In literary love

Below is the basic argument of Leslie Fiedler's essay War, Exile, and the Death of Honor from his book Wating For the End: A portrait of Twentieth-Century American Literature and Its Writers". I want his brain.



"It is tempting to think of the practice of our writers of the Twenties as representing a decisive disavowal of the temptations of avant-gardism, and, in a sense, this is true; but it is not true enough. Hemingway and Gertrude Stein may have become at last, symbolically as well as personally, enemies; yet the example of her war on syntax and coherence made him to the end a more insidious subverter of common speech than the readers of Life magazine could ever permit themselves to recognize even if they were capable of doing so. And however stubbornly Faulkner insisted on reinventing stream-of-consciousness in his own home-made terms, the experiments of Joyce surely inspired the effort. The ostensible rejection and the abiding nostalgia, the pride and shame of the generation of the Twenties in its encounter with Europe, is, in fact, the reaction of the tourist, the provincial tourist. It matters little whether the writers played abroad for a long time like Fitzgerald, or retreated immediately to their home towns like Faulkner, or kept seeking on foreign continents images of Montana and Upper Michigan like Hemingway--the writers who came of age in WWI remained what they were to begin with: country boys perpetually astonished at meeting the Big City and the Great World, provincials forever surprised to discover themselves in London or Paris or Antibes, and afterward dazzled to remember that they had ever been in such improbable places."

Fiedler than goes on to recount the long tradition of American writers abroad (From Franklin to Irving, Hawthorne and Melville to Baldwin and Burroughs) "It is, indeed, astonishing how many especially American fictions were conceived or actually executed abroad from Rip Van Winkle through the Leather Stocking Tales, the Marble Faun of Hawthorne, Twain's Pudd'nhead Wilson to Fitzgerald's Tender Is the Night and The Sun Also Rises of Hemingway.

"Such novels of exile and return reflect the deepest truth, the mythical truth of the experience of Americans abroad, a truth of art which life does not always succeed in imitating, though it is one to which it aspires. TS Eliot may never go back to St. Louis to live out his declining years, while Pound, released from captivity in the States, seems set on dying in Rapallo. And if Rapallo looks, as Karl Shapiro has somewhere observed, just like Santa Barbara, California, that is just one of those irrelevant jokes which history plays on us all"

He goes on to flush out this theme of exile and return. "Even Eliot, Anglo-Catholic and Royalist, returns home in his imagination, making a pilgrimage in the Four Quartets not only to New England, but even, less forseeably, to Huck Finn's Mississippi, beside which he was born."

"In Paris, obviously different from the dream of Paris, the American discovers he can bear Kansas City, which he began knowing was different from all dreams of it; and this is worth his fare plus whatever heartache he pays as surtax."

"And though there is a sense in which the anti-war novel is merely a late sub-variety of the international theme (and another in which it is a sub-genre of the class-struggle book), we are compelled how to recognize it as the greatest and most characteristic literary invention of the Twenties."

"But pacifism, too, was a fiction of WWII, which saw thousands of young men, who earlier had risen in schools and colleges to swear that they would never bear arms, march off to battle--as often as not with copies of anti-warbooks in their packs. Those books were real enough, like the passion that prompted them, and the zeal with which they were read; only the promises were illusory."

"We inhabit for the first time a world in which men begin wars knowing that their avowed ends will not be accomplished, a world in which it is more and more difficult to believe that the conflicts we cannot avert are in any sense justified. And in such a world, the draft dodger, the malingerer, the goldbrick, the crap-out, all who make what Hemingway was the first to call 'a separate peace,' all who somehow survive the bombardment of shells and cant, become a new kind of anti-heroic hero. And it is precisely such sad sacks, such refugees from honor and glory, who returned to American to beget or become the generation of the Thirties."

$$$ ₤₤₤ ₣₣₣ 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.

