1965-winter

RTERLY

3

The novels of James Baldwin

LUCIEN STRYK

21

'Let the spring breeze enter'

ZEN POEMS

28

ZEN ANECDOTES

30

SHINKICHI TAKAHASHI:

35

ROBERT A. BONE

The Quest of Zen

THREE POEMS

Humanism

}TranSlated

by Takashi Ikemoto

and Lucien Stryk

ERICH HELLER

37

The artist's journey into the interior: from Hegel to Hamlet (part two)

JOHN STEWART CARTER

55

Poetry and the hucksters

ART SINSABAUGH

64

Midwest landscapes: photography

WILLIAM EARLE

67

What is man?

HENRY VEATCH

74

vs.

Behaviorism

Two cultures-two kinds of

knowledge SCOTT GREER

80

The third culture and the self-fulfilling prophecy

W. B. SCOTT

94

The cypress veil

WALLACE DOUGLAS

105

The case of James T. Farrell

NEWTON BERRY

124

A preface to the death fantasy sequence from "Judgment Day"

JAMES T. FARRELL

127

The Case of James T. Farrell

Fragments from the unpublished fantasy sequence of "Judg­ ment Day" death

WALPOLA RAHULA

139

A note on future plans

145

Buddhism in the western world

Poetry RONALD JOHNSON

50

Winter

STEPHEN BEAL

60

"In Grateful Memory of the 133 Woodbridge Men Who Made the Supreme Sacrifice in the Great War"

FELIX POLLAK

61

Popular song / Critics' critter

MAXINE KUMIN

62

August 9th from the Joppa Diary

63

June 15th

PHILIP WHALEN

141

The season

DAVID PEARSON ETTER

141

Y oknapatawpha

SHERWOOD ANDERSON

64

American spring song

PETER MICHELSON

65

Chicago plainsong:

a

requiem for

feces PETER VIERECK

85

Grace of pine

JOHN STEWART CARTER

86

RONALD TAVEL

JEROME ROTHENBERG

87

Elegy written on the leaning tower Sands Street, Brooklyn

91

Dimensions

144

Antiphon

92

James Rooks

142

Mario Lanza was a relative of mine

143

The spare

T�'i"�TERLY

UPIPHOTO

The novels of James Baldwin ROBERT A. BONE

He made me a watchman upon the city wall,

And if I am a Christian, I am the least of all.

-NEGRO SPIRITUAL

�E

Negro writer to emerge during the last decade is of His publications, which include three books of essays, three

MOST IMPORTANT

course James Baldwin.

novels, and two plays, have had a stunning impact on our cultural life. His po­ litical role, as a leading spokesman of the Negro revolt, has been scarcely less effective. Awards and honors, wealth and success, have crowned his career, and Baldwin has become a national celebrity.

Under the circumstances, the separation of the artist from the celebrity is as difficult as it is necessary. For Baldwin is an uneven writer, the quality of whose work can by no means be taken for granted. His achievement in the novel is most open to dispute, and it is that which I propose to discuss in some detail. Mean­ while, it may be possible to narrow the area of controversy by a preliminary assessment of his talent.

I find Baldwin strongest as an essayist, weakest as a playwright, and successful

in the novel form on only one occasion. For the three books of essays, Notes of a

Native Son

(1955), Nobody Knows My Name (1961), and The Fire Next

Time (1963), I have nothing but admiration. Baldwin has succeeded in transpos­

ing the entire discussion of American race relations to the interior plane; it is a major breakthrough for the American imagination. In the theater, he has written one competent apprentice play, The Amen Corner, first produced at Howard Uni­ versity in 1955, and one unspeakably bad propaganda piece, Blues for Mister Charlie (1964). In the novel, the impressive achievement of Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953) has not been matched by his more recent books, Giovanni's Room (1956) and Another Country (1962). Perhaps a closer acquaintance with the author's life will help us to account for these vicissitudes.

James Baldwin was a product of the Great Migration. His father had come North from New Orleans; his mother, from Maryland. James was born in Harlem in 1924, the first of nine children. His father was a factory worker and lay preacher, TRI-QUARTERLY

13

disciplines of poverty and the store-front church. He experienced a profound religious crisis during the summer of his four­ teenth year, entered upon a youthful ministry, and remained in the pulpit for three and the boy was raised under the twin

years. The second crisis of his life was his break with this milieu; that is, with his father's values, hopes, and aspirations for his son. These two crises-the turn into the fold and the turn away-provide the first

play.

Baldwin graduated from De Witt Clinton on

material for his first novel and his

raw

High School in 1942, having served

the staff of the literary magazine.

He had already discovered in this brief en­

of transcending his

appointed destiny. Shortly after graduation

counter

means

a

he left home, determined to support himself as best he could while developing his talent as a writer.

After six years of frustration and false starts, however, he had

fellowships but no substantial publications to his credit. This initial literary failure, coupled with the pressures of his personal life, drove him into exile. In 1948, at the age of twenty-four, Baldwin left America for Paris, never intending two

to

a

return.

He remained abroad for nine years. Europe gave him many things. It gave him world perspective from which to approach the question of his own identity. It

gave him a tender love affair which would dominate the pages of his later fiction.

But above all, Europe gave him back himself. Some two years after his arrival in

Paris, Baldwin suffered a breakdown and went off to Switzerland to recover: There, in that absolutely alabaster landscape, armed with two Bessie Smith records and a typewriter, I began to try to re-create the life that I had first known as a child and from which I had spent so many years in flight I ....

had never listened to Bessie Smith in America (in the same way that, for years, I would not touch watermelon), but in Europe she helped to reconcile me to

being a "nigger."!

The immediate fruit of self-recovery was two books of reconciliation with his racial

a

great creative outburst. First came

heritage.

and The Amen Corner represent a search for roots,

Go Tell It on the Mountain a

surrender to

tradition, an

acceptance of the Negro past. Then came a series of essays which probe, deeper than anyone has dared, the psychic history of this nation. They are a moving record of a man's struggle to define the forces that have shaped him, in order that he may accept himself. question of his male identity.

Last

Giovanni's Room, which

explores the Here Baldwin extends the theme of self-acceptance came

into the sexual realm.

Toward the end of his stay in Paris, Baldwin experienced the first symptoms of a

crisis from which he has

never

recovered.

Having exhausted the theme of self­

acceptance, he cast about for fresh material, but his third novel stubbornly refused to move.

He has described this moment of panic in a later essay:

"It is the point

which many artists lose their minds, or commit suicide, or throw themselves into good works, or try to enter politics.'? Recognizing these dangers to his art, at

Baldwin has not succeeded in

avoiding them.

politics has been the recent bent of his career.

41

TRI-QUARTERL Y

Something like good works and Unable to grow

as

an

artist, he

has fallen back upon a tradition of protest writing which he formerly denounced.

Baldwin returned to America in 1957. was

ready

to confront society.

The buttered

self, he must have felt,

A good many of the essays in Nobody Knows My

impressions of America, but this is a transitional book, still largely concerned with questions of identity. Protest, however, becomes the dominant theme of his next three books. In Another Country, The Fire Next Time, and Blues for Mister Charlie, he assumes the role of Old Testament prophet, call­ ing down the wrath of history on the heads of the white oppressor.

Baldwin's career may be divided into two distinct periods. His first five books have been concerned with the emotion of shame. The flight from self, the quest for identity, and the sophisticated acceptance of one's "blackness" are the themes Name record his initial

that flow from this emotion.

His last three books have been concerned with the

emotion of rage. An apocalyptic vision and a new stridency of tone are brought

against the racial and the sexual oppressor. The question then arises, why has he avoided the prophetic role until the recent past? to bear

The answer, I believe, lies in Baldwin's relationship to his father, and still more, to his spiritual father, Richard Wright.

Baldwin's father died in

1943, and within

a year Baldwin met Wright for the first time.

It is amply clear from his essays that the twenty-year-old youth adopted the older man as a father-figure. What

followed is

simplicity itself: Baldwin's habit of defining himself in opposition to new relationship.

If Wright was committed to

his father was transferred to the

protest fiction, Baldwin would launch his own career with a rebellious essay called

"Everybody's Protest Novel.:" So long as Wright remained alive, the prophetic strain in Baldwin was suppressed. But with Wright's death in 1960, Baldwin was free to become his father. He has been giving Noah the rainbow sign ever since.

2.

Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953) is the best of Baldwin's

best is very good indeed.

novels, and the

It ranks with Jean Toomer's Cane, Richard

Wright's

Native Son, and Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man as a major contribution to Ameri­ can fiction.

essence

of

For this novel cuts through the walls of the store-front church to the

Negro experience

in America.

This is Baldwin's earliest

world, his

bright and morning star, and it glows with metaphorical intensity. Its emotions are his emotions; its language, his native tongue.

The result is a prose of un­ usual power and authority. One senses in Baldwin's first novel a confidence, con­ trol, and mastery of style which he has not attained again in the novel form.

The central event of Go Tell It on the Mountain is the religious conversion of an adolescent boy.

In a long autobiographical essay, which forms a part of The Fire Next Time+ Baldwin leaves no doubt that he was writing of his own experi­ ence. During the summer of his fourteenth year, he tells us, he succumbed to the spiritual seduction of a woman evangelist. On the night of his conversion, he suddenly found himself lying on the floor before the altar. He describes his trance­ like state, the singing and clapping of the saints, and the all-night prayer vigil which helped to bring him "through." He then recalls the circumstances of his life which TRI-QUARTERLY

I

s

prompted so pagan and desperate journey to the throne of Grace.

The overwhelming fact of Baldwin's childhood was his victimization by the white power structure. At first he experienced white power only indirectly, as refracted through the brutality and degradation of the Harlem ghetto. The world beyond the ghetto seemed remote, and scarcely could be linked in a child's imagination to the harrowing conditions of his daily life. And yet a vague terror, transmitted through his parents to the ghetto child, attested to the power of the white world.

Meanwhile, in the forefront of his consciousness was a set of fears by no means vague.

To a young boy growing up in the Harlem ghetto, damnation was

a

clear and

present danger: "For the wages of sin were visible everywhere, in every wine­ stained and urine-splashed hallway, in every clanging ambulance bell, in every scar on

the faces of the pimps and their whores, in every helpless, newborn baby

being brought into this danger, in every knife and pistol fight on the Avenue,"!

To such a boy, the store-front church offered a refuge and a sanctuary from the terrors of the street.

God and safety became synonomous, and the church, a part

of his survival strategy.

Fear, then, was the principal motive of Baldwin's conversion: "I became, dur­

ing my fourteenth year, for the first time in my life afraid-afraid of the evil within "(; me and afraid of the evil without.

As the twin pressures of sex and race began to mount, the adolescent boy struck a desperate bargain with God. In exchange for sanctuary, he surrendered his sexuality, and abandoned any aspirations which might bring him into conflict with white power. He was safe, but walled off from the world; saved, but isolated from experience. This, to Baldwin, is the historical betrayal of the Negro church. In exchange for the power of the Word, the Negro trades away the personal power of his sex and the social power of his people.

Life on these terms was unacceptable to Baldwin; he did not care to settle for less than his potential as a man. If his deepest longings were thwarted in the church, he would pursue them through his art. Sexual and racial freedom thus became his constant theme. And yet, even in breaking with the church, he pays tribute to its power: "In spite of everything, there was in the life I fled a zest and a joy and a capacity for facing and surviving disaster that are very moving and very rare."? We shall confront, then, in Go Tell It on the Mountain, a certain complexity of tone. Baldwin maintains an ironic distance from his material, even as he portrays the spiritual force and emotional appeal of store-front Christianity.

So much for the biographical foundations of the novel. The present action commences on the morning of John Grimes' fourteenth birthday, and before the night is out, he is born again in Christ. Part I, "The Seventh Day," introduces us to the boy and his family, his fears and aspirations, and the Temple of the Fire Baptized which is the center of his life. Part II, "The Prayers of the Saints," con­ tains a series of flashbacks in which we share the inmost thoughts and private his­ tories of his Aunt Florence, his mother, Elizabeth, and his putative father, Gabriel.

Part III, "The Threshing-Floor," returns us to the present and completes the story of the boy's conversion.

61

TRI-QUARTERL Y

Parts I and III are set in Harlem in the spring of 1935.

however, takes place for the

most

part down home.

The action of Part II,

Florence, Elizabeth, and

Gabriel belong to a transitional generation, born roughly between 1875 and 1900.

Go Tell It on the Mountain is thus a novel of the Great Migration.

It traces the

process of secularization which occurred when the Negro left the land for the Northern ghettos. This theme, to be sure, is handled ironically. Baldwin's pro­

tagonist "gets religion," but he is too young, too frightened, and too innocent to grasp the implications of his choice.

It is through the lives of the adults that we achieve perspective on the boy's conversion. His Aunt Florence has been brought to the evening prayer meeting by her fear of death. She is dying of cancer, and in her extremity humbles her­ self before God, asking forgiveness of her sins. These have consisted of a driving ambition and a ruthless hardening of heart. Early in her adult life, she left her dying mother to come North, in hopes of bettering her lot. Later, she drove from her side a husband whom she loved: "It had not been her fault that Frank was

the way he was, determined to live and die a common nigger" (p. 92).8 All of her deeper feelings have been sacrificed to a futile striving for "whiteness" and

respectability. Now she contemplates the wages of her virtue: an agonizing death in a lonely furnished room.

Elizabeth, as she conceives her life, has experienced both the fall and the redemption. Through Richard, she has brought an illegitimate child into the world, but through Gabriel, her error is retrieved. She fell in love with Richard during the last summer of her girlhood, and followed him North to Harlem. There they took jobs as chambermaid and elevator boy, hoping to be married soon.

Richard is sensitive, intelligent, and determined to educate himself. Late one evening, however, he is arrested and accused of armed robbery. When he pro­ tests his innocence, he is beaten savagely by the police. Ultimately he is released, but half hysterical with rage and shame, he commits suicide. Under the impact of this blow, Elizabeth retreats from life. Her subsequent marriage to Gabriel represents safety, timidity, and atonement for her sin.

As Gabriel prays on the night of John's conversion, his thoughts revert to the events of his twenty-first year: his own conversion and beginning ministry, his joyless marriage to Deborah, and his brief affair with Esther. Deborah has been raped by white men at the age of sixteen. Thin, ugly, sexless, she is treated by the Negroes as a kind of holy fool. Gabriel, who has been a wild and reckless youth, marries her precisely to mortify the flesh. But he cannot master his desire. adultery with Esther, and informed that she is pregnant, refuses all emotional support. Esther dies in childbirth and her son, Royal, who grows to manhood unacknowledged by his father, is killed in a Chicago dive.

Soon after the death of Royal, Deborah dies childless, and Gabriel is left with­ out an heir. When he moves North, however, the Lord sends him a sign in the He commits

form of an unwed mother and her fatherless child.

promises

to

raise Johnny as his own son.

He marries Elizabeth and

In the course of time the second Royal

is born, and Gabriel rejoices in the fulfillment of God's promise. But John's half TRI-QUARTERLY

17

brother, the fruit of the prophet's seed, has turned his back on God. Tonight he lies at home with a knife wound, inflicted in a street-fight with some whites. To Gabriel, therefore, John's conversion is a bitter irony: "Only the son of the bond­ woman stood where the rightful heir should stand" (p. 128).

Through this allusion, Baldwin alerts us to the metaphorical possibilities of his plot. Gabriel's phrase is from Genesis 21, verses 9 and 10: "And Sarah saw the son of Hagar the Egyptian, which she had born unto Abraham, mocking. Where­ fore she said unto Abraham, Cast out this bondwoman and her son: for the son of the bondwoman shall not be heir with my son, even with Isaac." Hagar's bastard son is of course Ishmael, the archetypal outcast. Apparently Baldwin wants us to view

Ishmael.

Gabriel and

Johnny in metaphorical relation to Abraham and This tableau of guilty father and rejected child will serve him as an

emblem of race relations in America.

Baldwin sees the Negro quite literally as the bastard child of American civiliza­ In Gabriel's double involvement with

tion.

bastardy, we have a re-enactment of

the white man's historic crime. In Johnny, the innocent victim of Gabriel's hatred, we

have an archetypal image of the Negro child.

Obliquely, by means of an ex­

tended metaphor, Baldwin approaches the very essence of Negro experience. That essence

is rejection, and its most destructive consequence is shame.

But God, the

Heavenly Father, does not reject the Negro utterly. He casts down only to raise up. This is the psychic drama which occurs beneath the surface of John's conversion.

The Negro child, rejected by the whites for reasons that he cannot understand, is afHicted by an overwhelming sense of shame. Something mysterious, he feels, must be wrong with him, that he should be so cruelly ostracized. In time he comes to associate these feelings with the color of his skin-the basis, after all, of his rejection. He feels, and is made to feel, perpetually dirty and unclean: John hated sweeping this carpet, for dust arose, clogging his nose and sticking to his sweaty skin, and he felt that should he sweep it forever, the clouds of dust would not diminish, the rug would not be clean. It became in his imagi­ nation his impossible, lifelong task, his hard trial, like that of a man he had read about somewhere, whose curse it was to push a boulder up a steep hill

(p. 27).

This quality of Negro life, unending struggle with one's own blackness, is sym­ bolized by Baldwin in the family name, Grimes.

One can readily understand how

by contact with the Christian tradition and transformed into an obsession with original sin. Gabriel's sermons take off from such texts as "I am a man of unclean lips," or "He which is filthy, let him be filthy still." The Negro's religious ritual, as Baldwin points out in an early essay, is permeated with color symbolism: "Wash me, cried the slave to his Maker, and I shall be whiter, whiter than snow! For black is the color of evil; only the robes of the saved are white."?

Given this attack on the core of the self, how can the Negro respond? If he accepts the white man's equation of blackness with evil, he is lost. Hating his true self, he will undertake the construction of a counter-self along the following lines: such

sense

a

8

[

of

personal

TRI-QVARTERL Y

shame

might

have been inflamed

everything "black" I now disown. To such a man, Christ is a kind of spiritual bleaching cream. Only if the Negro challenges the white man's moral categories can he hope to survive on honorable terms. This involves the sentiment; everything "black" I now embrace, however painfully, as mine. There is, in short, the path of self-hatred and the path of self-acceptance. Both are available to Johnny within the framework of the church, but he is deterred from one by the negative example of his father.

Consider Gabriel.

The substance of his life is moral evasion.

A

preacher

child, he cannot face the evil in himself. In order to preserve his image as the Lord's anointed, he has sacrificed the lives of those around him. His principal victim is Johnny, who is not his natural child. In disowning the bastard, he disowns the "blackness" in himself. Gabriel's psychological mechanisms are, so to say, white. Throughout his of the gospel, and secretly the father of an illegitimate

work Baldwin has described the scapegoat mechanism which is fundamental to the white man's sense of self. To the question, Who am I?, the white man answers: I am white, that is,

immaculate, without stain.

I

am

the purified, the saved, the

saintly, the elect. It is the black who is the embodiment of evil. Let him, the son of the bondwoman, pay the price of my sins.

From self-hatred flows not only self-righteousness but self-glorification as well.

From the time of his conversion Gabriel has been living in a world of compen­

satory fantasy. He sees the Negro race as a chosen people and himself as prophet and founder of a royal line.

But if Old Testament materials can be

appropriated fantasy world, they also offer a powerful means of grappling with reality. When the Negro preacher compares the lot of his people to that of the children of Israel, he provides his flock with a series of metaphors which cor­ respond to their deepest experience. The church thus offers to the Negro masses It is with this poetry of suffering, which a ritual enactment of their daily pain. to buttress such

a

Baldwin calls the power of the Word, that the final section of the novel is concerned.

The first fifteen pages of Part III contain some of Baldwin's most effective writing.

As John Grimes lies before the altar, a series of visionary states passes through his soul. Dream fragments and Freudian sequences, lively fantasies and Aesopian

allegories, combine to produce a generally surrealistic effect. Images of darkness and chaos, silence and emptiness, mist and cold---cumulative patterns developed early in the novel-function now at maximum intensity. These images of damna­ tion express the state of the soul when thrust into outer darkness by a rejecting, punishing, castrating father-figure who is the surrogate of a hostile society. The dominant emotions are shame, despair, guilt, and fear.

At the depth of John's despair, a sound emerges to assuage his pain: He had heard it all his life. but it was only now that his to this sound that came from the

ears were

opened

darkness, that could only come from dark­

ness, that yet bore such sure witness to the glory of the light. And now in his moaning, and so far from any help, he heard it in himself-it rose from his bleeding, his cracked-open heart. It was a sound of rage and weeping which filled the grave, rage and weeping from time set free, but bound now TRI-QUARTERLY

19

in

eternity; rage that had no language, weeping with no voice-which yet spoke now, to John's startled soul, of boundless melancholy, of the bitterest patience, and the longest night; of the deepest water, the strongest chains, the most cruel lash; of humility most wretched, the dungeon most absolute, of love's bed defiled, and birth dishonored, and most bloody, unspeakable, sudden death. Yes, the darkness hummed with murder: the body in the water, the body in the fire, the body on the tree. John looked down the line of these armies of darkness, army upon army, and his soul wisphered, Who are these? (p. 228).

This is the sound, though John Grimes doesn't know it, of the blues.

It is the

sound of Bessie Smith, to which James Baldwin listened as he wrote Go Tell It on the Mountain.

It is the sound of all Negro art and all Negro religion, for it flows

from the cracked-open heart.

On these harsh terms, Baldwin's protagonist discovers his identity. to those armies of darkness and must forever share their

Who

am

pain.

He belongs

To the

question,

I?, he can now reply: I am he who suffers, and yet whose suffering on

occasion is "from time set free." And thereby he discovers his humanity, for only ritualize his pain. We are now very close to that plane of human experi­

man can ence

where art and religion intersect.

What Baldwin wants us to feel is the emo­

tional pressure exerted on the Negro's cultural forms by his exposure to white oppression. And finally to comprehend that these forms alone, through their power of transforming suffering, have enabled him to survive his terrible ordeal.

3.

Give not thyself up,

then, to fire, lest it invert thee.

-MOBYDICK

Giovanni's Room (1956) is by far the weakest of Baldwin's novels. There is a tentative, unfinished quality about the book, as if in merely broaching the subject

homosexuality Baldwin had exhausted his creative energy. Viewed in retro­ spect, it seems less a novel in its own right than a first draft of Another Country.

The surface of the novel is deliberately opaque, for Baldwin is struggling to articu­ late the most intimate, the most painful, the most elusive of emotions. The charac­ ters are vague and disembodied, the themes half-digested, the colors rather bleached than vivified. We recognize in this sterile psychic landscape the unprocessed raw of

material of art.

And yet this novel occupies

a

key position in Baldwin's spiritual development.

Links run backward to Go Tell It on the Mountain as well as forward to Another

Country. The very furniture of Baldwin's mind derives from the store-front church of his boyhood and adolescence. When he attempts a novel of homosexual love, with an all-white cast of characters and

a

European setting, he simply transposes

the moral topography of Harlem to the streets of Paris.

When he strives toward

sexual self-acceptance, he automatically casts the homosexual in a priestly role.

Before

supporting this interpretation, let me summarize the plot. David, an

American youth living abroad in Paris, meets a girl from back home and asks her 10

I

TRI-QUARTERLY

to marry him.

Hella is undecided, however, and she goes to Spain to think it over.

During her absence, David meets Giovanni, a proud and handsome young Italian.

They fall deeply in love and have a passionate affair. When Hella returns, David is forced to choose between his male lover and his American fiancee. He abandons Giovanni to the homosexual underworld which is

only too eager to claim him. disgusting old fairy," inflicts upon the youth a series of humiliations, Giovanni strangles his tormentor. He is tried for murder and executed by the guillotine. Meanwhile David, who has gone with Hella to the south of France, cannot forget Giovanni. Tortured by guilt and self-doubt, he breaks off his engagement by revealing the truth about himself.

At the emotional center of the novel is the relationship between David and Giovanni. It is highly symbolic, and to understand what is at stake, we must turn

When Guillaume, whom Baldwin describes

as

"a

essay on Andre Gide.!" Published toward the end of 1954, about a year before the appearance of Giovanni's Room, this essay is concerned with the to Baldwin's

personality and the precarious balance which was struck be­ tween them. On the one side was his sensuality, his lust for the boys on the Piazza d'Espagne, threatening him always with utter degradation. On the other was his Protestantism, his purity, his otherworldliness-that part of him which was not carnal, and which found expression in his Platonic marriage to Madeleine. As Baldwin puts it, "She was his Heaven who would forgive him for his Hell and two sides of Gide's

help him to endure it." It is a drama of salvation, in which the celibate wife, through selfless dedication to the suffering artist, becomes in effect a priest. novel, Giovanni plays the role of Gide; David, of Madeleine.

Giovanni is not merely a sensualist, but a Platonist as well: "I want to escape this dirty world, this dirty body" (p. 35). It is the purity of Giovanni's love for In the present

...

David-its idealized, transcendent quality-that protects him from a kind of homo­ sexual Hell. David is the string connecting him to Heaven, and when David abandons

him, he plunges into the abyss.

We can now appreciate the force of David's remark, "The burden of his salva­ tion seemed to be

on

me

and I could not endure it"

to save, David rejects the

power with Giovanni is

a

priestly office.

kind of novitiate.

stated as follows: does David have

the heterosexual world?

a

(p. 168). Possessing the

Seen in this light, his love affair

The dramatic conflict of the novel true vocation?

Is he prepared to

When David leaves Giovanni for

can

be

renounce

Hella, he betrays his

calling, but ironically he has been ruined both for the priesthood and the world.

It is Giovanni, Baldwin's doomed hero, who is the true priest. For a priest is nothing but a journeyman in suffering. Thus Giovanni defies David, the American tourist, even to understand his village: "And you will have no idea of the life there, dripping and bursting and beautiful and terrible, as you have no idea of my life now" (p. 203). It is a crucial distinction for all of Baldwin's work: there are the relatively innocent-the laity who are mere apprentices in human suffering -and the fully initiated, the clergy who are intimate with pain. Among the laity may be numbered Americans, white folks, heterosexuals, and squares; among the clergy, Europeans, Negroes, homosexuals, hipsters, and jazzmen. The finest stateTRI-QUARTERLY

111

ment of this theme, in which the jazzman is portrayed as priest, is Baldwin's moving

story, "Sonny's Blues."!'

Assumption of the priestly role is always preceded by an extraordinary experi­ of suffering, often symbolized in Baldwin's work by the death of a child.

Thus in The Amen Corner Sister Margaret becomes a store-front church evangelist after giving birth to a dead child. And in Giovanni's Room, the protagonist leaves his wife, his family, and his village after the birth of a still-born child: "When I knew ence

that it was dead I took our crucifix off the wall and I spat on it and threw it on

the floor and my mother and my girl screamed and I went out" (p. 205). It is at this point that Giovanni's inverted priesthood begins.

Like Gide, he rebels

against God, but the priestly impulse persists. He retreats from the heterosexual world, achieves a kind of purity in his relationship with David, is betrayed, and consigned to martyrdom.

The patterns first explored in Giovanni's Room are given full expression in Another Country. Rufus is a Negro Giovanni-a journeyman in suffering and a martyr to racial oppression. Vivaldo and the other whites are mere apprentices, who cannot grasp the beauty and the terror of Negro life. Eric is a David who completes his novitiate, and whose priestly or redemptive role is central to the novel. There has been, however, a crucial change of tone. In Giovanni's Room, one part of Baldwin wants David to escape from the male prison, even as another part remains committed to the ideal of homosexual love. In the later novel, this conflict has been resolved. Baldwin seems convinced that homosexuality is a liber­

ating force, and he now brings to the subject a certain proselytizing zeal.

4.

Another Country (1962) is a failure on the grand scale. It is an ambitious novel, rich in thematic possibilities, for Baldwin has at his disposal a body of ideas bril­

liantly developed in his essays. When he tries to endow these ideas with imaginative life, however, his powers of invention are not equal to the task. The plot consists of little more than

a

series of occasions for talk and fornication.

Since the latter

is a limited vehicle for the expression of complex ideas, talk takes over, and the novel drowns in a torrent of rhetoric.

The ideas themselves

are

impressive enough.

At the heart of what Baldwin

calls the white problem is a moral cowardice, a refusal to confront the "dark" side of human experience.

The white American, at once over-protected and repressed,

exhibits an infuriating tendency to deny the reality of pain and suffering, violence and evil,

sex

and death.

must strike the less

He preserves in the teeth of human circumstance what

protected as a kind of willful innocence.

The American Negro, exposed to the ravages of reality by his status as a slave, has

never

come to

enjoyed the luxury of innocence.

On the contrary, his dark skin has

be associated, at some buried level of the white psyche, with those for­

bidden impulses and hidden terrors which the white man is afraid to face. The

unremitting daily warfare of American race relations must be understood in these symbolic terms. By projecting the "blackness" of his own being upon the dark

121

TRI-QUARTERLY

skin of his Negro victim, the white man hopes to exercise the chaotic forces which threaten to destroy him from within.

The psychic cost is of course enormous.

The white man loses the experience

of "blackness," sacrificing both its beauty and its terror to the illusion of security.

In the end, he loses his

identity.

For a man who cannot acknowledge the dark

impulses of his own soul cannot have the vaguest notion of who he is. A stranger to himself and others, the most salient feature of his personality will be a fatal bewildermen t.

There are psychic casualties on the Negro side as well. No human personality escape the effects of prolonged emotional rejection. The victim of this cruelty will defend himself with hatred and with dreams of vengeance, and wi1llose, perhaps

can

forever, his normal capacity for love. Strictly speaking, this set of defenses, and the threat of self-destruction which they pose, constitutes the Negro problem.

It is up to the whites to break this vicious circle of rejection and hatred. can

They

do so only by facing the void, by confronting chaos, by making the necessary

journey to "another country." What the white folks need is a closer acquaintance with the blues. Then perhaps they will be ready to join the human race. But only if the bloodless learn to bleed will it be possible for the Negro to lay down his burden of hatred and revenge.

So much for the conceptual framework of the novel.

What dramatic materials

employed to invest these themes with life? A Greenwich Village setting and hipster idiom ("Beer, dad, then we'll split"). A square thrown in for laughs.

A side trip to Harlem (can we be slumming?). A good deal of boozing, and an are

a

occasional stick of tea.

("He bent down to lift off the scarlet bikini"). Five orgasms (two interracial and two homosexual) or approxi­ mately one per eighty pages, a significant increase over the Mailer rate. Distracted Some male cheesecake

by this nonsense, how can one attend to the serious business of the novel?

In one respect only does the setting of Another Country succeed. Baldwin's descriptions of New York contain striking images of malaise, scenes and gestures which expose the moral chaos of contemporary urban life. The surface of his prose reflects the aching loneliness of the city with the poignancy of a Hopper

painting.

Harrassed commuters and jostled pedestrians

seem

to yearn for

closer

contact.

Denizens of a Village bar clutch their drinks with a gesture of buried

despair.

The whir of cash registers and the blatant glare of neon signs proclaim

the harsh ascendancy of the commercial spirit.

The tense subway crowds and the

The furtive scribblings on ubiquitous police convey lavatory walls provide a chilling commentary, in their mixture of raw lust and ethnic hate, on the scope and depth of our depravity.

Structurally speaking, the novel consists of two articulating parts. Book I is concerned to demonstrate how bad things really are in this America. Books II and III encompass the redemeptive movement, the symbolic journey to "another country."

The central figure of Book I is Rufus Scott, a talented jazz drummer who is driven to suicide by the pressures of a racist society. Sensitive, bitter, violent, he a

sense

of latent violence.

TRI-QUARTERLY

113

by pounding on the white skin of his drums. With some­ thing of the same malice, he torments his white mistress, ultimately driving her insane. Crushed by this burden of guilt, he throws himself from the George Wash­ ington Bridge. Rufus, in short, is a peculiarly passive Bigger Thomas, whose mur­ derous impulses turn back upon himself. Like Bigger, he was created to stir the conscience of the nation. For the underlying cause of Rufus' death is the failure of his white friends to comprehend the depth of his despair.

In the melting pot of Greenwich Village, Baldwin brings together a group of sublimates his hatred

white Americans whose lives are linked to Rufus' fate.

His closest friend is Vivaldo

Moore, an "Irish wop" who has escaped from the slums of Brooklyn. Cass, a girl stock, has rebelled against her background to marry

of upperclass New England

aspiring writer. Eric Jones, having left Alabama for an acting career in New York, has experienced a double exile, and is about to return from a two-year sojourn an

in France.

Each of these friends has failed Rufus in his hour of need. ness

of the whites that Baldwin

means

to stress.

It is the moral obtuse­

Rufus stands in relation to his

friends as jazzman to audience: "Now he stood before the misty doors of the jazz

joint, peering in, sensing rather than seeing the frantic black people on the stand and the oblivious, mixed crowd at the bar" (p. 4-5, my emphasis). The audience simply refuses to hear the frantic plea in an insistent riff which seems to ask, "Do you love me?" It is a failure of love, but still more of imagination. Vivaldo and the others fail to transcend their innocence. They are blinded by their fear of self.

Meaning well, they acquiesce in Rufus' death.

Having killed off Rufus early in the novel, Baldwin pursues the theme of ven­ geance and reconciliation through the character of Ida Scott. Embittered by the death of her brother, on whom she had counted to save her from the streets of Harlem, Ida takes revenge on the nearest white man. She moves in with Vivaldo,

ostensibly in love, but actually exploiting the arrangement to advance her career as a blues singer. Toward the end of the novel, however, Vivaldo achieves a new sense of reality. This enables Ida, who has come reluctantly to love him, to confess to her deception. In a gesture of reconciliation, she slips from her finger a ruby­ eyed snake ring-a gift from Rufus, and a symbol of her heritage of hate.

Books II and I II are dominated by the figure of Eric Jones, the young actor who has gone abroad to find himself. His adolescence in Alabama was marked by a homosexual encounter with a Negro youth. In New York he has a brief,

violent, and radically unsatisfying affair with Rufus, from which he flees to France.

There he falls in love with Yves, a Paris street boy, and through a chaste and tactful

courtship wins his trust and love. As Book II opens, they are enjoying an idyllic holiday in a rented villa on the Cote d' Azur. Eric must soon leave for America, however, where he has accepted a part in a Broadway play. After a suitable in­ terval, Yves will join him in New York.

Since the love affair of Eric and Yves is the turning point of the novel, we must pause to examine its wider implications. Book II commences with a highly charged,

symbolic prose:

141

TRI-QUARTERLY

Eric sat naked in his rented garden. Flies buzzed and boomed in the brilliant heat, and a yellow bee circled his head. Eric remained very stiU, then reached for the cigarettes beside him and lit one, hoping that the smoke would drive the bee away. Yves' tiny black-and-white kitten stalked the garden as though it were Africa, crouching beneath the mimosas like a panther and leaping into the air (p. 183).

Whitman, his spiritual progenitor, Baldwin tends to endow his diffuse sexuality with mythic significance. Here he depicts, in this Mediterranean garden, what appears to be a homosexual Eden. Then, in an attempt to fuse two levels of his own experience, he brings into metaphorical relation the idea of homosexuality and the idea of Africa. Each represents to the "majority" imagination a kind of primal chaos, yet each contains the possibility of liberation. For to be Negro, or to be homosexual, is to be in constant touch with that sensual reality which the white (read: heterosexual) world is at such pains to deny.

The male lovers, naked in the garden, are not to be taken too literally. What Baldwin means to convey through this idyllic episode is the innocence of the un­ repressed. He has been reading, one would surmise, Norman Brown's Life Against Death. "Children," Brown reminds us, "explore in indiscriminate fashion all the erotic potentialities of the human body. In Freudian terms, children are poly­ "12 In this episode on the Mediterranean coast, we are back morphously perverse. in the cradle of man, back in the sexually and racially undifferentiated human past; back in the lost paradise of the polymorphously perverse.

On these mythic foundations, Baldwin constructs a theory of personality. The primal stuff of human personality is undifferentiated: "He was, briefly and horribly, in a region where there were no definitions of any kind, neither of color nor of male and female" (pp. 301-2). One must face this formlessness, however, before Like

one can

hope to achieve form.

At the core of Baldwin's fiction is an existentialist psychology. In a passage whose language is reminiscent of Genesis, he describes Vivaldo's struggle to define

himself: "And beneath all this

was

the void where

anguish lived and questions

crouched, which referred only to Vivaldo and to no one else on earth. Down there, down there, lived the raw unformed substance for the creation of Vivaldo, and only he, Vivaldo alone, could master it" (pp. 305-6). As music depends ulti­ mately on silence, so being is achieved in tension with nothingness. Sexual identity -all identity-emerges from the void. Man, the sole creator of himself, moves alone upon the face of the waters.

We can now account for Eric's pivotal position in the novel.

Through his com­

mitment to Yves, he introduces an element of order into the chaos of his personal

victory, wrested in anguish from the heart of darkness, is Images of chaos proliferate throughout the novel. Rufus leaps into chaos when he buries himself in the deep black water of the Hudson River. Cass encounters chaos in the strange, pulsating life of Harlem, or in an abstract expressionist canvas at the Museum of Modern Art. To Vivaldo, chaos means a marijuana party in a Village pad; to Eric, the male demilife.

This precarious

the real subject of Another Country.

TRI-QUARTERLY

115

monde which threatens to

engulf him.

Eric is the first of Rufus' friends to face

his demons and achieve a sense of self. He in turn emancipates the rest.

From this vantage to write.

point, one can envision the novel that Baldwin was trying

With the breakdown of traditional standards--even of sexual normality­

homosexuality becomes a metaphor of the modern condition. Baldwin says of Eric, "There were no standards for him except those he could make for himself" (p. 212). Forced to create his own values as he goes along, Eric is to serve "as a

footnote to the twentieth century torment"

(p. 330).

The homosexual becomes

emblematic of existential man.

actually happens, however, is that Baldwin's literary aims are deflected by mystique. Eric returns to America as the high priest of ineffable phallic mysteries. His friends, male and female, dance around the Maypole and, mirabile dictu, their sense of reality is restored. Cass commits adultery with Eric, and is thereby reconciled to her faltering marriage. Vivaldo receives at Eric's What

his sexual

hands

a

fession. a

rectal revelation which prepares him for the bitter truth of Ida's con­ The novel ends as Yves joins Eric in New York, heralding, presumably,

fresh start for all and a new era of sexual and racial freedom.

For most readers of Another Country, the difficulty will lie in accepting Eric as

a

touchstone of reality.

Let us consider the overall design. Rufus is portrayed as

the victim of a white society which cannot face unpleasant truths. The redemptive role is then assigned to Eric.

But few will concede

a

sense

of reality, at least in

the sexual realm, to one who regards heterosexual love as "a kind of superior calis­ thenics"

(p. 336).

To most, homosexuality will seem rather an invasion than an

affirmation of human truth.

Ostensibly the novel summons us to reality. Actually

it substitutes for the illusions of white supremacy those of homosexual love.

In any event, it is not the task of a literary critic to debate the merits of homo­

sexuality, but to demonstrate its pressure on the novel. Let us accept Baldwin's postulate that in order to become a man, one must journey to the void. Let us grant that homosexuality is a valid metaphor of this experience. We must now ask of Baldwin's hero: does he face the void and emerge with a new sense of reality, or does he pitch his nomad's tent forever on the shores of the burning lake?

The answer hinges, it seems to me, on the strength of Eric's commitment to Yves.

Baldwin describes it as total, and yet, within a few weeks' span, while Yves remains behind in France, Eric betrays him with a woman and � man.

How can we grant

to this lost

youth redemptive power? that Baldwin, in his portrait of Eric, has desired above all to be faithful to his own experience. He will neither falsify nor go beyond it. Central to that experience is a rebellion against the prevailing sexual, as well as racial mores. But on either plane of experience, Baldwin faces an emotional dilemma.

Like Satan and the fallen angels, it is equally painful to persist in his rebellion and to give it up. Total defiance is unthinkable; total reconciliation only less so.

These are the poles of Baldwin's psychic life, and the novel vacillates helplessly One

senses

between them.

The drama of reconciliation is enacted

161

TRI-QUARTERLY

by Ida and Vivaldo.

Through their

symbolic marriage, Ida is reconciled to whites; Vivaldo, to women. This gesture, however, is a mere concession to majority opinion. What Baldwin really feels is dramatized through Rufus and Eric. Rufus can neither be fully reconciled to, nor fully defiant of, white society. No Bigger Thomas, he is incapable of total of Pushed to the limits hate. endurance, he commits suicide. Similarly, Eric can neither be fully reconciled to women, nor can he surrender to the male demi-monde.

So he camps on the outskirts of Hell. In the case of Rufus, the suicidal implica­ tions are overt. With Eric, as we shall see, Baldwin tries to persuade us that Hell is really Heaven.

In its rhetoric as well, the novel veers between the poles of reconciliation and defiance.

At times the butter of brotherhood seems to melt in Baldwin's mouth.

But here is Rufus, scoring the first inter-racial orgasm of the book: "And shortly,

nothing could have stopped him, not the white God himself nor a lynch mob arriving wings. Under his breath he cursed the milk-white bitch and groaned and rode his weapon between her thighs" (p. 22). With what economy of phrase "the milk-white bitch" combines hostility to whites and women! Nowhere is Baldwin's neurotic conflict more nakedly exposed. On one side we have the white God and the lynch mob, determined to suppress sex. On the other, adolescent rebellion and the smashing of taboo, hardening at times into Garveyism.

By Garveyism I mean the emotional and rhetorical excess, and often the ex­ travagant fantasies, to which an embattled minority may resort in promoting its own defense.

Another Country is doubly susceptible to these temptations, for it was conceived as a joint assault on racial and sexual intolerance.

Apparently prejudice encountered in either context will evoke a similar response. The arro­ gance of the majority has a natural counterpart in exaggerated claims of minority on

supremacy.

In the racial sphere, Baldwin employs defenses which go well beyond a healthy race

pride or a legitimate use of folk material. His portrait of Ida, for example,

leans heavily on the exotic, on that stereotype of jungle grace which flourished in

primitivism he adds flat assertions of su­ alive, colorful, more spontaneous, better dancers, periority: Negroes and above all, better lovers than the pale, gray, milk-white, chalk-white, dead­ the nineteen-twenties.

To

are more

a

touch of

more

white, ice-hearted, frozen-limbed, stiff-as sed zombies from downtown. Well, per­

haps.

One does not challenge the therapeutic value of these pronouncements, only

their artistic relevance.

Coupled with these racial sentiments are manifestations of sexual Garveyism.

Throughout the novel, the superiority of homosexual love is affirmed. Here alone can one experience total surrender and full orgastic pleasure; here alone the meta­ physical terror of the void. Heterosexual love, by comparison, is a pale-s-one is tempted to say, white-imitation. In many passages hostility to women reaches savage proportions: "Every time I see a woman wearing her fur coats and her jewels and her gowns, I want to tear all that off her and drag her someplace, to a pissoir, and make her smell the smell of many men, the piss of many men, and make her know that that is what she is for" (p. 210).

TRI-QUARTERLY

117

It may be argued that these are the sentiments of Yves and not of Baldwin, but that is precisely the point. In Another Country, the sharp outlines of character are

dissolved by

of uncontrolled emotion.

The novel lacks a proper dis­ of Baldwin's recent work that the author does

waves

One has the

impression psychic life leaves off and that of his characters begins.

What is more, he scarcely cares to know, for he is sealed in a narcissism so en­ grossing that he fails to make emotional contact with his characters. If his people have no otherness, if he repeatedly violates their integrity, how can they achieve the individuality which alone will make them memorable?

In conclusion, I should like to view A nother Country from the perspective of the author's spiritual journey. Reduced to its essentials, this journey has carried Baldwin from a store-front church in Harlem to a Greenwich Village pad. His formative years were spent among the saints, in an environment where repressive attitudes toward sex were paramount. As a result, his sexual experience has always contained a metaphysical dimension, bearing inescapably on his relationship to God. To understand the failure of Another Country, we must trace the connection between his sexual rebellion, his religious conceptions, and his style.

