Pages from on the decay of western criticism

ON THE DECAY OF CRITICISM THE COMPLETE ESSAYS OF W. M. SPACKMAN

EDITED BY STEVEN MOORE

Fantagraphics Books Seattle, WA

CONTENTS Introduction.................................................................................................7

ON THE DECAY OF HUMANISM Topic Sentences......................................................................................... 19 James, James..............................................................................................37 The Learned No........................................................................................66 Che ti dice il Wilson?................................................................................90 The Unbristling Beard: Aristotle on Poetry..............................................102 Cornbread and Circuses...........................................................................118

ESSAYS AND REVIEWS The Menace to Curriculum Reform....................................................... 131 Turning on the Human Spirit with the Classics..................................... 139 Literature as Literature, and Why............................................................ 141 Pascua, Rura, Duces ................................................................................ 151 Propertius................................................................................................. 158 Posilipo, Mer d’Italie, & Shore Points..................................................... 165 Nether Vert...............................................................................................172 Every Man His Own Pound.................................................................... 180 Au Fil du Moi.......................................................................................... 189 Quis Haec Potest Perferre? Qui Possit Pati.............................................. 195 Seamus Heaney’s North........................................................................... 199 Cendrars (1887–1961), Char (1907– )....................................................206 Professus Grandia Turget..........................................................................213 A Great Pleasure of Celts.........................................................................222 Being Fair about Lyof Nikolayevich........................................................ 229 A Few Rude Remarks about Manners..................................................... 238 Donald Sutherland, 1915–1978................................................................ 245 Undeath of the Novel.............................................................................. 248 A Time Was Had by All........................................................................... 255 Max Mort Lettre Suit................................................................................261

H.J., O.M. ( TV ).....................................................................................269 Worldly Wit.............................................................................................. 273 The Pleasure of Your Company.............................................................. 276 Ivy Compton-Burnett............................................................................... 279 An Ex Parte for Comedy.......................................................................... 282

APPENDIX A Conversation with W. M. Spackman................................................... 293 Spackman on Spackman......................................................................... 303

Index........................................................................................................309

Worldly Wit ⟡ 273

WORLDLY WIT Paul Theroux. The London Embassy. Houghton Mifflin, 1983.

his reputation as a fashionably disenchanted chronicler of exotic outposts, but—like Ambler, Greene, and Burgess (and Kipling before them)—what has distinguished him is the brilliance and intelligence of his craftsmanship, and in particular the bland worldliness of his wit, which is the signature also of this semisequel to The Consul’s File, from the first page of these eighteen short stories to the last.

PAUL T H E R O U X M A DE

I liked the Dutch. They were sensible; they had been brave in the war. They still tried to understand the world, and their quaint modernism had made them tolerant. They behaved themselves. It was a church-and-brothel society

in which theology was “without much terror” and the pornography “ridiculous.” And anyway “they had nice faces.” The assessment is offered you with an air of such helpful and impartial courtesy that it is almost not sardonic at all. Or consider the offhand legerdemain of this capsuling of our century’s chief cultural embarrassment, from one of the embassy’s economists: “I used to be colored, right? Then I was a Negro. And then I turned into an Afro-American. After that I was just a member of a Minority Group. Now, I’m black.”

Or the equally offhand pyrotechnics of characterization: “Being with her was like reading a letter to a stranger, chosen at random from the dead-letter office.” Or, “his voice had the plain splintery cadences of an Iowa Lutheran being truthful.” These are not the kinds of phrases one uses in developing a character at novel length. They are an aesthetic shorthand, the epigrammatic quality of the short story at its best, except that this time round there are no ghosts, the stories in The London Embassy are as versatile as ever. The new consul learns about the British aristocracy fast: the delicious Hon. who finds him a flat he expects to lure her

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into blandly bills him for her 2 percent finder’s commission and was never likely to be lured. Two giggling homosexuals get visas to peddle their lorry of antiques to California; one returns, but with a girl. An embassy colleague takes the consul temporarily to bed with her and her flatfull of pampered cats. He traps an Arab tomb-robber in the tomb. In this, Theroux’s third collection, the short story looks so natural to him that it may turn out to be the form he prefers.

