Rabbitarse Revealed!

In W.H. Auden's long poem "Letter to Lord Byron," he compares the lives of poets of his own generation to the hyper-glamorous bad-boy life of Byron.  Unsurprisingly, the comparison leads him to find the lives of his peers in the financially-strapped England of the 1930s a bit unglamorous:

The only thing you never turned your hand to

    Was teaching English in a boarding school.

Today it’s a profession that seems grand to

    Those whose alternative’s an office stool;

    For budding authors it’s become the rule.

To many an unknown genius postmen bring

Typed notices from Rabbitarse and String.

Like many an Auden reader before me, I'd long assumed that Rabbitarse and String were Auden's comical names for fictitious minor public schools of the sort at which a young poet might find himself employed.  In reading over a great many Auden-related documents for the chapter on his work I'm writing for a book I'm writing (now called Making Nothing Happen: Poetry in Society, Poetry for Itself), I noticed something that led me to believe I must have been wrong in my assumption.  The employment agency that placed young university graduates with various schools was called Gabbitas and Thring.  That this was, indeed, the source of Auden's phrase was confirmed by a look at No Home But the Struggle, the third novel in Auden-generation writer Edward Upward's trilogy The Spiral Ascent.  Here, we're told that the character Richard (based on Auden) invented the nickname "Rabbitarse and String" specifically for the Gabbitas and Thring agency.

These are dark times for humanistic scholarship, people, times in which the relevance of our work is questioned by bean-counting utilitarians.  Let the triumph of this moment, in which the meaning of Rabbitarse is revealed, be trumpeted from the hills.  Let the narrow-minded vocationalists and fetishizers of marketable research outcomes tremble.  More research funding, please!

Six Passages: Introducing Michael Benedikt

Hot news!  We're only weeks away from the appearance of Time is a Toy: The Selected Poems of Michael Benedikt, in which the intrepid editors John Gallaher and Laura Boss bring together poems from throughout the career of this often wonderful, often under-rated poet, whose work combined New York School wit and panache with neo-Surrealist uncanniness.  The book will come with three introductory essays: one on the man, one on the strange tale of the white suitcase full of Benedikt's unpublished works that led to the creation of the book, and one on the poetry itself.  I am the author of this last one, and here it is:

*

 Six Passages: Introducing Michael Benedikt

           

In the introduction to his 1976 book The Prose Poem: An International Anthology, Michael Benedikt defines the prose poem as having six special qualities: an attentiveness to the unconscious; a impression of external reality as something mediated by our inner worlds; a feeling for the fluctuations of consciousness; a commitment to colloquial speech; a sense of humor; and a “hopeful skepticism.” Benedikt’s selections in the anthology give this definition a surprising degree of credence, but Benedikt’s list doesn't just describe the style of the prose poem: it provides the best possible brief definition of the qualities of his own writing, in poetry and prose poetry alike.

1

The image is a pure creation of the mind. It cannot be born from a comparison but from a juxtaposition of two more or less distant realities. The more the relationship between the two juxtaposed realities is both distant and true, the stronger the image will be…

            —Pierre Reverdy, “The Image”

            Benedikt came by his interest in the unconscious through a long, deep, and fruitful engagement with Surrealism. Encouraged by Robert Bly in 1963 to investigate Surrealism, Benedikt became devoted to French Surrealism in particular, and in the early sixties alternated between undertaking translations from the French and writing his own poems, as if deliberately seeking the guidance of the Surrealist tradition. Indeed, by the time Benedikt’s anthology The Poetry of Surrealism appeared in 1974, he had become one of the leading American experts on Surrealist writing. So central had Surrealism become to his sense of what was most valuable in literature that, in his introduction to the anthology, he recruited his immediate influences—New York School poets like Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, and Kenneth Koch—and his favorite poets from the English Romantic school—Wordsworth and Coleridge—to the Surrealist camp. Benedikt eventually became wary of being too closely identified with Surrealism, though, claiming in 1977 that Surrealism was no longer central to his work. But, as the poems in the present volume attest, from the earliest to the latest work, his poetry frequently alternates or fuses passages of dream reality with empirical reality, following the proto-Surrealist Pierre Reverdy’s description of the process by which strong images are born via the juxtaposition of distant realities.

2

Modernity in the broadest sense as it has asserted itself historically, is reflected in the irreconcilable opposition between sets of values corresponding to (1) the objectified, socially measurable time of capitalist civilization… and (2) the personal, subjective, imaginative durée, the private time created by the unfolding of the ‘self.’

