M /5CELL4 /VY A%vietf of Literature ' ^- tj* LiUral jirts

Round Table Thoughts on Recent American Poetry: Louis Gallo; with Michael Dennis Browne, Philip Martin, Bob Tisdale, Chris Wallace-Crabbe.

New Fiction Richard Grayson, Lawrence Osgood, William Peden, James Ross.

Features Michael Fanning: Jimmy Connors, Oedipus Rex Ulf Zimmemann: Rilke's Novel City.

New Poetry Susan Fromberg Schaeffer, Philip Dacey, Mark Moe, Frederic Will, Robert Willson, David Fisher, Gail Trebbe, Margaret Robinson, Judith Minty, Pamela Espeland, Marjorie Hawksworth, Conrad Hilberry, Edward Hirsch, Jacqueline Hoefer, Christopher Howell, Malcolm Stiles McCollum.

Reviews of: Blaising's The Art of Life (Carol Holly); Paige's Agrarian Revolution (Kim Rodner); Anais Nin's Waste of Timelessness (Harriet Zinnes); Sartre's Life Situations (Donald Schier); Simone Weil: A Life (Bardwell Smith).

VOL. XVII, No. 1, Winter 1977 $2.00 Distributed to newsstands and bookstores by B. de Boer, 188 High Street, Nutley, New Jersey. All volumes available on microfilm through University Microfilms, 313 North First Street, Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Unsolicited manuscripts — which are submitted at the author's risk and which will not be returned unless accompanied by a stamped, self-addressed envrlope — should be sent to The Editor, The Carleton Miscellany, Carleton College, Northfield, Minnesota 55057.

Beginning with Vol. XVII, No. I, the magazine will appear three times a year. Subscription rates: $2.00 for a single copy; $5.50 for a year; $10.00 for two years.

The Carleton Miscellany is not an official publication of Carleton College, nor are the views expressed in its pages necessarily those of the College. The editors assume no responsibility for the views of individual contributors.

Copyright 1977 by Carleton College

Cover design and title by Betsy Edwards ClitLETOtf J^ISCEHAHY

A %eyietf of Literature <&• tlje Liberal Arts

Advisory Editors

Richard Wollheim

Philip Martin John Wain

A.K. Ramanujan Chris Wallace-Crabbe

Editorial Board Robert Bonner Paul Riesman Charles Carlin Davis Taylor Roy Elveton Robert Tisdale David Porter John Wright

Keith Harrison, Editor Donald Schier, Associate Editor Carolyn Soule, Managing Editor

Editorial Assistants Mary Ellen Hoffmann Laurie Kutchins Jennifer Snodgrass Brian Kitely NOTES ON FUTURE ISSUES

Volume XVII, No. 2 will feature writers of the Midwest, with poems by Keith Gunderson, Jerald Bullis, Hunt Hawkins, Tom Jackoway and others; stories by Mary Ellen Carew, and features by Don Schier and others. Round Table will be given to a discussion by Errol Harris' Testament of a Philosophical Dissenter, an important statement on philosophy and science. Volume XVII, No. 3 will contain an article on Antarctic exploration by Evan Connell, poems by Harold Witt, a story by Peter Meinke and a Round Table on Clifford Geertz' germinal article on The Balinese Cockfight. Volume XVIII, No. 1 will be an International Issue, featuring writers in English from overseas. So far we have stories by Jon Bovey (France), poems by Agha Shahid Ali (Kashmir) and we expect contributions by writers in Australia, England, Canada and many other places inside and outside the Anglophonic Zone. AN APPEAL Please ask your friends, wives, husbands, children, librarians to join our list of subscribers. Our annual subscription rate is only $5.50 (3 issues) which, in the present economy, is risibly inexpensive. There's a subscription form enclosed for you to pass on. Help us to spread word of The Miscellany. You'll notice we've never resorted to commercial advertising to maintain ourselves, and we'd like to stay this way. More subscriptions would help enormously. CONTENTS Vol. XVII, No.l 1977-78 (Winter)

Comments, Tributes 4 Poems by Mark Moe and Jacqueline Hoefer 8 ROUND TABLE Thoughts on Recent American Poetry, by Louis Gallo 12 Replies: Blood Relations, by Bob Tisdale A Dungeon with the Door Open, by Philip Martin Drawing a Bead on Louis Gallo from Minneapolis, Minnesota, by Michael Dennis Browne Mendeleef, Grass Roots and the Wombat Mandala, by Chris Wallace-Crabbe Louis Gallo Replies to the Replies 40 • Nixon to Haldeman, poem by Robert Willson 42 Jimmy Connors, Oedipus Rex, an article by Michal Fanning 43 Clean, a story by James Ross 54 Poems by Frederic Will, Margaret Robinson, Pamela Espeland, Conrad Hilberry, Susan Fromberg Schaeffer, David Fisher 60 Rain on the Roof, a story by Richard Grayson 70 From Prag to Paris: Rilke's Novel City, an article by Ulf Zimmermann 76 Family Portrait, a story by William Peden 90 Poems by Judith Minty, Philip Dacey, Marjorie Hawksworth, Gail Trebbe, Christopher Howell 92 The Madness of My Brother, a story by Lawrence Osgood 101 Poems by Edward Hirsch and Malcom Stiles McCollum 116 REVIEWS Harriet Zinnes on Anais Nin; Kim Rodner on Jeffery Paige's Agrarian Revolution; Bardwell Smith on Simone Weil; Carol Holly on Blaising's The Art of Life; Donald Schier on Sartre H8 Books Received 143 Notes on Contributors 148 COMMENTS, TRIBUTES

The Miscellany has been going sixteen years now. Sixteen years of extraordinarily turbulent social, political and intellectual change. There was, in retrospect, a certain leisured ease in the ambience of the early sixties when the magazine first appeared. Not so now. Too much has happened. There's no need here to toll out an exhaustive litany of that change nor to give my own guesses about the future. Instead I want to limit my observations to a couple of things which I think are relevant to the existence and purpose of this magazine. • In the intellectual climate of the last few years at least one broad change can be pointed to with some definiteness. Partly because of the effect of Black Studies and third-world programs in colleges, partly because of the influence of books by Thomas Kuhn and others—but there are many causes—we are being forced to be more inclusive in our thinking. For one thing, readers and teachers of literature have begun to see that literary works sometimes demand to be seen in con­ texts larger than that of literature itself. That the results are often messy and half-baked cannot be denied. Nevertheless the interest shown by literary scholars in such fields as history, anthropology, religion, philosophy, politics—and many other "non-literary" fields— points to a significant shift in emphasis. The well-wrought urn has become, for the most part, an archaism. There are many who see the social or psychological occasions of a work as legitimate fields of study, complementing, though not opposing, an interest in the formal properties of the work itself. It's as if we had taken T.S. Eliot's descrip­ tion of criticism—by one of his characters in the dialogue on dramatic poetry—not as a warning, but as a desideratum:

You can never draw the line between aesthetic criticism and moral and social criticism; you cannot draw a line between criticism and meta­ physics; you start with literary criticism, and however rigorous an aesthete you may be, you are over the frontier into something else sooner or later.

Yet, those who agree would also endorse the warning which ends that same speech: "The best you can do is to accept these conditions and know what you are doing when you do it." We still have, and we will always have, the dogmatists—those who will want to reduce a com­ plex work of art to a set of extra-literary preconceptions. But I believe our best minds are developing a double, or even a multiple vision, learning the methods and character of other disciplines and enriching the study of the works themselves by seeing that their occasions are indeed manifold and interrelated. • What Eliot—or his "character"—maintains about criticism and the impossibility of drawing lines, with any absoluteness, in literary dis­ cussions, also applies to the whole realm of the liberal arts—to history and the humanities, to the social sciences—and at least to certain areas of the "hard" or "natural" sciences. A man might begin talking about physics and quite legitimately go on to poetry or politics; begin with folk-lore and end with linguistics; begin with linguistics and end with symbolic logic or mathematics. And so on. It is not a question of asserting anything as foolish as that all disciplines are one. They are not. For heuristic purposes, clear edges are useful and, for adminis­ trative purposes, the divisions might even be unavoidable. But it is also important, particularly in those disciplines whose main medium of expression is the written and spoken word, to stress their interdepen­ dence. That disciplines have their shibboleths, their arcana, their special vocabularies, their "traditions"—that is undeniable and, to some degree, inevitable. But where disciplines strive to differentiate themselves absolutely from all others I believe we begin to find the kind of involution which can prove, and has proven at times, highly debilitating. For "traditions" can often be nothing better than the function of an habitual closed-mindedness, special vocabularies a form of fear and distrust. • These thoughts have influenced me in the shaping of an editorial policy. It is not a matter of making a sharp change but of building on what we always have been: a miscellany. We would like in these pages—among other things—to encourage a lively discussion, a well- articulated debate on some important questions in the whole range of the liberal arts. All these disciplines are the inheritors of a magnificent expressive instrument—the English language. And we would like to assist, however we can, in its preservation, for we have seen signs around us that its foundation is being undermined, sometimes in those quarters where one would least expect it: in the centers of liberal learning themselves. • We are not, let it be very firmly noted, concerned with a school- marmish notion of good usage. That the word "hopefully" on the American continent has, for these several years, meant the equivalent of the old phrase "with luck," that the word "their" in the sentence— "everybody should bring their own bicycles"—is an androgynous (and sometimes very useful) possive pronoun—such matters belong to the minor lexicography of change, and shouldn't bother us overmuch. There are larger matters of language at stake, matters which are concerned with the deeper qualities of writing, matters of tone, nuance, and, finally, of humanity. I think I speak for all the editors of this magazine when I say that we believe that, in any sophisticated form of verbal discourse, the manner of what is said can not be separ­ ated from the substance. Even the choice of rhetorical mode—as well as the fact that one chose this to discuss and not that—these are essential parts of one's necessarily subjective affirmation. All writers begin, unavoidably, by saying themselves. And, if they know their business, they try to make their words carry into the "third realm" as F. R. Leavis describes it—the realm beyond the "mere" objective text, beyond the "mere" subjective self. I have heard specialists in various disciplines pointing out inadequacies in the thought of the late J. B. Bronowski in certain of his excursions into their fields. I am not here defending Bronowski's "inadequacies." He had enough strengths to counterbalance them in good measure and he doesn't need my help, even were I able to offer it. But I think it is important to note that, even when we might disagree with Bronowski, he has the virtues in his prose of courtesy and urbanity, even when he is wrong. He cared enough to want us to know exactly what he was thinking. • The section of the magazine called Round Table represents an attempt to come to terms with some of the questions I have been raising. In most cases—and the present one is a good example— Round Table will concern itself with the relation between literature and other disciplines. In some cases, though, we will go beyond literary matters altogether and open up questions which seem to us important to air in this place, and at this time. • There are, in a modest estimate, roughly 8,000 published poets in the U.S. at the moment. That brings to mind an anecdote about the late Robert Lowell who, on being introduced to an audience at Columbia with the remark that there were twenty-two poets on the faculty of that University, replied that there weren't that many poets in the whole world. We are convinced that the figure is between twenty- two and 8,000, though it is undeniably on the lower side. Some of them have already written for us, and we expect to print more—and we will continue to look for the best fiction and articles of general interest that we can lay our hands on. • A magazine cannot function without its hidden yeomen. All women in this case. Laurie Kutchins, Mary Ellen Hoffmann, and Jennifer Snodgrass have shown remarkable powers of stamina and goodwill in helping me establish a new physical location for the magazine. I am very grateful for their good sense, their enthusiasm, and their gaiety. Without Carolyn Soule, though, we should all have been shipwrecked. She has a method of dealing with business transactions, subscriptions, the secret language of printers and the whims of contributors that outclasses the computer for swiftness. Her procedures are so rational that they seem arcane. Gramercy. • Sixteen years. And, during that time, the editorships of Reed Whittemore and Erling Larsen—each, in his own manner, a superb man of letters. One cannot try to emulate them without making a fool of oneself. It is some comfort perhaps to remember the Indian saying that it is better to die following one's own dharma than to live following someone else's. But because one cannot live (or die) by aphorisms alone, I have also taken the practical step of surrounding myself with an excellent group of advisors—men of letters, historians, scientists, musicians, anthropologists, mythologists, and philosophers—some in England, some across the Pacific, and a number within earshot. I have already been warmed by their camaraderie, encouraged by their generosity, and sometimes sharply awakened by their advice. • And then, Wayne Carver. Wayne Carver is a human being, teacher, writer and editor of such fecund capacities that he is deucedly difficult to write about without resorting to the kind of metaphor that he— being so ardent a believer in the kingdom of the real—would find unacceptable. Let me, then, speak plainly. During the last five years or so, scores and scores of writers have profited enormously from the tactful, light-bringing remarks he has made on our manuscripts. And even now, after being bombarded by millions of bad words, his edi­ torial generosity is still amazing. What can one say for all of us who aspire to be better writers and readers? Only thank you. We are sustained by knowing that you will be around.

Keith Harrison Mark Moe

SHUNNED

"Robert Bear, a Reformed Mennonite Church potato farmer, has been excommuni­ cated. Even his wife, his children, and other relatives participated in the shunning." (UPI Release)

Last week my wife left without speaking.

There is no other way to describe it: the black Bible spread like a bird on her breast, the mouth closed like an old piano.

I watched her vanish on the road, a small boat tied to a shrinking river.

It rained that night, and the next, and the next, and each morning the beds emptied themselves before me. Nothing could stop them.

Now only the white eyes of my potatoes look back in the moonlight. Like small children dug from their sleep in the dark, they too are silent and rubbed dumb by their Maker.

And while I do not believe that trees are the hands of sinners frozen in ascension, or that each river eventually returns to hell,

I have stood in my fields at dawn, and felt them bumping the brittle crust, and at night they have entered my arms like the sadness and the lies I've learned to live with, and slept like the dead.

But there is nothing left to do.

Outside it is nearly winter, and the great oak stands on one leg in the wind.

And if I listen closely, I can hear the soft flesh of the saved, filling the pews like snow.

FALL

This is it, the wood turning sour, the smell of roasted leaves, butcher shops full of brown meat. The fever season, the final string pinched like a vein and held until the maples burn and the dark fruit drops like blood from the violin trees.

The suitcase days, the sun packed in ice and driven south by sweaty trucks that stall in Montana, their grey engines frozen, their lights barely on, the earth turning slowly their color.

FIRST SNOW

It begins with water. The desire to drink yourself sick.

You can hear the antique clock tick, and inside it the immeasurable hour ages.

The furniture turns grey. The coffee sits like warm blood on the stove.

You go to the window. The apple trees are full of blackened ornaments.

You want the small heat of stars, the north wind to fill your lungs with milk.

You walk out over the broken arms of the backyard garden,

10 over the hard dark ink of the earth, and in silence it begins

to write itself, word for word, the letter you were waiting for.

Jacqueline Hoefer

KNOTS AND DRY PLACES

Outside my kitchen window, in melting sun, our thick-hipped, aging sycamores show green tits on every branch. Sure sign. Charged with light, beyond our vision, their lavish chemistry unfolds. A week, no more, and leaves will fill like spreading sails, cover over winter skin. I stare at knots and dry places, shrug bony shoulders, enkerneled, like a scabby ear of corn. No remedy in sight. They say, though, it's going to be a good season for miracles: Lord, roll away that stone, let this plain Jane burst into hysterical bloom.

SMALL CLAIMS

Will somebody over there in the dark please help? There were things left here—a dog with a cloudy eye, a tall blonde lady. They have been moved, or taken away. They can be found, surely. Somebody must have them. I have a claim. If not on them, on something. There is something, isn't there?

11 ROUND TABLE

Louis Gallo

THOUGHTS ON RECENT AMERICAN POETRY

Before Husserl introduced phenomenology modern philosophy seemed peculiarly ill-equipped to repair the extensive damage inflicted upon it at its outset by Descartes. Of course, Descartes merely epitomized the estrangement of self and non-self long endemic to Western thought; he did not invent it. Nevertheless, he stands as a convenient scapegoat for the intellectual hubris that had paralyzed philosophy for quite some time. But as philosophy quivered, science thrived on such hubris. Detaching himse// from objects enabled the scientist to scrutinize phenomena with a freedom previously unimagined. The technological and theoretical achievements of this arrangement cannot be dismissed lightly, despite the high social and psychological costs. [One need only consult the countless books already published on the subject of modern man's alienation and spiritual vacuity.] Yet to denigrate science qua science no longer suffices either, for there are now two distinct sciences, an old "classical" school and the new "quantum" school which has supplanted it. Diehard opponents of anything scientific quibble when they charge that if Newton's clockwork universe reduced man to machine, the apparent random­ ness of molecular activity in the form of quanta dissolves the old verities altogether. At least, they argue, we could always fall back on the dismal knowledge that some sort of ghost lurked in the machine; now man no longer knows who or what he is. Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle alone, itself a product of rigorous scientific investigation, assures us we can never really know the researcher from the research. The "detached" observer participates in what he observes. The truth is that quantum physics and its philosophic implications have actually excavated our first real escape-hatch out of the Cartesian-Newtonian machine. Our real mystics today are not capitalistic gurus, Sun Moon's, and Timothy Leary's, who peddle stale commodities indeed. But our habitual humanist prejudices against a dehumanized "objective" science obscure the face that "subjective" science can now offer man a positive, even sublime image. It restores to him once again his rightful place in the universe—from which the

12 old science had systematically uprooted him. Erwin Schrodinger, the expounder of wave mechanics, explained the original disaffection of self and non-self like this: "Mind has erected the objective world of the natural philosopher out of its own self. Mind could not cope with this gigantic task otherwise than by the simplifying device of excluding itself—withdrawing from its conceptual construction."1 Perhaps Schrodinger goes too far when he attributes ultimate reality to mind alone, but a few pages later he compensates by endorsing phenome- nology's basic premise: "Subject and object are only one." A parallel development occurs in the psychology of Erich Neu­ mann, who repudiates Freud's notion that birth ejects the infant into a hostile, alien world—the world of non-self. The child at birth simply has no self; its primal relationship with the mother/world is a unitary one. Only after we learn to think rationally do we audaciously interpret this union as a matter of the child being dependent on its mother/- world. "In coming-to-itself," Neumann explains, "the child emerges from this unity with its mother to become an individual subject confronting the world as thou and as object."2 Such distinctions arise incidentally with the development of a somewhat artificial ego. Neumann, unlike Freud, attributes greatest importance to the unity, not the separation, and even describes it nostalgically as paradise. In anthropology, we find generalists like Edward T. Hall populariz­ ing the idea that mind amounts to nothing more than internalized culture.3 On the sinister side there is Herbert Marcuse who, in numerous books, discusses the process of introjecting false con­ sciousness by means of totalitarian propaganda and media manipula­ tion. In philosophy, Husserl and his followers found the subject/object dichotomy untenable the moment one moved beyond practical, every­ day expediency. But as we saw, prior to Husserl modern philosophy had no means, no methodos, to cope with this problem. Challenges to scientific objectivity always came from extra-philosophic sources such as religion, ritual, magic, altered states of consciousness and, of' course, art. Phenomenology, however, authorized philosophy itself to negotiate the long overdue detente. Further, in the wake of Husserl's work, Heidegger affirmed the close affinity of philosophy and poetry, thus liberating poetry from the inferior status it acquired on the day Plato banished it from his Republic. While poets have always known poetry could, in fact, reveal truth, it has taken philosophers nearly two millenia to return to this fertile pre-Socratic view. Phenomenological analysis, then, encourages reexamination of the "external" world and our place in that world. It is from this perspective that I shall now comment upon the state of recent American poetry and, particularly, its lethal fidelity to subjects and objects. But first a word more on phenomenology. In his Existence and Love, William

13 Sadler supplies a simple, succinct explanation of phenomenology's aim—no slight task! Phenomenology, unlike traditional scientific or philosophic analysis, writes Sadler, "should first be described as a kind of spiritual vision (Schauen), which opens up for it a revelation of new facts that otherwise would be hidden. ... Brentano and Husserl had emphasized the point of focus for phenomenology was not upon either the subject or the object, but upon this point of contact, that is, upon the inherently unified, inseparable relation of subject and object."4 If we now turn to Ezra Pound's famous definition of image formulated in the Poetry manifesto of 1913, we find a strikingly similar idea. An image, for Pound, is "that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time."5 Pound's instant and intellectual and emotional complex satisfy the phenomenological requirements for "subject"; for "object" we cite another statement Pound makes in this same manifesto. Imagism requires, he admonishes, "Direct treatment of the 'thing,' whether subjective or objective." By qualifying thing as subjective or objective, Pound escapes the dilemma of some of his less insightful followers who took these strictures to mean that the poet's duty was to reproduce the perceived thing (all non-self) by means of verbal photography. Because Pound—and Williams Carlos Williams—have become the guiding spirits of many American poets since the 1950s, and because what I shall have to say about two conspicuous ailments in contemporary poetry bears closely upon the subject/object problem, we should keep Pound's exact words in mind. We further recall that under Pound's influence Williams revolu­ tionized his poetic style between his first and second volumes of poetry {Poems, 1909; The Tempers, 1913). During the early twenties, when he was editing Contact, Williams also came to prefer the term "Objectivism" to "Imagism." Both terms may repel by their chilling, unpoetic ring, but what is worse, they appear to elevate object at the expense of subject. According to George Oppen, Williams meant by objectivism "not an objective viewpoint, but to objectify the poem, to make the poem an object."6 And Williams himself clarifies his position when he writes, "In my work it has always sufficed that the object of my attention be presented without further comment. This in general might be termed the objective method."7 The object of my attention. From a Cartesian point of view, this could be construed as an attempt to depict the object out there in a manner similar to Pound's direct treatment of the thing. Phenomenologically, my attention changes everything. It posits the poem as that "inherently unified, inseparable relation of subject and object" Sadler describes. Both the poetics and the poetry of Pound and Williams confirm that poetry is the phenomenological enterprise par excellence—as

14 Heidegger saw. Mis-reading their poetics leads to either obsession with the object (whether tangible or abstract) or, conversely by way of reaction, a fatal solipsism. The first weakens a good number of poems in the Imagist, Amygist, Objectivist, and Projectivist tradition, while solipsism destroys the more self-indulgent confessional and nihi­ listic/surrealistic poetries. Even a cursory survey of recent collections, anthologies, and little magazines will disclose how poets writing today falter to the extent that they approach the limits of one or the other of these poles. The best poetry always emerges from phenomenological mid-ground.8

II It seems our poetry is dominated by a majority Populist Party advocating mimetic delineation of the thing and a minority Anarchist Party exploring the chasms of mind. While the Populists greatly outnumber the Anarchists, the latter compensate by the stridency of their voices and the shock tactics they employ. Populist and Anarchist are, of course, empty journalistic shibboleths. It is better to think of them as captions delimiting two prominent kinds of poetry— respectively, the mimetic and the surrealistic. I use the term "surrealistic" rather than the less cumbrous "surreal" or "surrealist" in the context of American poetry because the latter evokes a specific continental aesthetics that thrived earlier this century and still exerts tremendous but diffused influence on artistic endeavors in many fields. American pragmatic custom has, not surprisingly, resisted direct assimilation of pure surrealism; its assimilation has had to proceed through congenial filters such as the metaphysical tradition Edward Taylor borrowed from Donne's school (and which resurfaces in the formalist poetry of the Fugitives) and less zany European imports like the concept of the absurd. The temperament of the American writer seems hospitable enough to the formulations of a Sartre or Camus but stubbornly suspicious of the Dionysian tactics of a Jarry or Tzara. By surrealistic, then, I mean a distinctly American mode grounded in defiance of convention and tradition but at the same time bound to them by self-imposed mediations. In poetry it manifests itself in Dr. Johnson's notion of heterogeneous ideas yoked by violence, or, simply, outrageous meta­ phors. At best, it rescues poetry from the banality to which our "plain" style is prone; at worst, it spawns what I shall call here the "bathetic" metaphor.

15 By mimetic I have in mind an imitative, descriptive poetry based upon a mistaken, distorted vulgarization of the more sophisticated theories of Pound and Williams—which we have already discussed. But at the heart of mimetic poetics lies an epiphanic impetus, that is, a desire to compel things to reveal themselves. (Husserl wanted, incidentally, to "set aside" all preconceptions, metaphysical assump­ tions, didacticisms, expositions, and even intellection itself in order to spare phenomena mentalist contamination of any kind. If this resembles Cartesian doubt, so much the better, for while we must recognize the futility of Descartes' venture, we sometimes forget that phenomenological bracketing can prove equally risky. If Levi-Strauss and Chomsky are right, we cannot avoid preconceptions; they are innate structural principles of the human mind. But we can, through scrupulous self-discipline, eliminate as much of the spurious as possi­ ble. To the extent that this is possible, phenomenological analysis may seem uncompromisingly descriptive. But its ultimate raison d'etre, as we saw, is the desire to retrieve phenomena via immediate, intimate, and exact vision.) Since literary metaphor may obstruct phenomeno­ logical revelation, authentic mimetic poetry always approaches verbal photography: it attempts to freeze the image in a frame of spacetime. Thus, orthodox imagism serves as mimetic poetry's severe and self- defeating model. At this point examples of these poetic modes should help clarify my thesis. I choose two recent and fairly familiar poems as representa­ tives of, respectively, surrealistic and mimetic poetry. What follows is the complete text of James Tate's "The President Slumming" (The Oblivion Ha-Ha, 1970):

In a weird, forlorn voice he cries: it is a mirage! Then tosses a wreath of scorpions to the children, mounts his white nag and creeps off into darkness, smoking an orange.

Now consider James Wright's "Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy's Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota" {The Branch Will Not Break, 1963):

Over my head, I see the bronze butterfly, Asleep on the black trunk, Blowing like a leaf in green shadow. Down the ravine behind the empty house, The cowbells follow one another

16 Into the distances of the afternoon. To my right, In a field of sunlight between two pines, The droppings of last year's horses Blaze up like golden stones. I lean back, as the evening darkens and comes on. A chicken hawk floats over, looking for home. I have wasted my life.

Wright's poem might have been acceptable as verbal photography had the poet not added that extraordinary last line. If we pretend, for a moment, "I have wasted my life" disappears, not even the two meek similes in lines three and ten can save this poem from banality. Like Williams' "The Red Wheelbarrow," its impact depends upon abstract proposition. It is altogether too clear that a vulgarized imagism pro­ mises more than it can possibly deliver in most cases. Given the startling discrepancy between theory and effect, one wonders how bald description could have been and still is so adamantly defended by a surprising number of American poets. J. Hillis Miller, in his Poets of Reality, tries to make a case for Williams' "Red Wheelbarrow" by means of what he calls the poet's "resignation." "Williams," he writes, "gives himself up in despair and established a self beyond personality, a self coextensive with the universe."9 Abandoned self can then go on to "make a word visible or a thing in itself." The reason so much depends upon a red wheelbarrow, Miller contends, is that

By concentrating on the individual in its uniqueness the poet may reach for the universal. The same forces stream through it as stream through all existence. ... The wheelbarrow, red and glazed with rainwater, occupying its small spot in time and space, contains everything. In the same way a single word may concentrate the poet and his world in a breath 10

But the point Miller misses here is that what saues "The Red Wheel­ barrow" is precisely the abstraction of "so much depends/upon." If we omit that line, or lines, the poem becomes little more than a depiction.11 There is also a strange contradiction in Miller's reading of Williams. At first, it seemed he might embrace a semi-phenomenological position; inasmuch as Williams "gives himself up," Miller can proclaim the poet's self "coextensive" with the universe, thereby demolishing the subject/object dichotomy. But a strictly literal phenomenology would not go over to aver the presence of this universe in a red wheelbarrow —or even a chicken hawk. Phenomenology would seek the wheel- barrowness alone. Anything further belongs to religion, as Coleridge

17 aptly noted in chapter ten of Biographia Literaria when he said, "The idea of the Supreme Being appeared to me to be as necessarily implied in all particular modes of being, as the idea of infinite space in all the geometrical figures by which space is limited." Perhaps the function of great poetry is religious after all. Heidegger maintains it re-attuned fallen man to Being. Material reality lacks the means by which it may transcend itself, but man in his Dasein (being- there), Heidegger feels, can make this leap—or perhaps we should say this leap has been made for man—through language. Mimetic poetry, in its training towards the eidetic, loses itself in materiality and becomes alien and inaccessible. The poet can never be anonymous; without his presence the poem does indeed become an object, in which case we may as well fondle a pebble as read a poem. If we as­ sume the poem cannot help being present, however well he covers his tracks, it is unlikely his presence manifests itself through his choice of metaphors. Yet metaphor is what Williams and Wright have excluded from their poems. The perfect imagist or mimetic poem, then, has no choice but to squeeze out what little etymological metaphor survives in the world it contains. Since all words were originally metaphors, this is always possible. It is deliberate impoverishment however. Mimetic theory cannot explain the success of either "The Red Wheelbarrow" or "Lying in a Hammock. . . ." Today mimetic poetry thrives in the aftermath of the imagist- objectivist project. No wonder we are inundated with endless descrip­ tions of meadows, fields, stretches of landscape, cloud formations, and the like. If the mimetic poet conceives of metaphor as ornament to be used sparingly, the surrealistic poet makes it the sine qua non of his art. Although Tate's "The President Slumming" contains one metaphor ("smoking an orange"), there are also those two halluci­ natory images ("wreath of scorpions"/"white nag") that verge on the metaphoric. Moreover, the locus of Tate's poem is a dream-like, Tanguyish mileu which can itself be considered metaphor. Wright's description of Pine Island, on the other hand, belongs entirely to the natural world. Not once do we question the authenticity of his setting. Tate's poetry occurs exclusively in Tate's mind. The preceding observations allow us to distinguish mimetic and surrealistic metaphor by the criterion of naturalness. If we say "my love is like a red red rose," we accept the association as a most natural one: young girls (and I presume this is what the poet had in mind) do resemble red red roses. But when Allen Tate in his "More Sonnets At Christmas" compares Christ's eyes with shuttlecocks, we move beyond the natural and towards the surreal. It can be argued, of course, that all metaphors were originally outrageous. The first man in history to compare a young girl and a rose must have been a

18 scandalous fellow indeed. But as conceits become incrusted with tradition, they lose their novelty, their violation of common sense diminishes, and they may even deteriorate into cliches. Donne avoid­ ed this trap by inventing metaphors so bizarre they could never be entirely sanctioned by an appeal to naturalness or common sense. Thus the lovers and compass points. When this happens, however, a secondary incrustation takes place. Donne's metaphors seem per­ fectly tame today because they have become familiar to generations of readers. Allen Tate's brash comparison has not yet had time to become familiar and, therefore, it still shocks. Secondary incrustation leads still further to a tertiary incrustation. If we maintain that the initial incrustation begets cliche and platitud­ inous comparisons and the secondary incrustation makes otherwise unnatural comparisons familiar, the tertiary encourages surrealistic or bathetic metaphor. It is a sign of language's exhaustion. In this decadent phase, anything can be compared with anything, because all entities have acquired equal status. We could speak here of a democratization of material phenomena. (I shall resist the temptation to associate this development with the rise of political and social democracy, but a good case can be made for this elsewhere.) One might also consider the degradation of language in a culture that has abandoned genuine communication for slogans, a process examined in detail by writers as diverse as Gabriel Marcel in Man Against Mass Society and Jacques Ellul in Propaganda. It seems the motivation for both our dallying with the metaphysical conceit and the fully exploded surreal tactics Breton accounts for and partially creates in his mani­ festoes is the desire not only to purify the dialect of the tribe but to protect it from its own suicidal tendencies. We might go further and think of the cliche as verbal stone and ponder the zeal of language to ossify itself. If this is the case, mimetic poetry wrings out the final vibrancy of a language well on its way to extinction, whereas surrealis­ tic poetry attempts to create a new language out of the untested possibilities of the old. In both cases we detect a sense of emergency— in the form of an authentic crisis in language and also the frenzy to expedite the emergency of hidden beauty and/or truth; and in both cases the dangers are patently clear. Mimetic poets, often strangely self-righteous, flirt with the trite and insipid. Surrealistic poets must guard against puerility, nonsense, and needless maiming of the intel­ lect. Other weaknesses could be enumerated, but these seem the most flagrant.

