John Steinbeck's Hamburgers and Other Culinary Offenses of American Literature

John Steinbeck was a whiz in front of a typewriter, but don't ever let him don the paper cap of a fry cook.  And keep Hemingway away from your camp stove, people.  Your whiskey too—but that's another story, and one we've heard told many times.  

Consider this passage from The Grapes of Wrath, in which Steinbeck—with no condemnation and, indeed, with apparent admiration—describes the desecration of ground beef:

He presses down a hissing hamburger with his spatula. He lays the split buns on the plate to toast and heat. He gathers up stray onions from the plate and heaps them on the meat and presses them in with the spatula. He puts half the bun on top of the meat, paints the other half with melted butter, with thin pickle relish. Holding the bun on the meat, he slips the spatula under the thin pad of meat, flips it over, lays the buttered half on top, and drops the hamburger on a small plate. Quarter of a dill pickle, two black olives beside the sandwich… And he scrapes his griddle with the spatula and looks moodily at the stew kettle.

I'm all for grilled onions, warming a bun and, since the hamburger-eater has pretty much surrendered the cholesterol high-ground already, buttering things up in the manner of that finest of midwestern hamburger chains, Culver's (which also understands the virtues of the loose-packing 'smash technique' of patty making).  But no way, no where, no how, should anyone, ever, under any circumstances, press a hamburger flat with a spatula, as Steinbeck's hapless fry cook does not once but twice under the approving eye of the third person omniscient narrator, whose omniscience clearly does not extend into the area of burger frying.  One could point to any number of authoritative sources forbidding the practice, but I prefer to turn to a conversation thread on Chowhound, where the question was raised: just why do people insist on adding extra labor to the cooking process, only to dry their burgers out?  One "MartinDC" replied with what must certainly be the truth of the matter.  Why do these frycooks-manqué go nuts with the spatula?  "No reason," says our correspondent, 

...other than the guy cooking them has seen other guys doing it. Also, there are cooks who like to play with the food while it's cooking -- like busy work (a corollary to this are people who stir the pot too much). It's hard for some people to just step back and watch the magic happen by itself.

There's the sad truth of it.  I imagine gender comes into play, and that there's some kind of male tool-handling impulse underway that only Freud could explain, but until my research grant comes in, I just don't have enough ground round stored away to put the theory to a statistically valid test.


We probably shouldn't be surprised that Steinbeck was deficient in his culinary skills.  He was, after all, the man who wrote of the beer milkshake, without including the word "abomination" anywhere in the description.  The matter comes up twice in Cannery Row.  In the first instance, one has hope for Steinbeck, because he evinces appropriate levels of shame and trepidation:

In Monterey before he even started, he felt hungry and stopped at Herman’s for a hamburger and beer. While he ate his sandwich and sipped his beer, a bit of conversation came back to him. Blaisedell, the poet, had said to him, “You love beer so much. I’ll bet some day you’ll go in and order a beer milk shake.” It was a simple piece of foolery but it had bothered Doc ever since. He wondered what a beer milk shake would taste like. The idea gagged him a bit but he couldn’t let it alone. It cropped up every time he had a glass of beer. Would it curdle like milk? Would you add sugar? It was like a shrimp ice cream. Once the thing got into your head you couldn’t forget it.  He finished his sandwich and paid Herman. He purposely didn’t look at the milk shake machines lined up so shiny against the back wall. If a man ordered a beer milk shake, he thought, he’d better do it in a town where he wasn’t known. But then, a man with a beard, ordering a beer milk shake in a town where he wasn’t known — they might call the police.

