The Bourgeois Keats and the World of Capital

Cockney? Sure.  Aesthete? Absolutely.  But John Keats also took many of his cues from the dominant culture of his time and place, and the dominant culture of nineteenth century London was as bourgeois as a lace antimacassar on an Empire settee.  Consider, for example, his narrative poem “The Eve of St. Agnes.”  For all of its medieval trappings—creepy gothic castles, feuding aristocratic dynasties, pale maidens, daring youths, bloated knights sprawled out dozing in the great hall with haunches of beef, flagons of ale, and drowsy hounds in attendance—the fundamental ideological architecture of the thing is of a piece with that of the great nineteenth century novels that taught the burgeoning middle class how to be, well, middle class.

Firstly there’s the emphasis on a kind of inner synthesis, a balancing of the individual’s urges.  This is the stuff of many a bildungsroman: passions and reason, sociability and self-containment, sympathy and judgment—in one way or another, we find the great genre of the middle class creating protagonists who learn to police themselves.  They model the creation of a personality type the sociologist David Reisman saw as typical of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the inner-directed subject.  Such subjects were the result of populations torn from the tradition-bound life of pre-industrial villages, where mores were inherited from, and enforced by, a longstanding and close-knit community.  In an age of increased mobility, greater personal freedom, and the disruption of old communities—in, that is, the capital-accumulating societies of western Europe and America in the nineteenth century—a new way of life called for a new kind of person.  As Reisman put it, the new society bred “character types who can manage to live socially without strict and self-evident tradition-direction.”  They do so with reference to an “internal gyroscope,” which allows them to reach some form of moral balance in the absence of external direction from established community.  My personal touchstone for this kind of novel is Jane Eyre, where the passions symbolized by fire and the anti-social self-control symbolized by water threaten to overwhelm Jane until, at the end, we see her control and balance them, as she brings the chastened Mr. Rochester a tray with a glass of water and a candle—the emblems of forces she has learned to control.

In “The Eve of St. Agnes,” we see a synthesis of the bodily urges and the spiritual ones.  We begin and end with images of unmitigated bodily bloat—in the form of a feast-hall of overstuffed and indolent nobles—and equally unmitigated spiritual sterility—in the form of a holy man, cold and alone, counting his rosary in ashen reverie.  In between, we find the tale of Madeline, a pure maiden who goes to bed without eating in hopes of seeing a vision of her future husband on St. Agnes’ eve, the night when such things happen, according to ancient lore.  Unknown to Madeline, the young Porphyro, scion of a rival noble house sworn to enmity with her own, has found his way into the castle and, planning to seduce her, has hidden himself in her chambers.  The poem associates him with bodily lust and with the warm colors—red, purple—and her with spiritual purity and cold colors like white and silver.  When the would-be lover sees Madeline in her chamber, we get a kind of fusion of the two symbolic colors, foreshadowing the union of spiritual and bodily elements in the birth of love:

       A casement high and triple-arch'd there was,

       All garlanded with carven imag'ries

       Of fruits, and flowers, and bunches of knot-grass,

       And diamonded with panes of quaint device,

       Innumerable of stains and splendid dyes,

       As are the tiger-moth's deep-damask'd wings;

       And in the midst, 'mong thousand heraldries,

       And twilight saints, and dim emblazonings,

       A shielded scutcheon blush'd with blood of queens and kings.

       Full on this casement shone the wintry moon,

       And threw warm gules on Madeline's fair breast,

       As down she knelt for heaven's grace and boon;

       Rose-bloom fell on her hands, together prest,

       And on her silver cross soft amethyst,

       And on her hair a glory, like a saint:

       She seem'd a splendid angel, newly drest,

       Save wings, for heaven:—Porphyro grew faint:

       She knelt, so pure a thing, so free from mortal taint.

       Anon his heart revives: her vespers done,

       Of all its wreathed pearls her hair she frees;

       Unclasps her warmed jewels one by one;

       Loosens her fragrant boddice; by degrees

       Her rich attire creeps rustling to her knees:

       Half-hidden, like a mermaid in sea-weed,

       Pensive awhile she dreams awake, and sees,

       In fancy, fair St. Agnes in her bed,

       But dares not look behind, or all the charm is fled.

