THE CARLETON Miscellany Business REPORT ON EDITORS' Art, Science and Life MEETING AND FORMA­ (and Movies) TION OF A. L. M. A. DICKENS AND THE POPULAR TRADITION Pleasure —ARNOLD KETTLE ENGLISH MAKED SIMPLE —PATRICK BROPHY CYBERNETICS (A Poem) —HOWARD NEMEROV WAR OF THE ANTHOLOGIES THE SHATTERING —JACKSON BURGESS CONTROVERSIAL —ERLING LARSEN Displeasure POEMS AND STORIES PROTEUS CRITICUS —LLOYD ZIMPEL, SCOTT —W. B. SCOTT BATES, BARRY SPACKS, LA DOUCHE HERBERT MORRIS, SUSAN —WAYNE BOOTH ABRAMS, JOHN LUCAS, SOME SOCIOLOGICAL ROBERT GRANT BURNS, FICTIONS MARION MONTGOMERY, —EARL H. ROVIT CAROLYN STOLOFF HEMINGWAY AND NUMERALITY —WILLIAM J. SCHAFER

WINTER 1962 90c

CONTENTS ESSAYS: DICKENS AND THE POPULAR TRADITION Arnold Kettle 17 THE SHATTERING CONTROVERSIAL Erling Larsen 61 ENGLISH MAKED SIMPLE Patrick Brophy 86 SOME SOCIOLOGICAL FICTIONS OF THE FIFTIES. .Earl H. Rovit 87 THE WAR OF THE ANTHOLOGIES Jackson Burgess 93 HEMINGWAY: ARBITER OF COMMON NUMERALITY William J. Schafer 100 PROTEUS CRITICUS W. B. Scott 105

FICTION: THE SCRATCHING CAT BEFRIENDED Lloyd Zimpel 10 LA DOUCHE Wayne Booth 81

VERSE: Howard Nemerov 3 John Lucas $6 Scott Bates 6 Herbert Morris 57 Barry Spacks 8 Carolyn Stoloff 58 Robert Grant Burns 51 Marion Montgomery 60 Susan Abrams 5 3

PROCEEDINGS IN THE FORMATION OF THE ASSOCI­ ATION OF LITERARY MAGAZINES OF AMERICA 70

THE CARLETON MISCELLANY, Volume III, Number 1. Carleton College, Northfield, Minnesota. Published by Carleton College. Editor: Reed Whittemore Associate Editors: Wayne Carver and Erling Larsen Editor, Department of American: Wayne Booth Business Management: Haldor M. Bly and Arlys Wiese Drawings by CCW and ERW III The Carleton Miscellany is published in Winter, Spring, Summer and Fall. Rates are as follows: $3.30 for one year, $6.00 for two years. It is distributed to newsstands and bookstores by B. DeBoer, 102 Beverly Rd., Bloomfield, N.J. Manuscripts are submitted at the author's risk; further, they will not be returned unless they are accompanied by stamped, self-addressed envelopes. Copyright, 196%, by Carleton College Entered as second-class matter at the post office at Northfield, Minn. cago and has lived "near North" there for the past five years.

A story by LLOYD ZIMPEL print­ ed in the Miscellany in i960 re­ ceived honorable mention in the Martha Foley collection of short stories for 1961. NOTES ON HERBERT MORRIS'S verse has ap­ peared in Poetry and other maga­ CONTRIBUTORS zines. He lives in Philadelphia.

ARNOLD KETTLE, an English WAYNE BOOTH'S regular column Marxist, is a "senior lecturer" at the in The Miscellany has been omitted University of Leeds. His two-vol­ in this issue, to make room for the ume work, An Introduction to the business proceedings of the English Novel, published originally A.M.L.A., but he is represented by Hutchinson House, has been re­ anyway by "LaDouche," which is printed recently in a Harper's pa­ not an excerpt from his new book, perback. The Rhetoric of Fiction (Univer­ sity of Chicago Press, 1961). This W. B. SCOTT was a regular con­ book, it should be pointed out, is tributor to Furioso, and his works there, like "Chicago Letter," have one of the important books about been reprinted widely. He teaches fiction in recent years (editor's at Northwestern University. opinion of another editor), and for those who do not thoroughly un­ EARL H. ROVIT, of the English derstand the machinations of "La Department of the University of Douche" we recommend pages 56- Louisville, is the author of Herald 57, in the chapter, "Novels Must to Chaos (University of Kentucky Be Realistic." Press, i960). PATRICK BROPHY sent us a letter JACKSON BURGESS has had two which we lost; so all we know of novels published—Pillar of Cloud, him at the moment is that he has 1957; The Atrocity, 1961—and is been a contributor to First Person an assistant professor at the Uni­ and comes from Nevada, Missouri, versity of California. if that is possible.

SUSAN ABRAMS graduated from WILLIAM J. SCHAFER is in the Wellesley in 1954. The poems in graduate school at the University this issue are the first work of hers of Minnesota, after graduating from to be published. She works in Chi­ Earlham College. • HOWARD NEMEROV

CYBERNETICS

Now you are ready to build your human brain. You have studied the plan, and taken inventory Of all the pieces you found in the kit. The first brain won't be inexpensive or Compact; covering most of Central Park With these tiny transistors, it will cost A sum slightly in excess of the Gross National Product for Nineteen Fifty Nine; But that is not a scientific problem, For later brains will reproduce themselves At less expense, on a far smaller scale, Bringing down average costs in the long run. Screwdriver ready? But before you start, Consider, helmsman, what a brain requires. A human brain has always needed blood, And always got it, too, in plenty; but That problem occupies a later stage; Right now, some elementary decisions.

It must of course, be absolutely free, That's been determined, and accordingly You will program it to program itself, Set up its own projects and work them out, THE CARLETON MISCELLANY

Adjusting what it does tomorrow by The feedback from today, and casually Repairing yesterday's disasters with The earliest possible editorials. It must assure itself, by masterful Administration of the unforeseen, That everything works according to plan, And that, as a General from the Pentagon Recently told Congress, "The period Of greatest danger lies ahead." This way Alone it will be able to preserve Anxiety and sloth in a see-saw balance, Provoking the flow of both adrenalin And phlegm (speaking electronically), Whence its conflicting elements achieve A fair symbiosis, something between The flood of power and the drouth of fear: A mediocrity, or golden mean, Maybe at best the stoic apatheia.

At the same time, to be a human brain, It has to have a limiting tradition, Which may be simple and parochial (A memory of Main Street in the sunlight) But should be unequivocal as well: "My country right or wrong," or "I believe In free enterprise and high tariffs," Or "God will punish me if I suck my thumb." Something like that. You will provide also A rudimentary view of history: One eyeless bust of Cicero or Caesar, A Washington Crossing the Delaware, The Driving of the Golden Railroad Spike; Maybe a shot of Lenin tombed in glass. It need not be much, but it must be there. HOWARD NEMEROV

Oh, but you want a more ambitious brain? One that can keep all history in mind, Revise the whole to fit one added fact, And do this in three hundredths of a second While making accurate predictions of Price fluctuations for the next six months? Perfectly possible, and well within The technical means at hand. Only, there's this: It runs you into much more money for Circuits of paradox and contradiction. Your vessels of antinomian wrath alone Run into millions; and you can't stop there, You've got to add at every junction point Auxiliary systems that will handle doubt, Switches of agony that are On and Off At the same time, and limited access Blind alleys full of inefficient gods And marvelous devils. No, you're asking the Impossible, Dostoevsky described it: "A Petersburg intellectual with a toothache." Better to settle for the simpler model. You could put a man on the moon for less.

O helmsman! in your hands how equal now Weigh opportunity and obligation. A chance to mate those monsters of the Book, The lion and serpent hidden from our sight Through centuries of shadowed speculation. What if the Will's a baffled, mangy lion, Or Thought's no adder but a strong constrictor? It is their offspring that we care about, That marvelous mirror where our modest wit Shall show gigantic. Will he uproot cities, Or sit indoors on a rainy day and mope? Will he decide against us, or want love? HOWARD NEMEROV

How shall we see him, or endure his stride Into our future bellowing Nil Mirari While all his circuits click, propounding new Solutions to the riddle of the Sphinx?

• SCOTT BATES

FABLE OF THE FALLEN DROP OF DUNG

A rich and noble drop of dung Whose ancient privileged class Had lost repute once fell among Some proletariat grass

Whose spokesblade turned to him and said We don't need your kind here The feudal days of dung are dead As dews of yesteryear

We've passed the unprogressive stage When guts were all gung-ho Our modern scientific age Will rise with Vigoro!

The drop of dung felt fallen then But firmly answered Sir My strength is as the strength of ten For I am pure manure SCOTT BATES

FABLE OF THE HUNCHBACK WHO THOUGHT HE WAS A SWALLOW

The hunchback who thought he was a swallow Slept in the city dump Under a green umbrella With feathers on his hump

By gray popocatepetls Of fuming cinder piles And seas of emerald bottles And goodrich tire isles

The hunchback who thought he was a swallow Dreamed of summer gone To cloudbanks over Rio And down the Amazon

To big Brazilian beetles On green umbrella trees And butterflies like petals Floating over seas

The hunchback who thought he was a swallow Flew south over telephone poles Over perpendicular people With hunches on their souls

Over tall cathedral crosses To the isles below the wind To plane with albatrosses And others of his kind THE CARLETON MISCELLANY •BARRY SPACKS

AT THE AGE OF THIRTY WHEN HAMLET BEGAN HIS REVENGE, AND JESUS HIS MINISTRY

Don't mention the rocks, the blocks from the quarries, the boulders... I've heavier work down here in the dust of the gravel! Far off in the distance they heave a few Alps on their shoulders; I shudder, I bend my back low, I search with my tweezers. Enraged as a child when a wave leaps the moat of his castle, I clear a new space, I sift through the thousands of pieces; In shade from my mountainous body my fingers rustle, And out where it's simple they lever the slab of Australia. I laid out some lines, half-inches that looked like each other, And rose, and stumbled, and scattered the ends of my labor. How did it fit? how did it all fit together? Behind me the children are digging a hole to China.

TO MY STUDENTS, AT THE BEGINNING OF THE TERM

Each in a chosen corner And in each a chosen corner As the bell begins to ring us with a start To our mismatched wrestle through the year, Endure a formal moment of appraisal, And I will call out names until the people Can appear. Now you are bristling, acned, glowing like a brand, Or easy, chatting, munching, muscles lax; BARRY SPACKS

Some questions, I will say, let's ask some questions: "Dare man proceed by need alone?" "Did Jesus go for gentiles?" "Is any ear in order since Korzybski?"

Politesse, and hear the questions! Full of certainties and reasons (Or uncertainties and reasons) Why should you ignore the questions? What have you to fear from questions Who are bursting with your reasons, Full of reasons as a dog is full of love?

So—questions. Let us all consider questions. And once you pause to think I'll trip your heel, Put scissors to you, excavate your chest! I'll speak some soothing words about the past Until your back is turned, then stoop and throw Most foul, most foul, the future in your face.

THE SOLITARY

In the neatened room She brushed her hair And the curtains bellied up with air; She would rediscover, now he was gone, Ease, and sweetness. Awakened near dawn By insignificant sparrows singing, She reached for herself, And she wasn't there, And the curtains bellied Up with air. THE CARLETON MISCELLANY

THE SCRATCHING CAT BEFRIENDED

By LLOYD ZIMPEL

When Zetti's lifelong friend Poundstone died, aged eighty- one, he left behind a four-room house with measly furnishings and an old brown cat, raised from a kitten, that stalked from room to empty room, dangerously purring. Its green eyes shined in the gloom of drawn shades and marked grim duty for the liv­ ing. Zetti glimpsed them and groaned in his sleep the night after Poundstone's passing. In Poundstone's widower past, city hall found no heirs; a day after the final word was uttered over the gray body, Zetti walked from his side of town to the other to fetch the cat before it starved. He had no patience with animals, but he had promised. Friendship was friendship — and never more a duty than when the cat raked long claws across his right hand and scooted into the dust under the bedroom chiffonier. Grunting sourly, the old man crawled after it and finally, quite by accident, captured it behind the sofa. He bound it tightly in his plaid lumber-jacket. The cat was big and heavy as a hog. "Rotten beast," Zetti panted to himself as he lugged the twitching bundle across town. On the bridge he had half a mind to toss it, good coat and all, over the side, the way he and Poundstone some seventy years ago — both high-spirited boys in black stockings and cloth gar­ ters — once gladly did a favor for a cat-ridden neighbor by dis­ posing of a gunny-sack of week-old kittens.

IO LLOYD ZIMPEL

At home he first painted iodine on the bloody scratches on his hand, and then untied his coat sleeves on the sunny back porch. Out came the cat all matted fur and wild eyes. At once it bolted for the deepest corner, growling and murderously eyeing its new master. "Don't you mess on the floor," Zetti warned, hopefully put­ ting down newspapers as the cat backed so far into the corner it seemed to fold in upon itself. Dirty brown fur stood up stiffly around its neck; its musky male odor spread throughout the glass-enclosed porch. Gingerly, Zetti lifted his lumber-jacket—it was forever im­ pregnated with the same foul smell. In disgust, he slammed the door and hobbled out of the house. Twice around the block he went, his heart full of curses for this outrage in his ordered bachelor days. Who to blame—the ugly cat or Poundstone for leaving it? His second time around the block he stopped at the butcher's; he would begrudge the beast a mess of chicken guts and spoiling liver for dinner. "Going on a diet?" asked the butcher slyly, but fell to tune­ less whistling before the old man's glare. In his kitchen Zetti emptied the cardboard container of slops into a sardine can, and opened the door to slide it onto the porch: the cat sat twitching a tail as big around as Zetti's wrist, its tough eyes fastened on the sardine can as if it read the label with con­ tempt. "Gobble away, you greedy thing," said Zetti, nearly gagging at the thought. With the door shut behind him, he waited for the sickening sounds of the cat's feeding; but there was only silence. After a few minutes he peered in. Sitting exactly as before, the cat stared at him, food untouched. "Starve then," said Zetti crossly, hoping it would. Midmorning the next day when he came in from weeding his tomatoes to fix himself a cup of hot milk and coffee, he noticed that the slack skin on his hand around the scratches was red and

ii THE CARLETON MISCELLANY swelling. Against the itching under the skin he swabbed on more iodine. As he held the cup he studied his hand from a number of angles. A string of obscenities for the cat and an involuntary few for its dead owner stumbled past his lips. That cat might have given him blood poisoning. Wouldn't that be something? Only bitter obligation to the dead kept him from booting the beast as far as his frail legs could manage: but from somewhere out of the dim distant past he owed Poundstone a favor; no doubt- he had forgotten how or why or when and this made duty now rankle all the more. When he looked into the porch the cat, long as a leopard, was stretched out against the wall, steadily watching the door. The food lay in a hot-looking mound that appeared to hide some strange life beneath its shining surface. Its stench filled the porch. "Won't eat it, eh?" Zetti said. He brought a plateful of milk and held his breath to push it past the door. All cats drink milk, he told himself. But in the morning the milk was jelly-like, souring in the dish and adding its cheesy stink to that of the butcher's slops. The full strength of the smell nearly overwhelmed Zetti: he drew back choking and at once flew into a rage. "You think you'll get steak, you bastard?" he cried, and hurled himself into the kitchen where, in distraction, he over-boiled his breakfast oatmeal. Grum­ bling, he swallowed down the smoky lumps, and fell to poking ex­ perimentally at the puffed flesh along his scratches. Wine-colored spots surrounded them, and the skin was soft, resilient, as if liquid lay beneath. . . . Do something about that, he thought. Heating water as hot as he could stand he added a few drops of Lysol. As he bathed his hand in this solution he heard news­ papers rustle on the porch. With his hand dripping pale magenta polka-dots to the floor, he went to peek. The cat hadn't moved, the food still lay untouched. Ah, it made him sick to see the both of them! He shut the door and quickly left sight and smell of the beast and its dinner to walk through the early evening haze to the corner drugstore.

12 LLOYD ZIMPEL

"Nasty scratches," said the fountain man. "Goddam cat did it to me!" Zetti burst out, his voice afire with passion. "I took him in, he won't eat or nothing!" "What you doing with a cat?" piped up an old man in over­ alls from his seat at a wire-legged table by the window. "I took him in," said Zetti, too upset even to see who his questioner was. "He was old Poundstone's. I was doing him a last favor. I thought he was my friend." "A cat," said this same man in a reedy voice. "Good company in a person's old age." "Try him with fish," said the fountain man. And when Zetti started for the door, he further advised: "Ought to see a doctor for that hand." But the old man, forgetting whatever he had come for, cried furiously: "What could a doctor do? It's only a scratch!" and making a gesture of extreme agitation, hastened out. . . . His fitful sleep ceased just as the first light of dawn gave shape to his room. In his underwear, Zetti got up and walked to the porch. The cat had shifted only slightly; it sat now where Zetti's cane rocker normally stood. A glossy gray skin lay over the con­ tents of the sardine can; the sour milk, gone solid, had cracked like a crust of drying mud in a drained swamp bottom. Zetti slammed the door on the cat's unblinking gaze; his own eyes settled on the hand that held the doorknob: it had bloated to a mound curved as fatly as the over-sized brass knob, and the skin turned blue as pigeon gut. He fancied he made out the fierce pulse that beat beneath the skin. Very gently he ran a finger along the length of longest scratch and a pearly bead of pus pushed up at one end of the light scab. This he wiped away on his union-suit sleeve, and with cold curiosity pressed out as much more as would come. His tampering left the hand sharply athrob. A pain coursed up his arm, tickled nerves in his shoulder, and drove him into an ugly temper. For a long time he sat in the gray light of morning with the hand laid angrily before him on the flowered oilcloth of the

13 THE CARLETON MISCELLANY table; then he rose to light the fire under a pot of water into which he dribbled a cupful of salt. He immersed his hand. Im­ mediately it began to tingle and the pulsing pain gave way as the salt took sharp hold; but he did not move until the therapeutic heat had disappeared. The hand was less swollen now—what doctor could have done as well? Along each scratch the salt soon crusted in a white crys­ talline ridge. He wrapped a handkerchief around the hand and tied it loosely, using his gums to help make the knot. With the wound out of sight the pain seemed to fade. In wrathful purity, Zetti's thoughts returned to that beast, that damned cat so smug and scornful, too proud even to eat. What did it live on? Mice, guessed Zetti, who now cared not at all if the monster starved. For most of the afternoon he sat at the kitchen table pondering the problem of the cat. There were highly practical considera­ tions, aside from any others: with the cat in the porch he couldn't use the back door. Besides that, the shameful foul odor was al­ ready seeping into the house itself. He could smell it where he sat. For the first time in years he felt a longing for fresh air, but the windows were all permanently stuck. This much was certain: the cat could not stay where it was. The cellar—that would be the place; the cellar, where Zetti never ventured and from which even an odor could not escape; an ideal spot, entirely out of the way—plenty of mice there, too, he sup­ posed; perfect from all standpoints—except how to get the thing down there without risking another scratching. Craftily, he planned a transfer that would not require him to touch the beast: closing the kitchen door, he opened wide the one to the cellar—now the only way to leave the room was down the dark cellar stairwell. When he opened the porch door, the cat appeared idle and relaxed, but Zetti wasn't fooled—beneath the brown fur every strong muscle was tight as a wire. The wicked eyes followed him as he edged onto the porch. Then, precisely at the moment

H LLOYD ZIMPEL that he moved out of line between it and the door, the beast shuddered inside its skin and in an instant was gone, wholly dis­ appeared in a brown blur between the doorway and the spot it had so recently occupied. The sardine can flipped over to mark its swift passage. Startled, Zetti hurried inside; the cat was nowhere in the kitchen. Unless it had slipped down the sink drain, the cellar was the only place it could have gone. He leaped to slam the heavy cellar door, and grunted with satisfaction at having the brute out of sight and his house to himself again, more or less. On the parlor sofa that next afternoon he studied his hand, swollen from wrist to knuckles. He could flex the fingers only at the expense of a heavy pain which climbed up inside his arm to his shoulder and neck. "That goddamn cat will kill me yet," he soberly told himself, as much aware of the animal's hidden presence in the cellar as if it stood atop the radio glaring into his eyes. "Might have been he killed old Poundstone, too." Under the ache of hand and arm he soon dozed. When he awoke it was dusk. Cursing time that passed so swiftly, he went into the kitchen. He still hadn't gotten around to cleaning up the porch where the tipped food lay beneath a luxuriant spread of mold that seemed to be taking solid root in the worn boards of the porch floor. At least the odor had faded somewhat, al­ though it still lingered despite the fresh air from the propped- open porch door. "Got to disinfect every single inch," he told himself, but he was too worn out to do it now. He turned back to the kitchen to get something for his bad hand, something that would do a better job than salt and hot water. From beneath the sink he hauled out the dented kerosene can and soaked his handkerchief at the spout. He pressed the wet cloth over his wound while kerosene dripped off his fingertips to shimmer on the sink's porcelain. This was still another pain, unlike that of the scratches themselves or the salt.

15 LLOYD ZIMPEL

But even kerosene couldn't travel the distance to the throbbing shoulder. And he needed to reach it somehow. Grimly, he swore on Poundstone's soul that he would. Before he went to bed he mixed a pailful of mustard and hot water and thrust his arm into it—if this didn't work he'd give himself in to the clinic in the morning. But it was only one more useless pain for the withered flesh. A man had to marvel at the differences—iodine, salt, kerosene, mustard—and how nicely the scratches stood up to them. Quite a cat. But his admiration sped away and he told himself God was wrong to make a cat half that cruel and stubborn. "Kill or cure," he grittily advised himself; ground his gums and watched the cellar door as if a wild green eye might that very moment be gleaming at the keyhole. "Poundstone's cat, you're doing me in." Head awhirl with kerosene and mustard, he told his dead friend: "Well, I thought I could help you, but I can't. That's the way it is." With his good hand he threw open the cellar door and crawled dizzily to bed, pulling the quilt over his head. What did he care? But even with his ears covered and though he tried not to listen, he heard the cat thunder up the stairs and take off over land and sea looking for Poundstone. All night long Zetti's bum hand kept crawling onto the quilt to easily flex itself, as if it sought to grip something solid, even Poundstone's dead neck, instead of sour bedroom air.

