The Geography of the Imagination: Forty Essays (Nonpareil Book, 78)

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IMAGINATION FORTY ESSAYS BY GUY DAVENPORT

THE

GEOGRAPHY OF THE

IMAGINATION FORTY ESSAYS BY GUY DAVENPORT

North Point Press

•

San Francisco

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1981

Introduction to The Intelligence of Louis Agassiz. Copyright© 1963 by Beacon Press. Reprinted by perm1ss1on of Beacon Press. The essay, "Jonathan Williams," appeared first as the introduction to An Ear in Bartram's Tree: Selected Poems, 19S7-1967 by Jonathan

Williams. Copyright © 1969 Jonathan Williams. Reprinted by per­ mission of The University of North Carolina Press. A portion of the essay "Ronald Johnson" was first published as an introduction to Mr. Johnson's Valley of the Many-Colored Grasses published in 1969 by W. W. Norton., Inc. Reprinted by permission. Quotations from the works of Ezra Pound are all used by permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation: The

Cantos of Ezra

(Copyright© 1934, 1937, 1948, 1956, 1959 by Ezra Pound;

Pound '

Copyright © by the Estate of Ezra Pound); ABC of Reading (Copyright© 1934 by Ezra Pound); "Hilda's Book" published in the New Directions edition of H. D.'s

End

to Torment (Copyright ©

1979 by the Trustees of the Ezra Pound Literary Property Trust.)

All previously unpublished material by Ezra Pound, Copyright © 1981 by The Trustees of the Ezra Pound Literary Property T rust Fund.

FOR HUGH KENNER

Copyright © 1954, 1962, 1963, 1964, 1967, 1968, 1969, 1970, 1972, 1973, 1974, 1975, 1976, 1977, 1979, 1980 and 1981

by Guy Davenport. Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Card Catalogue Number 80-23870 ISBN: Cloth, 0-86547-000-61 Paper, 0-86547-001-4

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments The Geography of the I magination The Symbol of the Archaic

IX

3

16

Another Odyssey

29

The House That jack Built

45

Prehistoric Eyes

61

Whitman

68

Olson

80

Zukofsky

1 00

Mari anne Moore

1 14

Spi noz a's Tulips . ;I E. E. Cum mm gs . on ok Bo m Poe a e Hav Do You See ing She lley P lain Persep hon e' s Ezra The Pou nd Vortex Ezra Pound 188 5- 197 2 "Trees'' Jon ath an Wi lli am s Ro nal d Joh nso n P o etry' s Go lde n Wh ere Poe ms Com e Fro m Ish mael's Do ubl e Louis Agassiz That Faire Field of Enna Charles lves Ozymandias ith Ch rist 's Cu nni ng Rim esm s Joy ce's For est of Sym bol

arie s The Ma n Wit hou t Con tem por Nar rati ve Ton e and For m Tchelitchew Jack Yeats the Elder Wittgenstein Hobbitry D ictionary

k No But I've Rea d the Boo On ward Ma nne rs from Geo pha gy Th Ant hropology of Tab le

;

The Ind ian and H i s I ma ge Finding Ral ph Eugene Me atya rd Ern st Ma chs Ma x Ern st

123 131 135 141 1 65 1 69 177 180 190 205 20 9 215 230 250 272 278 282 286 300 30 8

Acknowledgments

31 9 326 331 336 33 9 343 345 353 359 3 68 373 I I

l

Most of these essays were called into being by editors and occasions. " The Symbol of the Archaic" was read at the University of Louisville as pan of the Conference on Twentieth-Century Literature i n 1 974, and later that year at the University of lllinois. " The House that Jack Built" was the inaugural lecture to open the Yale Center for the Study of Ezra Pound and Hi s Contemporaries, 30 October 1 975. " The Geography of the Imagination" was the Distinguished Professo r Lecture at the Univer­ sity of Kentucky for 1 978. "Joyce's Forest of Symbols" was the Eberhardt Faber Lecture for 1 973 at Princeton. For permission to reprint I am grateful to Perspective and The Georgia Review for slightly different versions of "The Symbol of the Archaic"; to Salmagundi for " The House that Jack Built" ; to Arion, Eva Hesse, Faber and Faber, and the University of California Press for "Persephone's ix

X

The Geography of the Imagination

Ezra"; to

Parnassus

for "In Gloom on Watch-House Point" and

Bound­

ary 2

for "Scholia andConjectures forOlson's ' T he Kingfishers'" (these

view

and the Jargon Society for "Do You Have a Poem Book on E. E.

two studies are combined here under the title "Olson"); to National

Cummings"; to

National Review

for

"Poetry's

Re­

Golden" (where it ap­

peared as "National Poetry Festival: A Report"), part of the essay on Zukofsky which appeared there as "Happy Birthday, Wm. Shaxpar," a review of

Bottom,

part of the essay on Tchelitchew, which appeared

there as "Romantic in an Unromantic Age," "Seeing ShelleyPlain," "No, But I'veRead the Book," "Wittgenstein," "Dictionary,'� and "ThePound Vortex"; to

Vort

for "NarrativeTone andForm"; toW. W. Norton and

Co. andSandDollar Press for the two pieces onRonaldJohnson that are here combined as a single essay; to

The Iowa Review for "Joyce'sForest Arion for "Another Odyssey" and "Ezra Pound 18851972; to Aperture for "Ralph Eugene Meatyard"; to Parnassus and Paideuma for two sections of "Zukofsky"; to The Ballet Review for part of "Tchelitchew"; to The Hudson Review for "Prehistoric Eyes," "The of Symbols"; to

Indian and His Image," "The Man without Contemporaries," and "WherePoemsComeFrom?" to Parnassus for "Whitman" and "Charles Ives"; to Beacon Press for "Louis Agassiz"; to the University of North Carolina Press and New Directions for "Jonathan Williams"; to Inquiry for "Christ's Cunning Rimesmith" and "Jack Yeats the Elder"; to Th e New York Times for "Ozymandias," "Trees," and " Hobbitry"; to Perspective for "Spinoza's Tulips"; to New Literary History for "Ernst Machs Max Ernst"; to Anta:us for "Finding" and "The Anthropology of Table Manners from Geophagy Onward" and to New Directions for all the quotations throughout from Ezra Pound.

The Geography of the Imagination

The Geography of the Imagination

The difference between the Parthenon and the World Trade Center, be­ tween a French wine glass and a German beer mug, between Bach and John Phi lip Sousa, between Sophocles and Shakespeare, between a bicy­ cle and a horse, though exp licable by historical moment, necessity, and destiny, is before all a difference of i magination. Man was fi rst a hunter, and an artist: his earliest vestiges tell us that alone. But he must always have dreamed, and recognized and guessed and supposed, all skills of the imagination . Language itself is continu­ ously an imaginative act. Rational discourse outside our familiar territory of Greek logic sounds to our ears like the wildest imagination. The Do­ goo, a people of West Africa, will tell you that a white fox named Ogo frequently weaves himself a hat of string bean hulls, puts it on his impu­ dent head, and dances in the okra to i nsult and infuriate God Almighty,

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The Geography of the Imagination

and that there's nothing we can do about it except abide him in faith and patience. This is not folklore, or a quaint custom, but as serious a matter to the Dogon as a filling station to us Americans. The imagination ; that is, the way we shape and use the world, indeed the way we see the world, has geographical boundaries like islands, continents, and countries. These boundaries can be crossed. Th at Dogon fox and his imp udent dance came to live with us, but in a different body, and to serve a different mode of the imaginatio n. We call him Brer Rabbit. We in America are more sensitive than most to boun'iia ries of the imag­ ination. Our arrival was a second one; the misnamed first arrivers must still bear a name from the imagination o f certain Renaissance men, who for almost a century could not break out o f the notion that these two vast continents were the Indies, itself a name so vague as to include Ch ina, India, and even Turkey, for which they named our most delicious bird. The i magination has a history, as yet unwritten, an d it has a geogra­ phy, as yet only dimly seen. History and geography are inextricable disci­ plines. They h ave different shelves in the library, and different offices at _ the university, but they cannot get along for a minute without consultmg the other. Geography is the wife of history, as space is the wife of time. When Heraclitus said that everything passes steadily along, he was not inciting us to make the best of the moment, an idea unseemly to his placid mind, but to pay attention to the pace o f things. Each has its own rhythm: the nap of a dog, the precession of the equinoxes, the dances o f Lydia, the majestically slow beat of the drums at Dodona, the swift run­ ners at Olympia. The imagination, like all things in time, is metamorphic. It is also rooted in a ground, a geography. The Latin word for the sacredness of a place is cultus, the dwelling of a god, the place where a rite is vali d. Cultus becomes our word culture, not in the portentous sense it now has, but in a much humbler sense. For ancient people the sacred was the ver­ nacular o rdinariness of things: the hearth, primarily; the bed, the wall around the yard. The temple was too sacred to be entered. Washing the feet of a guest was as religious an act as sharing one's meals with the gods. When Europeans came to the new world1 they learned nothing on the way, as if they came through a dark tunnel. Plymouth, Lisbon, Am� ter­ dam, then the rolling Atlantic for three months, then the rocks and pmes, sand and palms of Cathay, the Indies, the wilderness. A German cart?g­ rapher working in Paris decided to translate the first name of Amengo Vespucci into Latin, for reasons best known to himself, and call the whole thing America. In geography you have maps, and maps must h ave the names of places on them.

The Geography of the I l1'Z
5

We new-world settlers, then, brought the imagination of othe r coun­ tries to transplant it in a different geography. We have been here scarcely a quarter of the time that the pharaohs ruled Egypt. We brought many things across the Atlantic, and the Pacific; many things we left behind: a critical choice to live with forever. The imagination is like the drunk man who lost his watch, and must get drunk again to find it. It is as intimate as speech and custom and to trace its ways we need to reeducate our eyes. In 1840-when Cooper's The Pathfinder was a bestseller, and p hotography had just been made practical-an essay called "The Philosophy of Furniture" appeared in an American magazine. Dickens made fun of Americans for attending lec­ tures o n the philosophy of anything, the philosophy of crime on Monday, _ the philosophy of government on Wednesday, the philosophy of the soul �n Thursday, as Martin Chuzzlewit learned from Mrs . Brick. The Eng­ lish, also, we know from Thomas Love Peacock's satirical novels were addicted to the lecture. The great French encyclopedia, its imitato ;s, and the periodical press had done their work, and audiences were eager to hear anybody on any subj ect. Crowds attended the lectures of Louis Agassiz on zoology and geology (in 1 840 he was explaining the Ice Age and the nature of glaciers, which he had j ust discovered) ; of Emerson, of transcendentalists, utopians, home-grown scientists like Joh n Cleve Symmes, of Cincinnati, who explained that the globe is open at the poles and another world and another hu manity resident on the concavity of a hollow earth; and even Thoreau, who gave lectures in the basements of churches. This "Philosophy of Furniture" was by an unlikely writer: Edgar Allan Poe. In it he explains how rooms should be decorated. " We have no aristocracy of the blood," says this author who was educated at a univer­ sity �ounded by Thomas Jefferson, " and having therefore as a natural, and Indeed as an inevitable thing, fashioned for ourselves an aristocracy of dollars, the display of wealth h as here to take the place and perform the office of the heraldic display in monarchial countries." We are !amiliar with Poe's anxiety about good taste, a bout the fi delity o f the Umted States to European models. What we want to see in this essay is a clue to the structure o f Poe's imagination, which Charles . audelat �e tho �g �t the greatest of the century, an i magination so fine that _ au! Valery satd It was mcapable of making a mistake. Poe's sense of good taste in decoration was in harmony with the best _ EnglIsh s �le of the early Victorian period; we recognize his ideal room as _ one In whtch we might find the young Carlyles, those strenuous aesthetes or George Eliot and Elizabeth Gaskell-a glory of wallpaper, figured rugs, marble-top tables, tall narrow windows with dark red curtains , . s0 fas, antimacassars, vases, unfading wax flowers under bell Jars, a

:

6

The Geography of the I magi nation

rosewood piano, and a cozy fireplace. The amazing thing is that Poe em­ phasizes lightness and grace, color and clarity; whereas we associate his i magination with the most claustrophobic, dark, Gothic interiors in all of literature. On our walls, Poe says, we should have many paintings to relieve the expanse of wallpaper-" a glossy paper of silver-grey tint, spotted with small arabesque devices of a fainter hue." "These are," he dictates, "chiefly landscapes of an i maginative cast-such as the fairy grottoes of Stanfield, or the lake of the Dismal Swamp of Chapman. There are, nevertheless, th ree or four female heads, of an ethereal beauty-portr aits in the manner of Sully." In another evocation of an ideal room, in a sketch called " Landor's Cottage" he again describes a wall with pictures : " . . . three of Julien' s exquisite lithographs a trois crayons, fastened to the wall without frames . One o f these drawings w a s a scene of Oriental luxury, o r rather voluptu­ o usness; another was a 'carnival piece', spirited beyond compare; the third was a Greek female head-a face so divinely beautiful, and yet of an expression so provokingly indeterminate , never before arrested my attention ." Poe titled the collection of his stories pu blished that year Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque. These two adjectives have given critics trouble for years. Grotesque, as Poe found it in the writings of Sir Walter Scott, means something close to Gothic, an adjective designating the Goths and their architecture, and what the neoclassical eighteenth century thought of medi�val art in general, that it was ugly but grand. It was the fanciful decoration by the Italians of grottoes, or caves, with shells, and statues of ogres and giants from the realm of legend, that gave the word grotesque its meaning of freakish, monstrous, misshapen. Arabesque clearly means the i ntricate, nonrepresenta tional, infinitely graceful decorative style of Isla m, best known to us in their carpets, the geometric tile-work of their mosques, and their calligraphy. H ad P oe wanted to designate the components of his i magination more accurately, his title would have been, Tales of the G rotesque, Arabesque, and Classical. For Poe in all his writing divided all his imagery up into three distinct species. Look back at the pictures on the wall in his ideal rooms . In one we have grottoes and a view of the Dismal Swa mp: this is the grotesque mode. Then female heads in the manner of Sully : this is the classical mode. The wallpapaer against which they h ang is arabesque. In the other room we had a scene of oriental luxury : the arabesque, a carnival piece spiri ted beyond compare (Poe means masked and cos­ tumed people, at Mardi Gras, as in "The Cask of Amontillado" and " The

The Geography of the Imagination

7

Mas� ue of the Red Death " ) : the grotesque, and a Greek femal e head: the classical. � t� orough inspe� tion of Poe's work will disclose that he performs vanat l ons and muta tiOns of these three vocab ularie s of 1· m agery. we can . wh1ch rea d1. ly recogmze those work s m . a partic ular idiom is domi nant. The great octos y llabic sonnet "To Helen ," for instan ce, is classi cal "The Fall of the Hous e of Usher " is grote sque, and the p oem "Isra fel" is arabesque. But no work is restri cted to one mode ; the other two are there also. We all know the beaut iful "To Helen ," written when he was still a boy: ·

Helen, thy beauty is to m e Like those Nicaea n barks of yore, That gently , o'er a perfum ed sea, The weary, way-w orn wande rer bore To his own native shore. O n desper ate seas long wont to roam ' Thy hyacin th hair, thy classic fa ce, Thy Naiad a i rs have broug ht me home To the glory that was Greece And the grand eur that was Rome.

Lo! in yon brillia nt window niche How statue -like I see thee stand ' The agate lamp within thy hand !

Ah, Psyche, from the regions whi ch Are Holy Land!

�e � o rds _are as magic as Keats, but what is the sense ? Sapph o, whom . Poe 15 l mitat mg had comp ared a wom an' s beaut y to a fleet of sh ips. ; on had previ Ously writt en lines that Poe outbyrons Byron with, in glory that was Greec I And the grand eur that was Rome." But how � is elen also P syche ; who 1s the wand erer co ming home ? Schol ars are not sure. In fact , the P 0 em IS · not easy to . st the strictu de fend agam . . res of c Itlcs. �e ca poi t out that Nicae an is not, � as has been charg ed, a � P bJ� of g1bbe nsh, but the adjec tive for the city of Nice, where a or shlpwor ks was: Marc Anto ny ' s fleet was built there . We can de­ perfumed sea, whic h h as been called silly, by notin g that classi cal s s pfu never left Sight o f land , and could smel l orch ards on shore that _ per med 01l ' . class was an exten sive In · d ustry m ica l times and tha t ships . woul lad n 1th It d smell bett r t � an your shipl oad of sheep � . Poe is norma y ar more exac t than he 1s given credi t for. _ T �t Wind ow-n iche, howe ver , slipp ed in from Northern E urope· it is Got Ic, a sligh t tone ' of the grotto in this a lmos t who lly class ical p oem .

��{ � : =� �� �7 �

�

7

·

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8

The Geography of the Imagination

And the dosing words, " Holy Land," belong to the Levant, to the arabesque . . In "lbe Raven" we have a dominant grotesque key, With a vision of an arabesque Eden, "perfumed from an unseen censer I Swung by Seraphim whose footfalls tinkled on the tufted floor," and a grotes�ue raven sits on a classical bust o f Pallas Athene. That raven was the device on the flag o f Alaric the Visigoth, whose torch at Eleusis was the begin­ ning of the end of Pallas's reign over the mind of man Lenore (a name : Walter Scott brought from Germany for his horse) IS a mutatiOn of Eleanor, a French mutation of Helen. Were we to follow the metamorphoses of these images through all of Poe-grotes que, or Gothic; arabesque, or Islamic; classical, or Graeco­ Roman-we would discover an articulate grammar of symbols, a new, as yet u nread Poe. What we shall need to understand is the meaning of the symbols, and why they are constantly being translated from one Imagistic .

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·

idiom to another. The clues a re not difficult, or particularly arcane. Israfel for instance is an arabesque, and Roderick Usher a grotesque Orpheus; Orpheus him­ self does not appear in Poe in his native Greek self. But once we see Orpheus in Usher, we can then see that this masterpiece is a retell�ng of his myth from a point of view informed by a modern und�rstandmg of neuroses, of the inexplicable perverseness of the h u man will. That lute, that speaking guitar, all those books on Usher' s table about journeys underground and rites held in darkness-all fit into a translation by Poe of a classical text into a Gothic one. "The Gold Bug," as Northrop Frye has seen, is strangely like the marriage of Danae; the old black who low­ ers the gold bug is named Jupiter. Danae was shut up in a treasure house and a riddle put her there. . Where do these i mages come from? The Mediterranean in the time of Columbus was from its western end and along its northern shore Graeco - Roman , what historians call the Latin culture, and at its eastern end, and along its southern shore, Islamic. So two thirds of Poe's triple i magery sums up the Mediterranean, and fed his imaginati on with Its most congenial and rich portion. The Gothic style has its home in north­ ern Europe, "my Germany of the soul" as Poe put it. He w�s always . Identified. ambiguous about the culture with whic� , ironically, he IS Death, corruption, and dreariness inhere i n the Gothic. Poe relates It �o melancholia, hypersensitivity, madness, obsession, awful whirlpools In the cold sea, ancient houses spent and crumbling. Is there some pattern here from his own life? There is a real House of Usher, still standing, not in a gloomy Transylvanian valley by a black tarn, but in Boston, Mas­ sachusetts, where Poe was born, and where his barely remembered

The Geography of the Imagination

9

mother played the fi rst Ophelia on an American stage, a role definitivel y Gothic in Poe's scheme of modes .1 Poe's sense of Islam, which we can trace to Byron and Shelley, derived as well from the explorers Burckhar dt, Volney, and John Lloyd Stephens. The angel Israfel is not, as Poe wants us to believe, in the Koran, but from George Sale's introduct ion to his translatio n of the Koran by way of Thomas Moore. lbe classical was being restated before Poe's eyes in Charlotte sville by an old man who said he loved a particular Greek temple as if it were his mistress. Jefferson had the undergra du ates up to dinner at Monticel lo two at a time, in alphabet ical order. P is deep in the alphabet; Poe was expelled and the old man dead before the two most astute readers of Alexander von Humbold t in the United States could face each other over a platter of Vi rginia ham. Poe's i maginati on was perfectly at home in geograph ies he h ad no knowledg e o f except what his imaginati on appropriated from other writ­ ers. We might assume, in ignorance , that he knew Paris like a Parisian, that Italy and Spain were familiar to him, and even Antarctic a and the face of the moon. The brothers Goncourt wrote in their journal as early as 1 856 that Poe was a new kind of man writing a new kind of literature. We have still to learn that his sensibilit y was radically intelligen t rather than emotiona l. When he compares the eyes of Ligeia to stars, they are the binary stars that Herschel discovered and explained in the year of Poe's birth ( the spectroscopic dou ble Beta Lyra and the double double Epsilon Lyra, to be exact) , not the generalized stars of Petrarcha n tradition. We h ave paid too little attention to this metaphy sical Poe; and we scarcely understand European s when they speak of the passion they find in his poetry. What are we to think of the Russian translato r of Poe, Vladimir Pyast, who, while reciting "Ulal ume" in a St. Peters burg theater, went stark raving mad? Russians treasure the memory of that evening . Night after night, from 1 9 12 to 1 9 1 7, a m an who mi ght have been the inventio n of Poe, sat in a long, almost empty room in a working -cl ass district of Berlin , writing a book by candle light. Might have been the invention of Poe he was basicall y a classicis t, his doctoral thesis was on Heracli tus, his mind was shaped by Goethe, Nietzsc he, von Humbo ldt, and Leo Froben ius, the anthro pologis t and cultural morph ologist. Like Poe, he thought in symbols . He was Oswal d Spengl er. His big book, The Declin e of the West, was meant to paralle l the militar y campa igns of the Wermacht in 1 9 14- 1 9 1 8 ' 'Fiske Kimball, Domestic Architecture of the American Colonies and of the Early Republic -

(New York: Dover, 1966), p. 275.

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The Geography of t h e I m a gination

w hich by pedantic adherence to tactics and heroic fervor was to impose German regularity and destiny upon Europe. Spengler's book, like the Wermacht, i mp osed only a tragic sense that history is independent of our will, ironically perverse, and, a nightmare. The value of The Decline of the West is in its poetry of vision, its intuition of the rise, growth , and decline of cultures. By culture Spengler meant the formative energy of a people, lasting for thous ands of years . A civilization is the maturity of a culture, and inevitably its decline. His feeling for the effeteness of a finished culture was precisely that of Poe in "The Fail of the House of Usher" and "The .tvfurders in the Rue Morgue" -both stories about the vulnerability of order and civilized achievement. Spengler's most useful intuition was to divide world cultures into three major styles: the Apollonian, or Graeco- Roman; the F austian, or Wes­ tern-Northern European; and the Magian, or Asian and Islamic. Histo­ rians instantly complai n ed that the cultures of ou r worl d may not be divided into three but into seventy-six distinct group s . What interests us, however, i s that Spengler's categories are exactly those of Edgar Allan Poe. And those of James Joyce. Look at the fi rst three stories of Joyce's Dubliners. The first is concerned with a violation of rites that derive from deep in Latin culture by way of the Roman Mass , the second takes its symbols from chi va lry , the moral codes of Northern knighthood, and the third is named " Araby. " This triad of symbolic patterns is repeated four more times, to achieve fifteen stories. The first three ch apters of Ulysses also follow this structure, even more complexly ; and the simp lest shape to which we can summarize Ulysses is to say that it is about a man, Leopold Bloom, in a northern European, a Faustian-technological con­ text, who is by heritage a Jew of Spengler's Magian culture, who is made to act out the adventu res of U lysses, exemp lar of classical man. " We have museum catalogues but no artistic atlases," the great French historian and cultural geographer F ernand Braude! comp lains in his The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, "We have histories of art and literature but none of civilization." He suspects that such a map of the arts would disclose the same kind of historical structure that he has demonstrated for food, clothing, trade routes, industrial and banking centers ; and that our understanding of our imaginative life would tak e on as yet u nguessed coherence and hitherto uncomprehended behavi or. Such a map would presu mably di splay such phenomena as the con­ tours of the worship of Demeter and Persephone, coinciding with grain­ producing terrain, and with the contours of Catholicism. This would not surprise us. It might also show how the structure of psychology and

Th e Geography of the Imagination

11

drama nourish ed by grain-pr oducing cultures persists outside that ter­ rai n, continu ing to act as if it were inside, because its imagina tive author­ tty refuses to abdicat e. How else can we explain a story like 0. Henry's "The Church with the Oversho t Wheel" ? In this poignan t little tale, set in the pinewoo ds of North Carolin a, a miller's daughter named Aglaia (a name commen su­ rate � ith the style of naming girls in the Fancy Names Belt) is kidnapp ed by shtftless rovers who take her to Atlanta . The miller in his grief moves �way to the Northw est, become s prospero us and a philanth ropist, nam­ . best tng hts brand of flour for his lost daughte r whom he suppose s to be dead. In her memory he has his old mill rebuilt as a church, endowin g it handso mely, but keeping its overshot wheeL The commu nity become s a summer resort for people of modest means; and of course 0. Henry has the orphan daughte r come to it as a grown woman , and in a typical denouem en� , her memory of a song she used to sing as a child, togethe r wtth an acctden tal spill of flour over her father, who is visiting the old m t ll, reumtes them. 0. Henry, perhaps unconsc iously, has retold the myth of Persepho ne, using a name, Aglaia, "the bright gi rl ," which was one of the epithets of Perseph one, deificati on of wheat, and all the ele­ ments of the myth, transpos ed to twentiet h-centur y America : the rape that brought devasta tion, the return and reunion that brought healing and regene ration. I find an explana tion of this story accordi ng to the theory o f Jungian archetyp es-pat terns i mp rinted in the mind- unsatisf actory. I t is better to trace 0. Henry's plot and symbols backwa rd along geograp hical lines, through myths brought across the Atlantic from the Mediter ranean through books and schoolrooms, through librarie s and traditio ns, and t� assess his story as a detail in the structur e of a culture of strong vitality whtch dectded on the express iveness of certain symbol s five thousan d years ago, and finds them undi minishe d and still full of human sig­ ni ficance. �he appe� l . of popular literature must lie precisely in its faithfulness to anoent traditio ns. The charmi ng little childre n's book by Carlo Collodi , Le Av�ent�ri di Pinocchio, can scarcely claim to be include d in a history of Ita!tan hteratu re, and yet to a geogra pher of the i magina tion it is a more elegant paradig m of the narrati ve art of.the Medite rranean than any other book since Ovid's Metamorphoses, rehears es all the central myths , and adds its own to the rich stock of its traditi on. It reache s back �? a . Gnostic theme known to both Shakespeare and Emily Dickin son: S� lt t the suck," satd Jesus, " and I am there." It combi nes Pygma lion, Ovt � , the book of Jonah , the Comm edi a dell' Arte, and Apulei us; and will contin ue to be a touchs tone of the imagin ation. The discov ery of Americ a, its settlem ent, and econom ic develo pment ,

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The Geography of the Imagination

were activities of the Renaissance and the Reformation, Mediterranean tradition and northern acumen. The continuities of that double heritage have been longlasting. The Pequod set out from Joppa, the first Thoreau was named Diogenes, Whitman is a contemporary of Socrates, the Spoon River Anthology was first written in Alexandria; for thirty years now our greatest living writer, Eudora Welty, has been rewriting Ovid in Missis­ sippi. "The Jumping Frog of Calaveras County" was a turn for a fifth­ century Athenian mime. A geography of the imagination would extend the shores of the Mediterranean all the way to Iowa. Eldon, Iowa-where in 1 929 Grant Wood sketched a farmhouse as the background for a double portrait of his sister Nan and his dentist, Dr. B. H. McKeeby, who donned overalls for the occasion and held a rake. Forces that arose three millennia ago in the Mediterranean changed the

rake to a pitchfork, as we shall see. Let us look at this painting to which we are blinded by familiarity and parody. In the remotest distance against this perfect blue of a fine harvest sky, there is the Gothic spire of a country church, as if to seal the Protes­ tant sobriety and industry of the subjects. Next there are trees, seven of them, as along the porch of Solomon's temple, symbols of prudence and wisdom. Next, still reading from background to foreground, is the house that gives the primary meaning of the title, American Gothic, a style of ar­ chitecture. It is an example of a revolution in domestic building that made possible the rapid rise of American cities after the Civil War and dotted the prairies with decent, neat farmhouses. It is what was first called in derision a balloon-frame house, so easy to build that a father and his son could put it up. It is an elegant geometry of light timber posts and rafters requiring no deep foundation, and is nailed together. Techni­ cally, it is, like the clothes of the farmer and his wife, a mail-order house, as the design comes out of a pattern-book, this one from those of Alex­ ander Davis and Andrew Downing, the architects who modified details of the Gothic Revival for American farmhouses. The balloon-frame house was invented in Chicago in 1 8 3 3 by George Washington Snow, who was orchestrating in his invention a century of mechanization that provided the nails, wirescreen, sash-windows, tin roof, lathe-turned posts for the porch, doorknobs, locks, and hinges-all standard pieces from factories. We can see a bamboo sunscreen-out of China by way of Sears Roebuck-that rolls up like a sail: nautical technology applied to the prairie. We can see that distinctly American feature, the screen door. The sash-windows are European in origin, their glas s panes from Venetian

The Geography of the Imagination

13

technology as perfected by the English, a luxury that was a marvel of the eighteenth century, and now as common as the farmer's spectacles, another revolution in technology that would have seemed a miracle to previous ages. Spectacles begin in the thirteenth century, the invention of either Salvino degl'Armati or Alessandro della Spina; the first portrait of a person wearing specs is of Cardinal Ugone di Provenza, in a fresco of 1352 by Tommaso Barisino di Modena. We might note, as we are trying to see the geographical focus that this painting gathers together, that the center for lens grinding from which eyeglasses diffused to the rest of civilization was the same part of Holland from which the style ofthe painting itself derives. Another thirteenth-century invention prominent in our painting is the buttonhole. Buttons themselves are prehistoric, but they were shoulder­ fasteners that engaged with loops. Modern clothing begins with the but­ tonhole. The farmer's wife secures her Dutch Calvinist collar with a cameo brooch, an heirloom passed down the generations, an eighteenth­ century or Victorian copy of a design that goes back to the sixth century B.C.

She is a product of the ages, this modest Iowa farm wife: she has the hair-do of a medi<eval madonna, a Reformation collar, a Greek cameo, a nineteenth-century pinafore. Martin Luther put her a step behind her husband; John Knox squared her shoulders; the stock-market crash of 1929 put that look in her eyes. The train that brought her clothes-paper pattern, bolt cloth, needle, thread, scissors-also brought her hus band's bib overalls, which were originally, in the 1 8 70s, trainmen's workclothes designed in Europe, manufactured here by J. C. Penney, and disseminated acros s the United States as the railroads connected city with city. The cloth is denim, from Nfmes in France, introduced by Levi Strauss of blue-.iean fame. The de­ sign can be traced to no less a person than Herbert Spencer, who thought he was creating a utilitarian one-piece suit for everybody to wear. His own example was of tweed, with buttons from crotch to neck, and his female relatives somehow survived the mortification of his sporting it one Sunday in St. James Park. His jacket is the modification of that of a Scots shepherd which we all still wear. Grant Wood's Iowans stand, as we might guess, in a pose dictated by the Brownie box camera, close together in front of their house, the farmer looking at the lens with solemn honesty, his wife with modestly averted eyes. But that will not account for the pitchfork held as assertively as a . minuteman's rifle. The pose is rather that of the Egyptian prince Rahotep, holding the flail of Osiris , beside his wife Nufrit-strict with pious

14

The Geography of the Imagi nation

rectitude, poised in absolute dignity, mediators between heaven and earth, givers of grain, obedient to the gods. This formal pose lasts out 3000 years of Egyptian history, passes to some of the classical cultures-Etruscan couples in terra cotta, for instance-but does not attract Greece and Rome. It recommences in northern Europe, where (to the dismay of the Romans) Gaulish wives rode beside their husbands in the war chariot. Kings and eventually the merchants of the North repeated the Egyptian double portrait of husband and wife: van Eyck's Meester and Frouw Arnolfini; Rubens and his wife Helena. It was this Netherlandish tradition of painting middle-class folk with honor and precision that turned Grant Wood from Montparnasse, where he spent two years in the 1920s trying to be an American post­ Impressionist, back to Iowa, to be our Hans Memling. If Van Gogh could ask, "Where is my Japan?" and be told by Toulouse-Lautrec that it was Provence, Wood asked himself the where­ abouts of his Holland, and found it in Iowa. Just thirty years before Wood's painting, Edwin Markham's poem, "The Man with the Hoe" had pictured the farmer as a peasant with a life scarcely different from that of an ox, and called on the working men of the world to unite, as they had nothing to lose but their chains. The painting that inspired Markham was one of a series of agricultural sub­ jects by Jean Fran<;ois Millet, whose work also inspired Van Gogh. A digging fork appears in five of Van Gogh's pictures, three of them varia­ tions on themes by Millet, and all of them are studies of grinding labor and poverty. And yet the Independent Farmer had edged out the idle aristocrat for the hand of the girl in Royal Tyler's "The Contrast," the first native American comedy for the stage, and in Emerson's "Concord Hymn" it is a battle-line of farmers who fire the shot heard around the world. George III, indeed , referred to his American colonies as "the farms,'' and the two Georges of the Revolution, Hanover and Washington, were proudly far­ mers by etymology and in reality. The window curtains and apron in this painting are both calico printed in a reticular design, the curtains of rhombuses, the apron of circles and dots, the configuration Sir Thomas Browne traced through nature and art in his Garden of Cyrus, the quincunxial artangement of trees in orchards, perhaps the first human imitation of phyllotaxis, acknowledging the

symmetry, justice, and divine organization of nature. Curtains and aprons are as old as civilization itself, but their presence here in Iowa implies a cotton mill, a dye works, a roller press that prints calico, and a wholesale-retail distribution system involving a post office, a train, its tracks, and, in short, the Industrial Revolution. That revolution came to America in the astounding memory of one

The Geography of the lmar;ination

15

man, Samuel Slater, who arrived in Philadelphia in 1789 with the plans of al!Arkwright's Crompton's, and Hargreaves's machinery in his head, put himself at the service of the rich Quaker Moses Brown, and built the first American factory at Pawtucket, Rhode Island. The apron is trimmed with rickrack ribbon, a machine-made substitute for lace. The curtains are bordered in a variant of the egg-and-dart design that comes from Nabataea, the Biblical Edom, in Syria, a design which the architect Hiram incorporated into the entablatures of Solomon's temple- "and the chapiters upon the two pillars had pomegranates also above, over against the belly which was by the network: and the pome­ granates were two hundred in rows round about" ( 1 Kings 7:20) and which formed the border of the high priest's dress, a frieze of "pome­ granates of blue, and of purple, and of scarlet, around about the hem thereof; and bells of gold between them round about" (Exodus 28:3 3 ) . he brass button that secures the farmer's collar i s a n unassertive, puri­ taniCal understatement of Matthew Boulton's eighteenth-century cut­ steel button made in the factory of James Watt. His shirt button is mother-of-pearl, made by James Boepple from Mississippi fresh-water mussel shell, and his jacket button is of South American vegetable ivory passing for horn. The farmer and his wife are attended by symbols, she by" two plants on the porch, a potted geranium and sanseveria, both tropical and alien to Iowa; he by the three-tined American pitchfork whose triune shape is repeated throughout the painting, in the bib of the overalls, the windows the faces, the siding of the house, to give it a formal organization of im peccable harmony. If this painting is primarily a statement about Protestant diligence on the American frontier, carrying in its style and subject a wealth of infor­ mation about imported technology, psychology, and aesthetics, it still does not turn away from a pervasive cultural theme of Mediterranean origin-a tension between the growing and the ungrowing, between veg­ etable and mineral, organic and inorganic, wheat and iron. Transposed back into its native geography, this icon of the lord of e � �als with his iron sceptre, head wreathed with glass and silver, buckled In tin and brass, and a chaste bride who has already taken on the metallic thraldom of her plight in the gold ovals of her hair and brooch, are Dis and ersephone posed in a royal portrait among the attributes of the first editer �anean trinity, Zeus in the blue sky and lightning rod, Poseidon Ill the tndent of the pitchfork, Hades in the metals. It is a picture of a s �af of golden grain, female and cyclical, perennial and the mother of _ civilization; and of metal shaped into scythe and hoe: nature and technology, earth and farmer, man and world, and their achievement together.

�

�

_M �

�

The Symbol of the Archaic

17

The ox rib fo und at Sarlat was published before a learned community in Toronto by Alexander Marsh ack (in a paper given to the American Anthropological Association in December 1972). Professor Hallam Mov­ ius, Professor Emeritus at th e Peabody Museum of Archeo logy and Eth­ nology, Harvard, and a protege of L' Abbe Henri Breuil, the most dis­ tinguished of prehi storians, believes it to be 100,000 years old. Alex­ ander Marsh ack whose reading of p rehistoric notation (The Roots of Civilization) is as b rilliant and surprising as that of Andre Leroi-Gourhan (Treasures of Prehistoric Art), dates the Sa rlat ox rib at 135,000 years, and its discoverer, F ranr;ois Bordes, Director of the Laboratory of Prehis­ tory at the University of Bordeaux, p laces it at 230,000. It is man's oldest known work of art, or plat of h unting rights, tax receipt, star map, or whatever it is. Just a little over a century ago, John William Burgon, then an under­ graduate at Worcester College, Oxford, wrote a poem about the desert city Petra, which the traveller Johann Ludwig Burckhardt had come upon thirty years before. Except for these magic lines, much anthologized, the poem has been forgotten, along with its poet: Not saintly grey, like many a minster fane That crowns the hill or sanctifies the plain : But rosy-red, as if the blush of dawn Which first beheld them were not yet withdrawn : The hues of youth upon a brow of woe, Which men called old two thousand years a go ! Match me such marvel, save in Eastern clime,

The Symbol of the Archaic

A rose-red city-h a l f a s old as time!

the Dordo gne the rib Four years ago1 there was discov ered near S� rlat in bunn sevent y lines flmt a with of an ox on which some h u nter engrav ed mal schem aticall y ani some depict ing we know not what: some god, s of the moon . ratiOn mensu the drawn , a map, the turnin g of the season s, _ prehis tonc such many rance F We h ave found in this lovely part of writte n ove� with artifa cts, carved bones , myste rious sceptr es, rocks _ salmo n, remde� r with ted ecora lunar count s and season al notat ions and ? d fo r ages Ill earne being from and seals, the lines of which are worn faint the hands of hunters . . in the least p nmiMany of these object s, the engra �ing of which is not tive or unsop histica ted, are fi fty mdlen ma old. .

lin 1970. See Frant;ois Bordes, A p. 62. 16

Tale of Two Caves

(New York: Ha rper and Row, 1972),

S helley had put Petra in a poem as soon as Burckh ardt discovered it: it is one of the places the wandering youth visits in A/astor; the others are taken from Vol ney' s Les Ruines ( 1791), which had also inspired Queen Mab and The Daemon of the World. Burgon, stealing half a line from S amuel Rogers' Italy, makes Petra "h alf as old as time," for creation was still an event dated 4004 B.C. The eighteenth century taught u s to look at ruins with a particular frisson, to th ril l to the depths of years in which we can stand. Volney at Persepolis and Palmyra, Gib bon in th e Colosseum, Champollion at Thebes, Schliemann at Hissarlik and Mycenae were as symbolic of the attention of their age as Co mmand Pilot Neil Armstrong on the moon of ours. The discovery of the physical past generated a deep awe and Romantic melancholy, positing a new voca bulary of images for poetry. Petra, carved in red Nabataean stone, became an image resonant with meaning. Without its name, and with a sharper Angst than Romantic wonder, it can still move us in Eliot's evocation in The Waste Land:

The Geography of the Imagination

18

. . . you know only A heap of broken im ages, where the sun beats, And the dead tree gives n o shelter, the cri cket no reli ef, And the dry stone no sound of water. Only There is shadow under this red rock (Come i n under the shadow of this red rock) . . . .

From the visits in 1678 and 169 1 of English merchants to Palmyra, which they supposed to be the Biblical Tadmor, providing Gibbon with a sceptical footnote, Thomas Love Peacock with a fashion-setting poem, and the Romantic poetry of Europe with a new .kind of image, to the present diligent science of archeology, a meditation on ruins has been a persistent theme. In our time we have Charles Olson's "The Kingfishers," the central poem in the Projectivist School of poets and a meditation on ruins, demonstrating that the form is far from exhausted. It is even Vol­ neyesque, and, for all Olson's stringent modernity, can be read as an inquiry into the rise and fall of civilizations that continues a subject taken up in the earliest days of Romanticism. Like his master Pound, Olson sees civilizations grow and perish against a continuum of nature, though he is modern enough to know that na­ ture's moments are not really eternal; they are simply much longer than those of civilizations. Nature herself has her ruins, deserts, and flooded lands. Olson was writing poems about the drift of continents when he died. Olson's "The Kingfishers" was inspired in part by Pablo Neruda's Alturas de Machu Picchu, a masterpiece among poems about ruins by a travelled poet w ho had been to Angkor Wat and the Athenian acropolis, Yucatan and Cuzco. At the heart of Olson's poem is "the E on that oldest stone" meaning the epsilon on the omphalos stone at Delphi, which Plutarch puzzled over at the behest of Nero. We are still not certain whether it is part of the word, Gea, Earth, or part of a Greek citizen's name; Plutarch, always willing to be Pythagorean, gives many symbolic explanations, but for Olson the import of that conical, ancient stone was precisely that it is so ancient that we have lost the meaning of the writing upon it. When we discover what it means we will still be dissociated forever from the complex of ideas in which it occurs. . And that is the center of Olson's concern in this poem, that culture is both historically and geographically discrete. "We are alien," Olson said, "from everything that was most familiar." This is a random statement from his late, inarticulate lectures, and like so many of the poet's Delphic utterances lies u nexplained in a tangle of non sequiturs. Perhaps he felt that it was already elaborat ed by poets as different as Keats and Rim'

Th e Symbol of the Archaic

19

baud, who had intuitions of a deep past which we have sacrificed for a tawdry and impious present; by Neruda and Prescott, men appalled by the brutality with which the indigenous cultures of the Americas were murdered. Olson was writing his poem while Europe still lay in ruins from the Second World War. Olson was a poet with a frightening sense of where he was in time. He was one of the most original explicators of Melville, whose Clare[ is among the great (and greatly neglected) meditations on ruins (of Chris­ tianity as well as of cultures which he suspected he might have found more congenial than his own, if mankind had allowed them to survive), and whose Moby-Dick was Olson's model for his vision of the long con­ tinuum of nature, the majesty of which belittles the diminutive empires of man-man, whose bulk is one twelve hundred and fiftieth of that of a whale, whose lifespan is a third of that of a goose, and whose advantages over his fellow creatures are all mechanical and therefore dependent on the education of each generation: meaning that an intervening genera­ tion of barbarians destroys all that has been carefully accumulated for centuries. The unit of civilization is the city. The classical ages knew this so well that they scarcely alluded to it intellectually. Emotionally it was a fact which they honored with rites and a full regalia of symbols. The city appeared on their coins as a goddess crowned with battlements. She was the old grain goddess Cybele-Demeter, and it is dear that ancient men thought of the city as a culmination of a process that began among the cityless hunters who learned to pen cattle and live in the enclosure with them, who developed agriculture (the goddess's second gift, after the bounty of the animals) and made the city a focus of farms and roads. About the time the Romantic poets were being most eloquent about ruined cities; the city itself was undergoing a profound change. The rail­ road was about to cancel the identity of each city, making them all into ports of trade, into warehouses and markets. Eliot's Waste Land, Joyce's Ulysses, Pound's Cantos, Bely's Petersburg, all epics of city, appear at the same time as the automobile, the machine that stole the city's rationale for being, and made us all gypsies and barbarians camping in the ruins of the one unit of civilization which man has thus far evolved. The city lasted from Jericho, Harappa, and thli: (:atal Hiiyiik to its ruin in Paterson, New Jersey (as one poet specified), from Troy to Dublin: Joyce's long chord. Pound in the Cantos makes another chord of meaning with the beginning and end of Venice, Europe's first outpost against the barbarians. All of this is part of what Olson meant by saying that we are alienated from all that was most familiar. Basically he meant that we no longer

20

The Geography of the Imagination

milk the cow, or shoot the game for our dinner, or make our clothes or houses or anything at all. Secondly, he meant that we have drained our symbols of meaning. We hang religious pictures in museums, honoring a residual meaning in them, at least. We have divorced poetry from music, language from concrete particulars. We have abandoned the rites de pas­ sage to casual neglect where once we marked them with trial and cere­ mony. Thirdly, he meant that modernity is a kind of stupidity, as it has no critical tools for analyzing reality such as the ancient cultures kept bright and sharp. We do not notice that we are rulesf by the worst rather than the best of men: Olson took over a word coined by Pound, p ejorocracy. Poetry and fiction have gri eved for a century now over the loss of some vitality which they think they see in a past from which we are by now irrevocably alienated. Joyce found in Vico cause to believe that Western civilization is at an end. Olson felt with Mao Tze Tung that the new vitality will come from the East. Pound considered us to be in a blank hiatus between cultures. So did Yeats, and perhaps Eliot. D. H. Lawrence looked for restorative forces deep in blood and genitals, longing for the color and robustness of the Etruscans. All this pessimism and backward yearning has usually been counter­ balanced and complemented by a kind of fulfillment. for in any charac­ terization of the arts in our time we shall always want to say that if we have had a renaissance in the twentieth century, it has been a renaissance of the archaic. Every age has had its sense of archaic time, usually mythological, usu­ ally at va riance with history. It is man's worst ineptitude that he has not remembered his own past. Another way of saying this is that only at certain moments in cultures does man's past have any significance to him. Go back to the Sarlat bone, possible 230,000 years old, with which we began. What would it have looked like to a seventeenth-century anti­ quarian? John Aubrey, we remember, thought Stonehenge to be the ruins of a Roman temple, and his patron Charles was satisfied with this infor­ mation. When the Abbe Breuil petitioned UNESCO for funds after the Second World War to study the 20,000-year-old paintings in the Lascaux cave near Montignac (discovered in 1940 by Jacques Marsal's dog Robot, who was chasing a rabbit,) UNESCO refused, on the grounds that the paintings were obviously fraudulent. 2 Breuil had encountered the same incredulity for forty years. There was, however, a silent believer from the beginning of his career, who saw prehistoric art with eyes which would influence all other eyes in 2That UNESCO thought Lascaux a hoax was conveyed to me by Mr. Lester Littlefield, who was an official there a t the time of the Abbe Breuil's request.

The

Symhol of the

A rchuic

21

our time. When Breuil was copying the ceiling of bulls in the Spanish cave Altamira, a young man from Barcelona crawled in beside him and mar­ velled at the beauty of the painting, at the energy of the designs. He would in a few years teach himself to draw with a similar energy and primal clarity, and would incorporate one of these enigmatic bulls into his largest painting, the Guernica. He was Pablo Picasso. If we say, as we can, that the archaic is one of the great inventions of the twentieth century, we mean that as the first European renaissance looked back to Hellenistic Rome for a range of models and symbols, the twentieth century has looked back to a deeper past in which it has imag­ ined it sees the very begi nnings of civilization. The Laocoon was Mi chelangelo's touchstone; the red-stone Kouros from Sounion was Picasso's. What is most modern in our time frequently turns out to be the most archaic. The sculpture of Brancusi belongs to the art of the Cyclades in the ninth century B.C. Corbusier's buildings in their cubist phase look like the white clay houses of Anatolia and Malta. Plato and Aristotle some­ how mislaid the tetrahedron from among Pythagoras's basic geometric figures. Recovered by R. Buckminster Fuller, the tetrahedron turns out to be the basic building block of the universe. Pythagoras said that where two lines cross, the junction is two lines thick; Euclid said that lines can cross infinitely without any thickness at all. R. Buckminster Fuller con­ structs his tensegrities and geodesic domes with the firm notion that at their junction crossed lines are two lines thick. Fuller, then, is our Pythagoras. Niels Bohr is our Democritus. Ludwig Wittgenstein is our Heraclitus. There is nothing quite so modern as a page of any of the pre-Socratic physicists, where science and poetry are still the same thing and where the modern mind feels a kinship it no longer has with Aquinas or even Newton. Ethos anthropoi daimon, said Heraclitus, which may mean that our moral nature is a daimon, or guiding spirit from among the purified souls of the dead. Or it may be utterly primitive and mean that the weather is a god. Character, R. Buckminster Fuller seems to translate it, is prevail­ ing wind. Pound: Time is the evil. Navalis: Character is fate. Wyndham Lewis: The Zeitgeist is a demon. Wittgenstein was paraphrasing it when he said (as if he were an Erewhonian) : Charac..ter is physique. In Heraclitus our most representative writers discovered a spirit conge­ nial to their predicament as modern men. The neo-Epicurean philosopher Gasse ndi revived him, Nietzsche admired the elemental transparency of his thought, and we can now find him as a genius loci everywhere, in Hopkins, Spengler, Pound, William Carlos Williams, Eliot, Olson, Ger­ tru de Stein. It is not entirely Heraclitus's intuitive fusion of science and poetry that

22

T h e Geography o f t h e I m agination

has made a modern philosopher of him; it is also his primacy in western thought. He has lasted. The heart of the modern taste for the archaic is precisely the opposite of the Romantic feeli ng for ruins. Heraclitus, like the painti ngs at Las­ caux, like the eloquent fragments of Sappho and Archilochos, has sur­ vived and thus become timeless. Picasso liked to say that modern art is what we have kept. To his eyes Brancusi was Cycladic; Stravinsky in the Sacre du printemps was a pri mitive Russian. Conversely, the bisque­ colored, black-maned prancing tarpan of Lascaux, the very definition of archaic painting, is one of the most characteristic works of twentieth­ century art, for quite literally ours are the fi r� t eyes to see it ever . It was painted in the deep dark of a cave by torchlight, an uncertainty to the man or woman who painted it. The best way to see it has always been as a color reproduction in a book ; and now this is the only way to see it; twenty years of tourists' breaths caused bacteria to grow in the paint, and Lascaux, the most beautiful of the prehistori c caves, has been closed forever. It has taken half the century for modern eyes to see the archaic. Coc­ teau dated this aesthetic adjustment from the year 1 91 0, when Guillaume Apollinaire placed a Benin mask on his wall. Suddenly an i mage both ugly and disturbing, still bearing the name fetish which the Portuguese exploiters of Africa had given it, became a work of art which could hang in a museum beside a Hogarth or Rembrandt. Apolli naire was not all that original. He was taking his cue from the German anthropologist Leo Frobenius, who had begun to argue that Af­ rican art was nei ther primitive nor naive; it was simply the African style. Even before Apollinaire broadened his vision to see the sophi stication and beauty of African art, the French sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska had also read his Frobenius and was working in styles derived from Polynesia, Egypt, and ancient China. All he required of a style was that it be archaic; that is, i n the primal stage of i ts formation, for Gaudier and his fri end Pound had conceived the notion that cultures awake with a bri lliant springtime and move through seasonal developments to a deca­ dence. This is an idea from Frobenius, who had it from Spengler, who had it from Nietzsche, who had it from Goethe. Archaic art, then, was springtime art in any culture . We can now see how Pound proceeded to study and imitate the earliest Greek poetry, the earliest Italian, the earliest Chinese. Pound culminated his long career by translating the Chinese Book of Odes, the fi rst poems of whi ch are ar­ chaic folksongs collected by Confucius. And look at Canto I. It is a translation of the most archaic part of the Odyssey: the descent of Odysseus into Hades , a motif that goes all the

The Symbol of the

23

A rchaic

way back to the Gi lgamesh epic . And how does Pound translate it? Not from the Greek, but from the Latin of Andreas Divus, the fi rst Renais­ sance tran slator of Homer, thereby working another archaic fact into his symbol. And into what kind of English does he translate it? Into the rhythms and diction of The Seafarer and The Wanderer: archaic English . The modern grasp of the archaic happened fi rst not in the appreciation of modern art but in the attempt to recover the archaic genius of the language itself: in the sense William Barnes and Frederick James Fur­ nivall developed of a pure, mother English which would eschew Latin­ isms and Renaissance coinages-a kind of linguistic Pre- Raphaelitism that wanted to circumvent the Europeanization of English. The first fruits of this enthu siasm were Gerard Manley Hopkins, whose English is purer even than Spenser's, and the great unknown of English letters, Charles Montagu Doughty, who suspected all writers after Chaucer of whoring after strange dictionaries, who went into the Ara­ bian desert ( or " Garden of God" ) - the most archaic act of modern literature-to save, as he said , the English la nguage . That salvation is still one of the best of books, the Travels in Arabia Deserta, though we have neglected hi s masterpiece, The Dawn in Britain, with its archaic theme and its archaic English. When in Ulysses Joyce writes a chapter in English that evolves from its most archaic to the most modern and slangy styles, he conceals in his parody of Carlyle, the Victorian archaicist, the phrase "A doughty deed, Purefoy !" to let us know that he is keeping the faith. Joyce's rigorous sense of correspondences places him foremost, or at least alongside Picasso, in the century's equation of archaic and modern. Like Pound and . Kazantzakis he wrote his epic across the most ancient pages of Western literature, the Odyssey, and in Finnegans Wake writes across the fact of the Indo-European origin of European languages, seeing in the kinship of tongues the great archeological midden of history, the tragic incom­ prehensibility of which provides him with a picture of the funeral of Western culture. One sure principle of Finnegans Wake is that it always holds in its puns the modern and the archaic. A street full of traffic is also a panorama of prehi storic places and animals: . . . the wallhall's horrors of rollsrights, "

carhacks, stonengens, kisstvanes, tramtrees, fargobawlers, autokino­ tons, hippohobbilies, streetfleets, tournintaxes, megaphoggs, circuses and Wardsmoats and basilikerks and aeropagods . . . . "

While Joyce was discovering how to make a Heraclitean circle of the ode � � and the archaic, joining the end to the beginning, Veli mir Khleb­ rukov In Russi a was making a similar fusion of old and new, opening words etymologically, reviving Old Russian, and treating themes from

24

The Geography of the Imagination

folklore, all in the name of the most revo lutionary modernity . His friend VI adimir Tatlin , who liked to call himself the Khlebnikov of construe. tivist art, spent thirty years trying to build and fly Leonardo da Vi nc1's ornithopter. And what i s the only surviving example of Russian Fu­ turism, Leni n's tomb, but the tu mulus of a Scythian king combined with an Egyptian mastaba, comp lete with mummy ? Behind all this passion for the arch aic, which is far more pervasive in the arts of our time than can be suggested here, is a longing for something lost, for energies, values, and certainties u nwisely abandoned by an in­ dustrial age. Things, Proust says, are gods, and one way our arts seem to regard our world is to question what gods h ;ve come to dwell among us in the internal combustion engi ne, the cash register, and the computer. One answer to this question lies in a single rich symbol which is of such ambiguity that we can read only part of its meaning. It is an elusive sym­ bol, to be traced on the wing. We can begin with the mysterious pai nting Hide and Seek by the Russian painter Pavel Tchelitchew. This enormous painting ( now in the Museum of Modern Art) is a pictorial equivalent of the method of Finnegans Wake. All of its i mages are puns which resolve into yet other punning images. First of all, it is a great oak tree against which a girl presses herself: she is the it in a game of hide-and-seek. The hiders are concealed in the tree itself, so many chi ldren, who are arra nged like the cycle of the seasons, winter chi ldren, summer children. These children, seen a few paces back, become landscapes, and eventu­ ally two folded arms, as the tree itself resolves into a foot and h and; and, further back, th e face of a Russian demon, mustached and squint-eyed. Further back, the whole picture resolves i nto a drop of water­ Leeuwenhoek's drop of water under the microscope in which he discov­ ered a new world of little animals; the drop of crystal dew on a leaf at morning which acts like Borges's aleph or Blake's grain of sand or any Leibnizean monad mirroring the whole world around it; Niels Bohr's drop of water th e surface tension of which led h i m to explain the struc­ ture of the atom. This is a very modern picture, then, a kind of metaphysical poem about our non-Euclidean, indeterminate world. But at its center there is the one opaque detail in the painting: the girl in a pinafore hi ding her face against the tree. She is, let us say, t he same girl who as Alice went into the Freudian dark called Wonderland and through the looki ng glass into the reflected, di mensionless realm of word and picture. She is Undine, Ciceley Alexan­ der, Rima, Clara d' Ellebeuse, Grigia, Ada. She is Anna Livia Plurabelle, the Persephone of Pound's Cantos, Brancusi's " Mai astra" birds, the women in Antonioni's fi lms. She is a sy mbolic figure who serves in the

The

Symbol o/ the Arclhlic

25

i magery of modern art as the figure of Kon� in the rites of Demeter of the ancient world. A catalogue of her appearances will disclose that she emerges i n Romantic literature toward the begi nning of the nineteenth century. If we say that she is a symbol of the soul, we do not mean that she is con­ sciously so ex'cept in the i magination of writers who, li ke Dino Campana, Proust, Joyce, and Pound, were aware of her persistence and pervasive­ ness. She appears as a half- acknowledged ghost in Poe, who k new that she came from the ancient world and named her Ligeia and Helen. She is all but wholly disguised in Ruskin, where her name is Rose and where her new Hades, the indus trial world, is accurately identified. Picasso depicts her with proper iconography, a girl carrying a dove­ the Sicilian Persephone-and places her nea r a Minotaur, his symbol for a world h alf brutal. She is a constant fi gure i n the fiction of Eudora Welty, who is aware of her transformation into Eurydice, Helen, Pan­ dora, Aphrodite, Danae, Psyche. She is the magic female ph antom i n Jules Laforgue a n d Gerard d e Nerval, i n Ri lke a n d Leopardi . An a mbiguous symbol of life and death , she is Odette de Crecy as Swann i magines her in love : a girl fro m Botti celli, a lyrical phrase in Vinteuil's sonata, a flower. But she is also the depraved Odette whose music is not Vinteuil but Offe nbach's Orfee aux enfers, a witch of sensu­ ality and deception, a {leur du mal. In an age when the human spiri t is depressed and constrained, this sym bol of the soul is a depiction of Persephone or Eurydice in Hades. In a euphoric or confident ti me, she is above-ground: a Beatrice, an Aphro­ dite. Knowing this, we can read Rossetti 's paintings and Swinburne's poems as hy mns to the soul underground, the soul sunk in ungrowing matter, allied with sterile gold and crystal, but itself, like Persephone, a seed with the power to reach upward to the light. This light is the principle counter to dark, the sun, Demeter's torch, Orpheus's lyre, man' s regard for the earth's resources and the Themis of heaven. Where the soul i s depressed beyond hope, we have a Poe writing a black parody of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice: Roderick Usher with his hypersensitive lute and his schizoph renic, Hamlet- like indeci­ sion, whose will is rotten and perverse, who is terrified by existence itself and di abolically puts his E u rydice in Hades and spinelessly leaves her there. In Roderick Usher we see the emergence of the symbolic gear of the complementary myth which runs alongside that of Persephone-Eurydice in modern art. That lute will turn up on th e Cubist table-top, in th e iconography of Cocteau and Apollinai re , in Rilke and de Nerval. It will, with idiotic faithfulness, turn up on the stu dy table of Sherlock

24

The Geography of the Imagi n a tion

folklore, all in the name of the most revolutionary modernity. Hi s friend Vladimir Tatlin, who liked to call himsel f the Khlebnikov of construc­ tivist art, spent thirty years trying to build and fly Leonardo da Vinci's ornithopter. And what is the only surviving example of Russian Fu­ turism, Lenin's tomb, but the tumulus of a Scythian king combined with an Egyptian mastaba, complete with mummy? Behind all this passion for the archaic, which is far more pervasive in the arts of our time than can be suggested here, is a longing for something lost, for energies, values, and certainties unwisely abandoned by an in­ dustrial age. Things, Proust says, are gods, a�d one way our arts seem to regard our world is to question what gods have come to dwell among us in the internal combus tion engine, the cash register, and the computer. One answer to this question lies in a single rich symbol which is of such ambiguity that we can read only part of its meaning. It is an elusive sym­ bol, to be traced on the wing. We can begin with the mysterious painting Hide and Seek by the Russian painter Pavel Tchelitchew. This enormous painting (now in the Museum of Modern Art) is a pictorial equivalent of the method of Finnegans Wak e. All of its images are puns which resolve into yet other punning images. First of all, it is a great oak tree against which a girl presses herself: she is the it in a game of hide-and-seek. The hiders are concealed in the tree itself, so many children, who are arranged like the cycle of the seasons, winter children, summer children. These children, seen a few paces back, become landscap es, and eventu­ ally two folded arms, as the tree itself resolves into a foot and hand; and, further back, the face of a Russian demon, mustached and squint-eyed. Further back, the whole pi cture resolves into a drop of water­ Leeuwenhoek's drop of water under the mi croscope in which he discov­ ered a new world of little animals; the drop of crystal dew on a leaf at morning which acts like Borges's aleph or Blake's grain of sand or any Leibnizean monad mirroring the whole world around it; Niels Bohr's drop of water the surface tension of which led him to explain the struc­ ture of the atom. This is a very modern picture, then, a kind of metaphysi cal poem about our non-Euclidean, indeterminate world. But at its center there is the one opaque detail in the painting: the girl in a pinafore hiding her face against the tree. She is, let us say, the same girl who as Alice went into the Freudian dark called Wonderland and through the looking glass into the reflected, dimensionless realm of word and picture. She is Undine, Ci celey Alexan­ der, Rima, Clara d'EIIebeuse, Grigia, Ada. She is Anna Livia Plura belle, the Persephone of Pound's Cantos, Brancusi's " Maiastra" birds, the women in Antonioni's fi lms. She is a symbolic figure who serves in the

The Symbol of the Archazc

25

imagery of modern art as the figure of Kore in the rites of Demeter of the ancient world. A catalogue of her app earances will disclose that she emerges in Romantic literature toward the beginning of the nineteenth century. If we say that she is a symbol of the soul, we do not mean that she is con­ sciously so e�cept in the imagination of writers who, like Dino Campana, Proust, Joyce, and Pound, were aware of her persistence and pervasive­ ness. She appears as a half-acknowledged ghost in Poe, who knew that she came from the ancient world and named her Ligeia and Helen. She is all but wholly disguised in Ruskin, where her name is Rose and where her new Hades, the industrial world, is accurately identified. Picasso depicts her with proper iconography, a girl carrying a dove­ the Sicilian Persephone-and places her near a Minotaur, his symbol for a world half brutal. She is a constant figure in the fiction of Eudora Welty, who is aware of her transformation into Eurydice, Helen, Pan­ dora, Aphrodite, Danae, Psyche. She is the magic female phantom in Jules Laforgue and Gerard de Nerval, in Rilke and Leopardi. An ambiguous symbol of life and death, she is Odette de Crecy as Swann imagines her in love: a girl from Botticelli, a lyrical phrase in Vinteuil's sonata, a flower. But she is also the depraved Odette whose music is not Vinteuil but Offenbach's Or(ee aux enfers, a witch of sensu­ ality and deception, a fleur du mal. In an age when the human spirit is depressed and constrained, this symbol of the soul is a depiction of Persephone or Eurydice in Hades. In a euphori c or confi dent time, she is above-ground: a Beatrice, an Aphro­ dite. Knowing this, we can read Rossetti's paintings and Swinburne's poems as hymns to the soul underground, the soul sunk in ungrowing matter, allied with sterile gold and crystal, but itself, like Persephone, a seed with the power to reach upward to the li ght. This light is the principle counter to dark, the sun, Demeter's torch, Orpheus's lyre, man's regard for the earth's resources and the Themis of heaven. Where the soul is depressed beyond hope, we have a Poe writing a black parody of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice: Roderick Usher with his hypersensitive lute and his schizophrenic, Hamlet-like indeci­ sion, whose will is rotten and perverse, who is terri fied by existence itself and diaboli cally puts his Eurydice in Hades and sp inelessly leaves her there. In Roderick Usher we see the emergence of the symbolic gear of the complementary myth whi ch runs alongside that of Persephone-Eurydice in modern art. That lute will turn up on the Cubist table-top , in the iconography of Cocteau and Apollinaire, in Rilke and de Nerval. It will, with idiotic faithfulness, turn up on the study table of Sherlock

26

The Geography of the Imagination

Holmes, along with Usher's op ium and erudite books about su bterranean journeys. But then we remember that H olmes is Roderick Usher all over again, with Auguste Dupin thrown in ( Dupin, who could not fi n d a Per­ sephone named Marie Roget, but could identify the dark power which raped the ladies on the Rue Morgue) , and that Holmes is also derived from the man who drew the gaudiest picture of subterranean Perse­ phone in the nineteenth century, saying that she is older than the rocks among wh ich she sits, that like the vampire she has been dead many times and learned the secrets of the grave: the man who retold the myth of Cupid and Psyche for the nineteenth century., Walter Pater. Orpheus, then, is one archaic ghost we have revived and put to work bringing us out of the sterile dark; and Persephone in many disgui ses is our way of seeing the soul lost and in trouble. Persephone's most powerful evocations are in Joyce and Pound, as Molly Bloom and Anna Livia, and as Pound's Homeri c array of women, Pre- Raph aelite of beauty and Pre-Raphaelite of distress. For Pound these women are symbols of the power of regeneration. Lucrezia Borgia is among them, a literal queen of death who had her springtime at the end of her life, the reformed Este Borgia. Mada me Hyle, Pound calls her: Lady Nature, who takes the shape of tree or animal only through a coop­ eration with light. For Joyce th e regeneration of the spirit is a cyclic fe male process, like the self-purifying motion of a river. One of Joyce's strong themes is the human paralysis of will that stubbornly resists regeneration, and Anna Livia at the end of Finnegans Wa ke is resi sti ng her plunge into the sea much as Eveline in Dubliners balks at changing her life, though the tri umphant Molly Bloom, Demeter and Persephone together, cries out at one point to her creator, " 0 Jamesy let me up out of this!" Once this theory is sorted out and anatomized, we shall see that the artists for whom the soul in pli ght can be symbolized as Persephone sur­ round her with an imagery of green nature, especially the floweri ng tree which was one of her forms in the ancient Mediterranean world. Joyce, Tchelitchew, and Pound are clear examples of this correspondence of tree and maiden; so are Ruskin and Lewis Carroll, Francis Jammes and Proust, Yeats and Jules Supervielle. The poets who replace Persephone with Eurydice work under the sign of the lute of Orpheus: Laforgue, Riike, Poe, and we should not hesitate to add Braque, Orff, and Picasso. And if we ask why our artists have reached back to such archaic sym­ bols to interpret the distress of mind and soul in our ti me, there are par­ tial but not comprehensive answers. One reason, I suggest, is the radical change in our sense of what is alive and what isn't. We h ave recovered in anthropology and archeology the truth that pri mitive man li ves in a

The

Symbol of the A rchaic

27

world totally alive, a world in which one talks to bears and reindeer, like the Laplanders, or to Coyote, the sun and m oon, like the plains Indians. In the seventeenth century we di scovered that a drop of water is alive, in the eighteenth century that all of natu re is alive in its discrete particles, in the nineteenth century that these particles are all dancing a constant dance (the Brownian movement) , and the twentieth century discovered that nothing at all is dead, that the material of existence is so many little solar systems of light mush, or as Einstein said, " . . . every clod of earth, every feather, every speck of dust is a prodigious reservoir of entrapped energy." We had a new vision that death and life are a complementary pattern. Darwin and Wallace demonstrated this, but in ways th at were more dis­ turbing than enlightening, and Darwin's vision seemed destitute of a moral life. The nearest model for a world totally alive was the archaic era of our own culture, pre-Aristotelian Greece and Rome. From that world we began to feel terribly alienated, as th e railroad tracks went down and the factories up, as our sciences began to explain the mechanics of everything and th e nature of nothing. , The first voices of protest which cried that man is primari ly a spirit, the voices of Blake, Shelley, and Leopardi, sounded su fficiently deranged, and we had to hear the equally dubious voices of Nietzsche, Freud, and Jung before we could begin seriously to listen. It was, however, the artists who were performing the great feat of awakening an archaic sense of the world. The first effort was a clear outgrowth of Renaissance neoclassicism and led to a revolution in wh ich the themes were subversively rejuvenated: Shelley's Platonism, for i n­ stance, and Blake's kitchen-forged mythology, the metacultural visions of a Navalis or Baudelaire. The second effort can be called the Renaissance of 1 9 1 0, which recog­ nized the archaic. Hilda Doolittle, Pound, and Willi ams could catalyze poetry by returning to the Greek fragment, to arch aic simplicity, to a sense of rea lity that was fresh because it had been so long neglected. Brancusi, Gaudier-Brzeska, Modigliani, Picasso turned to the energy and li veliness of primitive art. The piano, Stravi nsky announced, was a per­ cussion instrument, like a drum from the j ungle. The artist Wyndham Lewis said, looking at prehistoric pai ntings that seemed to be excused from the ravages of time, the artist goes back to the fi s h. Whether, indeed, the century's sense of the archaic served to al leviate our alienation from what was once most familiar, or whether it put our alienation into even starker contrast to ages in which we romantically suppose man to have lived more harmoniously and congenially with his gods and with nature, it is too early to say. Certainly it has deepened our tragic sense of the world, and set us on a search to know what the begin-

The Geography of t h e Imagi nation

28

nings of our culture were. Only our age has prepared itself to feel the significance of an engraved ox ri b 2 3 0,000 years old, or to create and respond to a painting like Picasso's Guernica, executed in allusion to the style of Aurignacian reindeer hunters of 5 0,000 years ago. On the other hand, our search for the archaic may have contributed to our being even more lost. For the search is for the moment now over in the arts, and our poets a re gypsies camping in ruins once again. Perse­ phone and Orpheus have reverted to footnotes in anthologies. The classic sense of the city peri shed rather than revived in the Ren aissance of 1 9 1 0, which had spent its initial energies by 1 9 1 4, and was exhausted by 1 939, the year of the publication of Finnegans Wak e and of the beginning of the second destruction of the world in twenty-five years. Some of the masters lived on. Pound wrote two more masterpieces. Picasso continued, filling eighty years of his life with work, completing a p ainting every seventy-two hours of that time. Men have walked on the moon, stirring dust that had not moved since millennia before the arch ai c hand carved the images on the S arlat bone which mean nothing to our eyes. The world that drove Ruskin and Pound mad has worsened in precisely the ways they s aid it would. Eli ot' s waste­ land has extended its borders; Rilke' s freakshow outside which the barker invites us to come in and see the genitals of money is a feature of every street. Never has an age had more accurate prophets in its writers and painters . The donation remains, to be assessed and understood, and the discov­ ery, or invention, of the archaic is as splendid a donation as that of Hel­ lenism to the Renaissance. We are just now seeing, amidst the fads and distra<.-r ions, the strange fact that what h as been most modern in our time was what was most archaic, and that the impulse to recover beginnings and primal energies grew out of a feeling that m an in his alienation was dri fting tragically away from what he h ad fi rs t made as poetry and design and as an understanding of the worl d. Here are Ezra Pound's last lines: Poetry speaks phallic di rection Song keeps the word forever Sound is moul ded to mean this And the measure moulds sound .3

This i s a translation from an archaic Chinese text, explaining that poetry is a voice out of nature which must be rendered humanly in­ telligible, so that people can know how to live. 3H ugh Kenner, 1 97 1 ) , p. 1 04 .

The Pound Era

(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of Californi a Press,

Wie alles Metaph)'sische ist die Harmonie zwischen Gedanken und Wirk lichkeit in Jer Grammatik der Sprache aufzufmden. Like everything metaph)'sical the harmony between thought and reality is to be found in the grammar o{ the language. (Wittgenstein, Zettel, 5 5 )

Another Odyssey

Salvatore Quasimodo translates the three lines that begin the third book

of the Odyssey:

II sole, lasciata Ia serena distesa dell' acqu a,

si levo verso il cielo di rame a illumin are gli de i e

gli uomini destinati alia morte sulla terra fecond a .

What Eelios departs from here i s not thcilassa or p6ntos but limne, an inlet of the sea. The word later comes to mean a marsh or pooled tidewa­ �er, and is also used to mean a lake. T elemakhos and Athena are sailing Into the Bay of Navarino where they see the sacrifices at Pylas of the Sands; the poet calls the b ay a limne, and adds that it is very beautiful, Perikallea. Signor Quasimodo folds these two images together as Ia serena distesa del/'acqua as smoothly as he takes polykhalkon as a color

The Geography of t h e Imagination

30

adjective describing the glaring dawn sky. Richmond Lattimore gives limne the first meaning offered by the Revs. Liddell and Scott, "standing water" : Helios, leaving behind the lovely standing waters, rose up . 1

As for the sky, Professor Lattimore calls it " brazen ," a s d o Samuel Henry Butcher and Andrew Lang, Robert Fitzgerald, Willi am Cullen Bryant, and William Morris . Chapman understands the adjective to in­ clude both the h ardness and gleam of bronze:

English words, Joseph Conrad complained, say more than you want them to say. " Oaken," for instance, has overtones which force one to say in remarking that a table is de ch ene, th at i t is also solid and Bri tish. " Brazen" and "standing waters" are not phrases that a stylist, poet or prose writer, would consider without making certain th at he wanted the overtones as well. Except, of course, when he is asking the reader to agree that he is writing in a high style the dignity of which prevents one from imagining anything but the pu rest lexicographic content of every word. Such a request might be backed up by asking the reader to keep well i n mind a t all times that the text before h i m tranlates a great poem, said b y people who know t o b e magnificent. With such a n understanding be­ tween translator and reader, the translator can then write "immortals" where Homer has athdnatoi and "mortals" where Homer has thnetoi and forget that the two words were worn out years ago. A translator who dares not ask such an agreement feels compelled to convey the sharpness of the Greek. Signor Quasimodo has seen the interplay in the homily, has thought about it, and puts it into seamless contemporary words: the sun shines on the gods and on men who must someday die and on the fecund earth. Chapman mana ges to keep the two possi ble meanings of zeidoros, giver of life or giver of zeia, one of the most primitive of grains: To shine as well upon the mortal! birth Inhabiting the plowd life-giving earth

Into the brazen vault of heaven the sun

we see the translator shying away from particular description. He has a bay and a plowed field that he is content to render i nvisible; he introduces a bosom and a vault; and he is not afraid that in recitation the audience will hear "foodful" as a tongue-twisted "fruitful." There is a kind of thanksgiving piety in Bryant. The sea is a bosom ( Homer elsewhere calls it unharvestable) ; the firmament is a bit of decorative architecture which we should no doubt stand in awe of; and the sun shines for gods and men. Homer merely says that it shines on them. Professor Lattimore has the sun shining on gods and men but across the grain field-a gratuitous angle that shows us that a grain field for Professor Lattimore is a pretty landscape primarily and the sou rce of life secondari ly. Robert Fitzgerald sees the generosity of the sun: -all o n e brightening for gods immortal and for mortal men on plowlands kind with grain,

and hides altogether the idea of death and fecundity occurring together under the eyes of the gods and the indifferent sun. Mr. Fitzgerald likes to freeze time when he comes to the lovely passages, savori n g a still beauty; Homer's very beautiful bay is "the flawless brimming sea." He removes Homer's shadows and makes the scene golden, " kind with grain." If you don't care about words at all, it can be translated thus: As the sun rose from the beautifu l mere of the sea

As on the ever-tredders upon Death.

Lattimore's "mortal men," Quasimodo's "gli uomini destinati alia morte," Chapman's "ever-tredders upon Death"-which replaces a Greek word with a dictionary equival ent and which tries to unfold the Greek sense? " Show me," Wittgenstein liked to say, "how a man uses a word and I'll The Odyssey of Homer,

Now from the fair broad bosom of the sea

Upon the foodful earth,

And to the firme heav'n bright ascent did make.

1 967) .

tell you what h e really thinks about it." No word in a context can have more meaning than the writer thinks i nto it. When a writer does not care about the meaning of a word, we know it. We also know how a man cares about words; we know from his words what he honors, what he is unaware of, and how he modifies with his individual use of it the culture in which he exists. When, for i nstance, Willia m Cullen Bryant translates the passage we are looking at,

Rose shining for the immortals and for men

The Sunne now left the great and goodly Lake, ·

1Richmond Larrimore, tra n s . ,

31

Another Odyssey

(New York: Ha rper a n d Row,

To climb to the brazen heaven and shine with N.is light On gods and on men that inhabit the gr ain-giving earth.

This is simply a rewording ( executed in 1 948 by S. 0. Andrew) of William Morris's Now uprose the Sun, and leaving the exceeding lovely mere Fared up to the brazen heaven, to the Deathless shining clear, And unto deathful men on the corn-kind earth that dwell.

The Geography of the Imagination

32

Morris was at least trying to keep the reader aware that the poem is of an age. Mr. Andrew has sealed himself up in himself and is h aving a wonder­ ful time. But back to Professor Lattimore. Here is the beginning of the account of the hunt on Parnassos where Odysseus was scarred by the boar: But when the young Dawn showed again with h er rosy fingers, they went out on their way to the h unt, the dogs and the people, these sons of Autolykos, and with them noble Odysseus went.

Is it not a bit chewing-gummy to say that Dawn showed? Johnson gives ten definitions of "show," none of which sanctions this suppressed reflexive, and Fowler clucks his tongue if consulted on the m atter. Webs­ ter's Third International descri bes the intransitive "show" and takes its example of usage from H. A. Sincl ai r: " I ' m glad you showed, kid." And "out on their way" ? As for the "went," that's where Homer put it. And dear rosy-fingered Dawn, she turns up in The Faerie Queene about the time Chapman was putting her into his Iliads; it's a toss-up as to who stole her from whom. She is the Kilroy of Homeric translation. Professor Lattimore continues: They came to the steep mountai n , m antled in forest, Parnassos, and soon they were up in the windy fol ds.

(Colonel Lawrence has "wind-swept upper folds" ; Morris, "windy ghylls.") A t t h i s time the sun had j u st begun to strike on the plowlands, rising out o f the quiet water and the deep stream of the Ocean. The hunters came to the wooded valley, and on ahead of them ran the dogs, casting about for the tracks, and behi nd the m t h e sons of Autolykos, and with t h e m n o b l e Odysseus went close behind th e hou nds, shaking his spea r far-shadowing. Now there, inside that thick of the bush, was the lair of a great boar. Neither could the force of wet-blown winds penetrate h ere, nor could the shi ning sun ever strike through with his rays, nor yet could th e rain pass all the way through it, so close together it grew , with a fall of leaves drifted in dense profusion. The thudding made by the feet of me.n and dogs came to h i m as they closed o n him in t h e h u nt, a n d against them he from his wood l ai r bristled strongly h i s n a p e , a n d with fi re from his eyes g l a ring stood up to face them close.

" Piowlands" is an archaic word, once an exact measure. "The quiet water . . . of the Ocean" avoids the traditional "soft-blowing," but what does it mean? Surely Homer meant to describe a calm sea, not to calcu-

Another Odyssey

33

late the amount of noise it was making. "Casting about for the tracks" -here Professor Lattimore should h ave kept to Liddell and Scott, who say "casting about for the scent." Dogs do not follow tracks, a vi­ sual skill, but the smell of their prey. Why "noble" Odysseus ? He is no nobler than his uncles, and to single him out with such a word seems to put him in contrast to his very family. He's a stripling here ; surely Homer means "charming" or "handsome." Professor Lattimore in his faithfulness p laces himself at the mercy of the merciless Greek language. His boar " bristled strongly his nape, and with fire from his eyes glaring I stood up to face them close." The verb is most certainly "bristled" and the noun " nape," but a boar is a very spe­ cial kind of ani mal whose b ristling is a thing unto itself, and his nape, like a snake's neck, is more a word th an a reality. The very same words might be used of a cat, and we would h ave to trans.late "camelled his back and b ushed." A boar bunches his shoulders. He hackles. He burrs up. Mr. Fitzgerald has: with razor b a c k bristling a n d raging eyes he trotted and stood at bay.

Splendid, that "trotted and stood." Professor Latti more has the boar lying down until the dogs are at his door, which is a bit cool even for such an insolent beast as this one. Here is how Mr. Fitzgerald begins the boar hunt: When the young Dawn spread in th e eastern sky her finger tips of rose,

(Both Ch apman and Pope ducked having to do something with a

rhododaktylos Eos here, Ch apman looking to the sun's heat and Pope to its color for a paraphrase. Ch apman knows his out-of-doors, and h as not forgotten th at the hunters h ave j ust spent the night on the ground; Pope saw the dawn through windows ; Fitzgerald, w riting in a century whose every gestu re is timed, adds motion to the venerable epithet.) the men and dogs went hunting, taking Odysseus.

( Odysseus loses his dios, and the sons of Autolykos their p atronymic: no matter-that information is well-established," and Mr. Fitzgerald doesn't need formulae. ) They climbed Parnassos' rugged tl ank mantled in forest,

(Pope's "Parnassus, thick-perplex'd with horrid shades" has alternately an English and a Latin word: what we are looking at is a line of Vergil

34

Th e Geography of the I magination

every other word of which has been glossed into English. Homer, we might note, is at some distance, and his more cultivated imitator has the stage.) entering amid high windy fo lds at noon when Helios beat upon the valley fl oor and o n the winding ocean whence he came.

(The "amid" is not current English; "fold" is not good American, but British [Lawrence: "wind-swept upper folds"]; and is it at noon or just a fter sunrise that they reach the high gorges? The "winding" is taken from Homeric cosmography rather than from the text, which says "deep." But what a clear, solidly paced three lines! Bryant's " . . . airy heights. The sun, new risen I From the deep ocean's gently flowing stream, I Now smote the fields" misses the look of a great mountain, tries [like Fitzgerald] to tuck in Homer's earth-encircling ocean and makes a mess of it-the kind of paralytic total miss with an image that drives clever children and the literal-minded away from poetry altogether. Yet genteel readers in Bryant's day took that "stream" as a refinement, and the "gently," their experience of the sea to the contrary, as evidence of Bryant's higher soul. The version reaches solid ground with the Biblical "smote." But Bryant is simply Wordsworthing around here; four words on he's talking about "a dell.") Fitzgerald continues: With hounds questing ahead, in open order, the sons of Autcilykos went down a glen, Odysseus in the lead, behind the dogs, pointing his long-shadowing spear.

Fitzgerald deploys dogs and hunters in a forward motion: "questing ahead . . . in the lead . . . pointing" ; Professor Lattimore scatters the motion: "casting about . . . behind them . . . close behind . . . shaking." There is an outwardness to Fitzgerald's rhythms that makes Lattimore sound distinctly bumpy. Translation involves two languages; the translator is in constant danger of inventing a third that lies between, a treacherous nonexistent language suggested by the original and not recognized by the language into which the original is being transposed. The Greek says "of Odysseus the loved son," and Professor Lattimore translates "the dear son of Odysseus." Who uses such language in English? Chapman's "Ulysses' lov' d sonne" seems more contemporary. Bryant says "dear son," perhaps with an impunity that we feel we ought to withhold from Profes­ sor Lattimore. I once dined with Professor Lattimore and he did not speak like William Cullen Bryant. He spoke a charming and fluent and even racy colloquial English.

Another Odyssey

35

If we take everything in Greek in a literal, grammar-book sense, obvi­ ously we are going to come up with some strange locutions. If Homer says "And in his hand he had a bronze spear," by what determined deaf­ ness to English must Professor Lattimore write "in his hands holding a bronze spear ?" The verb is "have," not "hold." One may say "in his hand a bronze spear," or "holding a bronze spear," but not a mixture of the two. And why "hands" ? The Greek is "hand." To read Professor Lattimore's Odyssey we must simply accept the curious fact that he is writing in a neutralized English wholly devoid of dialect, a language con­ cocted for the purpose of translating Homer. It uses the vocabulary of English but not its rhythm. It has its own idiom. One can say in this language such things as "slept in that place in an exhaustion of sleep" (for Homer's "aching with fatigue and weary for lack of sleep"), and "the shining clothes are lying away uncared for" (for "your laundry is tossed in a heap waiting to be washed") . Professor Lattimore adheres to the literal at times as stubbornly as a mule eating briars. When, for instance, the Kyklops dines on Odysseus's men, he washes his meal down with "milk unmixed with water." But why would anyone, except a grocer, water milk ? The word that makes the milk seem to be watered is the same as the one that turns up in the phrase "unmixed wine," meaning neat. But even there the wine is unmixed because it is for dipping bread into; so the word comes to take on the latter meaning. What the homely Kyklops was doing was dipping the meat in his milk. There is a chill puritanism about Professor Lattimore' s program: which is to render the Odyssey ad verbum into English. Tone be damned, rhythm and pace be damned, idiom (like the milk for dunking) be damned; this version is going to be punctiliously lexicographic. I need not labor the truism that the literal translator can be at a great spiritual dis­ tance from his original, and I realize that this is something of a galling paradox. Of the two most exciting translations from Homer in recent years, one, Robert Fitzgerald' s, is as accurate as that of Professor Latti­ more's, but it is not obsessed with a verbal game as desperate as Russian roulette; the other, that of Christopher Logue, departs from Homer's words altogether (so do all other translators, for that matter) and recon­ structs the action as his genius dictates. Look a.t a passage near the begin­ ning of the nineteenth book of the Iliad as translated by Lattimore and Logue. Lattimore: The goddess spoke so, and set down the armour on the ground before Ach i lleus, and all its ela borations clashed loudly. Trem bling took hold of a l l the Myrmidons. None had the courage to look straight at it. They were afraid of it. Only Achilleus

T h e Geogra p h y o f the Imagi n ation

36

Another Odvsscy

looked, and as he looked the anger came harder upon him

Then found they lod g' d a Bore of bulke extreame

and his eyes glittered terribly under his lids, like suntlare.

In such a Queach, as never an y beame

37

The Sun shot pierc'st, nor any passe let finde -me moist impressions o f the fiercest winde,

Logue: And as she laid the moonlit armour on the sand it chimed: and the sounds that came from it followed the light that came from it, like sighing, saymg, Made in Heaven. And those who had the neck to watch Achilles weep could not look now. Nobody looked. They were afraid. Excep t Achilles. Looked, lifted a piece of it between his hand; turned it; tested the weight of it; then, spun the holy tungsten like a star between his knees, slitting h is eyes against the flare, some sa id , b u t others thought the hatred shuttered b y his lids made him protect the metal. His eyes like furnace doors ajar.

We have all been taught to prefer the former, out of a shy dread before Homer's great original; we instinctively, i f we have ever felt a line of poetry before, prefer the l atter. And the kind of paranoia fostered by graduate schools would choose to have Professor Lattimore give his imagination more tether and Mr. Logue rein his in, so that we could be certain that it' s all Homer that we are enjoying. Chapman translates the tale of the boar: When the Sun was set

Nor any storme the sternest winter drives, Such proofe it was: yet all within lay leaves In mighry thicknesse, and through all this flew The hounds' loud mouthes. The sounds, the tumult threw. And all together rouz'd the Bore, that rusht Amongs t their thickest: all h is brissels pusht From forth his rough necke, and with fl aming eyes Stood close, and dar'd all. On which horrid p rise Ulyss�s fi rst charg' d, whom above the knee The savage strooke, and rac' t it crookedly Along the skin, yet never reacht the bone.

There were still queaches near Hitchin in Chapman's day from which the more sanguine gentry might rout a boar. He blurs the mountain sce­ nery ("Concaves, whence ayr's sounding vapors fetcht") but deploys the hounds and moves in on the kill with a clear sense that the tremendum of the scene is in the ruckus of the dogs and the fury of the boar. William Cullen Bryant, the Henri Rousseau of Homer's translators, has the hunt unfold at a genteel pace: Up the steeps of that high mount Pamassus, clothed with woods, they climbed, and soon Were on its airy heights. The sun, new risen From the deep ocean's gently flowing stream, Now smote the fields. The h unters reached a dell; The hounds before them tracked the game; behind Followed the children of Autolycus.

And darknesse rose, they slept, till daye's fire her

The generous youth Ulysses, brandishing

Th'enlightned earth, and then on hunting went

A spear of mightly length, came pressing on

Both Hounds and all Autolycus' descent.

Close to the hounds. There lay a huge wild boar

In whose guide did divine Ulysses go,

Within a thicket, where moist- b l owing winds

Climb'd steepe Parnassus, on whose foreh ead grow

Came not, nor in his brightness co uld the sun

All sylvan off-springs round. And soone they rech't

Pierce with h is beams the covert, nor the rain

The Concaves, whence ayr's sounding vapors fetcht

Pelt through, so closely grew the shrubs. The ground

Their loud descent. As soone as any Sun

Was heaped w ith sheddings of the withered leaves. ·

Had fro m the Ocean (where his waters run

Around him came the noise of dogs and men

In silent deepnesse) rais' d his golden head, The early Huntsmen all the hill had spread

Approaching swiftly. From his lair he sprang And faced them, w ith the bristles on his neck

Their Hounds before them on their searching Traile.

Upright, and flashing eyes.

They neere, and ever eager to assaile, Ulysses brandishing a lengthfull Lance, Of whose first flight he long'd to prove the chance.

The boar dies "with piercing cries amid the dust." Bryant smacks of Currier and Ives; Chapman is closer to a Mantegna drawing. Bryant's

The Geography o f rhe l m �1ginarion

38

"thicket," "covert," and "shru bs" are wispy and feathery, and he has a humanitarian tenderness toward the badgered boar that is in contrast to Chapman's bloody delight in the kill ("And shew'd his point gilt with the gushing gore"-Chapman's world still thought of hunting as p roviding food for the family. And Bryant rejoiced when he got to a line he could silver over: "And sacred rivers flowing to the sea" ( 1 0.422) . His H omer is Vergilian, or at least Wordsworthian. Pope, Fenton, and Broome give u s :

Another Odyssey

39

An exile h ave I rold, with weeping eyes, Full twenty annu als suns in distant skies.

Here's the hunt as a Victorian painting by Landseer, the p rose version of Butcher and Lang: Now so soon as early Dawn shone forth, the rosy-fingered, they all went forth to the chase, the hounds and the sons of Autolycus, and with them went the goodly Odysseus. So they fared up the steep hill of wood-clad Par­ nassus, and quickly they came to the windy hollows. Now the sun was but

Soon a s the morn, new rob'd in purp le light,

just striking on the fields, and was come fo rth from the soft flowing stream of

Pierced with her golden shafts th e drear of night,

deep Ocean us. Then the beaters reached th e glade of the woodland, and

Ulysses, and his brave maternal race

before them wen t the hounds tracking a scent, but behind came the sons of

The young Autolyci, essay the ch ase.

Autolycus, and among them goodly Odysseus followed close on the hounds,

Parnassus, thick-perplexed with h o rrid shades,

swaying a long spear. Thereby in a thick lair was a great boar lying, and

With deep- mouth 'd hounds th e hunter-troop invades;

through the coppice the force of the wet winds blew never, neither did

What time the sun, from ocean's peaceful stream, Darts o ' er the lawn his horizontal beam.

thick it was, and of fallen leaves there were a great plenty therei n . Then the

The pack impatient snuff th e tainted gale;

tramp o f th e men's feet and of the dogs' came upon the boar, as they pressed

The thorny wilds the woodmen fierce assail:

on in the chase, and forth from his lair he sprang towards them with crest

And, foremost of the train , his carne! spear

well bristled and fi re shining in his eyes, and stood at bay among them a l l .

Ulysses wav'd, to rouse the savage war. Deep in the rough recesses of the wood, A lofty copse, the growth of ages, stood; Nor winter's boreal blast, nor thunderous shower, Nor solar ray , could pierce the shady bower. With wither'd foliage strew'd, a happy store ! The warm pavilion of the dreadful boar.

Rous ' d by the hounds' and hunters' mingling cries, The savage from his leafy shelter flies; With fiery glare his sangu i n e eye- balls shine, And bristles h i gh impal e his h o rrid chine.

One would like to know how Pope imagined that one could make a fi fteen-foot spear out of a cherry branch; dolikhoskios ( " long of shadow") isn't all that h ard to make sense of. But if one h as set out, Handel-like, with purple light fleeing from golden a rrows, a cherry-wood spear is no matter. In such a rendering, worthy of Salvator Rosa, all reality i s su bsumed in stage sets, costumes, and music; it is opera, and Italian opera at that. When Eurykleia speaks, the words come in a con­ tralto burst: "My son !- My king ! " ' ( Is that the Eurykleia who lifts her skirts and dances in the gore of the suitors, cackling with laughter?) Odysseus's reproof is baritone and Rossini : Thy mi lky founts my infant lips have drain'd: And have the Fates thy babbling age ordain'd To violate th e l i fe th y youth sustain'd?

the bright sun light on it with any rays, nor could the rain pierce through, so

A boar is never " at bay" -he attacks from the beginning. A stag at bay is one who is either trapped or winded and turns in desperation to fight. Homer's boar greets his enemies at his door, disdainful of thei r folly. In a boar hunt, technically it is always the hunter who is at bay, for one dis­ covers the boar tracking the h unt and turns on him. He is a fearless and ill-tempered beast. Words to Butcher and Lang are invariably decorative, swatches of color all. So that dogs tramp. And when there is a paucity of adjectives for fringe, Butcher throws in a "yea" ("many were the men whose towns h e saw and whose minds he learnt, yea" ) and Lang throws in a "lo" ( "lo, the dogs withhold him from his way" ) . I t was Samuel Butler who conceded that "Wardour Street has its uses" (what if "The Ancient Mariner" were called "The Old Sailor" ? ) , but h is Odyssey ( 1900) is an obvious movement away from the gorgeous antiqu­ ing of Butcher and Lang ( 1 8 79) and of Wi lliam Morris ( 1 8 8 7) . Butler hop ed for biscuit-plainness and sinew. " Here was the lair of a huge boar among some thick brushwood so dense that the wind and rain could not get through it . . . . " Odysseus has simply "a long spear in his hand" ; Butler slices away i ts shadow and whatever Odysseus was doing with the spear ( shaking, swaying, brandishing, waving) . Butler tidies up; he knows the difference between poetry and prose. Yet he remains respectful toward Homer's stock images and is not embarrassed by them. He keeps "the child of morning, rosy-fingered Dawn" while his successor Colonel Law rence thinks it too literary and writes instead a pukka "at dawn."

40

The Geography of the Im agination

Ennis Rees is equally eager to hide Homer's formulae and athei zes rosy-toed Eos into "the first red streaks I Of morning." Butler's boar "raised the bristles of his neck, and stood at bay with fire flashing from his eyes." Lawrence's has a " bristling spine and fire-red eyes." Rees: "bristling back and eyes aflame." A strange entropy runs through the translations of Homer into English, from Chapman to Colonel Lawrence. The descent might be plausibly ascribed to the revolt of the masses, the democratizing of literature. Another cause is just as plausibly a settled desire for gentility, for wistful sweetness, for taming. Both Butler and La'Yrence concocted Homers of their own imagining, and both wanted to see him as a literary bloke up to no discernible good; and both were men who deli ghted to do things which they protested weren't worth doing, while secretly hoping that they would be praised for ascribing virtues to Homer that we can no longer see. Butler's novelistic Homer and Lawrence's bookish rescinder of ancient tales are masks that we don't care to bring down from the attic any more. The end of entropy is to fall into one's own source of energy and die. The death throes came with W. H. D. Rouse-the dri ft toward making Homer an old salt's yarn complete. The names became Dickensian; every episode was gilded over with a William Morrisy cozi­ ness, and Homer was perhaps irretrievably a northern European, a Ro­ mancer, a Bard. And yet northern Europe was not all this time armoring itself in ob­ tuseness against the ravishments of Homer. Far from it. At the moment we are watching the resurgence of a new cycle: the relocation by Robert Fitzgerald and Christopher Logue of the translator's energies. Homer the poet seems about to have his day again. Between Bryant and Fitzgerald we have had no Odyssey from a major English poet. If we are willing to discount Pope's Odyssey as a work by Pope and take it as a work by apprentices capa ble of constructing with the master's example and direction a poem in the manner of his Iliad, we can then note an even wider span: two Odysseys only from poets in the history of English literature, Chapman's and Fitzgerald's. There are, at a guess, some fifty English Odysseys. Morris ought to have given us an Odyssey. His The Earthly Paradise, a neglected masterpiece of English literature sorely needing restoration to the curriculum, is poetry of the highest order and displays a narrative skill beautifu lly suited to the rendering of a Pre-Raphaelite Odyssey, a verbal equivalent of Burne-Janes's Circe. He gave us instead a verbal equivalent of Burne-Jones at his most turgid: Tennyson gone high and about to wriggle into the fanciest convolutions of Art Nouveau. Morris satisfied all his need to do an Odyssey when he made his Life and Death

Another Odyssey

41

of Jason. The land of Morris's heart's desire was northern, a barbaric

for est or Iceland or the Troll King's country. The force that broke the palsied spell the Victorians and their German cousins cast over Homer was Samuel Butler. But the force flowed not from his plain-prose Iliad and Odyssey. It flowed from his fierce impa­ t ience with humbug. Butler's real translation of the Odyssey is The Authoress of the Odys­ s ey, a great burst of Sicilian light upon Homeric studies that made the classicists secure their dark glasses the firmer. Butler's offering an in­ telli gent (and extremely funny) girl as a replacement of the Bard is a symbol of astounding importance. It was an event that has not yet been assessed, but its consequences are scarcely hidden. From Butler come many gifts that found their way to the worktable of James Joyce. The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man derives from Butler's Ernest Pon­ tifex (that we have to know under the un-Butlerian title The Way of All Flesh ) , and Butler's resurrection of the Odyssey precedes Ulysses. From Butler comes Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa's II Professore e Ia Sirena, a transmutation into fa ble of the essence of The Authoress of the Odyssey so pointed that it ought to be designated the highest moment of Homeric criticism in the twentieth century. "The Odyssey, " Butler perceived while he was still in school, "is the wife of the Iliad. " And years later that astute perception grew into the insistent news that the Iliad and the Odyssey are not ruins, but ali ve. But the century wanted Homer to be a ruin; romantic distance was the sole perspective from which it could appreciate the two poems. The Renais­ sance was over; the Hon. William Gladstone, who was known to corre­ spond with Schliemann and whose hobby was archaeology, took up the translating of Homer, thus : And the heralds ordered s i lence; And, on chai rs of polished stone , Ranged in venerable circle Sate the Elders. One by one Each the clear-toned herald's sceptre Took, and standing forth alone Spake his mind. Two golden talents Lay before them, to requite Only h i m , among the Judges, Straightliest who should j u dge the right.

No wonder Butler flipped back his cuffs and made a plain prose transla­ tion, and went even further and imagined a sprightly girl to replace the harper of Khios, so that the Elder Statesman's wheezings would be the ultimate affront to her elan.

42

The Geography of the Imagination

For the next half-century we get a curious pattern among writers in­ volved with Homer either as translators or imitators. Charles Doughty is careful to make his epic Dawn in Britain half Odyssey and half Iliad, like the Aeneid, with the Iliad getting the lion's share, as he had already written his Odyssey, the Travels in Arabia Deserta. Colonel Lawrence translated the Odyssey as a companion piece to his Iliad, The Seven Pil­ lars of Wisdom. Kazantzakis both translated the Odyssey into modern Greek and wrote a sequel. In j ust a few years, when a detached considera­ tion of our age is possible, Joyce's Ulysses and Pound's Cantos, both versions of the Odyssey, will take their pl;lce in a complex of meaning that we can now only suspect. And at the heart of the complex will be the two Homeric poems. And now real poets like Fitzgerald and Logue are returning to the poems themselves; which is to say that from the di ffuse appea rance of Homer in practically every form of art except translation, Homer is dri ft­ ing back to his own pages. The dust of Butler's demolition settles nicely, and in place. And P rofessor Latti m ore's Odyss ey, where does it fit in all of this ? Like his Iliad, it will please professors and serve as a standard textbook, for to the professori al eye it is accurate. It fits almost word for word over the Greek text; it can be used as a crib by the student. Its architecture is this: there was an extensive wall made of Greek bri cks. Brick by brick Profes­ sor Lattimore has taken down this structure, replacing each Greek brick with an English one, or perhaps a Basic English one. This is a mode of translation plumped for by Vladi mir Nabokov, a translator of formida­ ble talent and effecti veness (though it perhaps ought to be noticed, if only to catch in an inconsistency a man so sure of himself, that when Nabokov translates his own poems he takes his li berties) . It is the mode by which hopeful Christians assume the Bible was translated. And yet, and yet. This is a new Odyssey; it takes its place beside other Odysseys on the library shelf. There it sits, beside many Odysseys o bvi­ ously less competent and in various Wardour Street and Walter Scott styles; and beside burly, noble Chapman; beside good old leafy William Cullen Bryant; beside the graceful and inventive Robert Fitzgerald. Not far down the shelf are the passages of the Iliad rendered by Christopher Logue, a miracle of the i magination. Professor Lattimore is aware that he does not have access to a languag·e as rich as Chapman's, and says so in his introduction. No one has; that age is gone. Ours, he sighs, is not a heroic culture. So he feels he must make do with a diction all but fea ture­ less, all but denatured. Yet this is the age of Eli ot and Pound and Joyce. The curious thing about so many of Professor Latti more's words and

An other Odyssey

43

phrases is that they aren't very different from those of the Victori ans, or from those of the consci ously mannered Colonel Lawrence. He demands, to be sure, a stark neutrality of his words, and keeps the Zeitgeist well out of it, so that nowhere do we smile at homely tou ches such as Bryant's having Odysseus visit " the capitals of many nations," as if he were Emer­ son on a tour. This neutrality is not total; the King James Bible rings in from time to time ( "his time of homecoming," " nor among his own people") . There are, happily, grand lines throughout that reach for the ir resonance into the deepest traditions of English poetry; watch the alliter­ ation and assonance in this: slaughter his crowding sheep and lu mbering horn-curved cattle;

the Mi lton in this: and descended in a flash of speed from the peaks of Olympos.

Yet we must come across these lines in a style that by now can only be called Ageless Homeric Pastiche: My ch ild, what sort of word escaped your teeth ' s barrier'

And: Then i n turn the goddess gray-eyed Athene answered him.

Professor Lattimore is like a n engraver copy ing a painting. The color of the original must everywhere appear i n his work as monochrome shades. This need not have been, but Professor Latti more chose to have it that way. He is not writing an English poe m; he is writing a translation. He does not relish the half-compliment that Pope had to suffer; he has not written a very pretty poem that must not be called Homer. He has written a sprawling poem that imitates H omer along certain aesthetic lines . It is sometimes severely controlled, stately, grave; it is also a mussy poem, flaring out of control, losing contact with both Greek and English. Professor Lattimore's careful erudition and earnest solicitude for accu­ racy led him to believe that the Odyssey would somehow write itself. If he stuck to his business, the poem would stick to its. Why should it not? The method is logical but wildly i mprobable, for the simple reason that word s are not numbers, nor even signs. They are ani mals, alive and with a will of their own. Put together, they are invariably less or m o re than their sum. Words die in antisepsis. Asked to be neutral, they display al­ legiances and stubborn propensities. They assume the color of thei r new surroundings, like chameleons; they perversely develop echoes. Words also live in history, aging, or proving immune to the bite of

44

The Geography of the Imagination

time. Much that was thought clever in recent translations is already wilt­ ing and going quaint. A neutral vocabulary stands well against time and like the basic geometric figures never goes out of style. It is plausible that Professor Lattimore's Odyssey may weather our age and the next while translations more interesting to us at the moment will soon begin to sound like William Morri s. But posterity is one audience, and we here and now are another. Homer, in defiance of Heraclitus, remains.

The House that Jack Built

A hundred years before the death of Ezra Pound, a week short of the very day, John Ruskin sat down in his red room at Brantwood, among his geological specimens and Scott manuscripts, to instruct the English work­ ing man in the meaning of labyrinths, the craftsman Daedalus, and the hero Theseus. He was writing Letter XXIII of Fors Clavigera, h is monthly tracts against usury and banks. This incremental work, a splen­ did pottage of a utobiography, p amphleteering, preaching, and hap­ hazard digressions worthy of Sterne, gave lessons in aesthetics and economics, morals and literary criticism. Fors is a kind of Victorian prose Cantos , arranging its subjects in ideogrammatic form, shaping them with a poetic sense of i m agery, allow­ ing themes to recur in patterns, generating significance, as Pound did, by juxtaposition and the intuition of likenesses among dissimilar and unex­ pected things. 45

46

T h e Geography of t h e I m a gi nation

Ruskin, who sounded as provincial to Matthew Arnold as Pound to Gertrude Stein, was yearning in Fors Clavigera for a cleansing and reor­ dering of civilization, in almost the same way Pound did in The Cantos . Both works trace a heritage of wisdom and tradition now obscured or abandoned. Both works direct our attention to the monetary historian Alexander del Mar, to the capacious minds of Louis Agassiz and Alexan­ der von Humboldt, architects of systems of knowledge. Both works ana­ lyze the cultures of Venice and Florence, admire the energy of fi fteenth­ century condottiere, and draw morals from various kinds of Italian banks. Both teach us how to see the roots of the Renaissance in medi<eval art. Both are works by men with an extraordinary range of concerns who have the same, almost insurmountable problem of organizing their mate­ rial into a large work. And because both issued their work piecemeal (Fors in monthly in­ stallments from 1 87 1 to 1 8 8 7, The Cantos sporadically in magazines and books since 1 9 1 7, with Cantos LXXII and LXXIII yet to be published), the assumption has been fairly common that Fors and The Cantos are serial commentary basically random in organization. Yet both works are strenuously unified. They both insist that economics must be a part of our literacy and a legitimate and pressing subject for the artist. Watch how Ruskin in Fors XXIII goes about fixing the meaning of Theseus in our minds, and you will see how Pound built ideograms of images and ideas. A great captain, says Ruskin, is distinguished by Fortune's "conclusive stroke against him." We see this proof of adversity in the loss of Ariadne. But of Theseus, more later: we must turn to an engraving by Botticelli representing the seven works of mercy, "as completed by an eighth work in the center of all; namely, lending without interest, from the Mount of Pity accumulated by generous alms. In the upper part of the diagram we see the cities which first built Mounts of Pity; Venice, chief of all-then Florence, Genoa, and Castruccio's Lucca; in the distance prays the monk of Ancona, who first taught, inspired by Heaven, of such wars with usurers." Ruskin then rambles around in what seems to be a shambles of sub­ jects: Victorian fund raising, national defense, reforms in punishment, Maria Edgeworth's novel Helen , until he can get back to Theseus, this time to his image in the British Museum, where he is a stolen antiquity only, unless we can see his meaning. Theseus's stamp is common in our world, in, for example, the Greek fret we can see everywhere. The mean­ ing of this design is now lost, conveying nothing to our eyes. It was, however, the Greek life-symbol, and ours. Best try to understand it by remembering the cathedral doors at Lucca,

The House That Jack Built

47

near which, in the church porch, we can find this sixteen-hundred-year­ old inscription: Hie quem creticus edit Dedalus est Laberinthus de quo nullus vadere quivit qui fuit intus ni Th eseus gratis Adriane stamine iutus. (This is the labyrinth which the Cretan Daedalus built, out of which no­ body can find his way except Theseus, nor could he have done It unless he had been helped by Ariadne's thread, for love.) This, Ruskin goes on, can be reduced from medi<eval sublimity to the nursery rhyme "The House That Jack Built." 1 The cow with the crum­ pled horn will then be the Minotaur. The maiden all forlorn will sta? d for Ariadne, "while the gradual involution of the rhyme and the necessity for clear-mindedness as well as clear utterance"This is the farmer sowing his corn That owned the cock that crowed in the morn That waked the priest all shaven and shorn That married the man all tattered and tom That kissed the maiden all forlorn That milked the cow with the crumpled horn That tossed the dog that worried the cat That killed the rat that ate the malt That lay i n the house that Jack built-

are a vocal imitation of the deepening labyrinth. "Theseus, a pious hero, and the first Athenian knight who cut his hair short in front, may not inaptly be represented as the priest all shaven and shorn; the cock that crew in the morn is the proper Athenian symbol of a pugnacious mind; and the malt that lay in the house fortunately indicates the connection of Theseus and Athenian power with the mysteries of Eleusis, where corn first, it is said, grew in Greece." There was a Greek spirit in Shakespeare, Ruskin continues, compelling him to associate English fairyland with the great Duke of Athens. And Jack the builder neatly equals Daedalus, "Jack of all trades." Ruskin is just getting warmed up. Coins of Cnossos bore the symbol of the labyrinth. Symbols are natural shapes elevated to significance. The Greek fret existed before Theseus, but he gave it the meaning of a labyrinth. The spiral is the shape a worm draws with its coiling bore, a fern with its bud, and a periwinkle with its shell. Completed in the Ionic capital, and arrested in the fending point of the acanthus in the Co1Th e Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, 2nd ed. ( 1 9 56), p. 369, traces this rhyme to Nurse Truelove's New- Year's-Gift (1 755), but it is probably older.

48

The Geography of the Imagi n a tion

rinthian, it has become the prime element of architectural ornament in all ages. In Athenian work the spiral mi rrors wind and waves; in Gothic, the serpent Satan. But Satan is a power of the air, as in the story of job and the story of Buonconte di Montefeltro in Dante. Ruskin next compares labyrinths, coins, modes of justice, judges of the dead, until he can demonstrate that Dante's hell is a labyrinth, until he can triumphantly identify the Minotaur with greed, lust, and usury, like Ezra Pound, whose symbol for usury is Dante's monster of deceit, Geryone: "Hie est hyperusura." Modern criticism has X-ray eyes to see .t:hat the house that Ruskin makes Jack-as-Daedalus build is the house that jack Ruskin built: his cycle of books around the violence of greed in his world and the violence of lust within. His Ariadne was named Rose, whose name he finds, and conceals, everywhere in the text of Fors. Between Ruskin and Browning, Pound's first master, we can see the invention of Daedali an art in litera­ ture: the discovery that only in that intricacy which the Greeks called poikilia-cunning craftsmanship-can complexi ties of meaning beyond inherited styles of narrative and poetry be summoned into play. A terrible beauty, Yeats said, was born into the world. Did Pound know Fors ? He at least knew Ruskin's method, and called it by the Greek word paideuma. His early "I Gather the Limbs of Osiris" was perhaps an imitation of Ruskin's manner. Yeats's last prose work, On the Boiler, was a conscious attempt to repeat Fors Clavigera. In Charles Olson's Gloucester there still lived an old man who had heard Ruskin lecture at Oxford. Between his house and Olson's there is an inlet in which lay a sunken battleship completely covered with Gloucester sewage. The symbolism of this pleased Olson immensely. James Joyce certainly knew Ruskin's Fors , for the doubling of the labyrinth as the house that jack built became a Joycean mode of building symbols. Professor Herbert Marshall McLuhan has recently announced his discovery that the fifteen stories in Dubliners correspond symbolically to the fifteen books of Ovid's Metamorphoses. 2 What he is observing is the mythological dimension of those stories, whereby they are made to correspond to the adventures of Odysseus, to episodes in the Bible, and to various archetypal parables and fables. To find the outlines of Joyce's symbolic structures it is always best to follow the rules of symmetry. The tale of Daedalus, for instance, is midmost Ovid's text. "A Little Cloud" is midmost Dub liners . And if you look, you will find nothing overt about Daedalus in "A Little Cloud" (unless you want to see Little Chandler as a man trapped in an emotional labyrinth, tempted by Gallaher to fly away, 'Letters

to

the E d itor,

Th e James Joy<·e Quarterly,

Vol. 1 2,

no.

