American Writers Supplement I, Parts 1 & 2

AMERICAN WRITERS SUPPLEMENT I, Part 1 Jane Addams to Sidney Lanier SUPPLEMENT I, Part 2 Vachel Lindsay to Elinor Wylie

AMERICAN WRITERS A Collection of Literary Biographies LEONARD UNGER Editor in Chief SUPPLEMENT I, Part l Jane Addams to Sidney Lanier

SUPPLEMENT1,Part 2 Vachel Lindsay to Elinor Wylie Charles Scribner's Sons Macmillan Library Reference USA NEW YORK

Copyright © 1979 Charles Scribner's Sons 1633 Broadway New York, NY 10019-6785 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without the permission of Charles Scribner's Sons Printed in the United States of America. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Main entry under title: American writers. The 4-voL set consists of 97 of the pamphlets originally published as the University of Minnesota pamphlets on American writers; some have been rev. and updated. Includes bibliographies. CONTENTS: v. I. Henry Adams to T. S. Eliot, etc. PS129.A55 810'.9 [BJ 73-1759 ISBN 0-684-16104-4 (Set) ISBN 0-684-13676-7 (Vol. IV) ISBN 0-684-13673-2 (Vol. I) ISBN 0-684-15797-7 (Supp. I) ISBN 0-684-13674-0 (Vol. II) ISBN 0-684-16482-5 (Supp. II) ISBN 0-684-13675-9 (Vol. Ill) V/C

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by Selden Rodman and a review by Richard Eberhart in the New York Times, copyright 1946, 1955 by The New York Times Company, reprinted with permission; from a review by Lisel Mueller in Poetry, copyright © 1966, by permission of Poetry; from an interview by Ashley Brown, copyright © 1966 by Washington and Lee University, reprinted from Shenandoah: The Washington and Lee University Review, with the permission of the Editor.

Acknowledgment is gratefully made to those publishers and individuals who have permitted the use of the following materials in copyright. "Jane Addams" from The Settlement Horizon: A National Estimate, by Robert A. Woods and Albert J. Kennedy, copyright 1922 by the Russell Sage Foundation, New York ''James Baldwin'' from James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son, copyright 1955, Giovanni's Room, copyright 1956, Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of a Native Son, copyright © 1961, Another Country, copyright © 1962, The Fire Next Time, copyright © 1963, Blues for Mister Charlie, copyright © 1964, Going to Meet the Man, copyright © 1965, The Amen Corner, copyright © 1968, Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone, copyright © 1968, No Name in the Street, copyright© 1972,lf Beate Street Could Talk, copyright© 1974, by permission of The Dial Press; from The Furious Passage of James Baldwin by Fern Marja Eekman. Copyright © 1966 by Fern Marja Eckman. Reprinted by permission of M. Evans and Company, Inc., and Michael Joseph Ltd.

"Anne Bradstreet" from Roy Harvey Pearce, The Continuity of American Poetry, copyright © 1961 by Princeton University Press, reprinted by permission "John Cheever'' from John Cheever, The Wapshot Chronicle, copyright © 1957, and The Wapshot Scandal, copyright © 1964, by permission of John Cheever and the New Yorker; from Bullet Park, copyright © 1969, by permission of John Cheever and Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.; from Scott Donaldson in The Changing Face of the Suburbs, edited by Barry Schwartz, copyright © 1975, by permission of the University of Chicago Press "Kate Chopin" from Daniel S. Rankin, Kate Chopin and Her Creole Stories, copyright 1932, by permission of the University of Pennsylvania Press; from Per Seyersted, Kate Chopin: A Critical Biography, by permission of Universitetsforlaget, Oslo, Norway

"Elizabeth Bishop" from The Complete Poems, copyright© 1936, 1937, 1944, 1946, 1947, 1948, 1949, 1956, 1960, 1962, 1969 by Elizabeth Bishop, with permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc., copyright renewed © 1971, 1973, 1974, 1976 by Elizabeth Bishop; from Questions of Travel, copyright © 1953, by Elizabeth Bishop; from Geography ///. Copyright © 1972, 1976 by Elizabeth Bishop. Reprinted with the permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc.; from a review

"Hilda Doolittle1' from H. D., The Hedgehog. All rights reserved. From Collected Poems ofH. D., copyright© 1925, 1953 by Nor-

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sion of The Viking Press Inc. From Another Part of the Forest. Copyright 1946 by Lillian Hellman as an unpublished work. Copyright 1947 by Lillian Hellman. Reprinted by permission of The Viking Press Inc. Selections from An Unfinished Woman, Copyright © 1969 by Lillian Hellman; Pentimento: A Book of Portraits, Copyright © 1973 by Lillian Hellman; Scoundrel Time, Copyright © 1976 by Lillian Hellman. Reprinted by permission of Little, Brown and Company. From Montserrat. Copyright 1949 by Lillian Hellman as an unpublished work. Copyright 1950 by Lillian Hellman. Reprinted by permission of the Harold Matson Company, Inc. From The Autumn Garden. Copyright 1951 by Lillian Hellman. Reprinted by permission of the Harold Matson Company, Inc.

man Holmes Pearson. H. D., Bid Me to Live. All rights reserved. H. D., Red Roses for Bronze, copyright© 1929, 1931 by Norman Holmes Pearson. H. D., Trilogy, copyright 1944 by Oxford University Press. Copyright © 1972 by Norman Holmes Pearson. H. D., Hermetic Definition, copyright © 1961, 1972 by Norman Holmes Pearson. H. D., Helen in Egypt, copyright © 1961 by New Directions Publishing Corporation. From Ezra Pound, Poetry 1.4 (January 1913). All rights reserved. From Ezra Pound, Poetry 1.6 (March 1913). All rights reserved. From Ezra Pound. Personae. Copyright 1926 by Ezra Pound. From New Directions #16, copyright © 1957 by New Directions Publishing Corporation. All reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation. From letter to John Cournos, July 9, 1918, by permission of Perdita Macpherson Schaffner and the Houghton Library, Harvard University; from "End to Torment," by permission of Perdita Macpherson Schaffner and the Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. The author extends special thanks to Mrs. Schaffner and the staffs of the Houghton Library, Harvard University, and Beinecke Library, Yale University, for their assistance. From A Passionate Prodigality: Letters to Alan Bird from Richard Aldington, 1949-1962, edited by Miriam J. Benkovitz, copyright © 1975 The New York Public Library and Readex Books, reprinted with permission. From "In Defense of Reason" © 1947 Yvor Winters, reprinted by permission of The Swallow Press, Chicago. From Donald Carne-Ross, 'Translation and Transposition" in Craft & Context of Translation, edited by William Arrowsmith and R. Shattuck, by permission of Donald Carne-Ross

"Oliver Wendell Holmes" from Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams: An Autobiography, copyright 1946 by Charles F. Adams, by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company "Langston Hughes" from Fine Clothes to the Jew, copyright © 1927 by Langston Hughes. Renewed. Reprinted by permission of Harold Ober Associates Inc.; Langston Hughes, Not Without Laughter, copyright 1930, by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.; Langston Hughes, The Dream Keeper and Other Poems, copyright 1932, by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.; Langston Hughes, The Ways of White Folks, copyright 1934, by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., and George Allen & Unwin Ltd. Reprinted with the permission of Hill and Wang (now a division of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc.) from The Big Sea by Langston Hughes, Copyright 1940 by Langston Hughes, and with the permission of Harold Ober Associates Inc. Selections from The Best of Simple by Langston Hughes. Copyright© 1961 by Langston Hughes. Reprinted with the permission of Hill and Wang (now a division of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc.). Selected Poems of Langston Hughes, copyright © 1959, by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.; Langston Hughes, Ask Your Mama: 12 Moods for Jazz, copyright© 1961, by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., and Harold Ober Associates Inc.; Langston Hughes, The Panther and the Lash, copyright © 1967, by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., and Harold Ober Associates Inc.; Langston Hughes, Black Misery, copyright © 1969, by permission of Paul S. Eriksson; Langston Hughes, "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain," The Nation, 23 June 1926, by permission of The Nation

"Lillian Hellman" from The Children's Hour. Copyright 1934 by Lillian Hellman; copyright renewed © 1961 by Lillian Hellman. From Days to Come. Copyright 1936 by Lillian Hellman; copyright renewed © 1964 by Lillian Hellman. From The Little Foxes. Copyright 1939 by Lillian Hellman; copyright renewed © 1966 by Lillian Hellman. From Watch on the Rhine. Copyright 1941 by Lillian Hellman; copyright renewed © 1968 by Lillian Hellman. From The Lark. Copyright © 1955 by Lillian Hellman as an unpublished work. Copyright © 1956 by Lillian Hellman. From Candide. Copyright © 1957 by Lillian Hellman. Copyright © 1955, 1957 by Leonard Bernstein. From Toys in the Attic. Copyright © 1959 by Lillian Hellman as an unpublished work. Copyright © 1960 by Lillian Hellman. From My Mother, My Father and Me. Copyright © 1963 by Lillian Hellman. All selections from these works reprinted with the permission of Random House, Inc. From The North Star. Copyright 1943 by Lillian Hellman. Reprinted by permission of The Viking Press Inc. From The Searching Wind. Copyright 1944 by Lillian Hellman; copyright renewed © 1971 by Lillian Hellman. Reprinted by permis-

"Sidney Lanier" from Centennial Edition of the Works of Sidney Lanier, edited by Charles R. Anderson, copyright 1945, by permission of The Johns Hopkins University Press; from Aubrey H. Starke, Sidney Lanier: A Biographical and Critical Study, copyright 1933, by permission of The University of North Carolina Press

ill

Introduction

For a general account of the essays contained in American Writers, the reader is referred to the Introduction to the four volumes that were published in 1974. Much of what is said there about the essays, and about the subject of American writers and American literature, applies as well to these new essays—all published here for the first time. Just as this volume is a Supplement to the earlier volumes, so is this Introduction a supplement to the earlier one. This present volume is a Supplement in the obvious respect that it provides essays on subjects not covered in the first volumes. Some of these subjects are missing there and present here for a variety of reasons. For example, in the course of soliciting the earlier essays, some subjects were delayed because of critical prejudice arising from the fact that they had once been overrated, so that delay (resulting in omission) was felt to be a justifiable * 'corrective." Such subjects were specifically what one of the present essayists calls the *'schoolroom poets," those bearded trinominals of the nineteenth century who were so much a part of the culture and the education of early generations of the twentieth century: William Cullen Bryant, Oliver Wendell Holmes, James Russell Lowell, John Greenleaf Whittier. I suspect it was felt that these writers were well enough represented for the time being by the inclusion of Henry Wads worth Longfellow. I was in part responsible for the delay, so I speak for myself, although I have the impression there was consensus on this matter. But in this Supplement the "corrective" is corrected and the old favorites named above, as well as others, are included. Since the years during which the essays of American Writers were written, there have been changes in critical perspectives, including some of my own, and these changes affect editorial purposes and practices. The largest part of American literature has been written and published in the twentieth century. This fact is reflected by the large number of essays devoted to twentieth-century writers, many of them at this time still in full career or barely yet elders of the world of letters. But a substantial number of these are no longer among the living, and in that respect they are writers of the past. In this Supplement the majority of the essays are on writers of the past—of "past" lives and past centuries. A few writers, "alive and well," have been included for a number of reasons—because they are important writers, because they give balance and continuity to this Supplement, and because they give the Supplement a measure of correspondence with the earlier volumes. The essays of those volumes span American history from

colonial times to our own, and so do the essays of the Supplement. For that reason the Supplement provides a highly selective example of the course of American literature from the beginning to the present and shows different writers at different stages of history dealing with the essentially American subject of national identity—which for some writers is also the subject of individual identity. Among the essays here, identity, whether national or individual or both, is a subject, in the writings of Crevecoeur, Tom Paine, Thorstein Veblen, Langston Hughes, Sylvia Plath, and others. These names, selected first to illustrate one point, readily illustrate a number of others as well. Like other early American writers, Crevecoeur and Paine were born in Europe— one in France and the other in England. Like an impressive number of writers of the twentieth century, Veblen and Plath are first generation Americans. Hughes, the black writer, has an American family lineage longer than many other writers of the twentieth century. Crevecoeur, Paine, and Veblen were not writers of what is generally considered literature, not belletristic writers, for they produced no novels, poems, or plays. It was not their intention to be literary artists nor did they employ any of the forms of literary art to serve their interests and purposes. Their being included here implies the view that writers are not exclusively belletristic and that literature has a large and inclusive meaning, referring finally to all forms of writing, as it refers also to the continuity of human experience and human history. This Supplement, in greater degree even than the earlier volumes, includes writers who are not literary in the narrow sense, or who are not primarily literary—Jane Addams, Samuel Eliot Morison, in addition to those already mentioned. No major writers of the past were omitted from earlier volumes—Melville, Hawthorne, Emerson, Whitman, Dickinson, Twain, James, and others are all there. But there are writers who are considered important and distinguished without being seen in the category of major writers, and sometimes such writers are only newly recognized as having an aspect and a measure of importance and are therefore welcomed into the legacy of our national literature, to be reprinted, read, studied, and thus elevated or restored. Charles Brockden Brown and Kate Chopin are such writers. Other writers have long been famous, or at least known and remembered, but acquire new and different significance as we come to see them in new perspectives. Anne Bradstreet, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Louisa May Alcott are of this kind. One of the purposes of this Supplement is to call attention to writers in whom there is a renewed interest, to

iv

INTRODUCTION provide introductions to the writers, to their work, and to the critical perspectives by which they are interpreted and evaluated. Although the earlier volumes of American Writers were definitive with respect to including major writers (and specifically belletristic writers), it was acknowledged that among other writers, some were included and some were not for reasons that may be generally described as happenstance. This is true of the Supplement. Most of the essays are on subjects determined in advance and are written by the authors originally invited to do them. In a few cases, essays were accepted from authors who volunteered to write on particular subjects, while some were regretfully declined for a variety of reasons, mainly because there had to be a limit to the projected size of the Supplement. In a very few cases essays were expected but never delivered because of unforeseen personal circumstances. Essentially the Supplement is what it was intended to be. It extends the earlier volumes throughout the broad range of American literature, historically and generically, so that it has an integrity in regard to range. As already stated, I have been concerned to represent writing other than belletristic. At certain early stages of my editorial enterprise, I was advised or urged to include even more living writers, even more colonial writers, even more black writers, even more women writers. These categories are not coordinate or mutually exclusive, but they do represent real and justifiable grounds of persuasion—but if any one persuasion were to prevail, this volume would not be a true supplement to American Writers, but rather a wholly specialized addendum—or one among such classes of useful books as colonial studies, modern studies, black studies, women's studies, and so on. It was, however, my intention from the start that black writers and women writers should be present

I v

in the Supplement in greater proportion than they are in the earlier volumes, in accordance with perspectives and sensibilities that attend more recent times and correct earlier times. This intention, although affected by unforeseen developments and happenstance, has been achieved in some measure—although I am unable to say what the ideal measure would be. It was my intention also that essays on black writers would be written by black scholars and critics, that essays on women writers would be written by women scholars and critics. As it turns out, there are some exceptions to this policy, but such essays justify themselves by their own terms and their own merit. If there is an ideal scheme for such matters, I propose that it is more closely approached and more truly served when the timeless truth of a common humanity is not obscured by rigid groupings— and when the acknowledged reality of groupings (sexual, racial, and otherwise) in no way obscures the fact of individuality, the differences and likenesses that reach beyond groupings but that can never outreach our common humanity. There are differences, of course, among these essays— differences in style, organization, emphasis, critical principle, ideological position, personal taste, and so on. The essays furnish factual information, and they also offer interpretations, evaluation, judgment, opinion, taste. In their kinds of performance, the essays are no less various than in their kinds of subjects. Although for the earlier volumes a single author wrote two or three essays, all essays of this Supplement are written by "new" authors and each essay by a different author. This volume is thus a supplement in respect to subjects, and also in respect to a variety of performances. —LEONARD VNGER

Editorial Staff

MARSHALL DE BRUHL, MANAGING EDITOR G. MICHAEL McGiNLEY, Assistant Managing Editor FREDERIC C. BEIL III, Associate Editor DAVID WILLIAM VOORHEES, Associate Editor CHRISTIANE L. DESCHAMPS, Editorial Assistant LESLIE C. HENDERSON, Editorial Assistant ELIZABETH I. WILSON, Associate Editor JOEL HONIG, Associate Editor HELEN CHUMBLEY, Proofreader NORM A FRANKEL, Proofreader PAULINE PIEKARZ, Proofreader KAREN READY, Proofreader CATHERINE W. RILEY, Proofreader CLAIRE SOTNICK, Proofreader JOYCE ANNE HOUSTON, Indexer

List of Subjects

Part 2

Part 1 JANE ADDAMS Clarke Chambers

1

LOUISA MAY ALCOTT Ann Douglas

28

JAMES BALDWIN Keneth Kinnamon

47

ELIZABETH BISHOP John E. Unterecker

72

ANNE BRADSTREET Cheryl Walker

98

VACHEL LINDSAY Jay R. Balder son

374

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL Walter Blair

404

BERNARD MALAMUD Robert Solotaroff

427

EDGAR LEE MASTERS Linda W. Wagner

454 479

CHARLES BROCKDEN BROWN Emory B. Elliott

124

SAMUEL ELIOT MORISON David Herold

501

WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT Donald A. Ringe

150

THOMAS PAINE Michael D. True

174

SYLVIA PLATH Lonna M. Malmsheimer

526

JOHN CHEEVER Scott Donaldson

550

KATE CHOPIN Cynthia Griffin Wolff

200

ADRIENNE RICH Wendy Martin

M.-G. JEAN de CREVECOEUR Chadwick Hansen

227

HARRIET BEECHER STOWE Paul David Johnson

579

HILDA DOOLITTLE Peter E. Firchow

253

JAMES THURBER Robert E. Morsberger

602

LILLIAN HELLMAN Bernard F. Dick

276

THORSTEIN VEBLEN John P. Diggins

628

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES Thomas R. Wortham

299

E. B. WHITE Barbara J, Rogers

651

LANGSTON HUGHES Donald C. Dickinson

320

JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER John B. Pickard

682

SIDNEY LANIER Thomas Daniel Young

349

ELINOR WYLIE Josephine O'Brien Schaefer

707

List of Contributors

Listed below are the contributors to American Writers, Supplement I. Each author's name is followed by his institutional affiliation at the time of publication, titles of books written, and tide of essay written for the Supplement.

DAVID HEROLD. Assistant Professor of the Master of Science Program in Public Information, American University. Samuel Eliot Morison. PAUL DAVID JOHNSON. Assistant Professor of English, Wabash College. Harriet Beecher Stowe.

JAY R. BALDERSON. Assistant Professor of English, Western Illinois University. Vachel Lindsay.

KENETH KINNAMON. Professor of English, University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana. Author of The Emergence of Richard Wright: A Study in Literature and Society; co-editor of Black Writers of America: A Comprehensive Anthology; editor of James Baldwin: A Collection of Critical Essays. James Baldwin.

WALTER BLAIR. Professor Emeritus of English, University of Chicago. Books include Native American Humor; Horse Sense in American Humor; Mark Twain andHuck Finn; Mark Twain1 s Hannibal, Huck and Tom; A Man's Voice, Speaking: A Continuum in American Humor; Veins of Humor for Harvard English Studies. Co-editor of Herman Melville. James Russell Lowell.

LONNA M. MALMSHEIMER. Associate Professor and Director of American Studies, Dickinson College. Sylvia Plath.

CLARKE CHAMBERS. Professor of History, University of Minnesota. Jane Addams.

WENDY MARTIN. Professor of English, Queens College. Editor of The American Sisterhood: Feminist Writings from the Colonial Times to the Present; Women's Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal. Adrienne Rich.

BERNARD F. DICK. Professor and Chairman, Department of English, Fairleigh Dickinson University. Books include William Golding; The Hellenism of Mary Renault; The Apostate Angel; A Critical Study of Gore Vidal; The Technique of Prophecy in Lucan. Lillian Hell man.

ROBERT E. MORSBERGER. Professor of English, California State Polytechnic University. Author of James Thurber and The Language of Composition; co-author of Commonsense Grammar and Style; editor of Essays in Exposition: An International Reader. James Thurber.

DONALD C. DICKINSON. Director of the Graduate Library School, University of Arizona. Author of A Bio-bibliography of Langston Hughes, 1902-1967. Langston Hughes.

JOHN B. PICKARD. Professor of English, University of Florida. Books include John Greenleaf Whittier: An Introduction and Interpretation; Emily Dickinson: An Introduction and Interpretation; Memorabilia of John Greenleaf Whittier. Editor of The Letters of John Greenleaf Whittier (3 volumes). John Greenleaf Whittier.

JOHN P. DIGGINS. Professor of History, University of California at Irvine. Author of The American Left in the Twentieth Century. Thorstein Veblen. SCOTT DONALDSON. Associate Professor of English, College of William and Mary. Books include The Suburban Myth; Poet in America: Winfield Townley Scon. John Cheever.

DONALD A. RINGE. Professor of English, University of Kentucky. Books include James Fenimore Cooper; Charles Brockden Brown; The Pictorial Mode: Space and Time in the Art of Bryant, Irving, and Cooper. William Cullen Bryant.

ANN DOUGLAS. Assistant Professor of English, Columbia University. Author of The Feminization of America. Louisa May Alcott.

BARBARA J. ROGERS. E. B. White

EMORY B. ELLIOTT. Associate Professor of English and Chairman of American Studies Program, Princeton University. Author of Power and the Pulpit in Puritan New England; editor of Puritan Influences in American Literature. Charles Brockden Brown.

JOSEPHINE O'BRIEN SCHAEFER. Professor of English, University of Pittsburgh. Author of The Three-Fold Nature of Reality in the Novels of Virginia Woolf. Elinor Wylie. ROBERT SOLOTAROFF. Associate Professor of English, University of Minnesota. Author of Down Mailer1 s Way. Bernard Malamud.

PETER E. FIRCHOW. Professor of English and Comparative Literature, University of Minnesota. Author of Aldous Huxley, Satirist and Novelist; editor ofFriedrich Schlegel's Lucinde and the Fragments. Hilda Doolittle.

MICHAEL D. TRUE. Associate Professor of English, Assumption College. Author of Worcester Poets: With Notes Toward a Literary History. Thomas Paine.

CHADWICK HANSEN. Professor of English, University of Illinois at Chicago Circle. Co-author of Modern Fiction: Form and Idea in the Contemporary Novel and Short Story and of The American Renaissance: The History and Literature of an Era; Witchcraft at Salem. Michel-Guillaume Jean de Crevecoeur.

JOHN E. UNTERECKER. Professor of English, University of Hawaii at Manoa. Books include A Reader's Guide to William Butler Yeats; Yeats, A Collection of Critical Essays; Lawrence Durrell; Yeats and Patrick McCartan, A Fenian Friendship; Voyager: A Vlll

LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS I ix Life of Hart Crane. Editor of Approaches to the Twentieth-Century Novel; co-editor of Yeats, Joyce, Beckett. Elizabeth Bishop.

Eighteenth-Century Puritan Character; Other Lives; A Feast of Words. Kate Chopin.

LINDA W. WAGNER. Professor of English, Michigan State University. Books include The Poems of William Carlos Williams; Ernest Hemingway: Five Decades of Critcism; T. S. Eliot. Editor of William Faulkner: Four Decades of Criticism. Edgar Lee Masters.

THOMAS R. WORTHAM. Assistant Professor of English, University of California at Los Angeles. Co-editor of Literary Friends and Acquaintance, vol. 32 in A Selected Edition of William Dean Howells. Oliver Wendell Holmes.

CHERYL WALKER. Assistant Professor of English, Scripps College. Anne Bradstreet. CYNTHIA GRIFFIN WOLFF. Associate Professor of English, University of Massachusetts. Books include Samuel Richardson and the

THOMAS DANIEL YOUNG. Professor of English, Vanderbilt University. Author of John Crowe Ransom: Critical Essays and a Bibliography and John Crowe Ransom: A Critical Introduction; co-author of Donald Davidson: An Essay and a Bibliography. Co-editor of The Literature of the South, The Literary Correspondence of Donald Davidson and Allen Tale, and American Literature: A Critical Survey. Sidney Lanier.