Baldwin has described the spiritual geography of his adolescence in the opening tancing.

not know where his own

pages of The Fire Next Time. On a little island in the vast sea of Harlem stood the saved, who had fled for their very lives into the church. All around them was

blazing Hell of the A venue, with its bars and brothels, pimps and junkies, violence and crime. Between God and the Devil an unrelenting contest was waged for the souls of the young, in which the girls of God's party bore a special burden: "They understood that they must act as God's decoys, saving the souls of the boys for Jesus and binding the bodies of the boys in marriage. For this was the begin­ ning of our burning time."!"

Baldwin's adolescent rebellion began, it seems plain, when his dawning sen­ suality collided with his youthful ministry. At first he rebelled against the store­ front church, then Harlem, seeking to escape at any cost. Ultimately he came to reject the female sex, the white world, and the Christian God. As his rebellion grew, he discovered in his gift for language a means of liberation. Like hundreds of American writers, he fled from the provinces (in his case, Harlem) to Greenwich Village and the Left Bank. There he hoped to find a haven of sexual, racial, the

•

•

and intellectual freedom.

quickly discovered, however, that he had not left the Avenue behind. In Greenwich Village or its French equivalent, he peered into the abyss, the demi­ monde of gay bars, street boys, and male prostitutes. This he recognized as Hell and recoiled in horror. But what alternative does he offer to promiscuity and fleet­ ing physical encounter? He speaks in the rhetoric of commitment and responsibility, but what he has in mind is simply a homosexual version of romantic love. It is a familiar spiritual maneuver. Baldwin has built a palace on the ramparts of Hell He

and called it Heaven.

Its proper name is Pandemonium.

In an effort to make Hell endurable, Baldwin

rebellion.

181

Subjectively,

TRI-QUARTERLY

attempts to spiritualize his sexual

I have no doubt, he is convinced that he has found God.

Not the white God of his black father, but a darker deity who dwells in the heart of carnal mystery.

One

communes

with this dark power through what Baldwin The stranger the sex partner, the better

calls "the holy and liberating orgasm."14

for orgasm, for it violates a stronger taboo.

Partners of a different race, or the

preferably both, afford the maximum spiritual opportunities. to be a complete break with the past, but in fact he has merely inverted the Christian orthodoxy of his youth. Properly regarded, Another Country will be seen as the celebration of a Black Mass. The jazzman is Baldwin's priest; the homosexual, his acolyte. The bandstand is his altar; Bessie Smith his choir. God is carnal mystery, and through orgasm, the Word is made flesh. Baldwin's ministry is as vigorous as ever. He summons to the mourners' bench all who remain, so to say, hardened in their innocence. Lose that, he pro­ claims, and you will be saved. To the truly unregenerate, those stubborn hetero­ sexuals, he offers the prospect of salvation through sodomy. With this novel doctrine, the process of inversion is complete.

These contentions are best supported by a brief discussion of Baldwin's style.

Two idioms were available to him from the Negro world: the consecrated and the profane. They derive respectively from the church-oriented and the jazz-oriented segments of the Negro community. To Baldwin, the church idiom signifies sub­ mission, reconciliation, brotherhood, and Platonic love. Conversely, the hipster idiom conveys rebellion, defiance, retaliation, and sexual love.

The predominant mode of Another Country is the hipster idiom. For Baldwin it is the language of apostasy. In rejecting the God of his youth, he inverts the consecrated language of the saints. The general effect is blasphemous: "What a pain in the ass old Jesus Christ had turned out to be, and it probably wasn't even the poor, doomed, loving, hopheaded old Jew's fault" (p. 308). Baldwin's diction is deliberately shocking; its function is to challenge limits, to transgress. In the sexual realm, it exploits the fascination of the forbidden, like a cheap film aimed at the teen-age trade. Indeed, if the style proclaims the man, we are dealing with same

sex,

or

Baldwin imagines his new faith

an

adolescent: who else gets his kicks from the violation of taboo?

Curiously, however, the language of the store-front church persists. For the hipster idiom is really Baldwin's second language, and in moments of high emotion he reverts to his native tongue. This occurs primarily when he tries to heighten or exalt the moment of sexual union. In the vicinity of orgasm, his diction acquires a religious intensity; his metaphors announce the presence of a new divinity: "When he entered that marvelous wound in her, rending and tearing! rending and tearing! was he surrendering, in joy, to the Bridegroom, Lord, and Savior?" (p. 308, emphasis in original).

This sudden shift into the church idiom betrays on Baldwin's part a deep need to spiritualize his sexual revolt. Here he describes Eric's first homosexual en­ counter: "What had always been hidden was to him, that day, revealed, and it did not matter that, fifteen years later, he sat in an armchair, overlooking a foreign sea, still struggling to find that grace which would allow him to bear that revelation" (p. 206, emphasis supplied). This is the language of Pandemonium: evil has TRI-QUARTERLY

119

meaning which ensues is both moral and semantic, and the writer who permits it betrays both self and craft.

A nother Country is not simply a bad novel, but a dead end. It is symptomatic of a severe crisis in Baldwin's life and art. The author's popular acclaim, his current role as a political celebrity, and the Broadway production of his recent play, become Baldwin's

good.

The loss of

have tended to obscure the true state of affairs. But Baldwin must suspect that his

hipster phase is coming to a close. He has already devoted two novels to his sexual rebellion. If he persists, he will surely be remembered as the greatest American novelist since Jack Kerouac. The future now depends on his ability to transcend the emotional reflexes of his adolescence. So extraordinary a talent requires of him

less

no

an

effort.

NOTES 1

Nobody Knows My Name (New York, Dial Press, 1961), p. 5.

2

Nobody Knows My Name, p. 224.

3 See

Notes of a Native Son (Boston, Beacon Press,

4

See The Fire Next Time (New York, Dial Press,

5

The Fire Next Time, p. 34.

6

The Fire Next Time, p. 30.

7

The Fire Next Time, p. 55.

8 All

page references

o Notes

are

to

1963), pp. 29-61.

the Dial Press editions of the novels.

of a Native Son, p. 21.

10 See

Nobody Knows My Name, pp. 155-62.

11 See

Partisan Review

12 Norman 13

1955), pp. 13-23.

(Summer, 1957), pp. 327-58.

Brown, Life Against Death (Wesleyan University Press, 1959), p. 27.

The Fire Next Time, p. 32.

14 See

20

Blues for Mister Charlie (New York, Dial Press,

I

TRI-QUARTERL Y

1964), p. 105.

Let the

spring breeze enter:

the quest of Zen LUCIEN STRYK

,

i,

"

.t

"

In the way of definition To begin, permit me to set you a koan or Zen problem for meditation:

by

a

tiger,

you jump into an old well

crawling with snakes.

Chased

The vine which you

have miraculously snatched and which now sustains you a few feet from the brim of the well is being nibbled by a mouse.

As your roshi or master, I look you squarely in the eye and demand that you tell me what you would do. Tricky, ingenious, a Westerner through and through, you may very well find a way out of the well, but none of your clever stratagems will satisfy me. Again and again I send you back to the zenda or meditation hall to ponder the koan; it may take you

long as a year to come up with a solution, attained through sa tori awakening, that does not disgust me. Meanwhile some­ thing is happening to you: slowly you realize that there is no right answer, that all you can do while grasping that vine for dear life, for you are living the koan, is accept the fact that dear or not it is no longer yours. This may make it possible for you to experience the bliss of satori and, in so doing, understand the essence of Zen, which is said to be found in this four-line gatha: as

Transmission outside doctrine, No dependence on words,

Pointing directly at the mind, seeing oneself truly, attaining Buddhahood.

Thus

There are other, prosier ways of defining the spirit-life zest, awareness of the

preciousness of each instant and every thing, a gay seriousness-but perhaps Zen is best expressed in that poetry, usually written in either of two traditional Chinese forms, the four-line Zeku and the eight-line Ritzu, which outstanding masters have always composed. There is, for example, the poem by Daigu (1584-1669) from which I have drawn my title:

Who dares approach the lion's Mountain cave?

Cold, robust,

A Zen-man through and through, I let the

spring breeze enter at the gate.

It would not be in the spirit of Zen, which will not depend on words, to para­

phrase; indeed any attempt to do so might resemble the tyro's abortive efforts with the koan above. Though there are some who, while meaning well, have through their attempts to explain that spring breeze well nigh stoppered it for the man who would be refreshed by it, it is not after all the sort of thing that can be stoppered.

Like that famous wind of Archibald MacLeish it "Is trampled under the rain, shakes free, is again trampled." Which makes it like freedom. Which is another way of saying that the Tao, the path of Zen is the path of liberation.

221

TRI-QUARTERLY

Japanese backgrounds The three major sources of Japanese thought. and it is of Japanese Zen that I

write, are Shinto, the indigenous religion, the Way of the Gods; Confucianism, which was of course brought over from China and was concerned with the moral

ordering of society and emphasized the present; and Buddhism, the religion of eternity, which originated in India and reached Japan via China and Korea.

Over two thousand years old, Shinto is a national cult, the spirit of "Nippon," and it has always maintained that nature, which according to its mythology was not made but begotten, is sacred. Hence the veneration of trees, mountains, water­ falls, and the pure lines of its central Shrine at Ise. Evolved from Shinto, ancient state philosophy was based on kokutai (land-body) or the belief in the holy oneness of man and country. There has always been in Shinto a reverence for Emperor and ancestors, and a faith in the communion of the living and the dead: there is, in other words, a sense of an immortal presence.

Confucianism, on the other hand, has represented a rational, highly moral code of behavior and a system of firmly defined duties. Particularly upheld are the fol­ lowing relationships: Emperor-subject, father-son, older brother-younger brother, man-wife, friend-friend. And there are the practical rules of etiquette and protocol, too numerous

and intricate to go into but of great importance to the shaping of

Japanese form. Also the family system is Confucian, as is the rather unfortunate overspecialization in certain areas and the for-the-most-part inflexible bureaucracy (those who have seen Kurosawa's great film Ikiru have had a glimpse of the latter).

The feeling for the master or sensei, the title held by even an instructor in pingpong, is equally a result of Confucianism. With the master in total control of his disciple there has been litttle scope for the growth of originality as we think of it. Indeed the dismissive gesture, criticism, is in Japan the mark of a boor.

Mahayana Buddhism (the Great Wheel) has in spite of the demands of Shinto­ ism and Confucianism dominated the Japanese mind for 1500 years. All things, it claims, are predestined to become Buddhas, i.e., attain salvation. One must ignore the peculiarities of things and feel their absolute oneness. When, along with the human ego, the individuality of all is shed, then this oneness appears as empti­ ness. Through meditation of space can come the awakening to oneness, peace of mind, nirvana. Which as Dr. D. T. Suzuki explains in his Zen and Japanese Bud­ dhism is often misunderstood: as in when we talk of nirvana we imagine that there is such a thing the case of a table or a book. Nirvana, however, is no more than a state of mind or consciousness when we actually transcend relativity-the world of birth and death. ...

.

.

.

Buddhism does not use the word God, nor for the above reasons does it speak of the individual soul.

ing salvation:

Various sects, to be sure, differ in their methods of attain­

in one, for instance, the mere invocation of the Buddha's name, if

TRI-QUARTERLY

123

continuously and sincerely done, is alone sufficient. Other sects, more philosophical, require elaborate devotional devices. But whatever the sect, because of Buddhism's pantheism, it works harmoniously alongside Shintoism.

In contrast to Hinayana (the Small Wheel), Mahayana Buddhism is life-loving.

Even the concept of Mu or nothingness can be seen as positive because of the prin­ ciple of unity it implies. Mahayanists use the word Soku or "namely" and say, "The world is one, namely many." Perhaps the main difference between the two systems is to be found in their exemplars: the Hinayana Arhat seeks nirvana and Buddhahood fervently, whereas the Mahayana Bodhisattva willingly postpones en­ tering the blessed state until all others can be saved. It is for this reason that Mahayana Buddhists offer prayers to the Savior Bodhisattva, Amida. Though Mahayana absorbed many Hinayana ideas, it has always insisted that self-salvation is identical with salvation through a savior (jiriki soku tariki: own power, namely other power). Zen is squarely in the mainstream of Mahayana Buddhism.

Philosophy and Zen Those who should know, tell that Western philosophy got its greatest impetus round the time of the Enlightenment in the 18th c., when having lost faith in reli­

gion's ready answers to the big questions, man tried pretty much on his own hook to fathom the only world he was ever likely to know. In a truly religious culture there would be little need for philosophy, because all answers would be supplied by dogma. Judging from the fact that man has always philosophized, there has prob­ ably never been such a culture.

The most complete philosophers are those able to cope most completely with

24\

TRI-QUARTERL Y

the deepest problems: Kant, for example, with his Categorical Imperatives to guide conduct and his Cosmos to image an essentially atomistic universe. Some thinkers

have of course worked in a more fragmentary way-there are philosophical lyrics as

well

as

epics-but fragmentary or all-embracing, Western philosophy has not

greatly interested the Zen-man.

This lack of interest, it should be made clear at once, is not to be attributed to

incuriosity, nor should it be seen as the result of religious thralldom.

So far as Zen

is concerned, it is just that most of the questions asked by Western thinkers are

either frivolous or, worse, immodest. If posed at all by a master, they are pondered in a very different manner, as in the case of the koan, for the mind, it is thought,

severely limited and conditioned powerfully by egoistic needs, is simply not to be relied on when the issue is crucial. Intuition, mysterious as it may be, has always been considered by the Zen-man a truer way of discovery, less a toying with the world.

Revelation of the kind the Zen-man seeks is not to be confused with the Chris­

tian sort: for one thing, one needn't be sporting a halo to experience it. Yet it often takes a superhuman effort: }CANDO

(1825-1904)

It's as if our heads were on fire, the way We apply ourselves to perfection of That.

The future but a twinkle, beat yourself,

Persist:

the greatest effort's not enough.

But when there is an awakening:

TSUGEN

(1322-1391)

Not a mote in the light above, Soul itself cannot offer such a view.

Though dawn's not come, the cock is calling: The phoenix, flower in beak, welcomes spring.

Always Zen is to be found, if at all, in immediate experience, the firefly rather than the star.

In Zen aesthetics, dominant in Japan since the Kamakura Period (13 th c.), there

is a clear parallel to phenomenology. When, following Kierkegaard, Existentialists

speak of the need to leap from one state of awareness, commitment, to a higher, they are saying what the masters have always said. The sumiye painter, perhaps without training in Zen but heir to its aesthetic treasures, raises brush over blank­ ness and at just the right moment takes such a leap into a free and floating world.

"The form of the object must first fuse with the spirit," wrote the great 5th c.

Chinese painter Wang Wei, "after which the mind transforms it in various ways.

The spirit, to be sure, has no form; yet that which moves and transforms the form of an object is the spirit."

That life is most vivid to one on the brink of death is a truism. The subjects of TRI-QUARTERLY

125

sumiye painting-flower, rock, mountain, perhaps a human figure-are severely defined against the white background, thus taking on strong existential meaning. To most Japanese the background clearly represents death, the reality of Matsugo No Me or man facing annihilation, fully aware of his Mujo or impermanence.

In the literature conditioned by Zen there is also a sense of this nothingness against which mortal drama unfolds, as in Kawabata's fine modern novel Snow Country. Then there are the very early Noh plays, perfect in their expression of Zen, and the dramas of Chikamatsu Monzaemon, the 18th c. Japanese Shakespeare, so-called, full of the anguish of lovers about to commit suicide, etc.

Japanese suicide, of world renown, has much Zen in it. When a man finds him­ self faced, through an awakening sought or unsought, with the absurdity of his lot, he may decide coldly to make an honorable an end as possible by taking the exis­ tential leap--into the grave. One thinks of the 47 Ronin, those fearless samurai who committed harakiri at the command of the Tokugawa Shogun nearly 300 years ago, of the astonishing love suicides of the 1930's and, most remarkable, of those 10 members of the ultra-nationalist Japan Productive Party who on August 22, 1945, a week after the end of World War II, sat in a circle in downtown Tokyo and while chanting apologies to the Emperor for losing the war pulled pins from hand grenades and blew themselves to bits: less than a week later, three wives of the victims went to the exact spot and shot themselves to death. Less dramatic, perhaps, but of far greater importance to Zen literature (Zen, after all, has never condoned

suicide) is the stoic death: BAIRD

(1633-1707)

Never giving thought to fame,

One troublesome span of life behind,

Crosslegged in the coffin, I'm about to slough the flesh.

"If instead of the paradisiacal bliss

promised by your faith," I was once asked threatened with a chain of rebirths, each "you by with its portion of misery, until by some superhuman act you were able to snap a

student trained in Zen,

were

that chain, would you not make every effort to order your life so as to be able to

live it fully, now, while you have it?"

In so bleak a scheme of things, the implica­

tion must be drawn, there is small reason for the starry-eyed faith many profess to.

Yet there is a way out: unswerving acceptance of the reality of self. Existence, of which for ages a single image has been held up to the Zen-man, must be adjusted to: it cannot be altered.

His training in the zendo, all rituals of his Ifie, are meant

to help him make that adjustment.

The uses (and abuses) of Zen

During an interview with Taigan Takayama, a master of Yamaguchi, conducted along with my fellow translator Takashi Ikemoto and later to be published in the Fall '63 Chicago Review, I asked whether Zen could be used by artists, as it might have been used by the great master-painter Sesshu, to achieve the proper state of

261

TRI-QUARTERLY

Looking rather surprised, the master answered, "Zen

mind for serious production.

is not something to be used. Zen art is nothing more than an expression of a Zen state of mind."

But this

was

the subject that most interested me, and I had the

temerity to pursue it: "Well, then, how would you describe that state of mind, as it relates, that is, to the artist and his work? And though here I may be asking too much, would you say that artists-painters, writers, composers-might gain by periods of discipline? And if so, what have they to gain from meditation that drink or, to be more consistent, prayer and the seeking of vision might not be able to afford with less difficulty?" To this Taigan Takayama answered: "Let's put it this way: it is a state of mind in which one is identified with an object without any sense of restraint." Which of course echoes the words of Wang Wei, written some 1500 years ago and already quoted, and answers one would hope once and for all the question most Western artists want answered about Zen. "Can one pluck the flower, which is Zen, and transplant it, rootless, to an alien shore?" asks Dom Aelred Graham in his Zen Catholicism (Harcourt, Brace and

World). "It seems improbable," he goes on to answer the question. "The attempt to do so may account for some of the

oddities, not to say frivolities, attending the

current interest in Zen."

What, in fact, are these oddities, frivolities, these new Japanese queries? The aesthetics of the Beats and the action painters of a certain camp, the rehashes of Dr. D. T. Suzuki that one can pick up at the comer drugstore?

But, if so, what must one conclude about Pound and Imagism, about Yeats" ancient blade, Sato's, "still as it was,/Still razor-keen, still like

looking-glass/Unspotted by the cen­ turies"? Is it their fame that saves Pound and Yeats from chastisement? Surely it was the Zen in Japanese art that attracted them.

Whatever the author of Zen Catholicism has in mind, there is no question of Zen's current modishness, resembling that of Existentialism in the late '40's.

a

Item: in December 1962 A Tenth of

Inch Makes a Difference, three plays based

an

Zen folklore and anecdotes, was Thus, presumably, the reaction. In­ deed there's a new game, Kick-Zen, much fun and easy to play, one gathers, which those in the forefront of the reaction, a few of whom reign as stars of the literary quarterlies, are becoming quite expert at. But it's a game, a friend recently observed,

given at the East End Theatre in New

on

York.

that a true Zen-man would be very much inclined to enjoy.

Which amounts to real

Zen insight.

If the Beat poets find stimulation in Zen, fine; if the action painters interested in

Zen calligraphy

are

led to

a

few minor discoveries,

we

all stand to profit; if the

rehashers of Dr. Suzuki

provide us, if only fortuitously and because they bring a couple of novel ideas, well, why complain?

The one free world is the world of the mind, which is something we had better

Western sensibilities to the subject,

remember.

Yet a certain amount of obfuscation has resulted, and there is a real need to get as close to

the heart of Zen as possible, the writings of the masters. It is this that

Takashi Ikemoto and I are

attempting, along with others, and in publishing the

following poems and anecdotes it is our hope that the reader will be helped in his quest for freedom, which is the historical quest of Zen. TRI·QUARTERL Y

127

Zen poems translated from the Japanese

by Takashi Ikemoto and Luoien Stryk

Daito (12S2·1337, Rinzai): Death Poem

To slice through Buddhas, Patriarchs I grip my polished sword.

One glance at my mastery,

The void bites its tusks!

Shutaku (130S·SS, Rinzai)

Mind set free in the Dharma-realm,

I sit at the moon-filled window

Watching the mountains with my ears, Hearing the stream with open eyes.

Each molecule preaches perfect law, Each moment chants true sutra:

The most fleeting thought is

timeless,

A single hair's enough to stir the sea.

Myoyu (1333·93. Soto)

Defying the power of speech, the Law Commission on Mt. Vulture!

Kasyapa's smile told the beyond-telling.

What's there to reveal in that perfect all-suchness?

Look up! the moon-mind glows unsmirched.

NOTE: Other than Waka (31 syllable Japanese poems), all the poems are in classical Chinese forms, the exceptions being Takashi's free verse poems.

Daigu (1584-1669) Who dares approach the lion's Mountain cave? Cold, robust, A Zen-man through and through, I let the spring breeze enter at the gate.

Hakuin (1685-1768, Rinzai)

Past, present, future: unattainable, Yet clear as the moteless sky.

Late at night the stool's cold as iron, But the moonlit window smells of plum.

Soen (1859-1919)

Master Joshu and the dog-

Truly exorbitant, their foolishness.

Being and non-being at last Annihilated, speak the final word!

.

_."'

r­ I , ..

I

..

,

1·

,

, ,

I

<,

.,

\ \ '.

\

Zen anecdotes Compiled and Translated

by Takashi Ikemoto and Luoien Stryk

Ninagawa-Shinzaemon, linked-verse poet and Zen devotee, heard that Ikkyu (1396-1481, Rinzai*), abbot of the famous Daitokuji in Murasakino (violet field) of Kyoto, was a remarkable master, he desired to become his disciple. He called on Ikkyu and the following dialogue took place at the temple entrance: IKKYU: Who are you?

When

NINAGAWA: A devotee of Buddhism.

IKKYU: You

from?

are

NINAGAWA: Your IKKYu:

region.

Ah. And what's happening there these days?

NINAGAWA: The

crows

caw, the sparrows twitter.

IKKYU: And where do you think you

are

now?

NINAGAWA: In a field dyed violet.

IKKYU:

Why?

NINAGAWA:

Miscanthuses, morning glories, safflowers, chrysanthemums, asters. they're gone?

NINAGAWA: It's Miyagino (field known for autumn flowering).

IKKYU: And after

happens in the field?

NINAGAWA: The stream flows through, the wind sweeps over.

Amazed at Ninagawa's Zen-like speech, Ikkyu led him to his room and served him tea. Then he spoke the following impromptu verse: IKKYU:

What

I want to

serve

You delicacies.

Alas! The Zen Sect Can offer nothing.

At which the visitor replied:

The mind which treats me To

nothing is the original void­

A delicacy of delicacies.

Deeply moved, the master said, "My son, you have learned much:'

Kato-Dewanokami-Y asuoki, lord of Osu in Iyo Province, was passionate about the military arts.

One day the great master Bankei

(1622-93, Rinzai) called on

him. As they sat face to face, the young lord suddenly grasped his spear and made as

if to pierce Bankei.

The master silently flicked the head of the spear aside with

his rosary and said, "No good. You're too worked up." *Both

dates

and

Sect

throughout the selection.

30

\

TRI-QUARTERLY

affiliations-Rinzai,

Soto

or

Obaku-are

given. when known,

Years later Yasuoki, who had become

a

great speursman, spoke of Bankei as

the one who had taught him most about the art.

[@J Settan

(1801-73, Rinzai) and Sozan (1798-1867, Rinzai), the greatest masters

of their day, came to an important ceremony at the Myoshin Temple.

Settan be­

longed to the Inzan branch of their sect, Sozan to the Takuju branch, and as had been expected by all present they at once began a Zen engagement in a room of the temple to which no one else was allowed entry.

So horrible to the ears was the dispute, the whole temple was frightened. They shouted kwatz (Zen cry) and their staffs clashed like swords.

All at once from out of nowhere appeared a middle-aged priest who, head wrapped in a towel, a sake bottle bobbing from his sash, robe tucked between the legs, began to sing at the top of his voice a popular song: Looking down from the top of the mountain, O! The valley's a bed of melons and eggplants, O! Arya, don, don, don!

Korya, don, don, don!

Dancing crazily, he barged into the prohibited room.

At the sight of him the astonished Sozan turned to his rival and demanded, "Whose disciple is this?"

"Mine!" Settan said triumphantly. "That's my Keichu." (1824-1905, Rinzai) "You're lucky in your disciples," Sozan said. "I'm beaten."

Both masters laughed long together, and Settan, who had been training Keichu for more than ten years, now saw that he had attained Zen.

Sato-Kaiseki was very much disturbed by the implications of Copernicus' helio­ centric theory, which, of course, was inconsistent with the old Buddhist cosmology in which Mount Sumeru

occupies the center of the universe. He reasoned that if the Buddhist cosmos were proved false, the triple world and the twenty-five forms of existence would be reduced to nonsense, resulting in the negation of Buddhism itself. Immediately he set about writing a book in defense of the Mount Sumeru position, sparing himself no effort as champion of Buddhism.

When he had finished the work, he took it at once to Master Ekido (1805-79, Soto) and presented it to him triumphantly. After leafing through only the first few pages, however, the master thrust the book back at him, and shaking his head, said, "How stupid! Don't you realize that the basic aim of Buddhism is to shatter the triple world and the twenty-five forms of existence?

Why stick to such utterly

worthless things and treasure Mount Sumeru? Blockhead!"

Dumbfounded, Kaiseki shoved the book under his arm and went quickly home.

TRI-QUARTERLY

131

Gasan

(1853-1900, Rinzai), a distinguished master of the important Tenryuji Temple in Kyoto, was very fond of sake, which made him like many other Zen­ men. He would say, "One go of sake and I'm vivacious, five go and I'm mild as a spring day, one sho (ten go) and the wintry moon is high in the sky, the carp

leaps from the deep pond."

Once after being treated to drink in downtown Kyoto he returned to the temple in the evening almost helplessly drunk. As it was time for dokusan (guidance in koan meditation to disciples), the monks were overjoyed, for they expected the master, who always made dokusan a bitter trial for them, to be lenient for once.

When one by one they entered Gasan's room, however, they found him sitting more solemn than ever, eyes glaring at the doorway.

During a three-year period of severe training under the great master Gizan, Koshu (1839-1905, Rinzai) was unable to gain satori. At the beginning of a special seven-day session of discipline, he thought his chance had finally come. He climbed the tower of the temple gate and, going up to the Arhat images, made this vow: "Either I realize my dreams up here, or they'll find my dead body at the foot of the tower!"

He went without food or sleep, giving himself up to constant zazen, often crying out in his torment things like, "What was my karma that in spite of all these efforts

I can't grasp the Way?"

At last Koshu admitted his failure and, determined to make an end of it, advanced to the railing and slowly lifted a leg over it.

ing.

At that very instant he had an awaken­ he rushed down the stairs and through the rain to Gizan's room.

Overjoyed,

"Bravo!" cried the master before Koshu had

a

chance to

speak.

"You've

finally had your day!"

Tanzan (1819-92, Soto), a rare master, once officiated as indoshi (leader) at a

Facing the coffin, he formally made a great circle in the air with a fire­ splendid phrases. But

funeral.

And now all the attendants awaited the customary the master's mouth was clamped.

brand.

Then while the attendants stared in amazement the rays of the setting sun fell

directly on the master's bald head, seeming to scorch it. "Hot!" Tanzan said. "Hot! Oh, hot!" He then made a slight bow to the coffin and returned to his place.

Needless to say, the attendants remained puzzled long after the coffin had been settled in the earth.

Ex-EMPEROR: Gudo, what happens to the man of enlightenment and the man of illusion after death?

GUDO

(1579-1661, Rinzai):

Ex-EMPEROR: GUDO:

321

How should I know, sir?

Why, because you're a master!

Yes, sir, but no dead one!

TRI-QUARTERL Y

Dokuon (1819-95, Rinzai) to ask after him.

very sick, and Tckisui (1822-99, Rinzai) came Entering the sickroom, he announced himself, then straddled was

Dokuon. With his face almost touching Dokuon's, he said, "Well, how are you?"

"Very sick," answered Dokuon.

"Think you'll pull through?"

"No." Without another word, Tekisui got up and left.

A monk asked Master Busshin, "Do heaven and hell exist?"

"No," the master replied without hesitation.

Some samurai happened to be in

earshot, and, amazed at Busshin's answer,

asked him the same question.

This time, again without hesitation, the master said, "Yes." When accused by the samurai of being contradictory, Busshin said, "Well, if I there's neither heaven nor hell, where would the alms come from?"

were to tell you

The Lord of Hikone, wanting to try the monk Kansan, had a beauty bathe him and treat him most tenderly.

When he had finished bathing, Kansan dismissed the girl with a smile. "Thank

you," he said, "for taking so much trouble."

Taizen, who had a good deal of Zen experience, called on the master Tetsumon (1710-?, Soto) and said, "I'm dull iron. Won't you be good enough to temper me?"

"If Peter drinks wine," said the master, "Paul will be tipsy."

"My, you're dexterous with iron."

"How's that?"

"May I offer you another cup?"

At this Tetsumon laughed heartily, and Taizan moved back three steps.

"All right," said the master, "let's have some tea."

disciplinarian, happened to see Tekisui wiping his nose with "Is your nose so precious? That tissue's too good to waste on it. You should know by now that a virtueless man is the enemy of Buddha. Just why are you pursuing Zen?" From that moment Tekisui not only avoided wiping his nose with tissue, he One day Gisan,

a tissue.

a

"Fool!" he railed.

took great care not to catch cold.

After gaining satori, Tenkei (1668-1735, Soto) went to

see

Master Tesshin.

The master said, trying him, "I've been waiting for you a long time-what took you so long?"

TRI-QUARTERLY

133

"On the contrary!" retorted Tenkei.

"Why were you so late in seeing me?"

"My, you're talkative!"

"Try and stop mel" Tesshin smiled and said no more.

I@l A heretic approached the Buddha and said, "Please tell me, 0 Masterful One, what is above both speech and silence?"

The Buddha made no reply.

Filled with admiration, the heretic Stripped of illusion, I see at last!"

said, "I understand, World-most-Honored.

When the heretic had gone, the disciple Ananda said to the Buddha, "Hmm­ I wonder what it was he saw."

good horse," said the Buddha with a smile. the whip, and off he gallops."

"He's like

a

"Just the shadow of

"Other masters are always carrying on about the necessity of saving everyone,"

Gensha

"But suppose you meet up with someone couldn't see He your gestures, hear your preaching or, for

complained to his followers.

deaf, dumb and blind.

that matter, ask questions.

Unable to save him, you'd prove yourself a worthless

Buddhist."

disciples went to consult with the master Unmon, who like Gensha was a disciple of Seppo.

Troubled by these words,

one

of Gensha's

"Please bow," said Unmon.

The monk,

though taken by surprise, obeyed the master's command, then straightened up in expectation of having his query answered. But instead of the answer he got a staff thrust at him, and he leapt back.

"Well," said Unmon, "you're not blind. Now, approach."

The monk did what he was bidden.

"Good," said Unmon, "you're not deaf either. Well-understand?"

"Understand what, sir?"

"Ah, you're not dumb either."

On hearing these words, the monk awoke as from a deep sleep.

I@l A monk called

on

Master Bokushu and after

an

exchange of greetings, the

master asked him where he had been living.

The monk gave out with a kwatz:

"Very good," Bokushu said, "you've treated me to a kwatz:" (Zen cry).

At this the monk gave out with another, louder than the first.

"My, you are generous," said the master. "But, tell me, what happens after the third and the fourth?"

The monk, obviously confused, kept silent.

"Good-for-nothing!"

341

TRI-QUARTERL Y

Bokushu exclaimed with a hard slap to the monk's face.

SHINKICHI TAKAHASHI translated by Takashi Ikemoto and Luolen Stryk

Quails It is the grass that moves, not the

quails.

Weary of embraces, she thought of

Committing her body to the flame.

When I shut my eyes, I hear far and wide The air of the Ice

When I open them,

Age stirring. a

rocket passes

over

a

meteor.

quail's egg is complete in itself, Leaving not room enough for a dagger's point.

All the phenomena in the universe: myself.

A

Quails are supported by the universe (I wonder if that means subsisting by God).

A

quail has seized God by the neck

With its black bill, because there is God greater than

(Peter, Christ,

a

no

quail.

Judas:

a

quail.)

philosophy in solution.

(There is no wife better than a quail.)

I dropped a quail's egg into a cup for buckwheat noodles,

A

quail'S egg:

idle

And made havoc of the Democratic Constitution.

Split chopsticks stuck in the back, a quail husband Will deliver dishes The

on

a

bicycle, anywhere.

light yellow legs go up the hill of Golgotha.

Those quails who stood The nightfall is

on

the rock, became the rock!

quiet, but inside the congealed exuviae

Numberless insects zigzag,

on

parade.

SIIINKICHI TAKAHASHI trnnsln.ted by Takash1 Ikemoto and Lucien Stryk

Sun Stretched in the

genial sun

The mountain snake

Tickled its

length along the rock.

The wind rustled the

sunshine,

But the snake,

Fully uncoiled, was calm.

Fifty thousand years ago!

Later the Blazed

same

across

sun

the

pyramids,

Now it warms my chest.

But

below, through

Shattered rock, the snake

Thrusts up its snout,

fangs Flicking at my thoughts Strewn about the rocks like violets.

It's you, faces out like

Have

triangles,

the snake alive!

kept The pavement's greened with leaves.

Bream

What's land?

What's water?

In the window of the florist

Swims the

big-eyed bream,

Between dahlias, chrysanthemums.

So you're alone?

Well, forget

Others, keep talking to yourself.

Past the

hydrangea leaves Sways the scaly bream-mass.

History? Look between dry leaves of the sardine Paper. Oops! the anemone's Finally snagged a scale, The

And

flowering on a tulip stem,

The bream's tail and fin!

Why fear? What do you know Of what happens after death?

Just remember to pierce

The cactus

through your Xmas hat.

Brushed by trumpet lilies, roses, The bream

opens/shuts his mouth.

Part t'wo of a series

The artist's journey

into the interior: from Hegel to Hamlet ERICH HELLER

THE

HEGELIAN WORLD-SPIRIT seems to

be fond, sometimes, of rather obvious

Shakespeare was born in the year of Michelangelo's death; and the play that comes to mind, first and foremost, when Shakespeare's name is men­

theatrical effects:

tioned, is the most Hegelian-Romantic play imaginable: Hamlet, "the darling," in the words of Coleridge, "of every country in which the literature of England has

been fostered."

Coleridge attributes the surpassing popularity of this work not qualities (and of course he is right: for Shakespeare has certainly written works of equal or even greater poetic excellence) but to Hamlet's character having, in greater measure than any other of Shakespeare's heroes, "some connection," as Coleridge puts it, "with the common fundamental laws of our nature," a creation as it is of "Shakespeare's deep and accurate science in mental philosophy." Although this philosophical sentiment supports the suspi­ cion that Coleridge-just as, notoriously, Shakespeare himself-was not English, but German, and although it is shocking to the aesthetic puritanism of the modem sensibility, the sense of it is yet true (and sounds disturbing only because anything that is true shocks the modem aesthetic sensibility). The sense of it-not neces­ sarily the manner in which Coleridge put it. "The common fundamental laws of our nature," of which Coleridge speaks, need qualification, and so does "the deep and accurate science in mental philosophy." For this "nature" is our Romantic nature, and the "mental philosophy" the one that was to be perfected by Hegel.

(Coleridge, after all, read Hamlet with a mind Romantically initiated by Schelling, and even called on Hazlitt for help when he was accused of plagiarizing one of the founding-fathers of the German Romantic movement: A. W. Schlegel. The charge was probably unjust: his source may simply have been the Hegelian Zeitgeist.)

What Coleridge says about Hamlet might indeed have been said by Hegel if he had chosen to think more deeply than he did about this tragic teaser and familiar to its particular poetic

TRI-QUARTERLY

137

of four Romantic centuries. Teaser and familiar: for to be truly puzzled by Hamlet is surely a privilege bestowed upon the mind by the understanding of him. He who is

incapable of understanding Hamlet cannot even be truly puzzled by him; and

to believe that mystery and wonder are foreign bodies in the eye of comprehension

is only one of the many rationalist superstitions. Through Hamlet our Romantic and rational nature surprises, mystifies, and knows itself. For the "hysteria" of

Hamlet is merely the "normal" condition, dramatically heightened, of the Romantic

namely, its consciousness of the break-down of communications between When Coleridge speaks use Coleridge's coinage, "outness". of Hamlet's "very perceptions" acquiring, in passing through the medium of his contemplation, "a form and color not naturally their own," he reveals, inadvertently, the very perplexity of the Romantic critic. For in commenting, with great discern­ ment, upon Hamlet's Romantic propensities, he cannot but use the vocabulary of the Classical mind: the critic always aspires to classical certainty; and where mind:

inwardness and, to

this is unattainable, he at least behaves as if he knew what the "natural" form and color of perceptions are. But they have no natural form and color-except in the

things. The Romantic mind knows of no such fixed cor­ respodences. Within its ruling, there is neither good nor bad but thinking makes it so, neither beauty nor ugliness but it is so appointed by the eye of the beholder.

It was exactly such a Romantic person whom, as Coleridge believed, Shakespeare Classical order of

intended to portray in Hamlet: "a person in whose view the external world and all its incidents and objects were comparatively dim and of no interest in themselves,"

"hieroglyphics" of an inner state, beginning to captivate him "only when they were reflected in the mirror of his mind;" a person, that is, whose procrastina­ tions spring "from that aversion to action which prevails among such as have a world in themselves In other words (if they can be called other): "How all occasions do inform against me"-because all occasions in the world of deeds done and incidents occurring accuse the Romantic mind and inner being of its guilty "otherness", and inform it of its irremediable estrangement; therefore: "Denmark is a prison" and following pat upon it: "Then the world is one", and 'Tis too mere

"

...

"

narrow

melt

for your mind;" and therefore: "0 that this too, too solid flesh would Or is it "sullied"? The question, arising from a divergence between the "

...

texts of Quarto 2 and Folio, is certainly one of the most trifling in a field of inquiry

where, in any case, "textual" may well be an inveterate misprinting of "trivial"; for in Hamlet's dictionary the two words are synonymous: what is solid is sullied. The

scholar who,

searching for the images most expressive of the central thought that

dominates each of Shakespeare's tragedies, is certainly right in opting, with regard to

Hamlet, for "corruption".

Indeed, the attributes given by Shakespeare to the

indefatigable in their effort to catch every waft of putrefaction; it is a world muddied, ulcerous, and world in which the sweet prince is condemned to exist

are

diseased, gross as earth, thick and unwholesome, rank-a world that smells to heaven. But that something that is rotten in the state of Denmark is unlikely ever

yield to Fortinbras' surgical sword. For it is not in the state of Denmark: it is the state of Denmark as it so easily becomes the state of all external affairs in to

381

TRI-QUARTERLY

the perspective of the Romantic inwardness.

This is the

inescapable outcome of

the Hegelian flight of the Spirit into the inner recesses of the human soul, a soul ever more

alienated-the word is Hegel's=-from what was once its body and its

Hellenic world. Henceforward the landscape will turn into a waste land and only the "inscape" will be green. sent her to' a nunnery.

The Prince of Denmark dismissed his mistress and

And yet, what progeny!

The Romantic world has resounded ever since with the sounds of the inward

soul, sounds which, by-passing the domain of things, have found their musical order in pure principles of the mind: it was with great historical plausibility that SChD­

penhauer, two Romantic centuries later, was to assign to' music the highest rank among the arts because it was the most "metaphysical" of them all; that Heine was to sketch a historical order of the arts according to' which painting, because the Spirit found "stone much tDD hard" to' suit its increasingly subtle demands, WDn the day over architecture and sculpture, until an ever more heightened spirituality and abstract complexity reached out for pure sDunds to' express an ecstatic inward­ ness "which perhaps aims at nothing less than the dissolution of the whole material world;"* that, half a century afterwards, Walter Pater would believe that all the arts aspired to' the condition of music; and that, finally, Rilke would announce in Orphic exaltation that only in song was true existence to be found: "Gesang is!

Dasein:" And the scene of Romantic art has been set ever since for the play with abstractions from the solid world, with signs signifying nothing unless it be for the mind's eye alone, and with disembodied forms and patterns, and with words, words, words, unsullied by the common touch of reality; and it has swarmed with spirits alienated from the world and with worlds alienated from the spirit; and it has shown processions of authors vainly in search of their "real" person; of land­ surveyors without land to' survey; of strangers, strangers, strangers; and they all could swear, if they felt like swearing, by the name of Hamlet who had "that within which passes ShDW." "So far from being Shakespeare's masterpiece, the play Hamlet is most certainly

exquisite stage-thunderbolt of T. S. Eliot's=-t'most cer­ comparable only to' the observation that another English Royalist, John Evelyn, committed to' his diary in 1661: "I saw Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, played, but nDW the DId plays begin to' disgust this refined age, since his Majestie's being so long abroad." But there is, of course, much more to' Eliot's essay on Hamlet than meets the eye a little blinded by the going-off of that critical flashbulb. In fact, there is SO' much to' it that it would by itself suffice, in all its strange wrong-headedness, to' prove this poet's great critical intelligence.

It reads as if T. S. Eliot had studied Hegel's theory of the difference between Classi­ cal and Romantic art (which most certainly he had not) and then decided both to' an

artistic failure."

This

tainly" most certainly deserves immortality-s-is

*

And furthermore:

of life even

"Music is

perhaps the

last word of art

as

death is the last word

it is of great significance that Beethoven became deaf in the end so that the invisible world of tones ceased to have any resonant reality for him", until his ....

To

me

last creations

mere were made of "memories of tones, the ghosts of expired sounds."

(Heinrich Heine, Siimtliche Werke, ed. Ernst Elster, Leipzig and Vienna, VI, 259ff.)

TR!-QUARTERLY

139

\

\� ,

I

"

\

'\

JOHN ALMQUIST

against Hamlet, he demonstrates, to our complete intellectual satisfaction, that it is not-in Hegel's sense-a Classical but a Romantic work, obviously written during the Classical majesty's long absence. To provide himself with the law by which he passes the sentence of artistic failure upon Hamlet, T. S. Eliot paraphrases in his own idiom Hegel's definition of Classical art, that is, as we have seen, "art under the aspect of its highest appointment." This, then, is Eliot's Hegelian paraphrase: "The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an 'objective correlative'; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula are given, the of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts emotion is immediately evoked." The more, upon reflection, this comes to look like the wolf of Teutonic metaphysics in the clothing of an Anglo-Saxon empirical Iamb-that is, like the psychological version of Hegel's idea of Classical art as the concrete, objective, and absolutely adequate external reality of the inner spirit­

profit from it and to ignore it.

For when he argues his case

...

the harder it becomes to take it, as the sole criterion of artistic success, from a critic

who, qua poet, experienced, as lucidly as can be read in his East Coker, the Roman­ tic falling-away of the word-thought from the thought within, of the word-gesture

from the emotion, of the "objective correlative" from the inner meaning: Because one has only learnt to get the better of words For the thing one no longer has to say,

One is

no

longer disposed to say it

and who therefore, poetically, .

.

.

was

.

.

.

or

the way in which

,

left with

the intolerable wrestle

With words and meanings

.

.

.

if he was not to be fobbed off, and to fob off his readers, with a "paraphrastic study in a worn-out poetical fashion," and perhaps "like a whore unpack his heart with words"

which, as "mere" poetry, would not matter.

However, T. S. Eliot's essay on Hamlet continues: "The artistic 'inevitability'

lies in the complete adequacy of the external to the emotion."