4 ( 1 975 ) : 342.

The House That Jack Built

49

or allusio ns to great height and molten wax in the title and the name Chandler). You will, however, find phrases from "The House that Jack Built," the word malt and the phrase crump led horn. In the spiral labyrinth of The Cattle of the Sun chapter in Ulysses you will find an elaborate web of a llusions to Daedalus and the labyrinth, and an equally elaborate web of allusion to "The House that Jack Built." In the center of Finnegans Wake there is a corresponding evocation of the nursery rhyme: "the jackhouse that jerry built." Its address is 32 West 1 1 th streak (an entropic Fibonacci progression, the way nature runs down). Throughout his work joyce puts Jack at the center of the house he built, Daedalus at the center of the labyrinth, from which the design spi­ rals out or radiates. This symbolic figure from a childish, and therefore primal source in our knowledge of literature, is joyce's signature, his labyrinthine thumb­ print on his work. Finnegans Wake i s the house Jack Joyce built, but it is a reading of the Old Testament, the house that jacob built, and of the New Testament, the house that the carpenter jack Christ built. It is a world of involuted meaning like the house that jack Ruskin built, Ruskin being the Shaun to Charles Dodgson's Shem. The Wake dreams through ultimate absurdities of symbols, such as our dreams make us suffer, and through the tragic limitations of language which imprison us when we would be meaningful, and betray us, whatever our caution. Contemplating the sonorous midden of the Wake, William Carlos Williams decided to make an American model. He singled out a river even filthier than the Liffey, the yellow Passaic, and a New Jersy town with a name half Latin, pater, and half English, son; in America our parentage is European; and as Pound's Cantos begin-like H. G. Wells's Outline of History-with the word and, Williams's poem Paterson be­ gins with a colon, a device Joyce could not have used, as his art does not omit �he material implied to the left of that colon. In a sense, Joyce is on one side of that colon, Williams on the other. �e takes from the Wake one sleeping giant, one hamadryad, and the radical Idea that words go numb. And he also took, whether intentionally or not, the idea that where understanding fails the result is that we per­ . ceive a monster instead of an intelligible reality. This idea seems to have been precipitated frorp a painting by the Rus­ . Sian Pavel Tchelitchew. Willi ams met him in 1 942 and saw the massive canvas called "Phenomena" in progress. This pa inting is iconographi­ call y a Temptation of St. Anthony, with monsters of all sorts, monsters . which, a � Dr. Williams, a pediatrician, observed to the painter, are a l l tera tologiCally exact. Williams saw the point, and took away with him the courage to write about the decay of an American city as the gradual

Th e Geogra phy of the Imagination

50

metamorphosis of humanity into monstrosity. He ordered the original plan of Paterson with the four classical elements, earth, air, fire, and water, and saw in their flux a tragic entropy that nevertheless fell back into itself to begin again. A poet whose lifelong business it was to bring babies into the world could never see nature as anything but counter­ entroplc. And a monster of monsters, the atomic bomb (which, incredibly, its mushroom cloud shaped like a skull, appears in the deep background of Tchelitchew' s "Phenomena," painted nine years before Hiroshima )-the atomic bomb and the radioactivity of matter gave Williams his sense that the world is regenerative in a way we had not expected. He then added two more books to Paterson, one for love, and one for genius, which he symbolized by the figure of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, sensualist and monster, an artist who gazed on the ugly and lifted it with love and understanding into the realm of the radiant, into the articulate­ ness of exact statement. The Minotaur may, after all, be the heart of the labyrinth. The painter Tchelitchew later took to concealing Minotaurs in his Joy­ cean style of punning with multiple images inside the same outline, and even painted a "Riddle of Daedalus," an anatomical drawing of the nasal labyrinth where we breathe and smell: our animal intake of knowledge. This picture resolves, if you look carefully enough, into a bull's face and into genitals male and female. Just last month Louis Zukofsky, our greatest living poet, finished his long poem "A " that he began fifty years ago. 3 It was written under the double tutelage of Pound and of Pound's tutors, by a student stubbornly faithful and stub bornly original. "A" is a dance of words to Bach and to the music of Shakespeare's thought. It is a dance of imagery that follows the laws of Orphic Daedalus. It ties and unties knots in a harmony of emblems the way Ben Jonson's Daedalus instructs his dancers to do in the " Masque of Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue" : Then , as all actions of mankind Are but a laborinth, or maze, So let your daunces be entw i n'd Yet not perplex men , unto gaze. But measur'd, and so nu merous too, As men may read each act you doo.

·

And when they sec th e Graces meet, Admire the wisdom of your feet. 3This paper w a s read 30 October 1 9 75, a t Y a l e , to ina ugurate the Beinecke Rare Book and

Man uscript Library's Center for the Study of Ezra Pound a n d His Contemporaries.

The House That Jack Built

51

The daedalian artist infolds, he makes a comp licatio. We beholders are vo in lved in an explicatio; we unfold to read. Or, with Zukofsky, we un­ fold to hear, for, as with Joyce, it is the labyrinth of the ear in which zuk ofsky likes to move. His images pun with a playful energy we have not seen since Shakespeare. He has made a pun in English on every Latin word of Catullus; he has made sawhorses in a Brooklyn street (emblems of the letter A) gallop with manes made of the Latin word manes and with heads made of the number 7. He has made all of his work tributary to the poem "A . " His oeuvre is tied in an elegant and fanciful knot. To see the beauty of "A," we must know the maze-like commentary on Shakespeare called Bottom. For at the center of Zukofsky's daedalian labyrinth is a puckish Minotaur in­ deed, the ass-headed Bottom and his fellow daedalian craftsmen "in a quaint maze in the wanton green." (Remember that Ruskin accepts the Theseus of "A Midsommer Nights Dreame" as the proper English under­ standing of the Athenian maze-treader) . The la byrinth, as we could continue to demonstrate, became a life­ symbol of our century (witness Borges and his labyrinths, Gide' s Theseus, Cort<1zar's Hop-Scotch, Kafka, Kazantzakis). And so did Daedalus, Icarus, and their wings. A pioneering and all but complete edition of the writings of Leonardo da Vinci appeared in London in 18 83. Queen Victoria, the Kaiser, and even the National Library of Dublin are listed among the subscribers (but not Chester A. Arthur or the Library of Congress) . This handsome .edi­ tion omits those beautiful drawings of ornithopters and pages on the theory of flight that are to our eyes some of the most fascinating in da Vinci's notebooks. The omission is tacit and the reason obvious. Da Vinci the anatomist was of living interest (though Victoria covered them with decent blank paper in her copy) ; da Vinci the botanist, the geographer, the military engineer: these faces of his genius were of sound cultural interest. We must assume that the pages about flight were so much Baron Munchausen in 18 83. They had forgotten Daedalus. A one-year-old baby in Dublin would eventually remind them. And in five more years a steam·powered mono­ plane named the Aeolus would fly 150 feet outside Paris, Clement Ader its designer and pilot, only to hiss down with a plop and await the perfec­ tion of the internal combustion engine, until �nother example of its species would mount the air again. This was to be the pattern of the twentieth century-a lab yrinth as Ezra Pound would call it in The Cantos -histo ry would develop a maze· like pattern full of sudden surprises and tragic blind alleys. A man search-

T h e Geography o f t h e Im agi nation

52

ing for a way out, or attempting to plot the confusion, would rarely agree with, or even know about, other men on a similar search. The Cantos are a maze by plan and in subj ect. The second canto does not follow from the first, but takes up anew; and so do the third, fourth, and fi fth. At LXXIV the poem discloses a direction unplanned by the poet, and the last three divisions of the epic are meditations on ways of getting out of the labyrinth of history into the clear air of certainty. If the Victorians could see only unhinged frivolity in da Vinci's pages on flight, they were very much alive to other mythological symbols. Rus­ kin, lecturing at Oxford on sculpture, taught his students that the lesson of Daedalus is an ambiguous one. He placed the labyrinth in contrast to that golden honeycomb with which Daedalus crowned his lifetime of in­ vention. They are similar structures, but in one lurks a symbol of bestial­ ity and violence, in the other bees and honey, signs congenial to the royal houses of Mycenae and China, to John Bunyan and Napoleon. Propheti­ cally Ruskin disclosed symbols that would appear in work after work of twentieth-century art. Joyce in Dubliners depicts the city as a labyrinth (including, as we have seen, Daedalus the craftsman under the name of Jack). In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man he introduces his own Daedalus, fused with the figure of Icarus. Ulysses is a labyrinth within a labyrintr,. and Finnegans Wake is his golden honeycomb. Daedalus. He would have had the scrupulous, the piercing eye of Wittgenstein, who was also architect, engineer, craftsman, and aviator. He would have had the lean, nautical body of Vladimir Tatlin, architect, engineer, craftsman, and an aviator who proposed to assume wings pow­ ered by the human body, and pedal through the air. He had, as the myths tell us, the sudden temper and inept solicitude for apprentices that Leonardo himself displayed, da Vinci who was also architect, engineer, craftsman, and an aviator who designed a bat of lathes and struts in which he hoped to swim through the Tuscan air. He would have had the laconic inwardness and heroic alertness of Wilbur Wright, who was also architect, engineer. craftsman, and an aviator who, on Monday the 1 4th of December 1 903, at a little after three in the afternoon, from Kill Devil Hill at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, flew. He was ready the day before to take mankind on its first flight, toward Fiume, London, Cov en­ try, Berlin, Sheffield, Dresden, Hiroshima, Hanoi, except that the day before was the Sabbath, which he- declined to break. 0 si newy s i lver bi plane, nudging the wind 's w i thers !

(as Hart Crane wrote in "The Bridge") Warp ing the gale, the Wright windwrestlers veered Capeward, then blading the wind's flank, banked and spu n

r I

53

k Bui lt The House Tha t Jac What ciphers risen from Prophetic scri pt, What marathons new-set between the stars '

"]e n'ai cherche pendant toute ma vie, " said Pound's friend Brancusi, "que /'essence de val. Le val, que/ bonheur!" Henri Rousseau around 1906 painted a charming landscape of the

Pont de Sevres, and placed a balloon in the sky-there had been balloons

in the skies of France since Benjamin Franklin's day. Next year, the rud­ dered dirigible La Patrie took to the air, and Rousseau added it to his landscape. Next year, Wilbur Wright flew at Le Mans while Bleriot watched in tears of ecstasy, and Rousseau added the Wright Flyer No. 4 to his sky: the world's first painting of an aeroplane. In Dublin that year James Joyce invented a young man named Stephen Dedalus. Ezra Pound had just begun a long poem on which he would write for sixty-seven years, and never finish. Guillaume Apollinaire, addressing the Tour Eiffel, told her, shepher­ dess as he imagined her to be of bridges and automobiles: La religion seule est restee toute neuve Ia religion Est restee simple comme les hangars de Port-Aviation

And seeing in the aeroplane something as new as the unaging newness of Christianity, compared the new aviators to Christ and His priests: C'est le Christ qui monte au ciel mieux que les aviateurs II detient le record du monde pour Ia hauteur

and later, in

Zone:

et change en oiseau ce siecle comme Jesus monte dans /'air

Henry James, out walking his dachshund on the South Downs saw

Bleriot complete his Channel crossing in 1909. Kafka saw Curtis; and Roug�er fly at Brescia. Gertrude Stein included Wilbur Wright among her

Four tn America; Robert Frost wrote a " Kitty Hawk."

�d there was a day when Ezra Pound brought James Joyce to the studio Constantin Brancusi, who had metamorphosed a mythological _ Roumaman b1rd, the Maiastra, into an image of pure flight, and who had lpted a tombstone for Rousseau on which Apollinaire had written the epitaph . Brancusi' s portrait of Joyce is a spi ral labyrinth an ear. He kept it . ed P his wall, and told people that it was a sy bol opposite to that 0 Ia pyramide fatale," by which he meant the idea of fi tful material progress. The Minotaur enters Picasso's work in 1 927 to become a constant . ICOn thereafter. In 1 93 1 h e made a set of etchin s for Ovid's Metamor-

o�

�

��

to

�

�

54

The Geography of the Imagination

phases, for Albert Skira, specifying the work himself as the only one he was interested to illustrate. A few years later he did the most finished and mythological etching of his career, the mysterious " Minotauromachy," in which brutal violence stands opposed to an innocent girl holding flow­ ers and a candle. For the rest of his life, for another forty years, he would meditate on the Minotaur. Sometimes the Minotaur is as ambiguous a symbol in Picasso's iconography as the bullfi ght itself, which he insisted was prehistori c ritual, as disturbing as the animal-headed creatures from the imagination of Jean Cocteau, horse-headed daimons of the under­ world, cat-headed beasts which, if loved, tumed into prince charmings, as ambiguous as Gide's Minotaur, which was beautiful but brainless. Picasso's Minotaur is a symbol of creative energy, chthonic inspiration, the prehuman past, the animal in man; and our century has maintained an argument in its art as to the harmony between our bestiality and our humanity. What beast is there at the center of the labyrinth? It is sex embracing death, said Freud. It is, said Ezra Pound, the moth called over the mountain, the bull running upon the sword. It is the dolphin leaping in its element, said Yeats. Not until his old age did Picasso turn to the daedalian part of our myth. Commissioned to do a mural for the UNESCO building in Paris, he chose the fall of Icarus for his subject, making Icarus's body out of lines he had seen in prehistoric caves in the Dordogne, the raised arms that can be traced through stone-age art to the Egyptian hieroglyph for praise, spindly and uncertain lines with which the earliest artists drew man's body as distinct from the masterful lines and religious awe with which they drew their splendid ani mals. Picasso includes in his mural an Ariadne abandoned, and three figures on land beside the empty blue sea into which Icarus is falling: two reclin­ ing figures in warm earth colors, and a perplexed figure with joined hands, the gesture of the thinker, of man considering, of vapid theorizing at the very edge of plunging tragedy. Picasso's first mural depicted vio­ lence hurled from the skies upon a Spanish town; his second contrasted war and peace ; this, his fourth and last, displays how he finally saw our century: a woman in distress, youth falling from an awful height, a man lost in thought. The fi rst mural is in a museum, the second and third in a church, the "Fall of Icarus" in a building that ad ministrates educational programs. Like his other murals, it is unsigned, the sole works to which he did not put his name, as if to say that words have nothing to do with pure emblems, as if to remind himself, triumphantly and in a veritable temple of words, that he never mastered the alphabet.

55

The Ho use That Jack Built

It was a mural, according to a famous passage in Yeats, that served Pound as a plan for The Cantos: the Sala dei Mesi in the Palazzo Schifano ia that Francesco del Cossa, Cosimo Tura, and their assistants painted for the Este family. The photograph Pound showed Yeats at Rapallo was of the east wall of the room which is made to say in Canto XXIV: "Albert made me, Tura painted my wall." The Schi fanoia palace was built in 139 1 by Alberto d'Este; the Room of the Months, painted from floor to ceiling in three horizontal bands, is one of the few painted rooms to survive moth, rust, and thieves, and only two walls of it, at that. The uppermost zone shows in twelve divisions the triumphs of the Olympian gods, together with allegorical figures signifying the virtues and skills over which the gods preside. The middle zone shows in twelve panels the signs of the zodiac and the Decan symbols, figures appropriate to the three groups of ten days that make up the month over which each sign of the zodiac rules. Hence each of the middle panels contains four figures, or groups of figures, one for the zodiac, one for each Decan. The bottom zone, also in twelve parts, depicts the life of Ferrara in the time of Borsa d'Este, who figures in the first thirty cantos as a symbol of good will and just government. Reading downward, we see that allegory, symbol, and scene from his­ tory correspond. Thus, if the top shows Minerva, or Justitia, with schol­ ars, poets, priests, and women at their looms around her, the zodiacal band shows emblems of industry, and at the bottom we see a vineyard, a hunt (for food, not sport : dukes in those days provided for their own · tables, and later in The Cantos we see pharoahs sowing crops, and John Quincy Adams at the plow receiving news of his election to the presi­ dency) , the law courts at Ferrara, and Borsa d'Este trying a case. Yeats tells us that the upper panels, the Triumphs, represent archetypal persons in The Cantos, the center panels "a descent and metamorphosis" and the lower panels, in Yeats's wonderfully vague phrase, "certain mod­ ern events." It has been argued that Yeats got everything wrong, even if he heard and that Pound never followed this plan, or that he abandoned orrectly, � It long before the Pisan group. Some years ago I had the privilege of helping Ezra Pound move his effects from one house to another in Rapallo. With a Max Ernst in one hand and the poet's Spartan cot on my head ("Ecco if professore di greco, " sang out a jovial Rapallese, c on if letto del poeta sulla testa! " -what a symbol of critics and poets) I noticed at my feet the sepia "

n The Geog raphy o f the Imaginatio

56

the very prin t that l l of the Schi fano ia fres chi , repr odu ctio n of the east w a e wor ds on the thes d Tur ning it ove r, I foun Pou nd had show n Yea ts . back , i n Poun d's hand : Intention of Cant os later ) To run p a ralle l (th is fou n d The Tri umph s The Seas ons c tivit ies of the seas ons The con tem pora ry, with a

zaga palace in Mantua. Between Cantos IV a nd V Troy fades i nto the

o rcular city Ecbatan, with many a transformation on the way. As the . proceeds, houses begin to be the m ost substantial i mages: the House epiC

of Malatesta, the dynasties of China, the House of Adams. And, as Joyce . might h ave punned, many houses that jack built, meaning banks .4 . Basically three kinds of houses appear in the epic: the House of Hades

:

(the phrase i s Homer s) or repository of history , tradition, and myth, the

houses of great fa md1es (Italian, Chinese, American), and the "quiet houses" (Ithaca , "thy quiet house at Torcell o," the mountain retreats , as

Estate 63 .

of Confuciu s on T'ai Shan, Pumpelly's at Chocorua: places on hi lls wh ere

oet had take n dow n ing the pla n to Yea ts, th e � _ Forty years afte r exp lain . . an exd e mte rven ­ nterven ing, an exil e w1th m the fram ed prin t (the war i I ask ed, and ts had repo rted in A Visi on. ing) and con firm ed w h a t Yea it. was give n perm issio n to copy , a n d the acthe tri u mph s, the seas ons ow foll d e e d n i do s The Canto t kno w the past , kno w the tri ump hs we mus tivit ies of the seas ons . To n ow the pas t w e de­ gue s in man y p lace s ; to k whic h is told in man y ton the b l ood of our Hou se of Had es and give scend , like Ody sseu s, i nto the the dea d may spe ak. i s tori a ns, poe ts) s o that atte ntion ( as tran slat o rs, h osis , for thm gs are st und erst and met amo rph To kno w the seas ons we mu age. The con tem ­ the sam e mas k from age to nev er still ' and neve r wea r it is a vorteX , a whi le it i s ha ppe nin g: porary is wit hou t mea n i n g byri nth. w hirlpo ol of acti on. It is a la . The C� ntos, , Pou nd kne w, was history. The clue to this l a by ri n t h sub j ects , m od1f ymg in structure, a zigz ag of . therefore, are laby rint hin e . as If It we.re a by pro xim ity, trea nng tim � er oth each ing inat llum and i m Greek ti me, in an y di rection . We begm spa ce ove r wh ich one can m ove naiv ely, hke not e, the n i n to med iaev al tim m ove into Rom an ti m e and h and s of the in g Art hur 's cou rt, but th e Con necticut Yan k e to Kin e r par a­ Hom er, is Ody sseu s' , out of Hom . ed by guid es. The desc ent i n t o hell guid e uag lang the Ren aiss anc e, wit h the ph rased b y a Lat in h and in to our cars . whi ch is a mus ic fam iliar a rch aic Eng lish , the ton e of stanza to stanza , to roo m of a hou se, from We m ove as if fro m roo m ses are versus, ver , and n tho ugh t of as a h � use for a poe m has alw ays bee Can tos were The er. stai r, and we trea d m met our tur ning at a doo r o r m to room roo from Bro wni nge squ e mo vem ent o ri gina lly con ceiv ed a s a . . t0 of a pain ted palace . . Ho use of Cir ce as we beg m, to go orp hic We hav e left the me tam Pro teu s, who ert B row nin g fades into dom us Hades. A gh o st n ame d Rob . fad es into Ov id . Go nfad es into Ho me r, w h o of Ven ice and end s m the th yrin lab the in ins The thir d canto beg �

�

S7

Th e House Tha t Jack Built

the traveller who has seen the cities and known the m i n d s of men can "make it all cohere " ) .

The pattern from t h e Sch ifanoia freschi turns o u t to be the s a m e as the

plan given in Canto LXXIV:

between NEKUIA where are Alcmene a n d Tyro and the Charybdis of action to the solitude of Mt. Taishan

�

T i s is emblematically the plan of the

Dwme Comedy.

Odyssey

as wel l , and of

Th e

It is a lso Confucian, i mplying a reverence for an cestors

and past wisdom brought forward , a philosoph ical balance in the midst

of turmoil, a return to a spiritual h omeland .

We have many bri lliant read i n gs of Pound; he is as much a magnet

(and a battlefield) now as he was for more than half a century. Th e Can ­ . tos have that mtncacy of architecture a n d m inutely fi n ished detail which

have kept us n�ading both H o mer and Dante. They have that original ene�gy and freshness of Cubist canvases , the best o f Gaudier a nd Bran­ cusJ, a p � ge of Ulysses or Finnegans Wake, the brightness of Rim baud, pollma � re, and Cocteau, t at has not aged. Pound spent his scholarly

�

�

�e

l ookm? at a rt so beautifully made that it cannot deteriorate. That . o f hne and VItality i mage was his supreme lesson to us, and h i s best guide. But we have o n ly begun to read him, j ust as we have only begun to read

a � d to see and to h�ar the whole Tribe of Daedalu s: Eliot Cummings, . . am Ca rlos Williams, Ida Dool mle, Wilh Henri Gaudier-Brzeska Wyn­ . a m Lewis, Joyce , Zukofsky . Their art h a s changed a l l our p evious concepts of art, and much of our concept of reality.

�

:

The essence of daedalian art is that it conceals what it most wishes to

•1n Ray W Irvin 's D · I D: Tomp k zns: Governor of New York and Vice President of the . United Sta�es {New Hlstoncal Society' 1 9 76) one can see a re p roduction of a br o ad ­ side of the t"�me o f M a !Son parodying "The House that Jack Built." The house is the New York State reasury and 1ack IS used m the sense of money.

�m� �r .

·

58

The Geography o f the I magination

show: first, beca use it charges word, image and sense to the fullest, fusing matter and manner; and secondly, to allow meaning to be searched out. There are flying Daidaloi and falling lkaroi on all pages of A Portrait. When, in Ulysses, people make change, with money, a metamorphosis occurs. The word Stephen is concealed in the opening phrase of Finne­ gans Wake (" rivverun, p as t Eve an d Adam's . . . ") and the word steph­ anos, a garland or victor's wreath, is hidden in rainbows and Viconian circles down the page. But who has begun to see that The Cantos begin with a descent into Hell, a transformation involving wine, and a child amid ruins, as in a Renaissance nativity scene? And are about the driving of moneychangers from the temple? That Minos and his labyrinth are neatly concealed in Pound's portrait of the artist as a young man, Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, a poem moreover in which a Venus rises from the sea, as in Joyce's Por­ trait? When can we begin to see the parallels between The Cantos and Ulysses, both rewritings of the Odyssey ? When shall we appreciate that the words in which both works are written are as formulaic as Homer's ? Joyce accepted Homer's formulae in the comic mode, as cliche, and parodied all the English there is; Pound understood the formulae to be words shaped by masters : all those quotations are not quotations (and they us ually turn out to be misquotations, from memory, if you look them up) ; they are the formulaic gists of ideas in maximum verbal focus . Homer, as best we know, did not invent a version of the wanderings and return of Odysseus. From the best phrases he knew, all tried and tested by singers over the centuries, he took the firmest and finest, dialect be hanged, and built them into a strong, incredibly elegant symmetry. When shall we begin to see Joyce's radical invention, the interior monologue, random phrases and capri cious images (seemingly, though held firmly in a logic of association, correspondence , and symbol), as an invention parallel to, and strangely like, Pound's radical invention, the ideogram? The i deogram is a complex word, however many phrases long, a new kind of word, which we must learn to read in reverse etymol­ ogy, from components to the whole idea. The next step in reading The Cantos i s to master the labyrinth of its images so that we can see it with new eyes for what it is, not the Cretan maze but the last, triu mphant labyrinth of Daedalus the Master, a golden h9neycomb. But until we tread the maze wisely, it will remain a perplex­ ity. It is alive. It will change from labyrinth to honeycomb only after you have seen its architecture and learned the harmony of its ways. The English artist Michael Ayrton, disciple of Wyndham Lewis and a sculptor who specialized in Minotaurs and who wrote a novel about

The House That jack Built

59

Daedalus, was commissioned a few years ago by the mountain-climber and bee-keeper Sir Edmund Hilary to see if he could di scover how Daedalus made a honeycomb of gold. The lost-wax process, perhaps its very mvennon, was obviously involved. Michael Ayrton proceeded to make a golden honeycomb. Moreover, when Sir Edmund put it in his garden in New Zealand as a gleaming piece of sculpture, bees came, ac­ cepted it as a hive, and filled it with honey and their young. Just this week, my student Bruce Wiebe pointed out in a seminar on Joyce that in the fifth chapter of Ulysses, the Lotos Eaters, where the symbolism is concerned with flowers, Leopold Bloom is a bee gathering nectar ( look at Gold Cup, Sceptre, the calyx of the rolled newspaper, and Bloom's characteristicall y apian figu re-eight amble). Molly, in the preced­ ing chapter, is the queen of the hive. Stephen is a larva, and the whole novel is a daedalian golden honeycomb, the ultimate remaking and refi? �ment of the labyrinth (which it also is). The original labyrinth was pohttcal, the final one, the honeycomb, is a gift to Aphrodite. Crystal, we beseech thee,

(we read in Canto C) Cla rity, we beseech thee from the l a b y rinth .

And in Canto LXXXIII, written in the concentration camp at Pisa: and Brother Wasp is bu i l ding a very nea t house of fou r rooms, one s h aped like a squ a t indian bottle La Ves pa,

Ia vespa, m u d , swallow system

and further along in the Canto: and in the warmth after chill sunrise an i n fant, green as new grass h a s stuck its head o r tip out of Madame La Vespa's bottle

and: The i n fant has descended. from mud on the tent roof to Tel l u s

�

like t o l i k e color h e goes amid grass-bl des greeting them that dwell u nder XTHONOS OI X 8 0 'J I O I ; H<>

x!Jovwv<;

XHO�OL

t o carry our news to them that dwe l l under the earth,

The Geography of the Imagina tion

60

begotten of air, that shall sing in the bower of Kore,

l lf'ptTE rf>iwEw

and have speech with Tiresias, Thebae Cristo Re, Dio Sole i n about lfz a day she has made her adobe (la vespa) the tiny m ud-flask and that day 1 w rote no further.

Prehistoric Eyes

When the Dogon of Upper Volta and Mali, some of the most primitive people to survive into our age, build a new sanctuary, they decorate the far;ade with a tall painted oblong to the right of the door, and with one to the left. The one on the right is filled in top to bottom with two zigzag lines superimposed, making a kind of totem pole of lozenges, with a dot added to the center of each lozenge. The oblong to the left is divided into rectangles, each corresponding to the lozenges in the other oblong, and each with a dot in its center. Nothing could be simpler: we doodle such designs on our scratchpads at committee and board meetings, and we are aware that pottery the world over bears such repetitious designs. So does embroidery, wallpaper, furniture, jewelry. Encountering such designs, we have the aestheticians to tell us that they are rhythmic ways of fi lling space and of pleasing the eye. Archeologists will tell you that they are 61

62

The Geography of the Imagination

memories of the days when the first clay pots were imitations of woven baskets. The theories run on: these li near patterns spri ng from a love of symmetry, from a sense of infinity, from gene rosity of spiri t, from a pas­ sion for intricate decoration. But the Dogan are with us, lively and thriving, and if asked will explain thei r intent in painting a column of dotted lozenges to the right of a sanctuary door and a column of dotted rectangles to the left. The column to the right represents the descent of a heavenly ark from deep in space to the African earth. On board were the 266 things which constitute all of life. The lozenges are actually the same as the rectangles on the left of the door, but tilted, to indicate that the ark in its fall spu n like a leaf. Space is four-cornered ( witness t h e solstices a n d equinoxes) ; hence lozenges. The dots are stones for the primal field. The left-hand column also represents the ark and the stages of its descent. Its rectangles are the lozenges oriented properly, as space when the ark had landed settled down to a constant up, a constant down, and the cardinal direc­ tions were then established. The Dagon's explanation of this i nnocent-looking pattern goes on; you can consult 5 44 pages of it in the fi rst fascicle of volume 1 of a projected sixteen volumes . 1 Simi Jar explanations the world over of such designs are equally startling, equally discouraging to our attempts to read symbols. And if the symbols are 30,000 years old? We are then faced with the letter in Finnegans Wake scratched up from a midden-Joyce' s symbol for the deep, forgotten past, a past recorded sensitively and beautifully on cave walls, on bone, in sculpture, on Hint tools, rings of megaliths, and mounds of earth depicting running horses, ithyphallic giants, and ser­ pents. We have a vocabulary of responses to these signs, possibly all wrong, and probably projections of our way of seeing the world. We live in a decorated world, a frivolously decorated world, and thus see the Dogan graph of the pri mal ark's descent as a primitive pattern, some­ thing daubed by simple black souls. In the deep background of Alexander Marshack's bri l li ant speculative study of prehistoric symbolism2 is our gratuitous assumptions a bout the creature we call Cave Man. It was William Randolph Hearst, I believe, who gave us the shaggy, cow-browed, clu b-wielding lout dragging his wife behi n d him. We have received the curious notion that perhaps he .grunted rather than spoke, and hunkered around a stick fi re looking dazed and immensely stupid. ' Marcel Griaule and Germaine Dieterlen, Le Renard pale ( P a r i s : Institut d'Ethnologie, M u see de !'Homme, 1 9 65) . ZAlexander Marsh ack, Th e R o o ts of Civilization: Th e Cognitive Begi1mi11gs of Man 's First Art, Symbol a11d Notatio11 (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1 972) .

Prehistoric Eyes

63

Yet in 1 8,000 B.C. he stitched his clothes together wi th an eyed needle, and when he fished he took along a fishhook and braided twine. He painted magnifi cent pictures of animals and gods, he sculpted with naturalistic skill. He had summer camps and winter camps. He has even left us a picture of himself at Marsoulas, a face engraved i n rock. I t looks like nothing s o much a s a caricature b y the French car­ toonist Sine. The head is light-bulb-shaped. The eyes are shaky spirals crossed by an eyelid line. The nose is sharp and French, a triangle with a sagging hypotenuse. Two more lines: septum and mouth, at right angles, et voila! There is a hairdo, probably plaits. Is it a woman? If not, our Cave Man shaved. This George Price janitress (or god, or demon) is something we literally cannot see. We do not know if it is ugly or handsome, caricatiue or pious icon, male or female. Our eyes helplessly see it as witty and playful. It is Alley Oop by Alley Oop. An d from it we can deduce an anist, a chisel, a mallet, and an audience that liked to look at pictures. But Mr. Marshack starts his book with the fact that this creature watched the moon, noting its regularity of waxing and waning by notch­ ing bones, as if to be able to ascertain by dou ble-checking that indeed every 2 9 . 5 days it repeats its dramatic metamorphosis from dark to sickle to circle to sickle to dark again. This is Mr. Marshack's beginning. He was trying to make mathemati­ cal sense of the thousands of prehistoric objects on which prehistoric men kept track of something, like a western sheriff notching the handle of his gun for every horse thief brought down, or Robinson Crusoe with his calendrical stick. Some scholars said these incised lines were decoration ; some have tried to see the binh of mathematics in them. All, says Buckminster Fuller, is angle and incidence. Of primitive man's grasp of angles we know nothing. He would know that going downhill is easy, uphill hard, and wou l d h ave perceived the use of the simplest machine, the inclined plane, down which things roll of their own accord. Some vorarchimedisch Archimedes would have stepped on the up end of a log leaning across a log and seen the principle of the fulcrum . B u t it is incidence that Mr. Marshack tracks on the carved bones and cali brated rocks of the Upper Paleolithic. He offers dramatic and detailed arguments for reading the p hases of the moon . in series of notches which have been hitherto understood as decorations. Practically all the reviews of this pan of his book have been scholarly cautious, many of them un­ convinced. With reputations at stake, it is understandable that fellow prehistorians are not going to endorse Mr. Marshack straight off. Science is a matter of redoing experiments. In a sense it does not matter whether these markings are moon calendars or not. Mr. Marshack's point is that

64

The Geography of the Imagi nation

they are accounts in primeval numbers of something (animals k illed in the hunt perhaps, or years in office of a phylarch, or days between menstrual periods). When language emerges, the verb to draw is the same as to write. We can see, and to some extent read, the drawings of primitive man. Mr. Marshack's triumph in this book is that he goes a long way in showing us that the writing of the old stone age is indeed writing, and that there are plausible ways of reading it. From the notches which tend to come in groups of thirty and thus look suspiciously like lunar counts, he turns to engraved artifacts which have been around for years ,in museum cases and proceeds with a brilliantly useful idea-that of incidence, or as he says, "time-factoring" -to find coherences in symbols which had been interpreted be fore as totemistic, magic, or sexual. A mackeral engraved on a bone, its mouth closed, becomes after Mr. Marshack's reinvestigation with microscope a salmon with its mouth open. Moreover, he identifies the pip that appears in the salmon's mouth at the spawning season. And why is the salmon pictured with a seal? Because, Mr. Marshack explains, seals at this time (as we know from fossils) followed the salmon far up inland rivers. And a squiggle of tiny lines in the composition with the salmon and seal turns out under the microscope to be a flower. The images become a story: spring, spawning, the earth coming to life again. Mr. Marshack is the first student of prehis­ tory to detect floral imagery in these archaic pictures. Indeed, one needs a microscope to see the miniature blossoms and buds. Many " feathers," "spears," and "phalluses" of previous readings may well be primitive grains, or even trees. Trees. The acacia tree to the Dogan is an animal, not a vegetable, or, as they say, "a person." It is surprising that ethnologists have not applied their knowledge of primitive thought to the reading of prehistory. It is among primitive metaphysics that the symbolic grammar of paleolithic signs will have survived, if it has survived. (Anthropologists like Leo Frobenius and Bertha von Dechend assume that it has.) Why not take a Dogan cosmologist to these mysterious bones and ask him to read them? If the master Dogan metaphysician Ogotemmeli, the blind old wizard who explained the earth, fate, and the stars (star by star) to the French ethnologist Marcel Griaule, could have been enticed into an aliplani (as he called it) and taken to the caves of the Dordogne, God knows what he could have explained. Coming so soon after M. Andre Leroi-Gourhan's study of paleolithic cave painting, Treasures of Prehistoric Art ( 1 968), and Annette Laming's Lascaux ( 1 959), Mr. Marshack's pioneering theories arrive as part of a renaissance of prehistoric inquiries. Prehistory (Glyn Daniel has written a charming account of it in an available Penguin, The Idea of Prehistory)

Prehistoric Eyes

65

began among the antiquarians of England and France who kept stumb­ ling upon it as inexplicable data (John Aubrey explained to King Charles that Stonehenge was a Roman temple). Some of the stone-age caves in France were discovered in the eighteenth century, though the discoverers hadn' t a clue what they had discovered: they scrawled their initials and the date across the paintings and walked away, much as the chucklehead Bjarni Hrolfsson sailed by the coast of Massachusetts in 1000 and did not think it interesting enough to land upon. John Frere had begun by 1790 to collect flint weapons from a pit in Suffolk; in 1838 Boucher de Perthes had a collection of stone axes; and the great search sets out in 1 83 8 when Brouillet found in a cave at Vienne an engraved bone: the first example of ice-age art ( Darwin was at the same time grasping the principles of evolution in the Galapagos). Prehistory became a science in the hands of Henri Breuil and Emile Cartailhac and their circle. Even before their theories became current knowledge, Breuil's disciple Leroi- Gourhan, whose training was an­ thropological rather than antiquarian, found a way of making sense of the cave paintings. Starting with a survey of some 600 caves, he began to see patterns in the grouping of the animals: if a horse here, then a cow there. Human figures are always at the entrance or deepest part of the caves. Breuil had established the vocabulary of the images; Leroi­ Gourhan gives us a coherent theory of the grammar. Mr. Marshack of­ fers us a theory of inflections, of morphology. Context has been the great problem of understanding: how these im­ ages figured in man's life. Breuil, a priest, tended to see them as religious; Leroi-Gourhan posited a sexual context of survival and creation. Mar­ shack places them in time, in the seasons, and relates them to the hunt (man followed the herd animals; the Lapps still do), the sacrifice (the microscope discloses that images of animals have been "killed" several times over with lines in mortal places), the rutting and birth periods. The microscope can determine that a small object, an incised bone with images and time-notations, was carried in men's hands for years and years. It can also reveal that worn images were " refreshed" with new engraving after years of handling. This is a new concept for prehistory: suddenly we have migrant men with objects in their hands which are not axes or knives, but chronometers with persistent symbols-a horse and salmon together was one of the most common. The hunter hunted with an image of the dying, pierced animal in his hand.3 3Fran.;:ois Bordes, Professor of Prehistory at the Universiry of Bord eaux, announced in De­ cember 1972 that he had discovered an engraved bone near the Pech de I' Aze Cave, i n the environs of Sarlat, a region of the Dordogne rich in prehistoric caves and artifacts, which he estimates to be 230,000 years o l d . This is 200,000 years older than any previously known graph 1 c notation by a h u m a n hand. The bone is the thigh of a n ox, and the marks are arcs, bands, and double chevrons (hke a gull's wings in flight) . M r. Marshack flew to France to

66

The Geography of the I magination

The little goddesses, all fat behind and bosom, turn out to be anno­ tated, and this makes th e moon count wonderfully plausible, for she is our sole link between the wandering tribes and man the agriculturalist in his first cities. That she is a moon goddess is one of the very few sure guesses we can make about the religion of ice-age man. For years now two disciplines have been tunneling toward each other through deep time: the prehistorians, who see their subject melt into thin air before 10,000 B.C.. and the archeologists, who see their subject arising around 6,000 B . C . A few faint and tenuous lines are beginning to cross those blind years. The images on rock in the Val Camonica in the Tyrol seem to be continuous from prehistory to Roman times: in the earliest, horned men with strange paddles in thei r hands mate with reindeer cows, and in the later, they own wagons and chariots and bronze swords. James Mellaart's discoveries at (:atal Hi.iyi.ik in Anatolian Turkey connect his­ tory and prehistory: the bulls of Lascaux and Altamira are still in the religious symbolism, and the big-bosomed goddess is there, flanked by leopards, recogniza bly the Mama of Sumeria and the Cybele of ancient Syria. Zuntz's Persephone ( 1972) traces the rise of this old goddess (who will become the field-goddess Demeter of the Greeks and the city-goddess Cybele-Astarte-Fortuna of the Roman Empire) in Malta, where her pre­ historic underground shrines were kidney-shaped, dark, and devoted to the idea that birth and death are complementary events: Eleusis thou­ sands of years before Eleusis. "The repertoire of images found across the Upper Paleolithic of Europe," Mr. Marshack writes . . . suggests a storied, mythological, ti m e-factored, seasonal, ceremonial and ritual use of a n i m a l , fish, bird , plant, and serpent i mages, a n d it apparently also includes at times what seem to have been selective and seasonal killing and sacrifice, either of the im age, in rite, or of the real animal. The complex­ ity and interrelation of these storied mea n i ngs cannot easily he explained by determine b y microscopic a n a l y s i s i f i ndeed t h e bone is engraved rather than scratched o r cracked. H i s con clusion, w h i c h h e presented before t h e American Assoc1at10n o f Ar­ cheologists a t the end of the year, i s that it i s engraved by two di fferent chipped flint instru­ ments. Prof. Hallam Movi u s , the distingui shed p rotege of Hen n Brell l l and Professor o f A rcheology a t H a rvard, agrees t h a t the bone i s engraved deli berately (as distinct from , d i e whi ttling) . He would, however, s h a v e 1 0 0,000 years from t h e bone's antiquity, and Mar­ s h ack h i mself believes the bone to be no more than 1 35 , 000 years old. ! learned about the hone from the French press and, remembering its fl a i r for the sensational, called both Profs. Mov i u s and Marshack to see j u st what had been found. Prof. Marshack fee l s that markmgs are neither art nor notation o f the kind he e l u cidates in The Roots of Cil•ihzatron, but " certain that they are signs. The dat i n g of the bone is by geological strat u m . Except for the

s u reness that the bone is p re-Neanderth a l , there is no i n formatJon whatever to pomt to what kind of people might have engraved it. No marked object older than 35,000 years was known before its discovery.

Prehtstoric Eyes

67

a n y generalizin g theories propounding concepts of hunting magic, fertility ritual, o r sex u a l symbolis m . Instead, the art and sym bol suggest a broad range of cogn itions, cultural and practical, and a profound understanding of processes in na ture and of the va rieties of living creatures. (p. 260)

And of the men who left us this art Mr. Marshack has wanted to deter­ mine their "evolved human cognition." And there the mystery is con­ cealed: for we are on the moon studying geology and cosmology while acting, as nations and as individuals, with a savagery and brutality that may not even have been known (certainly not possible) to primi tive man. Man, it would seem, does not evolve; he accumulates. His fund of advan­ tages over nature and over the savage within is rich indeed, but nothing of the old Adam has been lost; our savagery has perhaps increased in meanness and fury; it stands out ever more terribly against a modern background. Art, for instance, has not evolved. It has always been itself, and modern artists have notoriously learned more from the archaic discovered in our time than from the immediate centuries. Heraclitus was more precious to Wittgenstein than Plato. One can move from Pythagoras to Buckminster Fuller without needing the intervening geometricians as a connection. And cognition? I would swap eyes, were it possible, with an Aurigna­ cian hunter; I suspect his of being sha rper, better in every sense. History is not linear; it is the rings of growth in a tree; and it is tragic. Mr. Marshack's study of mind twenty millennia back is a touching of ghosts in the dark, the ghosts of people from whom we are descended, whose genes we carry in our bodies. Our most diligent sciences look inward into the cell and atom, to stave off death. The historical sciences do not so obviously stave off death, but it seems to me that searching for man in his past and finding him not brutal and inarticulate but a creature of ac­ complished sensitivity and order, sane and perhaps more alive than we, is a shield against the forces among us that stave off life. The Dogon, most primitive of men, can point to the star (western man found it only recently, with a telescope, and catalogued it with a number, and published the fact in the back pages of a newspaper, which was then used to wrap garbage) that contains the plan for the spiral inside the crabgrass seed, the source of life. I imagine the reindeer hunters of the Dordogne could, too. The real meaning, it seems to me, of such a book as this, is not what we have grown from as men living together, but what we have lost.

Whitman

Whitman in wad ded paper; nonchalance was His room s in Cam den were shin-deep wading in, knew the othe rs o n mione of the household gods. Visitors, . , so with so much white hau and ear nous 1 y th ere around the old man 0f h osts g h e : robe on a buffalo freckled and so barbaricly slouched d ts Cloo sis char Columbus, of Ana Rossini and Scott, of Lincoln and . and E u emx hilom esses � Ar!emis Elias Hicks, and two supreme godd I s in his sixty-third year on B e d oe ed erect was lon theria whose eido ue sta ll, � t feet two red and Island a gift from the French, three hund Auguste Ban hold 1, at t e s ericFred of work the pedi m nt together, r in grey dawns with an angUis of which millions of eyes would wate duplicate ("Not a grave o f t e h ope whl. ch only Whitman's poetry can · turn to bear �· n Its for freed om murdered for freedom but grows seed and the snows rams the and w, seed , I Which the winds carry far and re-so nourish") , Liberty .

�

�

·

� �

�:

'­

� �� �� �

�

·

·

·

69

Lincoln on horseback tipped his hat to him in Washington one day, a gazing stranger whom Lincoln must have supposed was some office seeker or underling in one of the departments, perhaps a geologist with that grizzled a beard. It was the republican equivalent of Napoleon look­ ing in on Goethe to talk history and poetry. He attended Poe's funeral, stand ing toward the back of the mourners. He comforted the dying in the war (like Henry James) and wrote letters home for them (like Ezra Pound at Pisa) . Not until he was an old man did anyone care or know who he was. George Collins Cox came and photo­ graphed him hugging children (and copyrighted the photograph, as if Walt were Niagara Falls or Grand Canyon) ; Thomas Eakins came and did a masterpiece of a portrait. Young men came and learned what they might do with their lives, John Burroughs being the star pupil. Like Poe, he has always been suspect in his own country. To name the Walt Whitman Bridge the authorities had to sidestep the objections of Christians and Patriots that his morals were un-American. Emerson, who once strolled through the Louvre without stopping in front of a single picture, was at pains to have it known that he was not a close friend of Whitman's. Thoreau wrote in his journal, December 1, 1856: "As for the sensuality in Whitman's 'Leaves of Grass', I do not so much wish that it was not written, as that men and women were so pure that they could read it without harm." "Whitman," Kafka told his friend Gustav Janouch, "belongs among the greatest formal innovators in the modern lyric. One can regard his unrhymed verse as the progenitor of the free rhythms of Arno Holz, Emile Verhaeren, and Paul Claude!. . . . The formal element in Walt Whitman's poetry found an enormous echo throughout the world. Yet Walt Whitman's significance lies elsewhere. He combined the contempla­ tion of nature and of civilization, which are apparently entirely con­ tradictory, into a single intoxicating vision of life, because he always had sight of the transitoriness of all phenomena. He said: ' Life is the little that is left over from dying.' So he gave his whole heart to every leaf of grass. I admire in him the reconciliation of art and nature . . . . He was really a Christian and-with a close affinity especially to us Jews-he was there­ fore an imp ortant measure of the status and worth of humanity.'' 1 "Have you read the American poems by Whitman?" Van Gogh wrote to his sister-in-law in September 188 8 . "I am sure Theo has them, and I strongly advise you to read them, because to begin with they are very fine, and the English speak about them a good deal. He sees in the future, and even in the present, a world of healthy, carnal love, strong and frank-of friendship-of work-under the great starlit vault of heaven a something 1G ustav Janouch, Conversations with Kafka, trans. Goronwy Rees (New York: New D i rec­ tions, 1 9 7 1 ) , p . 1 67.

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Th e Geography of the I magination

etern ity in its place abov e this whic h after all one can only call God- and so cand id and pure; but it sets worl d. At fi rst it make s you smile , it is all you thinking for the same reaso n . 2 "The 'Pray er of Colu mbus ' is very beaut iful." i s impr essive and a bit his to nded respo that lities bi sensi of The range , Tenn yson, Victo r Hugo , puzzl ing: Henr y . Jame s, Melv ille, Swin burne usefu l to talen ts as diver se John Hay, Yeat s, the Rosse ttis. He was a force Dino Camp ana, Gui llaum e as those of Willi am Carlo s Willi ams and poetr y from exclu sive com­ Apol linair e and Hart Cran e. He had freed d the wide ning dista nce be­ mi tmen ts to narra tive and the ode. He close to face, so that our choic e i s twee n poet and audie nce. He talks to us face in turni ng away there is the betw een listen ing a n d turni ng away . And on the very stars and on uneas y feelin g that we are turni ng our backs ourse lves. of Amer ican ideal ism as He su cceeded in maki ng himse lf a symb ol Jeffer son or Jacks on. than brigh t and in m any ways far more articu late ncy. Thor eau and curre risky But as an ideal fi gure he turned out to be to rema in in the apt more Emer son were safer , more respectabl e, and realm of ideas. for the Amer ican spirit be­ Whit man, Jack Yeats comp lai ned, was bad natur ally in what Whit ­ too all cause it seem ed to him that we indul ged this view of Whit man tured m an urged us to wallo w. Beerb ohm carica youn g Ez ra Poun d in the d an , ) (" . . . inciti ng the Amer ican eagle to soar" much , whi le in­ too much man his Pre-R aphae lite suit thoug ht Whit the critic s we­ that there thing tellige ntly suspe cting that there was some

ren't seeing . 't seen. It is for insta nce Ther e are lots of things the cri tics haven ectua l backg round he as­ intell the wort hwhi le readi ng Whit man again st r reme mber ed excep t longe no is sume d his reade rs knew and which , from whic h Whit ­ boldt Hum von spora di cally: the world of Alexa nder Thor eau collec ted whom for siz, Agas man takes the word cosmos, Louis is as i nform a­ hich w of ective persp turtle s, Volne y's Ruins, the histo rical seems n aif that deal great A . Scott er, tive in Whit man as in Shelle y; Fouri . hes branc and and spont aneou s i n Whit man has roots tion, and Whit man' s His age still read Pluta rch as part of its educa ( less perso nal and ent differ ooks l ie under stand ing of erotic cama rader Band unde r Pel­ d Sacre an Theb the of eccen tric) besid e a know ledge ions i n Elysi u m with Freud opida s and Epam einon das, whos e conv ersat n ames were terro r to the e whos s heroe one woul d l ike to hear, those believ ed, in the Mast er's Spart an infan try , w ho were Pytha gorea ns who 2Complete Letters of VIncent van Gogh, val. 3 (New York: Graphic Society, 1 95 8 ) , p. 445 .

Whztm,m

71

dictu m, that a friend is another self, who were sworn to chastity, and who passed dady the palace of an old king named Oedi pus . And they were, as they said in their language, democrats. WhJt � an , s fon d gaze was for grace that is u n aware of itself; his con­ stant pomtmg to beauty in common robust people was a discovery. Cus­ tom sa1d that beauty was elsewhere. Women in his time, as now, were pathologically mterested in their own looks, especially in well-to-do fam­ t !Ies, becaus � that would be their sole achievement, aside from mother­ hood, on this earth. They were l aced breathlessly into corsets, caged in hoopskirts, harnessed into bustles. The body was girt about with bodices drawers, bloomers, stockings, gloves, petticoats. Their shoes were alway ; too small. T� ey took no more exercise than aged i nvalids. Their hair was curled with nons heated in an open fire, then oi led, then shoved into a bonnet It would tire a horse to wear. Thei r flesh never met the light of th e sun. They famted frequently and understan dably . How in the world did they pee ? In Plutarch you could rea � about Spartan girls who wrestled with boys, both naked. It was the opm10n of the Spartans that clothing on such an occasiOn would be in decent. ( We know of a Phi ladelphia woman in the ti me of Dr. BenJamm Rush who chose to die in modesty rather than let a doctor see her breasts) . One suspects th at Thoreau wou ld have married a woodchuck or a rac­ _ c �on, If the bwlogy of th e union could have been arranged; Whitman _ might, given the opportunity, like Clarence King or Lafcadio Hearn, h ave marned a bl ack wom an. It was one of his fantasies that he had had one for a mistress. Freud's replacing one Calvinism wi th another p retty much th e same should not fool us into thinking we can say th at Whitman's love for handsome boys was a psychosis which we can then su btract from his book like Victoria looking at da Vinci's notebooks with the anatomi cal : dra �mgs decorously covered by brown paper. That love is the very heart �f his VISIOn. He was remventmg a social bond that had been in civiliza­ tiOn from th e beginning, t ?a t had, in Christian Eu rope, learned various dodges, and met Its doom m Puritanism and was thus not in the cultural package unloaded on Plymouth Rock. As in the ancient worl d Whitman had no patience with the pathic (as _ . word was) , th � effemmate. He wanted in men and women a love that h1s was unaware � f Itself, as heroism is unaware of itself, as children are � naware of their own beauty. What Whi tman was observing as the m at­ mg ha �Jts of the species :v as a debased form of Courtly Love that the . mdustnal revolution ? ad mtwined with commerce (a pretty wife was an asset to a nch man, mdeed, she was part of his wealth) . Women were

The Geography of the I magination

72

sban d if Pluto were t h e most eligib le h u caug ht in a strange new myth , as for Perse phon e. s tu rning to those spirit s that were Th ere was accur acy in Whit man' of the . He loved , as Niet zsch e said free to be lively , l u sty , inven tive d at a stoo i s race was like none befo re . lt Gree ks the healt h of the race. H 's tman i h , the two h al ves of the worl d. W u niqu e p l ace in histo ry. It joi ned ment co�t ratio n of the span mng of our grea t visio n culm i nates i n his celeb e een Euro pe and Ame nca w1th th betw gap e with rails, th e cl osi n g of th leted comp ing of the Suez Cana l. Thes e trans atlan tic cable , and th e open t h an draw n th e first brav e arc. Mor e ad h s mbu the circl e of whic h Colu le who the d new route that at l a st belte com merc e wou ld flow alon g that g alon grate i aic as man h i m self i m m earth . Why shou l d not i deas as arch that line?

yet estin g right now i s that we do not One reaso n Whi tman is so inter . cord gling stran a i s an umbi l icus or know i f that band arou nd t h e earth am­ had ho�e mbe rg th at radio and telep Albe rt Speer expl ained at Nure rs so ed the i mpl emen tatiO n of h1s orde lerat acce and plifie d H i tler's scop e a need we at ts th able to p revio us tyran far beyo nd any such pow er avail done been have d how so muc h evi l coul new kind of i magi natio n to grasp was first h el l allow ed by th e worl d belt The s. year l in t h ose twel ve i n ferna the ed nfect i that old feud of the Engl ish Whi tman 's own Civil War , an i er, l Cava and d Hea wed v i gor, Rou nd new wor ld and brok e out with rene p l a nter. Nort h and Sout h, i ndus triali st and ld on h ospit als, Hen ry Jame s, wou Uni e th in rse nu w W h i tman ' s fello er­ Mod t. emen mov by easy scop e of live until 1 9 1 6, anot her hel l caus ed and n of a cohe sive soci ety fu rth er visio s ' man Whit sink nity seem s to bnl­ and y punt tial ting its essen furth er back into the past while isola n wou ld seem to be the inter nal visio his of izer steril lianc e. The final all move ment restle ss and capr icicomb u stion engin e, whic h h as made ous.

poetry t h ere is mov emen t. His age And at the cent er of all Whit man 's it boun ced in buck boar d and car­ walk ed with a sprie r step th an ours; A d s hake n and his m u scles p u l l e d . riage ; a man on a hors e h as his bloo no s offer ride ane a sloth ; an airpl man in an auto mob ile is as activ e as page s of a maga zine. Dull ness, the ng turni than uous stren activ ity more l ast thing Whi tman wou ld have cons tant num bing d u l l ness, was the has h appe ned. . thou ght of A meric a, but t h at i s what obj ected at lengt h to " wnte rs man Whit rson Eme to letter d In his secon w h at every one know s to be al­ fraud ul ently assu ming as alwa ys dead . be der if the assum ptiOn migh t not now ways alive ." He mean t sex; I won IO poet the of ust distr a S I onw ard there v alid of the mind . From Whit man the n, fictio be to was rica eel Ame th e U nited State s. T h e art o f gent

Whitman

73

movies, and Schlagsahne. There is a bewildering irony i n New Engl and

Transcendental i sm's fathering both Whitman and the current notion that

poetry is cu ltural icing, spi ritual upl i ft, wholly un rel ated to anything at all . What was u seful to mi ddle-class frumpery was trivialized for an­

thologies, and the rest dismissed to th e attention of professors and idealists.

Within a few miles of each other in th e 1 8 80s, Whitman was putting

last touches to his great boo k, Eadweard Muybridge was p hotograp h i ng movements milli seconds a part of thousands of animals, naked athletes,

a?d women, and Thomas Eakins was p ainting surgeons, boxers, musi ­

Cians, w restlers, and Phi l adelphi ans. Mary Cassatt, w h o might h ave been

among them, had moved to France, permanently. In a sense Muybridge and Eakins were catching up with Whitman's pi oneering. Their common

subject, motion, the robust real, skilled and p u rposeful action, was d i s­ tinctly American, an invention. Eakins and Muybridge worked together;

Eakins came over to Camden and photographed and p ai nted Whitman.

Th ei r arts ran parallel, shared a spirit an d a theme. Muybridge's p hoto­

g �aphs, th � monumental Zoopraxia, kep t Degas and Messonier up all mght lookmg at 1t. There has been no fin er movement in American art

nor a more fertile one (from Muybri dge, th r ough Edison, th e whole art of the film), and yet their i mp act was generaHy felt to be offensive. Eakins

and Muybridge were forgotten for years; Whitman persi sted. 3 Grass: " a uniform hi eroglyphic." Meaning in Leaves

of Grass

is an

interpretation of symbols. Th e poet's work encompasses the u ndertaking

of the most pri m i tive transcriptions of nature into signs as well as con­

temporary decip h e ri ngs of science, whi ch h ad " g reat s au r i ans" to ex­

p l ain, electricity, new p l anets. The double conti n u u m of time and space

became in Whi tman ' s i magination a coherent symbol with p erspectives

to range.

Emerson's "He seems a Minotaur of a man" and Thoreau' s " H e occa­

sionally suggests something a li ttle more than h um an" (both remarks 'Muybridge, eccen tric soul that he was, inscri bed the double-folio Zoopraxia: Men and a g1ft to Haverford College. The good Quakers wrapped i t i n brown paper and hid 1t on the shelves of the h b rary among outsized books, omitt
Am mals zn Motzon as

The Geography of the I m agination

74

itman in what would were in letters to friend s, not public print) catch Wh inapp ropria te to his was m idealis his becom e tradit ional opinio ns: that ed the idealis m offend atter m his of ness rough matter , and that the rough ever read could , ed assum was it n, of his cultiv ated reader s . No woma from kept be es, librari in placed if book, him; Lowel l i nsisted that the sem inar ians . coope rative strugg le Is he so big that n o one has yet taken his size? The Where Whitm an's ess. greatn upon ess to measu re Melvi lle reveal ed greatn here li ke " Out anyw g nothin is there : astery tone is rich we can see his m nt and sym­ resona m06t his at Hugo ( ng" of the Cradle Endle ssly Rocki not have could rival, ble plausi a , rdi Leopa bolic sound s thin beside it; does Nor . poem) the of ess openn lonely the achiev ed the wildne ss, sonian ' Tenny its all for d," Bloom ard Doory "When Lilacs Last in the color and voice, have an equal. left it. Mode rn There are 390 poem s in Leaves of Grass as Whitm an yet includ ed; the edition s add 42 others that he had rejecte d or not n ( Norto n, 1 965) Blodgett and Bradle y Comp rehens ive Reade r's Editio oteboo k drafts . adds 1 23 more pages of fragm ents, deletio ns, and n He threw away : I

am that h a l fgrown angry boy, fallen asleep,

The tears of foolish passion yet undried upon my cheeks

75

thropists. He gave two million to the English for h ousing for the poor, a museum to Harvard, and a museum to Yale. Yale got her museum to house the paleontological collection of Othniel Marsh, who was Pea­ body's nephew; Ha rvard got hers to house Agassiz 's biological speci­ mens. Harvard was not originally a beneficiary; it was only after the pwus Peabody dtscovered that Marsh was a Darwinian that he tried to counteract this heresy by bestowing equal funds on H a rvard where Agassiz, Darwin's superior as a zoologist, declined to accept th e great theory without further proof. Yet you will not find George Peabody in the Britannica. 4 As Whitman's world faded into di mness, a great deal of his poetry was r �ndered meaningl ess except as general or a bstract statement. Things . vtvtd to h i m and hts readers, such as Transcendentalism, the ph ilosophy . of Founer and Owen, the discovery of dinosaurs in the west by Cope and Marsh, phrenology, photography, telegraphy, railroads, have fused into a blur. A technological era was beginning to arti cu late itself and Whit­ man was its p �et. It was not a ti me to which one inside it could easily give a name, or a dtrec�wn. Whitman's only certainty was that he was living in a new kmd of soCiety, that tore itself asunder in the tragedy of the Civi l War, but d1d not thereby abandon its orignal i ntention to be a democratic republic. Quicksand years that whirl me I know not whither

�

Yo ur schemes, politics, fai l , lines give way, s u bstanc s mock and elude me,

and Him of The Lands, identical,

Whitman

I

sing, a long the s i ngle thread . . .

i n which the fu l l ti m bre of his voice is undi minished. Had Whitman written entirely in his strong, aria-like, lyric mode, he would have fared far better with the critics ( who speak o f his formlessness) and fellow poets (who complain of the catalogues, the dross , the talk ) , but he would have been little more than an American Victorian, Tennyson with a twang. We have paid too little attention to Whitman's subjects, especially when they smack of the prosaic. Consider "Outlines for a Tomb ( G. P., Buried 1 8 70)" which imagines various tableaux for a millionaire philan­ thropist' s tom b, a poem thoroughly traditional, a classical eulogy to which Chaucerian pictured rooms have been added. The poem comes i nto stereoptic focus when we go to the trouble to discover that G. P. is George Peabody ( 1 79 5 - 1 8 69) . The curious " b uried 1 8 70" becomes clear when we know that Peabody died in London and was brought home in a British war ship, with full honors. An apprentice to a drygoods firm at eleven, he worked his way up in the world until, as head of a banking firm with offices in Baltimore, Phi ladelp hia, New York, and London, he was able to become one o f the first great merchant philan-

On l y the th em e I sing. . . .

The theme. A music of sensations, songs containing catalogues of . . thmgs , as If creatiOn could be summoned and praised by chanting the name of everyth � ng there is, the constructing of a context, like Noah's ark, where th � re �� a place for everything, a compulsion to confront every exp � nence With Innocent eyes-no one phrase is ever going to label Whitman's them� . The base on which it stands is C h ristian: a sympathy whose scope IS n gorously u niversal, a predisposition to love and under­ sta � d. Young admirers fancied him an American Socrates, but of course he IS the very opposite. He was like those Greeks in love with the im­ med ate the caressab�e ( a l ways with the eye), the delicious, who, to St. � P � ul s distress, worshiped each other when free from placating and beg­ ging from a confusion of gods. And he was decidedly pagan, always ready with a good word for " the

�

•You will i n The Columbia Encyclopedia. For an account of Peabody i n his scientific con­ text, as wel l a s for a splendid history of paleontology i n the age of Whitman, see Robert West Howard ,s The Dawn seekers (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1 9 75). Yo u can also see m this book a photograph of Edgar Allan Poe inspecting the fossil skel eton of a prehistonc horse: a photograph sull unknown to the Poe scholars.

76

The Geography of the I magination

is rhythm ic myths of Greece and the strong legends of Rome." A pa?an (as easily could an Whitm gods. not a godles s man; he is a man with many the Jew, he liked to imagin e) kneel with the Muslim , hear the Law with . Pawnee the with sit in silence with the Quaker , dance . IS This splendi d sympat hy with forms knits his book together. Gras � mg the o ne univers al plant, absent only in the deserts of the poles. Class1fy smce rked overwo ts botanis kept has and n aming the grasses of the world for Li nnaeus , and the end is nowhere in sight. Leaves: we use the word Grass s. papyru grass, of leaves was paper the pages of books, and the first or of is a symbol for life through out the Bible, integra l with the metaph shepherd and sheep. we are There were "nation s ten thousa nd years before these States" ; record a not mark, a not " past this of carryin g someth ing on. And en forgott deep the in people the From remain s-and yet all remain s." pas t, Some with oval counten ances learn'd and calm, of insects, Some naked and savage, some like huge collectio ns

a heritag: . our heritag e is unknow n, but there is no doubt of there bei ?g man s that said e, mistak a lization civi t though Charles Fourie r, who both be to ood underst he ch whi Flame, Sacred fi rst duty to keep the h.ad mself hi man spirit of sses liveline those and our ki nship to God hke gemus nal commu atics, mathem music, , poetry invente d-the dance, house­ Dutch ism, sceptic Scotch rnness, stubbo French cuisine Cretan dlerized keeping . Whit� an knew Fourier only in the washed .and bow. m the wntmg s of and Farm, Brook at ed discuss t version s of his though 's Blaine, Greeley , and Margar et Fuller. Perhap s he believe d Emerso ? n d Founer warnin g that Fourie r w a s basical ly u nsound . Yet Whitm an a t rhymes , though r thei of much and t, momen al were of the same historic while say­ though with many a dissona nce. Fourier died (in Montm arte, c h1s by ded surroun bed, his against g � ts) when ing his prayers , kneelin texts Whitm an was eightee n. In those eightee n years Founer was wntmg pub­ not were ey ely-th mmens i an Whitm ed interest that would have world, a e describ They hed. npublis u still are some and 7 lished unti l 195 It i s a the New Harmo�y as Fourier called it, that has kept the . fla �e. . family a world divided up into beehive s of commu nities, each of which I S , an hour at of human beings and animal s. All work is done by every bod� g g od . All a time. The days are rhythm ic and con tain a little of everythi � ? diversi. ty · sexual predile ctions are arranged for and honored for their encom ­ Cerem onial honors are given to those whose passiOn ate nature � dr n learn passes the widest range. All are friend and servan t to all. Chi � I S rlay. Ity every skill by age ten, yet the domina nt note of the commu � _ he which m Fourier 's vision was an opp osite to the comme rcial world

Whitman

77

lived and suffered. In utopian design his is the most extreme yet achieved. It can be exp lained by noti ng that Fourier's every detai l intends to save the individual from that dullness and quiet despair which was the im­ mediate and alarming result of the Industrial Revol ution. If the world was to belong to the rapacious, civilization was then little more than the jungle. Rapacity, in any case, as Fo urier thought, was al­ ternative action symbolizing and di sgui sing warmer passions unaccept­ able to civilization. Marriage, for instance, is a reproductive not a soci al unit. A true family is an enormous gathering of people, like a primitive tri be, where congeniality can have a large scope, a nd where everybody knows he belongs. The city was to disappear, and we may already have cause, watching the cities rot and revert to the j ungle, to wonder whether Fourier's small communities co uld possi bly by this time have rotted with such Spenglerian gangrene as Detroit and St. Louis. To keep the sacred flame. The i mage is taken from antiquity, when the household fire was a god, part of which was given to each member of the family as they went away to new homes . Symbolically this fire was the fa mily sp irit, guardian of its integrity and survival. Fourier talks about it as if it were spirit itself, and he designed his Harmony to preserve the liveliness of the child into old age; he saw no reason why it should drain away. He is the only phi losopher interested in happines s as the supreme human achievement. A good nature should be the whole concern of government. It was compliant, insouciant, easy good n ature that Whitman admired most i n society. And nineteenth-century industri al culture had begun to erase the possibilities of Whitmanian good n ature. Ruskin noted the characteristic sulk on American girls' faces, the pout, the petulance. Look at the Steichen photograph of ] . P. Morgan, 1903, the one with the dag­ ger. Slow- bu rning rage, not charming insouciance, was to be the standard American state of mind. An American pu blisher remembered in old age "a large-boned old man in a sombrero" sh uffling into the Hotel Albert (the anecdote is Ford Madox Ford's, and is therefore suspect) . " I am Walt Whitman," said the old man, "if you'll lend me a dollar you'll be helping immortality to stumble on." (The dollar would have been equally useful upstairs in the hotel, where Ryder hovered over his visions: American culture has the eerie habit of passing i tself, in narrow corridors, ghostlike) . Whitman's personal loneliness and destitution became part of the legend quite early. "A fine old fellow in an iron land" begins Ruben Darfo' s sonnet to Whitman. Garcia Lorca : Not for a single moment, handsome old Walt Whitman, have I lost the v i sion of your beard full of butterflies,

Th e Geographv of the Imagination your corduroy shoul ders wasted by the moon your thighs of virginal Apollo, your voice l ike a col umn of coarse ashes; old man beauti ful as mist.5

Crane in The Bridge lets his evocation of Whitman walk ing on the beach "Near Paumanok-you r lone patrol . . . " blend with another beach, Kitty Hawk. Even if the Gasoline Age had not changed the world into the Slope of Sisyphus, it would still be arguable if any society could h ave lived up to Whitman's idealism. Like Thoreau's, it is an idealism for individuals rather than conglomerates. For all its' acceptance of the city crowds and the bustle of commerce, it is in essence p astoral, following n atural rhythms, with sympathies that depend on the broad and easy freedom of country people. Never agai n could a maj or American poet comprehend, much less repeat, Whitman's vision. Yet many began there and were nourished on its honey before they ate of the tree of the knowl­ edge of good and evi l. Charles Ives did, set some of the poems as songs, but abandoned his Walt Whitman Overture, if he ever indeed began it. Pou nd's Cantos are a version of "A Passage to India" written in finer historical detail and transposed into a tragic mode. Paterson i s Whit­ man's vision after a devastating rain of a cid vulgarity. Olson's Maximus records the awful fact that Whitman's prophecy for a coherent demo­ cratic society remai ns unfulfilled in any sense, as we now live in an in­ coherent i n dustrial society that has discovered that death is much better for business than life. The largest American business is the automobile, the mechanical cockroach that has eaten our cities; that and armaments . Of the delights celebrated in "A Song of Joys," most are accessible now only to the very rich, some are obsolete, some are so exploited by com­ merce as to be no longer joys for anybody except the stockbroker, two are against the law (swimming naked, sleeping with "grown and part­ grown boys" ) , and one is lethal (" the solitary walk" ) . Whitman i s a k i n d of litmus paper, perhaps a seismograph. Reading him, we become aware of an awful, lost innocence, and are not certain whether the innocence was real or i n Whitman's imagi nation. He gave his whole life to a book, he freed literature to go courses that were until Whitman unsuspected. He had the power to move even u nwilling hearts (w itness Gerard Manley Hopkins reading him because he couldn't not read him, knowing the author to be "a scoundrel" and the poetry to be wicked). Pound in the cage at Pisa remembered a University of Pennsyl­ vania philologist who was suprised at attitudes toward Wh itman, as "even the peasants in Denmark know him." The Japanese p u blish a jour5Geoffrey Dutton, trans., Whitman (New York: Grove Press, 1 961 ), p. I l l .

Whitman

79

nal devoted to him. The Russia n Futuri sts and Mayak ovsky considered Whitm an to be the founder of their schoo l . Many excelle nt books have been writte n a bout him, his place in world . hterat ure Is assu red. He is still, howev er, a renega de, di sreput able still. That he was a master of words and rhythm s is a ffirmed and denied with equ a l passio n . His cults come and go. He is, like Goeth e in Germa ny and . VI ctor Hugo In France , inextri cably part of our histroy . Like Jefferson and Frankl m he has been woven into our myth . He is our archety pal poet, our great I nventio n in literatu re, our lyri c voice. I like to think that eventu ally he will shame us into becom i ng Ameri cans again.

81

Olson

v'hiyim . .

Olson

I . IN GLOOM O N WATCH-HOUSE POINT

Charles It is now almost seven years since the enormo us presenc e of Plain of the of es distanc yellow the upon ld wi and d rumple Olson arrived of estate Elysian , on the outerm ost ring of the ci rcle river Okean os, embra �e heroes and poets, where he would have h ad to bend deeply to his m his beloved Keats, twenty -one inches shorter than Olson, who stockin g feet was taller by half again than Alexan der t � e Great. an an­ At Olson's funeral , Allen Ginsbe rg, chanti ng kaddish with ra­ shmay guished uncerta inty of the words ("Yisga dal v'Yiskadash the lower ba . ." ) , stepped in his confusi on on the pedal that would lurched , and ou tsized coffin into the grave. A soft whirr, the coffin tilted, continu ed He stuck before Ginsbe rg could leap away from the pedal. aya min-shm chanting the ancient Aramaic words "yhai shlama raba .

80

. " In the silence that followed, the undertaker's functionary who pressed his foot on the pedal that would lay Olson forever to rest discove red that Ginsberg h ad j ammed the mechanism. The coffin was wedged neither i n nor out of the grave. 1 Keeping as it does the tradition of funerary chaos among American men of letters-a locomotive j u mped its track and smashed Poe's tombstone (this is the "calme bloc ici-bas chu d'un desastre obscur" of Mallarme's "Tombeau d' Edgar Poe") , Bret Harte's funeral was followed by a taggle of dogs throwing his entrails into the air (evisceration was a problem for early embalmers, and Harte was the first American author to be embalmed) , and Melville, dying forty years after the world had forgot­ ten him, was buried as "a formerly well- known author" whose best book, said the obituaries, was Typ ee -Oison's funeral is a symbol of his reputation as a poet. His poetry is i n articulate. His lectu res achieved depths of i ncoherence. His long poem Maximus was left un finished, like most of his projects and practically all of his sentences. He put food in his pockets at dinner par­ ties . He was saved from starving by Hermann Brach . He once ate an oil rag. He was, like Coleridge, a passionate talker for whom whole days and nights were too brief a time to exhaust a subject. He wrote a study of American musical comedies, was a professional dancer, served in the State Department u nder Roosevelt, went to the rain forests of Yucatan, was rector of a college. He was taller than doors and had the physique of a bear. He was an addi ct as he grew older to both alcohol and drugs. He was interested in everythi ng. Stan Brakhage visited him in Glouces­ ter, May 1963. Their first conversation was twelve hours long; Brakhage wrote down what he could remember of it for his wife Jane. "This last year . . . most difficult ever . . . but that's changing, changing so fast . . . I see that change-yes, I HEAR you . . . how it takes form in terms of money; but then remember, this IS America-in three weeks this whole pi cture could be ch anged for all of us . . . . He was still interested in a collegium of scholars and teachers. Black Mountain, he felt, and the small college in general, was no longer the way. The universities were centers (" you can use them, you know . . ." ) where something li ke education just might h appen, i f you could get the right men togeth er. He took Brakhage round the town, pointing. He explained that he had been raised on the first point of the mainland of America, "that point geographically furthest out, I mean where I cou ld be most easterly.

"

1This account, I ' m tol d, is not wholly accurate. I had it from Stan Brakhage, who h ad it second hand. I leave it as an example of the kind of folklore about h i mself that Olson inspired and encouraged.

82

T h e Geography o f t h e Imagination

westerly . . . how I was, as my father before me, letter-carrier; my first job as a boy-right here, where we' re standing." He took Brakhage to stand where, u nder them, out of sight and out of most memories, a battleship's hull is buried, its pu mps functioning as the town's sewerage disposal. And the talk went on. Drama needed the mask again. Women actors ought not to have been introduced onto the stage. There were no more plays. " Yes, yes, we must, must, must get rid of drama, at all costs-! mean, even get rid of narrative-the temptati on, you hear ?" "With you, Brakhage, it is at this point a question of focus, is it not . . . ? I'm an authority on cave painting, as you surely know . . . . Stop trying to defend the fact that you ARE, a re you not, myopic, that is, NEAR-sighted; and wall-eyed . . . as am I . . . as is Robert Duncan . . . right ?" " I have, even tho' I suffer from claustrophobia, crawled around I N those tunnels, seen how, very often, the Pleistocene man HAD, that i s chose, t o paint whe re he couldn't h ave seen more than six i nches from where he was p ainting, eyes THAT close." "I mean what IS all that out there which we CALL focus ? What IS focus, Brakhage? Hey ?"2 Thousands and thousands of hours of such talk shaped his mi nd. His attention was constantly changing focus, from the rods and cones i n a pigeon's eye to the drift of continents. A good half the time in the classroom his students didn't know even remotely what in the name of God he could be talking about. Surviving lecture notes have such entries as "journals of the Arnie! brothers" -Olson's or the student's fusion of Amiel's Journal with that of the brothers Goncourt? Black Mountai neers remember the persistence of the names Frobenius and Berard; one won­ ders what they could have read to follow up? You couldn't step twice into the same Olson lecture. Mark Heddon's Black Mountain diary re­ cords that Olson wanted h is students to achieve vertically the entire hori­ zon of human knowledge.3 Knowledge to Olson was a compassionate acquisition, an act of faith and symp athy. He meant primarily that knowledge is the h arvest of at­ tention, and he fumed in great rages that the hucksters prey on our atten­ tion like a plague of ticks. In his first thoroughly Olsonian poem, " The Kingfishers," a canzone that divides decisively modern from postmodern poetry , the theme states that when our attentions change, our culture 2Stan Brakhage, Metaphors 011 Visio11, ed. and with a n i n troduction by P . Adams S1 tney, Film Culture, n o . .>. 0 ( Fall 1 9 63), pages unnumbered: passages quoted here all occur m the last five pages. -'Marti n Duberman, Black Mountain: An Exploration in Community ( New York: Dutton, 1 972), p . 373.

Olson

83

changes. He uses the firm example of the Mayan cultures, overgrown with j ungles. The Mayan shift in attention was culturally determined : every fifty-two years they abandoned whole cities in which the temples were oriented toward the planet Venus, which edges its rising and setting around the ecliptic. The new city was literally a new way to look at a star (this is one meaning of " polis is eyes") . There is history (Waterloo, Guadalcanal) and there is the history of attention ( Rousseau, Darwin) . The kind of knowledge that shifts atten­ tion was Olson's kind of knowledge. He was interested in the past be­ cause it gives us a set of contrasts by which to measure events and qual­ ities. The awe with which he told Brakhage about entering prehistoric caves and looking at the paintings done there is a sensitivity achieved with enormous learning and insight. The first prehistoric paintings to be dis­ covered were assumed to be a few hundred years old, the work perhaps of rude shepherds passing the time. It took a corps of scientists (Car­ tailhac, Breuil, Movi us, Peyrony, the Begoulns . . . ) half a century to p repare our attention to grasp the spiritual content of these eloquent pic­ tures, and to teach us the value of knowing what they are. Look what happens when you h ave neither knowledge nor sense of awe. By 1 846 only a few of the French caves in the Dordogne had been discovered, and there was only a rudimentary understanding of the pre­ historic: Salleles-Cabardes, Rouffignac, Le Porte!, and perhaps Niaux were known. ( Altami ra is 1 8 79, Les Trois Freres 1 9 1 6, Lascaux 1 94{)) . With whatever scant knowledge, a sonneteer in 1 846, annoyed by the proliferation of illustrations in Victori an magazines, shamed mankind for reverting to the crudity of communication by pictures. Here is the sonnet-it is the first mention in English poetry of Cro-Magnon poly­ chrome painting (40,000 to 25,000 B.C. ) , the renaissance of which by modern artists ( Picasso, Gaudier, Braque, Pound) constitutes the basis of the sharpest sensibility of our century: Discourse was deemed Man's noblest attribute, And written words the glory of his hand; Then followed Printing with enlarged command For though t-dominion vast and absolute For spreading truth, and making love expand. Now prose and verse sunk into disrepute Must lackey a d u m b Art that best can suit The taste o f this once-intellectual Land. A backward movement surely have we here, From manhood-back to childhood; for the age­ Back toward caverned life's first rude career.

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Avaunt th i s vile abuse of p i ctured page! Must eyes be all i n a l l , the tongue and ear Noth ing? Heaven keep us from a lower stage!

Wordsworth, of all poets, is the author of this sonnet. One gauge of th e kind of attention Olson meant is to i magine Wordsworth in Lascaux. ("Don't laugh," Degas sai d at a Cubist exhi bition, "this is as hard to do as painting. ") Would he have seen it as art at all ? What sensibilities could he have relied on to make a focus fo r his attention ? Olson's argument throughout his poetry is that awareness is an event caused by multiple fo rces, setting multi ple forces in action. No force is ever spent. All events are lessons. No event can be isolated. Olson therefore evolved a kind of poem that would at once project historical ponderables (for history is the ground for all his poetry) and allow him free p lay for contemp lation and response. The poems in Maximus III were written "in gloom on Watch-House Point" from 1963 to 1969. They constitute the third volume of perhaps one long poem, " Books VII and After" ( Olson's working title) , comparable in American literature to Th e Cantos and Paterson; perhaps a suite of poems ( the early format of "letters from Maxi mus" allowing for the versatility and spontaneity of a correspondence) like Leaves of Grass. The first volu me, The Maximus Poems, came out in 1960, as Number 24 of Jonathan Williams's Jargon series,4 the second as Maximus Poems IV, V, VI ( New York : Cape Goliard/Grossman, 1968 ). If we allow for the sections of these poems that quote historical docu­ ments, and for the occasional jeremiad, we can go a long way toward understandi ng them by noting that they are variati ons of Keats's nightin­ gale ode. They are for the large part written at night (by a Ti monish Endymion en pantoufles, or an insomniac bear with clipboard wandering about Gloucester, caught from time to time in the spotlight of a police cruiser) , they share the imagery of bird and flower ( cormorant and nas­ tu rti um here) , fierce seas and bonging bells ( buoys on Cape Ann), and they meditate on resonances of the past that can sti ll be heard. The first poemh aving descried the nation to write a Republic in gloom on Watch-House Point 4There had been two previous editions: The Maxim us Poems 1 -1 0 (Stuttgart: The J a rgon Society, 1 95 3 ) and Letters 1 1 -2 2 (Stuttgart: The Jargon Society, 1 9 56), both p u blished by Jonathan Wil l i a ms. Maximus I was revised for the 1 960 volume. You could sti l l h ave bought the 1 9 53 volume i n Highlands, North Carolina, last year for its original price of $2.25 (the going price outside North Carolina is $1 00) . Olson h i mself p laced the books with The Book Mart there, five copies, which took twenty-one years to sell.

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-contains the Keatsian verb descry (to spy out, to examine at a distance: Johnson ) , an eventful ph rase ("to write a Republic" invites us to under­ stand "to write a R epublic, like Plato and Machiavelli," "to write a letter to the Republi c" ) , and a place the name of which is transparently sy m­ bolic. The second is in a congenial voiceSaid Mrs Tarantino, occupying the yellow house on fort constructed like a blockhouse house said You h ave a long nose, meaning you stick it i n to every other person's business, do you not? And I co uldn't say anything but th at I do

And her name is Tarantino, citizen of Tarentum, the colonial city where Greek and Roman cultures first met and fused · Greek name Taras. Spartans founded Taras in 706 B.C. following the edi ct of the Ora� de at Delphi to "colonize this rich land and be a trial to the barbarians."5 Tarentine history was bri lliant under the archonship of the great Platonic philosopher and physicist Archytas. Over the centuries the Tarentine cavalry was the terror of southern Italy. After Pyrrhus' s eponymous vic­ tory over the Romans in 275 (about which Stephen Dedalus is question­ i ng his class at the opening of the second chapter of Ulysses ), the citizens threw in their lot with "the barbarians," and by 2 13 were so far from their Spartan heritage that they i nvited Hannibal to be their overlord. When the Romans retook the city in 209, they burnt it, fur Schreck­ lich keit, sold the entire population into slavery, and carried off the statues of the gods (all but the "angry ones" ) . The principal temple was to Demeter and Persephone, but the city had been under th e protection of Bona Dea, Athena of Cities. The third poem begins with her name. Gloucester was colonized in 1623, a town, like Taras, of fishermen and godly people; in 1776 it dissolved its ties with its mother country and joi ned th e federation: " . . . this filthy land I in this foul country where I human lives are so much trash"6 we read by page 120. 5]. Berard, L e Colonization grecque de I'Italie meridionale et de Ia Sicile dans l'antiquite (Pans, 1 57), p. 1 62 . This is not Olson's Berard that he was always talking about; rhat i s Vtctor Berard, who denved the Odyssey from Phoenician sailing maps.

�

6Automobile accidents, for exa m p le, claim 5 0 ,000 lives a year, and maim 75,000 bodies. To act out the fantasies of various liars, scoundrels, and politici ans 56,869 young Americans dted 1 n Vtetnam.

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Olson's spiritual barometers and seismographs give readings that we have to live with for awhile before they begin to render up sense. His view of mankind reaches into the backward abysm. Geologically the world is in the Pleistocene still , the age that evolved the horse, elephant, and cow more or less as we know them. And man. An d the arrangement of the continents as they are now. From Maximus IV forward Olson has introduced the subject of conti­ nental drift. Thi s is the discovery of the German geologist Alfred We­ gener, though the likelihood w as fi rst suggested by the United States geologist Frank B. Taylor between 1 908 and 1 9 1,().7 Francis Bacon ob­ served that the continents seemed to be a jigsaw puzzle, as did Fran�ois Placet and Alexander von Humboldt. Two h undred million years ago there was one continent, so the theory runs, named Pangaea, and one ocean, Panthalassa. (Has geology ever sounded more Ovidi an ? ) A northern l andmass, Laurasi a , split away from the southern landmass Gondwana a hundred and thirty-five million years ago. Another twenty-five million years, and India wandered away from A fri ca . The last of the continents to divi de was the one that became An­ tarctica and Australia. The long and peri lous voyage that brought Europeans into America as a second migrati on, 1 5 0,000 years after the Indi an came here from Asia , could at one ti me (if any men were about) h ave been made b y taking a single step. Throughout these last Maximus poems Olson keeps gazing at the offshore rocks, especi ally Ten Pound Island. That it was once at the bot­ tom of an ice sheet that l ay across Europe is a fact rich in mythological tone. The severing of the continents is itself a comprehensive symbol of disi ntegration, of man's migratory fate, of the tragic restlessness of his­ tory (" . . . and Gloucester still moves away from the Canaries-she was Terceira 'lightest' of those islands . . . . ) . What has happened to American culture (Melville o bserved that we are more a world than a nation) is a new disintegration that comes h ard upon our integrati on. A new daimon has got into the world, a daimon that cancels place ( American cities all look like each other) , depletes the world's supply of fossil fuel (if anybody' s around to make the statement, our time can be put into a sentence: the Late Pleistocene ate the Eocene), transforms the mind into a vacuum ( " Do they grow there ?" a New Yorker asked of the offshore rocks at Gloucester) which must then be "

"'Dover Publications h a s j ust reissued Wegener's The Origin of Continents and Oceans (New York, 1 929), translated by John Bi ram . Edwin H. Colbert's Wandering Lands and Animals (New Yor k : Dutton, 1 973) is an excellent exposition of the subject . A shorter account can be found i n Samuel W. Matthews, "This Ch anging Earth," National Geo­ graphic, Jan. 1 973, pp. 1 -37.

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filled with evaporating distractions called entertainment. 8 Olson was too intelligent to give a name to this daimon ; he was aware of the names Ru skin and Pound had given it, but a cooperation between greed and governments is far too mild a monster for Olson's vision. He was of De Gaulle's opinion that we are the fi rst civilization to have bred our own barbarians: De Gaulle was alluding to the masked rioters stomping down the Boulevard St.-Germain in May of ' 6 8 ; Olson would have meant the automobiles with thei r hind ends up like the butts of hemorrhoidal j ack­ rabbits that squaw\ their tires and are driven by a hunnish horde of young who h ave been taught nothing, can do nothing, and exhibi't a lemming restlessness. Their elders are scarcely more settl ed or more purposeful to themselves or th ei r neighbors. A shift in attention allows the jungle in. The polis i s gone; no one can imagine that there are any American cities left. The towns h ave died at their centers and thrown up a circular scab arou nd themselves, a commercial carnival. We know all too well what Olson is talking about, if not what he is trying to teach us. These poems are more frightening in their implications than the last of The Cantos, than Dr. Williams's diagnoses. I am not able here to given any notion of the wideness of these last Maxi mus poems-the horizon they survey is vast-nor of their depth, which goes back into various histories (the Hittite, Egyptian, Greek, Ro­ m an, paleolithic) in new and bright ways (Olson's eyes were open to everything and very little got by him). Nor can I adequately represent their religious concern. A movement is closed by them, a movement that began with Thoreau and Whitman, when America was opening out and possibilities were there to be stumbled over or embraced. Olson is the other term of this movement. He is our anti-Whitman ( like Melville be­ fore him) . He is a prophet crying bad weather ahead, and has the instru­ ments to prove i t.

II. SCHOLIA AND CONJECTURES FOR "THE KINGFISHERS"

"The Kingfishers" is itself a p aradigm of the process of continuity and change which it tracks with a kind of philosophical radar. This most modern of American poems, the most energetically influen­ . tial text in the last thirty-five years, is a resuscitation of a poetic form worked to death between the late eighteenth and mid-nineteenth cen8At a recent trial of some members of the American Nazi Party, the j u rors proved to be unpreJUdi ced, for the s1mple reason that they, all midd le-aged, had never heard of any Naz1s. And a ch ild for whom I was drawing animals the other day asked me to draw him a Jaws.

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turies, from the age of Peacock's "Palmyra," Shelley's "The Demon of the World" and "Ozymandias," and Volney's Les Ruines, to the master­ work of all meditations on ruins, Melville's Clare/. That there was life and a new relevance in a genre which had been a standard feature of the Victorian sensibility was p roved three years before "The Kingfishers" by the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, whose Alturas de Macchu Picchu pro­ vided Olson with a chord of images (honey, stone, blood), the balanced historical moments of brutal conquests and the Marxist revolutions of the present, the continuity of natural and the discontinuity of human history, and perhaps a line: "Not one death but many" (y no una muerte, sino muchas muertes ). Perhaps: for those words also occur in a dialogue of Plutarch's which is yet another instigation for the poem's composition . "The Kingfishers" is also a response to The Pisan Cantos, which h ad been pu blished the August before (Olson completed the poem 20 July 1 949);9 its opening line is modelled on the fifth line o f Canto LXXIV, "That maggots shd/ eat the dead bullock," Olson mistaking the slash after "shd" (a device Pound took from the letters of John Adams, along with the abbrevi ation, both of which were common practice in Adams's time) for a new kind of punctuation, "a pause so light it hardly separates the words." The Republic of China was proclaimed 1 October 1 949, three months after Olson wrote "The Kingfishers." The i mminent fall of China to the Communists is also a theme in the Pisan Cantos. Both Pound and Olson mark the event as a momentous one, and they are equally uncertain as to its meaning. One of the continued themes from the poetry of Pound to that of the Projectivist School is a new sense of h istory. It is a sense that is always in touch with archaic beginnings. Pound's Mao is "a snotty bar­ barian ignorant of T'ang history." Olson places Mao against ancient considerations that seem to have nothing to do with his revo lution: the fate of the Mayans, the Hellenistic empire in the time of Nero and Plutarch, the Kh mer dynasty of Cambodia. And then "The Kingfishers" is as well a Romantic ode, like Keats's "Nightingale" and Shelley's "Skylark" -a philosop hical lyric with a bird daimon at its center. Add to this that it is a Pythian di alogue i n the man­ ner of Plutarch ("The Praises" is another such di alogue among philosophers skilled in the traditions of thei r su bject, the "Leskenoi," devotees of Apollo Leskhenorios, " Apollo the Conversationalist") and we can begin to grasp the intricacy and energy of the vector field Olson has constructed. "Published in The Montevallo Review. no. 1 (Summer 1 95 0 ) , ed. Robert Payne.

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A new kind of poem then, asking for a new kind of reading. It can not be avoided that we as readers are asked to become Leskenoi along with the poet, to leave the polychrome i mages and finely modulated rhythms of the poem, learn some things, and then return as a worthy participant. A super fici al reading will show some of the perspectives, and some­ thing of the harmonies. The kingfisher. Audubon's Birds of America, plate 77, is a handsome on of the fowl. It is about a foot long. Megaceryle A/cyan. It epresentati � Is a lake and ri ver bird, ecologically welcome, as it feeds on enemies of the trout. There are no rivers in Yucatan, and John Lloyd Stephens in his catalogue of Mayan fauna lists no kingfishers, though they winter in other parts of Mexico. The European counterpart is a persistent image in classical poetry, from the Iliad forward. It i s also everywhere i n Romantic poetry. Is Olson presenting it as a symbol ? (Willi am Carlos Willi:1ms, who was fond of the poem, and habitually called it "The Woodpeckers," hoped not . ) " The trouble with symbol, it does not trouble" ("The Post Virginal " ) . We must take the kingfisher as a totem i mage, a hi eroglyph . It is an element in an ideogram. And the poem, like a canto of Pound, is a single ideogram, i ts components working i n synergy. 1. The opening line i s a translation of Heraclitus's Fragment 2 3 (quoted by Plotinus in the Enneads IV.viii . 1 ) . Metabdllon anapatiete: " Ch ange is at rest." Or: " Ch ange alone is unchanging." Sensing in the etymology of metabdllon the idea of wilfullness (bdllo, I throw, is kin to botilomai, I will), Olson translates metabdllon as "the will to change." There follows a narrative passage reminiscent of the room full of birds in Malraux's La Condition humaine, but which is proba bly a transcrip­ tion from life ( Ron ald Johnson assures me that Olson frequently slept in his clothes ) . Fernand is a mystery: a survey of Olson's circle and scholars has failed to turn up any identification at all. Leger at Black Mountain ? H e i s a man who knew J osef Albers ( b . 1 8 8 8 ) , the painter, who was o n the facu lty at Black Mountain when the poem was written, and knew some­ thing of th e Khmer ruins at Angkor Vat, somethi ng of the Aztec-Mayan commerce in kingfisher feathers, and something of the well of sacrifice ("The pool is slime" ) at Chichen Itza which Bishop Landa described in the sixteenth century and which was dredged by Edward Thompson in 1 904 - 1 907. The sacrificial victims thrown into this well by the Mayans (they were messengers with requests carefully memorized to recite to the gods once they were in the kingdom of the dead) wore head-dresses (corozas ) of feathers.

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2. The "E on the stone" is the epsilon carved on the omphalo s, or n avel stone, at the oracle of Delphi in Boiotia. I t is probably not an epsilon, but some Pythago rean mystical symbol that looks like an E. In Septembe r, 1 9 1 3, the French Archaeol ogist Francois Courby un­ earthed this " omphalo s" at Delphi, the stone which was thought to sit directly under the Pole Star and was "the navel of the earth ."10 Plutarch 's essay The E at Delphi (written toward the end of the first or in the early years of the second century A.D. ) discusses vari ous conjectur es as to what the mysteriou s E might signify . 1 1 It is abundan tly evident that the mean­ ing of the E had been lost by Plutarch' s time, and Pausanias seeme d not to realize that the omphalo s he was shown at Delphi was not the arch aic one with its enigmati c E, but a replica in white marble bound in a net­ work of fillets. This public omphalo s was discovered by Bourguet j ust before Courby found the archaic one. 12 Plutarch' s seven di fferent explanat ions of the E on the stone depend on the name of the letter i n Plutarch 's time (ei, rather than epsilon) , which is then taken to be a cryptic allusion. Ei, for i nstance, is the Greek for if, and this is a likely compone nt of question s asked the Delphic Oracle. Ei (or epsilon) is the second vowel in the alph abet; the sun is the second planet; the sun is Apollo's planet, and the Delphic Oracle is Apollo's 1oF. Courby, Comptes rendus de /'A cademie des inscriptions et belles h•ttres ( 1 9 1 4) , p p . 2 6 3 -66; a n d i n Foui/les de De/phes i i . l . 76. ' ' Pl utarch, " De E apud Delphos," i n Moralia (Cambridge, Mass.: Ha rvard University Press; Loeb Classical Library, 1 962) vol. Y. pp. 1 9 8 - 2 5 3 . 12for a full account o f w h a t Olson knew a b o u t Courby's stone, s e e A. B . Cook, "The De lphic Omph alos," i n Zeus (Cambridge, England: Cam bridge Univers i ty Press, 1 925) vol.

II, pp. 1 6 9-93.

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sacred place. Ei means "thou art," and affirms the existence o f Apollo. And so on, increasing our conviction that the meaning of the E was lost knowledge by Hellenistic times, even to the High Priest at Delphi, which position Plutarch held. I t is plausi ble that the stone i tsel f was lost by this time, and that Plutarch had not seen it. The stone Courby dug up has an E on it, and it also has more letters, which A. B. Cook read as GAS, "of the earth ." He argued that the E is not an epsilon, but a hieroglyph of a temple or shri ne, perhaps the peculiar symbol of Delphi itself, the center of a ci rcular world under a circular sky. This stone, then, is one end of the world's axis; the Pole Star is the other. Modern criticism tends to be skeptical. "The crude inscription," Pro­ fessor R. E. Wycherley says in his edition of Pausanias, 13 "once inter­ preted as being E (a scared symbol at Delphi) and GAS "of earth," proves to be part of the name of one Papaloukas." Mr. Papaloukas is even more mysterious than the E, but has not kept the museum at Delphi from placing Courby's stone on top of Bourguet's, where it seems to fit. To think of the "E cut so rudely on the oldest stone" is to contemplate a sign of central importance in a world we h ave lost the meaning of wholly. It is as eloquently mute as the prehistoric cave painti ngs in which Olson fo und so deep a meaning. What Mao said- "The dawn light is before us, let us rise up and act" -is in his speech of 1 94 8 to the Chinese Communist Party shortly before the government fell into their control. Two descriptions of the kingfisher from the Encyclopcedia Britannica ( 13th edition) intersperse Mao's words ( "The features . . . inconspi cu­ ous" and "it does nest . . . fetid mass " ) , and are themselves interrupted by the poet's " But not these things were the factors." The process by which the kingfisher became the architect of a nest which it always builds superbly well was developed over mi llions of years of evolution. Against this continuous line of natural onwardness the rise and fall of human empires are swift and of indi fferent interest to the living universe. The stone that marked the center of the earth for the Boiotians held the scienti fic and religious gaze of a h andful of Panhellenic tri bes for a few thousand years only. The Chinese meld i nto western his­ tory as a Marxist-Leninist revolutionary begins a dynasty in the world's oldest civilization. All th ree ideogrammatic elements are held in a relation to the sun: the Delphic stone religiously, Mao metaphorically and rhetorically, the kingfisher myth ically. 13Pausanias, Description of Greece, ed. W. H . S. Jones and R. E. Wycherley (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press; Loeb Classical Library, 1 9 1 8 ) vol. V, p. 1 70.

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3. The beginning remembers Canto XX: Jungl e : Glaze green a n d r e d fe athers, j ungle, Basis o f renewal , renewa ls; Rising over the sou l , green virid, of the j u n gle, Lozenge of the pavement, cle a r shapes, Broken, disru p ted . . . .

The ideogrammatic dements are all taken from Wi lliam H. Prescott's History of the Conquest of Mexico ( 1 8 43 ) . The' " fine ear" is possibly Robert Southey's, whose description of the magni ficent Tlascalan army is quoted by Prescott in a note. 14 The passage begi nni ng "of green feathers" (p. 1 9 7) is a description of gifts given to Cortes by Montezuma as re­ corded in Albrecht Durer's diary, 27 August 1520, when he saw them in Brussels, displayed by Charles V, then on his way to Aix-la-Chapelle to be crowned Holy Roman Emperor. The other two passages, parts of Pre­ scott' s account of the massacre at Cholula, (p. 273) are a mixture of quotation and paraphrase. The ideogram can be turned, like a mobile structure; one perspective juxtaposes tilled fields and the j ungle : culture (the word first means tilling fields) and its opposite, nature without the order of hu manity . Another perspective discloses the wealth and splendor of the Mexicans and the rapacity and cruelty of the conquistadores. There is a deeper pe rspective in historic time: the Delp hic stone knew its waves of conq uerors­ Persians, Spartans, Romans. Let us say that this element in the ideograms can be tagged: the unwilled change of war. And do not miss, out of ideological blindness, the fact that Mao, like Cortes, was exterminating a ci vilization, with comparable cruelty. 4.1 "Not one death but many" reflects both Pablo Neruda's long poem, the Alturas de Macchu Picchu, which Olson' s poem resembles and was in­ spired by, and Plutarch's Pythian dialogue, "The E at Delphi." In Neruda the line means that men with a life as hard as the Peruvians in their isolated mountain fastnesses die difficulty by difficulty. Plutarch's mean­ ing is Heraclitean: one self dies and is replaced by another as our con­ cerns and fo rtunes change. To quote a part of Ammonius's words i n the dia logue will locate the next seventeen lines of this section: I4(New York : Random House, n . d . ) , p . 235.

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" It is impossi ble to step twice in the same river" are the words of Heracleitus, nor is it possible to lay hold twice of any mortal substance i n a permanent state; by the su ddenness and swiftness of the change in i t there "comes dis­ persion and, at another ti me, a gathering together" ; or, rather, not at another time nor later, but at the same i n stant it both settles i nto i ts place and fo rsakes its p l ace; " i t is coming and going." Wherefore that which i s born of it never attains u nto being because of the unceasing and unstaying process of generation, which, ev er bringing change, produces from a seed a n embryo, then a b a be, then a chi l d , and in due course a boy, a young man, a mature man, an elderly man, an old man, causing the first generations and ages to pass away by those which succeed them. Bu t we have a ridiculous fear of one death, we who have already died so many deaths, and still are dy i n g ! For not only is it true, as Heracleitus used to say, that the death of heat i s birth for steam, and the death o f steam is birth for water, but the case is even more clearly to be seen in our own selves: the man in his prime passes away when an old man comes into existence, the young man passes away into the man in his prime, the ch i l d into the young man, and the babe into the ch i l d . Dead is the man of yesterday, for he is passed into the man of today; and the man of today is dying as he passes into the man of tomorrow. Nobody remains one p erson, nor is one person; but we become many persons, even as matter is drawn about some one semblance and common mould with i mperceptible movement. Else how is it that, if we remain the same persons, we take delight i n some things now, whereas ear­ lier we took delight i n di fferent things; that we love or h ate opposite things, and so too with our admirations and disapprovals, and that we use other words and feel other emotions and have no longer th e same personal appear­ ance, the same external form, or the same purposes in mind? 1 5

Something of the previous state, however, survives every change. This is called in the language of cybernetics (which took it from the language of machines) feedback, the advantages of learning from experience and of having developed reflexes. Olson learned this word from a book pub­ lished the year he was writing "The Kingfishers," Norbert Wiener's Cybernetics. "Feedback," Wiener says in The Human Use of Human Be­ ings: Cybernetics and Society, "is a method of controlling a system by reinserting into it the results of its past performance." 1 6 Men (and history ) , then, are both discrete and conti nuous; the kingfisher's hi story, for i nstance, is conti nuous (and eventless), evolution being a process by which all advantageous feedback is built henceforth into the design. Human culture is dis crete, disconti nuous: this is the sub15Plutarch, "The E a t Delphi," i n Moralia, trans. Frank Cole Babbitt (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1 962), vol. V, pp. 2 4 1 -43. 1'(New York: Doubleday, 1 95 4 ) , p . 6 1 .

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ject of Pound's Cantos and the concern of most historians after Vi co and Michelet. Nature phasing out the brontosaurus was adj usting a totality of ecological design; the fal l of Alexander's empire was tragedy. Olson takes the words " discrete" and "continuous" from the mathematician Riemann, and the reader who wishes to feel the full con­ tent of these words should go to Olson's essay " Equal, That Is, to the Real Itself." 1 7 Ch ange, therefore, i s always a message, a statement of attention and i ntention. Change is the mute, as language is the articulate, discourse of history, and the two are frequently at grievous di vergence from each other. Nature's feedback is the study of science; man' s feedback ought to be the study of history, except that hi story is blocked by ignorance and loss. The search for the past is arduous, and when found it is difficult if not impossible to read. "This very thing you are" can only be said, in the terms of Plutarch's dialogue, to a god, an imagined stabil i ty of Being. (Ammonius's dis­ course, quoted from above, is based on the interpretation of the E as ei, "thou art." ) Said to a man, it can only mean that what he is can be identified as a variant of a common model . The model, then, is the heart of every culture, the degree of excellence it offers the indivi dual. 4.2 Prescott again: the opening lines are from a passage about the mother goddess Cioa-coatl (a kind of Artemis ) . I have not found a source for the detail of the Mongoli an louse (either in books about the Mayas or from Mayan anthropologists I've consulted), though the Asia n origin of the American Indian is a widely held hypothesis. "The light is in the east" : we are at a dawn moment i n history. The Cold War was beginning, a new age of technology (atomic power, poly­ mers, jet flight, plastics) was beginning; empires (British, Soviet, Chinese) were changing character and boundaries. The "guide" is Ezra Pound, and his " rose" (an i mage from Dante) is the model civilization meditated on in The Pisan Cantos which history has consi stently betrayed through greed and loss of vision, but which remains as an ideal, " now in the mind indestructible." Olson perceives that Pound's clearest vision of this ideal was in Confucius, and echoes the fi rst page of the Pisan group ( "what whiteness will you add to this white­ ne ss, what cando r ? " ) , itself a paraphrase of the Analects. But the Heraclitean paradox remai ns, that justice is born from conten­ tion, peace from war, benevolence from violence. 1 7Selected Writings, ed. Robert Creeley (New York: New Directions, 1 9 66) .

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The meeting of East and West in post-Columbian Mexico is again evoked. The conquistador who " h ealed" is Cabeza de Vaca; the one who "tore the eastern idols down" is Hernando Cortes. The excuse for his violence was the greater violence of human sacri fice. Prescott, perplexed by the anomaly of human sacrifice among the splendid Mexicans, searches for paral lel examples among civilized people in a gory footnote (p. 698 ) : " Marco Polo notices a civilized people in South-eastern China, and another in japan, who drank the blood and ate the flesh of their captives; esteeming it th e most savory food in th e world-"La piu sapo­ rita et migliore, che si possa truovar al mondo' (Viaggi, lib. '2, cap. 75; lib. 3, 1 3 , 1 4) ." But do we judge the flower by the root; is the analogy in anywise apt? The rhetorical questions are anguished and damning. "Pudor" and "Pej­ orocracy" are from Pound's vocabulary; and Shakespeare's bitterest voice speaks through the mask of the desp airing Timon: Sonne of sixteen, Pluck e the lyn'd Crutch from thy old limping Sire With i t, beate out his Braines, Piety, and Feare, Religion to the Gods, Peace, Justice, Truth, Domesticke awe, Night-rest, and Neighbour-hood, Instruction, Manners, Mysteries, and Trades, Degrees, Observances, Customes, and Lawes, Decline to your co nfounding contraries. 1 8

Civilization "flowers" (the image is a cliche among historians ) ; Olson embeds puns alluding to this i mage (which his masters Pound, Eliot, and Williams redeemed from triteness) : "whence it arose," "what stalks." The sardonic last ten lines of this movement are Latinate, unarguably j ust in their charge, and balance with their lyric a nd rhetori cal clarity the busy energy of the interrupted articulateness and fragmented images that p re­ cede them. 4.3 [ Coda ] "That I am no Greek has not the advantage I would like." Is this the meaning? Klaus Reichert, the German translator of "The Kingfishers," misreads the line as: Kein Grieche bin ich, den vorzug hab ich nicht (and Olson did not o bject). I suspect a syncopated quotation here. Paraphrase: My culture and my language give me scant advantage for speaking as I would like. Pound in the Guide to Kulchur: "It is my intention . . . to COMMIT 1 8Timon of Athens IV.I. l , 1 3 -20. I am i ndebted to Mr. Gerrit Lansing for pointing out this quotation.

The Geography of the Imagination

96

myself on as many points as possible, that means I shall make a number of statements which very few men can AFFORD to make, for the simple reason that such taking sides might jeopard their incomes (di rectly) or thei r prestige or 'position' in one or other of the p rofessional 'worlds'. Given my freedom, I may be a fool to use it, but I wd. be a cad not to. " Pound, then, is the kinsman whose commitment and courage the poet wishes to emulate. (Pound at the time was serving the fourth year of a thirteen-year prison sentence for speaking his mind over Radio Ro me) . I f the failure of culture and langu age cannot give the poet words to complete his poem, he can at least plead that he is ;1ware of the violence underlying every feature of civilization's mask. Olson wrote "The Kingfishers" j ust before going to Yucatan: in a strange economy of an­ ticipation he wrote his meditation on the ruins before he ever saw them. So he chose to quote, as a coda to his meditation, a poet who left civiliza­ tion for the jungle and the desert, Rimbaud. The couplet Olson quotes occurs twice, first in a poem calles "Fetes de Ia Faim" (written August 1 8 72), Ma fai m , Anne, Anne, Fuis sur ton ane.

Olson

97

Les salades, les fruits N'attendent que la cuei llette; Mais l'araignee de la haie Ne mange que des violettes. Que j e dorm e ! que je boui l l e Aux autels de Salomon. Le bouil lon court sur l a rou i lle, Et se mele au Cedron.

Which is, roughly: If 1 have any taste,

1 t is for earth and stone. l take for my meals Rock, coal, iron. Hu ngers, leave. Graze, hungers, In fields of sound. Suck the morning glory' s Gay poison. Eat crunched pebbles, Ancient church stones,

Si j'ai du gout, ce n'est gueres

Bo ulders from the flood,

Que pour la terre et les pierres.

Bread cast in grey valleys.

Dinn ! dinn ! di n n ! dinn ! Mangeons ]' air, Le roc, les ch arbons, le fer . . .

and as a passage in Une Saison en enfer (1 8 73), Si j ' ai du gout, ce n'est gueres Que pour I a terre et les pierres.

The wolf bayed under the leaves, Spitting pretty feathers Of the birds he'd eaten . Like him, I consume myself.

Je dejeune roujours d' a i r,

Salads, fruit,

De roc, de charbons, de fer.

They wait to be p i cked;

Mcs faims, tournez. Passez, faims, Le pre des sons. Attirez le gai venin Des liserons. Manges les cai l l o ux qu 'on brise, Les vieilles pierres d'eglises; Les galets des vieux deluges, Pains scmes dans les vallees grises.

Lc loup c n a i t sous les fe ui l l es En crachant lcs be lles plu mes De son repas de volaillcs: Comme l ui je me consume.

But the grass spider Eats violets only. Let me sleep ! Let m e stew On Solomon's altars. The gravy spills down the rust And runs i n to the Kedron.