Later, though, the offense of consuming this teufelspissen, and the reaction—a kind of "meh"—is so out of proportion to the culinary effrontery that one has to discount Steinbeck's judgment of both food and drink completely:

Doc walked angrily to the counter of the stand.The waitress, a blond beauty with just the hint of a goiter, smiled at him. “What’ll it be?”“Beer milk shake,” said Doc.“What?”Well here it was and what the hell. Might just as well get it over with now as some time later.The blond asked, “Are you kidding?”Doc knew wearily that he couldn’t explain, couldn’t tell the truth. “I’ve got a bladder complaint,” he said. “Bipalychaetorsonechtomy the doctors call it. I’m supposed to drink a beer milk shake. Doctor’s orders.”The blonde smiled reassuringly. “Oh! I thought you were kidding,” she said archly. “You tell me how to make it. I didn’t know you was sick.”“Very sick,” said Doc, “and due to be sicker. Put in some milk, and add half a bottle of beer. Give me the other half in a glass — no sugar in the milk shake.” When she served it, he tasted it wryly. And it wasn’t so bad — it just tasted like stale beer and milk.“It sounds awful,” said the blonde.“It’s not so bad when you get used to it,” said Doc. “I’ve been drinking it for seventeen years.”

I mean, given the monumental lack of judgment here, we're lucky Steinbeck didn't advocate squishing those hamburgers with a shoe.

Fans of Steinbeck may take courage from the fact that he was not alone in his culinary ineptitude.  Consider an even greater writer, Ernest Hemingway.  While Hem was rightly considered something of a bon vivant, and could rhapsodize about the comestible delights of Italy and France, when he moves from being a diner to depicting the act of cookery itself, he stumbles from the sublime heights of Paris to the degraded depths of the canned food aisle.

Consider this passage from "Big Two-Hearted River":

 Nick was hungry. He did not believe he had ever been hungrier He opened   and emptied a can at pork and beans and a can of spaghetti into the frying pan. "I've got a right to eat this kind of stuff, if I'm willing to carry it,” Nick said.His voice sounded strange in the darkening woods. He did not speak again. He started a fire with some chunks of pine he got with the ax from a stump. Over the fire he stuck a wire grill, pushing the tour legs down into the ground with his boot. Nick put the frying pan and a can of spaghetti on the grill over the flames. He was hungrier. The beans and spaghetti warmed. Nick stirred them sad mixed them together. They began to bubble, making little bubbles that rose with difficulty to the surface- There was a good smell. Nick got out a bottle of tomato catchup and cut four slices of bread. The little bubbles were coming faster now. Nick sat down beside the fire and lifted the frying pan off. He poured about half the contents out into the tin plate. It spread slowly on the plate. Nick knew it was too hot. He poured on some tomato catchup. He knew the beans and spaghetti were still too hot. He looked at the fire, then at the tent, he was not going to spoil it all by burning his tongue. For years he had never enjoyed fried bananas because he had never been able to wait for them to cool. His tongue was very sensitive. He was very hungry. Across the river in the swamp, in the almost dark, he saw a mist rising. He looked at the tent once more. All right. He took a full spoonful from the plate. "Chrise," Nick said, "Geezus Chrise," he said happily.  

The writing here is really quite wonderful.  We get, of course, the characteristic rhythm of Hemingway’s sentences in their syntactically parallel style, and that great “Geezus Chrise” grin.  And we also get that zooming out into the eerie, almost sublime woods, large with a darkness that wraps itself around Nick’s echoing voice, and then the retreat to the little, cozy heimlich world of the campfire—a movement reflecting Nick’s own life-journey into war and, imperfectly, back home again.  But in inverse proportion to the glory of the writing is the food.  I mean, let’s be perfectly clear about this: the dish over which Nick Adams rhapsodizes, for which he invokes the name of God, is a can of spaghetti mixed with a can of pork and beans and poured over ketchup.  Had the narrative called upon us to pronounce heavy judgment upon Nick here, even to discard the sympathy for him that Hemingway has painfully cultivated in us, one could bear it.  As it stands, one is just a little bit shattered.  The only plausible beverage pairing for such a vexation to gastronomy is, of course, a beer milkshake.  But if I see you order one, I’m calling the police.

The Poet Resigns: Poetry in a Difficult World — Free Online Access, Sale Price on Amazon

Good news!  My book  The Poet Resigns: Poetry in a Difficult World is more available than ever — if you have access to Project Muse through, say, your local university library's site, you can download the whole thing, or any individual chapters, as free pdfs.  Also, you can get the print version on sale at Amazon for about thirteen bucks.  Since the thing weighs in at 323 pages, you can't afford not to get your hands on it!