            —Matei Calinescu, Five Faces of Modernity

            A confirmed agoraphobe, Benedikt was always more than ordinarily attuned to the boundaries between the public world of objective events and the world of private experience. In an interview with Naomi Shihab, Benedikt spoke of how the problem of communication for the poet had to do with “bringing the internal world and the external world together” linking or “playing off or perhaps testing the language of travel folders, the language of banking, of instruction manuals” against another world altogether, the world of “internal, ‘personal,’ or psychological things.” This, he goes on to say is “not only an aesthetic imperative but a moral imperative.” We get a sense, from this comment, of just how seriously Benedikt took the fusing of dream and external realities. There are moments in his work, though, when the moral imperative to connect the inner and the outer seems almost too great for him to bear. Condsider Mole Notes, the most sustained and most powerfully imagined work in Benedikt’s oeuvre. This sequence of prose poems represents something approaching a total retreat from the external world. Here, the world out there is dangerous, and the tunneling Mole retreats in pessimism to a world of the literal and psychological underground. One understands the urge to retreat, especially given the events of 1971, the year in which Mole Notes appeared: the Weather Underground bombing of the Capitol building; the conviction of both Charles Manson, and of the America lieutenant found guilty in the Mai Lai massacre; the arrest of 12,000 anti-war protestors; the Pentagon Papers bringing to light corruption and cynicism at the highest levels; genocide in Bangladesh; the prison riots at Attica; and the continuing specter of nuclear annihilation looming over the entire planet. If, as Benedikt claimed, Mole Notes and his next book, Night Cries, represented a “black pessimism,”it was pessimism well-grounded in events. It was also a pessimism that faded, and the poems of The Badminton at Great Barrington; or Gustave Mahler & the Chattanooga Choo-Choo find Benedikt once again fearlessly exploring the boundary between the subjective and the objective realms, this time giving us a protagonist who, unlike Mole, is excessively drawn to the excitements and allures of the external world.

3

Their purpose of writing was to portray, not a thought, but a mind thinking, or, in Pascal's words, la peinture de la pensée. They knew that an idea separated from the act of experiencing is not the idea that was experienced. The ardor of its conception in the mind is a necessary part of its truth…

          —Morris W. Croll, “The Baroque Style in Prose”

In an essay much-loved and quoted by poets as diverse as Elizabeth Bishop and Charles Bernstein, the critic Morris W. Croll described the tenor and technique of baroque prose, which eschewed classical reserve for “the energy and labor of minds seeking the truth, not without dust and heat.” Benedikt’s work frequently proceeds in the baroque manner, showing the probings of the conscious mind as well as the interweaving of the rational and the irrational. Not for Benedikt the paring down of an initial prolixity into the austere perfection of the mot juste in the manner of, say, the young Ezra Pound when he cut the 36 lines of an initial draft down to the spare couplet that is “In a Station of the Metro.” Instead, Benedikt shows the mind working to find the right expression. Consider “Invitation to Previously Uninvited Guests” from Mole Notes, in which the smoke of a rare cigar melting into a room full of guests is described as being “like a sugar cube melting on the tongue” and “like honey in the mind of a diabetic,” similes which launch a long catalog other comparisons:

…like your wallet in the hands of a prostitute, like chopped liver in the heart of the professional caterer, like surviving leaves in midwinter sleet, like ant feces in a vat full of nitrate, like an inexpensive tieclip before the onslaughts of rust, like conversation into silence among boring company, like the conception of generosity after December 26^th, like space beneath even the tiniest hand caressing even the tallest lover discovering the joys of some novel perversion, like the idea of 18^th century chamber music in the minds of the oppressed, like truth in a Latin-American newspaper, like dialogue in the mouth of the megalomaniac, like meaning in the mind of the poet.

What we see here is the mind of the poet seeking the mot juste, rather than the mot juste itself. While there’s a certain humorous quality to the proliferation of similes—when we arrive at the final image of meaning dispersing like smoke in the mind of the poet, we’ve reached a point of comic exasperation—there’s a serious purpose to Benedikt’s method. Just as he saw the exploring of the intersection of the inner and outer worlds as a moral imperative, he saw the depicting of the mind in thought as a moral as well as an aesthetic matter. His representation of the mind’s processes, he once claimed, had to do with “incorporating more and more and the incorporation doesn’t make you lose focus… but rather makes you get a greater part of your mind in focus.” For Benedikt, if one is to write truthfully, one must write the process of the mind into the poem.

4

That’s part of Personism. It was founded by me after lunch with LeRoi Jones on August 27, 1959, a day in which I was in love with someone (not Roi, by the way, a blond). I went back to work and wrote a poem for this person. While I was writing it I was realizing that if I wanted to I could use the telephone instead of writing the poem, and so Personism was born. It's a very exciting movement which will undoubtedly have lots of adherents. It puts the poem squarely between the poet and the person, Lucky Pierre style, and the poem is correspondingly gratified. The poem is at last between two persons instead of two pages. In all modesty, I confess that it may be the death of literature as we know it.