16 THE CARLETON MISCELLANY

DICKENS AND THE POPULAR TRADITION*

By ARNOLD KETTLE

By Socialist Realism, in the field of literature, I assume we mean literature written from the point-of-view of the class- conscious working class, whose socialist consciousness illuminates their whole view of the nature of the world and of the potenti­ alities of mankind. By Critical Realism I assume we mean litera­ ture written in the era of class society from a point-of-view which, while not fully socialist, is nevertheless sufficiently criti­ cal of class society to reveal important truths about that society and to contribute to the freeing of the human consciousness from the limitations which class society has imposed on it. That the division between Critical Realism and Socialist Real­ ism is a tricky business, which though basic is seldom clear-cut, should not surprise us, for the socialist revolution begins many years and even centuries before it can actually take place. As Lenin reminds us: between the bourgeois-democratic revolution and the socialist revolution there is no Chinese wall. Which does not mean that between the bourgeois-democratic revolution and the socialist revolution there is no essential difference. What Lenin is warning us against is the expectation of a simple process, a black-and-white picture. I should like to make two points about Critical Realism which

* This essay was a contribution to a seminar on "Problems of Critical and Socialist Realism in English Literature" held at the Humboldt University in East Berlin in November, i960. Comments on it are invited.

*7 THE CARLETON MISCELLANY

I feel may be worth bearing in mind. One is that it covers a great deal of literature which varies very much not only in quality and subject-matter but also in the point-of-view from which it is written. To take one or two examples only from the field of English literature: Defoe, Fielding and George Eliot are all, I think correctly, described as critical realists, but though they all three adopt a point-of-view deeply critical of British bourgeois society the three points-of-view have almost as much that dis­ tinguishes them as they have in common and their individual contributions to the liberation of British consciousness, though not incompatible, are certainly very different. It is important therefore to define, within the general context of Critical Real­ ism, the particular point-of-view of particular writers and of particular tendencies within this general picture. My second general point is that when we speak of point-of- view in relation to creative literature we are referring to some­ thing somewhat different from a man's consciously held, or fairly easily abstractable, ideas. We all know from experience that a writer may have very curious, illogical and even reactionary opinions and yet be a pretty good writer, and conversely that there are writers whose philosophical and political opinions are enlightened and 'correct' and yet who are not very good writers. The explanation, of course, is not that the processes involved in the exploration of the world through art and those involved in the formulation of scientific laws are contradictory but that they are not as a rule the same. You may well have appreciated in general terms the correctness of a certain principle but not have understood very fully the actual ways that principle operates: or you may have a remarkable grasp of the way it operates in a specific case or area but yet fail to see its general significance. This can happen to scientists as well as artists. I am not, heaven knows, trying to press some great general distinction between Science and Art or between the make-up of the Scientist and the Artist: but it seems that, just because he is dealing with hu­ man material of an exceptionally high degree of complexity, it

18 ARNOLD KETTLE is particularly possible for the artist to have very valuable spe­ cific insights without being able to transform them into general or theoretical ones. To cut short a complicated and difficult (though to me fascinating) subject, I think we should remember that when we refer to the point-of-view of a writer and use the adjectives Socialist or Critical, we are using adjectives which, though valid and necessary, are normally used in contexts in which the texture of thought is rather more abstract and theo­ retical than the habitual processes of art. The words socialist and critical are never of course to the Marxist purely abstract words. Marxism, which teaches us that reality is more basic than what we think about it, must itself always be a counteracting force to any tendency to 'pure' abstraction, 'pure' theory. Yet — to oversimplify a bit —when in everyday life we refer to a man as 'socialist' or 'critical' we are usually referring to his for­ mulated opinions, whereas the important thing about an artist is not his opinions (on that level) but his sensibility, his all-round apprehension and comprehension of things. I am not for a mo­ ment meaning to pose the concept of sensibility against that of intelligence or reason or science. This is a fatal error in much bourgeois thinking. But I am suggesting that it may be useful to remind ourselves that when we refer to a writer's point-of-view in the artistic sense we are referring to his sensibility rather than to his opinions or intentions, though of course both these are relevant factors. That is why I am presuming to use in this paper the term 'popular' more often than the term 'critical.' Within the general movement of Critical Realism, it seems to me, there are certain writers who —though certainly critical of bourgeois society — remain in their overall sensibility essentially attached to the ways of thinking and feeling of that society. I would put Charlotte Bronte, Mrs. Gaskell, Thackeray and George Eliot within that category. They are honest writers, they have many insights and attitudes highly inconvenient to the ruling class: I do not want to under-rate their value. But their sensibility, for all its progres-

19 THE CARLETON MISCELLANY

sive aspects, seems to me in the end to be exercized, however critically, within the confines of petty-bourgeois feeling: it does not, even in the case of George Eliot (the best of them), burst the buckles of bourgeois consciousness, though it certainly strains them. Whereas, in a basic and essential way, Emily Bronte and Dickens and Hardy do burst the buckles. The view of of the world they express, the feelings they generate, are not socialist but they are more than what is generally meant by critical. And it would seem that the essential difference between these two groups of critical realist writers is that the latter write from a point-of-view which can be described not merely in somewhat negative terms as critical but in positive terms as popular, that is to say expressive of the sensibility of progressive sections of the people other than the petty-bourgeois intelligentsia. Hardy is a popular writer in this positive sense because his sensibility is es­ sentially a peasant sensibility. Emily Bronte and Dickens reflect, as it seems to me, that great popular alliance of working class and petty bourgeoisie which might — up to about 1848 —have succeeded in giving the bourgeois-democratic revolution in Bri­ tain a different and more revolutionary content and thereby in bringing the socialist revolution very much nearer. The might- have-beens of history are, of course, mere speculation. To the literary critic and cultural historian, however, they have a sort of reality, for he is concerned with the expression of forces which, though they may in the actual power-struggle be for the time defeated, yet remain powerful and fruitful. Dickens was not a Chartist, but he could not, I think, have been the novelist he was without Chartism, and in the eighteen-fifties and sixties Dickens's novels carry forward the spirit of Chartism and in some ways even deepen it and bring it nearer the spirit of Social­ ism.

II There is a striking contrast between Dickens's general repu­ tation, by no means confined to Britain, as one of the great

20 ARNOLD KETTLE writers —one of the dozen or so writers of the world whom almost every literate person knows something about —and his treatment by literary specialists in his own country and America. Even among critics who have taken the novel seriously there has been little disposition to recognize him as a supremely great writer, a writer in the category of Shakespeare and Chaucer. The most serious modern English academic literary critic, Dr. Leavis, can find no central place for him in his great tradition of the English novel. And even though in the last thirty years — thanks largely to the work of Professors Edgar Johnson, Sylvere Monod, John Butt and Kathleen Tillotson and the admirable pioneering monograph of T. A. Jackson — the position has improved some­ what, there is still nothing like a general recognition in 'respect­ able' literary circles of Dickens's stature. Even among those who have done something to fight for the novelist's reputation one has the uneasy sense of the right thing being done for the wrong reason. We must all be grateful for Mr. Edmund Wilson's famous essay "The Two Scrooges" which made it impossible for the sentimental-hearty view of the great writer to be maintained, yet it has to be said that one of the chief effects of Mr. Wilson's essay was to provide the stuffy, respect­ able Dickens-figure with a few good sadistic neuroses very much to the taste of the post-Freudian western reader. And much as one must welcome the debowdlerising of the Dickens legend which Georgina Hogarth and the Dickens Clubs had for long succeeded in maintaining, there has been a tendency for recent biographical work simply to replace the image of Dickens the Victorian fuddy-duddy by that of the Edwardian sugar-daddy. Among the highbrow literary critics the situation has not been much better. It is now fashionable to refer to the novels as 'sym­ bolic' and certainly this often reflects a more serious and reward­ ing approach than that of a few decades ago; but 'symbolic' is a word which has at best to be used with the greatest care and can more easily lead away from that towards a just assessment

21 THE CARLETON MISCELLANY of Dickens's art especially if its use betrays — as it so often does — a preoccupation with Jungian metaphysics.1 Why is it that twentieth-century western literary criticism has so singularly failed to come to terms with Dickens's art? I think the reason has little to do with objective artistic merit but is al­ most entirely a matter of the historical development of capitalist society over the last hundred years and of the position of the intellectual within that society. To say that Dickens was very unlike a twentieth-century in­ tellectual is, in a sense, to say something all too obvious, yet it is perhaps worth saying because it explains at least in part why so many twentieth-century intellectuals have either despised Dickens or praised him for off-centre reasons. Specifically, to catalogue the dissimilarities, one might say that Dickens, unlike most twentieth-century western literary intellectuals, was very vulgar, very practical and very optimistic. Perhaps it should be added that, though habitually living beyond his income, he was, by professional middle-class standards, very rich. Also that he was in the more formal, academic sense, quite unintellectual. None or all of these qualities, of course, however admirable, in themselves make Dickens a great writer; but they do involve his being, when we come to take stock of him, a great writer of a particular and — by modern standards — peculiar kind. And if I use the word 'popular' to describe the kind I do so with my eyes open.

Ill There are various reasons for using the word 'popular' in con­ nection with Dickens's novels and some of them, though by no means irrelevant, are not, in my opinion, among the conclusive reasons.

1A good example of the sort of thing I mean are some recent interpretations of Great Expectations by Dorothy Van Ghent (in The English Novel, Form and Function) and G. R. Stange {College English, XVI, October, 1954) admirably commented on by Julian Moynehan in Essays in Criticism, Vol. X. No. 1. Jan. i960.

22 ARNOLD KETTLE

(i) In the first place there is the fact that Dickens was, and has on the whole continued to be, very widely read. There had never been anything like the success of Pickwick. And the pub­ lic that read Dickens was, from the first, remarkably wide, rang­ ing from the aristocracy (including later on the dear Queen herself) to countless not highly educated working-class people. It is improbable that any subsequent serious British novelist, even George Eliot at the height of her fame, had so large or so wide- ranging a reading public, though a contemporary best-seller like John Braine's Room At The Top, with its vast Penguin printing, might come within a comparable distance. But though a large circulation over a long period must be seen to be in the end a sine qua non of popular literature, yet the obverse is not true and I think it essential to insist that a satisfactory use of the word 'popular' cannot permit of its identification with circulation. It is indeed precisely this identification that has led to the debasing of the word popular in a country like Britain where it is most often used as a synonym for 'commercially successful.'

(ii) More important, perhaps, is the question of Dickens's relation with his public. There is no doubt that, both as an ad­ herent of serial publication and as Editor of Household Words, Dickens enjoyed an unusually close relationship with his readers. We all know about the letters begging him to spare Little Nell and it is all too easy to see only the ridiculous side of this kind of thing. Professor John Butt has put the matter into perspective very effectively in Dickens at Work:

"To the author (serial publication) meant a larger public, but also a public more delicately responsive, who made their views known during the progress of a novel both by writing to him and by reducing or increasing their pur­ chases. Through serial publication an author could recover something of the intimate relationship between story-teller and audience which existed in the age of the sagas and of

23 THE CARLETON MISCELLANY

Chaucer; and for an author like Dickens, who was pecu­ liarly susceptible to the influence of his readers, this inti­ mate relationship outweighed the inherent disadvantages of the system."

This point deserves emphasis, for it involves something impor­ tant in any consideration of a genuine popular tradition —an attitude to art in which the audience is seen neither purely as consumer (the commercial relationship) nor as a superior group of like-minded spirits (the highbrow relationship) but in some sense as collaborator. It involves of course a rejection of the ex­ treme individualist attitude in which 'self-expression' as opposed to the organization of social experience is seen as the object of art and in which the whole importance of communication is played down.

(iii) A further point which has undoubted relevance to the position of Dickens in a popular tradition is his relationship to existing forms of popular culture of various sorts. Too little de­ tailed work has yet been done on this subject, but it is not diffi­ cult to sense a number of profitable lines of exploration. There is the absorption, for instance, of the fairy-tale imagination. Quilp and Fagin, to say nothing of Squeers or Krook, are ogres; Betsey Trotwood (not to mention Brownlow or John Jarndyce) is a fairy godmother; Miss Havisham partakes of the tradition (given of course a sharp twist) of the sleeping beauty. The novels are full of witches and wicked uncles and cinderellas and babes in the wood. It is perhaps worth making the point that such traditional ele­ ments in folk culture do not have to be turned into 'archetypes' in order to gain significance and interest. The prevalence of the wicked uncle is quite easily explained in historical terms rather than as the manifestation of some abstract psychological pattern. In a society in which inheritance and primogeniture are impor­ tant it is naturally uncle, father's younger brother, who has a

24 ARNOLD KETTLE particular temptation to do the babes out of their rights. Ralph Nickleby needs no Jungian pedigree. The little lost boys of Dickens are an all too natural product of a situation in which the maternity death rate was still something like 20 per cent. Twen­ tieth century readers are happy to see Dickens's concern with the Little Em'lys and Nancys as evidence of some kind of un­ resolved personal obsession; in fact his very sensible interest in Miss Burdett Coutts's attempts to do something practical for pros­ titutes shows that he saw the problem as an objective, though difficult, social one. If many of the typical recurring figures and episodes in Dickens's novels partake of an older popular tradition it is because he moved, both in life and imagination, so deep in the actual experiences of the people, which do indeed recur and form definable and typical patterns, the expression of which in fantastic terms is the basis and function of folk art. I am not trying, of course, to suggest that Dickens was him­ self without his psychological problems, eccentricities and worse. He was a complex and in some ways deeply unhappy man. But his acceptance of an active practical and public life, his thorough­ going commitment not, in the twentieth-century intellectual's manner, to certain ideas about reality but to reality itself, to fac­ ing the world and changing it, counteracted to a profound ex- extent his personal frustrations.2 What I would insist is that the sensibility behind the novels is essentially sane, balanced and un- neurotic; the traditional description of Dickens as a comic novel­ ist, though it has sometimes veiled his greatness, is right; the elements of violence and extremity in the books — which are im­ mensely important — involve no more than an imaginative pene­ tration into the realities of the life he knew. If they are not 'nice' books it is because he did not live in a nice world. I think the

a Dickens's capacity to turn to objective use material, often very deeply felt, from his own life is most impressive. David Copperfield, the most autobiographi­ cal of the novels, is one of the most balanced, certainly the tenderest. An episode like the rediscovery of Mary Beadnell, about whom he had nursed deeply ro­ mantic illusions, is used in Little Dorrit with remarkable poise and control.

25 THE CARLETON MISCELLANY fairy-tale tradition greatly helped Dickens to encompass artis­ tically (perhaps fantastically is a richer word) the life he was faced with, and one of the marks of his triumphant absorption of this tradition is the fact that he has himself added so many char­ acters and episodes to a popular mythology. You do not have to have read Martin Chuzzleiuit to know the significance of Mrs. Gamp. Then there is his closeness to contemporary manifestations like the melodrama and the music-hall. Lady Dedlock is, in one sense, a stock figure of nineteenth-century melodrama. She is an ancestress of the heroine of East Lynne and of the smart bad women with a 'past' who move in and out of the plays of Pinero and Oscar Wilde. Dickens's own passion for the theatre and his love of acting were not mere sidelines or exhibitionism. It is hard to imagine any twentieth-century major novelist visiting the provinces for the sheer love of it in some ephemeral contempo­ rary farce. And it is just as hard to imagine a modern author describing in the same tone George Rouncewell's visit to Astley's Music Hall in Bleak House:

"He stops hard by Waterloo Bridge, and reads a play­ bill; decides to go to Astley's Theatre, Being there, is much delighted with the horses and the feats of strength; looks at the weapons with a critical eye; disapproves of the com­ bats, as giving evidences of unskillful swordsmanship; but is touched home by the sentiments. In the last scene, when the Emperor of Tartary gets up into a cart and condescends to bless the united lovers by hovering over them with the Union Jack, his eyelashes are moistened with emotion."

The point here is that the tone is neither ironical, patronizing nor sentimental though there is a whiff of both the first and last, a whiff which it is easy to blow up into a gale, but which repre­ sents, it seems to me, an acceptance, neither an ignoring nor a sophisticated savouring, of George's experience. It has nothing

26 ARNOLD KETTLE in common for instance with Mr. T. S. Eliot's self-conscious discovery of the significance of Marie Lloyd.

(iv) Associated with this point one should mention the inter­ esting fact, brought only recently to general notice by the suc­ cess of Mr. Emlyn Williams's 'readings,' that the best milieu for the appreciation of Dickens is reading aloud. The novelist's own performances, so phenomenally successful in his later years, have been used by recent critics to illustrate elements of his personal desperation (his need for money to maintain his extravagant way of life; the psychological need he is alleged to have tried to sat­ isfy by the repeated reading of the blood-curdling Murder of Nancy) rather than to illuminate the nature of the novels. Public readings of the sort Dickens himself went in for are of course a special case, involving careful pruning and choice of subject- matter, but they do usefully remind us that novels can be read aloud and indeed were. In fact this habit of reading aloud, which Victorian families went in for much more than their descendants of the television age, needs to be considered seriously by anyone trying to define the level of communication at which Dickens was aiming. It also underlines, incidentally, the dilemma involved in the need to avoid bringing a blush to the cheek of the young person. I would suggest that the texture of Dickens's prose is, whether through conscious effort or not, perfectly adapted for reading aloud. At this level his wit, which is apt, in the demand­ ing silence of private reading, to seem a bit heavy-handed, the repetitiousness and underlining which the more sophisticated reader often finds tiresome, turn out to be just right. I think this is an observation worth making because it throws light on the rather basic question of the level of sensibility on which Dickens was working. Before we speak of the effect of a scene like the death of Jo in Bleak House as 'crude'— let alone 'sentimental'— we need to remind ourselves of two things: in the first place that, just as the texture of dramatic dialogue is bound to be, for the sake of immediate comprehension, less subtly suggestive than,

27 THE CARLETON MISCELLANY

say, the conversations in a Henry James novel, so will the semi- dramatic medium of a public, or fireside, reading impose on the author a style in which the effects are likely to be somewhat 'broad.' In the second place the very adjective 'public' has im­ portant implications: it involves communication not just on a writer's own terms, but on the terms of the outside world. The tendency of modern Western criticism is to resent any such in­ trusion on the idealised communication between the individual artist and the perfectly attuned reader and to feel the need to explain away as a conscious 'concession' any broadening of effect which an admired artist goes in for. It is time we realized that Dickens's vulgarity — though no doubt it raises its problems — is on the whole an incomparable element of strength. I have mentioned a number of points — the width of his read­ ing public, his attitude to it, his closeness to what remained or had been adapted after the industrial revolution of an older folk culture, his implicit attitude to art as a public activity —all of which, I believe, inevitably lead us to the word 'popular' when we consider Dickens's art; but I do not think any or all of these considerations, however important, is the chief reason for calling Dickens a great popular writer. For that we must look at the actual nature and content of the novels themselves. By this I do not mean of course simply their subject-matter — the material on which Dickens worked — but the total complex that he created, which includes inextricably subject-matter (abstractable only in the sense that the fantastic world of a novel can and must in the end be related to the real world), organization, rhetoric, and the writer's personal, controlling point-of-view. While insisting that art is not life I do not think that we should take at all a purist attitude to the question of subject-matter. I do not think it for­ tuitous that the greatest English writer of the mid-nineteenth century should have written about London slums, prisons, rail­ ways, factories, dustheaps, the docks, workhouses and lawcourts, as well as about well-to-do mansions, financial speculators and comfortable middle-class homes. I do not doubt that the novelist

28 ARNOLD KETTLE who deals really well with a relatively small and even unprom­ ising social area (like Jane Austen) is of more value in every im­ portant sense than one who (like Disraeli) deal trivially with a much larger one; but to extend this thought to a defense of limi­ tation almost for its own sake is not, I think, helpful, and I do not doubt that the sheer breadth of Dickens's social interests and his passionate concern with what an historian must call the major issues of his day are one of the essential elements of his greatness. His novels are fantasies, a series of images, complex but clear, difficult and at the same time simple, of significant areas of life in mid-nineteenth-century England, of human situations within that area which combine into a total situation or pattern or im­ age which is the book. Sometimes the book is dominated by a single visualized image to which all else adheres —the image of the Law (made concrete in the Court of Chancery) in Bleak House, of the prison in Little Dorrit, of the Thames in Our Mu­ tual Friend. Sometimes the image is best described in more ab­ stract terms — the title of Great Expectations or Hard Times is self-revelatory, bearing as much consideration as the visual pat­ tern of a picture. The content of each book can be thought of only in terms of the total image or pattern which fuses all the component parts which go to make it up — subject-matter, style, the author's controlling point-of-view. The total image or pat­ tern of a Dickens novel is always concrete not theoretic, many- sided not flat, developing not static, historical not metaphysical. And the content is popular.

IV It is necessary to indicate as clearly as possible the sense in which the words people and popular are used in these pages. It will not be easy to do so within a short space, without laying oneself open to the charge of a somewhat abstract dogmatism. Fortunately Dickens himself has given us a good starting-point. In a well-known passage which concluded a speech given at the

29 THE CARLETON MISCELLANY

Annual Inaugural Meeting of the Birmingham and Midland In­ stitute on 2y September 1869, he announced that he would dis­ charge his conscience of his political creed "which is contained in two articles, and has no reference to any party or persons" and proceeded: "My faith in the people governing, is, on the whole, infinitesimal; my faith in the People governed, is, on the whole illimitable." The remark caused, at the time, quite a rumpus, especially among Liberals who, assuming that by "the people governing" Dickens was referring to Mr. Gladstone's government, thought Dickens must have turned Tory. The novelist himself did his best to clarify his meaning by insisting on a small 'p' for the first people and a capital letter for the second and returned to the subject next time he was in Birmingham, adding for good meas­ ure an interesting quotation from Buckle's History of Civilisation in England which develops the theme that "lawgivers are nearly always the obstructors of society rather than its helpers." That contemporary politicians and political theorists should have misunderstood Dickens's statement, despite his clear denial that he was referring to any party or persons, is not surprising, for what he said by-passes in two sentences the essential assump­ tions on which the political thinking of bourgeois democracy is based. The bourgeois democrat, who believes that the British parliamentary system as developed since 1832 is the apogee of democracy, cannot accept that there is a fundamental and in­ superable division in his society between those who govern and those who are governed. For, after all, he will argue, the gov­ erned elect those who govern them. If the People choose as their rulers people who rule against them, or those whose interests are different from their own, then either they are very foolish (and probably not fit to govern anyway) or else they will discover their error and in the course of time correct it. That they can­ not correct it within the framework of political assumption im­ posed by the socio-economic system as at present operating is to the average bourgeois democrat literally unthinkable, for it in-

3° ARNOLD KETTLE volves passing beyond the very assumptions on which his own thinking is based. For the theory of bourgeois democracy of the type developed in Britain in the last hundred and fifty years is in fact dependent on the contention that there are within that society no insuperable class divisions, that is to say no basic divi­ sions of interest which cannot, within the existing social order, be modified to the point of elimination. To put it another way, the bourgeois democrat cannot (without ceasing to be a bour­ geois democrat) accept the proposition that the ruling class in his society, by virtue of its ownership of the productive forces and its control of the state and propaganda apparatus of society, is able to rule against the interests of the overwhelming majority of the People, despite the democratic rights the people have won. The force of Dickens's statement of his political creed lies precisely in the recognition implicit in it of two separate and conflicting forces: the people governing and the People gov­ erned. That he was quite well aware, on a pretty deep level of political understanding, of what he was saying and doing is made clear by a letter he wrote James Fields, a few days after his sec­ ond appearance at Birmingham in January 1870:

"I hope you may have met with a little touch of Radi­ calism I gave them at Birmingham in the words of Buckle? With pride I observe that it makes the regular political traders, of all sorts, perfectly mad. Such was my intention, as a grateful acknowledgement of having been misrepre­ sented."

