Oil Derricks
GRAMMER
NC )YLT TR VA SUMMER 1957 | 75 sents
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SOUTHWEST Retiew ws published quarterly by sourmrRN MeTHODIST UNIVERSITY PRESS, Dallas, Texas. Subscription $3.00 a year. Two years, $5.50; three years, $7.50. Single copy, 75c. Entered as second-class matter October 10, 1924, at the Post Office at Dallas, Texas, under the Act of March 3, 1879. ©) 1957 by Southern Methodist University Press. All rights reserved. Printed in U.S.A. Opinions expressed herein are not necesarily those of the editors or the publisher
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SUMMER 1957 Volume XLII Number 3
ANNUAL LITERARY NUMBER
Fossils, Classics, and Presences Albert Guérard Revival Meeting Willard Marsh Slayer of the Alien Gods story Douglas Woolf
Again poem’ Edwin Honig Fairway of Dedication” poem George Abbe Existentialist Criticism Charles 1. Glicksberg Coat of Arms poem Robert Meredith This Evenin’ of This Summer svory Fred Myers Dylan Thomas’ Animal Faith Derek Stanford Temple Birds) porm Emilie Glen Everybody Can Be a Success story Charles Angoff Meditation at Elsinore poem Elizabeth Coatsworth James Agee: The Question of Unkept Promise W.™M. Frohock Wait by Night vorem — Joseph Joel Keith POINTS OF VIEW Twilight of Southern Regionalism John T. Westbrook The Mark of the Doodler Roy Bedichek Conversations with Robert Graves John Haller THE EDITOR’S NOTEBOOK THE RESIDENT ARTS: On Liking Grand Opera John Rosenfield
REVIEWS OF BOOKS
SOUTHWES 169 | 177 | 184 185 187 196 197 205 213 214 220 221 230 | 231 234 236 iv Vill Xi
VANCE RANDOLPH’S Tales From the Ozarks
Since 1899, Vance Randolph has “fished and fought and hunted and danced and gambled” with his backwoods neighbors. While making every effort to lose the look of the outsider, he has kept close at hand paper and pencil or a tape recorder to transcribe the tall tales of the Ozark country.
THE TALKING TURTLE
... is the latest product of his pleasant labor, and those who have read earlier volumes of his Ozark tales will be amazed at the variety this fifth collection has to offer. $4.00
THE DEVIL’S PRETTY DAUGHTER
... won this praise from Horace Reynolds in the New York Times; ‘These stories are our heritage both as Americans and as men. As usual, Vance Randolph manages to capture a lot of their oral aura, never forcing the language.” $3.75
WHO BLOWED UP THE CHURCH HOUSE?
...is another wonderful collection that reveals the drollness, the understatement, and the wryness that is unmistakably the spirit of the Ozarks. $3.50
WE ALWAYS LIE TO STRANGERS
... is said to be a slogan in Arkansas. These tales give good evidence of this, while amusing all readers and pleasing the most discriminating collectors of folklore.
$4.00 OZARK SUPERSTITIONS
... was reviewed by Wayland D. Hand in the Journal of American Folklore in these words: “One of the great works on superstitions to appear in this or any other country. In scope and method, and in its complete integrity, Randolph's work is one of the finest ever to have come from the pen of an American folklorist.” $43.75
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS # NEW YORK 27,N.Y.
Editor Allen Maxwell
Assistant Editor Margaret L. Hartley
Contributing Editors
Mody C. Boatright George Bond John Chapman Fred D. Gealy Albert Guérard
SOUTHWEST Review
Jerry Bywaters J. Frank Dobie Samuel Wood Geiser
Ernest E. Leisy John Rosenfield Henry Nash Smith Lon Tinkle
The Editor’s Notebook
LITERARY QUARTERLIES nowadays, complained Dudley Fitts recently in the New York Times Book Review, are marked by a New Solemnity, a “tone of lugubrious semi-literacy.”” Was not thus, he recalls, in the heyday of the experi- mental “little magazines” back in the twen- ties: “We took pains to be irreverent.”
As one of the “actual survivors from those big days,”’ as Mr. Fitts puts it, SWR disavows having taken pains to be irreverent; it just came naturally, in the twenties and now, And we hope to be right here with ready pin in hand so long as there's an overinflated balloon in sight that needs popping.
To demonstrate by present works: observe
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Cover
“Oil Derricks at Night” by George Grammer of Fort Worth is one of the paintings in a survey exhibition of Texas painting assembled recently by the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts for nationwide circulation by the Ameri-
can Federation of Arts.
Elizabeth M. Stover Wiggs N. Babb
the current issue, our ninth Annual Literary Number. In place of the endless explanations of textual content and meaning to which one supposes Dudley Fitts objects, we have here such niceties as Frenchmen singing about their love for onions fried in butter and the spectacle of a world-famous poet upchucking in the fire- place at a high-toned tea. Not that either of these items is the central note in the essays con- cerned; but surely they do indicate an avoid- ance of “solemnity.”
The fried onions find their happy way into our lead-off essay by ALBERT GUFRARD, once again on our masthead as a contributing editor after an absence of a dozen years or so, Thomas Mann once praised Protessor Guérard for his “hilarity,” by which he meant hilaritas, cheer- fulness. Senior citizen of the SWR community (Fossils, Classics, and Presences” is his eight- eenth contribution over a span of two score and one years), Professor Guérard has always averred, and proved, in 1916 as in 1957, that he does not wish to take himself too solemaly —despite his always substantial subject matter. “Fossils, Classics, and Presences” is itself the
best evidence that its author falls in the third,
SUMMER 1957
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the truly honorific, category: he is emphati- cally a Presence, a “contemporary,” to the great enrichment of an ever widening circle of readers as well as several generations of students.
New students and new readers both will benefit from Professor Guérard’s talents come next fall. He will again be on the active faculty at Stanford, from which he retired sev- eral years ago, teaching a seminar in the hu- manities; and Stanford University Press will bring out a book of his previously uncollected essays (about a third of them from SWR) ten- tatively entitled ‘Fossils and Presences,”” to mark the golden anniversary of his first asso- ciation with Stanford. Meanwhile, Mr. Guérard is off to Europe for the summer, with a stop for Brandeis University’s June commencement, at which he receives an honorary degree. “With a trip abroad,” he says, “four books in various stages of completion, and a year of resurrected teaching ahead of me, I feel like a very lively
fossil.”
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Presented here with postprandial levity in- tact (or almost), “Fossils, Classics, and Pres-
ences” was first heard over coffee cups by a
group of Stanford English teachers on Bastille Day a couple of years ago. In the course of his remarks Professor Guérard recalled also an- other Bastille, a pedagogical one, of half a cen-
tury ago:
It was what Irving Babbitt called the Philological Ring. It was particularly oppres- sive in the study of French: there the origins and variations of words, preferably before 1300, alone were considered worthy of a scholar’s attention; not their deeper signifi- cance or their esthetic overtones. . . . To deal with literature as an art, as a criticism of life, as a mode of self-exploration, as a source of esthetic delight was held to be amateurish, and fit for mere laymen. Well, Irving Babbitt led the fight against this Bastille; and although I disagreed, in exasperated admiration, with practically everything else he said or did, I re- main profoundly grateful to him for this holy insurrection. A second of silence and a drop of
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water in honor of his burly indomitable shade.
Babbitt’s crusade is a reminder that it is meet to alter the status quo once in a while, lest one good custom should corrupt the world; by gentle means of course, if they happen to be available and effective. For this ultra-conserva tive New Englander was, in his chosen field, a subversive; he sought to overthrow the existing order. Every progress is subversive of some ancient wrong. | am a man of words, if not quite a man of letters, and I am too familiar with them to be bluffed even by the most hor- rific among them. The most obvious of all our Bastilles is the one which symbolizes the tyranny of words.
New to SWR's pages but widely published in Britain is DEREK STANFORD, F.R.S.L., author of a number of books on contemporary poetry as well as studies of Wordsworth, Mary Shelley . and Emily Bronté. Mr. Stanford's essay on Dylan Thomas, also the subject of one of his book-length studies, was first read in slightly different form to the Shirley Society of Cam- bridge University.
Old hands herein are CHARLES Lt. GLICKS BERG and w. M. FROHOCK of the Brooklyn College and New School English departments, and the Harvard Romance languages and literatures department, respectively. During the past ten years Mr. Glicksberg has exam ined for SWR such authors as Henry Miller, James T. Farrell, and T. S. Eliot, besides in vestigating various literary trends, with spe cial attention to the ethical content of con temporary literature, Mr. Frohock, formerly of Columbia and Wesleyan Universities, is author of André Malraux and the Tragic Imagination and of The Novel of Violence in America; a revised and expanded second edition of the latter work, which first appeared as an SWR essay-series and in book form has been out of print for sev eral years, W ill be published this fall by the Southern Methodist University Press. In his present essay Mr. Frohock quotes passages from James Agee’s work by permission of Agee’s publisher, Houghton Mifflin Com
pany.
FICTION: Having recently completed a year as a state social worker with the Navajos, pouG-
LAS WOOLF now lives in Jerome, Arizona. A
native of Florida, FRED MYERS is now working
for a motion picture advertising firm in New Orleans; “This Evenin’ of This Summer’’ is his first published story. By contrast, CHARLES ANGOFF, contributor of both fiction and verse to previous issues of SWR, is author or editor of some seventeen books, including three novels and three collections of short stories. His most widely read volume has undoubtedly been the one published last year recalling the years he spent with H. L. Mencken on the old Ameri- Mencken: A Portrait
from Memory. A frequent lecturer at writers’
can Mercury—H. L.
conferences in and near New York, Mr. Angoft will be a staff member of two this summer: the Washington Square Writers’ Conference sponsored by New York University, and the New York City Writers’ Conference at Staten Island, held at Wagner College, where Mr. Angoff is adjunct professor of English.
POINTS OF view: A man of deep and broad and varied interests, ROY BEDICHEK of Austin shows a relaxed, informal side in “The Mark of the Doodler.” though never ponderous, works he has twice
For his more profound,
won the Carr P. Collins Award of the Texas Institute of Letters, given annually to the “Best Texas Book of the Year” —first with Kardnka- way Country and again, this year, with Educa- tional Competition, a history of the Texas Interscholastic League, which he directed for some thirty years. Also of Austin, JOHN M. HALLER spends much time in Mexico, and in an essay a few issues ago described from per- sonal experience what it feels like to be a wet- back. Tree Care, a manual for homeowners in which Mr. Haller discusses his professional specialty, is being published by Macmillan this June. Robert Graves, Mr. Haller’s subject in this issue, is author of a new book too, They Hanged My Saintly Billy. jouUN T. WESTBROOK
lives in Greenwell Springs, Louisiana.
SUMMER 1957
A BOOK OF TAILS by Anne Welsh Guy
iNustrated by Elizabeth Rice; Ages 4-7; 48 pp.; $1.50
Tails! Bushy tails, slick tails, short tails, magical disappearing tails
a whole book of tails. And all are different! Anne Welsh Guy tells how the animals use their tails and why each one prizes his own special ap pendage. Illustrated in color and black and white
HORNED LIZARDS
by M. Vere DeVault and Theodore W. Munch
Illustrated by Coro! Rogers; Ages 6.10, 2 pp.; $1.50
Accurate and interesting stories about the strange-looking, but harm- less, little horned lizards and some of their awesome, ancient relatives In this easy-to read book children will find the answers about the liz- ard family. Color illustrations
BOOKS FOR SPRING
THE LITTLE LEAGUE WAY by Curtis Bishop Author of Little Leaguer, Half-Time Hero and many sports books. Ages 9.12, 208 pp.; $2.00
Dave Owen — overweight and in different to sports or exercise does a turn-about-face soon after Jim Cantrell, a star Littl League pitcher, moves into his neighbor hood. Another of Bishop's famo 's Little League stories which is brim ming over with the action that young sports enthusiasts like
SAN JACINTO
by Curt Carroll
Author of The Golden Herd, historical
novel which won national acclaim in
1952. Ilestrated by Elizabeth Rice; Teen age; 192 pp.; $2.00
In this new junior historical novel based on the Texas Revolution, young Jamie Barton proves a wise choice in being chosen to get two field pieces and powder to the Texas army across an international bound ary. Full-color and two-color illus trations
Write today for your free copy of the Steck Book Catalog which lists these and many other delightful
selections for young readers.
THE STECK COMPANY
PUBLISHERS
AUSTIN, TEXAS
KUDOS: Resident Arts columnist JOHN ROSEN- riecp of the Dallas News was honored last Feb- ruary at the annual awards dinner of the Screen Directors’ Guild in Los Angeles, where he re- ceived the Critics Award for outstanding mo- tion picture critical writing during 1956; he is the fourth critic to receive this annual award as “Film Critic of the Year.” Mr. Rosenfield’s initial contribution to SWR was “The Movie Talks,” in 1928; and his current Resident Arts series, now in its ninth year, has frequently
examined the cinema field.
poetry: Currently living in Mexico City, WILLARD MARSH is a Californian seen fre- quently in SWR with stories as well as poems— work of prize-winning quality in both fields. His stories have been reprinted in both the Bes/ American Short Stories annual and the yearly O. Henry awards volume, while for his verse
he won several years ago the Robert M. Bender
SOUTHWEST Revieu
award, He is also successful in the science- fiction field. A Massachusetts trio are EDWIN HONIG, GEORGE ABBE, and ROBERT MEREDITH, residing in Cambridge, Springfield, and Brook- line, respectively. Author of three novels and five collections of poems, Mr. Abbe summers in Corpus Christi, where he is director of a writers’ conference. In 1956 he won the Shelley Memorial Award. A_ college-teaching Texan long expatriate, Mr. Meredith has his roots in southern Navarro County, along Pin Oak Creek
GLEN, a New Yorker, has been in these pages
scene of his poem in this issue. EMILIE before, as has—indeed, many times over a pe riod of three decades and more—PLizABETH coatswortH of Nobleboro, Maine. joseru of Los Angeles is another frequent contributor, whose “Wait by Night” is re
printed from our Spring number in repentance
for a typographical mixup suffered in its origi-
nal af pearance.
THE RESIDENT ARTS
On Liking Grand Opera
JOHN ROSENFIELD
SPRING is Opera time in Texas. The year-around resident establishments of Fort Worth, Dallas, and Houston proffer opera at intervals through the year, but we won't count these efforts in the present discussion. San Antonio gets its concentrated dose of opera in February, four productions on two week ends, and Dallas and Houston receive the annual visits of the Metro- politan Opera of New York in May — and fortunately now in air-conditioned buildings. All these performances are attended by large crowds, people who come from far and wide, to coin a phrase. There may be deficits, but these are the result of the cost of things and not public indifference. The truth is that tour- ing opera and even home-town production scale things at about 92 per cent of capacity, which is unrealistic to say the least. What if it rains or there is a tornado? Well, fortunately, there is usually an underwriting or a guarantee fund involving sums that can be deducted from income taxes.
The point here is that the ledgers of grand opera have nothing to do with grand opera’s appeal as a cultural-entertainment art; purely from an attendance standpoint, grand opera outdraws on this alien soil everything but the circus, or, for a long haul, a motion picture. We may call it “alien soil” for the good reason that there are few American operas, none viable, the American lyric theater genius
usually having expressed itself in musical comedy and in the long-run rather than the repertory exhibition system. What we mean by grand opera would be something like Le Nozze di Figaro of Mozart and Lorenzo da Ponte, composed with almost any place in mind other than the Western Hemisphere. The rest of the masterpieces that continue to attract the largest box-office receipts in America were composed without America in mind.
This goes for Madama Butterfly and The Girl of the Golden West by Puccini, both taken from Broadway plays by David Belasco. Butterfly had its premiere in Europe and its first successes there. Girl had its premiére in New York, as a result of the Metropolitan's connections with the Milanese publishing house of Ricordi, and the logic of presenting an opera about the American Wild West on these shores first. But Girl failed miserably in this country and survives only as La Fanciulla del Ouest in Italy as a lesser Puccini opera. And when a quotation in the score came out not as Stephen Foster's “My Little Dog Tray” but as Giacosa and Illica’s “Il Mio Cano Tray,” audiences in this country were ready to give the operatic Girl back to the Italians.
The Metropolitan’s close affiliation with Casa Ricordi and its greatest post-Verdi composer, Giacomo Puccini, accounted for the Broadway
world premiére also of the Puccini Trittico,
SUMMER 1957
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three one-act operas or a “triptych” consisting of Il Tabarro (The Cloak), Suor Angelica (Sister Angelique), and Gianni Schicchi, the last a comic opera in the Goldoni vein. But this was no more successful than earlier efforts to graft the lyric theater form on the sturdy trunk of American mores. Gianni Schicchi lingers; the other two have disappeared except for such revivals as the Southern Methodist University Opera Workshop and Community Opera Guild arranged in Dallas recently. The Chicago Opera gave the world premiére of Prokofiev's The Love for Three Oranges, but this was no more successful in establishing America as an opera center. Chicago still patromzed Rigoletto despite the high honor of a Prokofiev operatic accouchement. Countering this evidence of the durability of old-fashioned opera in America is the fact that opera is also a national joke. Just the other week one of our most widely distributed national magazines published a cartoon of a male operatic patron, complete with white tie and tails, walking somnambulistically out of his box in the Golden Horseshoe while a soprano bellowed from the Stage. There was once a hilarious vaudeville act, headed by Wil- lie and Eugene Howard, devoted almost en- tirely to the quartet from Rigoletto. As four singers screamed a parody of the well-known music, Willie Howard, looking like a dried prune, tried to peer down the traditional operatic bosom of one of his female associates. This act lasted in the two-a-day and later as a Broadway revue specialty almost as long as the quartet from Rigoletto itself. When first we saw it, we thought we never would feel respectful again of the Verdi quartet. But we did come to Rigoletto again, sung this time by Beniamino Gigli, Giuseppe Di Luca, Amelita Galli-Curci, and Jeanne Gordon. It was then the Willie Howard quartet that we forgot. Still the jokes go on. It has been said that a society dowager hired an upstairs maid, com
ing to full agreement on wages and days off.
The servant started down the stairs but re- membered something. Returning to her mis- tress’ bedroom she blurted out, “I don’t have to take your opera tickets, do 1?” (In fairness to opera it should be reported that the same
story has been told on symphony orchestra
tickets and flower show tickets. )
Operatic humor, whether in cartoon or anecdote, clusters around the cliché of bore- dom. It has yet to produce a comment, amus- ing or serious, to the effect that opera is good, that it should enthral its listeners, or that those anesthetic to it are boors, which they might very well be.
ALMOST NOWHERE, in Europe or America, is opera favorably received by the press. The shortcomings, which are many, are discussed in print in statistical detail, When critics en- counter a good performance at the opera house they dutifully report it with a rhetoric of com- plete amazement. Like most repertory systems, grand opera often wakes up to find its scenery out of date, its staging stale and routine.
Rudolf Bing, general manager of the Metro- politan, never heard Dallas’ Mayor Bob Thorn- ton’s country apothegm on keeping the chin up and maintaining a fair face on things. ‘No- body will give a quarter to bury a dead horse,” said Mayor Bob.
Mr. Bing has continually given America’s chief opera company a ‘po’ mouth” with a British accent. Let it be explained that Mr. Bing, although a German, spent much of his young life in England and speaks a careful Lord Dundreary English. The ‘po’ mouth” is a term from the American ex-Confederacy and means talking as if you didn’t know where the next meal was coming from. Such dis- tress usually prizes loose the nickels and dimes from the soft-hearted. It rarely pays off in the long run, for it gives the enterprise the aura of indigence and failure. Nothing succeeds like success is a truer adage.
Eventually Mr. Bing was talked out of run-
SUMMER 1957
ning up and down the land crying the Metro- politan Opera's distress and holding out his natty hat for donations. Now the financial situation of the Metropolitan appears much sounder, even if the dollar is harder and tighter, and Mr. Bing is talking about a new opera house in New York's Lincoln Square de- velopment. Still Mr. Bing and his pleas didn’t help the réclame of grand opera. It ceased to be the “diversion of Dives’’ or the true sport of kings and princes. No longer “diamond,” its horseshoe was reduced to a circlet; where the second tier of boxes once was, there is now a row of balcony seats. Even in Dallas, where the annual opera season is well patronized, the dressiness has been downgraded. Dinner jackets and cocktail dresses have replaced full-dress tails and tiaras with evening frocks.
