percy), Supp. Ill, Part 1,387 Losses (Jarrell), II, 367,372,373-375, 376,377,380-381 "Losses" (Jarrell), II, 375-376 "LostBoy,The"(Wolfe),IV, 451,460, 466-467 "LostDecade,The"(Fitzgerald),n,98 Lost Galleon and Other Tales, The (Harte), Supp. D, Part 1,344 Lost Illusions (Balzac), 1,500 Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book (Percy), SuppJII, Part 1,397 Lost in the Funhouse (Barth), 1,122, 135,139 "LostintheWhichyThicket"(Wolfe), Supp. Ill, Part 2,573,574 "Lost inTranslation" (Merrill), Supp. Ill, Part 1,324,329-330 Lost Lady, A (Gather), 1,323-325,327 "Lost Lover, A" (Jewett), II, 400-401, 402 "Lost Loves" (Kinnell),Supp.ni, Part 1,237,245

"Lost Sailor, The" (Freneau), Supp. 0, Part 1,264 Lost Son, The (Roethke), III, 529, 530-532,533 "Lost Son, The" (Roethke), III, 536, 537-539,542 "Lost World, A" (Ashbery), Supp.

01, Part 1,9

Lost World, 7%e(Jan-ell), II, 367,368, 371,379-380,386,387 "Lot of People Bathing in a Stream, A" (Stevens), IV, 93 "Lot's Wife" (Nemerov), III, 270 Loti, Pierre, n, 311,325 Lotze, Hermann, HI, 600 Louis XIV, King, 1,345 Louis XVI, King, Supp. I, Part 2,511, 512,514,521 Louis XVIII, King, 1,345 Louis, Joe, D, 589 Louis, Pierre Charles Alexandre, Supp. I, Part 1,302,303 Louis Lambert (Balzac), 1,499 Louisa May Alcott (Anthony), Supp. I, Part 1,46 Louisa May Alcott (Saxton), Supp. I, Part 1,46 Louisa May Alcott (Stern), Supp. I, Part 1,46 Louisa May Alcott and the Woman Problem (Elbert), Supp. I, Part 1, 46 Louisa May Alcott: Her Life, Letters, and Journals (Cheney), Supp. I, Part 1,46 Lounsbury, Thomas R., 1,335,357 "Love" (Olson), Supp. II, Part 2,571 Love among the Cannibals (Morris), in, 228,230-231 Love and Death in the American Novel (Fiedler), Supp. I, Part 2,601 Love and Fame (Berryman), 1,170 "Love and How to Cure It" (Wilder), IV,365 "Love and the Hate, The" (Jeffers), Supp. II, Part 2,434-435 "Love Calls Us to the Things of This World" (Wilbur), Supp. Ill, Part 2, 544,552-553 Love in the Ruins: The Adventures of a Bad Catholic at a Time near the End of the World (Percy), Supp. HI, Part 1,385,387,393-394,397398 "Love Is a Deep and a Dark and a Lonely" (Sandburg), HI, 595

"Love Nest, The" (Lardner), II, 427, 429 Love Nest, The, and Other Stories (Lardner), II, 43O-431,436 "Love of Elsie Barton: A Chronicle, The" (Warren), IV, 253 LoveofLandry, T/te(Dunbar),Supp. n, Part 1,212 "Love of Morning, The" (Levertov), Supp. ffl, Part 1,284 "Love on the Bon Dieu" (Chopin), Supp. I, Part 1,213 Love/>oeimr(Sexton),Supp.n,Part2, 687-689 "LovePoet"(Agee),I,28 "LoveSongof J.Alfred Prufrock,The" (Eliot), 1,52,66,569-570; III, 460; Supp. II, Part 1,5 "Love versus Law" (Stowe), Supp. I, Part 2,585-586 Love's Labour's Lost (Shakespeare), 111,263 Lovejoy,A.O.,O,365 Lovejoy, Elijah P., Supp. I, Part 2,588 Lovejoy, Owen R., Supp. I, Part 1,8 Lovelace, Richard, H, 590 "Lovely Lady, The" (Lawrence), Supp. I, Part 1,329 "Lovers, The" (Berryman), 1,174 "Lovers, The" (Buck), Supp. O, Part 1,128 "Lover's Garden, A" (Ginsberg), Supp. II, Part 1,311 "Lover's Song" (Yeats), Supp. I, Part 1,80 "Lovers of the Poor, The" (Brooks), Supp. Ill, Part 1,81,85 Lovett, Robert Morss, 0,43,53,149 "Love-Unknown" (Herbert),Supp.I, Part 1,80 "Loving Shepherdess, The" (Jeffers), Supp. II, Part 2,432 "Loving the Killer" (Sexton), Supp. II, Part 2,688 Lowance, Mason, 1,565 Lowell, Abbott Lawrence, 1,487; H, 513; Supp. I, Part 2,483 Lowell, Amy,I,231,384,405,475,487; 0,174,511-533,534; III, 465,581, 586; Supp. I, Part 1,257-259,261263,265,266,275, Part 2,465,466, 478,707,714,729 Lowell, Blanche, Supp. I, Part 2,409 Lowell, Harriet, 0,553,554 Lowell, James Russell, 1,216,458; D, 273, 274, 289, 302, 320, 402, 529,

LOWE-MCCU / 722 Lowell (cont.) 530,532,534,551; III, 409, 431; IV, 129, 171, 175, 180, 182-183,186; Supp. I, Part 1,168, 299,300,303,306,311312,317,318, 362, Part 2,404-426; Supp. II, Part 1,197,291,352 Lowell, Mrs. James Russell (Maria White),Supp.I,Part 2,405,406,414, 424 Lowell, Mrs. Robert (Elizabeth Hardwick), II, 365, 543, 554, 566, 584; IV, 425 Lowell, Mrs. Robert (Jean Stafford), 11,537 Lowell, Percival, fl, 513,525,534 Lowell, Robert, 1,172,381,382,400, 442,521,544-545,550; 0,371,376, 377,384,386-387,390,532,534-557; III, 39,44,142,508,527,528-529, 606; IV, 120,138,143,259,402,424, 430; Supp. I, Part 1,89,97, Part 2, 538,543,554; Supp. Ill, Part 1,6,64, 84,138,147,193,194,197-202,205208, Part 2,541,543,555,561,599 Lowell, Rose, Supp. I, Part 2,409 Lowell family, 0,403 "Lowell" (Brownell), Supp. I, Part 2, 426 Lowell and France (Stewart), Supp. I, Part 2,426 "Lowell and Longinus" (Pritchard), Supp. I, Part 2,426 "Lowell as Critic" (Robertson), Supp. I, Part 2,426 "Lowell on Thoreau" (Warren), Supp. I, Part 2,426 Lower Depths, The (Gorki), III, 402 "Lower the Standard" (Shapiro), Supp. II, Part 2,715 Lowes, John Livingston, n, 512,516, 532,533; IV, 453,455 "Low-Lands" (Pynchon), Supp. II, Part 2,620,624 Lowle, Percival, Supp. I, Part 2,404 Lowth, Richard, II, 8 Loy,Mina,III,194 Loyola, Ignatius, IV, 151 "Luaniof the Jungle" (Hughes), Supp. I, Part 1,328 Lubbock, Percy, I, 504; O, 337, 340, 341; IV, 308,314,319,322,330 Lubin, Isidor, Supp. I, Part 2,632 Lucas, Victoria (pseudonym), see Plath, Sylvia Lucid, Robert F., HI, 48

"Lucid Eye in Silver Town, The" (Updike), IV, 218 "Lucinda Matlock" (Masters), Supp. I, Part 2,461,465 Luck of Barry Lyndon, The (Thackeray), II, 290 "Luck of Roaring Camp, The" (Harte), Supp. II, Part 1,335,344, 345-347 Lucretius, 1,59; 0,162,163; HI, 600, 61O-611,612; Supp. I, Part 1, 363 Lucy, Saint, n, 211 Lucy Gayheart (Cathcr), 1,331 Ludwig, Jack, 1,166; III, 48 Ludwig, Richard M., 0,125,533 Luke (biblical book), III, 606 "Luke Havergal" (Robinson), in, 524 Luks, George, IV, 411 "Lullaby" (Auden), Supp. II, Part 1,9 "Lullaby" (Bishop), Supp. I, Part 1,85 "Lulls" (Walker), Supp. Ill, Part 2, 525 Lulu's Library (Alcott), Supp. I, Part 143 Lume Spento, A (Pound), III, 470 "Lumumba's Grave" (Hughes), Supp. I, Part 1,344 Lupercal (Hughes), Supp. I, Part 2, 540 Luria, Isaac, IV, 7 Lustgarten, Edith, III, 107 Luther, Martin, II, 11-12,506; III, 306, 607; IV, 490 Lyceumite (magazine), III, 579 "Lycidas" (Milton), II, 540; IV, 347; Supp. I, Part 1,370 Lydenberg, John, 1,380 Lyford, Harry, Supp. I, Part 2,679 "Lying" (Wilbur), Supp. Ill, Part 2, 547,562 "Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy's Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota" (Wright), Supp. m, Part 2, 589,599,600 Lyly,John,III,536;Supp.I, Part 1,369 Lynch, William James, n, 53 "Lynching, The" (McKay), Supp. I, Part 1,63 "Lynching of Jube Benson, The" (Dunbar), Supp. II, Part 1,214 "Lynching Song" (Hughes), Supp. I, Part 1,331 Lynd, Staughton, Supp. I, Part 1,27, Part 2,525 Lynen, John, 11,125

Lynn, Kenneth S., H, 294; III, 336; IV, 213 Lyon, Kate, 1,409; H, 138,143,144 "Lyonnesse" (Plath), Supp. I, Part 2, 541 Lyons, Charles R., 1,95 Lyrical Ballads (VfoTdsviortti),m,5&; IV, 120 LyricsofLoveandLaughter(DunbaT), Supp. II, Part 1,207 Lyrics of Lowly Life (Dunbar), Supp. II, Part 1,197,199,200,207 Lyrics of the Hearthside (Dunbar), Supp. II, Part 1,206 Lytle, Andrew, 1,426; H, 222; IV, 125, 143; Supp. II, Part 1,139 Lytton of Knebworth, see BulwerLytton, Edward George Mabbott, Thomas O., Ill, 431 McAlmon, Mrs. Robert (Winifred Ellerman),III,194 McAlmon, Mrs. Robert,*** Ellerman, Winifred McAlmon, Robert, IV, 404; Supp. I, Part 1,259; Supp. Ill, Part 2,614 McCall,Dan,IV,497 McCaWs (magazine), III, 58 Macaulay, Catherine, Supp. I, Part 2, 522 Macaulay, Thomas, II, 15-16; III, 113, 591-592 McCarthy, Harold T., Supp. I, Part 1, 70 McCarthy, Joseph, Supp. I, Part 1, 294,295, Part 2,444,611,612,620 McCarthy, Mary, D, 558-584; III, 169, 407; Supp. I, Part 1,84 McCarthy, Senator Joseph, 1,31,492; n, 562,568 Macbeth (Shakespeare), I, 271; IV, 227; Supp. I, Part 1,67, Part 2,457 McClatchy, J. D., Supp. I, Part 1,97 McClellan,JohnL.,I,493 McClure, Michael, Supp. II, Part 1,32 McClure, S. S., 1,313; 0,465; HI, 327 McClure's Magazine, 1,313,322 McCluskey, John, Supp. I, Part 1,70 McConnell, Fanny,see Ellison, Fanny McConnell McCormack,T.,III,242 McCullers, Carson, I,113,190,211;n, 585-608; IV, 282,384,385,386,400; Supp. II, Part 1,17

MCCU-MAGI / 723 McCullers, Reeves, HI, 585,586,587 McDavid, Raven I., Ill, 120,121 McDermott, John Francis, n, 317 McDermott, John J., D, 364,365 McDevitt, William, 0,485 McDonald, Daniel, 1,96 Macdonald, Dwight, I, 47, 233, 372, 379,380; III, 39,48 McDonald, E. J., Supp. I, Part 2,670 MacDonald, Jeanette, n, 589 MacDougall, Allan Ross, III, 144 MacDowell, Edward, 1,228; III, 504, 508,524 McDowell, Frederick P. W., n, 194, 195 McDowell, Mary, Supp. I, Part 1,5 McDowell, Tremaine, Supp. I, Part 1, 173 Macebuh, Stanley, Supp. I, Part 1,69 McElderry, B. R., Jr., IV, 473 McEuen, Kathryn, D, 20,23 McEwen, Arthur, 1,206 McGiffert, Arthur Cushman, I, 564;

n,22

McGlinchee, Claire, Supp. I, Part 2, 426 Macgowan, Kenneth, III, 387,391 McGovern, George, III, 46 Machen, Arthur, IV, 286 Machiavelli, Niccolo, 1,485 Machine in the Garden, The (Marx), Supp. I, Part 1,252 "Machine Song" (Anderson), 1,114 "Machine-Gun,The"(Jarrell),II,371 "Machines in Cheever's Garden,The" (Donaldson), Supp. I, Part 1,198 McHugh, Robert, III, 121 Mcllwaine, Shields, 1,311 Maclnnes, Colin, Supp. I, Part 1,70 Mackail, John William, Supp. I, Part 1, 268, Part 2,461 McKay, Claude, Supp. I, Part 1, 63; Supp. Ill, Part 1,75,76 McKay, Donald, Supp. I, Part 2,482 McKenney, Eileen, see West, Mrs. Nathanael (Eileen McKenney) McKenney, Ruth, IV, 288,307 MacKenzie, Agnes, 1,199 McKenzie, Barbara, D, 584 MacKenzie, Margaret, 1,199 Mackenzie, Captain Alexander, III, 94 Mackenzie, Compton, H, 82 McKinley, William, I, 474; HI, 506; Supp. I, Part 2,395-396,707

MacLachlan, John, 1,311 MacLaurin, Lois Margaret, n, 125 McLean, Albert F., Jr., Supp. I, Part 1, 173 MacLean, Kenneth, Supp. I, Part 2, 627 Maclean, Hugh, 1,427 MacLeish, Archibald, 1,283,293,429; n, 165,228; III, 1-25,427; IV, 377; Supp. I, Part 1,27,261, Part 2,654 MacLeish, Kenneth, III, 1 MacLeish, Mrs. Archibald (Ada Hitchcock), 111,1 McLeod, A. W., Supp. I, Part 1,257 McLeod, James R., Ill, 550 Macmahon, Arthur, 1,226 McMaster, John Bach, II, 125 McMichael, Morton, Supp. I, Part 2, 707 Mac milIan's (magazine), II, 329 McMurray, William, D, 294 MacNair, Harley Farnsworth, n, 533 McNamara, Robert, IV, 377 MacNeice, Louis, 11,586; III, 527; Supp. II, Part 1,17,24 McPhee, John, Supp. Ill, Part 1,289316 MacPherson, Kenneth, Supp. I, Part 1,259 McPherson, William, Supp. I, Part 1, 199 McQuillan family, D, 79,80 Macrae, John, 1,252-253 McShane, Frank, D, 222 "MacSwiggen" (Freneau), Supp. II, Part 1,259 McTaggart, John, 1,59 Mcr£agwe(Norris),in,314,315,316320, 322, 325, 327-328, 330, 331, 333,335 McWilliams, Carey, 1,213; D, 149 Mad Dog Blues (Shepard), Supp. HI, Part 2,437,438,441 "Madam and the Minister*' (Hughes), Supp. I, Part 1,335 "Madam and the Wrong Visitor" (Hughes), Supp. I, Part t, 335 Madama Butterfly (Puccini), III, 139 Madame Bovary (Flaubert), II, 185 "Madame Cdlestin's Divorce" (Chopin), Supp. I, Part 1,213 "Madame de Mauves" (James), II, 327 Madame de Treymes (Wharton), IV, 314,323

Madden, David, III, 242,243 Maddern, Bessie, see London, Mrs. Jack (Bessie Maddern) Mademoiselle (magazine), II, 586; III, 337-388; Supp. I, Part 2,530,531 Mademoiselle Coeur-Brise (trans. Sibon),IV,288 Mademoiselle de Maupin (Gautier), Supp. I, Part 1,277 Madheart (Baraka), Supp. II, Part 1, 47 Madhouse, The (Farrell), II, 41 Madhubuti, Haki R. (Don L. Lee), Supp. n, Part 1,34,247 Madison, Charles A., IV, 23 Madison, Charles, 1,237 Madison, Dolley, II, 303 Madison, James, 1,1, 2, 6-9; D, 301; Supp. I, Part 2,509,524 "Madman's Song'* (Wylie), Supp. I, Part 2,711,729 "Madonna" (Lowell), II, 535-536 "Madonna of the Evening Flowers" (Lowell), II, 524 "Maelzel's Chess-Player" (Poe), HI, 419,420 "Maestria" (Nemerov), III, 275,278279 Maeterlinck, Maurice, 1,91,220 "Magazine-Writing—Peter Snook" (Poe), HI, 421 Magdeburg Centuries (Flacius), IV, 163 Magellan, Ferdinand, Supp. I, Part 2, 497 Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (Crane), 1,407,408,410-411,416; IV, 208 Maggie Cassidy (Kerouac), Supp. IH, Part 1,220-221,225,227,229,232 "Magi" (Plath), Supp. I, Part 2, 544545 "Magic" (Porter), III, 434,435 Magic Barrel, The (Malamud), Supp. I, Part 2,427,428,430-434 "Magic Barrel, The" (Malamud), Supp. I, Part 2,427,428,431,432433 Magic Flute, The (Mozart), III, 164 "Magic Mirror, The: A Study of the Double in Two of Doestoevsky's Novels" (Plath), Supp. I, Part 2, 536 Magic Mountain, The (Mann), IH, 281282 Magic Tower, The (Willams), IV, 380

MAGI-MAN / 724 The (Thompson), Supp. I, Part 2, 525 Making of the Modem Mind (Randall), n, 302; Supp. I, Part 1,102, Part 2, 111,605 584; Supp. II, Part 2,441,442,452- "Mai Paso Bridge" (letters), Supp. D, Part 2,415,420 455,460,467,468 Magowan, Robin, D, 413 Malady of the Ideal, The: Oberman, Magpie, The (ed. Baldwin), Supp. I, Maurice de Guerin, and Amiel (Brooks), 1,240,241,242 Part 1,49 Maipie'f 5&fl4fiw; TA« (WintfFi); M^mud,B?ni<mU, H1375;II,12^ 425; III, 40, 272; IV, 216; Supp. I, Supp. II, Part 2,786,788 Part 2, 427-453 Mahan, Albert Thayer, Supp. I9 Part 2, 491 Malamud, Mrs. Bernard (Ann de Mahomet and His Successors (Irving), Chiara), Supp. I, Part 2, 451 11,314 "Malamud as Jewish Writer" (Alter), Mahoney, Jeremiah, IV, 285 Supp. I, Part 2, 452 "Maid's Shoes, The" (Malamud), "Malamud: The Commonplace as Supp. I, Part 2,437 Absurd" (Fiedler), Supp. I, Part 2, "Maiden Without Hands" (Sexton), 453 Supp. II, Part 2,691 "Malamud: The Uses and Abuses of Commitment" (Dupee), Supp. I, Mailer, Fanny, HI, 28 Part 2, 453 Mailer, Isaac, HI, 28 Mailer, Norman, 1,261, 292, 477; O, Malanga, Gerard, Supp. Ill, Part 2, 629 584; 111,26-49,174,192; IV, 98,216; Supp. I, Part 1,291,294; Supp. Ill, Malatesta, Sigismondo de, III, 472, 473 Part 1,302 "Maimed Man, The" (Tate), IV, 136 Malcolm X, Supp. I, Part 1, 52, 63, 65, 66 Main Currents in American Thought Malcolm, Donald, Supp. I, Part 1, 199 (Parrington), 1,517 Main Currents in American Thought: "Malcolm Cowley and the American The Colonial Mind, 1620-1800 Writer" (Simpson), Supp. O, Part 1,147 (Parrington), Supp. I, Part 2,484 Main Street (Lewis), I, 362; II, 271, "MALCOLM REMEMBERED (FEB. 77)" (Baraka), Supp. II, Part 440,441-442,447,449,453; III, 394 1,60 "Maine Roustabout, A" (Eberhart), 1,539 "Maldrove" (Jeffers), Supp.II, Part 2, 418 "Maine Speech" (White) Supp. I, Part Male, Roy, n, 239, 245 2,669-670 Maine Woods, 77wr(Thoreau),IV,188 Male Animal, The (Thurber), Supp. I, Majdiak, Daniel, 1,143 Part 2, 605, 606, 610-611 Major Barbara (Shaw), III, 69 "Malediction upon Myself (Wylie), "Major Chord, The" (Bourne), 1,221 Supp. I, Part 2, 722 "Major's Tale, The" (Bierce), 1,205 Malefactors, The (Gordon), II, 186, "Majorat, Das" (Hoffman), III, 415 199, 213-216; IV, 139 Majors and Minors (Dunbar), Supp. "Malest Cornifici Tuo Catullo" II, Part 1,197,198 (Ginsberg), Supp. II, Part 1, 315 Make It New (Pound), III, 470 Malin, Irving, 1, 147, 166; III, 360; IV, Makers and Finders (Brooks), 1,253, 23 254,255,257,258 Malkoff, Karl, III, 550 "Making a Living" (Sexton), Supp. II, Mallarm6, Stlphane, 1, 66, 569; n, 529, Part 2,695 543; III, 8, 409, 428; IV, 80, 86; Supp. I, Part 1,261; Supp. II, Parti, Making of Americans, The (Stein), IV, 35,37,4CW2,45,46; Supp. Ill, Part l;Supp.III,Partl,319~320,Part2, 1,37 630 Making of the English Working Class, Maloney, Russell, Supp. I, Part 2, 681

Magician of Lublin, The (Singer), IV, 6,9-10 Magnolia Christi Americana (Mather),

Malory, Thomas, 0,302; III, 486; IV, 50,61 Malraux, Andr6,1,33-34,127,509; O, 57, 376; DI, 35,310; IV, 236,247, 434; Supp. O, Part 1,221,232 Maltese Falcon, The (Hammett), IV, 286 "Mama and Daughter" (Hughes), Supp. I, Part 1,334 "Mamie" (iaiulbuf i), III, §82 "Mammon and the Archer" (O. Henry), Supp. O, Part 1,394,408 "Man" (Herbert), II, 12 "Man Against the Sky, The" (Robinson), III, 509,523 Man and Boy (Morris), III, 223,224, 225 "Man and the Snake,The" (Bierce), I, 203 "Man and Wife" (Lowell), II, 550 "Man and Woman" (Caldwell), 1,310 "Man Bring This Up Road" (Williams), IV, 383-384 "Man CarryingThing" (Stevens), IV, 90 "Man Child, The" (Baldwin), Supp. I, Part 1,63 Man Could Stand Up, A (Ford), 1,423 "Man in Black" (Plath), Supp. I, Part 2,538 "Man in the Brooks Brothers Shirt, The" (McCarthy), II, 563-564 "Man in the Drawer,The" (Malamud), Supp. I, Part 2,437 Man in the Mirror, The: William Marion Reedy and His Magazine (Putzel), Supp. I, Part 2,402,478 Man of Letters in New England and the South, The (Simpson), Supp. I, Part 1,149 "Man of No Account, The" (Harte), Supp. II, Part 1,339 "Man of the Crowd, The" (Poe), III, 412,417 Man on Spikes (Asinof), II, 424 "Man on the Dump, The" (Stevens), IV, 74 "Man on the Train, The" (Percy), Supp. Ill, Part 1,387 "Man Splitting Wood in the Daybreak, The"(Kinnell),Supp.ra,Part 1,254 Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg, The (Twain), 1,204; IV, 208 "Man That Was Used Up, The" (Poe), 111,412,425

MAN-MARK / 725 "Man Who Became a Woman, The" (Anderson),!, 114 Man Who Had All the Luck, The (Miller), III, 148,149,164,166 "Man Who Knew Coolidge, The*' (Lewis), II, 449 Man Who Knew Coolidge, The: Being the Soul of Lowell Schmaltz, Constructive and Nordic Citizen (Lewis), II, 450 Man Who Lived Underground, The (Wright), Supp. D, Part 1,40 "Man Who Lived Underground, The" (Wright), IV, 479,485-487,492 "Man Who Loved Yoga, The" (Mailer) III, 35-36 Man Who Was There, The (Morris), 111,220-221 "Man Who Writes Ants, The" (Merwin), Supp. Ill, Part 1,348 Man with the Blue Guitar, The (Stevens), IV, 76 "Man with the Blue Guitar, The" (Stevens), 1,266; IV, 85-87 Man without a Country, The (Hale), I, 488 Manchester, William, III, 103,121 Mandelbaum, Maurice, 1,61 Mandelstam, Osip, Supp. Ill, Part 1, 268 "Mandoline" (Verlaine), IV, 79 Mangan, Sherry, 1,450 Manhattan rrwisr/er(DosPassos),I,26, 475, 478, 479, 480, 481, 482-484, 487; II, 286; Supp. I, Part 1,57 "Mania" (Lowell), II, 554 "ManicintheMoon,The"(Thurber), Supp. I, Part 2,620 Manly, William M., Supp. I, Part 1,148 "Man-Moth, The" (Bishop), Supp. I, Part 1,85-87,88 Mann, Charles W.,0,270 Mann, Erika, Supp. II, Part 1,11 Mann, Thomas, 1,271,490; D, 42,539; 111,231,281-282,283;IV, 70,73,85 Mannerhouse (Wolfe), IV, 460 "Manners" (Bishop), Supp. I, Part 1, 73 "Manners" (Emerson), II, 4,6 "Manners, Morals, and the Novel" (Trilling),Supp.III,Part2,502,503 Mannheim, Karl, 1,279; Supp. I, Part 2,644 Manning, Frederic, III, 459

Mannix, Daniel P., Supp. II, Part 1, 140 Manor, The (Singer), IV, 6,17-19 Man's Fate (Malraux), 1,127 "Man's Fate—A Film Treatment of the Malraux Novel" (Agee), 1,3334 Man '5 Hope (Malraux), IV, 247 Man's Nature and His Communities (Niebuhr),III,308 "Man'sStory,The" (Anderson),!, 114 "Man'sPride"(Jeffers),Supp.II,Part 2,417 Man's Woman, A (Norris), III, 314, 322,328,329,330,332,333 Mansart Builds a School (Du Bois), Supp. II, Part 1,185-186 Mansfield, Katherine, III, 362,453 Mansfield, L.S., III, 95 Mansion, The (Faulkner), II, 73 Manso, Peter, III, 48 Manson, Alexander, D, 460 "Mantis" (Zukofsky), Supp. Ill, Part 2,617 "'Mantis': An Interpretation" (Zukofsky), Supp. Ill, Part 2,617-618 Mantrap (Lewis), II, 447 ManuductioAdMinisterium (Mather), Supp. II, Part 2,465-467 Manuscript (publication), IV, 261 "Many Handles" (Sandburg), III, 594 "Many Happy Returns" (Auden), Supp. II, Parti, 15 Many Marriages (Anderson), 1,104, 111,113 "Many of Our Waters: Variations on a Poem by a Black Child" (Wright), Supp. Ill, Part 2,602 "Many Swans" (Lowell), II, 526 "Many Thousands Gone** (Baldwin), Supp. I, Part 1,51 "Many Wagons Ago" (Ashbery), Supp. Ill, Part 1,22 Man van Letters (Olson), Supp. II, Part

i'571

Many- Windowed House, A (Cowley), Supp. II, Part 1,141, 143 "Many-Windowed House, A" (Cowley), Supp. II, Part 1, 137 "Map, The" (Bishop), Supp. I, Part 1, 72,82,85-88,93 "Mara" (Jeffers), Supp. II, Part 2,434 Marat, Jean Paul, IV, 117; Supp. I, Part 2, 514, 515, 521

Marble Faun, The (Faulkner), II, 55, 56 Marble Faun, The (Hawthorne), II, 225,239,242-243,290,324;IV,167; Supp. I, Part 1,38, Part 2,421,5% March, Frederic, HI, 154,403; IV, 357 March Hares (Frederic), II, 143-144 Marchand, Ernest, III, 336; Supp. I, Part 1,148 "March6 aux Oiseaux" (Wilbur), Supp. m, Part 2,550 "Marchen,The" (Janrell), II, 378-379 Marching Men (Anderson), 1,99,101, 103-105,111 Marco Millions (O 'Neill), III, 391,395 Marcosson, Isaac, III, 322 Marcus Aurelius, H, 1; III, 566 Marcus, Steven, III, 48; Supp. I, Part 1, 70 Marcuse, Herbert, Supp. I, Part 2,645 Midland a Voyage Thither (Melville), 1,384; n, 281; III, 77-79,84,87,89 Margaret (Judd),ll,29Q "Marginalia" (Wilbur), Supp. DI, Part 2,544 Margolies, Edward, IV, 4%, 497; Supp. I, Part 1,70 "Margrave" (Jeffers), Supp. II, Part 2, 426 "Maria Concepci6n" (Porter), III, 434-435,451 Marianne Moore Reader, n, 199 Marie of Romania, Queen, II, 183,191 MariellaGable,Sister,m,339,355,360 "Marijuana Notation" (Ginsberg), Supp. II, Part 1,313 "Marina" (Eliot), 1,584,585 Maritain, Jacques, 1,402; IV, 143 Maritain, Raissa, IV, 143 Maritime Compact (Paine), Supp. I, Part 2,519 Maritime History of Massachusetts, 2783-1860, The (Morison), Supp. I, Part 2,481-483 Marjolin, Jean-Nicolas, Supp. I, Part 1,302 "Mark, The" (Bogan), Supp. Ill, Part 1,52 Mark Twain in Eruption (Twain), IV, 209 Mark Twain's America (De Voto), I, 248 Mark Twain's Autobiography (Twain), IV, 209

MARK-MATH / 726 "Market" (Hayden), Supp. n, Part 1, 368,369 Marketplace, The (Frederic), II, 145146 Markham, Edwin, 1,199,207 Markings (Hammarskjold), Supp. II, Part 1,26 Marks, Alison, Supp. It Part 2,660 Marks, Barry A., 1,435,438,442,446, 450 Markus, Thomas B., 1,96 Marlowe, Christopher, 1,68,368,384; 11,590; 111,259,491; Supp. I, Part 2, 422 Marmee: the Mother of Little Women (Salyer), Supp. I, Part 1,46 Marnet The (Wharton), IV, 319,320 Marquand,J.P.,I,362,375;II,459,482483; III, 50-73,383; Supp. I, Part 1, 1% Marquand, Mrs. John P. (Adelaide Hooker), III, 57,61 Marquand, Mrs. John P. (Christina Sedgwick),III,54,57 Marquand, Philip, HI, 52 Marquis, Don, Supp. I, Part 2,668 Marriage (Moore), III, 194 "Mamage"(Moore),ni, 198-199,213 "Marriage in the 'Sixties, A" (Rich), Supp. I, Part 2,554 "Marriage of Heaven and Hell, The" (Blake), III, 544-545 Marryat, Captain Frederick, III, 423 "Mars and Hymen" (Freneau), Supp. II, Parti, 258 Marsden, Dora, III, 471 Marsden, Malcolm M., Ill, 574 Marsena (Frederic), II, 135,136-137 Marsh, Edward, Supp. I, Part 1,257, 263 Marsh, Mae, Supp. I, Part 2,391 Marsh Island, A (Jewett), II, 405 Marshall, George, III, 3 Marshall, John, Supp. I, Part 2,455 Marshall, Margaret, III, 455 "Marshall Carpenter" (Masters), Supp. I, Part 2,463 "Marshes of Glynn, The" (Lanier), Supp. I, Part 1,364,365-368,370, 373 '"Marshes of Glynn, The': A Study in Symbolic Obscurity" (Ross), Supp. I, Part 1,373 Marta y Maria (Valdes), II, 290 Marthe, Saint, H, 213

Martial, n, 1,169 Martien, Norman, III, 48 Martin du Gard, Roger, Supp. I, Part 1,51 Martin, Benjamin, Supp. I, Part 2, 503 Martin, Carter W., Ill, 360 Martin, Ernest, n, 509 Martin,Jay,I,55,58,60,61,67,70,426, 590; HI, 307 Martin, John Stephen, Supp. I, Part 1, 319 Martin, R. A., Ill, 169 Martin, Terrence, II, 318; Supp. I, Part 1,148 Martin Eden (London), II, 466,477481 Martineau, Harriet, Supp. II, Part 1, 282,288,294 Martson, Frederic C, n, 293 "Martyr, The" (Porter), III, 454 Martz, Louis L., IV, 151,156,165,166; Supp. I, Part 1,107 Martz, William J., 1,189; D, 557; III, 550 Marvell, Andrew, IV, 135,151,156, 161,253; Supp. I, Part 1,80 Marvell family, IV, 318 Marx, Karl, 1,60,267,279,283,588; O, 376,462,463,483,577;IV,429,436, 443-444,469; Supp. I, Part 2,518, 628,632,633,634,635,639,643645, 646; Supp. Ill, Part 2,619 Marx, Leo, Supp. I, Part 1,233,252 Marxism, 1,371,488,518; II, 26,34, 39,567; III, 3,17,27,30,262,297298, 304, 580, 602; IV, 5, 7, 288, 302,349,363,428,429,441; Supp. I, Part 2, 493, 518, 600, 628, 633, 635,643,645 Marxist Quarterly (publication), Supp. I, Part 2,645 Mary (Jesus' mother), IV, 152; Supp. I, Part 2,581 Mary, Queen, IV, 145,163 Mary Magdalene, 1,303 "Mary O'Reilly" (Anderson), II, 44 "Mary's Song" (Plath), Supp. I, Part 2, 541 Masefield, John, D, 552; III, 523 Mask for Janus, A (Merwin), Supp. Ill, Part 1,339,341,342 Maslow, Abraham, Supp. I, Part 2,540 Mason, Lowell, 1,458 Mason, Otis Tufton, Supp. I, Part 1,18 Mason, Ronald, III, 97

Masque of Mercy, A (Frost), II, 155, 165,167-168 "Masque of Mummers, The" (MacLeish), 111,18 Masque of Pandora, The (Longfellow), 0,490,494,506 Masque of Poets, A (ed. Lathrop), Supp. I, Part 1,365,368 Masque of Reason, A (Frost), II, 155, 162,165-167 "Masque of the Red Death, The" (Poe), III, 412,419,424 "Mass for the Day of St. Thomas Didymus" (Levertov), Supp. Ill, Part 1,283 Massa, Ann, Supp. I, Part 2,402 Massachusetts, Its Historians and Its History (Adams), Supp. I, Part 2, 484 Massachusetts Quarterly Review (publication), Supp. I, Part 2,420 "Massachusetts to Virginia" (Whittier), Supp. I, Part 2,688-689 "Massacre at Scio, The" (Bryant), Supp. I, Part 1,168 Masses (publication), 1,105 Masses and Man (Toller), 1,479 Massinger, Philip, Supp. I, Part 2,422 "Master Misery" (Capote), Supp. Ill, Part 1,117 "Master Player, The" (Dunbar),Supp. II, Part 1,200 Masters, Edgar Lee, 1,106,384,475, 480,518; 0,276,529; III, 505,576, 579; IV, 352; Supp. I, Part 2,378, 386, 387, 402, 454-478; Supp. Ill, Part 1,63,71,73,75 Masters, Ellen Coyne, Supp. I, Part 2, 478 Masters, Hardin W., Supp. I, Part 2, 468,478 "Masters and Whitman: A Second Look" (Burgess), Supp. I, Part 2, 477 Masters of Sociological Thought (Coser), Supp. I, Part 2,650 Matchmaker, The (Wilder), IV, 357, 369,370,374 Mate of the Day light, The, and Friends Ashore (Jewett), II, 404 Materialism, I, 383; H, 202, 282; III, 394,396-397,610,611 Mather, Cotton, 0,10,104,302,506, 536; III, 442,455; IV, 144,152-153, 157; Supp. I, Part 1,102,117,174,

MATH-MEET / 727 271, Part 2,584,599,698; Supp. II, Part 2,441-470 Mather, Increase, 0,10; IV, 147,157; Supp. I, Part 1,100 Matheson, John Wiiiam, III, 550 Mathews, Cornelius, III, 81; Supp. I, Part 1,317 Mathews, Shailer, HI, 293 "Matinees" (Merrill), Supp. Ill, Part 1,319,327 Matisse, Henri, III, 180; IV, 24, 90, 407; Supp. I, Part 2,619 Matlock, Lucinda, Supp. I, Part 2,462 Matthew (biblical book), IV, 164 Matthew Arnold (Trilling), Supp. Ill, Part 2,500-501 Matthews, T. S., n, 430 Matthiessen,F.O.,I,254,259-260,404, 517, 520, 590; O, 23, 41, 246, 340, 341,365,413,554; III, 310,453; IV, 181,189,259 Matthiessen, Peter, IV, 119 "Maud Island" (Caldwell), 1,310 Maud Martha (Brooks), Supp. UI, Part 1,74,78-79,87 "Maud Muller" (Whittier), Supp. I, Part 2,698 Maude, John Edward, D, 364 Maugham, W. Somerset, III, 57,64 Maule, Harry E., 0,460 Maule's Curse: Seven Studies in the History of American Obscurantism (Winters), Supp. II, Part 2, 807808,812 "Mau-mauing the Flak Catchers" (Wolfe), Supp. Ill, Part 2,577 Maupassant, Guy de, I, 309, 421; D, 191-192,291,325,591;IV,17;Supp. I, Part 1,207,217,223,320 "Maurice Barres and the Youth of France" (Bourne), 1,228 Maurier, George du, n, 338 Mauve Gloves &. Madmen, Clutter & Vine (Wolfe), Supp. Ill, Part 2,581 "Max" (Miller), III, 183 Max and the White Phagocytes (Miller), HI, 178,183-184 Maximilian (emperor of Mexico), Supp. I, Part 2,457-458 Maximilian: A Play in Five Acts (Masters), Supp. I, Part 2,456,457-458 Maximus Poems, The (Olson), Supp. II, Part 2, 555, 556, 563, 564-580, 584

Maximus Poems 1-10, The (Olson), Supp. II, Part 2,571 Maximus Poems TV, V, VI (Olson), Supp. II, Part 2,555,580,582-584 Maximus Poems Volume Three, The (Olson), Supp. II, Part 2,555,582, 584-585 "Maximus, to Gloucester" (Olson), Supp. II, Part 2,574 "Maximus to Gloucester, Letter 19 (A Pastoral Letter)" (Olson), Supp. H, Part 2,567 "Maximus to Gloucester, Sunday July 19" (Olson), Supp. n, Part 2,580 "Maximus, to himself* (Olson), Supp. II, Part 2, 565, 566, 567, 569, 570, 572 "Maximus to himself June 1964" (Olson), Supp. II, Part 2,584 Maxwell, D. E. S., 1,590 Maxwell, Gilbert, IV, 401 Maxwell, William, Supp. I, Part 1,175; Supp. Ill, Part 1,62 May, Abigail (Abba),see Alcott, Mrs. Amos Bronson (Abigail May) May, John R., Supp. I, Part 1,226 May Alcott: A Memoir (Ticknor), Supp. I, Part 1,46 "May Day" (Fitzgerald), II, 88-89 "May Day Dancing, The" (Nemerov), 111,275 "MaySunShedsanAmberLight,The" (Bryant), Supp. I, Part 1,170 Mayer, Elizabeth, Supp. II, Part 1,16; Supp. Ill, Part 1,63 Mayfield, Julian, Supp. I, Part 1,70 Mayflower, 77ie(Stowe),Supp.I,Part 2,585,586 Maynard, Theodore, 1,263 Maynard, Tony, Supp. I, Part 1,65 Mayo, Robert, III, 478 Mayorga, Margaret, III, 167; IV, 381 "Maypole of Merrymount, The" (Hawthorne), II, 229 "Maze" (Eberhart),I,523,525-526,527 Mazzaro, Jerome, n, 390,557 Mazzini, Giuseppe, Supp. I, Part 1,2, 8; Supp. II, Part 1,299 "Me and the Mule" (Hughes), Supp.I, Part 1,334 "Me, Boy Scout" (Lardner), II, 433 "Me Decade and the Third Great Awakening, The" (Wolfe), Supp. Ill, Part 2,581

Me, Vashya! (Williams), IV, 381 Mead, Elinor, see Howells, Mrs. William Dean (Elinor Mead) Mead, George Herbert, D, 27, 34; Supp. I, Part 1,5, Part 2,641 Mead, Margaret, Supp. I, Part 1,49,52, 66 Meaders, Margaret Inman, III, 360 "Meaning of a Literary Idea, The" (Trilling), Supp. Ill, Part 2,498 "Meaning of Death, The, An AfterDinner Speech" (Tate),IV, 128,129 "Meaning of Life,The" (Tate), IV, 137 "Meaningless Institution, A" (Ginsberg), Supp. II, Part 1,313 Mearns, Hughes, III, 220 "Mechanism in Thought and Morals" (Holmes), Supp, I, Part 1,314 Mecom, Mrs. Jane, n, 122 "MeddlesomeJack"(Caldwell),I,309 Medea (Jeffers), Supp. II, Part 2,435 "M6decin Malgr6 Lui, Le" (Williams), IV, 407-408 "Medfield" (Bryant), Supp. I, Part 1, 157 M6dicis, Marie de, H, 548 Medina (McCarthy), II, 579 "Meditation, A" (Eberhart), I, 533535 "Meditation 1.20" (Taylor), IV, 165 "Meditation 1.6" (Taylor), IV, 165 "Meditation 2.102" (Taylor), IV, 150 "Meditation 2.112" (Taylor), IV, 165 "Meditation 2.68 A" (Taylor),IV, 165 "Meditation 20" (Taylor), IV, 154155 "Meditation 40" (Second Series) (Taylor), IV, 147 "Meditation at Oyster River" (Roethke),III,537,549 Meditations (Descartes), III, 618 "Meditations for a Savage Child" (Rich), Supp. I, Part 2,564-565 "Meditations of an Old Woman" (Roethke), III, 529,540,542,543, 545-547,548 Meditative Poems, The (Martz), IV, 151 "Mediterranean,The" (Tate),IV, 129 "Medusa" (Bogan), Supp. Ill, Part 1, 50,51 Meeker, Richard K., 0,190,195 "Meeting South, A" (Anderson), I, 115

MEET-MERT / 725 "Meeting-House Hill" (Lowell), II, 522,527 Meiners, R. K., IV, 136,137,138,140, 143 Meister, Charles W., 0,112,125 "Melancholia" (Dunbar), Supp. O, Part 1,194 "Melanctha" (Stein), IV, 30, 34, 35, 37,38-40,45 "Melancthon" (Moore), III, 212,215 Melander, Ingrid, Supp. I, Part 2,548 Melcher, Frederic G., Supp. I9 Part 2, 402 Meliboeus-Hipponax (Lowell), see Bigelow Papers, The Mellaart, James, Supp. I, Part 2,567 Mellon, Andrew, III, 14 Melodrama Play (ShcpaTd),Supp.m, Part 2,440-441,443,445 Melodramatists, The (Nemerov), III, 268,281-283,284 Melting-Pot, The (Zangwill), 1,229 Meltzer, Milton, IV, 189; Supp. I, Part 1,348

Melville, Allan, III, 74,77 Melville, Gansevoort, III, 76 Melville, Herman, 1,104,106,211,288, 340,343,348,354,355,561-562; D, 27,74, 224-225, 228,230,232,236, 255,259,271,272,277,281,295,307, 311,319,320,321,418,477,497,539540,545; ffl, 29,45, 70, 74-48,359, 438,453,454,507,562-563,572,576; IV, 57,105,194,199,202,250,309, 333,345,350,380,444,453; Supp. I, Part 1,147,238,242,249,309,317, 372,Part2,383,495,579,580,582,6Q2 Melville, Maria Gansevoort, III, 74, 77,85 Melville, Mrs. Herman (Elizabeth Shaw), III, 77,91,92 Melville,Thomas, III, 77,79,92; Supp. I, Part 1,309 Melville, Whyte, IV, 309 Melville family, III, 75 Melville Goodwin, USA (Marquand), HI, 60,65-66 Member of the Wedding, The (McCullers), II, 587,592,592,600604,605,606 "Memoir" (Untermeyer), II, 516-517 Memoir of Mary Ann, A, III, 357 Memoirs ofArii Taimai (Adams), I, 2-3 "Memoirs of Carwin, the Biloquist" (Brown), Supp. I, Part 1,132

Memoirs of Hecate County (Wilson), IV, 429 Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli (Fuller), Supp. II, Part 1,280,283, 285 "Memoirs of Stephen Calvert" (Brown), Supp. I, Part 1,133,144 Memorabilia (Xenophon), II, 105 Memorabilia of John Greenleaf W/iim>r(ed.Pickard),Supp.I9Part £706 Memorable Providences (Mather), Supp. II, Part 2,458 "Memorial for the City" (Auden), Supp. II, Part 1,20 "Memorial Rain" (MacLeish), HI, 15 "Memorial to Ed Bland" (Brooks), Supp. Ill, Part 1,77 "Memories" (Whittier), Supp. I, Part 2,699 Memories of a Catholic Girlhood (McCarthy), II, 560-561,566 "Memoriesof Uncle Neddy" (Bishop), Supp. I, Part 1,73,93 "Memories of West Street and Lepke" (Lowell), II, 550 "Memory, A" (Welty), IV, 261-262 Memory of Two Mondays, A (Miller), HI, 153,156,15&-159,160,166 Memphis Commercial Appeal (newspaper), IV, 378 Men and Brethen (Cozzens), I, 363365,368,375,378,379 "Men in the Storm, The" (Crane), I, 411 "Men Loved Wholly Beyond Wisdom'* (Bogan), Supp. Ill, Part 1,50 "Men Made Out of Words" (Stevens), FV,88 Men Must Act (Mumford), Supp. II, Part 2,479 "Men of Color, to Arms!" (Douglass), Supp. Ill, Part 1,171 Men of Good Hope: A Story of American Progressives (Aaron), Supp. I, Part 2,650 Men Who Made the Nation, The (Dos Passos),I,485 Men Without Women (Hemingway), 11,249 Men, Women and Ghosts (Lowell), II, 523-524 "Men, Women, and Thurber," Supp. I, Part 2,627 Mencius (Meng-tzu), IV, 183 Mencken, August, III, 100,108

Mencken, August, Jr., HI, 99,109,11&-

119

Mencken, Burkhardt, III, 100,108 Mencken, Charles, III, 99 Mencken, Gertrude, III, 99 Mencken, H. L., 1,199,210,212,213, 235,245,261,405,514,515,517; II, 25,27,42,89,90,91,271,289,430, 443,449,485; HI, 99-121,394,482; IV, 76,432,440,475,482; Supp. I, Part 2,484,629-630,631,647,651, 653,659,673; Supp. II, Part 1,136 Mencken, Mrs. August (Anna Abhau) JH, 100,109 Mencken, Mrs. H. L. (Sara Haardt), m, 109, 111 Mendele,rV,3,10 Mendelief, Dmitri Ivanovich, IV, 421 "Mending Wall" (Frost), II, 153-154 Menikoff, Barry, Supp. I, Part 1,319 Mennes, John, D, 111 "Menstruation at Forty" (Sexton), Supp. II, Part 2,686 "Merced" (Rich), Supp. I, Part 2,563 Merchant of Venice, The (Shakespeare), IV, 227 Mercy Street (Sexton), Supp. II, Part 2, 683,689 "Mere Pochette" (Jewett), II, 400 Meredith, George, fl, 175,186 Meredith, Mary, see Webb, Mary Meredith, William, 1,189; H, 390,545 "Merely to Know" (Rich), Supp. I, Part 2,554 Merideth, Robert, Supp. I, Part 2,601 Meridian (Walker), Supp. Ill, Part 2, 520,524,527,528,531-537 M6rim£e, Prosper, D, 322 Meriweather family, D, 197 Meriwether, James B., 1,380; D, 76 "Meriwether Connection, The" (Cowley), Supp. II, Part 1,142 "Merlin" (Emereon), II, 19,20 Merlin (Robinson), III, 522 "Merlin Enthralled" (Wilbur), Supp. Ill, Part 2,544,554 Merrill, Bob, HI, 406 Merrill, James, Supp. HI, Part 1,317338, Part 2,541,561 Merry Widow, The (Lehar), III, 183 "Merry-Go-Round" (Hughes), Supp. I, Part 1,333 Merry-Go-Round, The (Van Vechten), Supp. II, Part 2,734,735 Merry's Museum (magazine), II, 397 Mertins, Louis, II, 172

MERT-MILL / 729 Merton, Father, III, 357 Merwin, W. S., Supp. Ill, Part 1,3»360, Part 2,541 Meservc, Frederick H., ffl, 598 Meserve, Walter J., D, 292,293 Meserve, Walter, Supp. I, Part 1,70 Message in the Bottle, The (Percy), Supp. HI, Part 1,387-388,393,397 "Message in the Bottle,The" (Percy), Supp. Ill, Part 1,388 "Message of Flowers and Fire and Rowers, The" (Brooks), Supp. Ill, Part 1,69 Messenger (publication), Supp. I, Part 1,328 Metamorphic Tradition in Modern Poetry (Quinn),IV, 421 Metamorphoses (Ovid), II, 542-543; HI, 467,468 Metamorphoses (trans. Pound), III, 468-469 "Metamorphosis" (Kafka), IV, 438 "Metaphor as Mistake" (Percy), Supp. III, Part 1,387-388 "Metaphors of a Magnifico" (Stevens), IV, 92 "Metaphysical Poets, The" (Eliot), I, 527,586 Metaphysicism, I, 384, 396, 447; II, 40, 211, 542; HI, 4,13,18, 32, 37, 38, 115, 173, 204, 245, 252-253, 255, 263, 348, 392, 393, 394, 405, 481,493,541,611;IV,28,100,115, 137,144,151,152,154,165, 283, 333, 349, 433, 482, 485, 487, 488, 493,495,496; Supp. I, Part 1,261, 366, Part 2,421,634,635,661,679, 704 "Metaphysics" (Ginsberg), Supp. II, Part 1,313 Metcalf,AllanA.,I,450 Metcalf, Eleanor M., Ill, 96,97 Metrical History of Christianity, The (Taylor), IV, 163 Metropolitan Magazine, H, 90 "Metzengerstein" (Poe), III, 411,417 Metzger, Arnold, n, 365 "Mexico" (Lowell), II, 553,554 Mexico City Blues (Kerouac), Supp. III, Part 1,225,229 "Mexico Is a Foreign Country: Five Studies in Naturalism" (Warren), IV, 241,252 Meyer, Donald B., HI, 298,313 Meyers, Sister Bertrande, III, 360

Meynell, Alice, Supp. I, Part 1,220 "Mezzo Cammin" (Longfellow), II, 490 "Michael" (Wordsworth), III, 523 Michael Angela (Longfellow), 11,490, 494,495,506 MichaelScarlett(Cozzens), 1,358-359, 378 Michelangelo, 1,18; D, 11-12; III, 124; Supp. I, Part 1,363 Michclson, Albert, IV, 27 Michigan Daily (newspaper), III, 146 Mickiewicz, Adam, Supp. II, Part 1, 299 Mid-American Chants (Anderson), I, 109,114 Mid-Century American Poets, III, 532 "Mid-Day" (Doolittle), Supp. I, Part 1,266-267 "Midas" (Winters), Supp. II, Part 2, 801 Midcentury (Dos Passos), 1,474,475, 478,490,492-494; Supp. I, Part 2, 646 "Middle Age" (Lowell), II, 550 Middle of the Journey, The (Trilling), Supp. Ill, Part 2,495,504-506 "Middle of the Way" (Kinnell), Supp. III, Part 1,242 "Middle Passage" (Hayden),Supp.O, Part 1,363,375-376 "Middle Toe of the Right Foot, The" (Bierce),I,203 Middle Years, The (James), II, 337338 Middlemarch (Eliot), I, 457, 459; II, 290,291; Supp. I, Part 1,174 Middlesex Standard (publication), Supp. I, Part 2,687 "Midnight Consultations, The" (Freneau), Supp. II, Part 1,257 Midnight Cry, A (Mather), Supp. II, Part 2,460 "Midnight Gladness" (Levertov), Supp. Ill, Part 1,284-285 "Midnight Show" (Shapiro), Supp. II, Part 2,705 Midpoint and Other Poems (Updike), IV, 214 Midsummer Night's Dream, A (Shakespeare), Supp. I, Part 1,369-370 "Migration, The" (Tate), IV, 130 Miles, Julie, 1,199 Miles, Kitty, 1,199 Miles, Richard D.,D, 125

Miles Wallingford (Cooper),see Afloat and Ashore (Cooper) Milestone, Lewis, Supp. I, Part 1, 281 Milford, Nancy, D, 83,100 "Militant Nudes" (Hardwick), Supp. HI, Part 1,210-211 "Milk Bottles" (Anderson), 1,114 Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore, The (Williams), IV, 382,383, 384, 386, 390, 391, 392, 393, 394, 395,398 Mill, James, n, 357 Mill, John Stuart, III, 294-295 Millay, Cora, III, 123,133-134,135136 Millay, Edna St. Vincent, I, 482; D, 530; HI, 122-144; IV, 433,436; Supp. I, Part 2,707,714,726 Miller, Arthur, 1,81,94; III, 145-169 Miller, C. William, D, 125 Miller, Edwin H., IV, 354 Miller, Henry, 1,97,119,157; HI, 40, 170-192; IV, 138; Supp. I, Part 2, 546 Miller, Herman, Supp. I, Part 2,614, 617 Miller, J.Hillis, IV, 424 Miller, James E., Jr., 1,404; 0,100; III, 241; IV, 352,354 Miller, Joaquin,!, 193,195,459;Supp. II, Part 1,351 Miller, John Duncan, Supp. I, Part 2, 604 Miller, Jordan Y., 1,96; III, 406,407 Miller, Mrs. Arthur (Ingeborg Morath), HI, 162-163 Miller, Mrs. Arthur (Marilyn Monroe), III, 161,162-163 Miller, Mrs. Arthur (Mary Grace Slattery),III,146,161 Miller, Orilla, Supp. I, Part 1,48 Miller,Perry,I,546,547,549,550,560, 564,566;II,23,460;ni,407;IV, 166, 186,188; Supp. I, Part 1,31,46,104, Part 2,484 Miller, R. B., Supp. I, Part 1,348 Miller, Robert Ellis, D, 588 Miller, Rosamond, IV, 47 Miller, Russell H., 1,143 Miller of Old Church, The (Glasgow), D, 175,181 "Miller's Tale" (Chaucer), III, 283 Millet, Kate, m, 48,192 Millgate, Michael, n, 76; IH, 48, 7273,336; IV, 123,130,132,143

MILL-MR. / 730 "Million Young Workmen, 1915, A" (Sandburg), III, 585 Mills, Benjamin Fay, III, 176 Mills, C. Wright, Supp. I, Part 2,648, 650 Mills, Florence, Supp. I, Part 1,322 Mills, Ralph J., Jr., 1,542; 0,557; HI, 549,530 Mills family, IV, 311 Mills of the Kavanaughs, 77^ (Lowe 11), 0,542-543,546,550; III, 508 "Mills of the Kavanaughs, The" (Lowell), II, 542-543 Milne,A.J.M.,I,278 Milosz, Czeslaw, Supp. Ill, Part 2,630 Milton, John, 1,6,138,273,587-588; H, 11,15,113,130, 411, 540, 542; III, 40,124,201,225,274,468,471, 486,487,503,511,525; IV, 50,82, 126, 137, 155, 157, 241, 279, 347, 422,461,494; Supp. I, Part 1,124, 150,370, Part 2,412,422,491,501, 522,622,722,724 "Milton by Firelight" (Snyder), Supp. II, Part 1,314 "Miltonic Sonnet, A" (Wilbur), Supp. III, Part 2,558 Milwaukee Journal (newspaper), III, 580 Milwaukee Leader (newspaper), III, 580 Milwaukee News (nev/spaper),ni,5SQ Milwaukee Sentinel (newspaper), III, 580 Mimesis (Auerbach), III, 453 Mims, Edwin, Supp. I, Part 1,362,364, 365,371,373 "Mind" (Wilbur), Supp. EH, Part 2, 554 "Mind,The"(Kinnell),Supp.III,Part 1,245 Mind Breaths: Poems 1972-1977 (Ginsberg), Supp. II, Part 1,326 "Mind in the Modem World" (Trilling), Supp. HI, Part 2,512 "Mind Is Shapely, Art Is Shapely" (Ginsberg), Supp. II, Part 1,327 Mindlin, Henrique, Supp. I, Part 1,92 Mind-Reader, The( Wilbur), Supp. Ill, Part 2,560-562 "Mind-Reader,The" (Wilbur), Supp. Ill, Part 2,561-562 "Mined Country" (Wilbur), Supp. Ill, Part 2,546-548 Miner, Earl, HI, 466,479 Miner, Ward L, 0,76

Ming Yellow (Marquand), III, 56 "Minimal, The" (Roethke), III, 531532 "Minions of Midas, The" (London), 0,474-475 Minister's Charge, The, or The Apprenticeship of Lemuel Barber (Howells), II, 285-286,287 Minister's Wooing, The (Stowe) II, 541 "Minister's Wooing, The" (Stowe), Supp. I, Part 2,592-595 "Ministration of Our Departed Friends,The" (Stowe), Supp. I, Part 2,586-587 "Minneapolis Poem, The" (Wright), Supp. Ill, Part 2,601-602 Minnie, Temple, H, 344 Minor American Novelists (Hoyt), Supp. I, Part 1,148 "Minor Poems" (Eliot), 1,579 "Minor Topics" (Howells), II, 274 Minority Report: H. L. Mencken's Notebooks (Mencken), III, 112 "Minstrel Man" (Hughes), Supp. I, Part 1,325 Mirabell: Books of Number (Merrill), Supp. Ill, Part 1,332-334 "Miracle" (Carver), Supp. EH, Part 1, 139-140 "Miracle of Lava Canyon, The" (Henry), Supp. II, Part 1,389,390 Mirage (Masters), Supp. I, Part 2,459, 470,471 "Mirages, The" (Hayden), Supp. II, Part 1,373 Miranda, Francisco de, Supp. I, Part 2, 522 "Miranda" (Buck), Supp. II, Part 1, 128 "Miriam" (Capote), Supp. Ill, Part 1, 117,120,122 "Miriam" (Whittier), Supp. I, Part 2, 691,703 "Mirror" (Merrill), Supp. Ill, Part 1, 322 Mirrors and Windows (Nemerov), ID, 269,275-277 "Mirrors of Chartres Street" (Faulkner), II, 56 Misanthrope, The (Moli&re, trans. Wilbur), Supp. Ill, Part 2,552,560 Miscellaneous Works of Mr. Philip Freneau, Containing His Essays and Additional Poems (Freneau),Supp. II, Part 1,263,264,266