Now the recognition of a fundamental division between Peo­ ple and rulers does not necessarily imply an analysis of the class basis of this division of the sort that Marx and Engels, contem­ porary citizens of Dickens's England, developed. Dickens was not a systematic political thinker. The very speech which ended with his profession of Radical faith reveals an extraordinary mix­ ture of paternalism, radicalism, belief in self-help, religious ideal-

31 THE CARLETON MISCELLANY ism, anti-clericalism and straightforward practical business-sense. The ambiguous attitudes toward philanthropy, embedded so deep in Bleak House, and expressed so interestingly in the complexi­ ties of his actual relationship with Miss Burdett Coutts, exemplify the sort of dilemma which was never resolved in his life. One would not wish to give the impression that Dickens was an un­ conscious Marxist or even a pre-Marxian socialist. He was, as he himself recognized, a Radical, with a good deal of the ambiguity that word implies in the mid-nineteenth century. But we are less interested in Dickens as a political thinker than in Dickens as a novelist. It is the emotional force and the imaginative imagery behind his confession of political faith rather than its abstract significance or its precise connection with Buckle's (or Carlyle's) philosophy that is important. And the test of Dickens's status as a popular writer lies not in his opinions but in his novels. If one stresses, then, this particular political statement it is because it does so remarkably draw together a number of threads, impres­ sions and emphases which, especially in the later novels, become more and more dominant. Dickens, then, sees the People not as a vague or all-inclusive term — an indiscriminate 'everybody'— but as a specific force in contradistinction to those who rule. And he sees them hopefully, confidently. That is all. But it is enough, both for his purposes as a creative writer and for a general clarification of the use of the word popular. That capital letter on which he set so much store is indeed of great significance. For what it indicates is a recognition of the People not simply as a passive mass but as an active force. This is fundamental. The People, in a society in which the essential property and power is in the hands of a small exploiting class, are those who are exploited as opposed to those who exploit them. There is, of course, no absolute merit in being exploited; but there is a specific demerit in being an exploiter, because the maintenance of the exploitation by which you live is bound, whatever your personal character or motives or aux­ iliary good deeds, to lead you to actions and attitudes and ideas

32 ARNOLD KETTLE which hold back the necessary development of human beings as a whole. In a class society like modern Britain the virtue of the People is that, unlike the ruling class, they are capable of solving constructively the fundamental problems with which society as a whole is faced and in doing so are able to raise themselves and the whole society to a new level of achievement and potentiality, to a new freedom. This advance is neither automatic nor inevi­ table, except in the general sense that history shows that up till now human beings as a whole have in fact (with whatever diffi­ culties, setbacks and errors) tended to choose to solve their es­ sential problems and to develop rather than to deteriorate. The struggle for power in modern British society is to be seen there­ fore not just as a struggle between two main and morally equal class groupings, of which the chief virtue of the larger is that it comprises more numbers than the smaller, but as a struggle be­ tween people and anti-people. The concept of the People, in fact, is inextricably bound up with questions of value and ques­ tions of value can be discussed only in relation to value to the People. Since there are no values but human values (the whole concept of what is valuable meaning what is good for human beings) it is impossible to judge or evaluate any manifestation of human culture, whether it is Bleak House or the latest tele­ vision serial, except in terms of its part in, and contribution to, human development. To state this general principle is not, of course, to imply that one has done more than to state a general principle. The problems of its application are extremely complex and certainly defy dogmatic treatment. But the principle is never­ theless true and it is for this reason that the question of Dickens's attitude to the People is so closely associated with the value of his novels. Popular does not — if we are to use the word thoughtfully — mean simply pertaining to the people in a passive sense. On the contrary, to use the word in such a sense is to debase it and, in doing so, further debase the people. To refer to the Daily Mirror as a 'popular' paper or a trashy television serial as 'popular' cul-

33 THE CARLETON MISCELLANY ture is a betrayal not only of words but of human dignity itself, for it implies that the worst is good enough for the People. Of course millions of men and women read the Daily Mirror and of course the act of buying it is, strictly speaking, voluntary. So no doubt was the act of the Indian women who used to commit suicide when their husbands died and of tens of thousands of young Germans who enlisted in the Nazi armies. If the pressures are strong enough people can be conditioned to take almost any action willingly. Human progress consists in the slow and often painful overcoming of those pressures and attitudes which, how­ ever widely accepted and even gloried in for a time, in fact pre­ vent human beings from enlarging their realm of freedom. Pop­ ular culture, if the phrase is not to become a mockery, is the culture which helps and strengthens the people, increases their self-confidence and clarifies their problems and potentialities. A popular tradition in literature implies, then, a literature which looks at life from the point of view of the People seen not passively but actively. Such a literature will not, of course, except at its peril, gloss over the weaknesses, the corruptions, the unpleasantness or the degradation of the People: it will not, ex­ cept at its peril, see life as it wants to see it. If its spectacles are rose-tinted it must be with the reflection of Blake's rose, not the rose on the chocolate box. Blake's or Dickens's London is not the less terrible for being seen from the point of view of the People, nor is Hardy's Oxford or Sholokov's Ukraine. The es­ sential characteristic of a popular tradition is not that it should be optimistic but that it should be true: and because it is true it will in fact be optimistic. But these large and generous words like true and optimistic are not as a rule the best to use in dis­ cussion and analysis. More modest ones serve us, on the whole, best. To use as a touchstone for the products of a popular tra­ dition the question: is it true? may be in practice less helpful and have less to do with truth than the question: does it serve the people? And though this touchstone, too, like any other, can be abused its abuses are at least more discussable and therefore

34 ARNOLD KETTLE more corrigible than the sort of inhumanity which defends itself in terms of high abstractions and absolute values.

V I should like to demonstrate from Bleak House what I mean when I suggest that it was the popular point-of-view from which Dickens's novels were written that determined their essential na­ ture and significance as works of art. I shall have time only to mention three points but perhaps they will serve to show what I am trying to get at.

(i) The central importance of the Law in Bleak House and Dickens's point-of-view in relation to it.

At the heart of Bleak House is the Court of Chancery. It is, most obviously, at the centre of the plot of the novel, for it is the case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce that links the various essen­ tial characters and groupings of the book and brings them into contact. But it is also the dominating image of the book, the very core of its pattern, sensuous and intellectual. It is the heart of the geography of the novel in the sort of way that London is at the centre of modern industrial England, and the Court of Chancery is embedded in London. It is presented with complete concreteness as a man-made institution physically and economi­ cally bound up with the development of a particular society, and the insinuating fog, so famously and graphically called up in the opening paragraphs of the book, creeps deep into the very tex­ ture of the novel, not merely colouring it but extending its di­ mensions. For the fog in Bleak House, like that of T. S. Eliot's Prufrock and indeed a real London fog, has a many-sided physi­ cal presence, cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of the shiver­ ing little 'prentice boy; and though, through the image of the megalosaurus, it recalls a past of primitive mud, barbarism and uncontrol, it combines this vision with the actual soot-flakes of the coal age so that the fog becomes associated at once with

35 THE CARLETON MISCELLANY

early Victorian London and with how much and how little man has made of man. Everything in Bleak House is linked together by the law. It is the Law that has ruined Miss Flite and Gridley and will ruin Richard. Tom-AU-Alone's, the foul slum which spews up Jo, is "in Chancery of course." Lady Dedlock's sin and Esther's stigma is to have offended the Law at a point in which legal and social sanctions come together, for Esther is illegitimate. The Law brings almost nothing but misery and it is revealed as being inextricably bound up with the British state and that state is shown (though Dickens himself would not have used the phrase) as an organ of class domination. To indicate how far Dickens's view of the state had developed by 1852 it is only necessary to compare Oliver Twist with Bleak House. While Oliver Twist is a novel which attacks certain abuses within bourgeois society, Bleak House strikes at the very foundations of that society. The Law then in Bleak House is revealed as a vital and inte­ gral part of the social fabric as a whole. It is continuously asso­ ciated in extremely complex but entirely concrete ways with money and power. The poor, like Jo, are at its mercy because they are poor; and it is the power of money that gives Mr. Tulk- inghorn his hold, via the Smallweeds, over an upright man like George Rouncewell. The Law is, in fact, a business. Mr. Vholes is the extreme instance but by no means an isolated one. And Dickens makes his general point when he writes: "The one great principle of the English Law is to make business for itself. There is no other principle directly, certainly and consistently main­ tained through all its narrow turnings. Viewed by this light it becomes a coherent scheme, and not the monstrous image the laity are apt to think it." The Law is administered by people who are at best, like Conversation Kenge and Guppy, absurdly, at worst, like Tulkinghorn and Vholes, wickedly inhuman. Mr. Tulkinghorn may not have a very coherent personal motive for his vendetta against Lady Dedlock but the point is that he is the agent of an impersonal system more potent and more sinister

36 ARNOLD KETTLE in its motivation than any expression of personal spite or hatred. Lady Dedlock implies this when she describes him to Esther as "mechanically faithful without attachment, and very jealous of the profit, privilege and reputation of being master of the mys­ teries of great houses." It is this very impersonality that makes Mr. Tulkinghorn so formidable. It is not his personal wickedness that Lady Dedlock is up against any more than it is the personal kindliness of the Lord Chancellor that determines the workings of the Court of Chancery. This sense of the Law as a force in itself, an independent business, self-perpetuating within its own closed circle of privilege and procedure, is basic to the meaning of Bleak House. And yet it is also basic that the Law is not in the last analysis independent. It has, like every bureaucracy, its inner circular logic, an almost infinitely frustrating image which breaks the spirit of those who get trapped in it; yet this apparent self- sufficiency is in the end illusory. Mr. Tulkinghorn's power is great but it is dependent on the great houses which employ him. He is Sir Leicester Dedlock's man. That is why the old baronet is so furious when he is killed. In Bleak House it is Sir Leicester, despite his personal anachronistic honourability, who is shown as the fountain-head of the Law. The Law is Sir Leicester's Law, the law of the ruling class. To present it in this way was possible to Dickens only because his own artistic point-of-view was dia­ metrically opposed to Sir Leicester's. Because he saw British so­ ciety from the point-of-view of the People, Bleak House is con­ ceived and constructed in the way it is.

(ii) The presentation of character in Bleak House. The characters in Bleak House are conceived and presented in relation to the central pattern of the book —the revelation of the working of the Law. Dickens habitually gives his characters general characteristics, associated with their work, their social position, the sort of lives they lead, before he establishes their

37 THE CARLETON MISCELLANY more individual features or endows them with their individual, idiosyncratic note or rhetoric. Notice the first presentation of Lady Dedlock: ". . . there is this remarkable circumstance to be noted in everything associated with my lady Dedlock as one of a class — as one of the leaders and representatives of her little world; she supposes herself to be an inscrutable being, quite out of the reach and ken of ordinary mortals . . ." There is, of course, no contradiction between this general presentation of a character as a type and his presentation as a unique and even eccentric individual. Those readers who think that such a phrase as "my lady Dedlock as one of a class" denotes in the author a lack of respect for the individual peculiarity of a character are in fact themselves victims of the illusion from which Lady Ded­ lock suffers. She thinks she is inscrutable but in fact it is she who is most deceived. It is usual to talk of Dickens's novels as though the characters, so rich and individual as they are, were simply invented casually, if prodigally, with no purpose beyond the expression of their own idiosyncratic vitality. But in fact in Bleak House there is scarcely a single character who does not contribute to the central pattern of the book. One or two, like Mr. and Mrs. Bayham Badger, with whom Richard lodges, do seem to be thrown in gratis for sheer good measure, but they are the exceptions. Take for instance a figure like Mrs. Pardiggle, the lady who takes Esther and Ada to the brickworkers. At first it might seem that her sole functions in the novel are to provide a necessary link in the plot and, incidentally, an amusing extra figure. But in fact Mrs. Pardiggle is an essential specimen in the exhibition Dickens has prepared. She, the Puseyite philanthropist, not only con­ trasts with and sets off the significance of Mrs. Jellyby but con­ tributes to the consideration of the whole question of philan­ thropy which is one of the main themes of the book. John Jarndyce's tolerance of the ghastly Mrs. Pardiggle becomes a comment on his own philanthropy and quality of feeling, just as his toleration of Skimpole, which at first seems an amiable

38 ARNOLD KETTLE generosity, in fact nullifies his efforts to help Jo and redeem his connection with Tom-All-Alone's. And, at the same time, Mrs. Pardiggle's religious affiliations do more than add a side to her personal character; they contribute to the working-out of the connection between religious bigotry and the working of an unjust Law which is a central theme of the novel. It is the reli­ gious fanaticism of Lady Dedlock's sister which, allied to the legal stigma of illegitimacy, sets in motion the story of Esther. Mr. Chadband (connected by marriage with Esther's aunt and through Mrs. Snagsby with the world of the Law) contributes also to this important theme. What I would wish to emphasize here, besides hoping to stress the tightness and consistency of the organisation of Bleak House, is that the attitude which such a treatment of character involves is something quite outside the province of a bourgeois sensibility. The superb individuality of Dickens's creations should not lead us to imagine that his approach to them is an individualist one. On the contrary it is because he sees the workings of capitalism as the determining and significant factor in the lives and person­ alities of his individual characters that he is able to allow them so much freedom of development. It is because a figure like old Beau Turveydrop is so firmly conceived as a social phenomenon, an anachronism surviving from the Regency period, that his idio­ syncrasy is so rich. It is because the horrible Smallweeds are in­ deed seen as part of a system, parasites of the oppressive Law, that they can be at the same time repulsive and funny, degraded human beings yet still human. I think this is very important. Be­ cause Dickens's artistic point-of-view is truly popular it is able to be truly inclusive. Even the most degenerate characters in Bleak House preserve a quality which makes the reader not ashamed to laugh. It is not quite a case of Baudelaire's "hypocrite lecteur, mon semblable, mon frere" (a sentiment which despite its ap­ parent sense of equality and humility has in fact still a suspect residue of individualism); but somehow in a Dickens novel we are all, including the reader, equals. Because there is no exclu-

39 THE CARLETON MISCELLANY sion there is no contempt and no superiority. We look degrada­ tion in the face and see humanity there. So that we can judge and enjoy at the same time. Our partisanship enlarges our com­ prehension and our inclusive sympathy strengthens our partisan­ ship. To understand all is to pass beyond limiting class judge­ ments, but it is not to pardon all. This is the sort of thing I mean when I stress the effects of Dickens's popular point-of-view.

(iii) Imagery. One of the key scenes and images in Bleak House is the fa­ mous "spontaneous combustion" episode in which Krook, the hor­ rible old 'Lord Chancellor,' is found dead. It is an astonishing scene, of a power and intensity which any­ one reading about it, as opposed to reading it in context, must find hard to imagine. Naturalistically, of course, the idea of the old man literally burning himself out is absurd and it was foolish of Dickens to have attempted a defense of it in such terms. But in terms other than the purely naturalistic the conception of the scene is completely right. It 'works' as infallibly as Gloucester's fall from the cliffs or Don Giovanni's confrontation by the com- mendatore. It is, in the first place, most carefully prepared for: the final sentence of the first chapter of the novel with its image of Chancery burnt away in a great funeral pyre opens up the idea. Then the presentation of Krook as the 'Lord Chancellor' is done with a wealth of detail of the most convincing sort. The oppressiveness, physical as well as psychological of that ghastly house with its limitless junk, its sacks of human hair, its creaking staircase and the wicked old cat, is established with tremendous realistic as well as imaginative force. There is a wonderful mo­ ment when Jarndyce notices that Krook is trying with great difficulty to teach himself to read and write and suggests that it might be easier for him to be taught by someone else. "Ay, but they might teach me wrong!" is the old man's immediate reply. In that second the almost schizophrenic horror of the Bleak

40 ARNOLD KETTLE

House world is glimpsed. At the most obvious level Krook's reply is wonderfully funny, off-centre, full of eccentric 'char­ acter: ' but beneath the laughter there opens up an abyss of alien­ ation which is far more than eccentric. The horror is not that Krook's distrust should have reached such a point but that he is, in an awful sense, quite right. In the world of Chancery in which every human being fights every other with any weapon of deceit and cunning he can muster there is no security, no possibility of common trust. Language itself becomes a mode of deception and prevarication; the lawyer is there to catch you out. It is only those like John Jarndyce who withdraws from the whole set-up, or Mrs. Bagnet, who lives in a different world, who can risk the human emotions of trust and generosity. The rest are like Mr. Guppy whose language is indeed self-expression. It is entirely right that it should be Mr. Guppy who discovers what has happened to Krook. The pages leading up to the dis­ covery are technically superb in their building up horror and suspense. A detailed analysis of them would show both the depth and the nature of Dickens's debt to Shakespeare. Macbeth is obviously the source of much of the imagery and treatment, es­ pecially the scenes around Duncan's murder and its discovery. But if Dickens has learned from Shakespeare, he has learned well, transforming as well as using, so that there is nothing derivative in the limiting sense about the scene. Indeed the climax of it is so uncompromisingly Dickensian and raises so sharply so many of the issues which divide those who admire and those who dis­ like Dickens that one cannot well avoid a rather long quotation. "They advance slowly, looking at all these things. The cat remains where they found her, still snarling at the something on the ground before the fire and between the two chairs. What is it? Hold up the light. Here is a small burnt patch of flooring; here is the tinder from a little bundle of burnt paper, but not so light as usual, seeming to be steeped in something; and here is —

41 THE CARLETON MISCELLANY

is it the cinder of a small charred and broken log of wood sprinkled with white ashes, or is it coal? Oh, horror, he is here! and this, from which we run away, striking out the light and overturning one another into the street, is all that represents him. Help, help, help! come into this house for Heaven's sake! Plenty will come in, but none can help. The Lord Chan­ cellor of that Court, true to his title in his last act, has died the death of all Lord Chancellors in all Courts, and of all authorities in all places under all names soever, where false pretences are made, and where injustice is done. Call the death by any name Your Highness will, attribute it to whom you will, or say it might have been prevented how you will, it is the same death eternally — inborn, inbred, engendered in the corrupted humours of the vicious body itself, and that only — Spontaneous Combustion, and none other of all the deaths that can be died."

The spontaneous combustion image, examined in the cold light of day, can be seen to express very completely the peculiar quality of the view of British society which is embodied in Bleak House. It has three essential features. In the first place it is an image dependent on natural processes as opposed to metaphysical concepts. The process that finishes Krook may not be scientifi­ cally accurate but it is nevertheless conceived in scientific, not mystical terms. The corruption that destroys him is presented not as some quality of being but is specifically associated with dirt, gin, grease and old paper; with rags and bottles; with sordid acquisitiveness. In the second place the spontaneous combustion image is a revolutionary image, as opposed to a reformist one. No one could cure Krook; he could not have been saved by charity or even by social services. The whole implication is that processes are involved which can culminate only in explosion and that such

42 ARNOLD KETTLE explosions are not exceptional and unnatural but the inevitable consequences of the processes themselves. Thirdly, the image emphasizes spontaneity as opposed to planned action. No specific act has caused the explosion. No match has been struck, no chain of powder prepared; indeed no outside agent is involved. It does not take much perspicacity to see the general signifi­ cance of all this. The death of Krook, the Lord Chancellor, represents in Bleak House the extreme possibility, the ultimate culmination of the processes at work at the very core of the novel. It is in this sense absolutely central to the novel's meaning and nothing that happens afterwards does in fact cancel or even modify the significance of the episode. It is the high point of what is best described as the revolutionary feeling of the book and this quality is not peripheral to Bleak House but at the very heart of its power and profundity. Yet it is a revolutionary feeling of a curious kind, for, though Bleak House is in this deep undeniable sense a revolutionary novel, there are no revolutionaries in it. Obviously this contra­ diction corresponds to the actual contradiction in Dickens's own attitude to capitalism. He hated it and wanted to see it destroyed but had very little idea as to how this could be done. And so in Bleak House, having expressed half way through the book with unforgettable power the revolutionary implications of his vision, he is faced with the problem of what to do with a real Lord Chancellor whose habits of life make spontaneous combustion less imaginatively plausible than in the case of old Krook. The second half of Bleak House is by no means a failure, but it undoubtedly lacks something of the controlled intensity and relaxed artistry of the earlier reaches of the book. The murder of Tulkinghorn, brilliantly effective as it is on the theatrical level, is, compared with the death of Krook, a bit of a fraud; for whereas there is, despite the naturalistic implausibility of the means, a deep artistic inevitability in Krook's death, the manner of Tulkinghorn's removal is arbitrary, dictated only by the needs

43 THE CARLETON MISCELLANY of the plot. And because there is no adequate motivation for Mademoiselle Hortense's action the affair is reduced to a 'mys­ tery' in the detective-story sense and Inspector Bucket takes over. And though in one sense the Inspector is a good deal more plausible as deus-ex-machina than the process of spontaneous combustion, in a more important sense he is a good deal less adequate. The world of Bleak House does not, like Krook himself, go up in smoke. The case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce, it is true, burns itself out and the fiasco of it destroys Richard. And the case of Lady Dedlock, too, smoulders relentlessly on to the inevitable, tragic flare-up, destroying not only the lady herself but Sir Lei­ cester and all he stands for. And around these central tragedies the stage is littered with subsidiary corpses, some dead indeed like Jo and Gnadley, some metaphorically dead like Beau Turvey- drop and the Chadbands and Harold Skimpole who are destroyed within the book as inexorably as Miss Flite is deprived of her wits. Each of these characters becomes a sort of living horror: when Mrs. Pardiggle walks into a room humanity is squeezed out of it; the ancient Smallweeds live on, but the degradation they embody is more appalling than any death. The imagery and significance of the spontaneous combustion episode embody both the strength and the limitations of Dick­ ens's sensibility and correspond to the strengths and weaknesses of the popular forces in 1852.