Ill Bathos can be defined as the anticlimax a work of literature suffers when it attempts but fails to reach what "Longinus" called the sublime.

19 Now it is by no means certain that contemporary surrealistic poets (James Tate, Michael Benedikt, Mark Strand, Kenneth Koch, Charles Simic, and Dennis Saleh, to name a few) create bathetic metaphors because they had so lofty an aim. In fact, the concept has been almost completely discredited today. When a Karl Shapiro can boast that the real poetry lies at the bottom of the garbage, we know the rules have changed. Consider, though, the following example from a poem in James Tate's new book, Viper Jazz (1976):

Trained slugs race across his jello in eight-cylinder sombreros.

What is the purpose of such a metaphor? What are its merits? If it no longer suffices to invoke the sublime, by what standards can we evaluate these lines? They remain anti-climatic—sublime or no sub­ lime. These are larger questions that must be considered elsewhere, but my point is this: the "trained slugs" business falls flat in a way that a good number of contemporary surrealistic metaphors fall flat. And, once and for all, such "slippages of the mind" prove metaphors cannot be constructed out of just anything that happens to be lying around.12 Bathetic metaphors are not ideas or images yoked by violence but by mistake. The current permissive climate, however, condones if not encourages such mistakes in the name of "creativity." I want to make it clear that I am not attacking James Tate as a poet. I believe Tate has written some of the finest poems of our time. Nevertheless, his errors instruct. Our problem now is to account for this contagion of bathos in recent poetry. Certainly ours is not the first period to experience it. They abound in the metaphysical poets of the seventeenth century as well as in the French Dada and Surreal eras. Here, for example, is a partial assembly of bathetic metaphors from one poem by Andre' Breton (as translated by David Antin):

My wife whose hair is a brush fire Whose thoughts are summer lightning Whose wrist is an hourglass Whose waist is the waist of an otter caught in the teeth of a tiger Whose mouth is a bright cockade with the fragrance of a star of the first magnitude Whose teeth leave prints like the tracks of white mice over snow Whose tongue is made out of amber and polished glass Whose tongue is a stabbed wafer The tongue of a doll with eyes that open and shut Whose tongue is incredible stone . . . .13

20 Breton's example is interesting because some of his comparisons work and some do not. The first two lines are, in fact, superb. But what about a line like "Whose waist is the waist of an otter caught in the teeth of a tiger" or "Whose tongue is made out of amber and polished glass"? The French surrealists were dedicated, as they claimed, to renovating the language; this does not mean, however, that anything goes. Language by its very nature both conserves and destroys, and it is because of this duplicity that language cannot tolerate the bathetic metaphor. In everyday usage, it may economize by encouraging platitudes and cliches but in poetry there must be sufficient blending of the old with the new. I have referred to a "contagion" of bathetic metaphors in recent American poetry. I have done so because, like any novelty, the bathetic metaphor is contagious. Its impact cannot be denied, and so it spreads from poet to poet. My use of disease imagery quite possibly gives the impression that I find surrealistic poetry wholly unattractive. Nothing could be more false. Surrealistic poetry may just be the healthiest poetry being written in America today. But its over-indulgence of bathos must cause some alarm. To illustrate what I mean I shall now present a "sampler" of bathetic metaphors, all of which have been gathered at random. I stress the fact that I am making no value judgments about the poets whose work I cite. I have elsewhere expressed my admiration for at least two of the poets included in my survey. Moreover, one can never totally escape the subjectivity of personal taste, and it is always possible that lines pulled out of context display nothing more than the limitations of the critic doing the pulling. With these provisos in mind, let us turn now to a few examples.

1. "I have a death rattle in my nose I have summer in my brain water I have dreams in my toes. . . ." (Kenneth Koch, "Alive for an Instant")

2. "I love you as a sheriff searches for a walnut That will solve a murder case unsolved for years. ..." (Kenneth Koch, "To You")

3. "the hairs are making conversation." (Charles Simic, "Sleep")

5. ". . . having felt wind/against my cheeks like the sonic boom of a moth gone by in darkness. . . ." (Albert Goldbarth, "On Sunday, the Beginning of the Week, I Make a Religion")

21 6. "Destined surgeons and physicists/are ambushed in the dark mouth/of a guitar." (Albert Goldbarth, "The Class of 65")

7. "Our hands are/an African plain/small beasts/run over." (Philip Dacey, "The Lover")

8. "Lilacs drifted into my nostrils/like small dirigibles." (Terry Stokes, "Mentioning James Dean")

9. "If a man denies his poems pleasure, his wit shall wear boots." (Mark Strand, "The New Poetry Handbook")

10. "A black ear crawls on the window." (David Shapiro, "New World of Will")

11. "I'm a flea with a thousand microphones/for eyes." (James Tate, "Sensitive Ears")

12. "I picture myself as a hummingbird/or as a nail robbing a grave." (James Tate, "Power of Youth")

13. "The hats are hungry." (Gregory Orr, "The Hats")

14. "Pinballs rattle like dislocated testicles . . (Terry Stokes, "Getting Lost on Friday")

15. "And flies and mosquitoes descend and resemble the overtones of clashing cymbals on an oscilloscope" (Michael Benedikt, "The Sky")

22 It is more difficult to demonstrate the dangers inherent in recent mimetic poetry because entire poems must be cited. But a few examples of short mimetic poems will suffice. I said previously that the particular weakness of this kind of poetry is its tendency towards descriptive flatness and that this tendency reveals itself predominantly in "Midwestern" poetry. As I did not indict surrealistic poetry, I have no itention of indicting Midwestern poetry. Richard Hugo, James Wright, and William Stafford are all Midwestern poets whose "local color" transcends its locale. We did see, however, that Wright's "Lying in a Hammock" approached flatness, only to be saved by a brilliant last line. I believe Wright deliberately underplayed his poem in order to heighten the effect of that line. But suppose he had ended the poem without it? Speculation aside, perhaps the best source book for mimetic catastrophes is the collection Heartland edited by Lucien Stryk. Here is a poem from this collection called "Wheat":

Musty with love, we are gathered up By the wind and the wheat we lie in. The sun drives the color of gold Into our silent, white bodies. Birds from ancient clouds Slip across my eyes; Miles and miles away, A tractor burrows up and down The summer. Closely, the Overland whistles Its way through the thick wheat, Flattens acres and acres of wheat With its passing. A shower of cinders Draws you to me once again.14

It is clearly the intention of the author of this poem to salvage the first thirteen lines with some Wright-like startler at the end. But "A shower of cinders/Draws you to me once again" does not do the job. The failure, cumulative in effect, does not repel; it merely bores us. Far worse is the poem "Two Beers in Argyle, Wisconsin," the structure of which resembles that of "Wheat." Here is the second poem:

Birds fly in the broken windows of the hotel in Argyle. Their wings are the cobwebs of abandoned lead mines.

23 Across the street at Skelly's the screen door bangs against the bricks and the card games last all day. Another beer truck comes to town, chased by a dog on three legs. Batman lies drunk in the weeds.15

The greatest misfortune of this poem is its juxtaposition of mimetic and surrealistic modes. "Batman lies drunk in the weeds" violates not only tone but consistency of genre. It makes a mockery of the preced­ ing lines which, in themselves, promised little more than a consistent blandness. It might be objected at this point that I have chosen bad poems for my examples. My defense would be that, aside from major exceptions, this is what most of the poetry in our little magazines sounds like. The flat mimetic poem is a model favored by most American poets now writing. And we need not limit ourselves to its rural forms. Consider, for instance, the poem "Alone" which was written by a California poet:

I go out on the porch and watch a firefly weave through the pines—lost Saint, stone lantern, looking for the way. The slow wheel in my chest turning. I sit at the card table, and trace your hair in the blue dust of my saucer. The rib of moon sails on. The sun drops into this valley. The leaves on the maple lift, and shiver in the morning— like the thin dresses in a closet you're opening somewhere.16

Like the two previous poems, "Alone" does not develop; it goes nowhere. We are left with nothing to remember. Nor does the author seem to have an identity. He like the author of "Wheat," has staked everything on the object he seeks to render. In "Wheat" that object was a scene and the mood it evoked; in "Alone" the emphasis is upon mood—but a mood described in such impersonal terms it hardly seems a mood at all. (Not surprisingly, the poet who wrote "Alone"

24 studied at the University of Iowa, thus becoming a Midwestern poet by adoption.) I want to present one more mimetic poem before concluding, one that reveals not the slightest tinge of Midwestern influence. Unfortu­ nately, because "Tentacles, Leaves" is a rather long poem, I can only excerpt two stanzas here. These stanzas, however, represent a blend of realistic narrative and confessional impulse that one sees too much of these days in contemporary women poets. The problem here is that mimetic reporting comes to take the place of the poem itself. We might call this form "low confessional." But I shall let the poem speak for itself:

he saw my picture in a magazine and told me he wanted to take me down the Mississippi hollering poems and blowing weed, he sounded crazy and i write that i'd never been beaten that i was a bitch too he sent me paint and lust for 19 days his aloneness how he wanted to fall into blue water he said my letters fell apart pressed to his skin in march my arms started melting. . . .17

The author of this poem also focuses upon an object, in this case, her personal response to the minutia of objective experience. We must not make the mistake of thinking such poems subjective; the "I" here does indeed confess something, but the poem objectifies the content of that confession.

25 IV I hope my examples have illustrated the point I tried to make earlier: the surrealistic poet, by refusing to check the extravagance of his imagination, sacrifices clarity and sincerity for the sake of subject (himself); the mimetic poet, by minimizing subject and ele­ vating external affairs above all else, sacrifices imagination for the sake of object. Poetry suffers as it approaches either pole and phenomeno­ logical balance disappears. The consequences are that surrealistic poetry tends to rely heavily on embarrassingly bathetic metaphors, while mimetic poetry seeks refuge in the safe but insipid realm of flat description. Because I have diagnosed what I consider a distressing situation in recent American poetry, I feel obligated to provide some prescrip­ tive advice as well. Unfortunately, I have none to offer. Perhaps "poetry factories," such as the various creative writing departments throughout the country, bear this responsibility. I fear, though, they only exacerbate the existing problem by encouraging conformity to accepted norms. On the other hand, they expose students to work they might otherwise overlook and supply necessary constructive criticism. Perhaps our discussion does reduce to the simple matter of good versus bad poetry after all, in which case, time alone will take care of things—as it usually does.

NOTES iErwin Schrodinger, Mind and Matter (Cambridge, England; 1958), pp. 42-43. 2Erich Neumann, The Child: Structure and Dynamics of Nascent Personality (New York, 1976), p. 11. 3Edward T. Hall, Beyond Culture (New York, 1977), p. 192. 4William Sadler, Existence and Love: A New Approach to Existential Phenomenolo­ gy (New York, 1969), p. 50. 5Cited in David Perkins' A History of Modern Poetry (Cambridge, Mass.; 1976), p. 333. 6Cited in Louis Simpson's Three on a Tower (New York, 1975), p. 288. 7Simpson, p. 282. 8Robert Pinsky's line of thought in The Situation of Poetry (Princeton, 1976) closely parallels some of the ideas I have developed in this paper. Pinsky's book is one of the best recent works on contemporary poetry. 9J. Hillis Miller, Poets of Reality (New York, 1969), p. 291. 10Miller, p. 311. nIn a recent issue of Concerning Poetry, Stanley Archer claims the word "glazed" is the crystallizing metaphor in Williams' poem. I disagree with Archer, but refer the reader to his note on the poem. See: Stanley Archer, "Glazed in Williams' 'The Red Wheelbarrow,'" Concerning Poetry (Fall, 1976), p. 27.

26 12I have borrowed this phrase from Keith Harrison (who used it in a letter sent me earlier this year). 13From Michael Benedikt's anthology, The Poetry of Surrealism (Boston, 1974), p. 133. 14From Lucien Stryk's anthology, Heartland: Poets of the Midwest (DeKalb, 1967), p. 35. i5Heartland, p. 62. 16David St. John, Hush (New York, 1976), p. 14. 17From Chester and Barba's anthology, Rising Tides (New York, 1973), p. 331.

Blood Relations

Bob Tisdale replies:

Wallace Stevens' definition of a poem as "a new relation" may serve to bring together several aspects of Mr. Gallo's essay: 1) the relation between publicly observable or plausible reality and the language of poetry, 2) how good poetry differs from flat prose or nonsense, and 3) how language is renewed by poetry. Before indulging in theory, however, let's examine the facts. Looking closely at Wright's "Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy's Farm ..." I find not bald description and meek similes but rather quite the sort of fusion of subject and object that Gallo imples is the essence of genuine poetry. The "bronze butterfly" (surely in part a metaphor and not merely unambiguous description of color), "asleep" and "blowing," has the vitality and particularity of a felt object, one in which the perceiver imagines sleep and passive motion. Cowbells, not cows, follow one another—a figure with the effect of metonymy unless one reads "follow" as a most passive action. "Into the distances of the afternoon" mixes space and time—a figure, like the previous one, which emphasizes the hearing rather than the hearer or the he(a)rd. Once again, an admirable fusion of subject and object. The "field of sunlight," hyperbolic if not downright metaphorical, sets the context for the transfiguration of "the droppings of last year's horses," related, of course to the metamorphosis which actually occurs in nature, rather than a willful imposition, although in this composed landscape Wright's perception has surprising force. In short, the poem to this point is richly figurative rather than univocally, prosaically descriptive. What of the poem's last line? That immediately confuses all that has been fused, and forces re-reading, consideration of a new set of relations. Is the poet complacent about his waste, or even somewhat proud? Or has he been driven by his musings on the vitality and beauty around him to consider his

27 own life useless, uncreative, and mean? The line surprises but at considerable expense. One might claim that it is too ambiguous, too unintegrated and out of context to do more than puzzle or distract. The poem is made and ques­ tioned by the line, and perhaps this is also what Wright intended. But no amount of discussion seems likely to delimit the appropriate range of the state­ ment's implication. We remain disturbed, garlanded with a wreath of thistles, if not scorpions. In any case, if Wright's poem is, as Gallo implies, simple and prosaic description redeemed from flatness by a meretricious last line, I'll eat that bronze butterfly. And what of Tate's surrealism? "The President Slumming" is surreal in the fashion of much satire but emphatically not in a class with Swift, Neruda, or Jacques Prevert. In fact, his sardonic humor's clarity subverts surprise and the discovery of new blood relations. We see exactly where Tate is coming from: his trite images fail to express more than his opinion. The President is reduced to a comic figure, a stereotype of mortal but gauche evil, something we scorn and fear but never need or want to understand. The only discovery in the poem derives from the word "forlorn," unless "smoking an orange" is either a misprint or an explicable and relevant but too private joke, needing, like a few passages in "The Waste Land," an explanatory note. The second example, from Tate's Viper Jazz, is in another category alto­ gether which I shall call "nonsense" rather than "surrealistic" poetry. It appears to intend a rape of language, an assault on the reader's understanding, rather than a gesture of loving intercourse. Perhaps the lines were hallucinatory images written under more powerful influences than fatigue and alcohol, but nonetheless their images remain willfully private, unrelated to common dreams and nightmares . . . "Invention Is Oblivion Ha Ha!": no discovery, no public discourse, no longer any intelligible relation of word to word, experience to experience. This is the snickering end of poetry, something far more serious than "bathetic surrealism," and if poets were legislators I'd fear for my life. "Poetry is a destructive force," as Stevens says, but Tate's self-indulgence is a destructive vacuum. In spite of my serious quarrel with Gallo's reading of Wright and Tate, I admire his mapping of contemporary poetry because it does schematize some of its major weaknesses—the failure to move beyond prosaic description or the determined march into cloud-cuckoo-land. I hope that he'll not mind my attempt to elaborate the map a bit, to make it more precise and inclusive. Gallo's remarks about confessional poetry provide a starting point. Confes­ sionals can be sung in many modes. The self can be described, as he says, like an object, or caught in metaphors which fuse subject and object (e.g., "the slow wheel in my chest/turning"). Or the poems can create an imagined scene with attendant emotions—yearning, grief, nostalgia ("like the thin dresses in a closet/you're opening, somewhere"). This last variety of confessional suggests the dramatic aspect of poetry in general and the many poems which are lyrical dramas entirely. For example, look at Michael Casey's brilliant use of G.I. slang in his poems about the Vietnamese war from Obsceniries (Yale Univ. Press, 1972). Casey's poems are mimetic in that they seem transcripts of the obscene speech which complements obscene behavior—and feeling. Of

28 course Casey's art consists in selecting, shaping, juxtaposing casual and slang remarks to reveal the feeling and explain, almost, the behavior. Each poem's complex rhetorical stance, involving syntax, diction, and rhythm, creates character and implies judgment. Each speaker's verbal posturing enacts a set of mind, a temper (or distemper) of spirit. This sort of poem is another sort of mimesis, much closer to Aristotle's models than the lyrics previously discussed. But all lyrics may be treated as little dramas, as the New Critics so clearly demonstrated, and Wright's poem is no exception, although figurative language more obviously carries the perceptual and emotional burden of the troubled (or satisfied?) mind cradled in William Duffy's hammock. Gallo's spectrum of poetic practice from mimetic to surrealistic expresses a continuum of relationship between word and thing as well as between thought (or perception) and thought. That is, in mimetic expression of a phenomenon one perception or thought about it follows another naturally, without strain, and remains within the public universe of discourse and the plausible range of associations. The successful poem is intelligible but still discovers or expresses a new relation. Surrealism, on the other end of the spectrum, expresses perceptions or thoughts in unfamiliar combinations of terms, putting together perceptions which for most people are not connected except in an alogical state like sleep or trance. Mark Strand offers better examples of surrealistic expression than Tate, I believe—"The Last Bus," or "The Dirty Hand," say, from Reasons for Movina, (Yale, 1969). In the latter poem the speaker's self-disgust leads to the injunc­ tion to cut off his hand. Eventually,

With time, with hope and its intricate workings another hand will come, pure, transparent as glass, and fasten itself to my arm. (p. 30)

An autonomous hand is no less "surreal" than trained slugs, but here, of course, meaning is wrought (and over-wrought) by context. Presumably in some context "eight-cylinder sombreros" would be meaningful. But when the poet fails to provide that context and it is not otherwise available to the reader, the result is nonsense. So I should like to amend Gallo's continuum thus: prose metaphor surrealism nonsense. Any or all of these might be redeemed into poetry by being set in a dramatic or rhetorical context that creates new relations and discovers meaning. This new continuum, though not complete by any means, may help us locate effective poetry where it belongs, within the ranges of intelligible but creative discourse, speech or writing which shows us the world (both inner and outer) anew by making new relations among terms and experiences. Ineffective poetry fails to refresh our vision or penetrate experience because either it discovers no new relations (and remains flat, undramatic discourse) or it implicitly denies the usefulness and pleasure of any intelligible relations (and remains non-sense).

29 To return finally from flights of theory, is it a wonder that poetry journals publish bald prose or arrant nonsense? Any editor knows from reading the work submitted that most writers recognize neither kissing nor blood rela­ tions: their poems are imitations, to be sure, but of poetry rather than of life.

Northfield

A Dungeon with the Door Open

Philip Martin says:

I'm grateful for Louis Gallo's essay. It points to symptoms which have worried me in recent poetry written in America, or written elsewhere (e.g. Australia) on American models. The one thing I find disappointing about it is the ending. As Mr Gallo admits, he has no prescriptive advice to offer. I see his problem, of course. I feel it myself as a poet, though I'm neither a 'mimetic' nor a 'surrealist'. Old ways of writing seem no longer allowed, either by the voices blaring at us from without or by those from within. 'You can't write like that any longer,' they say: 'make it new.' But how? We seem to be in a stretch of dead water: when will the new wind blow, and from which direction? If William Carlos Williams and James Wright have excluded metaphor from their poems it would be well to ask whether we have to do likewise. 'In poetry', Mr Gallo says, 'there must be a sufficient blending of the old with the new', and it may be at once necessary, possible and invigorating to dodge around the immediate past to the day before yesterday, or the day before that, and bring back things we can use in a new way. Metaphor (non-surrealistic) is one. We may of course need a great poet to show us how, but I don't see why we shouldn't have a bash while we're waiting: perhaps we live in a dungeon with the door open? But not only metaphor. Too often the modern poet, so pared and stripped- down, so sternly resolved not to indulge in any of the easy luxuries of the past, seems to me to be bent on an early death from anorexia nervosa. Or on the other hand, in trying to break out of this, it makes for that 'bathetic' surrealism in which 'anything can be compared with anything'. In both kinds of poetry I find, very often, a dubious rhythmic sense and an extremely simple syntax. This latter is considered a virtue, but is it? In prose, the imitators of Heming­ way have lost heart and fallen away for good reasons, but the poets seem to be going ahead on principles very like his. Hence we get whole poems made up of simple sentences (subject-verb-object, or the repetition of one syntactical formula to the point of tedium): little sense, here, of the complexity even of our bodies, which function in a much more complex way. And this syntactical monotony leads to a rhythmic monotony quite as deadening as anything the modern poet may be reacting against in the poetry of the past.

30 I don't want to take a hard line on this question, since much fine poetry has been written this century in open forms, but there's always the danger noted by Frost, of 'playing tennis without a net'. I want to put in a plea, knowing that I shall be howled down, for an intelligent return to metre. To break the pen­ tameter, that was the first heave': yes, but how about trying to reassemble it, As a result, Pope's pentameters are rhythmically different from Shakespeare's, Wordsworth's are different again, and no one is likely to mistake a line of Yeats for a line of Wallace Stevens. We've too readily given up on metre, it seems to me, and the result is that many modern poems aren't worth reading aloud. (Haven't I heard that this isn't every poet's desire? I have, but I still think the uo/ce remains the test for the vast bulk of poetry, ancient and modern.) The chief problem for the modern poet is to get authentic resonance into his poetry. By whatever means. I've suggested some. There are others, which I'll come to in a moment. But first: I agree with Mr Gallo about poems like Wright's 'Lying in a Hammock . . .': there just isn't enough imaginative life in the first twelve lines. And Wright's is not the only poem which leaves one's hunger for resonance unappeased. It may seem ungrateful to attack Robert Bly's poetry, since much of it has given me a lot of pleasure. But he has one four-line poem which calls for a word or two:

IN A TRAIN There has been a light snow. Dark car tracks move in out of the darkness. I stare at the train window marked with soft dust. I have awakened at Missoula, Montana, utterly happy.

Do we see those things? Yes, we do. Do we share in that utter happiness? No, we don't. Nothing in the first three lines leads us to expect the fourth. There's no reason, of course, why it should, but the fourth line itself is such a let-down: poetically empty. 'Utterly happy' could as easily have been 'utterly wretched'. Either way it would be mere assertion, utterly without resonance in itself and unable to borrow any from what came before. A line of Ralegh's flashes into mind: 'She is gone, she is lost, she is found, she is ever fair'. Simple in diction and syntax as it is, it conveys a powerful emotion. Ralegh doesn't tell us he's utterly happy or utterly wretched. In fact he seems to be both: the line is a strange mixture, mournful-exultant. Ah, but Bly isn't interested in mixed emotions. No, but he doesn't convey any emotion in his last line, he simply names it. He does much better when he writes in another early poem:

Now we sing, and do tiny dances on the kitchen floor. Our whole body is like a harbour at dawn. . . .

This is mimetic in the best sense and moves towards a surely acceptable use of metaphor which has nothing weary about it. John Ciardi once tossed off a definition of literature as 'the shaping of an experience in words which release the experience to a reader'. If the words

31 don't release the experience, then who cares what the poet says he does or feels? Much 'confessional' poetry is open to this charge, I think, and so are slabs of Lowell's Notebook. Try 'Mania, I', for instance, the one about Ann Adden in the dark house: a poem as embarrassing to read as an old love-letter forced on us by a stranger whose girl we never had the pleasure (it may be) of knowing. So where, apart from metre and syntax, is the modern poet going to get his resonance? We're mistrustful of the myth-poem, the poem on history, the poem on other works of art. And certainly, none of these can be treated as an easy solution. What about resonance from juxtaposition: the placing of disparate elements together so that they generate poetic electricity?

A gold-feathered bird Sings in the palm, without human meaning, Without human feeling, a foreign song. You know then that it is not the reason That makes us happy or unhappy. The bird sings. Its feathers shine. (Stevens: 'Of Mere Being')

And we shouldn't dismiss myth too easily, even if it has been used by rote in the past. Myth, symbol, the religious: as Jean Houston reminds us, '"Religio" means to bind. ... To bind back.... To bind back into the cosmos.' And when one is really living the myth or the symbol, one sees one's own life 'in terms of much larger historical and cosmic proportions. . . . One becomes resonant with a much larger symbolic and mythic process.'

Your average mimetic poet, as Mr Gallo suggests, is the sort of person who, when you ask for the bread of faithful speech, hands you a pebble. If he looked more closely he might see, and make you see, eternity in the thing. The surrealist poet may be closer to heaven, but if he's to take you there, as Mr Gallo has shown, very clearly in the case of Breton at least, he needs to ask himself, 'Is my next metaphor going to help them along the way?' The effect, however striking, must not remain merely on the page. One last point. Williams clearly has a host of followers. On Mr Gallo's account there don't seem to be many behind Wallace Stevens. Mark Strand, undoubtedly, is one. I'd have thought that Stevens, in a poem like 'The Course of a Particular', showed very well how to write barely, how to refuse empty metaphor, and how to confront the difficulty of talking about mere leaves in their otherness from the human. Yet the poem is unmistakeably personal. 'One can be as much ravished', he once said, 'by severity as by indulgence', and here as elsewhere he shows how ravishing severities may be achieved.

THE COURSE OF A PARTICULAR

Today the leaves cry, hanging on branches swept by wind, Yet the nothingness of winter becomes a little less. It is still full of icy shades and shapen snow.

32 The leaves cry . . . One holds off and merely hears the cry. It is a busy cry, concerning someone else. And though one says that one is part of everything,

There is a conflict, there is a resistance involved; And being part is an exertion that declines: One feels the life of that which gives life as it is.

The leaves cry. It is not a cry of divine attention, Nor the smoke-drift of puffed-out heroes, nor human cry. It is the cry of leaves that do not transcend themselves,

In the absence of fantasia, without meaning more Than they are in the final finding of the air, in the thing Itself, until, at last, the cry concerns no one at all.

Monash University Melbourne, Australia

Drawing a Bead on Louis Gallo from Minneapolis, Minnesota

Michael Dennis Browne writes:

I enjoyed the early pages of Louis Gallo's article, not least because of the happy discovery that I too am a phenomenologist. The names of the pro­ ponents of phenomenology are new to me, but Schrodinger's formulation makes a great deal of sense to me as a writer of poems. Gaston Bachelard, at the very beginning of his book The Psychoanalysis of Fire, says: "We have only to speak of an object to think that we are being objective. But, because we chose it in the first place, the object reveals more about us than we do about it." He moves on swiftly to an anti-phenomenological stance—"The axes of poetry and science are opposed to one another from the outset."—but his notion of the "impurity" of the initial source is true to my own experience of observing the world through my poems. And in this regard, one thing I miss in Mr. Gallo's article, particularly in his dicussion of poems by James Wright and William Carlos Williams, is any accounting of the selection of objects involved; it is not as if the wheelbarrow with its rain-glaze and chickens or the butterfly, pines, horse-droppings, etc., were the only objects available to the poets for description and evocation; and this contention, which I will come to

33 in more detail a little later, is at odds with Mr. Gallo's notion that such poems are examples of 'verbal photography,' with the poet as lensman only. After being cheered by the range and energy of the opening paragraphs, I was dismayed by the assertion that "even a cursory survey" of much recent work shows mostly mis-reading of the earlier imagistic formulations of Pound and Williams and that the great majority of our poets are either object- obsessed and inclined to the mimetic, or, in lesser numbers, solipsistically locked into their own minds at the expense of the objects 'out there.' And later, Mr. Gallo states that "aside from major exceptions," most of our poetry consists of those two kinds. My reply to this is—it is simply not so. While there are numerous examples to be seen of just these sorts of poetry, they can in no way be elevated into polarities, with some "major exceptions" between them; in fact, I would say that only a cursory survey of the scene could lead one to this conclusion, and that these two tendencies are only two among many in the very varied poetic practices of the day. There are so many exceptions to Mr. Gallo's polarities as to make us doubt their usefulness as such. Off the top ot my head I'll list a dozen or more poets who cannot be described as exponents of either tendency—Robert Bly, Wendell Berry, Muriel Rukeyser, Russell Edson, Katherine Fraser, Tom McGrath, Siv Cedering Fox, Tom O'Leary, Keith Gunderson, John Logan, Jon Anderson, James Moore, James Wright, Robert Francis, Margaret Atwood . . . where do I stop? Our poetry today is so eclectic that I am suspicious of attempts to pin it down in the way that Mr. Gallo does here. Unless one is a Nietschze or a Jung, categories can easily be evasions of the true complexity of a situation rather than illumina­ tions of it. As Rilke says in the first of his "Letters to a Young Poet:"—"Things are not all so comprehensible and expressible as one would mostly have us believe; most events are inexpressible, taking place in a realm where no word has ever entered, and more inexpressible than all else are works of art, mys­ terious existences, the life of which, while ours passes away, endures." And I consider my opinion on the matter to be, like the great Rilke's, in no way "anti- intellectual" but rather a recognition of the beautifully mysterious complexity of the arts in general. If I find Mr. Gallo's view of the poetry scene somewhat simplified, I find his view of one particular poem, James Wright's "Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy's Farm at Pine Island, Minnesota" almost malignant. I'll confess I'm bewildered that he considers the poem an example of "bald description," a poem of "banality" whose impact "depends upon abstract proposition" (the last line). He also says that the poem "might have been acceptable as verbal photography had the poet not added that extraordinary last line" but suggests that the poem, in all its "vulagarized imagism," is transformed by the presence of that line into a poem of quite a different kind—one which, like "Red Wheel­ barrow," puts all its weight on its "abstract proposition." I should admit at this point that I have loved this poem since I first read it, fifteen or more years ago, and anyone who attacks it has me to reckon with! I want to answer Mr. Gallo's view of his poem in two ways, and if I do so at relative length, it is because I think his remarks on the poem require it, and that they are mis­ guided because the enterprise of categorizing is itself mistaken—principally on account of its inclusive and prescriptive nature.