Misfits, The (Miller), in, 147,149,156, 161-162,163 Misrepresentations Corrected, and Truth Vindicated, in a Reply to the Rev. Mr. Solomon Williams's Book (Edwards), 1,549 "Miss Emily and the Bibliographer" (Tate), Supp. D, Part 1,103 "Miss Furr and Miss Skeene" (Stein), IV, 29-30 "Miss Kate in H—1" (Twain), IV, 193 Miss Lonelyhearts (West), 1,107; II, 436; III, 357; IV, 287,288,290-297, 300,301,305,306 Aftf5Afommfl>limee(Caldwell),I,308, 309,310 "Miss Mary Pask" (Wharton),IV,316 Miss RaveneVs Conversion from Secession to Loyalty (De Forest), IV, 350 "Miss Tempy's Watchers" (Jewett), 0,401 Mission to Moscow (film), Supp. I, Part 1,281 "Mr. and Mrs. Fix-It" (Lardner), 0, 431 Mr. Arcularis ( Aiken), 1, 54, 56 "Mr. Bruce" (Jewett), II, 397 Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain (Kaplan), 1, 247-248 "Mr. Coffee and Mr. Fixit" (Carver), Supp. Ill, Part 1,145 "Mr. Cornelius Johnson, OfficeSeeker" (Dunbar), Supp. H, Part 1, 211,213 "Mr. Costyve Duditch" (Toomer), Supp. Ill, Part 2, 486 "Mr. Edwards and the Spider" (Lowell), 1, 544; II, 550 "Mr. Flood's Party" (Robinson), III, 512 Mr. Hodge and Mr. Hazard (Wylie), Supp. I, Part 2, 708, 709, 714, 721724 "Mr. Hueffer and the Prose Tradition" (Pound), III, 465 "Mr. Longfellow and His Boy" (Sandburg), III, 591 Mr. Moto Is So Sorry (Marquand), III, 57,58 "Mr. Preble Gets Rid of His Wife" (Thurber), Supp. I, Part 2, 615 "Mr. Rolfe" (Wilson), IV, 436 Mr. Sammler's Planet (Bellow),!, 144, 147, 150, 151, 152, 158 "Mr.ShelleySpeaking"(Wylie),Supp. I, Part 2, 719

MR.-MONO / 757 "Mr. Thompson's Prodigal" (Harte), Supp. II, Part 1,354 "Mister Toussan" (Ellison), Supp. II, Part 1,238 "Mr. Whittier" (Scott), Supp. I, Part 2, 705 Mr. Wilson's War (Dos Passos), 1,485 Mrs. Albert Grundy: Observations in Philistia (Frederic), II, 138-139 "Mrs. Alfred Uruguay," (Stevens), IV, 81 "Mrs. Kate Chopin" (Deyo), Supp. I, Parti, 226 "Mrs. Maecenas" (Burke), 1,271 "Mrs. Mandrill" (Nemerov), III, 278 Mrs. Reynolds (Stein), IV, 43 Mitch Miller (Masters), Supp. I, Part 2,456,466,469-471,474,475,476 Mitchell, Dr. S. Weir, IV, 310 Mitchell, Julia P., Supp. I9 Part 1,252 Mitchell, Margaret, D, 177 Mitchell, Richard, n, 53 Mitchell, Tennessee, see Anderson, Mrs. Sherwood (Tennessee Mitchell) Mitchell, Wesley C, Supp. I, Part 2, 632,643 Mitgang, Herbert, III, 598 "Mixed Sequence" (Roethke),OI, 547 Mizener, Arthur, 0,77,81,84,94,99, 100,222; III, 25,241,289; IV, 132, 143,235,259; Supp. I, Part 1,97 "M'liss: An Idyl of Red Mountain" (Harte), Supp. II, Part 1,339 Moby Dick; or, The Whale (Melville), I, 106, 354; O, 33, 224-225, 236, 539-540; III, 28-29,74,75,77,81, 82,83-86,87,89,90,91,93,94,95, 359, 453, 556; IV, 57, 199, 201, 202;Supp. I, Part 1,249, Part 2,579 "Mocking-Bird The" (Bierce), 1,202 Modern Brazilian Architecture (trans. Bishop), Supp. I, Part 1,92 Modern Instance, A, a Novel (Howells), II, 275, 279, 282-283, 285 Modern Mephistopheles, A (Alcott), Supp. I, Part 1,37-38 "Modern Poetry" (Crane), 1,390 Modern School, The (publication), I, 384 "Modern Times" (Zukofsky), Supp. Ill, Part 2,624 Modern Writer, The (Anderson), I, 117

Modernist, The (publication), 1,384 Modersohn, Mrs. Otto (Paula Becker), Supp. I, Part 2,573-574 Modersohn, Otto, Supp. I, Part 2,573 "Modes of Being" (Levertov), Supp. HI, Part 1,282 Modest Enquiry into the Nature and Necessity of a Paper-Currency, A (Franklin), II, 108-109 "Modest Expert, A" (Moore), Supp. I, Part 1,97 "Modest Proposal, A" (Swift), 1,295 "Modest Self-Tribute, A" (Wilson), IV, 431,432 Moeller, Philip, III, 398,399 "Moench von Berchtesgaden, Der" (Voss), 1,199-200 Moers, Ellen, I, 520; Supp. I, Part 1, 46

Mohammed, 1,480; H, 1 Mohrt, Michel, IV, 259 Moltere, III, 113; Supp. I, Part 2,406; Supp. Ill, Part 2,552,560 "MollPitcher"(Whittier),Supp.I,Part 2,684 Moller, Karin, Supp. I, Part 1,69 "Molloch in State Street" (Whittier), Supp. I, Part 2,687 "Moloch" (Miller), III, 177 Moments of the Italian Summer (Wright), Supp. Ill, Part 2,602 "Momus" (Robinson), III, 508 "Mon Ami" (Bourne), 1,227 Monaghan, Charles, IV, 119 "Monet's 'Waterlilies'" (Hayden), Supp. II, Part 1,361-362 "Money" (Nemerov), III, 287 Monica, Saint, IV, 140 Monikins, The (Cooper), 1,348,354 Monk and the Hangman's Daughter, The (Bierce), 1,199-200,209 "Monk of Casal-Maggiore, The" (Longfellow), II, 505 "Monkey Puzzle, The" (Moore), III, 194,207,211 "Monkeys, The" (Moore), III, 201, 202 "MonocledeMonOncle,Le"(Stevens), IV, 78,84; Supp. Ill, Part 1,20 Monro, Harold, III, 465 Monroe, Harriet, 1,235,384,390,393; II,533;III,458,581,586;IV, 74,96; Supp. I, Part 1,256,257,258,262, 263,267, Part 2,374,387,388,464, 610,611,613,614,615,616

Monroe, James, Supp. I, Part 2,515, 517 Monroe, Marilyn, HI, 161,162-163 Monroe, N. Elizabeth, n, 195 Monroe's Embassy; or, the Conduct of the Government in Relation to Our Claims to the Navigation of the Mississippi (Brown), Supp. I, Part 1,146 Monster and Other Stories (Crane), I, 409 "Monster, The" (Crane), 1,418 Montage of a Dream Deferred (Hughes), Supp. I, Part 1, 333, 339-341 Montagu, Ashley, Supp. I, Part 1,314 Montaigne, Michel de, II, 1,5,6,8,1415,16,535; III, 600 "Montaigne" (Emerson), II, 6 Montale, Eugenio, Supp. Ill, Part 1, 320 Montcalm, Louis Joseph de, Supp. I, Part 2,498 Montcalm and Wolfe (Parkman), Supp. II, Part 2,5%, 609,610,611613 Monterey, Carlotta, see O'Neill, Mrs. Eugene (Carlotta Monterey) Montevallo Review (publication), Supp. Ill, Part 2,624 Montgomery, Constance Cappel, fl, 270 Montgomery, Marion, 1,590 Montgomery, Robert, Supp. I, Part 2, 611 Monthly (publication), 1,26 Monthly Anthology (publication), II, 302; Supp. I, Part 1,152,300 Monthly Magazine and American Review, The, Supp. I, Part 1,133,140, 144 Monti, Luigi, H, 504 "Montrachet-le-Jardin" (Stevens), IV, 82 Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres (Adams), 1,1,9,12-14,18,19,21; Supp. I, Part 2,417 Montserrat (Hell man), Supp. I, Part 1, 283-285 Montserrat (Robles), Supp. I, Part 1, 283-285 "Monument, The" (Bishop), Supp. I, Part 1,89 "Monument Mountain" (Bryant), Supp. I, Part 1,156,162

MOOD-MORS / 732 Moods (Alcott), Supp. I, Part 1, 33, 34-35,43 Moody, Mrs. William Vaughn, 1,384; Supp. I, Part 2,394 Moody, Richard, Supp. I, Part 1,280, 298 Moody, William Vaughn, HI, 507, IV, 26 Moon (periodical), Supp. D, Part 1, 172 "Moon and the Night and the Men, The" (Berryman), 1,172 "Moon-Face" (London), II, 475 Moon-Face and Other Stones (London), II, 483 Moon for the Misbegotten, A (O'Neill), 111,385,401,403,404 Moon Is a Gong, The(DosPassos),see Garbage Man, The (Dos Passos) Moon Is Down, The (Steinbeck), IV, 51 MoonoftheCaribbees, The (O'Neill), 111,388 "Moon upon her fluent Route, The" (Dickinson), 1,471 Mooney, Harry John, Jr., HI, 455 Mooney,Tom,I,505 "Moonlight Alert" (Winters), Supp. II, Part 2,801,811,815 Moony9s Kid Don't Cry (Williams), IV,381 Moore, Arthur, Supp. I, Part 1,49 Moore, Dr. Merrill, III, 506 Moore, George, 1,103 Moore, Harry, H, 608; III, 49,241 Moore, John Milton, HI, 193 Moore, John Rees, Supp. I, Part 1,70 Moore, Marianne, 1,58,70,285,401, 428,450; 0,390; HI, 193-217,514, 592-593; IV, 48,74,75,76,91,96, 402,424; Supp. I, Part 1,84,89,97, 255,257, Part 2,707; Supp. II, Part 1, 21; Supp. in, Part 1,58,60,63; Part 2,612,626,627 Moore, Mary Warner, HI, 193 Moore, Sturge, III, 459 Moore, Thomas, D, 296,299,303; III, 191,192 Moore, Virginia, Supp. I, Part 2,730 Moos, Malcolm, III, 116,119 "Moose, The" (Bishop), Supp. I, Part 1,73,93,94,95 "Moose Wallow, The" (Hayden), Supp. II, Part 1,367

"Moral Bully, The" (Holmes), Supp. I, Part 1,302 "Moral Equivalent for Military Service, A" (Bourne), 1,230 "Moral Equivalent of War, The" (James), II, 361; Supp. I, Part 1,20 Moral Man and Immoral Society (Niebuhr), III, 292,295-297 "Moral Substitute for War, A" (Addams), Supp. I, Part 1,20 "Moral Thought, A" (Freneau),Supp. II, Part 1,262 Moralism, 1,148,415; HI, 298 Moralites Legendaires (Laforgue), I, 573 "Morality and Mercy in Vienna" (Pynchon), Supp. II, Part 2, 620, 624 "Morality of Poetry, The" (Wright), Supp. HI, Part 2,596-597,599 "Morals Is Her Middle Name" (Hughes), Supp. I, Part 1,338 "Moralsof Chess,The" (Franklin), II, 121 Moran of the Lady Letty (Norris), II, 264;III,314,322,327,328,329,330, 331,332,333 Morath, Ingeborg, see Miller, Mrs. Arthur (Ingeborg Morath) Moravia, Alberto, 1,301 Mordell, Albert, H, 340; Supp. I, Part 2,706 More, Henry, 1,132 More, Paul Elmer, 1,223-224,247; O, 509; Supp. I, Part 2,423 "More Pleasant Adventures" (Ashbery), Supp. ID, Part 1,1 More Stately Mansions (O'Neill), III, 385,401,404-405 Moreau, Gustave, 1,66 Moreau, John Adam, 1,237 Morehouse, Marion, see Cummings, Mrs. E. E. (Marion Morehouse) "Morella"(Poe),III,412 Morgan, Edmund S., 1,566; IV, 149; Supp. I, Part 1,101, 102, Part 2, 484 Morgan, Frederick, IV, 424 Morgan, Henry, 0,432; IV, 63 Morgan, J. P., 1,494; HI, 14,15 Morgan,Robin,Supp.I,Part 2,569,578 Morgenthau, Hans, III, 291,309,313 Moricand, Conrad, III, 190 Morin, Paul, H, 509

Morison, Mrs. Samuel Eliot (Elizabeth Shaw Greene), Supp. I, Part 2, 483 Morison, Mrs. Samuel Eliot (Priscilla Barton), Supp. I, Part 2,493,496, 497 Morison, Samuel Eliot, Supp. I, Part 1, 123, Part 2,479-500 Morituri Salutamus (Longfellow), Supp. I, Part 2,416 "Morituri Salutamus" (Longfellow), D, 499,500 "Moriturus" (Millay),ra, 126,131-132 Morley, Christopher, ffl, 481,483,484; Supp. I, Part 2,653 Morley, Edward, IV, 27 Morley, Lord John, 1,7 Morley, Sheridan, III, 169 "MorningGlory" (Merrill), Supp. Ill, Part 1,337 Morning Is Near Us, The (Glaspell), Supp. Ill, Part 1,184-185 Morning Noon and Night (Cozzens), 1,374,375,376,377,379,380 "Morning of the Day They Did It, The" (White), Supp. I, Part 2,663 "MorningRollCair(Anderson),I,116 Morning Watch, The (Agee), 1,25,3942 "Mornings in a New House" (Merrill), Supp. in, Part 1,327 Morris, George Sylvester, Supp. I, Part 2,640 Morris, Gouverneur, Supp. I, Part 2, 512,517,518 Morris, Harry C, IV, 284 Morris, Lloyd, III, 458 Morris, Robert, Supp. I, Part 2,510 Morris, William, D, 323,338,523; IV, 349; Supp. I, Part 1,260,356 Morris, Wright, 1,305; II, 100; 111,218243,558,572; IV, 211 Morrison, Charles Clayton, III, 297 Morrison, Claudia C., 1,263 Morrison, Toni, Supp. Ill, Part 1,361381 "Morro Bay" (Jeffers), Supp. II, Part 2,422 Morrow, W.C., 1,199 Morsberger, Robert E., Supp. I, Part 2,626 Morse, John T., Supp. I, Part 1,319 Morse, Samuel F. B., IV, 95,96; Supp. I, Part 1,156

MORT-MUST / 753 Mortal Acts, Mortal Words (Kinnell), Supp. Ill, Part 1,235,236,237,249254 Mortal Antipathy, A (Holmes), Supp. I, Part 1,315-316 Mortal No, The (Hoffman), IV, 113 Moscow under Fire (Caldwell), 1,296 Moses (biblical person), 1,480; Q, 1,15, 60,166; IH, 347; IV, 371; Supp. I, Part 2,515,516 Moses, Montrose J., ffl, 407 Mosquitos (Faulkner), II, 56 Moss, Howard, HI, 452; ffl, 169 Moss, Sidney, HI, 432 "Moss of His Skin" (Sexton), Sup p. II, Part 2,676 Mosses from an Old Manse (Hawthorne), 1,562; II, 224; III, 82,83 "Most Extraordinary Case, A" (James), II, 322 Most Likely to Succeed (Dos Passos), 1,491 Motel Chronicles (Shepard), Supp. Ill, Part 2,445 Mother (Whistler), IV, 369 Mother, The (Buck), Supp. II, Part 1, 118-119 "Mother and Jack and the Rain" (Sexton), Supp. II, Part 2,686 "Mother and Son" (Tate), IV, 128, 137-138 Mother Courage (Brecht), III, 160 Mother Night (Vonnegut), Supp. II, Part 2,757,758,767,770,771 "Mother to Son" (Hughes), Supp. I, Part 1,321-322,323 Mother's Recompense, TTie(Wharton), IV, 321,324 "Mother's Tale, A" (Agee), 1,29-30 "Motion, The" (Olson), Supp. n, Part 4571 MotionofHistory, 77ii(Baraka),Supp. II, Part 1,55,56 "Motive for Metaphor, The" (Stevens), IV, 89 Motley, John Lothrop, Supp. I, Part 1, 299, Part 2,479 "Motor Car, The" (White), Supp. I, Part 2,661 Motor-Flight Through France (Wharton),I,12 Mountain Interval (Frost), II, 154 Mountains, The (Wolfe), IV, 461 "Mount-Joy: or Some Passages Out

of the Life of a Castle-Builder" (Irving), II, 314 "Mourners, The" (Malamud),Supp.I, Part 2,431,435,436-437 Mourning Becomes Electro (O'Neill), 111,391,394,39&-400 "Mourning Poem for the Queen of Sunday" (Hayden), Supp. H, Part 1,379-380 Moveable Feast, A (Hemingway), II, 257 "Movie" (Shapiro), Supp. II, Part 2, 707 "Movie Magazine, The: A Low 'Slick'" (Percy), Supp. HI, Part 1,385 Moviegoer, The (Percy), Supp. ffl, Part 1,383-385,387,389-392,394,397 Moving Target, The (Merwin), Supp. Ill, Part 1,346,347-348,352,357 "Mowbray Family, The" (Farrell and Alden),II,45 "Mowing" (Frost), II, 169-170 "Moxan's Master" (Bierce), 1,206 Moynihan, Julian, Supp. I, Part 2,627 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, I, 479, 588,592; IV, 74,358 "Mozart and the Gray Steward" (Wilder), IV, 358 "MS. Found in a Bottle" (Poe), III, 411,416 Mttron-Hirsch, Sidney, III, 484-485 "Muck-A-Muck" (Harte), Supp. II, Part 1,342 Mucke,Edith,IV,23 Mueller, Lisel, Supp. I, Part 1,83,88 Muhammad, Elijah, Supp. I, Part 1,60 Muhammad Ali, II, 417; HI, 46 Muir, Edwin, 1,527; II, 171,368; III, 20 Mulatto (Hughes),Supp.I, Part 1,328, 339 Muldoon, William, 1,500-501 Mulford, Prentice, 1,193 Muller, Herbert J., IV, 473 Mullins, Eustace, HI, 479 Mullins, Priscilla, D, 502-503 Mumford, Lewis, 1,245,250,251,252, 259,261; II, 271,473-474,485; III, 97; Supp. I, Part 2,632,638; Supp. II, Part 2,471-501 Mumford, Sophia Wittenberg (Mrs. Lewis Mumford), Supp. II, Part 2, 474,475 "Mundus et Infans" (Auden), Supp. n, Part 1,15

"Munich, 1938" (Lowell), II, 554 "Municipal Report, A" (Hemy), Supp. II, Part 1,406-407 Munsey, Frank, 1,501 Munson, Gorham B., 1,252,263,388, 432,450; Supp. I, Part 2,454,478 Murasaki, Lady, D, 577 Muray, Nicholas, Supp. I, Part 2,708 Murder in the Cathedral (Eliot), 1,571, 573,580,581; II, 20 Murder of Lidice, 77tt?(Millay),III,140 "Murders in the Rue Morgue, The" (Poe), III, 412,416,419-420 Murdock, Kenneth B., D, 340 Murphy, Francis, IV, 165 Murphy, Gardner, D, 365 Murray, Edward, 1,229; III, 169 Murray, Gilbert, III, 468-469 Murray, H. A., Ill, 95 Murray, John, 0,304; III, 76,79 Murrell,JohnA.,IV,265 Murrell, William, Supp. I, Part 2,626 Mursell, James L., Supp. I, Part 2,608 "Mus£e des Beaux Arts" (Auden), Supp. II, Part 1,14 Muses Are Heard, The( Capote), Supp. 01, Part 1,126 "Mushrooms" (Plath), Supp. I, Part 2, 539 Music After the Great War (Van Vechten), Supp. II, Part 2,732 Music and Bad Manners (Van Vechten), Supp. II, Part 2,733 Music for Chameleons (Capote), Supp. III, Part 1,120,125-127,131,132 "Music for Museums?" (Van Vechten), Supp. II, Part 2,732 "Music for the Movies" (Van Vechten), Supp. II, Part 2,733 "Music from Spain" (Welty), IV, 272 Music of Spain, The (Van Vechten), Supp. II, Part 2,734,735 Music School, The (Updike), IV, 214, 215,219,226,227 "Music Swims Back to Me" (Sexton), Supp. II, Part 2,673 "Mussel Hunter at Rock Harbor" (Plath), Supp. I, Part 2,529,537 Musset, Alfred de, 1,474; D, 543 Mussolini, Benito, III, 115,473, 608; IV, 372, 373; Supp. I, Part 1, 281, 282, Part 2,618 "Must the Novelist Crusade?" (Welty), IV, 280

MUTA-NARR / 734 "Mutability of Literature, The" (Irving), II, 308 Mute, The (McCullers), II, 586 Mutilated, The (Williams), IV, 382, 386,393 Mutiny of the Elsinore, The (London), 11,467 "My Alba" (Ginsberg), Supp. II, Part 1,320,321 My Antonia (Gather), 1,321-322 "My Aunt" (Holmes), Supp. I, Part 1, 302,310 My Bondage and My Freedom (Douglass), Supp. Ill, Part 1,155, 173 "My Brothers the Silent" (Merwin), Supp. Ill, Part 1,349-350 "My Butterfly" (Frost), II, 151 "My Confession" (McCarthy), II, 562 "My Country Tis of Thee," Supp. Ill, Part 2,616 My Days of Anger (Farrell), II, 34,3536,43 "My Father" (Sterne), IV, 466 "My Fathers Came From Kentucky" (Lindsay), Supp. I, Part 2,395 "My Favorite Murder" (Bierce),!, 205 "My First Book" (Harte), Supp. II, Part 1,343 My Friend, Henry Miller (Perils), III, 189 My Friend, Julia Lathrop (Addams), Supp. I, Part 1,25 "My Garden Acquaintance" (Lowell), Supp. I, Part 2,420 "My Grandfather" (Lowell), II, 554 "My Kinsman, Major Molineux" (Hawthorne),H,228,229,237-239, 243 My Kinsman, Major Molineux (Lowell), II, 545-546 "My Last Afternoon with Uncle Devereux Winslow" (Lowell), II, 547-548 My Life and Hard Times (Thurber), Supp. I, Part 2,607,609 My Life as a Man (Roth), Supp. Ill, Part 2,401,404,405,417-418 "My Lost Youth" (Longfellow), II, 487,499 My Mark Twain (Howells), II, 276 "My Metamorphosis" (Harte), Supp. II, Part 1,339 My Mortal Enemy (Cather), I, 327328; Supp. I, Part 2,719

My Mother, My Father and Me (Hellman),Supp. I, Part 1,290-291 "My Mother's Story" (Kunitz), Supp. III, Part 1,259 "My Old Man" (Hemingway), II, 263 "My Passion for Ferries" (Whitman), IV, 350 "My People" (Hughes), Supp. I, Part 1,321-322,323 "My Playmate" (Whittier), Supp. I, Part 2,699-700 "My Roomy" (Lardner), II, 420,421, 428,430 "My Sad Self9 (Ginsberg), Supp. II, Part 1,320 "My Side of the Matter" (Capote), Supp. Ill, Part 1,114,115 My Sister Eileen (McKenney), IV,288 A/y So/2,/o/m (film),Supp. I, Part 1,67 "My Son, the Murderer" (Malamud), Supp. I, Part 2,437 My Study Windows (Lowell), Supp. I, Part 2,407 My Uncle Dudley (Morris), 1,305; III, 219-220 My Works and Days (Mumlo>Td\Supp. II, Part 2,475,477,481 My World and Welcome to It (Thurber), Supp. I, Part 2,610 Myers, Andrew B., n, 317 "Mysteries of Eleusis, The" (Hardwick), Supp. Ill, Part 1,195 Mysterious Stranger, The (Twain), IV, 190-191,210 "Mystery, The" (Dunbar), Supp. II, Part 1,199,210 '"Mystery Boy* Looks for Kin in Nashville" (Hayden), Supp. II, Part 1, 366,372 "Mystery of Heroism, A" (Crane), I, 414 "Mystery of Marie Rog6t,The" (Poe), 111,413,419 "Mystic" (Plath), Supp. I, Part 2,539, 541 "Mystic Vision in 'The Marshes of Glynn' " (Warfel), Supp. I, Part 1, 366,373 Mysticism, 1,159,382,383,402; II, 21; HI, 561,562,567,568,602; IV, 4,7, 60,333,335,339,347,351,352,383 "Mystification" (Poe), III, 425 Myth of Sisyphus, The (Camus), 1,294 "Myth of the Isolated Artist The" (Oates), Supp. II, Part 2,520

Myth of the Machine, The (Mumford), Supp. II, Part 2,476,478,482 483, 493,497 Mythology and the Romantic Tradition in English Poetry (Bush), Supp. I, Part 1,268,275 Nabokov, Dmitri, m, 246,249,250 Nabokov, Mrs. Vladimir, III, 246,249, 250 Nabokov, Vladimir, 1,135: HI, 244266,283,286; Supp. I, Part 1,1%; Supp.II,Partl,2 Nabokov family, III, 245 Naked and the Dead, The (Mailer), I, 477; HI, 26,27,28-30,31,33,35,36, 44 Naked Lunch (Burroughs), Supp. Ill, Part 1,92-95,97-105 "Naked Nude" (Malamud), Supp. I, Part 2,450 "Name in the Papers" (Hughes), Supp. I, Part 1,330 "Name Is Burroughs, The" (Burroughs), Supp. HI, Part 1,93 Name Is Fogarty, The: Private Papers on Public Matters (Farreil), II, 49 Ato/ia (Zola), III, 321 "Nancy Knapp" (Masters), Supp. I, Part 2,461 "Napoleon" (Emerson), II, 6 Napoleon 1,1,6, 7, 8,474; H, 5, 309, 315,321,523; Supp. I, Part 1,153, Part 2,518,519 "Narcissus as Narcissus" (Tate), IV, 124 Narration (Stein), IV,27,30,32,33,36 Narrative (publication), Supp. I, Part 2,588 Narrative of a Four Months' Residence among the Natives of a Valley of the Marquesas klan&(MeMte\UL76 Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pymt The (Poe), III, 412 "Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, The" (Poe), III, 416 Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself (Douglass), Supp. HI, Part 1, 154-159, 162, 165 "Narrative Stance in Kate Chopin's The Awakening'9 (Sullivan and Smith), Supp. I, Part 1, 226 Narrenschiff, Das (Brant), III, 447

NARR-NELL / 735 Narrow Heart, A: Portrait of a Woman "Nature, Inc." (Lewis), II, 441 "Nature-Metaphors" (Lanier), Supp. (Gordon), II, 197,217 I, Part 1,352 Nash, Ralph, IV, 425 Nash, Thomas, Supp. Ill, Part 1,387- Nature of Evil, The (James), II, 343 Nature of Peace, r/i 439,453 "Negro Artisan,The" (Du Bois), Supp. Nature (Emerson), 1,463; II, 1,8,12, II, Part 1,166 16; IV, 171,172-173 "Negro Artist and the Racial Moun"Nature" (Emerson), Supp. I, Part 2, tain, The" (Hughes), Supp. I, Part 383; Supp. Ill, Part 1,387 1,323,325 Nature and Destiny of Man, The "Negro Assays the Negro Mood, A" (Niebuhr), III, 292,303-306,310 (Baldwin), Supp. I, Part 1,52 "Nature and Life" (Emerson), II, 19 "Negro Church, The: James Baldwin

and the Christian Vision" (Margolies), Supp. I, Part 1,70 "Negro Citizen,The" (Du Bois), Supp. H, Part 1,179 "Negro Dancers" (Hughes), Supp. I, Part 1,324 "Negro Farmer, The" (Du Bois), Supp. II, Part 1,167 "Negro Ghetto" (Hughes), Supp. I, Part 1,331 Negro in American Civilization, The (Du Bois), Supp. II, Part 1,179 "Negro in Large Cities, The" (Du Bois), Supp. H, Part 1,169 "Negro in Literature and Art, The" (Du Bois), Supp. II, Part 1,174 Negro in New York, The (Ellison), Supp. II, Part 1,230 "Negro in the Black Belt, The: Some Social Sketches" (Du Bois), Supp. II, Part 1,166 "Negro in the Well, The" (Caldwell), 1,309 "Negro Love Song, A" (Dunbar), Supp. II, Part 1,204 Negro Mother, The (Hughes), Supp. I, Part 1,328 Negro Quarterly (periodical), Supp. II, Part 1,237 "Negro Schoolmaster in the New South, A" (Du Bois), Supp. H, Part 1,168 "Negro Sermon, A: Simon Legree" (Lindsay), Supp. I, Part 2,393 "Negro Speaks of Rivers, The" (Hughes), Supp. I, Part 1,321 "Negro Takes Stock, The" (Du Bois), Supp. II, Part 1,180 "NegroTheatre, The" (Van Vechten), Supp. II, Part 2,735 "Negroes of Farmville, Virginia, The: A Social Study" (Du Bois), Supp. II, Part 1,166 "Nehemias Americanus" (Mather), Supp. II, Part 2,453 Nehru, Jawaharlal, IV, 490 Neider, Charles, IV, 212 "Neighbors" (Carver), Supp. Ill, Part 1,135,139,141 "Neighbour Rosicky"(Cather), 1,331332 "Neither Out Far Nor in Deep" (Frost), 1,303 "Nellie Clark" (Masters), Supp. I, Part 2,461

NELS-NEW / 736 Nelson, Benjamin, HI, 169; IV, 401 Nelson, Eraest, 1,388 Nelson, Gerald, 1,96 Nelson, Harland S., 1,427 Nelson, Jane A., HI, 192 Nelson, Lord Horatio, 0,524 Nemerov, Alexander, HI, 268,286 Nemerov, David, n, 268 Nemerov,Howard,I,542;in,267-289; IV, 137,140,143; Supp. Ill, Part 2, 541 Nemerov, Jeremy, III, 268 Nemerov, Mrs. Howard, III, 268 Neoclassicism,n,558,571,579;in,40; IV, 145 Neruda, Pablo, Supp. I, Part 1,89 Nest of Ninnies, A (Ashbery and Schuyler), Supp. Ill, Part 1,3 "Net to Snare the Moonlight, A" (Lindsay), Supp. I, Part 2,387 Nets to Catch the Wind (Wylie), Supp. I, Part 2,709,710-712,714 Nettleton, Asahel, 1,458 Neumann, Erich, Supp. I, Part 2,567 "Never Bet the Devil Your Head" (Poe),III,425 "Never Room with a Couple" (Hughes), Supp. I, Part 1,330 "Nevertheless" (Moore), III, 214 Nevins, Allan, 1,253; Supp. I, Part 1, 173, Part 2,486,493 Nevius, Blake, IV, 330 "New Age of the Rhetoricians, The" (Cowley), Supp. II, Part 1,135 New American Literature, The (Pattee),II,456 New and Collected Poems (Wilbur), Supp. Ill, Part 2,562-564 New and Selected Poems (Nemerov), III, 269,275,277-279 "New Art Gallery Society, The" (Wolfe), Supp. Ill, Part 2,580 New Challenge (periodical), Supp. II, Part 1,228-229,232 New Conscience and an Ancient Evil, A (Addams), Supp. I, Part 1,14-15,16 New Criterion, The (publication), Supp. Ill, Part 2,611,613 New Criticism, I, 267, 273, 276, 280, 281,282,283,517; III, 591; IV, 236, 237,331,433 NewCriticism, 77u?(Ransom),III,497498,499,501 New Critics, Supp. II, Part 1, 87-88, 90,103,106-107,135,136,137,318, Part 2,416,639,698,703,713

New Dictionary of Quotations, A (Mencken), III, 111 New Directions (publication), Supp. Ill, Part 2,624 New Eclectic (magazine), see Southern Magazine "New England" (Lowell), II, 536 "New England" (Robinson), HI, 510, 524 "New England Bachelor, A" (Eberhart),I,539 New England Courant(newspaper), II, 106 New England: Indian Summer (Brooks), 1,253,256 New England Primer, Supp. I, Part 1, 310 "New England Sabbath-Day Chace, The" (Freneau), Supp. II, Part 1, 273 New England Saints (Warren), Supp. I, Part 1,123 New-England Tale, A (Sedgwick), I, 341 New England Tragedies, The (Longfellow), II, 490,505,506 New England Weekly Review (publication), Supp. I, Part 2,684 "New Englander, The" (Anderson), 1,114 New Era in American Poetry, The (Untermeyer), Supp. I, Part 2,402 New Found Land: Fourteen Poems (MacLeish), III, 12-13 New Freeman (publication), II, 26 New Hampshire: A Poem with Notes and Grace Notes (Frost), II, 154155 "New Hampshire, February" (Eberhart),I,536 New Industrial State, The (Galbraith), Supp. I, Part 2,648 New Journalism, The (ed. Wolfe and Johnson), Supp. Ill, Part 2, 570, 579-581,583,586 "New Journalism,The" (Wolfe),Supp. Ill, Part 2,571 New Leader (publication), III, 292; Supp. I, Part 1,50 New Life, A (Malamud), Supp. I, Part 2,429-466 "New Light on Veblen" (Dorfman), Supp. I, Part 2,650 New London Telegraph (newspaper), 111,387 New Masses (publication), II, 450; HI,

434, 582; IV, 476; Supp. I, Part 1, 331; Supp. in, Part 2,618 "New Medea, The" (Howells),II,282 "New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking, A" (James), II, 353 "New Natural History, A" (Thurber), Supp. I, Part 2,619 New Negro, The (Locke), Supp. II, Part 1,176 New Negro movement, Supp. II, Part 1233 New Numbers (magazine), III, 471 New Orleans Crescent (newspaper), IV, 194,334 New Orleans Times-Picayune, D, 56 New Path to the Waterfall, A (Carver), Supp. HI, Part 1,138-140,147,149 "New Poems" (MacLeish), III, 19 New Poetry, The (eds. Monroe and Henderson), Supp. I, Part 2,387 New Poets, The: American and British Poetry Since World War Two (Rosenthal), Supp. I, Part 2,548549 New Radicalism in America, The (1889-1963): the Intellectual as a Social Type (Lasch), Supp. I, Part 1,27 New Republic (magazine), 1,170,230, 231,232,233,294; D, 430,562; III, 171,292,452; IV, 427; Supp. I, Part 1, 174, 332, Part 2, 609, 647, 709; Supp. II, Part 1,139,140,142; Supp. Ill, Part 2,612 "New Republic Moves Uptown, The" (Cowley), Supp. II, Part 1,142 New Review (publication), II, 26; Supp. Ill, Part 2,613 New Song, A (Hughes), Supp. I, Part 1,328,331-332 "New South, The" (Lanier), Supp. I, Part 1,352,354,370 "New Spirit, The" (Ashbery), Supp. HI, Part 1,14,15 New Spoon River, The (Masters), Supp. I, Part 2,461-465,473 "New Spoon River, The: Fifteen Facsimile Pages" (Robinson), Supp. I, Part 2,478 New Star Chamber and Other Essays, The (Masters), Supp. I, Part 2,455456,459 New Statesman (publication), I, 253; 11,445 New Testament, I, 303, 457, 458; D, 167;m,305;IV, 114,134,152; Supp.

NEW-NIGH / 757 I, Part 1,104,106, Part 2,516. See also names of New Testament books NewTestamen^A(Axidmon)^lGl 9ll4

"New Theory of Thorstein Veblen, A"(Galbraith),Supp.I, Part 2,650 "New Verse" (Mizener),SuppJ,Part

1,97 "New Woman Revisited, The" (For-

rey), Supp. I, Part 1, 226 New Woman's Survival Sourcebook,

The (eds. Rennie and Grimstead),

Supp. I, Part 2, 569, 578 New World Writing (Updike), IV, 217 New Year Letter (Auden), Supp. II, Part 1,14, 16 "New Year's Eve" (Schwartz), Supp. II, Part 2, 640, 656-657 New Year's Eve/1929 (Farrell), II, 43 "New Year's Eve 1968" (Lowell), II, 554 "New Year'sGift,The" (Stowe),Supp. I, Part 2, 587 "New York" (Capote), Supp. HI, Part 1,122 "New York" (Moore), III, 196, 198, 202,206 New York American (newspaper), I, 346; Supp. I, Part 1,155 New York Amsterdam News (newspaper), Supp. I, Part 1, 327 New York City Arts Project, Supp. III, Part 2, 618 New York Courier and Enquirer

(newspaper), 1, 346 New York Daily News (newspaper), I, 501; H, 591, IV, 3 "New York Edition" (James), II, 336, 337

New York Evening Mirror (newspaper), III, 413

New York Evening Post (newspaper), Supp. I, Part 1, 156, 158, Part 2,606 New York Evening Post Literary Review (publication), 1, 110 New York Evening Sun (newspaper), IV, 427 New York Express (publication), III, 413 "New York Gold Conspiracy, The" (Adams), 1, 4 New York Herald Tribune (newspaper), II, 424; in, 392; Supp. ID, Part 2,624 New York Herald Tribune Books (pub-

lication), III, 473

New York Independent (magazine), 11,151 NewYork/owi7tti/(newspaper),I,207, 208,408,409,411,425 New York Morning Chronicle (publication), II, 297 New YorkPost (newspaper), I,54;III, 395; IV, 123,196 New York Press (publication), 1,407, 416 New-York Review and Atheneum Magazine (eds. Bryant and Anderson), Supp. I, Part 1,156 New York Review of Books (publication), Supp. I, Part 2,550 New York Sun (newspaper), I, 407; 111,113,413,420 New York Times (newspaper), 1,25; D, 91,126,127,129,130,137,139, 430-431,591; III, 146,364,576; IV, 3,109,115,116,229,301,358,380, 384; Supp. I, Part I,65,83,200,295, Part 2,431; Supp. Ill, Part 2,624 New York Times Book Review, The (publication), II, 51; III, 575,581; Supp. I, Part 1,372 New York Times Magazine (publication), IV, 392 New York Tribune (newspaper), 1,407; D, 90-91; III, 53; IV, 197; Supp. I, Part 1,362 New York World (newspaper), 1,409, 500; IV, 432 New York World-Telegram (newspaper), II, 587 New Yorker (magazine), II, 437; III, 111, 246, 337, 361, 452, 552, 559, 564;IV,214,215,218,261,274,280, 429,430,437-439; Supp. I, Part 1, 60,174,175,195-196,372, Part 2, 530, 607, 609, 619, 620, 651, 653, 654,655,659,660,669,673,679 Newburyport Free Press (newspaper), Supp. I, Part 2,683 Newcomb, Robert, D, 111, 125 Newell, Henry, IV, 193 Newer Ideals of Peace (Addams), Supp. I, Part 1,11-12,15,16-17,19, 20-21 Newman, Charles, HI, 266; Supp. I, Part 2,527,546-548 Newman, Paul B., Ill, 48 "Newport of Anchuria" (Henry), Supp. II, Part 1,409 Newspaper Days, 1899-1906 (Mencken), III, 100,102, 111, 120

Newsweek (magazine), IV, 380 Newton, Benjamin Franklin, 1,454 Newton, Huey, Supp. I, Part 1,66 Newton, Isaac, 1,132,557; 0,6,103, 348-349; HI, 428; IV, 18,149 Next Room of the Dream, The (Nemerov),m,269,275,278,279-280,284 Next-to-Last Things: New Poems and Essays (Kunitz), Supp. Ill, Part 1, 257-259,261,262,265,266,268 "'Next to Reading Matter'" (Henry), Supp. H, Part 1,399 Nexus (Miller), III, 170,187,188,189 Niagara movement, Supp. II, Part 1, 168,172,176,177,180 NiceJewishBoy, The (Roth), Supp. HI, Part 2,412 Nicholas II, Tsar, Supp. I, Part 2,447 Nichols, Lewis, Supp. I, Part 1,199 Nick Adams Stories, The (Hemingway), II, 258 "Nick and the Candlestick" (Plath), Supp. I, Part 2,544 Nicoll, Allardyce, III, 400,408 Nicoloff, Philip, 11,7,23 Niebuhr, Elisabeth, D, 584 Niebuhr, Gustav, III, 292 Niebuhr, H. Richard, 1,494,566 Niebuhr, Lydia, III, 292 Niebuhr, Reinhold, III, 290-313; Supp. I, Part 2,654 Niedecker, Lorine, Supp. HI, Part 2, 616,623 Nielson, Dorothy, Supp. I, Part 2,659 Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilheim, 1,227, 283,383,389,396,397,402,509; D, 7,20,27,42,90,145,262,462,463, 577,583,585;III,102-103,113,156, 176; IV, 286, 491; Supp. I, Part 1, 254,299,320, Part 2,646 Nietzscheanism, I, 54,104, 383, 388, 506-507,532; 0,47,478,48O-481; 111,602 Nigger Heaven (Van Vechten), Supp. II, Part 2,739,744-746 Nigger of the "Narcissus," The (Conrad), II, 91 "NIGGYTHE HO" (Baraka), Supp. II, Part 1,54 "Night Above the Avenue" (Merwin), Supp. Ill, Part 1,355 "Night Among the Horses, A" (Barnes), Supp. Ill, Part 1,33-34, 39,44 "Night Dances, The" (Plath), Supp. I, Part 2,544

NIGH-NORR / 738 "Night, Death, Mississippi" (Hayden), Supp. II, Part 1,369 "Night Dream, The" (MacLeish),III, 15 Night in Acadie, A (Chopin), Supp. I, Part 1,200,219,220,224 "Night in New Arabia, A" (Henry), Supp. II, Part 1,402 "Night Journey" (Roethke),Supp.m, Part 1,260 Night Music (Odets), Supp. II, Part 2, 541,543,544 Nightofthe Iguana, The (Williams), IV, 382, 383, 384, 385, 386, 387, 388, 391,392,393,394,395,397,398 "Night of the Iguana,The" (Williams), IV, 384 Night Rider (Warren), IV, 243, 246247 "Night Shift" (Plath), Supp. I, Part 2, 538 "Night Sketches: Beneath an Umbrella" (Hawthorne), II, 235-237, 238,239,242 Night Thoughts (Young), III, 415 Night-Blooming Cereus, The (Hayden), Supp. II, Part 1,367,373 "Night-Blooming Cereus, The" (Hayden), Supp. II, Part 1,367 Night-Born, The (London), II, 467 "Nightbreak" (Rich), Supp. I, Part 2, 556 Nights (Doolittle), Supp. I, Part 1,270, 271 Nights and Days (Merrill), Supp. HI, Part 1,319,320,322-325 "Nights and Days" (Rich), Supp. I, Part 2,574 Mi?/ir-5ttfe(Oates),Supp.n,Part2,522 "Night-Side" (Gates), Supp. II, Part 2, 523 "Night-Sweat" (Lowell), II, 554 "Night-Talk" (Ellison), Supp. II, Part 1,248 Nightwood (Barnes), Supp. Ill, Part 1, 31,32,35-37,39-43 Nigro, August, IV, 119 Nihilism, 1, 104, 124, 126, 128, 130, 163; III, 277, 613; IV, 4, 484, 485, 491, 492,494 "Nihilist as Hero, The" (Lowell), II, 554 Niles, Thomas, Jr., Supp. I, Part 1, 39 Nilsson, Christine, Supp. I, Part 1, 355 Nimitz, Chester, Supp. I, Part 2, 491

Nims, John Frederick, HI, 527 Nin, Anais, HI, 182, 184, 190, 192; Supp. Ill, Part 1,43 "Nine from Eight" (Lanier), Supp. I, Part 1,352-354 "Nine Nectarines" (Moore), III, 203, 209,215 Nine Stories (Salinger), III, 552,55&564 7979 (Dos Passos), I, 482, 485-486, 487,489,490,492 "1929" (Auden), Supp. II, Part 1,6 "90 North" (Jarrell), II, 370,371 90 Trees (Zukofsky), Supp. Ill, Part 2, 631 "91 Revere Street" (Lowell), II, 547 95 Poems (Cummings), I, 430, 433, 435,439,446,447 "Nirvana" (Lanier), Supp. I, Part 1,352 Nishikigii(play), III, 466 Nitchie, George W., D, 172; HI, 217 Niven, Isabella Thorn ton, see Wilder, Mrs. Amos Parker (Isabella Thornton Niven) Nixon, Richard M., 1,376; HI, 38,46; Supp. I, Part 1,294,295 Nkrumah, Kwame, 1,490,494 "No Better Than a 'Withered Daffodil'" (Moore), III, 216 "NoChangeof Place" (Auden),Supp. II, Part 1,5 "No Coward Soul Is Mine" (Bronte), 1,458 No Door (Wolfe), IV, 451-452,456 "No Door" (Wolfe), IV, 456 No Exit (Sartre), 1,82,130 No Hero (Marquand), III, 57 "No Lamp Has Ever Shown Us Where to Look" (MacLeish), III, 9 No Love Lost, a Romance of Travel (Howells),II,277 No Name in the Street (Baldwin^Supp. I, Part 1,47,48,52,65-66,67 "No Nonsense" (Moynihan), Supp. I, Part 2,627 "NoPlaceforYou,MyLove"(Welty), IV, 278,279 No Plays of Japan, The (Waley), III, 466 No Safe Harbour (Porter), III, 447 No Star Is Lost (Farrell), II, 34,35,44 No Thanks (Cummings), 1,430,431, 432,436,437,441,443,446 "No Word" (Kunitz), Supp. HI, Part 1,263

Noa Noa (Gauguin), 1,34 Noah (biblical person), IV, 137,152; Supp. I, Part 2,506,690 Noailles, Anna de, IV, 328 Noble, David W., Supp. I, Part 1,70, Part 2,650 Nobodaddv(MacLeish).nL5-6&W. 11,18,19,20 Nobody Knows My Name (Baldwin), Supp. I, Part 1,47, 52, 55 "Nobody Knows My Name: A Letter from the South" (Baldwin), Supp. I, Part 1,52 "Nobody Said Anything" (Carver), Supp. Ill, Part 1,141 Nock, Albert Jay, 1, 245 "Nocturne" (MacLeish), III, 8 "Nocturne in a Deserted Brickyard" (Sandburg), III, 586 Nocturne of Remembered Spring (Aiken),I,50 Noel, Joseph, 11,485 "NoiselessPatientSpider" (Whitman), m,555;IV,348 Noland, Richard W., 1, 143 None but the Lonely Heart (film), Supp. II, Part 2, 546 None Shall Look Back (Gordon), II, 205-207,208 Nones (Auden), Supp. II, Part 1, 21 "Nones" (Auden), Supp. II, Part 1, 22-23 "Noon" (Bryant), Supp. I, Part 1, 157 "Noon Walk on the Asylum Lawn" (Sexton), Supp. II, Part 2, 673 "Noon Wine" (Porter), III, 436, 437438,442,446 Norcross, Frances, 1, 456, 462 Norcross, Louise, 1, 456, 462 Nordloli, David J., 0,292 Norma (Bellini), IV, 309 NormaAyMGlaspeU), Supp. ID, Part 1, 175, 186-187 "Normal Motor Adjustments" (Stein and Solomons), IV, 26 Norman, Charles, 1, 450; HI, 479 Norna;orf The Witch's Curse (Alcott), Supp. I, Part L, 33 Norris, Benjamin, III, 314 Norris, Charles, III, 320 Norris, Frank, I, 211, 355, 500, 506, 517, 518, 519; 0, 89, 264, 276, 289, 307; III, 227, 314-336, 596; IV, 29; Supp. HI, Part 2, 412 Norris, Gertrude, III, 314, 326

NORR-NYE / 739 Morris, Mrs. Frank (Jeanette Black), 111,326,327,328-329 North, Sir Thomas, IV, 370 North & South (Bishop), Supp. I, Part 1,72,84,85,89 North American Review (publication), I,1,4,5,6;D,322-323,345;IV,209; Supp. I, Part 1,154,155,300, Part 2, 406,413,418,420 "North American Sequence" (Roethke), 1,171-172,183; III, 529, 545, 547,548 "North Labrador" (Crane), 1,386 North of Boston (Frost), II, 152,153154,527; Supp. I, Part 1,263 NorthoftheDanube(Caldwe\\),l288, 290,293,294,309,310 "North Sea Undertaker's Complaint, The" (Lowell), II, 550 North Star, The (Hellman), Supp. I, Part 1,281 Northern Indianan (newspaper),!, 191 Northrup, Cyrus, Supp. I, Part 1,350 Norton, Charles Eliot, 1,223,568; D, 279, 322-323, 338; Supp. I, Part 1, 103, Part 2,406,479 Norton, John, Supp. I, Part 1,99,110, 112,114 Norton, Robert, IV, 329 Norwood, Hayden, IV, 473 "Nostalgic Mood" (Farrell), II, 45 Nostromo (Conrad), II, 600; IV, 245 Not about Nightingales (Williams), IV, 381 "Not Everyone Liked Thurber" (Geddes), Supp. I, Part 2,627 "Not Horror but 'Sadness' " (Wershba), Supp. I, Part 2,453 "Not Ideas About the Thing but the Thing Itself (Stevens), IV, 87 "'Not Marble Nor the Gilded Monument'" (MacLeish), III, 12 "Not Quite Social" (Frost), II, 156 "Not Sixteen" (Anderson), 1,114 "Not Slightly" (Stein), IV, 44 "Not Somewhere Else, but Here" (Rich), Supp. I, Part 2,552,573 "Not They Who Soar" (Dunbar), Supp. II, Part 1,199 Not to Eat; Not for Love (Weller), III, 322 Not Without Laughter (Hughes), Supp. I, Part 1,328,332 "Note on Lanier's Music, A" (Graham), Supp. I, Part 1,373

Note on Literary Criticism, A (Farrell), 11,26,49 "Note on Poetry, A" (Doolittle), Supp. I, Part 1,254,267-268 "Note on Realism, A" (Anderson), I, 110 Notebook 1967-68 (Lowell), II, 553555 Notebook of Malte Laurids Brigge, 77ie(Rilke),III,571 "Notes for a Moving Picture: The House"(Agee),I,33,34 "Notes for a Novel About the End of the World" (Percy),Supp. ID, Part 1,393 "Notes for a Preface" (Sandburg), III, 591,596-597 "NOTES FOR A SPEECH" (Baraka), Supp. II, Part 1,33 "Notes for an Autobiography" (Van Vechten), Supp. II, Part 2,749 "Notes from the Childhood and Girlhood" (Brooks), Supp. Ill, Part 1, 77 Notes from the Underground (Dostoevski), HI, 571; IV, 485 Notes of a Native Son (Baldwin), Supp. I, Part 1,50,52,54 "Notes of a Native Son" (Baldwin), Supp. I, Part 1,50,54 Notes of a Son and Brother (James), 11,337 "Notes on a Departure" (Trilling), Supp. Ill, Part 2,498 "Notes on Babbitt and More" (Wilson), IV, 435 "Notes on 4Camp"' (Sontag), Supp. Ill, Part 2,455-456 Notes on Democracy (Mencken), III, 104,107-108,109,116,119 "Notes on James Thurber the Man or Men" (Nugent),Supp.I,Part2,627 Notes on Novelists (James), II, 336,337 "Notes on Poetry" (Eberhart), 1,524, 527-528,529 Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (Stevens), Supp. I, Part 1,80 "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction" (Stevens), IV, 87-89 "Nothing Missing" (O'Hara), III, 369 Nothing Personal (Baldwin), Supp. 1, Part 1,58,60 "Nothing Will Yield" (Nemerov),III, 279 Notions of the Americans: Picked up

by a Travelling Bachelot (Cooper), 1,343-345,346 Nova Express (Burroughs), Supp. HI, Part 1,93,103,104 "Novel of the Thirties, A" (Trilling), Supp. Ill, Part 2,499 "Novelist of Suburbia: Mr. Saturday, Mr. Monday and Mr. Cheever" (Sheed), Supp. I, Part 1,199 Novella (Goethe, trans. Bogan and Mayer), Supp. EH, Part 1,63 "Novels of Edgar Lee Masters, The" (Flanagan), Supp. I, Part 2,478 Novels of Harriet Beecher Stowe, The (Crozier), Supp. I, Part 2,601 "Novels of Oliver Wendell Holmes, The: A Re-Interpretation" (Holmes), Supp. I, Part 1,319 Novels of Theodore Dreiser (Pizer), Supp. I, Part 2,478 "Novel-Writing and Novel-Reading" (Howells),II,276,290 "Novices" (Moore), III, 20O-201,202, 213 "Novotny's Pain" (Roth), Supp. HI, Part 2,403 "Now I Lay Me" (Hemingway), II, 249 "Now Is the Air Made of Chiming Balls" (Eberhart), 1,523 "Now the Servant's Name Was Malchus" (Wilder), IV, 358 "Now We Know" (O'Hara), III, 368369 Nowell, Elizabeth, IV, 472,473 Nowell-Smith, Simon, D, 341 Noyes, Alfred, IV, 434 "Nude Descending a Staircase" (Duchamp),IV,408 Nugent, Elliot, Supp. I, Part 2, 606, 611,613,626,627 Nuggets and Dust (Bierce), 1,195 Number One (Dos Passos), 1,489 "Numbers, Letters" (Baraka), Supp. II, Part 1,50 "Nun's Priest's Tale" (Chaucer), III, 492 Nunzio, Nanzia, IV, 89 Nuptial Flight, The (Masters), Supp. I, Part 2,460,471 "Nuptials" (Tate), IV, 122 "Nux Postcoenatica" (Holmes), Supp. I, Part 1,303 Nye, Russel B., Supp. I, Part 1,149,

Part 2,478

O-OF / 740 Observations (Moore), III, 194,195196,197,199,203,205,215 Observations: Photographs by Richard Avedon; Comments by Truman Capote, Supp. Ill, Part 1,125-126 Observer (publication), IV, 388,390 O'Casey, Sean, III, 145 "Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, An" (Bierce), 1,200-201; II, 264 "Ocean 1212-W" (Plath),Supp.I,Piurt 4528 0'Connell,Shaun,IV,119 O'Connor, Edward F., Jr., ffl, 337 O'Connor, Flannery, 1,113,190,211, 298; O, 221, 606; HI, 337-360; IV, 4, 217, 282; Supp. I, Part 1, 290; Supp. HI, Part 1,146 O'Connor,Frank, 111,158; Supp. I, Part 2,531 O'Connor, Mary, H, 222 O'Connor,Mrs.EdwardF.,Jr.(Regina L.Cline), III, 337,338-339 0'Connor,Richard,I,213;H,467,485 O'Connor, T. P., D, 129 O'Connor, William, IV, 346 O'Connor, William Van, H, 76, 222; m, 479; IV, 96, 259,425; Supp. I, Part 1,195 " Octaves" (Robinson), Supp. m, Part 2,593 "October and November" (Lowell), 11,554 "October,1866"(Bryant),Supp.I,Part 1,169 "October in the Railroad Earth" M (Kerouac), Supp. m, Part 1, 225, "Objectivists" Anthology, An (Zukof227,229 sky), Supp. m, Part 2, 613, 615 "OctoberMaples,Portland" (Wilbur), "Objects" (Wilbur), Supp. Ill, Part 2, Supp. Ill, Part 2,556 545-547 "Octopus, An" (Moore),HI,202,207Oblique Prayers (Levertov), Supp. ID, 208,214 Part 1,283 "Octopus, The" (Merrill), Supp. OI, "Oblong Box, The" (Poe), III, 416 Part 1,321 Obregon, Maurice, Supp. I, Part 2, 488 Octopus, The (Morris), 1,518; III, 314, O'Brien, Conor Cruise, Supp. I, Part 316, 322-326, 327, 331-333, 334, 1,70 335 O'Brien, Edward J., 1, 289; OI, 56; IV, O'Daniel,Therman B., Supp. I, Part 1, 142 69,348 O'Brien, Fitzjames, 1, 211 "Ode" (Emerson), II, 13 Obscure Destinies(CalheT),l,33l-332 "Ode for Memorial Day" (Dunbar), "Observation Relative to the IntenSupp. II, Part 1,199 tions of the Original Founders of "Ode: Intimations of Immortality" the Academy in Philadelphia" (Wordsworth),Supp.I,Part2,729; (Franklin), II, 114 Supp. m, Part 1,12

O Canada: An American's Notes on Canadian Culture (Wilson), IV, 429-430 "O Carib Isle!" (Crane), I,40(M01 "O Daedalus, Fly Away Home" (Hayden),Supp. II, Part 1,377-378 O. Henry Biography (Smith), Supp.n, Part 1,395 O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories, 1,290; D, 197; ffl, 56 "O Lull Me, Lull Me" (Roethke), III, 536-537 OPio/i^r5/(Cather),I,314,317-319, 320 O Taste and See (LeveTtov),Supp.lllJ Part l,27&-279, 281 O to Be a Dragon (Moore), III, 215 Oak and Ivy (Dunbar), Supp. II, Part 1,198 Oak Openings, The (Cooper), 1, 354, 355 Oasis, The (McCarthy), II, 566-568 Oates, Joyce Carol, Supp. I, Part 1, 199, Part 2, 548; Supp. II, Part 2, 503-527 "Oath, The" (Tate), IV, 127 Oberg,ArthurK.,I,96 Oberlin Literary Magazine (publication), IV, 356 Oberndorf, Clarence P., Supp. I, Part 1,315,319 Obey, Andr6, IV, 356, 375 "Obit" (Lowell), II, 554 "Objective Value of a Social Settlement, The" (Addams), Supp. I, Part

