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CENTENARY:

1. D. SNODGRASS. B. RAJAN WILLIAM P. FAY· MOODY E. PRIOR· )HN V. KELLEHER. PADRAIC COLUM D. T. TORCHIANA

EW FRENCH WRITING: JOHN SIMON ON "THE NEW NOVEL"· A NEW LAY BY JEAN-PAUL ARON: "THE OFFICE"· ROBERT BONE ON .JEAN IAGNER E. M. CIORAN ON THE JEWS· ROGER KEMPF· R. BARTHES ENNETH REXROTH. LEONARD BASKIN· INDEX

1. B. YEATS

RICHARD ELLMANN STEPHEN SPENDER· ONOR CRUISE O'BRIEN. PATRICK KAVANAGH· THOMAS KINSELLA·

Books on james JOYC€ ano IRiSh tettens

he WORkshop o� oaeoalus

mes Joyce and the Raw Materials for

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

By Robert Scholes and Richard M. Kain

fhere is no question that this book will ake serious scholarly study of Joyce's A "trait of the Artist as a Young Man posole for the first time to those who are iable to make special trips to library collecins in various parts of the country. The ithors have brought together intelligently id generously the documents without which ) truly meaningful evaluation of the work n be attempted." (MARVIN MAGALANER)

300 pages $8.00

he pnmteo wmuncs

I� GeORGe w. Russell (ae)

Bibliography

Edited by Alan Denson

Foreword by Padraic Colum

�r. Denson has raised him a permanent emorial which, with the reminiscences and itiques it incorporates, makes a complete ride for a future biographer." (The Times ;terary SIJpplement, London)

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W. B. yeats ano ceoncian IReLanO

By Donald T. Torchiana

During the last twenty years of his life, the period in which he wrote his best poetry, Yeats felt a dose identification with Protestant Ireland, in particular with its eighteenthcentury heritage. Professor Torchiana has made a thorough study of these influences, bringing to our attention many unpublished Yeats papers, letters, speeches, and interviews.

320 pages $8.50

scanomavian elements

o� �lnneGans wake

By Dounia Bunis Christiani

A thorough study of one of the many foreign languages in Finnegans Wake. It not only identifies and translates the Dano-Norwegian in Joyce's book, but explains the literary, linguistic, historical, and biographical materials to which the Scandinavian fragments allude. The work consists primarily of a Glossary of some 1400 Scandinavian words, distortions, quotations, and allusions, arranged by page and line.

275 pages $7.50

w. B. YEATS

CENTENARY

COLTON JOHNSON 66 Editor's Forward

WILLIAM P. FAY 68 A Yeats Centenary

PADRAIC COLUM 71 Reminiscences of Yeats

RICHARD ELLMANN 77 Eliot's Conversion

STEPHEN SPENDER 82 The Influence of Yeats on Later English Poets

CONOR CRUISE O'BRIEN 91 Yeats and Irish Politics

STEPHEN SPENDER

PATRICK KAVANAGH Poetry Since Yeats: a symposium

w. D. SNODGRASS 100 THOMAS KINSELLA

MOODY E. PRIOR 112 Yeats's Search for a Dramatic Form

JOHN V. KELLEHER 115 Yeats's Use of Irish Materials

ROGER MC HUGH 126 Yeat's Kind of Twilight

B. RAJAN 130 Yeats and the Absurd

D. T. TORCHIANA 138 Some Dublin Afterthoughts

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A People of Solitaries

E. M. CIORAN

ISHALL ATTEMPT to extemporize upon the ordeals of a people, upon its history which baffles History, upon its fate which seems to derive from a supernatural logic, in which the unheard-of mingles with the obvious, miracle with necessity. Some call it a race, others a nation, some a tribe. Since it resists classification, whatever precise things we can say will be inexact; no definition is quite applicable. To apprehend it best, we must resort to some special category, for here everything is unfamiliar: Is this people not the first to have colonized heaven, to have placed its God there? As impatient to create myths as to destroy them, it has forged for itself a religion on which it prides itself, of which it is ashamed For all its lucidity, this people readily sacrifices to illusion: it hopes, it always hopes too much A strange conjunction of energy and analysis, of irony and thirst. With so many enemies, any other people, in its place, would have laid down its arms; but this nation, unsuited to the complacencies of despair, bypassing its age-old fatigue for the conclusions imposed by its fate, lives in the delirium of expectation, determined not to learn a lesson from its humiliations, nor to deduce from them a rule of diffidence, a principle of anonymity. It prefigures the universal diaspora: its past summarizes our future. The more closely we scrutinize our tomorrows, the closer we come to and the more we flee this people: all of us tremble at the obligation to resemble it some day "Soon you will be following in my footsteps," this nation seems to tell us, even as, it draws, above our certainties, a question mark.

To be a man is a drama; to be a Jew is another. Hence the Jew has the privilege of living our condition twice over. He represents the alienated existence par excellence or, to utilize an expression by which the theologians describe God, the wholly other. Conscious of his singularity, he thinks of it constantly, and never forgets himself; whence that constrained, tense, or falsely assured expression, so frequent in those who bear the burden of a secret. Instead of priding himself on his origins, of advertising and declaring them, he camouflages them: yet does not his unique fate confer upon him the right to regard the human rabble with disdain? A victim,

he reacts in his own way, a loser sui generis. In more than one way, he is related to that serpent out of which he made a character and a symbol. Yet we shall not suppose that he, too, is cold-blooded: that would be to ignore his true nature, his enthusiasms, his capacity for love and hate, his thirst for vengeance or the eccentricities of his charity. (Certain Hassidic rabbis yield nothing in this matter to the Christian saints.) Excessive in everything, emancipated from the tyranny of local commitment, from the stupidities of enracinement, without attachments, acosmic, he is the man who will never be from here, the man from somewhere else, the stranger-in-himself who cannot unambiguously speak in the name of the natives, of all. To translate their feelings, to make himself their interpreter-what a task, should he lay claim to it! There is no crowd he can lead on, sweep away, arouse: the trumpet is not his forte. He will be reproached for his parents, his ancestors who lie at rest far away, in other countries, other continents. Without graves to point to, to exploit, without means of being the spokesman of any cemetery, he represents no one, if not himself. Does he originate the latest slogan? Does he stand at the source of a revolution? He will find himself cast out at the very moment his ideas triumph, when his words have the force of law. If he makes use of a cause, he cannot take advantage of it to the end. A day comes when he must contemplate it as a spectator, and a disappointed one at that. Then he will defend another cause, with no less ringing rebuffs. If he changes his country, his drama merely begins again: exodus is his seat, his certainty, his chez soi.

Better and worse than us, he embodies the extremes to which we aspire without achieving them: he is us when we are beyond ourselves Since his holdings in the absolute exceed our own, he offers-in good, in evil-the ideal image of our capacities. His comfort in imbalance, the routine he has acquired there, make him a nervous wreck, an expert in psychiatry as in every kind of therapeutics, a theoretician of his own diseases: he is not, like us, abnormal by accident or out of snobbery, but naturally, without effort, and by tradition: such is the advantage of an inspired destiny on the scale of a whole people. An anxiety-victim oriented toward action, a sick man unsuited to repose, he nurses himself on the move, and movingforward. His reverses do not resemble ours: even in disaster he rejects conformity. His history-an interminable schism.

Persecuted in the name of the Lamb, doubtless he will remain non-Christian as long as Christianity is in power. But so greatly does he love paradox-and the sufferings that result from it-that he will perhaps convert to the Christian religion at the moment it is universally reviled. He will then be persecuted for his new faith. Possessed of a religious destiny, he has survived Athens and Rome, as he will survive the West, and he will pursue his career, envied and despised by all peoples that are born and die

When the churches are deserted forever, the Jews will return to them, or will build others, or, what is more likely, will plant the Cross on the synagogues. Meanwhile, they wait for Jesus to be abandoned: will they see in him then their true Messiah? We shall find out at the end of the Church for unless there is some unforeseeable degradation, they will not deign to kneel beside Christians, or to gesticulate with them. They would have acknowledged Christ if he had not been accepted by the nations and had he not become a common property, an export messiah. Under the Roman domination, they were the only ones not to allow the statues of the emperors in their temples; forced to do so, they rebelled. Their messianic hope was less a dream of conquering other nations than of destroying their gods for the glory of Jahweh: sinister theocracy, that opposed polytheism with its skeptical tonalities. Since they kept apart within the empire, they were accused of crime, for their exclusivism was not understood, nor their refusal to sit down to table with strangers, to participate in games, in spectacles, to mingle with others and respect their customs. They credited only their own prejudices, whence the accusation of "misanthropy," a crime imputed to them by Cicero, Seneca, Celsius and, with them, all antiquity. As early as 130 B.C., during the siege of Jerusalem by Antiochus, the latter's friends advised him to "seize the city by main force, and to annihilate completely the Jewish race; for alone of all nations, it refused all social bonds with other peoples, and considered them as enemies." (Poseidonios of Apamea) Did they relish their role as undesirables? Did they seek to be alone on earth in principle? Certainly they appeared for a long time as the very incarnation of fanaticism, and their inclination for liberal ideas is rather acquired than innate. The most intolerant and the most persecuted of peoples unites universalism with the strictest particularism. A natural contradiction: futile attempting to resolve or to explain it.

Worn threadbare, Christianity has ceased to be a source of scandal and surprise, to precipitate crises or to fertilize intelligences. It no longer inconveniences the mind nor enforces the least interrogation; the anxieties it provokes, like its answers and its solutions, are flabby, soporific: no break with the future, no drama can start here. It has served its term: already we yawn over the Cross To attempt to save Christianity, to prolong its career, would not occur to us; on occasion it awakens our indifference. After having occupied our depths, it barely manages to sustain itself on our surface; soon, supplanted, it will be added to the total of our unsuccessful experiments. Consider the cathedrals: having lost the impulse that supported their mass, turned back into stone, they shrink and slip; their very steeples, which once pointed insolently to heaven, suffer the contamination of weight and imitate the modesty of our lassitudes.

When we happen to make our way inside one of them we think of the futility of the prayers offered, of so many fevers and follies wasted Soon the void will reign here. Nothing gothic is left in the substance, nothing gothic left in ourselves. If Christianity preserves a semblance of reputation, it is due to the backward who, pursuing it with a retrospective hatred, would pulverize the two thousand years in which, by some wile, it has obtained the acquiescence of men's minds. Since these retarded creatures, these haters, are becoming increasingly rare, and since

TRI-QUARTERLy 17

Christianity finds no comfort for the loss of so lasting a popularity, it seeks on all sides an event likely to restore it to the foreground, to actuality. To become "curious" once again, Christianity would have to be raised to the dignity of an accursed sect; only the Jews could take it over: they would project enough strangeness into it to renew it, to rejuvenate its mystery. Had they adopted it at the right moment, they would have suffered the fate of so many other peoples whose name history barely preserves. It was to spare themselves such a fate that they rejected it. Leaving to the Gentiles the ephemeral advantages of salvation, they opted for the lasting disadvantages of perdition. Infidelity? That is the censure which, after Saint Paul, continues to pursue them. A ridiculous criticism, since their fault consists precisely of an excessive loyalty to themselves. Beside them, the first Christians look like opportunists: sure of their cause, they cheerfully awaited martyrdom. By exposing themselves to it, they did no more than sacrifice to the mores of a period when the taste for spectacular blood-lettings made the sublime an easy matter.

Quite different is the case of the Jews. By refusing to follow the ideas of the times, the great madness which had seized the world, they provisionally escaped persecution. But at what cost! For not having shared the momentary ordeals of the new fanatics, they were subsequently to bear the burden and the terror of the Cross; indeed it was for them, and not for the Christians, that it became the symbol of torture.

Throughout the Middle Ages, they were massacred because they had crucified one of their own No people has paid so dearly for a rash but explicable and, all things considered, natural gesture. At least so it seemed to me when I witnessed the "Passion Play" at Oberammergau. In the conflict between Jesus and the authorities, it was, of course, with Jesus that the public sided, amid copious tears. Struggling in vain to do as much, I felt quite alone in that audience. What had happened? I found myself at a trial in which the prosecution's arguments struck me by their accuracy. Annas and Caiaphas embodied, to my eyes, good sense itself. Employing honest methods, they showed remarkable interest in the case before them. Perhaps they asked for nothing better than to be converted. I shared their exasperation over the evasive answers of the accused. Irreproachable on every point, they used no theological or juridical subterfuge: a perfect interrogation. Their probity won me over: I sided with them and approved of Judas, though scorning his remorse. From that point on, the denouement of the conflict left me indifferent. And when I walked out of the hall, I felt that the public was perpetuating by its tears a misunderstanding two thousand years old.

However grave its consequences may have been, the rejection of Christianity remains the Jews' finest exploit, a no which does them honor. If previously they had walked alone by necessity, they would henceforth do so by resolve, as outcasts armed with a great cyncism, the sole precaution they have taken against their future

Imbued with their fits of conscience, the Christians, gratified that another should have suffered for them, loll in the shadow of Calvary. If they sometimes busy themselves retracing its stages, what advantage they manage to derive from doing

so! With the look of profiteers, they bloom in church and, when they leave, scarcely dissimulate that smile produced by a certitude gained without fatigue. Grace, of course, is on their side, a bargain Grace and a suspect one which spares them from making any effort. Carnival "redeemed," braggarts of redemption, sensualists caressed by humility, sin and hellfire: ifthey torment their conscience, it is to procure themselves sensations. They procure others by tormenting yours. Once they detect scruple, division or the obsessive presence of a sin or a transgression, they will never let you go, but oblige you to exhibit your agony or advertise your guilt, while they watch like Sadists the spectacle of your confusion. Weep if you can: that is what they are waiting for, impatient to get drunk on your tears, to wallow, charitable and grim, in your humiliations, to feast on your griefs. These men of conviction are so greedy for suspect sensations that they seek them everywhere, and when they no longer find any in the world outside, rush upon themselves. Far from being haunted by the truth, the Christian marvels at his "inner conflicts," at his vices and his virtues, at their power of intoxication, gloats over the Cross and, an Epicurean of the horrible, associates pleasure with sentiments which generally involve nothing of the kind: has he not invented the orgasm of repentance?

Although chosen, the Jews were to gain no advantage by that privilege: neither peace nor salvation Quite the contrary, it was imposed upon them as an ordeal, as a punishment. A chosen people without Grace. Thus their prayers have all the more merit in that they are addressed to a God without an alibi.

Not that the Gentiles are to be condemned en masse. But they haven't much of which to be so proud: they calmly belong to the "human race" Which is what, from Nebuchadnezzar to Hitler, they have not been willing to allow the Jews; unfortunately, the latter have not had the courage to pride themselves on this. With an arrogance of the gods, they should have boasted their differences, proclaimed in the face of the universe that they had no like on earth nor sought to have, should have spat on races and empires and, in a burst of self-destruction, should have supported the theses of their detractors, should have sustained those who hate them Let us leave aside regrets, or delirium. Who dares take upon himself the arguments of his enemies? Such an order of greatness, scarcely conceivable in an individual, is not to be entertained on the level of a people. The instinct of self-preservation mars individuals and collectivities alike.

If the Jews had to face only the professional antisemite, their drama would thereby be singularly diminished. At grips, however, with the quasi-totality ofhumanity, they know that antisemitism does not represent a phenomenon of one period or another, but a constant, and that yesterday'S exterminators used the same terms as Tacitus The inhabitants of the globe are divided into two categories: Jews and non-Jews. If we were to weigh the merits of the former and the latter, uncontestably the former would prevail; they would have sufficient qualification to speak in the name of humanity, and to consider themselves its representatives. They will not find it in their hearts to do so as long as they preserve some respect, some weakness for the rest of the human race. What an idea, to want to be loved! They impose it upon themselves without success. After so many fruitless attempts, would they not be better off yielding to the obvious, admitting at last the substantiation

TRI·QUARTERLy 9

of their disappointments?

No events, no crimes or catastrophes for which their adversaries have not made them responsible. Extravagant homage. Not that we need minimize their role; but, to be just, we must consider only their real misdeeds: the chief of which remains that of having produced a God Whose fortunes-unique in the history of religionsmay well leave us something to think about; nothing about Him justifies such a success: bickering, crude, capricious, verbose, He could at best correspond to the necessities of a tribe; that one day He should become the object oflearned theologies, the patron of highly developed civilizations, no one could have foreseen, certainly. If the Jews have not inflicted Him upon us, they nevertheless bear the responsibility of having conceived Him. That is a flaw in their genius. They could have done better. However vigorous, however virile He may seem, their Jahweh (of which Christianity offers us a revised version) infallibly inspires in us a certain mistrust. Instead of getting flustered, seeking to impose Himself, He should have been, given his functions, more correct, more distinguished, and above all more assured. Uncertainties trouble Him: He shrieks, storms, fulminates Is that a sign of power? For all His grand airs, we discern the apprehensions of a usurper who, sensing danger, fears for his kingdom and terrorizes his subjects. A method unworthy of One who perpetually invokes the Law and demands submission to it. If, as Moses Mendelssohn maintains, Judaism is not a religion but a revealed legislation, it seems strange that such a God should be its author and symbol, He who has, precisely, nothing of the legislator about Him. Incapable of the slightest effort of objectivity, He dispenses justice according to His whim, without any code to limit His divagations and His impulses. He is a despot as jittery as He is aggressive, saturated with complexes, an ideal subject for psychoanalysis. He disarms metaphysics, which detects in Him no trace of a substantial, self-sufficient Being superior to the world and content with the interval that separates Him from it. A clown who has inherited heaven and who there perpetuates the worst traditions of earth, He employs extreme means, astounded by His own power and proud of having made its effects felt. Yet His vehemence, His shifts of mood, His spasmodic outbursts finally attract, if they do not convince us. Not at all resigned to His eternity, He intervenes in the affairs of earth, makes a mess of them, sowing confusion and clutter. He disconcerts, irritates, seduces.

However eccentric He may be, He knows his charms, and uses them at will. But what is the good oflisting the flaws of a God when they are displayed throughout those frenetic books of the Old Testament, beside which the New seems a thin and touching allegory? We vainly seek the former's poetry and asperity in the latter, where everything is sublime amenity, a narrative intended for "good souls." The Jews have refused to recognize themselves in it: that would be to fall into the trap of happiness, to strip themselves of their singularity, to opt for an "honorable" destiny, all things alien to their vocation. "Moses, the better to bind the nation to himself, instituted new rites, contrary to those of all other mortals. Here, all that we worship is flouted; in return, all that is impure in our eyes is allowed." (Tacitus) "All other mortals"-this statistical argument, which antiquity certainly abused,

could not escape the modems: it has served, it will always serve. Our duty is to reverse it in favor of the Jews, to use it for the edification of their glory. Too quickly we forget that they were the citizens of the desert, that they still bear it within them as their inward space, and perpetuate it down through history, to the great amazement of those human trees, "all other mortals."

Perhaps we should add that this desert, far from constituting merely an inward space, was extended physically in the ghetto. Anyone who has visited one of these (preferably in an Eastern country) cannot fail to have noticed the lack of vegetation: nothing grew there, everything was dry and desolate. A strange island, the ghetto, a tiny universe without roots, to the measure of its inhabitants, as remote from the life of the soil as angels or ghosts.

"The nations feel towards the Jews," observes one of their coreligionists, "the same animosity the flour must feel toward the yeast that keeps it from resting." Rest, that is all we ask; the Jews may ask it too: it is forbidden them. Their febrility needles you, lashes you on, carries you away. Models of rage and bitterness, they infect you with a craving for rage and epilepsy, for aberrations which arouse you and prescribe unhappiness as a stimulant.

If the Jews have degenerated, as is commonly said, we might wish such a degeneration on all the old nations "Fifty centuries of neurasthenia," Peguy said. Yes, but a dare-devil's neurasthenia, not that of invalids or dyspeptics. Decadence, a phenomenon inherent in all civilizations, the Jews are ignorant of, since their career, while developing in history, has no historical essence: their evolution involves neither growth nor decrepitude, neither apogee nor decline; their roots thrust into no one knows what soil; certainly not into our own. Nothing natural, vegetal in them, no "sap," no possibility of withering. There is something abstract about their perenniality, but nothing bloodless-a suspicion of the demoniac, hence simultaneously unreal and active, a disturbing halo, a kind of reverse nimbus which individualizes them forever.

If they escape decadence, all the more reason for them to escape satiety, a wound from which no ancient people is safe and against which all medication turns out to be inoperative: has it not eroded more than one empire, more than one soul, more than one organism? The Jews are miraculously inured against it. What could they have been satiated on, when they have known no respite, none ofthose moments of fulfillment propitious to disgust but mortal to desire, to will, to action? Unable to stop anywhere, they must desire, will, act, sustain themselves in anxiety and nostalgia. Do they fix upon an object? It will not last: every event will be for them only a repetition of the Destruction of the Temple. Memories and prospects of collapse! The ankylosis of peace does not lie in wait for them. Whereas it is painful for us to persevere in a state of avidity, they actually never emerge from it, and in it feel a kind of morbid well-being, suitable to a collectivity to which a state of trance is endemic and whose mystery is evident in its theology and pathology, without, moreover, being elucidated by the combined efforts of both.

Forced to face their depths and fearing them, the Jews try to bypass, to elude

them by clinging to the trifles of conversation: they talk, they talk But the easiest thing in the world: to remain on the surface of the self, they never achieve. For them, speech is an evasion: sociability, a self-defence. We cannot, without trembling, imagine their silences, their monologues. Our calamities, the reverses of our life, are to them familiar disasters, routine; their image of time: a crisis overcome or a crisis to come. If by religion we mean the will of the creature to raise himself by his discomforts, they all have, devout or atheist, a religious tinge, a piety whose sweetness they were careful to eliminate, along with its self-satisfaction, composure, and all that might flatter the innocent, the weak, the pure. It is a piety without candor, for none of them is candid, as, on another level, none of them is stupid. (Stupidity, indeed, is not in circulation among them: almost all are quick-witted; those who are not, the few rare exceptions, do not stop at stupidity, they go farther: they are simple-minded.)

That passive, languid prayers should not be to their taste is understandable; moreover such orisons displease their God, who contrary to ours, does not condone boredom. Only the sedentary man prays in peace, without haste; nomads, the hunted, must work fast and hurry on, even in their obeisances. This is because they invoke a God who is Himself a nomad, Himself hunted, and Who communicates to them His impatience and His panic.

When one is ready to capitulate, what a lesson, what a corrective in their endurance! How many times, when I was indulging the prospect of my ruin, have I not thought of their stubbornness, their persistence, their comforting as well as inexplicable appetite for being! lowe them many returns, many compromises with the non-evidence for living. And yet, have I always done them justice? Far from it. If at twenty I loved them to the point of regretting not being one of them, later on, unable to forgive them for having played a leading role in the course of history, I found myself loathing them with the fury of love turned to hate. The vividness oftheir omnipresence made me all the more sensitive to the obscurity of my country, doomed, I knew, to be smothered and even to disappear; while they, I knew just as well, would survive everything, whatever happened. Furthermore, at the time, I had only a bookish commiseration for their past sufferings, and could not divine those that were in store for them. Afterwards, thinking of their tribulations and of the resolution with which they endured them, I was to grasp the value of their example and to derive from it several reasons for struggling against my temptation to abandon everything. But whatever my feelings toward them at various moments of my life, on one point I have never varied: I mean my attachment to the Old Testament, the veneration I have always felt for their book, that providence of my excesses or of my ironies. Thanks to it, I communicated with them, with the best of their afflictions; thanks to it, too, and to the consolations I derived from it, so many of my nights, however inclement they may have been, seemed tolerable to me. This I could never forget, even when they seemed to me to deserve their opprobrium. And it is the memory of those nights when, by the poignant sallies of Job and Solomon, they were so often present, that justifies the hyperboles of my gratitude. Let someone else do them the insult of making "meaningful" statements about them! I cannot bring myself to do so: to apply our standards to them is to

strip them of their privileges, to tum them into mere mortals, an ordinary variety of the human type. Happily, they defy our criteria, as well as the investigations of common sense. To reflect on these tamers of the abyss (of their abyss), one glimpses the advantage of not giving over, of not yielding to the voluptuous delight of shipwreck, and by meditating their rejection of ruin, one resolves to imitate them, knowing even so that it is vain to make the attempt, that our lot is to sink down, to answer the Call of the Abyss. Nonetheless, by turning away, even temporarily, from our impulse to submit, they teach us to come to terms with a dizzying, unendurable world: they are masters at existing. Of all those who suffered a long period of slavery, they alone have succeeded in resisting the charms of abulia. Outlaws who hoarded their strength, by the time the Revolution gave them a civil status, they possessed more important biological resources than those of other nations. Free at last, they appeared, in the nineteenth century, in broad daylight and astounded the world: since the period of the conquistadors, no one had seen such intrepidity, such an awakening. A curious, unexpected, lightninglike imperialism. Repressed for so long, their vitality burst upon the world; and they, who appeared so self-effacing, so humble, were suddenly at grips with a thirst for power, for domination and glory which alarmed the disabused society in which they began to assert themselves and into which these indomitable elders were to inject new blood. Greedy and generous, insinuating themselves into every branch of commerce and knowledge, into all kinds of enterprises, not to accumulate but to expend, to squander; famished in repletion, prospectors of eternity strayed into the quotidian, nailed to gold and to heaven, and constantly mingling the luster of one with that of the other-a luminous and alarming promiscuity, a whirlpool of abjection and transcendance-they possess in their incompatibilities their true fortune. In the days they lived by usury, were they not studying the Kabbala in secret? Money and mystery: obsessions they have retained in their modern occupations, a complexity impossible to disentangle, a source of power. To persecute, to combat them? Only the madman risks doing so: he alone dares confront the invisible weapons with which they are armed.

To contemporary history, inconceivable without them, they have given an accelerated cadence, a splendid breathlessness, a superb second wind, as well as a prophetic poison whose virulence has not ceased disconcerting us. Who, in their presence, can remain neutral? One never approaches them to waste one's time. In the diversity of the psychological landscape, each one of them is a case. And if we know them by certain aspects, there are still a number of steps to take before we penetrate their enigmas. Incurables who intimidate death, who have discovered the secret of another health, of a dangerous health, of a salutary disease, they obsess you, torment you, and oblige you to rise to the level of their consciousness, of their vigils. While with the others, everything changes: beside them, one falls asleep. What security, what peace! One is at once "entre nous," one yawns, one snores without fear. By such frequentations, one is won over to the apathy of the soil. Even the most refined seem peasants, boors gone wrong. They wrap themselves, poor wretches, in a comforting fatality. Even if they had genius, they would still be ordinary. A vile fate pursues them: their existence is as obvious, as acknowledged TRI·QUARTERLY

as that of the land or of the water. Subsided elements.

No creatures less anonymous. Without them who could breathe in our cities? They maintain a state of fever, without which any agglomeration becomes a province: a dead city is a city without Jews. Effective as a ferment and a virus, they inspire a double sense of fascination and discomfort. Our reaction to them is almost always murky: by what precise behavior are we to adjust to them, when they locate themselves both above and beneath us, on a level which is never our own? Whence a tragic, inevitable misunderstanding for which no one takes the responsibility. What madness on their part to have attached themselves to a special God, and what remorse they must feel when they turn their eyes toward our insignificance! No one will ever disentangle the web in which we are caught, each inextricably laced to the other. Should we rush to their aid? We have nothing to offer them. And what they bring us-is beyond us. Whence do they come? Who are they? We approach them with a maximum of perplexity: he who takes a clear-cut attitude toward them misunderstands them, simplifies them, and becomes unworthy of their extremities.

A remarkable thing: only the unsuccessful Jew resembles us, is "one of us": it is as if he had retreated toward ourselves, toward our conventional and ephemeral humanity. Must we thereby deduce that man is a Jew who has not gone all the way?

Bitter and insatiable, lucid and impassioned, always in the avant-garde ofsolitude, they represent failure on the move. If they do not sacrifice to despair when everything should incite them to do so, the reason is that they lay plans the way others breathe, that they suffer the disease of projects. In the course of a single day, each of them conceives an incalculable number. Against the grain of the dirt-choked races, they cling to the imminent, send down roots into the possible: this automatism of the new explains the effectiveness of their divagations, as well as their horror of every intellectual comfort. Whatever nation they inhabit, they are at the mind's root-tip. Collectively, they constitute a mass of exceptions, a summa of capacities and talents unexampled in any other nation. If they practice a profession, their curiosity is not limited by it; each possesses passions or hobbies which carry him elsewhere, enlarge his knowledge, permit him to embrace the most disparate professions, so that his biography implies a host of characters united by a single will-it, too, without example. The notion of "persevering in being" was conceived by their greatest philosopher; such being they have conquered in pitched battle. Hence their mania for plans and projects: to the subsiding present, they oppose the aphrodisiac virtues of tomorrow. Becoming-again, it is one of them who made it the central notion of his philosophy. No contradiction between the two ideas, process leading back to the being who projects, and projects himself; to the being disintegrated by hope.

But is it not vain to assert that they are this or that in philosophy? If they tend

to rationalism, it is less by inclination than by a need to react against certain traditions which excluded them and from which they have suffered. Their genius, as a matter of fact, accommodates itself to any form of theory, any current of ideas, from positivism to mysticism. To emphasize only their propensity to analysis is to impoverish them, and to do them a grave injustice. They are, after all, a people who have prayed enormously. One realizes this from their faces, more or less bleached by the reading of the psalms. Then too, one meets, among them, only pale bankers Which must mean something. Finance and De Profundis!unprecedented incompatibility, perhaps the key to their general mystery.

Combatants by preference-the most warlike ofall civilian peoples-they proceed in their affairs as strategists, and never avow themselves defeated, though they often are. Condemned and blessed, their instinct and intelligence do not neutralize each other: even in their flaws, everything serves them as a tonic. Their progress, with its wanderings and its dizzy spells-how could it be understood by a slippered humanity? If they had, over the latter, merely the superiority of a quenchless failure, of a more successful way of not arriving, would that not suffice to assure them a relative immortality? Their last resort holds fast: it fails eternally.

Active, virulent dialecticians, stricken with a neurosis of the intellect (which far from hampering them in their enterprises, drives them on, makes them dynamic, obliges them to live under pressure), they are fascinated, despite their lucidity, by risk. Nothing makes them retreat. Tact, an earthbound vice, a prejudice of enracine civilizations, the instinct of protocol-is not their strong point: the responsibility for this lies in their flayed pride, in their aggressive mind. Their irony, far from being an amusement at others' expense, a form of sociability or caprice, smells of repressed vitriol; it is a long-brewed bitterness; envenomed, its darts kill. It participates, not in the laughter which is relief, but in the jeer which is the wince and revenge of the abased. Indeed, the Jews are unrivalled at jeering. To understand them, or to approach them, we must have lost, ourselves, more than one homeland, must be, like them, citizens of every city, must fight without a flag against the whole world, must know, after their example, how to embrace and betray every cause. A difficult task, for compared to them we are, whatever our ordeals, poor creatures swallowed up by happiness and geography, neophytes of misfortune, bunglers in every genre. If they do not possess a monopoly on subtlety, the fact remains, nonetheless, that their form of intelligence is the most disturbing there is, the oldest; it is as if they know everything, have always known everything, since Adam, since God.

Do not accuse them of being parvenus: how could they be, when they have passed through and left their mark on so many civilizations? Nothing in them of the recent, the improvised: their promotion to solitude coincides with the, dawn of History; their very defects are imputable to the vitality of their old age, to the TRl-QUARTERLY lIS

excesses of their penetration and their acuity of mind, to their excessively long experience. They are ignorant of the comfort of limits: if they possess a wisdom, it is the wisdom of exile, the kind which teaches how to triumph over a unanimous sabotage, how to believe oneself chosen when one has lost everything: the wisdom of defiance. And yet they are called cowards! It is true that they can cite no spectacular victory: but their very existence, is that not one? An uninterrupted, terrible victory, with no chance of ever ending!

To deny their courage is to misunderstand the value, the quality of their fear, an impulse not of retraction but of expansion, the beginning of an offensive. For this fear, in contrast to the cowardly and the humble, they have converted into a virtue, a principle of pride and conquest. It is not flaccid like ours, but strong and enviable, and consists of a thousand dreads transfigured into acts. According to a recipe they have been careful not to reveal, our negative forces become, in them, positive; our torpors, migrations. What immobilizes us, makes them advance, leap forward: no barrier which their itinerant panic fails to surmount. Nomads to whom space does not suffice and who, beyond continents, pursue some other homeland Consider the ease with which they traverse the nations! One, born in Russia, is now a German, a Frenchman, then an American, or anything Despite these metamorphoses, he retains his identity; he has character, as they all do. How explain otherwise their capacity to begin, after the worst mortifications, a new existence, to take their destiny in hand once again? It is something of a wonder. Observing them, one is amazed and stupefied. In this life, they must have had experience of hell. Such is the ransom of their longevity. When they begin to decline, and when they seem ruined, they catch themselves up, gain ground and refuse the quietude of failure. Hunted from their homes, born expatriates, they have never been tempted to give up. But the rest of us, apprentices of exile, latter-day deracines, eager to attain to sclerosis, the monotony of collapse, to an equilbrium without horizon or promise, crawl behind our misfortunes; our condition transcends us; unsuited to the terrible, we were made to languish in some imaginary Balkans, not share the fate of a legion of Singulars. Gorged on immobility, prostrate, haggard, how, with our somnolent desires and our crumbled ambitions, how could we possess the stuff the Wanderer is made of? Our ancestors, bent over the earth, scarcely detached themselves from it. Unhurried, for where would they have gone? their gait was that of the plow: the speed of eternity But to enter History supposes a minimum of precipitation, ofimpatience and of vivacity, all things different from the slow barbarism of agricultural peoples, hemmed in by Habit-that regulation not of their privileges, but of their melancholies. Scratching at the ground to be able to rest in it more easily at the end, leading a life at the level of the grave, a life in which death seemed a reward and a privilege, our ancestors have bequeathed us the legacy of their endless sleep, their mute and somewhat intoxicating desolation, their long sigh of living dead men. We are dazed; our curse acts upon us like a narcotic: it benumbs us; that of the Jews has the value of a flick of the fingers: it drives them ahead. And if they attempt to evade it? A delicate question, perhaps unanswerable. What is certain is that their sense of the tragic differs from that of the Greeks. An Aeschylus treats

the misfortune of an individual or of a family. The concept of a national malediction, any more than that of a collective salvation, is not Hellenic. The tragic hero rarely seeks an accounting from a blind, impersonal Fate: it is his pride to accept its decrees. He will perish, then, he and his. But a Job harrasses his God, demands an accounting: a formal summons results, of a sublime bad taste, which would doubtless have repelled a Greek but which touches, which overwhelms us. These outpourings, these vociferations of a plagued man who offers conditions to Heaven and submerges it with his imprecations-how can we remain insensitive to such a thing? The closer we are to abdicating, the more these cries disturb us. Job is indeed of his race: his sobs are a show of force, an assault. "My bones are pierced in me in the night season," he laments. His lamentation culminates in a cry, and this cry rises through the vaults of heaven and makes God tremble. Insofar as, beyond our silences and our weaknesses, we dare lament our ordeals, we are all descendants of the great leper, heirs of his desolation and his moan. But too often our voices fall silent; and though he shows us how to work ourselves up to his accents, he does not manage to shake us out of our inertia. Indeed, he had the best of it: he knew Whom to vilify or implore, Whom to attack or pray to. But we-against whom are we to cry out? Our own kind? That seems to us absurd. No sooner articulated than our rebellions expire upon our lips. Despite the echoes he wakens in us, we are not entitled to consider Job our ancestor: our pains are too timid. And our dreads. With neither the will nor the nerve to savor our fears, how can we make them into a spur or a spasm of delight? We manage to tremble; but to know how to orient our tremors is an art: all rebellions proceed from it. He who would avoid resignation must educate, must attend to his fears, and transform them into acts and words: he will be more likely to succeed if he cultivates the Old Testament, paradise of the frisson.

By inculcating us with the horror of extravagant language, with respect and obedience in all things, Christianity has made our fears anemic. If it sought to win us over forever, it should have treated us harshly, promised us a perilous salvation. What can we expect from a genuflection that has lasted twenty centuries? Now that we are standing at last, we suffer dizzy spells: slaves emancipated in vain, rebels the demon mocks or is mortified by.

Job has transmitted his energy to his own people: thirsting like him for justice, they never yield before the evidence of an iniquitous world. Revolutionaries by instinct, the notion of renunciation fails to occur to them: if Job, that Biblical Prometheus, struggled with God, they will struggle with men The more fatality impregnates them, the more they revolt against it. Amorfati, a formula for amateurs of heroism, does not suit these people who have too much destiny to keep clinging to the idea of destiny Attached to life to the point of seeking to remake it, and to make the impossible Good triumph within it, they rush upon any system likely to confirm them in their illusion. No utopia fails to blind them, to excite their fanatic zeal. Not content with having preached the idea of progress, they have even seized upon it with a sensual and almost shameless fervor. Did they expect, by adopting it without reservation, to benefit by the salvation it promises humanity in general, to profit from a universal Grace, a universal apotheosis? The truism

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that all our disasters date from the moment when we began to glimpse the possibility of "something better"-they will not admit. If they live in an impasse, they reject it in their thoughts. Rebelling against the ineluctable as against their miseries, they feel freer at the very moment when the worst should fetter their minds. What did Job hope for on his dung-heap, what do they all hope for? The optimism of the plague-stricken According to an old treatise on psychiatry, they furnish the highest percentage of suicides. If this were true, it would prove that for them life deserves the effort to cut oneself off from it, and that they are too attached to it to be able to despair to the end. Their strength: rather make an end of everything than accustom oneself to, or delight in, despair. They assert themselves at the very moment they destroy themselves, in so great a horror do they hold surrender, release, the confession of lassitude. Such intensity must come from on high. I cannot explain it to myself otherwise. And if I entangle myself in their contradictions and wander, lost, through their secrets, I understand at least why they have always intrigued religious minds, from Pascal to Rozanov.

Have we thought enough about the reasons why these outcasts eliminate death from their thoughts, death the dominant idea of all exiles, as if, between them and it, there were no point of contact? Not that it leaves them indifferent, but in the course of banishing death from their minds they have managed to take a deliberately superficial attitude toward it. Perhaps, in remote ages, they granted it too much concern for death to bother them now; perhaps they do not think of it because of their quasi-imperishability: only ephemeral civilizations willingly chew the cud of nothingness. Whatever the reason, they have only life before them And that life which, for the rest of us, is summed up in a formula: "Everything is impossible" and whose last word is flatteringly addressed, to our failures, our abasement or our sterility-this life awakens in them a preference for the obstacle, a horror of deliverance and of any form of quietism. These warriors would have stoned Moses if he had addressed them in the language of a Buddha, the speech of metaphysical lassitude, offering annihilation and salvation. Neither peace nor beatitude for the man who cannot cultivate abandon: the absolute, as the suppression of all nostalgia, is a reward enjoyed only by those who force themselves to lay down their arms. Such a recompense disgusts these impenitent soldiers, these volunteers of malediction, this people of Desire By what aberration have we ever referred to their love of destruction? They-destroyers? Rather we should reproach them with not being destructive enough. For how many of our hopes are they not responsible! Far from conceiving demolition in itself, if they are anarchists, they always seek some future creation, some construction, impossible, perhaps, but craved. Then too, it would be a mistake to minimize the pact, unique of its kind, which they have concluded with their God, and of which all of them, atheists or not, retain the memory and the mark. This God, however we may strive against Him, is nonetheless present, carnal and relatively effective, as any tribal god should be, whereas ours, more universal, hence more anemic, is, like any spirit, remote and inoperative. The old Covenant, far more solid than the new, if it permits the sons of Israel to advance in concert with their turbulent Father, keeps them, in exchange, from appreciating the intrinsic beauty of destruction.

They make use of the notion of "progress" to combat the corrosive effects of their lucidity: it is their calculated evasion, their willed mythology. Even they, even these clear-sighted minds, recoil before the last consequences of doubt. One is truly skeptical only if one stands outside one's fate or if one renounces having a fate altogether. They are too engaged in theirs to be able to escape it. There is no Indifference among them-did they not introduce interjections into religion? Even when they permit themselves the luxury of being skeptics, theirs is the skepticism of embittered hearts. Solomon suggests a ravaged and lyrical Pyrrho Thus the most disabused of their ancestors, thus all of them. With what complacency they display their sufferings and open their wounds! This masquerade of confidences is only a way of hiding. Indiscreet and yet impenetrable, they escape you even when they have told you all their secrets. A being who has suffered, no matter how much you have described, classified, explained his ordeals, eludes you in what he is, in his real suffering. The closer you come to him, the more inaccessible he will seem. As for this stricken collectivity, you can examine their reactions at your leisure, you will nonetheless find yourselfconfronting a mass of unknowns.

However luminous their minds, a subterranean element resides in them: they appear, they burst forth, these Ubiquitous, remote beings always on the qui-vive, fleeing danger and soliciting it, rushing upon each sensation with the hysteria of the condemned, as if they had no time to wait and as if the Terrible lay in wait for them upon the very threshold of their delights. Happiness they cling to, taking advantage of it without restraint or scruple: as if they were encroaching upon other men's possessions. Too ardent to be Epicureans, they poison their pleasures, devour them, set about them with a haste, a frenzy which keeps them from affording the least solace: men ofaffairs in every sense ofthe word, from the most vulgar to the noblest. The obsession of afterwards plagues them; yet the art of living-the apanage of non-prophetic ages, that of Alcibiades, of Augustus, or of the Regent-consists in the integral experience of the present. Nothing Goethean in them: they never seek to arrest the moment, even the loveliest. Their prophets, who constantly call down the thunders of God, who demand that the enemy's cities be annihilated, know how to talk ashes. It is their madness that must have inspired Saint John to write the most admirably obscure book of antiquity. Issuing from a mythology of slaves, the Apocalypse represents the best-camouflaged settling of accounts that can be magined. In it, everything is prosecution, bile, and a pernicious future. Ezekiel, Isaiah, Jeremiah had certainly prepared the ground Skilled at making the most of their disorders or their visions, they scoured the terrain with an art never equalled since: their powerful and imprecise minds helped them in the task. For them, eternity was a pretext for convulsions, a spasm: vomiting imprecations and anthems, they wriggled before the eyes of a God insatiable. for hysterias. This was a religion in which man's relations with his Creator are exhausted in a war of epithets, in a tension which keeps him from pondering, from emphasizing and thereby from remedying his differences, a religion based on adjectives, effects of language, and in which style constitutes the only hyphen between heaven and earth.

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If these prophets, fanatics of the dust, poets of disaster, always predicted catastrophes, it was because they could not attach themselves to a reassuring present or a commonplace future. On the pretext of turning their people from idolatry, they poured out their rage, tormented them and sought to make them as frenzied, as terrible as themselves. Hence they had to harry, to singularize that people by ordeal, keep it from constituting, from organizing itself as a mortal nation By cries and threats, they succeeded in making it acquire that authority in angst and that look of a vagrant, insomniac horde which irritates the natives and disturbs their snores.

If someone were to object that they are not exceptional by their nature, I should reply that they are so by their destiny, an absolute destiny, a destiny in the pure state, which by conferring strength and excess raises them above themselves and strips them of all capacity to be mediocre. One might also object that they are not the only ones to define themselves by destiny, that the same is true of the Germans. No doubt; yet we forget that the destiny of the Germans, if they have one, is recent, and that it comes down to the tragic quality of a period; as a matter of fact, to two close-set failures.

These two peoples, secretly drawn to one another, could never reach an understanding: how could the Germans, those arrivistes of fatality, forgive the Jews for having a destiny superior to their own? Persecutions are born of hatred, not of disdain; and hatred is equivalent to a reproach one dares not make to oneself, to an intolerance with regard to our own ideal embodied in others. When we aspire to leave our province behind and dominate the world, we attack those who are no longer bound by any frontier: we resent their facility in uprooting themselves, their ubiquity. The Germans detested in the Jews their dream realized, a universality they could not achieve. They too wanted to be chosen: nothing predestined them to that condition. After having attempted to force History, with the motive of escaping and transcending it, they ended by sinking even deeper into it. Henceforth, losing all chance of ever rising to a metaphysical or religious destiny, they were to founder in a monumental and useless drama, without mystery or transcendence, one which, leaving the theologian and the philospher indifferent, interests only the historian. Had they been more difficult in the choice of their illusions, they would have afforded us another example than that of the greatest, the first of the ineffectual nations. He who chooses time is engulfed by it and buries his genius therein. One is chosen; one becomes so neither by resolve nor by decree. Still less by persecutions of those whose complicities with eternity one envies. Neither chosen nor damned, the Germans pursued those who could rightfully claim to be: the culminating moment of their expansion will count, in the distant future, only as an episode in the epic of the Jews I repeat, the epic, for what else is it, that succession of prodigies and exploits, that heroism of a tribe which, amid its miseries, ceaselessly threatens its God with an ultimatum? An epic whose denouement is not to be

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divined: will it be fulfilled elsewhere? or will it take the form of a disaster which escapes the perspicacity of our terrors?

A fatherland-heimat, patrie-is a moment-by-moment soporific. One cannot sufficiently envy-or pity-the Jews for not having one, or for having only provisionalones, Israel first of all. Whatever they do and wherever they go, their mission is to keep watch; this is the command oftheir immemorial status as aliens. A solution to their fate does not exist. There remain the arrangements with the Irreparable. Hitherto, they have found nothing better. This situation will last until the end of time. And it is to this situation that they owe the mishap of not perishing

In sum, though attached to this world, they do not really belong to it: there is something non-terrestrial in their passage on earth. Were they in far-off times the witnesses of a spectacle of beatitude for which they retain a certain nostalgia? And what must they have seen then which eludes our perceptions? Their penchant for utopias is merely a memory projected into the future, a vestige converted into an ideal. But it is their fate, even as they aspire to Paradise, to collide with the Wailing Wall.

Elegiac in their fashion, they dope themselves with regrets, believe in them, make them into a stimulant, an auxiliary, a means ofconquering, by the detour of history, their first, their ancient happiness. It is upon that happiness they rush, it is toward it they run. And that race lends them an expression, both spectral and triumphant, which terrifies and seduces us, laggards that we are, resigned in advance to a mediocre destiny and forever incapable of believing in the future of our regrets.

Monument of Nothing for Apollinaire

MICHEL BUTOR

"A statue made of what ?" Tristouse asked. "Marble? Bronze ?"

"No, that's too antique," answered the Bird ofBenin, "I must carve him a profound statue out ofnothing, like poetry, and like glory."

1) WILHELM

This is in Monaco. He is a little boy of eleven.

He has just made his first communion:

He looks:

There is the young street and you are still only a child

Your mother dresses you in nothing but blue and white

You are very devout and with the oldest ofyour schoolmates Rene Dalize

You share an exclusive taste for Church funerals

He listens:

It is nine o'clock and the gaslights are turned down blue you sneak out of the dormitory

You pray all night long in the school chapel

His name is Wilhelm.

"Who is his father?"

"No one knows."

"Some people say it's a certain Monsieur d'Aspermont."

"Some say it's Monsieur Theuret, the bishop of the principality."

"Others that it's merely the Cure of Monte Carlo."

"And you, you know who your father is?"

"At least we know who his mother is!"

"Oh yes, his mother is known!"

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"It's Madame de Kostrowitsky."

"Some people say it's just Kostrowitsky."

"Since it's a Polish name, you should say Kostrowitska."

"And you should spell it Kostrowicka."

"Her first name is Olga."

"Funny, I thought it was Angelica."

"I've always thought Wilhelm was a German name, are you German1"

"He's always at the top of his class in German."

"Maybe his father was German."

"It's their Kaiser's name; we call him Guillaume but in German it's Wilhelm; it's a name the Germans like a lot."

"Still, it must be the same thing in German and in Polish, you know his mother's Polish."

"I've heard she was Russian."

"Nowadays Polish and Russian are the same thing; there is no more Poland for the moment; all the Poles are Russians or Germans."

"Is he a Russian Pole or a German Pole? Find out where he was born."

"In Rome."

"Then maybe he's Italian."

"As a matter of fact he is Italian."

"How do you say Wilhelm in Italian?"

"Guglielmo.

"All the same, it's much simpler to say Guillaume!"

"My mother always calls me Wilhelm. I'd like to be Guillaume."

"And you don't have any other names?"

"Apollinaris or Apollinaire."

"Which one are you, Wilhelm or Guillaume?"

"Where do you come from? Which country do you belong to?"

Now you are on the shore of the Mediterranean

Under the lemon trees that bloom all year round

You go for a boatride with your friends

One comes from Nice, one from Menton and two from La Turbie

We stare horrified at the devilfish of the deep

And among the seaweed swim thefish that are the image ofthe Savior

But why does everyone in Monaco treat me like a foreigner?

They're not French either; they're from the principality. They speak French the same way I do, but they're no more French than I am.

But they all know where they come from and their father's name, and how to pronounce their first name! And they feel right at home, masters of all that surrounds them, so that they don't need to bother about it any more!

For them it's all so simple: this house has always been their house, this city, their city; it's as if they were leaning against it: the rest of the world is seen from this peaceful origin of theirs.

While for him, places, names, objects drift; they have to be grasped, classified,

enumerated, their coordinates discovered. What does it mean to be Wilhelm or Guillaume?

One day

One day I was waitingfor myself

I said to myself Guillaume it's time you came

So I couldfinally discover the person I am I who know the others

2) QU'VLO'V'?

If one thing is certain, it's that his language is French; he knows several foreign languages, but his language ; and he possesses it every bit as well as the others, better in fact. Unless

Isn't there something in his accent that gives him away, something they all laugh at despite all the prizes he wins, not the sign of his own country-if he could only have one I-but of that original wandering, of what makes his mother, though he has no other mother tongue but French, nonetheless and necessarily call him Wilhelm and not Guillaume?

And he listens intensely. Oh it's not only the immediate meaning of the words that interests him, but their precise sonority; he watches for the slightest intonations. And it's not enough for him to listen, he reads as much as he can, he devours books. Oh if he could only know all the words, all the old words, all the forbidden words, in all their nuances! And not only to read them, to see them, to wrest all their secrets from them, by studying the way they're put:

You readprospectuses catalogues posters that sing at the top of their lungs

That's poetry this morning andfor prose there are the newspapers

There are the 25-centime serials full ofdetective stories

Portraits ofgreat men and a thousand different headlines

He has to go up to the capital to hear his voices, the tone of his voices, settle in that center to measure the rest.

Now you walk alone in Paris through the crowds

Flocks ofbusses, bleating, roll by you

You are choked by anguish and by love

As ifyou were never to be loved again

Ifyou were living in the old days you would enter a monastery

But he cannot stay in Paris, he must move on with his mother, "WilhelmI", settle in Stavelot in the Belgian Ardennes, along with his brother Albert and his new "uncle" Jules Weil.

How hard he listens to this other French, appropriates all these Walloon words, stares at his new landscape:

"The guitar of Qu'vlo'v'? was a bit of wind that always moans through the Belgian Ardennes

How carefully he records what he hears in the inns, tries to steep himself in this other, Northern accent, to balance that of the Midi, thus to master all the more surely the accent of that center: Paris!

"Nom di Dio l exclaimed Qu'vlo'v'? you, the babo, you don't even have enough censes to pay for your peket, you're going to schlsf at Mdmdi or at Stavleu. Make it fast! Have on vere sol hawai. Get your lainwe going, and then out!"

How related he suddenly feels to these people who speak so strange a French, and whose nationality is Prussian:

"Qu'vlo'v' ? means Que voulez-vous?, and Qu'vlo'v'? was born, though the most Walloon Walloon of Walloonia, a Prussian in Mont, a place called Berg in German and located near Malmedy on the road through those dangerous bogs called Hauted-Fanges or Hautes-Fagnes, or more exactly Hohe-Venn, since we are already in Prussia, as is attested by the black and white stakes, the sand and silver ones, color of the night, color of the day, on all the roads."

In Le Poete assassine, Croniamantal-Apollinaire's real father will quite naturally become that reincarnation of Qu'vlo'v' ? who is Vierselin Tigoboth, and it is not surprising to discover, all through the manuscript, the first version Qu'vlo'v' ? under this name.

As for the name Wilhelm, it is pronounced Guyame: "And it would have been extraordinary indeed ifin a corner ofthe inn one failed to discover Guyame the poet, who had the gift of ubiquity, for he was to be seen among all the beer andpeket drinkers between Stavelot and Malmedy." The difference is in that first syllable, which has the ring of "gueux", [the French word for tramp or hobo.-Tr.]:

"Now we must take our courage in both hands, for this is the critical moment. The moment to tell the glory and the beauty of the hapless hobo Qu'vlo'v'? and of the poet Guillaume Wirin, whose rags also clad a fine begging bum. Forward march! Apollo! My inspiration and Guide, out of breath? Away with you, bring on the other, Hermes the thief, worthier than you to sing the death of the Walloon Qu'vlo'v'? over which all the elves of the Ambleve make their moan. Let him appear, the subtle thief with winged heels, Hermes, god of the Lyre and ofherds the thief, let him fling upon Qu'vlo'v'? and upon La Chancesse all the ganic flies believed, in the north, to torment certain lives like a doom. Let him bring with him my second Patron, in miter and cope, the holy Bishop Saint Apollinaire

It is impossible to catalogue all the alliterations and plays on words that give this text, the gem of L'Heresiarque et Cie, a kind of foretaste of Finnegan's Wake: "Now the Ambleve was close by and flowing cold, between the alders that cloaked it. The elves made their little glass slippers squeak on the beads carpeting the river bed. The wind perpetuated now the sad sounds ofthe guitar. The Elves' voices traversed the waters, and Qu'vlo'v'? from the shore heard them chattering: "Mnieu, mnieu, mnieu." Then he went down into the river, and as it was cold, the fear of death came

upon him. Fortunately the voices of the Elves drew closer:

"Mnie, mnie, mnie,

Then, nom de Dio! in the river he suddenly forgot all he knew, and realized that the Ambleve communicates underground with Lethe, since its waters cause the loss of knowledge. Nom di Dio! But the elves chattered so prettily now, closer and closer:

"Mme, mnie, mnie

And everywhere, in the fashion of a round, the Elves of the pouhons, or springs, which seethe in the forest, answered them

Reading such a text indicates one of the fundamental aspects of Apollinaire's art, one that will permit him to appear, after the torment of 1914, as the "modern" poet par excellence, as the very type of poet who, though inspired to an extraordinary degree by literature, and even for this reason, manages not to be "literary"; in other words, the overpowering awareness he has always retained of the physical reality of language; it is as if he has made poetry fall back out of the sky and down to earth in his admirableincapacity to forgetthatwords are first ofall somethingyou hear and see. This intense concentration on what he hears spoken or sung in the streets, in the inns, in the fields and woods, closely links two regions of his poetry, which for many critics even today seem contrary: the folkloric poem and the conversational poem.

As a matter of fact, the one derives quite naturally from the other, and we may even find a remarkable intermediary in a poem like Les Femmes.

Now it is obviously during the stay in Wallonia that he began to be interested, in a practical sense, in folklore, for the simple reason that in this region it was still to be encountered, and it was at this moment that Wilhelm de Kostrowitsky became Guillaume Apollinaire.

Not without difficulty, not without a tremendous effort. Hermes, god ofthieves the stay, indeed, turned out quite badly. Madame de Kostrowitsky, having previously returned to Paris, suddenly recalls her sons who, without money, must decamp on the sly. Trial, investigation: who are you? where do you come from?

You are in Paris, before the examining magistrate

Like a criminal you are put under arrest

And later, an instance of theft, it begins all over:

And what sinister voice howls

Guillaume what has become ofyou

3) THE SUPPRESSION OF PUNCTUATION ON THE FIRST PROOFS OF Alcools

He listened to the songs of the streets and of the woods, and trained himself carefully, methodically, to speak to himself in lines of verse, in strophes of this kind on his walks. Fernand Fleuret reports, in fact, that Le Voyageur is one of those "interpolated songs" and "popular ballads with neither beginning nor end" that he and Apollinaire improvised as they walked along the country roads.

As a result of this practice, Apollinaire's prosody, departing from that of the romantics which was based on syllable-count, returns to the much older prosody which regards the line of verse as a unit of utterance.

In the recording he made in 1914 for the Sorbonne of Marie, Le Pont Mirabeau and, in fact, Le Voyageur, Apollinaire deliberately isolates each line.

It follows that the suppression of punctuation in Alcools is the direct consequence of this state of things. Whereas punctuation is indispensable in the broken, crannied versification of a Hugo, the internal silences in the lines often being longer than those which separate the lines, the introduction of punctuation marks in the first strophe of La Chanson du Mal Aime is not only futile but harmful: it risks provoking considerable errors of intonation: the suppression of the pause after the second line, the break in the unit formed by the third:

Un soir de demi-brume a Londres

Un voyou qui ressemblait a Mon amour vint a ma rencontre

Obviously he must have suffered from such errors, he must have heard them made, must have committed them himself at times; he must have wondered how to keep the lines from being read:

Un soir de demi-brume a Londres

Un voyou, qui ressemblait a mon amour, Vint a ma rencontre

Thus the line of verse in his practice once again becomes that "perfect line" Mallarme spoke of. An auditory or oral unit is naturally transposed into "volume" in a visual unit, a reading unit. The typographic arrangement of the poem recovers its origin.

This suppression has the further value of preserving a certain number of the words' properties which they have when heard and which generally lose when printed, at least in the West, particularly grammatical ambiguities.

If, in the middle of a conversation or a revery, I happed to pick up these words: "mon amour", they will radiate, so to speak, in all directions; they are like an atom with valences which seek out their complements. It is not possible that they will be attached for me to the preceding words which I have not heard, or to the succeeding ones which I listen for. If I hear this isolated line of verse:

Mon amour vint a ma rencontre

it has an obvious meaning, amour is the subject of vint. If I hear:

Un voyou qui ressemblait a Mon amour amour is the complement of ressemblait. But if I write: Mon amour, vint a ma rencontre

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then I know that amour cannot be the subject of vint ; the comma is not simply the indication of a brief pause, it is a barrier in the meaning, it keeps the word from radiating in a certain direction. By suppressing the punctuation, I leave the system as a whole its possibilities of error and correction. Thus:

Au tournant d'une rue bridant

De tous lesfeux de ses facades

Plaies du brouillard sanguinolent

OU se lamentaient les facades

Une femme lui ressemblant

The strophe has a complete meaning, the principal proposition has no verb, but we are quite used to that. In the following strophe, another sentence begins:

C'etait son regard d'inhumaine

La cicatrice a son cou nu

But the third line abruptly returns to the preceding sentence:

Sortit saoule d'une taverne

Au moment ouje reconnus

la faussete de l'amour meme

If I write:

(C'erait son regard d'inhumaine,

La cicatrice a son cou nu-)

Sortit seule d'une taverne

the entire effect of surprise disappears, and with it the whole force of this line. Particularly interesting from this point of view are the texts which Apollinaire had first written in punctuated prose and which he then cut up into verse, as La Maison des Morts, published first as a prose tale with the title L'Obituaire ; the paragraphs then became strophes; but let us consider this passage:

Soudain

Rapide comme ma memoire

Les yeux se rallumerent

De cellule vitree en cellule vitree

Le ciel se peupla d'une apocalypse

Vivace

Et la terre plate a l'infini

Comme avant Galilee

Se couvrit de mille mythologies immobiles

In almost every case, the line break simply replaces the missing comma or period, which we restore without any possible doubt; on the other hand, between apocalypse

and vivace, the pause cannot be noted by any sign of punctuation: a comma would break the meaning, three dots or a dash would introduce a false intonation. Similarly, the fact that we are not initially sure of the sign which in prose would separate

De cellule vitree en cellule vitree from

Le ciel se peupla d'une apocalypse

allows this line to benefit, in a sense, from the preceding one.

Lastly, this movement of our eye being taken much more frequently and, in particular, at much greater length than in the punctuated prose version, we are forced to read more slowly; a muffled silence invades the entire narrative like the blank margin of the page.

Of course the advantages of punctuation in the control not only ofgrammar but of intonation are tremendous and so obvious that the radical solution adopted by Apollinaire and by so many poets after him: total suppression, is necessarily provisional, so many opportunities being accessible when we combine the two systems; but it has had an eminent value as a manifesto, a proclamation, and has obliged us to become aware once again of what punctuation really was, of its value and its function, as well as of what verse was, and its arrangement on the page. If we can today explore the entire realm which extends from Apollinaire's non-punctuation to the punctuation of classical prose, it is indeed to him that we owe the fact, and the experiments which he conducted in this realm deserve the closest study.