The housing of opera destroys some of its class. From coast to coast in America it plays either in antiquated theaters like the Metro- politan Opera House itself or in’ barnlike municipal auditoriums. In either type of hall full evening dress makes one feel affected. In New York the Metropolitan Opera House looks like a baggy pants tramp beside even the Radio City Music Hall, the de luxe motion picture theater. Nor is the Met’s stage as big, its lighting equipment as modern, its backstage facilities as resourceful as Radio City’s.
Grand opera on three continents has been so closely associated with the nobility or official- dom, with wealth and luxury, that it is as- sumed it cannot survive without sponsorship of these elements. At a time, though, when nobility is rare, when wealth is heavily taxed, and when luxury is so widely enjoyed that it is hardly appreciated, grand opera continues to attract its largest if not its best-upholstered audience,
Grand opera survives still another threat, somewhat bound up in the other obstacles. In loose economic parlance, opera has lost its
“Veblen.” It has ceased to be a symbol of continued on page 242
SOUTHWEST Revieu
MESQUITE AND WILLOW
Texas Folklore Society Publication XXVII
Edited by Mody C. Boatright, Wilson M. Hudson, Allen Maxwell
Rich and varied as Texas itself, the contents of Mesgurre anp Wittow blend the universal and the regional: mesquite symbolizes the Southwest, willow the old Anglo-Saxon tradition ; mesquite stands for life, for lively humor— willow for death, for lost love, for the ghostly and the ghastly. The doleful plaints of English balladeers transplanted to Mississippi riverlands and Texas thickets echo through the essay by Brownie MeNeil, himself a
prime folksong practitioner.
Here is folklore both formal and informal, raw and refined — annotated studies of folktale dialogue and tale- type origins, plus ghost stories and good-humored animal tales bearing
nary a footnote.
This is a book for every reader who loves good folk stories and old, unfor- gettable songs.
$4.00
SOUTHERN METHODIST UNIVERSITY PRESS
Dallas 5, Texas
Reviews of Books
HILLBILLY HIGH JINKS
The Talking Turtle and Other Ozark Folk Tales BY VANCE RANDOLPH
Columbia University Press, New York $4.00
VANCE RANDOLPH began getting acquainted with the Ozark mountain people back in 1899 and has developed his relationship through an almost continuous residence since 1920. He puts it vividly: “I rode around the country with horse traders, interviewed old settlers, married Ozark women, cultivated country editors, and shacked up with berry-pickers under the hedges."’ What zeal some folklorists show! His long and intimate association has made him the most prolife reporter of the lore of these folk. But his work is marked by more than quantity. He has shown a degree of com mon sense and an appreciation not merely of authenticity but also of modern standards of effective collection and of the interests and limitations of the general reader which are very rare among publishers of folklore. Using all available methods of recording, he has held to his intention always to “record each tale as accurately as possible,” without making up anything, combining different versions, or im- proving the teller’s style, except to reduce an
excess of “cuss-words” and to modify extreme
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and confusing dialect. The Talking Turtle, along with the several earlier works, estab- lishes Mr. Randolph as probably the most dis- tinguished collector and editor of genuine folk- lore active in the United States today. Like its predecessors, the book contains the amusing and grotesque drawings of Glen Rounds; it makes a useful gesture toward scholarship through the erudite notes of Herbert Halpert.
Mr. Randolph is primarily a humorist, and some of his best yarns are just plain fun. The title tale puts the laugh on Lissenbee, who “talked too damn much.”” When a turtle told him that truth, he brought the town folk to witness the miracle, but the turtle was silent. The disgusted people beat Lissenbee up and tossed him in a ditch, whereupon the turtle merely said, “Didn't I tell you?” After killing a quarrelsome wife another man explained a racket in the kitchen thirteen days later by say- ing that her ghost was still mad. A farmer ran out one cold night in his “long-johns” with his shotgun to kill a varmint in the chicken house. As he squatted to get a better shot, the wet, icy nose of his old hound ran up the gap in the seat of the underwear, and the farmer leaped in the air with a screech, firing both barrels and killing half the chickens. A typical piece of Ozark wit tells of Adam, Eve, and their bare- footed kids walking enviously by a luxurious plantation house. When one of the boys ex- pressed his longing, Adam said that he and Eve had once lived in that very place until Eve ate them out of house and home.
The Ozark people love tricks and satire. A fisherman conducting a city couple on a float trip down the James River shook the lady up and delayed the trip considerably by giving her “loosening weed” as a physic. But the lady got even next season by handing the unsus- pecting hillbilly jokester a box of Feen-O- Chew gum. Another famous bit of foolery is
SUMMER 1957
a version of the speech supposedly made by Senator Cassius M. Johnson against changing the name of Arkansas. Doctors are the target of much mountaineer satire. One yarn says that doctors are never buried but merely left in their offices overnight; nothing remains the next day but a strong odor of burnt sulphur. When a patient complained vehemently against a charge of forty dollars for a minor opera- tion, the doctor said there was a sleight to it, a sleight that he had spent many years and a lot of money to learn. The hillbilly paid the doctor back by charging forty dollars for sev- eral loads of wood worth not over six dollars. “There's a sleight to chopping wood,” he said; “I've been learning it all my life.”
A good many of these Ozark tales are well- known and widespread story types, which Herbert Halpert has annotated or identified through the use of systems developed by the famed folklore scholars Antti Aarne and Stith Thompson, the latter a founder of the Texas Folklore Society. Among such stories are “The Wicked Stepmother,” in which the severed head of a little girl tells of the grandmother's crime; “Jack and the Gower,” with the theme of the hero’s using silver bullets to kill the monster; ‘The Cat's Foot,” a strange account of a man’s cutting off the foot of a huge cat in his smokehouse and of a neighbor's wife dying next day from an ax wound in her foot; and finally an ancient riddle-like question of how a donkey tied to an eight-foot rope could reach some carrots thirty feet away—simply by walking to them, since the rope was not tied!
The many very colorful and highly divert- ing stories and anecdotes in The Talking Turtle might justify an unqualified approval of the book were it not for two circumstances: the thoroughly favorable impression made on the reviewer by Mr. Randolph's We Always Lie to Strangers, and some questionable State- ments on the dust-wrapper of the volume. In
discussing his choice of materials the author
SOUTHWEST Revieu
fom
BRUCE CATTON says ot this new biography: “A real addition to the Jackson story and to the history of the Civil War . . . | know of no book which succeeds as well in present- ing Old Stonewall.”
andT. HARRY WILLIAMS calle it:
“An outstanding piece of work ... the definitive life of Jackson.”
MIGHTY STONEWALL
By FRANK VANDIVER $6.50, now at your bookstore
HL. BOOK
John Wesley Hardin
TEXAS GUNMAN LEWIS NORDYKE
The factual story of a man who made Billy the Kid look like an apprentice — a colorful, fast-moving drama of the turbulent Old West.
Map. At all bookstores, $4.00
WM. MORROW & CO., NEW YORK 16
says that he has picked not always the stories that appealed to him most but “those which the narrators themselves like best, and tell oftenest.” Some eight or ten quite dull yarns suggest that the editor has made too much con- cession to the tastes ot his hillbillies, for these tales definitely lower the average ot the book, the “blurb” writer to the contrary notwith- standing. A more tempered judgment would rank the latest collection of Ozark lore as quite comparable to earlier volumes at its best and only a little below par in a few spots. Cer tainly in the thoroughness of his understand- ing of these colorful folk and in the authen ticity, the richness, and the vigor and liveli ness of portrayal, Mr. Randolph shows no fall ing off from his best form.
John Lee Brook s
BRITON EYES TEXAS REPUBLIC William Bollaert’s Texas
BY W. FUGENE HOLLON AND
LAPHIAM BUTLER
University of Oklahoma Press, Norman $5.00
SOMFONE once remarked that people who write on the Republic of Texas are of two varieties: those who have consulted the Bol- laert Papers and those who haven't; and that the ones who used Bollaert have a firmer grasp and feel of the region in the 1840's, But the papers of this observant and articulate traveler are in the Newberry Library in Chicago, a long way from where Texas history is usually writ- ten; and authorities there were reluctant to permut extensive reproduction ot what Bollaert recorded, pending a time when the papers could be authoritatively edited and published. That time has come.
I his urbane, versatile Britisher went almost everywhere and saw everything, and he wrote down his impressions in piquant early Vic- torian prose sometimes im Verse. He was
aware of the incongruities of this new nation
and had a sympathetic understanding of what a handful of settlers, some of them English, were trying to do—and were doing. His jour- nals begin at the end of 1841 and extend to the middle of 1844, when he returned to England. It was a time of stress, what with Mexican invasions, talk of war, annexation agitation, and diplomatic complications. All these things Bollaert reports; but his chief in- terest is in the people, the land, and its resources, for he planned to become a coloni- zation agent and perhaps a permanent resi- dent. He had reasons to observe closely and to ingratiate himself with the Texans he met.
His record is valuable because it is accurate, firsthand data. It is delightful because it is multifaceted, touching matters that other travelers overlooked; and it is absorbing read- ing because the unique personality of this minor genius shines through it.
Who was this Bollaert? Stanley Pergallis, scholarly director of the Newberry Library, answers the question in nine fascinating pages. He was a Britisher of Dutch descent; his father was an apothecary, his brother a book- seller, and he himself was a chemist, explorer, metallurgist, geologist, geographer, soldier of fortune, linguist, author, and (for a brief time in Texas) a lawyer and a navy man. Before he came to Texas he had worked in the Royal Institution at London, prospected in Peru and Chile, planned an African safari, spent a year in Queen Maria II's army in Portugal (for which he was knighted), and served as a sort of undercover agent in the Carlist war in Spain (for which he apparently was neither knighted nor well paid). He lived until 1876 and pub- lished much on many subjects, but his Texas notes remained in manuscript.
Now Mrs. Butler of the Newberry Library and Professor Hollon, whose works on Pike and Marcy helped fit him for this task, have selected the more valuable portions of the
manuscripts and expertly but unobtrusively
SUMMER 1957
:
Edgar Quinet A STUDY IN FRENCH PATRIOTISM By Richard Howard Powers
IN ALL PRENCH LITERATURE, it has been said, no other author's books teach love of the fatherland with a more persuasive force than do those of Edgar Quinet. Publicist, philosopher, poet, and historian, Quinet made a significant contribution to the formation of the French republican tradition, and during the Third Republic his thought penetrated everywhere.
“This book has truth and verity, it has imagination and artistry, and it brings the dead to life. The author's style is mature and suggests considerable reserve. The volume is, in short, an excellent biography of one of the more important nineteenth-century French historical writers."’—Joe B. Frantz in Dallas Morn-
ing News.
Arnold Foundation Studies, VII
224 pages, $4.00
SOUTHERN METHODIST UNIVERSITY PRESS, DALLAS 5, TEXAS
edited them, and the University of Oklahoma Press has brought them out in sturdy and dis- tinguished format. Bollaert’s Texas is at last available to everyone. That is as it should be. As one who once journeyed to the Newberry Library in Chicago, where the manuscripts have been since 1911, and read through the more than a thousand pages of material, | con- fess that part of the charm lay in Bollaert’s unmistakably British script and even more in the sketches of towns, buildings, ships, and landscapes that he made part of the record. But I also allow that it is easier to read the printed text and that the specimen pages and sketches reproduced in this volume convey something of the “feel” of the original.
To Mrs. Butler, Messrs. Hollon and Per- gallis, and the Oklahoma Press we are grateful; but most of all we are grateful to Mr. Bollaert and for the Texans he observed.
Herbert Gambrell
sOUTHWEST Revieu
CENTURY OF AMERICAN BIRDS
Birds and Men: American Birds in Science, Art, Literature, and Conservation, 1800-1900
BY ROBERT HENRY WELKER
The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge $5.75
rae virte of this work is “wondrous cum- brous,” as a Greek professor of my acquaint- ance used to say of some freshman’s awkward translation, The reader will find here simply a history of American ornithology; and thus en- titled, the fact that birds, men, and the items mentioned in the subtitle are involved might be safely left to inference.
To be assured that modern ornithology had its origin in America gratifies the national pride and makes a significant addition to our list of “firsts.” Really, most of us would have accepted the claim on less conclusive evidence
continued on page 244
OXFORD books of exceptional interest
The Poems, English, Latin, and Greek
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Crashaw’s poems, as first published and as later revised by him. New material on both Crashaw and his work is included in this new edition. b plates; text figures, 7.20
William Wordsworth: A Biography The Early Years, 1770-1803
by MARY MOORMAN
This first volume of a two-volume work covers Wordsworth’s school days and early creative years. It is based on new material and on the work done on the poems, letters, and journals by Ernest de Selincourt and Helen Darbishire. Hlustrated, $8.00
Complaint and Satire
in Karly English Literature by JOHN PETER
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The Correspondence of Alexander Pope Edited by GEORGE SHERBURN
“these five closely packed volumes will remain as one of the outstanding achievements of modern research .. . well over two thousand letters are here scrupulously reproduced with indications of all early revisions and concoc- tions... arranged in chronological sequence ... in one long, unfolding nar- rative from |Pope’s| sixteenth year to his death.”--James L. Cirrorp, Vew York Times Book Review. 5 volumes. $33.60
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avi
j
Fossils, Classics, and Presences
ALBERT GUERARD
LAST TIME I saw Paris, six years ago, Bastille Day was celebrated on the historic Place des Vosges to the tune of this inane ditty:
Jaime Voignon frit au beurre, J’aime l’oignon, j'aime l’oignon, J’aime Voignon frit au beurre, J’aime Voignon quand il est bon,
an ardent and repetitive profession of love for fried onion. But I hope this was an exception. As a rule, from San Francisco to Ouagadougou, by way of Tuamotou, the Kerguelen Islands and Tananarive, Bastille Day rings with the grand old “Marseillaise,”” so called because it was composed in Strasbourg. In the last stanza, one of the best, although it was not writ- ten by Rouget de Lisle, the young genera- tion sing:
Nous entrerons dans la carriére, Quand nos ainés n’y seront plus; Nous y trouverons leur poussiére, Et la trace de leurs vertus.
“We shall enter upon our career, when our elders are no longer there; in it we shall find their dust, and the trace of their virtues.” This stanza, religiously sung by French youngsters, embodies a fallacy which, in subtler forms, is still affecting
SOUTHWEST Review
our thought: namely, that generations are discrete in the mathematical sense of the term, successive but wholly separate. Here are the quick, eager to do their work; and there lie the dead in their eternal sleep. But it simply is not so. The elders, obsti- nately, perversely, maliciously, insist on remaining in the career, with their dust and their virtues, while the young are impatiently trying to forge ahead. One example, from the scientific world. In the 1860's Berthelot, the great chemist, wrote to his friend Renan: “The trouble is that Chevreul stands in my way. He did some good work thirty years or so ago; but now he is cumbering the ground.” The cream of the jest is that Chevreul survived the premature burial suggested by Berthelot by nearly thirty years; he died, still active, at the age of one hundred and three. Education and literature do not pro- ceed by sudden collective jolts, like the old-fashioned spoils system we are at- tempting to revive under a more virtuous name: all rascally Romanticists out, all deserving Realists in. When masters of “the New Criticism” like Joel Spingarn haughtily proclaimed “We no longer do this or that,” the historically-minded could afford to smile. ““The world must change its basis: we were nothing, let us be everything.” This assertion of the
169
“Internationale,” cribbed from Abbé Si¢yés, is an ancient delusion. Everything that Spingarn did had been done before; everything that he condemned kept being done. History is a continuous process. Continuous, not even: there are fits and starts, and jolts and jars; jerks and sud- den twists of the kaleidoscope; vogues and phobias. But even these are superficial eddies, not the main stream. And espe- cially, they do not affect exclusively men of a given age: the young do not form a single block against the old. I have known college freshmen who were senile, and emeriti who were puerile. The term gen- eration has a definite meaning within the family: there is a well-established differ- ence between grandparents, parents, and children. But when applied to literature or history, it is so loose that it becomes worse than useless—misleading. We should not speak of the generation of 1660 in classical France, the generation of 1830 in romantic France, the generation of 1898
in modern Spain: we should speak of
moments. The old and the young were part of that moment. In 1830, Musset was barely twenty, Chateaubriand was sixty-
one.
war 1s modern? What is contemporary? In considering the meaning of these terms I shall take my concrete illustrations from The Columbia Dictionary of Modern European Literature, edited by the late Horatio Smith, and especially from The Contemporary French Novel, by Henri Peyre, of Yale. In my youth, we did know what these words meant. The Middle Ages succeeded antiquity with the fall of Rome in 476, as definitely as President Eisen- hower succeeded President Truman in
170
1953. Modern times arrived punctually in 1453, with the fall of Constantinople; and the contemporary period opened in 1789, say on the Fourteenth of July, with the fall of the Bastille. It was wonderfully neat and convenient: just the kind of knowledge that can be tested by Right or Wrong questions, the answers to be tabu- lated in a computing machine. Then it was realized that the first wave of in- vasions, in the third century, although it did not destroy the Empire, altered its character; and that the cities of the fourth century, rebuilt on the hills, shrunken, fortified, were already medieval. The great unnamed Renaissance of the eleventh cen- tury heralded a new age far more defi- nitely than that of the fifteenth. To de- scribe the McKinley period or even the reign of Calvin the Silent as modern would be a piece of rather crude humor.
For there is a certain quality, a tang, that attaches to the word modern. It has little to do with dates. That tang is lack- ing in most of our musical comedies and television programs; it is found in certain scenes in Aristophanes, in the Tanagra statuettes, in the mimes or sketches of Herondas, in Ecclesiastes with tonic bit- terness, in the delightful Voltairian tale of Jonah, in Lesage’s Turcaret, performed in 1707 under Louis XIV, which might be dated 1957. The modern touch is not smartness: nothing is so corny as the smartness of yestereve. It is a quiet ironic refusal to bow before dignified conven- tionalities. By that definition, many of the writers listed by Horatio Smith are emphatically unmodern: for instance Paul Bourget, who raised snobbishness to the height of a religion.
Contemporary is a better term, because
SUMMER 1957
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it is purely chronological: there is no spe- cial quality attached to it. Much as they must deplore it, Messrs. Bulganin and John Foster Dulles are contemporaries. The macrobe, the literary Methuselah, creates quite a problem for the chronolo- ger. Fontenelle, who lived to be almost exactly a hundred, was a contemporary of his uncle Pierre Corneille, who was born in 1606, and of Goethe, who died in 1832. Guizot was alive under the ancient regime, and was still active under the Third Republic. A lady created a commo- tion at the court of Napoleon III by re- marking: “Sire, Louis XIV once told my husband . . .” Dinosaurs from a lost world have a way of rearing their extremely ugly heads: I astounded little Hawaiians at the Bishop School when I told one of them I had seen Buffalo Bill in the flesh. The whole school gathered around me in awe. One of the boys asked: “Did you know Jesse James?” I tried to cover my retreat by boasting: “No, but I shook hands with Teddy Roosevelt.” Somehow, the Rough Rider failed to impress them: he was not part of their folklore. Contemporary means people—or works of art—that belong to the same age, that are alive at the same time. Now the life of a man and the life of his work are two different things. Nothing is quite so dead as the flop or the dud of this very morning, unless it be certain best sellers of yester- day: O what so dead as Anthony Adverse! Now literature is the study, or rather the enjoyment, of works, not of men. Chats about men belong to the gossip column, not to serious criticism. The fundamental principle in my Preface to World Litera- ture is the distinction between “the quick and the dead,” as applied to works, not to
SOUTHWEST Revieu
their authors. All literature that is alive is modern, is contemporary, is our proper field; whether it be as old as Genesis or the Odyssey, or as newly hatched as Faulkner’s The Town. Everything that is dead is the domain, not of the lover of literature, not of the critic (the two terms ought to be synonymous), but of the antiquarian. The antiquarian may be a re- spectable and a delightful person: let Old Mortality wander among the tombs, if he finds pleasure and profit in that melan- choly pastime. I have explored cemeteries myself, in quest of quaint epitaphs.