Hegel would have

agreed and only doubted, and justly so, the propriety of the term "emotion" to denote what is the "inner" case in art; and if he had read on to see Hamlet con­

demned because its hero is dominated by an emotion which is "in excess of the facts

they appear" and is therefore dramatically inexpressible, he would, again finding fault with "emotion" and perhaps wondering a little whether anyone could find better cause for excessive agitation than Hamlet after the encounter with his father's ghost, reply that precisely this constitutes the nature of all Romantic art. For all Romantic art entertains, like Hamlet himself, only the most tenuous relations with the outward appearance of things, with all that "seerns"-almost to the point of saying, as he says: "I know not 'seems' ". And however deeply Romantic art may be dedicated to the unavoidable artistic task of showing (and history proves that in the end it comes to show less and less of any recognizable outer reality), it yet has always "that within which passes show." This is the very core of its Romantic as

TRI-QUARTERLY

141

character, so different in this from Classical art, which has "within" only what is entirely realized in the showing of it. "It is," writes Hegel, "the inner world which is the content of Romantic art; and although this inwardness must-in art-show itself outwardly, it yet triumphs over the external and shows its victory over it

...

by reducing it to relative insignificance." This means that the external occasion, the configuration of circumstances, actions, and incidents, all that which serves as T. S. Eliot's "objective correlative" to convey the "emotion," becomes now more and more "a matter of arbitrary choice, of the peculiarity and caprice of the subjec­ tive individual and of the adventures of the imagination"; and neither the peculiarity nor the caprice, neither the subjectivity nor the adventure becomes less peculiar, capricious, subjective, or adventurous, by the artist's feeling that he is "compelled" to do what he docs. Hegel's diagnosis would be less profound than it is if he did not know that it lies in the nature of such compulsion that it has about it nothing of the feel of necessity but, in all its compulsiveness, is-and is felt to be­ peculiar, capricious, subjective, or adventurous. In other words: there will, in Romantic art, forever be an overflow of "emotion" and "inner" meaning, which will "carry us away" from the things shown into a region no longer that of the things so sadly reduced in their power to hold and contain the Spirit. The Invisible always steals the show 0/ Romantic art. Bounded in nutshells, it is the king-maker in the realm of infinite space. But those so royally appointed do not always find comfort in their regal positions. Rilke closes his Second Elegy by lamenting such ...

Romantic transcendence of the heart which lacks, unlike the Greek heart, the solace of containing its superfluity in the concreteness of the myth or in the bodies

of gods: ...

Denn das eigene H er: iibersteigt uns

noch immer wie jene.

Und wir kiinnen ihm nicht mehr

nachschaun in BUder, die es besiinjtigen, noch in

gottliche Kiirper, in denen es grosser sich miissigt.

C

..•

For our heart transcends us still

its wont in Grecian times. Yet we no longer can follow it with our eyes as it enters figures that sooth it, or into the bodies of gods that enhance and restrain it.) as was

Or in Friedrich Schlegel's words: "We have no mythology." This, for him too, was

the crux of Romantic art and the cause of its agony.

Hegel is at his most brilliant in those discourses of his A esthetics which deal with this particular characteristic of Romantic art: the break in the link that in Classical art joined the inner meaning of the work to its "objective correlative." The Classical artist did not have either to invent or carefully to choose the reality that was to receive the baptism of his spirit: it was there, born unto him from the womb of the myth. He moved in a world of, as Hegel puts it, "preconceived objectivities."

But even if "in actual fact" this had not been quite so, he would not have known that he was the maker of gods and heroes, their loves and hatreds, their battles, voyages, and tragic destinies; and thus he was not burdened with either the responsibility or the subjective glory of their being in the world.

But as the classical marriage

421

TRI-QUARTERL Y

between the true mind of the Spirit and the true mind of the sensuously real dis­

solved, the affairs of the spirit of art became ever more promiscuous and licentious;

kindly of it, the artist became ever freer and more and more "creative." He found himself loose, and often at a loss, among the seemingly infinite potentialities of his choice. Anything, and ever more "anything," be it madonna or courtesan, saint or pagan, beast or thing, invited his fair attention, turning him into the Don Juan of the creative spirit.

It is of this Romantic mind of art, enclosed within itself and regarding the external world as a mere assemblage of cues for its monologues, that Hegel says: "It does not make much of a difference to which circumstances it applies itself or which it or, to speak more

encounters"; and in this the mind of Romantic art does indeed differ from the Classical mind which forever contemplates its sublimely monotonous and changeless constellations of gods,

heroes, and myths. Hegel knew this; but it took a good

hundred years before the Romantic artists themselves became fully conscious of the most melancholy blessing of their being such arbitrary sovereigns who wield unpre­

dictable power from their inner courtrooms, or, which amounts to the same, who "

again and again overpowered by, as T. S. Eliot puts it, a few meagre arbitrarily chosen sets of snapshots" of the memory, "the faded poor souvenirs of passionate do certain moments." "Why," he asks, "out of all that we have heard, seen, felt images recur, charged with emotion, rather than others? The song of one bird, the leap of one fish, at a particular place and time, the scent of one flower, an old woman on a German mountain path, six ruffians seen through an open window playing cards at night at a small French railway junction where there was a water­ mill: such memories may have symbolic value, but of what we cannot tell, for they come to represent the depths of feeling into which we cannot peer ." It is a Proustian passage, as Proustian as the lines of Rilke's First Elegy which list his own "souvenirs," as full of passionate intensity as they are devoid of objective and communicable meaning: the tree on the slope, the road he once walked, or the sound of a violin reaching him through an open window; and it is Proust's and Rilke's and Eliot's experience that Hofmannsthal turned into succinct verse in his are

...

.

.

poem "Lebenslied": lhm bietet jede Stelle

Geheimnisvoll die Schwelle; Es gibt sich jeder Welle Der Heimatlose hin.

It means that he who is without a home in external reality will entrust himself to any of inwardness to take him

anywhere-for anywhere may be the threshold of the mystery. Clearly, T. S. Eliot knew what he was saying when he judged Hamlet wave

an

artistic failure because the hero's emotion exceeded his concrete situation or the

"objective correlative."

It is the more surprising that Eliot judged

for what he condemned is the occasion itself of Romantic art,

as

he judged;

including his own.

5

Perhaps he did not mean it.

Mean what?

It is the persistent and most troubleTRI-QUARTERLY

143

question of the Romantic mind. For having lost its world, it can never do what

some

it means; and what it means cannot be done. And when it is done, it says: I did not mean

it-just as Hamlet did not mean to kill Polonius.

There is a Romantic limbo

of misunderstanding providentially fixed between the inner and the outer

worlds,

and Hamlet is its first and greatest tragic hero-a hero who is a rogue and peasant slave in his inaction as well

as

in his actions.

For every action is an act untrue to

the order or the chaos within-an idiot's act, a madman's act, or an actor's act: "And all for nothing," "For Hecuba!!" It is not for nothing that Hamlet is, in every sense, the actor's play, the tragedian's tragedy.

What is Hecuba to the player? An

inadequate objective correlative arbitrarily chosen by the spirit of Romantic art to convey an emotion. For Romantic art knows no natural and necessary objectivities.

The answer to Hamlet's question about the actor ...

What would he do

Had he the motive and the cue for passion

That I have? is not unlikely the one that Hamlet does actually give: he would, if he be a Romantic

artist, drown the stage with tears and amaze the very faculties of eyes and ears. Yet this is more ore less what the player has been doing, even without a real Hecuba of his own and certainly without Hamlet's motive, inexpressible in action and expres­ sible only in poetry; and if he fell short of stage-director Hamlet's standards, then it is only because he was deficient in histrionic genius. what we watch Hamlet himself do most of the time.

Hamlet is about himself in this like John-a-dreams? from it!

It is amazing how mistaken

amazing soliloquy! Was he dull? Did he peak

Was he unpregnant of his cause? Did he say nothing?

He did say

eloquence is

Moreover, it is precisely

a

great deal, and

nothing if not

a

was

to

say

even

more; and his

Far

superb

symptom of his "pregnancy."

There is, in all drama, no other monologue like this. What Thomas Mann once said of Beethoven's Sonata

Opus 111: that it takes the tradition of composing sonatas beyond itself and brings it to an end, might be said of this soliloquy and its position in the history of that dramatic device. For as the soliloquizing Hamlet reaches the climax of self-disgust, he turns, as it were, against the very art in which his author has always excelled and excels once again at this very moment of the drama-the art of writing poetic soliloquies: Why, what an ass am I!

This is most brave,

That I, the son of a dear father murdered,

Prompted to my revenge by heaven and hell, Must like a whore unpack my heart with words

...

The "must" in the last line is very good: for it is the "must" of this dramatic genre.

In thus unpacking his heart, Hamlet is doing little more than his duty by the rules of the Elizabethan-and not

only the Elizabethan-poetic drama. Every single one of its heroes is always being insensibly detained by his author, and forced to traverse long distances of verse before arriving at the terminus of deed or doom.

441

TRI-QUARTERLY

Hamlet is the first to find this business irksome and unworthy.

It is a remarkable

passage. One is tempted to imagine Michelangelo's David complaining that his maker has prevented him from doing the job, petrified as he finds himself in the pose of sheer expectancy. Yet the wonder of the soliloquy is that it succeeds uniquely in dramatizing the irksome Romantic conundrum by cunningly exploiting the very conventions of poetic drama in order to present a hero batHed, to his

undoing, by the blindman's buff-or "the hoodman blind," as he calls it-played out between words that hit their mark and deeds that turn awry, between poetic enter­ prises of great pitch and moment, and real actions that lose their meanings and their names. There is the inner goodness and the outer bloodiness, the inner villainy and the outer smile; there are "eyes without feeling" and "feeling without sight" : ...

Then what I have to do

Will want true color

...

,

and "heaven's face"

Is thought-sick at the act.

Where T. S. Eliot diagnoses the "artistic failure" of the play, there lies in truth

its achievement. Shakespeare, favored by his age and his dramatic genius, succeeded with Hamlet where Goethe, for instance, had to fail with Torquato Tasso: in creat­

ing, paradoxically speaking, the "objective correlative" for a subjectivity Romanti­ cally deprived of any adequate "objective correlative." If this be melancholy, then Shakespeare has written the profoundest drama of a mental disposition that was so captivating to his age that a writer, only thirteen years his junior, wrote its Anatomy.

Very likely, Shakespeare's unknown model-prince, the "Urhamlet," was as distracted as his own, just as Hieronimo in Kyd's Spanish Tragedy or the hero of Marston's The Malcontent or Lord Dowsecer in Chapman's An Humorous Day's Myrth are And when a high-ranking personage in another drama as melancholy as Hamlet. of that epoch says: "My nobility is wonderful melancholy. Is it not most gentleman­ like to be melancholy?", we can be sure that this condition was as fashionable then as was quite recently (although it seems decades ago) the unshaven Existentialism of St-Germain-des-Pres or San Francisco. But it needed Shakespeare's genius to envelop the bones of the melancholy anatomy-the very anatomy of Hege1's Roman­ tic art-with the flesh, blood and nerve of the Romantic tragedy.

Hamlet has hidden the corpse of Polonius, slain by him. Where is it, they ask him; and Hamlet answers in words so enigmatic that it is not surprising they have, over the centuries, drawn upon themselves perhaps a greater frenzy of interpreta­ tive labor and silliness than any other lines of the play: HAMLET:

The body is with the king, but the king is not with

the body. The king is a thingGUILDENSTERN: HAMLET:

A thing, my lord!

Of nothing.

TRI-QUARTERLY

145

Praise be to the eminently reasonable Dr. Johnson who simply said: "This answer I do not comprehend."

Yet is it so hard to understand?

It is the

reply of a son

whose mother, in the preceding scene, had shown herself unable-even in the hour of her deepest distress-to see what Hamlet saw: the spirit of his father and her

murdered husband, the disembodied and yet, for one enormous moment of the theater, reembodied idea of authentic kingship. Where Hamlet saw so much, she

"nothing at ali," and was yet persuaded that she beheld "all there is"; for her so brazed by "damned custom" as to be "proof and bulwark against sense."-"My lord, you must tell us where the body is, and go with us to the king."

"Body" and "king" are the words upon which Hamlet pounces with his reply-the "methodic" reply of a madman, be his madness feigned or real. But where is the borderline between illusion and reality when, as throughout this play, the body is with a thing of nothing, and the spirit, be it that of royalty, or faithfulness, or dignity, or love, not with the body; when tongue and soul, in their dealings with each other, are hypocrites; when the cloudy shapes and coagulations of sensuous reality, severed as they are from the springs of meaning, may mean a camel, a weasel, a whale; when there is "the very witching time" of the world's obtuse darkness and, therefore, the high noon of words, make-belief, and poetry-when, in brief, the hour has struck for Hegel's Romantic calamity?

It was Coleridge who divined that Hamlet (and not Goethe's Tasso) was the first "Romantic" poet in dramatic literature. Commenting on the manner in which

saw

heart was

Hamlet introduces himself to the spectator in the second scene of Act I-the very

speech in which he claims for himself an inwardness "which passes show"-Cole­ ridge notices not only HamJet's "aversion to externals" and "his habit of brooding over the world within him," but also his native "prodigality of beautiful words, which are the half-embodyings of thought, and are more than thought, and have an outness, a reality sui generis, and yet contain their correspondence and shadowy affinity to the images and movements within." Correspondence and shadowy affinity? There's the rub! For Hamlet's animosity against "externals" does not altogether exempt words, precisely because they have no exact correspondence, and at best only a shadowy affinity, to that which is within. Coleridge, in speaking as he does, speaks in his time and even ahead of his time; but even more ahead of Hamlet's. Hamlet is indeed prodigious in making beautiful words; and again and again they are at the point of emancipating themselves from the bitter oppression of an unbeautiful world and, settling in their own reality, superseding the other.

But Mallarrne, Valery, or Benn are yet to be born. If HamJet be a symbolist poet in the making, he yet calls the symbolists names: whore, or ass. He intensely suffers from the lie of what the latter-day Coleridges were to embrace as their poetic truth: the sui generis reality of words signifying nothing but their own beautiful sound and fury. Nonetheless it is true to say that, if Hamlet is suspicious of language, this is a suspicion which, like the suspicion of jealousy, adds fire to his passion for words; yes, ecce poeta! Or rather: behold the Romantic poet!

Drop a word before the young Lord Hamlet, and he will, as if it were a mouse and his mind the cat, chase it through all the chambers of consciousness, comer it,

461

TRI-QUARTERLY

take it with a cunning smile between his teeth, let it go, be after it with graceful leaps, encircle it with the paws and claws of his brain, clutch it to his heart and, having thus prepared for his intellectual meal, blink with feigned indifference into vacuous

space as if in all the world there were no words to feed the truth. "We must speak by the card, or equivocation will undo us," he says before that punning knave of the verbal

absolute, the gravedigger who-like all makers of graves for external

reality=-came into his sinister employment on the day of Hamlet's birth. Equivo­ cation will undo us-what a word from this paragon of the equivocal! He might as well say: We are undone. For in Hamlet's world (and indeed in Shakespeare's) equivocation is not a trick of language; it is the language of that world-a world in which the relations between within and without, between the truth and the sign, the meaning and the word, have suffered a formidable disturbance. Once this has happened, there is no way of "speaking by the card," or to the point; for there is no point at which the inner soul meets the outward gesture.

It is a weighty equivocation with which Shakespeare's most troubled dialogue begins: QUEEN:

Hamlet, thou hast thy father much offended.

HAMLET:

Mother, you have my father much offended.

Thus begins a season of the soul.

For henceforward there will be no father; there

will only be the offense. And there is no father and only the offense because now

it is felt that neither is the inner spirit the father of the outer world nor the outer world the father of the inner spirit: none has authority over the other. Hamlet is the man

who has bequeathed to modern literature and thought the obsessive preoccu­

pation with "authenticity," the much-desired virtue that calls every other virtue hypocrite or, more fashionably, mauvaise [oi, bad faith. Of course, authenticity, in this sense, is a chimera and cannot be had by the heirs to Hamlet: because there is for Hamlet nothing-nothing he were to do or not to do-that could possibly be in perfect accord with his inner being (if that is what is meant by "authenticity").

Whether he were to kill his uncle or let him off, whether he were to make love to

Ophelia or undo her with his cruelty, whether he were to be kind to his mother or thrust words like daggers into her heart-the action chosen would always, whatever he did, crudely diverge from the subtle and illegible text written Within.

There is no outward gesture, no dispensation of human nature, no institution of society, that in Hamlet escapes the charge of falsity. Only friendship appears to be exempted from this charge-Hamlets friendship with Horatio which his soul, free from the passions' tyranny and unhindered by the ways, orders, and arrange­ ments of the world, chose when she was truly "mistress of her choice." This friend­ ship he wears "in his heart of heart," hoping with his dying breath that it might "in this harsh world" tell his story. For the rest, there is mirth in funeral and dirge in marriage; there is the head that is not native to the heart; there is the kingdom that is a prison, kingship that is murder, shown affection that is betrayal, love of which the distraught Ophelia sings (as if, in her derangement, she had become the Prologue to this aspect of the tragedy) : TRI-QUARTERLY

147

How should I your true love know From another one?-

and there is sexual passion that is throughout the play what it is in one of the most

striking Sonnets: "The expense of spirit in a waste of shame" or, still worse, what it is in the unspeakable words spoken by Hamlet to his incestuous mother: ...

to live

In the rank sweat of an enseamed bed,

Stewed in

corruption, honeying and making love

Over the nasty sty-

"Oedipus Unbound"-this has been, not surprisingly, the judgment the Freudian decades of Shakespearean exegis have passed upon HamIet's or his author's "sexual morbidity." For this is what, in the utterly false good cheer of their rational natural­ ism, they are pleased to find in the later Shakespeare's tirades against sex. Such a

verdict is, of course, the sheerest nonsense.

The sexual invectives of Hamlet or

King Lear are not more excessive than are the rapturous lark-and-nightingale rhap­ sodies of Romeo and Juliet's wedding-night, or, to avoid the issue of Shakespeare's years, the dithyrambs of the sublime, and indisputably "sexual," desire that sound the marriage between Miranda and Ferdinand in The Tempest. Both dithyramb and

invective, poetic exultancy and bawdy outrage, ecstasy and shame, are, and will forever be, the two voices of the sexual Romantic being. The Romantic god of sex

is not Eros of the sweet countenance but Janus of the two faces. It is here that the Romantic dilemma rests, as it were, upon its universal particular. rising from it to ever

higher heights of lyrical transfiguration and descending into ever deeper depths of spiritual dismay. In Hamlet it so happens that the rose is taken from the fair forehead of an innocent love and a blister put in its place; that sexual love is sickened by the germ of corruption that, waiting for its occasion, always dwells in it; and that the thought of the marriage bed becomes unendurable to a prince of the mind because it is the couch of the mesalliance between the inner truth and the outer act, the place moreover that heralds the perpetuation of this "Romantic" misery. Hamlet cannot

be the lover of Ophelia as he cannot be the killer of Claudius; and he can

neither be that lover nor this killer because neither the premeditated act of love nor the premeditated act of murder can in its poor simple-mindedness express the com­

plexities of the inner spirit.

In this, too, HamIet is the perfect Romantic hero, the

subtle subject in a world of undifferentiated predicates.

Hamlet is the so

surpassing tragedy of Hegel's Romantic epoch.

much Denmark as a world Of carnal, bloody, and unnatural acts; Of accidental judgments, casual slaughters; Of deaths put on by cunning and forced cause;

And, in this upshot, purposes mistook-

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TRI-QUARTERLY

Its scene is not

a

world, in short, whose creator appears to be at cross-purposes with the creator of

the human soul.

Fortinbras is

scarcely the man to set this world right.

bid the soldiers shoot and be shot.

He can

But Hamlet's soul never gave commandment

for their death. The solution, both Shakespearean and Hegelian, is provided rather

by Prospero.

Whether The Tempest be the last play of a poet who renounces his poetry or only the late play of a poet who shows a magician renouncing his craft, this great work shares with Michelangelo's last Pieta and Rembrandt's last self-portraits the appear­ ance

of being engaged in a noble insurrection of the purest inner spirit against all

the crudities, awkwardnesses, and futilities of the material medium. It is remarkable how little heed the master playwright pays in this drama to the principles of his

Shakespeare surely knew that Ariel, then as now, would defy any bodily representation. It may be within the power of the stage-engineer to render the shipwreck noisy, busy, and seasick-making enough, but it would require the stagecraft of a dream to conjure up that airiest of airy charms. Moreover, how impatient Shakespeare, this most discerning and most piercing of all soul-gazers, appears to have become in The Tempest with delineating the psychological subtle­ theatrical business:

ties of "real" characters! a return

It seems as if with The Tempest he had embarked upon

journey to the allegorical universals of medieval moralities-just as Michel­

angelo, with his Pieta Rondanini, had almost made his way back to the heaven-bound agonies of the Gothic. All the world, if it is not transmutable by magic, is now all but Caliban; yet the spiritual virtue of the magic power itself, the power to render the Spirit, against its own will, in the flesh, is intrinsically denied through the spirit Ariel's desire to win his freedom from the magic servitude, even though this has kept him busy doing only the friendliest of deeds. Whatever else Shakespeare may have "meant" by making Prospero abjure his "so potent art" that worked its charms "upon their senses," the magician certainly sets Ariel free in the end and allows him to become what, in the core of his nature, he had been all the time: a pure spirit, taking with him into his disembodied condition "all torment, trouble, wonder, and amazement" that inhabits "this fearful country" of the senses. And as Pro spero breaks his staff, buries it "certain fathoms in the earth," and drowns his book "deeper than did ever plummet sound," Shakespeare puts an eminently logical and a Hegelian end to Hamlet's blunderings in that Romantic no man's land that echoes with the inner voice turned to lament upon reaching the wall of the outer world.

"The artist's journey into the interior: Rilke;" the third and last part of this

Series, will appear in the Spring issue of TRI-QUARTERLY.

TRI-QUARTERLY

149

RONALD JOHNSON

Winter

...

Visionary power

Attends the motions of the viewless winds,

Embodied in the mystery of words:

There, darkness makes abode, and all the host Of shadowy things work endless changes.

-WILLIAM WORDSWORTH

1

Tchink, Tchink. low,

Tsee!

Then

continuous warbles

these Lakes in all their weathers-

pure as a Thrush.

A maze of sound!

'dim

The

mirrors', 'bright slate'

-the sheens like & spear-shaped streaks

Rothay, deliquescent

somewhere in these airs

of

& the sinuous yews.

Tsee!

There is

blinding darkness, here,

one

wind off the Lakes-

Churchyard

with the movement of yews, blackbirds & River

Rothay

running, as a

who could not daffodils

grave-side

see

'huge forms', Presences & earth 'working a

sea'.

It was Dorothy who lies at his side, who brought home

lichen & cushions of moss,

who

boundary, but entered influences' into his pores inner country

to

animate

of

deep, clear Lakes.

some

Windermeres of his mind's eye.

only like

that, that had no

'skiey

it has hundred years

past Wordsworth's -Wordsworth

polished steel.

For William there was only

a

in Grasmere

herrings

saw

As I sit in this darkness, the Rothay hissing

like its geese & the

night forming itself into

shapes of yew

& blackbird songs,

I wish for this

earth, beneath issue

to move, to

some

dark, meditated

syllable perhaps-

something more

Down, to

than this inarticulate

the quickly Lake.

warble & seething.

The burning blues of Dove Cottage

But this

soil, once Wordsworth, lies

garden-

in silence.

I wish to make

darkening

something circular,

seasonal, out

the spectral October flowers of night

-hydrangea, gentian.

of this 'wheel' of mountains

This soil, once Wordsworth.

-some

.

flowering thing in its cycle--an image of our footsteps planted in hommage over

each ridge

0, let us give stems to the flowers!

Substance

fog:

& valley.

.

to

this

some

subtle, yet enduring mold, But having to

come a

Grasmere,

from where the Lakes radiate like spokes, I see to

only the descent

for

bird-song,

night, & rivers flowing.

Let us catch the labyrinthine in words-

this darkness-

the rest vanishes -the steaming breath of

snare

sheep,

high, upon the fells:

wind,

syllable, following on syllable, somewhere in these airs, these sinuous yews

the view from Great Tongue to Silver Howa cone

of light,

thickening

to greys

down its

slopes

-Gentian, Great Tongue, Westmorland,

England: of this soil, Wordsworth.

out

� down

Tsee! Tsee!

Then low,

by a ghyll lined with rowan. Red-berry

pure,

-waterfall.

A rising mist to meet us.

once

continuous warbles, as

a

Thrush.

2

I traced

I slept & dreamed the encircling Mountains

the convolutions of

moved toward

me

& made strange

In

sleep.

my

a

barrows.

I entered the architecture of

deep indigo:

waving & sparkling with hidden lights.

The

windings with the mole

through undisturbed

To the horizon, the grass was

turf, laid out by men,

bees-their 'soft mossy bodies'

linked in warmth.

edges

of the Mountains moved

slowly.

I followed

against the stars,

the patterns of waters

& there

were

within earth,

sounds

as

of great doors

opening

saw

the whorls of buried

shells.

their bases bit

as

&

I followed the mottled lizard into

into earth.

scrolls of leaves I

lay

& traced the

the sublime motions of the grasses

plover to its

on

nest.

And came, at

& saw stars descend like snow,

where the

through snow-white brightness

had built

of the skies-

on

'as if the Sun shined

just as Fire by Night is'.

as of a field of infinite hoar-frosts melting

reforming shapes

every bush-

webbing

to which the 'dew

doth

perch'.

And

on

webs, more

tenuous

And as the grass grew I entered into its MAZE-

&

spiders

that intricate

for the Snow is reflected by the Air

last, to pastures

in

higher,

than

these, & of even more

complexitythe of

interweavings man

with earth: warp & woof with

the stuff of Mountains-

of beasts & curious

I retraced my

vegetation.

the Lakes:

steps around

encompassing Ullswater, Derwent, Crummock, Buttermere,

Ennerdale, Wastwater, Conniston, Esthwaite,

Rydal, & finally

Windermere to Elterwater, in

a

circle back

to

Wordsworth & Grasmere.

And this, where I began, of the MAZE:

was

the center

where the blackbird still sang-its song more clear into the night, than any wordswith the boundless

ambiguity, ceaseless

turnings &

redoubling & 'motions of the viewless

winds'.

3

the quickening gut, clings to oak.

out of

THE OAK OF THE MAZE

it

An aerial

Lichen.

green,

Lion's shin, oak-limb, tomb: all acquire a hundred years'

skin, a

to cover

with

against

break out like fire & wax greene'.

Mistletoe.

Ivy. Springs out earth,

of

winter's pelt-bones

that 'being striken one another

white-berried.

Its seeds

ripened within birds-

it

dark, shining leaves.

It is the mythic coat of an oak-

made of a shining & darkleaved thunder,

lightnings & the owls

of its hollows.

There

connections in these

are

-between an earth, sentient with moles, & the owl's radiant eyesfine

as

web drawn

a

by spiders, close, as the grain of oak.

From earth, to

mistletoe, ivy & lichen, to owl's­ wing, to thunder, to lightning, to earth-& back.

There to

are

look at

own

many ways an

oak, & one, with its

eyes:

the blunt, of

acorns

in

an

burning push

earth full

of movements,

slight rustlings, as a passage of night-birds,

& bones that

'being striken one against another

break out like fire

& wax

AUTHOR'S Man.

NOTE:

greene'.

'Winter' is the first section of

a

seasonal poem, The Book

of the Green

This was written after a year spent in Britain, walking for a month in the Lake Coun­

try and also tracing the to its source in

course

of the

Wye River on

foot from its mouth at the Severn

reading the English poets and naturalists and

Wales, visiting the places where they lived. Just as 'Winter' concerns Wordsworth and the Lake Country, each section con­ centrates on a man and a place--'Spring' is the Wye River and its diarist, Francis Kilvert; 'Summer' is the remarkable chapter house at Southwell with its proliferation of foliage and animals and the early naturalist, Gilbert White; 'Autumn' is Samuel Palmer and the Shore­ ham he painted. For the benefit of American readers the English blackbird actually does sing at night. Its warbling is a linkage of songs rather like our Mockingbird, but more liquid and melting like a Thrush. Tchink, Tchink. Tsee. is an approximation of its 'fuss-note.'

A ghyll is a stream and fells are hills in the Lake Country. The Green Man of the title is to be seen in many churches in England-a rather heavy, dull face of a man--even Frazier has little to say about him-an ancient figure of regeneration carried over into Christian iconography. He appears always as a head sprouting either hawthorn or oak leaves from temples, throat or mouth.

The epigraph for the book is a quote from an early observer at a Lord Mayor's Parade in London at which there were green men-'wodyn' (wildmen) with 'skwybes' (firecrackers).

Then cam four grett wodyn with four grett clubes all in grene and with

borning

skwybes

...

Poetry and the hucksters JOHN STEWART CARTER

KARL

SHAPIRO IN

A Defense of Ignorance points out with justice that the

standards by which Eliot becomes a major poet are standards which Eliot himself,

along with Ezra Pound, was careful to establish, that Eliot himself stands in judg­ ment of Eliot, and that Eliot himself was his own original appreciator. Had Critic Shapiro not been writing a defense of ignorance, he might have remembered off­ hand and immediately that Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Poe provided the criteria by which they were for many years judged, and had he thought a little longer, he might have come up with the proposition that historically poets and poems have always been sold to the public. Sometimes the huckster is the poet himself; some­ times his friends do it for him.

Someone has to, for Poets, no less than Winstons,

sold to the reading public.

Eliot is the thinking man's poet-packaged in an­

are

declaimed in classrooms,

Shapiro certainly knows this. Without artificial respiration, the poem dies in the magazine in which it appears. Even very good poems die. Poet Shapiro knows this.

Consider the normal life of a poem-a good poem. It is written with the life­ blood of its maker. It is created. Every word, every shade of meaning of that word, every assonance, every rhyme, every comma, every lack of comma is pas­ sionately debated; and even though some poems seem to write themselves and are a great pleasure to the poet, no one can say, "I wrote the poem in the twenty minutes it took me to prepare the manuscript." The poet knows that it took him the twenty-seven or forty-seven years of his life to write it. If he doesn't know this, the poem is an accident, and he is no poet. Other poems take a long time, and many, many are stillborn, but the story Oscar Wilde told of spending the morning putting a semicolon in a poem and the afternoon in taking it out is not the exag­ geration it is meant to be. Poets write letters about semicolons, ask the opinions of their friends, and worry about them until they die. Keats never knew how he wanted "La Belle Dame Sans Merci" to be read. Poe suggested a preposterous last stanza for "Ulalume" and left manuscript corrections in The Broadway Journal, which he edited himself, of poems which had already appeared in print three or four times. All good poems are the result of loving, continued care.

thologies,

assigned.

Professor

TRI-QUARTERLY

IS5

Their first impersonal

reading comes about when they are sent to a magazine and read not solely in terms of their poetic merit, but in terms of the space avail­ able, the general editorial policy, and the taste of the magazine's reader-which may very well be influenced by what he has had for breakfast. None of these con­ siderations has been in the poet's mind at all. If they were allowed there, there would be no poem. Yet the poem is originally read in such nonpoetic terms, and the chances are very great that the reader-the man who makes the decision-is much less accomplished than the poet who has submitted it. The poem may go through a dozen such readings before it finally appears in print, having reached a reader whom it may have touched in a manner not at all intended by the potty poet, who may have struggled for days to get rid of an inner rhyme whieh has, in fact,

beguiled the reader into acceptance. The poem in print is now ready to live a life of its own. At least it has a good many readers.

Some people read the poems in the New Yorker before they look at the cartoons and are so seduced by anything lined as verse that they will read the verse filler when they turn the page in the Saturday Evening Post before they go on with the story. These are the addicts and, in many ways, the reader to whom the poet really speaks. But even these readers do not customarily study the poem. They just read it, and most of the time, unless they know the name, they won't remember who wrote it.

They make a critical judgment-"the boy's got something there," "so what?" "fachrissake," but it is a momentary judgment. The magazine will be thrown out, or even if it is saved, no one will remember why it has been saved six months later, and the poem, at best, sinks into the subconscious of the reader. It

subjected to it. The poems of Shapiro which I remember, sitting here and without getting up to look, are those most anthologized.

These are not the best poems, I know, but are merely those I have seen most frequently. They keep on turning up.

The anthology-from the Greek anthologists, to Pal grave, to a Bedside Book of Verse-is the best single chance even a good poem has of survival, and once an­ thologized the chances are very good that the same poem will tum up again. Cer­ tainly from Tottel's Miscellany on, it has been easier for an editor to select a poem someone else has chosen than it is to go back and make a selection from the body of the poet's work. In fact, it doesn't even need to be retyped but can be cut out and pasted to the page. lance traced a half-hearted attempt to modernize the punctuation of Milton's sonnet on his blindness backwards and forwards through a half dozen or so anthologies. These were all by noted scholars; yet the punctua­ tion given-neither seventeenth nor twentieth century-would have made it impos­ sible for anyone coming on the poem for the first time to have any idea at all of has no chance to stand the test of time because it is

never

what Milton meant. The scissors and the paste pot.

At the time of their appearance, Oscar Williams' Little Treasuries were much

criticized because they omitted standard works and contained selections based on what was called Williams' "capricious taste." The chief value of the Little Treas­ uries is that they do contain nonstandard works and that the reader-and the an­

thologizer-is able to read again what might otherwise be lost in the back num­ bers of magazines or even in Collected Works. To become "standard" a poem

561

TRI-QUARTERL Y

usually will proceed from a general trade anthology to a school or college text.

Physically these productions are much improved since Shapiro and I first began looking into Chapman's Homer. They are much prettier. I remember the one we Thin paper, gray, crabbed, tiny print so squeezed into columns that half the lines were turned back called Twelve Tons (Twelve Centuries of English Literature).

-sometimes above, sometimes below.

Every typographical impediment to reading It is a wonder any poem survived. But by the time a was fanatically observed. a high-school anthology, it is part of the standard repertoire, and has reached poem the selling is supposedly done by the teacher. Questions on it will appear on Col­ lege Boards; most educated Americans will have read it more intently, if not more pleasurably, than they will ever read a poem not so sanctified.

The question I am asking Professor-Critic-Poet Shapiro to ask when he objects to Eliot's providing the mystique by which The Waste Land-even "Sweeney and the Nightingales" -has achieved the sanctity of the school anthology (despite the cost of permissions) in fewer than forty years is, "Hasn't some nonpoetic force always operated? Hasn't this always been the case?" Shakespeare became famous through the production of his plays. They were valuable properties during his own lifetime. Seeing, hearing a play is not at all the same thing as reading it. Almost anyone can see or hear. The work of reading is done by the actors, the producers, and the hundred intelligences that go into the production. The professor when he reads the poem aloud is performing a task for which the student is not prepared since he does not know how to hear what he reads to himself. Thirty years ago, certainly forty, we were better trained in this regard, for even geography lessons were read aloud by the student, and if the inflection of the voice faltered, the teacher, the classmates, and the boy who was reading all knew perfectly well that he wasn't understanding what he read. I remember a girl named Eyolene Clark who, reading a history lesson aloud, came to "King George III." She blithely read "King George, lilinois," because Ill. was where we lived. Students nowadays have to be read to, at least for a time.

"See," someone has to say, "it sounds like this."

A real reader of poetry will breathe the poem, will move his lips and tongue.

That

his mouth fills with spit and that he is going to arrive at the period out of breath

important clues to meaning. He knows that the problem is somehow kinesthetic -just as I have seen pianists shown a piece of music finger, in order to hear, the difficult passages. Shakespeare has always had the benefit of being read aloud, of being produced. He even left instructions about how he was to be read. Had this not occurred, what would have happened to the sonnets by William Shakespeare, not even really Gent.?

Milton, of course, had his position in the Commonwealth. Shelley'S grandfather was one of the richest men in the world, and Byron was notorious before he awoke are

to find himself famous.

None of them needed what Poe in America

was

to call

"puffery." But Shelley and Byron certainly got it and got it early. Mrs. Shelley devoted her life to selling her husband, distorting his meaning to meet the rising Victorianism, suppressing his letters and notes, making him acceptable to the re­

bitterly loathed. In the end she had her way. The "Ode to the West Wind" made the anthologies and was read as a nature poem-by Nature actionaries he

TRI-QUARTERLY

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57

Boy-for over a hundred years.

It was not its revolutionary

meaning that got it

its chance to stand the test of time, but once enshrined any reader who knows how to read can, if he pays no attention to the notes, read it as a poem.

At first glance, the case of Keats may seem to be different.

He was a poor boy

(although his poverty has been sentimentalized); there was no government posi­ tion, no personal notoriety. He simply wrote a miraculous volume of miraculous poetry. coughed up his lungs, and died, How did he get to the anthologies? Well, at first he wrote miraculously unmiraculous poetry. Actually poetry of such an order would never be printed today except by a vanity press or maybe the little magazines. Be that as it may, the poetry was criticized in leading articles. Shelley and Byron took it up. Who killed Cock Robin? The very men who made it pos­ sible for him to live. "Lycidas," I think, would have made Edward King, had Edward King been a good poet. At least he would have had a sonnet or two in the anthologies. Keats really is a part of the loveliness which once he made more lovely, and since Mary Shelley kept Shelley alive, Shelley himself can show us Adonais like a star.

Leigh Hunt according to the actual record had more to do with Keat's survival He not only published Keats but kept after his reputation. His Examiner review (1817) ran for three numbers (June 1 and 6 and July 15). This for an unknown, twenty-one year old poet. The Lamia review (The Indicator, 1820) is longer and even more detailed, running through two numbers (August 2 and 9). Still more significant from the point of view of what has happened to Keats is the reprinting-again by Hunt-of "The Eve of St. Agnes" in the London Journal (January 21, 1835) together with a running commentary. The running commentary is significant. I have just been through it in this connection, and it contains everything that would customarily be pointed out in the classroom. I have the old Twelve Tons with my notes, and it might just as well have been underlined and explained by Hunt. I am sure I was never told by any teacher that the opinions were Hunt's, the sensitivity his. I'm pretty sure that the teacher herself didn't know.

Poetry is not customarily taught even in the universities by poets. It is often taught by people who know nothing whatever about poetry except what the critics have said. I know a woman who taught "The Eve of St. Agnes"-kept it alive so that people who could read could read it-for years and never even guessed that the love of Madeline and Porphyro was actually consummated in the stanza than even Shelley.

Beyond a mortal man impassion'd far At these voluptuous accents, he arose, Ethereal, flushed, and like a throbbing star Seen mid the sapphire heaven's deep repose; Into her dream he melted, as the rose

Blendeth its odor with the violet,-

Solution sweet.

Now I know I knew what those lines meant when I was fourteen and addicted more to Liberty, Uncle Billy's

581

TRI-QUARTERLY

Whiz-Bang, and the Red Book than to the best that has

been thought and said.

Of course you don't mention such things at fourteen-or

at least we didn't at that age in Shapiro's and we

my roaring-to-a-close twenties-but

certainly knew them. Here is what Leigh Hunt-father of was it eleven?-says

two years before the accession of Victoria:

Madeline is half awake, and Porphyro reassures

her with loving, kind looks, and an affectionate embrace.

To this, Forman, a painstaking editor, adds, I cannot but think that in this one instance

the commentator is very decidedly at fault, and that no embrace is referred to in the stanza.

Hunt, at any rate, must have been familiar with Keat's statement that the poem was not intended for eunuchs, and both Hunt and Forman had staring them in the face Keat's manuscript' correction of "Blendeth her perfume" to the connotatively redolent "Blendeth her odor."

In Imagination and Fancy

(1844), Hunt, even though the Edinburgh Review capitulated, busy publicizing, huckstering Keats. And he still knows the temper of the times, for he is far more interested in the window than the bed and says "the only speck of fault in the whole poem arises from an excess

had long since

is still

of emotion." This was a fault that the Queen was later to find in "Enoch Arden,"

and one which Millais was to minimize in the painting still being reprinted in the

glossiest of school anthologies. It shows Madeline-no mermaid in sea-we ed-but completely clothed-bundled up even-presumably for the trip through the storm to the home across the moors. Had Keats lived to sixty, he would have seen Madeline in long underwear (for this is how she survived the Victorian country­ house damps); and I like to think that he might have been more disturbed, dis­ mayed-the care of those stanzas-than ever by the Quarterly Review. But it was in the Victorian country house that he stood his test of time.

Sir Charles Dilke

and Lord Houghton took him up (never underestimate the power of a title) and in a sense made him. When you consider that Byron's friends and Mrs. Shelley

"destroyed" in order to "preserve," and that poor Poe's one surviving, heartbreak­ ing letter is marked in Ingram's relentless hand "This must be destroyed," the enormous debt owed to Dilke and Houghton becomes apparent. Not because they add anything to Keats, but because they make it possible for those who know how to read him to prove to

those who must teach him that the miracle to which he

stumbles through revision after revision is indeed what he achieves.

It's too bad,

Professor Shapiro, but that's the way it is.

For poets who would wear their rue with a difference, there is always this: the

absolute certainty that nothing any critic said, including himself in "The Philosophy of Composition," had anything to do with the vision of Poe that appears to Hart Crane on the subway and that he tells of in The Bridge, TRI-QUARTERLY

159

And why do I often meet your visage here, Your eyes like agate lantems--on and on Below the tooth paste and the dandruff ads?

-And did their riding eyes right through your side And did their eyes like unwashed platters ride?

And Death,-aloft,-gigantically down

Probing through you-toward me, 0 evermore!

STEPHEN BEAL

"In Grateful Memory of the 133 Woodbridge Men

Who Made the Supreme Sacrifice in the Great War" The guns in France felled

England's roses,

Every cutting-garden died; Throughout the land, through reddened noses, All the garden mothers cried: "The sacrifice of

youth and beauty"­

Pause to blow their

noses

hard-

"Is every mother's bounden Then

they

tidied up the

duty!" yard.

They culled in armloads blasted flowers, (Mutilation all their own); Then giddy through the scented hours,

Potpourried the over-blown Till every home could boast war's chattels:

Medals, photos, barren wombs: Mute relics of the greatest battles Roses

ever

fought for tombs.

FELIX POLLAK

Popular song There's nothing between me and you but I,

baby, nothing before tomorrow but today, there's nothing but the is before the maybe, baby, between the is and maybe be what may. there's

Let's seize the

day before the day does cease us, for cease the day does do us, day by day, let's seize the day, for day does daily cease us, no matter what, our ceasing makes our day. nothing between you and me but you, baby, there's nothing after now but now no more, there's nothing but the was after the maybe, baby, after the here & now is only neither nor.

There's

Critics' critter The live

are

and their

capricious contradictions

fickle

of testily ticklish didactic dialectics

catastrophical debacles of definitive critiques. make often

The

dead, in turn, are docile

and modular: par excellence

exemplars

for malleable ex-post-facto manifestoes and

critically perspicacious explications by totally remote comptrollers with complete recall.

MAXINE KUMIN

From the Joppa Diary

August 9th The dewberries each

one

an

are

in,

oddball

bobbling on its own stem, each one a unique and bumpy cancer, a black bulge fattening under its leaf blanket; some

of them seven-titted,

some

stunted at three,

some

so

lopsidedly ripe

their nibs have split.

Picking is a

disease.

To suppose we were bushmen

redskins or a band

or

of lost, first-landed settlers

turned in

on

ourselves;

to suppose that God is

watching

and does not want

his

lumpish fruit to rot is, putting it mildly, to populate my symptoms when in fact I

am

alone in the pasture,

bending among deerflies and the droppings of porcupines.

I

undressed

am

The

sun

to

the waist.

licks my back.

Brambles crosshatch it.

The universe contracts to the

of

brilliant interior

five-gallon pail.

Still making plurals, a

I exhort my

selves, my crew:

bend your lazy backs, stick up your rumps, lean on stubble and thorns that scratch your arms;

pinch! pull! purple your fingers!

June 15th On this

day of errors a fieldmouse brings forth her young in my desk drawer.

