The World and the Open Sea: Poetry and the Aspect of Infinity

The crowd, as I remember it, consisted of about 200 young women—students of St. Mary's College—along with the poet John Matthias and a clutch of graduate students from the nearby University of Notre Dame, including myself.  It was the early fall, a year in the mid-1990s, and we were in the library at St. Mary's, waiting for Paul Muldoon to arrive.  When he strode in, a little late, with his mop-top flopping, he looked every inch the much-adored young prep school teacher in his blue blazer and grey flannels, and he carried himself, then as now, with a studied self-possession, letting the audience come to him with their attention, and knowing all along that they would.

But the first poem he recited, "The Briefcase," had nothing to do with self-possession.  Quite the opposite: it had everything to do with a kind of infinite dread.  On other occasions when I've heard Muldoon read the poem he's begun by mentioning its dedication to Seamus Heaney, and his anxiety about writing a poem involving eels since, he says, when you pick up an eel in Ireland and turn it over, it says "trademark Seamus Heaney" on its belly.  But in St. Mary's, when I first heard the poem, Muldoon prefaced the poem with an anecdote, possibly true, about receiving from his father in law the gift of a very expensive briefcase.  Then he began to recite the poem:

I held the briefcase at arm's length from me;

the oxblood or liver

eelskin with which it was covered

had suddenly grown supple.

I'd been waiting in line for the cross-town

bus when an almighty cloudburst

left the sidewalk a raging torrent.

At this point Muldoon pauses, glanced around at the rapt crowd at St. Mary's, and continued:

And though it contained only the first

inkling of this poem, I knew I daren't

set the briefcase down

to slap my pockets for an obol—

for fear it might slink into a culvert

strike out along the East River

for the sea.  By which I mean the 'open' sea.

It's all in that last part of the last line, isn't it?  Why, we wonder, does it matter that it's the open sea?  And immediately we feel it: the possibility of loss haunts the poem.  It's not quite rational: one isn't exactly likely to drop a briefcase, even a supple and slippery one, into a Manhattan culvert and see it drift out to sea in the East River.  But the thing about anxiety is that, even when it's well-founded, it doesn't operate rationally.  The open sea is, somehow, much, much vaster than the sea itself.  Indeed, the notion of openness puts the poem under the aspect of infinity— of the ever-expanding and endless.  The East River is a definite thing—as, for that matter, is the Atlantic Ocean into which it empties.  But the sea is indefinite, and the open sea promises not only an undefined vastness (does it refer to the Atlantic? To all oceans?  To the connection of all waters circling the globe?) but a sense of expansion.  We glimpse in it the possibility of utter loss.  And it's here that we encounter the poem's profound dread.

What, after all, is lost?  The poem, particularly when prefaced with an anecdote about an expensive gift, could be taken as a little parable about the downside of possessions, about how they make us anxious about the possibility of losing them.  But there's much more than that at work here.  The briefcase, we're told, contains the inkling of the very poem we're encountering: the loss of it would be the loss of the poet's work, and, in a sense, of a part of his life and his distinct identity.  The fact that the poem lost would be the one we're reading or listening to shows us what's at stake: the event we're experiencing might not have been, and we—Muldoon, the audience at St. Mary's, you, reading this—would all have been a little different, a little reduced.  We're brushed by the outer edge of the garment of infinite loss, of the possibility that who we are and what we've done might never have come to pass.

The undifferentiated vastness of the open sea stands in stark contrast to the poet and his particularity, his specific briefcase and specific poem and specific plans for getting somewhere in particular on the crosstown bus.  The whole world of identity and particularity brushes up against an infinite blankness into which things are lost and absorbed.  In a way, it's a vision of death, or at any rate the loss of oneself, and it's not a glorious mystical vision of oneness with the universe: it's a little shudder at the possible (no, inevitable) loss of our own small selves.