4) THE CRIES OF LONDON

This intense interest in the phenomenon of language is also one of the roots of his curiosity about erotic works, to a large degree explains the astonishing modernity of his attitude toward them. The point, in fact, is not to leave a single region of the vocabulary in obscurity, to know how we can speak about anything, how in fact we do speak about everything, even in secret:

For there are so many things I dare not tell you So many things you will not let me say

In his introduction to some selections from Sade, he remarks, when he comes to describing Les 120 Journees de Sodome : "It is understood in De Sade that the sensations that derive from the language of words are very powerful ones." and he expatiates at length on the settings of these terrible "narratives" which form the essential part of the work, all the rest, what is performed, being merely their accompaniment and consequence.

But what is most striking is his preface to John Cleland's Memoirs ofFanny Hill. Any other preface-writer might have introduced into it long extracts from Casanova's Memoirs, and as much as he could of a work entitled The Seraglios of London;

but on the pretext of flagellation, he calls our attention to "that curious work The Cries ofLondon," and from this moment we realize that John Cleland and the society he describes really interest him only as the most secret part of an entirely fascinating whole.

"The foregoing digressions have taken us away from our author," he declares, nor is he about to return to him. He has fallen on that gold mine, The Cries ofLondon, and cannot bear to tear himself from it. And thus he identifies himself with an ideal Cleland:

Un soir de demi-brume a Londres

Un voyou qui ressemblai a

[One half-foggy evening in London

A guttersnipe who looked like]

who takes us through the old London, as he himself explored cities. He is obliged to explain to us that unfortunately the real John Cleland was not an Apollinaire:

"But he did not undertake the task of describing this period He, Apollinaire, would not have missed such a splendid opportunity; he listens by the intermediary of his book to the cries of old London as he listened to the Walloon songs and contentions between Stavelot and Malmedy, as he was to listen to the conversations around him on a certain Monday in the Rue Christine. He is amazed, he repeats them to himself, plays with them; he will offer us more than sixty ofthem:

"Here is a particularly melodious cry: 'Ground ivy, ground ivy, come buy my ground ivy; come buy my water cresses.' The match-seller sang out: 'Matches, maids / my pickedpointed matches t' The trap seller carried a whole assortment which he advertised thus: 'Buy a mouse trap, or a trap for your rats.'

What a shame that Apollinaire should not have known what the great musician Orlando Gibbons had done with the cries of London!

5) LE ROI-LuNE

From the cries of London we move on to the cries of the whole world, and just as the songs appeared among conversations and cries, so all this appears among other noises, which language can sometimes reproduce. He will tell us in La Victoire:

Let us stir up the language

Send out sputtering lines

We want new sounds new sounds new sounds

We want consonants without vowels

Consonants that explode resoundingly

Imitate the sound of the top

Let a long, nasal sound crackle

Click your tongue

The "indecent" character of noise, on which Apollinaire readily insists (the poem continues:

Use of the muffled noise of a man eating without manners

The aspiratedscraping sound ofan expectoration wouldalso make afine consonant

The various explosive labials would also make your speeches loud

Get in the habit ofbelching at will

And what letter sinks like the sound of a bell down through the memory)

links it closely to erotic literature, and thus the cries of London appear quite naturally among those sounds of London of which certain ones are evoked by Cleland's work; thus in Le Roi-Lune, gem of Le Poete assassine, the great poem on the noises of the world quite naturally follows the voluptuous concert provoked by the curious machines resembling phonographs:

" These young men were lying over there. On the mattress which covered the ground, one could still see several wooden boxes opening the boxes, they set the machines going, which began turning slowly rather like the cylinders of phonographs. The operators still wore a kind of girdle which was attached to the machine at one end, and it seemed to me that they all must have looked like Ixion when he caressed the Phantom of the Clouds, the invisible Juno. The hands of these young men fluttered before them as if they were stroking supple and worshipped bodies. Their mouths gave adoring kisses to the air. Soon they became more lascivious and, irrepressible, wed the empty atmosphere. I was disconcerted, as ifI had watched the upsetting frolics of a college of priapic madmen; sounds came out of their mouths, words of love, voluptuous gasps, names so ancient in which I recognized those of the learned Helots, of Lola Montes, of a certain octoroon who must have come from some plantation in Louisiana in the eighteenth century; someone kept saying 'page, my handsome page.'

This anachronistic orgy suddenly reminded me of the inscriptions in the corridor. I listened more carefully to the lascivious terms

These machines have their origin in the last tale of L'Heresiarque et Cie, sixth of the adventures of Amphion the false Messiah (Amphion built cities with his singing), entitled Le Toucher a Distance:

"Just as the voice can be carried from one point to another very remote from it, similarly the appearance of a body, and the properties of resistance by which the blind acquire a notion of it, can be transmitted, without its being necessary that anything link the ubiquist to the bodies he is projecting."

declared Amphion the false Messiah, Baron d'Ormesan, Apollinaire's doubledamned figure.

Already his invention had an erotic aspect:

TRI-QUARTERLY

"Just consider the practical side of this invention! My mistress, a woman both charming and married, has never been informed of my journeys. She is even unaware that I have ever left Paris, for each week, on Wednesday, when she arrives at my house greedy for caresses, she finds me in bed

In Le Roi-Lune, the machine is endowed with a temporal dimension:

"This machine had as its function: on the one hand, to abstract from time a certain portion of space and to establish itself there at a certain moment and for only a few instants, for the machine was not very powerful; on the other, to make visible and tangible to the person putting on the strap the portion of time resuscitated."

By this means, erotic curiosity is revealed as a prefiguration of poetic curiosity; it is the same kind of vigilance, of attention; it is moreover by the intermediary of language that the young man wandering in the streets of London or of Paris will manage to grasp, to possess something besides a phantom of the clouds:

"Machines more powerful and built with a purpose more in rapport with modern morality might serve to reconstitute historic scenes. No doubt a combination with a phonetic device would permit the inventor, if he would yield up his secret to the public, instead of making it serve no more than the amusement of some subterranean debauchees, would permit, I say, giving the total appearance of the past in its discovered fragments, so that there might soon be explorers of past time as there are still, and for some time to come, explorers of unknown lands. One of these explorers will dedicate himself to reconstructing, reel by reel, the life of Napoleon. Newspapers will publish reports such as the following: "Monsieur X time explorer, has just, by a happy chance, discovered the poet Villon, whose life is still so little known, and, cylinder by cylinder, he will not lose him for a minute."

Ifollowed this bad boy Who whistled hands in his pockets

It is not surprising if, in the pages that follow, among the subsequent halls of the strange underground palace ruled over by the ghost of Ludwig II of Bavaria, we should come upon one of these phonetic devices, and if the link between the two inventions is an organ placed under the sign of Wagner:

"Around the hall, great brass horns emerged from the walls. The strange personage, whose anachronistic aspect contrasted so powerfully with the metallic modernity of this hall, was sitting in front of a keyboard on one key of which he pressed with a weary expression, and the key remained depressed, while there emerged from one of the horns a strange and persistent murmur whose meaning I did not at first discern.

The unknown man listened attentively for a moment to these murmurs. Suddenly he stood up, and making a gesture that was both effeminate and

theatrical, his right hand extended, his left over his heart, while the procession advanced from the oral sites, he exclaimed: 'Eremitical kingdom! 0 country of calm morning .'

Each of the twenty versicles which follow, corresponding to a key of the instrument, will be linked to one of the 24 time spindles. Here is the table of hours and places: dawn

Korea sunrise

Japan morning

New Zealand this splendid morning continued

Tahiti

American West

Chicago

New York

noon

four six seven angelus starry night

ten midnight one a.m.

three a.m. nearly dawn

Then:

Mexico

Rio de Janeiro

St.-Pierre de la Martinique

Paris

Bonn

near Naples

Tripolitania

Ispahan

Central Asia

India

Thibet

Saigon

Peking

Korea

"The king's fingers ran over the keys, at random, causing to arise, simultaneously in a sense, all the murmurs of this world around which we had just, motionless, circled as ear-witnesses."

Apollinaire did not feel the need to check on a globe or a pianisphere the arrangement of his oral sites; he would have immediately noticed, among other things, that the order should have been: American West, Mexico, Chicago, New York, Saint-Pierre de la Martinique, Rio de Janeiro, Paris, but since, for most of us, the representation of the earth is certainly as confused as the poet's, and even for geographers aside from their working hours, he nonetheless succeeded in making the planet turn admirably to our ear; and is it not captivating to grasp in this way the distortions of his mode of projection?

This is obviously the oldest of the simultaneous poems, and it considerably enlightens the other. Thus, here is the beginning of Arbre: You sing with the others while the phonographs gallop

Where are the blind where have they gone

The only leaf Ipicked has changed into several mirages

TRI-QUARTERLY

Do not abandon me among this crowd of women at the market

Ispahan has become a sky ofblue-enameled tiles

And in Le Roi-Lune:

Here we are at the Papeete marketplace the lustful vahines ofthe New Cytherea were wandering about

A moment later, ten o'clock! Are these beggars complaining, groaning so eagerly?

The king who hears them murmurs:

"That is the voice ofIspahan l hear, emergingfrom a night dark as the blood of poppies."

6) LES FENhRES

Many others and in particular Les Fenetres, apropos of which he wrote to Madeleine on July 30, 1915:

"Then, I am very fond of my verses since Aleools, there are enough for at least one book and I am particularly taken with Les Fenetres, which has been published in a catalogue of Delaunay's paintings. They proceeded from an esthetic that is altogether new, one whose means I have not since had in my control

and on November 30:

"One of my poems which I like most: Les Fenetres," (Since I shall be concerned with it at some length, I had better quote it entire first:)

Les Fenetres

From red to green all the yellow dies

When the macaws sing in their natalforests

Slaughter ofpihis

There is a poem to write about the bird that has only one wing

We shall send it by telephone

Giant traumatism

It makes the eyes run

There is a pretty girl among the young women of Turin

The poor young man blew his nose in his white tie

You will raise the curtain

And now the window is opening

Spiders when the hands wove the light

Beauty pallor unfathomable violets

We shall try in vain to take a rest

We shall begin at midnight

When we have time we have freedom

Anvils Lotte many Suns and the Sea-Urchin of the sunset

An old pair ofyellow slippers in front of the window

Towers

The Towers are the streets

Wells

The Wells are the squares

Wells

Hollow trees that shelter the vagabond nasturtiums

The Chabins sing unbearable tunes

To their brown women

And the wa-wa goose trumpets to the north

Where the rat-hunters

Scrape the peltries

Sparkling diamond

Vancouver

Where the white train of snow and nightfiresflees winter

o Paris

From red to green all the yellow dies

Paris Vancouver Hyeres Maintenon New York and the Antilles

The window opens like an orange

The lovelyfruit of the light

In Le Roi-Lune :

Then came Italy, near Naples. The cabmen were playing morra on a starry night

It is six o'clock in Saint-Pierre de la Martinique, the masked dancers arrive singing at the balls decorated with huge red canna blossoms. We hear them singing:

�a qui pas connaite Bela chabin ch«

�a qui pas connaite Robelo chabin

Now we are in America, the prairies are tremendous, no doubt a city has appeared, especially from this station from which the pullman is leaving whose whistle I hear along with the king

In Les Fenetres:

Wells

Hollow trees that shelter the vagabond nasturtiums

The Chabins sing unbearable tunes

To their brown women

And the wa-wa goose trumpets to the north

Where the rat hunters

Scrape the peltries

Sparkling diamond

Vancouver

Where the white train of snow and nightfiresflees winter

It will be noted that I have inverted the order of the oral sites borrowed from Le Roi-Lune. This is not a matter of a conscious repetition, but rather that Apollinaire's imagination, turning in the opposite direction around the globe, naturally rediscovers the same signs.

As for the beginning of the poem, it was already making the earth tum. Macaws come from South America, and the pihis from China, as Zone informed us:

TRI-QVARTERLY

The eagle plummetsfrom the horizon uttering a great scream

Andfrom America comes the little colibri

From China have come the long and supple pihis

That have only one wing and that fly in pairs

Then here comes the dove immaculate spirit

Andre Billy recounts in his Apollinaire vivant that this poem-conversation emerged "to a large degree" from the improvised collaboration of Apollinaire, Dupuy (Rene Dalize, "the oldest of your schoolmates") and himself sitting around a table Chez Crucifix. Thanks to the extraordinary skill with which Apollinaire could grasp in what he heard what would retain its tone, its presence when printed, it is easy to discover which are the lines which derive in this fashion from the murmur of a cafe, a rumor in which the good Andre Billy and Rene Dalize were merely, for the poet, the nearest participants:

The poor young man blew his nose in his white tie

We shall try in vain to take a rest

We shall begin at midnight

When we have time we have freedom

On the other hand Robert and Sonia Delaunay, for whom the poem was written, declare that it was composed in their studio; here again it is easy to isolate what comes from there: the description of the place:

Anvils Lotte many Suns and the Sea-Urchin of the sunset

An old pair ofyellow slippers in front of the window and naturally the evocation of the paintings, striking for anyone who knows Delaunay's work at all:

From red to green all the yellow dies

Giant traumatism

It makes the eyes run

You will raise the curtain

And now the window is opening

Spiders when the hands wove the light

Beauty pallor unfathomable violets many Suns in front of the window

Towers

The Towers are the streets

Wells

The Wells are the squares

Wells

o Paris

From red to green all the yellow dies

The window opens like an orange

The lovelyfruit of the light, of the paintings and of their titles: Paris Vancouver Hyeres Maintenon New York and the Antilles; It will suffice to read the column, certainly by Apollinaire, which Les Soirees de Paris devoted to the first Berlin salon d'automne, on November 15, 1913: "The remarks in the catalogue concerning the Delaunay entries are so delicious that we shall forever regret not having seen what he is exhibiting:

Sun 1; Sun 2; Sun 3; Sun 4; Sun Tower airplaine simultaneous;

Seine Tower Wheel Balloon Rainbow simultaneous

4th simultaneous Representation: Paris New York Berlin Moscow The Tower simultaneous, pencils of colors the prepresentation for the book of the colors of the Tower simultaneous with Everything " Apollinaire had of course seen all this in his friend's studio. We see that the poem, like a Delaunay picture, is formed of concentric circles:

Planetary poem: the entire earth, (the"orange", in the elementary school manuals, is even today one of the first representations of the earth suggested to our children,) Conversation poem: everyday Paris, streets and cafes, Still life poem: the painter's labor

These three zones are linked by the windows; thus the line: You will raise the curtain is both an element of the conversation poem and a description of the artist's labor; and there are window words on which the poet plays, such as Towers and Wells, since in French the words Tours and Puits are aural puns for the words meaning Turns and Then. The window of the Delaunay studio overlooks the street, but his paintings, whether they are called Les Fenetres or not, are also windows which give onto the street, then onto the whole world, open streets to the whole world, permit us to "understand" the everyday spectacle within a view of the incomparably surer and vaster reality.

Hitherto we had taken as a leading thread Apollinaire's sense of hearing, now we must follow him in his sight, his "watches". The passage of Le Roi-Lune on the amorous noises and cries is framed by those on graffiti; he himself, he tells us, leaving the singular boudoir, cannot keep from adding one (the interest in graffiti is obviously the formal origin of several pages of Calligrammes). The aural world, the oral sites, normally appear within a visual landscape, and language is not only something one hears, communicating with everything audible, but as soon as it becomes writing, something one sees, communicating with everything visible, causing the two regions to communicate to a high degree:

"Picasso and Braque introduced into their works of art letters from signs and

other inscriptions because, in a modern city, the advertisement, the inscription, the sign playa very important artistic role, and because they adapt themselves to this end."

The meeting with Picasso was obviously one of the decisive milestones in this itinerary of vision. The first texts Apollinaire devotes to him, during the blue period, attest not only to a great enthusiasm for the painter's talent, but to the recognition of a profound emotional affinity, going back to the earliest memories: "There are children who have wandered without learning the catechism. They stop and the rain dries up: 'Look! There are people who live in front of these shacks and their clothes are poor.' These children no one embraces understand so much. Mama, love me! They know how to tumble, and the somersaults they succeed in performing are like mental exercises

Thus these "saltimbanques" become the figures of his own original wanderings, of that drifting. And at the end of a certain time, his friend's cubism was to seem to him a kind of visible symbol of the solution to these problems and obsessions. Instead of knowing if the point of origin is here or there, if my ancestors were born here or there, if the point of view is here or there, I shall achieve images which will be equally valid for here and there, which "comprehend" the two points of view. Abandoning the impressionist "silhouette", I shall combine "profiles" which will allow me to situate all silhouettes subsequently. The definition Apollinaire gave of Picasso's art in 1913 is truly prophetic-I believe we have had to wait until these recent years to become capable of perceiving its full scope:

"A new man, the world is his new representation. He enumerates its elements, its details, with a brutality which can also be graceful. He is a new-born babe which puts order into the universe for his own use and also in order to facilitate his relations with his own kind. This enumeration has the greatness of the epic, and with order explodes the drama. We may contest a system, an idea, a date, a resemblance, but I do not see how we could contest the simple action of the enumerator."

If, in La Ville de Paris, Montmartre called for its complement the Eiffel Tower, in the "4th simultaneous Representation", as the red called for the green, Paris calls for its complement New York, Berlin, Moscow: o Paris

From red to green all the yellow dies

Paris Vancouver Hyeres Maintenon New York and the Antilles

To the complementarity of forms, Delaunay added that of colors, to the complementarity of details or aspects in an object, that of these objects as details or aspects in an urban whole, and to the latter the complementarity of all cities forming a network around the earth.

This esthetic of wholes, of which that of surprise is only a particular case, Apollinaire had practiced naively for a long time; thus in La Chanson du Mal Aime, the three interludes: "Aubade sung to a Laetare of the year gone by", "Reply of the Zaporozhye Cossacks to the Sultan of Constantinople" and "The Seven Swords", contrast with the tone of the other strophes and set them off.

But the example ofthe painters allowed Apollinaire to achieve a more acute aware-

TRI-QUARTERLy 139

ness of this method. He was moreover to anticipate in the pictures of the futurists, and in particular in their titles, the possibility of a new dimension into which he would to try to sweep Delaunay, who was to understand nothing about it. We know that the label "futurist" applied by Apollinaire to Delaunay provoked their quarrel. It was a question of completing a certain moment by another, of achieving figures within time:

There is also time one can drive away or bring back, for the question is not only "who am I?" and "where am I?" but also "when am 11"

Thus, in L'Infirme divinise which constitutes part of Le Poete assassine:

"The whole world and all the ages were thus for him a well-tempered instrument which his hand alone touched accurately."

Thus in Les Fenetres, since the words Tours and Putts=Towers and Wells-have attracted our attention to puns, we shall have no difficulty hearing the secret contrast which links Hyeres et Maintenon [puns on the words Hier and Maintenon, French for yesterday and tomorrow. - Tr.]

From the moment when the poet accords such attention to what is simultaneous and to what is successive, to the wholes which can be traversed in all directions, or in only one, he is obliged to translate it in his books, to find a means of transcending the simple succession of lines of verse, of thus more or less spreading out his poem before our eyes: noise, cries, conversations, songs, chants, inscriptions or speeches. But if I begin talking about calligrams

7) ENVOI

Apollinaire had flung himself heart and soul into the war; it was a matter of ridding himself at last of that shameful mask "Wilhelm", to become that Guillaume women could love; and this entire war was for him, wandering son of the wandering Qu'vlo'v'?, the WaUoonizing Walloon of Walloonia born a Prussian at Mont near Malmedy, the generalization of his inner drama, all Europe then in search of its site. He was thirty-eight when he died; he would be considered today as a young poet; he considered himself as at the start of his career, and his finest books as first stammerings. And how many insults he had received! How much nonsense he had had to put up with!

We are not your enemies

We want to give you huge and strange realms

Where there are new fires colors never seen

A thousand imponderable hallucinations

Which must be accorded reality

We want to explore kindness that tremendous country where everything is still There is also time one can drive away or bring back

Pity us who fight always at the frontiers

Of the limitless and of thefuture

Pity our mistakes pity our sins

Apollinaire was a specifically modern poet. He accepted the challenge of Rimbaud's exhortation that it is necessary to be absolutely modern. He accepted the challenge implicit in the cubist painting invented by his friends. He intended it to be modern and he succeeded, but his success was not without paradox. Although he was morallyand intellectually and artistically concerned with the idea of the modern, he could write:

"The most modern European is you, Pope Pius X." This will strike many as a contradiction. Indeed, it is a contradiction, but it is one of those very special, very fertile ones that are characteristic of the whole development of modern art; for Apollinaire did not look at the idea of the modern from the point of view of Christianity, but at Christianity from the point of view of the modern. In this light religion suddenly looked very new and strange to him, so much so that he declared:

That religion alone remains new that religion Remains as simple as the hangars of an Airport.

The symbolism is not accidental. That is to say, the comparison between the airplane hangars and the church becomes very clear when later in the same poem, Zone, Christ is compared to an Aviator. But to fully understand the quality ofApollinaire's mind and sensibility one must also observe that in this very same poem where he declares how modern religion seems to him he also expresses his impression that: the automobiles have the air of being ancient

It is not the purpose here to make a complete examination of Zone, but to isolate that very sophisticated and paradoxical attitude toward things ancient and modern that could result in a 2000-year-old religion looking new, and something as new and modern as an automobile in 1912 already looking passe. Because it was this same attitude that permeated Apollinaire's revival of an ancient literary form, the technopaegnia, that was several centuries older than Christianity. The poem Zone begins,

At last, you are through with the old world but paradoxically it is almost a manifesto for the calligrams the poet was about to reinvent. After all, if the Pope could have a relation to the heavens as absolutely modern as that of an aviator, why couldn't an old poetic form, even one as pedantic as figured verse, have a relation

to poetry as absolutely modern as the Eiffel Tower, A Lover, A Mandolin, or Rain?

"Apollinaire," wrote his friend, Andre Billy, "had no illusions about the originality of his work, he knew that the number of ideas of which the human spirit is susceptible has been calculated He hoped perhaps to restore the genre and introduce a grace, an imagination, a genius unknown to his predecessors."

It is unnecessary to go over the history of figured verse, which I have done elsewhere, in order to appreciate the grade, the imagination, the genius of Apollinaire's creations in this form. Of the seventy or so examples in the Pleiade Edition of his complete poetry, we have here four that contain the basic themes of the whole suite: War, Love, Grief, and Joy.

Keeping in mind that in figured verse the shape of the poem is the main metaphor of the poem, one notices first the strength of Apollinaire's metaphors. I find it impossible ever to look at the Eiffel Tower now without seeing it as the tongue of Paris stuck out at the Germans. Poetry and patriotism achieve a rare, witty and authentic synthesis here. And certainly I never read in Hesiod or Sappho the classic definition of Eros, or Love, as "the limbloosener" without thinking of Apollinaire's exuberant little lover with his limbs loosened to the point of flying apart. Aristotle asserted that the only aspect of poetry that can't be learned is metaphor, "the genius for resemblances." Apollinaire's resemblances have a special resonance because thay transcend the ordinary order of the words of a poem and make a picture on the page. In this kind of poem we perceive the metaphor before we have even read the poem. Apollinaire's genius was to have an image as strong and simple as a drawing by Picasso carrying with effortless wit a whole state of mind. In the Eiffel Tower and the Lover both the poet's patriotism and his attitude toward love achieve a quick, vivid and simple transformation into the metaphor. In the Mandolin, however, everything is more complicated. The two themes are present but are further along on the stages of life's way. To patriotism has been added the possibility of battle, to the enthusiasm of lovers has been added the reality of Woman. Thus the impending battles of World War I are merged with the personal difficulties the poet was having with "Lou"-Mlle. Louise de Coligny-Chatillon. It is not possible to explain every detail of this poem; it is intended to be a very private and personal message. Andre Billy writes that many of the Calligrams will never be deciphered because Apollinaire had made them undecipherable. If we can only speculate about the ultimate meaning of the Mandolin we can still take in the magical ambiguity of its image, nicely balancing what it reveals and what it does not. The Mandolin is the traditional symbol of the troubadour lover courting his beloved, and there is in the text the echo of the lover shot by Cupid's darts. But here they have been transformed into bullets, and it is the earth itself which trembles "like a mandolin" from the explosions of battle. Is the poem really about war or really about love? Both at once, it would seem. And somehow it is all because of the reasoning of Woman that both are the way they are, that battles require that one must be struck by a bullet to pierce the truth of battle, that love requires that one must be "slain" by love to pierce the truth of love. This serenade to feminine logic is itself an example of feminine logic. Only "Lou" herself probably got the complete message; if, indeed, she did. A little after the composition of this poem, however, Lou became the poet's mistress, only to be replaced in his affections by a girl he met on a train while returning to his regiment. The poet's reference to "my life's marvellous encounters" in It is Raining was written six months earlier, but his meeting with Madeleine Pages was certainly to be counted by him among his marvellous encounters. Perhaps if the poet had not already disposed himself to have "marvellous encounters," the later one would never have occurred.

Patriot, soldier, lover, poet and modernist, Apollinaire lived his life and his poetry simultaneously. Other poets have done this. But few with the sort of daily renewal that was Apollinaire's special characteristic. Many of his figured verse poems were written spontaneously in the presence of friends or incorporated in his letters. His revival of this ancient form succeeded because it was necessary to the daily revival of himself. The conscious modernist envied in the rituals of Catholicism the God who died on Friday and was "resuscitated" on Sunday. Apollinaire's calligrams are ritual images of the poet's own resuscitations.

TRI-QUARTERLY

translated by Charles Boultenhouse and Allen Tanner

Four Calligrams

by Guillaume Apollinaire

H AIL TO THE WORLD WHOSE ELOQUENT TONGUE I AM WHICH F�OM THE MOUTH OF PARtS

STICKS OUT AND WILL ALWA.'(S OUT AT ERM ST'CK THE G ANS

THE OFFICE or Derision

JEAN-PAUL ARON

CHARA CTERS:

THE DIRECTOR, Marcel Simon. THE EMPLOYEE, Raymond Taillard. THE COUNSELOR. A STUDENT, Moreau. A STUDENT, Fromentin. AN ApPLICANT

THE SECRETARY, Miss Marie-Therese. THE DIRECTOR'S WIFE, Mrs. Simon. STUDENTS.

A luxuriously appointed room. Behind a modern desk, the Director. The desk bare except for several telephones. Seated in a chair facing the Director, a young man. On the wall, immense photographs of distant countries.

THE DIRECTOR-You please me. I am on the point of hiring you.

TAILLARD-I am honored, Sir. Please believe in the expression of my gratitude.

THE DIRECTOR-You have nice little cheeks.

TAILLARD-I am aware of the interest that the Director must take in my personal appearance.

THE DIRECToR-There's good sense in that head, I feel certain, (With a paternal and indulgent air) Do you know, by the way, what we do in this firm?

TAILLARD-I've bee� told, Sir, that you operate an employment agency.

THE DIRECTOR (drily)-You were misinformed. A ridiculous definition. My enemies must have told you that. They'll do anything to hurt me. (Vigorously) I place ability. They say that we lack men. That's not true. The men are there. What is lacking is the men to whip the men into shape. They have complicated everything with their

TRI-QUARTERLy 147

machines, their coordinators, (He looks disgusted.) They have ruined everything. I believe in brains.

TAILLARo-There is in your analysis, Sir, the lucidity of an eagle.

THE DIREcToR-You're very kind. There is clairvoyance, let's call it clairvoyance One must think on a grand scale. Never sleep, that is my iron rule.

TAILLARo-Sir, if I weren't afraid of sounding like a flatterer, I would say that you have lifted my spirits to a state of ebullience.

THE DIRECTOR-You do please me. There is nothing to that state, however, except a deep desire to understand.

TAILLARO-I will never succeed! Never!

THE DIRECTOR-At what, little fellow?

TAILLARO-At raising myself to the level of your enterprise.

THE DIRECTOR-YOU are modest and sweet. I am engaging you. You may take over your duties this very instant.

TAILLARo-Sir, I have just found a father, here.

THE DIRECTOR (enchanted)-Isn't he amusing! Not a father, a big brother, for goodness sake! Now, you will have to leave me. You have been selected. You must get to work.

TAILLARO-Would the Director be kind enough to give me my schedule?

THE DIRECTOR-Careful! Never use that word on these premises. We don't like it at all. At Simon's we practice initiative. You have just wounded me. If you need a schedule in order to work, go next door, go and see Coquatrix.

TAILLARO-I did not mean to cause any pain to the Director, Sir.

THE DIRECTOR (with a weary look) Run along! My secretary will fill out your slip since it means so much to you: last name first, foreign languages, sports and games, esthetic preferences. Run along!

(The employee rises, bows, goes to the door, opens it, bows again, goes out.)

The secretarial office. Two metal desks. On the right, towards the rear, the desk of the secretary Marie-Therese. On her desk a typewriter, folders of papers. Towards the front, center stage, Raymond Taillard's desk. He is seated, examines various dossiers, turns an adjustable light on and off several times. He appears to be reading, then turns around abruptly.

TAILLARO-Miss Marie-Therese.

MARIE-THERESE (who is typing and stops)-Sir?

TAILLARo-Have you been here very long?

MARIE-THllRESE (drily)-I have been in the Director's service for two years, Sir.

TAILLARO-Oh.

(She begins typing again.)

TAILLARO (all of a sudden)-Actually, what does he do?

MARIE-THEREsE-You know what he does. Why are you trying to fool me? You spend hours in his office. Do you think that I have eyes in my typewriter?

TAiLLARD-He told me what I was supposed to do. But he keeps being vague about what he's doing.

MARIE-THEREsE-I'm sorry, Sir, but I can't answer you. Here everyone looks out for himself, and I've already wasted several minutes listening to your insinuations. Please remember that I am paid by the page.

TAILLARD-I'll make it up to you, don't worry. Anyway, I'll always be your friend.

MARIE-THER'ESE (almost reverently)-I must admit that you have beautiful manners.

TAlLLARD-Thank you.

MARIE-THERESE-Listen, I shouldn't waste any more time, but I can't help it, I don't know anyone who expresses himself as you do. It's as beautiful as a song.

TAILLARD-It is true that I have a certain facility in elocution.

MARIE-THERESE-I don't know if I'm right to say this, but I must tell you what it is that he does.

TAILLARD-Tell me!

MARIE-THliREsE (in a whisper)-Slave trade.

TAILLARD-Slave trade! Impossible, he'd be found out. He would get into trouble.

MARIE-THEREsE-Yes, yes, slave trade! He hears that over there they need colonels or priests. Then he exports them and places them at exorbitant rates.

TAILLARD-And you go along with these deals?

MARIE-THERESE-You get used to it.

TAILLARD-But do the colonels and the priests realize what vile transactions they are being used for?

MARIE-THERESE-No, that's his great talent. They don't know. They think they are leaving of their own free will.

TAILLARD-Does he do this for the money?

MARIE-THERESE-No. To prove his power. Less than a week ago, he said to me: "Marie-Therese, there are men who shine with character, there are those who bespeak money, I, do you know what I am?" "I don't know, Sir." "I am crowned with power."

(Taillard rises, goes over to Marte-Therese and looks at herfixedly)

TAILLARD-Do you also want to acquire power?

MARIE-THER�SE (suspicious)-What kind of power are you talking about?

TAILLARD-Power over other people. Domination.

MARIE-THERESE (glacial)-That? Then why bother to even bring it up? You know very well that women are kept in their place. You're trying to take advantage of me. Let me do my work!

TAILLARD-I believe in the equality of the sexes.

MARIE-THERESE-You only believe in it to compromise me. I can see it in your eyes.

TRI-QUARTERLY

My God, how could I have put my trust in you? I am very sensitive, the slightest thing upsets me, please, don't talk to me any more.

TAILLARD-Very well, but you'll regret your intransigence. I can't help thinking that we are all very similar one to another.

(She remains immured in her silence and like an automaton strikes the keys of the typewriter. He sits back down at his desk, opens a dossier and reads aloud, as though to make himselfheard by Marie-Therese.t

"Dossier VO" Metal solderers. Checked out of customs the 17th of March. Sailed the evening of the 17th. Engagement for one year, starting the 21 st. To be watched closely, it being necessary to regulate the modalities of their adaptation to the local siderography in the field.

A very bare room. A man is thinking, his elbow resting on a plain table. Behind the door which opens onto the landing one can see the inscription: "Enter without Knocking". Raymond Taillard knocks several times. There is no answer. The young man enters.

THE COUNSELOR-Knocking is prohibited! You have disobeyed. I shall break your pride.

TAILLARD-I am at your service, Sir.

THE COUNSELOR-Go out and come in again without knocking. Black Shirt! (Raymond Taillard goes out and comes back in again without knocking.

THE COUNSELOR-Luckily you are not late. I never wait any more. I have waited, I too, but now I am a counselor. I will take you on.

TAILLARD-Thank you, Sir.

THE COUNSELOR-Don't thank me. Nothing has been done. It will take time. Do you have any money? Pay me.

TAILLARD-How much, Sir?

THE COUNSELOR-That's for you to decide. It must come from you.

TAILLARD-All right, Sir. Here is the money.

(Raymond Taillard takes several bills out ofhis wallet.)

THE COUNSELOR-A little more!

(Taillard gives him two more bills.)

TAILLARD-That's all. I have given you everything I have.

THE COUNSELOR-That's good. He is so docile. What counsel do you want?

TAILLARD-I want to possess, Sir.

THE COUNSELOR-That's my specialty. Stand up. Look at me. Sit down. Possess what?

TAILLARD-Mr. Simon.

THE COUNSELoR-Description?

TAILLARD-Short, stocky, dark hair, blue eyes, black tie.

THE Couxsetoa=-Profession?

TAILLARD-Director.

THE CoUNSELoR-Your grievances?

TAILLARD-He resists me.

THE COUNSELOR-Special characteristics?

TAILLARD-Greedy, jealous, a wife, a black Peugeot 404, he wants a different car, a modem kitchen.

THECOUNSELOR-You appear to begifted, young man, have you ever possessed before?

TAILLARD (aroused)-I like that!

THE COUNSELOR-Why did you come here?

TAILLARD-Your reputation. With your help, I will advance more quickly.

THE COUNSELOR (condescending)-I will take you on. Let's get back to Simon. What is it you want?

TAILLARD-To possess him!

THE COUNSELOR-YOU will possess him. You must take my courses.

TAILLARD-Courses! What a stroke of luck!

THE COUNSELOR-Be quiet. You talk too much. You are a veritable blabber mouth. You are defying me!

TAILLARD (fearfully)-I'm sorry, Sir.

THE COUNSELOR-I am enrolling you in the 1st grade. Equip yourself with the usual things: notebooks, eraser, ink, blotters. Every evening at six o'clock. Don't be late, above all, don't be late!

The office of the Director. Taillard, out of breath, enters hurriedly.

TAILLARD-A rotten deal, Sir!

THE DIRECTOR-What deal, Taillard?

TAILLARD-The metal solderers. They say that they have had them evaluated. That they are barely up to washing floors. They claim that they are only half men. They are going to sue you.

THE DIRECToR-They were just trying to scare you. They took advantage of my absence. But I have my own evaluation. Three superb men, capable of soldering for twelve hours at a stretch. They're going to sue me for that! The little grubbers! I have the certificates, Taillard, the solderers' certificates. In twenty-five seconds they have soldered steel armour-plates of the Dusseldorf test-strength. And they're trying to start a fight with me! I'm going to fix them, I'm going to demand damages and interest for defamation of character and reimbursement for the solderers above the standard wage. Superb men, as strong as horses, mastadons who would solder a bus for you in the wink of an eye.

TAILLARD-Men like that, Sir, make life worth living.

(Taillard withdraws and in the doorway passes Marte-Therese who enters the office looking sad and resigned.i

MARIE-THEREsE-May I show in your ten o'clock appointment?

THE DIRECTOR (without raising his eyes)-Show him in.

(A man, young, impeccably dressed, enters the office and greets the Director who rises slightly from his chair and motions the visitor to be seated.)

THE DIRECTOR - You wished to talk to me, Sir?

THE ApPLlCANT-I am offering you my services, Sir.

THE DIRECTOR (smiling)-He comes right to thepoint! You are speaking, Sir, to Mr. Simon. What services?

THE ApPLlCANT-I have learned, Sir, that you have been guaranteed the rights on the Great Plain. Apparently there are still some concessions left. I propose to create houses there.

THE DIRECToR-Imagine that! But everything has been covered already, Sir. We will be shipping out boarders in groups over a period of two years.

THE ApPLICANT-We don't mean the same types of houses, Sir. I want to build.

THE DIRECTOR-Build, Sir! Build under my name, without references?

THE ApPLICANT-I have a very fine record, Sir.

THE DIRECTOR-No, Sir. I have arrived at that point in my career where I no longer need evidence in order to judge. You don't have any references.

THE ApPLICANT-I have built bungalows on the Nile, Sir. Their concept is entirely new. Each bungalow has its own well. Each one has a private swimming pool. Each one its own domestic animals. Every one of my bungalows is a little world unto itself. All of which has led to my being selected in Delhi. They want to build bungalows on the Ganges.

THE DIRECToR-There is the very word I was afraid of: selected! Our principle, here, Sir, which makes for the vitality of our operation, is never to select. We place. An example: I do a great deal ofwork with the church. The other day a bishop comes to offer me his services. He boasts about his merits. He is just back from Africa where he has converted five thousand infidels, among them three tribes of cannibals. I say to him: "Monseigneur, I will not engage you because I, Simon, I require ability." "And no doubt it's through incompetence, Sir, that I converted three tribes of cannibals and transformed a country where, according to all reports, for more than a year not one man has been devoured by his congeners." "Certainly not, Sir, it's precisely because of your former ability that I reject you, I need new brains. Yours is encumbered with cannibals. I place: which is to say, I create men for positions which I have invented myself."

THE ApPLICANT (ironical)-And you find a lot of them, these men of ability?

THE DIRECTOR (loftily)-Read our catalogues, Sir.

THE ApPLICANT (irritably)-Probably you take these new men from the lower classes. Then you can flatter yourself that you have formed them.

THE DIRECTOR (olympian)-From every class, Sir, The brain wears no labels. We even have princes, from the House of Savoy and the House of Bone.

THE ApPLICANT (sarcastic)-The House of Bone would astonish me. I know all the Princes of Bone.

THE DIRECTOR (with great firmness)-I have two princes of Bone under contract,

Sir. The Princes Piquet and Didier. They will be leaving for the Great Plain.

THE ApPLICANT (disconcerted)-I know Prince Paul of Bone.

THE DIllECTOR (scornfully)-lunior branch, very poor branch. Prince Piquet bears the patronymic of his family. It is a noble family, there is nothing nobler. (The Applicant and the Director are silent, apparently both moved by the majesty of their subject.)

THE DIRECTOR-You see, Sir, to my regret, I can't do anything for you. (Accompanying him, or rather, pushing him towards the door) Would you like a piece of advice? Be humble, I like to forge men. I would have undoubtedly placed you ifyou had confessed to your lack of experience. Learn to read into yourself, Sir. My strength, at least one of my strengths, was defined magnificently one day by my employee: it is lucidity. I shall say good-day, Sir.

A classroom. In the rear, before a blackboard, the lecture platform. Desks. Students, their arms crossed, are seated at the desks.

THE Couxssr.oa=Gentlemen, I am happy to introduce a new student, Taillard. Taillard, tell your comrades that you love them.

TAILLARD-But I don't even know them, Sir.

THE COUNSELOR (very gently)-Tell them anyway.

TAILLARD-I can't tell them, Sir. Later on, perhaps. But right now it would be deceiving them.

THE COUNSELOR-A bad beginning. A very bad beginning. I am deducting two points from your report card. (Menacingly) Do you love your comrades, Taillard?

TAILLARD (after a moment ofreflection)-I love them, Sir.

THE STUDENTS (in a chorus)-Bravo!

THE COUNSELOR-YOU gave in. It was about time. Taillard, think: you love them because one must love one's neighbor. If one did not love one's neighbor, one would not desire to possess him. One must love the obstacle.

TAILLARD-But I love my comrades, Sir! They're not obstacles. They're friends. (Exclamations ofhostility spread throughout the class.)

TAILLARD (rising, red in the face)-I didn't come here to listen to this! Stop it, or I'm leaving!

(The students grow increasingly hostile.)

TAILLARD (In a paroxysm ofexasperation)-Bastards! You bastards!

(The students, as one, heave a sigh ofrelief.)

THE COUNSELOR-Now, we can breathe freely, Taillard. Think about it: you said they were your friends! You love them, but there is no friendship. I love tin soldiers. Are they my friends? Fromentin, to the blackboard. (Fromentin nimbly mounts the lecture platform.) Tell me what you do to gain the esteem of a superior.

FROMENTIN-Depending on the age and disposition of the superior, one proceeds over a period of three, six, or twelve months. One must also take into account the independent variables.

THE COUNSElOR (interrupting him sharply) You're beating around the bush. Lesson badly prepared. Your work is falling off, Fromentin. You will copy one hundred times: "If I want to become a hero, I must sweat blood and tears". Go to your place. (He marks in a notebook the punishment he hasjust inflicted.)

TAILLARD (voice lowered, to his neighbor)-He's awfully strict!

THE NEIGHBOR (reluctantly answering Taillard)-Tough but fair.

THE COUNSELOR-Moreau! (Moreau rises.) Take your hands out of your pockets. Give Taillard a resume of the chapters of the previous lesson.

MOREAU (apparently confident in himself)-Chapter 123: On the methods of regaining the affections of a friend who has turned into an adversary:

I. By playing the victim.

2. By feigning good will.

3. By feigning condescension.

4. By feigning lucidity.

Chapter 124: On how to conduct oneself to punish one's adversary, formerly one's friend, for having resisted the attempts one has made to regain his friendship.

THE COUNSELOR-Enough! Let's return to Chapter 123, number 4. Discuss.

MOREAU (slowly and with compunction)-On the methods of regaining the affections of a friend who has turned into an adversary(pause), by feigning lucidity. (Flippantly) That's easy enough. I provoke an encounter with my ex-friend.

THE COUNSELOR (caustically)-How do you provoke this encounter, Moreau, when you are on bad terms with him, when the whole world knows that he who used to be your friend now crosses the street when he sees you coming? (A student raises his hand.)

THE COUNSELoR-Yes, Rivollet.

THE STUDENT (very excited)-And when he says that having had a friend like Moreau is a disgrace that taints a man for life.

THE COUNSELOR-Good, Rivollet. (To Moreau) Yes, would you kindly indicate to us just how you are going to set up your encounter!

MOREAU (calm and assured)-But that's simple. Theophile still loves me.

THE COUNSELOR-No, Moreau, I don't believe you!

MOREAU-But nevertheless, Sir, in my example Theophile still loves me!

THE COUNSELOR-Perhaps, but you shouldn't have chosen that example. I have just used an ultra-modern method of lie-detection on you. You should have told me politely that you weren't prepared to answer my question. You couldn't answer it, Moreau! You have attained the highest degree of insensitivity possible in this school. No heart, no friends! (The Counselor, satisfied by the sharpness ofhis reasoning, composes himself, breathing heavily.)

MOREAu-In the beginning, Sir, you promised to arm us to the teeth against every situation that might arise in life. You said: every situation, without exception.

THE COUNSELOR-But I added that certain situations never arise. No grass, no rabbits! You should have called a forfeit. (Irritated) Are you finished finding fault

TRI·QUARTERLY

with my ideas? If you continue, I shall write to your parents. (Addressing himself to the class.y Now then, it's time for recess. You can have a little rest. But watch out! No rough-housing, or I'll crack down on you! (He moves offcrossly.)

The Director's office. Mr. Simon paces up and down. Taillard knocks and enters.

TAILLARD-Sir, I would like to be worthy of your esteem.

THE DIRECTOR-What a good boy! Would you really like to make me happy?

TAiLLARD-Sir, if it were within my power, I wouldn't have to be told twice!

THE DIRECTOR-It's within your power, but only on the condition that you love me a great deal.

TAILLARD-What will they give me? Six months?

THE DIRECTOR-(with a soothing gesture) No! No! Not that! At the very worst you'll be roughed up a little. But you should be able to avoid coming to blows.

TAILLARD-(very stiffly) I wish to win your esteem, Sir. To win it, I am ready to come to blows.

THE DIRECTOR (annoyed)-He's always talking about esteem! You already have my esteem. What I want is for you to make me happy.

TAILLARD-Oh, how I would love to make you happy, Sir!

THE DIRECTOR-You know the firm Coquatrix & Son, the people next door, those pirates who claim that I am a nobody, that I handle affairs they would just as soon leave to me. I want you to put them out of business.

TAILLARD (with great conviction)-Sir, to me the course is clear: Coquatrix out of business!

THE DIRECTOR-That's right, Coquatrix out of business or, at least, with only a few shady deals which nothing would prevent us from taking over and making honest. It's precisely this sort ofpurification that would make me happy. To succeed, we would have to get inside Coquatrix's office.

TAILLARD-Do you have the tools?

THE DIRECTOR-Not like that, Taillard, my God, that's five years! To get inside Coquatrix's office without actually being there, do you follow? (He assumes a knowing look) What allows you to be somewhere without being there?

TAILLARD-The telephone.

THE DIRECTOR-What a head, I knew it! The telephone, exactly. To make me happy, you would have to hook us up by direct line to Coquatrix.

TAILLARD-How much will you pay?

THE DIRECTOR-(darkening)-Pay whom? You told me you wanted to make me happy.

TAILLARD-I said I wanted to be worthy of your esteem.

THE DIRECTOR-But later, you amended that: you declared that you would be willing to have your eyes put out to make me happy. And how, now, you talk about money. TRI-QUARTERLY 55

TAILLARO-It's not a question of haggling over your heppiness, Sir. But a telephone requires installation, lines, bugging devices, it's expensive.

THE DIRECTOR-You really believe that it's expensive, Raymond?

TAILLARo-Enormously expensive, Sir, because the lines, the bugging devices, all that doesn't just install itself. The intermediary of man is required.

THE DIRECTOR-When I think of the grandeur of man, Taillard, of the power of human resolve, I become intoxicated.

TAILLARO-All the same, Sir, that resolve must be rewarded. The contractors would have to be given money, in as much as they could be sent up for at least ten years.

THE DIRECTOR-We'll give them some money on account.

TAILLARo-Sir, I'm afraid it will be necessary to give them most of it in cash.

THE DIRECTOR-In that case, I must conclude that you don't want to make me happy.

TAILLARO-I have a plan, Sir, which would be easy to carry out without much money. Would you give me a little money?

THE DIRECTOR-Very little. Extremely little.

TAILLARO-I have connections at Coquatrix.

THE DIRECTOR-I wince, Taillard! You have connections with my worst enemy, a person who has said publicly to the governing committee: Simon is the hood of the profession.

TAILLARD-Let's say, Sir, that I have eyes and ears that can perceive beyond the usual radius.

THE DIRECTOR-What a head! And this connection could put us in communication with Coquatrix?

TAlLLARO-That's almost it. Or almost, because we would have to justify our demands to this connection, and give proof of our good standing.

THE DIRECTOR-There you go putting pressure on me again, Taillard. I see what you're up to: you're trying to get off the hook. You regret having become·too involved, having proclaimed your joy in making me happy. I was wrong to confide in you. I should have kept it an to myself.

TAILLARO-If I made you completely happy, could I, even I, count on receiving a few signs of your affections?

THE DIRECTOR-But you get them every day, my boy.

TAILLARO-Of course, Sir, but there is in me a need for tenderness which has not been completely filled by any exterior sign of your sollicitude.

THE DIRECTOR (very cold)-What more do you want?

TAILLARO-To be closer to your heart, to be up to my neck in the intimacy of your enterprise, which is my true family.

THE DIRECTOR-How sweet he is! Listen, Raymond, if you make me happy, do you know what I will do, I, Simon?

TAILLARO-Not exactly, Sir.

TRI-QUARTERLY

THE DIRECTOR-What will I do? I will make you an associate. I mean it, I will make you an associate. I will give you a contract.

TAILLARD-Well, if that's the way you feel, I have an idea, Sir, that they're going to be having quite a time over there at Coquatrix.

(Taillard withdraws. Affectionately, Mr. Simon watches him go towards the door).

The classroom, empty. Two students, Taillard and Fromentin, arrive early; they sit at their usual desks; Taillard gets up and leans his back against the Counselor's chair; facing him, seated, Fromentin.

TAILLARD-You have a good job?

FROMENTIN (very cold)-I am studying. I am not ready, as yet, to choose a profession.

TAILLARD (vehemently)-Iwork to pay for my education. That's much more moving.

FROMENTIN (incredulous)-You're not getting the pre-salary?

T

AILLARD-They refused to give it to me, on the pretext that I didn't meet the requirements. You're supposed to have a child. (Ironically) I didn't stand a chance. Since the age of thirteen I've been using contraceptives.

FROMENTIN-I'm not so sure about that.

TAILLARD-Why do you say that? I won't tolerate your insinuations.

FROMENTIN-I'll tell you the truth, Taillard. We know that you give in to your instincts as frequently as, at least, once every two weeks.

TAILLARD-That's perfectly normal. I am fully grown.

FROMENTIN-But ifyou wish to grow in power, Taillard, you'll first have to integrate yourself into our intellectual community.

TAILLARD-Do you play together after classes?

FROMENTIN-We meet in little groups and recite our lessons. We learn the chapter titles and the sub-headings by heart. We practice for hours, when necessary. That's how we get the best marks away from you.

TAILLARD (conceited)-But I have the better position in life.

FROMENTIN-You're a director?

TAILLARD-No, but that's where I'm heading. I'm climbing towards the summit, like St. Bernard the Hermit towards the Light.

FROMENTIN-And the rest of us, during this period, are moving ahead in the sciences at the growth-rate of fifteen chapters per day. At the end of the year, the Counselor will head us for excellent positions. We will only have to follow his system to become leaders.

TAILLARD (scornfully)-You're all over-privileged. You're being pushed by your parents.

FROMENTIN-A profound error, Taillard. I was abandoned at birth.

TAILLARD-Then you must be a bastard.

FROMENTIN-No, but my father refused to recognize my true vocation. He intended

TRI-QUARTERLy I 57

me to be a member of the Council of State.

TAILLARD-Fromentin, do you know what such conduct on the part of a father towards his son is called?

FROMENTIN (ingratiatingly)-No.

TAILLARD-It's an attack on freedom of thought, pure and simple.

FROMENTIN (continuing as though not aware of Taillard's interruption)-As I lay in my cradle he would deliver humiliating speeches to me: "This boy has the look of a judge of the Court of Appeals, or I miss my guess."

TAILLARD-SO what did you decide to do?

FROMENTIN-I did not take immediate steps. Later, I used the recommendations we learned in the preparatory course. (Reproachfully) You didn't take that course. So much the worse for you. You want to be different.

TAILLARD-What do they recommend in that course?

FROMENTIN (as though reciting)-To rid oneself of one's father and mother if by their acts, gestures or plans they stand in the way of the fulfillment of the greatest potential of the offspring. Daddy wanted to turn me into an official. So I began to operate with maximum efficiency. Thus I was able to orient myself calmly into an area more suitable to my natural predilections. (Skeptical and dreamy) Are you of the timber, Taillard, from which magnates are made?

(Noises are heard. The Counselor, followed by his students, enters the classroom. Taillard and Fromentin return to their seats.)

The Director's office. Mr. Simon is going through some papers. Raymond Taillard knocks at the door and enters. The Director looks at him with surprise. Taillard seems agitated.

TAILLARD-They telephoned from the port. The officers must be gotten through customs in twelve hours or they will be returned to you.

THE DIRECTOR-I refuse to pay. I've already taken a loss on those officers, it's not a good bargain. If I figure in the taxes, the risk of deaths in the field, the poor amortization-they'rejust crazy about traveling: every two years they keep changing sectors-there's nothing left in it for me. It is a prestige operation. Granted, as long as it's not eating up money. It is eating up money if I get them out of customs. Let them shift for themselves. Let them get themselves out of customs! Or let them go to Bristol and see Walpole. He specializes in the army. He has such a big market that he surely must have an export license.

(The Director walks back andforth nervously, seems to be talking to himself. Taillard remains standing near the door, waitingfor Mr. Simon to allow him to leave. Suddenly the Director's eye lights upon a photograph on his desk.)

THE DIRECTOR (holding out the photograph)-Do you know this person, Mr. Raymond?

TAILLARD-I don't think so, Sir, I can't place her.

THE DIRECTOR-It's my wife.

TAILLARD-What do you mean, Sir?

TRI-QUARTERLY

THE DIRECTOR-What do I mean?

TAILLARD-I didn't think Mrs. Simon would look quite like this.

THE DIRECTOR-She's a girl who appeals to me enormously, Mr. Raymond.

TAILLARD-You've been married for a long time?

THE DIRECTOR-Twenty years.

TAILLARD-That only confirms, Sir, my notion that time, far from deadening desire, continually heightens and rekindles it.

(Taillard bows discreetly and retires. The Director appears to be lost in deep thought.

The classroom. The Counselor seated behind his desk. The students at their desks.

THE CoUNSELOR-Taillard, go to the blackboard!

TAILLARD (rising)-The blackboard! At my age, Sir!

THE STUDENTS-Teacher's pet!

THE COUNSELOR (sarcastically)-At your age! When at the War College you can see generals and admirals, mature men, almost old men, answering questions, their hands and clothes covered with chalk like schoolboys. Go to the blackboard!

(Taillard, bewildered, gets up and goes to the blackboard.)

THE COUNSELOR (menacingly)-Now, be careful! I want accurate answers, or I'll throw you out. I will not let you walk out of here with your nose in the air. You will craw] out of here. Think of your pathetic fate: turned loose on the sea of life without support, helpless as a baby, more helpless than a baby! Stand up straight and smile. Tell me what you do to get out of an embarassing situation.

TAILLARD-What an inspiring subject!

THE COUNSELOR (furious)-For the last time, I do not allow comment on my choice of questions. Answer! Let's hear what you have to say.

TAILLARD-When I really am forced to take the bun by the horns, I assume, according to the circumstances, one of two roles.

(A grumbling is heard in the classroom. Moreau raises his hand.)

THE COUNSELoR-Moreau?

MOREAu-Sir, if Taillard is going to deal in abstractions, I shall submit my resignation.

SEVERAL VOICEs-Hear hear!

THE COUNSELOR-You hear them, Taillard? I cannot afford the luxury of watching my best students walk out on me, especially those who pay their bi1ls. Moreau takes private lessons, you don't. You an have your various professions, but I have sacrificed myself in order to form you. Now then, quickly, give me examples!

TAILLARD-If you'll just give me a chance, I'll be specific. First example: I come up against a dedicated superior who refuses to bow to my youthful talents. I let him glimpse the fact that he has reached an age where his chances of dying are about the same as his chances of living. I evoque, without appearing to, people

TRI-QUARTERLy I 59

who have died recently. I study the obituaries. One must always have in mind nine or ten distinguished deaths. Usually this works. I am frightening. I wear down my opponents' resistance. They end up asking me for help. I agree to stand by them. We talk about death. The thing must be faced squarely. They hope I will reassure them about their health. But I am inflexible. That we have conquered the microbe is nothing to brag about. All those viruses are waiting. They never fail!

THE COUNSELOR (showing signs of nervousness at the persuasiveness of Taillard's reasoning)-Give me an idea, Taillard, of what you do when your adversary is a young man in perfect health?

TAILLARD-There are the maladies of civilization, and the maladies of the good life. Death has surprised many a man in love's embrace. I always keep five or six examples in mind.

THE COUNSELOR (more and more unnerved)-And tell me, Taillard, how do you act when you are dealing with several determined opponents who refuse to let you get close to the source of the power?

TAILLARD (smiling)-Death, still death. I spread the rumor that I live with it night and day. It is my constant companion. I only work to numb myself. But I keep all this to myself. I don't want to bore others with my own troubles. In public, always talking, always cheerful. But alone, what a nightmare! Those I have brought myself to confide in hesitate to tell the whole story. They give very few details. It's like a bitter taste. It's strongest just when you're going to sleep. Another man could not have borne it. But I have guts. On the whole, this approach has opened up quite a few doors for me. I've really gotten ahead, thanks to my illnesses.

THE COUNSELOR (scowling)-That's one way. But don't think you know everything' Taillard. It's a gross technique, only suitable for beginners. If you want to assert yourself, you must take private lessons. All right now, it's recess. Amuse yourselves for a few minutes.

The Director's office. Mr. Simon, seated, seems harassed. Taillard, standing, faces the Director.

TAILLARD-Sir, I am unhappy.

THE DIRECTOR-Your heart, Taillard! You are among friends. Tell me her age, her associates, and I'll arrange everything, I'll force her to love you. I don't want you to suffer.

TAILLARD-As a matter of fact, Sir, you could, at this very moment, put me back in a good mood. Just a small gesture on your part would do it.

THE DIRECTOR-I already told you, Taillard, I am prepared to make the gesture. Just give me the name, address, age, profession, and other petinent details about this girl who is making you unhappy. I'll bet my bottom dollar I can bring her to her knees!

TAILLARD-But it's not a girl who's making me suffer, Sir.

THE DIRECTOR-What do you mean it's not a girl! I'm telling you it's a girl!

TAILLARD-No, Sir, it is not a girl.

THE DIRECTOR-Then who is it?

60 I TRl-QUARTERLY

TAlLLARo-It's you, Sir.

THE DIRECTOR-You dare say this to me when I've done so much for you, pulled you up out of no-where?!

TAILLARD-You haven't kept your promises, Sir, and that makes me sad. Do you remember: you told me: "Raymond, I will double your salary in three months, after you have proved yourself." I asked you: "What proofs do you want, Sir?" You answered: "Transactions handled by you which result in an influx of capital and prestige to the Simon firm." I have engineered at least two such transactions: I put together a little orchestra for wind instruments, and I installed an ultramodern bugging device over at Coquatrix. You have not doubled my salary. You also told me that you would arrange entertainment for me, you specified that it would be an extra, not deducted from my salary. I asked you, "How often, Sir?" You answered, "Once a week, Raymond, it's important for a boy of your age," and you added: "For a handsome boy like you." I am still waiting for that entertainment. I am not a slave to my senses, Sir. For me, work comes first! If Charles Morel, from Coquatrix, let that little orchestra for wind instruments slip through his fingers, he has only his senses to blame, you know. He is ravaged by desire. He confessed as much to me: "Raymond, lust is my Achilles heel." Thank God I don't suffer from that infirmity. But after all, you did promise me girls, it's a question of principle, you should keep your word, you should give me a raise and a few good times, or else I shall consider myself released from my obligations, and, from where I sit, Sir, I think I could make things rather sticky for you.

THE DIRECTOR-If I understood you correctly, Raymond, you threatened me, you insulted your benefactor. I don't know yet what I shall do, because it would not be enough just to throw you out of this firm, to which you owe your very existence, I must think of a way to reduce you to a state even lower than the one I found you in. Get out, leave me alone! He was trying to swindle me, he was trying to put the screws on Mr. Simon!

TAILLARO-You'll double my salary, won't you, Sir?

THE DIRECTOR-Are you mad? Get out of here. I've wiped out more than one person before you! Foetus, that I nourished with my own milk! Parricide!

TAILLARO-Do you know what I think when I watch you in action? I think you're beautiful!

THE DIRECTOR-You're just saying that to appease me. I don't believe you.

TAILLARo-Believe what you like, but when you are in a rage you have a supreme nobility. An angry man is a beautiful thing. I, too, was in a rage a moment ago.

THE DIRECTOR-You're sorry about all those horrible things you said to me?

TAILLARo-I'm sorry, Sir, to have offended you, but my cause isjust: I am unhappy.

THE DIRECTOR (conciliatory)-Unhappy because of me?

TAILLARo-Because of you. I can't eat, I can't get to sleep, I can hardly think.

THE DIRECTOR-I will reassure you. I will make you happy. In a week I will have drawn up your contract. It will be an extremely flattering contract.

TAILLARo-One of the better contracts?