"Ode: My 24th Year" (Ginsberg), Supp. II, Parti, 312 "Ode on a Grecian Urn" (Keats), I, 284; HI, 472 "Ode on Human Destinies" (Jeffers), Supp. II, Part 2,419 Ode Recited at the Harvard Commemora/jon (Lowell), Supp. I, Part 2; 416-418,424 "Ode Recited at the Harvard Commemoration" (Lowell), II, 551 "Ode Secrfcte" (Val6ry), III, 609 "Ode to a Nightingale," (Keats), II, 368 "Ode to Autumn" (Masters), Supp. I, Part 2,458 "Ode to Ethiopia" (Dunbar),Supp.II, Part 1,199,207,208,209 "Ode to Fear" (Tate), IV, 128 "OdetoNight"(Masters),Supp.I,Part 4458 "Ode to Our Young Pro-Consuls of the Air" (Tate), IV, 135 "Ode to the Confederate Dead" (Tate), II, 551; IV, 124,133,137 "Ode to the Johns Hopkins University" (Lanier), Supp. I, Part 1,370 "Ode to the Virginian Voyage" (Drayton),IV,135 "Ode to the West Wind" (Shelley), Supp. I, Part 2,728 Odets, Clifford, Supp. I, Part 1,277, 295, Part 2,679; Supp. II, Part 2, 529L.554 Odier, Daniel, Supp. Ill, Part 1,97 O'Donnell, George Marion, n, 67 O'Donnell, Thomas F., 0,131,149 "Odor of Verbena" (Faulkner), II, 66 O'Doul, Lefty, 0,425 Odyssey (Homer),III, 14,470; Supp. I, Part 1,185 Odyssey (trans. Bryant), Supp. I, Part 1,158 Oedipus Rex (Sophocles), I, 137; ffl, 145,151,152,332;Supp.I,Part 2,428 Oedipus Tyrannus (Sophocles), 11,203 Of a World That Is No More (Singer), IV, 16 "Of Alexander Crummell" (Du Bois), Supp. II, Part 1,170 "Of Booker T. Washington and Others" (Du Bois), Supp. II, Part 1,168 "Of Bright & Blue Birds & the Gala Sun" (Stevens), IV, 93

OF-OLIV / 741 "Of Dying Beauty" (Zukofsky), Supp. Ill, Part 2,610 "Of 'Father and Son'" (Kunitz), Supp. Ill, Part 1,262 "Of Margaret" (Ransom), III, 491 Of Mice and Men (Steinbeck), IV, 51, 57-58 "Of Modern Poetry" (Stevens), IV, 92 Of Plymouth Plantation (ed. Morison), Supp. I, Part 2,494 "Of the Coming of John" (Du Bois), Supp. II, Part 1,170 "Of the Culture of White Folk" (Du Bois), Supp. n, Part 1,175 Of the Farm (Updike), IV, 214, 217, 223-225,233 "Of the Passing of the First-Born" (Du Bois), Supp. II, Part 1,170 "Of the Sorrow Songs" (Du Bois), Supp. II, Part 1,170 "Of the Wings of Atlanta" (Du Bois), Supp. II, Part 1,170 Of This Time, Of This Place (Trilling), Supp. Ill, Part 2,498,504 Of Time and the River (W<Mt\lV AW, 451, 452, 455, 456, 457, 458, 459, 462,464-465,467,468,469 Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (Rich), Supp. I, Part 2,554,567-569 O'Faol£in, Se£n, Supp. II, Part 1,101 Offenbach, Jacques, D, 427 "Offering for Mr. Bluehart, An" (Wright), Supp. m, Part 2,596,601 "Official Piety" (Whittier), Supp. I, Part 2,687 "Off-Shore Pirates,The" (Fitzgerald),

n,88

O'Flaherty, George, Supp. I, Part 1, 202,205-206 O'Flaherty, Kate, see Chopin, Kate (Kate O'Flaherty) O'Flaherty, Mrs. Thomas (Eliza Paris), Supp. I, Part 1,202,204,205,207 O'Flaherty, Thomas, Supp. I, Part 1, 202,203-204,205 O'Flaherty, Thomas, Jr., Supp. I, Part 1,202 Ogden, Henry, n, 298 Ogden, Uzal, Supp. I, Part 2,516 "Oh, Fairest of the Rural Maids" (Bryant), Supp. I, Part 1,169 O'Hara, John, 1,375,495; 0,444,459;

III, 66, 361-384; IV, 59; Supp. I, Part 1,196; Supp. II, Part 1,109 O'Hara, Mrs. John (Belle Wylie), III, 361,362 O'Hara, Mrs. John (Helen Pettit), III, 361 O'Hara, Mrs. John (Katharine Bryan), 111,362 "Ohio Pagan, An" (Anderson), 1,112, 113 Ohio StateJournal (newspaper), D, 273 Ohlin,PeterH.,I,47 "Oil Painting of the Artist as the Artist" (MacLeish), III, 14 "OF Doc Hyar" (Campbell), Supp. II, Part 1,202 "OF Tunes, The" (Dunbar), Supp. II, Part 1,197 "Old Amusement Park, An" (Moore), 111,216 "Old Angel Midnight" (Kerouac), Supp. Ill, Part 1,229-230 "Old Apple Dealer, The" (Hawthorne), II, 227,233-235,237,238 "Old Apple-Tree, The" (Dunbar), Supp. II, Part 1,198 Old Beauty and Others, 77u? (Gather), 1,331 Old Bruin: Commodore Matthew C. Perry, 1794-1858 (Morison), Supp. I, Part 2,494-495 "Old Cracked Tune, An" (Kunitz), Supp. in, Part 1,264 Old Curiosity Shop, The (Dickens), I, 458; Supp. I, Part 2,409 "Old Farmer, The" (Jeffers), Supp. II, Part 2,418 "Old Father Morris" (Stowe), Supp. I, Part 2,586 "Old Flame, The" (Lowell), II, 550 "Old Florist" (Roethke), III, 531 Old Friends and New (Jewett), II, 402 Old Glory, The (Lowell), II, 543,545546,555 "Old Homestead, The" (Dunbar), Supp. II, Part 1,198 "Old Ironsides" (Holmes), Supp. I, Part 1,302 "Old Man" (Faulkner), II, 68,69 Old Man and the Sea, The (Hemingway), II, 250,256-257,258,265; III, 40 "OldManDrunk"(Wright),Supp.ni, Part 2,595

"Old Manse, The" (Hawthorne), II, 224 "Old Meeting House, The" (Stowe), Supp. I, Part 2,586 "Old Memory, An" (Dunbar), Supp. II, Part 1,198 "Old Men, The" (McCarthy), II, 566 "Old Mortality" (Porter), 111,436,438441,442,445,446 "Old Mrs. Harris" (Gather), 1,332 Old New York (Wharton), IV, 322 "Old, Old, Old, Old Andrew Jackson" (Lindsay), Supp. I, Part 2,398 "Old Order, The" (Porter), III, 443, 444-445,451 "Old Osawatomie" (Sandburg), III, 584 "Old People, The" (Faulkner), II, 7172 "Old Poet Moves To A New Apartment 14 Times, The" (Zukofsky), Supp. Ill, Part 2,628 "Old Red" (Gordon), II, 199,200,203 Old Red and Other Stories (Gordon), 11,197 Old Regime in Canada, The (Parkman), Supp. II, Part 2, 600, 607,608-^09,612 Old Testament, 1,109,181,300,328, 401,410,419,431,457,458; n, 166, 167,219; 111,270,272,348,390,3%; IV, 41,114,152,309; Supp. I, Part 1,60,104,106,151, Part 2,427,515, 516. See also names of Old Testament books "Old Times on the Mississippi" (Twain), IV, 199 "Old Trails" (Robinson), III, 513,517 "Old Tyrannies" (Bourne), 1,233 Olderman, Raymond M., 1,143 Old-Fashioned Girl, An (Alcott), Supp. I, Part 1,29,41,42 Oldham, Estelle, see Faulkner, Mrs. William (Estelle Oldham) Oldtown Folks (Stowe), Supp. I, Part 2,587,596-598 Oldys, Francis, see Chalmers, George "OlgaPoems,The" (Levertov),Supp. III, Part 1,279-281 Oliver Goldsmith: A Biography (Irving), II, 315 Oliver Twist (Dickens), 1,354 "Oliver Wendell Holmes" (Leary), Supp. I, Part 1,319

OLIV-ON / 742 "Oliver Wendell Holmes" (Menikoff), Supp. I, Part 1,319 Oliver Wendell Holmes (Small), Supp. I, Part 1,319 Oliver, E.S., III, 95 Oliver, Sydney, 1,409 Ollive, Elizabeth,see Paine, Mrs. Thomas (Elizabeth Ollive) Ollive, Samuel, Supp. I, Part 2,503 Olmsted, Frederick Law, Supp. I, Part 1,355 Olson, Charles, III, 97; Supp. II, Part I, 30, 328, Part 2,555-587; Supp. Ill, Part 1,9,271, Part 2,542,624 O'Malley, Frank, D, 53 Omar Khayyam, Supp. I, Part 1,363 "Ominous Baby, An" (Crane), 1,411 "Omnibus Jaunts and Drivers" (Whitman), IV, 350 Omoo (Melville), III, 76-77,79,84 1x1 (One Times One) (Cummings), I, 430, 436, 438-439, 441, 446, 447, 448 "On a Certain Condescension in Foreigners" (Lowell), Supp. I, Part 2, 419 "On a Honey Bee, Drinking from a Glass and Drowned Therein" (Freneau), Supp. II, Part 1,273 "On a View of Pasadena from the Hills" (Winters), Supp. II, Part 2, 795,796-799,814 "On an Old Photograph of My Son" (Carver), Supp. Ill, Part 1,140 "On Being an American" (Toomer), Supp. in, Part 2,479 "On Burroughs' Work" (Ginsberg), Supp. II, Part 1,320 "On Certain Political Measures Proposed to Their Consideration" (Barlow), Supp. II, Part 1,82 "On First Looking Out through Juan de la Cosa's Eyes" (Olson), Supp. II, Part 2,565,566,570,579 "On Freedom's Ground" (Wilbur), Supp. Ill, Part 2,562 "On Hearing a Symphony of Beethoven" (Millay), III, 132-133 On Human Finery (Bell), Supp. I, Part 2,636 On Judging Books in General and Particular (Hackett), Supp. I, Part 2,626 "On Looking at a Copy of Alice MeynelTs Poems, Given Me, Years

Ago,byaFriend"(Lowell),n,527528 "On Lookout Mountain" (Hayden), Supp. II, Part 1,380 "On Miracle Row" (Gardner), Supp. I, Part 1,198 "On My Own Work" (Wilbur), Supp. IH, Part 2,541-542 On Native Grounds: An Interpretation of Modern American Prose Literature (Kazin), 1,517; Supp. I, Part 2,650 "On Open Form" (Merwin), Supp. HI, Part 1,347-348,353 On Photography (Sontag), Supp. Ill, Part 2,451,458,462-465 On Politics: A Carnival of Buncombe (ed. Moos), III, 116 "On Reading Eckerman's Conversations with Goethe" (Masters), Supp. I, Part 2,458 "On Seeing Red" (Walker), Supp. Ill, Part 2,527 "On Social Plays" (Miller), III, 147, 148,159 "On Style" (Sontag), Supp. Ill, Part 2, 456-459,465-466 "On the Beach, at Night" (Whitman), IV, 348 "On the Building of Springfield" (Lindsay), Supp. I, Part 2,381 "On the Coast of Maine" (Hayden), Supp. II, Part 1,381 On the Contrary: Articles of Belief (McCarthy), II, 559,562 "On the Death of a Friend's Child" (Lowell), Supp. I, Part 2,409 "On the Death of Senator Thomas J. Walsh" (Winters), Supp. II, Part 2, 802,806 "On the Death of Yeats" (Bogan), Supp. Ill, Part 1,59 "On the Eve of the Immaculate Conception, 1942" (Lowell), II, 538 "On the Eyes of an SS Officer" (Wilbur), Supp. Ill, Part 2,548 "On the Fall of General Earl Cornwallis" (Freneau), Supp. II, Part 1,261 "On the Folly of Writing Poetry" (Freneau), Supp. II, Part 1,263 On the Frontier (Auden-Sherwood), Supp. II, Part 1,13 "On the Late Eclipse" (Bryant), Supp. I, Part 1,152

"On the Marginal Way" (Wilbur), Supp. Ill, Part 2,558,559 On the Motion and Immobility of Douve (Bonnefoy, trans. Kinnell), Supp. Ill, Part 1,235 "On the Night of a Friend's Wedding" (Robinson), III, 524 "On the Occasion of a Poem: Richard Hugo" (Wright), Supp. IE, Part 2, 596 "On the Platform" (Nemerov), HI,287 "On the Powers of the Human Understanding" (Freneau), Supp. II, Part 1,274 "On the Railway Platform" (Jarrell), 11,370 "On the Religion of Nature" (Freneau), Supp. n, Part 1,275 "On the River" (Dunbar), Supp. II, Part 1,193 On the Road (Kerouac), Supp. HI, Part 1,92,218,222-224,226,230231 "On the Skeleton of a Hound" (Wright), Supp. Ill, Part 2,593 "On the System of Policy Hitherto Pursued by Their Government" (Barlow), Supp. II, Part 1,82 "On the Teaching of Modern Literature" (Trilling), Supp. Ill, Part 2, 509-510 "On the Uniformity and Perfection of Nature" (Freneau), Supp. II, Part 1,275 "On the Universality and Other Attributes of the God of Nature" (Freneau), Supp. II, Part 1,275 "On the Use of Trisyllabic Feet in Iambic Verse" (Bryant), Supp. I, Part 1,156 On the Way toward a Phenomenalogical Psychology: The Psychology of William James (Linschoten), II, 362 "On the Wide Heath" (Millay), III, 130 "On the Writing of Novels" (Buck), Supp. II, Part 1,121 On 7/iw/s/flm*(Auden),Supp.II,Part Ul "On Time" (O'Hara), III, 369-370 "On Translating Akhmatova" (Kunitz), Supp. HI, Part 1,268 "On Writing" (Carver), Supp. HI, Part 1,142-143

ONCE-ORCH / 743 Once (Walker), Supp. Ill, Part 2,519, 522,530 "Once by the Pacific" (Frost), II, 155 "Once More, the Round" (Roethke), 111,529 "Once More to the Lake" (White), Supp. I9 Part 2,658,668,673-675 One (magazine), III, 36 "One Arm" (Williams), IV, 383 One Arm, and Other Stories (Williams), IV, 383 "One Art" (Bishop), Supp. I, Part 1, 72,73,82,93,94-95,96 "One Art: The Poetry of Elizabeth Bishop, 1971-1976" (Schwartz), Supp. I, Part 1,81,97 One Boy's Boston, 1887-1901 (Morison), Supp. I, Part 2,494 "One Coat of Paint" ( Ashbery),Supp. Ill, Part 1,26 "One Dash-Horses" (Crane), 1,416 One Day (Morris), III, 233-236 One Day, When I Was Lost (Baldwin), Supp. I, Part 1,48,66,67 One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (Kesey),III,558 "One Friday Morning" (Hughes), Supp. I, Parti, 330 One Hundred Days in Europe (Holmes), Supp. I, Part 1,317 "One Is a Wanderer" (Thurber),Supp. I, Part 2,616 "One Last Look at the Adige: Verona in the Rain" (Wright), Supp. Ill, Part 2,603 One Man in His Time (Glasgow), II, 178,184 "One Man to Stand for Six Million" (Hicks), Supp. I, Part 2,453 "One Man's Fortunes" (Dunbar), Supp. II, Part 1,211,212-213 One Man's Initiation (Dos Passos), I, 476-477,479,488 One Man's Meat (White), Supp. I, Part 2,654,669,676 "One Man's Meat" (White), Supp. I, Part 2,655 "One More Song" (Lindsay), Supp. I, Part 2,400-401 "One More Thing" (Carver), Supp. ffl, Part 1,138,144 "One More Time" (Gordon), II, 200 "ONE NIGHT STAND" (Baraka), Supp. II, Part 1,32

"One of Our Conquerors" (Bourne), 1,223 One of Ours (Gather), 1,322-323 "One of the Missing" (Bierce), 1,201202 "One Person" (Wy lie), Supp. I, Part 2, 709,724-727 "One Touch of Nature" (McCarthy), 11,580 "One Trip Abroad" (Fitzgerald), II, 95 O'Neil, Joseph E.,n, 509 O'Neill, Eugene, 1,66,71,81,94,393, 445; D, 278,391,427,585; III, 151, 165,385-408; IV, 61,383; Supp. Ill, Part 1,177-180,189 O'Neill, Eugene, Jr., HI, 403 O'Neill, James, HI, 386 O'Neill, James, Jr., HI, 386 O'Neill, Mrs. Eugene (Carlotta Monterey), III, 403 O'Neill, Oona,HI, 403 O'Neill, Shane, HI, 403 One-Way Ticket (Hughes), Supp. I, Part 1,333-334 Only a Few of Us Left (Marquand), 111,55 "Only in the Dream," (Eberhart), I, 523 "Only Rose, The" (Jewett), II, 408 "Only the Dead Know Brooklyn" (Wolfe), IV, 451 Only Yesterday (Allen), Supp. I, Part 2,681 Opatoshu, Joseph, IV, 9 Opdahl, Keith Michael, 1,166 "Open Boat, The" (Crane), I, 408, 415,416-417,423 Open Boat and Other Stories (Crane), 1,408 Open House (Roethke), III, 529-530, 540 "Open House" (Roethke), III, 529 "Open Letter" (Roethke), III, 532, 534 "Open Letter to Surrealists Everywhere, An" (Miller), III, 184 "Open Road, The" (Dreiser), II, 44 Open Sea, The (Masters), Supp. I, Part 2,471 "Open the Gates" (Kunitz), Supp. HI, Part 1,264-265,267 Opening of the Field, The (Duncan), Supp. Ill, Part 2,625

Opening the Hand (Merwin), Supp. DI, Part 1,341,353-355 "Opera Company, The" (Merrill), Supp. HI, Part 1,326 "Operation, The" (Sexton), Supp. n, Part 2,675,679 Operation Sidewinder (Shepard), Supp.m,Part2,434-435,439,446447 Operations in North African Waters (Morison), Supp. I, Part 2,490 Opie, John, 1,565 "Opinion" (Du Bois), Supp. II, Part 1, 173 Opinionator, The (Bierce), 1,209 Opinions of Oliver Allston (Brooks), 1,254,255,256 Oppen, George, IV, 415; Supp. Ill, Part 2,614,615,616,626,628 Oppenheim, James, 1,106,109, 239, 245 Oppenheimer, J. Robert, 1,137,492 Opportunity (magazine),Supp. I, Part 1,324,325,326 "Opportunity for American Fiction, An" (Howells),Supp. I, Part 2,645646 OpposingSelf, The (Trilling), Supp. HI, Part 2,506-507 "Opposition" (Lanier), Supp. I, Part 1,368,373 Optimist's Daughter, 77ie(Welty), IV, 261,280 "Optimist's Daughter, The" (Welty), IV, 280-281 Options (O. Henry), Supp. II, Part 1, 410 Opus Posthumous (Stevens), IV, 76,78 "OracleofSubocracy"(Scully),Supp. I, Part 1,199 Orage, Alfred, III, 473 Orange JuddFarmer (publication), II, 465 Oranges (McPhee), Supp. Ill, Part 1, 298-299,301,309 Oration Delivered at Washington, July Fourth, 1809 (Barlow), Supp. II, Part 1,80,83 Orations and Addresses (Bryant), Supp. I, Part 1,158 Orators, The (Auden), Supp. II, Part 1,6,7,11,18-19 "Orchard" (Doolittle), Supp. I, Part 1, 263-264,265,266

ORCH-OUTS / 744 "Orchard" (Ebcrhart), 1,539 Orchestra (Davies), III, 541 "Orchids" (Roethke), III, 530-531 Ordeal of Mansart, The (Du Bois), Supp. II, Parti, 185-186 Ordeal ofMarkTwain, TTie(Brooks), 1,240,247,248; D, 482 "Ordinary Evening in New Haven, An" (Stevens), IV, 91-92 "Ordinary Women, The" (Stevens), IV,81 "Oread" (Doolittle), II, 520-521; Supp. I, Part 1,265-266 Oregon Trail, 77i
Orr, Peter, Supp. I, Part 2,538, 540, 543,549 Ortega y Gasset, Jos6,1,218,222 O'Ruddy, The (Crane), 1,409,424 Orwell, George, I, 489; O, 454, 580; Supp. I, Part 2,523,620; Supp. II, Part 1,143 "OsbornLook,The"(Morris),m,221 Osborn, Dwight, IH, 218-219,223 Osgood,J.R.,n,283 O'Shea, Kitty, 0,137 Ossian, Supp. I, Part 2,491 Ostriker, Alicia, Supp. I, Part 2,540, 548 Ostroff, Anthony, 1,542-543; ffl, 550 Ostrom, John W., HI, 431 O'Sullivan, Vincent, IH, 121 Oswald, Lee Harvey, HI, 234,235 Othello (Shakespeare), 1,284-285 "Other, The" (Sexton), Supp. n, Part 2,692 Other America, The (Harrington), I, 306 "Other Bishop, The" (Mcdatchy), Supp. I, Part 1,97 Other Gods: An American Legend (Buck), Supp. II, Part 1,123,130131 "Other Margaret, The" (Trilling), Supp. HI, Part 2,504-505 "Other Tradition, The" (Ashbery), Supp. Ill, Part 1,15,18 Other Voices, Other Rooms (Capote), Supp. in, Part 1,113-118,121,123124 "Other War,The" (Cowley),Supp.II, Part 1,144 "Other Woman, The" (Anderson), I, 114 Others (publication), 111,194,199; IV, 76 Otis, Harrison Gray, Supp. I, Part 2, 479-481,483,486,488 Otis, James, III, 577; Supp. I, Part 2, 486 Otto, Max, 11,365 Our America (Frank), 1,229 "Our Assistant's Column" (Twain), IV, 193 Our Century (Wilder), IV, 374 "Our Countrymen in Chains!" (Whittier), Supp. I, Part 2,688 "Our Cultural Humility" (Bourne),!, 223,228

Our Gang (Roth), Supp. Ill, Part 2, 414 "Our Lady of Troy" (MacLeish), III, 3,20 "Our Limitations" (Holmes), Supp. I, Part 1,314 "Our Martyred Soldiers" (Dunbar), Supp. n, Partl» 193 "Our Master" (Whittier), Supp. I, Part

£704

"Our Mother Pochahontas" (Lindsay), Supp. I, Part 2,393 Our Mr. Wrenn: The Romantic Adventures of a Gentle Man (Lewis), 11,441 Our Old Home (Hawthorne), II, 225 Our Town (Wilder), IV, 357,364,365, 366,368-369 "Our Unplanned Cities" (Bourne), I, 229,230 Our Young Folks (magazine), II, 397 Ourselves to Know (O'Hara), IE, 362, 365 Ouspensky, P. D., 1,383 Out Cry (Williams), IV, 383,393 "Out of an Abundant Love of Created Things" (Esty), Supp. I, Part 1,198 "Out of Nowhere into Nothing" (Anderson), 1,113 "Out of Season" (Hemingway), n, 263 "Outof the Cradle Endlessly Rocking" (Whitman), IV, 342,343-345,346, 351 "Out of the Hospital and Under the Bar" (Ellison), Supp. 11, Part 1,246 "Out of the Rainbow End" (Sandburg), III, 594-595 "Outcasts of Poker Flats, The" (Harte), Supp. n, Part 1,345,347348 Outcroppings (Harte), Supp. II, Part 1,343 "Outing,The"(Baldwin),Supp.I,Part 1,63 "Outline of an Autobiography" (Toomer), Supp. Ill, Part 2,478 Outlook (publication), Supp. I, Part 1, 200, Part 2,380,709 Outre-Mer: A Pilgrimage beyond the Sea (Longfellow), II, 313,491 Outside, 77te(Glaspell),Supp.m,Part 1,179,187 Outsider, The (Wright), IV, 478,481, 488,491-494,495

OUTS-PARK / 745 "Outstanding Novels" (Schorer), Supp. I, Part 1,199 "Ouzo for Robin" (Merrill), Supp.ID, Part 1,326 "Oval Portrait, The" (Poe), III, 412, 415 "Over 2000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance" (Bishop), Supp. I, Part 1,90-91 "Over Kansas" (Ginsberg), Supp. II, Part 1,320 "Overgrown Pasture, The" (Lowell), 11,523 Overland Monthly (publication), I, 194,200; n, 465,466,468; Supp. II, Part 1,344,345,350,351-352 Overland to the Islands (Levertov), Supp. HI, Part 1,275,276 "Over-Soul, The" (Emerson), II, 7 Ovid, 1,62; D, 542-543; III, 457,467, 468,470 O wen, David, 0,34,53 Owen, Wilfred, 0,367,372; HI, 524 Owens, Hamilton, III, 99,109, Owl, The (publication), II, 465 Owl in the Attic, 77ie(Thurber),Supp. I, Part 2,614 "Owl Who WasGod,The" (Thurber), Supp. I, Part 2,610 "Owl's Clover" (Stevens), IV, 75 Oxford Anthology of American Literature, The, III, 197; Supp. I, Part 1,254 Oxford History of the American People, The (Morison), Supp. I, Part 2,495-496 Oxford History of the United States, 1783-1917,77i*(Morison),Supp.I, Part 2,483-484 "Oysters'* (Sexton), Supp. II, Part 2, 692 Ozick, Cynthia, Supp. I, Part 1,199

Pack, Robert, IV, % "Packed Dirt, Churchgoing, a Dying Cat, a Traded Cat" (Updike), IV, 219 Pagan, The (publication), 1,384 Pagan Spain (Wright), IV, 478, 488, 495 Pagany (publication), Supp. Ill, Part £613 Page, Kirby, III, 297

Page,Thomas Nelson, n, 174, 176, 194 Page, Waiter Mines, II, 174, 175; Supp. I, Part 1,370 Paid on Both Sides: A Charade ( Auden), Supp. II, Part 1, 6, 18-19 Paige, Satchel, Supp. I, Part 1, 234 Paige, T.D.D., III, 475 Pain, Joseph, Supp. I, Part 2, 502 Pain, Mrs. Joseph (Frances Cocke), Supp. I, Part 2, 502 Pain, Thomas, see Paine, Thomas Paine, Albert Bigelow, 1, 249; IV, 213 Paine, Mrs. Thomas (Elizabeth Ollive), Supp. I, Part 2,503 Paine, Mrs. Thomas (Mary Lambert), Supp. I, Part 2, 503 Paine, Thomas, 1, 490; 0, 1 17, 302; IH, 17, 148, 219; Supp. I, Part 1, 231, Part 2, 501-525 "Painted Head" (Ransom), III, 491, 494; Supp. II, Part 1, 103, 314 PaintedWord, The( Wolfe), Supp. Ill, Part 2, 580-581, 584 "Painter, The" (Ashbery), Supp. Ill, Part 1,5-6, 13 Painter Dreaming in the Scholar's House, The (Nemerov), III, 269 "Painting a Mountain Stream" (Nemerov), III, 275 Pal Joey (O'Hara), III, 361, 367-368 "Pal Joey" stories (O'Hara), III, 361 "Palantine, The" (Whittier), Supp. I, Part 2, 694, 696

pale Five (Nabokov),III,244,246,252 263-265 "Pale Horse, Pale Rider" (Porter), HI, 436, 437, 441-442, 445,446, 449 Pale Horse, Pale Rider: Three Short Novels (Porter), III, 433, 436-442 Paley, William, D, 9 Palgrave's Golden Treasury (Palgrave), IV, 405 Pa/fm/v
Panic: A Play in Verse (MacLeish), 111,2,20 Pantagruel (Rabelais), II, 112 "Pantaloon in Black" (Faulkner), H, 71 Pantheism, Supp. I, Part 1,163 Panther and the Lash, The (Hughes), Supp. I, Part 1,342-344,345-346 "Papa and Mama Dance, The" (Sexton), Supp. II, Part 2,688 Paper Boats (Butler), Supp. I, Part 1, 275 "PaperHouse,The"(Mailer),ffl,4243 Papers on Literature and An (Fuller), Supp. II, Part 1,292,299 "Paprika Johnson" (Barnes), Supp. HI, Part 1,33 "Paradigm, The" (Tate), IV, 128 Paradise Lost (Milton), 1,137; II, 168, 549; IV, 126 Paradise Lost (Odets), Supp. II, Part 2,530,531,538-539,550 "Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids, The" (Melville), 111,91 Paradox of Progressive Thought, The (Noble), Supp. I, Part 2,650 "Paradoxes and Oxymorons" (Ashbery), Supp. HI, Part 1,23-24 "Paraphrase" (Crane), 1,391-392,393 "Pardon, The" (Wilbur), Supp. Ill, Part 2,544,550 Pareto, Vilfredo, n, 577 Paris France (Stein), IV, 45 Paris Review (publication), 1,97,381, 567,587; D, 563,574,579; III, 194; IV, 102, 217, 218, 221, 246, 250; Supp. I, Part 2,618 "Paris, 7 A.M." (Bishop), Supp. I, Part 1,85,89 Park, Robert, IV, 475 "Park Bench" (Hughes), Supp. I, Part 1,331-332 "Park Street Cemetery,The" (Lowell), n, 537,538 Parker, Charlie, Supp. I, Part 1,59 Parker, Hershel, III, 95,97 Parker, Theodore, Supp. I, Part 1,38, Part 2,518 Parker, Thomas, Supp. I, Part 1,102 "Parker'sBack"(0'Connor),in,348, 352,358 Parkes, Henry Bamford, I, 287, 564; n, 23; Supp. I, Part 2,617 Parkinson, Thomas, n, 557

PARK-PEAB / 746 Parkman, Francis, n, 278, 310, 312; IV, 179, 309; Supp. I, Part 2,420, 479, 481-482, 486, 487, 493, 498; Supp. II, Part 2,589-616 Parkman Reader, The (ed. Morison), Supp. I, Part 2,494 Parks, Edd Winfield, Supp. I, Part 1, 373 Parks, Edw., Ill, 432 Parks, Larry, Supp. I, Part 1,295 Parks, Rosa, Supp. I, Part 1,342 Parliament of Fowls, The (Chaucer), 111,492 Parmenides (Plato), II, 10 Parmenter, Ross, IV, 377 Parnassus (Emerson), II, 8,18 Parnell, Charles Stewart, H, 129,137 Parrington, Vernon Louis, 1,254,357, 517,561,565; III, 335,606; IV, 173; Supp. I, Part 2,484,640 "Parrot,The" (Merrill), Supp. HI, Part 1,320 Parson, Annie, Supp. I, Part 2,655 Parsons, Edward, 1,564 Parsons, Elsie Clews, 1,231,235 Parsons, Talcott, Supp. I, Part 2,648 Parsons, Theophilus, II, 396,504; Supp. I, Part 1,155 "Part of a Letter" (Wilbur), Supp. Ill, Part 2,551 Partial Portraits (James), II, 336 Parties (Van Vechten), Supp. II, Part 2,739,747-749 "Parting" (Kunitz), Supp. Ill, Part 1, 263 "Parting Gift" (Wylie), Supp. I, Part 2, 714 "Parting Glass, The" (Freneau),Supp. II, Part 1,273 Partington, Blanche, 1,199 Partisan Review (publication), 1,168, 170,256; D, 562; III, 35,292,337338; IV, 128; Supp. I, Part 1,58,89 "Partner,The"(Roethke),ffl,541-542 Partridge, John, D, 110, 111 "Party,The" (Dunbar), Supp. II, Part 1,198,205-206 Party at Jack's, The (Wolfe), IV, 451452,469 Pascal, Blaise, H, 8,159; HI, 292,301, 304,428 "Passage" (Crane), 1,391 "Passage in the Life of Mr. John Oakhurst, A" (Harte), Supp. II, Part 1,353-354

"Passage to India" (Whitman), IV, 348 Passage to India, A, (Forster), II, 600 "Passenger Pigeons" (Jeffers), Supp. H, Part 2,437 "Passing Show, The" (Bierce), 1,208 "PassingThrough" (Kunitz), Supp. m, Part 1,265 "Passion, The" (Barnes), Supp. Ill, Part 1,36 "Passion, The" (Merwin), Supp. Ill, Part 1,343 "Passionate Pilgrim, A" (James), II, 322,323-324 Passionate Pilgrim, The, and Other Tales (James), II, 324 Passionate Prodigality, A (Aldington), Supp. I, Part 1,275 Passport to the War (Kunitz), Supp. HI, Part 1,261-264 Past, The (Kinnell), Supp. HI, Part 1, 235,253-254 "Past, The" (Kinnell), Supp. ffl, Part 1,254 Past and Present (Carlyle), Supp. I, Part 2,410 "Past Is the Present, The" (Moore), 111,199-200 "Past, The" (Bryant), Supp. I, Part 1, 157,170 Pasternak, Boris, n, 544 "Pastiches et Pistaches" (Van Vechten), Supp. II, Part 2,732 "Pastoral Hat, A" (Stevens), IV, 91 "Pastoral" (Carver), Supp. ID, Part 1, 137,146 Pastorius, Francis Daniel, Supp. I, Part 2,700 Pastures of Heaven, The (Steinbeck), IV,51 Patchen, Kenneth, Supp. Ill, Part 2, 625 Pater, Walter, I, 51, 272, 476; D, 27, 338; III, 604; IV, 74; Supp. I, Part 2, 552 Paterna (Mather), Supp. II, Part 2, 451 "Paterson" (Ginsberg), Supp. II, Part 1,314-315,321,329 Paterson (Williams),!,62,446;IV,418423; Supp. II, Part 2,557,564,625 Paterson, Book One (Williams), IV, 421-422 Paterson, Book Five (Williams), IV, 422-423

Paterson, Part Three (Williams), IV, 420-421 "Path, The" (Bryant), Supp. I, Part 1, 169 Pathfinder, The (Cooper), 1,349,350, 355 Patria Mia (Pound), III, 460-461 Patrick, W.R., 111,455 Patrimony (Roth), Supp. ID, Part 2, 427 Patriot, The (Buck), Supp. II, Part 1, 122-123 Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War (Wilson), III, 588; IV, 430, 438, 443, 444-^445 446 Pattee, Fred L., 0,456,485 Patten, Gilbert, D, 423 Patten, Simon, Supp. I, Part 2,640 "Pattern of the Atmosphere, The" (Zabel), Supp. I, Part 2,730 "Patterns" (Lowell), II, 524 Patterson, Royd, EH, 38 Patterson, Lindsay, Supp. I, Part 1, 348 Patterson, William M., Supp. I, Part 1, 265 Patton, General George, m, 575; Supp. I, Part 2,664 Paul, Saint, 1,365; 0,15,494; IV, 122, 154,164,335; Supp. I, Part 1,188 Paul, Sherman, 1,238,244; 0,23; IV, 179,189,424,449 "Paul Revere" (Longfellow), II, 489, 501 "Paula Becker to Clara Westhoff * (Rich), Supp. I, Part 2,573-574 Paulding, James Kirke, 1,344; H, 298, 299,303; Supp. I, Part 1,157 Paulding family, H, 297 "Paul's Case" (Gather), 1,314-315 Paulsen, Friedrich, HI, 600 "Pause by the Water, A" (Merwin), in, Part 1,354 "Pavement, The" (Olson), Supp. II, Part 2,571 Pavese, Cesare, Supp. I, Part 2,478 Pavilion of Women (Buck), Supp. II, Part 1,125-126 Payne, Edward B., D, 485 Payne, John Howard, D, 309 Payne, Ladell, IV, 473 Paz, Octavio, Supp. I, Part 1,97; Supp. Ill, Part 2,630 Peabody, Elizabeth P., Supp. I, Part 1,46

PEAB-PERS / 747 Peabody, Francis G., Ill, 293; Supp. I, Part 1,5 Peabody, Josephine Preston, III, 507 Peabody, Sophia,*** Hawthorne, Mrs. Nathaniel (Sophia Peabody) Peace and Bread in Time of War (Addams), Supp. I, Part 1,21,2223 "Peace of Cities, The" (Wilbur), Supp. Ill, Part 2,545 "Peacock Room, The" (Hayden), Supp. II, Part 1,374-375 Peacock, Gibson, Supp. I, Part 1,360 Peacock, Thomas Love, Supp. I, Part 1,307 "Peacock, The" (Merrill), Supp. Ill, Part 1,320 Pearce, Roy Harvey, I, 357, 473; n, 244, 245; IV, 354; Supp. I, Part 1, 111, 114,173,373, Part 2,475,478, 706 Pearl, The (Steinbeck), IV, 51,62-63 Pearl of Orr*s Island, The (Stowe), Supp. I, Part 2,592-593,595 Pearlman, Daniel, III, 479 Pears, Peter, D, 586 Pearson, Norman Holmes, I, 120; Supp. I, Part 1,259,260,273 "Peck of Gold, A" (Frost), II, 155 Peden, William, Supp. I, Part 1,199 Pedlar's Progress: The Life of Branson Alcott (Shepard), Supp. I, Part 1, 46 Peirce, Charles Sanders, D, 20, 352353; III, 599; Supp. I, Part 2,640; Supp. Ill, Part 2,626 Pelagius,III,295 "Pelican, The" (Merrill), Supp. Ill, Part 1,320 "Pelican, The" (Wharton), IV, 310 Pencillingsbythe Way (Willis), II,313 "Pencils" (Sandburg), III, 592 Penhally (Gordon), II, 197,199,201203,204 Penn, Robert, 1,489 Penn, Thomas, 0,118 Penn, William, Supp. I, Part 2,683 Penn family, 0,109,119 Penn Magazine, The, III, 412 Penney, Clara Louisa, n, 317 Pennsylvania Evening Post (newspaper), Supp. I, Part 2,505 Pennsylvania Freeman (newspaper), Supp. I, Part 2,405,686

Pennsylvania Gazette (newspaper), D, 108,113,119 Pennsylvania Magazine, Supp. I, Part 2,504,505 "Pennsylvania Pilgrim, The" (Whittier), Supp. I, Part 2,700 "Pennsylvania Planter, The" (Freneau), Supp. D, Part 1,268 Penrod (Tarkington), III, 223 Pentagon of Power, The (Mumford), Supp. II, Part 2,498 Pentimento (Hellman), Supp. I, Part 1,280,292-294,296 People, r/u?(Glaspell), Supp. Ill, Part 1,179 "PEOPLE BURNING, THE" (Baraka), Supp. II, Part 1,49 People of the Abyss, The (London), II, 465-466 "People on the Roller Coaster, The" (Hardwick), Supp. Ill, Part 1,196 "People v. Abe Lathan, Colored,The" (Caldwell),I,309 People, Yes, The(Sandburg), III, 575, 589,590,591 "People's Surroundings" (Moore), III, 201,202,203 Pepper, William, D, 124 "Peppermint Lounge Revisited, The" (Wolfe), Supp. DI, Part 2,571 Pepys, Samuel, Supp. I, Part 2,653 "Perch'io non spero di tornar giammai" (Cavalcanti), Supp. ID, Part 2,623 Percy, Walker, Supp. Ill, Part 1,383400 "Peregrine" (Wylie), Supp. I, Part 2, 712-713,714 Perelman, Mrs. S. J. (Lorraine "Laura" Weinstein),IV,285,286 Perelman, S. J., IV, 286 Perenyi, Eleanor, IV, 449 Peretz, Isaac Loeb, IV, 1,3 P6rez Gald6s, Benito, D, 275 Perfect Analysis Given by a Parrot, A (Williams), IV, 395 "Perfect Day for Bananafish, A" (Salinger), III, 563-564,571 Perhaps Women (Anderson), 1,114 Pericles (Shakespeare), 1,585; Supp. Ill, Part 2,624,627,629 Period of Adjustment (Williams), IV, 382, 386, 387, 388, 389, 390, 392, 393,394,397

"Period Pieces from the Mid-Thirties" (Agee),I,28 Perkins, David, Supp. I, Part 2,459, 475,478 Perkins, M. Helen, Supp. I, Part 1,26 Perkins, Maxwell, 1,252,289,290; n, 87, 93, 95, 252; IV, 452, 455, 457, 458,461,462,463,469 Perles, Alfred, III, 177,183,187,189, 192 Perloff, Marjorie, II, 557; Supp. I, Part 2,539,542,548 Perlov,Yitzchok,IV,22 Permanence and Change (Burke), I, 274 "Permanent Traits of the English National Genius" (Emerson), II, 18 Permit Me Voyage (Agee), 1,25,27 Perosa, Sergio, D, 100 Perrault, Charles, III, 216; IV, 266; Supp. I, Part 2,622 Perry, Bliss, I, 243; D, 23; IV, 354; Supp. I, Part 2,706 Perry, Dr. William, D, 395,396 Perry, Edgar A., Ill, 410 Perry, Matthew C, Supp. I, Part 2, 494-495 Perry, Patsy Brewington, Supp. I, Part 1,66 Perry, Ralph Barton, I, 224; O, 356, 362,364,365,366 Perse, St.-John, III, 12,13,14,17; Supp. Ill, Part 1,14 "Persistence of Desire, The" (Updike), IV,222-223,228 Person Sitting in Darkness, A (Twain), IV,208 Person, Place and Thing (Shapiro), Supp. II, Part 2,702,705 Personae (Pound), Supp. I, Part 1,255 Personae of Ezra Pound (Pound), HI, 458 Personal Narrative (Edwards), 1,545, 552,553,561,562; Supp. I, Part 2, 700 Personal Recollection of Joan of Arc (Twain), IV, 208 "Personal Reminiscences of James Thurber" (Budd), Supp. I, Part 2, 626 Persons and Places (Santayana), III, 615 Perspectives by Incongruity (Burke), 1,284-285

PETE-PICT / 748 Peter, John, III, 48 Peter, Saint, III, 341,346; IV, 86,294 "Peter Klaus" (German tale), II, 306 "Peter Parley" works (Goodrich), Supp.I, Part 1,38 "Peter Pendulum" (Poe), III, 425 "Peter Quince at the Clavier" (Stevens), IV, 81,82 Peter Whiffle:His Lifeand Works (Van Vechten),Supp.II, Part 2,728-729, 731,735,73&-741,749 "Peter" (Moore), III, 210,212 Peterkin, Julia, Supp. I, Part 1,328 Peters, Cora, Supp. I, Part 2,468 Peters, S. H. (pseudonym),jee Henry, O. Peterson, Gosta, IV, 425 Peterson, Houston, 1,60,70 Peterson, Walter S., IV, 424 "Petition, A" (Winters), Supp. II, Part 2,785 Petrarch, 1,176; D, 590; III, 4 "Petrified Man" (Welty), IV, 262 "Petrified Man,The" (Twain), IV, 195 "Petrified Woman, The" (Gordon), 11,199 Petronius, III, 174,179 Pettit, Helen, see O'Hara, Mrs. John (Helen Pettit) Pfeiffer, Pauline, see Hemingway, Mrs. Ernest (Pauline Pfeiffer) Pfister, Karin, IV, 467,475 Phaedo(P\alo),ll,W Phaedra (trans. Lowell and Barzun), 0,543-544 Phair, Judith T., Supp. I, Part 1,173 "Phantasia for Elvira Shatayev" (Rich), Supp. I, Part 2,570 Phantasms of War (Lowell), II, 512 Pharos (publication), IV, 383 Phases of an Inferior Planet (Glasgow), 0,174-175 "Pheasant, The" (Carver), Supp. OI, Part 1,146 Phelps, Robert, 1,47; D, 390 "Phenomenology of Anger, The" (Rich),Supp.I,Part 2,562-563,571 Phenomenology of Moral Experience, r/»6(Mandelbaum),I,61 Phidias, Supp. I, Part 2,482 Philadelphia Evening Bulletin (newspaper), Supp. I, Part 1,360 Philadelphia Literary Magazine, 11,298 Philadelphia Negro, The (Du Bois), Supp. II, Part 1,158,163-164,166

Philadelphia Press (newspaper), I, Phoenix and the Turtle, The 406 (Shakespeare), 1,284 Philadelphia Saturday Courier (news- "Phoenix Lyrics" (Schwartz), Supp. paper), III, 411 II, Part 2,665 Philanthropist (newspaper), Supp. I, "Photograph of the Unmade Bed" Part 2,587 (Rich), Supp. I, Part 2,558 Philbrick, Thomas, 1,343,357 Phylon (periodical), Supp. II, Part 1, 158,182 "PhilipofPokanoket"(Irving),II,303 Philippians (biblical book), IV, 154 "Physiology of Versification, The: "Philippine Conquest, The" (Masters), Harmonies of Organic and Animal Supp. I, Part 2,456 Life" (Holmes), Supp. I, Part 1, 311 "Philistinism and the Negro Writer" Physique del'Amour (Gourmonl), HI, (Baraka), Supp. O, Part 1,39,44 Phillips, David Graham, D, 444 467-468 Phillips, Elizabeth C, I, 96; Supp. I, Piatt, James, Supp. I, Part 2,420 Part 1,298 Piatt, John J., 0,273,293 Phillips, J. O. C, Supp. I, Part 1,19,27 "Piazza de Spagna, Early Morning" Phillips, Le Roy, D, 340 (Wilbur), Supp. Ill, Part 2,553 Phillips, Robert, Supp. I, Part 2,548 Piazza Tales (Melville), III, 91 Phillips, Robert S., O,607,608 Picaresqueliterature,IV,479-480,482, Phillips, Wendell, Supp. I, Part 1,103, 484,488,491,495 Part 2,524 Picasso, Pablo, I, 429, 432, 440, 442, Phillips, Willard, Supp. I, Part 1,154, 445;II,602; III, 197,201,470; IV,24, 155 26,31,32,46,87,407,436 Phillips, William L., 1,106,119,120 Picasso (Stein), IV, 28,32,45 Philosopher of the Forest (pseu- "Piccola Comedia" (Wilbur), Supp. HI, Part 2,561 donym), see Freneau, Philip Pickard, John B., Supp. I, Part 2,706 "Philosopher, The" (Farrell), II, 45 Philosophes classiques, Les (Taine), Pickard, Samuel T., Supp. I, Part 2, 682,706 111,323 "Philosophical Concepts and Practical Picked-up Pieces (Updike), Supp. I, Results" (James), II, 352 Part 2,626 Philosophical Transactions (Watson), Pickford, Mary, Supp. I, Part 2,391 11,114 "Picking and Choosing" (Moore), ID, 205 "Philosophy and Its Critics" (James), 0,360 "Picnic Remembered" (Warren), IV, "Philosophy for People" (Emerson), 240 n,i4 Pictorial History of the Negro in America, A (Hughes),Supp. I, Part "Philosophy of Composition, The" 1,345 (Poe), III, 416,421 Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, The Pictorial Mode, The: Space and Time (Mencken), III, 102-103 in the Art of Bryant, Irving and Cooper (Ringe), Supp. I, Part 1, "Philosophy of Handicap, A" (Bourne), 1,216,218 173 "Philosophy of History" (Emerson), Pictorial Review (magazine), IV, 322 0,11-12 "Picture, The" (Olson), Supp. II, Part 2,574 Philosophy of Literary Form, The (Burke), 1,275,281,283,291 "Picture of Little J. A. in a Prospect of Philosophy of the Human Mind, The Flowers, A" (Ashbery), Supp. Ill, (Stewart), II, 8 Part 1,3 Philosophy of Thorstein Veblen, The Pictures from an Institution (Jarrell), (Daugert), Supp. I, Part 2,649 0,367,385 "Philosophy, Or Something Like "Pictures of Columbus, the Genoese, That"(Roth),Supp.DI,Part2,403 The" (Freneau), Supp. II, Part 1, "Phocion" (Lowell), II, 536 258

PICT-PLEA / 749 Pictures of Fidelman: An Exhibition (Malamud),Supp.I,Pait2» 450-451 "Pictures of the Artist" (Malamud), Supp. I, Part 2, 450 Pictures of the Floating World (Lowell), II, 521, 524-525 Pictures of Travel (Heine), II, 281 Picturesque America; or, the Land We Live In (ed. Bryant), Supp. I, Part 1,158 Piece of My Mind, A: Reflections at Sixty (Wilson), IV, 426, 430, 438, 441 "Piece of News, A" (Weity), IV, 263 Pieces of the Frame (McPhee), Supp. Ill, Part 1,293 Pierce, David C, 1, 565 Pierce, Franklin, 0, 225, 226, 227; III, 88 Piercy, Josephine K., Supp. I, Part 1, 103, 123 Pierre etJean (de Maupassant), 1, 421 Pierre: or The Ambiguities (Melville), III, 86-88, 89, 96; IV, 194; Supp. I, Part 2, 579 Pierrepont, Sarah, see Edwards, Sarah Pierrot Qui Pleure et Pierrot Qui Rit (Rostand), II, 515 pigeon Geathers(Updike),Iv,214,218, 219,221-223,226 "Pigeons" (Rilke), II, 544 Pike County Ballads, The (Hay), Supp. I, Part 1,352 "Pilgrim" (Freneau), Supp. I, Part 1, 125 "Pilgrim Makers" (Lowell), II, 541 Pilgrim's Progress (Bunyan), 1, 92; II, 15, 168, 572; Supp. I, Part 1, 32, 38, Part 2, 599 "Pilgrimage" (Sontag),Supp. Ill, Part 2,454-455 Pilgrimage ofFestus, The (Aiken), I, 50,55,57 Pilgrimage of Henry James, The (Brooks), 1, 240, 248, 250; IV, 433 Pilot, The (Cooper), 1, 335, 337, 339, 342-343,350 "Pilot from the Carrier, A"(Jarrell), 11,374 "Pilots, Man Your Planes"(Jarrell), H, 374-375 "Pilots, The" (Levertov), Supp. Ill, Part 1,282 "Pimp's Revenge, A" (Malamud), Supp. I, Part 2, 435, 450, 451

Pindar, 1,381; D, 543; HI, 610 Pine Barrens, The (McPhee), Supp. Ill, Part 1,298-301,309 Pinker, James B., 1,409 Pinter, Harold, 1,71 Pioneer, The: A Literary and Critical Magazine, Supp. I, Part 2,405 Pioneers, The (Cooper), I, 336, 337, 339,340-341,342,348; D, 313 Pioneers of France in the New World (Parkman), Supp. n, Part 2, 599, 602 Pious and Secular America (Niebuhr), 111,308 Pipe Night (O'Hara), III, 361,368 Piper, Henry Dan, 0,100 Pippa Passes (Browning), IV, 128 Piquion, Rene*, Supp. I, Part 1,346 Pirate, The (Scott), 1,339 Pirates of Penzance, The (Gilbert and Sullivan), IV, 386 Pisan Cantos, The (Pound), III, 476; Supp. Ill, Part 1,63 Piscator, Erwin, IV, 394 Pissarro, Camille, 1,478 Pit, The (Morris), III, 314, 322, 326327,333,334 "Pit, The" (Roethke), HI, 538 "Pit and the Pendulum, The" (Poe), III, 413,416 Pitkin, Walter, D, 366 Pitt, William, Supp. I, Part 2,510,518 Pittsburgh Courier (newspaper),Supp. I, Part 1,327 Pittsburgh Daily Leader (newspaper), 1,313 Pittsburgh Dispatch (newspaper),I,499 "Pity Me" (Wylie), Supp. I, Part 2,729 Pius II, Pope, III, 472 Pius IX, Pope, D, 79 Pixley, Frank, 1,196 Pizer,Donald,I,424,III,240~242,321, 335,336; Supp. I, Part 2,478 PlaceCalled Esthervtile,A(C*ldwe\\), 1,297,307 "Place in Fiction" (Welty), IV, 260,279 Place ofDeadRoads, The (Burroughs), Supp. Ill, Part 1,196 Place of Love, The (Shapiro), Supp. II, Part 2,702,706 Place of Science in Modern Civilization and Other Essays, The (Veblen), Supp. I, Part 2,629,642 "Place to Live, A" (Levertov), Supp. Ill, Part 1,281

Placi, Carlo, IV, 328 "Plagiarist, The" (Singer), IV, 19 "Plain Language from TruthfulJames" (Harte), see "Heathen Chinee, The" "Plain Song for Comadre, A" (Wilbur), Supp. DI, Part 2,554 Plain Talk (publication), II, 26 "Plain Talk," see Common Sense (Paine) Plain Truth: Or, Serious Considerations on the Present State of the City of Philadelphia, and Province ofPennsylvania (Franklin), D, 117119 Plaint of a Rose, The (Sandburg), III, 579 "Planchette" (London), II, 475-476 Planet News: 1961-1967 (Ginsberg), Supp. II, Part 1,321 "Planetarium" (Rich), Supp. I, Part 2, 557 "Plantation a beginning, a" (Olson), Supp. II, Part 2,573 Plarr Victor, III, 459,477 Plath, Aurelia, Supp. I, Part 2, 527528,529,530,531,535,536,541 Plath, Otto, Supp. I, Part 2,527-529, 531,533 Plath, Sylvia, Supp. I, Part 2,526-549, 554,571; Supp. Ill, Part 2,543,561 Plath, Warren, Supp. I, Part 2,528 Plato,!, 224,279,383,389,485,523;H, 5,8,10,15,233,346,391-392,591; HI, 115,480,600,606,609,619-620; IV, 74,140,333,363,364; Supp. I, Part 2,595,631 "Plato" (Emerson), II, 6 Platt, Anthony M., Supp. I, Part 1,1314,27 Plautus, Titus Maccius, IV, 155; Supp. III, Part 2,630 Play Days: A Book of Stories for Children (Jewett), II, 401-402 Playboy (magazine), III, 40 Playboy of the Western World, The (Synge), Supp. HI, Part 1,34 Player Piano (Vonnegut), Supp. D, Part 2,756,757,760-765 "Plays and Operas Too" (Whitman), IV, 350 Plays: Winesburgand Others (Anderson), 1,113 "Plea for Captain Brown, A" (Thoreau),IV,185

PLEA-POEM / 750 "Please Don't Kill Anything" (Miller), III, 161 Pleasure Dome (Frankenberg), 1,436 Pleasure of Hope, The (Emerson), II, 8 "Pleasures of Formal Poetry, The'* (Bogan), Supp. Ill, Part 1,51 Plimpton, George, IV, 119 Pliny the Younger, D, 113 "Plot against the Giant, The" (Stevens), IV, 81 Plotinsky, Melvin L., I, % Plotz, Joan, Supp. I, Part 2,578 Plough and the Stars, The (O'Casey), III, 159 "Ploughingon Sunday" (Stevens), IV, 74 "Plumet Basilisk, The" (Moore), III, 203,208,215 Plumly, Stanley, Supp. I, Part 2,578 "Plunkville Patriot" (O.Henry), Supp. II, Part 1,389 Pluralistic Universe, A (James), 11,342, 348,357-358 Plutarch, 0,5,8,16,555 PM (newspaper), 1,296; IV, 477 Pnin (Nabokov), III, 246 "Po' Boy Blues" (Hughes), Supp. I, Part 1,327 Po Li, Supp. I, Part 1,262 Pocahontas, 1,4; II, 296; HI, 584 Pochmann, Henry A., D, 318 Podhoretz, Norman, I, 166; III, 48, 384; IV, 235,307,441,449; Supp. I, Part 2,453 Poe, David, III, 409 Poe, Edgar Allan, 1,48,53,103,190, 194,200,210,211,261,340,459; D, 74,77,194,255,273,295,308,311, 313,421,475,482,530,595;III,259, 409-432,485,507,593; IV, 123,129, 133, 141, 187, 261, 345, 350, 432, 438, 439, 453; Supp. I, Part 1, 36, 147,309, Part 2,376,384,385,388, 393,405,413,421,474,682; Supp. II, Part 1,385,410; Supp. Ill, Part 2, 544,549-550 Poe, Elizabeth Arnold, III, 409,413, 429 Poe, Mrs. Edgar Allan (Virginia demm), III, 412, 413, 418, 421422,428,429 "Poem" (Bishop), Supp. I, Part 1,73, 76-79,82,95 "Poem" (Kunitz),Supp.ni, Part 1,263

"Poem" (Wright), Supp. Ill, Part 2, 590 Poem, A, Spoken at the Public Commencement at Yale College, in New Haven; September], 1781 (Barlow), Supp. II, Part 1,67-68,74,75 "Poem About George Doty in the Death House, A" (Wright), Supp. Ill, Part 2,594-595,597-598 "Poem Beginning 'The,'" (Zukofsky), Supp. Ill, Part 2,610,611,614 "Poem for a Birthday" (Plath), Supp. I, Part 2,539 "POEM FOR ANNA RUSS AND FANNY JONES, A" (Baraka), Supp. II, Part 1,58 "Poem for Black Hearts, A" (Baraka), Supp. II, Part 1,50 "POEM FOR DEEP THINKERS, A" (Baraka), Supp. O, Part 1,55 "Poem for Dorothy, A" (Merwin), Supp. Ill, Part 1,342 "Poem for Hemingway and W. C. Williams" (Carver), Supp. Ill, Part 1,147 "Poem for Someone Killed in Spain, A"(Jarreil),II,371 "Poem For Willie Best, A" (Baraka), Supp. II, Part 1,36 "Poem in Prose" (Bogan), Supp. Ill, Part 1,58 PoemoftheCid(irans. Merwin),Supp. Ill, Part 1,347 "Poem on the Memorable Victory Obtained by the Gallant Captain Paul Jones" (Freneau), Supp. II, Partial "Poem Read at the Dinner Given to the Author by the Medical Profession" (Holmes), Supp. I, Part 1, 310-311 "POEM SOME PEOPLE WILL HAVE TO UNDERSTAND, A" (Baraka), Supp. II, Part 1,49 "Poem That Took the Place of a Mountain" (Olson), Supp. II, Part 4582 Poems (Auden), Supp. O, Part 1,6 Poems (Berryman), 1,170 Poems (Bryant), II, 311; Supp. I, Part 1,155,157 Poems (Cummings), 1,430,447 Poems (Eliot), 1,580,588; IV, 122 Poems (Emerson), II, 7,8,12-13,17 Poems (Holmes), Supp. I, Part 1,303