THE Quick and the dead! The difficulty is that while a competent physician may safely pronounce a man dead, there is no doctor of letters so efficient that he can pronounce a work of art dead forever. Many a piece of literature could flash back Mark Twain’s historic message: “News of my death greatly exaggerated.” Some fifty years ago, there was one of those literary discussions of which French news- papers are so fond, about the death of Naturalism. A telegram came: “Natural- ism not dead; letter follows.” The letter was lost to posterity; but the wire remains alive. As a matter of fact, more copies of Zola’s works were sold in the thirty years after his death than in his lifetime. I do not believe Anatole France is dead. I do not believe James Branch Cabell is dead. There was a gruesome tale during World War I: a detail was burying enemy casual- ties, and some of these protested: “But we are not dead!” The work proceeded: “Bah! they are such liars: why should we believe them?” Boileau packed the earth hard on the grave of Ronsard; John Donne was buried deep; Pope has been dead quite a
171
few times. Philip Guedalla wrote the epi- taph of Proust in these words: “The passing of the Marcel wave’; and where is Guedalla now? We need a medicolegal treatise that will enable us to tell the quick from the dead. I doubt whether it could ever be of scientific accuracy; but here are a few possible chapter heads.
The first of these twilight cases is that of the unburied dead or living fossil. He is different from the Methuselah or macrobe, for there are writers who never become fossilized, who are capable of renewing themselves even in their last decades, like Goethe, Hugo, Tolstoy, Thomas Hardy, Shaw, and Thomas Mann. A man of thirty may be the fossil of his twenty-year-old self, and remain so all his life. The fossil, although not alive, may be very lively. Almost up to the end of the Second Em- pire, in 1868, there lived a certain Viennet, born well before the Revolution, who must have been a very old-fashioned youth. He had steadily refused to move an inch; so, in the era of Flaubert and Baudelaire, he was writing without effort epistles, satires, and fables which belonged to the age of Voltaire, although not in the same class. There was nothing tenuous or spooky about him: he was indomitably alive, although his life had never been par- ticularly rich or varied. As the nineteenth
century, which believed itself boldly pro-
gressive, was spiritually an epoch of obscurantism and reaction, Viennet, an admirably preserved specimen of the En- lightenment, was much more “advanced” than most of his younger contemporaries. I had the curiosity, some time ago, to read a late novel of Paul Bourget, Our Deeds Dog Our Steps, written when he was several after the
seventy-seven, years
172
death of Marcel Proust. In thought and style, it was a period piece of the early eighties; yet apart from its antiquarian flavor, it had a vigor and even an austere charm of its own. The living fossil is, of course, a familiar character in politics and economics. We have the interpositionist; we have the D.A.R.; we have the Mc- Carthyite.
The living fossil, who honestly believes himself “contemporary,” is different from the epigone, who consciously follows the standards of a vanished generation. The epigone flourished in the eighteenth cen- tury and the early nineteenth. People kept writing tragedies scrupulously according to the pattern of Corneille and Racine; and Voltaire, so vibrantly alive in his tales, histories, and letters, spent much of his energy composing imitative drama. This disease became known as post- or pseudo- classicism; but there was a similar phe- nomenon in the Romantic tradition. In the age of Naturalism and Symbolism, such writers as Francois Coppée and Jean Richepin wrote poems which would have been fresh—if rather insipid—about 1830.
The epigone in his turn is different from the deliberate pastiche writer. The pastiche need not be merely a jeu d’esprit, as in Marcel Proust’s Pastiches et Mélanges, or in Reboux and Muller’s miraculously clever series A la Maniére de... , at times a very searching form of criticism. It may be a natural form of expression. Balzac’s Droll Tales are weird from the linguistic point of view; but they catch at least the more obvious aspects of the Rabelaisian spirit. Words of a Believer by Lamennais is an inspired biblical pastiche because his soul dwelt on biblical heights. Some of
SUMMER 1957
| |
Valéry’s poems have a touch of the pas- tiche, and are none the less quivering with life. Anatole France wrote La Rétisserie de la Reine Pédauque as a Voltairian pastiche and Jeanne d’Arc as a Froissart chronicle. The Rotisserie is a masterpiece, Jeanne d’ Arc a failure, because Anatole was per- fectly attuned to the eighteenth century, and not at all to the fifteenth. Transpose this problem into architectural terms. It is a crime today, punishable by law—the law of supply and demand—to design any building except in the “modern” or con- temporary style. All historical styles are dead. If you want a church, Le Corbusier will provide you with a highly functional “praying machine.” Well and good, if Le Corbusier will also furnish a theology of a strictly 1957 model, without any root in the past. If tradition counts in ecclesiasti- cal matters, then a Le Corbusier church might be stillborn, while the Liverpool Cathedral and St. John the Divine in New York are alive, and justified. I live in an eighteenth-century French house, because that is where I belong. I feel out of place in the aquariums that are ironically called modern homes.
Among the quick, we should count the perennial good seller, whether officially recognized as literature or not. Professors
still pour scorn on old Dumas and his tre-
mendous romance factory. He does not belong, he never belonged. Granted; but generation after generation still finds de- light in The Three Musketeers, and in Monte Cristo, which one of my students once renamed Monte Crisco because it was in need of shortening. Not so very long ago, people read The Wandering Jew and The Mysteries of Paris, by Eugene Sue. Paul de Kock was a would-be spicy enter-
SOUTHWEST Review
tainer, who never rose above the level of Thorne Smith, and that was a hundred years ago. I was surprised to discover his complete works on the scholarly shelves of the Widener Library, at Harvard, and a little shocked to find them so well thumbed: which was not true of Bailey's Festus, of Marius the Epicurean, of Doughty’s Dawn in Britain, or even of The Last Puritan. Low life, but life.
In limbo, neither life nor death, we find the reputation that refuses to consolidate into fame. There is a French song, idiotic and forgotten except for its refrain, “Il est des morts qu’il faut qu’on tue,” there are corpses that should be killed over again. It was written against Casimir Delavigne, an eclectic poet and dramatist, worthy of the bourgeois king under whom he flourished. Gustave Lanson, who duly mentioned him, wondered when it would become possible for the historian to ignore him altogether. There are many such names that linger in our memories—at least long enough to stand a Ph.D. oral examination. How many names and titles do we know, which are emphatically not worth knowing? Are Mrs. Aphra Behn and Colley Cibber really indispensable to your happiness and culture? When such worthies are dug up for a doctoral disser- tation, the result is not a resurrection, but an exhumation.
Once there was a symposium: What are the books that everyone should have read, and that you have not? H. L. Mencken answered: Paul and Virginia. Why on earth did he suppose that in the twentieth century one should have read that faded exotic idyl? It was once an eddy in the turbid stream of taste: but why re- member every eddy?
In Chantecler—a good example of the would-be masterpiece floating in the dubious twilight between the quick and the dead—Rostand speaks of “the immor- tality conferred upon the false artist by the taxidermist.” There is an active branch of taxidermy called the College Classics. Three decades ago the list of college classics coming in a steady stream from the educational publishers was lamentable and ludicrous. It included Cing-Mars, the only book of Alfred de Vigny that is sec- ond-rate; Saintine’s Picciola, Emile Sou- vestre’s Un Philosophe sous les Toits, Edmond About’s Le Roi des Montagnes, Hector Malot’s Sans Famille, Octave Feuillet’s Le Roman d’un Jeune Homme Pauvre, Anatole France’s Le Crime de Sylvestre Bonnard, and, \ast and worst, Ludovic Halévy’s L’Abbé Constantin. | take it that the editors wanted to make sure that nothing would distract the stu- dents’ attention from grammatical prob- lems: one of the many cases in which edu- cation and culture work at cross-purposes. These books are not bad; they are neither hot nor cold, like the Laodiceans. They might have been written, most of them, by any President of the Third or Fourth French Republics.
Ler us stupr from the backward to the forward view; from the books which are still alive, or claiming to be alive, to the books which are candidates for life. I re- member a huge sign in Los Angeles adver- tising a movie called Over the Hills: The Sweetest Story Ever Told; A Story That Will Never Die. This is supposed to be the test of all great art: life that conquers death. Horace’s fond hope and proud claim were Exegi monumentum and Non
174
omnis moriar: | shall not perish altogether. Can we discern in the mass of ephemeral books the few that have the enduring pow- er which alone is life?
Immortality: the dream of all noble souls; the pathetic assertion of perma- nency in a world of flux. Of this time- element, prospective instead of retrospec- tive, I shall quote three examples, one fic- titious, the other two extremely real.
The fanciful case is that of Enoch Soames, in Max Beerbohm’s tale. Enoch was a proud bohemian, persuaded that the glories of the day would fade, whilst his, still unacknowledged, would endure for- ever. Unfortunately, he put that bold and comforting hypothesis to the test. He sold his soul to the Devil, for the privilege of investigating his own record at the British Museum a hundred years later. Not a trace of Enoch Soames—until he finally discov- ered a single brief mention: Enoch Soames, a character in a short story by Max Beer- bohm.
The second case of prophetic vision is that of Beaumarchais, when Figaro’s Wed- ding was creating an uproar. He said: “I know my play is but froth; in two or three hundred years, people will have stopped fussing about it.” Which shows that in every respect, dramatic talent, relish in ideas, wit, and insolence, Beau- marchais was more Shavian than George Bernard Shaw.
The third is very serious. In the 1830's Stendhal, with two great novels to his credit, was neglected by the general pub- lic, ignored by the Academy, dismissed with an ironic smile by established critics such as Sainte-Beuve. He had Balzac on his side: but Balzac himself was struggling between notoriety and recognition. Twice
SUMMER 1957
at least Stendhal prophesied. Once he said: “I shall be understood about 1880”; and thanks chiefly to Taine and Bourget, he was. And again: “The problem is to be read in 1935”: and he gloriously won that Enoch Soames wager. In his own lifetime, he was alive as a writer and he, almost alone, knew it. In 1957, he is more alive than ever, and everyone is aware of it.
I wonder, though, whether that power of enduring is the only valid test of great art; if the desire for survival is not a primi- tive superstition, the naive worship of the great idol Ego. I have some sympathy with the Irishman who, reading on a tomb- stone, “Though dead, yet I shall live,” commented: “Faith! If I were dead, I wouldn’t make any bones about it.” To live again as a wraith in the memory of future generations—mostly fools, as Car- lyle would undoubtedly say—is that such a glowing promise? Why care so much about posterity? What has posterity done for us? I am tempted at times, with my master Vigny, to place the evanescent above the imperishable, to prize the rose that blooms of a morning far above the rock that endures sullenly for ages. What is so evanescent, what is so precious, as a smile? “Aimez ce que jamais on ne verra deux fois”—Love that which shall never be seen again.
So in contemporary literature, the lit- erature of our own time, I care little about what has lived, yesterday or two thou- sand years ago. And I care even less about that which, like the movie Over the Hills, is promised to interminable life; or for the masterpiece not within my ken, still un- recognized, “unborn to immortality.” The permanent is as great a delusion in art as it is in the beauty parlor. What concerns
SOUTHWEST Review
me is that which is fresh, living, quicken- ing, and therefore life-giving; that which enhances our consciousness of life. Smile at the fossil; revere the classic; commune with the Presence.
THIS WORD Presence is now a great favorite in French literary parlance. But what is a Presence? A Presence is a force that is with us. From the past? Who cares? For the future? Who knows? If in English there is in the word Presence a touch of religious awe, so much the better; but awe is not of the essence: Montaigne and Moliére are not awe-inspiring, and they are Presences. A buffoon may be a Presence: I think Charlie Chaplin deserves the name; while a preacher may be an eloquent fossil.
It would be interesting to list the Pres- ences in contemporary French literature. Quite a few living writers: say a couple of hundred out of ten thousand (Henri Peyre names ninety-three Many classics, but not in the usual order: Choderlos de Laclos, for instance, rather than the stately Buffon. World classics, of course, in preference to national mediocri- ties—Dante rather than Malherbe, Shake- speare rather than Boileau. At the present moment, I should name Kierkegaard, Kafka, Joyce, Faulkner; Baudelaire and Rimbaud no doubt but also Hugo and
novelists) .
Vigny; not Lamartine or Musset. Flau- bert, Zola, Gide, Colette, with question marks. Artine Steegmuller could not make up their minds about Maupassant: fossil of the
Artinian and Francis
Naturalistic age, minor classic, Presence? How many out of the forty immortals in the French Academy? Your guess is bet- ter than mine, for I absolutely refuse to guess.
175
Perhaps the best example of the dis- tinction I have in mind is the status in French literature of the great Russian trio, Turgenev, Tolstoy, Dostoevski. Turge- nev was the first to be known and appre- ciated. He spent long periods in Paris, where he had many friends. He was ac- cessible to Western minds. He is eminently sane and lucid. Yet he faded from a Pres- ence to a minor classic, and is now a fa- miliar, respected, properly labeled fossil. Tolstoy has long since attained, and may retain, classic rank. We still enjoy him, yet
Revival Meeting
he is not one of us. We may study him, we do not discuss him. He has reached those heights in Olympus which are a trifle cool and remote. Dostoevski is a Presence. He belongs with the quick, be- cause he still has a quickening influence. He is far more alive to the French liter- ary public than those grand old men loaded with well-deserved honors, Jules Romains, Georges Duhamel, André Mau- rois. Fossils, classics, Presences: under- stand these three words, and you will not have read these pages in vain.
WILLARD MARSH
The newsboy’s flatted fifth establishes the hour, The derelicts the scene, and down the credible Streets come salvation’s heralds, carrying their faces
Like candles, or like women eight months gone.
Wounding the air with their brasses, they close ranks, Flush the drunks from the leafless lampposts; The trombone levels her eyes at the durable
Stars in their shoals, surveying the moon
Like an absentee owner As the second cornet, stepping forth, Denounces the flooded room instead of drowning.
Thus while the clock
Spins out your hours like a manic spider, Prayerwheels are spinning counterclockwise: Join hands, brother, deposit your ticket
In the tambourine and hope — unless you're Lucky enough to happen to be a sparrow.
SUMMER 1957
nN
Slayer of the Alien Gods
DOUGLAS WOOLF
Now Slayer of the Alien Gods one 1 hear him. Sky through from one I hear him.
His voice sounds in every direction.
His voice sounds holy, divine.
HE TROTTED as he did everything else, expertly: on the balls of the feet, the plump khaki thighs moving out evenly and rhythmically, out and out, out and out, like that, the arms relaxed, the wrists relaxed, even the fingers relaxed although they held the rolled map, held the firehat too swinging easily. But on his head the other hat, the round Indian Service hat, official, sat straight and firm and sweat- less. A real Indian trot, anyone would say, he thought. The funny thing was that he had perfected all this in college, on an indoor wooden track.
Now the people were watching him out of their white wooden houses freshly painted, out of their bright new Ford pickup trucks, over their lovely white laundry so clean you could count the gnats on it, and to himself he did not deny that he had known they would watch, that he had wanted them to, that on leav- ing the radio room he had snatched up the firehat unnecessarily and purposefully. The trotting alone would not have been enough, though he did not often trot these days without good reason. So trotting he
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FROM A NAVAJO SONG
carried the firehat, easily, and to their questions he gave brief affirmative nods, for he was still breathing through his nose and he did not wish to spoil it. He wished to reach the house without panting. Yes, he nodded, yes, yes, yes.
He made it very nicely.
Inside he slammed the door, for effect and for Nancy, and removing his hat sank onto the Montgomery Ward chair. Now while he waited he mopped with a clean white handkerchief the drops of sweat forming, forming on his brow and on the nape of his neck. He took out another white handkerchief and _ polished his glasses against the light of the front win- dow. Then he sat back and waited for his heart to quiet: he was altogether relaxed, yet his heart was still trotting. This was the only part of himself over which he had not perfect control. Oh, he could light a supervisor’s cigarette in the wind without scorching it, he could look a ranger in the eyes and tell him a white lie without blinking, he could help a lady out of a pickup and she wouldn’t look as though he were breaking her arm; only
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his heart denied him, thump, thump, thump, thump. Wild. Sometimes he could almost scream.
But now hearing Nancy he had no time to indulge a weakness, no wish to. When Nancy came to the kitchen door he was on his feet with his hat on straight, the other and the map ready in his hands, and he waited standing stiffly, officially almost, for her quick, disproportionate worry which would come not as an expression of the eyes but of all the body, all the taut, nervous body he loved. He waited for her worry, wanted it, but as soon as it ap- peared it enraged him, for it made her look almost old. “Sure, some of them are okay when they’re young, but Jesus... .”” How many times he had overheard them ex- press their opinion, how very hard he had tried to prove them wrong, giving her everything, the automatic washers, the nylon hairbrushes, the nightcreams, ev- erything the others had. (How carefully in fact he had studied her smallboned slimness, her fine taut face, before he married.) And now even so at this mo- ment she looked ten years older than she had any reason to look, she looked easily forty. Tonight she would use her night- cream if he had to hold her down on the bed and apply it himself, all bottles of it. “Relax,” he said, and he saw her in- voluntarily tighten.
They stood thus for several seconds, she taut in her slimness, he in his stoutness, for it was in this way that they succeeded in communicating most deeply. For all the words they had, in the two languages, this was still the way they decided things: You're not going, George... Nancy, oh yes | am. So. All the rest was mere recon- ciliation. But it was all very necessary too,
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and he braced himself as she prepared to speak.
“What have you got that silly hat for?” she asked.
He did not look down at the firehat in his hand. He said, “Nat just radioed me.”
“Ranger Duffy?”
“Yes, Nat,” he said. “The Salitre Mesa fire is coming up. Nat wants a radio at Bluewater.”
“He wants a radio at Bluewater!” As with all usually tolerant people, there was something almost childlike in her scorn. “That isn’t any of our business, Blue- water. Why can’t the Forest Service look after its own fires?”
“Nat called me, Nancy,” he said when she had stopped. “Maybe someday I'll want to call him.”
“You?”
He nodded.
“You call him?” she said, pretending to laugh. “He'd laugh.”
He did not comment at once. He took off his glasses and held them six inches in front of his face, against the light of the window, studying them. “Why?” he asked.
“I’m sorry,” she said, and she had come a step or two toward him, bringing herself too into his new perspective. “I’m sorry, but why does he always call you? He doesn’t have to always call you.”
He replaced his glasses, blinking slightly as he adjusted them.
“Do he, George? Do he?”
"Does he.” He did not try to keep the
fury from his voice, never could. She had been to school, had even taught school, she knew better, yet she perversely reverted to these illiteracies in moments of excite- ment. He hated it in any of the people,
SUMMER 1957
but he hated it most in her because she was his wife and she knew better. “Does he what?” he asked more gently.
“Does he have to call you all the time?” Nancy asked. A little of the enthusiasm had gone out of Nancy’s voice too. “Can't he call one of the supervisors once in a while?”
“I told you Nat wants a good radio- man,” he said, now very weary of it and wanting to be gone, perhaps conserving himself a little too because he did not wish to be exhausted before he even began. “Nobody can understand supervisors on the radio, not even other supervisors.”
“I remember the last time he wanted you to be a radioman,” Nancy said. “You chopped trees.”
He did not allow himself to wince at the memory of that day and night, but she knew. “My radio broke down that time,” he said, adding a bit stiffly: “It won’t hap- pen again. I’m taking two radios.”
“I don’t want you to go,” she said.
“All right.” He tossed the firehat onto the Montgomery Ward chair. “You know what they say about us over there any- way,” he said, tossing the map down too. “They say we have to do everything in pairs. They say we even go to the...”
Nancy said, “George!” and ordinarily he would have smiled.
“They say we even go to the telephone in pairs,” he said. “One to hold the receiver and the other to do the talking. It keeps us busy and it conserves our strength, they say.”
He knew now that she would insist that he go, now that her function was served. Long ago they had found this the only way to deal with the others, the rangers and the supervisors, to look at everything
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together from both sides, at the same time. “Go on, then,” she said, and he smiled. “Go on then.”
Stooping to pick up his equipment he did it without flourish, for he did not really wish to upset her, not any more. “Estsanatlehi,” he said softly. “Changing Woman.”