Come for I

see

a

pencil,

each one,

pulled out of its case, begin to worm its way uphill to a pinhead teat.

a

wet steel thimble

As if I

were

an

enlarged owl

made both gross and

cruel,

I lean closer.

The mother

rears

and kills.

Her forelegs

loop like paper clips as she tears at her belly fur,

shredding it fine as onion skin, biting the blind and voiceless nubbles off.

Later, she runs past me.

I

see

her mouth

is stuffed full of

a

dead baby.

SHERWOOD ANDERSON

American spring song In the spring, when the winds blew and the farmers

were

plowing the fields,

It came into my mind to be glad because of my brutality.

Along a street I went and over a bridge.

I went through many streets in my city and over many

bridges.

Men and women I struck with my fists and my hands began to bleed.

Under a bridge I crawled and stood trembling with joy at the river's edge.

Because it was spring and soft sunlight came through the cracks of the bridge I tried to understand myself.

Out of the mud at the river's edge I moulded myself a god, A grotesque little god with a twisted face.

A god for myself and my men.

You see now, brother, how it was.

I was a man with clothes made by a Jewish Tailor,

Cunningly wrought clothes, made for a nameless one.

I wore a white collar and some one had given me a jeweled pin To wear at my throat.

That amused and hurt me too.

No one knew that I knelt in the mud beneath the bridge In the city of Chicago.

You see I am whispering my secret to you I want you to believe in my insanity and to understand that I love God-

That's what I want.

And then, you see, it was spring

And soft sunlight came through the cracks of the bridge.

I had been long alone in a strange place where no gods came.

Creep, men and kiss the twisted face of my mud god.

I'll not hit you with my bleeding fists.

I'm a twisted god myself.

It is spring and love has come to me­

Love has come to me and my men.

PHOTOGRAPHY BY ART

SINSABAUGH

PETER MICHELSON

Chicago plainsong: requiem for feces

a

The soot is

general all

Chicago and sworls softly falling on black and yellow cabs greasy granite banks the grain exchange--on central plains over

and treeless

hills, where men

of early time in sod

cabins

virgin land in need of light and heat gathered feces-fuel on

from freeborn bison herds to bake the bread for which

The soot is

general all over Chicago and sworls softly falling on city pride of progress as dung­ smoke fell on prairie pride of conquest and makes ask themselves

men

why bison chips are found today in city zoos

they broke the ground semened

with iron bars and tile

wheat and wreaked havoc

drains to

on

the land of god and

man.

The soot is

general all over Chicago and sworls softly falling on cinderheaps of fuel-feces standing stagnant outside steaming factories like heaps of dung made sterile by too much water running off the vital compost

into stark and

deep ravines etched jagged through the plains, which could withstand the gods of savage

men

but were

undone

by Christian men with steel plows who buried grass in furrow-wounds

and no

so

remained

no

balm

baIrn in Gilead

to make the wounded whole.

help wash compost

down the river to the

sea

instead of giving life to pampas grass,

why men

by way of tracks and coal cars

removed the beast

left its

ghost in tractor

plows that gave the land to wind and water conserved the land and held it down with concrete which way

we

city streets,

know can wash

by blast of bombs or

fault of earth

even

still the soot is

while

falling

faintly faIling upon living and the dead.

all the

a-

WILLIAM EARLE

What is man?

IT WOULD,

OF

COURSE, be absurd to

"protest against science" and its most

appropriate product, the machine. The natural sciences are but extensions of our legitimate interest in the workable side of nature; and if someone should prefer to remain ignorant of that side of nature, we must grant him his heart's desire and leave him to the consequences. For any single person to choose ignorance would doubtless be inconsequential; for a society as a whole to remain ignorant of it could hardly be counted a blessing and no such society at the present time could survive except on tolerance of those societies which did encourage such an interest.

The most appropriate product of the natural sciences I believe is not knowledge

about nature itself, but rather know-how, that is certain rules for certain types of natural things under certain conditions.

manipulating

And, as we have known

since Aristotle, knowing that certain substances will explode under certain condi­

tions, for example, is practical know-how of a useful sort, but hardly brings us closer to comprehending what any natural being is, unless we simply decide to an acquaintance with natural things "comprehension." In any event, I do not believe it is comprehension or understanding at all in any sense in which

call such

would legitimately say that we comprehend or understand ourselves or one another. I shall return to this later; but for the moment, the technical management

we

of natural things to produce results we desire finds its fulfillment in machines of

various sorts.

And no sooner have we multiplied machines and transformed our

living environment by them until we are virtually living in an artificial world, than some arise to protest against the machine. Again, a good deal of this pro­ test seems somewhat archaic, and little more than a preference of taste, perfectly legitimate as such, but not exactly obligatory on other tastes. If some prefer to write their poety with feather quills rather than typewriters, or gallop across town on horseback to fetch their potatoes rather than phone for a delivery by truck, their time is their own and let each employ it as he may. But if he acts on prin­ ciple, then he must be coherent; we will deny him aspirin for his headaches, ether for his surgery, electricity for illumination, and it is difficult to know exactly how far his asceticism will reach; I for one will not follow him, for under present his­ torical conditions I believe his trail when followed coherently leads not at all into an idyllic rapport with a natural environment, but straight into the most artificial environment of all, the mental ward.

If the protest

against "science" and the "machine" so stated look somewhat childish, perhaps we can relocate its intended thrust. It could hardly be authentic knowledge of nature which anyone would wish to reject, but rather an inauthentic by-product, the illegitimate extension of the methods of natural science to every subject-matter, and the ensuing philosophical notion that everything that is must be understood on the model of those things in nature which have yielded to the TRI-QUARTERLY

167

procedures of natural science. This it should be understood is not natural science, but rather a philosophy or perhaps a religion modeled upon natural science, and, to anticipate our conclusions, a highly defective one at that. The philosophical examination of the natural sciences is one thing; it helps to define what its methods are: observation, experiment, and prediction in the spirit of objectivity and imper­ sonality. But the inverse operation is another: the adoption of a conviction that such procedures and the particular form of know-how they can be expected to issue in are universally applicable to all domains of being, that scientific knowledge is knowledge par excellence, that nothing is known unless it is known by these pro­ cedures, that nothing is unless it falls in the same domain as those things which are usefully observed by the experimental sciences. None of this is itself a scientific fact but far outruns science itself to become not the philosophy of the natural sciences but rather natural science as a philosophy.

It is from this quarter that one hears such remarks

as

that "science has out­

stripped the humanities," that "ethics must catch up with the natural sciences," that we may hope for insight into the human condition when we too are subjected to an examination conducted according to the experimental method, that mind has now been shown to be nothing but a somewhat complicated computer, that science shows God does or does not exist, etc. etc. This particular species of madness reaches its practical zenith with the wish that political decisions be entrusted to experts in political science, sociology, and group psychology, as though the free and anguished decision as to what we shall communally make of ourselves were a matter of experimental conclusions or scientific expertise!

It goes without saying that substantial knowledge from any quarter is always welcome; but it should also go without saying that no knowledge whatsoever of what we have done or are now doing presents us with anything but a moral problem and not a solution: which of it shall we reaffirm, which change? and that particular decision can never be the logical conclusion of any scientific syllogism. To be better informed of our individual and social condition, to be better informed of the probable consequences of our actions is one thing; to suppose that information of itself determines our response is quite another. This is, of course, an old saw in philosopby; but even it is frequently forgotten in the enthusiasms of those who talk of "human engineer­ ing," "programmed lives," "controlled environments" and the rest. The saddest spectacle is offered however not by those who happen to think these things possible, but by those who dearly wish them to be true; what are we to say of any mind whose most ardent wish is not to be itself? Unamuno once heard a popular lecturer

proving to his audience that they were all absolutely mortal; what puzzled Unamuno was not that some believed it, for after all the whole question is of enormous difficulty, but that they all threw their hats into the air, cheering their own future death.

In any event, let us focus the discussion

on

one

I haven't the slightest intention of "answering" this

central issue: what is man?

question, but I would like to

advance some reasons for regarding it as unanswerable so put, and to suggest that

the question itself is raised from a false standpoint; there can be no true

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TRI-QUARTERL Y

answer

to the question: what is man,

be transformed into

but there is another way in which that question can

something more profitable: what are men, what have men The shift of emphasis is from something called

done, and eventually, who am I.

"man" to singular individuals; and from doctrines of a common essence or nature

shared by all, to singular lives lived, and finally from a perpetual obsession with

what other men must be like to a choice of what I as an existing man must do.

I wish I could claim this as a personal discovery; but unfortunately for that ambi­

tion, the Delphic Oracle three thousand years ago initiated philosophy with the commandment: Know Thyself. It did not say: know Nature, or know everybody else, or know yourself as though you were one object among many; it certainly did not command us to be psychologists of ourselves. In fact, like all oracles it presents us with an enigma, to do the best with we can. What it did not command is far clearer than what it might have wished as a fulfillment. western

But the initiator of

philosophy, Socrates, took it with absolute seriousness; it is not at all

certain but that he was the last who did. What does seem certain is that both the natural sciences

well

certain modes of

philosophical thought are virtually designed always have been other modes of thought which do not falsify us or betray our condi­ tion. These other modes of thought which I shall try to specify in a moment, are frequently considered especially today as "informal" or "bad science" by philo­ sophizing scientists; or as "merely human opinion" by devoted theologians, or as something "merely autobiographical" by philosophers hypnotized by universal doctrine; I should like to advance some reasons for believing that the autobio­ graphical, the biographical, and the "poetic" or humanistic mode of insight and expression is very far from being informal or uncontrolled science, and that it is not "merely" anything at all, but rather the most faithful, nuanced, and profound comprehension we have of the only thing in the world of being of which we can have any comprehension at all: ourselves. as

to make

us

as

forget who we are.

Natural sciences and

I believe there not only are but

man

The natural sciences, of course, aim at the laws of nature, and perpetually seek more

and more general laws under which more particular laws can be subsumed.

These laws

hypotheses issue from observations, experiments and predictions, We only know how and why various according classes of natural things change after we have watched them under a variety of artificially varied conditions; we formulate our guess as to the aspects of their total environment responsible, try it again under those new conditions, and see if the predicted results occur; when they do, we are happy and formulate the results as a law, theory, or hypothesis which has a degree of probability to it. Things which are susceptible to this approach, we call "natural"; and it is immediately apparent that there can be a scientific, natural law only of those things or events which follow a general law or rule. To follow a general law or rule is the same as to be repeatable; if the conditions are repeated, then the identical effects will follow.

In short, if, in the whole sphere of Being, some things are repeatable or cyclic, or

to well-worked out methods.

TRI-QUARTERLY

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then we can hope to discover the law of their repetition. Natural things clearly are

cyclic, and equally clearly, their law is susceptible of being found out. But simply because certain things and events in Being, natural events, are cyclic, we have as yet no ground for assuming that everything which is is cyclic, repetitive, and there­ fore that the law of its cycle could be found out. That is an enormous and illegi­ timate extension from the domain of nature which is largely cyclic to everything in Being itself; in short, this philosophy of naturalism which is not itself a natural science but either a philosophy or religion of nature, surely rests on nothing more than the wish to analogize everything which is to certain cyclic events in nature.

On the other hand, there is a very conspicuous domain of existence which at least in its first appearance and I also believe in its last truth, is not cyclic and repetitive: that domain is human history. In this domain, in contrast to the domain of nature, we encounter precisely the opposite: the perpetual emergence of novelty, the unpredicted, the explosive, the scene of choice and decision, a scene where one kind of being, man, has to decide what he will do, what kind of life he will live, and what he shall make of himself. And where societies do not offer us this

image, we are instantly inclined to think of them as primitive, not yet historical, asleep, and analgous to a bee-hive or ant-hill, caught up not in history but natural cycles of birth, life, decay. There are indeed societies which wear this aspect, ancient Egypt and ancient China, societies which do not seem to us explosive, or dynamic, but which aimed at an eternal mythical recurrence. Whether they were so in fact to those who lived in them is another question; it might very well be that their inertia and cyclic repetitiveness are due to the vast historical distance which separates us from them; or then perhaps that is exactly how they were. In any event, our conclusion is the same: the historical is inherently the life which free decisions of men make for themselves, and is inherently therefore developmental and not cyclic, although development here does not necessarily mean "progressing" or "improving" but only the minimal sense of a certain restlessness. If natural things have their lives already written out in the gene structure of their natural heredity, man finds that he is, in Sartre's phrase, condemned to be free, to such an extent, that even when he chooses to live according to some mythical cycle of meaning, that itself is only one more free choice, which must constantly be reconfirmed and enforced by free decisions.

When we recall then where we are in life, is it not clear that our actions are not effects of conditions, but rather free responses to

situation; and if frequently situation, hence decide to respond become repetitive and cyclic, in fact we have freely chosen to follow a rule, and could equally freely choose not to follow it; hence the rule has only the force of we

decide

to

in the

same

way to the

a

same

describing one more free choice, not determining it. History therefore appears to us as a domain of human

action, which means free response and choice among

alternatives open in the unique situation within which the choice is made. It is therefore least of all cyclic and repetitive, but the field of human creation. The sober truth is that when human life is cyclic and repetitive, it is boring; and while much of it may be boring, it is not then at its best, and there is no reason to be

drawn from the natural sciences which compel it to be so.

70

I

TRI-QUARTERL1I'

There is a second reason why the methods of the natural sciences ate the least

approaches to the inner sense of human life. Science Its as such and therefore natural science aims at something universally true. is classes of a not the This is in turn func­ things, proper subject-matter singular. tion of its interest in the law or rule. On the other hand, human existence is inherently an interest, choice, and preoccupation with the singular. Human beings first and foremost give themselves proper names. Our cities have proper names, and not most appropriate

and the parts of nature closest to our concerns all have proper names.

In short,

the domain of human existence is a domain of singularities, the sun and the moon,

the earth, ourselves in our

singularities; our interest in existence is in what we are themselves singular possibilities, not general­ ities. And our history is the record of what singular nations and singular men have singularly done. And for each, there is always his own singular death, which

must choose, alternatives which

no one

may die for him.

In a word, the essence of human existence is in its un­

repeatability, singularity, and its historical record; it is not in the universal, the general, the type, or anything designatable by common nouns. It is perfectly true that any singular whatsoever is at the same time an example of a general, common type; but it is also something very distinct from that type, and meanwhile the existential, active interest of human existence is not and can not be a interest in the universal, but only in the singular. And so while my own death is most certainly an instance of the universal notion, "death," it is not with respect to that universal that my efforts to live are directed, but toward my own singular existence with others. Death as such and as common to all, is not the issue for anyone's existence; it is only the singular event, my death and your death, which can logi­ cally function as a possibility for choice or avoidance. Similarly, if I go to a party, I go to be with other singular people each with his proper name; if all I were inter­ ested in were the universal, "Man," I need never stir out of my room; I myself exem­ plify that universal, and what reason would I legitimately have to look at others?

Hence the very posing of the question, What is Man, is itself an invitation to forget who we are; we are not merely examples of that universal category, but chiefly singular individuals existing mortally with other singular individuals, all of us having to choose freely who we are to become and what to do. There is no point whatsoever in trying to find something called the "definition of man," when the whole interest, concern and zest of human existence is precisely in an existence, our own, which has to decide in that existence which possible essence or defini­ its

tion it will wear. To attempt therefore to grasp the very essence of man is the attempt to grasp that which is the most irrelevant to the human scene, and what would be

fatal to take seriously. Am I not invited by any such pretended definition to think I already possess the significance of every lived human existence, all those which

have been, running back to ape-man, as well as all those now alive, and those to come? Ail we can conclude is any definition sufficiently universal to encompass the significance of every lived existence as well as the open future of man, would

have to be so general as to be pertinent to no single existence.

I conclude from these initial remarks that there can be no pertinent law of human

existence, no definition of man, and that we have instead a domain where if there TRI-QUARTERLY

171

is any rule at all, it is the simple law of free creation; that is, the law that here there is

no

law.

Morality If there is no definable human nature, neither can there be anything like "the"

human

situation, "the" human predicament, or "the" human problem, but only singular situations, predicaments, and problems, which may accidentally and with­ out any necessity, be shared by none, few, or many. A situation, predicament or problem, must be the situation, predicament or problem of someone, and if the decisive thing in men is their freedom and singularity, they are by that stroke free to create their own problems, take or leave what they like in their environment, or involve themselves in whatever they like as a predicament.

And it also follows from the same freedom and individual singularity of human existence, that there are no universally binding moral laws or values, let alone a universal sense of life, or religious commandment. As for values, values must be valuable for someone, or they aren't values at all but just generalizations from those singular things which have had value for certain men; but a general value can be correlated only to a general man; meanwhile such a general man has never been born, will never die, and obviously does not live at all. One must of course impose social laws upon a society, a society being in effect defined by its laws and those upon whom they are obligatory. But such laws are not categorical laws, having an unqualified obligation upon men, but rather prescriptions for a social order, having only that derived value which is conferred upon them by the value of the order they support. To reject then any particular feature of this or that social order is to reject at the same time those laws which are intended to support that feature. I hope it will be understood that these observations on the character of social laws and social morality to the effect that they are all grounded upon and supported by freedom, and not by God, nature, or reason, will not be under­ stood as invitations to disorder and social anarchy or personal disintegration. We are, it would seem, absolutely free to choose whatever condition we like; our choosing it confers upon it whatever value it has. I am equally free to choose my own life or death; but how can this be understood as conferring any value on

death?

Must I rush to suicide to prove I

the heroes of Dostoievski?

am

free to commit it, like

some

of

Or if man is free to order his collective social life as

he chooses, does this

supply some absolute justification for preferring no order?

That logic is as faulty as the logic which wishes to extinguish the freedom of man into some universal, collective, or general definition of human nature, his condi­ tion, or life, or duty.

Religiously the same consequence must be drawn. If the ultimate significance of human life is that which it has for God, then indeed, if would be God who would

enjoy that significance, and far from conferring a higher dignity on human life, removes it altogether; for now the sense of men's lives is to be gathered in not by those living men themselves, but by their creator, for whom they are now mere instruments. If a man freely chooses to live his life such that it conforms to his

72\

TRI-QUARTERL Y

sense

of a divine commandment, then indeed that is his free choice, and he and

he alone is the benefactor. Further such a choice has

other free choices.

no obligatory force upon Others remain free to find no value whatsoever in religious

life; they remain human too.

If there is no natural science of human life; and if there is no light upon the human condition to be gleaned from what man ought to do, ought to be, ought to

wish for, ought to prize, or some universal sense to all life to be derived from reve­ lations from God, have we not cast the whole of human existence into a rather pro­ found darkness?

singularity?

What light is left to human existences in all their freedom and

But surely men have never lacked awareness of themselves and one

another, and what they were about; only the expression of that awareness is not in science, moral law, or religion. Is it not rather in that most ancient form of human expression, what we now call the "humanities"? Men have always told each other what they have done, seen, suffered; and one of their chief preoccupations when they have exhausted themselves in biography, autobiography, and history, is in inventing imaginary tales, embroidering on what has been to dream of what could have been. In a word, literature and neither science, morality nor religion speaks most appropriately of human lives, in the language closest to those lives.

And, when literature is purest, and not trying to do what it can not in any case do, it never gives a scientific explanation of anything, or delivers laws of human existence, it neither urges nor threatens us with anything, and is least of all an informal sociology talking about the human condition, the human predicament, or human nature as such. Not, of course, that authors haven't done all these things.

But we should say that this aspect of literature is not its purest or most authentic side. Rather it should simply present or record singular human existences in their

singular situations, making their absolute choices of life. In short, it should show to ourselves, not to teach something about all, or to moralize, but simply and purely to show what has happened or what might have happened. The showing, or pure expression raises human existence to the plane of explicit consciousness; and that itself is the sole form of comprehension, I am convinced, that we can or should want to achieve. If Shakespeare shows us not the human predicament, and not mankind, but rather Hamlet, a most singular and unrepeatable man, in a most singular and unrepeatable situation, making precisely the existential choices which define Hamlet as Hamlet, then we end up, to whatever extent the play is successful, in comprehending Hamlet. We do not "explain" him, we do not morally judge him; instead we comprehend; this comprehension which we can achieve in great works of literature of the singular existences displayed in them is knowledge, the best knowledge we can have of ourselves and has virtually nothing in common with that other form of knowledge I spoke of at the beginning, scientific know-how.

I think it would be a vast mistake to consider works of literature as allegories for our time, even when their authors dearly wish them to be so. They may be written in our time or in another; they may present relatively common situations.

But their excellence in disclosing the free choices, the actions and sufferings of their heroes has nothing to do with whether the hero or his situation is common us

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or rare.

Nor has it anything to do with defining human nature. How indeed can

all of us be both K. of the Trial and Meursault, the Stranger? K. on the one hand is so ridden with a metaphysical guilt that he finally agrees with his executioners although he has done nothing; Meursault on the other hand has so little guilt that

all the forces of persuasion fail to make him confess any at all and he goes alone and undaunted to his death, although he has killed a man. Both of course present us

with human possibilities; but neither defines the condition of

man or

human

nature, and the value of neither is in some hoped for contemporary social com­ ment, even if Orson Welles does add a mushroom cloud at the end of his version of The Trial.

Would it not be more appropriate to the authentic excellence of literature then to read

it as disclosing the character, decision and singular situation of precisely

those who are shown in the particular work; and to bracket once and for all the ambition to transform these singular illuminations of singular existences into tracts for the times, into contributions to some hoped for general theory of human nature, into

teachings, allegories, and all the rest which only make us forget who and

where we are?

Against the value of the eternal, the value of the briefest, most transitory, seductive speck of gold on the belly of the serpent, life.-Nietzsche, Will to Power §577

HENRY VEATCH

Two culturestwo kinds of

knowledge

To ADDRESS ONESELF TO a topic such as that of "the two cultures" or of "hu­

manism and behaviorism in the

university" would seem to be like nothing so much as for a fool to rush in where angels fear to tread. For it will not be for­ gotten that while the ancient Zeus may have been petulant, he did wield thunder­ bolts. And the modem Zeus, while he may no longer be a real Zeus but only a Leavis, and while his thunder may be only a noise with no lightening, still his roar can be as terrifying as the sound of any rushing mighty wind.

Nevertheless, having resolved upon a course of folly, my first step will be to call into question one very common and, as it would seem to me, rather uncritical way of conceiving the issue between the sciences (and more particularly the behavioral sciences) and the humanities. For is not the issue often thought to be simply one of knowledge on the one hand, as over against some such thing as

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artistic feeling or appreciation on the other? Thus it is the scientists, we are forever

being told, who are competent to give us the facts in regard to human beings and inform us of the laws and principles governing our human life and human behavior; in contrast, it is to the humanities that we are told to look for help in learning to appreciate the so-called finer things of life, to enhance our personalities, and to realize to the full our priceless heritage of human freedom. Selah!

To confute this over-simple picture, however, I suggest that we consider but It consists in a brief quotation from Clarendon's a single concrete example.

History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England, the quoted passage being an instance of a kind of literary genre that was much in vogue in the 17th century, that of the character as it was called. In this particular instance, the character is that of the celebrated Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford. It begins with a brief account of his being led from his prison in the Tower to his place of execution On this Clarendon comments: "Thus fell the greatest subject in on Tower Hill. power (and little inferior to any in fortune) that was in that tyme in ether of three kingdomes; who could well remember the tyme when he ledd those people who then pursued him to his grave a man of great parts and understanding." After follows a sentence this one summary of an incident in the Earl's early rise to power.

The character then proceedes: to

...

"These successes, applyed to a nature too elate and arrogant of itselfe, and quicker progresse into the greatest imployments and trust, made him more transported with disdayne of other men, and more contemninge the formes of businesse, then happily he would have bene, if he had mett with some inter­ ruptions in the beginning, and had passed in a more leasurely gradation to the office of a Statesman. He was no doubte of greate observation, and a piercinge judgement both into thinges and persons, but his too good skill in persons made him judge the worse of thinges, for it was his misfortune to be of a tyme, wherein very few wise men were equally imployed with him, and scarce any whose facultyes and abilityes were aequall to his, so that upon the matter he wholy relyed upon himselfe, and decerninge many defects in most men, he too much neglected what they sayd or did. Of all his passyons his pryde was most praedominant, which a moderate exercise of ill fortune might have corrected and reformed, and which was by the hande of heaven strangely punished by bringinge his destruction upon him, by two thinges, that he most despised, the people and Sr Harry Vane; In a worde, the Epitaph which Plutarch recordes, that Silla wrote for himselfe, may not be unfitly applyed to him; That no man did ever passe him, ether in doinge good to his frends, or in doinge mischieve to his enimyes, for his Actes of both kindes were most exemplar and notorious."

a

.

Here clearly,

.

.

example of just the sort of thing that the socalled humanistic disciplines not only can and do occupy themselves in studying and investigating, but also something that they could in a measure even take credit for having inspired and produced. For as a character of the Earl of Strafford, this little piece is a superb achievement of 17th century literary art. It is comparable as a portrait in words to a portrait in line and color such as might have been executed, say, by a Van Dyck. One can even go further and suggest that concise we

have

an

TRI-QUARTERLy

17s

though it is, this account of the career and character of the Earl has many of the lineaments prescribed by Aristotle for something no less than a proper tragedy.

The hero of the action passes from a condition of high and happy estate to the depths of ill-fortune. He is a man unmistakably noble and better than the average.

The action involved is clearly one to excite pity and fear. Moreover, in the account which Clarendon gives of his character, it's as if he were providing a sort of sub­ stitute for a properly dramatic imitation of an action. Nor is it even too much to say that the pride and arrogance which Clarendon points to in the Earl's character seem to provide just such an element of hamartia as would make it possible to say of the Earl's downfall that it was "a misfortune brought about not by vice or depravity, but by some error or frailty." (Poetics XIII, 3).

Still, just what is the point of thus reading and reflecting upon this brief passage from Clarendon's History? Is it simply in order to savor its literary excellence?

No, the point is rather that Clarendon's character of Strafford comes through to us as something at once informative and instructive. It tells us something both about the man himself and about human beings and human life in general; and what it tells is something which is true, is significant, and is of a sort that any human being needs to know and be cognizant of. In short, what a humanistic discipline can and should provide is no mere heightened sensitivity or taste for literary and artistic achievement, but rather knowledge and understanding of human life and human existence.

But if it be a genuine knowledge and not merely aesthetic appreciation that the

humanities are meant to purvey, just what sort of a knowledge is it, and how does

it differ from such knowledge as we may be expected to derive from the sciences?

On this score, be it only remarked that what Clarendon's character of the Earl tells us is

simply what sort of a man the Earl was; and through this understanding of what

he was, his behavior and his career are rendered more intelligible to us. Not only

that, but in thus coming better to understand what the Earl was, we also come better to understand what man is, and vice-versa. For the characteristic pride and arrogance of this particular man, Thomas Wentworth, both illustrate and in tum illuminated by the nature of human pride and arrogance generally. Indeed,

are

Wentworth's pride was of a sort that was in part justified by his indisputably great

gifts, at the same time that it was in many ways the cause of his downfall. It was, as we have already noted, no less than the very flaw, or hamartia, in his character that made of his fall from power and his death on the block something partaking of the nature of real tragedy, as over against the more ordinary instances of failure or ill-fortune or even outright disaster. For tragedy is, after all, a fact of life, and as such it needs to be discriminated from, and recognized along side of, various other and different facts of life. To die in an air crash is certainly a misfortune and probably a disaster, but not necessarily a tragedy. And similarly, for a man to be plagued by bad luck may well strike us as being too bad and even terrible, but not necessarily as tragic. Accordingly, using this as but an example, may we not say that any adequate knowledge of human nature and of the nature of human life must needs take account of its possibilities for tragedy, as well as for failure

761

TRI-QUARTERLY

and for adversity of the more everyday sort? And it is with facts of life such as these that the study of the humanities can and should acquaint us.

But now let us tum to a consideration of that other kind of knowledge, the kind of knowledge which the are

able to provide.

a scientific

sciences, and more particularly the behavioral sciences,

And in order the better to point the contrast between such

type of knowledge and a knowledge of the humanistic type such as we

have just been considering, suppose that we try to imagine what a properly scientific and behavioristic approach to the actions and career of the Earl of Strafford would be like, and what they would inform us of both

to man and as to

as

the man.

Almost at once we begin to realize that the immediate and the over-riding concern

of such an approach would presumably be to concentrate on those features of the Earl's behavior and of human behavior

generally which would lend themselves

to more-or-less accurate measurement and also to being reproduced in such fashion as

to make

possible some sort of objective tests for purposes of verification and

falsification.

For example-though here I must apologize for having to speak with an' all-too­

patent and pathetic inexpertness regarding concrete matters of scientific procedure-­ a first step would be to set the problem-say, that of determining the degree and character of arrogance as displayed by a particular individual (in this case the

Earl), or that of determining the sorts of social consequences that are to be cor­ related with a display of character traits like those of pride and arrogance. To this

end, the investigator might properly set up definitions of the particular character traits in question in terms of readily observable responses and behavior patterns.

Arrogance, for example, might be defined in terms compilations of plus and minus answers on

batteries of carefully designed questionaires.

in terms of readily recognizable speech habits,

or

Or it might be defined

perhaps of various features of

one's physical carriage, or maybe in terms of certain observable and perhaps even

measurable responses to prescribed test situations. And once the key concepts had thus become defined, a proper verification or falsification of statements and

predictions containing such concepts could presumably then be carried out.

Clearly, any such projected account of human behavior, and more particularly of the behavior of the Earl of Strafford, would differ radically from the treatment which we have found Clarendon giving of the same subject and the same materials.

Nor would there seem to be any proper way of construing this difference, short of recognizing that the very logic of the two approaches is what is different. For indeed, the logic of a humanistic or philosophical approach like that of Clarendon is a logic that turns on what we might call 'what' questions. Already, we have noted how the chief resource of intelligibility in Clarendon's character of the Earl of Strafford lies in his discernment of the relevant

·whats'-Le., of the natures

of the people and things he is treating of.

Thus it is in terms of what

or essences

Strafford was, the kind of man he was, notably a man of unsurpassed capacity but at the same

time of an overweening pride, that Clarendon seeks to make intel­

ligible to us the behavior and the career of the Earl.

So also it is the 'what' of the

man, his very nature, that enables us to understand why he should have aroused TRI-QUARTERLY

177

such enmities as he did, and why his downfall at the hands of the people and of Sir Harry Vane should have had in it such irony as it did have.

And correspond­

ingly, it is in terms of our common human understanding of what tragedy is and of what the nature of the tragic element in human life involves that we can under­ stand the precise sense in which the Earl's career is a tragic one, one

as over

against

that is merely unsuccessful or illstarred.

But

now

consider the

logic of the behavioral science approach.

Here there

is little or no concern with finding anything like what might be called the natures

and

On the contrary, so far from its being the nature and of the man, of his pride and arrogance, that make Strafford's behavior

essences

essence

of

things.

intelligible, it is rather that on this approach pride and arrogance are defined simply in terms of certain patterns of behavior, and the character of Strafford identified

just with what he does and with his responses to people and things. Moreover, in virtue of statistical correlations of various human traits and dispositions with certain types of responses to various situations, and then of still further correlations of various patterns of human behavior with certain reactions on the part of varying

individuals and groups in the environing world,

a

behavioral scientist could pre­

man as Strafford, at least in sumably principle, predictable.

Indeed, one might say that in the respective approaches to an understanding of human beings-the humanistic and the behavioristic-the interest shifts from a concern with the intelligibility of human behavior to its predictability.

Or per­ haps, the same point might be better brought out by noting that in the scientific approach the concern is not so much one of understanding things in terms of what they are, as in terms of the relations they enter into. Indeed, the logic of modem science just is one in which things are understood not in their own natures and 'whats', but in their relations. For example, to take a case from outside the behavioral sciences altogether, consider Snell's Law:

render the conduct and

career

of such

a

'Whenever any ray of light is incident at the surface which separates two

media, it is bent in such a way that the ratio of the sine of the angle of inci­ dence to the sine of the angle of refraction is always a constant quantity for those two media.'

Such note

a

law might properly be said to be

a

law of the behavior of light.

But

that in this law the behavior of a ray of light in refraction is not made intel­

ligible in terms of the nature of light or of what light is. Rather if anything, what light is is to be identified simply with its behavior under varying circum­ stances and

conditions, among them that of refraction.

to be any effort made in such

a

context to

Nor

can

there be said

render the behavior of light rays intel­

ligible-at least not in the sense in which, as we have already used that term, Clarendon in his character of the Earl of Strafford might be said to have sought to make the Earl's behavior intelligible. No, instead of any reason or explanation being given as to why a ray of light should be refracted in just that way, it is merely

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TRI-QUARTERL Y

asserted that it is

refracted, and refracted in ways that are accurately and specifically predictable. In other words, intelligibility gives way to predictability, the minute one passes from a humanistic or philosophical account of things to a

so

scientific one.

Finally, be it noted that in the actual statement of Snell's law the logical formu­ lation is not that of what we might call a 'what' statement at all.

Just as

a

state­

ment, it is not in the form of an answer to any question 'What?'-What is light? or What is anything else? Rather it is simply a statement of a ratio or a correla­ tion between two measurable quantities, viz. the sine of the angle of incidence and

again, we see how the very logic of scientific statements is ordered to an understanding of things in terms of their correlations with other things, and not in terms of what they are or of those things' the sine of the

own natures

angle of refraction.

and

Thus

essences.

But if, then, the very logic of the sciences and of the humanities be thus different,

by what right can the one type of knowledge be depreciated from the standpoint of the other? Suppose that a behaviorial scientist were to charge that such pronounce­ ments as Claredon's concerning the Earl's behavior and human behavior in general are not of a type or in such a form as to permit of their being either verified or falsified in any scientifically reliable sense, the answer could well be, "So what?"

For even if the behavior of such a man as Strafford were to be rendered scientifically predictable, that would contribute literally nothing to the kind of understanding of the Earl's conduct and career that is mediated by an account such as Clarendon's.

A scientific account of human behavior, that is to say, would seem to be in large part simply irrelevant to the sort of account which the humanist gives.

And vice-versa, suppose that a humanist were to charge that a behavioristic account of men's doings and actions somehow always leaves one dissatisfied­ as if such an account really explained nothing and quite failed to render even the most patent and striking forms of human behavior intelligible-again, the proper rejoinder might be, "So what?" For not only do the behavioral sciences not provide a knowledge and understanding of human behavior of this sort and in this sense; they don't even try to. And to reproach them for not providing a kind of knowledge which such sciences cannot and ought not even to pretend to provide is to betray a distressing cultural provincialism, or as Aristotle would put it, a want of proper education or paideia, through which it might be expected that one would learn which methods and which standards of achievement are appropriate to which types of enquiry.

Still, all this eirenicism has its limits. For granted that the behavioral sciences and the humanities ask radically different kinds of questions and achieve radically different kinds of knowledge in respect to human beings, still the question remains as to which type of knowledge is the more important, and in what sense and for whom. With this apple of discord, it is surely time to conclude, and yet perhaps not without first expressing the hope that the judgment may eventually be not one of Paris but of philosophy.

TRI-QUARTERLY

/79

SCOTT GREER

The third culture and the self-fulfilling prophecy

by dim and primitive light. Religious dogma, folk-thought, the quasi-religious speculations of philosophers, provided what general theory of experience and the world we used. Our empirical knowledge was MOST

OF

HISTORY

has been carried

on

limited to commonsense, lore and the chroniclers

(old men who told the tales of

the tribe around the

To be sure,

fire-light in the evening).

commonsense

organized and handed down through the organizations that carried

on

was

the work

of the world: farmers told their sons the methods for planting and harvesting and

evading taxes, as tax-collectors told their new employees what tricks to expect and how to elude the tricksters. But these were, essentially, recipes for action. They were

arts, not sciences.

With the great intellectual revolution which exploded in the 17th century this state of affairs was changed, radically and probably for good. On many fronts­

physics, astronomy, biology, chemistry, geology-men made the world of folklore problematic. They turned the realities of everyday life into intellectual problems to be solved. The triumph of classical mechanics proved the value of the approach; a new and strange world, inexorable in its structure and predictable in its behavior, seemed to be emerging.

Enthusiasts of the new science early attempted to use it in explaining human affairs. Hobbes imagined a physics of political structure from which an applied science of politics could be derived; Comte saw the coming period dominated by science, succeeding the metaphysical and religious periods. The success of these fore-runners of social science was less scientific than ideological; they left major questions, but few propositions amenable to scientific test. They did leave a radical intellectual position called, indifferently: scientism, positivism, neopositivism or, latterly, "behaviorism". It is a position which stresses the causal determination of human behavior.

This has two correlates:

(1) human behavior is constrained

and determined by inescapable conditions which may be understood through laws discoverable in general, applicable to the given case; (2) the way to discover those laws is through the observation of human behavior: the development of hypotheses

about patterns found and the testing of hypotheses through The new position had no difficulty in finding its enemies. of the older tradition called "the classical

education",

new

observations.

They were devotees

the "liberal education" or

"the humanities". Such disciplines tended to stress dramatic evocations of the past,

speculations in metaphorical terms about the present, hortatory theories of the future. Abnegating the possibility of a true science of human society, such spokes­ men tended to fall into the position of having to prove it impossible.

The battle­ of where issues the else are intellectual course, ground was, university: major attacked? Within the university, the major field of conflict was in the "humanities".

80

I

TRI-QUARTERL Y

These latter, defined as everything that was neither true science nor vocational

education, witnessed the progressive dissolution of their subject

From

matter.

philosophy emerged psychology; from the philosophy of history came sociology and economics; from the faculty of law came political science; anthropology came from a

curious marriage of biology, religion and philosophy.

ment has

In

general, the develop­

been in one direction: towards the intellectual position described above,

"positivism" or "behaviorism". The break was far from clean, however, for in each of the developing social sciences the hostages to an older tradition were very much alive. Meanwhile, between the remaining humanities and the behavioral sciences the conflict burned brightly.

The results of this conflict include the development of two cadres in the world of the intellect. One is made up of ignorant humanists, the other of insensitive scientists. Both perpetrate confusions of fact and value; neither seems capable of bridging to a synthesis. Typically, the humanists state moral and esthetic pre­ ferences in the guise of empirical fact; scientists state matters of fact and believe them to be statements of moral value. But the humanist's appreciation for an artifact has little to do with the conditions of its creation, while the public opinion analyst's findings on faith in God have nothing to do with theology.

Thus the recent polemics concerning the "two cultures" lead, not to a resolution, but to a heightening of conflict. Neither Mr. Snow nor Mr. Leavis demonstrates anything except the sharpness of the separation. The means of integrating our intellectual world remain as problematic as ever.

An alternative

approach

experience as a naive given, we can then see specific frames of beings process the world as they relate to it. There are many frames-of-reference possible-in principle, an infinite range. For everyman we can assume, generally, the com­ To be sure, that monsense frame, the "practical vision" of his particular culture. can vary greatly, from an emphasis on satygraha to one on cannibalism, but it will have commonalities. It will be learned, unexamined and tested only by efficacy (practical and consensual). It changes when change is practically inescapable.

Much of anyone's life is controlled by such an abstractive frame. But some of everyone's life, and a great deal of the life of certain specialists, are controlled by If we take the world of human

various types of abstraction being derived from it. Using reference, suppressing detail and highlighting forms, human

other abstractive frames.

Practitioners of the arts

use

highly developed abstractive frames, which high­

light the minutest details, in terms of the esthetics of form.

Their basic touchstone

is that "esthetic component" in experience which F.S.C. Northrup has emphasized and their greatest professional burden is to see their work interpreted in the scientific or

didactic mode. Kin to this framework, though far from it in substance, is the

view of the moralist: here the precise distinctions of judgment arise from upon what is in the light of what he thinks should be.

scientist stands in sharp distinction to both.

a

focus

But the framework of the

Practicing the grim art of determining TRI-QUARTERLY

\81

the ineluctable, a scientist is interested in the "esthetic component" only as a subject for analysis or a clue to the operational definition. He is interested in the moralist

subject to be explained and predicted and finds his own method quite blind

as a

to the nature of "what should be".

None of these particular abstractive frames is required by the immediate experi­ In point of fact,

they are predictable from one's social learning-whether it be the general culture of the tribe or the common culture of a specialty within the tribe. But they are never completely predictable; whether responsibilities begin in dreams, accidents, slippage of metaphor or the systematic search for the new, the frame-of-reference keeps changing. In this lies the possibility of synthesizing the abstract frameworks and creating a viable position for contemporary man. ence.

Man as a subject for abstraction

One of the ways to think of man is world. more

Man is the residue.

with

a

given "objective" physical

If, however, the previous discussion seems valid, the

useful approach is to say "The physical 'objective' world is one abstraction

from our experience." ence

to start

Should we do this, nature is placed within human experi­

and man squarely in the world.

tion a pragmatic problem.

The objective is everywhere, its determina­

Thus the world of physics is one

possible abstraction

from the continuum of individual and collective human experience. On the face of it, it has no more or less utility than the world of the moralist, the artist,

or

the mystic.

If we take social action as our subject, however, and want to know the hard,

inescapable facts of it, how do we define man? We can look at the behavior of a species through time-but that is only one of the abstractive frames we can use.

It was that of Sigmund Freud. The difficulty with it is that man seems to have the magic art of self-transformation. Trobrianders differ from Viennese; laws that apply to Merovingian kings apply with indifferent results to De Gaulle; birth­ rates oscillate like heat-waves in July. The truth is that the appropriate abstrac­ tive framework for looking at man in a scientific way, expecting prediction and putative control, must build in his peculiar symbolic control system. The same facts that differentiate intellectuals by esthetic, moral and scientific viewpoint­ the facts that promise synthesis-must also be accepted by the most behavioral student of human action. As R. K. Merton says, men generate self-fulfilling proph­ ecies. To define man is to stipulate his status as a symbolically controlled beast who generates and transforms symbols.

If we understand this, we understand some of the quarrels between the beha­ viorists and the humanists. The behaviorists, those terrible simplifiers, would like to predict all generation and transformation of symbols-leaving out the likeli­ hood of emergence from what is, practically, unpredictable. Or else they would like to read them out of the congregation of factors. But the sad thing is, they are

often deacons--or shamans--or charismatic leaders of social movements.

What then? We can only say then that the social actor, member of a group and

part of a fabric of action, is also a potential innovator, whose innovation cannot

82\

TRI-QUARTERL Y

be perfectly predicted from a knowledge of the group. The social system is not com­

pletely closed. Furthermore, the problematic character of innovation-Will it sell or will it not?-means that those concerned with innovation have grounds for the hortatory theory. The major caution is this: What is imaginable differs from what is possible. What is possible differs from what is probable. What is probable can best be determined by the knowledge of context in time and social space-Le., behavioral social science.

Beyond this problem is that of the relative value of ends. What is worth doing and what is not? More realistically, what are the relative values of ends given the cost of means? Following the thought of Max Weber, one can differentiate between the zweckrationale and the wertrationale: the former refers to the rationality of given acts for given ends, the latter to the value of given ends in a given way of life. The most rocky problem is the latter: how do we determine what is worth doing?

But these are really two sets of problems. Not only do we ask: What is worth doing? but also: What price is this thing I want to do worth paying? The social scientist as behaviorist can only tell you what it will cost.

(But that is more than anyone else can tell you with any degree of logical coercion.) If you tum to con­ temporary, large-scale society, you will find that the true nature of man, the proper conduct of man, is not given. out in bloody combat.

Indeed, alternatives emerge and choice is fought

But this is the clue.

To determine what the "self fulfilling

prophecy" is worth in the language of sacrifice, one is driven to the individual solution: quoting Luther, Max Weber says, "I do this because I can do no other."

We struggle through social combat to determine the nature of what we are. If we are lucky, individually we express our most valued self; collectively we discover and reinforce a valuable character for our society. The problematic nature of the wertrationale is the inescapable reason for politics.

The third culture I have dismissed the argument over the "two cultures" in cavalier terms, for I

feel it hardly worth belaboring. Still it is worth pointing out that Mr. Snow makes two serious errors in his

critique of our contemporary intellectual establishments.