            Frank O’Hara, “Personism: A Manifesto”

            The comic quality of Benedikt’s work comes with an impressive pedigree. An exclamation-mark laden, buoyant, faux-naïve quality is especially evident in the earlier work, which was very much written in the shadow of Frank O’Hara and Kenneth Koch, whose works the young Benedikt would often read for an hour or so before setting down to write his own poems. A decade or so younger than the leading poets of the New York School, Benedikt was, like most of the more established poets, a Francophile, an ivy leaguer, and a professional art critic. Like them, too, he tended to write with an awareness of the hip, knowing intimacy of the New York poetry scene.  He’s not above dropping a proper name or two in a poem, and once you start counting the pronouns in Benedikt’s poetry, you’ll be surprised at how many times you’ll find “you,” “we,” and “us”— both of these are techniques that help to build a sense of reader-writer community. Indeed, much of the charm and warmth of Benedikt’s comic gestures depends on one’s sense of being taken into a little imaginative circle, where we communicate as intimates. His is a poetry that cracks a wry smile in a small room, rather than sounding a barbaric yawp over the rooftops of the world.

5

The principal object, then, proposed in these Poems was to choose incidents and situations from common life, and to relate or describe them, throughout, as far as was possible in a selection of language really used by men, and, at the same time, to throw over them a certain coloring of imagination...

            William Wordsworth, Preface to Lyrical Ballads

           

            Benedikt was prone to abuse T.S. Eliot in his critical writings, and one understands why. Unlike Eliot, whose strongest work could read like a polyglot tissue of quotations from classic or arcane texts, Benedikt insisted on a certain plain-spokenness, an ordinary language as the medium for poetry. He complained in Poetry about poets who asserted their bardic privilege, which was really nothing more than a “bardic abuse,” whose method was tediously “‘kultural,’ involving ponderously ‘literary’ phrases or phrases whose grace is meant to astonish, representing, by stuffing implication, the poetic soul.” This is not to say that Benedikt limits his range of diction to that of the ordinary man on the street, as the high incidence of the Romantic exclamatory or classically apostrophic “oh!” in his writing makes plain. What Benedikt does, though, is to shy away from the notion of the poet as a kind of collagist piecing together the fragments of tradition, and insist on language that appears to be the expression of a speaking subject, a talker talking to us. The notion is at least as venerable as Wordsworth, and as modern as Frank O’Hara, with his idea that the telephone can replace the poem—and it is an idea Benedikt inherits from both poets.

6

A particularly perceptive analysis of Benedikt's Mole Notes contains the following passage:

Ironically, what Mole seeks by way of unreason is a more reasonable, rationally utopian world. Throughout the poem… Mole’s dominant emotion is, as Benedikt puts it, disappointment…. Mole-Benedikt cannot locate or establish Mole City on earth as it is; he finds only war, riots, crime, delusion. The great climax of the poem occurs therefore in what the poet calls Mole’s apotheosis, his literal flying through space like a projectile. What in the individual man amounts to a personal Thoreauvian-like revolt must perforce divorce him from society.

            —Louis Gallo, “Benedikt’s Blues: Reason and Unreason in Poetry”

The passage captures the hopeful skepticism of Benedikt’s work: skeptical of any great claims for poetry or the renewal of the world, his poetry remains optimistic about the power and prospects of the individual imagination. Even after he had given up on many things—academe, fame, even the publication of his work, Benedikt could ask that we

…suppose then that, following our sudden realizations & quasi-epiphanies, madly
                inspired

With our eyes rolling around wildly, our tongue hanging out & our hair standing
                            up on end despite the breeze,

One of us rushes to our clattery, old-fashioned, pre-computer-era typewriter,

      To make at least a temporary little household racket…

Even if this racket might “Risk being mistaken by some, for a ‘Throwaway Poem’” that the poet writes only “for the light amusement of himself or herself & perhaps a few old friends” it remains the medium of enthusiasm and hair-raising enthusiasm. And even if the unpublished poems were tucked away in a suitcase, the hope remained—it is there in that line about the poem being “mistaken” as something only for the poet’s friends—that they would find their way out into the world, to you.

A Wedding Cake in the Rain: Notes on Auden's Face

"If that's his face, what must his scrotum look like?" asked the painter David Hockney after first meeting W.H. Auden.  For my money, it's the best, and cruelest, comment made about Auden's face in the last two decades of his life.  Other contenders include Auden's own remark "My face looks like a wedding cake left out in the rain" and Hannah Arendt's rather grandiose claim that "life itself had delineated a kind of face-scape" on Auden "to make manifest the heart's invisible furies." James Merrill's description of the face as "runneled and seamed" and Christopher Isherwood's claim that such a face "really belonged in the British Museum" are weak entries in the field, especially coming from such talented writers.  Perhaps their admiration for the poet held their tongues in check.

I'd long wondered just what had happened to Auden's face, which was pale and smooth in his youth.  Indeed, I'd developed a number of theories over my many years of reading Auden.

1.  Cigarettes and Benzedrine

Auden was, by any standard, an epic smoker.  Indeed, I've often suspected that a play he co-wrote with Christopher Isherwood, The Ascent of F6, names its fictional mountain after a German cigarette brand.  And for many years he took a daily dose of amphetamines (it may well have been the secret behind his Stakhanovite literary productivity, as it was for Sartre and Ayn Rand).  Could these have been the culprits behind Auden's sad decline into scrotum-facedness?