THE DIREcTOR-The very best. You just wait and see

The Many Meals of Voltaire

ROGER KEMPF

ERTHE STUDENT of Voltairian economics, nothing in the Contes is more bewildering, at first glance more gratuitous, than the profusion, extravagance or diversity of the meals: Zadig's dinners, where philosophy lays bare appearances; Parisian suppers, tedious and noisy, or those among the beaux-esprits where the young Marquis de la Jeannotiere learns "the art of saying nothing well"; gluttonies of robbers, tourists, guests, who devour two mountains (sic) or eat the Apian bull whole. Voltaire delights in staging dinners. Yet, unlike Marivaux, he does not use the meal as a means of revelation. In the Paysan Parvenu we hear, beyond the "muted noise of teeth" a more profound language: within the succulent world of kitchen and dining hall the stomachs of the Habert sisters speak at each line. Their plump figures, their little naps, their goings-out, their ample scarfs, the nature of their charities, all leads us relentlessly back to the best appetite in the world. Because she has not eaten a bite before mass, the too-scrupulous younger sister is taken ill on the Pont-Neuf, And there, on the table of the elder, among the remains of her breakfast eggs, is a half-bottle of Burgundy. "I believe," notes Marivaux, "that this detail will not in the least annoy; it is part of the portrait of the person of whom 1 am speaking."

Zadig or Candide answer quite another calling, like those younger sons destined, by parental authority, for the priesthood. They sit down to eat, they say they are hungry, but their appetite is only assumed. Better to recognize that food is here merely a pretext. Despite appearances-theprofusion ofexotic dishes-and however magnificent the meal, the tinkle of glass and the clatter of forks is at length lost amid the sallies of the diners. "Silence, Gentlemen, you can't hear yourself eat," a contemporary of Balzac was to say to his too-noisy neighbors. The art of degustation requires silence: such is the lesson of the gastronomes of the nineteenth century.

Very different are the meals of Voltaire, scenes of reunions and confidences, in which one can distinguish a dual purpose. First, with utmost banality, the meal serves as a means of presentation-but a factual rather than essential presentation. The characters define their identities, outline their careers and their misfortunes.

Thus Candide and Martin, eating with six strangers in a Venetian inn, learn that their companions are six dispossessed kings. Secondly, according to a satanic and obstinately recurrent scheme, the Voltairian meal is shown to be destiny's favorite hiding place-herchosen instrument. Not only past history but future fate is involved, for the famous liberte de table fosters mutual confidence and a dangerous abandon. Soon disputes erupt, spies emerge. The Inquisition has been watching, behind the mask of a little man in black who disappears with a whole dossier of statements, words and silences. Thus the guests, compromised either by their words or presence, meet again, mutilated or in chains. Memnon returns, blind in one eye, from a dinner which was to have dissipated his sorrow. Zadig entertains the Babylonian scholars and his life is in danger: he has been imprudent enough to speak of griffons in the conditional tense. Accused by the Greek patriarch of having dined with the Latin patriarch, Scarmentado receives a hundred strokes of the rod. Suspected by his dinner companion of not believing in the original sin, Candide is thrown into prison with Doctor Pangloss. Many are the meals begun in gaiety which toward dessert deteriorate; if not that, disaster strikes on leaving the table. Candide and Cacambo fall asleep after supper and awake to find themselves, bound and gagged, among fifty savages, the Oreillons, who have mistaken them for Jesuits. Again, Candide and Cunegonde, having sat down to eat together, scarce finish their meal when Don Issacar appears, "the most choleric Hebrew to be seen in Israel since the Babylonian captivity." Likewise, it is at the conclusion of a dinner that Candide is forced to join the Bulgarian regiment. This fearsome finality of the meal operates most rigidly in l'Ingenu. The education (religious, sentimental, political, etc.) of the young Huron progresses from dinner table to dinner table, each awakening or destroying a hope, until the last meal tragically concludes the cycle. The characters sit down to eat seven times:

First meal: The Abbe de Kerkabon and his sister, walking along the seashore, meet the youth, a Huron, whom they invite to supper.

Second meal: A Huron in the priory? "The good people of the canton hasten there to eat." MIle de St. Yves falls in love with the young Huron. And, as it has been unanimously decided to baptise him in the near future, this second reunion announces the third.

Third meal: The baptismal dinner serves to strengthen the love of the Huron and his godmother, Mile de St. Yves. Shortly thereafter, the Huron heroically repulses an English squadron, and everyone "urges him to make the trip to Versailles, there to receive the reward for his services."

Fourth meal: Along the way, at Saumur, he eats supper with some Protestants and is profoundly moved by the recital of their persecutions. "There was at the table a Jesuit in disguise who was acting as a spy for the reverend Father de la Chaise. He reported all that passed to him, and Father de la Chaise reported to Monseigneur de Louvois. The spy wrote. The Huron and the letter arrived almost the same time at Versailles."

Fifth meal: The youth, arrested as he leaves the table, is locked in the cell of Monsieur Gordon, a kind and learned Jansenist. We will not count the meals served through the prison window.

Sixth dinner: While the Huron is becoming "enlightened" and undergoing the metamorphosis from beast to man, Mlle de St. Yves makes the trip from Paris to beg help of Monsieur de St. Pouange, the favorite of Louvois. Not only will the Huron be released, but he will be rewarded with the command of a company. To obtain his freedom Mlle de St. Yves is forced, at the conclusion of a little dinner party, to surrender herself to St. Pouange.

Seventh and last meal: A supper reunites the lovers and their family. "But, while they were at the table, the illness of the unhappy girl took a fatal turn Consumed by remorse, MIle de St. Yves dies in two days.

Such then are the deceptions and hazards of the meal. Never do Voltaire's characters digest in peace, different, it would seem from those of Sade, for whom the meal represents a suspension of pleasure and pain, a truce decreed by nature. In Justine, for example, physiology would seem to be sufficient reason for eating. Willingly or no, victims and executioners alike set about the task of recuperating. Madame de Gernande, exhausted by the caprices of a bloodthirsty husband, "and pushed by nature to perpetual reparations, ate a great deal. She wanted partridge and duck from Rouen, which were thereupon brought in." "Rodin went to dinner. After such exploits, he needed to restore himself." But, when the executioners awake from their siestas, their restored bodies inspire new exploits, so that one can imagine no other salvation for Justine but a never-ending meal. In point offact, it is not a question of saving Justine or nourishing Rodin or Candide. With Voltaire as with Sade, though in different context, the meal fulfills the same function. Through the mediation of the characters the plot is nourished and regenerated. The meal has no other object than to presage or prevent the accession of happiness.

LEON-PAUL FARGUE

translated by Kenneth Rexroth

I love to go down into the town at the hour when the sky lies close against the horizon like a vast whale. It sinks down into the heart of the street like a worker into his ditch. The bell has swung before the windows and the panes are lit up. It is as though aU the eyes of the evening were filled with tears. In an opal the lamps and the day wrestle gently with each other. The advertising signs write to each other, spreading themselves in letters of lava across the face Of the buildings. The rope dancers stride over the abyss. A great long legged spider spins its web from the hooks of a bush full of flowers. An acrobat climbs up and throws himself down. Shipwrecked sailors signal foreign vessels. The houses advance like the prows ofgalleys with all their portholes blazing. Man runs between their golden flames like a waif in a harbor.

Dark and streaming the autos arrive from everywhere, like sharks to the quarry of a great shipwreck, blind to the fulgarant signals of men.

COLTON JOHNSON

Theseessays are by poets, public men, and teachers, most of whom came together last spring at Northwestern's W. B. Yeats Festival. The variety of assumptions which underly their work is proof-if any is needed-of Yeat's living presence. Some of the essays begin with a conception of Yeats which corresponds to at least part of everyone's notion of him: Yeats as a complex artifact. That the poet is an Immortal lies behind the official and private recollections, respectively, of Ambassador Fay and Padraic Colum. Mr. Fay's essay abstracts Ireland's debt to Yeats for his unofficial embassy. We are interested in such high observations-and such personal details as Mr. Colum's description of Yeats's inauguration of the Abbey Theatre, of a stay at Coole Park, or of the poet's theatrical get-up-simply because the figure and his age are important to us.

Professors McHugh and Prior speak, similarly, with the assumption of scholars that they are talking of matters important to most hearers. Their essays show how Yeats's ideas about the Celtic Twilight and about realism in drama may be traced in his work. Another scholar, Professor Kelleher, explores in great detail, the poet's working with diverse Irish sources. But the resulting anatomy of factual imperfection and creative genius reveals another part of our interest in Yeats. We are shown not only how Yeats the immortal worked or thought, but how Yeats the man had a troubling and humanly inefficient way of leading a creative life. This point of view recognizes the fact that Yeats continues to affect us partly because he annoys us. Not apart from-but clearly in addition tothe life and expression of the artifact there is the troubling and fascinating man who,

as Richard Ellmann shows here, was confronted by T. S. Eliot inconclusively throughout his career, and who remained unabsorbed into the Eliotian frame until his spectral appearance in Eliot's last great poem.

Yeats's politics also continue to trouble us. The furor raised by Conor Cruise O'Brien's analysis of Yeats's courtship of Fascism could hardly be greater if the poet were living. This essay is based on Mr. O'Brien's contribution to In ExcitedReverie, the centenary volume edited by Norman Jeffares, His conclusions there caused the reviewer in the Times Literary Supplement: to assert Yeats's right to be "like all the very great poets in a sense on everybody's side and nobody's side" embodying "the dialectic, the clash of opposites." These words may defend either the artifact or the man, but Terence de Vere White's spirited defense in The Irish Times based on "the friendship of his brother Jack" clearly directs attention to the man who happened to be the poet.

It is the political man who was the poet whom Stephen Spender recalls as he attempts, in an address given at the Newberry Library during the festival, to explain how the Internationalist poets of the '30s found a model in Yeats, the Nationalist. One of his conclusions is that they knew at first hand the truth of Yeats's testimony to the grave sacrifices that are made when the same body houses the man of poetic sensibility and the political activist. It is this embodiment of dilemmas, of paradox,l which is part of B. Rajan's evaluation. It is the man who discerns paradox in his being, the inexorable increase of paradoliJ as his life passes-and who manages to pose this situation directly-whom Mr.

Rajan speaks of as having pushed "an inch or so further in the direction of nothingness", the "frontier of insult", to which the "creative rejoinder" can still be made with conviction. Mr. Rajan speaks of "the richest of Yeats's images of defeat that of old age, with its angry frustrations, its humiliation of the body and its ironic reward of wisdom as the senses decay." Elsewhere in this collection, W. D. Snodgrass gives proof that the contemporary poet feels Yeats's presence most directly in such troubling images as those which recognize "the whole inverted paradoxical nature of the life of feeling."

While the aim of this collection is primarily to give a sense of the variety of speculation which the life and work of W. B. Yeats continues to excite, it is also to give some sense of the event last spring at Northwestern. Where possible, the texts have been edited directly from tape recordings of the proceedings and the speakers' permission has been obtained to include remarks not originally included in the text. The collection also presents the rather inconclusive panel discussion its nearly original 'form'. The admitted inability of the panelists to come together must have been part of the inspiration for Thomas Kinsella's comparison, in Hibernia, of the festival to "Yeats's Great Wheel itself turned by alterating hope and fatigue through dull and brilliant phases." And no �. could better record the rewards and frustrations of the festival as celebration than Donald Torchiana, the festival's director, whose essay concludes the collection.

Finally, we wish to acknowledge the permission of the Macmillan Company to quote selections from Collected poems of W. B. Yeats, copyright 1906, 1916, 1919, 1924, 1933 by the Macmillan Company and Last Poems and Plays, copyright 1940 by Georgie Yeats. Also, our particular thanks to Richard Ellmann for permission to reproduce his photographs used throughout the section, and to Richard Olson, Curator of Rare Books, Deering Library, for his inestimable services in the preparation of this collection.

"Now he is scattered among a hundred cities And wholly "iven over to unfamiliar affections ."

A Yeats Centenary

HIS EXCELLENCY

AMBASSADOR

WILLIAM P. FAY.

OF IRELAND

During his life, I must confess in all honesty, Yeats, though greatly honored in some respects, did not receive the honor and place to which perhaps the great poet could aspire. He was certainly no Sibelius in an Irish Finland. If he was comfortable towards the end of his life, it was probably more due to the fact of the bounty of Sweden, as he called it, the Nobel Prize. Nevertheless it is fair to say that, for a great portion of his life, there was no Irish State to do him honor and when the Irish State was founded in 1922, it did with small resources what it could. It created him Senator and, as Dr. Conor Cruise O'Brien has recently shown, his period as a Senator and indeed his public life was a very fruitful one for our country, quite apart from his greatness as a poet. And, of course, his greatness as a poet helped make his public life a fruitful one. He was six years a Senator, during which he spoke often and well sometimes very provocatively. One famou� occasion was when he advocated divorce before a House almost entirely composed of Roman Catholics who didn't admit it: he did it in such a way as to evoke a certain amount of feeling. He was also inclined to criticize public men with the freedom of the artist and naturally enough that has been resented. But, was it not always so? Haven't all the great poets felt themselves a little bit out of tune with the earthly city they were called upon to live in?

Seven wealthy towns contend for

TRI-QUARTERLY

Homer dead

Through whom the living Homer begged his bread.

Wasn't Dante exiled by the Florentine democracy? And didn't Michelangelo denounce his native city in terms I should think even more violent than those used by some of our writers, such as Sean O'Casey, about their native city?

Nevertheless, if Yeats did denounce what he sometimes called his "fool-driven land" if he mentioned "the daily spite of this unmannerly town where who has served the most is most defamed,"! if he complained about the "fumbling wits, the obscure spite of our old Paudeen in his shop,"2 he was a man who nevertheless loved and appreciated the people and above all decided to live among them. He didn't, in bitterness, exile himself from his native land or his people, In fact his only absences abroad were largely due to his health. And he admits in his own bitter poem from which I have quoted "The People," that his phoenix, Maude Gonne, had the better part of the argument, when she said, "I have been reviled but I have never complained of the people." Did he not too identify h�mself, on c�untless occasions throughout his poetry, With the Irish people:

"We Irish, born into that ancient sect

1. "The People," 3-4

2. "Paudeen," 1-2

But thrown upon this filthy modern tide "3

"That we in coming time may be Still the indomitable Irishry."!

Not merely his poetry, but also his prose, shows a constant concern, a passionate concern, with his native land. His last great work of this kind, On The Boiler, was published the year before his death. There is a passage which is very interesting because it shows his great interest right up to the end, not merely in his most famous achievement, the Abbey Theatre, but in what could now be described as American-Irish cultural relations.

"As I write these words the Abbey Players are finishing a successful American tour. These tours and Irish songs and novels when they come from a deeper life than their 19th century predecessors, are taking the place of political speakers, political organizations, in holding together the 20 scattered millions conscious of their Irish blood."

So before we even attempted to have a cultural relations officer in this part of the world Yeats felt, in a way, on his own shoulders, the obligation for exercising in some degree that capacity.

The creation of this famous theatre, the Abbey Theatre, is perhaps the thing for which he is best known. It was his most important gift to Ireland. He did it, of course, in collaboration with other people, with Lady Gregory, with John Synge, later; and he acclaims the trio as the founders, with my uncles Frank and William Fay. In his Genera/Introduction to My Work he evokes the memory of my uncle Frank and says if they had been alive together at this time, towards the end of his life, he would have liked to again have tackled the matter of the theatre because they fundamentally believed in the same thing, the art of the theatre in the heroic mode.

But if in all those respects Yeats was a patriotic Irishman in the truest sense of the word, it was the patriotism of an artist. He realized that early in life and put it as well as

3. "The Statues," 28·29

4. "Under Ben Bulben," 82·83

it can be put in the guiding lines which he offered in one of the issues of Samhain, his occasional publication for the Irish theatre. "We must learn," he said at a time when Ireland was impassioned by all sorts of causes, "that beauty and truth are always justified of themselves and that their creation is a greater service to our country than writing that compromises either in the seeming service of the Cause."

But this passionate conviction of the need for utter integrity and for the rejection of any compromise with anything less than that did not mean that he abstracted himself from the national life or ceased to be specifically an Irish poet as he claimed to be.

Professor Ellman in his book, The Identity of Yeats, quotes from an early article, as early as 1888, in which Yeats makes that distinction so well. Having claimed the absolute integrity of the artist, he says too,

"To the greater poets everything they see has its relation to the national life and through that the universal and divine life. You can no more have the greatest poetry without a nation than religion without symbols. One can only reach out to the universe with a gloved hand. That glove is one nation, the only thing one knows a little of."

Even in the peculiar jumble of dispersed elements which came to be his philosophic or religious creed, he affirms his Irishry. In his great poem, "Vacillation," written late in life, he appears to reject Christianity. But I say "appears" advisedly because in The General Introduction to My Work, which he never published during his life, he says,

"A modern man finds much that is congenial in St. Patrick's Creed as recorded in his Confessions and nothing to reject except the word 'soon' in the statement that Christ will soon judge the quick and the dead. I was born into this faith, have lived in it, and shall die in it. My Christ, a legitimate deduction, as I think, from the Creed of St. Patrick, is that Unity of Being Dante compared to a perfectly proportioned human body."

TRI·QUARTERLY 69

This is an affirmation that, in the profoundest sense of what he believed, Yeats felt himself to be at one with the Irish tradition, which he found in the fact that St. Patrick had accepted as much as he could and perhaps even more than he could of the old Celtic pagan tradition.

In "Vacillation," Yeats chooses Homer as his moral: "Homer is my example and his unchristened heart." He possibly overlooked the fact that Dante, who didn't cease to be a Christian man, had chosen another unchristened heart, Vergil, as his guide through Purgatory and Hell. Vergil brings him to the first circle, the Limbo, pleasant though hopeless, of the great pagans of antiquity. Among these first are

the great poets and first among the great poets is Homer. As he approaches them, he hears a voice calling out for honor to the highest poet. His guide, who is never any less modest than Dante, says that "this voice is addressed to me but as we are all equal here it can be applied to all." Similarly Dante is then assumed into this great company and forms a sixth with those who were there. Shall we not, remembering a great poet who was an Irishman and a great Irishman who was also a great poet, permit ourselves to imagine that he has joined the great spirits which he chose as compeers during life and say in chorus with the unknown voice of Limbo, "Onorate l'altissimo poeta."

when d Bov' by JB.Y�dt� R.HA.

Reminiscences of Yeats

PADRAIC COLUM

Ina poem I wrote on hearing of Yeats's death, I discounted eloquence in his mourners and asked for silence and candle-light. He spoke of candles in several of his poems. The first reference I make is to an early poem, "To an Isle in the Water"

"She carries in the candles, And lights the curtained room, Shy in the doorway And shy in the gloom;"!

These are the first candles I mention. Then there are the candles that burn before the altar in the poem that begins "Oh colleens kneeling by the altar rails long hence,"2 And the third time I mention candles is a reference to the tapers that burn when

"All wisdom shut into his onyx eyes, Our father Rosicross sleeps in his tomb."3

Something else comes into my poem too. At the time I was writing it Yeats's sister wrote to my wife and expressed a very genuine family affection. Once, when Yeats was spoken of as a great poet, the same sister simply said, "A good brother." Here is my poem:

THE ARCH POET:

William Butler Yeats.

Since he who kept us proud for two score years

With verse and speech is into silence gone, No eloquence!

But candles will avail:

They are more fitting to our hushedness!

And first

The candle that was sconced in curtained room

By one so shy, her motions were a plea

To be restored to that lake-island where

The wren and robin kept their heritage

Of quiet. And bring us, too,

The candles that were above the altar rails

Where country girls knelt, while, through their prayers

The songs a sinful man made for a girl

The like of one of them, came

Like the warm drippings from below the wicks.

But he

Had crossed our frontiers, and had read the books

Of Paracelsus, and his gains were known, Initiate's knowledge, fabulous discipline

In starlit poems. So we will bring

The gentile tapers from the Mountain Tomb

Where Father Rosicross, The Magus's and Sophist's wisdom closed

Within his eyes, and music and wine, Dancing, and lips kissed waste day and night,

While cataract sounds upon the mountain side.

But voices only here: we'll speak of him

As persons speak to persons in a room: A man of vision and a man of wit, And constancy, and one who kept beneath All that was noted in him, all Of phrase and mask, discourse, accomplishment, Steadfast affections, and was happily In places shared with sisters and with brotherCollonney, Ballysodare, Drumcliffe and Moherbui and Dromahair.

My first meeting with Yeats was the night of the last performance of A. E.'s Deirdre and Yeats's Kathleen ni Houlihan, the plays that were the first offerings of the National Theatre Society which eventually became The Abbey Theatre. I was the youth, in Deirdre, who carried a spear and had a speech about Fergus whom Deirdre accused of bartering his honor for a feast. I was a player and so was Maude Gonne who played Kathleen ni Houlihan and who was a party to Yeats's invitation to me to come to a hotel, his or hers, to discuss the draft of a play of mine. A. E. and Yeats had furnished the initial plays to the theatre but no other playwrights had shown themselves and so Yeats was interested when William Fay told them that I was trying to write a play. I need not say how exciting it was for a beginner to have himself put in the ranks of a possible dramatist for the National Theatre. The Yeats whom I now met as a man of the theatre was getting on to his 40th year. He had written The Wind Among the Reeds and it was known that he was eager to pass from such a tremulous kind of poetry to a more public kind and that in doing this he would have to grapple with the theatre. Therefore it was at a developing period in his life that I was fortunate enough to meet the great poet. He was preparing himself for a new career -indeed, I might say, for a new kind of being. He was reading all the dramatists, including the dramatists of the day, Ibsen and Maeterlinck. I remember I spoke of these two dramatists with fervor and Yeats

72 I TRI-QUARTERLY

spoke a word of warning to me in that voice of his that had something oracular in it. "We are obsessed with the translation." How good that remark was. Yeats was trying to tell me that there was only one language-that was the personal languageand that anybody who read important writers in translation had to be on his guard in the matter of language. The dramatist or the poet creates his own language; therefore reading Ibsen and Maeterlinck in translation was a rather dangerous thing for a young writer. This is one of the illuminating things I remember from early conversations with one who said most revealing things about literature. That night, in a hotel whose name I have forgotten, I read to him and to Maude Gonne the little play I had shown our schoolmaster, William Fay. Yeats noted that there were too many people, too many motives, in the opening. He made me aware that there is an exposition to a play and that the exposition has to be clear. He gave me a watchword: "Clear the decks for action." That was the first real directive I had been given for the writing of a play.

At this time Yeats was still the youngish man of the velvet jacket and the flowing tie. To the Catholic intelligentsia, who had a few years before picketed his play The Countess Cathleen, he was subversive. And that did not recommend him to the other side, the ascendancy side, the side of his father's friend, Professor Edward Dowden. They had seen him making a speech from the site of a projected monument to an Irish insurrectionist that was not at all in the spirit of Queen Victoria's Jubilee and denouncing that eminent lady in letters to the Press. But the fact that Unionists and Nationalists, the two sides of the Irish public, were hostile to him made this poet interesting; and to be interesting, Yeats would probably have said, was the first duty of a public man. He wanted to be a public man. I fancy that if at this stage someone had said to him, "But you are a poet, why want to be a public man?" Yeats would have told him that the entry into public life, like the entry into the theatre, would give a poet a more manful energy. That search for "a manful energy" is a very

important thing to remember about Yeats. It brought him into the theatre and it brought him into public life in Ireland. Now it was not his opinions alone that made him a marked man in the Dublin of the 1890's; that tall, lank figure in black clothes, with the blue-black hair coming over his forehead, frequent gestures and deliberate utterance, challenged people. Pose was the word that was often used about him and with reference to this word I should like to say something. Yeats was a man who believed in style-or manner, if you like to call it that. "Art is art because it's not nature," said Goethe, and Yeats often repeated that saying. This insistence on art, style, manner, infuriated all Dubliners except the sophisticated and certain members of the rising generation. People whose literary tradition went back to Thomas Moore and the oratorical poets of "The Nation" felt affronted by his dismissal of the Minstrel-boy kind of verse and by his downgrading such utterance to the category of oratory rather than poetry. Speaking of verse that derived from the popular "Nation" publication, he said to me. "I am leaving The Spirit of the Nation for my old age." The Spirit of the Nation was the Bible of young Irish Nationalists; it was poems, oratorical poems, by the poets of the 1840's and it was almost a sacred book. Yeats's saying "I am leaving The Spirit of the Nation for myoid age" seemed a terrible blasphemy. When I repeated this saying to an intelligent young man, he said furiously, "The Spirit of the Nation will leave Yeats for its old age." This aloofness of his may have been due to something in his character. His father once said to me, "Willie is like his mother. She seldom, if ever, showed any sign of affection. I could be six months in Africa and when I came back all she would say would be, 'Did you have any dinner?' But the old, reflective painter added, "There is a Yeats side in Willie too. He is expansive and he loves discourse." At that time he was comparing Willie, the poet, with his other son, Jack, the painter: Willie's aloofness with Jack's liking for the common people, Willie's discourse with Jack's laconic utterance. Willie was undemonstrative about everything ex-

cept art and abstract ideas and perhaps this contributed to the malice that was in Dubliners' talk about him. The elaborateness of his speech was also a theme for mockery. The elaborateness comes over in an interview reported by Gogarty between James Joyce and Yeats (an interview which may never have taken place.) Gogarty would deliver it exactly as Yeats might. "Joyce, the Japanese have a proverb, 'Be brave in battle. Be truthful to your friends. Be courteous always.' You are not courteous, Joyce. When Arthur Symons mentioned Balzac, you laughed."

But perhaps the way of accounting for the malice directed against a man whose gifts were known and whose purpose was enriching is the saying that is in the Bible, "My heritage is to me as a speckled bird. All the birds of the air are against it."

Still, this discussion about the ways of one who was admitted to be a poet, with the sacredness and mystery which has always surrounded the poet in Ireland, had another effect. His personality, his plans, his ideals, were made current. And there was something about Yeats that rarely goes with a poet: the successful public relations man, the one who made a theatre of amateurs playing in a hall that held only a hundred or so people into an institution, into what was never before: an Irish theatre. He was a great poet partly through his realization that poetry should be personal but that it should also be related to some public effort. A poet whose life he admired, William Morris, had spoken sadly of the poet of his time as "the idle singer of an empty day." Yeats was determined to be not that sort of a singer. Poets are well served, he knew, when they have a cause, an ideal, that brings them on the stage as spokesmen. He once said to me that the Catholic poets in England, Coventry Patmore and Francis Thompson, were fortunate in having a definite public. From his beginning, he asked the public to recognize him as an Irish poet.

"Know that I would accounted be, True brother of a company That sang, to sweeten Ireland's wrong, Ballad and story, rann and song;" 4

TRI-QVARTERLY 173

But he also wanted to be a power in Irish public life. Remember that if the Irish coinage is stamped with creditable designs it is due to Yeats, the Senator, working in committee. He never got around to making designs for the Irish stamps and so they are still the least artistic in Europe.

He was a capable man of affairs who was resolved to have his way in them. I remember that during a dispute in the formative theatre group he wrote a letter to A. E. which A. E. showed to me; he spoke of his own intention about the theatre and left no doubt as to who was to be in control. "The tools to him who can use them." He recognized in the theatre whose nucleus was the Fays' company a real form of national expression. Quoting Victor Hugo, he used to say, "In the theatre the mob becomes a people." He was able to fill with enthusiasm the members of this semi-amateur group. I remember the occasion of the reorganization of that group; the great affirmation in his speech came through a poem he repeated, the poem of Lionel Johnson's that is dedicated to John O'Leary that begins,

"A terrible and splendid trust Heartens the host of Inisfail."

The poem ends this way,

"A dream! a dream! an ancient dream!

Yet ere peace come to Inisfail, Some weapons on some field must gleam, Some burning glory fire the Gael."

And he made our enterprise seem equal to the insurrectionary one when he repeated the last and the significant verse,

"That field may lie beneath the sun, Fair for the treading of a host, That field in realms of thought be won And armed minds do their uttermost!

Some way to faithful Inisfail

Shall come with majesty and awe Of martial truth, that must prevail

To lay on all the eternal law.v

It was with these verses that he started the reorganization of the theatre. There and

then he enlisted us for that field in realms of thought for the martialness that was of the mind. Rehearsals were held at the back of a grocery shop and Yeats was often among us. He would read a poem that someone had sent in to him and speak to us about it. He was on the watch for the rise of a poet who would help to forward the enterprise -the avatar, to use a word of his-and it was there that he brought us evidence of the avatar's arrival, the short plays of a man whom none of us had heard of. The plays were In the Shadow of the Glen and Riders to the Sea and the writer was John M. Synge.

It requires practice to write verse which, spoken from the stage, is intelligible to the audience. When Yeats wrote the opening of The King's Threshold, the King's speech of greeting to the poet's pupils, he did not yet know how to make a speech that has some complicated expression. The climax of the play has been changed since it was first put on but that opening speech remains unchanged and it is still impossible to make it intelligible. This is a question of the timing of its delivery. When it was spoken from the stage, Willie Fay insisted it be changed. He said, "No. This won't do at all. No, no, no." Yeats was very much upset. I knew that the speech could not be made clearer no matter how much he tried. I went to Yeats who was standing ruefully aside and said to him, "The speech is frankly a public oration. What the audience will know is that the king is making a speech. It does not have to be intelligible line by line." His head went up and his face cleared. Running across to Fay he said, "Colum says that the speech is frankly an oration." It was then given as an oration without any attempt to make it particularly intelligible. I like to think that the unaltered speech that we now read, with all that talk about horses that draw the sun and the moon being welcomed by somebody for some fair woman's sake, is due to my intervention.

Synge's plays were produced and also a play of mine which he thought was immature, as it was. But he had faith in me as a dramatist and when I was finishing my next play, The Land, he had Lady Gregory invite me to Coole where we could discuss

revisions and developments in the play. In that beautiful house with its noble woods and lonely lake, I knew him without any of the pose that was attached to him in Dublin. He was a good oarsman and we sometimes rowed on the lake. The lake is in a picture he had painted, in it a golden crown in deep water,

"The jewelled crowns that kings have hurled, In shadowy pools, when armies fled;"6

as he wrote in a poem. It was a picture that evoked something of the verse in The Wind Among the Reeds and The Shadowy Waters; but that was a stage he had passed through. He told me that he was trying to get out of his poems the reds and yellows Shelley had brought back from Italy. Henceforth he was going to try to put into his poems the grays of the west of Ireland, the stones and clouds that belonged to Galway. How well he has done this we know from the later poems:

"The trees are in their autumn beauty, The woodland paths are dry, Under the October twilight the water Mirrors a still sky; Upon the rimming water among the stones Are nine-and-fifty swans"?

I used to go to the woods with him or with Robert Gregory who shot pigeons there. Or I walked in the walled garden with Lady Gregory while she spoke to me of the guests of hers who had thrown wallflower seed into the corners of the walls where there were now bunches of flowers. What a charming way of memorializing Douglas Hyde and Hugh Lane and many of the other illustrious visitors and, incidentally, what a Philistinism in Ireland to allow that beautiful house to be taken down and the woods to be cut.

In the morning at Coole, Yeats stayed in the large drawing room, sitting before a table or pacing about murmuring lines of verses that he had set down or was about to set down. Like most imaginative writers he had to tease himself into getting on with the job. At one time he used to smoke a

cigarette between lines but that gave him too much time off. Now he cut the cigarettes in halves. The smoking of half a cigarette was the interval that he now allowed himself. I told him that I thought of helping in some newspaper office for awhile every day so as to give myself discipline for a task that had to be done on time. There was no point, he told me, in doing this. The only discipline that mattered to the imaginative writer was the discipline that he gave himself through his work. In the drawing room where we often sat after dinner Lady Gregory, Robert Gregory, Yeats and myself, the conversation was natural and interesting. Yeats no longer made oracular pronouncements but spoke on all kinds of topics, gossiping with some humor about the coteries in London, repeating sayings of painters and writers. The son of a really great conversationalist, John Butler Yeats, he himself was a remarkable one. In the room across from us, the music room, Lady Gregory's nieces sometimes played. I discovered that Yeats, who was so varied in the music of his verse, was absolutely tone deaf. I had heard him say that he liked a harp because it was well shaped. Now, as we heard the music from outside the drawing room, he said to me, "What are they playing, a fiddle or a piano?" I left Coole bearing Lady Gregory's gifts with me. Yeats was satisfied with what I had produced. Speaking to me as a counselor, he said, "Make yourself indispensable."

There was more than one great moment in Yeats's life. To the honor of Ireland he was selected for the Nobel prize. As he addressed an audience which included the King of Sweden and the members of the Swedish Academy, he must have felt that this was a dazzling moment. And yet I think that the moment of achievement for him was the first night in which plays were performed in the Abbey Theatre. Irish dramatists and Irish players had gained an international reputation and now they were an institution. The audience for the plays that inaugurated the theatre was the elite of Dublin. Then there came on the stage that tall, dark-robed figure whom they could now recognize for a standard-bearer. They knew he was a man who could make this an

TRI-QUARTERL y 17S

occasion they would remember. He raised his hand in the gesture so familiar to all who approached him. There was drama in the way he repeated lines from Spencer: "Be bold, be bolder still, be yet more bold. But not too bold."

I will always remember that appearance and utterance of his as one of the great performances I have known.

At the time of my last meeting with the poet who gave such greatness to his time, he was living with his family in Rathfarnham, an ailing man. He consented to receive my wife and myself. We had been away from Ireland for some years. As compared with other times we had seen him, he was subdued. But in spite of the tiredness that he showed now and again, he talked as

a man with a continuing interest in what was creative in the world. He wanted to know about certain contemporary poets whose poetry he had read or heard of, particularly the German poet whom my wife had read, Stefan George. She was able to repeat some phrases from poems and he listened with much attention and made some comments. We left a stooped, whitehaired, courteous man, bringing with us a sense of grandeur. Here was one of the rare men in the world who had fully lived the creative, the intellectual life.

1. Yeats, "To an Isle in Water" II. 9-12

2. "The Lover speaks to the Hearers of his Songs in Coming Days"

3. "The Mountain Tomb" 11. 11-12

4. "To Ireland in the Coming Times" 11. 1-4

5. Johnson, "Ways of War"

6. Yeats, "He remembers forgotten Beauty" II. 5-6

7.

"The Wild Swans at Coole" II. 1-6

Eliot's Conversion

RICHARD ELLMANN

Eetsscarcely love each other. The coincidence which joins in the same year Yeats's centenary and Eliot's death invokes also the troubled congress of the two men during their lifetimes. Among their various mild collisions none was more defined than the dinner at Wellesley College when Yeats, seated next to Eliot but oblivious of him, conversed with the guest on the other side until late in the meal. He then turned and said, "My friend here and I have been discussing the defects ofT. S. Eliot's poetry. What do you think of that poetry?" Eliot held up his place card to excuse himself from the jury.

For Eliot as a young man looking for French ironies, Yeats was ornate and romantic, a protracted Pre-Raphaelite, while for Yeats as an old man, looking for wildness and strangeness, Eliot was too plain, a belated Alexander Pope, making poetry resemble prose. To others as well as to himselfYeats was accustomed to describe Eliot's verse as grey, cold, dry, flat, bare. While acknowledging its effect on the young, he regarded it as counter-revolutionary rather than revolutionary. Eliot, eluding the inheritance of the Hydraulic Press Brick Company of St. Louis, could not forget it. The gashouse and operating table replaced, as Yeats observed without enthusiasm, romantic metaphor, but only to cause Eliot a second aversion. The world became real to Eliot only to the degree that it was revolting. Auden's delight in the machinery of the gashouse, while inexplicable to Yeats, was at any rate a passion

for the world and so preferable to Eliot's distaste.

Yeats was also critical of Eliot's Christianity. He thought it for a modern mind unreal. At his most indulgent, he allowed that it might serve Eliot as "a convenient symbolism for some older or newer thought." At his most severe, he considered Eliot's religious development a false solution of the contemporary esthetic problem, because it entailed submission rather than search. What was necessary was to map out an "exposition of intellectual needs" such as Yeats's own A Vision provided; instead Eliot surrendered to belief. Yeats thought he saw in Eliot's work the turning of intellect upon itself, so that even when myth was employed, it was held rigidly apart from fact to misplay two tunes instead of one.

This attitude towards Eliot remained fixed. Eliot's attitude towards Yeats underwent, on the other hand, a curious change. When he arrived in London in 1914, he was not eager to be anyone's disciple, Yeats's least of all. Ezra Pound brought him two or three times into the presence, and Eliot allowed himself only to be bored. Yeats's two subjects of conversation at that period, he said later, were "George Moore and spooks". It is hard to know which interested him less. He did not go to Woburn Buildings any more. For several years he thought of Yeats as a leftover from the 'nineties, an out-of-the-way interest of Pound's. Then at some point Eliot had to modify his view. There is evidence of punctilious wobbling in Eliot's choice of

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the date when this climactic recognition occurred. Once he hit on 1916, the year that he attended a performance of Yeats's play, At the Hawk's Well, and was surprised by the strength of its diction. His surprise was evidently tempered, however, by the feeling which he also expressed later, that the play did not solve the problem of writing modern verse drama. Nineteen-nineteen is the other year Eliot gives for his having been won over to Yeats, evidently by the volume The Wild Swans at Coole. But this date must also be too early, for his review of a book of Yeats's essays in the Athenaeum during that year largely dismisses him as "a foreign mind," not foreign only to England but to the earth in general, a mind "in some way independent of experience." Neither poet agreed with the other's way of walking on the earth. Eliot is stern: "His remoteness is not an escape from the world, for he is innocent of any world to escape from." He finds Yeats's mind to be crude and egoistic because of not facing direct contacts, and successful only in achieving solipsism. He returns to the attack in "A Cooking Egg," published the following year, where the lines,

I shall not want Pipit in Heaven: Madame Blavatsky will instruct me In the Seven Sacred Trances,

must mock Yeat's membership in the Theosophical Society.

In 1923 Eliot, reviewing Ulysses, mentions Yeats favorably for "adumbrating" what must now be the new method in literature, of manipulating a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity. To adumbrate is however not to achieve, and it is Joyce rather than Yeats who is praised for perfecting the method. Evidently Eliot was as yet only slightly concessive, for in 1925 Ezra Pound, who was in a position to know, remarked in a letter, "Eliot don't see either Yeats or Hardy." There is some confirmation of Pound in 1933, when Eliot discussed Yeats rather patronizingly in lectures eventually published under the title After Strange Gods. Yeats had been guilty of two mistakes, Eliot discovered; he had tried to make poetry supplant religion, and he had tried

78/ TRI·QUARTERLY

to fabricate an individual religion. Eliot supports himself with a remark of I. A. Richards (not always his ally) that Yeats had repudiated life in favor of a supernatural world, one insufficiently connected with normal experience. Eliot could hardly forbid a supernatural enthusiasm, but Yeats's supernatural world was the wrong one, provincial and eccentric. He is really still objecting, though in lecture language, to Yeats's spooks. Then, to lighten his attack, Eliot praises Yeats for having given up most of his eccentricity in his more recent, austere poetry. He quotes with only partial sympathy-because its subject is regret-one passage from Yeats's poem, "Vacillation" :

Things said or done long years ago,

Or things I did not do or say

But thought that I might say or do,

Weigh me down, and not a day

But something is recalled,

My conscience or my vanity appalled.

And Eliot concludes with evident strain that "Yeats has arrived at greatness against the greatest odds." In his last years Eliot rather regretted the whole volume in which this criticism appeared, and would not allow it to be republished.

The death of Yeats a few years later prompted Eliot to speak more handsomely of him. J n the provincial and eccentric capital he told his Dublin audience that Yeats was "the greatest poet of our timecertainly the greatest in this language, and so far as I am able to judge, in any language." He later omitted this praise, perhaps feeling it was too fulsome or too trite an obituary. But the rest of his speech, which he kept intact in reprinting, testified to his respect. He takes the opportunity to defend Yeats's poem, "The Spur,"

You think it horrible that lust and rage Should dance attendance upon my old age; They were not such a plague when I was young: What else have I to spur me into song?

Eliot comments in the poem's favor, "To. what honest man, old enough, can these sentiments be entirely alien? They can be

subdued and disciplined by religion, but who can say that they are dead?" In his conclusion to this essay, Eliot indicates that he finds Yeats's thought and feeling in some aspects unsympathetic, and that there remain vital questions in the field of doctrine, which ultimately affect one's view of the poet. He boggles still, yet has clearly undertaken with conscience the literary experience of learning to like what one does not like.

So it is particularly admirable, after this, to find the figure of Yeats reappearing in Eliot's poetry, in Little Gidding (I 946). He reappears like one of his own spooks, and in ghostly form converses with Eliot who is patrolling London streets in wartime during an air raid. Though not named, and though, as Eliot said later, the figure blends various writers, especially Yeats and Swift, it is primarily and recognizably Yeats. Some of the lines suggest that Eliot had reached a new and final stage in his onerous relationship with Yeats. The spirit of the dead poet, no longer aggressive and tormented, warns the living one ironically of what gifts to expect in old age:

Let me disclose the gifts reserved for age

To set a crown upon your lifetime's effort.

First, the cold friction of expiring sense

Without enchantment, offering no promise

But bitter tastelessness of shadow fruit

As body and soul begin to fall asunder.

Second, the conscious impotence of rage

At human folly, and the laceration

Of laughter at what ceases to amuse.

And last, the rending pain of re-enactment

Of all that you have done, and been; the shame

Of motives late revealed, and the awareness

Of things ill done and done to others's harm

Which once you took for exercise of virtue.

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Then fools' approval stings, and honour stains.

From wrong to wrong the exasperated spirit

Proceeds, unless restored by that refining fire

Where you must move in measure, like a dancer.

In more didactic phrasing to suit the purgatorial scene, Eliot is paraphrasing here not only Yeats's poem on Just and rage, "The Spur," but also the other poem o� remorse, "Vacillation," which he had quoted earlier. There is a further tribute. Yeats in these lines: Eliot uses the images of fire and dance in the way they are used in Yeats's poem, "Byzantium," as images of the timeless:

At midnight on the Emperor's pavement flit

Flames that no faggot feeds, nor steel, has lit,

Nor storm disturbs, flames begotten of flame,

Where blood-begotten spirits come

And all complexities of fury leave,

Dying into a dance,

An agony of trance,

An agony of flame that cannot singe a sleeve.

The disagreements with Yeats over doctrine are forgotten, and nothing is said thij time about provinciality or eccentricitya

Just as in the third part of Eliot's The Waste Land the collocation of Buddha and St. Augustine, representatives of Christian

an�non-Christian cultures, is, as Eliot sa warily in his footnote, "not accidental," the collocation of Yeats and Eliot here deliberate and marks the reconciliation of: their lifelong differences. Eliot thought this' last of the Four Quartets his best poem, andij perhaps one reason for his estimate was t it brought about his rapprochement wit the poet who had always been formidab present in his consciousness. True frien, ship was only possible after Yeats was de and could be sifted down to those eleme which Eliot found congenial. That he foun at last, so many, is a measure of Yeats'" continued sway over the mind.

Published in England in Encounter. July I'.

The Influence of Yeats on Later English Poets

STEPHEN SPENDER

Onthe occasion of his l00th birthday, we can say that Yeats has been an immense success, an outstanding example of a boy who didn't do well at school or college, but who finally made good. Moreover his life has about it something of the fascination of a fairy story because he always knew that in the end he would come through. The fascinating letters of his father, J. B. Yeats, to him show that the father was the midwife of the son's fortunes, and that it was necessary for the son to disappoint the father in order that he might fulfill his father's dream and yet do so in a way that made him his father's opposite. If one were to reduce the outlines of Yeats's success story to a movie or television program, it would run something like this:

From 1865 to about 1910 it would be one long saga of dreamy frustration with beautiful, lonely, travel-poster photography of the poet walking through a mist or gazing out over the wan waves of a gray lake. Occasionally, the poet would mix in human affairs, in patriotic politics, and the theatre, attempting to realize his dreams through the medium of lesser men. Here the producer would have the satisfaction of showing that, like the Irishman in Shaw's John Bull's Other Island, the poet had a sounder and more realistic sense of business than all the hardheaded businessmen. However, frustration would still be the order of the day and the object of his frustrated passion, Maude Gonne, stunningly beauti821 TRI-QVARTERLY

ful and completely obdurate-and an actress to boot-would be there to prove it. Then suddenly there appears on the scene an American from the Midwest who becomes Yeat's secretary later on and who, with the evangelical fervor of a Billy Graham, starts giving Yeats the original Midwestern creative writing course. There are scenes in an Oxford garden with Ezra Pound looking at Yeats's manuscripts and scratching his head worriedly, saying with a look of deep concern, "'Had I the heaven's embroidered cloths .' but say, Willie, can't you be more specific?" There would be long conferences in which Yeats explained his philosophy to Pound who would say, "What strikes me about your ideas, Willie, is that they're unorganized. You need organizing, Willie."

We do, in fact, think of Yeats as a unique instance of a poet who lived half his life in homeless sleepwalking half-inactivity, then married, set up house, put his ideas in order and proceeded to write poetry in which the dreaming of his early life to a great extent became the material of the realistic thinking and writing of his later poetry. In a period 1 of ten years, between 1917 and 1927, he ceased to be the poet of the Celtic twilight and the poet dragged into theatre affairs and politics, whose muse was visibly drying up. He ceased to be a minor poet and he became a major one. He systematized his own thinking and wrote out his philosophy' in A Vision. As he himself put it, this use-

fully provided him with a fund of magical symbols which he could draw on in his poetry, whilst his memories and youth supplemented this with the mythology of his life in the real world during the most interesting period in recent Irish history. So to celebrate Yeats it scarcely needs emphasizing that the tidying up of the Yeats legend and the Yeats philosophy has proceeded apace in the past 20 years. Of course, Yeats hasn't been made to appear a rationalist, exactly, but today a complex and coherent system of reasons has been formed to explain his irrationality. His philosophy begins to look almost respectable like, say, Existentialism or Behaviorism.

In discussing the influence of Yeats on other poets I must begin by going back to the time before this huge edifice of critical explanation had been erected. The Yeats who exercised an influence on young poets in the 'twenties and 'thirties seems very different from the Yeats who may be influencing the work of some young writer in London or New York today. So I want to consider what it was in Yeats that influenced younger poets 30 or 40 years ago and I want to consider at what time he began to exercise this influence. I want, you see, to discuss Yeats, not to analyze his presence in the work of others; I want to discuss the influence in Yeats rather than the influencedin Day Lewis, Dylan Thomas, or Roethke. When we read Yeats today we tend to assume that the presence of the later, modern Yeats must have been felt by other poets at the same time he published the poems which today we think of as being in his late manner. We note that "The Second Coming" is dated 1920, so we think its influence must have been felt by then. But my own impression is that the force of this poem didn't really begin to be felt until the I930s, when two lines were widely quoted because they had the force of some epigramatic summation of the decades of Stalin, Hitler, and Mussolini:

"The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity."

Of course, I'm drawing dangerously on

autobiography when I add that I can remember reading these lines in the 1930s and feeling uneasily that they put me on the wrong side in two ways: firstly because I supported revolutionary politics, and secondly I lacked conviction.

My view is that until the publication of The Tower in 1928, Yeats was looked on as a poet of authenticity who had a great and rather dangerous attraction but who was a poet of dreams and fairyland like, say, Walter de la Mare. In 1926 I. A. Richards published his provocative essay, Science and Poetry. in which, in a famous footnote, he praises T. S. Eliot for having, in The Waste Land, severed poetry from all beliefs. Richards devoted a chapter to contemporary reputations, giving good marks to Thomas Hardy, attacking D. H. Lawrence for reconstructing himself as a Bushman, and bracketing W. B. Yeats with de la Mare as escapists from contemporary reality.

"Mr. Yeats retires into black velvet curtains and the visions of the Hermetist

"Mr. Yeats's work from the beginning was a repudiation of the most active contemporary interests. From the first [he] turned away from contemporary civilisation in favour of a world which he knew perfectly, the world of folklore as it is accepted, neither with belief nor disbelief, by the peasant. Folk-lore and the Irish landscape, its winds, woods, waters, islets, and seagulls, and for; a while an unusually simple and direct kind of love poetry in which he became something more than a minor poet, these were his refuge. Later, after a drawn battle with the drama, he made a more violent repudiation not merely of current civilisation but of life itself, in favour of a supernatural world Now he turns to a world of symbolic phantasmagoria about which he is desperately uncertain. He is uncertain because he has adopted as a technique of inspiration the use of trance, of dissociated phases of consciousness, and the revelations given in these dissociated states

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are insufficiently connected with normal experience Mr. Yeats takes certain feelings-feelings of conviction attaching to certain visions-as evidence for the thoughts which he supposes his visions to symbolise.

Possibly in 1926 a good many readers might have objected to this attack but not because they thought Yeats was a more modem poet than this. On the contrary they would have objected because they still thought of him as a Georgian poet and the Georgian poets were kind of preserves, or like partridges out of season; like bird sanctuaries, protected against critics-it was not supposed to be sporting to shoot at them.

In 1928 The Tower appeared and if we turn to the reviews of that volume which appeared in the English literary weeklies, we see that in praising The Tower the reviewers feel that the poet has become transformed, that he's reversed the whole development of his poetry in his old age. One might, in fact, imitate these reviewers by paraphrasing Lewis Carroll:

"You are old Father William, the critics all said, And your hair is remarkably white; And yet you incessantly stand on your head, Do you think at your age it is right?"

And in answering this question, they thoroughly approved ofhis standing on his head and thought he ought to have done so a long time before, so that the blood might have gone to the brain. The reviewer in The Nation remarked that "Years seem to have dried up the Celtic mists, to have braced the nerves and to have sharpened the senses of this particular poet." The New Statesman of October, 1928, gives the unredeemed early Yeats a reproachful glance:

however bitterly we might resent the impedimenta of Irish fancy, the Tuatha de Danaan and the whole charming, elusive, but slightly savourless conglomeration of Celtic fable, we were bound to admit that Mr. Yeats's treatment of his material was often as

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much at fault as the material itself, inclined, as he undoubtedly was, to exploit more often than properly utilise these figments of the folk-imagination, allowing their natural picturesqueness too great a scope, deepening the twilight when he should have illuminated it, and making a somewhat excessive play with the borrowed trumpery of mediaeval occult erudition

Mr. Yeats is essentially-phenomenon nowadays so rare-a racial poet, and combines in his person the better and worse tendencies of the literary revival which nurtured him.

The generation of poets of the 1930s were about 20 years old in 1928: Auden, 21; Day Lewis, 22; MacNeice, 20; myself 19. And the influence of The Tower was felt within a few months after the publication of that volume. Consider, for example, the opening lines from the third section ofthe title poem:

"It is time that I wrote my will; I choose upstanding men That climb the streams until The fountain leap, and at dawn Drop their cast at the side Of dripping stone; I declare They shall inherit my pride, The pride of people that were Bound neither to Cause nor to State, Neither to slaves that were spat on, Nor to the tyrants that spat, The people of Burke and of Grattan That gave, though free to refusePride, like that of the mom, When the headlong light is loose, Or that of the fabulous hom, Or that of a sudden shower When all streams are dry,"

think one can say that as rhythm anc rhetoric these lines caught on like wild fire In Auden's little-known volume of 1928 their effect is at once to be felt:

I chose this lean country For seven days' content

To satisfy the want Of eye and ear, to see The slow fastidious line

That disciplines the fell

Hear curlew's creaking call

From angles unforeseen

The drumming of a snipe

Surprise where driven sleet

Had scalded to the bone

And streams are acrid yet To an unaccustomed lip."

It would be possible to quote other examples from Edith Sitwell, Day Lewis, Richard Eberhart's early poetry, and later, Dylan Thomas, George Barker, Vernon Watkins, Theodore Roethke and half-adozen other poets to show the influence of The Tower. Probably The Tower was the volume by a contemporary published in this century which most affected the style of other poets. However, to list the influences in this way would be demonstrating the obvious. It suffices really to say that with The Tower Yeats restored rhetoric to poetry and that a poet like Dylan Thomas would scarcely have been possible without him. In Robert Graves's and Laura Riding's A Survey of Modernist Poetry which was published in 1929, they noted that there is no rhetoric in English poetry and they also urged the return of rhetoric to English poetry. They were extremely annoyed when it happened but their prophecy was perfectly correct.

I want now to turn to a less obvious kind of influence, a kind which perhaps a good many might not consider to be influence at all, because influence is usually taken to reveal itself as mere echo or reflection of one writer in the work of another writer. But if by "influence" we do mean just technical imitation it's too obvious, really, to be discussed, as in the lines above from Auden. Moreover, in our age such obvious influence is usually bad. One has only to think of the influence of a poet like Swinburne on his contemporaries to see this. There is, though, influence of a kind which it is much more difficult to analyze. This is the felt presence of one poet in the sensibility and attitudes of other poets. This is very obvious if we consider a poet like Eliot who, having few rhetorical devices, has few stylistic imitators and is, in fact, fatal to imitate. But he is a very great influence on his time and might

be said to have altered the poetic sensibility of two generations. By this I don't mean the influence of his expressed attitudes and his criticism; I mean an influence corning indirectly from what he does to language, the influence of rhythms in his poetry which meant that poets lived in a changed world after they read him and therefore changed their own poetry in ways which one could scarcely analyze. Now it might seem that Eliot was obviously a greater influence than Yeats because Eliot spoke a language which was more contemporary. He had listened to the machines and not to horses' hooves and chariots. But what I want to show here is that, in spite of there being something in his poetry from beginning to end which was not modern in the way that Ezra Pound and Eliot are modern, Yeats nevertheless was a very great influence on later writers and that his position as a poet whom we call great rests on the felt presence of his attitudes as a spirit working in the writing of other poets.

It is obvious that Eliot is a great influence because somehow his sensibility and his idiom, the words he uses, his rhythms, have essentially become us, become our own. We are, with our eyes and ears, tuned to him. We feel that he lives in our world. We feel that perhaps he's more like we are in his poetry, than we are like ourselves. With Yeats this isn't at all the case. He's forever stressing the differences between himselfand ourselves and that constitutes the difficulty of really liking him. I suspect people often only pretend to like him. He is so arrogant, so passionate. He insists on rejoicing on occasions when we feel he should be mourning. He chooses the Renaissance, the stones of Greece, the mosaics of Byzantium, ancestral homes for his habitat; he presents Neoplatonist philosophy, aristocratic ideology. In fact he stresses everything that distances him from our world. This being so, I think that our natural inclination is to admit his rhetorical grandeur but to reject everything else, his philosophy, his sympathies, his sensibility.

And yet if this were all there were to say about Yeats, Yeats would be a very special case in art, a kind of twentieth century Wagner. He'd have a position analogous to

TRI-QUARTERLY Iss

that of Stefan George in Germany: a great, cold forgotten monument, frozen in grandiose attitudes of the early part of a century. But I want to examine a bit further what one means by influence. I think that influence in poetry operates on several levels. In the first place there is the kind of influence which I call rhetorical. In the second place there is the influence of a deeper music and sensibility by which we're ravished. This is shown when, for instance, we can't get the lines of a poem out of our head. We're ravished by those lines but on the other hand we're very well armed to resist them and we do resist them. The influence which I've called "felt presence affecting our attitudes" occurs, I think, when we feel two things. First, we feel that the poet states an external situation which seems to be historically true of ourselves and, second, we feel that we recognize in the situation of the poet's own mind, out of which all his attitudes develop, a centre which seems very close, almost identical, perhaps, with the center of our own being and feeling. On these levels, influence can leap across centuries. Suddenly modern poets can be influenced by John Donne because they recognize in Donne a consciousness which finds itself in a historic situation in which (however great the dissimilarities) there is an important relationship with our own. It should be clear, I think, that Yeats again and again stated the external historic situation which we recognize as that of our time and he did so with a definiteness as great as T. S. Eliot in The Waste Land. "The Second Coming", as a statement about our situation, is indeed comparable with The Waste Land.

"Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony ofinnocenceis drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full ofpassionate intensity."

We recognize in these lines the historic 861 TRI-QUARTERLY

environment which is our own. And by this environment I don't mean simply a particular journalistic moment of our own. r mean a moment within the history of the whole of our epoch, the whole of the Christian epoch. Probably when people say that Yeats was a great poet they are thinking primarily of his power of making a kind of public historic statement of a general kind which yet strikes us as having a great particularity. The influence of this is felt perhaps in the obsession with the word "history" in the poetry of the '30s and '405.

The difficulty with Yeats, though, is not when he is acting his public character but when he's ceasing to speak about the environment and is speaking out of the centre of his own identity, his own particular consciousness situated within history. It is here that we're inclined to think of him as a bundle of poses and attitudes and impossible beliefs, archaic philosophies and carefully nurtured medieval superstitions. My intention is not to defend here his spiritualism, occultism, theory of the gyres and lunar phases and the rest except to suggest that they can be considered as a machinery: a machinery of inspiration and a machinery for schematising a philosophy of history when he wants to apply it to a particular moment in contemporary history. A machinery, if you like, for avoiding reportage and journalism in modern poetry. And here he isn't as far from Eliot as it may seem; Eliot also had a theory of history which interpreted our time within a picture of the whole of Christian civilization. The machinery, then, though it may look like the very centre of Yeats, is machinery and is therefore external. For the centre one has to look not at theories but at consciousness or conscience. One of Yeats's attitudes which is central to him, and which is in fact almost the principle of his consciousness and his conscience, is his idea of responsibility. Yeats sensed three main responsibilities and they are all central to consciousness as it's been expressed in art in our time. If, finally, Yeats is a greater poet than Eliot and the others, it's because this threefold responsibility is present in him and doesn't seem to be present in any other contemporary poet.

First of all, Yeats felt responsibility towards belief; secondly, responsibility towards action; thirdly, responsibility towards art. The real dialogue which goes on in Yeats's poetry, supplying the real dynamism, is the interplay throughout his work and in his soul of these three related, but by no means identical or harmonious, responsibilities.

Yeats felt that the poet has to believe, because without belief there can be no creation, that is, the imagination cannot act positively. Without belief imagination simply becomes passive, receptive, the imagination feeding upon the nightmares of history with which our time provides us. The result is the imaginings of a child frightened in the dark, of the silver which has withdrawn into itself at the back of the mirror. The function of the imagination is that man should create his own world from the centre of his consciousness. But such an invented world is also made up out of past worlds.

"Death and life were not Till man made up the whole, Made lock, stock and barrel Out of his bitter soul, Aye, sun and moon and star, all, And further add to that That, being dead, we rise, Dream, and so create Translunar Paradise."

Imagination of this order, imagination that can create its own world from the centre of consciousness, has to have belief, and here of course a difficulty in our time arises. The traditional dogmatic beliefs did not seem to Yeats to apply to our technological world. They may of course still provide us with a basis for withdrawing from that world, or for regarding it as a kind of gigantic irrelevance-in eternity as it seems to be regarded in the later poetry of Eliot. Belief in Yeats is extremely complex. He did believe in certain basic things: e.g. immortality, because without them imagination would be solipsist. He believed only intermittently in what I call the machinery of spiritualism which he set up in order to obtain evidence for his belief in immortality. We are now brought back to the fact

that what he ultimately believed in was imagination, not imagination solitary and isolated, but the power of imagination to communicate with the forces outside itself, another dream, perhaps to invent its world.

Yeats's second responsibility is towards action and by this I mean politics. That he was drawn into politics was the result of a situation, or a call upon his conscience, arising from the struggle of the Irish patriots of his time to attain independence. It seemed as if literature had a part to r lay in this movement of liberation. There were also the facts that the woman he loved was a fanatical Nationalist, that friends of his were involved in the same struggle against England, and that people he knew became martyrs. The opposition, indeed the conflict between the necessary external machinery and the inner conscience or consciousness committed ultimately to imagination are nowhere more apparent than in Yeats's politics. From the outside point of view he regards it as necessary to support the politics first of Irish Nationalism (which was a good cause) and then, rather deplorably, towards the end of his life-because his profound nostalgia for the past of Greece and the Renaissance made him admire authoritarianism- Mussolini-type Fascism. At this point it might be asked how a poet with such extreme right-wing views could yet exercise the very deep influence on the leftist poets of the 1930s. I think the reason is that underneath the machinery of organized views, Yeats expressed better than anyone in this century the dilemma of the man of imagination who feels bound through principles, loyalties, beliefs to support a particular kind of political action. No one saw more clearly that even the good cause makes demands on the artist which falsify the intense personal feeling which he puts into his art. And much more important than this, no one saw more clearly that what politics does to art, it does also to sensibility, and to the heart. As a political poet his great achievements are not the poems about Parnell but the poems about people, especially women, whose souls have been withered by political fanaticism.

In "Easter 1916" he wrote an elegy cele-

TRI-QUARTERLY I &7

brating the martyrdom of certain Irishmen after the 1916 Easter rising in Dublin. At first this poem seems to say that these men with whom he exchanged "polite meaningless words" or repeated at the club "a mocking tale or gibe" are suddenly transformed into martyrs. They

lived where motley is worn: But now all changed, changed utterly: A terrible beauty is born."