The experience described in the poem isn't the sublime, not quite.  The sublime, after all, involves not only a sense of the vast or infinite, but also of one's own superiority to that vastness.  In the dynamic sublime, to use Kant's term, we don't just experience the terror of a volcanic eruption, but also our own insulation from it, our distance at a safe vantage point, and we feel affirmed at being able to take in the destructive magnitude without being destroyed.  In the mathematical sublime, which is more like what we get in Muldoon's poem, we experience the notion of an ever-expanding vastness, an infinity—but we also experience something that isn't depicted in Muldoon's poem: our own superiority or privilege with respect to that vastness, by virtue of our ability to conceptualize it.  When we can write down an symbol or equation indicating infinity, we feel affirmed in our own small selves, because we have in some way been able to comprehend the endlessness.  We don't get that in "The Briefcase": in fact, we end with a vision of the small, controlled space of the briefcase being swept into the openness, lost beyond all recovery.  There's no superiority to or containment of the sense of dread, unless we consider the composition of the poem itself as a containment of dread, as I suppose we might, although that's a containment in the act of composition, rather than within the events depicted in the poem itself.

Much has been made about the Americanness of "The Briefcase," which is full of specifically American imagery.  It is the fate of Irish poets to be read as constantly meditating on their Irishness, and one can look at the dread of loss in this poem as a kind of Irish fear of deracination in America, a familiar enough story for Irish Americans.  But the direction the briefcase follows isn't toward the interior territory of the United States.  Instead, we move out from America, across the water—possibly, if we are Irish, toward our origins, though there's little to indicate any destination other than infinite openness.  For me, the primary theme of the poem will always be a matter of mortality rather than of national identity—a point underlined by the presence of the obol for which the poet slaps his pockets.  This isn't an American coin, but an ancient Greek one.  Specifically, it is the coin put in the mouth of the deceased to pay Charon to carry them across the water to the land of the dead.  We get the idea of a crosstown bus carrying one on a short trip (it is only a few blocks across Manhattan) in a highly populated area, and then we get the obol, temporarily not found, that will pay for our passage over water into an infinite land of death: another kind of open sea.

In the private anthology I carry in my head, Muldoon's poem is printed across from a poem by the Swedish poet Jesper Svenbro, in which we encounter another kind of infinity, one that, instead of confronting us with undifferentiated vastness, gives us an endlessly variegated infinity; one that instead of reducing us to fear and trembling, extends something like an invitation for us to join it.  The poem is called "The World," and I first encountered it when, teaching at Lund University, I accidentally picked up a copy of an English translation of it from the printer in the English department office (by some strange quirk of fate my colleage Lars-Hakan Svensson had, it turns out, been working on it via email with John Matthias, with whom I'd attended the Muldoon reading at St. Mary's).  It goes like this:

In my use of the word “world” there is a strangeness

which I have never been able to shake:

the word carries a hopefulness

which has no strict foundation

in the real world.

The world being what it is!

For although I know it cannot be used

in the sense I want to give it 

it is the same picture that faithfully

returns in my memory

whenever I pronounce it to myself—

it is the light space over my childhood,

white April sun over a province

whose horizon trembles in the distance:

The world rests over there.

It is the late 1940s. In those days

I went to Sunday school every week

in our northern Galilee. To me

Palestine was still a country

with heights, fields, and rivers such as ours;

and by a miracle

the hills of Rönneberga just outside of town

became the light green mountain

where on one spring day Jesus

had said to his pupils: “Go out into the whole world!”

Languages were buzzing in the air.

Jews, Arabs, Kappadocians, Egyptians!

We were in the Holy Land,

coltsfoots were blooming

along the ditch-banks of the whole world.

And among all the tongues that I heard 

was also the sound of my own.

The vastness here isn't an empty openness: it's an inhabited space, rich and various and full of life in all it's variety, life blooming, life talking, life buzzing in the air.  And we're not in danger of losing ourselves, there.  We're invited to take part, to enter this infinite world.  Indeed, we're already part of it: among the tongue we hear is our own.

For me, if for no one else, "The Briefcase" and "The World" are companion pieces—one giving us the invitation to participate in the ever-opening richness of life, the other giving us the intimation of our own mortality, and the endless vastness beyond our little selves.  Both show us poetry under the aspect of eternity.

The Birth of the Death of the Author: Uncreative Writing circa 1968

We live in a great age of literary unoriginality.  It comes in many forms, from the mildly sordid and deceptive kind we've seen in prominent poetry plagiarism by C.J. Allen, Christian Ward, and David R. Morgan, to the highly-theorized and honest kind Kenneth Goldsmith and Marjorie Perloff discuss in the context of poetry, to the grand claims for the novel-as-collage put forth  by David Shields.  Advocates of unoriginality should feel a certain satisfaction, then, in acknowledging that the idea of unoriginality is itself something quite long established, and that there is little new in our golden age of the unoriginal.