First, he confuses science, the developing map of the world based on ineluctables and proven by test, with the world of technology-the applied arts. are in no sense

ineluctables; they

are

matters of choice.

But these arts

Second, he fails to under­

stand the uselessness of physical science for the

problems which the humanists speaks development and popula­ tion control, yet these are not products of ignorance in the technologies derived from physical science. They are due to cultural and organizational constraints, political weakness and the lack of applied social science.

In short, the important intellectual force developing today is one that stands between the physical sciences and the humanities. Sharing the subject of the latter, the method of the former, the social sciences can show the physicist where he fits in the nature of social things: they can also show the humanist why the liberal underscore.

Thus he

of problems in economic

TRI-QUARTERLY

183

are

crucial (and

scientific

drudgeries).

arts

in the process, dissuade him from his pseudo­ Of course the humanist and the physicist, being equally

perhaps,

ignorant, will complain that the social sciences

are

not

real sciences like, for ex­

ample, physics. The answer to that is simple: real or not, social science is the major creator of social fact today. The social fact he creates determines policy which shapes destiny. It was not nuclear physicists who judged the beginning of the cold war-it was men skilled in Russian history, Political Science, diplomacy.

The judgement was one for which physics and Pushkin were rather irrelevant, though Pushkin less so than physics. And, to put the shoe on the other foot, the current revolution in Soviet psychology was not brought about by another Pavlov, but by the discovery that Pavlov is inadequate. Learning theory and the study of cognitive processes (largely American innovations) were much more to the point. Dogmas can be afforded only so long; costs mount.

The major danger today is that the social sciences will be subject to premature closure. Policy needs can freeze systems of knowledge long before their results are valid in universal terms for continuity and agreement are required. Yet social science can be a useful tool for increasing our self-knowledge and therefore our freedom only as long as it remains open-ended and self-correcting. The contingency of knowledge is a difficult thing to remember, yet we forget it at our peril. Perhaps between the chauvinism of a C.P. Snow and the crocodile tears of the humanist

history as a projective test, lies a valid perspective. Perhaps the social sciences can remain humble before the contingencies of discovery, the ubiquity of error, and the fallibility of judgment, but stubborn before the problems of under­ standing human society and its history. who

sees

PETER VIERECK

Grace of pine 1.

November is the

summer

season

(Gun-sight sun-light twine) On November twenty-second As the southwest year is reckoned Roses shine.

Sunless Boston roseless

Georgetown

(Was ever Cape Cod green?)

On November

twenty-second

As the northern year is reckoned Fall thuds between.

2.

See

a

horse without

Hear three shots

a

a

rider

thud of pine

Nation-welding twenty-second When whole continents are reckoned.

Climates twine.

Now the old outlive the young

Twine the seasons fall is green Shiver sunny twenty-second Pine is red a young Spring beckoned

Glaciers rise between.

3.

But the heart has heart's own landscape Inner grace of pine

Sands that only blood makes fecund Ice that tears melt in a second

(Death-pang birth-pang twine).

Dust-words

clashing deserts wrangling

Only "style" stayed green (Magic no machine has reckoned) Not those slogans was what beckoned But that grace between.

4.

Shots transfix but shots transfigure Darken but outshine Let November

twenty-second

Be three shocks

through years unreckoned

Crest root

wreath of pine:Crest

outshine the tribal beacons Root entwine between

Wreathe black rose and white (a second Lincoln agony has

beckoned)

Catalytic evergreen.

November 22. 1963

JOHN STEWART CARTER

Elegy written on the leaning tower The only thing of any conceivable Utility that I learned in the Army Navy was

How to Strip a Butt.

In Florida Kansas

Arkansas Georgia

Shreeveport, Louisiana the process was the same: You twirled the butt between the fingers until the hot head came

loose and fell

-if it was night

in a shower of sparksto the dust or gravel or grass

of the dried ground.

The voices would go on then

-innervoices, outer voices, it did not matter­ under the alien skies of preposterous states

while the fingers crumbed tobacco shreds

(for Lucky Strike Green had Gone to War) into nothing.

Finally (oh very finally for some) the paper would be twisted to a hard and tiny seed-like core

beneath the finger nail and as you spoke rolled back and forth

in no particular rhythm until the thumb would gather it from beneath the middle finger's

fleshy pocket.

Then you'd shoot it

-nothing, really nothing­ as if it were memorial aggie or

bone-remembered mib

away into the night to punctuate some

metaphysical point about God or Woman or

Loneliness or Stars.

The gesture had, as

a

I said,

certain Utility

and recommended itself to

all who might otherwise

have had to spend the morning

picking up Butts.

It was an Aid to Reflection

and although Ulysses had long since become sad Kilroy, who big-nosed peered

from toilet walls and public places, we

did not seem to mind.

So far this is anti-poem

any anti-poet knows

as

and while a few remarks on

the impossibility

of Stripping a

Filter Tip

might be allowed to intrude a note

of QU sont les neiges d' antan the anti-poet, the true anti-poet -French Chilean American Dutch­

is not prepared to admit that History

is as long as it is, which is very long indeed.

Longer than wars or

the time between wars.

Longer than nights or

the time between nights.

Longer than men or

the time between men.

And this I knew this summer when I stood at top of Pisa's tower.

The plain blistered with heat and sun, and scratched in marble dazzle of that parapet was "Kilroy,"

sad-nosed, bewildered, sure only of his own existence and the priority of that existence to

-all anti-poets take flight; close your eyes with holy dread for I have drunk the milk of paradise­ essence.

Kilroy was there.

Memorial fingers moved as once they moved and had not moved for years: I Stripped a Butt

and rolled the paper to its tiny core,

gathering it to the quick of nail.

"See,"-we looked, my children there and I from tilted marble height at those who had not made

the slanted circle's climb

yet waved to us beneath"A pound of feathers," was what I said

-the finger shot the pellet out"A pound of feathers, a

pound of lead."

Sands Street, All poets are

Brooklyn

(old and new)

always

and forever

Crossing Brooklyn Ferry (although they may, at no extra cost to themselves or us,

also use The Bridge).

But the point is

that good poets, the very best, the vintage bards, never

get to the other side

Where Sands Street is And this makes all poets

(old and new)

always and forever (whether they use The Bridge or Ferry) very difficult for wives or

children or anyone else

to live with.

Flesh leans not negligent ever,

Crossing Brooklyn Ferry: Where Sands Street is and lies before the Navy Yard

(as I ride the Ferry,

going back to then, coming forward into when but I cannot land there now, again) where sailors-ninety-bucks for tailor-mades­

dry from gut the dregs of drunks and pools shone opalescent vomit under all-night neon splattered, dimming Gatsby-green with sea-dawn East and fading moon that held the tide with loosened fingers.

(Music by Kurt Weil.)

retched

T. S. to you, oh Thomas Stearns,

with antique taxi throbbing, waiting, consider throb of waiting ship

awaiting dawn and tide and trembling men.

Ashen then such violet hour, ashen then the hollowed men.

Send not a blind Tiresias to look but look with me with eyes that see what eyes on Ferry must remember.

I would show you fear enfleshed in flesh not ever husked by lusted lusts, not ever come to metaphoric dusts.

Phlebas, your Phoenician lies beneath the warm Icarian sea where fantailed gold fish shimmering mouth to nibble chalk-white music from

the pretty zither of mere merchant's bones.

Such man sailed not zig-zag course

through Arctic seas of Murmansk run nor felt great piston plunge precise to heart in spurt of blood he had

thought spent in ooze of final night before his death began again with slip from swelling tide in lap of shore to shuddered engines deep with pull.

Fear licked not what was left of heart

with puke of unwarm searing flame

while winches screamed geared terror's shriek

beyond the ravenous cries of gulls awaiting windward garbage flung in earnest of the torn, young dead

(ninety bucks for tailor-mades) afloat upon the ocean floor

behind iron-bolt compartment door.

Dimensions

(Suburban Showing) "This is where I came in," he said and footed through the stumbled row

of feet, brushing rigid knees

politely spread.

Ahead in South Pacific

Vistavision two-yard lips agape met gleaming two-yard lips wet with Technicolor wanting.

He turned and slanted up the aisle

in plod of middle age intent on

cigarette.

Stereophonic

bongo drums, muted trumpets, cat-gut soar of violins fiddled with the plumping loins of ranch-type steadies teenish sprawled

by Friday night in movie dark where tinier tongues lick popcorn crumbs in salter, small similitude from hotter, buttered mouths.

RONALD TAVEL

BoY Killer' Of Gjrl� 9, Gets Life A

16·year·old Brooklyn youth,

convicted of Jirst-degree murder ;t>y a jury on April 14, was sen, �encved to a mandatory term of life imprisonment today by Suo preme Court Justice Barshay.

James Rooks, 0[234 Sands St., showed no emotion as sentence was pronounced, He was found guilty of raping Lourdes Bass, 9, on the root of the apartment building at 190 York St. where lIhe lived, then hurling her 14 stories to her death. Th.e crime occurred Dec. 4. 1962.

Justice Barshay said "the shocking manner in which this crime

was

committed

defies

understanding:' Rooks was .indicted twice tor the crime. The first indictment was overturned fer lack .of cor­ roborating evidence to a con­ fession the youth allegedly made. A t the trial; Rooks testd­ fied police had Virtually dictated the confession to hlm.

James Rooks

(arrest Dec. 5, 1962, re Lourdes Bass, Farragut Housing Project) He had the urge to take her to the And

"urge" is his a boy fifteen;

own

word:

a

To take off all her clothes in the

sky.

very exact,

a

curiously accusing word for

unlikely constellation of a cut lunch period.

She, concurring the Congo he collared back of her neck

pulling her into the automatic-elevator of, yes, still l'Union Minier: For she

was

colored too

Our Southern newspapers to the contrary, she

was

colored and Our

Lourdes, for she

"complied with me when I ordered her": again, his words. Accusing though still not read so: and very exacting of a boot in Brooklyn, that Ceilingward is only their hands with morningpapers neighborhood.

Lady of

Yet, this sky according to James James'

sky / James' loose-leaf against photographers and his period of free service to the school library attended the next day

clutched

were

facile affair

compared to the first: the fourteen Farragut stories;

and, only because she post-age faltered, our age

concurred, regretting hers so

that he

panicked, "so," he continued, "I

"took her

Savior-Age truths of the descent into newspaper and neighborhood, I "took her "to the edge of the roof and held her half-way over

having exposed myself on a public Omnibus, mounted like your Mama, the identical

fifteen cents when she was

nine.

"back.

As

"I

said, 'Are you still going to tell?, / I took her

soon

as

she

"got away from the edge (she was just barely nine years old) "said again she "was going to tell

she

"when "I took her back.

So

o Jesus' Mother Womb of Lourdes!

"I pushed her over."

The cypress veil Reflections on recent translations of Eugene Onegin

W. B. SCOTT

Sit farther and make room for thine own fame, Where just desert enrols

thy honored name,

The Good Interpreter. Some in this task Take off the cypress veil, but leave a mask, Changing the Latin, but do more obscure That sense in English which was bright and pure.

ANDREW MARVELL, "To His Worthy Friend Doctor

Witty,

Upon His Translation of

the 'Popular Errors.' " ...

a

"

baldheaded suntanned professor in a Hawaiian shirt sat at

a round table

reading with an ironic expression on his face a Russian Commentary on line 949.

book." Pale Fire, "

old, happy, healthy, heterosexual Russian, a writer in exile, fame, sans future, sans audience, sans anything but his art."

Pale Fire, Commentary on line 1000. ...

an

sans

ALEXANDER

(1799-1837)

his "novel in

verse," Eugene Onegin, during the 1820's, and completed it early in the 1830's. The eight chapters PUSHKIN

wrote

of the final text first appeared separately; the first complete edition was that of 1833.

In 1837, a very short time before Pushkin was fatally wounded in a duel, the "third

edition" (second complete edition) was published at Saint Petersburg. (This edition is photographically reproduced in volume four of Professor Nabokov's work dis­

cussed below.) Since that time there have been many more Russian editions, both

Tsarist and Soviet, as well as editions in Russian published abroad, and translations in various languages.

Eugene Onegin has been seven times fully translated in English; three of these

941

TRI-QUARTERL'f

translations (those by Arndt, Kayden, and Nabokov) have appeared quite recently.'

Two of them- attempt to reproduce Pushkin's tricky fourteen-line iambic-tetrameter

stanza, Professor Arndt going so far,

keep the exact rhyme scheme and the exact alternation of masculine and feminine rhymes. Kayden, while regularly using certain rhymes, is a bit more relaxed." Professor Nabokov, "a pro­ fessed literalist," aims at a line-by-line rendering, with careful attention to the meaning and function of every word, and with a hint of the iambic rhythm, but without the rhymes; this for reasons which he vigorously states and restates. He is scornful of what he calls "the disastrous versions of E 0 in English doggerel,"! and mentions (II. 257) his own "first and sinful, attempt at rendering E 0 in rhyme."

Of these recent works the most important by far is this in four volumes" by 1

or so

far out,

To these might be added the prose translation of

as

to

eighty-nine stanzas (selected from the

400-odd stanzas of the poem) in the Pushkin volume (edited by John Fennell, 1964) of the "Penguin Poets"-that admirable paperback series which combines texts in the original languages with footnote translations-plain prose trots for the benefit of those of us who have forgotten too much or never known enough.

'Walter Arndt's (a Dutton Paperback, New York, copyright 1963), and Eugene M. Kay­ den's (The Antioch Press, Yellow Springs, Ohio, 1964). Kayden's book is adorned with in­ sipidly-sketchy pen-and-ink drawings by the Soviet artist N. V. Kuzmin which do nothing for

Pushkin, the translation, or Soviet-American relations.

3

Pushkin's

unvarying rhyme scheme is:

a B

aBc c D D e F F eGG

(lower-case indicates

feminine rhymes, upper-case masculine). Kayden eases off to: abc b d e f d g h i h j j; he does not worry about the masculine and feminine rhymes.

'See especially his note (III. 183) to stanzas 17 and 18 of chapter eight. In his Foreword to volume two (II. 3-4) Professor Nabokov lists the "four 'English,' 'metrical' translations men­ These are by Lt.-Col. Henry tioned in my notes and unfortunately available to students "

...

Spalding (London, 1881); Babette Deutsch (New York, 1936 and 1943); Oliver Elton (Lon­ don, 1937); Dorothea Prall Radin and George Z. Patrick (Berkeley, 1937). "Even worse than these," Professor Nabokov adds, "is a new version, full of omissions and blunders, by Walter Arndt

...

which reached me after this Commentary was in press, and too late to be subjected

to detailed comment."

Professor Nabokov finally had his chance to make this detailed

com­

ment, in The New York Review of Books for April 30, 1964 ("On Translating Pushkin / Pounding the Clavichord," pages 14 and 15). It is a savagely disparaging as well as detailed

comment, and one's heart almost (but not quite, alas) goes out to Professor Arndt, who is allowed a reply ("Goading the Pony") on page 16 of the same issue-a reply in the outraged and bitter tone of a man who has just been set upon in an alley, and who, after staggering to

his feet amidst the upset garbage cans, old fish-heads, and broken bottles, lurches about throw­

ing a few game shadow punches. type in which to have his final say.

given a couple of. stickfuls of (When will The New York Review of Books publish an

Professor Nabokov is then

issue that is nothing but replies, counter-replies, counter-counter-replies, and so on, all spring­ ing from a single review?)

•

Eugene Onegin / A NOVEL IN VERSE BY Aleksandr Pushkin / TRANSLATED FROM THE RUS­ COMMENTARY Bollingen Series LXXII. Pantheon Books. Bollingen Foun­ dation, New York, 1964. Volume one contains a Foreword, an elaborate Introduction, and the text of the translation. Volume two contains the Commentary on chapters one through five. (Professor Nabokov translates and comments on not only the published text but numer­ ous rejected variants.)

Volume three contains the Commentary on chapters six through eight, plus a Commentary on the fragments of "Onegin's Journey," which are usually published with the poem, plus a reconstitution of and Commentary on the so-called "Chapter Ten." This volume also contains two Appendixes-the first a lengthy biography (highly speculative) of SIAN, WITH / A

•••

TRI-QUARTERLY

195

Professor V. V. Nabokov (1899-

), the well-known lepidopterist" and (self­ (III. 231).7 The four volumes, beautifully styled) printed and bound, easy to hold and to read, cost, boxed, $18.50. This is a lot

nonmammalogical taxonomist

of money, but the books should be more than worth it to

(a) serious students of Russian;

(b) frivolous students of Russian=-i.e., those (the writer of these comments, for instance) who have let a one-time acquaintance with the language shamefully slide, and whom Professor N abokov drives back to the text; (c)

amateurs of learned commentaries, whether or not they know any Russian.

Professor Nabokov's hundreds of pages of "casual notes" (his phrase, III. 183) are

packed with information, bibliographical, linguistic, literary, prosodic, biographical,

great-grandfather, the "African" Abram Gannibal (that is, Hannibal-the as "g" has produced over the years such confections as Goratsi [Horace], Geyne [Heine], Genri [Henry], Gitler, Garry Gopkins, Gumbert Gumbert, and Garrison Gayford). The second Appendix is a series of elaborate "Notes on Prosody," with particular attention to the iambic tetrameters of Onegin, The Rus­ sian tetrameter, says Professor Nabokov (III. 497) "is a solid, polished, disciplined thing, with rich concentrated meaning and lofty melody fused in an organic entity: it has said in Russian what the pentameter has said in English, and the hexameter in French. Now, on the other Volume four hand, the English iambic tetrameter is a hesitating, loose, capricious form has an excellent Index, plus the handsome photographic reproduction (mentioned above) of the 1837 "editio optima." At the beginning of each of the first three volumes Professor Nabo­ kov publishes his "Method of Transliteration," a note on the Old-Style calendar, and a list of bibliographical abbreviations and symbols.

Pushkin's maternal

Russian custom of transliterating roman and German "h"

"

....

•

Author of Neartic Members of the Genus Lycaeides Hubner (1949).

He has also

pub­

lished a study of Gogol (1944), which in this present work he characterizes as "a rather frivo­ lous little book with a nightmare index (for which I am not responsible) "; volumes of personal reminiscence, poems and short stories; and novels in Russian (subsequently trans­ lated). Professor Nabokov reminds his reader, on the rear flap of the dust-jacket of each volume, that he is "also the author of several novels in English"-these novels are not named, but this is an allusion, perhaps, to such works as Lolita (Paris, 1955; New York, 1958) and Pale Fire (1962). ...

7

"Taxonomy" and related words are favorite words, perhaps key-words, with Professor Nabokov, whose precise classificatory turn of mind and love of exact detail are admirably reflected throughout this work, as they are celebrated in a poem of his called "Discovery!'

(1943), where he recounts his finding "in a legendary land / all rocks and lavender and tufted grass" a kind of butterfly "new to science": I found

it, and I named it, being versed

in taxonomic Latin; thus became godfather to an insect and its first describer-and I want no other fame.

In his note to chapter seven, stanza 15, line two-a line which involves "a cockchafer, a scara­

baeoid beetle"-he writes, "why Miss [Babette] Deutsch should think fit to transform a co­ leopterous insect into an orthopterous one ('One heard the crickets' slender choir') is incom­ (The exiled royal professor-narrator-commentator of Pale Fire tells how he prehensible "descended by parachute from a chartered plane near Baltimore, whose oriole is not an oriole." [Commentary on line 691.J According to The Encyclopaedia Britannica [1957J, "oriole" is "the name applied in Europe to the members of the family Oriolidae. The golden oriole (Oriolus oriolus) is an occasional spring visitor to the British Islands, but has rarely The name is applied in America to the lcteridae family.") bred there "

...

.

....

961

TRI-QUARTERLY

.

.

autobiographical, historical, natural-historical, geographical, culinary, gustatory," sartorial, etc., all aimed at making clearer and richer our understanding of Pushkin, but frequently of considerable interest on its own account. In his Commentary (III. 43 ff) on the foolish-tragic duel (chapter six) in which Onegin kills his friend Lenski, Professor Nabokov treats his reader to a detailed and fascinating discussion of "the classical duel a volonte of the French code," then goes on to a full account of the duel in which Pushkin suffered his own fatal wound

(January 27, 1837).

There are similarly interesting excursions, long or short, into such matters (among

many) as "the banking game" (i.e., faro), the Wandering Jew, children's games ("The Scottish and English barla-breikis [barley-bracks, barlibrakes, barleybreaks, with 'barley' meaning a cry of truce] does not differ essentially from the Russian gorelki, both being country games of tig, tag, or tick"), the color crimson (an excellent note), the varieties of romanticism (II. 32 ff-an impressive taxonomic exercise), the Decembrist movement, botanical fine points," and so on. All this •

"The European beefsteak used to be a small, thick, dark, ruddy, juicy, soft, special cut of a generous edge of amber fat on the knife-side.

It had little, if any­

tenderloin steak, with

thing, in common with our American 'steaks'-the tasteless meat of restless cattle. The nearest approach to it is a filet mignon." (II. 149). "Baranki, 'bangle buns,' are known commercially in the U. S. as 'bagels' (through the Yiddish)." (III. 274) •

Professor Nabokov is unfailingly strict (see his comment, cited above [footnote 7] on Miss

Deutsch's crickets) with those who, out of ignorance or sloppiness, miss the precise meanings An elaborate note (II. 324 if) on the berry called brusnika in (and "Iingonberry" by Professor Nabokov in his translation) informs us that dic­ tionaries "and the harmful drudges who use them to translate Russian authors, confuse the ." These harmful drudges lingonberry with its blue-fruit ally, Vaccinium myrtillus Linn turn up again in an even longer note (III. 11 if) on (Russian) cheryomuha, "the racemose old-world bird cherry." "This racemose bird cherry lacks such a specific English designation as would be neither pedantic nor as irresponsible as the nonsense names that harmful drudges carefully transport from one Russian-English dictionary to another." In the detailed comment on Arndt's translation mentioned above (footnote 4) Professor Nabokov once more

of natural-historical terms.

Russian

...

...

"

the indispensable switch on Dr. Johnson's famous lexicographical joke: harmful drudges who compile Russian-English dictionaries have at least, under cheryomuha, 'black alder' i.e, 'alder buckthorn,' which is wrong, but not so wrong as Arndt's [alder]." Can this sort of thing also be an echo of that unending if largely sub-surface war which rages in modern-language departments between the Natives and the Foreigners?-to the extent that anything can be said to rage in modern-language departments (the Natives in this case being foreigners, and the Foreigners natives). In Pale Fire (Commentary on line 949) the Zemblan gunman, Gradus, on his way to New Wye aboard "the small and uncomfortable plane flying into the sun found himself wedged among several belated delegates to the New Wye Linguistic Conference, all of them lapel-labelled, and representing the same foreign language, but none being able to speak it, so that conversation was conducted in rather ordinary Anglo-American." (If, on the contrary, Gradus [or Professor Nabokov] had been in a hotel elevator during a convention of the Modern Language Association he might have found him­ self wedged among many rather small-sized people chattering animatedly in Spanish.) Pro­ fessor Nabokov himself appears admirably as well as enviably at home not only in Russian and English, but in French and (presumably) German. Indeed, one of the most important contributions of his Commentary is to make unmistakably clear the debt of Pushkin and other Russians of his time to French poets and French translators, and to point out the numerous in Pushkin's day Russian writers knew the literatures gallicisms in the Russian of Onegin. of England, Germany, and Italy, as well as the works of the ancients, not from original texts The gentleman author, the St. but from the stupendous exertions of French paraphrasts trots out his

...

...

.

.

.

"

...

.

.

.

TRI-QUARTERLY

197

reading than ninety-five percent of the novels» (including some of Professor Nabokov's own) and ninety­ makes much better

as

well

as

much

more

instructive

literary criticism that one somehow gets mixed up with. (d) (maybe). Professor N abokov is fascinated, obsessed II and may have done a kindly service to his fellow even, by prosodic minutiae, no who have Russian by transliterating all citations in Russian, prosodomaniacs nine percent of the

students of prosody

with acute accents to mark the stresses.P

Having "been forced to invent a simply

Petersburg fashionable, the ennuied hussar, the civilized squire, the provincial miss in her linden-shaded chateau of painted wood-all read Shakespeare and Sterne, Richardson and Scott, Moore and Byron, as well as the German novelists (Goethe, August Lafontaine) and Italian romancers (Ariosto, Tasso), in French versions, and French versions only."

(II. 158) One can only admire, without really envying, the prodigious reading in usually inferior, vapidly conventional French literature of the 17th, 18th, and early 19th centuries to which Professor Nabokov's task condemned him.

10

One would be mad to even pretend to discover in Professor Nabokov's Commentary any­ thing remotely sugggesting the shape of a novel; it is Pale Fire which so strikingly blends the theoretically disparate forms of prose fiction and learned commentary. Still, Professor Nabo­ kov is not one to keep villains and fools and some sense of drama entirely out of his notes.

In alluding to previous commentators on Onegin he is almost casually scornful of D. I. Cizevski (Evgenij Onegin, Edited with Introduction and Commentary, Cambridge (Mass.), the comic naivetes in (II. 80); 1953): "D. Chizhevski's careless compilation (II. 221). He saves his biggest [Cizevski's] running, or rather stumbling, commentary bombs for Soviet critics in general ("Sovpushkinists," he calls them [III. 297]), and the Soviet "

"

...

...

"

...

critic, N. L. Brodski in particular. Brodski's commentary (Evgenii Onegin / Roman / A. S. Pushkina Moskva) runs in its third edition (1950) to 408 pages (including end-notes) ...

of closely-packed discussion; although elaborately-illustrated, it is rather depressing to look at

through. In Professor Nabokov's pages Brodski begins to take on a silly-sinister character ("alias Jack Degree, de Grey, d'Argus, Vinogradus, Leningradus, etc.") of Pale Fire: he (Brodski) "attempts to prove by the forced cards of it is (II. 114); (11.48); he "goes on to rant sociologically specious quotation to circumnavigate funny to follow uninformed but wary compiler Brodski's maneuvers the issue without revealing his ignorance." (II. 246-this a sentence which might have come straight out of Pale Fire); he is "the incredible Brodski" (II. 262); "The incredulous reader is reminded that Brodski's book is 'A Manual for the Use of High-School Teachers!

(II. that Soviet toady, in his servile eagerness to prove that Pushkin was a solemn 253); he is" admirer of revolution (III. 363). Other potential fools and villains of the Commentary are only hinted at in passing: they bear such names as Stendhal (his "much overrated Le Ann [II. 90]; his "paltry literary style" [III. 115]); and Dostoevski (" Rouge et le nair Radcliffe [1764-1823], whose Gothic megrims, in various translations, so influenced Dosto­ evski-and through him the lady's ghost still troubles the sleep of English, American, and Australian adolescents." (II. 357) "Fyodor Dostoevski, a much overrated, sentimental, and Gothic novelist of the time ." (Ill. 191); "Dostoevski the publicist is one of those mega­ phones of elephantine platitudes still heard today, the roar of which so ridiculously demotes Shakespeare and Push kin to the vague level of all the plaster idols of academic tradition, from Cervantes to George Eliot [not to speak of the crumbling Manns and Faulkners of our times]."

Ill. 193).

11 Like Fyodor in his novel, The Gift (New York, 1963), which was first published complete in Russian in New York (1952), although it was written in Europe during the 1930's. See especially pages 172 II of the Popular Library paperback edition (pages 170 II of the Russian edition) 12The reader with some (or a lot of) Russian may be surprised and at first, perhaps, snob­ bishly vexed or saddened by the absence of the Cyrillic alphabet. But one soon gets used to or

not unlike that of the killer Jakob Gradus

"

"

"

...

...

.

...

.

.

...

...

...

"

...

...

..

.

the transliterations, which follow a clear and sensible system (in the Index under Khrushchev we are told "see Hrushchyov." On seeing it we read, "Hrushchyov / [incorrectly] Khrushchev,

981

TRI-QUARTERLY

little terminology of my own" (III. 499) for discussing prosodic matters, he betrays in his commentary

most sensitive ear for the

a

subtle modulations of Pushkin's

iambics, and for all sorts of sound-effects."

Who reads English translations of Eugene Onegin? A safe sort of answer would

include

(a) the translators themselves ("Exegi monumentum (b) their most loyal friends and relatives;

...

");

(c) semi-captive and captive readers--e.g., teachers of and students in Russian literature-in-translation courses;

(d) publishers' editors (?); proofreaders; ( e ) reviewers; (f) poets (?)14 Who else?

questioning of a few bright, well-read people of my no one who has, well, really read this work.

One knows about it, and/or about the opera ("Chaykovski's silly opera"­ A casual

acquaintance has so far turned up

Professor Nabokov, II. 333). to reading

But somehow or other,

one

has never got around

it, or even to feeling ashamed of not having read it; consequently one

does not have to pretend to have read it; in these respects it is in a different category from certain other great works of world literature, which it would be idle to attempt to list here.

Why should this be?

Is there something about Onegin that makes it lose much

of its effect in translation?

Nikita Sergeevich

Or is such

a

strong story,

question merely stuffy? Onegin has a story, of other course-among things-a story with characters who are part (so we hear) of every Russian's experience-Onegin, Tatiana, "poor Lenski," forgetful Olga15a

powerful idea?

Is it the lack of an important "myth," a

"

So in Pale Fire, Commentary to line 949: "Hrushchov (whom they spelled 'Khrushchev') ") Professor Nabokov makes clear his own feelings about the Cyril­ lie alphabet: "This writer fervently hopes that the Cyrillic alphabet, together with the even more absurd characters of Asiatic languages, will be completely scrapped some near day."

(III. 399. n.) (What makes an alphabet or "Asiatic" characters "absurd"? Professor Nabokov the revised, and romanized, Russian script does not say.) He looks forward (III. 492) to ...

...

"

...

of the future

" ...

13

With all his devotion to Pushkin and Onegin, Professor Nabokov is by no means senti­ mentally admiring of everything; he can find fault with his poet when he has to. So (for example) he points out in the phrase vragi Gimena ("enemies of Hymen"; chapter four, stanza 50, line 9) a "cacophonic clash of consonants (gi-gi) unlike anything else in EO." (II. 486).

Professor Nabokov's own (English) consonants (especially "p") at times do curious dances: a queer strain of triviality impairing the pounding of its profundities" (II. 236); in "

"

...

...

consequence of which the

MS copies." (II. 483);

pederasts

" ...

"

puzzled police pestered Pushkin and arrested the possessors of his the criticism is more applicable to insipid Virgil and his pale

...

(II. 55).

"In his excellent poem, "A Girl in a Library," Larina

as

a

sort of

revery-interlocutor;

then

Randall Jarrell

proceeds

to

subtly

brings in Pushkin's Tatyana merge her with Chekhov's

Lyubov Ranevskaya.

"Professor Nabokov, in his discussion (II. 280-81) of Tatiana and Olga as "types" (a notion he does not take very seriously) tell us that in "Soviet literature, the image of Tatiana has now been superseded by that of her sister Olga, now grown buxom, ruddy-cheeked, noisily cheerful. Olga is the good girl of Soviet fiction; she is the one who straightens things out at the factory, discovers sabotage, makes speeches, and radiates perfect health."

TRI-QUARTERL y

199

a

story with hopeless love (of its heroine for the jaded worldly hero, and at the

end-too late-of this hero for the

it is

by-now-married heroine), a fatal duel-but

shadowy sort of story even so, as stories go. The interest and charm of Onegin are not mainly in its qualities as a "novel" really-but lie in the wonderful game that Pushkin plays with words and feelings-in its variety of tones, its "Byronically"-chatty digressions, its mixture of tenderness and fun, of transposed poetic commonplace and fresh imagery, of the conventionally Arcadian and the "real," its subtleties of rhythm and sound (so exhaustively analyzed by Professor Nabokov)-all those qualities that in the translations often seem thinned-out to a sort of mild watery borshch-cum-Byron, as the long stanzas monotonously on. plod Are these new translations likely to change matters, if matters are as I've just been assuming? Probably not, even though Arndt's is published as an attractive and relatively inexpensive ($1.95) paperback, which a good many people may buyout of some vague untroubled sense of obligation, and which a few will at least dip into here and there. The difficulty is, that the two "literary" versions (paraphrases, as Professor Nabokov disparagingly uses the term), while the products obviously of undoubted love and considerable labor, are just not much fun to read: they are dutiful and respectful, laboriously-sprightful, and rather flat.

Professor Nabokov's, on the other hand, is explicitly and even truculently not "literary" : to my ideal of literalism I sacrificed everything (elegance, euphony, clarity, good taste, modern usage, and even grammar) that the dainty mimic prizes higher than truth. Pushkin has likened translators to horses changed at the posthouses of civilization. The greatest reward I can think of is that students a

...

may use my work as a pony.

(I. x)

Kayden's verse is relatively more tolerable than Arndt's, whose insistence on following Pushkin's metrical scheme without deviation is in the end self-defeat­ ing. Even a poet might be licked by this problem (although a true poet would most likely simply throw Pushkin-or anyone else-overboard, as, say, Robert Lowell does Racine; this can be a dangerous procedure-witness Pound's notorious rape in cornball-Poundese of Sophocles' Women of Trachis. Yet the result at least has some sort of existence on its own terms, as the well-intended academic exercise in translation is not likely to, hovering as it does between two

worlds, or stools,

the case may be). Professor Arndt is not a poet; his obligatory eking-out of Pushkin is not compensated by any extraordinary qualities of his English, and as

his rhymes

are

often

plain bad.!"

In both his version and

Kayden's the iambic

16

the capital" (20); "stacks have Examples (numbers refer to pages): "from the ball 'blue smoke aloft" (20); "Where torrid southern blazes char / My own, my native puffed Africa" (26); "hardened ardent" (40); "belittle riddle" (40); "mists afar je ne sais quoi (41); "islands silence" (41); "begging invaders" Onegin" (43); "day does old command, and" (133); "acacias (62); "pages outrageous" (98); "abandoned Horatius" (142); "With basins, dishes, crocks, and jars, / And sundry old etceteras" (179); Gibbon" (214); "Onegin "cribbing begging" (218).

"Old Horatius" is typical of Arndt's curious infelicity. The allusion is to the poet Horace ...

...

.

.

.

.

...

...

.

...

...

100

I

TRI-QVARTERL\,

...

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

...

...

tetrameters tend to jog-trot on the level of "I've measured it from side to side/But

only God can make a tree."

Discussions of translating and translations (especially of verse) have been going on for a long time now, and seem likely to go on for a while longer; the subject has generated over the centuries many familiar sayings, some serious, some witty; there is a huge and depressingly-proliferating Iiterature.!? Everyone likes to get into the act-no other intellectual or quasi-intellectual activity is more inviting to the hippies in their ceaseless battling with the squares. It is hard to avoid the feeling that some writing about translation is in fact not only more interesting than the same writer's own translations, but tends to form a minor branch of literature, along with letters, journals, travel books, occasional cookbooks, and record-album blurbs--especiaUy when it involves a sprightly-learned self-justification or second­ guessing, as it often does.

In that racemose

same

extended note

old-world bird

quotes (III. 13)

a

(see above, footnote 9)

cherry

and the harmful

in which

we

meet the

Professor N abokov

drudges,

couplet from a poem by Sir John Denham

(1615-1669) :18

That servile path thou nobly do'st decline Of tracing word by word, and line by line.

(A few lines later Denham further praises his friend, the translator, who

Foording his [the original author's] current, where thou find'st it low Let'st in thine own to make it rise and flow.)

(not to Horatius at the bridge), but the Latin form in English pronunciation is labored (to fit (Kayden also has a meter-saving Horatius: "Like sage Horatius ") Or consider this Arndt couplet, from stanza one of chapter eight: the meter) and silly in its effect: What speaker of English ever calls Horace Horatius? ...

One spring, when swan cries set aquiver The placid mirrors of the river

...

(195)

Swans can be noisy creatures, but these seem unusually and even desperately plangent-cousins,

perhaps, to those who were, in the famous old hymn, reserved for the dons. Professor Nabo­ kov's "pony" has "in springtime, to the calls of swans, / near waters shining in the stillness Kayden has (Wordsworthily) "

...

I wandered lone to watch the

swans

And hear their cries above the lake "

...

"

(216) has an odd muddy slush country-club flavor to it. "Fareway" here translates ulitsa (street) as on page 115 it does put' (path, way, road).

11 A few useful works on translation: Georges Mounin, Les belles infideles, Paris, 1955 (a lively "Defense et illustration de l'art de traduire"): Theodore Savory, The Art of Translation, London, 1957; Reuben A. Brower (editor), On Translation, Cambridge (Mass.), 1959eighteen essays on everything from "The Poetic Nuance" to "Automatic (Transference, Trans­ lation, Remittance, Shunting)"-in short, translation by machine; William Arrowsmith and Roger Shattuck (editors), The Craft and Context of Translation, Austin, 1960; Anchor Books, 1961-sixteen essays, some of them originally presented as lectures in a University of Texas symposium.

Arndt's

IS

...

the fareway's whiteness / Is thawing into

...

(See The Poetical Works

by Theodore Howard Banks, Jr.

"To Sir Richard Fanshawe upon His Translation of Pastor Fido,"

of Sir John Denham. Edited with New Haven, 1928, pages 143-4.)

notes

and introduction

TRI-QUARTERL y

1101

Professor Nabokov will of

course

have

none

of

this; he gladly chooses that

path, with a passing sneer at "those noble paraphrasts whom Sir John ."19 praised During the years towards the middle of the seventeenth century when Sir John Denham was praising his friend Fanshawe, Andrew Marvell wrote the lines to his worthy friend, Doctor Witty [or Whitty], from which the epigraph to these reflec­ tions was taken. Marvell's poem goes on, after the lines already cited: servile

Denham

.

.

So of translators they are authors grown, For ill translators make the book their own.

Others do strive with words and forced phrase To add such lustre, and so many rays,

That but to make the vessel shining, they Much of the precious metal rub away.

He is translation's thief that addeth more, As much as he that taketh from the store

Of the first author.

Between the positions set forth in these two amiable specimens of old-fashioned

complimentary verse, the arguments about translation have always raged, as they continue to. What's the answer? Of course there is no single or simple one. We will continue to have "noble paraphrasts" in spite of Professor Nabokov, and their paraphrasing will sometimes please and even instruct. But since most of us are at the mercy of the translators, it is not a bad idea, however grateful to them we must often be, to be suspicious of them always. From their positions of special privilege, well-earned or not, they can upstage up-put us on (or themselves)­ terribly, if we let them.t?

19

Professor Nabokov gave the title "The Servile Path" to his article in the volume On The various sections of this article now form part of

Translation (see above, footnote 17). the Commentary on Eugene Onegin.

20Here some wheels within wheels: Robert Corrigan, in his essay, "Translating for Actors," (published in The Craft and Context of Translation; see above, footnote 16) writes as follows there are some things that are lost that need not be. For (page 144, Anchor edition): ". in all the translations of Uncle Vanya the shooting is botched. The typical instance, published ,

.

translation reads: me go, Helen!

Let me go! (Looking for Serebryakov) Where is he? Oh, here he is!

(Fires at him) Missed! Missed again! (Furiously) Damnation-damnation take it (Flings revolver on the floor and sinks into a chair, exhausted).

"Not one translator has seen that in the Russian Vanya does not fire the gun, but he says

Let

...

incapable of action that even when his whole life is at stake he Here is a case where the meaning of the play has been dras­ tically changed by the translator's failure to see that Chekhov's conception of that ghastly moment is truer than our more simple-minded logic."

There are several things to say about this: (1) This "typical" translation is virtually word-for-word Constance Garnett's-with one important exception: she does have the word "Bang!" (the usual translation of Russian bats) after the stage-direction, "Fires at him."

(2) Before Vanya rushes in with the gun, chasing Serebryakov, we have already heard a shot

'Bang!'

He has become

so

cannot act but substitutes words.

1021

TRI-QUARTERL Y

Professor Nabokov is sometimes crotchety, arrogant, reactionary, outrageous­ in short, impossible." But these qualities, combined with his learning, his precise­ ness, his intelligent respect for detail,22 help keep us on our toes.

Would there were more like him!

Or--does madness lie that way?

Now I shall speak of evil as none has

Spoken before.

I loathe such things

as

jazz;

The white-hosed moron torturing a black

Bull, rayed with red; abstractist bric-a-brac; Primitivist folk-masks; progressive schools;

Music in supermarkets; swimming pools;

Brutes, bores, class-conscious Philistines, Freud, Marx, Fake thinkers, puffed-up poets, frauds and sharks.

-Pale Fire, a Poem in Four Cantos, lines 923-30 These are, to be sure, ill-fated Professor John Shades's lines.

Still.

offstage (which Professor Corrigan keeps in his own translation of the play). The Russian stage-direction which in this "typical translation" is rendered "fires at him" is strelyaet v nego, which means "fires at him" or "shoots at him" (not "pointing the revolver at Serebryakov," which Professor Corrigan has in his translation.)

(3) It is not improper to assume that the desperate Vanya, in this sad-funny travesty of a big moment, after missing again with the gun, frustratedly exclaims, "Bang!" (which all the translations I know do have).

21

pick a few holes in his display of learning; perhaps qualified than I has done so, or will do so. I must be pitifully content with a few incorrect page-references, and with the fact that Goethe's "marvellous Auf allen Gipfeln" (II. 235 and Index) is in fact "Uber allen Gipjeln;' And then there is the curious fondness of Pro­ fessor Nabokov (an excellent English stylist) for (as they say) "using as for like" (the opposite of using like for as-like a cigarette should). So we have "Russian literature, which, as all (III. 173); "Pushkin, as other Russians of his time, knew the poem great literatures, is (III. 211); "with whose pretty wife Pushkin, as many others, had a brief affair." (III. 331); "the latter was, as most of modern Russian culture, a Western European grafting (III. 479). The royal commentator of Pale Fire has the same tic: shaped almost exactly as the coronation chair of a Scottish king."

(Commentary on line 549, and see in the Lancer Books paperback edition pages 121, 153, 165, 177, 193). Journalists and television announcers have recently taken up this usage, in ostentations overcompensatory reaction against "like a cigarette should."

It would be a pleasure to be able to

someone more

"

"

...

...

...

"

...

...

"

...

22

"In art as in science there is no delight without the detail, and it is on details that I have

tried to fix the reader's attention. Let me repeat that unless these are thoroughly understood and

remembered, all 'general' ideas (so easily acquired, remain but worn passports

so profitably resold) must necessarily allowing their bearers short cuts from one area of ignorance to

another." (I. 8)

TRI-QUARTERLY

1103

The case of James T. Farrell WALLACE DOUGLAS

MORE

THAN THIRTY YEARS

have passed since we first saw Studs Lonigan,

"on the verge of fifteen," standing in his bathroom, "with a Sweet Caporal pasted

reflecting on being graduated from grammar school. In those thirty-odd years his creator has produced more than a dozen novels, almost as many volumes of short stories, and several very interesting collections of critical and political essays. Moreover he has now started on a new series, of which two parts have already appeared (The Silence of History, 1963, and What Time Collects, 1964). Yet for most of that period James T. Farrell has occupied the uneasiest of places in the literary world.

Somehow it is hard to feel that Farrell is still writing, in any meaningful sense of the word. In his own lifetime he seems to have become a paragraph in some history of literature-and a pejorative one at that. For the going line on Farrell is that he didn't develop but merely survived. According to John Aldridge, writing back in 1956, Farrell even then had "taken on something of that curiosity value which writers in this country tend around fifty to come into by virtue of the fact­ which we somehow never cease to find remarkable that they have managed to survive to that age." Farrell's works, we are told, are not really "interesting," because in them "we have the environment only, which we know from the news­ papers"; they are "filled with the minutiae of daily American life, not infrequently in a way that appears more thorough than illuminating." Or to use Aldridge again, "1 "We judge him perhaps as one of the last of the natural writers All this simply means that in his early career, when his reputation was being established, Farrell never had much time for the kind of material that generates the myths and symbols so prominent in the current literary tradition or the an­ thropological formulas that support Professor Frye's far-reaching, synoptic vision of literature as such. Nor did Farrell then have much to do with those lyric affirma-

in his mug," and

.