At first the poem simply seems to be about the transcendence by these people of their ordinary lives through martyrdom. But suddenly the poem changes abruptly in tone and becomes extremely somber.

"That woman's days were spent In ignorant good will, Her nights in arguments

Until her voice grew still."

Since the woman isn't even mentioned among the martyrs celebrated in the poem, this outburst must come from an almost irrepressible resentment of the politics of martyrdom.

The poem returns to the theme of those whose lives are redeemed by martyrdom, among them a personal enemy,

"A drunken, vainglorious lout. He had done most bitter wrong

To some who are near my heart, Yet 1 number him in the song; He, too, has been changed in his turn, Transformed utterly: A terrible beauty is born."

We're back at the affirmation ofmartyrdom, at the idea of the cenotaph. To the question, "Transformed into what?" there comes then, in a very high convention of elegiac poetry celebrating martyrdom and sanctitude, a marvellous answer.

"Hearts with one purpose alone Through summer and winter seem Enchanted to a stone To trouble the living stream."

The metaphor of the stone in the stream becomes enlarged into a picture of the

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stream-time-symbolised by the horse, the moor-hens and moor-cocks of the stream:

"Minute by minute they live: The stone's in the midst of all."

Thus, the stone is the transformed lives of the martyrs and we have again the idea of the marble cenotaph. But there is, in this poem, an astonishing return to resentment. The stone in the midst of all, the stone of the Grecian cenotaph, suddenly becomes identified with the stone that is the heart sacrificed to the public cause.

"Too long a sacrifice

Can make a stone of the heart"

It's difficult to think of any parallel, in a poem whieh is in honor of the martyrs to a public cause, for this bitterness. By the end of the poem, even the cause is put in doubt because the cause, of course, depends on the English being as black as they are painted. Yeats seems to have some doubts about this.

"For England may keep faith For all that is done and said."

So, more important than the external machinery of Yeats's politics, is expression of individual consciousness within that machinery; which necessitates him to take sides in certain situations and which has dehumanised him in the process. Now, I think this is a reason for the influence of Yeats as part of our consciousness. The poets of my own generation supported polities the opposite of those of Yeats at the end of his life, when he was speaking in the Irish Senate in praise of Mussolini. But as regards being situated inside an external machinery of public committments which were violating us in some way, our positiODf: were much the same. When Auden wrote his poem "Spain" supporting the Spanish Republic, he was confronting the same double responsibility of interior truth opposed by apparent external necessity as Yeats was confronting in "Easter 1916."

"To-day the deliberate increase in the chances of death,

The conscious acceptance of guilt in the necessary murder;

To-day the expending of powers

On the flat ephemeral pamphlet and the boring meeting."

Finally, the third responsibility of Yeats was towards art. And here the imagination is the centre of all, creating its world. The symbol which Yeats used for the spirit of the centre of the imagination is flame while the artifact, the image created out of the flame, is stone, bronze or gold.

"A starlit or a moonlit dome disdains All that man is, All mere complexities, The fury and the mire ofhuman veins."

This is the artifact, the starlit or the moonlit dome which disdains mere humanity. The spirit creating is

flames begotten of flame, Where blood-begotten spirits come And all complexities of fury leave, Dying into a dance

An agony of trance, An agony of flame that cannot singe a sleeve."

What does Yeats, then, ultimately feel responsible towards? The answer is, perhaps, to an abstraction, to the imagination which creates. But nevertheless this abstraction is a quality within ourselves. It's something the artist and even the man of action knows to be in him and which he feels may

be more important to him than his own self-concern. It may be more important for him to create something than to worry about his health. The dream, the superhuman, becomes more important than the mechanics of our self-regard-psychoanalysis, socialized health services, I beralism, planning and so on. Yeats has no ympathy with the idea that the world sheuld be a hospital administered by humanitarians. His opposition to humane causes is extremely dangerous, I think, and his idea of the superhuman as being the aim of art leads him perpetually onto the edge of inhumanity. Nevertheless the point I wish to make is that the centre of his conscious-ess is our situation both as individuals and as our history, which is realised at some point within the whole cycle of our civilisation. He confronts us with choice: to live for your vision or spend your life licking your wounds. Perhaps the dichotomy of the choice is overstated, over-dramatized, but nevertheless the centre of his being, from which he confronts us with the choice, is real and this centre is the imagination. You can create the world after the image of your imagination, after your vision. And when you have said this, after all, such oppositions as science an 1 poetry come together. I think then that the problem with Yeats is to discover the centre of his consciousness, his belief in the absolute of creative imagination, and then to move outwards into his systems which are a kind of machine within which his contemplating figure sits. The poet creates his world, he is not a projection of the machinery of his systematised ideas.

Yeats and Irish Politics

CONOR CRUISE O'BRIEN

It must be agreed that whatever one might demonstrate about Yeats the political man would not and could not detract in any way from the greatness of his poetry. Supposing we were to demonstrate, for example, that Yeats was in politics a Fascist; this would not diminish his stature as a poet. Therefore, I think it is not necessary to say or imply, as so many critics and admirers of Yeats have, that he took a passing, fleeting interest in Fascism. He took an interest in Fascism which began with the march on Rome and ended with his death and I don't think it could be less fleeting than that. In biographies as in literary histories, we too often find, instead of the complexities of actual political conjunctures, a generalized "political background" lacking the texture and the weight of real politics. It is often assumed, I think, that this does not matter much in the case of a writer like Yeats because his politics, if they existed, were probably rather vague and generalized themselves. In what follows I shall present some reasons for believing that Yeats's politics were less vague than is commonly supposed.

At the bottom of it all was the AngloIrish predicament. It's not ever quite enough to speak of Yeats as an Irish poet; J think the Anglo-Irish has to be made clear. The Irish Protestant stock from which Yeats came was no longer in his youth a ruling class but it was still a superior caste and thought of itself in this way. When he wrote towards the end of his life

of "the caste system that had saved the intellect of India",l he was almost certainly thinking not so much of India as of Ireland. His people, as is universal with the descendants of conquerors, were in the habit of looking down on their Catholic neighbors -the majority of those among whom they lived. This habit was imparted to Yeats early and I don't think he ever did quite lose it. But when he went to school in England Yeats was to find, as Parnell and others had found before him, that this distinction had lost much of its validity. Unsophisticated Englishmen made no more distinction between Protestant Irish and Catholic Irish than they did between Bramin and Untouchable. The Irish were known by their brogue-which in Yeats's case must have been quite marked at this stage-and the Irish were all comic, inferior and mad (among the sophisticated classes these same categories found gentler nuances: witty, impractical, imaginative). The Irish Protestant thus acquired two basic bits of information: the important thing about him in relation to Ireland was that he was a Protestant; in relation to England, that he was an Irishman.

For proud and sensitive natures, exposed at this period to the English view of the Irish, a political reaction was predictable, starting from the premises: "I, an Irishman, am as good as any Englishman. Ireland is therefore as good as England. Yet England governs herself; Ireland is governed by England. Can this be right?" Parnell

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thought not; Yeats's father thought not; Yeats thought not.

It used to be widely assumed, especially in Ireland, that Yeats became entangled in politics by Maude Gonne. This is of course wrong; Yeats had been drawn into politics before he ever heard of Maude Gonne, and the most active phases of his political life were to come after he had quarreled with Maude Gonne. Yeats entered politics under the influence of John O'Leary, the Fenian convict and exile who returned to Ireland in 1884. Yeats now became what he was to remain all his life-as he was to repeat towards the end-"a nationalist of the school of John O'Leary". The school of John O'Leary was one of radical- and uncomprising Irish republicanism. But at this time the circle was somewhat inactive because of O'Leary's concept that the thing to do was to prepare for a rising which was necessarily remote. And of course this was what the Irish Republican Brotherhood to which Yeats adhered-though he never seems to have taken the oath-was doing during these years. His involvement no doubt became intensified after his meeting with Maude Gonne but I doubt if one could trace much specific political influence there. Maude Gonne, for example, became drawn into the Agrarian Movement which was one of the most active groups at that time. But Yeats, with his aristocratic concept and his sense of belonging to a superior caste, never jointed in that. His active political involvement, as distinct from his rather passive association with John O'Leary, came not as a result of his association with Maude Gonne; it came a little later at the time of the death of Parnell in 1891.

The fall and death of Parnell had a powerful impact on him. "The modern literature of Ireland", Yeats told the Swedish Academy in 1925, "and indeed all that stir of thought which prepared for the Anglo-Irish War began when Parnell fell from power in 1891. A disillusioned and embittered Ireland turned from parliamentary politics; an event was conceived and the race began, as I think, to be troubled by that event's long gestation."? Elsewhere he speaks of four bells, four deep, tragic

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notes in Irish history, the first being the war that ended with the flight of the earls in 1603, the fourth being the death of Parnell in 1891. "I heard the first note of the fourth bell forty years ago on a stormy October morning. I had gone to Kingston Pier to meet the Mail Boat that arrived about 6 a.m. I was expecting a friend, but met what I thought much less of at the time, the body of Parnell."! On Parnell's death Yeats entered immediately into an active form of propaganda and politics. On the day of the funeral he published, in what had been Parnell's paper, an Elegy on Parnell. It is a rather bad poem which he never reprinted, called "Mourn and Then Onward!" but it certainly brought him to the attention of the Irish Nationalist public and he retained that attention during the next decade or so and even more. In fact he never wholly lost it.

At a later time, when the fighting started, a phrase used to be used with ironic overtones. It used to be said of somebody who was verbally very revolutionary, "X, you know, is on the literary side of the movement." But during the 1 890s, and the early 1900s the literary side of the movement was the only side that was moving and Yeats was doing most of the leading and the moving of it. This phase of his career, of course, culminated in 1902 with the production of Cathleen Ni Houlihan with Maude Gonne as Cathleen. This was the play which so moved people that P. S. O'Hagerty spoke of it as "A sort of sacrament"4 to the men of his generation and Stephen Gwynn said of it. "I went home asking myself if such plays should be produced unless one was prepared for people to go out to shoot and be shot".> And this, of course, came back to Yeats towards the end of his days when he examined his mind on the question:

"Did that play of mine send out Certain men the English shot?"6

In 1903 there occurred an important event, Maude Gonne's marriage; and it was: at this time Yeats broke with active Nationalist politics. After the curtain fell on Cathleen Ni Houlihan in 1902 it could, fairly be said that Yeats's work for the Irish

revolution had been accomplished. The poet-having acquired in his political years an audience and the dramatic society that was about to become the Abbey Theatrenow turned aside from Irish politics. He did not cease-he never ceased-to be an Irish Nationalist but his nationalism now became aristocratic and archaizing, instead of being popular and active. Aristocratic nationalism was not, in Ireland, practical politics because the aristocracy was almost entirely Unionist, that is to say antinational. This did not matter to Yeats who had enough, for the moment, of practical politics. In his new aristocratism he was releasing a part of his personality which he had been forced to try to suppress during the years of political activity. I n these years the Irish Protestant had necessarily emphasized his Irishness, minimizing or denying the separate and distinct tradition which the word Protestant implies. The Protestant now re-emerged with an audible sigh of relief. It had been stuffy in there, and getting stuffier. During this period, from 1903 to about 1916, there is in his work an increasing note of impatience and distaste for the rising Catholic middle class. He disliked this class doubly. He disliked them as a member of his own class, the Irish Protestant middle class, and he also disliked them for their Philistinism and for many other disagreeable qualities. Concerning them he wrote in the culminating poem on that particular subject, "September 1913".

"What need you, being come to sense, But fumble in a greasy till And add the halfpence to the pence

And prayer to shivering prayer, until You have dried the marrow from the bone?

For men were born to pray and save: Romantic Ireland's dead and gone, It's with O'Leary in the grave."?

The alliance of savings and prayers is a good symbolic definition of the rising Catholic middle class.

Most of the leaders who planned the rising which proved-three years laterthat romantic Ireland was not yet dead and

gone. belonged to the general class which Yeats distrusted; not to the most climbing and aggressive of it but to the "clerks and shopkeepers" whom he often thought of as "the base"; They included the basest of the base-from Yeats's point of viewMajor McBride himself who had married Maude Gonne. They had all been engaged for years in the kind of politics on which he had turned his back. But in 1916 they were shot by the English:

"All changed, changed utterly A terrible beauty is born."

The poems, "Easter 1916," "Sixteen Dead Men," "The Rose Tree," and "On a Political Prisoner" drew strength from the complexity as well as the intensity of the emotions involved-the sense-which became explicit years after-of his own share in the "gestation" of the event; the presence in the event of the strongest love and the strongest personal hatred of his life; an old hate, and even a kind of disgust, for much of what the insurrection meant,

"Blind and leader of the blind Drinking the foul ditch where they lie"8

an even older and deeper hate for those who crushed the insurrection; and finally, a prophetic sense of the still more bitter struggle yet to come:

"But who can talk of give and take What should be and what not While those dead men are loitering there

To stir the boiling pot?"9

By the time these poems were published in the Autumn of 1920 the pot had boiled over and the Black and Tan war was in full swing. It was a bold act to publish them. It was known in 1920 that Ireland was going to get some form of self-government. If the Rebels were beaten it would be the home rule (with partition) of the British Act of 1920. If the Rebels won, it would be the Republic proclaimed in 1916. The two poems that Yeats chose to publish covered, as it happened, both eventualities neatly.

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The spirit of the Proclamation of the Republic was in them:

'But where can we draw water'

Said Pearse to Connolly

'When all the wells are parched away

As plain as plain can be There's nothing but our own red blood Can make a right rose tree' "10

But there are also in them the doubts and reservations which most Irishmen had felt about the Proclamation of 1916: the doubts and reservations of those for whom home rule and the Act of 1920 represented an acceptable settlement;

"Was it needless death, after all?

For England may keep faith

For all that is done and said.

We know their dream; enough

To know they dreamed and are dead; And what if excess of love

Bewildered them until they died"ll

In the event the Anglo-Irish Treaty brought to Ireland the realities of the Act of 1920 with some of the trappings of 1916. This treaty set up, not the Republic proclaimed in 1916, but a Free State within the Empire and without the six counties of the northeast. Many of those who had been fighting felt that this was a betrayal, as Yeats's Pearce and Connolly might have felt:

"Maybe a breath of politic words Has withered our rose tree."

Those who felt in this way tried to reject the treaty and carryon the struggle. The majority of the people, tired of war, had voted, in effect, for the acceptance of the treaty and the Free State Government began liquidating the people who did not accept the treaty. At this time Yeats accepted a seat in the Senate from the Cosgrave government which had just put down the other side in the Civil War using the means which were probably necessary for that purpose and were certainly ruthless and harsh. Yeats was now an established public figure and he was soberly pleased about his political position and prospects. "We," he wrote of himself and his fellow

Senators, "are a fairly distinguished body and should get much government into our hands."12 His political options were now explicitly reactionary: "Out of all this murder and rapine," he wrote in 1922, "will come not a demagogic but an authoritarian government."13 and again: "Everywhere one notices a drift towards Conservatism, perhaps towards Autocracy. "14 His ideas for Ireland were explicitly linked with the rise of fascism in Europe. "We are preparing here, behind our screens of bombs and smoke, a return to conservative politics as elsewhere in Europe, or at least to a substitution of the historical sense for logic. The return will be painful and perhaps violent but many educated men talk of it and must soon work for it and perhaps riot for it The Ireland that reacts from the present disorder is turning its eyes towards individualist Italy. "15 "Individualist Italy" is a curious synonym for Fascist Italy but that is what he was referring to.

One of the major limitations in Yeats's right wing politics in Ireland now came into play. Any right wing government in Ireland that was going to work and any pro-Fascist government that might conceivably have emerged would have needed one thing and that was the support of the Church. And, in fact, the government which Yeats had worked for now became increasingly dependent on clerical support. They no longer needed British artillery which they had used before but they did need their flanks covered by the Canons of the Church. And they were. The clergy, for the degree of support which they supplied, exacted their price, in the form of specifically Catholic legislation from the Parliament of the day. This included legislation on divorce. Most Protestants swallowed this because in most cases their options had now become bourgeois options rather than specifically theological ones. But Yeats was outraged; he denounced the divorce legislation and of course it became clear that his nomination to the Senate would not be renewed. He became at this period a rather isolated figure in politics and remained so until 1932.

The year 1932 was a turning point in Irish political history. In that year the party, led by Mr. Cosgrave, which had won

the Civil War and ruled the country since the foundation ofthe State, fell from power. The party, led by de Valera, which represented the losers in the Civil War, now won a General Election and took over the Government. The respect for democratic process shown by Mr. Cosgrave's government was, in the circumstances, rather remarkable. It was indeed too remarkable to please many of the members of the fallen party, and some of these now set about organizing a para-military movement, on the Fascist model, for the intimidation of their opponents and the recovery of power. "They have the Blackshirts in Italy," said one ofthe politicians concerned, "they have the Brownshirts in Germany and now in Ireland we have the Blueshirts."

The picture presented of Yeats's association with this movement-by him, retrospectively, and by other commentators on it-is, I think, in some ways a little misleading. His association is probably best covered, for anyone who wishes to follow it, in the letters which he wrote to Olivia Shakespear, who sympathized with his views at this time. Afterwards, I think, he was rather inclined to minimize the degree of enthusiasm which he did feel for this movement at a given moment. He says in one letter to her, "I find myself constantly urging the despotic rule of the educated classes I know half a dozen men any one of whom may be Caesar-or Catiline. It is amusing to live in a country where men will always act. Where nobody is satisfied with thought. There is so little in our stocking that we are ready at any moment to turn it inside out and how can we not feel emulous when we see Hitler juggling with his sausage of stocking. Our chosen color is blue and blue shirts are marching about all over the country."16

And then: "When I wrote to you, the Fascist organizer of the blue-shirts had told me that he was about to bring to see me the man he had selected for leader that I might talk my anti-democratic philosophy. I was ready, for I had just rewritten for the seventh time the part of A Vision that deals with the future. The leader turned out to be a Gen[eral] O'Duffy, head of the Irish police for twelve years and a famous

organizer Italy, Poland, Germany then perhaps Ireland. Doubtless I shall hate it (though not so much as I hate Irish democracy) but it is September and we must not behave like the gay young sparks of May or June".17 He took apparently the view that it was inevitablethat thisshouldhappen.

And this goes on. The excitement goes on until about September, at which time the government took firm action against the Blue Shirts and the movement began to collapse and Yeats dissociated himself from it. The poem "Church and State" was written at this time and expresses his disillusion with it. It is customary to say that, at this point, Yeats had become disillusioned with Fascism. One may accept this judgment, but must also remark that a principal illusion which had been dissipated was the illusion that Fascism in Ireland stood a good chance of winning. In the spring and summer of 1933 the fascism of the Irish Blueshirts looked to many people like a possible winner and in this phase Yeats was with the Blueshirts. By the autumn and winter of 1933/4, the Government's energetic measures-described by Yeats as "panic measures"-made it clear that De Valera was no von Papen. O'Duffy, failing to devise anything effective in reply, revealed that he was no Hitler. The blue began to fade, and Yeats's interest in it faded proportionately.

Comment on the question of Yeats's attitude to Fascism has been be-deviled I think by the assumption that a great poet must be, even in politics, "a nice guy". If this be assumed then it follows that, as Yeats obviously was a great poet he cannot really have favored Fascism, which was obviously not a nice cause. Thus the critic or biographer is led to postulate a "true Yeats", so that Yeats's recorded words and actions of Fascist character must have been perpetrated by some bogus person with the same name and outward appearance. If one drops the assumption, about poets having always to be nice in politics, then the puzzle disappears and we see, I believe, that Yeats the man was as near to being a Fascist as the conditions of his own country and class permitted. His unstinted admiration had gone to Kevin O'Higgins, the most

ruthless "strong man" of his time in Ireland, and he linked his admiration explicitly to his rejoicing at the rise of Fascism in Europe-and this at the very beginning, within a few days of the March on Rome. Ten years later, after Hitler had moved to the center of the political stage in Europe Yeats was trying to create a movement in Ireland which would be overtly Fascist in language, costume, behavior and intent. He turned his back on this movement when it began to fail, not before.

Post-war writers, touching with some embarrassment on Yeats's pro-Fascist opinions, have tended to treat these as a curious aberration of an idealistic but ill-informed poet. In fact such opinions were quite usual in his class and in his time and were shared by very many respectable people like Mr. Eliot. Of course, it is said that Yeats was not a Fascist but he was an aristocratic authoritarian; he certainly would have preferred something more strictly aristocratic than Fascism but since he was living in the 20th century he was attracted to Fascism as the best available form ofanti-democratic theory and practise. It has been said that Yeats was really closer to Swift or Jefferson than he was to Mussolini but unfortunately Yeats was interested in contemporary politics and he was a contemporary not of Swift's or Jefferson's but of Mussolini's. George Orwell, though critical and up to a point percipient, about Yeats's tendencies, thought that Yeats misunderstood what an authoritarian society would be like. Such a society, Orwell pointed out, "will not be ruled by noblemen with Van Dyke faces, but by anonymous millionaires, shinybottomed bureaucrats and murderous gangsters." This implies a degree of innocence in Yeats which cannot reasonably be postulated. Yeats was a man with quite a lot of political avatars. O'Higgins and O'Duffy were not "nobleman with Van Dyke faces", and Yeats had considerable experience of practical politics, both in the 'nineties" and in the early "'twenties". When he thought of rule by an elite, it seems to have been a possible elite, resembling in many ways the nominated members of the Senate in which he sat. The membership of that Senate-bankers, organizers, ex-officers-

would correspond roughly to what Orwell, in more emotive language, describes

Yet in challenging the assumption that Yeats's pro-Fascism was either not "truly Yeats" or not "truly pro-Fascist", one must not over-look the intermittent character of his pro-Fascism and of all his political activity. If his pro-Fascism was real, his irony and caution were real too and his phases ofdetachment were not less real than his phases of political commitment. The long phase of nationalist commitment (1887-1903) was followed by a long phase (1903-1916) of detachment from almost all practical politics, by a critique of Irish nationalist politics, and by the formation of an aristocratic attitude which did not find practical political expression until after 1916 when-after a new flare-up of nationalist feeling-he re-entered Irish politics on the right, in the Free State Senate. After clerical pressures had made the Senate uncongenial to him and had extruded him from it, he withdrew again from active politics (1928-33) only returning when a situation propitious to Fascism seemed to present itself. When O'Duffy's Irish Fascists failed ignominiously he turned away from politics again. And always, in these long phases of withdrawal he tended to write of all politics with a kind of contempt, a plague-on-bothyour-houses air. He wrote to Ethel Mannin, "If [ did what you want I would seem to hold one form of government more responsible than any other and that would betray my convictions. Communist, Fascist nationalist, clerical, anti-clerical, are all responsible according to the number of their victims.

This was "the true Yeats" - the true Yeats of a period of political inactivity when he watched, bitterly or sardonically, a game he had no chance of playing. But when he had a chance, when he saw political opportunities, as in 1891 or 1920, or thought he saw them as in 1933, he wrote differently, and with excitement. These "manic" phases of political activity were no less real or important than the "depressive" phases which followed them. And the options of the "manic" phases were not haphazard or middle-of-the-road. They were either anti-English or-in Irish poli-

tics-aristocratic and, from the time Fascism had appeared, distinctly and exultantly pro-Fascist.

It was Yeats's misfortune as a politician, and his great good fortune as a poet, that his political opportunities or temptations were few and far between. Irish politics in their normal run have not, since the introduction of universal suffrage, been receptive to poets, aristocrats or Protestants-there have been distinguished exceptions, but that has been the general rule for many years. It is only in rare conjunctures, times of great national stress and division, that an Irish party is likely to find room for such exotics for, in such times, men welcome an ally with a name and a voice. Such moments of excitement and emotion, which offered opportunities, were also the moments which most stirred the poet. Such times were the Parnell split of 1891 and the Sinn Fein split of 1920/22. The abortive Fascist movement of 1933 seemed to be, but was not, the opening ofanother profound fissure in Irish life. In the first two cases, the world of Irish politics proved, when "normalcy" had returned, no place for the poet. In the third case, the poet retired from a political movement which had lost momentum. It is fairly safe to say that, if it had succeeded, it would have dropped him or forced him out, not through any great aversion on his part from thugs in colored shirts but because an Irish Fascism, to have any chance of staying in power would necessarily have to become an intensely clerical Fascism. In fact, the successor movement to the B1ueshirts-the Christian Front-was a noisily Catholic clerical-Fascist movement. This was a kind of Fascism-perhaps the only kind-which Yeats would not accept or tolerate, since his authoritarian view of life derived ultimately from his concept of the caste to which he belonged, and the distinguishing mark of that class was its Protestantism.

In the political writings of his last years the two elements in his politics-the "Irish" and the "Protestant" elements-entered into a new set of relations. The "Irish" element became more vocal than it had been since 1916 and the "Protestant" element was obliged to break finally with the traditional right wing in Irish politics. Anti-English

feeling, long dormant in Yeats, became increasingly pronounced in the period 1937/9. A series of poems, "Roger Casement", "The Ghost of Roger Casement", "The O'Rahilly", "Come Gather round Me Parnellites", both expressed and did much to rekindle the old pride in Irish nationalism which the cynicism which followed the Civil War had dulled. The Casement poems especially had a powerful anti-English charge.

"0 what has made that sudden noise

What on the threshold stands?

It never crossed the sea because

John Bull and the sea are friends;

But this is not the old sea

Nor this the old sea shore

What gave that roar of mockery

That roar in the sea's roar?

The ghost of Roger Casement Is beating on the door."

No Irishman, reading those lines on the eve of the Second World War, had forgotten that Casement had been hanged as well as "morally assassinated" for trying, in 1916, to bring help to Ireland from Germany. And some Irishmen, at least, must have reflected that if the sea was no longer the whole sea, which had been friends with John Bull, the reason for this might be that the nation from which Casement had tried to bring help now possessed a powerful airforce. Potentially, "The Ghost of Roger Casement" was as explosive as Cathleen Ni Houlihan.

Just at this time Yeats was writing to Ethel Mannin that, while he liked neither side in Spain, and did not want to see his old leader O'Duffy-now fighting for Franco-return to Ireland with enhanced prestige to "the Catholic Front", he was attracted by the thought that a Fascist victory would weaken England. I am an old Fenian and I think the Fenian in me would rejoice if a Fascist nation or government controlled Spain because that would weaken the British Empire, force England to be civil to India and loosen the hand of English finance in the Far East of which I hear occasionally. But this is mere instinct, a thing I would never act on." 19

TRI-QUARTERL y 197

At this period also he became reconciled to some extent with the de Valera government and his anti-British language and attitude are recorded by, among others, Dorothy Wellesley, who wondered why he hated the English so much at a time when they were so weak and when they had ceased to oppress Ireland. She said that there was something in him which rather liked the "ranting, roaring oppressors" and was contemptuous of the "stuffed lion".

During Yeats's life, the English government gave him a Civil List pension, and the Athenaeum Club gave him the signal honor of a special election. Since his death, the British Council has presented him to the world as one of England's glories. There is therefore some irony in the thought that there was something in him that would have taken considerable pleasure-though not without a respectful backward glance at Shakespeare-in seeing England occupied by the Nazis, the royal family exiled and the mother of Parliaments torn down. Meanwhile in Ireland one would have expected to see him at least a cautious participant, or ornament in a collaborationist regime.

It is probably fortunate for his future reputation, and especially his standing with the British Council, that he died in January 1939 before the political momentum of his last years could carry him any further than On the Boiler.

What all this has to do with his poetry is a question that one would need a good

I. On The Boiler

2. Lecture on accepting the Nobel Prize. Text in Autobiographies, p. 559.

3. Commentary on the poem "Parnell's Funeral." Text in AlIt and Alspach, The Variorum Edition of W. B. Yeats, p. 834.

4. "w. B. Yeats and the Revolutionary Ireland of his Time" in The Dublin Magazine. July-Sept. 1939

5. Quoted in A. N. Jeffares, W. B. Yeats, p, 138

6. "The Man and The Echo" I L 11-12

7. "September 1913"11. 1-8

8. "On a Political Prisoner" 11. 11-12

9. "Sixteen Dead Men" 11. 3-6

deal of time to answer. I would like to suggest in relation to it that Yeats had a greater feeling than most other poets, most other writers, for what was happening in Europe, an understanding of the telepathic waves of violence coming from Europe which touched something in his own heart and character. He understood what was hapening with the calculating, managing, diplomatic side of his mind, he entered into those sorts of relation that we have just touched on here. The sort of "premonitory" intuition present in The Second Coming and in other poems necessarily affected Yeats in his ordinary life as well as in his poetry. Yeats the manager, the Senator, the politician, stands in a diplomatic relation to these intimations of power. In the poetry, however, the raw intimations of what is impending-the "telepathic waves of violence and fear"- make themselves known not in the form of calculated practical deductions, but in the attempt to reveal through metaphoric insight what is actually happening. The poet, like the lady, is so caught up

So mastered by the brute blood of the air"

that he does indeed take on the knowledge of what is happening with the power to make it known. The political man had his cautious understanding with Fascism, the diplomatic relation to a great force. The poet conveyed the nature of the force, the dimension of the tragedy.

10. "The Rose Tree" II. 13-18

11. "Easter 1916" 11. 67-72

12. To Edmund Dulac, 1 December 1922, in Wade, The Letters of W. B. Yeats, p, 694

13. To Olivia Shakespear, May 1922. Letters, p. 682

14. To the same. October 1922. Leiters. p. 690

15. To H. J. C. Grierson, 6 November 1922, Letters, p.693

16. To Olivia Shakespear, 13 July 1933, Letters, pp.811-812

17. To The Same, 23 July 1933, Leiters. pp. 812-813

18. To Ethel Mannin, 8 April, 1936. Letters. p. 851

19. To Ethel Mannin, 11 February, 1937, Letters, p. 881

An expanded version of this essay may be found in In Excited Reverie, the volume of centenary essays edited by A. Norman Jeffares and published by The Macmillan Company.

Poetry Since Yeats: An Exchange of Views

STEPHEN SPENDER

PATRICK KAVANAGH

THOMAS KINSELLA

W. D. SNODGRASS

SPENDER: I'm supposed to say something in order to get the discussion started and then I'm going to ask afterwards for Mr. Snodgrass to speak and then Mr. Kinsella and then Mr. Kavanagh. Mr. Kavanagh has said he'd like to be last because he likes contradicting everyone so I thought he could be. I've never been a moderator before and I don't think Mr. Kavanagh's ever been moderated.

We are going to talk about poetry since Yeats, and I hope we will be remembering Yeats and bringing the conversation back to him.

Someone said this afternoon that Mr. Padraic Colum was the last ofthe dinosaurs. Of course what he meant by that was Mr. Colurn belonged to the generation of the very great poets early in this century, W. B. Yeats and then later on T. S. Eliot and I would include James Joyce. We feel that since then poets are not so concentrated on trying to produce great works. There's such a thing as deliberately setting out to write great poetry. At the beginning of this century writers deliberately set out to write great works and I think one reason why they did this was that they thought they were living at a time in which their civilization was perhaps coming to an end and they were occupied in making the last great statements about this civilization. They felt impelled on the one hand to invent a mod-

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ern medium, a modern idiom, in order to speak the language, you might say, the language of the dead, to speak to the doomed civilization in their language; but they also felt that these works would be a summation of the parts and thus there are works like The Waste Land, like Ulysses.. like The Tower and the great poems of Yeats. Writers like this were participants in a vast act, an invocation of the past, in order that the ghosts of Homer, Vergil, Dante, the Elizabethans, might haunt us by walking through their poems; they invoked the past in the way in which Dante invoked Vergil in order to hurl back into the mouths of the heretics of the modern age the accusation that they were the hollow men. Now compared to this I think the kind of poetry that is being written today seems in a much more minor key; it doesn't seem to have the same great ambition.

Recently I've been reading about a dozen volumes of poems written this year and I don't think that one can really regard 1964 as an unimportant year in poetry; a year which has produced the volumes of poems by Robert Lowell, Randall Jarrell, Philip Larkin, John Berryman, Donald Hall, and a posthumous volume by Theodore Roethke, can't be written off as a year negligible in poetry. But at the same time these poets seem minor in comparison with the dinosaurs. I think that one reason that they

may seem minor is because their merits seem to us negative. One of their merits, I think, is that they are not nostalgic. After all, the dinosaurs, Pound and Yeats and Eliot, were dependent on feeling nostalgic about the past. You can't go on being nostalgic forever. I think that to stop being nostalgic, although it seems negative, is in itself a great achievement. The other thing, I think, that strikes one about reading these volumes is that poets today use a medium which they've learned from their immediate predecessors, a medium of poetic language, poetic idiom and forms, in which they can discuss almost anything. You see a poet like Auden discussing the house that he has in Austria, going through it room by room, the kitchen, the bathroom, everything, writing poems about it-and very beautiful poems-but you feel that he's deliberately refusing to write about something more important. There's a deliberate negation, a deliberate refusal of the great theme; what he is showing us is his ability to write poetry about anything he likes, which is, nevertheless, poetry. Well, having said that I'm going to ask Mr. Snodgrass to speak.

SNODGRASS: I'm concerned with a related problem in that it seems to me that since Yeats we have had almost no poet with a full career, a poet that we can feel reached a maturity, a poet that we can feel has fully capitalized on his own ability or fulfilled his own gift. Most especially in this country we've had poet after poet with brilliant early poems, with a marvelous first book, sometimes with a marvelous two or three books, but none of the work in the middle age, the period we think of as maturity. During that period they almost all turn into idea mongers and are busy selling one system of belief or another. Then if they're lucky they come to a very late flowering, they come back to life after menopause. And I don't mean that entirely flippantly either. It seems to me very much related to the problems of love; during their middle life this seems to get much too difficult for them to handle and they have to substitute a system of beliefs, a system of ideas, for the world that has gotten unmanageable. It

seems to me that for nearly all of them-it's true in the theater quite as much-ideas are their great curse. Ideas can be used like a kind of mental aspirin to take the pain out of the world and, when you've taken the pain out of it, you have less reason to be an artist. You are less an artist.

In the generation immediately after Yeats, meaning Pound and Eliot, this is less a problem than it becomes later on. Now, for me, Eliot is his greatest in his earliest works, long before he develops an idea system or a system of beliefs. He's greatest to me in "Prufrock" or "Gerontion." I realize that I'm somewhat eccentric in this feeling but it seems to me that the more Eliot believes he is able to cope with the world or to either manage it or find a suitable substitute for it in belief, the less he is a poet. I read The Waste Land if somebody tells me to but I never tell myself to. Similarly, with Pound, I am much attracted to his early work but I find that as he goes on he becomes less and less a poet and more and more a kind of flash card machine. He's like someone flipping bits of phrases in front of my eyes in order to see if I have yet learned the lesson, if I have yet learned the right texts and what I am supposed to believe about them so that I will finally come to be totally under his domination. To me less and less in his later work is that lyrical presence felt that was the great poet that he was. However, for both Eliot and Pound ideas don't become such a problem that they stop writing. For the later poets they do become such a problem that they quit. Ransom is perhaps the essential case. We've never had a better poet than the early John Crowe Ransom. But through his whole middle life he absolutely stopped writing and only began again quite recently at about the age of 75, I believe, and is once again writing to the great joy of all of us. Yet, it's very strange that that man who had more ability than most of the poets writing quit through his whole middle career. The same thing in some sense is true of people like Stevens. It seems to me that his whole middle period is a desert of philosophy, of esthetic philosophy. It's only when he faces death, in his last book The Rock, that he comes back to doing anything like fulfilling

TRI-QUARTERLY 1101

the promise of his first book Harmonium.

You see the same kind of thing in William Carlos Williams, who in his middle period turns into the worst kind of English teacher, the kind who says to you, "don't write English, write American," and keeps saying it until you want to hit him you're so sick of hearing it. Finally, in his late life, when he had already had two or three heart attacks, he faced death and he came back to being a poet and wrote some unbelievably beautiful poems. The same thing I think can be said of Frost and Cummings, that essentially they stopped growing fairly early in their careers, Frost at about 40, Cummings at about 23. Frost gave up growing in order to develop a system of belief to prove his virtue. Cummings felt a neo-platonism.

I want to investigate the reasons that Yeats was able to escape some of this. It seems to me particularly the problem of the post-symbolist. Yeats was the last symbolist probably and certainly the finest symbolist in English. Yet in some very essential sense he never gave in to it. He could never be satisfied, I think, with any system of ideas or with any stay against confusion. He created far vaster systems of ideas, a far greater stasis in ideas than any of the later poets that I've mentioned, yet he never took them any too seriously or tried to make them very rational. He was willing enough to accept symbolism's liaison with occultism; he even embroidered upon that. But he didn't try to make it very convincing. In one ofhis poems called "The Apparitions" he writes this,

"Because there is a safety in derision I talked about an apparition, I took no trouble to convince, Or seem plausible to a man of sense, Distrustful of that popular eye

Whether it be bold or sly.

Fifteen apparitions have I seen; The worst, a coat upon a coat-hanger.

He did not care to seem plausible to a man of sense. He knew in some very essential way that he was creating a vision out of his own feelings and he did not especially care if that reflected the outside world or history. I think that's quite as true of A Vision as it is, say, of "The Second Coming."

102 ! TRI-QUARTERLY

Turning and turning in a widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and every-where

The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity."

It seems to me very clear that whatever he may be talking about in the outside world or you may feel he is talking about in the outside world, he is most essentially talking about his own feelings and the life ofhis own feeling, the sense that his center cannot hold against his growing confusion, against his growing sexuality, against the growing power of his own rage and lust, his own reawakened violence in old age. When he's talking about the inverted cones of history and the double cones within one another, he's very clearly talking about the reciprocal inversion of his own life, the matter of passion in old age, of rage in his time of weakness where he was very pure as a young man. He is speaking of the awakening of passion, violence and rage and lust in himself, in his return to the grave as a kind of womb, the whole inverted paradoxical nature of the life of feeling.

Now those who came after him, it seems to me, tried to make a system of beliefs that was reasonable, to reach the same state of symbolist ecstasy, and by ecstasy I mean literally standing outside, by reasonable means. That seems to me very much like bowdlerizing Shakespeare and trying to make him tidy, trying to make him fit the laws of classical plot-making. In doing that you cut down on his most essential meaning which is about the multiple nature of reality, about the relative nature of reality. In the first place, it seems that most of the poets who have tried to reach a state similar to Yeats have tried to do it through Christianity. It seems to me that Christianity is not really more reasonable than is Yeats's occultism. Any system of belief is about equally unreasonable if you take what you want and what fits you; but rationally you

cannot defend one more than the other. But for the poet why try to make a reasonable doctrine, a reasonable system of belief? The trouble is that the poets here are making a substitute for the world, a substitute for the unmanageability of the world. With Eliot, Christianity comes to replace the unbearable world of sensuality. Pound's system replaces and tries to dominate the unruly cultures which won't behave the way he wants them to, and Stevens's tries to block out the view of his own ugly business life and to create a decoration for abysmal life without meaning. All of these people are trying to cut down on the disparity of the world, the awful fact of difference. Difference in sex, difference in size, in power, in ability, is the one thing that we can bear least.

Yeats's idea system, on the other hand, silly as it may look at first, does tend to correspond to the outside world. In a very odd way he became so very much like his world, like his civilization, like the ancient edifice identified with the faith that was destroying him that he has only to describe his own feelings and he describes that culture. He says, "Why should not old men be mad?" He was, after all, a wild, old, wicked man identified with a wild, old, wicked civilization in its decay and corruption and he had something to say for it. He needs only to report his feelings-"the best lack all conviction while the worst are full of passionate intensity-" and he reports the case with his culture. As he gets older he gets closer and closer to the physical, to difference, to the sharp-edged reality, where most of our poets are trying to hold themselves away from that. Besides, Yeats had a taste for confusion. It seems to me that's essential in an artist almost more than anything else. He had an ear for intolerable music. He had a tolerance for all the insane awfulness of this world as almost no one else has had since. Although he was the last of the symbolists and although he engaged as they all did in a search for stasis, for a state of being, an ecstasy which would be literally a standing out of this world, it never could satisfy him as it could some of them. He created Byzantium just exactly as Rimbaud or Mallarrne always fixed on the

matter of stasis. In Rimbaud's most famous poem, I think, his "Memoire," he pictures himself in the last stanza as in a chained boat unable to reach either the yellow flower woman or the blue flower man and that is his state, chained in his own memory, but it is a stasis. Mallarrne sees himself as a swan freezing into the ice. They all sought a stasis whether they lamented it or celebrated it. They all sought for a world where one would not change and die, be born and suffer and then be wiped out for no apparent purpose. I think that's worth noting, well, at least for me the two important, most important men of the last several centuries are Freud and Rilke and I find it worth noting that both of them refused any sedatives when they were dying. To them, to men of that creative bent, sensation was the only life. Better to have a pain than numbness. Yeats writes in "Those Images",

"Recognize the five

That make the Muses sing."

The five senses above all are what he must trust. For him, too, it was the senses that were life. It was very great to build systems of thought, great myths out of his own feeling; it was nice to dream of political systems to solve the problems. But he knew they would not solve the problems. You remember the great poem:

"Parnell came down the road, he said to a cheering man: 'Ireland shall get her freedom and you still break stone.'

It was nice to dream about Byzantium, a place of stasis, a place where there would be no death. Yet none of those things could replace for Yeats the awfulness of the world he experienced. He writes in "The Circus Animals' Desertion"-speaking first about his earlier work-

"Those masterful images because complete Grew in pure mind, but out of what began?

A mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street, Old kettles, old bottles and a broken can,

TRI-QUARTERL Y 103

Old iron, old bones, old rags, that raving slut

Who keeps the till. Now that my ladder's gone, I must lie down where all the ladders start

In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.

And he cared for that foul rag-and-bone shop so much that no system of ideas, no myth of being or pure, changeless existence could take its place or keep him from painting every battered, tattered rag of it with the loving care of a Vermeer. Of course it'sgrand to imagine a stayagainstconfusion, to imagine a realm of pure existence, to fantasy a Byzantium of enduring art, but what fool can read Yeats's poems and not know if he had his way for one tenth of a second he'd grab the wheel of that ship and have it going back to Ireland. It's pleasant to think of being a golden bird singing to those very proper lords and ladies of Byzantium about what is past and passing and to come. But if he had his way he'd be back among the young in one anothers' arms listening to the birds in the trees. Like Gerard de Nerval, the first symbolist, he hears the call of the ancient fables and of Delphica. He even translated the Delphic Oracle's praise for Plotinus, the pure in heart:

"Behold that great Plotinus swim, Buffeted by such seas; Bland Rhadamanthus beckons him, But the Golden Race looks dim, Salt blood blocks his eyes. Scattered on the level grass Or winding through the grove Plato there and Minos pass, There stately Pythagoras And all the choir of love.

Yet he knew that he was not of the pure in heart. He belonged to the mire and fury of mortal salt blood. He knew that he had "News for the Delphic Oracle."

"There all the golden codgers lay, There the silver dew, And the great water sighed for love,

104 I TRI-QUARTERLY

And the wind sighed too.

Man-picker Niamh leant and sighed By Oisin on the grass; There sighed amid his choir of love

Tall Pythagoras.

Plotinus came and looked about, The salt flakes on his breast,

And having stretched and yawned awhile

Lay sighing like the rest.

Straddling each a dolphin's back And steadied by a fin, Those Innocents relive their death, Their wounds open again.

The ecstatic waters laugh because Their cries are sweet and strange, Through their ancestral patterns dance, And the brute dolphins plunge

Until, in some cliff-sheltered bay

Where wades the choir of love

Proffering its sacred laurel crowns, They pitch their burdens off.

Slim, adolescence that a nymph has stripped, Peleus on Thetis stares.

Her limbs are delicate as an eyelid, Love has blinded him with tears; But Thetis' belly listens.

Down the mountain walls

From where Pan's cavern is Intolerable music falls.

Foul goat head, brutal arm, appear, Belly, shoulder, bum, Flash fishlike; nymphs and satyrs

Copulate in the foam."

KINSELLA: I wish to say three things about poetry in English since Yeats's death that I regard as important and true, though perhaps only the last of them is really vital to an understanding of what has happened and is still happening.

I believe that the period of a quarter of a century since Yeats died is, like no other period before it, one of critical intelligenceJ This intelligence was pioneered by a former: generation and has made an essential difference to modern poetry. I don't think that this belief is an illusion, or that the cast of

mind which produces modern poetry and takes it seriously, will later come to seem any less intelligent or acute than it does now, or that any crippling naivety or selfdeceit will be revealed. There is, of course, incompleteness: the best criticism is temporary, and serves positively only until it is replaced by something else. Individual critics have their idiosyncracies or their hollow arrogances. One may suspect, or reject, even vital assumptions in the pioneer modern critics: we may think, for example, that the structure of T. S. Eliot's criticism is spoiled by the changing stresses produced by his own poetic development; or that the agonised scruples of I. A. Richards, and even his whole delicate experiment with the function of poetry, lead only into a closed circuit, and are therefore essentially trivial; we may find the abounding dissatisfactions of F. R. Leavis symptomatic of some basic critical monstrousness. But no matter how we suspect or reject, it is obvious that there has been a general movement of refreshment, on a vast scale, due to the work of these critics. It is a movement of honesty toward order. The dispersed effects of this movement begin to appear in post-war poetry. They are so far indirect in their effect, but they are essential. In poets the process of self-knowledge is helped by the change; in their public (or their imaginedpublic-it doesn't greatly matter) it arouses strict demands. I know of no contemporary poetry of the highest order which owes its existence solely to this increase in critical intelligence, but there is no doubt that the level of modern minor poetry is higher because of it.

A second conclusion about the last twenty-five years in English poetry that seems inescapable is that, at some time during that period, the growth point of contemporary poetry shifted from England to America. This is true in a way which is not affected by certain important phenomena in the period-the production of fine and perhaps great poetry in America, before this shift, by William Carlos Williams or Wallace Stevens or Robert Frost or others; or the writing of the Four Quartets in England; or the highly significant breaking down of Ezra Pound's poetic purpose, with much

attendant critical confusion, into something else. And it is not simply a matter of arithmetic: that more and better new poets have written in America than in England since the War, or that there are better poets in mid-career at this point of time in America than there are in England. It seems clear, over and above such things, that there is no longer a context for serious new writing in England, and that there is such a context in America. The situation in England is nicely illustrated in a new chapter which G. S. Fraser has recently added to his book The Modern Writer and His World. He is describing, in terms that recall Ezra Pound's Bloomsbury, a group of young poets in London in reaction to "the Movement" of the 1950's, a group of Cambridge poets connected with the magazine DELTA, includingPhilip Hobsbaum, Peter Redgrove, and Christopher Levenson. Ted Hughes, though I think a slightly older man, had connexions with this group (the name soon became an informal title) and David Holbrook, thoughagainolderand not intimately connected, wrote poetry which some of the members approved of. The Group transferred from Cambridge to London, and used to meet weekly in the flat first ofPhilip Hobsbaum and then, when Hobsbaum went to a university in theprovinces, in the Chelsea flat of Edward Lucie-Smith. At each meeting, a group of poems by one member would be circulated in typescript and stringently and soberly criticised (only coffee was served during the reading and critical sessions; the company might adjourn to a pub or open some bottles only after the critical session was closed). The Group have never made any public statement, unlike some of the Movement poets in this respect, about what they think poetry should be

These poets do not, in fact, bear much serious investigation, though a good poet may survive from among them. I would guess that it will be Ted Hughes, whom I was surprised to find taking part in such activities.

Literary London is, indeed, very like the literary Dublin of twenty years ago, giving off the same faint odour of isolation, of another time than this; expressing such strength as it has in one or two lonely fig-

TRI-QUARTERLY I [05

ures, perhaps in opposinon, or perhaps merely preoccupied. The contrast when it comes to the equivalent in the United States may have something to do with the existence of a nationwide minority community that keeps in touch mainly through Universities. Or it may be, more likely, that the developments in western man are taking place in America. In any event, I feel in American poetry a seriousness that is fruitful, and that is embodied for me in, for instance, William Carlos Williams's last poetry and Robert Lowell's poetic progress. These poets have written their own poetry in a way that is useful to other poets. Their achievements and changes are instructive, like those of Yeats. There is a quality of excitement about their careers which comes from the interplay of their personal effort and some relevant response: a response of a kind that is not offered by polite acceptance, or by a passive journalistic organising into Movements or Groups or by absorption into some closed literary world; a response that calls out poetic vitality and discovery. A recent example is the change of idiom between Robert Lowell's Mills ofthe Kavanaughs and his Life Studies. This change is a notable achievement and I think it is solely on account ofit that Lowell has managed to keep on writing poetry. This is not to suggest that the poetry in Life Studies is better than Lowell's finest earlier poetry: I don't actually believe that the poetic pressure anywhere in the later book is as high as it is in, say, "The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket". But the earlier poetry, under mounting pressure, had come to an impasse: the poem "Mills of the Kavanaughs" demonstrated at length, in a feat of pure willpower, how hopelessly jammed it was possible to become. Lowell's subsequent re-positioning, a lucky relaxation of effort and the finding of an easier level, is a high technical achievement-and, I repeat, instructive. The ability to make this change, and the general quick, sensitive realisation by Lowell's audience that it mattered, imply for me an alertness in the atmosphere in which the change occurred. It gives a sense of possibility and expectation. The scene has the groping characteristics of growth: multitudinous individual effort, frequent

adjustments and failures, uncomplete4! movements; with an unusually high level� of sensitiveness.

If there is a proper context in the United States, and none in England, you may possibly be wondering about Ireland. To examine the point it is necessary to enter a different world. In Ireland, the period since the death of Yeats divides up in various ways. I think the most startling of these is a division-about the middle of the 1950's -into an earlier sleep and a later confused awakening. Up to 1955 or so the feeling is one of isolation-isolation from War and then from the dynamic post-War phenomena in literature, economics and everythi,nf else: an JreIand hardly aware of what modern men and nations were demanding of themselves. The poets and writers who liked to call themselves Literary Dublin survived Yeats in a closed world, writing Georgian verse for each other, but giving it a "sweet, wild Gaelic twist". They understood, however, that important things were happening elsewhere, and asserted, with much encour-. agement from each other, that Irish poetry, no less than that ofother countries, reflected (and I quote one of them) "the violent innovations in modern poetry. The influences of Eliot, Pound and their English juniors have penetrated to Ireland. Hopkins's strong hand has been laid on us as on others; and Chesterton has not quite passed us by." There were only two exceptions, to my mind: Austin Clarke, whose remarkable career would be well worth describing if there were time, and Patrick Kavanagh. Kavanagh came from the country to that literary Dublin, full ofhope� He stayed to haunt its outskirts, and pour much sour-and largely incompetent- satire over it, with an anger proportionate lo his disappointment rather than to the importance of his subject. Since 1955 or SO there has been some change, on the whole for the better. Economically.

Ireland�is taking her place among the nations of West, and developing in the process a gombeen society-begot by the stallion economic development on the mare of. pietistic opportunism-a society that would hold few surprises for Yeats. But it is at least a more open society, where one's

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ignorance of. for example. contemporary American verse may be fairly said to be one's own fault.

But more important than any dazed groping towards consciousness in Ireland. or than any other single fact in the post-Yeats period, in its bearing on the condition of modern poetry, is the fact that during this time the Second Coming foretold by Yeats is in the throes of being accomplished: externally, in the physical chaos of extermination and race slaughter; internally, in a sense of precariousness and consequential disorder in the spirit. The random horrors of the First World War may have begun the process, and possibly provided Yeats with his first hint of basic upheaval. But it was one thing for Yeats to have foreseen such an upheaval as inevitable, in a schematic way, and even to have given body to his ideas as the rough beast slouching toward the place of rebirth, destroying one state of order in the emergence of another. It is another to have participated in the Second Coming itself, however remotely; to have breathed in the stench, and felt the dread, as the beast emerged out of massed human wills. It was of course no news that the human mind was an abyss, and that the will, just as much as the imagination, was capable of every evil. But it was something new that creatures out of Hieronymus Bosch should have materialised in the world, formally inflicting and enduring suffering beyond all reason, in obedience to a diabolic logic; it is also something new to have had the orderly but insane holocausts imagined by Leonardo da Vinci set loose on the earth by an act of logical but monstrous choice. The coming to reality of these apparently fantastic images is an inner catastrophe: we have opened up another area of ourselves and found something new that horrifies but that, even more intensely, disappoints. The realisation of this disappointment seems to me the most significant thing for poetry since Yeats, it is the source of that feeling of precariousness which is to be found in the best modern poetry.

Among the first of the properties to go in the destruction of the old order was the great poetic stance of romantic isolation, represented so beautifully by Yeats himself.

108 TRI-QUARTERLY

He is the nearest to us of the great images of poetic isolation, an isolation by reference to a more or less homogeneous society of which he is not really a part. He is almost certainly the last. He himself foresaw that as a figure of contemporary relevance he would be pounded to nothing in the mortar of change; and he knew also that something would come of this.

After the deluge, the Poet is still, naturally, isolated; but so now is every man. The repeated cruel checks to reasonable hope which the world has suffered have destroyed the cohesion of the modern social organism. The organism continues to function but the most sensitive individuals have been shaken loose into disorder, conscious of a numbness and dulness in themselves, a pain of dislocation and loss which may be the simplest meaning, the general human truth, that underlay the Romantic intuition. It seems to me that it is, again, Robert Lowell who is the representative figure: isolation, directionlessness, the pain of loss, characterise his state-and these not by virtue of humanity. In this, I repeat, he is not eccentric or special, but representative. Everywhere in modern writing the stress is on personal versions of the world, in which basic things are worked out repeatedly as if for the first time, and there are no fixed stars. The detailed exploration of private miseries is an expedition into the interior to find what may guide us in the future. It is out of ourselves and our wills that the chaos came, and out of ourselves that some order will have to be constructed. It is at this point that I have the sense of growth in modern American poetry, the idea of a common front of individual activity, the meristematic area of the poetic organism.

If the great poetic stance of Romantic isolation has been altered for ever, so I believe has the corresponding poetic motive or ideal: The Romantic image, hitherto the hypnotic focus of the poet's stare, an entity with an independent "other" vitality. which it is the poet's function to find and make concrete in our terms. Corresponding to the general diffusion through the modem mind of the sense of isolation, hitherto private and special, there ought to have been some development affecting the Image.

And perhaps there has been: is it too outlandish to identify in the form of the atomic cloud, significantly present in every modem mind and so full of meaning in itself, something of the beckoning shape, the great-rooted blossoming tree of life and death, the blank-faced absorbed dancer? Without pausing to test the scope of this, however, there are remoter and more satisfactory possibilities.

To start again with Yeats, I think it can be generally accepted that an obvious form of his work, in single poems and in his career as a whole, is that of progress toward some kind of triumph-a triumph ofachievement, of absorption of poetic matter, or of understanding or acceptance. This forwardtending poetic attitude contradicts, I suggest, the major supposition of his later work-the returning, endlessly-repeating cycle. It may not contradict the logic of Yeats's system, which allows for individual escape from the cycle, but it does contradict the tone of it. A conception of man as involved in a circumscribed treadmill of history-hardly acceptable if tested against our knowledge of all of man's past-is ludicrous or horrifying, but this is not the dominant impression of Yeats's work. It is as though emotionally he saw his Vision not as a closed cycle but as an open upwardtending spiral, working perhaps towards an ecstasy like the ecstasy he held to be the end of art-a sudden sense of power and peace; a gift of understanding such as he himself received near his death when he wrote: "It seems to me that I have found what I wanted. When I try to put it all into a phrase, [ say' Man can embody truth but he cannot know it' ". It is not to Yeats that we look for the appropriate response to the experience of history as treadmill, a nightmare ofreturningdisappointments, but to the poets who are writing now, the generation crushed by the most recent turn of the wheel.

Eliot gives us a key phrase when he speaks of "the boredom, the horror and the glory" of life. If we are pulled up by the incongruity here of "glory" we may choose to regard it as an attribute of the articulate, order-imposing victim, rather than of the process endured.

So I make the suggestion that the modem transformation of the Romantic image may take place as modern man absorbs his recent new experience of himself. As mediator between man and his experience the new image, or whatever is to perform the crystallising function for a new poetry, must possess new characteristics and must also continue to have some of the characteristics of the Romantic image, but transformed. We may very likely detect its presence by the sudden relevance of Eliot's "glory" as an attribute of life, by the rediscovery, in other words, of purpose and direction.

I am not going to speculate about such purpose or direction, beyond saying that we should not be too ready to write off everything that looks like half-baked evolutionism. I will simply end by pronouncing, hesitantly, with grave reservations, the name of Teilhard de Chardin.

KAVANAGH: Having listened to the three speakers I know that there couldn't possibly be any poetry in the world inhabited by such idiotic critics; such deadness and boredom and rubbish I have not listened to for many years. I'm not saying this merely to criticise and to contradict. It is a fact that it is all words, meaningless words, and of no consequence. You mention Robert Lowell. Well now he's all right but he is very dead. In fact I would say the only people in America that are alive are men like Jack Kerouac. On The Road is an excellent book, one of my favorite books about America since Henry Miller's The Air Conditioned Nightmare. And I like Corso, Ferlinghetti, and Allen Ginsberg very much. But the finest poet writing in English today is George Barker.

As for Yeats, he has nothing to do with Ireland. He was of the English tradition and the English is the only tradition. In poetry there's never been an Irish tradition and any American literary tradition was purely English. All that school of New England, Longfellow and all that of a hundred years ago and Melville and Bret Harte, all belong to the English and that English stupidity, a curious kind of stupidity which looks like stupidity but isn't. But

there are these lads in America, these youngsters that I admire very much. I admire all the beats, the beatniks, very much. I regret very much that I am not able to take part in their beatnickery, Dullness is the enemy and with the exception of some recreations from French, Robert Lowell is dull and the same, of course, is true and much truer of Robert Graves. So we must have humor; that's all that matters, the gaiety of spirit, comedy, fun, enjoying yourself. That's all there is to it and all this pretention and bawling lecherology that's Americanism is disastrous and shocking and, even though it's cutting my own throat, I say it. That's all.

SPENDER: Would either of you like to say anything?

KINSELLA: You go ahead and moderate.

SPENDER: Well, I have to say something. It's difficult really to take it back to before but I think that you have to think of English poetry in the context of England as it is today. Unfortunately for a moment we have to talk about something which really isn't poetry at all but poetry and the state of the poets connect with this. I think that English culture belongs to a wider context of the world than England politically does and this is really the tragic sort of position of England in the world today. The English writers, for instance, or many of them really belong to the whole English language area. They naturally go to America. If you took the names say of several young English writers who are good and I think that possibly Mr. Kinsella would agree that there are four or five more than Ted Hughes whom he mentioned, Philip Larkin, Ted Hughes, Tom Gunn, Charles Tomlinson, it would be rather difficult to say whether they live in England or whether they live in America. Only one of them really lives definitely

KAVANAGH: They don't live at all. They are dead!

KINSELLA: Well, Ted Hughes is not dead. The others might be.

KAVANAGH: They are all dead. And dying.

SPENDER: I think Philip Larkin is a very good poet. You will tolerate him?

KAVANAGH: Yes, in a very minor way. He

110 ! TRI-QVARTERLY

has a small talent, a minor talent. I merely mention this to establish a sort of positive position if I may coin one of the phrases of the lecture circuit. But there's no doubt; you have to reestablish values and you know that none of those people you're talking about in England are worth a damn.

(scattered applause)

SNODGRASS: I'm sorry but I can see no point in applauding the insult of people who have done decent and honorable work and have put their lives to it and have done very creditable work. Ted Hughes seems to me a very strong poet indeed and a man whose work has cost him much and I would not applaud an insult to him.

(scattered applause)

KAVANAGH: There's no insult to anybody. The fact of the matter is this: we are judging absolutely and not personally. This has nothing to do with persons whatever. You're dealing with a poet and must deal with an impersonal thing and never mind the man.

SPENDER: Well I think that it's very difficult to carryon a conversation which really amounts to trading insults. We have been told that everyone except George Barker and the beatniks is a bore. Well, you see, I consider the beatniks bores. As a matter of fact I just have read Jack Kerouac's last book. I really do consider it one of the most insufferably boring books I've ever read in my life. But I don't say this as a reply to anything Mr. Kavanagh was saying. I simply say it in order to indicate that one can't really reply. I would not discuss Mr. Kerouac or any of these people at all. I don't think we ought to be discussing people whom we think to be very boring.