For one thing, a convention of the exotic-outpost novels that were his models is that your characters have a bad time. Also, nothing happens that anybody can be amused at. The protagonist of Ambler’s Topkapi is a derisory antihero who is beaten and gratuitously humiliated. Greene’s early Confidential Agent (a prototype for Le Carré) is middle-aged and exhausted, and Greene’s later heroes have bad digestions and worries about eternity. Durrell’s and Naipaul’s people have perhaps less parochial miseries; but of the lot of them, Peacock might have said, “No one could relate a dismal story with so many minutiae of supererogatory wretchedness,” and this has been extremely popular. As it instructively should be: if your characters don’t suffer, how are your readers to tell it’s art?

Theroux was still working in this genre in his early (and admirable) novel Girls at Play—set-piece mayhem-and-misery in decolonialized East Africa, a standard scenario but brought to surprising and original life by its three unstandard main characters. But by Saint Jack, a couple of books later, the sardonic wit in Theroux had begun to take a hand, if not in fact take over, and if this gaudy biography of an old-China-hand pimp is a picaresque sequence rather than a novel, perhaps it was a symbol of Theroux’s independence of genre.

His novels however seem to me to have taken some odd turns.

A novel is a construction within a context, but this elegant definition dissembles a vulgar pitfall: the context can so affect and overinfluence the actual composition as to distort both your characters and their ambience. What makes a character appear to “live” seems to be, essentially, its doing and saying unexpected things, and this confronts a novelist with what he may not recognize is a dilemma. When, for example, we wrote those splendid labor novels in the 1930s, clearly, for verisimilitude, our workers did what workers do—unite, possibly shouting Da zdrastvuet!—but then where, and how, in characters already stock, inject the life-giving unexpectednesses? Even Dos Passos often forgot. Today too, for

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the average novelist, what’s a peasant if not peasanty?—and so for novels about blacks, libs, Jews, Californians, and the lot. The context takes over. The characters are flat.

Theroux’s novels have sometimes, it seems to me, suffered from an analogous sideslip. What made his early Girls at Play so astonishing from a young writer was that into a stock Africa and an action largely narrative-interest (and all done before), he transplants three women whose characters came straight out of his psyche. They then of course interacted with Africa as the story indicated, but nothing they did was standard whites-in-Africa. But in Theroux’s eighth book, The Family Arsenal, which begins in a firmly composed naturalism, the thematic nightmares of the context end by transposing the mode into what amounts to surrealism. It reads almost as if Theroux had lost control. His live characters turn to stock; preposterous uncharacters are added (Lady Arrow); the action ends in a perfect crescendo of unlikelihood.

The experiments of surrealism are of course now a part of our technical heritage. And more as well: the uncritical surrealism of, for instance, Robert M. Coates’s The Eater of Darkness was an apprenticeship for its epochal naturalization in his Yesterday’s Burdens, and we have had, since, Burgess’s M/F and in particular the South American explorations of the novel as myth. But at novel length surrealism takes doing; it is in such forms as Barthelme’s brilliant short stories that it flowers.

It may be this surrealist side of Theroux that explains the wonderful stylistic variety and invention, the energy and fireworks, the mastery, of his short stories. One can suspend reality judgments there, as one cannot for the length of a novel; and then the new realities appear. (The trouble with The Mosquito Coast may well be that a short story is all the idea could stretch to.) Theroux may indeed—like Mrs. Bowen, Hemingway, and Pritchett—write better short stories than novels. But in that company, how complain?

It is a pity that mistakes in French (what do copy editors speak?) make it a toss-up whether the page 227 menu of an embassy state dinner is broad parody or an author’s private joke. But, either way, a “navarin de homard”?…

New Republic, 1983

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THE PLEASURE OF YOUR COMPANY “He and She are variants of it, denoting an it that can be more readily transformed into a thou.”

—Philip Wheelwright

An Edwardian great-uncle of mine used to complain that women daunted him. Between their genius for angelic dissembling and the virtuosity of their self-delusions, he never made out what any of his girls really thought about him (“Am I the sweet creature’s lover, dammit, or a mirage?”), and I was too awed an apprentice to wonder whether this made even a libertine’s sense.