Poems (Lowell), Supp. I, Part 2,405 Poems (Moore), III, 194,205,215 /torn* (Poe), III, 411 /Vwmy(Tate),IV,121 Poems (Winters), Supp. II, Part 2, 809,810 Poems (Wordsworth), 1,468 Poems, The (Freneau), Supp. II, Part 1,263 Poems about God ( Ransom), III, 484, 486,491; IV, 121 Poems and Essays (Ransom), ID, 486, 490,492 Poems and New Poems (Bogan), Supp. Ill, Part 1,60-62 Poems by Emily Dickinson, Second Series (eds. Todd and Higginson), 1,454 Poems by James Russell Lowell, Second Series (Lowell), Supp. I, Part 2, 406,409 Poems by Sidney Lamer, Supp. I, Part 1,364 Poems from Black Africa (ed. Hughes), Supp. I, Part 1,344 Poems, 1924-1933 (MacLeish), III, 7, 15 Poems 1940-1953 (Shapiro), Supp. II, Part 2,703,711 Poems, 7943-7956(Wilbur),Supp.III, Part 2,554 Poems: North
POEM-POOL / 751 Poems of Two Friends (Howells and Piatt),II,273,277 Poems on Slavery (Longfellow), II, 489; Supp. I, Part 2,406 Poems Written and Published During the American Revolutionary War (Freneau), Supp.II, Part 1,273,274 Poems Written Between the Years 1768 and 1794 (Freneau), Supp. II, Part 1,269 "Poet, The" (Dunbar), Supp. II, Part 1207,209-210 "Poet, The" (Emerson), II, 13,19,20, 170 "Poet and His Book, The" (Millay), III, 126,138 "Poet and His Public, The" (Jarrell), Supp. I, Part 1,% "Poet and His Song, The" (Dunbar), Supp. II, Part 1,199 "Poet and the World, The" (Cowley), Supp. II, Part 1,145 "Poet as Hero, The: Keats in His Letters" (Trilling) Supp. Ill, Part 2, 506-507 "Poet at Seven, The" (Rimbaud), II, 545 Poet at the Breakfast-Table, The (Holmes), Supp. I, Part 1,313-314 Poet in the World, The (Levertov), Supp. Ill, Part 1,271,273,278,282 "Poet-or the Growth of a Lit'ry Figure" (White), Supp. I, Part 2,676 Poet Speaks, The (Orr), Supp. I, Part 2,549 "Poete contumace, Le" (Corbi&re), 0,384-385 Poetes negres des £tats-Unis, Les (Wagner), Supp. I, Part 1,348 Poetic Diction: A Study in Meaning (Barfield),III,274,279 " Poetic Principle, The " (Poe), ID, 421, 426 Poetics (Aristotle), III, 422 "Poetics of the Physical World, The" (Kinnell), Supp. Ill, Part 1,239 Poetry (publication), I, 51, 103,109, 235,384,393,475; n, 517; HI, 194, 458, 460, 465-466, 469, 581, 586, 592; IV, 76,370; Supp. I, Part 1,83, 256, 257, 258, 261, 263, 264, 265, 268,334, Part 2,374,387,389,392, 394,461,553,709; Supp. II, Part 1, 139; Supp. Ill, Part 2,610-616,621, 623,624,627-630

"Poetry" (Moore), III, 204-205, 215 "Poetry: A Metrical Essay" (Holmes), Supp. I, Part 1,310 "Poetry and Belief in Thomas Hardy" (Schwartz), Supp. II, Part 2, 666 Poetry and Criticism (ed. Nemerov), 111,269 "Poetry and Drama" (Eliot), 1, 588 Poetry and Fiction: Essays (Nemerov), HI, 269, 281 Poetry and Poets (Lowell), II, 512 Poetry and the Age (Jarrell), IV, 352; Supp. II, Part 1,135 "Poetry and the Public World" (MacLeish),IH,ll Poetry and Truth (Olson), Supp. II, Part 2, 583 "Poetry for the Advanced" (Baraka), Supp. II, Part 1,58 "Poetry in American: A New Consideration of Whittier's Verse" (Scott), Supp. I, Part 2, 706 Poetry of American Women from 1632-1945, The (Watts), Supp. I, Part 1,123 "Poetry of Barbarism, The" (Santayana),IV,353 Poetry of Meditation, 77i
Poganuc People (Stowe), Supp. I, Part i581,596,599-600 Poggioli, Renato, IV, 95 Poincarl, Raymond, IV, 320 "Point, The" (Hayden), Supp. II, Part 1,373 "Point at Issue! A" (Chopin), Supp. I, Part 1*208 "Point of Age, A" (Berryman), 1,173 Point of No Return (Marquand), III, 56,59-60,65,67,69 "Point Shirley" (Plath), Supp. I, Part 4529,538 Poirier, Richard, 1,136,143,166,239; m, 34,48; Supp. I, Part 2,660,665, 681 "Pole Star" (MacLeish), III, 16 Police (Baraka), Supp. II, Part 1,47 Politian (Poe), III, 412 Political Essays (Lowell), Supp. I, Part 2,407 "Political Fables" (Mather), Supp. II, Part 2,450 "Political Litany, A" (Freneau), Supp. II, Part 1,257 "Political Poem" (Baraka), Supp. II, Part 1,36 Politics (Macdonald), 1,233-234 Politics and a Belly-Full (Johnson), Supp. I, Part 1,173 "Politics and the English Language" (Orwell), Supp. I, Part 2,620 Politics of the Universe, The: Edward Beecher, Abolition, and Orthodoxy (Merideth), Supp. I, Part 2,601 Polk, James K., 1,17; 0,433-434 Pollard, James E., Supp. I, Part 2,626 Pollard, John A., Supp. I, Part 2,706 Pollin, Burton R., Ill, 432 Pollock, Jackson, IV, 411,420 Pollock, Thomas Clark, IV, 472,473 Polo, Marco, ffl, 395 Polybius, Supp. I, Part 2,491 "Pomegranate Seed" (Wharton), IV, 316 Pommer, H. E., Ill, 97 Ponce de Leon, Luis, HI, 391 "Pond, The" (Nemerov), III, 272 Ponder Heart, The (Welty), IV, 261, 274-275,281 Pondrom, Cyrena N., IV, 23 "Pool, The" (Doolittle), Supp. I, Part 1,264-265 "Pool Room in the Lions Club" (Merwin), Supp. HI, Part 1,346

POOL-POWY / 752 Porter, Katherine Anne, 1,97,385; D, 194,606; HI, 433-455,482; IV, 26, 48,143,138,246,261,279,280,282 Porter, Noah, Supp. I, Part 2,640 Porter, William Sydney (O. Henry), I, 201; HI, 5; Supp. I, Part 2,390,462; Supp. n, Part 1,385-412 "Porter" (Hughes), Supp. I, Part 1, 327 Porteus, Beilby, Supp. I, Part 1,150 Portland Gazette (newspaper), II, 493 "/V>ftfom/GoingOut,The" (Merwin), Supp. m, Part 1,345 Portnoy'sComplaint(Roth),Supp.m, Part 2,401,404,405,407,412-414, 426 "Portrait, The" (Kunitz), Supp. Ill, Part 1,263 "Portrait of a Girl in Glass" (Willll,114;ni,263,267,288,517;IV, liams), IV, 383 145; Supp. I, Part 1,150,152,310, "Portrait of a Lady" (Eliot), I, 569, 570,571,584; HI, 4 Part 2,407,422,516,714; Supp. II, Portrait of a Lady, The (James), 1,10, Part 1,70,71 Popkin, Henry, m, 169 258,461-462,464; D, 323,325,327, 328-329,334 Poplar, Ellen, see Wright, Mrs. Rich"Portrait of an Artist" (Roth), Supp. ard (Ellen Poplar) III, Part 2,412 "Poplar, Sycamore" (Wilbur), Supp. m, Part 2,549 PortraitofBascom Hawkes, A (Wolfe), IV, 451-452,456 "Poppies in July" (Plath), Supp. I, Part Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 2,544 A (Joyce), 1,475-476; III, 471,561 "Poppies in October" (Plath), Supp. I, "Portrait of the Intellectual as a Yale Part 2,544 Man" (McCarthy), 11,563,564-565 "Poppy Seed" (Lowell), II, 523 Portraits and Self-Portraits (ed. Pops, Martin Leonard, m, 97 Schreiber), Supp. I, Part 2,478 Popular History of the United States Portuguese Voyages to America in the (Gay), Supp. I, Part 1,158 Fifteenth Century (Morison),Supp. Popular Mechanics (magazine), n, 589 I, Part 2,488 "Popular Songs" (Ashbery),Supp.III, Portz, John, HI, 384 Part 1,6 "Porcupine, The" (Kinnell),Supp.m, "Poseidon and Company" (Carver), Supp. Ill, Part 1,137 Part 1,244 Porgy and Bess (film), Supp. I, Part 1, "Possessions" (Crane), 1,392-393 "Posthumous Letter to Gilbert White" 66 (Auden), Supp. D, Part 1,26 "Porphyria's Lover" (Browning), II, "Posthumous Poems of Edgar Lee 522 Masters" (Robinson), Supp. I, Part Port Folio (publication), II, 298,302 2,478 Port of Saints (Burroughs), Supp. HI, Postimpressionism, Supp. I, Part 1, Part 1,106 257 Portable Faulkner (Cowley), II, 57,59 Portable Veblen, T/i<»(Veblen),Supp. "Postscript" (Du Bois), Supp. II, Part 1,173 I, Part 2,630,650 Porter, Bern, III, 171 Pot of Earth, 77u?(MacLeish),ni,5,68,10,12,18 Porter, Bernard H., Ill, 121 Porter, Herman W., Supp. I, Part L 49 "Potato" (Wilbur), Supp. HI, Part 2, 545 Porter, Jacob, Supp. I, Part 1,153

Poole, Ernest, 11,444 Poor Fool (Caldwell), 1,291,292,308 "Poor Joanna" (Jewett), n, 394 "Poor Man's Pudding and Rich Man's Crumbs" (Melville), HI, 89-90 "Poor Richard" (James), II, 322 Poor Richard's Almanac (undated) (Franklin), n, 112 Poor Richard's Almanac for 1733 (Franklin), H, 108,110 Poor Richard's Almanac for 1739 (Franklin), II, 112 Poor Richard's Almanac for 1758 (Franklin), II, 101 Poor White (Anderson), 1,110-111 Poore, Charles, HI, 364 Poorhouse Fair, The (Updike), IV, 214,228-229,232 Pope, Alexander, 1,198, 204; 0,17,

"Potatoes' Dance, The" (Lindsay), Supp. I, Part 2,394 "Potpourri, A" (Miller), III, 190 Potter, Beatrix, Supp. I, Part 2,656 Potter, Jack, 1,4% Potter, Mary Storcr, see Longfellow, Mrs. Henry Wadsworth (Mary Storer Potter) Potter, Stephen, IV, 430 Poulet, Georges, 1,473 Pound, Ezra, 1,49,58,60,66,68,69, 105, 236, 243, 256, 384, 403, 428, 429,475,476,482,487,521,578; O, 26,55,168,263,316,371,376,513, 517,520,526,528,529,530; 111,2,5, 8, 9,13-14,17,174,194,196, 217, 278, 430, 453, 456-479, 492, 504, 511, 523, 524, 527, 575-576, 586, 590; IV, 27,28,407,415,416,424, 433,446; Supp. I, Part 1,253,255258,261-268,272,274,275, Part 2, 387,721; Supp. II, Part 1,1,8,20, 30,91,136; Supp. Ill, Part 1,48,63, 64, 73, 105,146, 225, 271, Part 2, 542, 609-617, 619, 620, 622, 625, 626,628,631 Pound, Homer, Supp. Ill, Part 2,617 Pound, Isabel, Supp. Ill, Part 2,617 Pound, Mrs. Ezra (Dorothy Shakespear), III, 457,458,472; Supp. I, Part 1,257; Supp. Ill, Part 2,617, 622 Pound,T.S.,I,428 Pound Era, The (Kenner), Supp. I, Part 1,275 Pound/Joyce: The Letters of Ezra Pound to James Joyce (ed. Read), Supp. I, Part 1,275 "Pound Reweighed" (Cowley), Supp. II, Part 1,143 Powell, Desmond, Supp. I, Part 2,706 Powell, Lawrence Clark, III, 189,191 "Power" (Emerson), II, 2,3 "Power" (Rich), Supp. I, Part 2,569 Power and the Glory, The (Greene), ffl, 556 "Power of Fancy, The" (Freneau), Supp. II, Part 1,255 "Power of Prayer, The" (Lanier), Supp. I, Part 1,357 Power of Sympathy, The (Brown), Supp. II, Part 1,74 Powers, J.F.,III, 360 Powys, John Cowper, Supp. I, Part 2, 454,476,478

PRAC-PRIN / 755 "Practical Methods of Meditation, The"(Dawson),IV,151 Practical Navigator, The (Bowditch), Supp. I, Part 2,482 Pragmatism, I, 128, 224, 225, 233, 234; II, 21,267,322; HI, 309,310; IV, 408 Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking (James), II, 352 "Prairie" (Sandburg), III, 583,584 Prairie, The (Cooper), 1,339,342 "Prairies,The" (Bryant), Supp.I,Part \ 157,162,163,166 "Praise for an Urn" (Crane), 1,388 "Praise in Summer" (Wilbur), Supp. III, Part 2,546-548,560,562 "Praise of a Palmtree" (Levertov), Supp. Ill, Part 1,284 "Praise to the End!" (Roethke), III, 529,532,539 "Praises, The" (Olson), Supp. II, Part 2^558,560,563,564 Prajadhipok, King of Siam, 1,522 Pratt, Anna (Anna Alcott), Supp* I, Part 1,33 Pratt, Louis H., Supp. I, Part 1,70 "Prattler" (newspaper column), 1,207 "Prattler, The" (Bierce), 1,196 Pravda (newspaper), IV, 75 "Pray without Ceasing" (Emerson), 0,9-10 "Prayer for Columbus" (Whitman), IV, 348 "PrayerforMy Daughter" (Yeats),II, 598 "Prayer for My Grandfather to Our Lady, A" (Lowell), II, 541-542 "PRAYER FOR SAVING" (Baraka), Supp. O, Part 1,52-53 "Prayer in Spring, A" (Frost), II, 153, 164 "Prayer on All Saint's Day" (Cowley), Supp. II, Part 1,138,153 "Prayer to the Good Poet" (Wright), Supp. Ill, Part 2,603 Prayers for Dark People (Du Bois), Sup p. II, Part 1,186 Praz, Mario, IV, 430 "Preacher, The" (Whittier), Supp. I, Part 2,698-699 Precaution (Cooper), 1,337,339 "PreconceptionsofEconomic Science, The" (Veblen), Supp. I, Part 2,634 Predilections (Moore), III, 194

Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note.... (Baraka), Supp. II, Part 1, 31,33-34,51,61 Prefaces and Prejudices (Mencken), m, 99,104,106,119 "Preference" (Wyiie), Supp. I, Part 2, 713 "Prejudice against the Past, The" (Moore), IV, 91 Prejudices (Mencken), Supp. I, Part 2, 630 Prejudices: A Selection (ed. Fanrell), 111,116 Prejudices: First Series (Mcncken^Ul, 105 Preliminary Checklist for a Bibliography of Jane Addams (Perkins), Supp. I, Part 1,26 Prelude, A: Landscapes, Characters and Conversationsfrom the Earlier Years of My Life (Wilson), IV,426, 427,430,434,445 Prelude, The (Wordsworth), III, 528; IV, 331,343; Supp. I, Part 2,416, 676 "Prelude to an Evening" (Ransom), III, 491,492-493 "Prelude to the Present" (Mumford), Supp. II, Part 2,471 "Preludes" (Eliot), 1,573,576,577 Preludes for Memnon (Aiken), 1,59, 65 "Premature Burial, The" (Poe), III, 415,416,418 Preparatory Meditations (Taylor),IV, 145,148,149, 150, 152,153,154155,164,165 Prepositions: The Collected Critical Essays of Louis Zukofsky (Zukofsky), Supp. HI, Part 2,630 "PRESSPOKEINALANGUAGE" (Baraka), Supp. II, Part 1,60 Prescott, Orville, III, 384 Prescott, William Hickling, 0,9,310, 313-314; IV, 309; Supp. I, Part 1, 148, Part 2,414,479,493,494 "Prescription of Painful Ends" (Jeffers), Supp. II, Part 2,424 "Presence,The" (Gordon),!!, 199,200 "Present Age,The" (Emerson), D, 1112 "Present Hour" (Sandburg), III, 593594 Present Philosophical Tendencies (Perry), 1,224

"Present State of Ethical Philosophy, The" (Emerson), II, 9 "Present State of Poetry, The" (Schwartz), Supp. II, Part 2,666 "Preservation of Innocence" (Baldwin), Supp. I, Part 1,51 Presidential Papers, The (Mailer), HI, 35,37-38,42,45 "Presidents" (Merwin), Supp. m, Part 1,351 Preston, George R., Jr., IV, 472 Preston, Raymond, 1,590 "Pretty Mouth and Green My Eyes" (Salinger), III, 560 "Previous Condition" (Baldwin), Supp. I, Part 1,51,55,63 Price, Richard, n, 9; Supp. I, Part 2, 522 Price, The (Miller), III, 165-166 "Price of the Harness, The" (Crane), 1,414 "Priceless Gift of Laughter," Supp. I, Part 2,627 "Pride" (Hughes),Supp.I,Part 1,331 Pride and Prejudice (Austen), II, 290 "Priesthood, The" (Winters), Supp. II, Part 2,786 Priestly, Joseph, Supp. I, Part 2,522 "Primary Ground, A" (Rich), Supp. I, Part 2,563 "Prime" (Auden), Supp. II, Part 1,22 Primer for Blacks (Brooks), Supp. ID, Part 1,85 Primer of Ignorance, A (Blackmur), Supp. II, Part 1,91 "PrimitiveBlackMan,The"(DuBois), Supp. II, Part 1,176 "Primitive Like an Orb, A" (Stevens), IV,89 "Primitive Singing" (Lindsay), Supp. I, Part 2,389-390 Primitivism and Decadence (Winters), Supp. II, Part 2,786,803-807,812 Prince, Morton, D, 365 "Prince, The" (Jarrell), II, 379 "Prince,The" (Winters), Supp. O, Part 2,802 Prince and the Pauper, The (Twain), IV, 200-201,206 Princess, The (Tennyson), Supp. I, Part £410 Princess Casamassima, The (James), 0,276,291; IV, 202 "Princess Casamassima, The" (Trilling), Supp. ID, Part 2,502,503

PRIN-PSAL / 754 "Principles" (Du Bois), Supp. II, Part 1,172 Principles of Literary Criticism (Richards), 1,274; Supp. I, Part 1, 264,275 Principles of Psychology, TTie(Jamcs), n, 321,350-352,353", 354,357,362, 363-364; IV, 28,29,32,37 Principles of Zoology (Agassiz),Supp. I, Part 1,312 Prior, Matthew, O, 111; m, 521 Prior, Sir James, n, 315 "Prison, The" (Malamud), Supp. I, Part 2,431,437 Prisoner of Sex, The (Mailer), III, 46 Prisoner of Zenda, The (film), Supp. I, Part 2,615 Pritchard, John P., Supp. I, Part 1,173, Part 2,426 Pritchett, V. S., 0,587,608; Supp. II, Part 1,143 "Privatation and Publication" (Cowley), Supp. II, Part 1,149 "Private History of a Campaign That Failed" (Twain), IV, 195 "PrivateTheatricals" (Howells), n, 280 "Problem from Milton, A" (Wilbur), Supp. HI, Part 2,550 "Problem of Being, The" (James), II, 360 "Problem of Housing the Negro, The" (Du Bois), Supp. II, Part 1,168 Probst, Leonard, IV, 401 Processioned (Lawson), 1,479 "Prodigal,The" (Bishop), Supp. I, Part 1,90,92 Prodigal Parents, The (Lewis), H, 454455 "Proem" (Crane), 1,397 "Proem, The: By the Carpenter" (O. Henry), Supp. n, Part 1,409 "Profession of a New Yorker" (Krutch), Supp. I, Part 2,681 Profession of Authorship in America, 1800-1870,77i€»(Charvat),Supp.I, Part 1,148 "Professor" (Hughes), Supp. I, Parti, 330 "Professor, The" (Bourne), 1,223 Professor at the Breakfast Table, The (Holmes), Supp. I, Part 1,313,316 "Professor Clark's Economics" (Veblen), Supp. I, Part 2,634 Professor of Desire, The ( Rot h), Supp. Ill, Part 2,403,418-420

"Professor Veblen" (Mencken), Supp. I, Part 2,630 Professor's House, The (Gather), I, 325-236 Proffer, Karl, HI, 266 Profile of Vachel Lindsay (ed. Flanagan), Supp. I, Part 2,402 "Prognosis" (Warren), IV, 245 Progressive (publication), Supp.I, Part 1,60 "Project for aTrip to China" (Sontag), Supp. Ill, Part 2,454,469 "Projection" (Nemerov), III, 275 "Projective Verse" (Olson), Supp. II, Part 1, 30, Part 2, 555, 556, 557; Supp. in, Part 2,624 Proletarian Literature in the United States (Hicks), Supp. I, Part 2,609610 "Prolegomena, Section 1" (Pound), Supp. Ill, Part 2,615-616 "Prolegomena, Section 2" (Pound), Supp. ID, Part 2,616 "Prologue" (MacLeish), III, 8,14 "Prologue to Our Time" (Mumford), Supp. II, Part 2,473 "Prometheus" (Longfellow), II, 494 Prometheus Bound (Lowell), II, 543, 544,545,555 Promise, The (Buck), Supp. II, Part 1, 124 Promise of American Life, TTie(Croly), 1,229 Promised Land, The (Porter), III, 447 Promised Lands (Sontag), Supp. Ill, Part 2,452 Promises: Poems 1954-1956 (Warren), IV, 244-245,249,252 Proof, The (Winters), Supp. n, Part 2, 786,791,792-794 "Propaganda of History, The" (Du Bois), Supp. n, Part 1,182 Propertius, Sextus, III, 467 "Prophecy of Samuel Sewall, The" (Whittier), Supp. I, Part 2,699 "Prophetic Pictures, The" (Hawthorne), II, 227 "Proportion" (Lowell), II, 525 "Proposal" (Carver), Supp. Ill, Part 1, 149 Proposals Relating to the Education of Youth in Pensilvania (Franklin),II, 113 "Proposed New Version of the Bible" (Franklin), II, 110

Prose and Poetry of Elinor Wylie, The (Ben6t), Supp. I, Part 2,730 "Prose for Departure" (Merrill), Supp. HI, Part 1,336 "Prose Style in the Essays of E. B. White" (Fuller),Supp.I,Part 2,681 "Proserpina and the Devil" (Wilder), IV,358 "Prosody" (Shapiro), Supp. II, Part 2, 710 Prospect, The (journal), Supp. I, Part 2; 520 Prospect be fore Us, TTie(DosPassos), 1,491 ProspectofPeace, The (Barlow), Supp. II, Part 1,67,68,75 "Prospective Immigrants Please Note" (Rich), Supp. I, Part 2,555 Prospects on the Rubicon (Paine), Supp. I, Part 2,510-511 Prospectus of a National Institution, to Be Established in the United States (Barlow), Supp. n, Part 1,80,82 Prospice (Browning), IV, 366 "Protestant Easter" (Sexton), Supp. II, Part 2,684 "Prothalamion" (Schwartz), Supp. II, Part 2,649,652 Proud, Robert, Supp. I, Part 1,125 "Proud Farmer,The" (Lindsay), Supp. I, Part 2,381 "Proud Flesh" (Warren), IV, 243 "Proud Lady" (Wylie), Supp. I, Part 2, 711-712 Proust, Marcel, I, 89, 319, 327, 377, 461; H, 377,514,606; III, 174,181, 184,244-245,259,471; IV, 32,201, 237, 301, 312, 328, 359, 428, 431, 434, 439, 443, 466, 467; Supp. Ill, Part 1,10,12,14,15 Prufrock and Other Observations (Eliot), I, 569-570, 571, 573, 574, 576-577,583,584,585 "Psalm" (Ginsberg), Supp. II, Part 1, 312 "Psalm of Life, A" (Longfellow), II, 489,496 "Psalm of Life, A: What the Heart of the Young Man Said to the Psalmist" (Longfellow), Supp. I, Part 2,409 "Psalm of the West" (Lanier), Supp. I, Part 1,362,364 "Psalm: Our Fathers" (Merwin), Supp. III, Part 1,350

PSAL-QUIN / 755 Psalms (biblical book), I, 83; II, 168, Puritan Origins of the American Self, 232; Supp. I, Part 1,125 The (Bercovitch), Supp. I, Part 1, 99 Psalms, Hymns, and Spiritual Songs of the Rev. Isaac Watts, The (ed. "Puritan Poetry of Anne Bradstreet, The" (Richardson), Supp. I, Part 1, Worcester), 1,458 123 Psychiatric Novels of Oliver Wendell Holmes, 7Yie(Oberndorf),Supp.I, Puritan Pronaos, The: Studies in the Intellectual Life of New England in Part 1,315,319 the Seventeenth Century (Morison), Psychological Review (publication), Supp. I, Part 2,485 IV, 26 "Psychology and Form" (Burke), I, "Puritan's Ballad, The" (Wylie), Supp. I, Part 2,723 270 Psychology: Briefer Course (James), "Puritanical Pleasures" (Hardwick), Supp. Ill, Part 1,213-214 H,351-352 Psychology of Art (Malraux), IV, 434 Puritanism, Supp. I, Part 1, 98-101, 103-117, 122, 123, 197, 253, 271, Psychology of Insanity, The (Hart), I, Part 2,375,400,421,479,484,485, 241-242,248-250 496, 505, 521, 522, 593, 600, 672, Psychophysiks (Fechner), II, 358 698,699 "Public Garden, The" (Lowell), II, Purple Decades, The (Wolfe), Supp. 550 Public Good (Paine), Supp. I, Part 2, Ill, Part 2,584 "Purple Hat, The" (Welty), IV, 264 509-510 Public Speech: Poems (MacLeish), III, "Pursuit of Happiness, The" (Ashbery), Supp. Ill, Part 1,23 15-16 Pushcart at the Curb, A (Dos Passos), Public Spirit (Savage), II, 111 1,478,479 Pudd'nhead Wilson (Twain), 1,197 "Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar" "Pushcart Man" (Hughes), Supp. I, Part 1,330 (Twain), 1,197 Pushkin, Aleksander,III,246,261,262 Pullman, George, Supp. I, Part 1,9 "Pullman Car Hiawatha" (Wilder), IV, "Pussycat and the Expert Plumber 365-366 Who Was a Man, The" (Miller), "Pulpit and the Pew, The" (Holmes), III, 146-147 Supp. I, Part 1,302 "Put Off the Wedding Five Times and "Pulse-Beats and Pen-Strokes" Nobody Comes to It" (Sandburg), (Sandburg), III, 579 111,586-587 Pump House Gang, The (Wolfe), Put Yourself in My Shoes (Carver), Supp. Ill, Part 2,575,578,580,581 Supp. Ill, Part 1,139 Punch (periodical), Supp. I, Part 2, "Put Yourself in My Shoes" (Carver), 602 Supp. Ill, Part 1,139,141 Punch, Brothers, Punch and Other Putnam, George P., D, 314 Sketches (Twain), IV, 200 Putnam, James Jackson, D, 365 Punch: The Immortal Liar, Documents Putnam, Phelps, 1,288 in His History (Aiken), 1,57,61 Putnam, Samuel, II, 26; III, 479; Supp. Punishment Without Vengeance Ill, Part 2,615 (Vega, trans. Merwin), Supp. Ill, Putnam's Monthly Magazine, III, 88, Part 1,341,347 89,90,91 "Pupil, The" (James), II, 331 Puttenham, George, Supp. I, Part 1,113 "Purchase of Some Golf Clubs, A" Putzel, Max, Supp. I, Part 2,402,478 (O'Hara),III,369 Puzzled America (publication),!, 115 "Purdah" (Plath), Supp. I, Part 2,602 Pyle, Ernie, HI, 148 Purdy,RobRoy,IV,143 Pylon (Faulkner), II, 64-65,73 Purgatorio (Dante), III, 182 Pynchon, Thomas, III, 258; Supp. II, Puritan Family (Morgan), Supp.I, Part Part 2,557,617-438; Supp. Ill, Part 1,101 1,217

"Pyrography" (Ashbery), Supp. Ill, Part 1,18 Pythagoras, 1,332 "Quai d'Orteans" (Bishop), Supp. I, Part 1,89 "Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket, The" (Lowell), II, 54,550 Quaker Militant: John Greenleaf Whittier (Mordell), Supp. I, Part 2, 706 Qualey, Carlton C, Supp. I, Part 2, 650 Quang-Ngau-che, III, 473 Quarles, Francis, 1,178,179 "Quarry, The" (Nemerov), III, 272 Quarry, The: New Poems (Eberhart), 1,532,539 Quarterly Journal of Economics (publication), Supp. I, Part 2,641 "Quaternions, The" (Bradstreet), Supp. I, Part 1,104-106,114,122 "Queen of the Blues" (Brooks), Supp. Ill, Part 1,75 Queen Victoria (Strachey), Supp. I, Part 2,485,494 "Queens of France" (Wilder), IV, 365 Queer (Burroughs), Supp. HI, Part 1, 93-102 "Quelques Considerations sur la m&hode subjective" (James), II, 345-346 Quest of the Silver Fleece, The (Du Bois), Supp. II, Part 1,176-178 "Questions of Geography" (Hollander), Supp. I, Part 1,96 Questions of Travel (Bishop), Supp. I, Part 1,72,83,92,94 "Questions to Tourists Stopped by a Pineapple Field" (Merwin), Supp. Ill, Part 1,355 "Questions without Answers" (Williams), IV, 384 Quiet Days in Clichy (Miller), in, 170, 178,183-184,187 Quinn, Arthur Hobson, HI, 431,432 Quinn, John, III, 471 Quinn,Kerker,I,542 Quinn, Patrick F., Ill, 432 Quinn, Sister M. Bernetta, D, 390; III, 479; IV, 421,424 Quinn, Vincent, 1,386,401,402,404; Supp. I, Part 1,270,275

QUIN-RAY / 756 "Quinnapoxet" (Kunitz), Supp. in, Part 1,263 Quintero, Josc\ III, 403 Quintet: Essays on Five American Women Poets (Saul), Supp. I, Part 4730 "Quintet Honors Thurber Fables" (Hawley), Supp. I, Part 2,627 Quintilian, IV, 123 Quod Erat Demonstrandum (Stein), IV,34 "Rabbi, The" (Hayden), Supp. O, Part 1,363,369 "Rabbit,The"(Barnes),Supp.m,Part 1,34 Rabbit Redux (Updike), IV, 214 Rabbit, Run (Updike), IV, 214, 223, 230-234 "Rabbits WhoCaused All the Trouble, The" (Thurber), Supp. I, Part 2, 610 Rabeiais,Fran9ois, 1,130; 11,111,112, 302,535;III, 77,78,174,182; IV,68; Supp. I, Part 2,461 "Race" (Emerson), II, 6 "'RACE LINE' IS A PRODUCT OF CAPITALISM, THE" (Baraka), Supp. II, Part 1,61 "Race of Life, The" (Thurber), Supp. I, Part 2,614 "Race Problems and Modern Society" (Toomer), Supp. Ill, Part 2,486 "Races, The" (Lowell), II, 554 Racine, Jean Baptiste, II, 543,573; III, 145,151,152,160; IV, 317,368,370; Supp. I, Part 2,716 "Radical" (Moore), III, 211 "Radical Chic" (Wolfe), Supp, m, Part 2,577-578,584,585 Radical Chic & Mau-mauing the Flak Catchers (Wolfe), Supp. Ill, Parti, 577-578 Radical Empiricism of William James, The (Wild), II, 362,363-364 Radical Innocence: Studies in the Contemporary American Novel (Hassan), Supp. I, Part 1,198 Radical Tradition, The: From Tom Paine to Lloyd George (Deny), Supp. I, Part 2,525 Radicalism in America, The (Lasch), 1,259

"Radio" (O'Hara), III, 369 Rank, Otto, 1,135 Radkin, Paul, Supp. I, Part 2,539 Ranke, Leopold von, Supp. I, Part 2, "Raft,The" (Lindsay), Supp. I, Part 1, 492 393 Rankin, Daniel S., Supp. I, Part 1,200, Rage to Live, A (O'Hara), III, 361 203,225,226 Raglan, Lord, 1,135 Rans, Geoffrey, III, 432 Rago, Henry, IV, 48; Supp. Ill, Part 2, Ransom, John Crowe, I, 265, 287, 624,628,629 301,473; II, 34,367,385,389,390, Rahv, Philip, Supp. II, Part 1,136 536-537, 542; III, 144, 217, 454, Rain in the Trees, The (Merwin), Supp. 480-502, 549; IV, 121, 122, 123, in, Part 1,340,342,345,349,354124,125,127,134,140,141,143, 356 236,237,284,433; Supp. I, Part 1, Rainbow, The (Lawrence), III, 27 80,361,373, Part 2,423; Supp. II, "Rainbows" (Marquand), III, 56 Part 1,90,91,136,137,139,318, "Rain-Dream, A" (Bryant), Supp. I, Part 2,639; Supp. Ill, Part 1,318, Part 1,164 Part 2,542, 591 Raine, Kathleen, 1,522,527 Rap on Race, A (Baldwin and Mead), Supp. I, Part 1,66 Rainer, Luise (Mrs. Clifford Odets), Supp. II, Part 2,544 "Rape, The" (Baraka), Supp. II, Part 1,40 "Rainy Day" (Longfellow), II, 498 "Rainy Day, The" (Buck), Supp. II, "Rape of Philomel, The" (Shapiro), Part 1,127 Supp. II, Part 2,720 "Rainy Season: Sub-Tropics" (Bish- Raphael, 1,15; III, 505,521,524; Supp. op), Supp. I, Part 1,93 I, Part 1,363 "Raise High the Roof Beam, Car- "Rappaccini's Daughter" (Hawpenters" (Salinger), III, 567-569, thorne), II, 229 571 Rapping, Elayne A., Supp. I, Part 1, Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpen252 ters; and Seymour: An Introduction "Rapunzel" (Sexton), Supp. II, Part 2, (Salinger), III, 552,567-571,572 691 Raise Race Rays Raze: Essays Since "Raree Show" (MacLeish), III, 9 1965 (Baraka), Supp. II, Part 1,47, Rascoe, Burton, III, 106,115,121 52,55 "Ration" (Baraka), Supp. II, Part 1, 50 Rajan,R.,I,390 Rake's Progress, The (opera), Supp. II, Rational Fictions: A Study of Charles Part 1,24 Brockden Brown (Kimball), Supp. I, Part 1,148 Rakosi, Carl, Supp. Ill, Part 2, 614, "Rationale of Verse, The" (Poe), III, 615,616,617,618,621,629 427-428 Ralegh, Sir Walter, Supp. I, Part 1,98 Raleigh, John Henry, D, 149; III, 408; Rattigan, Terence, HI, 152 IV, 366 Raugh, Joseph, Supp. I, Part 1,286 Rauschenbusch, Walter, m,293;Supp. Ramakrishna, Sri, III, 567 "Ramble of Aphasia, A" (O. Henry), I, Part 1,7 Supp. II, Part 1,410 "Raven, The" (Poe), III, 413, 421Ramsay, Richard David, IV, 448 422,426 Ramsey, Paul, 1,564; III, 313 Raven, The, and Other Poems (Poe), Ramus, Petrus, Supp. I, Part 1,104 111,413 Rand, Ayn, Supp. I, Part 1,294 "Raven Days, The" (Lanier), Supp. I, Randall, Jarrell, 1914-1965 (eds. Part 1,351 Lowell, Taylor, and Warren), II, Ravitz, Abe C, 11,149 368,385 Ray, David, Supp. I, Part 1,199 Randall, John H., 1,333; HI, 605 Ray, Gordon M., 0,340 Randolph, John, 1,5-6 Ray, John, H, 111, 112 Randolph family, D, 173 Ray, Man, IV, 404

RAYM-RELU / 757 Raymond, Thomas L., 1,426 Raynolds, Robert, IV, 473 Reactionary Essays on Poetry and Ideas (Tate), Supp. II, Part 1,106, 146 Read, Deborah, H, 122 Read, Forrest, HI, 478; Supp. I, Part 1, 275 Read, Herbert, I, 523; O, 372-373, 377-378; IV, 143; Supp. Ill, Part 1, 273, Part 2,624,626 Reade, Charles, Supp. I, Part 2,580 Reader, Dennis J., Supp. I, Part 2,402, 454,478 Reader's Digest (magazine), HI, 164; Supp. I, Part 2,534 "Reading Myself (Lowell), II, 555 "Readingof Wieland, A" (Ziff),Supp. I, Part 1,148 Reading the Spirit (Eberhart), 1,525, 527,530 "Readings of History" (Rich), Supp. I, Part 2,554 "Ready Or Not" (Baraka), Supp. II, Part 1,50 Real Dope, TVu? (Lardner), H 422-423 "Real Horatio Alger Story, The" (Cowley), Supp. II, Part 1,143 Real Life of Sebastian Knight, The (Nabokov), III, 246 "Real Source of Vachel Lindsay's PoeticTechnique,TJie" (Edwards), Supp. I, Part 2,402 "Realities" (MacLeish), III, 4 "Reality in America" (Trilling), Supp. Ill, Part 2,495,502 "Reality! Reality! What Is It?" (Eberhart),I,536 Reality Sandwiches, 1953-60 (Ginsberg), Supp. II, Part 1,315,320 "Reapers," Supp. Ill, Part 2,481 "Reasonsfor Music" (MacLeish), III, 19 Reaver, Joseph Russell, III, 406 "Recapitulation, The" (Eberhart), I, 522 "Recapitulations" (Shapiro), Supp. II, Part 2,701,702,708,710-711 "Recencies in Poetry" (Zukofsky), Supp. Ill, Part 2,615 Recent Killing, A (Baraka), Supp. II, Part 1,55 "Recent Negro Fiction" (Ellison), Supp. n, Part 1,233,235

"Recital, The" (Ashbery), Supp. HI, Part 1,14 "Recitative" (Crane), 1,390 "Reconciliation" (Whitman), IV, 347 "Reconstructed but Unregenerate" (Ransom), III, 4% "Reconstruction and Its Benefits" (Du Bois), Supp. D, Part 1,171 Record of Mr. Alcott's School (Peabody), Supp. I, Part 1,46 "RED AUTUMN" (Baraka), Supp. n, Part 1,55 Red Badge of Courage, The (Crane), 1,201,207,212,405,406,407,408, 412-416, 419, 421, 422, 423, 477, 506; 0,264; HI, 317; IV, 350 "Red Carpet for Shelley, A" (Wylie), Supp. I, Part 2,724 Red Cross (Shepard), Supp. ID, Part 2,440,446 "Red Leaves" (Faulkner), II, 72 RedPony, The (Steinbeck), IV, 50,51, 58,70 Red Roses for Bronze (Doolittle), Supp. I, Part 1,253,268,271 Red Rover, The (Cooper), 1,342-343, 355 "Red Wheelbarrow,The" (Williams), IV, 411-412 Redbook (magazine), III, 522-523 "Redbreast in Tampa" (Lanier),Supp. I, Part 1,364 Redburn: His First Voyage (Melville), IU, 79-80,84 Redding, Saunders, IV, 497; Supp. I, Part 1,332,333 "Redeployment" (Nemerov), 111,267, 272 Redfield, Robert, IV, 475 Redskins, The (Cooper), 1,351,353 "Redwings" (Wright), Supp. Ill, Part 2,603 Reed, Ishmael, Supp. II, Part 1,34 Reed, John, 1,48,476,483 Reed, Rex, IV, 401 "Reed of Pan, A" (McCullers), II, 585 Reedy, William Marion, Supp. I, Part 2,456,461,465 Reef, The (Wharton), IV, 317-318, 322 Rees, Robert A., n, 125; Supp. I, Part 2; 425 Reeves, George M., Jr., IV, 473 Reeves, John K., 11,292

Reeves, Paschal, IV, 472,473 Reeve's Tale (Chaucer), 1,131 Reflections at Fifty and Other Essays (Farrell),II,49 Reflections in a Golden Eye (McCuilers), II, 586,588,593-596, 604; IV, 384,396 Reflections on Poetry and Poetics (Nemerov),III,269 "Reflections on the Constitution of Nature" (Freneau), Supp. D9 Part 1,274 "Reflections on the Death of the Reader" (Morris), III, 237 Reflections on the End of an Era (Niebuhr), III, 297-298 "Reflections on the Life and Death of Lord Give" (Paine), Supp. I, Part 2,505 Reflections on the Revolution in France (Burke), Supp. I, Part 2,511,512 Reflections: Thinking Part 1(Arendt), Supp. I, Part 2,570 "Reflex Action and Theism" (James), D, 345,363 "Refugees, The" (Jarrell), II, 371 Regan, Robert, III, 432 R£gnier, Henri de, D, 528-529 Reichart, Walter A., 0,317 Reichel, Hans, III, 183 Reid, B.L., 11,41,47 Reid, Randall, IV, 307 Reid, Thomas, H, 9; Supp. I, Part 1, 151 Reign of Wonder, The (Tanner), I, 260 Reisman, Jerry, Supp. Ill, Part 2,618 Reiter, Irene Morris, D, 53 Reivers, The (Faulkner), 1,305; n, 57,73 Relearning the Alphabet (Levertov), Supp. Ill, Part 1,280,281 "Release, The" (MacLeish), III, 16 "Relevance of an Impossible Ethical Ideal, The" (Niebuhr), III, 298 "Religion" (Dunbar), Supp. II, Part I, 199 "Religion" (Emerson), II, 6 Religion of Nature Delineated, The (Wollaston),II,108 "Religious Symbolism and Psychic Reality in Baldwin's Go Tell It on rfi* Mountain" (Allen),Supp.I, Part 1,69 "Reluctance" (Frost), II, 153

REMA-RHET / 758 "Remarks on Spencer's Definition of Mind as Correspondence" (James), 0,345 Rembar, Charles, III, 192 Rembrandt, 0,536; IV, 310 "Rembrandt, The" (Wharton),IV,310 "Rembrandt to Rembrandt" (Robinson), III, 521-522 "Rembrandt'sHat"(Malamud),Supp. I, Part 2,435,437 Remember Me to Tom (Williams), IV, 379-380 Remember to Remember (Miller), III, 186 "Remembering Allen Tate" (Cowley), Supp.II, Part 1,153 "Remembering Barthes" (Sontag), Supp. Ill, Part 2,451,471 "Remembering Guston" (Kunitz), Supp. Ill, Part 1,257 "Remembering the Lost World" (Jarrell),II,388 Remembrance Rock (Sandburg), III, 590 Reminiscence, A (Ashbery), Supp.IH, Part 1,2 "Remora" (Merrill), Supp. EH, Part 1, 326 "Removal" (White), Supp. I, Part 2, 664-665 "Removal, The" (Merwin), Supp. Ill, Part 1,350,351 Remsen, Ira, Supp. I, Part 1,369 "Remy de Gourmont, A Distinction" (Pound), III, 467 Renaissance in the South (Bradbury), 1,288-289 Renan, Joseph Ernest, 0,86; IV, 440, 444 Renard,Jules,IV,79 "Renascence" (Millay),III, 123,125126,128 Renewal of Life series (Mumford), Supp. II, Part 2,476,479,481,482, 485,495,497 Renken, Maxine, HI, 192 Renouvrier, Charles, II, 344-345,346 Repent in Haste (Marquand), III, 59 "Repetitive Heart, The: Eleven Poems in Imitation of the Fugue Form" (Schwartz), Supp. II, Part 2, 645-646 "Reply to Mr. Wordsworth" (MacLeish),III,19

Report from Part One (Brooks), Supp. Ill, Part 1,70,72,80,82-85 Report from Part Two (Brooks), Supp. Ill, Part 1,87 Report of the Industrial Commission, Supp. I, Part 2,644 "Report on the Barnhouse Effect" (Vonnegut), Supp. II, Part 2,756 Reporter (publication), III, 292 "Repose of Rivers" (Crane), 1,393 Representative Men (Emerson), II, 1, 5-6,8 "REPRISE OF ONE OF A. G.'S BEST POEMS" (Baraka),Supp.n, Part 1,59 /tepwfc/ic(Plato),I,485 "Republican Manifesto, A" (Paine), Supp. I, Part 2,511 Requa, Kenneth A., Supp. I, Part 1, 107,123 "Request for Offering" (Eberhart), I, 526 Requiem for a Nun (Faulkner), II, 57, 72-73 "Rescue, The" (Updike), IV, 214 "Rescue with Yul Brynner" (Moore), 111,215 Resek,Carol,I,238 "Resemblance" (Bishop), Supp. I, Part 1,86 "Resemblance between a Violin Case and a Coffin, A" (Williams) IV, 378-379 "Reserved Memorials" (Mather), Supp. II, Part 2,446,449 "Respectable Place, A" (O'Hara), ID, 369 "Response to a Rumor that the Oldest Whorehouse in Wheeling, West Virginia, Has Been Condemned" (Wright), Supp. Ill, Part 2, 602 Responses (Wilbur), Supp. HI, Part 2, 541 Restif de La Bretonne, Nicolas, III, 175 Restoration comedy, Supp. I, Part 2, 617 "Result" (Emerson), II, 6 "Retroduction to American History" (Tate),IV,129 "Retrospects and Prospects" (Lanier), Supp. I, Part 1,352 "Return" (MacLeish), III, 12 "Return, The" (Roethke), III, 533

"Return: An Elegy, The" (Warren), IV,239 Return of Ansel Gibbs, The (Buechner),III,310 "Return of Spring" (Winters), Supp. II, Part 2,791 Return of the Native, The (Hardy), II, 184-185,186 "Return to Lavinia" (Caldwell), I, 310 Return to the Fountains: Some Classical Sources of American Criticism (Pritchard), Supp. I, Part 1, 173, Part 2,426 "Reunion in Brooklyn" (Miller), III, 175,184 Reuther brothers, 1,493 "Rev. Freemont Deadman" (Masters), Supp. I, Part 2,463 "Reveille,The" (Harte), Supp. II, Part 1,342-342 Revelation(biblicalbook),n,541;IV,104, 153,154;Supp. I, Part 1,105,273 "Revelation" (O'Connor), III, 349, 353-354 "Revelation" (Warren), III, 490 "Revenge of Hamish, The" (Lanier), Supp. I, Part 1,365 "Revenge of Hannah Kemhuff, The" (Walker), Supp. Ill, Part 2,521 "Reverend Father Gilhooley" (Farrell),II,45 Reviewer's ABC, A (Aiken), 1,58 Revolutionary Petunias (Walker), Supp. Ill, Part 2,520,522,530 "Revolutionary Symbolism in America" (Burke), 1,272 "Revolutionary Theatre, The" (Baraka), Supp. II, Part 1,42 Revon, Marcel, D, 525 Revue des Deux Mondes (publication), 11,405 Rexroth, Kenneth, O, 526; III, 191; IV, 23; Supp. II, Part 1,307, Part 2, 436; Supp. Ill, Part 2,625,626 Reynolds, Quentin, IV, 286 Reynolds, Sir Joshua, Supp. I, Part 2, 716 Reznikoff, Charles, IV, 415; Supp. Ill, Part 2,615,616,617,628 "Rhapsodist, The" (Brown), Supp. I, Part 1,125-126 Rhetoric of Motives, A (Burke), 1,272, 275,278,279

RHET-ROAD / 759 Rhetoric of Religion, The (Burke), I, 275,279 Rhinelander family, IV, 311 "Rhyme of Sir Christopher, The" (Longfellow), II, 501 RhymestoBe Traded for Bread (Lindsay), Supp. I, Part 2,380,381-382 Rhys, Ernest, HI, 458 Rhys, Jean, Supp. Ill, Part 1,42,43 "Rhythm & Blues" (Baraka),Supp.II, Part 1,37-38 Ribbentrop, Joachim von, IV, 249 Ricardo, David, Supp. I, Part 2,628, 634 Rice, Elmer, 1,479; III, 145,160-161 Rice, Howard C, Supp. I, Part 1,252 Rice, Mrs. Grantland, D, 435 Rice, Philip Blair, IV, 141 "Rich Boy, The" (Fitzgerald), II, 94 Rich, Adrienne, D, 390; Supp. I, Part 2, 546-547, 550-578; Supp. Ill, Part 1,84,354, Part 2,541,599 Rich, Arnold, Supp. I, Part 2,552 "Richard Hunt's 'Arachne' " (Hayden), Supp. II, Part 1,374 Richard I, King, 1,22 Richard III (Shakespeare), Supp. I, Part 2,422 Richards, Grant, 1,515 Richards, I. A., I, 26, 273-274, 279, 522; III, 498; IV, 92; Supp. I, Part 1, 264,265,275, Part 2,647 Richards, Laura E., D, 396; III, 505506,507 Richards, Rosalind, III, 506 Richardson, Alan, III, 295,313 Richardson, Dorothy, I, 53; D, 320; Supp. Ill, Part 1,65 Richardson, Hadley, see Hemingway, Mrs. Ernest (Hadley Richardson) Richardson, Henry Hobson, 1,3,10 Richardson, Jeanne, D, 221 Richardson, Robert D., Jr., Supp. I, Part 1,123 Richardson, Samuel, 1,134;D,104, 111, 322 Richelieu, Due de, IV, 319 Richman, Sidney, Supp. I, Part 2,453 Richmond (Masters), Supp. I, Part 2, 471 Richter, Jean Paul, H, 489,492 Rickman, Clio, Supp. I, Part 2,519 Ricks, Christopher, H, 557 Riddel, Joseph N., IV, 95,96 Rideout, Walter B., 1,119,120; D, 390

"Riders to the Blood-Red Wrath" (Brooks), Supp. Ill, Part 1,82-83 Riders to the Sea (Synge), III, 157 Riding, Laura, 1,437,450; IV, 48 Riesenberg, Felix, 1,360,361 Riesman, David, Supp. I, Part 2,649, 650 Right Stuff, The (Wolfe), Supp. ID, Part 2,581-584 Right Thoughts in Sad Hours (Mather), IV, 144 Rights of Man (Paine), Supp. I, Part 2, 508,511,512-514,516,519,523 "Rights of Women, The" (Brown), see Alcuin: A Dialogue "Rigorists" (Moore), III, 198 Riis, Jacob A., 1,293; Supp. I, Part 1, 13 Riley,EstaLou,III,192 Riley, James Whitcomb, 1,205; Supp. II, Part 1,192,193,196,197 Rilke, Mrs. Rainer Maria (Clara Westhoff), Supp. I, Part 2, 573574 Rilke, Rainer Maria, I, 445, 523; O, 367, 381, 382-383, 389, 543, 544; III, 552,558,563,571,572; IV, 380, 443; Supp. I, Part 1, 264, Part 2, 573; Supp. Ill, Part 1,239,242,246, 283,319-320 Rimbaud, Arthur, I, 381, 383, 389, 391, 526; O, 528, 543, 545; III, 23, 174,189; IV, 286, 380, 443; Supp. Ill, Part 1,14,195 "Rimbaud" (Kerouac), Supp. Ill, Part 1,232 Rinehart, Stanley, III, 36 Ring and the Book, The (Browning), Supp. I, Part 2,416,468 Ringe, Donald A., I, 339, 343, 357; Supp. I, Part 1,148,173,226, Part 2,706 "Ringing the Bells" (Sexton),Supp. II, Part 2,672,687 "Riot" (Brooks), Supp. Ill, Part 1,71, 84-85 "Rip Van Winkle" (Irving), II, 304306; Supp. I, Part 1,185 Ripley,Ezra,D,8;IV,172 Ripley, Mrs. Ezra, IV, 172 Ripostes of Ezra Pound, The, Whereunto Are Appended the Complete Poetical Works of T. E. Hulme, with Prefatory Note (Pound), III, 458,464,465

Rise of Silas Lapham, The (Howells), II, 275,279,283-285; IV, 202 Rising from the Plains (McPhee), Supp. III, Part 1,309-310 Rising Glory of America, The (Brackenridge and Freneau), Supp. I, Part 1,124 Rising Glory of America, The (Freneau), Supp. II, Part 1,67,253,256, 263 "Rising of the Storm, The" (Dunbar), Supp. n, Part 1,199 Rising Sun in the Pacific, The (Morison), Supp. I, Part 2,490 "Rites of Spring, The" (Morris), III, 223 Ritschl, Albrecht, III, 309,604 Rittenhouse, David, Supp. I, Part 2, 507 Rittenhouse, Jessie B., Supp. I, Part 2, 402 "Ritual for Being Born Twice, A: Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar" (Perloff), Supp. I, Part 2,548 "River, The" (O'Connor), III, 344, 352,353,354,356 "River Merchant's Wife: A Letter, The" (Pound), III, 463 "River Profile" (Auden), Supp. D, Part 1,26 "River Road" (Kunitz), Supp. Ill, Part 1,260 "River That Is East, The" (Kinnell), Supp. Ill, Part 1,241-242 "River Towns" (Masters), Supp. I, Part 2,473 Rivers, Larry, Supp. Ill, Part 1,3 Rivers and Mountains (Ashbery), Supp. Ill, Part 1,10,26 Riverside Magazine for Young People (magazine), II, 397,400 Rives, Am61ie,D, 194 Rivi&re, Jean, Supp. I, Part 2,426 "Rivington's Last Will and Testament" (Freneau), Supp. II, Part 1,261 "Rivulet, The" (Bryant), Supp. I, Part 1,155,162 Rix, Alice, 1,199 Roache,Joel,I,542 "Road Between Here andThere,The" (Kinnell), Supp. Ill, Part 1,254 RoadBetween, 77u?(Farrell),n,29,38, 39-40 "Road Not Taken, The" (Frost), II, 154

ROAD-ROOM / 760 "Road to Avignon, The" (Lowell), II, 516 Road to the Temple, The (Glaspell), Supp. in, Part 1,175,182,186 Road to Xanadu, The (Lowes), IV, 453 Roads of Destiny (O. Henry), Supp. II, Part 1,410 "Roan Stallion" (Jeffers), Supp. H, Part 2,42&-429 "Roast-beef (Stein), IV, 43 Roback,A.A.,IV,23 Robards, Jason, Jr., Ill, 163,403 Robbe-Grillet, Alain, 1,123; IV, 95 Robber Bridegroom, The (Welty),IV, 261,266-268,271,274 Robbins, J. Albert, D, 245; III, 431 Robbins,R.H.,I,590 "Robe, The" (Douglas), IV, 434 RoberttheDevil(trans.Merw\n\Supp. Ill, Part 1,341,346 Roberts, J.M., IV, 454 Roberts, Kenneth, III, 73 Roberts, Leo, 0,449 Roberts,Margaret,II,449;IV,453,454 Roberts, Meade, IV, 383 Roberts, Michael, 1,527,536 Roberts, Richard, III, 297 Robertson, D. B., Ill, 311,312 Robertson, J. M., Supp. I, Part 2,426 Robertson, John W., HI, 431 Robertson, William, H, 8 Robeson, Paul, HI, 392 Robespierre, Maximilien, Supp. I, Part 2> 514,515,517 Robins, Elizabeth, D, 340 Robinson, Dean, III, 506 Robinson, Edward, HI, 505 Robinson, Edwin Arlington, 1,480; II, 388,391,529,542; HI, 5,503-526, 576; Supp. I, Part 2,699; Supp. II, Part 1,191; Supp. Ill, Part 1,63,75, Part 2,592,593 Robinson, Frank Kee, Supp. I, Part 2, 478 Robinson, H. M., IV, 369,370,376 Robinson, Herman, HI, 506-507 Robinson, Jackie, Supp. I, Part 1,338 Robinson, James Harvey, 1,214; Supp. I, Part 2,492 Robinson, Mrs. Edward, III, 505 Robinson, Sylvia (Mrs. Amiri Baraka), Supp. II, Part 1,45 Robinson, W. R., HI, 526 Robinson family, III, 504,508

Robinson Crusoe (Defoe), II, 159; III, 113, 423; IV, 369; Supp. I, Part 2, 714 Robles, Emmanuel, Supp. I, Part 1, 283 Roblyer, Pamela, Supp. I, Part 1,275 Rochefoucauld, Louis Alexandre, Supp. I, Part 2,510 Rock Garden, The (Shepard), Supp. Ill, Part 2,432,447 Rockefeller, John D., 1,273; HI, 580; Supp. I, Part 2,486 Rockefeller, Nelson, HI, 14,15 Rockefeller family, 1,37; HI, 57 Rocket to the Moon (Odets), Supp. II, Part 2,541-543,544 "Rocking Horse Winner, The" (Lawrence), Supp. I, Part 1,329 "Rockpile, The" (Baldwin), Supp. I, Part 1,63 Rocks, James E., D, 222; Supp. I, Part 1,173,226 Rocky Mountain News (newspaper), HI, 437 Rocky Mountains, The: or. Scenes, Incidents, and Adventures in the Far West; Digested from the Journal of Captain E. L. E. Bonneville, of the Army of the United States, and Illustrated from Various Other Sources (Irving), II, 312 Roderick Hudson (James), D, 284,290, 324,326,328 Rodgers, Cleveland, IV, 353 Rodgers, Richard, III, 361 Rodker, John, III, 432,470 Rodman, Selden, 1,542,543; IV, 425; Supp. I, Part 1,83 Roethke, Charles, III, 531 Roethke, Theodore, 1,167,171-172, 183,189,254,285,521,542; 111,273, 527-550; IV, 138,402; Supp. I, Part 2; 539; Supp. HI, Part 1,47,54,56, 239,253,260-261,350 "Roger Malvin's Burial" (Hawthorne), II, 243 Rogers, Samuel, D, 303; Supp. I, Part 1,157 Rogers, W.G., IV, 47 Rogers, Will, 1,261; IV, 388 Roget, Peter Mark, Supp. I, Part 1,312 "Rogue River Jet-Board Trip, Gold Beach, Oregon, July 4, 1977" (Carver), Supp. HI, Part 1,140 "Rogue'sGallery" (McCarthy ),D, 563

Roland de La Plati&re, Jean Marie, n, 554 Rolfe, Alfred, IV, 427 Rolfe, Ellen, see Veblen, Mrs. Thorstein (Ellen Rolfe) Rollin, Charles, n, 113 Rolling Stone (periodical), Supp. II, Part 1,388,389 Rolling Stones (O. Henry), Supp. II, Part 1,410 Rolling Thunder Logbook (Shepard), Supp. in, Part 2,433 Rollins, Charlemae, Supp. I, Part 1, 348 "Rollo" tales (Abbott), Supp. I, Part 1,38 Romains, Jules, 1,227 "Roman Fountain" (Began), Supp. in, Part 1,56 "Roman Sarcophagus, A" (Lowell), 11,544 Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone, The (Williams), IV, 383,385 Romance of a Plain Man, The (Glasgow), II, 175,180-181 "Romance of Certain Old Clothes, The" (James), II, 322 Romanov family, III, 245 "Romantic, The" (Bogan), Supp. Ill, Part 1,50 "Romantic Coherence and Romantic Incoherence in American Poetry" (Duffey), Supp. I, Part 1,173 Romantic Comedians, The (Glasgow), 0,175,186,190,194 Romantic Egotist, The (Fitzgerald), II, 82 "Romantic Imagery in Kate Chopin's The Awakening" (Ringe), Supp. I, Part 1,226 "Romanticism and Classicism" (Hulme),III,196 "Romanticism Comes Home" (Shapiro), Supp. II, Part 2,713 Romola (Eliot), II, 291; IV, 311 "Rondel for a September Day" (White), Supp. I, Part 2,676 Rood, John, IV, 261 "Roof, the Steeple, and the People, The" (Ellison), Supp. II, Part 1, 248 "Room" (Levertov), Supp. Ill, Part 1, 282 "Room at the Heart of Things, A" (Merrill), Supp. Ill, Part 1,337