One could make a strong case for tracing the origins of contemporary unoriginality back to Roland Barthes' great essay of 1968, "The Death of the Author."  The essay seems to present us with a crime scene: the author has been killed.  Who did it?  Of course there is no real corpse, only the death of a certain idea of the author as a personality that can be referred to as the explanation of the text, the owner, the source, and the little god from whose head the poem or novel or essay sprung fully formed.  This figure, born with the rise of the modern bourgeois subject, was killed by a conspiracy of murders, chief among whom was Mallarme (his weapon: a belief that language was more important than the individual author), followed by Proust (wielding books in which the distinction between author and characters dissolved), and a gaggle of Surrealists (bristling with armaments, most of which had to do with the subconscious mind and the disempowering of the ego).  These conspirators were aided and abetted by modern linguists, who were happy to load their weapons with the latest munitions from the structuralist armories, including the explosive notion that the subject as not a person with agency so much as he was a mere function of linguistics.

When this gang had killed the author, Barthes tells us, they replaced him with a new figure more to their liking, someone Barthes calls the scriptor, whose only power is to mix and mingle pre-exising kinds of writing.  As the great conspiracy took hold, all the authors were killed and replaced with scriptors.  They looked the same, and had the same names, but they were entirely different creatures than the authors they replaced.  When we wanted an explanation of the novels of J.R.R. Tolkien the author, we looked to his life, saw his experiences in the first world war, and concluded that the terrifying battle scenes, pathos of comrades facing destruction, and sense of an overwhelming, continent-wide doom came from the author's own experience of war.  Not so when we looked at Tolkien the scriptor.  His novels made sense as the mingling of pre-existing modes of writing—as the coming-together of saga-literature, Norse mythology, Beowulf, and Victorian realism (no one in Norse mythology has to pack a lunch the way Tolkien's hobbits do).  The same process occurs across the canon of literature, as authors are replaced by scriptors: individual life-events cease to signify, and the Frankenstein-like stitching together of literary bits-and-pieces takes center stage.  All writing becomes rewriting, or even recycling, in the brave new world of the scriptor.

But what if the real crime scene here didn't involve a murder, but a theft?  What if Barthes weren't the originator of the modern idea of unoriginality?  What if he stole it from someone else?  I'm not talking about inheritance, here, although there is a long tradition of writing about the text as something the author doesn't create ex nihilo (think of Plato's Ion here, or Eliot's "Tradition and the Individual Talent").  I'm talking about the possibility of flat-out robbery.

Consider the facts, ladies and gentlemen of the jury.  Consider that in 1967, a year before the appearance of Mr. Barthes' essay, the novelist Italo Calvino wrote in a letter "For the critic, the author does not exist, only a certain number of writings exist."  Consider a later letter, in which he elaborated on the topic, saying "The living author, I believe, can never be taken into consideration.  To be able to study a writer, he must be dead, that is, if he is alive, he must be killed."  Consider, too, that Mr. Calvino knew Barthes—indeed, in the period leading up to Mr. Barthes' essay, Mr. Calvino was known to attend regularly Mr. Barthes' lectures in Paris.

It's intriguing to think of Barthes' grand theory of unoriginality being, itself, profoundly unoriginal.  Sadly, though, it's not so likely a case of theft as it seems at first glance.  When we look at the context of Calvino's remarks, it is clear that he's talking about the author as someone who is either ignored by scholars, who act as if he is already dead, or as a figure who disappoints readers after they've formed an image of him on the basis of his books.  His phrasing is as bold as Barthes'—and it is not inconceivable that the French critic pinched a good phrase from the Italian novelist—but his ideas are much more conventional.  Barthes' essay on the death of the author may present us with an exquisite irony: that there was considerable originality in the most powerful modern theory of the unoriginal.

Hierarchy: A Night

The Piquerary twins remain, for the English-speaking world, among the undiscovered gems of Belgian surrealist writing, despite the presence of their work in Poetry magazine, Exquisite Corpse, and elsewhere.  I wrote a short introduction to their work a few years ago, for those who might be interested.  But perhaps the best way to get to know Gabriel and Marcel Piqueray is from this wonderful reading of a prose poem of theirs I translated with Jean-Luc Garneau.  It's an odd piece, more or less in the mode of Kafka's parables, and is read, here, by the actor Samuel West.

Belgian Surrealism Conquers the Airwaves! I Become Janet Malcom!