Yet how could it have? Tongue-tied in bedrooms? Ford Madox Ford had his protagonist, Tietjens—my uncle’s own generation— say, “you seduced a young woman in order to be able to finish your talks with her,” the seduction hardly more than (Ford’s word!) a “by-product.” Cyril Connolly, thirty years Ford’s junior, still wrote that a “permanent conversation” was what made a marriage “intoxicating.” I of course didn’t go along with that “by-product” idea, and as to Connolly on marriage, his very next sentence begins, “But for the artist it may prove dangerous …” (and, well, wasn’t I an artist?), but otherwise and in principle, I thought, “What a natural formula?

Why not listen to girls—as well as the rest of it?”

Not, I did realize, that one could listen for information (with every girl, the information seemed to be different). But if one listened, what a fascination! Bit by bit, it turned out, the lovely thing was explaining herself to you. And the pleasure of being told was in part the flattery of her wanting to tell you. And presently I began to conclude (astonished!) that a girl could go on sweetly explaining herself to you until like a blessing she’d explained herself right into your arms!

Amazing. I was never the same again.

But then, I thought, why mightn’t this Ford-Connolly duologue work generally, why limit so productive a formula to love?

Here, perhaps, I still think, is a methodology for repairing the relations of woman and man that the vagaries of cultural lurches of a hundred generations have left so sadly damaged.

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So, a scenario as illustration: A year ago, a man’s wife’s charming college roommate (it can of course as easily begin “her husband’s prep school alter ego”) moved to New York; as things go, he and she now see each other fairly often: at parties, she kisses his cheek, smiling, when they meet; in milling crowds, she is a pleasure he makes his way to; their two social selves are established, a known. But then, one day, into the restaurant where he is lunching solo, by happy chance she comes, by herself also; he stands up and waves, and she laughs and joins him. And after the banalities of amusement and surprise, and a sherry has been fetched for her, and she has ordered all at once, it strikes him (her it had struck the moment she saw him) that this must be the first time the two of them have ever found themselves—that extraordinary word—alone.

Without thinking, he says so; and suddenly, in the wordless little moment of pause that follows, they are looking at each other, and the knowledge of what has happened is so shared, so evident, that it is like a third presence between them; they are free to say things they have never said to each other in all the social months before.

What they say, now that no one else is there to be irrelevant, is a risk one takes. For what ambiguity! The sense of freedom, of being themselves, “new” for each other, their social known gone for good, and every discovery to come, can easily let them light-headedly conclude they are falling in love. And tant mieux or tant pis, often they are.

But if (tant pis/tant mieux) they are not, then what has happened, I suggest, is a working model of how a woman and a man are most comfortable together in the privacy of à deux, free to explore each other.

But to attain to so simple and happy a state, modern man and woman have at least two encumbering traditions to work their way free of: our tendency to treat each other as commodities, and our addiction to traditional romance.

The first is a transaction so immemorial the Odyssey takes it for granted. Odysseus is not king of Ithaca at all: the royal house being matriarchal, Ithaca has a queen; the man who is Penelope’s consort is “king”—hence all those greedy suitors.

The commodities Odysseus brings to the transaction are protection and management, in exchange for Penelope’s status and power. So, in the Dark Ages, marauding lacklands latched on to orphan heiresses.

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The eventual result has been market values for women. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s father knew exactly how much real estate he wanted to trade for her. In Jane Austen’s world, daughters were graded by how well they did well. Under Queen Victoria, a spinster was a walking bankruptcy. This is not to say that girls were insensible to charm of manner (Lady Mary in fact eloped). But the economic base of a culture permeates its amenities, and today it is often the status market, not the simpering redundancies of passion, that prevails. A man is an object to women as well as a quiddity, and the competitions of Miss Austen’s day disfigure our manners still.

As to romance: When you think of what a woman and a man are (severally) after, “romance” is an absurd description, as well as an undefinition of how they go about it. The average man, disabused or not, will normally feel as “romantic” as a woman wishes, and she has the equipment to encourage him to; but how is he to explain her ever being in a state of mind she can think any of his competitors romantic in? So, he is skeptical.

And he cannot think romanticism has been good for her anyway, historically. The English romantic poets, for example, have a spectacularly bad record with women. “The wives of my acquaintance,” Lord Byron wrote in his journal in 1814, “have hitherto done me little good”—but heaven knows, neither had he them.