34 In the first place, the images of this poem seem to me to be far from 'verbal photography,' whatever that is. Out of all that was available for him to include in his poem, James Wright chose to notice objects which accumulate to a powerful subliminal effect by the pattern they create. The butterfly is bronze— not a normal attribute, I think. The trunk is black, the shadow green, the stones golden. In these colors alone there is an immense suggestiveness, and for me the colors reinforce my sense that the poet is reclining in, as it were, a natural temple, in which the usually "ordinary" objects have connotations of ancientness—the bronze of great doors, for example, the black of coal, the gold of altars or tribute. Also he hears the cowbells, and the fact that the cows are "follow(ing) one another" suggests another theme available by way of images, that of objects both ancient and functioning. Even the dried horse- droppings are (amazingly!) alchemized into precious properties. Now these are only components of pne possible reading of the poem, and Mr. Gallo is entitled to disagree with me or even find all this silly, but these are some of the feelings the poem arouses in me, in the face of which Mr. Gallo's dismissal of the poem seems to me arrogant. One can read too far into a poem of course, and I shall not go on to see Horus in the chicken-hawk or Jesus between the pines or stuff of that sort; but this is a poem of 'deceptive simplicity' and I think Mr. Gallo has scrambled over its soil, so to speak, unaware of its veins of gold and coal below. One other omission of Mr. Gallo's in his discussion/dismissal of the poem, an omission throughout his article, is any treatment of the sound of the words. And if I were to write my own attack on certain lacks in our poetry today, I should want to discuss the loss of music—authentic and colloquial, but music—which accounts, I think, for the flatness of so much that we read. Now James Wright began as a poet of a much more formal music than he now chooses to make, but he remains a poet of metrical beauty. Indeed, the most recent poem of his that I have read, With the Shell of a Hermit Crab (The New Yorker, August 22, 1977) is both rhymed, metrical and very beautiful. And there is a music underneath the poem I am now discussing which Mr. Gallo does not mention but which is one more energy in the poem to account for its extraordinary beauty. James Wright does not say—"I can see a bronze butter­ fly just above me; it's sleeping on the black trunk and it looks like a leaf which is blowing in a green shadow." That is the information of the first of the first three lines. The energy of the lines lies not only in the visual beauty and suggestiveness of the images but in the way the sounds are put together, that skillful mixing of regular and irregular stresses together with consonance, alliteration, etc., which marks the best of our free verse. I don't see how one can discuss this poem, or poetry, without paying attention to the sounds it is making. The first three lines are lines of metrical beauty and the sounds of the words themselves are frequently exquisite. This is not 'bald description' or any such things; in promoting his polarities, Mr. Gallo is sinning against the integrity of the poem's making. My last thought on the poem is this—if the surprising last line were absent, one would certainly have a different poem but one in which, according to my reading at least, the wastefulness of the poet's life would be implicit by the gentle stress placed on the creatures and objects doing what they are doing.

35 But even with that last line the images are in no way robbed of their power— indeed, they induce the last line—and I cannot see this as a poem whose "impact depends on abstract proposition." Being so fond of the Wright poem, I have spent perhaps too much time "defending" it. The Williams poem I have never been that thrilled about but enjoy for its "manifesto" quality, much like Pound's metro poem—the exhor­ tation to observe, to study—itself an antidote to the waffling and abstractness of several poetic tendencies of those poets' times. My thoughts on it lie some­ where between Mr. Gallo's and Mr. Miller's but, again, Mr. Gallo's dismissing of the importance of the objects seems wrong-headed to me. Whenever that poem comes to my head, or I summon it, I see the wheelbarrow (such a fine and ancient word!) and the rest and the 'abstract proposition' of the poem, on which, says Mr. Gallo, so much depends, is strictly of secondary interest to me. In my remaining remarks, I will just pick at a few more of Mr. Gallo's. I don't think that James Wright has "excluded" metaphors from his poems; rather, he has chosen the "symbolic image" as more suited, by and large, to his vision of things. The relative absence of metaphors from his work, or the work of the period of The Branch Will Not Break, does not make him, in any reductive sense, an "imagist" poet; I think of him as a poet who uses images in an expressionistic (rather than surrealistic) way, my sense of expressionism being a certain pressure upon naturalistic presences rather than their complete inversion or detonation. As for Mr. Gallo's view of certain midwestern poems, I can largely agree with his view of them. They are often indeed boring, with the absence of an intellectually or spiritually excited person in the poem, with the lack of a music which in James Wright is so strong, with the frequently mechanical or deriva­ tive in nature of their images. Not that I find these lacks exclusively in poets of the midwest of which I am now, by adoption, one! His discussion of bathetic metaphor has some truths in it too, though I love Jim Tate's surprising and inventive poems as well as Breton's staggering "Freedom of Love." Mr. Gallo's reaction to some of the lines of that poem, or his assertion that certain lines demonstrate that "anything goes," is one more sign, I think, that he is too dismissive a reader of modern poetry, and I should like to suggest that one day he get himself trapped in an elevator with all these poems he here dis­ parages and see if he would come out of the hours of that experience with a better understanding of those poems with which he would have had to keep such close company! Finally, it seems to me that since he is basically out of sympathy with certain kinds of writing, which I think he here misreads, I find myself wishing he had dealt with these 'mis-readings,' as he himself construes them, in a page or two, and then gone on to discuss those poets of the "phenomenological mid-ground" who bring him most delight. I should like to know his enthusiasms more fully, in some kind of balance with his dislikes. True, he has good things to say for some of Tate's work or surrealistic poetry in general, but I come away from his article frankly depressed by its negative cast and dismissive tone—"consistent blandness . . . platitudes . . . that one sees too much of these days in women poets . . . mimetic catastrophes . . . vacuity ... etc." (a random sampler!) That mixture of qualities whose absence

36 he castigates in the poets under discussion could well be more present in this particular piece of critical appraisal. The best criticism, like the best poetry, should have the capacity to inspire, no less. I have heard enough hellfire from pulpits; let criticism, like poetry, rouse us with visions of who we can be.

Minneapolis

Mendeleef, Grass Roots and the Wombat Mandala

Chris Wallace-Crabbe

It would be hard to disagree with Louis Gallo's description of the two most visible stylistic clusterings in American poetry of the 1970's, especially since these styles send troublesomely demanding little ripples through the coveys of young poets who gather elsewhere in the English-speaking world. It would be hard, too, not to agree with his strictures on what he calls the surrealistic manner and the mimetic. Both, as he presents them, are very restricted paths of poetry. Still it must be remembered that whoever sets out to describe the typical poetry of a particular decade finishes up describing something pretty limited. Let me put one particular card on the table before I go further. I was brought up by old-fashioned science teachers to believe in the Newtonian world, in what Mr. Gallo calls "classical" science; for me, until the age of sixteen, and even later, despite disturbing information about the behaviour of subatomic particles, Mendeleef's periodic classification of the elements was a solid, rich and luminous description of the component parts of absolute reality. Knowledge of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle — as of kindred developments — was, when it reached me, a drive back into confusion and disorder. Thus, on subjective grounds alone, while I responded to the optimism of Mr. Gallo's ambitious attempt to see a new integrative force in different branches of modern science, I cannot help wondering how far, and how soon, men will commonly feel that the new science offers them "a positive, even sublime image."

Whatever one would wish to cavil at, it is a pleasure to see a critic laying his ideological cards on the table like this, rather than keeping them on his

37 procedural lap. We can surely accept the programme by which phenomenol­ ogy is drawn upon in an attempt to bridge that ancient gully between subject and object, just as we can recognize the genuine complexity in Pound's definition of the image. The interesting question about this definition for me is why a modern poet finds especial value in the fact that something has been presented "in an instant of time". This suggests unstated presuppositions about poetry which could well be looked at.

Now we turn to the monstrous regiments of the Populists and the Anarchists, in Mr. Gallo's merry picture. I think, by the way, he is unsure at times here how harsh he wants to be with the poets under discussion; but who would object to so generous a fault? The phrase that has me bushed here is "an epiphanic impulse, that is, a desire to compel things to reveal themselves." I like the sound of it. It has a bold sweep and a general appeal. But its appeal is so general that I think we would find it applying to much bigger fry than the scurvy mimeticists. Such a desire would seem to me prominent in many good poets, though the notion of compulsion is tantalizingly obscure in its suggestions about method. How are we, or Rilke, or Wordsworth, going to make things reveal themselves? And shall we be as gods?

While I can see that James Wright's "Lying in a Hammock ..." looks like being a locus classicus for this discussion, it strikes me as a gross simplification to see the first twelve-thirteenths of the lyric as a kind of verbal photography. Granted, the staccato sentences would encourage us to read it like that, first up. But are the similes only meek? (And anyway, what are the criteria by which we decide, metaphor-good but simile-bad? It is a commonly assumed but seldom argued preference.) And I would find much more imaginative life in the oxymoron of "bronze butterfly . . . Blowing like a leaf". Again, I find something metaphorical in

The cowbells follow one another Into the distances of the afternoon.

Banal? No. Even the poor old cows have got left out. While what happens to the horses' droppings in the next couple of lines is far from banal or photographic. Still, it must be admitted that Wright has tried pretty hard to keep the surface of his poem flat, so that his last line can get at us better.

When we turn to the less skilful poets at the, end of the article, it does not take more than a moment to hear what is wrong with them: rhythmical ineptitude. I was surprised to see Mr. Gallo neglect rhythm entirely, for these, and many other recent poets suffer so badly from inert rhythms: rather like those very young poets who know that iambic metre, whatever that may be, is

38 naughty, and nothing else about metre at all. Incidentally, I believe that one of the main causes of this kind of spineless, verveless poetry is the habit of reading modern foreign poets in translation, without making any effort to follow the original fall of language. Poor translations — and how often are translations really good? — do a great deal to foster the belief that poetry is built of flat descriptions, surrealist kicks and lines ending with pronouns and prepositions.

I would take Mr. Gallo's argument one step further in another respect and say that what I keep missing in the poetry, or poetries, he talks about, is any sense of the social bonds, allegiances and styles of the poet. No, he implies this when he talks of solipsism, but I frequently wonder whether America is a country where visible social colouring is so much less expected in a writer than it is in other Western countries. Certainly Frost and Ransom had it. Jarrell and Lowell, too. But were these the well-rooted exceptions? And will the forthcoming recession drive poets closer to the social forces which they have been able to ignore (the Vietnam War excluded) so easily during the long, long Western boom?

The things I disapprove of in contemporary verse I have tried to sum up in the following lines, which could be entitled "Dear Sir," or "Wombat Mandala":

lam a young girl a hundred and seventy three years old, and I live in a glass green field. Nobody seems to want to love me although I am seven foot three and a half, warm and cuddley because I am covered all over with soft grey fur. When I grow up I want to be either a starfish or a vet. I don't go to the State School any longer but just clean chimneys at home. Also I have got all my second teeth, oh, and I forgot, I can swim butterfly in the pond.

39 Between Louis Gallo's recognizable poles, the other question that struck me was why Kenneth Koch, to my mind the best living comic poet, was lined up with the gentlemen of bathos. But then if someone were to ask me in the present climate how I know that Koch is a comic poet and other "surrealistics" are not, I could only answer that I feel it in my bones. In a climate where "anything can be compared with anything", we have no identifiable tones denoting responsibility, such as separated Carroll, Lear and (query) Clough from Tennyson and Arnold. The criteria by which I judge Koch to be an excellent writer of light verse rather than something more solemn and confused are personal ones indeed, but I have no doubt that I can demonstrate them in the poetry.

Florence

Louis Gallo Replies to the Replies

The general impression I get when reading my commentators is that I seemed to have said something I did not mean to say. I am thinking particularly of two items: first, my reduction of James Wright's "Hammock" to "verbal photography" and, second, my supposed dismissal of the poets I cite as inferior poets. Both of these notions are quite wrong and I would like to clarify. Let me begin with the second item. I took pains to provide examples of what I call "bathetic" lapses in some of the better surrealistic poets writing today. I deliberately avoided using examples of the very worst poetry I could find in little magazines and elsewhere. A number of my commentators seem to feel that because I quote isolated lines, I am condemning entire poems and poets. The truth of the matter is that I think poems can work despite an uncertain word here or an unfortunate line there. I do not hold with the formalist position that every period must be precisely situated. Further, most of the poets I cite have written poems that turn me green with envy. Secondly, on Wright: obviously, we can never reduce any verbal structure to "photography." The idea of "verbal photography" is itself a metaphor. (Heidegger shows us in example after example that every word has its etymological evolution and that if traced back far enough we can uncover spectacular and radiant moments when primitive, participatory consciousness managed to express itself.) When I say Wright's poem is "verbal photography," then, I mean something like this: with respect to the last line, which I insist perfects and completes

40 the poem, the "scene" described does indeed verge on the mimetic. Again, no word, no sentence, no poem can ever approach pure photography — simply because words themselves share conceptual as well as perceptual qualities. I believe if we read Wright's poem without "I have wasted my life" it would soon turn into a rather nice but unmemorable poem. "I have wasted my life" makes it, in my opinion, one of the best and most exciting contemporary poems. One more thing. The effect of the poem is cumulative; the proposition itself has no value without the verbal photograph preceding it. It almost seems that Wright, having beheld a wondrous painting, attempts to describe his reaction to it. Painting and emotional response together create the poem. I would like now to direct a few words to each of my commentators. I read with interest the notes by Mr. Tisdale and Mr. Martin. They were quite informative and I learned a few things. I feel particularly indebted to Mr. Tisdale for his elaborating upon my polarities, which, by the way, were meant as polarities and only polarities. My intention was to supply examples that illustrated abuse of the two modes of poetry I find most pervasive in America today. Mr. Martin's response was quite urbane and instructive. I too would like to see a return to more structured, metrical forms. The early Merwin, for example, seems a lot more substantial to me than the later Merwin. The same goes for Lowell (bless his soul). And I shall never tire of reading the poems of "old-fashioned" folks like Nemerov, Merrill, Hecht, and Hollander. I am also happy to find Mr. Wallace-Crabbe's opinion in general accord with mine. (And the parody is superb.) He is right that we should distinguish genuine surrealism from comic, absurdist poetry. Although we appear to disagree on Wright, I hope I have explained myself on that above. Unfortunately, Mr. Browne's acidic commentary only irritated me, which is what I suppose he set out to do. I am astonished at his bellicose tone. Browne certainly has a right to his own opinions, but why so pugnaciously, I wonder. Mr. Browne accuses me of mis-reading contemporary poetry, but I believe he has mis-read me. He missed the entire point of my argument and takes it as an attack on poets writing today. You can pick at a part without condemning the whole, just as you might detect a structural flaw in an otherwise sound building. To ignore the flaw is to invite disaster. As far as my "tastes" go, I also find much diversity in American poetry today — Ammons' Sphere, for example, is one of the most unique and magnificent works to appear recently; then there are the wonderful dramatic monologues of Richard Howard and Peter

41 Klappert. But is it necessary to state the obvious? What I tried to do in my article was point out two problems I and many of my colleagues have noticed in the poetry we find published in little magazines and anthologies — some of which later appear in individual collections. This is a legitimate enterprise and we should be able to discuss it congenially. I get the idea from Mr. Browne's response that he is one of those adamant fellows who regards poetry as sacred and inviolable. Some of my students feel that way about the Bible. Perhaps we should laugh about all of this a little more. After all, we are minority; not too many people read poetry in this country. Why slug it out? Mr. Browne, if I meet you in an elevator, I promise to take you over to the Sazerac Bar where they make the best Ramos Gin Fizzes in New Orleans.

P.S. Schrodinger was a physicist, the propounder of wave- mechanics. I find his vision "sublime" because in his unduly neglected little book, Mind and Matter, he states that "physical theory in its present state strongly suggests the indestructibility of Mind by Time."

University of New Orleans

Robert Willson

NIXON TO HALDEMAN: A FOUND POEM

(from a Sept. '73 tape) "Bring it out and fight it out and it'll be a bloody goddamned thing, rough as a cob. But we'll survive despite the polls and all the rest. There's still a hell. . . of people out there from what I've seen; there—you know—they, they want to believe. That's the point, isn't it?"

42 Michael Fanning

JIMMY CONNORS, OEDIPUS REX

Jimmy Connors, Tennis Star, and Oedipus, King of Thebes, are my heroes. Half of this admission means as little to most of my friends in the professor profession as the other half does to my weekend tennis buddies, and maybe it is exactly this criss-crossed lack of contact that urges me to explain. A new notion began in the fall of 1974. I had been teaching English long enough to know better than to listen to a student, but one day that fall I lapsed. Oedipus Rex time had come in World Literature 351, time to talk about that famous Greek, beloved of Aristotle and Freud, whose mental brilliance, you recall, prevented the sphinx from destroying Thebes but could not prevent himself from unwittingly killing his father and marrying his mother. Sophocles' play covers the apocalyptic day when—through confrontations with such people as his uncle Creon, the prophet Tieresias, and his wife/mother Jocasta— Oedipus finally reconstructs his past. As I perched before my sopho­ mores and juniors, standard Oedipus lecture flowing, I found myself watching Tilly (We'll call her that. Education major, black hair to the sixth vertebra, thick glasses, prominent gums, lively). Tilly was wob­ bling in her seat; eventually she stiffened her arm and didn't wait: 'But what was it . . . why do you think Oedipus was so dumb? I mean, really, he was dumb. Don't you think Oedipus was dumb?" My first reaction was huffy. Venerable Oedipus, apotheosis of the Greek intellect, was dumb? Why did she think such a thing? Because he took so long to figure out the truth, she said; because he hadn't questioned anyone about the missing king; because he had married an older woman. I had, of course, heard these objections before. I regaled Tilly with advice about not imposing probability on myths, about accepting the context of a play as given and conventional. This did not convince her, so I asked a question that must have occurred to me because in my back chambers I agreed with her. Plot reasons aside, in what scene did Oedipus behave dumb? After a few seconds of staring out the slit we call a window, Tilly said what I was afraid she would: "With Creon and that priest, that prophet, Ty . . .Ty . . . whatever his name was, when he was accusing them of trying to put him off the throne. That scene. Wasn't he just childish and obstinate and all in that scene?" What could I say? That was the one episode that had always pes­ tered me, peripherally, the fuzzy spot at the edge. I love Oedipus. The

43 adamantine dignity of his insistence on finding the truth has always started a chest-tightening in me that signals when my reading has tapped a secret sadness-hope. And when his demands mount to the final strength of sentencing himself and executing that sentence on himself, when those corneas split and the sockets gush and he stum­ bles into blackened exile, I hold nothing back: there is my man. So what am I to do with the Teiresias-Creon scene? Usually, I skip it. But this time I was brave. After class, I looked closely, and here is how the sequence goes: Because the prophet refuses to prophesy, Oedipus jumps, with no transitional thinking at all, to the conclusion that Teiresias himself took part in killing Laius. When this absurdity forces Teiresias to proclaim, "Thou art the murderer,"1 Oedipus jumps to a second conclusion as tenuously circumstantial and as much patent nonsense as the first: Creon and Teiresias are conspiring against the government. No evidence offered. In addition, Oedipus underscores his incautious illogic with what can only be called bad taste; he, for instance, jeers at Teiresias' blindness, and he slurs the priesthood, twitting Teiresias for failing to solve the sphinx's riddle, while he vaunts his own intellect: "I, the fool/Ignorant Oedipus—no birds to teach me—must come, and hit the truth, and stop the song". But even more disillusioning than the faulty thinking or the bad taste is the shrillness, the tantrum quality of his "unreasoned stub­ bornness". Everyone present recognizes that Jocasta is right when she labels the argument "a foolish strife of tongues." The tumbling iterative stichomythia sounds like a playground dispute over the swing-set. "You cheated!" "I did not!" "You did too!" And yet Oedipus, Ruler and Savior of Thebes, chases these peevish quibbles fervently, vehemently. "Rage," says Teiresias, and Oedipus takes him up on it, commencing at near-full volume, revving too quickly to full, then sus­ taining this piercing loudness far longer than could even be considered embarrassing, through and beyond Teiresias' accusations and Creon's detailed explanations and Jocasta's chiding and the Citizens' suppor­ tive remonstrances. Long after his hasty judgments have been effec­ tively demolished, Oedipus shouts them still. As much as I dislike saying so, that fall, there really did seem to be something undeniably small about all this. The graph of Oedipus' image dipped; a big man had shrunk. By May I had forgotten all about Oedipus. I was at a pregnancy celebration for the wife of the cello teacher. Our wives, inchingly liber­ ated, had decided husbands should crash female rituals, so there I was at a shower, eating strawberry ice-cream in somebody else's backyard, and watching a plump giggler strip the wrapping-paper from plastic bowls with suction-cups. No problem. But whenever anyone at all expressed a need—more plates, another folding chair—I leaped to

44 fetch. Motive? At that very hour Jimmy Connors and John Newcombe were playing their Challenge Match at Caesar's Palace in Las Vegas, and if I lingered over my errand, I had time to switch on my hosts' dining-room TV and catch a few rallies, maybe even the score. I was up and down and in and out all afternoon. It wasn't satisfying. (I suppose I should have scorned society and watched all of the match, but I hardly ever do such things.) Nonethe­ less, in spite of the spottiness of my TV coverage, I saw truth: I discovered that Jimmy Connors was thoroughly dumb. Connors had just missed a close shot down the line. In reaction, he executed a dramatic torso-twist, arms held crucifixion high; then he glided into a hoochy-coochy hip-quiver. In a sideline box, a middle- aged teased-blonde behind celebrity sun-glasses laughed. Connors cocked his head at her, psuedo-leered, and from the side of his mouth, a six-grader imitating mafiosi, he said, "We could really shake it together, Baby." Then I knew. That is dumb. Formless adolescent blather. And during other of my brief liaisons with the set, I caught him at the same level. At a rest period, for example, he leaned back on his stool to talk to his mother. The network commentator was speculating about what point of strategy they would discuss; whereupon, Jimmy was heard asking his mother for chewing-gum. With a whir of the hands, she rifled her purse and came up with some. And there was the time he contested a line call by scowling and stomping; then he withered the umpire with: "To tell you the truth, I could care less; y'know what I mean?" Now I was prepared to accept what sportswriters had said about Jimmy, that he was a "hellion," that he was "rebellious," "obscene," even that he was, as The New Yorker put it, "guilty of bad manners." All that is one thing. It lumps him with Thomas Paine and Rimbaud and Lenny Bruce. What I was not ready for was inanity. I guess Ihad never really listened to Jimmy. Maybe a few post-match interviews constructed of standard athletic cliches. But now, thanks to on-court microphones, the essential Connors was painfully audible. I was confused because this kid was, without a doubt, a genius. He had won Wimbledon and Forest Hills. But more than that, in my own incontrovertible innards I knew he was a genius. I had seen him pirouette his stork-peaked shoulders and leap into two-handed back­ hands with such daring and abandon that (hackers with aspirations will understand this) something like surprised tears had actually welled up, not in my eyes precisely, but somewhere, and my lower belly had tingled and released, not sexually but like it. It's true. Some of his shots are painfully beautiful. These strokes cannot be one millimeter off, cannot involve less than total energy, and cannot be planned. And

45 to perform them repeatedly, as Connors does, you must be playing "out of your head," as the pros say. His reflexes are not quick, they are prescient. In a sense, they are not even natural. But what impresses me even more than the esthetics and the spontaneity of Connors' play is its control. I would even call it moral control. But let me tell you what real tennis men call it. It has two forms. The first I have heard Pancho Gonzales describe as turning a defensive position into an offensive one. Pete Axthelm says Connors is "a highly creative player who can alter a dangerous situation with a sudden dramatic move." For instance, Connors is running to his left when his opponent volleys very strongly to the right. For a player in this predicament, it is a feat just to twist himself in time to get a racket on the ball. I couldn't do it. Many fleet young pros can, of course, but usually all they manage is a desperate slap, hoping for a lob that will earn a few seconds of breathing room. Defensive all the way. But frequently Connors refuses to accept that defensive option that most players see as mandatory; in the same situation, he aims for a winner. Stretched, awkward and off-balance, he calculatedly top-spins just over the opponent's head to a down-the-line corner, a difficult shot for a player in a good position, out of the question for one in Connors'. Or he hits back cross-court through the inch between the net-hovering attacker and the sideline, not just placing the ball but bludgeoning it, as if he were in a slow base-line rally with plenty of time to line up his stroke. At these moments Connors' control is extraordinary, then, be­ cause it is unreasonable; he is wholeheartedly refusing to acknowledge that a losing situation is losing, or even that it is threatening; he plays the shot as if circumstances had been favorable all along. The physics of that instant's fate he rejects, and he is thus relaxed enough to experiment and create a new response. He calls up another form of control when his concentration has slipped, as it did several times in the Newcombe match. In one game he attempted to slice a couple of forehands, and missed them both. Then he double-faulted, and he had lost his service. Connors stood a few seconds, staring showily, before he stalked back to the love- corner to recive another series of Newcombe's crush-velocity serves. Connors was indeed showing off, but there was a difference; it seemed this time that his affectation was serious. As he wheeled to face New­ combe, Peck's Bad Boy shivered slightly, and his pendulum bangs jerked. His jaws were chewing gum, his brows were squeezed, and his Porky-Pig eyes still stared forward at distance, at nothing. He pinged his head twice with the strings of his Wilson 2000, and he followed that by lowering his right palm and slapping his thigh very hard, a liquid pop, before he crouched to return serve.

46 Newcombe burned it, in the corner, but instead of tilting back for a reflex chip or block, Connors leaped forward and swung with a grunt, caught the ball almost before it bounced. Newcombe lunged a little as the ball passed him. Connors slapped his thigh again, this time in victory. No smile, more like a frown, but a frown seething with lepre­ chaun pride. Connors had asserted himself. The rest of the match he made few mistakes; he was aggressive and inventive. Whence cometh the power to take oneself in two, to consciously eliminate inability, to beat one's head at a moment of potential panic and actually have that head respond? For myself, king of the local chokers, I crave an answer. When Connors conducts his turn-the- game-around ritual, and it works, I want to fall down and froth at the mouth. I am hardly ever captain of my fate, especially on a tennis court where any downward trend rules me. Once it is set in motion, the most I can hope for is to slow its progress, never ever to halt or reverse it. And most people that I know (this brings me no comfort) suffer a similar helplessness. Momentum is all. I am sure, for that matter, that occasionally Connors too succumbs, for Fate has always been mighty, but often, often, he checks necessity, and amidst strong attack, under red pressure, for suffocating stakes, he pauses and determines, decides and acts, shapes—for that moment at least—his own destiny. Hooray for him. But the harmony? Were we doomed, as a sportswriter said, to keep "alternating between disgust at his behavior and admiration for his play"? Could any insight check the indecision? I began to scan the TV Guide for Connors matches, and having found one I watched, ignoring the pleas of my lonely children. I began, Lord help me, to do research {Reader's Guide, notecards, Sports Illustrated), hungering for some clue to a hidden Connors of depth and intelligence. I saw nothing new on the tube. And the only person who proclaimed his intelligence was Chrissie Evert, whom I discounted. Reported incidents confirmed that off the court he was never original, just empty-headed. "'You seemed a little uncomfortable at the beginning there today," another reporter said. 'Yeah,' Connors said. 'I had the farts.'" Or, "The 1974 Wimbledon and Forest Hills champion missed a shot during practice and unabashedly yanked down the seat of his pants before half a dozen wide-eyed watchers." Nothing any red-blooded red­ necked pre-adolescent couldn't negotiate. The list is long. All right. So nothing contradicted the impression I had formed at the baby-shower: Connors' smart was indeed hovering around zero. Still, that conclusion felt somehow at odds with the facts; I thumbed through the notecards three or four times before I realized what was wrong: the list was too long. There were too many incidents, and at the same time they seemed too deliberate. All the teenagers I

47 know are inadvertent about their stupidity; their awkwardness is natural. And what is more, occasionally they slip up and make sense. Connors, on the other hand, was monolithically silly; he never wavered, and in each episode he seemed to be expending too much effort. As Curry Kirkpatrick said, his "cutie pie" attempts "sometimes appear contrived." Then I was reading Playboy. In a barber-shop, of course. There wasn't anything else to do. And sandwiched in was an article on Connors, and the article contained a Connors quote:

Everybody is gonna be like they are. Everybody complains now about the way I act. . . . Just don't make all them out to be the good guys. Gonzales doesn't try to appear the good guy. He'll admit what he does on the court. So does Nastase. I'll stand up for what I do. I believe if you're going to be a schmuck, be a schmuck.

Light. Connors knows! He perceives clearly that he's a schmuck. And he chooses to act like a schmuck anyway. I began to recall facts about Connors' rearing. He was the "mop- haired immature creation of a stage mother." Belleville, Illinois. Mother Gloria, tennis pro herself, put a racket in his hands at three. "I did nothing for seventeen years but teach tennis to Jimbo." Her other son she ignored because he "just didn't have the guts for competitive tennis. When Jimmy was 16, . . . Gloria left husband James Connors and son Johnny at home and moved Jimmy to Los Angeles to further his career." Little education, enough high-school to pass, one semester at UCLA simply to win the NCAA Singles Championship. His life was sheltered if any life ever was, his sole horizons the boxed white lines of a tennis court. Result? Arrested development, "man-child"; at twenty- two, "the ultimate spoiled American teenager." And that child's men­ tality must meet an almost daily amphitheater of faces that examine him and expect significance, eyes that fix him, sprawling on a pin. What do you do if you are Jimmy Connors? You are center-stage and alone, in short pants. You do not understand the rows of people above you, you do not understand yourself. Like any other child, you want love and admiration. Self-consciousness heats you until your calves vibrate and your chest balloons, until throat and temples threaten to snap. You know you must do or say something that will show everybody how well you handle yourself, but what do you say? what do you do? Your behavioral vocabulary is as minute as your verbal. Your range of information is limited to newspaper headlines and hours and hours of Match Game, Hollywood Squares, andSatur-

48 day-morning cartoons. Normally you eat hamburgers and tell dirty jokes and mumble over the telephone to your girl-friend and some­ times play whistling games with locker-room cronies, and none of this—you are incontestably certain, you see it vividly—none of this provides the wherewithal to impress those crowds, those peering tiers of sophisticated grown-ups who know what grown-ups know. What are your alternatives? Behaving intelligently is out. You don't know how. So you are left with three: 1) clam up, 2) speak softly, 3) speak loudly. If you clam up, you avoid embarrassment; they may even consider you intense. If, on the other hand, you speak softly, you indeed have your say, but you are doing so meekly, apologizing by your manner and announcing that you are ashamed. But that third alternative. What possibilities! Here you can genuinely over­ come. You speak your stupidity loudly, as if no tongue were ever wittier. You talk badly baldly, perceiving your inanity but asserting and, in a real sense, your cleverness. "'He thinks he's Bob Hope,' says Australian Phil Dent, 'but he's about as funny as bloody Marcus Welby or somebody.'" You know, you thoroughly know, that "We could really shake it together, Baby" is an absurdly "or somebody" remark, and yet when you enunciate it clearly, your will and your act declare otherwise. By acting a contradiction, by consciously being a schmuck, you lift yourself above the situation, above the stadium; you have cut yourself loose from dependence; you are not ashamed. Newcombe says that when he won both Wimbledon and Forest Hills at 23, if he had acted like Connors he would still be ashamed. Jimmy's own unabashed pride in his similar feats glistens from the gold word 'Super' that hangs on a chain around his neck. You have shown all those units of potential rejection that you don't care what people think. Listen to Jimmy:

/ like my image. It's me. I like to have fans against me. I want to do everything I can to get them against me more. When they're yelling at me, I really get into the match. Everybody is gonna be like they are. . . . I'll stand up for what I do. Afterward I have to laugh at myself.