What could possibly be better than midcentury Belgian surrealist prose poetry?  Belgian surrealist prose poetry read on the BBC!  Zip forward to the 1:02 mark of this BBC "Words and Music" broadcast to hear the great Samuel West read a translation I did with Jean-Luc Garneau of "Hierarchy: A Night," a little Kafkaesque number by Gabriel and Marcel Piqueray.

In other news, Ian Duhig has some nice things to say about my book The Poet Resigns.  He says I write "clearly and without jargon about modern poetry with a firm grasp of its historical roots."  He also notes that I "caused something of a furore" with my article on Cambridge poetry, despite being quite sympathetic to it, and offers the kind of praise I like best when he says " I don’t agree with everything on this book, but I do recommmend it without qualification." (Well, okay, that's the kind of praise I like second best — what I really like is Michael Robbins' comment that I am "The slobby poor white guy's Janet Malcolm").

New issue of The Cultural Society: Rejoice!

Good news!  The new Cultural Society is up and running, including work by Graham Foust, Norman Finkelstein, Brooklyn Copeland, Peter O'Leary, Pam Rehm, Mark Scroggins, and many others.  If you're looking for writing by people associated with the New Gnosticism, this is the place to find it!  The gathering includes "Nag Hammadi: A Parable" by the present humble blogger.

Books published by the Cultural Society continue to proliferate—check them out!

Liberalism, Crisis, and the Arab Spring

If you believe in liberalism, Stephen Spender's journals can, at times, provide some disconcerting reading.  By liberalism, here, I don't mean to refer to the current American denotations of the word—a kind of weak-ass version of social democracy, in which minor state interventions are meant to provide some kind of cushion against the more extreme depredations of the market.  Rather, I'm thinking of the word as it is connected with Enlightenment-era philosophy and the political tradition that grew out of that philosophy in the nineteenth century: a tradition of freedom of speech, ideas, trade, assembly, religion, and the press, a tradition devoted to personal liberty, private property, egalitarianism, and the eradication of hereditary privilege.  This tradition finds its primary political expression in representative democracy, and, to a greater degree than most political philosophies, it shies away from the articulation of particular ideals and social goals.  You're free, as far as these classical liberals are concerned, to pick your own ultimate goal: one might even say you're condemned to be free.

This sort of liberalism is not without its contradictions—being in favor of private property but also for egalitarianism and the abolition of hereditary privilege leaves one having to make some pretty fancy arguments every time a trust fund kid cruises by on the way to Stanford in the Lexus daddy bought her for Christmas.  It's easy, and in many ways right, for those of us living in liberal democracies to focus on the contradictions and shortcomings of this kind of liberalism, but we ought not to take for granted just what an astonishing historical achievement this live-and-let-live philosophy represents.  It helped end the religious wars that tore Europe apart for centuries.  What is more, liberalism represents the political aspiration of many millions of oppressed people in the world today.  A significant portion of those who rose up in the Arab Spring did so in order to fight for a liberalization of their own societies.

The political crisis across the middle east isn't just an expression of liberalism, of course.  In fact, it presents us with a test case for the limits of liberalism at times of crisis.  And this brings us back to Stephen Spender, whose journals shed some light on the current muddle.

In 1945 Spender was in Germany, serving as a kind of cultural administrator in the reconstruction of the defeated nation.  Among his duties were the re-starting of German newspapers under new, non-Nazi management and the re-opening of libraries.  On the 28th of September his duties in the latter capacity took him to a library in a provincial city.  He records the experience in his journals:

An assistant librarian at Aachen said to me: 'We understand perfectly what you require with regard to our library.  We shall take all the Nazi books down from the shelves and lock them up in a separate room where they will be read by no one except students who may be given access to them for their purely historical studies.  We are perfectly used to doing this since formerly we took down from the shelves all the books by socialists and Jews and kept them locked up in a special room where they were only accessible to students writing anti-socialist or anti-Semitic studies.'