"Meteoric Burlesk Melodrama," (OR "there'd still be the brick")

In my post on Sandburg I made an aside to suggest that Sandburg's urban sketches owe something to contemporary cartooning. The slapstick broadstrokes of certain of his verses, no less than his imagistic "handfulls," are pure ash-can; and it is this sketchiness and emphasis on the "daily" (a chronologically generative constraint, then, as much as a populist quotidian perspective) that seems to be a sticking point for S's detractors. His haphazard pile of images bother especially those who find him a sentimental "mystical mobocrat" (William Aspenwell Bradley's phrase, reviewing Chicago Poems in the Dial). I think that a proper discussion of the gestural, democratic expansion of the comix medium in this period could redeem some of those very gestures, which I would not deny are present and, insofar as Sandburg never really bothers to work up much formal prosodic fuss, are indeed sometimes frustrating. (Perhaps an especially valuable redemption, for their proximity to yellow journalism?)

Well, here's an pretty unnecessary follow up: e.e. cummings, among illustrious others (Eliot, Pound, Hemingway, Stein, later Umberto Eco, etc.) read George Herriman's Sunday Krazy Kat strips regularly. For those unfamiliar, Herriman's genius was in his ability to endlessly riff on a roughly identical plot in most every strip: Krazy Kat loves Ignatz Mouse, and never so much as when the latter hurls a brick at him, which he takes to be a sign of Ignatz's affection. Offissa Pupp, who loves Krazy Kat, attempts to arrest Ignatz, who repeatedly escapes to pitch bricks once more. (They all speak in this bee-yoo-tee-full sorta Joyce-via-Vaudeville mishmash).

In 1946 the poet wrote an introduction to a collection of Krazy Kat, in which this whole cycle becomes a reflection on the anarchic play that Cummings places at the heart of democracy:



"Even if Offissa Pupp should go crazy and start chasing Krazy, and even if Krazy should go crazy and start chasing Ignatz, and even if crazy Krazy should swallow crazy Ignatz and crazy Offissa Pupp should swallow crazy Krazy and it was the millennium - there'd still be the brick. And (having nothing else to swallow) Offissa Pupp would then swallow the brick. Whereupon, as the brick hit Krazy, Krazy would be happy." (Cummings: A Miscellany, p. 105)

And because I can't help myself, also this (remember: 1946):

"Right! The game they're playing, willy nilly, is the exciting democratic game of cat loves mouse; the game which a lot of highly moral people all over the socalled world consider uncivilized. I refer (of course) to those red-brown-and-blackshirted Puritans who want us all to scrap democracy and adopt their modernized version of follow the leader - a strictly ultraprogressive and super-benevolent affair which begins with the liquidation of Ignatz Mouse by Offissa Pupp. But (objects Krazy, in her innocent democratic way) Ignatz Mouse and Offissa Pupp are having fun. Right again!" (104)

So here's Spiegelman's Maus in utero (a lineage which has been explored, not least of which by Spiegelman, though the debt is more clunkily overt in In the Shadow of No Towers).



Eros - the Conqueror! And so on and so on. Cf. Nathaniel West's description of The Day of the Locust as "a novel in the form of a comic strip", the chapters being "squares in which many things happen through one action." Apparently Faulkner was a good comic artist as well -- anyone seen these cartoons? I'm tempted to keep on by comparing how the quatrains of Pound's "Hugh Selwyn Mauberly" might be homologous to comic strip panels, or to compare that formal analogue to Cummings's typographical spillage as a satirical model. But i'd better not. [Hi Emily]

Oh, and P.S. as I'm reading back over this, is "there'd still be the brick" potentially a summation of Imagist poetics as it shades into Objectivism?

Little Geniuses

'Bout time for another one of these:
(That's Van Dyke Parks, by the way.)

lotta whisky in that

Faulkner was only five foot six.

Naiveté, Irony, Repetition, Repetition

So I have finally started reading Paul Fussell's The Great War and Modern Memory, and I'm struck, as who wouldn't be, by this sentence at the end of his first chapter: "I am saying that there seems to be one dominating form of modern understanding; that it is essentially ironic; and that it originates largely in the application of mind and memory to the events of the Great War" (35).