Jimmy plays his role to the hilt. He has chosen to be what he already is, not just accepted but chosen, and the more he bounces his image off the disapproval of people whose approval he craves, then the more he knows that the choice is his alone, and the greater grows his pride in his own strength. By liking himself when he is unlikable, he casts off iron necessity. I believe that Connors wills both the Jimmy who shoots a finger at Totie Fields and the Jimmy who wins Wimbledon, and that the one leads to the other.

49 Against everybody—even the most awesome smashers—he always takes service balls on the rise while standing inside the base line. It is brash, gutsy stuff when the Kid is in there blocking back the artillery; Connors gets away with it on remarkable timing and sometimes, it seems, sheer hubris. Hubris is flying in the face of facts; it is taking so much pride in yourself that you ignore the odds. For a self-conscious teenager, being laughed at, not with, is a fate worse than death. Jimmy fears those derisive chortles, and hips the hoochy-coochy anyway. His stubborn­ ness is serene because he knows he can do what his common sense tells him he should not. Certain of this, he is also certain that he can invest total effort in any act at all, more specifically in any tennis shot, no matter how impossible it may seem to the gallery, or even to his own better judgment. He can slam a return that logic says should be chipped; off-balance, he can top-spin a lob that logic says should never be attempted. The knowledge that he can go ahead and be juvenile, I contend, is what frees Connors to react creatively on the court, and to turn his game around by simply tapping his head with the sweet-spot. The man who is not afraid of being wrong is capable of being right. He lives loose; he can start himself any direction, stop at any point, without having to consider correctness, for willed wrongness is right; shouted stupidity ceases to be stupid. Nor has he any need to wait for a propitious occasion; any moment, even ostensibly the worst, will serve. He rejects received definitions and writes his own. "Connors thrives on adversity," says Time magazine. And even if the shot misses, the witticism flops, the crowds boo and snigger, his act of will remains; he has not been intimidated by his opponent or by Them. As far as he is concerned, all is right with the world. Then there is Oedipus. Dumb? Great because he was dumb? I read Sophocles again. In his first speeches, Oedipus is already in character, intoning first- person singulars until no doubt remains as to how highly he esteems himself: "Look! I am here, I, who am called 'the All-Famous Oedipus'!", and soon he is making commitments that are so voluminous they disdain qualification. "I will do all," he tells the Theban citizens. "All" is a big word. How does he know he is capable of that much? Campaign rhetoric? Think of the self-confidence it must take to assert such a pledge seriously and to follow through. By the end of the play, of course, we know that he did mean it, and that he had what it took to follow farther through than most of us would think possible. But how do these heroically made and kept promises harmonize with the petti­ ness of Oedipus' argument with Teiresias and Creon? How could such a nonsensical man ever have solved a god's riddle, led a nation,

50 unraveled his own complicated destiny, and sentenced himself, with high private and public justice, to mutilation and exile? I now believe that all the time he was berating Teiresias and Creon, Oedipus knew how wrong he was, and chose to continue. Beginning at line 583, Creon, as if he is in an Athenian law-court, enters into an extended argument from probability to prove the falsity of the con­ spiracy charge. ("Reason with thine own heart as I with mine.") The pace slows. Temporary abrogation of repartee. For over thirty lines all we hear is four-square logic that terminates in a round of applause from all the listeners but one. "Good words," say the Chrous (p. 72, 1. 616). Spectators on both sides of the orchestra are convinced; it is plain to all of us that Oedipus is the only one aligned against reason. In view of this consensus, and after such a lengthy calming monologue, the reader expects Oedipus perhaps not to have changed his mind, but at least to have reduced the decibels, to have softened his tone if not his premise. However, the Chorus have barely finished against hasty decisions when Oedipus hisses, "My will be death!" The Thebans cannot believe their ears, and neither can we. Against all common sense, Oedipus has actually hardened; he is more fanatic than ever. Must we conclude that the man is utterly oblivious to the absurdity of his position? I do not think so. Here is J.T. Sheppard's version of the next lines: Creon: Have you such wisdom? Oedipus: I can play my hand. Creon: But should play fair with me! . . . Oedipus: — who are so false! Creon: If you are blinded. Oedipus: Still I must be King! A contradiction. Up to this point Oedipus has prided himself on his sphinx-baffling wisdom, on being right. And yet, now, when Creon questions his sagacity, he does not fling back the all-inclusive retort we are accustomed to hearing: he does not reaffirm, "Yes I am right"; he says, rather, "I can play my hand"—an entirely different matter. More literally translated, Oedipus' response reads: [I am wise], at least, as far as / am concerned." The first-person pronoun, as always with Oedipus, finds the emphatic position, but uncharacteristically, it is accompanied by a strongly restrictive particle, an "at least" limiter that Oedipus, not one to limit himself, normally shuns. Here, however, he uses it, and the entire statement, as a result, sounds to me like a quiet admission that reverberates. He says in essence that he knows he is wrong, he knows that from an objective point of view he is behaving as unreasonably as he possibly can, yet—and here is the

51 important step—he is also saying that whether he is "right" or not does not matter as long as he is able to act in a way that he himself has chosen. In such a case, if the action is ridiculous, the self that acts is satisfied. J.T. Sheppard's translation is free but perceptive: "I can play my hand," the hand / have chosen, even if it is the wrong hand. But why? Why play a wrong hand? Because, says Oedipus, "Still I must be King!" First-person again. Before everything else, I must fulfill my role. Creon asks, "If you are blinded?" (literally: "If you understand nothing?") Then too. In spite of logic, beyond reasonableness, I must be who I have chosen to be. All other values recede, even public dignity, even truth and justice. Yes, Jimmy. "If you're going to be a schmuck, be a schmuck." It is clear, then, that Oedipus' fundamental self-respect depends almost solely on his conviction that no set of circumstances—even having one's constituency cluck their tongues at the King of Logic caught in disastrous illogic—can separate him from decision. He can always be King, even if he himself is the only man in the world who agrees with his definition of kingly action. Awareness is the center. Consciously he adopts and re-adopts a silly position, and if a man who prides himself on wisdom can consciously embrace folly, he can do anything. Such a man has cut himself loose from the ordinariness of common sense, and in this freedom, he possesses the instrument of genius; there exists in him now a potency that may at any moment billow more toweringly than would ever even occur to a reasonable man. Yes, Oedipus is dumb, but he is also a giant because he is not afraid. Which is about as dumb as you can get. And dumbness wins. Circumstance may crush him, but Oedipus is egotistical enough to know that it cannot touch the one thing that matters: Fate can never prevent a man from acting when he wants to act. When he refuses to believe Teiresias' predictions, Oedipus is in fact denying a future imposed from outside, and repetitions of that quixotic denial, in one form or another, constitute the entire play. At the end, when the mass of dark data threatens to topple and bury him, when he sees that his very search for the murderer is itself the lever of his undoing, his total intelligence cries out with Jocasta, "No! By the gods, no; leave it, if you care/ For your own life". Yet he continues the search, he imposes his own future. "Alas! So it has come, the thing I dread to tell," says the herdsman. "The thing I dread to hear. Yet I must hear it," says Oedipus the King who always keeps his promises, always, whether they lead to triviality or to judgment. A man freed from fear of consequences can go all the way, and in the final scene when Oedipus rushes on with eyesockets bleeding, no

52 man can grow larger, because he has gone all the way, his way. In his blindness he, like Cain, will live branded; unlike Cain, however, Oedipus has branded himself. Silly gesture? Could be. But Oedipus, if you recall, has never been deterred by silliness. During the Creon farce, Jocasta had asked Oedipus, "Are ye not ashamed?". No, he was not ashamed then, and he is not ashamed now. He is picking his own way through the debris; after Fate has done its worst, Oedipus comes on stage still giving orders. Albert Camus understood Oedipus. In The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus describes "the absurd hero" as one who finds himself in a situation where "the whole being is exerted toward accomplishing nothing. . . . The lucidity that was to constitute his torture at the same time crowns his victory. There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn." As an example of such a hero, Camus presents Oedipus, and quotes the blind king's words in Oedipus at Colonnus: "'Despite so many ordeals, my advanced age and the nobility of my soul make me conclude that all is well.' Sophocles' Oedipus . . . thus gives the recipe for the absurd victory.... The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart."3 Jimmy Connors is of course not Oedipus: the magnitude is not there. But both of them do own that will to be a schmuck that makes heroic acts possible. Connors will probably invest his money and think twice and behave himself and lose his absurd brilliance, but whatever he becomes, the fact remains that he has shared brotherhood with Oedipus Rex. They both talk vapid, and they've got the most beautiful moves I've ever seen. Greatness is one, at Caesar's Palace in Las Vegas or at the Royal Palace in Thebes.

NOTES

Quotations from Oedipus the King are taken from the translations of J.T. Sheppard (in Eight Great Tragedies, eds. Barnet et al [N.Y: New Amer. Lib., I960]) and R. C. Jebb (in The Complete Greek Drama, eds. Oates & O'Neill [N.Y: Random House, 1938]). Quotations about Jimmy Connors are taken from the following articles: Pete Axthelm, "Bad Boy of Tennis," Neiusiuee/c, Apr. 28, 75; Roger Kahn, "Render Unto Caesars: The Connors-Newcombe Match," Esquire, Aug. 75; Curry Kirkpatrick, "Jim- bo Comes On Strong," Sporrs Illustrated, Mar. 4, 75; Peter Ross Range, "Jimmy Connors Against the World," Playboy, Feb. 75; Philip Taubman and Jay Rosenstein, "Jimmy Connors: The Hellion of Tennis," Time, Apr. 28, 75; Herbert Warren Wind, "The Sporting Scene: from Wimbledon to Forest Hills—a Summer to Remember," The New Yorker, Oct. 18, 75. 3Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays, tr. Justin O'Brien (N.Y: Alfred A. Knopf, 1958), pp. 120-123.

53 James Ross

CLEAN

He would be pulled from sleep by their voices. "I'd rather not know," she would say. He could never make out his father's words, just the low rumble of his voice. "No, it's a filthy business." Sometimes a pleading tone. "But why do his dirty work for him?" Other times, anger. It dug through his door, his pillow, his sleepiness. "I wouldn't. Wouldn't sully my hands with that. Please, I'd rather not know." Often, quick, heavy steps down the hall, the door slamming. Sometimes she cried loud enough for him to hear.

He could learn nothing: His father slept in the back room during the day. The blind was always down, the heavy curtains tightly drawn. He sometimes muttered or snored. There was always a sour smell in that room. At supper time, his father would emerge in a worn, faded bathrobe worn over wrinkled pyjamas. Thousands of tiny hairs dotted his cheeks, chin, neck. The stubble blackened his face.

Consider his dismay: Then there was the night when the voices shouted. Before he was awake enough to understand the words, he heard the steps, the slamming door, his mother crying. The next day the cold winter air was rushing into his father's room, blowing the open curtains, making the blind flap against the window frame. The room stayed empty. His mother opened the window every day. "There's no need for you to know," she said. "But it was a filthy business he got involved in, I can tell you that much. If I'd known it before I married him. Well. Good riddance to bad rubbish, I say."

54 His confusion grew: "A shame, a dirty shame," the neighbours muttered, whispered, crooned. They glanced at him when he passed on his way to school, patted him on the head. Behind raised hands they leaned together, whispered. "Filthy gossip," his mother said. Dirty secrets. He investigated: Near the railway there was engine exhaust. Dust from the cinders on the track bed. Tar. Creosote. Rust. In the north end, steel mills, smoke. Furnace ashes. Metal particles. Acid spills At his cousin's farm there was dust. Mud. Oil. Grease. Chicken, cow, horse manure. And the city itself. Clogged pores. Blackheads. Every evening, a line of grey on his collars and cuffs.

Yet, Cleanliness is next to Godliness: His mother said that. Always. She drummed it, beat it, pounded it into him. He received severe punishment for grass stains on his knees, mud brought into her kitchen, spills, contact with dirty objects like parked cars. She nagged at him to scrub his face, wash behind his ears, scour his underarms, cleanse between his toes. Even to draw back his fore­ skin and purge it of all impurities. She provided a good example. She swept, vacuumed, polished, dusted, washed, bleached, ironed, folded. "Jesus o sweet jesus, how things glow and shine," she said.

As he matured, he sought relief: "Mother, this is Angie." Angie smiled. "Abbreviations are slovenly, son. She is unkempt." And later, he said "We're going to be married." She wept. "My son, my son. It will never work. She is slovenly; it will never work."

His wedding was not a proper one: It was in the registry office. They stood on a grimy floor between dull green, dirty green, smoke-stained walls. The Bible was worn; it felt greasy. The clerk's hands were inkstained; they smudged the marriage license.

55 Rejoice in his freedom: He let his clothes fall on the floor. He enjoyed allowing ashtrays to overflow, watching dust balls chase each other around under the furniture. Think of him finding jam on his coat sleeve as he was about to leave for work. Of adjusting to the odour of stale grease encrusted on the frying pan. Of writing ideograms in the bathtub ring. Think of the bitter quarrels: "We must achieve a balance, Angie," he pleaded. She smiled and ignored him. "You haven't done laundry for weeks. The sheets are smelly. I haven't got a single shirt without a spot or a stain or ring around the collar." "You sound like a commercial," she said. "You bore me." Consider his self-righteous indignation: In desperation he hurled the dirty clothes into the back seat of their small foreign car and left to seek out a laundromat. And his sense of relief: When he found one lit with fluorescent tubes which gave off a brilliant, hard-edged, white-blue glow, he was ecstatic. Inside it was even better—warm and slightly humid—with the comforting hum and slosh of the machines and the swish of the clothes lazily tumbling in the dryers. He separated the clothes into piles, tossed them into the machines, deposited the necessary quarters. Tried to sit nonchalantly and read, but found that he was drawn to the machines by a barely controllable sense of excitement. He opened one and peered inside. The water drained, carrying murky grey dirt with it. Fresh clean water rushed in. Later, it too flushed away. After a few minutes of rapid revolution the tub stopped; he lifted the clean clothes out and deposited them in the dryers. When the proper time came, he lifted out the warm, dry clothes, folded them carefully, pressed individual garments against his face and revelled in their freshness. This done, he packed it carefully into the basket (how light it was when he lifted it), and went reluctantly home.

Imagine his disappointment: He tried to tell Angela about this wonderful thing he had made happen, but she was asleep and merely grunted and rolled over. He went to the kitchen, made a cup of instant coffee (first washing a cup and spoon), then to the living room (where it was necessary to clear sitting space on the couch). The mess appalled him.

56 But he did not brood: Instead he closed his eyes and luxuriated in the memory of the bright fluorescent glow, the warm moist air, the swish of water, the rustle of fabrics. And at last he fell asleep. Every week after that he sought out a new laundromat, until finally he found himself driving twenty or thirty miles. As is to be expected in these matters, his choices varied from the distressingly unkempt to the intimidatingly gleaming. At last, having evaluated each in its turn, he chose. It had double and single load washers (avocado shade), new dryers (brushed aluminum), two extractors (stainless steel), and a dispenser for soap, bleach, softener and plastic bags. There were comfortable upholstered chairs (vinyl), and a portable television (woodgrain laminate). The dispenser never ran out, the coin changer always functioned, the washers and dryers never failed, the television always had a crisp, properly colour balanced picture. From the chairs he could watch TV, or by twisting slightly to the right (not enough to cause even the slightest discomfort) he could see the red, white and orange lights on the machines. To the left were the clothes doing their fine, lazy spins in the dryers.

He was content, almost happy: There was a beautiful woman who graced the room. Often he admired her fluid movements as she sorted and folded. A few times he was privileged to help her with large, heavy sheets. Sometimes, their eyes met, and she would turn away modestly. But not too quickly. He began to think he loved her. But his home was still chaos: He began to do laundry for his bachelor friends so he could escape from the filthy apartment. The entranceway was always piled with clothes—dirty ones to the left, clean to the right. Angela began to complain. They quarrelled. When this brought no solution, when her continued criticisms had no effect, she enrolled in a night school course. Within weeks he had every available surface covered with clean clothes. The climax came the night she went berserk and threw things everywhere. He struck her (he later claimed she was hysterical) and she ran out. The next day he returned from work to an apartment emptied of all furniture with the exception of the fridge and stove. She left him only a half-empty jar of cocktail onions.

57 He sought a new relationship: The beautiful woman allowed him to sit beside her and talk of childhood, marriages, dreams. One night he arrived, smiled, and saw her burst into tears. "I will be moving next week," she sobbed. "My husband has been transferred to Winnipeg." He expressed anguish. "But I'm free, I can move. It isn't over." "It's no use." She produced a glossy eight by ten photograph of them sitting side by side holding hands. "That picture! The man said he was a student taking a course. It was to appear only in a portfolio entitled City Life!" She nodded. "The man was a private detective. My husband detected my happiness and had me followed." "But it is so cold in Winnipeg." She wept again, pressed her lips to his, gave him the photograph as a souvenir, and drove away.

Picture his despondency: He could not face the laundromat; he became listless and slovenly. When he went out into the city streets he found it almost impossible to endure the noise, traffic, the people, the particle laden, odorous air. He took to watching soap operas and late movies. Even a letter from Angela with a picture of her and her new lover lounging in front of their service station (grease covered overalls, smudges of dirt on their faces, out-of-focus piles of old auto parts in the background)—even that could not rouse any emotion. His performance on the job declined; he was given two week's notice.

He took solace in reading classified advertisements: There were jobs available if he wanted one. But he was not ready to endure an office. Instead, the resort properties for sale attracted his attention. The advertisements said things like: "Pure Air and Water, Beach," "Quiet Seclusion, Sandy Cove," "Lovely Treed Location," "Crystal Clear Swimming," and by chance, "Run your own business in Beautiful Resort Setting."

He recognized his future: It was situated on a paved side road about fifty feet from a small bay. He sold film and souvenirs and canned goods and newspapers

58 and paperback books and T-shirts with pre-printed pictures and slogans. He was successful, so he built an addition with a picture window overlooking the lake. The following year he installed washers and driers. At first the laundromat side of the business was slow, but it increased enormously when he lit upon the idea of allowing customers to leave their dirty clothes (with the required number of quarters and dimes) for him to do. They could return in two hours to find their garments neatly folded and packaged in green plastic bags. He prospered, he was almost happy.

But there were still flaws: He put up a cork notice board, which allowed people to express their desires. Usually, they sought things to buy, or offered items for sale. Occasionally they advertised for companionship or expressed interest in things like chess or bridge or bowling leagues. One night a young man came in unobtrusively and pinned up a notice which said "Stories and poems for sale. Some ready made. Others prepared to order at slight additional cost." Under this was a row of tear-off tabs with a telephone number.

He developed a small core of inner strength: In the mornings, before he opened for business, it became his habit to walk to the small beach and stir up the sand with a stick until the water became alive with small suspended particles. Then he would set the stick on the sand, and while the sun warmed his back, he would stare patiently until the disturbance subsided, leaving his corner of the lake crystal clear again. During the day he was cheerful, talking and joking with his customers. In the evenings, he stood outside on the small porch and breathed deeply. He observed the stars and the moon reflecting from the black surface of the bay. He listened to the small rustlings of animals. In the winter he sat inside under the bright glow of the fluorescent bulbs, and breathed the sweet, humid air. Sometimes he would talk to the others in the laundromat, often they would merely sit in communal silence.

He yearned to share his knowledge: But when he looked for the poet's notice, it was covered with less important ones. And when he did find it, after removing every scrap of paper and replacing them again, he found that all the small tabs with the telephone numbers had been long since ripped off and taken away.

59 He never saw the young man again: He watched his customers carefully for months. He thought that perhaps the poet had grown older, or would appear with a wife and children, or would return to renew his offer. But it did not happen.

Compare his knowledge to a scar: When he became aware that his acquaintances did not remark upon it, or perhaps did not even notice it, he was at first hurt, then finally relieved. It was then that he stopped scanning each face that entered his premises in hopes of recognizing the young poet; and soon after that he went to the bulletin board and carefully took the notice down.

Frederic Will

Lines form on the sides of my face

Lines of aging start to form in my cheeks. I wipe at them in the mirror. I brush them away with the edge of my hanky. Still they grow, deeper and wider. They descend to my neck. They mount up my skull. Finally I see that nothing will stop them. I take off my clothes. I walk around naked. I look at the figure of my body in the mirror. It's been lovely, I inform it. Then with no more ado I remove my body. I pile it in the corner. I go off without it. In the future, I keep saying, I'll keep better company.

An old dream that keeps recurring

I've an old dream that keeps recurring. I'm busy in the cabin. Snow is descending. All of a sudden a bird comes to the window. He is terribly silent. He hovers there and watches me. I rise and approach him. When I reach him he vanishes. There's a spot of grease on the windowpane. A feather sticks in it. Far in the distance a bear lumbers seaward.

60 Margaret A. Robinson

TONGUE

Thawing on the freezer paper a purple lump. Taste buds dot the part that sticks out. I remember a tongue gray and pointed undulating over a Jersey's cud poking out to scrape my hand for salt as undeniably other as a cock. The barn was dark. Steam of dung and silage, and outside, snow.

And snow today. I boil the lump. Only the color changes: hot bones, gristle, plump glands. The skin pulls off like a sock. By candle light neat rectangular slices.

Next day at noon my throat clogs on the cold sleek meat. In spite of mustard, it tastes of rotten hay. I remember three young men who dared each other. They held a glass up to the spouting neck of a slaughtered cow. I remember Uncle Carl, who drank it down.

And snow all afternoon. It almost covers the frozen cat in the park. I breathe the cold and do not look away.

61 Pamela Espeland

FROM ALL SIDES

I

The front closet window in my grandparents' house faced west, the sun, the wheatfields the old black man who cared for the horses on the other side of the road

At evening, the sun lit all my grandfather's suits

The back bedroom closet window looked north to the Nordstroms' to bread rising in the kitchen, long fragrant halls

in the living room, a deep glass bowl full of polished stones

II

In my grandparents' bedroom we played in the bright closet in the shadows of dresses smelling of cloves in piles of worn leather shoes

grandmother's rhinestone pins hung down from soft dress bodices, maroon and dove-gray glinted in the light from the east window

It may have been, when they left Norway, that they promised to see America from all sides like the rooster on the weathervane, creaking and turning from the high point on the roof Even the chicken coop, windows on four walls a wide yard for pecking

62 Ill windows everywhere, open mirrors on the cabinet doors mirrors above the fireplace, above bureaus light traveling quickly in all directions warm floors, warm walls, pools of light on the mantle and the dining room table nine grandchildren ran from one room to another lit from without like small precious things while ants climbed the red peonies, deliberately and geraniums bobbed, grapes dangled, apples and pears and cherries tumbled in the wide afternoons butterflies lifted in clouds when grandfather mowed the lawn and grandmother's big face peered from the kitchen window, like the sun

Conrad Hillberry

WATCH

Tornado warnings are out, but nothing has happened. a girl calls her cat down from the rafters of the garage. We do what we always do. When I swing my leg over the bicycle, a sudden wind stops me—a gust from the place I am going. An oak limb lurches over the road. Nothing has happened, and yet the air cackles from fence to fence, its feathers on end. Pedalling uphill, I feel a sleepiness I cannot explain. No funnel has been sighted, but something massive catches a screen door.

We move by efficient causes, as the parents cause the child or the earth's turning darkens the sky. But that is not all. What is about to happen blows through ordinary streets like the smell of a meal no one has cooked yet. Its savour changes everything.

63 THE LETTER

From the top of the dune, I saw the dog loping slowly in a long diagonal across the empty beach to the water. It was not my dog, but I followed him down the dune and across the sand. The water felt good coming up my legs like a shadow. Underwater, I saw that I was surrounded by the eyes of fish. I was, in fact, inside a mail cubicle, surrounded by mail boxes with glass fronts. Eyes looked through all the boxes, waiting for mail. I had a large stack of letters in white envelopes, all addressed to "occupant." I knew these were not what the eyes were waiting for. They wanted letters from home, letters with red and green borders from Mexico or Liberia, letters from lovers. I thought the dog might come back with some­ thing in his mouth—he was, after all, a retriever—but he did not. I didn't bother putting the white envelopes in the boxes but just let them fall around my feet like a peony that has come apart all at once. I was now naked in the center of the eyes. The fish swam slowly toward me and began nibbling. The feeling was pleasant enough, like the cat's tongue on your arm or the barber vacuum­ ing your head after he has cut your hair. I felt their mouths on my skin all over my body. They crowded in so thick I could no longer see my body at all. I had become a pillar of fish, their finny tails sticking out like quills. Apparently, I was the news they were waiting for. I was the love letter.

Susan Fromberg Schaeffer

THE KING'S MELANCHOLY

The King took a mystical turn. There was only one thing he wanted,

Speech with the dead angel. In a dream, he was told

64 To pray for the angel in the form Of a bird, and then seek him.

The Queen grew tired And sulky, sat on the cliff's edge, Throwing jewels into the sea. The whole kingdom littered with them Like rubble.

One night, the King woke in a vision, And, in the great hall of tapestries, Found the strange bird.

Its spread wings Covered whole countries. Their shadows Seemed to burn the earth to blackness,

And there was the angel, Sitting on the floor, Cross-legged, as usual,

Balding, looking poor as any crow. The King asked, Why do you live here?

I never have, Said the angel. Why did you die? The King asked.

I think I was unhappy.

Unhappy? The King repeated the word. He did not understand. The angel plucked

A dry feather from his wings, Looked once more at the King, And flapping

65 His mud-stained wings Flew off into the sky, Straight into the sun which opened Its door for him.

The King Thought he felt something new, He could not describe it. It had the sound

Of small rocks clicking, One against the other.

He returned to the palace. Its stones Echoed cavernously and hollowly Behind him.

THE EXIT

The King and Queen waited patiently In their stone frieze; They grew to like the feel of the paper Shrouds they were draped in,

Visited by the warm blooded For their comical rubbings. They learned to like The warmth of common hands;

It was better, they agreed, Than the rough raw hands Of the weather.

In a lost tongue, They spoke only to each other. At least we are not forgotten.

They knew better Than to speak of the rest of their world.

66 If they tasted Juice of pomegranate, Felt their dry mouths moisten, They never said the words, Named the fruit.

No one knew how it began. The King remembered he was King; The Queen Once more felt the weight of her crown.

Time was the first to suspect, Arriving as a beam speckled with dust. When he saw them

They had already moved forward. It is not the natural way, he said, But at the sight of the sceptre, His voice trembled;

Death refused interference. He knew himself safe, Having taken both enemies and friends.

When they came down from the stone, Falcons stumbled; Hawks dropped mice at their feet; The wise men swore

There was nothing to rule. They turned their back on him; Setting off for a cold land Of lawns covered with gold leaves

That year, spring wisely Kept to her cave, Hugged her furs tighter, And slept late.

It is uncertain Where they are now,

67 Though at odd times, Rivers run silver, And a great number swear They were taught

To call the moon to their windows, To feed it sweets like a pet, And at night, Their faces

Shine silver in the dark.

David Fisher

THE HOUSE

It is late, the child is still awake, he thinks of turnips warm from the fields and the hog-nosed snake in the mailbox and the house whispers, "Are you awake, do you—?" and he is awake, the day was sweet and long, there was the yellow bus

with the flapping stop-signs, the smell of paste, the construction-paper chains, the steps of the gym where the big boys smoked, and the house whispers, "You are too little, you are like

the dog with his head in the smokehouse, none of this is yours." And the child turns his pillow to the cool side, and thinks about the afternoon the dogs asleep in the hard dirt yard, the shoe by the apple tree with the

black-widow spider in it, the hollyhock coins in bloom, and the evening had come slowly, in warm and cold currents, like diving deep in the lake. "Not yours, never yours," whispers the house. His father was not breathing right,

68 and sometimes his mother pressed her hand to her side. After supper he had helped to turn the crank for the bread, his mother rubbed the butter in with a little brush, and then his father was snoring in front of the ball game while his mother read from the catalogue, tomorrow he would ask his father. "Tomorrow," whispers the house. "Tomorrow you will still be too little, and after that you will be gone and you will not have time to understand, and nothing will ever belong to you." The boy thinks of his grandfather frail and bearded in a nightgown provided by the legislature, his false teeth lost in the darkness of a Mason jar, sleeping upright because he is afraid to die. "I am not so little," he tells the house. "Not so little as the dog who climbs the ladder and jumps into the blanket, or the yellow chick that died in the brooder, or the fawn whose eyes the raven took. I am not too little." The house is silent. An owl on the roof tree hoots, dark lines of geese cross the moon.

69 Richard Grayson

RAIN ON THE ROOF

Her mother died in May of 1962, the day after Memorial Day, the day Adolf Eichmann was hanged. She was thirteen at the time. She spent the summer with the family of her aunt at a bungalow colony in the Catskills. Every few weeks Leslie would go with her aunt's family to see summer stock at the theater in Forestburg. The theater was in an old converted barn. After the show, instead of taking curtain calls, the actors, in costume, would form a receiving line in the lobby. They shook hands with the exciting audience. Leslie would take care to shake each actor's hand. Then, once outside in the cricket-shirping night, she would lick her entire hand with her tongue. As if to preserve the evening's performance inside her forever. Hiding behind some battered station wagon, she would put tongue to palm and fingers. Mostly she tasted sweat. She was thirteen and a half when she menstruated. After three months, her periods stopped. Another seven months and she told her aunt, who took her to the doctor. The doctor prescribed tranquilizers. Leslie took them, and had her period again the next day, and after that she was fairly regular. She majored in Russian in college and went to law school. Then she got a job with the SEC in Washington. She married a very rich boy whose father owned a chain of men's clothing store on Long Island. What she liked about Evan was that he was pliable. And he looked like Mark Spitz. They lived apart: he in New York, she in Washington. They met on weekends. It was an open marriage, Evan made Leslie happy. Her favorite novel was The Eternal Husband. When she got to be an old lady she would make a new translation of it. Her specialty was Chapter Eleven, the section of the Federal Bankruptcy Law dealing with corporations. But at the SEC they had her investigating mutual funds frauds. It was a dreary business. She developed a nervous stomach, starting relying on Titrilac more. She took a yoga course, but it didn't go well. "You must loosen up more," the instructor would tell yer. "I'm sorry, Miss Shastri," she would say. "But this is as loose as I come."