What's disturbing about all this, for those with liberal consciences, is that the librarian does understand perfectly well what Spender requires.  In the context of crisis—and the rawness of the German defeat was a very real crisis, with the de-Nazification of the country far from an achievement or even a certainty—the locking away of Nazi propaganda was the task at hand.  It was, on the small scale of the libraries, an extension of a general process including the removal of Nazis from positions of power in the media, the Nuremberg trials of Nazi leaders, the outlawing of certain political parties and expressions, and so on (it was a big deal: initially some 90,000 were imprisoned, and almost two million forbidden to hold employment as anything other than manual laborers, policies that were moderated only in the early 1950s).  But as important as the political goal of de-Nazification was, it also involved a violation of the principles of liberalism.  Liberalism, after all, cherishes freedom of speech and of the press, and not just for people we agree with.  It relies on debate and argument, rather than state suppression, to weed out prejudice and falsehood—at least it wants to.  But in a time of crisis, liberals can find themselves in the position of advocating illiberal actions in the name of preserving liberal democracy.  The librarian of Aachen points out, perhaps slyly, the uncomfortable parallels between Spender's requirements and those of the totalitarian Fascists whose regime he is, in his small way, seeking to replace.

In the great sandstorm of the Arab Spring there are many places that give little reason to hope for the development of liberalism: Syria, for example.  Despite the rosy picture recently painted by Senator McCain of liberal democrats ready to ease into power after the dropping of a few well-placed American bombs, the darker assessment given by Slavoj Žižek is the more convincing.  "It seems," writes Žižek, "that whatever remained of the democratic-secular resistance is now more or less drowned in the mess of fundamentalist Islamist groups supported by Turkey and Saudi Arabia, with a strong presence of al-Qaida in the shadows."  The options in Syria for the great powers seem limited to "taking the side of one fundamentalist-criminal group against another."  In other places liberalism has been a strong component of the Arab Spring—but even here, it has shown its weakness in handling certain kinds of crises.

Consider the case of Egypt.  As Francis Fukayama has pointed out, the Tahrir Square revolution against the Mubarak was led by liberals—by, in his words, "angry young, middle-class Egyptians who used social media like Facebook and Twitter to organize their protests, spread word of regime atrocities, and build support for a democratic Egypt."  When democratic elections were held, though, those middle-class liberals lost at their own game: the Muslim Brotherhood, whose ideological base comes from the poorer classes, came to power and proceeded to destroy the embryonic institutions liberal democracy.  It turns out that the appeal of liberalism has difficulty in traveling beyond the middle class (and not just in the Arab World: watch a Chuck Norris movie, and you'll see the dream world of many blue collar  Americans—a world in which those who insist on such liberal niceties as police procedures, the law courts, and the rights of the accused appear as the unwitting allies of criminals who should be dealt with by brute force delivered from the fists and guns of mavericks who refuse to play by the rules).

In the crisis of embryonic liberalism in Egypt after the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood, a great many Western liberals have embraced the entirely illiberal methods by which the Islamist government of Mohamed Morsi was deposed.  Morsi came to power through liberal means, but was removed by a military coup, and that coup has the support—begrudging, to be sure—of many liberals.  As with Spender in the Aachen library, liberals find themselves awkwardly advocating the destroying of liberalism in order to save it.

Few liberals endorse the Egyptian coup without some serious pangs of conscience, like the pangs that drove Spender to record the words of the librarian of Aachen—without refutation—in his journal.  Many, too, have considerable doubts about the possibility of liberal democracy in Egypt.  Algeria, after all, went through a similar cycle years ago—opening to liberal democracy, seeing the rise of illiberal Islamists, and then shutting the whole thing down with strong-arm military tactics.  There is, however, some grounds for liberal hope in Egypt—not hope for the immediate future of political institutions, but hope for the conditions that make liberal institutions viable.  There is hope, that is, for an Egyptian public sphere.

The public sphere, as theorized by Jürgen Habermas in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, is a network of communications in which private individuals can articulate their social needs, eventually forging a broad-based public opinion that is often critical of established authorities such as the church and the state.  When it emerged in England in the eighteenth century, the primary institutions of the public sphere were the coffeehouse and the printed journal: it was through these that private citizens, most of whom had little or no prior access to political power, emerged as a social and political force over the course of the century.  The public sphere, with its critical discussions in person and in print, would eventually become a monitor of power, and even in some sense the leading force in society, making political authorities legitimate themselves before the court of public opinion.  In Egypt, what began with Facebook and Twitter and public assembly in Tahrir Square has grown into a much larger-scale opening of the public sphere, and there is reason to believe that this public sphere will survive the current crackdown, and grow.  In fact, it is in the best interest of everyone in Egypt that it do so, as it would allow for the creation of a court of pubic opinion to which the regime and the leaders of the various social factions could be held accountable.  It is this kind of unofficial court of opinion that made liberalism possible in the nations of the West, and its survival is the best hope for Egypt.  Despite its contradictions, liberalism is a robust plant, and once it really takes root it is hard to get rid of for long.  