KAVANAGH: On The Road is the best book about America since the Air Conditioned Nightmare of Henry Miller's. I have made it my bedside book for several years. I'm not saying that he wrote other good books but he wrote one good book and that's enough for me. Also, Ferlinghetti, Corso, and Ginsberg, have all written direct, personal statements, nothing involved, no, just

statements about their position. That's all. They are not bores as far as I am concerned.

KINSELLA: I must say I find all of this kind of discussion extremely boring. Time is precious.

KAVANAGH: Apparently not, with the longwinded speeches we've been listening to.

KINSELLA: I think the first thing we could all agree on is that we are all against dullness. We're simply differing on what dullness is. I think the sincerity and the honesty and the human feeling ofthe Beats is beyond reproach but the poetry is very poor. There has to be some kind of absorption of the

one into the other before the thing can be discussed seriously at all. That's my point. I think we are in total and utter and irretrievable disagreement on the bench here.

KAVANAGH: The disagreement is simply between life and death. I'm on the side of life and you are on the side of death and that is the key to it all. I believe in youth, in gaiety and fun. I'm not interested in boredom.

KINSELLA: Well, perhaps we should all go off and go to some kind of a dance

(Therefollows a conversation in which the panel decides. to abandon the project.)

Yeats's Search for a Dramatic Form

MOODY E. PRIOR

Yeats did not evolve his dramatic forms, as, for example, did Shakespeare, by becoming a part of a going theatrical world and allowing his genius to work upon the available dramatic materials and theatrical conventions. On the contrary, his discoveries in dramatic form came out of earnest thought over a considerable period of time and were a consequence of profound skepticism about even the most original and admired achievements of his day.

The starting point of Yeats's thinking about drama was his conviction of the inferiority of plays written in conformity with the theory of realism which was shaping fiction and drama. William Archer, the translator and promoter of Ibsen, helps us to recreate the enthusiasm, the sense of triumph, of the admirers of the new realistic drama of the late nineteenth, the early twentieth centuries, which formed the background of Yeats's revolt. In The Old Drama and the New (1923) in which he summed up the tastes and principles of his long involvement in the theatre, Archer wrote: I do not believe that Robertsonian realism, as it has been perfected by his successors, will ever be entirely ousted from the position it now holds; for it is only the last term in an inevitable process of evolution." This process, he believed, had brought into being a dramatic species more effective in itself and better suited to its environment:

The experience of three centuries has shown us that the spirit of modern man

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can no longer produce masterpieces in the impure form in which Shakespeare worked. A thousand attempts to do so have all proved more or less abortive. The two elements of the old drama, imitation and lyrical passion, have at last consumated their divorce. For lyrical passions we go to the opera and music drama, for interpretation through imitation we go to the modem realistic play.

To Yeats, these presumed triumphs were hollow indeed. "Have we not been in error," he wrote, "in demanding from our playwrights personages who do not transcend our common actions any more than our common speech?" This, Yeats was sure, was not the way of Shakespeare or Sophocles. "It is only by extravagance, by an emphasis far greater than that of life as we observe it, that we can crowd into a few minutes the knowledge of years." Reading a bundle of new German plays, he is discouraged to find "everywhere a desire not to express hopes and alarms common to every man that came into the world, but politics or social passion, a veiled or open propaganda." In the works of the great "Scandinavian master," no less than in these inferior works, he finds that "even the most momentous figures are subordinate to some tendency, to some movement, to some inanimate energy, or to some process of thought whose very logic has changed it into mechanism-always to something other than human life." The

conclusion was inescapable: "the great realists seem to the lovers of beautiful art to be wise in this generation, and for the next generation, perhaps, but not for all generations to come."

At one time Yeats entertained the hope that salvation from all this error in direction would come through the efforts of an Irish national theatre, for in Ireland he felt existed all the raw ingredients from which a great drama could be formed. Fresh matter for the plays was there in abundance: "Ireland in our days has rediscovered the old heroic literature of Ireland, and she has rediscovered the imagination of the folk." Perhaps even more important, the availability of an unspoiled, colloquial speech offered an escape from what he described as the "impersonal language that has come, not out of individual life, nor out of life at all, but out of the necessities of commerce, of parliament, of board schools, of hurried journeys by rail." The situation in Ireland was, as he saw it, parallel to that of Shakespeare's day: "Language was still alive then, alive as it is in Gaelic today, as it is in Englishspeaking Ireland where the school-master or the newspaper has not corrupted it."

To be sure, there was need for the unpractised Irish dramatists to learn about construction, and Yeats urged that they learn it even from the French and from Ibsen. But in the matter of language they needed no tutors: "Let us learn construction from the masters, and dialogue from ourselves," he wrote in 1901. But his experience with the new Irish drama he helped to create was finally disillusioning. It seemed to him that, except for the plays of Synge, the plays of the Irish dramatists had all the characteristic limitations of the realistic drama, with only the thin disguise of a local speech idiom. "We did not set out to create this sort of theatre," he wrote, "and its success has been to me a discouragement and a defeat."

With respect to the roots of great drama, his convictions did not change. The substance out of which the poet builds is myth, or something like it: "I come always back to this thought. There is something of an old wives' tale in fine literature." "Poets

have chosen their themes more often from stories that are all, or half, mythological, than from history or stories that give one the sensation of history." And instinctively he turned away from the commonplaces of a language shaped to serve the needs of modern industrial society. But the problem of creating a new drama turned out to be complicated and stubborn. It required something more than finding for the substance stories in the rediscovered legends of Ireland. Myth was something more than a good story. "Myth is not a rudimentary form superseded by reflection. Belief is the spring of all action; we assent to the conclusions of reflection but believe what myth presents." But where this belief is absent, the artist is in difficulties. "All symbolic art should arise out of a real belief, and that it cannot do so in this age proves that this age is a road and not a resting-place for the imaginative arts." There was an analogous problem with language. It was not simply a choice for the dramatic artist between the "mimicry of the conversation of two countrymen of the roads, or that idealised speech poets have imagined for what we think but do not say." The state of affairs was otherwise, Yeats reflected, in times like those of Hesiod and Homer, when "a man of that unbroken day could have all the subtlety of Shelley, and yet use no image unknown among the common people, and speak no thought that was not a deduction from the common thought." A different situation faced the poet of today: today, "partly from a lack of that spoken word which knits us to normal man, we have lost in personality, in our delight in the whole man but have found a new delight, in essences, in states of mind, in pure imagination, in all that comes to us most easily in elaborate music." We have, therefore, "to prepare to stage for the whole wealth of modern lyricism, for an art that is close to pure music for those energies that would free the arts from imitation, that would ally acting to decoration and the dance."

The form which a drama thus conceived would take would almost necessarily be short, and it would need to sever all associations, certainly with the commercial theatre and even, as Yeats discovered, with most of

the traditional dramatic forms and conventions established by the classics of western drama. His discovery of the Japanese Noh plays provided him with a stimulating model. He seemed particularly taken by the suggestion of ritual in their conventions and by the puppet-like quality of their characters-he was convinced that the concern of dramatists with "character" was a handicap in achieving the highest sort ofdramatic truth and excellence. He devised a ceremony of folding and unfolding of a cloth by a few musicians. He introduced masks. He made use of dancing. In this kind of theatrical setting, even familiar myths lost their familiarity and became the basis for dance, ritual, and symbolism. These efforts at formalization led him away from the luxuriance of language and sentimentality of treatment of the earliest plays - The Countess Kathleen (1892), The Land of Heart's Desire (1894). They encouraged obscurity in the symbolism and in the language, especially in the lyrics, and increasing reliance on the dance and on music. In the last plays, however, especially in Purgatory (1940), there is a departure from the more unconventional formalizing devices and a simplification in the language. The range ofYeats's inventions in dramatic form is thus very wide, and their variety is as impressive as their originality. What his experiments have in common is a persistent search for a drama suitable to the poet in the absence of any living forms which would offer him a proper vehicle and would place him in the tradition of the great masters of the past-Sophocles, Corneille, Shakespeare, whose names appear in his writings as illustrations of poets who had found artistic fulfillment in the drama. It comes as a surprise to find him writing of "a mode of drama Shelley and Keats could

have used without ceasing to be themselves, and for which even Blake in the mood of The Book of Thel might not have been too obscure." He had dreamed of a vital national theatre, but even as early as 1919 he was writing, "I want to create for myself an unpopular theatre and an audience like a secret society where admission is by favour and never to many." And for a playhouse, he asked merely for "an audience of fifty, a room worthy of it (some great dining-room or drawing-room), half-adozen young men and women who can dance and speak verse or play drum, flute and zither." He had believed that Ireland provided an environment similar to that of Shakespeare's time for the vivid and dramatic use of language, and how far his confidence in this possibility was shattered can be seen in his comments on Fighting the Waves (1935), a revision of an earlier play (The Only Jealousy ofEmer): "I have retold the story in prose which I have tried to make very simple and left imaginative suggestions to dancers, singers, musicians. I have left the words of the opening and closing lyrics unchanged, for sung to modern music in the modern way they suggest strange patterns to the ear without obtruding upon it their difficult, irrelevant words. Fighting the Waves is in itself nothing, a mere occasion for sculptor and dancer, for the exciting dramatic music of George Antheil." It is as though William Archer had made his point only too well. Purgatory suggests the freshness of a new departure, and if it does not seem in retrospect the answer to Yeats's hope for a vital new theatre-the final answer to his artistic problem-it is nevertheless striking testimony to his resilience and inventiveness, and his refusal to accept defeat in his search for a new dramatic form.

Yeats's use of Irish Materials

John V. Kelleher

Inmy experience the three questions students most regularly ask about Yeats's poetry are, what does "lebeen-Ione" mean? and who or what is Clooth-na-Bare? and what is a good book that will explain all the references in Yeats's work to Irish history and mythology and folklore and things like that? This is the only one of the questions that can be answered easily. There isn't any such book. If there were, it would look something like the Encyclopaedia Britannica, except that it would have six or seven volumes of index.

The reason such a work, if adequately thorough, would have to be so big is not because of the amount of Irish material Yeats used, but because of the way he used it. Actually he did not employ a great number of Irish themes or borrow characters and incidents from many Irish tales and sagas. He used only a small and, on the whole, not a very rich selection, mostly taken from books he had read in the late 'eighties and in the 'nineties. During the remainder of his lifetime the amount and variety and richness of the material available to him in scholarly translation increased dramatically, and a number of tales were published for the first time, which one might think he would have seized on, so close were they to the tone of his later work; yet he seemed unaware of them or indifferent to them. In the 1930's his interest was obviously restimulated by Frank O'Connor's translations of Irish poetry which he helped prepare for the

Cuala Press; and in the Last Poems there is a great explicit resurgence of his Irishness. Curiously, though, much of what comes bubbling to the surface in those lyrics must have been buried in his memory, unthought of, for more than fifty years.

The fact is, of course, that usually we must deal not with Yeats's ultimate sources, but with his memory of his sources. This in turn means that we must try to understand what his memory was like. Obviously it was capacious and retentive. Obviously, too, it was a creative memory. What it yielded up was apt to reappear transformed-often, I expect, quite out of recognition-and mostly enriched or improved. Mostly, but not always. As we all know, there is some rather embarrassing evidence that his memory could also work badly and could trip him up just when he was stalking most nobly, as it did in the first version of "To A Young Beauty" when he mistook "Beaujolet" for the name of a French painter or in the first version of "Pardon Old Fathers" where he put his Butler ancestors in the wrong army at the Battle of the Boyne. But these are extreme instances and not typical. Generally it would be better to speak, not of a tendency toward error, but of a gift for what one might call literary ionization. A random literary fact crossing Yeats's sphere of influence was very apt to pick up an extra particle or to lose one and to emerge with a distinctive Yeatsian spin. To the intense annoyance of some of his more rigoristic Irish readers, Irish facts

TR[-QUARTERLy I [[5

were peculiarly subject to this sort of alteration. Take, for example, "Iebeen-Ione."

You will recall that it is used by the old crane of Gort in the poem "The Three Beggars."

'Though to my feathers in the wet I have stood here from break of day, I have not found a thing to eat For only rubbish comes my way. Am I to live on lebeen-lone?'

Muttered the old crane of Gort. 'For all my pains on lebeen-Ione?'

The term was first called to my attention nineteen years ago in Dublin by a man who wanted me to put my young friend Mr. Ellmann straight on one thing, that whatever else Yeats was-and as far as the man was concerned Yeats could have been anything he wanted to be-but whatever else he was, he wasn't genuinely Irish. No true Irish poet would stoop to invent Irish, fake Irish words that meant nothing at all. Needless to say, he adduced examples. And needless to say, a couple of the chief examples-and in fact there were not many -were "lebeen-lone" and "Clooth-naBare."

Ten years or so later, when I had become fairly certain that I knew what the term did mean, I asked the greatest living Irish scholar about it, a man who had known Yeats well. He replied that he had often wondered himself what Yeats had had in mind, and had indeed meant to ask him about it. Now he felt the question was forever insoluble. Though obviously meant as Irish, "Iebeen-lone" was simply impossible, whether as one word or two.

The scholar's quandary is a good example of the danger of approaching a small problem with over-adequate means for solving it. Had his own knowledge of Irish been less full and exact he would have had little difficulty. What balked him was his trained expectation that words in any language must obey that language's grammar. He failed because he tried to read "lebeen-lone" as Irish. It is not. It is Yeatsian Irish. But in fact the solution scarcely requires Irish at all. If the reader would look directly at the poem and refrain momen-

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tarily from hunting for deep meanings, the meaning of "lebeen-lone" would be reasonably clear. The part of the poem in which the crane appears is a frame for the central lyric which is concerned with King Guaire and the three beggars. The frame-poem concludes:

'Maybe I shall be lucky yet, Now they are silent; said the crane. 'Though to my feathers in the wet I've stood as I were made of stone And seen the rubbish run about, It's certain there are trout somewhere And maybe I shall take a trout If but I do not seem to care.'

Setting aside the fact that the poem as a whole is concerned with a problem in Zen Buddhism, and that both the crane and the beggars lack satori or enlightenment which King Guaire possesses, the crane's immediate problem is that he is unable to catch a good-sized fish, a trout. Since he is hungry but not starving, since, though he doesn't think much of it, he has at least "lebeen-lone" to live on, I submit that one can figure out what "lebeen-lone" stands for.

The crane means that he can get nothing but minnows or fingerlings to eat, a thin diet for so big a bird. He ought to express this as "lone lebeenee," though it is doubtful that any native speaker of Irish, human or avian, ever used the term. Instead, being a Yeatsian crane, he employs an impermissible, though phoneticallypleasing inversion and leaves off the genitive-plural ending. His "lone" is plainly Irish Ion: food, fare, provender. "Lebeen" represents leidhbin, a little rag or strip, which by extension is used for any very small fish. The nominative and genitive plural is leidhbini.

How Yeats got the term is of course unknown. He was quite a fisherman, and may well have heard leidhbin used for minnow. Or it may be that when he was writing the poem he asked Lady Gregory how to say in Irish "a diet of minnows," and was told that Ion leidhbini would do. Since this would not fit the meter, he would then, I presume, have "run it" through the "mill of the mind," ground off the awkward ending, reversed the remainder to iambic, and set

it down without expectation of difficulty or intent to deceive. There is also the possibility that he made the compound himself. In both 1898 and 1899, in letters written from Coole Park, he mentioned that he was then studying Gaelic. This would mean that he had at least some practice in using an Irish dictionary, so that "Iebeen-lone" may not have been beyond his capacity. At any rate, so far from being a mere invention or proof of an all too cavalier attitude toward the national language, the term represents an unusually earnest endeavor on Yeats's part to supply an authentic Irish touch. Somebody must have told him that he had not succeeded this time either, for apart from names, placenames, and an occasional translated idiom,"lebeen-lone" seems to have been his last attempt at Irish. Meanwhile, for the last fifty-two years, it has lent a pleasing extra touch of mystery to a fine poem

If "lebeen-lone" is thus only a sort of half-mistake, and not a very complicated one, what about "Clooth-na-Bare"?

Admittedly this is really impossible in Irish, but is it simply an ignorant howler, or is it an invention, or is it a deliberate alteration of a known term? And if it is deliberate, what is the purpose?

Now, clooth is not an Irish word. It is not even an Irish sound; the "th" would be silent. Yet from the very first it must have seemed annoyingly plain to many Irish readers what Yeats was getting wrong. Even the gentle Thomas MacDonagh, one of the few younger Irish writers whom Yeats genuinely liked and admired, was irritated, and complained in his Literature in Ireland (1916) that

nothing is gained, surely, by that extraordinary perversion of the Irish name of the Old Woman of Beare, Cailleach na Beard. The word clooth is not Irish; it has no meaning. Even for others than Irish scholars the right word would have served as well. And-if it be not too Philistine a question-would not:

And over the grave of the Hag of Beare," have been better in this poem in English?

Indeed MacDonagh was so upset that he got the name wrong himself. It is Cail/each Bheara rather than Cailleach na Beara, Unconsciously he has accepted Yeats's unwarranted insertionofthe genitivearticle. However, his translation is right. Back there somewhere behind clooth is the Hag or the Old Woman of Beare.

The name first occurs in 'The Hosting of the Sidhe,' a poem written in 1893 and used as an introductory for The Celtic Twilight, published in the same year.

The Host is riding from Knocknarea And over thegraveofClooth-na-Bare

She is also mentioned in 'The Untiring Ones,' a chapter of The Celtic Twilight, but since this passage is quoted by Yeats in a note which I will cite presently, we may pass it by for the moment. The third and, I believe, the last mention of Clooth-naBare is in the third stanza of the third and final version of the poem now called "Red Hanrahan's Song About Ireland." A version of the poem was originally published in 1894. Clooth-na-Bare was not put in till 1903, and then no longer as a person but apparently as the name of a mountain:

The yellow pool has overflowed high up on Clooth-na-Bare

It is interesting to find Yeats still playing with the name as late as 1903, for we may be sure that MacDonagh was by no means the first to complain about it; and in the note I mentioned above, which appears in The Wind Among the Reeds, in 1899, Yeats seems definitely on the defensive. The note, and I would like to quote it extensively, reads as if its real purpose were to take the reader who is puzzled by Clooth-na-Bare gently by the hand and lead him up the airy mountain and down the rushy glen till he is far, far away and thinking about something else entirely. Indeed the note is so jam-packed with error and innovation that for a long while I thought Yeats had simply made it up, that he was offering one invention to prove the authenticity of another. But I was wrong. As a matter of fact, he is not simply on the defensive either. He is on TRI-QUARTERLY 117

what might be called the offensive-defensiveevasive-creative, a type of play in which he always showed remarkable skill.

The note, which can also be found on pages 800-802 of the Variorum Yeats, is much too long to quote in full. I will begin somewhat more than half-way through.

Knocknarea is in Sligo, and the country people say that Maeve, still a great queen of the western Sidhe, is buried in the cairn of stones on it.

Here, by the way, I must interpose to say that the country people may have said that and they may not. Their name for the cairn was Meascdn Meidhbhe, a name also applied to the cairn on Muckish mountain in Donegal, and meaning "Maeve's Butterpat." In either case the name has about the same associative value as any Lover's Leap or Devil's Punchbowl in this country, which is to say, practically none at all. But to go on-

I have written of Clooth-na-Bare in 'The Celtic Twilight.' She 'went all over the world, seeking a lake deep enough to drown her faery life, of which she had grown weary, leaping from hill to hill, and setting up a cairn of stones wherever her feet lighted, until, at last, she found the deepest water in the world in little Lough Ia, on the top of the bird mountain, in Sligo.'

Here again I must pause to warn you not to waste your time studying maps of Sligo, looking for little Lough Ia or the "bird mountain." You will not find either. Back behind these lies Lough Dagea (Loch eM ghedh) "the lake of the two geese," on Slieve Daeane (Sliabh do en), "the mountain of the two birds," about halfway between Sligoand ColIooney and at thewestern end of Lough Gill. Why Yeats should be so vague about the names, I do not understand. He must certainly have been familiar with the mountain, whether or not he had actually climbed to the lake.

Then comes his source-

I forget, now, where I heard this story, but it may have been from a priest at Collooney.

Frankly, I have strong doubts about the

priest. You will find in other early instances that Yeats's source is an old woman at Ballysodare, or a pilot at the Rosses, or a manuscript which he has mislaid but which, he seems to recollect, contained the information now presented. The implication is that, though you must often take Yeats's unsupported word, you can do so safely, for he gets his lore direct from the people and from the tattered Gaelic manuscripts that pass from hand to hand among them.

The rest of the note I will give without interruption-

Clooth-na-Bare would mean the old woman of Bare, but is evidently a corruption of Cailleac Bare, the old woman Bare, who, under the names Bare, and Berah, and Beri, and Verah, and Dera, and Dhira, appears in the legends of many places. Mr. O'Grady found her haunting Lough Liath high up on the top of a mountain of the Fews, the Slieve Fuadh, or Slieve G-CulIain of old times, under the name of the Cailleac Buillia. He describes Lough Liath as a desolate moonshaped lake, with made wells and sunken passages upon its borders, and beset by marsh and heather and gray boulders, and closes his 'Flight of the Eagle' with a long rhapsody upon mountain and lake, because of the heroic tales and beautiful old myths that have hung about them always. He identifies the Cailleac Buillia with that Meluchra who persuaded Fionn to go to her amid the waters of Lough Liath and so changed him with her enchantments, that, though she had to free him because of the threats of the Fiana, his hair was ever afterwards as white as snow. To this day the Tribes ofthe Goddess Danu that are in the waters beckon to men, and drown them in the waters; and Bare, or Dhira, or Meluchra, or whatever name one likes the best, is, doubtless, the name ofa mistress among them. Meluchra was the daughter of CulIain; andCullain Mr. O'GradycaIIs, upon I know not what authority, a form of Lir, the master of waters. The people of the waters have been in all ages beautiful and changeable and las-

civious, or beautiful and wise and lonely, for water is everywhere the signature of the fruitfulness of the body and of the fruitfulness of dreams. The white hair of Fionn may be but another of the troubles of those that come to unearthly wisdom and earthly trouble, and the threats and violence of the Fiana against her, a different form of the threats and violence the country people use, to make the Tribes ofDanu give up those that are "away.' Bare is now often called an ugly old woman; but Dr. Joyce says that one of her old names was Aebhin, which means beautiful. Aebhen was the goddess of the tribes of northern Leinster; and the lover she had made immortal, and who loved her perfectly, left her, and put on mortality, to fight among them against the stranger, and died on the strand of Clontarf.

This profusion, though rich and melting, does not lack structure. Through it runs a clear, if unstated argument. We are given ten other names for this supernatural creature-CaiIleac Bare, Bare, Berah, Beri, Verah, Dera, Dhira, Cailleac Buillia, Meluchra, and Aebhin-and who then would be so illiberal as to refuse to allow an eleventh, Clooth-na-Bare? Admittedly clooth is preposterous as Irish. But what matter? so are most of the other names; and in any case one does not look for pedantic accuracy from the folk or from priests in out-of-theway places like Collooney, Yet note that you are not to regard Yeats himself as either gullible or untrained. He can cite learned sources and literary examples-in this case Standish O'Grady and Patrick Weston Joyce, historian, song-collector, folklorist, onomatologist, and Irish grammarian. He can proffer rationalizations such as were the mark of scientific folklorists in the 1890's. And to all he can add a still deeper level of interpretation, one singular to himself, from his own knowledge of the occu1t.

All these we can see. What is not revealed to us is that the bulk of the note is paraphrased closely from pages 126 to 131 of W. G. Wood-Martin's Pagan Ireland, published in 1895, from which I need but

quote but one sentence-

Prominent in Irish folk-lore are two celebrated 'hags', Aine or Aynia, and Bheartha (Vera), variously styled Vera, Verah, Berah, Berri, Dirra, and Dhirra.

Even the citation ofDr. Joyce is from WoodMartin. Yeats, incidentally, quotes it wrongly, though he must have had the book in front of him as he wrote. But more still is borrowed from Wood-Martin. We need but turn to his History ofSligo, County and Town, and in the third volume, published in 1892, we will discover the source of the story that Yeats offers us, so vastly improved, in The Celtic Twilight.

On the mountain overlooking the scene of this catastrophe lived a giantess named Veragh. She was so tall that she could easily wade the rivers and lakes in Ireland. One day, however, when trying to cross Loch-da-ghedh, it proved to be beyond her depth, and she was drowned; but her house on the mountain still remains, and is styled Calliagh-a-Veragh. This lake has the reputation of being the deepest in the County Sligo.

In a footnote Wood-Martin adds that "Calliagh-a-Veragh is the denuded cist of a earn."

Here then is where Yeats got his Cloothna-Bare who went all over the world seeking water deep enough to drown her faery life of which she had grown weary, and who at last found the deepest water in the world in little Lough la. You can also find that most of the confusion in Yeats's note and in his poetry about whether Clooth-na-Bare is a placename or a personal name, and, if the latter, whether it means the "hag of Beare" or a hag whose name is Beare or any of seven or eight increasingly remote variants of that syllable-that all this confusion is inherent in Wood-Martin's books, of which one can only say that they are the sort of amateur pseudo-scholarship that Yeats would choose to forage from. They seem to have no ground-rules; and perhaps wisely, considering the Yeatsian vagaries of his spelling of Irish words and names, Wood-

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Martin is very stingy about acknowledging his sources.

Nevertheless, one of the sources can be clearly identified, a short article on folk-lore published in 1852, in the second volume of the Transactions of the Kilkenny Archaeological Society (now the Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland). The author was Nicholas O'Kearney who also edited and translated the Fenian tale Feis Tighe Chondin for the second volume of the Transactions of the Ossianic Society, in 1855, and supplied with it a long, rambling, and highly diverting introduction which was not only known to Yeats, but positively mined by him when he was working up his knowledge of the Irish faeries. (Incidentally, in our own time, the same introduction has supplied one of the more mysterious arcana in Robert Graves' The White Goddess.) Yeats also knew the article on folk-lore, very likely having read it, and perhaps even copied it, in 1887, when he was gathering materials for his first anthology, Irish Fairy and Folk Tales.i In the note, though he seems to be paraphrasing Wood-Martin, he is at one point clearly referring back to the article. Recall what he says about the "people of the waters" and how "Bare, or Dhira, or Meluchra is, doubtless, the name of the mistress among them." Then mark this from O'Kearney-

Anna, or Anec, was a Carthagenian goddess; and Juno was especially worshipped at Carthage; but Diana, or the moon, was Juno, according to Catullus:-

Tu lucina dolentibus, Juno dicta puerpuris. and the same poet makes his Dianaa singular coincidence with the functions attributed to our Aine, and her sister Milucradh, or the Cailleach Biorar-mistress ofrivers, or waters

Earlier O'Kearney explained his Cailleach Biorar as

I. Yeats's knowledge of these sources is discussed by Russell Alspach in "Some Sources of Yeats's The Wanderings of Oison," PMLA, LVIII (Sept., 1943), 861 ff., and in "Yeats's The Grey Rock," Journal of American Folklore (Jan., 1950), 57-71.

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Milucradh of Sliabh GuiIlean, better known among the peasantry as the Cailleach Biorar (i.e. the old woman who frequents the water) of Loch Dagruadh, on that mountain, and the daughter of CuiIlean, or Guillean, from which that mountain is supposed to have derived its name.

In Yeats's note this identification of Meluchra with CaiIleach Biorar (whom Yeats calls Cailleac Buillia as a compromise with O'Grady's version, "Callia-Bullia") is melded with a paraphrase of the rhapsody from The Flight of the Eagle and is thus by implication attributed to O'Grady, but so far as I can discover O'Grady does not mention it in any of his books. Even if he did write of it in some article unknown to me, his source would be O'Kearney; and it would seem that Yeats's knowledge of O'Kearney was at least as good as O'Grady's and certainly fresher.

The matter need not be pursued further. Of the four men involved, only O'Kearney knew Irish and only O'Kearney, you may be sure, got any significant amount of lore directly from the people. On the level of what all accepted as scholarship the other three, Yeats, Wood-Martin, and O'Grady, were so alike in their handling of particulars that we can hardly distinguish among them. Each was impressionistic and inconsistent in his attempts to render Irish names. Each trusted his own too fallible memory. Each was reckless with fact and ready to plump for the most colorful, rather than the most reasonable, among possible interpretations. And on that count O'Keamey was one with the others. Yet, though the substance of Yeats's note is mainly a frustrating mishmash of misremembered misquotation of bad nineteenth century pseudo-learning, at the very bottom there is a stratum of genuine folk-belief. When we reach that stratum, however, we do not find Cloothna-Bare.

We find fragmentary recollections of 'hag' stories. Hag stories are a widelyknown type of rather low-level folk-lore, possibly degenerated from myth and generally pretty vague. Most purport to tell how some feature of the landscape-an

island, a ravine, a lake, a cairn, a dolmencame to be where it is or got its name. The hag is usually a fierce giantess, often endowed with immensely long life. This is not the sort of figure with whom a poet of Yeats's tastes and genius could do much of anything. But in fact he had to deal with one. Up there on Slieave Daeane, right in the middle of his own chosen landscape where he then intended that all his poetry should be set, was a lake and a cist associated with a hag, popularly known, if we can both trust and correct Wood-Martin, as Coil/each a' Bheara, Neither the name nor the story was at all graceful. Something had to be done; and something was. Clooth-naBare, and her story as retold by Yeats, is little more than a tidying up of inconvenient fact. Possibly he intended at that time to develop both further and to incorporate them constructively into the ostensibly traditional, but in fact largely new-woven mythology with which he was investing the Sligo countryside. However, he did not. And it is interesting to observe that by 1908, when he was revising The Celtic Twilight for his Collected Works, he had apparently forgotten where Loch Dagea was, for in a brief revision of the note, complete with new misspellings, he is obviously puzzled about where he got "Lough Ia."

Doubtless Clooth-na-Bare should be Cailleac Bare, which would mean the old Woman Bare. Bare or Bere or Verah or Dera or Dhera was a very famous person, perhaps the mother of the gods herself. A friend of mine found her, as he thinks, frequenting Lough Leath, or the Grey Lake on a mountain of the Fews. Perhaps Lough Ia is my mishearing, or the storyteller's mispronunciation of Lough Leath, for there are many Lough Leaths.s

Given this remarkable drift from former positions, it is not at all surprising to find that "Clooth-na-Bare" is next used, in 'Red

2. The final clause is an unfortunate guess on Yeats's part. No Lough Liath is given in Hogan's Onomastican Goedelicum or in P. W. Joyce's Irish Name> of Plac". On the one-inch to the mile Ordnance Survey map showing Slice Gullion (No. 59. "Castleblayney") the lake near the summit is called' Calliagh Berra's Lake."

Hanrahan's Song,' as the name of the mountain. But there is something here more remarkable still. The suggestion that "Bare was perhaps the mother of the gods herself" can only be explained by Yeats's fantastic memory reaching back, perhaps twenty years, to his reading of O'Kearney's article in which, you will recall, the Carthagenian Anec is equated with Juno who is equated with Diana who is equated with the Irish Aine who is the sister of Milucradh who is the Cailleach Biorar, the mistress of the waters.

Anyway, by 1908, it did not much matter who or where Clooth-na-Bare was, for Yeats's poetry had entered a new phase and was set in a new landscape, the country around Coole Park in south County Galway.

But to return to the question of Yeats's memory-it is evident that he easily forgot what did not interest him or what he saw no likely use for. Equally plain is the tenacity of his memory for what did interest him and the fact that what he recollected came back to his consciousness refashioned for the sort of use he alone could put it to. He was not concerned with knowledge for its own sake or with pointless accuracy, though, he appreciated the persuasive value of being able to seem accurate. In his essays and autobiography he showed himself a master of the art of exposition by means of the rhetorical question which, when uttered in sufficiently lofty a tone, not only puts the burden of proof upon the reader, but puts him on the defensive as well. Yet admitting all this, admitting too that he made his full share of plain, ordinary mistakes, one must never fall into the error of imagining that he was an ignorant man or that he did not know what he was doing. He knew a great deal on a great many subjects. And he knew something which is better than any amount of mere information-he knew his job.

Like any other poet he dealt with certain ideas or dilemmas over and over again. He has, for instance, dozens of what one can call "Second Coming" poems, as many before he developed A Vision as after. Just about as frequent is "The Choice" poem in which he faces up to the apparent contradiction between his mysticism and his art.

TRI-QUARTERLY i 121

Martin is very stingy about acknowledging his sources.

Nevertheless, one of the sources can be clearly identified, a short article on folk-lore published in 1852, in the second volume of the Transactions of the Kilkenny Archaeological Society (now the Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland). The author was Nicholas O'Kearney who also edited and translated the Fenian tale Feis Tighe Chondin for the second volume of the Transactions of the Ossianic Society, in 1855, and supplied with it a long, rambling, and highly diverting introduction which was not only known to Yeats, but positively mined by him when he was working up his knowledge of the Irish faeries. (Incidentally, in our own time, the same introduction has supplied one of the more mysterious arcana in Robert Graves' The White Goddess.) Yeats also knew the article on folk-lore, very likely having read it, and perhaps even copied it, in 1887, when he was gathering materials for his first anthology, Irish Fairy and Folk Tales.i In the note, though he seems to be paraphrasing Wood-Martin, he is at one point clearly referring back to the article. Recall what he says about the "people of the waters" and how "Bare, or Dhira, or Meluchra is, doubtless, the name of the mistress among them." Then mark this from O'Kearney-

Anna, or Anec, was a Carthagenian goddess; and Juno was especially worshipped at Carthage; but Diana, or the moon, was Juno, according to Catullus:-

Tu lucina dolentibus, Juno dicta puerpuris. and the same poet makes his Dianaa singular coincidence with the functions attributed to our Aine, and her sister Milucradh, or the Cailleach Biorar-mistress ofrivers, or waters

Earlier O'Kearney explained his Cailleach Biorar as

I. Yeats's knowledge of these sources is discussed by Russell Alspach in "Some Sources of Yeats's The Wanderings of Oison," PMLA, LVIII (Sept., 1943), 861 ff., and in "Yeats's The Grey Rock," Journal of American Folklore (Jan., 1950), 57-71.

120 I TRI-QUARTERLY

Milucradh of Sliabh Guillean, better known among the peasantry as the Cailleach Biorar (i.e. the old woman who frequents the water) of Loch Dagruadh, on that mountain, and the daughter of Cuillean, or Guillean, from which that mountain is supposed to have derived its name.

In Yeats's note this identification of Meluchra with Cailleach Biorar (whom Yeats calls Cailleac Buillia as a compromise with O'Grady's version, "Callia-Bullia") is melded with a paraphrase of the rhapsody from The Flight of the Eagle and is thus by implication attributed to O'Grady, but so far as I can discover O'Grady does not mention it in any of his books. Even if he did write of it in some article unknown to me, his source would be O'Kearney; and it would seem that Yeats's knowledge of O'Kearney was at least as good as O'Grady's and certainly fresher.

The matter need not be pursued further. Of the four men involved, only O'Kearney knew Irish and only O'Kearney, you may be sure, got any significant amount of lore directly from the people. On the level of what all accepted as scholarship the other three, Yeats, Wood-Martin, and O'Grady, were so alike in their handling ofparticulars that we can hardly distinguish among them. Each was impressionistic and inconsistent in his attempts to render Irish names. Each trusted his own too fallible memory. Each was reckless with fact and ready to plump for the most colorful, rather than the most reasonable, among possible interpretations. And on that count O'Kearney was one with the others. Yet, though the substance of Yeats's note is mainly a frustrating mishmash of misremembered misquotation of bad nineteenth century pseudo-learning, at the very bottom there is a stratum of genuine folk-belief. When we reach that stratum, however, we do not find Cloothna-Bare.

We find fragmentary recollections of 'hag' stories. Hag stories are a widelyknown type of rather low-level folk-lore, possibly degenerated from myth and generally pretty vague. Most purport to tell how some feature of the landscape-aJij

island, a ravine, a lake, a cairn, a dolmencame to be where it is or got its name. The hag is usually a fierce giantess, often endowed with immensely long life. This is not the sort of figure with whom a poet of Yeats's tastes and genius could do much of anything. But in fact he had to deal with one. Up there on Slieave Daeane, right in the middle of his own chosen landscape where he then intended that all his poetry should be set, was a lake and a cist associated with a hag, popularly known, if we can both trust and correct Wood-Martin, as Cailleach a' Bheara. Neither the name nor the story was at all graceful. Something had to be done; and something was. Clooth-naBare, and her story as retold by Yeats, is little more than a tidying up of inconvenient fact. Possibly he intended at that time to develop both further and to incorporate them constructively into the ostensibly traditional, but in fact largely new-woven mythology with which he was investing the Sligo countryside. However, he did not. And it is interesting to observe that by 1908, when he was revising The Celtic Twilight for his Collected Works, he had apparently forgotten where Loch Dagea was, for in a brief revision of the note, complete with new misspellings, he is obviously puzzled about where he got "Lough Ja."

Doubtless Clooth-na-Bare should be Cailleac Bare, which would mean the old Woman Bare. Bare or Bere or Verah or Dera or Dhera was a very famous person, perhaps the mother of the gods herself. A friend of mine found her, as he thinks, frequenting Lough Leath, or the Grey Lake on a mountain of the Fews. Perhaps Lough Ja is my mishearing, or the storyteller's mispronunciation of Lough Leath, for there are many Lough Leaths.s

Given this remarkable drift from former positions, it is not at all surprising to find that "Clooth-na-Bare" is next used, in 'Red

The final clause is an unfortunate guess on Yeats's part. No Lough Liath is given in Hogan's Onomastiron Goedeitcum or in P. W. Joyce's Irish Names 0/ Plaa,.. On the one-inch to the mile Ordnance Survey map showing Sliee Gullion (No. 59. "Castleblayney") the lake near the summit is called "Calliagh Berra's lake."

Hanrahan's Song,' as the name of the mountain. But there is something here more remarkable still. The suggestion that "Bare was perhaps the mother of the gods herself" can only be explained by Yeats's fantastic memory reaching back, perhaps twenty years, to his reading of O'Kearney's article in which, you will recall, the Carthagenian Anec is equated with Juno who is equated with Diana who is equated with the Irish Aine who is the sister of Milucradh who is the CaiIIeach Biorar, the mistress of the waters.

Anyway, by 1908, it did not much matter who or where CIooth-na-Bare was, for Yeats's poetry had entered a new phase and was set in a new landscape, the country around Coole Park in south County Galway.

But to return to the question of Yeats's memory-it is evident that he easily forgot what did not interest him or what he saw no likely use for. Equally plain is the tenacity of his memory for what did interest him and the fact that what he recollected came back to his consciousness refashioned for the sort of use he alone could put it to. He was not concerned with knowledge for its own sake or with pointless accuracy, though, he appreciated the persuasive value of being able to seem accurate. Jn his essays and autobiography he showed himself a master of the art of exposition by means of the rhetorical question which, when uttered in sufficiently lofty a tone, not only puts the burden of proof upon the reader, but puts him on the defensive as well. Yet admitting all this, admitting too that he made his full share of plain, ordinary mistakes, one must never fall into the error of imagining that he was an ignorant man or that he did not know what he was doing. He knew a great deal on a great many subjects. And he knew something which is better than any amount of mere information-he knew his job.

Like any other poet he dealt with certain ideas or dilemmas over and over again. He has, for instance, dozens of what one can call "Second Coming" poems, as many before he developed A Vision as after. Just about as frequent is "The Choice" poem in which he faces up to the apparent contradiction between his mysticism and his art.

TRI-QUARTERLY 121

After all, if a man truly understands mysticism, believes truly in God and the immortality of the soul, his duty is to make his soul, to strive single-mindedly for salvation, and not to be distracted by poetry which must be of this world and addressed to this world. Yeats's choice, whether it be in the poem of that name or "A Dialogue of Self and Soul" or "Vacillation" or any of the others, is always to decide for poetry and to accept the consequences. If poetry wins in that struggle, we can be sure that poetry will also win in any struggle with his Irish material. If the facts of Irish history stand in his way, if the actuality of the Irish my hs and sagas as he finds them prove awkward for his purposes, he will alter them.

He was always quite right to do so. Had he been afraid to follow his own sense of what the job required, of the primacy of form over matter in poetry, not only modern literature, but Ireland herself would now be the poorer. In any case, he could usually remodel his material without doing violence to its natural context because his knowledge of things Irish was actually broad, detailed, and enlivened by much thought. Our difficulty now in identifying all the sources for any of his Irish poems or plays, is not so much because he changed what he borrowed, but because there are so many minute particulars to account for and so many slight, yet well-informed readjustments and re-evaluations. In the 1890's and the early years of this century there were plenty of other poets in Ireland who tried to imitate him or who attempted to work with like themes and like materials. None succeeded as he did. It was not only that they lacked his imagination. They didn't know as much.

He got the broad basis of his Irish knowledge very early and very suddenly. He began as any young Anglo-Irish poet might in the 1880's by imitating Shelley and Spenser and by borrowing Indian trappings from Edwin Arnold. In 1886 he met John O'Leary, the Fenian leader. By the end of the year he was an Irish poet. In September, 1887, he published 'King Goll,' now 'The Madness of King Goll,' an Irish poem which works. The chief elements in its

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composition can be readily identified: the story of the madness of Suibhne from Book IV of Sir Samuel Ferguson's long narrative CongaI (I 872); the episode of Goll, the boy-king of Ulster, in Kuno Meyer's edition of the Fenian tale, the Battle of Ventry (1885), and, perhaps as catalyst, an article by Standish O'Grady on the death of King Magnus Barefoot in a raid on Ulster, in 1093, published in the Irish Fireside in February, 1887. To name these, however, is only to say what the larger building blocks were before they were reshaped and fitted together in a wholly new unity. It does not account for the fine details that cement the structure or for the imagination that conceived it. Above all, that sort of research does not tell us what the poem is about.

To see what the poem is about and to understand why it works will be made easier if we compare Yeats's early achievement with Ferguson's achievement as a poet. Ferguson, whose dates are 1810-1886, was a poet, a solicitor, and a scholar. For some years before his death he was deputykeeper of the public records in Dublin. He was friendly with most of the Irish antiquarians, had published learnedly on Ogham, and knew far more about Irish history and legendary materials than Yeats was ever to know. Moreover, he had a fine poetic gift, especially evidenced in half a dozen really beautiful translations of Irish songs but also proved repeatedly in his personal poetry. Y-eats, when he was starting out, read all of Ferguson's work and he went on borrowing from it all his life long. His late play The Herne's Egg is another reminiscence of Congal. In the Last Poems the unusual meter of "High Talk"-

Processions that lack high stilts have nothing that catches the eye

is the rhythm of Ferguson's 'Cashel of Munster---

I'd wed you without herds, without money or rich array

as you can easily test for yourself by singing both to the tune we know as "The Riddle Song." In The Pot of Broth Yeats

tried and failed to improve on Ferguson's "Pastheen Finn." His play On the King's Thresholdderived from Ferguson's The Tain Quest. Earlier still his Fergus in "Fergus and the Druid" and in the song from The Countess Cathleen came recognizably from Ferguson's "The Abdication of Fergus Mac Roy." And we may be sure that the hope Yeats expressed in "To Ireland in the Coming Times," lines never altered in that much-revised poem-

Nor may I less be counted one With Davis, Mangan, Ferguson

was sincerely meant. We may also be sure that he knew that Ferguson had failed and that he knew why.

In his later life Ferguson put his large knowledge and considerable gifts into a series of long verse-retellings of the sagas. His most ambitious effort was Canary, based on "The Destruction of Da Derga's Hostel," a huge turbulent story compared with which the late and rather paltry Fenian ballad that served as the model for Yeats's The Wanderings ofOisin looks pale indeed. Of course, Ferguson had to edit the stories he took over. No one then could expect contemporary readers to accept the wild fantasy, the exaggeration, the occasional incoherence, or the sheer bloodiness that so often characterize the tales as they are found in the old manuscripts. These Ferguson would cut out, and, when necessary for the structure and continuity, he would substitute passages of his own invention and would provide his characters with motivations his readers could understand. He solved all sorts of problems as he went along. But he did not solve, or perhaps even recognize, the biggest problem of all, the question of why anybody should bother to plow his way through an edited or bowdlerized retelling of an old story in modern verse when he can read the story itself or a full translation of it. Even if he had seen the problem, the chances are that he would not have accepted Yeats's solution, to break up the old stories and to recast them as personal statement. Ferguson could never have brought himself to do that; he had too much scholarly respect for his sources. As a

result, in those lengthy narratives he succeeded mildly as a scholar and failed mildly but definitely as a poet. I am afraid that no one reads those poems now, except mild, respectful scholars looking for Yeats's sources.

There can be no greater contrast with Ferguson's unfortunate caution than Yeats's handling of the greatest of all Irish legends in the five plays he wrote about CU Chulainn. These plays date from 1904 to 1938 and are a sort of spiritual autobiography. They are written at long intervals and out of chronological order, and thus show anything but a consistent line of development. Yet despite any number of inconsistencies, all the wide variation of style, the plays as a group have an unmistakable unity. In them Yeats brooded longest and most intensely upon a single theme, the theme most central to all Celtic literature, the nature of the hero; and because it takes a heroic imagination to visualize and depict a hero, he could fairly claim CU Chulainn as an image for himself. The unity of the plays is personal, the continuity of what a man learns about himself from decade to decade, always changing, always the same. For Yeats that meant, always tragic, always gay, always indomitable.

The plays do not, of course, keep more than within intermittent hailing distance of the legends they are supposed to reflect. It was naturally quite in order that when Yeats first wrote of CU Chulainn, in 1892, in the poem "The Death of Cuchullin," he should kill him off. But that is not all. Though as Yeats well knew, the CU Chulainn of saga died at twenty-seven, Yeats made him an old man. Properly CU Chulainn had only one son, Conla, whom he killed at Baile's Strand, not recognizing him till the death wound had been given. The boy's mother was Aife, a Scottish woman-warrior. Yeats makes him son of CU Chulainn's wife Emer who, in the stories, had no children. And for some inscrutable reason he renamed the boy Finmole. The poem remained substantially like that till 1924. Then, five years after he had written The Only Jealousy of Emer in which, according to his invention, Cu

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Chulainn was saved from death by Emer's renunciation of his love, Yeats revised the poem, gave it an inconclusive ending and a new title, "Cuchulain's Fight with the Sea," and for some wholly inscrutable reason renamed the boy himself CU Chulainn. In the plays he shelved the question by not naming the boy at all. Thinking of the old tales, our minds may boggle at the spectacle of a CU Chulainn Senior fighting with a ell Chulainn Junior, but we must respectfully note that in 1924 that side of Yeats's imagination which created Clooth-na-Bare was neither dead nor intimidated.

Of course he was never intimidated by his source material. The plays prove that to the very end. The last, The Death ofCuchulain, shows him unintimidated by the precedents set by himself in the earllier days of the series, yet to my mind, though thrown together pell-mell and not finally corrected, it is the most magnificent of them all, the play in which his concept of the hero triumphs most surely.

The fullest single study of what he did with his borrowings from early Irish literature is Birgit Bjersby's The Interpretation of the Cuchulain Legend in the Works of W. B. Yeats (Upsala University, 1950). A more indicative title would be The Recreation of the Cuchulain Legend, for in fact what he did was to create anew. Without explanation or apology he assumed exactly the same freedom that had been assumed twelve or thirteen hundred years ago by the man or men who first wrote of CU Chulainn; and so he achieved a somewhat comparable result. They had taken God knows what drifting fragments of outmoded pagan mythology, tribal history, ancient herotales-and we have no way of knowing what sort of central figure, apparently a god, Setanta-re-imagined the whole, bound it into rude epic in rude imitation of the Aeneid, and so created an epic and an epic hero. Their creation plainly captured the mind of a people who had accepted Christianity, and who perhaps were not altogether happy about it, and established for them the enduring image ofthe ancestral hero. It is significant that we do not know what the epic was like in its first form. It was reworked continually, century after

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century, revised, added to, inflated, parodied, re-imagined-which is but to say that it remained alive, that in each generation, as long as the stories circulated, men at once accepted OJ Chulainn as the supreme Irish hero and yet tried to bring him nearer to their own immediate needs. One thing is clear, a strong idea of the hero was a need.

Because Yeats felt the same need, just as strongly, and because he insisted on a live CU Chulainn, a CU Chulair n who could speak to his age, his creation can I believe teach us more about the CU Chulainn of medieval and pre-medieval Irish literature than we could ever learn through mere scholarship. Great literature is written and is best interpreted by great poets, not by professors. The lesson, however, is not easy to decipher, especially if the great poet is given to snarling-up the evidence.

You may ask then, should you, considering what he does to them, bother to search out and read his Irish sources. I would say, on the whole, yes; but while you are working on Yeats do not get distracted by the sources. Read them, if you can discover them, to see for yourself what captured his attention, what set his imagination to work along its own characteristically devious paths. You will find that they are well-worth reading, especially in the light that he in turn sheds upon them. That is not the only light by which the old tales can and should be read, but for seeing and understanding them as literature it is certainly the strongest we presently possess.

Finally, I would point out that Yeats himself was never in any doubt about his own methods or the paltriness of some of his materials. He speaks of them bluntly enough in 'The Circus Animals' Desertion,' that great poem written to complain that he could no longer write poetry-

Those masterful images because complete

Grew in pure mind, but out of what began?

A mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street, Old kettles, old bottles, and a broken can,

Old iron, old bones, old rags, that raving slut

Who keeps the till.

The slut being Cathleen Ni Houlihan, the soul of Ireland-the junk, all magically

transformed into the sword, the cauldron, the spear, the stone brought by the Tuatha De Danann from the mythical cities of Falias, and Gorias, and Finias, and rich Murias. Sheer magic. What mortal else could do it?

Yeats's Kind of Twilight

ROGER McHUGH

The Celtic Twilight, as it was generally thought of during the first decade of this century, has been described accurately by Austin Clarke I and Ernest Boyd- as a shadowy world of subdued speech and nuance; it was full of nostalgia for an ideal world of perfection and full of weariness of this world; its pictorial effects were remote and dim, its figures mythological, occult, esoteric. "Soon all that is vague, wistful and dreamful was assumed to be characteristic of the Celtic race, here and elsewhere," wrote Clarke: "Soon the fashion was set of departure into a dim, invisible world."

The interesting thing about Yeats's book The Celtic Twilight (1893) is that the general impression conveyed by its contents is not quite that described above. The book is a collection of stories and of anecdotes mainly gathered in the Sligo area and almost entirely concerned with the ghosts and fairies of Irish oral tradition. The few which are not are varied in character. Zozimus the Dublin ballad-singer rubs shoulders with the equally down-to-earth St. Colmcille. The latter cures his hypochondriacal mother, by responding to her daily complaints that she is worse, with the wish "May you be worse tomorrow" until she catches on and tells him daily that she is better. There is also an amazing story, little more than an anecdote, about an O'Byrne who, being tried for splitting someone's skull, offers the defence that some skulls are

I. Poetry in Modern Ireland (Dublin, 1958)

2. Ireland's Literary Renaissance (London, 1917)

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so thin that a man can't be responsible for them. "That little fellow's skull" he tells the judge, pointing to the prosecuting counsel, "If ye were to hit it, would go like an eggshell, but a man might wallop away at your lordship's for a fortnight." At the other extreme are a few mystical or symbolic stories such as "The Visionary." which seems to be about AE, and the brief "Eaters of Precious Stones" in which apes greedily eat scarlet and green gems from the palms of their hands.

The bulk of the stories, however, are about fairies and ghosts and an interesting feature of their narration is that, although Yeats repeatedly defends folk-beliefs concerning them, on the grounds that the imagination has its own reality, he has a half-ironic approach to them which often accords with that of some native storytellers. The story which perhaps illustrates this best is about a haunted house. A man seeks refuge there on a bitter night and sits by the fire. The door opens and two men enter, carrying a corpse which they put on the cooking-spit. They order the lone man to turn it until it is cooked; "if you let it burn, we'll have to put you on the spit instead." The man turns it but longs to sleep on the bed in the inner room.

Soon the two men address him: "Have you a story?" they ask. "Devil a one," he replies. They put him out into the raw, windy night until he begs to be let in. They seat him by the fire again. "Have you a story now?" "I have." "Begin." "I have no story but the one, that I was sitting here

and you two men brought in a corpse and put it on the spit and set me to turning it." "That will do. Ye may go in and lie on the bed so."

This is an interesting mixture of the macabre and the ironic, which is a notable ingredient in some of the early Celtic sagas such as the Story of Mac Datho's Pig, where it is also combined as here with a certain punctiliousness of speech and savagery of conduct; and here, perhaps, may be discerned what Yeats meant by the title of his book, the 'Celtic Twilight' being that of the folk-tradition reflecting dimly earlier heroic beliefs. Yeats sometimes appears to share in these beliefs on poetic grounds: "Are there not moods which shall find no expression unless there be men who dare to mix heaven, hell, purgatory, fairyland, or even to set the heads of beasts to the bodies of men or thrust the souls of men into the heart of rocks?" he asks, and answers immediately: "Let us go forth, the tellers of tales, and seize whatever the heart longs for, and have no fear. Everything exists, everything is true, and the earth is only a little dust under our feet." But the bulk of his observations have a half-bantering tone, and it was this prevailing element, I imagine, which led James Joyce in 1903 to refer to the "delicate scepticism" of Yeats "in his happiest book The Celtic Twilight,,;3 this tribute is, of course, coloured by Joyce's view of a twilight which he regarded as senile until he rejuvenated it in the twilight sleep of Finnegans Wake. In so regarding it at that time he obviously parted company from Yeats, to whom it was of great importance as imaginative pabulum. How important to him it was and what use he made of it may be discerned in his book The Secret Rose (1897). The curious inquirer who, perhaps tired of the geigercounters clicking over Yeats's middle and later works, turns to those two volumes should be warned of their Protean changes. Whether Yeats's belief that the borders of our minds are constantly shifting is true or not, it is certain that the borders of Yeats's books followed that procedure. The Celtic

3. Review of Lady Gregory's Poets andDreamers, reproduced in The Critical Writings ofJames Joyce (London, 1959)

Twilight (1893) reappeared in 1902 with twice as many stories, including some first published in The Secret Rose (1897) and the stories of Red Hanrahan at one time were incorporated in the latter and at another published separately. Here reference is to the first editions of The Celtic Twilight (1893) and The Secret Rose (1897).

With The Secret Rose we can see immediately that we are dealing with rather a different kind of twilight. The rose design on the cover springs from a tree whose branches are elaborately interlaced: it incorporates Rosicrucian and Platonic symbols and the heads of two lovers; strange rays emanate from it, for it is the rose of the alchemists. The dedication to AE, leader ofthe Irish mystics, says that national poetry and romance cannot be made by writing about the historical themes "but only by looking into that little, infinite, faltering, eternal flame that one calls one's self So far, however, as this book is visionary it is Irish." Finally, the quotation from Villiers de I'Isle Adam on the opposite page and the introductory poem "To the Secret Rose" reinforce the impression of mysticism and of intricate symbolism conveyed by these signs.

The seventeen stories of The Secret Rose are tales which were written by Yeats at different times and in different manners but for the most part in a style which he was later t<1 term "that elaborate and artificial English so many of us had played with in the 'nineties'." It is a style of cultivated simplicity which can be effective in its graphic imagery but often slips into fauxnaivete or betrays its pretence by shying away from simple facts. The longest story "Rosa Alchemica" is told by a student of the occult who is visited by Michael Robartes, the magician, who takes him to the west of Ireland, where he is initiated into the occult mystery of the Rose: his initiation involves symbolic dances with ghosts and magicians, whose ritual is interrupted by an attack of local fishermen who fire the house. The narrator escapes, leaving the magicians to their fate; if indeed they are in any danger, being humans and spirits by turns. In this story Yeats is clearly trying to link occultism, Celtic mythology

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and folk-tradition; Robartes considers that in the west of Ireland the reign of the Celtic gods has never ceased, since it is carried on by the fairies until the gods can return again, and his great-vellum history of the alchemical order opens with a description of how it was founded by six students of Celtic descent.

A similar blending is found in the six stories of Hanrahan the Red, a character clearly modelled on the Irish hedgeschoolmaster poets of the eighteenth century; learned wanderers, often casual labourers, they were the last link with the old bardic tradition which the previous century had destroyed in its organised form. Like many of them, Hanrahan is drunken and full of devilment. Yeats introduces him as an amateur occultist who learns in the Book of the Great Dhoul the ritual of bat's blood and incantation which conjures up the fairy goddess, Cleena. When he rejects her love, she curses him and he undergoes a series of misfortunes until, dying, he sees the withered crone who nurses him transformed, like Cathleen ni Houlihan, into a beautiful girl, the goddess herself.

Yeats was later to revise these Hanrahan stories, turning them with Lady Gregory's help into Kiltartanese; though he dropped Hanrahan's necromancy, probably on her advice, he retained most of the esoteric symbolism, which is even more incongruous in its new dress of folk idiom. But if these stories as a whole do not come off successfully, they have many passages of strange charm and often give flashes of recognition of images, characters and symbols which he was to use more successfully in maturer work. In "The Vision of Hanrahan the Red," for example, Hanrahan sees a procession of phantoms, lovers who "had heart-shaped mirrors instead of hearts and looked in each other's mirrors incessantly pondering upon their own faces." The meaning of these symbols of self-centered love is explained to Hanrahan by the ghost of Dervorgilla, who tells the story of the curse that has fallen upon herself and Dermot, because they first brought the Normans to Ireland. Nearly twenty years were to pass before Yeats used this theme in "The Dreaming of the Bones," perhaps his

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most successful play in the Noh form. Similarly the germ of The Unicorn from the Stars is found in the brief story "Where there is Nothing there is God", the symbolism of the heron in "The Old Men of the Twilight," the theme of the singing severed head in "The Binding of the Hair." Students of Yeats's developing style may find it interesting to compare the version of "Red Hanrahan's Song about Ireland", which appears here in all its dreamy imprecision, with its final harder version; and it is also worthwhile to observe the very contrasting treatment which Yeats and Austin Clarke gave the theme of the mediaeval Vision of Mac Conglinne, which is the basis of Yeats's strange story "The Crucifixion of the Outcast" and of Clarke's play The Son of Learning, written in reaction against Yeats's verse dramas.

Taken together, these two books show the merging of several kinds of twilight. There is the Celtic twilight as Yeats understood it, the twilight of folk tradition. There is the twilight of the Symbolists, who emphasised the states of dream and trance as providing the private images of poetry. There is the twilight of the occult, esoteric and obscure. Finally there are the twilights of mysticism, theosophy and aestheticism. The dedication of The Secret Rose to Russell is of course significant. Russell, mystic and theosophist, believed in the insubstantiality of the world's appearances, expressed this by the dissolving and merging images of his poetry:

"Its edges foamed by amethyst and rose

Withers once more the old blue flower of day

and this dim, dissolving quality makes some of his lines practically indistinguishable from those of Yeats:

I weave

My spells at evening, folding with dim caress

Aerial arms and twilight dropping hair

It was a quality which fitted into the dyingcentury mood of the aesthetes, whose poems were full of world weariness: even love was bound to end, and pearl-pale

women lifted languid hands to let fall their long dark hair for the lover's farewell kiss:

"Let us part, ere the season of love can forget us, With a kiss and a tear on thy drooping brow

Yeats's kind of twilight soon came to be called "The Celtic Twilight." This must have made sense to him, for all the stories of The Secret Rose, as he put it, "have but one subject, the war of spiritual with natural order" and as far as his book was visionary it was Irish; "for Ireland, which is still predominantly Celtic, has preserved with some less excellent things a gift of vision." The result, as Louis Mac Neice once pointed out,S was a widespread misunderstanding of the nature of Celtic literature, whose poetry is full of vivid concrete images and whose tales, though often fantastic, are not dreamy or wistful or esoteric and have manv oassaees of hard direct realism.

S. The Poetry of W. B. Yeats (London, 1949)

These elements, of course, were later recognised by Yeats himself, when Hyde's translations and Synge's writing brought it home to him. By that time he was writing regularly for the theatre, which provided another impetus towards a severer style. He passed gradually out of his twilight period, doubtless assisted also by the wish to get away from his imitators. But, as Austin Clarke has perceptively observed, he had achieved several results during it, bringing back imaginative feeling to fairy themes, creating a wandering, elusive music and rhythm to express it, and awakening other Irish poets to the subtle shadings and half-lights of the Irish scene. For there is in fact an Irish twilight in which the sea is dove-grey, the sands are glossed with light. If in Dublin, that cynical city which dubbed Yeats "Symbolical Bill" and Russell "The Hairy Fairy," one prefers at most times Yeats's middle and later poems, in Sligo it is the earlier poems and stories that one recalls, for they are linked to us not only by place but by atmosphere.