An English physician, Douglas Model, shown a photo of Auden, offered a diagnosis of "smoker's face."  It is certainly true that smoking can have deleterious effects on one's skin, but Auden's seems to be a special case.  No similar condition afflicted his many smoking friends.

2.  Pale Skin in Ischia

In his later years, Auden took to spending a good portion of every year on the Italian island of Ischia, where the sun beats mercilessly down on the near-white sand of the beaches.  Auden, who took pride in his Scandinavian heritage, was not equipped for such a climate, and his friends reported with alarm his bleached hair and perpetually peeling skin.  Could this lie behind the wedding cake face?  It seemed plausible to me for some time, although the lack of a similar effect on Chester Kallman, Auden's unswarthy companion of many years, raises questions.

3. Squalor

No friend of Auden could go without noting the filth and squalor in which he lived.  Edmund Wilson devotes paragraphs to it in his journals; Stephen Spender (perhaps wishing to score points off the man in whose shadow he lived and wrote) composes prose arias to the abject state of Auden's surroundings, and Igor Stravinsky's housekeeper was appalled at Auden's refusal to bathe or shower when he visited the composer while working on the libretto to The Rake's Progress. I'm no dermatologist, but I have found myself speculating about Auden hosting a vast population of mites or other parasites of the sort that thrive (one imagines) on the unbathed skin of the more bohemian literati.

4. The Truth

As it turns out, none of my theories was correct.  Indeed, inasmuch as they all blame Auden for his condition, they turn out to be not only incorrect, but vaguely puritanical.  It is to Richard Davenport-Hines that the world owes a true explanation of Auden's imposing—nay, geological facial folds and fissures.  He writes, in his biography of the poet

Auden had apparently been suffering since early manhood from Touraine-Solente-Gole syndrome in which the skin of the forehead, face, scalp, hands and feet becomes thick and furrowed and peripheral periostitis in the bones reduces the patient's capacity for activity.  There was no therapy for the syndrome, which does not affect either life expectancy or mental status, but which accounted for Auden's striking appearance of grave, lined melancholy.

The condition is inherited rather than contagious, and quite rare.  So it seems most of us, regardless of any smoking, ill-advised beach exposure, or squalor, will be saved from inciting such questions as that asked by Mr. Hockney.


**UPDATE**

Marcel Inhoff, head fact-checker at Samizdat Blog's German Research Bureau, has just sent in, by urgent telex, fax, and pneumatic tube message canister, the following important observation: "As a former citizen of the GDR I can confirm that F6 is actually a post-1950s brand of shitty socialist cigarette.  The name itself stands for 'filter cigarettes of the 1960s.'"  Thus dies all speculation about the tobacco-oriented subtext of The Ascent of F6.

Emancipation of the Dissonance!

"The Emancipation of the Dissonance," my retrospective review of C.S. Giscombe's career in poetry, has been republished by The Volta, and is online in its entirety — have a look!

The Last Habsburg Poet: Marjorie Perloff on Paul Celan

Richard Strier was already a few minutes into his introduction when I & my colleague Josh Corey stumbled into a packed room in the University of Chicago's new Logan Center to hear Marjorie Perloff talk about Paul Celan yesterday afternoon.  We slipped into the very last seats, just behind Michael Anania, Simone Muench, and Garin Cycholl, and next to Ray Bianchi.  Chicu Reddy was perched across the aisle.  Just as I cracked open my notebook and took in the large map of the Habsburg empire, Marjorie began her talk.

At first, I was a little surprised by the direction she took: I'd been expecting Big Ideas, but what we were getting was a mixture of biography and geography.  Marjorie talked about Celan's birth in Czernowitz, an outpost of the West far, far from the German or French spheres, more oriented toward the Ottoman Empire than Paris or London, and about the polyglot, multiethnic nature of the place: Romanian but not Romanian, Christian, Jewish, with an endless number of languages, including a German quite different from the German of Berlin.  She then talked in great detail about Celan's poetry, but not the poetry most known to American readers.  She described his early Surrealist poems, his Romanian poems, and, above all, his love poetry—something he wrote for many years, and used in his role as expert seducer, often presenting the same poems to different women, with generally successful results.

I wasn't at all sure where this was all leading, but when Marjorie said it was a version of material that would form the epilogue to a book on Austro-Modernism it all began to come into focus.  And, indeed, it all began to seem part of a very Big Idea indeed, and a good one.  This wasn't just a ramble in poetic biography: the point of all of the context and focus on Celan's particular brand of Austrian German language was to recontextualize Celan entirely, and, in so doing, to propose not just a new way of understanding Celan, but a new way of understanding a whole branch of modern European literature.

We tend to see Celan almost exclusively in the context of Holocaust writing, with John Felstiner's Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew as the great explanatory text.  Celan certainly is a Holocaust poet—plausibly the greatest of Holocaust poets—but we are wrong to think that this exhausts his meaning and the range of his achievement.  In focusing on Celan's early life and his love poetry (which he continued to write after the war) Perloff showed us a fuller, less iconic, more humanized figure, a Celan who wasn't just a Survivor, but a man, with all the foibles and idiosyncrasies one might expect in a somewhat coddled aesthete raised by adoring and indulgent parents (Jean Daive has been working on something along these humanizing lines as well).

