Some dead people

In your face, suckers!

$$$ ₤₤₤ ₣₣₣ ℳℳℳ

H0w much of the particular character of Modernism can be accounted for by major transformations in the world economy in the first 30 years of the century: e.g., the Panic of 1907 and subsequent bail-out by J.P. Morgan (see Williams' poem on this subject in Spring and All); the slow collapse of Germany's national economy under the mountain of national debts incurred after the First World War; and, climactically, the stock market crash of 1929? Think of some of the individual modernist authors who experienced drastic changes in their financial positions during this period, for these and a variety of other reasons: Proust; Eliot; Yeats; Woolf; Stephen Spender; George Oppen; Nabokov. (You'll have to help me out with the Americans, Adrienne. Didn't Faulkner's family lose a bunch of money? Or was that during Reconstruction?) For these writers, all of whom were raised in an atmosphere of affluence that was later significantly reduced or threatened, how could the expression of despair and cynicism one normally associates with the Modernist moment not also be, in some way, a panic fear about a change in their personal situations? (Others, of course, improved their situations in this period, notably Pound and Joyce — mostly because they were both relatively poor to start with. And how significant is it that, despite living until almost the end of WWII, Joyce never wrote any fiction set later than 1904, when all of these catastrophes were still on the horizon?)

Thus those who become writers during the time of Modernism often give the impression not of entering a new, higher rentier class (which would be the typical role of the author in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries) but of giving expression to a certain loss of value, a certain fall from grace. (In contrast, the postmodernists — the Americans, anyway — are largely back in the upwardly mobile position, though at this point they are competing for smaller slices of the cultural capital pie, and those usually attached to positions at major American universities. In this context, Nabokov, who grew up as the child of liberal aristocrats, becomes an impoverished European émigré, moves to the U.S. and gets on the academic-job treadmill, and finally finds himself accidentally a Great American Author and rich and famous culture hero, cuts a particularly interesting figure.)

With these circumstances in mind, I can see why Anglo-American Modernism displays such a cautiously exploratory attitude toward the radical positions of Continental Modernism (Surrealism in particular), which by 1920 had largely accepted that important literature was now the province of either the radical Bohemian fringes or the future Marxist state.

So I think we need (if it doesn't exist already) a financial history of these and other relevant figures: an audit of Modernism, as it were. Who got poorer, who got richer, who was in danger and who was not, and how do these various positions affect their writing?

Yes, this has got me thinking.

Two things

A) James Weldon Johnson's Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man is like Proust-jr. Cocky uber-mama's boy narrator. Aestheticized relationships to abstract women vs. strong manly love for men. Autobiography came out in 1912, a year before the first volume of In Search of Lost Time and I'm sure they weren't reading each other, so I'm not gonna push the connection. It's just strange that the lonely yet irritating narrator becomes prominent trans-atlantically. (oh, i'm also trying to work out something in my head about American fiction and the theme of loneliness...more on this later)

B) I'm trying to figure out which Philip Roth to read. I had Goodbye Columbus for next week, but I've already read it a few years ago and figure I would be better served to do something else. I already have The Human Stain on my list (which I've also read and kind of refuse to reread) but i dont know what else I should do. I'm open to anything but American Pastoral. OR should I skip Roth for something else of his era? I'm looking for a way to squeeze Ragtime on to my list, but it just doesn't seem right to jump Roth for Doctorow.

All for now. Going away to Maine for a long weekend and hoping to emerge with some new thoughts on White Noise. I haven't read it since I was a freshman, and I think I wasn't ready for it then...I recall not knowing no what to make of it or what to do with it. I'm also gonna re-read some Flannery O'Connor who used to be my favorite author as a freshman and who I think shaped me as a reader in some ways.

Specters of Eliot

This week it's the 30s. A little depressing after all that terrible honesty and sexy Surrealism, but what are you gonna do, we've got to get to the 60s somehow.