VI I have placed a good deal of emphasis on the Birmingham speech in which Dickens defined his attitude to the people be­ cause it seems to me to give an important clue to his significance as an artist. It ties up, so to speak, the gathering impressions made by his later novels and illuminates the essential unity between his artistic and his personal point-of-view. It shows that, for ex­ ample, the linking of utilitarianism with the interests of the capitalist class, of Gradgrind with Bounderby (an insight far

44 ARNOLD KETTLE less obvious in the 1850s, when the Benthamite tradition of phil­ osophic radicalism still wore progressive colours, than it is today) was no casual hunch; that the devastating exposure of the Law as an institution of class domination in Bleak House was what Dick­ ens in every sense meant; it shows that the revelation of the character of acquisitiveness in Great Expectations and of the whole force and horror of Podsnappery in Our Mutual Friend were indeed no side-issues but central artistic insights. As I hope I have demonstrated from an analysis of Bleak House, it is from his popular point-of-view that the actual overwhelming artistic energy of the books springs. Perhaps the most remarkable of the many extraordinary things about Bleak House is that it should have been begun in 1851, the year of the Great Exhibition, that symbol of expanding capital­ ism and of the economic boom which succeeded the miseries of the forties. It is not astonishing that the appalling conditions of the thirties and forties and the strength of the great popular Chartist movement should have produced in this period not only novels like Oliver Twist but Sybil and Mary Barton and Alton Locke. What is more remarkable is that Bleak House should go on from where Oliver Twist left off and that in the fifties and sixties the tone of Dicken's novels becomes ever more uncompro­ mising. It is interesting that whereas the socialist Charles Kingsley was much impressed by the Great Exhibition in the Crystal Palace, Dickens loathed it. And he loathed it, fundamentally, because he hated nineteenth-century capitalism even more when it was working successfully than when it was working badly. This is a point which repays the deepest consideration, for it reveals the nature of Dicken's moral and artistic sensibility in contrast to that of almost all his contemporaries among the writ­ ers. He was not less outraged than a Kingsley or a Mrs. Gaskell by the conditions of life of the poor, not less touched in ways which it is no shame to call humanitarian; but in his humanitari- anism there was less tinge of superiority, less tendency to look on the people as 'less fortunate than ourselves' with the reserva-

45 THE CARLETON MISCELLANY tions such a phrase applies. The condition of the poor aroused in Dickens not just pity, but indignation, and his indignation was based on something more solid than a general sense that such things must not be. Dickens was not uttering an empty phrase when he talked about his illimitable confidence in the People: he was expressing the very quality of mind that made it possible for him to be not just a good but a supreme writer. It is not by chance that in the very speech at Birmingham in which he defined his attitude to the people he had already had occasion to express his views on 'materialism.' What had, appar­ ently, particularly riled him was a sermon, delivered only a few days previously, by Dr. Francis Close, Dean of Carlyle, who had delivered himself of the sentiment that "There is no question that there is in the present day an evil spirit of the 'bottomless pit' ris­ ing up among us, . . . and he was bound to say he laid a large portion of it at the door of science." Dickens took up the point with a splendid gusto:

"I cannot forbear from offering a remark which is much upon my mind. It is commonly assumed —much too com­ monly—that this age is a material age, and that a material age is an irreligious age. I have been pained lately to see this assumption repeated in certain influential quarters for which I have a high respect, and desire to have a higher. I am afraid that by dint of constantly being reiterated and reiterated without protest, this assumption — which I take leave alto­ gether to deny —may be accepted by the more unthinking part of the public as unquestionably true; just as certain cari­ caturists and painters professedly making a portrait of some public man, which was not in the least like him, to begin with, have gone on repeating it and repeating it, until the public came to believe that it must be exactly like him, simply because it was like itself, and really have at last, in the full­ ness of time, grown almost to resent upon him their tardy discovery that he was not like it. I confess, standing here in

46 ARNOLD KETTLE

this responsible situation, that I do not understand this much- used and much-abused phrase a 'material age,' I cannot com­ prehend — if anyone can: which I very much doubt — its log­ ical signification. For instance, has electricity become more material in the mind of any sane, or moderately insane, man woman or child, because of the discovery that in the good providence of God it was made available for the service and use of man to an immeasurably greater extent than for his destruction? Do I make a more material journey to the bed­ side of my dying parents or my dying child, when I travel there at the rate of sixty miles an hour, than when I travel thither at the rate of six? Rather, in the swift case, does not my agonized heart become overfraught with gratitude to that Supreme Beneficence from whom alone can have pro­ ceeded the wonderful means of shortening my suspense? . . . When did this so called material age begin? With the inven­ tion of the art of printing? Surely it has been a long time about; and which is the more material object, the farthing tallow candle that will not give me light, or that flame of gas that will?"

I have quoted the speech at length, not only because it is in some of its incidental aspects so splendidly Dickensian, but be­ cause it reminds us that Dickens, unlike so many of his contem­ poraries and successors, was not an intellectual Luddite. And this, as C. P. Snow has recently emphasized, is something signifi­ cant. An important aspect of the rise of a 'highbrow' as opposed to a popular culture in the last hundred years has been the sharp division among intellectuals between a scientific and a literary culture. Literary intellectuals have, by and large, been not only ignorant of science but have adopted an attitude of self-conscious superiority to it. This attitude is, I feel certain, due less to the in­ creasing complexity and specialization involved in modern scien­ tific knowledge (though obviously this is a real problem), than to what is at bottom a fear of losing a privileged position. The mod-

47 THE CARLETON MISCELLANY ern literary intellectual is afraid of science for the same reasons that he is afraid of the people: both threaten, though in different ways, his security as a member of an elite. The nature of the sensibility developed by the literary intelligentsia of the western world during the last hundred and fifty years, their ideas about freedom, their most sacred and most deeply ingrained modes of feeling, the assumptions of value so deeply assumed that a ques­ tioning of them is too agonizing to be even seriously considered: all this is a consequence of a fundamental division between Peo­ ple and ruling class. The significance of the passage from Dickens I have just quoted is that in it he boisterously and yet carefully avoids so many pitfalls. Science he sees not as a danger but as a blessing: it is its potentialities 'for the service and use of man' that attract him, and his illustrations have all the homely practical effectiveness of a man used to thinking not in terms of abstrac­ tion but in those of the real world in which theory and practice have to be united. Even more significant is Dickens's attitude to the word 'ma­ terial' and his refusal to be drawn into a way of thinking which sees 'material' and 'spiritual' as opposites. This is not, it must be stressed, a mere matter of verbal juggling. It is, as far as the de­ velopment of a unified popular culture is concerned, an abso­ lutely essential issue. For idealism, the refusal to recognize that spiritual values have a material basis, is in its various forms the mental sustenance of class division. The modern intellectual's posing of spiritual values in some sort of opposition to material values often proceeds (as far as his subjective development is concerned) from a humane and healthy reaction against the ac­ tual operation of capitalist society in which spiritual and human decencies are indeed subordinated to mercenary considerations and the perpetuation of class domination: but the posing is nev­ ertheless fatal, for by removing spiritual values or indeed 'thought' of any kind into some kind of 'special' realm so that they become the property of the 'enlightened,' their actual appli­ cation in practice is made more difficult. For it is only when in-

48 ARNOLD KETTLE tellectuals have a respect for material reality that they are able to help change anything, material or spiritual. Dickens had such respect for material reality. And because he had it he was able to develop a sensibility that was in so deep a sense popular. I am not suggesting that Dickens's sensibility was completely unified, that there were no areas of weakness, no loose ends or unresolved conflicts in his make-up. But I am sug­ gesting that — perfectionism excluded —he had an astonishingly unified sensibility — an ability to face, absorb and cope with a remarkably wide area of reality, certainly a good deal wider than that of any succeeding British writer. And I am not posing width here against depth. His art is deep because it is broad and tough and balanced. He was able to achieve this unified sensibility because he looked at life from the point-of-view not of the ruling class or of some sort of intellectual elite, but from that of the people. One of the sources of his artistic greatness is his capacity to look deg­ radation in the face and see humanity there. This was possible because he looked not from above but from the level. It is easier for an artist in class society to share the people's aspirations in a general, somewhat abstract way than for him to share their way of looking at life. Dickens was not without his complacencies, but they did not include the basic complacency of evolving an outlook 'better' than the people's or of imagining — as even the most sincere and tormented of middle-class reformers imagine — that the world will be changed by the middle class. The very vulgarity of him, his enjoyment of the material pleasures, the lack of what the petty-bourgeois sensibility calls 'good taste'; all this is not a limitation but a colossal strength, a product of an inclusiveness of sympathy which is the opposite of insensitivity. Looked at in artistic terms this meant that his point-of-view and hence his artist's poise, his capacity to release and control and organize artistic energy was not only inclusive but at once sufficiently firm and sufficiently flexible to permit of continuous growth and development. When one calls him a popular writer

49 THE CARLETON MISCELLANY what is primarily involved is not his opinions or his success but the quality of his sensibility. I have tried, in my analysis of Bleak House, to show in con­ crete terms how this quality of sensibility asserts itself in art. If one were to attempt to summarize in a more general sense the principal features of that sensibility one would have to say that it was:

(i) realistic (in the sense that the fantasy-world which the artist creates bears a humanly helpful relation to the real world, i.e. makes us see the real world more realistically when we look at it again and thereby helps us to cope with the real world),

(ii) critical (as opposed to a view which accepts and records passively. The popular novelist, just because his point-of- view is popular, sees art actively as a challenge. He is not afraid of being accused of propaganda, for he knows that all writing has an effect and he knows the sort of effect (a strengthening of the people) he wants to make),

(iii) non abstract (as compared with the work of the 'Con- dition-of-England' novelists or of the Godwinian Radi­ cals who were in certain respects Dickens's ancestors), (iv) non-metaphysical (in the sense that the characters are not seen as metaphysical entities but as interdependent social creatures, historically placed, and that there is no tendency towards an underlying metaphysical pattern or interpretation),

(v) inclusive (seeing society from below rather than from above and thus avoiding the exclusiveness of the ruling- class or elite sensibility),

(vi) optimistic (basically confident of the capacity of men and women to make their world better),

5° ARNOLD KETTLE

(vii) historically and linguistically based in existing manifesta­ tions of popular culture. Necessarily therefore national (as opposed to cosmopolitan) and linked with the folk- imagination of the peasantry under feudalism.

Dickens is a supreme realist artist. To describe him as a critical realist rightly emphasizes his critical relationship to the bourgeois society he inhabits; to insist on his place in a popular tradition elucidates the nature and quality of his critical realism.

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51 ROBERT GRANT BURNS

FOUND ON THE POET'S TABLE

One poem more, patient Mercutio, and I shall leave this business. I was suffered time to quarry what things were rightly mine and for this I am grateful, howbeit I have lost my life, having loved it overmuch.

Tell the women the sorghum will be turning in the near field, with its maroon berries I love, that will do fine for wreath. It will be fine, that day, gathering such ripeness. I would like to be there, myself.

I have superscribed only a few trees and the chair painted light green, and the three windows of my house through which I saw so much of a world. These and a few random papers amount about to what I had, and which I willingly pass on.

There is so little soundness among one's relatives, one hardly could decide who most would take on so many words, and such a load of love. I know Eleanor will live long. If she hadn't been such a fanatic, I know I would have married her.

52 THE CARLETON MISCELLANY • SUSAN ABRAMS

A VIEW OF "SUN AND FOREST" BY MAX ERNST

Tree toads don't slough shirts, leaf Hoppers don't quaff juice here. No wood pussies snuff nor Feathers ruffle. You hear Just muffled Huffy ca- Hoots. Scratch a limb though, You'll fetch small Screeches. Or a knob-nosed

Wooden-legged gnome's glum Boo. And what does this deep Green-eyed thicket, this clumped Crouched gang now Ogle so Vegetatively? Over that

Wall, are there bleeding hearts, And buttercups melting? Or do those trees face ... towards Me in the gallery comes A smiling Lady. "Sweet Lambs of trees!" Says she, so surely. Then... in what

Woods am I?

53 THE CARLETON MISCELLANY

MONOLOG WITH A RICH OLD MAN

His desk chair squeaks as he Thuds back. Stomach and feet Elevate.

Down slopes of tweed there's no Face ... gruff dictographic Cigar speaks ...

Puffs up old forecasts, wind- Falls, loopholes, scrawled gray tales That show Earth

Squeezed by high hands and crammed Through a paper ring, his Private brand's

Gilt band. Here, I see, through Shriveling eyes, a man-blown Stuffy cloud

Swiveling ... baffling air. He Disappears. Just once, we Share a cough.

54 SUSAN ABRAMS

HANDICAP

Washed gloves are clinging damply By wrinkling fingers to rails Like mateys drowning limply Or gloomy cotton crocodiles Who drop tears to the tiles.

But lucky the gloves that dry On blue-skewed lines . .. that wave As if crickets and bugs that fly by Are long-lost stitches or buttons ... connive With sleeves and leaves ...

Knock with knee socks or flirt With shirts ... or leap from a blow From low foxglove. A pair can concert In a grip, or clap pianissimo. Some, for exercise, throw

A ten-finger fling, will flee On wind-high hand springs, explore, Or live awhile in a tree. Time drips off town gloves; they never soar; They stare at the floor.

55 THE CARLETON MISCELLANY

• JOHN LUCAS

ALL SET (Handlings of a Sapphic Fragment)

I (Pseudo-Haiku) Pleiades leave sky, moon sets, time passes by- all while alone lie I.

II (Neo-Classic) The Pleiad sky wanes with the moon, The midnight cry has come and gone, Time passes by, I lie alone.

Ill (Curtal-Sonnet) Too soon night's daughters have begun to set: Pursuing her together down the sky, The six cool Pleiad girls tonight have met Their straying sister in a single try: Chase-worn already, Artemis has let The blanket draw above her lovely eye.

All is not well, complains the waning moon: Not well at all, stars echo: midnight's cry Has sometime come and how long, how long gone: Time passes, passes, passes by and I, I lie alone.

5<5 THE CARLETON MISCELLANY •HERBERT MORRIS

THE COASTS

Out of the night, beset by wind, time, the chill currents flowing, out of myself from great transfigured houses eaten with light, the wrath on them of gutted eaves, of waiting mastered, out of the dead and dumbly sleeping, I come to you from confluences met in their sweep and darkly given unto what depths shall open to them.

Out of those streets whose rains I dreamt, whose dust I wept, whose stones were words hammered out for the avenue of singular and deep address, I come this night to lay these hands, to bear the stars, to hear the roots, to court the maidens in the graveyard long under salt and silt and storm.

Out of the dream, beneath the sea, after the wars, clad in that morning immaculately spun belief, I come tonight to bring this life, to feast on sails, to sleep with light together all the desolations after, set out by this, and live.

And render God somewhere and fiercest, ground where the wastes flay double anchors plowing their routes and streaming acid, turned from the ports of facile entry,

57 HERBERT MORRIS

the pagan coasts, the doubtful harbors; barred at the gates of ghost and exile that give way to the kingdom's ramparts and the great doom of halfway stations where no redemption is forever, where the wind's judgment burns our music too slowly out of us and soon.

Blind in the wave and under siege, I come this night to pick my way, to rouse the sailors from their shipwreck reeking of gall and gulf and grief, to kiss the beast, or learn the heart, to break the language where it broke me, to take up salt or suffer Thou for the first time across these lips purer than light, profound as water.

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[email protected] THE CARLETON MISCELLANY

• MARION MONTGOMERY

THE GIRL: NIGHT AND MORNING

Last night after the dance they sat in the swing, First singing the old songs of the crowd dwindling to two. Then words. Then the delicious sound of silence while fireflies signalled mysteriously across the swollen darkness.

Now before the late freshness is gone, she comes with a deliberateness of disbelief to choose a rose for her mother's table— A red one, long stemmed— But being tenderly wary of those thorns that everyone is always talking about.

RETIRED COLONEL

With the first bugle of the sun he walks out with the easy discipline of thirty years upon his sleeve. The morning glories by the wall announce him clear and clean; The grass addresses to his presence; Everywhere the birds wait, except a tohee, Insubordinate among the dead leaves banked beyond the stockade of meticulous holly. Even shasta daisies stand naked straight as privates as he returns to toast and morning tea.

It is only the warped oak beside the strict alignment of the drive that surpasses him in service.

60 ERLING LARSEN

THE SHATTERING CONTROVERSIAL

La Dolce Vita, Directed by Federico Fellini, Story by Federico Fellini, Tullio Pinelli and Ennio Flaiano, Produced by Giuseppe Amato and Angelo Rizzoli for Riama Film (translated text published by Ballantine) The Lime Twig, by John Hawkes, New Directions, New York, 1961 Miss Lonely hearts, by Nathanael West, New Directions, New York, 1933 Aristotle's Poetics, translated by Ingram Bywater, The Modern Library, New York, 1954 Peer Gynt, by Henrik Ibsen, translated by William and Charles Archer, Charles Scribner's Sons, New York, 1923

It had been a long afternoon in Freshman Rhetoric with the talk running about the problem of the "topic sentence," its use and its deadliness, with most of the students arguing that the first sentence or at least the first paragraph ought to give the reader a clear idea of what the writer was planning to say. "This way," one student said, "the reader can tell whether or not he wants to continue." And Ford Madox Ford's idea that a novel, for instance, should not be understood or should not present the material basis for understand­ ing until the last or the next to the last word, fell on what most of the students no doubt would have described as "deaf ears." With this argument reverberating in my mind, we went that night to see La Dolce Vita. We had read some of the reviews. We knew this film had been called a "morality of epic proportions" which is so "real and shocking . . . that one has a sense of having participated," a "shattering, controversial film that lays bare the corruption and decadence of our times" and which was produced by

61 THE CARLETON MISCELLANY the man who had made "the second biggest moneymaker in Italy in 1953" and "the greatest critical and financial success in Europe" in 1954 and now with this new film was smashing "all records at the box-office." And I could not help thinking that here, if ever, was a lesson in rhetoric and its uses, assuming of course that rhetoric is somehow related to persuasion and that the spending of money is somehow proof of a persuading to spend it. So that very soon after the film started I began to tell myself that there ought to be a Law: When you see a movie beginning with a sequence in which a helicopter carries a statue of Our Lord, His arms outstretched as if blessing the great city which flows beneath Him, as if blessing the children who run along the streets before the stark white apartment- building walls and point yelling up at Him, as if blessing finally the walls themselves when His shadow, arms like wings now, flips up that one rectangle of vertical whiteness and disappears with swallow­ like swiftness while the chopping roar of the engine dies slowly away, when you see such a movie with such a beginning you are bound to be disappointed in the end. And in the ending. For, after all, the question is: Where do you go from there? And one answer might very well be: Nowhere. Because that upward sweep and dis­ appearance of Our Lord is the end. Or because no cameraman or director could find in the time which economics allow for the making of one film three hours of images as exciting or as telling as those in the first shots. Or because any artist tipping his hand and giving away his point, his final generalization, his assumptions, his entire donee, in one five-minute sequence ought to quit right there. Or, finally, because any artist having done this without then quitting is bound to do something later in the work which will make suspect his first statement, his beginning-ending, or will in some way sully or smirch or alter, perhaps even destroy, that which he has perhaps too definitely too early established. Indeed I began to tell myself that some of that smirching or damaging had already been done when the sequence of flying-God images was broken by the squeals of the sun-bathing girls who opened their armpits and waved their breasts and pointed their navels at the God or at the following chopper-load of photographers and reporters, only to retreat in a quite non-religious sense and refuse to give their telephone numbers to those observers and escorters of the God, the men who had come down out of the sky and had hovered begging and imploring. The director's plan had of course been to make some kind of contrast between the serenity of the

02 ERLING LARSEN floating God and the ardent yearning of the men and the teasing of the almost nude women. But what was the apex of this triangle? Who was rejecting what? Who was worshipping what? And, more important, why? My freshmen, I was afraid, would think this open­ ing sequence a pretty crummy topic paragraph. What finally gave it point, I agreed, was that final view, from above, of the God high over Saint Peter's, the square, and all the people, but floating on his back now, and looking not down in blessing but up and away so that I was reminded inevitably of the flight away of His shadow a few seconds before. But the girls, I kept asking myself, had they been blessed or rejected? Had they blessed or rejected, or had they blessed in rejecting? The purity of the images, the consistency of the structure of images, that which had convinced me the picture was ended, had been destroyed already. I told myself the Law, which I had said "ought to be," existed. But we stayed to watch the rest of the film. Perhaps we stayed because of the sudden startling shift from that last view of the float­ ing God to the new one of the sequined Siamese dancer and his muscled almost nude accompanists, from the sun of the high sky to the dark of the nightclub. And as this kind of shifting went on, as story followed story, I began to think that the Law probably did not after all exist, that in a picaresque form for instance not only was no topic paragraph needed but that no continuity or coherence was necessary at all, that only a single roving character whom we can see in all the various episodes is necessary, that this indeed makes coherence. On the other hand doubts arose because occasionally some kind of oblique reference was made to that first sequence. Marcello compared Rome to a jungle in which one could "hide" oneself; Maddalena said that she needed a "whole new life;" Steiner spoke of "sounds we have forgotten how to hear." Yet the story moved with apparent aimlessness from nightclub to church to air­ port to fountain pool to the Field of the Miracle, and in each scene we met new characters and watched new stories which we never saw again and were never followed out. The first part of the film ended in the Field of the Miracle where we met the good priest who did not believe in what the TV cameramen and the journalists were exploiting, a vision of the Virgin, the Mother of the flying God. Again the "topic." But the second half ended at a party in a plush beach-house where Marcello, now a prosperous press-agent, ridiculed and cursed his clients and his friends, and out of hatred for them tormented and tortured a stupid drunken girl. Then, full of

63 THE CARLETON MISCELLANY hatred for himself, he stayed there until the last bitch had been hung and apparently even decided to remain there, or at least in that society, as long beyond that time as he could. Not, I thought, "the topic." As I wondered about the picaresque tradition I remembered Aristotle had said "a single action [is] one that is a complete whole in itself, with a beginning, middle, and end, so as to enable the work to produce its own proper pleasure with all the organic unity of a living creature" and unity of plot "does not consist, as some sup­ pose, in its having one man as its subject." I remembered that he called a plot "episodic when there is neither probability nor nec­ essity in the sequence of its episodes." But this was too easy. It was like the freshmen and their topic sentences. For I remembered, my memory being very good now that I am away from the theatre and can look at the text, that he had also said "the greatest thing by far is to be a master of the metaphor. It is the one thing which cannot be learned from others; and it is also a sign of genius, since a good metaphor implies an intuitive perception of the similarity in dis- similars." And I began to wonder about the metaphor here. The film was a part of a "new wave." It reminded me of a novel by John Hawkes, whom critics have labeled either a "non-realist" or an "anti-realist." And I came to what I supposed was the crucial thought of the evening, to what I was afraid might be another Law: When you see a work of art you do not like, one which leaves you feeling frustrated rather than purged, the difficulty may lie in yourself and not in the work; you are a part of the old wave, you are trying to find an answer to the So-What question this work poses and to which this work says no answer is possible, you are not under­ standing the metaphor. But no. I had been pummelled and I wanted to pummel back. I remembered The Lime Twig which begins as a first person narra­ tive and shifts to the third person when the narrator dies under the hooves of a stolen race-horse, in fact shifts a little before perhaps in order that he may die there. And I remembered again the blurb for La Dolce Vita which had described the film as laying "bare the corruption and decadence of our time." And some of my old-wave literary memories began to rise in protest. A good deal of "laying bare" takes place in the film, metaphorically maybe and certainly actually and realistically, but it occurred to me that our anti-realists were using to the full the right to speak out which thirty years ago we thought needed the last drop of our defending blood when

64 ERLING LARSEN writers like Hemingway were being called obscene and decadent. This was again perhaps too simple. And again I found difficulties; I could still not explain why La Dolce Vita made me think of the movies you hear tell are shown on occasion in Joe's garage and at the Rotary-convention stag parties in Dubuque Corners. And then two literary memories came to help. One was of the old Mencken who had explained to me once that the great reason for the success of the travelling evangelists and moralists had been that their lectures on the evils of sin had disposed all males who heard them to be unexpectedly and unusually "kind to their wives" with the result, and this I am quite sure he proved statistically, that nine months after the revival the town hospitals and doctors would be suddenly and unusually busy with an extraordinary number of parturiating wives. Those lectures, for Mencken's money, were ob­ scene because they professed to be one thing and were actually another —as, I told myself, this film was obscene because it hid its prurient interest behind the moralistic facade which not the director or writer but the advertising men and the blurb-writers had erected. In agreement I had even The Times Literary Supplement and one of its leading articles which had attacked the problem of what it called the "Mis-Committed" in terms of "would-be humanitarian- ism." In a rather complicated argument about the Beats and their sentimental love for cripples and dwarfs and the "sub-human," this love, the article said, has the same "blend of sentiment and sadism that was the hallmark of the S.S." and is "far more like a piece of emotional self-indulgence than a genuine cry of pain." Then came the quotation which really fit the film I fought that night: "As a protest it fails, because it so obviously exploits the horrors at which it is protesting." What in the film offended me was the hypocricy, the exploitation of protest, the realistic argument in favor of non-realism. In a recent review of The Lime Twig, a novel in the same tenor as that of the film, Webster Schott wrote that the Hawkes "anti-realism" was very realistic indeed and that he had "been keeping a file on the Hawk- esian world as described in the Kansas City Star." He then listed a series of events like the murder "just for the hell of it" of a sixty- two-year-old man by two teen-agers who also murdered six other persons in a "nutty cross-country spree." Schott went on to argue that "the traditional 'realistic' novel of the nineteenth century has run out of steam in the twentieth century. It has become technically obsolescent because 'realistic' fiction cannot keep up with fact . . .