She looked at him with a somewhat forced sullenness. It still disturbed her a little when he used the holy people in this way, Estsanatlehi above all, but it pleased her too because she knew that at such times he was pleased with himself, and with her. He smiled at her. “But you are,” he said. And she was—for him at any rate —the holy one, the good wife and some- how, although not tiresomely, the good mother too, infinitely kind, infinitely pa- tient... eternally beautiful. Yes, tonight there would be nightcream. “You really are,” he said to her. “Goodbye.” But at the door he turned quickly and came back to her, stooping to kiss her and at the same time pat her backside. It always surprised her just a little, so she giggled. It was a good custom.
ouTtsipe where the people were watching him he resumed at once his trotting as though he had only momentarily broken his stride. And now, briefly, he could an- swer their many questions because he did not have so far to run this time, to the pickup only, and after that there would be fifty miles of restful driving, and after that the radio. Yes, it was a forest fire. Yes, it was the lightning. Yes, it was the chain lightning. Yes, it was the wind, yes. No, it was over on Salitre Mesa, over by Mt. Taylor, over by Bluewater, over there. Yes, he and Jimmie Charlie were going
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over there. Yes, they had called for him, yes. Some of the people seemed disap- pointed; he could hear them mutter, feel them lose interest. Would they prefer to have the fire on the reservation? “Fire is fire,” he said trotting. “It burns every- body, like the sun.” Some of them nodded.
There around the pickup the people were gathered watching Jimmie fasten down the tarpaulin and smooth it with his hands carefully, as though this were a picnic they were going on and they did not wish to lose the wienies. He trotted up to Jimmie and the people made way for him. He threw the map and the firehat into the cab. He was fine, he was scarcely panting at all. “Jimmie, have we got everything? The pack radio, the canteens, the field glasses, the sleeping rolls?”
“You know it,” Jimmie said. “And the chow.”
“Good. Let's go.”” He jumped into the cab of the pickup and started the motor, gunning it a little while the radio warmed up. Then he picked up the radio speaker. He held the button down for precisely three seconds before checking the radio, both channels, with Manuel in the tower. He gunned the motor again and into the clear space ahead shot the pickup forward past the warehouse, past the radio tower, past the bright white houses and the clean rows of laundry, onto the road in high. The people were all watching and he was glad that he could not see Nancy watching him from the front window of their house. This way he did not have to wave goodbye to her like a little boy going off to school on the school bus.
He took the back road, the dirt road that led past Hosta Butte to the valley— already before him he could see the two
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sacred mountains aligned, Mt. Taylor, the blue mountain, looming in the distance, Hosta Butte, round-thing-sitting-on-an- other-round-thing, squatting in the fore- ground, one beautiful, one grotesque, both sacred—he took this way because it was shorter in miles and because on the way to a fire there was no good sense in getting caught in a traffic of tourists. The road had not been scraped since the spring thaw, it was fretted with deep, sun-baked ruts in some places, loamy in others; but this only called for more skill in driving, and he had ample of that. The pickup was of course performing beautifully, like everything he used, like himself. Through the windshield the low sun lay like a blanket on his chest, warming his blood, while from the south a fresh breeze passed through the open windows of the cab; together they comforted him. “It’s a good day for a fire,” he said.
“Good for a fire,” Jimmie agreed. “What about fire fighters?”
“Don’t worry about that,” he said. “We'll be on the radio.”” He was glad to have Jimmie with him today. He usually was glad to have Jimmie with him, al- though he did not like to look at Jimmie any more than he had to. For in appear- ance Jimmie was almost a smaller replica of himself, with the same stoutness, the same stockiness, the same official clothes of course, even the same steelrimmed glasses, except that with Jimmie the glasses always seemed to reflect light, as did somehow Jimmie’s face itself. He did not think that his own glasses reflected light, yet he was aware that others saw them in this way, as somewhat comical brothers, twins big and little. So he did not look at
brothers,
SUMMER 1957
Jimmie as he said, “What they need over there is a good radioman, Nat said.”
“You're getting famous,” Jimmie said. “Maybe they’ll make you a supervisor for this.”
“Sure, in thirty or forty years,” he said. “They give us that posthumously. It’s cheaper that way.”
“Just like the goddam army.”
“That’s right,” he said, “just like the goddam army.”
He always spoke of the army in this way to Jimmie, but actually he thought of the army with almost a fondness, a fondness that increased steadily in pro- portion to his frustration in the Service. Quite aside from the college education, the radio training, the life insurance, the bonuses, the army had given him that inti- mate knowledge of the others which he needed in order to compete with them on their own terms, and which with his nat- ural ability had enabled him to surpass them at their own talents. Secretly, very secretly, he wished that he had remained in the army, for in his present position he found himself stupidly thwarted. By now he should be a supervisor, like those others who had been in no longer than he, or at any rate a G-9 or 10 rather than still a G-4. In the army he might be a major by now: Major George Whiterock. To him it was the sweetest sound in the world, sweeter than supervisor. Whenever he thought of himself leaving the army he blamed it on his heart, although the army doctors had never been able to find any- thing at all the matter with his heart. They had called it his nerves. He did not like to think of himself as having nerves, and he laughed. “I feel fine,” he said, and
now he did turn to look at Jimmie, for the
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pickup was stopped waiting for sheep. “Really fine.”
“That’s nice,” Jimmie said, reflecting light.
At least he had got more out of it all than Jimmie, far more. Jimmie had come home from the army with nothing but the separation pay and the glib army talk, and he had gone right into the Service. He was still aG-3, and with his education he prob- ably always would be. The answer to Jim- mie was that he had no ambition, or at any rate what ambition he had was a false one, to be measured only by the Geiger counter which he carried at all times, even now, at his waist. Or where was it now? George had to raise his voice over the noise of the sheep: “What the hell are you do- ing with that thing?”
“Just testing,” Jimmie said, leaning far out of the cab.
“You can’t use it that way, square- head,” George said. “The steel in the truck throws it off.”
“Who knows?” Jimmie said.
“I do.”
Shrugging, Jimmie drew in his counter, slid it like some priceless fish into the case at his belt. “When I open my uranium company I'll hire you for radioman,” he said. “I'll make you a G-10.”
“Thanks.” The sheep had passed, and now he did not have to look at Jimmie any more. He had his own idea about the uranium. It was the entrails of the first of the alien gods, the giant Yeitso, slain by the holy brothers, the two war gods, chil- dren of Changing Woman and of the Sun, slain while he drank from the lake, in this same valley they were going to now. Just as Cabezon Peak was Yeitso’s head (tossed over Mt. Taylor by the elder brother,
they say), just as the lava bed flowing southeast of Bluewater Lake was his blood, so the uranium found everywhere in this neighborhood was his entrails. But with a difference too. While his head was now dead and sightless, his blood long dry, the entrails were still alive, still wicked. Left to themselves the people would probably never have found them, yet today they spent half of their time testing the earth with their picks and their Geiger counters. The appalling thing to him was that they, who were so superstitious about so many more trivial things, should so casually take part in the most sinister sacrilege man had yet devised. For this, the secret fruit of his own imagination, was more sacred to him than the entire sacred legend itself. He had often thought of telling it to others. Yet he knew that it would do no good to tell it to the people. He knew that it was the others who ought to be told, but no- body ever listened to him except on the radio.
AHEAD Now to the left Hosta Butte squatted like a giant anthill scraped off at the top, and he looked for smoke toward Mt. Taylor but could see none: only the brooding sun, watching. Big fires were rare in this country, almost unheard of, but it could happen, it could happen. The forest was tinder dry, there was plenty of slash left on Salitre Mesa from past timber sales, there was the wind, there was the sun. Oh yes, it could happen, and if it was a good radioman they needed to get every- one working together, to co-ordinate the attack, they had him, he was ready. George pressed the accelerator pedal; it was already down to the floor. “When he stooped down to drink from the lake, one
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hand rested on Mt. Taylor and the other rested on Mt. Sedgwick, they say. His feet stretched as far as aman can walk between sunrise and noon, they say.”
Jimmie turned from his window. “The fire is Yeitso?”
“In the morning the brothers went to the valley and waited for the giant to come and drink, they say.”
Jimmie slapped George on the back. “You're Slayer of the Alien Gods,” he said, generously. “I’m Child of the Water.”
“All right, younger brother.”
“We've run away from Changing Woman to visit our father the Sun.”
“Yes, brother.”
“He gave us the armor and the light- ning arrows, brother, and he shot us down to Mt. Taylor on a streak of lightning.”
“You've got it, brother.”
Jimmie leaned out the window, point- ing ahead. “There it is, brother!” he shouted. “Do you see it now?”
“I see it, brother. I do see it.” For rising over the crest of a hill they could see the smoke everywhere ahead now, black, burning in timber and slash, burning the air and making the morning suddenly hot, making the wind hot too, making the wind suddenly the fire’s own hot breath. Shooting down into the valley, past Casa- mero, past Smith Lake, past Thoreau, to- ward Bluewater Lake, he knew that every- where along the way the people were watching him from their hogans, from their houses, from their wagons and their battered trucks, but he did not look at
them, he looked always ahead, joyfully. But when they reached the edge of the lake there was no longer anything to look ahead to, it was everywhere around them now, over them, in them, of them, and
SUMMER 1957
for perhaps the first time in his life he found himself breathing deeply and joy- fully, for it seemed to him that this at last was the kind of air that he had been born to breathe.
He felt extraordinarily calm as he asked Jimmie to get out the pack set and hang out a good antenna in the event that any of the lookouts were difficult to reach. His hands were not trembling at all as he spread the map out on the hood of the pickup, carefully weighted its rolled cor- ners down. His heart was behaving beau- tifully. “Everything set, Jimmie?”
“All set, brother.”
“Before he came down to drink he showed himself four times on the moun- tains, they say,” he said. “First he showed his head over the high hill in the east, they say,” he said. Now he spoke calmly into the microphone: “Mt. Sedgwick, 833. Mt. Sedgwick, 833.”
“Read you clearly, 833. clearly.”
Of course you do, George thought smil-
Read you
ing, of course, of course you do. Quickly, expertly, he got Mt. Sedgwick’s fire bear- ing, recorded it on the map, thanked Mt. Sedgwick, and signed off.
“Then he showed his head and chest over a hill in the south, they say,” he said. He called El Morro and recorded the El Morro reading on the map as well. “Then he displayed his entire upper body over a hill in the west, they say,” he said, and he called Mt. Powell.
It was not Mt. Powell that answered him. Already he had recognized the slow, tired voice of Ranger Duffy. It came again now, slowly.
“George, where the hell are you?”
“I’m at Bluewater Lake, Nat,” George
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said as slowly but more distinctly. “Range 10 West, Township 12 North, Section 33, northeast corner. Everything is all set up here. I’m getting fine reception from all lookouts .. .”
“Look, George, skip all that,” Nat broke in. “Skip all that.”
“Will you repeat that message? Will you please repeat that message? Over.”
“I think everything’s under control, George,” Nat said, and his voice was quite distinct now. “We're backfiring the south line, that’s what most of the smoke’s about. I think everything will be okay if the wind doesn’t shift. We could sure use some more help on the line though—my men are about bushed. We could sure use you boys, George. Over.”
George held the button down about five “You won't need the radio at all then, Nat?”
“Not the way things look now, George.
seconds, longer than necessary.
But leave the pickup there just in case. You can make it in to the line from there in about twenty minutes. If we need a radio we'll know where it is.”
This time George let Ranger Duffy wait almost a minute before he spoke. “833, 10-7,” he said. Then he turned the radio off and folded the map and returned it to the pickup. When he turned to Jimmie, Jimmie was winding the antenna into a coil. “And the fourth time,” George said quietly, “Yeitso showed himself all the way down to the knees over Mt. Taylor in the north, they say. And then he de- scended the mountain and came over to the lake where the brothers stood trem- bling, they say.”
Jimmie was stowing the pack set care-
fully into the back of the pickup, but
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now he stopped and peered at George. His glasses reflected a bright and somehow hideous light. “The fire is Yeitso?” he asked.
George did not answer that. Instead he took a shovel from the back of the pickup and handed it to Jimmie. “Then the younger brother cut off the giant’s scalp and took it home to Changing Woman, they say,” he said. “Thereafter he was known as He Who Cuts Round, they say,” he said.
He took another shovel out of the pick- up. “Then to stop the flow of Yeitso’s blood Slayer of the Alien Gods cut deep
Again
EDWIN HONIG
Woman: part flesh part salt, under the immense blue sun-blaring cause, turning
Toward the fire-fastened city,
her husband’s warning gurgle just dying on the swollen air,
And she, drab wife bundled in a prophecy, that moment see her frozen,
—
lines across the valley, they say,” he said. “He did this so that Yeitso might not re- turn to life,” he said, “they say.”
Clicking his heels Jimmie shouldered his shovel like a gun. George did the same with his; it clanked dully against his fire- hat. They marched away from the pickup in single file, in step, Jimmie in front, George a few steps behind. As Jimmie broke into a trot the leather case flapped at his waist uneasily, and trotting after him George imagined the needle inside secretly palpitating, like his own heart, to unspeakable terrors beneath and upon the earth.
Burning, turning taller than all her godstruck kin breathless for the blessed ark,
The curse of all her kind wishing backward to the lavish lurid safeties
From puffing on those plains, those horrid distances
of cold command.
SUMMER 1957
—
184
Fairway of Dedication
GEORGE ABBE
His wife
tried to insist
he visit the art exhibit—
religion with her; with him, death.
Instead, he cursed her rapture, departed in anger; took danger and lolling sea of afternoon lonely strolling the golf course, under green flow
of slow sun wave, gold flower:
hours of devotion.
Soft
the lofty sail
of elm and cloud, and deep
his clean rubber soles on grass.
To pass the shrine of honeysuckle he bows
the cool Now of money enough, male strength to lengths of abstract time,
far chime of truth:
And new
with reverent will,
spills the approach shot at brink
of green ring where satyrs kneel;
the steel and fire of Hera flow in his putt; the rush of Artemis’ arrow climbs
in his drive—falling on chapels
dappled with leaves
of dreaming.
Planned hook
past brook to green
is the freed spirit’s stroke broken to canvas. Titian’s line
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flies warm with shining in ball’s curve and bound. Soft mound of bunker, flash of ball from trap catch meaning of memorial, and art.
The garb and air of Botticelli
lightly breathe in girl
who twirls club leaving tee,
free-moving.
Behold,
the gold of Raphael
falls on the distant surf;
the stuff of oratorio
flows on the Sistine of the living sky. White blazes distant clubhouse by white beach, teaching like Michelangelo,
toned like Madonna’s chair
where bare love lies
in the arm
of bar and dance floor,
pure yacht sail and beach,
fresh chancel rock
for backdrop.
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186
Existentialist Criticism
CHARLES I. GLICKSBERG
A NEW SPiRiT is making itself felt in liter- ary criticism. Instead of approaching the work of literature with objective cate- gories or refined technical tools of analysis, it seeks to enter imaginatively into its very being, to apprehend it from within. That means the new type of critic must make a strenuous, though always unavailing, ef- fort to comprehend the nature of the crea- tive process, to know intimately how the poetic mind works, and then respond sensitively to what it produces. All this implies, of course, that the critical func- tion must be extended to embrace ques- tions of psychology, symbolism, reality, truth, logic, faith, life in all its problemati- cal variety and numinous fulness. In short, the boundary lines have broken down, and we get as a result a species of criticism that is certainly challengingly different in both orientation and method. For example, George Whalley, in Poetic Process, de- clares that he turned for aid to such think- ers as Aristotle, Aquinas, Bergson, and Whitehead. When his work was well ad- vanced, he found fulfilment in the writ- ings of Kierkegaard, Jaspers, and Gabriel Marcel. Why should this be any more sur- prising than the fact that a romantically venturesome critic like Herbert Read found inspiration and nourishment in men
like Vico, Karl Marx, and Sigmund Freud?
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In his search for a philosophy of aesthetics that would take its point of departure from the nature of artistic experience it- self, instead of abstract theories or con- ceptual entities, George Whalley was led to formulate a type of Existentialist liter- ary criticism that is poles removed from the kind of criticism practiced by Jean- Paul Sartre in What Is Literature? and Psychology of the Imagination, and by 1. A. Richards in Principles of Literary Criticism.
Here, then, is a school of literary criti- cism which endeavors to transcend estab- lished theories and literary conventions and to reach “the reality” that is glowingly alive at the heart of a poem. Frankly, Exis- tentialist criticism of this variety acknowl- edges the presence of mysteries that lie be- yond the grasp of cognition, mysteries that cannot be fathomed by the plumb line of reason. Antipositivistic in outlook, it is opposed to the regnant system of analy- tical dissociation, the demolition of a poem by a process of semantic disintegration. George Whalley prefers to use a dialectic, a method, in which the pivotal terms “held in tension are contemplative entities and not propositions.” We are back at what used to be called loosely “creative criti- ’ except that here the insights are sensitively elucidated and rooted in a phil-
cism,’
187
osophy which is basically idealist and mys- tical. The complementary activities of analysis and synthesis are to be fused. It is not surprising to discover that in this work, as in Jacques Maritain’s volume on Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry, the emphasis is placed on such key terms as “intuition” and “vision.”
Concretely, the Existentialist critic al- lows the materials of art to “discover” their own inherent principle of coherence. No formalized method should be per- mitted to stand between the critic and the poetry to which he wishes to respond. He must wear no methodological spectacles, be governed by no ideological preconcep- tions. Fundamentally, he cannot separate himself from the poem he is writing about. His critical observations are a function of his power of vision, and vision is the man. He must therefore, in a spirit of discovery, preserve an open mind and remain hospi- table to all sorts of ideas and impressions. This “dialectical” or “heuristic” method, George Whalley believes, is returning to the West under the aegis of Existentialism. method that frankly retains many of the overtones of
Here is a_ philosophical
mysticism,
George Whalley recognizes the power that the technical mind can wield, what it can achieve with its remarkably special- ized instruments, and how fruitfully these can be applied, but feels that its success has made more conspicuous its intolerable lim- itations. Though it has rendered man ma- terially more comfortable, better fed and better clothed, it has not exorcised the terrors of the infinite or learned to minister to the needs of the sick mind. Whalley charges that a materialist obscurantism is
now dominant in the United States and is
188
rapidly infecting Europe “under the guise of cultural and democratic insemination.” Here the animus comes out clearly in the open: the familiar charge leveled against materialism and rationalism, the broadside fired against the sovereign “superstition” of science, which induces, we are told, “a destructive futility” and is guilty of “cos- mic impertinence.” Here the “prejudices” of Existentialist criticism that derives from Aquinas and Kierkegaard and Jas- pers and Marcel stand unmistakably re- vealed: the distrust of all so-called prog- ress, the hatred of science, the pessimistic depreciation of liberalism, humanitarian- ism, and the “myth” of democracy. George Whalley engages in this vendetta against the idolatry of science because it has popularized the notion that the scien- tific method offers the best and only reliable approach to discovery and knowl- edge. He refuses to accept the belief that science embraces the totality of knowledge. On the contrary, he asserts that there are other forms of knowing besides the scien- tific kind—forms equally valid. Here is a spirited attempt to effect a restoration of values, for the conflict is essentially be- tween two types of vision, two types of “knowing.” The artistic experience, which deals with mystery, plunges into darkness and confronts events which are fortui- tous and inexplicable. (Observe that Jac- ques Maritain, in Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry, also contends that poetry rep- resents the effort of the human being to divine the inner essence of things, for Na- ture constitutes a mystery, an enigma that invites and yet baffles understanding.) In the artistic mind, form and content are fused into unity, so that the work is neither form nor content. This unity can be
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achieved when two modes of mental ac- tivity, the contemplative and the techni- cal, are brought into harmony and func- tion together.
Thus at the start the Existentialist critic is faced with the task of working out a valid conception of reality, a valid psy- chology, for that is the only way in which to discover how the mind of genius em- bodies its acts of vision. Hence determin- ism cannot hope to do justice to the com- plexity of human behavior, for it leaves out such essential elements as will and value and moral judgment. Each work of art must be judged intrinsically as an individ- ual event of value, with its own structural coherence and its own mode of knowing. It incarnates a form of prelogical knowl- edge that is not propositional or analytical.
Though he agrees that the theological element in the study of art should be elimi- nated, Whalley, like T. S. Eliot, fails to see how the religious implications can be avoided. He is interested principally in getting inside the workings of the poetic mind in its periods of tortured loneliness and extreme creative tension. The artist cannot be understood in terms of objec- tive judgment; the work of art is unique, inevitably right in its own medium, be- yond the assaults of time. The artist is in- variably right because what he affirms is beyond the test of proof or disproof; the poet is not concerned with the attitude of the world, its stamp of approval. The work of art happens to him; he is, as it were, the medium who transcribed the vision that came to him, thus bodying forth the truth of reality. But this reality is neither felt nor communicated except by those who are spiritually prepared for its sacramental dispensation. There is,
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then, a vivid, underlying connection be- tween art and religion, and this is to be sought and found in the integrity of the inner life.