Yeats and the Absurd

B.RAJAN

Theabsurd is a concept that steadily enlarges its empire and some delimitation of it seems prudent if the term itself is to be saved from absurdity. It is not proposed here to equate the absurd with that which is beyond reason (a practice into which enthusiasm leads certain critics), since the classic relationship between reason and revelation insists that revelation, though inaccessible to reason, is fully compatible with it and indeed reflects back on the rational, completing it and endowing it with significance. That which transcends the rational will on occasion, also violate it and these violations will become increasingly representative in any way of thought which tends to decouple the two orders of reality and so to increase the difficulty, or "absurdity," of manifesting one in terms of the other. Nevertheless the absurd is not the miraculous and despite influential claims to the contrary, Tertullian and Thomas Browne are not absurdists. The aim of the inexplicable is not the denial of meaning but its renewal in terms which are ultimate and authentic. Paradox and miracle become the means of exposure to a higher logic which comprehends but does not annul the lower. For the same reason the lack of design in the human situation, the torments of the dark night or the desert, are only transiently absurd if their intention is to prepare for the leap into faith. Though that leap may be felt as a deliverance from absurdity its purpose is to redeem the absurdity from which deliverance is made. Once again, the result is the recovery of

meaning, not the confirmation of the meaningless.

The true absurd must rest on the permanent, not the interim facts of the human situation, facts which no transcendental commitment can evade or alter and which right knowledge cannot expose as maya or metaphysical illusion. One can go further and suggest that the true absurd lives not so much in the absence of meaning as in the presence of anti-meaning, though one has to remember that for certain critics antimeaning acknowledges form by inverting it and so undercuts the basis of absurdity. At any rate it is because of the envelopment of anti-meaning that the strategy of the absurd is often a mode of irony, the dark halfknowledge of the agent being contrasted with the blinding omniscience of the manipulator. Satan's alleged absurdity belongs in this tradition though, in this particular instance, significance lies in the envelopment rather than in the alienated centre and Satan's progressive frustration thus becomes a progressive achievement of meaning. However, since the death of God (or more precisely the transformation of God in.o Satan) cosmic irony has become sadistic rather than providential and it is this predicament, the pred cament which Yeats sardonically describes as the struggle of the fly in marmalade, with which the modern absurdist has to concern himself.

Yeats's correspondence with Sturge Moore reveals an unprofessional interest in philosophy and one of his last poems includes an unenlightening reference to

McTaggart. With one exception, there is no particular evidence that he read any of the fathers of existentialism and in any case his work was over before this particular philosophy came into vogue. Yeats did read Nietzsche with care, a care that is reflected in the marginal comments which are quoted by Ellmann. But a sense of humour was not Nietzsche's most distinctive characteristic and it is from a strong native sense of the incongruous that Yeats's specific vision of the absurd develops. Here again we need to tread with caution. Some element of the incongruous or, to put it differently, some stretching of decorum, constitutes the creative friction in nearly every work of art. If the incongruous is to ferment into the absurd it may need to be strengthened by the tones of tragic derision; and if the derisiveness is not to be a matter of simple surface tactics it must succeed in enveloping some central process of mockery. In other words, the absurd, being anti-human, must have at its heart some image of the human. It is out of this clash between centre and envelopment, between man and circumstances, between potentiality and its humiliation, that the act of creation or of nihilism emerges. To view Yeats's work in this perspective is at least an original and perhaps not a fruitless exercise. When his achievement is eventually disengaged from the various esotericisms that are competing to claim it, it may well be found that his singular achievement among twentieth century poets was the image of man that he established and that he succeeded in holding under assault. One should add in tribute to the honesty of poetry that most of the assaults were mounted and manoeuvred by Yeats.

The world of the 'nineties was not the best of all possible worlds for a maturing absurdist, though the historical mind will recognize how the romantic image of the artist as the solitary and the rebel, withdrawn from a society given over to Philistine values and hence "absurd" in its indifference to the authentic, carries within it the shape of some familiar modern responses. The difference is the difference between estrangement and involvement; and the movement across the border into the twentieth century is not so radical as to

rule out continuity. Yeats had begun to make this movement even before the storm of 1903 "changed the looks of things" in the Seven Woods and the storm in his own mind compelled a new look at old allegiances. The King's Threshold brings into focus the conflict between poetic faith and Philistine attitudes or, to see the problem through the world's eye, between practical wisdom and creative futility. At this stage, the envelopment is still far from ironic; though Yeats was later to discard the happy ending, the statement that "tragedy is a joy to the man who dies" is not devoid of sentimental overtones and Seanchan's death is surrounded in the play by poetry which anaesthetizes the truth of its conclusion. It is in On Baile's Strand that the lines of battle begin to be drawn with precision. The play has strong Elizabethan affinities in its integration of plot and sub-plot (or more precisely of character and subcharacter) and with the Fool and the Blind Man suggesting that the low life is the good life, the heroic life is driven into its natural world of defeat. Fighting the sea is a potent symbol of absurdity, of the hero destroying himself by a madness inherent in the nature of his heroism and yet by the very act of destruction perhaps creating the statement of his identity. At any rate what the hero achieves or whether indeed he achieves or salvages anything, is significant only to himself and the poet. From the outside he is trapped. He is forced to kill his own son and the play's many ironies of imagery make this an act of compulsion as much as an act of ignorance. Then having been struck at and destroyed from within, he is pitted compulsively against the sea's overwhelming forces and the double jest completes the wheel of tragedy. The final absurdity is yet to come. As the hero dies and the man in the street intrigues himself with the spectacle, it is for practical wisdom to steal the bread from the ovens.

This reading of On Baile's Strand is grimmer than some other views of the play but it seems to be borne out of Yeats's first two attempts to remake the Cuchulain myth in the Noh form. At the Hawk's Well, whatever else it may be, seems clearly a study in complementary types of failure. Neither vigilant passivity, symbolized in the

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Old Man, nor heroic action, symbolized in Cuchulain, are capable of gaining the miraculous waters; the moral seems to be that defeat is part of the human condition. While it is true that defeat can be avoided if the quest is renounced, the play does not really recommend this as a prescription for living and the concluding lyric about the advantages of staying at home, surrounded by milch cows, must be taken as ironic in tone. Man's natural element is that of conflict and it is significant that after Cuchulain has failed and the women of the Sidhe are arming against him, he is described by the stage directions as shouldering his spear and "no longer in a dream." At the same time, the clarity which the play seeks and which is symbolized in its setting (a place "stripped bare" by the sea-wind) makes it evident that in choosing life man also chooses failure.

The Only Jealousy ofEmer pulls the knot of circumstance even tighter. The irony of the play is not simply that Emer saves Cuchulain only in order to lose him to Eithne Inguba. The point is also that in saving him she, in a sense, destroys him. Her loyalty closes the escape into eternity and binds him to the wheel of reincarnation. So Emer's sacrifice not only defeats her but also defeats Cuchulain. The pattern of failure completes that in At the Hawk's Well with an almost geometric exactitude. Man cannot save himself and also cannot save others. Though the possibilities of the fifteenth crescent continue to be proclaimed in Yeats's work, the trap of existence is for all practical purposes closed and the problem is that of remaining oneself in the trap. That is why in Yeats's rendering of an old story, Deirdre's limited achievement has to be that, though a prisoner of fate's and of Conchubar's chess game, she is still able to create her style of dying.

Though Yeats as a myth-maker is a familiar figure in the academies, not enough attention has been given to his delineation of the myth of failure. The dominant image in this myth is of course Cuchulain and though he arrives at the Hawk's well brimming with confidence ("Never had I long / To wait for anything"), his fate is to fail to obtain the elixir, to fail to liberate himself from the wheel of time, to destroy

himself in his son, to die fighting the waves and to die finally on a blind man's kitchen knife, complementing Congal's death on the knife of a fool. As the recognition develops it becomes clear that the high style of Deirdre's death is almost a passing phase in the evolving bitterness; and it is no accident that Congal's death takes place heroically perhaps, but also under the round moon of comedy. The progression reminds us that death is the ultimate failure, an existential recognition which by now is too well-known to be underlined, though the bleak insistent clarity with which Yeats sees it is remarkable so early in the twentieth century. The destitution and the insults with which Yeats surrounds his images of heroism are both unflinching and highly individual. Seen in perspective, they constitute an impressive testimony to his "modernity," to his status as a pioneer in the themes of the contemporary theatre. However, the richest of Yeats's images of defeat and the one that he makes most distinctive is that of old age, with its angry frustrations, its humiliation of the body and its ironic reward of wisdom as the senses decay. The tattered coat on a stick, the insult of the physical self tied to the imagination as a tin can is tied to a dog's tail, the development from wry detachment into angry obscenity, and from creative song into creative frenzy, all constitute not merely a centre of alienation but one charged with the truth because it is so finely responsive to both the process and the texture of living. Perhaps all is summed up in those two affirmations of exclusion that seem to take in so completely the extremities of defeat.

Bodily

decrepitude is wisdom; young

We loved each other and were ignorant.

Or perhaps the lucidity of failure is best sculptured in that recognition which rises with almost tranquil detachment from the torrent of anger that is "Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen"

Man is in love and loves what vanishes, What more is there to say?

Enough has been said to indicate to what extent the symptoms of the absurd appear

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and are enmeshed in Yeats's writing. The lunatic poet and the floundering hero, the assembly of beggars, fools, spiritual sluts and singing and swearing old men who populate Yeats's particular blasted heath have one thing in common-they are outcasts. It would be natural to infer from these images that the lunatic fringe is also the creative element, but the other and grimmer side of the picture is that creative power must always seem ridiculous in the world's eye. To the extent that the poet's condition is the human condition-and the poet and hero are simply man stripped of all compromise-man's fate, with certain elaborations, is that of Sisyphus as the modern imagination sees that figure. "The poet finds and makes his mask in disappointment, the hero in defeat" is a statement that contains the clue to much in Yeats and the man snared in half-knowledge, living his life as "A blind man battering blind men", hemmed in by failure and surrendered to death without dignity, has clearly been born to know defeat in all its dimensions. He cannot even retreat into an inner world of tranquillity, for Yeats in his most potent metaphor of mockery has made sure that wisdom is properly chastened by the inescapable insult of the aging body.

One of the dangers of thematic analysis is its abstraction from the living whole, its ignoring of the cross movements and counter forces that situate the theme within the work. Yeats is not a nihilist poetindeed no poet of our time is more exhilarating in his almostjoyous proclamation of the life sense-but his affirmations gain their strength because they are forced through a stranglehold which, in a lesser poet, might be the ground of despair. Yeats knows, like Shakespeare, that the poor forked animal, stripped of all pretences and driven into the storm, has in him a certain ineradicable residue of dignity. The question is on what frontier of insult can the creative rejoinder still be made with conviction? Perhaps one measure of Yeats's achievement is that he has pushed this frontier an inch or so further in the direction of nothingness. Yeats belongs to a tradition and one source of his power is the authority with which he can make the tradition serve him; but Cuchulain and

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Congal can also play the end game with a thoroughness that looks forward to Samuel Beckett.

In coming to terms with the absurd, or in defining the quality of one's protest, the first step is recognition. To know one's fate is not to master it but it is at least to ensure that the situation does not overwhelm the man or increase his absurdity by trapping him in his own ignorance. Solutions are not possible in the world of tragedy from which the absurd is a sardonic derivation: but it is possible to achieve the kind of response which validates life in the absence of a solution. Among Yeats's statement that we begin to live when we consider life as tragedy, Camus's statement that the only real philosophic problem is that of suicide and Kafka's statement that from a real antagonist boundless courage flows into one, there is a distinct family resemblance. There are also differences enough to teach us that in that "dolphin-torn that gong tormented sea" which is our element, each man must shape his survival in his own way. Yeats's response is not apathy nor lucidity, nor rebellion, controlled by a sense of the human, which is Camus's solution for the man who has passed beyond suicide. It is the aggressive counter-attack and the great strength of his strategy (for those few who have the creative power to employ it) is that the absurd is virtually turned upon itself; it becomes merely the ultimate provocation by which man's dignity is established and intensified. Tragic joy, the heroic cry in the midst of despair, the act of faith and reason that makes one rejoice in the midst of tragedy are differing formulations of this basic response. The undertone is a kind of exultant recklessness which in The Herne's Egg can become compulsive, but which when it is adequately balanced, is deeply expressive of the dignity of those who come "proud, open-eyed and laughing to the tomb". "I think that all profound philosophy must come from terror" Yeats said in a late broadcast and the consequence is, as one might expect, a virtual invitation to the storm. "We have put a golden stopper in the bottle. Open it. Let out reality"

"My temptation is quiet", Yeats says in "An Acre of Grass," but he is in fact

describing the general temptation of age. His personal temptation is quite the opposite and the concept of "frenzy" which dominates "An Acre of Grass" is a calculated risk in the direction of hysteria. If the risk is negotiated it is partly because of Yeats's power to take the ancient idea of creative madness and make it grow within the specific frustrations of age, the withering away of the body and outer world, that throws one implacably back on one's inner resources. In "Lapis Lazuli" hysteria is once again faced and the disengagement effected with great strategic skill, as the ascent of the aesthetic mountain distances and puts in perspective the emotions of the abyss. "The Gyres" is less successful, perhaps because the prophetic mountain is an incitement to declamation that Yeats cannot wholly resist. The large gesture is native to him and with the arrogant expertise which is his trademark he can make the gesture look deceptively like the experience. This is the other side of Yeats's capacity to use the mighty line and to use it unashamedly; both that capacity and the sheer singing lucidity of "Among School Children" and "Sailing to Byzantium"-a lucidity which he seems to derive directly from Marlowe-are his strongest inheritances from the Elizabethans. What saves the outcome from "rhetoric" (the word is used with reluctance in its modern connotation) is Yeats's readiness to accept and indeed to maximise the deflationary effect of irony and to encourage in his poetry its characteristic tones of ridicule and derision. The poor forked animal, tattered and destitute in his age, the monumental blunderer in love, the hero rendered obsolete by history and finally killed by the Philistines for twelve pennies are never far behind the ringing declarations; and because the poem is driven with such confidence through the envelopment of absurdity the heroic line can be sung with uninhibited power.

That poems, including Yeats's poems, demand to be read as wholes is the kind of truism that ought not to need repeating. If it is repeated now it is because the singling out of some of Yeats's more spectacular affirmations has tended to distract attention from the structures in which

they reverberate. I n "The Tower" in particular we must bear in mind the entire bankrupt and lunatic company who, in the second section of the poem, bring themselves to that half-ruined symbol. They represent man's folly, if one can be allowed the simplification, but it is folly shading off into creative power; and Hanrahan, both magician and the victim of his magic, suggests in his behaviour to his own creations the possible behaviour of the man who has created him. This lecherous repository of wisdom brings together many forces in that paradoxical amalgam which is human nature. At the end of the procession stands the poet, the present master of the tower and the most distinguished of a long line of blunderers. It is this strong sense of absurdity and of nobility struggling through it and inseparable from it-a sense established in the very first lines of the poem-that sets the stage for the crucial third section. Against this presence one becomes aware that pride as Yeats defines it, is not one of the seven deadly sins; it is realized in images which suggest the rejoicing of creative power in its own creativeness, even in that last act of death which is eventually part of the life-process. As the birds build their nests with the wisdom of anima mundi the sense of organic continuity is further developed, softening the heroic affirmation which old age and delusion have already chastened and mocked. Yet the affirmation lives and lives in a context which is both richly and inclusively human

And I declare my faith:

I mock Plotinus's thought

And cry in Plato's teeth, Death and life were not Till man made up the whole, Made lock, stock and barrel

Out of his bitter soul, Aye, sun and moon and star, all

When the poem began the muse was sent packing off stage and Plato and Plotinus were chosen as companions. The wheel has turned as it must, in order to tell the whole truth. But the "Monuments of unageing intellect" have not been forgotten: it is with "learned Italian things" and the "proud

stones of Greece" that the poet prepares his peace.

In "Among School Children" the poetic strategy is similar and, as the consolations of philosophy metamorphose into the vanity of philosophers, the singing line is preserved intact, as if to remind us that dignity inheres in the stuff of the ridiculous. The "self-born mockers of man's enterprise" tell us that every man is the prisoner of his own myth. But that does not mean that the myth is not creative; it remains the symbolization of "all heavenly glory". The scholar's wisdom may be blear-eyed; but it is still wisdom, which survives and redeems the absurdity of its agent. It is on the warp and woof of folly and nobility that the rich texture of life has to be woven; and the poem having lived ts way through this recognition has also earned its right to proceed to that climatc symbol wh ch is possibly the supreme moment of Yeats's poetry.

o chestnut-tree, great rooted blossomer, Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?

o body swayed to music, o brightening glance, How can we know the dancer from the dance?

These lines have been sufficiently glossed and perhaps it is not prudent to add one's blear-eyed wisdom to the total of commentary. The point being made here is simply what the procession of images suggests-that the creative process is ultimately one with the life process-and that neither process can be seized in its totality through anyone of its aspects. If the chestnut tree is neither leaf, blossom nor bole, if the dancer cannot be known from the dance, then man's nature lies in neither dignity nor defeat, in folly, recklessness nor nobility but in that substratum of recognition, perhaps accessible only to the poet, which gives rise to these individual partialities.

To define a central position in Yeats's work is not easy, if only because the structure of his achievement consists of a pattern of positions, each of them indi-

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vidually lived through and each enriching the others by its presence. As his poetry developes into the great phase of full engagement with reality, there are movements in it of both nihilism and transcendence. Those movements indeed are to be expected in any poet with a strongly developed sense of the absurd. Perhaps one only states one's preferences or exposes one's limitations in arguing that Yeats's typical position and the one he feels most deeply is between these extremes. Its characteristic is a sense of life, intense because it is both joyous and tragic; and its rhetoric is a defiant humanism, a ringing declaration of man as the measure. One has only to compare Yeats's Life and death were not

Till man made up the whole

with Eliot's

Teach us to care and not to care

Teach us to sit still

to realize that what is being exposed is not simply a difference of attack and temperament but a difference in the mode of recognition, as radical perhaps, as a given time can allow. Yeats's sense of man as the creative centre, of independence rather than dependence, is so passionate that the attack upon God becomes an important part of his myth in the last plays and poems. It is a conviction proclaimed in the startling declaration that "Man has created death" and again in the conclusion of "Two Songs from a Play."

Whatever flames upon the night Man's own resinous heart has fed. Here the conviction is given depth by the potent ambiguity of the symbol, the resinous heart that is both funeral pyre and beacon, destroying the past and lighting the way to the future. The conviction lives also in Yeats's much-used symbol of the severed head singing, a symbol which dramatically informs us that creative action outlives the mortality of its agent. It lives with deep irony in Cuchulain's imperious cry "I make the truth" corning at a time when it is evident that he is not making the facts. Yet if it is the Morrigan's privilege to arrange the dance it is Man's last right to

give that dance its meaning.

This sketching of Yeats's main position perhaps underlines its arrogance but, as has already been suggested, that arrogance is held in check and humanised by the consistent attacking pressure of Yeats's irony. It is an irony wholly different in quality from the vigilant urbanity, the alert acknowledgment of the critic over one's shoulder, with which the modern poet seeks to establish his credentials. Ranging in scope from affectionate mockery to the tragic derision of failure, Yeats's irony is characteristically presented, not as an additional layer of implication, an impartial rounding-out of the picture, but as a radical challenge to one's sense of design in reality. Yet the very power of Yeats's response, the manner in which he maintains his definitions against the Ironic envelopment, makes it evident that he is not a total absurdist and that man, the maker of meaning, spurred into creativeness by the provocation of the absurd, cannot but bestow significance on the blind man's ditch through which he is made to blunder. The end is not protection from the absurd or conquest of it but the kind of creative acceptance that is best expressed by Yeats's modulation of Blake's idea.

We must laugh and we must sing, We are blest by everything, Everything we look upon is blest. The rejoinder in other words is the poet's rejoinder. It helps to remind us that, while Yeats has a strong sense of the absurd, he cannot be expected to have a philosophy of it. It is a position through which he often lives and by which many of his recognitions are shaped; but it is also one response among others and therefore held in balance by the others. "Man can embody truth but he cannot know it" are Yeats's deliberate words in his last letter. They are the words of the person who says that he has chosen to live with absurdity (the very words are eloquent of both defeat and achievement) but also to live with the recognition that there is that in him which no absurdity can reach.

Since every century derives its creative strength from some conviction of its own uniqueness, it is pertinent to note that the

phenomenon of man is not a new phenomenon and that we have had before us for several centuries, several of the specifications of that angelic animal. The contradictions in that great amphibium whom Hamlet celebrates in his meditation upon dust and whom Pope surveys in passionate paradoxes has been the driving force behind much of Western literature; and man, in his pivotal position on the great chain of being, has opportunities for absurdity that can only be called unique. There is however a difference between a situation in which absurdity is created by a deliberate act of choice and one in which it is given by circumstances which one has not chosen and cannot hope to control. There is also a difference between a situation in which meaning is recovered by a further act of choice, which is also an admission of dependence, and one in which meaning is created by the lonely, assertive strength of the individual. These distinctions help to expose a dominant and possibly a limiting feature of Yeats's universe, namely that it is a universe of forces rather than values in which the central affirmations of creative and heroic power are sustained by their own strength rather than by their moral content. Good and evil as in the universe of theology, error and forgiveness as in the universe of Lear (a play which otherwise is suggestively absurdist) are not factors which are of shaping significance in Yeats's world. Whether something is gained or lost by this concentration on creative energy, the "terrible" beauty of life which is also its richness, is scarcely for this article to suggest. Perhaps the decision between the two worlds is one that lies beyond poetry though it necessarily has its poetic consequences.

It seems fitting to close with a message to statisticians. The Cornell concordance of Yeats's poems has been electronically computed and its evidence is therefore mechanically beyond challenge. It lists "absurd" once and "absurdity" twice. Perhaps that means that this article has wasted the time of its reader. Or perhaps it means that even the best of machines cannot ten an of the truth. There is still room for the human aberration and for that fraction of it which we call the literary critic.

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Some Dublin Afterthoughts

DONALD T. TORCHIANA

In total April innocence, gazing hopefully into the depths of a soft, gray Irish rain from the window of O'Neill's pub on Merrion Row, I was suddenly struck by the approaching centenary of W. B. Yeat's birth. The year was 1962. Instead of sitting still and letting the fit pass with the brief shower, I mentioned the idea of a Yeats Festival to my cronies, Des Kennedy of the National Library and Frank Ford of University College, Galway. The delusion seemed harmless enough. Having caught the Yeats Exhibition at the Dublin Building Centre and offered some blather of my own at the last Yeats Summer School in Sligo, well, I had my ideas. Frank and Des murmured halting approval, while glancing quizzically into their jars. Des went out to place a bet, and we passed on to more important matters. Six weeks later I had already hurled myself, wife and family back into the American Midwest where, almost as a second thought, I tried the idea again on our chairman, Jean Hagstrum, and then on Lawrence Towner at the Newberry. The subject had been properly broached andgiven the clear skies, sunshine, and honest industry of Evanston-would be properly forgotten.

Or so it seemed. However, on a particularly balmy fall day of 1963, the idea took hold again. Instead of grading a few student papers to test my sanity, I compulsively wrote Dick Ellmann in England and then got on the electric telephone and called myoid pal Glenn O'Malley. Both were enthusiastic. Ellmann allowed that 138 TRI·QUARTERLY

the Concora people might allocate funds; then men like Hagstrum and Dean Moody Prior whipped up various official enthusiasms. I also had a hunch that George Yeats might approve-distantly. So we were off.

Like most American university dudes in search of greatness, I thought we ought to acquire some famous, plenipotentiary names to grace our three-day madness. Quite naturally, we tried to persuade W. B.'s late and early well-wishers, Eliot and Pound. However, the first was in bad health and the second somewhat vague. Next we discovered that Auden turned out to approve of Yeats even less, if possible, than his condescending little elegy, "In Memory of W. B. Yeats," might indicate. His point, quite decently taken, was that a centenary celebration was certainly no time to pour scorn. Marianne Moore, Robert Lowell, Northrop Frye, and Frank O'Connor had other pleas. The first three had heavy publishing commitmentsalthough I am told that Lowell revoked and spoke quite stupidly on Yeats later in the year. O'Connor took a long time in saying No, perhaps because he was busy, as usual, slandering Joyce, eking out his own autobiography, or damning some American writer in the Dublin newspapers-it doesn't really matter. To cut this short, we suddenly found ourselves freed from commitments to names, able to get down to business and find writers who were genuinely and fetchingly taken by Yeats.

As might be expected, Ellmann did

yeoman work in England, assuring me that Stephen Spender would help us out, that B. Rajan was fortunately to be at Wisconsin that year, and that John Kelleher, who must be the dean of Irish studies in America, could be bullied into coming. Ellmann also hit on the splendid idea of asking William P. Fay, the Irish Ambassador to America. Then, after all this cisatlantic collusion, I found myself in Ireland again. And now it was summer, 1964.

Luckily, I met Conor Cruise O'Brien at my bench in the National Library in Dublin, where he was good enough to show me his essay on Yeats and politics. Without reading it through, I sensed the chance of getting him to Evanston and asked him on the spot. He agreed. Intoxicated, so to speak, by his acceptance, I proceeded to MacDaid's and caught Paddy Kavanagh in the back hall just concluding a gargle before the chiming of the Holy Hour and chucking-out time. When told there would be a jet flight and about two hundred quid in it for him, he too readily agreed. The next day, no longer prepared to be daunted, I found Tom Kinsella in the Department of Finance behind Leinster House. He was favorable but couldn't give me a definite Yes. Never mind, said I, he will. And ultimately he did. Thomas MacGreevy was another fond hope. He gave me an audience in the Shelbourne but led me to believe, without ever saying so directly, that his health made such a venture impossible. His absence is my great regret. To read his comments on painters like Poussin and Jack Yeats is to realize the gap his absence made. However, on returning to dear old Evanston, I was able to nab Padraic Colum by Air Mail in Woods Hole. Always kind, he took pity on us and signed up. By fall I had also tracked down W. D. Snodgrass between plane flights to New York where he was doing a play. After his astonishment vanished on being asked to hold forth on Yeats, he began to take heart and, after some browbeating by mail and phone, enlisted. I suspect that the fact that I'd written a helter-skelter essay on him left him no choice but to succumb. But no matter, by Christmas we were set.

Now the preparations. I'll not bore the

reader with a laundry list. Still and all, the matter of programs, posters, schedules, publicity, invitations, mailings, hotels, lecture halls, electronic equipment, parties, dinners, receptions, yes, even ice cubes was maddening. Butall kindsofpeoplepitched in. The Press allowed us to store posters and programs in the shipping room. Some forty or fifty freshman girls from Willard Hall, led by their counselor, Miss Parsons, sometimes worked till midnight sending out announcements and invitations. Dick EHmann and Moody Prior broke off their own work to hold night meetings on scheduling and the like. Writer Bob Lefley and other members of the public relations crew were put at our disposal. Richard Olson cooked up a telling exhibition of books and manuscripts by Yeats at Deering Library. The always gracious Miss Skelly made the financing run easy. A hardy group of instructors and graduate students in English, all with special talents, formed themselves into an Irish Mafia, their sole purpose being to guide, corral, restrain, cajole, remind, deliver, or just plain keep in sight each of the distinguished guests. I had the extremely diplomatic Colton Johnson for Ambassador Fay. For Tom Kinsella, a soft-spoken behemoth, Pete Michelson, editor of the Chicago Review. Thad Koza, another gentle giant, watched over Padraic Colum. For the likes of Paddy Kavanagh, I had on hand an ironstomached, 240-pound Swede, Gerry Nelson. The very solid and personable Clarence Creasy took Snodgrass in tow. Quick-witted Lee Ramsey seemed the right match for the notoriously nimble-minded Conor Cruise O'Brien. And so the pairing went. With the aid of beer and cigars we quickly became a fighting unit. I still recall fanning out with Koza, Nelson, and Creasy on a fine, wet April afternoon, a Panatella clenched in my teeth and fifty posters stuck under my arm, ready to take on every department bulletin board on South Campus. I might add that our poster man, Larry Levy, a former student, did such a fine job, that for the first few days we discovered many of our coveted posters torn down and stolen away. But enough. To speak further of these preliminaries TRI-QUARTERLY 1139

would also force me to reveal a great swizzle of frantic department secretaries, bored wives, half-spanked children, stunned janitors, and bewildered students.

Let me settle down, then, to a day-by-day account of this Irish-American hoolie.

The first day sparkled. The Mafia took their places around noon on April 28th at the proper airline desks at O'Hare and delivered their men alive soon after at the Orrington Hotel. I had a chance to help Gerry Nelson bring the Kinsellas in a few days earlier. Tom's good Dublin voice, the gossip of poetry Ireland, and the windy, buffeting ride into Chicago and lunch at Ireland's on North Clark Street set the pace and tone for the first day. By late afternoon of that Wednesday, Colum, Rajan, Spender, Fay, and Kinsella had already taken turns jousting with Chicago newspaper reporters at a press conference at the Orrington. Colum made remarkably clear how sweet and deft he could be in parrying the questions of any who laid inquisitorial hands on him-and this in his 82nd year. This interlude past, keepers and distinguished guests alike piled into two or three cars and descended on President and Mrs. Miller's reception. We hadn't expected the excited verve and cooperation from so many freshman girls at Willard. Nor had we imagined that the busy head of a large university would have time to offer himself and his home to a relatively minor fuss engineered largely by the English Department. But he did. As we entered, the resurrected April sunshine flooded a spacious living room, elegantly and graciously prepared to receive us. Already the redoubtable Mr. Kavanagh, his truculence in abeyance, stood in a far corner armed with a sloping glass of bourbon and engaged in deep conversation. The affable Ambassador Fay and smiling Dick EHmann had also joined arms, so to speak, with an equally genial group of University officials. For sheer fun and glitter this hour of welcome was the peak of the three days.

The first dinner at Sargent Hall went well enough, though our guests from the University of Chicago seem, to a man, to have ditched us. However, Ernest Samuels, who presided, with some gentle shepherding got

[40 TRI-QUARTERLY

us all to Tech Auditorium on time for President Miller's words of welcome. Jammed with close to a thousand people, the auditorium hummed with an excitement and bustle that I had never heard in my twelve years on the payroll here. Responding to President Miller, Ambassador Fay set the direction of the evening by outlining Yeat's paradoxical triumph, his years of restive love and hate for Ireland amid his frequently uncomprehending Gaelic, Catholic countrymen. Ellmann then cited the long line of attacks, critical or cowardly or contemptuous, right on down to Ivor Winters' sharply written buffooneries, that Yeats had to endure. Padraic Colum capped the evening with cleverly meandering reminiscences swelled with snatches of verse and intimate pictures of Yeats with Lady Gregory and Robert at Coole. Our doughty Willard girls, who had already guided the seating, passed out programs, and even handled the elevators, now took up their posts in the third-floor lounge and served coffee. Here addicted students and enthusiasts from the North Shore met face to face with the poets, scholars, and men of letters we had gathered. We were beginning to get some of the active, direct engagement we wanted. By I I :00 I was off again, this time to the Ellmann home for a Jameson nightcap and a final check with the Mafia, who were still at their chores, and then a chat with Snodgrass just off a late flight from Cleveland. Then good night and home. We had started.

The next day all hell broke loose. But the storm was some time in brewing. So far Kavanagh had been on his best behavior. He had been eating, drinking, sleeping, and talking like any other person, peasant or American, and had usually made sense in his remarks. He had spoken some halting platitudes about the poet as a good man to a large sophomore English class on Wednesday and even recited some of his verses, after Gerry Nelson had sprinted three blocks to his car and back for the CollectedPoems. As we had expected, Kavanagh was doing marvelously with small groups of students that he is always delighted to talk with personally and informally. All was well. Yet somehow I sensed a shoring up of

grace that might bode ill for the evening panel, for, like those of Stephen Duck, the thresher poet before him, Kavanagh's effusions were not always granary ones. However, Thursday started well enough. Many an English class was regaled by one of our various speakers who had promised to put their talents at the disposal of advanced people. This time English B70 heard Tom Kinsella quote energetically and movingly the verses taken from his days as a young man courting in Dublin. He rang the hour closed with a high-spirited reading of his masterful "Baggot Street Deserta." With Kinsella's stint over, we swung by the Orrington, picked up Eleanor Kinsella, along with Nelson and Koza, and sped down to Chicago for Irish Consul General Brian O'Kelly's luncheon. At the Evanston border there was time for ice cold pitchers ofbeer-someonesaid, "Justlike Mullingar" -that cheered more than one Irish heart among us.

When we had scaled the Prudential Building and thirty-nine flights on the everready express elevator, O'Kelly and his assistants ushered us into the resplendent Mid-America Club, where we met a rather stunning array of Irish-American notables. Then, all the while gazing at the slow, hazy white and blue of Lake Michigan, seemingly a mile down, we also had put under our noses a sharply conceived and bravely served Mid-America lunch. All this pleasant respite, however, was simply a prelude. For our immediate destination, the Newberry Library,layahead. Onceagain the Librarian, Lawrence Towner, with the aid of Colton Storm and Richard Johnson, had done himself proud. He had lured to the quiet, panelled dignity of the Scholars Lounge a scattering of literary Chicago-poets, editors, patrons, teachers, now all students of Yeats. After our distinguished lecturers had been introduced, Stephen Spender gave a beautifully paced, spontaneously voiced paper on the impact of Yeats on the English poets of the Thirties. After more conviviality, all the more heightened by the booklined walls and the carefully spaced treasures of an Irish Literary Revivial exhibit, the game was on again-the speeding, winding chase back to Evanston in the

chilly, gray April twilight.

Within two hours we were back in Tech Auditorium with another packed house and the panel discussion began. As a viewer from so far away as Wittenberg College wrote me later on, the evening was not a loss, far from it. Despite the occasional formality-and for all the triviality of Kavanagh's eruption at the end-you got what a panel is meant to give-an immediate feeling of living presence.

Spender led off for the second time that day. Speaking impressively in his slightly stooped, silvery, ambiguous way, he sharply distingusihed the poetry written since Yeats from the earlier masterpieces of the century and then handed the panel over to Snodgrass. That bearded hotshot, who enunciates in a clear, forthright voice the most complicated poetic matters, threw out more than one arresting comment that cut to the heart of contemporary poetry: the fear of the irrational, the curse of ideas, the skittishness over the confused life of the body. Next Kinsella came on, this time speaking home truths, often bitter ones, especially about the decline of poetry in England and the long-delayed jagged verse sprung out of the piously economic success of Ireland since 1955. All the while Kavanagh, gloomy and saturnine, pendant on the horizon like a Connacht bishop, waited his turn. I could have predicted what he might say thousands of miles away in Dublin, but I still harbored hopes for innocent, illiterate, unsuspecting Evanston. But to no avail. For here came the usual stale Kavanagh cliches: Yeats was not Irish, most contemporary poets are dull, American criticism is loony-all the unexamined, defensive blather that he has filled The Bell, Envoy, nonplus, and the Kilkenny Magazine with for so many years. And as usual, he came out venomously and grimly for gaiety and humor, of which there was not a shred in his talk or in any of his verse. Still, I imagine Yeats would have taken great glee in the proceedings, especially in the way they ended in eruction, conflict, violent disagreement, and armed stand off. Having seep to it that I was terribly busy inspecting the water fountains in the outside hall during the whole scrap, and the final exasperated impasse, I couldn't

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help recalling Yeats's words at the end of his life while swinging a giant sword above his head: "Conflict! More conflict!" Thus I must admit to a rather unholy set of mixed feelings-that did not preclude amusement -in noting the faces of the audience suddenly spilled out of the fast-emptying auditorium: dumbfounded students, gasping faculty wives, and horrified librarians who had expected poets to behave like members of a church choir; then Spender, striding out very angry but very rational, followed by a large number of instructors shaking their heads; and then, of course, the Chicago businessmen and their wives with eyebrows frequently arched, or bluehaired North Shore matrons with pursed lips and silent husbands at heel. Quelle vie!

After commiserating over coffee with various ofthe stunned parties, I felt strangely happy if not consoled and marched on to another late party. This evening it was an ebullient half-hour at the Prior home, although I was saddened to find one of our Mafia stalwarts done in, half-asleep in the car, yet insisting in the best tradition of the service that he was ready to press on should he be called. With the night beginning to recede into black dawn over the L tracks on Ridge Avenue, I drove home with him and threw myself down beside my grumbling wife, my eyeballs locked open on the brightening ceiling.

Friday began wonderfully. After obtaining a text of Yeats's poems, Conor Cruise O'Brien strode into my 18th-century English lit. class five minutes after the bell and opened his remarks by reciting "The Seven Sages." I've never heard that incantation of Georgian Ireland uttered so well. O'Brien followed up this performance with the appropriate remarks-seemingly offhandon the Battle of the Boyne, the Penal Laws, the Protestant Ascendancy, Grattan's Parliament, and the Union. His delivery was flawless. Doubting that the day could offer another fifty minutes like O'Brien's, I dashed up to Tech and propelled Snodgrass into my English B70 class, where he promptly stole the class away-forever, so far as I can tell. The class wanted Frost. So Snodgrass launched into "The Witch of Coos," while at the same time shooting out

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a series of brilliant running comments. He followed that excursion with "Design," again interspersing equally subtle side remarks. Then, holy of holies, he dove into the selected horror and glory of Berryman's 77 Dream Songs. He had five of them by heart and sang them out with all the gestures, pauses and grit they demanded. At the sound of the bell, the students, as though transformed, rose to a man and clapped, thunder upon thunder, one volley of applause after another, for what must have been a full ten minutes. Although this third day's description leaves me open to the charge of peddling more superlatives than ever, I must say that I've never witnessed a poetry reading like that one. Mad, man!

That afternoon Moody Prior and John Kelleher spoke, respectively, on "Yeats's Search for a Dramatic Form" and "Yeats's Use of Irish Materials." Both talks rather cunningly prepared for the Department of Interpretation's contribution to the Festival. As I had expected, Charlotte Lee came through with three amazing performances. My plan had been to show Yeats's three different attitudes towards Ireland in three contrasting plays from three widely-spaced periods. Thus, for all its cornball nationalism, Cathleen Ni Houlihan, played straight by the student actors in a readers theater performance, was strangely thrilling. There followed the exquisitely danced The Dreaming of the Bones, where again I found myself stirred by the nearly perfect pronunciation of the Irish names and strict attention to Yeatsian detail. But the greatest performance came last. By this time the aisles were filled with sprawling, uncomfortable, yet rapt students who seemed to sense the ability that Frank Galati had summoned to his role as the Old Man in Purgatory. It makes the most taxingdemands on an actor: he must somehow make the figure symbolic yet insinuate Yeats himself into the part and, at the same time, hint a theory of history to account for a man's killing his father and then his son with the same knife. Galati not only turned this obscure corner of Irish dramaturgy but also added the near hallucinatory dimension of baffled hatred that Yeats threw into the

faces of the uncomprehending Abbey audience of August 1938. As sheer visual tributes to the memory of Yeats, these smashing performances beat the rest of our efforts hollow.

One more night remained. Cocktails and dinner at the Orrington brought together, joyously and contentedly, many of the festive groups that had tailed along for three days: distinguished guests and keepers; an odd Irishman or so from Loyola, Notre Dame, and Fordham; the whole damned tenure staff in English, plus more fat cats from Arts and Sciences; and then a smattering of guests from other Big Ten schools. At the last minute J had to run out, grab a cab, and help set up the rostrum at Tech. I must admit that this last evening found us somewhat jammed: the subjects were weighty and some of the talks ran over their time. Nevertheless, Rajan spoke with real finish and subtlety on Yeats and the absurd, and Erich Heller gave one of his characteristic performances on Nietzsche -this time with Yeats added. Conor Cruise O'Brien-who had already regaled students in African Studies, wowed my l Sth-century people, and lured Studs Terkle all the way up to Evanston dragging his electronic equipment behind him-well, O'Brien capped the evening. He set a number of matters straight on Yeats and Irish politics and, even better, started up an equal number of hares in the course of his remarks. The direct impression of his talk was that of a man who had made a mark on life and letters superior to that of any speaker on that platform for many a year. Once again a full house heard us to the last, though much too close to 11:00 p.m. for most of us. Our valiant Willard girls-who had been charmed by Colum at lunchtook their posts in the coffee lounge, and then distinguished guests, keepers, and a few hundred other students and wellwishers slid over to my renovated funeral home for one last bump for Yeats before rocketting back to normalcy. Strange and wonderful impressions of that evening still stick with me, even here in Dublin: Kelleher exulting over Gray's "The Bard;" Snod-

grass singing and accompanying himself on a lute before a group of students; and Kavanagh signing a copy of his Collected Poems. Then, too, O'Brien, in true ISthcentury fashion, kissed Millie O'Malley's hand; I gave a picture away and God knows what else; Colum drank orange juice; and so the night wore on.

By eight the next morning the Mafia were on the move again. O'Brien was off to California for a wedding, Colum headed back to New York, and Kavanagh, somewhat reluctantly, aimed in the general direction of the Kentucky Derby. Me?-I went down to the Midwest Renaissance Conference at the Newberry and then took my boys to NU's spring football practice. First things first. And W. B. Yeats? After all the hectic, hellish, brilliant, and boring three days, what can be said as excuse? Perhaps only this: one has no idea how most students, beyond our fanatics, took it. The Daily Northwestern seems to have politely dismissed the whole business from the beginning. We got a marvelous story about Yeats the eccentric and then an eerie, sour little finale calling our last evening go unattended and dismal-both descriptions slightly at odds with the facts. But I don't blame the Daily, since it had had no more experience with such monstrous literary celebrations than we had. Otherwise, if I were a good administrator or statistician, I'd probably address myself to the question of what permanent good the Yeats Festival did Northwestern or the students or the image or the parents or the future or the education of the U. S. Navy. But such questions never get answered truly or even interestingly. So I'll drop that line and say this: one of the Mafia boys met a girl doing Honors in English on the first day. Both were swept away by Yeats or something and got engaged immediately after the third day. Now they are married. Perhaps that's what poetry and Yeats and festivals are for anyway.

Dublin 30 August 1965

And walk among long dappledgrass, Andpluck tilltime and times are done The silver apples ofthe moon, Th«goldenapples ofthe sun.

W. B. Teats,

Three essays

ROLAND

BARTHES

Strip-Tease

THE STRIP-TEASE-at least the Parisian variety-is based on a contradiction: woman desexualized even as she is denuded. Hence we are offered a terrorist spectacle, or rather, a "frighten-me" one-as if eroticism here remained a kind of delicious alarm, whose ritual signs suffice to provoke both the notion of sex and its exorcism.

The mere duration of the undressing turns the public into voyeurs; but here, as in any spectacle of mystification, the decor, the accessories, and the stereotypes contradict the initial provocation of the enterprise and end by engulfing it in insignificance: sin is paraded the better to embarrass and exorcise it. The French strip-tease seems to utilize what I have elsewhere called Operation Astra, a method of mystification which consists in vaccinating the public with a drop of sin, the better to plunge that public, subsequently, into a henceforth immunized Morality: a few atoms of eroticism, designated by the very situation of the spectacle, are in fact absorbed into a reassuring ritual which effaces the flesh as surely as a vaccine or a taboo arrest and contain a disease or a transgression.

Hence we get, in the strip-tease, a whole series of screens set before the woman's body, even as she pretends to undress that body. Exoticism is the first of these distances, for there is always a frozen exoticism involved, one which alienates the body into the fabulous or the fictional: the Chinese Siren armed with an opium pipe (that obligatory symbol of Sinicism), the undulating Vamp with her gigantic cigarette-holder, the Venetian courtesan with her gondola and serenading gondolier -all these aim at constituting woman,from the start, as a disguised object; the goal of the strip-tease is thus no longer to draw out into the light a secret depth, but to signify nakedness, through the removal of a baroque and artificial vesture, as the natural clothing of woman, in other words, to rediscover, finally, a perfectly modest state of the flesh.

The classic accessories of the burlesque-theater and the music-hall, mobilized here without exception, also alienate the undressed body at every moment, forcing it into the enveloping comfort of a familiar rite: furs, fans, gloves, feathers, netstockings-in a word, the entire range of adornment-constantly reintegrate the

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living body into the category of those luxurious objects which surround man with a magical decor. Furred or gloved, a woman parades herselfhere as a frozen music-hall element; and to strip herself of such ritual objects now has nothing to do with a new divesting: furs, feathers, and gloves continue to impregnate her with their magical virtue even once they are removed, afford a kind of enveloping memory of a luxurious carapace, for it is an obvious law that the entire strip-tease is given in the very nature of the initial garment. If the latter is improbable, as in the case of the Chinese Siren or the Venus in Furs, the ensuing nude remains quite unreal herself, as smooth and impenetrable as a lovely, slippery object, alienated by its very extravagance from human use: this is the profound meaning of the diamondor sequin-sewn G-string, which is the very goal of the strip-tease: that ultimate triangle, but whose pure and geometric form, by its hard, glittering substance, bars the sex like a chastity belt and definitively ejects woman into a mineralogical universe, the (precious) stone here constituting the irrefutable theme of the total and useless object.

Contrary to common prejudice, the dance which accompanies the whole of the strip-tease is not an erotic factor at all; it is probably, in fact, quite the opposite. The more or less rhythmic undulation here exorcises the terror of immobility; not only does it afford the spectacle the guarantee of Art (burlesque dances are always "artistic"), but above all it constitutes the last and the most effective screen: the dance, consisting of ritual gestures seen a thousand times, functions as a cosmetic of movements, conceals nudity, coats the spectacle with a glaze of useless and yet leading gestures, for here undressing is relegated to the rank of a parasiticaloperation conducted in an improbable distance. Thus we see the professionals of strip-tease cloak themselves in a miraculous ease which ceaselessly envelops them, removes them, gives them the icy indifference of skillful practitioners, arrogantly taking refuge in the certitude of their technique: their dexterity clothes them like a garment.

All this scrupulous exorcism of sex can be verified a contrario in amateur striptease contests: the"beginners" remove their clothes before several hundred spectators without resorting, or resorting very clumsily, to magic, which incontestably reestablishes the erotic power of the spectacle. Here, at the start, we find nowhere near so many Chinese or Spanish numbers, neither feathers nor furs (simple outfits, street wear), few original disguises: clumsy steps, inadequate dances, the girl continually trapped by immobility and, above all, a "technical" embarrassment (resistance of panties, the dress catching on the bra, etc.) which gives the gestures of revelation an unexpected importance, denying the woman the alibi of art and the refuge of the object, confining her within a condition of weakness and timidity.

Yet, at the Moulin Rouge, an exorcism of another kind appears, probably typically French, an exorcism which seeks, moreover, to domesticate rather than to abolish eroticism: the master of ceremonies attempts to give the strip-tease a reassuring petit-bourgeois status. First of all, the strip-tease is a sport-there is a Strip-Tease Club, which organizes healthy competitions whose prizewinners emerge crowned, rewarded by edifying prizes (a course of physical-culture treatments), a novel (which has to be Robbe-Griller's Voyeur), or useful trophies (a pair of nylons, five-hundred francs). Then, the strip-tease is identified with a career (beginners, semi-professionals,

pros), that is, with the honorable exercise of a specialty (the strip-tease "artists" are qualified workers); even the magical alibi of work can be accorded: vocation (one girl is "on her way" or "likely to fulfill her promise", or else "taking her first steps" on the arduous runway of strip-tease). Finally, and especially, the competitors are placed socially: one is a salesgirl, another a secretary (there are a great many secretaries in the Strip-Tease Club). Thus the strip-tease reunites the hall, acclimatizes itself, turns bourgeois, as if the French, unlike the American public (at least from what I have been told), and following an irrepressible tendency of their social status, could conceive of eroticism only as a household property, "covered" by the alibi of a bi-weekly sport, much more than by that of the magical spectacle: this is how, in France, the strip-tease is nationalized.

Billy Graham Comes to Paris

SO MANY MISSIONARIES have reported on the religious customs of "Primitives" that it is really too bad there wasn't a Papuan witch-doctor at the Vel' d'Hiv' the other night to tell us about the ceremony Doctor Graham conducted under the name of an evangelical campaign. For there is some splendid anthropological material here which seems, moreover, inherited from certain "savage" cultures, presenting as it does, under an immediate aspect, the three great phases of every religious act: Expectation, Suggestion, Initiation.

Billy Graham makes us wait for him: hymns, invocations, a thousand futile little talks entrusted to walk-on pastors or to American impresarios (thejolly introduction of the troupe: Smith the pianist from Toronto, Beverly the soprano from Chicago, "a star of American radio and television, a truly wonderful Gospel singer"-a long spiel precedes Doctor Graham, who is continuously being announced and who never appears. At last he is with us, but only to transfer our curiosity all the more effectively, for his first speech is not the good one: he is only preparing us for the coming of the Message. And more interludes prolong our expectation, warm up the house, assign in advance a prophetic importance to this message, which according to the theater's best traditions begins by making itself desired in order to exist all the more readily afterwards.

In this first phase of the ceremony we recognize that great sociological resource called Expectation (Waiting on God), of which the recent demonstrations of the hypnotist Le Grand Robert have already furnished a modern example in Paris. Here too the Mage's appearance was postponed as long as possible, and by repeated artifices the public was worked up to that pitch of anxious curiosity which is quite ready to see in fact what it is made to expect. Similarly, from the first moment, Billy Graham is presented as a true prophet, through whom we entreat the Spirit of God to be so good as to descend, this evening in particular: it is an Inspired TRI-QUARTERLY 1147

Prophet who will speak to us, the public is invited to observe the spectacle of a man possessed: we are asked in advance to take the words ofBilly Graham as literally divine. If God does speak through Dr. Graham's mouth, it must be confessed that God is a dunce: the Message is astonishing for its banality, its childishness. In any case, God is certainly no longer a Thomist, he avoids logic like the plague: the Message consists of a kind of buckshot of broken affirmations which are quite unrelated to each other, and which have as their sole content the tautology God is God. The dullest Marist Brother, the most academic pastor would look like a decadent intellectual beside Dr. Graham. Reporters, deceived by the Huguenot decor of the ceremony (hymns, prayer, sermon, benediction), lulled by the soothing compunction of Protestant worship, have praised Dr. Graham and his troupe for their restraint: we expected some form of outre Americanism, girls, jazz, and a few red-hot metaphors (there were two or three of these, at least). Billy Graham has no doubt filtered everything picturesque out of his sessions, and French Protestants found them quite acceptable. Nonetheless Billy Graham's manner breaks a whole tradition of the sermon, whether Catholic or Protestant, inherited from classical culture, and which is that of a need to persuade. Western Christianity has always submitted itself, in its exposition, to the general form of Aristotelian thought, it has always agreed to come to terms with reason, even when it was accrediting the irrationality of faith. Breaking with centuries of humanism (even if the forms may have been hollow and rigid, the concern for the Other, the audience, has rarely been absent from Christian didacticism), Dr. Graham brings us a method of magical transformation: he substitutes suggestion for persuasion: the pressure of the argument, the systematic elimination of any rational content from the proposition, the constant breaking-off of logical trains of thought, the verbal repetitions, the grandiloquent designation of the Bible held in an outstretched hand like some universal snake-oil remedy, and above all the absence of warmth, the manifest contempt for the audience's presence-all these operations are part of the classical material of the musichall hypnotist: as I said, there is no difference between Billy Graham and Le Grand Robert.

And just as Le Grand Robert ended the preparation of his public by a special selection, calling up to the stage the Chosen People of hypnosis, entrusting certain privileged beings with the burden of a spectacular capacity for torpor, Billy Graham crowns his Message by a material segregation of the Elect: the neophytes who the other evening at the Vel' d'Hiv, among the advertisements for Super Dissolution and Cognac Polignac, "received Christ" under the influence of the magical Message were herded to a room apart, and if they spoke English, to a still more secret crypt: it matters little enough what happened there-whether inscription on the conversion lists, new sermons, spiritual conferences with the "counsellors", or collectionsthis new episode is the formal ersatz of Initiation.

All this concerns us quite directly: first of all, Billy Graham's "success" manifests the mental fragility of the French petite bourgeoisie, a class from which the public of these sessions appears to be chiefly recruited: the plasticity of this public to alogical and hypnotic forms of thought suggests that there exists in this social group what one might call a situation of risk: a part of the French petite bourgeoisie is no longer

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even protected by its famous bon sens, which is the aggressive form of its class consciousness. But that is not all: Billy Graham and his troupe have heavily and repeatedly emphasized the purpose of their campaign: "to awaken" France ("We have seen God do great things in America; an awakening, in Paris, would produce a tremendous influence the whole world over." "What we want is for something to happen in Paris which will have repercussions throughout the entire world."). Apparently the point of view is the same as President Eisenhower's in his remarks on French atheism. France is distinguished by her rationalism, her indifference to faith and the irreligion of her intellectuals (a theme common to America and the Vatican; moreover, a theme greatly overrated): it is from this bad dream that she must be awakened. The "conversion" of Paris would obviously have the value of a world-wide example: Atheism KO'd in its very stronghold.

Obviously we are dealing here with a political theme: France's atheism interests America because it appears to be the preliminary face of Communism. "To awaken" France from atheism is to awaken her from the Communist spell. Billy Graham's campaign has been nothing more than a McCarthyist episode.

Einstein's Brain

EINSTEIN'S BRAIN is a mythical object: paradoxically, our image of supreme intelligence is that of a perfected mechanism; when man is too powerful, we isolate him from psychology and install him in a world of robots (science fiction shows that there is always something reified about supermen). Einstein too: he is ordinarily expressed by his brain, an anthological organ, a true museum-piece. Perhaps because of his mathematical specialization, the superman Einstein is divested of any magical character; he has no diffuse potency, no mystery save the mechanical: he is a superior organ, prodigious but real, even physiological. In terms of myth, Einstein is matter, his power does not spontaneously produce spirituality, but requires the assistance of an independent morality, the remedy of the savant's "conscience" (science without conscience, the saying goes )

Einstein himself contributed something to the legend by bequeathing his brain, which two hospitals fought over as though it were some unheard-of machine that could at last be dismantled. One photograph shows him lying down, his head bristling with electric wires: his brain waves are being registered while he is asked to "think about relativity". (But as a matter of fact, what does "think about" mean?) We are doubtless meant to assume that the seismograms will be all the more violent since "relativity" is a difficult subject. Thought itself is thus represented as an energetic substance, the measurable product of a complex (virtually electric) apparatus which transforms the cerebral matter into power. The mythology of Einstein makes him so un-magical a genius that we speak of his thought as of some functional

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labor, analogous to the mechanical manufacture of sausages, the milling of grain or the smelting of ore: Einstein produced thought, continuously, as the mill produces flour, and death, for him, was above all the cessation of a localized function: "the world's most powerful brain has stopped thinking."

What this mechanism of genius was supposed to produce was equations. With the help of the Einstein mythology, the world delightedly recovered the image of a formulated knowledge. Paradoxically, the more the man's genius was materialized in the nature of his brain, the closer the product of its invention approached a magical condition, reincarnated the old esoteric image of a scientia compassed in a few letters. There is a secret that explains the world, and this secret is contained in a formula, the universe is a safe whose combination humanity is searching for: Einstein almost found it-that is the myth of Einstein; in it we rediscover all the Gnostic themes: the unity of nature, the ideal possibility of a fundamental reduction of the world, the open-sesame of a formula, the ancestral conflict between a secret and a magic word, the notion that total knowledge can be had only at a single stroke, like a lock that suddenly yields after a thousand fruitless fumblings. The historic equation E me", by its unexpected simplicity, virtually realized the pure idea of the key-naked, linear, made of a single metal, opening with magical ease a door with which Humanity had struggled for centuries. The iconography shows this clearly: in photographs, Einstein stands beside a blackboard covered with mathematical symbols of an evident complexity; but in drawings (that is, in legend), the chalk still in his hand, he has just written on an empty slate, as though without any preparation whatever, the world's magic formula. Thus mythology respects the nature of various tasks: research proper mobilizes mechanical means and its seat is a material organ monstrous only in its cybernetic complication; discovery, on the contrary, is of a magical essence, is simple as a primordial, principial body, the Philosopher's Stone of the Hermetics, Berkeley's tarwater, Schelling's oxygen.

But since the world continues, since research still proliferates and since, too, God's share must be secured, Einstein must suffer a certain failure: Einstein died, we are told, without having been able to verify "the equationfor the secret ofthe universe." In other words, the world resisted him; no sooner broached than the secret closed up again, the cipher was incomplete. Thus Einstein fully satisfies the myth, which brooks any contradiction provided it establishes its euphoriac security: both mage and machine, eternal seeker and unfulfilled finder, releasing the best and the worst upon us, brain and conscience, Einstein satisfies the most contradictory dreams, mythically reconciles man's infinite power over nature with the "fatality" of the sacred which he still cannot reject.

Eugene lonesco

Issac Babel

Frederich Holderlln

Anton Chekhov

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Leonid Martynov

Evgeny Evtushenko

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Peter Viereck

Robert Sward

Lewis Turco

Richard Howard

Elmer Gertz

Bridget Riley

Ronald Johnson

on Death Penalty Literature, Underground American Cinema, A. R. Ammons, New African Literature and Drama, Op & Pop, Wind and Water Sculpture, French-African Poetry, Zen, Communism, Modern Music, and how the evolution ofpiano construction has influenced for the worst a new generation of concert pianists, and others.

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Perception and Metaphor in the "New Novel"

Notes on Robbe-Grillet, Claude Simon and Butor

JOHN K. SIMON

DEFINING

THE AIM of modern art, Baudelaire wrote, "It's to create a suggestive magic which contains simultaneously object and subject, the world external to the artist and the artist himself." In the development of French fiction, the radical split which this statement presupposes is first identified in Flaubert. Over a hundred years have passed since then, and the effort of the "new novelists" seems still to be directed toward the same synthesis. Proponents of the most intellectual creative genre in a country renowned for its ability to theorize and its willingness to carry experimentation to its logical epitome, these writers are only the most dramatic representatives of a larger trend. In fact, Baudelaire's expression could be extended from the realm of art to include, not just the neighboring domain of criticism, but research typical of the contemporary social and natural sciences as well. A new magic of measurement and description is required in all areas to relate the observer to the thing observed.

Objects and Intentions

The use ofobjects and the search for structures are the elements which characterize the "new novel" and make of it a phenomenon of some coherence. In the fiction of today, point of view and act can no longer be held in isolation, and thus traditional elements ofcharacter and plot fade out and become, on the periphery, the incidental pretext of the narrative. "Things" in the new novel are located at the meeting of human perception and the material world, and this obsessional point is, first of all, a substitute for the suspense of traditional action to hold the reader's attention. The magic of the phenomenon itself, it resembles the agreeable functioning of abstract events in a newspaper, a programmed computer, or the various fascinations which occur neither wholly in our mind nor in the world at large, but rather on the

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tangent of each, in the conjoining forms and structures of experience.

The portrayal of objects can never be objective, however. Since no observation and no experiment can be even remotely innocent, the author's particular context, the method of presentation, reveals an attitude which one is constantly led to discover. Indeed, with all specifics removed, the new novel concentrates almost exclusively upon the existential nature of perception. The reader, identifying with no individually conceived character necessarily but with the general philosophical premises of the author, adopts a certain view of the relationship between the psyche and the outside world. It is in this sense that we may speak of a didactic purpose on the part of the novelist. Having focussed his attention on this problem alone, he is imparting, deliberately or without design, one of several attitudes of synthesis.

Certain objects lend themselves well to the role of mediation-photographs, movies, and paintings; lower forms of animate life, particularly insects; the written word-containing an ambiguous mixture of the concrete and animate. However objective their existence, by recurrence and analogy they form metaphorical patterns. Exemplary of the very nature of perception and illusion, they provide a continuous testing device. Comparative study of these modern topoi may help, on the one hand, to differentiate the various "new novelists" significantly from one another, and also perhaps, to suggest a means of esthetic evaluation, essentials which have been almost completely neglected in the abundant critical commentary that the movement has inspired.'