65 THE CARLETON MISCELLANY journalism has killed a certain novelistic genre." Now all this may be true; if horror in religion, terror in sex, fear in all human rela­ tions are "realism" as defined by the enemy when we were defend­ ing Faulkner, then of course the newspapers and life itself have outdone realism. But it seems strange that the artist who therefore professes "anti-realism" should simply try in turn to outdo, to out- gore, to out-rape the news and should claim that in so doing he is showing how really bad things are. Before we can understand this we may need not only a new definition of "realism" but a clear statement as to what "anti-realism" is. Meanwhile, until we can obtain these definitions, it must continue to seem strange or indecent, if only semantically, that a "non-realism" or an "anti-realism" is needed to rescue "realism" for the arts. Just as it seemed strange to Mencken that the sexually inclined in his day needed the stimulus of the anti-sexual lecture in order to feel moved to action. Suppose, however, we simply missed the meaning of the film which started all this topic-sentence memory? Suppose the picture really was a picaresque epic morality play. Then what? What does the film say? What is the topic? Simply, I think, on the evidence available to me, that a man is in trouble is in trouble is in trouble. To which I think those of us who have been on the receiving end, those of us who have been asked again and again "So what?" may respond with our own "So why?" For I can think of two anti- realistic works of art which do more than either The Lime Twig or La Dolce Vita to make artistic sense out of nonsense, which make reason out of trouble, and which still remain picaresque and anti- Aristotle in tone and structure. One is a comparatively recent book, Nathanael West's Miss Lonelyhearts. The hero of that book is like the hero of La Dolce Vita, he is in trouble and unhappy, but he is also different, he knows what he is unhappy about and he has a mission. The mission fails and the hero dies. In the mission, I think, lies the difference. Miss Lonelyhearts wanted to save the world, and he failed. This is not revolutionary; it is something we have heard before. But it makes a kind of sense which Steiner in La Dolce Vita does not when he says looking out the window of his fine apartment that "It is peace that makes me afraid ... it is only an appearance, that hides a dan­ ger." Because of this, Steiner says with fine anti-realism, ". . . we should come to love one another outside of time, beyond time. Detached," he says yearningly. "To live detached." And he de­ taches himself completely by committing suicide. This death is not

66 ERLING LARSEN like that of Miss Lonelyhearts, who dies at the hands of the simple- minded man he was trying to save. Or is it, with Steiner in both roles? But perhaps Steiner is not the hero of La Dolce Vita. If the film is picaresque, then the hero, because he is the man we see in each of those unrelated episodes, is Marcello, who goes from place to place seeking whatever it is he seeks. We might even say that he is self-indulgent and is destroyed in his self-indulgence, and that he is, as the blurbs say, corrupt and decadent. But before we can believe this we have to move through the exploitation in the film and come out on the other side with a topic paragraph written not into the film but constructed in our own minds out of our own experience. Which means that in the final analysis the film, with the novels which follow the same formula, is not only anti-realism but anti-art. For the artist, the writer or the producer, has abandoned his intent to the viewer or reader or blurb-writer for final expression. Which brings me to that second work, Henrik Ibsen's Peer Gynt. Peer is a picaresque hero if ever there was one. His career takes him from a poor mountain farm in Norway to the caves and grottoes of the underworld trolls to the desert camps of the bedouins (where he is exploited sexually and financially as was poor old Michael Banks in The Lime Twig) to America to China to a yacht in the Mediterranean to an insane asylum in Cairo (where he is called the greatest philosopher of all time) and back home to Norway and a meeting with a button-moulder who tells him it is time for him to be melted down and re-cast. "I have orders, without delay,/On Master's behalf to fetch your soul." But Peer would rather not be re-cast. He wants to retain his identity, his Self. He begs off, saying that he is "At worst ... a sort of bungler —/ But certainly not an exceptional sinner." And the button-moulder explains that is ex­ actly the reason Peer is "excused all the torture-pangs" and will, "like others, land in the casting-ladle." He says that the whole trouble with Peer is that he is "No sinner on the heroic scale," that "It wants more than merely to wallow in mire;/ For both vigor and earnestness go to a sin." The button-moulder tells Peer that he is not badly off, for at the Royal Mint "they do just the same with coin/ That's been current so long that its impress is lost." At this point Ibsen begins to give us the topic sentence. He has Peer reply that he objects to being re-cast, that he will not "be de­ prived of one doit on my Self," and so moves us into what might be the nineteenth-century version of the theme of the twentieth-

<57 THE CARLETON MISCELLANY century anti-realistic La Dolce Vita. For the button-moulder replies that Peer is wrong, that he has never been himself at all. But he does generously give Peer a little time in which to prove that he has. This selfishness or selfhood is "the question that's in dispute," they both agree. Here Ibsen writes a finely ambiguous scene. Peer goes to the troll-king for evidence to use against the button-moulder's charge, evidence now that he is a sinner and no bungler, evidence that will get him into hell as Himself, save his Self from oblivion. But the troll-king says that Peer has made two mistakes: first, in an access of lust and arrogance he had accepted the anti-social troll philos­ ophy, "To thyself be enough;" second, he had refused to have his eyes slit in a way to make him forever see life as the trolls see it. Thus, the king charges, Peer had lived as a troll but claimed always he was Himself; his impulses had come from outside but he had persisted stupidly in believing they were his own. He had, in a parody of the Christian ideal, lost his Self for the purpose of saving it. He had become a social weakling in his sinning. He had in the manner of Marcello at that closing party simply participated in what James Farrell used to and the Beats still call a "gang-shag." When Peer reports this to the button-moulder he is given still another chance to save, or to damn, himself. In search of self- justification, or damnation, Peer meets the Devil who begins the conversation by complaining about how "slack the whole business is" with "nothing doing in souls." Peer tries to take advantage of this and says that so long as "the business is going awry" the Devil might "not be over-particular." Peer says, "My demands are in no way excessive," thereby once more not coming up to the button-moulder's standards for sin, and says that he would not insist on a salary. The Devil is not impressed. His calm statement that he's been getting many such requests forces the desperate Peer to cry out that he has "an absolute claim to admittance" and begins a vain catalogue of the sins which he hopes give him the right to retain his Self in hell. He has trafficked in slaves, he has sold idols in China, he has even "set up as a prophet." But the Devil says all this is "mere wish- wash." And Peer uncorks what he thinks is his great sin. During a shipwreck and a ride through the breakers clinging to a drifting life-boat Peer had made no attempt to save a ship's cook whose hands were slipping from the keel of the boat and who was there­ fore drowned. Almost incoherently he describes this scene. "But hear this: In a shipwreck —I cling to a boat's keel,—/ And it's

68 ERLING LARSEN written: A drowning man grasps at a straw,—/ Furthermore it is written: You're nearest yourself,—/ So I half-way divested a cook of his life." This melange of cliches and evasions and pseudo-logic is met only with scorn by the Devil, who replies, "It were all one to me if a kitchen-maid/ You had half-way divested of something else./ What sort of stuff is this half-way jargon,/ Saving your pres­ ence? Who, think you, would care/ To throw away dearly-bought fuel, in times/ Like these, on such spiritless rubbish as this?" And gives in a final outburst a sort of epitaph for both Peer and Marcello: "You have nothing either to howl or to smile about;/ No cause for rejoicing nor yet for despair;/ Nothing to make you feel hot or cold;/ Only a sort of something to fret over." Topic sentence finally found. And not at the beginning and not at the end but in the 1866 outburst of a bearded Norwegian moralist who was trying to lay bare the corruption and decadence of his time only to discover that the only corruption in his people was their inability and their lack of desire to sin. The question is not "So what?" but "What next?" ERLING LARSEN

69 THE CARLETON MISCELLANY

SUMMARY OF THE PROCEEDINGS IN THE FORMATION OF THE ASSOCIATION OF LITERARY MAGAZINES OF AMERICA (Editor's note: The secretary at the meeting was unable to take down a ver­ batim account for much of it. She transcribed and edited her notes, and then passed them on to the chairman of the meeting, who made further modifications so that the direction of the proceedings would be apparent. Every effort has, however, been made to represent the various speakers accurately, though there may be some unfortunate omissions. It is hoped that no one has been seriously misrepresented.) On November 11, 1961, from 10 A.M. until 5 P.M. in the St. Paul Hotel, St. Paul, Minnesota, the first business meeting of a proposed association of literary magazines was held. The meeting, sponsored by The Carleton Miscellany, was partially subsidized by the Mc- Knight Foundation of St. Paul. The following representatives of 19 magazines and certain other publishing organizations were present: Mr. Roger Aplon—Chicago Choice Mr. Hal Bly—Carleton Miscellany Mr. Robert Bly—The Sixties Mr. Whit Burnett—Story Magazine Mr. Lawrence Bensky—Paris Review/Random House Mr. Emile Capouya—Macmillan Co. Mr. Jules Chametzky—Massachusetts Review Mrs. June Oppen Degnan—San Francisco Review Mrs. Jane Esty—Mutiny Magazine Mr. M. D. Elevitch—First Person Mrs. Richard Foster—Minnesota Review Mr. Fred Jordan—Evergreen Review Mr. George Lanning—Kenyon Review Mr. Paul Lett—Mutiny Magazine Mr. and Mrs. Erling Larsen—Carleton Miscellany Mr. John Logan—Chicago Choice Mr. Andrew Lytle—The Sewanee Review Mr. Roy Miller—San Francisco Review Mr. Robie Macauley—Kenyon Review Mrs. Ruth Mackenzie—Carleton Miscellany Mr. Victor Navasky—Monocle Mr. and Mrs. Russell Nash—Middle State Review Mr. Hyung Woong Pak—Chicago Review Mr. Walter Prescott—The Coolidge Company

70 A.L.M.A.

Mr. Paul Rohmann—Antioch Review & Press Mr. Kim Taylor—Texas Quarterly Mr. J. R. de la Torre Bueno—Wesleyan University Press Mr. Allen Tate—The Sewanee Review Mr. Robert Weaver—Tamarack Review Mr. and Mrs. Reed Whittemore—Carleton Miscellany I. PROBLEMS OF THE AGENDA Mr. Reed Whittemore, acting chairman, opened the meeting by recalling a resolution put forth at dinner the previous evening, that the editors divide into two groups—one to deal with distribution, the other promotion—for the morning's proceedings, and then re­ convene after lunch and report their findings. This procedure was voted down, and the meeting then continued, temporarily, in one piece, with the discussion turning to the general principles upon which an association might be formed. Mr. Bly of The Sixties said that before agreeing upon associating we should, he believed, limit the scope and purpose of the associa­ tion. He was in favor of an association for distribution only. Mr. Elevitch of First Person said he preferred to think of the asso­ ciation in larger terms. He felt that it should try to dispel the idea of the little magazines as being purely alms seekers; that it should try to gain recognition for the literary magazines so that they would not be considered as mere stepchildren in the field of literature but as a very essential part of American literary life. He suggested that the association should try to introduce forcefully to the communi­ cations media the fact that the little magazines have something very valuable to offer. In this regard he specifically mentioned the New York Times which, he felt, should be encouraged or persuaded to have a regular column in which literary magazines are reviewed. A motion at this point, by Mr. Bly of The Sixties, that an associa­ tion be formed by the magazines present, was put aside in favor of further discussion of the nature and size of the association. Mr. Lytle of The Sewanee Review brought up the point of mem­ bership—what magazines should be included, what magazines ex­ cluded. He felt that there were probably some magazines not good enough to be included and thought this should be one of the first points to discuss. Mrs. Degnan of The San Francisco Review said that perhaps an advisory board, to be nominated, could handle this aspect of the association.

7' THE CARLETON MISCELLANY

Mr. Burnett of Story said that Mr. Tate and Mr. Lytle, who rep­ resented old line literary magazines, could possibly help a good deal in dealing with membership problems, but that he felt that all liter­ ary magazines, small or large, new or old, faced pretty much the same problems. He stressed the importance of the magazines as a group and said that he wished to support the ideas of Mr. Whitte­ more and Mr. Macauley of an association which was inclusive rather than exclusive, an association bringing together non-competitive and disparate little magazines into one large organization which might then approach various foundations for financial aid which could be used by each individual magazine to suit itself. Mr. Tate of The Sewanee Review took issue with the Burnett point that the association be thought of as an agency potentially capable of distributing money to individual members. He said that the methods of determining who should get what would be a perma­ nent source of discord. He thought that the association should be thought of, instead, as a propaganda agency, designed to persuade foundations as well as the public, of the usefulness to our culture of the literary magazines. He singled out the Rockefeller Founda­ tion as an instance of wrong-thinking here: the Foundation subsi­ dized three magazines for three years, and then withdrew its subsidy on the grounds that these magazines should then become self- supporting. Mr. Tate thought that the association would have the job of showing such foundations that continuing support of such magazines was necessary and important, as in the case of other cul­ tural ventures; and showing them as well that the literary magazines were indispensable to literature. Mr. Macauley of the Kenyon Review said that it seemed clear from the discussion that the magazines had many common problems and that association was in the air, though the issue of membership had yet to be settled. Mr. Chametzky of the Massachusetts Review then made a motion, which was seconded by Mr. Tate:

RESOLVED, that we agree that an association is desir­ able and necessary to work on those problems that we all have in common.

This motion was approved. There was then doubt expressed as to how to proceed. Mr. Bly talked to the point of membership, expressing dislike of the princi­ ple of exclusion. He felt that if some of the smaller magazines were

72 A.L.M.A. excluded they might turn around and attack the organization. He felt that the prime requisite should be a fee payable on admission. Mr. Burnett said that membership could be considered after it had been determined what the organization stood for. He thought that a charter or statement of principles was necessary, which the member­ ship could then grow to fit. He thought that there should probably be a screening committee, and that the qualifications for member­ ship should include a certain stability and certain literary standards. Mr. Chametzky then made the following motion: RESOLVED, that the discussion about forming an asso­ ciation be terminated, as this has already been voted upon and unanimously approved. This motion was approved.

Mr. Macauley then moved as follows: RESOLVED, that discussion on "distribution and pro­ motion" and "the public image, and how to foster it" now commence.

This motion, which was never passed, brought forth an extended discussion of what the agenda should now be. Mr. Macauley felt that it would be impossible to settle major problems of principle during the morning, and that committees should be formed to work out statements of these. Mr. Taylor of the Texas Quarterly said on the other hand that the day's meeting should be confined to principles: a) to establishing the association; b) to defining the association; and c) to electing a committee to go into matters of distribution, and so on. Mr. Lytle suggested that a statement of principles should be drawn up, along with a statement of the history and value of the little magazines. He thought that we could not proceed further until some such statements had been framed. Mr. Jordan of the Evergreen Review said he thought it was more important at this point to consider the value of an organization and its problems. He wished to see the organization concern itself with practical problems and suggested the following points for considera­ tion: a) what kind of study should be undertaken. b) how these studies were to be carried on.

73 THE CARLETON MISCELLANY

Several other editors spoke to these points. Mr. Whittemore then asked for a vote as to whether principles or specific problems should be next on the agenda. An informal vote was taken, the results being 12 to 7 in favor of discussing specific problems. Mr. Lytle then moved that the group split up according to the vote, and carry on both activities simultaneously. This motion was seconded and passed, Mr. Whittemore asking Mr. Macauley to act as chairman of the "distribution and promotion" group and Mr. Lytle to act as chairman of the principles group. The principles group then retired to another room to frame a statement of prin­ ciples.

II. DISTRIBUTION AND PROMOTION In the Distribution-and-Promotion room Mr. Macauley began by making a general statement of what he regarded as the association's "uses." He pointed out that there were a great many potential read­ ers the magazines were simply not reaching, people who read good paperbacks and yet never see the magazines on sale. He noticed this particularly at the University of Utah last summer, where he taught at the Writers Conference. Many of his students asked him why it was so difficult to obtain a good literary magazine. He suggested that the Salt Lake City condition was representative of a great many places in the country where an interest in writing and in literature existed and where, therefore, the literary magazines should be on sale. He pointed out that few of the magazines, individually, had the resources (of help or money) even to begin to handle their distri­ bution effectively. This was where the association could help. It could help most if it were "professionally operated" to reach the potential public for such magazines, a public Mr. Macauley esti­ mated at about 12,000 now. Mr. Jordan suggested that the association look into the possibility of a closer working relationship with B. DeBoer, the present dis­ tributor of many of the magazines. He thought, however, that help might also be obtained from organizations like the Tappanger (sp) organization which sends out salesmen, and that the association should also work on its own and compile a list of 300-500 stores in the country that could be approached with the idea of selling the little magazines. He added that the college market had scarcely been touched, and that a sensible procedure might be to establish a net­ work of college representatives, each of whom, operating on a per-

74 A.L.M.A. centage basis, would be expected to set up a display rack of the magazines somewhere on the campus. He pointed out that if each of 50 colleges could sell 5 copies of each magazine, the magazines would still be doing better than they are now. At this point the discussion broadened and various other sugges­ tions were made. The possibility of appointing certain stores as sub­ scription agents was mentioned, as was the possibility of placing dis­ play racks in terminals (airport, train and bus), and of placing free copies of the magazines in various public places, from prison libraries to medical and dental offices. It was suggested that each magazine contribute a certain number of free copies for such distribution. One editor then said that he had tried to get help in such distribution for overseas libraries from the U.S.I.A., but had been turned down by them as well as by the Carnegie and Ford Foundations. Mr. Taylor said that the Texas Quarterly had had some success here; the maga­ zine has an arrangement with a German publisher who handles sub­ scriptions for them. He thought other foreign publishers might be so enlisted. The discussion returned to distributor DeBoer. It was said of him that he had not done a satisfactory job for many of the magazines (one editor said that De Boer had tried to censor his magazine), but that his job was a difficult one and that every effort should be made to cooperate with him. It was asked whether or not the association itself could, in cooperation with De Boer and other distributors, begin to handle some of the actual distribution, setting up, for exam­ ple, a central invoicing and accounting office, and handling the "ful­ fillment" of subscriptions for all magazines. It was decided that a study would be helpful here, to determine the costs of such an oper­ ation so that foundation help could be solicited. In connection with both the sale of the magazines on racks, and the selling of group advertising, Mr. Torre Bueno of the Wesleyan University Press suggested that the establishing of a uniform size, or at least two or three uniform sizes, for the various magazines, would be a very practical consideration. Mr. Macauley then introduced Mr. Prescott of the Coolidge Com­ pany, an organization specializing in mailing lists. Mr. Prescott ex­ plained his organization's functions and suggested that a unified mailing list might be compiled, putting all the magazines' lists to­ gether arid eliminating duplications so that a master list would be generally available. He added that such a list could be rented to users outside the association, and that the income therefrom could

75 THE CARLETON MISCELLANY be used to maintain the list. Objections were raised to the use of the list outside the association. Mr. Prescott pointed out that his organ­ ization could not go along with such a restriction because its out­ side use was what his organization needed such a list for. This discussion was then terminated, as was the framing of prin­ ciples in an adjoining room, for lunch.