Anyway. Anyone remember two weeks ago when I noted that T.S. Eliot seems to have developed a split personality in the mid-1920s? Well, what's interesting me currently is that these two sides of Eliot seem to have borne fruit in two different writers: significantly, one a novelist, one a poet. I'm reading Henry Green's Living at the moment, which I highly recommend to both of you and to anyone else who may be reading this: it's really an extraordinary book, and certainly a neglected Modernist text (it was first published in 1929). I sort of expected Green to be basically a novel-of-manners type, and I suppose in a way he is, but he's much weirder than I expected. He writes a very spare, almost telegraphic kind of prose, not a million miles away from Hemingway or D.H. Lawrence or even at times Gertrude Stein, full of abbreviated syntax and dropped articles (for example, here are the third and fourth sentences: " 'What we want is go, push,' said works manager to son of Mr. Dupret. 'What I say to them is — let's get on with it, let's get the stuff out,' " 207). But Green pushes it further, and to more striking effect, in my opinion, than any of them. At times it anticipates David Mamet! At other times, William Gaddis! As well as more expected people like Green's friend Graham Greene, especially his early stuff like Brighton Rock.

As the above comparisons should indicate, what Green is especially good at, and what his reputation rests on, is dialogue. The range of voices in Living is pretty extraordinary, encompassing upper-class and lower, young and old, male and female, etc. And he's especially interested in his working-class characters, the rhythm of their speech, their slang, their reflection of motifs and phrases from movies, music, and other pop culture. As I wrote before, this was a talent of Eliot's which he largely neglected to develop after Sweeney Agonistes, perhaps deciding that it wasn't really suitable to lyric poetry: at any rate, I think Green must have read Sweeney, and the relevant sections of The Waste Land, before writing his book. John Updike's introduction makes it seem as if Green wasn't all that avant-garde of a guy (for one thing, he was the managing director of an engineering firm, just like "Mr. Dupret's son" in Living) and suggests that his style is modeled on Charles M. Doughty's 1888 Travels in Arabia Deserta (also a big favorite of Marianne Moore's; clearly I need to take a look at this book); but I'm thinking that there just have to be some Modernist skeletons in Green's closet as well: certainly Eliot and Lawrence, if not Stein. He does admit to reading Proust (and refers to him, very amusingly, on page 261; apparently he was a big tipper) but that influence is more or less undetectable, whereas the English writers — who would, of course, have been right under Green's nose — are all over the place.

At the same time, more or less, W.H. Auden is making the first significant advance on Eliot's style and sensibility in English (as opposed to American) letters. And he does it by taking the bleak, blasted landscapes that Eliot's poetry had colonized (in "What the Thunder Said," "The Hollow Men" and "Ash-Wednesday") and making them more specifically English, both in their descriptive particulars and in their metrical expression. But it largely lacks Eliot's irony, or sense of humor (though Auden would soon manifest one of his own); Auden, at this stage anyway, is not really interested in colloquialism, or vulgarity: he's interested in refining Eliot's style (and "refining" seems like an appropriate word here, since one of the things Auden does is put factories into Eliot's waste lands). The sense of sinister atmosphere that Eliot conjures in his poetry of the 20s becomes absolutely oppressive in Auden's early work: and for the Laforguean Symbolist lightness that Eliot always retains, even when seriously bumming us out, Auden substitutes a very English heaviness, experimenting with alliterative verse in imitation of William Langland's Piers Plowman (e.g., "Doom is dark and deeper than any sea-dingle") and other lugubrious effects. (The Doughty influence seems to sneak in in places as well, particularly in the prose sections of The Orators.)

I will probably write about Auden again soon so I'll stop here. But for now, in order to radically oversimplify everything and help me see what's wrong with my own argument (a useful tactic, I've often noted), I'll say that Eliot, in his early years, was equally interested in the way the modern world talked (which both delighted and repelled him) and the way it looked (which just filled him with disgust). Green is only interested in the former, Auden the latter.