Painting and the cinema are the two arts which the "new novel" and contemporary fiction in general most evoke. Each of course faces in its own way the same challenge to fuse subject and object, but it is hard to resist the temptation to make theoretical comparisons and draw bold conclusions. If one's first thought is respectively of abstract painting and the documentary, justifying this orientation with the explanation that these are the appropriate fundamentals, historically or generically speaking, then the corresponding division between subjectivity and objectivity will appear attractive. One could, however, conjecturing from the perspective of literature, think of the two visual arts in terms of the actual medium of communication, the means of apprehension. In this context, for the painter, corresponding to words, the synthetic intermediary par excellence, there are pigments; the object and its texture are there, available to our touch. For the movies, however, the substance is neither on the screen nor the celluloid; whether the play of light and shadow, the prism, or the lens itself, there is a phantom-like quality and the sense of abstraction.

In any case, the spectrum of attitudes toward perception extends from absolute solipsism, with its suggestion of all outside reality consumed by the mind, to a total belief in materiality, characterized by collapse before the plenitude of externals. The aim would seem to be to tread an uneasy balance between the two extremes. Along the spectrum, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Michel Butor, and Claude Simon present interesting variations.s To anticipate, it might be mentioned that Robbe-Grillet, a former statistician, recently has turned to the movies, as he seemed inclined to do for some time; that Simon, provincial and close to Faulkner, was originally a painter; and that Butor, who is scornful of the tendency toward the cinematographic medium and is generally the most devoted to letters in the pure classical tradition

of Gide, has a typical literary formation.

I have not anticipated by much. The titles of the novels I propose to study in detail prepare for a similar differentiation. La Jalousie, L'Herbe, and La Modification date from the period, 1957-58, which may well emerge as the high point of a brief movement. The general perspective of each may be reduced to a particular visual situation, consonant with the title, which represents the special viewpoint of the author. Thus the double meaning ofjalousie directs our attention to the screenarchitectural accessory or charged emotion-through which objects are viewed; we are thus fixedly situated in the eye of the beholder. The most important vantage point in Simon's novel is, precisely, on the grass outside an old country home, and our gaze is constantly diverted to the process of growth and decay in the phenomena outside. Modification, lost in the purely psychological meaning of the English title, "A Change of Heart," expresses the intermediary realm which might include both mood and mode, change of mind and change of structure. It is suggestively represented by the actual situation of Butor's hero. The window of his train compartment allows his and our attention to be drawn simultaneously to the passing countryside and the reflection on the pane.

While thus there is some basis for a schematic contrast of emphasis, the general impressionism of this introductory statement gives rise to two questions: In a given work or in a selected descriptive passage, how may it be determined whether the subjective or objective intention is being stressed? And-in a sense, to question the value of the statement of Baudelaire quoted at the outset, not to mention the validity of our entire preoccupation-if some intention can be determined, does an analysis of this kind serve any function, evaluative or otherwise?

Subjective Illusion

La Jalousie' has a meagre story line which one feels obliged-apparently against the author's intention-to put together cautiously from beneath the layers of unchronological free association, the fantastic obsessions of its narrator. We are in a hot climate similar to that of Africa, in a house with a large terrace situated on a banana plantation, several hours distance from a port city. There are three principals: the owner or manager of the plantation, in whose consciousness we find ourselves from beginning to end; his long- and dark-haired wife A ; and Franck, a more recently arrived neighbor, whose wife and child are sometimes indisposed and do not accompany him on his frequent visits.

In the apparently monotonous round of customary events-seasonal for the cultivation of the banana-trees, solar for the regulation of light inside and outside the house, domestic for the serving of meals and cocktails-Franck mentions that he is planning to spend a day in the city to consider buying a new truck and suggests that A accompany him. Although they plan to be back that night, Franck explains when they arrive the next day that their delay is due to mechanical trouble in his car. At a certain moment in the dining-room in the course of a meal it appears that Franck has gotten up and crushed a centipede which A... has noticed crawling on the wall.

There are many other details which we could ply from the mass of variations

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and distortions that are described, calling them part of the given "realities" of the novel, but they would lead us too far. The primary intent of the author is to draw us into the uncertain labyrinths of a jealous mind and to draw after us, as it were, even the core of banal incidents above.

The novel contains an abundance of examples of the diverse ways of perceiving events and objects. By analogies with the process of perception we are not referring to the primary level of distortions with which the jealous man interprets the nucleus of his story. The different indications of strange behavior which he attributes to A ." and Franck and which we did not include in our summary begin by leading one to distrust the narrator's account. The reader uncomfortably seeks to disengage the "real" elements, but is this what the narrator, even paradoxically, intends?

Rather, through the positive and negative effect of his SUbjectivity, he attributes "a disproportionate energy and zest" to the most banal gestures and, by depersonalizing the movements of the others in a Sartrean sense, seems to establish the basic impossibility of ascertaining the most ordinary meanings. Thus, he is unable to determine if his wife has eaten or not; whether a servant has momentarily disappeared or never appeared; whether A is breathing heavily or not; whether various smiles and gestures are meaningful or imaginary. I pass over the pseudoincidents which are replayed more frequently, such as the letter which A may or may not have transmitted to Franck, the intimacy they mayor may not have had when she leaned through his car window, when they walked out into the dark together, or, of course, when they were delayed while absent during the night. The narrator doesn't hide the key word:

A is humming a dance tune whose words remain unintelligible. But perhaps Franck understands them, if he already knows them, from having heard them often, perhaps with her. Perhaps it is one of her favorite records. (p. 16, my italics)

We are sure that a SUbjectivity is at work, but the lack (and always possible absence) of an unfiltered event or object prevents us from knowing in which direction: whether, as it seems occasionally, the narrator is naively attempting to blind himself to evidence of his cuckoldry or supplying this evidence himself.

The servants walk like puppets under the subjective gaze, and Franck's second arm and both of A .'s, extended on the parallel arms of the terrace chairs, are amusingly dehumanized into a three-armed monster. But the process of mechanization is most significant applied to A. From the same flat perspective, she is zombie-like; her detached hands and fingers mechanically undulate through her hair like an insect, she moves her head mechanically, never blinks and is always facing us.

However, she is given other characteristics which, fitting in neatly from a psychological point of view with our suppositions regarding the narrator, make her an ambiguous figure. Thus her voice is "clear, moderate," and she makes herself understood without difficulty by the servants. Taking all the decisions with regard to the upkeep of the house, she cuts up her fowl at the table with the precision of a surgeon and even walks with assurance ("with her decisive gait"). In brief, two sentences serve to make A the epitome of the narrator's obsessions: 1561 TRI-QUARTERLY

Wherever she is, she keeps quite comfortable [conserve la meme aisance].

But A from her manner of sitting on the chair, looks as natural as ever, though without the slightest slackness. (pp. 2, 50, my italics)

Although objectified, A continues to show an innocent affirmation, entertaining a meaningful deliberation in her appearance and gestures. This too, of course, may be a creation of the narrator's consciousness. Nevertheless, it is the possibility of such lack of uncertainty on her part which he seeks to destroy by imposing the primacy of subjectivity. He wishes to undermine the existence of objects identified with Nature; the expression, "as is natural," seems scornful, as if unsubjectified things could exist.

And they don't. Rather than simply being there as Robbe-Grillet theorizes, things are constantly mixed with an active consciousness anxious to justify its immense subjectivity. It accomplishes this justification, first by making things transform themselves, disintegrate or merely disappear, and, in addition, by making them mirror the processes by which this mystification takes place. The subjectification finally touches on the form of the novel itself.

Of course, on the strictly narrative level, optical illusions are the accessory of the theme ofjealousy before they come to represent a more universal phenomenon. Thus, like the diverting cycles of banana-harvesting and replacing the rotted-out wooden supports for the bridge, the more abstract periods of time and light playa large role in the prevalence of uncertainty and unreality. For example, was there a noise?

As it fades in time, its likelihood diminishes. Now it is as if there had been nothing at all. (p. 116)

The play of light and shadow-that of the sun, a butterfly, or the lamps insideproduces uncertainty about episodic problems: Was it a smile? Is he facing us or the other way? But the incentive to make a flat inventory without regard to differences in plane is traced to this kind of optics:

Thus the office is plunged into a dimness which makes it difficult to judge distances. Lines are just as distinct, but the succession of planes gives no impression of depth (p. 49)

Things are not necessarily viewed merely through the limited cadre of the jalousie. The pun extends to take in the artifice and obstacles of spying, and finally the perspective of light and shadow involved in sight. A pane of glass interposed in front of things makes vision an active experiment in optical illusion. The defects in the glass which incidentally jumble the gestures and relative positions of Franck and A near the car, become the pretext for a game, analogous, like other phenomena described within the book, to the art of writing. When these defects "give a few shifting nuances to the too uniform surfaces," we think of the narrator's avowed aversion to the naturel. In a virtuoso performance, too long to quote, the glass disintegrates a small truck, cutting it apart, toying with the size and form of its separate parts at will. Just as the narrator succeeds in erasing his most potent obsession, the crushed centipede on the wall so that, with the lack of chronology,

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it may be impossible to tell whether the centipede exists or not, the pane seems to have the power of creation or elimination:

In the left window-leaf the reflection is brighter, though deeper in hue. But it is distorted by flaws in the glass, the circular or crescent-shaped spots of verdure, the same colors as the banana trees, occurring [se promenant] in the middle of the courtyard in front of the sheds.

It is easy to make this spot [oil in the courtyard] disappear, thanks to the flaws in the rough glass of the window: the blackened surface has merely to be brought into proximity with one of the flaws of the window-pane, by successive experiments.

The spot begins by growing larger, then suddenly everything disappears. (pp. 36, 85)

Significantly, this last passage is immediately followed by a repeat of the crushing of the centipede, grotesquely humanized, and the intricate effort to erase its mark on the wall.

The objects described in the novel seem always ready to offer an analogy with the pattern of SUbjectivity controlling the narrative and to exemplify a moral: their dependence upon this subjectivity. Thus, the balustrade offers a Rorschach test of painted and chipped surfaces, "complicated figures with angular, almost serrated outlines." A "discreetly" oiled swinging door or a double window ajar presenting three fragments or panels of the outside view signify-before they are actually present in themselves-a circular movement or dissolution. It is difficult, for example, to miss the moral of this short passage:

On the column itself there is nothing to see except the peeling paint [like the balustrade above] and, occasionally, at unforeseeable intervals and at various levels, a grayish-pink lizard whose intermittent presence results from shifts of position so sudden that no one could say where it comes from or where it is going when it is no longer visible. (p. 125)

Perhaps the epitome in the abstraction of similar real objects occurs in the elaboration of insect movements around a lamp. The size, distance, speed, and variety of the bugs are deliberately and assiduously nullified by a parody of abstract scientific jargon which would normally endeavor to establish their existence and which instead proposes an impressionistic solution:

Besides, whether it is a question of amplitude, shape, or the more or less eccentric situation, the variations are probably incessant within the swarm. To follow them it would be necessary to differentiate individuals. Since this is impossible, a certain general unity is established within which the local crises, arrivals, departures and permutations no longer enter into account. (p. 101)

In fact "a certain general unity" [permanence d'ensemble] presents itself as a romantic image in the form ofwater, recalling the theme ofthe canals in Les Gommes, then externalized, a sort of quiet flood. The man crouched on the bridge near the plantation house looking in the water is linked with the man in the calendar on the bedroom wall, and the tile of the floor in the house continually leads us back to the

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illusion of a continuous undulation of waves. What the man is studying in the water demonstrates the way objects are deprived of all substance, floating in a sea of unconscious: "some sort of flotsam whose vague mass is floating half raised by the tide, seems to be an old piece ofclothing or an empty sack." The lack of contours in the outside world is expressed in the oilcloth on the table:

Around the hand radiate the creases, looser and looser as they move out from the center, but also wider and wider, finally becoming a uniform white surface (p. 76)

Like the image of the insects forming a flat impressionistic permanence d'ensemble as they take part in an optical illusion around the lamp, the noises of animals in the night and the singing of the second chauffeur attain the immaterial existence of something registered upon the mind. Indeed, one description of the recurrent sounds of the animals, differing only in gravity and sequence, recalls the psychological and physical trajectory of the narrator himself:

Still, all these cries are alike; not that their common characteristic is easy to decide, but rather their common lack of characteristics: they do not seem to be cries of fright, or pain, or intimidation, or even love. They sound like mechanical cries, uttered without perceptible motive, expressing nothing, indicating only the existence, the position, and the respective movements of each animal, whose trajectory through the night they punctuate. (p. 17)

We recognize the reflection of a passive, receptive consciousness, directed by a vague emotion of jealousy, which might be simply a desire to see, able to record merely the subjective impressions which originate in its own mind as it travels through the illusions of time and space.

The natives of this tropical climate, in a similar way, speak and sing as if words, intonation, rhythm, and form-in short, everything communicable, or external in that sense-were non-existent. A puzzled Occidental like the narrator conjectures, "It is as if man were content to utter unconnected fragments as an accompaniment to his work." Once more, these excerpts from a description of the chant suggest the inner autonomy of the consciousness creating, transforming, and erasing a reality all its own:

Because of the peculiar nature of this kind of melody, it is difficult to determine if the song is interrupted for some fortuitous reason-in relation, for instance, to the manual work the singer is performing at the same timeor whether the tune has come to its natural conclusion.

Similarly, when it begins again, it is just as sudden, as abrupt, starting on notes which hardly seem to constitute a beginning, or a reprise

It is doubtless the same poem continuing. If the themes sometimes blur, they only recur somewhat later, all the more clearly, virtually identical. Yet these repetitions, these tiny variations, halts, regressions, can give rise to modifications-though barely perceptible-eventually moving quite far from the point of departure. (p. 66)

Finally, distrust is registered with regard to words. The singsong of the native's speech makes his tone the same, no matter what he says, and an incomprehensible

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comic exchange takes place between two natives resembling the esoteric chant which he mentioned before. The servant has only one term to designate any of the different emotions which he is thinking of. Obviously, on one level, we are to recall the ambiguous exchanges between Franck and A but a parallel exists with all the illusions of sight and sound in the outer world. The indigenous chant which a voice sings has incomprehensible words or is without words altogether. Perhaps even the signs for outer reality do not exist.

This comment might extend to the novel which Franck and A are reading. In a way familiar to modern fiction, the book appears to resemble certain aspects of La Jalousie so that Franck and A discuss it, "speaking of the scenes, events, and characters as if they were real things." Their way of proliferating the variations and ambiguity of events neatly parallels that of the narrator with real events. Franck's return to the "facts"-"It's no use making up contrary possibilities, since things are the way they are: reality stays the same"-is evidently to be taken with things are the way they are: reality stays the same"-is obviously to be taken with heavy irony. In another novel, Franck's statement might be the incontrovertible moral. However, Franck's and A 's conversation about the book might be a distortion on the part of the narrator, too. Furthermore, the thought comes to the reader that the entire novel he is reading may be a construction recreated by the narrator from Franck's and A .'s conversations that he overhears about the book he has not read.

Without knowing whether one book is a mirror distorting the other, or, if so, which one, we may easily see that the book within the consciousness of the narrator, becoming an object, suffers the same fate as the other objects, that of decomposition. The transition in the conversation between the malaria of Franck's wife and the novel containing a similar character is assured by Franck's repeated comment, "It's all mental, things like that."

Furthermore, without any explanation, in a long paragraph at the end of the novel, we read:

The main character of the book is a customs official. The character is not an official but a high-ranking employee of an old commercial company. This company's business is going badly, rapidly turning shady. This company's business is going extremely well. [etc.] (p. 148)

This may be the product of the two different readings of the novel or an amusing resume of the innumerable discussions he has overheard. His compilation may also be dependent upon his frequent distraction. He loses much of A 's and Franck's conversation while deciding whether a sentence one of them said ends by 'savoir attendre,' ou 'i quoi s'attendre,' ou 'la voir se rendre,' 'Ii dans sa chambre,' 'Ie noir y chante,' ou n'importe quoi." The deliberate contradictions recall of course the diverse modifications in setting during the course of the novel, but more particularly a sequence of sentences in a paragraph neatly refuting each incident in an immediately preceding scene earlier in the book.

In thinking of the opposition between the uncertainty of all the objects described, and the precision of point-of-view for the consciousness encompassing the objects, we may perhaps be forgiven for quoting one sentence for its symbolic import:

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It is possible to protect over long periods of time only structures built far off the ground [constructions aeriennes bien isolees du sol], as in the case of the house, for instance. (p. 68)

Never leaving the house, our narrator, spying about it and studying it like an impressionistic painter, becomes strangely identified with it, isolated, hanging in space. Thus another possible genesis for the narration of La Jalousie occurs in considering the passages beginning, "Now the house is empty ," when A and Franck are absent. It would be appropriate that the entire construction emerged from this experience: subjectivity in the void.

By way of support, an unusually abstract expression occurs during one of these long passages in reference to the bedroom where the narrator has carried out numerous experiments with light as well as more personal rummaging. He has already noticed the cubic dimensions of the room. With the sudden extinction of the light and the new absence of sound, we find this sentence with its unusual metaphor and philosophical implication:

The chain which was gradually playing out has suddenly been broken or unhooked, abandoning the cubical cage to its own fate: falling free [la chute libre]. (p. 118)

The containment of the reader within a consciousness becomes clear. Without any sound or light effect to record, it is not the mind which is a void, but the outside which had otherwise been attached, hanging only by means of phenomena registered by the human witness. Another expression on that same page, "cette nuit sans contours," seems to confirm the sentiment that this is a world implicity conforming to Berkeleian theory.

In La Jalousie, the reader is constantly reminded where there is a consciousness recording the story, but never directly named, even by a single pronoun. With some affectation, the fourth or third place at the table is never mentioned; the third glass never specifically filled, held or drunk; the fourth or third chair on the terrace never occupied. The technique is particularly diverting as a game because of the elaborate arrangement of these and all the other objects in the novel. The paucity of actions attributed to the narrator, a structurally and psychologically essential element in the significance of the work, helps to avoid making him a visible agent. Whenever he does something or asks a question, an agentless, passive verb permits us to pass safely over the lapsus.

Also, the narrator, though creating an eternal present tense by means of his familiar, simultaneous confusion of time sequences, never really participates in the active present tense. This is the most comic aspect of his role as jealous cuckold. Unlike the husband in the novel Franck and A are reading, he never "comes home" at the right moment. Distracted by a look from A or his fascination with various optical illusions, he observes only on the brink of suspicion or in its aftermath. He, therefore, must judge if A .'s immobility is recent. (Has she smiled? Can she have just put her head through the window of Franck's car?) The convolutions of his obsessed mind keep him always a little late, guessing on the edge of the present, which is here an unreal void.

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The narrator might as well be considered simply an unnamed character easily identifiable. A coy preciosite keeps the husband nominally outside of the sentence structure and merely suggests that his hand and sleeve are seen at the edge of a picture of A Yet he is in fact present in an obsessive manner, and not just indirectly. Robbe-Grillet resorts to the use of the term "observer," invokes "memory" in general and speaks of the unpersonalized vision which must accustom itself to the dark. These concessions to the author's je-neant formula are followed by a particularly significant passage:

-This brightly illuminated profile still clings to the retina. In the darkness where no object can be seen [rien ne surnage des objects], even those closest, the luminous spot shifts at will, without its intensity fading, keeping the outline of the forehead, the nose, the chin, the mouth (p. 95)

The presence of a particular eye recording specific, emotionally oriented impressions becomes affirmed. In a sense, one thinks of the truquage needed in filming a scene of pitch dark to make out the details of what is taking place by subtle reflections. However, the difference is Robbe-Grillet's humanizing use of the "lens" as an instrument of memory and of fantasy (with the same motivation as a long movie fadeout).

If various spots or stains constitute the basic controlling image-the crushed insect on the wall, the oil in the courtyard-where do the sources of the pseudonarrator's preoccupations, his extraordinarily complex visions and meditations, his jealousy, begin? Having established the interesting phenomenon of the retina, the author continues:

The spot is on the wall of the house, on the flagstones, against the empty sky. It is everywhere in the valley, from the garden to the stream and up the opposite slope. It is in the office too, in the bedroom, in the dining room, in the living room, in the courtyard, on the road up to the highway. (p. 95)

The stains which seemed to have such a recurrent materiality are deliberately vaporized, becoming optical superimpositions, for Robbe-Grillet is too methodical a craftsman not to have wished to associate the "spot" of this visual phenomenon with the thematic "spots," diversely transformed in the course of the book. There is no other reason for having this seemingly disembodied eye project its transparent reflected image on all those elements of the decor which have been so assiduously studied at all moments of the day. This scene, by a curious reversal as in a negative transparency, reveals that the real void is outside, that the consciousness of our unnamed protagonist, paradoxically, may be the sole location of what is described. From the very first mention of the crushed insect-"a blackish spot marks the place where a centipede was squashed last week, at the beginning of the month, perhaps the month before, or later"-it is obvious that the text gives this spot, in the shape of a question mark, the same uncertain existence in time as the above image of A .'s head in space. At a moment when A appears to be looking for the mark on the wall, a presumed chronological order is reversed, jumbling the erased spot ("scarcely visible because of the oblique light") with its total absence ("The immaculate paint offers not the slightest object to her gaze"). One must

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conjecture about the very existence of the centipede. Perhaps, it is A and not even the narrator, who imagines the insect first. Franck too is eliminated from the scene with facility, and the various attributes of the centipede, including its magnified noises, are transferred to the crab that is being eaten. Finally, there is the spread of description from a Rorschach-type ("like brown ink impregnating the surface layer of the paint") to the pathological crescendo, to nothing.

Significantly, the reader feels urged to make up a plot conforming to these psychic perceptions, filling in the "blank" picture of the husband. Plenitude is not in the world of the novel, or, for that matter in the universe itself, according to RobbeGrillet; it is in the mind, which exists, for the protagonist, author and reader outside of the objects and words on the pages. This impression has been compounded in the author's recent film which bears many resemblances to La Jalousie,' L'Annee derniere a Marienbad. There, also, the viewer is teased with the deliberately vain hope of reality-once again, the realm of subjectivity (this time that of several characters) with trompe-l'oeil objective correlatives. In an interview about his second film L'Immortelle-the first entirely under his supervision-Robbe-Grillet was moved to declare, aphoristically, "Une image montre. Une description detruit."

In an early article on Robbe-Grillot," Roland Barthes plays upon the meaning of objectif, an adjective, but also a noun: lens, according to Littre, "object-glass, the glass of a spy-glass meant to be turned toward the object one wants to see." By having a shutter and using it, the creator of films is obliged to choose a specific point from which he is viewing, and he must limit his material to the light that passes through his shutter-thus to the visual-even when the subject matter is fantasy. In order to avoid misunderstanding, it is necessary to compare this limitation, not with the mercurial material of literature, but with different limitations of the fine arts and their lack of point of view in this sense. In outlining his field as that which is visual, experienced through a particular emotional shutter, RobbeGrillet approaches the cinematographic, just as the presence of an alien, conceptual frame of reference inside the subjective "eye" of the camera makes a film literary.

As in the Gidian recit, the first-person manner upstages the objects described, and the solipsism which is formed continuously diverts the .reader outside of the novel where the real focus lies. The voice is that of an inner situation, the details of which the reader is teased into seeking to fill in. As a framework for that situation he is given no concrete reality but only its subjective reflection. But, in RobbeGrillet, this is meant to satisfy our sensibility. The author seems not to undercut or deplore the distorting screen but rather finds it esthetically adequate. "To want to reconstruct the chronology of La Jalousie is impossible, impossible because I wanted it so, I write on the level of things [au ras des choses]; I must be read on the level of words [au ras des mots]." We are meant to accept the narrative as pure subject without the kind of objectification furnished by Gide's irony. In a way, the avoidance of a first-person pronoun represents an ingenious attempt to prevent us from recognizing the narrator in such a way that we take our distance from him and treat him with irony.

Superficially La Jalousie may recall the most famous shorter work of an author

who is frequently invoked with reference to Robbe-Grillet. However, the case of Gregor Samsa in The Metamorphosis presents a significant difference with the "hallucinations" of Robbe-Grillet's invisible hero. The specific obsession is carefully enclosed in an impeccable reality where it is ambiguously "at home," and in parallel fashion, the story is narrated with an indirect, only equivocal identification with Gregor.

It is essential to compare the elaboration of Robbe-Grillet's images-insects, viscosity, stains-with the objects of fascination common to earlier writers: Dostoevsky, Kafka, Faulkner, Malraux, Sartre. There, images of dehumanization constitute apocalyptical incursions into a calm human pattern. However, in RobbeGrillet they do not appear as a depersonalizing force in a larger struggle but are exhaustively described as obsessions. Their limited, emotional role, one of exorcism, is an end in itself.

On the other hand, Malraux, in a famous prefaces introducing Faulkner and Sanctuary to an appreciative French public, dwelt upon the precise nature of fascination. The aim of imaginative exorcism is creation and not release. For the obsessed artist, there is an external presence inextricably bound to the personal correlative. Malraux' lesson is in recalling, if we may paraphrase, that the horror must exist apart from the consciousness capable of conceiving it.

The Collapse of Consciousness

Claude Simon's L'Herbe relates the degeneration of a family in southwestern France. In the late nineteenth century an immigrant, illiterate peasant succeeded in cultivating the land and sought to have his one son become a professor of letters. Through the selfless efforts of two spinster sisters, Pierre fulfilled his father's hopes and, toward the beginning of the First World War, married Sabine, a helpless kind of debutante. They become grotesque figures of outlandish proportions-he, fabulously obese and ineffectual, she, a despotic, excessively made-up shrew, with a paranoiac fear of death and marital jealousy. Their son Georges, in turn, revolting against the pursuit of an intellectual career, tried unsuccessfully to return to the land; a physically pitiful figure, he then turned to gambling. He has been married to Louise, a girl of ordinary origin; she deceives him with an engineer with whom she considers eloping.

With Louise, the stranger in this household, the reader attends the dying of the last of Pierre's sisters, Marie, who, at 84, has embodied a puritanical stoicism which owes a great deal to the Faulknesian primitive woman. During the ten days Marie is taking to die, lying inert in the large house, Louise's (and our) point of view is a nearby field where she meets in the evening with her lover. She is fascinated by Marie and by what Marie represents, which comes close to being an impersonal vision of the earth itself. By the end, Louise denies her own interests, her independent consciousness as it were, and, refusing to run away, gives in to her fascination with the scene.

The image of the large house observed by Louise is at first familiar: the empty anonymous setting apparently expecting the entrance of 1641 TRI-QUARTERLY

actors who never come and who even when they do come or linger or remain in our field of vision, far from resolving the mystery, darken it still further, for since it is impossible from the fact of their distance, to discover all of their behavior, or rather to remedy their absence of behavior by the commentary of their voices, or even, generally, to see their lips move, they seem frozen in an immobility both enigmatic and disturbing (p. 90)

There is a definite resemblance with the ominous plantation house, spied upon by a narrator who is also unable to determine clear movement or meaning. But the difference is essential. Whereas, in Robbe-Griller's novel, through their deliberate enclosure in a distorted mind, things bathe in the uncertainty of subjectivity itself, in Claude Simon, all uncertainty is dependent upon human limitations. In the preceding passage, we should underscorefrom thefact oftheir distance. Rather than a formulation of optical illusion, we are here dealing with the authenticity of optics. In a phrase immediately preceding the above text, we learn that the landscape illustrates "that huge disparity between our actions and the immensity at the heart of which they are immersed." The obsessive presence of "Ia folIe vegetation envahissante" of the title is not humanized as a projection:

the heavy, dense September night penetrating the room with its heavy, violent perfume of rotting fruit, creeping like a thick layer of viscous black paint, covering the earth, the trees, the plants encrusted within it in filigree, like those vegetable fossils in the obscure depths of layers of carbon, the buried forests (p. 132)

Like Sartre's root in La Nausee, there is a constant excess of independent reality in the outside world, making itself felt in a spectacle of disintegration, liquefaction, and vibration.

It is no kind of expansion of the senses to fit the universe which fascinates Louise and makes her sublimate the act of love at the end of the novel, "experiencing that sensation of the swimmer who rises to the surface." Rather, as she feels the imprint of the grass blades in the meadow and inhales "the powerful and harsh smell of grass and earth mixed," a total indifference characterizes the earth. Scenes which recall Robbe-Grillet's technique-following the horizontal displacement of objects as Louise turns away from her husband; forsaking perspective to equate the size of the chambermaid near the house and a close-by insect perched on a blade of grass in the field-do not point to the ambiguous urgency of our point of view, but to the tenacious independence of all that we experience.

This moral becomes most apparent in an animal leit-motif occurring whenever Louise takes up her post in the adjoining field. The cat, whose dyamic immobility recalls images of Faulkner, and the perpetual round of insects are analogies similar to those that we found above in Robbe-Grillet, but their net effect is entirely contrary:

the insects still circling, mingling the unforeseeable pattern of their flight, the unforeseeable skein with unforeseeable and sudden changes of direction, a three-dimensional divagation, as if they were compelled to fly without a purpose, without respite, around an invisible epicenter, continuing heedless and, even after it had disappeared, silhouetted later, gray and impalpable,

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against the sky going from green to rust above the blacker and blacker bushes, heedless of anything except circling in an increasingly vaguer cloud, as if some torment were forcing them to circle where they were, but that wasn't it, she thought, any more than any intention makes that hand [that of Marie, dying] move back and forth over the sheet, as if the limbs were taking their revenge, their independence (p. 20)

The same natural phenomenon here is not centered in the effects of light on the observing eye, producing an impressionistic permanence d'ensemble, as above in Robbe-Grillet, Instead, the inhuman detachment is stressed by the repetition of unforeseeable, heedless [s'en fichant pas mal], the denial of any autonomy in the movement, cutting it off from the realm of thought. Hostility, rather than complicity, is the mark, too, of the cat whose magic appearances might otherwise be compared with the lizard in La Jalousie. Instead ofconfirming the fleeting reality of a subjective pattern, the cat interposes a different kind of mirror before Louise: the electrifying look of otherness, the cruel, blank, objectifying face of matter.

A suggestive device which Simon uses to establish the absolute independence of matter is his habitual allusion to the photographic and cinematographic image. While the camera may be subjective as the medium of an art form, it is objective as the mechanical instrument for a number of scientific discoveries. Its use as an analogy in Simon-tending to objectify by adding an inhuman dimension, a monstrous third eye-clearly distinguishes him from Robbe-Grillet.

Whereas, in the latter, the psychological discoveries of the moving or still camera are incorporated in the writing to reinforce subjectivity-a photograph, for example, being indistinguishable from a "live" view-the identical phenomena in Simon's novels serve as metaphors for the objectification of appearances. Nature itself frequently calls for comparison with the pictorial substance: summer is "that thick and opaque material, like the drippings of a paintbrush too thickly filled," or the thick wild grass silhouetted like brushstrokes of Chinese ink against the fading sky, and on one of them (also drawn or rather condensed by one of those subtle oriental brushes) an insect about the size of a pinhead, complex and bristling (like those ink spots crushed on a page folded in two) (pp. 209-2 I 0)

Not a Rorschach test, this description is complete in itself without reaching out into the human consciousness to find an arbitrary form.

On the other hand, it is to reduce the pretentions of consciousness that human figures and the subjective point of view are placed in the frame of the camera to show their basic inescapable materiality. No aspect of the sustained metaphor is neglected: the gelatinous texture of the film itself and its transparency to show the transitory nature of events; the flat white light of the flashbulb to take away the illusory fullness of shadow and reveal the disintegrating surface of flesh; the same effect suggested by the medical photos showing the body in a disinfected surroundings with the traditional black rectangle over the eyes; the syncopated rhythm of old movies recording official events and giving them a pathetic, mock-transcendental aspect. The obvious absurdities of an old movie-mute gesticulations, striated surface, sudden automated behavior-produces an insurmountable distance between

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subject and object which precludes communication and identification.

The metaphor of the old film is of course closely allied with theatrical artifices and outmoded expressions of emotion. Underlying the image is therefore a determining dislocation in the essential concept of time. Simon observes that we are unable to conceive ofcertain physical and quotidian attributes in bygone Hollywood cinema-natural hair, nakedness, all banalities: the objective universals. In their place, the artificialities and postures constitute the optical illusions of the past.

That the author of La Jalousie is haunted by such scenes is evident in the magnificent decor and exquisitely stylized posturing of L'Annee derniere a Marienbad. There we have a conscious utilization of all the elements of the old film to demand our participation in a world of total subjectivity, the very opposite of Simon's intent since nothing in Robbe-Grillet's scenario is banal, unsubjectified, or "natural." In L'Herbe, on the other hand, analogies of this kind serve only to bring us back to the brute existence of matter.

Within the actual plot structure of the novel, an antinomy between subjectivity and objectivity is neatly established between the figures of Marie and Sabine, and it is clearly denoted by means of the analogy with photography which we have just described. Thus, the puritanical indestructibility of Marie is seen against a backdrop of a disintegrating country as she travels across France, about to be overrun in World War I:

around her an entire country came apart, collapsed, fell into ruin in a welter of vociferations and screeching metal-which was like the converse of the cheers and the virile trumpets of glory-slipped like film over a reel, melting, leaving nothing but the transparent celluloid and little, indelible black figure sitting in the void (p. 182)

In counterpart, Marie's brother and sister-in-law, particularly the latter, never cease ot embody the very evanescence of the cinema. It is like a musical theme for Sabine,

indifferent to the green September countryside that fled past on each side of the road, as if the sky, the fields, and the trees didn't exist, were totally without reality, so that her own words and herself, with her make-up, her blood-red nails, her gaudy hair, seemed (as in a film whose sound track is badly synchronized with the movement of the images, the characters speaking either before or after their mouths, as if alongside their mouths, acting alongside their bodies) somehow to share in this same unreality (p. 84)

The central conceit in L'Herbe, as can easily be seen above, revolves around an attitude toward things, toward the substantiality of objects, toward some form of synchronization. Marie is constantly pictured in terms of inanimate things. Her yellow and fleshless hands are like ivory, like chicken claws; her fingers, little sticks of knotted dry wood with wrinkled bark. An image includes her association with homely objects:

the fragile mound of bones and dried flesh that barely raised the sheet, the whole body, now, like a tiny handful of straw, one of those faggots old women gather and (back in the house, untying their aprons) drop in front of the fireplace, so that they spread and scatter on the floor (p. 174)

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On the other hand, Sabine is characterized by artifice and ethereality. Her voice is unreal and mineral-like, her cold glance as well, epitomized in the vaporous image of her costly and obscene perfume vainly struggling against the heavy odor of grass and hay.

As an indication of their respective physical "presence," the skin of the two women is compared: Marie's, hard, firm, and tough; Sabine's, transparent, waxen, made with a fragile porcelain paste. While her sister-in-law is systematically associated with the arabesques of the eighteenth century, Marie calls forth images of primitive· myth, solid, eternal structures of ancient times. The concept of virginity exudes from the photograph of the affected group surrounding the newlyweds, Pierre and his "porcelaine de Saxe." However, a genuine archetypal, mysterious innocence is contained in Marie's body. In a similar way, Marie's primitive ritual of death is juxtaposed with an artificial, operatic version.

The dichotomy between objective and subjective views is perhaps most clear when applied to the theme to time. Time for the Catholic Sabine is coated with a personal symbolism of imagined infidelities which she weaves into the contours of a subjective monologue, while time is "voluminous" and unchanging for Marie in her atheistic stoicism. Eighteenth-century clocks, appropriately decorated with garlands and cherubs, seem always to attend Sabine. A symbol for this kind of time is placed in contrast near Marie: a rusted tin box with the feminine image of a modestly dressed, languorous girl lying in the meadow beside a poodle. Since the girl holds a similar box in her hand, a Quaker-Oats-box effect is directly in contrast with Marie's quiet concept of time, signifying instead "the idea of this endless repetition which escaped the senses, the sight, precipitating the mind into a kind of dizzying anguish." That anguish is foreign to Marie becomes explicit in the comparison of a picture of her with that of the tin box; seated in a chair, she wears a dark, high-collared dress, and beside her is

the dog short-haired and dark too, and its body with hard muscles too, so that she, the chair and the dog looked as if they were made of one and the same unalterable material, as if (perhaps it was the brownish tint of the photograph and their motionlessness which gave this impression) they had been melted down and cast together in something like bronze (p. 189)

Other images help to express the inalterable spatial view of time: the "T" formed by the light entering through the shutters left ajar in Marie's room "like the initial ofthe word Time, an impalpable and stubborn letter trailing in the moribund odor ,"

[creeping] across the room, patient, reptilian and immaterial, collapsing, reconstituting itself as it passed from one piece of furniture to the next, finally dying in the evening, or rather simply disappearing without ceasing to exist, back again the next morning, implacable, a kind of Mene, Mene, Tekel Upharsin traced by a hand of fire (pp. 92-93)

We recall the similar impressions on the retina of the narrator in La Jalousie, his play with light and sequence. There, time was the plaything of the human mind; here, it is a tangible element of fatality.

Similarly the dates on the cover of Marie's notebook present a figure of solidity:

like a kind of wall with its elements cemented or rather assembled, adjusted without the least crack, the least fissure or interstice, something that reminded her of those vestiges of ancient Pelasgian or Roman constructions which seem not to have resisted time but somehow to be time itself (p. 100)

The notebook, aside from the inventory of banal articles in her tin box, is the most eloquent indication of Marie's attitude toward things and furnishes another clear contrast with Sabine. In a sense, the quotations of insignificent events and meticulously thorough accounts constitute Simon's book within the book. Robbe-Griller's use of the African novel, one of a series of deliberate partes-a-faux that make up the novel, differs in nature and role from the objects which Marie entrusts to Louise which come to symbolize the fascinating authenticity of the dying old maid pulling the onlooker into a world where the self gives way.

As evidence ofthe supremacy ofthings over the ineffectual signs for them, concrete images abound within the novel to undercut the ephemeral vapor of words. Thus, Pierre's corpulence, which almost makes an invalid of him as he sits scribbling in the kiosque adjoining the house, is described as a separate thing, existing apart, "that terrible and parasitical burden of dead meat, like a man forced to carry around forever the corpse of another man tied to his own body."

Spoken or written words are likewise divested of any metaphysical value by being pinned to a material though fleeting form: like smoke escaping from the mouth, "a gray ball coiled upon itself," "indistinct, futile and insignificant gray spots." In another image, the word takes on the obscenity of Sabine's perfume as it uses the invisible vehicle of air, like the fish in water: "a simple quiver, a mere vibration, an undulation, a flash, the shimmer of a silvery underside, green over blue [glauque sur glauqueJ

The use of words supposes a concrete correlative in the past, and this is the role of the dying figure of Marie and of her notebook. Latin syntax is considered in perspective as an illusory preservative "in the expectation of future mutilations and with the sole purpose of being reconstituted a thousand or two thousand years later," but these words too are merely proxies. They constitute an artificial order, "the graphic or sonorous symbois of things, ofsentiments, of excessive passions

Any form of intellectualization which treats these signs apart from, as a valid commentary on, or on the same level as, their concrete references denatures their original evocative power. Thus, the son of the old illiterate peasant, having become a learned etymologist, has not only conquered words but has

pulled them apart, stripped them, emptied them of that mystery, that terrifying power that every unknown thing or person possesses when it is without antecedents or past, apparent fruits of some mysterious, spontaneous, virtually supernatural generation: committing himself, then, to discover in them an ancestry, a genealogy and, from that, to predict, to assign them an ineluctable degeneration, a senility, a death, as if, by doing this, and as a sort of pious filial vengeance, he affirmed the invincible preeminence of the old illiterate (p. 38)

In this context it is clear that Marie is intended as an embodiment of the primitive character of words and literature. Marie herself partakes of the spontaneous,

uncivilized existence of words as her black figure appears "not having been first a child, then an adolescent, then a woman, but appearing here on earth one day, eighty-four years ago, just as she had looked [ten years ago] Marie puts all events, "the immemorial and invariable entities," on the same level in her ledger. Her writing is comparable with the lack of punctuation and capitals in soldiers' letters, and indeed she seems to need no language at all in order to communicate. Her notebooks, in a sense, have the aim of restoring the mystery of things by simply naming them, treating the words and writing as a pure and limpid medium. Louise, in opening them, makes the point by contrast with another form of writing:

neither journal nor memoirs nor yellowed letters nor anything of the kind: that is, anything that might betray some quality of impropriety-and not even impropriety: of absurdity, of nonsense, for these were the sorts of ideas (keeping a journal, writing the story of her own life) which could not even have occurred to the woman who had written here that schoolgirl handwriting, with the thick and thin strokes imperturbably formed, unyielding, as though depersonalized, stamped too with that inflexible modesty which refused all commentary (p. 20)

It is fitting that Marie's innocent refusal to look inward should have a concrete equivalent in the very writing of her notebook. Any coherence, Marie obviously assumes, will be found outside.

The reader has only to back away from this central image of Marie's inventory to grasp the way that Louise, fascinated by the old woman and turned toward her, prefigures in turn the attitude of the author, fascinated in turn by Louise's effort to understand and capture the reality of these ten days of dying. Although this view suggests a series of expanding circles, it is important to recognize that, underlying them all, there is no tendency toward the void of endlessly revolving and illusory words. Louise expresses the general distrust and futility of analysis with regard to her own decision, revealed only at the end of the novel. She will remain by Marie and, refusing a romantic solution, will accept what she symbolizes:

it was about as futile to try to know the moment when a decision was reached and the reasons for that decision as to know the moment (and the reasons why) one catches a cold, the only possible certitude in the one case or the other (the decision or the cold) being when the one or the other reveals itself, and by then they have already been established for a long time (pp. 127-128)

In choosing to pursue the quest which she has begun at the beginning of the novel, Louise, like Marie, refuses all personal commentary.

The hero of La Jalousie also, in general terms, arrives after the event, but whereas there we are interested in the optical illusions which this absence produces in the mind's effort at reconstruction in personal and psychological terms, in L'Herbe a desperate attempt is made to get hold of the objects alone and apart. Louise's voice is heard at the beginning of the book trying to explain to her lover why she has not fled already, and why, eventually, she will not flee at all. Her explanations are centered on Marie of course, but more pertinently on an even more neutralized object which is there, outside, to be stared at:

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I'm not even saying if it hadn't been for 'her', I'm saying: if it hadn't been for 'that.' And now she's going to die, and there'll be nothing left" (the voice stopping, suddenly breaking off, and Louise standing there, panting a little, as if surprised furious at having talked so much, still staring at whatever it was that he [her lover] couldn't see ). (p. 14)

It is naturally an impossible task-Simon's epigraph is from Pasternak: "no one makes history, no one sees it happen, no one sees the grass grow"-but key objects are sighted and restituted in the hope that they will transmit ce quelque chose. After completing his following novel, Simon was quoted in an interview: "In La Route des Flandres, there is something that I didn't succeed in rendering as I wanted The exact sound of the cannon!" The author continues by indicating his admiration for Conrad who was able to recreate the actual voice of the Nigger of the Narcissus at the opening of that book.

That, in the process of Louise's search for a correlative, becomes associated with an odor of wilted flowers mixed with the tepid smell of rotting fruit; also, with a monotonous death-rattle which provides a burlesque comparison with Vulcan's forge on the one hand and the trumpets of Judgment Day, on the other. The net effect of this macabre introduction of mythological similes is to make the sound or odor that Marie produces as inhuman as possible. Ce quelque chose, while remaining a concrete thing, is persistently neuter:

what had emanated from it [Marie's parchment-like mask] since it had first what had emanated from it [Marie's parchment-like mask] since it had first been laid there and which was not in the nature of what a face customarily does or can express, but an object (p. 97)

The problem, of course, is that of all mimesis: how to communicate the incommunicable, in this instance the basically inhuman, by human mediation:

after all it's silly, it's even completely ridiculous to be forced, to think you're forced to express yourself coherently when what you're feeling is incoherent. (p. 171)

Louise is clairvoyant to the point of omniscience, recounting what is happening at the railroad station or at the house from the field or in an adjoining room from her own. No ambiguity is created in the medium of communication to stop our attention deliberately in the realm of consciousness. In fact, the function of memory is itself given over to the concrete world in an unusual analogy: the imagination or the memory-even when freshly impressed-never really function except as auxiliaries of the organism laboring to digest, to assimilate, to appropriate-ahead of time, or after the fact-events or emotions, so as-exactly as for food-to make them if not profitable at least tolerable (p. 85)

In an interview, Simon quotes Proust and Faulkner to support an involuntary and "corporeal" memory, taking the mediation away from the mind: "The only true one, the memory of the muscles. You know: 'Legs, arms are full of sluggish memories .' Faulkner too says about the same thing ." Louise no longer even seems to need the usual human means ofperception, "seeing, not by the intermediary

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of her eyes but by means of that knowledge of the body which can observe its own movements as if from outside."

With the apparent disappearance of a specific point of view, Louise loses the first-person voice. When she swoons at the end of the novel, it is not into sexual ecstasy since what she provokes her lover to do is not happening to her. Instead, she enjoys the vicarious pleasure of what is happening elsewhere, becoming completely transparent. Lying in the grass, she is, like Marie, self-denying in the strongest sense, giving way to the kind of experience which Simon records in his essay, La Corde raide:

Still, in the night, looking at the chance disposition of lighted windows, rectangles painted in orange-yellow, listening to the noise of a step on the boulevards, listening to a woman who laughs somewhere, a music, listening to the tree throb and open, push its branches through me, filling my hands with its leaves, filling me with its whispering voice The branches pass through me, come out through my ears, mouth, eyes, sparing them from looking and the sap flows in me and spreads, fills me with memory, memories of the days that are coming, submerging me in the peaceful gratitude of sleep."

Nevertheless, Louise is a character only insofar as she is torn between running away from her dull, weakling husband and staying with his dying aunt. Because we know from the beginning the strong attraction of Marie, Louise is of little direct dramatic interest. Since the meaning of her fascination is the total dissolution of the self, a denial of a personal perspective on the outside world, there is no tension in the narration, no play between object and point of view. Dissolving into reality, she becomes superfluous as a cadre for the story.

The danger of this lack of tension is acknowledged by Simon in a curiously lucid passage:

[Louise] still able to see herself with that perspective which remoteness in time affords, free from the subjection of the present, watching herself act with that kind of half-scornful, half-irritated, slightly envious condescension we feel toward ourselves when we see ourselves after the fact, as we would watch a child act, unaware of what we know, have learned in the light of what has happened since, as if knowing the future conferred a superiority upon us, whereas all we have gained is perhaps to have a few less illusions, a little less innocence, so that it has not been a gain at all, but a loss (p. 106)

Recognition of the loss of "innocence" which results from a clear-eyed impersonal contact with things, devoid of the mediation of subjectivity, prompts Simon to make his narrator something more than an artificial witness.

In the novel preceding L'Herbe, he succeeded in a limited fashion. The principal figure in Le Vent, perhaps the only French version attempted of Faulkner's Benjy Compson or Prince Myshkin, is both an indirect narrator and an actor in the plot. Indeed, his intended position of synthesis is outlined from the beginning as he appears, the "idiot," a catalystic stranger with his "third eye," a camera, continually hanging on his chest. However, just as he quickly proves himself totally ineffectual against the wind, the disruptive forces of the background, so his camera, figuratively, has no real lens in it, just plain glass, like that which separates Louise

from the outside. In more recent efforts, La Route des Flandres and Le Palace, the indirect narrators have proved to be more or less transparent straight men. Robbe-Grillet followed his humanization of objects into the first-person spectrum ofjealousy, centering his and our interest in a consciousness situated really outside of the things evoked in the novel proper. On the contrary, Simon's artisan-like objectification leads him to go to the other extreme. Within each of his novels there is a block of material-objects, events, impersonal experience-remaining basically incommunicable by the subjective voice. The mediator and his area of mediation slip outside of the novel in the case of Robbe-Grillet; in Simon, they gradually fade into that which is being mediated. No tension between object and subject is upheld. In a significant image, Claude Simon makes clear his own abnegation of consciousness:

as in those railway compartments where the exhausted traveller [discovers] still low on the horizon, the sun ahead of which run successive levels of trees at different speeds, from the indistinct ones in a slashed curtain nearest the vanishing tracks, to those farther away, almost motionless, and between them, juxtaposed, drifting parallel as they pass, thickets and hedges, archipelagos swept away in a kind of slow and enormous debacle across the liquid and unknown earth himself, in that passive, foetal position that peaceful and illusory sensation of immobility or rather of immutability sought for in the womb of sleep, so that unlike those science fiction travellers carried in the inner calm of a rocket launched at a speed greater than that of light and therefore supposedly possessing the privilege of moving backward in time or at least of holding back its course, he suddenly realizes with a kind of bitter laceration, an impotent and overwhelming despair that it is not the train that, during the falsely protective night, has swept him on from one place to another, that he has come closer not to new shores, new horizons, but to his own destruction (pp. 93-94)

Outside, a chaos of time and space rushing on like a flood is given an independent reality apart from the perspective of the witnessing consciousness; inside, no genuine coherence is possible, even in the traditionally passive position of sleep.

The Equilibrium of Language

In La Modifications Leon Delmont, Parisian sales executive for an Italian typewriter concern, leaves his wife and children to go by train to Rome, as he often does on business, this time with the surreptitious intention of making future plans with his mistress Cecile. He intends to bring her to Paris where he will find her a job and make a clean break with his wife Henriette. However, in the course of the overnight train ride in the busy second-class compartment, Leon recognizes the futility of this resolution. He decides to return to Paris without seeing Cecile and to put off until later the possible reconciliation of his split existence.

This "fissure" which divides Leon and the whole world that he perceives is the fundamental theme of the book, and, in accord with the punning French title, the schism occurs in a variety of modes. "Modification" as change is evident on several levels: material changes around the traveler, his psychological or sentimental motivation, the transformation of mistress and wife into symbols for the

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larger significance of their respective cities and the transformation of the banal story into one of mythic proportions; and the circular Proustian process whereby the closing period of experience presumably leads back to the opening sentence of literary enterprise.

Besides the obvious moral problem of the novel, Leon, from whose point of view it is written, personally suffers the fragmentation which systematically characterizes our modern world. Physically, he appears broken by middle age and routine as he takes the unfamiliar night-train rather than his habitual first-class daytime express. Mentally, his attention is divided between deep reflection on the past and simultaneous, assiduously detailed notes of the immediate scene.

The memories of his diverse trips to Rome-the actual train rides and their significance-overlie one another transparently like so many avatars, just as the train windows interposed before the countryside might equally act as partitions between the travelers in the compartment itself. Leon is separated from his neighbors by the impossibility of communication, as from his wife and from his mistress by the uncertainty ofthe real in perpetual modification. He is also separated from himself and seeks an integrity which he vaguely recalls as an early part of his personal history, parallel to the historic unity of ancient times.

In a sense, each of the three novels which we are studying tells of the temptation of evasion into some sort of personal world: the hallucinations of the jealous man, Louise's lover's offer of escape, and the freedom which Cecile and Rome propose to Leon. Everything leads us to suppose that this is a satisfactory solution for the narrator (and the author) of La Jalousie; Simon's heroine dramatically rejects this possibility, and her abnegation leads to her virtual disappearance as a personality. In Butor, there seems to be recognition of an intermediary truth which warns Leon of the illusory nature of "freedom" and yet makes a return to humdrum reality no more satisfactory: an ideal tension between the interpenetrating elements of reality and dream.

Significantly, the very nature of relating these novels reinforces their disparity. While the "content" of La Jalousie, qualified by a consciousness, keeps slipping off toward the subjective so that there is not much to tell in the novel, the basic facts of L'Herbe are deliberately voluminous, providing the substance where Louise literally loses herself. The difficulty in summarizing La Modification, like Butor's other novels, comes not from an" excess or an absence of "content" as such, but from the insistent dualism, the simultaneous presence of inner and outer worlds.

The basic analogy that governs the novel is the funambulist figure of the motionless traveler. The situation of a moving compartment was applied by Simon to the passivity of his still, womb-enclosed passenger crushed by the "slow and enormous debacle across the liquid and unknown earth" outside. This might be compared with an entirely different Robbe-Grillet interpretation where the spectator's imaginative vision takes over: the long opening scene of Le Voyeur for example as Mathias stands on the deck of a docking boat awaiting to debark on the island where an ambiguous murder will be committed.

For Butor, however, the paradox of balance is expressed by Michel Leiris' description: "theatre, at the same time stationary and moving, of a solitary

traveler's meditation." As the author of La Modification remarked,

The window is indeed an image which I cherish. It mayor may not let me see beyond it. Window or mirror, it's the symbol of the novel itself-It has its own hardness and through it I plunge, I discover something.

Leon Delmont sees simultaneously the reflection of his own face and, juxtaposed, the familiar scenery where he loses himself, through which other trains run, crossing his, transformed into the trains he has taken on other trips at other times.

The idea of a glass separating the individual from experience, the consciousness from act, has become a commonplace of the modern scene. Butor seeks not to give in to either side of an antinomy between the distortions that might be induced from the surface of the glass itself (Robbe-Grillet) and the outside pull of its transparence (Simon). He tries rather to maintain a simultaneous double perspective, the monologue interieur recording outside movement and the fixity of a personal point of view.?

Contrasted with Robbe-Grillet's statement about La Jalousie that no chronological reconstruction is possible by design-an attack on the conventional myths which is itself wilfully mystifying-Butor's goal and his means are basically constructive. From the beginning, his set of correlations is purposefully objectiveocassionally excessively so-like the clearly exposed "spinal column" which he proclaims writing is for him. Butor writes,

I can compose a novel only after having studied its construction for months, only at the point when I find myself in possession of diagrams. The expressive capacity of these latter in relation to that region which originally had appealed to me must seem adequate. Armed with that instrument, that compass, or if you prefer, that provisional map, I begin my exploration, I begin my revision

Construction, diagrams, region, compass, map-this vocabulary should be sufficient to evoke the backbone correlative of Butor's novel: an apartment house, a city, a lycee and its curriculum in Passage de Milan, L'Emploi du temps, and Degres, and the railroad line from Paris to Rome in La Modification.

The "instruments" are not only objects of the novelist's attention. They are also antagonists, and their presence as jeering, complex entities threatens to crush man or disperse him in fragments. Thus, while Passage de Milan is merely downright confusing, the other three novels present labyrinths or variations of geometric precision which are destined to challenge, tax, and finally evade the protagonist and author, and the reader as well. However, the aim of describing these objects, this exploration, is knowledge, and the tantalizing mythology which seems within grasp cannot be reduced to mystification.

Butor's realism, which Michel Leiris stresses in writing of his "realisme mythologique," consists of a constant, respectful deference to the framework which guides his narrative. His constraining time-spans (twenty-four hours in the life of his cross-sectional apartment-house, the suspenseful time-lapse of a diary to recapture the past from oblivion, the punctuality of a French train schedule) and the corollary attitude toward space exemplified by the compartment on rai!s

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are elements of a new classicism. Acting as checks against the possibility of the sort of subjective dimensions in time and space which control La Jalousie, these new unities permit free associations and digressions only within the reality of an objective structure.

As Leiris shows in his long study, the mythological imagery of La Modification is coaxed out of the real elements in the network of train rides from Paris to Rome and back just as the celebrated figure of the Grand Veneur, mythic huntsman on horseback, slides out of the woods to confront the protagonist. Like the other legendary moments of the book-those hallucinations, dreams or distortions the tenor of which is never confused, as in Robbe-Grillet, with that of the real situation-the Grand Veneur may be traced to a specific childhood apprehension and attached to a banal, Kafka-like incident. The mythology is not undercut by this process, but rather the desperate interrogation to find identity and destination, linked to the use of the second-person narrative form in the novel, is given an authentic poignancy. The imaginary personage in the landscape and the real customs officer both ask: "Qui etes-vous? Oil allez-vous?"

In the Joycean interpretation which Leiris convincingly supplies for La Modificationl? the principal theme of Leon Delmont's "chasse spirituelle" through an infernal mythology concerns language and a mythic word. From the banality of not knowing Italian to the ritual search for a lost sacred book of knowledge, Leiris rightly insists on the theme in the novel of a return to the absolute source of language.

In the light of this continuous interplay between legend and banality, the book which Leon Delmont carries into the train offers an interesting subject for comparison, particularly in view of the importance of the theme of language and literature in the novel. We remember the meaning suggested by each of the books that Robbe-Grillet and Simon included in their works: another in a series of optical illusions in the one case, a symbol of the impenetrable, incontrovertible hardness of things in the other. Neither the epitome of evanescent fiction, nor a core offactual experience, Leon's book remains throughout La Modification the suggestive expression of dualism. While constituting the center of that circuitous theme which makes La Modification the literary project which Leon intends to write as he exits from the train in the Stazione Termini, the book serves as a sort of genie bottle for creating the intermittent dream of the last part of the book. It also serves prosaically to mark the protagonist's place when he leaves the compartment. As a final comment on Butor's position of cautious equilibrium between consciousness and act, the book remains closed throughout the entire trip.

Although it is accurate to say that Butor restores a balance between subjectivity and objectivity, the ultimate reference is to Things. They form that primitive state. Thus the protagonist disciplines himself, frequently repeating, "I must keep my eyes fixed on things that are actually there ":

You must keep your attention fixed on the things you can actually see, this handle, that shelf, [etc.]

on the people in your compartment, on the two Italian workmen, [etc.]

so as to put an end to this inward tumult, this dangerous brooding and mulling over memories (p. 132)

However, the true nature of Things as they represent that threat, which is both the purge and the danger that objectification provides, is expressed in this passage:

[a certain blue light in the compartment,] combined with the ceaseless tremor, the noise, your consciousness of other people's breathing, makes things revert to their original uncertainty, and you no longer see them plainly but have to reconstitute them from signs, and so they seem to be looking at you as much as you at them,

makes you yourself revert to that quiet terror, that primitive emotion in which, above the ruins of so many lies, the passion for existence and for truth asserts itself with such haughty power. (p. 207)

Butor's dualism is manifest in the startling aspect of his novel that has been most commented on by the critics: his use of the second-person plural as the protagonist and point of view almost throughout. Although, in a complex and suggestive way, the vous form constitutes an important, positive "freezing" of perspective between objectivity and subjectivity, here too the hierarchy is never in doubt. The exceptional passages in the third part of the novel where the third person abruptly appears warn us that we are in a dream. Curiously enough, this interrupted dream is objectified in accordance with the depersonalizing distance which intervenes.

Thus, paradoxically, the material introduced there, which is associated with the book that Leon does not open during his ride and which would appear, by its nightmarish and mythological aspects, to be pure fantasy, is accorded a reality more objective than the main narrative. In fact, these sequences form an "external" stimulus rather than some hallucinatory product, and the switch is made back to the second person only with the application of these mythic elements to the personal situation. As Michel Leiris writes, "The legendary or mythical components of the traveller's cogitation come to him, in short, from outside and as cultural donnees (things read or related) before becoming part of his authentic reality." Even through that most subjective of phenomena-the dream fantasy-the movement is clearly revealed which makes experience originate in the objective, then becoming transformed toward the subjective.

Having tried several times to justify his use of vous in newspaper interviews, Butor was led to clarify at length his meditations on the use of the personal pronouns in an important essay." The order of the novelist's discussion essentially follows both a historical pattern and the evolution of his own performance: classic narrative (Passage de Milan), somewhat Gidian journal with a Proustian effort to fuse third and first persons separated by time (L'Emp/oi du temps), second-person solution to the problem posed by the monologue interieur (La Modification), complex experiment in literary displacement with emergence of multiple narrator iDegres). The last words of Degres, "qui parle?" murmured by the delirious original narrator of the novel, now about to die, are ironic. But they may also be taken seriously as a problem of deepest urgency for the author.

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One would be mistaken in stressing merely the superficial universality or value of identification in the use of vous. Indeed, the universality can hardly be achieved by this means if the person loses abstraction by becoming a recognizable Parisian businessman. Also, paradoxically, identification is weakened by this device which accentuates the distance between the figure in the novel and the reader by calling attention to their relationship. Rather, Butor's intention is to find a point of balance in two delicate areas of the literary process: between the author and the hero and between the latter and the reader.

For Butor, too, the police inquest becomes a prototype. His analysis of the second person as a form of interrogation recalls the fact that, in all his novels, a kind of urgent inquiry is at work, sometimes, as in his first two books, specifically concerning a murder. Leiris, thinking of the professor in the compartment whose dissertation topics Leon Delmont considers, thinking perhaps also of Butor's academia, recalls that the second person, which Butor classifies as always introducing a "didactic tale," is indeed the pronoun of direct interrogation.

The roman policier aspect might lead us to compare Butor with Robbe-Grillet as another manipulator of object clues within the infinite spaces of a witness' mind before the tribunal. Yet, Leon Delmont's prise de conscience is not that of a direct, unlimited consciousness. On the contrary, it is important to note that in the role of vous, he is, as Butor writes, "the one to whom his own story is told."