What's in the thing, you ask?  Here's the jacket copy listing the questions the book asks:

What are we really wishing for when we want poetry to have the prominence it had in the past? Why do American poets overwhelmingly identify with the political left? How do poems communicate? Is there an essential link between formal experimentation and political radicalism? What happens when poetic outsiders become academic insiders? Just what makes a poem a poem? If a poet gives up on her art, what reasons could she find for coming back to poetry? These are the large questions animating the essays of The Poet Resigns: Essays on Poetry in a Difficult Time, a book that sets out to survey not only the state of contemporary poetry, but also the poet's relationship to politics, society, and literary criticism. In addition to pursuing these topics, The Poet Resigns peers into the role of the critic and the manifesto, the nature of wit, the poetics of play, and the persistence of modernism, while providing detailed readings of poets as diverse as Harryette Mullen and Yvor Winters, George Oppen and Robert Pinsky, Pablo Neruda and C.S. Giscombe. Behind it all is a sense of poetry not just as an academic area of study, but also as a lived experience and a way of understanding. Few books of poetry criticism show such range - yet the core questions remain clear: what is this thing we love and call 'poetry,' and what is its consequence in the world?

Those of you looking to download just a chapter or two might want to have a look at an earlier post in which I wrote a sentence or two on each of them.

Project Muse, if you're lucky enough to have access to it, is a great source not just for scholarly articles, but for books.  You can also download my 2010 book Laureates and Heretics: Six Careers in American Poetry there (or buy an actual book for eighteen bucks).

And, since I'm in full-on self promotion mode, I might also mention that you can now download Slight Return: Remix and Ekphrasis, one of my collections of poems, for free too — even if you don't have Project Muse.  Among other things, it includes the prose poem sequence "The Kafka Sutra," with amazing illustrations by printmaker Sarah Conner.

Charmless and Interesting: What Conceptual Poetry Lacks and What It's Got

The brouhaha over conceptualism continues, with more and more people chiming in. There's a roundup of current opinions over at the Poetry Foundation, and the PF has been kind enough to allow me to lay down my own views.  Here are the first couple of paragraphs:

Fourteen months after reading at the White House, Kenneth Goldsmith found himself in the real center of American power: cable television.  His appearance on The Colbert Report, though, coincided not with a general celebration of the conceptual poetics with which he is associated, but with two stinging attacks on such poetics: one by the young poet Amy King in The Rumpus, and another by the esteemed poet-critic Calvin Bedient in Boston Review.  King’s criticism revolved around the idea of conceptualism as an in-group phenomenon, and on the hypocrisy of conceptual poets striking anti-establishment poses while simultaneously seeking, and beginning to find, such laurels as the established institutions of American poetry have to offer.  Bedient’s article criticized conceptualism for a lack of concern with emotion and affect, which he linked with both a truncating of poetry’s possibilities and a kind of reactionary political stance.  People’s responses to these criticisms, to judge by the emails, texts, phone calls, and Facebook messages I received, were passionate—half of my friends in the little world of poetry expressed delight that the horrible careerist bastards were finally getting called out for their sins, while the other half spluttered in outrage at those who dared try to quench the glorious yet fragile flames of poetic innovation.

This is a moment, then, for an assessment of the virtues and vices of conceptual poetry.  What does conceptual poetry lack, compared to other poetries, and what does it have to offer?  Any brief answer will, of course, be too general, but we can begin to sketch things out with reference to two aesthetic categories: the charming and the interesting.  Whatever else conceptualism has got going for it, it lacks—at least in its pure form—the former.  And whether one likes conceptualism or not, anyone who has engaged with it has found that it has, wonderfully or frustratingly, got plenty of the latter.

The rest is up at the Foundation's site.
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2013/08/charming-and-interesting-what-conceptual-poetry-lacks-and-what-its-got/

"And the Winner is...": The 2014 Madeleine P. Plonsker Award Winner Revealed!

The Madeleine P. Plonsker Emerging Writer’s Residency Prize, now in its sixth year, honors an author under forty years old with no major book publication.  The winner receives ten thousand dollars, publication of his or her manuscript by Lake Forest College Press (with national distribution via Northwestern University Press), a spot in the Lake Forest Literary Festival, nd a two-month residency at the Glen Rowan House, with the time to be spent revising the manuscript.  The prize alternates each year between fiction and poetry.  It's a great thing, and I'm glad to have been a part of it since the beginning.