III. PRINCIPLES AND COMMITTEES At 2:30 P.M. the two groups met together again. Mr. Macauley summarized the discussion of distribution and promotion reported above, and Mr. Whittemore read the following preamble or resolu­ tion which had been composed by the "Principles" group: RESOLVED, that we form an association, the purpose of which is to increase the usefulness and the prestige of the literary magazines in the United States and Canada. Other cultural organizations—art museums, symphony or­ chestras, little theater groups and liberal arts colleges—have had, and presumably will continue to have, public and pri­ vate support, but the magazines devoted to the publication of literature have been supported, when at all, only spas­ modically, since they are thought, and wrongly, to be pri­ vate enterprises created for commercial ends. It will be the purpose of this organization to combat this climate of opin­ ion, and therefore to strengthen the economic condition of the magazines as a group and, accordingly, their capabilities. Thus, the association will work to secure outside financial help for the magazines from individuals, foundations and other organizations; it will undertake to meet collectively the grave problems of distribution and promotion which the magazines face; it will serve to exchange information between the magazines and to meet other common prob­ lems of the group. To these ends it is now dedicated. Its members will meet at least once a year, and a permanent central office will be established. It is a well-known historical fact that American Litera­ ture since 1910 would not have survived in its present variety and vigor without these magazines. Almost without exception, all the distinguished modern writers in America started their careers in them—writers such as Faulkner, Frost, Sandburg, Eliot, Hemingway, Saroyan, Tennessee

76 A.L.M.A.

Williams and Robert Lowell, as well as scores of younger writers now emerging into prominence. Nor are the maga­ zines concerned only with, dedicated only to, the great talents. A nation's body of literature does not depend wholly on the great, and since the magazines have served as a seedbed for each generation of creative writers they have also helped to preserve the very impulse to literary creation. The literary magazines of the present generation are continuing this indispensable tradition. The nucleus of this organization was formed in the St. Paul Hotel in St. Paul Minnesota, on November n, 1961, at a meeting of nineteen magazines. Applications for mem­ bership in this organization, The Association of Literary Magazines of America, are invited from magazines whose editors were unable to attend this meeting. Inquiries should be addressed to the temporary headquarters of the Associ­ ation: Story Magazine (editor, Whit Burnett), 135 Central Park West, New York 23, New York. (to be subscribed to by the editors attending)

Following this presentation, a motion was made and seconded that the above resolution or preamble be adopted by the association. Certain minor changes in phrasing were suggested, Mr. Elevitch particularly objecting to the beginning of paragraph two as being bad tactics, since its tone was defensive. The motion was amended to read that the resolution be adopted "in essence," and the motion passed. Mr. Lytle then recommended that a committee be appointed to shoulder the problems of membership. He added that since money was needed one of the first requirements for membership should be the payment of a $100 fee by each magazine. Problems connected with such a fee were then discussed, defer­ ring a motion recommending the establishment of a membership committee. It was pointed out that smaller magazines could not afford to pay as much as larger ones, and it was suggested that some scale of fees could perhaps be established. The figure of $2500 was set forth as a minimal figure for carrying the association through its organizational period. Mr. Whittemore asked that these problems be put off until a membership committee was appointed, but he was overridden, and after considerable further discussion of the fee the following motion was duly made and seconded:

77 THE CARLETON MISCELLANY

RESOLVED, that the amount of $50 be considered a Charter Membership Fee which we all pledge, and that temporarily Mr. Whit Burnett act as custodian of the money. The motion passed. Mr. Burnett then suggested that each of the magazines in the asso­ ciation reserve space in their next issues for announcing the forma­ tion of the association, since this was news of great consequence. His suggestion was therefore moved as follows: RESOLVED, that each member magazine will undertake to print the association's preamble in its next issue. The motion passed. Mr. Whittemore then asked Mr. Miller of the San Francisco Review to explain the mechanics of setting up such an association. Mr. Miller explained that the association would have to compose by­ laws, and that by-laws normally included, in addition to a statement of general purpose such as that already voted upon, a description of the name of the organization, the identifying of an office where the organization does business, and a description and identification of all the organization's members. He added that he foresaw no diffi­ culty in classifying the organization as a non-profit organization even though the individual members might be trying to make a profit. He suggested that if the membership committee ran into difficulties in deciding upon criteria for membership, the admission of associate members might be feasible, members who had no voting rights but who might be admitted to certain privileges of the association. The following motion was then made and seconded: RESOLVED, that Mr. Roy Miller is hereby authorized to draw up the by-laws of the association, with the part pertaining to membership to be delayed until the member­ ship committee can state it in detail. The motion passed. Mr. Miller said that he would draw up the by­ laws and send a copy of them to each member magazine. At this point the way seemed to be open for the appointment of committees and officers. Mr. Macauley made the following motion, which was seconded: RESOLVED, that Mr. Allen Tate be made honorary chairman of the association.

78 A.L.M.A.

The motion passed. The following motion was then duly made, and seconded: RESOLVED, that a temporary Executive Committee of three be elected. The motion passed. Nominations were made, and the following per­ sons were elected to act as the Executive Committee: Mr. Whit Bur­ nett, Mr. Roy Miller and Mr. Reed Whittemore. The following motion was then duly made, and seconded: RESOLVED, that a temporary Membership Committee of three be elected. The motion passed. Nominations were made, and the following per­ sons were elected to act as the Membership Committee: Mr. Robie Macauley. Mr. Robert Bly and Mr. Andrew Lytle. The following motion was then duly made, and seconded: RESOLVED, that a temporary Distribution and Promo­ tion Committee of three be elected. After some discussion this motion was amended to make a committee of seven. As amended, it passed. Nominations were made, and the following persons were elected to act as the Promotion and Distri­ bution Committee: Mr. Lawrence Bensky, Mr. Fred Jordan, Mr. Hyung Woong Pak, Mrs. June Degnan, Mr. M. D. Elevitch, Mr. Paul Rohmann and Mr. Jules Chametzky. Then Mr. Bensky suggested that each member magazine complete a questionnaire he had compiled, containing questions pertaining to circulation, costs, distributional procedures and so forth. He felt that the association would need such information to perform its functions properly, pointing out that foundations, for example, need specific figures before they will award grants. Some editors objected to the questionnaire as asking for informa­ tion which should not be made "common knowledge." It was coun­ tered that the information could be kept within the association, and it was suggested that the information be sent to Mr. Whittemore for safe-keeping, and for use, at his discretion or with the permission of the magazines individually, when statistics about the association's members were needed. Mr. Weaver of the Tamarack Review said that he thought the concern being expressed about the release of such information was

79 A.L.M.A. unwarranted. He briefly described the literary situation in Canada, where circulations are exceedingly small and where such informa­ tion must be published in the magazines since many of them are actually subsidized by the Canadian Council. He mentioned a general grant of $15,000 to the Canadian Art Magazine, and smaller grants for specific issues to Prism, Tamarack and The Canadian Forum, and he wondered why the American magazines had not considered soliciting governmental aid. An informal motion was then passed to the effect that each maga­ zine submit answers to the questionnaire unless its editors objected, and that the conditions for the use of answers be indicated to Mr. Whittemore by each magazine. Then the following motion was duly made and seconded: RESOLVED, that Mr. Prescott be made a charter asso­ ciate member of the association.

The motion passed. Then the following motion was duly made and seconded: RESOLVED, that the second meeting of the association be held in New York City in March, 1962.

The motion passed. It was suggested that before the March meeting all members should have sent in their charter membership fees, that the by-laws should have been prepared for presentation, that the temporary committees should have prepared themselves to make specific recommendations, and that consideration should have been given to the appointment of permanent committees and officers. Hope was also expressed that by that time certain foundations would have been approached and that some cooperative distributional pro­ cedures would already have been put into effect. Mr. Whittemore suggested that the respective temporary committees choose their own chairmen immediately after the meeting. Then a motion for adjournment was made, seconded and passed. As Reported by: MARIAN SALMEN, Secretary REED WHITTEMORE, Meeting Chairman

80 FROM DOMES OF PLEASURE AND DISPLEASURE

LA DOUCHE

One of the most anti of the anti-novelists takes a shower in the uCamping,'> of the Bois de Boulogne. A map of the Bois should be studied carefully before the reader begins.

If one pulled back the curtain with one's left hand, while hold­ ing the bottom half across the aperture with the right, one could shut off the sight of the stagnant water accumulated in the drain below. The diagonal line of the curtain from left to right bissected an imaginary square of shower wall on the far side. Down the tri­ angle, from the right obliquely toward the middle (but never quite reaching it), the drops jerked, forming a serrated pattern of testi­ mony to the recency of the previous occupant. If supper was to be on time, the campstove need not be lit for another half hour. But a slight lowering of the curtain (in the right hand) revealed that there was no place to rest one's shoes; the floor of the antechamber was as wet as the shower room floor itself— no, no, there were some muddy patches that could hardly be called wet. By holding one's nose and inhaling through one's mouth, one could to some extent suppress the odors rising from the walls and floor, but the picture remained: the shoes of many previous camp­ ers had left a rich dark slime standing out against the somewhat lighter gray of the higher spots in the unevenly laid cement. But one could not delay indefinitely. The fact was that if one were to go about one's task aggressively and cheerfully, a cold shower on this brisk July evening might not take longer than the allotted time. It could certainly do no harm to try. It was, in fact, all a matter of method: so many gestures, so much time to each. Even the difficulty of not having any place to rest one's shoes— a difficulty that could earlier have been solved, one now realized, by changing into one's sandals—even that difficulty could be met by simply retieing the shoelaces and hanging the shoes from the rusty torn edge of showerroom wall that was visible, hanging at an angle of approximately thirty-seven degrees and some odd minutes to the vertical, just two and one half inches below the middle of the northeast wall. Even though one had only twenty five minutes now until the campstove must be lit so that one's wife could begin to heat the Kraftdinner, one could still take a shower, perhaps even two, in twenty-five minutes. But obviously only if one began without delay. When the whole curtain was drawn back, one saw for the first time the full extent of one's problem. As the harried cries of camp­ ing parents drifted in through the half-open roof, one tried various angles of vision to see if one might mitigate what lay plainly there exposed: the water in the footbath beneath the shower was yellow, and in one corner there was, half-submerged, a blob of darker yellow that might very well be, indeed almost indubitably was, a deposit of human dung. Still, there was no point in despairing. Obviously this place was intended for taking showers, and clearly a shower could be taken in it. But only after more careful thought and preparation than one had originally bargained for. With the shower curtain drawn again, the light coming through from the outside now, the pattern of mud and water below on the vestibule floor was more clearly articulated than before, and one could see that there was, after all, no island; even what had looked like mud was at least slightly submerged. It was, however, a simple matter to stand on one's left foot, resting one's left elbow against the damp northeast wall, in order to remove one's right shoe and stocking. Carefully retieing the shoelace, so that the shoe could be hung on the rusty jagged edge of shower wall, and stuffing the stocking into the shoe, one noticed that the uppers were coming away from the sole just three and one quarter inches before the onset of the heel. Had some of the muddy water seeped through, without the straining out that one had counted on? The dampness in the stocking had seemed nongranular. Though one's left leg was growing a bit tired, it was still quite easy to remove the stocking again from the shoe; no, the stocking, the sock, was simply damp. It was to be hoped that the other shoe had proved as effective. Still on one leg, it was not really difficult now to slide one's right pantsleg over the quite dry foot and then, holding the bunched leg and seat in the left hand, carefully slide the remaining bit of one's shorts over the same right foot, everything still quite uncon- taminated by the floor. Now, with all of the clothing removed from the right leg and posterior, one could safely lower one's right foot, naked, into the mud. Transferring one's right pantsleg and right shortsleg to one's right hand, one encountered no real problem, one found, in lifting one's left foot, untieing the shoelace of one's re­ maining shoe, removing the shoe and stocking and ... It was not quite so simple to retie the shoelace of one's left shoe. One's right hand was already occupied, but a solution could be found if one used one's right elbow, pressing one's right pantleg against one's side, thus freeing the right hand to cooperate with the left in re­ tieing the shoelace and hanging the shoe, with the stocking carefully stuffed, ungranular though damp, deeply into the shoe, sole and upper intact. Then, still standing on one's bare right foot and hold­ ing the right side of one's clothing with the right hand, one could easily remove the left pantleg and the left shortsleg and lower one's left foot, naked, grateful, into the cold mud. It was now ten minutes to six. One knew that one must quicken one's pace, but that should not be difficult, now that the problem was seen honestly. An instant sufficed to remove one's shirt and undershirt, and since one's plans for a final rinsing of each foot were by now fairly well defined, one need not hesitate to step into the dung-enriched water in the adjacent cubicle. The shower outlet came directly overhead, and since there was no room to move to either side, one would be required to wash one's head after all, an operation that in itself must take an additional five and one half minutes. No help for it now. The taps were exactly three feet from the floor, but spaced at least 14 inches apart—much further than one usually found. F on the left and C on the right. He raised his hand to turn the C tap, but paused. The money belt! No real problem there. Though hard to untie, it was no more than three minutes before he had it tucked into a pocket, having quite easily reached around the half partition that divided the two cubicles. And oh, yes, the glasses. It was safer to shove them in behind one of the damp stockings. Without one's glasses, one could not see which tap was marked F and which C, but one was quite sure that this shower followed the customary policy of having the warm tap on the left. But then of course it made no real difference because one had forgotten to

83 put in the coin for a warm shower. The right tap turned more easily. One felt one's wristwatch strain at one's wrist as the water hit it and one's head almost simultaneously. The right tap did not turn off as easily as it had turned on. Reaching around blindly to where one's pants hung, one deposited the watch in an unidentifiable pocket. One turned, this time, the left tap . . . Stepping back into the vestibule, onto the mud, one dried oneself with a certain sense of hurry. Though the hour could not be ascer­ tained without finding one's watch and one's glasses, it must be some time after the agreed upon moment for lighting the campstove. If one dried oneself hurriedly, however, and kept a tight control on each step in the process of reassembling one's garments, one might very well arrive in time to avoid hysteria. The problem now was, of course, to get back into one's clothing without carrying with one either the mud or the by now dung-laden water covering the floor of the vesti­ bule. Clearly one must begin with a clean foot, and this would require carrying out to the letter one's previous plan of extending one's left foot back into the shower compartment and washing it once more. This done, one quite simply dried the foot (one corner of the towel touching lightly, briefly, into the ooze) and proceeded to put first the left shortsleg and then the left pantsleg on, balancing oneself mean­ while on the right foot, in the water, using one's right elbow as a prop and holding the right pantsleg and right shortsleg, carefully tucked into the pants, with the right hand. So far so good. But now, with the left leg extended, to keep it from dangling the foot into the dung- mud-water, how was one to put on the left stocking? In the first place, it was, as one discovered by pulling it out of the shoe with one's left hand, turned inside out. Working with intelligence and patience, one gradually turned it right side out and, still holding calmly to the rest of one's clothing with the right hand, slipped the sock onto the left foot, working it gradually up over the heel until it was firmly, though a bit soddenly, in place. Next, of course, came the left shoe, easy enough to disengage from the jagged wall, but not so easily opened (working with one hand), worked onto the foot, and retied. Retieing, in fact, was impossible with only one hand; one was finally forced to work the laces progressively looser and looser through all of the eyes until no end dangled more than two and one half inches, the distance from the lowest lacehole to the water. This done, one could lower one's left foot, slowly, into the water, which, after all, at no point rose to more than one fourth inch above the cement. The shower room was two feet square and six and one half feet high; the vestibule

84 was slightly narrower but otherwise identical. There was no soapbox, which had led one to hold the bar of soap and washrag in one hand continuously; at the end one had found that one could not avoid throwing both soap and rag into the water, permanently jettisoned, for want of a place to rest them on. Now, however, different problems arose. The left foot dressed, one could twist oneself about handily to reach one's right foot back into the shower far enough to wash off the mud-dung. Then, after drying, one could just barely raise one's right foot high enough to allow the pantleg to fall, without touching the water, and to extend one's right foot, first through the shortsleg, then through the upper opening of the pantleg, and finally on out the lower aperture, mean­ while supporting oneself with one's left elbow against the rusty wall, two inches above the jagged edge of the shoe hook. With both hands free now, it was a childish task to put on one's right stocking, undo one's right shoelace, put on the shoe — an ob­ stacle! oh, yes, the glasses — remove the glasses to their proper posi­ tion, put on the shoe, tie the shoe lace, lower the foot into the water, raise the left shoe, re-tighten the shoelaces and tie them, and lower one's left shoe into the water. Through all of this, of course, the trousers must remain unbelted and unzipped, and one must keep one's legs extended as far as the dimensions of the vestibule would allow, to prevent the pants from slipping downwards into the dung-mud. Now one could fasten the pants, easily, without strain, find one's watch in the rear, wallet pocket — where was the wallet? Back at the tent? — and prepare to leave . . . The money belt! Where was that? In the right hand front pocket. Undo the pantsbelt, unzip, spread legs to hold up pants, because hands must be fully occupied to tie the always recalcitrant money belt. Water could be felt inside the shoes now, though one could safely assume that most of it was strained, reasonably clean water. Money belt tied, one retrieved the towel from its rack and wiped one's sweating face, remembering only as one caught the faint odor of dung that it had, however fleetingly, touched the water. Through the water drops on one's glass lenses—where had the drops come from?—one could see, extending outward from each drop, tiny radiations of rainbow, which expanded and contracted according to whether one opened one's eyes wide or, as one felt somewhat more inclined to do, retracted them into crinkle and haze.

WAYNE BOOTH

85 ENGLISH MAKED SIMPLE (So as to be Easily Digged, Speaked, and Writed)

Language experts have sweared for years that the out-growed condition of the English tongue maked it mandatory that it be bringed up to date. The most important thing, they have sayed many times, be that all the grammatical irregularities still holded over in English must be throwed out and getted rid of. For it be well-knowed that such irregularities have maked it difficult for foreigners to learn how the language be speaked and writed; and, as we be constantly telled, that be how the battle for men's minds will be lighted and winned. Civilizations which have clinged to keeped-over usages of speech have always failed and sinked down; while those which forsaked their outweared words and awkward grammar have rised and standed long. It be easily enough seed that we have letted our irregular verbs last long enough. Educators canned, if they willed, long ago have teached students that exceptions to the dental preterit* can be abided no longer in a decent, civilized language. These unnecessary nuisances, so many of which have corned down to us from olded times, must be forbidded and forsaked, and all passed-tenses of verbs beginned to be wreaked alike. Then the language barrier truly will have been bursted and drawed up, and the struggle for verbal re­ armament swinged our way. Perhaps the new streamlined Regular English of the waked and enlighted future (the so-poetical millennium of the "ill-getted gains" and the "cleaved palate" and the "drived snow," of store-buyed clothes and Breaked Arrow, Oklahoma) will be finded to sound less strong and colorful than the old outweared irregular kind; but even if it doed, still better to have choosed Regular than been gived Russian. Anyway, the change will really be so slight and well-hided as hardly to be feeled, as plainly can be telled from the easy elegance of the regularizations of verbs writed into this well-thinked-out little piece. PATRICK BROPHY

* At its last convention, in a surprise maneuver, the American Dental Association corned out in enthusiastic endorsement of (i) Gloom Toothpaste, (2) horizontal brushing, and (3) "the dental preterit universally applied." Habitual use of the dental preterit, together with fluoridated water, they sayed, was finded to have resulted in 69% fewer cavities, in a recent nationwide test.

86 SOME SOCIOLOGICAL FICTIONS OF THE FIFTIES

Among serious novels published in the last decade, a small family- related few have received little or no examination by the literary quarterlies. In this case, however, this should not be considered a mere matter of caprice or poisonous silence on the part of our lit­ erary critics; rather, it is, in a paradoxical way, a tribute to these fine novels which have succeeded (far better than Joyce ever knew) at almost completely concealing the fact that they are novels at all. Dispensing deliberately with most of the surface impedimenta of the novel form (coherent plot, differentiated characters, and functional setting), the specimens of this group have been able to establish an immediate contact with a mass audience without the distracting ma­ chinery of "let's-pretend" which novels usually carry. But that they are creditable works of fiction, and not, as is erroneously believed, "social science," will be the burden of this study. It is surely time to disclose the secret and add the vine-leaves of aesthetic approbation to the overwhelming plaudits they have already so rightfully earned — albeit, for the wrong reasons. The foremost of the group, not only in terms of publication date, but also in stature, is David Riesman's The Lonely Crowd. This gar­ gantuan novel, with a panoramic sweep in both spatial and temporal directions, is the first American effort that can bear challenge to the masterpieces of the great Russians. Superb eclectic that he is, Ries­ man's literary forebears are many; but some distinct influences — besides War and Peace — are apparent. One guesses that he first pro­ jected his giant canvas in response to the challenge which Dos Passos posed in USA: can an American novel effectively capture all Amer­ ica within its pages? Riesman must have intuitively realized that while Dos Passos was exceedingly dexterous in conveying a sense of history and a perspective of continental expanse to his pages, he un­ wittingly scrambled his well-ordered American scene by peopling it with different kinds of characters. Riesman shrewdly rose above this tactical error. The Lonely Crowd has no people in it; its protagonist is The American Social Character, a statistical cadaver, so conceived as to fit everybody without being anybody. This, in turn, led to the difficulty of discovering a plot structure which would contain suspense without having people. Fortunately, the answer was ready at hand, and from Mann and, possibly, Gals­ worthy, Riesman adopted the designing principle of the "layer" or "family-generation" novel. Having already posited The American

87 Social Character, he could easily play variations on that Character by giving it an ancestor, and that ancestor an ancestor, ad infinitum. Accordingly, he fixes the structure of his novel in the now-famous demographic episode which opens the novel. Here he subtly presents the reader with the figure of an "S-shaped curve"— a figure which as we shall see is to serve many functions in the whole work. Structurally, the "S" shape represents a tangible image of— pro­ ceeding from bottom to top — the three generations of The Ameri­ can Social Character, or to use the names which Riesman lovingly bestows upon them: Tradition Di Rektad (a vague sort of grand- fatherly American Indian who is killed off very early in the story), Henner Di Rektad (a puritanic but transcendental father-type), and Arthur Di Rektad (the twentieth century inheritor of the family's traditions). With these characters fixed in genealogical ascent, plot- suspense can now be attained — as to a certain extent in Mann's Bud- denbrooks — not on a horizontal episodic line of "what's-going-to- happen," but on an ironic vertical interplay of generations-in-con- flict, or "Good-God!-Look-what's-happening!" Riesman's most intense focus is on the plight of young Arthur, caught up in a life-long protest against the unwanted but undispos- able legacy he has received from Henner, his father. It is in the dramatic caricaturization of Arthur that the author's prose achieves its most electric effects and the reader's empathies are most pro­ foundly stirred. Arthur is compassionately seen as a child, swiftly turning his nascent intelligence to the bemusing problems of brand- differentiation. His father, Henner, who has always used any com­ modity he wanted and "Damn-the-brand!" is naturally appalled at heir Arthur's conduct. Although this Oedipal conflict never breaks out into dramatic nakedness, it is a credit to Riesman's art that we are always aware of the latent sexual jealousy between father and son — a bitter rivalry which locks the two generations in what the author poetically terms a "Characterological Struggle." But The Lonely Crowd is a good deal more than just a searching psychological portrayal of a particularly nasty father-son relation­ ship. It reverberates symbolically into other, and more significant, regions of meaning. Arthur and Henner, as was earlier suggested, are meant to be recognized as prototypes of the two most recent cultural epochs in American history. And their personal struggle is projectively meaningful on what Riesman terms the "socio-economic" plane of interpretation. Henner stands here for a laissez-faire attitude toward economics and a Jacksonian frontier-type of social democ- racy; Arthur, in opposition, pleads for a protectivist Welfare State economics and an odd social mixture of clique-aristocracy and egali- tarianism. He is constantly striving to be accepted by The Peers — an influential group which seems to have peculiar dominance in his society — even though it would not be quite fair to characterize him as snobbish. In his penetrating analysis of Arthur's climb toward status, Riesman throws as much indirect light on the very real prob­ lems which contemporary American society is facing as does any sociological novel I know. The religious symbology of the novel is brilliantly prefigured in the already-cited "S" figure which creates the structure of the novel and also points to its highest level of meaning. The "S" is, on this level, an emblematic hieroglyph which, as is abundantly plain in context, is meant to stand for an uncrucified dollar sign. Thus, in the struggle between Father and Son, Arthur becomes the incarna­ tion of a gross, unrepentant materialism — a Christ figure who is un­ willing to accept His Cross. However, although the novel ends be­ fore the resolution of the clash, the denouement is symbolically never in doubt. The final movement of the work is the chorusing summons for the "autonomous" child —he who is to be born of no forebears, he who will unite the warring generations, synthe­ sizing the thesis (Father Henner) and the antithesis (Son Arthur) with the Utopian product (The Wholly Spirited). Such a plot synopsis hardly does justice to the vigorous sweep of the novel, which employs an almost Jungian multiple-mask device of personae to examine the nooks and ingles of the contemporary American scene. Riesman gives us many faces, but always we can make out either the jutting determined jaw of Henner or the nervous smile of Arthur underneath the integuments of whatever new face he presents. His style is a peculiarly personal achievement which serves functionally to conceal the fact that Riesman is a novelist. In the creation of his style, he has managed to effect a unique and happy blend between the prose rhythms of the later Henry James and the poetic diction of the earlier Thorstein Veblen, with personal contributions from his own capacity for metaphor. The gross effect of this style is to sensitize the reader into a kind of textbook-recep­ tion trance, punctured intermittently by witty asides and fascinating digressions. Needless to say, this is precisely the kind of style best suited to induce the hypnotic-educational mood on which Ries­ man's poetic symbols can operate to most advantage. The unwitting reader is seduced both by the lecture tone of the writing and the

89 sheer bulk of illustration into feeling that he is being offered statis­ tical analysis and empirical deduction; instead, of course, he is being conducted on a marvelous fictive adventure with Riesman driving the insight-seeing bus. A second novel in this new school which unashamedly reflects the influence of Riesman's pioneer efforts is The Organization Man by William H. Whyte, Jr. Whyte, a worthy acolyte, exploits a much smaller segment of reality as a locale for his fiction — namely, the commercial vales and suburban heights of the junior executive class. The Organization Man —taking a note from Kafka, Whyte never names him —is clearly seen to be our old friend, Arthur Di Rektad. The design of this novel hews fairly close to the traditional frame of the Bildungsroman — that is, we follow Arthur from the recess-yard outside his suburban school through his multiple-lives as business-trainee, research scientist, and hobbying hubby. Tech­ nically, Whyte's Arthur is cast in the role of p/carro-as-protagonist, but the novelistic opportunities for satire and adventure which this novel-structure offers are wholesaledly rejected by the author. The Organization Man is written with a L/fe-editorial earnestness, wrap­ ped in adroit Fortune magazine prose-patterns — a kind of incapable- of-wrongness style, abounding with double negative qualifiers and circumlocutory solemnity. As in The Lonely Crowd, Arthur is crushed by the inexorable processes of our modern society; unbelievably massive operations are carefully manipulated in such a way as to seem to be primarily and ultimately trained on the ruthless annihilation of Arthur's vital being. As also in The Lonely Crowd — albeit less poetically —a re­ deeming solution is found in the conclusion of the novel, as the author himself intrudes on the narrative to suggest that Arthur must learn how to fight against the Organization without actually rebell­ ing. Inasmuch as Whyte has devoted over three hundred pages to an exhaustive display of why Arthur can be only the way he is, the reader is moved to applaud Whyte's idealism, without granting him much in the way of common sense. After Whyte is through with his caricatured junior-executive, Arthur is as likely to rebel against the system as he is to shed his Bermudas in Bergdorf-Goodman's. In fact, Arthur is not very attractive in Whyte's novel anyway, and this reader was left with the impression that he would be even less attractive without the security of the Organization which he so patently needs. A third novel, and in a sense the sprightliest of the three, is A. C.