.

.

....

1

John W. Aldridge, In Search of Heresy (New York, 1956), p. 186; Mark Schorer, "Tech­

nique as Discovery," Hudson Review, I (1848), 82; Arthur Mizener, The Sense of Life in the Modern Novel (Boston, 1964), p. 129.

TRI-QUARTERLY

I

lOS

tions of man's tragic condition that have plagued the academic calling, in this coun­

try at least, for the last couple of decades. Farrell's imagination works rather with the world of fact, of happenings; and there is always about his books the impres­ sion that the

goings-on in them are verifiable by reference to the real world.

Farrell's subject has always been the simple lives and understandings of the people he knew, who grew up with "dust and prairies, gravel playgrounds and artificially pretty parks" as their "backgrounds." His people do not "come from cultivated households"; they do not "live in a cultural milieu." And writing about them, Farrell never had much to say about Life; he dealt rather with "the determinism of

social forces and social laws that prevent men from achieving their ends and aims.'?

Perhaps Farrell suffered too much from that "unironic committedness" that Mizener says "we" now find embarrassing in writers of the Thirties."

Farrell's position as a literary personage has been further eroded by his stub­ born refusal to join any of the groups whose bitter battles about literature and politics filled parlors, lofts, and journals-at least in New York-during the Thirties and Forties. crowd and Lionel

Farrell

couldn't, of course, follow the old Partisan Review

Trilling into Morningside Heights liberalism.

Neither did he

link himself with the Stalinists, though indeed the Trials seem to have been only a

final cause for separation. On the other hand, he was not, I think, strongly iden­

tified with the Trotskyists either; organizationally, that is; no doubt his consistent of the "-ist" suffix and his support of the John Dewey-Suzanne LaFollette investigation of Trotsky'S assassination indicates a direction of sympathy. Yet-at

use

least during these two crucial decades-Farrell always carried on his polemics with­ in the general framework of leftist controversy; Masses literary policies

even

his famous attack

on

New

(1946) was a battle about interpretations of scripture and

offered ordinary reviewers little reason to revise their stereotype on Farrell.' Farrell is like a politician or a military man who has dissipated, or lost contact with, his

support. And so today, while he gives us verse on St. Just, Jack Conroy is carry­

ing on the old fights by describing him as writing "long and incoherent complaints to critics who feel that nobody, either mundane or divine, has ever yet succeeded 2

See "The League of Frightened Philistines" and "Thirty and Under" in The League of Frightened Philistines (New York, 1945), especially pp. 9, 50; also "My Beginnings as a Writer" in Reflections at Fifty (New York, 1954), especially p. 162. Lately Farrell has begun to look down a vista, as it might be called, of human values that are basic enough to satisfy the most implacable leavisite. Unfortunately the literary world seems not to have noticed this development.

•

Quoted in "A Proposed Symposium," The Carleton Miscellany, VI (1965), 7.

•

But notice the Foreword to Reflections at Fifty (pp. 11-12: "Since the end of World War II, America has been under constant attack by Moscow. Over and over again, Communist propagandists have attempted to convince West Europeans that America is without tradition and culture, that its freedom is a lie, and that it seeks to precipitate a third World War. Gloom­ ily, I must grant that this propaganda has had some influence on the minds of some of the best European intellectuals, though today America has become the hope of mankind. For America stands as the biggest and strongest bastion of freedom in a world menaced by totali­ tarians." The point is repeated in "Tradition in America" (1953, pp. 169-79 in Reflections).

It is perhaps a little odd that Farrell's position has not improved in the decade since these pieces.

1061

TRI-QUARTERL Y

in telling him how to write.":' At this stage of his career, Farrell's reputation as a

dull, graceless, and repetitious writer has been fixed. And probably nothing that he, or anyone else, can do is going to help.

As long ago as the publication of Father and Son (the third volume of the Danny

O'Neill series) in 1940, Edmund Wilson was telling Farrell that he seemed to him

(Wilson) as well as to "routine reviewers" to be only repeating the same "diffuse story," Although Wilson had apparently read nothing of Farrell after Judgment Day (the last volume of the Lonigan series, 1935) he felt able to say, in that patronizing tone that is so irritating a quality of most Farrell criticism: At the end of two volumes of Studs Lonigan I was much impressed by the reality of your picture. I felt exactly as if I had spent a childhood in the section of Chicago you describe. But before I finished the third volume, I felt that I wanted to grow up and move away. Yet you don't want your readers to move away and you don't want your heroes to grow to manhood.

Farrell's reply was simple enough to suit his most unfriendly critic:

Anyone who thinks that my books about the O'Neill and O'Flaherty families are merely about a boy growing up has been patently misinformed, or else he has misread these books. As for Studs Lonigan and Danny O'Neill, they are distinctly different in temperament, attitudes, desires, accomplish­ ments, and social status and class backgrounds."

What Wilson probably did was to read Father and Son in the light of the "routine reviews" and persuade himself that Danny O'Neill was a repeat of Studs, and that,

therefore, his story was, or was going to be, the same one that Farrell had already done in Studs Lonigan:

"study" of the effects of cultural or spiritual poverty on the growing-up of a lower middle class Irish Catholic boy from the mean and sordid streets west of Washington Park in Chicago. (It sometimes seems that Studs Lonigan is a book that people have neither read nor forgotten.) However come by, such a judgment as Wilson's ignores most of the material facts about Farrell's work; yet appearing as it did in the New Republic and with Wilson's authority, the passage may have had a considerable influence on the development of Farrell's reputation, or anti-reputation. I should judge it might have been more important even than W. V. Shannon's somewhat xenophobic notions about a conspiracy among Left reviewers.' At any rate, perhaps now some re-examination is in order, a

"

"Farrell: "Golden Youth: 1794," Conroy: the contemporary fact ", Carleton Misc., VI, 25 and 38. Conroy is alluding to a remark he says Farrell made to Whittaker Chambers at ...

...

the end of the first Writers' Congress (1935): "Neither man nor God is going to tell me what to write." Such a remark does not appear at the end of the published record; what does appear is "-James Farrell arose and suggested that the Congress conclude its final session by singing the International. This was done." '''James Farrell on James Farrell," New Republic CllI (28 October 1940), 596. Even Lovett

could call Studs Lonigan "a classic of American boyhood." (R. M. Lovett, "Farrell at the Crossroads," New Republic, LXXXXVI (21 September 1938), 194.

'William V. Shannon, The American Irish (New York, 1963), p. 257.

TRI-QUARTERLy

1107

not, of course, for critical purposes (to revaluate Farrell) but merely to establish some of the facts behind the curious case of James T. Farrell and the literary world.

At the beginning of Young Lonigan (the first volume in the Studs Lonigan series,

subtitled "A Boyhood in the

Chicago Streets"), we are shown Studs alone, ap­ into the bathroom mirror and reflecting (or at least telling him­ parently looking self), "Well, I'm kissin' the old dump goodbye tonight." In Judgment Day, his last spoken words, directed to his mother and his Church, s are a summation of the disintegration of the tough-guy self-image that he had acted out, seventeen years before, as "a small, broad-shouldered lad," with a "frank and boyish face," wide, thick lips, and blue eyes, who was waiting to go off to his grammar school gradua­

tion. And the action of Studs Lonigan expresses this reversal of Studs' insubstantial dreams for himself--of how "he was going to be an important guy" and "life was

going to a whole lot more

...

fun."

In some sense the action must embody the life

process of what John Chamberlain calls the "Irish 'adventurous boy,' who grows up to such an immature and pointless middle age," and perhaps it does tell us, as he suggests, that the wages of sin is death."

Perhaps, too, there was enough Jansen­

ism (or at least Irish Puritanism) in the Chicago Church in Farrell's day to make it likely that such

simple moral fable would have been congenial to his spirit.

But the question, at least according to Farrell's comment to Wilson, would seem to be what kind of adventurous Irish boy Studs Lonigan was. Chamberlain may have known his likes among the Grand Avenue Irish of New Haven. But what, precisely, would the likes of Studs Lonigan have been?

There is, first of all, the fact of being other. This is not merely being Irish and Catholic in a more or less Protestant America. It is also being one of the other nation. "For many of us Americans," Farrell has said, a

there is a gap between our past and our present, between our childhood and our productive manhood. We are the sons and daughters, the grandsons and granddaughters of the disinherited of the earth. Our forbears partook little of the great culture of mankind. Their lives and destinies were hard; their contributions to our civilization were made with their backs. We have come from their poverty.

We have a personal past different from the past to in and the great suggested inspiring world of culture and ideas.

Such blind admiration and envy (obviously Farrell's education took)

are

distress­

ing, but the feeling cannot be ignored.

Secondly, I suppose, was the exact quality of Studs' Irishness. He was a part of that parochial, sectarian, sentimental, illusion- and tradition-bound world of Irish Catholicism, Chicago brand, in the early part of the twentieth century. It was, 8

"Mom, I'm sick. Put me to bed." (Judgment Day, p. 388) "I'm dying." "Priest." (p. 392)

"Mother, it's getting dark." (p.465) •

Introduction

to Studs

Lanigan (1935, a printing of the whole trilogy in one volume), pp.

viii and xii.

10

Foreword, Reflections at Fifty, p. 10. lOS

I

TRI-QUARTERLY

in many ways, a rather comfortable world, in which the apostolate was expressed, the Church judged, by growth, much as businesses were-and men too. If known, the social encyclicals were not much considered; and neither the

assumptions nor

the consequences of the economic system were questioned. The cure of souls more or

less took care of itself.

Not to speak of the availability of the Mass and the

night when, somewhere in the city, there was not a mission going, or a novena, special or perpetual, as the case might be. Even in the late Thirties a special police detail was required to take care of traffic movement for a Friday night novena at one of the great Boulevard cathedrals'! on the sacraments, it was

a

rare

West Side.

The ethos of this culture is brilliantly

suggested in Father Gilbooley's gradua­ tion speech at the beginning of Young Lonigan. In the first part of the speech he is the benevolent pastor congratulating those who "had possessed the courage, the conscience and the faith to give their children a Catholic education," so that they would walk "in the ways of Gawd" and grow up "into sterling-silver specimens of Catholic manhood and womanhood." As the elder Lonigans listen, they feel that "they had participated in a great work, that they had done the will of the Great Man who sat on the Heavenly Throne."

But the Word is thinly heard through the priest's revivalist patter of sentiment and threat. The graduation, he says, symbolizes the arrival of your little ones in the first safe haven of their journey across the stormy and wave-tossed sea of life. It symbolizes the victory and achievement which is the result of eight hard years of patience and care; a triumph whose ultimate crown of success will be forged at the very throne of Gawd Almighty.

As further protection against the storms of life, he commends to them the Catholic

high schools of Chicago.

For the end of the speech, which is addressed to the graduates, Father Gilhooley takes up the central fear that is Peter's rock.

In a nice confusion of "the great and

inspiring world of culture and ideas," Father Gilhooley warns the graduates, Tempus fugit! Time flies! Time is sometimes like a thief in the night, or like some lonely bird that comes to the banquet hall of this earth where man is feasting; it comes from a black unknown, flies through while man eats, and is gone out in the black night; and I may add, my dear young friends, the black night is black indeed, unless one has abided by the will of Gawd.

And he tells them,

They must say their prayers morning and evening and whenever they were heavily beset with temptations, they must keep the commandments of God and of Holy Mother Church, receive the sacraments regularly, never wilfully 11

So far as I know, the phrase is John Cogley's; see his "Ages of American Catholicism," Commonweal, LXXIX (4 October 1965), 29-31. It is certainly an apt one for those great romantic piles that loom over the dingy two-fiats of Chicago's inner city.

TRI-QUARTERLY

1109

miss mass, avoid bad companions and all occasions of sin, publicly defend the Church from all enemies and contribute to the support of their pastor.

In Judgment Day, when Studs lies dying of his life, what is left of his mind re­ turns to this material, the matrix of his kind.

He hears the voice of God rumbling

from out of

blackness, "like some tremendous command," and saying to him, "Verily, verily, I say unto you, if you want a soft bed, honor thy father and thy mother." Remembering Father Gilhooley's prayer that "Gawd forbid any grad­ uates of St. Patrick's to cause gray hairs to a father or a mother," he hears-from his father-"The son who puts one gray hair on the head of a mother or a father

will rue the day, rue the day, rue the day."

Then in his delirium, A fat priest in a black robe with a red hat stepped from behind a wide band of wine red, like an actor making an entrance on the stage, and spoke in a solemn pulpit voice.

Remember, 0 Lonigan, that thou art dirty dust, and like a dirty dog thou shalt return to dirtier dust.

Later Studs hears the Pope asking whether he receives the Sacraments regularly;

still later "Father Gilhooley in gold vestments thumbed his nose at Studs and said: "Contribute to the support of your pastor."

In "How Studs Lanigan Was Written,"12 Farrell insisted that the book was not a

slum novel.P its subject was a culture, not an economic condition.

Had I written Studs Lanigan as a story of the slums, it would then have been easy for the reader falsely to place the motivation and causation of the story directly in immediate economic roots. Such a placing of motivation would have obscured one of the most important meanings I wanted to inculcate into my story: my desire to reveal the concrete effects of spiritual poverty. It is readily known that poverty and slums cause spiritual poverty in many lives. One of the most important meanings I perceived in this story that here was a neighborhood several steps removed from the slums and dire economic want, and here, too, was manifested a pervasive spiritual

was

poverty.

One

hopes that "spiritual poverty" does not mean lack of contact with "the

great and inspiring world of culture and ideas." At any rate, according to Farrell, in 1938, its causes were to be found in the national experience of his folk.

The fathers,

grandfathers, great grandfathers of boys like Studs Lonigan to a new world. They came from the shores of that island

came to America as

whose history is one of the most bitter of all nations. Most of them were poor immigrants. Some of them could not read or write. They belonged at 12

The Introduction to the Modern Library edition (1938), reprinted in League of Frightened

Philistines, pp. 82-9; see pp. 86-7.

18

Indeed not.

Patrick Lonigan, Studs' father, is a small contractor and employer; he owns

the apartment building the Lonigans live in. And it may be worth noting that he, like Studs, is seen in comparative triumph at the beginning of Young Lanigan and in drunken defeat at the end of Judgment Day. 110

I

TRI·QUARTERL Y

the bottom of the American social and economic ladder. Many of them did menial work, and the lives they led were hard. They struggled upward in American society just as have other immigrant groups and races before and after them. Their lives constituted a process in which many were assimilated into the American petit bourgeoisie and the American labor aristocracy.

Their lives were dedicated to work, to advancing themselves, to saving and thrift, to raising their families. They rose socially and economically. Ulti­ mately many of them owned buildings and conducted their own small busi­ ness enterprises.

They became politicians, straw bosses, salesmen, boss craftsmen, and the like. And they became tired. Their spiritual resources were meagre. They believed in the American myth of success and advance­ ment. They believed in the teachings and dogma of their faith. They believed that with homilies, platitudes about faith and work, and little fables about good example, they could educate their children. They believed that thus their children would start off on the race of life with greater advantages than they had had, and that their children would advance so much the farther, so many more rungs up the economic and social ladder.

What Farrell says there in his own person finds expression in many ways and

places in Studs Lanigan, but perhaps most notably in the reverie of Studs' father at the beginning of Yaung Lanigan, as he sits on his back porch, "exuding burgher comfort," and thinks of his life and work. His thoughts go from "those ragged days when he was only a shaver and his old man was a pauperized greenhorn" to the present when "he sits there, and is comfortable and content and patient, because he knows that he has put his shoulder to the wheel, and he has been a good Catholic, and a good American, a good father, and a good husband."

He had stuck to his job and nearly killed himself working.

But now he

as a reaping his rewards. and weren't were there unions then like there painter's apprentice, strong now, and there was no eight-hour day, neither, and the pay was nothing.

In them days, many's the good man that fell off a scaffold to die or become permanently injured. Well, Pat Lonigan had gone through the mill, and he had pulled himself up by his own bootstraps, and while he was not exactly sitting in the plush on Easy Street, he was a boss painter, and had his own business, and pretty soon maybe he'd even be worth a cool hundred thousand

was

It had been no soft job when he had started

berries.

Yes, sir, let God call him to the Heavenly throne this very minute, and he could look God square in the eye and say he had done his duty, and he had been, and was, a good father. They had given the kids a good home, fed and clothed them, set the right example for them, sent them to Catholic schools to be educated, seen that they performed their religious duties, hustled them off to confession regularly, given them money for the collection, never allowed them to miss mass, even in winter, let them play properly so they'd be healthy, given them money for good clean amusements like the movies because they were also educational, done everything a parent can do for a child.

Yet in spite of such material, in spite of Farrell's obvious interest in the socializ­

ing functions of the gang sub-culture and of the life-denying, anti-human, ascetic TRI-QUARTERL y

lUI

values of the Irish Church, two institutions that Farrell sees as constituting cultural

systems of great strength and vitality, still it seems to me hard to see how Studs

Lanigan can be categorized (and perhaps dismissed) as a "study" of the Chicago Irish, a depiction of cultural disintegration (if anything the culture is too hardy), or a fictionalizing of Thrasher's work on gangs.

For the fact is that the central of Studs lies within the conflicted personality of Lonigan dynamic principle deep its hero, and the book is as much a study in individual psychology as it is one in social circumstance.

The nature of Stud's conflict is established as early as his reverie at the opening of

Young Lanigan.

Here the surface material is concerned with institutions and

conventions, but conflict is there too, epitomized in the meaning that St. Patrick's grammar school has for Studs. It was a "jailhouse that might just as well have barred windows"; it had swallowed Stud's life, giving nothing except un-valued memories, secular and religious, of, for example, -Solomon who was wiser than any man who ever lived, except Christ, and maybe the Popes, who had the Holy Ghost to back up what they said; arithmetic, and square and cube roots, and percentage that Studs had never been able to get straight in his brain; catechism lessons the ten command­ ...

God, the six commandments of the church, the seven capital sins, and the seven cardinal virtues and that lesson about the sixth commandment,

ments of

which didn't tell a guy anything at all about it.

...

The tensions carried in the associations of the school are also found in Studs' memories of feeling-experiences that seem to be tied to his fantasies, his impulsive nature.

School, for example, means "Studs, twisting in his seat, watching the sun

come in the windows to show up the dust on the floor, twisting and squirming, and

letting his mind fly to all kinds of places that were not like school." More impor­ tantly it means his memories of Lucy Scanlan, which are memories of love and sin and fear.

He thought of the March day when he had walked home with her. All It along Indiana Avenue, he had been liking her, wanting to kiss her had been a windy day in March, without any sun. The air had seemed black, and the sky blacker, and all the sun that day had been in his thoughts of her They had walked home lazy, and he had carried her books, and wished he had the price to buy her candy or a soda, even if it was Lent, and they had stood before the gray brick two-story building where she lived, and he had wanted, as the devil wants souls, to kiss her, and he hadn't wanted to leave her because when he did he knew the day would get blacker, and he would feel like he did when he had been just out of his diapers and he had been afraid of the night. ....

....

This material on Lucy Scanlan provokes Studs to memories of the role-demands made by gang culture. He tells himself that he remembers the day with Lucy even

better than the day when he was just a punk and he had bashed the living moses out of that smoke who pulled a razor on him over in Carter Playground, and

1121

TRI-QUARTERL Y

gang of guys had carried him around on their shoulders, telling him what great guy he was, and how, when he grew up, he would become the white hope of the world, and lick Jack Johnson for the championship. a

a

He had gone

through school wishing for another day with Lucy like the one dizzy, flowing feelings it had given him. (The words no doubt are a comment on Studs' cultural deprivation, not on the quality of his feelings.) But what he does is to re-establish his tough-guy role.

in March; and now, remembering it, he feels "it all over again, the goofy,

He puffed and told himself: Well, it's so long to the old dump tonight!

He wanted to stand there, and think about Lucy, wondering if he would ever have days with her like that one, wondering how much he'd see of her after she went to high school. And he goddamned himself because he was getting soft. He was Studs Lonigan, a guy who didn't have mushy feelings!

He was a hard-boiled egg that they had left in the pot a couple of hours too

long.

He took another drag of his cigarette.

He wanted the

day back again.

He faced the mirror, and stuck the fag in the mouth. He looked tough and sneered.

right-hand corner of his

If this sequence of action and feeling means anything, it means that Studs' recourse to the irresponsibility of the male gang-world is a more or less deliberate defense against anxiety engendered by love. to grow to

manhood.")

and physical

The

("-and you don't want your heroes

sharp split that Studs

makes between romantic

love should also be noted,

especially as it functions in the famous episode when he walks with Lucy in Washington Park, feeling briefly, as the beauty of the world, a sense of order and control within.t!

This basic fact in Studs' personality is reflected in the triangular struggle among him and his parents. This also is established at the very beginning of Young Lanigan. First, immediately after the graduation ceremony, there is a rather obvi­ (good)

ous

(dirty)

little argument between the mother, who wants to make

son, and the father, who somewhat feebly asserts his

a

Jesuit out of her

right to have his son's help

in the business. Later, at the graduation party at the Lonigans', there is another "In "How Studs Lonigan Was Written"

(p. 86), Farrell says, "I decided that my task was

not to state formally what life meant to me, but to try and re-create

to Studs

Lonigan."

It would be

a sense

of what life meant

interesting to know just where Farrell stands in relation to

especially insofar as the sexual attitude is concerned. When "some white unexpected (and somewhat literary) per­ ception of irony: "-seeing the bird that sang like this one doing that, well, it kind of hurt him, and told him how all living things were, well, they weren't perfect; just like the sisters had said they weren't in catechism." And later-this time wholly in his own person-Farrell says, "And Time passed through their afternoon like a gentle, tender wind, and like death that was silent and cruel.

They sat, and about them their beautiful afternoon evaporated, split up and died like the sun that was dying a red death in the calm sky." But the naturalistic conventions and Farrell's own well-known inability to recognize ironies (except, evidently, when previously discovered) make it difficult to decide how much of this detail is mere literary decoration and how much is personal expression.

Studs in this scene,

stuff" from a singing bird falls on Studs, he had an

...

TRI-QUARTERLY

1113

This time the mother claims,

dispute, similar in content though different in form. as it were, ultimate rights over her children.

"They're not just children any more," the old man said.

"Yes, they are. They are too. They're my children, my baby blue-eyed boy and my girl. They can't be taken away from me either," the mother said

tenaciously."

Here, confronted with a clear choice, Studs turns to his father for help, asking whether he can leave school and start learning the trade.

The father temporizes.

The act may be a decisive one in Studs' growth. For in later passages, the general rivalrous hostility between father and son is defined by Studs in terms of the father's weakness and indecision-"the world's champion putter-off," he calls him.

The destructive conflict within Studs is summed up, completed, in the visions of his mother that Studs suffers during his dying delirium, in a kind of final tragic

expression of his most deeply concealed feelings. Studs first sees his mother as a "thin distorted figure" with "the flapping lips in her witch's face opened in a moan." From this maleficent guise, she speaks to him out of all the long years of destructive love.

You'll never have another mother.

I'm damn glad of that, he said, knowing that his words would his soul more deeply in Hell.

only sink

On the morning after the graduation, "Studs left home immediately after break­ fast so he could get away from the old lady.

She was always pestering him, tell­

ing him to pray and ask God if he had a vocation." And walking along the street, he thought, "families were goddamn funny things; woman were

everybody'S old man and old

the same; they didn't want a guy or a girl to grow up. His mother

always blowing off her bazoo about him being her blue-eyed baby, and his Well, he was growing up in spite of them Let 'em do their damnedest; Studs Lanigan was growing up in spite of them."

In his delirium, however, as he moves closer to dying, his mother is seen as a protection against the institutions of a world of responsibility and independence.

When Sister Bertha tells him, "Now you die like a thief because you shot spit-balls was

old man was always giving advice .

.

.

....

.

in the class," his mother knocks her over and cries, "No one loves you like your

Finally she is seen stepping in front of President Wilson, who is calling for enlistment; she says, "The home is the most sacred thing on earth." The father, incidentally, appears only as reduced to her companion, an announcer of platitudes of behavior. These visions are, I take it, the sign of Studs' defeat in the battle he had announced so proudly to himself on the morning after his graduation. mother."

I am not by any means trying to tum Studs Lonigan into ll5

That

"tenaciously" reminds

me

of "Lillian

Lugubriously Sighed," Otis Ferguson's won­ Republic, XCIII (10 November

derful review of a volume of Farrell's short stories (New 1937). 22, which is still one of the best.

1141

TRI-QUARTERL Y

something other than

novel; I am only trying to show that l"urrl'll'� conception of causation and motivation is, perhaps, somewhat more complex than his critics have noticed. In his reply to Edmund Wilson, Farrell said, a social

In my fiction I seek to recreate a precise detailed and objective picture of certain features of the so-called American Way of Life. I seek to answer the question: what happens to people? I hold a functional conception of char­ acter, viewing it as a social product embodying the reciprocal play of local influence on the individual, and of the individual on society. I am concerned with the concrete processess whereby society, through the instrumentality of social institutions, forms and molds characters, giving to the individual the very content of his consciousness.v-" As I understand it, the action of Studs Lonigan goes forward

as

the result of

the interaction of social forces or conditions and individual characteristics or tend­

encies. Studs becomes what he becomes because he is what he is.

I am not here

talking about Studs' constitution at birth or his neonate experience, though indeed I think Farrell's exploration of Studs' psychology is deep enough to allow at least

conjecture about the ultimate constituents of his response system. But in this context, of course, "what Studs is" can only mean what he is at the beginning of the novel. "A normal American boy of Irish-Catholic extraction," Farrell once called him, perhaps after reading some routine reviewer. On the evidence, it would seem more accurate to call him an emotionally-deprived, falsely-loved child. But this is a general type ("normal" in Farrell's language). And in fact what Studs is, the individual form of the type, is determined by where he is. His special choices of defence or escape are limited by the institutional forms of Irish-American culture

it existed on the South Side of Chicago (or even within "St. Patrick's" parish)

as

in the first third of the twentieth century.

To clarify the point, consider such a boy growing up twenty years

or so

after

Studs (Le. in the Twenties) among a family of Irish Catholics living on the North Side of Chicago, on Sheridan Road, say, between Irving Park and Foster. (The

location is defined to separate them from the mansion dwelling Irish to the North.)

Supposing, however hazardously, all other ::anditions-family and economic-to be the same, still the fact of living on the North Side would be a significant dif­ ference, capable of generating all kinds of moral and psychological differences. As prosperity and assimilation had allowed the Irish to move from the Valley or Back of the Yards to the South and West Sides, so another generation of work and saving allowed many of them to follow the El out to the new neighborhoods around Wilson Avenue. The North Side Irish of that time and that place would be sufficiently removed from the conditions of immigrant life (and the neighbor­ hoods would be less marginal) so that, for one thing, the gang sub-culture would not be necessary, and hence there would be no such place of retreat and support.

This alone would be enough to make the difference. It is not that a boy growing up there would differ in personality or character, but that he would differ in be­ havior, and so his story would have to be different too.

16

"Farrell on Farrell," p. 596.

TRI-QUARTERL y

1115

Some awareness of Farrell's psychological system might have helped critics dis­

tinguish between the stories of Studs Lonigan and Danny O'Neill. In a rough sort of way Danny O'Neill is like Studs Lonigan, at least to the extent that both are "normal American boys of Irish-Catholic extraction," and maybe we are to sup­ pose that both (insofar as they derive from Farrell himself) have some special kind of sensitivity, are prone to enjoyment of more or less conscious fantasies; anyway both seem to share a feeling of alienation, loneliness, separation. In addi­ tion the material circumstances of their lives look to be the same or similar. course

Of

Danny's natural family is very clearly iron-stove Irish; at the beginning

of the O'Neill series they are living on LaSalle Street, apparently between Twenty­

fourth and Twenty-fifth Streets, close to the Rock Island tracks. It is a slum and

Sleep is so universal a need, so common a phenomenom that it is taken for granted.

The sleep of others is usually not an interesting fact about themselves or of emphatic

importance in the course of their lives as they are carried along the many changes that sleep, sleeping forever. But the really and is and relative, interesting important unpredictable. Going to sleep can, at some

lead to the end of their destiny, which is like

time, on some occasion, be one of the

important experiences in someone's life, a story of segments of their lives, then, those lives can be distorted out of shape and become a false image.

This is what false art does; it is what bad art also does. It is what dream art does, when that dream art reaches the constituent elements of the dream, the public and accepted romanticisms and actions for what should be private, undramatic, personal, and commonplace.

Fear not to be commonplace. For the commonplace is the familiar repeated in its familiar generality. The commonplace is not such, but unique and sometimes, dramatic or the prelude to the dramatic, when it is an event of uniformity with the millions and billions of events of the same category, function, and process-but it acquires a meaning which is beyond its normal functioning one. That is to say, when the commonly recur­ rent functioning act· of the human being is a special one; becoming one of the events of singular importance in a life, because of the consequences which seem to be associated with it, and even, perhaps, caused by it.

[From a novel in progress] most

and if omitted from the story of their lives, which is always but

mixed neighborhood. But the O'Flahertys, Danny's mother's family, who are rais­

ing him, live in comparative respectability like the Lonigans, around Fifty-first Street and Calumet A venue. Danny's father is a teamster, his uncle is a shoe salesman, his aunt a cashier-bookkeeper. The O'Flahertys are on the fringe of lace-curtain Irish. If they are not abstractly in the same circumstances as the Lonigans, at least their manner of living puts them several degrees above the O'Neills.

With so many similarities between the two characters, it is perhaps no wonder that Aldridge would say that we have no way of measuring or understanding the

redemption, as he called it, of Danny O'Neill."?

17

But I think the

answer

is clear

In Search of Heresy, p. 107.

TRI·QUARTERLY

1117

enough; it is to be found in the essential structural differences in the circumstances of the two boys. I don't mean that the differences in social class or economic role of their families have immediate consequences in the behavior of the two boys.

After all, whatever Danny's background and the real position of his uncle and aunt, it is clear that the class identification of the O'Flaherty household is with the petit bourgeoisie not the working class. It is rather that these social and eco­ nomic differences provide the occasion or ground for essential and determinative differences in the family structures that the two boys know.

The poverty of his own family is the reason that Danny O'Neill has to go to his mother's family. The consequences of that move are important. Danny becomes the object of all the guilt-ridden hostilities and animosities of the two families; he also has to suffer all the tensions in the O'Flaherty household. He never fully experi­ ences the network of feelings and ties that defined the defensive function of the family unit among the Irish immigrants. Or perhaps it would be safer to say that he experiences it only in the distorted form of the failed O'Flaherty family. But this means that he does not endure the possessive, unconsidering, and self-supporting love with which Mary Lonigan accomplished the destruction of her son. Yet it is significant (if only in connection with Farrell's own psychology) that Danny cannot take his "last step to freedom" until after his grandmother has died; only then can he "go forth fully armed and ready to fight."

There is still, however, the question of the gang. After all, at the end of No Star Is Lost, Danny has moved down to the Fifty-eighth Street neighborhood, and almost the last we see of him is as a new boy meeting Studs and Johnny O'Brien. "They seemed all right and it was good luck and swell to make new friends on his first day in the new neighborhood." How is it, then, that he did not become part of the gang, or escaped from it?

The explanation lies, I think, in Danny's family-experience. It must be remem­ bered that, in the world of these novels at least, the gang is a supplement to, not a substitute for, the family. Its function is to provide, but in non-threatening form, the same social security as the family unit. It is a means of defense for the stranger, the exile; a secular sodality that is a reflection not merely of immigrant status but also of sectarian specialness.

But Danny has no experience of this protection, either in his own family or in the O'Flaherty pseudo-family. The fundamental difference between Studs and Danny is the degree of socialization they could achieve as children. It is a given with them both that they have very strong inner-turning tendencies, deep feelings of their inability to make contact with the world. In Studs' case, however, the institutional structure is strong enough (or he is weak enough?) so that he does follow the "normal" path of his kind from the family into the gang as a first step toward independence. In Danny's case, however, no institutional force is there to direct such a movement. Because of the familial disorganization, he turns to himself for protection and support. Indeed he has no need for the gang, no way of using it. The tendency is probably enforced by his position as the adored cen­ ter of the O'Flaherty household; this too cuts him off and makes him different.

1181

TRI-QUARTERLY

So too perhaps do the cultural pretensions of his uncle.

The fact of the matter

is that Studs loses his fight precisely because, in his world, the institutions of Irish

culture, especially the matriarchal family unit,

are

viable, still functioning.

still

Danny, on the contrary, wins his because he is the child of that cultural disor­ ganization which is supposed to be at the center of all Farrell's novels.

In the last decade or so

(after finishing the Bernard Carr trilogy, which seems political world), Farrell has got hold

to record his personal emancipation from the

of-or been

captured by-a rather new line.

I have the

feeling that it is the (1953), or per­

result of his return to the O'Flaherty saga in The Face of Time

haps of the mood he was in when he wrote it: My subject matter concerned the family of poor and illiterate immigrants.

Forty-seventh and Indiana in Chicago and the yellow stone building in which the O'Flahertys lived was far away, set in such a small corner of the world.

One day I had been flying from Los Angeles to Chicago. Sitting in the plane, I worked on my novel. I looked off to the left where there was a dark puff of hanging cloud, miles away. It was the cloud from an atomic explosion.

In the age of the airplane and the atomic bomb I was going back to that small section of Chicago, and I was full of the life and death of an old teamster and of what his family said and thought and did.

Farrell thought of calling the book A Legacy of Fear, which is

nothing if not an interesting title. Baffled, after he realized that he might be suggesting a detec­ tive story, he took down a volume of Yeats and found his title in the last lines of "The Lamentations of the Old Pensioner": I spit in the face of time

That has transfigured me.IS I don't know whether Farrell had

to make

regular thing of reading Yeats, approach of his fiftieth birthday. Whatever the case, in "Reflections at Fifty" he is to be found explaining, or

come

a

whether he was just feeling liverish about the

When I first began to write I was full of indignation because of the sor­ of this world. I was angry because of cruelty, because of the exploita­ tions of some men and women by others, because of the coldness with which some people manipulate others, because of dirt, poverty, ignorance, aggres­ siveness, and the other things which ruin and sadden human lives. In vari­ ous ways this indignation was reflected in my first writings.

It is not possible at fifty to feel the indignations of one's youth. My feelings are somewhat different today as I write. There is more tranquillity, but this is relative.

I suspect no man is completely tranquil, and I know that I am not. The rest­ less temperament of my youth has not been remade completely. The sense of alienation of my childhood and youth has not been completely eliminated from my personality. The scars of a crowded life are not all dim and scarcely visible. Time has not worked its miracles on me. Indignation has turned to

rows

18

"How The Face of Time Was Written," Reflections, pp. 35-41;

see

pp. 40-1.

TRI-QUARTERLY

1119

I have come to see that pain and agony are part of the way Often I think of this, and of a line of Yeats, whose poetry has been one of my lifelong admirations: a stoical

feeling.

it is in life.

"The wrong of unshapely things is a wrong too great to behold."

In another place in the same essay, Farrell announces, "Life carries the price of

death." All this gloom seems to prepare for the dark concluding sentence of the essay, "To look into the Face of Time, and to master its threat to us-this is one of the basic themes and purposes of art and literature."!"

One would not, of course, hold Farrell to his youthful enthusiasms; but still it is sad to remember "Thirty and Under" in which he dismissed the New Hu­ manism as "an irritating arrogance."

The last sentence of that essay was,

In brief, the problem of those of us who own the Thirties is of social attack than of ethical reversion and traditionalism."

more

one

But it is the late Farrell that we have to deal with here; and all one can say is that he does indeed seem to have Time on his hands. Note the titles of his latest works: The Silence of History and What Time Collects.

Note also the hero of

the former,

to come upon even in

as

book-haunted'"

a

youth

as

one

is

likely

these days, who seems to be in a more or less constant meditation on the realities of time and death and how he fits into what he persists in calling History.

Un­

fortunately his connections with "the great and inspiring world of culture and ideas" are all too clear; and he is given to quoting or thinking some of the sadder lines in The Golden Treasury (or would it be just Lieder, Lovett, and Root?): things like And

even

the weariest river winds somewhere safe to

sea

or

Who waged contention with their time's

decay

or

The still sad music of humanity.

To make matters rather the worse, it is all too clear that the

Eddy Ryan of this book is pretty close to Danny O'Neill, even to having a keening grandmother.

In What Time Collects these tendencies

are

somewhat concealed because Far­

rell has based the novel on his old subject, a family analysis, though perhaps the

aspect of consideration is slightly different, not to say skewed. Apparently Far­ rell has decided to take up the frustrations of two families of White Anglo-Saxon

living in a small Mid-western city. I have the feeling that the city is Indianapolis, though the only supporting evidence is an allusion to what is called "the English theater," which is on a square where there is also an im­ portant club. But the location doesn't make any difference now; Farrell is beyond Protestants

19

In Reflections at Fifty, pp. 58-65; see pp. 61-2, 63, and 65.

eo

League of Frightened Philistines, pp. 149-53; see pp. 152, 153.

"The word is Robert Gorham Davis' in his review of The Silence of History, New York Times Book Review, 12 May 1963, p, 1.

120

I

TRI-QUARTERL Y

all

that, having,

sector

I

gather,

taken up

humanity,

or

at

least the whole WASP

thereof.

What Time Collects is about the Daniels and Duncan families, especially Anne

("a sincere, passionate, admittedly sex-hungry girl who grows into a woman before the book is done") and Zeke Daniels ("probably the most dedicated lecher and drinker of bootleg whisky in all modern literature"), and the sources Duncan

and consequences of their ruttish connection. Anne's mother's name is Sara.

Her

father is called Zachariah Hosea, as if Farrell had been saying over the names of the minor prophets, or perhaps we are to remember the notorious Protestant interest in Holy Writ. Lower class Protestants only, however, it would seem, for the elder Daniels

are

Frances and

Thomas, their daughter is Myrtle, and another son is

Richard; and the Daniels are clearly a cut above the Duncans.

Neither the Duncans nor the Daniels are happy. The reason, as I read the details, is that the parents, in the Puritan way, are filled with Augustinian feel­ ings about concupiscence and, therefore, do not experience love. In keeping with Farrell's new interest in Time and the Pains of Life, a good deal of space is consumed examining the rather nasty lives of "the restless, blighted earlier gen­ eration" that produced Anne and Zeke. The jacket summary is reasonably faithful to

the book: For Anne's parents married life began with a disastrous honey­ and ended the night Zach dropped dead of a heart attack while crank­ .

.

.

moon

were ing his car outside the town brothel. Meanwhile, Zeke's parents entombed together in wedlock that was a public success but a private catas­ trophe: Tom a feckless, frustrated, fear-ridden Ku Klux Klanner, and Frances, a cold, steely woman whose only satisfying love affair occurred when she was sixteen-with a most unexpected partner. .

The sins of these fathers

are

experience love either; indeed

all too

.

.

clearly visited. Anne and Zeke do not experience that kind of grand

do not even

they passion which in some conventions excuses, though it may never compensate for, the lack of love. One knows all, I think, when, after their wedding (before a justice-of-the-peace in a sort of unpremeditated elopement), they are "seated [sic] in the Chalmers." Things then proceed thus: -the strain they both felt was snapped. Zeke grabbed Anne, and gave her wet, open-mouthed kisses, French kisses. Anne returned his kisses, and

passionately.

"Take me there to that hotel-take me some place, take me there, darling."

She spoke in gushes of fast breathing.

"Hotel Bliss," he said in a gasp of panting breathing.

This and much more sounds like a book that must have been dictated by Studs But to say so would be to be unfair to Farrell's intense seriousness and to the major theme of What Time Collects. For in this book Farrell is using

Lonigan.

Frances and Zeke Daniels to

implicit

as

openly explore the mother-son relationship that is And he has revealed,

the motivational center of the earlier novels.

TRI-QUARTERLY

1121

complication of feeling (guilt and hate, fear and desire, hostility and sympathy) that such a relationship involves.

All of his workmanship and intelligence can be seen in the scene of the return of Zeke and Anne to his house after their elopement. The Daniels family are "stricken with silence," Farrell says, when they see Zeke and the girl. They all suppose that he has brought home "some loose girl or tramp that he'd picked up with great insight and sensitivity, the extreme

in a dive, and that she was either a whore or should be one." To Frances Daniels, the mother,

The girl was obviously a stupid trollop. As for Zeke, he was bringing her into her home with a bad boy's wish to annoy his mother and his family.

The thought of money also came to her like a flash, but the miserable crea­ ture was too pitiful and frightened for blackmail. Mrs. Daniels understood that whatever this scandalous affair was, it was the doing of Zeke and not of the girl. For Anne was so uncertain, bewildered, frightened, and tem­ porarily shattered that she appeared to be a pitiably characterless girl, and evidently a fool to boot.

Before any of the

Daniels, my mother,

family can escape their stricken silence, Zeke says, "Mrs. meet Mrs.

Daniels, my wife." speech in some detail:

Farrell explains the effect of the Mrs. Daniels had understood

immediately that Zeke was making fun of

her with his mode of introducing the girl. He was humiliating her, telling her what he thought of her and what he must have thought of her for a long time, for years. She was stricken by Zeke's thrust. He was trying to stab her with his contempt, and to mock her by making this girl her

She would control herself-and the situation. Yes, it sad creature, she thought. And her rage was at Zeke.

No one in the parlor except Zeke and Mrs. Daniels

was

equal.

Zeke,

was aware

sages of hatred had just been exchanged by mother and

.

.

.

not this

that mes­

son.

I am not at all sure that Farrell's open exploration of the mother-son relation­

ship should be seen as a sign of freedom.

There is too much of his past in the

story for that. As the novel goes on, more and more parallels with Studs Lonigan assert themselves.

Mary Lonigan, Frances Daniels makes high demands of her son. Zeke Daniels, though he doesn't use the gang-escape (except, perhaps if Dull-Pill Gary is the equivalent of the gang), still preserves the parallel by marry­ ing and abusing ("Come on, Babe, get into bed, just like you was my special whore.") a girl who is presented in pretty clear contrast to his mother, as Catherine Banahan was to Mary Lonigan. Tom Daniels is reduced even farther than Patrick Lonigan, being little more than the object of his son's bored inattention.

There is also the fact that Frances Daniels exists and suffers not only dra­ matically, within the action of the novel, as object for her son. She seems also to have artistically uncontrolled function. Farrell gets at her through her son and Like

also with his own devices as author. In her second role Frances Daniels has to bear

Mongoloid child, enjoy a childish lesbian relationship, spy on her son and daughter in bed, go through an episode of autoeroticism, and generally endure a fairly total destruction of her attributes as woman and mother. The effect of all a

1221

TRI-QUARTERLY

this material is to suggest that Farrell is still carrying on his old and constant war

against his heritage;" this time in a peculiarly exacerbated form that somewhat limits his powers of artistic choice.

There are to be two more volumes to this series, it is said; in the third volume,

the characters from the first two are to be drawn together, though by what chance or mischance

is not yet divulged.

I find myself wondering how it will be brought

about, and what the outcome will be.

And maybe that's a tribute to Farrell's base

But who else is there to wonder? A long time ago Otis that Farrell's "name is now one of the indelible words of this time.":" said Ferguson

story-telling power.

But even then, in

1937, when he had published five novels, Farrell was eligible

for a prize for the best serious novel that had sold under five thousand

copies.

The original edition of Young Lonigan (1932) sold only 533 copies, though per­

haps as much because of the year as anything. Bernard Clare (1946) sold 39,000, Farrell's best sale.24 Maybe after that he did run into a change in popular taste, signalized by the curious discovery .of James Gould Cozzens or Edmund Wilson's revival of Scott Fitzgerald, which didn't really get going until the late Forties or Fifties. Or maybe it was that he held his imagination too much within the limits of the imaginations of his own characters, and thus deprived readers of some of the headier literary experiences and knowledges.