This year's winner, Matthew Nye, was selected by guest judge Anne-Laure Tissut, Professor of American Literature at Rouen University, France (some of you may know her as one of the organizers of the 2012 &NOW Festival in Paris).

Matthew Nye's manuscript, Pike and Bloom, is a work of fiction of which Tissut writes "[it] leads the reader into a refreshingly comic immersion in major metaphysical and existential questions."  Nye is a graduate of Dartmouth and the University of Utah, and currently lives in that wondrous little outpost of civilization that is Athens, Georgia, where he is pursuing his doctorate.

2013-14 Plonsker Prize winner Matthew Nye

The Madeleine P. Plonsker Emerging Writer’s Residency Prize is made possible by a donation from a local philanthropist who was impressed by the College’s recently established publishing enterprise, Lake Forest College Press / &NOW Books. The previous winners are:

• Jessica Savitz for Hunting Is Painting (poetry);
• Gretchen E. Henderson for Galerie de Difformité (fiction);
• Jose Perez Beduya for Throng (poetry);
• Elizabeth Gentry for Housebound (fiction, forthcoming in November);
• Cecilia K. Corrigan for Titanic (poetry, forthcoming in Fall 2014).

The 2014-2015 Plonsker Prize will be awarded to a poet under forty years of age who has not yet published a full-length book. Poets interested in applying should submit a curriculum vita, a 30-page excerpt from a manuscript in progress, and a one-page statement of plans for completion to &NOW Books / Lake Forest College press via Submittable.com

The submission period is January 1 through March 1, 2013; no more than 200 submissions total will be considered. There is no entry fee.

Kenneth Rexroth's Other Worlds: Notes on "On What Planet"

So there I was, rooting around on the Bureau of Public Secrets website, when I ran across Kenneth Rexroth's "On What Planet," a poem I hadn't thought about since I'd chanced to see it in the library as an undergraduate, when I was wandering through the stacks and pulling down random books of poetry to read.  The moment I ran across this poem on the BPS site, the whole thing came back to me: that coastline, those owls, and that final turn out toward something much bigger.  I think the reason the poem had lodged itself in the back of my brain, waiting for something to trigger its resurgence into consciousness, has something to do with the simple, powerful structure of the thing.  Mike Theune is very keen on the notion of the turn, or volta, as a structural device at the core of poetry—so much so that he's devoted a web journal to giving readings of the various ways poems turn.  It's the turn, here in Rexroth's poem, that's the trick: it takes us from one kind of experience into something different and much more powerful, something that can make us rethink the experience of those stanzas that precede the turn.  Check it out.

The first stanza, taken by itself, is a decent enough bit of landscape. 

Uniformly over the whole countryside

The warm air flows imperceptibly seaward;

The autumn haze drifts in deep bands

Over the pale water;

White egrets stand in the blue marshes;

Tamalpais, Diablo, St. Helena

Float in the air.

Climbing on the cliffs of Hunter’s Hill

We look out over fifty miles of sinuous

Interpenetration of mountains and sea.

It really shows you where Robert Hass gets some of his sensibility for landscape, doesn't it?  The sense of forces moving dynamically through the landscape, the proper names of specific places, the land and water equally important.  But so what?  Well, there's this:

Leading up a twisted chimney,

Just as my eyes rise to the level

Of a small cave, two white owls

Fly out, silent, close to my face.

They hover, confused in the sunlight,

And disappear into the recesses of the cliff.

It takes a bit of a different tack from the opening stanza, since we find we are not just looking at the landscape from on high, at a kind of Apollonian distance, as observers above the action.  We're a part of the scene, and disturb it.  And what's more alarming, we suddenly see the landscape—or, at any rate, its inhabitants—looking back at us.  Those owls in Rexroth's are perfect for this, since they're all eyes.  When I read these lines, I remember a particularly terrifying moment in my Canadian youth, when I stood on a granite outcropping high above an isolated lake, and what I'd taken to be a large white stone on the cliff's edge suddenly swiveled its head around and fixed me in its horrible, huge glare: it was a snowy owl, and I, the observer, suddenly became the observed.