This "taste for stone" i s a theme in modern li terature that emerges in the early days of Romantic writing and flows like a sub merged river of meaning through p ractically all serious works in the ni neteenth and twentieth centuries. It stems from the classical feeling that stone was a dead substance and therefore belonged to a separate realm of being. Hades, for instance, was stone, as was the dead moon. The firm Greek sense that stone does not grow distinguished it radically from th ings that

The Geography of the Imagination

do. And yet it was of mineral substance that everything is made: an or­ ganism was an interpenetration of matter and spirit. Put the understanding another way: science and poetry from the Ren­ aissance forward have been trying to discover what is alive and what isn't. In science the discovery span ned three centuries, from Gassendi to Niels Bohr, and the answer is that everything is alive. Poetry has had a similar search, and its answer is not yet formulated, as it cannot understand nature except as a mirror of the spirit. One can read The Cantos as a subtle meditation on whether stone is alive, and a gener­ ation of French poets found in the mineral world a correlative of art , itself: Baudelaire, Lafargue, and Mallarme chiefly. That is why Rimbaud is asked to witness at the end of "The Ki ngfishers"-his hu nger for stone is the modern question all over again : " What is alive, and how ?" Though Olson can ask the question in the nineteenth-century manner-is man an a lien spirit in a world that has its own, separate existence?-in such a poem as "The Praises" and in the Maximus poems, he puts th e brunt of his question in "The Kingfishers" as Pound (or a classical Greek) would put it. In what way does meaning inhere in things ? Does meaning drain from art, for instance, "when the attenti ons change ?" Is the Mayan culture lost to us forever, like the meaning of the E on the Delphic navel stone? Is there really a feedback operative in his­ tory, so that men learn from experience ? (This question was being asked three years after we had found the mountains of corpses at Buchenwald and Auschwitz, and while the Red Guards were oiling their carbines) . The poet's taste (a pun in Rimbaud's French: appetite, correct dis­ crimination) i s a characteristically Olsonian insistence on the physiology of things: he means intellectual p assion . And in it he conceals a qua rrel with his master Pound, who set out in The Cantos to say how cultures rise and fall. Olson's very silence on the economic vision which Pound gives as an explanation states h is indifference to it. Hence the pointed question, which is a way of asking what can survive as salvageable mean­ ing from Fascism ("that maggots shd/ eat the dead bullock," the dead bullock being Mussolini hanging by his heels at Milan). The question is also Samson's riddle: "Out of the eater came foorth meate, And out of the strong came foorth sweetness" (Judges 1 4 : 1 4 ) . History i s fable. Its meaning i s always the harmony o f meaning which we can make out of it. It is th e lion slai n in the sun; i t is a stone carved with an enigmatic E. It is the Mayan ruins, Angkor Vat, Macchu Picch u. The kingfishers : they quelled the winds and brought the new year in, their feathers crowned the messengers to the gods, they are fixed as bright emblems of spirit in the poetry of the Chinese. A modern scientist will tell you that they control insects and the enemies of the trout. They are an order of being.

Olson

There is history, Olson says in Maximus

99 V

("A Later Note on Letter

# 1 5 " ) , and there is the dream of history : fact and interrupted fact, or

fa ble. Obj ective history is always a lie, for it cannot disclose the truth . " No event" (Olson i s quoting Whitehead) "is not penetrated, i n intersec­ tion or collision with, an eternal event." "The Kingfishers" is a projection (Latin, "propelling forward") of in­ tersecting events which would never otherwise have come i nto relation to each other except for the poet's imagining them in this conju nction. Like Pound's ideogrammatic forms, it is poetry that demands consideration among several people, and thus easily becomes social discourse, rich material for classes in schools. Its seeming inarticulateness i s not a failure to articulate, but a decli ning to articulate images and events which ca n be left in free collision .

/ukofsky

Zukofsky

I . "A"

Lou is Zuk ofsky wro te, with awe ­ For for -six year s, from 1928 to 1974 , fi rst twelve parts were set some c e and skill a long poem calle d "A. " Its Kyat� in 1959 . The rs in type by Japa nes� com positors and printed in the ergh� -fifth thro g thirty of Poun d' s Cantos were set by Fren ch , fi rst h alf of Olso n s �axzm s wa ninety-fifth by Italia n com posi tors; the 1 land ; . Walt Whrt an r s . prin ted in Germ any, the seco nd h alf in Eng o o the pnn tmg of Clare . � set Leaves of Grass; Melv ille paid for of its hand som e bm rng an use beca own poek e t·' The Columbi . ad sold u 1 ton. 1 0n 1 Y Wil liam s' s Paterson typo graph y and engr avrngs by Ro b ert F

�

7

;

�

�

��

��

� 1�

. betw een steam boat s som d ay wnte a b t the affi nity 'Stea mboa t Fulto n. Some one must , and Shel ley when boat steam first mat en voyag 0 f and and poets . Robert Burns was on the any plyin g betw een Lond on comp tp -s steam a nd fou to t he was drow ned was just abou Genoa.

100

� ;h�

101

came m an untroubled and ordinary way from a publisher. It cannot be demonstrated that the American public has ever clamored to read a long poem by an American p oet. "A ", 1 -1 2 was issued in America in 1 967 (a p hotocopy of the Japanese compositors' work) . This edition was fi nanced by The Paris Review and is now out of print. "A ", 1 3 -2 1 was published in England in 1969. "A "-24, the final section of the poem, was published in New York-New York!- 1962. Parts 22 and 23, written in Port Jefferson, N . Y . , the poet's final home after a lifetime in Manhattan and Brooklyn, were published in 1975.2 The whole poem was brought together and published as Zukofsky lay dying in 1978.3 He never saw a copy. Every skilled poet finds the in nocent world pregnant with analogies. If saw-horses have been set up outside one's Brooklyn apartment and one h as the seventh part of a long fugal poem to compose, there are things to be seen in those horses with their letteri ng on their crosspieces, la nterns hung on their ends. These wooden horses lack heads and necks, for in­ stance, but with horses so archaically elemental, won't the num ber 7 it­ self supply that want? And the poet will supply the manes, the di manes of his shamanistic art. And what presence will emerge in the trance? Two horses together make an M (each horse singly, an A) . As the poet is work­ i ng in counterpoint like his great master Bach, whose spirit presides over the whole poem, the theme M inverted is W (the theme of manes trotting across itself inverted, the theme of William, the one named Shakespeare; as the theme A simultaneously moves across i ts extreme in the alpha bet, Z) . The theme A doubled suggests doubling li nes; li nes get doubled in a sestina, so we begin to make a sestina. When we double theme A in its seventh progression, the n umber 14 pops up, and that is a Sh akespearean number, the lines of a Shakespearean sonnet, so our sestina must blend into a cycle of sonnets. How man y ? Seven, of course. One would expect these wooden horses to bear Greeks into Troy; they bring, instead, Roman soldiers to the agony in the garden: Christian Friedrich Henri ci's libretto for Bach ' s St. Matthew Passion has figured in the poem from the beginning. Does "A " begin in a thoroughly Marxist way, positing man's economic anguish as an agony in wh at might have been, had greed and misdirection not ruined it, the ga rden of the world? The poem begins on Passover 1928 at a performance of the St. Matthew Passion at Carnegie Hall; Easter is four days away. The banks are soon to close; the country is deep into the Depression. Women in diamonds have come to hear 2Louis Zukofsky, "A"-24 (New York: Grossman, 1 9 72) . "A" 22 & 23, same publisher, 1 9 75 . 'Loui s Zukofsky, "A " (Berkeley and L o s Angeles: University o f California Press, 1 9 78).

1 02

The Geography of the I m agination

underpaid musicians. Zukofsky always counterpoints his themes with the precision of a baroque master. Passover: Easter. Leipzig 1 728: New Yo rk 1 929. Jew : Ch ri sti an. Christ on the cross: industri al workers crucified on their machines. Lenin had been dead only four years. The poet's pa rents spoke no English and he grew up speaking Yiddish with a Russian accent. It was the opinion of the Communist Party cell which he attended with a view to joining (his sponsor was his classmate at Colu mbia, Whittaker Chambers) that he was not CP material but a young man ambitious to move to the West Side. Gibbon would eventually temper, correct, and . supplement Marx; Thomas Jefferson , Lenin. But Shakespeare and Bach would become the lares p enatesque of this most passionately i ntellectual of Ameri can poets. Only Emily Dickinson has kept to her hearth more than Zukofsky. When he left home, a home i ntensely a focus of his whole existence, he traveled, li ke Basho, with his own weather, co als from his fire, a splendi d sense that by drawing this chair here and that chair there he could summon the exact skirts of the tent that kept out the sand and desert cold on the marches across Sinai, the straw curtains that screened the family from the chatter and blasphemy of Babylon, the lamplit walls of Polish rooms, the shades one draws against Brooklyn. This inwardness is the ground for all the glittering themes and their variations which dance in "A. " Dance, for the essence of the poem is in play, intellectual play, a play of words and music. Zukofsky is the most Apollonian of our poets, but his Apollo cavorts with Pan and Priapos. So did the Apollo of Bach, Shakespeare, and Catullus. Zukofsky's honor for olden and aban doned spirits is one of his most stren uous pieties. There are many ways of talking about Zukofsky's particular marshalling of spiritual domi nions and p owers. "A, " for i nstance, is about a marriage in which the wife has the Elizabethan name Celia, hence lyrics for the lute throughout) ; it is crucial, however, to an understanding of his art to single out the wonder of his playfulness, for it sets his work aside (and above) as distinctly as his superb mastery of sound and measure. Consider the pantomimic brio here: Man in the moon stand and stride On his forked goad the burden he bea rs It is a wonder that he does not slide, For doubt lest he fall he shudders and sheers. ("A "- 1 3 )

This buffo glissando clowns on for forty lines, achieving the most spi­ rited aria Pierrot ever sang to the moon ( " Hop out H ubert in your hose magpie!") . Is it Pierrot baying at the moon and crying for the sun? Is it Zukofsky watching astronauts on TV ? I s it a bumpkin from Shakespeare

Zukolsky

1 03

drawlin g what would be fine euphuis tic rhetoric except that its socks keep fa lli ng down around its ankles ?4 All, and more. For by the middle and later parts of "A " Zukofsk y had found a way ( like Charles Ives, as we shall see) to harmon ize counter ­ pointed themes that is somethi ng like the defe rential richness of a Latin line of poetry (the genitive s, datives, and ablative s generou sly and prom­ iscuousl y attachin g themsel ves to the words around them, though we are supposed to reserve our sense of relations hips until the whole line is in p lace), someth ing like Pound's and William s's imagist ic gisting of English phrases into a Chinese aesthet ic of tersenes s, and someth ing of Zukof­ sky's heroic endeavo r to marry words to a music, the more impossi ble the program , the better. In the eccentri c Catullus, the Latin is the music, and the English is the words set to it. "A " - 2 1 is so many English words set to Plautus ' s Latin; "A " 1 5 begins with the English words set to the Hebrew of job. Sharp ears can hear Mallarm e in "A "- 1 9 . 5 This interpen etration of meanin g and meanin g ("once She now Eunuch reigned "-"A " - 2 1 , for exampl e, refers to the reign of Justice in Ovid's Golden Age, though an obvious theme of our time gets alluded to, and the gramm ar can read, " We are ruled by eunuch s rather than by just men" ) has a parallel in Ives, one of whose best interpreters is the poet's son Paul. Ives's " Concord Sonata" begins with what sounds like v ariation s on the initial theme of Beethov en's Fifth Symphony; we discover later that the joke is Louisa May Alcott trying to play Wagner 's piano redactio n of the noble sympho ny, making a mangle out of it and faking difficult pas­ sages with phrases from the Calvini st hymns with which her fingers are most comfortable; but a musicol ogist can tell us that the phrase isn' t Be�thoven at all, but a Scots folk melody that sounds like Beetho ven, just as In the grand theme of the Second Sympho ny we are convinc ed we are hearing the Nation al Anthem ( " Colum bia, Gem of the Ocean" at that time) whereas we are hearing yet another Scots tune, " My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean." This is all very Zukofsk ian. (I once asked Zukofsk y what the "mg. dancer" is who dances in "A " - 2 1 , a milligra m sprite, a magnes ium elf, a margin dancer, or Au­ rora, as the di ctionar y allows for all of these meanin gs. " All," he replied .) -

•It is Zukofsk y's translatio n i n to modern English of a Middle English lyric about Hubert, the man m the moon, H a rley MS 2253. For one medieval text see J. A . W. Bennett and G. V. Sm1thers, Early Middle English Verse and Prose ( Ox ford: Oxford Universit y Press, ,

1 960) .

5See Kenneth Cox's essay, " Z ukofsky and Mallarme " i n John Taggart's excellent collection of Zukofsk ian studies, Maps 5: Louis Zukofsky, ( 1 9 73). These ten essays make as in­ telligent an mtroduc twn to Zukofsk y as is avail able at the moment : pioneer work, all.

The Geography of the Imagination

1 04

Consider ( "A " 2 1 , again) : -

sleepless in a city of thieves

who cannot foretell evening from morning.

s canno t tell in the Both robbe d and robbe r are the sleepl ess. The thieve ate men, hunted morni ng if they will be alive by nightf all (addic ts, desper all these senses ) . The men, starvin g men: the words will accom modat e that they canno t tell thieves are in such a world of thei r own confu sion morni ng from evenin g. The passage continues: from morning still cobbled

trafficked streets Could be

a sphere of pyramidal honeycomb, the sphere enclosing the most space with the least surfa ce strongest again st internal pressure

the h oneys

enclosing the least space

most

surface best to withstand external pressures could be one lean buck take heart grow fuller knowing like transported cargo smells of portage th e wi nter-wrapped tree elsewhere May

a summer's

dory unstowed so much so little each one's house just float off

nations j u st stops

and wander th at needs no feet.

The "sphere of pyrami dal honeycomb" is the geodesic dome which R. Buckmi nster Fuller has proposed to build over Manhattan and thus con­ trol i ts weather: his name is concealed further down in "one lean buck I take heart grow fu ller." Fu ller gets into the poem (or rather, int? Plautus's Rome which is the mask New York is made to wear at thts

Zukofsky

1 05

point) because of the dangerous streets, which, like Rome's, signalled the collapse of her culture. Fuller is a systems designer; he is like the buck in winter who knows that May will come again ; Zukofsky li kes Fuller's ideas of portable houses and of finding life-support systems in nature for the rejuvenation and continuance of our city li fe, but worries (taking the lyri c as a whole, of which I have quoted only the latter section) whether a culture can stand so much nomadi s m , and wonders if the modern city isn't more a matter of nomads and hordes wandering than of people li ving i n a settlement. New York died as a city in which one can live while Zukofsky was writing his poem. Now that almost the whole structure is available to us, we can see that it is a series of metamorphoses in which thought turns into music. That's what happens in Shakespeare's sonnets; thought becomes one of the figures in a richly patterned music. The thought itsel f is accidental, like the plot of a short story. It comes from the outside: the war in Vi etnam, saw horses i n the street. There is enough narrative and anecdotal matter in "A" to make a shelf of novels. The ending of the poem is 239 pages of music, Handel's Pieces pour le Clavecin copied out in Celi a's neat h and. Against this musi c actors per­ form a masque by reci ting from Zukofsky's essays (the volume Preposi­ tions ) , his play of 1 936, Arise, Arise (the title is the International talki n g a t the same ti me a s John Donne) , the book o f stories I t Was, and previous portions of "A. " The masque begins this way: the harpsi cho rd opens with a fine arpeg­ gio. A voice begins to read from an essay called " A Statement of Poetry " : And i t i s possible i n i m agination to divo rce speech o f all graphic elements, to let it become a movement of sounds.

(The ghost of Mallarme nods agreement from the az ure.) While we hear this voice speaking about the movement and tone words, a second voice, lower, speaks disj unct lines, as if at random from the script, from the play Arise, Arise: ( " My mother hit her mother ? ") . Simultaneously a third voice recites from the story " It Was ." The loudest voice, comi ng in at the second bar of the music, speaks the lyric " Blest I I nfi nite th ings" from "A " - 1 4. This goes on for an hour and ten mi nutes-four voices speaking simul­ taneously to a constant glory of Handel. 6 Nothing, let us note, is being 6Ma urice Edwards staged a performance at the Cubiculo on West 5 1 st Street, June 1 4 -23, 1 9 73, with Douglas Coe at the h a rpsichord. The p a rts were spoken by Keith Aldrich, B i l l Mal onev, L u a n e Roh rbacher, Helene Fri edman, Cordell Reagon , and Gary S m i t h . A di scus·

sion after the Friday performance amounted to a p u b l i c conve"ation between the poet and Hugh Kenner.

1 06

The Geography of the Imagination

Zukofsky

obscured by all these voices talking at once . We have no more right to complain that we can understand nothing (as indeed we can't) than to complain of Ives's Putnam's Camp, Redding, Connecticut that we can' t make out what two military bands are playing ( separate tunes simultane­ ously on top of some lovely ragtime and a bit of Tristan) . The elements exist elsewhere, and can be consulted. This is Celia's Masque for LZ : she knows the parts by heart, and if it pleases her to hear them this way, then that is the symbol, the figure as she makes it out in the carpet. She typed all these words in a house with a violinist p racticing. 7 Polyphonic voices is not a musical form we are, used to, though any American room will usually h ave two conversations going at once while the television set maintains its diarrhea of words and crappy music. I suspect that u ltimately Zukofsky wanted "A " to cu lmi nate and fulfill itself at a family reunion of his work, inside and outside of the poem, a grand Jewish family affair, with everybody cheerfully talking at once. The surface of the poem then achieves its maximum turbulence within such forms as the h arpsichord can impose; the reciters must watch the score, and follow the measure. Total familiarity with the piece will begin to disclose remarkable dis­ sonances and harmonies. The scholars will want to ask why the voices have been put together in just this way. Why, for instance, the essay on Henry Adams is made to move alongside a reprise of "A"-7, while other voices are talking about graves . Familiarity is the condition whereby all of Zukofsky's work renders its goodness up. Zukofsky's su rface is apt to appear spare and a bit cold, as Finnegans Wake is apt to seem a briar-patch of words. Many of Zukof­ sky's phrases seem to be knots tied too elabo rately : they seem to ask to be picked apart. Once we know that every ph rase is an ultimate condensa­ tion of what the same concepts would be in a windi er poet, we can then gear our wits to Zukofsky's finer machinery than we could possibly be used to. It has been complai ned of Zukofsky that he confuses obscurity and profundity. He is profound ( but never arcane ) ; he is profound as music is profound, for his words are powerful enough to stir response, sympathy, and revery. They reward attention, and keep rewarding attention. His obscurity is in the reader's mind, not in the poem. And it is an obscurity which disappears as we learn our poet, his precision and ski ll. His pas­

1 07

recently has the poet begun to appear in reference works of American poets, and in an occasional anthology. He has had the pleasu re of riding along a London street under a banner tied from lamp post to lamp post on which he could read WELCOME TO CAMBERWELL LOUIS ZUKOFSKY. He has with incredible and disgusting difficulty seen his Bottom: On Shakespeare and his Catullus into print, agonies comparable to Joyce's, the details of which constitute a formal indictment of the American publishing industry on charges of critical dullness, terminal stupidity, and general mopery. Perhaps, at the moment, when the life of the mind is in more peri l than ever in the Republic, Zukofsky must seem to be not so much a poet's poet as a poet's poet's poet, and may be the last man of the great generation of the Men of 1 9 14, the inventors of the art of the century. Our greatest living poet is usually a man as unknown to the professariat as to the corps of reviewers and the deaf custodians of the lau rels. It was true of Whit­ man in 1 873, and is true of Zukofsky in 1 973. 11.

SCRIPTA ZUKOFSKII ELOGIA

1 Eighteen songs, set to music by his wife, and fi fty-three lines of type in six blocks of prose: this is Zukofsky's Autobiography, not his most ec­ centric work but certainly foremost as an eccentri city among the world's auto biographies. 1 . 1 The first of these songs is a buffoonery that Mr. Punch, Groucho Marx, Zero Mostel, and Buck Mulligan might sing in Elysium. It is a motet. General Martinet Gem Coughed Ahem, and Ahem, and Ah em Deploying the nerves of his men Right, and about face, to his phlegm. Their w h angs marched up to the sky, His eyes telescoped in his head A pillow that as pillar o f Europe He flung to his rupture Ahead.

1.2

The song i s Zukofsky' s world. Wrangel, Haig, Toj o, Goering.

siOn . Zukofsky's work has been pu blished for fifty years and the reviewers and scholars, except for a few, h ave been silent and indifferent. Only

1 . 3 The city i n which Zukofsky lived h e pictured by translating Catul­ lus, as effective a recreation of the color, odor, and tone of its original as Orff's Carmina Catulli o r F elli ni's Satyricon.

7Some in his young years. Paul Zukofsky defies the rule o f constant pra ctice to which other

1 .4 The h o me in which Zukofsky lived is "A". It contained two musi­ cians, a poet, many books, and a television set.

vi olinists a d here with perhaps as much superstition as benefi t.

l

The Geography of the Imagination

1 08

2 " Has he pu blished ?" a professor asked at the committee meeting where I was trying to h ave a thousand dollars appropriated to bring Zukofsky to the University of Kentucky for a reading. But this same pro­ fessor h ad p robably never heard of Ausonius, Ts'ao Chih, or Stevie Smith. 2 . 1 How to answer the ignorant professor? The greatest of elegies for JFK ("A '' - 1 5 The fetlocks ankles o f a ballerina ' Black Jack' Sarda r with blackh ilted sword black dangled in silver scabbard from the saddle rider less rider h i s life looked back into silver stirrups and the reversed boots in th em. John to John-John to Joh n son).

2.2

The most original meditation o n Sh akespeare since Coleridge.

2 . 3 A translation o f a l l of Catullus, a l l b u t u n readable except with great sympathy and curiosity, in which the English sounds like the Latin and is in the same meter. The beauty of this strange text is that it catches Catul­ lus's goatish nasty with dignity, h onesty, and a decent eye.

2 . 5 Four vo lumes of lyrical poems, some of which rank among the finest of our century. 2 . 6 Some critical prose distinguished by its good sense and a pure style, some n arrative prose distinguised by its whimsy, wit, and i ndividual tone. LZ wrote prose as a race horse walks: nervous, skittery, itching for the bugle and the track. 3

His Shakespeare was a q uattrocentu Florentine.

4 Spinoza, Heraclitus, Wittgenstein, Bach, Jefferson, LZ: men with brotherly minds. 5 The engineering of his poetry, when revealed and demonstrated, will bring him close to Joyce. He taught at a polytechnic institute, saw the Brooklyn Bridge daily for thirty years, was fascinated by the shapes of the letter A ( tetrahedron, gable, strut) and Z (cantilever) , and designed all his poetry with an en­ gineer's love of structure, of solidities, of harmony.

6

Zuko(sky

1 09

7 Le Style Apollinaire. LZ is a scrupulous punctuator, with correcter parentheses, dashes, and semicolons than anyone else. Punctuation be­ came dense as the rai l road tracks went down, corresponding to their points, switches, signals, and semaphores. With the airplane, trackless and free, we get Apollinaire with no punctuation at all, Eliot, Pound, Cummings. 7 . 1 "A" - 1 6 has no punctuation: it is airborne and speaks of the windflower. 80 Flowers has no punctuation. But LZ' s punctuation re­ mains that of the city man for whom traffic signals are crucial. "A" - 1 3 is a poem imitating a partita by Bach; I - 7 5 is a four-lane highway.

8

The elegant engineering of "A" is an integral symbol.

9 The invention that distinguishes Zukofsky is the play of his wit. His instructors here were S hakespeare and the Baroque fiddle: a continuum of sense that nevertheless interrupts itself all along the line to play, j ug­ gle qui bbles, pun, dance in and out of nonsense, sustain cadenzas of aweseome virtuosity, and switch the ridiculous and the subli me so fast that we are taught their h appy interchangeability in a beautifully poised sensibility. 10 Jewish humor assumes a sweet intelligence. We feel the non­ Euclidean rightness of Sam Goldwyn's " Include me out" and " A man who goes to a psychiatrist ought to have his head examined ." It was Freud who thought h u mor was the tension of anxiety released in a cryp­ togram that was soci ab le and congenial though threatening to the psyche as a decoded statement. As soon as we reach th e anecdote of the rabbi and the telep hone i n "A", we know we are in good h ands. 1 1 Zukofsky as a child thought that the uncircumcised couldn't urinate and was troubled to understand the radically different physi ology of the goyim. Hence the concealed j okes about urine throughout "A" . O r as the Queen o f British barmaids Before the Jury o f h er Pee-e rs, Call Me Hebe, that means goddess of youth, Dears!

("A "- 1 3 )

Freudian blips zing across cockney fun : Jewry acro'ss jury, hebe (Hebrew) across Hebe, and in Dears! you can hear Fagin's lisp. 12 LZ was a prodigious and searching reader. He accepted books as his inheritance and spent a lifetime assaying the bequest. 13 He had the gift of the laconic. To Pound praising Mussolini in 1 939, he said, "The voice, Ezra, the voice ! " There must be hundreds of critical

The Geography of the I magi nation

1 10

postcards like ones I've had from him. Of my Archilochos, "Something new !" Of Flowers and Leaves, " Yes, but where's the passion ?" Of my " Herakleitos," "Jes' crazy!"

14 Hearing that he frequently saw Djuna Barnes when he was out for a morning paper, I asked him if they exchanged pleasantries. "No," he said. " What do you say to the Minister's Black Veil?" Fellow artists have treated him as a phenomenon, a force, a man ( like Mallarme or Whistler) to make obeisance to whether you u nder­ stand his work or not. His appearance in Brakhage's 23rd Psalm Branch is characteristic of such homage. In a sequence about the Nazi concentra­ tion camps, Zukofsky's face is i ntroduced as a motif. He was the kind of man who would h ave suffered Mandelstam's fate in Russia, Max Jacob's in France.

15

1 6 Joseph Cornell, Lorine Niedecker, Ronald Johnson, Charles lves, Albert Pinkham Ryder, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman . LZ was wise in the ways of a family as William Carlos Williams i n the ways o f a community, Pound in the splendors o f cultures. L Z w a s the most civilized of the three, an accomp lished city dweller, a p ractical critic of p lace and history.

17

1 8 He would not talk on the phone if Celia were not there to hear the conversation. 1 9 Exploring the prehistoric caves at Les Eyzies in the Dordogne, he went into some that were too uncomfortable for Celia but described them so well that she felt she'd seen them. 20

A music of thought.

The precision of his mind demanded a heterogeneous and i mproba­ ble imagery. Surmounting difficulties was his daimon. When enough people become familiar with "A " so that it can be discussed, the first wonder will be how so many subj ects got built into such u nlikely pat­ terns, and what a h armony they all make.

21

22 Two lives we lead: in the world and i n our minds. Only a work of art can show us how to do it. The sciences concerned with the one aren't on speaking terms with those concerned with the other. Lenin once said that Socialism would i nspire in the working man a love of natural beauty. One of my colleagues, a professor, once observed in front of my crack­ ling, cozy fireplace that it was such a day as one might want to sit in front

Zukofsky

111

of a crackling, cozy fireplace if only people had such nice things anymore. I thought I was losing my mind: he really did not notice that he was sitting in front of a fire. His talk runs much to our need to expand our consciousness. LZ in his poetry is constantly knitting the two worlds together, fetching a detail from this one to match one in the other. And he saw into other minds with a lovely clarity.

23

Spinoza with a body.

He propounded no theory, stood on no platform, marched i n no ranks. He thought, he observed, he loved, he wrote.

24

Carmen 95 of Catullus is "to Ezra Pound." "Purvey me my inti­ mate's core," it ends, "dear monument's all that there is, / let th' populace (tumid or gaudy) eat Antimacho." Parva mei mihi sint cordi monumenta soda/is, I at populus tumido gaudeat Antimacho.

25

BOTTOM

Born in a country market town, educated at the grammar school, re­ garded by his villagers as capable of taking over, in time, his father's business in beef and hides, he married Anne Whateley or Hathaway (the records are confused) and seemed to settle down as a burgher with a family. But then, inexplicably though perhaps precipitated by a tangle with the poaching laws, he set out for London with his friend Robert Davenport. Two decades later he had become the only writer of English whose imagination and mastery of words rivaled Chaucer's. For the first time in the history of the West, the supreme poet was not Homer but Homer or Shakespeare, as you would. Homer had grasped the h uman spirit in its perennial truths. It is all there, the world agreed, all that need be said of man. It remained to Shakespeare to render another description of man, this time of his i magination and its inward world. Look at Tele­ machus; look at Hamlet. Listen to Hermes in the Odyssey; listen to Ariel. Compare Priam and Lear in their anguish; the one, we say, needing no other words, is Homeric, the other Shakespearean; and nothing has reached such greatness. Of all birthday presents of the qua tercentenary, none has come close to the p oet Louis Zukofsky's offering, a discursive book of 470 pages called Bottom: On Shakespeare, boxed with a second volume by his wife, the composer Celia Zukofsky, a musical setting for Pericles. The body of Zukofsky's book is a cycle of essays, or "an alphabet of subjects," from A to Z. The momentum that carries the reader fascinated through this poet's notebook of perceptions is generated in the intro-

1 12

The Geography of the Imagination

duction, 90 pages ostensibly about eyes (" Let the audi ence look to their eyes," cries Bottom) . Wh at emerges is a kind of dance of imagery and words which Zukofsky, with pure delight, has set in motion. It is Shake­ speare's peace of mi nd that intrigues him, the bala nce of the poet's argu­ ment within itself. An elaborately cultivated i magination has li mits and contours-one begins to wonder if Shakespeare's have ever been found-but there are interior harmonies that act like music in their repe­ titions and contrasts and which visually are inexhaustible of interest. Zukofsky reports from a li feti me's study of these harmonies, and before we are well into the book we meet a Shakespeare classrooms and theatres have never heard of. Floated on footnotes, tastefully edited by professors, dried into j erked beef for the Hy marx Series, strained for teenagers and the delicate, Shakespeare has survived, has communicated. One feat Zukofsky has performed without saying a word: he has wrested Sh akespeare from two centuries of embattled siege by the English professors. ( Olivier's placing of Shakespeare in the film Henry V, deep in the background of the dres­ singroom scene, in dark glasses and shirt sleeves, leafing through a prompter's script, did more than three whole lectures on the bard to make him a flesh-and-blood being, though I've never met another soul who saw him there . ) Occasionally a Landor or a Hazlitt has helped u s to see the breathing Englishman, hazel-eyed, superbly deep but always clear of thought, with the heart of man helplessly naked to his gaze. But the student begins to think of him very soon as an institution vaguely religious, vaguely ped­ agogi cal , inscrutable, endless of corridor, governed by generations of quarreling wardens. The institution endows chai rs, gives assistant profes­ sors grants for studies of kingship, Tudor allusions, i mage clusters, stage history. As if all this grind and cough had never existed, Zuk ofsky has written a book about a poet whose precision of word and eye can be talked about endlessly. It is a book that belongs to that scarce genre which we can only call a book, like Boswell's johnson, Burton's Anatomy, Walton ' s Compleat Angler. Zukofsky gives us a lover' s insight into the way he reads Shake­ speare; he makes lines that we have read all our lives turn to gold before our eyes. All that poets and men of good talk have sai d about Shake­ speare is there; the index runs to thirty pages ; on page 346 we get the innocent quotation, " Od's me! Qu'ai-j'oublie?'' (Merry Wives l.iv .64) and the typist's ad li b Nothing! has been let stand, and with j ustice. For Zukofsky Shakespeare is an elaborate argument that flows, a voice all its own, in and out of characters, from play to play. It is an argument

:Lukofsky

1 13

about love, about understanding, about truth. "It argues with no one," he says, "only in i tsel f." With the humblest touchstone- Botto m's wildly innocent fantasia on Shakespeare's great theme that love is to reason as eyes are to mind-h ere is the greatest meditation, certainly the most in­ tricately lucid and beautiful, ever built around the thousand forms of a single thought.

Marianne Moore

1 15

give me diatribes and the fragrance of iodine, the cork oak acorn grown i n Spai n ; t h e pale-ale-eyed i mpersonal look which the sales-placard gives the bock beer buck.

This " fine careless rapture," as Ezra Poun d called it i n 1 9 1 8 (it was h is first letter to Miss Moore, seven pages of strenuous excitement) , has been sustained for forty years now, and to it has been added the translations of La Fontaine. "Definiteness of your delineations is delicious," Pound wrote in his second letter to her. He was judging from the verse that went into the Observations of 1 9 23, much of which was deleted or revised in later years. The Collected Poems of 1 95 1 has, for examp le, a much finer version of "Poetry." Titles have grown terser and wittier, and poems which would do credit to a lesser poet have been stricken from the canon. It is a poetry anxious to reproduce textures and the peculiar qualities of plants, animals, and places with an accuracy of simile and a precision i n words. The pangolin's armor is "scale I lapping scale with spruce-cone regularity." Vi rginia pansies are "dressed, but for a day, in over­ powering velvet; and I grey-blue-Andalus ian-cock-feather pale ones, ink-lined on the edge, fur- I eyed, with ochre I on the cheek." Miss Moore h as said of poetry that [not] til l the poets among us can be ' li teralists of the imagination' -above insolen ce and tri viality and can present

Marianne Moore

for inspection, 'imaginary gardens with real toads in them', shall we h ave it. 1

In Marianne Moore's poems-there are but seventy-one of them, five more than the restrained Eliot has pu blished-we are asked

It is curious, at first glance, that Miss Moore would speak of poetry this way : her own poetry seems real gardens with real toads, so meticu­ lously accurate is her descri ption. But then we realize that she means j ust what she says . The poet or painter who transcribes literally-"an externali st," as Miss Moore says elsewhere-is reproduci ng only a segment of experience; he must be lit­ eral about the imagination also. " Li teralists of the imagin ation" is a

Does yonder mouse with a grape in its hand and its ch ild i n its mouth, not portray the Spanish fleece suspended by the neck ?

And we are told of the jerboa that Its leaps should be set to the flageolet.

We are taken i nto this kind of confidence: If tributes cannot be imp l i cit,

! !4

l

1The 1 9 5 1 version of this poem is twenty-five l i n e s longer than the 1 923 one. To the l i st of bat, wolf, base-ball fan, and statistician has been added "the im movable critic twich ing h i s skin l i k e a horse t h a t feels a flea" -a tell i n g n o t e i n a revision m a d e between 1 924 and 1 95 0 , and one that apparently d i ctated that "these phenomena are p leasing" to b e changed to "these phenomena are important." The recasting of this poem i s as revealing a gauge as one would want of Miss Moore's craftsmanship and scrupulous care in composition.

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The Geography of the I m agi nation

phrase adapted fro m Yeats's essay on Bl ake's illustrations to Dante.2 Dare's Dante is dull because it is literal; it provides the very simulacra an unimaginative reader could supply for himsel f. Blake, despising the realistic painting "of Venice and Holland" which has not the limpid bounding lines of Mi chelangelo or Durer, gives us in his watercolors to Dante an imaginative response-they are transmuted forms but they are alive precisely where Dore's are dead. Wallace Stevens has pointed out that the ostrich of "He ' Digesteth Harde Yron' " can be found in ency­ clopedias, too, and proceeds to compare an encyclopedia entry with Miss Moore's poem. 3 The diffe rence is a delightful sh o�k. The encyclopedi a is blind; the poet can see. Put it any way you like. The encyclopedia is literal; Miss Moore is i maginative. Th e encyclopedia is disinterested, is indifferent, is academic. But it is clear that the poet's mind is, paradoxi­ cally, more interested in the ostrich than the ornithologist who wrote "Ostrich" for the Britannica. Let us look fairly closely at a si ngle poem of Mari anne Moore's i n order t o understand her a s well a s w e can. "His Shield" is an essay on freedom. First, to simplify the matter of the poem in bare outline, the roughest kind of paraphrase: Hedgehogs, echi noderms (sea urch ins and the like), porcupines and rhinoceroses are examples of heavi ly armored ani mals. It is better, by way of armor, to be clad in asbestos and iron shoes, like the fabled emperor Presbyter John. His mythical land had abundant gold and rubies; his people knew neither greed nor flattery. For all his magical armor, however, his true armor was his h umility. This took the form of his givi ng up instantly what anyone wanted to take from him; that is true freedo m. My advice, then, i s : arm yourself well, do nothi ng to make your neighbors envious, never evaluate, never criticize, be dull-that is your protecti on. What the poem says is not merely satirical or merely sarcastic: it is scornful. And the p rose paraphrase shows well that statement abstracted from an imaginative structure of sound, rhythm, and i mage is perforce inadequate and by no means equivalent to any part of the poem. The beginning is a cacophonous indecision, like a man picking his way through thorns. A pattern of assonance and consonance distresses us as much as the five bristly animals their neigh bors. We guess part of the poet's meaning already: heavy armor is a ruinous price to pay for well­ being. Whether or not we begin to expand the meaning at this point is of 2w. B. Yeats, " W i l l i a m Blake and His l ll u strations to the ' Di vi n e Comedy'," Ideas of Goo d ana Evil ( London : Macmil lan, 1 9 0 8 ) . 'Wallace Stevens, "About O n e o f Marianne Moore's Poems," The Necessa ry Angel ( Ne w York: Knopf, 1 9 5 1 ) .

Mariamze Moore

1 17

no consequence. Certain cliches come to mind. Switzerl and, mountain­ fortressed and peaceful, has been a dull little cou ntry culturally and his­ tori cally. The hedgehog and the porcupine figure in the imagination as formidable and inviolable, but our affection is for the graceful deer and the witty monkey. The rhinoceros has no fans. Such animals are dull as battleships are dull. The sound of the opening lines is as fanciful as the images. The second line, for instance, h as this succession of vowels: 3'- £ a i J £ a i J i £ i a u . Note that [ £ a i ::l ] is repeated exactly. Th e music of [ i ::l i £ i au ] is the same kind of see-sawing of sound we get i n Chedevilles's

Even the rhyme-scheme ( a b c a b c ) seems satiric. The words-Miss Moore, like any poet with a distinctive style, seems to have words all her own-are deliberately ambiguous because ambiguity is p art of the poem's subject: how much freedom does one h ave whe � he is t�e pris­ oner of hi s own security? Neither pin-swin nor spine-swme are hsted m the OED; they are coinages, perhaps, or dialect words, as is edgehog ("sword-point pig") . Pig-fur may be leather or i t may be, as in "perma­ nent pig on the instep," pig iron. Salamander ski n is fire-proof. The sec­ tion of the poem about Prester John is taken, as information, from the Encyclopa:dia Britannica and, as with "He 'Digesteth Harde Yron"', the transformation of the material is a lesson in itself. "His Shield" is a typical poem of Miss Moore's in that it exercises many of her devices. It is an essay, for it treats its subj ect discursively and offers informal i llustrations of it. It is built in the spirit of a bestiary : such and such an animal has certain qualities from which we can derive a practical lesson . Its language creates a texture and an atmosphere : the poem is bristly and hostile. To be literal about it, armor of one sort or another is mentioned thirty-seven times. Its rhythm is comp lex and de­ signed to slow the eye-and the voi ce-to a meditative pace. One would like to call it Baroque; much of it is counterpointed in the manner of Hopkins.

wh�t o;1e w�uld k�ep ; II th�t i� fr�edo'-'m . II B�ca'me

There are two caesuras to this li ne; at each one the feet reverse: this is the principle of counterp oint that Hop kins found in Samson Agonistes. Marianne Moore's literalness sets her poetry apart i n modern verse.

The Geography of the I m agination

1 18

Pound and Wi lliams are literal in m uch the same way, and all three have avoided the pervasive surrea lism that mars so much minor poetry of the period and which has been pushed to levels of excellence in Dylan Thomas, Lawrence Durrell , and Wallace Stevens. Take Pound's the fe male Is a chaos An octopus A biological proces s . 4

We understand the li nes as being imaginatively lite�al ; there is folklore (and Remy de Gourmont) to testify to the first equation. The second is a richly a m biguous metaphor, and the third, less inventive, lives in the momentu m bui lt up by the first two. Historically such language stems from Ri mbaud (particul arly Une Saison en enfer ), although there are examples of it in Hebrew and Persian poetry. But Miss Moore's l iteral ness is apt to be more rigorous still . "An Oc­ topus" is about "an octopus of ice." At a first reading we h ave no way of knowing that the "octopus" is the snow-cap of a mountain, not a real octopus frozen or one carved from ice. The poem is a fine description of animals and scenery i n the Rockies, yet the metaphorical octopus is kept as an allusion throughout. Metap hor, no matter how si mple, always makes a double image. To work out and sustain an i mage of an octopus­ like snow-cap is an extension of the use of metaphor to what must be one of its ultimates. "The Jerboa" is a poem in two parts : "Too Much" and "Abundan�� · " Ostensibly both parts treat of t h e jerboa, a small desert rat whose agility a nd courage are proper cause for admiration. We can imagine the jerboa easily and with delight. Here he is feeding and running: By fifths and sevenths , in leaps of two lengths, like the uneven notes of the Bedouin fl ute, it stops its gleaning on little wheel castors, and makes fern-seed foot-prints with kangaroo speed. •Canto XXIX. These l i nes are doubly pertinent to our s u bject i n that they were first a jovial

parody of Miss Moore, sent to her i n a letter ( London, 1 Feb. 1 9 1 9) . The female i s a chaos, the male is a fixed point of stupidity . . . stupidity . . . .

One recognizes it as the method used i n "The Mind Is an Enchanting T h i n g" and "To a

Steam Roller." See Paige, e d . , Th e Letters of court, Brace, 1 95 0 ) .

Ezra

Pound 1 907- 1 94 1 (New York: Har­

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I n a recent movi ng picture, Walt Disney's "The Living Desert," there were sequences in which the America n desert rat-cousin of the jerboa-triu mphed over a sidewinder. The photography was with tele­ scopic lens, in sharp focus, and of an excellence that would convi nce one that he had been in as inti mate a position to observe the spunky little rat as ever he could be. But there was no imaginative control of the subj ect such as Miss Moore gives us. Disney used a musical accompaniment, but accompa ni ment is precisely what it was . To compare the jerboa's alter­ nating long and short leaps to the sound of a Bedouin flute is another matter altogether. Bedouin music and a Bedouin rat are yoked i n an imaginative trope that camera and sound-track can only approximate. "Fern-seed foot-prints" is hyperbolic; fern-seeds are well nigh mi­ croscopic. This, however, is one Miss Moore's most powerful devices. She is describing the jerboa with what seems to be the accuracy of an Agassiz or a Fabre. She isn't. She describes with an accuracy that is literal about the imagination only, but manages to make us see a jerboa more sharply than Disney's camera, a National Geographic article, or even our seemg one in a zoo. But what is the poem saying? It opens with a description of an ugly Roman fountai n , proceeds to talk of Egyptians and thei r ani mals, of "Ph aroah's rat," the tama ble mongoose, and lastly of the jerboa. " Abun­ dance," the second part, opens with the jerboa, takes up Jacob's vision of the ladder, and mi rages. The last seven stanzas are sharp descriptions of the jerboa. Yet it is a poem about freedom , or, m ore accurately, about liberty. A very great m any of Miss Moore's poems are. But it is not "about" its subject in the way that John Stuart Mill's On Liberty is, or Spinoza's " Concerning Human Bondage." It is prob ably convenient to think of "The Jerboa" as an essay, for its structure is closer to discourse than to narrative or lyric. It is also an elaborate entry in a bestiary. The jerboa is a symbol of freedom for Miss Moore, as the ostrich is one of justice, the hedgehog of dull ness, the skunk of wit, and so on. The free, in whatever sense, keep the enslaved alive. The "enslaved" in the poem are Romans and Egyptians; they have "power over the poor" and even though they are enslaved in spirit only, they look to the completely free spirit with an astonished admi ration. That is why the Romans were proud of their bronze fir-cone fountain executed by a freed slave. It be­ came automatically a sym bol of freedom. The Egyptians with their rigid cities and ceremonial life dedi cated the mongoose to Pharoah, who gave his name to "basalt serpents and portraits of beetles," " and he was named for them." The jerboa, however, is "free- born," and thus became a potent symbol of freedom-as Ananse to the West Afri cans and Brer Rabbit to the southern Negro. This ability to create folklore

The Geography of the Imagination

1 20

while anatomizing with an essayist's thoroughness a difficult abstraction is certainly not the least of Marianne Moore's achievements. . " Marriage" is an essay in verse-and to say so is not to deprecate It as poetry. Its wit comes not so much from its brilliant satire as from Its swift changes of point of view. One opinion on wedlock displaces another; image follows image with the jolt of i ncongruity or the delight of the exact phrase or of the perfectly appropriate sentiment. Hymen is "a kind of overgrown cupid" ; the ritual of marriage has in its lavishness fiddle­ head ferns, lotus flowers, optunias, white dromedaries, a hippopotamus (" nose and mouth combined I in one magni ficent hop per") and a snake and potent apple. The reader is not apprehensive over the lotus flowers of m arriage or its optunias, but just what the hippopotami of marriage might be is a speculation that plunges us i nto the h eart of Man anne Moore's poetics. Is it an image of unwieldiness ( marriage as more than one can h andle) ; is it a rough equivalent of Pound's " Et q uant au troisieme I II est tombe dans le I De sa femme . . . " ( C anto XXVII) ? And marriage's white d romedaries? All of this is a mixture of sense and nonsense-for nonsense is very much a part of Miss Moore's business. " What monarch would not blush I to have a wife I with hair like a shaving-brus h ? " The poem's laconic ending is a fine example o f its method . Abruptly into the subtle arguments pro and con is inserted Daniel Webster's " Li b­ erty and Union I now and forever" (the i nscription on the base of � is . statue in Central Park), followed by an i mage of Webster himself, gnm and authoritative. The effect is hilarity itself. Ultimately it is to Miss Moore's language that we turn m order to appreciate the extent of her genius. The lemur-student can see that an aye- aye is not an angwan-tfbo, potto, or loris. The sea­ side bu rden shou ld not embarrass the bel l - boy with the buoy-ball endeavouring to pass hotel patronesses; nor could a practised ear confuse the glass eyes for taxidermists with eye glasses from the optometrist.

A student of lemurs, or a student with lemur eyes ? Is the bell-boy em­ barrassed because of an accident of sound? It is a rule, seemi ngly, of Miss Moore's craft to ca rry a subj ect to extremes. This poem, " Four Quartz Crystal Clocks," ela borates a theme from Jean Gi raudoux-that scien-

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ti fic observation i s more and more confused with wisdom, so that accu­ racy of measurement threatens to replace native wit and acumen. In the passage above Miss Moore is laughing hard at confusions which no one is likely to be guilty of. But from the ludi crous extreme to the j ust mean is not so easy, and the reader who doesn't see that the accuratest of clocks is being laughed at also is misreadi ng the poem. There is what we might call Miss Moore's genius for illustrations. A cross section of one's correspondence would seem to imply that we are "citizens of Pompeii arrested in action" ("Bowls" ) . Apropos the Irish, she refutes the adage that water seeks its own level, by observing, " You h ave seen it, when obstacles happened to bar I the p ath, rise automatically" ("Sojourn in the Whale" ) . The cat " takes i ts p rey to p rivacy, I the mouse's limp tail hanging like a shoelace from its mouth" (" Silence" ) . This apt­ ness is the result of a precisionist's searching for words : brief words exactly right, and with a rare terseness. There is her abili ty to reproduce color and texture with the success of an Audubon: A brass-green bird with grassgreen throat smooth as a nut springs from twig to twig askew, copying the Chinese flower piece,-businesslike atom in the stiff-leafed tree's bluepink d regs-of-wine pyramids of mathematic ci rcularity . . . . ( " S mooth Gnarled Crape Myrtle")

There is the ability to construct an atmosphere of place and time. Here is a graveyard in Virginia: A deertrack in a church-floor brick, and a fine pavement tom b with engraved top, rem ain. The now tremendous vine-encompassed hackberry starred with the ivy- flower, shades the church tower; And a great si nner l yeth here under th e sycamore.

Marianne Moore's poetry is a body of such consistently good poems, and good in so many ways, that a summary description of them capsizes in richness. Few poets have made an aesthetic so pliable or versatile. Each poem is a complex of experiences appropriate to that poem only, so that in her work there a re no "periods," no sequences of poems, no poems using a theme or subject-or form-used in any other. Her subjects are

1 22

The Geography of the Imagination

those of a mind intent on seeing thi ngs not only for what they are pre­ cisely, but how they act in and with the imagination. T� at is why her _ when animals are uncannily real and why they lose none of their reality they become symbols or points of departure i nto speculation. One proba bly never reads a poem of Miss Moore's in a large enough context. Wi thin a minute description of a Swedish carriage there is

Washington and Gustavus Aldophus, forgive our decay. And the carriage thereby becomes much more than aR i mage of past ele­ gance. An heirloom has outla sted the heirs. Miss Moore is neither a sen­ timental collector nor a dabbler in wildlife. Behind her work IS a love of-it is unfair to have to speak for her-things cunningly made: for one, armored anteaters, and for another, Egyptian pulled glass bottles. Things that seem to defy description but which her art labors well to describe well: icosaspheres and paper nautiluses. Beauty-her triumph is that she has found it where few have before, and convinced us of it. ConCiseness and symmetry. Liberty. Tough, even cantankerous individuality. Justice: there is "Virginia Bri tannia" and the poems written duri ng the last war. The "inwardly" of

A man's paradise is his own good nature. (VI Dynasty, Massime degli antichi Egiziani, Boris de Rache wiltz, 1 954) Look down now, Cotton Mather, from the blank. Was heaven where you thought? It must be there. It must be where you think it is, in the light On bed-clothes, in an apple on a plate. It is the honey-comb of the seeing man.

("The Blue Buildings in the Summer Air")

I inwardly did nothing 0 lscariotlike cri me ! is a key to all her poems. One has to learn to read a poetry with so engaging a su rface from the inside out. The alternative is the externalist's. But the full quotation is:

I inwardly did nothing 0 Iscariotlike crime! Beauty is everlasting and dust is for a time.

Spinoza' s Tulips

Between Glauco Cambon's Stevens, "un acrabata interiore che vol­ teggiava fra bellezza e verita" and Mr . Winters's Stevens, a brilliant but ineffectual smith of gaudy verse-these being chara cteri stic extremes of explaining away a poet not wholly understood-there is the Stevens who is the poetic cousi n of Spinoza and Santayana. It is this Stevens, the p hilosophical poet, or, considering the imagery that objectifies most often the philosophy in Stevens, the philosophical landscapist, that I i ntend to discuss. Writing after Mr. Wi lliam Van O' Connor's The Shaping Spirit, one feels free to inspect Stevens at any point without needing to explain or eulogize his entire work. To keep my argument close to a si ngle poem I have chosen for analysis the poem that, in a sense, " makes all the differ­ ence" between Stevens and his fo rbears and contemporaries, "The Com­ edian as the Letter C." The extreme of sensuous coloring in Stevens's 1 23

The Geography of the Imagi nation

1 24

poetry, its vocabul ary of intense seriousn ess, h ilarity and wit, its brilli ant but difficult and seemingl y capriciou s orderi ng of sense and i magery h ave all been subj ected to a variety of considera tions. My purpose i s not to eluci date h i s poetics but to single out his injunctio n to discount the poem and to look to the concrete particula rs of which i t is an abstract , to turn ts Spinozan materiali st, i n fact, and learn to live in a world stripped of i illusions. Stevens grows from a philosop hical spiri t rather than from any one al philosoph y, but that spirit can be identified and shown to be of vit worth in the understa nding of him. "To define poetry as an unofficia l view of being," Stevens says in "The Figure of the Youth as Virile Poet ," "p laces it in contrast with philosoph y and at the same time establishe s the relation between the two . . . . We must conceive of poetry as at least the

equal of philosophy." S antayana , addressin g an audience at the Hague on the tercenten ary of Spinoza's b i rth, asked his listeners "to i magine the truth to be as unfa­ vorable as possible to your desires and as contrary as possible to your n atural p resumpti ons; so that th e spirit in each of us may be drawn away from its accidenta l home and subjected to an utter denudati on and su-

preme tri al." Compare this, then, with the opening passages of " Notes toward a Supreme Fiction" : Begin, ephebe, by perceiving the idea Of this invention, this invented world, The inconceivable idea of the sun: You must become an ignorant man aga in And see the sun again wi th an ignorant eye And see it dearly in the idea of it.

Without followin g just now what I hope will appear as a philosop h ical k inship among Stevens, Santayan a, and Spinoza- Spinoza, too, for in­ stance, had an experien ce with the sun, which in his deliberat ely becom­ ing an ignorant man again seemed " about two hundred feet away"- it should be seen th at the results of their three i ntense speculat ions on the nature of being are wonderfully different, no matt er h ow dose the pro­ cesses of i nquiry ; that, briefly, the "imagele ss ontology of Spinoza, " as my Friedrich Schlegel called it, and "Fat girl, terrestri al, my summer, sepa­ from almost are Stevens of night . . . my green, my fluent mu ndo" I t, rate orders of thought. Their kinship needs Santayan a to i llumi nate pas­ one that y greener for as h which even though The Realms of Being, sage from Wordsw orth quoted to be disappr oved of diligent ly, is almost

Sp inoza's Tulips

1 25

as i mageless as the De Ethica. It is when Santayana asks what " i nmost allegia nce, what ultimate religion, would be proper to a wholly free and disillusioned spirit?" that we see the root of the drama in "The Comedian as the Letter C" and the central i dea in "Su nday Morni ng," " L' Es­ therique du Mal," and " Notes toward a Supreme Fiction." And, once it is understood, as Crispin has it, that "the soil is man's i ntelligence," that Santayana's Realm of Matter is the prose parallel of much of Stevens (note, for example, "The Blue Bui ldings in the Summer Air" ) , Stevens's use of landscape in practically every poem can be seen as the mundus etern ally feeding the mind, the vital and proper traffic between reality and the imagination. Wordsworth's "one i mpulse from a vernal wood" is not Santayana's complex of essences, but the reverse: the spirit outside of man "whose dwelling is the light of setting suns" is but another fiction impeding per­ ception, an accidental predilection of the imagination positing i ts imagery and arbitrary v ocabulary upon the dumb i mage of la ndscape. It is ironic that Wordsworth was excited by and possi bly deeply interested i n Spinoza a n d what h e thought was his pantheism, for what he achieved as a poet of nature is as alien to Spinoza's Deus siva Natura as it is to Stevens's theme of landscape. The distinction is insi sted upon in "Notes toward a Supreme Fiction": Never suppose a n i n venting mind a s source Of this idea nor for that mind compose A voluminous master folded in the fire.

Iamblichus's sun, as metaphor, is not uncongenial. I have shown Ste­ vens's attitude toward such " honeycombs of the seeing man" in my superscription. Th at the i maginative conception of the real-the poet's ?usiness-is ultimately superior to the i m agin ativt> treatment of the imag­ mary is discussed at length i n "The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words." The mind struggles wi th two worlds, fictive and real. Stevens's �� jor the.me is his philosophical propou ndi ng of this struggle. He has Jomed Spmoza and Santayana in thei r h onest materi alism and made a body of poetry brilliantly distinct from that of any other of the moderns. The struggle is dramatized more concisely than elsewhere in "The Come­ dian as the Letter C," concerning one Crispin, a European valet who comes to settle i n the Caroli nas.

;.art

I, " "!'he World with out Imagination" introduces Crispin who . created, m h1s day, a touch of doubt" as to whether man "the in­ telligence of his soil" is also "preceptor to the sea." As with M ;lville' for whom the sea was an old chaos of the una bated deluge where m an's

1 26

The Geography of the I maginati on

predicament in a disordered civilizati on and an inscrutable world can be seen in greater relief than in the confusing speciousness of land, the sea in Stevens is an elemental landscape, Ubiquitous concussion, slap and sigh , Polyphony beyond h is baton's thrust.

Crispin as a character comes into French literature in 1 654, in Scar­ ron's E colier de Salamanque, "un valet, " as the Larousse sums h i m up,

"goguenard, peureux, fanfaron, (ripon, frotte de latin et de philosophie comme ses maitres, touiours pret a les flatter au a les iouer, habille presque comme eux (petit chapeau et vetement noirs, fraise blanche, bot­ tes molles, ceinture de buffle et longue rapiere), apte a taus les metiers . "

Behind the initial poses o f Crispin, a t the beginning o f the poem, there are echoes of plays about him: "Preceptor to the sea" (Crispin precepteur of La Thuillerie, 1 679), "musician of pears" (Crispin musicien of Hauteroche, 1 674 ) , "this nincompated pedagogue" (le Fou raisonnable of Poisson, 1 664 ), "this same wig of things" (Crispin chevalier of Champ mesle, 1 67 1 , and Crispin gentilhomme of Montfleury , 1 677) . To identify him, moreover, as another Ca ndide is not fa r ami ss, and if we draw attention to his likeness to Peer Gy nt or indeed to any of the sophomores of satiric contes i n w hi c h a clown or Harlequin-Pinocchio, for a good exa mple-is forced by the buffeting of fortune to become a tragic or "serious" figure we will h ave a basis for understanding the ori­ gin if not the su bsequent develop ment of Crispin. Crispin as virtuoso servant, amateur savant and dilettante is meant to epitomize the ruses of the time: politic for h onest behavior, Ia politesse for intelligence, polish for sensibility. Verities i n the hands of vigorous men ran counter to such daintiness. It was as a servant of state and church that Swift came to grief; Joh nson's brusqueness registered a p ro­ test. After the eighteenth century the " wig of things, this ni ncomp ated pedagogue" could no longer function, the "eye most apt in gelatines and jupes, I Berries of villages, a ba rber's eye" with its aesthetic of Pope and C hristop her Wren became a fiercer searcher of man's role in nature. Crispin's metanoia up on the sea, his change from eighteenth to nine­ teenth-century man can be seen in the Turner family, where the father was a lady 's barber, a specialist in gossip and the roiled coiffures of the age, the son the greatest of Englan d's romantic seascapists. The barber­ valet imagery-touched first, as a theme, in Crispin's name (crispus, curled) and brought to ironi c fulfilment in And Daughters with Curls­ affects the opening experiences of the sea-change ("silentious porpoises, whose snouts I Di bbled in waves that were mustachios, I Inscrutable h air in an inscrutable world.")

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"The valet i n the tempest was annulled," and nothing remained of Crispin but "some starker, barer self." The attendant god is Triton , or th e idea of Tri ton, for he, too, long before, had gone the way of Crispin so that "memorial gesturings" only were left, " hallucinating horn . . . A sunken voice." This device of mythological context is repeated in Part II, "Concerning the Thunderstorms of Yucatan," the note Of vulcan, that a valet seeks to own . . . .

I n Yucatan the violence of earthquake parallels the storm at sea of Part I. Now stripped of hi s civilized finesse and polished manners, Crispin discovers that he is "aware of exquisite thought" and that he has become a "connoisseur of elemental fate." The office of Vulcan has succeeded that of Triton; Crispin's adventures are at a peak. Yucatan serves Crispin as a landscape a degree more human than the sea, " most inhuman of elements." His voyage plunged him into primeval chaos; the jungle is but a little less overpowering. If Crispin's fate is a fable, in part, of the adj u stment of the European homo faber to his American wilderness, then Yucatan, the seat of an extraordinary and obscure culture that was already in ruins when the Spaniards first saw it and utterly forgotten when it was rediscovered in 1 8 3 9, has been selected as a fine example of landscape in high contrast to anything Europeans had seen. Confusion, h aving broken up previous concepts into elemental awe, soon became a basis for renewal. The pri mitive Mayans, partly sav ­ age and pa rtly westernized (there are but 200 of them living nowadays), still praying to the night-bird and running to the cathedral i n time of disaster, leave Crispin with a chthonic respect fo r nature. The pattern is not unfami liar: Gauguin in the South Seas, Hudson i n the Amazon basin, von Hum boldt, after seeing America, recognizing the sixteen basic kinds of landscape. Landscape itself became in the nineteenth century a mediu m of expression of considerable impact, functioning in painting as Stevens makes it function in h i s poetry. We have but to look at Edward Lea r's profound disturba nce on first seeing India after a lifetime of doing " �iews" of Italian passes and Adriatic bays and promontories, or at Rus­ km's analyses of landscape in terms of moral edification to appreciate Stevens's remarkable recovery and consummate application of an art that h as become in our day moribund and symptomatically insignificant. "Approaching Carolina," the third part of the poem, is a second voy­ age for Crispin, another "sweating change." At first he hopes that the Northern spri ng ("America was always north to him") with its "legen­ d � ry :noon light" and "green palmettoes in crepuscular ice" might give h1m , the relentless contact he desired" and be

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The liaison, the blissful liaison, Between himself and his environment, Which was, and is, chief motive, first delight For him, and not for him alone . . . . But immediately he realizes that " the book of moonlight" will not do, that it's "wrong as divagation to Peking," a "passionately niggling night­ ingale." He must have a robust landscape about him, "prickly and obdu­ rate. " The spri ng that he comes upon on the Carolina coast is

time abhorrent to the nihilist Or searcher for the fecund minimum. The moonlight fiction disappeared . . . . A

He savors the " burly smells" of the docks , becomes infatuated with "the essential prose I As being . . . the one integrity" and decides that " prose shall wear a poem's guise at last." It is not difficult to see in the poem thus far the pattern of discovery that brought Spinoza to his initial skepticism and Santayana to his stoic materialism. The world h as had few men "disillusioned" enough to accept the world stripped of all fictive ornament, "the same insolu ble lu mp" as Crispin calls it. But such an idea is bed-rock, else the poem wou ld end here. Santayana's philosophy, be­ yond its Spinozan metaphysics, is an ela borate ethics and aesthetic: the essenti al prose, to be tolerable, and because it leads, with Spinoza, to man's love for his world, and because, with Santayana, it grows from an " animal faith," must wear a poem's guise. It must be "chief motive, first delight." We recognize a similar experience in Melville's saying that a whaling ship was his Harvard and his Yale, a nd i n much of Thoreau. One might compile a select company of such u ncompromising artists who will have no illusions a bout them, who want for paradise nothing but their own good natures; they are not many. And in the history of ideas they must be seen as renegades from the seemingly un breakable tradition of nineteenth- and twentieth-century pessimism, beside whi ch they stand out as hearty, jovial aristocrats of the heart. If no confusion between pessimism and ill wil l botch the rightness of the comparison, or, for that matter, between good will and optimism, an excellent symbol woul d be Captain Ahab and Ishmael. Crisp in belongs to the family of Ishmael, although Ishmael, agreeing that much docrine is to be concocted from the . rout of things and that the flavor of the world comes in "Seraphic proc­ lamations of the pure I Delivered with a deluging onwardness," would emend Crispin's final deduction to "the sea is man's intelligence." Part IV, " The Idea of a Colony," shows us Crispin acting to make his "new intelligence prevail." Mr. O' Connor points out that "The Come­ dian as the Letter C" is autobiographical, that it can be read as Stevens's

Spinoza's Tulips

1 29

poetic manifesto. It is also a microcosm of the intellectual development of that part of America which was transplanted from eighteenth century Europe, enriched by the shock of inundation by a savage terrain, and which flourished as a hive of li beralism and individuality in the milieu of Jefferson, Frankli n, and their republican fellows until, like Cri spin , it set­ tled complacently into q uiet mediocrity. Crispin's "si ngular collation" of plans for a colony in the new world is mock-Jeffersonian:

The melon should have apposite ritual, Performed in verd apparel, and the peach, When its black branches came to bud, belle day, Should have an incantation. But ( and here we have the only hint as to why Crispin made his voyage) :

These bland excursions into time to come, Related in romance to backward flights, However p rodigal, however proud, Contained in their afflatus the rep roach That first drove Crispin to his wandering. Stevens chides gently the fervor of the colonizer, a " clown, perhaps, but an aspiring clown." Left to make a world for hi msel f, he makes, after all, a replica, as best he can, of the world he left. But he does it with his new intelligence, with a vigor for him unprecedented. Whereas before he wrote his annual poem to the spring (a proper bow to what the paideuma of �is former culture held to be the nature of things) , he now knows the spnng for what it is, "the essential prose . . . the one discovery still possi­ ble to make I To which all poems were incident . . . . "

Mr. Stevens himself makes the comparison with Candide but with the differe� ce that Cripsin h as "a fig in sight." It is worth no:ing that "The Comedian as the Letter C" is not only an elaboration of such contes philosophiques as Candide, where the ability to come to terms with one's wor �d is ultimately parochial and isolationist, but an i mplicit criticism of . trad�uonal pessimi sm: Crispin is to be seen as a better manipulator of his destiny than his literary brothers. Where Peer Gynt is lost and fit only to be re�ast as molten materi al-the parallels are perhaps not accidental: it was m Carolin a that Peer stripped h i mself of all integrity and in tropic landscapes th at he realized his worthlessness-Crispin continues to s�rugg l� at recla mati on. His advantage over a Peer Gynt or a Gulliver is _ his ability to make his heart a honeycom b, to be both disillusioned and a man of imagination. Nowhere does Stevens saddle him with being sh�cked at the truth; on the contrary, he's delighted with it, but in­ telhgently always. Stevens's faith in his bandy-legged, comi cally en-

1 30

The Geography of the Imagination

thusi astic hero would distress a Swift and bring a charge of levity from an I bsen. It is on this account that one should recognize in Stevens a pre'e mi­ nence both in modern phi losophy and poetry for his rigorous sanity and honied good nature. There is a proper questioning of Crispin's achievement in the final pa rts of the poem. Is he a failure as innovator for returning to salad beds? Has he wasted his efforts in ending contentedly with a nice shady home and four curly-haired daughters? When he becomes a " fatalist" Stevens uses the word with irony, for what Crispin has learned is " not doctrinal! In form though in design." It is, after all, in a real world, "autumn's compendium," "perfectly revolved." If Crispin h as con cluded " fadedly," he has at least done so honestly, has illuminated-as the poet must­ "plain and common things" " from a fancy gorged I By apparition." It is a comedy with which we are dealing; it resolves itself, unlike tragedy, only i n relation to its audience. The closing line is doctrinal : "So may the relation of each man be cl ipped." Crispi n as persona of the poet wears a H a rlequin's mask and thus acts out but part of the drama in Stevens's poetry. His tableau is at once a fable of our landscape and what we have made of it (or, as Spinoza and Santayan a would say, what it has made of us, what it has, by i ts power to be congenial or hostile to the spirit, caused us to feel and to think), and of Blake's Fool who persisted in his folly and came upon a paradise all the same. There is a tale that Spinoza found the onions of Amsterdam particu­ larly tasteless and accepted thei r insipidity as part of the price one pays for exile, for being able to live as he pleased. But he discovered one day that all along he had been eating tulip bulbs, not onions. Crispin's voyage is an elaboration of this moral tale; the intelligent man's intelligence of his vegeta bles is prologue to intelligence of his world, "veracious page on page, exact." One h ardly needs to add that few men have attempted Crispin's voyage or had his energy or heart, or that Wallace Stevens's poetry is of a freshness and sanity all too scarce in contemporary writing.

Do You Have A Poem Book on E. E. Cummings ?

The poet-"one who writes in measure," as Johnson laconically defines him-and poetess ( " a she poet") have always had a rough time of i t i n the Republic. It h a s ever been their endemi c luck t o starve, become a Harvard professor, commit suicide, lose their reading glasses before an audience of sop homores, go upon the people a Ia Barnu m, and serve as homework in state universities, where they could in nowise get a posi­ tion and where thei r presence usually scatters the English faculty like a truant officer among the Amish . But the very worst has happened to him, and i n the last couple of decades. It has been forgotten in h igh places what he is, and every school child is taught the most godawful rot as to why he writes as he does in measure. The things of the world are always at one's doorstep; the miseries of the American poet were nicely defined while I was on my errands this morning deep in Kentucky. At the grocer's, as I was throwing Time into

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my cart, a lady broke into a motherl y smile. "Thar you go," she said, " buyin' th' magerzine book of your choice for the month : ain't it grand to read?" It was at the local paperback emporium that a teen- ager, obvi­ ously a time-server in summer school, asked for "a poem book on E. E. Cummings." The lady admi rer of literacy is a guitarist and sings "G reat Speckled Bird" and "The Murder of James A. Garfield" on the radio. She is, in her way, a poet; and one of the things utterly forgotten about poets is that they come in hierarchies and orders. Edgar A. Poe and Edgar A. Guest spoke, to be very sure, from di fferent sensibilities, but their greatest difference is that they spoke for different sensi bilities . The young man with his poem book on E. E. Cu mmi ngs will have been taught by the time this gets into print that Mr. Cummings's poems are the expression of Mr. Cu mmings's inward reflecti ons and ideas. Mr. Cummings h ad Personality, and was cap able of Self Expres­ sion. He was a book author. Lord h elp us, he even used Symbols. If Mr. Cummings speaks with another man's voice, as he does in poem after poem , the teen-ager's teacher will exp lain that the poet is Undercutting with Irony. That the poet speaks for people who cannot speak, that he makes sen­ tences for people to say, is as outmoded a concept in pedagogy as whack­ ing the behind for laziness and insolence. The poet, poor fellow, h as be­ come a Personality, and the only authority for his raving is that he stands in his shoes. That pair of shoes over there: in them stands a man who for lack of Personality might be as fa mous as the poet. One can think of statements that seem to explain so wry a misun­ derstanding of the poet as an issuer of personal pronunciamentos. Be­ havioral psychology, squirted into the ears of students from Head Start through the Ph .D., can account for no action not grounded in self­ advancement; it follows that the poet as a voice for other people is sus­ pect. He must be expressing hi mself, don't you see? Poor Whitman. He wrote a corpus of poems for an entire nation, to give them a tongue to unstop their inarticulateness. He wrote in their dialect, i n corporating the nerve of their rhetoric and the rhythms of the Bible from which their li teracy came. He wrote two elegies for Lincoln, one for grownups ("When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd") and one for school chil­ dren ("0 Captain ! My Captain !"). He tried to understand the voi celess American and to speak for him, and as much as any poet h as ever suc­ ceeded, he did. Yet he has been idiotically deposed from the fulcrum he so carefully selected. He wrote not a single personal poem and yet ev ery word is taught to students as the self-expression of an elate disk-j ock ey who made his scene with a poetry book, Way Back Yonder ( but still pertinent, as he used sy mbols and sometimes undercut wi th irony) . Th us th e editors of Time have no trouble doing an article on the most

E. E. Cummings 2

1 33

significant modern American poet. Marianne Moore ? Louis Zukofsky ? Ezra Pound? Robert Kelly ? Ronald Johnson ? Robert Duncan ? Naw. Robert Lowell. Mr. Lowell has, indeed, worked h ard at being a poet. He has been severe in his output, and kn ows, with Brah ms. th at writing is all too easy. What's hard is to throw most of what you've written in the trash- basket. He has been smart and modern in metric and diction. And he h as been bleak, agonized, and serious, terribly serious. He seems to have always had a headache. He is respected at Bennington. Mr. Pound (as Time does not seem to know) has read from his poems at Spoleto. And Time h as singled him out as the significant poet. And he is, if we define poetry as essenti ally self-exp ression. And if Mr. Lowell's response to the world were as eloquent as, say, Stan Laurel's or Fran�oi s Villon's or Mahalia Jackson's-that is, if there were some j uice or even some mud between the toes-the report from his inwards might instruct us in grief and support us when we' re doleful. One need not diminish Mr. Lowell's excellence to say what's out of j oint in Time's report on current American poetry; but since they set him up as represen­ tative, it is necessary to say with some firmness that he is not. He is a thoughtful, serious, melancholy academic poet; if he is representative of anything beyond hi mself, i t is of a broody school of professor-poets whose quiet, meticulous verse is perhaps the lineal and long-winded de­ scendant of the cross-stitch sampler. Poets, Time says, are moony minded, seeing camels and bunny rabbits in clouds. (Shiver and snuggle up, dear reader, Time is going to walk right up to a poet, give him an Ed Sullivan hug, and get him to express himself about his self-expressi on.) Shelley, by golly, saw a cloud as a cloud, but never mind. "Poets," Mr. Lowell says, " are a more accepted part of soci­ ety." Mr. Lowell is a Harvard professor, and would no doubt, if he taught physiology, explain to his students that the tongue is an admirable and useful organ, and that society is almost reconciled to i ts being a part o� the body. When Ezra Pound ("the father of modern poetry,' ' says Tzme ) became a more accepted part of society, after thirteen years in the pokey wh �re society put him in a moment of rejection, he was detained momentanly by reporters asking the usual silly questions. " Ovid had it a lot worse," he said, and while they were looking at each other's note­ pads to see how to spell Ovid, he clapped his h at on his head, and walked off to take a ship to Italy. Mr. Lowell is a poet and presumably knows his fellow poets, and when h� says that they are integrated and a ccepted and living it up in what Tzme calls "an ambi ence of instant feeling," I still wonder about an excel­ lent poet who I happen to know is a bus boy in a short-order kitchen , and �nother who cleans shower stalls at a gym, and another who is a janitor 10 a Boston tenement-all thoroughly sane and serious people whose

1 34

The Geography of the Imagination

ambitions are simply more poetical than material, but scarcely to be de­ scribed as within the grateful embrace of society. "Poetry books," Time assures us, "trip ever more b riskly off the pres­ ses." A major American poet, whom I shall not embarrass by naming has sought a pu blisher for a major work for two years now, and the hope of finding one is still thin. The poet and publisher Jonathan Willi ams stumps the country annually, reading, showing slides, and importuning financial sources for the wherewithal to pu blish American poets. His list of those to be accommodated is staggering. What Time ought to have said about the state of American poetry i s that it is extremely diverse, bouncing and healthy, and that the publi c who migh t buy it and read it is so dismally stupid, sheepish, and tediously ignorant-! mean the less than 1 per cent of the population th at buys books and the fraction of them that read them-that it is a kind of miracle that we h ave a single poet in th e country. The blue-h aired followers of Kahlil Gibran read Dyla n Thomas, their Thammuz and their Adonis. Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky, who look like the ghosts of Karl Marx and Raymond Duncan, have their raggletaggle following. As Mr. Lowell says, the world is swimming with poets. But he neglected to i nform Time of their names, so that their readers, imagining themselves informed a bout American poetry, h ave never been quite so miserably misinformed. Louis Zukofsky is not men­ tioned. A simple telephone call to Henry Rago, editor of Poetry would have ascertained that Zukofsky, alongside Marianne Moore and Ezra Pound, is one of the three most distinguished living American poets. And the elate and brassy Michael McClure, as American as a six-shooter, Time has not heard tell of him, either. Or the masterful lyricist Robert Kelly, or the visionary Ronald Johnson. Or Jonathan Wi lliams and ]. V. Cunningham, whose poems are as well made as wristwatches. The scope for educating Time is large; one could go on. Journalism, the p urpose of which is to inform and to disseminate, isn't doing i ts job; neither are the schools. Thi rty years of liberal twiddling with the lines of communication has made it al most impossi ble to broadcast anything but received prop­ aganda. All the arts are in the same predicament, so that what's happening in the minds that keep other minds alive and give them the courage to live is reported, if at all, in a dangerously denatured and offi cial trickle of news . The arts can look after themselves; they are used to neglect and obfusca­ tion. It is the people who suffer from the dullness and ignorance of the press. The diligent goddess Nemesis is an ironic old girl. Time was, the journals were li terate in America and cried out for poets to grace the nation. Now the j ournals when they babble about poetry are illi terate, and can't even find out the poets' names.

Seeing Shelley Plain

Wordsworth pushing a wheelbarrow containing Coleridge with blistered heels; the grave infant Milton watching lean Will Shakespeare and fat Ben Jonson staggering home from the Mermaid; Rousseau hiding all day in his own attic because he'd had the servant say to Boswell that he was out and the intrepid Scot shoved his way in to sit stubbornly until the philosopher showed; Joyce and Proust in a taxi, the one lowering the windows because of his claustrophobia, the other raising them because of his asthma, up and down, down and up, all the way to Maxim's; Eliot and Pound lifting thei r feet to accommodate the i maginary vacu u m cleaner of a lunatic while they conversed in a cell in St. Elizabeths Hospital-the literary anecdote, as Donald Hal l observes in the introduc­ tion to his Remembering Poets, is a genre all to itself "at the edges of literature." Hazlitt was a master of the form; what would the English Romantics 135

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look like without his account of them? It was gossipy Henry Crabb Robinson who gave us our i mages of the Blakes reading Paradise Lost i n their back garden, naked, pink, and chu b by. And what else was Boswell doing but compiling an epic portrait of Johnson out of anecdotes? Now that literature itself has become p aperborne, the literary anecdote may be the last survivor of the oral traditi on . It would , I think, be awk­ ward for a poet nowadays to offer a recitation of his verses at a dinner party (something you went to dinner parties for, once upon a time, when a duke's wink from deep inside a ruff of squi rrel fur activated a page, who brought a candle to the shoulder of Maister Chaucer, who unfolded a sheaf of parchment and began to speak in octo syllables ) , but if he has spent a drunken evening with Cal Lowell, or sat at the colossal knees of Robert Kelly, or played billiards with Sam Beckett, he has an audience all ears. Gossip is a social art form, it is intimate, and it is a tradition as old as eating in company. It does not go easily into p rint (one of Professor Hall 's triumphs as a writer is that his style keeps the feel of telling) . I f it's literary gossip, it has few occasions for native expression ; you can't tell an anec­ dote about an obscure poet, and you must also have the sense that you are satisfying curiosity. I would venture a grander role for the anecdote than Donald Hall modestly claims; it is the folklore that plays around a high seriousness, the saints' legends of a religion, and usually h as the truth of myth rather than of fact. Hall omits the anecdote of Dylan Thomas's question to Harry Levin, who he had j ust learned was a professor of Comparative Literature: "What," Thomas asked in his best Welsh White Trash voice, " do you compare it to ?" The deliciousness of this cannot be explained to the un­ initiated ( but it isn't a snob's anecdote; snobs can't tell literary anecdotes worth a damn) : Harry Levin is a gracious and civilized soul with a poise that one cannot imagine being discomfited, and yet his immense useful­ ness to the world is explaining literature, and here he is, in Cambri dge congeniality, being cheeked by a poet. The Urgestalt of the anecdote is Diogenes asking Alexander the Great to get out of his light. Donald Hall, poet, short-story writer, critic, teacher, and raconteur, tells us what it is like to have known Eliot, Thomas, Frost, and Pound, not for any length of time-know a great man too well and you can't write about him at all-but in intense intermittences: a h air-raising day of pub-crawling in London with Thomas, and an overnight stay with his pitiful family in Wales; visits to Eliot's lair at Faber and Faber; sessions with Frost at writing conferences; Felli ni-li ke visits to the ancient Ezra Pound in his decade of ghostly silence. And with all, b usiness. Hall is no

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lion-hunter (they can't tell anecdotes, either) ; h e is, as best one can make out from his book, a literary diplomat. To him we must p ay our gratitude for the very last fragmen ts of The Cantos. One of the ironies of the literary life is that capable Boswells turn up just when the subject i s on its last pins, either drinking him � elf to dea�h like Thomas, or i ll and frail like Eliot and Pound, or weanng a pubhc mask li ke Frost. Still, our curiosity about a great creative figure grows with his eminence. The clever old codgers write a script for the inter­ viewer, eve ry chuckle in the same place-Sir P. G. Wodehous e was the master of this, so was Frost, a mysterious and secret man who p ut on h1s Norman Rockwell face for any public whatever. (Hall's " Mortimer Snerd" is a bit harsh; it was more like Uncle Remus up at the big house, Tomming it to a fare-thee-well . ) Professor Hall was a student o f his poets' writings; underneath h i s very human curiosity about them as men with children to feed and mortgages to pay off was his concern for seeing into the work with the leverage of the person. Talk about pitching mercury with a fork ! In meeting great men a wholly uninspected and peculiar chemistry transforms the psyche, provided, of course, that one has the hero wor­ ship, the awe, the p langently romantic giddiness of anticipation and fulfillment. I wonder that some psychological boffin has not anatomized for science this longing of admirers to see distinguished men; somewhere deep in the phenomenon is a clue to faith, loyalty, and all the gaudier kinds of enthusiasm. Lord knows I have known enough of the giddiness of such excitement to be the perfect reader of Donald Hall's book. I met T. S. Eliot five times over the years; four of them involved (as you will find in the sheets of the Recording Angel when the scrolls are opened) the exchange of the words " Pleased to meet you," together with a handshake. The fifth encounter was chummier. I had accomplished the fifth " Pleased to meet you," and handshake in the Common Room of Eliot House, and had the honor of steering hi � toward the dining room where all Harvard that was any­ body and enterprising awaited his presence. To the right of the door lead­ ing out of the Common Room hangs a portrait of Eliot by Wyndham Lewis, or rather, a first draft of Lewi s's first portrait of him, the cir­ cumspect banker who was known in both South Kensington and Blooms­ bury, the TLS crack reviewer, the chameleon American who could chat Gibbon with Strachey on Lady Ottoline Morrell's lawn or Benda with Hulme at a chop house, a man with an ether addict for a wife. Eliot drew up short before the portrait, held his lapels and craned for­ ward the eagle's profile. " I seem," he said to me, " to h ave changed. "

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I have had even briefer rencontres with the great. My father and I saw Franklin Roosevelt fall from a train, sprawling onto the station floor (Gainesville, Georgia, 1 9 36, FBI goons snatching cameras left and right); and I have assi sted in extinguishing Jean-Paul Sartre when he was on fire. Pete Maas and I, in our salad days, were at the Deux Magots of an even­ ing. "Guy," sai d the affable Pete, "that old wall eye over the way put his lit pipe in his j acket pocket awhile ago and in j ust a bit will be in flames, wouldn't you say ? Go tell him." We tried out vari ous phrases, selecting Monsieur, vous brulez as the most expressive. Pete is a more forward person than I, and it was he who went over, begged the pardon of Sartre, and told him that his jacket pocket was on fire. Nothing happened. The conversation raged on, arms flailing, Existentialism as thick in the air as th e smoke from Sartre's con­ fection. Sartre did not deign to notice Pete, though Pete ventured a polite tug at his sleeve. Nor di d Monsieur Camus or Monsieur Rich ard Wright give the least heed. Whereupon I offered Pete our carafe of water, and this he poured into the philosopher's pocket, which hissed. My fate has been the tangential brush . I have listened to Roy Campbell drunk and Mann sober, all in respectful silence. My sessions with J. R. R. Tolkien were an exquisite misery: he was trying to teach me Anglo­ Saxon. I have helped Marianne Moore look for her lost glasses, and have shaken hands with Gerald Ford (by mistake, he thought I was somebody else ) . I have said " Pleased to meet you" to Eleanor Roosevelt and mounted the steps of Widener as Prince Karim Khan and the King of Belgium descended them, and nodded, futilely, to both. I have heard Faulkner's voice through a dosed door; I have been the one on KP, on my knees at the time, sweep ing ashes from under a range, who noticed that in our midst General Mark Clark was wandering about, presumably look­ ing for a cup of coffee, and shouted the stentorian "TEN-s hun ! ! !" and presented arms with a broom, the propriety of which in military poli te­ ness is still a dubious point with me. And Frost. "The man from Porlock !" he said of me the one time I went to his house in Cambridge, though I was scarcely i nterrupting the com­ position of a second " Kubla Khan," only a Saturday Evening Post cover tableau of the freckled old apple-ch eeked New Hampshire Poet by a crackling fire, the inevitable Andrew Wyeth (a barn in January li ght) over the mantlepiece and Harvardlings at h is feet. I had brought the piece of paper that would release Ezra Pound from 13 years in a madhouse. Eliot had already signed it, twice, as it turned out, once in the wrong place and once in the right. Faulkner had signed it, Hemingway had signed it on a yacht off the coast of Cuba ( natural ly ) .

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MacLeish had signed it. Wallace Stevens had refused. ( " I don't want Ezra on my back step, do you ? " ) And now Frost was to sign it. A year before, Attorney General Rogers had been willi ng quietly to no/ pros the Pound case, on the grounds that a case 13 years cold could not be tried, but the press got wind of the matter and raised such a ruckus that nothing could be done. Now MacLeish was trying again, as he had for years. Rogers h ad asked for a big name to cow the press, and everyone agreed that Frost was just about as good as the Statue of Liberty. Frost took the paper, disappeared into another room with it, meditat­ ing a whole ten minutes. The Harvardlings glared at me. I dripped from a snowstorm outside, and my purse di d not run to overshoes. The old man shuffled back i nto the room, frowning. " Eisenhower will never consent to this," he said. " It' s a waste of all our time. Why didn't Arch ie come himself ?" Professor MacLei sh, I explained, had left the day before for Antigua. I pronounced it as a Spanish word. "They used to call it An-TIG-yu-ah ," he said, holding the door for me to leave. "They've changed everything." He had never visited Pound in the asylum. Professor Hall's account of Frost's efforts to free Pound are not quite right. Archi bald MacLeish, for all practical purposes alone, got Pound out. Frost played his part, as re­ quested. He may even , as Hall hi nts, have imagined that he thought it all up himself. The portrait of Pound in this wonderfully readable book is the most thorough, the most moving, and the one with the most cooperative sub­ ject. (Hall's Paris Review intervi ews with Pound and Eli ot are included in an appendix.) With Thomas, Eliot, and Frost Professor Hall h ad a worn path to beckon him on, but the way to Pound had been i nitially blocked by Pound's besmirched reputation as an antisemite, bootlicker of Musso­ li ni, Fascist, obscurantist, and traitor. But get around these he di d, to find a man perhaps more complex and pesky than the scary one. The Pound he knew was in the depths of guilt and, frequently, despair, accusing himself of having wrecked his and his family's life. He brooded terribly. He practiced a candor of terrifying honesty. ("How are you, Mr . Pound ?" " Senile.") He clawed the back of his hands. He watched his world die and fade utterly away. Still, in h is rui n, he was more interesting tha n ten hale newly mi nted literati together. He could swim like a dol­ phi n at eighty. He walked upright, dressed with dapper taste (though he became so thin that his trousers fell off at the opera , an accident that made him so fu rious with the nature of thi ngs that he simply stood and gla red while he was ri nged about by fri ends ) .

1 40

The Geography of the Im agination

The value of reports from the horse's mouth is th at public opinions get revised; prop inquity co rrects the distant, th ird-hand view. Here we have an arrogant Frost and a contrite Pound, the opposite of received opinion. The gilt flakes off Thomas. Eliot remains as inscrutable as ever, a whole theater of mimes, the king of the possu ms. Donald Hall is a fine reporter, a clear-headed witness, and j udging by his friendly association with these four diffi cult men , a worthy com­ pamon.

Perse p hone' s Ezra

THE FLOWERED TREE AS KORE

Of the twenty-three poems in Ezra Pound's first book of verse, the unpub­ lished Hilda's Book now in Houghton Library at Harvard, written be­ tween 1 9 05 and 1 907 for Hilda Dooli ttle in whose posession it was dur­ ing most of her lifetime, only "Donzella Beata," " Li Bel Chasteus," and "The Tree" were salvaged for A Lume Spento in 1 9 08. " Donzella Beata" prefers a live girl to a Blessed Da mozel waiting in heaven, and " Li Bel Ch asteus" depicts Tristram and lseult high above the common world in their rock haven. " The Tree ," however, begins a theme that has remai ned in Pound's poetry for sixty years. It is the first poem of the Personae canon, and is echoed as late as Canto CX (" Laurel bark sheathing the fugitive" ) . It is a poem under the spell of Yeats, kin to "'The Song of Wandering Aengus" and other evocations of an enchanted wood. The Pre-Raphaelite Yeats is everywhere in Hilda's Book.

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Autumn is over the long leaves that love us, And over the mice in the barley sheaves; Yellow th e leaves of the rowan above us, And yellow th e wet wild-strawbe rry leaves

begins Yeats's "The Fal ling of the Leaves" (Crossways, 1 88 9 ) . The first poem of Hilda's Book opens with a hint of Whitman but proceeds as if by Yeats: Chi l d of th e grass The years pass Above us Shadows of air All these shall love us Winds for our fe llows The browns and the yellows Of autumn our colors.

But Celtic twilight and Yeatsian diction are but p art of the strange beauty of "The Tree." That a tree can be a persona at all is startling. Joyce, years later, wil l have a tree speak in his poem "Tilly" (Parnes Penyeach, 1 9 27) . Pou nd's poem tre mbles between the imitative and a strong originality. It is as precious as the early Yeats while having the masculine boldness of William Morris. It is both Ovidian and Thoreau­ vian. It is seed-rich in matters that will occupy Pound for years: the theme of metamorphosis and the mimetic act of assuming a mask and insisting on the most strenuous empathy. Daphne and the figures of Baucis and Philemon will appear throughout Th e Cantos. The most fructive theme, however, is that of chthonic n ature as a mystery, the Eleusinian theme. To understand " many a new thing . . . . That was rank folly to my head before" is to find a mode of perception other than one's own . Omnifor­ mis omnis intellectus est, Psellus says in The Cantos, quoting Porphyry. But why begin with the nymph's supernatural, intranatural sense of things ? The question is a large one, for trees are everywhere in Pound' s poetry, and become symbols of extraordi nary power and beauty in Rock-Drill, Thrones, and the cantos drafted for the poem's conclusion. Hilda 's Book is green with trees, poem after poem. "Dulce myrtii floribus," we read; "sweeter than all orchards breath" ; " She swayeth as a poplar tree" ; "the moss-grown kindly trees"; "some tree born spirit of the wood/About her." A Lume Spento was originally titled La Fraisne, the ash tree; and the poem of that name is a variant of "The Tree," as is " A Girl" in Ripostes. In 1 9 60 Pound chose fo r the translator Alfredo Rizzardi a selection of his poems to be published in Arnoldo Mondadori's Poeti de lla Specchio series. From the twenty-three poems of Ripostes as that book is preserved in the Personae canon, he chose "N.Y.," that charmingly i ronic-romantic

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poem in which he persists in having the New York of "a million people surly with traffic" appear as a girl praised by Solomon, "a maid with no breasts, I . . . slender as a silver reed" ; "A Girl" ( "The tree has encoun­ tered my h ands") ; "The Cloak," a poem about the cl ai ms of love and death and a paraphrase of Sappho' s poem reminding a girl who refused her gift of roses that death is long and loveless ( Fragment 5 5 , Lobel and Page) ; !1wpw, another poem of love and death ("The shadowy flowers of Or� us I Remember thee. " ) ; and "Apparuit," a ghostly and splendid evo­ cation of Persephone, in sapphics and with the touch of Sappho more finely upon it than any translation yet of Sappho into English . A glance at R ipostes- a book dedicated to William Carlos Williams with the Propertian tag Quos ego Persephonae maxima dona ferarn: to which Williams rep lied in his Kora in Hell ( 1 9 20)-will show that Poun d selected for his Itali an translator only those poems that contained the theme of Persephone as the sign of youth radi ant before its doom or as the indwelling spirit of springtime. Conversely, Pound chose from the early Personae volumes ( 1 908- 1 9 1 0) only those poems that are about Aidonian Persephone whose beauty is destructive, Helen and lseult, the figure that will become Circe in The Cantos. Pound was not without clues as to how to move from the neurasthenic dark of the nineteenth-century Circe-world and its h ell-like cui de sac ; h e h a s acknowledged h i s debt t o Whitman and Whistler. He h a d the end o f the thread when he wrote "The Tree. " B u t he preferred t o g o back t o the very beginning of literature, to see its growth from sensibility to sensibil­ i ty, and to arri ve, if possible, with its masters who knew the art best. We find him instinctively turning toward robustness and clarity. There are many ways of studying Pound's evolution; his own criticism will proba­ bly remain the surest record. But everywhere we turn in his poetry there is �h e clear emergence of Persephone and her springtime as a persistent Image and sym bol. The first great search concentrated on the springtime of styles and cultures; with what sureness does he introduce the archaic Minoan undulations and Cretan basketwork braids into the Edwardian fog of Mauberly! (and he was working, except for the Illustrated London News and Sir Arthur Evans's Mycenaean Tree and Pillar Cult of 1 9 0 1 , well ahead o f the world's knowledge of Knossan art ; Mauberley was . a year before Evans's Th e Palace of Minos ) . published A s if Persephone were his guide toward the light h e sought, a s if she, the power of renewal , h ad chosen him and not he her (as in the conceit i n Cant� LXXVI wh ere w e have "Dafne's Sandro," the fleet laurel nymph _ choosmg Botticelii as her painter rather than the other way round) , his er e went to the master poets whose manner is limpid, sharp, clear and Simple: Homer, Ovid, Dante, and Chaucer. So carefully did he study each

The Geography of the Imagination

1 44

r, or wholl y to that one can plausi bly trace Pound 's style wholl y to Home the unbro ken is at g lookin Dante, as it would seem; what we would be equall y of clear ure, literat traditi on of the Home ric ph rase in wester n a specia l at g lookin be also metric , sound , i mage, and thoug ht. We would iscent of remin girls, t radian prope nsity to find conju nction s of trees and ss' s godde the as tree and the Cretan and Mycen aean assimi lation of pillar or ellian Bottic as ed describ be sign. It is an atmos phere that can best Ovidia n. In Arnau lt Danie l,

Ges rams floritz De fioretas envoutas Cui fan tremblar auzelhon ab lurs bees Non es plus frescs, in Cavalcanti,

Avete in voi li fiori, e Ia verdura, in Dante,

Tu mi fai rimembrar dove a qual era Proserpina nel tempo che perdette Ia madre lei, ed ella primavera, in Li Po

While my hair was still cut straight across my forehead I played about the front gate, pulling flowers, he found a mode of poetry that moved him with a force easier to i llus trate than to attempt a theory versatile enough to encompass all its dimen­ sions. In "The Alchemi st" he brings such i llustrious women as Odysseus saw at Persephone's request in Hades in conjunction with American trees "under the larches of Paradise I . . . the red gold of the maple, I . . . the l ight of the birch tree in autumn . . . . " The heart of the poem is a p rayer to Persephone (" Queen of Cypress" ) in her other kingdom, th e world under earth or ocean :

From the power of grass, From the white, alive in the seed, From the heat of the bud, From the copper of the leaf in autumn , From the bronze of the maple, from the sap in the bough ; Lianor, loanna, Loica, By the stir of the fin, Bv. the trout asleep in the gray-green of water; V anna, Mande tta, Viera, Alodet ta, Picarda , Manue la From the red gleam of copper,

Persephone's Ezra

1 45

Ysaut, Ydone, sli gh t rustling of leaves, Viema, Jocelynn, daring of spirits, By the mirror of burnished copper, 0 Queen of Cypress, Out of Erebus, the fiat-lying breath, Breath that is stretched out beneath the world: Out of Erebus, out of the flat waste of air, lying beneath the world; Out of the brown leaf-brown colourless Bring the imperceptible cool. Apart from the satires and the studies of the forces counter to Perse­ phone, such as the Hell cantos, which are about the abuses of nature, and the great "Sestina: Altaforte," in which Bertran de Born welcomes Easter as good weather for a military campaign , there is little in Pound that is fa r away from Persephone and her trees. It is curious that Michael Ventris was born when Pound was drafting h is first Canto. A man with The Cantos in his head sees this correlation of p eriploi Odyssean voyages-as being within the numen that Pound, more than any man of our time unless it be Picasso and his Ovidian eyes, h as recovered and charged with meaning. Canto I, set in Persephone's kingdom which is not the dead past but the com municable spirit of being, metamorph osed fro m the temporal to the eternal, is Homer's most ar­ chaic matter, his deepest plumbing of " rite and foretime" (in David Jones's resonant p h rase) . It is the hero's necessary recognition of his life's roots in the powers that sustain him. -

Poured ointment, cried to the gods, To Pluto the strong, and praised Proserpine. These words contain strata, like a geological cross-section, or, to take an even more pertinent image, like the rings of growth in a tree, for they are Homer's words ( fi rst discernible date: the beginning of Mediterra­ nean literature) , Andreas Divus's words,

Excoriantes comburere: supplicare autem Diis, Fortique Plutoni, et laudatae Proserpinae, (second date: the Renaissance) , cast in the Anglo-Saxon rhythms of The Seafarer (third date: the Renaissance of 1 9 1 0, the linguistic renovations of wh ich are still not understood, but wh ich grow out of Morri s' s and Doughty's new sense of the genius of English ) , and they are words written with the intuiti on that thei r chth onic matter would continue to speak, as Yentris, Chadwick, and Palmer found Persephone and Demeter in the Linear B tablets; Frobenius, "the car of Persephone in a German barrow" (K ulchur, 244) .

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They are the eyes at the end of Mauberley that do not know they are dead. They are the ghostly eyes of The Pisan Cantos, where they stand in relation to a continuum of images that reaches back to the Souls out of Ere bus, cadaverous dead, of brides Of youths and of the old who had borne much : Souls stained with recent tears, girls tender

of Canto I , the murdered bride Inez de Castro of Canto III, the lone and " Eyes floating in dry, dark air" of Canto VII. These eyes in Hades are one of the concomitants of Persephone's theme. A1,1 other is the alignment of girl and tree, as in And Sulpici a green shoot now, and the wood white under new cortex (Canto XXV)

or the appearance of Nausicaa, a type of Persephone, in a canto about women whose souls are chaotic, establishing a contrast between neurosis and health, confusion and clarity: Beauty on an ass-cart Sitting on five sacks of laundry That wd. h ave been the road by Perugia That leads out to San Piero. Eyes brown topaz, Brookwater over brown sand, The white hounds on the slope, Glide of water, lights and the prore, Silver beaks out of night, Stone, bough over bough, lamps fluid in water, Pine by the black trunk of its shadow And on hil l black trunks of the shadow The trees melted in air. (Canto XXIX)

This theme prepares itself in the fi rst thirty cantos, recurs less frequently but rhythmically through the American and Chinese cantos ( XXXVI : woman radiant, a ric pensamen to the mind , inluminatio coitu to the heart; XXXI X : Circe, the richly dark, chthonic nature of woman- the two cantos form a diptych, and are brought together in XLVII, which is about the harmonizing of intelligence and the fixed order of nature: "First must thou go the road I to hell / And to the bower of Ceres' daugh­ ter Proserpine"), and becomes in the Rock-Drill and Thrones sections a synergetic presence. Beyond the poem's beginning in her underworld, Persephone is apt to

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b e j ust off-stage, o r invisibly contained. She is the spm t of natural metamorphosis; in the first thirty cantos her absence is as significant as her presence. In Canto XXI she, Pallas, and Pan, Titania and Phaetusa, Aetna's nymph at the entrance to the under-realm, are set in contrast to Midas, Plutus, and gold: the power to grow toward renewal, to think, to reproduce-against greed and ungrowing matter. At the end of XXI her rape is staged like I carus's fall in Brueghel's painting, unnoticed, its im­ plications unsuspected: Dis caught her up. And the old man went on there beating his mule with an asphodel.

The loss of form through aimlessness, through moral slither, through the continued use of form without content, or by infl uences hostile to the organic nature of a form is a metamorphosis that is seedless, a stasis. Life to make mock of motion : For the hu sks, before me, move. (Canto VII)

One can follow throughout The Cantos the force that reclaims lost form, lost spirit, Persephone's transformation back to virginity. As Homer shows us a chastened and chaste Helen in the Odyssey, so the fi rst thirty cantos end with the moral regeneration of Lucrezia Borgi a, that ar­ chetype of the Circe-world of the late nineteenth century from which every major artist of the time had to extricate himself in order to discover the inoral nature of reality. She appears with the drunken gaiety of Bot­ ticelli's Primavera, Dea Flora, and the Graces, " foot like a flowery branch," " Madame " YAH,' " a woman obedient to all of nature's appe­ tites, but with the b alance and rhyth m of nature's seed-cycle regenera­ tion. Through the Pisan Cantos Persephone is the promise of rebi rth from the dark, an Ariadne in the labyri nth . " When night is spent," ends the Pisan group, in wh i ch Persephone was prayed to throughout. Pisa paral­ lels the Homeric episode of Odysseus captured by the Kyklops (of whom the brute violence of war is an exa mp le) , and the evocations of Perse­ phone are under the sign of !:J.YJJ.tYJTTJP 8aKpvwv, nature impotent and dy ing. with a smoky torch thru the unending l a byrinth of the souterrain or remembering Carleton let him celebrate Christ in the grain and if the corn cat be eaten Demeter has lain in my furrow. (Canto LXXX)

The Geography o f the Imagination

lSO

But faith in all that Persephone has meant in the poem is unwavering. Elysiu m, though it were i n the h a ll s o f hell, What thou lovest well is thy true heritage What thou lovest well shall not be reft from thee. ( C anto LXXXI)

In watching a baby wasp, born in a nest in the corner of Pound' s tent at Pisa, the poet brings the theme to one of its most resonant statements: When the mind swings by a grass-blade an ant' s forefoot shall save you the clover leaf smells and tastes as its flower The i n fant has descended, from mud on the tent roof to Tel lus, like to like colour he goes amid grass-blades greeting them that dwell under XTHONOS \.00:\01 01 \.00:\ 101, to ca rry our news EL� xOovwu� to them tha t dwell under the earth, begotten of air, that shall sing in the bower o f Kore,

llep(n:¢6vt:w

and have speech with Tiresias, Thebae.

(Canto LXXXIII)

"Man, earth," says Canto LXXXII, "two halves of the tally." Man is under Fortuna, the Pisan Cantos say repeatedly, and the DTC at Pisa is "a magna NOX animae" ( Canto LXXIV) , a very dark night of the sou l, a hell out of which some spiritual recovery like the earth's from winter must happ en. The placing o f events in time is a romantic act; the tremendum is in the distance. There are no dates in the myths; from when to when did Hera­ des stride the earth? In a century obsessed with time, with archaeological dating, with the psychological recovery of time (Proust, Freud) , Pound has written as if time were unreal, has, in fact, treated it as if it were space. Wi lliam Blake preceded him here, insisting on the i rreality of clock time, sensing the dislocations caused by time (a God remote in time easily became remote in space, an absentee landlord) and proceeding, in his enthusiastic way, to dine with Isaiah-one way of suggesting that Isaiah's mind is not a phenomenon fixed between 742 and 687 B. C. Pound's mind has to be seen for the extraordinary shape it has given to itself. To say that The Cantos is " a voyage in time" is to be blind to the poem altogether. We miss immediately the achievement upon which the success of the poem depends, its rendering time transparent and negligi­ ble, its dismissing the supposed corri dors and perspectives down which

Persephone's Ezra

IS1

the historian invites us to look . Pound cancelled in his own mind the dissociations that had been isolating fact from fact for centuries. To have closed the gap between mythology and botany is but one movement of the pro �ess; one w � y to read The Cantos is to go through noting the . rest �rattons of relatiOnshtps now thought to be discrete-the ideogram­ mat te method was mvented for just this purpose. In Pound's spatial sense _ of time the pa st ts here, now; its invisibility is our blin dness, not its ab­ sence. The mneteenth century had put everything against the scale of time _ and dtscovered that all behavior within ti me's monolinear progress was evolutionary. The past was a graveyard, a museum. It was Pound's de­ termi nation to obliterate such a configuration of time and history to treat what had beco �e a world of ghosts as a world eternally prese �t. Whatever the pass10ns and predilections that we detect in The Cantos �hey are d!spositions of mind that Pound is reflecting, not programs h � ts adv�catmg, not even matters on which he has passed judgment. The botantst may have a preference for conifers but he does not therefore ? mit mushrooms from his tex tbook. Pou nd's understanding of the world ts always dt rected toward making us share the understanding he has found in other minds; we hear St. Ambrose and John Adams condemn usury, not Pound; Confucius speaks for rectitude and probity; a good thousan� VOI � e� speak. It was Pound's skill, the duty he assumed, to keep u � from tmagmm ? that we are listening to ghosts, or that we are hearing di mly over vast ttme, or that the voices are meaningless. Persephone, as a word, was, in the historical account of things, current a �ong certam Greeks, Cretans, Sicilians, and Romans between such­ and�such a year and such-and-such a year. Ethnology can also tell us that she ts also k� own as Kore (The Girl ) , Flora, Persephatta, Persephoneia, a ?d �roserpt ? a . Any actual modern reference to her, in, say, the Greek ht ls, ts a quamt bit of folklore, like the Cretans's still pl acing in the corp­ se s hand some tok en for Charon. The springtime, however, is eternal, _ , thoug� man s emotional response to It depends upon his sensibilities and educatiOn. � d everything we call civilization depends upon that re­ spons� . Man Is aware of or blind to the order in which he lives by keeping � r losmg the tone of that response. From the beginning Pound was intui­ tively drawn to speaking of women and trees as if the one transparently howed somet� ing of the beau:y of the other. From poem to poem this mage gre � ; It ts posstble to pomt to where this or that detail was added _ the ennchment, until coming across a late passage such as m

�

:

The purifications are snow, rain, artemi si a , a l s o dew, oak, a n d the juniper

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And i n thy mind be auty, 0 Arte mis,

as of mountain lakes in the dawn.

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the life of man, to Penelope, whose virtues are domestic, an unwavering continuum: this is t h e grain rite

Foam and silk are th y fingers, Kuanon,

near Enna, at Nys sa: Circe, Persephone

and the long suaviry of her moving, wil low and olive reflected (Canto CX)

e of the we find the ideogra m to be a focus for meanin gs (the purpos the eye which from rface su a than rather place) ideogra m in the first anydiscern can poem the in it before come has that uneduc ated by all . words the of beauty thing beyond the . of mem­ For these words are not p rimarily lyric: nor are they a deta1l a visiona ry ory, as they would be in Words worth, nor the epipha ny of poem thelr � state, as they would be in Yeats. They are lines from an epic e I S The muse is Calliop e, and their concern is with men in action. Call1op looked and Muse with the Beautif ul Eyes, and her busines s is to h ave seen. Tell me of that man, Musa, who took the uneasy turn At all the crossroads, who came homeward in disaster From the plun dering of the holy acropolis of Troia; Many towns has he see n , known the minds of man y men,

were as begins the Odyssey, a poem about a man who though t trees was an ny patnmo whose trees; as l beautiful as girls, girls as beautifu nently perma is , Athena m i by h given peace, orchar d and vineya rd, whose tn the who tree, olive the of re signatu the in n before him and his childre of lore the of aster witch-m the by sent was ring darkest trope of his wande mystery whose one, Perseph of g dwellin the to flowers and leaves, Circe, way home. is the power of eternal regeneration, in order that he find his trees are her d; returne has she over: is tragedy In Thrones Perseph one's peace: at ial, colloqu easy, are her of speak that in blossom . The voices And was her daughter like that; Black as Demeter's gown,

eyes, hair?

Dis' bride, Queen over Phlegethon, girls faint as mist about her? The strength of men is in gra i n . (Canto CVI)

She is the power of moving from dark to light, from formlessness to form, from Circe, whose inhuman mind is instructive but tangenual to

so different is sea from glen th a t the j u niper i s h e r h o l y bu sh.

In 1 95 8 , after the thi rteen Odyssean years in a fastness that had been an aboretum ( and has kept its trees) before it became a prison, Ezra Pound, a free man, went first to the sea whose greatest poet he is i n our time, and secondly to a parti cular apple tree i n Wyncote, Pennsylvania, in whose boughs he read the lines of Yeats's that moved h i m to write "The Tree" that stands foremost in his poems: I have been a hazel tree and they hung

The Pilot Star and the Crooked Plou gh Among my leaves in times out of min d

The stars by which Odysseus navigated ! THE TREE AS TEMPLE PILLAR OR DEMETER

Jardins audacieux dans les airs souten us, Temples, marbres, meraux, qu'eres-vous devenus? (Andre Chenier, E legie XCVI)

. At the end of Canto XXX, before the laconic notation of Alessandro Borgia's death-for the opening three decades of the poem are essentially a vortex of turbulence and misdi rection to which Alessandro's dark squalor makes a fitting signature-we are shown the colophon of a book printed in July of 1 5 03 (Alessandro died the next month of that year) . Girolamo Soncino, one of a family of Jewish printers who came to Italy from Nurnberg in the late fifteenth century, and Francesco Griffo da Bologna the type designer (who also cut type for Aldus Manutius, the Veneti an printer whose editions of the classics spread the Renaissance beyond the scholars' walls) were brought to Fano by Cesare Borgia to found a press for books in Hebrew, Greek, Latin, and Italian. The text which is "taken . . . from that of Messire Laurentius I and from a codex once of the Lords Mal atesta" is Petrarch's Rime which Soncino printed for Cesare Borgia in 1 5 03-seventy-eight years before the editi on of the Petri at Basel which bibliographies are apt to list as Petrarch's earliest p rinting. With characteristic obli quity in the angle of his gaze Pound stations the Realpolitik of the Borgias within the humanist tradition that has come

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is plac­ down to us as a distinct activity . We can also observe that Pound �e­ the and sta's Mal�te de alongsi arts ing Cesare' s p atronag e of the emng op Its from ellian, Machiav spirit in is dici's. And th at Canto XXX s of the planh against Pity to its alignme nt of Petrarch and the attempt with a ends XXX, Canto like Principe, Il Borgia s to u nify Italy; for fi r m the and h's Petrarc of dream a both on s melancholy h ope that depend , e insegna a u s Ia sotto che, accio . . . " : h and o f a Borgia or a Medici que! i verifich si i auspizi sua li sotto e ata, questra p atria ne sia nobilit detto del Petrarc a" : Virtu contro a furore Prende ra l' arme; e fia el combatter corto: Che l'antico valore Nelli italici cor non e ancor morro.