But can art take the place of religion? Can the poet become the secular priest of mankind, the dispenser of sacraments? Though art cannot be used as a substitute for religion, there can be no denying the vital relationship that exists, and has al- ways existed, between the two. Whalley re- fers to Kierkegaard’s conviction that every human being who is not conscious of him- self as spirit and of God as spirit is bound to fall into despair. Life lived aesthetically results inevitably in this spiritual impasse. The artist must be sustained by a sense of humility in his assumption of power. He is not self-sufficient, beyond the laws of morality, indifferent to the spectacle of existence. By virtue of his engaging in the creative process, he is compelled to take on the virtues of humility and disinterested- ness. Whalley recognizes the right of the artist to concentrate upon his own inner universe of experience and to express him- self freely and fully without regard to the coercive pressures of social convention; yet he must not suspend moral discrimina- tion.
In the light of these presuppositions, it is not surprising to find that Existentialist criticism is at odds with most of contem- porary literature, which it condemns as brash, egotistic, exhibitionistic. Though it is brilliant, it reveals a world that is mor- ally indifferent and spiritually dead. And literary criticism has been derelict in that it has neglected the responsibility of pass- ing moral judgment. It has restricted it- self, on false pretenses, to scientific evalu- ations. As Whalley declares:
in art, however, judgment is a direct grasp of value, intention, integrity—in short, of moral- ity. Such judgments are not purely aesthetic any more than they can be purely scientific. If one supposes that poetry is the utterance of wisdom and being, and that philosophy is the criticism and correlation of statements about wisdom and being, then poetry and philosophy go hand in hand.
In other words, intelligence is not enough in the analysis of art, nor is sensibility alone a sufficient criterion of judgment. One must go beyond and extend the aesthetic sensibility, as T. S. Eliot demands, into the realm of spiritual perception.
HOW CAN the critic depend on his intro- spective experience when confronted with a poetic work? What will it say to him, what will he hear and feel? The insights and judgments spring from a long process of preparation: from close and serious con- templation of various works of art. The critic strives to grasp some intimations of the ontological mystery. His central dif- ficulty lies in finding words to clothe the intuition that is involved in the aesthetic response, to avoid the trap of already form- ulated and abstract conceptual language. For the language of poetry cannot be translated into the ordinary counters of literal discourse; it cannot be approached with a body of formal, ready-made rules. If art is universal, it is at the same time unique. Though art communicates, what it communicates is not a proposition or a general conclusion. That is why the phe- nomena of artistic experience can be sug- gested only in terms of metaphors that change from generation to generation; even the language of art changes. The art work must be continually rediscovered in
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all its surprising freshness and immediacy. Art, in brief, cannot be defined.
Hence the refreshing, if heterodox, in- sistence of the Existentialist critic that what the critic needs above all is not so much technical training as a change of heart, a readiness to receive, an innocence of vision. The aim is not to dissect and comprehend with the devouring intellect, to search for abstract meanings. The critic must prepare himself to commune in all seriousness with the work of art. The ele- ment of personal engagement cannot be avoided. Associated with this, of course, is the belief that art does shadow forth a reality deeper and truer than that pro- jected by the camera of common sense. It offers some profound truth for our con- templation, it comes to grips with ultimate reality; otherwise it would not be worth bothering about. Art makes possible a more revealing insight into reality and knowledge, value and truth.
The process of creation is as much of a mystery, a sacred mystery, as that of criti- cal appreciation. The poet does not start with a completed poem in his head, or even with the shadowy outline of one. He discovers it, and himself, in the process, and at the same time he discovers the world. What he does is to combine body and spirit, earth and heaven, soul and matter, in the mystery of incarnation.
Transcending the preoccupations and pas-
sions peculiar to the self, the great poet em- braces a timeless and transcendent vision. He reconciles all oppositions and contra- dictions, blending energy with restraint, intensity with supreme control. He cap- tures a precious moment of vision and lifts it beyond the soilure of the fugitive pres- ent. Art is thus both sensuous and spiritual,
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but it is through the sensuous that the lineaments of the spiritual are made mani- fest. Each of the poet’s works is an experi- ment, ever strange and new, in discovering the mystery that is the world.
But what is reality? The reality that the poet shadows forth, after being immersed in it, is something not to be found in the circumscribed world of common sense. In this respect, the artist’s vision is close to that of the mystic. Whalley draws a dis- tinction between total assertions—the province of religion and art-—and partial assertions, which are logical judgments based on probability. The total assertion arises out of the whole of reality, in all of its baffling, unpredictable complexity. Such an assertion, when clothed in the luminous language of vision, is an expres- sion of poetry, whereas the language of science apprehends only the part, not the whole. But if poetry is invested with this exalted function, if its total assertions spring directly from the naked heart of reality, then why should it be looked upon as “abnormal”? Man is driven by an im- perious desire to rise above himself, to improve the quality of his life, to unify his experience. And “physical reality” is not the whole of reality. There is also “psychic reality,” the multifarious pro- cesses that take place within. This reality is fluid, elusive, intangible, constantly changing, and yet both vivid and impor- tant, the richest source of experience. Since things-in-themselves cannot be known apart from the mediation of consciousness, who shall say what reality is? Whose re-
port is more valid, and in what sense, that of the scientist or that of the poet? Whal- ley tries to demonstrate that the poet is closer to reality than the scientist, for the
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apprehension of reality in all its various- ness cannot be achieved without the in- trusion of value. Profound concern is the dynamic of vision. The poet must feel what he sees; otherwise how can he see it clearly?
The poet seeks to portray the truth of reality in all its integrity, but he cannot perceive any object in isolation; always it is part of a context, in complex relation to a whole universe of things. The poet pro- jects his feelings about the things he sees, and these feelings necessarily enter into the making of his poems. Thus he invests his creative experience with value. This is the mystical doctrine—the apprehension of reality through love—that Whalley re- lies upon in developing his aesthetic phil- osophy. By getting inside reality, by grasp- ing the radiant essence of things, the poet comprehends the soul of the world. Reality is forever changing, unstable, precarious, challenging, and yet it is the threshold of eternity. The highest apprehension of reality is revealed through art. Only by making the work of art can the artist com- municate some satisfying image of this mysteriously elusive and numinous reality.
If poetry is a means of expressing experi- ences that are instinct with value, a dis- covery of some aspect of reality and of the self, then it is not primarily a medium of self-expression. Once the poem is born, it no longer belongs to the poet. Each poem contains its own symbolic meaning, which is complex and paradoxical and never to be grasped in all its completeness. Though in- tellectual activity is present in the making of the poem, the poet does not rely on the intellect; he works perceptually and through the feelings. Metaphysical in es- sence, poetry has as its primary function
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to reveal “reality and Being.” All poems glow with the bright flame of the spirit. The poet transcends the false distinction between subjective and objective, because the physical universe he beholds is inevit- ably colored by his responses. There are no things-in-themselves, no completely “‘ob- jective” attitudes. What the poet gives is total awareness, an all-inclusive vision. And because it offers this vision of reality, a poem can never be exhausted by analysis. Since reality is both unknown and un- knowable, no poem can be judged by ex- ternal, quantitative standards. The critic must therefore come before the work of art in a spirit of devout humility, naked and receptive, concerned to grasp directly its full meaning. This is the striking inno- vation in literary criticism that George Whalley sets forth at considerable length in Poetic Process.
Much of what he says has been antici- pated by Jacques and Raissa Maritain in The Situation of Poetry. Mrs. Maritain, however, in her discussion of “Sense and Non-Sense in Poetry,” makes it clear that, whatever the mysterious depths out of which the poetic spark of vision is born, the appeal of poetry is not only to the in- tuition but also to the intelligence. Even when the poet celebrates the burden of the mystery, he must communicate what is intelligible and at least begin with what is known. The experience of life that poetry seeks to communicate is, properly speaking, ineffable. The poet’s achieved expression, which is always fragmentary, should reverberate with overtones of the mysterious totality that it cannot encom- pass. That is why, though the poet strives
in his own way to create some measure of
clarity, he cannot avoid the element of ob-
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scurity which mirrors the mystery of the original source of his inspiration. The prin- cipal cause of this obscurity is that the poet catches glimpses of a vision which is intrinsically numinous, even if he does not believe in the existence of God. The more pure and profound his creative imagina- tion, the more surely will he be seized by despair at the impossibility of capturing the heart of reality or of expressing the truth of the inner life.
Yet poetry, Mrs. Maritain insists, is not revelation. It is a mistake to assume that poetry is essentially religious. Poetry is not to be confused with mysticism. The mysti- cal experience seeks to establish commu- nion with the ground of all being, and reaches beyond language into the ultimate of silence. The poet must always concern himself with the reality of the world, with the visible objects and experiences of nature, as well as with the conflicts of the soul. Whereas the poet imitates God, the saint endeavors to penetrate the mystery of the Deity itself. The consummation of the creative struggle is an object—the lu- minous, living poem. The poem cannot emerge when the poet retreats into a state of mystical rapture; he falls into the trance of absolute silence. Yet Mrs. Maritain, like Whalley, defines poetry as “the fruit of a contact of the spirit with reality, which is itself ineffable, and with the source of reality, which we believe to be God him- self in that movement of love which causes him to create images of his beauty.”
THE BURNING FOUNTAIN, by Philip Wheelwright, is another venture into lit- erary and aesthetic criticism that moves in the same general direction. Existentialist criticism is to be identified not only by its
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negations, its rejection of the naturalistic synthesis, but also by its positive affirma- tions. Mystical in outlook, it holds that the life of man cannot be summed up within the framework of naturalism. Impelled by the divine principle of metaphysical rest- lessness, man moves out beyond the border line of natural instinct; and he can never overcome his perception of a beyond, of the mystery of existence. This intimation of the mystery beyond sense-data is rooted, Wheelwright believes, in the nature of consciousness. Hence man cannot be con- fined within a purported science of what is human. Only what resembles the behavior of objects can be studied scientifically in man, but the whole man, that which is dis- tinctively human in him, cannot be sub- sumed under the rubric of empirical reason.
This is the Existentialist first principle which Wheelwright feels transforms the whole landscape of criticism, for this awareness of “something beyond” is bound to affect the vision and judgment of value on the part of the literary critic. He pos- sesses not only the sense of time present vanishing into the future, but also the re- ligious dimension, the aspiration of man to become incorporate with eternity even as he is about to suffer annihilation. Man incessantly aspires upward; that is the measure of his predicament, a religious pre- dicament which cannot be resolved by secular remedies. This is the threshold situ- ation Wheelwright describes with sensitive mystical insight: the awareness of a Some- thing More, an awareness dim but never- theless certain, which can be conveyed only by means of analogies that, at best, are faulty. Man can, however, have direct glimpses of this beyond. The seer is no
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freak, the poet no fool. They catch blessed if fugitive intimations of this higher re- demptive truth.
But how can man express this sense of the beyond? If he is endowed with the power of reaching beyond the co-ordinates of here and now, he also possesses the gift of symbolizing his experiences. Wheel- wright then raises the crucial question: does the poetic vision have any validity at all, and if so, of what limited kind, or is knowledge of reality to be pre-empted by science alone? The latter alternative clearly implies that religion and metaphysics as well as poetry must be rejected as vital ele- ments in human life, since they can no longer be supported by scientific methods of verification. Wheelwright contends that the mature reader is profoundly affected by a poem because it offers a kind of genu- ine insight and therefore reveals a kind of truth. And religion, like the poetic re- sponse, is not to be restricted to the purely emotive effect. The believer prays because he believes in the truth of his beliefs. In brief, Wheelwright is emphatically assert- ing “that poetic and religious emotions, when they are depth-oriented, may have or come to have distinctive ontological bearings of their own.” This is the Coper- nican Revolution in semantics, a non- Euclidean method of interpretation, that Wheelwright is proposing to usher in.
Like Whalley, Wheelwright makes a cogent plea that the humanistic uses of language, as exemplified in poetry, reli- gion, and myth, are as legitimate and fruitful as those of logical discourse. Ac- cording to the principle of contextualism
he develops, an expressive symbol is a con-
trolled semantic variable the full meaning of which does not stay fixed but remains
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dex
fluid within limits. That is so because, in resisting the manacles of definition, it re- sponds to the infinite flux of life itself. It carries a multiple burden of meaning, which must be conquered afresh upon each reading. A poetic statement is thus not a proposition but a venture in paradox and depth, seeking to shadow forth some trans- cendent truth. The essentially mysterious character of poetic utterance is never ex- hausted by the sum of its explanations. Poetry, in its concern with the sensuous and immediate qualities of experience, bodies forth the ineffable concrete and thus triumphs over abstract generality. Looking upon each object in the universe with undimmed awe, the poet questions it as if it were a thou and lets it speak to him. The poet starts with the particular and finds the universal resident there. The archetypal image, a gateway to the infinite and the mysteriously other, lends depth to poetic discourse. Wheelwright shows how archetypes enter into the living stream of poetic discourse. Introducing the concept of nonlogical and translogical kinds of truth, he maintains that many religious and poetic statements have a profound bearing on the human situation. Why should there be no truths other than those legitimized by science and logic? Though the truth-assertions of religion and meta- physics and art are not as definite and pre- cise as those attainable by science, they are not to be dismissed as the vagaries of sub- jectivity.
Any truly religious-minded or mystical critic, who applies his intuitions freely and without benefit of dogma, is bound to ar- rive at such, in general, “Existentialist” conclusions. The fountainhead and in- spirational model for much Existentialist
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criticism is found not only in Kierke- gaard and Jaspers but in Coleridge. In Studies of Type-Images in Poetry, Reli- gion, and Philosophy, Maud Bodkin, who was first (under the influence of Jung) drawn to the study of archetypal images in poetry, examines the dual image of God: God the suffering savior and God the omnipotent Judge and Father. Man, she points out, cannot live without the media- tion of religious images, which express the unseen relation of man to an invisible reality. She, too, holds that certain images convey truth which is not to be tested like the restricted truths of science. She bases her work on Jung’s belief that symbols, whose home is in the collective uncon- scious, cast a shadow ahead of time present and cannot be summed up neatly in ra- tional, intellectual terms. And Jacques Maritain, in Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry, makes clear to what extent the poet must embrace a metaphysical myth that will lend coherence and completeness to his vision.
EXISTENTIALIST CRITICISM marks a fasci- nating and possibly fruitful departure, de- spite its lack of terminological exactitude, its failure to arrive at internal consistency, and its rooted abhorrence of definition and the discipline of reason. It calls for an alert sensitiveness on the part of the critic to the work he is attempting to interpret, a will- ingness to enter imaginatively into the world that the poet creates. It approaches the universe of art in a spirit of high seri- ousness and earnest dedication, which is in keeping with its conception of the crea- tive process and the quasi-priestly or pro- phetic function of the poet. By insisting on the important qualitative difference be-
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tween scientific and poetic discourse it en- deavors to forge a new language of criti- cism, and by its close study of the role of symbol, metaphor, and myth it adds a new dimension of depth to the act of analysis. In warring against the limitations of the positivistic system, it upholds the thesis, which is certain to be hotly challenged, that poetry as a distinct form of knowl- edge reveals Truth and Being and is thus akin in its revelations to religion. Perhaps its most valuable contribution lies in its insistence that the exploration of reality is not exhausted by the instruments and in- sights of science. The ontological mystery remains; and it is the service of poetry and art, as of religion and myth, to give voice and form to this mystery, whose highest expression is to be found in the symbol of God.
Yet the dangers and deficiencies of Existentialist criticism are equally conspic- uous. By virtue of dealing in such loose, omnivalent categories as Being and Truth, Value and Reality, without attempting to define them clearly (definition is already a limitation on that which resists strict con- ceptualization), the Existentialist critic is free to pontificate and prophesy, to indulge in mystically grandiose but unverifiable and often irresponsible utterances. Since he rejects the test of verification and de- pends exclusively on his intuitions, he is free to make any assertion he pleases. No check can be imposed on his powers of in- tuitive improvisation. He must not stray too wildly, for he is aware that other crit- ics, not bound by the same metaphysical procedure, may challenge his conclusions. Nevertheless, the danger is there: the temptation to rely on mystical conjectures and mythical elaborations rather than
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tested methods of critical analysis and evaluation.
Every critic plays curious variations on the honorific word “reality.”” He cannot escape its use, and yet it is an exceedingly difficult word to pin down in meaning. As John Hospers states in Meaning and Truth in the Arts: “Nothing is absolutely real or unreal; reality or unreality can be predi- cated only with reference to a criterion which is specifically stated in advance.” This is precisely what the Existentialist critics fail to do, with the result that all sorts of confusions crop up in their writ- ing. Is “reality” that which lies beyond the realm of sense verification, beyond the bourne of space and time? From this is the corollary to be drawn that the sensible world we live in is unreal? According to this “Existentialist” conception, poetry penetrates beyond the world of appear- ances and bodies forth a transcendent reality. But how can such a reality ever be given expression? If it cannot be experi enced, then how can it be expressed? As Hospers inquires, how can such a trans- cendent reality be of any relevance to lit- erature? Art cannot go beyond the frame- work of experience, actual or possible. Moreover, by removing the creative act and its embodiment out of time and situat- ing it within eternity, the Existentialist critic eliminates the social background and whatever influence it may exert on the mind and style of a writer. Existentialist criticism ignores the sociological and his- torical context of the literary work. Es- sentially, Existentialist criticism represents a movement, which is gaining an increasing number of followers, to introduce “re- ligious” and mystical values in the inter- pretation of literature.
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Coat of Arms ROBERT MEREDITH
When | was a schoolboy fresh from fields of Agincourt and Crécy recruited for service on my father’s Navarro County farm, June was the season of haste,
long hours of light to work and grow—
then languorous July gave pause to our campaign. Summer hung on dead center.
With crops laid by we rested,
reflected on our purposed course
and waited for autumn’s turn.
To edge the ease with calculated danger,
| climbed the lookout oak in the meadow,
felt in it the strength of earth—and striving for the sky— clung suspended in space-time.
In a dying fall a cicada sang to silence
ticking intervals of time:
the sun stood still.
Perspective abandoned—
a farmhouse on my extended hand—
and from an oaken flagstaff by my ear
unfurled fabric of rough-grained bark
seamless seeming into a fresh-plowed field
unbroken as a stiffened banner defying breezeless day, when man would seem brave in all weathers,
make uncertain charges seem pell-mell.
Pennants and ensigns chequered
the pied plain, corn ripening yellow,
cotton opening motley green and white—
gold suffused—the timeless scene.
I yearned to fix color, shape, space, and time
on the flat of memory emotion charged.
A winged seed floated by, effortless,
bound from unknown to unknown,
adrift in indeterminate blue,
bearing past and future in its going.
My transcendent spirit leaped—
my rampant heart shaped this device:
dexter oak or, argent thistledown on azure emblazoned on remembrance-plane,
to shield me in the fields of lesser color
and guard against the march of ceaseless time.
SUMMER
This Evenin’ of This Summer
FRED MYERS
THERE WERE NO CLOups in the sky even though it was past one o’clock, and noth- ing to stop the violence of the sun on the bare fields. Emmett was sitting on the front porch in the shade, but the house itself was naked to the sun. It was between two ten-acre cotton fields, and the yard was always kept bare by the chickens. Emmett could feel the heat wrapping thickly around him. He had helped his father all morning and then eaten a big lunch, and he was almost overcome by sleep. He knew if he went to sleep he would wake up in a few minutes soaked in sweat and uncomfortable.
He picked up a pebble from beside the step and threw it at the brake drum that held the gate closed. He missed, and snapped his fingers. The brake drum made a nice ringing sound when it was hit, and yesterday he had hit it three times in a row. He looked around for another peb- ble. His sister Naomi came out and sat by him.
“Whatcha doin’?”
“I’m hittin’ the brake drum with a pebble.”
“Less see.”
“I awready done it. I ain’ gon’ do it no more.”
“Why not?”
“T jus’ ain’t.”
“Aw.”
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“It make a nice ring when you hit it,” he said, teasing her.
“I wanta hear it!”
“I awready done it. You shoulda been here.”
“I been sweepin’ the house for Mama.”