Anyway: the more I think about Rexroth's poem, the more I think Hass owes to it: there's a moment in part four of Hass' "On the Coast Near Sausalito" when the speaker looks right into the living eye of the fish he's caught, and feels himself caught in that uncanny gaze—so alien, but still something we recognize, and that recognizes us—is a moment straight out of "On What Planet."

But even with this development, the poem has yet to take its major turn.  Look what happens in the concluding stanza of the poem:

All day I have been watching a new climber,

A young girl with ash blonde hair

And gentle confident eyes.

She climbs slowly, precisely,

With unwasted grace.

While I am coiling the ropes,

Watching the spectacular sunset,

She turns to me and says, quietly,

“It must be very beautiful, the sunset,

On Saturn, with the rings and all the moons.”

The girl is a kind of further development of the owl image: just as we'd added more characters to the poem with the owls, we add another here; and just as the owls introduced the concept of a gaze other than the speaker's to the poem, the girl is given to us as a seeing entity, with her "gentle confident eyes" foregrounded.  And the real turn comes when we get to see what she sees: she takes in the landscape to which we've been introduced, and combines it with her own sense of wonder, to ask about even more exotic and spectacular sunsets. 

There's so much going on here I hardly know where to start.  For one thing, the introduction of a younger, more naïve viewer of the landscape places the poem in the Romantic tradition, specifically in the tradition of Wordsworth's great "Tintern Abbey," where the speaker (let's call him Wordsworth) turns to his younger sister and thinks about the difference between how she perceives the landscape and how he sees it.  We get some great themes.  There's the importance of each person's particular subjective experience—how we share an objective world, but nevertheless have our own private interiority.  There's also the difference between adult perception and childhood perception.  Both Wordsworth and Rexroth give the edge to childhood perception, but for different reasons.  For Wordsworth, the child's perception is less mediated by thought and memory than the adult's.  For Rexroth, the child sort of juices up or amplifies the existing scene, allowing wonder at the present beauty to lead to even greater wonder at imagined beauties.  (I think it's significant that Rexroth has the adult engaged in some mundane, utilitarian tasks while this happens—it heightens the contrast between down-to-earth or practical adult and wonder-oriented child).

But to put Rexroth's poem in the Wordsworthian context doesn't exhaust the thing.  There's more!  The girl's observation about Saturn defamiliarizes the whole scene.  We've been thinking about the landscape of the early stanzas as impressive, but when we're asked to compare it to a sunset on Saturn, everything becomes less familiar.  We think of the exoticness of other worlds, and then we think of our own world not as something complete in itself, but as one of many worlds—not as nature, but as one little particular articulation of galaxy upon galaxy of nature's variants.  Our world doesn't just seem grand—it becomes strange, as weird and particular a combination of elements as are found on Saturn, or anywhere else.  The large richness of infinite planetary beauties opens before us, and this makes our own scene not just spectacular and big, as it had seemed, but particular and small too: it's a big place of grand forces and jutting sea cliffs, but it's also, at the same time, our own dear little home in the vastness of space.  The effect is to render the scene uncanny, familiar and strange at the same time.

The real kicker, though, that comes with the poem's turn toward the girl and her observation, is the way we move from one kind of sublimity to another, more complicated kind.  The landscape in the opening stanzas of the poems is sublime in the way Edmund Burke wrote of sublimity in his famous Philosophical Enquiry into Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful.  Here, Burke speaks of the qualities of sublime objects—their vastness, ruggedness, jaggedness of line, and so forth—that mark them out from the merely beautiful.  Those cliffs in the first two stanzas, and their interprenetration with the sea, are sublime stuff by Burkean criteria.  But the girl takes us somewhere else, and, indeed, somewhere more profound.  When she sees the grand, sublime landscape, she thinks of something even vaster.  We were dwarfed by the landscape before, but now we're really dwarfed by the idea of the solar system, and behind that by the idea of the infinite plenitude of worlds, each with its own sun, its own grand vistas, its own sunsets—a deep sublimity of vastness upon vastness.  But (and this is the crucial thing) we're not overwhelmed by this.  In some strange sense, we've mastered it more than it has mastered us, because we—or, to be specific, the girl, and through her, the rest of us—have contained these vast multitudes in our minds.  It's not just that there are an infinitude of planetary landscapes and exotic sunsets, it's that we have imagined them, and their possibility.  This is one of the kinds of sublimity Kant talks about in his Critique of Judgment, where the sublime isn't just constituted by vastness, but by our ability to comprehend that vastness.  This kind of sublime experience doesn't just tower over us: it affirms the power of our minds to take in such infinite vistas.  It's a kind of affirmation not only of the outer world, but of the power of our imaginations to encompass it.  The sublime experience ennobles us, as well as the world (or, in the case of this poem, the worlds).