Well, it goes on, with the sheer spiritual innocence of Madeline converting Porphyro’s bodily lust into something finer, and the physical presence of Porphyro leading Madeline out of the realm of spiritual visions and into the reality of love.  It’s another one of those grand bourgeois moments of synthesis, forging an inner ethos for the characters.  Sure, we’re in a castle, but we’re miles from the way actual medieval romances like, say, Gawain and the Green Knight, work, with their tests of whether a protagonist can live up to an externally determined virtue.  With Keats, we’re much closer to the bildungsroman than to the medieval quest romance.

And then there’s the matter of the ending of “The Eve of St. Agnes.”  The story of young lovers from feuding families inevitably brings Romeo and Juliet to mind, but Keats’ tale is significantly different.  Shakespeare allows the tragic death of the lovers to bring the feuding houses together: we end with Montagues and Capulets reconciled, and inasmuch as there is any redemption in the play, it comes in the form of a restoration of harmony among noble houses.  In Keats, the emphasis isn’t on the houses at all—dynasties simply aren’t as important in the world of the nineteenth century bourgeoisie as they were in Shakespeare’s day.  Instead, we end with the two lovers escaping, not to an assured happiness, but to a storm.  They leave Madeline’s clan behind, not for the security of Porphyro’s ancestral house, but to hazard their fortunes in a world of large and brutal forces, indifferent to their happiness or unhappiness:

       They glide, like phantoms, into the wide hall;

       Like phantoms, to the iron porch, they glide;

       Where lay the Porter, in uneasy sprawl,

       With a huge empty flaggon by his side:

       The wakeful bloodhound rose, and shook his hide,

       But his sagacious eye an inmate owns:

       By one, and one, the bolts full easy slide:—

       The chains lie silent on the footworn stones;—

       The key turns, and the door upon its hinges groans.

       And they are gone: ay, ages long ago

       These lovers fled away into the storm.

       That night the Baron dreamt of many a woe,

       And all his warrior-guests, with shade and form

       Of witch, and demon, and large coffin-worm,

       Were long be-nightmar'd. Angela the old

       Died palsy-twitch'd, with meagre face deform;

       The Beadsman, after thousand aves told,

       For aye unsought for slept among his ashes cold.

A little domestic pair, removed from stability, exposed to the indifferent forces of the storm—it’s an image of the modern bourgeois couple, cut free from the traditional bonds of extended family, hoping for the best in a world in which they may or may not thrive, but which they cannot control.  The presence of the beadsman and his “ashes cold” reminds us that fertility and worldly happiness depend on couples like Porphyro and Madeline, and that retreat from the stormy world they hazard is a retreat from modern life itself.  We root for them, the way we root for any young couple setting out in the world capitalism has made.  We wish them well, and tremble.

John Ashbery and the Lonely Crowd

When I first started teaching at Brooklyn College, I had to teach a genre course for students who presumably had never read a poem before. I was puzzled about how to go about this. I started with an anthology of rock lyrics, because I thought this would be something they would probably be familiar with and we could get going and later become increasingly more serious. But they weren't really that interested in the rock lyrics…. I started to get very bored with this, as did the students. So I finally said, "Well, You have this other anthology, and next time I want you to read Wallace Stevens' 'Sunday Morning' and come and talk about it." And that went much better.

So said John Ashbery in an interview conducted by Christopher Hennessey for the American Poetry Review a few years ago.  It’s an anecdote I’ve heard from a few of the people I’ve been talking to about Ashbery in the process of research for the Ashbery chapter of a book I’ve been writing.  And I’d like to offer it here as a key to an important part of Ashbery’s sensibility: what we might call, following the sociologist David Riesman, Ashbery’s other-direction.

Riesman is best remembered for The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character, a work of humanistic sociology from 1950 that he wrote with the help of Nathan Glazer and Reuel Denney.  Riesman sees something new in the social character of the generation coming into adulthood in 1950 (when Ashbery turned 23), and attempts to get at it by contrasting it with earlier types of subjectivity.  The book is subtle and complex and full of all of the qualifying statements and codicils one would expect from a responsible sociologist, but the short version of his analysis is this: there are three dominant types of social character, corresponding to three distinct historical phases.  These are the tradition-directed, the inner-directed, and the other-directed (these ideal types are rarely encountered in isolation in an individual or a society, but they vary in which is dominant in any particular society or historical moment).