The lines are from the "Italia mia" canzone of Petrarch' s and the word before the one that begins Machiavelli's quotation is "pity." But it is pity by which virtu takes up arms against Italy's enemies; it is solicitu �e for Italy. The theme of Italy as a high culture is more lyncally and dnectly stated throughout the poem (and Italia serves here as a type of the. patrzae and urbes that illustrate the theme of the city as the sacred reservoir of the continuity of ci vilization, and we should remember that Petrarch's al­ legorical Italia began her history as the city-goddess Roma) . Between a matrix of stars above and a m atrix of stone and water be­ neath, the earth is given its form. "Zeus lies i n Ceres' bosom" (Canto LXXXI)-light shapes the dark seed into the wheat ear. The p r? fou n dest . diagram of this process, no less for civilization's rhyth� of mevltable decay and conscious renewal than for the green world, IS the myth of Persephone. Yet her myth is of the kinesis of growth and germination, of loss and return. Her mother Demeter has been from the begin ning the sign of the p rocess's m aturity, the harvest. Persephone is the living tree; Demeter is the tree carved, shaped, painted, capita l led with acanthus, translated i nto marble, even turned upside down (as at Knossos) . Ecbatana, Deioces' city as Herodotus describes it (Cantos IV, V, LXXIV, and LXXX) reflected i n its seven concentric walls the circuits of the planets, and its acropolis was (as in the ziggu rats of Sumeria and the Parthenon at Athens) a place of the meeting of man a n d god, and Pound remembers that mountains first served this purpose (Si nai, T' ai Shan, Olympus) . The Prophet Ezra honours Cyrus's anxiety to restore the tem­ ple at Jerusalem ( " for Yahweh is the god of that place"). Nineveh took Its ground-plan from U rsa Major; Jerusalem began as a model in heaven, was translated into brick and stone for an historical existence and was by John of Patmos's ti me a heavenly p aradigm agai n. Sigriya in Ceylon is an

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earthly model o f th e celestial city Alakamanda. ( Leo Frobeni us' s Erlebte Erdteile is still the fullest and most perspicacious study for the sacred origi n s and designs of the walled, temple-centered city, though the sub­ ject has received brilli ant attention in the fifty years th at Pound h as been building the su bject i nto Th e Cantos: see especially Dumezil's Jupiter, Mars, Quirinus, and Tarpeia, Giedion's Th e E ternal Present, and Eli ade's Cosmos and History ) . The figure o f Italia ( o r Roma) persists o n Italian money and postage stamps: a woman's head crowned by battlements. She is the city "now in the mind indestructible" of Canto LXXIV. Toward this allegory Pound tends to move all the goddesses he evokes in Th e Cantos, u ntil he has constructed one of the richest symbols in the whole poem. Persephone's wreath of meadow flowers will become interchangeable with Demeter's coronal of wheat. The goddess crowned with an i mage of her city is the Mediterranean's oldest emblem of sovereignty (the high priest of Babylon wore a replica of a ziggurat that is the model for the Pope's tiara today; the Ph araoh' s dou ble crown of the Two Kingdoms represented a pyr.amid) . And the em blem was not only of the holy acropolis, with . which Pound assoCiates the tower of Danae, human receptacle of divine seed and archetype for the poem of the women who bear children to gods, but of the outer limits as well-the man- made stone wal l and the outer, magic, invisi ble wall which was put into place with music and incantation ( like the Knossan maze and the wall that Achilles destroyed when he drove Hector counter-clockw ise around Troy, undoing the spell that bound the city to Pallas's protection, or the walls of Alba Longa [Aeneid V. 5 8 3-602]. It was Cybele, the Phrygia n Demeter, who, as far as we know, fi rst wore a crown of battlements, for she was not only the goddess of moun­ t� I ns, forests, and the wealth of nature, but was the giver of towers a n d c1 � walls t o mankind. In her is that marriage of flower and stone toward which Pou nd's early poetry moved, not quite k nowing its way, seeing in s �one something sinister (as had the major poets and painters of the nineteenth century) rather than the under-mat rix of nature. Once we realize this double nature of Demeter's patronage , her protection of both fie! � a nd city, we can see with what care Pound h a s chosen his pictures of her In all her transmuta tions. She fi rst appears in the poem as Venus, with the towers and wa l l s (munimen ta) of mountain copper (orichalchi) at Cypr�s as her allotted place. This initi al conju nction of city and goddess Is deh b�rately portentou s and auspiciou s. From it will grow the definition . of CIVIIIzan on everywhe re implicit in The Cantos. In the Homeric Hymn _ to Aphrodite from which Pound takes " Cypri muniment a sortita est " Venus appears disguised as a Phrygian princess, to beget with Anchis �s

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the city-build er Aeneas, transplan ter of a culture to which, in tim� , an oracle w ill cause Cybele's turret-cro wned image to be brought. Ovtd m the Fasti (IV. 1 79-376) d escribes her arrival in Rome, and explams her diadem of towers: at cu r tu rrifera caput est onerata corona? an primus turris urbibus illa dedit? (IV.

2 1 9-20)

Yet the goddess was already in Rome. She was the Etruscan Vortumna , Goddess of the Turning Year, an indigenous Demeter whose name wo.uld get changed to Fortuna, and who was to be fuse with the allegoncal Roma. In the Aeneid we can feel the subtle confusiOn of Roma and For­ tuna, for practically every mention of Fortuna involves the destmy of Rome' s walls.

�

Qu a visa est Fortuna pati Parcaeque sinebant Cedere res Latio, Turnus et tua moema text.

(Aeneid XII. 1 4 7-48)

Vergil of course was awa re of the Phrygian origin of the wall-crowned goddess: Et hujus, nate, auspiciis incluta Roma Imperi u m terris, animas aequabit 0\ympo Septemque una sibi muro circumdabn arces, Felix prole virum: qualis Berecynna mater Invehitu r curru Phrygias turrita per urbes Laeta Deum partu centum complexa nepotes, Omnes caelicolas, omnes supera tenentes. (Aeneid VI. 78 1 - 8 7)

Lucretius describes the goddess: Muralique caput su mmum cinxere corona, Eximiis mu nita locis quod sustinet urbes.

(De rerum naturae II. 606-7)

The Greek Tyche also wears a crown of towers, whence Fo.rtuna got her� . Doughty found somewhe re in his erudition cause t? descnbe an allegon­ cal fi gure of Claudi us Caesar's triumph over Bntam as (Minerv a seems ! )

Colonia Nova, Claudia;

Like shielded goddess, with high turrets crowned.

(The Dawn in Britain, XV!I)

The resonant kredemnon of Canto XCVI-the goddess lno­ Leucothea's headdress-may be a doubled image, for kredemna were the

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battlements o f a city, and Leucothea i s under the sign o f Fortuna. (Kre­ dem non: something that binds, a turban or magic precinct around a city.) Fortuna, evoked so lyrically in Thrones and Rock -Drill, is another mask of the pervasive Mediterranean diety whom anthropology has traced through a thousand guises by now and who-as Pound sees her- always emerges, wh atever her name or attributes, as the chthonic, mysteri ous force whose h armony man must sea rch out and adhere to or perish . As Castalia she comes crystal and clear from the dark earth (Canto XC, and as Arethusa and other spring nymphs throughout R ock -Drill and Thrones), inspiration of poets and Pound's further exten­ sion of the rivers of light in Dante's Paradiso and the opposite of the destructive floods in Thrones (rhyming with Petrarch's flood-imagery i n the "ltalia mia" canzone, where the floods are the barbaric ravagers of Italy ) . Or she comes from the chaos of the sea (Aphrodite, Leucothea) as civilization itself grows from the dark forest and wildness to the ordered perfection of a city. An altar to Tyche stands at Eleusis, fa ci ng the sea. Fortuna eluded all the forces of time and Christianity that disguised or banished the other gods. She lived quite respectably in the mediceval mind, where (as in Alan de Lille and Bernardus Silvestris) she becomes i dentified with Natura and moves suavely in and out of theology and p hilosphy. Goliardry and the Carmina Burana fashioned her into a striking figure, though her reputa­ tion, as now, vacillated between that of a strumpet and a powerful force worthy of placation and circumspect deference. In Inferno VII Vergil chid�s Dante for so misunderstanding Fortuna: He whose wisdom transcends a l l m a d e t h e heavens a n d gave t h e m guides, s o that every p a r t shines to every part, dispersing t h e light equ ally. I n t h e same way He ordained for worldly splendours a general minister and guide who should i n due time change vain wealth from race to race and from one to another blood, beyond the prevention of human wits, so that one race rules and another l a nguishes according to her sentence which i s hidden like th e snake in the grass. Your wisdom cannot strive with her. She foresees, j u dges, and mai n tains her kingdom, as the other heavenly powers do theirs. Her changes have n o respite. Necessity makes h e r swift, so fast men come to take their turn . This is she who is so reviled b y the very men that should give her praise, laying on h e r wrongful bla m e and ill repu te. But she i s blest [ma ella s ' e beata] and does not hear it. Happy with the other primal creatu res she turns her sphere and rejoices in her bliss [e beata si gode] . l

This is reflected i n Canto XCVII as: 'Trans. John D. Sinclair ( london: J o h n L a n e the Bodley H e a d , 1 94 8 ) .

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Even Aq uinas could not demote her, Fonu na, v i o let, pervenche, deep i ris, beat'e, e gode,

and as: All neath the moon, under Fortuna, splendor' mond an', beata gode, hidden as eel in sedge, all neath the moon, under Fortun a .

Fortuna is the goddess of forsitan: of perhaps. Her virtue is in "ever­ ' shifting change" ( Canto XCVII) , t he constant motion that Thoreau thought was the very definition of life. Pound claims Fortuna as a positive force u nder the theme of metamorphosis ( even if she wears the Gorgon mask of Nemes is); her unceasing turbulence is a natural mode, and all of man's actions are within it. That Fortun a should come to the fore in the Pisan group and remain a s a lyric presence grows from the Homeric grou nd-plan. All o f Odysseus's adventures are either ha irbreadth escapes or subtle enchantments. In the first half of the poem we find the adventures of enchantment, Sirens, Lotos Eaters, Circe. The Pisan DTC begins the adventures of entrapment and physical endurance, Scylla, Charybdis, Kyklops, and the shipwreck before Phaeacia. The mimesis of action, however, is Great Bass, as Pound calls it. We listen to it to calculate the aptness of the counterpoint, re­ membering that we are experiencing an epos of ideas released in inter­ locked phrases each of which is a musical phrase, an im age, and as much of a grammatical coherence as the poet can allow. There i s a la rger grammar, where entire cantos count as ideograms; to see the meaning of the goddesses we must read the la rger grammar. We have seen that Per­ sephone and her green world move through the poem. Cantos I-XXX are under the sign of Circe. XXXI-XLI are u nder the sign of three goddesses insofar as they have power over wild beasts; that is, are civilizing and taming forces: Aphrodite, Circe, and the Egyptian Aphrodite ( roughly) H athor. X LII-LI are under the sign of Demeter, as are LII-LXXI. The Pisan Cantos bring to a crescendo the theme of De­ meter and Persephone, in trodu ce Fortuna, and evoke Athena, Artemis, and Fortuna's planet the moon. Rock -Drill i ntroduces Leucothea ( an agent of Fortu na), and carries forward the amplified theme of all the n atural goddesses, adding many from cultures other than the Mediterra­ nean, Kwannon, the Buddhist goddess of Mercy, for instance. The visio­ nary eyes of the goddess, flowing crystal, light "almost soli d," mermaids, nymphs, and many historical fi gu res ( Elizabeth I, Theodora, Jeanne d' Arc) em body the bright theme of the lady of spiritual power. Th rones approaches the imagery of the Paradiso in its translucent b rilliance.

Persephone's Fzra

! 59

These images are not only radiant; they act as mirrors to each other in patterns of increasi ng cla rity the more we understand the poem. Many . distinct but congemal themes flow through the matters we h ave j ust been lookmg at ( the half-visi ble parallel to Christianity, for i nstance, reach ing . from Eleus1s, as Tadeusz Zielinski argues i n Th e R eligion of Ancient � reece, to the saintly ecstasies of the twelfth centu ry) , but what we are Inte rested to watch emerge is the articulation of the offices of Demeter and Persephone into an image of extraordinary meaning and beauty . A culture, I n the sense that Leo Fro beni us understood it ( and hence Po und), has two dominant symbols, the male one of action the female one of stillness and place (Ruhe und Raum ) . The male symbol is of direc­ tion, expansion, intensity, considering space as distance to traverse and measure, and is therefore volatile, unstable, destiny-ridden. Moth is called over mountain The bull

run s

blind on the swo rd, natur,ms. (Canto XLVII )

A n d in the same canto, and again o f Odysseus: First must thou go th e road to hell

And to the bower of Ceres' dau gh te r P ro se rpine , Thro ugh overhanging dark, to see Tiresias,

Eyeless that was, a shade, that is in hell So full of knowing that the beefy men k n ow less than he, ·

Ere th o u come to thy road's end.

Knowledge the shade of a shade, Yet m u st thou sail after knowledge

Knowing less than drugged beasts . . . .

Canto X LVII aligns even the i n do mitable Odysseus with the fate of the yearly slain : Tammuz, A donis, Osiris, for man the seed-scatterer is stac­ cato, di scontinuous. He runs on the sword; he perishes as the moth . The . fe � ale IS on the other hand a mountain, a cave, the fecund earth, consid­ enng space as a room . Woman for Pound is the stillness at the heart of a culture. The Cantos, fo � all their ability to make the past transparent, are ulti­ mately about the1r own century. Pound's despair over h is own time rarely stated personally in the poem, is nevertheless an astringent theme: The man who wrote the Hell Cantos ( XIV-XVI) a n d who wrote in Ca nto X C VI Go_?d- b ye to the sun, Autumn is dying Xcnp� o "H>.w_. XaL'p� clarore

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. . ld doe sn't . Livi in 1 96 3 · "Th e mod ern wor . said to the 1our na ,1st G raz1 a �r · past Its ch does not und erst and . exis t beca use noth ing exis ts whi . nme m ts only as a fusw n, a span . , f ture The world of toda y exis sis d; we have "heaped fads on Eleu date e i � Pou nd's ima ge, inun h tragedy outl ined 10 I ) . We have lost our clar i � . The (C ;nto XCV n ury cent th . m the nme teen . . . The Cantos begi ns deep h ard deta!, m d Iy mar d aor extr f o itua l met amo rpho sis . . Euro e was prep arin g a spir still be seen only m � can sis rpho amo met this of men swn s. The natu re · ty tran slate h we can :-vlth . som e cert ain sym boli c con figu ratio ns, alth oug re, Chen ier And . s fact l ima gine to be h isto nca th e sym bo I s Into what we . . end of th e the s a e seen ies that can b p . . ( 1 762 -94) writ ing a su1te of eleg w rh ets begm ' at th e vers ly ncho mela etly swe of . med itati ve trad ition ns of an Jma gma ry past o golden h or as the first Rom anti c inve ntio we n that is ?oth past and futu re ndo r begi ns to cons truc t a visio . aim c to hope we that ity spir itua l real reco ver from the high cult ures a : say d coul he ical Cyth erea Lik e Wat teau ima gini ng a mag

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Byza nce m' appe lle. Partons ' Ia voile est pret e, et _ (Elegie XLVII I )

world-order consonant with nature ( Wordsworth, Ruskin, the Tran­ scendentalists) . The other was deliberately arti ficial, arcane, symbolic. Navalis's Heinrich von Ofterdingen searching for his blue flower, des Esseintes i mmured among his bibelots and curios, Yeats longing to be refined into a mechanical nightingale in a Byzantium under the spell of faery- Baudelaire (the spiritual heir of Navalis, Hoffman, and Poe) gives a name to the century's predilection for a counterfeit world, les paradis artificie/s, a phrase that Pound saw as the ultimate etiolation of Villon's Paradis paint, ou sont harpes et Ius. Baudelaire was principally concerned to contrast the healthy mind with the drugged one, natural vision with that induced by opium. Helplessly he p referred the natural, but as the drunkard commends sobriety. He was committed to his "nouveaute sub­ lime et monstrueuse" (as Guillaume Apo llinaire called it) . Practically all its practitioners saw the Decadence as a religious force, specifically an inverted, mirror-like p arody of Christianity; Baudelaire, especi ally, saw Les Fleurs du mal as a kind of hymnal or missal . It contains litanies, prayers, meditations. 6 vierges 6 demons, 6 monstres, 6 martyres,

Chercheuses d'infini, devotes et satyres, Vous que dans votre enfer mon arne a poursui vies.

Mr. Yeats called it Byzantium. (Canto XCVI)

(Femmes damnees)

be left l recovery of what there might Che nier h ungered for the phy sica of the past : s, Spar te, Myc ene; L'he rbe couv re Cori n the, Argo . ps ou ut Athe nes. cham aux me chau le e coup La faux (Elegte XCVI)

�

of ntiu m are deri ved from the imagery Yea ts's two grea t visio ns of Byza Shel ley's The Revo lt of Islam, this vast dome , . m pierce dept hs w hich thou ght can seldo the Whe n from e hom e. Geni us beho lds it rise, his nativ ( l . L. 1 - 3)

· ons of para dise s and d with VIS! The nine teen th cent ury was o bsesse h - ! 1' k e ridg e's Xan adu , Shel ley s B � sc. utop ias: Blak e' s Jeru sale m, Cole . le JUng s u RIm bau d's a nd Hen n Rou ssea land s of th e spi ritua] I Y cI eans ed , ese 1 h t ro to cont n, we have seen , seem ed . gard ens Two pole s of attractio roo ts m Ch nsIts of e som · th WI , 1 ra natu visio ns. One was Are ad ian an d . e seekmg a for thos e Rom antt cs wh o wer tian thou ght, and was a node ·

·

'

zEpoca 50 ( 1 96 3 ) : 6 5 2.

161

De Ia realite grand esprits contempteu rs ,

" Constantinople" said Wyndham "our star,"

·

Persephone's E;:ra

What, to Pound's mind, the century was doing was imagining Perse­ phone's reign in hel l . And the artist is a p rophet. He shows the first symp'toms of what will become contagion. Persephone's hell is one of nature's modes-the dwarf world, as folklorists know it, a world with phosphorus for light, with strange parodies of growing nature (geode for fig, gems for flowers, crystal for water) . Image after image betrays an unconscious longing to be released from the sterility of this gorgeously artificial Hades, though its evil consists solely in one's mistaking it for reality's wholeness. Poe symbolized i ts psychology by p lacing his demon raven atop a bust of Pallas: the irrational dominating the intellect. Ros­ setti's paintings became an endless series of portraits of Persephone in hell. The " Veronica Veronese" of 1 872 shows a young lady in plush (Miss Alice Wilding, the model) in a room hung with heavy cloth . She is reproduci ng on a violin the notes of her caged canary. Flowers made of jew els hang from her wrist; shells of ivory, gold, and pearl figure in her necklace. Once Pound had perceived that the major a rtists of the late nineteenth century h ad, for the most part unconsciously, taken Perse­ p hone grieving for another world as a dominant symbol, he was in a position to write both Hugh Selwyn Mauber/ey and the fi rst thi rty cantos. He had identified the ch thonic Persephone with Circe, and the mirror-

1 62

TI1e Geography of the lm3gi narion

world in which nineteenth-century art had locked itself as a counterfeit paradise, a paradis artificiel. One of his responses was to write " An Idy ll for Glaucus," casting the problem of increasingly arcane subj ectivity as that of a g irl trying to communi cate with the metamorphosed Glaucus (he has eaten a magic herb and become a sea-creature) . Three English writers began a lmost simu ltaneously to transmute this precious, ungrowing world of the i magination (reflecting what malady of the soul practically every artist of the twentieth century has tried to say) i nto visions of growth and organic fufilment, to find again the ancient conjunction of flower and stone, underworld, world, and empyrean ( " Topaz, God can sit on , " Canto CIV) . All three, Joyce, Eliot, and Pound, were close students of Dante , and all three, however differently, were involved in the recovery of the Mediterranean past by arch aeology and anthropology. I n Da ntesque terms, Eliot managed a n Inferno (The Waste Land) and fragments of a Purgatorio (Ash Wednesday , The Four Quar­ tets). Joyce constructed in Ulysses the century's Inferno and in Finnegans Wa ke a Purgatorio-a cyclic Purgatorio from which one cannot escape. Pound has attempted a Paradiso, a vision of the world's splendor encom­ passing, as he configures the design, both of Persephone's kingdoms, "the germinal universe of wood alive, of stone alive" (Spirit of Romance, p. 72). It is in religion eclectic and is as interested in j ustice and piety, as reflected i n collective human behavior, as i n the fulfilment of the soul's i nwardness. Eliot's and Joyce's city is u nquestionably hell. Pound chose to traverse the dark vision completely and posit the ci ty as the one clear conquest of civilization. Each of the fi rst thiry cantos either ends with the image of a city wall or tower or contains such an image: even the comic Canto XII ends with the word "Stambouli." The darkest of these i mages are of ruin (III, IV, XVIII, XX) or treachery (V, VI, VII, XXVIII) . The brightest are of Aph rodite's copper walls, Danae's tower, Si gismundo's Rimini, Chinese dynastic temples, and Florence, Venice, and Ferrara at thei r height. Yet everything in Th e Cantos is seen in tragic deterioration up until Pound discloses in the Pisan group th e enveloping i dea of the past as a symbol alive in the present and h olding wi thi n it the seeds of the future. It is here that he brings in the city "n ow i n the mind indestructible" and the oldest myth in the entire poem, that of Wagadu in Africa, a Soninke legend of a city, Wagadu, that was lost as a reality but remained in men's hearts. " Four times Wagadu stood there in her splendour. Four times Wagadu dis appeared and was lost to h u man sight: once through vanity, once through falsehood, once through greed, and once through dissension. Four times Wagadu changed her na me. Fi rst she was called Dierra, then

Persephone's Ezra

1 63

Agada, then Gaona, then Silla . . . . Wagad u, whenev er men have seen her, h as always had four gates, one to the north, one to the west, one to the east, and one to the south. These are the directio ns from whence the strength of Wagad u comes, the strength in which she endures no matter whet er she be built of stone, wood or earth, or lives but as a shadow in the m m d and longing of her children . For, really, Wagadu is the strength . which lives In the hearts of men, and is sometim es visi ble because eyes see er and ears hear the clash of swords and ring of shields, and is some­ . times Invisi ble because the indomi tabili ty of men has overtire d her, so that she sleeps . . . . S hould Wag adu ever be found for the fifth ti me, then . s he w'· 1 1 1·1 ve so forcefully In the minds of men that she will never be lost . agam, so forcefu lly that vanity, fa lsehood , greed, and dissensi on will never be able to harm h er."3 I n Can �o XVI, emergin g from the hell of the deciviliz ers, we h ave as a . counter-vision:

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entered the quiet a i r t h e new sky, the light as after a s u n-ser, and by their fountain s, the heroes ' Sigismun do, and Malatest a Novello and founder s, gazing at th e

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ounrs of th ei r ci ties.

In Canto XVI I : "and the cities set in their hills." In Canto XXVI there . Is a Jerusale m pain ted by Carp acci o, which was also a city fou rsquare , . . � any time � lost and now a VISion m the mind, as it (or she) was ifi the time of Isaiah and Jeremi ah, i n whose pages the myth of Wagadu would be �erfectly at home. In the figure of the city that h as become a th rone- a . 5�' :' tua power of greates t force- Pound sees the one inclusiv e symbol o f . ti CIVIhza On. Here the odyssey s o f m e n come t o rest a nd cohere with the Penelop e-work at the still center. By Canto CVII Demete r has become ueen of Akraga s, and the cities th rough whose historie s The Cantos ve moved become temples contai ning light, and the p rocesses of ar­ . C Itecture the m usic by which Amph ion lifted the enchan ted stones into . P !a ce to nng Theb es with a wall.

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Amphion not fo r m useums bur for her mind l i ke th e underwave. (Canto CVI I) · · 'Leo Frohe nius and Do u gl a s· c · F . · ox, A� , rrcan C enests ( London : b hc r a n d Faber, 1 93 1! ) , pp. 1 0 9_ 1 0.

1 64

The Geography of the Imagination

The museum, twentieth-century parody of a temple, is all that we have, physically, of the past; and Joyce begins hnnegans Wake m a museum. The early i nterpreters of The Cantos tended to see the poem as a study of the man of willed and directed action, as a persona of Odysseus. It IS now . clear that the poem rests most fi rmly in a deeper, suller sense h an ity, the city and its continuity, sym bolized by the goddess o e an citadel wearing the sanctuary of her people as a crown.

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The Pound Vortex

A little past one o'clock on the fi fth of June 1 9 1 5 , Corporal Henri Gaudier of Seventh Company, 1 29th Infantry, Capitaine Menager com­ manding, ordered his squad to fix bayonets and deploy themselves i n diamond formation around h i m a s they went over the top . The artillery cover began to crack its flat thunder behind them, whining over their heads to blow yet more of the grey stone houses of Neuilly St. Vaast to ru bble, where the Germans were dug i n . I n the charge Corporal Gaudier was cut to pieces b y machine-gun fire. He was twenty-three years old. He was descended from sculptors who had worked on Ch artres. The precedi ng November he had l ain in mud and watched a cathedral burn, the lead of its molten roof dropping in great white glo bs through Gothic tracery. This Corporal Gaudier, cited for bravery, remembered by his fellow 1 65

1 66

The Geography of the I m agi nation

soldiers for his intelligence, was one of the greatest scul ptors of our cen­ tury. He signed his work Henri G a udier-Brzeska, adding the n ame of his Polish mistress to his own. Though it is futile to guess what work he would have done had he lived, it is now clear that he died with the century. Wh at we call the twentieth century ended in 1 9 1 5 . Those artists who survived the collapse of civilization at that point completed the work they had planned before then, when they looked forward to a century of com­ pletely different character. J oyce wrote his Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, both implicit in the nineteenth-century idea of .literature. Proust, aware that tanks were crawling like monsters out of H. G. Wells and J ules Verne over the poplar-li ned road to Illiers, comp leted his account of the world which the war obli terated as the bri mstone Sodom. What the war blighted was a renaissance as bri lliant as any in hi story which we can only know by the survivors and by the early work of the dead-the Alain-Fourniers (Battle of the Meuse, 1 9 1 4 ) , S ant' Elias (Monfalcone, 1 9 1 4), Apollinaires ( 1 9 1 8) , Gaudiers. No man was more aware of this renaissance than Ezra Pound, one of its most vigorous instigators and the center of its vortex. Gaudier had carved his bust (a fter sixty years it is still as smartly and strangely modern as the day it was finished; there is something classical in its ability to resist becomi ng a period piece) ; Gaudier had read Cathay to his troops. Cathay ("Pound is the inventor of Chinese poetry for our time"-T. S. Eliot), Personae (actors' masks ! ) , Cantos; Pound' s poetry was very new and very old at o n ce. The m an seemed to live deep in hi story and yet he was the present for writers alive with the idea of being m odern . Even now Pound's genius for the ancient and the modern together has not been generally grasped. O u r ignorance of the past blinds us to his finest a c­ complishments. Unless he designates that a poem is a paraphrase of La­ tin , we miss it, Latin h aving dropped from classrooms. Nor is it a settled matter that Pound is a master poet. The great paradox wh ich Mr. Kenner must struggle with in this fi rst full-scale study of Pound and his era is that Po und was the fi rst to arrive in the modern renaissance, an d his reputa­ tion wil l be the last to arrive in its proper place in the worl d's opinion . Mr. Kenner' s The Pound Era (a history book, a book of explication , " an X- Ray moving picture," as he calls it) was ten years in the writing. It is not so m u ch a book as a li brary, or better, a new kind of book in which biography, history, and the an alysi s of literature are so harmoniously articul ated that every page has a n arrative sense. Mr. Kenner's prose, always a mi racle of compression and robust grace, is h ere b rought to a pe rfection. Has anyone si nce De Quincey wri tten English with such verve and color? Has any scholar ever been so thorough ?

The Pound Vortex

1 67

Mr. Kenner's peculiar gen ius is the ability to move into a subject as Tolstoy constructs an episode: with the authority of a s u re h a nd, with the steady accum ulation of detai l a sense of effect demands, and always , al­ ways, the perfect awareness that something is being expl ained and that somebody is following. There is a touch of the magici a n in Mr. Kenner; he knows when to produce the dove from a cl ap of empty h ands, wh en to make his audience suck in its breath with surpri se. Era, an age; the Pound era. It began in Philade lphia, in classro oms of philology ( "we studied u ntil we droppe d," Pound once said) and in the now gone and imposs ible idealism of student s at the turn of the century . (There were, for i nstance , but two student s in the Catullus class at Penn in 1 904. Thirty- five years later those two student s were knocki ng on the doors of two very differen t statesm en, to i nstruct them h ow to behave themsel ves. Poun d failed to get an audience with Rooseve lt to demon­ strate to him how to avoi d the Second World War, though the other student of Catullus , the Quaker saint George Walton, was admitted to the presenc e of Reichsk anzler Hitler, to whose face he said, " Thee are not a kind man .") Learnin g, then , great, ardent learning , and idealism . Pound has always gone on the princip le that if a thing can be though t it can, by golly, be done. One can animate the dead past and make it live again in a poem (The Cantos ), one can find out the causes of wars, one can educate the p eople and make them noble, one can protect men of genius and see to it that they are known and that they get enoug h to eat. But all this fervent �ctivity, _ ma intaine d at fever pitch for sixty years (even for thirteen years 10 a mad house, one of Pou nd's most produ ctive and busy period s) can be put into a p h ra se: to find the best in the past and pass it on. That is what Mr. Kenner demon strates , the sifting of the past and the ways found for passin g it on-a nd not in abstra ctions and mumbli ngs through a hat, but with a passio n for showi ng how things work (such as ho� a poem is tran slated, word by word, p rocess by proces s, from the Ch10�se, from Greek , from Proven �al) a n d how things correla te: th u s we have 10 T� e Pound Era the interw oven career s of Eliot, Joyce , Wynd ham . m Carlo Lewis, Wilha s Willia ms , and others , even Amy Lowe ll (whos e _ war wuh Pound over Imagis m is germa ne to the plot, and Mr. Kenne r's account of that battle make s the funnie st pages in litera ry critici sm since Mark Twai n threw Coop er down and danced on him) . The Pound Era is a book to be read and reread and studie d. For the studen t of mode rn letters it is a treasu re, for the gener al reade r it is one of � ost intere sting books he �ill ever pick up in a lifetim e of readin g. IS IS because Mr. _ both thoro Kenn er, s mmd IS ugh and partic ular. If the modern sense of word s has a histor y (it does) , he can work that histor y

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168

The Geography o f the Imagination

(another scholar's fat book, were another scholar to write it) into his narrative without dropping a single strand of his complex web. The ele­ gantly relevant digressions in The Pound Era might be the work of a community of scholars rather than the diligent labor of Hugh Kenner. And the authority of detail, of place, of time; how does he do that? For one thing, he has been and looked. He has been to the site of the concen­ tration camp at Pisa and w aited until the mountain beyond looked like Taishan, the Chinese sa cred mountai n. And then he has photographed it (he is a superb p hotographer) just as Pound saw it and described it i n The Cantos. (There are fifty- seven other illustr(ltio ns, all a n integral p art of the narrative ) . Mr. Kenner has also talked with most of the characters in the book: Eliot, Lewis, Beckett, Wi lliams, Zukofsky, Mari anne Moore, Pound ("Ma rvellous raconteur, Professor Kenner," Miss Rudge, Pound's companion, once explained to me, who had known that fact for twenty years, and Pound nodded gravely, in assent) . But why the Pound Era? Why did Mr. Kenner, who has written simi­ larly thorough studies of Wyndham Lewis, Joyce, Eliot, Beckett (even Chesterton), and delightful studies of invisi ble movements among things and people, styles and metamorphoses of the spirit (The Stoic Come­ dians, The Counterfeiters) , why has he cast his masterpiece around Pound and the genius he fostered? One reason is obviously Pound's difficulty (caused not by Pound but by the withering of the audience for which he thought he was writing) and consequent need of lucid explica­ tion. Another is that Pound was i ndeed the center of literature in English for those si xty years, as Picasso was the center of painting, Brancusi the center of sculpture, Wittgenstein the center of philosophy. Pound alone was vocal and mobile. He alone wrote stacks of letters daily, saw everyone, knew everyone, and eventually suffered the tragedy in real which all the greatest of modern artists suffered symbolically or cast into their art. For they were all exiles, the borders of their homelands closed to them. Picasso spoke to Fascist Spain with the Guemica, Joyce to Ireland with Ulysses, Pou nd to the United States over short-wave radio, maddened by the spectacle of another war. His tragedy (con centration camp, j ail, insane asylum, and in his last years a Trappist silence and a formal repudiation of his writing) is the tragedy of the artist in the century that did not turn out as its best minds planned or hoped. It was the Fi rst World War that drove Pound to study the economi c theories that made him a casua lty in the Second. His fate was the same as Gaudier' s, after all. Ga udier's was swift, Pound's slow; they both failed to complete the wor k only they could have done; they both saw the cathedrals burn .

Ezra ·Pound 1 8 8 5 - 1 9 72 From the a bsol tion by a black -stole d Bene dictin e with asper gillum and � �enser (te supp lrces exoramus pro anim a famu li tui Ezra ) fou r gond oliers . In their Sund ay best brou ght the coffi n throu gh the Palla dian door of s San G10rg1o M agg10 · re w h ere tt · had latn · before the altar in a solem nity of egonan chan t and Mon tever di, and set it with trick y skill amo ng heap s flowers 1. 0 a black gond ola from the stern of whic h thirt y-five fat cora l ses rode ! n �igh solit ary splen dor as it mov ed acro ss the laguna, nod­ ng and d1pp mg the1r red tnto the Adr iatic . . . Wtth its burd en of weig htles s flowers and a frail old man who had died sl�ep, hrys anthemu ms crow ded � yello w and white alon g the n s nght side , long fron ds of palm arch ing out of bank ed ruffles of �0Ior, the gond ola mad e its cade nced prog ress thro ugh the cana ls. of Ven. � � ilie campo santo on San M1ch ele. Here the gond olier s shou ldere d

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1 70

The Geography of the Imagination

the coffin and set it on the ropes with which it was lowered i nto the grave, where it lay at a slight angle to the sides . In paradisum deducant te Angeli, the priest sang, in tuo adventu suscipiant te Martyres, et perdue­

ant te in civitatem san ctam jerusalem.

This burial among exiles is temporary. Ezra Pound specified in his will that he wished to be buried in Hai ley, Idaho, where eighty-seven years before he was born. His portrait bust by Henri Gaudier- Brzeska is to be his tombstone. This summer he consulted Isamu Noguchi about a pedi­ ment and setting for his Gaudier. In the last week of his life he attended a Noh play and the Peter Brook production of A Midsummer Night's Dream, flatly refusing to wear his topcoat to either. He was a stu bborn old man, locked into a silence out of which he could rarely be enticed. His last words in public were dunng the intermission the evening of the Shakespeare. A woman had come over to pay her respects. After she left, he said to his party, " Beautiful." Silence. Then : " And smart, too." He could get through whole days without saying a word. I have seen h i m sit in an agony of silence in a restaurant, the waiter standing with courteous p atience while Olga Rudge, Pound's ch arming companion, cajoled and p leaded, trying one argument after another, to little avail. The alternative to not saying what he wanted was to go without lunch while the rest of u s ate. The agony deepened, and with it the silence. It was like a saint breaking a vow when he sagged and gave in. "Gnocchi, " he said. When he did venture a remark, it was apt to be a Proustian obliquity . O n a sweet August evening after we had a l l been swimming and Miss Rudge had invited me, the fi lm-maker Massimo Bacigalupo, and the ar­ chaeologist Steven Diamant to dine with her and Pound at a favorite trat­ toria i n the hills of San Ambrogio, the old p oet broke hours and hours of silence to say, "There's a magpie in Ch ina can turn a hedgehog over and kill it." The silence was now ours. Miss Rudge, the master of any situation, picked it up . " Wherever, '' she laughed, " did you fi nd anything so eru­ dite ?" " In Giles ' s Dictionary," he said, a fl icker of mischief in his eyes. Then he glared at me, and went back into the silence u ntil a good hour later, over dessert, when he said, " Coffee is the one thing you mustn't order here ." The Chinese magpie, as I remember, kept its secret u ntil the next day. Steve, Massimo, and I worked it out, with some help from Miss Rudge. Three days before I had given Pound a copy of my translation of Ar­ ch ilochos. It was the H edgehog and Fox fragment he was alluding to, and

Ezra Pound, 1 8 85-1 972

1 71

this was his way of acknowledging that he had read the translation . He had read it to Miss Rudge, and we learned thereby that the silence ended at mght, when he ! ked to read alo �d . That week, in fact, he was reading _ Rudge Sartre s Les Mots, which had just been published. M1ss A book less likely to interest Pound cannot be imagined, and yet he was always capable of suprising our notions of what he did and di dn' t like. His last journey was by yacht to the Schloss Duino. Rilke! Wh o cou ld have forseen that act of homage? His last critical admonition was to bid us look at Lafargue again and appreciate h1s depths. His last translation might have been of Henri Michaux's ldeogrammes en Chine, a p rose poem written as an introduc­ tion to Leon Ch ang' s La Calligraphie chinoise ( 1 9 7 1 ) , except that he gave it up after a few starts. -�his si lence at the end of his life follows the design of his major work s , w � 1ch begm With forte movements a n d e n d pianissimo. The Cantos open with the noise of the sea and clattering oars; the fragments with which they end evoke quiet houses, the stillness of nature the silence of moun­ tains. Jv!auberley ends with a gazing face, Proper;ius on the Styx. The Confucian Odes begin with crying hawks, gongs and horse-bells; their concluding poems fold together i mages of autumnal stillness, sacri fi ci al drums that are tapped softly with sticks, a palace "high in the air and quiet." His generation had assumed that a life was a work of art, and it helps . us und � rstand the thi rteen years in which Pound was locked up with catatOJ;ucs. Only a man with deep resou rces could have survived that o:deal. Like Pascal with his account of his vision of Christ h ung around h i s neck, Pound wore a si milar document: it was from a friendly . s�ranger, a psychiatnst who had taken the trouble to write out instruc­ tions �or a sane man condemned to li ve among the insane. Art Is a matter of models; life is a matter of models. In St. Elizabeths he emembered C. Musoni us Rufus, condemned fi rst to a waterless Aegean � Island by Nero (he survived by discovering a spring for himself and his . fellow pnsoners) and finally to slinging a pi ckaxe in the chain gangs that dug �he canal across the isthmus of Cornith . He remembered Tasso and R� leigh writing in th ei r cells. As for the charge of treason he sh ared that with William Blake, Dante, and Socrates. And the charge � f madness was aU but the common property of poets, deserved and undeserved. In an a �e of sober realism a Chri stopher Smart on his knees praying in the middle of L � ndon traffic must be taken to Bedlam, and a poet shouting over the radio that arma ments manufacturers have the morals of cock­ roach es must be locked up in St. Elizabeths. A theme th at runs through the poetry of the madhouse days is mind-

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gina tion Tht Geo grap hy of the Ima

amo ng edu cate d men a um whi ch h ad onc e bee n less nes s, esp ecia lly the v acu his con dem nat ion of the clas sics . Ho w stra nge kno wledge of hi stor y and of Ruskin aga inst the tha t h ad forgotten the rage usu ry sou nde d to a wo rld te voi ces of Fou rier , the shil ling, the p assi ona shr inki n g of all v a lues into slav es of fact orie s and t men wer e bec om ing the Tho rea u, and Ma rx tha

Ezra

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1 73

bout being a writer and drank himself to death with-

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. In the Mobius tri ckery of the b.wgr a p h les o f a rtists we know that . . Stephen Dedalus was kill ed tn J oyce an d was replaced b Y an art1st w h o . , . cou I d understand Leopold Bl oom as ctvtTtzatton s failure and humanity ' s triumph.

. Pound could do neither . H e k ept h IS D ed alus InSide himself, maturing .

bank s.

th an its inab ility to twe ntie th cen tury mo re No thin g cha ract eriz es the k. Pou nd spe nt th e last g for mo re tha n a wee pay atte ntio n to any thin e. cen tury w as i nco her enc g tha t the spi rit of the thir d of his life lear nin has y eat •it, and the cen tur ast are doo me d to rep , Me n wh o forget the p war s, its styl es in the arts its g rep eati ng itse lf, idio tica lly stum bled alon . tury voi ce of the cen Joy ce, not Pou nd, was the its epid emi cs of unr eas on. rotectio n of Apo llo p the er und Pou nd beg an Th is par ado x is cru el . wh o can spe ak i n the poe ts and phi l oso phe rs Leskh eno rios , pat ron of aug men t the trad itio ns cou ld refi ne, mo dify , and anc ient trad itio ns, wh o hea r the se Pyt hian dis­ d the m . I n Plu tarch we onc e the y h ad mas tere ws Ho mer by hea rt, of allu sion : eve ryo ne kno courses wit h their wea lth phy . The i r ant hol ogi es ts, the sch ool s of phi loso the pla ywrigh ts, the poe yew tree , Dia na of i den tify Zeu s, Jehov ah, the did not hav e foo tno tes to Kah n . the Eph esia ns, and Kub lai w as Bro wn ing , and the nin etee nth cen tury of n a i nor khe Les The gre at wo uld add Chi n a to hm s to his Beetho ven . He Pou nd inte nde d to play Bra all the arts and imit ate reco ver the spri ngt ime of the trad itio n, he w oul d edu cate d men . They . His aud ienc e w oul d be the m in the ir full est vigor fact the Gre ek li ne i n m Ho mer (as a ma tter of wo uld reco gniz e a tag fro bee n set acc ura tely in et i n fifty -od d atte mpt s " Ma ube rley " has n o t y nce (can one u n iv er­ Cap ane us and his sign ifica type ); they wo uld know Am eric an aud ienc e Cap ane us? ) ; cert ainl y an sity stud ent in 5 000 i den tify wit h the wo rd " And ." an epic poe m begi nn i n g w ould see the rele van ce of iced the Ho mer ic pun .) (They hav e n ot even not Joy ce kne w tha t the in but aro und Pou nd. S o a trad itio n rott ed not bel i ev ed Fla ube rt. Joy ce rot a l ong ti me ago . He trad itio n had beg un to y, its grie f and al iena ­ in the hea rt of th e cen tur the refo re loca tes h i s wo rk Fin negans Wake i s nd spo ke to it. A page of tion , and spe aks for i t . Pou the r from Buc hen wal d, y, the pol yglo t mu rmu the voi ce o f the cen tur ga min jam ce voi ave the UN, th e Rus sian sho rt-w Bab el in the cor rido rs of Hun gari an poe m. the you ng Joy ce. Dech the you ng Pou nd as e Step hen Ded alus is as mu -she phe rd and be th ma ntle of the poe t-pr iest the me assu to was us dal . What bec ame of him ud and a rrog ant mag us con scie nce of his rac e, a pro se nep hew wro te like tha t Ja mes Joy ce who ably sum pre ; not w kno e w fell ow Iris hm en to self Surprised he b o red his The Horse's Mo uth and Her

Pound, 1 8 85 - 1 972

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around him, utterly un a b l e to see the cumen of Odysseus distributed . _ among all the poeple re cog t �t n g It on y in those examples of Odyssean cunning which in Joy e's op mon were best bred out of m a n . poun d k ept . hIS attention on rulers, Joyce on th e ru I e d . . . p oun d ' s eye was on the sources of ener mg us to the neglected g gy' w d . . ones, guarding them from con t ammatwn Joyce was i n terested m energy . . as Jt is actually used · Th us J oyce th e Cathohc saw noth.mg tn · samts · so . . . I ong as religion seemed to be � II bt �otry and superstition , while Pound the Protesta nt saw everyth.mg m samts , and was i n 1 ove Wit · h so many . re Iigions that we have to accept hl m as a pagan who couldn' t have too

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many gods on his hearth.

Joyce's books are perfections . Pound' s a II tend to resemble the Renais. sance bui ldi n g which h e ceIeb rates 1n The Can tos an d w h.tch IS . one of his . . Rimini . The Tempw richest symbols the Tempio M a I atest1ano m · IS a ' . . sh el I of neocl assical ma rble encasmg a G othlc church. Like The Cantos i t . . . . . . is unfinished , IS a monument to t h e skill a n d senstttvtty o f tts creato_r , and · yet is a realized, useful part of the world one can go to mass 10 the . Templp, one can read The Can tos. . The Cantos. "Fragments shored a a·t st our rum, a poem about empires (Alexander's ' Rome ch · n , 'te d States) , a poem about the . advantages mora l spirit a l ' n t c no gtcal o f hav i ng an accessible and pervasive sen ibi lity a a out t e wealt of the sterile and the ·

.

, �� ��T� 7 � � � � � poverty of the producti �e j�:� n �s : e an eptc restatement of Rus­ � . kin's F o s Clavigera the ;h ests o tw Ic ts that the usefulness of a gov. r

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ernment is its powe to t ssue money

. What drove Pound mad was the s m p I e fact that the Umted States i s. sues no money at all b t b o ney Issued by a p ri vate bank. The ideous and o bscene t xes pay our government are actually . . mterest on this perpetu a I I oan, tnera d ICable and u npaya bl e. To explain . Sisyphe an econom th IS i i n. un con i ced hi mse lf tha t i t wa s all . t h e rs. un urther be heved that if the a plot o f interna i o na l . p �ople could ever know that the U mt d tates gave up m 1 9 1 3 its Con­ � Stlt utional directive to issue m o ey {wi th the founding of the Federal Re� . _ se rve Bank) they w ould nse up m revo l utwn puri fy th e g overnment, and ' . I t i re urn to a s mp le ' ta x ess federanon o f states, ruled by laws locally

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1 74

The Geography of the Imagi n a tion

Ezra Pound, l flfiS- 1 9 72

passed and locally enforced. The Jews, financers and provokers of world

was bla nk. I u n der sto od An a ent o f th e R o t � sch ilds ' cou ld spot me by tha t stud y of Afr ican an hro p l ogy an d be dnve n to fury th a t 1earnm g was b emg · free ly tran spo rted a bou . . t the Re u bi"�(.:, - Paranoza, Said I, and wa s gra tefu l for the disc losu re, and fur the r e I t t at a an cau ght 10 such � a fate (esc ape from a Par tisa n firi n g sq ad, con cen trat ion cam p wh ere he was cag ed like a n anim al and _ ' f th en I_ n Is eigh th yea r in a ma dho use ) wa s entit led to all the pa ran m.d ant asie s he was ple ase d to n urs e . A few yea rs aft er his retu rn to Ita! y, s dd en Iy o ld a n d si lent , he went into the gar den one day and s a t dow n at IS type wri ter. He wro te lett ers. He had not wri tten any bod y i n yea rs. Were t h e old fire s flann · g up agam ? The des pon den cy and fati gue "dee as th e grav e, r oll _ g away He mail ed the lette rs himse lf. m ? Within a ek they bega n to ret urn . They were add ress ed to Jam es Joy ce' For d M a d ox For d , Wy ndh am Lew _ts, Wi llia m B. Yea ts.

wars, wou ld then be powerless to ma nipulate national treasuries and

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would presu mably revert to being private usurers. Such was the geometry of his vision.

"Usury," I h e a rd him say one afternoon at St. Elizabeth s , " I wi sh I'd

never heard the da mned word." I had two degrees after my name when I

sion of civilization by usury was a subject lightly touched on if at all by

Kirkwood, Mo. , who had tutored Wi lliam Jennirrgs Bryan and Wendell

Wilkie, and who w a s past ninety and deaf. I read Ruski n . I read Thomas

Mar. I learned all sorts of things I would probably never h ave heard of

otherw i se. Like many another, I saw in Pound the very archetype of the

The gre at sile nce beg . an. Th e Ital ian s did ot h ke It, the y wh o fu the mse lves wit h wo rds lfill It wa s s l ap I t he ace wit h a fish . " It wa s all but tot al, thi s refu sal t spe ak . t a ce I e rati_ o n of the D' An nun zio . ten nia l wh ich he wa s Ceo atte ndi n g WI t h h IS . fnen d Sal vat ore Q . uas imod o, h e was recogmzed and app lau ded unt J.1 h e sto od . " Tem pu s 1 oqu en d.1 , , t fra1. 1 vot ce said with he its typJ· ca 1 nst ng q uav er "te mp us tace n d.t, " quo ti. ng E cc I esta . stic us, Ma la testa and Th o . ulta neo usly and ex­ � s J�££ers on sim p lain ing , in his wa y ' tha h e h ad sat qUi te eno ugh . Wh at he had abo ut D' A n n u nzio to say or i nst anc e, had bee n said forty-t hre e yea rs before . Did h e see t o SI 1 enc e a new wa y o f t a lk.mg .' D I. d h e fear tha t he wa and a bo re to the s old wo rld ' and wo u ld spi. ke th at by one last rev inv e�ti on? olu tion ary

m a n who cared a bout things.

I had first read Th e Cantos years before meeting Pound. One fine

summer Christopher Middleton and I walked about Italy and France

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strangeness and beauty in great m easure. It, li ke Donne, was always

something to read, passing m agic. I had also got onto Gaudier before I knew anything about Pound. Thank God the universities let contempo­ rary literature alone in those days !

.

My Pound was first of all a man who h ad written a rich, ba rely com­

I first knew. The man himself di d n ot alter my view of h i m . H e talked a s I

suspected he would ta lk. A n d it was from Pound himself th at I first s aw how whacky the anti-Semiti sm was. It made no sense that I could see. I

had paid attention to the war, I k new refugees, I u n derstood Trebli nka and Buchenwald, I had seen Europe i n ruin s .

Southerners take a certain a m o u n t of unhi nged rea l i ty for granted, and I was grateful for a day at St. Elizabeths when Pound gave me a copy of

Frobenius' s Kulturges chichte Afrikas.

" How are you leavin g ? " he a sked, reaching for the book.

When I said I was leaving by trai n, he reversed the dust jacket, so that it

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much n otion as to what the long poem was about, except that it had

essays (and our many conversati on s) bears any resemblance to the Pound

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w ith two books only, a Donne a nd a Cantos. Neither of us, I think, had

though only Hugh Ken ner's in his two books about h i m and his m a ny

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who pounced on it with tha t mind and that energy). I read A lexander Del

I have had to become aware of many other versions of Pound since,

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Hart Benton the elder (and m anaged to i ntroduce Benton to Perry Mi l ler,

seducti on.

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my teachers. Pound sen t me to study under dear old John Talbot, of

Gaudier. My fi rst response was to learn Italian and Proven�al, and to paint in the q uattrocento manner. All real education i s such unconscious

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met Pou nd, and was worki ng toward a third and a fo urth, a nd the corro­

p rehensible poem, a man whose portrait bust had been chiselled by

1 75

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At the very las t he . had reg ain ed a kin d o f spn g h tly com pos ure of une asy pea ce. , a kin d He had th e Ga u d.Ier b ust bro ugh t fro m Bru nne n b u rg to Ve nic e and set it _ i n his s rna ll ' ti d v apa rtm ent. H e p 1 ann e d an . rea d.lOg tou r A mer ican and h ! f . n d were ter i fi ed that he wou ld p odi um be fo r mou nt the e horde o es d the n ous a n d say a bso lute i � g. H e ate veal ly not h­ burg ers i n . ar, a n ove r h t_ s Ice- cre ti me to tea se am wa s a good h i m out of h ts ' g a n n g s i len ce. Mi ss Ru dge kne w the m u l ae. for"Ezra ! " .

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" Wh was Mr . Joyce wo nt to bre ak i nto ?" A s mi e, a lon g pa use befo re spe ak ing : "M Y fn end Mr . J oyce wa s wo nt to bre ak int o song . " He was b oro the yea r of Bra hm s , s F o urt h and of Diana ways; of The of the CrossMikado a nd the sec . . on d vo l urn e of Das Kapztal; In the rei gns £ G rove r Clevel and and Vi c t on. a. A t h.IS dea th eve ry sch oo l of po ets

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1 76

The Geography of the Imagination

writing in Engish was under his influence, and his name was spoken with awe by every man of letters in the world. I h ave seen students learn Chinese because of hi m, or take up medireval studies, learn Greek, Lati n , music; the power o f his instigation has not flagged. Joyce said that he was more i n his debt than to any other m a n . He was a mentor to Eliot, Ford, Wyndham Lewis, Hil da Doolittle, Marianne Moore, Louis Zukofsky, William Carlos Willi ams, Charles Olson. Once he was through his epigonic work (which belongs to Pre­ Raphaelitism) he saw that the art of the century would take its energy from the pri mal and archaic, and h e set about donni.ng the masks of early Chi nese poets, of the m asters of medireval poetry, of Homer, of Dante . Like Stravinsky and Picasso and Joyce, he h ad styles rather th an a style. As his reputation recedes i n ti me, his radi cal Americanness will pro ba­ bly emerge from all the foreign masks. His rage at usury is a deep Ameri­ can theme, and is derivable from transcendentalist passions and ideals as well as from the firmest traditions stemmi ng from Jefferson and Adams . His poetry is by i ts n ature intricate, and will generate curiosity and expli­ cation for as long as we continue to study poetry. There will be many revisionist views of Pound the man. Whatever view we take of his work, we cannot diminish its inventiveness or mastery of language, or the per­ vasive i ntelligence which drove him to both his tragedy and his greatness. He wrote to Henry Rago, when Poetry awarded him its Fiftieth An ­ niversary p rize as its most distinguished contributor, that he was content to be remembered as "a minor satirist who contributed something to a refinement of the language." The modesty of those words well up from old age and disillusion. He was a renaissance.

"Trees ' '

In June, 1 9 1 8, the Cin cin . nati poet El oise R o bmso n was in the was tela nd of Pica rdy h n d" u ch �cola te a n d re itin g poe try to the Am eric an � . Expeditio na F e . eciting poe try! It IS all but uni mag inab le that i n tha t h II f rr o r, g angren e, mu star d gas , slee ples sne ss, lice , and fati gue , there e o men ts w h en b one -we ary so Jd" Iers , f or th e mos t part mer e . boys , wou ld Sit m . a o. rc I e aro und a I a dY poet . m an ankle-le ngth kha ki skin and Boy s cou t h at to h ear poems. I n th e mi" ddle of one poe m the p oet's me mo ry flag ged . she apo I ogi. Zed pro fuse ly, for the poe m, as she . exp lain ed , w as Imm ens eIy pop u l ar back h orn e. Wh ereu pon a serg eant held up his han d, a s l" f m . sch ool , and vol unteer ed to recite it. An d did . . So that n h e htd eou sly rav age d orc har ds and stra fed wo ods of th e val ley of th u e the fi ld were crat ered a n d stre wn w ith coi ls of barbed ire, . d reek e o cord Ite and carn_ on, a voic e reci ted

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1 77

1 78

"

The Geography of

the Im agination

Trees." How wonde rful, said Eloise Robinson, that he should know 1t.

" Well, ma'am," said the sergeant, "I guess I wrote it. I'm Joyce Kilmer." He wrote i t five years before, and sent it off to the newl y founded magazine Poetry, and Ha rriet Monroe, the editor, p aid h i m six dollars for it. Almost i m mediately it became one of the most famous poems i n English, the staple o f school teachers a n d the o n e poem known by practi­ cally everybody. Sergean t Alfred Joyce K i l mer was ki lled by German gunfi re on the

heights above Seringes, the 30th of July, 1 9 1 8 . The French gave h i m the

Croix de Guerre for his gallantry. He was thirty-rwo.

"Trees" is a poem that has various reputations. It is all right for tots and Middle Western clubwomen , but you are supposed to outgrow it. It symbolizes the sentimentality and weak-mindedness that characterizes middle-class muddle. It is Rotarian. Once, at a gathering of poets at the Library of Congress, Babette Deutsch was using it as an example of the taradiddle Congressmen recite at prayer breakfasts and other orgies, until Professor Gordon Wayne coughed and reminded her that the poet's son, Kenton, was among those present. No one, however, rose to defend Kip­ li ng and Wh ittier, at whom La Deutsch was also having. It is, Lord knows, a vulnerable poem. For one thing, i t is a poem about poetry, and is thus turned in on itself, and smacks o f propaganda for the art (but is therefore useful to teachers who find j ustifying poetry to bar­ barian students uph i l l work) . For another, the opening statement is all too close to Gelett Burgess's "I never saw a Purp l e Cow,'' lines that h a d

been flipping from t h e tongues o f wits since 1 8 95.

And if the tree i s pressing its hungry mouth aga in st the earth's sweet

flowing breast, how can it then lift i ts leafy arms to pray ? This is a posi­ tion worthy of Picasso but not o f the Cosmopolitan Cover Art Noveau aesth etic from which the poem derives. Ask any h ard-nosed classicist, and she wil l tell you that the poem is a monster of mixed metap hors. And yet there i s a silvery, spare beauty about it that h as not dated. Its six couplets have an i nexp l i cable i n tegrity, and a pleasant, old-fashioned music. It soothes, and it seems to speak of verities. The han dbooks will tell you that Yeats and Housman are behind the poem, though one cannot suspect from it that Kilmer was one of the earliest admi rers of Gerard Manley Hopkins. Poems of great energy are usually distillations of words and sentiments outside themselves. Poems are by nature a compression. Another chestnut, Longfellow' s "A Psalm o f Life," was generated by the Scotch geologist Hugh Mil ler's Footprints

of the Creator and Th e Old Red Sandstone, books made popular in

America by Longfellow's colleague at Harvard, Louis Agassiz. It is an example of the miraculous ( a n d of the transcendentally vague) h ow

" Trees " 1 79

Lo ngf ello w, rea din g abo ut fossi ls i n M i l l er, 1 a tch ed o n to the san dst one and the ves tige s the reu po n, to mt ' . on e " LIve s of g reat men a II rem . We can ma ke our live md us I s sub li me I A n d m . pas . sm g lea ve beh i n d u s pri n ts on the san ds I Foot­ , of t i m e. Poets work that wa y, con den sin ren de ri g dow n to ess enc e. A n oth er po em , as po pu lar in i ts day as ee s, " E W1_ n Ma rkh am ' s "The Ma n wit h the Hoe" live d i n Ezra pou n d' s mi_ _ . n d u ntl l n b eca me t h e ope mn of Th e Pisan Ca nto s. g li ne "T he eno rm ou s tra gedy o f th e d rea m 1. 0 t h e pea sant 's ben t shou l der s . " "Tree s" is, if you loo . k, ver y mu ch of its ti me. Trees were fav bois for Yeats ' Frost o n te svm ' , a n d eve n t h e yo u ng p ou n d . Th e nat rop hyl l had jus t bee ure of chl on dis cov ere d an d T . arzan of th e Apes ' -s et 1n a tree wo rld - had jus t bee n p ub li h d . T ees were eve ryw her e i n per iod , an d it wa s art of the un der sto o h a t t ey belo nge d to the reg ion of ideas, to San tay ana 's Realm of Bea uty. . me r had B ut Kil bee n rea din g abo ut trees i n ano the r con hav e forgotten one tex t tha t we tha t acc ou nts for ' . the sel f- eff acm . g c 1 osm ( " Poem s are ma de g 1'mes by foo ls lik I B n ] Go d can fo"a ke lines tha t hav e ele vat a tre e" ) , ed the po e o d b e uty as a reli gio us . Kil me r's yo ung ma hom ily. . nh oo d wa s 1 n Step Wit h th e 1. dea ) 1Sm ' o f t he cen tur y. On e of the i n ven tio ns i n ide al·1sm th at att racted mu c h atte nti On wa s the mo vem ent to stop chi l d l a bor and . � set up nur ser y sch oo ls 10 slu ms . On of the m ost dili gen e t pio nee rs i mo v me nt was the En glis hw om an Ma rga ret Mc Mi l lan , wh o ha d h app y de a tha t a bre ath of fresh air and . n i n ti ma te acq � ua int ance wi th gra ss a n d trees were wo peno ls and des ks i rth all the n the wh o!e sc h � I sys tem . Th ere wa s som eth ing a bou trees tha t she wa nte t d he r slu m ch r n to feel She had th em ta ke naps un der tree s, roll o . n g rass ' da nee a 1 un tre es. Th e En glis h wo " nasiu m equi pm ent rd for gym ­ is a a s. A n d i er boo k La bou r and hood ( 1 9 07) you Child­ wil l fi sen ten ce. . Ap par atu s can be ma de by foo ls, but only Go d ca n rna k e a tre e."

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jonathan Williams

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seminator of culture, and Jonathan Wi lliams i s i ts master. H e i s the iconographer of poets in our time, and of the places and graves of poets gone on to Elysium. He is an ambassador for an enterprise that h as n either center nor hiera rchy but whose credentials are ancient an d re­ spected . He is also a traveller, hiker, botanist, antiqu arian, epicure, and much else to engage our attention if we wish to look at the poet rather than the poetry. And so, quickly, before the poet gets in our line of sight, the poetry . Its weightlessness is that of thistledown and like the thistle it bites. Its coherence is that of clockwork, at once obvious and ad mirable. Its beauty is tha t of the times : h a rsh, elegant, l o ud, sweet, a brupt all together. The poet in our time does what poets have always done, given a tongue to dumbness, celebrated wonderments, complained of the government, told tales, found sense where none was to be perceived, found nonsense where we thought there was sense; in short, m ade a world for the mind (and occasionally the body too) to inhabit. Beauty, poets have taught us, is the king's daugh ter and the milkmaid, the nightingale and the rose, the wind, a Greek urn, the autumn moon, the sea when i t looks like wine. None of which appear often i n the confusion of our world. Yet, perhaps all too rarely, poets keep to their traditional loyalties: dawn songs in the dews of young orange trees; and ranging orisons; and wordless longings sung in tranquillity's waters sliding in sun's light; an� benisons sung in these trees. . . .

Jonathan Williams

That cello passage is Jonathan Wil l i a ms meditating on Frederick De­ Iius. The imagination o f the poet converses with the i magination of the composer. The la nguage for talking to Delius is Delius. And what if the

array o f othe r th ings , too, , poet . H e is a n ente rtain ing ' Jona th an W1' l l Jams the co nOJs s n of pub lishi ng to talk abo ut,_ but they are for the hist oria er, I a ny e mcl chro er, the raco nteu r, the o f fine boo ks, the biog raph ecol ogy h a ve ual llect ts who in our new mte com es forw ar d , o f the poe coII ege s ' · m d rea to es, and repu tatio ns risk ed thei. r stom ach s, nerv .wns ) ' stat g . fillm , (yes CA 's ' fi lling stat ions YM CA' s , h.1gh sc h oo I s, YW is a ere . Th es stor ent . dep artm YM HA 's ' chu rche s ' and even . univ ersit ies, ter s mm k uc B . R was It we shal l retu rn. fo r this goli ardr y' to whi ch - Ken tuck y at ea m eep d (and to Gha na on his way from Carbon dale ul Joh n� y n Wil liam s that "he ' our a ath Jon f o d - es p oets , m the ti e) who rem arke hs e tha n we kno w." He pub lese ed- we need him mor A o to ors fess poe ts to read ers, pro tr uce s poe ts to poe ts, t poe s raph . tog fess ors, and he ph � ( per ilou s bus ines s) to pro dis­ . t ch arm mg ic lant ern, Is still the mos mag the of slid e, desc end ant

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poet wants to talk back to the TV set? It is there that he encounters of a

morning rockets blasted toward a star his ancient craft has sung for two

thousand years (and probably longer) . He switches from cello to clarinet, piano, sn are dru m, and trombone: Woke up this morn i n' ,

Cape Canaveral can't get it up . . .

Woke up this mornin', Cape Canaveral can't get it up . . . Bur sent a cable to Great Venus­ told her, better w atch her ass !

"Unravished bride of quietness, " blasts off in m y head . . . "Unravished bride of quietness, " blasts off in my head . . .

1 82

The Geography of the Im agi nation

Jonathan Williams 1 83

Liable to be a whole lot more people than just John Keats

Poi si rivo lse, e p a rve di col oro che corrono a Verona d dra ppo ver de per Ia cam pag na; e parve di costoro quell! che vin ce, non colui che per de.

dea d!

Lonnie Johnson and Elmer Snowden, accomplished singers of the blues, were enlisted in this enterprise, for their trad i tion of eloquent dis­ may before a world i ndependent of their will and opaque to their evalua­

Th e gho st a lso sai d , to Mr Eli ot·. "Next yea r s wo rds await ano voi ce. " An oth er mas ter the r to w J� han Wi lli� �s has li sten ed wit h care wro te: " No ide as but in th s. a t w� s Wi lha m Ca rlo s Wi llia ms ( no kin ) wh o app ear . s in his poe tr ' say mg (m . Da nge rou s Ca lam us Em tions") : o-

tion of life has been under refinement for three centuries, and their sly

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alignment of technology's troubles with a riba ldry both venerable and primitive is worthy of Brer Fox. The art of Melies is there, too-the poet is reme mberi ng

The R ocket to the Moon, in which Verne' s astronauts

smack into the p lanet's outraged eye. And Keats's great ode. Poets are

h im and

licensed idiots an d can be counted on without fail to note the change when the sile n t moon-Sappho's wild - rose-fingered moon born from the violet sea , Vergil's friend of silence, S hakespeare's moist starre- becomes a junkyard. The poet, like a horse, is a mythologica l creature. The accoutrements of both are the same now as in the days of Hsiang Yu, Mimnermos, and Caedmon . Their duties are the same, th eir numen, their intractable iden­ tity and presence. They are, they always have been. The horse is as ar­ chaic as he is modern, forever the "neighing quadruped, used in war, and draught and carriage" that Johnson said he was, independent of time and fashion : which is why the poet Christopher Fry called him the last mythological beast. Eternity seems to h ave made a separate contract with h i m , and extended the same gracious codici l to the poet, who also is neither archaic nor modern, or rather is most modern when he is most archaic. For the work of the poet is continuous, while al l other modes of discourse-mathematics, physics, politics-are wildly disconti nuous, re­ peating stupidities because they forgot the past, stopping and starting because of barbarians, rebellions , and simple loss of vis ion. The p oet works h is melodies into the very grain of existence. An eidetic Ezra Pound, we learn from the p oe m " Some Southpaw Pitching," once appeared to the poet Charles Olson to say, "Let the song lie in the thing!" Our other recorded appearance of Ezra Poun d as " a familiar compound ghost" was t o Air Raid Warden Eliot during the Blitz when he cou l d be discerned " i n the waning dusk," along with D ame and Mallarme, saying

. . . our concern was speech, and speech impelled us To purify the d i alect of the tribe And urge the mind to aftersight and foresight.

Eliot of course is here reimagining Dante's encoun ter with his teacher Brunetto Latini-the meeting to which the title of Jonathan Williams's fi rs t book alludes in its elate way,

The Empire Finals at Verona ( 1 9 5 8) .

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tha t Jes uit, the m wit h the var iab le feet­

t hey changed It!

Wa lt Wh itm an, he me ans and Gerar d M a n ley Ho pki ns. W h a cha nge d is wh at Jon ath t the y an i l lIam ' s ( Wit h h e l p and In . goo d com pan y ) Is stl'II c h ang ing : poe try . , . " Next yea. r s word s aw ait ano the r V Ice. mg car efu l att ent ion By pay � to Wi llia m Ca rlo s Wi l lI. a J_Tis, wh o ms iste d tha t the poe t's bus ine ss is to let the wo r ld spe ak for Itse lf, Jon ath an Wi learn ed to ma ke suc h l li a ms _ po em s as t h Is:

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Mister Wil l iam s lets youn me mo ve tot her side the hou se the wo ma n

cho ppi n woods mite n igh the awker dis t thi ng I seen .

The titl e to thi s po em is a ver ba I ges tur e a l ert ing us to coc " Un cle Iv Su rve vs k our ear s: ' Hi s D om am from His Ro cke r of a S un d ay A fter noo n as A u n t Do ry Sta rts t o Ch op Kin dli n , The poe m defi Ed wi n Ma rk h a m nes a cult ure . wa s sat isfi ed t� I et t e ma n wtt h t he hoe voiceles s as the Barb rem ain as _ izon p am . nn . g 111 w h Ich he £oun d h I m . Th at the t h ey ha ve been wo rld . so dil ige ntl y d escn' · bI ng mig h t hav e a voi la te i dea to ce see ms to be a A m cri· can po ets . James J y o ffered as the p u rpo se o ture the simp le but f lite raradi call ai e offi ce o maki ng the eak d u m b to . And n ot in pa raph r ·sp e loc at � s him self betw and th e po em , and � en rea lity tra ins him sel f to e t e me diu m thr oug . flo ws mto the p h wh ich rea lity oe m .

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I found the poem s In the fields An d only wro te them down

Th at is John Clare as h ers in the Me a do w Te l

a n Wil li ams s ' " What the Fl owf :J::,k�mdjtohnath ere IS a res ·

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The Geography of the Imagination

1 84

John, claritas tells us the words are not idle, the syllables are able to turn plaintains into quatrains, tune raceme to cyme, panide and umbel to form coroll as in light clusters of tones . . . Sam Palmer hit it: "Milt on, by one epithe t draw s an oak of the large st girth I 'Pine and monu mental oak' :

ever

saw,

I have been trying to draw a large one in Lullingstone; but the poet' s tree is h u ger than any in the park . " Mu se in a mea dow, compose i n a mind !

comp lex as Any poem worth its salt is as transp arent ly a i r in a hornet's nest over the water makes a solid, six-sided music

a n aria and a horn arc where in every qualit y is mi rrored in anoth er (and typog raph ica lly �so met­ camouflaged into the richne ss) ; that the lines are . nest; sohdis 1ded; s, ric, seven -syllab led, and inwar dly ornam ental (-net's treble) is as n ative an m, and n so place d as to make a bass li ne to the ecture . i nstinct to the poet as the horne t's hexag onal archit is the anima l that Man . Nativ e, to be certai n, but only after much work ng has roots a nd learni choos es its insti n cts throu gh emula tion, and all his to be Charles seem b ranch es. Jonat h an Willia ms's first masters would master was hose w and hed, Olson , w hose Maxi mus poem s he l ater publis Poun d to from nt desce Ezra Poun d. We canno t draw a direct line of Zuko fsky Louis ation. Olson howe ver for there is an i n terven ing gener and its rme Malla its , and William C � rlos Willia ms are at i ts center tech­ ivity, object ed stress Whitm an . Their admo nition s to the young c� n­ be to not was poem n ique, hones ty, clarity , reali s m . The Europ ean nng rccur l; feuda was e tinue d in Amer i ca; it was not rep ublica n. Rhym come must s Image h. speec l metri cal p attern s warp ed thoug ht and n atura ore find a new shape not from books but the world . The poet must theref a rder dema nds than h far for every poem , and liberty tu rned out to make ce of p hrasm g, balan with gle the sonne t. Henc e Olson 's heroi c strug hone sty, and h boyis and ntry Willi a m Carlo s Willi ams's plain carpe rhyth m and � o ol contr Zuko fsky's daredevil integr ity and fierce a d1am ond. w1th steel on ved desig n-a passi onate math emati cs engra tools or m fine such with ed work y Neve r befor e h ad A meric an poetr

jonathan Williams

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s � sted up ? n such craftsmanship. Professors of literature, ever conserva­ tive, cautwus, and lazy, will discover all thi s in thei r own sweet time. The you n g poets who went to school to these hard m asters - Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan, Jonathan Williams, Robert Kelly, Ronald J? hnson-have by ?�w each evolved a style of his own . The spare asceti­ cism of the1 r tra m m g remains, however, as an armature within. Johnath an Willi ams learned h ow to wri te a poem as tri m and economical as a tree. And like a tree his poems have roots, exist against a background, a � d convert light into energy. And t a ke their s h ape not only . from I� ner des1gn but also from the weather and thei r circumj acence. Wh1ch bnngs us to the fact th at the honey bee h a s a lethal s ting. Were . not for a long and distinguished history of poets who h ave balanced a 1t love affair and a feud with the world-Archilochos Catullus Horace : Villon, Pope, E. E. Cummings-Jonathan Wil liams's d ou ble-thr� at h and iness with a lyric would seem charmingly schizoid. Odi et amo. A settled hatred for one's species (Little Harp's excuse for his terreur, and h i s last words) is traditionc:lly counterpoised in the satirist by a rich sensuality before all that's i n nocent. The satire h as b � en there from the fi rst; wit and sense do not exist apart fro � each other m Jonath an Willi ams's mind. Pathos must appear i n comic socks or n o t a t all. Incongruity seems to be the stuff of existence and outrage may be our surest response to the universe. There i s a moraJ discourse of some consequence i n the poet's reply to poli ti cal rhetoric: Hush, L'il Guvnuh, don't you fret . . . .

The genius of Jon than Williams 's satire is as old as tyranny. The slave � m nddles a d sly enigm a s ; The Blue-Tailed Fly, h omely � kso�g �s It s eemed, was In fact a song of emancip ation . Look h ard at . pungenc f}'s satires. the1r y and s ass are not nrespon sible nor their wit tppant. In "Faubu s Meets Mingus during the Latter's Dy � asty" the p ar_ ncul ar porItic1 . . an and compos er easil y translate into the struggle between power � n d a anywhe re. It is Jonata hn William s's surest i ns tinct tha t � t s no� tdeas or rhetoric . He locates meanin g specific ally. T o the c dd s questi on,

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whut fer theseh yar animules be, Granny?

the reply is:

The Geography of the Imagination

186

Jonath an Willia ms

newspaper, the lyricist's predilections begin to display a wonderful strangeness. A pattern of artists emerges-Blake, Ives, Nielsen, Sa muel Palmer, Bruck ner- and (if we have our eyes open) a whole world. It is a world of English music, especially the Edwardian Impressionists and their German cousins Bruckner and Mahler, of artists oriented toward Blake and his circle but going off by centrifugal flight into wildest orbits, men like Fuseli, Calvert, and Mad Martin. The poet's admiration for Edith Sitwell will have had something to do with this exploration of En­ glish eccentricity, and the poet's Welsh temperament, and, m,ost clearly, William Blake himself. The artist is aware of a heritage not only because, like the rest of us, he recognizes in it his origins and values, but because he is consciously adding to it. What Jonathan Wi lliams found in England, Wales, and Scotland was not a second heritage ( as it might seem to a casual glance) but the heritage in which he was raised from the beginning. When , for instance, he met the Scotch poet Ian Hamilton Finlay, amon g whose work we can fi n d ( i n the Glaswegian tongue) :

hain t fer to name! why Adam' s O ff-Ox in thishyar Garden haint got no name neither yet but the Lord's li:1ble to call thishyar tree Arber Vity h it's got thishyar

hooch

sarpint

a heilan coo

i n it.

wis mair liker

"And out of the ground the LORD GOD formed every beast of the field and every foule of the aire, and brought them u nto Ada � , to see wha � he would call them : and whatsoever Adam calle? ev� ry livm g crea­ ture that was the name thereof. . . . " The child who mqmred about the gin am and calico animals in the patchwork qu� lt w ll have heard these words in Sunday School and may never hear Milton s

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The grassie Clods now Calv' d, now half ap peered The Tawnie Lion, pawing to get tree His h i nder parts, then springs as broke from Bonds, And rampant shakes his Brinded main; the Ounce, The Libbard, and the Tyger, as the Moale Ri sing, the crumbl' d Ea rth above them threw In Hillocks; the swift Stag from under ground Bore up his branching head

nor Jules Supervielle's Sombres troupea ux des monts sauvage s, etages, Fa ires attentio n, vous allez vous figer. Ne pouvan t vous laisser errer a votre gu1se Je m'en vais vous donner d'etem elles ass1ses. Les chamoi s bondiro nt pour vous . .

1 87

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its Tree, nd it Serpe · but has his visio n all the sa me of the Gard en, are � at ':' ere a As we read Wil liams 's poem s we becom e aw. es m this mo r i ng headlm satiris t's p redilec tions are as esoter ic as the .

ferr feart o rna herr-do

he was, as perhaps only a citizen of Appalac hia can know, solidly within his heritage. Finlay probab ly got his matter out of the air (the heilan coo can be found in his Glasgow Beasts, an a Burd, Haw, an lnseks, an, Aw, a Fush ) withou t necessa rily knowin g that he was retelling a song that can be traced to Taliesi n (the Cdd Goddeu ) , is known in Spanish , Italian, Rouma nian, Greek, and Serbian version s, and is sung in Jonath an Williams's neck of the woods as " She looked out o the winder as white as any milk. " 1 Finlay has remarked of the Glasw egians that their di alect . aro dies itself, so that arch comic banter has becom p e the preferred mode of � scourse. The same observation describ es Appal achia, the linguis tic honzon that Jonath an Willia ms has never cared to stray very fa r from. English eccentricity goes back to the Druids and beyond-the Sutton Ho jewelry discovered in 1 93 9 looks remar kably as if it were what Jonathan Willia ms calls Theosophica l Celtic Art Nouve au. From Blake' s IIhi�nft Hamilton Finlay's little book is based on the transformation theme. 8

s shape from one

The protago nist

ammal to another for vanous reasons. See Buchan, Ancient Ballads ond Songs, I , 24, and Child's English and Scottish Ballads, I , 244.

188

The Geography of the Imagination

Ancients (Sa muel Palmer and Edward Calvert) stems a traditi on. The Rossettis belonged to it; Browning p aid it his respects; but for the most part it is a tangled and untraced path in and out of official literature and art . There' s Charles Doughty, whom entire departments of literature uni­ versity after university have not read, a state of affairs roughly analogous to a department of physics su blimely ignorant of Proteus Steinmetz. There's Stanley Spencer, J. R. R. Tolkien, Edith Sitwell. And Bruckner and Bax and John I reland. And Odilon Redon and Ja mes McCarrel l . And more-we await the h istorian of these v isionaries. Literature, as Harry Levin is wont to say, is its own historian, and Jonat;han Williams's honor to his spiri tu al forebears may be the beginning of a resuscitati on . Mean­ while, we must recognize that they constitute a tradition, and that he has taken up their torch, and carries it to and fro in the United States. His Mahler, responses movement by movement to the ten symphonies, will mark (once the dust has settled) the introduction of Blake's " Young An­ cients" to our shores, a hundred and forty years late. If Walt Whitman had married the Widow Gilchrist as she proposed, we should not have had to wait so long, perhaps. And that speculation makes it clear that I h ave wandered far enough into an u nwritten history . Poetry i s always i nviolably itself, and it i s always something more. Jonathan Williams offers us in every poem a lyric line of suave clarity and a highl y involved verbal harmony. The poem itself finds and a rticulates a single image or action. Th is is an art like pole vaulting: the center of gravity i s outside the traj ectory . Build-up and follow-through are not the poem , though the poem depends upon them; the one is in the poet's control, the othe r in yours. We are not suprised to learn that the poet is an athlete. And the poet is a wanderer. If his poetry defines and extricates a tradi­ tion fro m th e pa st, his wandering (as Buckminster Fuller points out) de­ fines the curious transformation of the shape of American culture. There is no American capit al; there never has been . We have a network instead. A French poet may plausibly know all other French poets by living in Paris. The smallest of American towns contains major poets, and all other kinds of artists. In no other country does such a distributio n of mind appear. Mi llidgevi lle, Ga ., contained Flannery O'Connor (and at one ti me Oliver H a rdy) ; Jackson, Miss., Eudora Welty; Minerva, 0., Ralph Hodgson; Rollinsvi lle, Col., Stan Bra khage. If you know where Charles Ruggles lives, Ray Bradbury, Michael McClure, or Edward Dorn, you may count yoursel f learned indeed. For a decade now jonathan Willi ams has made it his business to go from point to point on the network: there has been nothing like it since th e medireval scholars w ho for want of any other means of communication wandered from uni-

jonathan Williams

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ver sity to uni ver sity . His Ion . . g zi z ag nps ca eas ily be exp lain e � by no­ tieing tha t he is a pub lish er o boo s un we com e to com mer Cial pub­ lish ers (wh o are clos er t t ro cery bu m ess than to th � at fou n ded by Gutenberg) ; by invitatio s mv ers lt! es to rea d, sho w slid es, lect ure on boo k des ign , arc hite ctu re a n poe try ; a nd by the fact tha t to kno w arti sts and poe ts one has to g � t o poca. tell o, l dah o , and Pip pa pass es, K . .. y. Th e tru e slgm fica nce of all this gad d1ng . a b out 1s ' .· the poe t Wit h h Is th 1s ' preternatu ral, p rop het ic sen se kno ws tha t this i s t h e . way he mu st hve Buc km mst er Ful ler wh o has . al s b o n h e oa� for the sam e dec ade , knew wh y Jon ath a� Wi llia ms is he o o f r t e Sim ple reas on tha t the y are each in h i s ow n way do mg · the sam e thin g. Eac h has per _ ceiv ed tha t all othe r lines of com m um cat Jon are ove rlo ade d . A yth ' ng . wo rth k now mg � pas ses from one per son to � ano the r. Th e b ook IS sull a VIa ble wa y of com mu nicat ing , pro vid ed one has t ugh t nes el f to find the boo k one ? needs to rea d. It isn 't easy All th ect rom c me dJ a are a � ood noi se. An d no me diu m can rep l ac _ � wh at y be an essenua l nee d In the of poe t: an aud ienc e. Ho mer reci ted h,· s poe ms to peo ple wh o ch . eered an d e en gav e pnz es; at leas t the y pas sed aro . und me. Ch aucer read h i s poems �m fi relit rooms . Ev ery line of warm Sha ke pea re was wn tten to mo ve a p ayin g . aud ien ce Th e nex t t1m e you read a s 1 ack: � scu b re, con vol uted poe m, reflect tha t it wa s wri tten in an age wh e n pnn ung has rep lace d rec itat ion , and tha t the poe t can not te 11 h IS goo d poe ms fr · b ad e�cept by m o h Is · ous criticis m. £onwt Jon ath an w·l Jrl a ms s b ooks have fine edi tion s been pu bhshed in m any of them co Ilectors _ ' Item s from th e mo men t . pn ntmg, and' all of the m of the ir . . b y thi s tl m e sca rce . It IS the refo re not to say tha t tho usand s hyp erb ole of peop I e ave h h eard h IS · poe ms at co II eges and au dit on um s (an d at tha . t one fili i ng stat ion) for eve ry five who kno w the m on the pri nte d pa ge . The1r . c Ian ty to th e �ar an d t h e mn er eye has bee n tested in th e clas sic al weath er o f poetry, hst enm g fa ces .

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the alch mis ts living quality which The green gold is the nat ure . t z s an nzc rga n but als o in ino saw not onl y i n ma mu nd 1 or fil I U S · . ·1 zrzt, · · the ani ma z,e-sp expresszon of the 1 e o anz ma tes th e u•hol. . the An thr opo s wh macro cosm!, mg yth ver e ' t 0 · m if e · has pou red h zms cosmoS · This spirit · al an d met · m t en res p zs matter; he even into inorga nic stone.

(Carl jung,

ections) Me mo ries , Dr eam s, Refl

Ron al d Jo hn so n RED TH E MANY- CO LO TH E V ALLEY O F

GR ASS ES

e a . . mi da ble tal ent s cam ste m, from 1wh ose for gen Wm s her ok sop bo ilo the ph e as Th p eller as well ne , a d an ai P n ach i m e ng h sewi that u a life se, ed ho f h is anguish , sai tow ar t e red no ho to is he em ich po a wh of for r thi n k · te a po em b ut cou ld n eve had alw ays wa nte d to wn . a poe m , do ub tle ss for the sam e rea son . s wn te two . wr ite . No r did He rac litU I e by wh ich we ha ve . kn ow 0 f. Th e m1 rac w at s h t nse o, d ar on jours, � Le r llOS No thagoras de . ms ter F u II er, t he p y ice tw as h se poems f rom R . B u ckm pro dy ma xio n fact tha t Mr . F u 11 er s able from the tra nsp are nt b een fo und to be read . ce twi a nd h as · h ens wn . ph ra se by phra se or "v entidefi ed mortal compre y Is, . h e p age as poetr . g wor d for w ord the same . Thes e when dis tn· buted on t · t an ce bem h ms . . dif ficu lt evo ca. lated '" the tex ts ·In eac nat ion are use ful if ag� Im C eti po the f o au stere ext rem es

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tions, for Ronald Johnson's transmutation of the English poem reaches down to the very roots of poetry itself. If a poem has ever occurred to Mr. Johnson, he has never written it. At least he has never published it. A poem as it is generally understood is a metri cal composition either lyric, dra matic or pensive made by a poet whose sp iritual dominion flows through his words like the wind or the leaves or the lark' s song through twilight. In the fourth part of " When Men Will Lie Down as G racefully & as Ripe ," Mr. Johnson performs for a passage of Emerson's what Buckminster Fuller did for his own prose. He spaces it out and makes a poem of it, though this bald-faced act scarcely answers to the received notion of how a poem is written. It is not Wordsworth in his blue sunglasses pacing his gravel walk and dictating to Dorothy. Nor Jaufre Rudel tuning his lute a mong the nightingales at Sarlat. The lyric poem from Sappho to Voznesen sky, with all its variants and transmutations, has become for us the model of all poems. The creden­ tials of thi s ideal western poem tend to lu rk not in the poems but in the personality of the poet. All that Byron wrote is somehow not as great as Byron. This illusion, fostered by the scandal-mongering of professors and the Grundyism of psychology, is a lazy and essentially indifferent view of poetry. The p oet, who writes not for hi msel f but to provide the world with an articulate tongue, longs to be as absent from his finished work as Homer. Objective and subjective are modes in the critic's mind; the poet scarcely knows what they mean . If the finely textured geometry o f words Ronald Johnson builds Q n his pages is not what we ordi narily call a poem , it is indisputably poetry. It is poetry written to a difficult music ("a different music," as the poet him­ self says) . It is a poetry with a passion for exact, even scientific scrutiny. It incorporates in generous measure the words of other men. It does not breathe like most of the poetry we know. It is admirably un- self­ conscious-the work of a man fa r too occupied with realities to have given much thought to being a poet. This objectivity is no doubt fi rst of all a matter of temperament. It is no surp rise to learn that the man writes cookbooks erudite enough to be published by universi ty presses, seems to be so mething of a wanderer in a society where every man jack of us is bolted down and labelled, and that if he comes to visit he is apt to forget to go to bed and be up all night reading a book about the symmetry of the universe. It is perhaps unfair to give even so vague a glimpse as this of the poet, since he himself has shown us nothing more than h i s meti cul ous connoisse u rship of the world as a system of harmonic advantages. " Na­ ture," says the very fi rst voice of philosophy, "loves to hide. What is h�� den in nature is more harmonious than what we can easily see." The Vtston by which we discover the hidden in nature is sometimes called

The Geography of the Imagination

1 92

science sometimes art. Mr. Johnson's books-A Line of Poetry, A Row of Tree� ( 1 9 65 ) , The Book of the Green Man ( 1 967) , and Th e Valley of the Many-Colored Grasses (whi ch incorporates a s� or�ened and re­ arranged version of the first book)-are about this vtswn � n all tts m �n­ . ifestations from the scientific to the stmple but difficult busmess of seemg ' the world with eyes cleansed of stupidity and indi fference. Hen �e Mr. Johnson's special fascination with � en who h ave sha �pene ? their eye­ sight: explorers, anatomists, botamsts, pamters, ant1quanans, poets, microscopists, mathematicians, physicists. Poetry from the old age of Browning to the old "ge of Ezra Pou � d has had a passion for obj ecti vity. Whitman made a note to htmself to mve�� " a perfectly transparent plate-glass style, artless, with no ornaments. Mr. Johnson's immediate patnmony m lett�rs comes from Jonathan Williams, the poet, publisher, and a long-ume fn end. But Jonathan Williams is h imself a kind of polytechnic institute, and at the time Ronald Johnson met hi m, had already distilled from the confusmg s�ate of Amer­ ican poetry a clear sense that the masters were Pound, Wtlham Carlos Willi ams, and Louis Zukofsky, and had set about writi ng ( and showmg others, Ronald Johnson included, how to write) poems as spare func­ ; tional, and alive as a blade of grass. It was a poetry n �ither �edttattve nor hortatory but projective. It insisted that the world IS mterestmg enough m itself to be reflected in a poem without rhetorical cosmetics, an arbttrar_Y tune for melodramatic coloring, or stage directions from the literary kit and caboodle. . Art prepares its own possibilities for metaphys ical shi fts. We are at a point in the history of art when Robert Rauschenberg does not draw h1s drawings and is nonetheless a bnlhant draughtsman. Ch � rl� s lves wrote his music, and we must qu � ckly add that of course he dtdn t � th�se t statements exist in the realization that Ives IS the most tmagmattve a accomp lished of American composers. The quotations in R �nald Jo n­ son' s poems are simply a part of the world, like Wordsworth s daffodils, whi ch the poet wishes to bring to us. The poet is at the edge of our consciousness of the world, fi ndin� beyond the suspected nothmgne _ _ our perceptiOn another acre or so of bemg which we imagine limits wor our venturing upon. · h as It is always difficult to know how much of the world the artist taught us to see· once we see it we are quick to suppose that it was always there. But ther were no waterfalls before Turner and ordworth, no moonlight before Sappho. The apple has its history. For It IS � ot thmgs which poets give us but the way in which they exist for us. The nch the� e of The Green Man has always "been there" in the history of thmgs, In folklore, m architecture, m poems. Some weeks after I read Mr.

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J ohn son 's Boo k of the Green Man I was loo king at Nelson Glu eck 's boo k about the anc ient Nabataeans and w as able to say of the strange leaf-beard ed and leaf-ha ired demons depicted there, " Her e's Ronald Johnson's Green Man way back in the Bib lica l Edo m." Two day s late r the Joll y Green Gia nt sud den ly lost his com mer cial ena mel and stoo d there on his tin of beans as a hou seho ld god thor oug hly num inou s. "Every forc e," said Mother Ann Lee of the Sha ker s, "ev olves a form ." For the poe t this is the opposite of sup pos ing tha t a form can be fille d with a forc e. The senti ments aro used by the moo n pain ted by Ryd er can be acco mm oda ted by a sonnet, but it is the son net in the end which is being acco mm oda ted, not the moon. In Ronald Joh nso n's poetry form seems to have been connected into diag ram mat ic eleg anc e. What has happened is that the force of the subj ect m atter has been allo wed to shap e the poem. The story of Edgar Alla n Poe from which Mr. Johnson take s the title of this boo k has for an epigraph a tag from Lully whi ch is a coro llary to Mo ther Ann Lee 's percepti on: Sub conservatione formae specificae salva anima. Nature, not cult ure, is for Mr. Joh nso n the con­ stant mod e of the wor ld; his ever y poe m has been to trace the intr icate and subtle lines of force whe rein man can discern the ord er of his rela tion o � � e natural wor ld. These lines, as Her acli tus suspected, are largely InVI sibl e. Abo ut 250 0 years ago poetry deta che d itse lf from the ritu als of mu�i c a�d dan ce to go into the business of mak ing the invi sibl e visi ble to the Jma nation . This seeing � wh ere there is not hin g to see guid , ed by mere words, IS stil l the mo st astound ing ach ieve men t of the hum an min d. Tr�e irr agin atio n makes up not hing ; it is a way of seei . ng the wor ld. The Ima gm atwn for Ron ald Joh nson is obv iou sly a mo re complex ocess tha n we nor ma lly thin k it. There is the wo rld to be seen, with its ldden har m ny, and ther e is the � poet (or pai nter, or composer) to per­ m the magtc whe reb y we can pos sess the arti st' s visi on. There is mo re. f roughou t hts poe try Mr . Joh nso n is interested to sho w us the wo rld rom mu ltip le angles of visi on, not onl y wh at he can sho w us but wh at others hav e seen also , so tha t we fi nd our selv es not in the com pany of one but of ma ny, and not onl y p oets. All the se voices quo ted in Ro nal d 0 nson' s poe m s are oth er modes of visi on wh ich he . is allo win g to p lay ovenhe su bJ ect 1 a ong wit h his ow n. In the late poe r ms we hav e to learn �ead two poe ms at nee, as in "The Differe nt Musics," and to see ? ap1dly refo cus sed with VISIOn, as in "T he Un fol . din gs . " £ There IS . a WI l d fres h ness abo . ut the se poe ms tha t can not be accounted by th eu .xor · newness of form an d gree nne ss of I. ma ger y. lllg the traditIOn In avo id" a1 form s of t h e poe m, Inc1 udm g the sup ertr adi tion of Modern al form eli Poetry, Mr. Joh nso n also esc ape d the em otio nal clic ng hes tha t them like tick s to a dog . Th ing s wh olly new are per hap s imp oss i-

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ble and a b i t frightening; like all things fresh and bright, Mr. Johnson ' s newness is a reseeing o f things immemorially old. In The B ook o f the

Green Man h e gives us a new look at Wordsworth, and adds Kilvert to the accou nt; it is the conjunction, not the elements, that creates a new light. Much of Mr. John son's i m agery that seems so wonderfully clean

and new has been discovered in out-of-the-way p laces. Invention, we re­

member, really means

finding. The knowledge he likes to teach u s is in­ deed knowledge all but lost. We scarcely think of the poet any longer as a

teacher, but Mr. Johnson does; and if we like to think of the poet as our

conscience and our political guide and a figure SJi'eaking o f contemporary

and fashionable anxieties, we di scover that Mr. Johnson might just as

well be writing in any century you might arbitrarily n ame for all the

mention h e makes of h i s times . There is a brave innocence in this p ro­

gram, and an aptness th at may not come readily to mi n d. It is ch aracteris­

tic of Mr. Johnson's generation and its i m medi ate predecessors that a mind of one' s own is preferable to tagging along with corporate thought. It was Louis Zukofsky, the friend of Whittaker Chambers at Columbia in

its Reddest heyday, who read Gi bbon with an eye to seeing what Marx

would have done about it all and th u s bade farewell to M arx and all his

host. Stan Brakhage, the filmmaker, once banned the newspaper from his

house and substituted Tacitus, which he read to his family daily. He had reached

th e

assassination

of Caesar

on

November

22, 1 9 6 3 .

R.

Buckminster Fuller, a friend of Mr. Johnson's, h as noted that in nature there i s no occasion on which the perimeter of a sphere is passed through

its middle and h as thu s dismissed pi from h i s mathematics. One can note

th at we are looking at an awful lot of Transcendentalism here about

which one could w rite quite an original book. In an essay we can do no more than alert o urselves to Mr. Johnson ' s transcendentalism and note

that he came by it honestly, an d read hi m accordingly. Transcen­

dentalism holds that man must do his percei ving and his thi nking for himself, and that h e must learn how with much discipline and with con­ stant awareness. Much th at is new and rich in Ron ald Johnson ' s poetry

can be traced to his having seen the contents o f his poems with his own

eyes, out of his own curiosity. This charming doggedness, which Mr.

Johnson shares with our best poets writing today, may have saved Amer­

ican poetry from a dis mal return to the academic slu sh into which it is

constantly threatening to si nk. Sensitivity serves well for reading poems

but not for writing them. The same Transcendentalism which flows from

Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman into the best of o u r poetry is the tradi­ tion also whereby it is assumed by ni nety- nine out of a hundred practic­ ing poets th at sensitivity is the whole apparatus fo r making a poem.

He/as. Th e goodness of Ronal d Johnson i s in having got the real Tran­ scendentalism from the very start, the kind that served lves and

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B u ckminste r Full er both of wh om went b ack to ' . .th e b eg mmn g of the ir a rts as if time d i d not exi st and b gan an s ts a to ugh an d h az ard ­ t ��· o u s way of going about o e 's a r ' esp_ecta y If the re are two tho usan d years of trad itio n at one 's bac _ k A n d I t req mr es eno rmo us reso urce fu !n ess, sureness of h and , clar ity of visi on an d gen ms. . But thes e Ron ald ' Johnson has.

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Art is � an ' s teac her, but an is art' s teac her A poe t . usu ally find s hts poetry m anoth er poet . Thi s pro cess us ed to be call ed emu I atw . n, was a dmtr . ed and enc our age d but tum bl ; d . t � d ts . repu te from the Rom anti cs _ to our day , whe n the re ban ner _ o . tf al � ty w as e a rn ed to the bar­ ricades w here it still sta nds . An . d' Inev tta y, It was long ago disc overed that emu latio n is one of the m _ . ost revo l uno n ary forms o f ong · . ma1 tty. The word invention ' whi ch 0 0 ce me ant finding rat h er th an mak mg from scratch, now mea ns findin . aga m. Loo k at El1.ot Ives, poun g d , Joy ce, Ptcasso, Stra vins ky (The . ' mo st ongt. na 1 wrt· ter o f our tim . e, Ger trud e Stei n, still beg ins The Ma kin of A m ertcans Wtth N a p a ssage from the g icho ma cha ean Eth ics , a n d co n ceal s t h e wo rd ros · e 1 0 " A rose ts a rose '' is a rose . ·

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Ron ald Joh nso n's find ing . his oe � Ra dt. os mst. de Paradis e Lost is startlingly mo der n and · _ tho roug y tra Itlo nal. Inso . far as he is mak ing a version of the epi. c h . e Is m t he good compan y o f Wor dswo rth, Blak e, and the Joyce of the Wa ke. And f M . l o h t_ m self, for to the c ra ftsm an ' s eye, _ Milto n fou n d his poem i n th Bi l n Hf mer , tn Ytrg il, tn Jos hua h Syl­ Vester's tra nsl atio n of Gu ill ; u � e e S al uste du Ba rtas 's La Semaine ca lled D ivine We , ekes and o r �s, a n d (as Mi lton sch olar s tend not to know) in Ser afin o del la Sa l an d ra s A damo Ca du t0· I t wou ld be as ra te to s ay that . acc u. . Milton foun d his ept c m th at fierce spir it of the Baroq u e th at had begun al l ove r E uro pe t o sta te th e ten ston b etw een exu ber ance and restrai nt between form an d coot en t b ' etw een t h e two win ds of thoug ht tha t m ' ade th e w,eat h er 0f Md . t on ' s rnln d G reec e and Isra el. The attempt to har nes ' s the m bo th to on e tum . ultuou s ch ano t gave us an d Mi.chela nge Rac ine lo , D u.. rer and M ont a1g N ne or IS th is t he firs t poe m to be reo. p ttat ed from Paradise Los � Prelude is a nothe t. The r ' Wt.th l· ts t ran s l atw n · o f th th erne mto th e psy cho e of Rom a nti logy cis m an d its tra ns mu . n of h tano t e Mi ltom. c P h rase to . e0 ds, wh Its ow n ere by wo rd swort h can beg1. n h IS · poe m Wit . h Sat an' s wo rds propri ate d ap. a new and s e t m con tex t:

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The Geography of the Imagination

Free as a bird to settle where I wil l. What dwelling shall receive me?

Whether Wordsworth wanted us to hear Satan's voice inside h i s own here (and identify London with Jerusalem on high, and see Satan' s wings in that bird, and hear the anguish of the outcast in the question) is the same consideration Ronald Johnson invites throughout hi s text. At least two voices are speaking: Milton's and Ron ald Johnson's. Blake also rewrote Paradise Lost, once as the u nfinished epic called Vala or A Dream of Nine Nights or The Book of·Moon light, and once as his poem Milton. Blake was correcting and amplifying Milton ; he was opening him up, as he said. Some day someone will explain why t� e Romantics wanted to rewrite Paradise Lost and the moderns to rewnte the Odyssey. And then we will have a clearer understan ding of why Ronald Johnson returned, as a signal act of the postmo ?ermst p � nod (The Age of Olson the books wil l get around to nammg It), to Milton. Part of the answer will be th at Ronald Johnson began as a latter-day disciple of Blake. His fi rst poems are modelled on the visionary concerns of a group of young men who used to visit Blake in his old age. It was an October afternoon i n 1 8 24-the year of Byron' s death , Beethoven's Ninth, and the comp letion of the Erie Canal-that the por­ traitist John Linnell took the young Samuel Pa lmer to meet William Blake. (If you translate Palmer into a poet, you have Ronald Johnson , not . exactly, b ut close enough .) They foun d him working in bed on the illu s­ trations to Dante which Lin nel l had commissioned. ( He also commis­ sioned the Job engravi ngs. ) F o r Palmer, a Baptist a n d a n artist, h i s mind shaped b y scripture, Bunyan, and Milton, it was one of those radi ant encounters in which a disciple foun d his m aster. Blake had but three years to live. He was old, troubled by piles and gallstones, but his mind was as bright and as ferti le as ever. In another, more prosperou s, part of London Charles Babbage was building the grandfather of all computers. The steam locomo�ive had been i nvented and was already wobbling along a few short rails. The world said that it was now rational, scientific, p rogressive. When Palmer stepped into Blake ' s simple house at Fountain Court it was as if he had erased th ree thousand years o f hi story and stepped into the tent o f Isaiah · Palmer, in turn, brought his mystical friend the pagan pa inter a n d en­ graver Edward Calvert, and eventually an enclave of enth usiasti � young men who began to call themselves The Ancients- Pa lmer's cousm John Giles, the Rev. Arth ur Tatham and his broth er Fredenck, the painter George Richmond, Franci s Oliver Finch, Henry Walker, and Welby

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Sherman . Only Calvert and Palmer survi ve i n history ; Linnell is half­ rem �mbered; the others deserve to have their n ames kept in the list, epic­ fashwn, because they brightened the last day s of Blake and because they are the fi rst mem bers of a family that exi sts to this day . Ronald Johnson is very much an Ancient of the tribe of William. The world i nto which he came (out of Kansas) offered encounters with Charles Olson and Louis Zuko fsky, who bo th had been friends of Ezra Pound, channel of traditions ( from him you could be one remove from James, Yeats, Ford, Joyce, or if you were s o minded, Brancusi, Gaudier­ Brzeska, Cocteau, Gourmont, or again, Wy ndham Lewis, Eliot, H. D., John Qumn) . At this wri ti ng Zukofsky, our greatest li ving poet, is not . cons.Idered to be our greatest li v i ng poet; Ols o n is slowly being read and studied. Our liveliest literary tradition, as us ual, is an unknown, even an unsus �ected one. It is Ronald johnson's tradition, his fa mi ly, and the custodi an of the thmgs he honors. He came t o it through his Ioli a n friend ?f a decade, Jonathan Williams, lyrical and s a tiric m aster of rhythms and Images, whose masters are Olson, Zukofsky, Catullus, Bunting, and the great god Apollo h i m self. R��ald Johnson's fund of imagery and to nes goes back to Ruskin's _ description and Thoreau' preCisiO n m s exact knowledge of nature, b ack · · to t� e viswnary eyes of Palmer, Dove, and B u rchfield. All that is pa rticu­ . s lendor belongs lar m Its to h i s imagination, Audu bon and John Irel an d, p Cheval the French postman who b uilt an Idea l Palace out of rocks pi cked u p for twenty years, Satie, Arnold Bax, Vi cto rian diarists. He once de­ . scnbed ,my lawn in Kentucky as "all Klimt wi t h violets." . From book to book he has grown more res ponsive to light and pattern In nature; he beli eves that light evo lved the e y e to see itself, an i dea that Would have made a stir among the Platonists at Chartres in the twelfth entury, o r i n the study of Bishop Grosseteste at Lincoln. The m ajor oo�s are A Line Of Poetry, A R ow of Trees ( 1 96 3 ) , The Different Muszcs ( 1 967)- both collect ed in Valley of the Many-Colored Grasses 69)-The B ook of the Green Man ( 1 9 6 7) , Songs of the Ea rth ( 1 9 70), . the wntmg A th e great work now m rk ' p a rt 1 of which is finished ' part 4 of which m ay be Radi os . . T e paradox of originality houses many roo ms, and the views from the �n ows are all different. What the artist see ms to create has ' as the artist ts th e firs t to appreCiate an d acknowledge, al re ady been created . Desi gn rrangement are the artist' s passion. Place is all. The painters caux found their horses in the rock. Wh e rever there was a bulge in th l e cave wall that suggested equine solidity, t hey surrounded it with an e ega nce of mane, legs, an d tail. The nose was drawn first then ' in a . maste rfu1 strok e, th e beautiful hoe from fac e to butt, the hori zon of

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h orse. We have found this line all by itself, whether u nfinished or su fficient to say " horse" we shall never know. This line survives in the Chinese ideogram meaning horse, ma, together with the prancing legs that are man's fi rst graph of the verb to move. Poetry and painting have a passport through time; historical styles w hi c h are the essence of a work of art to the historian are the artist's last consideration. So there is no anomaly in Ronald Johnson's choosing Milton to fuse into a new poetic symbiosis. The choice, however, was pu re genius. Toward the end of the nineteenth century Milton was already going out of fashion . Men with the surest command of•English-especially the two masters Doughty and Hopkins-were turning away from the Re­ naiss ance donation of English diction and going back to native words and phrases. Yeats and Pound (outlanders, note) completed the process toward a natural, genial diction, and Milton was damned for writing no English at all. He was artificial. He was Latinate. (This is illusion. Eighty per cent of the words in Paradise Lost are of Anglo-Saxon derivation. Milton used far fewer Latinisms than Gibbon, and only sixty percent of Shakespeare's words are of English origin. And he was the most sparing of stylists-the word afternoon occurs but once in all his writing, abrup t, inconvenient, and America n ) . Milton was indeed arti ficial. His sonorous, highly p ictorial style was evolved to impose classical form on one of the most energetic langu ages since Greek. A meticulously conscious artist in an age that knew the use­ fulness of art, Milton understood exactly where he was in history, and what he had to do to give his art its step in the pace of time. Time, Pythagoras had said, is the mind of the stars. The book in which you could h ave found that sentence was printed in Paris in 1 5 5 2, a trans­ lation into Latin of Plutarch's On the Generation of the Soul. Within the decade men would be born in England who wo uld invent a poetry which they imagined was like that of the ancient world. All Europe by this time knew that a lost world was being recovered, a world th at contained Plato and Homer, Pythagoras and Plutarch, Diodorus the Sicili an, St. Jerome and Virgil, Ovid and Catullus. The fi rst bright dawn of the Renaissance in England did not take time to study the economy of tone of the Greek and Latin which i t was eager to h ave in English . With the old genius of British poetry the fi rst trans­ lators went at their matter undaunted, godlike. Here is Arth ur Golding doing Ovid: She scarce had said these words, but that she leaped on the wave, And getting to the ships by force of strength that Love hir gave, Upon the King of

Candies

Keele in spight o f him she clave.

Whome when hir fa ther spide (for now he hovered in the aire,

R onald Johnson

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And bein g mad e a Hob by Hau ke d i d soare betw een a paire Of mmb le wmgs on y ron May le) · he souse d d own a mam . e To seaze upon h1r as she hung and woul d h ' a ve t orn h.It fame · · . W It h bowm g B ea k e.

George Chap man tran slatin g Hom er: This sh ield thus done , he forg 'd for him such cure rs as ours hin'd The blaze of fi re . A helm et then (thro ugh whic h n o steel e coul , d fi n d Fore t passa ge) he com posd e, who se hue a hund red colo urs took e· And m the crest a p l u me of gold , th at each brea th stirr' d he stuc e · All done , he all to Thet is brou ght, and held up all to he She took e them a l l , and like t' the haw ke ( s u rn a med the Ossp ringe r) , From Vulc an to her m1gh t1e sonn e, with that so glori ous show Stoop t from the steep e Olym pian ' hill, hid in etern al! snow .

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head long mete r wou ld be tam ed by Mar lowe , �hakespeare, Jonson,andSpen ser, each in his own tone ( Shak espe are in a

�ndre d t ones ) , ye� the energy rem aine d, and the idio m rem aine d En­ gltsh , glon. ous Eng hsh. In thts seco nd perfectio n of the lang uage (the first was Ch auce r) , the Btbl e was tran slate d with a m ajest y of phra sing . a mus t o f nuan ce an� paus e, a stren gth of dict ion that has neve r b : . en equa ed m any vers ton of scrip ture :

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Lift up y ou r head s, 0 y ee gate s, And be y e lift up y e ever lasti ng door es · ' And the King of glor y sh all come i n . Who ! s this king of glor y? The LORD stro ng and mig htie , The LORD mig hty in batr ell.

The P �ft who wou eve a new visio n of Eng lish poet ry and turn it �. rrevoca y �award ldtheachipure mod els of Gre ek and Lati n was the atec��er Milt on. As he cou ld have look ed out the win dow and ���� akesreare and aJonbaby son in the ir tall, dov e-gr ay felt hats and

roya l cape s, o he h ed o n the stree � t that one took to get to the tave � _ rn with a mer mat d on tts shm gle. av e no n otio n wha t serv ed Sh akes pear e for relig ion, the scho larly an b born ons j on was som eti mes p rote stan t, som etim es Cath olic· . English tnte ' llectu a l s wer e apt to r un to Co n· nth· tan ' man ners unti l re minded by t h e can non , s mou th or the hea dsm an 's ax that they wer e Chri stian T� e you ng Mtl ton was p ious and grav e, a Pur itan with some­ thin of pr vate t�eolo gy ( as his grea test emu lato r Blak e kne w very well L'k I e ot er Pu nta ns he was a h uma nist , che rish ing p agan lore for its . beau Wts dom � Cot to Mat her read his Ovi d alon � g with his Calvin) . . He dy ts mm d wtth Latm , Gre ek, and Heb rew at Cam bridge, did the

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grand tour (Galileo let him look through hi s telescope, and probably as­ sured him in w hispers that Copernicus was right: the earth is a planet among others that circles the sun, which great light, like God, moves all without itself moving) . He became Latin secretary to Protector Cromwell (on whose guns was inscribed " God is Love" ) , and here he read and wrote himself blind. When the king returned, he withdrew into a houseful of daughters and composed his epic. We are told that he got the lines straight in his head upon waking, and in the freshness of the morning announced that he was ready to be milked. He sat across a chair, his back against one arm, his knees over the other. One visitor described him in a suit of rusty green, and we are told that before bedtime he regaled himself with the pleasure of a pipe of Virginia tobacco and a cold glass of water. Even in his blind­ ness he wore his sword. The great poem he dictated-twice, as he expanded it amost imme­ diately after i ts first edition from ten to twelve books-was the greatest verbal expression of the Baroque style w hich culminates the Renaissance, aggrandizing its spirit to a lyric grandeur. Music to Shakespeare was the lute ; to Milton, the organ. While he dictated, the long rule of Louis XIV began, no rain fell in India for three whole years, Velazquez painted the Spanish court and Vermeer Dutch housewives pouring milk, the Turks cut their way through Hun­ gary and Transylvania toward Vienna, and certain children were born and baptized Daniel Defoe, Henry Purcell, Matthew Prior. In t he Ameri­ can colonies Michael Wigglesworth publi s hed The Day of Doom, which sold more copies than any book of poetry ever p u blished in this country. And 3 1 0 years later a poet in San Francisco sits down with the text and begins to erase it. So that it now begins "0 tree into the world, Man the chosen Rose out of Ch aos: song." Trees come into the world (from seeds underground) in answer to light, and once there they convert our breath into oxygen which we breathe again, and they digest light in order to ferment water and minerals which they have brought up from the earth into a nourishing green, which we can eat, or eat the animal that has eaten the green . No tree, no man. We rose out of chaos together, and the rose is an o rder of petals symbolizing the opposite of chaos. The poem we are reading is still Milton's, but sifted. The spare s catter­ ing of words left on the page continues to make a coherent poem, Milton imagiste. (Wordsworth and Blake did the same thing to the poem, except that they filled up the spaces again with their own words.) Strange and wonderful things happen on these pages. Here, for i nstance, Milton is made to anticipate the first Duino Elegy :

R onald johnson 201

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entire, the hea rt to wo rk i n fire , wo rds The Arc h.