It's particularly important, I think, that it is a child who, in Rexroth's poem, calls us back to the power of our own imaginations.  This makes such power innate, rather than learned.  In fact, it makes such power latent, waiting to be rediscovered in us through our encounter with the world as seen by the child, or by the poet.  This belief in the innate, but easily forgotten, power of the imagination is what marks Rexroth, for me, as a Romantic.  And it's why I'm glad to have found my way back to a poem whose powers remained latent in a forgotten corner of my memory.

America, England, and the Disinheritance of the Poets: Notes on W.H. Auden

I am, and will always be, a great lover of the poetry of W.H. Auden—and, come to think of it, of his prose and plays, too.  But any honest reader of Auden ought to ask two questions: why does W.H. Auden’s early, English work read as if the most important events of the time all took place in an English boarding school?  And why does his later, American period read as if it were inspired by the syllabus of a college course called, say, “Introduction to Western Civilization”?  I think the answers to both questions come when we look at the social situation of Auden and the groups with which he associated in the English and American periods of his career.  In each case, we’re dealing with very particular kinds of disinheritance, and with poetics that speak to different kinds of disinherited people.

Many people have noted the fixation on schoolboy stuff in Auden’s early poetry: there is, most famously, The Orators, a kind of sendup of prize-day orations at English boarding schools; and the early poems are full of a kind of students-vs-elders conflict.  And it’s not just Auden who writes this way. I remember first reading Christopher Isherwood’s Lions and Shadows, and being astonished at what I took to be the narcissism of the piece: here was something claiming to be a novel that was really little more than a memoir of Isherwood’s school days, with scenes laid out as if they were of the greatest significance.  Edward Upward’s fiction can have much the same quality, Graham Greene edited a collection of essays called The Old School (to which Auden contributed) and Cyril Connolly’s Enemies of Promise, purportedly a book about what one must do to write a lasting piece of literature, consists for almost half of its length of recollections of Connolly’s time at Eton.  What gives?  Why this emphasis on one’s old school?

Connolly offers an answer that’s at least half right.  He writes, near the end of Enemies of Promise,

…were I to deduce any system from my feelings on leaving Eton, it might be called The Theory of Permanent Adolescence.  It is the theory that the experiences undergone by boys at the great public schools, their glories and their disappointments, are so intense as to dominate their lives and to arrest their development.  From this it results that the greater part of the ruling class remains adolescent, school-minded, self-conscious…

Well, it goes on, and includes a bit about homosexuality that many would feel reflects poorly on Connolly.  But for present purposes, the point is that the public schools (Americans would say private schools—both terms refer to schools paid for by individual fees, rather than by taxes) make a deep impression.  No doubt this is true: such schools are about forming an elite, and they work hard to give their students a sense of status, with duties and privileges, and with a sense of obligation to the old school itself.

Connolly’s theory of permanent adolescence, though, does not fully explain the school-obsession of the generation of English writers born between, say, 1902 and 1909.  After all, other generations before them had gone through the intense experience of elite boarding schools without having their work deeply marked by specifically boarding school themes and imagery.  What was so different about Auden’s generation?  The answer, I think, is disillusion and disinheritance.  It’s not just that they had intense experiences in school—it’s that their experiences involved a terrible dissonance between the values and expectations of school and the reality into which the schoolboys entered.  They were never able to fully rid themselves of school, because they were never able to fulfill the expectations the schools created for them.