ROOM-RUNE / 761 "Roomful of Hovings, A" (McPhee), Supp. Ill, Part 1,291,294 Roosevelt After Inauguration And Other Atrocities (Burroughs), Supp. HI, Part 1,98 Roosevelt, Eleanor, IV, 371 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, I, 482, 485,490; D, 553,575; HI, 2,18,69, 110, 297, 321, 376, 476, 580, 581; Supp. I, Part 2,488,489,490,491, 645,654,655 Roosevelt, Kermit, HI, 508 Roosevelt, Theodore, 1,14,62; II, 130; HI, 508; IV, 321; Supp. I, Part 1,1, 21, Part 2,455,456,502,707 Roosevelt family, m, 376 "Roosters" (Bishop), Supp. I, Part 1, 89 Root,Abiah,I,456 Root, Simeon, 1,548 Root, Timothy, 1,548 Rootabaga Stories (Sandburg),til,583, 587 "Rootedness: The Ancestor as Foundation" (Morrison), Supp. HI, Part 1,361 "Rope" (Porter), III, 451 Rope, The (O'Neill), III, 388 "Rope's End, The" (Nemerov), III, 282 Ropemakers of Plymouth, The (Morison), Supp. I, Part 2,494 Rose, Alice, Sister, HI, 348,360 Rose, Pierre la, 0,340 "Rose, The" (Roethke), III, 537 "RoseforEmily, A" (Faulkner), II, 72 Rose in Bloom (Alcott), Supp. I, Part 1,42 Rose Tattoo, The (Williams), IV, 382, 383, 387, 388, 389, 392-393, 394,

397,398 "Rose-Morals" (Lanier),Supp. I, Part 1,364

Rosenbaum, S. P., 1,473 Rosenberg, Bernard, Supp. I, Part 2, 650 Rosenberg, Julius and Ethel, Supp. I, Part 1,295, Part 2,532 Rosenberry, E. H., Ill, 97 Rosenfeld, Alvin H., Supp. I, Part 1, 120,123 Rosenfeld, Paul, 1,116,117,118,119, 231,238,245,263; IV, 96,425 Rosenfield, Isaac, I, 287; IV, 3, 22, 307

Rosenthal, M. L., 1,189,404,543; D, 390,550,557;ffl,276,289,479,550; IV, 425; Supp. I, Part 2,548 "Roses Only" (Moore), III, 195,198, 200,202,215 Rosinante to the Road Again (Dos Passos),I,478 Rosmersholm (Ibsen), m, 152 Rosmond, Babette, H, 432,438 Ross, Alan, IV, 307 Ross, Danforth, D, 222 Ross, Don, IV, 401 Ross, Harold, Supp. I, Part 1,174, Part 2,607,617,653,654,655,660 Ross, John F., 0,110,125,366 Ross, Lillian, 1,427; H, 270 Ross, Robert H., Supp. I, Part 1,373 Ross, Sue Fields, IV, 472 Ross and the New Yorker (Kramer), Supp. I, Part 2,626,681 Rosset, Barney, m, 171 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, I, 433; D, 323; Supp. I, Part 2,552 Rosskam, Edwin, IV, 477 Rostand, Edmond, D, 515 Rosy Crucifixion, The (Miller), ID, 170, 187,188-189,190 Roth, John K.,D, 365 Roth,Philip,I,144,161;n,591;IV,119; Supp. I, Part 1,70,186,192, Part 2, 431,441,443,453; Supp. II, Part 1, 99; Supp. Ill, Part 2,401-429 Roth, Russell, IV, 425 Rothwell, Fred, D, 366 "Rouge High" (Hughes), Supp. I, Part 1,330 Rougemont, Denis de, D, 586; IV, 216 Roughing It (Twain), II, 312; IV, 195, 197,198 Rougon-Macquart, Les (Zola), n, 175176 "Round,The"(Kunitz),Supp.HI,Part 1,268 Round Table (magazine),Supp. I, Part 1,350 Round Up (Lardner), II, 426,430,431 Rourke, Constance, 1,258; IV, 339,352 Rouse, Blair, D, 195 Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 1,226; n, 8, 343; III, 170,178,259; IV, 80,173, 440; Supp. I, Part 1,126, Part 2,637, 659 Roussel, Raymond, Supp. HI, Part 1, 6,7,10,15,16,21

"Route Six" (Kunitz), Supp. HI, Part 1,258 Rover Boys (Winficld), III, 146 Rovit, Earl, I, 143; D, 270; IV, 102; Supp. I, Part 2,453 Rowe,H.D.,I,403 "Rowing" (Sexton), Supp. II, Part 2, 696 "Rowing Endeth, The" (Sexton), Supp. H, Part 2,696 "Rows of ColdTrees,The" (Winters), Supp. H, Part 2,790-791,800 Rowson, Susanna, Supp. I, Part 1,128 Roy,Emil,I,96 "Royal Palm" (Crane), 1,401 Royce, Josiah, 1,443; HI, 303,600; IV, 26 Royster, Sarah Elmira, HI, 410,429 Rubdiydt (Khayy*m), 1,568 Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (Fitzgerald), Supp. I, Part i 416; Supp. HI, Part 2,610 Rubin, John D.,0,222 Rubin, Larry, 0,222 Rubin, Louis, Supp. I, Part 2,672,673, 679,681 Rubin, LouisD.,Jr.,I,311;H,195,221, 222; HI, 360; IV, 116,119,259,284, 462-463,472,473 "Ruby Brown" (Hughes), Supp. I, Part 1,327 "Ruby Daggett" (Eberhart), 1,539 Rudens (Plautus), Supp. Ill, Part 2, 630 Rueckert, William, 1,264,287 Rugby Chapel (Arnold), Supp. I, Part 2,416 Ruggles, Eleanor, Supp. I, Part 2,402 Ruihiey,G.R.,n,533 "Ruins of Italica,The" (trans. Bryant), Supp. I, Part 1,166 Ruland, Richard, 1,263 Rule, Margaret W., 1,96 "Rule of Phase Applied to History, The" (Adams), 1,19 "Rules by Which a Great Empire May Be Reduced to a Small One" (Franklin), II, 120 "Rumpelstiltskin" (Grimm), IV, 266 "RumpelstUtskin" (Sexton), Supp. II, Part 2,690 "Runagate Runagate" (Hayden), Supp. II, Part 1,377 "Runes" (Nemerov), III, 267, 277278

RUNG-SAMP / 762 Rungless Ladder, The (Foster), Supp. Sacramento Union (newspaper), IV, 196 I, Part 2,601 "Running" (Wilbur), SuppJO, Part 2, Sacred and Profane Memories (Van Vechten), Supp. II, Part 2,735,749 558-559 "Sacred Chant for the Return of Black Runyan, Harry, D, 76 Spirit and Power" (Baraka), Supp. Rupp, Richard H., Supp. I, Part 1,199 II, Part 1,51 "Rural South, The" (Du Bois), Supp. Sacred Fount, The( James), 11,332-333 II, Part 1,174 Rush, Benjamin, Supp. I, Part 2,505, Sacred Wood, The (Eliot), IV, 431; Supp. I, Part 1,268,275; Supp. II, 507 Part 1,136,146 Rusk, Dean, n, 579 "Sacrifice,The" (Oates), Supp. n, Part Rusk, Ralph L., 0,22,23; IV, 189 2,523 Ruskin, John, O, 323, 338; IV, 349; Supp. I, Part 1,2,10,87,349, Part 2, Sacrilege of Alan Kent, The (Caldwell), 1,291-292 410 "Sad Brazil" (Hardwick), Supp. Ill, Russell, Ada Dwyer, D, 513,527 Part 1,210 Russell, Bertrand, D, 27; III, 605,606; "Sad Dust Glories" (Ginsberg), Supp. Supp. I, Part 2,522 II, Part 1,376 Russell, Herb, Supp. I, Part 2,465-466 Russell, Peter, III, 479 Sad Dust Glories: Poems Written Work Summer in Sierra Woods (GinsRussell, Phillips, n, 124 berg), Supp. n, Part 1,326 Russia at War (Caldwell), 1,296 Russian Journal, A (Steinbeck), IV, Sad Heart at the Supermarket, A (Jarrell),II,386 52,63 Sade,Marquisde,m,259;IV,437,442 Ruth (biblical person), IV, 13 Ruth, George Herman ("Babe"), II, "Sadness of Brothers, The" (Kinnell), 423; Supp. I, Part 2,438,440 Supp. Ill, Part 1,237,251 Ruth (biblical book), Supp. I, Part 2, Saffin, John, Supp. I, Part 1,115 "Saga of King Olaf, The" (Long516 fellow), II, 489,505 Rutledge, Ann, III, 588; Supp. I, Part 2,471 Sage, Howard, n, 149 Sahl,Mort, 11,435-436 Ryan, Pat M., IV, 472 Ryder (Barnes), Supp. HI, Part 1,31, "Sailing after Lunch" (Stevens), IV, 73 "Sailing to Byzantium" (Yeats), III, 36-38,42,43 263 Rymer, Thomas, IV, 122 Saint-Gaudens, Augustus, 1,18,228; 11,551 S-l (Baraka), Supp. II, Part 1,55,57 St. John, James Hector, see Cr&vecoeur, Michel-Guillaume 5.5. Gliencairn (O'Neill), 10,387,388, Jean de 405 5.5. San Pedro (Cozzens), 1,360-362, Saint-Simon, Claude Henri, Supp. I, Part 2,648 370,378,379 "St. Augustine and the Bullfights" Saadi,H,19 (Porter), III, 454 "Sabbath, The" (Stowe), Supp. I, Part "St. Francis Einstein of the Daffodils" 2,587 (Williams), IV, 409-411 "SabbathMom" (White), Supp. I, Part St. George and the Godfather (Mailer), 2,671-672 "Sabotage" (Barak a), Supp. 11, Part 1, 111,46 St. Jean de Crevecoeur (Mitchell), 49,53 Supp. I, Part 1,252 Sacco, Nicola, 1,482,486,490,494; n, 38-39, 426; III, 139-140; Supp. I, Saint John de Crevecoeur: Sa vie etses ouvrages (Crevecoeur, R.), Supp. Part 2,446 I, Part 1,252 Sachs, Hanns, Supp. I, Part 19 259 "Sacks" (Carver), Supp. Ill, Part 1, Saint Judas (Wright), Supp. Ill, Part 2, 143-144 595-599

"Saint Judas" (Wright), Supp. ID, Part 2,598-599 St. Louis Daily Globe-Democrat (newspaper), Supp. I, Part 1,200 St. Louis Globe-Democrat (newspaper), 1,499 5/. Louis Post-Dispatch (newspaper), IV, 381; Supp. I, Part 1,200 St. Louis Republic (newspaper), 1,499 St. Mawr (Lawrence), II, 595 St. Nicholas (magazine), II, 397 "Saint Nicholas" (Moore), III, 215 Sainte-Beuve, Charles Augustin, IV, 432 Saints9 Everlasting Rest, The (Baxter), III, 199; IV, 151,153 Saints, Sinners, andBeechers (Stowe), Supp. I, Part 2,601 Saintsbury, George, IV, 440 "SaleoftheHessians,The"(Franklin), 11,120 "Salem" (Lowell), II, 550 Salinger, Doris, III, 551 Salinger,J.D.,n,255;III,551-574;IV, 190,216,217 Salisbury, Harrison, Supp. I, Part 2, 664 Salmagundi; or, The Whim-Whams and Opinions of Launcelot Langstaff, Esq., and Others (Irving), II, 299,300,304 Salome (Strauss), IV, 316 Salt, Henry S.,IV, 188,189 Salt Garden, 77i
SAMS-SCHA / 765 Samson (biblical person), IV, 137 Samson Agonistes (Milton), III, 274 "Samson and Delilah" (Masters), Supp. I, Part 2,459 Samuel de Champlain: Father of New France (Mohson), Supp. I, Part 2, 496-497 "Samuel Eliot Morison and the Ocean Sea" (Herold), Supp. I, Part 2,500 Samuels, Charles Thomas, 1,96,143; IV, 235 Samuels, Ernest, 1,24 "San Francisco Blues" (Kerouac), Supp. Ill, Part 1,225 San Francisco Call (newspaper), IV, 196 San Francisco Chronicle (newspaper), 1,194 San Francisco Examiner (newspaper), 1,198,199,200,206,207,208 San Francisco News-Letter (newspaper), 1,193 San Francisco Wave (publication), III, 315,327 Sanborn, Franklin B., D, 23; IV, 171, 172,178,188,189; Supp. I, Part 1, 46 Sanborn, Ralph, III, 406-407 Sanchez, Sonia, Supp. II, Part 1,34 Sanctuary (Faulkner), D, 57,61-63,72, 73,74,174; Supp. I, Part 2,614 Sanctuary (Wharton), IV, 311 "Sanctuary" (Wylie), Supp. I, Part 2, 711 "Sanctuary, The" (Nemerov), in, 272, 274 Sand, George, n, 322 "Sandalphon" (Longfellow), II, 498 Sandbox, The (Albee), 1,74-75,89 Sandburg, August, III, 577 Sandburg, Carl, 1,103,109,384,421; 0, 529; III, 3, 20, 575-598; Supp. 1, Part 1,257,320, Part 2,387,389, 454,461,653; Supp. Ill, Part 1,63, 71,73,75 Sandburg, Helga, III, 583 Sandburg, Janet, III, 583,584 Sandburg, Margaret, HI, 583,584 Sandburg, Mrs. August (Clara Anderson), III, 577 Sandburg, Mrs. Carl (Lillian Steichen), 111,580 Sands, Robert, Supp. I, Part 1,156,157 "Sands at Seventy" (Whitman), IV, 348

Sanford, John, IV, 286,287,307 Sanford, Marcelline Hemingway, n, 270 Sangamon County Peace Advocate, The (Lindsay), Supp. I, Part 2,379 Sanger, Margaret, Supp. I, Part 1,19 Sansom, William, IV, 279,284 "Santa" (Sexton), Supp. II, Part 2,693 Santa ClausiA Morality (Cummings), 1,430,441 "SantaF6Trail,Thc"(Lindsay),Supp. I, Part 2,389 Santayana, Colonel Augustin Ruiz, 111,600 Santayana, George, I, 222, 224, 236, 243, 253, 460; O, 20, 23, 366, 542; III, 64, 599-622; IV, 26, 339, 351, 353,441; Supp. I, Part 2,428; Supp. H, Part 1,107 Santayana, Senora Josefina, III, 600 "Santorini: Stopping the Leak" (Merrill), Supp. Ill, Part 1,336 Sapphira and the Slave Girl (Gather), 1,331 Sappho, n, 544; III, 142; Supp. I, Part 1,261,269, Part 2,458 "Sappho" (Wright), Supp. HI, Part 2, 595,604 "Sarah" (Schwartz), Supp. II, Part 2, 663 Sargeant, Winthrop, III, 217 Sargent, John Singer, n, 337,338 Sargent's New Monthly Magazine, n, 232,233 Saroyan, William, 1,119; III, 146-147, 191; IV, 393; Supp. I, Part 2,679 Sarton, May, Supp. Ill, Part 1,62,63 Sartor Resartus (Carlyle), II, 26; III, 82 Sartoris (Faulkner), II, 55,56-57,58, 62 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 1,82,494,496; II, 57, 244;III,51,204,292,453,619; IV,6, 223,236,477,487,493; Supp. I, Part 1*51 Sassoon, Siegfried, n, 367 Satan in Goray (Singer), IV, 1,6-7,12 Satanstoe (Cooper), 1,351-352,355 "Sather Gate Illumination" (Ginsberg), Supp. II, Part 1,329 "Satire as a Way of Seeing" (Dos Passes), III, 172 Satires ofPersius, The (trans. Merwin), Supp. Ill, Part 1,347 Satori in Paris (Kerouac), Supp. Ill, Part 1,231

Saturday Evening Post (magazine), I, 374; 0,80,87,91,94,95,418,420, 422,430,441,466; HI, 50,54,55,56, 57-58,413,552,591; IV, 299,451 Saturday Press (newspaper), II, 273 Saturday Review (magazine), III, 452; IV, 288 Saturday Review of Literature (publication), Supp. I, Part 1, 332, 344, Part 2,654 "Saturday Route,The" (Wolfe), Supp. Ill, Part 2,580 Satyagraha (Gandhi), IV, 185 Saul, G. B., Supp. I, Part 2,730 Saunders, Richard, D, 110 Savage, James, II, 111 Savage God, The: A Study of Suicide (Alvarez), Supp. I, Part 2,548 Savage Holiday (Wright), IV, 478,488 Savage/Love (Shepard and Chaikin), Supp. Ill, Part 2,433 Save Me the Waltz (Fitzgerald), II, 95 Savo, Jimmy, 1,440 Sawyer, Julian, IV, 47 Saxton, Martha, Supp. I, Part 1,46 Say Us This the U.S.A.? (Caldwell), I, 293,294-295,304,309,310 Saye and Sele, Lord, Supp. I, Part 1,98 Sayre, Robert F., 0,125; Supp. I, Part 1,71, Part 2,402 Sayre, Zelda, see Fitzgerald, Mrs. F. Scott (Zelda Sayre) "Scalesof the Eyes,The" (Nemerov), 111,272,273,277 "Scandal Detectives, The" (Fitzgerald), II, 80-81 "Scarecrow, The" (Farrell), II, 45 Scarlet Letter, The (Hawthorne), II, 63,223,224,231,233,239-240,241, 243, 244, 255, 264, 286, 290, 291, 550; Supp. I, Part 1, 38; Supp. II, Part 1,386 Scarlet Plague, The (London), II, 467 "Scenario" (Miller), III, 184 "Scene" (Howells), II, 274 "Scene in Jerusalem, A" (Stowe), Supp. I, Part 2,587 "Scenes of Childhood" (Merrill), Supp. Ill, Part 1,322,323,327 "Scented Herbage of My Breast" (Whitman), IV, 342-343 Scepticisms (Aiken), 1,58 Scfcve, Maurice, Supp. Ill, Part 1,11 Schapiro, Meyer, D, 30 Schaumbergh, Count de, II, 120

schwme Schechner, Richard, 1,96 Scheffauer,G.H.,I,199 "Scheherazade" (Ashbery),Supp.III, Part 1,18 Scheler,Max,I,58 Schelling, Friedrich, Supp. I, Part 2, 422 Schenk, Margaret, 1,199 Schermerhorn family, IV, 311 Schevill, James, 1,116,119,120 Schickel, Richard, 1,143 Schilder, Paul, Supp. I, Part 2,622 Schiller, Andrew, D, 20,23 Schiller, Johann Christoph Friedrich von, 1,224 Schilpp,PaulA.,III,622 Schlamm, William S., Supp. I, Part 2, 627 Schlegel, Augustus Wilhelm, III, 422, 424 Schleiermacher, Friedrich, HI, 290291,309 Schlesinger, Arthur, Jr., Ill, 291,297298,309,313 Schlissel, Lillian, 1,237,238 Schmidt, Kaspar, see Stirner, Max Schmitt, Carl, 1,386-387 Schneider, Alan, 1,87, % Schneider, Herbert W., 1,566 Schneider, Louis, Supp. I, Part 2,650 Schneider, Robert W., 1,427 Schnellock,Emil,III,177 Schneour, Zalman, IV, 11 "ScholarGypsy,The" (Arnold), II, 541 "Scholastic and Bedside Teaching'* (Holmes), Supp. I, Part 1,305 Scholes, Robert, 1,143 Schonemann, Friedrich, IV, 213 School, Peter A., Supp. I, Part 2,627 "School of Giorgione,The" (Pater), I, 51 "SchoolPlay,The" (Merrill), Supp. m, Part 1,336 Schoolcraft, Henry Rowe, D, 503 Schopenhauer, Arthur, UI, 600, 604; IV,7;Supp.I,Partl,320,Part 2,457 Schorer, Mark, n, 28, 460, 485, 608; III, 71,455; Supp. I, Part 1,68,199 Schrader, George A., Ill, 48 Schrader, Mary von, see Jarrell, Mrs. Randall (Mary von Schrader) Schreiber, Georges, Supp. I, Part 2, 478 Schreiner, Olive, 1,419 Schroeter, James, 1,334

Schubert, Franz Peter, Supp. I, Part 1, 363 Schuetz, Alfred, D, 366 Schulberg, Budd, D, 98,100 Schulz,MaxF.,m,48 Schumach, Murray, HI, 169 Schumann, Dr. Alanson Tucker, in, 505 Schuyler, George S., m, 110 Schuyler, William, Supp. I, Part 1,211, 226 Schwartz, Delmore, 1,67,70,168,188, 288; D, 390; HI, 384,502,550; IV, 128,129,143,437,449;Supp.II,Part 1,102,109, Part 2,639-668 Schwartz, Edward, III, 455 Schwartz, Joseph, 1,403 Schwartz, Lloyd, Supp. I, Part 1,81,97 Schwitters, Kurt, III, 197 Schyberg, Frederik, IV, 354 "Science" (Jeffers), Supp. II, Part 2, 426 Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures (Eddy), 1,383 "Science Favorable to Virtue" (Freneau), Supp. II, Part 1,274 Science of English Verse, TTie(Lanier), Supp. I, Part 1,368,369 "Science of the Night, The" (Kunitz), Supp. Ill, Part 1,258,265 Scopes, John T., Ill, 105,495 Scott, Anne Firor, Supp. I, Part 1,19, 27 Scott, Arthur L., IV, 213 Scott, George C, III, 165-166 Scott, George Lewis, Supp. I, Part 2, 503,504 Scott, Howard, Supp. I, Part 2,645 Scott, Nathan A., Jr., D, 27; III, 550; IV, 497; Supp. I, Part 1,71 Scott, Sir Walter, 1,204,339,341,343, 354; 0,8,17,18,217,2%, 301,303, 304,308; III, 415,482; IV, 204,453; Supp. I, Part 2,579,580,685,692 Scott, Winfield Townley, 0,512,533; IV, 377; Supp. I, Part 1,199, Part 2, 705,706 Scott's Monthly Magazine, Supp. I, Part 1,350 Scottsboro boys, 1,505; Supp. I, Part 1, 330 Scottsboro Limited(Hughes),Supp.I, Part 1,328,330-331,332 Scoundrel Time (Hellman), Supp. I, Part 1,294-297

Scratch (MacLeish), III, 22-23 "Scream, The" (Lowell), II, 550 "Screamers, The" (Baraka), Supp. II, Part 1,38 "Screeno" (Schwartz), Supp. II, Part 2,660 Scribner's Monthly (publication), I, 289,408,458; 0,87,407; IV, 456; Supp. I, Part 1,353,361,370, Part 2,408 Scripts for the Pageant (Merri\\),Suvp. HI, Part 1,332,333,335 Scrolls from the Dead Seat The (Wilson), IV, 429 Scudder, Horace Elisha, H, 400,401, 509; Supp. I, Part 1, 220, Part 2, 410,414,426 Scully, James, Supp. I, Part 1,199 "Sculptor" (Plath), Supp. I, Part 2, 538 "Sculptor's Funeral, The" (Gather), I, 315-316 Scupoli, Lorenzo, IV, 156 Sea and the Mirror, The: A Commentary on Shakespeare's "The Tempetf" (Auden),Supp.H,Part 1,2,18 "Sea Burial from the Cruiser Reve" (Eberhart), 1,532-533 "Sea Dream, A" (Whitter), Supp. I, Part 2,699 Sea Garden (Doolittle), Supp. I, Part 1,257,259,266,269,272 "Sea Lily" (Doolittle), Supp. I, Part 1, 266 Sea Lions, The (Cooper), 1,354,355 Sea ofCortez (Steinbeck), IV, 52,54, 62,69 "Sea Pieces" (Melville), III, 93 "SeaSurfaceFullof Clouds" (Stevens), IV,82 "Sea Unicorns and Land Unicorns" (Moore), III, 202-203 "Sea-Blue and Blood-Red" (Lowell), 11,524 Sea-Wolf, The (London), II, 264,466, 472-473 "Sea's Green Sameness" (Updike), IV, 217 Seabury, David, Supp. I, Part 2,608 Seager, Allan, III, 169,550; IV, 305 Sealts, Merton M., Jr., D, 23; III, 96, 97 "Stance, The" (Singer), IV, 20 Seance and Other Stories, The (Singer), IV, 19^-21

SEAR-SENN / 765 Searching Wind, The, Supp. I, Part 1* 277,278,281-282,283,292,297 Searle, Ronald, Supp. I, Part 2, 604, 605 Seaside and the Fireside, The (Longfellow), II, 489 Season in Hell, A (Rimbaud), III, 189 Seasons, T/i*(Tliomson),II,304;Siipp. I, Part 1,151 "Seasons of the Soul" (Tate),IV, 136140 Seattle Times (newspaper), Supp. I, Part 2,652,653,669 Seaver, Edwin, HI, 167,240; IV, 496 "Seaweed" (Longfellow), II, 498 Secession (periodical), Supp. II, Part 1,138 Seckler, David, Supp. I, Part 2,650 "2nd Air Force" (Jarrell), II, 375 Second American Caravan (publication), III, 434 Second Coming, The (Percy), Supp. Ill, Part 1,383,384,387,388,396397 "Second Coming, The" (Yeats), III, 294 Second Flowering, A (Cowley), Supp. II, Part 1,135,141,143,144,147, 149 Second Tree From theCorner (White), Supp. I, Part 2,654 "Second Tree From the Corner" (White), Supp. I, Part 2,651 Second Twenty Years at Hull-House, The: September 1909 to September 2929, with a Record of a Growing World Consciousness (Addams), Supp. I, Part 1,24-25 Second Voyage of Columbus, The (Morison), Supp. I, Part 2,488 SecondWorld, 77ie(Blackmur),Supp. II, Part 1,91 SecretGarden, The (Burnett), Supp. I, Part 1,44 Secret Historie (Smith), 1,131 "Secret Integration, The" (Pynchon), Supp. II, Part 2,624 "Secret Life of Walter Mitty, The" (Thurber), Supp. I, Part 2,623 "Secret Lives of James Thurber, The" (Schlamm), Supp. I, Part 2,627 "Secret of the Russian Ballet, The" (Van Vechten),Supp.O,Part 2,732 "Secret Society, A" (Nemerov), III, 282

Sedges, John (pseudonym), see Buck PearlS. Sedgwick, Catherine Maria, I, 341; Supp. I, Part 1,155,157 Sedgwick, Christina, see Marquand, Mrs. John P. (Christina Sedgwick) Sedgwick, Ellery, 1,217,229,231; ffl, 54-55 Sedgwick, Henry, Supp. I, Part 1,156 Sedgwick, Robert, Supp. I, Part 1,156 Sedgwick, W.E., HI, 97 Sedgwick family, Supp. I, Part 1,153 "Seduction and Betrayal" (Hardwick), Supp. Ill, Part 1,207 Seduction and Betrayal: Women and Literature (Hardwick), Supp. Ill, Part 1,194,204,206-208,212,213 "See in the Midst of Fair Leaves" (Moore), III, 215 "Seed Leaves" (Wilbur), Supp. Ill, Part 2,558 "Seeds" (Anderson), 1,106,114 "Seele im Paum" (Rilke), II, 382-383 "Seelein Raum" (Jarrell), II, 382-383 "Seen from the *L*" (Barnes), Supp. Ill, Part 1,33 Segal, David, Supp. I, Part 1,199 Segregation: The Inner Conflict in the South (Warren), IV, 237,238,246, 252 Seidel, Frederick, 1,185,189; D, 557 Seize the Day (Bellow),!, 144,147,148, 150, 151, 152, 153, 155, 158, 162; Supp. I, Part 2,428 Selby, Hubert, Supp. Ill, Part 1,125 Seldes, Gilbert, 0,437,445 Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology (Mackail), Supp. I, Part 2, 461 "Selected Classified Bibliography, A" (O'Daniel), Supp. I, Part 1,348 Selected Criticism: Prose, Poetry (Bogan), Supp. HI, Part 1,64 Selected Essays (Eliot), 1,572 Selected Poems (Aiken), 1,69 Selected Poems (Ashbery), Supp. Ill, Part 1,25-26 Selected Poems (Brooks), Supp. Ill, Part 1,82-83 Selected Poems (Guillevic, trans. Levertov), Supp. Ill, Part 1,283 Selected Poems (Hayden), Supp. II, Part 1,363,364,367 Selected Poems (Hughes), Supp. I, Part 1,341,345,346

Selected Poems (Jarrell), II, 367,370, 371,374,377,379,380,381,382,384 Selected Poems (Kinnell), Supp. Ill, Part 1,235,253 Selected Poems (Lowell), II, 512,516 Selected Poems (Moore),IO, 193,194, 205-206,208,215 Selected Poems (Ransom), III, 490, 492 Selected Poems of Gabriela Mistral (trans. Hughes), Supp. I, Part 1, 345 Selected Poems, 1923-1943 (Warren), IV, 241-242,243 Selected Poems, 1928-1958 (Kunitz), Supp. Ill, Part 1,261,263-265 Selected Poems 1936-1965(Eberhart), 1,541 Selected Poetry of Amiri Baraka/ LeRoi Jones (Baraka), Supp. II, Part 1,58 Selected Works ofDjuna Barnes, The (Barnes), Supp. Ill, Part 1,44 Selections from the American Poets, Supp. I, Part 1,158 Selections from the Popular Poetry of the Hindus, U, 8 "Selene Afterwards" (MacLeish), ID, 8 "Self (James), II, 351 Self and the Dramas of History, The (Niebuhr),III,308 "Self-Made Man, A" (Crane), 1,420 "Self-Portrait" (Mumford), Supp. II, Part 2,471 "Self-portrait" (Wylie), Supp. I, Part 2,729 "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror" (Ashbery), Supp. ID, Part 1,5,7,9, 16-19,22,24,26 "Self-Reliance" (Emerson), H 7,15,17 S61incourt, Ernest de, Supp. I, Part 2, 676

Sellers, Isaiah, IV, 194-195 Sellers, William, IV, 208 Semmelweiss, Ignaz, Supp. I, Part 1, 304 Senancour, £tienne Divert de, 1,241 Sencourt, Robert, 1,590 Sendak, Maurice, n, 390 Seneca, D, 14-15; ffl, 77 "Senility" (Anderson),!, 114 Senlin:A Biography (Aiken), 1,48,49, 50,52,56,57,64 Sennett, Mack, HI, 442

SENS-SHAK / 766 Sense of Beauty, 77u?(Santayana),III, 600 Sense of Life in the Modern Novel, The (Mizener),IV,132 "Sense of the Sleight-of-Hand Man, The" (Stevens), IV, 93 Sense of the Past, The (James), II, 337338 "Sense of the Past, The" (Trilling), Supp. Ill, Part 2,503 "Sense of the Present, The" (Hardwick), Supp. DI, Part 1,210 "Sense of Where You Are, A" (McPhee), Supp. Ill, Part 1,291,296298 "Sensibility! O La!" (Roethke), III, 536 "Sentiment of Rationality, The" (James), II, 346-347 "Sentimental Journey" (Oates), Supp. II, Part 2,522,523 "Sentimental Journey, A" (Anderson), 1,114 SentimentalJourney, A (Sterne), Supp. I, Part 2,714 Sentimental Novel in America, The (Brown), Supp. I, Part 2,601 "Separation,The"(Kunitz),Supp.III, Part 1,263 44 Sepia High Stepper" (Hayden), Supp. II, Part 1,379 "Sept Vieillards, Les" (trans. Millay), III, 142 "September 1,1939" (Auden), Supp. II, Part 1,13 Sequence of Seven Plays with a Drawing by Ron Slaughter, A (Nemerov), 111,269 "Sequence, Sometimes Metaphysical" (Roethke), III, 547,548 Seraglio, The (Merrill), Supp. HI, Part 1,331 Seraphita (Balzac), 1,499 Sergeant, Elizabeth Shepley, I, 231, 236,312,319,323,328,334; H, 172, 533; Supp. I, Part 2,730 Sergei, Roger, 1,120 "Serious Talk, A" (Carver), Supp. Ill, Part 1,138,144 Serly,Tibor,Supp.III,Part 2,617,619 "Sermon by Doctor Pep" (Bellow), I, 151 "Sermon for Our Maturity" (Baraka), Supp. II, Part 1,53

Sermones (Horace), II, 154 Sermons and Soda Water (O'Hara), 111,362,364,371-373,382 "Sermons on the Warpland" (Brooks), Supp. Ill, Part 1,84 "Serpent in the Wilderness, The" (Masters), Supp. I, Part 2,458 "Session, The" (Adams), 1,5 "Sestina" (Bishop),Supp. I,Part 1,73, 88 SetThisHouseonFire(Styron),TV,9&, 99,105,107-113,114,115,117 Seth's Brother's Wife (Frederic), II, 131-132,137,144 Settlement Horizon, The: A National Estimate (Woods and Kennedy), Supp. I, Part 1,19,27 "Settling the Colonel's Hash" (McCarthy), II, 559,562 "Seurat's Sunday Afternoon Along the Seine" (Schwartz), Supp. II, Part 2,663-665 Seven Ages of Man, The (Wilder), IV, 357,374-375 Seven Arts (publication), 1,106,108, 109,229,233,239,245,251,384 Seven Deadly Sins, The (Wilder), IV, 357,374-375 Seven Descents of Myrtle, The (Williams), IV, 382 Seven Plays (Shepard), Supp. HI, Part 2,434 "Seven Stanzas at Easter" (Updike), IV, 215 Seven Types of Ambiguity (Empson), D, 536; IV, 431 Seven-League Crutches, The (Jarrell), II, 367, 372, 381, 382, 383-384,389 Seventeen (magazine), Supp. I, Part 2, 530 73 Poems (Cummings) 1,430,431,446, 447,448 77 Dream Songs (Berryman), 1,168, 169,170,171,174,175,183-188 "Seventh of March" (Webster), Supp. I, Part 2,687 Sevier,Jack,IV,378 S6vign6, Madame de, IV, 361 Sewall, Samuel, IV, 145,146,147,149, 154,164; Supp. I, Part 1,100,110 Sewanee Review (publication), II, 197; III, 206,292,337-338; IV, 126 "Sext" (Auden), Supp. II, Part 1,22

Sexton, Anne, Supp. I, Part 2, 538, 543,546; Supp. II, Part 2,669-700; Supp. Ill, Part 2,599 Sexus (Miller), III, 170,171,184,187, 188 Seybold, Ethel, IV, 189 Seyersted, Per E., Supp. I, Part 1,201, 204,211,216, 225,226 "Seymour: An Introduction" (Salinger), III, 569-571,572 Shackford, Martha Hale, D, 413 "Shadow, The" (Lowell), II, 522 "Shadow—AParable"(Poe),m,417418 Shadow and Act (Ellison), Supp. II, Part 1,245-246 "Shadow and Shade" (Tate), IV, 128 "Shadow and the Flesh, The" (London), II, 475 Shadow of a Dream, The, a Story (Howells), II, 285,286,290 Shadow on the Dial, The (Bierce), I, 208,209 "ShadowPassing"(Menvin),Supp.m, Part 1,355 Shadow Train (Ashbery), Supp. Ill, Part 1,23-24,26 Shadows by the Hudson (Singer), IV, 1 Shadowson f/ie/fc>c/r (Cather),I,314, 330-331,332 "Shad-Time"(Wilbur),Supp.in,Part 2,563 Shafer, Thomas A., 1,565 Shaftesbury, Earl of, 1,559 Shakespear,Dorothy,^ePound,Mrs., Ezra (Dorothy Shakespear) Shakespear, Mrs. Olivia, III, 457; Supp. I, Part 1,257 Shakespeare, William, 1,103,271,272, 284-285, 358, 378, 433, 441, 458, 461,573,585,586; 11,5,8,11,18,72, 273,297,302,309,320,411,494,577, 590; 111,3,11,12,82,83,91,124,130, 134,145,153,159,183,210,263,286, 468, 473, 492, 503, 511, 525, 567, 575-576,577,610,612,613,615; IV, 11,50, 66,127,132,156,309, 313, 362,368,370,373,453; Supp. I, Part 1, 79,150, 262, 310, 356, 363, 365, 368,369,370, Part 2,397,421,422, 470, 494, 622, 716, 720; Supp. II, Part 2,624,626 "Shakespeare" (Emerson), II, 6

SHAK-SHRO / 767 Shakespeare and His Forerunners (Lanier), Supp. I, Part 1,369 Shakespeare in Harlem (Hughes), Supp. I, Part 1,333,334,345 ShallWeGatherattheRiver(Wright), Supp. HI, Part 2,601-602 "Shame" (Gates), Supp. II, Part 2, 520 "Shame" (Wilbur), Supp. Ill, Part 2, 556 "Shampoo, The" (Bishop), Supp. I, Part 1,92 Shankaracharya, III, 567 Shanks, Edward, III, 432 Shanley, James Lyndon, IV, 189 Shannon, William V., HI, 384 "Shape of Flesh and Bone, The" (MacLeish), III 18-19 Shapers of American Fiction, The (Snell), Supp. I, Part 1,148 Shapes of Clay (Bierce), 1,208,209 Shapiro, Charles, 1,427,520; Supp. I, Part 1,199 Shapiro, Dorothy, IV, 380 Shapiro, Karl, I, 189, 404, 430, 450, 521; 0,390; HI, 527; IV, 425; Supp. II,Part2,701-724;Supp.III,Part2, 623 Shatayev, Elvira, Supp. I, Part 2,570 Shattuck, Charles, 1,542 Shaw, Colonel Robert Gould, D, 551 Shaw, Elizabeth, see Melville, Mrs. Herman (Elizabeth Shaw) Shaw, George Bernard, 1,226; H, 82, 144,271,276,581; III, 69,102,113, 145,155,161,162,163,373,409; IV, 27,64,397,432,440 Shaw, Irwin, IV, 381 Shaw, Judge Lemuel, III, 77,88,91 Shaw, Robert, Supp. I, Part 2,578 Shaw, Sarah Bryant, Supp. I, Part 1, 169 She (Haggard), III, 189 "She Came and Went" (Lowell), Supp. I, Part 2,409 She Stoops to Conquer (Goldsmith), 11,514 "She Wept, She Railed" (Kunitz), Supp. HI, Part 1,265 Shea, Daniel, 1,565 Sheaffer, Louis, III, 408 Shearer, Flora, 1,199 "Sheaves, The" (Robinson), III, 510, 524 Sheean, Vincent, III, 144

Sheed, Wilfrid, HI, 48; IV, 230, 235; Supp. I, Part 1,199 Sheehy, Eugene P., 1,119; III, 216, 336 Sheeler, Charles, IV, 409,425 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 1,18,68,381, 476,522,577; D, 331,516,539,540; HI, 412,426,469; IV, 139; Supp. I, Parti, 79,311,349,Part 2,709,718, 719,720,721,722,724,728 Shellow, Sadie Myers, Supp. I, Part 2, 608 Sheltered Life, The (Glasgow), II, 174, 175,179,186,187-188 Shelton, Mrs. Sarah, see Royster, Sarah Elmira Shenandoah (magazine), Supp. I, Part 1,79 Shenandoah (Schwartz), Supp. II, Part i 640,651-652 "Shenandoah" (Shapiro), Supp. n, Part 2,704 Shenker, Israel, Supp. I, Part 2,453 Shepard, Alice, IV, 287 Shepard, Irving, D, 484 Shepard, Odell, D, 508,509; Supp. I, Part 1,46, Part 2,418 Shepard, Sam, Supp. Ill, Part 2,431450 Shepard, Thomas, 1,554; IV, 158 Sheppard Lee (Bird), III, 423 Sherlock, William, IV, 152 Sherman, Stuart Pratt, 1,222,246-247; H, 460; Supp. I, Part 2,423 Sherman, Tom, IV, 446 Sherman, William T., IV, 445,446 Sherwood, Robert, 0,435 Sherwood Anderson & Other Famous Creoles (Faulkner), 1,117; II, 56 Sherwood Anderson Reader, The (Anderson), 1,114,116 Sherwood Anderson's Memoirs (Anderson), I, 98, 101, 102, 103, 108,112,116 Sherwood Anderson's Notebook (Anderson), 1,108,115,117 "Shiddah and Kuziba" (Singer), IV, 13,15 Shield of Achilles, 77ti(Auden),Supp. II, Part 1,21 "Shield of Achilles, The" (Auden), Supp. II, Part 1,21,25 Shifts of Being (Eberhart), 1,525 Shigematsu, Soiko, Supp. Ill, Part 1, 353

"Ship of Death" (Lawrence), Supp. I, Part 2,728 Ship of Fools (Porter), III, 433, 447, 453,454; IV, 138 Ship to America, A (Singer), IV, 1 Shipley, Joseph T., Ill, 408 "Ships" (O. Henry), Supp. II, Part 1, 409 "Shipwreck,The" (Merwin), Supp. HI, Part 1,346 Shock of Recognition, The( Wilson), D, 530 Shoe Bird, The (Welty), IV, 261 "Shoes" (O. Henry), Supp. II, Part 1, 409 "Shoesof Wandering,The" (Kinnell), Supp. Ill, Part 1,248 "Shooting Script" (Rich), Supp. I, Part 2,558 Shore Acres (Herne), Supp. II, Part 1, 198 "Shore House, The" (Jewett), II, 397 Shores of Light, The: A Literary Chronicle of the Twenties and Thirties (Wilson),IV,432,433;Supp.I,Part 2,730 Shorey, Paul, III, 606 Short, Clarice, D, 413-414 Short Friday and Other Stories (Singer), IV, 14-16 "Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber, The" (Hemingway), II, 250, 263-264 Short History of American Poetry, A (Stauffer), Supp. I, Part 2,478 Short Novels of Thomas Wolfe, The (Wolfe), IV, 456 Short Poems (Berryman), 1,170 "SHORT SPEECH TO MY FRIENDS" (Baraka), Supp. II, Part 1,35 "Short Story, The" (Welty), IV, 279 Short Studies of American Authors (Higginson), 1,459 Shostakovich, Dimitri, IV, 75 "Should Wizard Hit Mommy?" (Updike), IV, 221,222,224 "Shovel Man, The" (Sandburg), III, 583 "Shower of Gold" (Welty), IV, 271272 "Shrike and the Chipmunks, The" (Thurber), Supp. I, Part 2,617 "Shrouded Stranger,The" (Ginsberg), Supp. II, Part 1,312

SHUF-SKAG / 768 Shuffle Along (musical), Supp. I, Part 1,322 "Shut a Final Door" (Capote), Supp. Ill, Part 1,117,120,124 Shut Up, He Explained (Lardner), II, 432 Sibley,MulfordQ.,Supp.I,Part 2,524 "Sibling Mysteries'* (Rich), Supp. I, Part 2,574 Sibon,Marcelle,rV,288 Siddons, Sarah, D, 298 Sidis, Boris, 11,364 Sidnee Poet Heroical, The (Baraka), Supp. II, Part 1,55 Sidney, Algernon D, 114 Sidney, Mary, Supp. I, Part 1,98 Sidney, Sir Philip, II, 470; Supp. I, Part 1,98,111,117-118,122, Part 2,658; Supp. II, Part 1,104-105 Sidney, Sylvia, Supp. I, Part 1,67 Sidney Lanier (De Bellis), Supp. I, Part 1,373 "Sidney Lanier" (Fletcher), Supp. I, Part 1,373 Sidney Lanier (Mims), Supp. I, Part 1, 373 Sidney Lanier: A Biographical and Cri7ico/5/u
"Silent Slain, The" (MacLeish), III, 9 Singer, Isaac Bashevis, 1,144; IV, 1-24 "Silent Snow, Secret Snow" (Aiken), Singer, Israel Joshua, IV, 2, 16, 17, 1,52 22 Silhol, Robert, D, 460-461 Singer, Joseph, IV, 22 Silver, Mildred, D, 23 Singer, Joshua, IV, 4 "Silver Crown, The" (Malamud), Singer, Rabbi Pinchos Menachem, IV, 16 Supp. I, Part 2,434-435,437 "Silver Filigree" (Wylie),Supp.I,Part "Single Sonnet" (Bogan), Supp. Ill, £707 Part 1,56-58 Silverman, Kenneth, Supp. J, Part 1, "Sinister Adolescents, The" (Dos Passes), 1,493 149 Simison, Barbara D., II, 317 Sinister Street (Mackenzie), II, 82 Simmel, Georg, Supp. I, Part 2,644 Sinners in the Hands of an Angry Simmons, Charles, II, 608; III, 48-49; God (Edwards), 1,546,552-553, 559,562 IV,118 Simmons, Harvey G., Supp. I, Part 1, "Sinsof Kalamazoo,The" (Sandburg), 111,586 71 Simms, William Gilmore, 1,211 Sintram and His Companions (La Simon, Jean, III, 97 Motte-Fouqu£), III, 78 Simon, John, 1,95 "Siope" (Poe), 111,411 "Simon Gerty" (Wylie), Supp. I, Part "Sir Galahad" (Tennyson), Supp. I, Part 2,410 2,113 Simone, Salvatore, Supp. I, Part 2,478 "Siren and Signal" (Zukofsky), Supp. Simonson, Harold P., Ill, 574 Ill, Part 2,611,612 SirensofTitan, 77ii?(Vonnegut),Supp. Simonson, Lee, III, 396 "Simple Autumnal" (Bogan), Supp. II, Part 2,757,758,760,765-767 Sinn, V. (pseudonym), see Nabokov, Ill, Part 1,52-53 Simple Heart (Flaubert), 1,504 Vladimir Simple Speaks His Mind (Hughes), Sisley, Alfred, 1,478 Supp. I, Part 1,337 Sw/erCarri*(Dreiser),I,482,497,499, Simple Stakes a Claim (Hughes), Supp. 500, 501-502, 503-504, 505, 506, 515,519; HI, 327; IV, 208 I, Part 1,337 Simple Takes a Wife (Hughes), Supp. "Sister of the Minotaur" (Stevens), IV,89 I, Part 1,337 Simple Truth, The (Hardwick), Supp. "Sisters, The" (Whittier),Supp.I,Part %696 Ill, Part 1,199,200,208 Simple's Uncle Sam (Hughes), Supp. "Sitalkas" (Doolittle), Supp. I, Part 1, 266 I, Part 1,337 Simply Heavenly (Hughes), Supp. I, SituationNormal(MmeT)9m, 148,149, 156,164 Part 1,338,339 Simpson, Lewis P., Supp. I, Part 1,149 Sitwell, Edith, 1,450; IV, 77; Supp. I, Simpson, Louis, Supp. Ill, Part 2,541 Part 1,271 Since Yesterday (Allen), Supp. I, Part Six French Poets (Lowell), II, 528-529 2,681 "Six Persons" (Baraka), Supp. II, Part 1,53 Sincere Convert, The (Shepard), IV, "Six Variations" (Levertov), Supp. HI, 158 Part 1,277-278 Sincerely, Willis Wayde (Marquand), "Sixteen Months" (Sandburg),OI,584 HI, 61,63,66,67-68,69 Sincerity and Authenticity (Trilling), 1601, or Conversation as It Was by the Fireside in the Time of the Tudors Supp. Ill, Part 2,510-512 (Twain), IV, 201 Sinclair, Upton, D, 34,440,444,451; 111,580 "Sixty Acres" (Carver), Supp. in, Part 1,141 Sinclair Lewis: An American Life Skaggs, Merrill Maguire, Supp. I, Part (Schorer),II,459 Singer, Irving, III, 622 1,226

SKAT-SMIT / 769 "Skaters, The" (Ashbery), Supp. Ill, Part 1,10,12,13,18,25 "Skaters, The" (Jarrell), II, 368-369 Skeeters Kirby (Masters), Supp. I, Part 2,459,470,471 "Skeleton's Cave, The" (Bryant), Supp. I, Part 1,157 Skelton,John,in,521 Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent, The (Irving), II, 295, 303, 304-308, 309, 311, 491; Supp. I, Part 1,155 Sketch of Old England, by a New England Man (Paulding), 1,344 Sketches of Eighteenth Century America (Cr&vecoeur), Supp. I, Part 1,233,240-241,250,251 Sketches of Switzerland (Cooper), I, 346 Sketches Old and New (Twain), IV, 198 "Skier and the Mountain, The" (Eberhart), 1,528-529 Skin of Our Teeth, The (Wilder), IV, 357,358,369-372 Skinner, B.F.,IV, 48 Skinner, Richard Dana, III, 408 "Skipper Ireson's Ride" (Whittier), Supp. I, Part 2,691,693-694 "Skirmish at Sartoris" (Faulkner), D, 67 Sklar, Kathryn Kish, Supp. I, Part 2, 601 Sklar, Robert, n, 100 "Skunk Hour" (Lowell), II, 548-550 "Sky Line, The" (Mumford),Supp.II, Part 2,475 "Skyscraper" (Sandburg),m,581-582 Sky-Walk; or the Man Unknown to Himself (Brown), Supp. I, Part 1, 127-128 "Slang in America" (Whitman), IV, 348 5/aps;ic&(Vonnegut),Supp. II, Partly 753,754,778 Slapstick Tragedy (Williams),IV,382, 393 Slattery, Mary Grace, see Miller, Mrs. Arthur (Mary Grace Slattery) "Slaughterer, The" (Singer), IV, 19 Slaughterhouse-Five (Vonnegut), Supp. II, Part 2,755,758-759,760, 770,772-776 Slave, The (Baraka), Supp. II, Part 1, 42,44,56 Slave, The (Singer), IV, 13 "Slave on the Block" (Hughes), Supp. I, Part 1,329

Slave Ship: A Historical Pageant (Baraka), Supp. II, Part 1,47-49, 53,56-57 "Slave's Dream, The" (Longfellow), Supp. I, Part 2,409 "Slave-Ships, The" (Whittier), Supp. I, Part 2,687 688 "Sleeper, The" (Poe), III, 411 "Sleepers, The" (Whitman), IV, 336 "Sleeping Fury, The" (Bogan), Supp. Ill, Part 1,58 Sleeping Fury, The: Poems (Bogan), Supp. Ill, Part 1,55-58 "Sleeping Standing Up" (Bishop), Supp. I, Part 1,85,89,93 "Sleepless at Crown Point" (Wilbur), Supp. Ill, Part 2,561 Sleepless Nights (Hardmck),Supp.m9 Part 1,193,208-211 "Slick Gonna Learn" (Ellison), Supp. II, Part 1,237-238 Slick, Sam (pseudonym), see Haliburton, Thomas Chandler "Slight Rebellion off Madison" (Salinger), III, 553 "Slight Sound at Evening, A" (White), Supp. I, Part 2,672 "Slim Greer" series (Hayden), Supp. II, Part 1,369 "Slim in Hell" (Hayden), Supp. II, Part 1,369 Sloan, Jacob, IV, 3,6,22,23 Sloan John, 1,254; IV, 411 "Slob" (Farrell), II, 25,28,31 Slocum, Joshua, Supp. I, Part 2,497 Sloman, Judith, IV, 24 Slote,Bernice,I,404 "Slow Pacific Swell, The" (Winters), Supp. II, Part 2,790,793,795,796, 799 Small, Albion, Supp. I, Part 1,5 Small, Miriam Rossiter, Supp. I, Part 1,319 Small Boy and Others, A (James), II, 337,547 Small Craft Warnings (Williams), IV, 382, 383, 384, 385, 386, 387, 392, 393,396,398 "Small, Good Thing, A" (Carver), Supp. Ill, Part 1,145,147 "Small Rain, The" (Pynchon), Supp. II, Part 2,620 Small Town in American Drama, The (Herron), Supp. I, Part 2,478 Small Town in American Literature, The (Herron), Supp. I, Part 2,478

"Small Wire" (Sexton), Supp. II, Part 2,696 Smalls, Bob, n, 128 Smart, Christopher, HI, 534; Supp. I, Part 2,539 Smart Set (magazine), II, 87; III, 99100, 103, 104, 105-106, 107, 113; IV, 380,432 "Smashup" (Thurbcr),Supp.I,Part2, 616 "Smelt Fishing" (Hayden), Supp. II, Part 1,367 Smidt, Kristian, 1,590 Smith, Adam, n, 9; Supp. I, Part 2, 633,634,639 Smith, Benjamin, IV, 148 Smith, Bernard, 1,260,263 Smith, Carol H., 1,590 Smith, Chard Powers, III, 526 Smith, Eleanor M., n, 414 Smith, Elihu Hubbard, Supp. I, Part 1, 126,127,130 Smith, George Adam, III, 199 Smith, Grover, 1,590 Smith, Harrison, 0,61,460; IV, 377 Smith, Henry Nash, 1,357; D, 23,294; IV, 210, 212, 213; Supp. I, Part 1, 233 Smith, Herbert F., 1,143; Supp. I, Part 2,423,426 Smith, James, n, 111 Smith, James Ward, 1,566 Smith, Janet A., n, 340 Smith, John, 1,4,131; B, 296 Smith, John Allyn, 1,168 Smith, John E., 1,564 Smith, Johnston (pseudonym), see Crane, Stephen Smith, Kellogg, Supp. I, Part 2,660 Smith, Lamar, n, 585 Smith, Lula Carson, see McCullers, Carson Smith, Mary Rozet, Supp. I, Part 1,5, 22 Smith, Mrs. Lamar (Marguerite Walters) II, 585,587 Smith, Oliver, D, 586 Smith, Peter Duval, III, 266 Smith, Porter, III, 572 Smith, Red, n, 417,424 Smith, Seba, Supp. I, Part 2,411 Smith, Simeon M., D, 608 Smith, Stewart, Supp. I, Part 1,226 Smith, Sydney, 0,295 Smith, William, D, 114 Smith's Magazine, 1,501

SMOK-SOME / 770 Smoke and Steel(Sandburg), III, 585587,592 Smoller, Stanford, Supp. I, Part 1,275 Smollett, TobiasG.,I,134,339,343;II, 304-305; III, 61 Smyth, Albert Henry, D, 123 "Snake, The" (Crane), 1,420 "Snakecharmer" (Plath),Supp.I,Part 2; 538 "Snakes, Mongooses** (Moore), III, 207 "Snakesof September, The" (Kunitz), Supp. Ill, Part 1,258 Snappy Stories (magazine), IV, 123 Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law (Rich), Supp. I, Part 2, 550-551, 553-554 "Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law" (Rich), Supp. I, Part 2,553-554 Snell, Ebenezer, Supp. I, Part 1,151 Snell, George, 11,318; IV, 449; Supp. I, Parti, 148 Sneil, Thomas, Supp. I, Part 1,153 "Snob, The" (Shapiro), Supp. H, Part 2,705 Snodgrass, W. D., I, 400; Supp. Ill, Part 2,541 Snow, C. P., Supp. I, Part 2,536 "Snow" (Sexton), Supp. 11, Part 2,696 "Snow-Bound" (Whittier), Supp. I, Part 2,700-703 "Snow Bound at Eagle's" (Harte), Supp. II, Part 1,356 "Snow Man, The" (Stevens), IV, 8283 "Snowflakes" (Longfellow), 11,498 Snow-Image and Other Twice Told Tales, The (Hawthorne), II, 237 "Snowing in Greenwich Village" (Updike), IV, 226 "Snows of Kilimanjaro, The" (Hemingway), II, 78,257,263,264 "Snowstorm, The" (Gates), Supp. II, Part 2,523 "Snowstorm as It Affects the American Farmer, A" (Crfcvecoeur), Supp. I, Part 1,251 Snyder, Gary, Supp. Ill, Part 1,350 Snyder, William U., IV, 473 "So-and-So Reclining on Her Couch" (Stevens), IV, 90 So Little 7ime(Marquand),in,55,59, 65,67,69 "So Much the Worse for Boston" (Lindsay), Supp. I, Part 2,398

"So Much Water So Close to Home" (Carver), Supp. Ill, Part 1,143,146 "So Sassafras'* (Olson), Supp. II, Part £574 "Soapland" (Thurber), Supp. I, Part 2,619 Scares, Lota Costellat de Macedo, Supp. I, Part 1,89,94 Sochatoff, Fred, IV, 259 Social Thought in America: The Revolt Against Formalism (White), Supp. I, Part 2,648,650 Socialism, 1,206,214,226,515; H, 464, 465, 467, 471, 478, 480-481, 483; IV, 237,429 Socialist Call (publication), Supp. I, Part 1,321 "Sociological Habit Patterns in LinguisticTransmogrification" (Cowley), Supp. II, Part 1,143 "Sociological Poet, A" (Bourne), 1,228 Socrates, 1,136,265; 0,8-9,105,106; III, 281, 419, 606; Supp. I, Part 2, 458 Soellner, Rolf, Supp. I, Part 2,627 Soft Machine, The (Burroughs), Supp. Ill, Part 1,93,103,104 Soft Side, The (James), II, 335 "Soft Wood" (Lowell), II, 550-551 "Soire*e in Hollywood" (Miller), III, 186 "Sojourn in a Whale" (Moore), III, 211,213 Sokoloff, B. A., 1,166; III, 48 Sokolov, Raymond, IV, 119 "Soldier, The" (Frost), II, 155 "Soldier's Testament, The" (Mumford), Supp. II, Part 2,473 S0/d/>r5'Pay(Faullcner),I,117;II,56, 68 "Solitude" (Maupassant), Supp. I, Part 1,223 Solomon (biblical person), Supp. I, Part 2,516 Solomon, Eric, 1,427 Solomon, Henry, Jr., Supp* I, Part 2, 490 Solomons, Leon, IV, 26 Solotaroff, Robert, III, 48 Solotaroff, Theodore, III, 360, 452453; Supp. I, Part 2,440,445,453 "Solstice" (letters), Supp. II, Part 2, 433,435 "Solstice, The" (Merwin), Supp. DI, Part 1,356

Solt, Mary Ellen, IV, 425 "Solutions" (McCarthy), II, 578 Some American People (Caldwell), I, 292,294,295,2%, 304,309 "Some Foreign Letters" (Sexton), Supp. II, Part 2,674 "Some Good News" (Olson), Supp. II, Part 2,575,576,577 Some Imagist Poets (Lowell), II, 511, 518,520; Supp. I, Part 1,257,261 "Some Like Them Cold" (Lardner), 11,427-428,430,431 "Some Lines from Whitman" (Jarrell), IV, 352 "Some Negatives: X. at the Chateau" (Merrill), Supp. Ill, Part 1,322 "Some Neglected Points in the Theory of Socialism** (Veblen), Supp. I, Part 2,635 "Some Notes for an Autobiographical Lecture** (Trilling), Supp. HI, Part 2,493,497,500 "Some Notes on Miss Lonely-hearts'* (West), IV, 290-291,295 "Some Notes on Organic Form" (Levertov), Supp. Ill, Part 1,272, 279 "Some Notes on Violence" (West), IV, 304 SomeoftheDharma (Kerouac), Supp. III, Part 1,225 Some of Us (Cabell), Supp. I, Part 2, 730 Some People, Places, & Things That Will Not Appear in My Next Novel (Cheever), Supp. I, Part 1,184185 Some Problems of Philosophy: A Beginning of an Introduction to Philosophy (James), II, 360-361 "Some Remarks on Humor" (White), Supp. I, Part 2,672 "Some Remarks on Rhythm" (Roethke),III,54&-549 Some Trees (Ashbery), Supp. Ill, Part 1,3-7,12 "Some Trees" (Ashbery), Supp. Ill, Part 1,2 "Some Words with a Mummy" (Poe), 111,425 "Someone Puts a Pineapple Together'* (Stevens), IV, 90-91 "Someone Talking to Himself" (Wilbur), Supp. HI, Part 2,557 Somers, Fred, 1,1%