The se pag es at fi rst glan . ce loo k ha haz ard (as a Cub ist pam . tmg . seemed to firs t viewers to be an acc iden t . Th ar� not . There IS a pag e tha t has the wor d man at the . top, flo er In t e mid dle, and star at the bott om. The re are othe r wor d s on t e pag e, and they help us see the rela tion ship between man ' flo wer, an d star . One ord er . s: ' o f wor d s give 'ma n passed thro ugh fi re I . His t �m Ie ngh . t aga mst the blac k. " It is, fo r inst anc e, elec tro che mic al . ene y m ram cell s der ived from p hot osy nth e­ tic sug ars in veg etab les wh ere y we can see a star at all, and the fire of the star we call the sun thus a rran ged th at It cou ld be seen an d t h oug ht of by nou rish ing th e b ram · . Is th at sys tem cl o e d '. D '" d �h e sun gr w the tree tha made the pap er you are hol t � . k din g' and t e In on It, so tha t It can read this boo k thr oug h you r eyes ? Th e eye as a kin d of sca . . . nne r for the sun Is an ' d ea Wit h a glim pse of God in i t. It is kno wle dge , . In Mi l ton s myt h ma n was crea ted to be li. ke a li on, Wit h ins tin cts Su . h cre atu e fulfi lls Itse lf by bei ng an exc elle nt lion (the rose kno ws n �thi g u t to e a rose) . He fee ls, b reed s, figh ts, eat s ' sleeps. He wi ll nev er k now th e h arm ony of num . b ers or com pos e a par hta. He wil l nev er bu ild an Id ea I pa I ace or tell a folk tale to his nie ces or . nephews But h e li ves In a paradi. se . If h e were to 1 ose tha t par adis e, he would ha ve to beg ,· . . n fi n dmg . aga m. It He wo uld kn ow he wa s in a n a t I· en tate, . and h is kno wledge wou ld be tragi c. The kn � owledg e of goo d a nd evd t� at ma n cho se tur ned out (as h e coul d not to be h a ve sus pecte d) me anm . g Iess. He cou 1 d kno w fact wh Ich are n eut s' ral ' h ear t I ess ' apt to ser v� one opm · wn · To knowled as wel l as ano the r. ge must be added gra ce. ' It Is at this tur nin g of Mi that Ron ald lto n s p lot · joh nso n see ms to h a e b eco me mte res ted in foll ow ton through � ing Mi lhis z f w o d , m tent isolating �m minin g a p a rticul ar o re, on , fo r gre r l rity ' s ngl e ra dIan t qua lity . When Satan ( who is the ess nce of not h mg) . te mpted an into know­ edge, he exi � led him from li on oo d' from a harm ony With cre atio n. We

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can call this a blindness, and the search for understanding a hu nger for . that vision. It was Blake who saw that seeing eyes can be perfectly blwd, they can see without that special gift of apprehenswn that h � Identifi.ed . with Christ, redemption, and grace. Milton calls t�e mmd ' mfin1tude confined" (Ronald Johnson retains these words m hts erasure). . Nature has no nothing. To feel that it has is what we call the devil, the enemy. In Blakean words, our predicament is that we can extst and snl\ not be, for being requires an awakeness from the dream of custom and of ourselves. The self is by nature turned outward to connect Wit� the har­ mony of things. The eyes cannot see thems � lve:;, but somethmg other. The strange and paradoxical rule of nature IS that we are fullest I � our being by forgetting our being. To love nothtng ts. to be nothmg, to give Is to have. Radii are the lines outward from a center. We exist because o f th � ra d. · of the sun (because of the radii of God, Milton would say) . Radta � �e, wheel after wheel of it, whether of benevolence or mustc or attennon, Is a basic pattern of life. . . of knowledg . This Knowledge is a kind of ignorance, ignorance a kmd � peculiarly American perception runs through our lt �eratu �e, wellmg up . from our experience. Wind brought us over, pushmg satls, and spmt brought us over, pushing minds, and our greatest efforts ha� e always been to harness energy. With forgivable innocence and unforgtvable ar­ rogance we mistook the knowledge of others for ignorance as often as we mistook our ignorance for knowledge. Learning has al.w ays the:efore been a conversion for us. Our literature is one of persuaston and dtscovery, of vision. . our poets have al­ Behind the mask of custom there is natural hfe, ways said; inside history, light. Our calipers f�r taking the measure of nature have never been on a human scale. Melville saw that a spermato­ zoon is a microscopic whale. Gertrude Stein, remembering Emerson, satd that moonlight in a valley is before and after history. Poe could find a symbol for all of European civilization-Alaric the Vi sigoth's black crow surmounti ng a bust of Athene-and make a ghost story of It. We have sought a thoroughly enigmatic and inclusive sy mbol of the world all our art showing fear in a handful of dust, affectton . a handful of grass ( ':I guess it must be the handkerchief of the Lord"), death in the buzz of a fly. . places and make a new Foragers by destiny, we like to go into famthar report of the contents-Henry Adams to Chartres, Pound to Chma, ? !­ son to Yucatan. All too characteristically we have no notton what :'e re looking for; we are simply looking. Something, we feel� t�; national hunch-is always there. Louis Zukofsky began wntmg A 1 92 5 , u

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fini shin g it fifty yea rs later (the first g Am erican poe m to he fini shed since Melvil le's Clare[) , ma kin g it uplon as he wh o put in a fou nda tion wit hou t any idea went along, like an arc hitect whether he would continue in glass or bric k. So Olson wrote his Maxim Pou nd his Can tos , Wh itm an his Leaves of us, Wil liam s his Paterso n, Gra ss. Ronald Johnson is writing a long poe m call his wor kta ble, visi ons in his hea d. It is a poem ed Ark, variou s schema on the concerns of his ear lier poetry, unf old ing thetha t grows natura lly out of to':"ard noontide. But no soo ner had he mo m like a sunrise mat urin g ved into this com plex and bnlha.nt poe m, a masterpiece of new forms and rhy thm s, tha n he (true Am enc an forager) fou nd an idea along the wa y. He found a poem insi de ano the r poe m. All he had to do wa s to rem ove the superfluous wo rds . Works of art in response to other works of art crea te a sym bolic cho rd reachin g acr oss the two . Uly sses in Itha ca, Ulv sses in Dub lin: a web of mea nin g not entirely under Joy ce's control brid ges the extremes and be­ gins genera ting rati os. We can recognize in Ron ald Joh nso n's derived poem an image of Am eric a as a paradise lost ; it is a them e of the times. We. can recognize the constant American the me of wo nde ring all over agam what to do with the gift of creation . Mil ton had the sen se that the Reformation was wak ing the hum an spir it to thin gs it had aba ndoned through error and negligence. It d and per hap s urgent purpose for po.etry to speak to a people whois, aatvali st, h ave no vision of the gift of betng other than to mak e money, slidwor e (or and to spe nd the rest of their tim e before rip) aro und in an aut om obi le, t�em t�t Ha ley' s M.O . unclogs the slug a box tha t alternately informs gish bowel and that fighting con­ tmu es the streets of Bei rut . Radi os is a med itat io n, firs t of all, on grace. lt finds in Milton 's �oems those clusters of words which were orig ina lly a mo lecu lar intu i­ tlon of �he com ple x har mo ny of nature sourc� tn the sun , the ear th, the tree wh ere by eyesight loo ps back to its galaxtes, and my ste riou sly to the , our cou sin ani mals, the spi rall ing these elements ("crea tion " wa s inh um an black of empty spa ce. Ou t of and our social order. At the cenMi lton's word) aro se our ima gin ed gods on the origin of wheat. (By ter of the Greek spir it wa s a meditation ana log y the center of Am eric an spir it should be a tem ple to petrole um , but we don't hav ethe even tha t.) As I write this a spaceship is circ ling Ma rs, its computer eyes loo kin g for a place to lan d. It wil l rep ort bac k, if it functions, that the re i s nothing there. but deso 1 auo · n. A stm · · 1 ar voyage to all the oth t er pla s wil l report noth mg, nothing, nothin g. That we are alone in a univernet and h tte sta se of red stars b . rs, a catast he of ltght and electr ic thu nder o f tim e viant forever, forever brigrop : ht, fifty-eight .sexti llio ?, seven hun dre li n, seven hundre d qui�til. n mt! es wid d and stxty quadnllto e (by Einstein's 10

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to live with , as reckoni � g), . 's. :he plal·n fact our a e will have to learn of the sun, a planet a is earth I the hat � earn d to Milton m hts lifetime h a smallish star. . . g :o tell us about events in space called The astronomers are begmnm a revolutiOn black holes and naked parti culan u es. Some cyl_ cle h �s madea vis ion of the ade n o t l M ere h w a pomt t and come aroun d agam . somehow still is t momen new our t a Th It. � m world and of man's place , . poet only that ry discove a scove d s on ohns ald Ro Miltonic is n J l r:�d sha pens our sense of apoet ry r ances h en at h t y cou ld make ' a discover . h rld . wo e t to way new a in and opens our eyes ·

Poetry� s Golden

While the First National Poetry Festival convened in Coolidge Audi­ torium of the Library of Congress to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, one of the hardier survivors of the Re­ naissance of 1 9 1 0 (its founder and first editor Harriet Monroe died in 1936; its present editor is the poet Henry Rago), and to inaugurate an annual Oktoberfest, sponsored by the Republic, of recitations and criti­ cal scrutiny, Ezra Pound dozed under his editor's .eyeshade on the Via MacKay in Rapallo; William Carlos Williams sat in the morning sun among his Demuths, Sheelers, and Audubons at 9 Ridge Road, Ruther­ ford, N.J., T. S. Eliot was at his desk in Russell Square; Marianne Moore Was painting watercolors in Greece. At the last minute Robert Penn War­ ren fell ill in Connecticut and Robert Lowell and John Hall Wheelock senr their regrets. Archibald MacLeish, Conrad Aiken, and Arthur 205

206

Th e Geogra phy of the I m agination

Freeman budged not from Cambridge. Kenneth Patchen, Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gregory Corso, Carl Sandburg, Richmond Latti­ more, and W. H. Auden moved in courses which did not transverse the Library of Congress, where one could hear a confused h i gh-school �irl saying to th e battalion of poetic geni us before h er, " But, l mean , you re all college professors!" . The festival raged for three days, mornings, afternoons, and evenmgs. There were some h eady moments, some beautiful fights, and in a mong the heavyweight talk some fine exch anges among masters of words, as when Muriel Rukeyser, embattled in a plea for volca nic spontaneity as the unfettered condition of poetry, brought ] . V. Cu nningham to his feet to say, "Madame, you are an eloquent and warm-blooded woman .. I am a cold-blooded reductionist. Let us leave it at that." Whereupon Sn Her­ bert Read announced that form was shape, and that shape was economy. Cunningham rose again. "Sir Herbert," h e said, " my meditations on form began in profound disagreement with you and I h ave had no occa-

sion to ch ange my mind." . The session, given over to worrying publi cly about poetry's a u dtence m America, began in antique ideas and soon foundered. Miss Babette Deutsch ( Mrs. Avrah m Yarmolinsky ) , still on the barricades of the twen­ ties, asked (glass of water in h and) , " Who answers to the name of poet, what manner of man or woman ? " Her water reminded h er that Shelley, Hart Crane, Virginia Woolf, and Li Po all drowned. Then she assured us that no beatniks were present and that only Sir Herbert Read spoiled the gathering's being a proletarian bloc. As evidence of poetry' s h ard times . Miss Deutsch produced The Congressional Anthology, offensive m the first instance through i ts sponsorship by the International Ch ristian Leaders, a "pious and p atriotic" club, and in the second by its generous connoisseurship of Edgar Albert Guest and Ella Wheeler Wilcox. Kipl­ ing' s "If" and Joyce Kilmer's "Trees" also appear i n this compendium ( Kenton Kilmer, the poet' s son, was in our audience) along with other detrimenta. Whereas, we are told, Russi an poets of th e fi rst water enj oy a " large and enthusiastic public," Tovarishch Yevtushenko and h i s follow­ ing being evinced as a more ideal relationship than the " American poet can claim" (except, of course, those who don' t deserve it and get quoted ' by legislators) . Langston H ughes jovi ally denied Miss Deutsch s contentions, giving his own lively career as counter-evidence. . Mr. Howard Nemerov spoke in despair. A sweet despau, to be sure, and having made a disclaimer of patriotism for himself and one for poetry as "a mi nistry of propaganda and culture," he animadverted on the delicate uselessness of poetry, shuddered to contemplate "the gnm phalanx of poets" before him, announced that "life i s h op eless and beau­ tiful," and sat down. .

Poetry's Golden

207

Karl Shapir o wistfu lly reported that Yevtus henko s poetry sells in ' editions of 1 00,000 , begged not to be mistak en for a patriot i f he used the adjective "Amer ican," recom mende d euthan asia for Americ an poetry , a nd revealed that the real poetry of the U.S. is its prose. "The dawn of American poetry still lies ahead." Ther� was an embar rassin g mome nt when Mr. John Klapa ck asked, " What ts a poem ?" Richar d Wilbu r, to whom the questi on was directe d declined to answer . Mr . Nemer ov offered an emend ati on of Archib alcl MacLeish: a p oem should mean and be. Mr. Unterm eyer a lso decline d to answer the questio n but warne d us that poets are not seers nor sages no r philosopher s. Mr . Wil bur then procee ded to sugges t th at if one has to ask, one is never going to know what a poem is. From time to ti me within the polem ic, rhetor ical questio ns, and incred­ ibly opaque formal papers ( "the impulsion to contin ue with the alexan ­ drine," "a poetic hold of a focus of a range of referen ce") there were hopeful mome nts when it seemed that someo ne migh t say somet hing sig­ nificant. " I h ave never heard the beatni ks read," John Crowe Ranso m said, " but I u n dersta nd that they somet imes read to musica l accom pani­ ment." Prof. J ames V. Baker , of the Univer sity of Houst on referred to Allen Ginsb erg's Howl as " a verbal vomit '' and hoped tha; Allen Tate would agree; but Mr. Tate refused "to autho rize that identi ficatio n." �ss Deuts ch declared that our poets will be read when "supe rannu ated Ideas are not allowe d to contro l twent ieth-ce ntury weapo ns, and it must be soon, " an d wh en sh e was asked to retrac t h e r words , quoted Kierkegaarq on the prope nsities of swine . Mr. Tate confe ssed publicly that h e h a d recently refuse d t o write for t h e Saturday Eveni ng Post a n d now feels t�at h e did rang. And so it went, until one began to see that panel � . discus sions wtll go down in history as one of the charac teristic aberra ­ tions of our age, as peculi ar to us as bull leapin g to Cnoss ans . Rober t Frost, enterin g, broug ht the audien ce to its feet. The real tradi­ . tion which fo r three days eluded the wits and embar rassed the critics was palpa bly presen t. With shuffl ing nonch alance the smi li ng poet began to constru ct the past that h ad cared for him in his beginn ing: Harol d Munro, "a poet who ran a books tore," his ear ly pu blisher s, Susan Hayes Ward, Thom as Byrd Moshe r, Edwar d Thom as, Lascel les Aberc rombi e, Mark Va n Doren . He saved until the end of his talk hi s eulogy to Harri et Monroe and Ezra Pound . Two theme s figure d in i ntrica te contr ast t? rough h is s � endid ly ramb ling talk. One was a mode st b ut firm i nspec ­ p _ tion of �h e spmt of h1s own poetr y. "It' s tone I ' m in love with · that's what p oet :r IS, ne." The other r was a sly, shrew d comm entary �n h is recent �� Russian VISit, which he ironic ally called "an experiment in trans lation that turned out to be an absolu te loss." "I could n't see if my poetr y was . any good tn Russia n and they couldn' t see if I was any good in Englis h. It Mr.

208

gin a ti on The Geograp hy of the Ima

n he at a h und red yard s in fog. " Whe was like duel l ing with batt le-ax es pol­ is, that f, grie from e vanc ish grie com plai ned that they cann ot dist ingu " Man t Grea "the y l mere wer e not itics from poet ry, one felt that they ks wor othe r way thro ugh out) and all his (he referred to Khr ushc hev i n no . "A ere ywh ever ry poet to l es ini mica and all he stan ds for, but th e forc in a side own his take to ded dmin Libe ral," h e said , " i s a man too broa than t kno dian Gor the with fuss rath er quar rel." And : "A Libe ral wou ld ki at Man had said to him , " As Gor Gre the that ered emb ' rem He cut it. ' too g such a thi ng as a coun try's bein rem arke d to Tols toy," 'Th ere's al, misc hief in his eyes : " Very intel lectu soft-h earted to figh t.' " Then with that Great M an!" old voic e was anything but indepenNo one imag ined that this gran d a his own tough mas tery of poet ry and dence itsel f, non part isan except to two r t of cour tesy ," referred to "ou jealo us love of freedom. He h ad, "ou ' s pres ence and had been assu red Man kind s of dem ocra cy" in the Grea t ets catio n to peac e. The Cu ban rock by him pers onal ly of Rus sia's dedi e spok t ds wer e spok en and as Fros were bein g seated even as thos e wor n dow let to effect the bloc kade . " I feel that nigh t our fleet was on its way

by him, you know .'' s h ad let him dow n, so had the But if the man ipula tors of griev ance its before him. It was trad ition and defenders agai nst grief, the poe ts ­ audi ned lear fina lly. He accu sed his mem ory and care that he i nsisted on pas­ a gly To prov e it , he quot ed lovin ence of not k now ing its real past . atio n of myr tles and rose s . . . " and agit old e sage of poet ry begi nnin g "Th no one one there coul d iden tify it. And confi dent ly but sadly said that no

Where Poems Come From

coul d.

�oo �s h ave family resemblances and tribal affinities. Stanley Burnshaw's

r;ause on the poe�ic afflatus , The Seamless Web ( 1 9 70 ) , is a grandchild

Ar�hur Koestler s !he Act of Creation ( 1 964) and The Ghost in the Machzne ( 1 967) and ts a cousin to Rene Dubas ' s So Human an A nrma 1 0

and a 11 th e recent b ooks we, ve been getting from the New Biology and its a�t �ndant prophets-roughly Konrad Lorenz and h is circle. The slightly ms r figure of Eugene Ma rais haunts these new Calvinists-Marais e oger Cas emen: of biology. It was he, the �bscure South Africa � . wntmg perversely in Afrikaans and wearing his misan­ a ateu ctenttst t r py - e an opera cape, who tore open the closed question of man' s . � J ?cts �nd starred the search for a definition of man that does not set _ m bhnd fatth that we are born blank-mi nded. Along with the news that we are born programmed wtth th e instincts of the animal we are has _ co me a sptll of attendant suspicions. I f man is a brute only par;ially ·

l

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209

Wh ere Poems Come From

Ima gin atio n The Geo gra phy of the

210

· t. M 'Jght not the sam e .spo oky a sCJe ntJs . also an art ist and nes s, tame d , h e 1s . . 1 ous y, m ad pos ses sive . aggress .iOn , Jea . cts tha t driv e h im to his mstm K ? Mr. oes ­ ' at th e root of his creati ven ess s I Je and oth er ape-like pos t.ure g and now . Mr. nonon Wit h m uch lear nin ' tIer h as pon d ered this com e up Wit h a ough h und red of books and p Bur nsh aw has sea rch ed thr sou rce of poetry from dee t ess r p ­ ner raggle-taggle and bre ath l l tra cen f- plo ed rav i nes of the s an dow n 1 0 the arte sian wel l vou s sys tem . tro ubl e wit h Mr . . ' ffi cu I t to deCJ. d e if the . Or so he say s. It IS dl re on o ur kne es e lab ors h is sub ject man ! we � Burn sha w's boo k is tha t h ' own tat ion s t h at h IS ' as b rou ght i n so ma ny quo cry ing for mer cy, or I f h e h read as h nsh aw hea p . i n any cas e, Mr . Bur . The per sp!. cad. ty gets I ost m the en Op voi ces. The resu I t IS a conf usio n of taent .ire Iy too m any boo ks . quo 06) pag e ( 1 d y ou wil l find on a single e, � Seamless Web at ran dom an Bla , Eck erm ann ts, A . C. Bra dley ' Go eth e, tmg non s fro m He rac litu s, Yea quo on h Bac The n xt pag e be gins wit Plat o, Ma rita m, and Bac on. s , but let loo se now k d Go pan s. oo o Luc reti us quo ting Ana xag ora rns h aw is talk ing h ot er a Itt e, a n Mr . Bu all tog eth er the y elb ow eac righ t alo ng wit h the . sub ject of Mr . find with som e ing enu ity the The rea der mu st t ere fore ran . . It , . IS d I' ffUSed thr oug h so ma. ny . IS, It Bur nsh aw s essa y. Wh ateV er h er rat IS it . an d obl iqu itie s th at · d tes t .lm om. als ' '1 II ust ran ons , ed domIy pos lte ask n stio the que . one h as h 0 ld of i t I thin k fine ly shredded by the n me fur the And 1 spir itua l stat e ge e rate by the essay is thi s : Wh at haw rns Bu r. M s try to ma n . The . n: Wh a t goo d IS poe . ther que sno . le wh o said tha t Keb hn . ] y b n gJve n IS n ' like s to thi s sec ond que stJo car pen try e arts , I sh o ld thi nk, fro m t l a o d So e. san n ma ps poe try kee to mus ic. ally thr oug h . . M Bur nsh aw mo ves ecle ctic To a nsw�r his fi rst quest! O · a libr ary of and i t of h u ndreds of p oets, the New Bw logy , the obzter c s rich boo k thi of trea sure , a d the rea din g cri ti cism . He has fou nd ma ny ns to Mr . ste li sta�e m w �· ch one sim ply oug ht perha ps to be a rela xe a cha rm ­ h wit I t IS h ke bem g in the roo m Bu rnsh aw' s fervent mon olog ue. hun dred l era sev . foun d a b 1 g su bj' ect in mgl y mte1 1·1gen t man w ho has . thi s asout tin this way : tha t :Vay , poin boo ks. He atta cks the subject book er aft k bo w a 11 the wh 1le tak mg d o n are tute ness and th at percepti On, you end the sag e. �a . ng h e rd him to ce and read ing the rele van t pas en her � c ts i for you mi g t con . en s e it all ve sti ll a bit puzzled as to how you ' ussion disc nt . tha t It IS an 1m p orta and thru st, b ut you are aw are th is bo ok : it mv Jtes of ess I n . u f se . u ate J d e J mm hea rd. And tha t ma y be the n a gau ntl et. I tles , an d ma y flin g dow osl cun w ne s use · aro on, I n a specu ·

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found myself being most grateful for Mr. Burnshaw's dismissing the cur­ rent vulgar opinion that poetry is self-expression. At the risk of offeri ng a map in p rimary colors for what in reality is a densely wooded kingdom, I think we might say that Mr . Burnshaw wants to tunnel through the world of Descartes and Locke and get back to the pri mal sense of art as inspiration, possession, vision. And he wants to do it not with enthusiasm and wishful thinking but with the unviolated rea­ son of science, or at least with the moral support of several advance scouting parties a mong the biologists. He wants to locate the origin of poetry neither in the desire for elegant sel f-expression nor in the rational, objective desire of the artist to be a steady fulcrum for the world's moral uplift. Poetry comes rather from a more intricate and unexplored source. It comes not from the mind but from the body. Such an idea can be both maddeningly intractable and wonderfully useful. Mr Burnshaw finds in it the discernible heaves and throbs of the power of poetry to move us with vari ously modulated emotions. Metric derives from the dance; the m usic of poetry is therefore addressed to and originates in the muscl es. The tongue dances right along with feet and arms, and there is obviously some p lexus deep in the inwards of the cen­ tral nervous system that is the heart of the dance. Every movement of a poem can be traced to corresponding physical resonances. Like music and pai nting, it arises from the total organism. Mr. Bu rnshaw, with these potent matters before him, devotes the greater part of his energies to the fact that poetry , like any creative im­ pulse, is .more li kely than not born in the anarchy of strong emotion, and must be tamed before bei ng shaped into a sy m bol of uni versal com­ prehension. The poem is born raw and bloody, the darkness of dreams still clinging to it. It is frequently in con flict with the code of the tribe. If it is a successful poem, it has the busi ness of modifying the sensi bilities of the order into which it is introduced. Mr. Burnshaw's arguing of these perceptions proceeds with much heat and perhaps too much documenta­ tion and illustration. The reader finds himsel f longing for an outline, or for a succinct grap h . The reader will also fi n d himself practically a t every point wanting to join in the discussion. Any knowledge of the arts will never overlap anothe r knowledge of th e arts, and I must now continue this essay not as a for mal re sponse to a book whi ch I have been asked to assess for th e reading com munity, but as a response from a parti cular reader who has foun d the book to be extremely interesting but also a little confusing and someti m es wide of its ai m . Fi rst of a l l , I kept buildi ng u p expectations that were n o t satisfied.

21 2

The Geograp hy of the Imagination

Wh ere Pocnzs Come Fro m

thought surely that Mr. Burnshaw would get around to the very modern thinkers and artists who seem to me to have contributed to h is su bject. Nowhere, for instance, do I find Ray L. Birdwhistell , Jr. , the wizard kinesiologist who knows more about eyesight, the movements of the body, and the reverberations of emotion within the body t h an any man alive. If reading a poem makes the hair crawl on the back o f your neck , right eye di late a minim. It will be a great day when Mr . Burnshaw meets Dr. Birdwhiste l l . And Stan Brakhage. H i s Metaphors o n Visio n is a s resourceful a set o f

insights into t h e creative process as we h ave h ad recently, a n d Brakhage's store of knowledge about the body and perception is (I suspect) way out

;

in advance of science.

And Robert Ke lly, that great singer of the body ? And Gottfried Benn and his ideas about p ri m al vision ? And Louis Zukofsky and Charles network of quotations not for his fascinating analyses of the creative process but as the purveyor of a secondary source for a quotation of Dostoiev sky . Joyce is passed over altogether. It is, of course, absurd to keep pointing out what one would li ke to see i n a book. But these inatten­ tions serve to define a curious thing about this book: it is flattened against When Mr. Burnshaw writes such a sentence as, "To anyone personally

for the high purpose of producing objects to give other people p leasure or instruction or knowledge or moral guidance is simply too ludicrous to be borne," he discloses his determination to believe that poetry can only be the voice of a possessed initiate. He also condescends from an apparent vantage of great p rivilege; even so, I who am less privileged, would like to witness for the opposite view and say that it is not in the least ludicrous to

imagine poets producing obj ects (curious phrase !) to give other people pleasure, instruction, knowledge, and moral guidance. In fact, it seems to me to be the great enterprise of modern poetry to do just that; we live amongst the most moralistic pack of versifiers ever to be set loose on a public since the days of Michael Wiggleswort h . Allen Ginsberg is a minor Hebrew prophet, Robert Lowell a master of the di dactic, Gregory Corso a friar scholastic, Robert Creeley an anguished moralist. Poetry is not yet capable of escaping from the context given it by Transcendentalism. I cannot think of a poet who does not think of himself as having <J. purpose and a h igh calling. What in the worl d would the reviewers and p rofessors do if we were to have a Catullus or a Sappho? There has been only one poet in English

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Olson and their clarities about breat hing ? Thomas Mann figures in the

acquainted w i th creative artists, the picture of poets busying themselves

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the centrifuge of a passionate argument.

2!3

sin ce Ch rist oph er Sm art wh o was unt ouc hed by the mo ral fer vor Transc end ent alis m · the of re's no nee d to add ' th at he ' s unread . In fact, . the re's grea ter pur pos e . . in not me n u onm g . h 1s na me, as lt · wo u l d b e tos smg h1s cro wn of laur el into . b ewJ. 1 derm ent an d Ind . i ffer enc e . That IS, . for all hls . car efu l ins pec tio n of t e h k md . s of VOi. ce Wit . h w h 1ch poe ms spea k ' Mr B u rns . h aw sees the po em s a partt· u I a r k m . d of poe try t O the exc lusi on of oth er kin � ds. p etr y for Im Is lyn c or ele gia c alm � wholly, and I thin k wha t ost m ove s h 1 m IS song' th e n· ch . . surge o f em otw the rad ian t glory of spe ech n, . in flIg " h t. Th I" S IS spl end id ' o f co urs e, b ut It tends tow ard a p urit ani sm · tha t d.l ml. m.s h es our tas te fo r the com ic, the sati ric, the grotesque , the nar rat" v poe , t h e w� ole som e and dra b. Poe try is mo st cert ain ly as M ; s aw elu CJ dat es, he mo � st inte nse of ma n's voi ces . T 0 dev ot � a I o n g an mt n cate book to I ts sour ce withi n the spirit, a nd to the te n s ions o f I t s cre atiO n and . recep uo · n, IS · an ent erpnse tha t can onl y be p raised , p an 1cu 1 ar I y . wh e I IS wn · tten · b y a sch ola r as me xha usti bly cur iou s and as we 11 rea d as Mr . Bur nsh aw . Yet I fee l tha t the re is a l i mit in� asym me �� t o this stu dy- a mis sin g roo m to the stru ctu re. An i n sp e cu on of o gm s oug ht also to con n itse lf wit h fina l cau ses cer n . _ tim · Ou r cen tur y IS eb oun d m · Its · psy cho log ical bia s; fut ure ages wil l ma rve l at our l. nw ard nes s, at the ferv or o f our su bjec tivi ty. It wo u l d be use fu I to h ave a co mp a n IOn · boo k to M r . B urns h aw ' s tre atis e on th e b"ut h o f poe · ms- a stu dy o f P etry ln the wor l d ' Its · effe ctiv ene ss and <:> . i ts use ful nes s . I wo uld hke to thm k tha t use of po etr y is to tea the ch W"1 th In . t h e arts we h th e me mo ry of ma nki nd In a �ay no oth er con tin uu m of cult ur � h a s kep t the use ful p ast . Scie nce is self-e ras ing an d co nst an t! y un der rev isio . n . Th e eco log ica l ski the age dem a nds. lls shi ft as It is tru e tha t the art . s kee p us san e ' but l . . � arg er bia s for ts surely thi s per cep tio n _ th e fact that t h e arts k eep us CJ v1 hze d 0 n<.:e a poe m IS be Ion gs to the wo wn tten ' it . r l d an d Its · gre ate st des tm y IS · tts · use fu 1 ness to the tri La guage is pe rpe be. � tua lly ref ine d by th e poe t, the eye J pa int er, t he s tau ght by the ear by th e com po ser . Th e . ps ych 0 1 ogy o f aes li nuted . the ncs 1s of Inte res t w he n we . . note t h at po etr y t eac h es Wit h a gre ate r than I t e nte force . rtai ns . Th e tra ge dy . o f ou r time may b Voices- Ru e t h at the two fier ce _ skin 's a n d pou n ' . d s- wh l ch cne d o ut teache rs of tha t the a rts are the morality first an d f ore mo st are preCise discount as · 1 Y t he eas iest . · voi ces to th ose of c h arr mn g cra nks . 0 ne mig that these tw h t d o wo rse tha n not o c ranks m d ice he stu die s of the arts of centuries and the ir gua r e h lg est excel len ce ey knew w hat of the art s, and tha t they were tal i ng a b ou t. And (if my exp . en. enc e wit h the tea chi ng o f po etry to wa y stu de nts is in an y typ tcal ) i t i s w orth while addi ng t h at t h e po we r of the p oe m to tea ch

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The Geo gra phy o f the I mag inat ion ements ���h:���. �. t b k l not only sen sibi lities and the subt le movg th�\c��l:r� ti edge , real l asti n g ��t �n �w le d�����:�; l��e� i n to and r eleasable from and pedagogues. e 0 Y f gs verstty tn th e Republ ic First thmthe poe try can rep lace pra ctic ally any um to add ca� i t m ts wh at first, then . The pnm al tmportance of a poe ind ivid ual min d. . . b. th the voice of a peo ple in its poe t at tts Poetry is the vm ce of a ful wo rk of art . ulti mate fulf ilm ent as a successful and use

214

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Ere Babylon was dust, The Magus Zoroaster, my dead child, Met his own image walking in the garden. That

apparition, (Shelley,

sole

of men,

he

saw.

Prometheus Unbound)

I too would pelt the pelted one:

At my shadow I cast a stone. Wh en lo, upon that su nlit ground I saw the quivering phan tom take

The likeness of St. Stephen crowned: Then did self-reverence awake. (Melville,

Shelley's Vision)

it chanced that the vapory fleece hanging low in the East, was shot through with a soft glory as the fleece of the L a mb

of God seen in mystical vision and

simultaneously therewith, watched by the wedged mass of uptu rned faces, Billy ascended; and, ascending, too k the full rose

of the

dawn. (Melville,

Billy Budd, foretopman)

Ishmael's Double

"I felt

a

melting in me," Ishmael says, speaking of his first days in

Queequeg's company. " No more my splintered heart a n d maddened

hand were turned against the wolfish world. This soothing savage had redeemed it" (Moby-Dick, ch. 1 0) . Each of the well n igh n ameless protagonists of Melville's first six novels, all young voyagers­ "Tommee," "Typee," "Taji," Redburn, "White Jacket," Ishmael-is furnished with a bosom friend. Four of them are companions in adven­ ture, chums. One, Dr. Long Ghost of Omoo, is kind of father to the protagonist. Queequeg, in whom Melville's conception of the ideal com­ panion reaches its fullest development, but not its end, is brother, father, and by his own symbolic Polynesian code, marriage partner. " Now this chummying among sailors," Taji says in Mardi, "is like the b rotherhood subsisting between a brace of collegians (chums) rooming together. It is a a

2 1 'i

Ishmael's Dou ble

the Ima gin atio n The Geo gra phy of

216

art ner sh i p of . an d defenc e, a cop a lea gue of o ffe nce tua l cha mFid us- Ac hatess htp , mu a d fee li ng ' and bon d of l ove an d goo chests and toi let s, a ). . t o ne" (Mardt , ch. 3 urs e, ver y pio nsh lp of th e ab s_en , . c fict ion ' is, of co roi he y ll a . eCl . esp , on ticn D l . ion d ISTh e co m Pan . E k" d - bu t ou r i nterest her e IS th e . h ad esh gam Gtl ' s. Me lvil le' s old i � dee vill e s nov els an d tale fi s i on pam com the e rath er, tin cttv e rol . rge wi th the he ro, or, . to show eve ntu aI I y me an m m d com pam ons , I hop e goo ic . bol sym s le' lvil Me ' dd u B w mt o "1 ll Y rep lac e h t m and gro . l evi h and My . com bat wit !-w ille d wife of " I w mto tha t p o �: rfu wo ma n Me lvil le' s her oin es gro yey cla t tha or into " ple-Tree Ta b le Ap . he "T d an Ch t mn ey th ou gh per h.aps Th e very reaI F ayaw a y ' . an -M nce t:de , on, C e Th Go nen·t o f exi ste nce , gtv es . . p oss ibi lity of her n a me th e tm ng nm pu her in ho rne bet ray ing y at ho me in Ha wt . Lu cy ' more p rop erl lah Yii tom an ph on ly wa y to the . . gm a i sab e I . After that ' there are . - d b Y the em I a�e rep ts . s, a nob le or Dic ken . per mi ll There is atd t n h ed etc wr and es, wiv lle the wr etc hed _ a h e roi e Fo r Me lvi b ut s e ts ess as, tad can En e Th in ror of wom an y frie nd ' eve r a mir ple me nta ry ' a h e art com and l e rna was dau. alter ego 's Wi lli am Wi lso n's a con sCie nce l I" k e Poe �r za Pan cho San e fol ly lik l vi l le wro te: ble . In his old age Me

�

�

B

�� � ��

� �

of-gold l dre am of the hea rtswsfe\lo n rnia The Fale Hafiz and Horace,

�;�

�

�

sped­

Huck Finn's unlikel y sexual innocence is answered for, tacitly, in Nigger

Ji m , who u nder the slave-holding code was not accountable for i m moral­ ity so long as it was within h is own race. Mel ville seems

to

have conceived of the companion as an idea l climate

for th e protagoni st's comfort. In Omoo the companion is comic; in

Typee h e is romantic; i n Mardi, sea h ardy; i n Redburn, a gentleman; in White Jacket, heroic and a paragon of all things nautica l , the sail or's sailor; i n Moby-Dick, the epitome of that Polynesian l i fe which lay fertile in Melville's heart, the pagan stoic, p a rt Horatio, p art Odysseus, kind,

loyal, wise, self-controlled, at peace with his world. To serve s u ch a hmc­ tion, the comp anion is almost wholly imagi nary, created to fill a need

that grows less urgent as each novel p rogresses. The companions, save in

Moby- Dick,

have thei r bi g scene in opening chapters and then fade into

the background.

Melville's fascination with the alter

ego

i s decidedly of its time. If Hugh

Henry Brackenridge's John Farrago and his I rish servant Teague Oregan are in strict imitation of the picaresque tradition, and Cooper's pioneers

and Indians create almost imperishable archetypes ( th e Indian and the

Negro are neatly together a s attendant comp anions in

subtler conceptions of the hero's

alter ego

Th e Redskins ) , the

begin to be developed in Poe,

other bo�es (" Morella") , of being sp li t i nto two beings ( " William Wi l ­

son " ) , of enteri n g into a n i mals ( "Metzengerstein " ) , of stopping bestially

half-formed

in its development (" The Murders i n the Rue Morgue,"

"Hop Frog" ) and wrecking all before it with the savagery of

the ju ngle.

As Poe's characters go i nto or emerge from the dark, either companion­ less, o r, excepting Arthur Gordon Pym, with insignificant companions, Melville's characters proceed to an

.

n o an d his co mp ani O en. ved fr o m the her d b e to s on siti po One of the sup nev ert hel ess con . . a he oi c cha racter i s tha t th e imagt n au on m crea n l ses den ied th e impu s th os trai ts and spt and ter rac cha l This wo uld ceives of a rea ry an d co ntr ast ing at once com ple me nta serio us, holly her o into a ch ara cter w the an d h I. S 51. de-kick boy cow n rica me A e h t wo u ld seem true of Sm iley Bu rnette. It the fa . f l low n and rey sh in Aut he l � i fi i nd my th .2 T ch aste Gene e o n ct o n a u a pop r the ano ny ma . seem true of

;f

:

·

·

�\ � �

.

428 . nst abl e, 1 9 24) , p. P uems (Lo ndo n·· Co _ co m· 1He rman Melv ille, . the h ero ' s 1 sh fra gm ent s, me lga Gi . as the JOn · · rded h u ma n l· mag mat 1 s over i n to com euy ble rum t tha n 0 2As e arl y in the reco t. a s1tu a eroh ral the t o d · pas eme d W I· 1 d ' l I. ens e mm y") . Enk idu , a . anion was give n a n c. o Pan z a ' "ho i tu e. This IS h i S n Quqote and Sa by a city pros titut uced ui e often ( l e an Do i s se , l s a m m a uage o lang the s and erst figu re w ho und

c

Tonto: a lmost an apology for so doughty and detached an instrument.

for whom the ego is an imperishable substance, capable of being divided

rris But the ma rigo ld's mo d; hea ir the Is dan ced o'er s, llow me ry mo me A n d the ir me d , Em balmed and b ech ar d fellows ! 1 Hea rts- of-g old and goo

t

ing improbabi lity of the Lone Ran ger is made up for by the good, friendly

against itself ( " The Fall of the House of Usher") , of being passed o n to

An d Be r ange r- all the Fall , Dex trou s tu m bl ers elud ing Fled , can be spe d?

�

217

;

d

impasse-Bartleby's

wal l , shi p less

"civiliz ing," that he might serve as auxiliary strongman to Gilgamesh. After a week with the seductress he can no longer understand the animals, and can but to the city to serve. Yet h e

remams u n cout h and Samson-ish beside h i s more po li s he d comrade. See Alexander Heidd, The Gtlgamcsh Epic and Old Testament Parallels, 2nd. ed. ( C hicago: University o f Chicago Press , 1949) . Robi nson Crusoe's Friday rema i n s a disci ple and body servant, even in Europe, and be­ . gins to p lay a co mic role (the bear-baiting scene in the Pyrenees) which the dour Crusoe

�ould never fi n d a ben t for. The subject of hero and companion is, of course, en ormo s . te St�phen Dedal u s and Buck Mulligan and the complex s y m bo l i s m attached to them: M . thra�c pn est and acolyte, S 1 r Gawam a n d the Green Knight, Hal and Falstaff, etc. The u

a

SltuatJo� is levelled out in P magruel and Pan urge, and in Wu C h 'en g· en ' s Monkey the compamon us urps the stage, so that th e novel's real hero, the m on k Tri pitaka, stands sec­ to �he doings of Monkey , a si tuation quite fr e qu e n t in popular l i t e ra tu re ; for example, a t Disney' s Ben and M e, in which the Franklin myth is presented a s th e achi evemelll of a Pru dent mouse who h a d Ben 's ear.

W�

218

The Geography of the Imagination

Ishmael, Israel Potter before his moss-covered cord of wood---:- well pro­ vided with companions.3 But between Poe and Melv1 lle there IS the kin­ ship of Pym and Moby-Dick, and the character of the half- breed Peters, replacing gradually the ini tial Toby-Harry-Bolton-l1ke alte:-ego Augus­ tus, seems to foreshadow the movement in Melville from spmted, genteel companions to a tougher sort : Jack Chase and Queequeg. Yet Dlfk Peters is all brawn and pioneer cunning; he does not, hke Queequeg, stand by the hero to remind him of his innate nobili ty, although the germ of th � t idea may be in him. It remained for Hawthorne, in the years of MelvJile s . silence, to create a faun-like creature incapable of,ev1l because Ignorant of it within himself, until seduced by it. Is Billy Budd Melvi lle's answen � g version of him?4 This type of character mirrors in those surro � ndmg him their potential toward his reality: Toby, his discontent movmg toward decisive action; Dr. Long Ghost, his abi lity to be prudent and to suffer good naturedly a mess of things; Jar �, his strength of convictiOns; Harry . Bolton, his pluck, albeit foolish, to nse above bad times; Jack Chase, h1s joie de vivre; Queequeg, his philosophical power to work and observe, and to love. It remained for Henry Ja mes to push the alter ego mto a purely psychological drama, i n "The Jolly Corner" ( 1 9 09) , to turn the idea as Freud was beginning to shape It, and as DostOievsky, whose work was completed twenty-eight years before, had done, m studymg that spe­ cial twist of the alter ego, the "double." Ja mes took the mirror functiOn of the alter ego into the m ercurial area of speculation: what � man m1ght have been. Queequeg, we remember, was " George Wash1 ? gton can­ nibalistically developed" (Moby-Dick, ch. 1 0) . Are Melville s compan­ ions elaborate metaphors for the will of the protagomst? Melville, m his poem "Shelley's Vision," 5 grieves for his imagination's having martyred so many times his shadow. Are not Toby and Jar! and Queeque� sac­ . rificed to hostilities that might well have destroyed Tommee and Tap and Ishmael ? It is quite clear that Queequeg's death, more strictly his prepara­ tion for death, is Ishmael's salvation.6 In the passage from Shelle � at the head of this essay, the Platonic ideals are ' ' underneath the grave , '"How can the prisoner reach outside except by th rusting th rough the w a l l ? To me, the white whale i s that wall, shoved near to me" (Mohy- Dick. c h . 3 6 ) .

•when T . E . Lawrence i n t h a t uncannily Melvi l le-like book, The Mint, asks u n easily, ' ' D a , fauns brood?" he seemed to put h i s finger on the shortcomtng of Hawthorne s 1 m agmat1o n • . w h ich Mel ville seems to be correcting in Billy Budd. Yeats's laun of Phase I, In A Vzszmt, IS

wholly un aware, like Bil ly, of his extraord i n a ry perfection, or ol the nature of the world that makes it extraord i nary. 'Melville, Poems, p. 272.

r

� d :�

"Note the ritualistic tone of Queequeg's preparing his coffin. Slain Pol nesian warrior ar cook ed a n d placed in canoes, by the1r enemies, as part o f the VIctory east. Warnors e among thei r people, a> Queequeg tells us ( i n contradiction to mformanon In Mardt ) , nhcP.-1 i n t h e i r canoes a n d floated out to sea . Melville seems t o have b e e n remembenng th e

Ishmael's Double

219

where do inhabit The shad ows of all forms that think and J i v e Till death u nite them and they p a rt no more. 7

I

In Melv ille's "She lley's Visio n" the death of the shad ow awak ens "self­ reverence." In other term s, the sacri fice of the comp anion is the only gaug e of one's wort h . Melv ille seems to have realiz ed in his poem the statu re that the comp anion s had adde d to his hero es, all perso nae of hi mself. The first of the comp anion s is Toby , of Type e. As this acco un t of ad­ ventu re is not a nove l, there is no parti cular dema nd that Toby be a developed chara cter, and he isn't. An acco mplic e to j umpi ng ship, a com­ panio n as long as the n arrat or is searc hing for the Happ ars, his Byro nic prettiness pales amon g the paga n beau ty of the Type es. He is pract ically forgotten until his myst eriou s disap pear ance , and were it not for The Story of Toby whic h is now usua lly boun d in with Typee, and the real Toby 's enter ing i nto the p u blic li fe of the roma nce, he wou ld be as unob ­ trusive as Jar!, in Mardi, with whom he must be class ed. Melv ille seems to have h ad an artis tic reason for creat ing Toby and Jar!, a reason that failed him in comp ositio n. Harr y Bolto n, in Redb urn, would be simil arly neglected did he not beco me a surro gate green horn on the retur n voya ge. Dr. Long Ghos t of Omo o and Jack Chas e of White Jacket, if not ne­ glected quite as much , do not fulfil l the expe ctati on built up arou nd them . Not until Mob y-Di ck does the comp anio n achie ve his pote ntial : Queequeg rema ins the masterpiece of Melv ille' s com pani ons. Pierr e's cousin. Glen dinn ing Stan ly, at last anim ates the com pani on to full pa'h ic­ ipati on in the plot and mak es him, as even Que equeg is not, an indis pens ­ able part of the nove l' s struc ture. At this po int in Melv ille's work a curi­ ous thin g happ ens: the com pani on com es into the fore grou nd as the protagonis t. Israe l Pott er, so fittin gly a side- kick to John Paul Jone s or Eth an Allen , has the novel to hims elf. We are remi nded of Tho mas De­ loney's lack of Newbury , with Hen ry VIII and Card inal Wolsey com ing and g oing , or of Nas he's Unfo rtun ate Traveller. In The Confiden ce-M an the very natu re of the ethic and psyc holo gy of the compani on is ques tion ed- the nove l's them e dem ands itand the confi�ence man ( or men ) beco mes the com pani on of a cong lome ratio of n mankm d, tu rnin g the trust ing relat ion of Taji and Jar!, Ishm ael and Queeq ueg, i nto a nigh tmar e trav esty of itsel f. But the nove l belo ngs to that fede ratio n of man ipul ator s who wou ld be confi dant s, for wha teve r

nrican n a

I di n ' s being burie d in his cano

e, or , poss i b l y , the fanta stica lly carve d death ship ? t e Balinese, Tempon Telon 's Bana ma Ttng It P dasses from isl a n d to islan d. See Leo Frobe ang, w hich gathe rs u p the souls of the dead as n i us, The Childhood of Man ( Lond on: an Co., 1 909) . Seele y

7Prometheu s Unb oun d, l , 1 1 . 1 971 99.

220

The Geography of the Imagi n a tion

purpose, of everybody. Billy Budd is equally the fri end of all, a kind of ship's mascot: the companion, at last, in Melvi lle's work, the ulti mate hero. Toby is singled out by the narrator because of his "remarkably prepos­ sessing exterior" amid a crew "as coarse in person as in mind." On �atch he is good for "chat, song, and story. " He is "active, ready, and obhg1� g, of dauntless courage, and singularly open and fearless m the expr�sswn of his feeli ngs." Jack Chase in embryo, but whatever else he is remams as well in embryo. Li ke the genteel sailors in Victori an paintings,8 he � s "singularly small and slightly made, w�th great. flexi bility of limb. H �s naturally dark complexion had been deepened by exposure to the tropi­ cal sun and a mass of jetty locks clustered about his temples, and threw a darker 'shade into his large black eyes" (Typee, ch. 5 ) . Thi s is part of the aesthetic of the time, a correlative to Toby's melancholy and Ishmael-like character ("one of that class of rovers you sometimes meet at sea" ) , b �t, as cannot be denied with later examples of the companion, a certam amount of appetence is in play here.9 Melville is his own best explicator: in Pierre he writes of "the fri endship of fi ne-hearted, generous boys, nur­ tured amid the romance-engendering comforts and elegancies of life, sometimes transcend[ing) the boun ds of mere boyishness, and revel[1 ng) for a while in the empyrean o f a love which only comes short, by the degree, of the sweetest sentiment entertained between the sexes" (Pi�rre ch . 1 5 ) . 10 For the nonce it would be a mistake to loose the analytical faculties of psychology upon what could so unobstructedly be a supposed homosexual potentiality in Melville, as though he were \Vhitman at sea .

1

BSee, for example, Abraham Solomon's Firs t Class-The Meeting, 'An at Ftrst Meeting I�oved"; J. C. Horsley's Blossom Time; and particularly Arthur Hughes s Home (rom the Sea. All are reproduced in Graham Rey nolds's Painters of the Vzctortan Scene ( London: B. T. Batsford, Ltd . , 1 953) . 9To see the extent, and to my ju dgement it is the extent, of Melville's flanerie with the handsomeness of sai lors, compare these rwo pa ssages from Moby-Dtck. From chapter 5: "This young fellow's healthy cheek is like a sun-roasted pear 10 hue, and would seem to

smell almost as musky. . . . " From chapter 6: " Elsewhere match that bloom of theirs [the women o f New Bedford], ye cannot, save in Salem, where they tell me the young gtrls breathe such musk , their sailor sweethearts smell them miles off shore, as though they we e drawing nigh the odorous Moluccas instead of the Puritanic sands." However, M elville s preoccupation with the good-looking sailor has been accounted for as the satisfactiOn of a latent homosexuality, notably in Newton Arvin's Herman Melvt!le ( New York: Duell, Sloane, and Pierce, 1 950) . See also W. H . Suden, The Encha(ed Flood (New York: Random House, 1 950), p. 1 4 9 , especially in relation to Billy Budd.

�

JOPerhaps Melville's inability 1 0 his first five novels to develop the companion i s shown i n his deflecting discussion of homosexuality from its probable outcome, and p roceedwg mro a non sequitur. I n Pierre (New York: Hendricks House, 1 949, ed. H e n ry A . Murray, P · 25 5 ) , he begins t o digress o n "the confirmed bachelor" i n America, 1 0 t h e v e ry Ick of h t s eulogy on '' boy-love," but t r a i l s o f f in t h e evastve statement t h a t t h e bac ; lor ts the vtcnm _ of a too profound appreciatiOn of the infinite charmmgness of woman.

�

��

Ishmael's Double

22 1

His imag inati on hone stly stop ped shor t " by one degr ee," and the later sym bohc deve lopm ent of this relat ions hip is too grea t an achie veme nt to stam p with med ical nom encla ture. If Tob y w as selected for an acco mpli ce as m uch as for his satis fying a _ t1on certam adm 1r � �s �or h1s mela ncho ly and Rom antic broo ding , that pleas ure IS qUi ckly diSSi pate d by the Type es and their " bouy ant sense of a heal thfu l phys ical exist ence " (Typ ee, ch. 1 7) . In the descripti on of "the nobl e Meh evi" in full warr ior's costu me (ch . 1 1 ) , and of the " Poly nesia n Apo llo" Mar noo ( ch. 1 8 ) Melv ille finds a riche r idea l of hum anki nd. Pierr e Loti , thirt y year s later, desc ribed his Nuk uhev an frien d with pretty �uc h th e same aesth etic. "Houga est b eaucoup . . . joli . .

. ; il a vingt­ cmq ans, un p eu de favoris n oirs, et des yeux d'un e douceur charmante; sa figur�, de forme grec que, n 'est pas tatouee . .

. . " 1 1 It is, of cour se, the appr ox1m atwn to the Gree k ideal of phys ique that Melv ille's heroes de­ light in. Gaug uin, whose pain ting so curio usly para llels Melv ille's Sout h Sea roma nces , 12 saw in the Poly nesia ns not Gree k but Egyp tian form , as many of h1s pam ungs indicate. Dr. Long Ghos t, "a towe r of bone s," over six feet tall and a lover o f misc hief, i s a com ic com pani on, the very oppo site of Tob y. Omo o is neith er 1dyll nor adve ntur e; like T. E. Law renc e's The Min t or E E Cum ming s's The Enor mou s Roo m, it chro nicle s the bore dom an d fu� of men in ridic ulou s strai ts, from cripp led wh aler to the Cala booze Bere­ tanee to beac h com bing . Seedy Dr. Long Gho st play s a pate rnal role. The roma nce in Omoo is all in mem ory. Long Gho st has had his share : a n amo ur in Pale rmo , lion h u nting amo ng the Caffres. He wou ld have mad e good copy for Life on the Mississipp i. Som erset Mau gham will eventually com e alon g and take him serio usly. Like the nam eless ca­ d �v �rous repo rter in Faul kner 's Pylon, his emac iatio n is a symp tom ;f his spmtu al exh austion. The re is muc h of th e run- dow n abou t him · inde ed the or igina ! who sat for the port rait, Mr. Jay Leyd a thi nks, �ay hav� . step i been th e 1m t1al n conc eivin g the figur e of the conf iden . ce m an. l 3 With Jar!, the avu ncul ar chum o f Mardi, we get an even mor e matu re comp amo n th an Dr. Lon g Gho st. He has made a frien d of Taji poss ibly becau se of "tha t hear t-lon eline ss whic h over take s mos t seam en as they ow aged." He is a Skyeman , of Norse desc ent, i lli terate, and i nscr _ uta_ e . Bes1de the you ng mzlo rd curl y-ha ired p retti ness of Tob . y, and the mlc paleness of Dr. Lon g Gho st, J ar! is a start ling patc h of colo r. "Ov er e ordi nary tann ing of the sailo r, he seem ed mas ked by a viso r of japa n-

�� ��

· · · "C · We J ey Btrd, Pterre Loft, correspondant � et dessinateur 1 8 72 1 !18 9 ' quelq ues fragmedtt_ s de "} ourna 1 _Inttme · " ( p ans: · Impre ssion s Pierre Andr e, 1 947) 2 , p. xxi . 1 Charl es Esn enne , Gau gutn (Ge nev a : Skir a, 1 9 5 3 ) , p p . 62- 65. 1 3J a y Leyda, The Melville Log ( New York : Ha rcour t, Brace and Co., 1 9 5 1 ) , p. xxxi i i .

men ts

The Geography of the Imagi n a tion

222

ally ning dotted all over with freckles , so intensely yellow and s:, mmetri � ch . r z a d circular that they seemed scorche d there by a burnmg glass (M ng nteresti i 1 0) . He is carefull y charact erized, given an importa nt and the r of tou pan-a nd, l i ke Toby, dropped . First he is exclude d from the _ , s pur­ islands by being little better than abando ned , then kdled by TaJI Mel­ suers . When his death comes we have almost forgotten h1m. That to picture the ville (and Taji) los t interest in h i m is clear; he is erased from the m make room for King Media and his court. We see the anomaly have been novelis t's imagina tion : how bored the taciturn old salt must ,

, with that floating salon . , In creating his Rabelai sian, peripate tic compan y of go ?s, de m1gods m rev1val s and philoso phers, Melville was no doubt aware of the rehgwu and the Society Islands which had champio ned the gods Ta'aroa and � ro. ber­ h w1th artists which centered in the Arioi Society , a group of "literar y tine morals" 14 who attempt ed to evangel ize surroun ding isla nds. This movem ent began in the poets and craftsm en's guild- the tahu'a-that apprenticed student s in "literar y compos ition, traditio ns, astrono my, black magic, medicin e, religion and the constru ction of canoes, houses .

and maraes (temples) . " 1 5

"L'origine de cette sectc demeure assez obscure, " comment Patrick O'Reilly

and Jean P o i rier , "une grande licence sexuelle etait de rigueur en tre les membres qui devaient d'autre part prendre /'engagemen t de mettre a mort tout enfant qui viendrait a naitre 1i partir de leur agn!ga tion a Ia societe. Elle etait devouee au cu/te d'Oro, mais son influence ne s' est exercee que dans les

iles de Ia Polvnesie centrale (Societe) . Moerenhout, qui n 'appreciait guere les Areoi, decri

t dans

les termes suivants leur fonction artistique et litteraire:

'Tan t6t, comme /es bardes et les sea/des de /'anti quite gauloise et scandinave, ils celebrent en des hymnes inspires, les merveilles de Ia crea tion, Ia vie et les actions des dieux .

.

.

.

"'1 6

The relati onship between the Arioi and Media's jolly cult of Oro ought to be looked into. Harry Bolton returns, in type, to Toby: the young gentl � man reduced in circumstances. After he disappoints Redbu rn's expectatwns, pushmg his folly to ruination and self-pity, Melville makes him act out the bitter experience of the greenhorn on the return trip. In his delicately smooth y, and Legend. cd. M a ri a 14''Polync sian Mytholog y," Diction ary of Folk lore, Mytholog Leach ( New Y o r k : Funk and Wagn a l l s , 1 95 0 ) .

!SJbid.

es, I, En cyclopedic d e I a Pleiade (Paris: t &" Lirreratu res Oceanien nes," Historie des litteratur G a l l i m ard, 1 95 5 ) .

I shmacl's Double

223

masculinity there is a hint of the rake, of a possible nobility sapped by . 1rrespons 1b1hty and selfish ness. Toby is the only companio n that we see, moment anly, against his own backgro und, the plush gambling parlor. Other compam ons hold thei r homes in nostalgia . As Toby is lost, Dr. Long Ghost left beach combing , and Jarl sacrificed for Taji so Harry Bolton is given the comeupp ance that Redburn has alread suffered . Redburn, for all its haste in compos ition, is a serious encount er with the world. The h ero is still the voyager all eyes and ears, but he is beginnin g . to u nderstan d h1s world. The compani on of sudden impulses will be ex­ changed for one with imp u lses proceedi ng more from experien ce. The Amencan and European gentry must give way to English stalwartn ess and primitive royalty. Jack �h ase is at once one of the most colorful and engaging of the com � amons, and the most static. He is simply there, a portrait. All action on his part grows so logically from his nobility as to seem anticlim actic. But he was Me lville's particula r fa vorite-Billy Budd is dedica ted to him-"J ack Chase, Englishm an . . . that great heart." He emerges from a medley of "The Spanish Ladies" and Os Lusiados. He has read " all the verses of Byron, and all the romances of Scott." He leaves one navy to fight for another with a more urgent cause. Handso me as Toby and Harry, learned as Long Ghost, crafty a sailor as Jarl, and as devoted as all, Jack Chase is clearly a friend the pariah White Jacket would long to have. And because the wish is so devout, the reality is lessened. The ideal C�II_Ipanion of all is too symmetr ically and complete ly conceive d. To c�ltlCJze him for such consum mate skill of spirit and mind is, of course, to nsk the stuffed owl's walking away, for if Melville used his real name he must have dra :n carefully (with leeway for a sailor's roundin g ou t of a ' tale) · The pity Is that the imagina tion was satisfied with the stance and demanded no action from it; Jack Chase belongs to the ode, not to the myth or ballad.

�

II

�� describing Queequeg as he fi rst saw him, Ishm ael notes: " Still more, IS

very legs were marked, as if a parcel of dark green frogs were running

�p the. trunks of yo�ng pal �s" (Moby-Dick� ch. � ) . Melville's im ages are

ccrenons. An ongmal vividness on the renna gathers about it cohering . . s1gmficances u ntil it becomes a complexity, the nucleus oftentimes lost to the reader but apparently active for Melville. Think of M och a Dick and Moby- ick . This nuclear image is the reverse of Blake's " world in a grain . . of s and ; It Is the gram of sand become pearl. What was Melville remem­ . benn g when he was remi nded of frogs? Look at Mardi:

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The Geography of the Imagination

224

Farther on, there frowned a grove o f blended banian boughs, th ick-ranked manchineels, and many a upas; their summits gilded by the sun; but below, deep shadows, darkening night-shade ferns, and mandrakes. Buried i n their midst, and dimly seen a mong l a rge leaves, all h al berd-shaped, were piles of stone, supporting fal ling temples o f bam boo. Thereon frogs leaped in damp­ ness, trailing round their slime.

(Mardi,

ch. 1 07)

A fertile scene-the frogs are breeding amid all that devil's collection of poisonous trees (save the banyan, w h ich is the holiest of Polynesian trees, sacred to Hina) -in a fertile chapter. It is perhaps not beside the point that Queequeg in the hold of the Pequod, when the burtons are upped is described " crawling about amid that dampness and sli me, like a green spotted lizard at the bottom of a well." But back to the frogs . Melvi lle describes the Polynesian god of the ocean Ta'aroa (or Tangaroa) carved as a creator of all other gods : We stood before an obelisk-idol, so towering that gazing at it, we were fain to th row back our heads. According to Mohi , winding stairs led up through its legs; its abdomen a cell ar , thick-stored with gourds of old wine; its head, a ho llow dom e; i n rude alto-relievo, its scores of hillock breasts were carved over with legi ons of baby deities, frog-like sprawling .

.

.

.

17

(Mardi,

ch.

3)

We ought to make nothi ng more of this than that Melville intended Queequeg to be richly done iconographically, which is to make quite a lot of it. If Queequeg is to be the pagan counterpart of George Washington, whose monument in Baltimore, Ishmael says in chapter 25, "m arks that point of human grandeur beyond which few mortals will go," a "sea Prince of Wales," " Czar Peter content to toil in the shipyards of foreign cities" ( ch . 12) , and on and on, we must understand him under those signs. He is a pagan by choice, having rejected Christianity good-naturedly. He is both king and warrior, bearing both with Washingtonian modesty. "Was there ever such unconsciousness?" Ish mael asks a fter the rescue in the Acushnet river. His teeth are fi led and pointed (a cosmetic affair, though Melville wants u s to see it as a kind of predatoriness, nobly con­ trolled in Queequeg) and Ish mael describes him in the heat of the chase as though he had Grenadier steak in sight. His tomahawk pipe is a p lowshare-sword image. Times and p laces meet in his appearance. His harpoon i s carried everywhere: the Polynesian king's spear of office. His wallet is sea lskin; his beaver, of brand-new New England make. The tat1 7"The figure represents the Polynesian god of the Ocean, Tangaroa, at the moment of creation oi other gods and h u ma n beings." ( Note on plate 82, showing t he Rurutu, Tuhai Islands, version of the god Melville is dcscribmg in Mardi ) . Herbert Tischner and friednch H ew icke r , Ocea>t i<· Art (New Yo rk: Pantheon, 1 9 S 4 ) .

Ishmael's Double

225

tooing on his arm is "a Cretan la byrinth of a figure." His bald head is "lik� a mildewed skull." Queequeg is the first of the companion s to be �et m distrust. There is much fun in so devi lish-looking a creature's say­ mg to the pale Presbyterian for the fi rst ti me before him, " Who-e debe! you ?" The identity is mistaken, but the advent of Queequeg has been long prepared for. When a child, Ish mael had pla yed sweep in the chimney and had been put to bed in the daytime for it. Asleep, he woke to feel a supernatural hand placed in his. Quequeeg's unconscious hug reminded h1m of that clasp. Did not the black idol Yojo in the sooty chimney also? Yojo is an ancester, h unchbacked with venerable age, yet he reminds Ishma�l of a " three days' old Congo baby." Into blackness, into experi­ ence, IS treacherous, but there are companion goers of the way . Their " marriage"-one of those "extravagant friendships, u nsurpassed by the story of Damon and Pythias: in truth, much more wonderful" which Melville describes in Omoo (ch . 3 9)-is elabo rated in the symbolism of the monkey-rope, later in th e novel, where their separate fates are made one. The rudiments of Queequeg are fi rst seen in Melville's work in the Marquesan nurse to Queen Pomaree's children, Marbonna. He was "a phi�osopher of nature-a wild heathen, moralizing upon the vices and follies of the Ch ristian court of Tahiti-a savage scorning the degeneracy of the people among whom fortune had thrown him" (Omoo, ch. 8 1). But what a growth from Marbonna is Queequeg! Along Marbonna's tattooing the young p rinces trace their fingers, fascinated with its intri­ cacy. Qu�equeg's tattooing becomes one of the most elabo rate i mages in Moby- f?tck. It IS a Cretan labyrinth, the gods clinging to Ta'aroa, a per­ son al h1eroglyph (he uses a detail of it for a signature), the Zodiac. We discover in chapter 1 1 0 that it is "the work of a departed prophet and s �er of h1s Island, who, by those h ieroglyphic marks, had written out on his b?dy a complete theory of the heavens and the earth, and a mystical treatise on the art of attaining truth; so that Queequeg in his own proper pers on was a nddle to u n fold; a wondrous work in one volume; but whose mysteries not even himself could read, though his own live heart beat against them . . . . " His coffin, made from timber "cut from the a ?original groves of t he Lackaday island s , " was carved with replicas of his tattooing. A fter Queequeg, there are only John Paul Jones and Billy Budd as examples of the sworn brother in Melvi lle's work. The stories, like Pierre � nd The Confidence-Man, often tell of treachero us and piti ful compan­ Ions . Bartleby, in a sense, is an unwelcom e and undetach able companio n _ employer, to h ts dousing h is jovial commerci alism with despair. The

226

Th e Geography of the I m agi n ation

moralizing companions of "Poor Man's Pudding and Rich Man's Crumbs" are self-fooled idealists. The automaton of "The Bell Tower" destroys his maker. There are cu rious companionships struck up with a cock, a ch i mney, a mountairi. But what is happening i n these stories is this: there is no alter ego because the ego itself, the persona, has been transmu ted, no longer Ishmael but an imagined, easily perturbable old codger, kin to Yeats's "sixty-year-old smiling public man." If you will, he is Ishmael old and grown domestic. All the p rotagonists through Pierre have been the same kind of p erson. In Israel Potter and the tales a sudden objectivity occurs. The protagonist becomes what. I would like to dub The Ardent Simpleton. He is Bartleby's emp loyer, if not Bartle by himself. He is the cock-fancier of " Cock-a-Doodle-Doo ! ," the worshiper and the theater-goer of "The Two Temples," the naive spectator of " Poor Man's Pudding and Rich Man's Crumbs" and of "The Paradise of Bachelors · and Tartarus of Mai ds." He is beset by lightning-rod salesmen and crack-pot uncles with crack-pot inventions; he is a poet made a fool of by a complacent has-been ; he grows sentimental over roses and peacocks on ruined wallpaper. He is the eternally innocent, brash, un­ comprehending Captain Delano of " Benito Cereno." He defends his chimney and his apple-tree table; he wanders into Massachusetts moun­ tains that remind him of Nukuhevan forests, looking for fairyland. The Confidence-Man, like Pierre, scarcely allows that a companion can exist. But our subject is much in play here nevertheless; for, like Bi lly Budd, the confidence man is a companion to every body; everybody will have none of him. There is indeed no protagonist in the novel with whom he could ally himself, save "that multiform pi lgrim species, man." 1 8 Throughout the novel the little scene th at unites companions in other novels is attempted again and again, endi ng in failure-or delusion. Yet here is Melville' s most searching study of trust and the relation that must exist between men if the world is to survive-but the novel ends ques­ tioning that very survival. Billy Budd, though an orphan and with no home save that of ships, is not an Ish mael. He is connected with no search, no journey, no chase. He is a creature entirely of the present, without nostalgia. llliterate, ignorant of his age, he has no being except his calling and his friendli ness. Melville has made fo r him a set of metaphors new in his work. To call Queequeg "this sea Prince of Wales" rings with the humor of farfetchedness-a '"There is no evi dence that Melville had been rere a ding C h a ucer while writing this most Chaucerian o f his books (as he hi msel f claims in the second chapter) , but we might note·that Chaucer has but t h ree swearings of brothe rhood among a l l his c h a ra cters: between Pala­ mon and Arcite in "The Knight's Tale," among the thieves in "The Pardoner's Tale," a n d between the summoner and the d e v i l i n " T h e Friar's Ta le"-a veritable devil's ad vocate's collection for a m i santhrope.

Ishmael's Double

227

metaphor stri king home in the spirit o f i t s incongruity. T o call Bi lly Budd a " sea-Hyperion" is a p lea for myth . "Close-reefing topsails in a gale, there he was, astride the weather yard-arm-end, foot in the Flemish horse as ' stirrup,' both hands tugging at the 'ear-ring' as at a bridle, in very much the attitude of you ng Alexander curbing the fiery Buceph alus" (Billy Budd, ch . 1 ) . Before our eyes a sailor working in a storm congeals into a Greek fri eze: both images are strength enlisted toward order. " A superb figure, tossed b y the horns o f Taurus against the thunderous sky, cheerily hal looing to the strenuous fi le along the spar. " The image be­ comes sailor and rigging again, but through the catalyst Taurus, the springtime constellation, the image with which The Handsome Sailor is introduced. He is " like Aldebaran among the lesser lights"; that is, like alpha in Taurus. In him his admirers " took that sort of pride in the evoker of i t which the Assyrian priests doubtless showed from their grand sculptured Bull when the faithful p rostrated themselves . " Billy is unfallen Adam-"a fi n e specimen o f the genus homo," as Cap­ _ Vere remarks to Lieutenant Ratcliffe, "who in the nude might have tam posed fo r a statue of young Adam before the Fall'' -Orpheus, young Joseph, young David. As we see hi m he is every body' s companion, the exact opposite of the confidence-man, rejected by all. The confidence man is all talk, all specul ation; Billy is a stutterer, all action. Melville has chosen to portray him in passing from adolescence to manhood; he is about to be given a position of leadership when Cl aggart tempts him to murder. Queequeg was neither "caterpillar nor butterfly," neither civilized nor primitive. Billy is a "barbarian" and "Budd" is obvious. Melville is sly when writing of matters sexual , and havi n g to be sly tempts him to poker-faced mischief. The passage on the mating and birth of whales in Moby-Dick, written with such beauty and feeli ng that D. H. Lawrence turned part of it into a poem, has a footP.ote with this master­ piece of pedantic tact in it: "When overflowing with mutual esteem, the w hales salute more hominum. " But "The Tartarus of Maids" and chap­ ter 95 of Moby-Dick , "The Cassock" are bold enough for wide-awake readers. Dr. Henry A. Murray in his introduction to the Hendricks House edition of Pierre h as pointed out passages in that book where the sexual life of the hero is plai nly put, once we know the voca bulary. It i s because of �his slyness that one is tempted to read a passage in Billy Budd with active suspicion. The scene is following the h anging: ·

·

· the Purser a rather ruddy rotund person more accurate as an accountant

than profound as a philosopher said at mess to the Su rgeon, " Wh a t tes­ timony to the force lodged in will power" the l a tter-saturnine spare and tall, one in whom a discreet causticity went along with a manner less genial th an polite, replied, " Your p a rdon, Mr. Purser. In a hanging scientifically

The Geography of the Imagination

228

conducted-and under special orders l myself directed how Budd's was to be effected-any movement following the completed suspension and originat­ ing i n the body suspended, s u ch movement i n d i cates mechan ical spasms in the muscular system. Hence the absence of that is no more attributable to will-power as you call it than to horse-power-begging your pardon." "But this muscular spasm you speak of, is not that in a degree more or less invariable in these cases?" "Assuredly so, Mr. Purser." "How then, my good Sir, do you account for its absence in this instance ? " "Mr. Purser, it i s clear that your sense o f the singu lari ty i n this matter equals not mine . . . . It was phenomenal, Mr. Purser, iri the sense that it was a n a ppe ar nce the cause of which is not immediately to be assigned." (Billy

a

Budd, ch. 27)

Largely the Surgeon and Purser are talking about the absence of mus­ cul ar spasm in Billy's dyin g body, which would be what the Puritans would have called a " remarkable," a sign from God that Billy, in the divine scheme, was innocent. But is not Melvi lle slyly telling us also that Billy inexplicably did not show that spasmodic erection of the pen is re­ sulting from the sudden cru shing of the spinal cord wh i ch is usually a consequence of hanging? An answer is not easily given. It may well be Melville's insistence that Billy did not suffer a fall comparable to the Fall, i f, indeed, he " fell" at all. Perhaps in spite of his treatment o f Billy's physical beauty, Melville wanted him eventually to be pure goodness, pure spirit. Blake's ability in his drawings and in some of his poetry to achieve a similar effect comes to mind, and we know that Melville's mind was much on Blake during the composition of the nove\ . 1 9 Treacherous evil does not tempt Billy so much as it affronts him, face to face. For all the Christian overtones of Billy Budd, it is not at all clear wherein th e connections lie. Billy dies " a barbarian." He is clearly sacrificed to order, but the order is mi litary and inhuman and brought i nto being by war.20 19ln April 1 8 8 6 Melville wrote James Billson, " I t pleases me to learn from you rhar [james)

Thomson was i n terested in wm Bl ake, " and when in 1 8 8 8 Bi lls o n sent Melville Thomson's essay on Rlake, he was extremely interested in it. Melville bought Gilchrist's Life of William Blak e in J 870. See Jay Leyda, The Melville Log, pp. 7 1 2 , 799, 8 1 1 .

20To gauge the ch ange in Melville's ideas of good and evil between B enit o Cereno and Billy Budd-some th irty- four years-note rhar in B en ito Cereno evil stains the innocent and guilty alike. The gray of the story stands for indifference, indiffe rence as a mode of igno­ rance. It is Captain Delano w h o i s gray, and he remains as unrouched by th e A ffaire San D omin ic as by rhe world before. Bur he has nor expe rie nce d the evil of the situation or felt the h o rror of the h um a n capacity for evil which rhe slaves sy m bol i z e . Don Benito is crushed

by this evi l, though i nnocent of it, except as a conveyor i n the slave trade. He cannot look at Babo during the trial, because he i s ashamed for h i m . In Billy Budd Claggart's evil warp of mind has no effect on Billy: si gn ificantly he sees it only as a lie. (True, Billy has no time to reflect on it rea s on a b l y, bur would he?) B enit o Cereno is a richly wrought tale, deep with i n s i ght , and stands beside Pierre and The Confidence-Man as a psycho l ogical and ethical srudy. Billy Budd is n arrow, clear, and powerfu l, a st atem e nt rather than a srudy. Benito i s analytical; Billy Budd, a synthesis, mythological.

Ishmael's Double

229

From �oby to Billy Budd transv erses a lifetim e's imagi native creati on n � d this hne of dissec ting is a possib i lity amon g limitle ss ones. The su b� Ject could be extended to the Pequo d's mates and their harpo oneers to Ah a b and Pip, to Ahab and Fedall ah, to Israel Potter and John Paul Jones. The p ropensity f r creatm g the compa nions is clearly sizable a � part of the energy of Melvil le's imagin ati on. Behind it may lie one of the . pOignanCies of a troubl ed life-b ut that is the man, not the work. It se� med always for Melvil le that the heart could seek the idyll while the m md froze at the sight of the reality . Where else in Melvil le is there a scene as terribl e as the battle between the Serapis and the B onhom me . Rtchar d-a descrip tion that makes Paul Jones' s own accoun t, in the fa­ mous letter to Frank lin, p alely tame- and what do we find there amon the batteri es of guns firi ng point blank at each other, "su rround . ed b their buff crews as by fauns and satyrs" ?

�

Louis Ag,lssiz

23 \

scum (Director, Professor Alexander Agassiz) , containing valuable col­

lections of comparative zoology," the starred attraction being "the glass

flowers at Harvard" which, Marianne Moore's father observed, superior people never make long trips to see. Mr. Moore was at least h a l f satiric in

h i s observation, but h i s intuition was perfect in suspecting that the glass flowers were ridicu lous. They are, in fact, a symbol of Agassiz's achieve­ ment as it surv ives. His great museu m of n atural hi story is an appendage

to Victorian simulacra; hi s reputation is thought to be part of the Ameri­ can dullness i n the late ni neteenth century.

Among the contributors o f specimens to Agassiz's great unfinished work in the natural histo ry of the United States we find "Mr. D. Henry Thoreau, of Concord," who is not to be wholly identified with the tran­

scendental hermit of the li terary handbooks, author of Walden and one

lesser book. The Thoreau to whom Agassiz made his acknowledgment

was a scienti st, the pioneer ecologist, one of th e few men in America with

whom he cou ld talk, as on an occasion when the two went exhaustively into the mati ng o f turtles, to the dismay o f thei r host for dinner, Emerson.

"Several score o f the best-educated, most agreeable, and personally the

most soci able people i n America united in Cam b ridge to make a social desert that wou ld have starved a polar bear," Henry Adams says in the

Education. "The liveliest and most agreeable of men -James Russell Lowell, Francis J. Child, Lo uis Agassiz, h i s son Alexander, Gurney, John

Fiske, William James and a dozen others, who would h ave made the joy

of London or Paris-tried their best to b reak out and be like other men in

Cambridge and Boston, but society called them p ro fessors, and p rofes­ sors they had to be." One reason that Agassiz is the su bject for many

Louis Agassiz

romantic biographies, many inspiring books for children, and a mysteri­ ous figure in American intellectual history is that h e moved among people who paid him every comp l iment except comprehensi on. He lectured every­

I. BEYO ND THE GLASS FLOW ERS tortures think . Nobo dy can ever know the Brown Sequard tel l s me 1 must not . . , I endure in trying to stop think ing. . . of fattg ue; (Lou is Agas stz, JUSt before dymg

the director­ t of Napo leon' s powe r, refus ed This is a man who , a t the heigh He mtgh t, re. empt the of or senat as a seat shi p of the Gard en of Plants, and n d the tot much after less, penm s t he but with littl e pains , have been rich; l ongs e c wht um gaged to supp ort a muse very house over h i s head is mort · to other peopl e. ns of A gasszz · Theodore Lym an, R ecollectw

��

Cam ­ Stat es, the Eng lis h tour ist in I n the 1 904 Baed eker for the United Mu­ tty vers U 01 h " t e 1m h' mme nded to bridg e, Mas sach u setts , h ad reco

where, brilliantly. H i s lectures took the highest reward of nineteenth­ century fame: parody. Artemus Ward and Josh Bil lings gave sp lendid satires

of them, assuring audiences who h ad sat through Agassiz's masterful zoologizing that the hen is a fool and th e mule an oversight. These dedicated

audiences enjoyed Agassiz and Artemus Ward with compartmentalized minds, never realizing the h u mor as a higher app reciation than thei r own desperate patron age. ·

Thoreau' s fi nest thought remained in the privacy of h i s rich notebooks

�ecause of the du l l ness of the p u blic interest, which he treated to inspi red

IOsults and ironic exhortations, daring to risk his meditations on its blank

surface. Agassiz remained charmingly gracious to the same audience, vagu ely aware that it was there. He would talk natural history with pro­ fess or or stable boy; what mattered was that he could focus an idea out

232

The Geography of the I magi nation

loud. Agassiz made a wild guess about the autumn leaf, cal ling its color a maturation. Dutifully all the poetlings and ladies' di aries took up the phrase, "the maturing of the leaf." Emerson displayed a conceit about the account of the Brazilian expedition, a collaboration between Agassiz and his wife, saying that the book was like a mermaid, � o h armonious was the combination of ichthyology and travelogue. Th1s promptly became a Boston riddle: "Why is the Agassiz Brazilian book like a mermaid ? " " Be­ cause you can't tell where the lady begins and the fish leaves off." Watch an English artist within this insi pi dity. Mana nne North, the painter, visited the Cambridge of Agas si z j ust weeks before her mcred1ble , debut at the White House as the daughter of Lord North, Earl of Guil­ ford (fl. 1 776) -Ulysses Grant even i nquired as to his lordshi p's h ealth . She perceived a level of culture at the Adams's, but then she began to meet people who wept over Dickens, and people who were trymg the mermaid riddle one more time, and ladies who "wept bitterly" when Miss North sang after dinner, and th e Miss Longfellows introduced themselves on the street car, <;�pd took her to lunch. "The luncheon was worthy of a poet-nothing but cakes and fruit, and cold tea with lumps of ice in it." Longfellow was "full of pleasant unpracti cal talk , qutte too good for everyday use." But i n Agassiz, though she had been told that he was "the clever ol Swiss professor" who had married "a most agreeable handsome woman and a Bostonian to boot , she found a man " more to my mind," who "gave me a less poetical dinner." Darwin had been a little like th is, full of Linnaean binomials for everything, a man who had looked and seen . Agassiz was more congeni al, seeming "entirely content with hi mse � f and everyone else." His museum was a catalogue of nature. He called ht m sel f the li brarian of the works of God, scarcely a facile i mage m t ts t mpltcati ons. For all her advantage as an outsider, Marianne North perceived only th at Agassiz was a m an far above th e i ntellectual atmosphere i n which she found him. And he has remained a figure of unquesttoned stature m American intellectual history. Few, however, can attach any reality to hi s vaguely fa miliar, vaguely exotic name. William James and Henry Adams would have th ought th is i mpossi ble, certainly unhkely. But m ne1ther F. 0. Matthiesen's A merican Renaissance nor the comprehensive Spiller, Thorp, Canby and Johnson Literary History of the U� ited States will one find Agassiz mentioned, much less related to the mmds upon whtc� he pressed such i nfl uence. The obscurest subject in the curncula of J\mer� can colleges is the intellectual history of the United States . L1ke Am � ncan . hi story itself, intellectual achievement has been styltzed mto an eptsodtc

�

Louis Agassiz

233

myth in which the mind has no real prominence. Patrick Henry has be­ come a single sentence; John Randolph has disappeared. The American scholar who found in his eightieth year the vestige of m anki nd's first cultivation of cereals is as unknown to American hi story as the tactician who drove Cornwal lis into Washi ngton' s hands. Everyone agrees that Agassiz is a heritage. But what kind of heritage? Once one has discovered that beneath the legend is a system of ideas, it becomes apparent how wrong it is that Agassiz's writing has lain unpubli shed for over a century.

II. VERBAL PRECISION

Phi losophers and theologi a ns have yet to learn that a p hysical fact i s as sa­ cred as a moral principle. Our own nature dema nds from u s this double a l legiance.

(Th e Natural History of the United States)

Now that at mid-century we have Louise Hall Tharp's A dventurous Alliance: The Story of the Agassiz Family of Boston ( Boston: Little, Brown, 1 95 9 ) and Edward Lurie's Louis Agassiz: A Life in Science

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1 9 60), the asperity is dimini shed in h aving to witness the survival of Agassiz' s genius as a facile and homely myth except for the almost secret publication by John Kasper and Ezra Pound, of an abominably p rinted but wholly admi rable collection of paragraphs entitled Gists from Agassiz, or Passages on the Intelligence Working in Nature, (Washington, Square Dollar Series, 1 95 3 ) . This in­ spired, ninety-six-page pamphlet was th e fruit of both Pound's h ome­ work for the Rock-Drill cantos and Kasper's explorati on, under Pound' s tutelage, of an American writer of greatest caliber now lost from cur­ ricula, a neglected classic whi ch, in the unflagging dil igence that turned up Alexander Del Mar, Senator Th omas Hart Benton, John Randolph of Roanoke, and like treasu re, Pound recovered for his pupils from his dis­ mal quarters in those fourteen Washi ngton years. Hence the publishers found it expedient to note that a classical education is not "the mere adjunct of an art shop or a collection of antiques, b ut a preparation for contemporary life." The first three lines of the Paradiso made its epi ­ graph: L a gloria d i colui c h e tutto move

per l'universo penetra e risplende

in una parte pili e meno altrove.

Behi nd that alignment of scientist and poet who were gazing at the same intricate design of nature there is an equally fine, invisible in-

234

The Geography of the I m agination

telligence to be discerned, and without detracti ng from john Kasper's diligence, rather congratulating him that his teacher was pleased to col­ laborate anony mously, we can identify the unmistakable voice of Ezra Pound on the book' s jacket: The boredom cau sed by "Am erican cultu re" of the second h a l f o f the X I X'11 century wa s due to i ts being offered as "somethi ng like" English cultu re, bur rather less lively; something to joi n Tennyson in "Th e A b bey" p e r haps, but nothing q u i te as exciting as Browning, o r f itzge rald's

R ubaiyat.

Agassiz, a p a rt from his brilliant achi evements in natu ra l science, ranks as a writer of prose, precise know ledge of h i's subject leading to great exactitude o f expression.

Agassiz, who as a freshman at Heidelberg knew more about fish than he was able to find from his professors or in their libraries, and whose last act in a life as creative as that of Leonardo or Picasso, was to sail along the route of the Beagle before announcing his final and authoritative re­ j ection of evolution, 1 would as soon have laid down his Pliny and Aris­ totle as his Baer or Cuvier. Agassiz was a major figure in nineteenth-century American culture, as much a part of our li terary history a s our scientific. Agassiz assumed that the structure of the natural world was everyone' s interest, that every community as a matter of course would collect and classify its zoology and botany . College students can now scarcely make their way through a poem organized around natural facts. Ignorance of natural history has become an aesthetic problem in reading the arts. Thoreau, though he wondered w hy the very dogs did not stop and admire turned map les, knew better what the American attitude was, and was to be, toward natural h istory. Nullity. The place scientific writing might claim among the corpus of imagina­ tive writing zoned off as literature by unstable rules for a dm1ssion and rejection is a strong one, allowi ng for inevitable airs of condescension from the p rotectors of letters. The spirit of our age has been curiously M o nthly 21 ( 1 8 7 3 ) : ' See Elizabeth Ca ry Agassiz, " I n the Straits o f M a gellan," The Atlantic voyage of the Has­ This 79-84. 5 . p p , d i b i ," Galapagos e h t r through e h d n " Cruise 8 9 - 9 5' a Darwinian sler wa , m a i n ly oceanograp h i c . Aga ssi z saw the opporruniry "to study the whole a s he wrote to a German theory free from all external i n fluences and former prejudi ces," Darwin h imself came friend, Carl Gegen ba u r, adding that "It was on a similar voyage that . 3 7 2-77 o f his Louts p p voyage, this of account Lurie's Edward " ! s e theori s i h to form ulate 1 960), i s particularl y fine. Agassiz: A Life in Science, (Chi cago: Uni vcrsiry o f Chicago Press, 74 , " Ev o l ution !lnd Per­ The crystallized rejection of Darwinian theory was p u b lished in 1 8 . The student o f 1conogrpa phy manence of Type," The Atlantic Monthly 33 ( \ 8 74) : 9 2- 1 0 1 , Mrs. AgasSiz, and Meli s i nvited to compare the G a l a p agos as they appeared to D a rw t n . view of the impact ot prophetic a as is Enc,mt<•d Las v i l le, whose sustained vastation in evoluti onary data on the i maginative m i n d .

Louis Agassiz

23 5

?enyin�, although its search for purity is understan dable. The American m p arncular regards his mind as a showroom for certain furniture s as content, a nd this s illy ide a gets defended by the vulgar error that if the mmd 1s stuffed, there' ll be no room for i mportant things in their ti me. 1 fi rst colhded wit� this homely belief while teaching in St. Louis, that m useum of Amencan a, and should have known that it came from Poor . Richard or Sherlock Holmes. It is from Holmes. At a more crucial level our very schools and j ournals encourage neglecting everything but some approved matter at hand. Even in so fine a morp hology of litera ry form as Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism, the shape of scientific writing gets but a p assing glance (a sharp one, h owever) . Agassiz's masterpie ce was to have been the Contributions to the Natural History of the United States. Its four handsome volumes remain as a triumph of thought and scholarship . So carefully do they begin, . holdmg en �1 re hbranes of fact in perfect balance with origin al research, that the mmd marvels at the inconceiva bly fi ne book the finished work would have been; for in 1 , 600 pages Agassiz has but described the em­ bry �logy of the North American turtles and the anatomy of the most elus1ve and per� shable of creatures, the jellyfish and his kin . "Jellyfish ? " a transcende ntahst once asked Agassiz. " It seems to be little more than organized water. " "Agassiz ' s influence on methods of teaching," William james reported to � e Amencan Society of Naturalist s in 1 8 9 6, "was prompt and declslv e,-all the more so that it struck people's imaginatio n by its very excess. The good old way of committin g printed abstractio ns to memory seems never to have rece1ved such a shock as it encountered at his hands." The ability to com bine facts, he said at the end of his life is a much rarer � ft than to discern them. Thi s observatio n h as weigh � . The man . �ho s a1d 1t h ad combined facts enough, and when he held fi re on evolu­ tion he had, as Darwin knew, more facts than Darwi n to combine but he was also the man who discerned what a glacier was, and the evid� nce of the Ice Age, and who cancelled species after species identified by his colleagu es bY pomtmg · · out th at the new-foun d creature was but the pup of a well-kno wn anim al. It h as � een said too often, especiall y as a motive for shelving Agassiz as � romantic biologist , that he refu sed to see the truth of evo lution because lt was n 't h'I s d'1scovery . Th IS . 1s · easy to believe, difficult to p rove. The accuracy of h1s eye I S more importa nt than five h undred anecdot es °f Ca mbridge life, and anyway his role as upsetter of the Harvard ambi­ c� sound s like (and, one hopes, was) an unsuspe cted maliciou sness of mlgatory intent rather than the amusing mishaps of a sweet, distrait .

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scientist . The snakes that the Boston ladies found beside them on the set­ tee in the Agassiz parlor, the lizards and toads produced at transcenden­ tal dinners (one must overlook these deep thinkers) , and the drunken bear stal king what is now Massachusetts Avenue (one of Professor Agassiz's specimen s) , and a thousand other inadvertences, can scarcely all have been unplanned. The Harvard in which Agassiz halfheartedly submitte d to the bit part of tame professor, the Harvard of Longfellow and Jam :s Russell Lowell, elicited gestures of self-defense. It was the Harvard which dyna­ mited Raphael Pumpelly 's bride (an error in victims, the char�e bemg intended for a local tease), thereby alienating a brilliant mind. Agassiz found the Cambridg e High School's chemistry lab better than Harvard' s and worked there; his major biological work he did for a while in an abandoned bath house on the Charles, and later in a wooden building which was twice moved to greater distances from the Yard. It was the Harvard which denied Thoreau the use of its library. To watch Agassiz at his bedrock -mounted microscope, tipping a watch-glass in which yellow granular cells in unfertilized turtle ova are like "glass globes whirling along, freighted on one side with g.olden peb­ bles" is to realize what science was in its heroic age. To watch IS the verb ; the verbal precision of Agassi z's prose, unmatched in American litera­ ture, can sustain for fifty pages a lucid description of th � inside of an egg. n When the "hyaline masses" of these ova are swollen With water t? lea � m ch m an of redth five-hund one globe," "glass the of the tensile strength _ _ diameter, the yolk grains "dance about their confined sphere �n � zigzag _ quiver, and finally their delicate boundary wall, which by this �Ime has become unequivocally demonstrated, bursts suddenly on one side, �nd extrudes at a single contractive effort nearly the whole horde of Its viva­ cious motes, assuming itself by this loss a wrinkled, unsymmetrical, much diminish ed shape, but still holding a few oscillating corpuscles ." Darwin's prose, beside Agassiz' s, is wordy, undistinguished, indecisive as to its audience. Agassiz was both popular lecturer and essayist; w� a_re not surprised to find his scientific prose elegantly exact, scrup �l�us m Its details. It has the eloquence of information, but it also has a bnlhance all its own which flashes from deep sensibility and sharp awareness of beauty. e In a long, formal essay on the embryology of the turtle, we find thes sentences in a study of the eggshell : ous deposit , are com­ Th e outerm ost of these layers, next t o the h a rd calcare ling at times exces­ resemb fibres, uniform most posed of the smooth est and deposit ed, these layers is shell the Before . crystals ar tubul ed sively elongat us appear ance w h t ch may be recogn ized by the peculia rly brillian t nacreo been noticed most has thts where ta, strikes the eye. In Glyptem ys insculp

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freq uentl y, the compone nt fibres are of excessive tenuity and compactn ess among each other , the l atter feature tending, no doubt, to heighten the polished aspect of the su rface o f the layer.

Agassiz wrote comforta bly in French, German, and Latin; English he learned late; he was never at ease speaking it and rejoiced when, in Brazil or exploiting the pretensions of Cambridge society, he could lecture in French . His written English, like Conrad's, depended heavily on the easy cliche, hence "resembling at times," "may be recogniz ed," "which strikes �he eye, " "the latter feature tending, " and "aspect" in this passage, a JUdiCious p1ckm g from that smooth Victorian literacy from which few native writers escaped, Ruskin alone, perhaps, toward the end of his life. A necessary verbal conciseness gives the passage "calcareo us," "tubular crystals, nacreous , · and compactness. ' ' It is Agassiz's clarity tenmty . of mmd that makes the sentence pleasant to read and allows it to be accessible to the reader who exults in precision as a quality of mind. "

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The earliest indication of a mesoblast is mani fested by a slight haziness at one smg l e point within the ectoblast , close against its wall. When th e Purkinjea n vesicle has reached a size but a little larger than that of the last, the Wagneria n vesicles almost entirely cover the wall of their parent, . , by their clearness and roundness stmulattng of contour, drops of dew lining a glass globe. The clear transpare nt nature o f the younger states o f the Wagneria n vesicles is gradually lost in a certai n measure, and supersede d by a pearly or milky complectw n bounded by a rather dark, soft outline, calling to mind the ap­ pearance o f the denser species of Medusae , or the bluish transpare ncy of b01led carulage; at the same time there appears a very bright, irrefractiv e, eccentric spot, the Valentin ian vesicle.

Not the artist, but that fiction the public, consi ders the scientist an _ �hen. A � approved and perhaps j ournalistically hatched topic of the day ts the d1chotomy of humanist and scientist, and atomic physicis ts are _ �reated as If they were Martians, humanists as from Arcadia, while the JOu rn�li ts who pit one against the other apparen tly went to school to the � angehc mtelligences, happy to explain humanism to the scientist ' science to the human ist. But look ! Photograp hy, as Bouvar d or Bloom will tell you, was a blow to art, rivaling, demoralizing, and displacing it. Yet we cannot find the frightened artist or the sanguin e photographer to give substance to t h.Is t·dee ' refue. We can fi nd Renoir ecstatic over photo. graphic tone, Stieglitz sponsoring a whole movem ent in modern painting a company of French painters staying up all night looking at Muybridge' � ph?tographs, and on and on, not to mention the disting uished list of Patnter-photographers. We should be especially suspicious of the adver-

The Geography of the Im agin ation

23 8

tised antagonism between students of matter in terms of natural l aw and students of all things in whatever terms. One of the most provocative books on the biology of sex is by a poet, Remy de Gourm ont; one of the finest on art, by a scientist, Leo Frobenius.2 One could fill pages with the sensibility of da Vinci ; a painter invented the electric telegraph; the great poem Paterson was written by a doctor. The line of distinction is misdrawn . Redraw it to zone sensibility from barbarity, and such an intelligence as Agassiz's will need no apology. Th e fact that a misplaced distinction exists leads us into dissociating Ribes Bracteosum, Doug\. Unarmed, glabnms; leaves o n long petioles, cor­ date, deeply 5-7 lobed, sprinkled with resi nous dots beneath, the lobes acuminate, coarsely doubly serrate or incised; racemes long, erect, many­ flowered, o n short pedu ncles; calyx rotate, glabrous; flowers white; fruit black, resinous- dotted and scarcely eatable,

from th is definition of love by a poet: Where memo ry liveth, it takes its state Formed like a diafan from light on shade Which shadow cometh of Mars and remaineth Created, having a name sensate, Custom o f the soul, will from the he art; Cometh from a seen form which being understood Taketh locus and remaining in the intellect possible Wherein hath he neither weight nor still-standing Descendeth not by quality but shineth out Himself his own effect unendingly Not in delight but in the being aware Nor can he leave his true likeness otherwhere.

The fi rst, from Sereno Watson's Botany (United States Geological Exploration of the Fortieth Parallel, 1 8 7 1 ) is as severely disciplined a record of a prai rie gooseberry as Guido Cavalcanti ' s poem is a closely argued, scholastic definition of love ' s attributes. So confused is the p res­ ent delinquency from verbal p recision that many sophomores and many professors will unhesitatingly declare this paragraph a hopeless specimen of pedantry, "scientific j argon . " It is uni maginable that these professors and sophomores cannot appreciate the diction which named a j elly fish Medusa or chose as Linn aean binomials for Wyoming flora Artemisia 21 mean Gourmont's Physique de /'amour: essai sur /'instinct sexuel ( 1 904) and Frobenius's Erlebte Erdtei/c, esp . val. IV: Paideuma ( 1 928) .

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frigida, Helenium autumnale, Fritillaria p udica, Helianthus exilis and Cilia ciliata. Samuel Johnson i s palmed off in classrooms as a harmless drudg� of a lexi cographer, yet open the Dictionary anywhere and find preCiston and eloquent plainness. " ROOST: That on which a bird sits to sleep . PO ETESS: A she poet. HORS E : A neighing quadruped, used in war and �raugh t and carriage. " Watson's description of the gooseberry is

within a tradition of exactitude whi ch was never divorced from sensibil­ ity Scientific langu age (which, like poetry, is cared for word by word) i s : as mteresung to the artist as the language o f fi n e prose a n d poetry t o the . sCientt �t. Botamcal nomenclature, for instance, is transparent, un bet­ r� yed mto the opacity of use by rote. Viola saint-pauliana, the African vwlet, was discovered and named by a Christian missionary . This is not a fact; cultures can be deduced from any fragment thereof. 3 Helenium au­ tumnale bears its original Greek name, aligning flower and woman in the deep tradition that awed and pleased John Ruskin , and a nineteenth­ century botanist added autumnale, specifying both i ts flowering season and the botanist's world-weary nostalgi a over cl assical culture, so that one cannot distinguish between the poetry and the science of the name; they are fused-a n ame fitted with p recision into a universal nomencla­ ture for all the flora and an image of a tall, aging heroine. lhe common name for Helenium autumnale is sneezeweed, and one perceives a known culture in that, too. The second passage is a translation (by Ezra Pound, in Canto XXXVI) of a medieval poem which defines love. It does not define with terms any less clear �ha � those of a psychologist, and if we are willing we can easily see t� e scte� �t fi c preciSi on of the poet with the same eyes that detect the poetic preCISIOn of the botanist. To see Sereno Watson and a mediieval poet wi th� n one frame is not only an advantage and privilege to the per­ �eptor; It IS also an invitation to read with new eyes. The index to culture IS sensitivity. Our culture can be gauged as exultantly in Agassi z's long study of the n aked-eyed Medusa as in Marianne Moore's dilation upon the e.dge-hog. But where can we find the teachers to talk about the two in one context? Even Wallace Stevens, in a b rilliant and congenial essay in T� e Necessary Angel, compared Miss Moore' s ostrich not with an os­ tnch but with the article on ostriches in the Britannica, that pons

asinorum. In Lowell's stultifying elegy, Agassiz, we find:

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JNeq t uam, quoniam media d� fonte le orum surgit amari a/iquit quod in ipsis jloribus an h gat. I hate to dtsllluston you, ' Agasstz s successor writes with Agassizian kindness "but e name was gtven b y a professional botanist i n Hannover, Wendland, who, as f r as 1 n_ow, never went abroad; the name ts tn honour of a German nobleman, Baron Walter von Satnt Paul, who brought a spectmen back from Africa . "

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does not lay till four years after copu lation, or when eleven years old. The

. . . in him perhaps Science had barred the gate that lets in dream, And he would rather count the perch and bream.

Lowell allows Agassiz "the poet's open eye," but metap horically only , for he suspected that so great a grasp of nature must coincide somewhere with the Wordsworthian sensibilities he dealt in. It is fairly clear that Lowell had no way of conceiving of Agassiz and Wordsworth as writers within the same range of meditation. Lowell hi mself was two men, th e one not on speaking terms with the other. His comic alter ego Bigelow had a viable diction and wit. The official poet called "James Russell Low­ ell" could only manipulate, with a variety of ineptitudes, a collection of verbal tags and i mitated emotions from Wordsworth, Milton, and Gray . The elegy to Agassiz's memory, written in Florence and dispatched to The Atlantic Monthly, is almost a good p oem. He cannot hide Agassiz with his pomposity. He k new the man too well, and good phrases get in despite th e poem's commitment to a high diction. We accept as accurate "his broad maturity" ( Lowell perceiving a mind that had actually arrived at ideas and was not merely hankering for them) . We ca n see Agassiz in "his wise forefinger raised i n smiling blame," and in similar clear p as­ sages. But we read the poem with bleak appreciation, though we learn from Lowell's every gesture why the real excellence of Louis Agassiz is unknown to American students, and why American intellectual life (that " level monotone," as Lowell called i t) could make nothing at all of the genius e to live and work in i t.

Ill. INTELLIGENCES

Agassiz tel l s his class that the intesti nal worms in the mouse are not devel­ oped except in the stomach of the cat. Picked up, floating, an

Emys picta, hatched last year. It is an inch and one­

twentieth long in the upper shell and agrees with Agassiz' s description at that age. Agassiz says he could never obtain a specimen of the insculpta only one year old, it i s so rarely met with, and young Emydidae are so aquatic. I have seen them frequently. Agassiz says he has discovered that the haddock, a ous.

deep-sea fish, is vivipa r­

March 2 0. Dine with Agassiz at R. W. E.'s He thinks that the suckers die of asphyxia, having very large a i r- b ladders and being i n the habit of comihg to the surface for air. But then he is th in king of a di fferent phenomenon from the one I speak of, which last is confined to the very earliest spring or winter. He says that the

24 1

Louis Agassiz

Emys picta does not copulate till seven years old, and then

Cistudo Blandingii (wh i ch he has heard of in Massachusetts only at Lancas­ ter) copulates at eight or nine years of age. He says th is is not a Cistudo but an Emys. He has eggs of the serpentina from which the young did not come forth ti ll the next spring. H e th inks th at the Esquimau d og is the only indi­ genous one i n the United States. H e had not observed the silvery appearance and dryness of the Iycoperdon fungus in water wh ich I showed. He had broken caterp illars and fou n d the crystals of i ce i n them, but had not thawed them. When I began to tell h i m of my experiment on a frozen fish, he said th�t Pallas had shown that fishes were frozen and thawed again, but I affirmed the contrary, and then Agassiz agreed with me. Says Aristotle de­ scribes the care the pouts take of their young. I tol d him of Tanner's account o f it, the only one I had seen. The river over the meadows again, nearly as high as in February, on ac(Thoreau, The journals) count of the rain of the 1 91h .

From the Lakedaimonian ca bin at Walden Pond, Thoreau sent to Agassiz fish, snapping turtles, snakes, whatever he thought the professor might not know. Throughout the Journals, and even in Walden and the Week on the Concord and Merrimac R ivers, we find Thoreau exulting to have found things as yet unclassified. Agassiz paid well and Thoreau needed the money. When funds were low, Thoreau would advertise the riches of Walden to Agassiz's assistant, the naturalist Elliot Cabot: minks, muskrats, frogs, lizards, tortoises, snakes caddie-worms leeches muscles, "etc., or rather, here they are. " For the reat Natural History o the United States, Thoreau on one occasion made up an im pressive ship­ ment of his elected neighbors. From the pond came fifteen pouts, seven­ teen perch, thirteen shi ners, one land and five mud tortoises. From the river came seven perch, five shiners, eight bream, four dace, two mud and five painted tortoises. The cabin itself gave up a black snake and a dor­ mouse. Agassiz, forever lecturing, fo rever searching out money for his collections-"I am too b usy to mak e a living" - regarded Thoreau' s de­ tachment from the world with envy. " My only business is my i ntercourse with nature," he wrote to Thoreau in 1 849, "and could I do without draughtsmen, lithographers, etc. , I would live still more retired. This will satisfy yo u that whenever you come this way I shall be deligh ted to see you-since I have also heard something of your mode of living." No one sent in such fresh fish as Thoreau, or seemed to know so intui­ . tively what would please Agassiz, who, soon aware that his collector was no mean naturalist, began to cast his orders as hints ( " I do not know how much trouble I may be giving Mr. Thoreau" ) . And h is letters to Thoreau began to take on professional tones: " . . . the small mud turtle was really

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superimposition of Progress upon the processes of Evolution taxes pure empiricism more than Agassiz's finding an intelligent plan or even a di­ vinity in nature. If Darwin's mechanism of natural selection has the merit of doing away with a single act of creation, it nevertheless leads to the embarrassment of introducing both purpose in nature and cognition in the evolutionist as dei ex machina. This difficulty has sufficiently im­ pressed some of the acutest twentieth-century scientists and philosophers of science to lead them into doctrines of multiple acts of creation and even in to attributing spontaneity, awareness , and purpose to all natural process. But in order not to distort, fro m our privileged point in time, a "vanquished viewpoint," let us simply note that Agassiz's writings i n natural history and systematic biology are equally i mperative readi ng for us, and let us consider whether a passage such as the following, from Agassiz's " Essay on Classification," is a last and most explicit statement of pre-Darwi nian teleology or whether it is a suggestive precursor of post-Darwinian teleology and natural philosophy:

the Sternothoerus odoratus, as I suspected,-a very rare species, quite distinct from the snapping turtle." More than once Agassiz came to the cabin at Walden "to look after new Leucisci, " and to inspect turtles. Looking at these two a h undred and twenty-odd years away, we per­ ceive a curious touching of worlds. It is not, even now, known who Thoreau was, what science, purposefully unseparated from meditation, lies in the notebooks and j ournals. One distillation from his extraordi­ nary reading of nature is Walden; given other precipitates, we can coagu­ late other systems of stuff. He was clearly an ecologist; he was also a student of time, of cyclic movements in nature and of the miraculously synchronous organization of plants an d animals. Hence his daily inspec­ tion of one woodscape, k nowing every detail of its life. Agassiz knew oceans, continents, mountains; he had lived on a glacier as Thoreau lived at Walden. But Thoreau did not know Agassiz any more than Agassiz knew Thoreau. These two m inds of intense brightness were equally famil­ iar with the shyness of turtles; each knew the un suspected mysteries of nature, seeing more than they would ever have ti me to record. But notice, however remote these conversations of Agassiz and Thoreau must remain to us, that the two fi gures-portly, bald Agassiz, shaggy, nim ble Thoreau-bent over a painted turtle at Walden, change a great deal of our attitude as to what the nin eteenth century called Nature. Bryant, Whittier, Emerson; Lowell, Longfellow, Holmes-they knew their Romantici sm; they knew how to arrive at the "Wordsworthian im­ pulses." Yet they could also focus on leaf or meadow with something of the discipline of a Japanese poet (a nd spoil their gaze, to be sure, with an easy moralizi ng) . Their work is now considered dull. Go back to it, how­ ever. Be patient or kindly blind to their interpretive gestures. Look with their eyes at the physical world that held their attention: it is the symbol of the age's profound attachment to biological fact. Not rusticity merely or picnic-day ebullience, their engagement was aesthetic, faithful, an in­ tuition of ulti mate authenticities. Thoreau's love affair with the scrub­ oak, homeliest of trees, began to have the qualities of myth, the Greek feeling for the olive wh ich we find in Oedip us at Co/onus.

But, which i s the tru ly h u m b l e ? He w h o , penetrating i nto the secrets o f cre ation, arranges them u nder a formula w hich he proudly calls h is scientific system ? or he who, i n the same pursuit, recognizes his glori ous affinity with th e Creator, and, in deepest gratitude for so su blime a birthright, strives to be the fa ith ful i nterpreter of that Divine Intel lect with whom he is permitted, nay, with whom he is i ntended, according to the laws of his being, to enter into communion ? . . . i f, i n short, we can prove premeditation p rior to the act of creation, we h ave done, once and for ever, with the desolate theory which refers us to the laws of m atter as accounting for all the wonders of the u n i­ verse, and leaves us with no God but the monotonous, u nvarying action of physical forces, bi nding all things to their i nevitable destiny. I thi nk our sci­ ence has now reached th at degree of advancement, i n which we may venture upo n such an investigation . . . . I disclaim every i n tention of intro d ucing in this work any evidence irrelevant to m y subject, or of �upporting any conclu­

sions not immediately flowing from it; but I cannot overlook nor disregard here the close connection there is between the facts ascertained by scientific · i nvestigations, and the discussions now carried on respecti ng the origin of organized beings.