70 Her father was a linguistics professor at the University of Minnesota. He still looked good when she saw him, which wasn't often. Neither of them were letter-writers. Ken was her lover. Mostly he was gay. But it was a calm, low-key affair: what she needed. Evan was seeing his old girlfriend in New York during the week. She needed someone too. Ken was available. He managed a movie theater on Connecticut Avenue. He didn't ever cry the way Evan did. Ken was even an acquaintance of Evan's girl Sari. It was that kind of a small world. When she first asked Ken what he did, he told her he twisted, twisted slowly in the wind. She laughed. They had casual sex, nothing very heavy. Ken used to come to her apartment and stare at the photograph she had of Evan. He also thought Evan looked like Mark Spitz. She once told Ken he didn't seem particularly gay. When she asked him why he didn't call himself bisexual, he told her she wouldn't be able to understand. And about being particularly gay: "I'm gay. And I'm particular, too." Every night at eleven, Evan would call her. He seemed to approve of Ken. Or of what Leslie told him about Ken. Evan himself was too involved with Sari to intrude on Leslie's business. There were private things that did not require discussion. Leslie and her husband operated on trust. They both had lots of psychic space. Everyone did. Ken had his Senate page, apart from Leslie. Sari was living with a radical therapist who rather liked Evan. It was all in the open. Leslie and Ken both called in sick one day and went to see the Peacock Room in the Freer Gallery: enormous, lusciously-feathered peacocks on the shuttered windows; turquoise-painted leather ceilings; the portrait of the Princess from the Land of Porcelain— Harmony in Blue and Gold. The painting showed a young woman in a creamy kimono standing in front of a pastel sixfold screen. It was elegant, somewhat Oriental, somehow very comforting. While they were sitting on the bench, Ken told her he was leaving Washington. She was surprised at how surprised she was. Ken put down his cup of herb tea and looked at her. "Are you throwing a silent temper tantrum because I'm going away?"

71 She made herself look innocent. "Who, me?" she said. And some of the tension melted. She kissed his cheek. She quoted Gogol. "Skuchno na etom avete, gospoda." "And what does that mean?" She blew her nose. '"It's gloomy in this world, gentlemen.'" "Don't overdramatize."

That night she didn't sleep. She had a cold. The post-nasal drip was keeping her awake. She had nightmares too, even though she wasn't quite asleep. In the morning she called in sick and it was true. She wanted to be taken care of. That was the part that made her feel so guilty.

She called Evan in New York. She hinted around, hoping he would say "Poor baby" and take the next shuttle to Washington. But he didn't. He made a joke, told her it was appalling that a person like her should get a cold. She didn't get it. "You take all that Vitamin C," his voice over the phone said. "Like Linus Pauling says. A-Pauling, get it?" She hung up.

He called back and said, "I love you." "I love you too." He was having a problem with the Huntington store, he said. He couldn't talk to her too long. She told him that was all right. She went to the Lincoln Memorial at night, despite the cold. She wanted to see if it was true what Ken had told her, that Lincoln's stature smiled from one side and frowned from the other side. She was impressed, enough to tell some stranger about it, a hip-looking guy from Colorado. "Schizophrenia, that's all," the Colorado guy said. "Why not? After all, it's the American national disease." He gave her what she knew was supposed to be a meaningful look. "How schizophrenic are you?" he asked her. She smiled, took the Fifth Amendment, and moved on.

She reached for a Contac and wondered if the Age of Anxiety had given way to the Age of Possibilities. No more "shoulds." Growth was the king. Everyone was growing—not up or down or tall or fat—just growing. Living like Topsy they all were.

72 Her nightgown had worn so thin it was nearly transparent. She had some Darvon in her medicine cabinet and she debated whether to take one. Wooziness might help. Her arms and legs ached, like the "growing pains" she felt as a girl. In the end she decided against the Darvon. It might not mix with the cold capsule she was taking.

She wondered if she should do something. But she didn't know what she had anything to do about. She was separated from Evan by an hour's flight, Ken hadn't left town yet—so why did it matter, being alone? Questions formed in her head, the kind General Eisenhower used to talk about.

She thought of her operation at New York Eye and Ear when she was only five. The muscles of her right eye had been weak, and the eye was turning inward. Her mother slept in the hospital room with her, both the night before surgery and for two days afterward. When Leslie got out of the hospital she had to wear a special pair of glasses with one red-colored lens. She was in the first grade, standing outside the school at 8:30 on a cold morning when a fat Chinese boy came over to her and said: "Hey, Red Eye! You should be on television!" She didn't say anything to the boy then. Now she wished she had killed him. When Evan first brought up the possibility of marriage, she told him she didn't know if she loved him. "If you think you're in love, then that's love, Les," he had said. "'I think I love you' is as good as 'I love you.'" At the time she thought she loved him. She still supposed he was right. Five years before, on a Sunday morning, she was taking a bus home from a boyfriend's house. She was a senior at Barnard. On the bus she began a casual conversation with a boy her own age. He was dark and fragile-looking and had the longest eyelashes she had ever seen on a boy. He was stoned out of his head, but she didn't care; he was funny and nice. He was coming home from a trip to San Francisco, and he told her how beautiful California was compared to New York and he told her the things he had done out there. When she told him she had to get off, he said he wanted to give her something because he liked talking with her so much. His shoes were expensive, he said. Couldn't he give her his shoes?

73 She laughed and said no, that it was all right. She said good-bye and wished him luck and got off the bus. Leslie never saw him again. She watched a made-for-television movie in which a with-it heroine ran away to find herself. But Leslie didn't have to find herself and she didn't believe in running away. Of course she could always start therapy again. But she lacked the energy for that. She could not sleep. Her cold had become worse. She couldn't stifle her cough, nor keep her throat from getting dry, nor stop her head from hurting. She drank some pineapple juice, went back to bed, got up again. Leslie remembered an article that said you could cure insomnia if you kept your tongue tucked into your cheek for a long period of time. She tried it while sitting in her kitchenette. She felt foolish so she put her tongue back where it belonged.

She tried to read what she thought was an irresponsible book: How to Prepare for the Next Great Depression. Another woman lawyer at the SEC had given it to her. Leslie got annoyed with the author after thirty pages. Granted, things did not look good; still, one shouldn't panic people. She put the book away.

It was 3:17. Evan had made her a digital clock. He was so clever at things like that, but he still felt he was better of working for his father. It was 3:18. She wanted so desparately to sleep. She started to cry. Leslie cried for several minutes, then went to the bathroom mirror to look at herself. Her eyes were red. She tried smiling broadly, just to see herself smiling with swollen red eyes. Her throat hurt when she swallowed.

Since college Leslie had been waiting for someone to call her Duska: "little soul" in Russian. She knew that Evan would call her that if she asked him to, but that would have meant asking him to, and there was no point in that. Evan's clock said it was 3:43.

Before she finally slept, she said "I love you" aloud. She didn't have the slightest idea whom she was talking to.

74 Leslie had a dream. She was walking along the campus of the University of Pennsylvania, where she had gone to law school. Clouds were overhead, threatening. Suddenly she started running, past the library, running quickly. She was off campus, running up the Franklin Parkway, passing the hilltop hulk of the art museum alongside the Schuykill. Leslie was not surprised at how fast she was running. She reached her aunt's bungalow colony in the Catskills in no time. It was still raining and it was becoming night. She opened the door of the bungalow. Sari, Evan's Sari, was inside, sitting on a waterbed by the floor. She was wearing a kimono with a red sash, just like the girl in Whistler's painting, the one Ken had taken her to see. "I lost my pocketbook running," Leslie whined, Sari remained serene. "That's all right." Leslie wondered if Evan was around, but she was afraid to ask Sari. "If I were you," Sari said, getting up from the waterbed, "I would have done things differently." "But if I were you, I would have done your things differently," Leslie protested. Sari just smiled. She loosened her sash and undid the top half of her kimono, slipping it around her waist. Her breasts were bare. They were full and pendulous, unlike Leslie's, and her nipples were within Leslie's reach. "It's still raining," Sari said softly. Leslie listened for the rain on the roof. From the window came a moment of lightning. No thunder followed it. Leslie felt secure. She was safely inside, safe with Sari. Sari seemed so sure of herself. She felt what she knew was love. She touched Sari's breast with one finger. Then another. With her fingers she drew circles around Sari's nipples. She bent over to kiss them. She stirred out of sleep. She tried to get back into the dream.

NOTE

The article that follows is an adaptation of a public lecture given by the author at Carleton in February 1975 in connection with the Senior Colloquium and Performance Program on "The City as a Creative Center."

75 Ulf Zimmermann

FROM PRAG TO PARIS: RILKE'S NOVEL CITY

"So, here's where people come to live; I'd think it to be likelier to die here."1 This sentence opens The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, the only novel of Rainer Maria Rilke. In many ways it is an autobiographical novel, and its narrator, Malte Laurids Brigge, is a poetic persona of the author Rilke. One reason Rilke adopts this persona is to depict at its most extreme the powerful impact Paris has on a poetic sensibility. As this first sentence indicates, it's a question of life or death. Rilke himself had not only survived this impact, but probably became the greatest poet writing in the German language in the twentieth century because of it. Where he might have merely remained the greatest poet of Prag, it was this city, Paris, that pro­ vided him with the personal and poetic experiences to write the works for which he is generally best known in English-speaking countries: the Duino Elegies, which he composed and compacted over a period of more than a decade, and the Sonnets to Orpheus, which came forth almost overnight in celebration of having completed the Elegies. Both of these volumes, the ten elegies and the fifty-one sonnets, were finished in that annus mirabilis, 1922, which gave us Joyce's Ulysses, Eliot's Waste Land, Babbitt and Siddharta, The Forsyte Saga—and Wittgenstein's Tractatus. All of these, as Spengler would no doubt have it, simply document The Decline of the West, which was also completed that year. But the literary accomplishments enumerated here would much likelier mark for us the coming-of-age of modernity. And while Rilke was of course recognized for his large share in this development, along with Eliot and Joyce, it was some time after the publication of Ulysses and the novels that came in its wake that Rilke's own much earlier achievement in prose fiction began to be accepted and finally acknowledged as the seminal novel that it is. For while the various volumes of poetry had all along been translated as promptly as possible and as often as another poet felt equal to the task, it was twenty years until this novel was translated into English at all. But then The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge appeared long before most of the other novels we associate with modernism in fiction. For the most part the Notebooks were written in Paris during the last of The Banquet Years—as Roger Shattuck titled his study of "The Origins of the Avant-Garde in France 1885 to World War I"—and Malte Laurids Brigge first appeared in public in 1910. This Janus-faced year is often thought to mark the end of art nouveau, but at the same it can be

76 used to mark the beginnings of modernism in the visual arts: in pastoral Bavaria after a stay in Paris, Kandinsky, with his concern for the spiritual in art, was completing his first abstract painting; and in metropolitan Paris itself Braque and Picasso had made their break­ through to Cubism. And like Braque, Picasso, and so many of the artists in Paris at this time, Rilke too had learned from Cezanne; lesson after lesson is amply and repeatedly documented in Rilke's letters as well as in Malte's notes. The orientation of the vision in those notes seems to reflect these advances in painting—and that is perhaps one reason the book's acceptance as a novel was so long in coming. For on the surface The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge does not have the customary fictional plot, nor does there appear to be the kind of straightforward chronological continuity we might expect in an autobiography. It can perhaps best be likened to a Cubist painting in which a number of sides or aspects are on the surface at once, because in this novel all times and all places exist side by side in the mind of the narrator. But of course owing to the nature of his medium, Malte's recording of the notes necessarily creates a particular narrative sequence. And the sequence that is hereby established then gives the reader a re­ flection of the narrator's mental movement, which is basically the subject of the novel—and in this respect it may perhaps be likened to an abstract painting. Or as Rilke himself put it in a letter to one Reverend Zimmermann:

These 'Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge' contain a reckoning, demonstrated in the figure of a young Dane (hence a completely invented figure), with the essential insolubilities of inner being: Paris, which increases the visibility of everything that can be experienced and conjures heavens and hells where another milieu only offers the acceptable and the burdensome.2

Since the narrator, Malte, therefore bears the thematic burden of the book I'll anticipate here by describing him briefly as an orphaned and impoverished twenty-eight-year-old Danish aristocrat and aspiring poet who has come to Paris to experience real life and to write real poetry. With this slim image of him in mind now, I would like to return to that first sentence and proceed to the rest of Malte's first notebook entry. And by presenting and discussing this entry along with a few others, I would like to show what Malte sees as the experience of the modern metropolis. More importantly, I would like to show what impact these Paris experiences have on this narrator, and how, as a result, the structure of modern fiction is radically altered.

77 So, then people do come here in order to live; I would sooner have thought one died here. I have been out. I saw: hospitals. I saw a man who swayed and sank to the ground. People gathered round him, so I was spared the rest. I saw a pregnant woman. She was pushing herself cumbrously along a high, warm wall, groping for it now and again as if to convince herself it was still there. Yes, it was still there. And behind it? I looked on my map: Maison d'Accouchement. Good. They will deliver her—they know how. Further on, rue Saint-Jacques, a big building with a cupola. The map said: Val-de-Grace, Hopital militaire. I didn't really need this information, but it can't seem to do any harm. The street began to smell from all sides. A smell, so far as one could distinguish, of iodoform, of the grease of pommes frites, of fear. All cities smell in the summer. Then I saw a curiously purblind house; it was not to be found on the map, but above the door there stood, still fairly legible: Asyle de nuit. Beside the entrance were the prices. I read them. The place was not expensive.

And what else? A child in a standing baby-carriage. It was fat, green­ ish, and had a distinct eruption on its forehead. This was evidently peeling as it healed and did not hurt. The child slept, its mouth was open, breathing iodoform, pommes frites and fear. It was simply like that. The main thing was, being alive. That was the main thing. (MLB p. 13)

Disease and dread: these are the sights and smells of Paris as our narrator perceives and presents them. All of these are such surprising­ ly and consistently nasty and negative images that a normal reader might be considerably taken aback. One reaction might be to ask whether another person, say an American student in Paris, would tend to see things the same way? Or wouldn't he probably be much likelier to marvel at the churches, the architectural spectacle spread out before him, and wouldn't he be likelier to revel in the exotic odors emanating from the endless number of eating and drinking establish­ ments and to delight in glimpses of strolling girls and children playing? Such a contrast as this is a matter of psychological perspective, and the manipulation of it in the case of Malte is one of the novel's most fundamentally modern aspects. And to round out our own perspective a bit and to reenforce our impression of the narrator, I'd like to give another example of his perception as he hears the sounds of the city.

78 To think that I cannot give up sleeping with the window open. Electric street-cars rage ringing through my room. Automobiles run their way over me. A door slams. Somewhere a window-pane falls clattering; I hear its big splinters laugh, its little ones snicker. Then suddenly a dull, muffled noise from the other side, within the house. Someone is climb­ ing the stairs. Coming, coming incessantly. Is there, there for a long time, then passes by. And again the street. A girl screams: Ah tais-toi, je ne veux plus. An electric car races up excitedly, then away, away over everything. Someone calls. People are running, overtake each other. A dog barks. What a relief: a dog. Toward morning a cock even crows, and that is boundless comfort. Then I suddenly fall asleep. (MLB, p. 14)

The mechanical manifestations of industrialism, the trolleys and automobiles, are naturally the most strikingly new elements of the modern metropolis as it had just begun to take shape in Paris. Simi­ larly, the noises which are apparently made by various other people in the house evoke the typically close city community in which they live. But at the same time it is equally apparent that these noises are anonymous, since the narrator simply hears them without knowing the people making them. What this indicates is the isolation of the individual that is usually considered so characteristic of city life. But to what extent this isolation is actually a necessary consequence of city life, as it's usually made out to be, is a question that shouldn't be decided off-handedly. We might find ourselves just reflecting a tradi­ tional bias that cities are unnatural, and in the meantime we might be ignoring the narrator's rather specific and strange circumstances in Paris. He is, after all, a newly-arrived stranger, not just from the country, but from a foreign country at that. In order to come to some sort of balanced view, and at least a tentative decision, let's reexamine some of the narrator's statements and see if a hypothetical relation between the narrator and the city can be established. [To start somewhat flippantly, we could advise him to shut his window since, to judge by his earlier olfactory experiences, no fresh air is coming through it anyway, and that would at least muffle the traffic noises from the street below.] All we know so far is that he has opened himself up to these auditory disturbances on his own initi­ ative. What's more, the way he interprets them is more than merely idiosyncratic: the trolleys and cars are made to appear aimed at him alone; the glass not only shatters noisily, but is anthropomorphized and characterized as making fun of the narrator; it's made to snicker at him in his poverty and isolation, and it threatens him just as the steps coming up the stairs seem to do. So it seems that he's not just a simple but sensitive country boy; it appears instead that he's a very subjective, not to say self-centered soul with a singular talent for self-

79 expression. Having shown this talent in action here, I would suggest that his almost paranoid reactions in this passage are conditioned as much by the provincial literature he has grown up with as they are by any sort of pastoral life he may have led earlier. The traditions of that literature easily lead to a narrator as dinstinctive as Malte and they easily prompt him to establish his own extreme version of the typical polarity city = bad, country = good. It's natural then that the sounds of animals, in contrast to those of people and things, bring relief and comfort—and in that order: the dog brings only relief because it could also be associated with the city, but the cock brings true comfort since he's almost inevitably associated with the country. We can see here too just how turned around Malte is from his new experiences, because when he hears the cock's crowing he goes to sleep rather than getting up, as country people supposedly did at that signal. But then the life he had once been accustomed to on the manor had been a more slowly moving one than this metropolitan hustle and bustle, and it had been rooted in a seemingly timeless set of family traditions. As he writes in a letter from his room in Paris: "Three weeks elsewhere, in the country for example, would be like a day; here they seem like years." {MLB, p. 15) Given this temporal and spatial dislocation that he experiences, it's only to be expected that he'll eventually try to return to those manorial fields and their familial roots—even if he can do so only in his memory. But before he retires to the country, let's look at what else he faces in the city that makes his removal all the more inevitable, and let's see what his poetic psyche does with the visions it selects. By the time that he makes the sixth entry in his Notebooks, he has discovered himself that this city has opened his eyes. More than that, it has opened up to him a whole stratum of his subconscious: now he's able to see things outside as well as inside himself that he's never been able to see before. The opening itself has been made specifically by his encounters with all the strange new faces of the people of Paris. What strikes him as even stranger, now that he's able to see it, is that many of these people actually have more than one face; they appear to put these on, wear them out, and replace them or save them for their children almost at will. But while this seems uncanny to him, what really upsets him is to see an obviously poor woman whose face had apparently just come off leaving her completely faceless. In his own poverty and insecurity he immediately feels fatally afraid that he is just as faceless and that he'll be indistinguishably absorbed within the masses that this city has made so visible for him. "I am afraid," he writes.

80 One has to take some action against fear, once one has it. It would be very nasty to fall ill here, and if it occurred to anyone to get me into the Hotel-Dieu I should certainly die there. This hotel is a pleasant hotel, enormously frequented. One can scarcely examine the facade of the Cathedral of Paris without danger of being run over by one of the many vehicles that must cross the open square as quickly as possible to get in yonder. They are small omnibuses that sound their bells incessantly, and the Duke of Sagan himself would be obliged to have his equipage halted if some small dying person had taken it into his head to go straight into God's Hotel. Dying people are headstrong, and all Paris is at a standstill when Madame Legrand, brocanteuse from the rue des Martyres, comes driving toward a certain square in the Cite. It is to be noted that these fiendish little carriages are provided with uncommonly intriguing windows of opaque glass, behind which one can picture the most magnificent agonies; the phantasy of a concierge suffices for that. If one has even more power of imagination and it runs in other direc­ tions, conjecture becomes simply boundless. But I have also seen open cabs arriving, hired cabs with their hoods folded back, plying for the usual fare: two francs for the hour of agony. (MLB, pp. 16-17)

The tone and the conclusion of this passage suggest that the narrator is using irony as defense and discovery: in defense he distances himself ironically through his rather forced humor; and it is an ironic discovery when he sees that dying may be no more than a mechanical ride at a fixed price, and the moment this discovery enters the narrator's consciousness, he continues in an even more ironic vein and elabo­ rates the modern way of death into an image of dehumanized and depersonalized mass society:

This excellent hotel is very ancient. Even in King Clovis' time people died in it in a number of beds. Now they are dying there in 559 beds. Factory-like, of course. Where production is so enormous an individual death is not so nicely carried out; but then that doesn't matter. It is quantity that counts. Who cares anything today for a finely-finished death? No one. Even the rich, who could after all afford this luxury of dying in full detail, are beginning to be careless and indifferent; the wish to have a death of one's own is growing even rarer. A while yet, and it will be just as rare as a life of one's own. Heavens, it's all there. One arrives, one finds a life, ready made, one has only to put it on. One wants to leave or is compelled to: anyway, no effort: Voila votre mort, monsieur. One dies just as it comes; one dies the death that belongs to the disease one has (for since one has come to know all diseases, one knows, too, that the different lethal terminations belong to the disease and not to the people; and the sick person has so to speak nothing to do).

81 In sanatoria, where people die so willingly and with so much grati­ tude to doctors and nurses, they die from one of the deaths attached to the institution; that is favorably regarded. But when one dies at home, it is natural to choose that polite death of genteel circles, with which a first-class funeral is so to say inaugurated, with the whole sequence of its delightful formalities. The poor then stand outside such a house and gaze their fill. Their death is, of course, banal, without any fuss. They are glad when they find one that fits approximately. Too large it may be: one always keeps growing a little. Only when it does not meet round the chest or when it strangles, then there is difficulty. {MLB, pp. 17-18)

In the process of writing about this sort of impersonal death in the city, Malte has also discovered one of his most central concerns and has found out what the basic source of his own fear really is: the figu­ rative death of the threatening loss of identity he experiences as this vast city engulfs him and makes him into an absolute nobody—as he acknowledges later. Writing of death in the city has further reminded him of his grandfather's death on the manor, which now in contrast seems to him to have been a truly individual one. But as the careful reader finds out somewhat later, grandfather was only able to indulge his individuality once his wife had died; he would never have dared take precedence over her. I'm referring to this here because it is an exemplary instance of Malte's delusions about the past; it's second- nature to him to think of the past, in contrast to the afflicted present, only as the good old days. As he admits, recording the death of his grandfather here has been an inward escape from the present, and from Paris, and it's an escape he's been able to make by virtue of his poetic talents: "I have taken action against fear; I have sat all night and written; and now I am as agreeably tired as after a long walk over the fields of Ulsgaard."8 (MLB, p. 23)

Obviously he has no more trouble producing such nostalgic and escapist writing than he did applying irony earlier. And like that irony, this sort of idyllic writing can also have a defensive function, with even greater immediacy. Consequently he applies it to a few similarly idyllic street scenes he comes across in Paris. Exceptional as such scenes may be there for him, he describes them in detail essentially for their own sake; his only purpose is to perfect his own prose technique by practicing with random compositions. Because of this idyllic, purely descriptive character these passages have often been called prose poems, but if they're examined more closely it becomes apparent that they might almost better be called prose paintings since they are pure­ ly visual and color compositions. (This painterly composition once more illustrates the importance of Paris artists for Rilke's writings; and

82 he illuminates that connection further by intimating that life imitates art as he likens what he sees to a portrait by Manet.) In these figurative prose paintings he feels now that he has finally succeeded at rendering the realities of Paris visible—even though we know that he has exer­ cised far too selective a vision. And on the basis of this feeling he begins to reassess his past poetic efforts and attempts to establish a program for his future writing. But before quoting this most famous and most often quoted prose passage of Rilke's, I should point out that with him at least the relation between painters and poets also proved to be a reciprocal one; this passage, for instance, later led Ben Shahn to produce a book of drawings—For the Sake of a Single Verse—all inspired by these lines.

I think I ought to begin to do some work, now that I am learning to see. I am twenty-eight years old, and almost nothing has been done. To re­ capitulate: I have written a study on Carpaccio which is bad, a drama entitled "Marriage," which sets out to demonstrate something false by equivocal means, and some verses. Ah! but verses amount to so little when one writes them young. One ought to wait and gather sense and sweetness a whole life long, and a long life if possible, and then, quite at the end, one might perhaps be able to write ten lines that were good. For verses are not, as people imagine, simply feelings (those one has early enough), —they are experiences. For the sake of a single verse, one must see many cities, men and things, one must know the animals, one must feel how the birds fly and know the gesture with which the little flowers open in the morning. One must be able to think back to roads in unknown regions, to unexpected meetings and to partings one had long seen coming; to days of childhood that are still unexplained, to parents whom one had to hurt when they brought one some joy and one did not grasp it (it was a joy for someone else); to childhood ill­ nesses that so strangely begin with such a number of profound and grave transformations, to days in rooms withdrawn and quiet and to mornings by the sea, to the sea itself, to seas, to nights of travel that rushed along on high and flew with all the stars—and it is not yet enough if one may think of all this. One must have memories of many nights of love, none of which was like the others, of the screams of women in labor, and of light, white, sleeping women in childbed, closing again. But one must also have been beside the dying, must have sat beside the dead in the room with the open window and the fitful noises. And still it is not yet enough to have memories. One must be able to forget them when they are many and one must have the great patience to wait until they come again. For it is not yet the memories themselves. Not till they have turned to blood within us, to glance and gesture, nameless and no longer to be distinguished from ourselves—not till then can it happen that in a most rare hour the first word of a verse arises in their midst and goes forth from them. (MLB, pp. 26-27).

83 Another reason for quoting this passage at such length is that the program it presents is also something of a summary of what Malte then proceeds to write about in the notebook entries that follow. But even so he doesn't really meet his own programmatic demands—he isn't actually experiencing any of those things enumerated. Rather, he's merely reading them or imagining them—though some are dis­ tanced personal recollections—and so he gradually deviates more and more from the criterion that good writing be the result of hard experi­ ences that have been completely absorbed by the writer—experiences such as those that might continue to confront Malte in Paris, for instance. But with those, as we've seen so far, he rather does what he can to resist them, by escaping into the ironic or the idyllic. And it does seem that Rilke has granted his narrator rather more than enough poetic power to make good his escape from reality. In fact, he seems to have given Malte so much verbal talent that he's been able to make virtually unbounded lyrical leaps into preciosity and mannerism—and to show those has been the final purpose for quoting him extensively.

On the principle that the style is the man, this style is purported to be that, of the fictive narrator, Malte, so that its characteristics are meant to be his; but it is of course the hand of Rilke at work. It's been noted repeatedly that, in the figure of Malte, Rilke voids himself of all his own stylistic excrescenses so that he himself can achieve that pure objectivity for which Malte strives unsuccessfully. And to the extent that Malte and his style are failures in that sense, they are characteristic of a pre-Parisian Rilke who had only just begun to serve his apprenticeship to Rodin and to the city of Paris. It was, after all, from his revered model, Rodin, that Rilke learned the lesson of artistic fidelity and the principle of steadfast work at first hand, and Paris showed him his subjects and shaped his perception of the real world. And insofar as it's on the basis of these factors that a genuine poet will succeed or fail, Malte fails so that Rilke may succeed.

Now since it is largely Malte's style, with its slanted subjectivity and its inherently false sentimentality that ultimately keeps him from mas­ tering the reality of Paris, and since this style leads him to romanticize his rural background in Denmark instead, I will leave him with those memories of the manor and meanwhile trace them back to their in­ spirational sources in Rilke's own past in the Bohemian backwaters of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and its provincial capital of Prag. It was here that Rilke was born in 1975 and brought up as the only child of a very unhappily married woman. Her husband, who was then a minor railroad official but had once been a promising young military officer, had altogether failed to satisfy her social ambitions. Then too

84 their first child, a daughter, had died very early, and now the mother was forced to make do with little Rene (as he was then called). There are echoes of this upbringing in the novel, but there Malte claims to have invented the role of a girl to amuse his "Maman." I mention this because it is a transformation of the past similar to those others that Malte regularly makes and because, insofar as the novel is auto­ biographical, it fulfills in fiction what Rilke's mother had vainly desired in her own life. She had finally passed these social desires on to her young son, and by hobnobbing with the best European aristocrats he went on to fulfill all of her ambitions in his life. Yet even after her initial ambitions had been frustrated because her husband's military career had been cut short by circumstances (times were too peaceful) and inadequate health (he seems to have had some sort of throat problem that prevented him from shouting commands properly), the Rilkes' actual status in Prag wasn't all that lowly: they were after all, as Madame Rilke was proud to note, Germans among all those Czechs and Jews.

With this background in mind, I'd like to try to show how—until Paris had its massive impact upon him—it was precisely this popu­ lation mix, the multi-lingual and vari-cultured milieu of Prag, that impressed its peculiar stamp on Rilke's style and, for that matter, actually informed his imagination. And to show that I'll add to Rilke's personal background a few notes on Prag itself. By the time of Rilke's youth a great deal of antagonism had devel­ oped between that large majority of Czechs and the politically as well as socially dominant German minority. Nurtured by the Romantic inclination to delve into the races' past, two equally antagonistic literary nationalisms had split the once symbiotic Bohemian woods into solid German oaks and upright Czech pines, and the poetry of Prag had become decisively divided into German and Czech writing. While the German-language population meant to maintain its dominant position by sustaining its political and literary bonds to Vienna's empire, and while the Czechs wanted to achieve complete independence and national autonomy, the third party found itself in the middle. And this party, that of the Prag Jews who saw their own hope in an undivided Bohemia, now sought to mediate between the two nationalisms and therefore began to translate and interpret the products of Czech art for the German-speaking population. But unlike so much of the regional "blood and soil" literature of either nationality, the works that this group transmitted or even produced for the German community were characteristically metro- and cosmopolitan. These Jewish writers were in touch, if tenuously, with developments in Vienna, Munich, Berlin, and even Paris.