Jane Addams 1860-1935

MORE than a century since her birth on Sep-

for many years president of the National Federation of Settlements. She seconded the nomination of Theodore Roosevelt on the Progressive ticket in 1912 and drew an ovation and acclaim second only to his. The concerns that Addams addressed stood at the heart of progressive America: public health; housing; social insurance; the multiple exploitations of an industrial system; education; parks and playgrounds; recreation and play; free speech; the rights and needs of women, children, blacks, and immigrants; world peace; prostitution. On all these pressing social issues she had something to say, and many things to do; and the word, spoken and written, gave weight to the deed. In fact, her skill with words constituted a major source of her enormous influence in private circles and in public spheres. Allen Davis, in his masterful biography, American Heroine: The Life and Legend of Jane Addams, has documented the administrative and political talents that she employed to create and sustain the Hull-House Settlement. Addams knew how to raise money, and how to compose and manipulate boards and committees. She knew where the lines of social and civic influence ran, and how to channel them to the advantage of the institutions and causes she directed. Her skill as a manager drew in substantial part on her genius for compromise and conciliation; she

tember 6, 1860, and more than forty years after her death on May 21, 1935, it is still difficult to assess the authority that Jane Addams carried in American life during the years—beginning with the founding of Hull-House in 1889—when she was the country's most prominent, and probably its most beloved, heroine. There were many personae: settlement house pioneer, social reformer, civic leader, feminist, suffragist, civil libertarian, pacifist. To her intimate associates she was "Beloved Lady," the woman to whom they turned for inspiration and guidance, for moral support and comfort. No reform association was complete without her name on the letterhead and her presence at its board meetings—the National Consumers' League, the National Child Labor Committee, the National Playground Association, Survey Associates, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the National Urban League, the Juvenile Protective Association, the Immigrants' Protective League, the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, the American Civil Liberties Union (to cite only the most obvious). Very early in Addams' career delegates to the annual meetings of the National Conference of Charities and Correction (later the National Conference of Social Work) waited on her words; she was founder and

/

2 / AMERICAN could identify common ground and persuade opposing factions to join common efforts. If many perceived Addams as both priest and prophet, close associates appreciated as well her practical bent for organization, for holding together a coalition, for advancing a program. But whatever the task, the force of personality expressed itself through words; and it is her authority as orator and author that this essay will address. Born in Cedarville, Illinois, in the year of Lincoln's election to the presidency, Addams learned from her father, John Huy Addams, the principles that underlay village democracy in the mid-nineteenth century—or at least those ideals that informed a prospering and solid entrepreneurial and professional class—hard work, fair play, neighborliness, ambition, concern for others (always including the "less fortunate," as the unlucky or the improvident were known), simple honesty, straightforward dealings, the lightness of property (the rights and the responsibilities of the propertied), an equal chance. Although churchgoing on the sabbath was an accepted and expected ritual, John Addams, a successful lawyer, politician, and businessman (he owned a prosperous mill), was not a churchly man (he did, however, profess a personal faith in God); and his daughter's ybuthful search for religious truth never moved much beyond the social ethic of the Good Samaritan, the Golden Rule, and the spiritual example of Jesus. Although her writings, especially in the early years, often referred to a Christian tradition and ethos, it was a social gospel, and not theology, that moved her. Her father remained the chief influence in Addams' early childhood, and it was his values and conscience that she made her own. And when, in Chicago, she apparently was offered an inducement (the promise of $20,000 for Hull-House) for a political act, she trembled with chagrin, for her father's upright reputation had been such that no one had dared even approach him with a con-

WRITERS sideration or a bribe. Indeed, all her models were male heroes: Lincoln, whose example she held the same as her father's, if more remote; Giuseppe Mazzini, of whom she first learned from her father, and whose struggle for national independence she admired; Ralph Waldo Emerson, John Ruskin, Robert Browning, and Thomas Carlyle, from whose aesthetic and moral ideals she drew inspiration; Canon Samuel Barnett, from whose strategy at Toynbee Hall she borrowed; and, a bit later, Leo Tolstoy, exemplar of the "sermon of the deed" whose strength had come from the act of putting himself ' 'into right relations with the humblest people." As for her mother, Sarah Weber, who died following childbirth when Addams was two, and her stepmother, Anna Haldeman, an intelligent, cultured widow whom John Addams had married six years after the death of his first wife, Addams records but one sentence, although it is likely that the imperious second Mrs. Addams exerted great influence: "My mother had died when I was a baby and my father's second marriage did not occur until my eighth year." At Rockford College, Addams accepted the discipline of a classical liberal education deemed fitting for the daughters of substantial families. Whatever subtle and profound influences those four years may have exerted, she recalled the school's "atmosphere of intensity"; its encouragement of personal evangelism (a pressure to declare for Christ that she successfully resisted); the wide-ranging study of history, the classics, basic natural sciences, fine literature; and, perhaps most important for her later growth as a feminist, a sense of fellowship with like-minded young women, associated with a feeling for community that arose from shared experience. The exposure to a variety of devoutly held ideals and perceptions, received from instructors and from books, strengthened the innate skepticism that from early years was so central a part of Addams' attitude toward the world of ideas and ab-

JANE ADDAMS I 3 stractions, and taught her to seek out practical courses in a "wilderness of dogma." Her suspicion of systems of revealed and directed truth readied her for the pragmatic strategies of John Dewey and William James when she came upon them later, and was a source as well of her determination at Hull-House to open the settlement's forums to persons of radical and contesting persuasions. The realization of impact came later, of course; and in the meantime there were further years of study and travel. That also fit the pattern for young ladies of Addams' class, generation, and training. If one did not marry and settle down to provide a haven of cultivation for husband and children, if one did not become a teacher, or—still better—a missionary to foreign lands, what was there but further preparation? Plans to do postgraduate studies at Smith College had to be set aside when, in the summer of 1881, she fell victim to what that era knew as nervous exhaustion, a complaint of listlessness and despondency that claimed so many sheltered young women. Her father's sudden death that same summer removed a foundation on which she had built her life. The exertion of sheer will enabled Addams to begin studies that fall at Woman's Medical College of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia; but she was joined there by her stepmother, soon fell ill again, and was forced to withdraw. Years of aimless drift and near-invalidism followed. For a time Addams helped manage the home in Cedarville, but that held little challenge. For two years (1883-1885) she traveled in Europe with her stepmother and two college friends. The travels were saved from becoming just another "finishing" experience by the curiosity that impelled her to delve beneath the superficialities of art galleries, libraries, and cathedrals. Although the journals Addams kept and the letters she wrote do not explicitly justify the claims she later made for a conversion to social concern arising from firsthand observations of

poverty and injustice, they do suggest that her vision was broader than that of many of her contemporaries and that she had disciplined herself to report in words her subjective responses to the observed scene. Yet her life's purpose still escaped definition, and that failure left a void that was not easily filled. Looking back upon those drifting years of her twenties, in Twenty Years at Hull-House Addams explained her dilemma (and it was one she had shared with many friends and acquaintances) by quoting Tolstoy's phrase "the snare of preparation," which he insists "we spread before the feet of young people, hopelessly entangling them in a curious inactivity at the very period of life when they are longing to construct the world anew and to conform it to their own ideals." Here was a theme she had first expressed in 1892, at a national conference held just three years after her own sense of futility had been resolved by the move to Hull-House. Her words carried force because they welled up from her intense personal experience of having submitted to the claims of family at a time when she was ready to coordinate "thought and action" and reach out to realize "human brotherhood." She had seen "young girls suffer and grow sensibly lowered in vitality in the first years after they leave school." The self was wasted by a process of "elaborate preparation, if no work is provided. . . ."Here was a cadre of young persons whose uselessness hung heavy, who longed to overcome the separation that cultivation had imposed, to find creative work that attempted "to socialize democracy," and to "share the race life." This marked Addams' first serious attempt to set forth what she called "the subjective necessity for social settlements," and was published together with a balancing companion piece that argued "the objective value of a social settlement." The dialectic that emerged displayed a rhythm that was to inform so much of her work

4 I AMERICAN and her social thought. On the one hand was the pressing need for concerned youth to find constructive ways to act out altruism in practical service; on the other were the exploitation and injustice that industrialism had brought to the Western world, social ills that cried out to be righted. The first paper, "Subjective Necessity for Social Settlements," spoke of the "renaissance going forward in Christianity" that sought to fulfill the ancient "command to love all men, with a certain joyous simplicity." Its rhetoric reflected the biblical and the Victorian romantic words she had imbibed. It proclaimed that settlement "residents should live with opposition to no man, with recognition of the good in every man, even the meanest." Although its philosophy rested on the foundation of the "solidarity of the human race," in other matters that philosophy must "be hospitable and ready for experiment," flexible in tactic, quick to adapt, and ready to change. The classes had been shut off from one another, yet their dependence was mutual and reciprocal; social disorganization and chaos arose from division, and could be bridged and redeemed through "common intercourse." "Theblessings which we associate with a life of refinement and cultivation can be made universal and must be made universal if they are to.be permanent," Addams concluded, "for the good we secure for ourselves is precarious and uncertain, is floating in mid-air, until it is secured for all of us and incorporated into our common life." The rhetoric of "The Objective Value of a Social Settlement" is more prosaic, less charged with passion. It speaks simply of inadequate schools, houses unconnected with sewers, streets that were "inexpressibly dirty." Almost in journalistic style Addams reports on an immigrant wife who ' 'picks rags from the street gutter, and laboriously sorts them in a dingy court." The count of 250 saloons and but seven churches and two missions in her ward on Chicago's West

WRITERS Side is matter-of-fact and straightforward. So is the annotated listing of the activities of the settlement—the clubs, the music and art, the library and lectures, the classes in sewing and mending and language, the day nursery for children of working mothers, summer camping for the young, support for the organization of women's trade unions. Just when the decision was made to found a settlement in Chicago is unclear, although in retrospect Miss Addams, as she was always known except to a few close friends, set the date as 1888, when she was traveling in Europe again, this time with several friends, including Ellen Gates Starr, whose love and support proved vital to Addams' self-assurance and will. The years of "mere passive receptivity" and "curious inactivity," she recounts in Twenty Years, were ended by the decision to "rent a house in a part of the city where many primitive and actual needs are found, in which young women who had been given over too exclusively to study might restore a balance of activity along traditional lines and learn of life from life itself. . . . " The early years at Hull-House were filled with activity; and the need to act, together with the exhilaration that came from shared fellowship with residents and neighbors, provided the direction and purpose Addams desperately needed. Both the opportunity to be of service and the companionship were important. * 'If it is natural to feed the hungry and care for the sick, it is certainly natural to give pleasure to the young, comfort to the aged, and to minister to the deepseated craving for social intercourse that all men feel,'' she wrote in Twenty Years at Hull-House, in words that drew on biblical inspiration. And sprinkled throughout all her early writings were phrases that spoke of the longing for community—"a bond of fellowship," "mutual enterprises," "collective living," "companionship," the fostering of "a higher civic life"

JANE ADDAMS I 5 through "common intercourse," the dictate to 4 'be content to live quietly side by side with their neighbors, until they grow into a sense of relationship and mutual interests," * 'the companionship of mutual interests," the "companionship of mutual labor." From these intuitions grew the subsequent conviction that working men and women might secure a greater control over their lives by joining together in labor unions—this at a time when the vast majority of those reformers who thought of themselves as "progressives" remained suspicious of trade unions and preferred the tactic of protective legislation to ameliorate conditions of labor and life. To Addams, self-determination through collective efforts of the group became the crucial strategy for the enlargement of social democracy. Although the management of a complex enterprise consumed her energies and life, Addams from the beginning controlled her schedule so as to allow time for study, contemplation, lecturing, and writing. Her two papers given before a conference of Ethical Culture Societies in 1892 were published the following year, and made an immediate impact on an elite national audience. The point was not missed. Spoken and written words had the power to move hearts and inspire practical action; the reception and response provided the recognition and assurance essential to the realization of her own personal, subjective needs. The deed and the word, the act and its exposition, were reciprocal sources of fulfillment and authority. The words carried weight because they reflected authentic experience, and because their author worked hard at perfecting her literary craft. The task began with earnest doing, watching, and listening, with conscious effort to understand the desires and motives of intimates whose perceptions matched her own and of those radical others, the immigrant families and workers who were her neighbors. Her daily routine car-

ried Addams into the tenement slums and back alleys of the immediate neighborhood, to precinct police stations, to city hall, into factories and sweatshops. When no one else would attend the delivery of a child of an unwed mother, she and an associate assisted the birth and cared for the forlorn girl. She dined with the rich and powerful, persuaded them to her cause, and inveigled their financial and political support. In the evening the residents gathered in the commons (Addams presided over the ceremonial ladling of the soup) to share the day's recitation of excitement. It was a distinguished company: the indomitable Florence Kelley, Grace and Edith Abbott, Julia Lathrop (whose gentle manner belied an iron determination), Alice Hamilton, and two whom Addams counted her closest friends, Ellen Gates Starr and Mary Rozet Smith. Among her two most generous patrons were Louise de Koven Bowen and Anita McCormick Blaine, leaders of Chicago society. Fellow settlement leaders Mary McDowell and Graham Taylor often dropped by, as did such visiting notables as Washington Gladden, Francis G. Peabody, and Charles Zueblin (proponents of a social gospel), Henry Demarest Lloyd, John Dewey, Albion Small, George Mead, Richard T. Ely, W. E. B. Du Bois, Paul U. Kellogg of the Survey, Sidney Hillman, Clarence Darrow, and Harold Ickes. Visitors from abroad also made pilgrimages to Halsted Street: for example, Maxim Gorki, Peter Kropotkin, Keir Hardie, Beatrice and Sidney Webb. In American Diary (1898) Beatrice Webb recorded of the HullHouse assemblage: "The residents consist, in the main, of strong-minded energetic women, bustling about their various enterprises and professions, interspersed with earnest-faced selfsubordinating and mild-mannered men who slide from room to room apologetically." The informal seminars ran far into the night, and Addams was as often the apt student as the provocative teacher.

6 / AMERICAN It would require a fat and tedious volume to list the lectures Addams gave, the range of topics she chose for exposition, and the variety of audiences before which she appeared. Popular lectures were reworked in response to the reactions they elicited, and presented in revised form before other groups. When satisfied with structure, theme, and style, she put them on paper and sent them off for publication in the best popular and scholarly journals. The final refinement came with the melding of various articles into book form. Although her later works tended to become meandering and discursive, Addams' early publications bear the mark of their spoken origin. She was clever enough to avoid a pat formula, but many of the articles and chapters echo the best of that generation's sermons (of which art form she had heard so many). Often she began with a brief text, quotation, or theme borrowed from philosophical and spiritual mentors. Then, without pausing for elaboration (the moral is rarely belabored), she presented anecdotes. To listeners and readers accustomed to stories and ideas borrowed from other observers, it must have been exhilarating to follow the adventures of one who drew from firsthand experiences freshly minted. The images are concrete, the story lines quick (but not hurried), the sketches of persons and events made plausible and alive by telling detail. There was no mistaking that she had been there. All the senses were engaged: sight and hearing, smell and touch (and finally moral sensibility). Homiletics, Addams knew, required a point; the stories had to lead to a conclusion, a moral (rarely a moralism). Effective rhetoric demanded the sense of what not to say and when to stop, and she was her own best critic and editor. The stories led smoothly to a peroration in which Addams returned to her opening text; in several concluding paragraphs the central themes were elucidated. And then she stopped.

WRITERS Other devices were just as obvious and just as effective. For one steeped in nineteenth-century poets and essayists, in the mummeries of Victorian piety, and uplifted by the prosody of transcendental idealism, it is a wonder Addams so rarely employed conventional sentiments and phrases. Perhaps she was saved by Browning, Walt Whitman, Tolstoy, and the Bible. Whatever the case, her written work reveals that she searched for precisely the appropriate figures and modifiers, and only occasionally does her prose become "elegant." On occasions, it is true, she could manipulate conventional Christian norms to stir the conscience of "the best Christian people" of her time. One passage, for example, in The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets (1909) poignantly portrays the lot of a girl who could find no place to go in the evening to escape the closeness and surveillance of the tenement in which she lived. Of the plight of such young women, Addams wrote that "never before in civilization have such numbers of young girls been suddenly released from the protection of the home and permitted to walk unattended upon city streets and to work under alien roofs. . . . " They were ensnared by an industrial system and by the temptations of modern city life. Then the barb aimed at the heart: . . . there appeared to my mind the delicately tinted piece of wall in a Roman catacomb where the early Christians, through a dozen devices of spring flowers, skipping lambs and a shepherd tenderly guiding the young, had indelibly written down that the Christian message is one of inexpressible joy. . . . Who is to blame that the lambs, the little ewe lambs, have been so caught upon the brambles? Elsewhere the girls are portrayed as they are, not in the flat prose of the social survey; and then the insinuation of "the little ewe lambs . . . caught upon the brambles." The point needs

JANE ADDAMS I 7 making, for Addams was a person very much of her own age, yet she usually avoided the sentimentality that branded so much other writing of social protest at the turn of the century; she also stayed clear of the thick jargon that academic social scientists were beginning to inflict on the language. One can date her writing, but so little of it (to the contemporary eye) is dated. Authors are cheered by rave reviews. Surely Addams must have rejoiced when no less an authority than William James reviewed Spirit of Youth with uncontained praise: ' 'She simply inhabits reality and everything she says necessarily expresses its nature. She can't help writing truth." (The quote is used by nearly all her biographers; see Allen Davis, introduction to The Spirit of Youth, p. vii.) Addams worked at her craft so that her visions of realities might find a responsive audience, and she was enough of a pragmatist to sense the relationship of means and ends. If the proof of the writing was in the reading, surely she passed the test. The goal, however, was not fine writing, but to inform and to move those persons and groups that shaped society and that could be inspired to join common efforts toward reshaping a more just and more open democracy where a social ethic would prevail. As her biographers have pointed out, Addams was not an original thinker; but she never claimed to be a philosopher. Rather, her writings set forth in commonsense terms those major currents in contemporary social criticism that matched her own experience. She was no scholar, and it is likely that she learned more acutely from conversations with a multitude of people than from the printed page. Addams did not have to read Lincoln Steffens, for example—although undoubtedly she did—to know that urban political bosses were more often in touch with the needs of their constituents than were the reformers who presumed to speak for the masses they did not understand.

Her commitment to progressive education was rooted in what she observed in the day nursery, in the social clubs, in the adult forums at HullHouse, and in her service on the Chicago school board as much as it arose from her association with John Dewey. Addams responded with intuitive ease to William James because what he said made practical sense; although the phrase "the moral equivalent of war" was his, the strategy she employed was, by his acknowledgment, as much hers as his; and she took up the theme and elaborated upon it. The urban surveys made at Hull-House—Hull-House Maps and Papers (1895) were among the first—borrowed from Charles Booth's magisterial volumes on London, and set standards for social research that the best scholars of that generation emulated. The Fabians, especially the Webbs, inspired Addams to examine the realities of class; but she was canny enough to utilize only such insights as had special relevance for the American scene. Addams needed no conversion to a "social gospel," for her religious sentiments flowed naturally toward applied Christianity without benefit of clergy—as exemplified by George Herron, Walter Rauschenbusch, and other religious leaders who sought in that era to bring theology down to earth and to create institutional churches that would be responsive to human needs in an urban and industrial environment. She heard and read their sermons, and consciously incorporated many of their insights into her own lectures and writings. Addams was familiar with the work of pioneer anthropologists; but her early writings, infused with an implicit recognition of the relativity of cultural systems, drew more from immigrant communities than from learned books. From direct contact with immigrant and workingclass families she came to sense how profoundly their value systems differed from those of genteel middle-class society, and to accept the uncomfortable truth that what seemed to be deviant behavior could in fact be positively functional.

8 I AMERICAN Addams' critique of charity as it was practiced at the turn of the century was shared by other settlement leaders. She joined the first generation of caseworkers in promoting formal schooling and training for all social workers, that they might become more professional and provide services to society that would be both more efficient and more humane. A quarter of a century before the passage of the Social Security Act, she emphasized the necessity for comprehensive social insurance to protect against unemployment, old age, accident, and ill health. On this question Addams stood in good company—Florence Kelley, Paul Kellogg, John Kingsbury, Owen R. Lovejoy, and others who made up a small advance guard of progressives on this and other social issues. In short, if she was not in the mainstream of American life and thought, she was certainly no lonely prophet or iconoclast. In advance of a broad public on most issues, she was very much part of the social experience and intellectual excitement of her own generation. From the beginning, and down to the last, Addams moved to enlarge the ideal of social democracy, a tenet she first identified with Lincoln's republic of "plain people"; and it was his "marvelous power to retain and utilize past experiences" that she strove to emulate. The sense of organic unity, which she saw manifest in the lives of Lincoln and Mazzini, provided the foundation upon which to build a race fellowship that would incorporate all classes and all peoples, that would cross the dividing lines of sex and race and generation. * 'We do not like to acknowledge that Americans are divided into two nations, as her prime minister once admitted of England," Addams declared in an essay composed at the end of the century for the American Academy of Political and Social Science. "We are not willing openly and professedly," she continued, "to assume that American citizens are broken up into classes, even if we make that assumption the

WRITERS preface to a plea that the superior class has duties to the inferior." And yet all about her, in the searing depression years of the mid-1890's, Addams witnessed the "organization of society into huge battalions with syndicates and corporations on the side of capital, and trades-unions and federations on the side of labor.'' It was that very threat that the modern industrial world was in fact being divided into "hostile camps" and was turning the republic "back into class warfare and class limitations" that gave urgency to her work. It was an anxiety Addams shared with other concerned citizens—solid, old-line Americans like herself—that the integrity of community, which she identified with village America, would be shattered by the divisive forces of industrialization and urbanization. But, unlike most of her contemporaries, Addams found in the settlement a coign of vantage for observing and experiencing the alienation that the processes of modernization had provoked. "All about us are men and women who have become unhappy in regard to their attitude toward the social order," she wrote in 1902 in her first major sustained work, Democracy and Social Ethics. Insecurity of employment and income, the unrewarding and dulling routine of factory work, the chance of accident and ill health, the exploitation of the labor of the leastfavored—women, children, and immigrants— had become root causes of a pervasive poverty that set apart millions of workers and their families from society. And yet, among the poor themselves there existed resources for mutual assistance in times of need to which the more favored philanthropic classes remained blind. "The poor are accustomed to help each other and to respond according to their kindliness," Addams observed. They were moved, of necessity, toward "primitive and genuine" relations of neighborliness. That natural and spontaneous altruism was not matched, however, by the charitable efforts that

JANE ADDAMS I 9 society provided in such niggardly and calculating fashion. In Democracy and Social Ethics Addams pointed out: "A most striking incongruity ... is the difference between the emotional kindness with which relief is given by one poor neighbor to another poor neighbor, and the guarded care with which relief is given by a charity visitor to a charity recipient." Here arose a clash of values that subverted the possibilities of spontaneous community concern. How irrelevant the counsel of well-meaning friendly visitors seemed to those who were in need, as they perceived it, through no fault of their own. To practice prudence and thrift was a luxury those who lived along the margin of existence could ill afford. The poor man is understandably "chilled by an investigation and an intimation that he ought to work." To the charity agent the saloon is viewed as a "horror," while the workman "remembers all the kindness he has received there . . . the loan of five dollars he got there when the charity visitor was miles away and he was threatened with eviction." The admonition of piety sounds strange to one for whom the church seems "quite apart from daily living." Addams' critique anticipated the perception that became more widely accepted only with the passing of many years: that poverty involves culture as well as class; that the poor are not necessarily like the rest of America, only less so, but, rather, express values that relate to their own peculiar condition. Her own sympathies lay clearly with what she perceived to be, not without a certain lacing of romantic sentiment, the * 'bigger, more emotional, and freer lives of working people." Longing for a society that would transcend the divisions she witnessed, Addams nevertheless recognized the pervasiveness of class bias and explored ways in which a new democratic social ethic might be evolved. In that mission, Addams assigned a primary role to the daughters of respectable and substantial families (such as her own). To readers of her

essay on the "subjective necessity" to be involved, the argument was familiar; but it carried the increased authority that came with experience. It was difficult for young women to break the primary claim of family precisely because of their sensitivity, ingrained and trained, to the acceptance of established standards. To seek a "more active share in the community life" was normally construed as "setting up her own will against that of her family's for selfish ends." If the primacy of family obligation had once made sense, it now frustrated the competing and larger claims of society, and warped the young woman's personal need for "simple, health-giving activity, which, involving the use of all her faculties, shall be a response to all the claims which she so keenly feels." Women, thep, must play a leading part in the redefinition of social roles as the nation moved "from an age of individualism to one of association." Crucial ^s well would be the leadership of enlightened representatives of labor and management. Addams held no brief for the benevolence of paternalistic;employers such as George Pullman, who had -endeavored, through suppression of unionization and through domination of a company town, to extend industrial discipline over the sociaj life of his workers; and she implied that just jas political democracy demanded the consent of [the governed, so did industrial democracy require the consent of the workmen. The expectation that employees would repay the employer for the introduction of welfare measures in the factory with gratitude and loyalty was bound to fail unless the workers themselves became engaged, through independent associational activities, in management policies involving the whole range of issues bearing on the conditions of their labor. Labor unions, for their part, resting their rights upon "brotherhood, sacrifice, the subordination of individual and trade interests," surrendered their community claim when, by violent action, they challenged "the

10 I AMERICAN hardly won standards of public law and order." Like many other progressives, she abhorred violence and disorder, a view understandable in an era torn by so many and such fundamental divisions. Orderly evolution of a social ethic was her prayer and her rule. * 'If the method of public agitation could find quiet and orderly expression in legislative enactment, and if labor measures could be submitted to the examination and judgment of the whole without a sense of division or of warfare, we should have the ideal development of the democratic state." What better means for achieving orderly progress than through democratic education? The experience began in the elementary schools. But there, too often, programs emphasized basic skills acquired by rote; lessons that had little meaning for immigrant children (handicapped, as most of them were, by halting facility in English and by traditions that made them indifferent to recitation); promotion through the grades with the apparent aim merely of getting the students "ready for something else"; and the inculcation of habits (in fact, if not always explicitly by intent) of accuracy, "punctuality and order," and obedience, values functional in the business world but hardly designed to engage the enthusiasm of the young. Addams, along with John Dewey, had learned an alternative strategy— popular education that would engage the child and prepare him "for the enlarged social efforts which our increasing democracy requires." Adult education, she observed, tended to be little better; it was "usually bookish and remote, and concerning subjects completely divorced" from the experiences of workingmen. The workers, "heavy and almost dehumanized by monotonous toil," stood in need of "the artist's perception or student's insight, which alone could fuse them into social consciousness." If education were to become the source of a new social ethic, its institutions, like those of charity, family, and industry, had first to be

WRITERS democratized. On education, as on some other issues, Addams' diagnosis proved sounder than her social prescriptions, and one catches a glimpse of lingering Romanticism (perhaps inspired by her early reading of Ruskin) in the conceit that art and scholarship could somehow transform the workers' lives. For all the sense of realism Addams intended her essays in Democracy and Social Ethics to carry—however much her observations arose from practical experience in Chicago, their optimistic tone, her sense of latent social harmony merely waiting to be released by intelligence and good will—the implied premise that human nature was originally and basically good reflected her own moral set more than the practical possibilities that era afforded. More sensitive than most other reformers to the existence of class, she nevertheless shared with other progressives a vision of an ordered, evolving society in which class interest and division would be transcended by the public good and the general welfare. The liveliness of her own account gave plausibility to a message that others were proclaiming and provided assurance to a company of hopeful reformers who were prepared to believe the best. Experiment and process were the key concepts in working toward a new ethic, and this pragmatic premise informed Addams' writing and life—so naturally that one suspects the mode eased in without conscious thought. Part of it may have been her openness to diversity, for daily exposure to customs and values quite different from one's own can shake a faith in absolutes. As she confessed in Democracy and Social Ethics: "We have learned as common knowledge that much of the insensibility and hardness of the world is due to the lack of imagination which prevents a realization of the experiences of other people." Addams stressed the active concept of "experience" in the full body of her work. Knowledge, unless rooted in experience, is stale and abstract; one learns by doing; hu-