IV. M ET A M O R PH O S I S : A G A S S I Z AND D A R W I N

Hindsight in structs us to wonder why Agassiz could not see the truth of Evolution. But hindsight also reminds us that Agassiz consistently lo­ cated i ntelligence in or behind nature, long before Bergson, Whit � head, and Wittgenstei n were forced by logic to return i ntelligence to nature, as man had assumed from the beginning of thought, rather than live with the miserable confusions of nineteenth-century mechanism. Darwin 's $

t

The more we look into his work, the more we realize that, in a sense, he did see the truth of Evolution. He h ad Darwin's facts before him and saw with different eyes the pattern they made .' He saw metamorphosis. For �gassiz, evolution meant the growth of the em bryo in the egg, the exfoliation of form from the inexplicable potential within the fusion of sperm and ovu m . This was the classic sense of the word until the Dar­ winians applied it to the entire organi c world. Where science now sees a linear development in time, Agassiz saw a lateral spread of design, some-

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how modified over long undul ations of the eons, as Cuvier had suggested (possibly by the creation, no one knew how, of new species to replace extinct creatures), and somehow involved with the encroachment and recess ion of continental sheets of ice. The western world has had three students of metamorphosis: Ovid, Darwin, Picasso. Ovid took evolution on faith and metamorphosis for granted. Form flows into form. Eternal form, a god, must make his epiphany in matter. Beauty must manifest itsel f in beautful things. Agas­ siz inherited this ancient idea: that within nature there is an intelligence, the force which the Greek perceived as a god, the force which Ovid as a poet saw expressed in the myths, a system of metap hors. An oak leaf is a thought. It is a manifest idea . All of nature is some intelligent being's meditation on being. And on becoming, one might add, but we need not limit ourselves to that angle of vision. The becoming is not growth but transformation. Oak, acorn; acorn, oak. Agassiz saw that there are several maturations, not any one fi nal fructification. In copula­ tion we free a mature being, an animal we have carried in us, spermato­ zoon. He is little more than Chaos Chaos, an amoeba with a tail. Loosed, he ( not us) goes to breed. He does what we agonize to do, what poem, song, and saint's meditation long for. He penetrates another being (or dies in crystal desiccation) and fuses with it. And here the succession of our metamorphoses begins. The fetus is a recapitulation of structural ideas, of themes in creation, an ela borate series of puns. Each stage is complete yet transitional; zygote is fetus to the child, anarchist, and tyr­ ant. The adolescent is not a recent child about to become an adult. He is completed, mature, with a life sp an, a mode of thought and response; he is in fact a separate animal. The child is to the adolescent, and the ado­ le�cent t ; the young man, as the tadpole to the frog. By being wholly psychological about this physical fact we have accumulated a fantasia of inadequate ideas and bruised our knowledge of reality. At this point it may be worthwhile to indi cate that Henry Adams saw in the science around h i m a hope that "sex and race" would at last be exp lained by trained minds, and he looked to a Cla rence King and Raphael Pumpelly, Agassiz's second-generation men in the field, to corre­ late data. The world still wai ts. If the ideas on this page seem curious, the reader is i nvited to reflect that Agassiz, Pu mpelly, and K i ng are scholars whose neglect is distu rbing to contemplate. Agassiz died mid-career leav­ ing a parabolic undertaking in scientific k nowledge, and students are perfectly free to take up where he left off. . Growth, Agassiz saw, takes place within metamorphic form. The transformation of form into form is not properly growth but a true metamorphosis involving the total organism. There is no single growing

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up. The grown chi ld metamorphoses into an adolescent (what under­ standing we might have if scientists would define these matters !) ; the adolescent into what classical wisdom called a juventus. Hence the bore­ dom of a Spengler or a Frobenius, master analysts of metamorphic form and of the peculiar destinies inheren t in form, with the tidy, insular mi nds of Darwin and Huxley, who wanted the interlocked natu ral systems of metamorphoses to be a progress ( history is dramatic) , a beautiful growth from one breathtakingly important-and accidental-egg, an exfoliation of al l from a fortuity that held in potential the armadillo, the rose, the leopard, John Dillinger, and Confucius. Agassiz was not bored by Darwin; one won ders what a complex of certainty and doubt sometimes appeared to Agassiz's intelligence that never found expression. Spengler's fi nding Darwin insular derives from an inspection of the form of ideas, and ultimately, at our remove, it is precisely the characteristic contours of ideas which can lead us to an understanding of the nineteenth-century heritage we are still struggling to understand and to modify. Ovid studied men turning into animals; Darwin, animals into men. Between these two brilliantly imaginative perceptions the su bject of metamorphosis stands as one of the most lyric of natural facts. With one gesture nature holds matter fi rmly within her patterns. Gingko biloba, the oldest of survivi ng trees and high among the loveliest, is of a design so primeval that nothing but ferns and slimes are so antique. Yet it is a Stammvater tree, an archaic and oriental kinsman of the conifers. In Darwin's great vision of descent it was fit and survived, and so were its cedar and loblolly and fir cousins; that is, it is within a linear metamor­ p hosis , branching into a deltoid pedigree, but most of all in deep time, a metamorphosis eons long. For Agassiz, who discovered the Ice Age, time was no strange subject. But in the p uzzle of seeming Ur-parents and infinitely varied descendants he was more modern. He belongs to the spirit of Picasso and Tche­ lit.chew, who have meditated on change as i n fi ni te variety within a form, theme variations made at the very begi nning of creation, simultaneous. The ideas of nature were for Agassiz what an i m age is for Picasso. Gen us and species are perhaps ideal forms from which nature matures all the p ossibilities. Time need not enter into the discussion. Snake and bird and p teridactyl all came from the same workshop, from the same materia available to the craftsman; they do not need to be seen as made out of each other. An artist fascinated by a structural theme made them all. Darwin pl aced them in a time-order, and invited scientists to find the serpent halfway in metamorphosis toward being a pteridactyl, the pteri­ d actyl becoming bird. Agassiz stood fi rm on the unshakable fact that

I mag i n a tion The Geo grap hy of the

246

r igi n of . net s· sna kes sna kes . The O swa , %�t m�rp h ose� w ould h ave been bet ­ dogs alw ays h a ve pupptes a . t s h on Sp ecies was a mts nom er. arw d fair ly soo n we ma y find bot an t a nva l poe . ter , but the n. Ag ass tz wa s ndo rs of tma g mat ton . · the she ! f wtth 0vi d ' s pl e ck vas tati on, con l ''d e - Da rwi n sat in bla Ide as of nat ure are m �ra ich , that allo wed to . d, h e c ld nev er dec ide wh the tem pla nng the god , or vot h hor rors as the tap ewo rm, · oce nt ma tter sue th e mn . . re evo1 ve from mo was view in's . . . . poh om yeIttts vtru s . D a rw syp h ths sptroch aete, the . ses , tho ugh by the end of h ts . o f cou se,. he was spa re d vtru � ma cro sco ptc , . Da rwi n felt bla ck g th e su b t1 e , m u rderers . day s optics wer e dtsc losm . . f a cat wit h .a cap ture d mo use eno ugh abo ut th e. wa y o . ma n, a cer tam red atu d-n I goo y us ono not a . We can detect m Aga sstz , d eve r e t degree, to plea s ical med a ing tak his in eva i 1 sion n - w s his 1 hed sCie nce was rep g ookin g at a pat ient . All app cou ld fit men a cttc ure f reality . Les ser, pra cal ling to stu dy the na suc h an ard reg we ast days f the wo rld kno wle dge to use . In t ese Da rwi n t. i ut abo ic iast t e ent hus we ca espect; r ld c with tude atti � reation not as a th . Wa s hi s plan of c tro des ry the hts t tha urt h s wa tra ble tru th ? to be referred to dem ons . n a us l arv m gence dts� �� At l st the eloqu ent intelli out. . Agasst z s go any w h ere . nat ure wa s a p alpa bl e attn b ute o f God · We do not m ' bl e rm ce ' t I· n him bet we en can not disc ove r any confl tc we ic; ost agn an ssiz Aga find relig ion and scie nce .

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Louis Ag,1ssiz

24 7

dards he h ad set for h is zoology labs. "The education of a naturalist now consists ch iefly in learning how to compare," Agassiz said (a nd the now is ominous ) . "By the same p rocess the most mature results of scientific re­ search in Philology, in Ethnology, and in Physical Science are reached." The b rilliant strokes of the i ntellect can be seen best in genera lizations, in fi n di ng "the great laws of combination," but fi rst the facts must be collected. Hence the diligence of the next generation, almost invariably Agassiz's pupils, in the field. Henry Adams has left us pictures of Clar­ ence King i n the Montana w i lderness, and Pump elly has left his own fine record of geologizing the world over. These two bri ng the matter of ' Agassiz s teaching i nto focus, for neither was his pupil; they took his inspiration from the air, and yet both acknowledge his leadership as if they h ad been his closest assistants. Agassiz's influence has flowed beyond science , as he hi mself suggested that it might. If any man has repaid America's debt to E urope for giving us Agassiz, it is Ezra Pound, who, as we have seen, has acknowledged his debt to Agassiz. By transposing Agassiz's comparative method for critical use in literature, Pound created an extra ordinary richness in contempo­ rary criticism. In Pound' s The ABC of R eading we find: The proper METHOD for studying poetry and good letters i s the method o f contemporary biologists, that i s careful first-hand exa min ation o f the matter and continual COMPARISON of one "slide" or specimen with another. No man i s equipped for modern thi n king until h e has u n derstood the anecdote of Agassiz and the fish : A post-graduate student equipped with honors a n d dip lomas went to Agassiz to receive the final and finishing touches. The great man o ffered h i m

V . RAD IEN CE

e and yet a si ngle sent enc fe to the stud y of Nat ure, e I have devo ted my. who le l i enc ond resp cor a s tha t the re i d ne. I h av h ! . may exp ress all th a t h a ages of st ferent dif the and imes o i fi s es o m fJeo(Meth od of S be tween the su ccess iO n o tu dy in Na tural Hi st ry) s . a ts at h -t egg thei r growth w the

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l n '� d to be a resul.t tha t w as But Ag ass iz add s: " It cha nce r a l t0 oth er . con el usw ns o f a vo oth er gro ups an d h as 1 e d of the De . tgn ora nce t o kn ow leg e · t from g stz gas A b Y ere , wh . �' me tho d a s sim 1 co mp an son . oth er c��cl st� ns nian and Silu rian fos s t is to i e which fi lled Ag� ss t z s entag � disci is ethod" m parative om "The c . ion s afterward a nd ntJs ts for two g erat scte h wtt s om sro clas an Am eric t. . wh ich has bor ne oth er frui iz wa s em ph asi zple , comp I am ed tha. t Agass peo all of on, ers Em en Wh ass iz pat ien tly 1 rd as a um ver st. ty , Ag ° f H a rva ing scie nce to t h e d etn ment . to the sta nup t ugh cu urn sh ou ld be bro curn the of rest e th at th lied rep

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a sunfish a n d told h i m t o describe i t . Post-graduate student: "That's only a sunfish . " Agassiz: " I know that. Write a description o f i t . ' ' After a few minutes the student returned with the description of the Ichthus Heliodip lodokus, or whatever term is used to conceal the commo n sunfish from v ulgar knowlege, family of Heliichtherinkus, etc., as fo und in · textbooks of th e subject. Agassiz again told the student to describe the fish. The student produced a four -p age essay . Agassiz then told him to look at the fish. At the end of th ree weeks the fish was i n an adv a n ced state of de­ comp osition, but the student knew something about it.

When Pound comp leted and edited Ernest Fenollosa's The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry, he already had an intui tive

grasp of Agassiz's intellectual heri tage and saw in Fenollosa's inspection of Chinese poetry exactly the method which Agassiz had recommended

248

The Geography o f the Imagi nation

to Emerson, Throughout Pound's critical work the guidelines suggested by Agassiz are discernible, and from this effort more brillian � ideas have been exposed than literary history will be able to follow up m a genera­ tion of scho lars. Hence in the Paradiso of The Cantos: Out of von Humboldt: Agassiz, Del Mar and F robenius.

Hu mboldt's Kosmos is still good reading, though, as with Agassiz, scholars give us biographies which generate interest in texts that remain unprinted and oftentimes ina ccessible. "Agassiz never appeared to better advantage," Emerson wrote in his Journal in 1 8 70, " as in his Biographi­ . ca l Discourse on Hum boldt, at the Music Hall in Boston. . . . Wh at rs unusual for him, he read a written discourse, a bout two hours long; yet all of it strong, nothing to spare, not a weak point, no rhetoric, no falsetto;-his personal recollections and anecdotes of their intercourse, simple, frank, and tender in the tone of voice, too, no error of egotism or self- assertion, and far enough from French sentimentalism. He is quite as good a man as his hero, and not to be dup licated, I fear." Emerson the next year would include Agassiz among his Carlylean heroes ( " My men" ) . Emerson could understand Agassiz as the heir of Hu mboldt and Cuvier (toward the end we find Agassiz l ooking to Baer the embryologist as his preceptor and writing in his introduction to the American edition of Hugh Miller's Footp rints of the Creator that the next significant dis­ coveries would have to be in embryology)4 because he habitually saw genius as a spiritual gift from teacher to pupil. Behind "Out of von Hu � ­ boldt: Agassiz . . . " there is a perception of radiant intelligence, certam qualities of h umanity, a signature of the analytical faculties in concert with the searching mind. Agassiz was a graft, analogous perhaps to Conrad in the hi story of the English nov el. Japan had Lafcadio Hearn, Pumpelly , and Ernest Fenol­ losa, and from them learned to teach, to mine ores, and to splice a long tradition to a neglectful present, but each of these scholars enlisted native genius. Their task was not so much transformation as directing energy, catalyzing. Agassiz transformed Harvard from college to university, but the bulk of his contri bution he brought with h i m : a detailed knowledge of nature which Darwin envied, which upset the settled conclusions of lesser investigators. Agassiz focused his transforming powers on the st� ­ dent; it was as a teacher that he wished most to be remembered. H1s 4Throughout the fi rst edition of The Origin of Species•. Darwin, whose German was notori­ ously shaky, made the Freudian error of writing Agassiz when he meant von Baer. Th 1 s was shamefacedly corrected i n later editions, but i t tells u s where Darwm was actuall y gettmg his knowledge of embryology. See Jane Oppenheimer, "An Embryological Emgma I n The Origin of Species , " in Forerunners of DarUJin 1 745- 1 85 9, ed. Glass , Te mkm, and Straus ( Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1 95 9 ) , pp. 292-3 22.

Louis Agassiz

249

colleagues he urged to think as they would, within the capacities of a temperament which , i nheri ted by Alexander Agassiz and aggravated by America, ran to horse-whipping utter strangers "for looking insolent," and pulling incautious drivers from the first automobiles and shaking them unti l their teeth rattled. In an age of touchy formalities and pathological restrictions of spirit, Agassiz insisted that the teacher was both a dedicated scholar and a goo �-n � tured h u man being. The Agassiz intellect was as admirably lib­ eral In Its co mmerce with the world as intense and uncompromising in scholarship. Agassiz's father, Benj amin Rodolphe, h unted on Sabbath mornings, leaving his game and fowli ng-piece at the church door while he preached to his congregation at Motier, on Lake Morat. Agassiz himself broke every smoking rule at Harvard, fenced with his students, and once offered the Emperor of Brazil an assistant's position at the university museum. Scholarship, i m agination, energy, intellect, good nature. Theodore Lyman, watching the Harvard students bearing Agassiz's heavy casket to the chapel in the Yard, said: "He was younger than any of them ."

That Faire Field of Enna Persephone in a cotton-field Ezra Pound, "Canto 1 06"

25 1

still, the gibbets of the Latin people, as if they wished at all times to have the hideous fact of death by crucifixion in their minds. They moved on, with crow an d cross, to burn Corinth and Sparta, and all in between, on, eventually, to Rome itself, which had not seen an invader for 8 00 years. What they destroyed at Eleusis was the sacred place where the Greek mind-which continues to educate the world-believed civilization to h ave begun. Here the transition was made from the restless, alert life of the hunter to the settled ways of the farmer, a life that would blend with others and found cities , where in the congenial life of the street leisure and conversation would invent philosophy and mathematics, j u rispru­ dence and history. The year after the burning of Eleusis, Claudius Claudianus, court poet to the western emperor Flavius Honorius, wrote his De Raptu Proser­ pinae, a melancholy, magnificent, unfinished poem. Claudianus was Alex­ andrian, his language Greek, his poetry erudite and ornate. He could i mitate the classical style; his sense of the world, however, is already medi&v al, wrought, colored. Marlowe and Chapman might h ave trans­ lated the De Raptu as a twin to their Hero and Leander. Claudianus's very first image is that of ships, which organized Mediter­ ranean civilization into coherence; his next is (in Harold Isbell's Penguin translation) : the black horses of that thief from the underworld, the stars blotted out b y t h e chariot's shadow

That Faire Field of Enna

Every September for thousands of years before Alaric the Visigoth rode through the pass at Thermopylae in 3 9 6 A.D. like a field of horses on a racetrack, as the historian Eunapios wrote, a procession of worshippers united by their common tongue, which by law had to be Greek, the lan­ guage of the gods, and by thei r faith in the life of the soul after the death of the body, walked the dusty Sacred Way from Athens to Eleusis, reson­ ant drums pacing thei r steps, fourteen mi les. The priests who led them wore l ong red cloaks, and their h air was bound with twists of cloth called strophia, and with laurel. They carried piglets, of which the goddess of grain, Demeter, was fond. Alaric's flag that floated in the smoke as he burned the sanctuary of Eleusis bore an emblematic crow, and his army wore stranger symbols 250

-the subterranean horses of Dis, but also the horses of Alari c at Eleusis. Claudianus's poem sees the rape of Persephone in the fall of Eleusis and Rome to the Visigoths and Huns: h orse people knowing nothing of ships, agriculture, o r cities. This sense of people who walk and people who are mounted on horses is deep within the symbolism of Miss Welty's fi rst transmutation of the myth of Persephone, the novel Delta Wedding. Her Delta family must accept with what grace it can the marriage of a daughter to Troy Flavin, a son of the hill people whose culture is primitive and rough (a culture to which Miss Welty would later devote her masterpiece, Losing Battles ) . Troy Flavin. Flavin i s a yellow dye derived from the black oak; he i s red-haired and rides a black horse. His name i s a combination o f black and yellow, of alien and familiar. His first nam� points to the rape of Helen by Trojans, for which that of Persephone by Dis was the archetype. His surname mirrors that of the Flavius at whose court at Milan ( Huns j ust beyond the hills) Claudian wrote the De Raptu. Everywhere in Miss Welty's fi ction there is the same understanding as . In Claudian's poem that Persephone's innocence and vulnerability are to

T h e Geography of t h e Imagination

252

be seen as a civilized order menaced by invasion . In "The Burning" the invaders are Union soldiers who ride their horses into the living room where Southern ladies are sewing. (This story is paralleled by the story "Circe," with all the values transposed into a different key. Performing variations on a theme is a major impulse in Miss Welty's aesthetic will.) Another September, some two thousand years after the high eminence of Eleusis in the Graeco-Roman world, in Mississippi, three girls ride into the town of Fairchilds from Shellmound plantation ( chapter 5, part 2, Delta Wedding) . They travel by pony cart, two little girls, one in h er teens, Laura, India, and Shelly. Tanagran figurines survive to show us that Greek ladies travelled thus. The resemblance seems charmingly deliberate. Their errand is into the black part of town, "dead quiet except for the long, unsettled cries of hens walking around, and the whirr of pigeons now and then overhead. Only the old women were home. The little houses were many and alike, all whitewashed wi th a green door, with stovepipes crooked like elbows or hips behind, okra, princess-feathers, and false dragonhead growing around them, and China trees over them like u mbrellas . . . . They arrive at the shack of old Partheny, long a retainer of the family . She is to be invi ted to the wedding, and to be asked if she knows anything a bout the whereabouts of a lost garnet broach. Partheny wore " a tight little white cap on her head, sharp-peaked with a frilly top and points around like a crown. " Inside the house India finds and snuggles a guinea pig, a pet of Partheny's. The scene is rich, several plot lines being developed simultaneously, and deliciously comic ( "Got a compliment on my drawer-leg," she says of her cap to a neighbor after they leave) . But if we ask why that crown of twisted cloth ( the strophia of the Eleusinian hierophants) , the piglet, the name (Parthenia, an epithet of Artemis and Athena : virginity or girlhood), and the garnet ( from the Old French pome grenate, pomegranate) we begin to see how beautifully a vocabulary of images from a myth has been woven into Miss Welty's text.

That Faire Field of Enna

253

And Ceres , as he ended, was determined To have her daughter back, but the Fates fo rbade it. She had been hu ngry, wandering in the gardens, Poor simple ch ild, and plucked from the leaning bough A pomegranate , the cri mson fruit, and peeled it, With the inside coating of the pale rind showing, And had eaten seven of the seeds . . . .

Diodoros the Sicilian's account of the rape of Persephone in his History of the World, written in the girlhood of Mary and the reign of Gaius Octavius Caesar Augustus: The myths say that Kora was caught in the meadows of Enna. The place is j u st outside the city , famous for its violets and for w i l dflowers of every kind, the delight of the goddess. So rich i s the odor of the flowers thereabout that, as the story goes, h u nting dogs lose the spoor. I t is level, low, and veined with streams, this meadow, but rises steeply, like a bowl around its edges. The Sicilians say that it is the very center of their island and call it Our Nave l . There a r e holy trees nearby, across t h e marshes, a n d a deep cave that leads down into the earth. Its mouth, facing north, was where the Lord o f the Dead, Plouton, rode out in his chariot to capture Kora.

"

The violets and other flowers bloomed the year round in thi s meadow, giving it a weather of incredible sweetness. The myth says that Athena and Artemis had, like Kora, made a vow of virginity, and grew up i n her company, and went with her to pick flowers. The three of them wove their father Zeus's coat. They loved Sicily beyond a l l other islands a n d lovely places, because o f t h e ti me they w e r e together there and because o f their love for each other. . . . It was near Syrakousa that Plouton raped Kora away in his chariot, rip­ ping the earth open to take her down into Hades. From this wound i n the meadow rose the Blue Fountain . . . . After the rape of Kora, Demeter, her mother, looking everywhere for her, lit torches at the fires o f Aitna the vol­ cano, and wandered over the inha bited earth. To the people who were kind to her she gave grains o f wheat, which were then unknow n . The kindest welcome o f a l l was at Athenai, whose citizens were t h e second · to be given wheat, after the Sikeliotai. In her honor the Athenians began the great mysteries at Eleusis, which, for their holiness and ancientness, are talked about i n wonder by the whole o f mankind.

" . . . let Proserpina come To the upper world again, on one condition: She must, i n the world below, have eaten nothing, Tasted no food-so have the Fates enacted."

(This is Jove explaining to Ceres how she can reclaim her daughter from Hades . ) l 1 0vid, The Metamorphoses V, trans. Rolfe H u mphries, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1 9 5 5 ) , lines 529- 5 3 2 .

II

Unlike the Homeric parallels in Ulysses, where we can say that Bloom is Odysseus, Molly Penelope, Stephen Telemachus, and so on, and unlike P ound's ideogrammatic array of images, where we can say that meaning bonds this element with that because of affinity or su bject-rhyme, the symbolic content of Miss Welty's fi ction transverses the realistic surface

T h e Geography of the Imagination

254

That Fuire Field

like sound waves, or like starshake against the grain of wood. The effect is that of a moire pattern. A theme will cross another from an angle, vi brantly. In the first para­ graph of "Going to Nap les "-

of bma

255

lot more awake than we usuall y are before a text. She expects us, fo r . tn�tance to nottce her design . The passa ge just quote d begi n s and ends � wtth frutt: the tone, therefore, is going to be in harmo ny with these au­ tumna l tmage s ( "the old peopl e going home ") , with a theme of fulfi ll­ ment and matur ation.

The Pomona s a i l i n g out of N e w Y o r k was bou n d fo r Palermo a n d Naples. It was the warm September of a Holy year. Along w i th the pilgrims and the old people going home, there rode in

turistica h alf a dozen pairs of mothers

III

and daughters-these seemed to take up the most room. If Mrs. C. Serto,

Myth is a tale anyon e can tel l : it is not the story itself in a particular form or with a p a rticula r finish, like a p lay by Shake speare or a story by Chek­ ov. An Alaba ma folkta le called " O rpy and Miss Dicey ," Cocte au's Or­ p hee, Monteverdi's Orfeo , Gluck ' s Orphee, Poe's " The Fall of the House of �sher " are all versi ns of an i mmem oriall y ancien t patter n of event s � which senstb dltl es as dtvers e as those of Guilla ume Apoll in aire (" Zone" and the Cortege d'Orp hi:e), Anton Donch ev (Vrem e Razdeln o ) , Rilke (Sonnette an Orpheus ) , and Eudor a Welty were interested to retell . The tragic singer who lost his wife twice and who was torn apart by madw omen has never been absent from the art of Europ e since its archai c formu lation i n the moun tains of Thrac e . In our time the theme arises obliqu ely from v a rious new source s. I suspec t that Stend ahl uncon ­ scious ly awake ned the theme with the severed head of Julien Sorel in Le Rouge et le Nair ( 1 830), the roman tic irony of which Flaub ert reinte r­ preted in his " Herodias" later in the centur y There . after the head of Or­ pheus or St. John becam e an obsess ive subjec t amon g painte rs ( Morea u) ' poets (Wilde), and comp osers (Strau ss) . The Orphe us myth is compl ement ary to that of Persep hone. Both are a �out loss and redem ption, about grief and the progress of grief on to a tn umph . In the myth of Orphe us the femini ne spirit is a bsorbe d and inte­ grated with the mascu line, and the archetypal poet is an o rganiz ation of both. A society like Morg ana, Missis sippi, urban and agricu ltural, takes its shape from the templa te of such societ ies the world over. Its inner myth is that of Persep hone and Deme ter, the death and birth of nature ; Miss Welty's first two books of storie s tend to be set at the equin oxes and . sol � ttces, to allude to antipo des ( diggin g to China , china berry trees, Chma Grove ) , to projec t a mirage of Perse phon e's rape and return . Or� h � u � was a �h epher d, his peopl e Thrac moun taineers (Miss �el � s , �t l �p eople , ). That the fema le spi rit can ian be redeemed by the male . 1� an Idea mi mJCa l to barle y- it� peop le. � ss Welt y's grasp and explo ra­ � . tion of thts tdea has been b n lh ant, fruct tve, and infin itely subtl e. In the story " Moon Lake " Miss Welty write s her versio n of Orph eus an d Euryd tce. Loch Morn son I S Orph eus. A Boy Scout lifegu ard on duty

going to Naples, might miss by a h ai r ' s breadth being the l a rgest mother­ there was no question about which was the largest daughter-that was hers. An d how the daughter did love to scream ! From the time the Pomona began to throb and move down the river, Gabriella Serto regaled the deck with clear, soprano cries. As she romped up an d down after the other girls-she was the youngest too: eighteen-screaming and waving good-by to the Statue o f Liberty, a hole broke through her stocking and her flesh came through like a pear.

- we can see Miss Welty's Persephone theme in the name of the ship (Pomona, goddess of fruit, an asp ect of Demeter) , in its destination (Sic­ ily, where Persephone was raped, Naples, ancient realm of the siren Parthenope, is a daughter city to a Greek mother city, " metropolis," hence its name Neapolis, New Town) , in the month September, time o f the Eleusinian mysteries, in the Holy Year ( commemorating the immacu­ late conception of Mary, whose image and cultus continue those of De­ meter, and Her birthday is September 8 ) , in the phrase "mothers and daughters," in the name Serto (a garland of flowers) , in the screaming of Gabriella ( " . . . with a wai ling voyce a fright did often call I Hi r Mother and hir waiting Maides, but Mother most of all " ) , and in the image of the pear of flesh bulging through a hole in Gabriella's stocking, richly and am biguously suggestive. And over all, easily missed because of its fa mili arity, Demeter with her torch presides: the Statue of Li berty. (Iconographically, that statue, an allegory of Liberty, derives directly from Cybele, goddess of cities and mother of Demeter. Th e cap of her Phrygian devotees became the Li berty cap of both the French and Ameri­ can revolutions. Note the symbolic value it would have had for the Cer­ tos, an immigrant Italian fa mily.) This reticulation flows all the way through the story, a music ins ide a music. For Joyce ' s skill with a simi lar method the cri tic Hugh Ke nner coined the phrase " double writing . " In a sense, all writing and all lan­ guage is double by nature, for words are all metaphors that have lost their resonance through use. Joyce demands of us that we know the ar­ chaic components of words; Miss Welty seems to count on our being a

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256

Th e Geography of the Imagination

for a week at Moon Lake for a camping party of Morgana girls and some girl orphans, he saves the life of Easter, an orphan. His name is a play on the words moon lake: loch, a lake; Morrison is the word Moon with the Greek for a spit of land stretching out into a lake, ris, dropped into the middle of it, the way dancing water fractures the reflection of the moon on it. Like Orpheus, this adolescent who de­ spises girls for their ineptness and clannish selfishness has thei r nature unsuspected within himself. He is the lake of lethal moonlight into which all that fall lose their selfishness and identity. Eurydice means the justice

of the world.

.

Thus Loch is a symbolic Christ ("martyred presence . . . . Life saver . . . ordeal . . . dived high off the crosspiece nailed up in the big oak" ) ; the girl he saves is named Easter. But that is her illiterate pronunciation of her real name, which is Esther, who, like her, was an o rp han, but an orphan who redeemed her people in cap tiviry. The name goes deeper: Esther is our spelling of the Akkadian !star, the Biblical Astarte, a chthonic god­ dess whom the ancients thought to be the same as Venus. Easter: the dawn of the year, Persephone's retu rn, resu rrection. Easter-Esther-Istar is the way Miss Welty wants us to u nderstand her orphan. She is ill-bred, sassy, independent, and resentful of her fear of the other girls. She is the prisoner of thei r selfishness, pride and status. She seems unassailable until an unexpected tickle sends her i nto the lake to drown ( symbolically a snake bite, as with Eurydice) .

IV

The story "Sir Rabbit" repeats in a Morgana wood the seduction of Leda by Zeus as a swan. Yeats's sonnet in A Vision is worked into the fabric: A sudden blow: the great wings beating still Above th e staggering gi rl, her thigh s caressed By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill, He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.

( " When she laid eyes on Mr. MacLain close, she staggered, he h ad such grandeur, and then she was caught by the hair and brought down as suddenly to earth as if whacked by an unseen shillelagh . " ) H o w can those terri fied vague fingers push The feathered glory from her loosen ing thighs, And how can body, laid in that white rush, But feel the strange heart beating where i t l i es ?

That Faire Field of Enna

257

(" Presently she li fted her eyes in a lazy dread, and saw those eyes above hers, as keenly bright and unwavering and apart from her life as the flowers on a tree.") A shudder i n t h e l o i n s engenders there The broken wall, the burning roof and tower And Agamemnon dead. Being so caught up, So mastered by the brute blood of the air, Did she put on his knowledge with his power Before the i n di ffe rent bea k could let her drop?

(" But he put on her, with the affront of his body the affront of his sense too. No p leasure in that ! She had to put on wh ;t he knew with what h � did-maybe because he was so grand it was a thorn to him. Like submit­ ting to another way to talk, she could not answer his burden now his whole blithe, smiling, superior, frantic existence. And no matter �hat happened to her, she had to remember, disappointments are not to be borne by Mr. MacLain, or he'll go away again. " ) Yeats's sonnet opens that part o f A Vision called " Dove o r Swan " i n which h e compa res the two annunciations, Leda and Mary, the p �gan and the Christian ages. ("A dove feather came turning down through the light that was like golden smoke. She caught it with a dart of the hand, and brushed her chin; she was never displeased to catch anything. Noth­ ing more fell.") We can, with delight, follow Ovidian details through this story . King MacLain is dressed in white, swanlike, and fi res his gun by way of hurling a thunderbolt. The way of a god with a girl-but the story is deeper than that. Zeus is the sky (as his name means in Greek) ; he is the whole presence of light in the world. He is promiscuous because he is generous and impartial. We can pick our way through the story looking at trees, for light fa lling on .matter evolved the green world, which is a response to light. We see because photoelectric cells in the brain, which are nourished by carbohy­ drates made by leaves from light, water, and earth, are alive to the rain of light from the sun. Nature is far more complex than that, but a myth that cele brates celestial generation is wonderfully true. The first tree is a hickory (the word is from the Indians of Vi rginia ) . Ran and Eugene MacLain look around i t t o tease Mattie Wi ll H olifield nee Sojourner. It is a nut tree of a family kin to but smaller than the oaks : When King MacLain appears, it will be from behi nd an oak, Zeus's sa­ cred tree. The Latin botanical name for the walnut family juglandaceae,

258

T h e Geography o f the I m agin ation

of which the hick ory is a member, preserves an image of Zeu s's testi­ cles: Juglans. Ju (as in Jupiter, "Zeus the Father" ) , glans, nut. Ancient metaphor and folkish understanding survive and coop erate in the im age, and the oak is Zeus's tree, containing his p resence, at Dodona. These faunish twins begin and end the story. At the beginning they shape the idea of Zeus Digonos, the begetter of twins (the phrase can just as well mean Zeus of the Two Testicles, and ancient Greeks normally called testicles "the twins" ) ; at the end they assume in Mattie Will's mind an affectionate regard-"they were like young deer, or even remoter creatures . . . k angaroos . . . . For the first ti me Mattie Will thought they were mysterious and sweet-gamboling now she knew not where . " A cluster of plants symbo lically balances another a t the story's ex­ tremes. Before King MacLain's appearance, sunflower, dewberry, peach, pin oak; after the seduction, haw, cherry, cedar, sunflower. Each has a thicket ( dewberry, haw) , a sunflower, a fruit tree of the genus Prunus (peach, cherry ) . King MacLain trai ls his gunstock (which would be of walnut, Juglans) through periwinkle (which is our homely pronunciation of per vincia, "overcoming in all di rections") ! Note how the double­ headed pinecone rhy mes with the twins, with the testicle imagery , and (as we discover from the l ast story i n the book) th e twins Mattie Will gave birth to afterw ards. King MacLain is "up there back of the leaves "-light. Consider that 0. Henry could not have conceived of writing this story, that it is utterly outside the consciousness of Poe. It is both resuscitation ( Ovid) and in­ vention, the most splendid tri umph of manner over m a tter in American literature. Ra bbit, who comes from Daho mey and Nigeri a with the slaves, to mingle with his cousin Wabos of the Menominee, Cadj wanecti of the Yuchi, Manidowens of the Chippewa, tricksters all. We know him as Brer Rabbit, Joel Ch andler Harris's fusion of an African and Indian cre­ ature w hose strategies of camouflage and Brechtian disavowal are de­ rived from b lack plantation m anners. (The song about him that Mattie Wil l remembers was found by Miss Welty in Zora Neale Hu rston's col­ lection of black fo lklore, Mu les and Men. ) lt would be like rabbit to seem to be two of hi mself, and very like him to serve as a vehi cle for the great god Zeus, who usually mated with humankind in animal guise. So the fi rst word of "Sir Rabbit," he, refers at fi rst, in supposition, to King MacLain, until he, with godly i mproba­ bleness, looks around both sides at once, and is recognized as the Mac­ Lain twins, Ran and Eugene. Is Mi ss Welty basically sum moning spirits she knows to be out there,

That Faire Field of Enna

259

so that her stories in their deepest music are incantation s ? It was at the Treaty of the Dancing Rabbit that the Indians of Mississippi deeded their land to General Jackson. Every marriage, Erich Neu mann says in his Amor and Psyche, IS a rape of Persephon e. And every rabbit Pan. v

!he Russian p ainter Pavel Tchelitchew ( 1898- 1956) began to conceal I mages within images in his pi ctures after he came to the United States in the 1930s. A " Dav id and Goliath" exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in 1942 ( Miss Welty was then writ ing Delta Wedding and beginning the stones for The Golden Apples) is ostensibly a handsome Connecticu t landscape: blue hills, autumnal foi l age, streaming clouds. The title invites � s to l� ok again. The leafless tree to the left will render up a figure stand­ mg w1th 1ts back to us, its contours coin ciding with those of the tree limb's. The demonic, bearded face of Goliath can be found occupying the shadow side of a mountain. Clouds become the h air of David, whose profile fills the righthand side of the picture, the bounding line being the e ?ge of trees against distant hills. There are other i m ages that can be discovered, faces among leaves, for instance. In Miss Welt_Y' s ' 'June Recital" a sailor on leave who has been dallying . _ an empty With V1rg1e Ramy 10 house is flushed out by the house's being set on fi re. He encounters a confusion of people outside: Old Man Mood y ' s party was only now progressing again, for the old woman

:

had f llen down and they had to hold h er on her feet. Further along, the ladtes Rook P a rty was commg out of Miss Nell's w i th a pou ring sound. The sailor faced both these ranks. The marshall tagged him hut he ran straight off into the wall of ladies, most of whom cried "Why, Kewpie Moffitt ! " -an ancient ni ckname he had outgrown. He whirled a bout-face and ran th e other way, and since he was carrying his blouse and was naked from the waist up, his col l a r stood out behind him lik e the lowest-hung wings.

The way we see Cupid bolting from Psyche in this passage is the way we find Dav1d and Goliath in Tchelitche w's landscape . From 194 0 to 1942 Tchelitchew painted the large composition for wh1ch he IS best known, Cache-Cache (Hide and Seek ) . The idea for the pa10t1ng seems to have germi nated from some studies of an ancient tree i n Sussex m ade in 1 934, a tree i n which t h e painter saw a likeness t o a large, gnarled, open h and, with its fingers about to grasp. Its root system l ooked to h1 m h ke a foot. Later he added children playing around it and in its branches.

260

Th at Faire Field

The Geography of the Imagination

The completed painting depicts a girl standi n g with h er face to the tree, the It of Hide and Seek . Stand back, and her body makes the face of a winking demon: a butterfly near her right arm serves for his left eye; her left arm, his half-crossed right eye. Her dress is hi s nose, her legs his Viking moustache. We can look at thi s a mazing painting at one distance or another; its i m ages change i nto other images as you approach or draw back . In the i ntervals between the branch-fi ngers of the tree- hand there are chil dren drawn in headlong perspective (the way a camera distorts things too near it, or a telescope the w rong way around) . Th <;se chi ldren are transparent; through them we can see landscapes with yet other children, wheatfields, branches in the middle distance which outli ne faces and have leaves that turn out to be boys in cloaks. One child' s face resolves at closer inspec­ tion into mushrooms, dandelions, dew into vine tendrils, and these i n turn can b e identified as veins a n d arteries, tissues and muscles, a n d down among these are elfin children still. Organizing all this we can make out a cycle of the seasons, the ages of man, sexual organs human and vegetable, life as a game and biological process, a lyric and informed affirmation of the synthesis of flesh and spirit, and a network of allusions concerning the Tree of Life, innocence and vitality, natural design, fate. The root idea o f the painting may be some piece of Russian folklore, for in Kiev there is a si milar, though much cruder, painting by A. A. Shovkunenko called The Honorable End of the Old Oak Tree wi th pun­ ning i mages of gobli n creatures worked as visual puns into the leafage.2 Tchelitchew's first major American painting was a Temptation of St. Anthony, a subject that in our time, after i ts i m mense significance in th e late middle ages and the Renaissance, elicited great attention and genius from Flau bert (La Tentation de st. A ntoine ) , Joyce (th e Circe chapter of Ulysses ) , Wyndham Lewis (The Childermass ) , and Samuel Beckett (Happy Days) . The painting is called "Phenomen a" ; instead of the Bosch-like gry IIi and surrealistic hybrids native to the subject T chelitchew has human teratological speci mens. When the poet (and doctor) Wi lli am Carlos Wi lli ams saw the picture, he delighted the painter by remarking on the accuracy of the monsters. And thereafter monsters began to figure in Williams's long poem Paterson, dwarves, h ydrocephalies, and notably Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, monster and genius, who is the poem's sym­ bol for the artistic sensibil ity. This seems far afield from Miss Welty's Ovidian Mississippi until we learn that Tchelitchew's monsters in "Phenomena" derive from the poet Charles Henri Ford's connoisseurship of side-show freaks (such as Miss Welty's Petrified Man and Keela, the Outcast Indian Maiden) in his na2See The Soviet Encydopedia, val. 48 ( 1 954), p. 1 3 2, for an i l lustration of it.

of Emza

26 1

rive Mississippi . Coincidence; but coincidence in a context. Southern writers, from Poe to Flannery O' Connor, have seen a kind of Sybil in the h u m an monster (the ph rase is Tchelitchew's) ; wi tness Faulkner's idiots, �arson McCuller's mai med characters, Harry Crews's ogres. Miss Welty hkes to quote Flannery O' Connor's reply to someone who asked about this anomaly i n Southern i magination. "Well," said Flannery, "we know a freak when we see one." Dwarves belong to the world of Hades, i nside Mountains. They are workers of stone and metal, the crops of Persephone's realm when she is Dis's queen. In the old Greek understanding this realm was a negative to the upper world of light and growing things. It has been an instinct of the European i magination to see the mineral world as finite, dead, a nd inert. We can thus trace through art a set of symbols opposing tree to stone ' buttercup to gold, light to dark.

•

I

VI

M�rgana , Missi ssippi : "The town of Morg ana and the county of Mac­ _ us Lam . . are fictitio . . . " says the ritual disclai mer oppos ite the table of c� mtents in The Golden Apple s. There is a Morg an City in Missis ­ S ippi,_ and a Morg antow n, but as with Y oknap atawp h a Count y (said to h ave been Inspir ed by the Cocon ino Count y of " Krazy Kat" ) , there is no Morg ana. Mi ss Welty h as named h er town that becau se the storie s are all about the morga natic marria ges of Zeus; morganatic, a legal term from the Ger� an Morgan, "morni ng," meanin g a left-ha nded marria ge of a noble w� th a comm oner whose childre n canno t inherit . The marria ges of Zeus With mortal s was divine condes censio n, i mprov ing, as Greeks thoug ht, the q uality of the famil y. But in the straits of Messi na betwe en Sici ly , Persephone' s island and th e place most often doubl ed with Missi ssippi in Miss Welty 's fiction , a nd l� aly, you can see a muage-th e refrac tive qualit ies of dense , cold air a re d1fferen from those of thin, hot air, � and if there are two layers of air throu gh whic� you are looki ng, one very h ot, the other high and cold, you see two VISIOn s of distan t objec ts, ships that appea r to be in the air, _ u �� I?e down trees, water y cities shimmering above real cities -wh ich the SICili an s call "the encha ntme nt of the witch Morg ana Ia Fata . " S� � comes from ancie nt tales of t h e Wels h, this Morg an I e Fay. Many � Il_ld1es that bear her n ame came to Missi ssipp i ; she is well know n in CI!y becau se Norm an knigh ts broug ht the Arthu rian legen ds with them . 0 see the Fa a Morg an � 1s to see what 's befor e your eyes and � something else also, reaht y and a viswn toget her. (Ther e is a paint ing of Tche litch­ ew's called " Fata Morg ana" that depic ts wood ed hills which becom e, as ·

I

j

�

;

262

Th e Geography of the I magi nation

we look, a nymph and a fa un fallen apart in exha ustion after coupling; it was painted in 1 940. Did Miss Welty see it and have her own idea about fusing a mirage with a Celtic name to local rea lity ?) Mirage is a way of talking about many o f Miss Welty's effects . She arranges images so that we see them i n sh arpest focus and simu ltaneously as a ghost of reality . When, for instance, a child is rescued from an on­ coming train in Delta Wedding, we are made to see ( i f our imagination has its eyes open ) , the black, fum i ng chariot of Dis s wooping down on Persephone picking flowers. The scene is not exactly a symbolic enact­ ment· it is a mirage of it. The train is called "The Yellow Dog." Troy Flavi �, another Dis with another Pers �phone, has a name that means yellow (flavin ) . Yellow: daffodils, roses, sunflowers; but gold, too. Dis' s realm p arodies our own ( " I have another sun and other stars," he tells Persep hone in the de Raptu ) ; the apples there, for instance, are golden. The pomegranate in Delta Wedding is of stone, a garnet. VII

For the fi rst time since Dante, symbols became transpare nt on Joyce's pages. Psycholo gy in the study of dreams defined the symbol as essen­ tially opaque, a confusio n rather than an epiphany of meaning . The darker the symbol , the richer it was thought to be, and ambigui ty became a vi rtue in literatur e. James may be partly responsi ble, but then James posited for our pleasure in such things an ambigui ty that is true of experi­ ence (we do not know each other's inner dark of soul, nor what IS wntten in letters locked in a cupboar d, nor what people see when they say they've seen a ghost) . The symbols of the French symbolistes and their school from Oslo to Salerno, from D ublin to Budapes t, were not properly symbols at all, but enigmas derived from the German doctrine of elective affi nities among things and from Fourier and Swedenb org. These sym­ bols so-called in the sensi bili ties of Baudelaire and Mallarme became an in the abstrac t art, paralle ling the disappe arance of intelli gible images cannot You ater. l ion p ainting of Malevi ch and Kandin sky a generat traninterpre t a symboliste symbol , you can only contem plate it, like a scendent alist brooding on the word nature. first Joyce, who rethoug ht everythi ng, rethoug ht sy mbolism . It must t, resonan logical, be must of all be organi c, not arbitrar y or fanciful . It symbol true a that learned transpa rent, bright. From Flaubert he h ad parrot must be found in an i mage that belong s to the narrati ve. The devo­ the feel us make to Loulou in Un Coeur simple acts symbo lically colors ts i In . Felicite of city simpli tion, lonelin ess, ecstasy, and inviola ble her nephew has we remem ber the map of Americ a shown Felicite , where _

That Falre Field

of Enna

263

gone, the windows of the cathedral, the dove inca rnating the Holy Spirit; It would not be too much to say th at the stuffed Loulou symbolizes Madame Aubam, Paul, Virginie, all that Felicite h as loved. It is also her vision of God . Flaubert says none of these things; he makes us see them in a piece of gaudy taxidermy. In Joyce a rolled up newspape r with the words Gold Cup and Sceptre among I ts racmg news becomes a sym bolic blossom around wh ich two men, symbolic be � s, forage. This is a deeper symbolism than more appar­ ent ones m operation at the same time: Odysseus among the Lotus Eaters, a spmtually lost Jew longing to return to Israel ("and the desert shall blossom like th e rose") , a m an p sychologi cally a drone to his queen-bee wife, a man named Flower enacting the suffering of a saint named Flower (Ant� ony) and his temptatio ns; and on and on. Joyce's symbols are labynnths of meanmg, but they are logical, and they exp and meaning. They are, as medi aeval g rammaria ns said, involucra -seed husks ask­ ing to be peeled. VIII

Plutarch in the fi rst structural ist study of myth , Isis and Osiris, demon­ strates that there is no one way of telling the tales of the tri be. A myth is a pattern, not a script. Like Levi-Strau ss dismantlin g and laying out the componen ts of the Oedipus myth to discover that it is about an excess and a lack of kinship, Plutarch sifts through motifs in Greek and Egyp­ tian mythology and makes a philosophi cal harmony of them by isolating themes ( the gnef of Isis, the grief of Demeter) and fra ming con cepts (time as the wife of water, space the wife of dryness) implicit in dramatic sur­ faces. ("The insidious schemi ng and usurpation of Typhon, then, is the p ower of drought . . . . ") He shows how divergent and unsuspected fea­ ture s �an fit into the same contours. His humanisti c interpreta tion of Egyptian cosmology i n terms of Hellenic philosoph y is a triumph of an�lyti �al perc pti n unequalle d until Sir James Frazer m ade his great : ? synthe sis of pnmltl ve and classica l ritual. Plutarch 's insight into the Egyptian mind comes into sharpest focus in . his comprehe nding that Egyptian piety was essentiall y a sustained medi­ . tatio � of every minutest example of life, to find out what they could see th� rem of the divine "Creatio n is the i mage of being in matter, and the _. t� mg created Is a picture of reality . " Nothing is trivial, nothing insig­ ni ficant. Thought at its beginning was always, as far as we know, nurtured by a fanatic earch for analogie s, creatmg a poem in which flowers, � girls, trees of certam kmds, sea shells, the moon, song birds, em broidery, ri bbons,

The Geog raphy of the Imag inatio n

2 64

That Faire Field

n . (A Dog on of rgin ity, a nd spri n gs are a ll k i cats , dill, the left h a nd, fire, vi e thtn g fore skin s, and the sun are the sam Upp er Volt a kno ws that lizar ds, star the a nd stru al bloo d , crab gras s seed , under thre e guis es, as are men rhe f o such thou ght (whi ch reaso n, one S i ri us) . Levi -Stra uss note s that 1ves surv deni es the nam e of thou ght at all) Gree k mod es of the mind , now ture and itera l tifies iden fore there He . n o as wha t we call a rt in civil izati ever occu rred . had n ratio sepa no if as h, myt n , a goin g o f two way s. The re was , i f not a sepa ratio

26 5

of Enna

of it forward to her masterpiece

Losing Battles.

The first brilli a n t analysis

of VOiceless people for whom reason and caution are alien modes is the

f

story "The Wide Net." Here a young cou n try wife leaves a note or her husband to find, saying that she i s goi ng to commit suicide in the river . He, home from an all-nigh t binge, enlists the countryside in helping h i m drag th e river with a wide net. Afterwards, he discovers (as w e suspect h e knew by i n tu i tion a l l along) that h i s wife was hidden behind the door

while h e was readi ng her note. The dragging o f the rivt:r is Homeric in its

energy, l i ke a heroic game, i nvolvi ng a fish fry and m uch congenial fel­

lowsh i p . The river i s turned i n side out, rendering up a flea market of obj ects and alligators.

IX

Throughout the story the di alogu e addresses i tsel f neither to the drama

we r fate, hut in Eud ora Wel ty's fictio � Acti on is char acte r, and char acte idle­ busy a follo w actio n with out purp ose, are almo st alwa ys invi ted to of � nsus pect ed ery achm m the in is it n whe ness . She obse rves char acte r s, mea ls , ce of ritua ls: fune rals, wed dmg eran ond prep the ce Hen es. forc t o M1s s t e h e u s u a l sort is o f so little inter � recit al s , jour neys . Acti on of t _ Balz ac h wh1c t men tion of mot lvat wns to Wel ty that it plea ses her to omi . wou ld devo te page s. t a ? Itali a n les," for i nsta nce, is a bou The story "Go ing to Nap m arn ed. The re r fat dau ghte r t o Sicil y to be A mer ican mot her taki ng h e , and one s here in the stor y is thi said her plum pnes s is an asse t. Now Delta ovel n The ot confi ded i n the dau gh ter. . gues ses that the mot her h as n . ath bene g gi rl wh � 1s mar rym Wedding is abou t a head stro ng, stub born . ap perh , perv erse joy of h avm g her way her, for spite , perh aps, for the s y ybod ever l , thou gh It must be m Very l i ttle is mad e of thi s in the nove

o f th e suicide, nor to the problem between husband and wi fe that might have caused it. That l i fe h appens at all times i n a context we do not u n derstand, and that most of our actions go unexplained among ourselves, and that when we do try to be articul ate we usually talk about one thing while meaning ano� her, are things we a l l know. Fiction, however, can usual l y be caught out Ignoring this o bvious truth . Flaubert began to acknowledge it, mak­

i ng a distinction between conscious and unconscious motives. Miss Weltv

;

takes it for granted th at her characters cannot know th ei r predicamen , and that they are wanderers full of expectation for they k now not what. We feel that there is wisdom in th e silence of the two characters i n " No

;

Place For You, My Love," the first story in The Bride of the Innisfal/en, b u t it wou l d be difficult to say what they are up to, what they expected of

mind.

e of wha t abo ut peo ple w h o ar� un � war T h e e a r l y stor ies tend t o b e .mc1b le 1g oran ce. Her inde dnes s or m : � they are doin g b ecau se of feeb le-m I S som etim es, as With s Th1 . s d l wor their into char acte rs a re alwa ys lock ed s1 g; som e­ i nno cenc e is i n v olab le, a bles Unc le Dan iel Pon der, who se but usu­ 0., P. tor of " Wh y I L1ve at the time s com ic, as with the n arra er t s the ract Cha . Wel ty's i roni c obse rvat io n ally i t is the co ntex t for Mis s

!

�

desi gn of our bou nda ries.

crossmg of the Styx, but are the characters Orpheus and Eurydice or Dis

and Persephone ?) This is not to say that Miss Welty is in articulate, or that she deli ber­ ately tells her stories a m biguousl y, like James or Conrad. She is the most a rticulate of writers, and her subject is the i n coherent buzz of experience, the way we l ive.

XI

X

Wel ty' s ficti on lute d i stinc tion mak es M i ss If one wer e aske d wha t abso tic, hon est be her aler t, perf ectly idi oma di ffere nt, the an swe r wou l d not smu ta­ tran stan d i n g of cha ract er, n or her pros e, nor her i mm ense u nder ulat earnc m bol , but her umq ue stud y of tion of fact into univ ersa l sym . ness . ed her stud y i n her care er, and h a s earn She foun d the inar ti cula te earl

each ? ther, why they p art as they do. (The story is a descent i n to Hades, a

�

Co11_1 edy is the salt of civilization, i ts critical Voi ce. Having, through

Chnstian ch ari ty and Stoic d i gn ity, forbidden cruel laugh ter ( th e ancient R_om� n, l t ke the Pygmy and the Dobu, t hought the pain of others to be h l la n ous), ci vilized man evol ved a comic spir i t concerned with his own n ecessary ba rbari ty, ani mali ty, and l apses of breedi ng . Being i n love (a kindred of madness, as Aristotle said) is biologically no . di fferent from being a blissoming ewe or a clickety fox , but man is a

2 66

The Geography of the I magi nation

social animal cramped by taboos (societies th at know no more of genetics than a pu llet will not let you marry your sister or your aunt) , pride, prop­ erty, race, and aesthetics (a handsome Spartan was fi ned for marryi � g a short, plain wife) . Is it any wonder that comedy is said to have grown mto an art at weddings? The comic spirit is forgiving, stands up for freedom and elasticity, and counters the corrosive power of evi l by refusing to acknowledge i ts claim to dominance over the hu man spirit. Its real enemy is custom drained of significance; it is the ability of life to assert its claims no matter what soci a l forms dictate.

xu

Losing Battles ends with an Orp heus and Eurydice walking along a road

h and-i n-hand, singing " Bringing in the Sheaves." For the first time i n Miss Welty's fiction, Eleusinia n symbols fuse with Christi an ones, and for the fi rst time a love story h as a h appy ending. Two-thirds of the way through this transcend ently beautiful novel , Granny Vaughn, the n i nety-year -old great-gra ndmothe r of the hero ( th e hero not the protagon ist, who i s h i s wife Gloria) , rises without preamble frorr: her chair in the midst of a family reunion at a north Mississipp i farm, pats h er foot, and begins to sing. ( " Is it Frog Went A-Courting o r Wondrous Love?" Aunt Birdie whispere d. " Sounds like a little o f both .") Noah Webster Beecham sprints across children, dogs, and preachers , banjo in hand, to p rovide the accompan iment. The joy of this homely aria springs from its rising like music out of music one of those elate touches Mozart loves to introduce just to show us tha� even though he h as the whole of creation dancing a jig, a shooting star accross the sky won't h u rt anything. And by the time of Losing Bat­ tles, Miss Welty's prose h ad become pure Mozart. There is nothing con­ sciously musical in it-she is the least affected of great stylists- but of the speech of Mississipp i country folk she has made, adding scarcely any words of her own , a music that is as inventive and charmed as the perpetual harmonies of Baroque music. . Out of the talk of fi fty mem bers of a family from dawn to midmght, every word of it authentic , she precipitat es a plot about which one can only say that it is one of the best stories in the world. It is romantic , it is comic, it is elegiac, it is tragic. It is as close to myth as h er other work, with a transpare nt surface and a moire of allusion. But never h ave the mythical details been mo re glitteri ng in their fragment ation- for some­ thing wonderfu lly strange h appens i f we try to articulate the myth . Or­ pheus turns out to be female, Eurydice male, their roles reversed. Through. .

That Faire Field of Enna

267

out all her work Persepho ne has slowly metamor phosed into Eurydice and ' now Eurydice becomes Orpheus. Losing Battles is mytholog ical in that its concerns are timeless its ac­ tion as old as agri culture and sin. The Scotch and Welsh of n � rthern Mississip pi are matriarc hal, clannish, and hero-wo rshipping . The novel's hero, Jack Jordan Renfro, who has busted out of Parchma n , the state penitentia ry, a day before his sentence is up, to be at Granny Vaughn's bmhday party and grand reunion, m ight well h ave stepped out of Sir Walter Scott, blue eyes, golden smile, and all. But h e is also the same Jack who toppled giants, and he is Orpheus and Parsifa l. Like a proper hero he wms his battles by losing them ; the truly heroic are hammered by fate. These hill people have been losing battles since Bonnie Prince Charlie went under at Culloden Moor. But they are stil l there, as permane nt as grass. Against the sti ll music of the reu nion Miss Welty has set a raucous counterth eme of great h i larity. On a bluff above the reunion she poses a 1 932 Buick, Its motor running, its occupant s fled, its fron t wheels h ang­ . mg ove r noth mg, its midriff balanced on an evangelic al signpost with one of Mississi ppi's most feather-b rained citizens pi cking a guitar 'in the back seat to keep it from going over. A highly independ ent mule, a true� amateu nsh ly reconstru cted after an encounte r with the Memphi s Speci al , a ch arge of dynamit e th at eccentri cally explode s at interval s, and . a committee of Jack and some women and children , all fail for hundred s of p ages to save this hap less Buick. ( " Looks like a booger h ad a fit in it' '' says someon e of its eventua l state.) A third, tragic theme interrupt s the rich interplay of the pastoral and c?m tc m ovements . This is the death of Miss Julia Mortime r, the commu­ , nn y s teacher, whose selfless life h a s touche d that of everyone at the re­ union. Her funeral serves as a coda to the long day that fills most of the novel. Infinite comic detail, i nexhausti ble invention : Losing Battles is the or­ che&tration of all h er former themes. The Golden Apples showed how . gnef and common trouble make the world kin, make a universe of h u �ankmd rath r than a confusion o f suffering i ndi viduals. L osing Bat­ � tles msists on reCiproc ity. That is why Orpheus and Eury dice swap roles ' each becom ing the other. . XIIJ

Th e opti mist of The Optimist's Daughter is a Mississippi judge named McKelva, and hi � optimism is hearty enough, foolish enough, generous enough, to lead him to marry m his old age a young wife, a woman from

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. Wanda Fay Texas whom he'd met at a Bar Associ ation conven tion might remar k. Chisom is her n ame, and it says all, as Miss Lizzie Stark be Snope s, Had she come to the attenti on of Faulk ner, her name would been named and if Flannery O' Conno r had created her, she woul d have . trash white South, the of order g peckin the Shiflet. She is, in us, weak­ rapacio these by before ted fascina been Miss Welty has . and hkes t? witted, pathol ogically selfish daught ers of the disposs ess �d, the decrep tt bring them in sharp contra st (as in The Ponder Heart) wtth howev er chivalry and good manne rs of Mississ ippi gentry. The res�lt, ance, comes comple x and sensiti ve Miss Welty' s handli ng of the mtsallt d by one that ts by close to being a wail that an older order is being replace contra st barbarous and withou t transition. relishe s the The novel modu lates finely betwee n satire and traged y. It both into absurd and the incong ruous, with the canny gift of transla ting moral rm � a tragic unders tanding . The power behin d thi s rare ability is . ts yet an, sense of human conduc t. This sense, h u manist and Chnstt tion. civiliza broade r and deeper . It i s archaic , from the beginn ings of Psyche (h �r I n Laurel the j udge's daught er, we can see the fi gure of Fay ts Wanda h usband -to-be was named Phil, that is, Philos, Love) . Thus Psyche s thi , always as a concentrate of Psyche 's nasty, h ateful sisters. But, is ?asicall y figure ( named for the tree into which Daphne was turned) ltgh � as a by shaped Perse phone, image of natural order. Laurel ( matter ts �he spnte) a + fay, tree) is the li ving Perseph one; Wanda Fay (wand dymg is rit spi the dead Perseph one. How do we s ay this otherw ise? That order? in our time ? That we live in a spiritua l hell rather than a natural s that impetu the to In The Optimist's Daughter Miss Welty returns or morals t withou t wrote " Petrifie d Man," her severest vision of conduc �oral The forms. values, which have been replace d by greed in all its n for b fe as condem nation of that power ful sto ry grows from a concer archaic as the myths it alludes to . . . a fneze o f Watch how careful ly The Optimist's Daughter flows agams t are a l l flowers a s if a l l the action were a ritual of spring. The people ­ wither or , ) houses rootles; (the Texas Chisom s live in trailers rather than ttern, pa l cyclica a ing. The vision is chilling and tragic, and yet it implies . symbo l ts the howev er awful the loss. (The most eloque nt Eleusin ian and careles s ­ breadb oard, which Wanda Fay mutila tes out of ignora nce ness). XIV

That Faire Field o( Enna

The Geography of the Im agination

The meaning of the world, said Wittgenstein, is outside the world. Events and values are distinguis hable only in relation to others. A totahty of events and values, the world itself, requi res another. Hence our recourse

269

to s�mb � ls, which serve for a sense of other ness, and our i nadeq uate t �eas of ttme and death , f purpo se and being . Into this inade quacy man­ . ? kt nd mtrod uced an tmag mary world in which the elusiv e is made to stand . and n order sttll, too extens ive and too comp lex for our under standi ng � is gtven ltmtt and meas ure. The artist show s the world as if mean ing were inhere nt in its partic u­ lars We dress bwlog tcal t mpera tive in custo m and ritual ; the artist dres­ : ses tt tn analogy, and finds design in accid ent and rhythm in casu alness . That �very event ts u ntque an d every essenc e distinc t from all others rarely Interests the artist, for whom event is p attern and essence melod ic. XV

We need a geogra phy of the imagin ation to unders tand the appear ance and stgm_ ficance of cultura l vernac ulars beyond their origins . Such a g�� �raphy would find a mong its concer ns the contin uity of culture i nto ctvt ltzatto n, tts transfo rmatio n there, and the p hysiolo gy of its integra­ . tion. Anth � opology has demon strated for ove r a century now that culture s cohere tn patter ns of wholly i magin ative assumptions about the world . that consttt ute system s of law, kinship , langua ge, and p hilosop hy. Civili­ . zatton when we are first aware of it accepts cultur e as its archai c mome nt p rectsely when it has lost its feeling for that mome nt and can be critica l o f lt. It wo � ld be useful to know where we are i n this h istoric al p rogres sion; I d? u bt tf we are anywh ere near finding out. We have gotten as far as seemg the shores of the Medit errane an as the o rigin of the world as it . now ts. Even the techno logical invent ions of cultures alien to the . Medtterr anean have passed hrough th at culture to be approp riated by it an d returned : p nntmg , for �mstanc e, the elemen ts of which paper ink nd movea ble pe, are Chine se, but a mode rn Chine se pri n ;ing pl;nt i s � U rop ean, a ret mportation . Arabi an optics and bota y , Mesopotami an astron omy, northe rn � Euro ean shtp destgn and navtg at10n, . � Hindu mathe matic s: all are know n tn �edtter ranea nized idiom . Plato would recognize the surviv al of ts 1 eas m. the Marx ist state, both Lenin ist and Maoi st. It can be argue d · ·1· · th a t there ts b ut one ctvt tzatiQ n (while still u nderstandi ng very little of the ar h tc root that branc hed mto Chin a and Euro pe) which now has abso r e all but th e ost prim itive cultu res. m .t s H � o ry is still grand ly dark. When Marc el Griau le died he was not re 1 he had disco vered that the Doga n had inven ted the zodia c dif­ �ed by the dawn of history all over the world , or wheth er their ve ;sion of It Was a decay ed know ledge which they too k over from anoth er cultur e

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The Geogra p hy o f the Imagi nation

thousands of years ago. Professor de Santillana's speculations on the evolution of myth into science, Fou cault's p rospectus for an archeology of knowledge, Frobeni us's and Spengler's theories of diffu sion and metamorphosis, Levi-Strauss' s fo rmulae fo r cultu ral structures, Eliade' s identifi cation of rite and sacredness of place as a common denominator of religions-all contribute to, but do not enter upon, a geograp hy of the i magination. Geography-lands, seas, clim ates-is overlaid with the second geog­ raphy of political groups, empires, li nguisti c conglomerates. The geogra­ p hy of the imagination woul d be a third c;onstruing of cultural di visions, show ing, fo r instance, the a reas of the portrait, the epic, the novel, the symphony. Inside what boundaries is the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice meaningful ? The version of it that we fi rst know arose in the Rhodope mountains of Bulgaria, though it has obvious derivations from Akkadia and Dilmun. Why was it an Ovidian and Miltonic theme, why h as it remained so close to opera and the dance, why was it a major theme of Parisian culture in the twentieth century? Why was it so compelling a story for Poe? For Eudora Welty ? Folk lore h as been of servi ce in tracing the spread of motifs; literary hi story and theory h ave made fortuitous and largely random tracings of certain routes; Jungi an psycho logy h as posited an obscurantist hypoth­ esis of archetypes that can ignore both history and geography . XVI

Eudora Welty sh ares with Samuel Beckett the mastery of English p rose a mong writers now living; she is one of the greatest of Ameri can writers in all our hi story, taking her p lace beside Hawthorne, Poe, and 0. Henry in the craft of the short story. She canno t be placed as a novelist for the simple reason th at her novels are unlike any written in the United States. We have to turn to Flaubert and Joyce to find a family for them, and ultimately we have to note that as the culminator of a parti cular tradition in prose she i s alone, a superb and triumphant arti ficer. Her distinctness is sti ll blurred by critics and anthologists. To i solate it we want to observe certain qualities in her art that are i nventions as profound and successful a s any in our literatu re, and progressions in the development of fiction after Joyce which must be seen alongside those of Faulkner and Beckett. Art is the attention we pay to the who leness of the world. Ancient intuition went foraging after consistency. Religion, science, and art arc alike rooted in the faith that the world is of a piece, that something is common to all its diversity, and that if we knew enough we could see and give a name to its harmony .

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of Enna

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A n anecdote abou t F aulk ner relat es that once on a spring even ing he . InVIt ed a wom an to com e with him in his auto mibl e, to see a bride i n her wed dmg dres s. He drov e her over certa in Mississip pi back road s and even tuall y acro ss a mea dow , turn ing off his head light s and p roce edin g in dark ness . At last he ease d the car to a h alt and said that the brid e was befo re them . He swit ched on the light s, who se brill iance fel l fu l l upon an app 1 e tree m bloss om . The sens ibilit y that shap es that mom ent i s of a n age, at least, with civili zatio n itself .

Charles lues

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A hund red years ago last October 20th-on Ri mbaud's twentieth birthday and while Une Saison en enfer was goi n g through the press of Poot et Cie. in Brussels-Charles lves was born in Danbury, Connecticut. Naturally the site is now a parking lot ; naturally the parking lot is owned by a bank. For his centennial, his country, whose greatest composer he was , and among its most disti nguished patriots, issued no commemora­ tive postage stamp, erected no monument, set no plaque, commanded no orchestra to p lay his music. True, it was a year in which the country had to turn out a p a ck of scoundrels, porch climbers, thieves, bullies, liars , and bores from the Executive Branch of the government, a year in which the sludge of usury which forms the basis of our economy began to slither and lurch, a year indistinguishable from any other in the national contempt for the arts . 1 Ives would not have been shocked. The government was simply living up to his opinion of politicians. H e was born in the admin istration of Grant. He h ad h i s fi rst heart attack after shouting at Franklin Roosevelt a princi ple of democracy w hich Roosevelt couldn't u nderstand . He wanted to amend the Constitution so that two thirds of the states h a d to ratify a decla ration of war. Ten years after h i s death we were capable of getting into a war that cost a mi llion dol l a rs a day and fifty thousand American lives without anybody in the government being able to say just how we got into it. Perversely he read the London Times to find out the news . He did not listen to the radio, p a i d scant attention to books. He got through a long life without reading Robert Frost; he looked into Gertrude Stein and called her a Victorian. Like Pound, his junior by eleven years, he consid­

Charles lves

ered Browning to be the great modern poet, and wrote a handsome, majestic overture in h i s honor-in twelve-tone rows, a dozen y ears be­

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me k cent enni al year The New Yo At the end of Cha rles lves 's . o s oo ant port m I 1st issu e to the . Review devo ted its Dec emb er or sic Mu or able Not or er und er Si gnifi cant Tha t i t did not men tion , eith Mou ntam s: idge 's Fro m the Steep les and oldr id Wo Dav any rub n. c at all ' . . pro b a bl y was �' t a n ove rs1gh t, is an over sigh t (n .4 Study of Charles Ives d lour � a I of r Rep ubli c' s most dist ingm sh � _ the to y but out of cou rtes �mg Lmco mi o to sigh t) com para ble . ture we will take it as an over wn m pre ndin g f �s m Times, i nde ed, was a list of the p resid ents . The slep t thro ugh s not exis t; the revi ewe rs h a Mr W oldr idge ' s boo k doe a t ers are u n der the i pr s � ts u b li ati n, and its pub lish o e , on the cont rary , pu I S e . ' p ubli shed a flop . They have fi rst . su b .1e ct the first tho roug h stud y of lves s mus iC, the I ves wo rth y o f Its pose r. biog raph y of our grea test com .

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fore Schoenberg invented them. His creative l i fe occupies only nineteen years, 1 8 9 8 to 1 9 1 7, of his

seventy-nine. In that intense p eriod, Mr. Wooldridge shows , with great depth of biographical detail and sharpness of critical atten ti on, that lves "wrote more music, of greater stature, than most composers in a lifetime." By this time all literate people know the strange history of that music,

how Ives ' s reticence would have kept it from being· played at all, how Nicolas Slonimsky played it in Boston, San Francisco, Paris; how Ger­ man musicologists comp l ai ned that it hurt their ears; how small groups heard some of the string works and songs; how John Kirkpatrick began his long task of teaching audiences to hear the Concord S on ata in Spar'The 0. Henry centennial was similarl y denied a commemorative stamp, tho ugh not by the Union of Soviet Socialist Republ ics.

274

The Geography of the I magination

tanburg, South Carolina, where a large cement apple si ts on a pedestal in the Square. And Mr. Wooldridge h as uncovered evi dence that Mahler played the Third Symphony in Munich in 1 9 1 0 ! David Wooldridge, i n the face of such a strange history , has had to write not one but three books about lves, interweaving them as he pro­ ceeds. One is a brilliant, O lson-like essay on Ameri can music and Ameri­ can culture, so that we can see the cou rage and breathtaking dare of what Ives was doing, and knew he was doi ng. He was staging, almost alone, a transcendental movement i n music paralleling the same movement in literature: a musical declaration of indep,endence from Europe. Because he was th erefore out of phase with what seemed to be American cultural history , he was like a lost battalion of an army which still had its own battle to fight, long after the war was over. He was not trying to be the Jefferson of music, but i ts Emerson and Thoreau. The second book within Mr. Wooldridge's work is a study of the mu­ sic. Both composer and conductor, he writes from that advantage as well as from a deeply philosophical sense of what lves was inventing, why, and how. The third book is lves's dark, tragic life. Just before Mr. Wooldridge' s study I had read t h e fifty-six accounts of l ves in Vivian Perlis's Charles Ives Remembered: An Oral History , a collection of reminiscences for which Ms. Perlis ought to be awarded a medal by Congress, and the effect h ad been that of reading abou t fifty-six extraordina rily interesting men all named Charles Ives . Mr. Wooldridge focusses the kaleidoscope i nto a single, resolved image-a genius who made two million dollars i n the insurance business, composing o n weekends, strangely anxious that no one see him as an artist, accepting occasions for music as they fell i nto his hands (the explosion of the General Slocum on which Leopold Bloom brooded, the sinking of the Lusitania .) He was a man needlessly defens ive and pathologica lly touchy ; he came to guard his obscurity as if it were his genms. Mr. Woo ldridge's study belongs to that small category of books writ­ ten with passion and p reci sion out of a need to understand , and make others understand , a subject of great importance and great complexity . It is a chapter in our cultural history which h ad hitherto been blank. If I have any reservations about so accomplishe d and splendid a book, it is a slight q uarrel over some poi nts of interpretati on h aving to do with lves ' s subtlety. Far from being mawkishly sentimental, the little trilogy of songs of which "Tom Sails Away" is the center seems to me to be a tri umph of bi tter contempt- the kind of sati re that comes equ ally from heart and spleen. I concede Mr. Wooldridge his stricture while reserving my choice to listen to those songs as if they were wickedly satirical. lves i s .

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275

a con: poser where frame of mind while listening is crucial. His superb vanatl ons on America can be heard in innocence or as a glorious take-off on church organist s and their styles (Method ist Gloom , Presbyte rian Correctn ess) and lves the Imp-fo r one of the variation s is not America but a Persian dance that sounds like it. Invited to celebrat e lves, I h ave thus far p roceeded by disguisin g my celebrati on as a review of David Wooldri dge's study, as that pioneeri ng book fell under the evi l spirit that has kept Ives h imself a shy ghost i n . Amenca n art. How long It took us to see Melville ! We sti ll have no no­ tion of Poe's greatnes s. Our Whitma n and our Thoreau are not Whitman and Thoreau . We h ave a wrong, vague, and inadequa te apprecia tion of Stephen Foster. And the great Formalis t painte r Grant Wood, who in Europe would h ave founded a school. Did Man n hear about Ives from Schoenberg and conceive of his Dok­ tor Faustus then and there ? Faustus is a rich composi te, an allegory of the German spmt, b u � we still have to account for descr iptions of i maginary music corres� on ? mg so eerily to the Fourth Symphon y. Hearsay is a powerfu l m sugatwn to the creative mind. What a symbol it would make and what a closing of the circle: Goethe , Transcen dentalism , Ives, Mann Goethe. June 1 8 63: a bandmas ter in shako an d sash snaps out the cake-wal k rhythms of "Dixie" while Lee rides ahead of the flags across the Mason and Dixon Line. The troops shout a great Huzzah! It is a moment: iacta alea est. Mi litary music h aunted Ives all of his career; it was the ti}ngible memory of his fat� er, it was an art th at strangely went to war, where i ts presence was as n gh t and congenia l as singing i n church. " When the cannonad e was at its height," Col. Fremantl e wrote in his account of Gettysbu rg, " a Confederate band of music, between the cemetery and ourselves , began to p lay polkas and waltzes, which sounded very curi ous, accompa med by the h issing and bursting of shells." Before the line of tanks at El A lamei n marched a li ne of high land pipers, Custer rode into Little Btg Horn to "The Girl I Left Behind Me," Raleigh sailed i nto Cadiz h arbo r, p layed an insulting fanfarol on the trumpet, and sailed out again; the redcoats at Yorktow n laid down their muskets , compan y by com­ pany, to a ]. l g called "The World Turned Upsided own"; D ' Annunzi o rode i nto Fiume at the head of his army of veteran garibaldini and Boy Scouts pre �eded by a symph ony orchestr a playing Verdi . Music is what the Og­ bom call "words of powe r." It is both a spirit and a summo ner of spirit; woe to them who tnvtali ze words of power . One way of beginni ng to hear lves is to listen to how he summo ns spirits : his martial music incorpo rates the chains of the caisson s the rat­ tle of gear, distant bugles, tolling bells of chu rches near the b attle . When

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Charles h •cs

he summons various songs and noises all at once, he is working the syne rgy of heightened quotation: the same effect Borges savors when he has a character drench hi mself in Cervantes's psychology and style u ntil, after a lifetime of trying, he can write a page of the Quijote. The page is identical with one of Cervantes's, but " much richer." The lines Eliot ap­ propriates for Th e Waste Land, Pound for The Cantos, Wordsworth fo r Th e Prelude operate in this way . It is one of the century's modes. As value inheres i n money alone, the arts shore u p against their ruin.

But p ractically all ? f lves is like nothing else. There is beneath every passage � grasp of v1s1on completely Ives's. I hear in it a li felong gri ef for all that 1s tragic in our history : the caissons going into p lace at Shi loh, Fost�r's taktng up the abolitionist cause i n his songs, the p ri mal force of music as a word of power (the black regiment that m a rched th rough a burmng Richmond singing "The Day of Jubi lo," the bagpipers who led the tank attack at El Alamein, the band that played " Nearer My God to Thee" as the Titanic went down) . Music , we a re told, was born from tragedy; nearly ali of Ives's grand themes allude to tragedies, particularly to that of the Civil War, and to his father's role in it as a musician.

Ives always quotes with perfect love and p erfect contempt. Ives has remained in classic American obscurity because: He is ironic. He is comic, satiric, lyric, contentious all at once. His music is a matter of idea s. Practically every composition is in a new form. He despised music which beguiles, overpowers, or exists for itself: and this i s our sole conception of music. It is p ractically impossible to dis­ cover people listening to music. We have it everywhere, drib bli ng, dron­ i ng, boomi ng. We converse to it, drive to it, wait to it, have our teeth dri lled to it. It is simply another narcotic. A person who assumes a pre­ dilection for music finds himself dumbfounded before Ives, where listen­ ing is required. Conversely people who use music for sensual p leasure find lves flat and un moving. I see an analogy in Browning, where you have to keep awake l i ne by line: you can' t read him, as people manage to read Keats or Tennyson, "for the beauty of it."

The � urfac e of lves' s musi c is musi c, just as the surface of Joyc e's Ulysses 1s a ttssu e of clich es in one conv entio n or anot her. Pou nd' s Cantos was to have been an un brok en surfa ce of voice s from the p ast u ntil at Pisa in the cage the design brok e and the poet spok e in his own voice and in expe cta­ . tion of deat h be fore a firing squa d. colla ge is retro spect ive in cont ent, mod ern in its desig n. Kept up, it . . will reca pitul ate and sum mari ze the h i story of its own bein g. O ne can go thro ugh lves notin g the voices (the Alco tts tryin g to spea k Beet hove n and Cult ure from Euro pe, Thor eau spea king thro ugh a hym n play ed on his flute agai � st the voic e of his woo ds, Four th of July band s spea king with a . marti al a i r bes1d e the voic e of ragt ime; Brow ning , Arno ld, Wh itma n) . Iv�s got as far as Isaia h asking Wha t is Man ? in the Four th Sym phon y. H1st ory answ ers in the spi ritua l artic ulati on of m usic, and final ly a chor us of unidentifi able voices answ ers, in inart icula te word s.

The first American composer and t he last great composer in the western tradition that descends from Bach, lves is in the unique position of being a great inventor who ends rather than begins a series. He is therefore like R. Buckmi nster Fuller, fellow transcendentalist and spi ritual twin : their content goes back to archaic beginnings, thei r methods are profound i n­ ventions. Both have been repeatedly dismissed as cranks, though success thorough and i ndi sputable vi ndi cates their every venture. You can't argue with a geodesic dome or with the tragic grandeur of lves's Fourth Symphony. lves aligns with the most signi ficant art of his time: with Pound and Eliot in the reuse of extant compositions (Mann again, in ascri bing to Lever­ kuhn as to his own narrative p rose the mode of exposition by serious pa rody as the mode of the twentieth century ) , with Joyce in the hermetic . diffusion of sym boli sm throughout a work, with Picasso 10 explonng the possibilities of extending forms and techniques.

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Ozymandias fold a s the ding y shee p driv en earl y to O n a win ter a ftern oon as brow n ker ban n dark enin � gard� n , a gentlema dow n the h igh stre et beyo nd the a of ry libra name, is s1ttmg m the long from Lon don Hor ace Smi th by from mes low , a few mile s up the Tha plea sant hou s� i n the villa ge of Mar . Hen ley. He is writing a sonn et. and . . . ic udm ess of Dom bey abo ut h1m mat pris the of ng ethi som is re The last the rs of Mr. Pick wic k. He wea som ethi ng of the rubi cun d jovi ality to age the of coa t is alre ady the alpa ca _ cent ury' s sma ll clot hes still , but his 1s hke are the name Horatio S m1th com e. The nov els he writes und er tke l end th-c entu ry man ner and _ clot hes: they begi n in the eigh teen a nd h1m , , them n otte forg as ld h wor nine teen th-c entu ry nov els. The an. He ully hum ?ro us, and �ener� us � thou gh he was a tale nted , won derf l, an qml h1s hos t's silve r box , d1ps accepts a pinch o f snu ff from his

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begins to write on a block o f paper the top sheet of which bears his host's drawing of a pine forest, an imp, and a labyri nth . There is, however, room for a sonnet. Outside the leaded diamond panes a thoroughly dreary Saturday a fter­ noon makes the fi relit room even more comfortable. A white haze from the river sifts through the rusted garden. It is but two days after Christ­ mas of the year 1 8 1 7, and the banker has walked up the Ty burn Turnpike from London to Uxbridge, and thence by various country roads to the lacemaking town of Marlow. Our banker's host, a mere boy to judge from his snub nose, spindly six feet, and wild h air (he ducks his head i n a pail of water from time to time, for the freshness of it, as he explains) , h as been reading Gibbon all week and talks about h istory, to our banker's straight face, as if it were nothing but a succession of tyrants gnawing the elbows of the poor. His wife, a wide-eyed young lady, reads Tacitus for hours on end. She, too, has written a novel , now at the printer. Frankenstein, or The Modern Prom­ etheus, she calls it. The talk of the three turns from history to certain modern travelers who have been looking at, and theorizing on, cities and empires that have disappeared from the earth with scarcely a trace-to Count Constantin Franc;ois de Chasseboeuf de Volney, whose Voyage to Egypt and Syria of 1 78 7 and R u ins, or Meditations on the Destiny of Empires of 1 79 1 were books much discussed i n Europe and America, and t o Johann Lud­ wig Burckhardt, who had refound the " rose-red city" Petra and the col­ ossal statues of Rameses II at Abu Simbel, and who died earlier that year, buried as a Mohammedan somewhere in the wastes of Egypt. Our banker has been reading the historian Diodorus, and it is on a description he has found there of a toppled monument that he is about to write a meditative sonnet. Some 3,300 years before, the grandest Pharaoh of them all ' Rameses I I ' set up a statue of himself at Thebes. It was sixty feet tall, weighed a thousand tons, and had inscribed on it: " I am User- ma-Ra, ruler of rul­ � rs, king of Upper and Lower Egypt, He of the Sedge and Bee, the mi ghty _ of Re, the chosen of Re. I f a man wishes to know the greatness of JU Stice me, here I lie, let him surpass what I have done." Six hundred years later, the Greek traveler Hekataios visited Egypt and wrote an account of Rameses ' great statue, doing the best he coul d with his name but making a hash of it. "Osymandyas" was how "User-ma­ Ra" sounded to his Greek ears. His book is lost, but Diodorus, which ou r b �nker has open before him, i ncluded his description in his forty-volume h1s tory of the world written i n the time of Augustus Caesar. Here the inscription runs: "King o f Kings Osymandyas am I. If any

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want to know how great I am and where I lie, let them outdo my deeds if they ca n." . So by lamplight and the fai li ng winter sun Horace Smith the li terary banker writes: In Egypt's sandy si lence, all alone, Stands a gigantic Leg, which far off throws The only shadow that the desert knows. ''! am great Ozymandias," saith the stone,

"The King of kings ; this mi ghty city shows

The wonders of m y hand." The city's gone! Naught but the leg re maining to disclose

,

The sight of that forgotten Babylon. We wonder, and some hunter may express Wonder like ours, when through the wilderness Where London stood, holding the wolf i n chase, He meets some fragment huge, and stops to guess What wonderfu l , but unrecorded, race Once dwelt in th at annih i l ated p l ace.

Before he has finished, his boyish host j oins h i m across the table. He p roposes to wri te a sonnet on the same theme. And writes: There stands by Nile a single pedesta l . On which t w o trunkless legs o f crumbling stone Quiver thro sultry mist; beneath the sand Half sunk a shattered vi sage lies, whose frown And wrinkled lips impatient of command Betray some sculptor's a rt whose

Here he quits, n i bbles his qui ll, and strikes out the fi rst line and the first word of the second line. Smith has fi nished his sonnet. His h ost takes a new sheet and begins over : I met a traveller from an antique land, Who said-"Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the de s a rt . . . . Near them, on the sand, Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold co mmand, Tell that its sculptor well those p assions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these li feless things, The h and th at mocked the m , and the heart that ted ; And on the pedestal, these words appear: My n ame is Ozy mandias, King of kings .

Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and desp a i r !

Ozymandias

28 1

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and b a re The lone and level sands stretch fa r away."

Thus, i n ten minutes fl at (or thereabouts) , Shelley wrote one of the masterpieces of English poetry. But look how a Pharaoh, a committee of histori ans and exp lorers, and the luck less Horace Smith, wrote it for h im . Genius is perh aps being i n the right place a t the right time, p repared for the moment. They sent their sonnets off to a newspaper, which pri nted both. The honest Smith called h i s " On a Stupendous Leg of Granite, Discovered Standing by Itself in the Deserts of Egypt, with the Inscri p tion Inserted Below." Sh elley called his " Ozymandi as." Genius may also be knowing how to title a poem.

Christ's Cunning Rimesmith

Christ's Cunning Rimesmith

� � � : :��� � ; � � :�:� ��: !: :�

Cha nn l . n fero ciou s gale s on the Eng lish The win ter of 1 875 was one of nam e t e r !me Dec emb er, a Ger man the earl y hou rs of the 7th of bro � e u an d to New Yor k, foun dere Deutschland saili ng from Bre men m l t g cau hed and roll ed, its ke�l on the Ken tish coa st. As it lurc y bes a bed pas sengers and crew chm . san d its dec ks floo ded , and its aytn s e t nto , fing er-f reez ing wm d, cou l d in pitc h-da rk and how ling ther e, and held on t e nt rigg ing. Ma ny cou ld not mou ­ r mto the se a. Am ong ese m asts unt il wav es claw ed them e wer y the l i unt d . o rel e an d p raye n nun s who held h and s tn a last , tall est of the m crie d out at the the t tha d ned . A sur vivo r reporte 1 . . " 0 Christ , com e quickly !" . n the attention ms of thts pttl ful ca amt ty o To ponder the dive rgen t clai _ ma tter an d een betw ft n dro ps us i nto the of a Victori an fath er and son

�:�: 282

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spirit which so many earnest nineteenth-century sensi bili ties ached to close . For Manley Hop kins, Anglican, spiritual advisor to the Hawaiian Islands, and broker i n marine insurance, the disaster was a financial as well as a deplorable event. For his son Gerard Manley, a Jesui t who had renounced poetry along with the world, it was the signal that his love of words and worldly beauty had a place in his priesthood. He spent a year composing " The Wreck of the Deutschland," as im­ passioned a poem as we have in English. Even now, when it is normal to expect all serious poetry to be difficult to construe, Hopkins's archaic "sprung rhythm" (a syncopation of metric which he heard in everyday ta lk-"do it; it needs to be done, don't it?"-and in nursery rhymes­ " One, two: buckle my shoe I Three, four: shut the door") and "chiming of consonants" imitated from Welsh verse, require sharp attention to follow. To the editors of the Jesuit magazine, The Month, where he sent it for publi cation, it was bewildering. They accepted it, tried tampering with it, and finally shelved it. Forty-two years would pass before the world coul d see it in pri nt. Hopki ns's poems became the ward of his fri end and con fidant, the Poet Laureate Robert Bridges, who cautiously (and with much misgiving) pub­ lished them in 1 9 1 8 , thi rty years after Hopki ns's death. By then, at least, there was some comprehension of the movement afoot among philologists and poets to effect a renaissance in English dic­ tion by anglicizing the language. This movement would lead to the Early English Text Society and the Oxford English Dictionary, would influence Hopkins, Hardy, Yeats, Pound, and many another. It was the feeling, both patriotic and aesthetic, of certain scholars like F. J. Furnivall, R. C. Trench, Wi lliam Barnes, and James Murray, that English can say any­ thing it wants to in a native way without coining from French, Latin , or Greek. We ought, for instance, to say foreword rather than preface-it is a measure of the movement's partial vi ctory that we now use both words. We should say sunprint for p hotograph, inwit for conscience, wordhoard for vocabulary. The most rigorous of the angli cizers was not Hopkins but Charles Montagu Doughty, whose allegi ance to pure English i n his Travels in Arabia Deserta (whose first champion was Robert Bridges) and his great unknown epic, The Dawn in Britain, has had a lasting impact on style-by way of Henry Green to John Updike, for i nstance; by way of Joyce to Eudora Welty, for another. H opkins saw in this predilecti on for real roots, as agai nst gra fti ng or borrowing, the same spirit that moved him in Duns Scotus and Herac­ litus. His conversion to Catholi cism, i ndeed, follows, as he would say, the same instress and inscape. His was not a mind for half measures or com-

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the

Imagination

promises. He grew up, as Paddy Kitchen shows us in an admirably brief biography, 1 in a thoroughly Victorian worl ? . It was a world of decreed . hierarchies, it recognized only a world-desrgn of rts own makmg, and rejected all that did not conform to its sense of comfort, wealth, or propriety. . The Oxford to which the young Hopkins was sent to be made mto a Vi ctorian gentleman was, as it turned out, a try-pot for rendering minds of susceptible plasticity into various contending idealis ms. As we k now from Geoffrey Fa ber's study of the Oxford Movement (of which Paddy Kitchen gives a rather too breathless summ � ry as her introductory chap­ ter) , there was concealed in the High Church cause an eprcurean phi­ losophy which on i n spection turns out to be a blend of pederasty, aes­ theticism, Anglo- Catholicism, and good breeding. Walter Pater, connoisseur of male adolescent charm and the very fine fine arts was Hopkins's tutor. Young men walked arm-in-arm in those pre-Fre;dian days, swore eternal friendship, and sighed wistfully that . . Ther r prep-school these times were not those of Alci biades and Lysrs years had been one constant sideswiping by buggery and sadistic caning that all too frequently was masochistically received. Paddy Kitchen sees the stain of Oxford sexual mores th roughout H opki ns' s poetry (in "The Bugler's First Com munion," "The Loss of the Eurydice," an � " �pi­ thalamion"-Hopkins's Whitmanesque description of boys bathmg m a p ool) . But surely if ever an appetence was refined into purest ess� nce, H opkins's h abitual awareness of the sexuality of man and n ature rs the most chaste we a re l ikely to know. It is Hopkins's deli neation of beauty that leads most of us to him in the first p lace. He wrote when words still h ad to serve science in its descriptions of nature. The photograph and half­ tone cut had not yet arrived to assist geologists like Hugh Mi ller and Agassiz. A generation of exact prose invented the discipline with which . Hopkins descri bed the � extures an � shapes of things. ( � sc olar m� gh : do worse for the next thesrs on Hopkms th an compare Miller s descnptwns of fossil fish of the O ld Red Sandstone, Ruskin ' s descriptions of flowers and rocks, and Agassiz's descriptions of turtle embryos with Hopkins ' s . verbal precision-which, of course, has other instigations as well m scholastici s m and in Greek poetry.) One would like to follow more closely than Ki tchen' s biography does Hopkins' s sweet mind from Victorian Oxford to his theological trai �ing with the Jesui ts, and to have some understanding of his resea rches mto . Scotus and the pre-Socratics. He was, in every sense, extraordmary. It rs chilling to remind ourselves that Joyce' s Jesuits were, some of them,

�

'Paddy Kitchen, G erard Manley Hopkins (New York: Atheneum, 1979).

Christ's Cunning Rimesmith

28 5

J:Iop kins 's colle ague s in his last days in Dub lin. Wha t did Hop kins look hke to the JesU it who cond ucts the busin essm en's retre at in Joyc e's story "Gra ce" ? Once we h ave lea rned to be on our guar d agai nst Padd y Kitch en's style (she says "vul nera ble" whe n she mean s "sus cept ible, " "as" when she mea ? s "wh ile," and is apt to intro du ce Jung ian jargo n), we can ap­ p reo ate the goo� ness of her biog raph y. It is terse ly narr ated , and pack s i n a weal th o f deta ils a bout Hop kins' s unev entful outw ard life. It is char m­ ing to know that H opki ns help ed di rect a Jesu it perf orm ance of Mac beth in whic h, for prop riety 's sake , Lady Mac beth beco mes Uncl e Don ald a nd that a serm on of Hop kins' s was so ludic rous that it was drow ned ou� by the laug hter of fello w semi naria ns. Hop kins had thou ght he coul d make sacred geog raph y imag inabl e by comp aring the Sea of Galil ee to a left ear. He then locat ed Naza reth by sayin g that it wou ld be near the correspon ding nose , the Jord an wou ld run dow n throu gh the hair of the �ead , and so on. We learn that Hop kins was batte d out of a Jesui t spel­ h ng bee (an Ame rican cont est that h ad beco me all the rage in Euro pe) by the word "alle gian ce." It i s inter estin g to know that he h ad socia list h op �s for the futur e, that he knew the Yeat s fa mily in Dub lin, that he adm rred Whi tman while think ing him depr aved , that he did not like . Brow � mg, that he met John Tynd all, the evol ution ist, on a walk ing tour of Swit zerla nd, that he tried his hand at com posi ng mus ic. He was stil l youn g when the filthy drink ing wate r of Du bli n did h i m i n : typh i ? . H i s l a s t year s were h i s most � tryin g. He w a s a t the peak of his crean vrty , he had hope s of cont ri butin g to the scho larsh ip of Greek pro­ sody , and all his ti me was claim ed by a somn ambulism of class room drill and pape r grad ing. His sensi tive natu re had suffered in mini steri ng to p� rishe s i n �iverp ool, Lond on, and Glas gow . Dru nken ness and poverty drstressed h1m to beho ld. He was not an effecti ve p reach er. Exce pt for a . short, gold en peno d at Oxfo rd, his mi ni stry was the trial of his soul he knew it wou ld be when he took his vow s. But Dub lin seem ed to be the sum of all that he foun d most unco ngen ial. It was drun ken, inert , and poor; and the umv ers1t y was a trea dmi ll. At his fune ral ther e was no one to susp ect that the obsc ure prof esso r of Greek Inter red at Glas nevi n Cem etery (where fifteen year s later an imag i­ ? ary mou rn er nam ed Leop old Bloo m wou ld opin e that pries tly mum bo J U m bo allev i. ates grief , as it is a kind of poet ry) wou ld be reco gniz ed in the next c� ntury as one of the grea test of Eng lish poet s . "I am so hap py," wer e h1s last wor ds.

Joyce's Forest of Svmbols

Joyce' s Forest of Symbols that we can all be artists by turn ing In Boo k 10 of The Rep ubli c we learn Mul ligan in the first chapter of a mirr or roun d and roun d, like Buck the son o � Arm� nius , cam e to h fe _ at Ulysses, and that a man nam ed Er, ycho sis. Thts Er turn s up m Fm­ his own fune ral and expl aine d mete mps � and Com eniu s, quar re er� w �th _ Fat ; negans Wak e fuse d with Arminius , the thun dergod Er. Airm iemo us wea ring the mas k of his nam esak e, the com pa?y he keep s, Hurdleb ury Joyc e calls h i m, and we k now h i m by obse quie s. . Fenn and othe r atten dants of their own ic age is over will learn to s1t hero his n whe who Er, ish egan This Finn to have a hous e and a la �p, and by his wick i n h is wick , civili zed enou gh essin g soul s read y for remca �na­ be kno wn as Earw icke r, says that in witn swan , Ajax choo se to �e a hon, a as tion he saw Orp heus choose to retu rn . en mind ing hts own busm ess. and Ulys ses choo se to be a priva te citiz

}

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Giambattista Vico could have advised Ulysses that he had made his choice in harmony with the course of history, for the age of heroes and kmgs gtves way to the age of the common man, j ust as the age of the gods had given way to that of heroes and kings . W e can locate Bloom b y other roads. The hero of the Aegean epic b� comes in Athens the center of his nobi lity rather than a man who places _ his no bdtty at the center of events. In the truest genius o f Roman litera­ ture the hero becomes the privileged spectator, like the charmi ng scape­ graces of Apuleius and Petronius. The gods give way to magic, virtues and vices become civic rather than tragic and indivi dual, and literature sh ifts from its concern for the rela­ tionship between God and man to a concern for the relationship between man and society. Yet the hero remains a hero, whether venturing i nto the lands of faery or into hell and purgatory. Not until Sancho Panza began to be as interesting as his metempsycho­ tic master was the age of heroes rea lly over. And then, to speed up literary history to a blur, the children of Sancho emerge as Mr. Pickwick and Tartarin de Tarascon, wh o are products of metempsychosis by enthu­ siasm, and thence to the ulti mate enthusiasts, Francois Denys Bartholomee Bouvard and Ju ste Romain Cyrille Pecuchet, who believe that the verities are not on Olympus, or in the club arm of a Hercu les, or on a throne, b ut in the Bureau of Statistics and in the university, or in their equivalent, the encyclopedia. The fourth age of Vico has arrived, and the man of acumen feeds the printing -press with matter, p u ffs the win ds of trade, and participates i n al l the events o f history insofar as they have survived; rather, as they have survived-the prehistoric triple legs of the Manx arms, the ancient sym­ bols persisting, the Sirens still at their station, Polyphemus still drunk and throwing things, Ulysses still seeking his home. No book, u nless it is Don Quijote, has been more aware than Ulysses of its place in time. Oolysaze (so Joyce said h is title, a pronunciation that reflects better the genitive of Ulex, the mountai n gorse that grows in the nostrils of the giant Finnegan, the heroic barbarity from which Bloom is descended and refi ned away from) , Ulysses projects all its images trans­ parently upon other images, which in turn lie transparently over other images, several piles deep. To read these multiple·images we must learn to �uffer the ridiculous i mage to disclose itself within the tragic, the mythic m the tri vial, the ironic in the poignant. You do not read Ulysses; you watch the words. Reading is possible only after we have mastered Joyce's method and can share with him the tragic grief and comi c fury that charge every word. So complex a fusion of meanings becomes a picture of meaning itself in all its darkness of ambiguity , ironic duplicity, an d

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tri umphant a rticulation of dead symbols, signifying that symbols, like seeds, come alive in due season and place. Comic fury: the advantages of flexibi lity held up for comparison with the paralysis of D u blin. Tragic grief: that a history containing the bright sanity and comp rehensive forgiveness of Homer, the virtue of Epa­ meinondas, the minds of da Vinci and Edison, the ministry of Christ, the ear of von F lotow, has come to this. Ulysses i s more of a poem than a novel, or rather is a poem i nside a novel. I f tragedy educates our hearts against pain, and comedy makes us good-natured, Joyce's art acts like Galva�i's electrical current touched to the dead frog's heart. We quicken. We feel the charm of the matter a n d the manner. With o u r attenti on thus fixed, the charm can work i ts trans­ formation. Most serious readers feel that they h ave by now mastered the prose, prose which fifty years ago gave i ntelligent peop le tro uble. Shaw, Wells, Virginia Woolf, Yeats could not read it. Thomas Wolfe and Wyndham Lewis misread it. Thomas Mann longed to read it. Ezra Pound' s interest soon waned after an initial excitement over its Flau bertian qualities. Stately, the book begins ; followed by plump, two adjectives modifying one Buck M u lliga n who, like Scipio Africanus, shaves every day. Stately, plump: these two words, stu died for what we might call the Kells effect, the symbolic content of i lluminated lettering serving a larger purpose than its decoration of geometry, imps, and signs, contain the word that ends the book, Molly's ambiguous but eloquent yes (so that Ulysses, like the Wake, is circular, as is the Portrait, for the fabulous artificer at the end m ade artificial cows like the fabulous cow of the beginning­ "any body can be an artist by turning a m i rror round and rou nd" ) . When we are ready t o scrutinize t h e Kells decorati on, we can see that stately and p lump encaps u late the whole first chapter. Stately is an adjec­ tive for kings, p lump for p lebeians. The etymologist Skeat, whose dictio­ nary Stephen Dedalus carried in his pocket, gives "ru de and clownish" for the original connotation o f plump. It is the plump Falstaff who sings 0, won't we have

a

merry time

Drinkin g whisky, beer, and w i n e O n coronation,

Coronation day ?

And it is the putatively stately Hal who must dismiss the spirit-stealing Falstaff before he can be a ki ngly man. Behind Hal a n d Falstaff are Everyman and Misrule. Joyce builds the chapter around a spectacle of authority usurped by disorder, Telem achus's plight, Hamlet's plight. Stephen, melancholy, ineffectual, depressed, sta nds in contrast to Mul-

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ligan's rough ebullienc e. The one has power and spirit, the other longs for . them. Mulligan, beari ng his bowl of lather on which a mirror and razor .�1e crossed, IS m fact a priest, but the god w hose altar he approach es, l ntomng playfully the openmg of the Latin Mass, is not the Christian God. He Is the Shavian god whose mask Nietzsche h ad placed on the face of t�e Z el tgetst, Zoroast er's god Ahura- Mazda, the sun , whose processes of light, daily resurrect.ion and serpentin e course through the zodiac : were symbo lized tn the anCient world as a Kronos with a lion's head or ' as we can say, Leopold. Mu lli ?an w ears the yell ?� robe of the Mithraic hieropha nt and carries the sacnfiCJa l bowl conta1mn g the sperm of a slain bull, the razor with � hich he slew, and the mirror with which the priest of Mithra flashed tIdmgs of the sun to bless the earth: south, east, and west, omitting Dub. (t 1m ? the north) In h1s blessing. He growls at Stephen in the ritual lion gr�etmg of Mithrat cs, a n d pr sides at a feast of milk and honey, the Mith­ � r�l c euchans t. And all this 1s happeni ng on the Mith raic sabbath the ' SIXteenth of every month . St�phen longs and d �es n �t long for Mul ligan's euphoric and p agan all �giance to the age , s elan vrtal, and IS thus pictured as an aspirant to M1thra1c orders, the stages o f initiation being distribute d symbolica lly . th �ough the chapter. With diligence and perspicac ity one can espy the N.£tthratc orde �s : that face gilded with m armalade is one, Mulligan' s flap­ pmg h1s arms IS another. The degree of lionhood is concealed in a song: I a m the bov

J

That can en oy Invisibility

-that is, Ariel, Lion of God. But Sh � kespeare's Ariel also, for Mulligan is a kind o f Cali ban p laying hav oc wtth Stephen's melanch olia. Stephen should therefore be Ariel though Mull1gan, borrowing a witti cis m of Wilde ' s calls h i m Cali ban ' Corres pondence s in this first chapter are frequently t�psy-turvy : Stephe � h a s th e pagan name, Mulligan i s the pagan. Stephen h as Ari el's soul and . � ahban's status. As in a comedy, affairs are upsi de-down and m ust be nghted. They are not, but the process of righting has begun when the novel ends. The Mithraic correspond ences in the first chapter can be accounted for. After Bloom appears in the fourth chapter, there is a Bi blical scheme of correspon dences, Old and New Testamen ts linked together typologi­ cally. The " Telemachiad" m ust the refore be extra-Bi blical, and Jovce . chose to muror .m these three chapters the three forces that m�st threatene d Chnstlam ty : the rivalry of Mith raism in its early years in .

2 90

The Geography of the I magination

Rome, the barbari c m a rriage of chivalry and Christi anity, and th e struggle with Islam. . T0 our surpri se, we might notice that the first three stones of Dublmers answer to this same correspondence: there is a vision of Persia in "The Sisters " and the old priest' s sin is not si mony, of course, as the childish narrat� r has misheard, a sin scarcely available to an Irish parish p �iest, but sodomy ; the chiva lry in " An Encounter" is the Wild West vanety; and the evocation of Islam in " Araby" is obvious. But Joyce's correspondences are not li near parallels; they are a net­ work. The tension between Step hen and ,Mulligan in the first chapter lead s to an ineffe ctual telegram: "The sentimentalist is he who would enjoy without incurring the immense debtorship for a thing done." This is from Meredith's The O rdeal of Richard Feveral. Go back , however, to the opening ch apters of The Ordeal of Richard Feverel and see Rich � rd _ _ latwn the Zoroastri an, fire-worshiper and burner of hay ncks. No reucu in the network of correspondences, it seems, was to be left untied. One can search along the network of symboli c correspondences by asking questions. Why, for instance, does Ulysses h ave eighteen ch apters? The Odyssey h as twenty-four, as many as the letters of the Greek al­ phabet. Step hen, we learn in the Proteus chapter, once conside �ed wri ting _ to books with letters for titles. A good rule for solving Joycean nddles Is go directly to the Irish connection , which in this case will render u p an Irish alph abet, one of such antiquity that its letters are the names of trees with magic properties, making it possible for Joy ce to strike a great chord of correspondences, Irish alphabet to trees to Greek epic, and thus place Baudelaire' s foret des symboles as a sustained transparency of sym �o �s over his novel. Joyce found this alph abet in a book with the serendipi­ tously Homeric title Ogygia, p u blis hed in Latin in 1 785 by Rodenc O'Flaherty, antiquarian, and tran slated into E ngli sh in 1 793 by the Rev . James Hely. That name, Hely, an anagram for hyle, Greek for " forest," wanders through Ulysses on so many signboards carri ed by admen of peristalti c gait, as if Joyce wa nted a sy mbol of a symbol, or wanted to sign al to u s that this Helv a stationer is named Wisdom, i mplying that the forest of symbolic tre�� ' wh i ch de�ermine the number and the pattern of corre­ spondences of each chapter, is, like the seven trees that supported Sol­ omon ' s tabernacle, Baudelai re's "temple ou de vivants piliers I Laissent .

parfois sortir de confuses paroles. "

The first letter of the Irish a l p h abet is Beth, the bi rch tree, the branches of which expel evi l spirits and a re used for beating the bounds of ter­ ritories, for purifi cati on ; and it is a tree p ropitious to inceptions, such as starting out on a quest. For Hamlet-Telemachus-Ariei-Stephen, who

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must set h i s h ouse in orde r a n d go i n ques t o f a good daim on, i t is a mos t app rop nate sym bol. The seco nd is Luis, the row an, whic h com pels dem ons to answ er . diffic ult ques tions . This seco nd chap ter is mad e up entir ely of ques tions and answ ers. T� e third is Nio n, the ash, w hich is sacre d to Man anna n McL ir, the Celt tc Poseidon , and Is a charm again st drow ning . The back grou n d of th ls chapte IS the sea; its strug gle is � with the shap eless ness of wate r and . With aqua city of thou ght. The fou rth is Fearn, or a l der, the circl ing tree which conf ines and pro­ tects a sanc tuar y, as Caly pso' s m agic islan d w as h idde n by ring ed alde r trees , and as Bloo m's back -gar den Eden is by spea rmin t. Here is one of thos e correspo nden ces, Hom er's Ogy gian alde r for the alde r of the Irish alph abet, w hich mak es one belie ve that God desig ned the wor ld for Joyc e's conv enie nce. The fifth is Saille, or willow , which protects one from char ms as Bloo m mus � �e protected from the n a rcosi s of the lotus which drug s �his �h apte r. Th1s I S the chap ter i n which Bloo m is mos t deft with wor ds, and mad vertently p roph etic. The w illow is the poet 's tree. The sixth is Uath, the h a wtho rn, whic h bloo ms in the seaso n whe n Herm es Psyc hopo mpo s leads the dead to Had es, and is sacre d to the g�ddess of the dead , Mai a. This is the chap ter of the buri al of Padd y D1gn am. The seve nth i s Duir, the oak, the tree of the weat her and the door of t� e seaso ns, the equi noxes and so lstice s, whe n wind s ch ange thei; di rec­ . Is tion ; and th is the Aeo lus chap ter, as wind y as a cany on, and full of door s. T�e eight h is Tinn e, the holly, the oak tree' s twin and rival . A stran ge and m oluted sym bolis m here seem s to s ay that the cann ibali stic : Les­ trygom ans are the a buse of the mou th as a door inwa rd to the body , as in the precedmg chap ter the tong ue is i n wind y rhet oric the door outw ard �rom the body and that as the oak and holly vie for the rule of the year '. , hke the oak kmg ht and the h olly knig ht, the one a lway s deca pitat ing the othe r, so belly and voic e vie to deba uch ou r sens es and sens e. Cert ainly Joyce does som e deca pitat ing o f his own , for why shou ld Bloo m in this � ost Zola esqu e of chap ters eat gorgonzo la i f Joyce wer e not, Pers eus­ l! ke , oldm g up for our i nspe ctio n th e head of h is false twin , the Gor gon zo1 a .

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The ninth is Col!, o r h azel , whi ch give s one the pow er to curs e. This chap ter Is sulfu rous with ritu a l curs es, m ainl y upo n both the hou ses of Ans totle and Plat o, an d pa rticu larly upon the care of liter atur e in the h an ds of p recio us dilet tant es and refin ed libra rian s. One of the dark er

the The Geography of 292

Ima gina tion

ful pu n: AE , IO U ; con cea led in an aw y to d etect, as i t i s the lan gua ge of curs es is not eas in . rge Ru sse ll ' bu t de bt to you. ' c;,eo r eto rt to t h e ctic la tha t I. S , 1 am m 11 . ma Y literate p rophy . mlm e h t gic ma . Medi terranea n . or d er. . · . . on o f the vow. els m aech l e. De vil I S the recJta n. m of wh i ch I S B bolis sy e t h vme, the grape e ring The tenth is Mum , spir al , o r a wa nd . sym b ol to� e a the en tak e v a h h ICh . Joy ce seem s to oco sm i c scen es w to h I m the. micr d geste sug this red to . aro und, and sym bo lism ·, i t i s sac vme h as a va ned e Th er. h ot n erh . cri ssc ros s eac y Kell eher the. u d 0 sin . . . S o f U/Yss.es , Corn h e t and e, stanc · . ggestmg th at . Os m s , for m . ve to Irelan d (su . e 1s not nan vm the e smc . · d plan . ; taker, I S here satir ical and bitte r s S dark ly h I ps wr � elp , eit he r) , Joy ce the alp h abe t i sn' t ho with libe ral h he r tl h of e for en d. ali islan the � ral a roun d ���·p:ral�s is of the ute� �a �g� p ��v� tnb on c d h a s an e , us, i n from Bacch on to the v . . I com pani � e Ivy,mt h e con viVI th ort, G is enth . The elev h S!re ns and m usic . rmond Hotel Bar wit ke s arrows ma the sce ne I S t h e 0 ich wh of od rf e e , h e '_Va .d or , ith Pe is h its Rabela i­ Th e twelft ::s chap te r, wi th s ts the Po;yp e tht d an , nts gia g for sla yin gu age . es . Th is is Gerty sia n gig an. tis m of lan . th e tree of wi tch ' the e ld er ·s Ut R IS h ent rte us to the d'IThe tht . f th e tree alert s and the weu'dne ss o r, ap c h s ll' we m ore pro m� . Ma cDo . un no ticed amon g wh lc h IS apt to go , on tttt ers sup of me nsi on lyi ng-in ine nt themes. . d b i rth. Thi s is the or t h e fi r' tree o f chil m, Atl is h ent rte Th e fou ·

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. g equi nox, ho spi tal cha pte r. bloo ms at th e sprin the furz e, wh ICh t, . Om is th een fift chapter' a WafTh e I S c·! r ce' s ' 1 to be g In the yea r. Th'IS na sig s sun the is ect ion , or at and aI d e ath and res urr . . erg oes a ntu und n phe Ste . ht nac pu rgzs . me tan m . with the mati ng lea st p rep are s for a ich is associ ated a, the �eat her wh Ur S i nth tee er h as yet to Six e Th Bl oo m in thi s c hapt os of eph e ' an d am ros g hie e ded by the Th s. man of bee boli sm was com see �ow t�e sym can we t bu d, ine pla be ex nd enc e. th e alp ha bet ic co rre spo es urrection , and e Po � Jar ' tree o f r IS Ea dh a, t h is th a, co een ent co o f . sev e Th . u l a r co mmu nion . ch apter wit h i tS sec h Js t f l o b o sym g gs. clo sm e of n ew begi nnin m bon dag e,' th e h op ves, a nd the one of freedo m fro or of sleep and gra otect , the yew, pr The eighteenth is Idho s bows are ma de . . . wood from wh ich nu mber of cha pter givmg Joyce the as alp habe tic al tre es, used any m g Th i s sch em e of . h er pattern a mon re than just an ot to it not on I y he cou ld wr ite, IS mo y e wa s attracted o k. or w he t for rint tends an i nv i sibl e armature o r blu ep . a /so . �ecaus e it ex but ] nsh cally ai no vel wi th beca use it is arch tmg ove r the wh ole scap e, thereby ten forest over his city ·

joyce's Forest of Symbols

293

Dante's selva oscura , Caly pso' s magical ly restraining trees, the lost Eden, the forest of Europe from wh i ch our culture arose.

If li ghtning caused man, as Vico thought, to see god in the flash, the bounty of nature provided an idea of God' s benevolence. Vico showed Joyce how to make grand l inguistic chords by looking at the forest-floor exi stence of man in primal words that are stil l spoken today, completely drained of their original meaning. Bloom solicits ads for a newspaper.