85 But just being in touch with the latest literary developments in these cities proved to be more of a problem than anything else when, around the turn of the century, the latest fashion to come from Paris to Prag via Berlin was Naturalism. To explore the artistic possibilities of Naturalism in Paris or in Berlin was a simple matter, but for the German-language writers in Prag it was a very unlikely pursuit. There were practically no German workers in Prag whose fate such a writer could have depicted Naturalistically in the proper industrial milieu. And though industry was thriving and the working-class population had grown proportionately, the workers that had more and more come to Prag were all Czechs and they were consequently almost completely foreign to these writers, Jewish or German.3

If they wanted to write at all then, and the new Naturalism had been ruled out, they were left essentially with the new Romanticism to turn to. As it was, this suited the writers and their environment per­ fectly. Neo-romanticism let them pursue their own peculiar individual fates, down the narrow alleys of this old city, with all its millenarian cemeteries, its baroque churches and dusky synagoges, its mysterious catacombs and passionately inflamed saints at every turn. Here in Prag the symbols of Neo-romanticism were palpably real, and they authenticated the poet's mystical utterances at every step. All of Prag seemed suddenly pervaded by a hothouse atmosphere and everything exuded a monstrous eroticism and a sultry sexuality; the whole city seemed to have become populated with an outrageous array of extreme types, like a wax museum: murders, lepers, pimps, perverts, drunks, ghosts, doppelganger, cretins, homunculi, and that famous Yiddish monster, the Golem, lurked in every shadow.4

But the most important factor leading to this erratic development in Prag's literary situation was neither the individual author nor the tradition of works. It was the audience they addressed. As the charac­ ter of these writings readily suggests, there must not have been very many "real" people for them to portray or to address; otherwise perhaps the writers wouldn't have been so obsessed with themselves or with such non-people. A survey taken in 1900 disclosed that 415,000 inhabitants of Prag considered themselves Czech and 34,000 considered themselves German. There was then almost no audience for these writers beyond a small circle of German-speaking and -writing intellectuals; they constituted the reading public within that otherwise stuffy upper class of Germans. Whenever Rilke attempted an imaginative evocation of Prag, he portrayed these Germans as soulless figures who were settled in a deathlike atmosphere and who had become petrified in their mem-

86 ories, habits, and thinking processes. They were inevitably turned away from life and towards death, and, in this, they appeared ridicu­ lous. But they appeared especially ridiculous—hollow beings that they were—in that their arrogance derived from nothing better than the fact that they were German.5 I've cited Rilke's Prag Germans here because his damning description of them applies equally to their language. In their chauvinistic pride they naturally maintained German as their language, but it was fast becoming a stagnant idiom because it was so completely isolated. From the rest of German society it was isolated geographically (and of course there were no more new Germans moving here); from the rest of Prag society it was isolated linguistically as well as socially. With these other segments of society the Germans communicated by means of two bastard dialects which I would translate as "kitchen Bohemian" and "market German" and which were derived, respectively, from Czech and Yiddish. At the same time they defended their own exclusive German by sticking strictly to grammatical rules codified all too long ago and by preserving an ossified syntax that had also long ago been sapped of its vital vocabulary. What was left was an almost abstract, artificial language that was largely limited to private and bureaucratic use.

Yet it was this very same socio-linguistic situation that produced two of the greatest writers in twentieth-century German literature. And each of them attained such stature, I would suggest, because of the distinctive individual style he evolved out of his interaction with this particular socio-linguistic environment. It was, for example, the brittle language of the bureaucracy that Kafka used during his working day at the insurance company that at night he would pare down and polish until it was almost totally devoid of such human elements as dialogue or conversation and until it had that familiar cold and colorless consistency. Just how much Rilke's style differed from that has become ap­ parent, but I'd like to illustrate this difference in their public manner as well. Kafka had from early youth championed the socialist movement of the Czechs, and as a sign of his political sympathies he would wear the traditional red carnation. But the young Rilke, who was far folksier sounding, could meanwhile be seen playing the flaneur on Prag's main promenade, wearing a black frock coat and an old-fashioned hat, or even an abbe's habit, with a lorgnon and white gloves, and carrying a cane in one hand and a long-stemmed iris in the other, as he cere­ moniously paraded up and down, sometimes handing out poems to the poor. When he would get home from these fanciful tours of Prag, Rilke would recreate the elements of his environment in an efferves­ cence of voluptuous images and in virtual orgies of macaronic and

87 archaic vocabulary. Unlike Kafka, Rilke only affected a knowledge of Czech, just as he adopted Czech nationalist sentiments chiefly as an intellectual fashion and out of adolescent contrariness. And like most other Prag German poets he had to consult the dictionary to expand his poetic vocabulary. In order to write creatively at all, both of these men had to take stylistically extreme courses to get beyond this Prag idiom. But the provincial confinement of this city also made them feel a more per­ sonal need to escape. And while Rilke directly acted on these feelings, Kafka stayed on and gave them their best expression: in one of his little pieces a man suddenly runs out to the stable, saddles and mounts his horse, and makes for the gate. But there an inquisitive servant intercepts him. "Where are you riding off to, Master?" he asks. "I don't know," the Master answers, "just away from here. On and on away from here, that's the only way I can reach my goal." "So you do know your goal?" the servant asks. "Yes, I told you, didn't I: away from here, that's my goal."6 With little more of a final goal and no more than a distant glimmer of Paris, Rilke got away from Prag in 1896. While in Munich, ostensibly to study law, he met Lou Andreas-Salome, and this illustrious woman took him on as a son and lover. It was she who introduced him to her native Russia and to the inner reaches of his soul revealed to him in that country. After he and Lou separated, Rilke settled in an artists' colony on the North-German heath, an area reminiscent of the Russian steppes, and here he met and soon married the sculptress Clara Westhoff. And in turn it was through her interests and influence that he finally did make his way to Paris—with Clara's personal rec­ ommendation to Rodin and a publisher's advance for a monograph on him. How Paris initially struck him we've already seen refracted in the image of his fictive narrator Malte. And that it struck Malte forcibly, shattering him like that window-pane, can be seen in the structural pattern of his notes. To get a comprehensive image of the narrator, the reader has to piece it together himself, and all he has to go on in this Paris world is the absolute and exclusive subjectivity of that narrator's "Prag" mind. For Rilke this subjectivity expressed the alien­ ation and total isolation his hero experiences in this strange and multi­ tudinous city. To document the author's purpose here one need only examine his two rejected earlier drafts. Both of them are third-person narratives, and in both of them Malte is still in contact with other persons. By making the novel a first-person narrative, Rilke finally eliminated the need for any sort of realistic chronology of Malte's time in Paris. And this opens up the structure of the novel to allow a sort of

88 psychic sequence of notebook entries that reflects the narrator's perceptions and his mental reactions to them. Initiall then, the structural sequence is strictly dictated by the things he perceives in Paris and by the order in which he perceived them. But then as he finds that the world is too much with him he rejects it by withdrawing more and more from it, first by moving back into his memories, then into images of medieval history, and finally into the Biblical past. And he does this in search of historical and mythic models of an authentic identity which would help him to replace that which he feels he has lost in the all too modern world of Paris. Clearly Malte's search for the self in a non-existent past is futile, and his withdrawal from Paris is the basis of his failure. What Malte would have had to do, and what Rilke did, to get a grip on himself was to grasp the realities of Paris with both hands, so to speak, and then to model them into a poetic reality of equivalent validity. But Malte re­ mained faithful to the style of Prag, while Rilke—whose eyes had been opened by Baudelaire and given their focus by Ce'zanne— acquired in Paris a valid vision of the modern city of man.

NOTES

This is my own translation of the first sentence; all other translations are from Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, trans.M.D.Herter Norton (New York: Norton, 1949). Subsequent references to it are identified in the text with the abbreviation MLB and the page.

2This letter of February 3, 1921 to Rudolf Zimmerman appears in Rainer Maria Rilke, Briefell (1914-1926) (Wiesbaden: Insel-Verlag, 1950), p. 217. The translation is my own.

3For information about Prag and Rilke's childhood and youth I am particularly indebted to Peter Demetz, Rene Rilkes Prager Jahre (Dusseldorf: Diederichs, 1953).

"The description of Prag literature is in part adapted from Klaus Wagenback, Franz Kafka (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1964).

5Egon Schwarz, Das verschlucte Schluchzen: Poesie und Politik bei Rainer Marie Rilke (Frankfurt: Athenaum, 1972), p. 7.

6Franz Kafka, "Der Aufbruch," in Beschreibung eines Kampfes: Novellen, Skizzen, Aphorismen aus dem Nachlass, ed. Max Brod, 2nd edition (New York: Schocken, 1946). The translation is my own.

89 William Peden

FAMILY PORTRAIT

My father died of a stroke at the age of sixty. Weeding in his flower garden. I found him lying there a few minutes after breakfast, a small spading fork and a trowel by his side, the peatmoss in the trowel was still cool and moist. His blue eyes were open and I think he recognized me but he could neither speak or move. I took off my jacket and placed it carefully over his shoulders. I'll be right back, Dad, don't worry, don't try to move. I run to the house (it is a Wednesday, my mother left shortly after breakfast to do the week's groceries). I call our family doctor and hurry back to the garden. My father is dead among the dahlias he never got to show at the county fair. He had not been a great success. Worked in the local bank most of his life. After a quarter of a century became vice president, but that is as far as he ever went. My mother wanted him to be president of the bank and mayor of the village. A quiet, gentle man whom I never really knew. Few close friends. Neither drank nor smoked. From a family of small farmers (landowners, my mother said), shop-keepers (business men, my mother said), school-teachers, mini­ sters, and religious maniacs. Only once do I remember hearing him curse. It was after dinner, one summer night. I was eight or nine. He was puttering around in the cellar where he had a workbench of a sort (with gardening, his only hobby). My mother had been pestering him to do some kind of kitchen chore, repairing the icebox or fixing a light or something. Kept calling him to come up from the cellar which he finally did. Grudgingly. Rummaged around beneath the sink where he'd left a heavy wrench or something. Straightened up too soon. Banged his head terribly, knocked off his glasses, crushed them with his feet or the wrench, I could hear the lenses tinkling, he was terribly near-sighted. Damn, he said, not loud but deep. On his hands and knees, fumbling amongst the broken lenses, rubbing his bruised head. Damn. GodAlmighty, JesusCHRIST, GODDAMN! Walter! How could you! Mother's back straight as an arrow. Trans­ fixed him with a glance. Damn, he said again, trying to straighten out the bent frame. GODALMIGHTY JESUSCHRISTGODDAMN.

90 Mother went to her room, closed the door, stayed there for a week. I never heard him curse again.

(2) He made things grow. A few weeks before my eleventh birthday I was haunted. Maniacs in the next county had predicted the world would come to an end. Precisely at midnight, at a specified date in late September. Sold all their belongings and took refuge on a nearby hill (hardly even a hill, this was flat country). Waiting to be saved. All others would be damned. I was terrified. Fear and dread my constant companions. ' Dared not tell anybody. Tried, but couldn't do it. Joined the Episcopal Church (my father was a vestryman) before my eleventh birthday, youngest child ever. Tried to talk about the end of the world with the minister. Could not. That last night was agony. Lay in bed staring, waiting for heavens to open. Finally tiptoed down hall to parents' bedroom. Door ajar but I knocked as I'd been taught to. My father and mother were sitting by the open windows. It was hot for late September and they had turned off the lights against the mos- quitos. From the bedtable the lemony odor of a citronella candle. Patches of fog a few feet above the ground and from the bay the recurring blaaaaat of a foghorn. "Yes?" my mother said, without turning from the window. Courage, resolve, left me, I mumbled something, and retreated. A few minutes later I heard my father's knock at my door. He didn't speak. Just pulled a chair close to my bed. Scratched my back. You're feverish, son, he said. Sat there beside me in silence. Put his hand on mine. Said nothing, just sat there in the darkness, his hand lightly on mine, listening to the sound of the foghorn and looking out into the dark garden and the tall wildcherry trees beyond the vegetable patch. A dam in me broke. Is the world really going to come to an end tonight? I told him everything. He didn't say anything. Just sat there. No, he said, finally. The world's not going to come to an end tonight. Patted my hand. The world's always coming to an end, son. For somebody. But not for us, not tonight. Not for us. Ran his hands through my hair. You need a haircut, son. We'll go to the barber's tomorrow. Squeezed my hand, started to say something, tiptoed away. A taciturn man, not given to demonstrations.

91 Judith Minty

RAVEN

I

For three days, his shrieks ripped through the woods. And I, not knowing what or who, would miss a step in the cabin, still my cup between table and lips, hold breath near the ribs.

Things turn when you're alone. Smoke doesn't rise, trees walk at night. Sometimes the mind twists into grotesque shapes.

On Thursday then, in a gash above the falls, his shadow crossed the river and he opened his throat to me. I held myself in the dark circle, and was caught by the thrust of his beak.

II

Child in veil and white dress, a taking in: the wafer melts on my tongue. Later, the other sacraments, but words twist, grow ragged, scatter like feathers.

Now that he has found where I live, he will always be here. I creep under his wings and he follows, ruffling robes, reciting matins.

If I open the door, he will perhaps swoop down and enter. This box of a house, the place of annointment. Kneeling, lips to the river's curtain, I begin crossing over.

92 Philip Dacey

HOPKINS TO HIS JESUIT SUPERIOR

No, I must not, must not now continue Taking from God by acts of love for This world in the journal I told you of His time, what I have and owe, not own. Father, give me permission for penance To close that book against the flora Of countryside and fauna of men's speech I fill it with out of curiosity. Curious. Akin to care. I care for What I should not. The trees take me Into themselves. I wept last week To see one cut down, but before Drew it, line and word, but no good It is gone. I cannot guess it anymore. And I will come after it and so must turn From those poor pages, even poems, Father, forgive me, and shut my eyes To better see the light I, let me, live for.

No, no, you need not say it, I know This world is His as much as that one is, Time and eternity cross in the mystery Mastery of the moment, Being is Here, Presence present, But in disguise, wearing the world, And I watch too well the wearing, The mere dress, dross. That cedar, The great one on the walk to the grove, Smells in the sun, its bark, but not In the shade. And in the cedar A pigeon, yesterday, a tiny crush Of satin green clear, hidden, clear As the head bobbed above the breast. I love the sun-bark and the green light On the neck. If observation were prayer, My poor notebook would see me into heaven.

93 O I am windy, blow, would grieve a

Gale. Let only my silence be heard. For me, for long, the Via Negativa. Yes I know Christ is the word, But, see, he too went in the tomb. The world's too wide, I need less room.

MATER INVESTIDA

(Editor's note: The following two items, a letter from Gerard Manley Hopkins to Robert Bridges and a journal-entry by Hopkins constituting the three pages heretofore missing from Manuscript C.1I, Bodl, were recently discovered together among papers of the late Col. Andrew Hough Bridges, grandson of the laureate.)

I

Manresa House, Roehampton, April 9, 1874

Dearest Bridges,—Do you think you cd. locate and send me a copy of Kerr's Ecclesias­ tical Entries? Our library's is listed as missing. I'm told Kerr speculates that some early Christian cults experimented with a blend of sex and religion. Scandal put a stop to them (not quickly, took decades, he says) and Christianity went off in a different direction. Veered angelically. (Now you'll have something else to hold against the Roman Church.) No doubt Kerr's aim is wild but I shd. like to see if he can help me live with a dream I was visited, invaded, by last week. I'll spare you the disturbing details. I'll be on retreat here from the 12th to the 18th but can receive the book after that. Gratefully and affectionately. Gerard

II April 3, 1874

I must record it Before I forget it, though The memory shall only Bring me pain: Christ, His Mother Naked on a throne. He the infant propped On her knee. Both of them crowned, The effect would have been comic Had not a lurid light hung Heavily upon Their bodies. They looked At each other, as they do In various images,

94 But with some knowledge between Them too advanced for An infant and too Ripe for a holy virgin. Nor was the form of her flesh Restrained but expressed itself Clearly and with much Emphasis. Coarseness Even. How to describe it? But of course—the exhibit at The Victoria and Albert Museum! Only A few days ago. It must have slipped into last Night's dream. Stone- and earthen-ware Recently excavated From the bowels of Crete. One terra-cotta Figure in particular— A goddess, 50 B. C— Held me to it. Her. So much So one of the young Scholastics I took With me commented on my Rapt manner. I overheard: "Father Hopkins would seem to Have a new subject For meditation. And other than Ignatian." (The tone was respectful if Puckish.) She was roughcast. Bold­ ly inattentive To refinement. No Less powerful, though, for that; Rather, more. As if all her Great energy were released Through the familiar Way she addressed (touched Deeply, was deeply touched by) The raw. Her several dear Parts were too large for her frame, Pushed forward to tell Reproduction. Fruit.

95 Were not too large. Told truth. Told With so pronounced an accent I listened, lovingly, as Once, in Wales, learned new (To me) from hillfolk Old words. Thick on the tongue. And Sweet. So it was with Mary. But no, she was no statue; Saw her breathe. And if She didn't move with Dramatic fullness, gestures Dropping a brood of meaning, It was because she didn't Have to. (She did, for One brief moment, seem To point, with the hand free Of the child, at her naked Self. Or was the finger at The breast aimed beyond, Where heart hid? Who knows Which? It was the quickest sign, For the quickest quick. And I Asleep. I missed. Mother, help.) But how express with What stiff shock (shame? what Name?) I marked were Heaven's queen, Who bore Him whom alone I Love (loves me now less and less, Seems to, what loss, mine) And who on high is (Was where she walked) lady-thin, Gave way to heavy, pendent Fleshfolds, gatherings thickpitched Towards earth, godgraced, gross? Cannot. Can only Record one more, greater, shock: The babe turned and I saw was No longer the babe, was I. Hopkins-faced. And old. Or, say, not fresh. Say, Experienced, Above the babe's Body. (Did I shiver then In sleep? I shiver now.) Saw

96 Too, as if as part Of that image these Other images: myself As substitute on the cross And loved lover of the well, Woman. She was that. Rosa caelestis. Rosa mystica. Rosa Incarnata. At the smile On his (my) lips, a smile like That of one stole back What once was his by Rights but since lost, I woke. In A sweat. Prayed God grant me dreams More pure. If it be His will. I must burn this.

KNOWING HOW EASILY

The old rajah on his elephant rides on a sea of wrinkled skin. The gray waves beneath his little cask swell with the constancy of an aged woman's breast as she lies beside her lover of fifty years. The Brahmin knowing how easily one form slips into another closes his eyes and rocks to the elephant's amble. He is aware that in the soft dip and roll of this large silver animal water has disciplined itself to walk on the land.

97 THE INGROWN TIGER

Now he is gold— so strong that he has breathed in his black stripes. They lie just beneath the pelt like a double set of ribs. Vaulted arches, they outline the long nave where a sleek yellow sun lies at full length to worship himself.

Gail Trebbe

PENELOPE for Gary

When I say no to the men who would substitute for you the negative rises like a buoy weighted underwater. It cuts its shape through their speculations.

They had imagined me a pier hungrily cupping an ellipse of air after the ship has sailed. And they have rushed to fill me in.

I admit I have amused the potential. Some bright afternoon, our shuttered bedroom, I would kick your pillow to the floor and take him into me— a startling new composition of muscles and breaths.

For, truly, you are an absence. I have noticed, for instance, how the bath soap shrinks almost imperceptibly, how the pantry is stocked with only my tastes.

98 Still, you resonate in these rooms as the sun echoes in a stone after night has cooled the air.

And I am learning there's an art to missing you.

On a certain Japanese screen unpainted symmetries slip into the harmony of bamboo trees. Into the spaces the mind must enter to spread its fertile field.

All summer your spaces have glided like counterpoints along the edges of my movements. Until you return no one can fill them. Not even you.

Christopher Howell

SPRING STORM

Rain. Rain sonatas of blood-dark smoke lash the new thaw. Trees bow, shy girls at a party, then churn with sudden velocity like acres of hair exploding toward Colorado. Men in offices shout into their collars. The sidewalks disappear without regret. Drowning, the everyday monsters sprawl in the streets, their pink and green smiles beginning to run.

II

After the storm I walk along railroad tracks out of town. The teacup moon tilts under silver edged clouds, massive black in their centers. Urgently the stars hurl light at me through the intergalactic weave. They have a message perhaps.

99 Ill

Cars snore in the puddle-heavy drives on High Street. Their gleaming skins toss the moon and stars back into darkness. There is no message. In the dream of John the gravedigger everyone dies at once, except the servants and members of his fraternity. I walk by his little gravedigger's house just as this dream is escaping, serpentine, a vowel of light, a bee-swarm whirling through rain to the next flowering mind.

SADNESS IS NOT BEAUTIFUL for Rod

.Sadness is not beautiful. It is the cold cup through which the starving see children they may only be imagining. It is dreams in the corroded face of 1912's roundup queen. It is lying about murder.

It is not in your "mind's eye," or "plain as day." It is not "oh Linda, the sea gulls, it's our song." It is not "carnations," or "1946 oh my loss." It is combing

the beach, perhaps; but hopelessly or with the need to rape. It does fly through lonesome cities . . . like doves turning poison in the rest-home park. And it is on Stanyan Street, Rod, among the graves of marketable feeling, all the headstones reeling, limp with bad lines' and your name.

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[email protected] Malcolm Stiles McCollum

WINTER, 1944

The sky of French winter Settles on red tile roofs. Black oak trunks open and splinter And heave silently cuffed

By shrapnel on a far hill. Villagers scurry under their plumes From door to door and lesser generals Sit worrying in commandeered rooms.

Colonels pass brandy to majors. There is much talk of strategy Fear lights cigarettes and labored Tactics blurt from startled proteges.

In the cellar of the butcher Ike juggles three wooden balls Smooth as black market butter One rises as another falls.

In Huertgen Forest death bellows And thrashes, blood flows in brown trenches In the snow. Ike juggles in the cellar. Tout. Rien. Ike often thinks in French

Of what must be done. Practice. Cold as the limestone of these buried walls. One must escape from all tactics. Two hands. At least three balls.

117 REVIEWS

FOR FRIENDS ONLY

Anais Nin. Waste of Timelessness and Other Early Stories. Weston, Conn., Magic Circle Press. Distributed by Walker and Company, 720 Fifth Avenue, New York. 105 pp. $7.95.

With unnecessary modesty the late Anais Nin prefaced Waste of Timelessness and Other Early Stories with the remark, "This is a book for friends only"—as though her beginnings as writer would be of interest only to sympathetic readers. These beginnings, however, have not only the "irony and the first hints of feminism" that she notes but are passionate narrative expressions of the awakening of Nin as artist and as woman. Stirred by song, by stretch of beach, by book, especially by the life of words, Nin begins to write stories just as she learns hungrily new words that

penetrated her with a sweetness, sometimes like a caress, and sometimes they burst on her like explosive revelations, filled her with a clamor of joy and excitement. They were miraculous; they not only named what was there before her, but revealed the incredible existence of vaster and even more fantastic worlds . . .

Anais Nin's books now published by commercial presses (the pub­ lication of the one under review by the Magic Circle Press is simply an acknowledgement of the diarist's loyalty to the kind of small press that for years was the only one willing to take the risk of publishing her) are being read today not only by the underground, by college students, by women (some of whom almost worship her as a symbol of total female liberation) but by the ordinary reader interested in extraordinary experiences made accessible by radiant intelligence and a clear and emphatic vision. Waste of Timelessness takes us back to Nin's young years in Louveciennes, and in Paris where lovers meet in cafes, dances and artists work and talk, men and women find themselves by rejecting destructive loves. There are also stories about the craft of fiction, such as the story "Alchemy," in which the writer is shown to be dependent not on imitation but on transformation. A poodle in real life may

118 become a child in fiction; a mistress may become model for wife, and wife for mistress. The recently published erotica of Anais Nin entitled Delta of Venus begins and ends in passion, but a reading of this early work shows that though she presumably wrote her erotica for money, passion is a natural source of all her fiction—just as a passion for a total life is the source of the excitement of the journals. In these stories as in later ones Nin demonstrates how passivity is destructive of love, and in this recurrent theme she is much influenced by a dominant influence in her writing life, D. H. Lawrence. Over and over again, Nin makes dramatically clear that without what she calls "human plenitude" there is no love. It is the "passive, uncreative woman" who not only destroys herself but also her lover. It is the clinging woman as she relates in "Our Minds Are Engaged" who weakens men—"clinging did not make [her] . . . feel whole." And the woman who silences the "world of [her] own inside of [her] head" is a venom of love, for a passive woman induces male tyranny, that is, to Nin, an expression of the lover's incapacity to love through strength. He can love only through a weakness of his beloved. The lover who asks of his beloved to "Be small, be creepy, warm and mindless" is seeking a victim, not a beloved; is seeking to torment, not to love. Not all of Nin's early stories are so overtly and uncomfortably didactic but it is true that despite the intensity of feeling that emerges there is a weakness in the telling. Dialogue is awkward, heavy handed. Occasionally too the language the writer uses is embarrassingly "poet­ ic" (as in the quoted passage above). Words and images are employed for their own sake. One yearns for the directness of her diaries (which, of course, she was writing even earlier than these stories—from age 11 on) when one reads a sentence like this one from "The Dance Which Could Not be Danced": "Life was gathered around the fountain, in the sybaritic women carrying water, in the raising of their arms to sustain the jugs on their heads, in the sibilance of the water and the women's voices, and life was in the spiritous sunlight splintering the air to isolate shadows." (Oh the follies, the passionate love of language of the young writer!) But then there is the occasional strong statement, the consequence of intelligence and humanity, just as in the later stories and essays. In the following statement from the story already mentioned called "Our Minds Are Engaged"—much of which is in dialogue—Nin can write with uncluttered efficiency: "Irony is a form of lucidity. It is a cooling off of the mind." Again, though at times Nin invests the artist and bohemian with excessive glamor she shows how from her early work on she was able

119 to assert the importance of gaiety in the lives of all, not only in that of the bohemian. To Nin, one is always creating and revivifying the self. It is never static. In "A Spoiled Party" in this volume she uses the symbol of the party, as she would later brilliantly use it in Ladders to Fire, as a way of reducing the narrow self to absurdity. She demonstrates here that the self created not from within but from false (what then would be called "bourgeois") values is a monstrous embodiment of self- seeking power. The story, the most inventive in the collection, makes the hostess of the party, Mrs. Stellam, a mockery of gaiety. Her "very long, very glossy turquoise-colored eyes and sienna hair which stood out around her head airily" are manifestations of joylessness and death. In Mrs. Stellam's evasion of self she is a mere clown walking. It is of course too early to draw conclusions about the works of Anais Nin, but to this reader at least it is not the women's movement that has made her work more attractive, though certainly the move­ ment has had some effect; it is the seriousness of the work itself revealed even in these early stories, its psychological richness, its vision of the creative union of two, each independent, each seeking a completion of the self not through the other but with the other, with respect for the other's desires and passions. This vision of the self, and the other, anticipated in America by half a century the revolution of female consciousness. Anais Nin knew in her twenties that the world inside one's head is made richer when the other too has a world inside her head. The search for self must come first, Anais Nin says over and over again (and this is what has been called disparagingly the "narcissicism" in the diaries). The self, she writes in "The Song in the Garden", needs "not the key to the universe; the universe [is] in her."

Harriet Zinnes

RICE AND REVOLUTION— or Why we Bombed in Vietnam

Agrarian Revolution: Social Movements and Export Agriculture in the Underdeveloped World. Jeffery M. Paige, The Free Press (Mac- millan), New York, 1975 (435 pages), $15.95.

Peasants comprise the vast bulk of the world's population, and in the 20th century peasants have provided the social bases for the great agrarian upheavals in Mexico, Russia, China, Cuba, Algeria, Viet Nam as well as the less dramatic transformations of nations such as Peru and Angola.

120 A number of scholars have published books developing their own theory of peasant revolution such as historian E. J. Hobsbawm's Prim­ itive Rebels (1959), sociologist Barrington Moore's Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (1966), and anthropologist Eric Wolfe's Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century (1969) to mention three of the most famous. Agrarian Revolution: Social Movements and Export Agriculture in the Underdeveloped World, by sociologist Jeffery Paige (now at the University of Michigan) is also about peasants as well as other workers of the soil. It is a long (376 pages of text), carefully- argued and altogether brilliant addition to our understanding of the special problem of agrarian revolution and to the general social situ­ ation of what anthropologist Ralph Linton once called "most of the world." Because it is a difficult book (theoretically, methodologically and substantively) and because its topic is seemingly remote from the daily cares of most Americans some contextual comments are in order. At the most practical level Agrarian Revolution can be read as a guide to the meaning behind the confusion of items in the back pages of the world press. C. Wright Mills once argued that the ultimate test of the social imagination was the capacity to read a good newspaper intelligently. Having read Paige's book, the world-wide reports of agrarian land invasions, farmer protests, guerrilla movements and agricultural labor reform actions will never look the same. Indeed, once one reads the book, the American debacle in Viet Nam takes on radically altered meaning. Had scholarship such as Agrarian Revolu­ tion been available in the late 50's or even early 60's (when Viet Nam was still strictly back page stuff) it is at least debatable whether or not we would have ever gotten involved. Knowledge (of Paige's sort) is power and this suggests a second important way of viewing Agrarian Revolution—as a grounding for foreign policy. In this context it matters not a whit whether one is radical, liberal, conservative or deep-dyed reactionary; the book is basic reading for those interested in linking knowledge to action. A third way of seeing the book is as a sophisticated yet simple demonstration that a materialist strategy works in explaining a broad range of complex social patterns regardless of local customs, tradi­ tions, ideas, beliefs, values, religions, philosophies, or even personality and family systems. In other words, the theory explains social move­ ments and related behavior without even passing reference to what it has become customary since Marx's time to call "ideological" factors. A final and not least important way of placing Paige's book is to recognize that it adds a new dimension to the tradition in large scale comparative work in the social and historical fields, the kind of work

121 which we still associate with Alexis de Tocqueville (on France and the United States, and indirectly England, Germany and Russia) and with the Max Weber of Economy and Society and the wide-ranging studies in religion and economic rationality. This tradition was almost lost in the United States in the first half of this century, almost buried under the combined assault of social problems studies, social psychological studies of attitudes and opinion and the zealous diligence of abstract quantifiers. No longer. Since the late 1950's a major resurgence in macro-comparative and historical-comparative work has emerged. Paige adds greatly to the renaissance and enlargement of this 19th century style. The book divides neatly into three closely related subsections: 1) the theoretical argument, 2) the world-wide empirical test of the theory, and 3) the application of the theory and the world survey to three archetypical case studies which add refinement and concrete reality to the theoretical abstraction. These case studies involve labor reform movements and land revolts (or invasions) in Peru, nationalist revolu­ tionary movements in Angola, and socialist revolutionary movements in Viet Nam. We need to take each of the three subsections of the book in order: 1) Like most powerful theories Paige's argument is surprisingly (and believably) simple. Also like all good theories, as Einstein enjoyed pointing out, it tells us what to look for. Facts are without end (as in telephone directories); only good theories can give limit to their creeping tyranny. At the center of the theoretical stage in Agrarian Revolution stand two major social antagonists, the landlords and the peasants (or farmers), the owners of rural production and the workers on the land, or in Paige's more universal terms, simply the "cultivators and the non-cultivators." Our contestants in this play of agrarian life are stripped to their basic essentials; their relationship is defined by the most elementary and perhaps still most effective definition of social class: access to the means of livelihood, control over the sources and types of income. The stage is set and the relationships of the actors defined. What now determines the exact nature of the action is first and foremost the specific source of income of the two players: a) income from the land, b) income generated from highly capitalized agricultural investment or c) income from wages earned in agricultural work. Land, capital and wages understood as income sources are in turn directly related to the systems of land tenure in the types of agriculture enterprises found in agrarian settings: a) commercial haciendas (where the income source for both cultivators and non-cultivators is from the land), b) modern

122 plantations (cultivators get wages, non-cultivators derive their income from capital), c) independent small-hold farmer systems (non-cultiva­ tors have capital and cultivators have land), d) sharecropper systems (non-cultivators have land and cultivators get wages) and finally e) migratory labor systems (where also, non-cultivators have and land and cultivators get wages). These five types of agricultural enterprises and their associated income sources are the arenas in which the culti­ vators of the land find themselves pitted against the non-cultivating elites, and this typology more or less exhausts the world-types of non-subsistence agricultural enterprises. These enterprises are in turn strongly influenced by the kind of world export crop which is produced on the land: coffee, sugar, tea, rubber, bananas, cocoa, cotton, tobacco, wool, rice, wheat, sisal and so forth. Paige is arguing then that the specific crop powerfully influences the type of rural agricultural enterprise, which in turn produces a given income source and that this determines the nature of class conflict (or its absence) in rural areas. And in closing the theoretical ring he argues that these differing patterns of class pressure result in the specific social and political forms taken by world-wide social movements in peasant and farmer societies: a) land revolts or invasions in hacienda systems, b) labor reform movements in plantations, c) commodity control and credit reform movements in small, free farmer systems, d) socialist revolutionary movements in sharecropper systems, and e) nationalist (ethnic) revolutionary movements in migratory labor estate systems.