Not only did Perloff reveal this Celan to us: in stressing the differences between his German and the German spoken in Frankfurt or Berlin (and, indeed, in stressing the vast geographic removal of Czernowitz from Germany proper) she showed us Celan as a representative of a culture quite distinct from that of Germany: the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the traditionally Habsburg (alternately Hapsburg) lands.  The Empire's German was distinct, and Marjorie was quite convincing in demonstrating that many of the legendary 'difficulties' of Celan's poems are actually quite clear, at least to one hearing "with an Austrian ear."  And the Empire was by no means an Empire of German:  it was a polyglot culture of many languages, and no one spoke just one.  Indeed, the multicultural Imperial identity, in which many peoples felt equally enfranchised, was utterly different from German identity, and it showed in the culture: "There is no way Wittgenstein could have been a German writer," Marjorie said, "and no way Heidegger could have been an Austro-Hungarian one."

Celan the product of this multicultural and polyglot sphere, to which belong the works of Robert Musil, Elias Canetti, Sigmund Freud, Karl Kraus, Joseph Roth, and Franz Kafka—but he was the product of this world in a special way, because he was the product of that world's dissolution.  Born just two years after the end of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, he came of age in the penumbra of loss, with a sense of the ghostliness of his own multicultural and polyglot identity.

In the end, Marjorie wasn't just telling us that we would do well to think of Celan in the broad context of the dying Habsburg culture: she was telling us that we have a great deal of work ahead of us in reconstructing the lost Empire as a cultural field, and in finding the meaning of its writers not in some generalized Germanic tradition, but in the shadows and fragments of a dying polyglot state.  We would be as wrong to discuss Musil or Kafka or Celan outside this context as we would to discuss William Carlos Williams without reference to his Americanness.  This, I thought, is a big idea—it proposes not just a new understanding of Celan, but a new field of literary study.

The room in the Logan center was full of bright looking young graduate students.  If they had their ears open, they now know they've got their work cut out for them.

The Haunting of Jorge Luis Borges, or: Borges in the Kantian Tradition

Jorge Luis Borges, lauded everywhere as one of the greats of short fiction, rarely gets his due as an essayist.  But his essays can be every bit as intriguing as his stories—and, in fact, are haunted by the same suspicion that haunts his fiction: the suspicion that there is an order of some kind just beyond our reach, and an elusive significance always on the verge of manifestation.  Both of these suspicions emerge in the wake of Kantian and post-Kantian thought on the meaning of the beautiful.

Consider “The Wall and the Books,” in which Borges speculates about the motives of the Chinese emperor Shih Huang Ti in ordering the building of the Great Wall and decreeing the burning of all books. Borges is, of course, aware of simple historical explanations for the phenomena.  “Historically,” writes Borges, “there is no mystery in the two measures…. he built the wall because walls were defenses; he burned the books because the opposition invoked them in order to extol former emperors.”  But that’s just too plodding and dull for a mind like that of Borges, who soon turns to questions about a larger meaning for the emperor’s actions.  Noting that those who were found preserving books were sentenced to work on the wall, Borges begins speculating:

Perhaps the wall was a metaphor, maybe Shih Huang Ti condemned those who worshipped the past to a work just as vast as the past, as stupid and useless. Perhaps the wall was a challenge and Shih Huang Ti thought: “Men love the past and I can do nothing against this love, nor can my executioners, but some time there will be a man who feels as I do, and he will destroy my wall, as I destroyed the books, and will erase my memory and will be my shadow and my mirror and will not be aware of it.” Perhaps Shih Huang Ti walled in the empire because he knew it was fragile and he destroyed the books because he understood they were sacred books, or rather books that taught that which the entire universe teaches or the consciousness of every man.

That’s a pretty freestyle set of hermeneutic principles Borges is employing, isn’t it?  “Perhaps it means this, perhaps that…”  But Borges isn’t much interested in precise or authoritative interpretation, here.  Rather, as he says a little later, he thinks it is likely that the grand idea of the wall and the burning of the books “touches us by, over and above, the conjectures it allows.”  The wall and the books are valuable to Borges precisely because they conjure possible interpretations: they seem meaningful, but render up no precise meaning.

Indeed, thinking about the wall and the books in this way leads Borges to conjecture that “we could infer that all practices have their virtue in themselves and not in some conjectural ‘content’” and that this emphasis on the form or pattern that hints, but only hints, at significance would be in accord with the thinking of Walter Pater, who “contended that all the arts aspire to the condition of music, which is nothing but form.”  Music, after all, is like mythology, or “certain twilights,” in that all of these things “try to tell us something… or want to tell us something.”  For Borges, this is an “imminence of a revelation, which does not happen” and “is, perhaps, the aesthetic act.”