JANE ADDAMS I 11 man evolution, the progress of civilization, is achieved by working together in common cause; truth cannot be exclusive; truths are made viable through deeds that enjoy the widest validity only when incorporated into the common experience of all. "It is as though we thirsted to drink at the great wells of human experience, because we knew that a daintier or less potent draft would not carry us to the end of the journey, going forward as we must in the heat and jostle of the crowd." When Addams opened the doors at HullHouse, at age twenty-nine, neither she nor her partner, Ellen Gates Starr, had much more than a hazy strategy in mind. The tactics and programs evolved from responding to what they interpreted as the immediate, pressing needs of their neighbors. Programs that seemed to work were enlarged; tactics that faltered were modified or dropped. From the beginning it became clear that the needs and dispositions of their neighbors varied by nationality; what appealed to Italian-Americans or Greek-Americans did not automatically work with members of the Polish or Lithuanian or Jewish communities. What she stated fully in her reminiscent Twenty Years at Hull-House in 1910, she had first set down in 1892. The settlement was an * 'experimental effort," and the "one thing to be dreaded . . . is that it lose its flexibility, its power of adaptation, its readiness to change its methods as its environment may demand. . . . It must be hospitable and ready for experiment." The personal cost could be measured in the blur of fatigue that came with "unending activity" and confusion. "All one's habits of living had to be readjusted," she recalled in Twenty Years, "and any student's tendency to sit with a book by the fire was of necessity definitely abandoned." The settlement had also to encourage the open expression of all ideas, however strange or threatening they might seem to conventional ways of thought. The weekly open forums

served as safety valves against social explosion, but they were more than that. One learned best from those who knew firsthand—of poverty and of "failures in the social structure" from "the man at the bottom, who has been most directly in contact with those failures and has suffered most." One learned as well, in the practice of untrammeled debate, respect for the views of others and resistance to all forms of dogma and tyranny. Abstract notions could thus be put to the ultimate test of the concrete event. It was also the case that an essential order was best maintained in society not by the imposition of authority from outside and above, but, as Addams wrote in Newer Ideals of Peace, by "liberty of individual action and complexity of group development." What was true for the state held also for industry, where factory discipline represented "coercion, and not order" because it failed to engage the "co-operative intelligence" of the working force. The denial of free speech during World War I, the harassment Addams personally endured for her refusal to support America's military effort, and the opprobrium she and companion "radicals" suffered during the postwar "red scare" were a source more of sadness and disappointment than of rage. The nation, in time of trial, had not lived up to the essential democratic standards of freedom of expression; society was more the loser than those whose liberties had been suppressed. The practice of civil liberty constituted a crucial element of pragmatic thought, but there were other ingredients. That thoughts and acts had consequences, that means and ends, processes and goals, were knitted together in reciprocal relationship were formulations Addams had reached on her own; and her conversations with Dewey and James and her study of their work served largely to clarify and confirm habits already established in the arena. It was the common sense of the matter that inappropriate means

12 I AMERICAN corrupted ends, however noble in conception. Americanization programs that forced assimilation on unwilling immigrants invariably provoked resistance and hostility. Labor unions, tempted to the use of violent tactics, alienated public goodwill on which, in the long run, they depended. Upper-class politicians who failed to consult and to win over the sentiments and support of the masses thereby subverted intended reforms. To deny the vote to women, to limit their influence in the public sphere, was to make difficult the achievement of welfare reforms. That a nation would choose to go to war could be explained, but that it could realistically hope to enlarge democracy through belligerent action proved folly. (John Dewey, that fine pragmatist, and Paul Kellogg might be taken in by the Wilsonian crusade; she and Lillian Wald and Roger Baldwin were not.) Only when the means were congruent with goals could higher levels of ideals be incorporated into a shared community life. Not by "the teaching of moral theorems" was virtue to be won; rather, that would be accomplished by "the direct expression of social sentiments and by the cultivation of practical habits,'' she concluded in Newer Ideals of Peace, for "in the progress of society sentiments and opinions have come first, then habits of action and lastly moral codes and institutions." In the doing—by democratic processes—were new ideals made real, and therefore true. There were practical matters to be considered. The agenda of reform and reconstruction ran long—sanitation and public health, housing, education and recreation, the protection of women and children from industrial exploitation, a living wage and higher standards of life and labor, establishment of the rights of labor to organize, the suppression of prostitution ("an ancient evil"). Few causes so acutely commanded Addams' attention in the decades that straddled the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries as the enhancement of childhood and youth. It was a

WRITERS theme she and her associates had addressed at Hull-House, and in one way or another in all her writings; it culminated in the book she always held dearest, The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets (1909). The passion came, perhaps, from the mothering and nurturing roles that women had traditionally played, functions that Addams continued to cherish and exalt even though she and most of her closest women friends remained unmarried and childless. It undoubtedly arose as well from nostalgic memories, mostly happy, of her own childhood, when she and her companions engaged in spontaneous play, protected by adult chaperonage * 'not then a social duty but natural and inevitable." The modern city permitted no such free-ranging exploration of life's possibilities and joys; children of the immigrant and the poor, with particular harshness, were denied the free play of the "quest for adventure" that had been the privilege of the young in simpler times. Commercial demands set young girls to labor in factory and shop by day, and by night extracted from them "their petty wages by pandering to their love of pleasure." The city made no constructive provision for the "insatiable desire for play" and offered in its place "coarse and illicit" activities that confused "joy with lust, and gaiety with debauchery." Throughout the book is the language thus charged. Schooling is described as "unreal and far fetched," industry as "ruthless and materialistic." The attractions that the "dingy," ''sordid,''' 'cramped and dreary'' cities offer are "gaudy and sensual," "illicit and soul-destroying," "flippant," and "trashy"; their streets are "thronged," their shops "glittering." The inborn love of excitement seduces young boys to experiment with drink and with drugs, to steal, to rob, and finally even to murder; the desire for adventure, cut off from healthy outlets, leads young girls to shoplifting and to vice. Privation inspires self-indulgence, and down the line "wretched girls" are cast "upon the shores of

JANE ADDAMS I 13 death and destruction" when they should have been carried * 'into the safe port of domesticity.'' Premature labor at dull and monotonous jobs is bound to squelch the natural exuberance and joy of youth, Addams insists. Factory discipline calls for "an expenditure of nervous energy" more than "muscular effort"; the demands made upon the young worker's eyes are "complicated and trivial, the use of his muscles is fussy and monotonous, the relation between cause and effect is remote and obscure"; and by factory or street work youth becomes separated from both family and community. The book is peppered with what might have been, in the hands of other social workers, case studies, but which become, under her pen, poignant, personal vignettes of youth compelled astray, not unlike the exposes of Friedrich Engels, Charles Dickens, and Charles Booth in England or the tracts of Jacob Riis and John Spargo in the United States. The book is not long—indeed, it is her shortest—and its quickness of pace helps account for its impact. Not a section is without dramatic anecdote. Let one illustration suffice: A Russian girl who went to work at an early age in a factory, pasting labels on mucilage bottles, was obliged to surrender all her wages to her father who, in return, gave her only the barest necessities of life. In a fit of revolt against the monotony of her work, and "that nasty sticky stuff," she stole from her father $300 which he had hidden away under the floor of his kitchen, and with this money she ran away to a neighboring city for a spree. . . . Of course, this preposterous beginning could have but one ending and the child was sent to the reform school to expiate not only her own sins but the sins of those who had failed to rescue her from a life of grinding monotony which her spirit could not brook. The extravagance of The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets makes it a remarkable testimony.

There are other features. In it, for example, Addams suggests in reticent language what Sigmund Freud had not yet made popular: that in "sex susceptibility" lay a force of unusual power that, thwarted and repressed, became the source of personal and social trouble. The same impulses, left free of artificial inhibition and commercial exploitation, became the motive force for art, personal fulfillment, and strong family bonds. And what if that sex instinct, that emotional force, were to be allowed dignity and encouraged to be socially useful—might not the young be able, then, "to make our sordid cities more beautiful, more companionable?" Society, in the meantime, through schools and community festivals, parks and playgrounds, could foster "companionship and solidarity." It could severely regulate or prohibit the labor of children, and establish juvenile courts. It could provide protective legislation for women and children in industry. It could provide an environment conducive to home and family, and release that devotion to the young that had first lifted society "out of the swamp of bestiality." In that "thirst for righteousness" the nation could appeal to * 'the wonderful and inexplicable instinct for justice—which is never so irresistible as when the heart is young." Anthony Platt, among others, has suggested that the "child savers"—his ironic term to describe Addams and her sisters who labored to protect the young through the juvenile court and other devices—were in fact engaged in imposing social control over the lower classes at a time when traditional liberalism was breaking down. Far from humanizing the criminal justice system for children, he argues, the "child savers helped to create a system that subjected more and more juveniles to arbitrary and degrading punishments." In a larger sense, he continues, the progressive movement sought to "rescue and regulate capitalism," to "co-opt the rising wave of popular militancy," and to devise "new forms

14 I AMERICAN of social control to protect their power and privilege." If progressivism often exhibited class bias, if it rested on elitist conceptions, as Platt proposes, his interpretation seems partial and flawed when applied to the whole body of Addams' work and life; and yet it cannot be denied that however much she tried (and she seems to have had greater success than most other middleclass reformers) to understand classes and cultures alien to her own, there were many times when the task proved impossible. Nowhere was this more the case than in Addams' efforts to come to terms with organized prostitution—a cause that troubled so many of her contemporaries, who were still tangled in the sexual mores of the Victorian age. A New Conscience and an Ancient Evil (1912) was a logical next step from The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets; it brought to the subject of syndicated vice her heartfelt concern for the plight of young women (her reference was more often to "girls") caught up in the commercialized and distorted environment of the modern city, but her views in this instance were flawed by her inability to comprehend the complexity of motives that drove bewildered young girls into a life of sin. If her powers of empathy enabled Addams to appreciate the quality of life of her neighbors, they faltered when it came to prostitutes, of whom she knew so little. Precisely because the lives they led were, to her, unimaginable, she could not comprehend the range of motives that led them to the practice of what that generation knew as "the oldest profession." Other social issues Addams knew and felt firsthand; although she had talked with some of the girls who had been rescued from a life of iniquity by the intervention of her associates working through the Juvenile Protective Association of Chicago, her knowledge was gained essentially secondhand from their reports and from other sociological and legislative investigations of the white slave traffic. The prostitute as victim was Addams' theme.

WRITERS She came to it naturally from her other studies and from her experiences on the West Side of Chicago. Were not women, children, immigrants, and the poor (all the "least favored," a phrase that recurs throughout her writing) victims of circumstances and social arrangements quite beyond their control? Had her intent not been to find ways for all persons and groups to secure a larger measure of self-determination in their lives? Had not her father's generation gone to a war, which had proved to be the central heroic event of the nineteenth century, to root out the ancient evil of human (black) slavery? So, by analogy, her own generation might enlighten public opinion and elaborate a "new conscience" in order that the "moral affront" of white slavery could be abolished. It was an appealing analogy to the daughters and sons of abolitionists. Prostitutes were enslaved victims as surely as blacks in the antebellum South had been. Both systems had an economic base; for white slavery it was the "connection between low wages and despair, between over-fatigue and the demand for reckless pleasure. "In both instances human greed and cruelty drove the system; in both the blame and responsibility ultimately lay with the larger community that tolerated and protected the exploitation and with an ethos that denied full humanity to blacks and women. The early chapters of the book are devoted to a description of the devices by which traffickers in white slaves enticed and coerced young girls into their service and by which they held their victims in captivity until they were so "warped and weakened" in will by forcible subjection that the "forced demoralization" became "genuine." The most vulnerable among the young were the most easily victimized: unattached immigrant girls and girls fresh from the countryside; factory hands, waitresses, and clerks unable to live on starvation wages; daughters dominated by tyrannical fathers who seized their meager wages and denied them a normal social life; the very young (for the syndicates

JANE ADDAMS I 15 thrived on fresh merchandise for their customers). No one, apparently, entered the life of her own volition. The paths to abolition were obvious, if not easy. In,4 New Conscience Addams pointed out that "in addition to the monotony of work and the long hours, the small wages these girls receive have no relation to the standard of living which they are endeavoring to maintain,'' and so it seemed logical to raise labor standards by protective legislation for working women. That young women were forced to work outside the home in order to supplement and regularize insufficient and uncertain family income implied the need for legislation that would strengthen the market position of men workers as well, and provide financial assistance through public funds to families in which the mother alone was head of the household, so that she could stay at home and care for her children. Solution lay as well in what Addams thought of as positive measures—the introduction of courses in sex hygiene in the schools, for example, confined not to biology alone but incorporating material as well from "history and literature, which record and portray the havoc wrought by the sexual instinct when uncontrolled, and also show that, when directed and spiritualized, it has become an inspiration to the loftiest devotions and sacrifices." So also must the community provide opportunities for constructive and healthy recreation to compete with the disorderly saloon and with public dance halls where "improprieties are deliberately fostered," where "all the jollity and bracing exercise of the peasant dance is eliminated, as is all the careful decorum of the formal dance." Efforts to overcome prejudice and discrimination against blacks, to provide job opportunities and the chance to live in neighborhoods with better housing were essential, for ' 'colored'' girls provided a disproportionate number of the "white" slaves. There was a further plea, one that Addams reserved for the conclusion, thus signaling its

significance in her mind. Men monopolized the profits of prostitution, male customers enjoyed the benefits and suffered none of the penalties: the double standard of sexual morality lay at the heart of the ancient evil. Society must, therefore, demand a single standard of chastity for men and for women. That was the hope, for women were coming to play a larger public role. The moral was clear: "Every movement . . . which tends to increase woman's share of civic responsibility undoubtedly forecasts the time when a social control will be extended over men, similar to the' historic one so long established^over women." As women slowly moved toward full equality with men in all affairs, they would become "freer and nobler, less timid of reputation and more human"; and that, in turn, would "also inevitably modify the standards of men.'' A new consciousness, a new conscience, would have to "include the women who for so many generations have received neither pity nor consideration; as the sense of justice fast widens to encircle all human relations, it must at length reach the women who have so long been judged without a hearing." And so Addams circled back to the progression proposed earlier in Newer Ideals of Peace: sentiments and opinions first, social policies next, and moral codes last. Women (and men) made newly sensitive to feminist issues arising from the vwomen's movement of recent years have not found it easy to understand, or to accept, earlier forms and perceptions of feminism that informed the lives and careers of Jane Addams, her associates, and her friends. The lingering Victorianism that made them reticent when dealing with the "sex susceptibility" is not to our taste. We are made uneasy by their apparent eagerness to control the behavior of others, as they governed their own lives, presumably, through self-control. We find it difficult to reconcile their urge to protect others with their impulse to move toward personal autonomy and independence for themselves. The words, which slip into sentimentality and Ro-

16 I AMERICAN mantic idealism, are not to our rhetorical taste. Their conviction that women were blessed with an instinct for compassion and nurturing smacks too much of what we hold to be the ultimately limiting bourgeois ethos of the nineteenth-century "cult of domesticity." It is important, then, to attempt to understand the complex and even contradictory strands of feminism that Addams represented and inspired (a task already addressed implicitly at points in this essay). First to be considered are the legends that attached themselves to Addams, myths to which she herself contributed—sometimes consciously, often unwittingly—as recent biographical evaluations have pointed out. Until she fell from favor by opposing democracy's war, she was one of the nation's most eminent heroines—sage, prophet, priestess, earth mother—the embodiment of a nation's conscience on all the pressing social issues of the day. Even those who disagreed with her (and there were many who strenuously fought the causes she espoused) felt bound to respect her reputation and even to honor her moral authority. The myths did not refer to Addams' extraordinary talent for administration and the management of practical affairs, nor did they accommodate her genius for compromise and conciliation—but that is the way of legend. Yet there was no mistaking the womanliness of her influence, for she was seen as displaying the very finest of the female virtues—compassion, sensitivity, refined intuition, self-sacrificing service to others, particularly to the weak and defenseless. Almost as a matter of course, Addams cultivated the latent qualities that women like herself had made manifest by manifold good works. Her prose carried biblical force: in Twenty Years at Hull-House ihe natural instinct "to feed the hungry and care for the sick, . . . to give pleasure to the young, comfort to the aged . . ."; elsewhere (and everywhere), the mission to heal, to reconcile, to uplift, to console—the ancient female functions going back to Martha and

WRITERS

Mary. At Hull-House, as in so many other settlements, there evolved a fellowship of women; and it was to young women of good families that Addams called as persons peculiarly fit to fulfill missions of humanitarian impulse. Reality informed myth; otherwise the legends would have had no foundation and, therefore, no validity and no appeal. Addams also carried in her heart and portrayed in words an image of woman as victim. Even her own class of women had had to break with claims of family to take up the larger claims of society. Where custom had frustrated the aspirations of the daughters of families of substance, economic exploitation ground down the daughters of the disinherited and the dispossessed. Other fundamental facts gave proof to the historic^l subjugation of women. The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets and A New Conscience and an Ancient Evil documented the nefarious ways in which girls and women were abused and enslaved. In Newer Ideals of Peace the forces of oppression and injustice were pictured as operating more profoundly, if at a remove. A detailed discussion of the book can await the examination of the theme of pacifism in Addams' life; it is sufficient at this point to note that she set up a dialectic between the military and the nurturing values in society, the former operating through male power (although not all men were militarists by any means), the latter the traditional domain of women (although many men were also of that disposition). The state historically rested on force; it pressed down the masses, whom it distrusted; its organization was hierarchical; its final justification was military; its last resort was the use of brute force. In industrial society, property appropriated to itself the power of technology; and the "possessor of the machine, like the possessor of arms who preceded him, regards it as a legitimate weapon for exploitation, as the former held his sword." When employers fought unions, when union labor fought unorganized workers,

JANE ADDAMS I 17 there came the reversion to war. Men, of course, were as often the victims of authoritarian regimes (military and industrial alike) as were women; but the systems themselves and the ethos on which they rested were implicitly male. More directly to the point is Addams' The Long Road of Woman's Memory (1916). The book opens with a long account of the story of the "Devil Baby" that the neighbors came to believe was being harbored in Hull-House. For six weeks in the spring of 1913 she was forced to devote her attention solely to the hundreds who swarmed in to witness the dreaded event. "The knowledge of his existence burst upon the residents of Hull-House one day when three Italian women, with an excited rush through the door, demanded that he be shown to them," she began. "No amount of denial convinced them that he was not there, for they knew exactly what he was like with his cloven hoofs, his pointed ears and diminutive tail; the Devil Baby had, moreover, been able to speak as soon as he was born and was most shockingly profane." No amount or vehemence of denial could squelch the rumor. Addams heard many versions. One "dealt with a pious Italian girl married to an atheist. Her husband in a rage had torn a holy picture from the bedroom wall saying that he would quite as soon have a devil in the house as such a thing, whereupon the devil incarnated himself in her coming child." The Jewish version had the father of six daughters proclaim before the birth of a seventh "that he would rather have a devil in the family than another girl, whereupon the Devil Baby promptly appeared." The persistence of the neighbors in acting upon such superstition at first shocked Addams' sensibilities, but as she listened—especially to the old women who lingered in the hallways and rooms—she began to appreciate the source and the power of the myth, which ran far back into woman's memory. Slowly she came to understand that many who came to see the Devil Baby

"had been forced to face tragic experiences, the powers of brutality and horror . . . acquaintance with disaster and death." They had struggled "for weary years with poverty and much childbearing, had known what it was to be bullied and beaten by their husbands, neglected and ignored by their prosperous children, and burdened by the support of the imbecile and the shiftless ones." Yet in these aged women, Addams discerned patience under suffering long endured, "impatience with all non-essentials," "the sifting reconciling power inherent in Memory itself." But why the belief in the Devil Baby? What function had the story played for untold ages? "The legend exhibited," Addams concluded, "all the persistence of one of those tales which has doubtless been preserved through the centuries because of its taming effects upon recalcitrant husbands and fathers." She found the hunch confirmed by the obvious relief expressed by "shamefaced men," brought by their womenfolk to see the baby, on learning that there existed "no such visible sign of retribution for [their] domestic derelictions." The story, she deduced, had been for generations a device used by the woman "to take her mate and to make him a better father to her children." Blasphemy earned retribution. As The Spirit of Youth was her favorite book, so did Addams cherish most this single story; and she told it again in Second Twenty Years at Hull-House (1930). The trauma the event carried and the wisdom she learned from it are attested to by the electric charge of her prose. The women needed to believe in the certain consequence of "punishment to domestic sin, of reward to domestic virtue." "Humble women" had to seek as best they could rules of conduct "to counteract the base temptations of a man's world": They remind us that for thousands of years women had nothing to oppose against unthink-

18 I AMERICAN able brutality save "the charm of words," no other implement with which to subdue the fierceness of the world about them. Only through words could they hope to arouse the generosity of strength, to secure a measure of pity for themselves and their children, to so protect life they had produced that "the precious vintage stored from their own agony" might not wantonly be spilled upon the ground. The passion is the key. The complexities of Addams' feminism cannot be understood apart from this one story, so deeply felt, so forcibly told. The rest of the book is devoted to supporting themes—mothers' enduring love (and its frustration by cruel husbands and a brutal world); the safeguarding of family life; woman's mission to understand, pity, and nurture, but not to judge; society's obligation to redefine moral ethics so as to protect those at the "bottom of society, "especially the 4 'young and unguarded.'' The latter required enactment of the kinds of laws that other modern nations had provided to guard women workers who suffered "industrial wrongs and oppressions" and who, "forgotten and neglected, perform so much of the unlovely drudgery upon which our industrial order depends." Of equal force was the need to encourage and support women workers when they organized into unions, only to be greeted by the community's hostility, and who were sustained only by "their sense of comradeship in high endeavor. '' Joining together in mutual effort, learning friendship through shared experiences and "constant association," the unionized women workers not only were able to promote their own interests but also, Addams reported, were "filled with a new happiness analogous to that of little children when they are first taught to join hands in ordered play." From unionization sprang economic, social, and psychological gains.

WRITERS Not only in The Long Road of Woman's Memory but also in all Addams' writing and work lay the fundamental premise that the human task of nurturing life had been given uniquely to women. Nurture began with food: milk from the breast; the fruits of the earth, mother earth, from which all life sprang and to which all lives returned in death. Like a golden thread—gold the color of ripened grain—the great theme of woman as the maker and giver of bread ran through her work. At Rockford Seminary her class had selected woman the bread-giver as its symbol; a college address had elaborated that theme. Later Addams gathered from anthropological studies (especially from Otis Tufton Mason's Woman's Share in Primitive Culture) that women were the first agriculturalists and that through settling on the land, nomadic tribes gained that sense of place and security from which civilizations had originally emerged. From her reading of James Frazer's Golden Bough, Addams discovered that all primitive societies had worshiped goddesses of the earth, of grain, of corn, of rice; and she conjured up those powerful images in the cause of family, justice, and peace. Addams' feminism continued to be rooted in bourgeois Victorian images of womanhood, and her efforts were directed toward the enhancement of traditional domestic roles within the structures of an industrial and urban society. That was a chief rationale for social reform and a chief justification for extending the franchise to women so that they would be able to play a primary role in the "house-keeping" issues of education, recreation, health, and security of family income. Women would bring to politics in the public realm an influence for the larger welfare of society. Addams' longing for temperance and her endorsement of prohibition were related to the demoralization she had witnessed making women and children the certain victims of male drunkenness. Paternalism distorted char-

JANE ADDAMS I 19 itable effort by its patronizing of the poor; welfare services would better seek to share than to give. Social policies should move toward the goal of enlarging the capacity of the dependent to care for themselves; until then the state was obliged to protect those who were most vulnerable. In the concluding chapter of The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets, "The Thirst for Righteousness," Addams asserted: ". . . evolutionary progress assumes that a sound physique is the only secure basis of life, and to guard the mothers of the race is simply sanity.'' The penultimate chapter of Newer Ideals of Peace argued that because women traditionally (and still) labored "to care for children, to clean houses, to prepare foods, to isolate the family from moral dangers," theirs must be a primary role through "civic housekeeping" in overcoming the evils of insanitary housing, poisonous sewage, contaminated water, infant mortality, the spread of contagion, adulterated food, impure milk, smokeladen air, ill-ventilated factories, dangerous occupations, juvenile crime, unwholesome crowding, prostitution, and drunkenness. . . .Perhaps we can forecast the career of woman, the citizen, if she is permitted to bear an elector's part in the coming period of humanitarianism in which government must concern itself with human welfare. The settlement movement itself—and for many, Hull-House was the mother parish—reflected many of the same virtues. Robert A. Woods and Albert J. Kennedy, settlement leaders and official historians of the pioneer generation, observed in The Settlement Horizon (1922) that women were attracted to neighborhood work because it offered an opportunity for ample exercise of those spiritual, domestic and associational instincts, minimized in other occupations, which are so important a part of woman's heritage. In

undertaking to reestablish healthful home and neighborhood relations, in bringing about better administration of more human departments in city government, the enlightened woman is simply making new and larger adaptations of her specialized capabilities. As J. O. C. Phillips has suggested, the settlement was a home for the residents who became a family, for the neighbors who came as guests. In the settlement the residents acted out the close companionship they had first enjoyed, and cherished, as classmates in women's colleges. Persisting in the traditional devotion to the family and to woman's role as wife and mother, they created new life-styles for themselves; in the critical words of Jill Conway in "Women Reformers and American Culture, 1870-1930," they were "aggressive, hard-working, independent, pragmatic and rational in every good cause but that of feminism." And in the process they invented systems of affection, intimacy, companionship, and psychological support that feminists of the 1970's might identify as "sisterhood." "They reinforced each other in a day when independent women were still the exception," concludes Anne Firor Scott, "and developed a strong sense of responsibility for their mutual well-being." Living in an era when it was all but impossible to combine marriage and career, Addams, like most of her associates, remained unmarried. Exalting domestic virtues, recognizing but still made uneasy by the power of "sex susceptibility," not once on the printed page did she discuss contraception or make reference to Margaret Sanger's crusade for birth control. Addams moved gracefully and effectively in a "man's world," and in her network of friendship she found solace and strength; but the basic contradictions inherent in her system of feminism continued unresolved. That complex system of feminism, in turn,

20 I AMERICAN provides the central clue to understanding her career as a pacifist. Although Addams opposed the Spanish-American War, she did not play a major role in the coalition of antiwar forces until after American imperialism occupied the Caribbean and the western Pacific; and even then she was made anxious less by the American presence than by the exertion of force that it had required. In this, as in other causes, her feelings were inspired more by events than by theory. It was the utilization of violence in civil and in international affairs that Addams abhorred—the exertion of force that sacrificed lives, broke families, and disrupted the fundamental order of society that was prerequisite to the winning of justice. For some years Addams had been searching for ways in which aggressive impulses in mankind, whether expressed in wars of nation against nation or in the impressment of class by class, might be restrained; but it was not until 1903, in a lecture she titled "A Moral Substitute for War," that she tentatively proposed a coherent strategy for moving toward peace. The following year she and William James shared a platform at a Universal Peace Conference, and it may have been on that occasion that they first explicitly recognized how parallel their concepts ran. James's definitive statement came in 1910, in the pamphlet "The Moral Equivalent for War"; but whatever the chronology, it is clear that each drew insight and comfort from the other. Addams acknowledged her debt by quoting in her Newer Ideals of Peace (1907) his thesis of the need (in his words) to "discover in the social realm the moral equivalent for war— something heroic that will speak to men as universally as war has done, and yet will be as compatible with their spiritual natures as war has proved itself to be incompatible." Addams' theses are by now familiar. Conquest stands opposed to ' 'the nourishing of human life," brute force and competition to compassion and cooperation. The progress of civili-