His friend Shelley left a trail of betrayed and weeping sillies from England across Europe to Italy. That low word “groupies” had not been thought up, but in effect even Wordsworth helped perpetuate the economic domination, and all of them refused their women any real part in intellectual activity.

“On donne des conseils, mais on n’inspire point de conduit,” said La Rochefoucauld; and Lord Chesterfield’s letters to his son may never have made the oaf deserve his father’s favorite adjective, aimable. But Chesterfield’s fundamental principle of pleasing (“It is not sufficient to deserve well—one must please well, too”) seems to me still the way to restore ease and good manners to the relationships of men and women—if only because it keeps us reminded that we are dealing not with objects of my old uncle’s “mirages,” but with beings who will reciprocate. The reason Lady Mary Pierrepont eloped with Wortley Montagu (and that he renounced her dowry) was that they pleased each other; and what happened to the luncheon partners in my scenario is that they discovered what pleasing each other had suddenly offered them. As their creator, I hope they enjoyed it.

Town & Country, 1983

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IV Y COMPTON-BURNET T Hilary Spurling. Ivy: The Life of I. Compton-Burnett. Knopf, 1984.

was the hundredth birthday, however few of us observed it, of the great novelist this admirable biography celebrates; and as Dame Ivy has now been dead fifteen years, our academic establishment might well look up from their James or their Joyce and ponder: Here was the woman novelist of our century—isn’t she that for other centuries perhaps too? Even prima inter pares with de La Fayette, Austen, the Brontës, and George Eliot?

Certainly, every element for an answer is there—the elegance and the endless wit of her style, the formidable intelligence behind it, and, if you only judge by selected profundities, “a knowledge of people which would have been held to be impossible.”

One could even echo Morand’s question to Proust: … à quels raouts allez-vous donc la nuit, pour en revenir avec les yeux si las et si lucides, except that dame Ivy’s terrifying inspections of the human heart can make Proust’s seem a child’s. All this the British establishment has been dealing with since her Brothers and Sisters in 1929; indeed, possibly all that still has to be professorily worked out is what could be called the Moral Basis comparisons.

In all her predecessors, characters assume that a fundamental human (or Divine) decency of some sort is what their lamentable transgressions transgress; in the Compton-Burnett world, the grim secret about the lawless appetencies of man is that in fact no such saving ideal operates or even exists to ennoble our sufferings, and the critical question is therefore whether her characters’ appalling acceptance of evil’s being universal, unregretted, largely unpunished, and perhaps not what we call evil anyhow, may be a vital part of the tremendous power of her thematic mythology.

In fact, “Much that I ought not to have done, I would do again,” greed and treachery included, says the domestic tyrant of Darkness and Day; and as Hilary Spurling remarks, almost every one of the twenty novels “revolves around a protagonist of ferocious energy operating … with catastrophic consequences for the weaker or dependent members of his or her household.”

LAST JUNE 5TH

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This is not moreover just the routine Sophoclean “wrath, envy, discord, strife, / The sword that seeketh life,” but parricide and pervasive sexual scandal, incest in particular. A father seduces his son’s wife, the child she bears being therefore the old lecher’s son and grandson, the son’s half-brother, and the girl’s brother-in-law as well as her son: “all these relations who are something else!” a character murmurs. And not only is sin always discovered—and the discovery brazened out by the sinner—but the baseness of human conduct is taken for granted, as simply how we do behave.

“Bridget has done and suffered the traditional thing. As nearly as Oedipus as a woman can. He killed his father and married his mother.

And she caused her mother’s death when she was born, and married her father. The difference is, that she has not put out her eyes.”

“Perhaps fashions have changed,” said Selina.

Small wonder if, in 1925, the “heartlessness” of her earlier Pastors and Masters, even if high-spirited and amusing, baffled and dismayed her friends. She was after all a severely formal late-Victorian spinster, known as placidly pouring tea for the chattering guests of the witty and fashionable decorator she shared a flat with, Margaret Jourdain. Why should this inarticulate contemporary of Lawrence, Joyce, and Woolf turn out dialogue of the irreverent generation of Powell, Connolly, and Waugh?