The tradition-directed individual internalizes his or her values early on from a relatively homogeneous group: a tribe or clan or village.  The individual is small and counts for little; the group looms large and is everything.  Little or no energy goes to the development of new solutions to problems, because life is precarious, and experimentation with the new constitutes too great a risk.  “If we plant the crops in a new way,” the tradition-directed individual might think, “we could all starve: the old ways are best.”  Individuals tend to be well adjusted to the values of the group, and to develop little autonomy, although tradition-directed societies usually have some way of accommodating, or containing, those who deviate from the norms.  Shamanism and monasticism are two of Riesman’s examples of deviance accommodation in tradition-directed societies.  Riesman doesn’t talk much about poetry, but if we wish to think of a poet coming from a tradition-directed context, we could think of the Beowulf poet: anonymous, and giving voice to the heroic values of a tribe, not to the lyric yearnings of an individual.

For Riesman, tradition-direction has been on the wane in the West since the Renaissance, but it is only in the nineteenth century that it is displaced as the dominant form of character formation.  It is then that we see the triumph of the inner-directed character.  While the term sounds like it might designate an independent, autonomous, or even existentially authentic sort of person, the inner-directed character isn’t quite that.  Instead, it describes the type of character formed by the values inculcated by a small family, and internalized to the point where the person becomes largely immune to the siren-song of other values.  This is a subjectivity for the era of social mobility, and perhaps the best way for a 21^st century American to think about inner-direction is to think of the value system of many first-generation immigrants: parents will instill, early on and quite powerfully, a set of values and expectations (“you will be studious and dutiful and not wayward and you will be a medical doctor and marry within the ethnic group and excel!”).  The society at large is not the dictator of values, here: instead, the inner-directed person is outfitted with what Reisman calls a “psychological gyroscope” early on, and this gyroscope (given to, not chosen by, the individual) governs his or her actions and choices and life-trajectory.  The inner directed person is on a kind of mission, and rejects the pressure of the outside world.  The stiff upper lip comes to mind as an emblem of this sort of character.  If you want to think about poets who fit this mode, you’ll find them aplenty among the ranks of the reactionary modernists.  T.S. Eliot was surely outfitted with a “psychological gyroscope” oriented toward his family’s values of spiritual rectitude and community leadership.  He suffered terribly when he felt his own urges at odds with the directions of his inner gyroscope, and, when social changes in American society more-or-less dissolved the old paternalistic elite to which he belonged, he had to dream up a society into which his values would fit (you can find this in his illiberal social writings from the period between the two world wars). 

The era of inner-direction, thought Riesman, was just starting to come to an end, at least in the United States, with the social transformations that came after the Second World War.  Some of this had to do with the move from a society of deferred gratification to a society of abundance and consumption; some of it had to do with the ubiquity of mass media, but whatever the cause, the effect was this: character was decreasingly determined by parents and the internal gyroscope they installed in their children, and increasingly determined by shifting signals from peer groups and media outlets.  Instead of unshakable values, we have malleable ones.  Instead of an inner mission, we have both an anxiety about, and an empathy for, those around us.  Father no longer knows best: in fact, if dad has some crusty old views that the media or our fellow sophomores tell us are no longer acceptable, we question and challenge him.  He’s not the Godlike patriarch of old: he’s Archie Bunker, and we’re meant to shunt him aside.  Compared to the inner-directed person, the other-directed person will be less militant, less rigid, more malleable, more open to change, more susceptible to public opinion.  Is Ezra Pound other-directed? Not a chance.  But in certain respects John Ashbery is very much the product of an other-directed generation.

I’m not the first to connect Riesman with Ashbery: Andrew Epstein, for example, mentions Riesman in connection with the 1950s culture of conformism from which the New York School poets sought escape.  While I do see Ashbery sitting a little uneasily with the conformity inherent in other-direction, though, I also see many elements of Ashbery’s sensibility as congruent with other-direction.  In contradistinction from many of the great modernist poets, for example, Ashbery is the least doctrinaire or agenda-driven of poets.  No Celtic Mysteries in the manner of Yeats, no Christian society in the manner of Eliot, no Social Credit in the manner of Pound—none of that for Ashbery.  And some of this comes from the other-directed impulse, the desire to avoid conflict with the world rather than to attack it at the direction of an inner gyroscope.  “John is not a dogmatist,” an old friend of Ashbery’s once told me, “he says he’s bored in advance of all the trouble he’d create if he was.”  This flexibility, this demurral of any strong desire to argue or convert or conquer, probably lies behind another of Ashbery’s qualities, described by the same friend as “his bewildering talent for not threatening people.”  And one can certainly see the character forming influence of a peer-group (especially the poets, like Kenneth Koch and Frank O’Hara, Ashbery encountered while a student at Harvard) as greater than the influence of Ashbery’s family back on the farm in upstate New York.  The influence of the mass media comes into play, too: not just in the pop culture that was to inform so many of the poems, but in the way Ashbery initially encountered experimental art which he discovered through a 1936 issue of Life magazine with a feature on Surrealism.  This was the sort of receipt of values from beyond the family circle unavailable in the childhood of T.S. Eliot.  But it is the lack of a doctrinaire position, and the lack of interest in haranguing or cajoling an audience, that marks a real difference between Ashbery and the poets of the Pound era (it marks him off, too, from some of his contemporaries, like Allen Ginsberg—social character types, as Riesman notes, never cover everyone in a society or generation).