The idea of a pure form that does not connect to utility—the wall as metaphor, rather than as defense—haunts Borges, and pushes into his mind despite his grasp of simpler, more material explanations for the wall.  And the haunting is specific to the Kantian and post-Kantian eras, in that it was Kant who told us that the aesthetic experience involves a sense of “purposiveness without purpose”—of form with no necessary connection to function.  Moreover, it was Kant who spoke of genius as a capacity for creating images that function exactly like the wall and the books in Borges’ essay.  Here’s the relevant passage from Kant’s Critique of Judgment:

Genius is, in short, the faculty of presenting aesthetical Ideas; an aesthetical Idea being an intuition of the Imagination, to which no concept is adequate. And it is by the excitation of such ineffable Ideas that a great work of art affects us.

For Kant, the products of genius cannot be reduced to any single concept or meaning.  Rather, they give rise to a plethora of possible significances.  Both the notion of purposiveness without purpose and the notion of genius irreducible to concept lie behind Borges’ speculations about the wall and the books: Borges is fascinated by the possibility of something that can be “nothing but form,” and by the notion that a formal pattern “hints, but only hints, at significance.”  Borges mentions Benedetto Croce and Walter Pater in his essay—and neither figure would exist in recognizable form without Kant.  But another figure derived from the German Idealist tradition comes to mind in connection with Borges’ idea of the “imminence of a revelation, which does not happen” as central to aesthetics: Carl Gustav Jung.  Jung, in his great essay “On the Relation of Analytic Psychology to Poetry,” argues that the most significant forms of art give us not specific meanings per se, but  “a language pregnant with meanings, and images that are true symbols because they are ... bridges thrown out towards an unseen shore.”  Meaningfulness without meaning, we might say, is the gist of Jung’s theory, here: and it is certainly a theory in accord with Borges’ fascinations.

Borges' concern with pure form and “imminence of a revelation, which does not happen” informs his best-loved fiction every bit as much as it informs his essayistic thinking.  Consider “The Lottery of Babylon, ” in which all of the arbitrariness in the world just might be the result of a secret, carefully administered lottery—a pattern or form behind the apparent randomness of life, a purpose or meaning we can almost detect.  Or consider the famous “Library of Babel,” in which a vast library of books, each unique, combine to present all possible combinations of letters.  In this strange universe, men seek not only the revelation of meaning, but absolution through that revelation:

When it was proclaimed that the Library contained all books, the first impression was one of extravagant happiness…. At that time a great deal was said about the Vindications: books of apology and prophecy which vindicated for all time the acts of every man in the universe and retained prodigious arcana for his future. Thousands of the greedy abandoned their sweet native hexagons and rushed up the stairways, urged on by the vain intention of finding their Vindication. These pilgrims disputed in the narrow corridors, proferred dark curses, strangled each other on the divine stairways, flung the deceptive books into the air shafts, met their death cast down in a similar fashion by the inhabitants of remote regions. Others went mad ... The Vindications exist (I have seen two which refer to persons of the future, to persons who are perhaps not imaginary)…

The imminence of these most personal of revelations, though, never really manifests: “the searchers did not remember that the possibility of a man's finding his Vindication, ” we read, “can be computed as zero. ”

“The Garden of Forking Paths,” is perhaps the best example of Borgesian fiction haunted by Kantian aesthetics.  It is in this story that we see our protagonist escape from the anxieties of his situation—he is in a hostile country, pursued by an implacable foe—by contemplating a labyrinth created by an ancestor:

I have some understanding of labyrinths: not for nothing am I the great grandson of that Ts’ui Pên who was governor of Yunnan and who renounced worldly power in order to write a novel that might be even more populous than the Hung Lu Meng and to construct a labyrinth in which all men would become lost. Thirteen years he dedicated to these heterogeneous tasks, but the hand of a stranger murdered him—and his novel was incoherent and no one found the labyrinth. Beneath English trees I meditated on that lost maze: I imagined it inviolate and perfect at the secret crest of a mountain; I imagined it erased by rice fields or beneath the water; I imagined it infinite, no longer composed of octagonal kiosks and returning paths, but of rivers and provinces and kingdoms . . . I thought of a labyrinth of labyrinths, of one sinuous spreading labyrinth that would encompass the past and the future and in some way involve the stars. Absorbed in these illusory images, I forgot my destiny of one pursued.

The labyrinth, a structure purposive but without purpose, is an object of contemplation that lifts him above his self-protective anxieties, and takes him into a different state of mind.  Indeed, it takes him into something like disinterest, the condition in which we contemplate without thought of our ourselves and our needs—the very state Kant says we enter with aesthetic contemplation.

As it turns out, the labyrinth is not a physical maze, but a book—a seemingly incoherent book that, in fact, has a pattern to it.  But the pattern is infinite, and the full meaning of the book can never be made manifest: it is a text pregnant with meanings, a bridge thrown out to an unseen shore.