Consider the timing of their births: Auden’s generation came of age too late to participate in the First World War.  They saw their elders at school—often their brothers—go out to war, to face what Isherwood called “the test”—the battle in which one would prove one’s value as a man, a leader, and a representative of one’s elite training. The schools preached sacrifice and the military virtues, knowing that they were creating officers for a desperate struggle, and even a future skeptic of all things jingoistic, the 11 or 13 year old Eric Blair (we know him as George Orwell) wrote poems in which he anticipated “the test.”  Here’s the first stanza of one called “Awake! Young Men of England”:

Oh! Give me the strength of the lion

  The wisdom of Reynard the Fox,

And I’ll hurl troops at the Germans,

  And give them the hardest of knocks.

One could go on quoting the rest of it, but the point is already clear: one must muster one’s courage and one’s wisdom, appeal to one’s God, and above all lead (it is the speaker who will, as an officer, hurl troops at the Germans).  That the result of all this will be the giving of hard knocks is enough to show us the puerility of the poet: this is no Wilfred Owen writing, but a child whose sense of war comes from the old men teaching at his school and telling stories about Nelson and Wellington trouncing Napoleon, or quoting from the more heroic passages of Macauley’s Lays of Ancient Rome.

We may well think that Auden’s generation should be grateful for having missed the slaughter, and I’m sure in some sense they were.  But in addition to a kind of survivor’s guilt, there’s a significant sense of not having been allowed to take the test for which one had prepared—a failure to fulfill one’s set task.  It’s important not to underestimate the effect of this on a generation whose elite status was in large measure justified by a rhetoric of service through leadership.  Many of Isherwood’s travels and adventures, including his dangerous trip to China during the Sino-Japanese war, were in his own estimation attempts to take “the test” he’d missed.  And Auden, the least militaristic of men, took an inordinate pride in his American major’s uniform when, after the Second World War, he worked as part of a group surveying the psychological damage caused by bombing.

There was another role the boys at England’s elite schools were meant to inherit, beyond that of military leadership: they were meant to rule over the greatest and most expansive economic empire the world had ever known.  This world, of course, was destroyed: war debt and the resulting taxation ruined the landed families, and the Depression (or, in English terms, the Slump) destroyed the industrial economy.  If you were a middle-class schoolboy, hoping to get ahead by your wits and your elite school credentials, you were in terrible trouble: of two million middle-class jobs in England during the Slump, some 400,000 disappeared.  Joining the workforce when one in five of the positions you might have aspired to has disappeared is a terrible thing, far worse than the dire conditions faced by current graduates in America, and more on a par with what we’re seeing now in Greece and Spain.  One was meant to be a valiant leader at war and a prosperous leader at peace, and instead all of one’s intense training and indoctrination at school led to… well, to a sense of failure, and perhaps of betrayal.  The arrested development and permanent adolescence of which Connolly speaks wasn’t just the product of intense school experiences: it was the product of the failure of these experiences to be fulfilled.  It was a matter of disinheritance.  And if you want feel how powerful a sense of disinheritance, consider how largely the American Civil War looms in the consciousness of the southern states as compared to the states of the north.  If we had to go by the numbers of war re-enactors, we’d think that the Confederates outnumbered the Union troops ten to one.

But what about Auden’s American period, from 1939 on?  I’m going to have to sit down and make a proper study of Auden’s vocabulary and allusions some day, but my sense is that there’s a marked turn away from psychological and Marxian terminology and a serious uptick on overt references to what we might call the classics of Western high culture after Auden settles in America.  It’s certainly true that his work appears in fewer political contexts and in more academic and cultural reviews (a quick survey of his bibliography reveals that about half of the appearances of his writings in journals during his English period appeared in politically-oriented publications, while only about 15% of them did during his American period, which would make sense for a poet shifting from theory and politics to high culture).  But let’s grant, on the basis of my experience as a longtime reader of Auden, the assertion that there are a lot more poems like “The Fall of Rome,” “The Shield of Achilles,” “Voltaire at Ferney,” and “At the Grave of Henry James” — that is, a lot more of the overtly high-culture themed poems—in the work of the American Auden than in the English Auden.  What explains this turn toward overt high-cultural references?