Or maybe it was, as I think, that Farrell so conspicuously and assertively has clung to the method of the great naturalistic tradition, finding his only symbols in the classifiable and understandable behavior of men, his only myth in the premise that "the major evils in this world are the consequence of the exploitation of man by man. Human nature is affected by this exploitation, and so the human na­ ture that results in societies based on exploitation causes needless misery, suffer­ ing, injustice, brutality, war, bestiality, and in consequence, human nature is deforrned--deformed for the worse.":" It is not yet the time to decide about James T.

already done so.

And I don't suppose the time will

Farrell, though many have come

soon, when he

can

be

judged fairly. For it is all too clear that we are by no means ready to acknowledge that at the heart of naturalism, beyond all the pother about scientific determinism, was a clear, cold understanding of the forces that shape society."

We are as little interested in understanding those forces as we are unready to listen to Farrell saying, If there is any hatred in my books it is directed not against people but against conditions which brutalize human beings and produce spiritual and material poverty."

When we are ready to listen, then we can judge-and not before ..

.

Hoke Norris in the Chicago Sun-Times.

23

New Republic, XCIII, (10 November 1937), p. 22 Shannon, American Irish, p. 257. ,.

"New Roads," rptd. from Politics, March 1946. ,.

Harry Levin, "Tell It Not in Oath," New Republic, CXIII (23 July 1945), 105 ., Quoted in a statement by Van Allen Bradley in The Coming of Age of A Great Book (New York, 1953), p. 7 from Farrell in Chicago Daily News, 1 December 1937. .

..

.

TRI-QUARTERLY

1123

NEWTON BERRY

A prefaoe to the death fantasy sequenoe of "Judgment Day"

The publication of this heretofore

unprinted excerpt from Studs Lanigan at this time, some thirty years after completion of the third and final book of that trilogy, is an occasion of literary significance, but one that needs some explaining. The power of Farrell's writing here is too impressive one would think to have been voluntarily deleted by the author himself.

It is too easily integrated into Studs' death scene-indeed, it seems to be the very apex of the work's climax-to have been omitted for the usual

reasons

an

author cuts his

own

work.

Censorship was not, for once, a determining factor. The real story is one that merits telling, however.

In 1929 James Thomas Farrell, then a student at the

story entitled "Studs," which

was

conceived, imagined, and written."

University of Chicago, wrote a short Lonigan trilogy was

"the nucleus out of which the Studs In this story about

a

wake (not too dissimilar from that

of Arnold Sheehan in The Young Manhood oj Studs Lanigan) of a young an

man

called Studs,

unnamed narrator, who could have been Danny O'Neill, described his fellow-mourners:

They kept on talking, and I thought more and more that they were a bunch of All the adventurous boy that was in them years ago had been killed. Slobs, getting fat and middle-aged, bragging of their stupid brawls, reciting the commonplaces of their days I walked home with Joe, who isn't like the others. We couldn't feel sorry over Studs. slobs.

.

.

.

It didn't make any difference.

"Joe, he was a slob," I said.

When Professor Robert Morss Lovett

suggested that he treat his subject at greater length, Young Lanigan that traced the degeneration of Studs from a basically healthy, though punkish, boy of fourteen through the events recorded in The Young Manhood oj Studs Lanigan. This was to have been a single novel concluding with Studs death; but before he had even begun to approach that point of the story, it had become too long to publish as one work and Farrell divided it into two books, the second ending with the drunken Farrell began a novel

New Year's Eve bacchanal wherein his buddies rape and brawl while Studs passes out

on

ultimately lead to his death.

Farrell had planned to devote the final book of the trilogy to Studs' dying, which was to have been treated primarily as a fantasy; and to prepare himself for the task he wrote the wonderfully imaginative account of McGinty's dream, which appears as Chapter Four of Gas-House McGinty. (He also wrote about Studs preparatory to the Danny O'Neill series.)

However, Judgment Day-perhaps because it had to stand not only as a book by itself, a

snow-laden curb to catch the pneumonia that will

but also as a part of what had gone before and because there was still more to be told before

Studs could die-had to be written in the

same detailed, realistic fashion that characterizes preceding books of the series. Nevertheless, Farrell did produce a death fantasy sequence of approximately fifty pages all except a few passages of which he then removed of his own volition before the book was published in 1935.

In 1946 a fire destroyed Farrell's home and with it forever two unpublished novels, an 80 page study of Irish literature, a book on censorship, morality and literature, various other pieces, and all but the bottom halves of some of the pages from the unpublished "Death Fantasy Sequence." It is these half-charred fragments, which the author dug out of the mud and reassembled and revised, that are presented here at this time. There are understandably fewer scenes, characters, and incidents in this version of the work; and yet it still holds together remarkably well as it pitilessly moves toward the inexorable death of Studs Lonigan.

the two

Farrell chose to omit this sequence from Judgment Day, it was much longer, unwieldy, and more of a literary feat. The author who is noted for his young punks

When more

1241

TRI-QUARTERLY

and ignorant Irish Catholics from

Chicago's South Side,

i\

himself

author who is renowned for his disdain of conventionul writing "Life is not a plot, but an

experience

...

an

intellectual; and the

technique and who said,

The plot story is beaten."

is in fact

a

strict dis­

ciplinarian stringently self-imposed upon his writing. Farrell re­ moved the death fantasy because it was too much of a literary tour de force. In its lengthy whose high standards

are

original form it was by itself roughly comparable to a Ulysses In Nighttown and completely distorted the whole of Judgment Day by focusing too much attention upon itself and dis­ tracting from the book's overall meaning. Its stuntish aspect tended to cancel out whatever meager dignity the Last Rites had afforded the dying Studs.

Farrell has stated, "I seek to answer the question: what happens to people?" And the people he deals with are almost invariably normal, usually falling into one of three cate­ gories: the heroes, who like Danny O'Neill, Bernard Carr, and Eddie Ryan are largely auto­ biographical idealizations; the anti-heroes, who like Studs, Ed Lanson, and Tommy Gallagher allow false philosophies to distort their characters; and a vast middle group of the well­ intentioned bewildereds, who like Jim O'Neill, Peg O'Flaherty, and Gas-House McGinty can His ability to convincingly depict a never quite cope with a world they don't understand. of differentiated of all wide variety sharply personalities ages, many intellectual and social walks of life and both sexes is undoubtedly Farrell's single strongest asset as a writer, and in that he has few peers. Most of his characters have real life antecedents, and Farrell's unflinching honesty never permits him to mechanically manipulate them to demonstrate his intellectualized theories.

Ellen Rogers,

a

minor masterpiece which Thomas Mann described

love-stories I know, of unusual truthfulness and write a well structured

simplicity,"

result much of his work

"one of the best

ample proof that Farrell can "speak for itself," he

to be

covers

and

any way artificialize his work.

and yet it has

plotless repetitive, compared to "a pneumatic drill pounding of the nervous system."

seems

power to it that Alfred Kazin has

last

as

novel; but because he chooses to permit life to

invariably ignores every rule of writing that might in

stripping off the

is

a

As

a

stark, mind,

raw

at the

physically, it is nonetheless rigidly limited. For in seeking truth, he has consistently halted at the gates of the unknowable.

His characters exist in a world where "the unknowable" is a luxury they can ill afford; it is the opiate of the Lizz O'Neills. Grasping what can be known allows Danny to prevail; failure to even try to do so underwrites Studs' downfall. His triumphant characters are those who "through knowledge and the acquisition of control, both over nature and over self," achieve "free will;" but nowhere in Farrell's work is there a genuine sense of the preter­ natural, or an idea that the unconscious may possess thoughts which have not been filtered through sensory channels of empirical experience.

Farrell, who chooses to call himself a "philosophical naturalist in the John Deweyian sense," is the third link in a chain of great naturalistic writers. Though more psychologically aware than Zola and more subtle in his characterizations than Dreiser, he is, like his pred­ ecessors in this tradition, dedicated to an exploration of reality that begins with the assump­ tion that "all events are explainable in terms of natural origins."

Yet, ironically, the naturalists in dealing with objective reality have gradually expanded its boundaries into the subjective, which is, of course, paradoxically a part of objective reality.

A worthy example of this is "The Death Fantasy of Studs Lonigan." Farrell makes use of all the states of consciousness and unconsciousness that Studs is capable of experiencing.

There is a revealing passage early in Young Lonigan that gives us a valuable insight into As broad as Farrell's scope is

to tell all of the knowable

the mind

of Studs:

Whenever Studs had queer thoughts he had a good trick of getting rid of them.

He imagined that his head was a compartment with many shutters in it, like a locker room.

He just watched the shutters close on the queer, fruity thoughts, and they were gone, and he'd have a hell of a time bringing them back, even if he wanted to.

TRI-QUARTERLy

1125

This escape mechanism postpones for Studs the time when he must confront the logical con­ tradictions of his crudely

wrought he-man philosophy of life; but the price he must pay identity is a psychological one, as his unconscious is forced to admit, one after another, the unacceptable truths about his life that Studs con­ sciously fears to face.

In an essay on dream analysis Carl Jung has stated, "The psyche is a self-regulating system that maintains itself in equilibrium as the body does. Every process that goes too far immediately and inevitably calls forth a compensatory activity The relation be­ tween conscious and unconscious is compensatory." And so it is with Studs, who outwardly uncritical, dead and secular in his attitude toward the religion and morality he accepts but does not live by, is inwardly guilt-ridden, torn, and contemptuous toward it. If we accept the definition of religion as that which we live by-as opposed to that which we pay lip service to-then the sac religious speeches of the death fantasy can be viewed as much more than cathartic release of repressions; Studs has, in fact, actually come to accept his role as an Anti-Christ. He has finally identified so thoroughly with what the Catholic faith condemns that these things have in essence become his religion.

His death fantasy is not merely a dream, however; it is the delirium of a very sick man. sick in soul as well as body. And the effects of his illness influence the course and con­ tent of the dream with the fires of Hell being supplied as well as inspired by his feverish condition. A parallel to this is found in Gas-House McGinty'S dream wherein McGinty, having fallen asleep with a full bladder and sexually frustrated by his wife, dreams of to maintain the fiction of his "real stuff"

.

.

.

-

-

-

oceans, rivers, and sexual conquests.

People often pretend to be something they are not, and Farrell makes good use of dreams techniques to reveal the essential being. Yet even when the characters of Studs' fantasy seem to violate their true natures by speaking in his language rather than their own, his own basic conception of them has not been altered.

Technically, the time and space montage effects of the cinema and the stream-of-conscious­ ness influences of James Joyce are in evidence-although Farrell carefully avoids the am­ biguous element which is so fundamental in Joyce's work.

Surprisingly, and perhaps because it is so well integrated into his work, Farrell's experi­ mental writing has for the most part gone unnoticed; and yet he has continued to make and stream-of-consciousness

innovations in both form and content from his earliest to his very latest work. all the

This becomes

amazing when we consider how few other serious modern writers have suc­ cessfully experimented in this vein. Since that rich Thirties period that also produced Dos Passos' U.S.A., Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury, and Virginia Woolfs To The Lighthouse, there have been few great innovators. Among the newer group of novelists perhaps only more

William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, and Chandler Brossard (Samuel Becket and Alain Robbe­ Grillet in France)

seems to be seriously attempting experimental work.

Possibly Farrell would not have been overlooked as an innovator had this death fantasy sequence not been omitted from Judgment Day. Certainly one is tempted to speculate upon what might have been the result had the death fantasy been included in the trilogy-not in its original fullness, but in a shortened version such as the fragment printed here. The primary consideration involved, however, is the effect within Studs Lonigan rather than on critical opinion. What one senses here in the death fantasy is an exhaustive culmination of that irresistible driving toward death, destruction, and utter wretchedness which is subtly begun in Young Lonigan, fearfully perceived in The Young Manhood 0/ Studs Lonigan, and unalterably grinding toward its grim end in Judgment Day. The death-bed delirium obliterates with dreadful finality the last faint glimmer of hope that this once potentially worth-while, youthful life might yet be salvaged-if not in this world, then perhaps in another.

1261

TRI-QUARTERLY

Fragments from the unpublished death fantasy sequence of "Judgment Day" JAMES T.FARRELL

BURNED, his

legs were on fire, his chest was heavy, crossed by pains, warm, burning, allover him, there was a fire consuming his skin, •..

AND

CHEEKS

HIS

and his nerves. His bones ached.

His back ached.

In his backbone at the base

of his spine, there was pain. There was fire and weariness in the thin arms beneath

There was pain and fire in his sunken cheeks.

the covers of his bed. fever in his

glazed half-opened eyes,

He tried to speak.

bent towards him.

.

.

.

and in the lids that

There was

pressed them down. cool,

The strange white woman, her white soothing and

.

.

.

In his mind, there formed the words

I'm afraid.

They travelled to his tongue and issued as sounds that the strange white woman bent to hear.

The sick eyes closed. bound

Blackness

came

.

crossed in front of the blackness

.

.

certain

objects in the misty room

through the colors, and a cool surrounded by grass large tree, and seemed to be propelled away from him fast and faster and faster, and he suddenly broke into a run after the tree, and he felt that if he caught that tree, touched it, stood under it, climbed it, only caught up with it, he would not die, and he felt that he was dying. And the tree disappeared.

Instead of finding himself dead, he found himself to be only a boy, and he could not understand it. He was a boy, in short pants, and he was walking down Indiana Avenue, and there were new houses on Indiana Avenue, and he couldn't understand how there could be new houses on Indiana Avenue, today, when there had been and he looked to glance into the window of the only the old houses on Indiana stone house where Lucy lived. And it was not there. In its place, there was a tall men and apartment building; out of it, people walked, strangers, who did ...

.

.

.

.

...

.

.

•

.

.

.

.

.

.

women whose faces were not clear

...

a woman

.

.

he felt he must have seen someTRI-QUARTERLY

1127

where came

...

some

place before, and he could not remember what

along and said.

.

.

.

.

.

Helen Shires

.

Helen was gone. Indiana A venue was gone. Studs had been propelled away from Indiana A venue, and he was riding in an aeroplane, regretful, thinking of Indiana Avenue, and

wondering why he had been carried way, how, where he was going to, and he fell over trees, and he looked down, and he thought that he recognized Washington Park, and he did not know, and he carried with him, in this aeroplane, the regret, and kept asking himself why he had been carried He shouted to the driver

away.

Hey! The driver did not answer him, and a pain began to spread of regret, of

.

.

.

over

him, a pain

unsatisfied.

longer in the aeroplane. He did not know where he was. therefore, phallic, shapes, twisted, gargoyles shapes similar objects, chairs and stoves, and buildings twisted and tom, and he felt felt that he was dying, and that he was many things. sorry and sick Behind them, the fires of Hell burning with terrific heat, and he stood facing them helplessly, a terrific heat parching his body, causing the perspiration to drip from him in large warm drops that caused small and prickling irritations little fires amongst dried grass at his feet. And with the face of Weary Reilley, the devil bobbed up and down in the flames, and shouted each time his face appeared And he

He

was

no

that he

saw

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

...

...

.

You're coming to me, you bastard!

Above the fires of Hell, the Sacred Heart of Jesus hung, blood dripping from

it, to sizzling sizzle in the flames.

"The wages of sin is death, you skunk," the Pope of Rome dourly said to Studs.

"Give me a nickel to save your soul

tribute to the " ...

Ha!"

...

for the Church commands you to con­

pastor," Father Gilhooley said, extending his hand. our life in Hell. Ha! Ha! jazzed whores, and now you're going to get ...

...

Father Shannon told him.

"Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord

Thy God in vain," the Pope of

Rome said.

"In your life you spent three times as much on whores salvation of your immortal soul," said Father Gilhooley.

as

you did

on

the

"Woe unto you, you who disregarded my word in my missions, you in whom

confidence," said Father Shannon.

"You're coming here, you bastard, and these flames go up your brown," the

I placed

devil with the face of Weary Reilley said.

Hell, give me a break. Fathers forgive me for I have sinned. I'm heartily sorry. Hell, give me a break. Jesus Christ give me a break and a drink. I'm dying, I'm dying, I'm burning, for Christ sake give me some water and put out the fir.e. I'm dying. Goddamn it! I'm dying. I'm a goddamn fool, and I'm dying. can't wait all eternity for "Well, hurry up about it, you fatheaded slob a measly bastard with a damned soul like yours to die," the devil with the face ...

...

of Weary Reilley called out to him.

128\

TRI-QUARTERL Y

" ...

you had the water of faith to

" ...

Father Gillhooley said sternly, rubbing

his bay front, just as he had comfortably rubbed it when he stood speaking on the

stage that night in June 1916 when Studs Lonigan had graduated from St. Patrick's grammar school.

"Drink some moonshine now, and be damned with it," said Father Shannon.

Studs rubbed his hand

his

sweating, heat-tortured brow, and looking at his hand, he saw blood on it, and his fear and horror again spread through him, until he felt like a boil ready to burst in pain and pus.

The Pope of Rome turned and pointed at the bleeding Sacred Heart of Jesus, and the blood dripped drop by drop from it to sizzle and dry in the fires of Hell.

"Each drop of that precious blood is shed because of the mortal sin you com­ mitted with whores, William son of Lanigan," the Pope of Rome said.

I didn't know no better. Forgive me, give me absolution must I die like a goddarnn dog, said Studs.

"You sonofabitch, you ain't begun to suffer yet," the devil with the face of Weary Reilley said. across

.

.

.

...

"Suffer little louse to come unto me and I will burn thee in the fires of Hell and

damnation," said Father Shannon, and brimstone, like firecrackers, shot up from the fires of Hell, and fell all around the burning bare feet of Studs Lonigan. his knees and cried.

He fell

on

Drink.

A drink of water.

For Christ sake give me a drink of water.

lips of kneeling Studs Lonigan, and poured liquid fire down his throat, the fire burning a path into his stomach, and Studs Lanigan let out a terrified yell.

Mrs. Lonigan rushed into the bedroom, and looked at the tossing, fire-burned, sick and wasting body of her son, and amidst a dribble of inarticulate sounds and disconnected words, he emitted a weak and painful cry. She screamed, and shouted, "He's dying."

The nurse came over to Studs' bed; wiping his face with a wet washrag, she asked her to be quiet.

The Pope of Rome

came

.

.

forward and placed

a

bottle of fire to the

.

"He's in a very critical condition, and he is in a restless coma. His fever is very

high too," the nurse said.

Fighting back tears and sniffling, the mother looked down at her son. Unable to hold back her tears any more, she burst forth in a deluge, and the tears ran hot down her cheeks.

"I'll call the doctor," the

nurse

She energetically left the

room.

said.

II

Lanigan sat drunk by the kitchen table. He hicupped. He put his head down and cried, babyishly. He got up and told himself, Paddy, buck up and be a man.

Then he walked unsteadily to the stove, and lit the gas under the coffee pot.

He staggered over the coffee pot, and looked down at it, and at the gas flame.

TRI-QUARTERLY

1129

He turned from the coffee pot and walked to the cupboard, drew out a cup and saucer, and set it on the table.

and

Then he sat down at the table, looking at the cup

saucer.

Buck up Paddy, be a man, brace yourself,

Paddy, my boy, he told himself.

My son is dying, he tearfully informed himself.

He lowered his head on the table, thinking that he might close his eyes a minute while the coffee heated. He raised his head. He thought dully, stupefied, of him­ self as a ruined man, and of his son on his death bed. Any minute Bill would die. He had a sense of there being so many things that might have been averted, but that were now too late! His dullness persisting, he reflected, like a man in a stupor, of how so much had passed by. He looked at the clock on the window afraid of what the clock signified, beyond the stove, and listened to its ticking the passage of seconds that all added up, in minutes, and hours, and days. He looked at the clock, acutely aware of the ticking of seconds in a quiet house, feeling that these ticking seconds meant the approach of a catastrophe. He looked at the clock hands which read a quarter to eight, and wished that they would stop, that time would stop for a while. The ticking of these seconds, the slow change of the minute hand from notch to notch, was indissolubly tied up for him with the death of his son. He was tense, and stared evenly at the table and the dishes he had laid out on it. The coffee boiled steadily in the percolator on the stove, and he was heedless of it. He felt completely powerless. He could do nothing for Bill. He could do nothing to check the downward swing of business that had taken his money from him, and was ruining him. He was sobering up also, and he felt lassitudinous. He commenced to have a sick headache, and he realized how tired and worn out he was. And he feared sleep, feared lest, if he go to sleep, ...

he should wake up and find his son dead. He leaned his left elbow on the enameled

table, and laid his forehead against the palm of his left hand.

He ran his

hand

through his

He

snapped his

thinning hair.

The coffee pot right fingers. right began to burn, and a burning odor started to pervade the kitchen. He was unaware of it, and sat in a stupor.

"Goodness, Patrick, what's this? Is the house on fire?" Mrs. Lonigan exclaimed, rushing into the kitchen, making a face as she raised her nose to smell, and her nostrils twitched.

He looked up at her, like

one

aroused from

an

absorbing internal distraction.

"What, Mary? Oh, hello," he said vacantly.

He was merely a voiceless body, and the words came listlessly through his lips.

She rushed to the stove and turned the gas out. He realized that he had let the coffee pot burn, and was aware of the burning smell in the kitchen. He looked

boy, and immediately she thought of her dying son, and saw in his abashed and guilty expression, her son William in short pants, after being caught in some domestic misadventure.

She commenced to cry. Seeing her drop her head, Lonigan appeared to wince.

He moved clumsily to her, and awkwardly put his arms around her shoulder, and drew her against him. at her, a look which seemed to her like that of a guilty small

130

I

TRI-QUARTERL Y

"Father," she said in a moan.

"Now Mary, we got to be brave, you and me, and face whatever the Lord

gives us. I know it's hard, but Mary, now you and me, we've come through a lot together, and we've still got each other," he said, and her body shook as she cried against his shoulder. She seemed not to have heard what he had said, and continued to choke and gasp out in moans.

He patted her back, stroked her hair He had

....

nothing to say, and he looked aside.

He felt like

crying also.

She

finally turned from him and busied herself with washing out the burned coffee pot, and he stood helplessly by her side.

III The white-garbed nurse looked down at the form of Studs Lanigan and smiled.

He was resting easily now, and that was a hopeful sign.

by the bedside, and yawned.

There was

a

She sat back in her chair

body on the bed, and

tremor in the

she dropped into a snooze.

Studs lay on the bed, and his body twitched.

There was a twitch in his wasted

face, a slight motion of a hand under the cover, the movement of his breathing beneath the sheet.

And Studs Lanigan walked along a strange street with

a

gun, and he said to

himself Al Capone

Lanigan.

He pulled the gun out and shot at a man on the

opposite side of the street along, and three policemen Weary Reilley. calmly intruded on him, looking like Bull Mac Namara, the cop around Fifty-Eighth Street, used to look, and he pot-shotted them, and they dropped like felled logs.

Al Capone Lanigan.

He walked along, and he forgot that he was Al Capone Lanigan, and he thought He

who looked like

walked

to himself

I'm Jack

Dempsey Lanigan.

He was no longer walking along a street, but he was entering a ring with two

million people looking on, and he was the heavyweight

champion of the world, and across from him, seated in the ring, there was Jim Jeffries, Jack Johnson, Jess Willard, Jack Dempsey, Gene Tunney, and Jack Sharkey, and he thought it funny that he would be fighting six men. And he thought, could they all be fight­ ing at the same time, when they were not of the same age and some were old timers? He returned to his handler and manager, Lucy Scanlan, and he asked How come?

They're fighting you.

You can beat them because I have

You can beat them.

confidence in you, and I've always loved you.

He walked into the ring and he knocked. .

.

.

The nurse awakened from her snooze, and looked at him.

resting, and again she heard him callout something in

a

He seemed to be

feeble voice.

TRI·QUARTERLY

1131

She felt his pulse, and bent down to listen to his heart, and then sat down again

by his bedside.

Studs Lonigan rode on a railroad train, thinking that Lucy would be in the next town, and he would meet her. He had something to tell her, and he forgot what it was, but he felt that if he saw her, he would remember all over again what he had to tell her. The train was drawing near to the city where he would see Lucy, and it gathered speed, and shot right through, and Studs ran up and down the aisle yelling Hey, stop the train!

The conductor "This is

a

to him and

carne

said,

through train."

Well, stop it. I got to get off.

I got to get off.

I got to get off.

The conductor looked at him.

"Get off

then," the conductor said Studs ran to the end of the train, and He stood

on

the

.

the last step, and there was Lucy

....

platform of the last car, knowing that he was a coward, and

that out of cowardice, he had failed to see Lucy, and he felt that he had forever lost something.

Lonigan walked through a jungle looking for Lucy. About him were lions and tigers, and he was constricted by a fear within him. Out of this fear, he lost suddenly his motive power, and he stood still, and felt himself to be shrink­ ing, shrivelling up within, growing smaller, and if he did not check this growing smaller because of his fear, he would shrink to a pinpoint, or bust with fear.

He saw Red Kelly walking by, unafraid, and he called Oh, Red. Red Kelly walked on, dressed like a hunter with a sunshade, puttees, white shorts, shirt, and long rifle. He saw Red disappear through a snarling group of lions and tigers.

Fly, he told himself. He raised his arms, and like a bird he floated through the air, without arms, over snarling packs of hungry carnivorous animals. He Studs

floated on, and.

.

.

.

He seemed to float and fly, flapping armwings for a long indefinite period, and the pleasure he had derived from it changed to boredom, and then to fear, and

looking down at the blue water, a terrible thirst burning in his body, his tongue dropping parched from his dry mouth, he wondered would he ever touch land, and would he ever again have a drink of water. A fear of unknown and threaten­ ing consequence blotted from his mind other things that stood in the part of and on and on he flew, parched and dry and afraid he knew unless his it stopped, unless he received water, unless his feet touched land, and he knew when and why he was there, he would corne to some unhappy end. Clarity came to him, a clarity that told him that unless such a thing happened, he would die.

Floating still, he knew that he was flying to death, and he knew that he did not want to die, and he a deep and mournful sadness that he did not articulate ...

...

.

1321

.

TRI-QUARTERL Y

.

in words, but that he felt vaguely. He looked at the water beneath him and around

him, water running.

.

.

.

I'm dying, he told himself.

On and on he

flew, and suddenly, he was flying no more. He was standing in sand, and every step he took, his feet sank in sand, so that walking was slow and difficult. He walked on slowly, difficultly, tortured, directionless. He looked up at a sky in which there was a blazing hot sun, and he wondered, was he in Africa? He looked off, and beyond the stretch of sand he was crossing, in a far distance, there were trees, some kind of shrubbery and vegetable growth. He knew that he wanted to get there, and walking was slow. He went along in sand, and he could not remember where he was and where he was going to. All that he knew was

...

he was himself. He said to himself as he travelled

I am Studs Lonigan, the great Ham What Am! He walked on. He had come from some place away from him.

.

.

.

He was

pain.

glad to be

pain for him in the

He could remember how there had been

he stood for place from which he had come, and it lingered from him a moment, his feet sinking in sand.

He could not remember it, or what it was. He did not know where he was going, he knew nothing, and he walked tiredly forward, and again he was thirsty.

He fell down. He crawled on his hands and knees, feeling that it was a com­ pulsion. He crawled feeling that he did not no more know how to walk, and ahead of him he saw a man walking, a man with his back turned, but with a walk and a figure and build that seemed to him familiar. He stopped and looked as the man moved ahead of him, unimpeded, with ease. He was awed that a man should be able to walk on his legs, instead of having to crawl. He was envious .

.

.

.

.

.

...

He moved to catch up with the man to ask him how he could do such an astounding thing walk on his legs. He crawled swiftly, a man

could do that.

...

and overtook the man, and he was Red Kelly, and Studs

recognized him.

Red Kelly, why can you walk on your legs?

Your small fry

brother, Red Kelly said, walked

...

leaving Studs alone and

sad and envious and he crawled slowly with lowered head.

.

.

.

In pain, Studs Lonigan sensed mistiness, and in this mistiness terror and danger.

He sensed a sickness through a surrounding realm of this grayish blue mistiness, as if it were to attack him, to transport its danger from outside him to his body, his

mind, his soul. He knew he was sick, and his soul was sick, and the world was

unhappy, and he was unhappy, and he standing in it alone. If only he could hear a voice.

If only he could see someone. If only he could see Lucy. Hear Lucy. to Speak Lucy. Or if not Lucy, then Catherine. Yes Catherine. Now he remem­ bered. He had loved Lucy, and he had loved Catherine. He had loved and laid Catherine, and she had said to him, Studs jazz me when you want me, anytime, he had led her into sin, and the sin black on her soul was anywhere, anyplace blacker on his own soul, and now he was and sick in a sick world, unhappy in in a world of black an unhappy world, sinful sin, and around him there was mist, .

.

.

.

.

.

TRI-QUARTERLy

1133

mist and no one, no voice, no voice of

...

no

voice from Lucy, from Catherine,

from friends or enemies, or angels.

He sat down. He was too sick and too fatigued And Studs Lonigan understood.

Clarity

....

him, and the voice of his con­

came to

science said to him

Die, goddamn you, die, die like a dog. Die, you Lonigan louse, die like a mangy dog.

He sat there, looking from right to left, forward and behind him, his face distorted with terror and fear, and he knew something was happening to him. He sat there.

He took mist in his hand, and formed it, and he realized, in terror and abjectness, that he was anti-Christ. Anti-Christ Lonigan arose. He was afraid and knew that he was sinning, and he heard from beyond the mist, the powerful voice of God. I am the Lord Thy God, and Thou shalt not have graven images before me!

He knew that he must not defy God, and Anti-Christ Lonigan was forced to defy God. He was compelled to stand up as the rival of God. He held the mist in his hands, and he said cur

·

..

·

..

·

..

·

..

there be a sinful black world of orangemen saw

the mist

spread

before him there was a

.

.

.

.

.

urine at his feet, and blessed himself lefthanded, and then, over the world,

with his left hand, he spread the filthy holy water of his own urine, and said As Anti-Christ, I say, let there be sin. Let there be birds and beasts, and flowers, and trees, and let there be males, and let there be females, and let the males be like

tomcats, and let the females be like she bitch dogs, and let them jazz morning, and noon, and night, and let them jazz until their sin rises to heaven in

a

great and

powerful stink like that of the Chicago stockyards.

And Anti-Christ

the fifth Sunday of February after Pentecost went on into

on

the world of his own sinful creation, and Anti-Christ Lonigan walked amongst

...

cities, and over the plains, and across the mountains and down into the seas, and on the waters that were his own urine, and everywhere, amongst the birds and amongst and cows, and cats, and men and women, the bees, and amongst the fishes, and he went, jazzing, and he said, everywhere he went ...

Let Heaven stink with the jazzing of my own ·

..

·

..

stink rose from the world of

...

...

the duty of leading his people in sin, and he jazzed in the mountains, and in

the valleys, in the hills and in the dales, in the cities and in the villages, towns and

hamlets, and on the plains, and the plateaus, and on the oceans, and he jazzed the fishes and the beasts of the fields. and the birds of the air, and he jazzed Lucy

Scanlan, and he jazzed his sisters and his mother and his cousin, and he jazzed Catherine, and he jazzed Helen Shires, and Helen Borax, and he jazzed the sister of Weary Reilley, and the sister of Lucy Scanlan, and the sister of Helen Shires, and he jazzed until

.

.

.

God could no longer stand the stockyard stench

.

.

.

in his

nostrils, and he turned his face away, and Amen, amen, verily I say unto you, I cannot stand the sinful smell of Studs Anti...

1341

TRI-QUARTERLY

Christ Lonigan, and he

...

and the world of his creation must die, and that

...

be

death unto this world, for verily, verily, he is black with sin.

And Anti-Christ Lonigan flung himself on his knees heavens where God

.

.

...

and looked up to high

.

Father, I say unto you, forgive me for I have jazzed. Father forgive me, and if you must, kill me, but let me die in the state of grace, and with the last Sacraments of the one holy true and apostolic church that takes up a collection every Sunday

under the auspices of Father Gilhooley, who is known as the one and only Gilly Himself.

And God looked down upon Studs Anti-Christ Lanigan who knelt humbly in his own

defecation, and God said unto him,

Verily, verily, go take a flying jazz at the moon and die!

And Studs Anti-Christ Lanigan knelt in his own defecation, and he lowered his

head, and said unto himself

Verily, verily, verily, I must take a flying jazz at the moon and die.

And he raised himself, and said aloud I go forth as I am told to jazz the moon.

He walked over the hills and over the dales moon

.

.

.

.

.

.

climbed up ladders of air to the

and he jazzed the moon, and then he stood again alone in a mist, and

he knew that he must die. And he felt that if only he could have a drink of water, he would die. His throat dried.

Save me!

Parched, he tore at his hair, and cried out

Save me!

IV

The doctor looked at Studs. Studs lay there, wasted and breathing rapidly. He felt the pulse and found it feeble, 110 a minute. He talked in delirium, unascertain­

able

.

.

.

ugly sounds, out of which there were audible the words

Save me! Save me!

The doctor found that Studs had a high fever and an indication of pus in the

lungs

...

V

Studs Lanigan again seemed resting quietly.

He

saw

himself

clearly as a boy

around Fifty-Eighth Street, the morning sunny, walking down Indiana Avenue.

He felt that he should be happy, and he was unhappy. Sadly, his face moody, he walked slowly along,

looking at the buildings, looking in at the building where

Lucy Scanlan should live, but where he was sure she did not live, and seeing through

dusty windows the interior of a fumitureless parlor.

He walked on. The buildings, all of them, he realized, were untenanted, and this was funny none of the old people were there An awful loneliness was in him like some great thwarting obstacle. .

.

.

.

.

.

Well, you got your wish, a voice told him.

TRI-QUARTERLY

1135

What wish? he asked, seeing no one.

You wanted to be back here.

Riding home from the wake of Shrimp Haggerty, you asked for your wish, and here it is, here is your wish. You're back on Fifty­ Eighth Street, back on Indiana A venue, back in the old neighborhood. You got what you want, I hope you're satisfied, the voice said.

Where is the old gang, said Studs.

All

right, the voice said.

Studs turned, and saw walking toward him a procession of people, walking one by one. As they approached, a stout woman with four double chins smiled, walked up to him, kissed him, and he felt.

.

.

.

Studs, you darling boy, said the woman.

Who are you? asked Studs.

I'm Lucy Scanlan, the woman said.

Studs looked at her.

She walked on, and Studs saw in back of her a crummy

little runt, who looked like a bum on West Madison Street.

Got a butt, Studs asked the crummy .

.

.

...

Phil Rolfe, dressed in a jockey suit.

Studs, the riding is fine. I'm riding your kid sister, and Studs no man else ever But now I want some new riding, said Phil Rolfe, laughing lewdly.

Studs stood at the edge of the sidewalk, speechless.

Joe Thomas passed, small, and looking like hell, and be said Studs, don't ever get without a job.

Studs, bow you like my new suit, said Johnny O'Brien.

Studs, go wash your dirty mouth, said Helen Borax, a fat woman with a lorgnette.

Look at Studs, he hasn't changed, said Dan O'Neill, dressed in a gray suit.

Studs, go hop in, and stay hopped, said Weary Reilley in convict's stripes.

Studs, don't have crippled kids. When you have crippled kids, even jazzing rode her, and she was good riding in her day.

doesn't pay, said

...

Simonsky.

Come on back in the alley and bend your the man

...

.

.

.

over a

barrel, little boy, said Leon,

with a breast hanging through his shirt.

Studs turned. He did not want to see

....

Studs knew that he was in some unhappy and dangerous state, and something

happening to him, and he did not know what it was, and if his wish came true, He walked through an alley, down to Michigan, back along Fifty-Eighth Street to Prairie, and there he saw Barney Keefe, his peeker banging was

it would not happen.

out, with his false teeth tied to them.

Go home, you lousy Lonigan little brat, Barney said.

Studs looked at Barney, and walked on, saying nothing. He turned in the alley in back of the elevated, and there saw Father Gilhooley on an ash wagon, emptying ash cans, and he asked

Father, what's all the ashes?

Remember oh man that thou art dirty dust and to dirtier dust thou shalt return.

Come on in, and give me your dirty ashes, the priest, dressed like an ash man, said,

1361

TRI-QUARTERLY

and Studs knew that he was dying, and that his wish was to live, and he wanted life.

He ran from the priest, feeling that in

running from the priest dressed like an ashes,

ash man, he was running from death, and he ran, but when he stopped and he knew that he could not run .

.

.

...

....

and dirty, and the world was full of them, and they pelted Studs Lonigan.

Wherever he went, they pelted him, and he had no escape, and he stood, stormed under by them, choking, crying out

Help!

Mrs. Lonigan rushed sobbing into the room, and saw her son on the bed, and heard his feeble delirious cry of

Help!

Oh God! she loudly cried.

"Mrs. Lanigan, please be patient," the nurse said, moving toward her.

"Oh, God! Jesus, Mary and Joseph! Jesus, Mary and Joseph! He's dying, he's dying," she loudly cried.

"Mrs. Lanigan, please, please. Now you go and stop fretting yourself. He is not dying

...

Disregarding the nurse, Mrs. Lanigan flung herself on her knees beside the bed, and looked through her teary eyes at her son, seeing him as in a fog

.

.

.

Lonigan, having heard the cries from the kitchen, where he had been slumped the table with his head down, asleep, appeared in the doorway, and winced, seeing Mary flung on the bed looking at Studs, and sighing from the sight of her boy.

He moved slowly toward her. The will was out of him.

"Mary," he said.

"My son," she murmured, ignoring her husband's gentle word.

He patted her. He looked at his son, a sight which, he told himself, was scarcely over

bearable.

"Now Mary, come, you must get some sleep."

"My son," she said.

She arose, went to the dresser, and lit a holy candle. She walked from the room, and he followed her,

a

helpless man, looking on at a woman's, a mother's over­

stimulated sorrow. She went to the dresser drawer, fished out

...

She blessed herself with it, and knelt down to pray before the holy candle.

VI Before him stood a thin woman, and for a moment, he knew not who she was.

She was familiar, and old enough to be dried up.

bones. He looked at her.

Her skin was tight against her

He realized that it was his mother.

He did not want

her there before him like that, a figure standing alone, with nothing else in sight, and she not plain, but shifting, her features and form becoming clear, and then

unclear, as if he was drunk and seeing her drunk, or as if she was drunk, and not steady on her feet before him.

She was nervous and excited.

"Honor thy God and thy mother!" she said, pointing an accusing finger at him.

TRI-QUARTERLY

1137

"Your mother is your best friend," she then said, and he felt that her talon-like finger would be dug into his eye.

long,

Yes, he said, meekly, wishing she would go away, not wanting her there.

Christ, he exclaimed to himself.

"You'll only have one mother," she said.

Jesus

"When your mother dies, you'll never have another."

Thank God! "No one loves you like your mother."

"God punishes a son who dishonors his mother."

Does God punish "If a son gives

a

a

son

who jazzes his mother?

Studs asked.

mother one gray hair, he will merit the punishment of God,"

said his mother. His father pointed an accusing finger at him and said solemnly: "Honor

thy father and thy mother."

Screw you, said Studs.

"Nothing is as sacred as the home," the father and mother said.

And as goddamn unadulterated dull, said Studs.

"You'll never have a second home, and when you have your own home, and your own children, you will know the truth of what we say. You'll remember then, and say Mother and Dad were right, if I only had listened to them when I had the chance."

If I listened to them, where in the name of Christ would I be now?

Shut up.

Shut up, for Christ sake, shut up, you make my head dizzy and my ears go around,

said Studs.

"The home is next to heaven, your father is next to God, and your mother is next to the Blessed Virgin Mary."

Whoops! said Studs, feeling a strangeness, feeling brave at saying things he had never had the heart to say and he only wished that people, some of the fellows were there, to hear him say these things.

S

ing 'em, sing 'em, sing them blues, said Studs. things she did for you. o means only that she's growing older

M is the million

T is for the tears she shed to

save

you.

H is for her heart of purest gold E IS for her eyes with lovelight shining R is

right and right she'll always be.

P ut them all together, they spell Mother

A word that

138\

means

TRI-QUARTERLY

the world to

me.

JAMES T. FARRELL

A note on future plans

I have been asked to write something about my literary plans for the future.

This is

a

most

welcome request. It is precisely the question that I have long wished to be asked, and under circumstances in which I could control my cannot

expression

and

answer

I

as

wanted

to.

This

are.

But

he done in an interview.

A journalist

myself, I wonder how many of the newer crop got the way they

this is another subject. It touches on this essay only in the sense that in a couple of interviews,

plans was cheaply distorted and tended to be bewildering.

my discussion of my future

My

interest is in the present, and in the future.

many it presents

an

opportunity.

My past is the

It is far easier for them to stand

concern

of others.

For

Studs Lanigan than

by

place it-as it belongs-in the massive series of my works of fiction. It is easier for them to set it apart and treat it in categorical isolation. to relate it to my work as a whole, or to

The focus of public interest in me centers on Studs Lanigan. am

not interested much

in Studs Lanigan.

But in my mind and thoughts,

problem for me in my current was writing much else, planning writings. future works, preparing myself for the writing of them, accelerating my flexible life plan of events. As soon as Studs Lanigan was finished, I went on to new novels. I was not only interested in creative writing but also in criticism and many other matters. I kept on pursuing these interests and continuing my work while others were making a Frankenstein of Studs Lanigan behind me. In time they succeeded in fixing upon me a new and total I

It is finished work.

characterization-"the

author

Even while I

of

The issue was not the merits

Studs

was

It poses

no

writing it, I

Lanigan."

the lack of merits of Studs Lanigan.

It was my future, planned in a flexible manner. My fiction is based on full life of experience. Years ago, and many times since, I have said this-it is not often printed for reasons that others need to explain.

There has been too much inaccuracy about my work-this inaccuracy has been long­ standing-it has been going on for over thirty years.

Facts are not rabbits pulled out of a magician's hat. Nor are they hard stones that bruise the feet of those who walk the carefully, ever-nurtured ground of cliches, believing that they are traversing the earth.

Constant errors of fact for over thirty years cannot be excused. My first book, Studs Lanigan, is not a story of the slums. My 37th book, What Time Collects, is not the story of a Roman Catholic family in Chicago. However, I propose to do more than protest or rail at our higher sensibilities.

The critical reputations of Edward Dahlberg, J. Donald Adams, Henry Moore, Irving Howe, Leslie Fiedler, Orville Prescott, Hoke Norris, Clifton P. Fadiman, and many others depend partially upon their hate of my books. But I am preparing lists of names, classifica­ tions, and other data about my characters. I do this by hand, devoting one to two and a half hours daily. I am classifying under about 40 categories. This glossary, catalogue, gazette, shows and will go on to show more forcibly how my writing is unified, and how or

my life work which has been

I used the facts.

I propose to make my defense of my work almost

as

massive as my work

itself. When I complete it, let a critic dare to make a mistake.

The public is more the victim than I am of the failure to represent my work and my purposes more correctly than has been done. It is they who have been deceived. J have continued my work and

developed my plan. I have not allowed any trouble, opposition difficulty to stop me.

I am doing something that no one else is doing. I am writing my own Comedic Humaine of our days and years and more than that. I have grown with the past and committed part of it to the body of my work.

or

TRI-QUARTERLY

1139

In 38 years of writing, I have published 30 books of fiction-18 novels and 12 collections

of short stories. There is so much more to publish, that with

immodesty or vanity, I can publishing industry. having my own capital I the I to fact consider fortunate for have (a publishers) depend upon them.

Publishers determine dates of publication, and other business details concerning my books.

If I fail to make a living from my books-my life work-it is the failure of publishers. If I fail to complete my life work, it will be due to publishers. My books do not fail with the public. I have a world audience.

During the 1950's I had a series of business struggles. The press would not accept these as they were.

Instead, stories were invented. I was said to be in a decline. The fact is, I could not always publish, because I did not have enough sources of publication. Some pub­ lishers even refused to read my manuscripts. In Chicago, for example, there has been dis­ cussion of the question: Is there any reason for having faith in Farrell's ability to write anything of value? But then, Chicago is a city where my work has fared poorly. In Beirut, Belgrade or Delhi, it is discussed more intelligently. There are few exceptions in Chicago.

When I had written a long and carefully thought out analysis of the role of Chicago in Amer­ ican culture, I couldn't find publication for it in Chicago. I could in Delhi, India.