90 Spectorsky's The Exurbanites. If Riesman is the Tolstoi of this new school, then Spectorsky is surely the F. Scott Fitzgerald. His prose has a blessedly natural crackle, and, in stark contradiction to the others, he has a sense of humor. Indeed, in his portrayal of Arthur (and yes, it is Arthur whom we meet again —now a slightly older and more tired exurban-commuting Arthur, who is one of the un- sacred legion in the vast communications or "manipulating" indus­ try), we find almost a different Arthur. This Arthur is a testier, better paid, more neurotic Arthur —an Arthur whom one can be­ lieve capable of having brains, sophisticated hatreds, and adulterous affairs. But he too, in spite of his greater sensitivity, talent, and in­ come, is caught in the novelistic vise of anxiety and frustration. Unlike Riesman and Whyte, Spectorsky invokes no deus ex machina in the closing lines of the last act; he doggedly follows the script of the exurban Arthur to its logical conclusion. Arthur's doom, which consists in having to consume ever-increasing quantities of Haig & Haig in order to put up with a continually more-aggravated ulcer, is irreversible, and Spectorsky spares neither Arthur nor the whiskey. The reader will undoubtedly call to mind several other novels which would seem to belong to this new school (in fact, so many that one critic has facetiously suggested that this new genre be named "Arthur and The Multiplication Table"). Vance Packard's The Hidden Persuaders might conceivably be so categorized, but in a serious literary review we can only mention this much more "popular" novel in passing, as we would Sax Rohmer in a treatment of twentieth century American literature. White Collar and The Power Elite by C. Wright Mills likewise bear certain intimate rela­ tionships with the novels of this school, but, in my opinion, Mills seems to be too much the social scientist to be included; that is to say, he lacks the poetic imagination, or novelistic urge, to abstract emotive forms from reality —a practice which is of absolute nec­ essity in transforming fact into myth. For the school that we do have, certain rather stringent principles seem to apply. The novels that we have discussed are all written along the lines of the traditional novel of manners. A protagonist is chosen arbitrarily, not in order to be examined as a unique individual who may exhibit universality of meaning in proportion to the depths of his disclosed being; but, rather as an "average" representative citizen —a Sinclair Lewis caricature — who is happily vague and unexplored enough to fit anyone's personality tolerably well. This protagonist is then placed in one or a series of pre-arranged situa-

9i tions, contrived to show his impotence and pathos when fronted with the grinding conditioning-machine of Society. If they wanted to, the authors could easily so contrive the situations as to show the courage and freewheelingness of the protagonist (since a cari­ cature has no self-motivated life-thrust of his own), but all our authors seem to be committed to the notion that there is no hope for the representative Arthur Di Rektad short of a miracle. Although this is beyond the bounds of literary criticism, one might wish that these novelists had exercised their undeniable talents in presenting a less starkly pessimistic mythic world for our delectation. The novelist, of course, has absolute freedom to choose his own materials and do with them as he likes, but I for one am thankful that Arthur has no breath beneath his papier-mache vest and that his world exists only in imaginative symbols. Finally, all our novelists tend to intrude on their created worlds from time to time, breaking the narrative illusion of that world, but adding a homely touch of paternal reassurance and crochety nerv­ ousness to the action, much like Thackeray's interrupting the Battle of Waterloo to shake an admonitory fist at Becky Sharp and con­ gratulate the ethereal Amelia. Indeed, the Thackeray allusion is par­ ticularly apt, and this is probably the major sin of the writers in this group. They all protest indignantly at the beginnings of their novels that their protagonists are not to be believed in, that they are mere abstractions of social character — puppets for the novelist to enter­ tain with. But, like Thackeray, they get carried away with their puppets; they love them, they hate them, and they feel mingled pity and contempt for the wretched little lumps of jerky machined movement which they have made. Rationally considered this is not sane behavior, but poetic license allows what science cannot, and the reading public has been sentimentally entertained thereby. EARL H. ROVIT

92 THE WAR OF THE ANTHOLOGIES

The War of the Anthologies began in March of 1958 when Robert Pack, Donald Hall and Louis Simpson brought out a book called The New Poets of England and America. It scarcely seemed the beginning of a war: Pack, Hall and Simpson unfurled their ban­ ners upon an open field, with no enemy in sight, not even as a rust­ ling in the underbrush. Their book contained selections from the work of thirty-five American and sixteen English poets, all born since 1917, that is, all under forty in 1957, when the book was being compiled. The New York Times reviewed the book prominently and favorably, admiring the overall quality of the verse and noting only one American poet who, the reviewer thought, should have been in the book and wasn't: Robert Horan. A couple of weeks later in the New Yorker, Louise Bogan praised the collection at some length. The first printed admission that anything was significantly miss­ ing from the American two-thirds of the book came, interestingly enough, from an Englishman who was included. Thorn Gunn, who had lived in the United States for about five years, reviewed the anthology in The Spectator and remarked, as an observer who had detected a rustling in the underbrush, that it contained none of the work of what he called "the San Francisco group,"—Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso and Laurence Ferlinghetti—but said that they were ". . . very properly excluded: without benefit of either skill or rationality, their fashionable indignation has nothing to do with lit­ erature." The only omissions he lamented were Ralph Pomeroy and Alan Stephens, to whom, however, he assigned no geographical iden­ tification. If San Francisco had suffered a municipal literary snub, however, its most bookish newspaper took no offense. The Chronicle book section reviewed New Poets of England and America in June and made no mention of its omission of "the San Francisco group." The review was favorable. Strangely enough, the names Ginsberg and Corso and Ferlinghetti, and the names of many of their friends, did turn up on the Chronicle book page that day, in a review of the Gartenberg-Feldman collection of "Beat" writing. It was treated with withering scorn. Hall, Pack and Simpson seemed secure in the citadel of New Poets of England and America, and their poets securely "the" poets

93 under forty. So far as a book-page reader could tell, the only other poets were the Beats, who, despite their success on the front pages and in the picture magazines, were getting a very bad literary press. Life magazine called their capers "... the only revolt in town . . ." but Life was up to its usual feat of presenting the commonplace as inside dope, for a far more serious revolt—poetically, that is—was already brewing. Like Fidel Castro in the Sierra Maestre, Charles Olson, an obscure poet and teacher at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, was rallying a small band in the Great Smokies. Most of his followers, however, were known only to the readers of and writers for (groups largely identical) magazines like Extansis, Measure, Golden Goose, and Black Mountain Review. However un­ known, these poets were writing prolifically, nourishing one another by a system of incestuous cross-dedication of their poems, printing each other's poems on small, hand-operated presses, and awaiting their day. The next skirmish on the pages of the Times began as a mopping- up. Another anthology of Beat writing, this one edited by Seymour Krim, was reviewed by Richard Schickel, identified as a "New York editor" and vaguely assigned to Bleecker Street. Mr. Schickel would have none of Mr. Krim's Beats, charging that theirs was a "mock pro­ test" and that they had found no "suitable posture" for rebellion, despite their protestations. The response to the review appears to have startled the Times. Two weeks later it printed almost a full page of letters, most of them protesting the review as ignorant and unfair. Krim himself wrote to deny the competence of the reviewer, to whose Bleecker Street background other correspondents made derisive reference. Most significantly, the printed letters came not from San Francisco but from New York. Word from the West ar­ rived belately, however, for the very next week the Times printed a letter from San Francisco, from the occupant of an apartment where the photograph illustrating Schickel's review had been taken. He charged that the Times had made him ridiculous and infamous by this pictorial suggestion that he was Beat. The editors regretted his suffering. Attacking the Beats began to seem like whipping a dead horse, but worse was to come. From the beginning, their chief intellectual patron had been Kenneth Rexroth, of San Francisco, and in the late spring of i960 Rexroth himself turned and rent them. In the Chron­ icle magazine of books, he angrily denounced Beat fakery. Rexroth was said to be the originator of the poetry-to-jazz readings which

94 many thought a specifically Beat art form, and he had praised and tutored many Beat writers, but in the Chronicle he pointed out that he had praised and tutored many other writers as well, that he had been a poet and critic long before the Kerouac-Ginsberg generation got beat, and that certain Beat writers were devoting more energy to publicizing themselves (with the happy connivance of the middle­ brow press) than to their art. He further announced that he was tired of being held responsible for, or called upon to justify, the rudeness or silliness or exhibitionism or criminality of bearded intel­ lectual delinquents. With all this, however, Rexroth did not go over to the other side, the side of New Poets of England and America. He carefully singled out the Beat writers whom he admired (Gins­ berg, Corso and Ferlinghetti, among others) and then he turned his back upon the tourist-trap that had been North Beach. As was to become clear later, he was off on a flank march, not a retreat. In the summer of i960, came The New American Poetry, 1945-60. Although this anthology, edited by San Francisco's Donald M. Allen, covered roughly the same age-group as the Hall-Pack-Simpson book, it did not contain a line by a single one of the poets of New Poets of England and America. There were even mutters that it included every poet who wasn't in the earlier book, but this was an exaggera­ tion, for though it presented, sure enough, Ginsberg, Corso and Fer­ linghetti, it concurred in omitting Pomeroy and Stephens, suggested by Gunn, and Horan, the Times nominee. Nonetheless the book's preface, by the editor, announced that these were "the" poets. Allen made no reference to New Poets of England and America. His only suggestion that other or "untrue" poets existed lay in his remark that his poets had in common a total rejection of ". . . all those qualities typical of academic poetry." Since all three of the editors of the earlier anthology were teachers, this seemed to make the point. Still, most of the biographical notes in the Allen anthology (many of them composed by the poets themselves in a strange and rapturous third-person) did contain references to university training, some to advanced degrees and even Fulbrights and Guggenheims. Further, it was rumored that some of the contributors had, in com­ posing their notes, suppressed still more advanced degrees and still more Fulbrights and Guggenheims. With the appearance of Allen's anthology, Charles Olson came out of the Smokies, for the book was clearly his: his poems came first in the collection, his statement of poetical beliefs (Allen ap­ pended a credo by each poet) was the longest and most elaborate,

95 and many of the other contributors made reverential mention of his influence and his tutelage. The Times, having by now learned that the Beats had been but an advance suicide battalion of a much more formidable army, instantly declared itself an open city by extending to Allen's book the same benign accolade it had given to New Poets of England and America. It performed the extraordinary feat of reviewing the new book without notice of the conflict between the tables of contents of the two, and without balking at the large claims of Allen's preface. The counterattack came in October when Audit, an obscure re­ view published at the University of Buffalo, printed an article by John Simon which was one of the most savage reviews of recent literary history. Mr. Simon, an associate editor of Mid-Century, the publication of the Mid-Century Book Club, wasted no words, de­ claring in his first paragraph that the Allen anthology ". . . is a book for everyone but two . . . poets and poetry lovers . . ." Im­ mediately, he paid his respects to the ". . . passable, if by no means perfect. . ." New Poets of England and America, leaving no doubt who he considered "the" poets. The assault which followed was more bludgeon than rapier. He called the contributors "pseudo- poets," declared that "Mr. Allen's anthology divides all gall into five parts . . ." and lambasted the writers for "pseudo-learned ab­ surdities," "proto-academic parochialism," "torrential flows of ver­ biage," and "every abuse that can be heaped on language." He ridi­ culed the poets' preoccupation with love, calling it their udeus ex vagina," and a "sorry testimonial to the essential lovelessness of these poets." He noted but two things at which these writers "can be" good: rhetoric and humor, but even in one of his two or three sen­ tences of almost-praise, Mr. Simon was cruel, finding there were a few true, well-made poems in the collection—"Oddly enough." He twitted the contributors for misspellings and malapropisms, jeered at their biographical notes, and ridiculed their statements of faith. Hudson Review next unlimbered its guns, assigning The New American Poetry to Cecil Hemley for review in its winter issue. Hudson had all along been regarded as one of the principal targets of Allen's gibe at "academic poetry," partly on internal evidence, since the anthology included a poem by Kenneth Koch in which occurred the lines: ". . . Supposing that one has the misfortune/ To see some of the examples of some of the poetry/ Written by men with their eyes on the myth/ And the Missus and the midterms, in The Hudson Review/ Or, if one is abroad, in Botteghe Oscure . . ." and partly

96 on external evidence, since Louis Simpson, one of the editors of New Poets of England and America, was a regular Hudson contrib­ utor and had held a Hudson fellowship. (Louis Simpson, unashamedly an associate professor of English at the University of California, has pointed out that Koch is now, two years after the publication of the lines quoted above, himself a teacher at Columbia and a Guggenheim fellow.) Hemley's review labelled Allen's book an attempt to assert a ". . . narrow, dictatorial taste," as authoritative, but he went on to admit that some of the poetry was interesting if one could overlook the ". . . pretentious name and the confused preface, with its out­ rageous claims." He did not refer specifically, as Simon had done, to New Poets of England and America, but said that a ". . . host of well-known younger poets," had been omitted. His review gave considerable praise to two of Allen's poets: Denise Levertov and Robert Duncan, but concluded that the anthology announced by the title of the book ". . . remains to be done." He dealt in passing with the San Francisco problem (which had been somewhat mud­ dled by Rexroth's denunciation of the Beats, by the removals of Thorn Gunn and Louis Simpson to Berkeley, just across the bay from San Francisco, and by Allen's assertion in his preface that the original Beats really came from New York) by declaring that Gins­ berg was a poet but not Corso, and by accepting Allen's decree that Ferlinghetti belonged not to the Beats but to the "San Francisco Renaissance." It seemed that Ginsberg, Corso and Ferlinghetti were becoming the Balkans of this war: battles raged on but not for them. In January, the rebels carried The New Republic. There Kath- erine Garrison Chapin took The New American Poetry as demon­ strating the "extent and direction" of a rebellion in American poetry against the "enthroned" poets, of whom, however, she warily iden­ tified only T. S. Eliot, overage for either anthology. This rebellion, she said, had been prefigured by such diverse phenomena as a "blast" by Robert Graves and a "revaluation" by Karl Shapiro. Although she did not discover in the book evidence of a ". . . fresh, creative impulse in poetry," she accepted the contents as labelled, recom­ mending it as an introduction to "the avant-garde," with no refer­ ence either to omissions or to the existence of New Poets of England and America. Her review leaned rather heavily on Allen's intro­ duction to his book, particularly in the identification of this poetry with ". . . abstract painting, experimental music and jazz . . ." and in the geneology tracing it to Pound, Williams, Cummings, and H.D.

97 Two weeks later, it became clear just what ramparts Kenneth Rexroth had been heading for when he had marched out of the smoking ruins of North Beach. He had swung to the South, bugled up reinforcements in the Smokies, and on February 12, 1961, he appeared, like Jackson at Chancellorsville, on the front page of the Times book review section. His subject, he declared, was America's ". .. young poets who have come into prominence since World War II." Meticulously, he defined these young poets as a "valid group," distinguishing them on the one hand from the Beat Generation left behind in San Francisco (or perhaps in Greenwich Village) and on the other from their "sheltered academic colleagues"— now sheltered, it appeared, largely in Hudson Review and little Audit. Although Rexroth made no reference to either anthology, his article closely paralleled Allen's preface. These new poets, he declared, spurn the English tradition in poetry (the credos appended to Allen's anthol­ ogy had vied in twisting the lion's tail) and the conventional market­ place, while they embrace simplicity, "the social role of the poet," and the "world idiom of twentieth century verse." He discussed several of these young poets in detail: Levertov, Duncan, and Robert Creeley among them. Assuming the Times book editors were aware of the division be­ tween (in Robert Lowell's terms) "cooked" poetry and "raw" poetry, it looked as if the Magazine of Books, failing in its magnifi­ cent attempt to swallow two camels, had chosen the more aggressive one. It was not long, however, before the Times coppered its bet: exactly one month after Rexroth's article, the Times "Speaking of Books" department was given over to Donald Hall of New Poets of England and America. His piece, devoted largely to a defense of free verse, admitted the existence and, indeed, the competence, of two poets from The New- American Poetry—Denise Levertov and Robert Creeley. Had the open city policy brought peace? By the time Hall's "Speaking of Books" appeared, it had become known that a revision—or rather a sequel—was planned for New Poets of England and America, to be edited by Hall and Pack, Simp­ son having seceded from the triumvirate upon moving to San Fran­ cisco Bay. Hall's Times piece was taken as an indication that Lever­ tov and Creeley would be represented in the new anthology. The rumors, however, were that this prospect, far from delighting the poets of the Allen selection, divided them, some demanding a blood pact to spurn, one and all, the "academic" anthology, however it might be revised, and others turning against Creeley and Levertov

98 as already somehow tainted with respectability, much as the Beats had earlier been tainted with fame. Success, it was said, was having its usual way with rebels. But if the rebels were divided, so was the palace. Not only had Simpson gone West, but Robert Bly, a young Minnesota poet who had appeared in the first New Poets of England and America, was reported preparing still a third anthology of America's best poets under forty, this one to draw its contributors from both the camps created by the sharp division of the earlier two, and from the remaining unanthologized poets. Thorn Gunn, after seven years in the States still clutching his license as a foreign observer, took notice of the Balkanization of American verse in a review for The Yale Review this past summer, describing it as a "Baron's War" with Baron Bly, Baron Rexroth, and Baron Fitts (Dudley Fitts, editor of the Yale Younger Poets series, a chieftain of Eastern, Ivy League bards) hurling cries of defiance at one another. He might also have mentioned Baron John Ciardi, crouched behind the ramparts of The Saturday Review under his banner with the strange device: "I Publish No Sonnets," and Baron Charles Olson, ally of Rexroth. About the same time, Poetry, a magazine which is never in a hurry, produced its long-awaited review of The New American Poetry. The review, by a young poet named X. J. Kennedy, was neither as fierce as Simon's nor as bland as Miss Chapin's, but rather sorrowful. Mr. Kennedy thought some of the poems good and some bad and most "stodgy." He missed Snodgrass, Merwin, Lowell and Wright—all in New Poets of England and America—and also Cid Corman, who wasn't. He agreed with Rexroth that Creeley, Lever­ tov and Duncan are poets, but he dismissed with scorn the elaborate poetical theories of Olson—the articles of faith of the Order of Black Mountain. The battlefield is confused at the moment, one of those "darkling plains swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight," and there is little likelihood that the publication of the new Hall-Pack an­ thology, or the Bly anthology, will clarify issues. For instance, if Creeley and Levertov are not in the Hall-Pack will it mean they've been excluded again or that they've snubbed Hall and Pack? What about Ginsberg, Corso and Ferlinghetti? What about Pomeroy and Stephens? What about Robert Horan? To whom will the Times assign its review of the new book—will they attempt another ac­ commodation, swallow another camel, or will they take a side? And if Hall and Pack accept Creeley, Levertov and Duncan, will Gunn,

99 or Hemley disown Hall and Pack? Maybe when Bly has published his anthology some Young Lochinvar will rally together all whom he dismissed, from both sides, and mold an army of malcontents to topple the poor old Times again. We may yet live to see Charles Olson ar­ raigned by Brother Antoninus (perhaps in the pages of Look) for having driven Donald Finkel out of his mind. Let us hope that the war will continue in what Swift called ". . . the true spirit of controversy, with resolution to be heartily scurrilous and angry, to urge on his own reasons without the least regard to the answers or objections of his opposite, and fully pre­ determined in his mind against all conviction." JACKSON BURGESS