WRITERS zation has been won, although the gains are precarious, by mutual assistance, a habit the poor and oppressed exhibit in their daily lives; and the "new heroism manifests itself in the present moment in a universal determination to abolish poverty and disease, a manifestation so widespread that it may justly be called international." "Social energy" is released and "sustained only by daily knowledge and constant companionship"; hope "lies in a patient effort to work it out by daily experience." Lasting amity awaited the incorporation of all peoples into an active and full participation in the common life. Domestic justice and international peace were commingled ideals; and in a passage that came as close as ever she did to embracing democratic socialism, Addams bemoaned the failure to treat the machines of modern technology as "social possessions." If only human welfare had been ' 'earlier regarded as a legitimate object of social interest." The path was not easy, hard-won gains were easily lost, the creation of new institutions and new moral codes called for the heroic exertion of conscious will if the forces of barbarism were to be overcome. And in the end—as was so often the case— Addams returned to those spiritual preceptors whose moral absolutes made feasible the pragmatic strategy—Tolstoy and Isaiah. "Who can tell at what hour vast numbers of Russian peasants . . . will decide that the time has come for them to renounce warfare, even as their prototype, the mujik, Count Tolstoy, has already decided that it has come for him?" With their "insatiable hunger for holiness," the peasants—"perfectly spontaneous, self-reliant, colossal in the silent confidence and power of endurance"—might signal a movement toward a sentiment of peace. As for the greatest of Old Testament prophets, his was a trenchant message for the modern instance—the cause of peace rested upon the cause of righteousness. When swords were beaten into plowshares, "the poor

JANE ADDAMS I 21 and their children would be abundantly fed." That was 1906. In 1912, Addams steeled herself and embraced the candidacy of Theodore Roosevelt (gunboats and all) with the prayer that no politician in American life stood so forcefully for all the social justice programs, including women's rights (but hardly including peace). And then came the war. There was no faltering; within weeks there gathered at the Henry Street Settlement a company of like-minded reformers determined to keep the United States neutral and to explore ways that the awful conflict might be mediated. In 1915 Addams was a chief founder of the Woman's Peace party, and traveled to The Hague to help direct the first International Congress of Women. "As the ship, steadied by a loose cargo of wheat [always the instinct for the apt metaphor], calmly proceeded on her way," the spirits of the delegates rose, she recalled in Peace and Bread in Time of War, but the auspicious beginning was doomed to falter. There were intimations that by meeting "the supreme test of woman's conscience—of differing with those whom she loves in the hour of their deepest affliction," they risked alienation. And so it proved. The conference sent delegates to call on statesmen of belligerent and neutral powers and they were not ill-received; it was just that nothing constructive came from their diplomacy and, returning home, they were soon reduced to writing ineffectual manifestos that did little more than arouse popular amusement and, in time, provoke hostility. Poor health more than good judgment kept Addams from joining Henry Ford's abortive mission to Europe in the winter of 1915-16 to seek grounds for the calling of a conference of neutrals. Affairs worsened, each passing month of war inspiring deeper animosities and emboldening the belligerents to more stubborn pursuit of victory on the fields of battle. Soon America would be tempted into the fray—and when Addams saw

old friends and associates begin to waver in their pacifism, seduced, as she saw it, by the prospect of an enduring peace, a war to end wars, she sadly recalled that they "did not know how old the slogan was, nor how many times it had lured men into condoning war." Yet she herself endorsed Wilson's bid for a second term in 1916, in the expectation that he was best inclined to keep the nation aloof from war, and endorsed his stirring call for peace in January 1917. The rush to war in the weeks that followed left her despondent, and her opposition to the war imposed an isolation she found it hard to bear. The inner turmoil Addams had suffered during the years following her graduation from Rockford arose from conflicting claims upon her latent capacities and upon her very person. Her despondency and sickness were not resolved until the clarifying decision had been made to settle on Chicago's West Side. The alienation and sickness she suffered during the war derived not from drift and indecision but from her blunt determination never to participate in a military effort. The decision in 1889 had put her in touch— with neighbors and associates whose friendship became a sustaining stream. The decision in 1917 cut her off—from many former friends, from associates in the settlement movement (many of whom accepted with mounting enthusiasm the hope that the mobilization of human resources that war entailed could be turned to the reconstruction of society when peace arrived), and, most severely damaging, from the larger American community. Addams numbered as casualties the young men from the neighborhood whom she had known through settlement clubs, the sons and brothers of friends, and long-cherished ideals of democracy: rational discussion, free speech, free association. She watched in sadness as the young men registered for the draft at Hull-House and expressed dismay at their surprising "docility"; she listened to immigrant women, bewildered by

22 / AMERICAN conscription, who complained: "They did this way over there, but we did not think it would be this way over here." At times it seemed, she wrote in 1922, "as if the whole theory of selfgovernment founded upon conscious participation and inner consent, had fallen to the ground." Peace and Bread in Time of War (1922) became Addams' summary statement of events of these years. All of her writing—without exception—was autobiographical. Invariably she began with what she knew best, her own response to events personally experienced; and only then did she move outward to illuminate broad social issues. So it was in all she did— descriptions of the dynamic interchange of subjectivity and objectivity, rooted in concrete experience and kept in tension at dialectic poles. Her life, in her mature years, caught the same rhythm—months of intense engagement and activity in the world, weeks of seclusion and contemplation. Especially as she grew older, as her reserves of energy lessened, Addams found relief from the burdensome demands of Hull-House in a week's stay at the family home of Mary Rozet Smith on the Near North Side, where she could rest, read, and write without distraction and interruption. The summer home she shared with Smith near Bar Harbor, Maine, provided longer respites. The coming in and the going out established a rhythm, provided a psychic distance, essential to the understanding of self and of other. During the war years, so sapping of morale, that rhythm sustained her. Peace and Bread in Time of War gives evidence of the composure she found; it is an eloquent but never an embittered cry. Addams' declared intent was frankly autobiographical: "As my reactions [to the war] were in no wise unusual, I can only hope that the autobiographical portrayal of them may prove to be fairly typical and interpretative of many like-

WRITERS

minded people who, as the great war progressed, gradually found themselves the protagonists of the most unpopular of causes—peace in time of war." The title came to her as the writing progressed: "Not because the first. . . words were the touching slogan of war-weary Russian peasants, but because peace and bread had become inseparably connected in my mind." That both were also symbols of a woman's role to heal and to nourish became clearer as the account unfolded. Because of its autobiographical angle of vision, the climactic chapter is "Personal Reactions During the War'' (chapter 7 of eleven; what followed was denouement). It opens with a confession whose disarming truthfulness not many of Addams' contemporaries and but a few of her biographers recognized. During her lifetime it was usual to perceive her as a radical, a prophet ahead of her time; images set so early and so firmly have a way of persisting beyond the span of life. Addams knew better. "My temperament and habit had always kept me rather in the middle of the road; in politics as well as in social reform I had been for 'the best possible.' " But the war had pushed her to the "left," into an "unequivocal position." She became the target of distorted news stories, and an object of derision and hate. Addams fell into an illness (beginning with a bout of pleuropneumonia) that led to three years of semi-invalidism. "During weeks of feverish discomfort," she wrote, "I experienced a bald sense of social opprobrium and wide-spread misunderstanding which brought me very near to self pity, perhaps the lowest pit into which human nature can sink." Having believed in the evolutionary possibilities inherent in a democratic society, it was difficult for Addams to stand against millions of her countrymen, especially when the majority included leading teachers of pragmatism who defended the war "with skill and philosophic acumen." The consequent "spiritual alienation"

JANE ADDAMS I 23 led her to long "desperately for reconciliation with friends and fellow citizens" when the only course was to fall back upon "comradeship with the like minded." War derived from specific causes that, having been identified, could be rooted out. The prudent course, then, was to hold quietly to one's own conviction, wait out the war, and be prepared to take up the search for peace when the times were more auspicious. As a pragmatist, Addams knew that truth must "vindicate itself in practice," yet the war "literally starved" the pacifist of "any gratification of that natural desire to have his own decisions justified by his fellows." And so she was driven back "upon the categorical belief that a man's primary allegiance is to his vision of the truth and that he is under obligation to affirm it." Hers was no footloose pragmatism; it was founded on the rock of moral absolutes that she knew, instinctively, were sound. Armistice found Addams up and active again; and the rest of the book details her efforts, together with others, to promote a just, and therefore a lasting, peace. There were errands to Europe, conferences, negotiations, the composition of manifestos and platforms. But facts more than words engaged her attention as she traveled through Europe, and starvation was the ugly fact that loomed the largest. War, like all injustice, fell hardest on the most defenseless, in this case the very old and the very young, who had been rendered listless and emaciated by years of malnutrition. In northern France, Addams watched as a row of children—"a line of moving skeletons"—passed before an examining physician. Always with the journalist's (or the novelist's) eye for the telling detail, she reported: To add to the gruesome effect not a sound was to be heard, for the French physician had lost his voice as a result of shell shock during the first bombardment of Lille. He therefore whispered his instructions to the children . . . and the

children, thinking it was some sort of game, all whispered back to him. Throughout Europe the same stark fact of physical want: peace and reconstruction would need to begin with bread. Starvation transcended national boundaries. Wherever war had raged, there was hunger; and it was that universal condition, Addams felt, that might become the base from which realistic instruments of international cooperation would arise. And where better to begin than with a mobilization of the women of all lands? Theirs was the "age-long business of nurturing children," theirs the "office of reconciliation," theirs "the primitive obligation of keeping the children alive." Addams found a model to emulate in a Belgian woman who, at war's end, organized a group of compatriots to carry relief to the children of Austria and Germany. She was typical of many women, Addams felt, "who had touched bottom . . . in the valley of human sorrow and had found a spring of healing there." The giving of bread, woman's ancient charge, showed the way to peace by the propaganda of the deed. And so a book, marred by sorrow and disillusionment, was able to end, like all Addams' others, on a note of renewed optimism. That was ever the affirmation, more difficult this time than before; but still it struck the dominant and recurring theme. That men would go to fighting one another again was abnormal, "both from the biological and ethical point of view." Their "natural tendency" to draw together into "friendly relationships" and "to live constantly a more extended life" was sure to reassert itself. Addams' own contributions toward that end were made through the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom; and in 1931 her efforts were rewarded by a Nobel Peace Prize, an award she shared with Nicholas Murray Butler, whose views on world affairs usually were opposed to

24 I AMERICAN hers. (The irony was not lost on many of her friends, who were less charitable, or less restrained, than she.) The award carried a commendation, quoted in John Parrell's Beloved Lady: A History of Jane Addams' Ideas on Reform and Peace, to the heart of the matter. "In Jane Addams there are assembled all the best womanly attributes which shall help us establish peace in the world." The last fifteen years of Addams' life can hardly be counted as downhill, yet it was probably more momentum than newly initiated efforts that kept her going. Recurring illnesses associated with advancing age, together with the inhospitableness of the decade of normalcy (as President Warren G. Harding put it) to social reform, steadily depleted her energies and her will. The Second Twenty Years at Hull-House, subtitled with a Record of a Growing World Consciousness (1930) was Addams' longest— and her least—book. The material in many of the chapters had appeared earlier. The variations on old themes were less sharply delineated, less melodious, the prose less disciplined, the pace not so much leisurely as meandering. Addams still wrote in the major key, with here and there a minor chord: Even if we, the elderly, have nothing to report but sordid compromises, nothing to offer but a disconcerting acknowledgment that life has marked us with its slow stain, it is still better to define our position. With all our errors thick upon us, we may at least be entitled to the comfort of Plato's intimation that truth itself may be discovered by honest reminiscence. That had been her strategy throughout: to illustrate events, and the truths they held, through autobiography. Addams' life was remarkably of one piece; but that is not to say that it always ran smoothly, for the trauma of war was not the only interruption. It was simply that she had divined her central

WRITERS concerns and outlined the major ingredients of her social theory very early on. The Second Twenty Years more or less closes the parentheses on the spinning out of ideals, processes, attitudes, and stories. And so Addams again measures the progressive response to all "the stupid atrocities of contemporary life, its arid waste, its meaningless labor, its needless suffering, and its political corruption"; affirms the centrality of concern for the "little child deprived of parental care"; reports how she was sustained by "the uplifting sense of comradeship" of working in common cause with true friends; restates the "necessity of women's participation" in civic affairs so that society can be the beneficiary of their "great reservoir of ... moral energy"; emphasizes her pacifist creed that "peace was not merely an absence of war but the nurture of human life, and that this nurture would do away with war as a natural process." A chapter on "postwar inhibition" judges the negative impact of the "red scare" upon social reform, when "to advance new ideas was to be a radical, or even a bolshevik"; another deplores the spirit of intolerance and conformity that marked the 1920's. Addams' assessment of prohibition is balanced: on the one hand are the negative consequences—widespread violation of the law, police corruption, gang warfare; on the positive side of the ledger—more orderly family life, fewer industrial accidents, better housing and education. Other chapters provide an updating of old agenda items—the humanization of justice, immigration, arts and crafts, education. Unlike all her other works, The Second Twenty Years concludes on a relatively flat note, with a mild reassertion of John Dewey's faith in democratic education. One new touch is worth comment—Addams' brief, candid, yet guarded evaluation of the unmarried career woman. In her generation, she concludes, there had been little opportunity to combine marriage and career—men were reluc-

JANE ADDAMS I 25 tant "to marry women of the new type"; women were unable, lacking the new household technologies, to fulfill both functions; public opinion was not yet prepared to tolerate the double role. And then she leaves to Emily Greene Balch a more extended explanation, which she quotes approvingly. Many professional women were willing to admit that they had missed "what is universally regarded as the highest forms of woman's experience," Balch observes, but there was nothing abnormal in the lives they led. 'They are strong, resistant and active, they grow old in kindly and mellow fashion; their attitude to life is based upon active interests; they are neither excessively repelled nor excessively attracted to that second-hand intimacy with sexuality which modern science and modern literature so abundantly display." From what we know of their lives, and of Addams', it seems a reasonable summing up. There were two more books: a collection of memorials Addams had delivered on the deaths of beloved friends, The Excellent Becomes the Permanent (1932), and a partial biography, My Friend, Julia Lathrop (1935), published posthumously. Her energies flagged. The return of old disabilities and the coming of new ones hastened the end. She died on May 21, 1935, in Chicago. In her lifetime, friends hailed Addams as a prophet. If to prophesy is to foretell wondrous and calamitous events and to be disbelieved (the model of Cassandra), Addams does not qualify. Her optimism kept her from accurately assessing the forces leading toward war in 1914; the persistence with which she clung to notions of evolving amity provided others no better guide in bracing for events that followed soon after her death. If to prophesy is to say the awful truth in the presence of the king, like Nathan before David, Addams comes closer to filling the role. Her own judgment was closer to the mark, in that regard, than that of her friends—her habit had kept her rather close to the middle of the road,

and in politics and reform she had been willing to accept "the best possible." Her analyses of the origins of injustice and her eloquent portrayals of the human consequences of social evils went to the root, but the solutions she proposed were ameliorative and reformist; basically she accepted the social system because she was so certain that it could be reconstructed by patient and democratic processes. Addams' capacity for empathy put her in alliance with the least favored. And in 1917 hers was a prophetic "No." In an era when women were still trained to say 4 'Yes" and 'Thank you, sir," Addams had been reared by her father to be independent and to stand up for principle. She spoke out against a war she implicitly believed to be a consequence of masculine, militaristic impulses. If to be a prophet is merely to be "ahead of one's time," then surely Addams is a candidate. In social theory and in program she anticipated most of the measures of social democracy made real by subsequent generations. Where most of her contemporaries remained suspicious of unions, she insisted on the basic right of working men and women to organize and bargain collectively through agents of their own choosing; she regretted the resort to violence, but she remained true to the central principle of self-determination in the marketplace, as in all other arenas. Most other progressive reformers of her generation were hostile, condescending, or indifferent to the rights of racial minorities. Through the NAACP, Addams pursued full civil rights for blacks; and through the Urban League she hoped to promote the social and economic resources of blacks as they moved from the rural South to the urban North so that in time they, too, could enjoy a larger measure of self-determination in American society. Yet so many of the reforms she had espoused fell short or failed—prohibition, health insurance, and the eradication of prostitution. And women's suffrage never had the welfare consequences for which she had hoped.

26 I AMERICAN Addams was "ahead of her times," yet very much in the heart of her times. And those times reached back into the nineteenth century, to the ethos of village communities; middle-class decorum; Victorian reticence; a religious ethic of work, good works, stewardship, and fellowship; and back to Lincoln's simple republic of plain folk. Some critics have faulted Addams for looking backward nostalgically to those earlier days; but she was born, after all, in 1860, and reared in mid-America. It was said Addams was pastor or priest. Perhaps. She preached effective sermons. She performed many of the accustomed roles of service to others, and even appropriated the male prerogative of being the chief eulogizer at funerals and memorial services of friends and associates. In another sense, if she was a religious, she was a mother superior, competent to manage a vast and complex enterprise, canny enough to cajole even the crustiest archbishops to her side. With the spoken and written word Addams aroused public opinion, pricked the national conscience, provoked reforms, and informed the thoughts and acts of her generation—she probably touched and moved a larger and more diverse audience, in the United States and throughout the world, than any of her peers. In the word, as much as in the propaganda of the deed, lay the manifestation of her genius and the source of her authority. The issues she addressed still confront the nation and the world: the enlargement of democracy to embrace the social sphere, provision both for effective governance and for individual liberties, the liberation of oppressed groups, the enrichment of culture, the achievement of world peace. Her writings and her life provide no easy blueprints, but they may inform our social and moral perceptions and the ways we choose to shape our lives.

WRITERS

Selected Bibliography The best, but still incomplete, list of Addams' writings is M. Helen Perkins,/! Preliminary Checklist for a Bibliography of Jane Addams (Rockford, 111.: 1960).

WORKS OF JANE ADDAMS BOOKS

Democracy and Social Ethics. New York: Macmillan, 1902. Newer Ideals of Peace. New York: Macmillan, 1907. The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets. New York: Macmillan, 1909. Twenty Years at Hull-House. New York: Macmillan, 1910. A New Conscience and an Ancient Evil. New York: Macmillan, 1912. Women at the Hague, the International Congress of Women and Its Results. New York: Macmillan, 1915. (Written with Emily G. Balch and Alice Hamilton.) The Long Road of Woman's Memory. New York: Macmillan, 1916. Peace and Bread in Time of War. New York: Macmillan, 1922. The Child, the Clinic and the Court. New York: New Republic, 1925. (Written with C. Judson Herrick, A. L. Jacoby, et al.) The Second Twenty Years at Hull-House; September 1909 to September 1929, with a Record of a Growing World Consciousness. New York: Macmillan, 1930. The Excellent Becomes the Permanent. New York: Macmillan, 1932. My Friend, Julia Lathrop. New York: Macmillan, 1935. ARTICLES

Addams published more than 500 articles in her lifetime, many of which later appeared, in revised form, in her books. Of special importance for this essay are the following:

JANE ADDAMS I 27 "The Subjective Necessity for Social Settlements," in Philanthropy and Social Progress; Seven Essays. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1893. Pp. 1-26. "The Objective Value of a Social Settlement.'' Ibid., pp. 27-56. "The Settlement as a Factor in the Labor Movement," in Hull-House Maps and Papers. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1895. Pp. 183-206. "A Function of the Social Settlement, "Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 13:33-55 (1899). SELECTED EDITIONS

Jane Addams: A Centennial Reader, edited by Emily Cooper Johnson. New York: Macmillan, 1960. The Social Thought of Jane Addams, edited by Christopher Lasch. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965.

CRITICAL AND BIOGRAPHICAL STUDIES BIOGRAPHIES

Davis, Allen F. American Heroine: The Life and Legend of Jane Addams. New York: Oxford University Press, 1973. Farrell, John C. Beloved Lady: A History of Jane Addams' Ideas on Reform and Peace. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1967. Levine, Daniel. Jane Addams and the Liberal Tradition. Madison: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1971. Linn, James Weber. Jane Addams: A Biography. New York: D. Appleton-Century, 1935.

CRITICAL STUDIES

Conway, Jill. "Jane Addams: An American Heroine,"Daedalus, 93:761-80 (Spring 1964). . "Women Reformers and American Culture, 1870-1930," Journal of Social History, 5, no. 2: 164-77 (Winter 1971-1972). Curti, Merle. "Jane Addams on Human Nature," Journal of the History of Ideas, 22:240-53 (AprilJune 1961). Davis, Allen F. Introduction to The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1972. Pp. vii-xxx. Lasch, Christopher. The New Radicalism in America (1889-1963): The Intellectual as a Social Type. New York: Vintage Books, 1965. Lynd, Staughton. "Jane Addams and the Radical Impulse," Commentary, 32:54-59 (July 1961). MacLeish, Archibald. "Jane Addams and the Future," Social Service Review, 35:1-5 (March 1961). Phillips, J. O. C. "The Education of Jane Addams," History of Education Quarterly, 14:49-65 (Spring 1974). Platt, Anthony M. The Child Savers: The Invention of Delinquency. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969; 2nd ed., enl., 1977. Scott, Anne Firor. Introduction to Democracy and Social Ethics. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1964. Pp. vii-lxxv. (John Harvard Library ed.) Woods, Robert A., and Kennedy, Albert J. The Settlement Horizon: A National Estimate. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1922. —CLARKE A. CHAMBERS

Louisa May Alcott 1832-1888

L

/ouisa May Alcott was thirty-five in 1868, when her phenomenally popular Little Women was published. She was beginning her career as the best-loved American author for the young. By 1868 Alcott, who lived with her parents and sisters, had developed fiercely intense habits of family-centered privacy. She disliked the "lionhunters" who soon came in even greater numbers to the family's Concord, Massachusetts, home. She could not always avoid them, however, and the ensuing encounters were usually painful to her, and sometimes to her visitors. Alcott herself records how one little girl wept violently and could not be comforted that this sharp-featured, dark, middle-aged woman was the author of Little Women. This anecdote is not as predictable and slight as it first seems. Until recently, most of Alcott's critics have been less perceptive or open than that little girl who so frankly registered her shock at the discrepancy between the literary persona and the reality of Louisa May Alcott. For, to put it dramatically, Alcott was a woman with a secret, and one that she meant to keep, possibly even from herself. Despite her ruthless censoring of her private journals and correspondence, despite her determined refusal to identify much of her most interesting work, Alcott did not succeed in hiding her self. And it is in part the growing awareness of Alcott's darker side that is restoring her impor-

tance today. Long considered the patron saint of harmless juvenile literature, Louisa May Alcott, the woman and the writer, is coming into view: highly gifted and deeply divided. "Duty's faithful child," as her father, the transcendentalist philosopher Bronson Alcott called her, Alcott provides a haunting exemplum of the meaning of compulsive yet unwilling adherence to Victorian literary and personal conventions. "Shall never lead my own life," Alcott wrote in one of her many curtly despondent late journal entries, and she was partly right. There was sheer personal misfortune to contend with. Initially blessed with enormous physical vitality and zestful if erratic good spirits (she lost both during an illness contracted in her work as a Civil War nurse in the winter of 1862-63), she spent her remaining twenty-five years in a maze of ill health, drugs, and suffering. But much of her frustration seems less straightforward than her health problems. Her rebelliousness is indisputable. A vehement, adventurous person with a dread of boredom, she played with boys as a child, remained single, enlisted briefly as a nurse in the Civil War at thirty, and supported women's rights and other reform causes in middle age. Yet Alcott was as much a local crank as an activist reformist. A child of the Concord renaissance, her mentors were of course her father, Bronson Alcott, and his friends Ralph Waldo

28

LOUISA MAY ALCOTT I 29 Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and other luminaries of the transcendentalist group. Alcott's growing bitterness at what she felt was the provincial high-talking and small-mindedness of Concord helps illustrate how confining that center of the American Renaissance could seem to a nonconforming feminist spirit. She outgrew, if not Concord, at least her need for it, but she never really moved away. As a writer, the same contradictions may be seen at work. She possessed a genius for melodramatic plot and the machinations of strategic deception that such a form entails; she early published anonymously or pseudonymously at least a dozen dazzling, highly plotted, darkly sensational tales on which she worked with the utmost absorption. Yet she rose to fame as the author of cheery, nearly plotless books like Little Women, An Old Fashioned Girl (1870), and Eight Cousins (1875), which she herself found of little interest. Alcott's life was not happy, and her achievement, while impressive, was not equal to her talents. The still unexplained connection between compulsive will and imaginative impulse that could turn self-flagellation into genuine inspiration and bridge profound psychic fissures for many Victorian authors snapped early for Alcott, probably by the time she reached her mid-thirties. Her success, in a sense, ended before it began. In this, although not in her unhappiness, she was not typical of her generation. One must start with some introduction to Alcott's family. Among American authors, only Thomas Wolfe could be said to have drawn his material so extensively from family autobiography; only Emily Dickinson stayed nearer family ground. Unlike either Wolfe or Dickinson, moreover, from adolescence on Alcott defined her task in life as the financial and emotional support of her gifted but impecunious family. She wrote, she insisted, to meet what she felt as their claims on her. She sometimes confused her lack of separate identity with familial demands

on her to perform; she genuinely loved her family and they her; none of this lessens or entirely explains her claustrophobic sense of obligation. Louisa May was born on November 29, 1832, the second child of Amos Bronson and Abigail (Abba) May Alcott. Of farming stock, Bronson became a brilliant if improvident educator and philosopher, unemployed for the better part of thirty years. Abba was a talented member of the well-bred, reform-minded Sewall and May families. The couple had four daughters and no sons. Bronson and Abba made heavy demands on their gifted second girl. While recognizing Louisa's enormous strengths of purpose and affection, they found her difficult and even violent. Bronson described Louisa on several occasions as "demonic," a term he also used for her mother. Abba, a strong-minded woman deeply devoted to her husband but anxious for a little more of the worldly goods Bronson's high-mindedness bypassed, also saw her second-born as cast in her own mold. In Louisa's moodiness and the tenacious loyalty that she increasingly used as the only means of controlling it, Abba sensed both a source of affection and an eventual wellspring of income for herself. Until after the Civil War, Abba did more to support the Alcott family than her husband. An amateur pioneer in social work and a tireless laborer at home, she everywhere saw, in her trenchant phrase, "woman under the yoke," and she early impressed upon Louisa that there would be "few to understand" her. Whether she spoke in bitterness or hope was unclear, but her message was not: Louisa must strike out for herself. Abba Alcott's matriarchal feminism and the largely patriarchal system that it sustained were to be an uneasy source of inspiration for Louisa throughout her life. Abba of course is the model for Marmee in Little Women. Her energy, passion, and determination, moreover, clearly lie behind the damned heroines of Alcott's "sensational" tales as well. But it was Louisa's father

30 I AMERICAN whose precepts and personality most seriously guided, and perhaps damaged, Louisa's development. If Abba felt Louisa was her ally, Bronson, despite the pride he eventually took in her, often considered her his opponent. He felt, not inaccurately, that Louisa was able to learn only through her will, through conflict. Hence, he noted in the journal that he devoted to her early development, she experienced the world largely as intractable materialia; Louisa would not discover the unchanging Platonic unity behind appearances in which he himself believed. Since Bronson was Louisa's teacher as well as her father, it was difficult for her to elude or modify his definitions of her. Bronson Alcott, a radical and unpopular pioneer in children's education, experimented largely of necessity on his own offspring. His technique was deliberately to merge the extremes of introspection with those of sublimation. His daughters and the students at the Temple School that he ran for a few years in Boston in the mid1830's were encouraged in most unconventional ways to plummet the deepest reaches of their spirit in earnest discussions of everything from conscience to conception; but in the process they subjected their findings to peer and adult inspection and judgment. A notorious example is Bronson on the topic of birth. He asked his pupils, mainly under ten years of age, to ' 'give me some emblems on birth." His pupils responded with answers such as birth is "like rain," birth is "a small stream coming from a great sea," birth is "the rising light of the sun." Finally, Bronson simply closed the discussion: "I should like to have all your emblems, but have not time. There is no adequate sign of birth in the outward world, except the physiological facts that attend it, with which you are not acquainted.'' He had asked his students to ponder things that they could not fully comprehend; he demanded growth but also commanded a special kind of fear.