Once again, a certain kind of disinheritance comes into play.  We can get at it by first considering some words Edmund Wilson wrote about Auden in 1954.  Surveying Auden’s Collected Poems, Wilson notes a difference between the English Auden and the American Auden.  “He is no longer rebelling against British institutions,” writes Wilson, he is dealing with a very different world, a hypermodern, industrialized, commercialized, materialistic and rootless world, and with “the problem of how to live in it… to avoid being paralyzed or bought by it.”  Wilson continues:

It may well be that this aspect of Auden is more intelligible to an American than an Englishman, for this feeling oneself a member of a determined resistant minority has been now for nearly a hundred years a typical situation [for cultivated humanistic writers] in America.  Such people in the later nineteenth century were likely to be defeated or embittered.  In our own, they have felt the backing of a partly inarticulate public who are not satisfied with the bilge that the popular media feed them in their movies and magazines, and who are grateful to anyone who will take a stand for that right to think for themselves which is supposed to be guaranteed us by the Bill of Rights and that right to a high level of culture which the framers of the Constitution—taking it so much for granted—would never have thought to include.  These American writers of which I speak do not constitute a group, they do not frequent an official café; and on this account the visitor from Europe is likely to come to the conclusion that, except in universities, we have no intellectual life.  He cannot conceive that the American writers are functioning in the crevices of cities, on the faculties of provincial colleges or scattered all over the country in the solitude of ranches and farms.  This kind of life was now [since his arrival in 1939] to be Auden’s lot…

Wilson is describing a very real America, one dominated by a materialistic elite that, in the later part of the nineteenth century, displaced the old cultivated and civic-minded elite of which the purest model is the Boston Brahmin.  It is the world T.S. Eliot, whose family had once dominated St. Louis and paternalistically run the town as a kind of colony of cultivated Boston, fled, seeking to find something like it surviving in England.  And it was a world from which Wilson, himself descended from the older and more cultivated and paternalistic elite, felt profoundly alienated.  Here’s something he wrote only two years after the piece on Auden, something about the destruction of the old elite by the new ruthlessly commercial and materialistic elite, and how that destruction effected his father’s generation:

The period after the Civil War—both banal in a bourgeois way and fantastic with giant fortunes—was a difficult one for Americans brought up in the old tradition…. They had been educated at Exeter and Andover and at an eighteenth-century Princeton, and had afterwards been trained… for what had once been called the learned professions; but they had then to deal with a world in which this kind of education and the kind of ideals it served no longer really counted for much…. Of my father’s close friends at college, but a single one was left by the time he was in his thirties; all the rest were dead—some had committed suicide.  My father, though highly successful, cared nothing about making a fortune or keeping up with current standards of luxury, which in our part of the world were extravagant.  Like many Americans who studied law, he had in his youth aimed at public life…. But he could not… be induced to take part in the kind of political life that he knew at the end of the century…

The new America that arrived in the late nineteenth century was triumphant in the middle of the twentieth, and disinherited class of people committed to high culture functioned, in mid-fifties America, as a kind of resistance to the dominant commercial culture, and its badge of membership came in the form of references to that culture.  All this would change soon enough: generations that saw no conflict in citing Henry Adams and Mickey Mouse in the same novel or poem were on their way.  But the view from Wilson’s desk in 1954 was of a high culture that was a form of resistance to the values of commodity and commerce—the disdain for pop culture implicit in his statement about Auden is almost at an Adornan level.  And there was a sense among a broader segment of the population that there was something to this sense of high culture as resistance: it’s what sent the young Allen Ginsberg to the poems of Blake, for example, and caused him, in a poem written in the year between these two passages of Wilson’s prose, to denounce America as “Moloch”—an ancient Ammanite god, and hardly a figure out of popular culture. 

Auden was, of course, caught between the residual world of the American poet as highbrow or leftover Brahmin, and the then-incipient, now-dominant world of the American poet as academic (or, more precisely, as creative writing professor).  His work wore the badge of the older, highbrow caste, and his poems provided something the caste, and those sympathetic to its resistance to commercial culture, needed: the Collected Poems that Wilson reviewed sold some 30,000 copies—a success even in the commercial terms that dominated, and still dominate, American life.