It is this desire not to be bothersome or pushy in one’s views that explains Ashbery’s initial reticence about bringing the poetry he most admired to his students at Brooklyn College.  He wanted, instead, to meet them on what he imagined to be their own terms, and was surprised to find that they were more interested in being guided into his sensibilities—the love of Wallace Stevens, for example—than being left with their own.

Reisman describes the other-directed person as possessing not a gyroscope but a kind of radar that picks up signals from others and tries to accommodate them—and Ashbery was anticipating certain signals from his students.  But what happens when some of those signals being sent don’t seem to be meant for you?  This, for Riesman, is when we find ourselves imperfectly adjusted to the other-directed environment—and this, I think, is what happens with Ashbery.  He is certainly made in the undogmatic, flexible style of the other-directed character, but not all of the peer-and-media signals coming his way in midcentury America were meant for him.  There are a number of reasons for this, including precocious intelligence and aesthetic aptitude, but most prominent among them is his homosexuality, which placed him well outside the penumbra of general social acceptability.

What does one do if one is the conflict-averse product of an other-directed culture, but at odds with some of that culture’s norms?  In Ashbery’s case, it seems that the answer is that one wanders away a little.  One doesn’t pick up a megaphone or take to the streets: instead, one seeks escape.  In many aspects of Ashbery’s life and work, this seems to be what takes place.  There is an often ingenious school of interpretation, whose foremost figure is the poet and critic John Shoptaw, that sees Ashbery’s poetry as a kind of encrypted allegory of gay identity.  At times I find this convincing, but I think if one really wants to see the function of homosexuality in Ashbery’s poetry, one needs to consider Ashbery’s comment, from the interview with Hennessy, that “I think if there is an evasion it comes from having to conceal one's feelings from an early age. Maybe that plays a more important role in my poetry than I'm aware of.”  The evasion here is, I take it, an evasion of statement or narrative completion—and inasmuch as this is a way of neither embracing dominant values nor directly challenging them, it can be said to be the product of a wandering away from doctrine and conflict.  This can be seen as the product of other-directed sensibilities (“I don’t want to give anyone a hard time”) running up against the social prohibition of one’s identity (“but I can’t embrace the values of the society around me”). 

We can see this wandering away at work in Ashbery’s life: a flight from his family background first to the artistic bohemia of New York in the 50s, and then to Paris, which Ashbery often praises for the opportunity it offers the expatriate for solitude and shelter from fashionable opinion.  We can see it, too, in a number of aspects of the poetry.  There is, for example, the escapism of poems like “The Instruction Manual,” in which dissatisfaction with the ordinary workaday world leads not to any kind of programmatic rebellion, but to a dream of wandering away to the exotic aesthetics of Guadalajara.  There is, at a more profound level, the evasion of completion or coherence in the poems: they digress away from anything like a thesis, sometimes in their large structures and sometimes in the syntactic incompletion or ambiguity of the individual sentences.

The escapism, or wandering away, that accompanies Ashbery’s ill-fitting other-direction, comes at a price: isolation.  Ashbery’s poetry is among the loneliest bodies of work of any major American poet, and the Crusoe-like isolation of the shipwrecked figure in “The Skaters” is as poignant a picture of isolation as I have found in any poem in English.  Indeed, for a longer time than most of us realize, Ashbery was a rather isolated figure in American literature, unsure of his reputation, without critical champions, and convinced that fame would elude him.  But like those students at Brooklyn College, a surprising number of readers have come around to admiring Ashbery’s sensibility.  Maybe this is a sign that we’re as uneasy with our other-direction as he is.