The precise arguments which link all these factors to one another are much too complex to go into here. Suffice it to say that the degree of flexibility available in the income sources of non-cultivating elites to meet the demands of the cultivators is one critical factor in determining the type of social and political movement. For instance, such flexibility is essentially nil (or zero-sum) for elites who gain their livelihood solely from the land while it is much more open where high capitalization is involved. Thus haciendas, sharecropping and migratory labor estates are relatively rigid and unyielding where plantations and freehold sys­ tems are more open to change, and this has parallel consequences for the nature and number of social movements. (This is still very much too simple a rendering of Paige's theory but it perhaps suggests one central theoretical link in the chain of causation.)

What all this amounts to is that Agrarian Revolution's theory can make sense of everything from the relative passivity of the social classes in the migratory labor estate systems of the Guatemalan high­ lands to the explosions of the same general type of system in Algeria, Angola and Kenya; from the docility of Ceylon's great tea plantations to the revolutionary eruptions on Malaya's (so-called) rubber "planta-

123 tions"; from the sharecropper benignity of the American Deep South and Middle East (Egypt, Syria and Turkey) cotton producers to the revolutionary violence of the rice sharecroppers in Viet Nam and the Hukbalahap of Luzon; from the populist commodity and credit pro­ tests of small-hold free farmers of the great plains in the United States and Canada from the 1880's.to the 1940's to the land invasions of High Peru in the early 1960's. 2) Paige tests his theory with a sophisticated array of quantitative techniques using primary newspaper sources to map the social move­ ments or "agrarian events." He also uses secondary literature which gathers and organizes data on such events in Latin America, Africa and Asia. The empirical test of the theory uses data drawn from 70 societies, representing 135 different agricultural export sectors and involving over 1,600 agrarian social movement "events" for the years 1948-1970. The data support the general theory and in most cases strikingly so. Paige exercises a variety of controls on his data, and his analysis is especially subtle in his use of what social scientists call "path diagrams", diagrams aimed at tracing the relative impact of each component of a simultaneously acting set of causes. 3) The theory and the evidence of the world survey of social movements are both brought down to earth and into history in the longest part of the book with Paige's case studies of Peru, Angola and Viet Nam. Viet Nam is perhaps his toughest case and there Paige demon­ strates what the French and the Americans learned the hard and tragic way, that rice sharecropping tenancy systems are a tinderbox of class conflict. He shows that the RAND Corporation (Edward J. Mitchell) and Paul Mus and his students (Frances FitzGerald of Fire in the Lake and John T. McAlister, Jr.) as well as other studies over­ looked the true locus of revolutionary forces by concentrating on the Viet Nam central lowlands (RAND) and on the political integration in the villages (Mus, et al.) rather than on the economic reality of absentee ownership and parasitic rice sharecropping in the Mekong Delta. The Peruvian case is the most complex, with highly capitalized sugar plantations (the world's most productive) in the northern coastal valleys developing strong reformist labor movements (A.P.R.A., left- wing rhetoric notwithstanding), while the haciendas of the highlands (in wool, wheat and coffee) produced more volatile land invasions on the part of the peasants. Yet, in accordance with the theory, even though these High Peru land invasions of the early 60's destroyed an entire feudal class the peasants were essentially conservative in their

124 orientation. Furthermore, peasants invaded only in those areas where international agricultural export markets had fully penetrated the otherwise subsistence based haciendas. Agrarian Revolution is a book about the fundamental causes of rural social movements on a world-wide scale. But it is not a book that can explain the form or shape which actual governments may take even when they are based upon such movements. For that we need a different kind of theory, perhaps more like the one Barrington Moore has pioneered in Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy. Nonetheless with Paige's book we travel a good way down the road to a truly general theory of comparative political sociology. The book has won high praise and a top prize, and while it needs to be extended to other case studies and to include additional export sector data we already have a model to emulate. Whatever one's politics, Agrarian Revolution is essential reading for policy makers and for individuals interested in understanding the back pages of newspapers before those stories become front page head­ lines. It is no less a gold-mine for any historian wishing to explain rather than narrate history, and I expect to see Paige's ideas applied to the data of history in a dozen or more ways in the years ahead. Few social scientists have developed and tested a theory as substantively power­ ful as Jeffery Paige's, and because of its power we may expect to see it attract wide attention, in particular from those convinced that history has a pattern—that it is not "just one damn thing after another."

Kim Rodner

A CALLING TO AFFLICTION

Considering the shortness and relative obscurity of her life, one is struck by the fascination Simone Weil has had since her death for so many in Europe and America. Her own writings and those of others about her have been considerable. The most recent treatment is an extensive biography by Simone Petrement entitled Simone Weil: A Life (New York: Pantheon Books, 1976), translated from the French by Raymond Rosenthal. Mile. Petrement, doctor of philosophy and doctor of letters, was a close lifelong friend of Simone Weil and has done exhaustive research trying to present and interpret the activities and reflections of a complex person against the background essentially of the period between the two world wars. In some sense one may regard this as an official biography, for it is hard to imagine a future account with access to much further information, let alone to the judgments of those who knew Simone Weil personally.

125 The reader has a right to wonder whether this account borders on the hagiographic, whether the author was too close to the subject to be genuinely objective. While this reviewer cannot pretend to be familiar with all the evidence cited, let alone to have an informed and independent basis by which to evaluate this evidence, one is struck by Simone Petrement's attempMo include alternative and critical inter­ pretations of Simone Weil as person, as writer, and as relentless seeker after truth and justice. If the author is immensely appreciative of Mile. Weil's quality of mind and honesty as a human being, one has the sense that this biography seeks not only to revere but to represent faithfully an odyssey which comes alive precisely because one is presented with a life filled with self-doubt, inner struggles, and torment about contradictions within herself, as she sought to recon­ cile a passion for both truth and a just social order. Within her lifetime, and since, she has been labelled a "Jewish anti-Semite", "obsessive- compulsive", a "bleeding heart liberal", a "turncoat radical", an "iconoclast-Christian", a "self-immolationist", a "romanticist", and the like. One can understand the basis for many of these labels, but each fails to capture the complexity of the person. In a short review one cannot do justice to the details of an elaborately documented, 540- page account; one can only underscore several themes which this account highlights. At the end of the review a caveat will be raised about the book qua biography.

Born into a cultured and liberal Jewish family in Paris, Simone Weil and her older brother Andre showed early signs of genius. With a passion for literature, Simone was reading and reciting Cyrano de Bergerac when she was six, scenes from Corneille and Racine at age seven, and had read Crime and Punishment at thirteen. By the time she was ten, with the Great War just concluded, she had become vitally interested in politics and was thought by some to be a com­ munist even then. In these early years the two most enduring passions of her life began to be manifest, namely, a deeply felt concern for the fate of the poor and a conviction that anyone "can penetrate to the kingdom of truth ... [if he] concentrates all his attention upon its attainment" (22) By the time she was enrolled at Henri IV Lycee in 1925 these equally powerful concerns had become commitments which shaped the remainder of her life. On the one hand, there was "the revolt against the social order, the feelings of indignation and severity towards the powers-that-be, the choice of the poor as com­ rades and companions" (25). On the other hand, particularly under the influence of the philosopher Alain (Emile Chartier) who was her intellectual mentor for the next several years, she cultivated "a spirit of inquiry, of resistance, the determination to judge freely and to keep

126 the powers-that-be—which in Alain's view always want to tyrannize— within their just limits through the force of control exerted by opinion" (25). Through the maturing of these two passions, her life combined a sensitive instinct for justice with a persistent questioning of all social structures and ideological postures. Her biographer indicates that there were two principal periods in Simone Weil's adult life, one in which she was actively involved in political or economic movements of various sorts and the other (beginning around 1934) in which she drifted away from these involve­ ments out of disillusionment with their ends for society as well as their means. The book devotes approximately equal attention to both periods and shows how in the mid-thirties there was an agonizing and self-critical transition from political activism to a more reflective questioning of the several social forces which were in contention in Europe prior to World War II. During her years at the Ecole Normale (1928-31) she became distrustful of belonging to any organization or party, because of its implicit claims to truth, and inclined toward a deeper kind of radicalism which recognized that "in order to become master of oneself one must know that one is not God" (65). While this did not keep her from political activity or prevent her from writing voluminously about the economic and political order, it did generate in her a permanent conviction that all human structures were funda­ mentally opposed to authentic freedom. During this first period her hopes lay with the unions and while she was employed as a teacher in lycees variously at Le Puy, Auxerre and Roanne (1931-34) she worked on behalf of trade union unity and toward helping workers attain knowledge and culture as a means toward their own liberation. At Le Puy especially she established her solidarity with unemployed laborers, writing communiques and arti­ cles, demonstrating with them in their causes, and was labelled in print as a militant agitator, as the "red virgin of the tribe of Levi, bearer of the Muscovite gospels" (114). Throughout her activist years she remained primarily concerned about how to analyze the real causes of economic and political oppression. Initially, she was outspoken against "technology as the most truly oppressive feature of capitalism" (122), seeing the worker as dominated by instead of being liberated through modern machines. In the summer of 1932 she visited Germany to understand the strength of Nazism's appeal, observed the clashes between the Com­ munist Party and the Social Democrats there, and returned to France having lost all respect for communism as a movement and for the Soviet Union as a socio-political model. Her disillusionment with the U.S.S.R. lay essentially in its having substituted one form of subor-

127 dination of the workers (under capitalist production) for another (under state bureaucracy). During the next two years she wrote a large number of articles about the failure of the Russian revolution, about the plight of the worker in the Soviet Union, about Marx's mis­ guided assurances of what post-capitalist society would be like, and about the growing captivity~of labor unions to political ideology. It became her conviction both that a "bureaucracy always betrays" (151) and that one cannot possibly understand the real nature of industrial oppression, let alone write about it convincingly, unless one experiences this directly. This belief grew in part out of an earlier desire to do manual work herself as a way of breaking down the false split between reflection and work, for "thought, value and existence are the same thing" (67). The real revolution is the triumph of the rational (208); it is the resistance to all forms of centralization (212).

This led to the second principal period in her life, one in which she sought for firsthand experience with affliction, going beyond the vicari­ ous affliction she had felt since her early adolescence. She began to see more distinctly the dangers of loving and suffering only through the imagination and was convinced that separation of mind and body was a violation of the human spirit. While this was a distinctly new stage in her career, it included basic continuities with the past, mostly in her continued identification with "the humiliated layers of the social hierarchy". "She always struggled for them and with them, wanting to be on their side whatever happened. She never gave up the fight against the forces of oppression and, for this reason, she involved herself in dangerous and unusual undertakings. She passionately and obstinately searched for the truth, and in the most diverse domains" (214). What had been a somewhat abstract identification became over the better part of a year, during which she took a leave of absence from teaching and worked in several factory positions, a genuine sharing of affliction. She had hoped that this experience might make evident to her how industrialized existence could become more humane. She admitted later that she had discovered no fundamental solutions to the problems of how factory life should be reorganized, but she learned, as she could not have otherwise, the humiliation experienced by the workers, the fact that oppression induces not rebellion but submission, and, to her surprise and sadness, that little sense of fraternity existed within the ranks of labor. These eight months of extremely hard work (for one who was as frail as she had always been) sobered her visions of what was seemingly possible and increased her pessimism about the claims of each political or economic nostrum of the day. As her biographer makes clear, it was this first­ hand experiencing of affliction which both signalled an end to her

128 youth, with its fierce idealism, and began to produce a softening of her nature, thereby opening up depths within her that were not evident before. In attempting to explain to others why this sort of identification was crucial, Simone Weil wrote: "It is very difficult to judge from above, and it is very difficult to act from below. That, I believe, is in general one of the essential causes of human misery. And that is why I myself wanted to go right to the bottom and will perhaps return there." And, again, "I long with all my heart for the most radical possible transfor­ mation of the present regime in the direction of a greater equality. ... I do not at all believe that what is nowadays called revolution can bring this about" (256). Her brief participation in the Spanish Civil War in the late summer of 1936 as a member of the militia of the central anarchist trade union movement only confirmed her awareness that the power struggles between fascism and communism throughout Europe were forms of idolatry and madness that revealed on both sides ideological blindness and an incapacity to create a just social order. She noted the failure of imagination throughout the modern scene and was especially critical of communism, for which she earlier had serious hopes: "... it is always dangerous to have a doctrine behind you, and especially one that includes the dogma of progress and an unshakable confidence in history and in the masses. Marx is not a good author for forming the capacity of judgment. Machiavelli is better" (312).

While there was yet time in the late thirties, she concentrated her efforts less on the trade union movement, which she saw to be dying, than on supporting the struggle of colonial peoples for eventual liber­ ation, on furthering work in behalf of political refugees, and in arguing the cause of peace though she increasingly realized the futility of this for the immediate future. During these years she wrote a great deal about the horrors of force and centralization, seeing Europe's current idealization of power as a legacy of the Roman Empire which epito­ mized to her the adulation of conquest. Turning primarily to the past for insight, she refined her philosophy of history, stripping it of all illusion: "I would suggest that barbarism be considered as a permanent and universal human characteristic that becomes more or less pro­ nounced according to the play of circumstances. ... I would be pre­ pared to present this postulate: that we are always barbarous toward the weak. Or at least, ... we are always barbarous toward the weak unless we make an effort of generosity that is as rare as genius" (361). The most significant influences upon her thinking in this period, other than the events of the day, were varied and included the Iliad, the Greek tragedies, many Shakespearean plays, the Gospels, The Epic of

129 Gilgamesh, the Bhagavad-Gita, as well as broad readings in European history, especially pre-seventeenth century history. Throughout her intellectual quest at this point she was seeking to combine a stark sobriety about the human condition with an effort to understand the roots of human dignity. During these years she fashioned her own understanding of the necessity of affliction. She was clear to distin­ guish a vocation for affliction from a desire for affliction, the latter being a form of self-indulgence. In her mind, the necessity of affliction (malheur) arises naturally out of a passionate desire for justice and the willingness to identify with those who suffer. "Since affliction exists in the world, she found it difficult to go without her share of it; and above all she believed that one must share in it so as to understand how one can remedy it. Furthermore, she thought later on that only through affliction can one come to know the truth of existence, the complete and absolute truth" (516). Much has been written about Simone Weil's religious pilgrimage, about her mystical experience of Christ in 1938, about her repeated conversations with certain Christians about being baptized, and about her persistent decision not to join the Church. The Petrement bio­ graphy is especially helpful on this final phase of her life, one which became more intense in the five years prior to her death in 1943. Basic, of course, for an understanding of this period are her own works: Gravity and Grace, Waiting for God, The Need for Roots, as well as her Notebooks. A short review cannot adequately rehearse these developments; it can perhaps suggest the basic continuity they had with her earlier attempts to become one with those who suffered and yet retain her own independence of thought and conscience. Her disillusionment with the coercion implicit in all political parties and movements evolved naturally into her suspicions that the Church values man's loyalty and allegiance more than his independence of mind and spirit. The record of the Church's declarations of "Anathema sit ..." upon all deviations of doctrine was an historical flag of warning that it called for a level of devotion owed only to God. While she ago­ nized over whether there was in fact salvation outside of the Church, she instinctively repudiated the ancient doctrine of "nulla salus extra ecclesiam" for many reasons. Primarily, she believed that joining the Church would compromise her lifelong vocation to preserve freedom of thought. And, also, she refused the comfort of being baptized herself, despite her great longing for it, as long as this implied the excluding of any human being from such a community. In her words: ". . . when I think of the act by which I should enter the Church as something concrete, which might happen quite soon, nothing gives me more pain than the idea of separating myself from the immense and

130 unfortunate multitude of unbelievers" (451). This pain of separation from those who suffered is a thread which links together her reflec­ tions and activities from the start. While it is easy to be critical of the extent to which she carried this vocation for affliction, often to greatly impractical lengths, it is impossible to discredit its sincerity and the degree to which it ultimately contributed both to her spiritual travail and her dignity as a person. Several have seen in her life the evolution of saintliness. Simone Weil, on the other hand, referred to herself as "a rotten instrument". And yet, she carried a vision not simply of the possibility of reasoning creatures becoming freed from self-preoccupation and manipulation of others, but of the necessity of it. In the last months of her life she began to develop a conviction about the Church's fundamental vocation. In the words of her biographer: "Our epoch demands that universality, which in the past could be implicit, must now be fully explicit. It demands a new kind of saintliness. God's friends have the obligation to produce the genius to invent this new saintliness." Or, in Simone Weil's words: "The world needs saints who have genius, just as a plague-stricken town needs doctors. Where there is a need, there is also an obligation" (470). That final sentence could well be the epitaph for Simone Weil, for she was clearly one who sought to respond with mind as well as heart to the suffering to which she increasingly became sensitive. In conclusion, one must ask the question whether this book serves the basic purpose intended by the biographer, namely, to show how in Simone Weil "the bond between her life and her thought was inconceivably close" (viii). Even in relatively successful attempts at biography, the appropriate answer to such a question is "yes, but..." On the positive side, Simone Petrement has provided the reader with an immense amount of detail about the social and political involve­ ments of Mile. Weil which has hitherto not been available. One critic (Elizabeth Hardwick, The New York Times Book Review, January 23 and February 27, 1977), however, has maintained that "the life itself can scarcely be excavated beneath the lava" of the biographer's docu­ mentation. This is rebutted by Simone Weil's brother, Andre (see above, February 27, 1977), who claims that the Petrement work is "an indispensable companion to Simone Weil's own books and articles". My own judgment is that both are right. The reader is sometimes overwhelmed with detail, especially in pages 75-214 where one learns more about penguins than one wants to learn (in this case, the strug­ gles within the French trade union movement). One may share Ms. Hardwick's lassitude here and wish this section had been condensed, yet Andre Weil seems justified in implying that extensive documenta-

131 tion is essential to portraying adequately his sister's thought as well as her life. The debate is in part over what constitutes a biography, which cannot easily be resolved, and whether as carefully documented an account of Simone Weil's political activities as one has here blurs and obscures the subject or whether it serves to bring it into sharper focus. Without dodging that issue, this reviewer believes that, on the whole, Mile. Petrement's effort is successful, though there are long sections which could have been reduced or put into an Appendix. In any case, Andre Weil is correct in stating that the book "provides an irreplaceable guide and commentary to her writings, translated and untranslated, published and unpublished". Whether this constitutes biography in an artistic sense may be questioned, perhaps as much by the biographer as by anyone else, but what does emerge is both an assemblage of vital information and a coherent interpretation of a fascinating person "of transcendent intellectual gifts and the widest learning", who took upon herself the sufferings of humanity.

Bardwell L. Smith

CONTEXTS OF THE SELF

The Art of Life: Studies in American Autobiographical Literature, by Mutlu Konuk Blaising. Austin & New York, University of Texas Press, 1977. $11.95.

Article by article, book by book, critics are producing a literature on autobiography that has begun to rival that written on the novel in the fifties and sixties. We can trace the beginning of this critical concern to Roy Pascal's Design and Truth in Autobiography (1960), a work which defined, more completely and in greater detail than ever before, the particular nature, form, and development of autobiog­ raphy as a genre. In the years following, a smattering of books and articles on American and British autobiography began to fill in, piece by piece, the historical and theoretical picture for which Pascal had sketched the broader outlines. By 1970, the study of autobiography was no longer in the hands of a few, dedicated pioneers; critics everywhere were either exploring the development of the genre, offering detailed readings of texts that had previously been ignored, or working with problems of theory and definition, as the impressive writing of Daniel Shea, Carol Ohmann, F.R. Hart, and James Cox attests. Through the seventies, interest in autobiography has so increased that now our academic journals hardly seem complete without an article on the subject. Books proliferate too. Scanning the book ads in the January PMLA, I found announcements for three new

132 books on autobiography. Mutlu Blaising's The Art of Life brings that number to four. And rumor has it that at least six more manuscripts on autobiography are currently in preparation or in press. I mention this recent surge of interest in the genre not only to emphasize the timeliness of Blaising's discussion of American auto­ biographical literature, but also to highlight the uniqueness of her approach. Her discussion, in five chapters, of such autobiographical works as Walden, "Song of Myself," James's Prefaces, The Education of Henry Adams, Paterson, and O'Hara's poetry might lead one to believe that The Art of Life furthers the discussion of the development of American autobiography begun by Robert Sayre (The Examined Self) and Daniel Shea (Spiritual Autobiography in Early America). But from the start, Blaising disavows any intention to provide a survey or definitive theory of autobiography in America; she claims, in fact, that only "to a certain extent" is autobiography her subject in the book. For her "primary purpose is to develop a theory for talking about literature in general," one that counters the penchant of critics to read literature apart from the historical, cultural, and literary context which both nourishes and is nourished by a work. To this end, Blaising offers in her introduction a method for viewing literature not as static artifact or "relic," but as "ritual event," wherein the artist is seen as communicating formally with his age, with the past (including literary tradition as well as personal past), and with the future. Then, in individual chapters, she examines this interaction between history and form by analyzing each work according to the "dialogue of the artist, the art available to him, his psychic life, his culture, and his times," a method which allows, indeed requires, her to draw on the work of Freud or Jung, Langer or Husserl, Robbe-Grillet or Duchamp, that authority, in other words, who best illuminates the art, the artist, or the age. If Blaising's concern in The Art of Life is to define a critical approach to literature in general, then why does she make autobio­ graphical literature in America the focus of her study? In the first place, Blaising believes, autobiographical literature is closer than other literary forms to its historical origins and thus reveals more readily than other kinds of literature the transaction between history and form. In autobiography, the "I" as historical subject, as organizing (or formal) principle, and as personalizing style records as it enacts the dialogue between the artist and his personal history and concerns; in addition, autobiography represents an exchange that is public as well as private, "for not only has the self-recording consciousness developed within a particular historical context, but the formal patterns and the style that shape and re-shape this development, are

133 modes or organization and communication shared by the culture as a whole." Thoreau's intensely introspective, or "narcissistic," art in Wal­ den, for example, derived not only from a personal life dedicated to solitude and isolation but also from nineteenth-century cultural experience in which the absence of universal certainties made intro­ spection not just a choice but a necessity. Second, the predominance of the autobiographical mode in America suggests that here, in particular, writers have made a tradition of creating literature out of their historical selves. After all, American writers had no material but the self, as we know from Henry James's extensive catalogue, in Hawthorne, of all that was missing in American culture. In turning inward to explore the only territory available to him as an artist, the American writer necessarily turned himself inside-out, to make of inner experience a public example. Beginning with Thoreau and Whitman, in fact, American autobio­ graphical literature continually combines the inward, or spiritual, searching of an Edwards with the outward, or worldly, instruction of a Franklin, so that, individually and collectively, autobiographical writing in America records as it enacts the American experience, both public and private, of inventing an identity. The Art of Life describes, in successive stages, this cumulative cultural experience. In Chapter One, for example, Blaising explains not only how the economy and narcissism of Thoreau's life determined the subject, structure, and style of Walden, but also how the prolonged composition of Walden determined Thoreau's future perceptions and actions. Chapter Two examines how, through Whit­ man's successive revision of the poem, the mythic personality of "Song of Myself," became less a transcendent and more a human, social personality, as if Whitman gradually made the celebration of an archetypal self into the record of an individual life. Furthermore, as "the hero of the 1855 version became more closely identified with a particular person, Whitman himself patterned his life after the self- image that had been created in 1855." So in each chapter does Blais­ ing describe the interaction between the life of the writer and the work of art; at the same time, however, she reveals how each work also interacts with its culture; how, for example, the historical subjects in Walden, "Song of Myself," James's Prefaces and the other works function as representative heroes who both reflect and create their cultures. Thus, as Blaising claims of all six authors she studies, ". . . creators of such works create at once themselves as artists and as person, their culture, and their art, and by asserting their power as creators of the totality of their existence, they resurrect themselves as people before the Fall." But Blaising does not leave it at that; for she

134 considers at the end of every chapter how we, as readers, continually perpetuate this redemptive exchange between life and art in America. The Art of Life also provides valuable critical insight into the form and function of autobiographical writing; for Blaising uses each chapter to focus on an element of autobiography that, although present in every other work, is most prominent in her immediate subject. The economical narcissism of all autobiography thus provides the focus for her discussion of Walden; the relationship in autobiog­ raphy between self-consciousness, retrospection, and narration is her primary concern in the James chapter; and the comic perspective Blaising sees as present in every autobiography becomes the organizing principle for her chapter on Adams. "Thus each work," Blaising claims, "is treated as a mirror which may reflect other works," both within and outside of her study. But in spite of the effectiveness of her method, Blaising often fails to define terms that would have clarified and therefore strengthened her argument. I, for one, wish she had sharpened her distinction between autobiographical literature and what she often calls, without defining or giving examples, "strictly autobiographical recordings" or "autobiography in a more convention­ al sense." What does she see as the difference between, for example, James's Prefaces and his Autobiography, both artful autobiographical works concerned with the development of an artist and the re-creation of a life? So, too, might Blaising have clarified the relationship between the clauses in her essentially disjointed compound sentences: "A good part of American literature may be characterized as autobiographical, and while this study is not a survey of American autobiography, it is to a certain extent a study of autobiographical literature in America." As this, the first sentence in the book suggests, the reader of The Art of Life is often asked to do work that is better left to the author or her editor. Nevertheless, the questions left unanswered and the occasion­ ally cumbersome prose do not mar, seriously enough to matter, a work that reflects so brilliantly the dynamics of literary creation in American autobiographical writing.

Carol Holly

135 SUNSET

Jean-Paul Sartre. Life Situations: Essays Written and Spoken. Trans­ lated by Paul Auster and Lydia Davis. New York: Pantheon Books, 1977, $8.95.

Jean-Paul Sartre is now seventy-two, almost completely blind, and, as he himself believes, at the end of his career as a writer. The present volume consists of the texts of three interviews (one of them con­ ducted by Simone de Beauvoir) and four political essays, of which only one "Elections: A Trap for Fools," is of much interest outside of France. From the interviews we learn that Sartre's immediate plans include a television series in which he will discuss "the seventy-five years of this century," and a book of conversations with Simone de Beauvoir, which will, in effect, continue The Words. He will try also to dictate to a tape-recorder, but he has little hope that this will succeed; style, he thinks, is achieved only by crossing out and rewriting. Such polishing is difficult when one is dealing with the spoken word. He carries on his life from day to day as best he can, is read to by Simone de Beauvoir and others, and continues to take part in the fortnightly meetings of the editorial board of Les Temps modernes. Writing has been for Sartre the organizing principle of his whole life. Even when he publicly expressed his disillusionment with the effect of writing in The Words he nevertheless proposed to keep on doing it: nulla dies sine linea. And he has kept on. Since the autobiography he has produced the massive, three-volume study of Flaubert and numerous articles. But now all that seems to be ended. In the first interview (with Michel Contat) in this book he says, "The only point to my life was writing. I would write out what I had been thinking about beforehand, but the essential moment was that of writing itself. I still think, but because writing has become impossible for me, the real activity of thought has in some way been suppressed." One of the incidental revelations of this interview is that Sartre is a music-lover and until his recent difficulties must have been a fairly accomplished pianist. He seems to care little for the symphony (per­ haps, as the interviewer suggests, because he dislikes the bourgeois ceremonial of the concert). He played Schumann, Mozart, Chopin and the Beethoven sonatas except the very last ones. He even gave piano lessons when he was a student at the Ecole Normale. All this is particularly interesting because, with the notorious exception of the song "Some of These'Days" in Nausea (and the scratchy record of that tune is clearly a parody of Vinteuil's Sonata and Septet in Proust) music plays no part in Sartre's writings. In her autobiography Simone

136 de Beauvoir describes how she and the young Sartre listened to jazz players in the thirties, and Sartre still thinks that a knowledge of music should include all its forms from polyphony to jazz. However he ends by saying, "But I tell you—you're asking me about jazz because you play it yourself—the music that really matters to me is classical." As Sartre looks back over his oeuvre as a whole, it is clear that his emphases,if not his fundamental values, have changed. Being and Nothingness seems to have faded, while the Critique of Dialectical Reason has become the central work in the canon. He says of Being and Nothingness only that in it he was tempted to certain stylistic flourishes ("Man is a useless passion") which he now regrets. He continues to use the vocabulary of that book (being-for-itself, being- for-others, etc.) but his interests have been displaced from a quasi- academic ontology to the necessity of political praxis. Sartre seems to have been relatively slow in developing the political convictions which now dominate his life. He spent the year 1933 in Germany, but did not become anti-Fascist until his return to France. And it was not until his mobilization in 1939 (described in The Reprieve) that he experienced what he calls the negation of his freedom and at the same time the weight of the world, i.e., his ties with others. He had already discovered the true enemy, who was precisely the public that bought his books—the bourgeois reader. This hatred of the class from which he comes, a hatred already visible in Nausea and traced to its origin in The Words, really amounts to self-hatred. There is clearly much of the young Sartre in the Hugo of Dirty Hands as well as in the Mathieu of The Roads to Liberty. The discovery by the recruit Sartre of "the weight of the world" recalls also Orestes in The Flies who, until his commitment to free Argos from superstitious fear, had never pressed the ground with the full weight of a man. The discovery of the bourgeois as the enemy confronted Sartre with the pervasive, all-enveloping influence of Marx. In the English- speaking world Marx remains at most a cult-figure, a totem of whom it is probably fair to say that his most vocal partisans are those who have the least technical knowledge of his work. It is otherwise in Europe. In the Critique of Dialectical Reason Sartre says of Marx's teachings that they are a totalization of the knowledge accessible to us in our time, and he means by totalization not the sum of extant knowledge but its organizing and synthesizing principle. Thus as Sartre's belief in the efficacy of literature faded and his conviction grew that he must take part in pre-revolutionary action, so Being and Nothingness lost impor­ tance in his eyes and the Critique gained. There is in Sartre a disguised Christian, maybe even a Christian

137 martyr. The intensity and singlemindedness of his moral convictions are extraordinary. In the Critique he says passionately that we must destroy evil; Savonarola would not have said otherwise. Sartre is, of course, aware of this quality in himself; and although he insists that he is incapable of feeling reverence and that God vanished from his early adolescent life without leaving a trace, he nevertheless says of himself in The Words:

. . . the writer appeared, the Ersatz of the Christian I could not be: his only business was salvation ... I thought I was giving myself to Literature when in reality I was going into Holy Orders.