WRITERS Like her schoolmates, Louisa early discovered what is now called her unconscious only to find that it was somehow not her own but, rather, to a degree unusual in Victorian America, public property, even an arena for the formulation of new laws of etiquette. For her education consisted at every level of catechisms in which her private and public selves were helplessly intertwined. For example, Bronson on one occasion left an apple within her reach, told her not to touch it, noted the length of time she resisted temptation, watched her succumb to it, and then cross-examined her on the mental processes involved in her fall. When Louisa responded that she took the apple because she wanted it, she showed herself candid but uncontrolled. Bronson's work of moral instruction continued. Louisa kept a journal from early childhood on; but this fledgling authorial effort was no first strike for privacy, for her own life; it was written for her parents, who read it and penned commentaries for her edification. Louisa was by nature a highly creative, complicated, and difficult person; she might well have blocked her development under any conditions. But it is true that she never even began to map out her inner self, as she might have done under the more conventional system of religious repression that dominated the childhood of women like Harriet Beecher Stowe. Bronson recognized, as few Victorians did, a multilayered psyche, yet he did not entirely rid himself of the belief that its contents could be predicted, if not dictated. The only genuinely inner identity that Louisa found was her protest at being exercised in the ritual of who she ought to be, but for various reasons she never accepted or dealt with this resistance. Not least of these reasons was her ambivalent but valid admiration of Bronson. Alcott could never write extensively about her father, as she did about all the other members of her claustrophobically tight-knit family. She did not un-

LOUISA MAY ALCOTT I 31 derstand, much less sympathize, with his ideas or with the poverty they entailed for his family. But there was a valid uncertainty, an instinct that she did not grasp the material he offered, as well as unexplored hostility, at work in her omissions. Bronson Alcott could not fully aid or sympathize with his most talented daughter; he did not really need her. This is to acknowledge how much he lacked at every level; but it did not alter for Louisa, nor should it for us, what, and how much, he possessed. Bronson's journals testify that he was, as historian Perry Miller has claimed, the "shrewdest judge of character" of his day in New England. A number of Bronson's friends concurred with Emerson that, despite Bronson's inability to write, laugh, or vary himself (considerable defects), he might well be the "highest genius of his age." Louisa herself not infrequently voiced the widespread, if contested, view that her father was a "saint." The usefulness of this term lies not in its laudatory connotations but in its possible precision as a descriptive formulation of certain patterns of character and behavior that still retained some currency in Victorian America. Abba supported Bronson, if at times grudgingly, somewhat in the spirit that people supported anchorite recluses in the Middle Ages. Emerson felt that the commonwealth of Massachusetts owed Alcott a subsistence, and he donated thousands of dollars to what Abba called her husband's "experiment in living." Bronson was convinced that he had a calling and should pursue nothing but this experiment. Like a medieval saint, he saw his life as a laboratory for discovering the higher possibilities of his kind. As his daughter would become, Bronson was, a reformer: an early abolitionist, a full supporter of women's rights, and the founder of a shortlived but impressive Utopian community at Harvard, Massachusetts. He was also a mystic. He rightly described himself as a "prophet" and a "hoper," and he put his faith in the future,

whether or not it resembled the present. He was never confined to those ideas that his culture made available to him; and he saw the cult of work and material progress, as well as the new Hegelian historicism that supported them, as denigrations of possibility. His notions of organic, cyclical, and periodic development are strikingly anticipatory of the best of Jungian and Eriksonian thought. Significantly, he loved gardens and planted and tended dozens of them; and in an age of architectural camouflage, he restored the original materials of the numerous houses he lived in. A witness to the cheapest kind of religious liberalization, Alcott, like his model Samuel Taylor Coleridge, was engaged in the critical process of modernizing—not secularizing—the religious sensibility. Alcott reaped the rewards of his disposition and effort. He is perhaps the only prominent American of the Victorian age who appears to have been almost consistently at peace with himself and who grew more so with age. Although horribly complacent at times, he did not stagnate. He never changed; he absorbed fresh life. Typically, success as a writer, speaker, and thinker came to him in his sixties and seventies; he opened a summer school for philosophic minds at eighty. Louisa was as talented as her mother, but she used her abilities as Abba had not hers. She was as gifted as her father and, in some ways, more so: she had the wit, pragmatism, terseness, verbal skill, and passion that he lacked, and of course her influence was greater. Bronson recorded that Louisa's favorite childhood activity was moving all her playthings back and forth between her father's study and her mother's realm, the nursery. This is not a happy vignette, but it is critical to Louisa's career. Abba possessed a passion, a life, a will that Louisa shared but partly mistrusted as perhaps wrong and certainly painful. Bronson was peaceful, in ways that must have seemed enviable, but perhaps he also ap-

32 I AMERICAN peared lifeless to his more turbulent daughter. Louisa had two models, each capable of inspiring fine work from her; but she was too divided between them to continue serious, sustained production in either vein. All her life, if within narrow confines, Alcott was in the process of moving, never of settling. She shared with Bronson a love of John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress—it is the text on which Little Women is a commentary—but one suspects that her point of emotional contact with the work was rather different from her father's. Abba once described herself as "a beast of burden," and Louisa too felt less like a traveler passing through to a higher realm than an overburdened wayfarer struggling through this world. She never believed she owned anything—not even her fame—nor did she want to; she preferred to think of herself as simply overladen. Increasingly, her very identity was irritation. Consequently, as a writer she became tragically, if inevitably, ever less creatively responsible to her own very real possessions—talent, energy, and intelligence. Alcott's literary work is a chronicle of growth and decline, and her books may be grouped into three more or less chronologically sequential genres. Her initial works, written between the late 1840's and the late 1860's, are sensational dramas and stories in which she explored her (to use Bronson's term) "demonic" side: the damned femme fatale was her leading character. In the second group of stories, which includes the three sagas of the March family, Little Women, Little Men (1871), and Jo's Boys (1886), as well as Work (1873) and the unfinished late story "Diana and Persis," she attempted to cross-fertilize the sensational and the juvenile genres: her dominant character was the difficult young woman or man trying to reach a genuinely functioning maturity. In the third group of tales, which proliferated in the decade between 1875 and her death, she

WRITERS gave herself largely to out-and-out juvenile material; her heroine, or hero, is the spirited child who discovers docility rather than development. In these three genres, Alcott's special creative nature and aspirations become apparent. She blocked fast, but hers was not the proverbial writer's block. Despite her fluency, her intensity of interest quickly exhausted itself, yet this was not always a defect. Indeed, blocking itself began part of her subject. Alcott was among those artists whose achievement is inspired and limited by their nemesis, and Alcott's nemesis, as Bronson observed, was an obsession with what might be called objectification: she understood emotions best as purposes, and purposes almost literally as objects. Alcott always emphasized her "brains," by which she meant less her intellect than her will and ability to exploit it. She constantly spoke of her mind in terms of physical entities, often employing mechanistic, technological, and military terms. "Spinning brains," using brains as a "battering ram" against the world, a "thinking machine," were among her favorite phrases in discussing her ambition. Always she disavowed "inspiration" and "genius" in favor of "necessity" to explain her motive for writing. Bronson never thought of himself as poor; for Louisa as for Abba, poverty was her root means of self-identification. It explained her radical materialism. Alcott trusted only the concrete, and yet she was not, as her father sometimes thought, unimaginative. Far from it. Rather, in contrast to Bronson's mystical, imaginative life, the condition of Louisa's imagination was literal-mindedness; gravity was the law of her creative impulse. Reversing Bronson's most characteristic process, she turned mind into matter. Alcott told part of the story of her creative career in the rather episodic novel Work (1873). Christie Devon, the heroine, sets out at twentyone to find her fortune. Christie, an orphan, is

LOUISA MAY ALCOTT I 33

warm, talented, emotional, and giving. She marries happily and has a child, only to be conveniently widowed so that she may head a matriarchal society. Here as elsewhere in Alcott's work, domestic feminism is the doctrine of the book but not its greatest strength. Alcott's reformist themes were always heartfelt but by definition easy for her. They were her safest contribution to the Alcott legacy; and in safety lay neither Alcott's chief interest nor promise. What makes Work powerful is Christie's constant quest for a career that will represent, stabilize, and even substitute for her inner life: Work is the saga of the search for an object. Christie might well ask with Samuel Johnson, "Where then shall hope and fear their objects find?" Like Alcott, Christie tries in turn being an actress, a maid, a nurse, a companion, and she is always a full-time hero-worshiper. Despite her ever-active aspirations, the most haunting, truest material in the book is her intermittent loneliness, her drift toward death—there are four suicide attempts including her own—and her constant fight, with the critical help of other women, against depression. Louisa almost drew in Christie a portrait of exhaustion: we catch glimpses of a woman determined to fight but drained by the struggle with a reality whose rigidity is the product both of her poverty and of the workings of her psyche. But by 1873 Alcott was stopping short of the demands of her subject. Alcott had once been more daring in the exploration of her own creativity and its consequences. There are the "lurid" sensationalist works of the 1840's, 1850's, and 1860's, including her early melodramas, her first novel, Moods (1865), and her subsequent anonymous or pseudonymous tales written for popular magazines. Her preparation for this masterful writing was uneven but sure. As a young woman, Alcott published trite poetry under the conventionally coy nom de plume of Flora Fairfield, and rendered the rather sac-

charine little fairy tales that she told Emerson's young daughter Ellen into a collection entitled Flower Fables (1855). But her real literary apprenticeship had come in her teens with the writing and acting of the plays that her sister Anna (Pratt) later had printed as Comic Tragedies (1893). In such stormy melodramas as Norna; or, The Witch's Curse and The Unloved Wife, Alcott ostensibly concerned herself with the pure maiden, surrounded by a host of malign men plotting against her life and virtue. Notably, however, Alcott chose to play on stage the role not of the persecuted maiden but of the male villain; in other words, she acted as the agent of the plot, not as its victim. What interest these plays still possess derives from their author's compulsive if unskilled rush from one rhetorical high to another: characters speechify and declaim until they faint (they would have to). Here is Count Rodolpho, ''A Haughty Noble,'' threatening in vain the fair Leonore in Norna; or, the Witch's Curse: Rodolpho. Thou art an orphan, unprotected and alone. I am powerful and great. Wilt thou take my love and with it honor, wealth, happiness, and ease, or my hate, which will surely follow thee and bring down desolation on thee and all thou lovest? Now choose . . . Leonore. My Lord, I scorn thy love, and I defy thy hate. Work thy will, I fear thee not. . . . henceforth we are strangers; now leave me. I would be alone. Rodolpho. Not yet, proud lady. If thou wilt not love, I '11 make thee learn to fear the heart thou hast so scornfully cast away. . . . Thou shalt rue the day when Count Rodolpho asked, and was refused. But I will yet win thee, and then beware! Leonore. Do thy worst, murderer. . . . (Exit Leonore) Rodolpho. Foiled again! Some demon works against me.

34 I AMERICAN The dramas are youthful studies in the possibilities of excitement. Alcott's first novel, Moods, was originally published in 1864 after the success of Hospital Sketches (1863), a witty and biting report on Alcott's adventures as a nurse during the Civil War. The sketches are the closest Alcott ever came to emulating Charles Dickens' comic genius, whose every manifestation she followed from childhood on. Describing her attempt to get a pass allowing her to travel from Boston to Washington, Alcott deftly foreshortens and compresses the minor disasters of dreadful weather, incompetent officials, and approaching homesickness into a tight comic vignette: Here I was, after a morning's tramp, down in some place about Dock Square, and was told to step to Temple Place. Nor was that all; he [her last informant] might as well have asked me to catch a humming-bird, toast a salamander, or call on the man-in-the-moon, as find a Doctor at home at the busiest hour of the day. It was a blow; but weariness had extinguished enthusiasm, and resignation clothed me as a garment. I . . . doggedly paddled off, feeling that mud was my native element, and quite sure that the evening papers would announce the appearance of the Wandering Jew, in feminine habiliments. Moods, on which Alcott worked much harder than the Sketches, is a totally different kind of book, in which Alcott picks up and develops the themes of her adolescent melodramas. Sylvia Yule, the "moody" heroine, is the product of an unhappy mismatch, and she herself has married too young. Her husband, Robert Moore, is intelligent, kindly, and a bit "effeminate." Sylvia actually prefers his best friend, the rugged Adam Warwick, clearly modeled on Louisa's lifelong idol, Henry David Thoreau. When Sylvia learns, after a year of matrimony and misery, that Adam does love her and wishes her to leave Robert, she is painfully, fatally torn. As in Alcott's early plays, it is duty versus passion, but delineated

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with new subtleties. Sylvia is neither the passive victim nor the vehement villain of Alcott's melodramas, and she lacks the calm strength of her older, unmarried mentor Faith, a precursor of Marmee, whose sermons punctuate Sylvia's woes. Sylvia cannot control, subdue, or assert herself, and her only recourse is death. Alcott's social themes are always coherent, important, and in order. Sarah Elbert, an astute critic of Alcott, has pointed out that through the example of the tragic career of Sylvia, a teenage bride, Alcott is implicitly arguing for a free period of adolescent maturation for girls in which they might be unhampered by love and marriage worries—a period like the one that American society had increasingly accorded its young men. Yet there is still another level to Alcott's material, one centering on Sylvia's destructiveness to others and herself; Sylvia condemns herself at one point as uncontrollably moody and even emotionally defective, a view her author fully substantiates. That Alcott understood Sylvia profoundly cannot be doubted. In passages like the following, the reader feels genuine self-scrutiny at work in Alcott. After speaking about "the moods" that tormented Sylvia and "made a blind belief in fate so easy to her,'' Alcott gives a penetrating profile of her heroine's fatally divided psyche: From her father she received pride, intellect, and will; from her mother passion, imagination, and the fateful melancholy of a woman defrauded of her dearest hope. These conflicting temperaments, with all their aspirations, attributes, and inconsistencies, were woven into a nature fair and faulty; ambitious, yet not self-reliant; sensitive, yet not keen-sighted. These two masters ruled soul and body, warring against each other, making Sylvia an enigma to herself and her life a train of moods. Alcott cannot fully explore this level of her character, at least not when writing under her own name. Yet it was just in the penetration of this

LOUISA MAY ALCOTT I 35 destructiveness that Alcott's potential for real artistic coherence at this point in her career lay. The public response to Moods was mixed. Alcott had dared to publish it partly because of the adulation accorded the infinitely less significant Hospital Sketches. Her gamble backfired, and she was fiercely responsive to the hostile reviews she received—this overreactiveness would constantly determine her career decisions. Critics, the young Henry James among them, attacked her ignorance of the passions of love and the institutions of marriage and mocked the exaggerated quality that characterizes the whole book. This reception deepened Alcott's divisions; and the already wide separation, between her father's image and her mother's, between the juvenile and pulp markets, and between slipshod but respectable hackwork and serious if underground artistry, became irreconcilable. In 1868 she published Little Women, and she dedicated her acknowledged work ever after to her most conventional critics. When she reissued Moods in 1881, she bowdlerized and weakened it, casting a chastened Sylvia back into her kindly husband's arms. Yet between 1865 and 1869, Alcott published stories pseudonymously in periodicals like Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper (whose readers knew little and cared less about Concord sages). These tales, recently discovered and edited by Madeleine Stern, took the hidden drama of Sylvia, the wayward destructive femme fatale, and exploited it to the utmost. Given the public rejection of Moods, one wonders where Alcott found the courage to do this, even pseudonymously. Much later in Jo's Boys (1886), she created the fascinating character of the wild vagabond Dan, the "black sheep" of Plumfield, Jo March Bhaer's school for difficult boys. Jo tries to reclaim Dan from his restless, law-breaking ways, and she succeeds—but too late. Dan can atone for his crimes (murder among them), but he is forever separated from polite society by them. He can never marry Bess, the pure, golden-

haired girl he loves. The point here is less Dan's criminality than the protection from conformity that it offers. The novel ends with his selfimposed exile to the Indians and the frontier. It no longer matters if he wants to be a member in good standing of the middle class; he cannot be. In a similar way, the protest aroused by Moods served as a temporary self-liberating "crime" for Alcott. If she had forfeited approval, she had not forfeited herself. Her own anonymous exile would be all too short, and she would pay for it with a lifetime of repentant if eccentric respectability; but she had her day among the Indians on the frontiers of her own creativity. In her pulp stories, Alcott was following the masters of the new "sensation" novel, a genre whose critical importance is only beginning to be recognized. Dickens' Little Dorrit (1857) and Great Expectations (1861), Wilkie Collins' The Woman in White (1860), Mrs. Henry Wood's EastLynne (1861), and Mary E. Braddon'sLarfy Audley's Secret (1862) were the big best sellers of the early 1860's. They are all tales of premeditated crime. The plots are characterized by incest, bigamy, identity confusions, returns from the grave—by any violation of Victorian norms that involved deception and doubling devices. "Sensationalist," the term popularly used to describe these stories, is not quite accurate, despite their violent appeal to the sense and capacity for terror. Such novels are rather radically "materialistic" in the sense that they are obsessed with purposes so fixed as to function like objects. Little Dorrit is dominated by the fierce will of the Calvinist invalid, Mrs. Clenham, determined to keep her illegitimate gains and the knowledge of her son's true parentage to herself. The story of Great Expectations is also the product of a diseased woman's scheming. Miss Havisham, jilted decades earlier at the altar, still dressed in her unused bridal costume, plans to avenge herself on the opposite sex through her adopted protegee, Estella, whom she has trained to be as heartless as the world. The Woman in

36 I AMERICAN White, which Collins described as the contest of "Woman's patience" and "Man's resolution" against the forces of evil, pits the heroic young Marian against the diabolic Count Fosco in a desperate struggle over the sanity and inheritance of Marian's sister Laura. East Lynne depicts the painful attempt of a woman of beauty and high birth to gain back and watch over the husband and family she had foolishly abandoned. Lady Audleys Secret, the most thrilling and influential for Alcott of the English sensationalist novels, focuses squarely on a beautiful, insane, and criminal woman's attempt to secure the love and position to which she was not born and which she hardly deserves. The pattern is clear: strong, if disturbed, heroines, plotting to refashion by any stratagem a hostile world. They would clearly be congenial to Alcott. Indebted as she was to her English contemporaries, however, Alcott made this genre her own. She spent almost no time on the detective figures who intrigue Dickens, Collins, and Braddon. Unlike her English colleagues, she hid few secrets from her readers; and there are few servants in her tales to carry and obfuscate the mystery. Alcott at her best does not let her wicked heroines even pretend to be helplessly sweet and feminine, nor does she waste time on the good heroine who opposes the bad one as in the works of her contemporaries. Like Edgar Allan Poe, Alcott brushed away the intricacies created by other more socially-minded authors in their awareness that good as well as evil exists and plays its part. More interested in the criminal mentality than in the process of unmasking it, Alcott presents the scenario of deception, the essential plot of the sensation story, as its own raison d'etre. Behind a Mask (1866), Alcott's masterpiece in this genre, concerns a governess called Jean Muir, a kind of alter ego to Sylvia. Jean poses as a nineteen-year-old victim of fortune loved too well by too many. In actuality (we know this

WRITERS from the start), she is an embittered thirty-yearold ex-actress whose selfish ambition has condensed to a desire to outwit the world once and for all and retire from her exhausting career of deceiving everyone all the time. She has no time for moods, much less emotions. Calculated step by calculated step, she wins the obsessive attention and love of the members of the well-born, affluent family in which she is working. But her success is short-lived, and it soons seems that her various deceptions will be publicly exposed. In a brilliant race against time, Jean secures the affection and hand of the chivalrous elderly uncle of the house. She sweeps out of her fictive kingdom in triumph, leaving her detractors permanently silenced by her new status—a victory, one notes, seldom granted her English counterparts. Much interests Alcott about the plot of deception. In a patriarchal society deception can be a means for women to infiltrate a closed world and get from it what they want: Jean wins her game because she fakes the lineage without which no wealthy well-bred man would marry her. And, if nothing else, deception allows women to professionalize, manipulate, and make excitingly perilous their one culturally sanctioned area of expertise, the creation and display of emotion. Alcott did not create Jean an actress without reason. Boredom is the ultimate nightmare of the sensationalist genre. Yet it is unlikely that the only source of Alcott's artistic fascination with lies was her dilemma as a woman. For Alcott, as for many of her contemporaries, deception was most compelling as the literary calisthenics of the will. Deception as the narrative focal point can necessitate a stripping or undermining of the narrator's moral and reflective commentary on the plot, no matter how elaborate the plot itself. The novelist undertaking such a plot must have first and foremost, as the English novelist Wilkie Collins wrote, an "idea"; he must, almost perversely, work backward not forward, from the end of the story. Thinking backward, like count-

LOUISA MAY ALCOTT I 37 ing backward, is totally abstract. It is sheer purpose. Jean Muir can promise the hostile young man who mocks her histrionic skill at the opening of the action that her "last scene will be better" than her first. And it is—as she carefully reminds him in the story's last line. This can be seen as a typical use of Victorian plot development, but it is a highly wrought and extraordinarily self-conscious one. For there is almost no separation between Jean's plot and her author's. Jean's scheme is not effectively exposed; her pulse is Alcott's. Behind a Mask is not plotted, it is about plot; plot has become subject as well as technique in this, Alcott's best sensationalist work. Deception is an effort of the will so intense as to be tantamount to a constant vigilante against the emotions. Mark Twain once remarked that the pleasure of telling the truth is that one doesn 't have to remember what one says. But the memory enforced by deception, memory as relentless attention, a persistent hangover of the most aggrandizing curiosity, a constant lashing of the mind to the objects it perceives, is exactly what Jean Muir—and Alcott—want. The plot of the sensation story provides an uncanny parallel to the dynamic by which the mind desperately strives for some conscious hold on essentially unconscious material. Deception as a theme provides a way to psychologize plot. Deception, moreover, creates a paralyzed dialectic between the desire for omnipotence and the fear of rejection, the dual fueling processes of the will. Jean Muir makes everyone fall in love with her, at least for a while, by her fantastic ability to be all things to all people. Using every charm in the book, Jean proves that she possesses any gift that can be transmuted from a resource into a weapon. As long as she can conceive of a hostile purpose for any skill or feeling, it is within her command. She charms Edward Coventry, the younger brother of the house, by exhibiting her real fearlessness and self-reliance

in a calculated display of interest in his highspirited horse Hector. She fascinates Gerald Coventry, Edward's dandified, Byronic elder brother, by using her hard-won penetration into the secrets of the human heart to flatter him with her brilliant analysis of his character. She captivates old Sir John, eventually to be her doting husband, as she airs her genuine pride in the service of her fabrications about her background. Jean Muir does not want to love; we know from other of Alcott's sensationalist stories like "V. V." that to love, for this kind of woman, is to die. Jean does not even want to be loved; she wants the exemption from scrutiny granted the loved object. She is buying time to avoid confronting the fissure of her self. Her ability to deceive depends on her belief that if she is fully present at one time in one place with one person, if she is fully known, the contradictions of her psyche will be literally explosive: she will not only be rejected, she will come apart. As Jean nails down the infatuation of various members of her world, she deals with each individual more or less in isolation from the others. She operates under a taboo. She cannot bring these curious courtship situations together because she is building up, objectifying in increasingly extensive and concrete ways, the different facets of her self. The impending nemesis, the ending from which Alcott rescues her, is one in which Jean would be left in a psychic graveyard full of the elaborated monuments of her fragmented personality. It was a finale from which Alcott could not entirely free herself. In 1868, Alcott turned more or less permanently from the sensationalist press to the even more lucrative and certainly safer juvenile market, and entered the second major phase of her career. She issued one "melodramatic" work in the twenty years between Little Women and her death. A Modern Mephistopheles (1877) sports a typical sensational Alcott story. Two ambitious men plot viciously to outwit each other in art and

38 I AMERICAN love. Although the tale is weakened by the saintly nature and early death of Gladys, the object of rivalry, it is nonetheless powerful and alive. Significantly, Alcott relished working on the novel again (she had begun it long before) and rejoiced at the chance momentarily to stop producing "moral pap." She enjoyed the speculation that greeted its anonymous publication; to her pleasure, many readers thought Julian Hawthorne had written it. Alcott was a great admirer of Nathaniel Hawthorne's; Gladys reads The Scarlet Letter, and the plot of A Modern Mephistopheles has affinities with that of The Marble Faun. Hawthorne's school, Alcott knew, was hers, but she dropped out early. In spending the last two decades of her life writing almost exclusively for the young, Alcott was harvesting increasingly poorer crops from the soil of her nature. This is not to suggest that Alcott did not make notable contributions to the field of children's literature; and her start in that area was a fine one. When Alcott began writing the March family sagas, she was transforming a well-known genre. Prior to her ascent to fame, the evangelical Jacob Abbott's ' 'Rollo'' and ' Tranconia'' tales, along with Samuel G. Goodrich's "Peter Parley" works, dominated the juvenile market. Abbott, who had a great deal in common with Alcott and her father in his efforts to educate the young, is worth considering. In an unfavorable review of Eight Cousins, Henry James lamented Abbott's decline in popularity—and he had a point. Abbott repays rereading, if in small doses. Like Alcott's, Abbott's stories, for all their howto pragmatism, are versions of Pilgrim's Progress; they tell of children encouraged to minute self-examination, particularly through open-book journals and family conversation conducted very much in the style of the March family. When Abbott describes a plan for an edifying family journal in his best-selling The Young Christian (1832), he could be giving a blueprint for Little Women. He advocates:

WRITERS a description of the place of residence . . . the journeys or absences of the head of the family or its members—the sad scenes of sickness or death . . . and the joyous ones of weddings or festivities or holidays—the manner in which the members are from time to time employed—and pictures of the scenes which the fireside group exhibits on the long winter evening—or the conversation which is heard and the plans formed at the supper table. But, in dramatic contrast to Alcott, Abbott is everywhere religious and didactic. The pilgrimage that Abbott writes of takes the next world, not this, as its goal. Conversion is always Abbott's aim; and he is aware in traditional Calvinist fashion that his narrative can only prepare for, not effect, a change of heart in his readers. Indeed, if they enjoy his work, which is only a means to grace, and do not then draw closer to a state of true grace, they will be deeper in sin than if they had never read it. Pleasure, that is to say, is not Abbott's point. Alcott, bred in liberal transcendentalist circles, a friend and devotee of the radical minister Theodore Parker, secularized children's literature. At least initially, she made her books a source of enjoyment for her young readers: her stories were their possession. Yet she did not sacrifice the traditional preaching mission of juvenile writing. Her girls and boys undergo a change of heart; but it is always the expressed love of those around them, not God's approval, that they win. Indeed, Alcott's juvenile narratives generally climax in festivities—birthdays, camping trips, anniversaries, home theatricals—occasions when approbation can become celebratory. There is a good deal of applauding in Alcott's work. The festive scene in all its mutations is Alcott's equivalent of a celestial vision. Yet this somewhat self-indulgent aspect of her secularizing process is not the most interesting one. Alcott wants to educate her young readers,

LOUISA MAY ALCOTT I 39 and the doctrines she instills are social, not specifically religious: equal rights for women and men, correct hygiene, kindness to animals, sympathy for the poor. Rereading Abbott and Alcott, one cannot find the latter uniformly superior in art or instruction. Yet Alcott's concern with the process of secular socialization, combined with her intelligent recognition of children's lively mischief-making needs, gives her early juvenile work special value. Alcott does allow her children and adolescents to say the socially forbidden or to question the social order with impunity; this much of her own rebelliousness of the 1860's emerges as creative sprightliness in the 1870's. And she does this precisely because she believes in a unique status for children and a unique license attached to it. Her children are society's creatures but also its critics. Unlike Abbott's, they are not little adults, although on occasion they pretend that they are. In Little Men (1871), Nan, a tomboy who wishes to be a doctor, soon gets tired of playing dolls with her more docile little friend Daisy, and Alcott weaves her ennui into tart social commentary: " 'Never mind, I'm tired of dolls, and I guess I shall put them all away and attend to my farm. I like it rather better than playing house,' said Mrs. G. [Nan], unconsciously expressing the desire of many older ladies, who cannot dispose of families so easily, however." The fact that Alcott has dropped serious preoccupation with religious salvation as an overmastering and leveling goal is important. She is at liberty to perceive and fight for the unique aspects of the state of childhood. Her children's books, along with Mark Twain's richer and more significant work, constitute a major post-Civil War plea that young Americans be permitted to be young—if only for a while, if only because the world that awaits them is difficult at best and needs opposition more than approval. Youth in Alcott's work will eventually turn out to be a heavily regimented affair, but originally it was an arena for experimentation, even if of a care-

fully supervised kind. At her best, in the three March family books, Alcott tried something perhaps harder, if far less well-realized, than anything Twain took on: to explore the question whether or not the trained passions of children (and a number of her young people are passionate indeed) can be channeled effectively into the social order and even change it without being totally subverted in the attempt. Alcott was unable to make this question consistently intelligent and dramatic or to sustain it, but it is to her credit that she raised it. Despite Alcott's expressed lack of interest and belief in it, Little Women is an important novel, even leaving aside its legendary popularity. She wrote it at the urging of her father and Thomas Niles, Jr., of Roberts Brothers Publishers, but it is nonetheless her book. A kind of Alcott family autobiography, it represents her major attempt to examine a form of moral effort by which a nature like hers might at least bridge the distance between its own turbulence and the serenity represented by her father. In literary terms, Alcott hoped to let sensational and domestic fiction educate each other. Little Women is of course the story of a family of four girls, Meg, Jo, Amy, and Beth, and their strong and kindly mother, Marmee. Although the women have seen more affluent days, they are true gentlefolk who win the love and regard of their rich neighbors, Mr. Lawrence and his difficult grandson Laurie. Mr. March, the father, clearly based on Bronson Alcott, is away for much of the action, serving as a chaplain in the Civil War. But he is not simply disposed of as too difficult or too uninteresting to handle; he is also an ideal for the conflict-laden Jo and her equally strong-tempered mother. He has the active life permitted men and the serenity legislated for women. Jo's remarks, like Alcott's early journals, are filled with resolves; to be good, dutiful, calm, in general "better." As she herself is well aware, she breaks most of her resolves daily. It is easy to mock the naivete of this typically Victorian en-

40 I AMERICAN terprise, but the underlying therapeutic strategy of moral resolution is neither despicable nor simple. Out of crisis can come the will to change. Like other Victorians, like her author, Jo hoped by 4 'resolution," especially failed resolution, to mount the will to change to crisis proportions and, in the process, genuinely to activate it in a paradoxical campaign against itself. The story of Little Women is about this incessant stimulating of the moral will; events, Marmee, Father, and her own conscience continually intensify Jo's struggle to subdue herself. She rejects the charming Laurie who is so like her and accepts the scholarly, awkward, warm-hearted Professor Bhaer who is so like her father, not just out of punitive self-denial but out of a genuine sense of her own needs. Jo, like Alcott, may confuse peace with repression, but that does not mean that she does not want and seek peace. In Little Women, as in its successors, Little Men and Jo's Boys, Jo is not entirely successful in her efforts at change. This is why we like her. At all levels, she is real to us. We believe in her desire to be steadier and less turbulent. After all, her capacities for anger, unlike Jean Muir's, are in this realistic context, frightening. After a quarrel with Amy, she deliberately does not warn her younger sister that the ice on the river where Amy is skating near her is very thin. Amy falls in and almost drowns, a victim of Jo's rage. Beth catches her fatal fever because her three sisters—Jo, Beth's self-appointed protector among them—refuse to heed her gentle pleas for assistance with a fever-stricken poor family. And Jo's partial success in her fight against selfishness is convincing: this is the way it is, we think; this is more or less what we can expect. The very fact that Jo does not marry up socially or financially (Bhaer is a poor German emigre) guarantees an ongoing life of effort and work for her, and that is what she's about. She tries. And Jo's efforts, in the sequels to Little Women, are almost always interesting. Jo is kind

WRITERS and powerful. Alcott's preoccupation with what Nina Auerbach calls literary matriarchies—fictive societies and families dominated by women who run their worlds and bring up children along lines congenial to their interests—persisted to the end of the March series, although it took an increasingly somber cast. In Little Women, Marmee rules the roost, although guided by the paterfamilias. She sends out all her surviving girls to marry; but Jo, as a mother and schoolmistress, is clearly going to preside over a larger kingdom than her mother claimed. Yet, in Little Men, the ambitious Jo has totally given up sensationalist writing to turn out "moral pap" and help her husband run a school that is as much an extended family as an educational institution. Better an extended family than Harvard, Alcott often tells us, and she may not be wrong. But, in her emphasis on innovative child rearing, she is nonetheless betting heavily and in perilous ways on the future against the present. In Little Men, Amy, now married to Laurie, is no longer painting. Meg's husband dies, leaving her with two little children to care for. Jo's writing seems a financial necessity and a burden. She is constantly putting down books she would like to read; she is adept, we learn, at keeping her little charges amused and edified by making toys for them "out of nothing." When the March saga officially closes in Jo's Boys, things look much better on the surface. The March girls have their occupations back; Jo is writing only for an audience she loves (her school and family), not for a crowd of autograph hunters; Meg plays the starring actress in Jo's Plumfield drama which is, significantly, about an "old woman"; Amy is painting once more, and so is her daughter; Jo's favorite protegee, Nan, is well on her way to a pioneering career in medicine. Old Mr. March is benignly dispersing wisdom and Professor Bhaer seconds him; both are indispensable if totemic figures. Yet the March world is so much happier here because it is also

LOUISA MAY ALCOTT I 41 much more encapsulated. It is like a little kingdom in a magic glass ball, to be held in one's hands, not entered. All of Jo's boys who go out into the world go out to trouble—shipwreck, jail, and degenerative living are their initial experience until luck and Plumfield rescue them. The March women are stronger, indeed, but the world may have grown stronger still. Alcott's interesting unfinished manuscript "Diana and Persis" (in manuscript at Houghton Library, Harvard University, and soon to be edited by Sarah Elbert) is, in an unofficial sense, the last of the March series. The story is based on May Alcott, Louisa's younger sister, a charming person and a talented painter, and her experience in Paris in the 1870's. May died in 1879 after an interesting if minor artistic career and a short, happy marriage. In the tale, Alcott depicts two women, idealistically modeled on herself and May, who love each other deeply; both are artists, enormously gifted, and beautiful. They are types of the "coming woman" whom Alcott wrote about eloquently if disjointedly in An OIdFashioned Girl. In the course of "Diana and Persis" the younger woman Persis (May) marries happily a man who could not be more sympathetic to her career aspirations, and she has a child she adores; but, as Diana notes, the dust is thickening on her painting tools and she is looking at her child more than at her canvases. Diana is also drawn, if tentatively, to a man. He is a great artist, but, due to a personal tragedy, he can no longer create or do anything but love his only child. Like May, he has retreated to the world of the personal that seems antithetical to that of creativity. As in the other March books, we cannot see here a road that leads from undeniably growing female strength to a further heightened female satisfaction. In considering Alcott's non-March books written after 1868, it is useful to return to Little Women and remember Beth, Jo's alter ego and Mr. March's favorite. Jo has strength, although

she is often frustrated and turbulent. Beth has perfect satisfaction, perfect peacefulness, although she is very limited. We believe in Jo, and we believe in Beth, too—because we know from the start that she is going to die. It is a bit like knowing that chronic depressives have no trouble sleeping. Any virtue or bit of luck that accompanies an insoluble problem makes sense. Beth, like Jo, pays the price. But—and here is the trouble with the later work—Jo's female successors will bypass or overcome their will, as Jo could not, and yet survive—even flourish—as Beth could not. It was perhaps the success and, more important, the exposure that Little Women entailed that catapulted Alcott back into the confusions of her childhood catechisms: come tell what you feel and be judged. Everything she wrote after 1869 was read, her work was no longer a secret, her creativity no longer a weapon. The approval that she gained at home and abroad had little relevance to her, if only because she knew it to be unearned. Her obsessive denigration of her fame was not mere modesty or fear of recognition. Alcott wrote Little Women, unlike her earlier work, partly at Bronson's instigation. In becoming the most successful author for children in America, she fulfilled one of her father's most cherished ambitions: he had long felt the lack of a healthy literature for the young and yearned to fill the gap. And Alcott's stories were about infant education, often conducted along at least partly Bronsonian lines. Yet she was not fully representing—much less gaining—her father's virtues. In her later children's books, Alcott reversed the patterns developed in her "lurid" writing rather than testing them as she did in the March books. But the two sides of her imagination, unlike those of Dickens, were neither creatively juxtaposable nor equally developed. In Alcott's sensational tales, women and men oppose each other bitterly: "love" and "hatred" are forged into a single mechanism by the per-

42 I AMERICAN vading force of relentless self-assertion. In the juvenile stories, little boys and girls endlessly educate each other in a process that suggests mutual cancelation rather than genuine association: Bab and Bette, Demi and Daisy, Dan and Nat, Jack and Jill, Rose and Matt—in the very names of the characters a fearful law of averages seems at work. And their actions tend to demonstrate the same rule. Jo brings the tomboy Nan to Plumfield partly to "stir up" her rather prim little niece Daisy; she also believes that Daisy's influence will make the wild Nan "as nice a little girl as Daisy." While Daisy, who is capable of baking up cookies with specially designed child's cook ware and exclaiming, "How nice it is to do it all my ownty donty self,'' brings feminine good manners to "the wilderness of boys" that is Plumfield, Nan proves to its youthful male inhabitants that "girls could do most things as well as boys, and some better." At the story's close, Jo can remark triumphantly to her friend and patron, Laurie: 'You laughed at it in the beginning and still make all manner of fun at me and my inspirations. Didn't you predict that having girls with the boys would prove a dead failure? Now see how well it works,' and she pointed to the happy group of lads and lassies dancing, singing, and chattering together with every sign of kindly good fellowship. The phrase "lads and lassies" is homogenizing, dismissive. In the sensational novels and stories, characters exploit and destroy "love" to gain their objects. In the later juvenile stories, children are taught to abandon the objects of their will to win love and approval: "taming" is frankly and repeatedly used to describe this breaking-in process. The sensational characters exist in painful solitude; their only real links to society are conspiratorial. In her later work, Alcott's little folk—with the important exceptions of Dan in

WRITERS Jo's Boys and Phebe in Rose in Bloom, both mutations of sensational characters—are never alone. They can never free themselves from what feels like a claustrophobically communal atmosphere. Rose confronts her "eight cousins," not to speak of half a dozen aunts and uncles, in a single week, for example. All her newly found relatives soon prove themselves vociferous critics as well as warm admirers of the little orphan girl. This is not just the experiment in socialization mentioned earlier in connection with the March books. In a real sense, the later characters, for all the learning they ostensibly do, are just plain outnumbered. Polly, of An Old-Fashioned Girl (1870), and Rose, the heroine of Eight Cousins (1875) and Rose in Bloom (1876), have no real rebellious instincts; they slip easily into the social niches gaping for them. Reconciling quarreling families, helping the needy, spending or acquiring tidy incomes, and picking out the right husbands interest them, if not us. The books in which they appear have the charm of fairy tales told with just enough realistic detail to make us (at least as youngsters) able to appropriate them for our own fantasy needs. Yet struggle is not unknown in the late books. The high-spirited and impoverished heroine Jill in Jack and Jill (1880) is a tomboy like Jo March. Through a protracted selfinflicted illness, however, she gains all of Beth's meekness and is rewarded with life to boot, not to speak of social mobility. Like a little infanta, she is clearly pledged to Jack, the son of a wealthy neighbor; Laurie does get Jo here. Destined for a career of good works, Jill faces, to use a telling phrase from Work, "the monotony of a useful life." Under the Lilacs, published two years before Jack and Jill, is probably Alcott's weakest effort and oddly interesting just for that reason. The story is an exercise in prissiness. There is the celestial Miss Celia, practicing hard for her future career as a minister's wife. There is her ob-

LOUISA MAY ALCOTT I 43 noxious, self-righteous young brother Thornton, whom we are expected to tolerate without getting the satisfaction of seeing thoroughly humbled. The class pretensions of both brother and sister are odious and unexamined. Miss Celia kindly adopts Ben, a young vagrant who formerly made his living performing in a circus with his father and his highly trained dog Sancho. Ben soon becomes a kind of adoring page to Miss Celia. He tolerates her various unjust suspicions of him and leaves his wild ways and even his unconventional thoughts to become, as his father notes at the story's close, "a gentleman." Yet it is Ben's two young friends, the sweet, rather dull Bette, a Beth figure, and her warmhearted but difficult sister, Bab, a Jo figure, who hold the reader's interest. Bab is thematically linked to Ben's dog, Sancho. She loves Sancho but loses him through carelessness to a shyster kidnapper who wishes to market his canine skills. Eventually, Sancho returns but sadly scarred. Although still a creature of tricks and fun, he has suffered during his kidnapping and becomes distrustful and embittered. Only through the character of a dog will Alcott acknowledge her own deeply felt sense of the pain of living and the damage it does to those who endure it. But Bab ends by learning about life from the innocent Bette, not from the experienced Sancho, just as Ben gives his fealty to Celia, not to his father, a potential "Pap" figure whom Alcott converts with lightning speed to middleclass values. Bab, a crack little archer—no one needs a knowledge of Freud or classical mythology to sense the implications of her skill— deliberately throws an archery contest to Ben, a boy. Ben wins, Bab seems a true "girl" and at last earns the same affection that Bette effortlessly attracts. Bab's conflict is Jo's, but her answer is not. Jo tried to cope with her nature, not cancel it. Indeed, the later books often depict the relative ease of moral transformation. Prodded by

illness or a winning example, we can all improve and, accordingly, be loved. Many of us can chirp like robins and be rosy of cheek and willing of heart. The fantasy of transformation is, as Alcott depicts it, a form of flippancy. We do not believe in it, and perhaps it is, ultimately, not meant to be believed. Flippancy and even slyness, as Henry James noted in his hostile review of Eight Cousins, are the hallmarks of Alcott's later books for children. These works are often almost insultingly careless. Alcott's professionalism as a writer functions in the worst of the late books as a license to be slipshod. She entirely rewrote her first semisensationalist novel, Moods, at least three times. Little Women and all consecutive books were sent off to be published more or less as rough drafts. Alcott's sincere avowals about the literary merits of unpretentiousness do not adequately explain the vast body of almost unpardonably poor writing. Aunt Jo's Scrapbooks (6 vols., 1872-82) and Lulu s Library (3 vols., 1886-89) are largely multivolume testimonies to the slightness of material that Alcott was willing to use her name to sell. A story like "Buzz," for example, about a fly that annoys the author in her hotel room to which she has retreated to write, is interesting only as a reminder that Alcott occasionally felt impelled to write when she had nothing to say. Moreover, the self-conscious use of slang, the acknowledged rambling, episodic nature of the narratives, the cavalier and slighting references to major historical events, the willingness to reshuffle the prospects and fates of her characters to suit her readers in the later books—all testify that Alcott the artist was no longer fully present in her work. Several samples of Alcott's writing from her three genres make the point. Moments of decision, always crucial to Alcott, turn on speeches and conversations, which dominate in Alcott's narratives. In a segment from the first genre, taken from "Behind a Mask," Jean Muir is

44 I AMERICAN alone for the first time. She has just left her new employers and drops her disguises, physical and otherwise. Off come her wig and makeup. Then, 4 'her first act was to clench her hands and mutter between her teeth . . . 'I '11 not fail again if there is power in a woman's wit and will.' She stood a moment motionless with an expression of almost fierce disdain on her face. . . . Next she laughed, and shrugged her shoulders with a true French shrug saying low to herself: 'Yes, the last scene shall be better than the first. Mon dieu, how tired and hungry I am.' " She then takes a drink and addresses her "cordial" as if it were a live friend, " 'You put heart and courage into me when nothing else will. Come, the curtain is down, so I may be myself for a few hours if actresses ever are themselves.' " This may not be great prose, and perhaps it is untrue to life, but it is true to its own pretentions. It is solid, nothing is wasted, everything is calculated to the strong effect that it achieves—the convention of penetration. Now here is Jo March turning down Laurie's proposal in Little Women: " 'I'm homely and awkward and odd and old, and you'd be ashamed of me, and we should quarrel,—we can't help it even now, you see,—and I shouldn't like elegant society and you would, and you'd hate my scribbling and I couldn't get on without it, and we should be unhappy, and wish we hadn't done it, and everything would be horrid!" After a few more harsh words from Jo, Laurie takes himself off, he says, "to the devil!" and Jo goes home, feeling "as if she had murdered some innocent thing, and buried it in the leaves." Again, as with the first passage, the words give us something precisely, again perhaps less the feeling involved than the motion of the mind: Jo's unexamined, hurried, epistemological shorthand that we, the readers, easily elaborate as angry and yet compassionate, a kind of chronic unexplored guilt. Finally, here is Bab's climactic moment in

WRITERS Under the Lilacs, her decision to lose the archery contest to Ben. She tells Miss Celia: " 'I want to beat, but Ben will feel so bad, I 'most hope I shan't.' " Miss Celia responds: " 'Losing a prize sometimes makes one happier than gaining it.' " Bab gets "a new idea, . . . and she followed a sudden generous impulse as blindly as she often did a wilful one. 'I guess he'll beat,' she said softly, with a quick sparkle of the eyes, as she ... fired without taking her usual careful aim." Ben then wins, and Bab congratulates him. There is still clarity, simplicity, even charm here, but the stakes are in every sense lower. The passage doesn 't gather as the two earlier ones do; Bab has neither Jean's density of will nor Jo's unexplored complexity of motive. There is a sense of diminished significance; the real material, which Alcott at her best either overdramatized or curtly referred to, has simply been passed over. The most enduring children's literature—Lewis Carroll's, Mark Twain's, or Frances Hodgson Burnett's—shows children creating an autonomous world separate from the adult realm; childhood serves the author as a means to explore a less trammeled consciousness. Carroll's Alice is presented initially to the reader accompanied by her sister and slipping easily into her "Wonderland": there are no adults to restrain or censor her. Twain's Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn contend with parental figures (strikingly, neither boy has a responsible living parent, however), but they beat or at least evade them. Burnett's classic The Secret Garden (1911) shows two children planting a garden as a refuge from a dark adult world. Even Little Lord Fauntleroy in Burnett's famous story of 1886 overcomes the authority of his stern grandsire and replaces it by the gently courageous regime of his and his "dearest" mother's imaginative devising. In contrast, Alcott's later little people are under constant guidance and surveillance by their "Uncle Alecs" and "Mother Bhaers";

LOUISA MAY ALCOTT I 45 imaginative life is stamped out. Alcott and the talented writer Rebecca Harding Davis once exchanged observations about their motives for writing the way each did: Davis' life was happy and her work gloomy, Alcott's pattern even by this relatively early time was the reverse. Alcott, noting the conversation in her journal, speculates not at all on this obviously significant difference. Here, as everywhere in her late fiction for juveniles, she operates on a provoke-and-stop principle. She kills connotativeness. "Queer" was a word that Alcott often used about herself as a child in the journals written for parental inspection. The word does not appear in her sensational fiction, but it crops up again and again in her domestic tales. It serves Alcott as a catchbag for all the unexplored areas of psychic life; it is a signpost of her unwillingness to care. Because there are no permissible objects except self-betterment in Alcott's late children's stories, there are few genuine plots. And if she did not plot, she would not think and could not feel. After Alcott barred herself from selfexpression in the late 1860's, she increasingly felt that there was nothing left to express and, worse, nothing by which to achieve a genuine transformation of the self in order to gain new resources for fresh expression. Alcott's later little girls have something in common with her early femme fatales: they are subject to metamorphosis, not growth. In a sense, murder pervades the worlds of both. And we have seen the increasingly blocked world that the March girls try not to notice; even they must live by not looking. The most interesting young figure in the last two March books is Dan, a murderer, a semisensational character, and Jo's favorite "boy." But Jo has little more real contact with him than with her Bronsonlike husband, Professor Bhaer. Dan has gone to the bad as decisively as Bhaer has gone to the good. Jo is in the middle, and the middle ground has increasingly become the place where the extremes do not meet.

Alcott's late works were evidence of her decline, both physical and artistic. In the 1880's recourse to health spas and the devoted care of an outstanding physician, Dr. Rhoda Lawrence, did little to alleviate the famous author's insomnia, headaches, vertigo, and increasing inability to eat or work. It is one of the ironies of literary history that Louisa May Alcott died within twentyfour hours of her father; for a half decade, Bronson had been reduced to more or less happy passivity by a stroke. Louisa died in pain, Bronson in peace; whatever the love between them, they never yielded the secrets of their personalities to each other. Louisa May Alcott's considerable achievement is as significant in its limitations as in its strengths. Hers was an important Victorian career; it is time to know and understand it better.

Selected Bibliography WORKS OF LOUISA MAY ALCOTT Flower Fables. Boston: George W. Briggs, 1855. Hospital Sketches. Boston: James Redpath, 1863. On Picket Duty and Other Tales. Boston: James Redpath, 1864. Moods. Boston: Loring, 1864. Little Women, or Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy. Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1868. Little Women, or Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy. Part Second. Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1869. An Old-Fashioned Girl. Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1870. Little Men: Life at Plumfield with Jos Boys. London: S. Low, 1871. Shawl Straps. Aunt Jo's Scrapbag, II. Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1872. Work: A Story of Experience. Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1873; repr., edited by Sarah Elbert. New York: Schocken, 1977.

46 I AMERICAN WRITERS Eight Cousins; or, The Aunt-Hill. Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1875. Rose in Bloom: A Sequel to "Eight Cousins." Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1876. A Modern Mephistopheles. Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1877. Under the Lilacs. Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1878. Jack and Jill. A Village Story. Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1880. Spinning-Wheel Stories. Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1884. Jo's Boys, and How They Turned Out. A Sequel to "Little Men." Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1886. Behind a Mask: the Unknown Thrillers of Louisa May Alcott, edited by Madeleine Stern. New York: William Morrow, 1975. Plots and Counterplots: More Unknown Thrillers by Louisa May Alcott, edited by Madeleine Stern. New York: William Morrow, 1976.

CRITICAL AND BIOGRAPHICAL

STUDIES

Anthony, Katharine. Louisa May Alcott. New York: Knopf, 1938. Auerbach, Nina. Communities of Women. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978. . ''Austen and Alcott on Matriarchy,"Novel, 10:6^26(1976). Cheney, Ednah D. Louisa May Alcott: Her Life, Letters, and Journals. Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1889.

Elbert, Sarah. Louisa May Alcott and the Woman Problem. Boston: Little, Brown, 1978. Gowing, Clara. The Alcotts as I Knew Them. Boston: C. M. Clark, 1909. Janeway, Elizabeth. Between Myth and Morning: Women Awakening. New York: William Morrow, 1974. Miller, Perry, ed. The Transcendentalists: An Anthology. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1950. Moers, Ellen. Literary Women: The Great Writers. New York: Doubleday, 1976. Peabody, Elizabeth P. Record of Mr. Alcott1 s School. 3rd ed., rev. Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1874. Salyer, Sandford. Marmee: the Mother of Little Women. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1946. Sanborn, Franklin B. and William T. Harris. A. Bronson Alcott: His Life and Philosophy. 2 vols. Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1893; repr., New York: Biblo and Tannen, 1965. Saxton, Martha. Louisa May Alcott. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977. Shepard, Odell. Pedlar's Progress: The Life of Bronson Alcott. Boston: Little, Brown, 1937. Shepard, Odell, ed. The Journals of Bronson Alcott. Boston: Little Brown, 1938. Spacks, Patricia Meyer. The Female Imagination. New York: Knopf, 1975. Stern, Madeleine B. Louisa May Alcott. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1950. Ticknor, Caroline. May Alcott: A Memoir. Boston: Little, Brown, 1928. —ANN DOUGLAS

James Baldwin 1924-

H

not so much on the historiography of slavery as on a projection of autobiographical experience on the large screen of social and racial generalization. As the titles Nobody Knows My Name (1961) and No Name in the Street indicate, Baldwin is a writer obsessed by the theme of identity or its absence. Because his interrelated treatment of psychological and social issues derives so directly from his personal history, it is necessary to examine his early life with some care before moving to a consideration of his literary career.