The ghost of pure form, of a purposiveness beyond purpose; and the haunting sense of a meaningfulness that refuses to resolve into definite meaning—these are the specters behind many of the lines Borges wrote, fiction and nonfiction alike.  They are, I think, the central principles of his aesthetics—and the product of a long tradition in Western philosophy.

Fallon McPhael: Biographical Notes and The Previously Unpublished Condom Poems!

Hot news, people!  An independent scholar living in Whiting, Indiana, has assembled biographical notes on the life of Fallon McPhael, whose wake we are to observe one week from today (7:00 pm at The Charnel House in Chicago, 3421 West Fullerton) with tributes from Chicago poets & writers, music, drink, and—as specified in McPhael's final will and testament—burlesque.  Not only has our scholar put together a biographical sketch, he has managed to bring before us previously unpublished poetic works from the great man's final years.  Behold, and be enlightened:

Some Notes on the Life and Times of Fallon McPhael     

Fallon McPhael (Fáelán Máel Ó Secnaill) was born 1919, 1920 or 1922 (his own reportss differ) in Inniskeen, County Monaghan, Ireland.  There is very little reliable information about McPhael’s parentage or his childhood circumstances.  By one of his accounts, he was fathered by George William Russell, the Irish poet, artist and mystic known as AE, during a walking tour of Monaghan in 1919.  In another McPhael story his father was an Ulster Catholic his mother found hiding in a hay rick. McPhael briefly attended Kednaminsha National School, and his name is on the 1935 student registry of the O’Connell School in Dublin.  By his own account, though no one else’s, he studied at University College Dublin, where he is said to have said that he was a member of the Literary and Historical Society and editor of Comhthrom Féinne (Fair Play), the College literary journal.  The name, Fallon McPhael, never appears in the journal, though there are several instances of a Gaelic pen name that bears some similarity to his own, Fáolán, the Wolf, and the reviews published with that by-line show early signs of the bitter, reproachful tone of McPhael’s later literary journalism.

We have only McPhael’s often contradictory stories to account for his life in Dublin after the time he claims he left University College.  He was, by his own lights, a motorman, professional sparring partner, gun runner, publican, procurer, counter-tenor and bookie.  The novelist, Flann O’Brien, writes in a 1949 letter that he had come across McPhael working in the Brown and Nolan Bookstore in Dublin.  “There was McPhael, the caustic scribbler, behind the counter at B & N, a fictional writer employed in an invented establishment. “  We do know that for a time McPhael lived with the poet, Eugene Watters (Eoglian Ó Tuairisc), and his wife near Cork.  The arrangement apparently ended in a domestic dispute during which Watters shot McPhael in the foot.  “Now,” McPhael said of the ensuing limp, “I’m Oedipus without a complex.” In later years McPhael spoke with nostalgia of Watters and his wife.  “Eoglian treated me well, don’t you know, as Dermott in his poem, “Dermott and Grace.”

McPhael came to the United States sometime between 1950 and 1953.  Apparently, he lived in New York for a year or so before going to Boston, where he was arrested in 1955 for public drunkenness and lewd behavior.  During his arraignment he convinced the magistrate that he was the illegitimate child of Joseph P. Kennedy, and the charges were dropped.  About the episode, Kennedy is said to have said, “These fools will believe anything pronounced in a deep enough brogue,” though he was obviously concerned enough to give McPhael “a princely sum” and send him to Chicago, where he was given a job as a ghost night watchman at the Merchandise Mart. 

McPhael’s literary life in Chicago is well documented—his frequent quarrels with Algren (“as Irish as a Jewish Swede can be,” he wrote), the drinking bout with Mike Royko and his time as the stand-in accordionist at Riccardo’s.  There is no evidence at all that he ever fought Norman Mailer, in the ring or out.  The one fight he is credited, or rather discredited, with was against the Irish poet, Patrick Kavanagh, in 1964.  Kavanagh was in Chicago for an appearance at Northwestern, and somebody named Fink decided it would be a good idea to bring the two great Irish writers together.  After a considerable amount of drink, Harp (McPhael’s ale of choice) followed by Jameson’s, the two began reciting poetry in Gaelic. Their argument was either over grammar or cadence; no one could tell which.  Challenges were made, and a fight was arranged.  Someone pointed out to McPhael that Kavanagh had only one lung.  McPhael replied, “And don’t I know that,” pushing a pencil stub into one nostril, “fair’s fair.”  Descriptions of the fight vary wildly, though Studs Terkel, who was there, said that there was more wheezing than punching.  It ended with both Irishman vomiting on the shoes and pant legs of the crowd around them and a boisterous verse or two of “Arrayed for Bridal.” McPhael’s literary reputation in Chicago seems to have been based, almost entirely, on his ethnicity, ceaseless bad behavior and energetic litigiousness.  “As far as I can tell, “Don Rose once wrote, “all of McPhael’s published books were the result of out-of-court settlements of his endless law suits.” 