“God always seems to me a pathetic figure, friendless and childless, and set up alone in a miserable way,” said Emily. “Such a superior, vindictive, and over-indulgent one. He is one of the best-drawn characters in fiction.”

But the frivolous lucidity of this was a trial run for what Spurling admirably describes as the “compact prose, exquisitely balanced and refined,” that Dame Ivy’s dialogue soon became famous for. Her novels are almost wholly dialogue, and one aspect of her art is that every character’s individual voice is as clear to us as his individual point of view, yet the very simple language is as polished as epigram.

“To know all is to forgive all, and that would spoil everything.”

“The worst of things worth doing is that they are worth so little else.” “My service is of a kind that cannot be paid for in money. And that means it is paid for in that way, but not very well.”

A suggestion that marriage would have led to a fuller life is an-

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swered by “I don’t want the things it would be full of.” Yet this eighteenth-century plainness (only seven words in fifty-one have more than one syllable) has a flexibility that can run from the urbane understatement of an epigram to the shrieks of tantrum, and has a standard level of politely savage in-fighting that Auden once called “no quarter asked or given.”

Spurling’s biography of this strange and daunting genius is a first-rate job, in scope as in detail. In particular she sets out, as one has to for us, that network of inbred British intelligentsia cross-meshing the British class system, with every one of her immense cast clearly in his proper relationship and place. (Of course the British themselves need sometimes to be told too, e.g., that Jourdain’s friends Soame Jenyns and Willie King “were connected through Bulwer Lytton on the Jenyns’s side whose grandson married Byron’s daughter Ada, wife to the eighth Baron King.”)

And throughout there is a practiced raconteuse’s shower of anecdote and incident—some familiar (it was Jourdain’s sister Eleanor who saw those Versailles ghosts), but some, astonishing coincidence, even in a society where nearly everybody knew nearly everybody else (Dame Ivy’s beloved brother Noel took over Rupert Brooke’s rooms in Trinity, and they got their Fellowships together in 1913). Spurling has in fact produced a remarkable picture of a vanished day, and been wonderfully readable doing it.

Washington Post Book World, 1984

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AN EX PARTE FOR COMEDY The mistake is to think there is (a) a subject and (b) a work about it.

—Charles Mauron

A R I S T O T L E D I D HIS magisterial best for us at the beginning of literary criticism as of everything else—there he was, with the Answers—and, if his kind of best was not temperamentally what in fact was called for, at least the Poetics tried to say what makes literature literature, and moves us. Historically, too, his analysis has been of happy service academically, for he laid down a rule: what moves us in a drama is what it portrays, the pity and terror the represented actions stirs us to—and there mimesis has been these 2,300 years since, for his professorial heirs to chant as a charm against critical uneasiness.

Yet this is not how people who produce literature are likely to look at it at all. They do not assess a play by what its characters do, nor a book by what it is about, nor a script by its theme; they will maintain they know better (and I agree with them); and in a word the critical misunderstandings that have resulted from Aristotle’s doctrine are so fundamental that they could well have exasperated the Homeridae too, four or five centuries earlier still.

In particular, I shall argue, they exasperate the writer of comedy today; and by “comedy,” I mean not farce or satire or slapstick, but the comedy of manners.

For to the writer, what a work that moves you portrays is all very well, but how was the thing made moving? What if it is in fact the talent that matters, not the artifact? If for example the Œdipus of Sophocles leaves audiences deeply shaken, or at least bemused, why doesn’t the same shocking myth in the Œdipe of Voltaire? What counts, clearly, is not what is portrayed at all, but the style of the portrayal.

And in fact, for the writer, the animating interest (and why not say it once and for all) is less his “subject” than what he sees he can do with it. It is a process, not a result: he discovers what he is writing “about” by writing it—unwinding Ariadne’s ball of twine

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into that daunting labyrinth (at whose center however is his editor, not the Minotaur), then rewinding the twine back out to Ariadne, though he may well find it is her sister Phaedra waiting there to kiss him instead. (And perhaps it was never Ariadne anyhow …)

Put another way: the writer is a fabbro; he creates artifacts, things in themselves made to be things in themselves. And as words connote and resound as well as say, this ability of language to suggest more than it states is what he deals with and depends on. His “subject” can be anything.