SOME-SOUT / 771 Something in Common (Hughes), Song of Solomon (biblical book), III, 118; IV, 150 Supp. I, Part 1,329-330 "Something Wild..." (Williams), IV, Song of Solomon (Morrison), Supp. 381 III, Part 1,364,368,369,372,379 "Sometimes I Wonder" (Hughes), Song of Songs (biblical book), II, 538; IV, 15^-154 Supp. I, Part 1,337 "Somewhere" (Nemerov),ffl, 279-280 "Song of the Chattahoochee, The" (Lamer), Supp. I, Part 1,365,368 "Somewhere in Africa" (Sexton), "Song of the Degrees, A" (Pound), Supp. II, Part 2,684-685 111,466 "Somewhere Is Such a Kingdom" "Songof the Exposition" (Whitman), (Ransom), III, 492 Sommers, William, 1,387,388 IV,332 Son at the Front, A (Wharton), II, 183; "Song of the Greek Amazon" (Bryant), Supp. I, Part 1,168 IV, 320 Son Excellence Eugene Rougon Song of the Lark, The (Gather), 1,312, 319-321,323 (Zola), III, 322 Son of Perdition, The (Cozzens), I, "Song of the Open Road" (Whitman), IV, 340-341 359-360,377,378,379 "Son of the Gods, A" (Bierce), 1,202 "Song of the Redwood Tree" (Whitman), IV, 348 Son of the Morning (Oates), Supp. II, Part 2,518,519,520-522 "Songof the Son" (Toomer),Supp.ID, Part 2,482-483 Son of the Wolft The (London), II, 465, 469 "Song of the Sower, The" (Bryant), Supp. I, Part 1,169 "Song" (Bogan), Supp. HI, Part 1,57 "Song" (Bryant), see "Hunter of the "Song of the Stars" (Bryant), Supp. I, Woods, The" Part 1,163 "Song" (Dunbar),Supp. II, Part 1,199 "Song of the Swamp-Robin, The" (Frederic), II, 138 "Song" (Ginsberg), Supp. II, Part 1, 317 "Song of the Vermonters, The" (Whittier), Supp. I, Part 2,692 "Song" (Rich), Supp. I, Part 2,560 "Song" (Wylie), Supp. I, Part 2,729 "Songof the Wandering Aengus,The" (Yeats), IV, 271 Song and Idea (Eberhart), 1,526,529, 533,539 "Song of Three Smiles" (Merwin), "Songforthe Last Act" (Bogan), Supp. Supp. Ill, Part 1,344 Ill, Part 1,64 "Song on Captain Barney's Victory" "Song for the Middle of the Night, A" (Freneau), Supp. II, Part 1,261 (Wright), Supp. DI, Part 2,594 "Song to David" (Smart), III, 534 "Songfor the Rainy Season" (Bishop), Songs and Satires (Masters), Supp. I, Part 2,465-466 Supp. I, Part 1,93-94,% "Song of Advent, A" (Winters), Supp. Songs and Sonnets (Masters), Supp. I, II, Part 2,789 Part 2,455,459,461,466 "Songof Courage, A" (Masters), Supp. "Songs for a Colored Singer" (Bishop), I, Part 2,458 Supp. I, Part 1,80,85 Song of Hiawatha, The (Longfellow), Songs for a Summer's Day (A SonnetH, 501,503-504 Cycle) (MacLeish), III, 3 "Song of Innocence, A" (Ellison), Songs for Eve (MacLeish), III, 3,19 Supp. II, Part 1,248 "Songs for Eve" (MacLeish), III, 19 "Song of My Fiftieth Birthday, The" Songs of Innocence (Blake), Supp. I, Part 2,708 (Lindsay), Supp. I, Part 2,399 "Song of Myself" (Whitman), II, 544; "Songs of Maximus, The" (Olson), III,572,584,595;IV,333,334,337Supp. II, Part 2,567 339, 340, 341, 342, 344, 348, 349, "Songs of Parting" (Whitman), IV, 351,405 348 Song of Russia (film), Supp. I, Part 1, Songs of the Sierras (Miller), 1,459 281,294 "Sonnet—To Zante" (Poe), III, 421

"Sonnets at Christmas" (Tate), IV, 118,135 "Sonny's Blues" (Baldwin), Supp. I, Part 1,58 59,63,67 Sons (Buck), Supp. II, Part 1,117-118 Sons and Lovers (Lawrence), III, 27 Sontag, Susan, IV, 13,14; Supp. I, Part 2,423; Supp. IH, Part 2,451-473 "Soonest Mended" (Ashbery), Supp. Ill, Part 1,1,13 "Sootfall and Fallout" (White), Supp. I, Part 2,671 Sophocles, 1,274; II, 291,385,577; III, 145, 151, 152, 153, 159, 398, 476, 478,525,609,613; IV, 291,363,368, 370,376; Supp. I, Part 1,153,284, Part 2,491 "Sophronsiba" (Bourne), 1,221 "Sorcerer's Eye, The" (Nemerov), III, 283 Sordello (Browning), ffl, 467,469,470 Sorokin, Pitirim, Supp. I, Part 2,679 Sorrow Dance, 77ie(Levertov),Supp. III, Part 1,279-280,283 Sorrows of Young Werther, The (Goethe, trans. Bogan and Mayer), Supp. Ill, Part 1,63 "S O S" (Baraka), Supp. II, Part 1,50 "Sotto Voce" (Kunitz), Supp. Ill, Part 1,265 Sot-Weed Factor, The (Barth), 1,122, 123,125,129,130,131-134,135 Soulf The (Brooks), 1,244 Soul Gone Home (Hughes), Supp. I, Part 1,328 Soul of the Far East, The (Lowell), II, 513 Souls of Black Folk, The (Du Bois), Supp. II, Part 1, 33, 40,160,16&170,176,183 "Sound and Fury" (O. Henry), Supp. II, Part 1,402 Sound and the Fury, The (Faulkner), 1,480; H, 55,57,58-60,73; III, 237; IV, 100,101,104 "Sound Mind, Sound Body" (Lowell), 11,554 "Sound of Light, The" (Merwin), Supp. Ill, Part 1,356 Soupault, Philippe, IV, 288,404 "Source, The" (Porter), III, 443 "South, The" (Hughes), Supp. I, Part 1,321 South Bend Times (newspaper), II, 417

SOUT-SPOO / 772 Southan,B.C.,I,590 Southern Excursions: Essay on Mark Twain and Others (Leaiy), Supp. I, Part 1,226 Southern Literary Messenger (publication), in, 411,412 Southern Magazine, Supp. I, Part 1, 352 "Southern Mode of the Imagination, A"(Tate),IV,120 Southern Review (publication), 1,170, 294;n,20;ni,442,443;IV,236,261 "Southern Romantic, A** (Tate),Supp. I, Part 1,373 "Southern Woman in the Fiction of Kate Chopin, The" (Fletcher), Supp. I, Part 1,226 "Southerner's Problem, The" (Du Bois), Supp. D, Part 1,168 Southey, Robert, H, 304,502; Supp. I, Part 1,154 Southpaw. The (Harris), II, 424-425 Southwell, Robert, IV, 151 Southworth, James G., Ill, 550 "Sow" (Plath), Supp. I Part 2,537 "Space Quale, The" (James), II, 349 Spacks, Patricia Meyer, Supp. I, Part 1,46 "Spain" (Auden), Supp. II, Part 1,1213,14 "Spain in Fifty-Ninth Street" (White), Supp. I, Part 2,677 Spangler, George, Supp. I, Part 1,226 Spanish Background of American Literature, The (Williams), Supp. I, Part 1,173 Spanish Ballads (trans. Merwin), Supp. Ill, Part 1,347 Spanish Papers and Other Miscellanies (Irving), II, 314 "Spanish Revolution, The" (Bryant), Supp. I, Part 1,153,168 Spanish Student, The (Longfellow), D, 489,506 "Spanish-American War Play" (Crane), 1,422 Spargo, John, Supp. I, Part 1,13 "Sparkles from the Wheel" (Whitman), IV, 348 Sparks, Jared, Supp. I, Part 1,156 Sparrow, Henry, HI, 587 Sparrow, Mrs. Henry, III, 587 Speak, Memory (Nabokov), III, 247250,252

Speaking and Language (Shapiro), Supp. II, Part 2,721 "Speaking of Counterweights" (White), Supp. I, Part 2,669 Speaking of Literature and Society (Trilling), Supp. Ill, Part 2, 494, 496,499 Spears, Monroe K., 1,404 "Special Pleading" (Lamer), Supp. I, Part 1,364 Special View of History, The (Olson), Supp. II, Part 2,566,569,572 Specimen Days (Whitman), IV, 338, 347,348,350 Specimens of the American Poets, Supp. I, Part 1,155 "Spectacles, The" (Poe), III, 425 Spectator, The (journal), II, 104-105, 106 Spectorsky, A. C, IV, 235 "Spectre Bridegroom, The" (Irving), 11,304 "Spectre Pig, The" (Holmes), Supp. I, Part 1,302 "SpeechtoaCrowd"(MacLeish),ffl,16 "Speech to the Detractors" (MacLeish), 111,16 "Speech to the Young" (Brooks), Supp. Ill, Part 1,79,86 "Speech toThose Who Say Comrade" (MacLeish),III,16 Spence, Thomas, Supp. I, Part 2,518 Spencer, Edward, Supp. I, Part 1,357, 360,373 Spencer, Herbert, 1,515; 0,345,462463,480,483,536; III, 102,315; IV, 135; Supp. I, Part 1,368, Part 2,635 Spencer, T. J., Supp. I, Part 1,348 Spencer, Theodore, 1,433,450; Supp. Ill, Part 1,2 Spender, Stephen, D, 371; III, 504, 527,550; Supp. I, Part 1,71, Part 2, 536; Supp. II, Part 1,11 Spengler, Oswald, I, 255, 270; H, 7, 577;H, 172,176; Supp. I, Part 2,647 Spens, Sir Patrick, Supp. I, Part 2, 404 "Spenser'sIreland"(Moore),III,211, 212 Spenser, Edmund, 1,62; III, 77,78,89; IV,155,453;Supp. I, Part 1,98,152, 369, Part 2,422,719 "Sphinx" (Hayden), Supp. II, Part 1, 373

"Spider and the Ghost of the Fly, The" (Lindsay), Supp. I, Part 2,375 Spider Bay (Van Vechten), Supp. II, Part 2,746 "Spiders" (Schwartz), Supp. II, Part 2, 665 Spiegelberg, Herbert, D, 366 Spiegelman, Willard, Supp. I, Part 1, 97 Spiller, Robert E., 1,241,357,520; n, 125,413,533; HI, 408; IV, 188,448; Supp. I, Part U 04,148, Part 2,601 Spillway (Barnes),Supp.m,Part 1,44 Spingarn, Amy, Supp. I, Part 1,325, 326 Spingarn, Joel, 1,266; Supp. I, Part 1, 325 Spinoza, Baruch, 1,493; n, 590, 593; HI, 600; IV, 5,7,11,12,17; Supp. I, Part 1,274, Part 2,643 SpinozaofMarketStreet, The (Singer), IV, 12-13 "Spinster" (Plath), Supp. I, Part 2,536 Spirit of Culver (West), IV, 287 Spirit of Romance, The (Pound), III, 470 Spirit of Youth and the City Streets, 77i
SPOR-STEP / 775 Sport of the Gods, 77u?(D unbar), Supp. II, Part 1,193,200,207,214-217 Sports Illustrated (magazine), II, 259;

ni,so

Sportsman's Sketches, A (Turgenev), 1,106; IV, 277 "Spotted Horses" (Faulkner), IV, 260 Spratling, William, D, 56 Sprigge, Elizabeth, IV, 31,47 "Spring" (Millay), III, 126 "Spring Evening" (Fanrell), II, 45 "Spring Pastoral" (Wylie), Supp. I, Part 2,707 "Spring Pools" (Frost), II, 155 "SPRING SONG" (Baraka), Supp. II, Part 1,60 Spring Tides (Morison), Supp. I, Part 2,494 Springer, Marlene, Supp. I, Part 1,225 Springfield Daily Republican (newspaper), 1,453,454 "Springfield Magical" (Lindsay), Supp. I, Part 2,379 Spruance, Raymond, Supp. I, Part 2, 479,491 Spy, 77u?(Cooper),I,335,336,337,339, 340; Supp. I, Part 1,155 Spy, The (Freneau), Supp. II, Part 1, 260 Squanto, Supp. I, Part 2,486 "Square Business" (Baraka), Supp. II, Part 1,49 Square Root of Wonderful, The (McCullers), II, 587-588 Squaring Off: Mailer vs. Baldwin (Weatherby), Supp. I, Part 1,69 Squires, Radcliffe, H, 222; IV, 127, 142,143 Stade, George, 1,449 Stael, Madame de, fl, 298 "Staff of Life, The" (Miller), III, 187 Stafford, Jean, see Lowell, Mrs. Robert (Jean Stafford) Stafford, William, 1,543 "Stage All Blood, The" (MacLeish), III, 18 Stalin,Joseph,1,261,490; 11,39,40,49, 564; III, 30,298; IV, 372,376 "Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast: A Literary Manifesto for the New Social Novel" (Wolfe), Supp. Ill, Part 2,586 Stallman, R. W., 1,70,405,425,426, 427

Stanard, Mrs. Jane, III, 410,413 Stand Still Like the Hummingbird (Miller), III, 184 Stander, Lionel, Supp. I, Part 1,289 Standish, Bun L. (pseudonym), see Patten, Gilbert Standish, Miles, 1,471; 0,502-503 Stanford, Ann, Supp. I, Part 1,99,100, 102,103,106,108,109,113,117,123 Stanford, Donald E., 0,217,222; IV, 165,166 Stanford, Leland, 1,196,198 Stang, Joanne, IV, 401 Stanton, Frank L., Supp. II, Part 1,192 "Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse" (Arnold), Supp. I, Part 2,417 Stanzas in Meditation (Stein), Supp. Ill, Part 1,13 Staples, Hugh B., 0,557; III, 550 Star Rover, The (London), II, 467 Starbuck, George, Supp. I, Part 2,538 Starke, Aubrey Harrison, Supp. I, Part \ 350,352,356,360,362,365,370, 371,373 Starr, Ellen Gates, Supp. I, Part 1,4,5, 11 Starrett, Vincent, 1,425,426 "Starry Night, The" (Sexton), Supp. n, Part 2,681 "Stars" (Frost), II, 153 "Stars of the Summer Night" (Longfellow), II, 493 "Starting from Paumanok" (Whitman), IV, 333 "Starved Lovers" (MacLeish), III, 19 Starved Rock (Masters), Supp. I, Part 2; 465 "State, The" (Bourne), 1,233 State Journal (newspaper), 1,313 State of the Nation (Dos Passes), 1,489 "Statement of Principles" (Ransom), 111,4% "Statue, The" (Berryman), 1,173 "Statue and Birds" (Bogan), Supp. Ill, Part 1,50 "Statues, The" (Schwartz), Supp. II, Part 2,654,659 41 StatusRer urn" (Pound), Supp. I, Part 1,257 Stauffer, Donald A., Ill, 502 Stauffer, Donald Barlow, Supp. I, Part 2,478 "Staying Alive" (Levertov), Supp. ID, Part 1,281

Steadman, Goodman, IV, 147 "Steam Shovel Cut" (Masters), Supp. I, Part 2,468 Stearns, Harold, 1,245 Stedman, Edmund Clarence, 111,431; Supp. I, Part 1,372,373; Supp. II, Part 1,192 Steele, Sir Richard, 1,378; D, 105,107, 300; m, 430 Steen, Mike, IV, 401 Steeple Bush (Frost), II, 155 "Steeple-Jack,The" (Moore), HI, 212, 213,215 Steffens, Lincoln, 11,577; 111,580; Supp. I, Part 1,7 Stegner, Page, HI, 266; IV, 114,116, 118 Steichen, Edward, HI, 580,594-595 Steichen, Lillian, see Sandburg, Mrs. Carl (Lillian Steichen) Stein, Allen F.,D, 149 Stein, Arnold, III, 550 Stein, Gertrude, 1,103,105,119,476; n, 56,251,252,257,260,262-263, 264,289; HI, 71,454,471-472,600; IV, 24-48,368,375,404,415,443, 477; Supp. I, Part 1,292; Supp. HI, Part 1,13,37,225,226; Part 2,626 Stein, Leo, IV, 24,26,47 Steinbeck, John, 1,107,288,301,378, 495,519; 0,272; III, 382,453,454, 589;IV,4!>-72 Steinbeck, Olive Hamilton, IV, 51 Steiner, Nancy, Supp. I, Part 2, 529, 549 Steinhoff, William R., Supp. I, Part 2, 681 Steinmann, M., Jr., 1,286 Steinmetz, Charles Proteus, 1,483 Stekel,Wilhelm,III,554 Stella, Joseph, 1,387 Stelligery and Other Essays (Wendell), Supp. I, Part 2,414 Stelzmann, Rainulf A., Ill, 360 Stendhal, 1,316; III, 465,467; Supp. I, Part 1,293, Part 2,445 Stephen, Leslie, IV, 440 Stephen, Saint, n, 539; IV, 228 Stephen, Sir Leslie, IV, 440; Supp. I, Part 1,306 Stephen Crane (Berryman), I, 169170,405 Stephen Crane Newsletter (publication), 1,405-406

STEP-STOW / 774 Stephens, Robert O., n, 270 Steps to the Temple (Crashaw), IV, 145 Sterling, George, 1,199,207,208,209, 213; 0,440 Sterling, John, n, 22 Stern, Madeleine B., Supp. I, Part 1, 35,46 Stern, Maurice, IV, 285 Stern, Milton R., 0,100; HI, 97 Stern, Richard G., HI, 360; Supp. I, Part 1,298 "Sterne" (Schwartz), Supp. II, Part 2, 663 Sterne,Laurence,D,302,304-305,308; III, 454; IV, 68, 211, 465; Supp. I, Part 2,714 Stetson, Caleb, IV, 178 Stevens, Holly, IV, 95 Stevens, Mrs. Wallace (Elsie Kachel), IV, 75 Stevens, Wallace, I, 60, 61, 266, 273, 462,521,528,540-541;II,56,57,530, 552,556; III, 19,23,194,216,217, 270-271, 272, 278, 279, 281, 453, 463, 493, 509, 521, 523, 600, 605, 613, 614; IV, 73-96,140,141,332, 402,415;Supp. I, Part 1,80,82,257; Supp. II, Part 1, 9, 18; Supp. Ill, Part 1,2,3,12,20,48,239,318,319, 344, Part 2,611 Stevenson, Adlai, H, 49; III, 581 Stevenson, Anne, Supp. I, Part 1,97 Stevenson, David L., IV, 119 Stevenson, Elizabeth, 1,24 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 1,2,53; fl, 283,290,311,338,340; III, 328; IV, 183-184,186,187,189; Supp. I, Part 1,49; Supp. II, Part 1, 404-405 Stevenson family, D, 119 Stevick, Robert D., Ill, 509 Stewart, Allegra, IV, 48 Stewart, Charles Oran, Supp. I, Part 2, 426 Stewart, Dugald, D, 8,9; Supp. I, Part 1,151,159, Part 2,422 Stewart, John L., D, 222; III, 502 Stewart, Randall, D, 244,245,246 Stewart, Stanley, n, 607 Sticks and Stones (Mumford), Supp. II, Part 2,475,483,487-488 "Stigmata" (Gates), Supp. II, Part 2, 520 Stiles, Ezra, 0,108,122; IV, 144,146, 148

"Still Life" (Malamud), Supp. I, Part 1450 "Still Life" (Sandburg), III, 584 "Still Life: Moonlight Striking up on a Chess-Board" (Lowell), II, 528 "Still Moment, A" (Welty), IV, 265 "Stillborn" (Plath), Supp. I, Part 2, 544 Stimson, Eleanor Kenyon,sie Brooks, Mrs.VanWyck "Stings" (Plath), Supp. I, Part 2,541 "Stirling Street September" (Baraka), Supp. II, Part 1,51 Stirner, Max, 11,27 "Stirrup-Cup,The"(Lanier),Supp.I, Part 1,364 Stock, Noel, HI, 479 Stockton, Frank R., 1,201 Stoddard, Charles Warren, 1,193,195, 196; Supp. II, Part 1,192,341,351 Stoddard, Elizabeth, H, 275 Stoddard, Richard, Supp. I, Part 1,372 Stoddard, Richard H., Ill, 431 Stoddard,Solomon,I,545,548;IV, 145, 148 Stoic, The (Dreiser), I, 497, 502, 508, 516 "Stolen Calf, The" (Dunbar), Supp. II, Part 1,196 Stone, Albert E., Jr., Supp. I, Part 1, 252 Stone, Edward, HI, 479; Supp. I, Part 4626 Stone, Geoffrey, III, 97 Stone, Irving, 11,463,466,467,485; III, 384 Stone, Phil, n, 55 Stone, Ronald H., Ill, 312,313 Stone, Wilmer, Supp. I, Part 1,49 "Stones, The" (Piath), Supp. I, Part 2, 535,539 Stones of Florence, The (McCarthy), 11,562 "Stop" (Wilbur), Supp. Ill, Part2,556 "Stop Me If You've Heard This One" (Lardner),II,433 Stopover: Tokyo (Marquand), III, 53, 57,61,70 "Stopping by Woods" (Frost), II, 154 Stopping Westward (Richards), II, 396 Storer, Edward, Supp. I, Part 1,261, 262 Stories, Fables and Other Diversions (Nemerov), III, 268-269,285

Stories ofF. Scott Fitzgerald, The, O, 94 Stories of the Spanish Civil War (Hemingway), II, 258 Stories Revived (James), II, 322 "Storm, The" (Chopin), Supp. I, Part 1,218,224 "Storm Fear" (Frost), II, 153 "Storm Ship, The" (Irving), II, 309 "Stormy Weather" (Ellison), Supp. II, Part 1,233 Story (magazine), III, 28, 442, 551; Supp. I, Part 1,174 "Story,A"(Jarrell),lI,371 Story of a Country Town, 77u?(Howe), 1,106 Story of a Novel, The( Wolfe), IV, 456, 458 "Story of a Proverb, The" (Lanier), Supp. I, Part 1,365 "Story of aProverb,The: AFairy Tale forGrown People" (Lanier), Supp. I, Part 1,365 Story of a Wonder Man, TTte(Lardner), 0,433-434 "Story of an Hour, The" (Chopin), Supp. I, Part 1,212-213,216 "Story of Gus,The" (Miller),III, 147148 Story of Mount Desert Island, Maine, The (Morison), Supp. I, Part 2,494 Story of the Normans, The, Told Chiefly in Relation to Their Conquest of England (Jewett), II, 406 "Stoiy of Toby,The" (Melville), III, 76 Story of Utopias, The (Mumford), Supp. II, Part 2,475,483-486,495 Story on Page One, The(Odets), Supp. II, Part 2,546 Story Teller's Story, A: The Tale of an American Writer's Journey through His Own Imaginative World and through the World of Facts . . . (Anderson), 1,98,101,114,117 "Storyteller's Notebook, A" (Carver), Supp. Ill, Part 1,142-143 "Stout Gentleman, The" (Irving), II, 309 Stovall, Floyd, 0,23; III, 432; IV, 188 Stover at Yale (Johnson), HI, 321 Stowe, Calvin, IV, 445; Supp. I, Part 2, 587,588,590,596,597 Stowe, Charles, Supp. I, Part 2, 581, 582 Stowe, Eliza, Supp. I, Part 2,587

STOW-SUKA / 775 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, n,274,399, 403, 541; Supp. I, Part 1, 30, 206, 301, Part 2, 579-401; Supp. HI, Part 1,154,168,171 Stowe, Lyman Beecher, Supp. I, Part 2,601 Stowe, Samuel Charles, Supp. I, Part 2,587 Strachey, Lytton, 1,5; IV, 436; Supp. I, Part 2,485,494 Strandley, Fred L., Supp. I, Part 1,71 Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The (Stevenson), II, 290 Strange Children, The (Gordon), II, 196,197,199,211-213 "Strange Fruit" (song), Supp. I, Part 1, 80 Strange Interlude (O'Neill), III, 391, 397-398; IV, 61 "Strange Story, A" (Wylie), Supp. I, Part 2,723 Stranger, The (Camus), 1,53,292 "Stranger, The" (Rich), Supp. I, Part 2,555,560 "Stranger, The" (Salinger), III, 552553 "Stranger in the Village" (Baldwin), Supp. I, Part 1,54 "Stranger in Town" (Hughes), Supp. I, Part 1,334 "Strangers from the Horizon" (Merwin), Supp. Ill, Part 1,356 "Strato in Plaster" (Merrill), Supp. Ill, Part 1,328 Strauss, Johann, 1,66 Strauss, Richard, IV, 316 Stravinsky (De Schloezer), III, 474 "Stravinsky's Three Pieces 'Grotesques/ for String Quartet" (Lowell), II, 523 Straw, The (O'Neill), III, 390 "Stray Document, A" (Pound), II, 517 Streamline Your Mmrf(Mursell), Supp. I, Part 2,608 Street in Bronzeville, A (Brooks), Supp. Ill, Part 1,74-78 "Street Musicians" (Ashbery), Supp. HI, Part 1,18 "Street off Sunset, A" (Jarrell), II, 387 Streetcar Named Desire, A (Williams), IV,382,383,385,386,387,389-390, 395,398 Streets in the Moon (MacLeish), III, 5, 8-11,15,19

Streets of Night (Dos Passos), 1,478, 479-480,481,488 "Strength of Gideon.The" (Dunbar), Supp. O, Part 1,212 Strength of Gideon and Other Stories, The (Dunbar),Supp. II, Part 1,211, 212 Strether, Lambert, D, 313 Strickland, Joe (pseudonym), see Arnold, George W. Strictly Business (O. Henry), Supp. II, Part 1,410 Strindberg, August, 1,78; in, 145,165, 387,390,391,392,393; IV, 17 "Strivings of the Negro People" (Du Bois), Supp. n, Part 1,167 "Stroke of Good Fortune, A" (O'Connor), III, 344 Stroller, Leo, IV, 189 Strong, George Templeton, IV, 321 Structure of Nations and Empires, The (Niebuhr),III,292,308 Strugneil,JohnR.,IV,259 "Strumpet Song" (PIath),Supp.I,Part 2,536 Strunk, William, Supp. I, Part 2,652, 662,670,671,672 Strunsky, Anna, D, 465,484 "Strut for Roethke, A" (Berryman), I, 188 Stuart Little (White), Supp. I, Part 2, 655-658 Stuart, Gilbert, 1,16 Stuart, J.E.B., 111,56 Stubbs,JohnC,I,143 "Student,The" (Moore), 111,212,215 "Student of Salmanaca, The" (Irving), 11,309 "Student's Wife,The" (Carver), Supp. Ill, Part 1,141 "Studied Ambiguities: Arthur Mervyn and the Problem of the Unreliable Narrator" (Brancaccio), Supp. I, Part 1,148 Studies in Classic American Literature (Lawrence), II, 102; III, 33, IV, 333; Supp. I, Part 1,252 "Studs" (Farrell), II, 25,28,31 StudsLonigan:A Trilogy (Farrell), II, 25,26,27,31-34,37,38,41-42 "Study of Lanier's Poems, A" (Kent), Supp. I, Part 1,373 "Study of Images" (Stevens), IV, 79 Study of Milton's Prosody (Bridges), 11,537

"Study of the Negro Problems, The" (Du Bois), Supp. II, Part 1,165 Stuhlmann, Gunther, III, 191,192 Stultifera Navis (Brant), III, 447 Sturges, Henry G, Supp. I, Part 1, 173 Sturgis, George, m, 600 Sturgis, Howard, IV, 319 Sturgis, Mrs. George, see Santayana, SeftoraJosefma Sturgis, Susan, HI, 600 Stuyvesant, Peter, n, 301 "Style" (Nemerov), III, 275 "Style of the 70's, The: The Novel" (Gates), Supp. I, Part 1,199 Styles of Radical Will (Sontag), Supp. Ill, Part 2,451,459,460-463 Styron, Rose, III, 169 Styron, William, III, 40; IV, 4,97-119, 216 "Subjective Necessity for Social Settlements" (Addams), Supp. I, Part 1,4 Substance and Shadow (James), II, 344 Subterraneans, The (Kerouac), Supp. Ill, Part 1,225,227-231 Subtreasury of American Humor, A (White and White), Supp. I, Part 2, 668 Suburban Sketches (Howells), II, 274, 277 "Subway, The" (Tate), IV, 128 Success (publication), 1,500,506 Successful Love and Other Stories (Schwartz), Supp. II, Part 2, 661, 665 "Such Counsels You Gave to Me" (Jeffers), Supp. II, Part 2,433 "Such Things Happen Only in Books" (Wilder), IV, 365 Suddenly Last Summer (Williams), I, 73; IV, 382,383,385,386,387,389, 390,391,392,395-396,397,398 Suderman, Elmer F., D, 149 Sudermann, Hermann, 1,66; IV, 329 "Sugary Days in St. Botolphs" (Corke), Supp. I, Part 1,198 "Suicide" (Barnes), Supp. Ill, Part 1, 33 "Suicide off Egg Rock" (Plath), Supp. I, Part 2,529,538 "Suitable Surroundings, The" (Bierce),I,203 Sukarno, IV, 490

SULA-SYCA / 776 600; HI, 36; IV, 35, 297; Supp. I, Stt/a(Monrison),Supp.III,Part 1,362, Part 2,614 364,367,368,379 5unafMuiwg/i/(Soseki,trans.Merwin Sullivan, Harry Stack, 1,59 and Shigematsu), Supp. m, Part 1, Sullivan, Noel, Supp. I, Part 1, 329, 353 333 Sun Do Move, The (Hughes), Supp. I, Sullivan, Ruth, Supp. I, Part L, 226 Part 1,339 Sullivan, Walter, D, 222 "Sullivan County Sketches*9 (Crane), "Sun, Sea, and Sand" (Marquand), 01,60 1,407,421 Sunday, Billy, H, 449 Suma Genji (Play), III, 466 "Sumach and Goldenrod: An Ameri- Sunday after the War (Miller), HI, 184 can Idyll" (Mumford), Supp. II, "Sunday at Home" (Hawthorne), II, 231-232 Part 2,475 "Sunday Morning" (Stevens), II, 552; "Summer" (Emerson), II, 10 ffl, 278,463,509; IV, 92-93 "Summer" (Lowell), II, 554 "Sunday Morning Apples" (Crane), I, Summer (Wharton), IV, 317 387 Summer and Smoke (Williams), IV, 382,384,385,386,387,395,397,398 "Sunday Morning Prophecy" (Hughes), Supp. I, Part 1,334 "SummerCommentary, A" (Winters), "Sundays of Satin-Legs Smith, The" Supp. II, Part 2,808 (Brooks), Supp. Ill, Part 1,74,75 "Summer Day" (O'Hara), III, 369 Summer Knowledge (Schwartz) iSupp. Sundell, Carl, Supp. I, Part 2,627 Sundermann, K. H., Ill, 97 II, Part 2,662,665 "Summer Night" (Hughes), Supp. I, Sundial (magazine), Supp. I, Part 2, 606 Part 1,325 "Summer Night, A" (Auden), Supp.II, "Sunflower Sutra" (Ginsberg), Supp. Partl,8 II, Part 1,317,321 "Summer Noon: 1941" (Winters), "Sunlight Is Imagination" (Wilbur), Supp. II, Part 2,811 Supp. Ill, Part 2,549 "Summerof '82" (Merwin), Supp. Ill, "Sunrise" (Lanier), Supp. I, Part 1, 370 Part 1,355-356 Summer on the Lakes in 1843 (Fuller), "Sunset" (Ransom), III, 484 "Sunset from Omaha Hotel Window" Supp. II, Part 1,279,295-296 (Sandburg), III, 584 "Summer People" (Hemingway), II, "Sunthin' in the Pastoral Line" 258-259 (Lowell), Supp. I, Part 2,415-416 "Summer People, The" (Merrill), Supp. Ill, Part 1,325-326 "Supper After the Last, The" (Kinnell), Supp. Ill, Part 1,239 "Summer Ramble, A" (Bryant), Supp. Suppressed Desires (Glaspell), Supp. I, Part 1,162,164 III, Part 1,178 "Summer's Reading, A" (Malamud), Supp. I, Part 2,430-431,442 Suppression of the African Slave Trade '"Summertime and the Living . . .*" to the United States of America, (Hayden),Supp.II,Part 1,363,366 1638-1870(Du Bois),Supp.II,Part Summertime Island (Ca\dwc\\),1,2811,157,162 308 Sure Hand of God, The (Caldwell), I. Sumner, Charles, 1,3,15; Supp. I, Part 297,302 2,685,687 "Surgeon at 2 A.M." (Plath), Supp. I, Sumner, John B., 1,511 Part 2,545 Sumner, William Graham, III, 102, Surrealism, 1,201; II, 435,540; IV, 411, 108; Supp. I, Part 2,640 486,493; Supp. I, Part 2,440,443, "Sumptuous Destination" (Wilbur), 527 Supp. Ill, Part 2,553 Survey Graphic (publication), Supp. I, "Sun" (Moore), III, 215 Part 1,323 Sun Also Rises, The (Hemingway), I, "Survey of Literature" (Ransom), in, 107; O, 68, 90, 249, 251-252, 260, 480

Survival of the Bark Canoe, The (McPhee), Supp. Ill, Part 1, 301, 302,308,313 "Surviving Love" (Berryman), 1,173 Sut Lovingood's Yarns (Harris), II, 70 Sutcliffe, Denham, ID, 525 Sutherland, Donald, IV, 38,44,48 Sutton, Walter, HI, 479 Sutton, William A., 1,120 Swallow Barn (Kennedy), II, 313 Swan, Bradford F., HI, 121 Swanberg,W.A.,I,520 Swann, Thomas B., Supp. I, Part 1, 275 Swanson, Gloria, II, 429 Swcdenborg, Emanuel, n, 5,10,321, 342,343-344,396 Swedenborgianism, Supp. I, Part 2, 588 Sweeney, John L., n, 340; III, 217 Sweeney Agonistes (Eliot), 1,580 "Sweeney Among the Nightingales" (Eliot), III, 4 Sweet, Blanche, Supp. I, Part 2,391 Sweet and Sour (O'Hara), III, 361 Sweet Bird of Youth (Williams), IV, 382, 383, 385, 386, 387, 388, 389, 390,391,392,395,396,398 Sweet Fly paper of Life, The (Hughes), Supp. I, Part 1,335-336 Sweet Thursday (Steinbeck), IV, 50,52, 64-^5 Sweezy, Paul, Supp. I, Part 2,645 "Swell-lookingGirl,A" (Caldwell),!, 310 Swift, Jonathan, 1,125,194,209,441; 0,110,302,304-305,577; m, 113; IV,68;Supp.I,Part2,406,523,603, 656,665,708,714 "Swift" (Schwartz), Supp. II, Part 2, 663 "Swimmer, The" (Cheever),$upp. I, Part 1^185,187 "Swimmers, The" (Tate), IV, 136 Swinburne, Algernon C, I, 50, 384, 568; D, 3,4,129,400,484,524; IV, 135; Supp. I, Part 1,79, Part 2,422, 552 "Swinburne as Poet" (Eliot), 1,576 Sword Blades and Poppy Seed (Lowell), II, 518,520,522,532 "Sycamore, The" (Moore), III, 216 "Sycamores, The" (Whit tier), Supp. I, Part 2,699

SYLV-TATE / 777 Sylvester, Johnny, Supp. I, Part 2,438 Sylvester, Joshua, 1,178,179; II, 18; DI, 157; Supp. I, Part 1, 98, 104, 114, 116 Sylvester, William A., Ill, 455 "Sylvia Plath: A Poetry of Suicidal Mania" (Hoyle), Supp. I, Part 2, 548 Sylvia Plath: HerLife and Work (Aird), Supp. I, Part 2,548 Sylvia Plath: Method and Madness (Butscher),Supp.I, Part 2,526,548 "SylviaPlathonMotherhood"(Uroff), Supp. I, Part 2,549 Sylvia Plath: Poetry and Existence (Holbrook), Supp. I, Part 2,526527,548 "Sylvia Plath's Crossing the Water: Some Reflections'* (Hughes), Supp. I, Part 2,548 "Sylvia Plath's Poetry: A Complex of Irreconcilable Antagonisms" (Ashford), Supp. I, Part 2,548 "Sylvia Plath's Tulips': A Festival", Supp. I, Part 2,549 "Sylvia Plath's Women" (Uroff), Supp. I, Part 2,549 "Sylvia's Death" (Sexton), Supp. II, Part 2,671,684,685 Symbolist Movement in Literature, The (Symons),I,50,569 Symonds, John Addington, 1,241,242, 251,259; IV, 334 Symons, Arthur, 1,50,569 "Symphony, The" (Lanier), Supp. I, Part 1, 352, 360-361, 364, Part 2, 416 Symptoms of Being 35 (Lardner), II, 434 Synge, John Millington, I, 434; III, 591-592; Supp. Ill, Part 1,34 Synthetic Philosophy (Spencer), II, 462-463 "Syringa" (Ashbery), Supp. ID, Part 1,19-21,25 "Syrinx" (Merrill), Supp. Ill, Part 1, 328 "System, The" (Ashbery), Supp. Ill, Part 1,14,15,18,21-22 System of Dante's Hell, TTse (Baraka), Supp. II, Part 1,39-41,55 "System of Dante's Inferno, The" (Baraka), Supp. II, Part 1,40 "System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether, The" (Poe), III, 419,425

System of General Geography, A (Brown), Supp. I, Part 1,146 Tacitus, Cornelius, 1,485; D, 113 Tag" (Hughes), Supp. I, Part 1,341 Taggard, Genevieve, III, 144; IV, 436 Tagore, Rabindranath, 1,383 "Tailor Shop, The" (Miller), m, 175 "Tain't So" (Hughes), Supp. I, Part 1, 330 Taine, Hippolyte, 1,503; n, 271; HI, 323; IV, 440,444 Takasago (play), III, 466 "Take Pity" (Malamud), Supp. I, Part 2,427,428,435,436,437 "Tale, A" (Bogan), Supp. Ill, Part 1, 50,51 "Tale of Jerusalem, A" (Poe), III, 411 Tale of Possessors Self-Dispossessed, A (O'Neill), III, 404 Tale of Two Cities, A (film), Supp. I, Part 1,67 "Taleof Two Liars, A" (Singer),IV, 12 Tales (Baraka), Supp. II, Part 1, 39,55 7a/ey(Poe),III,413 Talesofa rrave//er(Irving),II,309-310 Tales of a Wayside Inn (Longfellow), II, 489,490,501,502,504-505 Tales of Glauber-Spa (ed. Bryant), Supp. I, Part 1,157 Tales of Men and Ghosts (Wharton), IV,315 Tales of Soldiers and Civilians (Bierce), 1,200-203,204,206,208,212 Tales of the Argonauts (Harte), Supp. II, Part 1,337,348,351 Tales of the Fish Patrol (London), II, 465 Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (Poe), II, 273; III, 412,415 Tales of the Jazz Age (Fitzgerald), II, 88 "Talisman, A" (Moore), III, 195-196 Talisman, The (publication), Supp. I, Part 1,157 "Talk of the Town" (magazine column), IV, 215 "Talk of the Town and the Country, The: E. B. White" (Hasley), Supp. I, Part 2,681 "Talk with John Cheever" (Hersey), Supp. I, Part 1,198 "Talk with the Yellow Kid, A" (Bellow), 1,151

"Talking" (Merwin), Supp. in, Part t 354 "Talking Horse" (Malamud), Supp. I, Part 2,435 "Talking to Sheep" (Sexton), Supp. D, Part 2,695 "Talking with Adrienne Rich" (Kalstone), Supp. I, Part 2,578 "Talking with Adrienne Rich" (Plumly, Dodd and Tevis), Supp. I, Part 2,578 "Talking with John Cheever" (Firth), Supp. I, Part 1,198 Talma, Louise, IV, 357 Talmud, IV, 8,17 "Tarn O'Shanter" (Burns), II, 306 "Tamar" (Jeffers), Supp. II, Part 2, 427-428,436 Tamar and Other Poems (Jeffers), Supp. II, Part 2,416,419 Tambour (publication), II, 26 Tambourines to Glory (Hughes), Supp. I, Part 1,338-339 "Tamerlane" (Poe), III, 426 Tamerlane and Other Poems (Poe), 111,410 Tangential Views (Bierce), 1,209 Tanner, James, IV, 354 Tanner,Tony,1,143,166,260,261; HI, 48; Supp. I, Part 2,453 Tannhauser (Wagner), 1,315 Tanselle, G. Thomas, 1,119; HI, 95; Supp. I, Part 2,402,426 "Tapestry" (Ashbery), Supp. in, Part 1,22-23 Tappan, Arthur, Supp. I, Part 2,588 Taps at Reveille (Fitzgerald), II, 94,96 Tar: A Midwest Childhood (Anderson), 1,98,115; II, 27 Tar Baby (Morrison), Supp. Ill, Part 1,364,369-372,379 Tarbell, Ida M., HI, 322,580 "Target Study" (Baraka), Supp. n, Part 1,49-50,54 Tarkington, Booth, H, 444; HI, 70 Tartuffe (Moli&re, trans. Wilbur), Supp. Ill, Part 2,560 Task, 77i*(Cowper),II,304 Tasso, Torquato, 1,276 Tate, Allen, I, 48, 49, 50, 67, 69, 70, 381, 382, 386, 390, 396, 397, 399, 402,404,441,450,468,473,591;!!, 197-198, 221, 367, 390, 536, 537, 542, 551, 554; III, 144, 217, 424, 428,432,454,482,483, 485,493,

TATE-TERR / 775 Tate (cont.) 495, 496, 497, 499, 500, 517,550; IV, 96,120-143,236,237, 259,284,433; Supp. I, Part 1,364, 371,373, Part 2,423,730; Supp. II, Part 1,90-91,96,98,103-104,136, 139,144,150,151,318, Part 2,643; Supp. Ill, Part 2,542 Tate, Benjamin Lewis Bogan, IV, 127 Tate, John Allen, IV, 127 Tate, Mary Barbara, III, 360 Tate, Michael Paul, IV, 127 Tate, Mrs. Allen (Caroline Gordon), IV, 123,126-127,139,142,282 Tate, Mrs. Allen (Helen Heinz), IV, 127 Tate, Mrs. Allen (Isabella Gardner), IV,127 Tate, Nancy, 0,197 Tattooed Countess, The (Van Vechten), 1,295; Supp. II, Part 2, 726-728,738,742 Tatum, Anna, 1,516 Taupin, Ren6,11,528,529,533; IV, 96, 425; Supp. I, Part 1,275; Supp. Ill, Part 2,614,615,617,621 Tawney, Richard Henry, Supp. I, Part 2,481 Taylor, Bayard, II, 275; Supp. I, Part 1, 350,361,362,365,366,372 Taylor, C Clarke, IV, 234 Taylor, Cora, see Howarth, Cora Taylor, Deems, III, 138 Taylor, Edward, III, 493; IV, 144166; Supp. I, Part 1,98,123, Part 2, 375,386,546 Taylor, Eleanor Ross, D, 390 Taylor, Elizabeth, n, 588 Taylor, Frank, HI, 81 Taylor, Frederick Winslow, Supp. I, Part 2,644 Taylor, Graham, Supp. I, Part 1,5 Taylor, Harvey, D, 461 Taylor, Henry W., IV, 144 Taylor, Jeremy, 0,11; III, 487; Supp. I, Part 1,349 Taylor, John, IV, 149 Taylor, Kezia,IV, 148 Taylor, Larry E., IV, 235 Taylor,Mrs. Edward (Elizabeth Fitch), IV, 147,165 Taylor, Mrs. Edward (Ruth Wyllys), IV, 148 Taylor, Nathaniel W., Supp. I, Part 2, 580

Taylor, Paul, 1,293 Taylor, Peter, n, 390 Taylor, Richard, IV, 146 Taylor, Robert, Supp. I, Part 1,294 Taylor, Thomas, 0,10 Taylor, Walter, F., IH, 336 Taylor, Welford D., 1,119,120 Taylor, William, IV, 145-146 Taylor, William Robert, Supp. I, Part 2,601 Taylor, Zachary, 1,3; D, 433-434 Tchelitchew, Peter, H, 586 Tea and Sympathy (Anderson), Supp. 1, Part 1,277 "Tea Party, The" (MacLeish), III, 11 "Teacher's Pet" (Thurber), Supp. I, Part 2,605-606 Teall, Dorothy, 1,221 Teasdale,Sara,Supp.I,Part 2,393,707 Technics and Civilization (Mumford), Supp. I, Part 2,638; Supp. II, Part 2, 479,493,497 Technics and Human Development (Mumford), Supp. I, Part 2, 638; Supp. II, Part 2,497 "Teddy" (Salinger), III, 561-563,571 Tedlock,E.W.,IV,72 Teggart, Richard, Supp. I, Part 2,650 Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre, III, 359; Supp. I, Part 1,314 Telephone Poles and Other Poems (Updike), IV, 214,215 Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone (Baldwin), Supp. I, Part L, 48,52,63-65,67 Tell Me, Tell Me (Moore), III, 215 Tell Me Your Answer True (Sexton), Supp. II, Part 2,683 "Tell the Women We're Going" (Carver), Supp. Ill, Part 1,138,144 Teller, Edward, 1,137 Teller, JuddL.,IV, 24 Telling Tales (magazine), IV, 123 "TellingtheBees"(Whittier),Supp.I, Part 2,694-695 "Tell-TaleHeart,The"(Poe),III,413, 414-415,416 Tempest, The (Shakespeare), I, 394; 0,12; III, 40,61,263 Temple, Minnie, n, 323 Temple, William, III, 303 Temple of My Familiar, The (Walker), Supp. Ill, Part 2,521,527,529,535, 537

"'Temple of the Fire Baptized'" (Barksdale), Supp. I, Part 1,69 "Temple of the Holy Ghost, A" (O'Connor), III, 344,352 Temple, The (Herbert), IV, 145,153 Ten Harmsel, Henrietta, Supp. I, Part 1,199 Ten Days That Shook the World (Reed), H, 577 T
TERR-THIR / 779 Terry, Edward A., H, 128,129 Terry, John Skally, IV, 472 Terry, Rose, Supp. I, Part 2,420 Tertium Organum (Ouspensky), 1,383 Tess of the d'Urbervilles (Hardy), II, 181 Test of Poetry, A (Zukofsky), Supp. Ill, Part 2,618,622 "Testament of Flood" (Warren), IV, 253 Testing-Tree, 77t£(Kunitz),Supp.III, Part 1,260,263,264,267,268 "Testing-Tree, The" (Kunitz), Supp. Ill, Part 1,269 Tevis, Walter, Supp. I, Part 2,578 Thacher, Molly Day, IV, 381 Thackeray, William Makepeace, 1,194, 354; D, 182,271,282,288,316,321, 322;III,64,70;IV,326;Supp.I,Part 1,307, Part 2,421,495,579 Thales, 1,480-481 "Thanatopsis" (Bryant), Supp. I, Part \ 150,154,155,170 "Thanatos and Eros: Kate Chopin's The Awakening'9 (Wolff), Supp. I, Part 1,226 Thanatos Syndrome, The (Percy), Supp. Ill, Part 1,385,397-399 Thank You, Fog (Auden), Supp. II, Part 1,24 Thank You, Mr. Moto (Marquand), 111,57,58 "Thanksgiving, A" (Auden), Supp. II, Part 1,26 "Thanksgiving for a Habitat" (Auden), Supp. II, Part 1,24 "Thanksgiving Spirit" (Farreli), II, 45 Thanksgiving Visitor, The (Capote), Supp. Ill, Part 1,116,118,119 "Thar's More in the Man Than Thar Is in the Land" (Lanier), Supp. I, Part 1,352-353,359-360 "That Evening Sun" (Faulkner), II, 72 "That I Had the Wings" (Ellison), Supp. II, Part 1,238 "That Thurber Woman," Supp. I, Part 2,627 "That Tree" (Porter), 01,434-435,446, 451 Thayer, Abbott, 1,231 Thayer,Scofield,I,231 "Theater Chronicle" (McCarthy), II, 562 "Theft" (Porter), III, 434,435

Their Wedding Journey (Howells), II, 277-278 Thelen, Mary Frances, III, 313 Thelwell, Mike, IV, 119; Supp. I, Part 1,71 them (Oates), Supp. II, Part 2, 503, 511-514 Theme Is Freedom, 77i*(DosPassos), 1,48^-489,492,494 Theme of Identity in the Essays of James Baldwin, The: an Interpretation (Moller), Supp. I, Part 1,69 "Theme with Variations" (Agee), 1,27 "Then It All Came Down" (Capote), Supp. HI, Part 1,125,131 Theocritus, D, 169 "Theodore the Poet" (Masters), Supp. I, Part 2,461 Theophrastus,I,58 "Theory and Experience in Cr&vecoeur's America" (Rapping), Supp. I, Part 1,252 Theory of Business Enterprise, The (Veblen), Supp. I, Part 2,638,641, 644 Theory of Moral Sentiments, The (Smith), Supp. I, Part 2,634 Theory of the Leisure Class, The (Veblen), 1,475-476; Supp. I, Part 2,629,633,641,645 "There Goes (Varoom! Varoom!) That Kandy-Kolored TangerineFlake Streamline Baby" (Wolfe), Supp. Ill, Part 2,569-571 "There She Is—She Is Taking Her Bath" (Anderson), 1,113,114 "There Was a Child Went Forth" (Whitman), IV, 348 "There was a Youth whose Name was Thomas Granger** (Olson), Supp. II, Part 2,558,560,563 "These Are My People" (Hayden), Supp. II, Part 1,365 These Thirteen (Faulkner), II, 72 These Three (film), Supp. I, Part 1, 281 "Thessalonica: A Roman Story" (Brown), Supp. I, Part 1,133 "They Ain't The Men They Used To Be" (Farreli), II, 45 "They Can't Turn Back" (Baldwin), Supp. I, Part 1,52 "They Sing, They Sing" (Roethke), 111,544

They Stooped to Folly (Glasgow), II, 175,186-187 "They're Not Your Husband" (Carver), Supp. IH, Part 1,141,143 "Thin People, The" (Plath), Supp. I, Part 2,538,547 "Thin Strips" (Sandburg), III, 587 "Thing and Its Relations, The" (James), II, 357 "Thing That Killed My Father Off, The" (Carver), Supp. HI, Part 1, 143 "Things, The" (Kinnell), Supp. ID, Part 1,246 "Things Aren't What They Seem" (Janeway), Supp. I, Part 1,198 Things as They Are (Stein), IV, 34,37, 40 Things of This World (Wilbur), Supp. Ill, Part 2,552-555 Think Back on Us... (Cowley), Supp. II, Part 1,139,140,142 Think Fast, Mr. Moto (Marquand), 111,57,58 "Thinking Against Oneself: Reflections on Cioran" (Sontag), Supp. III, Part 2,459-460 "Thinking of the Lost World" (Jarrell), H,338-389 "Thinnest Shadow, The" (Ashbery), Supp. Ill, Part 1,5 Third Circle, The (Norris), III, 327 Third Life of Grange Copeland, The (Walker), Supp. Ill, Part 2, 520, 527-536 Third Rose, The (Brinnin), IV, 26 "Third Sermon on the Warpland, The" (Brooks), Supp. HI, Part 1,85 "Third Thing That Killed My Father Off, The" (Carver), Supp. Ill, Part 1,144 Third Violet, The (Crane), 1,408,417418 Thirlwall, John C, IV, 425 "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" (Stevens), IV, 94 "30. Meditation. 2. Cor. 5.17.— He is a New Creature" (Taylor), IV, 144 Thirty Poems (Bryant), Supp. I, Part 1,157,158 Thirty Years (Marquand), III, 56,6061 Thirty Years of Treason (Bentley), Supp. I, Part 1,297

THIR-THRE / 780 "Thomas Paine—Introduction" (Clark), Supp. I, Part 2,525 Thompson, Charles M., n, 414 Thompson, Cy, 1,538 Thompson, Dorothy,!!, 449-450,451, 453,461 Thompson, E. P., Supp. I, Part 2,525 Thompson, Frank, D, 20,23 Thompson, George, Supp. I, Part 2, 686 Thompson, Kenneth, III, 313 Thompson, Lawrance, II, 76,171,172, 508,509; DI, 97 Thompson, Ralph, 1,47 Thompson, William T., Supp. I, Part 2, 411 n,42 "This Morning, This Evening, So Thomson, James, n, 304; Supp. I, Part 1,150,151 Soon" (Baldwin), Supp. I, Part 1, 63 Thomson, Virgil, IV, 45 This Music Crept by Me upon the Thoreau, Henry David, 1,98,104,228, Waters (MacLeish), III, 21 236,257,258,261,305,433; D, 7,8, This Property Is Condemned (Wil13,17, 22,101,159, 224, 273-274, liams), IV, 378 295, 312-313, 321, 457-458, 540, This Proud Heart (Buck),Supv.U,P*rt 546-547;III, 171,174,186-187,189, 1,119-120 208, 214-215, 453, 454, 507, 577; This Quarter (publication), II, 26 rV,167-189,191,341;Supp.I,Part "This Sandwich Has No Mayonnaise" 1,29,34,116,188,299,358, Part 2, (Salinger), III, 552-553 383, 400, 420, 421, 507, 540, 579, This Side of Paradise (Fitzgerald), I, 580,655,659,610,664,678; Supp. 358; D, 77,80,81,82-83,84,85-S7, Ill, Part 1,340,353 88 Thoreau, John, IV, 171,182 "This,That & the Other" (Nemerov), Thoreau, Mrs. John, IV, 172 111,269 "Thoreau" (Lowell), Supp. I, Part 2, This Very Earth (Caldwell),I,297,302 420,422 Thomas, Brandon, D, 138 Thornton, Lionel, HI, 291 Thomas, Dylan, 1,49,64,382,432,526, Thorp, Willard,n,222,533;III,97;IV, 533; HI, 21,521,528,532,534; IV, 142 89,93,136; Supp. I, Part 1,263, Part Thorslev, Peter L., Jr., 1,524,543 Thorstein Veblen (Dowd), Supp. I, Part 2,478; Supp. Ill, Part 1,42,47 Thomas, Edward, II, 154; Supp. I, Part 2,650 1,263; Supp. II, Part 1,4 Thorstein Veblen (ed. Qualey), Supp. I, Part 2,650 Thomas, J. Parnell, Supp. I, Part 1, 286 Thorstein Veblen: A Chapter in Thomas, Jonathan, D, 292 American Economic Thought Thomas, William I., Supp. I, Part 2, (Teggart), Supp. I, Part 2,650 641 Thorstein Veblen: A Critical Interpre"Thomas, Bishop, and Williams" tation (Riesman), Supp. I, Part 2, (Lowell), Supp. I, Part 1,97 649,650 Thomas Paine: A Bibliographical Thorstein Veblen: A Critical ReapCheck List of Common Sense, with praisal (ed. Dowd), Supp. I, Part 2, an Account of Its Publication 650 (Gimbel), Supp. I, Part 2,525 Thorstein Veblen and His America "Thomas Paine Fights for Freedom in (Dorfman),Supp.I,Part 2,631,650 Three Worlds" (Gimbel), Supp. I, Thorstein Veblen and the InstitutionalPart 2,525 ists: A Study in the Social Philoso-

Thirty-Six Poems (Warren), IV, 236, 239,240 "This Configuration" (Ashbcry), Supp. Ill, Part 1,22 "This Corruptible" (Wylie), Supp. I, Part 2,727,729 "This Familiar and Lifeless Scene" (Shapiro), Supp. I, Part l> 199 "This Gentile World" (Miller), III, 177 "This Hand" (Wylie), Supp. I, Part 2, 713 This Journey (Wright), Supp. Ill, Part 2,605-606 This Man and This Woman (Farrell),

phy of Economics (Seckler), Supp. I, Part 2,650 "Those before Us" (Lowell), II, 550 Those Extraordinary Twins (Twain), IV, 205-206 "Those People of Spoon River" (Masters), Supp. I, Part 2,478 "Those Times..." (Sexton), Supp. II, Part 2,670,684 "Those Various Scalpels" (Moore), 111,202 Thought and Character of William James (Perry), II, 362 "Thoughts after Lambeth" (Eliot), I, 587 Thoughts and Reflections (Lord Halifax), II, 111 "Thoughts on Being Bibliographed" (Wilson), IV, 435 "Thoughts on the Establishment of a Mint in the United States" (Paine), Supp. I, Part 2,512 "Thousand and Second Night, The" (Merrill), Supp. HI, Part 1,324 "Thread, The" (Merwin), Supp. Ill, Part 1,351 "Three Academic Pieces" (Stevens), IV, 90 "Three Agee Wards, The" (Morris), HI, 220-221 "Three Around the Old Gentleman" (Berryman), 1,188 "Three Avilas,The" (Jeffers),Supp.n, Part 2,418 Three Books of Song (Longfellow), II, 490 "Three Bushes" (Yeats), Supp. I, Part ISO Three Centuries of Harvard (Morison), Supp. I, Part 2,485 Three Essays on America (Brooks), I, 246 Three Literary Men: A Memoir of Sinclair Lewis, Sherwood Anderson, and Edgar Lee Masters (Derleth), Supp. I, Part 2,477 Three Lives (Stein), 1,103; IV, 26,27, 31,35,37-41,42,45,46 "THREE MOVEMENTS AND A CODA"(Baraka),Supp.n,Partl, 50 Three Papers on Fiction (Welty), IV, 261 Three Philosophical Poets (Santayana), III, 610-612