“T hit it three times in a row yesterday.”
“Emmett!” She got up and picked up a pebble and walked up on the porch and threw it, leaning her knees against Em- mett’s back. She missed by about four feet. He laughed, and she said “Emmett!” again and tried to sit on his shoulder. He moved, and she almost lost her balance, but she grabbed his shoulder and stood up.
“T gon’ tell Mama on you.”
“How come? What I been doin’?”
“You teasin’ me.”
“Mama ain’ studyin’ you.”
“Listen to you!” She put her hands on the top of his head and tried to lean her whole weight on him. He held his neck stiff, showing her how strong he was.
She said, “Less go walkin’.”
“You know somethin’ we can go see?”
“I know where they some blackberries ripe.”
“Mama hear that she'll make us take a bucket and get some for Daddy and them.”
“They ain’ enough to take a bucket. Come on!”
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He jumped up and ran to the gate, making the chickens run and squawk, and slipped through and held it closed to her.
“You gotta climb over!”
“Emmett! Le’ me through!”
“You gotta climb over!”
She climbed onto the gate, and when she was on top he began to swing it back and forth.
“Emmett! Stop!” she said, breathless, laughing, trying to keep her voice low. She climbed over, holding on tight, and jumped off when he pulled the gate closest to himself. As soon as she was off he let go of the gate and started running, to get ahead of her. Then he stopped and said,
“Where we goin’?”
“Cross the field here.”
They started walking across the cotton field. It was bare now, except for a few dried stalks, and they could feel the heat rising from the powdery earth. The hot dirt felt good to Emmett’s feet, as long as he did not stay in one place too long, and he kicked into the dirt, making a dust cloud rise as high as his knees. He was sweating already.
“Boy, it hot!” he said.
“You right.”
They came to the edge of the field and Emmett climbed on the wire fence, next to a pole. When he got to the top he bal- anced on the pole on his hands, and wig- gled the pole back and forth, shouting.
“You crazy!” Naomi said, laughing. “You gon’ hurt yo’self!”
He lowered his legs so that they swung free, and swung them back and forth until he could throw himself over the fence. He landed and fell on his hands and knees and paused there, just a moment too long. Just as he remembered her she fell on him,
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laughing, flattening him out in the dirt. He turned his head so that none got in his eyes or mouth. She rolled off of him, and he covered his head with his arms and raised himself up so that he was sitting on his legs. He groaned loudly, pretending to be in pain.
“Onnnhhh!” he wailed. “She done kill me!” Naomi pointed at him and twisted in helpless laughter.
“Kill me! Thass what she done! Kill me!”
Naomi trailed off into breathless gulp- ing and giggling, and got up.
“Aw, Emmett, you ain’ hurt!” She pushed him, trying to push him over, but he was too well balanced. He stiffened his body, made a face, and rocked back and forth like a roly-poly. Her laughter grew to a shriek again and she fell over back- ward, letting her feet fly into the air.
“Now you do it, Naomi.”
She sat on her legs and put her arms stiffly by her side. She closed her eyes and tried not to smile. He pushed her, and she rocked back and forth, but she did it wrong. When she came forward he leaned over her and put his arms around her, pin- ning her down. He dug his chin into her back.
“You do it wrong—you ain’ no good!”
“Ow, Emmett! I am too!”
“Ain't!”
He let her go, and got up and put his hands on his head and groaned again, loudly. She started laughing again with- out knowing what he was going to do. He started running toward a clump of pine trees.
“Onnnhhh! That sun gon’ kill me!” He ran into the shade and stopped, leaning against a pine tree. She ran up to him.
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“You ain’ got no sense!”
“How come you say that?” He let his jaw drop and rolled his head to one side and looked at her, like an idiot.
She said, “You a funny brother.”
He tried to brush some of the dirt off. It stuck to his arms and shoulders, where he had sweated, and to his overalls where the sweat had come through and wet the cloth. Even in the shade of the trees he could feel the heat pounding on him.
He said, “Less go down to the pon’ and go swimmin’.”
“Aw right.”
He pushed himself away from the tree and then he said, “Do you know where it’s at?”
“Sho!”
“Okay, go on.”
“Huh?”
“Go on—you lead the way.”
“I can’t! You got to guide me, Em- mett!”’
“Aw right,” he said slowly. He liked the way she looked up to him for anything she did not know. It was good having a sister. She was ten—one year younger than
he.
THEY WALKED through the woods, under the trees, and occasionally through open spaces where there were no trees. In the open spaces there were weeds and small bushes that were dry and hard and would hurt your foot if you did not step care- fully, but under the pine trees it was smooth and even, with a cool slick carpet of pine needles. Under one of the pines Emmett found an Indian pipe.
“Look, Naomi, a Nindian pipe!”
They sat down by the tiny plant. She said, “Can I pick it?”
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“Yea, if you wanta. It ain’ gon’ do you no good.”
“I gon’ pick it and smoke it.”
Emmett laughed. “You can’t smoke it. It got sap inside it jus’ like any other bush.”
She said, “Listen to you!” and pulled it out of the ground and held it upside down, by the flower, between her thumb and forefinger like a pipe. She put it to her mouth, barely touching her lips, and breathed in deeply, puffing out her chest. He laughed.
“How that mouthful a sap tas’?”
“I ain’ studyin’ you.” She stood up and started walking away. He got up and walked ahead of her. After a while she passed him, taking giant strides and swing- ing her left arm wide and puffing on her pipe.
He said, “Look out!” and started chas- ing her. From here there was a clear path all the way down to the pond, and he chased her to the pond and they stopped, almost at the same time.
The pond was in a hollow with two large water oaks overhanging it, shading it from the sun except right in the center; it was small enough so that the two oaks almost touched across the water. Rushes grew all around it, on the shore and in the shallow water, but there was one little sandy beach, under an oak, that led into a blank- et of hard bottom. Emmett liked to come down here even in the winter, when you could not swim, and sit and look across the pond and think. It was still and peaceful and sometimes a crane would come in and walk around the edge, looking for frogs. In the late afternoon a mist would rise from the water, bringing a chill to every- thing.
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Now in the powerful heat the pond made the air seem cooler. Emmett stood on the grass at the edge of the beach and look- ed all around the shore. There was sup- posed to be an alligator in the pond, but he had never seen it. He unbuckled the straps of his overalls and stepped out of them and ran into the water. He ran as far as he could and fell flat, with his arms out stiff, making as big a splash as possible. He turned over and sat on the bottom. The water came up to his chin.
Naomi laid her pipe down carefully in the grass, then took off her dress and panties and ran to the water’s edge and stopped. She walked into the water, slow- ly and carefully, and when it was up to her knees she stopped again.
“Come on in, Naomi!” He pretended to tread water.
She bent down and rippled the water with her hand and then straightened up. “I scared I'll drown,” she said. She always had to be coaxed into the water at first. She would walk in up to her knees and stand there, waiting to be coaxed. Emmett liked to look at his sister’s body. It was a warm brown. His own color was darker, almost black. And her body was so nicely rounded, all the parts fitting smoothly to- gether. When he looked in the mirror it was like looking at a bunch of black, bumpy tubes stuck together. Of course he was a boy, and a lot stronger than she was. Maybe to be strong you had to have muscles that bulged like his did. But it was nice having a sister whose body was pretty like that.
He walked up to her, bent down so that the water would support him. “Come on in, Naomi,” he said. She eased away from him. When he was close enough he reached
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around quickly and pinched her on the be- hind. “Scat!” he said, and dove away from her, laughing, swimming toward the deep water. She followed him a few feet and stopped and tried to splash water on him. He swam back and forth, just out of her range, in water almost over his head.
“Come on, Naomi, lemme give you a lesson.”
She stopped splashing at him and stood, waist-deep now, looking at him.
“You promise you ain’ gon’ pinch me or nothin’?”
“Yea, come on, you gotta learn how to swim!” He walked up to about three feet from her and held out his hands. “Swim to me.”
She stood, trying to get up courage, and said, “I scared.”
“Come on, Naomi, I'll catch you.”
“Promise?” she asked slowly, untrust- ing.
“Promise!”
But that still was not enough. “Hon- or?”
“Honor.”
She didn’t move. “You better, now, Em- mett!”
will! Come on!”
She hesitated again, and then, gasping with daring, jumped toward him, pad- dling wildly. The force of her jump car- ried her to within his reach, and he grab- bed her under the arms and walked back- ward, quickly.
“Emmett!” she screamed. “We over my head!”
“I know it. Don’t, Naomi!” She was holding him tightly around the neck, hurting him. “Come on, now, don’t be scared.” He put his hands on her stomach
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and pushed out, so that she was flat in the water. It was easy to hold her up.
“Okay, now, draw yo’ legs up and kick!” She pulled her legs to her body one at a time and kicked, rolling her body.
“Naw, that ain’ the way! Hol’ yo’ body still and kick both legs at the same time!” She kicked again, both legs together this time, and Emmett felt the force of the kick pushing against him. He said, “Okay, now—” and pulled her arms from around his neck and pushed her away from him, still balancing her with his hand under her stomach. He put his other hand under her chest and held her as far out from him as he could.
“Now! Paddle yo’ arms! Reach out and grab the water and pull it back to you! Pull it back and down! Push it down!” He lowered the hand under her chest, and her chest came right down with it. “Hol” yo’ fingers together!” He tried her chest again, and it still came down.
“Naw, Naomi, you ain’ doin’ it right.” He pulled her around so she could grab his neck again and held up his hands out of the water, keeping his fingers close to- gether and making paddling motions, to show her.
“See?” he said.
“I can’ do it now, Emmett. I scared.”
“Come on, Naomi, try it again!”
“I too scared!” She was hurting his neck again. “Take me back, Emmett, I scared!”
“Okay.” He grabbed her underneath her thighs and pushed her around so that the lower part of her body was facing the shore.
“Le’ go my neck.”
“Whatcha gonna do?”
“I show you. Le’ go my neck!” She let go and sat in his hands, facing the
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shore. He lifted her up and pushed as hard as he could. She gasped and windmilled her arms, not really swimming, but the force of his push carried her to where she could stand up. He swam up to her, laughing.
She backed away from him. “You stay way from me. You mean.”
“That ain’ hurt you none. I gon’ teach you how to swim.”
“Nemind. I gon’ learn how to swim some day. You see.” She backed up almost to shore and sat down. The water only came to her waist when she was sitting. He moved up to her, floating flat and walking on his elbows.
“Emmett! Don’ mess with me now!”
“TL ain’ gon’ mess with you.” He came up beside her and rolled over on his back, with his elbows propped behind him so that his head was out of water.
“It sho look like a long way cross the pon’ when you lyin’ down low, don’t it?”
“Less see.”” She lay back on her elbows, but her arms were too short and her face almost went under. She sat up, spitting, her back to him now. He laughed, and she turned around and tried to hit him on the stomach, but the water stopped her hand. She moved back and leaned back on her hands so that she could see him without turning around.
She said, “Some day I be good enough to swim all the way cross the pon’, you see.”
That was what Emmett wanted to do. He wished he could do it now, but every time he went over his head he was scared. He knew it was wrong to be scared. Peo- ple said that the pond was bottomless, and if a body went down in it it was never found. Emmett did not know whether to believe it or not, but he thought about it every time he went over his head.
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But he would not go down. Some day he would swim all the way across the pond, over the depths. He wanted to do it before the summer was over. He would even learn to duck and swim under water, and go down and look at the depths. He was brave enough, and he would do it some day.
He had to come down here by himself some time and try swimming out far, and find out how you put your head under water. He liked to play with Naomi, and go swimming with her, but it is better when you are trying to learn things to be by yourself. “WHATCHA THINKIN’, Emmett? You wish you could swim across?”
“Naw, I can awready do it. When you |.” He stopped, and lifted up his head, rigid. He thought he heard a noise in the bushes behind them, on the shore.
“W hassa
“Hush!”
She tried again, whispering: “What—”
“Hush up, Naomi!” he whispered. He saw the bushes move, above the beach, and he moved quickly into the weeds. He whispered, “Come on!” and his sister pad- dled behind him and held on to his shoul- ders. The bottom under the weeds was soft and unpleasant.
A man walked down to the beach. He was a white man, from the plantation, dressed in khakis. He stopped, close to their clothes, and looked all around the pond. Emmett crouched down lower, put- ing his chin under water. He could not un- derstand how the man had not seen them.
The man bent down and picked up a stone and looked across the pond, away
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from them. He spoke aloud, as if to him- self:
“Well, I think I see a alligator in the pon’. I think I'll kill him with this here rock.” He put back his arm to throw, and turned and looked directly at Emmett.
“Naw suh! Mistuh, naw suh! We ain’ alligators!”
“Well, I swear if it ain’t two little cul- lud kids. What chawl doin’ in the pon’?”
“We jus’ swimmin’.”
“I swear! The water feels good on a hot day like today, huh?”
“Yes suh!”
The man looked off again, and then bent down and picked up Naomi’s dress. He said, ““Here’s a ol’ rag. I think I'll take it to clean my cah,” and he started walk- ing away. Naomi wailed, and moved out to open water.
“Naw, suh! That ain’ no rag! Mistuh!”
He turned back, smiling. “Yea it is. I’m gonna take it.”
Naomi stood up. “Naw! That my dress! Please!” He looked back at her and laughed, and Naomi hurriedly squatted down in the water. The man dropped the dress and walked away, laughing.
Emmett laughed and called out: “You shoulda take it, mistuh!” He moved out onto the sandy bottom, and his sister turned to him and hit him on the shoulder.
“Whatcha do that for?” He opened his mouth wide.
“Cause you on his side.” She splashed water at him, catching him with his mouth open. She laughed at him coughing and spitting. He grabbed her around the head, tight.
“I gon’ duck you!”
“Emmett! Naw!” she screamed. He let her go. He was afraid to duck himself, so
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he did not think it was fair to duck her. He stood up and dove toward shore and rolled over on his back, on his elbows.
“Naomi, that white man saw you.”
“He ain't!”
“He sho did — you stood right out of the water up to yo’ knees — course he saw you!”
“Ain’t!”
“Did!”
“Well, he saw you, too!”
“No, he ain’t — I stood scrunched down in the water all the time — he ain’ never seen me!”
“Aw, Emmett!” She turned her face away and hid it in her hands.
“And he gon’ right up to the plan-ation and say, ‘I seen that Naomi gal nekid!’”
“Emmett!” She ran out of the water up to their pile of clothes.
“Whatcha doin’?”
“I gon’ get dressed!” She turned around to face him, holding her hands crossed be- tween her legs, as if the man were still there. Emmett laughed.
“Ain’ no sense in that. He done seen you and gone.”
“Aw, hush up.” She jumped up and down to shake the water off, still covering between her legs. Emmett came out of the water, splashing heavily on the sand.
“You ain’ ready to go yet?”
“Yea. I ain’ never goin’ swimmin’ nekid again!”
Emmett looked back at the pond. The water was still stirred up where they had been, and ripples waved out all the way across the pond. He took a deep breath and breathed out hard and put his hands on his hips. His sister was trying to flap herself dry with her panties.
“Well,” he said, “I ain’ gon’ get dressed
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yet. I gon’ set down and dry off some.” He walked over to the grass, by his overalls, and sat down. Then he lay back and put his hands behind his head. “I gon’ lay here and watch them clouds.”
She looked up. A few small clouds were slowly crossing the sky. She said, “Em- mett!” and came over to him and hit him on the stomach, sharply. He could feel the anger in the blow.
“Augh!” he grunted, and sat up. “How come you hit me? I ain’ done noth- in’!”
“Cause.”
“Cause what?”
““Nemind.”
He got up and put on his overalls. “You mad at me?”
“Uh-huh.”
“How come?”
“Cause you take sides with that white man.”
“I ain’ never take no sides with him. | just teasin’ you, thass all.”
“Nemind.” She turned away from him. He waited for her to say something else, and then he said, “I on yo’ side, Naomi!” She did not answer, and he started to walk off, but stopped and turned back to look at the pond. It was still covered with small ripples. The heat of the day was coming back to him, and he remembered the good feel of the water. He said:
“Naomi, late in the evenin’ a mis’ come up off a the pon’. It real quiet and spooky.”
“How you know?”
“I been down here sometimes, after supper.”
“Well, I don’ care!”
He paused, and said, “It real nice that
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time a day. I bring you down sometime, if you wanta.”
“Naw!”
He turned and started walking up the path, She let him pass her, standing well out of his reach. When he was about ten feet ahead of her she started walking. Aft- er a while he stopped and turned back to look at her. She stopped, watching him, ready to run.
ain’ studyin’ you, Naomi.”
He walked on, trying to think of some- thing to do, and then he remembered where he had seen some almost-ripe black- berries a few days before. He turned off the path.
She said, “Where you goin’?”
“Thass a secret.”
“I goin’ with you,” she said, standing in the path.
“Thass aw right. You ain’ never gon’ find out.”
“Yes I will!”
“Naw you won't. Iss my own secret.” He turned and started walking. He knew she would follow him.
When he was close to the blackberry patch he watched her carefully, and when he was sure she had seen the berries, he said, “I gon’ eatum all!” and ran to the bushes. Screaming, she ran up beside him and started pulling berries and cramming them in her mouth.
This mine!” she wailed. “This the patch I tol’ you about!”
“Thass aw right I got it now!” He was eating wildly. When she pricked her finger on a thorn he laughed and said, “Thass whatcha get for tryin’ to act like a nol’ hawg!”
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“Listen to you!” Then she said, “I still mad at you!”
He said, “You think I care?” and picked some red blackberries and threw them at her, and then ran away slowly. She chased him, and he ran to a small tree and grabbed a limb and pulled his feet from the ground. He made monkey sounds and swung his body back and forth. He looked at her and popped his eyes and stuck out his front teeth, snort- ing. She came up to him and laughed and began spanking the inviting behind. He yelled loudly and dropped off, landing hard on his rump. He rolled over and rest- ed on his knees and his cheek, his arms lying limply on the ground and his behind in the air.
“Onnonhhh!’” he yelled. “I ain’ never gon’ be able to sid down again!”
She stood by him, laughing, ready to move in for another spank, and he raised up and said, “You the cause a that!” and grabbed at her. She shriecked and jumped away from him, and he took off after her. He chased her a long way, dodging the wrong way when she dodged, and when he almost caught up with her he stopped.
“What I wanta try to catch up for? You ain’ worth nothin’ nohow.”
“You mean you can’ catch me, thass it!” She was breathing hard and giggling.
“Listen to you!” He walked along slow- ly, and she walked ahead of him, not both- ering to keep any distance between them now. Emmett had an idea. That night, when she came up to him while he was milking, he would lift up a teat and squirt her right in the eye. He knew he could do it. He had been practicing in secret.
SUMMER 1957
Dylan Thomas’ Animal Faith
DEREK STANFORD
IN THE great glaring minds of newspaper editors, there seems to be the following bias in presenting creative personalities: the myth of the man rather than the man, and if not the myth, well, the man him- self in preference to what most counts— his work. This is a procedure in direct opposition to what Donald Davie suggests as the best approach to the Muse. Mr. Davie, I recall, was especially annoyed with James Mitchie, who wrote of Dylan Thomas’ death that “The gloom it caused * and shortly after- ward pronounced the true formula which
was almost patriotic,’
critics should observe: “Not poetry, but
poems. Now with this approach I have much
sympathy. It prevents us from talking at cross-purposes, since both of us may speak of Wordsworth’s poetry, but while you are thinking chiefly of The Prelude | might be reflecting on “The Idiot Boy,” in which case our references and judgments will differ. When Thomas died four years ago, I think I was one of the few people who did not mourn his death in a poem. I took the longer but easier course, and decided to write a book” about his work. In it I concluded that of his hundred-odd poems, a third represented valuable work. To this Philip Toynbee took exception, feeling *Dylan Thomas: A Literary Study (Citadel Press).