Writers, consequently, also criticize writing principally on its style and technique. How in fact can you praise or deplore a fellow-craftsman for a “subject” you both know he may first have looked at from a mere passing whim? Voltaire has to be judged, with allowance for his era’s notions about the Classics, on his restyling, not his effrontery.

But Aristotle was not a writer; he was an herbalist-physician’s son, whose inherited passion for taxonomy even a youth misspent auditing Plato never cooled. He was moreover our supreme Common Man, and looked at the arts as most of us do, from outside them. In particular, the plastic arts may have been what led him astray—for why paint, say, a portrait if it is not to be a likeness, a representation? Polygnotus, Pauso, and Dionysius painted people differently, yes, but they all represented people. So today the common man too: Manet’s Olympia is not Titian’s or Giorgione’s notion of a houri reclining on a bed, but it is a houri. And a bed is what she is reclining on.

But even passing over that blind “differently” (and with at least all our three surviving versions of Electra right there in his library!), Aristotle’s mimesis has difficulties he overlooked. Œdipus’s stabbing out his eyes, for example, one cannot conceivably say mimeîtai human conduct. Yet if that appalling act is not a representation but a symbol or the like, what has become of mimesis as a description of what Sophocles was doing? Or for what any writer does, the nonrepresentational and the myth-novelists least of all.

Unhappily, however, the critical establishments of our time have taken to paying even less attention than Aristotle to how the creative intelligence operates; indeed, any work they are in principle discussing for our enlightenment can simply disappear in the ground-fog of what they have thought up to say about it. And this nearly always, alas, turns out to be an exegetical restructuring of its “content”—the thing’s theme, its “ideas,” its everlasting Meaning.

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Yet the ludicrous result of this prepossession is that academic pronouncements on literature are so little literary that style and technique are seldom dealt with, and never dealt with seriously; and the indispensable discernment, of aesthetic merit, is not an element of the performance at all. The first postwar Princeton literary seminars are typical. Off and on for a year, Institute as well as University faculty met to discuss, with the help of such able critics as Blackmur, Berryman, and Maritain, a select docket of literary masterpieces, with the noble aim of finding a consensus on what is what, and why. But in what particulars the masterpieces to be discussed were masterpieces (though one, not) no one bothered to say: the point was, to discuss them, weightily—and indeed it turned out at such a level of irrelevant animadversion that we find even as practical a working poet as the late Robert Fitzgerald delivering himself of remarks on the De Anima! But what made the masterpieces masterpieces, no way of telling was mentioned. There was no academic habit of it. Yet if you don’t look first at how a thing is made, you have no way of deciding whether it is made well or not so well. The tinkling Bodleian lyric is Shakespeare’s, as it says.

The establishment’s happy obsession with a work’s content leads moreover to discussions of much that isn’t actually there.

Professor Kitto of Cambridge told his Sather Lectures audience at Berkeley that if the Œdipus “addresses itself to the nerves and emotions but not seriously to the mind, then we must not include it among the world’s great works of art”—but what can he have imagined in it for the mind to respond to? With Æschylus he might have had a point: the Oresteia was produced 2,444 years nearer primitive religion than we are, and Erinyes were Erinyes.

But Sophocles did not fabricate his masterpiece of peripeteia to turn the Theatre of Dionysus into a graduate seminar, nor would his end-of-the-century Athenian audience have differed greatly from opera-goers today. For a writer, “thoughts” are what his characters think, not his audience; nobody but an engagé is likely to have a cast of serious thinkers anyway. Sophocles being an old pro, it is language and well-made-play-manship that punctually deliver us our pity and terror: the Œdipus, like any other fiction, is a construction within a context.