THRE-TINY / 781 "Three Players of a Summer Game" (Williams), IV, 383 Three Poems (Ashbery), Supp. HI, Part 1,2,3,14,15,18,24-26 Three Soldiers (Dos Passes), I, 477478,480,482,488,493-494 "Three Steps to the Graveyard" (Wright),Supp.m,Part 2,593,596 Three Stories and Ten Poems (Hemingway), II, 68,263 Three Taverns, The (Robinson), III, 510 "Three Taverns,The" (Robinson), III, 521,522 Three Tenant Families (Agee), 1,3738 "Three Types of Poetry" (Tate), IV, 131 "Three Vagabonds of Trinidad" (Harte), Supp. II, Part 1,338 "Three Waterfalls, The" (Lanier), Supp. I, Part 1,350 "Three-Way Mirror" (Brooks), Supp. Ill, Part 1,69-70 "Three Women" (Plath), Supp. I, Part 2,539,541,544,545,546 Three Worlds (Van Doren), Supp. I, Part 2,730 "Three-Day Blow, The" (Hemingway), II, 248 Three-Penny Opera (Brecht), 1,301 3-3-8 (Marquand), III, 58 Threnody (Emerson), Supp. I, Part 2, 416 "Threnody" (Emerson), II, 7 "Threshing-Floor, The" (Baldwin), Supp. I, Part 1,50 Thucydides, D, 418; IV, 50; Supp. I, Part 2,488,489,492 "Thunderhead" (MacLeish), III, 19 Thurber, James, I, 487; fl, 432; IV, 396; Supp. I, Part 2,602-627,653, 654,668,672,673,679,681; Supp. II, Part 1,143 Thurber, Mrs. James (Althea Adams), Supp. I, Part 2,613,615,617 Thurber, Mrs. James (Helen Muriel Wismer), Supp. I, Part 2,613,617, 618 Thurber, Robert, Supp. I, Part 2,613, 617 Thurber, Rosemary, Supp. I, Part 2, 616 Thurber, William, Supp. I, Part 2,602

Thurber: A Biography (Bernstein), Supp. I, Part 2,626 Thurber, a Collection of Critical Essays (ed. Holmes), Supp. I, Part 2,626 Thurber Album, The (Thurber), Supp. I, Part 2,611,619 "Thurber Amuses People by Making Them Squirm," Supp.I,Part2, 627 "Thurber—an Old Hand at Humor with Two Hits on Hand," Supp. I, Part 2,627 "Thurber and His Humor.... Up with the Chuckle, Down with the Yuk," Supp. I, Part 2,627 "Thurber: As Unmistakable as a Kangaroo" (Benlt andBen£t),Supp.I, Part 2,626 Thurber Carnival, A (Thurber), Supp. I, Part 2,620 "Thurber, Inc." (Coates), Supp. I, Part 2»626 "Thurber Letter, A" (Bernard), Supp. I, Part 2,626 "Thurber Used Humor to Camouflage His Exasperations with the Human Race" (Brandon),Supp.I,Part 2,626 "Thurber's Walter Ego: The Little Man Hero" (School), Supp. I, Part 2,627 "Thurber's Walter Mitty—the Underground American Hero" (Lindner), Supp. I, Part 2,627 Thurman, Wallace, Supp. I, Part 1, 325,326,328,332 "Thursday" (Millay), HI, 129 "Thurso's Landing" (Jeffefs), Supp. II, Part 2,433 Thus Spake Zarathustra (Nietzsche), 11,463 "Ti Demon" (Chopin), Supp. I, Part 1, 225 Ticket for a Seamstitch, A (Harris), II, 424-425 Ticket That Exploded, The (Burroughs), Supp. Ill, Part 1,93,103, 104 Tickless Time (Glaspell), Supp. HI, Part 1,179 Ticknor, Caroline, Supp. I, Part 1,46 Ticknor, George, II, 488; Supp. I, Part 1,313 Tide of Time, The (Masters), Supp. I, Part 2,471

"Tide Rises, the Tide Falls, The" (Longfellow), 1,498 Tiger, The (magazine), II, 82 "Tiger" (Blake), Supp. I, Part 1,80 TigerintheHouse, 77w?(VanVechten), Supp. II, Part 2,736 Tiger Who Wore White Gloves, The: or, What You Are, You Are (Brooks), Supp. HI, Part 1,86 Tiger-Lilies (Lanier), Supp. I, Part 1, 350-351,357,360,371 Till, Emmett, Supp. I, Part 1,61 Till the Day / Die (Odets), Supp. II, Part 2,530,53^-536,552 "Tilley the Toiler" (Maloney), Supp. I, Part 2,681 Tillich, Paul, 0,244; HI, 291,292,303, 309,313; IV, 226 Tillotson, John, D, 114 Tilton, Eleanor, Supp. I, Part 1,317, 319 Tilton, John, 1,143 Timaeus (Plato), II, 10; III, 609 Timber (Jonson), II, 16 Time (magazine), 1,25,30,377,378; II, 430; III, 551; IV, 215,434; Supp. I, Part 1,52,196 "Time" (Merrill), Supp. ffl, Part 1,325 "Time and the Garden" (Winters), Supp. II, Part 2,801,809 Time in the Rock (Aiken), 1,65 Time Is Noon, The (Buck), Supp. II, Part 1,129,130-131 "Time of Her Time, The" (Mailer), 111,37,45 Time of the Assassins, The: A Study of Rim baud (Miller), 111189 "Time Past" (Morris), III, 232 "Time Present" (Morris), III, 232 Time to Act, A (MacLeish), III, 3 Time to Speak, A (MacLeish), III, 3 "Times, The" (Emerson), II, 11-12 Times Literary Supplement, The (publication), 1,260-261; III, 471 Times of Melville and Whitman, The (Brooks), 1,257 "Timesweep" (Sandburg), III, 595596 Timoleon (Melville), III, 93 Timothy Dexter Revisited (Marquand), 111,55,62,63 Tintern Abbey (Wordsworth), Supp. I, Part 2,673,675 Tiny Alice (Albee), 1,81-86,87,88,94

TINY-TO / 782 "Tiny Mummies! The True Story of the Ruler of 43rd Street's Land of the Walking Dead" (Wolfe), Supp. m, Part 2,573,574 "Tired" (Hughes), Supp. I, Part 1,331 "Tired and Unhappy, You Think of Houses "(Schwartz), Supp. II, Part 2,649 Tischler, Nancy M., IV, 401 Titan, The (Dreiser), 1,497,501,507508,509,510 Titian, Supp. I, Part 2,397,714 Tiusanen, Timo, m, 408 "To —, with a Rose" (Lanier), Supp. I, Part 1,364 To a Blossoming Pear Tree (Wright), Supp. HI, Part 2,602-605 "To a Blossoming Pear Tree" (Wright), Supp. 01, Part 2,604 "To a Caty-Did, the Precursor of Winter" (Freneau), Supp. D, Part 1,274-275 "To a Chameleon" (Moore), III, 195, 196,215 "To a Conscript of 1940" (Read), II, 372-373,377-378 "To a Contemporary Bunk Shooter" (Sandburg), III, 582 "To a Cough in the Street at Midnight" (Wylie), Supp. I, Part 2,727,729730 "To a Defeated Savior" (Wright), Supp. Ill, Part 2,593-594,596 "To a Face in the Crowd" (Warren), IV, 239 "To a Friend" (Nemerov), III, 272 "To a Friend Whose Work Has Come to Triumph" (Sexton), Supp. II, Part 2,683 To a God Unknown (Steinbeck), I, 107; IV, 51,59-60,67 "To a Greek Marble" (Aldington), Supp. I, Part 1,257 "To a Locomotive in Winter" (Whitman), IV, 348 "To a Military Rifle" (Winters), Supp. II, Part 2,810,811,815 "To a Negro Jazz Band in a Parisian Cabaret" (Hughes), Supp. I, Part 1,325 "To a Poet" (Rich),Supp. I, Part 2,571 "To a Prize Bird" (Moore), III, 215 "To a Republican, with Mr. Paine's Rights of Man" (Freneau), Supp. II, Part 1,267

"To a Shade" (Yeats), III, 18 "Toa Skylark" (Shelley), Supp. I, Part 4720 "To a Waterfowl" (Bryant), Supp. I, Part 1,154,155,162,171 "To Abolish Children" (Shapiro), Supp. II, Part 2,717 To Abolish Children and Other Essays (Shapiro), Supp. II, Part 2,703 "To an Old Philosopher in Rome" (Stevens), III, 605 "To an Old Poet in Peru" (Ginsberg), Supp. II, Part 1,322 "To Aunt Rose" (Ginsberg), Supp. II, Part 1,320 To Bedlam and Part Way Back (Sexton), Supp. II, Part 2,672-678 "ToBeethoven" (Lanier),Supp.I, Part 1,364 "To Build a Fire" (London), II, 468 "To Charlotte Cushman" (Lanier), Supp. I, Part 1,364 "To Cole, the Painter, Departing for Europe" (Bryant), Supp. I, Part 1, 157,161 "To Crispin O'Conner" (Freneau), Supp. II, Parti, 268 'To Death" (Levertov), Supp. Ill, Part 1,274 "To Delmore Schwartz" (Lowell), II, 547 "to disembark" (Brooks), Supp. Ill, Part 1,86 "To Dr. Thomas Shearer" (Lanier), Supp. I, Part 1,370 "To Earthward" (Frost), II, 154 "To Edwin V. McKenzie" (Winters), Supp. II, Part 2,801 "To Eleonora Duse" (Lowell), II, 528 "To Elizabeth Ward Perkins" (Lowell), II, 516 To Have and Have Not (Hemingway), 1,31; D, 253-254,264 "To Helen" (Poe), III, 410,411,427 "ToHell With Dying" (Walker),Supp. Ill, Part 2,523 "To His Father" (Jeffers), Supp. II, Part 2,415 "To James Russell Lowell" (Holmes), Supp. I, Part 1,311 "To Jesus on His Birthday" (Millay), 111,136-137 "To John Keats" (Lowell), II, 516 "To Justify My Singing" (Wright), Supp. Ill, Part 2,590

"To Lose the Earth" (Sexton), Supp. II, Part 2,684,685 "To Lu Chi" (Nemerov), III, 275 "To My Brother Killed: Haumont Wood: October, 1918" (Bogan), Supp. HI, Part 1,58 "To My Class, on Certain Fruits and Flowers Sent Me in Sickness" (Lanier), Supp. I, Part 1,370 "To My Greek" (Merrill), Supp. in, Part 1,326 "To Sir Toby" (Freneau), Supp. II, Part 1,269 "To Sophy, Expectant" (Mumford), Supp. II, Part 2,475 'To Speak of Woe That Is in Marriage" (Lowell), 0,550 "To Statecraft Embalmed" (Moore), III, 197 To Stay Alive (Levertov), Supp. Ill, Part 1,280-282 "To the Americans of the United States" (Freneau), Supp. II, Part 1, 271 "To the Apennines" (Bryant), Supp. I, Part 1,157,164 "To the Bleeding Hearts Association of American Novelists" (Nemerov), III, 281 "To the Citizens of the United States" (Paine), Supp. I, Part 2,519-520 "To the Dandelion" (Lowell), Supp. I, Part 2,424 To the Finland Station: A Study in the WritingandActing of History (Wilson), IV, 429,436,443-444,446 "To the Governor & Legislature of Massachusetts" (Nemerov), HI, 287 To the Holy Spirit (Winters), Supp. II, Part 2,810 "To the Keeper of the King's Water Works" (Freneau), Supp. II, Part 1,269 "To the Lacedemonians" (Tate), IV, 134 To the Lighthouse (Woolf), 1,309; II, 600 "To the Man on Trail" (London), II, 466 "To the Memory of the Brave Americans Under General Greene" (Freneau), Supp. n, Part 1,262,274 "To the Muse" (Wright), Supp. Ill, Part 2,601

TO-TRAD / 783 "To the New World" (Jarrell), II, 371 "To the One of Fictive Music" (Stevens), IV, 89 "To the Peoples of the World" (Du Bois), Supp. n, Part 1,172 "To the Pliocene Skull" (Harte),Supp. II, Part 1,343-344 "To the Reader" (Baudelaire),II,544545 "To the Reader" (Levertov), Supp.HI, Part 1,277 "To the River Arve" (Bryant), Supp. I, Part 1,163 "To the Snake" (Levertov), Supp. ni, Part 1,277 "To the Stone-Cutters" (Jeffers), Supp. II, Part 2,420 "To the Young Who Want to Die" (Brooks), Supp. Ill, Part 1,85-86 "To Train a Writer" (Bierce), 1,199 "To Whistler, American" (Pound), ID, 465-466 "To Wine" (Bogan), Supp. Ill, Part 1, 57,58 "Toast to Harlem, A" (Hughes), Supp. I, Part 1,338 Tobacco Road (Caldwell), 1,288,289, 290, 295-296, 297, 298, 302, 307, 309,310; IV, 198 Toback, James, III, 48 Tobias, Richard C, Supp. I, Part 2,626 "Tobin's Palm" (O. Henry), Supp. II, Part 1,408 Tobit (apocryphal book), 1,89 Toby Tyler: or, Ten Weeks with a Circus (Otis), III, 577 Tocqueville, Alexis de, III, 261; IV, 349; Supp. I, Part 1,137, Part 2,659, 660; Supp. II, Part 1,281,282,284 "TODAY" (Baraka), Supp. II, Part 1, 55 "Today" (Ginsberg), Supp. II, Part 1, 328 Todd, Mabel Loomis, 1,454,470,472 Toilet, The (Baraka), Supp. II, Part 1, 37,40-42 Toklas, Alice B., IV, 27,48 Toledo Blade (newspaper), 1,515 Toller, Ernst, 1,479 Tolstoi, Leo, 1,6,7,58,103,312,376; D, 191-192,205,271,272,275,276, 281, 285, 286, 320, 407, 542, 559, 570, 579, 606; III, 37, 45, 61, 323, 467,572; IV, 17,21,170,285; Supp. I, Part 1,2,3,6,20

Tom (Cummings), 1,430 "Tom Brown at Fisk" (Du Bois), Supp. II, Part 1,160 Tom Brown *s School Days (Hughes), Supp. I, Part 2,406 "Tom Fool at Jamaica" (Moore), III, 215 Tom Jones (Fielding), 1,131 "Tom Outland's Story" (Gather), I, 325-326 Tom Sawyer (Twain), Supp. I, Part 2, 456,470 Tom Sawyer Abroad (Twain), 11,482; IV, 194,204 Tom Sawyer Detective (Twain),IV, 204 Tom Swift (Stratemeyer), III, 146 "Tom Wolfe's Guide to Etiquette" (Wolfe), Supp. m, Part 2,578 Tomas, Vincent, 1,565 Tomkins, Calvin, 0,100 Tomlinson, Charles, III, 217 Tommy Gallagher's Crusade (Farrell),

n,44

"Tommy's Burglar" (Henry), Supp. H, Part 1,399,401 Tomo Cheeki (pseudonym) see Freneau, Philip Tomorrow (magazine), III, 579 "Tomorrow the Moon " (Dos Passos), 1,493 Tompson, Benjamin, Supp. I, Part 1, 110,111 Tone, Aileen, 1,21-22 Tongues (Shepard and Chaikin) Supp. III, Part 2,433 "Tonight" (Lowell), II, 538 "Too Anxious for Rivers" (Frost), II, 162 "Too Young" (O'Hara), III, 369 "Too-Late Born,The" (Hemingway), 111,9 Toomer, Jean, Supp. I, Part 1, 325, 332; Supp. Ill, Part 2,475-491 Tooth of Crime, The (Shepard), Supp. Ill, Part 2,432,441-445,447 "Top of the Hill" (Jewett), II, 406 Torah,IV,19 Toronto Star (newspaper), II, 260 "Torquemada" (Longfellow), II, 505 Torrence, Ridgeiy, III, 507,525 Torrent and the Night Before, The (Robinson), III, 504 Torrents of Spring, The (Hemingway), 1,117; D, 250-251 Torrey, Bradford, IV, 188,189

Tortilla Flat (Steinbeck), IV, 50, 51, 61,64 Tory Lover, The (Jewett), II, 406 "Touch,The" (Sexton), Supp. II, Part 2,687 Touch of the Poet, A (O'Neill), III, 385,401,404 "TouchingtheTree" (Merwin), Supp. in, Part 1,355 Toulet, Paul Jean, IV, 79 'Tour 5" (Hayden), Supp. II, Part 1, 381 Tour of Duty (Dos Passos), 1,489 TouronthePrairies,A (Irving), 11,312313 "Tourist Death" (MacLeish), III, 12 Toward the Gulf (Masters), Supp. I, Part 2,465-466 "Toward the Solstice" (Rich),Supp. I, Part 2,575-576 Towards a Better Life (Burke), 1,270 Towards an Enduring Peace (Bourne), 1,232 "Tower" (Merwin), Supp. Ill, Part 1, 343 "Tower Beyond Tragedy, The" (Jeffers), Supp. II, Part 2,429-430 Tower of Ivory (MacLeish), III, 3-4 Towers, Tom H., D, 149 Town, The (Faulkner), II, 57,73 Town and the City, The (Kerouac), Supp. Ill, Part 1,222-224 "Town Crier" (Bierce), I, 193, 194, 195,196 Town Down the River, The (Robinson), III, 508 "Town Dump, The" (Nemerov), III, 272,275,281 "Towns in Colour" (Lowell), II, 523524 Townsend, Harvey G., 1,565 Townsman, The (Sedges), Supp. II, Part 1,124-125 Toys in the Attic (Hellman), Supp. I, Part 1,289-290 Trachtenberg, Alan,1,143,404; m, 243 "Tracing Life with a Finger" (Caldwell), 1,291 "Track Meet, The" (Schwartz), Supp. II, Part 2,665 "Tract against Communism, A" (Twelve Southerners), IV, 125,237 Tracy, Lee, IV, 287,288 "Tradition and Industrialization" (Wright), IV, 489-490

TRAD-TRIS / 784 'Tradition and the Individual Talent" (Eliot), 1,441,574,585 Tragedies, Life and Letters of James Gates Perdval (Swinburne), Supp. I, Part 2,422 Tragedy of Don Ippolito, The (Howells), 11,279 "Tragedy of Error, A" (James), II, 322 Tragedy ofPudd'nhead Wilson, The (Twain), IV, 206-207 "Tragic Dialogue" (Wylie), Supp. I, Part 2,724 Tragic Ground (Caldwell), 1,297,306 "Tragic Mulatto Theme in Six Works of Langston Hughes,The" (Davis), Supp. I, Part 1,348 Traherne, Thomas, IV, 151; Supp. Ill, Part 1,14 "Trailing Arbutus, The" (Whittier), Supp. I, Part 2,691 "Train Rising Out of the Sea" (Ashbery), Supp. Ill, Part 1,22 "Train Tune" (Bogan), Supp. m, Part

(Carne-Ross), Supp. I, Part 1,268269,275 "Translation of a Fragment of Simonides" (Bryant), Supp. I, Part 1,153,155 "Translations" (Rich), Supp. I, Part 2, 563 Translations of Ezra Pound, The (ed. Kenner),m,463 "Trans-National America" (Bourne), 1,299,230 Transport to Summer (Stevens), IV, 76,93 "Traps for the Unwary" (Bourne), I,

235

"Tree of Night, A" (Capote), Supp. HI, Part 1,114,120 Tree of Night and Other Stories, A (Capote), Supp. HI, Part 1,114 "Tree, the Bird, The" (Roethke), III,

548

"Trees, The" (Rich), Supp. I, Part 2,

555

"Trees Listening to Bach" (Merrill), Supp. m, Part 1,336 Trelawny, Edward John, Supp. I, Part

£721

Trent, William P., 0,317 Trial, The (Kafka), IV, 113 "Trial by Existence, The" (Frost), II,

166 TraubeK Horace, IV, 350,353 Traveler at Forty, A (Dreiser), 1,515 TrialofaPoet, The (Shapiro), Supp. H, Traveler from Altruria, A, a Romance Part 2,710 (Howells), II, 285,287 Trial of the Hawk, The: A Comedy of "Travels in Georgia" (McPhee), Supp. the Seriousness of Life (Lewis), II, in, Part 1,293-294 441 Travels in the Congo (Gide), III, 210 "Tribute, The" (Doolittle), Supp. I, Travels with Charley (Steinbeck), IV, Part 1,267 52 Tribute to Freud (Doolittle), Supp. I, 1,64 Trawick, Leonard M., Supp. I, Part 2, Part 1,253,254,258,259,260,268 706 "Traits of Indian Character" (Irving), Tribute to the Angels (DooliUlc),Supp. 11,303 Tre Croce (Tozzi), Supp. Ill, Part 2, I, Part 1,272 Tramp Abroad, A (Twain), IV, 200 616 Triem,Eve,I,450 Tramp's Excuse, The (Lindsay), Supp. "Treasure of the Redwoods, A" Trifler, The (Masters), Supp. I, Part 2, I, Part 2,379,380,382 (Harte), Supp. II, Part 1,337 459-460 Tramping With a Poet in the Rockies Treasury of the Theatre, A (Gassner), rri/7«s(Glaspell),Supp.ni,Part 1,175, (Graham),Supp. I, Part 2,397,402 178,179,182,186,187 Supp. I, Part 1,292 Transactions of the Royal Society (pub- Treasury of Yiddish Stories, A (eds. Trilling, Diana, II, 587,600; III, 48-49; lication), IV, 163 Howe and Greenberg), Supp. I, Supp. I, Part 1,297 "Transatlantic" (Toomer), Supp. Ill, Part 2,432 Trilling, Lionel, 1,48,120,334,0,579; Treat 'Em Rough (Lardner), II, 422III, 308,310,319,327,383,384; IV, Part 2,486 423 Transatlantic Review (publication), II, 201,211,213;Supp.III,Part 2,49368,435; ID, 471; IV, 27 Treatise Concerning the Lord's Sup515 Transatlantic Sketches (James), II, per (Doolittle), IV, 150 Trilogy (Doolittle), Supp. I, Part 1, 324 Treatise Concerning Religious Affec271,272 tions (Edwards), I, 547, 552, 554, "Trilogy of Desire" (Dreiser), 1,497, 'Transcendental Etude" (Rich),Supp. 508 I, Part 2,576 555,557,558,560,562 Transcendentalists, Supp. II, Part 1, Treatise on Right and Wrong, A Trimmed Lamp, The (O. Henry), 279,289,291 (Mencken), III, 110,119 Supp. II, Part 1,410 Transcendentalists, The: An Anthol- "Treatise on Tales of Horror, A" Trio (Baker), Supp. I, Part 1,277 ogy (ed. Miller), Supp. I, Part 1,46 (Wilson), IV, 438 "Trip to Hanoi" (Sontag), Supp. Ill, "Transcontinental Highway" (Cow- Treatise on the Gods, A (Mencken), Part2,46(M62 ley), Supp. II, Part 1,141 111,108-109,119 Triple Thinkers, The: Ten Essays on "Transfigured Bitd" (Merrill), Supp. "Tree, The" (Pound), Supp. I, Part 1, Literature (Wilson), IV, 428, 431; 255 Supp. n, Part 1,146 HI, Part 1,320-321 Transformations (Sexton), Supp. II, "Tree, a Rock, a Cloud, A" (McCul- "Triplex" (Doolittle), Supp. I, Part 1, Part 2,689-691 lers),II,587 271 transition (publication), III, 434; IV, "Tree at My Window" (Frost), II, 155 "Triptych" (Eberhart), 1,522,539 "Tree of Laughing Bells, The" (Lind- Tristessa (Kerouac), Supp. ID, Part 1, 31; Supp. HI, Part 2,611 "Translation and Transposition" say), Supp. I, Part 2,376 225,227,229

TRIS-TWEN / 785 Tristram (Robinson), ID, 521,522,523 Tristram Shandy (Sterne), 1,299; IV, 465-466 Tritsch,Walther,IV,377 "Triumph of a Modern, The, or, Send for the Lawyer" (Anderson), 1,113, 114 "Triumph of the Egg, The" (Anderson), 1,113 Triumph of the Egg, The: A Book of Impressions from American Life in Tales and Poems(Ai\dersoi\),l,n2y 114 Triumph of the Spider Monkey, The (Oates), Supp. D, Part 2,522 "Triumphal March" (Eliot),!, 580; ffl, 17 Triumphs of the Reformed Religion in America (Mather), Supp. II, Part 2, 453 Trivial Breath (Wylie), Supp. I, Part 2, 709,722-724 Trois contes (Flaubert), IV, 31,37 Trojan Horse, The: A Play (MacLeish), 111,21 Troll Garden, The (Gather), I, 313, 314-316,322 "Trolling for Blues" (Wilbur), Supp. Ill, Part 2,563-564 Trollope, Anthony, 1,10,375; D, 192, 237; HI, 51,70,281,382 Trembly, Albert Edmund, Supp. I, Part 2,402,403 "Troop Train" (Shapiro), Supp. n, Part 2,707 TropicofCancer(m\ler),Ul 170,171, 174,177,178-180,181,182,183,187, 190 Tropic of Capricorn (Miller), III, 170, 176-177, 178, 182, 183, 184, 187, 18&-189,190 Trotsky, Leon, 1,366; 0,562,564; IV, 429 Trotter, W., 1,249 Trouble in July (Caldwell), 1,297,304305,306,309 rrou6/e/5/ari<*(Hughes),Supp.I9Part 1,328 "Trouble of Marcie Flint, The" (Cheever), Supp. I, Part 1,186 Trow, John F., 1,564 Troy, William, 1,450; IV, 48,307 "Truce of the Bishop,The" (Frederic), D,139-140 True History of the Conquest of New Spain, The (Castillo), III, 13

True Intellectual System of the Universe, The (Cuddleworth), II, 10 "True Vine" (Wylie), Supp. I, Part 2, 723 7>u£Wert(Shepard),Supp.III,Part2, 433,441,445,447,448 Trueman, Matthew (pseudonym), see Lowell, James Russell "Truest Sport, The: Jousting with Sam and Charlie" (Wolfe), Supp. Ill, Part 2,581-582 Truman, Harry, III, 3 Trumbo, Dalton, Supp. I, Part 1,295 Trumbull, John, Supp. II, Part 1,65,69, 70,268 "Trumpet Player" (Hughes), Supp. I, Part 1,333 Trumpet Shall Sound, The (Wilder), IV, 356 "Trust Yourself" (Emerson), II, 10 "Truth" (Emerson), II, 6 "Truth, The" (Jarrell), II, 381-382 'Truth of the Matter,The" (Nemerov), 111,270 "Truth the Dead Know, The" (Sexton), Supp. II, Part 2,681 "Truthful James" (Harte), IV, 1% "Trying to Talk with a Man" (Rich), Supp. I, Part 2,559 "Ts'ai Chih" (Pound), III, 466 TuFu,H,526 Tu Fu (Ayscough), II, 527 Tucker, Ellen, see Emerson, Mrs. Ralph Waldo (Ellen Tucker) Tuckerman, Frederick Goddard, IV, 144 Tuckey, John S.,FV, 213 "Tuesday April 25th 1966" (Olson), Supp. II, Part 2,585 "Tuft of Flowers, The" (Frost), II, 153 Tufts, James Hayden, Supp. I, Part 2, 632 Tugwell, Rexford Guy, Supp. I, Part 2, 645 "Tulips" (Plath), Supp. I, Part 2,540, 542,544 Tulips and Chimneys (Cummings), I, 436,437,440,445,447 Tully,Jim,III,103,109 Tura, Cosimo, III, 474-475 TurandotandOther Poems (Ashbery), Supp. Ill, Part 1,3 Turgenev, Ivan Sergeevich, 1,106; D, 263,271,275,280,281,288,319,320, 324-325,338,407;m,461;IV,17,277

Turgot, Anne Robert Jacques, II, 103; Supp. I, Part 1,250 "Turkey and Bones and Eating and We Liked It" (Stein), IV, 44 "Turn of the Screw, The" (James), II, 331-332 Turnbull, Andrew, D, 100; IV, 473 Turnbull, Dr. George, D, 113 Turnbull, Gail, IV, 425 Turnbull, Lawrence, Supp. I, Part 1, 352 Turnbull, Ralph a, 1,565 Turner, Addie, IV, 123 Turner, Arlin,n, 245 Turner, Darwin, Supp. I, Part 1,339, 348 Turner, Frederick Jackson, Supp. I, Part 2,480,481,632,640 Turner, Nat, IV, 113-114, 115, 116, 117 Turner, Susan J., 1,263 Turns and Movies and Other Tales in Verse (Aiken),!, 65 Turrinus, Lucius Mamilius, IV, 373 Tuscan Cities (Howells), II, 280 Tuskegee movement, Supp. II, Part 1, 169,172 Tuthill, Louisa Cavolne, Supp. I, Part 2,684 "Tutored Child, The" (Kunitz), Supp. in, Part 1,264 Tuttleton, James, HI, 73 "T.V.A."(Agee),I,35 "Twa Sisters, The" (ballad), Supp. I, Part 2,6% Twain, Mark, 1,57,103,107,109,190, 192, 193, 195, 197, 203, 209, 237, 245, 246, 247-250, 255, 256, 257, 260,261,292,342,418,469,485; D, 70,140,259,262,266-268,271,272, 274-275, 276, 277, 280, 285-286, 287, 288, 289, 301, 304, 306, 307, 312, 415, 432, 434, 436, 446, 457, 467,475,476,482; HI, 65,101,102, 112-113, 114, 220, 241, 347, 357, 409, 453, 454, 504, 507, 554, 558, 572,575,576;IV,190-213,333,349, 451; Supp. I, Part 19 37,39,44,247, 251,313,317, Part 2,377,385,393, 410, 455, 456, 457, 473, 475, 579, 602,604,618,629,651,660; Supp. II, Part 1,193,344,354,385 Twelve Southerners, IV, 125 Twentieth Century Authors,1,31'6,527 "Twenty-Four Poems" (Schwartz), Supp. II, Part 2,646,649

TWEN-UNGU / 786 "Twenty-one Love Poems" (Rich), Supp. I, Part 2,572-573 "Twenty-One Poems" (MacLeish), 111,19 27 Wagons Full of Cotton and Other One-Ac/Ptoj* (Williams), IV,381, 383 Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (Verne), 1,480 "Twenty Years Ago" (Lindsay), Supp. I, Part 2,384,399 Twenty Years at Hull-House (Addams), Supp. I, Part 1,3,4,11,16 Twice-Told Tales (Hawthorne), 1,354; D, 224; III, 412,421 Twilight (Frost), II, 151 Twilight Sleep (Wharton), IV, 320322,324-325,327,328 "Twilight's Last Gleaming" (Burroughs and Elvins), Supp. Ill, Part 1,93,94,101 "Twins of Table Mountain, The" (Harte), Supp. n, Part 1,355 "Twist,The" (Olson), Supp. n, Part 2, 570 Two Admirals, The (Cooper), 1,350 Two-Character Play, The (Williams), IV, 382,386,393,398 Two Citizens (Wright), Supp. ID, Part 2,602-604 "Two Environments, The" (Trilling), Supp. Ill, Part 2,510 "Two Friends" (Gather), 1,332 "Two Gardens in Linndale" (Robinson), III, 508 Two Gentlemen in Bonds (Ransom), HI, 491-492 Two: Gertrude Stein and Her Brother (Stein), IV, 43 "Two Hangovers" (Wright), Supp. III, Part 2,596 Two Letterstothe Citizens of the United States, and One to General Washington (Barlow), Supp. II, Part 1,80 "Two Lovers and a Beachcomber by the Real Sea" (Plath), Supp. I, Part 2; 536 Two Men of Sandy Bar (Harte), Supp. II, Part 1,354 "Two Morning Monologues" (Bellow), 1,150 "Two on a Party" (Williams), IV, 388 "Two Portraits" (Chopin), Supp. I, Part 1,218 "Two Scenes" (Ashbery), Supp. Ill, Part 1,4

"Two Sisters" (Farrell), II, 45 "Two Songs on the Economy of Abundance** (Agee), 1,28 "Two Temples, The" (Melville), HI, 8£-90 "Two Tramps in Mudtime" (Frost), 11,164 "Two Views of a Cadaver Room" (Plath),Supp.I Part 2,538 "Two Voices ina Meadow" (Wilbur), Supp. m, Part 2,555 Two Years before the Mast (Dana), I, 351 Two-Ocean War, The (Morison), Supp. I, Part 2,491 Tyler, Parker, IV, 259 Tyler,Royall,I,344 Tynan, Kenneth, HI, 169 Tyndale, William D, 15 Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life (Melville), III, 75-77,79,84 "Typewriter Man," (Thurber) Supp. I, Part 2,681 "Tyrant of Syracuse" (MacLeish), in, 20 "Tyrian Businesses" (Olson), Supp. II, Part 2,567,568,569 Tzara, Tristan, Supp. Ill, Part 1,104, 105 OberdieSeelenfrage(FechneT),Il,358 "Ulalume"(Poe),III,427 Ultima Thule (Longfellow), II, 490 Ultramarine (Carver), Supp. Ill, Part 1,137,138,147,148 Ulysses (Joyce), 1,395,475-476,478, 479,481; H, 42, 264,542; HI, 170, 398; IV, 103,418,428,455; Supp. I, Part 1,57; Supp.HI, Part 2,618,619 Unamuno y Jugo, Miguel de, III, 310 "Un-Angry Langston Hughes, The" (Kearns), Supp. I, Part 1,348 Uncalled, 77u? (D unbar),Supp.H, Part 1,200,211,212 "Uncle Jim's Baptist Revival Hymn" (Lanier and Lanier), Supp. I, Part 1,353 "Uncle Lot" (Stowe), Supp. I, Part 2, 585-586 Uncle Remus tales (Harris), Supp. II, Part 1,201 Uncle Tom's Cabin (Stowe), II, 291; Supp. I, Part 1,49, Part 2,410,579, 582,589-592; Supp. II, Part 1,170; Supp. Ill, Part 1,154,171

Uncle Tom's Children (Wright), IV, 476,478,488; Supp. II, Part 1,228, 235 "Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut" (Salinger), III, 559-560,563 "Undead, The" (Wilbur), Supp. Ill, Part 2,556 "Undefeated,The" (Hemingway), II, 250 "Under Cygnus" (Wilbur), Supp. ffl, Part 2,558 "Under Forty" (Trilling), Supp. Ill, Part 2,494 "UnderLibra: Weights andMeasures" (Merrill), Supp. HI, Part 1,328 Under Milk Wood (Thomas), III, 21 "Under the Cedarcroft Chestnut" (Lanier), Supp. I, Part 1,364 Under the Lilacs(Alcott),Supp.I9P*rt 1,42-43,44 "Under the Maud Moon" (Kinnell), Supp. in, Part 1,246-247 "Under the Rose" (Pynchon), Supp. D, Part 2,620 UndertheSignofSaturn (Sontag),Supp. Ill, Part 2,451,452,458,470-471 "Under the Sign of Saturn" (Sontag), Supp. Ill, Part 2,470 "Under the Willows" (Lowell), Supp. I, Part 2,416 Under the Willows and Other Poems (Lowell), Supp. I, Part 2,424 Undercliff: Poems 1946-1953 (Eberhart), 1,528,536-537 Understanding Fiction (Brooks and Warren), IV, 279 Understanding Poetry (ed. Brooks and Warren), IV, 236 Undertaker's Garland, The (Wilson and Bishop), IV, 427 Undine (La Mottc-Fouqu*), II, 212; 111,78 Undiscovered Country, TTie(Howells), 11,282 Unembarrassed Muse, The (Nye), Supp. I, Part 2,478 "Unexpressed"(Dunbar), Supp. II, Part 1,199 "Unfinished Poems" (Eliot), 1,579 Unfinished Woman, An (Hellman), Supp. I, Part 1,292,293,294 Unframed Originals (Merwin), Supp. Ill, Part 1,341 Unger, Leonard, 1,591 Unguided Tour (Sontag), Supp. Ill, Part 2,452

UNID-VACH / 787 "Unidentified Flying Object" (Hayden), Supp. II, Part 1,368 "'Uninhabitable Darkness* of Baldwin's Another Country, The: Image and Theme" (Gross), Supp. I9 Part 1,70 "Union" (Hughes), Supp. I, Part 1, 331 "Union Street: San Francisco, Summer 1975" (Carver), Supp. DI, Part 1, 138 United States Army in World War //, Supp. I, Part 2,490 United States Constitution, 1,6,283 United States Literary Gazette (magazine), Supp. I, Part 1,155,156 United States Review and Literary Gazette (magazine), Supp. I, Part 1156 Universal Passion (Young), III, 111 "Universe of Death, The" (Miller), III, 184 Universe of Time, A (Anderson), II, 27, 28,45,46,48,49 "Universities" (Emerson), II, 6 "University" (Shapiro), Supp. D, Part 2,704-705,717 "University Days" (Thurber), Supp. I, Part 2,605 "Unknown Girl in the Maternity Ward" (Sexton), Supp. II, Part 2, 676 "Unknown War,The" (Sandburg), HI, 594 "Unlighted Lamps" (Anderson), 1,112 Unloved Wife, The (Alcott), Supp. I, Part 1,33 "Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall, The" (Poe), III, 424 Unprecedented Era, The (Goebbels), 111,560 "Unprofitable Servant, The" (O. Henry), Supp. II, Part 1,403 Unseen Hand, The (Shepard), Supp. Ill, Part 2,439,445-^46 Unspeakable Gentleman, The (Marquand), III, 53-54,60,63 "Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Literature" (Morrison), Supp. Ill, Part 1,375,377-379 Unterecker, John, 1,386,404 Untermeyer, Jean, D, 530 Untermeyer,Louis,1,450; 11,171,516517,530,532,533; III, 268; IV, 354;

Supp. I, Part 2,402,730; Supp. Ill, Part 1,2 Untimely Papers (Bourne), 1,218,233 "Unused" (Anderson), 1,112,113 Unvanquished, The (Faulkner), II, 55, 67-68,71; Supp. I, Part 2,450 "Unvexed Isles, The" (Warren), IV, 253 "Unwithered Garland,The" (Kunitz), Supp. Ill, Part 1,265 UnwobblingPivot, The (trans. Pound), 111,472 "Unwritten,The" (Merwin), Supp. in, Part 1,352 "Up and Down" (Merrill), Supp. Ill, Part 1,328 Up from Slavery (Washington), Supp. II, Part 1,169 "Up in Michigan" (Hemingway), n, 263 Upanishads,l\,l83 Updike, John, I, 47, 54; III, 572; IV, 214-235; Supp. I, Part 1,186,196, Part 2,626,627 Updike, Mrs. Wesley, IV, 218,220 "Updike Lauds National Medalist E. B. White," Supp. I, Part 2,681 Upham, Thomas Goggswell, D, 487 "Upholsterers, The" (Lardner), II, 435 Upjohn, Richard, IV, 312 "Upon a Spider Catchinga Fly" (Taylor), IV, 161 "Upon a Wasp Child with Cold" (Taylor), IV, 161 "Upon My Dear and Loving Husband His Going into England, Jan. 16, 1661" (Bradstreet), Supp. I, Part 1, 110 "Upon Returning to the Country Road" (Lindsay), Supp. I, Part 2, 382 "Upon the Burning of Our House, July 10th, 1666" (Bradstreet), Supp. I, Part 1,107-108,122 "Upon the Sweeping Flood" (Taylor), IV, 161 "Upon Wedlock, and Death of Children" (Taylor), IV, 144,147,161 "Upset, An" (Merrill), Supp. Ill, Part 1,336 Upstairs and Do wnstairs (Vonnegut), Supp. II, Part 2,757 Upstate (Wilson), IV, 447 "Upturned Face" (Crane), 1,423 Upward, Allen, Supp. I, Part 1,262

Urang, Gunnar, IV, 119 Urania: A Rhymed Lesson (Holmes), Supp. I, Part 1,300 "Urban Convalescence, An" (Merrill), Supp. Ill, Part 1,322-324 "Urbanization of Humor, The" (Blair), Supp. I, Part 2,626 "Uriel" (Emerson), II, 19 Uroff, Margaret D., Supp. I, Part 2, 542,549 "U.S. Commercial Orchid, The" (Agee),I,35 U.S.A. (Dos Passos), 1,379,475,478, 482-488, 489, 490, 491, 492, 493, 494,495; Supp. I, Part 2,646; Supp. Ill, Part 1,104,105 "Us" (Sexton), Supp. II, Part 2,687 Ushant: An Essay (Aiken), I, 49, 54, 55,56,57 "Usher 11" (Bradbury), Supp. I, Part 2,622 Usual Star, The (Doolittle), Supp. I, Part 1,270 Utica Observer (newspaper), II, 128 Utopia 14 (Vonnegut), Supp. II, Part 2,757

V. (Pynchon), Supp. II, Part 2, 618, 620-622,627-630 "V. V." (Alcott), Supp. I, Part 1,37 "Vachel Lindsay*' (Sayre), Supp. I, Part 2,402 "Vachel Lindsay" (Masters), Supp. I, Part 2,402 "Vachel Lindsay" (Rittenhouse), Supp. I, Part 2,402 Vachel Lindsay: A Poet in America (Masters), Supp. I, Part 2,402,473, 474 Vachel Lindsay, Adventurer (Trombly), Supp. I, Part 2,402 "Vachel Lindsay and America" (Masters), Supp. I, Part 2,402 "Vachel Lindsay and His Heroes" (Bradbury), Supp. I, Part 2,402 "Vachel Lindsay as I Knew Him" (Armstrong), Supp. I, Part 2,402 Vachel Lindsay: Fieldworker for the American Dream (Massa),Supp.I, Part 2,402 "Vachel Lindsay: The Midwest as Utopia" (Whitney), Supp. I, Part 2, 403

VACH-VERY / 788 Vachel Lindsay: The Poet as Film Theorist (Wolfe), Supp. I, Part 2, 402 "Vachel Lindsay—or, My Heart Is a Kicking Horse" (Ames), Supp. I, Part 2,402 "VachelUndsayWritesto Floyd Dell" (Tanselle), Supp. I, Part 2,403 "Vachel Lindsay-iana: A Bibliographical Note" (White), Supp. I, Part 2,401 " Vag" (Dos Passos), 1,487-488 Valentine, Saint, IV, 396 Valentino, Rudolph, 1,483 Vatery, Paul Ambroise, O, 543,544; 111,279,409,428,609; IV, 79,91,92, 428,443 Valgemae, Mardi, 1,96 Valhouli, James N., Supp. I, Part 1,199 Valley of Decision, The (Wharton), IV, 311,315 Valley of the Moon, The (London), II, 467,481 "Valley of Unrest,The" (Poe),ffl, 411 "Values and Fictions" (Toomer), Supp. Ill, Part 2,485-486 Values of Veblen, The: A Critical Appraisal (Rosenberg), Supp. I, Part 4650 Van Buren, Martin, n, 134,312; ffl, 473 Van Doren, Carl, 1,252-253,423; O, 103,111,112,125,461; III, 144; IV, 143; Supp. I, Part 2,474,478,486, 707,709,717,718,727,730; Supp. II, Part 1,395 Van Doren, Mark, 1,70,168; n, 245; III, 4,23,589,598; IV, 143; Supp. I, Part 2,604,626; Supp. Ill, Part 2, 626 Van Dyke, Henry, 1,223; 0,456 Van Gelder, Robert, III, 73 Van Ghent, Dorothy, 1,334 Van Gogh, Vincent, I, 27; IV, 290; Supp. I, Part 2,451 Van Nostrand, Albert, EH, 384 Van Rensselaer, Stephen, 1,351 Van Rensselaer family, IV, 311 Van Schaick, John, Jr., D, 509-510 Van Vechten, Carl, I,295;IV,76;Supp. I, Part 1,324,327,332, Part 2,715; Supp. H, Part 2,725-751 Vande Kieft, Ruth M., IV, 260,284 Vanderbilt, Cornelius, III, 14 Vanderbilt family, IV, 311 Vandover and the Brute (Morris), III,

314, 315, 316, 320-322, 328, 333, 334 "Vanisher, The" (Whittier), Supp. I, Part 2,691 Va/iiryFair(magazine),I,429; 10,123; IV, 427; Supp. I, Part 2,709 Vanity Fair (Thackeray), 1,354; II, 91; 111,70 "Vanity of All Wordly Things, The" (Bradstreet), Supp. I, Part 1,102, 119 Vanity of Duluoz (Kerouac),Supp.m, Part 1,221,222 "Vanity of Existence,The" (Freneau), Supp. n, Part 1,262 Vanquished, The (Faulkner), 1,205 Vanzetti, Bartolomeo, 1,482,486,490, 494; D, 38^-39, 426; III, 139-140; Supp. I, Part 2,446,610,611 "Vapor Trail Reflected in the Frog Pond" (Kinnell), Supp. ID, Part 1, 242-243 "Variation on a Sentence" (Bogan), Supp. Ill, Part 1,60 "Variation: Ode to Fear" (Warren), IV, 241 "Variations: The air is sweetest that a thistle guards" (Merrill), Supp. Ill, Part 1,321 "Variations: White Stag, Black Bear" (Merrill), Supp. Ill, Part 1,321 " Varick Street" (Bishop), Supp. I, Part 1,90,92 Varieties of Religious Experience, The: A Study in Human Nature (James), H, 344,353,354,359-360,362; IV, 28,291 Vasari, Giorgio, Supp. I, Part 2,450; Supp. Ill, Part 1,5 Vasilievskaya, O. B., 1,427 Vassal! Morton (Parkman), Supp. II, Part 2,595,597-598 Vasse,W.W.,III,478 Vaudeville for a Princess (Schwartz), Supp. II, Part 2,661-662 Vaughan, Henry, IV, 151 "Vaunting Oak" (Ransom), III, 490 Veblen, Andrew, Supp. I, Part 2,640 Veblen, Mrs. Thorstein (Ellen Rolfe), Supp. I, Part 2,641 Veblen, Oswald, Supp. I, Part 2,640 Veblen, Thorstein, I, 104, 283, 475476,483,498,511; 0,27,272,276, 287; Supp. I, Part 2,628-650 Veblen (Hobson), Supp. I, Part 2,650

Veblenism: A New Critique (Dobriansky), Supp. I, Part 2,648,650 "Veblen's Attack on Culture" (Adorno), Supp. I, Part 2,650 Vedas,TV,l83 Vega, Lope de, Supp. HI, Part 1,341, 347 Vegetable, The, or From President to Postman (Fitzgerald), II, 91 Vein of Iron (Glasgow), II, 175,186, 188-189,191,192,194 "Velvet Shoes" (Wylie), Supp. I, Part 2,711,714 Vendler, Helen H., IV, 96; Supp. I, Part 1, 77, 78, 92 95, 97, Part 2, 565 "Venetian Blind, The" (Jarrell), II, 382-383 Venetian Glass Nephew, The (Wylie), Supp. I, Part 2,707,709,714,717719,721,724 Venetian Life (Howells), II, 274,277, 279 Venice Observed (McCarthy), II, 562 "Veracruz" (Hayden), Supp. II, Part 1,371,373 Verga, Giovanni, 0,271,275 Verhaeren, Emile, 1,476; D, 528,529 Verlaine, Paul, O, 529, 543; HI, 466; IV, 79,80,86,286 " Vermeer" (Nemerov), III, 275,278, 280 Vermont Notebook, The (Ashbery), Supp. Ill, Part 1,1 "Vernal Ague,The" (Freneau), Supp. II, Part 1,258 Verne, Jules, 1,480 Vernon, John, III, 550 Verplanck, Gulian O, Supp. I, Part 1, 155,156,157,158 Verrazano, Giovanni da, Supp. I, Part % 4%, 497 "Verse for Urania" (Merrill), Supp. III, Part 1,329,330 "Verses for Children" (Lowell), II, 516 "Verses Made at Sea in a Heavy Gale" (Freneau), Supp. II, Part 1,262 Verses, Printed for Her Friends (Jewett),II,406 "Version of a Fragment of Simonides" (Bryant), Supp. I, Part 1,153,155 Very, Jones, HI, 507 "Very Proper Gander, The" (Thurber), Supp. I, Part 2,610

VERY-VOIC / 789 "Very Short Story, A" (Hemingway), 11,252 Vesey, Denmark, Supp. I, Part 2,592 "Vespers" (Auden), Supp. n, Part 1,23 Vested Interests and the Common Man, The (Veblen), Supp. I, Part 2,642 "Veteran, The" (Crane), 1,413 "Veteran Sirens" (Robinson), III, 512, 524 "Vetiver" (Ashbery), Supp. ID, Part 1,26 "ViaDieppe-Newhaven"(Miller),m, 183 Vicar of Wakefield, The (Goldsmith), 1,216 Vickery, John, 0,608 Vickery,01gaW.,D,76 Victim, The (Bellow), 1,144,145,147, 149, 150, 151, 152, 153, 155, 156, 158,159,164; IV, 19 "Victor" (Mumford), Supp. II, Part 2, 476 Victoria, Queen, D, 191,490 Victorian Knight-Errant: A Study of the Early Literary Career of James Russell Lowell (Howard), Supp. I, Part 2,426 Victorian literature, D, 499,507-508, 590; HI,4,87,109,189,509,510; IV, 230, 321, 435; Supp. I, Part 1, 29, 35-37, Part 2,552,656 "Victory at Sea" (television series), Supp. I, Part 2,490 Victory in Limbo: Imagism 1908-1917 (Harmer), Supp. I, Part 1,275 "Victory of the Moon, The" (Crane), 1,420 Vidai, Gore, II, 587; IV, 383 Vie unanime, La (Romains), 1,227 Viereck, Peter, Supp. I, Part 2,403 Vietnam (McCarthy), II, 578-579 "View, The" (Roussel), Supp. Ill, Part 1,15,16,21 View from 80,77ur(Cowley),Supp.II, Part 1,141,144,153 View from the Bridge, A (Miller), III, 147,148,156,158,159-160 View of My Own, A: Essays in Literature and Society (Hardwick), Supp. Ill, Part 1,194,200 View of the Soil and Climate of the United States, A (trans. Brown), Supp. I, Part 1,146 "ViewoftheWood,The"(O'Connor), 111,349,351,358

"Vigil, The" (Dante), III, 542 Vignaux, Georgette P., Ill, 313 Vigny, Alfred Victor de, 0,543 Vilas, Martin S., Supp. I, Part 1,148 Vile Bodies (Waugh), Supp. I, Part 2, 607 Villa, Jos6 Garcia, HI, 217 Villa, Pancho, 1,210; III, 584 "Village Blacksmith, The" (Longfellow), Supp. I, Part 2,409 Village Hymns, a Supplement to Dr. Watts*s Psalms and Hymns (Nettleton),I,458 "Village Improvement Parade, The" (Lindsay), Supp. I, Part 2,388,389 Village Magazine, The (Lindsay), Supp. I, Part 2,379-380,382 Village Virus, The (Lewis), II, 440 Village Voice, The (newspaper), III, 36-37 "Villanelle of Change" (Robinson), 111,524 Villard, Oswald, Supp. I, Part 1,332 Villon,Frangois,II,544;III,9,174,592; Supp. I, Part 1,261; Supp. Ill, Part 1,235,243,249,253, Part 2,560 Vincent, H. P., Ill, 95,97-98 Vindication of the Rights of Women (Wollstonecraft), Supp. I, Part 1, 126 Violent Bear It Away, The (O'Connor), 111,339,345-348,350,351,354,355, 356,357 Virgil, 1,312,322,587; n, 133,542; IV, 137,359; Supp. I, Part 1,153, Part 2, 494 Virgin Mary, I, 111; 0,522 "Virgin and the Dynamo" (Adams), 111,396 "Virgin Carrying a Lantern, The" (Stevens), IV, 80 "Virgin Violeta" (Porter), III, 454 Virginia (Glasgow), II, 175,178,181182,193,194 "Virginia" (Lindsay), Supp. I, Part 2, 398 "Virginia Britannia" (Moore), II 1,198, 208-209 Virginia Quarterly Review (publication), III, 292,443 "Virginians Are Coming Again, The" (Lindsay), Supp. I, Part 2,399 Virtanen, Reino, IV, 259 Visible Saints: The History of a Puritan Idea (Morgan), IV, 149

"Vision, A" (Winters), Supp. II, Part 4785,795 "Vision and Prayer" (Thomas), 1,432 Vision of Columbus (Barlow), Supp. I, Part 1,124; Supp. II, Part 1,67,68, 70-75,77,79 Vision of Sir Launfal, The (Lowell), Supp. I, Part 1,311, Part 2,406,409, 410 "Vision of the World, A" (Cheever), Supp. I, Part 1,182,192 Vision of This Land, 77ie(eds.Hallwas and Reader), Supp. I, Part 2,402, 478 "Visionary, The" (Poe), III, 411 Visionary Farms, The (Eberhart), I, 537-539 Visioning, The (Glaspell), Supp. Ill, Part 1,175-177,180,187,188 Visions of Cody (Kerouac), Supp. Ill, Part 1,225-227 Visions of Gerard (Kerouac), Supp. Ill, Part 1,219-222,225,227,229 "Visions of the Daughters of Albion" (Blake), III, 540 "Visit of Charity, A" (Welty), IV, 262 "Visit to Avoyelles, A" (Chopin), Supp. I, Part 1,213 "Visit with John Cheever, A" (Nichols), Supp. I, Part 1,199 Vistas of History (Morison), Supp. I, Part 2,492 "Vitamins" (Carver), Supp. Ill, Part 1,138 Vivas, Eliseo, IV, 143 "V-Letter" (Shapiro), Supp. II, Part2, 707 V-Letter and Other Poems (Shapiro), Supp. II, Part 2,702,706 "Vocation and a Voice, A" (Chopin), Supp. I, Part 1,200,220,224,225 Vogler, Thomas A., 1,404 Vogue (magazine), II, 441; Supp. I, Part 1,211 "Voice from Under the Table, A" (Wilbur), Supp. ID, Part 2, 553, 554 "Voice of Rock, The" (Ginsberg), Supp. II, Part 1,313 Voice of the City, The (O. Henry), Supp. II, Parti 410 "Voiceof the Mountain,The" (Crane), 1,420 Voice of the Negro (Barber), Supp. II, Part 1,168

VOIC-WALL / 790 Wade, Grace, 1,216 Wade, John D., 1,263 Wade, S.J.,IV, 188-189 "Wading at Wellfleet" (Bishop), Supp. I, Part 1,80,85,86 Wadsworth, Charles, 1,454,470 Wadsworth, M. C, 0,364 Wadsworth family, D, 486 Wagenheim, Allen J., Ill, 49 Wagenknecht, Edward, O, 245, 317, 508,510; ffl, 432; IV, 213; Supp. I, Part 2,408,426,584,706 Waggoner,HyattH.,I,404;n,245,414, 533,557; HI, 289,550; Supp. I, Part 1,173, Part 2,478,706 Wagner, Jean, Supp. I, Part 1, 341, 346,348 Wagner, Linda Welshimer, IV, 425 Wagner, Philip M.,m, 121 Wagner, Richard, 1,284,395; H, 425; 111,396,507 "WagnerMatinee,A"(Cather),I,315316 Wagoner, David, III, 549 Wahl, Jean, 0,366 "Waif of the Plains, A" (Harte),Supp. II, Part 1,354 Wain, John, IV, 449 "Wait" (Kinnell),Supp.m,Part 1,250 "Waitingby the Gate" (Bryant), Supp. I, Part 1,171 Waiting for God (Weil), 1,298 Waiting for Godot (Beckett), 1,78,91, 298 Waiting for Lefty (Odets),Supp.I,Part l,277;Supp.n,Part 2,529,530-533, 540 Wake Up and Live! (Brande), Supp. I, Part 2,608 "Waking Early Sunday Morning" (Lowell), II, 552 "Waking in the Blue" (Lowell), II, 547 "Waking in the Dark" (Rich), Supp. I, Part 2,559 Waking, The (Roethke), HI, 541 Walcott, Charles C., 1,120,427,520; 0,53,149,485; III, 336 Wald, Lillian, Supp. I, Part 1,12 Walden; or, Life in the Woods (Thoreau),I,219,305;n,8,142,159, 312-313,458; IV, 168,169,170,176, 177-178,179-182,183,187; Supp. W (Viva) (Cummings), I, 429, 433, I, Part 2,579,655,664,672 434,436,443,444,447 Waldhorn, Arthur, H, 270 Waldmeir,Joseph,III, 49,360; IV,119 Wade, Allan, 0,340

Voice of the People, The (Glasgow), D, 175,176 "Voices from the Other World" (Merrill), Supp. HI, Part 1,331 Voices in the House (Sedges), Supp. U, Part 1,125 Voices of the Night (Longfellow), II, 489,493 "Voices of Village Square, The" (Wolfe), Supp. HI, Part 2,571-572 Voisin, Laurence, 1,450 Volney, Constantin Francois de Chasseboeuf, Supp. I, Part 1,146 Volpe, Edmond L., 0,76; III, 49 Voltaire, 1,194; O, 86,103, 449; HI, 420; IV, 18; Supp. I, Part 1, 288289, Part 2,669,717 Von Abele, Rudolph, 1,450 Von Frank, Albert J., Supp. I, Part 2, 705 Vonnegut, Kurt, Supp. II, Part 2,557, 689,753-316 "Voracitiesand Verities" (Moore),m, 214 Vore, Nellie, 1,199 Vorticism, O, 517; in, 463, 465,466, 475; Supp. I, Part 1,257 Voss, Arthur, Supp. I, Part 2,426 Voss, Richard, 1,199-200 "Vowels 2" (Baraka), Supp. II, Part 1, 51 Voyage dans la Haute Pensylvanie et dans Vetat de New-York (Crfcvecoeur), Supp. I, Part 1,250-251 Voyage to Pagany, A (Williams), IV, 404 "Voyage" (MacLeish), HI, 15 "Voyage, The" (Irving), II, 304 Voyage, The, and Other Versions of Poems by Baudelaire (Lowell), II, 543 "Voyages" (Crane), 1,393-395 Voyages and Discoveries of the Companions of Columbus (Irving), II, 310 Voznesensky, Andrei, n, 553; Supp. Ill, Part 1,268, Part 2,560 "Vulgarity in Literature" (Huxley), 111,429-430