EAR the end of one of James Baldwin's most remarkable books, No Name in the Street (1972), the author discusses the doomed quest for love of the San Francisco flower children as symptomatic of the degeneration of American society. Suddenly, in one of those bewildering leaps in logic that characterize his social essays, Baldwin writes: It has been vivid to me for many years that what we call a race problem here is not a race problem at all: to keep calling it that is a way of avoiding the problem. The problem is rooted in the question of how one treats one's flesh and blood, especially one's children. The blacks are the despised and slaughtered children of the great Western house—nameless and unnameable bastards.

Born in Harlem in 1924, James Baldwin had a singularly unhappy childhood. In 1927 his mother, Berdis Emma Jones, who worked as a domestic servant, married David Baldwin, a sternly authoritarian religious fanatic who had migrated from New Orleans to New York. Young James thus acquired a name but not a loving and supportive paternal figure. On the contrary, David Baldwin despised his stepson for his illegitimacy, his physical weakness and ugliness, and, later, his independence of spirit. The child's mother provided whatever compensatory affection she could, but her eight additional children born over the next sixteen years and her work in white people's kitchens left her little time to spend on her firstborn. Indeed, while she was scrubbing floors and dusting furniture down-

In a quite literal historical sense, the statement has some validity. Uprooted from African culture, enslaved and transported, sexually exploited by owners and overseers, sold and resold in defiance of family ties, given the patronymic of the oppressor regardless of actual parentage, black people in America did appear, in Baldwin's historical perspective, to be bereft of legitimacy and identity. Alex Haley's Roots and Herbert Gutman's The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750-1925 raise basic questions about this view, but Baldwin's adherence to it is based 47

48 I AMERICAN town, young James was cleaning house and tending the growing brood of half brothers and half sisters uptown. In such a family situation it is little wonder that the future author's sexual development was ambiguous or that his major literary themes were to be the searches for love and identity. If Baldwin's family life was emotionally difficult, its objective circumstances were economically tenuous and socially repugnant. Even with both parents working in menial jobs, the most that could be expected was physical survival. The squalor and vice of the slum neighborhood in which this survival had to be achieved left an indelible impression on young Baldwin's mind, first as evidence of the wages of sin, and later as the pathological symptoms of a racist society: . . . visible everywhere, in every wine-stained and urine-splashed hallway, in every clanging ambulance bell, in every scar on the faces of the pimps and their whores, in every helpless, newborn baby being brought into this danger, in every knife and pistol fight on the Avenue, and in every disastrous bulletin: a cousin, mother of six, suddenly gone mad, the children parcelled out here and there; an indestructible aunt rewarded for years of hard labor by a slow, agonizing death in a terrible small room; somebody's bright son blown into eternity by his own hand; another turned robber and carried off to jail (The Fire Next Time). From such nightmarish reality, some refuge was needed, some sanctuary offering spiritual and physical safety and emotional release. For the Baldwins this sanctuary was the storefront church where David Baldwin preached. In No Name in the Street, Baldwin speaks of his stepfather's "unreciprocated love for the Great God Almighty" as the major passion of his life. Mercilessly, he strove to inculcate his faith in all the members of his family, not always with complete success. His beloved youngest son by his

WRITERS first marriage, Samuel Baldwin, rebelled in adolescence against his father's puritanical regimen and left the household at the age of seventeen. If neither God above nor his favorite son on earth would reciprocate his love, the elder Baldwin must have felt, none should be lavished on young James, another man's son whose reliability, apparently unquestioning acceptance of Christian faith, and intellectual precocity served only to call to mind the absence of these qualities in Samuel. For James, religious faith was an effort to escape the dangers of the street, to placate his father, and finally to defeat him by excelling him in his own ministerial vocation. Whatever the motives, the intense emotional commitment to religion in his early life left James Baldwin an enduring literary legacy of religious subjects and imagery, a hortatory style, and high moral seriousness. Three of his books—Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), The Amen Corner (1968), and Blues for Mister Charlie (1964)—deal explicitly with religious experience, and six others—The Fire Next Time (1963), Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone (1968), No Name in the Street, One Day, When I Was Lost (1972), IfBeale Street Could Talk (1974), and The Devil Finds Work (1976)—derive their titles or epigraphs from spirituals or Scripture. In contrast with the stresses of home and the emotionally depleting ecstasies of church, school offered Baldwin an arena for personal triumph removed from the awesome shadow of his domineering stepfather. Not that it provided physical safety, for the boy's diminutive size and mental superiority made him the easy target of schoolyard bullies; but the psychological support of his obvious intellectual prowess helped to sustain him in otherwise impossible circumstances. It also brought him to the favorable attention of Gertrude Ayer, the black principal of Public School 24 and something of a role model for young James, and of Orilla Miller, a white teacher who expanded his interests from books to

JAMES BALDWIN I 49 the theater and befriended his family over a period of several years. A voracious reader, Baldwin finished his first book, Uncle Tom's Cabin, at the age of eight and moved quickly to The Good Earth, Dickens, Robert Louis Stevenson, Dostoevsky, and the Schomburg Collection of black literature and history. As he commented to Margaret Mead in 1970, "By the time I was thirteen I had read myself out of Harlem." He then began forays downtown to the main collection of the New York Public Library on Fortysecond Street, the resources of which even his appetite for books was not likely to exhaust. Baldwin's childhood thus developed simultaneously in two worlds—the actual world of home, street, church, and school, and the imaginary realm of book, play, and film. One of his mother's most characteristic recollections emphasizes this duality: "He'd sit at a table with a child in one arm and a book in the other." At Frederick Douglass Junior High School in Harlem and at DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx, Baldwin accelerated the creative efforts begun at Public School 24. Poems, plays, stories, and essays poured out, gaining him recognition as editor of The Douglass Pilot and The Magpie at Clinton. Encouraged by such gifted teachers as the poet Countee Cullen and Harvard-educated Herman W. Porter at Douglass, and Marcella Whalen and Wilmer Stone at Clinton, Baldwin longed to become a writer. Before this ambition could be fulfilled, however, he had to confront related crises of sexual and religious identity. Baldwin has written at length of this period of his life, which began at age fourteen, in The Fire Next Time and, in fictional guise, in Go Tell It on the Mountain. The onset of puberty intensified the sense of innate depravity preached so incessantly by David Baldwin as axiomatic in his version of the Christian faith, and as especially applicable to his diabolically ugly stepson. The ranks of the fallen pimps and whores on Harlem streets bore vivid

testimony to the doom of those who yielded to the temptations of the flesh, now being felt so insistently by James and his suddenly adolescent acquaintances. Only through a transcendent religious experience, it seemed, could such a fate be averted. In this receptive frame of mind, Baldwin was led by his friend Arthur Moore to Mount Calvary of the Pentecostal Faith Church, whose pastor, the charismatic Mother Horn, received him warmly. Later the same summer his salvation came: One moment I was on my feet, singing and clapping and, at the same time, working out in my head the plot of a play I was working on then; the next moment, with no transition, no sensation of falling, I was on my back, with the lights beating down into my face and all the vertical saints above me. The purging anguish and ecstasy of this experience temporarily relieved the pressure of Baldwin's developing sexuality. It led him also to the pulpit, where as a boy-minister he could be the catalyst for the salvation of others and where, more importantly, his histrionic gifts would outshine the more austere evangelical style of his stepfather. So long disadvantaged in his oedipal rivalry with David Baldwin, James could now vanquish him on his own religious field. As the young preacher's congregation grew during the three years of his ministry, his stepfather's followers dwindled in number, driving him closer to the paranoia that finally overwhelmed him. Baldwin's success as a preacher was purchased dearly, not only in its effect on his stepfather but also in the inner conflict it produced in himself. At the very time that his ministry developed from the religious experience that simplified the moral issues of self, family, and environment, his intellectual and literary development was complicating his sense of reality. At the very moment of his seizure, he was devising the plot of a play; and in the parallel account of John

50 I AMERICAN WRITERS Grimes on 'The Threshing-Floor" in Go Tell It on the Mountain, "a malicious, ironic voice" of his skeptical, secular intelligence provides counterpoint to the prayers of the saints. As this voice grew in volume, Baldwin's faith subsided. Leaving the pulpit and the church, he was to become a bitter critic of Christianity, of which the actual "principles were Blindness, Loneliness, and Terror, the first principle necessarily and actively cultivated in order to deny the two others" instead of the professed Faith, Hope, and Charity. The historical role of Christianity in aiding and legitimizing the enslavement of nonwhite peoples, as well as its stultifying effect on individual lives, was to receive his bitter condemnation. His faith lost and his family situation deteriorating still further as his father sank into madness, but with his literary aspirations still intact, Baldwin in 1942 felt that he had to leave Harlem in order to survive. Joining his high-school friend Emile Capouya in New Jersey, he secured employment as a defense worker. He found himself in an extremely hostile racial environment. Except for some traumatic encounters with white policemen, Baldwin's direct experience with white racism in New York had been limited. In New Jersey, however, among native racists and white Southerners working in defense jobs, Baldwin, looking for a haven, found an almost ubiquitous hostility that seemed to confirm his stepfather's bottomless resentment of whites. "I learned in New Jersey," Baldwin wrote in the title essay of Notes of a Native Son (1955), "that to be a Negro meant, precisely, that one was never looked at but was simply at the mercy of the reflexes the color of one's skin caused in other people." From this exposure he contracted what he called a "dread, chronic disease, the unfailing symptom of which is a kind of blind fever, a pounding in the skull and fire in the bowels." His rage culminated in a violent confrontation in a Jim Crow diner at Trenton in which he was ready to murder or be murdered.

Called back to New York because of his stepfather's fatal illness, Baldwin was now more prone to understand the role of white racism in shaping the black condition. On the day after the funeral, August 2, 1943, which was also James Baldwin's nineteenth birthday, Harlem erupted in a riot occasioned by the shooting of a black serviceman by a white policeman. Black Harlem now seemed no more habitable for Baldwin than white New Jersey, for he had come to recognize the marks of oppression for what they were, not as the wages of sin. He concluded an Esquire essay on Harlem in 1960 with a solemn proclamation: "It is a terrible, an inexorable, law that one cannot deny the humanity of another without diminishing one's own: in the face of one's victim, one sees oneself. Walk through the streets of Harlem and see what we, this nation, have become." Like many young Americans with artistic or literary ambitions, Baldwin was attracted by the legend of Greenwich Village. Perhaps here, he thought, free of Harlem's constraints of family and poverty and New Jersey's blatant racism, he could begin his career as a writer. Far from tranquillity, however, the Village provided an atmosphere more frenetic and fluid than anything Baldwin had known before. Racial and sexual problems persisted, not to speak of the effort required to maintain a hand-to-mouth existence while undergoing a literary apprenticeship. However precariously, though, Baldwin managed not only to survive his five years in the Village but also to make contacts that were to prove beneficial and to break into print for the first time in serious magazines. Baldwin's first professional efforts, published in 1947, were book reviews for the Nation and the New Leader. In them he began to stake out areas and establish positions that were to characterize his early career. "Everybody's Protest Novel" (1949) is his most famous attack on the use of fiction as an instrument of social change,

JAMES BALDWIN I 51 but two years earlier his reviews were attacking Maxim Gorky for his outmoded revolutionary zeal and Shirley Graham for her emphasis on racial uplift. He concluded his remarks on the latter's biography of Frederick Douglass: "Relations between Negroes and whites, like any other province of human experience, demand honesty and insight; they must be based on the assumption that there is one race and that we are all part of it." A year later he reviewed five novels of racial protest for Commentary with astringent hostility. While complaining of over-simplification and sentimentality in novels about race, Baldwin noted the centrality of sex in racial conflict. With much oversimplification of his own, he had asserted in a 1947 review of a novel by Chester Himes that "our racial heritage . . . would seem to be contained in the tableau of a black and [a] white man facing each other and that the root of our trouble is between their legs." The autobiographical implications here are clarified in his review of a book by Stuart Engstrand about repressed homosexuality and in the slightly later essay "Preservation of Innocence." Rejecting overt racial conflict, though not race, as a literary theme and affirming the human pain and dignity of the homosexual, Baldwin was preparing himself for his first major creative efforts—Go Tell It on the Mountain, The Amen Corner, and Giovanni's Room (1956). Such attitudes were bound to bring him into eventual conflict with his literary idol, Richard Wright. When Baldwin met Wright in 1945, the older man read his manuscript, praised his talent, and helped him to secure a Eugene F. Saxton Memorial Trust Award, his first real literary recognition. In one of his several discussions of his friendship with Wright, Baldwin confesses that he viewed him as a father figure, David Baldwin having died only two years earlier. But for Baldwin a father figure was by definition what one rebelled against in order to establish one's own

identity. The explicit criticism of Native Son in "Everybody's Protest Novel" and "Many Thousands Gone," and the earlier implicit rejection of the Wrightian mode in the reviews of other works of protest fiction thus derive, as does all of Baldwin's work, from psychological pressures as much as from intellectual conviction. The overt rupture in the relationship between Baldwin and Wright occurred in France in 1949, but it had been inevitable from their first meeting in Brooklyn four years before. Encouragement by Wright and Robert Warshow, editor of Commentary, was welcome to Baldwin and the recognition of publishing in major magazines was gratifying, but progress on his fiction (an overtly autobiographical novel and a novel about a bisexual based on the Wayne Lonergan case) was slow and the turmoil of his personal life continued. Plans to marry failed to develop because of his bisexuality, and the nervous strain of working, writing, and suffering in New York was depleting his energies and his morale. A friend had committed suicide by leaping from the George Washington Bridge, as Rufus was to do in Another Country (1962), Baldwin's novel based on his years in the Village. The protagonist of his first published short story, "Previous Condition" (1948), is a black actor suffering from a double alienation: as a black man he cannot identify with the white society that oppresses him; as an artist-intellectual he cannot identify with the black society from which he comes. No alternative now seemed available to Baldwin himself other than exile. When Richard Wright went to Paris in 1946 as an official guest of the French government, he was lionized by such luminaries as Andre Gide, Roger Martin du Gard, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Simone de Beauvoir. His response to the beauty of the city and to the splendor of French civilization was unequivocally favorable. When his protege, James Baldwin, arrived in Paris two and a half years later, he had some forty dollars in his

52 / AMERICAN WRITERS pocket. Paris, he was to tell his biographer, "was awful. It was winter. It was grey. And it was ugly." Taken by a friend to Les Deux Magots, he ran into Wright, who helped him to find a cheap hotel. But, on the whole, life in Paris proved to be an even more precarious struggle for survival than life in New York. If prejudice against blacks was less intense than in the United States, prejudice against Arabs was ferocious. And prejudice against the poor and the powerless was a universal characteristic of the comfortable classes, as Baldwin was to learn from a humiliating episode, described in the essay "Equal in Paris" (1955), involving some stolen bedsheets and resulting in his brief imprisonment. Various friendships helped to sustain Baldwin during these years, chief of them a close relationship with Lucien Happersberger, a seventeen-year-old would-be painter from Switzerland, who was to remain the writer's companion for many years and to whom Giovanni's Room is dedicated. It was on a visit to a Swiss village with Happersberger early in 1952 that Baldwin completed the manuscript of the novel on which he had been working for a decade. Go Tell It on the Mountain was published in May of the following year to critical acclaim. Still poor and hungry, the author was nevertheless definitely on his way. Two more books— Notes of a Native Son and Giovanni's Room— would appear before he returned to the United States to live in July 1957. In the late 1950's the civil rights movement in the South was gaining momentum. The Supreme Court decision of 1954 outlawed racial segregation in public education, and at the end of the following year Martin Luther King launched a bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, that brought him to national attention. Throughout the South blacks were being reviled, brutalized, and murdered as white supremacists rallied their forces in opposition to racial change. Expatriation seemed

to Baldwin an evasion of his social responsibility. After two months in New York, he took a long trip to the South, his first, visiting Charlotte, Little Rock, Atlanta, Birmingham, Montgomery, and Tuskegee, and meeting numerous leaders, including Dr. King. In such essays as "The Hard Kind of Courage" (1958), "Letter from the South: Nobody Knows My Name" (1959), "Fifth Avenue, Uptown" (1960), "They Can't Turn Back" (1960), "The Dangerous Road Before Martin Luther King" (1961), and "A Negro Assays the Negro Mood" (1961), Baldwin addressed mainly white readers in an urgent plea for understanding and support of the black struggle. With Nobody Knows My Name and, especially, The Fire Next Time, he became a major spokesman for the movement. Since the early 1960's Baldwin has been a genuine celebrity, lecturing throughout the country, appearing on television talk shows, conferring with Attorney General Robert Kennedy, gazing from the cover of Time magazine, writing for Broadway and Hollywood. Always restless, he has continued to travel from New York to Paris and the south of France, as well as to Turkey, Puerto Rico, and elsewhere. Both Another Country (1962) and The Fire Next Time were best sellers, allowing him to help his large family and still maintain a glamorous life-style. But Baldwin has never lost his sense of racial outrage. Indeed, such later works as Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone, No Name in the Street, and The Devil Finds Work subject American civilization to a more merciless examination than anything that preceded them, with small hope left for the healing power of love, upon which he once posited his faith. The deaths of the 1960's—Medgar Evers and Malcolm X and Martin Luther King and the Birmingham girls and so many others—have all but extinguished hope, Baldwin argued to Margaret Mead. Still, he returned in 1977 from St. Paul de Vence to the United States, renewing once more his

JAMES BALDWIN I 53 contacts with the personal, racial, and social realities that have informed his fiction, his drama, and many of his essays. The terrain of Baldwin's imagination encompasses four main sectors: church, self, city, and race. Naturally, the boundaries of these sectors are not always clearly defined, but they will serve as general areas on which his literary achievement can be mapped. In the chronology of his career, the church was his first major subject, for it had dominated his spiritual life at precisely the time in adolescence that his intellectual and creative life was beginning. Before moving to other subjects, he had to treat the crucial tension between the most absorbing of social institutions and the emergence of the autonomous self. Go Tell It on the Mountain was Baldwin's first, and is still his "best," novel, his most perfectly achieved, most carefully structured, most tightly controlled. Ostensibly the story of a Harlem youth named John Grimes who undergoes a religious experience on his fourteenth birthday, the novel is also, almost equally, the story of John's stepfather Gabriel, a sternly fanatical zealot whose influence blights the lives of all who come near him. It is likewise the story of Florence, Gabriel's sister, and of Elizabeth, his present wife and John's mother. The various stories not only illuminate each other in their psychological intimacy, but also exemplify almost a century of black American social experience. Part One and Part Three are set in the present of the mid-1930's, but the middle section, twice as long as the other two parts combined, consists of extended flashbacks to the separate but related life stories of Florence, Gabriel, and Elizabeth, all of whom leave the South to live in New York, "the city of destruction." From the tales of slavery and emancipation told by the mother of Gabriel and Florence to the restoration of white supremacy to the great migra-

tion from the southern Egypt to the northern slums, the common denominators of the black social experience are revealed to be sex, race, and religion, precisely those elements with which John Grimes must come to terms if he is to achieve putative maturity and self-definition. John's severe Oedipus complex propels him toward homosexuality. Although honoring the letter of his promise to Elizabeth to care for the material needs of her illegitimate son, Gabriel refuses to accept or love John, caught as he is in his dream of a regal procession of saints springing from his own loins. Pampered and protected by his mother, John lavishes his love on her. Ridiculed and rejected by his stepfather, he responds with fierce hatred. In repudiating Gabriel's overbearing cruelty, however, John tends to repudiate his overbearing masculinity as well. Symbolically emasculated by his stepfather, John turns to a slightly older, more virile youth, Elisha, for compensatory affection. Denied paternal love, John finds a homosexual surrogate. Racially, John can achieve his identity only when he accepts his blackness without associating it with ugliness, dirt, and humiliation. Ashamed of his appearance, his color, his ghetto environment, he has longed for what he considers the cleanliness and order of the white world. Baldwin does not belabor the point, but his description of John's racial shame implies an indictment of the white racism responsible for it that is all the more telling because his protagonist does not make the connection. On the threshingfloor of the Temple of the Fire Baptized, however, John does come to a tentative racial self-acceptance when he hears a ' 'sound that came from darkness"—the sound of the black past of suffering and victimization—"that yet bore such sure witness to the glory of the light." John hears this sound in the mood of religious transport. Rejected as an Ishmael by his stepfather, who thinks of him as "the son of the bondwoman," and rejected because of race by

54 I AMERICAN WRITERS the country and city of which he is a native son, he turns to God and to the fellowship of the saints. The religious milieu of the storefront church and its congregation is described in the most intimate detail. The power of the spirit becomes almost palpable; the psychological reality of the drama of sin and salvation is almost unbearable in the intensity of its presentation. John's ecstatic moment is valid and genuine, moving him through shame and hatred to love and temporary peace. Yet all the implications are that John will finally have to leave religion to engage the world, just as he must leave the Temple of the Fire Baptized to reenter the Harlem streets. In its most conspicuous agent in the novel, Gabriel Grimes, religion becomes malevolent, an instrument of oppression. Therefore the ironic and skeptical voice speaking in John's ear in Part Three will eventually, the reader feels, bring him down from the mountaintop and into the world. Go Tell It on the Mountain is a carefully constructed novel about the black church that has penetrating characterization, an intensely poetic style, and fully realized psychological and social themes. It gives religion its due, but finally implies religious skepticism. A more openly unfavorable view of religion appears in the play The Amen Corner, written in the summer of 1952 and first produced in the 1954-55 season at Howard University, under the direction of the poet-playwright Owen Dodson. The protagonist of this play is Margaret Alexander, a preacher who seems to be a composite of Mother Horn and Baldwin's stepfather. Like the former, she is a charismatic leader of her flock; like the latter, she is harshly fanatical, a "tyrannical matriarch" (Baldwin's phrase) to correspond to the tyrannical patriarch David BaldwinGabriel Grimes. The text of the sermon she delivers as the play opens is, ironically, "Set thine house in order," a favorite text of David Baldwin and Gabriel Grimes. Yet, like theirs,

her house is in fearful disorder: her son is in the process of leaving the faith for more worldly pleasures; her dying husband has returned home, after a long separation, to force her to face the consequences of her choices; and even her hold on her congregation is slipping as jealousies, rivalries, and suspicions begin to disrupt the fellowship of the saints. Margaret's flaw in character, tragic in its results, is her effort to escape the anguish and pain of living in the world by embracing a religious faith that supersedes human love. Denying her function as woman, she has turned from her husband's arms to the sexual surrogate of religious enthusiasm in an impossible quest for purity. Baldwin sees clearly that this element of religion accounts for both its emotional richness and its betrayal of the primary relationships. Margaret advises a young woman in her congregation to leave her husband, as she had done, the better to serve God; and another member of the flock boasts, "I ain't never been sweet on no man but the Lord Jesus Christ." Betrayed by her followers, reproached by her husband, Luke, and disappointed by her son, David, who, like Baldwin himself, must leave his stifling environment to release his creativity, Margaret, in her very defeat, manages to attain a clarity of vision, however late, that constitutes a kind of triumph: "To love the Lord is to love all His children—all of them, everyone!—and suffer with them and rejoice with them and never count the cost!" Substituting a humanistic for a supernatural faith, Margaret must confront her failure. David, rejecting his mother's mistake and acquiring his father's worldly vision, must leave his home, significantly in the same tenement as the church, to pursue the fulfillment of the self. Baldwin's own search for self is brilliantly set forth in several of his early essays, especially "Autobiographical Notes," "Notes of a Native Son," "Stranger in the Village" in Notes of a Native Son, and "The Discovery of What It Means to

JAMES BALDWIN I 55 Be an American'' in Nobody Knows My Name. It is also the theme of his first published short story, "Previous Condition," and of his second published novel, Giovanni's Room. In the former, a black actor named Peter is put out of the room of a white friend by a racist landlady. Neither the friend nor Peter's white girl can offer much consolation, but neither can habitues of a Harlem bar to which Peter flees. "I didn't seem to have a place," Peter ruefully recognizes, alienated as he is from both whites and blacks. Only by leaving the security of the group can the individual define the self, but the success of the effort is by no means assured and the process is necessarily painful. The search for self is presented mainly in sexual terms in Giovanni's Room. Not as directly autobiographical as Go Tell It on the Mountain, Baldwin's second novel concerns white characters, principally those in a triangle relationship involving two expatriate bisexuals—David, an American, and Giovanni, an Italian—both living in Paris, and David's girl friend, Hella. Like Baldwin's first protagonist, David of Giovanni's Room struggles with questions of identity posed by his relationship to his parents. His mother having died when he was five, David suffers from a recurrent sexual nightmare involving her: "her hair as dry as metal and brittle as a twig, straining to press me against her body; that body so putrescent, so sickening soft, that it opened, as I clawed and cried, into a breach so enormous as to swallow me alive." This disgust carries over into shame at his father's drunken affairs with women, the subject of shrill scolding by David's aunt. His father, moreover, has a kind of invincible American boyishness that inhibits the maturation of his son, who first resents, then pities, his father and his hapless love for him. A brief, bittersweet homosexual encounter with a boy named Joey compounds the confusion of the family situation. In what he explicitly calls an effort to find himself, recognizing in retrospect that

it was really a flight from recognition of the true nature of the self, David goes to France. There he becomes involved first with Hella, an apprentice painter from Minneapolis who leaves him to travel through Spain in order to evaluate their relationship, and Giovanni, working as a bartender at a homosexual establishment presided over by Guillaume, a thoroughly corrupt and dangerously shrewd scion of an aristocratic French family. Like David, Giovanni is a bisexual moving inexorably toward homosexuality. Unlike David, he is willing to accept the imperatives of love, whatever form they take. David moves into Giovanni's small, cluttered room; but, despite the genuine affection of their relationship, he fears the prospect of becoming like Guillaume or Jacques, a businessman with a predilection for football players. This fear, this failure to commit himself fully to their love, constitutes a betrayal on David's part that drives Giovanni to desperation and finally to the murder of Guillaume. Apprehended, Giovanni awaits the guillotine while David, consumed by guilt, strives vainly to restore his relationship with Hella. However different the circumstances, David's failure in Giovanni's Room is comparable with Margaret's in The Amen Corner. In both cases a culturally sanctioned and socially prescribed pattern—heterosexuality or Christianity—is followed in denial of the protagonists' responsibilities to the human beings they most love and to the deepest urgings of their own natures. Attempting to achieve security by accepting an externally imposed identity, they precipitate chaos. Rejecting the risks of recognizing the true self, they construct identities that are both specious and destructive. Baldwin handles the homosexual theme in Giovanni's Room with dignity and restraint; but as a protagonist David lacks tragic stature, eliciting pity, perhaps, but hardly terror. A pattern of imagery recurrent in this novel and elsewhere in