Another embarrassing trap that content-analysis sets for the unwary professor or reviewer is that he can find himself airing his moral distaste at the behavior of purely imaginary characters; and if he then forgets they were created to behave as they do, the

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self-satisfaction of pointing out that a spade is a spade becomes, unnoticed, the basis of his literary assessment. Why must Ovid squander his Mozartian genius on girls and bedrooms? Les Liaisons dangereuses is as brilliant as Le Princesse de Clèves, yes, but are we to include a chronique scabreuse, written to while away a barracks winter in a dismal provincial town, among the world’s great works of art? Established exceptions do of course exist: the sulks and tantrums of Achilles are not held to discommend the Iliad. But on the very morning I write this, one of the New York Times’s pontificating moralists was abusing an urban comedy of manners because “from these women’s relentlessly selfish pursuit of gratification and their utter lack of self-knowledge … the novel, as a whole, never becomes anything more than a vaguely trashy chronicle of vaguely depressing—and decidedly unpleasant—lives.”1 The editor who passed this petulant nonsense was perhaps not at his Aristotelian best. But we are all educated to think a piece of writing is what it is about. In prep school we plot-outline Hamlet, and this then is the play; in college the Insights we are purveyed become Hamlet for us in their turn. And content is everywhere. We read Homer and Tolstoi in translation as being Homer and Tolstoi, without a qualm about a translator’s era, social class, linguistic sensibility, or tendency to blush: for Anna’s “I’m pregnant,” she said, to Vronski, we read Mrs. Garnett’s KingJames-y “I am with child” and Ms. Edmonds’s extraordinary “she whispered slowly.” American Lit happens to be cluttered with novels lectured on for their content—causes, social upheavals, wars, racial and sexual inequalities, regional pretensions. Finally, we are an illiterate and piety-simple people, our minds much confused by ameliorist claptrap, in particular those abstractions we invent to make reality appear a less intractable frustration; and accordingly we look to literature for comforting nostrums.

And sure enough, “art’s ability to instruct and console [provides] a coherent system for interpreting the world and our role in it,” a professor of American Lit wrote in a recent Times review.2 What could be straighter Aristotle? Diluted, yes; chapel not church; but that “console” is still pity and terror, restated at Reader’s Digest level or not.

[Michiko Kakutani’s review of Maggie Paley’s Bad Manners, 18 January 1986.—SM] [Larry McCaffery’s review of Robertson Davies’s What’s Bred in the Bone, 15 December 1985. But McCaffery refers to “the old-fashioned virtues associated with great art of the past,” not with the postmodern fiction he champions.—SM] 1 2

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It is this pervasive spiritual miasma that is especially noxious to comedy. “Critics feel uneasy,” said William Gerhardie, “when a writer is not solemn. Who is he laughing at? who with? Warily they trot out that stupid word ‘satire,’ or the silliest word of all, ‘sophistication.’” This he wrote in an exasperated 1947 preface to the collected edition of his novels, and one shares his exasperation; but the trouble may well be the standard description content-critics find themselves stuck with, rather than just their uneasiness.

For example, The Way of the World portrays (a) the trivial social behavior of (b) irresponsible characters in (c) a totally artificial style that merely (d) emphasizes their moral shallowness (“frippons”: Voltaire)—not one of them (e) redeemed by suffering and thereby (f) made likable. The establishment reviewer will dutifully point out, too, that Congreve lacked moral stamina himself: at his first failure he gave up writing altogether, though only thirty years of age. The reprehension even carries over: Henry Green’s modernizations of Congreve’s Millamant— Amabel in Party Going and Mrs. Weatherby in Nothing—are clearly among his lightest creations. …

Yes; but to the writing itself?

As to absolute good/bad there is naturally no answer: that is not what is being talked about. But as to good/bad in the respective genres, then? But that six-point deprecation—is it of the work or of the genre? As with Ovid, is Congreve’s play brilliant but the comic mode regrettable? And here we are nearer an answer: for what if the comedy is rebuked less for anything it in fact is than for not being something entirely different instead?

A handy demonstration is a sequence from a Washington Post review, a year or so ago, of a comedy of manners (which, to be fair to its author, a Los Angeles Herald-Examiner review called “a gem of a novel”): “… from first to last [this sort of] novel is dominated not by ideas or observations or conflict or even passion, but by an elaborately relaxed, elaborately lightweight style.”3 The “style” was of course the author’s demonstration of what he could do with his material, but the rest is good standard establishmentese, and indeed the reviewer was from the Princeton English Department. But what can he have supposed this random list of desideranda had to do with the comedy of manners?