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that my salvage-figures were too low. These disagreements have a limited impor- tance, but I mention them to indicate that I neither wish to bury Thomas nor unre- servedly to praise him. My principal desire is to pass some remarks that may help to explain certain factors in Thomas, though if I did not believe a portion of his work to merit an exceptional meed of praise, I should think my observations a mere trifling. In order to arrive at a picture of the poet, I shall be transgressing against Mr. Davie’s canon, since I shall be speak - ing on the person of the poet as well as on his poetry. But one thing I shall try to avoid: a pigeonhole approach to his poetic reputation and a swift disposal of our image of the man in terms of some single role or aspect. Writing in the shortly after the poet’s death, James Mitchie painted the portrait which so pro-
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voked Mr. Davie’s critical conscience. “Dylan,” he wrote,
was a figure, a character, a bard, even a card; he looked and behaved more like a poet than anyone since Yeats, Whatever our ideas may be about the artist’s place or responsibility in society, we all cherish archetypal pictures of the Poet, just as we do of the King. We may have monarchs who behave and dress like us, or slightly better; we may have forced them democratically to do it; but half of us wants
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the bold, bad, gorgeous kings and queens back again. It’s the same with our poets. They may disguise themselves protectively as business- men nowadays, but is this what the public really wants? Dylan was wild and gencrous, flamboyant, unpredictable, religious, ribild, and thirsty. His poetry was rhapsodical, anti- industrial, and, above all, musical.
Thomas doubtless had all these qualities, but there were others that are not men- tioned here; and the danger inhering in Mr. Mitchie’s in-itself-stimulating report is that it may lead us to lump together these vivid properties in one overcolored whole. Most people in possessing some property or another possess, so to speak, its antonym. Such was certainly true of Thomas, but this truth is hardly allowed for in Mr. Mitchie’s enthusiastic précis; for from seeing the poct as a thirsty quaffing crea- ture, one looks next to find a type of writ- ing cut entirely to this spirituous pattern. That Thomas’ barroom personality was only a side of his nature is, I think, indi- cated by a reply he made to John Bayliss, editor of the anthology New Road. Mr. Bayliss had written to know if Thomas could contribute a story to the next num-
ber, and in answer Thomas said:
I'll see what I can do about a story in the next month, if that’s not too late, but I can’t promise anything for the only storics I've written since the war, and very fev, have been straightforward anecdotes (not, I'm glad to say, of the “Then he downed a bloody pint,
see” kind).
In a like fashion, Mr. Mitchie’s refer- ence to Thomas’ flamboyance might lead us to think of the poet as habitually heightening all his words and gestures in sustained assault upon the down-to-earth.
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But there were many poses he did not sup- port. The conventions and pretensions of gracious living he invariably regarded as false or unreal; and on the occasion of one British Council party he insisted on re- ferring to the slim coffee cups and slender wineglasses as “lovely mugs.” For all the bardic airs that Thomas could assume, nothing amused him more than the as- sumption of artistic “high seriousness.” Seeing a certain young writer who held himself aloof from the chatting crowd with a look of attentive religious gloom, at a well-attended literary soiree, he an- swered—-when asked who the young man was—"Oh, he’s not a bad chap, really. Thinks he’s God, but he’s really quite
nice.”
This calling of coffee cups “lovely mugs” was something he did in his poetry, too. Here, what I may call his reversed euphemism makes for a welcome break in the “O altitudo” flight of his style. And
in the way he brings earthiness, a sense of limitations remembered, back into the poem there is something of the pathetic and the ironic. How well he describes the sense of aspiration suffocated by our mor- tal dress when he talks of the rub or bite of his “pinned-around the spirit /cut-to- measure flesh.” Like Yeats who saw old age as a can tied to a dog’s tail, Thomas early developed an awareness of the carnal impediments in living. Indeed, he had every reason to do so, since one of the most severe occupational diseases of the creative life had quickly claimed him. The physical tragedy which so often runs in the same shafts as genius is seldom under- stood. The habit of drinking which de- stroyed the poet has not yet been seen in its right perspective. The tendency is to
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interpret his condition in romantic or rabelaisian terms. Thus Mr. Mitchie refers to his state through the simple but zestful adjective “thirsty,” while A. G. Prys- Jones loses all sense of the poet’s nemesis in a colorful historical comparison. “One can imagine him,” he writes, “in the earlier Elizabethan age roaring and roistering with Thomas Prys and William Middle- ton, those full-blooded buccaneering Welsh poets, in the taverns of London and Llanrwst.”
Both these modes of reference are con- ventional enough, but they carry with them small report of the reality behind their words. I am not suggesting that the ill which Thomas suffered should be con- veyed without amusing high lights. There was plenty of relief in the poet’s course; and both shadow and light should be re- membered. To emphasize one and forget the other is to see his poetry in plain black and white rather than in subtle and com- plex combination.
When, therefore, we relate this aspect of the poet to his poetry, we should not look to find the dipsomaniacal darkness reflected in Thomson’s “City of Dreadful Night” nor yet the unperturbed high spirits of “Drunken Barnaby’s Journal” by seventeenth-century Richard Braith- waite. There are two sides to the poet, in this matter, which I think we should re- member: two sides which should not be divorced from each other. The first re- mains, for me, an altogether charming memory of. Thomas in his cups.
Eleven years back, at a New Year’s party, I remember meeting him for the first time. Among the planetary names of that evening I moved with all the shyness of one quite unknown. Then I spied the
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poet (who was certainly tight) treading out the measure of a slow impromptu dance along with a linked circle of friends. The circle faced inward and, standing on its rim, I greeted Thomas by his Christian name as the shuffling figures came revolv- ing round. Only my own intoxication per- mitted me this liberty of gesture: would I be answered or would | be snubbed? Hearing himself called, Thomas turned back to me. “And a very good evening to you, sir,” he replied, bowing in a fine old- worldly fashion. Such, | think, was his courtesy on most occasions when not un- der stress.
A second picture presents what I call the involuntary Thomas whose actions were not willed by him but
Thomas—a
decided on by his alcoholic alter ego. A certain lady who lived in the suburbs and both patronized and contributed to the arts had received from Thomas a promise that he would come and read some poems at her house. To have acquired so difficult a lion filled the hostess with proud antici- pation. But would he really come? The chairs were all set, and friends and acquaintances soon disposed of all free space in the room. The roving timeless nature of the poet was known to the hostess, who began to fear the worst. But no, a knock, and there he was, swaying a little uncertainly in the hall. Carefully piloted into the room, he propped himself up by the mantelpiece and read to the company, from a manuscript, one of his afterward most famous poems. Her appre- hension calmed, the hostess was all beams; but hardly had the applause of hands ceased when the poet was violently sick in
the hearth. This was the vexing encum- brance—the object tied to a dog’s tail
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which Yeats speaks of in his poem “The Tower”—whose clatter disturbed and embarrassed Thomas more and more with the passing of years.
There are plenty of references to sense of fate in his this knowledge of an
Thomas’ growin poems. Nor wa order belonging §o elegiac conventions. At y-one, he told a friend
all be dead within two years”; and allowing for a youthful pa-
the age of twe in London: “I
nache of despair, his statement clearly ex- presses insight. The laments which he wrote for himself begin early. ‘““Twenty- four years” is the first of a number of nativity poems which recall the poet’s birthday with grief and apprehension: “Twenty-four years remind the tears of my eyes.” In “Holy Spring” his sorrow is more specific. Here he speaks of “the cure- less counted body,” where “counted,” I think, can best be seen as a term of equal import to “numbered,” as one might say “his years are numbered.” It also bears an additional burden by suggesting a defeated boxer whose prostrate body is “counted out.” But it is in the “Poem on his birth- day” that his deepest knoweldge of his destiny is set. Here he writes of how “He celebrates and spurns/His driftwood thirty-fifth wind turned age”; or of how “Thirty-five bells sing struck/On skull and scar where his loves lie wrecked”; of “The voyage to ruin I must run’”’; and ends by speaking of sailing ‘‘out to die.”
In these phrases and many others, self- pity and self-knowledge painfully com- bine to form a vivid amalgam of pathos. But for all the plangency of his “tumble- down tongue,” the poems are not examples of straightforward threnodic composition. “Poem on his birthday,” particularly, is as
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loud with praise as with weeping. In this great confession of self-dereliction, we encounter images of rich vitality, gestures of glory, moments of blessing:
the closer | move To death, one man through his sundered hulks, The louder the sun blooms And the tusked, ramshackling sea exults.
What I wish to emphasize just here is that Thomas, in treating of this aspect of his life in terms of poetry, was no more simple than in his life itself; and that a too-rounded myth of Thomas will prob- ably deter us from understanding the full complexity of his work.
Now if I apprehend Yeats aright, and Thomas Henn’s exposition of him in his excellent study, The Lonely Tower, there is one way the poet may simplify his life when he comes to set it down in verse. This is by the device of masks—a drama- tization of different aspects of one’s own personality. Of course, there is always something dramatic—something, that is, larger than life—in all poetry, however little it appears to be concerned with the poet’s selfhood. But through the creation of masks, Yeats attempted something more conscious—a deliberate heightening of one side of one’s nature, or of its imagined opposite, sharply isolated from the others. Thus a poet might take the seven ages of man, and write as if he dwelt within any of these separate human phases. Yeats, especially, insisted on the importance of getting into dramatic touch with types
most antithetical to oneself. These types he
visualized as constituting the antiself; so that he who inclined to sedentary dream- ing, an existence of reading, and aristocra- tic leisure was able to portray himself,
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through violence and action, as a rough man-at-arms or a ranting beggar.
This method of multiplying the number of psychological roles which one might adopt as a poet was little employed by Thomas. True, in his tales and dramatic writing he used it, I suppose, as all writers do who place a portion of themselves in their own characters. But even here, | think, it was not deliberate, save in such a piece as his broadcast composition “Return Journey.” Here it is most originally con- trived, in that the self of the poet is built up by memories and testimonies of those who knew him, without his once appearing in person. This is what the Park-keeper has to say of Thomas’ self-image:
Oh yes, yes, I knew him well. He used to climb the reservoir railings and pelt the old swans. Run like a billygoat over the grass you should keep off of. Cut branches off the trees. Carve words on the benches. Pull up moss in the rockery, go snip through the dahlias. Fight in the bandstand. Climb the elms and moon up the top like an owl. Light fires in the bushes. Play on the green bank. Oh yes, I knew him well. I think he was happy all the time, I've known him by the thousands.
But this dramatic portraiture of the self was kept by Thomas for dramatic or nar- rative work. In his lyrical writing he did not much use it, apart from one notable exception: his stylized picture of himself as a total reprobate in the poem “Lament”:
When I was a windy boy and a bit And the black spit of the chapel fold, (Sighed the old ram rod, dying of women)
Between a poetry that expresses the self through a number of set types and a poetry that expresses the self by means of meta-
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physical exploration, there is a world of difference; and Thomas’ approach gen- erally belonged to this latter order. The discrepancy between these two kinds of poetry, as I see it, consists in this: that whereas the poetry of types presupposes agreed-on bearings—definite expectations and limitations—the poetry of metaphysi- cal exploration has no such preconceived bearings to rely on, but has to establish its bearings for itself.
At this point I enter debatable ground, and I must lay down a personal definition. By metaphysical poetry in this instance, I refer, not to a poetry which uses the de- vices of the school of Donne—scientific images and philosophic terms and some show, perhaps, of ratiocination—but to a poetry concerned with ontological eschat- ological matters. In other words, a poetry of beginnings and ends, of where we come from and where we go to.
In classifying Thomas as a poet of this order, I do not suggest that his metaphysi- cal interest was of an intellectual nature. The metaphysical moments in Thomas are arrived at accidentally or rather, say, ob- liquely. They rise to the surface of his verse through the underwater pressures of grief and exultation, and are not come at by dis- interested pursuit. They derive from deep adulterate experience rather than from pure speculation. For an example, suppose we take his long late “Poem on his birth- day.”
Though I emphasize certain passages and figures in this poem, the whole com- plex movement of thought in which these passages are located should be borne in mind. As I said before, praise and lamenta- tion sound alternately throughout the poem. Like Lawrence’s “The Ship of
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Death,” “Poem on his birthday” is not a conclusion, a finis or finale, psychologi- cally speaking. It is not the tale of a dead- end destination so much as a log of dis- covery, a song of exploration rather than exhaustion. One way of putting it would be to say: The end is come, but the best is not yet. This, then, is the context in which Thomas places statements of a highly ambiguous order. These lines are particularly relevant:
And to-morrow weeps in a blind cage Terror will rage apart Before chains break to a hammer flame
And love unbolts the dark
And freely he goes lost
In the unknown, famous light of great And fabulous, dear God.
Dark is a way and light is a place, Heaven that never was
Nor will be ever is always true, And, in that brambled void,
Plenty as blackberries in the woods The dead grow for His joy.
There he might wander bare
With the spirits of the horseshoe bay Or the stars’ seashore dead,
Marrow of eagles, the roots of whales And u“ ishbones of wild Reese,
With blessed, unborn God and His Ghost, And every soul His priest, ...
Here we encounter a God who is “dear” yet somehow “fabulous” and “unborn,” and a Heaven which is referred to as a
place “that never was/Nor will be ever”
yet is, at the same time, “always true.” What can we make of these paradoxes? Are they anything but self-contradic- tions?
By concentrating on one term at a time,
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it might be possible to build up a full meaning. Thus we might say that when Thomas speaks of God as “dear” he is thinking ef the desirability of the notion of deity, and that “dear” also carries with it a sense of intimacy, a reference to some- one emotionally near at hand. When we pass on to the term “fabulous,” all the affirmative vibrations of the first word are lost. But “fabulous” need not be taken as synonymous with “unbelievable.” Its sug- gestion here may rather be “that which appears as highly strange or fantastic to the undiluted rational mind.” A_ third connotation is “that which belongs to the nature of the fable rather than to the more prosaic narrative.” So far, we see there is no essential contradiction in the spirit of the passage. Nor need the term “unborn” disturb us. God is spoken of as “unborn” possibly because a faith in Him, a feeling of certitude concerning his exis- tence, has not yet been born in the poet. If this is so, the term is subjective, and in no way denies God’s objective being. Heaven “that never was/Nor will be ever” and yet is “always true” presents at first glance a harder problem. One reading of the sense, however, may be that Heaven whose reality has always existed bears no resemblance to what man has believed, or now believes, its nature to be. The truth of its existence, in other words, must be taken in conjunction with the falsehood of all our notions of it.
This is one way—a pan-Christian way— of interpreting this poetic puzzle; but to me the kind of statements Thomas makes here seem rather to invite comparison with the celebrated mot which parodies, yet serves to summarize, Santayana’s think-
ing: “There is no God, and Mary is His
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Mother.” I mention Santayana’s name on purpose. In his book Animal Scepticism and Faith, he describes himself as being “an ignorant man, almost a poet.” When a philosopher, however ironically, can humble himself in this fashion, his words may assist us in understanding the self- subsistent undefining images of art.
A passage from Santayana’s Preface may help us to view the enigma of Thomas in an unusually fruitful fashion. “I lay siege,” he writes,
to truth only as animal exploration and fancy may do so, first from one quarter and then from another, expecting the reality to be not simpler than my experience of it, but far more exten- sive and complex. I stand in philosophy exactly where I stand in daily life; I should not be honest otherwise. I accept the same miscella- neous witnesses, bow to the same obvious facts, make conjectures no less instinctively, and admit the same encircling ignorance.
Santayana is saying that his philosophy is not all of one piece in the sense, for ex- ample, of a straight length of string. The thoughts that feed it do not come blowing single-mindedly from one direction. In- stead, the “miscellaneous witnesses” which go to make up his picture of things are met with first in one quarter, then another. Nor does he pretend that this self-pat- terned world has the validity of a cosmic blueprint or of a map metaphysically to scale. ““My system,” he frankly admits, “is no system of the universe.”
Santayana likewise provides a useful lead-in to Thomas when he draws a dis- tinction between moral and animal faith. The latter he describes as “a sort of expec- tation or openmouthedness,” while “When a man believes in another man’s thoughts and feelings, his faith,” he tells us, “is
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moral, not animal.” It would be interest- ing to compare this distinction between moral and animal faith with that which the Roman Catholic church establishes be- tween acquired and infused knowledge: acquired knowledge being that which the church teaches, infused knowledge that which God plants in us. Now those who submit to the Christian faith have gener- ally expressed their sense of infused knowl- edge, at least partly, in terms of knowledge acquired, But if we say that Thomas’ poetic intuition represents a kind of in- fused knowledge, then this is just what he does not do. His faith being of an animal order, he did not believe he should express it in terms of “another man’s thoughts and feelings.”” And because, as Santayana tells us, animal faith is “a sort of ...open- mouthedness,” he expresses both his nega- tive and positive reactions to the thought of deity and after-existence: “blessed, un- born God and His Ghost,” “fabulous, dear God,” “Heaven that never was/Nor will be ever is always true.”
A study of Thomas’ poetry reopens those discussions of twenty years back on the relations of poetry and belief, but this time rather from the poet’s side than from the side of reader and critic. We all know how much of this debate was crystallized into I. A. Richards’ words when he distin- guished between a statement and what he called ‘‘a pseudo-statement.” “A pseudo- statement,” as he conceived it, is a “form of words which is justified entirely by its
effect in releasing or organizing our im- pulses and attitudes (due regard being had for the better or worse organizations of
these inter se).” “A statement,” on the other hand, as he defined it, “is justified by its truth, i.e. its correspondence, in a
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highly technical sense, with the fact to which it points.”
Now there are several disadvantages to the terms and implications of this first definition. To call a form of words a pseudo-statement is to suggest to the poet that a pseudo-state of mind is a fit launch- ing-site for a poem, and that a pseudo- integrity of thought is perfectly adequate for the production of a so-called pseudo- statement poem. I. A. Richards’ words might also be thought to justify the kind of poem which sets out consciously to re- lease and organize our impulses and atti- tudes, i.c., a deliberately therapeutic or propagandist poetry.
Strangely enough, I have found an anti-
dote to these implications in a book pub- lished in 1878: Ethics and Aesthetics in Modern Poetry, by J. B. Selkirk. In his
chapter on skepticism and poetry, the au-
thor makes some interesting remarks on the need in poetry for conviction. “There
is,” he writes,
a certain degree of heat at which language fuses, and becomes the possible vehicle of poeti- cal feeling, and the point of liquefaction is never registered below conviction, but above it. We do not say that conviction is all that is necessary, Oxygen itself would quickly con- sume life, yet a man must consume oxygen to live. Conviction alone will not produce poetry, but it is an essential component of the atmos- phere in which alone poetry can be sustained. At the degree in the mental thermometer which chronicles conviction, the possibility of poetry begins. Anything below that lacks one of the first conditions of its existence.
Now this passage is admirable, I think, in allowing for the involuntary factor es- sential to the creative act; in suggesting that a poem cannot be assembled like a car
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on the assembly-belt from a number of prepared parts. In comparison with this, I. A. Richards’ passage has a utilitarian tone. It seems to imply that just as a good poem will organize the reader’s inner life, so likewise a good poem can be constructed out of a deliberated plan of psychological organization; in brief, a poetry envisaged as providing so many ready-made mental suits. | am aware that this conclusion is not one which I. A. Richards would support, but I think his phrasing might appear to offer a hint of conditioned tailoring to many.
But where, I feel, the older author falls down is in thinking of conviction as being synonymous with an act or state of religi- ous assent. I think one may hold a half- belief, or a belief with reservation, with the same momentary conviction with which one may subscribe to a full public faith. What seems to me to constitute conviction is not the comprehensiveness of its articles but an integrity of mind; an insistence on things manifest to one, and an insistence on these things only.
Now in the passage from Thomas con- sidered above, both doubt and belief are manifest together: God is “dear” but “un- born” and “fabulous,” and “Heaven that never was/Nor will be ever is always true.” To do other than reproduce these intimations, deriving from the poet's “openmouthedness,” would be for Thomas to have violated his integrity; to have written without the fusing effect, the speech-annealing powers of conviction.
I believe that the phenomenon of “ani- mal faith” has not been sufficiently recog- nized in poetry, and that the poetry of Dylan Thomas offers a rich ground for examining its workings.
SUMMER 1957
Temple Birds
EMILIE GLEN
Beefed slattern of an Amusement Park,
Blowzy bluffer,
Broken down arches teetering on platform beels, Product of calloused corneas,
Fat arms full of monster prizes,
Plaster and plush,
The voice of a macaw.
Stand among stands
In an alley smelling of cold grease pizza,
Garbaged with melon rinds, corn husks,
Gum blobs, spittle,
Debris of folk stultified
By mass produced deformities,
Beating the senses
Ten thousand times ten thousand,
Between barkered jitter wheels, grin house, ball pitch,
Like a new moon through smoking slag, Mozart from a juke box, Fragrance in a fish market—
The temple birds.