Yeah? You and what army? As always with this kind of pronouncement, it depends when, and where, you situate the "modern," and Fussell is situating it in the England of the 1910s, by which point modernity, by most people's lights, had already been going on for some forty years, if not fifty or sixty. (It's a weird experience to read critical texts semi-chronologically and see the date of the beginning of "modernity" recede further and further into the past; I think it's about at 1550 now.) All of this is just semantics, though, and doesn't affect Fussell's basic argument (in his first chapter; not in the whole book) that a form of irony associated primarily with Thomas Hardy became, as a result of the colossal social disillusionment by the events of World War I, the modern literary temperament, preparing the way for Eliot, the later Pound, and all the rest of the Modernist gloomy gusses. This irony, put in the simplest possible way, posits an innocent Before and a terrible After, with the author/speaker situated firmly on the latter side, the After (whether it be of war, modernity, death, classicism, revolution).

While not exactly disagreeing with this analysis, I'm interested in the fact that it so obviously doesn't apply to the two modernist writers I've been reading most intensively lately, namely Gertrude Stein and Guillaume Apollinaire. While Fussell locates the force of Hardy's irony in "a collision between innocence and awareness" (5), it seems to me that both Apollinaire and Stein skirt these categories in favor of a thoroughgoing, incorruptible naïveté which simply cannot be mapped on to the before/after structure Fussell sets up. This naïveté seems, more than anything else, to be what links these two seminal figures, and on Fussell's reading it is utterly opposed to the definition of "modern" sensibility that the Great War puts forward and that, on his reading, is apotheosized in a postwar modernist like Eliot. So, is it only because Stein and Apollinaire came of age well before the War that they are so invested not in knowingness (which is what irony, in Hardy's sense, is all about) but in ignorance, in lack of knowledge? Is it because they are American, and French/Italian/Polish, rather than British? Or what?
I'll start with Stein. I keep thinking of a remark made I think by Tristan Tzara in that amazing Pamphlet Against Gertrude Stein that Jeremy assigned us last semester, to the effect that Stein has a "baby style": not quite right, I don't think (she's more like an extremely excited and confident six-year-old) but close enough to suggest the lack of sophistication that Stein so willfully projects in her writing, a lack of sophistication coupled with a dogged urge to pronounce, to state, to display authority.

Two procedures seem important to Stein in maintaining this tricky balance between naïveté: repetition (yes, that again) and time-framing. I was very interested, Greg, in what you wrote a while back about Yeats "testing" his words through repetition, or, to quote you specifically, "asking his rhythm to test ideas and words til they become old in the way polished stones in creeks are old." It's tempting to apply this description to Stein as well: certainly, The Making of Americans (when it's not reminding me of a vacuum cleaner) has the feel of a verbal laboratory, in which the author tries tiny variations on a limited number of formulae, hoping to produce some long-promised extraordinary effect. But Yeats' testing, one could say, attempts to create a sort of eternal present through the construction of a usable mythic past; whereas Stein is always oddly oriented toward the future, at the expense of the past and present. What's interesting in The Making of Americans is how she continually dispels the incantatory power of her repetitions with little reminders that she's driving at something: "soon there will be a history of the Hersland children," "later it will become clearer the kind of being that each one had in them," etc. (I'm paraphrasing; you know how it is, the book's all the way on the other side of the room). These reiterations aren't allowed to seem old, or familiar, or even properly symbolic, the way Yeats' (or Eliot's or Pound's) repeated words are, because they're so obviously temporary: they're not mantras but coordinates on an enormous map we will soon (but when?) be able to step back and admire.