[Stephen Koch’s review of Spackman’s A Difference of Design, 14 August 1983.—SM]

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“Ideas,” as said, are for the philosopher or the engagé. But “observation” is above all what the comedy of manners results from—one has lived it! (Or does the Department still teach Wordsworth as shambling about the landscape jotting down the precise lilacs of the birdseye primrose’s umbel, for use in the impending thirty thousand lines?) But it is the no-conflict-no-passion that is the shocker, for the novel’s “subject” was the unhappy rival infatuations of two young women for an experienced man, his own conflict an equally unhappy consequence. Can the reviewer actually not have realized it was a comedy of manners he was reviewing? Or was it its being a comedy of manners that prejudiced him?—for what he described as the “realm of the rich” background, and the characters’ social level, seem to have upset him considerably: at one point the review is as good as shrill about them! At any rate, he can hardly have noticed the implication the review ended on: even English departments don’t argue that upperclass infatuations aren’t something to be stylishly relaxed about in print. There are, after all, improprieties we must put up with in Henry James too.

Yet, intellectually abashing or not, here I suggest the real answer lies before us: comedy is universally held to be an inferior genre, and inferior because the characters and the conduct it mimeîtai are somehow inferior—less dignified, less generally commendable, less noble, less humane, even less deserving of happiness, than mankind’s pompous traditional ideal of us suggests we must be.

And this, looked at historically, turns out to be almost wholly a masculine ideal. Our earliest Western literature, the Homeric epic, deals only with the deeds and the interests of men, the helpless fate of women her only part in it. With a few exceptions like Sappho, there have not even been women writers until the Renaissance. In consequence, for centuries of establishing tradition, what to write about seriously was what masculine theory and practice held to be serious. Historically, also, it was clear that when Sappho, Sulpicia, Vittoria Colonna, Louise Labé, and finally Mme. de La Fayette wrote, all they wrote about was the relationship of men with women— love, in short; not in the canon at all. (And indeed how not?

For millennia, women had been brought up to please—what they wrote about was simply the result!) And it is to be noted that the tradition did not change even when Etherege, Wycherley, Marivaux, Richardson, Prévost, and Constant saw the

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enchanting possibilities of the thing. It was only manners still.

And drawing-room manners.

Moreover, not only the topic but the way women write can strike us as from some different culture entirely. As Anthony Burgess wrote in a review of Elizabeth Bowen, women writers have a better natural fictional equipment than men. They notice surfaces, which is what novels are made out of; they have a phenomenal semantic range when it comes to dealing with texture, color, and nuance of speech; being the primal order of creation, they enclose men and see through them.

And one might add, they have long and detailed memories.

But even if on n’est jamais si n’importe quoi qu’on ne s’en offre de preuves, our stay here on earth is a shattering experience, and isn’t our literature there to show how commendably nobly humanely and so forth we put up with it? This, tragedy does and has always done. And, now we have the common man, the middling grades of misery can do it too: “I done me best when I was let.” But comedy? It lets the side down, and in public! What can it be but a minor genre?…

Well, comedy’s differences from tragedy naturally cannot be an aesthetic difference. One asks all art the same assessing question about the same aspect: does it do what its style claims for it? Art is “tragic” or “comic” simply as the artist has seen his material becoming. And this is a function of his sophistication as much as of his temperament—Sartre for example never quite outgrew being engagé, Camus did. But the material art is made of is perfectly irrelevant.

Art is also, it has to be said, sometimes a mere matter of technique. An approving reviewer of a recent comedy of manners of my own wrote that the “dark” tone of some passages between lovers “shaded them into reality.” But consider: to put a quaver in a girl’s voice simply means orchestrating the vowels in a dialogue, and is no more than this to have created Forster’s “rounded” character from what was flat a moment before?

Done even by those who pretend not to. Few writers have been more tiresomely hypocritical about writing than Plato: Book X of the Republic even abuses us for bothering about our style! Very lofty-minded and Platonic indeed. But Dionysius of Halicarnassus preserves a scandalous story: to the end of his days Plato fussed over his prose (Dionysius says) “like a hair-dresser over a coiffure,” and a writing tablet of his was even found, after

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his death, on which he had tried out different orders for the first four words of the Republic itself. It is not an anecdote you find in any college course. You only come on it by chance. It is in Quintilian too. But who reads Quintilian either?

American Voice, 1986