Sartre is mocking himself here, but we must take him seriously and literally, for only the conviction of the priestly vocation accounts for what has always seemed to me an inconsistency between his philosophy and his politics. Every person who feels the twentieth century in his bones must accept the analysis of the human condition set forth in Being and Nothingness—its inexplicability, its purposeless- ness. He must also acknowledge his own feelings about this condition: his sense of isolation, his anguish, and accept the irreconcilable dis­ proportion between what he feels to be necessary for his life and what reality in fact offers. But nothing in this view of the world allows for missionary zeal. Why seek to destroy evil in an absurd world? Can evil (or good) be said to exist in absurdity? Sartre's political convictions and actions take it for granted that life is real and life is earnest, whereas his philosophy gives no grounds whatever for this supposition. Camus argued that social and political actions must be undertaken in full consciousness of their ultimate futility. Every man is Sisyphus, even a revolutionary. In Sartre there is a vein of puritanical narrow­ ness which makes it possible for him to concentrate on secondary intellectual problems without looking beyond them at the great void in which all of history is swallowed up. But is this not precisely what was defined in Being and Nothingness as the esprit de serieux? It has been known ever since the publication of Simone de Beau- voir's autobiography that Sartre used drugs to drive himself beyond the limits of ordinary human endurance—what in French racing circles is known as le doping. While he was writing the Critique he was taking as much as twenty pills of an amphetamine called corydane a day. When Michel Contat taxed him with ruining his health in that way, Sartre answered, "What is health for? It is better to use it to write the Critique of Dialectical Reason—I say this without pride—it is better to write something that is long, precise and important in itself than to be in perfect health."

138 It is an odd fact about Sartre's work as a whole that the principal books in it are all unfinished. In Being and Nothingness he promised a treatise on ethics which has never appeared. Now we learn that he had filled "dozens of notebooks" with thoughts on this subject but then lost them. The Critique remains a torso; the promised second volume will certainly not appear. And the book on Flaubert is only three quarters completed although Sartre thinks, or at least says, that following the lead of the first three anyone could write the fourth, which was to have been a study of Madame Bovary. The Roads to Freedom was to have been a four-volume novel of which only three were written, and even The Words stops at Sartre's adolescence, al­ though he now plans to carry on with it in the projected conversations with Simone de Beauvoir. Sartre no doubt regrets these incomplete­ nesses, but only from the formal point of view. He is convinced that he has said what he had to say. It is interesting to consider the list of his books which he hopes will continue to find an audience of young people. They are the collections of essays titled in French Situations, Saint-Genet, The Critique of Dialectical Reason, The Devil and the Good Lord, and what he considers to be the best of his purely literary works, Nausea. If I were to try to second-guess Sartre about his post­ humous reputation, I would certainly leave Nausea in the list, perhaps replace Saint-Genet by the Flaubert, certainly replace The Devil and the Good Lord by either or both of No Exit and The Flies, and put The Words in place of the Critique whose ponderosities seem to me a disconcerting mixture of the obvious and the incomprehensible. Constant mention of the Critique shows that we must come to grips with Sartre's political theories if we are to have any clear concep­ tion of the man and the writer. It must be said right off that I think most Americans have a hard time not only in sympathizing with Sartre's political views, but even in understanding them. Maybe this is because, as Lasky remarked in his correspondence with Mr. Justice Holmes, for an American "the last desirable, indeed the last permis­ sible revolution occurred in 1776." To a naive but, I hope, forthright American, Sartre's endless logic-chopping must at last turn awry and lose the name of action. He never stops talking about praxis, but seems to mean by it editing gauchi'ste newspapers or cutting down trees and burning parked cars as in the "events" of 1968. I have already said that Sartre's political sympathies do not follow from his analysis of the human condition. In the beginning was his hatred of the bourgeois, a self-hatred which squares only too well with the self-destructive tendencies of the pill-popper. Given this basic position, all the political writings can be seen as a tourtuous effort to

139 rationalize it and to translate it into a satisfactory gesture. Consider in the present volume the essay "Elections: a Trap for Fools" in which Sartre argues essentially that "universal suffrage is an institution, and therefore a collective, which atomizes or serializes individual men." By voting, he says, the voter affirms his universal powerlessness. In a sense this is true. Each one of us is alone in the voting-booth, which is a very different psychological situation from marching arm in arm or shoulder to shoulder with the comrades. Yet would any rational man prefer burning parked cars to the exercise of universal suffrage? And what happens after the revolution when the marching presumably stops except on the first of May? Are the unanimous votes of the Politburo reassuring affirmations of freedom and self-determination? Although it is acutely and intensely argued, it seems to me that Sartre's political position is really very weak. It aims at the destruction of bourgeois society, but unlike official Communism, it has no clear plan for the new world. In order to avoid the cruelties of Stalinism and even of Brezhnevism it remains purely theoretical, or sympathizes with muddled and indecisive violence like that of 1968. Camus argued in The Rebel that revolutionary dogmas, carried to their logical and practical conclusion, end by being as murderously oppressive as the regimes they replace. Therefore even social idealists must not be logi­ cal, consistent or thorough. If revolutions are to avoid turning into dictatorships, they must, in the name of humanity, stop short of their own complete realization and accept being in part thwarted by tra­ ditional values and morality. The individual revolutionary is primarily a soldier; the individual rebel on the other hand (like Tarrou in The Plague) mindful of the absurdity in which we move, shuns parties and all acts of violence, seeking to improve the human lot case by individual case. This was the disagreement which brought about the break between the two men. Sartre was and is more deeply and actively sympathetic to the professed aims of international Commu­ nism than Camus although he has never been able to bring himself to join the Party (Camus was a party member briefly as a young man in Oran). While clinging to his Marxist convictions, Sartre excoriates the actions of the USSR in East Germany, Hungary and Czechoslovakia. He is disillusioned with Castro because his protest, together with that of other French intellectuals about the imprisonment of Padilla, remained without effect. He sees the French Communist Party as inert, the Socialists as mere reformists, the Republic of Giscard as a horror exceeded only by that greater abomination which is the USA. He has been forced to become a kind of partyless revolutionary, a position which seems mostly to show how incapable he is of adjusting himself to the real world. While these political attitudes arise from the

140 very purest motives, they leave Sartre finally in an isolation which is rather sourly Molieresque: Nul n'aura de I'esprit, hors nous et nos amis. Although Sartre seems to prefer to forget Being and Nothingness and to stand on the Critique, it is possible that he is mistaken. In the earlier book he was in the line of subjective philosophers that runs from Saint Augustine through Pascal and Kierkegaard to the twentieth century. As the author of Being and Nothingness Sartre also had his place in the large and disparate group of anti-Hegelian thinkers which includes Jaspers, Gabriel Marcel, Husserl, Heidegger and others. This was Sartre's period of feeling that he was "a man alone," an attitude clearly reflected in Nausea. Then because of the war and the influ­ ence of his friend Paul Nizan, Sartre moved closer to the Communists. Inevitably his focus shifted from the description of individual experi­ ence to praxis. This shift in turn led to the Critique of which Sartre characteristically says that despite his then new-found convictions, it was written against the Communists who, in his view, had distorted Marx's teachings. In writing it Sartre joined a very different group of thinkers, political and social theorists and activists like Herzen, Baku- nin, Nechaiev, Lenin and Trotsky—a less distinguished list than the preceding. The Critique was an attempt to dissolve the sclerosis of the various Communist Parties and to free them from their nineteenth century scientistic rigidity. It did not succeed; and whatever contribu­ tion it may have made to an understanding of the mechanics of collec­ tive action (analysis of seriality, of the group-in-fusion, etc.) it made no noticeable dent in the armor plate of the party ideologies. But the leopard cannot change his spots; and the last fifteen years of Sartre's writing life have been largely devoted to a project singularly remote from praxis—the Flaubert. To be sure the book is a continu­ ous attack on the bourgeoisie, but it also shows how far Sartre has come from Being and Nothingness. The theorist of absolute freedom now believes in a kind of determinism which he calls (with an unexpect­ ed echo of old, unhappy far-off theological disputes) predestination. He now says, "I believe we are not free—at least not these days, not for the moment—because we are all alienated. We are lost during child­ hood." The Flaubert who wrote the Education sentimentale, Madame Bovary and the Tentation de Saint Antoine was the predestined end- product of social conditioning and familial restraints: "... options remained for Gustave, but they were conditional options." The book follows out the various threads that finally fixed Flaubert (a helpless and suffering Gulliver) in an attitude which left him only the illusion of choosing for himself. The book tries for as complete an understanding as possible of a complex human being. It is thus the ultimate develop-

141 ment of Sartre's previous studies of Baudelaire and Genet. No doubt there is in this most recent work an application of Marxist principles to the analysis of the social and economic conditions that conditioned a nineteenth century middle-class family like the Flauberts. But in the nature of things this analysis cannot pretend to scientific rigor; the book is a kind of novel, that is, an imaginative construct with a greater or lesser foundation in fact. In The Words Sartre expressed his disillusionment with literature, and he continues to regard preoccupation with art for art's sake as a neurosis. He now says that if he were fifty again he would never begin the Flaubert, devoting himself instead, one must suppose, to projects like editing La Cause du peuple. But this is clearly a case where the wrong choice is the better one. I am willing to bet that L'Idiot de la famille will be seriously read and studied when no one can identify Danny Cohn-Bendit. Pascal, after all, invented an adding machine and the omnibus, but it is not for such trifles that he is remembered. Though he is far from being alone, Sartre believes he has no dis­ ciples. His writings came into style again with young people soon after May, 1968, during his association with La Cause du peuple, but this popularity turned out to be "a garland briefer than a girl's." Now he believes he has lost touch again. By his own account he has never had close associations with other writers except Camus. Sartre's memory of him is very different from the conventional image of the author of The Stranger: "We could not go far on the intellectual level because he grew alarmed quickly. In fact there was a side of him that smacked of the little Algerian tough guy, very much a hooligan, very funny." Despite their celebrated quarrel Sartre now says of Camus, "He was probably the last good friend I had." Sartre has dominated his time in much the same way that Voltaire dominated the eighteenth century. There is an interesting parallel to be pursued here. Both began as litterateurs and then became more interested in social action. After a period in the vanguard of thought (Voltaire's longer than Sartre's) both came to feel themselves out­ distanced by the rising generation. Voltaire thought his literary emi­ nence was guaranteed by his tragedies; Sartre puts his faith in the Critique. My own guess is that Nausea or The Words will turn out to be Sartre's Candide and the Flaubert perhaps his Philosophical Dic­ tionary. Voltaire was able to exercise personal influence on a scale impossible to any private person in the twentieth century, but Sartre's intellectual influence has probably been at least as pervasive in our time as Voltaire's in his. Every literate person who came of age be­ tween 1940 and 1960 has come to see and feel life as Sartre described it: gratuitous, care-ridden, and meaningless; he has lived en situation,

142 faced the ambiguity of his relations with others (autrui), recognized his bad faith, and has tried as best he could to achieve authenticity. He may also, from the social point of view, think of himself as serialized, powerless, alienated and deluded by the society of which he is a neg­ ligible part. If we feel we inhabit that world, we owe the recognition of our predicament to Sartre, who has defined our fears and made our most unsettling intuitions explicit. It is not Sartre's fault that our world is far from being as reassuring a place as Voltaire's deistic and Newtonian universe, but he has been in large part the source of our perception of the world and has formulated our definition of our­ selves. Even if Sartre turns out not to be the Voltaire of our time but only its Taine, its Renan or its Saint-Simon, he has marked the mid- century generation as no other writer has. Donald Schier

BOOKS RECEIVED

Allan Chase, The Legacy of Malthus. Tristan Tzara. Primele Poeme/First New York: Knopf, 1977, $17.95. Poems. Translated by Michael Impey and Traces the development of the new Brian Swann. New Rivers Press, 1976, "scientific" racism from Malthus and Gal- $10.00 (cloth) $2.50 (paper). ton to Shockley and Banfield. Chase him­ Before he became Tristan Tzara and self is a writer, not a biologist, but this is a the Daddy of Dada, Sami Rosenstock serious and comprehensive discussion of wrote the rather conventional Rumanian the question. verse here translated. Original text not given. Three Kingdoms: China's Epic Drama. Translated and edited by Moss Roberts. Yves Bonnefoy. Words in Stone/Pierre New York: Pantheon, 1976, $10.00. Ecrite. Translated by Susanna Lang. Am­ This text is something like a Chinese herst: University of Massachusetts Press, equivalent of Shakespeare's histories and 1976. Homer. It describes events of 206 B.C.— Sensitive and perceptive translations A.D. 220 as they were recreated by Lo of the French existentialist poet by a Kuan-chung more than a thousand years student at Williams College. Text and later. Illustrated. translation on facing pages.

More Latin Lyrics From Virgil to Milton. The Unabridged Mark Twain. Edited by Translated by Helen Waddell. Edited with Lawrence Teacher. Opening remarks by an Introduction by Dame Felicitas Corri- Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. Philadelphia: Running gan. New York: Norton, 1976, $12.95. Press, 1976, $8.95. A further somewhat thinner gleaning All of Mark Twain's "major" fictions in from the previously harvested field of an elephantine paperback of 1289 pages. medieval Latin poetry. Text and transla­ Clear, readable type, unjustified right-hand tion on facing pages. Appendix and Index. margins.

143 OH. Peake. James Joyce, The Citizen William Righter. Myth and Literature. and the Artist. Stanford University Press, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975. 1977, $16.95. Righter argues that in our stripped- "Ulysses implies that opposition, not down world myth, here indistinguishable integration, is the natural and healthy from "fiction" in its broadest sense, some­ state, both in the individual and society; how illuminates life or makes it intelligible. the citizen and the artist are of value to Our choice is between such tentative an­ each other precisely because they strive swers to the problems of life or no answers in different directions." Peake argues that at all. Joyce's books grew out of his vision of himself, not from the ideas of Vico, Bruno William A. Settle, Jr. Jesse James Was or Jung. His Name. A Bison Book. Lincoln: Uni­ versity of Nebraska Press, 1977, $3.95. Jacques Dupin. Fits and Starts. Poems Thorough and well documented but selected and translated by Paul Austen. rather woodenly narrated history of the Living Hand, Distributed in U.S.A. by James brothers' gang, showing how little Book People, Berkeley, California. they merited the Robin Hood image that Hermetic poetry celebrating mostly has grown up about them. Illustrations. love and rocky landscapes, by a French poet who began to be published in the sixties. Original text not given. D.S.

Lawrence R. Ries. Wolf Masks. Port the most sensible and telling confron­ Washington: National University Publi­ tations with Winters that I have seen so cations, 1977. Subtitled 'Violence in Con­ far. In all, for those interested in the life of temporary Poetry,' this is a study of modern letters, this anthology is essential the work of Sylvia Plath, Thorn Gunn, reading. Ted Hughes and John Wain in an at­ tempt to see how they resolve, in their Essays of E. B. White. New York: Harper poems, the violence without and within. It and Row, 1977, $12.50. White, in his fore- is a very useful preliminary sortie into dif­ ward, describes the essayist as "a self- ficult territory. We need more work in this liberated man sustained by the belief that field. The analysis here of Hughes' work is everything he thinks about, everything particularly good, though it doesn't go far that happens to him is of general inter­ enough in explaining Hughes' almost to­ est." For one with lesser talents than E. B. tal addiction to the non-human world. W. the belief could lead to literary disas­ ters. But White can range over the whole field - from dash-hounds to sailing, from The Quarterly Review of Literature. 30th the Florida Keys to disarmament policy - Anniversary Criticism Retrospective. with a charm and relish that is almost un­ Edited by T. Weiss and Renee Weiss. This rivalled among modern essayists. The is the fourth and last anthology (the book is a thorough delight. others were devoted, respectively, to poetry, fiction, and special issues) to cele­ Diana Trilling. We must march my dar­ brate the 30th year of the QRL. And a lings. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovano- splendid collection it is. There's an en­ vich, 1977, $10.00. Very readable, urbane gaging editorial introduction by Theodore and varied. Mrs. Trilling writes both with Weiss which discusses the vicissitudes of compassion and acerbity on some of a literary editor, excellent essays by those things in recent cultural history that Auden, Sartre, Cocteau, Alfred Kazin, have excited her curiosity. Her analysis of and a whole array of other riches. Weiss' the lonely disenchantment of modern stu­ own piece on Winters' Anatomy is one of dents, of the mentality of Timothy Leary,

144 of D. H. Lawrence and others, all add up two categories indicated in the title. to a poised and mature vision which, even French Letters, an essay on the experi­ where one disagrees, demands our re­ mental novel, contains flashes of billiance spect. A book filled with the courage of as well as much that is highly debatable. In independent thought. all, whether on literature or on present- day culture, Vidal is highly readable, if at Gore Vidal. Matters of Fact and Fiction. times somewhat nasty. New York: Random House, 1977, $10.00. For those who like Vidal's various imagin­ ation and his, at times, waspish style, this is a useful gathering of pieces under the KH

NOVELS

Vladimir Nabokov. The Real Life of Se­ 1920's. Lucien Bodard is a best-selling bastian Knight. New Directions Paper­ French author whose own experience was back 432, 1977, $2.45. remarkably parallel to that of the boy Nabokov's first novel in English, origi­ Lucien Bonnard. nally published in 1941. In his Introduction Conrad Brenner describes this book as Austin Wright. The Morley Mythology. "an outright literary trick"; it is a literary New York: Harper and Row, 1977, $10.95. detective story with a baffling conclusion. The social irresponsibility of an impor­ tant and comfortable life is revealed by a Michael Malone. The Delectable Moun­ series of anonymous telephone calls. tains. New York: Random House, 1976, $8.95. Elsa Morante. History/A Novel. New A reconstruction of the world of 1968 York: Knopf, 1977, $10.95. in Floren Park, Colorado, with people that The life of a poor Italian school-teacher, say things like I HATE GOD (in small Ida Mancuso, and of her two children, one caps) and a hero who chucks it all to the result of her rape by a German soldier, become an elementary school teacher. seen against the background of world his­ tory, especially from 1941-1947. A long­ Thomas Williams. Tsuga's Children. New time best seller in Europe. York: Random House, 1977, $7.95. A story about but not necessarily for children which begins "Once their was a as. family named Hemlock who lived in an­ other time"; so right away we get the idea that fiction has become myth.

Jeffrey Caine. The Cold Room. New York: John Cheever. Falconer. New York: Knopf, 1977, $7.95. Knopf, 1977, $7.95. Everyone has his A contemporary Gothic novel com­ candidate for the most overrated book of plete with a hidden room, a heroine who the year. This is mine. Easily. Some of the prison scenes are well-done, but the novel goes mad at the end, and rats that brush as a whole has so many major flaws that against ankles in the dark. one comes away with the feeling of being grossly cheated. The coincidences sur­ Lucien Bodard. The French Consul. New rounding the escapes are just too much, York: Knopf, 1977, $10.00. and Farragut himself is at times a com­ The French consul's son grows up in pletely unconvincing character. Enough the foreign concessions. The time is the said.

145 Michael Ondaatje. Coming Through thenic, but highly talented trumpet player. Slaughter. New York: Norton, 1976, New Orleans, Ca. 1900. $6.95. The Collected Works of Billy the Ondaatje seems to me one of the few first- Kid, Ondaatje's first novel, is an aston­ rate talents working in the novel today. ishing work, magnificantly written, beauti­ His work has depth, variety, extra­ fully conceived. It lives in that interesting ordinary richness of texture. Here is a country between documentary and fic­ writer, a major talent. More about him tion and it conjures up the West with such later. raw felicity that all the old cliches fall down. We are there, and it is awful - and fascinating. Coming Through Slaughter uses a similar strategy. Ondaatje bril­ liantly captures the times and the char­ acter of Buddy Bolden, a strange, neuras­

POETRY

David Rosenberg. Blues of the Sky and Robert Graves. New Collected Poems. Job Speaks. New York: Harper and Row, New York: Doubleday, 1977. The blurb $6.95 and $7.95, respectively. A fascin­ claims that Graves is one of the giants of ating attempt to re-write the Psalms and modern literature. Even if we disagree, it the Book of Job in modern American is good to have this collection, made in his speech. Parts of the "translations" are ripe years, by a considerable poet, and an very fresh and lively but the Job in partic­ exemplary man of letters. Contains a ular had me scurrying back, to exper­ bibliographical introduction and sixteen ience once again the dark and terrible mu­ pages of photographs. A handsome book, sic of the original. with some splendid poems in it.

Stanley Kiesel. The Pearl is a Hardened Another Republic. Edited by Charles Sinner. Minneapolis: Nodin Press, 1976, Simic and Mark Strand. New York: The $3.50. Reprint of a collection originally Ecco Press, 1976, $12.95. A fine col­ published by Scribner's. Contains many lection of European and South American fresh poems about small children and poets, by various hands. The hands in­ their world. Stanley Kiesel has a fast and clude those of W. S. Merwin, Paul Black­ dancing style which makes these poems a burn, Michael Hamburger and the edit­ distinctive pleasure to read. ors. Well worth having. The Popa pieces are a delight. There are also good sel­ Dannie Abse. Collected Poems. Pitts­ ections of Paz, Cortazar, Parra, Celan burgh University Press, 1977, $3.95. A and Holub. strong selection from the British poet's published work, plus a number of newer Peter Meinke. The Night Train and the poems written between 1973 and 1976. Golden Bird. University of Pittsburgh Abse is a very readable and often a mov­ Press, 1977, $3.50. A very readable, and ing poet whose work is grounded in the often highly amusing selection by a poet obdurate realities of the world. A son of who has published in this magazine. Hardy rather than, say, of Mallarme. Meinke has a very quick eye, an ear for the speech of now, a lively and sometimes The Prose Poem. Edited by Michael Bene- delightfully zany imagination. dikt. N.Y. Dell, 1976, $2.50. A splendid, wide-ranging anthology of prose poems Michael Borich. The Black Hawk Songs. translated from the French, German, Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1975, Spanish, Swedish, Russian and Japanese. $2.45. This is an astonishing book for a There's also a selection by modern Brit­ writer in his twenty-fifth year. The author, ish and American practitioners. out of his own part-Indian heritage, and Contains - mirabile dictu! - very useful out of his deep familiarity with Indian lore bio/bibliographies of the authors. has made an impressive collection of

146 songs, some of them piercingly beautiful, Marvin Bell. Stars Which See, Stars some of them angry, some of them noble. Which Do Not See. New York: Athen- Here is a new poet worth watching. Mean­ enim, 1977,$3.95. Marvin Bell is a splen­ while, this book is essential for any reader did teacher and critic and one of the interested in that part of America's real healthiest influences in American poetry. I past that is so rarely given its due in the cannot, for the life of me, put my finger on academy. what it is that prevents these poems - in the main - from getting to me. But it took James Dickey. The Zodiac. New York: me a long while to come to Williams too, Doubleday, 1976, $6.00. I couldn't finish and I am going to wait. It is very likely that, this book. The sensation of reading it was as with Ashbery, (to whom he bears no re­ like being beaten over the head with an semblance) I am simply misreading him. unpadded mallet. The story is a recre­ ation of "a drunken and perhaps dying Frederic Will. Botulism. Amherst: 1975. Dutch poet, who returns to his home in Frederic Will has been doing a splendid Amsterdam after years of travel and tries job, through his magazine, Micromegas, desperately to relate himself, by means of of introducing European writers in trans­ stars, to the universe." (Dickey's own lation to American readers. Now he gives description). The story is not without us a handsome chapbook of his own. The interest, but the style is of such unre­ poems are witty, difficult, often laced with mitting insistency that it makes the poem a kind of surrealism. Some of them are hard to approach. Dickey is a prodigious very zany and some I don't understand at talent. Why does he have to shake us so all. I am going to read those ones again, roughly? though. And again.

W. D. Snodgrass. The Fuhrer Bunker. James Tate. Viper Jazz. Middletown: New York: Boa Editions, 1977, $4.95. This Wesleyan University Press, 1976, $3.45. is subtitled "A cycle of poems in pro­ This reader is one of those impossible gress" and it is hard to tell how finished squares who think that James Tate's first the cycle is. There is some powerful book was probably his best, though some writing here but I didn't find the book as of the poems in The Oblivion Ha-Ha and gripping as I had hoped. Perhaps later Absences were strikingly original and per­ versions will bring out the essential drama ceptive. I don't know what to make of Vi­ of ideas and events that Snodgrass is per Jazz. It is full of such arbitrary sur­ apparently striving for somewhat more realism that without a psychic biography sharply than this version does. It is an of the author I am, for the most part, quite interesting project. lost. It is possibly where I am supposed to be, but it doesn't help.

George Oppen. Collected Poems. New York: New Directions, 1975, $3.75. Every­ one, including Hugh Kenner - who must be listened to - has been greeting this Lorine Niedecker. Blue Chicory. New book with superlatives. Hanged if I can Rochelle: The Elizabeth Press, 1976, see it. I think I understand Oppen's place $8.00. A posthumous collection by a poet in the objectivist "tradition" - but where is who died in 1970. Her work is marked by the excitement, the passion, the rhythm? a delicacy of music and often a most en­ They seem to be so far "behind" the gaging deftness and brevity: a poetry as poems we have on the page that the subtle and definite as the brush of a wing poems have the air of ghosts looking for on a window-pane. She deserves to be their bodies. Some one please take me up. much better known. The Elizabeth Press has printed her very handsomely, as it has a number of other poets, among whom the following are worthy of attention: Cid Corman (out & Out, 'S); Larry Eigner (Anything on Its Side); Theodore Enslin (Papers, Views, Landler, Etudes). K.H

147 Notes on Contributors

ROUND TABLE LOUIS GALLO teaches and writes poetry in New Orleans, at the University there • ROBERT TISDALE has taught American Literature and Modern Poetry at Carleton for many years • PHILIP MARTIN and CHRIS WALLACE-CRABBE both teach in Melbourne, Australia at, respectively, Monash University and the University of Mel­ bourne. They are both widely published poets and excellent men of letters. We welcome them to our first Round Table and to the Advisory Board • MICHAEL DENNIS BROWNE teaches writing at the University of Minnesota. His second collection of poems, The Sun Fetcher will be published by Carnegie-Mellon University Press in 1978.

FICTION Short stories by JAMES ROSS have appeared in The Canadian Forum, Prism International and many other places. Ross is a free-lance who wants to learn to drive a formula ford race car. No comment • LAWRENCE OSGOOD, who appears w;th us for the first time, is presently living in New York, a city from which he apparently makes frequent departures • RICHARD GRAYSON has published short stories in over fifty places, including Transatlantic Review and The Texas Quarterly • The pieces by WILLIAM PEDEN are part of a series he is writing on family life •

FEATURES ULF ZIMMERMANN teaches German language and literature at Carleton. He has done extensive work on Rilke, including a doctoral thesis at the University of Texas (Austin) on The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge • One guesses that on of the reasons why MICHAEL FANNING lives in Louisiana is because of the long tennis season. After all, one can read Oedipus Rex anywhere.

POETRY The poems by PHIL DACEY are from a book-length sequence based on Hopkins' life. The author, who teaches at the U. of Minnesota (Marshall) is presently on a Bush Foundation Fellowship • This is MARGARET ROBINSON'S first publication here. She used to be a high-school teacher but is now a successful short-story writer, a novelist, and a beginning (her word) and talented (our word) poet • ELLEN DUDIS was born in Brooklyn but now lives on a Maryland farm. She's had poems in Poetry, The Nation and elsewhere. After the birth of her child in February she retired from advertising writing. There is obviously more money in farming and poetry • JUDITH MINTY'S first book is Lake Songs and Other Fears. Her work has appeared widely in, among others, The Atlantic, Poetry, Poetry Northwest and The New Yorker • SUSAN FROMBERG SCHAEFFER'S first novel, Falling, was one of Time's 10 best novels of the year. Her fifth book of poetry will be published by Doubleday soon. As she also teaches at Brooklyn College she is quite busy • Although she now lives and works in San Francisco, the experience of growing up in Illinois is reflected in much of JACQUELINE HOEFER'S recent poems. We share her pleasure in her first appearance in our pages • PAMELA ESPELAND, a graduate of Carleton, works as a free-lance writer and editor in Minneapolis. She is thankful she did not go to graduate school and says that "her goal in life is to edit the Miscellany (just kidding)." Alas! • The journal of poetry and translation, Micromegas, has introduced a splendid variety of non-English poetry to readers in this country. Its editor, FREDERIC WILL, is professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Massachusetts, a widely published poet, and an extraordinarily productive man of letters • MAJORIEHAWKS- WORTH has won a number of awards for her poetry, which has appeared in The Paris Review and The Minnesota Review and in other places • DAVID FISHER was the first poet we chose for Volume XVII, No. I. We won't know for a few years how to interpret that fact. Fisher is a Yale Ph.D. who has had a very untypical post-graduate

148 career writing and teaching in San Francisco. We welcome him to the Miscellany, and to the continent's true center • CHRISTOPHER HOWELL says he has been reading us for a long time. Now we are glad to print him. He is presently in residence at Colorado State University, working on a new book, and directing Lynx House Press • In addition to hunting for found poems ROBERT WILLSON teaches Shakespeare at the University of Missouri - Kansas City, where he chairs the English Department. These latter facts are independent • CONRAD HILBERRY says he had poems in the Miscellany in 1960 and 1962 "when the planet was just beginning to cool." He is wrong. It has been cold here for a million years • Another free-lance and new-comer, GAIL TREBBE won the 1975 John Masefield Award from the Poetry Society of America. For bread, she works, like all of us, in multi-media • "I'm a former Olafite living in Denver and teaching at Metropolitan State College. I've been published in a few little magazines." In that way, very pertly, MARK MOE introduces himself. And we reply, very briefly, we are glad we saw these poems first • EDWARD HIRSCH lives in Philadelphia and MALCOM STILES McCOLLUM in Colorado Springs. They are both newcomers to this magazine •

REVIEWS HARRIET ZINNES, poet, short-story writer and critic teaches at Queens College (CUNY). Her latest book is Entropism's (prose poems) • BARDWELL SMITH former Dean of Carleton has returned to full-time teaching in the Religion Department, where his special interest is in Asian Religions • CAROL HOLLY, a specialist in American Literature, teaches at St. Olaf College • DON SCHIER is an established presence in this magazine and, we are glad to say, its new Associate Editor • KIM RODNER teaches Sociology at Carleton. He agrees that poetry and anthropology are at bottom the same thing, though there is some disagreement about what that means •

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