The intelligentsia of Chicago, not the people, are the ones I have in mind when I write as I do in reference to Chicago. no

state that I have outwritten the American

Not

Immediate reactions to a book of mine do not not

dismay

I have proven my

me.

of mine written in have sold better,

1928, 1929,

ability

1930

are

too much to

mean

to write books that

read

today

can

with interest.

me.

A bad press does

sustain attack.

Stories

Often books of mine

twenty years after publication, than they had sold immediately after released the being by publishers. I have had sudden manifestation of interest in my work, even

publication, in spite of full and extreme criticism and denunciation.

My most productive years have been since 1950, and these continue. this I have During period, published well over 250 pieces alone, mostly in Asia, and primarily

years after

My fiction grows.

in India. After 31 years, I have also resumed writing poetry, and my first volume will appear

along with my 38th book early in 1965.

My main plan is to complete my life work with a series of novels that, as of now, promises to run to the number of twenty-seven. Two of these have been published, The Silence of History and What Time Collects. Volume III, Lonely For The Future, is almost written, but not typed. Much progress has been made on Volume IV which, as yet, has not been definitely titled. Two titles I have in mind as possibilities are When Time Was Cliche or The Distance of Sadness.

In addition to the series that I mention above, I have thousands of pages of manuscripts -about 32,000 pages of fiction. The publishers who claim to be on a constant lookout for books have not bothered to read most of it.

magazines.

But

This work refutes every criticism that has

publishers speak of not having enough material. So do writing. do not want my writing unless I can be told what to write. And this they

been made of my

Yet

is the type of advice which I do not need.

My plan, then, is to apply every effort to complete

a

life work that will

run

to over

62

Thirty books of my fiction have already been published. As I have said, I want to make of this my Comedie Humaine of all of our days and years. I will

volumes of fiction.

leave

a

mountain of

manuscript

to

fall with

crushing weight

even

if it is not

published

in my lifetime.

I have done some work on about twenty-two of the twenty-seven novels. I have worked on this series every day for the past six years-but most people would rather ask me ques­ tions about Studs Lonigan time to for these years.

or

any other

Even to this

thing than about the work I have devoted all my

day, with two books published and two more almost

completed, I am not believed. It is thought that I am either kidding or crazy. in the past I have completed what I said I would is forgotten.

140

I

TRI-QUARTERL Y

The fact that

DAVID PEARSON ETTER

Yoknapatawpha "The first eye had seen the flood; The second eye had watched Christ die:' PATCHEN, The Dark Kingdom

-KENNETH

After the worst of the

flood,

with cats and dark flowers,

swelling a golden rain barrel was found, come down from the goodbye river.

(Boys sobbing in barns,

were

bewildered among oily

and

a

shotguns and mules,

trunk of broken

toys.)

And when the boards were pried loose

by nervous fingers caked with mud, the mutilated skull of Christ rolled out into the rot gut

sun.

PHILIP WHALEN

The

season

aches

and

pains

begin

a

season

new

of

collapse

& frustration & pomegranates

red

woody blood sugar crown!

at the hem of my gown at the

top of the LAW SCROLL

curtain bells

network of sweet

sticky red

incorruptible!!

RONALD

TAVEL

Mario Lanza

was a

relative of mine

When you think if I think of my inane love of when I think of my innate love of

sentimentality and aristocracy I think

sitting

more

and

more

of Alexis

Chitty Dictionary

down to definitions for Grove's

of Music and Musicians I also think of the precisely unnumberable

who

paid in all too-numberable

5 million dollars to sit to listen to a

singer of Mozart and Handel not sing

Mozart and Handel and the

percisely

unnumberable of them that had to stand I think how

precisely

Chitty sat to think

of his definition

and for the

Dictionary's fifth edition

wrote of Irish tenor John McCormack

for class concert-conscious 1924

"by this time he could no longer be taken altogether seriously as a musician since in his later years he devoted his extraordinary and unimpaired

gifts too largely to sentimental and popular ditties not to be listen to with patience by critics or with enjoyment by true music-lovers" you must think

if I think of my inane love of Alexis and John McCormack's sentimental

Chitty ditty

when I think of my love of

aristocracy I think of how McCormack stood to sing and think of aristocracy's debt to the precisely unnumberable that it think it think it understand

every word he think he's

which

means

singing

the unnumberable must

never

stoop

to

its level of McCormack ditty

but rise to the definition of

Chitty

that if you think if you think how when I think that

Mario Lanza was

relative of mine

a

you think I think I wouldn't put

a

dime

in a music box for him or Pinza or Peerce I think you think I think you think

how I think about aristocracy and the patrician in the unnumberable

JEROME

plebian's definition.

ROTHENBERG

The spare In the trunk of my

'fifty seven Plymouth Is a tire that is no longer used, Smooth-edged and smudged with grime: A spare.

And

To

It has gone round

round, and now is back

ending, an ending that is like The beginning, because it waits an

For the end of

a

circle.

A spare is wanted at the end of Because its Tum

core

a

circle

is empty, it cannot

anything within.

Lashed to

a

It hangs

false axle, while the

countryside,

it is,

Imagined exactly Makes the repeated pledge to be believable.

A 'fifty seven Plymouth is a narrow Platform for dreaming the eccentric, Its driver must be appropriately awake as

Behind

a

wheel that turns

Through a different plane. Yet it is not Impossible to slip. A simple T-wrench

can

If the present,

redeem the past.

endlessly apt, goes fiat.

JOHN STEWART CARTER

Antiphon (for Mr. De Paolis and soprano) Si mes vers avaient des ailes Comme l'oiseau.

All the birds at morning lay dead upon the beach and they strewed the reach of rain-ridged sands with beaten death.

Cloud-crushed they lay

plumeted from sky to wave that bore the drowned, the migrant dead to graveled sands of shore.

Si mes vers avaient des ailes Comme l'esprit.

Oh the bodies of those birds hollowed at the height of blind soar by night

which starless held enclose of close.

Shard-pierced the shriveled lungs, webbed muscles rent, the wings

storm-frayed in final flex of desperate aspiration splayedSi mes vers avaient des ailes­

Wind-husked they stir, wreathed in wraiths of drying spume as

breath of dune-dawn creeps through craw

to

quicken quill-bright death.

Si mes vers avaient des ailes Comme l'amour.

Cry caw crow. Raucous carnage screech across

the charnel beach

where dreamless move the bleaching dead.

Raven, ravin brave bird heart from brittled cage of bone which else had fed a resinous rot of twig and spore-spent cone.

Buddhism in the western world WALPOLA RAHULA

As

A HUMBLE BHIKKHU from

Ceylon, I am conscious now of the deep sense

of gratitude at the honour you have done me in inviting me to be the first Buddhist monk to hold a chair in a western university.

To me it is most gratifying and heartening to see that American Christians are so

open-minded and gracious as to invite a Buddhist monk from Ceylon, which

is considered to be the home of pure Buddhism, to teach that religion in one of their universities under the

Bishop.

auspices of a Fund honouring a beloved Methodist

Your liberal and enlightened gesture, unparalleled elsewhere in the world,

will be appreciated and remembered

by all Buddhists who value freedom and

enlightenment very highly.

In fact, it seems to me that through the creation of this Chair honouring a great

Bishop Brashares who stands for peace, tolerance, understanding, univer­ sal love, equality of opportunity for all men, you pay appropriate tribute to ideals common to both Buddhism and Christianity. It is encouraging to feel the promise of greater good, understanding and harmony from such fruitful contacts as this provided by the Charles Wesley Brashares Chair. It is most fitting that this spirit should be immortalized in a great university where it will animate the young men and women who study here and, will emanate from these young leaders to bless the peoples of the earth. The Methodists who have made this venture possible are spiritual pioneers as daring as those who created here a citadel of political free­ dom. May this noble example inspire others.

I accepted your kind invitation with the idea of working together with you and doing what little I can to promote understanding, good-will and co-operation between our two great religions for the happiness and peace of mankind. I am most grateful to Prof. Edmund Perry for his vision and initiative and for his personal kindness to myself. The true Spirit of Christ within himself, the stability and clarity of his own Christian faith, make our efforts toward deeper under­ standing and increased co-operation authentic and solid, and hence our work together promises far more than either of us dares to predict. The neutral territory of this university, dedicated to the discovery and unhindered propagation of "whatman like

TRI-QUARTERL Y

/145

things are true," is the proper setting for our work in finding the Path to mutual understanding and the Spirit of unity that will not break under the strains of any seemingly differing political and religious ideologies.

The Buddhist connection between your country and mine is no new thing: soever

it goes back to the late 19th century.

One of your great countrymen, Col. H. S.

Olcott, who fought on the Federal side in your Civil War, went to Ceylon in 1880 and thereafter dedicated his life to the revival of Buddhism, Buddhist culture and

education which at that time were sadly degenerate as a result of long alien domi­

Theosophical Society in Colombo which opened up many hundreds of Buddhist schools throughout Ceylon. Ananda Col­ lege, which he founded in Colombo, is still today the leading Buddhist school in the Island. The six-coloured Buddhist flag, now internationally accepted in all Buddhist countries, was designed by Olcott with the approval of the leading Bud­ dhist monks in Ceylon. And that flag is raised here in a Christian church, perhaps for the first time in history, and that too, most appropriately in Olcott's native land.

His Buddhist Catechism, primarily intended for children in Buddhist schools in Ceylon, has been translated into several languages. The name of your great countryman, Col. H. S. Olcott, is commemorated yearly throughout Ceylon with affection, gratitude and veneration.

The Anagarika Dharmapala of Ceylon, one of Olcott's close collaborators, attended the World's Parliament of Religions which was held in the City of Chicago in 1893. At the end of its sessions, C. T. Strauss of New York, probably the first person to embrace Buddhism publicly on American soil, ceremonially received the Three Refuges and the Five Precepts from Dharmapala under the auspices of the Theosophical Society of Chicago. This could perhaps be considered nation.

He established the Buddhist

the introduction of Buddhism to the United States.

I

But Buddhism in the Western World goes back to a period before the Christian Era. You can follow my outline very easily. It has three points and a benediction!

First, I shall speak about those contacts and inter-cultural influences which gave Buddhism a hearing in the world into which Christianity was born and developed.

Secondly, I shall single out the most outstanding scholars who in the 19th and 20th centuries presented Buddhism to the Western world through scholarly edi­ tions and translations of Buddhist Scriptures and other forms of research. Finally, and perhaps most interesting, I want to correct some misrepresentations of Bud­ dhism which persist in the minds of Westerners, and I want to present a brief

positive account of what Buddhism has to offer to our modem world.

As you all know, the Buddha lived in India in the 6th century B.C.

The first

historical and important confrontation between the classical East and the classical West took place in the 4th century B.C. when Alexander the Great invaded India.

He was no ordinary soldier.

Being a pupil of Aristotle, he deeply appreciated cul­ tural values, and on his expedition was a large number of scholars and artists for cultural exhanges. It is reasonable to suppose that the knowledge of Indian culture

1461

TRI-QUARTERL Y

these Greek intellectuals and artists took back

country included some acquaintance with Buddhism. As a result of this meeting of East and West, diplo­ matic relations were established, and continued, between several Greek rulers and India's Court of Pataliputra (modem Patna), the capital of the Maruya Empire.

In the 3rd century B.C., the great Buddhist Emperor Asoka of India, some­ times described as the Buddhist Constantine, in three of his Edicts (Rock Edicts II, V and XIII), engraved on rocks and still extant, declared that he had established to

their

ministry of religious affairs called Dharma-mahamatra to spread the Dharma and religious life among the people, and that he had sent suc­ cessful Missions of Piety to some Greek territories in addition to various parts of his own empire. He mentions by name five Greek kings to whom these missions were sent.

They are now identified as Antiochus II of Syria (261-246 B.C.), II of Egypt (285-247 B.C.), Antigonas Gonatas of Macedonia (276Ptolemy 246 B.C.), Magas of Cyrene (300-258 B.C.) and Alexander of Epirus (272-258 B.C.). There can be no reasonable doubt that Asoka's "envoys" or "missionaries," (Dutas) spread a knowledge of Buddhism in these Greek territories, where the Jewish backgrounds of Christianity were already forming.

A few years ago an Edict of Asoka in both Greek and Aramaic languages was discovered in Afghanistan. (It is interesting to note here that Aramaic was the language of Christ). Very recently another Edict in Greek only, not as yet pub­ lished, was discovered in the same country. The contents of these Edicts are more or less the same as those of Asoka's "Edicts of Dharma" (Dharmalipi) a

to promote moral and

discovered in India. It is now believed that almost all Asoka's Indian Edicts were

published simultaneously in Greek too for the benefit of Greek speaking peoples.

"The Questions of Milinda,"

(The Milinda-panha), the well-known Buddhist (A.C.), reports a

text in Pali language written about the 1st century after Christ

discussion on some important Buddhist doctrinal problems beween a king named Milinda and the Buddhist scholar-saint Nagasena. as

This king has been identified

the Greek king Menandros, who ruled over the northwestern part of India in

the 1st century B.C. "The Great Chronicle" of Ceylon, (The Mahavamsa), written in the 5th century

A.C., but based on earlier material, says that in the 1st century B.C. a delegation of Buddhist monks from the Greek city of Alexandria (Y ona-nagara-A lasanda) led by the Greek Elder Dhammarakkhita the Great, attended the inauguration ceremony of the Great Stupa, (now called Ruvanvali-saya), at Anuradhapura in Ceylon. Whether this refers to Alexandria in Egypt or some other Alexandria, ,

it was a Greek city where an important Buddhist community existed.

Clement of Alexandria, one of the "early Church fathers," in the closing decade of the 2nd century A.C., says that among the "barbarians" whose philosophy came to Greece were

"those who obey the precepts of Buddha."

Numerous scattered references like these indicate the existence of Buddhism in the West in those early days. There should be no doubt as to the Buddhist influ­ ence

on

the Greek world and

on

early Christianity.

The Christian monastery It is well-known

itself seems to have been influenced by the Buddhist monachism.

TRI-QUARTERLY

1147

that Buddhists were the first in history to establish and organize cenobitic monas­ teries.

Yet, curiously, no documents pertaining to Buddhism in the West in those early days are to be found today. One wonders whether they were destroyed by nature or perished at the hand of narrow-minded fanaticism.

The influence of Buddhism and Indian thought on Western culture during especially those formative Chris­ tian centuries would provide serious students with numerous subjects of research.

II

After a silence of many centuries, the West began to hear of Buddhism again about the beginning of the 16th century. Christian missionaries who went from

Europe to the East returned reports, as might be expected, which were biassed and misleading, full of prejudgements and misunderstandings. But we must not forget the valuable contributions made by some Christian missionaries in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

The serious study of Buddhism begins in the West in the early 19th century. If what follows should seem to be no more than a bead-roll of the names of those to whom the Western world today owes its knowledge of the Buddha and his teach­

ing, I make no apology for drawing your attention to those who founded the study of Buddhism in faculties and universities all over the world.

I feel conscious that

here in this great University of yours my work may be the modest beginning of an Institute of Buddhist Studies destined for future eminence.

At the outset of our summary of the 19th century advance in Western studies

of Buddhism we must mention, of course, the German philosopher Schopenhauer

(1788-1860) who awakened an interest among Western philosophers and intel­ lectuals through his references to Buddhism which he greatly admired.

But the credit for

beginning the systematic and scientific study of Buddhism goes to the French Orientalist Eugene Burnouf (1801-1852) with the publication in 1826 of his pioneer work Essai sur Ie Pali, in collaboration with the German scholar Lassen. Among his other works should be mentional L'lntroduction a l'Histoire du Bouddhisme indien (1844) and his translation of the well-known Mahayana Buddhist Sanskrit sutra called Saddharma-pundarika (1852). Among Burnouf's eminent pupils was the German Indologist Max MUller. One may con­ sider Burnouf as the father of Buddhist studies in the West.

The work initiated by Burnouf was continued in Paris by researches and publi­

original texts and translations. The greatest worker in this field was Sylvan Levi (1863-1935), who discovered and published rare Mahayana Bud­ dhist Sanskrit texts with his translations. His work, too vast and versatile to be discussed here, opened up new fields of research in Buddhist philosophy and his­ tory. The great French tradition established by Burnouf and Levi is most suc­ cessfully continued today by a brilliant pupilary succession: Paul Demieville, Louis Renou, Jean Filliozat, Paul Mus, Olivier Lacombe, Armand Minard, Andre Bareau, etc., though some of them are not exclusively Buddhologists.

Among Sylvain Levi's pupils was a Belgian, the famous Louis de La Vallee cations of

1481

TRI-QUARTERL Y

Poussin.

Of his numerous works, his

epoch-making translation (1923-1931) of

Vasubandhu's Abhidharma-kosa should be singled out as it is almost an encyclo­

paedia, not only of Sarvastivada, but of Buddhist philosophy in general. La Vallee Poussin's tradition in Belgium, generally considered as a part of the French School, is excellently continued today by his worthy pupil and successor Etienne Lamotte, whose voluminous contributions are universally esteemed and appreciated.

This interest in Buddhist studies, begun in Paris, gradually spread all over Europe.

In Denmark, Victor Fausboll brought out in 1855 an edition of the Dhammapada, the best known Buddhist text, accompanied by a translation and notes in Latin.

This was the first Pali text to be published in full in Europe in Roman characters.

Another remarkable Danish Pali scholar Critical Pali Dictionary,

a

was

V.

Trenckner, who initiated The

tremendous undertaking, still in the course of produc­

tion. Its headquarters are in Copenhagen. Helmer Smith, the renowned Swedish Pali scholar,

was

also connected with this

dictionary.

In Holland, H. Kern edited and translated several Buddhist Sanskrit texts, and

his Manual of Indian Buddhism, published in 1896, is still profitably consulted by students of Buddhism.

The Dutch tradition is continued today by J. W. de Jong

and others.

In Germany, apart from Max MUller's great contributions, Hermann Oldenberg,

working both in Germany and England, edited the whole V inayapitaka in 5 vol­ (1879-1883) in addition to the edition and. translation of the Dipavamsa (1879). Neumann translated several Pali Canonical works into German. Geiger's

umes

edition and translation of the Mahavamsa is well-known. So is the work of H. von

Glassenapp. The German tradition is continued today by Waldschmidt and several others. We should not forget Paul Dahlke who did much to spread Buddhism in Germany. His house is today the Buddhist Temple in Berlin. Winternitz's work in Czechoslovakia may be included in the German School.

In Italy, G.

Tucci, for several decades, has been making a considerable con­ tribution by publishing Sanskrit and Tibetan texts and their translations, besides his own researches.

In Russia, Vasilieff,

Minayeff, Oldenburg and Stcherbatsky did a great deal to

promote the scientific study of Buddhism. The Bibliotheca Buddhica Series, founded

by Oldenburg in 1897, has published more than 30 volumes up to now. Stcher­ batsky's invaluable Buddhist Logic was published in the same series. In 1960 a Russian translation of the Dhammapada was published.

In the United States, the Harvard Oriental Series, designed to bring about "mutual understanding and good-will between East and West," has been publish­ ing a large number of volumes since the late 19th century. In this series, Warren's Buddhism in Translation (1896), Burlingame's Buddhist Legends (1921) and Chalmer's Buddha's

Teachings should be mentioned as works which have com­

mendably popularising Buddhism in the West. An edition of the Visuddhi-magga, well-known Pali Commentary of Buddhaghosa, was pub­ lished in this series in 1950. Apart from this, a valuable contribution to Sanskrit Buddhist studies was made by the late Prof. Edgerton of Yale University through contributed towards

TRI-QUARTERLY

1149

his Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit Dictionary, Reader and Grammar, published in 1953.

But it is England that has rendered the greatest service to Buddhism in the West.

A century ago this year, in and

reaching

a

lasting

1864, two events took place that were to have a far­

influence

on

Pali Buddhist studies in the West.

In that

year, Robert Childers left Ceylon and his friend T. W. Rhys Davids went there; both were civil servants in Ceylon; both studied Pali there; both were impressed

by the beauty and sublimity of the Buddha's teachings enshrined in the Pali Canon.

On his return to England, Childers edited and published his famous Dictionary of the Pali Language (1872-1875), which is still well worth consulting.

After 8 years in Ceylon, Rhys Davids returned to England in 1872, and began to work with other Orientalists in

Europe.

The greatest of the many and varied

by Rhys Davids (1843-1922) was the foundation of the Pali Text Society in 1881. The purpose of this Society was contributions to Pali Buddhist studies made

"to render accessible to students the rich stores of the earliest Buddhist literature."

wife, a woman of remarkable intel­ was second only to that ligence of her husband, Rhys Davids directed the activities of this Society harnessing and coordinating talents scattered in many countries both in the East and the West.

It is not possible in a few words to do justice to the enormous work done by this Society during the last 83 years. This great work is most successfully continued today by its energetic and devoted present President, Miss I. B. Horner. Thanks With the assistance and collaboration of his

and of unbounded energy, whose contribution

to the Pali Text Society, we have now in Roman characters all the Pali texts of the

Buddhist

Scripture, the Tipitaka, though some of the Abhidhamma texts need editing more fully. In addition, the Pali Text Society has also edited, in some

60

volumes, the Pali Commentaries of the Tipitaka, besides a number of other

postcanonical works. There are the English translations, in some 58 volumes, of practically the whole Tipitaka. To these should be added the Pall-English Dictionary, English-Pall Dictionary, The Dictionary of Pali Proper Names and the Pali Tipitaka Concordance.

It is interesting to observe here that while countries on the European continent like France and Belgium specialized in the Mahayana, England specialized in the Theravada.

One has only to look into the

lished in Paris under the able

Bibiliographie Bouddhique in 31 Tomes, pub­ editorship of Mademoiselle Marcelle Lalou, to

realize the tremendous amount of work produced in the field of Buddhist studies in the West during the 19th and 20th centuries.

The interest of most of these scholars in Buddhism was academic.

To them it

was a new field of research like ancient history or archaeology, and not as a living

religion or a way of life. To Rhys Davids, however, it was not simply academic, it was a living force as well. He said: "Buddhist or not Buddhist, I have examined every one of the great religious systems of the world, and in none of them have I found anything to surpass, in beauty and comprehensiveness, the Noble Eightfold Path of the Buddha. I am content to shape my life according to that Path."

And this Path could scarcely be so widely known in the West as it is today but 150

I

TRI·QUARTERLY

It vl'Iy few I have had time is a new turn, and there are thousands Buddhism Today, taking

for the selfless labours of the scholars of whom only to mention here.

in the West who try to follow the teaching of the Buddha as a way of life. Some

finding that Buddhist philosophy combines with Christian faith better than the classical philosophy of Plato and Aristotle, and the modern existential phi­ losophy. The popular interest in Buddhism is growing more and more. Hundreds of books on Buddhism for the general reader, written by both the competent and the incompetent, have appeared; Buddhist societies, centers and groups, even Buddhist Viharas or Temples, have been founded in several countries in Europe and in the United States. These popular Buddhist activities in the West have con­ siderably increased since 1956 when the Buddha-jayanti, the 2500th anniversary are

of Buddhism, was celebrated on an international scale.

This period beginning from the early 19th century may be regarded as one of the most important periods, if not the most important, in Buddhist history since

Asoka's time.

Never before in the

been

disseminated

history of Buddhism has Buddhist literature widely throughout the world. This may be considered as a new Dharma-cakra-pravartana, "Setting in motion the Wheel of Truth," in two Continents: old Europe and the new world of America. so

III

study of Buddhism, there still prevail in the West some fundamental misconceptions introduced by certain early writers either through lack of understanding or prejudice.

For instance, there is the misconception that Buddhism is a pessimistic religion.

First of all, Buddhism is neither pessimistic nor optimistic. If anything at all, it is realistic, for it takes a realistic view of life and of the world. It does not falsely lull us into living in a fool's paradise, nor does it frighten and agonize us with all kinds of imaginary fears and guilt-feelings. It tells us exactly and objectively what we are and what the world around us is, and shows us the way to perfect freedom, peace, tranquillity and happiness.

The Buddha taught four fundamental truths pertaining to our life, our existence, But even after nearly one and

a

half century's

which are known as Four Noble Truths. The First is that our life, our existence, is

impermanent and is attended with conflicts, sufferings, dissatisfactions both physical and psychological. The Second Noble Truth teaches that the cause of all these sufferings, conflicts and dissatisfactions, is our own selfish desire due to our false idea of self. The Third one declares that by getting rid of selfish desire, getting rid of the idea of self, one can get rid of these conflicts and sufferings, and one can attain perfect freedom, harmony and peace, one can realize the Absolute Truth, Nirvana, here and now, in this very life. Lastly, the Fourth Noble Truth teaches the Way, the Path to attain the state of peace through our own efforts, through our moral, spiritual and intellectual discipline and perfection.

This is no pessimism. People in Buddhist countries are not pessimistic; they Buddhist art and architecture, Buddhist are spontaneously cheerful and gay. never of the gloom or sorrow, but produce an atmosphere temples, give impression TRI-QUARTERLY

1151

of calm and

serene

joy.

In

fact, according to Buddhism, joy (pui) is one of the

qualities necessary for Enlightenment. In Buddhist painting and sculpture the Buddha is always represented as serene, peaceful, calm and compassionate.

Never a trace of suffering, agony or pain is to be seen in his countenance. The German philosopher Herman Keyserling says: "The East has succeeded in what has never yet been reached in the West: the visible representation of the divine I know nothing more grand in this world than the figure of Buddha." as such.

This grandest creation of art, the figure of the Buddha, surely could not have been produced by a pessimistic religion.

Then there is another misconception equally grave that Buddhism is a monastic religion, a religion for monks living in secluded monasteries, and not a religion for laymen leading a family life. The Buddha's teaching is not intended for monks alone, indeed it is for laymen as well. Vacchagotta once asked the Buddha straight-forwardly whether there were laymen and women leading the family life who followed his teaching successfully and attained to high spiritual states. The Buddha categorically stated that there were not one or two, not a hundred or two hundred or five hundred, but many more. Surely it is the same today. It is only a question of sincere effort.

It might then be asked: If a layman can follow Buddhism while leading the life of an ordinary man, why was the Sangha, the Order of Monks, established by the Buddha. The Order provides opportunity for those who are willing to devote their lives not only for their own spiritual and intellectual development, but also for the service of others. An ordinary layman with a family cannot devote his whole life to the service of others as a monk can. I should like to emphasize here that true Buddhist renunciation is not a cowardly escape from life, but the giving up of all selfish desires and interests to face life boldly in a higher and nobler way in order to be able to serve humankind. A Bodhisattva who renounces everything, even his own Nirvana in order to save all living beings, does not escape from life; seven

he takes all life

on

himself.

Others say that Buddhism is interested only in lofty ideas, high moral and philosophical thought, and that it ignores and discourages the social and economic

well-being of people. This, again, is a grievous misconception. The Buddha was interested in the happiness of men. According to him, true happiness was not possible without leading a pure life based on moral and spiritual principles. But he knew the difficulties of leading such a life in unfavourable material and social conditions. Certainly Buddhism does not consider material welfare as an end in itself: it is only a means to an end, a higher and nobler end. But it is a means which is indispensable.

The Buddha did not take life out of the context of its social and economic

setting. He looked at it steadily and as a whole, in all its social, economic and political aspects. His ethical, spiritual, and philosophical teaching is fairly well known. But little is known, particularly in the West, about his teaching on social,

dealing with these questions. For instance, in one of the discourses he said that a layman who

economic and political matters.

1521

TRI-QUARTERLY

Yet there

are

numerous

discourses

leads an ordinary family life has four kinds of happiness:

I)

a

sufficient income,

i.e. economic security (atthi-sukha), 2) the enjoyment at his wealth (bhoga-sukha),

3) freedom from debts (anana-sukha) and 4) leading a blameless, pure, moral and

spiritual life (anavajja-sukha). It should be noticed that the first three of these four are economic and material. Elsewhere the Buddha said that one of the causes

of immorality and crimes is poverty (daliddiya), and that instead of trying to suppress them by punishments, which is a futile and unsuccessful method, rulers should find ways to raise the economic standard of the people. This sounds very modern.

In fact, Buddhism, though it is 25 centuries old, is most modern. It appeals

rational, scientific minds. Buddhism arose in India as a spiritual force against social injustices, against degrading superstitious rites, ceremonies and sacrifices; it denounced the tyranny of caste-system and advocated equality of all men; it emancipated woman and gave, her complete spiritual freedom.

In Buddhism there are no dogmas or beliefs that one has to accept on blind faith without question. It gives full responsibility and dignity to man. It makes man his own master.

According to Buddhism, there is no higher being that sits in judgment over his affairs and destiny. That is to say, our life, our society, our world, is what you and I want to make out of it, and not what some other unknown being wants. The Buddha said: 'One is one's own refuge, who else could be the refuge?'

Based on this principle of individual responsibility, the freedom of thought allowed by the Buddha is unheard of elsewhere in the history of religions. He advises us (in the Kalama-sutta) not to accept anything just because it is handed down by tradition, or because it is set out in religious texts, or because it is taught by our teacher or by some other authority.

Only when we know for ourselves that certain things are good and wholesome, then we should accept them; when we know for ourselves that certain things are bad and unwholesome, we should give them up.

Not merely the freedom of thought, but also the tolerance taught by the Buddha is astonishing to the student of history of religions. Once when Upali, an important follower of Jainism, begged the Buddha to accept him as one of His lay disciples, the Buddha advised him to respect and support his old religious teachers as he to modern

used to before.

In the 3rd century B.C., the great Buddhist Emperor Asoka of India

(to whose

Edicts reference was made earlier), following this noble example of tolerance and

understanding, honoured and supported all other religions in his vast empire.

In one of his rock Edicts the Emperor declared that "one should not honour only one's own religion and condemn the religions of others, but one should honour others' religions for this or that reason. So doing one helps one's own religion to Let all listen, and be grow and renders service to the religions of others too to listen, to the doctrines professed by others." willing This spirit of freedom of thought, tolerance and sympathetic understanding has been from the beginning one of the most cherished ideals of Buddhist culture and civilization, and may be considered as the most important lesson that the world today can learn from Buddhism. Though Buddhist countries have gone to war for ....

TRl-QUARTERLY

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political or other reasons, there is not a single example of persecution or the shedding of blood in order to convert people to Buddhism, or in its propagation, during its long history of 2500 years. It spread peacefully all over the continent of Asia, having 600 million adherents today.

There is a complaint prevalent everywhere that modern man is secular minded and is uninterested in religion. This, I think, is an incorrect appraisal. Man today is no more secular minded or less interested in religion than in any other period.

It is a universal tendency that people always believe that the past was the best, that the present is bad and the future will be worse. But humanity as a whole has gradually progressed, not only materially and technically, but also morally and spiritually. Some ideas preached by religions have been absorbed into our social system. One example: Buddhism and Christianity both are against slavery, though it could

during the time of the Buddha or of the Christ. But today by although there may still be some vestiges of it which, too, will surely disappear in time to come. May we not consider the principles on which the United Nations is organized-ideas like freedom, peace, human rights, the dignity and worth of the human person, etc.-as the essence of true religion, although not declared as such? The label is immaterial.

If modern man does not believe in a personal god, if he does not accept some dogmas of the established religions which are incompatible with modern scientific liberal spirit, it does not follow necessarily that the respect for or belief in moral and spiritual values, which constitute the essence of religion, has waned. In fact, modern man yearns for the living spirit of religion divested of its out-worn dogmas, beliefs and mythologies. not

be abolished

and large it no longer exists,

There is a common belief that material and technical progress is unfavourable to religious and spiritual life. It is hard to understand how an oil-lamp is more

conducive to religious life than an electric lamp, or that an ox-cart should produce

spirituality than an automobile. If religion cannot live in a society of material and scientific progress, in a society of prosperity, if it can thrive only in a society of poverty, misery and ignorance, then the sooner that religion disappears from the face of the earth the better for humanity. Anachronistic and out-dated external forms and expressions of religion must change with the change of the times, but the spiritual essence of religion, vital piety and true knowledge, will survive and will continue to renew humanity.

Buddhism is neither a faith nor a belief; it is a way of life to be experimented with and experienced, to be followed and practiced in the world we live in, here and now. It is a vast and complete system of ethico-philosophical and psychological teaching based on a highly scientific and analytical method, going deep into all aspects of human life. It is a Path that leads man gradually through his own moral, spiritual and intellectual discipline and development, to the highest realization, more

to

the realization of the Absolute Truth, Nirvana.

I do not propose now to go into the details of this Path.

Path-which is called the Noble

categories

1541

or

But very briefly, this Path because it is composed of eight

Eightfold divisions, namely, Right Understanding, Right Thought, Right Speech,

TRI-QUARTERL Y

Right Action, Right Livelihood, Right Effort, RIFIiI Mindfulness and Right Con­ centration-aims at developing three essential qualities necessary for man's true happiness, his peace and harmony, and for the realization of the Ultimate Truth.

The first of these three essential qualities is a pure moral and ethical conduct, without which no spiritual progress is possible. The second is mental purification and development through meditation, which is indispensable for insight, inner peace, harmony and equilibrium. The third is the development of Wisdom, which is not only the ability to see things objectively as they are, not only perceiving the Truth, but also attaining complete freedom from selffish desire, hatred and violence, and the unlimited capacity to love all living beings without discrimination. The attain­ ment of this perfect Wisdom-Love is the ultimate aim of the Buddhist way of life.

You may ask: But what is Buddhism's answer to social unrest, social conflicts?

Buddhism's answer is very clear. As the first verse of the Dhammapada teaches, all unrest, all conflicts, all disturbances are first born in the mind. Conflict or war

is nothing but an external manifestation of greed, hatred, ill-will, violence, ignorance

nothing but an individual conflict There is no society apart from individuals, and there

born in the minds of men. on an enormous

scale.

Social conflict is

If there is peace within indi­ So, in order to have a peaceful world, we have

is no social conflict apart from individual conflict.

viduals, then society is peaceful. to produce peace within individuals, providing them with social, economic, moral and spiritual security. This is Buddhism's answer. It is clear, but difficult to achieve. Yet without achieving it, no amount of treaties and pacts on paper can

produce real peace in the world.

The United States of America today is a leader of nations in the material sphere.

It would be most fitting that she should lead nations spiritually as well by putting

effectively these noble teachings of peace, freedom, non-violence, into practice, even as Asoka did in the 3rd century B.C., and thereby setting an example to other nations for the peace and happiness of all men.

Bhavatu sabba-mangalam

"Mayall blessing be upon you!"

TRI-QUARTERL Y

1155

CONTRIBUTORS

...

DR. ROBERT A BONE, author of The Negro Novel in America (Yale University Press,

1958), taught at Yale and UCLA and is presently engaged in full time writing. This essay will appear as part of a longer study to be published by Yale University Press in June.

ERICH HELLER is professor of German at Northwestern University. In an enlarged form, this essay will be part of his forthcoming book, The Morality of Knowledge to be published

by Messrs. Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., and Messrs. Martin Seckel' and Warberg, Ltd. London.

JOHN STEWART CARTER is a professor of English at Chicago Teacher's College, and is recipient of this year's Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship for his novel, Full Fathom Five.

A volume of his poetry, The De Paolis Papers, will be published by Houghton Mifflin in June.

WALTER B. SCOTT is Professor of Dramatic Literature at Northwestern University and has published reviews and parodies in many journals. JAMES T. FARRELL's Collected Poems will appear in 1965 from the Fleet Publishing Company. Professor HENRY VEATCH is Distinguished Service Professor of Philosophy at Indiana University and is currently a visiting professor at Northwestern. Among his books are Intentional Logic (Yale 1952), Logic as a has

Human Instrument with F.

H. Parker (Harpers 1959), Rational Man (Indiana University 1962). WILLIAM EARLE is Professor of Philosophy at Northwestern and has pub­ Iished Objectivity (Noonday Press 1955), and a translation of Karl Jaspers' Reason and Existenz as well as numerous articles. At present he is working on a counterpart to Objectivity. to be called, Subjectivity. SCOTT GREER is Professor of Sociology and Political Science and Director of the Center for Metropolitan Studies at Northwestern. Among his scholarly books are Last Man In: Racial Access to Union Power, The Emerging City: Myth and Reality, Governing the Metropolis, and Metropolitics: A Study of Political Culture. He has also pub­ lished two volumes of poetry, The Landscape Has Voices, and Via Urbana and Other Poems.

(Alan Swallow 1964). WALLACE DOUGLAS is Professor of English at Northwestern Uni­ versity, and Chairman of the Curriculum Center in English. NEWTON BERRY is Editor of Writers' Forum, and has recently completed a novel, Bughouse Square and optioned a play, We Shall Come Rejoicing. LUCIEN STRYK has published two volumes of verse Taproot and the Trespasser in England and is the recipient of this year's Isaac Rosenbaum Poetry Award

by Voices. He is presently teaching Writing and Oriental Literature at Northern Illinois Uni­ versity. TAKASHI IKEMOTO, Professor of Styli sties and Head of English in Yamaguchi University in Japan, has published translations previously in New Directions Annual, Orient/ West and is Lucien Stryk's collaborator on Zen which Doubleday-Anchor is to publish next fall.

Press

The Venerable DR. WALPOLA RAHULA, a Sinhalese Buddhist monk, first trained in the tra­ ditional discipline Sangha (order of Buddhist monks), and studied later at London and Ceylon Universities. For the past ten years he has been at the Sorbonne in Paris engaged in recon­

structing

and

translating

ancient Sanskrit

Mahayana Buddhist

texts.

His works

What The

Buddha Taught (Gordon Fraser, London, and Grove Press, New York), and The History of Buddhism in Ceylon (Gunasena & Co., Colombo) have been translated into several European and Asian

languages. He is the first Bishop Brashares Distinguished Visiting Professor of Religion at Northwestern and his appointment marks the first time in history that a Buddhist monk has held a chair in any university in the West. Portions of this essay were given as an inaugural address. PETER VIERECK is Professor of Modem European and Russian History at Mt. Holyoke College. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1949, Mr. Viereck is author of Meta-Politics, The Unadjusted Man, Conservatism Revisited, and poetry, Terror and Decorum, Strike Through the Mask, The First Morning, and The Persimmon Tree. MAXINE KUMIN lives with her husband and three children in Newton Highlands, Mass. Joppa Diary is the title of one section of her forthcoming collection of poems, The Privilege, which Harper and Row will bring out in 1965. Harper and Row, together with Hamish, Hamilton and Gollancz (London), will also publish her novel, Through Dooms of Love next year. STEPHEl\ REAL teaches English at Lake Forest College. He has published poetry in England and is currently working on a novel, The Pornographer. PHILIP WHALEN, author of Like I Say (Totem Books, New York 1960) and Memoirs of an Interglacial Age (Auerhan Press, San Francisco 1960) lives in San Francisco and will publish a new book of poems, Every Day, due this spring from Coyote's Journal. Selections from RONALD TAVEL's novel Street 0/

1561

TRI-QUARTERL Y

Stairs appeared in the 1964 issues of the Chicago Review, lit is currently

a

scenarist for the

New American Cinema and is featured as a speaker und actor in several of their films. JEROME

ROTHENBERG teaches Economics at Northwestern and has published his poetry in various

literary magazines. FELIX POLLAK, whose poetry and translations have appeared widely, is Curator of Rare Books at the University of Wisconsin. His book of poems, The Castle and the Flaw, is available from the Elizabeth Press. JOHN ALMQUIST is head of the Art Depart­

Country Day School, Winnetka, Ill. PETER MICHELSON teaches English Chicago Review. RONALD JOHNSON's first volume of poetry, A Line of Poetry, A Row of Trees, is just out from Jargon Books. 'Winter' is part of a seasonal work in four parts, The Book of The Green Man. Other sections of this work will appear in future issues of Tri-Quarterly, Poetry, and Location. A book of Mr. Johnson's translations from Erik Satie being prepared by The Wild Hawthorn Press, Edinburgh. DAVID PEARSON ETTER has published poetry widely and his first volume is ready for publication.

SIX MID-AMERICAN CHANTS by Sherwood Anderson and ELEVEN MIDWEST LAND­ SCAPES by Art Sinsabaugh are available in another magnificently conceived book from Jargon Books, which we think is the most provocative publisher in this country. The photographs are reproduced in the same size as our insert (150 line half-tone screen, duotone, varnished).

It is available at $6.50 through The Asphodel Bookshop, 465 The Arcade, Cleveland, Ohio, or through our office. For more about Jargon Books generally, write to Jonathan Williams, Publisher, The Nantahala Foundation, Highlands, North Carolina. ART SINSABAUGH has been photographing the midwest since 1952. Dissatisfied with the standard instruments, he used a special camera with 12 x 20 sheetfilm to capture these landscapes of Illinois and Indiana.

His work has been published widely in this country and abroad, and he has exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the American Federa­ tion of Arts. He is currently Professor of Art at the University of Illinois. The editors wish to thank Mr. Hayward Blake of Low's Incorporated, Chicago, for assistance in the printing of these photographs. American Spring Song by SHERWOOD ANDERSON-Copyright 1918

by John Lane Co. Copyright renewed. Reprinted by the permission of Harold Ober Associates, Inc. The cover of this issue is from a scroll, "Plum Blossom," by IKE·NO TAIGA (1723-76) master of the Japanese Nanga School and great calligrapher. Taiga studied with I Fu-chiu and trained in Rinzai Zen under Hakuin. A favorite of Japanese writers, his work was especially admired by Ryunosuke Akutagawa of Rashomon, and he is represented in the novelist Yasunari Kawabata's distinguished collection. The scroll is the property of Samuel Stryk. The editors also wish to give special thanks to the Inter-Fraternity Council of Northwestern University, whose generous grant made possible the visual material in this issue. ment at

North Shore

at Northwestern and is Editor of the

EDITOR:

John

Charles Newman.

Almquist,

Akkeron.

Colton

CIRCULATION:

Suzanne Kurman.

DIRECTOR:

ART

Johnson,

Valerie Nelson.

ADVERTISING:

Lawrence

Gerald Nelson.

BUSINESS:

Adele Wolfberg.

Levy.

ASSOCIATES:

PRODUCTION:

Lauretta

Stephen Bornemeier,

STAFF:

Arthur F. Gould,

William A. Henkin, Jr., Richard Thieme, Joel Pondelik, Mark Malkas, Anne

Campbell,

Dan Conrad, Jill

Harmon, Joan Sugarman, Suzanne Berger,

Judith Jay. The Tri-Quarterly is a national journal of arts, letters and opinion, published in the fall, winter and spring quarters at Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois.

Subscription rates: $3.00 yearly within the United States; $3.25 Canada and Mexico; $3.75 Foreign. Single copies will be sold for $1.25. Contributions, cor­ respondence and subscriptions should be addressed to Tri-Quarterly, University Hall 101, Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois. Unsolicited manuscripts are welcome, but will not be returned unless accompanied by a self-addressed stamped envelope. Copyright © 1964 by Northwestern University Press. All rights reserved. The views expressed in the magazine, except for editorials, are to be attributed to the writers, not the editors or sponsors.

NATIONAL DISTRIBUTOR TO RETAIL TRADE:

B.

DEBOER,

188

HIGH

STREET, NUTLEY,

NEW JERSEY

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Coming in future issues of TRI-QUARTERLY

A W. B. YEATS CENTENARY SUPPLEMENT

CREATIVITY IN THE SOVIET UNION.

Translations of Pasternak, Evtu-

shenko, Voznesensky, and others; a critical look at contemporary Russian painting, music, cinema, dance, literature and poetry.

J argon Books Six

Mid-American

Chants-Sherwood

Anderson/Eleven

scapes-Art Sinsabaugh. Forward by Edward Dahlberg

Midwest

Land­

$6.50

Ronald Johnson-A Line of Poetry, A Row of Trees

Drawings by Thomas George

Individual inquiries

to

$4.50

Jonathan Williams, Publisher, Jargon Books, The

Nantahala Foundation, Highlands, North Carolina (

Bookstore and Library inquiries to the Asphodel Bookshop, 465 The Arcade,

Cleveland, Ohio