An Elegy for Seamus Heaney

Yesterday we heard the sad news of the death of Seamus Heaney. Today we have this, an elegy for Heaney by my friend and mentor John Matthias, which appears here with his kind permission. It takes its form—in meter and in rhyme—from the third section of W.H. Auden's great elegy for W.B. Yeats, which Heaney also used in his poem "Audenesque," an elegy for his friend, the poet Joseph Brodsky. Ultimately, this form of elegy, its iambic tetrameter truncated by the omission of the initial unstressed syllable, goes back to Shakespeare's "The Phoenix and the Turtle," a kind of elegy for the death of love. But this is no occasion for my pedantry—so let's have Matthias' poetry instead:


Elegy for Seamus Heaney Seamus felt it in his feet, Clods of fuel in the peat. In the peat a fire to warm Children not yet even born. Joseph Brodsky was his friend. Wystan Auden would amend Dances William Blake would like, Tigers lurking in the night. Metric feet and feet in boots – Robert Lowell was shown his roots Welcomed in an Irish town Where the sky was falling down. Mister Yeats was dead by then Honored by some mortal men Heaney his example took, Brooding sky and flying rook. Even Possum shares the beat In Joseph’s poem for Thomas Stearns. Heaney’s poem for Brodsky, dead, Lives in turns, not Grecian urns. What dread turning plow or spade Having dug up things well made Digs now to inter a shade. World poets learn your trade!

T.S. Eliot and the Vanishing Brahmin

Hot news -- the new issue of the Battersea Review is out, and available online!

It's got poetry by John Tranter, Alfred Corn, Peter Robinson, Katia Kapovich, and many others, as well as new translations of Georg Trakl, Sophocles, Pushkin, and Mandelshtam.

You'll also find essays on Harvard & Yale poetry culture, Wallace Stevens, Federico Garcia Lorca, Romanticism, and more -- including my essay "T.S. Eliot and the Vanishing Brahmin."  Check it out!

Many thanks to U.S. Dhuga and Ben Mazer for putting it all together, and for running the most intelligent and eclectic literary journal of the decade.

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Here's the first paragraph of my essay:

"Noblesse oblige," wrote E.J. Dionne in the Washington Post, "sounds bad until you don't have it any more." Dionne's point was that the American elite no longer seems much interested in legitimating its position by undertaking the kind of social and cultural leadership to which earlier elites had devoted themselves. Dionne's sentiment is apt for our times, but it would have been equally germane to the America in which T.S. Eliot came of age, an America in which an old elite headquartered in Boston found itself shunted aside by a rougher sort altogether: the Carnegies and Fricks and Morgans and Rockefellers, and the equally ruthless men whose stories Lincoln Steffens told in The Shame of the Cities, men who made an art of turning public resources into private profit in the burgeoning metropolises of the nation. Eliot's class, the old Boston Brahmins, with their patrician scruples about fair dealing and community leadership and responsibility, didn't stand a chance, and their decline mattered immensely to Eliot. Indeed, the decay of Eliot's class of origin would prove crucial to his Anglophilia, his poetics, and even to his love of etymology.

The Old School Tie: Privilege and the Literature of the 30s

The first thing you notice, when you start reading the canonical literature of the generation of English writers who came of age in the 1930s, is their seeming inability to actually come of age.  Everywhere one finds images of school, schoolboys, school games, school prize days.  And by everywhere, I do mean everywhere.  These images aren't confined to memoirs of childhood, though there are plenty of those: they're used even to describe the most pressing problems of a world entering a state of deep political and economic crisis.  Could any other generation have produced something like Auden's Orators, where the state of the world is just the state of the English public school writ large?