The distinction with the role of witness is essential. If the equivalent of an investigating inspector or prosecutor is speaking, the accent is on the positive quest for the truth rather than on the debilitating first-person confession or third-person detachment. Robbe-Grillet tries to deny in theory both SUbjectivity and objectivity and thus creates a void filled only by the negatively inspired imagination resulting from this dual distrust. In contrast, Butor plays upon positive elements of both sides in a reconstruction according to Socratic method. As Butor says, it is the "how of knowledge," and concomitantly, the birth of language.

Butor's interest in Faulkner springs not from the theme of the impotent voyeur which has often attracted French critics, but rather from a particular process of narration:

Thus, with Faulkner, in certain passages, one finds conversations, dialogues, where certain characters tell others what the latter did in their childhood, things that these others have forgotten or else were never more than just partially conscious of.

Faulkner's work is by no means an intellectual search for order but an intense interest in recording the disorder of experience and the birth of consciousness as it is found in the more primitive form of the monologue or the related, indirect awakening of a subnormal figure.

It is this kind of paradoxically undeveloped figure that interests Butor as well. The French author may have abandoned the standard monologue technique because of the artifice which the pretense of immediacy forces upon the author, otherwise shutting off the possibilities of exchange. ("You find yourself consequently faced with a consciousness that is closed," Butor laments.) Nevertheless, his solution is familiarly Faulknerian:

Consequently the character in question, for one reason or another, must not be able to tell his own story; language must be forbidden him, and that interdiction overcome in order to provoke access it's a question of drawing his testimony out of him, either because he lies, because he is hiding something from us or from himself, or because he hasn't all the elements, or else, even if he has them, because he is incapable of relating them suitably to one another.

In Butor, the search for the character through whose groping the birth of language may be shown suggests a number of possibilities. We think of the man paralyzed with fear or perhaps even under some sacred observance of silence-the double meaning of interdit (forbidden, stunned) and its link with dire are suggestive, of course-the liar, the criminal, the foreigner, the ignorant, the unequipped.

On the other hand, the disintegration of personality which is one of the major premises of modern French literature-and of course the justification for Butor's study of personal pronouns as well-is not simply a philosophical truism but vitiates the possibility of constituting the voice of an actual hero. In Robbe-Grillet things perceived in the distorted vision of a pathological consciousness are deliberately traced to a figure left in a marginal blank. In Claude Simon, a narrator threatened by the penetrating objectivity ofthings also remains unrealized and transparent. Butor does find a median between objectivity and subjectivity in his use of material and his method, but the hero of La Modification disintegrates in a way remarkably similar to Simon's Louise. Leon Delmont's vain justification for his personal deteriorationif there hadn't been these objects, these images onto which my thoughts fastened, so that, a kind of mental machine was set up, making the various regions of my being go sliding one over the other (p. 240)

-does not make his deterioration as a literary figure any less serious: ( that fatalism crushing you in the darkness), that powerful process at work within you which is gradually destroying your sense of personality, that change of lighting and perspective, that rotation of facts and their meanings-resulting from your weariness and from the circumstances, (p, 204)

It would seem that only a certain syntax, but no individual voice is capable of communicating the universe in these terms. Thus, to return to Butor's narrative itinerary, we see him tending toward the dialogue of a whole group-or as in Mobile, of a whole country-with the resulting aim of depersonalization: disassociate more and more that notion [the general problem of personality] from that of the physical individual, and interpret it as a function occurring within a mental and social milieu, in an interval of dialogue." The entire predicament of the literary imagination is, like Butor's non-character, "in communication with an immense historical fissure," and the search for equilibrium cannot be conducted with the limitations and security of traditional aesthetics. The "new novelists" have brought to the genre concerns which many may think more properly belonging to the "purer" fine arts and poetry. We have been led, in the analyses above, to seek out basically poetic criteria: analogies with the TRI-QVARTERLY I 179

process of perception; objective and subjective states of mind; the actual situation of the so-called "objective correlatives." That neither a pure narrative nor a pure description is possible can be shown by elaborating a relative gradation from one to the other. In the scale of reality attributed to the apparently undifferentiated elements of consciousness or objects, Robbe-Grillet has moved toward a secondary impressionism; Claude Simon, toward an emphasis-uncommon for the French climate of intellectualism-upon brute externals. Butor's position may be described as intermediary between a dominant subjectivism and the pursuit of elusive raw experience. Correlative objects are there but to elude us by proving ultimately inaccessible, threatening to swallow up the observer, or to be gobbled up themselves, vanishing into the encompassing mind.

The tension between subject and object is not identical with, but recalls a traditional, unconscious truce between spiritual and material worlds. The gesture of reconciliation needed may in fact be a poetic creation. The work of Francis Ponge, for instance, in this context suggests balance between lyricism and imagism. In seeking the proper perspective on man, the author of Le Parti pris des choses has developed a deliberately mediating stance before his stilllifes. Unlike the novelist, he does not have to fill the void left by the destruction of character. For him, the creation of a voice can establish the necessary equilibrium.

And the Nouvelle Critique

As in literature itself, the problem of imagination is central to contemporary criticism. Proust, who is perhaps the first "modern" critic in France, in his famous essay on Flaubert, made the metaphor the sine qua non of literary art, leading the reaction against a science which simplified the process of creativity by stressing factors of biography and historical data. No author today can describe the phenomenological situation with the same equanimity as Balzac when he wrote, "Enfin toute sa personne explique la pension, comme la pension implique sa personne." Similarly, the trend of self- or infra-consciousness has made of the study of any particular work or author a challenge of methodology.

In France, as elsewhere, uncertainty about the functioning of imagination has centered in a distrust and total reconsideration of language itself: the "Terrorist" attack of surrealism; Jean Paulhan's reply in Les Fleurs de Tarbes, calling for a new rhetoric; Rmayond Queneau's and Brice Parain's diverse writings; Maurice Blanchot's persistent questions of life and death, paradoxes of silence; more recently still, Roland Barthes' Le Degre zero de /'ecriture and the controversy around Robbe-Griller's theories which the Tel Quel group has proclaimed "la Querelle de la Metaphore." Leaving aside the more philosophically pertinent writings of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Sartre (La Phenomenologie de la perception, L'Imaginaire and L'Imagination, to mention just their first explorations), an account of recent literary theory, including the same two philosophers quite prominently of course, would trace the elaboration of a method (proceeding from a vision) analogous to those of the novelists treated above.

In fact, it seems quite evident that the proponents of the "nouvelle critique," as the movement has inevitably come to be known, are far more influential in 180 TRI-QUARTERLY

terms of writing-and internationally-than the nouveau roman. While certain authors may well endure individually, the "new novel," now abandoned for the most part as a style to the variations of second-string performers, at this point may be dated and surveyed, if not classified. Its search for structures and use of objects as metaphors of intention place it, as a brief, (relatively) popular event, within the context of a fundamental development of thought the most explicit results of which are apparent since the last world war.

Contemporary critics, whether exploring the imagination of certain authorsGoldmann on Racine, Starobinski on Rousseau, Jean-Pierre Richard on Mallarrne, Sartre on Genet-or the imagination of a cultural moment or else man in generalPoulet's Studies of Human Time, Bachelard's Poetics of Spacel2-concentrate upon the metaphorical complex of psychological and material factors which may be most authentically grasped at the moment of perception. Like conjectural studies in other fields in this age of criticism, their findings are often of more interest than counterpart works of fiction.

It would be unproductive to belabor specific connections between novelists and critics, but they are not without significance. Most readers would agree that RobbeGrillet's writing reveals a knowledge of the modern process of mystification as studied by Roland Barthes whose reviews of Les Gommes and Le Voyeur undoubtedly helped to orient the novelist's polemical essays, if not his subsequent creative evolution as well. For Claude Simon, the most appropriate affinity might be with Gaston Bachelard, or Jean-Pierre Richard perhaps, the comparison provided by a common respect for the primacy of matter and the elements, a common effort to recreate the very sensations of experience, apprehending and rehearsing the primitive forms which recur. As for Butor, the particular experiment in combining, through a careful modulation of language, external structures with inner perceptions (geographic and social networks with journals and journeys of the mind), suggests the methodical studies made by Georges Poulet of the expression that the concepts of time and space reflect in the consciousness of man.

Since some implicit or explicit view of the image is crucial to each modern critic, here too persists an inherent dualism similar to that which is at the basis of the novels analyzed above. Dualism is, after all, the most evident pattern of the existential philosophy which informs our whole era. In criticism as well each effort is directed toward synthesis: the inner structures of the artist's creation, with the corresponding outer forms related to him and to it. While among critics strongly influenced by either the method of psychoanalysis or the natural sciences, there may be a latent tendency toward the precedence of subjective consciousness or the material world, none today can possibly be unaware of the complex and paradoxical nature of the human perspective. "Structuralism," that grouping of the rapidly coalescing disciplines of anthropology, sociology, linguistics, etc., which are situated at a point of juncture because of the mediating quality of society and language as subject matter, must guard against the same divisive tendencies with regard to the creation of structures.

In American criticism, the work of Kenneth Burke seems the most methodologically in tune with the French approach. Reacting against an earlier static TRI-QUARTERLY

aesthetics with its decorative conception of beauty, Burke proposes the tension of a newly rephrased antithesis:

by starting with "the sublime and the ridiculous," rather than with "beauty," you place yourself forthwith into the realm of the act, whereas "beauty" turns out to be too inert in its connotations, leading us rather to overstress the scene in which the act takes place. Confronting the poetic act in terms of "beauty," we are disposed to commit one or another of two heretical overemphases: either we seek to locate beauty in the object, as scene, or by dialectical overcompensation we seek to locate it in the subject, as agent. Confronting the poetic act in terms of the sublime and the ridiculous, we are disposed to think of the issue in terms of a situation and a strategy for confronting or encompassing that situation, a scene and an act, with each possessing its own genius, but the two fields interwoven.»

We thus return to the Baudelairian magic of fusing subject and object. but in the more modern, existential language of situation. Situation, structuralism, phenomenology.' terms with deliberately extraliterary connotation. The chief accusation against modern criticism is identical with that leveled against modern art: its refusal to remain a purely autonomous genre or discipline, its insistence upon making every act a matter of ontological inquiry. Wayne Booth's provocative and immensely interesting Rhetoric of Fiction, with its view of literature as technical achievement, is a case in point. Booth's premises avoid the consideration of modern narrative as proceeding from the kind of philosophical disposition of object and point of view that we have been discussing, with its complex of intentions. The basic precept of Sartre, that a novelistic technique refers one back to a metaphysique, means that the problem of metaphor must always be invoked. Its fundamental nature does not just characterize the aim of synthesis within each discipline. It also strongly suggests the exemplary quality, interpenetrability, interdependence of all human activity.

NOTES

1. There is yet no full-length study of the "new novel" as such. Laurent LeSage has offered an introduction and sampler in The French New Novel (Pennsylvania State, 1962). The more interrogative Un nouveau roman r, ed. I. H. Matthews (Minard, 1964), which concentrates on the way in which the new techniques fit into a French tradition, gives the most recent extended bibliography, including special numbers of periodicals. Particular attention should be called to the early article of J. Robert Loy, "Things in Recent French Literature," PMLA, LXXI (1956), pp. 27-41.

2. There have been countless studies of Robbe-Grillet, books by Olga Bernal (Gallimard, 1964), Bruce Morrissette (Minuit, 1963), and Ben Stoltzfus (Southern Illinois, 1964). On Butor, two important articles, one in particular on La Modification by his friend, the writer Michel Leiris, originally in Critique, XIV (1958), pp, 100-118, reprinted in appendix to the 10/18 paperback edition of the novel; and a two-part study by Leo Spitzer in Archivum Linguisticum, XIII, Part 2 (1961), pp. 171·195 and XIV, Part I (1962), pp. 49·76. Claude Simon has provoked little commentary.

3. Translated by Richard Howard (Grove, 1959), from the original French (Minuit, 1957). Page references in the text are to the American editions.

4. Critique, X (1954), pp. 581·591, reprinted in his Essais critiques (Seuil, 1964).

5. Translated in Yale French Studies, No. 10 (1952), pp. 92·94.

6. Translated by Richard Howard (Braziller, 1960), from the original French (Minuit, 1958).

7. (Sagittaire, 1947), p. 187; my translation, as elsewhere when not otherwise noted.

8. Translated by lean Stewart (Simon & Schuster, 1959), from the original French (Minuit, 1957).

9. I explored this briefly in "View from the Train: Butor, Gide, Larbaud," The French Review, XXVI (1962), pp. 161·166.

10. See note 2 above.

11. Les Temps Modernes, XVII (1961), pp. 936·948, reprinted in the second volume of his collected essays, Repertoire Jl (Minuit, 1964).

12. (Johns Hopkins, 1956 and 1959) and (Orion, 1963), the most important texts-except for Sartre's-available in English at the moment.

13. The Philosophy of Literary Form (Vintage, 1957), p. 54.

182 TRI·QUARTERLY

America's Oldest Literary Quarterly

Winter, 1966

A Special Issue containing Critical Essays, Reminiscenses and Tributes to the Memory 0/

T. S. ELIOT

edited by Mr. Allen Tate

contributors will include

NEVILLE BRAYBROOKE F. V. MORLEY

J. V. CUNNINGHAM

H. S. DAVIES

BONAMY DOBREE

WALLACE FOWLIE

HELEN GARDNER

FRANK KERMODE

G. WILSON KNIGHT

CECIL DAY LEWIS

ROBERT LOWELL

EZRA POUND

HERBERT READ

I. A. RICHARDS

JANET ADAM SMITH

ROBERT SPEAIGHT

STEPHEN SPENDER

LEONARD UNGER

AUSTIN WARREN

ROBERT PENN WARREN

THE SEWANEE REVIEW

Sewanee, Tennessee

ROBERT BONE

LES

POETES NEGRES DES ETATS-UNIS: Le Sentiment Racial et Re/igieux dans la Poesie de P. L. Dunbar a L. Hughes (1890-1940).

By Jean Wagner.

Paris, 1963.637 pp.

Two years have passed since the appearance of M. Wagner's book, and as yet no English translation is in sight. Scholarly in nature, and inordinately long, the book does not invite commercial speculation. Nevertheless, it is an important, even a seminal work, and should be made available to American readers, even in truncated form. What I propose therefore is to abstract tl:e central argument, and to initiate debate over certain aspects of the work with which I disagree. The abstract will be written under great compression, in a ratio of perhaps one to thirty. Apologies must be offered in advance for whatever awkwardness of style or distortion of meaning may result from so radical a condensation.

M. Wagner's central thesis is the interdependence of racial and religious feeling inAmerican Negro poetry. He finds between the two a vital union, a symbiosis in which feelings of religious origin are often "racialized," while feelings arising out of racial conflict are often "spiritualized," or projected on a metaphysical plane. The most eloquent illustration of this symbiosis is the spirituals, where the slave's desire for freedom in this world and his hope for salvation in the next are closely intertwined. Curiously enough, the same interplay of racial and religious feeling may be found in the work of contemporary Negro poets, most of whom have long since abandoned the forms if not the emotional ambience of their religious heritage.

What accounts for these interlocking planes ofexperience in the soul ofthe Negro poet? A schizoid tendency in Western cul-

ture, which first appeared when the white man decided to evangelize those whom he enslaved. To reduce the black man to the status of a thing, and then to save his soul: such were the contradictory impulses of a culture hopelessly torn between greed and guilt, between its lust for empire and its commitment to Christ. This fundamental conflict in the white man's soul was then transmitted, like some hereditary blight, to the Negro slave. For the black man perceived with a clarity born of suffering the contradictions of the system in which he was enmeshed. Once converted, his faith in God was placed in constant doubt by the odious spectacle of human slavery, as practiced by his Christian masters.

From the first, moreover, white Americans have tried to link he idea of God with that of white supremr c '. With appropriate Scriptural allusions, they have argued that slavery and segregation were ordained by God. They have thereby guaranteed that the Negro's political rebellion, when it finally emerged, would be accompanied by an assault on Christian values. How could it be otherwise? By a process of transference,feelings ofhostilityaroused by thewhite man's injustice came to l e directed toward the white man's God. jl mong Negro intellectuals in particular, Christianity becarr.e associated with the submissive attitudes of slavery times. Hence the dilemma of the Negro poet: "Between God and the race, one felt constrained to choose."

This choice, in all of its reverberations, provides the focal point of M. Wagner's study. A word, however, must be said about the chronological limits of the book. The oral tradition of American Negro poetry extends to early slavery times; the written tradition begins in 1746. M. Wagner, however, gives summary treatment to the poets of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. There is a preliminary chapter on Paul Laurence Dunbar, but the heart of the book is concerned with six poets of the Negro Renaissance. In essence, we have a study of the principal Negro 'poets published between the two world wars. I have tried to preserve this emphasis by restricting my discussion to the seven poets selected for extended treatment by M. Wagner.

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PAUL LAURENCE DUNBAR, 1872-1906

In life's Red Sea with faith I plant my feet,

And wait the sound of that sustaining word

Which long ago the men of Israel heard, When Pharaoh's host behind them, fierce and fleet,

Raged on, consuming with revengeful heat.

Why are the barrier waters still unstirred?-

That struggling faith may die of hope deferred?

Is God not sitting in his ancient seat?

The billows swirl above my trembling limbs,

And almost chill my anxious heart to doubt

And disbelief, long conquered and defied. But tho' the music of my hopeful hymns Is drowned by curses of the raging rout, No voice yet bids th' opposing waves divide!

-"Mare Rubrum"

Paul Laurence Dunbar published six volumes of verse, four collections of short stories, and four novels in the course of his short career. Best known as a dialect poet, he himself preferred the small proportion of his work written in standard English. Many, if not most, of Dunbar's poems are emotionally inaccessible to the present generation, by virtue of their accommodationist philosophy. Yet Dunbar has a lyric and dramatic power which struggles for expression against the most incredible cultural odds.

In the aftermath of the Reconstruction, an image of the Negro was cultivated throughout the nation, the purpose ofwhich was to humiliate and to degrade. Minstrel shows presented the black man as buffoon, while the plantation tradition, represented by such writers as Thomas Nelson Page, Joel Chandler Harris, and Irwin Russell, portrayed him as a child-like creature, satisfied for the most part with his former lot as a slave. In Dunbar's time, a more accurate portrayal was impossible. It would

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have been rejected out of hand, for these cherished stereotypes were deeply rooted in the political and social order.

To the strength of these stereotypes, Dunbar bears ironic witness. Not himself a Southerner, he capitulates to Southern ideology, undertaking in his poems a spirited defense of Southern agrarian values. His migratory Negroes in the Northern cities are still longing for the old plantation. Thosewho chose to staybehind are unswerving in their loyalty to the old order:

Er in othah wo'ds, you wants us to fu'git dat you's been kin',

An' ez soon ez you is he'pless, we's to leave you heah behin'.

Well, ef dat's de way dis freedom ac's on people, white or black,

You kin jes' tell Mistah Lincum to tek his freedom back.

Do these and similar utterances reflect Dunbar's own convictions, or are they merely tactical concessions to popular prejudice? The truth is that in Dunbar's time the white man's definitions of cultural reality were all but overwhelming. How could a Negro poet begin to free himself from the power of these social fictions? Later generations of Negro writers have turned for a usable myth to the Russian revolution, or the rise of Africa in world affairs, or a fully articulated jazz tradition. Dunbar, writing in 1900, was trapped in the swampy bottomland of the plantation school. And yet he undertook, in certain poems, the crucial task of self-definition, groping however uncertainly toward a vision of Negro life as seen through Negro eyes.

His best poems, in their sympathetic treatment of folk material, managed to transcend the limits of the stereotype. There was, after all, a basis in fact for the extravagant caricatures of the minstrel tradition. The folk Negro's skill as a dancer, his extraordinary talent as comedian and musician, his love of costume and of color, his animation, and his highly sophisticated sense of rhythm were qualities that might well provide a source of inspiration for the Negro poet.

This material, moreover. gave full scope

to Dunbar's histrionic talents. He was a great success as a platform reader, bringing to his poems a lively animation which is lost in the written text. Dunbar's public readings were ritual occasions, important ceremonial events in the life of the Negro community. By recalling the people to their folk origins, he helped them to achieve a sense of group identity. For this reason he became, as all those Dunbar Highs bear witness, the first poet laureate of the Negro people.

As for Dunbar's treatment of religious themes, he is best described as a dissembler. In a widely anthologized poem entitled "We Wear the Mask," Dunbar acknowledges his ties to a long tradition of dissimulation, designed to disguise the Negro's true convictions from the whites. This proclivity for masking no doubt accounts for the facade of conventional piety and unexceptionable orthodoxypresented by his poems. On occasion, however, the mask slips, and we have a glimpse of the poet's doubt and disbelief. Dunbar is the first Negro poet whose personal religious views diverge perceptibly from the social norm. This gap will widen in the next generation to the proportions of a crisis, as the younger poets reflect bitterly on the impotence of God and of the Christtian church in the face of growing racial violence.

THE NEGRO RENAISSANCE

In the aftermath of World War I, an upsurge of creativity took place in Harlem. A new generation of poets appeared who would dominate the literary scene for two decades. Theirs was a mood ofdisaffiliation, for the great dream offreedom set in motion by Emancipation had been too long deferred. They had lived through wartime riots and betrayals, shared in the excitement of the Russian revolution, witnessed the rise of Garvey's Back-to-Africa movement, noted with satisfaction the white world's discovery of jazz and of primitive African sculpture. In short, alternatives appeared, choices opened up, new definitions of reality were possible.

Out of this ferment, Negro poets began to affirm a set of values and to celebrate a life-style quite at odds with the dominant

ethos of white, middle-class America. Battle lines were drawn, and the younger poets rallied to the banner of cultural dualism. They called not so much for a naked confrontation between Negro and occidental culture as for the recognition that Negro folk culture contained unsounded depths and possessed emotional and spiritual resources that they intended to explore.

This mood of separatism, of partial disaffection with the values of European civilization, was not without religious implications. Where Dunbar's generation looked upon Emancipation as the liberation of the black man by an act of God, the younger poets knew that their emancipation remained to be accomplished. It seemed to them, moreover, in their daily struggle with white power, that God revealed Himself more often as the black man's adversary than ally. What was at the outset a racial conflict thus became, in successive stages, a cultural, then a spiritual conflict in which the Christian God and the Negro people seemed to be opposed.

According to their inclinations in this conflict of racial and religious loyalties, the six major poets of the Negro Renaissance may be classified as "folklorists" or "spiritualists." James Weldon Johnson, Langston Hughes, and Sterling Brown regard their folk tradition as a primary source of inspiration. Their language and their forms are drawn from folk sermons, work and prison songs, blues and ballads, jazz and jive. In varying degree, they view Christianity as the religion of slavery, the opiate of the people, and a major obstacle to their emancipation. Privately or publicly, they reject religious faith as incompatible with their loyalty to the Negro people, whom they wish above all to rehabilitate, exalt, and defend.

The "spiritualists," in contrast, affirm their loyalty to God. Claude McKay, Jean Toomer, and Countee Cullen are likewise victims of a splintered culture, but in their case the conflict deepens, even as it is internalized. For these poets discover in the end that the fundamental conflict is not between the white man and the black, nor between the black man and his God, but between each man and himself. It is through the transcendence of self, and a truly heroic

TRI-QUARTERLY 1187

conquest ofspiritual values, that these poets surmount their dilemma and achieve a lifegiving synthesis from which the soul of the black man can emerge transfigured and enlarged.

CLAUDE McKAY, 1889-1948

Think you I am not fiend and savage too? Think you I could not arm me with a gun

And shoot down ten of you for everyone Of my black brothers murdered, burnt by you?

Be not deceived, for every deed you do I could match-out-match: am I not Afric's son, Black of that black land where black deeds are done?

But the Almighty from the darkness drew My soul and said: Even thou shalt be a light

Awhile to burn on the benighted earth, Thy dusky face I set among the white For thee to prove thyselfof higher worth; Before the world is swallowed up in night, To show thy little lamp: go forth, go forth!

-"To the White Fiends"

Claude McKay was the author of four books of poems, three novels, a collection of short stories, and an autobiography. Born in Jamaica, he came to the United States in 1912 to complete his education. Soon he withdrew from college, preferring to seek in Harlem the stimulation of the political and literary avant-garde. For fifteen years he roamed around the world, living at intervals in London and Moscow, Paris and Marseilles, Spain and Morocco. Having returned to New York in 1934, he became interested in the program and philosophy of Friendship House, the center of Catholic social work in Harlem. In 1944 he converted to Catholicism and moved to Chicago, where he taught in the parochial schools until his death.

In 1912 his first two volumes of verse, Songs of Jamaica and Constab Ballads, appeared. The first reflects his early life among the black peasants of the Jamaican highlands; the second, his experience in

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Kingston as a police recruit. Both are written in a patois native to the place, unlike the so-called Negro dialect of the Dunbar school, which in fact is borrowed from the whites, and corrupted by their racial animosities.

The value-conflict that emerges from McKay's Jamaican poems anticipates the cultural dualism of the Negro Renaissance. On one side is his respect for nature and the soil, for the black peasants and the sturdy racial pride that they display in the face of hardship and adversity. On the other is his hatred of the provincial capital, its corrupt constabulary and deracinated Negroes, its contempt for the black "mountain man" and its elevation of the mulatto group to the status of a privileged caste. The city is a cauldron of hatreds, and the poet flees it to protect himself from self-estrangement. To remain would be to risk becoming "morally mulatto," by internalizing the white man's hatred of the black.

It was in America that McKay discovered his true subject. Writhing under the lash of lynchings and floggings, bombings and race riots, his soul was goaded to a fury of hatred and rebellion. He sings in Harlem Shadows (1922) of his hate, and in giving vent for the first time to this contraband emotion, liberates the Negro heart. At the same time that McKay performs this bardic function, addressed to the deepest psychic needs of the Negro people, he unleashes in himself an emotional storm which can lead to his salvation or destruction. Without a doubt, the American Negro must develop a capacity for hate in order to survive. Given the social pathology of racism, hate is a normal and even healthy response, without which the personality would be overwhelmed by the hostile world in which it is condemned to live. But hate, like most effective antidotes, is itself a poison. Coursing unchecked through the soul, it soon produces death by internal bleeding. The problem, then, is one of mastery, of self-control, of a desperate victory over human passion. For hate,indulged for its own sake, is a purely destructive emotion. It is healthy insofar as it may lead the soul to a higher plane of being. It

must become, in short, a purgatorial hate. This determination to master his hatred is the essence of McKay's spiritual quest. In revolt against American racism, he explored the possibilities of expatriatism, Communism, primitivism, and Negro nationalism. All were evasions - projections of an unmastered emotion. For his basic conflict could not be resolved on the political or cultural plane. The problem and solution lay within, where hate and love were locked in deadly combat. In the end, McKay discovered that without a constant effort to surpass himself no victory over hate was possible. He took the path of selftranscendence, and it led to his conversion, to his peace with God.

JEAN TOOMER, 1894-

Unease the races,

Open this pod,

Free man from his shrinkage

I am, we are, simply of the human race.

Unease the nations,

Open this pod,

Keep the real but destroy the false; We are of the human nation.

Unease the regionsOccidental, Oriental, North, SouthWe are of Earth.

Free the sexes,

I am neither male nor female nor in-between;

I am of sex, with male differentiations.

Open the classes;

I am, we are, simply of the human class.

Expand the fieldsThose with definitions which fix fractions and lose wholes­

I am of the field of being, We are beings.

Unease the religions; I am religious.

Unease, unpod whatever impedes.

-From "Blue Meridian"

Jean Toomer is best known as the author of Cane (1923), the most remarkable achievement ofthe Negro Renaissance. This highly imaginative, richly poetic work is a melange of fiction, poetry, and drama. Perhaps the fact that Cane transcends all

esthetic categories is symbolic of the author's desire to transcend all racial categories, and to speak in a purely personal voice. Light enough to pass, Toomer has been accused in some quarters of denying his Negro ancestry. It is a fact that he has been married twice, each time to a white woman, and has not maintained close ties with the Negro community since the late nineteen-twenties. It is equally clear, from Cane, that he has grappled courageously with the question ofhis Negro identity, at leastduring one period ofhis life.

Cane is a pilgrimage to Toomer's sources, an attempt to discover the meaning of the Negro past. It is not, however, to affirm his group tradition, but precisely to transcend it, that he undertakes this spiritual journey. Toomer goes to Georgia to confront the brute realities of slavery and to purge himself of shame. For in his bastard's soul, master and slave are wed forever. In the imagery of Cane, he projects this duality upon the Georgia countryside. Images of earth and sky, twilight and dawn, beauty and cruelty, provide contrasting pairs. Obsessed with his double identity, he strives to surmount it, to achieve an inner unity. To be an American Negro, he perceives, is to be split, divided, torn by inner conflict. And he resists this schism in the soul with all the means at his command.

Toomer's literary method flows directly from his deepest spiritual need. He turns to symbolism out of a desire for oneness, fusion, harmony. For the symbol has a mediating power; it is an instrument of synthesis, a means of unifying opposites. Thus the color symbolism in this central passage from his long poem, "Blue Meridian":

A strong yes, a strong no, With these we move and make drama, Yet say nothing of the goal.

Black is black, white is white, East is east, west is west, Is truth for the brain of contrasts; Yet here the high way of the third, The blue man, the purple man Foretold by ancient minds who knew, Not the place, not the name, But the resultant of yes and no Struggling for birth through ages.

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The regeneration of America, through each individual citizen and each constituent community, is the basic theme of "Blue Meridian." In accents reminiscent of Walt Whitman and Hart Crane, Toomer calls upon his countrymen to complete the myth of America, to fulfill the founding fathers' dream. If the original dream has been debased, the fault lies as much with the Negro's stubborn attachment to parochial values as with the white man's greed. If it is at last to be accomplished, a new synthesis of racial strains and cultural traditions will be required. The poet, meanwhile, speaks for the homo americanus of the future, refusing to submit to the indignity of a divided soul.

CoUNTEE CuLLEN, 1903-1946

He never spoke a word to me, And yet He called my name; He never gave a sign to me, And yet I knew and came.

At first I said, "I will not bear His cross upon my back; He only seeks to place it there Because my skin is black."

But He was dying for a dream, And He was very meek, And in His eyes there shone a gleam Men journey far to seek.

It was Himself my pity bought; I did for Christ alone What all of Rome could not have wrought With bruise of lash or stone.

- "Simon the Cyrenian Speaks"

The published works of Countee Cullen include five books of verse, two anthologies, one novel, a play, and two juveniles. Shame is the emotional center of his life and work. He was ashamed of his social origins, and deliberately concealed the circumstances of his birth and early childhood. He was ashamed of his ambiguous relations with his adopted father, the Rev. F. A. Cullen, who was pastor of a substantial Harlem church. He was ashamed of the failure of his first marriage and ofhis

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inability, partial or total, to lead a normal sexual life. But above all he was oppressed by the burden of his color, by the social shame of being black. So deep were his feelings of inferiority and self-contempt that he contemplated suicide on more than one occasion.

In his debilitating lack of self-esteem, Cullen embodies the social history of his race. For the chief psychological weapon of white supremacy has always been the systematic infliction of shame. Thus demoralized, the Negro personality is incapable of resistance or rebellion. The purgation of this shame was Cullen's bardic task. The initial thrust of his poetry is toward pride of self and pride of race, the first step in the rehabilitation of the Negro people. Racial pride, however, like racial hatred, is not without its hazards. If the process of selfmagnification is essentially unreal, the ego may retreat into a world of pure fantasya compensatory world with which the readers ofEbony will be sufficiently familiar.

The problem is especially acute for Negro Christians. Historically, there can be no doubt that Christianity has served the ends of white supremacy. The slave was expected to walk humbly with his master, as well as with his God. The New Negro of the nineteen-twenties rejected this demeaning conduct in the name of racial pride. But for the serious communicant, spiritual pride, of whatever origin, remained an obstacle to his salvation. Humility, after all, is a precondition of surrender to the will of God. The problem was to attain an authentic Christian humility which was sharply differentiated from the abject servility of slavery times.

It is to these problems that Countee Cullen's poetry is addressed. His early work is an affirmation of racial pride, and especially pride in the African heritage of the American Negro. America is portrayed as a cruel stepmother; Africa, as the Negro's motherland. The poet sings the glories of the African past, the superior beauty of black women, the regal grace still apparent in the descendants of African kings. He exalts the primitive and the exotic, finding in the Harlem cabaret, the tom-tom beat of the jazz band, and the

lascivious contortions of black dancing girls a delicious atavism, a frank abandonment to instinct and sensuality. Africa, in short, is a projection of Cullen's pagan self in conflict with his Christian education. There is in all of this an unconvincing ring. Cullen's racial pride seems rather an inversion than a transcendence of his shame. Sensing that the African mystique is an evasion, a barrier to his spiritual growth, the poet enters into a dialogue with Christ which culminates in his surrender. In a long poem called "The Black Christ," all elements of the unfolding dialectic are present in symbolic form. Jim's mother represents the traditional Christian faith of the Negro masses; she is one of the humble to whom much may be revealed that is hidden from the proud. Jim is an incarnation of the New Negro, whose whole being emanates pride of race and impatience with the yoke of white supremacy. The victim of a lynch mob, Cullen's hero relives the Crucifixion and experiences, in the midst of his torment, a mystical union with God.

JAMES WELDON JOHNSON, 1871-1938

And now, 0 Lord, this man of God, Who breaks the bread of life this morning-«

Shadow him in the hollow of thy hand, And keep him out of the gunshot of the devil.

Take him, Lord-this morningWash him with hyssop inside and out, Hang him up and drain him dry of sin, Pin his ear to the wisdom-post, And make his words sledge hammers of truth-

Beating on the iron heart of sin.

Lord God, this morningPut his eye to the telescope of eternity, And let him look upon the paper walls of time.

Lord, turpentine his imagination, Put perpetual motion in his arms, Fill him full of the dynamite of thy power, Anoint him all over with the oil of thy salvation, And set his tongue on fire.

-From "Listen, Lord"

James Weldon Johnson was a man of striking versatility, having been at various times a teacher, lawyer, diplomat, race leader, journalist, and song-writer. In addition to editing an anthology of Negro poetry and two collections of spirituals, he published three volumes of verse, a novel, and an autobiography. Johnson was of an older generation than his fellow poets of the Negro Renaissance. He was a contemporary of Dunbar, and his early work reveals the same desperate compromises with a hostile cultural tradition. Unlike Dunbar, Johnson lived to witness the rise of a new literary movement. The result was a somewhat disjointed career, for the value systems and literary conventions of the two eras could not be reconciled.

Ambivalence is the keynote of Johnson's career. It is the ambivalence of the Negro middle-class, at once drawn to and embarrassed by its folk origins. In his dialect verse, Johnson was quite capable ofslandering the Negro masses, but at the same time a subterranean passion for their folkways was apparent. In the altered climate of the postwar years, his interest in Negro folklore found a proper outlet; his systematic effort to rehabilitate the racial past was a major contribution to the Negro Renaissance. Johnson's feelings toward white civilization were ambivalent as well. In an early poem called "The White Witch," he warned against the seductive fascination of the dominant culture, thus anticipating the coming crisis of the Negro middle-class.

Johnson's ambivalence was not projected, like that of Countee Cullen, on a metaphysical plane. To Cullen, God Himself was sometimes white, sometimes black, according to the changing fortunes of his inner war. But Johnson was a lifelong agnostic who either maintained a discreet silence or concealed his true convictions behind a mask of piety. The result is a certain coldness of tone and a fatal loss of lyrical abandon. Even in his most impressive poems, the seven verse sermons of God's Trombones, the religious forms are emptied of their spiritual content and subordinated to anthropological and literary ends. From a safe distance, the poet renders homage to the Negro preacher, and

TRI-QUARTERLY 1191

attempts to preserve a dying folk art for posterity.

Nothing reveals Johnson's basic ambivalence more than his poetic diction. Fully a third of his first collection, Fifty Years and Other Poems (1917), was written in the dialect of the Dunbar school. Five years later, in the preface to his Book ofAmerican Negro Poetry, he condemns the use of dialect as compromising to the Negro's sense of dignity. The problem, however, was not dialect as such, but the degrading perspective in whose service it was traditionally employed. Liberated from that perspective, as the early Johnson definitely was not, Langston Hughes and Sterling Brown have written dialect pieces of substantial merit. Johnson's own approach, as embodied in God's Trombones (1927), was to write in standard English with a Negro flavor. This was the compromise of a divided man, who wished to retain a Negro sensibility, but to clothe it in the vestments of white respectability.

LANGSTON HUGHES, 1902-

I TRIED

LORD KNOWS I TRIED DAMBALLA

I PRAYED

LORD KNOWS I PRAYED

DADDY I CLIMBED UP THAT STEEP HILL THE VIRGIN WITH A CROSS

LORD KNOWS I CLIMBED BUT WHEN I GOT JOHN JASPER JESUS WHEN I GOT TO CALVARY UP THERE ON THAT HILL ALREADY THERE WAS THREEAND ONE, YES, ONE WAS BLACK AS ME

-From Ask Your Mama

Langston Hughes is by far the most prolific Negro poet, having published some thirteen volumes of verse, in addition to two novels, two collections of stories, a two-volumeautobiography,and threebooks

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featuring Simple, the comic but philosophic Harlemite-not to mention numerous plays, librettos, radio skits, translations, anthologies,juveniles, newspaper pieces, and magazine articles. Throughout his long career, Hughes has been primarily an interpreter of the Harlem scene. Closely attuned to the temper of the urban masses, he has turned for inspiration to their music. The world of jazz has supplied him with his social types and with his language (jive), with the forms and technical devices of his verse, and with a philosophy of life, a state of soul, a point of view that constantly conditions his poetic vision.

The shaping event in the life of Langston Hughes seems to have been his father's desertion of his mother and himself. As a young boy, he felt abandoned by his father, and in adolescence took revenge by a bitter rejection of his father's values. A successful businessman, the elder Hughes sent his son to Columbia University to prepare for a respectable career. But Hughes dropped out of college to explore Harlem, to ship out for Africa and Europe, and, in a crowning gesture of defiance, to become a poet. A pattern of rejection and retaliation was thus established. Scorned by society for the color ofhis skin, the poet would identify throughout his life with the weak and powerless, the exploited and oppressed-in short, with the abandoned child.

His career can best be understood as a series of inversions, or reversals, of conventional values. If the Negro poet of the nineteen-twenties remained a captive of the Genteel Tradition, Hughes would scandalize the Philistines with poems of Harlem life. If the Negro middle-class believed in its secret heart that white was right, he would glorify the color black. To Victorian prudery he would counterpose African primitivism; to the Protestant ethic, jazz exoticism; to world capitalism, Soviet Communism. On the metaphysical plane, his revolt was absolute. The black man in America had never been admitted to the communion of the saints. What fealty could he owe the white man's God?

Neither the racial romanticism of his early years nor the revolutionary politics of his middle period produced much poetry

of worth. Hughes will be remembered rather for his recent poems, deriving from the jazz tradition. Montage of a Dream Deferred(1951), whose theme is the frustration of the Harlem masses, borrows freely from the innovations of the bop musicians. Sudden shifts of key, unexpected chord progressions, impudent verbal interjections, and outrageous harmonies are transposed with varying success to the medium of verse. Ask Your Mama (1961) carries the principle of jazz experimentation to its utmost limit. This work is to Hughes' early poetry as Ornette Coleman is to Dixieland, and it makes similar demands upon its audience.

The central theme of Ask Your Mama is the rise of former colonial peoples to a new position of prominence in world affairs. This changing alignment of external forces is reflected in the soul of the poet, where a new serenity may be discerned. It is not that the poet has made his peace with God, but that God, by allowing the political situation to improve, has made the first move toward improved relations with the poet. Even so, the reconciliation is incomplete and is rendered psychologically endurable only by splitting the Deity in two. God the Father remains a hostile force (that is to say, white), but God the Son has now become approachable (that is to say, black). In this antagonism the poet projects the basic conflict of. his childhood and betrays the limits of his spiritual growth.

STERLING BROWN, 1901-

The devil is a rider In slouch hat and boots, Gun by his side, Bull whip in his hand, The devil is a rider; The rider is a devil Riding his buck stallion Over the land.

The poor-white and nigger sinners Are low-down in the valley, The rider is a devil And there's hell to pay; The devil is a rider, God may be the owner,

But he's rich and forgetful, And far away.

-"Arkansas Chant"

Poet and critic, editor and folklorist, college professor and New Deal functionary, Sterling Brown has moved with great aplomb through a variety of worlds. The common theme of his life and work has been the necessity for roots, for a strong identification with the Negro folk tradition. A connoisseur of jazz, a gifted humorist and raconteur, a master of the arts of recitation and of mime, he is the living embodiment of this tradition. As a poet, continuity with the Negro past has been his ruling passion. It is no accident that his single volume of verse is called Southern Road (1932). There, in the folk culture of the Southern Negro, and especially in his blues and ballads and prison songs, he has found his forms and themes, his language and his world-view.

The world of Sterling Brown's poetry is coextensive with the world of the blues. It is a hostile universe which at every moment threatens to overwhelm its occupants with violence and destruction. Flood and tornado, lynch mob and chain gang, poverty and ignorance, conspire to defeat the black man's hopes. Rebellion, while heroic, is also suicidal, for Negroes in the deep South face insuperable odds. In his personal as well as his political relations, the black man's life is grounded in frustration and despair. Sexually as well as economically, he leads a marginal existence. Unable to achieve a stable family life, he must depend on casual encounters more often marked by brutality and betrayal than by tenderness and trust.

In this bleak universe, barren even of human love, man must learn to live alone. If God exists, He is an absentee landlord, indifferent to the sufferings of his black share-croppers. Sterling Brown is more ruthless than his predecessors in eliminating spiritual forces from his universe. Rejecting Christian faith as an illusion, he puts his trust in the toughness, resourcefulness, and perseverance of the Negro people. Over the centuries they have developed tested methTRI-QUARTERLY

ods of survival: evade the blow if possible; cushion it with humor; bear it with a stoic calm. Above aU, they have had the courage to begin eternally again: "Guess we'll give it one mo' try." This Sisyphean courage, the poet seems to say, is what we have instead of God.

III.

To be conscious is not to be in time

But only in time can the moment in the rose-garden, The moment in the arbour where the rain beat, The moment in the draughty church at smokefall

Be remembered

Only through time time is conquered.

-T. S. Eliot

The time has come to exchange the role of collaborator for that of friendly critic. As we abandon the expository for the polemical mode, it may be well to reaffirm M. Wagner's achievement. Previous scholars in the field have concentrated on the racial attitudes of Negro poets. M. Wagner has demonstrated the interdependence of racial and religious feeling, and thereby has transformed the terms of the debate. Nevertheless, implicit in his work is a theory of culture which finally obscures his vision. The same religious sensibility that accounts for his most valuable insights also leads to serious distortions in his view of Negro poetry.

M. Wagner's angle of vision is European and Catholic. His theory of culture is therefore unitary. Deriving as it does from medieval models, it stresses oneness: one Church, one Truth, one God. To such a sensibility, the pluralism and multiplicity -in a word, the Protestantism-of the new world is an enigma. It can only appear as so many proliferating sects, attachment to which confirms the individual in his alienation from God. Transposed to the cultural plane, this view would hold that distinctive national or ethnic traditions are essentially parochial in character. They attempt, that is, to substitute the lesser for the greater

1941 TRI-QUARTERLY

good. Since the spiritual life alone can lay claim to universality, all "futile particularisms" must be abandoned before the soul can attain to oneness with God.

M. Wagner is troubled by the twoness, the duality that he encounters in the soul of the American Negro. Therefore his first epigraph from W. E. B. DuBois: "One ever feels his twoness-an American, a Negro: two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder." And therefore his second epigraph from Goethe:

Lasst aIle Volker unter gleichem Himmel Sich gleicher Farbe wohlgemut erfreun.

Here, in the root meaning of the word, is a catholic ideal. If only all men might dip their souls in the sky-blue tincture of the Infinite! To this end, M. Wagner recommends to Negro poets that they "abdicate their particularisms."

Implicit in this point ofview is an apriori rejection of, and even contempt for, Negro folk culture. Thus jazz is dismissed as the opiate of the urban masses, and the blues, as a music of despair. Folk humor is regarded as a spiritual evasion, unworthy of a serious poet. Language or verse forms of folk origin are to be eschewed, for they impose parochial habits of mind on their practitioners. This is the summary indictment of the "folklorists" by M. Wagner. When all allowances have been made, and every charity extended, these poets are seen as frivolous and shallow, spiritually passive and irresponsible, and diverted from the inner life by their stubborn commitment to the Negro past.

Behind these strictures, one comes to suspect a theological misconception. Here I must consult a Protestant theologia,n: it is a case of having to combat the Faithful with their own tools. In a recent book entitled The CelebrationofFlesh, Dr. Arthur McGill of Princeton University defends the place of poetry in Christian life. He sees it as a necessary corrective to "the constant tendency of Christians to evade rather than to celebrate their existence as flesh." Poetry, he insists, is the language of flesh.

As such, it is a source of embarrassment to those Christians who, out of spiritual pride, are tempted to evade their enfleshed condition. Such a Christian, disoriented by a false otherworldliness, "does not want to be an earthen vessel but a spiritual atmosphere."

"Yet in all this," Dr. McGill continues, "he reverses his true situation. His flesh as the realm of his weakness and mortality does not alienate him from God but draws him to God. Faith is confidence in God as the Lord of the here and now, as the One who became our flesh, who sustains our flesh, and who graces our flesh, so that He may finally glorify us in the flesh. Faith therefore gives men the freedom to be what they are, concrete mortal creatures openly engaged with the world" (my emphasis). In the miracle of Incarnation, man has a symbol of his own condition. We live on earth not in oneness, but in twoness-in a duality of flesh and spirit. We best fulfill our human destiny when these two aspects of our being remain in fruitful tension.

As with the coercions of the flesh, so with those of human culture. The same impatience, the same resentment, the same desire to be pure spirit, free ofall constraint, may lead the soul to reject the time and place and circumstances of its earthly origin. Thus Jean Toomer proclaims a false freedom: "I am of no particular race. I am ofthe human race I am of no particular region, I am of the earth." But to become incarnate is to enter time and space. No man is born in the nth century, in the town of Blank. He is always art Elizabethan Englishman, or a nineteenth-century Russian, or a contemporary American Negro. He who speaks of "the accident of color" denies the reality of flesh.

Moreover, if we speak of poets we must speak of language, and of its coercive impact on the human spirit. For speech is likewise of the tongue, the flesh. According to the theory of M. Wagner, the great Catholic epic of the middle ages ought to have been written in Latin, the universal language of the Church, of Holy Writ, and of the sacraments. But when the great poet actually appeared, he wrote in the vernacular, in Tuscan dialect at that! For Dante

was a Florentine, and like all great poets, thoroughly immersed in the culture of his time and place. Did Dante "abdicate his particularisms" in order to enter upon a dialogue with God? On the contrary, when he stepped into Eternity with Virgil, he found that certain citizens of Florence had preceded him, and they addressed the poet in the Tuscan tongue.

The point is that our bodies and our cultures and our native tongues impose upon us certain limits. These are the limits of the concrete and particular, in other words, of flesh. To be sure, the poet must strive against these limits and transcend them, if he would affirm a universal truth. To transcend, however, is to climb beyond, not to deny, reality. The word implies a dualism, a tension between climber and terrain. It confronts us with a paradox. Just as salvation of the soul is through the flesh, so salvation for the poet is through his particularity. In fruitful tension with his time and place, the poet attains his universal vision. Far from alienating him from God, his particular tradition is the poet'spathway to transcendent values.

In "Burnt Norton," T. S. Eliot distinguishes two pathways of the soul to God. One is the way of vacancy; the other, of plenitude. To empty the soul of all concreteness and particularity is the method of the saint and mystic. To fill the soul with sensuous delight, even to the point of ecstasy, is the method of the poet. That M. Wagner confuses the pathways of the poet and the saint is the final weakness of his book. For in emptying the soul of the Negro poet of its "futile particularisms," he would deprive him of the warmth and richness, the imaginative vigor, and the spiritual resources of his folk tradition. He would deprive him, in a word, of his identity-that sense of self which is the starting point of all surrender.

TRI-QUARTERLY /195

Tri-Quarterly INDEX

Numbers one through three, Fall 1964 to Spring 1965

KEY: A-Artwork; BR-Book Review; DDrama; E-Essay; Photo:-Photography; Trans - Translation; I-Interview; P-Poetry; S-Fiction. F-Fall 1964, W-Winter 1965, SSpring 1965.

ANDERSON, SHERWOOD P, W,64 American Spring Song

AKHMATOVA, ANNA

P, S, 118 Before the Spring, There Are Such Days To the Memory of V.S. Sreznevskaya (trans. Lydia Pasternak Slater)

B

BRAUTIGAN, RICHARD S, F, 62-7

A Confederate General From Big Sur

BONE, ROBERT A E, W, 3-20 The Novels of James Baldwin

BERRY, NEWTON

E, W,124-7

A Preface to the Death Fantasy Sequence from "Judgement Day"

BEAL, STEPHEN

P, W,60

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

BROWN, DEMING

Vasli Aksenov at 33

BRODSKY, JOSEPH

E, S, 75-83

P, S, 89-96

Elegy for John Donne '\ A Christmas Ballad I Untitled Poem r (trans. George Kline) Solitude J Sadly and Tenderly c

CANDELARIA, FREDERICK P, F, 61 Firs

CARTER, JOHN STEWART E, W,55-9

Poetry and The Hucksters

Elegy Written on the Leaning Tower

P, W, 86-124 Sands Street, Brooklyn Dimensions

Antiphon Klavierstuck P, S, 158-60

CHAADAYEV, PETER YAKOVLEVICH E, S, 45-9

Philosophical Letters (trans. Mary-Barbara Zeldin)

COOK, THOMAS I. BR, S, 173-80

Viereck Revisited: In Search of Continuity and Values

DOUGLAS, WALLACE E, W, 105-24 The Case of James T. Farrell

EEARLE, WILLIAM E, W,67-74 What is Man?

ETTER, DAVID PEARSON P, F, 68-68 Where I Am On the Courthouse Steps Moonflowers

March

Yoknapatawpha P, W, 141

EVTUSHENKO, EVGENY P, S, 55 A Talk Tenderness (trans. Lydia Pasternak Slater)

ENGLISH, MAURICE P, S, 161-3 Night Thoughts of Maybelle Revere

F

FIEDLER, LESLIE A E, F, 7-15 Poetry, Science and the End of Man

FARRELL, JAMES T S, W, 127-39 Fragmentsfrom the Unpublished Death Fantasy Sequence, of "Judgement Day" A Note on Future Plans E, W,139-40

FIELD, ANDREW E, S, 57-61 Marina Tsvetaeva's Poems to Blok

GGREER, SCOTT E, W, 80 The Third Culture and Self-fulfilling Prophecy

HHELLER, ERICH E, F, W, S Artist's Journey Into the Interior: Hegalian Prophecy F, 35-47 Hegel to Hamlet W, 37-49 Rilke S, 145-56

HENKIN, WILLIAM A P, F, 84 Kafkaball

HOUGHTON, NORRIS E, S, 139-43 Creativity and Control in Soviet Theater

·1

IKEMOTO, TAKASHI. Co-Trans, W, 30-5 Zen Anecdotes Shinkichi Takahashi: Three Poems

JORAVSKY, DAVID E, S, 119

The Silences of Academician Prianishinkov

K

KUE, LT E, S, 65

Creativity and Control in the Soviet Union

KAZAKOV, YURI. S, S, 129

A Place to Spend the Night (trans. Gabriella Azreal)

KLINE, GEORGE L. E, S, 85 Introduction to New Brodsky and Voznesensky Poems

KUMIN, MAXINE P, W, 62-63 August 9th t June 15th \ from the Joppa Diary

M

MICHELSON, PETER P, W, 65 Chicago Plainsong: A Requiem for Feces o

OKUDSHAVA, BULAT P, S, 74,143 The Painters (What I Love Best) [trans. Anselm Hollo1 p

POLLAK, FELlX P, W,61 Popular Song Critics' Critter

PATCHEN, KENNETH P, F, 78

A Portfolio of Picture Poems

PILLIN, WILLlAM P, F, 25 Space Music

PASTERNAK, BORIS E, P, S, 51-54

To Friends East and West A New Year's Greeting The Spring-It had Simply Been You The Patient Watches (trans. Nicholas and Lydia Pasternak Slater)

RREINSBERG, MARK E, F, 77

What Republicanism was in the Coming Electiou

RAHULA, WALPOLA E, W, 145

Buddhism in the Western World

ROTHENBERG, JEROME P, W,143

The Spare

STRYK, LUCIEN

'Let the Spring Breeze Enter' E, W, 21 Zen Anecdotes: Shinkichi Takahshi: Three Poems (vide supra) Co-Trans, W, 30-5 Crow P, F, 85-87

Hearn in Matsue

SINSABAUGH, ART Photo, W, 64

Midwest Landscapes

SCOTT, W. B E, W, 94

The Cypress Veil, Reflections on Translations of Eugene Onegin

SPENDER, STEPHEN E, W, 94 The Literary Mood of the 1930's

STIMSON, FREDERICK S E, F, 50

The Birds and the Bees: Modern Spanish-American Poetry

SNODGRASS, W. D Co-Trans, F, 33 Koz'ma Prutov : The Lady and the Tarantula Autumn

STAFFORD, WILLIAM P, F,47-49

From the Head Archer at Warwick Chronicler and Historian Isolationists Extended Haiku Exorcism

TRILLING, LIONEL E, F, 26 A Valedictory

TSVETAEVA, MARINA P, S, 62-64 Homesickness Two Untitled Poems (trans. Lydia Pasternak Slater) A Letter (trans. Denise Levertov)

TAVEL, RONALD P, W, 92, 142

James Rooks

Mario Lanza was a Relative of Mine

TOLSTOY, TANYA Co-Trans, F, 33 Koz'ma Prutkov (Vide Supra)

VIERECK, PETER E, S, 7

The Mob within the Heart: A New Russian Revolution Grace ofPine P, W, 85-86

VOZNESENSKY, ANDREI. P, S, 97-117 Oza

VEATCH, HENRY E, W,74 Two Cultures- Two Kinds of Knowledge

WHALEN, PHILIP P, W, 141 The Season

YEATS, J. B E, F, 70

On James Joyce: A Letter

TRI-QUARTERLY 197

On James T. Farrell

Gentlemen:

May 18, 1965

I was amazed to read, some time ago, in Tri-Quarterly that I had made my literary reputation by attacking James T. Farrell. This is the more amazing because it was said by Farrell himself, who ought to know better. If indeed I have thus made my literary reputation, then it is the quickest, easiest reputation ever made by man, in all history. I have reviewed two of Mr. Farrell's bookstwo. Hardly, I would think, sufficient basis on which to establish a reputation.

The puzzle is further deepened by the fact that I praised both of those books-"French Girls are Vicious" (short stories) in 1956, and "The Silence of History" (a novel) in 1963. I didn't say they were perfect books-what book is?-but in total I found them more rewarding than otherwise. Nowhere did I "attack" Mr. Farrell or his works-nowhere have I "attacked" them in a review or in any other form of communication. It happens that I admire Farrell-he's a pro, he keeps going-and like everybody I have my reservations about his recent work. I can only conclude that in his disappointment over the critical reception of some of his work, he has seized my weapon at hand and struck anybody within reach. I was standing there, I suppose, and got in the way.

But it's a slight wound, and the scar will not long linger. My hope now is that Farrell will return to his novels, which is where he belongs, and forget the critics, whom he doesn't need.

Yours truly, Hoke Norris

Dear Editor, I wonder if you would give me a few lines to correct an inaccurate statement by James T. Farrell in your Winter 1965 issue.

He lists me among the critics whose "reputations depend partially upon their hate of my books." I do not know what he can have in mind-except this: During the late 1940's I wrote for Partisan Review a brief, though admittedly, severe note on Farrell's literary criticism, which struck me as a crude effort to employ Marxist categories in discussing literature. Even in that piece there was not, I think, any "hate" of Farrell's books. Since then I have not published anything whatever about Farrell's work, so that I don't see on what basis he concluded that I "hate" his books, other than a need, perhaps, to think himself assaulted by critics. As it happens, I admire some of his novels, and others not.

Sincerely, Irving Howe

Aug. 20, 1965

In the article I tried to suggest-but too impressionistically, it seems-the great extent of Farrell's production. He wants it known that he has published precisely eighteen novels, twelve books of short stories, four books of essays and criticism, one humorous book, one book on Israel (called It Has Come to Pass), one book on baseball, and (the thirty-eighth book) a collection of poems. During the last decade he has been writing a great deal on politics in a variety of periodicals; for example, a series of articles in Asia between 1956 and 1958, unsigned editorials that appeared in "up to 120 country and small town newspapers," and critical pieces in Thought, which is an Indian publication, and Park East, a newspaper "Serving the 'Silk Stocking' District"-i.e. the Seventeenth Congressional District in New York, which includes Sutton Place, Beekman Place, and Grammercy Park, among other neighborhoods.

Since his fiftieth birthday (in 1955) Farrell has lectured at close to a hundred colleges and schools, including Agnes Irwin, in Bryn Mawr, Pa. (I regret having to use an approximate figure; Mr. Farrell's writing is somewhat obscure at times.)

To The Editors:

This is a sort of footnote to my article on James T. Farrell in the Winter issue of the Tri-Quarterly, I write it out of respect for Mr. Farrell, who has commented on the article at some length.

In addition to his questions about my factual accuracy, Mr. Farrell has some objections to my judgment of his latest novels, which are part of a series called "The Universe of Time," which will consist of "about 27 novels." I suggested some distaste for his new theme; Farrell tells me that he is "concerned with Time in a number of ways." I take it that one of the ways is philosophical. I also suggested that his present fascination by Time must be characteristic of a later Farrell. I think Farrell would rather have his work seen as a single whole. I have to say, however, that I see a very sharp and decisive difference between the novels that reflect Farrell's announced interest in Time and those earlier ones that grew out of his deepest feelings. It was to point up this difference that I called attention to a bookish quality in the hero of The Silence of History and cited, in support, his comments on Napoleon, which struck me as expressing attitudes typical of the literary or humanistic tradition. Since, as Farrell tells me, Charles A. Beard praised an essay of his on Napoleon, perhaps I should revise my opinion ofEddy Ryan's lucubrations. It was to emphasize the change in Farrell's ideological position that I mentioned his reading of Yeats, unfortunately in a way that suggested that he had only lately taken it up. Farrell began reading Yeats, he says, in 1927; and I am happy to make that clear. But I was thinking of Yeats as a kind of symbol, or at least a sign, of the value system of Farrell's latest work. I had in mind the attitudes embodied in the lines from "The Second Coming" about anarchy being loosed upon the world and the "ceremony of innocence" being drowned. And whenever he began to read Yeats, it seems to me clear that the early Farrell certainly didn't "use," was not respon-

sive to, such dour and blind frustration as those lines express.

Mr. Farrell has other objections to my article (such as my use of the word keening in relation to the grandmothers of Eddy Ryan and Danny O'Neill), but I shall comment on only one of them. Mr. Farrell takes exception to the second last sentence of my text. I wrote: "We are as little interested in understanding [the forces that shape society] as we are unready to listen to Farrell I supposed that the construction implied, indeed expressed, my regret at the attitudes, now so prevalent among academics and critics of the humanist persuasion, that, for similar reasons, condemn Farrell to inconsequence and human beings to perpetual poverty and oppression. I am sorry that my intent was not clear. It is wrong to ignore Farrell. It is also wrong to ignore what he once called "conditions which brutalize human beings and produce spiritual and material poverty."

Yours sincerely, Wallace W. Douglas

Sirs:

July 22, 1965

Accepting the fact that I wrote "partially make a reputation," I apologize for my unintentional side swipe at Irving Howe and Hoke Norris. When I apologize, I do so unconditionally. I refrain from any comment about what Irving Howe and Hoke Norris have said about my writings.

Sincerely yours, James T. Farrell P.S.

Please, friends and others, forget the notion that I care if I am disliked. I don't read all reviews of my work. If I happen on one, I read it until there is fuzziness or foolishness in the writing, then I put it aside. In the more distant past, I have received more angry receptions than in the 60's. During the 30's Life Magazine called me the worst writer in America-it remains a distinction.

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