Waldmeir, Joseph J., Supp. I, Part 2, 476,478 Waldron, Edward, Supp. I, Part 1,348 Waley, Arthur, 0,526; HI, 466 "Walk at Sunset, A" (Bryant), Supp. I, Part 1,155 "Walk before Mass, A" (Agee), 1,2829 "Walk in the Moonlight, A" (Anderson), 1,114 Walker, Alice, Supp. I, Part 2, 550; Supp. Ill, Part 2,488,517-540 Walker, C. L., Supp. I, Part 2,627 Walker, Franklin D., H, 485; III, 321, 335,336 Walker, Obadiah,n, 113 Walker, Warren S., 1,357 Walker, William E., 0,221 Walker, Williston, 1,565,566 Walking Down the Stairs: Selections from Interviews (Kinnell), Supp. Ill, Part 1,235,249 "WalkingHomeatNight"(Ginsberg), Supp. II, Part 1,313 "Walking Man of Rodin, The" (Sandburg), III, 583 "Walking Sticks and Paperweights and Water Marks" (Moore), III, 215 Walking to Sleep (Wilbur), Supp. m, Part 2,557-560 "Walking to Sleep" (Wilbur), Supp. HI, Part 2,544,557,559,561,562 "WalksinRome"(Merrill),Supp.III, Part 1,337 "Wall, The" (Brooks), Supp. HI, Part 1,70,71,84 Wall, The (Hersey), IV, 4 "Wall, The" (Roethke), III, 544 "Wall,The"(Sexton),Supp.II,Part2, 696 Wallace, Emily M., IV, 424 Wallace, Henry, 1,489; III, 111, 475; Supp. I, Part 1,286, Part 2,645 Wallach,Eli,m,161 Wallas, Graham, Supp. I, Part 2,643 "Walled City" (Gates), Supp. II, Part 2,524 Wallenstein, Anna, see Weinstein, Mrs. Max (Anna Wallenstein) Waller, Edmund, HI, 463 Waller, Fats, IV, 263 Walling, William English, Supp. I, Part 2; 645 Walls Do Not Fall, The (Doolittle), Supp. I, Part 1,271,272

WALP-WATE / 797 Walpole, Horace, 1,203; Supp. I, Part 2> 410,714 Walpole, Robert, IV, 145 Walser, Richard, IV, 472,473 Walsh, Ed, n, 424 Walsh, Richard J., Supp. II, Part 1, 119,130 Walsh, Thomas F., IV, 96 "Walt Whitman" (Masters), Supp. I, Part 2,458 "Walt Whitman and the 'New Poetry' "(Brown),Supp.I,Part2,477 WaltWhitmanHandbook(AOen)9IV9 352 Walt Whitman Reconsidered (Chase), IV, 352 "Walter T. Carriman" (O'Hara), III, 368 Walters, Marguerite, see Smith, Mrs. Lamar (Marguerite Walters) Walton, Izaak, Supp. I, Part 2,422 " Waltzer in the House, The" (Kunitz), Supp. Ill, Part 1,258 Wampeters, Foma, & Granfalloons (Vonnegut), Supp. II, Part 2,758, 759-760,776,779 "Wan Lee, the Pagan" (Harte), Supp. II, Part 1,351 "Wanderers, The" (Welty), IV, 273274 "Wandering Jew, The" (Robinson), 111,505,516-517 Wanderings of O is in (Yeats), Supp. I, Part 1,79 "Wanted: An Ontological Critic" (Ransom), III, 498 "Wanting to Die" (Sexton), Supp. II, Part 2,684,686 Waples, Dorothy, 1,348,357 Wapshot Chronicle, The (Cheever), Supp. I, Part 1,174,177-180,181, 196 Wapshot Scandal, The (Cheever), Supp. I, Part 1,180-184,187,191, 196 War and Peace (Toktoi),l,6 J-,11, 191, 205,291; IV, 446 "War Between Men and Women,The" (Thurber), Supp. I, Part 2,615 War Bulletins (Lindsay), Supp. I, Part 2,378-379 "War Diary, A" (Bourne), 1,229 War Dispatches of Stephen Crane, The (Crane), 1,422 War Games (Morris), III, 238

War in Heaven, The (Shepard and Chaikin), Supp. DI, Part 2,433 War Is Kind (Crane), 1,409; III, 585 "War Is Kind" (Crane), 1,419 War of the Classes (London), II, 466 "War Poems" (Sandburg), III, 581 "War, Response, and Contradiction" (Burke), 1,283 "WarWidow,The"(Frederic),II,135136 Ward, Aileen,n, 531 Ward, Artemus (pseudonym), see Browne, Charles Farrar Ward, Henry, Supp. I, Part 2,588 Ward, J. A, IV, 235 Ward, Lester, Supp. I, Part 2,640 Ward, Lynn, 1,31 Ward, Mrs. Humphry, D, 338 Ward, Nathaniel, Supp. I, Part 1,99, 102,111,116 Ward, Samuel, n, 22 Ward, Theodora, 1,470,473 Ward, William Hayes, Supp. I, Part 1, 371 "Ward Line, The" (Morris), III, 220 Warfel, Harry R., Ill, 243; Supp. I, Part 1,148,366,373 Warner, Charles Dudley, H, 405; IV, 198 Warner, John R., Ill, 193 Warner, Oliver, 1,548 Warner, W.Lloyd, III, 60 "Warning" (Hughes), Supp. I, Part 1, 343 "Warning" (Pound), III, 474 "Warning,The" (Longfellow), II, 498 Warning Hill (Marquand), III, 55-56, 60,68 Warnke, Frank J., Supp. I, Part 1,199 Warren, Austin, 1,265,268,271,287, 473; 0,246; IV, 166; Supp. I, Part 1, 123, Part 2,423,426 Warren, Earl, III, 581 Warren, Gabriel, IV, 244 Warren, Mrs. Robert Penn (Eleanor Clark), IV, 244 Warren, Robert Penn,1,120,190,211, 517, 520; O, 57, 76, 217, 228, 253, 390; III 134,310,382-383,454,455, 482,485,490,496,497,502; IV, 121, 122, 123, 125, 126, 142, 236-259, 261, 262, 279, 284, 340-341, 458; Supp. I,Part 1,359,371,373, Part 2, 386,423,706; Supp. II, Part 1,139; Supp. Ill, Part 2,542

Warren, Rosanna, IV, 244 Wars I Have Seen (Stein), IV, 27,36, 477 Warshawsky, Isaac (pseudonym),see Singer, Isaac Bashevis Warshow, Robert, Supp. I, Part 1,51 "Was" (Faulkner), II, 71 "Was Lowell an Historical Critic?" (Altick), Supp. I, Part 2,423 "Wash" (Faulkner), II, 72 Washington, Booker T., Supp. I, Part 2, 393; Supp. II, Part 1, 157, 160, 167,168,171,225 Washington, George, 1,453; D, 313314; Supp. I, Part 2,399,485,508, 509,511,513,517,518,520,599 Washington Square (James), II, 327, 328 Waskow, Howard J., IV, 354 Wasp (publication), 1,192,196,197 Wasserman, Earl R., Supp. I, Part 2, 439,440,453 Wasserman, Jakob, Supp. I, Part 2, 669 Wasserstrom, William, 1,263 Waste Land, The (Eliot), 1,107, 266, 298, 395, 396, 482, 570-571, 572, 574-575, 577-578, 580, 581, 584, 585,586,587; III, 6-S, 12,196,277278,453,471,492,586;IV,122,123, 124,140,418,419,420; Supp. I, Part I, 272, Part 2,439,455,614; Supp. II, Part 1,4,5,11,96; Supp. Ill, Part 1,9,10,41,63,105 Watch and Ward (James), II, 323 Watch on the Rhine (Hellman), Supp. I, Part 1, 276, 278, 279-281, 283284 "Watcher by the Dead, A" (Bierce), I, 203 "Water" (Emerson), II, 19 "Water" (Lowell), II, 550 Water Street (Merrill), Supp. Ill, Part 1,321-323 "Water Walker" (Wilbur), Supp. Ill, Part 2,548,560 "Watercolor of Grantchester Meadows" (Plath), Supp. I, Part 2,537 Waterman, Arthur E., Ill, 243 Waters, Ethel, 0,587 "Watershed" (Warren), IV, 239 "Watershed, The" (Auden), Supp. II, Part 1,5 Water-Witch, The (Cooper), I, 342343

WATK-WELL / 792 Watkins, Floyd C, II, 221; IV, 452,473 Watkins, James T., 1,193,194 Watson, J.B.,n, 361 Watson, James Sibley, Jr., 1,261 Watson, Richard, Supp. I, Part 2,516, 517 Watson, Robert, n, 390 Watson, William, n, 114 Watt, Frank William, IV, 72 Watteau,JeanAntoine,m,275;IV,79 Watts, Emily Stipes, n, 270; Supp. I, Part 1,115,123 Waugh, Evelyn, 1,480; HI, 281; Supp. I, Part 2,607 Wave, A (Ashbery), Supp. Ill, Part 1, 1,4,24-26 "Wave, A" (Ashbery), Supp. ID, Part 1,9,19,24-25 "Wave, The" (MacLeish), III, 19 Way, Brian, 1,96 "WayDown,The"(Kunitz),Supp.m, Part 1,263 "Way It Is, The" (Ellison), Supp. II, Part 1,245 Way Some People Live, The (Cheever), Supp. I, Part 1,175 WaytoWealth, The (Franklin), 0,101102,110 "Way We Feel Now, The" (DeMott), Supp. I, Part 1,198 "Way We Live Now, The" (Didion), Supp. I, Part 1,198 "Way We Live Now, The" (Sontag), Supp. Ill, Part 2,467-468 "Way You'll Never Be, A" (Hemingway), II, 249 Ways of the Hour, The (Cooper), I, 354 Ways of White Folks, The (Hughes), Supp. I, Part 1,329,330,332 Wayward and the Seeking, The: A Collection of Writings by Jean Toomer (Toomer), Supp. HI, Part 2,478-481,484,487 WaywardBus, The (Steinbeck), IV, 51, 64-65 "We Are Looking at You, Agnes" (Caldwell),I,309 We Must Dance My Darlings (Trilling), Supp. I, Part 1,297 "We Real Cool" (Brooks), Supp. Ill, Part 1,80 "We WeartheMask" (Dunbar),Supp. II, Part 1,199,207,209-210

Weales, Gerald, D, 602,608; IV, 401; Wedekind, Frank, HI, 398 Supp. I, Part 2,627 Wedge, George F., Ill, 360 "Wealth," from Conduct of Life, The "Weed, The" (Bishop), Supp. I, Part 1,80,88-89 (Emerson), II, 2,3-4 "Wealth," from English Traits "Weeding Out Process, The" (Ray), Supp. I, Part 1,199 (Emerson), II, 6 Wealth of Nations, TTie (Smith), II, 109 "Weeds, The" (McCarthy), II, 566 Weary Blues, The (Hughes), Supp. I, Week on the Concord and Merrimack Part 1,325 Rivers, A (Thoreau), IV, 168,169, "Weary Blues, The" (Hughes), Supp. 177,182-183; Supp. I, Part 2,420 I, Part 1,324,325 "Weekend at Ellerslie, A" (Wilson), IV, 431 Weatherby, W. J., IV, 401; Supp. I, Part 1,69 Weekly Magazine, Supp. I, Part 1,126 Weatherhead, Kingsley, III, 217; IV, Weekly Spectator (publication),n,3QQ Weeks, Edward, III, 64,73 425 "WeepingBurgher" (Stevens), IV, 77 Weaver, Harriet, ffl, 471 "Weeping Women" (Levertov), Supp. Weaver, Mike, IV, 425 Weaver, R.M., HI, 97 in, Part 1,282 Weaver, Robert, HI, 384 Wegelin, Christopher, n, 318 Web and the Rock, The (Wolfe), IV, Wegner, Robert E., 1,450 451, 455, 457, 459-460, 462, 464, Weigand, Charmion von, III, 408 467,468 Weil, Simone, 1,298 Web of Earth, The (Wolfe), IV, 451- Weinberg,Heien,I,166 452,456,458,464,465 Weinstein, Hinda, IV, 285 "Web of Life,The" (Nemerov), 111,282 Weinstein, Lorraine "Laura," see Webb, Beatrice, Supp. I, Part 1,5 Perelman, Mrs. S. J. (Lorraine Webb, Constance, IV, 497 "Laura" Weinstein) Webb, James W.,H, 76 Weinstein, Max, IV, 285 Webb, Mary, 1,226 Weinstein, Mrs. Max (Anna WalWebb, Sidney, Supp. I, Part 1,5 lenstein),IV,285,287 Webb, Stephens., 1,564 Weinstein, Nathan, see West, NaWeber, Brom, I, 120, 383, 386, 403, thanael 404; III, 49; IV, 143 Weinstein, Norman, IV, 48 Weird Tales (magazine), IV, 380 Weber, Carl J., 0,413-414; III, 525 Weisenberger, Bernard, 1,427 Weber, Clara Carter, D, 413 Weber, Max, I, 498; Supp. I, Part 2, Weisheit,Rabbi,IV,76 637,648 Weiss, Daniel, 1,427 Weiss, Peter, IV, 117 Weber, Sarah, Supp. I, Part 1,2 Weissman, Philip, III, 408 Webster, C.M.,n, 318 Webster, Daniel, D, 5,9; Supp. I, Part "Welcome Morning" (Sexton), Supp. II, Part 2,696 2,659,687,689,690 Webster, John, 1,384; Supp. I, Part 2, "Welcome the Wrath" (Kunitz),Supp. m, Part 1,261 422 Webster, Noah, Supp. I, Part 2,660; Welcome to Our City (Wolfe), IV, 461 Supp. II, Part 1,77 Welcome to the Monkey House (Vonnegut), Supp. II, Part 2,758 Webster's Seventh New Collegiate Dietionary, 11,525 Weld, Theodore, Supp. I, Part 2,587, 588 Wector, Dixon, D, 103; IV, 213 "Weddingin Brownsville, A" (Singer), Welded (O'Neill), III, 390 IV, 15 Welker, Robert L., 0,221 "WeddingoftheRoseandLotus,The" Welland, Dennis, HI, 169 (Lindsay), Supp. I, Part 2,387 Wellek, Rene\ I, 253, 261, 263, 282, 287; n, 320 "Wedding Toast, A" (Wilbur), Supp. Ill, Part 2,561 Weller, George, HI, 322

WELL-WHEN / 793 Western Lands, The (Burroughs), Welles, Gideon, Supp. I, Part 2,484 Supp. Ill, Part 1,106 Welles, Orson, IV, 476; Supp. I, Part 1, Western Monthly Magazine, The, 67 Supp. I, Part 2,584 "Wellfleet Whale, The" (Kunitz), West-Going Heart, The: A Life of Supp. Ill, Part 1,263,269 Vachel Lindsay (Ruggles), Supp. I, Wellfleet Whale and Companion PoPart 2,402 ems, The (Kunitz), Supp. Ill, Part Westhoff, Clara,s«r Rilke, Mrs. Rainer 1,263 Maria (Clara Westhoff) Wellman, Flora, H, 463-^64,465 Wells, H. G., 1,103,226,241,243,253, Westminster Gazette (publication), I, 408 405,409,415; 0,82,144,276,337, 338,340,458; HI, 456; IV, 340,455 Weston, Jessie L., II, 540; HI, 12; Supp. I, Part 2,438 Wells, Henry W., 1,473; IV, 96 Welsh, Mary, see Hemingway, Mrs. West-running Brook (Frost), II, 155 "West-runningBrook" (Frost),D, 150, Ernest (Mary Welsh) 162-164 Welty, Eudora, D, 194,217,606; IV, "Westward Beach, A" (Jeffers),Supp. 260-284 II, Part 2,418 Wendell, Barrett, HI, 507; Supp. I, "Wet Casements" (Ashbery), Supp. Part 2,414 III, Part 1,18-20 Wendell, Sarah, see Holmes, Mrs. Abiel (Sarah Wendell) Whalen, Marcella, Supp. I, Part 1,49 WeptofWish-ton-Wish, The (Cooper), Wharton, Edith, 1,12,375; 0,96,180, 183, 186, 189-190, 193, 283, 338, 1,339,342,350 444,451; III, 69,175,576; IV, 8,53, "We're Friends Again" (O*Hara),III, 58,302-330 372-373 "Were the Whole Realm of Nature Wharton, Edward Robbins, IV, 310, 313-314,319 Mine" (Watts), 1,458 Wershba, Joseph, Supp. I, Part 2, What a Kingdom It Was (Kinnell), Supp. Ill, Part 1,235,238,239 453 Wescott, Glenway, 1,263,288; D, 85; What a Way to Go (Morris), III, 230232 111,448,454,455 What Are Masterpieces (Stein), IV,3OWest, Benjamin, Supp. I, Part 2,511 31 West, James, H, 562 West, Mrs. Nathanael (Eileen Mc- What Are Years (Moore), HI, 208-209, Kenney),IV,288 210,215 West, Nathanael, 1,97,107,190,211, "What Are Years?" (Moore), III, 211, 298; 0,436; III, 357,425; IV, 285213 307 "WhatCanITellMyBones?"(RoethWest, Ray B., Jr., HI, 455 ke), III, 546,549 West, Rebecca, D, 412,445; III, 598 "What Color Is God?" (Wills), Supp. I, Part 1,71 "West Wall" (Merwin),Supp.III,Part 1,355 "What Do You Do in San Francisco?" "West Wind, The" (Bryant), Supp. I, (Carver), Supp. HI, Part 1,143 Part 1,155 "What God Is Like to Him I Serve" Westall, Julia Elizabeth, see Wolfe, (Bradstreet), Supp. I, Part 1,106Mrs. William Oliver (Julia Eliza107 beth Westall) "WhatIBelieve"(Mumford),Supp.n, Westbrook,Max,I,427 Part 2,479 Westcott, Edward N., D, 102 "What Is an Emotion" (James), II, 350 "Western Association of Writers" What Is Art? (Tolstoi), 1,58 (Chopin), Supp. I, Part 1,217 "What Is Civilization? Africa's An"Western Ballad, A" (Ginsberg), swer" (Du Bois), Supp. II, Part 1, Supp. II, Part 1,311 176 Western Humanities Review (publica- "What Is College For?" (Bourne), I, tion), Supp. I, Part 1,201 216

"What Is Exploitation?" (Bourne), I, 216 "WhatIsIt?"(Carver),Supp.III,Part 1,139 What Is Man? (Twain), II, 434; IV, 209 "What Is Poetry" (Ashbery), Supp. Ill, Part 1,19 What Maisie Knew (James), II, 332 "What Must" (MacLeish), III, 18 "What the Arts Need Now" (Baraka), Supp. II, Part 1,47 "What Thurber Saw" (Brady), Supp. I, Part 2,626 Wia/r/m«Co//ecto(Farrell),n,46,4748 What Was the Relationship of the Lone Ranger to the Means of Production? (Baraka), Supp. II, Part 1,58 What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (Carver), Supp. Ill, Part 1,142-146 "What You Want" (O. Henry), Supp. II, Part 1,402 "What's Happening in America" (Sontag),Supp.m,Part 2,460-461 "What's in Alaska?" (Carver), Supp. III, Part 1,141,143 What's O'Chock (owell), II,511,527,

528 Wheaton, Mabel Wolfe, IV, 473 Wheel of Life, The (Glasgow), II, 176, 178, 179, 183 Wheeler, John, D, 433 Wheeler, Otis B., Supp. I, Part 1, 226 Wheelock, John Hall,IV, 143,461,472 When Boyhood Dreams Come True (Farrell),II,45 "When De Co'n Pone's Hot" (Dunbar), Supp. II, Part 1, 202-203 "When Death Came April Twelve 1945" (Sandburg), III, 591, 593 "When I Buy Pictures" (Moore), III, 205 "When I Came from Colchis" (Merwin), Supp. Ill, Part 1, 343 "When I Left Business for Literature" (Anderson), 1, 101 When Knighthood Was in Flower (Major), III, 320 "[When] Let by rain" (Taylor), IV, 160-161 "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd" (Whitman), IV,347-348, 351

WHEN-WHIT / 794 "When Malindy Sings" (Dunbar), Supp. II, Part 1,200,204-205 When She Was Good (Roth), Supp. Ill, Part 2,403,405,410-413 "When the Frost Is on the Punkin" (Riley), Supp. D, Part 1202 When the Jack Hollers (Hughes), Supp. I, Part 1,328 "When the Light Gets Green" (Warren), IV, 252 When Time Was Born (Farrell), 11,46, 47 "When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision" (Rich), Supp. I, Part 2, 552-553,560 "When We Gonna Rise" (Baraka), Supp. II, Part 1,48 "WHEN WE'LL WORSHIP JESUS" (Baraka), Supp. II, Part 1,54 "Where I'm Calling From" (Carver), Supp. Ill, Part 1,145 Where I'm Calling From: New and Selected Stories (Carver), Supp. m, Part 1,138,148 "Where Is the Voice Coming From?" (Welty),IV,280 "Where Knock Is Open Wide" (Roethke), III, 533-535 Where the Cross Is Made(OWe\\\\m> 388,391 Where Water Comes Together With Other Water (Carver), Supp. HI, Part 1,147,148 "Wherever Home Is" (Wright), Supp. Ill, Part 2,605,606 "Which Theatre Is the Absurd One?" (Albee), 1,71 Whicher, George F., 1,473; IV, 189 Whicher, Stephen, 0,20,23,24 Whilomville Stories (Crane), 1,414 "Whip, The" (Robinson), III, 513 Whipple, Thomas K., 0,456,458; IV, 427; Supp. I, Part 2,402 "Whip-poor-will, The" (Thurber), Supp. I, Part 2,616 "Whispering Leaves" (Glasgow), II, 190 "Whispers of Heavenly Death" (Whitman), IV, 348 "Whistle, The" (Franklin), II, 121 "Whistle, The" (Welty), IV, 262 Whistler, James, I, 484; III, 461, 465,466; IV, 77,369 "Whistling Dick's Christmas Stock-

ing" (O. Henry), Supp. II, Part 1, 390,392 Whitbread,T.B.,I,95 White, E. B., Supp. I, Part 2,602,607, 608, 612, 619, 620, 627, 651-681; Supp. II, Part 1,143 White, Elinor, see Frost, Mrs. Robert (Elinor White) White, Elizabeth Wade, Supp. I, Part 1,100,103,111,123 White, Henry Kirke, Supp. I, Part 1, 150 White, Joel, Supp. I, Part 2,654,678 White, Lillian, Supp. I, Part 2,651 White, Lucia, 1,258 White, Maria, see Lowell, Mrs. James Russell (Maria White) White, Morton, 1,258; Supp. I, Part 2, 647,648,650 White, Mrs. E. B. (Katharine Sergeant Angell), Supp. I, Part 2,610,653, 655,656,669 White, Ray Lewis, 1,119,120 White, Ruth, Y., Supp. I, Part 2,627 White, Sara, see Dreiser, Mrs. Theodore White, Stanley, Supp. I, Part 2, 651, 655 White, T.H.,HI, 522 White, T.W., HI, 411,415 White, Walter, Supp. I, Part 1,345 White, William A., 1,252; 0,270; III, 72; IV, 189,307,354,424; Supp. I, Part 2,401 White Buildings: Poems by Hart Crane (Crane), 1,385,386,390-395,400 White Deer, The (Thurber), Supp. I, Part 2,606 White Fang (London), II, 471-472,481 "White Gods and Black Americans" (O'Brien), Supp. I, Part 1,70 "White Heron, A" (Jewett), II, 409 White Heron, A, and Other Stories (Jewett), II, 396 White Jacket; or, The World in a Manof-War (Melville), III, 80, 81, 84, 94 "White Lights, The" (Robinson), III, 524 WhiteMan, Listen!( Wright), IV, 478, 488,489,494 "White Mulberry Tree,The" (Gather), 1,319 White Negro, The (Mailer), III, 36-37

White Oxen and Other Stories, The (Burke), 1,269,271 "White Silence, The" (London), II, 468 "White Snake, The" (Sexton), Supp. H, Part 2,691 "White Spot" (Anderson), 1,116 Whiteficld, George, 1,546 White-Footed Deer and Other Poems (Bryant), Supp. I, Part 1,157 White-Haired Lover (Shapiro), Supp. n, Part 2,703,717 Whitehead, AlfredNorth, 111,605,619, 620; IV, 88; Supp. I, Part 2, 554, 647 Whitehead, Margaret, IV, 114, 115, 116 Whitehead, Mrs. Catherine, IV, 116 "Whiteness of the Whale, The" (Melville), HI, 84,86 Whitlock, Brand, 0,276 Whitman, George, IV, 346,350 Whitman, Iris, D, 510 Whitman, Richard, HI, 72 Whitman, Walt, 1,61,68,98,103,104, 109, 219, 220, 227, 228, 237, 242, 246, 250, 251, 260, 261, 285, 286, 381, 384, 386, 3%, 397, 398, 402, 419, 430, 459, 460, 483, 485, 486, 577; H, 7,8,18,127,140,273-274, 275, 289, 295, 301, 320, 321, 373, 445, 446, 451, 457, 494, 529, 530, 552; III, 171,175,177,181-182,189, 203, 234, 260, 426, 430, 453, 454, 461, 505, 507-508, 511, 528, 548, 552, 555, 559, 567, 572, 576, 577, 579,584,585,595,597,606,609; IV, 74,169,191,192,202,331-354,405, 409, 416, 444, 450-451, 457, 463, 464,469,470,471;Supp.I,Partl,6, 79,167,311,314,325,365,368,372, Part 2,374,384,385,387,389,391, 393, 399, 416, 436, 455, 456, 458, 473, 474, 475, 525, 540, 579, 580, 582,682,691,705;Supp.III,Partl, 6,20,156,239-241,253,340, Part 2, 596 Whitman (Masters), Supp. I, Part 2, 473,475,476 "Whitman: The Poet and the Mask" (Cowley), Supp. II, Part L, 143 Whitney, Blair, Supp. I, Part 2,403 Whittemore, Reed, III, 268,289; IV, 143

WHIT-WILL / 795 Whittier, Elizabeth, Supp. I, Part 2, 700,701,703 Whittier, John Greenleaf, I, 216; D, 275; 111,52; Supp. I, Part 1,168,299, 313,317,372, Part 2,420,602,68^ 707 Whittier, Mary, Supp. I, Part 2,683 "Whittier" (Hall), Supp. I, Part 2,706 "Whittier" (Powell), Supp. I, Part 2, 706 Whittier: A Comprehensive Annotated Bibliography (von Frank), Supp. I, Part 2,705 Whittier and Whittierland: Portrait of a Poet and His World (ed. Pickard et al.), Supp. I, Part 2,706 Whittier: Bard of Freedom (Bennett), Supp. I, Part 2,705 "Whittier Birthday Speech" (Twain), Supp. I, Part 1,313 Whittier Newsletter, Supp. I, Part 2, 706 "Whittier Reconsidered" (Jones), Supp. I, Part 2,706 Whittier-Land:A Handbook of North Essex (Pickard), Supp. I, Part 2, 706 "Whittier's Fundamental Religious Faith" (Jones), Supp. I, Part 2,706 "Whittier's Snow-Bound: A Poem About the Imagination" (Trawick), Supp. I, Part 2,706 Whitty,J.H.,III,431 "Who Be Kind To" (Ginsberg), Supp. II, Part 1,323 Who Owns America?, IV, 237 "Who's Passing for Who?" (Hughes), Supp. I, Part 1,330 Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (Albee), 1,71,77-81,83,85,86,87,94; IV, 230 Who's Who, n, 530, III, 466 "Whoever Was Using This Bed" (Carver), Supp. Ill, Part 1,148 "Whoever You Are Holding Me Now in Hand" (Whitman), IV, 342 "Whole World Knows,The" (Welty), IV, 272 Why Are We in Vietnam! (Mailer),III, 27,29,30,33,34-35,39,42,44 "Why Did the Balinese Chicken Cross the Road?" (Walker), Supp. Ill, Part 2,527 "Why Do the Heathens Rage?"

(O'Connor), III, 351

Why I Am Not a Christian (Russell), Supp. I, Part 2,522 "Why I Entered the Gurdjieff Work" (Toomer), Supp. Ill, Part 2,481 "Why I Live at the P.O." (Welty), IV, 262 "Why Is Economics Not an Evolutionary Science?" (Veblen), Supp. I, Part 2,634 "Why Negro Women Leave Home" (Brooks), Supp. Ill, Part 1,75 "Why the Little Frenchman Wears His Hand in a Sling" (Poe), III, 425 Why We Behave Like Microbe Hunters (Thurber), Supp. I, Part 2,606 "Wichita Vortex Sutra" (Ginsberg), Supp. II, Part 1,319,321,323-325, 327 Wickes, George, III, 191,192 Wickford Point (Marquand), III, 50, 58,64-65,69 "Wide Net, The" (Welty), IV, 266 Wide Net and Other Stories, The (Welty), IV, 261,264-266,271 "Wide Prospect, The" (Jarrell), II, 376-377 Widmer, Kingsley, III, 192 Wieland; or, The Transformation. An American Tale (Brown), Supp. I, Part 1,128-132,133,137,140 Wieners, John, Supp. II, Part 1,32 "Wifebeater,The"(Sexton),Supp.II, Part 2,693 "Wife-Wooing" (Updike), IV, 226 Wigglesworth, Michael, IV, 147,156; Supp. I, Part 1,110, 111 Wilbur, Richard, H, 557; III, 527; Supp. Ill, Part 1,64, Part 2,541-565 Wilcocks, Alexander, Supp. I, Part 1, 125 Wilcox, Ella Wheeler, Supp. II, Part 1, 197 Wild, John, D, 362,363-364,365,366 Wild, Robert, IV, 155 WildBoyofAveyron, The (Hard), see De Veducation d'un homme sauvage Wild Boys, The: A Book of the Dead (Burroughs), Supp. ID, Part 1,106107 Wild Flag, The (White), Supp. I, Part 2,654 "Wild Flowers" (Caldwell), 1,310 "Wild Honey Suckle,The" (Freneau), Supp. II, Part 1,253,264,266

Wild in the Country (Odets), Supp. II, Part 2,546 Wild Old Wicked Man, The (MacLeish),III,3,20 Wild Palms, The (Faulkner), 11,68-69 "Wild Palms, The" (Faulkner), II, 68 "WildPeaches" (Wy lie), Supp. I, Part 4707,712 Wilde, Oscar, I, 50, 66, 381, 384; D, 515; IV, 77,350 Wilder, Amos Parker, IV, 356 Wilder, Isabel, IV, 357,366,375 Wilder, Mrs. Amos Parker (Isabella Thornton Niven), IV, 356 Wilder, Thornton, 1,70,360,482; IV, 355-377,431; Supp. I, Part 2,609 "Wilderness" (Sandburg), DI, 584,595 Wilderness (Warren), IV, 256 "Wilderness, The" (Merwin), Supp. Ill, Part 1,340,345 "Wilderness, The" (Robinson), III, 524 "Wildwest" (MacLeish), III, 14 Wilhelm Meister (Goethe), II, 291 Wilhelm, Jane, III, 121 Wilkes,John,Supp.I,Part 2,503,519, 522 Wilkins, Roy, Supp. I, Part 1,345 "Will to Believe,The" (James), II, 352 Will to Believe, The, and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (James), II, 356; IV, 28 Will to Change, Poems 1968-70, The (Rich), Supp. I, Part 2, 551, 557559 Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? (Carver),Supp.m,Part 1,138,140144 "Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?" (Carver), Supp. Ill, Part 1,137,141 Willard, Samuel, IV, 150 William I, King, IV, 148 William III, King, IV, 145 William the Conqueror, Supp. I, Part 2,507 William Cullen Bryant (Bigelow), Supp. I, Part 1,173 "William Cullen Bryant" (Blanck), Supp. I, Part 1,173 William Cullen Bryant (Bradley), Supp. I, Part 1,173 William Cullen #rya/tt (Brown),Supp. I, Part 1,173 William Cullen Bryant (McLean), Supp. I, Part 1,173

WILL-WINT / 796 "William Cullen Bryant" (Rocks), Supp. I, Part 1,173 William Cullen Bryant: Representative Selections (McDowell), Supp. I, Part 1,173 "William Faulkner's Legend of the South" (Cowley), Sup^. II, Part 1, 143 "William Ireland's Confession** (Miller), III, 147-148 William James and Phenomenology: A Study of the "Principles of Psychology9' (Wilshire), II, 362 William Styron's Nat Turner: Ten Black Writers Respond (ed. Clarke), IV, 115 "William Wilson" (Poe), II, 475; III, 410,412 Williams, Ames W., 1,426 Williams, Blanche C, D, 485 Williams, Cecil, D, 508,510 Williams, Charles, Supp. II, Part 1,15, 16 Williams, Gratis D., 1,120 Williams, Dakin, IV, 379 Williams, Daniel D., Ill, 313 Williams, David, D, 149 Williams, Edward, 1,564; IV, 404 Williams, Edwina Dakin, IV, 379,401 Williams, Horace, IV, 453 Williams, John A., IV, 497 Williams, John Sharp, IV, 378 Williams, Miller, III, 502 Williams, Mrs. William Carlos (Florence Herman), IV, 404 Williams, Paul, IV, 404 Williams, Raymond, HI, 169 Williams, Roger, Supp. I, Part 2,699 Williams, Rose, IV, 379 Williams, Solomon, 1,549 Williams, Stanley T., 0,301,316,317, 318,510; Supp. I, Part 1,173,251 Williams, Stephen, IV, 148 Williams, Ted, IV, 216 Williams, Tennessee, I, 73, 81, 113, 211;n,190,194;III,145,147;IV,4, 378-401; Supp. I, Part 1,290,291 Williams, William, IV, 404,405 Williams, William Carlos, I, 61, 62, 229, 255, 256, 261, 285, 287, 428, 438,446,450,539; 0,133,536,542, 543,544,545;III, 194,196,198,214, 217, 269, 409, 453, 457, 458, 464, 465,591,598; IV, 30,74,75,76,94,

95,96,286,287,307,402~425;Supp. I, Part I, 254, 255, 259, 266, 275; Supp. II,Part 1,9,30,308,318, Part 2,421,443; Supp. ID, Part 1,9,147, 239,271,275,276,278,350, Part 2, 542, 610, 613, 614, 615, 616, 617, 621,622,626,628 Williams family, 1,547,549 Williamson, George, 1,591 Willingham, Calder, HI, 49 Willis, Nathaniel Parker, H, 313; m, 431; Supp. I, Part 2,405 Wills, Garry, Supp. I, Part 1,71,294 Wills, Ridley, IV, 122 Wilshire, Bruce, H, 362,364,366 Wilson, Angus, IV, 259,430,435 Wilson, Douglas, III, 622 Wilson, Edmund (father), IV, 441 Wilson, Edmund, 1,67,185,213,236, 247,260,263,434,450,482; 0,79, 80,81,86,87,91,97,98,99,146,276, 341,430,438,530,562,587;IH, 144, 455,588; IV, 48,72,307,308,310, 330, 377,426-449; Supp. I, Part 1, 372, Part 2,407,627,646,678,709, 730; Supp. II, Part 1,19, 90,106, 136,137,143; Supp. Ill, Part 2,612 Wilson, Reuel,0,562 Wilson, T. C, HI, 217; IV, 425 Wilson, Thomas, IV, 153 Wilson, Woodrow, 1,245,246,490; O, 183,253; III, 105,581; Supp. I, Part 1,21, Part 2,474,643 Wilton, David, IV, 147 Windham, Donald, IV, 382,399 "Windhover" (Hopkins),I,397;II,539 "Windows" (Jarrell), II, 388,389 "Winds, The" (Welty), IV, 265 Windy McPherson 'sSon (Anderson), 1,101,102-103,105,111 "Wine" (Carver), Supp. in, Part 1,138 "Wine Menagerie, The" (Crane), I, 389,391 Wine of the Puritans, The: A Study of Present-Day America (Brooks), I, 240 "Wine of Wizardry, A" (Sterling), I, 208 Winesburg, Ohio: A Group of Tales of Ohio Small Town Life (Anderson), I, 97,102,103,104,105-108, 111, 112,113,114,116; III, 224,579 Wing-and-Wing, The (Cooper), 1,350, 355

Wings of the Dove, The (James), I, 436;II,320,323,333,334-335;Supp. H, Part 1,94-95 Wink, John H., Supp. I, Part 1,199 Winner, Arthur, IV, 119 Winner Take Nothing (Hemingway), 11,249 "Winnie** (Brooks), Supp. HI, Part 1, 86 Winslow, Devereux, D, 547 Winslow, Harriet, D, 552-553 Winslow, Ola Elizabeth, 1,547,564 Winslow, Warren, D, 540 "Winter Daybreak at Vence, A" (Wright), Supp. HI, Part 1,249-250 Winter Diary, A (Van Doren), 1,168 "Winter Dreams" (Fitzgerald), II, 80, 94 "Winter in Dunbarton" (Lowell), II, 547 Winter Insomnia (Carver), Supp. Ill, Part 1,138 "Winter Landscape" (Benryman), I, 174 Winter Lightning (Nemerov), III, 269 Winter of Our Discontent, The (Steinbeck), IV, 52,65-66,68 "Winter on Earth" (Toomer), Supp. Ill, Part 2,486 "Winter Piece, A" (Bryant), Supp. I, Part 1,150,155 "Winter Remembered" (Ransom), 111,492-493 "Winter Scenes" (Bryant), see "Winter Piece, A" "Winter Sleep" (Wylie), Supp. I, Part 2,711,729 "Winter Swan" (Bogan), Supp. Ill, Part 1,52 Winter Trees (Plath), Supp. I, Part 2, 526,539,541 "Winter Weather Advisory" (Ashbery), Supp. Ill, Part 1,26 Winternitz, Mary, see Cheever, Mrs. John (Mary Winternitz) Winterrowd, Prudence, 1,217,224 Winters, Yvor, 1,59,63,70,386,393, 397,398,402,404,471,473; 0,246; III, 194,217,432,498,502,526,550; IV, 96,153,425; Supp. I, Part 1,268, 275; Supp. II, Part 2,416,666,785816 Winterset (Anderson), III, 159 Winther, Sophus Keith, III, 408

WINT-WOOL / 797 Wolfe, James, Supp. I, Part 2,498 Wolfe, Mabel, IV, 454 Wolfe, Mrs. William Oliver (Julia Elizabeth Westail), IV, 454 Wolfe, Peter, 1,96 Wolfe, Thomas, 1,119,288,289,374, 478,495; 0,457; ffl, 40,108,278, 334,482; IV, 52,97,357,45&-4T3; Supp. I, Part 1,29 Wolfe,Tom,Supp. Ill, Part 2,567-588 Wolfe, William Oliver, IV, 454 "Wolfe Homo Scribens" (Cowley), Supp. n, Part 1,144 Wolfert,Ira,m,169 Wolfert's Roost (Irving), II, 314 Wolff, CynthiaGriffin,Supp. I, Parti, 226 Wolff, Geoffrey, Supp. II, Part 1,97 Wolkenfeld,J.S.,IV,24 Wollaston, William, H, 108 Wolle, Helen Eugenia, see Doolittle, Mrs. Charles Leander (Helen Eugenia Wolle) Wollstonecraft, Mary, Supp. I, Part 1, 126, Part 2,512,554 Woman at the Washington Zoo, The (Jarreil), II, 367,386,387,389 "Woman Dead in Her Forties A" (Rich), Supp. I, Part 2,574-575 "Woman in the House, A" (Caldwell), 1,310 Woman in White, The (Collins), Supp. I, Part 1,35,36 Woman of Andros, The (Wilder), IV, 356,363-364,367,368,374 Woman on the Porch, The (Gordon), 0,199,209-211 "Woman on the Stair, The" (MacLeish), III, 15-16 Woman Within, The (Glasgow), D, 183, 190-191 "Womanhood" (Brooks), Supp. DI, Part 1,77 Woman's Share in Primitive Culture n,in (Mason), Supp. I, Part 1,18 Witt, Grace, HI, 49 "Woman's Will, A: Kate Chopin on Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Supp. HI, Part Selfhood, Wifehood, and Mother2,626-627 hood" (Zlotnick), Supp. I, Part 1, "Wives and Mistresses" (Hardwick), 226 Supp. Ill, Part 1,211-212 Woman's Home Companion (magaWolf, William John, III, 313 zine), III, 591 Wolfe, Ben, IV, 454 Woman's Honor (Glaspell), Supp. in, Wolfe, Don M., IV, 117 Part 1,179 Wolfe, Glenn Joseph, Supp. I, Part 2, Women and Economics (Gilman), 402 Supp. I, Part 2,637

Winthrop, John, Supp. I, Part 1, 99, 100,101,102,105, Part 2,484,485 Wirt, William, 1,232 Wirth, Louis, IV, 475 Wisdom of the Heart, The (Miller), ID, 178,184 M«?£/o0d(O'Connor),in,337,338, 339-343, 344, 345, 346, 350, 354, 356,357 "Wiser Than a God" (Chopin), Supp. I, Part 1,208 "Wish for a Young Wife" (Roethke), 01,548 Wismer, Helen Muriel, see Thurber, Mrs. James (Helen Muriel Wismer) Wisse, Ruth R., 1,166 Wister, Owen, 1,62 14 Witch Burning" (Plath),Supp.I,Part 2,539 "Witch Doctor" (Hayden), Supp. II, Part 1,368,380 "Witch of Coos,The" (Frost), II, 154155 "Witch of Wenham, The" (Whittier), Supp. I, Part 2,694,696 "Witchcraft in Bullet Park" (Gardner), Supp. I, Part 1,198 With Eyes at the Back of Our Heads (Levertov), Supp. Ill, Part 1,276277 "With Mercy for the Greedy" (Sexton), Supp. II, Part 2,680 With Shuddering Fall (Oatcs)ySupv.ll, Part 2,504-506 With the Empress Dowager of China (Carl), III, 475 "Withered Skins of Berries" (Toomer), Supp. Ill, Part 2,485 Witherington, Paul, 1,96; Supp. I, Part 1,148 Witherspoon, John, Supp. I, Part 2,504 "Witness, The" (Porter), III, 443-444 Witness Tree, A (Frost), II, 155 Wits Recreations (Mennes and Smith),

Women and Thomas Harrow

(Marquand), III, 50,61,62,66,68, 69^70,71 Women at Point Sur, The (Jeffers), Supp. II, Part 2,430-431 Women in Love (Lawrence), m, 27,34 Women in the Nineteenth Century (Fuller), Supp. II, Part 1,279,292, 294-296 Women ofTrachis (trans. Pound), III, 476 "Women Reformers and American Culture, 1870-1930" (Conway), Supp. I, Part 1,19,27 Wonderful O, The (Thurber), Supp. I, Part 2,612 Wonderland (Oates), Supp. II, Part 2, 511,512,514-515 Wonders of the Invisible World, The (Mather), Supp. II, Part 2, 456459,460,467 Wonder-Working Providence (Johnson), IV, 157 Wood, Audrey, IV, 381 Wood, Mabel, 1,199 Wood, Margery, III, 49 Wood, Mrs. Henry, Supp. I, Part 1,35 Wood, Richard Clement, III, 191 "Wood Dove at Sandy Spring, The" (MacLeish),III,19 Woodberry, George Edward, 111,431, 432,508 Woodbridge, Frederick, 1,217,224 Woodbridge, John, Supp. I, Part 1, 101,102,114 Woodbury, Charles J., D, 23 "Wooden Umbrella, The" (Porter), IV, 26 "Woodnotes" (Emerson), II, 7,19 Woodress, James L., Jr., n, 245,292, 294; HI, 431 Woodrow, James, Supp. I, Part 1,349, 366 Woods, Robert A., Supp. I, Part 1,19, 27 Woodson, Thomas, 0,557; HI, 432 Woodward, C Vann, IV, 114,47O-471 Woodward, Robert H., 0,148,149 Woodwell, Roland B., Supp. I, Part 2, 706 Woolf, Virginia, 1,53,79,112,309; O, 320,415;IV,59;Supp.I,Part 2,553, 714,718 Woolicott, Alexander, IV, 432; Supp. I, Part 2,664

WORC-WRIT / 795 Worcester, Samuel, 1, 458 "Word About Simple, A" (Jackson), Supp. I, Part 1,348 "Word Out of theSca, A" (Whitman), IV, 344 "Wordplay of James Thurber, The" (Eckler), Supp. I, Part 2, 627 "Words" (Merwin), Supp. Ill, Part 1, 352 "Words" (Plath), Supp. I, Part 2, 547 Words for Dr. Y (Sexton), Supp. II, Part 2, 698 "Words for Hart Crane" (Lowell), I, 381; 0, 547 "Words for Maria" (Merrill), Supp. Ill, Part 1,327 "Words for the Unknown Makers" (Kunitz), Supp. Ill, Part 1, 264 Words for therWimd(Roehke),III,529, 533,541,543,545 "Words for the Wind" (Roethke), III, 542-543 Words in the Mourning Time (Hayden), Supp. II, Part 1, 361, 366, 367 "Words in the Mourning Time" (Hayden), Supp. II, Part 1, 370371 "WordsintoFiction"(Welty),IV,279 "WordsofaYoungGirl"(Lowell),II, 554 Wordsworth, William, 1, 283, 522, 524, 525, 588; O, 7, 11, 17, 18, 97, 169, 273,303,304,532, 549,552; 111,219, 263, 277, 278, 511, 521, 523, 528, 583; IV, 120, 331, 343, 453, 465; Supp. I, Part 1, 150, 151, 154, 161, 163, 312, 313, 349, 365, Part 2, 375, 409, 416, 422, 607, 621, 622, 673, 674, 675, 676, 677, 71O-711, 729; Supp. II, Part 1, 4; Supp. Ill, Part 1, 12,15,73,279 Work (Alcott), Supp. I, Part 1,32-33, 42 "Work Notefr-'66" (Baraka), Supp. II, Part 1,47 Work of Art (Lewis), II, 453-454 Work of Stephen Crane, The (ed. Follett),I,405 "Work on Red Mountain, The" (Harte), Supp. II, Part 1, 339 WorksofLove, The (Morris), III, 223224,225,233 World and Africa, The: An Inquiry into the Part Which Africa Has

Played in World History (Du Bois), Supp. II, Part 1,184-185 "World and the Door, The" (O. Henry), Supp. II, Part 1,402 World Elsewhere, A: The Place of Style in American Literature (Poirier), I, 239; Supp. I, Part 2,681 World Enough and Time (Warren), IV, 243,253-254 "World I Live In, The" (Williams), IV,388 World I Never Made, A (Farrell), II, 34,35,424 World in the Attic, The (Morris), III, 222-223,224 "World in Thurber's Fables, The" (Weales), Supp. I, Part 2,627 World Is a Wedding, The (Schwartz), Supp. II, Part 2,643,654-660 "World Is a Wedding, The" (Schwartz), Supp. II, Part 2,655656,657 "World Is too Much with Us, The" (Wordsworth), Supp. I, Part 1,312 Wo rid of Apples, 77u?(Cheever),Supp. I, Part 1,191,193 World of Gwendolyn Brooks, The (Brooks), Supp. HI, Part 1,83,84 WorldofH. G. Wells, The (Brooks), I, 240,241,242 World of Light, A: Portraits and Celebrations (Sarton), Supp. Ill, Part 1,62 "World of Pure Experience, A" (James), II, 356-357 WorldofSex, 7MMiller),ffl,170,178, 187 "World of Tomorrow, The" (White), Supp. I, Part 2,663 World of Washington Irving, The (Brooks), 1,256-257 World So Wide (Lewis), II, 456 "World Without Objects Is a Sensible Place, A" (Wilbur), Supp. Ill, Part 2,550 World's Body, The (Ransom), III, 497, 499; Supp. II, Part 1,146 World's Greatest Hit, The: Uncle Tom's Cabin (Birdoff), Supp. I, Part 2,601 "World's Fair" (Berryman), 1,173 World's Fair, The (Fitzgerald), II, 93 Worldly Philosophers, The (Heilbroner), Supp. I, Part 2,644,650 Worlds of Color (Du Bois), Supp. II, Part 1,185-186

"Worlds of Color" (Du Bois), Supp. II, Part 1,175 "World-Telegram" (Berryman), I, 173 "Worn Path, A" (Welty), IV, 262 "Worsening Situation" (Ashbery), Supp. HI, Part 1,17-18 "Worship" (Emerson), II, 2,4-5 "Worship and Church Bells" (Paine), Supp. I, Part 2,521 Wound and the Bow, The: Seven Studies in Literature (Wilson), IV, 429 Wounds in the Rain (Crane), I, 409, 414,423 "Wraith, The" (Roethke), III, 542 "Wreathfora Bridal" (Plath),Supp. I, Part 2,537 "Wreck of Rivermouth, The" (Whittier),Supp.I,Part 2,694,696697 Wrenn,JohnH.,I,496 Wright, Austin McGiffert, 1,120 Wright, Bernie, 1,191,193 Wright, CelesteT.,Supp.I,Part 2,730 Wright, Chauncey, n, 344 Wright, Conrad, 1,566 Wright, Donald P., Supp. I, Part 2,706 Wright, Frank Lloyd, 1,104,483 Wright, George, III, 479 Wright, Harold Bell, H, 467-468 Wright,James,I,291;m,289;Supp.ni9 Part 1,249, Part 2,541,589-607 Wright, Mrs. Richard (Ellen Poplar), IV, 476 Wright, Nathalia, D, 317; III, 98; IV, 155,166 Wright,PhilipGreen,ni,578,579,580 Wright, Richard, H, 586; IV, 40,474497; Supp. I, Part 1,51,52,64,332, 337;Supp.D,Part 1,17,40,221,228, 235,250 "Wright, Ellison, Baldwin—Exorcising the Demon" (Bryant), Supp. I, Part 1,69 "Wright, the Protest Novel, and Baldwin's Faith" (Kim), Supp. I, Part 1,70 "Writer,The" (Wilbur), Supp. HI, Part 2,561,562 Writer in America, The (Brooks), I, 253,254,257 "Writers" (Lowell), II, 554 Writers on the Left (Aaron), IV, 429; Supp. II, Part 1,137

WRIT-YOUN / 799 "Writer's Quest for a Parnassus, A" (Williams), IV, 392 "Writing" (Nemerov), III, 275 "Writing American Fiction" (Roth), Supp. I, Part 1,192, Part 2,431,453; Supp. HI, Part 2,414,420,421 "Writing of Apollinaire, The" (Zukofsky), Supp. Ill, Part 2,616, 617 Writing on the Wall, The, and Literary Essays (McCarthy), II, 579 Writings to an Unfinished Accompaniment (Merwin), Supp. Ill, Part 1> 352 "Written History as an Act of Faith" (Beard), Supp. I, Part 2,492 Wroth, Lawrence C, H, 124 "Wunderkind" (McCullers), II, 585 Wundt,Wilhelm, 11,345 Wyandotte (Cooper), 1,350,355 Wyatt, Bryant N., IV, 235 Wyatt, Thomas, Supp. I, Part 1,369 Wylie, Belle, see O'Hara, Mrs. John (Belle Wylie) Wylie, Elinor, IV, 436; Supp. I, Part 2, 707-730; Supp. Ill, Part 1, 2, 63, 318-319 Wylie, Horace, Supp. I, Part 2, 708, 709 Wylie, Philip, III, 223 Wyllys, Ruth, see Taylor, Mrs. Edward (Ruth Wyliys) "Wyoming Valley Tales" (Crane), I, 409 Xaipe (Cummings), I, 430, 432-433, 447 Xenophon, 11,105 Xingu and Other Stories (Wharton), IV, 314,320 Y & X (Olson), Supp. II, Part 2,556 Yage Letters, The (Burroughs), Supp. III, Part 1,94,98,100 Yale Literary Magazine, D, 439,440; IV, 356 Yale Review (publication), III, 292; Supp. I, Part 1,174 Yamamoto, Isoroku, Supp. I, Part 2, 491 Yankee City (Warner), III, 60 Yankee Doodle (publication), III, 77

"Yankee Gallimaufry" (Baker), Supp. I, Part 1,198 Yankee in Canada, A (Thoreau), IV, 188 Yankey in London (Tyler), 1,344 "Yannina"(Merrill),Supp.III,Partl, 329 Yates, Norris W., IV, 235; Supp. I, Part 2,626 Yates family, D, 173 Yatron, Michael, Supp. I, Part 2,402, 478 "Year, The" (Sandburg), III, 584 "Year of Mourning, The" (Jeffers), Supp. II, Part 2,415 Year's Life, A (Lowell), Supp. I, Part 2,405 "Years of Birth" (Cowley), Supp. O, Part 1,149 Years of My Youth (Howells), II, 276 "Years of Wonder" (White), Supp. I, Part 2,652,653 Years With Ross, The (Thurber),Supp. I, Part 2,619,681 Yeats, John Butler, III, 458 Yeats, William Butler, 1,69,172,384, 389,403,434,478,494,532; 11,168169,566,598; III, 4,5,8,18,19,20, 23, 29, 40,205,249, 269, 270-271, 272, 278, 279, 294, 347, 409, 457, 458-460, 472, 473, 476-^77, 521, 523, 524, 527, 528, 533, 540, 541, 542,543-544,591-592; IV, 89,93, 121, 126, 136, 140, 271, 394, 404; Supp. I, Part 1,79,80,254,257,262, Part 2,388,389; Supp. II, Part 1,1, 4,9,20,26,361;Supp.III,Partl,59, 63,236,238,253 Yellow Book (publication), 1,421;III, 508 "Yellow Girl" (Caldwell), 1,310 "Yellow Gown, The" (Anderson), I, 114 "Yellow River" (Tate), IV, 141 "Yellow Violet, The" (Bryant), Supp. I, Part 1,154,155 " Yentl the Yeshiva Boy" (Singer), IV, 15,20 Yerkes, Charles E., 1,507,512 "Yes and It's Hopeless" (Ginsberg), Supp. II, Part 1,326 Yet Other Waters (Farrell), II, 29,38, 39,40

Yevtushenko, Yevgeny, Supp. Ill, Part 1,268 Yohannan, J. D., n, 20,24 Yonge, Charlotte, n, 174 "Yore" (Nemerov), III, 283 "York Beach" (Toomer), Supp. Ill, Part 2,486 Yorke, Dorothy, Supp. I, Part 1,258 Yoshe Kalb (Singer), IV, 2 Yost, Karl, HI, 144 "You All Know the Story of the Other Woman" (Sexton), Supp. II, Part 2,688 "You, Andrew Marvell" (MacLeish), III, 12-13 You Can't Go Home Again (Wolfe), IV, 450,451,454,456,460,462,468, 469,470 "You Can't Go Home Again: James Baldwin and the South" (Dance), Supp. I, Part 1,70 You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down (Walker),Supp.m,Part 2,520,525, 531 "You Can't Tell a Man by the Song He Sings" (Roth), Supp. Ill, Part 2, 406 "You Don't Know What Love Is" (Carver), Supp. DI, Part 1,147 "You, Dr. Martin" (Sexton), Supp. II, Part 2,673 You, Emperors, and Others: Poems 1957-1960 (Warren), IV, 245 "You, Genoese Mariner" (Merwin), Supp. Ill, Part 1,343 YouHaveSeen Their Faces (Caldwell), 1,290,293-294,295,304,309 You Know Me Al (comic strip), II, 423 You Know Me Al (Lardner), II, 26, 415,419,422,431 You Touched Me! (Williams and Windham), IV, 382,385,387,390, 392-393 "You Wouldn'tBelieve It" (Broyard), Supp. I, Part 1,198 Young, Alfred F., Supp. I, Part 2, 525 Young, Art, IV, 436 Young, Charles L., D, 24 Young, Edward, O, 111; III, 415,503 Young, Philip, 0,270,306,318 Young, Stark, HI, 408 Young, Thomas Daniel, III, 502

YOUN-ZULE / 800 "Young" (Sexton), Supp. II, Part 2, 680 "Young Child and His Pregnant Mother, A" (Schwartz), Supp. II, Part 2,650 Young Christian, The( Abbott), Supp. I, Part 1,38 "Young Dr. Gosse" (Chopin), Supp. I, Part 1,211,216 "Young Folks, The" (Salinger), III, 551 Young Folk's Cyclopaedia of Persons and Places (Champiin), III, 577 "Young Goodman Brown" (Hawthorne), II, 229 "'Young Goodman Brown* and 'The Enormous Radio'" (Ten Harmsel), Supp. I, Part 1,199 Young Immigrants, 77te(Lardner),II, 426 Young Lonigan: A Boyhood in Chicago Streets (Farrell), II, 31,41 Young Manhood of Studs Lonigan, The (Farrell), II, 31,34 Young Poet's Primer (Brooks), Supp. m, Part 1,86 "Young Sammy's First Wild Oats" (Santayana),III,607,615 "Your Face on the Dog's Neck" (Sexton), Supp. II, Part 2,686 "Youth" (Hughes), Supp. I, Part 1, 321 Youth and Life (Bourne), 1,217-222, 232

Youth andihe Bright Medusa (Gather), 1,322 Youth's Companion, The (magazine), 11,397 Yugen (periodical), Supp. II, Part 1, 30 Yurka, Blanche, Supp. I, Part 1,67 Yvernelle:A Legend of Feudal France (Norris),III,314

Zabel, Morton Dauwen, D, 431; HI, 194,215,217,525; Supp. I, Part 2, 721,730 Zabriskie, George, IV, 425 Zangwill, Israel, 1,229 Zarathustra,III,602 Zaturenska, Gregory, 1,404 Zaturenska, Horace, 1,404 Zaturenska, Marya, 1,404; D, 533; III, 144,217 Zechariah (biblical book), IV, 152 "Zeitl and Rickel" (Singer), IV, 20 Zend-Avesta (Fechner), II, 358 "Zeusover Redeye" (Hayden),Supp. II, Part 1,380 Zevi, Sabbatai, IV, 6 Ziegfeld, Florenz, D, 427-428 Ziff,Larzer, 1,427; 11,149 Zigrosser, Carl, 1,226,228,231 Zimbardo, Rose A., 1,96 Zimmer, Dieter E., Ill, 266

Zinsser, Hans, 1,251,385 Zlotnick, Joan, Supp. I, Part 1,226 Zola, fimile, 1,211,411,474,500,502, 518; 0,174,175-176,182,194,275, 276,281,282,319,325,337,338;ffl, 315, 316, 317-318, 319-320, 321, 322, 323, 393, 511, 583; IV, 326; Supp. I, Parti, 207 ;Supp.II, Parti, 117 Zolotow, Maurice, HI, 161 "Zone" (Began),Supp. Ill, Part 1,6061 "Zoo Revisited" (White), Supp. I, Part 2,654 Zoo Story, The (Albee), 1,71,72-74, 75,77,84,93,94; HI, 281 "Zooey" (Salinger),m,564-565,566, 567,569,572 Zorach, William, 1,260 ZuckermanBound:A Trilogy and Epilogue (Roth), Supp. DI, Part 2, 423 Zuckerman Unbound (Roth), Supp. Ill, Part 2,421-422 Zueblin, Charles, Supp. I, Part 1,5 Zukofsky, Celia (Mrs. Louis), Supp. HI, Part 2,619-621,623,625,626629,631 Zukofsky, Louis, IV, 415,425; Supp. Ill, Part 2,609-636 Zukofsky, Paul, Supp. Ill, Part 2,622, 623-626,627,628 Zuleika Dobson (Beerbohm), Supp. I, Part 2,714