That licit root goes deep back through many words and meanings, words

having to do with law (lex , legis), teaching (lecture ), gathering (collec­ tion ) , until we get back to the forest floor, picking up the sacred acorns o f Zeus, collecting-col/egere, to Iegere from the ilex, the holm-oak.

Co llege sports: words Bloom designs a poster for in h i s head in chapter

5. He would put a large bicycle wheel on h i s version of the poster, with

the word sports repeated as the spokes, and at the hub he wou ld put the word co llege. This is a n icely modern design for 1 9 04, and it is an Art 1\:ouveau poster Bloom is redesigning, wherein a cycl i st is doubled up l ike a cod in a pot. Never mind for the moment th at that fetal cyclist is

Stephen, and that the sun burst design Bloom prefers is Bloom himse l f, a mature and accomp lished man . Bloom's design is as arch aic as the forest of Europe. It is Ro bin Goodfellow's phallic Maypole. Hub h as Viconian connections with H ob, or Rob, as does sport with spurt and disperse, and there is the oak god ' s acorn-gathering w ord again : college. Whose voice are we listening to? That Old Artificer' s, I think, who received Stephen's

prayer at the end of the Portrait, to stand h i m in good stead.

It is a ghostly voice, and we must train our ears to hear it. It is a poet's

voice, speaking a long with the m i m i cry of the prose voice. Homer, as far as we k now, shaped his poems out of nothing he originated. He told the

stories men had told over and over; like Shakespeare ("He said he has beat them all," Nora Joyce said when the Wake was being written, "ex­ cept that feller Shakespeare") he gave stories elegant, strong, geometrical shap es. He gave them the rhythm and integrity of narrative that they needed for greatest resonance. So Joyce. He is an instrument through which the p ast can speak . Joyce's past, like Homer's, is not h i story. Jf the success of man as a politi­ cal, companionable animal whose culture has thus fa r progressed to families l i vi n g in cities, that achievement of humani ty· i s dying, Joyce saw. Li fe at family level goes on pretty m uch as in the b ronze age. Man's idea of God, though, i s i n trou ble; his i dea of the state i s in trouble; and an

awful restlessness begins to disturb the inert, paralyzed, darkened l i fe of the people. Ulysses was written between 1 9 14 and 1 92 1 , dates that end a worl d. By asking what decorum can allow Joyce to weave correspondences of

294

The Geography of the I m agination

such intricate obscurity through his realistic prose, we come to the �epths of the novel implied by these correspond ences, and upon the pn nCJple of their effectiveness . " Mr. Leopold Bloom ate with relish the i nner organs of beast s and . fowls" is the Dickensian sentence that introduces our typologica l U lysses, who ' moreover, has a sweet tooth for kidneys cooked just so . The sym­ bols of this fourth chapter will flow from this i nnocent statement, and will all support the radical idea that Bl oom i s a man, not a god, and that given a choice , nay tempted, as U lysses was by Calypso to become a god, he w ill defiantly choose to be a man. Ulysses's possible dlVIOity would have come from his eating ambrosia and drinking nectar: Ill the bronze age you a re what you eat. . . Bloom's breakfast kidney is a corresponde nce to the zodJacal posltlon of the sun on the 1 6t h of June; because he burns it, it is a sacrifice to h1s former god Jehovah; and it is the chapter's correspondi ng orga n , as Joyce indicated in the scheme he w rote out for Linati. Kidney, m the hero1c age of English, meant someth ing l ik e belly-pod, the innards. . The chapter's symbol, Joyce speci fied, is the vagin a, w. h �. ch m Greek .IS " fertile field," and the chapter extends itse l f between visions remote m . space and time, and places darkly inward: the jakes, bowels, k1dneys, the inside of hats, the fastnesses of Edwardian skirts and Molly under the bedcovers, sniffing herself, saying her first word in the novel: " Mn,'' less articulately than her alter ego the cat had said, " Mrkgnao." . This Calypso-Molly is Bloom's disillusioned view o f womankmd, a queen ant, fat and sn ug, served by her feeders . Th e oldest identifiable temples in th e world are the subterranean earth-h1ves of Malta, all kidney-shaped. Here man wors h ipped the pri meval Cybelc, or Demeter, . on what he h a d and Homer mav h ave based his knowledge of Ogyg1a heard of Malt ;, for Calypso means the hider, an d Ogygia means th e ancient place. . Molly, then , is a uterine creature, demanding and selfish. She IS a vam . Eve so little u nderstandin g herself or her husband that she whonshly tucks the tempter' s letter under her pillow, a toad close by her ear. Bloom does not even know his own disgust for h er, though Joyce lets us see 1t. Nor does Bloom know that his vision of a model farm i n P a lestine, of a maiden with a zither, of a happier Utopian existence, is hi s deeply He­ braic longing for an ideal Molly, a vi rtuous Penelope, a resurrecre.d Jerusalem , Isai ah' s desert blossomin g like the rose. H1s name, after all, I S Bloom. Bloom, Greek, anthos. Joyce follows medixval tradition rather than good etymology in deriving the name "Anthony" from the Gree for "flower." Of all Bloom' s guises, that of St. Anthony-Flaubert s St. .

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joyce's Forest of Symhols

29S

�ntoin �-w ould seem to be the one that h as most poign antly inten sified m the fifty years of the book 's exist ence. Bloom th e antih ero h as become a cli che, th � secon d Chap lin of the centu ry; Bloom as Charles Bovary, as B ouva rd-Pe cuche t, as a Krafft- Ebing case histo ry, as the true existe ntial Ch ristia n, as the Wand ering Jew, as a Dubl in Walt er Mitty , as {'hom me moyen sensuel-a ll of these roles have been richly ponde red. Joyce with p rophe tic accur acy saw that Flaub ert's most beaut iful but least read maste rpiece, La Tentation de saint Antoine, was the symb olic statem ent � hat woul d last out the centu ry, and p robab ly the next, and work ed It mto Ulysses as a confi gurat ion of p ri me symb olic i mpor t. The Orce chapt er, the longe st in the book , is Joyce 's Temp tation, the work 's great fanta sia of them es, i ts Desc ent of O rpheu s into Hade s its Faust amon g the witche s. ' Becau se so many of i ts symb olic corre spond ences are in stage di rec­ . tions , where we do not expect them , we have misse d seeing that this grand move ment begin s with a man n amed Anto nio emergin g w ith a swan from fog: St. Anth ony and Orph eus, cham pions of stu b born faith and of a rt over the death of the spi rit. They are mask s of Bloom who has porti on enou gh of their geniu s, and has besid es Ulyss es's m oly, magi c flower or Moll y. Steph en enters next, servin g mass as alway s (the bread .' �nd wme are con cealed in th e stanz a of Omar Khay yam, which he tries to Illustrate With gestu res) . He, too, is an Orph eus whose Eu rydice is Old Gumm y Grann y herself, Irelan d; and in anoth er sense, his Euryd ice is his own soul, whic h he has seen once befor e, a girl stand ing in the sea, like Ven us, her skirt rucke d up so that she resem bled a wadi ng bird, the ibis Thot h, mven tor of writi ng. Steph en dies his spirit ual death i n this chap ­ ter; Joyce slays the Steph en Deda lus withi n himse lf, arche type of the . . sten le artis t. Blo? m, howe ver, stand s forth in an epiph any that in many ways is more Impo rtant than his astou nding epiph a ny in the next chapt er, wher e he appe ars 1 0 the news pape r (the daily Odyssey of Vico' s fourt h age) , betrayed by a typograp hical error -he is revea led to be wh a t Steph en gu essed God alway s was (with a h int from Vico) : thund er: L. Boom , El, b o om! If in this last phase of a cycle that began in the bronz e age (Zeus Th un­ derer , ts god) man is man' s god, the multu � s the unum, Bloom is the age's portr ait of that shout er m the street, a u nit of the traffi c along the Nevsk y Pros � ekt, the Boule vard Rasp ail, or Graft on Stree t. If there is h igh com­ edy m Bloom as God, there is eloqu ent prop hecy in Bloo m as St . An­ t? �ny. The sense in which the world is h is temp tation is o u r sense of hvmg in a world , spect ators and consu mers all, whic h invite s us deepe r and deepe r mto matte r, wheth er we h ave the maste ry to shape it into .

gi n a ti on The Geo grap hy of the Ima

296

ent the nov el is matter' s ass . Th at ye� at the end of or, sign ific ant for m or not ern gov or god by ed er agr eemg to b s hap or , to for m, fem ale ma tt n Sire , o yps Cal ce, s c h oas es . S e i s Cir l wh iche ver strategy U ysse

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Pene lo pe. ltim ate stat em ent of the . ves f rom F l au b e rt' s u B l oo m as A nt h o ny den of the Ent d et Pe'cu che ' inh eritors ' fro m B ouvar t sam h e f t o h . t see phg orld 's fi rst gen era tion to th nch Rev o I uti. ligh ten men t and the Fre liam ent s � -.: . o c s of the wo rld' s par the wa nt to, and hea r everyt hm g If � mu seu ms , the att � c . veI arr anged in dai y , left at the ir doo rste ps gui n i pap erb ack boo ks ( Pen s ate ft ava a wis dom of the ag: s ( tran put the blicatio n of Ulysses, to t e soo n a Boo ks we re esta blis hed an' s ledge in the wo rkin gm a nd u p!I tl g n clas sics and all use ful rs two tho usa nd yea o f l u m e) m s ort ' h ma n h a n d s at sixp ence the v o ' lv civi liza tion groane d to evo � uch et, . , his last B ouvard et Pec s t e Tentatron Fla ube rt's fi rst boo k wa rew rote h i s ton , m u ch as Ezr a Pou nd the T n wh ich i s a rew ritin g o f tius, s o tha t we o t Sextus Proper H ugh Se l wyn Ma u berley as t e w mo dern i he . The Tentat on is the IOn or t e wo uld und erst and one ver� ates , rdin coo less nes s, o f its loss of . . Its di rectiOn w or 'd's firs t stat eme nt of . WI. th ate We can app reo . es and v ers i On � o f rea lity . n s o f i ts proliferatin g choiC aloft ied i rr ca A thon y . . of the Tentatz on, w h ere grim agreeme nt th e end c n atu rali sm. ntifi scie and ics hys p ern d mo on d ure lect by the dev il and hic h wa y i s dow n? . n _'" say s t h e devl·t . "W Anthon y 1s tern" fi e d "D ow pendant des mil liards au- dessous de 1a terre asAny way at al l . " "D es cends , I'a nd , So wo uld our as au +. . azs . tu n arrzver . de milliards de stec 1es , Jam rse cou its · tory to slip d tra 1ec . · co mp ute r-a 1me it tro nau ts feel , wer e t h elr . and u n abl e to add a cub ts f ac y b n f orme d Bou var d and Pec uch et, um . St see we oug h wh ich t, are tran spa ren Cles th r to the ir height by tho ugh . Ant hon y; and so is Blo om bol s, tha t •ce 's han tas ma of sym _ Blo o , St of tion pta . It is this Tem ns ( on ly tio � ve been tem pta oo m ent re s o sho ws us tha t all the adv � titl e to tive rna t an alte mer s h ero w�r e) , and tha half the adv entu res of Ho , A nth any . Th e Temptatzon of St adUlysses mig ht h ave b een t sol i tud e and the ser e d ty p em t was he . ' The reali ty before A nth ony th e for li a e r w th l S h i s bei ng. But he nev er s � h e fles h . ora tion of Go d fulfi lled d a n rs pro ress ors , . h mo nste rs, P h 1" l osophe ' dev il veil ed it Wit des it lik e . r to see for J oyce h 1. rde h a . Bl oom lS Wh at real ity there IS be fore of bon es , s end th; joi ned As the e l ow I_ S e i" th r b a H era cl itean princi ple. eig htless , w a ther, u all toge e t ee ce spa the nor res ligatu , ' nor the ' ty i s neit her th e s o Blo om s reali ar n a m enm app h nt ? ' abs tract eve the sym bo li c _ . a bl Y P aro die s ) ' n or mvan are hiCh ( w e pag e h t · wo rds on ani ngs , no r mges a nd com ple x me . . g Ima pun nm energy rele ase d th rou gh ·

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Forest

of Symbols

297

visibi lities that ep ip hanize when we can free the pattern from its

background with which it blends in ca mouflage, but all these energies cooperating with each other.

What Bloom senses is temptation, idle, distracting, and deflecting. The

world is opaque to him; people a re capricious forces; he has no fri ends;

h e is self-conta ined. His education has melted, the wealth o f kn owledge

he has learned from books and newspapers is in disarray, sex is under­ wear, he is a Jewish Catholic Protestant Agnosti c, he is solicitous abou t the lying-in of a woman whose name he remembers alternately a s Beau foy a n d Pu refoy.

Bloom is a dictionary of the age's mythology. The ideas of Fourier and

Marx flicker i n his mind; like Van Gogh h e believes that a home medical guide wil l i m p rove the national h ygiene; he believes in advertising, callisthenics, special trams for funerals, plan ned p arenthood, Irish home

rule, and enlightenment through travel. He is a graduate of the un iversity of life .

This comi c surface of Bloom wou ld be glorious, anarchic, and ragbag,

except that Joy ce has given it poetic order. We can trace Bloom' s thoughts as they zigzag down a page in strict con formity to Freud's disci­ p line of linked association, and even supp ly Bloom's next thought as surely as we can comp lete a Homeric formulaic p hrase.

At the same time Joyce weaves into Bloom's i nterior monologue and its

interjacent narrative prose other threads of correspondences. A lmost constantly (I suspect absolutely constantly) Joyce recites in one disguise

or another the adventures of Ulysses. In with this there is each chapter's

sp ecial symbolism, colori ng all the other matter with its pecu liar tint.

In the Hades chapter, for i nstance, Joy ce h as had to find in Du bli n

geography those details that reflect Homer's matter. In and out of this runs the endlessly repeating list of the adventures. This complexity is then

figured over with correspondences to hearts, in many senses. Then it pleased Joyce to allegorize the characters into the seven deadly sins doing a Totentanz around Bloom. And then, for good measure, Joyce makes the words, all of them i n the chapter, rehearse over and over the sins them­

selves, with the exception of pride, for which h e su bstitutes a meekness on Bloom's part .

Genius , Kafka remarked, is the ability to pay attention to two things at once. But then he had not read Ulysses.

There are other correspondences that need to be l ooked into by the scholars. I suspect, for instance, that every chapter is a mass, or sacrifice, of a different kind. We can best u nderstand the great lyricism of Mol ly' s monologue by grasping how strangely primitive a sacrifi ce it seems to sy m bolize: an utterly archaic spilling of blood. It is with Molly ' s ( as with

Th e Geography of the I magi n a tion

298

Penelope's) consent that the suitors are slain. The arrows are released in the preceding chapter ( Ithaca) , question and answer being the opposite forces of the bow and the string. The slaughter is wi thi n Molly's monologue, and its gore is reflected in Molly's menstrual flow (negating the afternoon's lust) , in the poppies and other red flowers, and in the blood-red Mediterranean at sunset, the apocalyptic transformation of th e sea . This last chapter clearly corresponds to Revelation, as chapter 4 cor­ responds to Genesis, chapter 14 to the bi rth of Christ ( the three Magi o f the first chapter are there, sta b le ani mals, a n d a b a b y born t o a woman named Pure Faith) . Bloo m's dialogue, i nterior and exterior, is charmi ngly clea r; so is his mind. M o l ly (what we hear her say) is not an articulate convers ationalis t but c a n rep lay experience w i t h t h e genius o f Proust. A n d n o w look aga i n at Stephen. W e c a n follow h i s metaphysi ca l mi nd in its interior m usings, and he is quite an accomplished poet in his abstruse thou ghts (though Joyce in the

Scribbledehobble

calls him "a gentle man wordsmith" ) . But

what cri tic has dared to notice that when he opens his mouth nonsense flies out? Nonsense. Throughout

Ulysses

Stephen tells parables or riddles or

conundrums, and none of them make any sense. He is so eloquent of thought and so skilled in sarca sm that we expect his words to make sense. Go and look at them, all of them, and see what sense can be made of them. All his words a re self-collapsing systems, cancelling themselves and interfering w ith their own logic. Ask yourself why Stephen says what he d oes. Why does he sing "H ugh of Lincol n " to Bloo m ? What does his telegram to M u lligan mea n ? What do his speeches in the Circe chap ter mean? Bloom i s articulate of speech, i n a rticulate of mind. For Molly, mind and speech are the same-she tal ks to herself to think , and thinks out loud to speak. Together they complement each other, and make a poem that speaks in three voi ces at once, as Hamlet w hen he speaks is a dis­ traught prince of Denmark, a poet as enigmati c as Stephen Dedalus, and, ineluctably, the voice of S h akespeare. Is not Joyce in many ways more like Bloom than Stephen? Professor EHmann has found a real M a rtha Clifford ; �ora Barnacle's letters are as much like Molly's monologue as Joyce's city-d well i ng habits are like Bloom 's. Looked at this way, the novel becomes a solipsistic poem which ac­ cepts its inabili ty to know another mind, and thus boldly stands forth not only as an epiphany of kinds of li fe in our time, uncompromisingly o b­ jective, but as an epiphany of art itself, the work of one mind and one sensibility, uncompromisingly subjective.

Joyc e's Forest ol Sym bols

299

Op posit es coo per ate , sai d He rac litu s · opp . osites mee t, said Blak . ity, say s R. Buc k min ster e; u n Fu II er, I nvo I ves at lea st two thi ngs . I am sug .mg , t h en, that the i mp ort gestant voi ce in Ulysses . not the n atu ral i stic IS which can stand beside one' th a t 0 f J oyce s ma ste rs Ja �:- o bsen, T o1sto y, an d Fla ube rt. It is rat I bsen , . her the inn er voice o ' f t h e nov el, the poe tic voi ce o f the sym bol s ' tha t give s th e wo rk Its co h · ere nce an d Its pro fou nde st harm on y. .

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The Man Without Contemporaries

has no assurance that she will not be expelled from the country, and

and unruffled t it was all smo oth . It cannot b e sat.d tha undertak en ent erzm st exp . t!Jz·s huge' new sociali zn . saz. /tnR . · 1 m ue wor/d. e stat ts san pea by the first wo rke rs' and Unz on iet Sov . the biograp hy of the . a page m Th ere IS cu l of h e t of d rred to as the p erio which is generally refe p }ose of e nam the nd up with person al 1"ty. It is bou

wrote both volumes of her memoirs expecti ng the knock of the police on the door. Mandelstam's very existence h as been a secret for which time itself

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Stalin. 1

30 1

through a complex gear of destinies evolved the di sclosure. His wife says that she would not have twice braved the risk of samizdat

(post­

Gutenberg dis tri bution of manuscripts in carbon copies) and publication in the West i f the invisible and u napproach able commissars of Litkontrol

Alb ert P. Nen aro kov , Century Rus sia in the Twentieth

had p u blished her hus band's poetry. (She could scarcely h ave guessed that among more Kafkaesque reasons for bidi ng their time they were also waiting for the copyri ght to run out: why pay royalty checks to an old woman whose husband in sulted Stali n and slapped the face of Comrade Alexei Tolstoi ?) While Mrs. Mandelstam was writing h e r 1 1 00 pages of memoirs with­ out a title (the English titles, pu nni ng on her name, which means " hope," were furn i sh ed by the publisher), Professor Clarence Brown, of Prince­ ton, was finishing a twenty-year study of the poet. In 1 955 there began to appear, in Russian, a New York edition of Mandelstam' s poetry, col­ lected and edited by two exiled schol a rs, Gleb Struve and Boris Filippov. This now runs to three volumes. Our first substantial knowledge of Mandel stam' s writing was Clarence Brown's translation of three prose pieces (The Noise of Time, Theodosia,

The Egyp tian Stamp ) 2-three delightful, lapidary, bright narratives. They seem to h av e been achieved by applying the severest rules of Im­ agism to the art of the nov el. Mandelstam's economy with words was

empo ra ne s The Man With ou t Co nt

Spartan. He envi ed the mediceval phi losophers their cl arity and precision.

llar me , as iqu ely allu siv e as Ma . . . lsta m, a p oet as obl r of form Os ip Erru lJev Jch Ma nde y, and suc h a ma ste . . compact as z u k o fs k our um e, hon ed, ch Ise I I e d ' an d of atest Ru ssi an poet gre e h t . e 11 b we y ma b ann ed ' and Imagery th a t h e rom age thi rty-twoyea rs o f his life-f he was 8 spe nt the las t fifteen 93 1 _ . th des per ati on . In . nd at u me s ms ane w1" nt h s . mo . sta rvm g, h orne 1 ess, a few a . . he die d after camp 111 St b ena , wh ere sentence d to a lab or yea rs late r. . . d of h i s dea th three un on s His bro the r was not Jfie Ma nd els tam 's per sec d h , evn I ko Ya hda � dez sec uti on His wid ow , �a ve been a simi lar per �g sur viv ed w t 111 the rs yea wh ile he wa s ahv e, for ath of Sta lin liv ed re ks an d t e n. She ow her exc ept for luc kie r b of s i n room s kit e h en, an now live . cor ner of som eon e else r

which the same h a nd h as drawn comi c furniture and o bjects with a life of

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Fragmentary an d capricious as his p rose seems, it has a sense of whole­ ness.

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alte the ir gra vity , did not . ' s " d'. sto rtio ns for all tahn sole ed sen tim ent tha t S alis m," this is the soci of rs a 'Ex cep t for the add pil the e k · ! tst " sou n o r dI d th ey S h a - e ty . ror the nat ure of soct a Ter thir ty·v . ear hist ory oo k to the reference i n a Sov iet

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A page of Mandelstam's prose is a kind of algebra of ironies over their own a Ia C h agall. The Noise of Time is a spiritual inventory of the mode of l i fe swept away by the Revolution-men condemned to stations

on the moon migh t write such books a bout l i fe on the ea rth : a book that would teach us that the usual and the routine look like miracles once you have lost them forever. Mandelstam wrote anywhere and everywhere. We can scarcely begin to realize his world in which the penci l stub and the three pieces of paper you h ave is all the pencil and all the paper you arc ever going to have. He compo sed in his head, dictated to his wife, or wrote on a ch air seat while kneeling. Some poems (like the offending Stalin lyric) were not wri tten down at all .

'The Prose of Osip Mandelstam

( Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1 965).

.'\ 0 2

the I m a gina tio n Th e Ge ogr aph y of

for wh ich mo rize d eve ryt hin g s death h i s wife me ezh . Th e After Ma nd els tam ' ron Vo er. She was in se and po etr y togeth NK VD the , she had a tex t, pro ion ng fro m on e dir ect ach t we re thr eateni tan ks of the We hrm

int if Ma nfro m ano the r. nd abl e up to a po wo uld be un der sta po nen t of Such per sec uti on op en Tr ots ky, or an op ma n of po we r, like po et. In ic lyr del sta m had bee n a le s an all bu t inv isib the con tra ry, he wa eve n­ and the Bo lsh evi k s . On nt me ere d his har ass offi cia l mi nd s tha t o.rd tha t n tio no the stu p idit y of the dim e ave bee n som Sib eri a the re mu st h to ted ver con tua lly his sen ten ce to sly o had sus pic iou a n ide alis tic Jew wh , a air t ho ch he wa s an aes the te, mu so rx and Le nin wh o con sid ere d Ma atsional or Ch ri stia nit y, a ma n hra ses of the Intern rap pa ite r goi n g to wr po et who wa sn' t eve dam enan Od e to Sta lin . face to face wit h fun ss a s the lib era l spi rit osi te opp No thi ng i s s o hel ple and al equ t wit h an we r can on ly be me the for yed tali s m . Suc h bru te po pra o wh Wi tne sse s tha t of the Jeh ova h's the , ald enw mo ral str eng th, like ch Bu at l the y fel unn ers bef ore wh om s m' lsta nde sou ls of the m a chi neg Ma or , in the Circus ro nai le d to cro sse s Sov iet a of sin gin g C hri stia ns Ne ys olle v the led u n der u mi lyo v wh o cru mb col lea gue the poet G me r to his hea rt . Ho a and a Bib le t, firi ng squ ad, clu tch ing mo irs3 i s , lik e the firs ' sec on d vo lum e of me s tam els nd Ma a a Na dez hd anged acc ord ing to , its com po nen ts arr vel no t alis rm Fo a l­ to chr ono des ign ed as her tha n acc ord i ng on gst its sub jec ts rat sin ce 1 93 2) t sen se of k i n sh i p am vie -So un as has b een ou tla we d art eir (th ts alis rm Fo og y. Th e ndy as som eth i n g lik e the y saw Tristam Sha del mo ir the for ar­ too k Ste rne a of a nar rat ive the re exc ited by the ide we y the and , l g e a cub ist nov con ven ti on al u nfo ldin re pro mi nen t tha n the mo s wa ich wh e of Th e ) . chi tec tur n the y cal l 0. Ge nry i n flu enced by the ma o als re we ey (Th ck­ . a ve b of a p lot the flex ibi lity to mo es Mr s. Ma nd els tam i n ou r ct Fo rm alis t ma trix giv tru ons rec can a plo t li ne wh ich we g lon a rd wa for wa rd and rm alis t i ma gin ati on . ng i n the typ ica l Fo the me mo irs (op eni of e lum vo t e firs h ati on In t lsto i ' s face, the exp lan m sla pp ing Ale xei To lsta nde Ma h fou r wit n t fas hio tam rec ord s the las aw ay) Mr s. Ma nd els es pag ny g­ ma is bio ich his of wh she pos its eno ugh of s l i fe. In dig res sio ns ip' Os of ts rs yea sen ng pre terri fyi sec ond vol um e she se of h i s life . In th is sen ll fu a us e giv to rap hy firs t vol um e. n (62 1 pag es) to the the sp irit a sus tai ned dig res sio t her s, any wa y ) , pa ir of the titl e (no des ng mi see the all r de Hope Fo rro r and gri ef ma i s ind om ita ble . Te ce ten sen au tho r­ ry t eve vie beh i n d acc ou nts of So of the mo st ch ill ing e on pe and to s upHo st Again tsy n' s Firs t Circle uth e ntic ate S olzh eni o a t book ( a nism i taria ! 9 74) . um , (Ne w Yo rk: Ath ene tra ns. Max Ha yw ard 3Hope Abandoned,

1hc Mull Wtthout Con temp oraries

303

p lement Ehzaveta Almadm g n ' s tern fy mg

Now

Tomorrow Will Come).

�ol ume, to meditate, to sift, to fill m details. . .

there IS ti me, in thi s second

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Mrs. Mandelstam's t one can range from tha t of Ch n snan stoJc. . h et-to a Brech tian forg1vmg and devastatin g Wit h th e same fell eplt ·

trooper who can call a man a son o f a b l tch and make the phrase have the hiss of a ttger whose eyes h av e J U S t turne d to fi re an d wh ose claws have all

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· · for any JUStice un sheathed at once· The h ope s he h as a ba n d ne d IS or h sense m the mi serable regime under which s e as suffered for over half a · capable of cackcent u rv . Her contempt has b ecome eI oquent' an d s h e ts e o hng with a k i n d of tragic gaiety a t t h bs emttes she has had to abide . ·

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She was dismissed , for in stan c

s h e h a d after h e r hu sband's d e at .

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e only sohd teaching position

is was at a school remote in the

. provm ces where she was h at' Ie cl at mgh t to a k angaroo court (People's . . . . Court, they call it) a n d ch arge d Wit h rnak 'mg all uswns a bout th e nsmg . · · I S replaci n g young (vtz. ' that in the E ng I't s h Ianguage the young m fi mttve . the old gerund) ' with te a ch mg ' a nonexistent ('I.e., for b 1' d den) law o f . . sound changes (that o f Gri mm) a n d with s l ttmg on a wmdow ledge (kul. . turny Communist ladies Si t de urel Y m ch a1 rs ) .

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Sh e h as wntten a book of multi p le p rpo ses : a book that comments on � Mandelstam 's poems ·' that pr eserves h ts 1d eas ' h I S comp 1 ex personality, . and obiter dicta; th at surrounds the p t wtth hts people-fellow Acmeists, notably Gumilyov a nd A n n a hmatova, Kh lebnikov' Ehren. burg, Gorodetski ' a w ho Ie generation o f R us �I· a � I· n tellectuals and . . . artists-that expou nds her wonde rfu II y Wise and md l vldual p h ilosophy ' . part Christi an ' p a rt pragmatJ c; th at condemns th e wh ole Soviet . ·

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ngmarole and all its cruel ab sur d.1ty. . . . ' . Tht s great document of the hum an con d Itlo� IS m essence, under all th e

· details, the Leskovian WI. t' th e D ostoyevsk I a n passwn, the Brechtian . ch eek, an extended statement by a m doe � n Anugone. lt n n gs with An. . ' ugone s moral authori ty ' an d It h as A nugone's sense o f a freedom to spea k no matter what th e consequences . . Pro fessor Bro wn was te 11·mg me recently th at wh I' l e h e was havmg tea . . Wit the Smiavskis this spring in Paris ' th e ph one rang. It was Nadezhda callmg from Moscow Ob . were li steni g. But what in the sI h � wo rld could they ad to l er that wasn t already there in f . . great measure .' They were li stemng to th WI dow o f M ande lstam �nd a . prisoner in perpetual exile. Did t ey reahze that they were h sten� o I.l tlcal . tng to two VIctims of th e1 r tyranny f rom ho tyra n n y h ad taken all that . It can, leavi ng them free to say what th y p eased ., Clarence Brown ' s combined bio 5 g .ra ph y � n d study of Mandelsta m 4 invalved several journeys to th e ovlet Umon and to peop I e w ho k new . . •

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Mandelstam (Cambridge ' En gland.. Cambndge Un1versity Press, 1 973).

304

The Geography of the Imagi nation

Man delstam . The research w as peculiarly difficu lt fo r obvi ous reasons. There were a lso myths to elude, especially that of a Mandelstam di­

min ished to an e l fi n sprite remembered for his bird-li k e gestures and fin­ de -siecle poses. The same thing h appened to Shelley , a six-foot robust man who wa s mythologized into a frail win d spirit delicate as a lily.

Th e Mand elstam who emerges in Professor Brown's biography is a comp lex figu re, a poet of genius, a m a n of great integrity. He becomes tr agi c becuase of the hi storical context in. which he lived on the of

edge

bein g. The v i olence of the times demanded patience and he roi sm from hi m at i mm e nse cost to his poetry . The wonder is that he wrote anything at all a fter Stone, his first book of poems. H e seems to h a ve developed a useful stoicism ("Who says that we were m eant to b e ha ppy ? " ) and the art of living nowhere and with no re­ sour ces. The number of bone-wracki ng train journeys he had to make is app alling. It is no comfort to realize that the events of his li fe can be paralleled with wearyi ng repetition from Dostoyevsky to Solzhenitsyn;

ni ghtmares get worse as they persist. The enga ging di fference between Professor Brown' s biography and the

usual way o f reconstru cti n g a life from conflictin g and obscure evidence is that he irons nothing out a n d indi cates all the p roblems and b l ank spaces. H e refrains from senti ment and guesswork , frequently showing us

the processe s of research (interviews, visits to Mandelstam's school and pla ces of exile) i n lieu of suppositions and sleight-of-hand narrative . Un­

published documents are for the most p a rt given in full, and the dis­ cuss io ns of the Acmeist School are rigorous and lucid.

Professor Brown shows how Acmeism ( which can be defined roughly

as the poet ry of Mandelstam, Gumi lyov, and Akhm atova) is curiously like Imagis m as Pound and Hulme p re a ch ed i t. Roth movements were a

return to fin ely perceived realities ( " to the world," Mande lstam said), aft er rich, and ri chly vague, Sy m bol i st m o vements degenerating i nto a rh etoric of mysticism a n d an aesthetic of bogus philosophy and private

vocabularies. Mandelst am is not quite l i ke a ny other poet, so that a nalogies run into instant tro uble. My feeling that there is a great deal of Rim baud in him i s

app arently wrong, as neither Professor Brown nor Mrs. Mandelstam mentions hi m. By Rimbaud I mean the gnarled i m a ge which suggests a

cho rd of meanings rather than a simple metaphor or si mile, a respect for cla ssi cal form together with a bold origina lity, a h a rdness of poetic phras­ i ng that de fies translation into prose. Ma ndelst am' s " contemporaries" (he said that he h ad n one in the li tera l sense) were Ovi d, Villon, Dante, Raci ne, Poe. He was also aware that h e was a n O rpheus trying t o reclaim a lost spirit : i n the poems of t h e la te

The Man With out Con tem por a nes

305

1 920s Per sep hon e bec om . es an elo uen t b 1 . as ' f Ma nde lsta m saw how pro phe tica lly he h a d n med fi s k - ston e . His St. Peters burg was etym0 1 ogic . · a ll y " the City of ston e . , Th e a rt o f rIv . . . . mg m . a u es (wh ich is wh at " ci v i liza tion " mea ns) b egm . s Wit . g of . h th e sha pm . .ion bec ·stone , an d CIVI . . 1 IZat . om es for M a d e 1 stam � me tap h�s ica l nos tal­ gia. Civ iliza tion figu res in his mi nd a s he opp osit e of Soo ahs m. Sto ne tak es on a n add ed am b.IgUi. ty: R uss ia has becom e ston . e Had es ' an und erworld' a pn son for the spir it. The beau ti. fu 1 and mys teri ous p oem "So lom inka " is full 0 f wom en wh o retu rned from the dea d · Lenores a n d . S erap , h Itas .

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Ma nde lsta m poe m rI ve s ll1SI· d e I· tsel f. As i n , Keats Ma l l · me, or Sh a k espeare , the words breed meani ng. A am . ' . ar and aga m Pro fes sor � Brown m a k es an uish ed sta c g s abo u the Imp ossi bili ty of tran slat ing Ma nde lsta m into Eng lish to m a e the . I atte mp t he tur ned to the poe t W. S. Me rwi n (wh o k nows b us h e l s of Ia ngu age s b ut not R ss i a n ) and en tere d i n to o ne of the ha 11 a b ora t n s o f II. te rary his w tory . s I n P r ofess or B row n ' s Man de fin d th IS l I tera I tra nsla tion : . . n ngtn g littl e stra w, dry Sol om ink a, you hav e dru nk up all of dea th and become tend erer . M e rw i n turn s this i nto :

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dry Solo min ka, littl e ring ing stra w who sipp ed up the who le of dea th- it has mad e you gent l e. (Note how Me rw i n mo . . ves mg a n d m k 1!1 . from th e extreme s of the line an d ca n cels e s b . h ty of u n k c l n k g I i i i � ag a i nst in k . I s up pose i t Ma n delst a mi n o .: st raw , to sugg est "sip . " ) We can not bea r s trai ned silen ceThe faul tine ss of sou ls is offe nsiv e after a l l ' . e read er h ad bee n con fuse d wh n he first app eare d d was glee fu l l y greeted with crie s of ''Ple ase! " 1 kn e w I t , 1 kne w who was invi sibl y ther e: A man out of a nigh tma re was read ing " Ula lum e." a mng 1 S mer e van ity and the wor d i s only nois e I 1e, pho neti cs Is the seraph' s han dma iden . gar s harp wou ld si ng of the Hou se of Ush er e mad man dra nk som e wat er, blin ked and s id no mo re . I was on the stre et. The silk of autu mn whi stle d And the sdk of a tick ling scar f war med my th roat . Th at is Pro fes sor Bro . . wn ' s trot , m ten ded for . th e Bro w n and I n form atio n onl y. H e re's M erw m versi on :

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'Osip Man dels tam Sele cted Poems, tran s. CJ a rcnc e Bro wn and W. S. Mer Athene u m , 1 9 74) . ' win ( New Yor k:

306

The Geogra phy of the Imaginatio n

He can 't speak, and we can't bear it! It's like watch i n g a muti l a tion o f the soul . A reciter stood on the stage, wild-eyed, And the} went rnad, shouting " Please , please !" I knew th a t another was there, invisible, a man from a n i ghtmare, reading ' ' U l a l u me." W'hat's meaning but vanity ? A word i s a sound­ one of the han d m a i dens of the serap h i m . Poe's h a rp -song of the House of Usher. T!ien the madman sw allowed some water, came to hi mself, was silen t. I was i n the street. The silk of autumn was whi stling . . . .

(The poem is "about" an evening i n St. Pe tersburg when th e poet Vla­

dimir Pyast went mad while reciting Poe's "Uialume . " ) 6

T h e Russian rhymes abba and h a s in i t glorious sou n ds ( a s best as I can

make out) not i m i tated in e i th er translation-th e thi rd stanza begi ns 0

domye Esherov Edgara pyela a rfa, which elegant knot of words seems to

make Edgar a member of the House of Usher ( a n astute bit of re ading o n

Mandelstam's p art) a n d t o give him Roderick Usher's lute ( a nd therefore

" heart-strings " ) . The poem is a diagram (autu m n of cu lture, a house split

down the middle, the poet p ossessed by a prophetic meani ng, a spirit lost

and longed for: grief, m adness, hysteri a ) . I t was written i n 1 9 B : four

more years u n t i l the locomotive bearing its t1ags of bi lious y e llow and

a ngry red would hi ss into the Fi nland Station.

Mall a rme a n d B a u delaire learned Engli sh to read Poe : Proust learned i t

t o read Ruskin and George Eliot. Surely i t is time for us to begi n Ru s s i a n

to read Mandelstam (and Khle b n i k ov a n d Akh m a tova ) , for i t i s evi dent from these studies that the school of Russian poets flourishing (if that ca n

be the word) i n the Revolution and Soviet period is not mere ly an out­

growth of European poetry-not a branch but a new tree altogether. The R u s s i a n genius of this time could take western m atters, transform them, and give back a whole new e n ti ty.

For years it h a d seemed that the Bauhaus was the fans et origo of

practically all the international modern sty les. Not so: it w a s the gift of modernism returned from Russia, reshaped and refined by Ta tli n and

M a lyevich. The catenary arch now in St. Louis was designed for Red

Square. These are random examples of a time of invention t h a t counts as

one of the great Renaissances i n the West.

The rema inder of the twentieth cen t u ry ( most miserable of ages si nce

the Barbari ans pou red into Rome) m i gh t profitably be spent putti ng to­ gether th e h u m an achievements which tyranny has kept beh i n d wall s.

"Neither Cla r en ce Brown n o r Bi l l Merwin ..: an sp ell the name which the scul p tor Ar­

�hipcn ko, a t lca,t, Lh�d to p ro n o u n c e Headgear O l y a n Paw. Edgar Poe in..:orporatcd i n to h i s n a m e t h e n a m e o f h i s foster father John Allan.

The Man \rll t hou t Contempor aries

307

Na dez hda M an delstam 's two v o l u m es ofc me mm. rs wo u ld hav e bee n p u b li she d in a cult ura l vacu u m wer e lt not •or Pro tesso r B row n , s mo nume nta l stu dy of the poe t. Both boo ks (plu s. the Bro wn -M erw in tran slation of som e of the p oem s) do mo re tha n Imp ort a ma jor poe t; the y find Ma nde lsta m for u s The re is n o gre ater success for sch ola rsh ip tha n to reco ver esta hli s h , � n d I. n terp ret a n unk now n. figur e. I t Is · a recom pen se . for a luck less l i fe that M a n d e I s ta m IS serv e d 111 p ostent · y by two mas ters . of pro se, for the crit ics are alre ad not mg th a t Na dez hda Ma nde lsta m is a very gre at wri ter . And Cl are nce Y Brow n IS a p r�se sty j Ist ' of t h e first ran k, i f so few peo ple mig h t con stit ute a ran k ' fo r w at lS rare r than a scho lar wh o can wri te luc id stro n g, and gra ce ful p ros e? He h a s a gre at dea l of the Ma nde lsta m i a n �it an dsen se o f th e a b s u rd · h . . e h a s t h e u n f1aggmg ' cu n osity to hav e trac ked d o wn eve ryth mg . trac kab le dow n - and . has mer cy on the Ru ss1a ' n ess read er and a 1 w ays rna k es allo wa nce s for him But the tri um ph is to h . ' ave wn. tten . . a book ever.y d e t a1 1 o f w h 1c h 1s . new and stra nge to the maJ · ori ty o f Its rea d ers' wh 1ch keep s mat ters clea r ' e fhCie . ntly organ i z ed ' and h an d som e Iy ren der ed. ' .

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Narrative To nP and Form

309

the street of our village with the help of a stick. This is inviting, congenial,

grandfatherly, British: English Novel Formulaic. We read it, assu ming we

know we h ave begun a novel, waiting for the effect to take, as if we w ere breathing the Pythian fu mes . What we are doing is learning style : the

hang of how this story is goin g to be told. Most novels begin with incon­

sequential remarks ( short stories rarely, poems, never) to give us a chance to tune our ears to the sty le.

Mr. Hackett turned the corner and saw, in the failing light, at some

little distance, his seat. These are the rhythms of a Dublin storyteller. The v oice is practiced. Narrative is its art: it knows how to drop prepositional

p h rases between the verb and its object, so that we h av e both to pay

attention and wait. En un Iugar de Ia Mancha, de cuyo nombre no quiero

acordarme, no ha mucho tiemp o que vivia un hidalgo de los de Ianza en astillero, adarga antigua, rocin flaco y galgo co rredor. I s i t only the unex­ p ected adjective for the nag that transposes the ritualness of this opening

sentence i n to another key altogether? .Style is character. Th e success of

the sentence is our realizing that the narrator is keep i ng a grave face whi le wanting to break into a smile.

Twentieth-century narrative has tended to dispense with the beguiling

opening sentence. Gertrude Stein's The Making of Americans begins:

Once an angry man dragged his father along the ground through his own

orchard. "Stop ! ' ' cried the groaning o ld man at last, "Stop ! I did not drag

my father beyond this tree. " Something to fi gure out. Even i f w e recog­

nize that the lines are lifted from the Nicomachaean Ethics, we are no

wiser as to w h at they mean at the beginning of a novel. ( Morphologi­

Narrative Tone and Form

cally, an epigraph h as been absorbed into the narrative ) .

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s i t b �ys a kin d of dialect. Th e law . The styl e of a nar rati ve is i tta b � I S li a styl e is nat ura l and mev own natu re. Fee ling that n ca le Sty ces. di reju p . we sha re trad itio ns and amo ng peop l e Wl th who m th e rly e Jt see o T ding with our igno r anc . therefore be invi sibl e, blen . d p ut i t k it awa y fro take critic fre quently h as to ive is a rtifice , other w ay o n t t t agai nst ano ther , or fi n d som e too live s w i th thi s rdrn g to a sty e . Th e a t' st deli bera te, and sha ped acco e cl are r abo ut his to Ka fk a th at h e WI p rob lem , whi ch can sugg est . kee pm . g t h e L aw tr the s Jews Chi nes e and own pre d'Jearn e n t if he call . tive . e IS th erefor� fre e d . Na rra His nar rati ve voic a b UJ' ldi ng the Gre at Wa l l . . . the functwna I lI' berty of the lie. When I was is first of all inte reste d m o wh ld an m m be of the century I small boy at the beginning ob le abo ut o s t o l w sted stoc kmgs, an wor e kneebreeches and wor

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Narrative voice (tone, attitude, confidence) i s a s characteristic o f its epoch as any other sty le. We do not, however, live in an epoch ; we l i ve

between epochs . Literature, once a river defined by banks, is now a river in an ocean. Johnson and Vol tai re read , or looked into, everything that came from the presses. A scholar's learning nowadays is certified by the ignorance with

which he surrounds his expertise . It is therefore almost i mpossible to tell if the twentieth century has a style variously perceived by a variety of sensibilities, or the greatest diversity of styles known to cultural history .

SOME CERTAIN L A NDMAR KS:

The style of B ouvard et Pecuchet, th e full develop ment of Haubert's hard, detached style, where banality appears as a kind of Swiftian sar­ casm through sh eer tone of voice. The phrases are innocent: the openi ng

i n a tion The Geo grap hy of the I mag

310

Narr,1 tir•e Ton e and Form

stri a l stre et betw een read i ng, n ote that a n indu li nes give a ther mom eter use of the su mm er des Plan tes ts dese rted beca the Bas tille and the Jard in ord t nary men , one i ts traffi c, and fow s on two hea t, desc ribe a can al and utto ned hts vest , to the bac k of hts hea d, unb f hom has pus hed his hat a cap . Flau be �t r wea rs a bro wn suit and n rem ove d his tie. The othe the nov el mea ns 1s arti cula te. Eve ryth ing that has lear ned to mak e things the tran spo sltlo n of g : Flau bert had perc eive d in that ther mom eter read in o e set of stg­ sign al of valu� or rank ) from � sign ifica nce (sig n, sym bol, g disp l aced by a es o f hum an valu es was bem nifie rs to ano ther . On e seri ld hav e fore seen t was an acci den t. Wh o cou n ew seri es; the disp lace men pold and Mo lly Enli ghte nme nt wou l d be Leo that the cu l mi nati on of the et? Flau bert doe s Bov ary, Bou vard and . Pec uch Blo om, Cha rles and Em ma ) why the age turn ed t to risk h i s own reservat wns not k now (or is relu ctan desc npt wn wt th care to ani mat e obje ctiv e out so· h ence his i mm ense itsel f. Thi s style be trus ted to spea k for dam ni g deta il that can . It bec ome s . a Wake ) , Beckett, Eud ora W elty Joyce (inc lud ing Finnegans s as Ger trud e Stem adm ittin g of suc h van ant twe ntie th-c entu ry nor m, quo ted phr ases is con tes ) , Pou nd (fac ts and (Th ree Liv es is a Cub ist Tro Kafk a, Ma nde lsta m, ideo gra mm tc mol ecu les ) , serv ing a s ato ms for his

THE STYLES OF LU DWIG WITTGENSTEIN AND G E RT R U D E STE I N :

Strangely simultaneous i n thei r stylistic concerns, the two were at work from 1 9 1 7 onwards on identical li nguistic phenomena : the splashed meaning of chattered language, l anguage which is gesture, politeness, or

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social form ula. We are aware of the fascination of such language for Henry James and Ionesco, who ask us to listen to talk with an intensity we cannot afford in useful and casual conversation. ( I vy Compton­ . Burnett achteves a dramatic richness in her dialogue by having characters pay spiteful attention to each other's remark s : Wittgen stei n i a n analysis i n t h e raw.) When Wittgenstein asks u s t o thi n k hard about the philosophi­ cal implications of saying "l have a pain" a n d "l think l understand what

you are driving at," he i s being a dramatist at a primal level, trying to get us to wake up in the midst of dreaming. Gertrude Stein's play, An Exercise in Analysis ( 1 9 1 7) , is a Wittgen­

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stem drama of cliches and formul ae. To notice that they make nonsense is to take the fi rst step toward seeing why she assem bled them. Unlike lonesco, Gertrude Stein is not interested i n the a bsurdity of language but in the astounding implications that can be flushed from its ordinari ness.

He�e is plenty of space. This sentence crowds us in a logical corner out of

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folk tale . h e b eriag e of Flau bert and the . The styl e of Kaf ka is a mar and obje ctiv e, bert ian pro se, rest ram ed Flau d goo is a erik Am of ginn ing Stat ue of Ltbe rty. enc e, whi ch desc ri bes the righ t up u ntil the seco nd sent nd the

which we can sq uirm only by insisting ( and th is i s what she wants us to

feel) that you h a ve to understand what language means in spite of what it

and rou up as if newly stre tche d aloft: The arm wit h the s word rose . t tma gm � ­ lhan hea ven . Tha t � s the m? st b n figure blew the free winds of from Col umb u s

� e. Note how dt ffer ent It 1s tive tou ch in mod ern liter atur l d . Or how dt ­ wor new the n i s lion a les, and seei ng merm aids , nigh ting e m Lon don . It IS an look ing for Not re Dam eric Am the from is it ferent s tha .t the wor ld for the first time i n cen turi � the narr ativ e voic e say ing e m wht ch we hav e the wor ld of the sam e nam des crib ed i n ficti on is not kmd com m.l tted by deli bera te mis take of the our bein g. It is a kind of and turn ed I t m to a a desc ript ion of Ves uvtu s H ome r whe n he mi srea d by med Hev al arti sts owe d and thre w rock s, or one -eye d gian t who bell acc oun ts of th at the Ma gi from inad equ ate wh o had to pain t cam el s for a sim dar gem us for gs i de Ma x Ern st, who had bea st. Kaf ka wor ked alon who se hon m Th alon gsid e Hen ri Rou ssea u, tink erin g with real ity, and n more cam ne o wit h a man e, a nd was ev � Sleep ing Gypsy is simply a dog arra n ?en: ent s tal t gem (or was told ) the differen anatomy unt il he not iced rati ve ts It nar ka's nce (and the p owe r of Kaf of dog s and cat s. The esse h ad don lser Wa nly intr usio ns of 1 rrea l1ty . O recep tivi ty to une xpe cted i s Car_ Lew er, au Ch � e of eith er dre am vtsl n ( this befo re out side the fram J O the t I of n tatw tmJ s Tentation and Joy ce s rol l) or i l l usio n (Fla ube rt'

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says-and this is not what we understand language to be at all. He was a boy. Now I understand. Extra size plates. These three seemingly innocent phrases are incautious matches struck in a murk of stupidity. Can you recollect missing him. One reason Willi am Carlos Wi lli ams seems flat beside a poet using language charged according to traditional poetic diction ( Wallace Ste­ vens, for example) is that we do not see the Steinian slant of h i s language. When he quotes, early in Paterson, a sign saying that dogs are not a l­ lowed in a park except on l eash es, he wants to catch us in the Steinian­ Wittgenstei nian moment of seei ng that, yes, the sign has a kind of p u r­ pose, but as dogs can't read, the sign exists in a sleep of reason. I see a pattern here: a movement from assuming the world to be trans­ parent, and availa ble to lucid thought and language, to assuming (having to assume, l thmk the artists involved would · say) that the world is opaque. This would seem to be the assumption of Joyce, Borges, Beckett, Barthelme, Ionesco. The radical change i n twentieth-century narrative is of form. There has been a new understanding that literature is primarily literature and not a useful critique of manners. And there has been a vigorous search for new � atterns to th e novel. Cubis m , a nonsense word for a style of p ainting . tnvented by Ptcasso and Braque, was essentially the return to an archaic

tion The Geography o f the Ima gina

312

as wri ting . Pre his­ ting to be the sam e thin g mod e that u nde rsta nds pain anc e, was dra wn by ima ges . A tarp an, for inst tori c painters abb revi ated to scut . The n o f p ro fi le tha t flows from ears beg inni ng with the dor sal line t, fron t legs , bell y and ears . The n the tail . Nex the h ead was add ed, eye s, at any poin t i n the desi gn cou ld be a ban don ed line and hind legs . The sal line i s still the still mea n tarp an. Tha t dor pro ess; the grap h wou ld line s add ed. Chi nes e for hor se, wit h leg red how muc h of ed whe n the arti st con side Cub ism mus t h ave dev elop idity of perc epti on. d. Fini shi ng invo lves a stup his sketch mus t be fi n ishe er. Rus kin felt th at go dul l or get l o st alto geth Gra cefu l, spo nta neo us l ines part s of the can vas . pain tin gs as he fi lled in all Tur ner ruin ed each of h is n of pict urin g by fol­ to avo id this stul tific atio Pica sso and Bra que trie d the ot er sid e of Hai da arti st alw ays de� icts low ing arch aic mod els. The wm gs h mged at a so tha t his wha les loo k like the anim al he is d raw ing, ch wou ld reqm re de visu al i nfo rma tion whi med ial poin t. Cub ists i nclu one poin t of view . pec tive com mit s itse lf to seve ral poin ts of view . Pers ve. Les Fau xm on­ is th erefore a Cub ist nar rati The Sou nd and the Fur y tena nt's W�ma , lector and The French Lieu nayeurs, Fow les' s The Col Ger trud e Stem s e, Cortaza r' s Hop-Scotch. Ma nde lsta m' s Noise of Tim s. Th e Ma king of A merican

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give n a role to p lay rati ve are emp has ized and The arch itec ton ics of a nar is, whe n they see elist s bec om e Cub ists ; that in dra mat ic effect wh en nov , an ideo gr a m bol sym a h iero glyp h, a coh eren t . the pos sibi lities of mak ing st arti sees that It I S com es into bei ng whe n an bol sym A k. wor l tota e h of t pro cee ds by fait h. mea nin g i n . Gen ius alw ays . t h e onl y way t o get a l l t h e the par ticu lars of n g in Rom an liter atu re whe rgin eme el nov the see We a new k i nd of myt : Apu leiu s wan ted to wri te real ity rise to floo d-ti de. , trav el, trad e, Cup 1d sis, Plat oni sm, Mit hra ism sen sua lity , bru tali ty, Eleu and the tal e-te ller the se tou che d eac h oth er . and Psy che -s om eho w all h s app ens aga m Wit h r. So wit h Petr oni us. Thi ethe ltog a them w dra ld cou ken s and Dos toie vsk y. Cervante s, aga in with Dic how to sync o­ ente rs wan ted to lear n The twentieth -cen tury exp erim h of the tar­ muc as nce wit h a gist : to dra w p ate, hyp hen ate , get the esse tha t rea l­ wn kno h inte llige nce . Art h as alw ays pan as wou ld inte rpla y wit ouf lage cam ural nat y h ubr is bac k into the ver ity can esca pe from arti stic ' s horses are r heu Bon d to i sola te it. Ros a from whi ch the a rtist h ad h ope p rais ed God , sso' s hor ses. The one h a s Pica h o rses ·' Pica sso' s h orse s are y the othe r und erstood H i m . The twenty-eigh th d a d lasts fift y-fi ve day s. The act ion o f the Ilia raid ives on the ir nig t of the epi c, find s the Arg ( Book X) , or tim e-ce nte r skin , Me nel aus Ill tha t lion me mn on d ress es in a into the Tro jan line s . Aga

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Na rrative Tone and Form

of a l eopard ; Odysseus wears the helmet of his thieving gran d father Au­

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The Wolf ) . Dolon, th e Trojan spy they encounter, wears a wolf s h 1 de. Greek and Troj an alike h ave become stalking nocturnal

ammals. Homer h as measured out the days of his poem so that there are twenty-seve � days + a day on which men dress as animals and act with

brutal cunnmg + twenty-seven days. At the extremes of this elegant

Bronze Age geometry we find th � first and last words of the poem, blind f� ry an horsetamer. The meanmg of the Iliad is thus written in its de­

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sign: It Is a poem a bout taming the animal in man.

The symmetry of th e Iliad is rigorous (the duel of Paris and Menelaus . balancmg th e duel of Hektor and Akhilleus, the one in the third b ook , the other

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the third book from the end, Zeus's p l an to dishonor the

Greeks occupymg the central ten books) ; its balanced, archaic strictness

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bound by laws of repetition and rhythmic recurrence. The Odyssey is more eccentric of design, though th e adventures o f

Odysseus fall mto a p a ttern. Th e descent to Hades i s the center; six ad­

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ventures fal away on each side, and pair off symmetrically. The Kikones and Pha1aktans are opposites: earthly and supernatural societies. The Lotus

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and Kalypso ( adventures

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and

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tempt Odysseus with

defle cuons of the wi l. The Kyklops and the Cattle of Hyperion (3 and . . 1 1 ) mvolve sms agamst the gods. Aiolos and Skylla and Kharybdis ( 4

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and 1 0) � re forces of nat � r � . The Laistrygonians and the Sirens (5 and 9) are canmbals. The two visits to Kirke (6 and 8) straddle the descent to

Hades, the center o f the symmetry. These can be arranged as concentri c ci rcles around the descent, a symbolic wh irlpool, so that we can say of . the Odyssey th at It has the shape of water in a vortex, water being its p ervasive symbol . The symbol of the Iliad is fi re, which, like Akhilleus, can get out of hand, rage, and burn itsel f out. The ei ghtecnth century saw the design o f the Homeri c epics as rude . and Oss1amc, though demurrers were beginning to stir. When the Rev. Donald McQueen (the same who rowed Dr. Johnson along the coast o f . t e Hebrid s) " alleged th at Homer was made u p Scalpa m of detached � . fragm �nts, Johnson InSi sted that "you could not put a book of the Iliad o u t of Its p l a � e" ; and he believed the same migh t be said of th e Odyssey. 1 . . It 1 � our opm10n nowadays th at not a l i ne of either poem can be p ut out of Its place.

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The beauty o f architectonics is both in and out of favor in our time which I. S a way o f � aying that we are confused about design. The stru ctu r , of Joyce s works IS now k nown to be of an astounding i n tricacy· it has

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taken critici sm h alf the century to learn to see the architecton i s of

'James Boswel l, The journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel johnson ed L Powell (London: j. W. Dent, 1958), p. 104. '

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The Geo g ra p hy of the I m agination

Portrait and Ulysses. The bones of Finnegans Wak e lie undected under its flesh of words; we cannot even find the outer shape, and s uspect it of being a monster. My guess is that the shape of the Wake wi ll turn out to be as strong and simple as Flaubert's Trois contes, a triptych o f saints

bound by a common allusi on to a chu rch window. Poun d' s Cantos seem to defy mappi ng. Our age is unlike any other in that its greatest works o f art were constructed in one spirit a n d received in another.

There was a Renaissance around 1 9 1 0 i n which the nature of all the

arts changed. By 1 9 1 6 this springtime was blighted by the World War,

the tragic effects of which cannot be overestimated. No r can any under­ standing be achieved o f twentieth-century art if the work under consider­

ation is not kept against the background of th e war which extinguished European culture. (Students reading Pound's " eye-deep in hell" auto­

matically think it is an a l lusion to Dante until you tell them about

trenches. )

Accuracy i n such matters being impossible, we can say

nevertheless that the bri lli ant experimental period in twentieth-centu ry

art was stopped short in 1 9 1 6. Charles lves had written his best music by

then; Picasso had become Picasso; Pound, Pound; Joyce, Joyce. Except

for individual talents, already in development before 1 9 1 6, moving on to

full maturity, the century was over i n i ts sixteenth year. Because of thi s

collapse (which may yet prove to be a long i nterruption), the architec­

tonic masters of our time h ave suffered critical neglect or a buse , and if admi red are admired for anything but the structural innovations of their work .

In 19 04 a man who concealed his n a me behind that of the French pharmacist Etienne-Ossian Hen ry (a name he would have seen daily i n

the U. S. Dispensary, a reference work druggists keep handy, a n a m e that

deflates deliciously to 0. Henry) published a novel called Cabbages and

Kings. The setting is a Central American banana rep u blic. The Panama

Canal had been begun earlier in the year; our author has an eye for topicality. And as the author's pseudonym mischievously hides the fact

that he was very recently the pharmacist at the Ohio State Pen itenti ary,

the title alludes to ( among other things) the resemblance of the fat, mous­

tached Secretary of War Wi l l i a m Howard Taft to a walrus, Taft th e de­ signer and executor of American i mperialism ( " Dollar Diplomacy") in Central American affa i rs . The full joke of the title i s that the cabbages

and kings of Anchuri a are bananas and vain dictators, the latter deriving thei r sovreignty from the American exporters o f the fo rmer. Anchuria :

land of the lazy, the happy, the expansive spirit. 0. Henry does not ex­

plain his pseudonym for Honduras: it was app a rently another private

joke that he was describing an anti-United States. Earlier in 1 904 Nostrom o had been p u blished. So in

a

sense 0. Henry,

who had recogn ized his plight in Lord Ji m ' s (" . . . we both made one

Nar rati ve To n e and For m

315

. . fateful mis tak e at the sup rem e cns ts of our l i ves ' " he said to . h AI p h ons o S mit . tak e from ' " a mis w hic h w e cou l d n ot reco ver " ) ,2 was rep eati ng Con rad 's nov el a bou t the dt. sap pea ran ce o f an eno J·· mo us sum o f mo ney aga inst a bac kgr oun d of Lat in A mcn. can revo I u uon . e tter By nne r's idea tha t 0. Hen ry try his han d at I e y man so you ng an d so fresh fro m H arvard wo u ld have suggested to 2 a 4 -y ear-old mas ter of the sho rt stor y ( h e wro te 66 i n 1 904 ) tha t h e t urn to a l ang er form . B ynn er sug ges ted th at cer sto ries alre ady in prin t tain cou ld be stit che d tog eth er Into a lon ger nar rat ive. A stor y ("M one y Ma ze" ) was s I.Ice d up and ts I parts Inte rsp ers ed wit h new ma teri al . 0 . He nry ca II s th e form a "va ude . ville " a n d as k s s to . Ima gm e the last three scen es � of the nov el as thre e fil me 1'.Ips from th e 'Yi. t" agr aph oscop e , an art h t en Ill the for ma tive han . ds of MeTIes, ' Ed Ison , and the Lum icre bro the rs. Ind eed , the mo vi ng pic tur e mu st hav e bee n mu , . ch . 0 s hen he wro te this spli ced -tog eth er nov el. It h as the p i d i gw e acc ept as mo re cha ract . eris ti c of the mo v· p h n th e pros e n rra tive . It exp loit s the adv antages of mim e � e s y w h I Ch we mts un d ers tan d wh at i s h a p enm are larg ely mis rea din gs of visu al infor ma tio n Th e no vel p s g us loo k at a gra ve and rea d the hea dst one : We are the w n ten ll1g the gra ve, but we are not told wh o he is or for w . . h om he IS wo rkm g. The ent ire " Pro em " . . h 1s, ( w h 1c as 1·t to a I ert the p ersp tcac wu s rea d er to the arc hite ctu re of the . boo k "B th e C e , t ned p re ent a tio n of misinformati on. I s i t w'ithi t th e b i f tc o not e t a t th e con vi ted emb ezzl er 0 . Hpn ry Is c on e o f I I' tera tur e' s ma ..,. . sters of sne aki n g b eau . I . tJ f u ly fals ifie d mfo rma tion pas t the rea de r ? .

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Mi sun der sta ndi ng is the ma ins p rin g o f t he p I ot. A tele gra m alerts a bus ine ssm an in a coa sta l tow n th at th e dic tato r of a cou ntr y has . a bscond ed Wit . h t h e nat ion al trea sur y in sui tcas es . . . . . Wit h h Im Is h Is mJs ­ tr ss, an ope ra sta r. Th ere afte r foll ow s � . a c h �In of eve nts so mtn cate ly mis rep res ent ed tha t de Ma up ass ant (or Dos tOie vsk y) wo u l d hav e env it as plo tw ork Bu ied t d M p assa . and D osto ievsky would have used 0 . � H enry's tricky p l ot t s h e n cts d t nsw ns risin g from the a nd pas sio ns of wil ls cha rac ters c a r a ct ers a rc New . t p es, hu m ors, fi Com edy y gu res f rom jok � a te ' a n d mu s1ca ! com e d y. ' Cabbages an d Kings I· s a n arch J. tect om c nov el: a nar rati ve bui lt out of discrete ieces of i m y n e ote, and sho rt sto ries ( o f w hich the re are five , thr � oc o f wh ich ara cter s eac h) . To Its au dien ce in 1 904 it was a lig ht' witty com . edy Inte rsp ers ed Wit h del icio us jok es; if it had any , .

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316

The Geography of the I magination

Narrative

deeper meaning it was an apology on be � alf of the comic spirit to . at anchor 1n her h arbors . Panama for McKi n ley's grey gunboats swmgmg perhaps a rationaliza­ and confession disguised a as it read now can We tion of his crime and fl ight to Honduras. W h at gives the novel constant energy is its versatile playing with appearance and reality.

3 17

accessib le arch itectoni c form in our liter atur e. Olso n's Max imus and Zuk ofsky's "A" are too sym boli cally and verb ally com plex , resp ectiv ely, to com man d larg e aud ienc es, espe ci ally in an age whe n a coll ege . deg ree is beco mm g a cert ifica te of i1literac y.

The Russian Formalist critic Boris M. Ejxen baum notes in his "0. Henry and the Theory of the Short Story"3 • th at in Russi a 0. He� ry is thought of as a master of anecdote and picaresque adventures; th at Is, the robust American flavor. The theoretici ans of Formalism (e.g. , Shklovsky) admired h i m for his mastery of form and technique, seeing in his tricky plots and swift narrative a deep allegiance to the primal roots of the s hort story in folktale and legend. . Brevity Ejxen baum takes to be American energy, bno. He n �tes that the golden period of the American short story ( 1 8 3 0-50) cmnodes with the perfection of the long Victorian novel. He then notiCes that . short stories tend to accumulate along thematic li nes (he argues a umty of theme-and I wou ld add, of i magery-for each of 0. Henry's sh ort­ s tory collections) , taking Cabbages and Kings to be 0. � enry's one at­ tempt to make thematic unity more obvious than � collection. There Is a parallel in Eudora Welty, whose books of stones all h ave abundant . thematic u nity, t hough only The Golden Apples draws attention to Its architectonic structure. Ejxenbaum sees Cabbages and Kings as a return to the earlier fo rms of the novel in which the plot is a cycle of anecdotes. He migh t have said also that the American novel would create a tradi �ion of the novel as a diverse compendium of elements. Hugh Kenner, thi nk­ ing of Melville and Hemingway, h as remarked that th e instruction m � n­ . ly a love of skills ual seems to be the model for American novels. Certam and technologies runs through all the American arts: Eakins (who painted sportsmen and technicians), Whitman, Faulk ner. Architectonic form absorbs and displaces n arrative. This begins to h ap­ pen on both sides of th e Atlantic, with Pound in The Cantos (an archit� c­ tonic epic made of thematically interacting images rather than a plot With characters) , Mandelstam and Shklovsky in Russia, Hermann Brach In Germany, Gide and Cocteau in France. A fter the War, the moveme �t subsided; except for Ulysses and some nota ble exceptions (Dos Passos s . USA, Cummings's EIMI, Bely's Petersburg), n arrative streamlmed and simplified the traditional novel. Pound remained an exemplum to Amen­ can artists. Williams's masterpiece, Paterson, may be the only wholly

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'Tra ns. I. R. Titunik, i n Ladislav Matejka and Krystyna Pomorska, eds., R eadings in sian Poetics : Formalist and Structuralrst Vrews (Cambndge: MIT Press, 1 97 1 ) , PP· 2 7

Tone and Form

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Fifteen year s ago ther e beg an to emerge a scho ol of Am eric an arti sts w orkmg exc lusiv ely with arch itec ton ic form -th e New Am . eric an Cm ema (Ma ya Deren, Gre gory Ma rko pou los, Jon as Me . kas, Jam es Bro ugh to ) , the gem us o� whi ch is Stan Bra kh age, who se Ant � icip atio of n . the N�ght IS the first arch itec tom c film . Its "na rrative" (sai d by Bra khage to be tnflu enc ed by Pou nd and Stei n) is a succ essi on of i mages that do not tell a story but defi ne a stat e of min d. His Dog Star Ma n goe . s even fur­ ther ; It IS a long p oem in ima ges som ethi ng like Paterson and The Can tos. It Is usef ul to k n ow a bou t the A mer ican film -ma kers bec ause they . created an atm osp here m whi ch pro se writ ers could turn to arch itec ton ic form . Pau l Met calf ' s Gen oa is the only full y real ized pro se wor k of this . new arch itecton ic mov eme nt. (It was pub lish ed in 1 9 65 by Jarg on Boo ks and received two reviews ) . It has no plot -it care fully draw s a hier ogly ph before o ur eyes , a stra nge ly dark sym bol. As if intr odu cing and . . dev elop ­ Ing mus ical the es, �r. Met calf spea ks thro ugh a cha racter w ho, � we are to understand, Is fi ctio nal in seve ral differen t way s. This c hara cter a Dr Mil ls, is (like Paul Metcal f ) descended from Her man Me lvill e. At th� same tim e, his bro ther is the not orio us Car l Mil ls, who , with Bon nie Bro wn H ead y, kidn app ed and murdered Bob by Gre enle ase . i n 195 3. So two rela nve s are join ed in a ficti on. Th� narr ativ e is buil t up by inte rwe avin g the careers of Col umb us and Me lvill e, ea h of who m gras p d the fact o f spa ce in his own way � � . Mr . M�tcal f pos its h1s matena l With a min imu m of narr ativ e con nec tion s, u � mg pas sages from Col um bus vi lle's wri ting to esta blis h a � 1ghl y defined psy cho logi cal iden'stityandforMel eac h. There are furt her elem ents Intersperse d: passage s from emb ryo logi cal wor ks (esp eci ally tera tolo gy), P�s �ages from exp lore rs and peo ple in Me lvill e's a mbi ence . Alo ne amo ng cnt1 cs of Me lvill e, Mr. Me tcal f h as seen that Aha b and his men swa rm pon Mo by- Dick as sper mat ozo a upo � n an ovu m (a curi ous ly com plex Image, as Me lvi l le has emp h a size d the spe rm wha les' rese mbl anc e to spe rm atozoa ). Giv en the chie ved rich nes s of Genoa (an essa y, thre e live � s, a poe m Wit h a bJ. �Iog iCal them e a med itat ion on wha t it wo uld : feel like to be Car l Mil ls s bro ther , a hist ory of cert ain idea s) , it wo uld seem inev itab le tha� the fo m wo uld be arch itec ton ic. I wo uld like to thi � n k tha t the form den ves ulti mat ely fro m Me lvil le. Of wha t oth er nov el tha n Mo by- Dic k

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gi n a tion The Geo grap hy of the Ima

ht fit into it? any subj ect und er the sun mig can you say that a chap ter on pter . In the cha the con trol led by the form of In Gen oa ever y sent ence is h as to do on acti dis" ever y ima ge, i dea , and cha pter entitled " Ch aryb k i s p a ra­ wor toni c is so uni fied .) No arch itec with whi rlpo ols. ( U lyss es sh apes ning mea othe r narr ativ e in that the p h rasa ble, for it diff ers from er than alon g a line . i nto a web , or glob e, rath narr ativ e; his radi cal shift i n the form of Met calf repr esen ts our m ost real ized but not entu ry nor m, bea utif ully ton e belo ngs to the twe ntie th-c ed. Don ald B a rth­ will be an ach ieve men t inde diff eren t. A cha nge in tone neth Gar gem i . in this dire ctio n , as h as Ken elme h as gon e a long way said that the duty tone ; his frien d Shk lovs ky Man dels tam was a cha nge in and Am erican familiar stra nge . Eur ope an of the writ er is to mak e the nge fam i liar. stra cent ury tryi ng to m ake the writ ing has largely spent the

Tchelitchew

; �tbl"' �;� i.�ventJQ. .n of ninet.eenth- century gentility, lai d it down as on i ts r i � s nc t took up � u l ture, that it does n' t know I � a,t�It :now anything about a�t�: ���at It li kes, thus assuming as its Th

own folk wisdom what th e emperor a Igula h ad assumed for it. On the . was a ll t. r · · first Sunday that the p u b l Ic ow ed mto th e Bntish lY lUSeu m , a . portly greengrocer backed into the a m h ra th at mspired Keats's ode ·

and smashed it to ru bble

�� . t a� e cigar t � public burnt all of With a dIS �

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Frederi ck Catherwood 's rawin gs o t e Mayan cities o f Yucatan . The public has scratch d o ut t e e yes of pai n tings in th e Uffi zi, and one fi n e da y a me m b er o f he pu b l I C p ut t h e M ona L"tsa un d er h IS " arm, carried i t

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o u t o f the Louvre with great coo I , an d h ung It at the foot of his h u m ble bed.

Tax gatherers and philanth ropists are not dismayed , h owever, an d th e 319

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The Geography of the Imagination

deci dedly grim public has its surprise s. It took to Whistle r's austere and r's Mother, Arrange ment in Grey and Black No. 1 , rename d it Whistle sketch of oil s rt' a and hugged it to its breast. It singled out Stu five by cluding n i ts, Washin gton , to the exclusio n of all other portrai Gallery al Nation the Stuart. It prefers Van Gogh to Manteg na. It goes to paintin g at the to see Dali's Last Supper. And, mirabile visu, its favorite pronun ciation eludes Museum of Modern Art is by a painter whose name n. It is attentio and whose other painting s have no claim on the public's it public the to but the Cache-C ache of Pavel Fyodor ovitch Tchelit chew, work the is and Seek, and is "that picture you see things in," called Hide ever know of Pavvle Chelly Chew. The public is wiser than it can perhaps

to see it as a very special picture . c, have The critics, less creature s of impul se and love th an the publi paint­ the Sitwell, Edith always been embarr assed by Cache-C ache. And for a it before sat ed, concern ing's sole audienc e as far as the painter was was it after ust j it see to solid hal f-hour, h aving sailed to New York lik e is it Indeed it. about word finished , without saying- ever-a single to people like t o n d i d chew (Tchelit no other picture. Its punning i mages da from baldo, m Arci r te n ai p say) are develop ed from the Renaiss ance faces are Vinci , and from those games, dear to children and artists, where hidden i n the branches of trees. little girl, Cache-C ache depicts an ancient, gnarled tree against which a is also a tree The counts. and leans the " it" i n a game of hide-and -seek, s of the contour the fill faces n's hand, and its root system a foot. Childre other yet of out made are faces these branche s, and on closer inspecti on the facr, n i also; shapes make tree the faces . Landscap es visible beyond into develops that n u p nuous conti a enti re surface of the painting is simply a thousan ds of images- this is not hyperbo le but fact. It is quite in it, the is seasons the of cycle The painting that can be looked at forever. beau­ strangely in often , depth al human body in every possible anatomic muscles and veins, bone, skin, at looking tiful transpar encies where one is a child's ear all at once, though one might have begun by looking at of the rphoses metamo The s. branche two that is also the space between a become wheat in playing boys embryo are here, defined i n flowers; a become leaves and apples of lattice a lion's face; children seen through spaniel.

frie n d But not until Parker Tyler- poet, historia n of the movies, and 1 was ache Cache-C reting interp of e task th of T chelitch ew-se t hi mself the than other s, painting modern of richest there any response to this Jt at looked ever has who e everyon that rstand unde intuitive appetite to its to led rocess p What ? come t i did d n mi of kind has felt. Out of what ' Parker Tyler, The

Divine Comedy of Pavel Tchelitchew

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creati on? M r . Tyler h a s written a l u mi nous a n d deep book; no other kind v.:ould have served to approac h Tchelitc hew. He has also written a new k � nd of book. It is a biogr phy and it is also a novel, but it is, as well, a � dtscurs tve book hat explam s the paintin gs, traces their growth , and ana­ � ly� es thetr meanm g. H e calls it a divine comedy becaus e Tchelit chew con­ scwu sly dtvt ded his work i n to i mages of hell, purgatory, and heaven , and . culmma ted � ach mode m an enormo us paintin g, much as Picasso has alway � termma te hi periods with one definitiv e paintin g into which all � the sk l ll and meditat ion of many i n dividua l paintin gs are brough t to a perfectiOn . The hell pa inting i s s o terrible that few have looked a t it, o r been given . the opportu nity �o. It ung for years in the Ringlin g Brother s Museum i n Sa � asota (s1�ce It de I cts side-s ow freaks) . With whateve r irony and � . pomt, Tcheht chew willed It to h1 � native Russia, to "the Soviet People ," who, when he last saw them , had JUSt approp riated his father' s estate and vast forests. The Tchelit chews crossed Russia like a b a nd of gypsies , reac mg the Bl ack Sea, where they made a brief stand with the White arm� es. Then they fled to Turkey . Tchelit chew's life thereaf ter was exile: Berlm (where he began to design for the theater) , Paris (where he was t� ken under Gertrud e Stein's wing) , London (here Edith Sitwell became h �s p � tron), Ne w York, Connec ticut, and eventua l l y Rome, where he . died m 1 957, J USt short of his fifty-nin th birthda y. No one k new quite . . what to do when It was discove red that he wished Russia to own the panoram a of freaks and monste rs he called Phenom ena. Lincoln Kirstein u � dertoo k to deliver it duri ng a cultura l exchan ge tour of the New York City Ballet. The Russian s accept ed it with cold and trouble d politen ess. They loaned It to the Galle ry of Modern Art, which opened in 1 964 with a retrosp ective show of Tchelit chew's . It present ly sits in the baseme nt of that m useum . The Russia ns do not reply to offers to have it return ed. The p u rgatory paintin g i s the Cache-Cache, which in every sense is the opposi te ot Phenom ena. They both depi ct nature with an accura cy and w ealth of m form atio n that no artist betwee n da Vinci and Tchelit chew has master ed, u nless it be such technic al master ies as those of Stu bbs and udubo . Phenom ena is satiric, but the satire � springs from a pervasi ve umb gnef that nature could ever be grotesq ue and mean. Cache- Cache cel� brates the metam orphic structu re and growt h of nature i n all of its �pnngn me s : childh ood, new leaf and blosso m, the transm utation s of seed Into plant and ani m l. Only the tree is old- and, if you stand back far � enough-t he ba rbana n face with cunnin g wink i n to which the entire pic­ tur e res olv es . The third great paintin g, e ntitled The Unfinis hed Picture , may or may n�t be the evocat ion of Paradi se Tchelit chew had spoken of Mr Ty 1er · . th m k s th a t I· t Is, and present s a convm o n g and fascina ting argume nt. It

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3 22

�l11e Geo grap hy of the Imag ina tion

e� Tch elitc hew developed after Cach grow s out of the supr ising style of t n ccou a r's Tyle Mr. ract and p ure. Cache, a style that is geometric, abst pictu re, the last to be p a i nted , show this with ns begi Tch elitc hew ' s care er ible. . . . ing how its swir ls o f light are i n tellig distm guts habl e from y raph biog no has hew elitc Tch Like mos t artis ts, hi msel f was elate and fey, with that of the labo r of pain ting. The man . Quit e early he had inve nted a mask perio dic seizu res of Russ ian gloo m nality that Nab okov migh t have to wear before the wor ld: a p erso ian splee n and passion . ML Tyler thou ght up for a nove l satir izing Russ g into his biog raph y-T cheh tche w care fully i ncor pora tes this p lay- actin ian batt le-cr uiser duri ng the Revo lu­ terri fied of a mou se aboa rd a Russ to be exam i ned for i nduc tion by tion, Tche li tchew goin g off in a Dai mler hief soak ed i n perfu me acro s s his an Ame rican draf t boar d, a hand kerc hand . But ML Tyle r i s also caref ul foreh ead , a distr essed l ady hold ing his who pain ted the pictu res, desig ned to mak e it clear that the Tche litch ew the gene ral of a besie ged fort, was stag e sets, and prot ected his care er like look in g to the safety of h er cubs . abou t as wish y-wa sh y as a moth er tiger his close st fri ends , and perh aps to Tche litch ew was an enig ma even to an age that spur ned Rom anticism; h imse lf as well. He was a Rom antic in to Ame rica as exile s h e had the abil­ like few Euro pean artis ts who cam e Engl and land scap es in which he has ity to put dow n deep root s-h is New seem to have been evok ed from our hidd en Bibl ical and myth ical mot ifs shre wdly prac tical and deep ly . past rathe r than his. He was both morp hosis wa s at once soen ttfic, supe rstiti ous. His visio n of n atur al meta and refe rence book s of mod ern art mag ical, and reli giou s. Mos t acco unts tion of the beau mon de and the omit h i m altog ether . The vola tile atten surro unde d Tche litch ew is alrea dy hyste rical critic al amb ience that once nt to see the artis t and his achie veme thinn ed out enou gh for us to begi n ­ hom their paid dy alrea have fash ion with some clari ty. Men i mmu ne to os Carl iam Will ton; Nor t Burn Eliot' s age: Cache-Cache insp ired p a rts of t " Phen omena" ; and som e of the mos to h muc owes rson Pate 's Will iams in Cocteau' s Leon e deriv e from myst eriou sly beau tiful p assages Tche litche w' s doub led i mage s. first bri llian t biog raph y of any Mr. Tyle r has writt en, i ronically , the se citiz en he was p roud to be, can Ame rican artis t, thou gh Ame rica, who ­ the art of bi ogra phy cla i m so i nve� scarc ely clai m Tch elitc hew ; nor can acco unt of a life. It is scho larsh ip tive a stud y as Mr. Tyle r's as simp ly the gly thor ough , and it i s story tel­ at its very best , perc eptiv e and p ainst akin o him self, Mr. Tyle r has the abili ty t ling of a high orde r. Like Tch elitc hew this, brin ging into p rom inen ce now cont rol mult iple leve ls of n arra tive, and roduct of man y year s of labo r now th at th eme . Hi s book is the p a ed, scho lars have ev en appr oach resea rch, and achi eves what very few

Tchelitchew

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lucid study i n depth of a c? n � e mp orary artist that i s also as exci ting to read � s a novel, and which 1s m itself a wholly new and i magi native way of wnnng. .Tchelitchew's . vision of death came early-a woman in white who glided down a VIsta � f R ssi n trees. Like Nabokov, and Stravinsky, and � � Chagall, he took with h 1 m I n to his lifetime's exi le a Russian childhood that became mythological over the years and served him as the Greek and R � man myths served Ovid in his exile in the Caucasus. Tchelitchew' s last P�Jnttng was of the white woman, Death. The trees among which she ghded and the sh ape of the lake nea rby are remembered i n the Cache­ Cache. The leaf-children , the idiot Tsars, the notion of a rt as an icon of forces world! � and other-world ly, the i nterpenetrat ion of man and land­ scape, the arttst as a ,r assionate and s uffering seer-all are profoundly Russian. Tchehtchew s devious route to our eyes, to the distracted and sh.allow New York of th e 1 940's, has prevented the ahistorical American mmd fro.m domg more with the strange Russian genius than p erceiving that In his Immediate past was the equally odd England o f the Sitwells and before that the Paris of Gertrude Stein . And before that, Berlin an d Constantmople. �arker Tyler therefore begins his biography with Tchelitchew' s death which happ � ned at a remoteness as great as his birth and adolescence a; a � sycholog1cal and spati a l distance that only the tragic ironist can reg� rd ":Ith any sense. That Is why Parker Tyler's biography is fi rst of all a novel . defining km .to Dostoievsky m the life of a genius whose work flowed strai �h t for� ard with great power and whose heart wen t crabwise in an a�onized sp1ral . Tcheli tchew' s work, graphed dispassionate ly by an art histonan, demonstrates a steady progression from style to style; his life Wit� ? ut the art sounds like a novel by Nabokov: a decidedly h alf-mad . . Russian whose Impractical anstocracy keeps h i m trapped in a worl d of masculme women and feminine men . Parker Ty ler's first triumph is to show, as well as any a rtist is likely to, the harmony of m an and painter It I S a str�nge and beautiful pattern ; only Ma nn's Doktor Faustus is a � y­ . t�mg hke It. Mr. Tyler achieves his biography by one of the feats of . our nme: htera.ture m he com � i nes novel, biography, and scholarly study. �e hides none of h1s sources, Is e.ven willin g to weave autobiography into _ his strong design, � n d Is determmed to illuminate his subject with every resource he can bnng to be r upon it. Hence this is a biography with n o � los�d doors, an d yet ther� I s nothing cli n i cal o r prurient about i t. Every . etai!, whether 1t Is Tchehtche w's tapeworm or some esoteric fi nesse of appetence, has Its place in the design. It is al most as if M r. Tyler, like Man�, had thought up an artist. But who could have thought u p Tchehtch ew?

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3 24

The Geography of the Imagi nation

Tyler, when he set out on this biography, had before him essen­ tially two books to write. One would elucidate the paintings, the other would find some pattern in Tchelitchew's life. Both tasks were formida­ ble. The life, for instance, had not been observed by any one person; the biographer had to recover its segments, frequently from sources guard­ edly secret. Tchelitchew's life was in one sense a great anguish, like Byron's, and in another a continuous gesture. The gesture was not only Romantic; it was Russian as welL Moreover, it was an actor's (should we say a dancer's?) gesture, both defending and hiding the absurd duality of his nature. The tense balance Tchelitchew maintained seems to have been an agreement whereby a feminine will, stubborn, dark, and capricious, ruled the man; and a masculine will, easy, bright, and accomplished, painted the pictures. These two wills began to cooperate quite early; the painter came to depend on the feminine self for its inspiration-an inspi­ ration that was thoroughly media:val (or perhaps simply Russian) in its intricate maze of zodiacal lore, white magic, superstition, and practically anything, so long as it was sufficiently incredible. The phenomenon is not uncommon: Cocteau saw it as a matter of putting down roots into the dark in order to blossom in sunlight. Tchelitchew, as Mr. Tyler goes to pains to show, was more aware than even Cocteau of the need to plumb the dark, and was just as aware that the work of art thus fed must be wholly free of its origins. The artist who does not free himself simply imposes his obsessions on his audience, and his art is morbid and puz­ zling. Each of the three masterpieces of Tcheli tchew Phen mena, Cache-Cache, and L'Inacheve-breaks from an awful darkness into the full clarity that a work of art creates both for itself and for the world. The fullest triumph of Mr. Tyler's biography is that he can demon­ strate the dark processes by which the paintings came into being, and can demonstrate with equal facility the coherence and clarity of the com­ pleted work. The biographer of an artist frequently finds himself in pos­ session of dramatic facts-Shelley's covey of wives, Turner's eccen­ tricities, and so on-which he knows must somehow be pertinent to the artist's work. The trick is to show how. Has anyone seen Leonardo the military engineer in the Mona Lisa, or Van Gogh the evangelist in L 'Ar­ lesienne? M r. Tyler has the kind of mind that refuses to let a relationship elude it. Tchelitchew's work is always harmonic, and his explicator had to master that harmony; and master it he has. Iconography, that subtlest and most painstaking of modern humanistic disciplines, came to its maturity just when Mr. Tyler began his biography. Edgar Wind himself recognized at a glance that the Cache-Cache was a masterpiece, and must have sighed at the thought of an iconographer accounting for the multi­ ple transparences organized in such a harmony of astounding strangeMr.

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ness. De Chirico to Chirico the scholar isb:���:' t'� alt· u :�ea:i::. ��geow but in looking at a de ult rma tely as warm and. famrTrar as the pas t of , n whrch he searches rs Ital y. It is qui te another thin to I k d a at e de in t o the fo � _ ��� as i :to a : nd �:a� u. ��ir/�e mco s, be long rests of Russ ia, as well ed to no school, had no ' ted to a poe p eer . ' and was commrt tic visi on all but wholly inward an d p nvate. Mr . Tyl er reprod . t pict . ures ong th\h�ndde d and twenty-ergh that illu strate his booucek sa am ph t g p Ly�es of fou rteen Europ�an artists then in exil� i� ;�� Unhed e�:� �s . . � �� e p otograph was ma de In March ' 1 942 ) 0n IY one face peers und rstu rb d e an d supremeIy confident from these troubled ma sks . It is the fa ce f M would be jus · _t as composed In the anthrax forests of Ma rsax Ernst, that . Euge, ne Ber­ man, �ondn an, and Chagall are visi bly distres sed · Bre ton are erng brav e, unsuccess fu II y. The rest, except 'Tch elitcheanw,d Masson .t ngbup for . are put­ a good sho l . w st they can . Tchehtchew's face is defiant ; it is also fill. ed Wit. h gne f. H"asIs be eyes alo ne are unfocussed; he alone has no sen of be::g ;����g�aphet Wh ate er Ernst is, Tchel!tchew is the oppos i te. seIf Erns s � art as r�relyvkno wn a saner mm d), the n Tchelitchew is wildly insa ne' n o bserv ano n one feels he would have agree d wrt. h, nervously. The sane artist moves toward visi was sane); the artist who h d ed o IIon (Blake w�s sane, Flaubert m oves rather toward a re;�ve� o ; r:a �;;' t�e rrratr��al into his art Tchelitchew sum marized years of work in t�o u t on Is ?w_n terms. is devoted to the irrational within man and _e normo�s par� tmgs: �ne of h�m. Here nat ura l design has gon e hideously wro� �rr n o :�� t�e :i � � \ oo as gone wrong. Th e face Tchelitchew gives him self in . Phe n om , ena rs t h e one fthat ap�ea �s /n Lhnes s photograph of the exiled arti sts. The re is both ury n gne In t ness Is� wntten. at face, but it is also a face on which a great ,·nwardIs there a portra it of Tchelitchew in the Cache -Ca che ? H as any one Ioo k ed'. H IS " sym bo 1 Sign · atu res are the re as Mr Tyl . er sh us, b ut I suspect that his rievIc·�:� place 'In. a pai ntin g thaows t has obliterated the artist m�re t · face h�sernrn_o ��r painted anymore than ���c�ne_r , s mtt�me. The Cache-Cache was not wa s wntten, or Brancusi's Maias tra was scu lpted It cam e In to bem g p�m ung was incidental. It grew and was thr h a pro�ess to � hr. ch Prcasso Is_ a painter Tchelitchew Is. a forchal f a ��e�-Ime m t e grow mg. If e o f nature. ' ·

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Jack Yeats the Elder

J ack Ye ats the Eld er kno w . f t h e rest of th e w orld ' the I rish Of time ' the tyra nt and obse ssiO n o ne ver as h rs, yea 0 0 5 1 for Cat holi c city not hin and care less . Dub lin, a ro its l. They inte nd t of cou rs gott en rou nd to buil ding a cath edra or ' The Iris Fr e ate, or r inception the Rep ubli c of Eire (or . has ) , in i teve r nam e t ey eel e o n . Pob lach t na h-E irea nn, or .wha . Jau nt!·J y in at h t ntry cou of the issued post age stam ps depic tmg a rna � day wil l King dom . N. eve mi nd · the dudes a larg ish port ion of the Unit ed h ous e hol d ' ' in . The cloc k m t e .l oyce com e whe n it will be Irel and s aga oth er cl ock s. . W I' th Du blm 's we reme mbe r, disa gree d b y h ours . ts in the his tor y of itis rtra po d of the m ost gi fte . m .John Butl er Yea ts, one d o f Wi llia . and 's greatest pam ter, an art, the fath er of Jack Yea ts ' Irel . e . g hty-th ree yea rs as i f ttm e t, spen t h Is But ler Yea ts, Irela nd's greatest poe · an orgy of dy na mi te in n beg an wit did not exis t. Wh en the Reb ellio

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1 9 1 6, one o f the casualties was a studio full o f his unfinished o i l portraits. And he, always the level philosopher, would have been the first to admit that he probably wouldn't have finished them a nyhow. At his death in 1 922 there was a self-portrait on his easel that had been commissioned for the incompa rable collecti on of john Quinn. It had been on the easel for fifteen years. A generation of American painters watched him work on it. He would charge his palette with colors, take up a brush, fiddle with an effect, and begin to talk. His skill as a raconteur, as a conversationalist, as a speaker at dinners or on any occasion, was magni ficant, Irish, and inexhaustible. G. K. Chesterton reme mbered an offhand example of his mastery of the sen­ tence: "Mr. Joseph Chamberlain has the character, as he has the face, of a shrewish woman who ruins her hu sband by her extravagance; and Lord Salisbury has the character, as he has the face, of the man who is so ruined." Such balance of phrase, melody of words, and pungent imagery were accomplishments as admired as they were expected in J. B. Yeats's world. He talked with William Morris and Sam Butler, Father G. M. Hopkins and Edward Dowden, with Lady Gregory and John Qui nn, with Ellis the editor of Blake and John O' Leary. He spoke briefly on the street one day with James joyce. It tells us much about J. B. Yeats's ambience that he remarked to Quinn in later years that he was aware the people Joyce wrote about in Dubliners and Ulysses existed, but of course one had not met them. The Yeatses were Anglo-Irish with eighteenth-century manners. They abi ded the Catholics but drew the line at Scots-Irish Protestants, who were apt to be ill- bred, bigoted, and enthusiastic. The young John Butler went off to a proper private school and Tri nity College, and was setting out to be a ba rrister when he married the sister of a schoolmate, Susan Pollexfen of Sligo. Her family were merchants; in W. B. Yeats ' s poetry we hear much of them, their stalwart character, their virtue. A great measure of Pollexfen endurance was indeed necessary to be the wife of John Butler Yeats, who in the first two years of hi s marriage earned exactly ten pounds, and that was a college prize for eloquence. Susan Pollexfen Yeats bore him two sons, and three daughters. To them we are indebted for many fine poems, painti ngs, and books (the daughters founded the Cuala Press and colla borated with Lady Gregory in a little renaissance of Irish fol k crafts) . But Susan remains a shadowy figure i n all of this, a p atient woman with a brilliant, unpredictable hus­ band and talented children. Caught between the practicality of her own family and the irresponsibility of the Yeatses, she went quietly, pitifully, ma d.

328

The Geography of the Imagination

J. B. Yeats spent his entire career as a Dublin barrister drawing carica­ tures of the court. In the only deli berate decision of his life he moved to london to study art, but when he arrived there he became the universal model of dilatoriness. Everyone liked him, he had a preternatural gift for catching a likeness, but he fitted into no editor's or sitter's schedule. Robert Browning called, possibly wanting his portrait painted; we shall never know, as J. B. Yeats never got around to arranging an appoint­ ment. Nor were Dante Gabriel Rossetti's overtures followed up. Not until he was 61 did he have an exhibit, at which time Dublin learned all at once, in the space of a week, that three Yeatses, old Jack, young Jack, and Willie, were all geniuses. One suspects that the news was equally astounding to old Jack, for whom this week of exhibits and plays was merely an interval in his life of impassioned talk. If, as he heard, he was a portraitist of the first rank, he had better set about finding a studio and taking commissions. Such was his intention (when he allowed himself an intention), but another matter intervened. A man from New York, a lawyer from Ohio with a taste for art and things Irish, had begun to come to Dublin to spray dollars in all directions. He bought Yeats drawings, he bought Willie's manuscripts, he bought books from the Cuala Press. It was of no interest that this John Quinn also bought Brancusis, Picassos, Wyndham lewises, Rousseaus, Augustus Johns, and Matisses, or that he owned all of Con­ rad's manuscripts and a manuscript of Eliot' s that would surface thirty years later, the first draft of a very different Waste Land from the one we know, transformed by Ezra Pound's editorial pencil. When Quinn arranged for a show of Irish folk craft in New York, to be exhibited by lillie Yeats, old Jack thought it would be a fine idea if he tagged along, to see the sights across the water. Quinn thought this an awful idea, for what was he to do with an old man who could talk all day and most of the night? What he did was introduce him around (people loved him) , commission a self-portrait for his collection of modern Irish art, and abide his leisurely ways until it was time for his departure back to Dublin. Quinn was one of the busiest men in the world. He was a corporation lawyer whose clients were apt to be Standard Oil of New Jersey and his adversary in court The United States of America. He was involved with the struggles of the avant-garde (sendin g almost daily checks and advice to Pound, Joyce, Eliot, W. B. Yeats); he was the most astute and sensitive collector of modern art in the U.S., making even Gertrude Stein seem an amateur. And here was old Jack Yeats come to visit. Quinn got him a room in a Bohemian and wonderfully comfortable boarding house run by three

.Jack Yeats the Elder

329

French sisters. He re old Jack bec am e th r o f yo ung pam ters an d poe . eermespnto . ts. H. e was a success as an after- dmn h Is readmg visits' letters floated back an e ak er. wt· urte I ooked m. on . d f orth to Du bl" an d london (I etters so Intere stin g tha t tw o s e Iect wn s o f th em ' one by pou n d' one by joseph Hone, ma de fam ou s) ' an d �he . dra wrn . g of po rtraits in pencil we nt on , as often givhim en aw aY as for a 1ee. He never went ho me buried in Chestertown, New York, in a cemetery plot donated by; heh.ts isfnen . He never fin ished the sel f-p o rt rat. t. dIfJeh eanne Foster, Qmn n ,s 1 ast mi.stress. . er fin ISh ed anyth.tng properly' nei ther did he use any thi ng up l. f remnev . am of drawmg, of eating, of dri nk ing, of ed. a won der fu 1 rou nd of talk , always on the defense agai nst every entreadmg, of speculati on . He was . nt. to run sm ooth ly · a groove. He wished Wi llie wou1d giv. e �piceme his Slo an his sill y po liti cs He lectured Qutn st lly mystic. ism and John nurses who came to loo k after h tm . tn. h.IS bn-ou' tshewth. rew th mgs at trained th ousands o f discerning, hastily rendered . I th th. e f1 H " legacy is peno I portraits, some masterful oils , and his life. It is Wi llia m MurPh Y ' s surest understa . lously documented bio . l ndt i ngr tn h ts 1 ong and meticura h Yeats ( 1 83 9 - 1 922), � } :k �:a���: li�: h e : T�e Life of fohn Bu t r Into a prodigy of yearsth' istwah at we wa nt , h ts dady rou nd mu ltip lyinleg to kn ow a b out. .A separate study (one is needed) of his art would h ave kn ow ledge of his sitters would con sntu been qw. te a dtffer ent book. A intellectu al life of Du bli n' Lon don , an dte a history of a large part of the tury. To write biogra ph ies of other meNew York for over h alf a cengenerous space on the stage for old Jack n one must h.e I pI ess Iy make a was so wh en he wrote his fine life of Joyeats. B. l. Rei d fou nd that this h n Qumn, The fv!an (rom New York ( 1 96 8). In books abou t W B. . a n d you the Irish Renaissance' a b out reaI Ist pa mt , m books about . mgngI njacNkewYeyats or th e century, there he is ' a firm o ld ma k at the tur n of . and talk ing ln Murph Y 's b.wgraphy he is frequ en ntl talk mg . offstage wht le necessary detail s �re imparted- facts abou t Sy n:e' the Arymo mg to and fro ude Gon e, oger Casem ry Show, La dy Gregory pac­ ent-but he is always present in his absence : Ma was as �u phy di. scovered, in. credible richnHe le around whi ch an of �tran ds rwas wo und. He awasps ind str h IS promi nen ce. ess . ed poet before ange Iy unaware of Wi llie was a n es ta b hsh he rea lized it. It is questionable if he knew Wh o h IS_ fnen _ d and p a tron Qum n Jeanne er whose be uty . n ir was h i � finest dra wingsreatollyward en d of h is Fost ; ;n d who se :nen �s ��Ip �ed enJ day s oy ed , remem bered a characheteristic tale of old Ja ck's tenactous pla CJdtty£ . Qui nn , busy Wi. th a case at 1a w, was goin g m d a w ith old J ac k good gram ma r and po ised p hrases 1 und. er oot, Imperturb abl y leisurely, eap mg fro m him as thick as Du bli n ·

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Imagi na tion The Geography of the

330

g t en d she was goin r, ask ed h er to p re ho ned Mi ss Fo ste fleas. He secretI Y P a gentle man . ged th e c omp an of r n to th ings . sho ppin g, and beg rea dy for a new t u ays a w greed old Jack , a hot- water "To b e sure ," a with o it wa s tuck ed ·I nt e aro un d , old Jack with a h ot d vide Qu inn 's Ro lls cam pro . req u est , o , at h IS als as e w H ug. r ut!. fu I bo ttle an d. a lap ch a uffe ur' the bea th e great ca r , the As . lth ea h IS . h Jan ua ry s1 ush to ddy to sip, f or . h ma n mo ved i nto the ld Ins r o a ty-ye . h elg e . h. ap py Slg w om a n a n d th n Fo ste r wi th a h to J ed tur k Jac s old � ow e kn of Fift Av enu e, uin n , he sai d. "H . ab ou t t mi ad to t go e v " On e thi ng yo u'

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h ow to live ."

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'

Wittgenstein

Like the gentle Anton Bruckner, who counted leaves on trees to while away a Sunda y afternoon, Ludwig Wittgenstein in odd moments calcu­ la ted the height of trees by paci ng off from the trunk the base of a right triangle, wheeling around and sighting a long his walking stick (up the hypotenuse) to the tree's top , invoki ng then the majestic th eorem of Pytha g oras. Together with inventing a sewin g machine (in his teen s ) , de­ signing a house in Vienna (still standi n g) that eli cited the admiration of Frank Lloyd Wri ght, and fol lowing assiduously the films o f the Misses Betty Hutton and Carmen Mi randa , this is one o f the few acts o f the philosopher that was at all transp a rent. No mystery, however, surrounds either h is l ife or his thought. I f h e was not the greatest p h ilosopher of our a ge, he was the most si gnificant. He founded (inadvertently) and dis­ owned two major phi losophies. He was " gettin g at something" when h e

332

The Geography of the Imagi n a tion

died, just what we shall never k n ow. At the end of his first book, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (completed in a concentration camp dur­ ing the First World Wa r) he wrote: " My propositions serve as elucida­ tions i n the following way : anyone who understands me eventually rec­ ognizes them as nonsensical, when he has used them as steps to climb up beyon d them." At the beginning of h i s other book, the Philosophical Investigations, he wrote: "It is not impossible that it should fall to the lot of this work, in its pove rty and in the darkness of this time, to bring light i n to one brain or another-but, of course, it is not likely." On ce, when a student posed a question during one of his classes at Cambri dge, Wittgenstein said: "I might as well be lecturing to the stove." A box of ' slips of paper-Z ettel -was fou n d among Wittgenstein s effects. On each slip is written a thought. The order of the slips, if any, is of course unascertai nable. To come to s o me u nderstanding of them is not, as Sir Thomas Browne would cheer u s on, beyond all conjecture, but we must go about it with the ghost of Wittgenstein whispering: " But, of course, it is not li kely." Wittgenstein before he came to ph ilosphy was a mathematici an, a musician , an archi tect, a sculptor, a mechanical engineer, a grade-school teacher, a soldier, and an aviator. He could h ave followed any of these careers doubtless with brilliant success; just before he came to Cambridge (they gave hi m a doctorate at the door) h e was strongly i nclined to "be an aeronaut." Every accoun t of his strange life i ndicates that he tried to teach . He did not dine with the faculty, as the faculty in its grandeur always dines in academic gowns, black shoes, and neck tie. Wittgenstein was forever tieless and wore a suede j acket that opened and closed with that marvellous i nvention the zipper; and his shoes were brown. He held his lectures in his rooms, in the continental manner. As there was n o fu rniture except a n a r m y cot, a folding chair, a safe (for t h e Zettel ), and a card ta ble, the students brought their own chairs. Philosophy classrooms in our century have frequently been as dramatic as stages: Santayana, Samuel Alexander, Bergson- men of passionate articulateness w hose lec­ tures fell on their students like wind and rain. But Wittgenstei n , huddle d in silence on h i s chair, stamm ered quietly from ti me to time. He was committed to absolute honesty . Nothing-nothing at all-was to be al­ lowed to escape analy si s. He had nothing up his sleeve; he had nothing to teach. The world was to h i m an ahsolute puzzle, a great lump of opaque pig i ron. Can we think about the lump? What is thought? Wh at is the meaning of can, of can we, of can we think ? What is the me aning of we? Wh at does it mean to ask what is the meaning of we? If we answer these questions on Monday , are the answers valid on Tuesday? If I answer them at all, do I thin k the answer, believe the answer, k n ow the answer, or imagine the answer?

VVittgcn stcln 333

It wa s app are ntl y n o t of t h e lea st interest t Wi. ttgenstelll tha t Pla to h a d ans wered cer tain que stio ns tha t p hi! � osop ers n eed to ask, or that Kant or Mencius h ad an swe re d th em . H e som etim es like d los op her s' que stio ns· he oth er phi seem s nev er to h ave pa . ' d any att ent wn ans we rs. Truth was stu to the ir bbo rn·' w·Ittgenstem . was stu bbo rn; and nei the r fac ed the oth er dow n We h ave to l oo k b ack t o th e stm c Mu som. us to find ano the r ma n so nak dl h . eIf so tg he aded y sing l le-m in ?ed. He a ctua l ly taught for very �l ttl� o��:s li fe . H e was for eve r gm ng off mto the No rwe gia n forests to R ssi a to the west of Ireland where- an d i is a l l we k now of th�'se , � th s sol1 t ud es- h e tau gh t th e Conn em ara bI. rd s to come and sit in his h an ds H e mastere d no con ven . t ton oth er t h an spe ech we ari ng clo the s ' a n d- g ' ru dgm - g I y and w'· th camp atn 1 · t- the s y mb ols of m ath em atic s. The dai ly . . cho res o f our CIV! , Iza uon wer e won ders to h . an d wh en he partici pat tm , ed in the m th �y b �arn e as stra nge as hou sek eep ing a mo ng the Ban tu . ­ He lik d a h Ing �'s es af er a me al. He pu t dis hes and silv erw are in the . the �atl�u �' s t ud Ie ; car e u lly t h e deterg ent , tem per atu re of the wa ter the ' a n d spe n t h our s at h1s - tas k ' an d h ours more 111 the n n sw g and drv in If he was a es for vera days , all the ] to be iden tica l wi�h ;h fl rs meals h ad : � e t , wh e ; er rea ��ast , lun ch, o r din ner . What he ate wa s of no ma . tte r' -1. u s t so It wa s a I wa ys th e sam e. H e 1 Iste car efu lly to h u m an spe · ned . ech ' an d too k It to pie ces bef ore one 's eye s. Lan gu ag e ' he de cide d ' wa s a gam e men h ad lea rne d to p I ay, an d he wa alw ays , lik e an ant hro s po log ist from M a s, . try mg to find out the rule Wh en he lay dyi ng o f s. can cer at hI. s doctor�s h . ous e ' th e d oct or ' s k Ill . rem em ber ed his bir thd d wif e ay and ba k e d h I. m a cak e. Mo reo ver , she wro te it wit h icin g ' "M any on H app · y Retu rns . , Wh en w·Ittg - ask ed enstem she ha d exa mi ned the her i f . . tw , m p I Ica ns of tha t sent I' me nt, she b an d dro pp ed the cak urs t mt o tea rs e " Yo u see, w·ittg enstem said to the doctor w he a rrived on the s � " l . hen ce e ' h ave nei th er the cak e nor . an ans we r to my qu est ion ." So me da ys bef ore . ' the doctor, s wif e, p atie nt ma rty r i n the hi story of p hil oso ph y ha d sh ow n Wmgen stem her new coat tha t she wa s to we ar to a pa rty . th� t v eve mg . Sile ntl y h e fetched the len tly he sn ippe d t scis sor s, si­ �7 h e b u on s rrom the coa t, sile ntl y he rep lac sci ssors. Th e sain . ed the ted WI fe rem ark ed th a t ' yes m - d eed ' com e to thi n k the coat did loo k of it' better WI" th OU t I. tS b Utt ons ' but on 1 y wh en th op ene d a t Doom e seals are will the p hilu sop h er, s . ski. ll Wit h the SCi sso rs dec lar e its mean ing . Except for the ma the ma tic ian Da vid Pin sen t, to wh om the Tra ctatus dedi cat ed and wh o . is . wa s k 1"Il e d m h t . F e I rst Wo rld W ar, h e was 1 uck less fnen d s; he see m s . i n to h ave not ice - d wo me n m ord er to k no w wh ere to flee Th e I. dea of a fema . . le p h . lo h er ad hi clo se h�s ey� s in desp Insa n ity and suici air . de ran :n ��� f�m i7y . � � e p ead ed Wit h his stu ta ke menia l jo bs den ts to (as h e did from tim e to . tim e, as a cou ntr y sch oo ltea che r '

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334

The Geography of the Imagination

and m echanic) . Life was perhaps a strange disease which one su ffered with

heroism;

thought was

certainly

a disease which

philosophy,

perhaps, could cure. Like Henry Adams he felt that a healthy intellect

would be unaware of itself, and wo uld get on with life's busi ness, m a ki ng beautiful m a chi nes, music, and poetry, without reflection. Whatever the

truth of the worl d, it was simple i n the sense that one can say, for in­ stance, that death is not a part of li fe (one of the perceptions i n the Trac­

tatus ) and that the world is independent of my will (another) ; and it was complex in the sense that all that happens is the result of many causes not all of which can ever be known . It is only Wittgenstein's writi ng in the middle of h i s career that gives one fits-the part that gave birth (to h i s regret) to li nguistic analysis, philosophy's darkest night. The early work-the Tractatus -is lucid and powerful. The newly discovered Zettel can only be comp ared to the fragments of Heraclitus. Indeed, Wi ttgenstein admired all his life the epigrams of the a cid-tongued Lichtenberg, and felt that thought was bas­ i cally perception. What the philosopher says about the world is not too different from the p roverb, the old saw, the in finitely repeatable line of poetry. It is clear that the Zettel are a return to the manner of the Trac­

tatus, back to the archaic period of phi losophy, back before the talkative charm of Socrates. The philosopher, as Wyndham Lewis sai d of the ar­ tist, goes back to the fish. Physics in Wittgenstein ' s lifetime was going back to Heraclitus (a clue to cracking the atom was found in Lucretius by Niels Bohr) ; so was a rt; so was architecture. What could be more nakedly Pythagorean than the geodesic structures of Buckmi nster Fuller, what more household caveman tha n the p aintings of Paul Klee? One definition of modern is a renaissance of the archai c (as the Renaissance was a reach­ ing back to Hellenism, to Rome, to a ripened civilization rather than to the green springtime of that same civilization) . "The limits of my language are the li mits of my world." "The mos t beautiful order of the world is sti ll a random gathering of things insig­ ni ficant in themselves." Which is Heraclitus, which Wi ttgenstei n ? "The philosopher," says one of the Zettel, "is not a citizen of any com munity of ideas. That is what makes him a philosopher." And: "What about th e sentence- Wie ist es mit dem Satz - 'One cannot step into the same r iver twice' ?" That Her aclitean perception has always been admired for its hidden second meaning. One cannot step . . . ; it is not only the flux of the river that m a kes the statement true. But is it true? No, Wittgenstei n would smile (or glare), but it is wise and interesti ng. It can be examined .