All this to say, Stein is not a Symbolist: where Mallarmé or Verlaine or Symons or Yeats take aesthetic pleasure in the symbol, the image and the word in and of themselves, Stein is so focused on her version of the novelist's traditional "big picture" that she refrains from putting too much weight on any one detail or image or construction. What's happening in The Making of Americans is happening sentence by sentence, but it's not happening within the sentence; and it is, for that reason, impossible to excerpt. One could say that it's happening in the next sentence, only by the time we get there it no longer is. Again and again, we confront Stein's "sometime," "someday," "soon," and, occasionally, a "now" that projects us into the next sentence or paragraph hopefully only to confront us with another delay, or another restatement. This stops being incredibly frustrating only once (and if) you begin to view Stein's progress as incremental, that is, that she is actually accomplishing what she claims to be putting off until later: viz., narrating the history of a family's progress.
Another kind of modernist naïveté is displayed by Stein's contemporary and friend Guillaume Apollinaire. Even more than poétès maudits like Rimbaud and Verlaine, Apollinaire writes a style of French that is intentionally awkward: polyglot, crude, often obscene, syntactically either overly simple or ridiculously muddled. (It may or may not be necessary to emphasize that he did this on purpose; his critical prose is perfectly literate, even elegant.) The title of his most famous volume is Alcools and I think more than a few times in it he is endeavoring to mimic drunkenness (and in the last poem he turns into the mouth of Paris and drinks the blood of Europe like wine). Like Stein, he uses repetition to an effect that is less authoritative than childlike ("Les anges les anges dans le ciel," e.g.). And he also likes to play with the time-frames of his works, most obviously in his landmark poem "La Chanson du Mal Aimé," which begins:

Et je chantais cette romance
En 1903 sans savoir
Que mon amour à la semblance
Du beau Phénix s'il meurt un soir
Le matin voit sa renaissance

(And I sang this ballad
In 1903 in ignorance
Of love's resemblance
To the Phoenix dead at evening
Resurrected by morning) (Alcools, 14-15)

Apollinaire is effectively beginning his poem with a disclaimer: this poem was written in 1903, when I knew less about the subject; I no longer feel this way. But somehow rather than undermining the lyric intensity of the poem that follows, this bizarre flash-forward heightens it (and the tension builds as Apollinaire goes on to interpolate three further poems, taking place further back in the speaker's past or in his fantasy, all of which complicate the lyrical "now" of his "Chanson"). The reason for this is that the ignorance of the speaker is exactly what conditions his utterance: it is Apollinaire's favored pose to be bewildered, melancholy, and slightly drunk-seeming, just as it is Stein's to be earnest, relentless, and positivistic. The poem works if we are affected by this state of confusion and ignorance, and identify with it. But unlike in traditional dramatic irony, where the speaker's ignorance helps us to attain a position of interpretive power over him (because we know more than he does), here the effect relies on us sharing for the most part in the speaker's ignorance, while still recognizing it as ignorance.

Like Stein, then, Apollinaire makes us feel that we aren't fully in possession of the equipment we need to read his work: that it would not just be a matter of understanding how he feels now, but also who he used to be. And of course this knowledge is not just difficult to acquire, it's impossible, and not just for us, but for the speaker himself. The proper time of understanding the poem is not now and not then, and not a simple mediation between the two (as in Hardy's customary irony). For in Apollinaire's poems, each line is an experience of its own: they float on the page, abutting but not intruding on each other (an effect which is enhanced by Apollinaire's removal of all punctuation from the book at the proof-correcting stage).

What I am (very provisionally) theorizing here is a sort of naïve irony common to Apollinaire and Stein, a chosen naïvete, one which always retains the suggestion of a state of greater knowledge to come but which prefers to write out of ignorance (thus, perhaps, anticipating Beckett and his epochal rejection of Joyce's "omniscience and omnipotence"); and that this stands apart from the essentially ironic, elegiac strain of Modernism that Fussell sees as coming to fruition during the Great War. I can't decide whether this type of irony — if it even is irony — is the opposite of Hardy's, or just a lot more complicated: for Hardy there is only before and after, now and then, while for Apollinaire there is a complex weft of nows and thens, perhaps as many as there are lines in the poem.

Question: does this kind of naïve attitude make irony, as such, impossible?

OK, I am probably sounding like Marjorie Perloff with a couple of drinks in her. Sorry to go on so long.

I haven't even gotten to Apollinaire's war poetry yet, but I think it will make a fascinating comparison with the kind of stuff Fussell writes about in his book (about which also more anon).