ERNEST HEMINGWAY: ARBITER OF COMMON NUMERALITY

Perhaps enough time has now passed to call for a re-evaluation of the early short works of Ernest Hemingway. Although some of the "spadework" has been done in earlier criticism, a close reading of many of the tales has convinced me that there is much yet to be done to further explicate these masterworks. In particular, my atten­ tion has been drawn to a story hitherto largely ignored by the crit­ ics: "The Light of the World." At first glance this tale seems to be all surface, with no substance to it; but in re-reading it, I discovered a certain perplexing — seemingly minor — problem which I have now decided to be of great significance in correct estimations of the Hemingway corpus. In my edition1 the story opens innocently enough; it is seemingly a conventional "action" story. The alert critic, however, will notice that Hemingway is doing some strange things with the little uni­ verse he has created. For instance the text reads, plainly enough, "Down at the station there were five whores waiting for the train to come in, and six white men and four Indians," a statement which at first appears as just another example of the naturalistically-oriented writer's compulsion to enumerate everything, a compulsion related

100 to the primitive man's totemic reverence for counting and the magic residual in numbers. Further on, however, the author introduces a startling, though simply-stated, ambiguity when he writes: "Two Indians were sitting down at the end of the bench and one standing up against the wall." Careful calculation assures us that the total of Indians has diminished by one. No mention is made of the other Indian. This strange numerical shift is further reinforced, when, a page or so later, the following passage occurs: "The ticket window went up and the three Indians went over to it." In my edition, this is, significantly, printed as a separate and distinct paragraph. Notice now that the semantics have become specific; it is uthe three Indians." At some point between the opening totalization and the next mention of the supposedly insignificant Indians, one Indian has van­ ished. Now this is a detail that the general reader, with his sketchy appreciation of background and small niceties, would be unlikely to notice. However, as I shall endeavor to show, it is of vital impor­ tance to the plot, structure, atmosphere and theme of this story, and is possibly a key to the complete understanding of the Hemingway ethos. This missing Indian, as in the ancient gnomic rhyme, "One little/Two little/Three little/Indians," is crucial to the development of a complex moral concern. You will recall that the story, on the surface, concerns the adven­ tures of Nick Adams and a friend identified only as "Tommy." Let us call this story-line the "A" plot, and observe the deliberately am­ biguous handling the author gives it. Nick and "Tommy" enter an unnamed town probably somewhere in Michigan;2 they enter a bar, exchange insults with the nameless bartender, then move on to a railway station in which the previously quoted total of personages is present. Once in the station, Nick and his "friend" speak and lis­ ten to several of these personages, and the dialogue occasionally becomes risque. The story then seems to shift its center to two "whores," one called only "Peroxide," the other "Alice." Again deliberate ambiguities are introduced to prevent the reader from knowing too much about these supposed protagonists. The reader's attention is forcibly focused on the quarrel which arises between "Peroxide" and "Alice" through the use of such con­ ventions as dialogue, description, narrator-commentary, etc. But this is simply a well-executed subterfuge which diverts attention from the real central characters — the unknown quantity, as it were — the Indians. While the Indians do not speak or contribute noticeably to

101 the action, such as it is, of the "A" plot, it is, as I shall endeavor to prove, a mistake to treat them as fixtures or mere parts of the local color. The Indians (or The Indians) are deliberately treated in an equivocal manner; in fact, the author seems to be trying to camou­ flage them, to divert the reader's attention from them (as a bird will lead pursuers from its nest) by over-stressing the superfluous "A" plot. Upon thoughtful examination, it becomes obvious that the dia­ logue carried on by the characters in the "A" plot is entirely trivial in nature, being simply a recount of the "whores' " relationships with an obscure pugilist. But this vulgar story is served up baldly and at some length, to act as a snare for the unwary reader's attention — "springes to catch woodcocks."

Let us now turn our critical microscope upon the powerful forces which the author is assembling, as it were, behind the scenes. If the "A" plot embraces the "whores," the "white men," Nick and "Tommy," then the subplot must, perforce, center on the Indians. Let us call this the "B" plot. When the reader absorbs the "A" plot of the story, he is left with the impression that he has read a very simple story about a group of unimportant people (only half-named) in an anonymous railway station at an unspecified time in an unidentified location. But what does this very uncertainty suggest to the astute critic? This am­ biguity invests the story with the stature of myth, parable and allegory, implying as it does that the "railway station" is really: a) the Cosmos; b) Hell; or c) Limbo.3 Any of these variant readings can be validated by an examination of the role of the so-called "Indians." The crucial "B" plot, then, is as follows: four "Indians" are pres­ ent in the "railway station" when Nick and Tommy enter. The obscene dialogue begins almost at once. At some point during the colloquy, one of the "Indians" disappears. This is the beginning of the weaving of a symbolic web. Why, precisely, does the "Indian" leave? Who (or better, what) is he? Let us first look at the term "Indian" itself and determine what "clues" it may yield. Webster's lists, as primary meanings of the term: " i. Of or pertaining to India or the East Indies . . . 2. Of, pertaining to, or designating the aborigines or In­ dians of America . . ."

102 The average reader, encountering the term in its present context, would naturally assume the second definition to be the correct one. But the critic, in an atmosphere as charged with semantic lightning as the one in this tale, must ever be on the alert for plurisignificances and their emotive directions. It is entirely feasible — nay, imperative — that these "Indians" are not American aborigines. They are, to come to the point, none other than the Four Wise Men of the twenty-second book of the Rhama Gondagetsha, or Book of In­ structions, of India.4 Briefly, the functions of the Four Wise Men in their religious capacity are those of censors, corresponding to the four senses of the human body. One of them listens to the world, one watches, one feels and one smells; they act as divine go-betweens who intercede for man in any of his stages of advancement toward Nirvana. Their names are not translatable, but this is not important for the purposes of this essay; the important fact is that the one "Indian" who leaves the "railway station" (in fact only identified as a "station," perhaps referring to the Stations of the Cross —the author did become a Convert in later life) is the Wise Man who functions as a Nasal Censor. His departure is subtly prepared at the beginning of the story with the passage: "Your goddam pig's feet stink," Tom said . . . "You stink yourself," the bartender said, "All you punks stink."

And then: It [the town] smelled of hides and tan bark and the big piles of sawdust.

And in reference to the "station" itself: It was crowded and hot from the stove and full of stale smoke, (italics mine)

These are the only overt references to the noxious situation, yet the whole tone of the story reeks with implications of nastiness and bad-smellingness. It could be argued that the "Indian" (Wise Man) who leaves the station would naturally be the Aural Censor, offended at the obscene talk. Yet a careful study of the myths of the Four Wise Men (a discussion too complex to enter into in this place)

103 will show that the Nasal Censor would be the one of the four most affected (especially in light of the belief prevalent in the myths that obscene words are connected in some way with halitosis/excretory processes). No, it must be the Nasal Censor who is most affronted and who leaves before the odiferous language becomes even more offensive. It can now be seen that by applying these critical techniques,' an otherwise trivial and inexplicable story is shown to have the stature and universal implications of myth. This is truly a parable of man's damnation and possible salvation, for the Wise Men become the Great Judges at the end of the myth-sequence and it is on their verdict that man's fate hangs. Surely, if only one of the Four Wise Men is offended, even the worst of man's trespasses can be forgiven; this is the moral implication of the story "The Light of the World." This introduction of comparative religion has then helped even in the explication of this baffling tale, which seems to call only for Judeo-Christian interpretation. The many ambiguities of the story, then, can be shown to have a direct significance, in the manner of classic allegory.5 The little world of the "station" becomes the Great Hall of Judgment; and while the Judges are still deliberating, we can rest in confidence of a vote of three-to-one for humanity. WILLIAM J. SCHAFER

1 A rather dog-eared copy of the 1938 Scribner's The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories. 2 A town designated only as "Cadillac," is mentioned, supposed home of the prizefighter who appears fleetingly in the story. There is a town named Cadillac in Michigan. 3 Just what would a railway station be doing out in the wilds in those days? It strikes the reader as a bit contrived and obvious, does it not? * There is no English translation available. In fact, the only part of this curious document still extant is a small fragment pasted on the bottom of a large urn (now shamefully filled with sand and used as an ashtray) in the British Museum. BI am currently at work on a major project, to be called: "Ernest Hemingway, John Bunyan, C. S. Forester, Colin Wilson and Horace Greeley: Hands Across the Sea in the Tradition of the Allegory." This will further develop the definition of allegory as it is used herein.

104 PROTEUS CRITICUS

Cetait pas un satyre qui se donnait Vapparence dun faux flic, mais un vrai flic qui se donnait Vapparence d'un faux satyre qui se donne rap­ parence d'un vrai flic. La preuve, c'est quHl avait oublie son pebroque. —Zazie dans le Metro

17 October 1961 Dear Reed, When I took the latest Carleton MISSilaney and not the Carleton MiSELLuhny out of its envelope, it fell open spontaneously at the beginning of the Yellow Pages. My eye was then seized by the next- to-last paragraph on the facing white page (32): "He laid her in the crib again and watched quietly. The screams were a little different now. He looked at his watch. 4:30. Jesus, he said. The screaming had all but stopped." Now I swear to you that I assumed the paragraph was saying what it seemed to be saying, in the best modern manner, or in one of the best modern manners; my first thought was, "In the crib? What kind of crib?" Then I turned back a few pages and began to read the whole story. Of course I soon discovered where I'd gone wrong, and how I'd wasted my cool hipness as a reader on what I had incorrectly taken to be the hip coolness of the writer. All the same I couldn't help wondering about the varieties of modern fic­ tion, and what Alain Robbe-Grillet, for instance, would have done with the crib, or any crib, and with the situation which I had (wrongly) assumed that paragraph to be about. Maybe it was because I'd just been looking through the 95-cent paperback Grove Press Tropic of Cancer, or maybe it was Karl Shapiro's introduction ("The Greatest Living Author"—an old essay reprinted as an introduction) that I'd just been looking through, where manysided Sciapiro says (page xiv), "Every serious reader of erotica has remarked about Miller that he is probably the only author in history who writes about such things [i.e., "exploits in bed"] with complete ease and naturalness." Charles Chapireau doesn't provide a footnote at this point, or any sort of bibliography, so I'll have to do without that list of serious readers of erotica that I'm too lazy or too incompetent to put together on my own. Are they members of a club or what? Well, I thought (I had still read only the paragraph, not the

K>5 whole story) the author of this paragraph also writes about such things (exploits in cribs) with complete ease and naturalness, and the serious readers of erotica sitting around cutting up touches about such things at The Sludges or The Toads or The Big Boys or what­ ever their club is called, if they have a club and if the club has a clubhouse, ought to remark that about him too. Then I read the story and saw where I'd gone wrong. But I still kept thinking about Rashipo-san's introduction. As introductions go, it runs to just under xxvii pages (in this edi­ tion: I never did buy or steal the $7.50 hardcover edition which Grove had tactfully brought out several months earlier in order not to cut into the sales of the 95-cent edition, and which for many weeks now has been on the New York Times Book Review best­ seller list). Of course in xxvi pages and 20 lines a writer like Kip Sharolar can get quite a lot said, and I don't want to impose on you in a communication like this by citing all he says. Anyhow, I expect you've read it (the introduction) long since, and separated the wheat from the goats. He (Kilror Pasha) starts off (page v) by alluding to a letter of his own to Lawrence Durrell in which he (Lars Porikha) had sug­ gested making a bible out of Miller's writings and putting one in every hotel room in America, "after removing the Gideon Bibles and placing them in the laundry chutes." When later on I got to the part about serious readers of erotica I realized that Korli Shapar had not been joking, for what serious reader of erotica trapped in an American hotel room would want to read a Gideon Bible when he could be reading a Miller bible? Those people (non-serious readers of erotica, serious readers of non-erotica, non-serious readers of non- erotica, serious non-readers of erotica, non-serious non-readers of erotica, non-serious non-readers of non-erotica) who miss the other kind of Bible can read it in the laundry chute. Later (page xvi) Krla Shpraio writes, "Like other Millerites I claim that Miller is one of the few healthy Americans alive today." According to the Encyclopedia Britannica (as recently as 1957), millerite is a mineral consisting of nickel sulphide, NiS. "The colour is brass-yellow and the lustre metallic. Typical specimens of mil­ lerite, so-named, in 1845, in honour of W. H. Miller, are found in the coal-measures in the neighborhood of Merthyr Tydvil. . . ." (Merthyr Tydfil [sic] is "a municipal, county, and parliamentary borough of Glamorgan, Wales, on the Taff river. ... It was named after St. Tydfil, a Christian princess slain by raiding Picts in the 5th

106 century.") The followers of William Miller (1782-1849), who pre­ dicted the Second Coming in 1843, were also known as Millerites. In the 1961-62 Chicago phone book there are 38 Henry Millers, in­ cluding a couple of firm names, but only two Wm. Shakespeares, one of them Wm. Jr. But to get back to Rip Kasharol and his essay, "The Greatest Living Author." Yet why get back to it? It is all there, in the book, for whoever has 95 cents or $7.50. I certainly had no intention of going on at this length when I began this note to tell you about my ridiculous misinterpretation of the paragraph on page 32. The first time I ever saw Tropic of Cancer was in 1938 (I think) in the Princeton library, but it didn't occur to me then that it would ever be republished with an introductory essay by Ralk Haspori, the poetic. I can't find out what nickel sulphide is good for, if anything — however, have a go at spelling NiS backwards! The Eleventh Edition of the Britannica says that Merthyr Tydfil is situated "m a bleak and hilly region on the river Taff," and that "St Tydfil, daughter of Brychan, was put to death by Saxons in the 5th century." (My italics.) Yrs, W.B.S[COTT]

P.S. (By special courier, several weeks later.) Since dashing off the foregoing tribute, I have read another piece by Lark Oripash called "Europe is not what the guidebook says," in WFMT Perspective (November, 1961). Did you know what Abigail Adams said in 1786? "Paris is the very dirtiest place I ever saw," she said. Of course Kaspr Haroil knew. For some reason he doesn't mention the make of "our own Yankee station wagon," in which he and his family travelled, and at which Italian natives "pointed and snickered," but one has the feel­ ing rolling through the article in it that it might have been one of those wide-tread Paranoid Eights, with the inside exhaust and becket seats. Here is the second sentence of Krishar Opal's piece: "This is the second time in six years that I have fled from Europe with my fam­ ily, the fourth I have fled on my own." This is a practically perfect sentence, so I'd better not tamper with it. Still, how did the kids feel about it all? "Oh, Daddy, do we have to flee again?" "This is the fourth time Daddy has fled!"

107 "Gee, Daddy, you must be just about the best fleer there is in the whole world!" "Ah, well,—and now you kids run away and play while Daddy copies out this sentence from Abigail Adams." "Abigail Adamsl Gosh, Daddy!"

CORRESPONDENCE

To The Editor, The Carleton Mis­ often in a language that varies cellany. scarcely at all, do we choose the best and chuck out the others? and do we Dear Sir, choose to preserve something else Mr. George P. Elliott's article merely because it says something in your Summer issue contains so that has not been said before? If we much that is pertinent, so much that did we would be the poorer; Cf Dr. is useful and demands assent, that Johnson: "whatever hope can per­ it seems of first importance to reg­ suade, or reason evince, experience ister disagreement where he has can boast of few additions to an­ made some assertions that are cu­ cient fable." I like R. H. Wilenski's rious to say the least. Thus, on page remark on Turner which goes to 79: he talks of Pound's subject mat­ the effect that many painters of his ter as "private jabber, social an­ period travelled all over Europe alytics ... or archaic platitudes." painting the same picture in differ­ It is this last which jars, especially ent places, but it was Turner's merit in the sense in which Mr. Elliott both to have travelled and painted expands it. "As venerable as carpe new paintings where he went. It diem" he writes a few pages later. is in this sense that Pound, surely, Because Catullus and half a dozen talks about "Make it new." Archaic others in antiquity wrote classic platitudes may be beautifully re­ carpe diems, does this in any sense juvenated by a new situation and invalidate e.g. Ronsard's, Ben Jon- a new expression, for no two poems son's, e. e. cummings' exquisite really "say the same thing" except variations? Because we find in any in paraphrase, which is not the anthology of Mediaeval lyrics two poem. Nor is it new to say that hundred that say the same thing, Pound uses "voices" in his poems:

108 this was clearly suggested, I had to. Without being conscious of always thought, by his use of the that, a reading of the poem will be title "Personae" for one of his vol­ insufficient, almost, one might say, umes of verse, and again for the incompetent. It makes for the kind collected editions of his shorter of relation used by Eliot in "A poems. The point to look for in Game of Chess." Again Mr. Elliott Pound, surely, is not what new fumbles unnecessarily over identi­ themes and what new voices has fying the tone of "Pull down thy he created for poetry, but how has vanity"; of course it is not addressed he used old ones, and to what pur­ to Pound's own vanity, neither need pose? He did make something new Mr. Elliott have included his phrase out of the Victorian narrative "commanding us who have impris­ poem in "Near Perigord"; his epi­ oned him" just there, (page 88). grams make use of a technique of The passage is a fine public plea Martial, used again by Sir John (the tone is of course identified in Davies in our own language, in a those features of rhetoric that Mr. new situation with propriety and Elliott does not fail to notice: gives brilliance. And each literary allu­ us a list of them in fact). And the sion may serve the useful and en­ authority that Mr. Elliott demands riching (to the poem) purpose of emerges from the context: "The a frame of reference for the genre enormous tragedy" are the open­ in which the poet writes; he de­ ing words of this section of the clares himself at once, and every Cantos, the tragedy that in this variation from the norm becomes world all indeed may be reft from the more startling because the thee, but with the message of hope reader knows where he started that "what thou lovest well re­ from: it works in much the same mains." This surely is exemplified way that a good metre can. Equally in the personal experience that it seems a little simpliste of Mr. everywhere informs and is recorded Elliott, on page 89 apropos of "Go, in the Pisan Cantos. It is a fine dumb-born book," to talk of the piece of preaching from a man who "almost incredible fact that to has faced despair. When Mr. Elliott achieve this pure, small perfection, shares with Pound a literary herit­ Pound assumed another man's age that includes the preachers that voice." If Waller's most famous it does, and the Bunyans, the Blakes, poem is not immediately present to the Shelleys, the Ruskins, it is the reader of Pound's lyric, the strange that Mr. Elliott should be latter loses one of its most im­ unable to place the tone of the portant dimensions: the voice of passage here. Waller is demanded, it shouts One must also take issue with through the poem, and it is intended the remarks re Eliot's advocacy of

109 Pound (page 85). Eliot had read­ avoided. Footnote 16 is a very ers far more rigid than is conceiv­ feeble remark; if Mr. Elliott had able now to combat to get even paid attention to his reading of small recognition for Pound; Mr. Pound's prose, he would have no­ Elliott shows himself fully aware ticed better reasons' than that for of the situation on the top of page the hatred of Universities: where- 94. And on the subject of his criti­ ever this topic comes up, it is with cism Pound has always disparaged exasperating regularity coupled with that activity as "a work of art in two quotations from Pound's cor­ itself"; he would, I fancy, be pleased respondence: "The University is that Mr. Elliott found his criticism not made for the exceptional man" wanting in this respect, for he states and "Admitted that it had nothing over and over again words to the to do with life but said that it tune of "Criticism, I take it, is writ­ couldn't be changed, therefore I ten in the hope of better things." did not take the course." And on His criticism IS important never­ page 83, what is this strange pres­ theless just because it has the look ence of a quotation from Pater but of a workshop in which many the use of a hackneyed scapegoat? poetic developments were worked In its context (the fine prefatory out; and I personally find Pound remarks to the essay on Giorgione pleasantly blunt and honest where from The Renaissance) the state­ Eliot is frequently prissy (Mr. El­ ment surely implies little more than liott notes that Eliot took over the adumbration of the concept, many suggestions from Pound); advanced for the time, that music and finally Pound's criticism re­ is the type of all the arts because mains a huge spawning ground for its form is least separable from its seminal ideas that have become content, and for that reason (a very commonplaces since—the hoary old good one) all arts aspire to the con­ chestnut of the "concrete image," dition of music. Mr. Elliott would stems directly from Pound's work have done better to refer to Pound's on Fenellosa's Chinese Written own continually reiterated tripartite Character Essay. Such criticism has division of poetry into logopoeia, proved of the utmost importance phanopoeia and melopoeia, the last to subsequent developments both being an art which he considered in poetic practice and in criticism to have died in England (with a itself. few exceptions) since Rochester. Finally, although Mr. Elliott And one of the main interests of keeps his discussion in general on his study of Calvacanti and trouba­ a pleasantly high level, he has de­ dour metric was the revival of the scended into some cheap critical art of melopoeia, (see the letter to journalese that one wishes he had Felix E. Shelling no. 190 in the

no Paige edition of the letters and are worth close and careful atten­ elsewhere in prose writings). Fi­ tion. nally, where is all the rasping scorn Sincerely, for the Victorian Romantics (page RACKSTRAW DOWNES 81 top)? Swinburne, Rossetti, Omar MR. ELLIOTT REPLIES: Khayam, Browning, Lionel John­ son, even Beardsley's Under the Reading Pound's works is a bit like going through a hurricane— Hill are all praised by Pound; and sometimes marvelous, sometimes in the essay "Swinburne and his dreadful, always tossing except for biographers" (second paragraph) he the dead center. At least he is mag­ discriminates clearly between two nificent. But entering into contro­ generations of Victorians and us­ versy with a Poundian is like stick­ ually sticks by this discrimination. ing your finger in a mix-master. I'd This is a long letter, but the rather not, thanks all the same. article in question and its subject GEORGE P. ELLIOTT

Dear Mr. Whittemore: ber of reasons, including its lack of consummate excellence as poetry; . . . the enclosed submission will but at least admit that it's better speak for itself, I think, about one than what it satirizes. ... I bear disappointing experience with your no personal malice toward Don magazine. . . . Maybe you won't Hall; but let's face it, he's asked want to print it, for any of a num­ for this.

On Reading Two "Poems" by D. H. (Carleton Miscellany, Fall 1961)

I ON READING "NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS" The poet-editor lounges at ease In the plush of his reputation; Invokes with a shrug the satiric muse, And delivers his next publication. For published it surely will be, and fast,

111 Whatever the worth of its wit. Rejection-slip days are a thing of the past; Now that he's famous, why sweat? In minutes at most the satire is born, From the top of his head, full grown— Unfettered by passe rythm or form, Though laid out in lines, like a poem. And what does his artless derision expose? The fool and knave in high stations? The huckster mind that would banish the muse? The unearned reputation? Oh no. This savage indignation Aims at a safer mark: The inept beginner whose humble submission Earns his professional smirk For, of all things, "dead rhythm." Oh Brave kettle, to call the harmless Empty pot empty with such bold Unstinting emptiness!

II ON READING "EATING" The poet-editor is growing fat. With what rare candor he confesses that! And see how he matches diction and rhythm to sense By loading every rift with flatulence! MARTIN HALPERN

112 NAME OF RECIPIENT.

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