Birds black and yellow as Chinese lacquer Tell fortunes leisured
As a breeze through meadow grass, Quieting as temple bells,
The Chinaman unhurried in his celestial robe, Left before the gate, shoes of haste,
The bird takes the coin in his beak, Crosses the bridge fo the temple,
Returns with a fortune white as rice Birds black and yellow
Silence
Sanctuary
SOUTHWEST Revieu
CHARLES ANGOFF
1 TEACH every year at a writers’ confer- ence, and there I meet all sorts of people. There was one woman, in her eighty-sec- ond year, who had just started work on a trilogy dealing with her life in the north- ernmost sections of Maine; there was a re- tired lawyer, aged seventy-five, who had made a fortune as legal counsel for oil prospectors in the South, who wanted me to teach him in two weeks to write like Rex Stout, and when I told him that my opinion of Mr. Stout’s literary works was not of the highest, said, “But he makes plenty of money, doesn’t he?”; there was a nineteen-year-old girl who wanted me to teach her in a week (she couldn’t stay the entire two weeks of the conference) how to write like Emily Dickinson; and last year there was a man who submitted a book entitled “Everybody Can Be a Success.”
He was the first to talk to me at the conference and there was hardly a time of the day or night when, if we happened to be within talking distance of each oth- er, he didn’t manage to tell me how high an opinion he had of my own writings and how much he would value my views of his manuscript, “Everybody Can Be a Success.”
He was about thirty-five years old, was
the father of three children, held hands
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Everybody Can Be a Success
freely with all the young girls at the con- ference, and always smiled. He wore slacks and summer shirts that showed off his hairy chest, and his carefree sports shoes added to the boyish bounce of him. Fur- ther, he sprinkled his talk with mental- health enthusiasm: “If you set your heart on something, you will get it. .. . After all, what is God? He is a Force for good, and if you desire good, the All-Embracing Good is right there to punch in your cor- ner.... The secret of success is that there is no secret. That’s it. There is no secret. You must only will it, and there it is, right on a platter, given to you free by the greatest Free Giver of all, God...”
I finally got around to reading “Every- body Can Be a Success,” and I saw at once that it was a rehash of Norman Vincent Peale’s gospel. | wanted to drop “Every- body Can Be a Success” by the time I reached page 20. But somehow I kept on going. The language was as simple as sky writing. The sentences were short, and the paragraphs were also very short, few of them longer than two sentences, some only
one sentence long. There were many brief case histories of people who thought they were failures but “once they realized the All-Goodness of the All-Embracing Good, they became transformed. As was St. Paul on the road to Damascus. As was Moses
SUMMER 1957
« |
when he faced the burning bush. They were born anew. They shed their past. They became whole again. They became Successes. And so did Tom and Dick and Harry. And so can you. Nothing can stop you. Except yourself. That is the beautiful thing about life. Life is on your side. Al- ways on your side. Don’t interfere with its goodness, with its lovingkindness.”
But by the time I got to the middle of the manuscript I had had enough, and I began to wonder what I could say to this man who was obviously trying to make a quick dollar. I still didn’t know what he did for a living. I imagined he was a high- school teacher, who didn’t like teaching and wanted to make a lot of money quick- ly without much regard to how, and he probably thought that if Norman Vin- cent Peale could get away with his mer- chandise, there was no reason why he couldn’t also. I imagined that perhaps he taught physical culture in some business college, or maybe he was a floorwalker in a department store —or maybe he ran a dancing school, together with his wife. In any case I didn’t want to hurt him. I just didn’t want to tell him that his manu- script was rubbish, but how tell a man that his manuscript was rubbish without having him know? The manuscript, in fact, had a certain facility; indeed so much of it, that I even wondered if he hadn't done a little plagiarizing from the master Peale himself, but I had no desire to check. I just didn’t care. But I didn’t want to hurt him, and I was worried what to say to him.
FINALLY I faced him. He seemed all smiles, obviously sure that I would tell him his book was fine. As I greeted him I really
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had no idea what I would say to him, though I knew pretty well what I wanted to say.
“Well, professor, what's the verdict?” he asked cheerfully.
“It’s well written, that’s clear,” I be- gan, still unsure how I was going to tell him the truth. “Well organized. There’s no doubt in your mind what you want to say, and the reader has no doubt either.”
The smile spread all over his face. “So far so good,” he said. “I’ve made the first hurdle. I guess I'll live, eh?” He laughed mechanically and obviously expected me to laugh with him. I opened my mouth and spread my lips, but for some reason or other I couldn’t really laugh, and I was sure he noticed my lame attempt.
“But | wonder,” I went on, “I won-
“About what?”
“Why you wrote the book,” I said, and was instantly glad that the truth was out. I couldn't imagine that he would miss my point.
His face lost its smile, and lines of seri- ousness came to the neighborhood of his mouth, and his voice dropped: it had been a little high-pitched before. He said, “Well, I thought that was clear. I think there is a need for it.”” He moved closer to me, tapped my knee, and said, “I’m a minister. You didn’t know that, did you?”
I was rather surprised by the informa- tion, though as soon as he told me I was somehow amazed at myself that I hadn’t guessed before. I recalled the preachiness of the script, the smoothness of the writ- ing, and I could almost smell the pulpit as I looked at him.
“The Reverend Seymour B. Dalton, that’s my full name.” He smiled at me,
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|
and then said, “You didn’t know that, eh?”
“No.”
“I didn’t put Reverend on my manu- script, because I didn’t want any special attention, any kowtowing. You know, when a man, or woman, for that matter, finds out you're a minister, they begin to act differently to you, you know, talk nice, hold back, don’t swear. Hell, that’s foolish, plain foolish. Look at me. I’m a minister. Does that keep me from being human? Of course not. I swear. You just heard me. I don’t happen to like it too much, but now and then I say hell, god- dam it, nuts, and so on. I like a drink. I like to look at a pretty girl. I like to be accepted by folks, regular folks, play a game of cards, take a drink.”
I looked at him as he spoke and sudden- ly noticed that he looked somewhat like Kirk Douglas, the movie actor, and I somehow was sure that he knew it and was proud of it.
“Did I act different from others around the conference?” he asked.
“Not at all, Reverend Dalton.”
“Call me Seymour, please, professor. All my congregation does, even the little ones in the Sunday school. Some of their parents correct the children, tell them to call me Reverend, or Doctor, well, I’m not a doctor. Frankly, one of the reasons why I wrote the book is maybe it will get me a doctorate. It’s hard to get anywhere in the ministry unless you have a doctor-
ate. And I figure this book might hc’ » me.
Besides, there’s psychology.” “What do you mean, psychology?” “Well, that’s where the book comes in. Mind if I call you David?” “Why, no. I wish you would.”
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“Might just as well be friendly. Sey- mour, David.” He smiled, and for the first time I was rather offended by him, by his facility, by his rapid talk, by his over- friendliness, even by his looks. He went on, “Psychology. I believe that’s the big thing now. Bigger than the A-bomb or the H-bomb. A couple of Sundays ago I delivered a sermon entitled: ‘Your Soul: The Greatest H-Bomb of All.’ Like that?”
“Colorful,” I said lamely.
“Glad you like it, David. My people all liked it, too. And when I called all of them little centers of atomic power, they all looked at me with real surprise. But it’s true.” He pointed to the region of his heart. “Right here is the biggest H-bomb plant in all the world. And that’s where Jesus comes in. He preached faith. He preached holiness. He said holiness was-in the heart. In every man’s heart. He said holiness was strength. He said holiness was the greatest wonder, the greatest miracle worker of all. And what’s in the heart is God, Jesus, divine, power, abundance, ev- erything. In John 10:10 it says, ‘I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly.’ And in Isaiah 40:30, 31, it says, “They that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; and they shall walk, and not faint.’ This is a definite promise. And we can all have this strength: to fly as eagles. Think of it, to fly as eagles!”
I realized that Seymour was talking as he wrote: sharp, crisp sentences; but I also felt, more and more, that they were too sharp, too crisp, too “heavy-laden with spiritual power,” to use one phrase in the book that I somehow remembered.
SUMMER 1957
Seymour stopped suddenly and looked at me, and I thought he wanted me to say something more about the book manu- script.
“What I mean is,” I said hesitantly, “what I mean is that what you say in your manuscript has, well, been said by Nor- man Vincent Peale and Rabbi Joshua Loth Liebman and Bishop Sheen, and — I don’t claim to have read every line they wrote — frankly, I think what they write is pretty shabby, they promise too much to people. After all, how much can you tell people faith will help them, if what they need is a doctor or a dentist or a $150 loan, or maybe to get their wife to a psychia- trist, or maybe take a vacation together, away from the family, or maybe the man needs a new job, but for all sorts of reasons can’t leave his present one... all sorts of troubles like that? I mean it’s all right to tell such a man, such people to have faith and be optimistic. It’s all right, I guess, but that sort of stuff, while it eases things a bit to people in trouble, it eases them, though, for only a little while, and then they’re back where they were. That’s why, I guess, I’ve always felt that the Peale and Liebman and Sheen books are sort of, well, I don’t mean frauds exactly, but they’re aspirin, they help the pain for a while, but then the pain comes back, see?”
I was glad that I had talked the way I had, and also a little surprised that the words had rushed out of me — they told the truth about my feelings. But I was also a little sorry that I had used just these words. I was mixed up between being glad and being sorry, only a little sorry.
But what surprised me even more was that what I had said didn’t depress Sey- mour. “No,” he said, “I must differ with
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you, David, if you don’t mind. These books do good. I know they do. They help people over rough spots, and sometimes these rough spots are all that human troubles are.”
“But human troubles are very often real troubles—an immature wife that no amount of faith on the part of the hus- band will cure, no job, poor health,
“True, true,” he said. “But isn’t even a little help worth something?”
“I guess so,” I said, and was angry with him for putting me in such a corner. | knew that he knew that he had trapped me... that he knew there was an answer to his glib question, but that I wasn’t quick enough to think of it.
Just then he had to rush off to a confer- ence with the poetry instructor. Seymour also wrote poetry, and later I learned from the poetry instructor that Seymour's poetry was not bad, yet very bad: “It’s smooth, he knows construction, I mean, he knows two or three verse forms very well, oh, he'll sell to the Saturday Evening Post and the Ladies Home Journal and the New York Times and Herald Tribune, too, they often, most often print poor poetry, he'll get published in these papers, oh, the Christian Science Monitor, too,
he'll get published there, too, their poetry is often worse than the poetry in the New York Times or the Saturday Evening Post, on account of their religion, I guess, there is no death and sickness and no trouble in the world, and no trouble in the heart, all
is fine, well, from such a viewpoint you seldom get good poetry, poetry comes from turbulence, trouble, turbulence gives you insight, and that’s where Sey- mour, he also asked me to call him by his
217
first name the first time I saw him, the trouble with him is that his poetry has no trouble, he has no turbulence. But, once he'll learn his craft a little better, he al- ready is pretty good, he needs to be only a little more skilful, he'll make money with his poetry, which is more than I’m doing.”
1 SAW SEYMOUR several more times, and I also discussed him with other instructors at the conference, and in this manner I learned more about him, a great deal in fact. And I guess I learned most of all about Seymour from Seymour himself. I kept on discouraging him about his book “Everybody Can Be a Success.” After all, I said, he saw that I really couldn’t help him with his manuscript, because I didn’t like what was in it... yet he kept on talking to me about it and about himself. He ad- mitted that perhaps he didn’t add so much very new, but he insisted that his book had value: “Well, anyway, my cases are differ- ent, and maybe people who would read it would recognize their troubles in my cases, whereas they couldn’t recognize them in cases in Peace of Mind, Peace of Soul, and the other books. It could be, couldn't it?”
“Yes, it could.”
“That's all | want to know, and you ad- mit it’s well written.”
“Yes,” I said, “but the content...”
He still wasn’t fazed. He said that content didn’t matter so much. “Some Frenchman or maybe it was a French- woman—they’re the same, aren't they?” He laughed out loud, and for a moment I didn’t get the reason for his laughter. Slowly I did get his tawdry joke and didn’t like it, but I said nothing, of course. He continued, “Well, this French person said that it’s not so much what you say as how
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you say it. And you admitted that I write well.”
There was another time, when he man- aged to catch up with me as I was walking aimlessly along a country street, and be- fore I knew it he and I were sitting to- gether on a stone. One of the reasons | was beginning to dislike him so much was that somehow he managed to maneuver me into doing things I didn’t want to do: such as sitting with him, having a heavy breakfast (I'm normally a light breakfast man), drinking a martini with him (I drink very little, and martinis almost nev- er), and listening to bad singers sing pop- ular hit tunes.
As we were sitting this time he told me about his life. He had been born a Catholic and for a while thought of studying for the priesthood; then, still under twenty- one, he became converted to Methodism, much against the wishes of his parents (“The old man was boiling”) ... but he was unhappy with the Methodists, so he became a Baptist, though he didn’t make clear why he preferred the Baptist theolo- gy to the Methodist theology. But he was still unhappy, and then, in succession, he tried the Presbyterian theology, the Epis- copalian, the Lutheran, “and for a while I even thought of going into Christian Science. There’s a lot of truth in what they say, a great deal of it. But I met a Uni- tarian minister about that time, and he really sold me a bill of goods. That was for me. I could take what they had to give. They make use of psychology, history, lit- erature, you really don’t have to believe anything you don’t really believe, you know what I mean. I liked their emphasis on psycho-social health, psychology. Hell, I have Jews in my congregation and Cath-
SUMMER 1957
olics, on the sly, of course, Methodists, writers, anybody, anybody can join, you don’t have to believe anything, so long as you want to do the right thing, and I sure give them sermons, real, hot, punchy ser- mons, for justice, I’m a liberal in politics, and I have bankers in my congregation, but they take it from me. And I give them Freud and Jung and Liebman and Norman Vincent Peale and Billy Graham, the evangelist. I don’t like his theology, but he’s a good salesman, and religion needs better salesmanship. I’ve learned a lot from him. Selling religion is like selling any- thing else. I mean you have to sell. And that’s where psychology comes in. That’s why I wrote ‘Everybody Can Be a Success.’ It’s psychology, it’s true.”
He spoke in a torrent of words. I was offended by so much of what he had said as well as by his manner. I was especially offended by his juxtaposing of Freud and Jung and Liebman and Billy Graham — it
was Billy Graham’s presence in this com- pany that offended me most of all. Even Liebman seemed superior to Billy Graham ... but I said nothing.
“Well,” I began, wondering what | could possibly say without offending him. After all, I was an instructor, and | couldn’t tell my students the whole truth about them...
Fortunately, Seymour interrupted me. He wanted very much to talk. He appar- ently liked to talk to anybody who would listen, and it occurred to me that perhaps that was the reason why he entered the ministry in the first place. Maybe, I thought, as I listened to him, the world was divided into talkers and listeners, or may- be it was a matter of percentages, for all people are both talkers and listeners, ex-
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cept that some are more talkers than lis- teners and the other way around, and Sey- mour was clearly chiefly a talker. In fact, I realized, whenever he was with me he did most of the talking, though ostensibly he wanted my advice—but then, perhaps he had heard all he wanted to hear from me, and he talked so much because he didn’t want to hear any more, and he wanted to talk himself into thinking that I didn’t dislike his book as much as another part of him told him that I disliked his book intensely.
“Yes,” he said, “that’s it, psychology. Psychology is the kingpin now. And I don’t mind telling you that I have another reason for wanting to get the book pub- lished. Hell, what you say may be true and all that...”
“I didn’t say anything really ...” I be- gan.
He smiled and said, “No, you didn’t. But that’s all right. I’m not saying I’m Harry Emerson Fosdick or Reinhold Nie- buhr or any of the theologians in that league. I’m a bush-leaguer. Now, what | really want to say is this. If I get this book published, and I will, mark my words, I will, it will help me out in all sorts of ways. I can get some little theological seminary to give me a doctor degree, you know, Doctor of Divinity or even a Doctor of Laws, sure, I know how those doctor de- grees are handed out, I mean a hell of a lot of them, but the people like to have their ministers called doctors, even the Uni- tarians, and they’re pretty intelligent, peo- ple are strange about such things. But there’s something else. Once I get that book published, I can get lecture engage- ments, and boy, there’s money in that. For
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a half hour of gab, you can get fifty bucks, and seventy-five bucks, and if you go up and up, you can make a hundred bucks and more. Sweet dough and easy, easy as pie. Get me?”
“Yes,” I said, almost out of breath from listening to him.
“So now you know.”
“Yes,” I said, and I wondered if Sey-
Meditation at Elsinore
ELIZABETH COATSWORTH
mour knew what I had learned about him and from him ... and I began to wonder about his congregation, about the people who came to his church in search of solace from the buffetings of fortune, in search of hope and comfort and encouragement, in search of someone to help them get closer to the Infinite Mystery of all Life ...and my heart sank.
“Good-night, sweet Prince”
That is the tragedy,
Not blood, not poison,
Not even the reedy stream
Where flowers and little bawdy ditties ended.
The tragedy was love.
Love was the chord to which the young prince moved, And one by one his loves betrayed bis love:
His father’s ghost was harsh and stank of hell;
His mother’s love was coupled with the siren’s; While young Ophelia spoke, her father listened; His boon companions came as spies; on every hand His love turned sword and twisted in his grasp Piercing his side. But others died as well.
Despite this heaped-up death, these corpses strewn As thick as daisies in a meadow, hate
Was never victor. All was done for love;
Not hate, but love speaks last—
“Good-night, sweet Prince.”
SUMMER 1957
James Agee: The Question of Unkept Promise
W. M. FROHOCK
TO THE DOZEN or so good reasons that have been suggested for our having no new major novelists in America I should like to suggest the addition of one more. America now maintains so many areas in which a creative talent can find room for exercise that a writer whose gifts at one time would have assured us a long series of good fictions is now invited to divert his energies in a dozen different directions. And for an example of what happens to solicit some talents I would offer the case of James Agee, who had a great gift and could, one suspects, have written some fine novels.
Agee died in 1955 of coronary occlusion at the age of forty-five, leaving one book of poems, Permit Me Voyage; one book about sharecropping, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men; and one short novel, The Morning Watch. If you knew anything else of his, it was because you had come upon a fugitive piece in some magazine or other, or had happened to notice his name in connection with the script of a movie. The truth is that on paper Agee’s accom- plishments are quickly listed and seem only mildly impressive.
When Permit Me Voyage was published (1934) in the “Yale Series of Younger Poets,” Agee was shortly out of college and earning his living as a writer on For-
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tune; and the two main lines that his life as a writer would take were already evi- dent. The book revealed a kind of ago- nized self-searcher who would go on for the rest of his life trying to put his feel- ings about himself and the world into some acceptable order. His work on Fortune revealed a craftsman who could lose him- self, with complete detachment, in any ephemeral piece of writing which hap- pened to challenge his skill. (It was clear that he could, at least temporarily, lose his troubles in it also.) The self- searching would go on in his poems, his study of sharecroppers, and toward the last of his life in what little fiction he had time left to write. The craftsman wrote articles for Fortune, Time, and Life, movie reviews for the Nation, and the movie scripts he published as well as those which were filmed in Hollywood. What may be harder to believe is that both lines of activity were so important to him.
THE PoeMS in Permit Me Voyage were a selection from early work that Agee thought worth saving. Some were overly intricate, some precious, some extremely good and mature work. Reviewers depre- cated the preciousness (one remarked that the title itself is a circumlocution for “gangway’) and admired the poet’s musi-
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cal ear. They also talked, more often than not unfavorably, about the book’s curious dedication. Actually it was the “Dedica- tion” —in quotes because it is the title of a section of the book—which most clearly
revealed the line Agee’s career was taking.
Most dedications are one line long, on a special page. Agee’s “Dedication” ran from page 16 on to page 23. It starts by offering the book to God, and to Agee’s friends, and relatives, and teachers; it then enumerates men he has admired without knowing them, like Chaplin and Joyce, and offers the book to them; it continues with an offering to all those “who have told the truth,” and from them goes on to men he disagrees with or disapproves of, or even hates, including the then current enemies of humanity. At the very end it calls down a blessing upon all:
Have mercy upon us therefore, O deep God of the Void, spare this race in this your earth still in our free choice: who will turn to you and again fail you, and once more turn as ever