It is harmonious and poetic. The more we read Wittgenstein the more we feel that he is befo re Heraclitus, that h e deliberately began a n i n finite recession (in order, of

Wittgenstein 335

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cou rse , to go for wa rd . wh en he fou nd a f u ng) . He bow ed out of tra dit ion wh ere by all the . ph il oso p hers dtg est a oth e r phi loso phe . rs, ref utin g and enr ich ing for min . g a l l egt ances an d enm . . tne s ' an d emt· ttm ' · g t h etr sto n of wh at the ver y hav e lea rne d from a con uer ed v ntage wh . � tch mu st be def end ed nig ht and da � . . ec n d to n pect the hist philoso p hy. It is q uest i � �� ory of e Ie h e a ever com und ers tan din g o f the e to any num b e r 2 · T o what . gs T wo th m would have to be � ide ntical, wh ich is a bsu ? . . rd I f I dent tty h as any . m ean mg . 0 ne o f the Zettel wo nde rs wh at the phr ase " fr · e dl y h an d' ' l c d oul mea n. Anoth er , if the . . abse nce of fe elin g is a fee l i ng th er, I f h IS sto ve has a n ima ina tion and wh at it me ans to � ass um e . at e s ov d oes no hav . e an l lna gm ano n. � Wittg ens tein did not a rgu e·, he m ere y t o u ?h t h i mse lf into sub tler and dee per pro ble ms . Th e rec ord wh Ic . h th ree o f h Is students h . a ve rna d e o f h ts 1 ectures and con ver sat ion s at C . b .d dts c 1 oses a ma n tra gic all! bon ­ est and wo nde rfu lly, ast oun din s d · l n every m em Oi r o f him we mee t a ma n we are hun gry to k � ow mo re a bou t, for eve n i f h i s eve ry sen ten ce rem ain s o a ue . to l t IS t at e arc hai c tra nsp are ncy of his tho ugh t is li k n thin g at p h p y as see n for tho usa nds of yea rs. It is als o cle ar tha t he t try . ng to be wise a nd to m a ke wis e. He lived in the wo others rld at or t e war Id . He cam e to bel ieve tha t a nor ma l, hon est hum an b i g c u l d not be a pro fess or. It is the aca that gave him his rep dem y ura ion o p ene trab le abstrusen � ss; nev er has a ma n des erv ed a rep uta � tion I s . p le wh c a me to him expecti n � to find a man of i ncr edibly dee l a r g, oun a ma n who saw . ma nkm d held together b sufferi n I d ln n. abl y advised them kin d as pos si bl to to be as oth er . I e a l � qulSl. tlve me n, to mu ltip ly his exp erie nce . He read Tolsto y (a ays getttng bog ged dow n) � Go spe ls and bal es and the of detec(l ve sto nes . He sho ok his hea d ove When he d. e d h e wa r Fre ud · s rea dm g Blac k B eau l ty. H.ts last wo rds wer e : "Te the m I've h ad a wo ll nd erf ul life ."

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Hohhitry

337

N o t until years later could I k n o w t h a t this vague a n d incomprehen­ si ble lecturer, having poked a round on a page of the dread "Anglo-Saxon Chronicle" for an hour, muttering p lace na mes and chuck ling over var­ iant readi ngs, biked out to Sand field Road in Headington and moved Frodo and S a m toward Mordor. Even when I came to read The Lord of the Rin gs I had trouble, as I still do, realizing that i t was written by the m u m bling and pedantic Prof.

J.

R. R. Tolkien . Nor have I had m uch luck in blending the professor and the author i n

my m i n d . I'v e spent a delicious afternoon in Tolki en's rose garden talking with his son, and from this conversation there kept emerging a fond father who never qu i te noticed that his children h ad grown up, and who, as I gathered, came and went between the real world and a world of his

own invention. 1 remembered that Sir Walter Scott's son grew up in ig­

norance that his father was a novelist, and re marked as a lad in his teens when he was among men discussin g Scott's genius, "Aye, i t's common ly him is first to see the hare."

Nor, talk i n g with his bosom friend H. V. G. ("Hugo") Dyson , could I

get any sense of the Tolkien who i nvented hob bits and the most wonder­ ful adventures since Ariosto and Boia rdo. " Dear Ronald," Dyson said, "writing all those silly books with three i ntroducti ons and ten appen­ dixes. H i s was not a true i magination, you k now: H e made it all up." I have tried for fi fteen years to figure out what Dyson meant by that re­ mark. The closest I h ave ever gotten to the secret an d in ner Tolkien was in a casual conversation on a snowy d ay in Shelbyville, Kentucky . I forget

H ob bitry

how in the world we came to talk of Tolkien at all, but I began p lying questions as soon as I knew that I was talki n g to a man who had been at Oxford as a classmate of Ronald Tolkien's. He was

me, phi lolo gy is tot will alw ays be bey ond ce l n the sad list of things tha om obi le or pro nou n ina bili ty to driv e an aut ch ward th e ��p , up WI' th m tea to es siti ver two uni . T e we l l-m ean t efforts of the word m!f ron ng. " te an d spe ak) . Old Enwn to , are htm . nig g recu rrin · t I h ave no mte nt1o n me to read (and in a d II e ca es etim som they ' glis h or Ang lo-S axo n as dgme nt D ay I shall are per man ent. On lJu s dge gru e Som g. ivin r of f sin k i n g . to beg rudge l� arn mg h o w pro ud y a n d stu bbo rnly on g . d l ive mac hme -gu n fi re, an ship how to craw l und er gy of holo rp mo d an e with the syn tax arro w The first pro fess or to h , and s ark rem his in de d ech l m ic, O l d En glish h ad a spe oth l in G l up we e er · h l s, f his we, t tha k thm to s I see med allu ded to. Ho w wa . mm a r o f w h.1c h h e f reely gra e th h I s c W d an aErse, . ' k of one of our exa mm day wn tten on th e bac one ad h he t tha now . k to . d a h o bb I t" '. 1 IVe . e i n the gro und th ere uon p a per s, " I n a hol

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h istory teacher,

Th e Lord of the

R ings.

Indeed , he was astonished and p leased to k now that h i s friend of so m any years ago had made a n am e for himself a s a writer. " Im agine th at! You know, he used to have the most extraordinary interest i n the people h ere in Kentucky. He could never get enough of my tales of Kentucky folk. He used to m ake me repeat fa mily na mes like Barefoot and Boffin and Baggins and good country h ames li ke that." And out the window I could see tobacco barns. The charming anach­ ronism of the hobbits' pipes suddenly made sense in a new way. The Shire a nd its settled m a nners and shy hobbits h ave m any antecedents i n

folklore and in reality-I remember the fun recently of looking out of a n English bus and seeing a roadsign pointing to Butterbur. Kentucky , i t seems, contri buted its sh are. Practi cally

all

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The Geography of the I magin ation

r in She l­ e that aren 't can be foun d ove Lex ingt on pho ne boo k, and thos k with Tal g. and cure pipe -we ed for a livin byv ille. Like as not , they gro w " righ t " tell, ase are pur e hob bi t: "I hea r them , and thei r turn s of phr eith er oved and second cou sin, onc e rem agin ," "so Mr. Fro do is his fi rst but rse, cou of The se are Eng lish locu tion s, way ," "th is v ery mon th as i s ." . land in Ken tuck y than in Eng one s that are hea rd oftener now folk ett what his talk of Ken tuck y Barn I desp aire d of tryi ng to tell the of d Lor n. I urg� d him to read The became in Tol kien 's imagin atio he at th w kno t er cros sed aga in, I don' Rings but as our path s hav e nev g alon ks wal in ted by an Oxfo rd fi re and did . No r if he kne w tha t h e crea ks, buc ndy Bra gins es, Bof fins , Too ks, the Che rwe ll and Isis the Bag t, as a , and Pro udfoots (or Prou dfee dies Gru bbs, Bur row ses, Goo dbo stud y ial spec the who wer e, we are told , bran ch of the fam ily will h av e it) ful bash r thei in ard who was interested of Gan dalf the Gre y , the only wiz and cou ntrifi ed way s.

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Dictionary Some years ago on a particu 1 ar1 y distraught evening, th e d n. ft of th .mgs ' . mto chaos wa · d b y consu lting Webster's Th ird lnterna,· Itate tiona! for the user. wanted to know was whether it sported _ $47 50 for my Webster's · it an umlaut or not . It wasn , t th ere I paid . a table for it as' it weighs as mu ch as a six-year-old g1 rI · an d 1 h ad to b UIId ' '. . is too bulky t0 go I nto a b ookshelf and WI· 1 1 anyway come all to pi eces unless it sits open d a y and i gh t. An d no M � user. Indeed, Webster's is wary of trade names of an o menti on all proper names w hat­ � tnotottoXerox ever. They recognize k leen x ) , fngz daz re (but not jockey sh orts ) , kodak (but not Buffe in ) b a 'k h a ' a oo o b , :, , , , ; � a g D JctJOn Js thoroughly conservative; one word per object admo s he M use. I once popped

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. le drugstore next . door to the Rhumerie martiniquaise on the Into Boulevard St.-Germam. "E t a Iors, " I said ' "est-ce que vous avez mouth ':f;: '/:: ;:.��i��:�:;'�S��""d, ··vou< voukz di" I' k ex! Stan Brakhage, the film-maker, was once sho��:g �':; �m acial n�ze an��her name for Scotties, the purpose bemg to get people to . de P ap te · r. "An d now ' sweeth eart ," :aid the formidable for mouchozrs Brakhage to th e mop pet who was the star of his commercial ' "when l hold up my h an d ' .blow your . nose on the kleenex. " If' however' you put the word kleenex Into pnnt, you will .receive . by next mail a stern letter from the manufacturers of same pomtmg o t that you should have � Kleene (Reg. Trade h e h a e IV en up expecting n �::���:�. �:ti:g �hat � y�u. persist in writing klee�� �a�� �:��� t t Kleenex, a b Ig blu e p oliceman wdl appear at your d oor. . . people, who mamtam a burn baiTff I wh o d oes nothing but search public writ looking for xe:ox; then he pounces. . of No won der dicuonanes have a nervous vi ew of a whole . family words which the pe�p 1 e use with In th e . . utter abandon and licentiousness. new American Hentage Dtctzonary of) the English Language, for m­ stance, we fi n d Cok e . (Reg. Trade Mark b ut not C oca-Cola. (The senior members of my fami ly do�n in South Carolina always refer to CocaCola as "a dope," and my mtrepi. d moth er calls it "a Pepsi," enough to make the public relations �oys m Atlanta weep d rin their hands.) The AHDEL is generous With names abormng, b:� o�y ;ithin cautious . limits. Thermofax, for instance, an d k otex are not, as far as t h e A mencan . Henta.ge. peop 1e ��e ���cer; ed� part of our language. A d ICtiOnary s u y efi itio n be the vocabulary of a language, a uters Languages task beyond both human effort and t . ht f are intractable for the simple. reaso? t�:t���y a�e ��Jty ali�e, dropping s (The AHDEL dutifully d lo g :s�; ;u��k , : ���: :!�i � o�y;;,���i��� n i :�: ;��: :��� : Wake as Finnegan's Wak e glVlng e � ;�� i a vocabular scientist whimsically took its.n�me.) tctually a . ct. ����:;u:e t restricted by the concept of dictiOn: t e range o wo . . t. at a partie:. 1 ar time, ·f-big if'-diction were of a coherence. It Isn . . 11 y ar­ · Is· hierarchtca The part of a language in use at any given ttme ranged in two great patterns, a vertical one li s:�r �� ��e ure and Olymthe low and racy pian style of Santayana or Henry jame , a� s i � abble of modern poets an d use d -car ea .ers. There . is overlying this an �orizontal gradation of dialect and p rof�ssion�l Jar�o�' ��g��h e; : ith the disastrous traumas f ed uca twn w h.erem nauve dI a ec g e t color and precision have been badgered mto bem. g "correct" English. Thus

Dic tion ary 341

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"between you and I and "irregardless" and "l hav e sa w," and all the other mo nsters whose" inc ept ion can be laid at the sor e teacher. And then there was the stern hand of No feet of the English wh o felt tha t everyth ing in a word tha t cou ld ah Webster him self, pronounced sho uld : hen ce, falcon pronou nced so tha t its firs t syll abl e be rhy dread bird is a fawk 'n. And forehead, pronou nce mes with shall. That tha n forrid. The AH DE L mis pronou nces the one, d ad litteram, rather but heroically holds to tradition wit h the other. Along with a pervas deterioration of idio m and the chronic mis­ behavior of pro nou ns ive in the obj ect ive cas e, the mo st thoroughgoing abuse of English by American tongues is the pro nun ciat ion of words seen but apparently never heard, and I fear me that the AH DE L offe rs encour­ agement to these ignorances by listing the mispro nun cia tion s {e.g . h over, plo ver, kiln ), as a sec ond and the refo re goo d eno ugh pro nun cia tion . Th e format of this diction ary follows that of the Lar ous se dic tion arie and encyclopedias in Fra nce, placin g the illu strations in an ample margins. These are for the most par t sharply reproduced photographs, breaking the tradition, tha nk goodness, the drawing and wood engraving. There is an ann oyi ng up-to-dateness inofthe wh at U Thant looks like, but not SirseleWactioltern ofScoillu strations. One can see not Joh n Ad am s. Giorgio de Chirico is misspelledtt; Jomo Kenyatta, but The wh ole virtue of a dic tion ary, however, is as "di Chirico." in the cision with which it defines words is here that the AHDEL pre appearance and sits in the. Anmudckit bes crisp ide Webster's Third andlosallestheitsrest our i:ime, with the exception of the old Collier's New Century Dictionaryin, one of the nobler efforts of Wi llia m Jam and his circle. But the art of defi nition seems to hav e died with SamuelesJoh n, wh ose stern clarities can stil l be detected behind the graceless manso raphy. For example, the AH DEL's defi nition ofngles of modern lexicog­ specifically, a me tal rod use d to stir a fire ," poker, "on e tha t pok es; Joh nso n's "the iron bar with which men stir the isfirea ."spa stic version of Scratch, "a line like ma rk ed by scratching" (AH DEL) : "an inc i­ sio n ragged and sha llow" (Joprohnsduc on) . Pastor, " a Christian minister in his capacity of hav ing spi ritu al charge ove r a congregation or oth er group" (AH DEL); "a clergyman wh o has the car of a flock; one who has souls to fee d with sou nd doctrine" (John son ). eJoh imagistic rather than schematic; where modernso n's science is of course taxonomy (Scorpion, "an y of the various aran dictionaries give us cold chnids of the order Scor­ pio nid a . . . "), johnson offered a homely poetrymu ch rese mbling sma ll lob ster, but that his tail Scorpion, "a reptile ends in a poi nt with a very venomous stina g." An d for all of joh nso n's fam grouch rum blin g out latinate words, it is he and e as a pedantic old not a modern dic tionary

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342

b l u nt defi niti on. For shru b blurt out a sim ple, . w h o can b e counte d on to · ht . " J oh son ·. ." a h etg dy plan t o f rela tive ly Io w the AH DE L give s " a woo Web ster s Thu d wed A H D E L h avin g follo bus h a smaI I tree. , A n d (the T l tt ) 1oo k wh gent o of wor ds once tabo o , ( AH DEL ) , out f the Freu dian j u ngle nate n u to of a eup hem ism : pzss , l ea ps quic kest to the safety n). "to mak e wat er" (Joh nso f c -boo k s ht to be one' s han dy spel ling oug A good dict iona ry L e T . age s u ect . ds, and guide t.o corr enli g hten men t for hard wor ' h a s add ed any new quality it that t see don I but e w1' Il serv e for all of thes ' t th e des k·, copy to the. offic e, to orna men . ograp hy I shal l take my to 1ex1c J oh nso n ' · Its d an tury . all kee p its Am en can Cen m wor ktab le at h ome sh ble a c­ etra mpe an or � l wor d com es alon g a d whe n a hair y scie ntifi c rna­ Inte d Thir 's ster ss the room to Web rony m, I shal l still wal k acro . me. a regi stered trad e n a tion a l , hop ing that it isn't

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Since the days when Randolph of Roanoke tried to talk the Senate i nto outlawing the bowdlerized text of Shakespeare, such as h igh schools still use, American l i teracy in p u blic places has drifted the other way . Now we h ave Tarzan tossed out of a Califo rnia grade school, for living in sin with Jane. This happened over the Christmas holidays, and cries and counter­ cries went up. Grosset and Dunlap assu red the Repu blic that Lord Greys­ toke and Miss Jane Porter, of Baltimore, were married with full rites of the Church of England, on page 3 1 3 of The Return of Tarzan, the second of the twelve-volu me saga. The good folk of Downey, Cal i f., were think­ ing of Hollywood's Tarzan.

In Burroughs's pages, when Miss Porter met Tarzan formally-she h ad seen him previously when he rescued her from the attenti ons of the ape Terkoz, a s uitor u nacceptable to La Porter-he could read and write 343

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The Geography of the Imagination

English ( a trifle mushily) , could speak " ape and a little elephant," and French. By the sixth volume of the epic Tarzan speaks Arabic, English, German, Bantu, a great deal of elephant, Swahili, French, monkey, Mid­ dle English, lion, A byssinian, and has a fair understanding of A meri can . So it goes. O pen y o u r Frankenstein a n d h e a r the monster quoting Aes­ chylus; see him Byronizing over the sublimity of the Alps; look at the poor critter in Hollywood's hands.

A grumpy stickler for consistency might. complain that it ' s not fair to

deteriorate both ways: to debase Tarzan with one hand and then ban him with the other for being a vulgar shadow of his chivalric sel f. And Tar­ zan, i f you will, is immoral. To the student of ideas he is the man super­ ciliously above the law, the superman with lifted nose. He is, in fact, Sherlock Holmes catalyzed by Rousseau and Fenimore Cooper and set in D a rwin's imaginary jungle, fit and surviving. And Holmes i s but Walter Pater dressed up like a sleuth so that the British public could participate, after all, in the arcane doings of the Aesthetes ( Holmes the most dedi­ cated and last Pre-Raphaelite of them all) . But you can't have everything as clear as you would like. Tarzan isn't ever going to be banned because the sensibilities i n those novels a re blunt and numb and are frequently in contempt o f the kind of blundering jus­ tice which the rest of us have to make do with. As matters stand we can only urge Mr. Burroughs's authentic Tarzan on, good-hearted lunkhead and brilliant linguist that he is; for, comp a red to his diminuendo in film,

comic book, and vacuum tube, he is a gran d and noble creature indeed and, alas, worth a defense.

The An th ro po logy of Ta ble M an ne rs fro m Ge op hagy O nw ar d

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A bus ine ssm an no w nse n o a VIce -pre side ncy tells me tha t i n his app ren tice days he us e d t o cro ss e epest Ark ans as as a mer e trav elin g sale sma n and tha t the re wer e cert _ ' am farm s at whi ch men f rom h IS . com pan y put u p ove rnig ht, me als bei ng inc luded in the deal O nee, on a new rout e h e a p p eare d at b rea k fast ' afte r a refresh ing slee p in a feat her bed to face a h ar d y arr ay of bu t tery eggs, b' scm. ts, app le pie; coffee, and fatb ack . � Th is I t r ltem w as u n fam .lhar to him and from the look s of it he was dam ne d e wou l d eat lt. He kne w his man n r h owev , an . d In pas smg ove the fatb ack cha � tted wit h the lady of t e ous e a out how eati ng h a bi ts ten d to be loc al ' i nd IV! · .d u a I ' and a mat ter of ho w one h as been rai sed H e h ope d s h e wou ldn 't take It w rong t h at h c , unu sed to con sum mg fatb ack ' left it unt ou c he d on h IS ' p l ate. ·

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The genial Arkansas matron nodded to this poli tely, agreei ng that food is different all over the world. She then excused herself, Happed her copious apron, and retired from the kitchen. She returned with a double-ba rreled shotgun which she trained on the traveling salesman, with the grim remark, " Eat hit." And eat hit he did. Our traveler's offense was to reject what he had been served, an insult in practically every code of table manners.. Snug in an igloo, the Eskimo scrapes gunk from between his toes and politely offers It as garnish for your blubber. Among the Penan of the up per Baram in S � ra wak y �u e �t your friend's snot as a sign of y our esteem. There are dmner p art1es m Africa where the butter for your stewed calabash will be mi lked from

your hostess's hair. And you dare not refuse. . Eating is always at least two activi ties : cons umi ng food and obeymg a code of manners. And in the manners is concealed a program of taboos as rigid as Deuteronomy. We rational, advanced, and liberated Americans may not, as in the Amazon, serve the bride' s mother as the we dmg fea st; . we may not, as in Japan, burp our appreciation, or as in Arab1 a, eat w1th . our fingers. Every child has su ffered initiation into the mystenes of table manners : keep your elbows off the table, ask for things to be passed rather than reach, don 't cut your bread with a knife, keep your mouth closed while chewing, don't talk with food in you r mouth, and on and on, and all of it witchcraft and another notch upward in the rise of the middle class. Our escapes from civilization are symptomatic: the first :ule we break is th at of table manners. Liberty wears her reddest cap ; all is permitted. I remember a weekend away from paratrooper barracks when we dined ? n eggs scrambled i n Jack Daniel' s, potato chips and peanut bn ttle, wh1le the Sergeant Major, a family man of bankerish decorum m ordmary times, s a ng falsetto "There Will be Peace in the Valley" stark naked except for cowboy boots and h at. . . But to children, hardest pressed by gentility at the table, a httle bendmg of the rules is Cockayne itself. One of my great culi nary moments was being taken as a tot to my b l ack nurse's h ? usc to eat clay What this . child needs," she h ad muttered one day wh1 le we were out, IS a ba1t of clay ." Everybody in So uth Carolina knew that black , for reasons un­ known, fancied clay. Not unnl I came to read Toynbcc s A Study of Hts­ tory years later did I learn th at eating clay, or geophagy, IS a prehistonc habi t ( i t fills the stomach until you can bring down another a urochs) surviving only in West Africa and South Carolina. I even had the oppor­ tunity, when l met Toynbee at a scholarly do, to say that I had been m my day geophagous. He gave me a strange, British look.

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The eatin g took place in a bedr oom , for the galva nized buck et of clay was kept unde r t�e bed, for the coo l. It was blue clay from a creek , the . cons � stenc of sligh tly gritt y ice cream � . It lay smoo th and delic ious­ Iook mg In Its pail of clear wate r. You scooped i t out and ate it from your hand . The tas e w s who lesome, mine � ral, and emp hatic . I have since � eaten man y thmgs m respectab le resta uran ts with far more trepi datio n. The techm cal n ames have yet to be inven ted for some of the subm is­ . sions to cour tly beha vior laid upon me by table man ners. At dinn ers cooked by bride s in the early day of s their appr entic eship I h ave forced down boile? potat oes as crunchy a . s wate r chest nuts, bleeding pork , gravy m which you coul d h ave pickl ed a kettle of herri ng ' and a puree of raw chick en livers . I have had repo rts of wom en with skim py atten tion to la bels who h ave made biscuits with plast er of Paris and chicken feed that had to b downed by timid husb ands a nd polite gues ts; and my v entur esom e Aun Mae once prep ared a salad with witch haze l, and once , i n a mom ent of a ando ?e creat ivity , served a bana na pudd ing that had h ard-b oiled eggs hidden m It here and there . Raph ael Pum pelly tells in his mem oirs of the Wes t in the good old days abou t a two- gunn ed, bear ded type who rolle d i nto a Colo rado hotel with a VIand wrap ped i n a band na. This he requested the cook � to prep are, and seate d at a ta ble, napkmed, wield ing knife and fork with manners pass ably E stern cons ultin g the salt and pepp er shak ers with a nicety, � ; gave a fa1r Imita tion of a gent lema n eatin g. And then, with a gleam in his eye and a grea t b urp, he sang out at the end, " Thar , by God , I swor e I'd eat that man 's liver and I've done it! " The �canin g o f t h i s acco unt for those of us w ho are great scien tists i s that this hero of th e West chose to eat h i s enem y's liver i n the dinin g . room of a hote l, wtth man ners . Eatin g as mere cons ump tion went out th�u sand s of years ago; we ave forgo tten what it is. Chap lin bonin g the . n ads from his stewe d sh 10 The Gold Rush is thus an incom parab le ?� . mlZln mom ent of sanre , epitO g all that we have heard of Briti sh gentl emen dre.ssmg for dmn er 10 the Cong o ( like Livin gston e, who mad e Stan ley Walt before the famo us enco unter u ntil he could dig his form al wear out of his kit). Rusk in and Turn er neve r di ned toge ther, thou gh an invit ation was once sent. :rurne r knew that his man ners were n't up to those o f the re­ fined Rusk ms, and said so, expl ainin g grap hica lly that, being tooth less, he suck ed his mea t. Prop riety bei g prop riety , there was noth ing to be � done , and the grea t pain ter and his grea t expl icato r and defen der were dam ned to dine apar t. Nor coul d Wittgens tein eat with his fello w dons at a Cam bridge h igh

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table. One wishes that the reason were more straightforward than it i s . Wittgenstein , for one thing, wore a leather jacket, with zipper, and dons at high table must wear academic gowns and a tie. For another, Wi ttgen­ stein thought it u ndemocratic to eat on a level fourteen inches higher than the students (at, does one say, low table?). The code of Cambri dge manners could not insist that the p hi losopher change his leather j a cket for more formal gear, not could i t interfere with his conscience. At the s a me time it could in no wise permit h i m to dine at high table improperly dressed. The compromise was that the dons sat at high table, the students at thei r h umbler tables, and Wittgenste i n ate be­ tween, at a card table, separate but equal, and with English decorum un fractured. Maxi m's declined to serve a meal to Lyndon Baines Joh nson, at the ti me President of the United States, on the grounds that its staff did not have a recipe for Texas barbecue, though what they meant was that they did not know h o w to serve it or how to criticize Monsieur le President's manners in eating it. The best display of manners on the part of a resta u rant l have witnes­

sed was at the I mperi al Ramada I n n in Lexi n gton , Kentucky, into the Middle Lawrence Welk Baroque dining room of which I once went with the photographer Ralph Eugene Meatyard (disguised as a businessman) , the Trappist Thomas Merton ( i n m u fti, dressed as a tobacco farmer w ith a tonsure), and an editor of Fortune w h o had wrecked his Hertz car coming from the airport and was covered i n spattered blood from head to toe. Hollywood is used to such things ( Li n da D a rnell h aving a mi lk shake with Frankenstei n's monster between takes) , and Rome and New York, but not Lexington, Kentucky. Our meal was served with no comment whatever from the waitresses, despite Merton's downing s i x m a rtinis and the Fortune editor stanch i n g his wou nds w ith all the napkins. Posterity is always grateful for notes o n the table m anners o f the fa­ mous, if only because this i n formation is wholly gratuitous and u nen­ lightening. Wh at does it tell us that Montaigne glupped his food? I have eaten with Allen Tate, whose sole gesture toward the meal was to stub out h i s cigarette i n an otherwise untouched chef 's salad, with Isak D i ne­ sen when she toyed w ith but did not eat an oyster, with Louis Zukofsky who was di ning on a half pi ece of toast, crumb by crum b . Manners su rvive the test o f adversi ty. Gertrude E l y , the Philadelphia hostess and patron of the arts, was once i n spi red on the spur of the mo­ ment to i nvite home Leop old Stokowski and his orchestra, together with a few fri en ds. Hai ling her butler, she said breezi l y that here were some people for pot luck. " Madam," said the butler with considerable frost, " I was given to un-

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de rst and tha t you we re din ing alo ne thi s ev emn . g,. plea se acc ept m n ati on . Go od nig ht y resi. gto you a l l . " " Qu ite ," sai d Miss . Ely who then w ith a gr CJ usn ess u n flum an d abs olu te, set eve � � ' mo xed ry ta le in the h o u se and dis tnb ute d spl int ers of the one bak ed hen at her . dis p osa I , pm ch es . of l et t uce, an d d rops na ise, no t qu ite wi o f m a yan th the succes r s o f th e l oa ves and fish es of scr ipt ure at lea st a spe ck o f som , bu r eth ing ror eve ry . bo dy . I , v., ho h ve alm ost exc lus ive ! . o f f f . e d ba lon ey, Cam p bel l's ou Sn ick ers ba rs, wo uld p, and � no t fin d a ble n _ lar ner s o f any p art icu they had no t' eve n 1 Int . ere st i f i n a li' fe as re c u . s1ve and u nev entfu l as so ma ny bru she s wit . e, I nvo lve d mm h dea th . Th a gre at wo ma n Ka the n ne � ph ilo sop her an d aes Gil bert, the the tic ian o nee I SJst e tha t I eat som e Fl ter tha t Benedetto ' ore nti ne but­ Cr oc e ha d giv en er. I ad do wn ed sev m u ffin s sm ear ed wi era l po rtio ns o f . th th'IS Im po rta nt b utte r bef re I gathere on go ing co nv ers ati d from her ? o n tha t the bu tte r ha d b een gJv en her mo som ew he re i n the nth s bef ore , Tu sca n hil ls in the m o nth of Au gus t, and crossed the At lan tic tha t it had by bo at pack e d Wit _ h her b oo k s, I ta ]'J a n wt' ld flow ' ers, pro sciut to and ' other me m nto s o f Ita lian cul tur e. ' � Fev er a n d dou . . ble vlsto n set Ill . . . som e h ou s 1ate r, tog eth er Wit h a de!mu m i n whic h I � rem em bere d pl· eo . della MI r a n do Ia ' s I ast me al, ser ved htm by Lu crez i a and Cesar e Bor g J. a. I h a ve be n tn extrem (oc topus an d wh at is in Crete � tas ted lik e s he l l ac k e d n_ ee Wit h p Adam . . Yugos Ia v1a s sJtn . · ey) , t n (a mos t inn oce nt-! oo km g me lon ),' Ge no a (ca lf 's b rai ns ) , En gl and (a blac kish s tew th a t see . me d to ha ve b een coo k e d m Fra nce (an an do uil - ker ose ne) , . lette' Ma i' gre t' s favo nte feed ' the pom · t b em · g, as I now und ers tand, that you . have to b e b oro m Au ve gne to sto ma ch it). Are there n o co un � ter- rna nne rs to sav e one 's )Ife In these un fa J. d oms to po lite nes s r ma rtyr? I h ave he ard tha t Ed w d Dah l be rg h a d the manli­ ness to refu se dish � t es a tabl e b u t h e I o st h Is ne nds the reb mi san thr op e. Lo rd y and bec am e a By ron on'ee re fuse d eve ry c urs e o f a me . by Br eak fas t Ro a 1 ser ved h J m ? gers Ma net h fo d Spam sh foo d rev deter i ned t o stud olt ing but wa s y he pai ti g i n � t e Pra do , spe nt tw nd Wi tho ut eat in o we eks m Ma d­ a n y thi n at all. Som e Przvatdozent wit h ha n ds shou l d co tim e on his p i le a eu ogy to tho se cul ina ry stoics wh o, Anto nv dra n k fr lik e Ma rc om y e ll ow poo ! s ' men did di e to 1 oo k starvi· ng and dest upo n. Not the . itute w h 0 tn . wa rs a n d s1eg . es h ave eat en t h e glu . b ook bm di. ngs e Ill a n d co rn t h at h a d pas se d t h rou gh ho rse a nd ani m a l s i n s, wa llp ape r, bar k, . the z o o · b pn son ers of CJv Jhz ati on wh gri stle on the twe o h ave sw all ow ed ntie t a em p wh ile kee pin g up a bra ve t he au thor of a ch itc hat wit h n o vel a b out t ree gen era tio ns of a pa fam ily . ssi on ately aliv e Who h as m ann ers an ymo re any ho w ' Nobo d y , to be sur e; eve ryb od y,

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ly the mos t oafis h teen � ager who main if you h ave the scien tific eye. Even will ety soci m and at the Burg er Kmg eats from the refrigerator at h ome re he is unde r the eye of his fathe r­ whe table a even tuall y find hims elf at mak e the effort to wolf his roll in two in-la w to be, or his coac h, and will e som e for the next pers on whe n h e bites rath er than one, and even to leav le e will , natu rally , still char ge h i s who is pass ed a bow l of pota toes . H cake his eat and ck over his wate r, p late with six glop s of cats up, kno , the coun try clu b, and the Rota r­ wife a but from the palm of his h and; d twen ty-fi ve h e' ll be eatin g fruit sala i ans will get him , and befo re he's his ing sipp re befo with the n apki n with exte nded pink y, tapp ing his lips and fond ues with the boys at the s wok ng talki sauterne Alm aden , and

office . that we can desig nate the begi nArch aeol ogis ts h ave rece ntly decid ed shar ing the same kill, in which sim­ ning of civil izati on in the conc ept of . the fam ily, the com m u nity, the state ple idea we can see the ince ptio n of ­ sleep er long o n are that Jack and Jill Of disin tegr ating mar riag es we note whe n they are no long er eatin g to­ is k brea real the ing toge ther whe n d rite. No cultu re has worn the b on­ geth er. The table is the last unas saile Germ ans, who h ave neve r had any net rouge ther e, alwa ys exce ptin g the man ners at all, of any sort . e be the pres sure placed on us of The tyra nny of man ners may therefor g is the mos t i n tima te and at the same su rvivi ng in h ostil e terri totie s. Eatin to function s. Goin g from dinn er table time the mos t publ i c of biolo gica l even her, anot to re cultu g from one dinn er table is the equi vale nt of goin gran dmo th ers served butt er and my of One ly. fami with in the same r wou ld h ave faint ed to see mola sses molasses with her biscu its, the othe with the mea l , the othe r after. One on any table . One gave you coffee r with h amh ock. One put ice cube s cook ed gree ns with fatb ack , the othe hous e. My fathe r used to com plain in your tea, the othe r ice from the ice since the inven tion of the refrigthat he h adn' t h ad any cold i ced tea erator. He was right . one with Engl ish coun try man Cou ld eithe r of my gran dmo ther s, the n on an airpl ane ? Wh at wou ld the ners , the othe r with Fren ch, have eate re foot of sp ace ? My fami ly, alwa ys Roi Solei! h ave done with th at squa until well after the Seco nd Wo �ld shy, did not vent ure into resta uran ts give j ugle t of milk whic h they used to Wa r. Aun t Mae dran k back the tiny of ions port the that ie Buzz Unc le you for coffee, and com men ted to y. things in these cafes are certa inly sting r peop le's cook ing was a m ajor othe g eatin that ve belie to d I was raise I uage or h ow to pilot a plan e. acco mpli sh men t, like learn ing a lang and Gre eks li ved excl usiv ely off g arlic thou ght for the longest time that selpick y a bou t thei r food that they dand elion s, and that Jew s wer e so

Th l' Anth ropolog)' of Table Mannas

35 1

dom ate at all Uncles who had been to Fra nce with the AEF reported that : the French existed on roast rat and snails. The Chi nese ' I learned from a book, begin their meals with dessert. Happy peopl e ! Manners, like any set of signals, constitute a language. It is possible to learn to speak Italian; to eat Italian, never. In times of good breeding, the rebel agamst custom always has table manners to violate . Diogenes as­ su�ed the polish of Dame! Boone, whi le Plato ate with a correctness Emily P � st co �l d have studied with profit. Thoreau, Tolstoy, and Gandhi a l l ate with pomted reservati on, sparely, and in elemental simplicity. Cal­ vm dmed but once a day, on plain fa re, and doubtless imagined the pope . gorgmg himself on pheasant, nigh tingale, and minced boa r in macaroni. J:'l � nest John Ada ms, eating in France for the first time, found the food dehc� ous _If unidentifiable, but blushed at the conversation (a lady asked . him If his famd � had invented sex ) ; and Emerson once had to rap the water glass at his table when two guests, Thoreau and Agassiz, intro­ duced t e matmg o� turtles into the talk. Much Greek philosophy, Dr. Johnson s best one-h ners, and the inauguration of the Christian religion h appened at supper tables. Hitler' s table-talk was so bori ng that Eva Braun and a field marshal once fell asleep in his face. He was in a snit for a month " Generalissimo Franco fell asleep while Nixon was talking to . . h i m at dmner. It may be th at conversation over a shared haunch of emu is m deed the beginning of civilization. To �at in silence, like the Egyptians, seems peculiarly dreadful, and . sn �f. S1r Walter Scott ate with a bagpipe droning in his ear and all his ammals ar�und him, and yards of babbling guests. Only the truly mad eat alone, hke Howard Hughes and Stali n. Eccentricity i n ta ble manners-one h as heard of rich uncles who wear oilcloth aviat �r caps at table-li ngers in the memory longer than other foibles. My spme tmgles anew whenever I remember going into a Toddle House to find all the tables and the counter set; not only set, but served. O�e sea : only was occupied, and that by a ve ry eccentric man, easily a . � Ilhonaire. He was, the waitress explained some days later, giving a �-hnner party there, but no one came. He waited and waited. He h ad done �t several times before; no one had ever come. It was the waitress's opin­ Ion that he always forgot to send the invitations; it was mine that his guests could not bring themselves to believe them. And t here was the professor at Oxford who liked to sit u nder his tea table, hidden by the tablecloth, and hand up cups of tea and slices of cake from beneath . He carried on a lively conversation all the while and most of his friends were used to this. There was always the occasio�al student who c�me to tea unaware, sat goggling the whole time, a nd tended to break mto cold sweats and fits of stammering.

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South or one sum mer eve nin g in . as telli ng abo ut this pro fess I sm, cou lish man ner s. A remote Eng h wit e ienc aud my se amu Ca �o na ' to ly con side red . d from the cou ntry and. had rare a g1rl m her teen s, w h o h ai. I e e h orro r, wen t ned to my ane cdote m grav the way s of fore igne rs, liste hom e and had a fit. . we re tol d qUie t dow n E ffi e M ae," w e "It too k u s h alf the nigh t to cou ld see was that . d for hou rs tha t all . she · som etim e Iater . " She scre ame Wit h a cu p an d wit h just his arm n,�tn u p · bug germ an under tha t tabl e, . ects to get ove r It. sauc er. She says she nev er exp

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The Indian and His Image

"He is smart," the eighty-year-old Crow Plenty Coup said of the white man, " but not wise." At Little Big Horn the medi cine men stole the wits of Custer's cavalrymen, Wooden Legs remembered, so tha t they went crazy and shot each other. The Cheyenne and Sioux, men trained to feign indi fference to danger li ke the bear and to stare at their enemies like the wolf, had also assumed that the United States Army was usually dizzy with fire water. The Columbia Encyclopedia speaks of the " overwhelm­ ing numerical superiority of the Indians" without a word a bout their stone- age weapons. Was the band stil l playing "The Girl I Left Behind Me" on fifes and drums when the indifferent, copper-faced Cheyennes lifted their chins, tossed their shoulders , a nd gave the coyote cries th at froze a thousand Pres byteri an bowels? By this ti me we can play Homer and expend ri ch ly

The Geography of the Imagination

354

Romantic sympathies for the hearts that beat beneath breastplates of porcupine qui lls and those that beat beneath blue gabardi ne. We ca n cheer on the Sioux ponies p l unging so rhyth mically to the pounded sh a­ m a n' s drum and war cries, or we can be stirred by the frantic bugles trilling form and ch arge, by feathered spears or by the guidons dispersing th ree ways as captains standing in their stirrups tried to shape battle li nes against a seamless and focussing horizon of Cheyenne and Sioux. Custer, who h a d watched Lee h and h i s sword to Grant at Appomat­ tox, m u st h ave known that h is opponent on this occasion, a sachem of sachems who seemed to be a cross between a Roman senator and a n owl with a l l its feathers blown backward, would merely grunt with disgust if he offered him his sword, and get on with the ti ck l i sh business of s calping so bald a m a n as George Armstrong Custer. Sentimentality and cruelty are the ingredients of practically all our at­ titudes toward th e redskin . He m u st be an o fficial sy mbol in A merican l o re, the presiding gen ius at Thanksgiving, the honorable and hieratic Fi rst American, the i m age for fifty years o n our basi c coi n , the penny ( 1 8 5 9- 1 9 0 9 ) -outlasting his fellow v i ctim the buffalo, which was o n o u r nickle for twenty-five years ( 1 9 1 3 - 1 9 38)-a n d a t the same time he must disappear one way o r another, either through outright extermina­ ti on, or by assimi lation. The Indian has refused both these exi ts from existence. Elemire Zolla, professor of American literature at the University of Genoa, 1 examines in a long and meticulously detailed study2 the histori­

cal ri valry of contradictory and consistently i nadequate ideas with which E uropeans approached the Ameri can Indi a n . The villain o f Professor Zolla ' s book i s an idea: that o f Progress. I t was

i n herent in both the Puritan plan to convert and thus civilize the Indi an, a nd i n the Enli ghtenment programs o f various kinds, which were not so m uch i nterested in savi ng the Indian ' s i mmortal soul as in i ntrodu ci ng him to soap, decent clothes, education, and a steady job. Progress is a complex, self-deluding idea. It must suppose that the hi story of man is from some primitive condition to a civilized one, and civi lization at the time of the New World's discovery was already transformi n g itself into a definition which uncritically i nclu ded all technology while assuming that . A man who has done pioneer research into matters American schol a rs have largely ne­ glected (the sources and meaning of Melvtlle' s Clare/, for example) . Novelist (Mlnuetto all'm(erno, Cecilia u d lla disattenziune) and historian of ideas, he is best known fo r his Th e Eclipse u( the Intellectuals ( 1 95 9) , a stu d y of twentieth-cent u ry phi losophy and art agai n st the backgro u n d ot technology a n d the bli n di n g i dea of h u man progress . H1s study of al­ che m y , Le meraviglie della natura: introduzione all'a/chimia, was publi shed in 1 9 75. 1

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2Eiem i re Zol l a , The Wnter a n d t h e Shaman: A Morphologv o f the American Indian, trans­ lated hy Ray mond Rosenthal (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich), 1 9 73.

The Indian and His Image

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spi ritu al con cer ns we re settled lon g bef ore . an d wou ld as If by a law of nat ure loo k after the ms elves. Th e Pur itan s wh o tho ugh t th e y were b n. ngm g salv atio n t o the Indi a n (the gift was mo re l i k 1 e gun pow d er rum m ea s es, an d parano .ia) were '. . g i nst ead ' brt. ngm the god progress Ill :V hos e sup erfi cial goo dne ss and sin gle -mi nde d jea lo usy of i s p rog attv es �as con cea led the p la n o f gen oci de wh ich in fact deve op s the wht te man 's only real atti tu de toward the Indi a n for thre e h u n re yea rs. The . nee r Bib re are piO . les in the li bra ry of the u n Iver · sny o f Texa s bou nd in In di an s k m. ' hat sym bol con ce ntrates eve ryt hin g Pro fes sor Zo lla h a s to say . A n eat tdea! Som thin g to go loo k a t e. on our vac atto n ' Bt_ bles b oun d m . . I n Ian d ski Gen oci de ma y we ll be n . . . an A me nca n mv entton . . A d y t the Rena issa n�e min d had tra ined itse lf to thi n k of Ov idia n Go I n ges , w h en ma . . n hve d i n a Sim · p 1e, nat ura 1 n o bili ty. Here it all is : dis cov ere d- a t tvt · · ng p ast . Am . . enc a was A a d'Ia, t h e I � dia n a nat ura l _r p h i los oph er. But that ide a con cea l d gen o e, to , for It was a l i tera ide a wh ich no one seri � ry ous ly inte n e d to o any th m g abo ut. What hap . pen s to Go lde n A h t y e s a e b ag s symb oliz ed by bas er, m ore p ract ta . f a i s oo Pro fess or Zol la mu st cha rt the imp act of R nat. ss n ce I. d eas on the New Wo rld and sho � tha t there was littl e for w t e Indi a n to cho ose b etween the eva nge lists ( "An d w h Y dI' d you wa . it so ' I ong, saJ· d a M ass ach use tts Ind ian , "to come tell us ) " ) and the cap . tta I Jsts . Th e I ndi an' s sub tles t ene my wa s an d pro . ba b ly sti. l l IS, ' hum anit ariani sm bred of Enl igh ten ment h ope for rea son in all th mgs an d u m ersa 1 b on to n. The I ndian � is a chi ld o f N a ure,. . a crea ture he Is � of pas ston a n d ins tinc t. He is pri . . mJ tJ ve. To th e E n l1gh ten me t mm · d h e �a s tn the pre cise sen se of the wo � rd reta rded. He was . beh md tim e on the lme ar scal e of histor y; his fut ure . (as col lege pre d ent s say at com men cem ent) was before him · giv en rea all son ' h e wo u mo ve ahe ad to inve nt the elec cha ir, usu tric ' lan dlo rds ' p ol I'te con ver sat iOn , and the ma chi n e gun Thr oug h out th e first thr ee cent u · s o f co 1 o . za o n the u n derstanding m ti ne _ o f th e I ndian ' s mo de o f !I fe was all but nil . te ma Th e w h J . . ed to mis n seem ed deter­ mm und ers tan d . Th � I n d . t an ' s ch astJ. ty, wh ich oug . ht to hav e been ad mi red bv . , a Ch nst tan , was mte rp reted as frigi dity . At . . e th e th e sam e tim I n d Ian 's nak edn ess wa s said to . us. The Ind . b e sa Iac!O tan 's ind ifference to p ain was not com par ed to Sp a rta an d the Sto ic creeds but to a per ma soc his m The Ind · verse . _ tan ' s mt ens e rel1_ g�o us o bserv am: e was gra .I d ent ifie tuit ous ly d as dia bol ism . H e w a s to E uro pea n eyes a shif tles s cre atu re. Hi s wo me nfo lk did all m . anu a l l a b h e gam ble d de I'tght ' ' int o tra nces, and i m �d In war fare , fell agi n ed th a t h e cou ld c onv ers e wtth bea rs coo n s. and ra-

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Much misguided energy went into determining who he was, as Scrip­ ture was silent on his existence. (That the red men were lost tribes of Israel was a long-held theory, and giddy Puritans were always trying to address them in Hebrew.) Racism is a precise prejudice; you never know who a man might not be. And prejudice must always have a man one's inferior or superior, never one's equal. The Indian is still caught in the schizoid view that he is superior (a noble savage) and that he is utterly . inferior (evolutionary drop-out) . By the nineteenth century the white man began in the name of sci ence to listen to the Indian, to find out what he thought, how he understood the world. Though the man usually credited with beginning research into Indian ethnology is Henry Rowe Schoolcraft (from whose writings Longfellow would glean "Hiawatha" ) , Professor Zolla places him among the ob­ structioni sts. He ended by convicting the Indian one more ti me of the unforgiva ble sin of refusing Progress, and thus saw red men as an inferior race. Schoolcraft got it into his head (and was widely believed, especi ally by the United States Government) that the Indian is just that, a Hindu , a member of a "static" race which through fatigue and s loth had declined man's destiny of perpetual development. From Schoolcraft comes the idea of that benevolent concentration camp, the Indian Reservation . Another early ethnologist, Lewis Henry Morgan, had even more far­ reaching effects. His demonstration that the Indian was, in some slow way, evolving (he saw in the Iroquois the transition from tribe to primi­ tive n a tion) fell into the hands of Engels and eventually into the hands of Lenin. Liberalis m thereby acquired an ethnology, and Marxism even now looks forward to the greatest synthesis man can imagine: the noble sav­ age simple, moral, kind, and pure of heart in the most adv anced tech­ nological development. The real pioneer in Indian ethnology was Charles God frey Leland ( 1 824- 1903), a Philadelphian edu cated at Prin ceton and Heidelberg, a kind of American George Borrow who was indi fferent to appearances and i mmune to the idea of Progress. He was initiated into the tribe of the Kaw, joined the Gypsies, and died in Florence study ing Etruscan lore and witchcraft. It was Leland who first understood the shamanistic nature of Indian religions, the sources of spiritual power, the sharp difference of the Indian mind and soul . From mid-nineteenth-century anthropology onward the search into the reality of Indian life has gone forward (this account occupies the sec­ ond half of Professor Zolla's study ) . The outline of the Indian's progress from Puritan writings to Cooper to Black Elk is fairly well known to reasonably literate people; it is the forgotten heroes of the process who

The Indian and His Image

357

are most interesting, essayists li ke Mary Austin ( 1 868 - 1 934) whose The American Rhythm Professor Zolla restores to its rightful place in Ameri­ can literature, as well as her novel, The Land of Little Rain. Ethnologists

(Franz Boas, Ruth Benedict) and novelists ( Willa Cather, William Faulk­ ner) have had the lion's share of interpreti ng the Indian, and sometimes the two are com bi ned, as in Jaime de Angulo. In cataloguing these latter-day portrayers of the Indi a n , Professor Zolla is commendably thorough and searching: this book deserves the adjective authoritative. It will assume the status of the survey of the American Indian in our litera­ ture, and many theses will be generated from its ideas, pro and contra. Scholars will want to argue with some of the categorizing that Profes­ sor Zolla's neat mind posits (is Bartram, for instance , to be p laced among the insensitive ? or Mark Twai n ? ) Professor Zolla has his off moments : he does not seem to understand that Thomas Berger's Little Big Man is an ironic novel. He does not know the work of Paul Metcalf ( Will West, Patagoni) . He does not ta lk nearly enough about the image of the Indian in the movies. Hi s zoning out of his s u bject the Mexican and South Amer­ ican Indian may in many ways have distorted his subject (one thereby loses such signal statements as Charles Olson's "The Kingfishers" and Prescott's Incas and Aztecs ) . On the other hand, it i s refreshing to see that an Italian sch olar is not taken in by the unresonating mind of Edmund Wi lson, whose under­ standing of things spiritual (Indian or otherwise) tended to be extraordi­ narily flat. Professor Zolla ends his book with an informed glance at Indian litera­ ture itself, and may be right in suspecting that there exists in it a treasure very like the lore of the Dagon which Marcel Griaule and Germaine Dieterlen found. For the Indian is still a prisoner on his own continent and his religion and lore are sti l l an unknown matter. Whether they are about to become a depressed people i s a question aside from that of their treaties and their civil rights. Indians are still shot for sport in Brazil. Most Americans proba bly suppose that they are already extinct, or that the Department of Indi an Affairs can still be counted on to render them extinct if they raise a se rious ruck u s ( like b urring up to the Atomic Energy Commission or objecting to a new highway for the American God, the Automobile) . I spent my childhood collecting Indian arrows and tomahawks, and used to know practi cally every camping ground on the upper Savannah before the A.E.C. flooded them a l l . I was aware that two Indians Anne Breadcrust and Jack Frost, used to live on the edge of the old hom�stead, the social inferiors of even the black fieldhands. The first real Indian I met (aet. 1 0 ) sold me a Cherokee bow (" Made in Czechoslovakia" was

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stamped in purple i n k near one bownotch) . For all my awareness of the real Indian, he might as well be a myth ological creature, an Etruscan to our Rome, one of the Old Gods now so shy and cautious that they are rarely seen. But of course this is not so. The Indians are probably more numerous now th an at the time of Col u mbus's discovery. They are a vigorous people. After four h undred years of stubborn refusal to accept the gift of Europe which we have by now corruP.ted out of all resembla nce to any­ thing like a civilization, they should be brought to the council tables with all the old treaties in their hands. The idea that time cannot be reversed is mere Enlightenment dogm a, libe ral twaddle. And the sovereignty of the State is a totalitari a n idea useful only to collect taxes. Let the Indi an nations exist again within our borders. Professor Zolla's study of the Indian in our literature is a book that means far more than it says. It is obviously a companion to h is analysis of modern art and thought in a technological culture. The myth that was made to serve technology (the Renaissance myth of progress from pri mi­ tive origins to a sophisticated and enlightened civilization) is comi ng to pieces before our eyes. It was perhaps an economic (and therefore im­ moral) myth to begin with; all its spirituality clotted i nto the idea of convenience, one of the strangest and tackiest ideas ever conceived by mankind. It may be the most corrupting social idea si nce that of slavery; and like slavery it is invisi ble while we are in its midst. It is the pri me duty of the moralist to point to examples of virtue; I have a feeling that th is is what Professor Zolla is doing in this long study of th e encounter between a people and a culture which they h ave held i n utter contempt for four centuries. The wise man ( better t o say simply the sane man ) will look at this contempt, to see what gives it its integrity and substance. The Indian is but one example of a people free of the myth of maniacally reiterated examples of convenient gi mmick ry which we mis­ take for progress. Any book that can penetrate the opacity of the technological myth is worth attention: this one is also a distinguished contribution to the h istory of ideas.

Finding

Every Sunday afternoon of my childhood, once the tediousness of Sunday school and the appalling boredom of chu rch were over with, corrosions of the spirit easily salved by the roast beef, macaroni pie, and peach cob­ bler that followed them, my father loaded us all into the Essex later the ackard, and h eaded out to look for Indian arrows. That was th e phrase, to look for Indian arrows ." Chi ldren detect nothing different in their own families: I can't remember notici ng anything extraordinary in our family being the only one I knew of that devoted every S unday afternoon to amateur arch aeology. We took along, from time to time, those people who expressed an interest in fi n ding Indi a n arrows. Most of them, I expect, wanted a n ex­ cuse for an outing. We thought of all neigh bors, friends, and business associates in terms of whether they were good company or utter nui-

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sa nces on our expeditions. Surely all of my attitudes toward people were shaped here, all unknowing. I learned th at there are people who see noth­ ing, who would not have noticed the splendidest of tomahawks if they had stepped on it, who could not tell a worked stone from a shard of flint or quartz, people who did not feel the excitement of the whoop we all let out when we found an arrowhead or rim of pottery with painting or incised border on it, a pot leg, or those major discoveries which we re­ membered and could recite forever afteJ;Ward, the finding of an intact pip e, perfect celt, or unbroken spearhead elegantly core-chipped, crenu­ lated and notched as if finished yesterday. "I've found one ! " the cry would go up from the slope of a knoll, from the reaches of a plowed field, a gully. One never ran over; that was bad form. One kept looking with feigned nonchalance, and if one' s search drew nigh the finder, it was permissible to ask to see. Daddy never looked at what other people found until we were back at the car. " Nice." he would say, or "That's really something." Usually he grunted, for my sister and I would have a fistful of tacky quartz arrowheads, lumpish and hal fheartedly worked. Or we would have a dubious pointed rock which we had made out to be an arrowhead and which Daddy would extract from our plunder and toss out the car window. These excursions were around the upper Savannah valley, out from places like Heardmont, Georgia, a ghost town in the thirties; Ware Shoals, South Carolina; Coronaca (passing through which my grand­ mother Davenport always exclaimed, " Forty years come on Cornelia!" and to my knowledge n o one ever asked her why, and now we shall never know), Calhoun Falls, Abbeville, and a network of crossroads (usually named for their cotton gins), pecan groves, and "wide places in the road" like Iva, Starr, and Good Hope Commu nity. The best looking was in autumn, when crops were in and frost had splintered the fields. It was then that arrowheads sat up on tees of red earth, a present to us all . A stone that has worked its way to the surface will remain on a kind of pedestal, su rrounding topsoil having been washed away. These finds were considered great good fortune. "Just sitting right up there ! " was the phrase. But these were usually tiny bi rd arrowheads in blue flint. Things worth finding were embedded, a telltale seri f only showing. It was Daddy who found these. My best find was a round stone the size of a quarter, thick as three quarters, with Brancusi-like depressions on each surface, as if for fo refinger and thumb. I'd thought it was the stone on which Indians twirled a stick with a bowstri ng, to make fi re, yet the depressions did not seem to have been designed for that, or caused by it. Years later, at Harvard, I took the stone, at Daddy's suggestion, around to an Indianologist at the Peabody Museum. He looked at it and laughed. Then he pulled open a drawer full of similar stones. What were

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they for? "We don't know," sighed the Indianolo gist. M y father's guess that they were counters for some gam bling game was probably right. The Cherokee ':hose stone artifacts we collected from their h unting grounds and campsites were passionate gam blers, and would stake squaw and papoose on a throw of the dice i f all else were lost. These Sunday searc�es were things all to themselve s, distinctly a ritual whose sacrum had taCit and m v olable boundaries . Other outings, long � . forays Into the chmquapm and h ickory forests of Abbeville County, were for th � pleasure of the walk and the odd p ineknot, rich in turpentin e, that one migh� pick up for the fi re. The re were summer drives for finding hog plums, wild peaches, and blackberr ies on the most abandone d of back dirt roads, autumn drives in search of muscadine s and scupperno ngs, the . finding of which, gnarled high m trees like lianas, wanted as sharp an eye as an arrowhead . We were a foraging family, completel y unaware of our passwn for getting at things hard to find. I collected stamps, buttons, the . ca �ds that c � me With chewing gum, and other detritus, but these were pnvate affa i rs With nothing of the authority of looking for Indian arrowhead s. Childhoo d is spent without introspec tion, in unreflective innocence . Adolescen ce turns its back on childhood in contempt and sometime s shame. We find our childhood later, and what we find in it is full of astoundin g surprises. As Proust has shown us, and Freud, its moments come back to us according to strange and inexplicab le laws. If there is a penny on the sidewalk, I find it; I normally p ick up seven o r eight cents a week ( I walk everywh re, rejecting the internal combustio n engine as an � effete surrender to laziness and the ignoble advantage of convenien ce), . together With perfectly good pencils, fi rewood, and the rare dime. At Fiesole, when I should have been admiring the view, I unearthed with my toe a Mussol ini nickel. I t is now shocking to me that I realized so few connectio ns between . thmgs as a child. I vividly remembe r reading a book about Leonardo and remember the i mportant detail of his finding seashells in the moun ;ains �ut i t� ought that wonderful, wholly beyond my scope, failing to see an simdanty between my amateur archaeol ogy and Leonardo 's. What con­ trolled this severe compartm entalizati on of ideas was my sense of place. Books were read by the fi re or by the Franklin heater in the kitchen- in the summer, under the fig tree, and what one read in books remained in the place where one read them. It did not occur to me that any of my teachers a � sch ool had ever heard of Leonardo da Vinci any more than of Tarzan VIcto r H ugo, Robert Louis �tevenson , or the Toonerv ille Trolley, all o f . which were lumped together m my head as privacies in which no one else could be in the least intereste d. The schoolro om was its own place, our home another, the red fields of

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the Savannah valley another, the cow pasture another, uptown, the movies, other people's houses: all were as disti nct as continents in dispa­ rate geological epochs. The sociology of the South has something to do with this, I think. All occasions had their own style and prerogatives, and these were i nsisted upon with savage authority. At Grannyport's (thus her accepted name a fter its invention by us children) one never mentioned the moving pictures that played so great a part in my life, for Grannyport denied that pictures could move. It was, sve said, patently i llogical (she was absolutely right, of course, but I didn't know it at the ti me) , and no dime cou ld ever be begged of her for admission to the Strand (Hopalong Cassidy, The Lone Ranger, Roy Rogers) or the Criterion ( Flash Gordon, Tarzan) , for these places were h u mbug, and people who went to them under the pitiful delusion that pictures can move were certainly not to be fin anced by a grandmother who k new her own mind. Nor could the movies be mentioned at Grandmother Fant's, for attend­ ing them meant going into p u bli c, a low thing th at the Fants have never done. The Fants were French H uguenots, from Bordeaux. They were a kind of Greek tragedy in the third of a great trilogy . Once they were rich, w ith two sh ips that bore South Carolina cotton from Charleston to France. The United States Navy sank them both in the time of the War: there was a tale we heard over a n d over of Grandfather Sassard going down with the Edisto, standing imp assively on her bridge, a New Testa­ ment clutched to his breast, his right arm saluting the colors of the Con­ federacy, which were soon to follow h i m beneath the waves of the Atlan­ ti c. His brother wore a friendship ri ng given him by Fitzhugh Lee, and this sacred ornament would be got out of a kind of jewel casket and shown to us. I don't think I ever dared touch it. After the War my grandmother, born and raised in Charleston (she never said "the Yankees," but "the stinking Yankees," the one unladylike locution she ever allowed hersel f ) , married a Fant, who took her to Florida to homestead. There my uncles Paul and Silas were born, with teeth it was always pointed out, two ti ny pink teeth each, for this was the signum of their fate. As they lay in their cradle a catamount sprang through the window and ate the m. Sometimes it was an alli gator that crawled into the house and ate them. As Granny Fant reached a ma­ triarchal age, her stories began to develop structural variants. She used to ask me never to forget that we are descended from Sir Isaac Davis, though I have never been able to discover who Sir Isaac Davis was. Through him we were related to Queen Anne. And the stinking Yankees stole her wedding ring and gave it to the Holmans' cook, who wore it a day of glory and then returned it to Miss Essy. Nor could I sing "The Birmingham Jail" at Granny Fant's, as Uncle

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Jam ie had once spen t a nigh t in that plac e. Nor coul d we (late r on in adol esce nce) men tion new bi rth s in Uncl e Jam ie's pres ence, for at fort he still did not �now the facts of li fe, and Gran ny Fant was dete rmin ed to keep up the Illus iOn that hum anity is resto cked by the stor k. She was , as my �athe r an d I disco vere d to our ama zeme nt, wron g. It turn ed out that Jam ie tho � ght preg nanc y cam e abou t by the pass age of a testi cle i nto so;ne unt� mka ble orifi ce of the fema le. He rema rked refle ctive ly that i f h e d marn ed h e coul d only h ave had two child ren. " And I don' t think I coul d have stoo d the pai n . " Nor coul d we ment ion look ing f arro or whea ds- the thou ght that her daug hter, son- In-la w, and thei r child ren walk ed all over field s and mead ows in p u blic wou ld have sent Gran ny Fant to her bed with a vin­ egar rag acro ss her forehead. My poin t is that thro ugho ut my child hood p lace dete rmin ed moo d and tone . My scho oltea cher s knew noth ing of our arch aeolo gy. Certainly the Miss es Ann a and Lillie Brow n wou ld som ehow disap prov e; they were gent eel. I cann ot reme mbe r any men tion wha tever of history in gram mar scho ol. All we learn ed of the Civil Wa r is that our prin cipa l, Miss May Russ ell, was take n from her bed and kisse d as a � mfan t by the otor ious rene gade Man se Jolly , who h ad, to Miss ? _ May s grea � satis f ctl on, gallo ped his hors e dow n the lengt h of a banq uet � table � t whic h Umo n offic rs were dinin g, colla psin g it as he progresse � d, em � m two sixsh oote rs mto the � Yank ees and yode ling, " Roo t hog or die . This was the rebe l yell that Dou glas Sout hall Free man gave for a recordmg and drop ped dead at the end of. This grot esqu e fact wou ld not h � ve fazed Miss May Russ ell; wha t finer way wou ld a gent lema n wish to d te ? We all h ad to lea n it: the root is pitch ed on a drun ken high note � In the flatt est of whim ng cotto n-pla nter 's pron unci ation , the ha wg i s screa med m a n awfu l way , and the aw dah i s an hyst eri cal crescendo �ecalh ng Herod's sold iery at wor k on male i n fants. We love d squ awli ng It, a n d were told to reme mbe r how the day was save d at Bull Run whe n Beau rega rd and Joh nson were in a swea t until the Sixth Sout h C � rolin a Volu nteers unde r Wad e Ham pton rode up on the left flank (they had asse� ble?, in red shirt s, arou nd our own cour t hous e and marched awa y to Ytrg tma to "Th e Palm yra Scho ttisc he") . But scho ol was scho ol, as chu rch was chur ch and hous es were hous es. Wha t w nt on In one neve r over � flowed into any other. I was perfectly �apa ble In Sund ay scho ol of belie vein g all the vici ous bilge they wall owe d In, a n d at ho me stud mg With glee the murders in the old Sunday � A meri­ can, and then spen dmg the after noon h unti ng arro whe ads. After whic h cam e Jack Be �n y, and a chap ter or two of Sir Wal ter Scot t. To _ _ have m entio ned reltg wn whil e hunt ing India n arro ws wou ld h ave been a brea ch of man ners beyo nd con cept ion or belie f, insa nity itsel f.

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3 64

of The rule was: everyth ing in its place. To this day I paint in one part others: two in fact, in read, ; my house, write in another , read in another Gard­ frivolou s and deliciou s reading such as Simeno n and Erie Stanley from away am I when And . ner in one room, scholars hip in another mind simple the to us suspicio seem home, I am somebo dy else. This may me of a psychia trist, but it seems natural enough . My cat does not k now ion express his from gather I and home, when we meet a block away from that I'm not suppose d to k now him, eith�r. would Shaw has Joan of Arc say that if everybo dy stayed at home, they such soldiers English the makes that be good people. It is being in France own his in only Turk a is dog A point. devils. She and Shaw h ave a real feel the yard. I am a profess or only when I arrive in the classroo m; I can on damn�n the suffered have I n. operatio Jekyll-H yde syndrom e flick into to de wh a takes It ing. threaten and enial of a heretic in rooms uncong man done; be can It . ngs rroundi su r nfamilia u make a place for oneself in world's can do a nything . I have read Mann's Joseph novels beside the A Corps. e Airborn XVIII the of room on recreati lou dest j ukebox in the Guadal­ on guns field the behind Tolstoy colleagu e remembers reading of canal · another finished reading all of Shakesp eare at the Battle First the in s trenche the to them with work their Kohi :na . Scholar s took l World War; Apollin ai re was reading a critical j ou rnal when the shrapne wound. the felt he before red all page the saw He sprayed into his head. Walter Napole on took a carriage of books with him to Waterlo o. Sir head, his in suddenly lines good some with and Scott, out hunting poem the wrote and feather, a from pen a whittled brought down a crow, on his j a cket in crow's blood. How capable we are off our turf ( " far afield," "lost," "no place for am a me," the phrases run) may be one of the real tests of our acu men . I acute suffer could I family my with home from away bad traveller . Even an nostalgia as a child. I know of no desolatio n like that of bein� . i n of ty poss1bd1 the with travel all associate I and unconge nial place, toilets its with le Knoxvil in l termina us b nd Greyhou the unconge nialirythe awash with urine and vomit, its abomina ble food and worst coffee m higher the food, the ble unpalata more the that is rule their universe ( and the price), its moronic dispatch ers, and the hordes of vandals in tight pink trousers and sleevele ss T-shirts who patrol the place with vicious aim­ lessness; all airports ; all meeting s of any sort without exceptio n; cock­ tail p arties; l awn p arties; dinner parties; speeches . .. dtt Some slackne ss o f ritual, we are told, that h u rt the feelings o f the ans. montes, the gnome s of the hills, allowed Rome to fall to the barbari knows e These gods of place were genii, spirits of a place. All folklor place, them and when a hero died who had wound his fate with that of a

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he oined i ts genii and thereaft er partook of its life. Our word "congen ial­ , . Ity means kmshtp With the soul of a place, and p laces have souls in a way very like creatures . In hunting Indian arrowh eads we were always, it seemed , on congeni al terntory, though we were usually on somebod y's land. We could trust them to know we were there; country people have suspicio us eyes . My father was raised in the country and knew what to do and what not to do. Rarely would a farmer stroll out, in the way of peering at the weather or the road, and find out what we were up to. Likely as not, he would have some arrowhe ads back at the house and would give them to us. Never sell, give. He would be poorer than poor, but he would not sell a piece of rock. Here at these unpainted clapboa rd sharecro pper houses we would be . 1 n v1ted to have a dipper of water from the well, cold, clean and tooth­ some . Sometim es a sweet-potato biscuit would be served by the lady of the house, a tall wo an m an �pron and with the manner s of an English � lady from the c unnes . W children would ask to see the pigs. Country ? � people were a differen t nation, both black and white, and they exhibite d mores long rememb ered. There was once an elder daughte r who retired to a corner and tied herself into a knot of anguish . We assume d idiocy, as country peop! e do not send their demented off to an asylum. But the m other explame d, w1th simplicit y, "She has been lewd and she thinks ' you can see it in her." An � once we fo � nd a black family with our name, and traded family . . h1s:ones , blacks bemg as talkative and open as poor whites are silent and re ticent, until we discover ed that their folk had belonged to ours. Where­ up on we were treated as visiting royalty; a veritable party was made of i t, and wh �n we were leaving, an ancient black Davenpo rt embrace d my . fa :he � w1th tears m his eyes. "0 Lord, Marse Guy," he said, " don't you w1sh It was the good old slavery times again ! " �hat lives brightest i n t h e memory of these outings is a Thoreau vian feelmg of lookmg at thmgs- earth, plants, rocks, textures , animal tracks, all the secret places of the out-of-d oors that seem not ever to have been l ooked at before, a hidden patch of moss with a Dutchm an's Breeches stoutly in i s n idst, aromatic stands of rabbit � tobacco , : beggar's lice, . hza rds, the mevltab le mute snake, always j ust leaving as you come upon hi m, hawks, buzzard s, abando ned orchards rich in apples, peaches or plu ms. Th�rea uvian, because these outings , I was to discove r were very like . his dad walks, with a purpos e that covered the whole � en ;erprise but was not senous enough to make the walk a chore or a duty. Thorea u, too, was an Indian- arrowh ead collecto r, if collector is the word. Once we had

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found our Indian things, we put them in a big box and rarely looked at them. Some men came from the Smithsonian and were given what they chose, and sometimes a scout troop borrowed some for a display at the county fair. Our u nderstanding was that the search was the thmg, the pleasure of looking. . at work, I felt perfectly When, in later years, I saw real archaeologists at home among them: diggers at Mycenae and at Lascaux, where I was shown a tray of hyena coprolites and w�ndered which my father would have kept and which thrown away, for petrified droppings from the Ice Age must h ave thei r range from good to bad, l i ke arrowheads and stone axes. And I learned from a whole childhood of looking in fields how the pu rpose of things ought perhaps to remain invisible, no more than h � l f known. People who k now exactly what they are doing seem t o me to miss the vital part of any doing. My family, praises be unto the gods, never i nspected anyth i ng that we enjoyed doing; criticism was stnctly for ad­ versities and not very much for them. Consequently I s p ent my cht ld­ hood dr�wing, bui lding things, writing, reading, playing, dreaming out loud, without th e least comment from anybody. I learned later that I was thought not quite bright, for the patterns I discovered for myself were not things with nearby models. When I went off to c�llege It was w1th no . purpose whatsoever: no calling in view, no profession, no ambttlon . Ambition was scorned by the Fants and u nknown to the Davenports. That my father worked with trains was a glory that I considered a windfall for other fathers sold things or processed thmgs. If I am grateful for the �nintentional education of having been taught how to find things ( all that I have ever done, I think, with texts and pictures) , I am even more grateful, in an inconsequenti al way, for my father's most astound­ i ng gift of all: being put at the th rottle of a lo comotive one mght � n d allowed to drive it down the track for a whole fi v e mmutes. I loved trams, a nd grew up with them. I had drawn locomotives with t he passion of . Hokusai drawing Fujiyam a . My wagon had been an 1magmary locomo­ tive more th an it h a d been a rocket ship or buckboard. And here we were meeting the Blue Ridge one summer evening, and my fat her must have . seen the look in my eyes as I peered into the cab of the enp,1�e. Su � denl y I was li fted onto the step, and helped by the engineer-! believe h1s name was Singbell-into the i neffably important seat. The engine was merely switching cars in the yard, but it was my ten-year-old h and on the throttle that shoved the drivers and turned the wheels and sent plumes of steam hissing outward. Life has been downhill ever sine� . But this is not the meani ng of looking for Ind1an arrow � eads. That will, I hope, elude me forever. Its i mportance has, in m atu nty, become

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more and more appa rent -a n educ atio n that shap ed me with a sure r and finer han d than any clas sroo m, an expe rien ce that gave me a sens e of the earth, of autu mn after noo ns, of all the seas ons, a con nois seur 's sens e of things for thei r own sake. l was with grow n-up s, so it was n 't p lay. The re was no lecture, so it wasn't scho ol. All effort was will ing, so it was n't wor k. No i deal com pelle d us, so i t was n't idealism or wor ship or phi losop hy. Yet it was the seed ing of all sort s of thin gs, of scho larsh ip, of a stoic sens e of p leasu re (I thi nk we were all bore d and ill at ease whe n we wen t ' on offic ial vaca tion s to the mou ntai ns or the shore, w here as out arrowh ead- lo king we were cont ent � and easy ), and mos t of all of fora g­ mg, that preh isto ric u rge still not bred out of man . There was also the sens e of goin g out together but with each of us acti ng alon e. You neve r look for Indi an arro ws in pair s. You fan out. But you shou t disc over ies and com men ts ( " No Indi an was ever arou nd here !") acro ss field s. It was com e to thin k of it, a hum anis tic kind of hu nt. My fath er neve r hunt e d a m ma ls, and I don 't thi nk he ever kille d anyt hing in his life. All hi s brot hers were keen h unts men ; I don' t know why he was n't. And , con­ versely, none of my uncl es wou ld have been caught dead doing anyt hing so stlly as look 1ng for hou rs and hour s for an i ncise d rim of pottery or a Cher okee pipe . I kno w that my sens e of plac e, of occa sion , even of doin g anyt hing at all, was shap ed by thos e after noo ns. It took a whil e for me to real ize that peop le can grow up with out bein g taug ht to see, to sear ch surfaces for all the deta ils, to chec k out a who le land scap e for wha t i t h a s to offer. My fath er became so good at spot ting arro whe ads that on road s with likel y gulh e � he w ould find them from the car. Or give a com men tary on wha t . we m1gh t p1ck up were we to stop : "A nice spea rhea d back there by a m ayp op, but wi th the tip brok en off." A nd it is all fold ed awa y in an irrev ocab le p ast. Mos t of our field s are n �w the bott om of a vast lake . Farm ers now post their land and fenc e i t w � th barb ed wire . Arro whe ad colle cting h a s beco me som ethi ng of a mmo r hobb y, and shop s for the tour ist trad e mak e them in a back room and sell them to peop le from New Jers ey. Ever ythi ng is like that now a­ days . I cher ish thos e a ftern oon s, kno wing that I will neve r und erst and all t� at they taug ht me. As we grew up, we bega n not to go on the expe di­ tion s. Not the last, but one of the last, afte rnoo ns foun d us tow ard sun­ set, fi ndin gs in h and , endi ng up for the day with one of our ritu als a Coca-Co la from the iceb ox of a cros sroa ds stor e. "Th ey tell over ;he radi o," the p ropr ieto r said , "tha t a bun ch of Japa nese airp lane s hav e blow ed up the who le islan d of Haw aii. "

Ralph Eugene Meatyard

Ralph Eugene Meatyard When I moved to Lexington in 1 9 64 the poet Jonathan Willi ams wrote me that there was a photographer here who took pictures of children and American flags in attics. His name was Ralph Eugene MeaD;a rd. He was, Jonathan insisted, strange. I had learned to trust Jonath an s JUdgments. When he said strange he meant strange. . The next time Jonathan was in town, on one of his reading and shde­ showing tours around the Repu blic in his Volkswagen, The Blue Rider, with its football decal on a window saying THE POETS (the footba ll team of some Sidney Lanier High School in the pine fastnesses of Geor­ gia) he and Ronald Johnson, Stan Brakhage and his six-year-old daugh­ ter Crystal, Bonnie Jean Cox and I set out to visit the Meatyards. The address was 4 1 8 Ki ngsway. We all piled out at 4 1 8 Queensway, and to this day I don't know the sta rtled citizens who opened theu door to find

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such a collection of people on the steps. Jonathan was got up as a Methodist minister in a three-piece suit, Stan was in his period of looking like a Pony Express scout out of Frederic Remington , and Bonnie Jean and Crystal were both gazing innocently up out from u nder bangs. We fitted in well enough at the Meatyards' when we got there, a place where you were li able to find anything at all. There was an original draw­ ing of Andy Gump crying " Oh, Min!" from a toi let stoo l : he has no p aper. There were Merzbilden, paintings by the children, found objects, cats and dogs, books jammed into every conceivable space. Gene Meatyard was a smili ng, affable man of middle age and height. His wife Madelyn, Scandinavi an in her beauty , had a full measure of Midwestern hospitality to make us feel comforta ble. My own welcome was assured when we heard, as Melissa, the youngest Meatyard, showed her agemate Crystal Brakhage the kitchen, a little gi rl' s piping voice say­ i ng, " Guy Davenport has ants and bugs in his kitchen." This gave me a chance to explain th at I ke pt a saucer of sugar water fo r the wasps, hor­ nets and ants that I liked to see in the h ouse. To the Meatya rds it meant that I couldn't be all bad. Photographs were handed around. We talked about them. But not Gene. For nine years I would see the new pictures as they were pri nted and mounted, always in complete silence fro m Gene. He never instructed one how to see, or how to interpret the pictures, or what he might have i ntended. The room was full of keen eyes: Jonathan's lyric, bawdy eye; Ronald's eye for mystery ; Stan's cinematic eye (a bit impatient with still images, as Gene was impatient with Stan's films-he never went to the movies, but would watch television if the program were sufficiently ab­ surd); Bonni e Jean's stub born, no-nonsense eye. I di d not know unti l after his death that he brought me the pictures to cheer himself up. " Guy knows what to say," he told Madelyn. I only said w h at the pictures drew out. I think he liked my having to fall back on analogies : that this print had a touch of Kafka, this a passage as if by Cezanne, this echoed de Chirico. In his last period he was fascinated by Cezanne and the cu bists, by the verbal collages of William Carlos Williams. We saw a wealth of pictures that evening. I remember thinking that here was a p hotographer who might illustrate the ghost stories of Henry James, a photographer who got many of his best effects by introducing exactly the right touch of the unusual into an authentically banal Ameri­ c an usualness. So much of Gene's work requi res the deeper attention w hich shows you th at in a quite h andsome pictu re of lawns and trees there are bricks floating in the air (they have been tied to branches to m ake them grow level; you cannot see the wires ).

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Light as it falls from the sun onto our random world defines everything perceptible to the eye by constant accident, relentlessly changing. A splendid spot of light on a fence is gone in a matter of seconds. A tone of light is frailer in essence than a whiff of roses . I have watched Gene all of a day wandering around in the ruined Whitehall photographing as di li­ gently as if he were a newsreel cameraman in a battle. The old h ouse was as quiet and still as eternity itself; to Gene it was as ephemeral in its shift of light and shade as a fitful moth . He developed his film only once a year; he didn't want to be tyrannized by impatience, and I suspect that he didn't like being cooped up in the darkroom. He was a lens grinder by profession, which meant he was short of free time. His evenings were apt to be taken up with teaching, lecturing, arranging shows, and he longed to read more and more. There were books in his automobile, by his equipment in his offi ce. He had more hobbies than could be kept up with, especi ally those th at involved his family: hiking, cooking, collecting the poetic trash that served as props for his pictures. One could usually find the Meatyards up to some­ thing rich and strange: making violet j a m (or some other sufficiently un­ likely flavor), model ships, fanciful book covers; listening to a superb collection of antique j azz, or to recordings which Gene seemed to dream up and then command the existence of, like the Andrews sisters singing Poe's " Raven" ("Ulalu me" on the flip si de, both in close h armony ) . He had a recording of the wedding of Si ster Rosetta Tharp. He had a loose­ leaf notebook of th ousands of grotesque and absurd names. He was a living encyclopedia of bizarre accidents and Kentucky locuti ons. One evening he turned up to tell with delight of hearing an old man say of the moving pictures these days that by God you can see the actors' gen­ itrotties. And there was nothing behind him, nothing at all that one could make out. He had invented himself, with his family's full cooperation. One knew that he had been born in Normal, Illinois, because of the name. He had a brother, an artist, but it took forever to find this out. He had been to Wi lliams. Willi ams ! Surely this was an invention. Like hearing Harpo Marx had a degree from the Sorbonne. For whereas Gene seemed to read German, he pronounced French like Dr. Johnson-as if it were English. Greek nor Latin had he, though he once figured out with a modern Greek dictionary that a l yri c of Sappho (which he had set out to read as his first excursion into the classics) had something to do with a truck crossing a bri dge. Yet, by golly, he had been to Williams College. He was there with the Navy V- 1 2 program. One even learned that he used to play golf. But he had no past. His own past had no interest whatever for hi m. Tomor­ row morning was his great interest. There was the London telephone book to be read (the scholar Tom

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Stroup sent h i m one ) , new books o f poetry t o read between customers at the eyeglasses shop. He was an unfailing follower-up, which is why I think of him as the best educated man I h ave ever known. As a professor I must work with people for whom indifference is both a creed and a de­ fense of their fanatic narrowness of mind, but Gene knew nothing of th is. When he met Louis and Celia Zukofsky at my house, he went away and read Zukofsky. Not that he was an enthusiast. He simply had a curiosity that went all the way, and a deep sense of courtesy whereby if a man were a writer he would read what he had written, if a man were a painter he would look at his paintings. Gene's extraordinary di fference from any type sometimes puzzled people when they first met him. One evening the Montaigne scholar Marcel Gutwirth was in town, and he and Gene and I had a marvelous evening of talk while watching a new litter of kittens spring around the living room. When I walked Professor Gutwirth back to his hotel after­ wards, he asked who this Monsieur Meatyard might be. "Oh, Gene's wonderfu l," I said. "He knows more about modern litera­ ture than anyone at the university, but he's never read the Odyssey. " " But, ah!" Marcel Gutwirth said. "What a reading the Odyssey will have when he gets around to it!" Gene took up photography i n 1 95 4 and began to love it enough to su bmit to the demands it was making. He must have seen the difference between a photographer and an artist whose medium is photography. After a heart attack in 1 9 6 1 , he gave himself ten years to master hiS"art. He was a great photographer well before that decade was up. My first experience of Gene at work came when I asked him to do some pictures of me for the covers of a book. I had already selected a rich picture of his th at I wanted for the front cover (the book was Flowers and Leaves ) , and we needed a portrait for the back. Gene drove me over to Interstate Highway 75 on a Sunday afternoon and put me out in the middle of traffic. He parked on the shoulder and began to photograph me trying to dodge a Greyh ound bus and other dashing objects. I have never seen these pictures. Then he took me to an old churchyard and photo­ graphed me among th e headstones. Finally, he drove to a house gutted by fire, and here he made the picture which we used. He never explained any of these setti ngs. I only knew that he was after essence, not fa ct. Usually he ph otographed people in so casual a manner that one did not know he was at work. I can remember three wonderful conversations with Thomas Merton, one of Gene's closest friends, which were recorded in this way. Gene never dropped out of the talk to find an angle, never asked anyone to pose. The camera was simply there. And, afterwards, the pictures. He was rare among American artists in that he was not obsessed with

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his own image in the world. He could therefore live in perfect privacy in a rotting Kentucky town. He was forever sending off shows, he kept up with everything, he encouraged everybody. He was a quiet, diffident, charming person on the surface, a known ruse of the American genius (William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore). This modesty amou nted to there being at least two distinct Gene Meatyards in the world: an invisi­ ble Lexington businessman a nd a genius who achieved one of the most beautiful styles in twentieth-century art . . His death, heroic and tragic, proved to be the occasion for recognizing the two Gene Meatyards. For two funerals were required. The first was Protestant and, despite the distinguished people who came from all over the United States, thoroughly dull. I felt, as Cocteau had at a nother such obsequy, that Gene had not cared to attend. It was so formulaic and u ninspired that I had to go and stand with my hands flat against the coffin to assure myself that I was at a funeral at all. But there was another funeral, a true Meatyard funeral, one at which the rites were made up out of the family fund of i nventiveness. A small group of us, Madelyn, the children (Mike with his wife and chi ld, Chris­ topher and Melissa ) , Joy Little, Bo b May, Jonathan Greene, Bonnie Jean and I, went into the Red River Gorge which Gene had explored and photographed and tried to save from the ravagements of politics and greed. It was a fine spring Sunday . We cli mbed to an eminence that Gene had liked, a place as remote and quiet as any forest that has not yet heard the buzz saw and the bulldozer. Here we drank a wine that Gene had brewed. I read aloud a poem that Christopher had written, Mike emptied the canister that held all that could die and be bu rnt of Gene over the ledge of a high rock-a few dry bones which sifted into the tall treetops below. Melissa cast after them a bagful of flower petals. Then we walked to another part of the forest and ate a feast, picnic fare of the outrageously copious and toothsome and rich kind which Gene fancied for a proper outing. Had Homer been a Sybarite, he would have described such a meal : chilled wines and cold chicken, crisp vinegary salads and homemade bread. I cannot descri be it for I don't think I got to see it all , the choices were so great. I remember that when we could eat no more there were sti l l plums swimmi ng in port passed around in small round glasses. And this funeral Gene attended.

Ernst Machs Max Ernst Mr. Richard Pevear, the gifted poet and translato r, has remarke d of my book of stories Tat/in! that although it contains "a wealth of narrative inventio n, the inventio n does not go outside the limits of fiction . " l He is � aking a valid, if troubles ome, distincti on between storytel ling and fic­ tion, b� tween narrativ e that is openly an inventio n (Apuleiu s, Malory, Rabela1s are his example s) and narrativ e that is so plausibl e and lifelike that it is indisting uishable from an account of reality ( M rs. Gaskell, Bal­ zac, Proust) . H feel s that storytell ing is native to the human spirit, � con­ . gemal, and soci al, n. ch in "interru ption, quotatio n, dialectic . " 2 Fiction, 'Richard Pevear, "Tat/in!, or the Limits of Fiction," The Hudson R eview, 2 8 (Spring 1 9 75) : 1 4 1 -:- 46. F o r other studieS, see Alan W i l l iamson, " A Lateborn Modernis t," Shenandoah, 2 6 (Spnng 1 9 75) : 8 7- 90; Richard Wertime, " Tat/in!, " The Georgia Review, 29 (Winter 1 975 ) : 948-57; a n d John Wilson, "Tat/in!: The Renaissa nce of the Archaic," Master's . thesis, Cahforma State Umversity, 1 975. 2Pevear, p. 14 1 .

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on the other hand, casts a spell, is narcotic and propagandi stic; it is an art of "continuity, coherence, persuasion . " 3 It i s M r . Pevear' s observation that my writing keeps comi ng close to breaking out of fiction into storytelling, but that it never does. I read his article with much interest and a great deal of puzzlement. We had a long and instructive corresponde nce on the matter, which I initiated, as I had not once thought about the distinction while I was writing the stones, and because critical attention of such thoroughne ss and intelli gence was something I could scarcely have anticipated. Talking about oneself, said Menander, is a feast that starves the g� est, and I hope in this essay to keep to the subject l was invited to cons1der, the confrontatio n of self in i maginative writing. l accepted the mv1tatton with a wry trepidation, out of curiosiry to see what could be discovered. My writing is primitive and contrived, and I h ave never wn tten about mysel f in any conscious way : my stories are all set in places of wh � ch I h ave no personal knowledge and usually in ti mes when I dt d not exiSt. I was forty-three when I wrote my first story since undergradu ate days , "The Aeroplanes at Brescia,"4 i n which Kafk a attends in the company of his friends Max and Otto Brod an airshow of archaic flying machines. Kafka's account of this event is his first published writing, and as he could not in 1 909 know the significance of what he had seen, I combined his newspaper article with Brad' s memory of the occasion in his biog­ raphy of Kafka, and with what I could discover of other people (D' An­ nunzio Puccini) who were there, as well as of people who mtght well h ave b� en there (Wittgenstei n ) . To realize certain details I studied the contempora ry photographs of Count Primoli, read histories of aviation, . built a model of Bleriot' s Antoinette CV25, and collected as n ch a gather­ ing of allusions to the times as I could. I presided ov er the story like a . playful Calvinist God who knew what would happen m years to come. I . knew that Kafka's first entry i n his notebooks th at led to wntmg Th e Castle was made at Merano, where he would h ave been gazing at the castle in which Ezra Pound was living at the ti me I was writing . What kind of symbol (if any) this constru cts I do not know, but I felt that something was i nside the image. It can be said of all my involucra that I hope there is a meaning inside, but do not necessarily know . I trust the im age; my business is to get it onto the page. . A page, which I think of as a picture, is essentially a texture of Images. In th e stories "Tatlin ! " and " Robot" drawings appear as integral parts of the text: sculpture by Tatlin that probably no longer exists, drawn 'lbid.

R eview, 2 2 (Winter 1 9 70) : •Guy Davenport , "The Aeroplanes at Brescia," The Hudson 5 67-85 . (The text in Tat/in! is slightly revised.)

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from poor photographs in bad rep roductions; icons of Lenin and Stali n ; quotations from Lascaux. The text of a story i s therefore a continuous graph, kin to th e imagist poem, to a collage (Ernst, Willi Baumeister, El Lissitzky ) , a page of Pound, a Brakhage fil m . A writer's o w n sense o f influences is spurious and frequently prepos­ terous. When an influence dyes the mainstream it is all too obvious, disas­ trous, and tyra nnical. As a true tributary it adds its lot and disappears into the flow. Who would su spect the influence of Delacroix on Van Gogh ; of Dickens on Kafka, of Harriet Beecher Stowe on Tolstoy? My literary models ( Kafk a , Joyce, Hau bert, Welty) probably go unsuspected because of the ineptitude with which I have followed them, but my picto­ rial models are more deeply integrated, and perhaps more of an instiga­ tion than literary ones. As a scholar I have always kept literature and painting together as a compound subj ect, the one complementing the other: Milton and Durer, Joyce and Tchelitchew, Apollinaire and Picasso, Kafka and Klee, Whis­ tler and Henry James. I first saw a way to plot stories by studying the films of Stan Brakhage, where an architectonic arrangement of images has replaced narrative and documentation. Wh at Brakhage is doing in his films is an invention that brings cinema close to poetry like the odes of Keats or the ideogrammatic mode of Pound, Zukofsky, Wi lliam Carlos Willi ams, and Charles Olson, all of whom Brakhage claims as masters. How one art learns from another is a question better asked as what one art learns from another. The process begins in inspiration, which we might call the aesthetic will. Whistler's nocturnes and harmonies are a response to subject matter. His paradigmatic i n fluences (Hiroshige, Degas, Velazquez) must fit into thi s process, along with sy mbolism and iconology, and the tacit and unsus­ p ected di ctates of vogue and epoch. Brakhage, I know, is writing a poem and composing a piece of music (his films are for the large part silent), at least, when he is making a film. He knows the history of film as well as Joyce k new th at of literature or Picasso that of painting. Things become quite complex, then, when we start looking at what activates the aesthetic will. And I suspect that the elements to be consid­ ered most profitably to understanding are the ones so familiar that curios­ iry passes them by in innocent stupidiry. Words, for a beginning. Though I admire styles in which words are deployed in a practical economy. Bunyan , Caesar, Agassiz) , my heart is with styles cont rolled by artifice. The p rose of Doughty's Travels in Arabia Deserta is the most consistently interesting that I know, and his Dawn in Britain is a poem I read often, not only for the severiry and archaic beaury of its diction, but also be­ cause it is the only epic in English.

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My intent, then (to begin to answer Mr. Pevear's query as to whether I am a storyteller or fictioneer) , h as been to emulate Doughty in an arti­ ficial diction. Fiction demands a concealed and inconspicuous style; storytelling, a mimi cry or a postured manner. Compare the Tentation with Madame Bovary: both styles are hallucinatory. The Tentation, however, is at every point a fa brication which we attend to because of its formal and imaginative qualities. We read Madame Bovary with quite different eyes. . The subjects I chose for the stories in Tat/in! are all in the position of being, as fact, almost not there. The story "Tatlin!" is built out of a mere handful of doubtful certai nties. There is no biography of the man; his work is hidden or destroyed. All my information was at least thirdhand. The same is true of a day in 1 909 at Brescia, of the discovery of Lascaux (no accounts agree, and though I talked with Jacques Marsal one beauti­ ful July evening in Montignac, we did not talk about the discovery of the cave but about the tragedy of its having to be closed because of mi­ croorganisms growing u nder the twenty-thousand-year-old p aint) . Of Heraclitus's life no one knows anything. The story about Poe is a lie Poe told, which I take at face value, and there is no biography of Adriaan van Hovendaal, whom I think I saw one morning in Amsterdam fifteen years ago. It is my sense that I am always telling a story rather than projecting an illusory, fictional world. I am aware of the trap in argument whereby we can seem to square a story with reality, and I felt wonderfully helpless when various critics j u mped on my " mistakes." One brave Boston soul ' swore he was at that air show in Brescia, that Kafka wasn t there (the crowd was estimated by La Sentinella Bresciana to be 5 0, 000), and that Bleriot did not look like my description. A Russian has written to know why I h ave Lenin speaking in a dialect he wouldn't have used. And so on. After the book was published, I h ad the strange and exciting experi­ ence of talking with a man who h ad known Tatli n. I heard details I would like to have known before : Tatlin's love of children, who were invaria bly fascinated by his own childlikeness; his atheism (which stil l shocked my interlocutor) ; his mi stresses ("j ust women, one of them very beautiful" ) ; his friendship with the watercolorist Bruni; his singing; the whiteness of his stark rooms in the bell tower of the New Maiden Monastery in Mos­ cow. I learned that he never j oined the Communist Party, that his e)' eS were slate gray, that he was a dark blond, that his voice was baritone, and that " he was a very complicated man, restless, disillusioned, silent, stu bborn." But verisimilitude of the kind invented by Scott and Flau bert, which achieved its apotheosis in D. W. Griffith's and Cecil B. De Mille's movie

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sets, I had sidestepped at the outset, trying i nstead for Kafka's description of America (skyscrapers symmetrically placed in wheatfields, the Statue of Liberty with a sword in her hand), for Rousseau's meticulous and pedantic mistakes. Euripides h as the Egyptians living in pyramids; a character in Jardiel Poncela perversely consults a map of Barcelona to locate streets in Madrid; and I saw that my best hope of a sustained reality would be one like Max Ernst's world, which is always of verifiably real things that are not, however, where they are supposed to be. Sur­ realism knows no mistakes . Writing in the twentieth century has for its greatest distinction the dis­ covery of the specific. "Things," Proust said, " are gods." Compare Henry James and Joyce, Monet and Ernst. One could write a history of the specific and the vague; it would probably turn out to be a history of attention. If, as Barthes says, writing is an excess of historic in­ telligi bility,5 what wri ting is about and how it is written, especially with what regard to detail , constitute a parallel, companion history. We are aware of this kind of history, though much history h as been written without instruction from it: Gi bbon, for instance, in whose greatest of histories everything metamorphoses into style before our eyes. All is Gib­ bon, Gibbonesque. All is shaped in deference to polish, to a regularity of surface. And all styles must do something like, or fail to be a style at all. I am not aware of having a style (hence my clai m to primitiveness), but I am intensely aware of style when I write. I know how Joyce broke out of neoclassical rules, while seeming to obey them; how he dared to be angu­ lar, eccentric, barbaric. Style, " the man," remains unexplained, like dif­ ferent h andwritings. It is imitation that h as progressed into individuality; it is a psychological symptom kin to tone of voice and personality; it is a skill, an extension of character, an attitude toward the world, an enigma. Let us say that style in writing is a su bdivision of manners, i ts clarity solicitude to be u nderstood, its form deference, and its choice of words decorum. This would be a classical definition. We know how Romanti­ cism modified it. With realism came the mot juste and the rendering of description in the diction of the characters ( Ford, Conrad, Joyce) . The logical development of this would be parody and quotation, the stylistic program common to Joyce, Pound, Mann, and Eliot. It is also the stylistic p rogram of Max Ernst, who, like Joyce, discov­ ered that quotation can be eloquent beyond its original statement, and can release meanings concealed in the original. Ernst discloses a night­ mare presence in vernacular advertisements and illustrations; Joyce, an 5Roland Banhes, Sade/Fourier/Loyola, trans. R1chard Mi l le r ( New Yor k : H i l l and Wang,

1 976), p. 1 0

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unsuspected wealth of psychological nua nce in popu lar fiction ( Doyle , Corelli, Dodgson ) . This autopsy of wri ting corresponds t o Ernst Mach' s disturbing and fruitful analysis of science as a psychological history o f scientists. Theories, he argued, and even the laws of nature as we know them, are rooted in individu a l psyches, li ke works of art. The theory of relativity is in the genius of its conception and in the style of its expression as much a projection of the u niquely individu ated mi nd of Einstein as Jerusalem is of Blake's. A door thus opened admitted both Einstein (who regarded Mach as the li berati ng force that led to his great discoveries) and Joyce, who needed to see that the mind, whatever its activity, is a u nity, its concerns all interdependent. My understanding, then, of where writing's frontier was when I dared to try a contri bution to it (rather like piping along on a pennywhistle while listening to Beethoven ' s Ninth ) , saw Joyce as a culmination, in the s ense that Homer was a culmination of archaic Greece, Plato of the classical world, Plutarch of the Hellenistic, D ante of the mediceval, Shakespeare of the Renaissance. One can learn everything from Joyce except how to emu l ate hi m. Pound, Proust, Mann: the same holds true of them. There are, however, corridors around these mountains. One is the hard path Kafka blazed. Another is the discovery by Ernst that Surrealism need not be Freudian: the raw, u nexplained dream still has its power; the dream with legi ble symbols is a spent force. Hence the liveliness of Ernst, the dullness and triviality of Dali. Ernst shares with Mach the phenomenological doubt that we witness anything except in agnosis. What we understand of an event is very little compared to our ignorance of i ts meaning. The greater our sensibility, the sharper our skepti ci sm, the more we are aware of the thinness of the light that is all we have to probe the dark. Ernst's surrealism di slocates our skilled, habitual reading of phenomena, awakening childish wonder, metaphysical dread, engaging us in a relationship with the world that forces us to confront a Heracli tean logos (what nature, desire, design, and God are saying) which we are free to ignore, "like men in a stupor," or to work with. My little vision, then, could be generated by taking a few verbs and nouns of the logos (which, Heraclitus warns us, is wordless and requires translation from a language of harmonic design, trees, light, time, con­ sciousness, attractions like gravity and reproduction) and speaking a simple statement. My first concern was to follow Mach and Ernst and see that the logos hides in technology in our ti me. Tat/in! begins with the invention of an archai c fly ing device, recognizable in other technological

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dialects as Pegasus, Chinese kites capable of reaching the moon, D aed alu �'s wings, the Wright Flyer, Eros as a pteros or winged phallos, . s ornithopter. da Vmct Tat/in! ends with Commander Neil Armstrong stepping onto the dust of the dead moon. The book therefore spans the hi story of flight, a sus­ tamed symbo!t c web woven throughout with images of birds, pteroi, machines-eight of the nine sentences i n the first paragraph of "The Aeroplanes at Brescia" allude to things that fly, or to things like smoke and flags that seem to. Composition as I understand it must be both a concrete and abstract continuum. It is not enough in a work of art to narrate; the narration must be made of words that constitute an inner and invi sible h armony. -r:he blossoms on the cherry , lyric white and as beautiful a sign as nature gtv �s, must also be seen as a thousand new cherry trees in potentia, as a vanant statement of the logos tree, a machine (in the language we now speak) that manufactures carbohydrates with sunlight and atoms. One of my sure guides is Mother Ann Lee's Heraditean dictu m that every force evolves a form, together with the inj unction from a Shaker hymn that we must " love to lay a good foundation I In the line of out­ ward thi ngs." This rhymes with the Dogon understanding, more rigor­ ously p latonic than Plato, that forms exist in God ' s mind, realize them­ selves first in th e world as points ( the fo ur corners of a house, the four corners of the universe: two solstices, two equinoxes), then as connected poi nts (what we call a blueprint) , and then as a three-dimensional schemata fi lled in with matter. They await, like Bl ake, the apocalyptic day when this scheme will turn itself inside out and disclose an ultimate harmony as yet hi dden by God for His own good reasons. This Dogon sense that man is a forager trying to find God's complete plan of the universe instructs (I hope) every page of Tat/in! ( both Hera­ clitus, in the story named for hi m, and the Dutch philosop her Adriaan van Hovendaal, in "The Dawn of Erewhon, " are made to be aware of �his inner consistency of all dialects of the logos; Kafka and Wittgenstein In "The Aeroplanes at Brescia" have an i ntuition of it, as do the Abbe Breuil in "Robot," Poe in " 1 830" ) . A later story, "Au Tombeau de Charles Fourier,"6 isolates this theme of foragi ng and proceeds like an Ernst collage to involve seven themes, or involucra, which when opened dt sdose the theme of foraging in various senses (Gertrude Stein and the cubists; wasps; the Dogon and their forager god Ogo; Charles Fourier and his utopian New Harmony; the flying machine, a bionic wasp as developed by Bleriot and the Wrights; the French photographer Lartigue 6The Georgia R eview, 29 (Winter 1 9 75 ) : 8 0 1 - 4 1 ; a second version in Da Vinci's Biq'C/e (Balti more: johns Hopkms Umversity Press, 1 9 7 9 ) .

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who made all his masterpieces with a child's intuition before he reached adolescence; and myself) . That "mysel f" means nothing more than that I wanted to include a conversation of Samuel Beckett's a bout Joyce, and felt th at this poignancy belonged to the pattern I was making and not to autobiography. The i nscription on Fourier's tomb had been copied down in the cemetery at Montmartre the afternoon of the same day that I talked with Mr. Beckett at the Closerie des Lilas (in chairs once occupied by Apollinaire, Joyce, Picasso, Jarry, Braque ) ; the story, or assemblage, was generated by this moment, with courage derived from the encounter. The sixteen drawings that are meant to be integral with the prose of this story (one hears a lot of the logos with one's eyes) turn the text into a graph ("to write" and "to draw" being the same Greek verb) . I do not know that this continuing of a theme through picture and word "works'' ; it is perhaps a skill of reading that has been abandoned for so long that we can't accept it. The method is implicit in Ernst (whose pictures are all texts to be read) and in the history of art: the prancing tarpan in Lascaux which I use as the first sentence of "Robot" has a glyph above it that clearly says "horse." Inside the theme of a technological logos I see a question which I trans­ late from both Samuel Butler's Erewhon (following van Hovendaal's es­ says on that astounding involucrum of a book) and Fourier; namely, is matter alive or dea d ? My symbols here are the living, green earth and the dead moon. Each of the stories states the question in its own way, and the final, long story, "The Dawn in Erewhon,"bri ngs a ll the statements to­ gether. And here my primitiveness as a writer asserts and defines itself, for I could manage no other way of exploring the theme of live earth and dead moon than to keep stating it with an imagistic inarticulateness that helplessly puts whole faith in the ability of the symbols to speak for them­ selves. The most meaningful of facts about nature seems to me to be that of the ten planets only the earth is alive. Next to this parareligious fact is the machine, which seems to be alive, but isn't. Hence the double theme from Fourier, who redesigned soci ety so that we could make the best possible success of being alive on the only living planet, and from Butler, who with wise satire first claimed the machine as a living thing, showed its rivalry to natural evolution, and i magined a people who valued life enough to kill the machines. Neil Armstrong's step onto a dead planet was the most p ressing state­ ment of the question as to the life of matter. He was a human being carried in a mach ine to posture as if in a charade (the photographs of him standing by that insectlike spacecraft, the American flag starched into a semblance of flying in a wind, the unerasable footprints, and none ever to

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be discovered o f a Friday there before him, the absolute u niqueness o f the event, dreamlike, had been anticipated by hun dreds of Max Ernst draw­ ings and paintings ) . The meaning of that charade is not only unknowa­ ble, it is unaskable. The first appearance of the moon in "The Dawn of Erewhon" (the Ernst-like description of which is derived from the descriptions of an otherworldly landscape in Wyndham Lewis's Childermass ) is intercut-Brakhage fashion-with scenes of Dutch chi ldren, in a setting of sterile sand that seems lush beside the dust of the moon, discovering the sexual attraction of each other's bodies . The h uman body in this story is a countersymbol to the machine. Butler, I feel, would have done much more with this in Erewhon if Victorian prudery had not stood in his way . I felt free to be as explicit as I could, for we have so misunderstood the animali ty of our bodies that we may deserve, as I have an Erewhonian Villiers de I'Isle Adam say, to have machines do our li ving for us. "The Dawn in Erewh on," whose title is that of a Wyndham Lewis painting (an allusion by Lewis to Doughty's "The Dawn in Britain " ) is set in the Netherlands (the nether land, Hades ) , and the recurring i mages of the moon, where Plutarch and apparently the Pythagoreans thought Hades was, supply visions of a wasteland. Adri aan van Hovendaal ( Had­ ri an, the garden keeper, i.e., Epikouros) is in one dimension an Orpheus in the u nderworld trying to reclaim Eurydike, by whom I mean ( follow­ ing Ruskin, Proust, Pound, and Joyce, among others) a spirit lost to this world. What this spirit is-some liveliness, some principle of regenera­ tion and care (I equate it with civilization ) -has been the concern of western literature since around 1 8 30. Hence a story with that title, and my endeavor to make Poe a nameless spirit identified with Byron, Navalis, and others who seem to record the rape of a Persephone or the death of a Eurydike. (Claudian wrote the de Raptu Proserpinae the year after the Goths b u rnt Eleusis; in 1 8 3 0 the locomotive and other steam machinery began to appear-Hades's black horses in their Aetnaean smoke.) Van Hovendaal' s vision of a lost Eurydike is of both kore and kouros, because what he is recovering in his philosophy is an archaic understand­ ing of the world, like his contemporary Wittgenstein. One is Kaatje, one Bruno. Each is meant to be a being from the world of Fourier's New Harmony, free of the restri ctions and evasions of "civilization" (Fourier's name for what we call the Enlightenment and industrial revolution ) . They are epigoni c extensions o f Adriaan: when he is Fourier, they are members of the Little Hordes; when he is Higgs the traveler in Erewhon, they a re Erewhonians. Together they illustrate a spontaneity and elastic­ ity which a money-valued society must quickly b reed out of our young i n

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order to keep the world going in its murderous, despairing, narcotic way. To achieve a richness of meaning I could manage no other way (again, primitively) than of constant rhyme in images, and of translation of meaning from one image to another, so th at somewhere i n the textum a thread would become vivid, or a portion of the design would become clear and lead the attentive reader on into the rest. On the surface I had only a sense that a page could be dense i n various ways: through a knit­ ti ng of sound patterns ("voluble pines and yellow villas of the Via Ponale") , through a knitting of imagery, 'and by evoking the names of people and things (there are ninety-three historical personages named in "The Aeroplanes at Brescia" ) . For making these particulars cohere I tried to learn from certain highly elliptical writers how much can be omitted from the texture of a page. If it is of any i nterest, the styles I find most useful to study are those of Hugh Kenner, Osip Mandelstam, Samuel Beckett, Wyndham Lewis, Ezra Pound, Charles Doughty. All of these are writers who do not waste a word, who condense, pare down, and proceed with daring synapses. From Viktor Shklov ski I saw how narrative can be suggested rather than rendered, and how anything can be made startling by taking it out of "its series." Shklovski ( and other Formalists) felt that art served a purpose by " making the fami liar strange," a process of regeneration (of attention, of curiosity, of intelligence) the opposite of narcosis. One of my concerns was to let nothing of myself get into these stori es, whether for Flaubertian detachment or a reluctance to make a copy of myself or anyone I know, I can't say. Yet a friend who is also a very great critic has remarked with a degree of irony and wit that all the stories in Tat/in! are self-portraits. What he is perceiving is my engagement with the materials and people of which the stories are made, some as scholarly research, some as lines of inquiry crossing a diversity of activities : the story about Tatlin grew out of a political stance I took some years ago and h ave since modi fied, and out of a backtracking study in search of the origins of modernism in painti ng and sculpture; "The Aeroplanes at Bresci a," " Robot," " Herakleitos," and " 1 8 3 0" all developed from studies of Kafka, p rehistoric pai nting, early Greek writing, and Poe which exist in other forms (essays, critical studies, translations) . There is another sense in which autobiography enters i nto writing that is ostensi bly obj ective far deeper than the coloration of attitude and characteristic attention. This entry is secret, sometimes personal, but not hidden (no one, for instance, could find it). In the story "Tatli n ! " there is a grandfather to give some reality to, so I gave him detail s of my own (fused with the grandfather in Gogol's " Old World Landowners" ) , and gave Tatlin in his childhood activities and emotions I knew from my own

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childhood. This kind of piecing out (always to fill a vacuum of informa­ tion) is in all of the stories. I confess that these mi nor detai ls have a peculiar satisfaction for me; it is as if I had a fund of resources to be drawn on only when I could locate nothing i n history. I could fill these lacunae with made-up material, except that I mistrust made-up material. This sounds like a paradox, but I have an i ncident to guide me here. Once, praising ] . R. R. Tolkien to his friend H ugo Dyson, I was surprised to hear Dyson say that Tolkien would be a much better writer if he "hadn't made i t all u p . " The lesson to be learned from this is that the writer assembles, finds, shapes. There is nothing to be gained by displac­ i ng the authentic. ( And I would not agree that Tolkien did : ' the romantic epic is a game, and we do not confuse games with reality) . There is however, more to be seen here. My Tatlin i s not Tatlin, nor my Poe Poe. But my stories are stories about them. We have lived for some two centuries now in a histori cal glare to which we are perhaps not yet, as a world, accustomed; we can no longer mythologize events. We do not know anything else to do with people. The Civil War is not a myth, but Lincoln is. Tat/in! begins with the last historical event-the Russian Revolution-to be mythologized by its participants. Into this soft place in the iron ring of history I moved my wedge. By ironically handling the Revolution I hoped to have the purch ase to sustain a mythologizing of events, in order to h ave the advantage of storytelling (while keeping enough of the conventions of fiction to ward off a vatic tone) , of the high h and that quali fies as "an excess of historic intelligi bility." So i f we go back to the fiat of these stories, there is nothing there but the author, his aesthetic will , and the grist he needs for his work. I hope that every selfish expedient obeyed its explicit exclusion from the feast. All creation is so comp letely self-expression that the phantom, "the self," its quarrels with the world, its confessions, its admi ration of its image in nemoral pools, should be u nwelcome for what it is, a guest-invited guest, an intruder. The self, in any case, is a vacu u m : nothing until it is filled. Continuity of perception, Mach said, is all we can call mind. A story, then, might be blatantly what it is under various guises of drama, prop­ aganda, social signi ficance, example, "entertainment" -an atomic spray of essences. The essences I choose (from forty years of attention to the world) can be displayed in words and pictures only, so already we have essences of essences, an absurdity, and must fall back and admit that stories are made of words: writing. Far from wanting a word to be invisi ble, unassertive, the makeshift vehicle for something else ("idea," "thought") , I want every word to be wholly, thoroughly a word. If reality can be pictured in words, words must be seen as a set of essences in parallel series to the world. This

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sounds platitudinous until we notice how words are locked into the fomulae of parole, paralyzed in cliche, and used without a regard for color, tone, diction. Joyce brought writing closer to speech th an it had ever been before, and at the same time distinguished writing from speech and returned it to its lost place among the arts that require geni us and labor for their execution. The tenet of Romanticism that art can accom­ modate and be enriched by the vernacular has by now grown out of all proportion i nto the belief that the vernacular, unskilled, spontaneous, and unhindered by any discipline, is the only style natural to writing. If I have a sensi bil ity distinct from that of my neighbors, it is simply a taste, wholly aritificial and imaginary, for distant plangencies and differ­ ent harmonies in which I can recognize as a stranger a sympathy I cou ld not appreciate at my elbow: songs of the Fulani, a ntumpan, male and female, of ceremonial elephant drums of the Asantehene, dressed in silk, under a more generous sun and crowding closer upon the symbo lled and archaic embroidery of the ski rts of God, the conversations of Ernst Mach and William James, Basho on the road to the red forests of the North, Sir Walter Scott at dinner with Mr. Hi nze, his cat, sitting by his p late. All I have done in Tat/in! is to forage among certain events with multi ­ ple causes a n d effects, and t o mythologize them a s Max Ernst pictured the world in a temporary agnosis, to induce a stutter of recognition. My diction is labored and chiseled, out of a Shakerish concern for the built, and out of a desire to make it as sensitive as I could to "the pat of a shuttlecock, or the creaking of a jack" (a phrase recorded by Johnson in the Dictionary) .