In the mid 1960s McPhael had a position as Advisor to the Irish Collections at the Southern Illinois University Library in Carbondale, a job he got through the Irish barrister and genealogist, Eoin O’Mahony, who was a Visiting Professor in Irish Studies there.  O’Mahony was fascinated by McPhael’s undetermined lineage and had, based on sentiment alone, filed a number of law suits on McPhael’s behalf.   Shortly after O’Mahony returned to Ireland to mount an unsuccessful campaign for Prime Minister, McPhael was fired from the University.  The official cause for dismissal was that in his time in the library he never recommended a single book he had not himself written, though stories persist that having taken over O’Mahony’s class in Gaelic, he taught the students that Gaelic could only be pronounced when half clothed and through a pallet tempered by Jameson’s.

There is no evidence that McPhael ever married, though he “kept company” for at least twenty years with the Irish-Australian playwright and actress, Kathleen O’Houghlihan, “the Countess Kathleen,” as he called her.  She is the editor of his last, and as yet unpublished, collection of poems, In Excited Reverie. According to O’Houghlihan these poems were written in rhyming tetrameter on condoms she brought to him in St. Bridget’s Home, where he spent his last years.  “He wrote them out with a red felt pen on the stretched out condoms, then rolled them up again and put them back in their wrappers.  ‘It’s how poems ought to be written,’ he told me, ‘in excited reverie.’” His plan was to have Kathleen put the condoms back on the drug store shelves, so that they would be discovered and read, as he put it, “in extremis.”  “I couldn’t bring myself to put them back, you know, and lose the poems forever.  And then, he claimed that he wore them for the writing, so it didn’t seem right.”   The verses are varied in quality and sentiment.  Here, with Ms. O’Houghlihan’s kind permission, are a few of the more decorous examples;

‘Twas Yeats’ ghost took Paddy’s lung
For every plowman’s song he’d sung
And Joyce that made poor Flann a drunk,
The curate pouring for the monk.

* * *

On the Armagh Road I met a lass
And by St. Agnes’ pinched her ass.

 * * *
A. Norman’s gone from Leeds, a prince,
With poems to make all Hades wince.

 * * *
A laureate, then, this Heaney or Hiney,
A man of parts, Eeney, Meeny and Miney,
 Ulster man, more green than orange,
As tuneful as a rusted doorhinge.

 * * *
 
Irish poets learn your trade;
A rhyme can often catch a maid
And if there are no maids about,
A carp’s as tasty as a trout,
Which is to say, you drop your line
And judge whoever takes it, fine.

 * * *
Billy, the Golden Dawn entreats
From wet and chilling yellow sheets
And the Celtic Twilight glows
From pustules on my numbing toes.

 * * *
Notes to the poems:

Yeats’ ghost:  Eoin O’Mahony (see above) said that the ghost William Butler Yeats’, Irish poet (1865-1939), was “about in the world” and had for various slights and misdeeds killed several people, among them Thomas Hone’s son and AE’s secretary. Kavanagh’s poems ennobling farm labor could be seen as offending Yeats’ view of Romantic Ireland.

Paddy:  Patrick Kavanagh, Irish poet (1904-1967), lost a lung to cancer in 1954. (see above)

Flann:  Flann O’Brien (Brien O’Nolan), Irish novelist and follower of James Joyce, called Joyce “The Curate.” 

The monk:   One of O’Brien’s many pseudonyms was Brother Barnabus.

Armagh Road:  In Dublin the Armagh Road ends at the Church of St. Agnes.  The couplet was probably meant to recall Patrick Kavanagh’s romantic poem, “On Raglan Road.”

A.Norman: A. Norman Jeffares, Irish scholar (1920-2005) was Chair of English at Leeds University.

With poems:  Jeffares edited a volume of Irish Love Poetry.

Heaney:  Seamus Heaney, Irish poet and Nobel Laureate (1939--).

Hiney:  One of the many variants of the Anglo-Irish surname, Heaney.

Eeney, Meeny and Miney:  This counting rhyme may suggest Heaney’s family’s history as cattle traders, though it may refer as well to the channel islands and Druidic sacrifices on the Isle of Mona.

An Ulster man:  Heaney was born in Northern Ireland to a Catholic family, hence “more green than orange.”

Rusted doorhinge:  May well allude to the “rusted gate” passage in Yeats’, The Celtic Twilight, or to the unused door through which in Celtic mythology  Cuchulain threw the stone that killed the Hound of Ulster ( see Yeats’ play, On Baile’s Strand (1904).

“Irish poets learn your trade”: from Yeats’ poem, “Under Ben Bulben.”

Billy:  William Butler Yeats.

Golden Dawn”:  A Hermetic mystical order in England in the 19^th and early 20^th centuries.  Both Yeats and Maude Gonne were active members of the Order.

The Celtic Twilight:  An 1891 book of essays by W.B. Yeats.  The ‘twilight,” Yeats thought, would give rise to a Celtic revival, led by poetry and the arts.

toes:  A reference to the Celtic fairies,  about whom Yeats’ says in The Celtic Twilight, “their feet never tired.”