One kind of explanation for the schoolboy poetic comes when we see the remarkable similarity of background of the prominent writers of the generation.  W.H. Auden, Cyril Connolly, Stephen Spender, John Betjeman, Edward Upward, Cecil Day Lewis, Christopher Isherwood, Louis MacNeice, Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, George Orwell, Anthony Powell—the only real difference in their educational background (besides Orwell's refusal to go on to Oxbridge) was the degree of prestige associated with their respective public schools in the subtle hierarchy of English education.  Not one was a grammar school boy.  This, it should be noted, is an unusual state of affairs in English literature, one without precedent, and one not repeated in later generations.  Consider the prominent writers active in England 1915, while the writers named above were still in school.  Yeats, Conrad, Shaw, Joyce, Woolf, D.H. Lawrence, Wyndham Lewis, Pound, Eliot, H.G. Wells, Kipling—a few went to English public schools (Ford, Kipling, Lewis for a time), but some (Conrad, Yeats, Pound, Eliot) were foreigners, others were from humbler backgrounds (notably Wells and Lawrence), some were both (Shaw, Joyce) and Woolf was excluded by gender from the schoolboy experience.  Consider the prominent writers in England today, and the diversity is all the more striking.

Why, one wonders, was there such a concentration of public school old boys in the literary generation of the 1930s?  What drove them to become writers at a higher rate than previous generations from similar backgrounds?  Here we enter the realm of speculation.  My sense of things is that there may be something akin to the nineteenth century Parisian phenomenon at work.  For much of the nineteenth century in France, the social and educational system produced far too much talent for the social system to absorb.  Respectable professions such as the law, the clergy, finance, and politics couldn't take on all of the bright young men seeking places, and this contributed to the enormous growth in the field of culture—writing, the arts, and the bohemia that came along with them.  In the England of the 1930s, the generation of public schoolboys faced a destroyed economy and much-reduced prospects.  They were deprived of the areas of action and fulfillment available to previous generations with similar backgrounds.  Along with this displacement came a sense of alienation from the ideology of leadership and service with which they had been instilled.  They had, then, both motive and opportunity (or, shall we say, lack of opportunity) enough to become writers: critical of their time, needing to rethink the relation of self and society, equipped with exquisite educations, and unable to get traction in fields of social leadership, they took up their pens.

Of course there were many English writers of the time who did not come from the same sorts of school background as the Audens and Isherwoods.  What of them?  What of Julian Symons, Christopher Caudwell, Derek Savage, George Barker, and a host of others?  One could make an argument along the lines of "well, they weren't as good, were they?" but this would be highly contentious.  Read a few George Barker poems side by side with some of Spender's and tell me the case for the superiority of the public schoolboy remains clear.  A more convincing case could be made for the relative lack of social capital among the non-public school set.  That is: even though they may have been denied the easy entry into positions of security and authority that they had thought their birthright, the public schoolboys were still as a whole better connected socially, more financially secure, less burdened by family obligations, and held more impressive academic credentials than their peers from humbler backgrounds.  Moreover, they had formed very close bonds with their peers at school—one of the main functions of prestigious boarding schools, and one that ensured the career-building value of the old school tie.  This gave them a stronger starting position in the race for literary reputation.

Early advantages, as every investor knows, have a tendency to become still greater advantages as time goes by.  If the public schoolboys entered the field of literature at an advantage over others, that advantaged only increased as their concerns and stylistic ticks (such as the prevalence of public school imagery) became identified as the markings of a whole generation of writers—as part became taken for whole.  This happened in the self-mythologizing of the public school writers, in their mutually-admiring critical writing, memoirs, and romans-à-clef, and it has continued to happen in the scholarly writing about the period.  Here, for example, is the opening paragraph of Bernard Bergonzi's excellent study Reading the Thirties, which shows far more self-awareness about the process of taking part for whole than do most similar documents:

This book is not about all of the literature written in England between 1930 and 1940.  In the title, and throughout the book, I use the term 'the thirties' in the same deliberately selective fashion that made it possible for Edward Upward to give the all-embracing title In the Thirties to a retrospective novel about the progress of a young poet and schoolmaster from bourgeois individualism to the Communist Party which restricted itself to a dozen or so characters.  Despite the narrowness of the range, Stephen Spender could still call Upward's novel 'the most truthful picture of life in that decade.'  In the present book I do not intend 'the thirties' to mean just a period, but also to refer generically to a group of writers and the work they produced in that decade, occasionally later.  Indeed, 'the thirties' in this sense largely corresponds to… 'the Auden generation.'

I cherish the works of Auden, I read the works of Isherwood with a hearty appetite, I ransack Spender's journals for gems of gossip and social observation.  But I try not to forget that both the achievement and the prominence of those writers rests on a bedrock of privilege, albeit of privilege displaced from the realm of power to the realm of art.

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.