56 / AMERICAN Baldwin's work is that of drowning or being smothered or engulfed. David's dream of being swallowed alive in the embrace of his mother's decaying body reappears as his revulsion at Hella's female sexuality intensifies: "I was fantastically intimidated by her breasts, and when I entered her 1 began to feel that I would never get out alive." As Giovanni instructs David, "Women are like water," and the danger of drowning is always imminent. But David also perceives his life in Giovanni's room to be taking place under water. His sense of claustrophobia is acute. His problem, then, is not so much homosexuality or even bisexuality; it is asexuality, a disinclination to take the sexual plunge that can lead to emotional and psychic liberation. As he looks at his naked body in a mirror at the end of the novel, his language grows strangely theological: "I look at my sex, my troubling sex, and wonder how it can be redeemed . . . the key to my salvation." As is frequently pointed out in the novel, David's stunted self is an American self, tormented by puritanical attitudes that repress the psychic growth made possible only by undergoing the risks of love. New York and Paris are the settings of Go Tell It on the Mountain, The Amen Corner, and Giovanni's Room, but the urban theme is muted to give full resonance to the interior conflicts of the protagonists. In the more socially conscious 1960's, Baldwin began to give greater attention to the relations between private anguish and collective despair. The city itself—New York in particular—with its inhuman living conditions, ethnic hatreds, commercial corruption, and moral disarray becomes a central concern, a fact readily apparent when the reader turns from Baldwin's earlier works to Another Country. In Go Tell It on the Mountain and The Amen Corner most of the action takes place in a cramped flat or a small church; in Giovanni's Room the setting is again interior—the house in the south of France, Guillaume's bar, Giovanni's

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or Hella's room. Another Country unfolds not only in apartments, pads, hotel rooms, bars, and restaurants, but also on rooftops, balconies, the George Washington Bridge, an airplane—all offering panoramic perspectives of New York—as well as on the streets in the shadows of the looming skyscrapers and in the subways rumbling below. The very first sentence locates the disconsolate Rufus Scott in the heart of the city, "facing Seventh Avenue, at Times Square," having just emerged after ten hours in the movies, trying to sleep in spite of the film, an importunate usher, and homosexual molesters. Rufus, we are told as he walks the hostile streets, is "one of the fallen—for the weight of this city was murderous—one of those who had been crushed on the day, which was every day, these towers fell." At the end of the long first chapter, he takes the subway from Fourth Street to 181st Street, traveling almost the entire length of the murderous city, and leaps to his death from "the bridge built to honor the father of his country." In this city of the damned, the weather contributes to the general malaise. In early winter "a cold sun glared down on Manhattan giving no heat." In early spring "the wind blew through the empty streets with a kind of dispirited moan." The terrible New York summer, "which is like no summer anywhere," frazzles the nerves with its relentless heat and noise, intensifying hostilities and discomforts. Such a city, one of the characters realizes after returning from the more civilized milieu of Paris, is a place "without oases, run entirely . . . for money; and its citizens seemed to have lost entirely any sense of their right to renew themselves." In such an environment it is little wonder that the desperate search for love of the major characters is doomed, for the daily reality of their lives is conditioned by constant reminders of hatred and violence—graffiti, barroom brawls, schoolboy gang fights, racial enmity, casual sex, and prostitution. Baldwin's relentless portrayal of the hor-

JAMES BALDWIN I 57 rors of New York confers a savage irony on the final words of the novel, which describe the entrance of a young Frenchman as "more highhearted than he had ever been as a child, into that city which the people from heaven had made their home." Another Country, then, is an ambitious effort to portray a city, calling to mind Manhattan Transfer or even Ulysses. In other ways, too, the scope of this work is larger, more expansive than Baldwin's writing of the 1950's. It is twice as long as Go Tell It on the Mountain and almost three times as long as Giovanni's Room. The plot is also much more complex, involving the interrelated lives of eight major characters. Rufus Scott, a black jazz musician fallen on evil days, commits suicide one-fifth of the way through the novel, but his memory persists in the minds of his friends, most of whom consider themselves to be in some degree responsible for his death. Much of Rufus' immediate despair derives from his tormented affair with Leona, a goodhearted poor white refugee from the South whom he drives to a nervous breakdown. Rufus' best friend, Vivaldo Moore, an "Irish wop" from Brooklyn who lives in Greenwich Village and is struggling to write a novel, falls in love with Rufus' sister Ida, a beautiful but embittered girl mourning her brother but determined to survive in the urban jungle by any means necessary. Richard and Cass Silenski, the only married couple in the circle of Rufus' friends, are another oddly matched pair. In contrast with Vivaldo's struggle to create a meaningful work of fiction, Richard, his former teacher, publishes a commercially successful but artistically worthless murder mystery. This literary prostitution costs him the respect of his wife, a woman from an old New England family who admires Ida and Vivaldo. She then has an affair with Eric Jones, an Alabama-born bisexual actor who has left his younger lover, Yves, in France in order to resume his career in the United States. Eric had

earlier been involved with Rufus, and after Cass he makes love to Vivaldo while waiting for Yves to join him in New York. These characters and relationships, all of them treated at some length, are necessary for the scope and diversity Baldwin is seeking, but they present a formidable challenge to his literary powers as he moves from one to another. Although Another Country does sprawl somewhat compared with the two earlier novels, the author shows considerable dexterity in rendering the individual stories so that they illuminate each other and develop a central theme. This theme is the human craving for love and the difficulty of satisfying it in the city of New York. "Do you love me? Do you love me? Do you love me?" is the musical phrase "unbearably, endlessly, and variously repeated" by the saxophonist playing with Rufus at his last gig. Indeed, the question is repeated and considered by all the characters of the novel. The failure to find a satisfactory affirmative answer drives Rufus to suicide, Leona to a mental institution, Ida to the unloving arms of a television executive who can advance her career as a blues singer, Vivaldo to distraction and to Eric, Cass to Eric, Richard to wife-beating. Leona, Ida, Vivaldo, Cass, and Eric all realize that their love for Rufus was not strong enough to avert his fate. Their frenzied efforts to find what Rufus was unable to find are partly attempts to assuage their guilt. In this way Rufus, who dies at the end of the first chapter, becomes a central reference point for the other characters as the author unfolds his theme. The other reference point is Eric Jones, who brings bisexual solace, if not quite love, to Vivaldo and Cass. He first appears in the first chapter of Book Two, naked in a garden, watching his lover, Yves, swimming in the Mediterranean. Many critics have noted the Edenic quality of the scene, contrasting sharply with the frenzied life of New York, and they have gone on to

58 I AMERICAN interpret Eric in quite favorable terms. Baldwin does indeed seem to feel sympathetic toward this character, who, though a southern white man, rises above racial and sexual categories to accept himself and others, even to reconcile the discords of his New York friends. Yet Baldwin also suggests reservations about Eric. The garden in which he sits is rented, and the images of flies and a stalking kitten likewise suggest a postEden world. Furthermore, his love for Yves is based as much on his memory of Rufus as on Yves himself, and he even questions the quality of his love for Rufus: "had it simply been rage and nostalgia and guilt? and shame?" Eric's love for Rufus is linked to his love for "the warm, black people" of his childhood. This undifferentiated love of black people comes near to being white racism inverted. As for Eric's love of Yves, one doubts that it can survive in New York. Certainly no sense of fidelity to it inhibits Eric in his ministrations to Cass and Vivaldo. A certain authorial ambivalence toward Eric, then, somewhat qualifies his success in the role of reconciler in Book Two and Book Three of the novel. The relief he brings to Cass is only temporary; and as for Vivaldo, one feels that Ida is a far more effective catalyst of his maturation: "her long fingers stroked his back, and he began, slowly, with a horrible, strangling sound, to weep, for she was stroking the innocence out of him." As tortured as their relationship has been and will be, their love seems the most likely of any in the novel to provide the right answer to that endlessly repeated question. The difficulty of achieving love in a destructive city is further explored in Nothing Personal (1964), for which Baldwin wrote a prose meditation to accompany a collection of striking photographs by his old high-school friend Richard Avedon, and in the superb short story "Sonny's Blues." First published in Partisan Review in 1957, "Sonny's Blues" prefigures some of the concerns of Another Country. Like Rufus,

WRITERS Sonny is a jazz musician down on his luck and unable to secure the emotional support he needs from his family. Unlike Rufus, Sonny turns to heroin rather than suicide in response to his suffering. Also unlike Rufus, Sonny triumphs by transmuting, through musical expression, not only his own suffering but also that of his family and, by extension, his race in such a way as to redeem himself and simultaneously to expand his elder brother's moral awareness. The story is narrated by Sonny's brother, a conventional, middle-class black man who teaches algebra in a Harlem high school and strives to remain detached from the pain surrounding him. As always in Baldwin's work, the effort to achieve security, to insulate oneself from the risks of living, is profoundly misguided. As the story opens, the brother, on his way to school, reads in a newspaper of Sonny's arrest on a heroin charge. After school he encounters a friend of Sonny's, funky and strungout, who provides more information. The very way in which he learns of Sonny's trouble is a measure of his estrangement, his failure to be his brother's keeper. This, precisely, was the charge imposed by his mother. Both parents had recognized the evil of the world, whether down home, where drunken white men ran down the father's brother in a car, or up North, where heroin and prostitution devoured so many of the young. Love and support were necessary to save one another from the pervasive darkness, or to enable one another to survive it. With their parents dead, Sonny's care devolves upon his brother, who cannot reconcile Sonny's commitment to jazz and the jazz life to his own bourgeois aspirations. Only his daughter's death from polio, by proving his own vulnerability, induces him to renew contact with Sonny. "My trouble made his real." It is this community of suffering that constitutes the theme of "Sonny's Blues." Through a skillful reversal, Sonny becomes his elder

JAMES BALDWIN I 59 brother's keeper; the teacher and the pupil exchange places. "Safe, hell!" their father had exclaimed. "Ain't no place safe for kids, nor nobody." Sonny teaches his brother this lesson, explaining that he can lapse at any time into his heroin habit. More effective than his words, however, is his music. Indeed, it is music that links the black community in its response to suffering and its triumph over it. Throughout the story Baldwin plays riffs that prepare for Sonny's set at the end. As the elder brother and Sonny's friend talk at the beginning, they hear from a nearby bar "black and bouncy" music to which a barmaid keeps time. The brothers' uncle is carrying his guitar on the last night of his life. Sonny's idol is Charlie Parker, of whom the elder brother has never heard. Sonny plays the piano incessantly while living with the dicty family of Isabel, his brother's financee. The singing and tambourine beating of sidewalk revivalists bring together a diverse crowd of passersby in recognition of their brotherhood and sisterhood. Finally, the concluding scene in a downtown nightclub, in which Sonny and his jazz group achieve an ultimate musical expression of personal and racial suffering and survival, constitutes an experience for Sonny and his brother that is almost religious in its intensity and is certainly liberating in its effects. Baldwin's complete artistic control of language, point of view, and theme makes "Sonny's Blues" not only one of his finest personal achievements, but also a true classic of American short fiction. The same cannot be said of If Beale Street Could Talk. Many of the familiar concerns and characters are present in this story of Tish and Fonny, young black lovers in conflict with a hostile urban society but sustained by their love for each other and the loving support of some members of their families. Falsely incarcerated on a charge of raping a Puerto Rican woman, Fonny must struggle to retain his sanity while

Tish, pregnant by him, struggles against time and a corrupt legal system to free her man before their child is born. In this effort she is aided by her parents and sister and Fonny's father, although Fonny's mother, an acidly sketched religious fanatic, and his sisters turn their backs on the trouble. Tish and Fonny recall Elizabeth and Richard of Go Tell It on the Mountain. Fonny, an illegitimate child, becomes a sensitive artist (a wood-carver) at odds with society, a recurrent situation in Baldwin's fiction with clear autobiographical overtones. In the abrupt conclusion of // Beale Street Could Talk the baby has been born and Fonny is out on bail, although his legal fate is still uncertain. Nevertheless, life has been renewed through love, despite all the malevolent forces of a corrupt and racist city. It all seems too pat. The sentimentality that has always vied with Baldwin's artistic instincts seems to overcome them here, and the affirmative conclusion seems willed rather than inevitable. The point is debatable, of course, but another weakness, a serious failure in technique, seems beyond dispute. The narrative mode of// Beale Street Could Talk is first-person; the narrator is nineteen-year-old Tish. For the first third of the novel the narrative voice is carefully and consistently maintained. The use of Tish's voice seems to restrain the rhetorical excesses to which Baldwin's style is too often prone. After the reader has begun thoroughly to appreciate the narrative advantages of Tish's pungently colloquial voice, Baldwin suddenly lapses into his own language, point of view, and elaborate syntax in a passage dealing, significantly, with love and respect between men. Referring to women's response to such emotions, the author has Tish meditate: The truth is that they sense themselves in the presence, so to speak, of a language which they cannot decipher and therefore cannot manipulate, and, however they make a thing about it, so

60 I AMERICAN far from being locked out, are appalled by the apprehension that they are, in fact, forever locked in. Only two sentences earlier Tish was referring to "this fucked up time and place." In the second half of the novel the exigencies of the plot require Tish to narrate episodes of which she has no firsthand knowledge: conversations between Joseph and Frank, the fathers of the lovers, or between her mother and their lawyer; her mother's trip to Puerto Rico in a fruitless attempt to gain the cooperation of the raped woman; Fonny in prison. On such occasions Baldwin forgoes any effort to work out his problem of technique. Instead, he awkwardly calls attention to it: "Joseph and Frank, as we learn later, have also been sitting in a bar, and this is what happened between them" or "Now, Sharon must begin preparing for her Puerto Rican journey, and Hay ward briefs her." After an excellent beginning, then, Baldwin's technique breaks down in this novel. Despite brilliant individual scenes, an arresting conception, and a powerful indictment of urban corruption and racism, If Beetle Street Could Talk does not fulfill its artistic potential. As with any but the most escapist of AfroAmerican writers, race has been a major concern in almost all of Baldwin's books, Giovanni's Room and Nothing Personal constituting the sole exceptions. Beginning with the publication of The Fire Next Time in 1963, moreover, race and racism are the central issues in eight of^ the eleven published between then and 1976, and very important in two of the others (Going to Meet the Man [1965] and IfBeale Street Could Talk). His attitudes have evolved from an effort at disengagement in his youth to fervent commitment to the redemptive power of interracial action for civil rights in the late 1950's and early 1960's to endorsement of black revolutionary nationalism in the late 1960's to a bitterly pessimis-

WRITERS tic awaiting of retributive vengeance on the white racism of America that characterizes his position in the 1970's. The Fire Next Time consists of two pieces previously published late in 1962: a brief letter to his nephew in the Progressive, and the long "Letter from a Region in My Mind," which appeared, incongruously, amid the advertisements directed to conspicuous consumers in the New Yorker. In the first Baldwin argues in a vein strikingly similar to that of Martin Luther King. Before blacks can be liberated from their condition, they must liberate whites from their racism by accepting them with love. In the second piece, red tied "Down at the Cross" when published in the book, Baldwin divides his meditation into three parts: an account of his youthful conversion, ministerial career, and rejection of Christianity because of the implausibility of its doctrines and the crimes committed in its name; a report on his meeting in Chicago with the Honorable Elijah Muhammad and,a sympathetic assessment of the Black Muslims from a nonbeliever's point of view; and an analysis of American racial relations in the context of national history and contemporary international politics. In the final section Baldwin restates in a more tough-minded way the doctrine of his letter to his nephew. Because of the moral history of the-West, black people are in a position to teach white people to give up their delusions of superiority and to confront the national political necessity to eliminate racism so as to survive the century. The Fire Next Time concludes with a magnificent peroration, worthy in its rhetorical power of comparison with those of the Old Testament prophets so familiar to Baldwin's youth: If we—and now I mean the relatively conscious whites and the relatively conscious blacks, who must, like lovers, insist on, or create, the consciousness of the others—do not falter in our

JAMES BALDWIN I 61 duty now, we may be able, handful that we are, to end the racial nightmare, and achieve our country, and change the history of the world. If we do not now dare everything, the fulfillment of that prophecy, re-created from the Bible in song by a slave, is upon us: God gave Noah the rainbow sign, No more water, the fire next time! If "Down at the Cross" is a stronger statement of Baldwin's position on racial issues than "My Dungeon Shook: Letter to My Nephew on the One Hundredth Anniversary of the Emancipation," the play Blues for Mister Charlie is stronger still. The racial protest is more vehement and the prospect of interracial cooperation much less likely. Indeed, the black and white inhabitants of the southern town in this play are so segregated by race and so polarized by the murder of a young black man that the pervasive mood is a hatred and tribal loyalty so fierce that love seems quite out of the question. Yet for all its vitriolic language and abrasive emotions, Blues for Mister Charlie constitutes another effort by Baldwin to force white America to confront the plague of race so as to begin to overcome it. In his prefatory note Baldwin speaks of the necessity to understand even the most unregenerate racist, who is after all a product of the national ethos. He may be beyond liberation, but we can "begin working toward the liberation of his children." At the end of the play, Parnell James, the weak but well-intentioned white liberal who edits the local newspaper, marches alongside, if not quite with, the blacks, and at the end of the prefatory note Baldwin writes, in language recalling John's conversion in Go Tell It on the Mountain: "We are walking in terrible darkness here, and this is one man's attempt to bear witness to the reality and the power of light." Blues for Mister Charlie goes beyond anything that Baldwin had previously written in the racial outrage expressed, but it does not abandon hope for amelioration.

Based remotely on the Emmett Till case of 1955, the play treats the racial murder of Richard Henry, a young black man returned home after living in the North, by Lyle Britten, a red-neck store owner. As the play opens, a shot is heard and then the audience sees Lyle dump Richard's body with these words: "And may every nigger like this nigger end like this nigger—face down in the weeds!" The murder scene is presented in full at the end of the play, after Lyle has been found innocent of the crime by a racist court. Within this frame Baldwin explores various aspects of racial life and relationships in "Plaguetown": the leadership by Richard's father, the Reverend Meridian Henry, of a nonviolent campaign for civil rights, coping as well as he can with the impatience of black student activists; the ambivalent efforts of Parnell James, a longtime friend of the Reverend Henry, to secure justice while trying to reconcile his mutually exclusive friendships with the Reverend Henry and Lyle; the family life of Lyle Britten; Richard's inability to neadapt to life in the South after living in the North and his growing love for Juanita, one of the students; the perversions of the judicial system. In probing the sources and ramifications of racism, Baldwin finds the sexual component to be central. This is certainly true of Richard, Lyle, and Parnell. Richard is cast from the same mold as Rufus and Sonny. Like both of these characters he is a jazz musician. Like Rufus he attempts to achieve racial revenge through intercourse with white women, whbse insatiable appetites prove too much for him. Like Sonny he attempts to ease the intolerable pressures of his life with dope. Even more than Rufus and Sonny he is proud and sensitive and tormented, too rebellious to survive anywhere in America, certainly not in the South after eight years of living in the North. Richard's specific torment originated in his reaction to the death of his mother, whom he believes to have been murdered by white men for

62 I AMERICAN resisting their sexual advances, and his shame at his father's acquiescence. After experiencing white racism South and North, he has reached the conclusion that the only way black men can achieve power is by picking up the gun. To pacify his grandmother, however, he gives his own gun to his father, leaving himself unarmed for the fatal encounter with Lyle. This surrender of the gun, not without Freudian overtones, is clearly part of Richard's suicidal recklessness, as is his flaunting of photographs of his white women from his Greenwich Village days. His tense exchange with Lyle on their first meeting and their fight on their second are filled with sexual rancor. In the Britten store Richard flirts mildly and mockingly with Lyle's wife, Jo, Lyle joins the issue, and Richard impugns Lyle's potency. The sexual insult is repeated just before Lyle fires his first shot during their third encounter, and the dying Richard accuses Lyle not only of sexual jealousy of him but also of homosexual interest in him. The scene recalls Baldwin's early diagnosis that the root of American racial conflict lies between the legs of a white man and a black man confronting each other. Richard must act out his racial-sexual stereotype even if it means his death. Lyle is equally a victim of the psychosexual pathology of racism. Aware of the need to make this character a man, not a monster, Baldwin presents him as an example of the banality of evil. On his first appearance in the play he is fondling his infant son, whom he loves, but strains in his sexual life immediately emerge in the ensuing dialogue with his wife, who complains of his excessive demands and implies his infidelity. His past affairs include one with a black woman whose jealous husband he murdered. His violence proceeds directly from the volatile combination of sex and race. Even Parnell, a liberal intellectual of sorts and a bachelor, associates sexuality with blackness. Although his sexual life involves both white and

WRITERS black women, his tomcatting after the latter takes place with Lyle. Parnell's deepest feelings are directed toward a sensitive, poetic black girl whom he loved as a youth. It is her name, Pearl, that he utters during intercourse with white women. But Parnell's fascination with black sexuality is more amorphous than Lyle's. In a flashback soliloquy in the third act, Parnell thinks of this ruling passion of his life: "Out with it, Parnell! The nigger-lover! Black boys and girls! I've wanted my hands full of them, wanted to drown them, laughing and dancing and making love— making love—wow!—and be transformed, formed, liberated out of this grey-white envelope." Although the bisexual hint is not developed, Parnell may be viewed as a kind of soured Eric Jones, an Eric who stayed home. Like Eric, he thinks of heterosexual lovemaking as only a "calisthenic." Blues for Mister Charlie makes brief and passing reference to other dimensions of racism— economic exploitation, political domination, social control—but these fade into insignificance compared with sex. Without underestimating the important role it does in fact play, one can say that the dramatist does overemphasize it. Here, as elsewhere in Baldwin, one feels that his psychological perceptions somewhat distort his social observations. They also compromise effective dramatic technique, for the flashbacks are too numerous, the soliloquies too introspective, the dialogue too discursive to constitute effective theatrical action, especially in Act Two and Act Three. One honors the attempt to avoid the easy commercial success of the superficial well-made play, but one must nevertheless note that the author's talents are more novelistic than dramatic. In the title story of Going to Meet the Man, Baldwin moves beyond his portrayal of Lyle in presenting the sexuality of white racism. Overcome by impotence, a white southern deputy sheriff named Jesse lies in bed "one hand between his legs, staring at the frail sanctuary of

JAMES BALDWIN I 63 his wife," whose name is Grace. Earlier in the day he has had an instant erection while beating a black activist in a jail cell. Now, lying in the darkness, he dreams back to his childhood, when at the age of eight he was taken by his parents to witness a lynching. There he stared at "the hanging, gleaming body, the most beautiful and terrible object he had ever seen till then." Still more beautiful and terrible than the phallic body was the phallus itself, which the boy watched as the emasculator severed it. The ritual filled the child with a great joy, reminiscent of the children in Claude McKay's poem "The Lynching," as well as with great love for his parents. Aroused by his dream, he turns to his wife with a surge of potency and takes her, moaning, "Come on, sugar, I 'm going to do you like a nigger, just like a nigger, come on, sugar, and love me just like you'd love a nigger." The story has an undeniably powerful impact, but upon reflection the schematization and oversimplification of some complex psychological processes become apparent. Of the other seven stories collected in Going to Meet the Man, "Sonny's Blues" and "Previous Condition" have been discussed. "The Rockpile" and "The Outing" clearly belong to the body of autobiographical material out of which Go Tell It on the Mountain comes. The homosexual theme is central to "The Outing" and also to "The Man Child," a curious, almost allegorical tale about white characters in an unspecified rural setting. Homosexual frustration and jealousy result in the murder of blond, eightyear-old Eric, the man child. Stark and haunting in its almost dreamlike simplicity, "The Man Child" is a memorable story, differing sharply from Baldwin's other fiction. "This Morning, This Evening, So Soon" is a novella on the author's version of the international theme, looking back in some ways to Giovanni's Room and Another Country. Like the novels, this work contrasts the experiential wis-

dom of Europeans and blacks gained through suffering with the dangerous and destructive innocence of white America, to which the black protagonist must return from his European exile. Finally, "Come out the Wilderness" compares with the Ida-Vivaldo sections of Another Country in its exploration of the stresses in interracial heterosexual love. What drives Ruth and Paul apart in this story also accounts for much of Parnell 's problem in Blues for Mister Charlie: 4 'The sons of the masters were roaming the world, looking for arms to hold them. And the arms that might have held them—could not forgive." In the American racial context, the white search for sexual forgiveness of racial crimes seems doomed to perpetuate the sexual exploitation that was the greatest of those crimes. Baldwin's ideological shift from nonviolence to at least the possibility of violence as a means of black self-defense reveals itself in Blues for Mister Charlie when the Reverend Meridian Henry places his dead son's gun on his pulpit under his Bible. An even more emphatic endorsement of violence as a legitimate weapon of the racially oppressed appears in the long novel Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone. In the concluding scene of this work the protagonist, Leo Proudhammer, agrees, still somewhat reluctantly, with his young friend-lover Christopher, a black nationalist, that, however outnumbered, "We need guns." Although in 1968 Baldwin could hardly expect to match the militance of the Black Panthers or Imamu Baraka or the martyred Malcolm X, the pressure of the times seemed to require some kind of affirmation of the nationalist position. This nervous affirmation takes place at the end of the book as Leo, a highly successful actor, is completing his convalescence from a near-fatal heart attack suffered at the beginning of the book. The body of the novel moves back and forth in Leo's first-person narration between the present and the past of his memory. Although

64 I AMERICAN Leo is a bisexual actor, not a writer, his Harlem background, his New Jersey and Greenwich Village experiences, and above all his temperament and personality indicate that he is quite clearly an autobiographical character. Indeed, Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone is Baldwin's most autobiographical novel, even if Go Tell It on the Mountain may be closer to the actual facts of his life, for he maintains virtually no aesthetic distance between himself and his protagonist. Their voices are all but indistinguishable. The result is that the portrayal of Leo involves much material familiar to the regular reader of Baldwin, but sentimentalized far beyond anything that preceded it. Whatever the particular circumstances, Leo's overriding emotion is likely to be fear, as he confesses to the reader scores of times. Lying on his back in his dressing room after the heart attack, Leo realizes that his life "revealed a very frightened man—a very frightened boy." In his childhood he "was afraid" of the friends of his beloved brother Caleb. On the subways he "first felt what may be called a civic terror." Riding past his stop and becoming lost, he "became more and more frightened." Once, taking refuge from the rain in an abandoned house, he "squatted there in a still, dry dread." Stopped and frisked by policemen, he "had never been so frightened." When his father admonished him not to fear whites, he agreed. "But I knew that I was already afraid." After the return of Caleb from prison, Leo commiserated with his brother's suffering: "I listened, extended, so to speak, in a terror unlike any terror I had known." As a young man he is also subject to "sudden fear, as present as the running of the river, as nameless and as deep." Alone in an apartment in New Jersey with a white woman, Leo is "really frightened." After their lovemaking he becomes "terribly, terribly afraid." Arrested by New Jersey policemen as a suspicious character, he finds it difficult ' 'to keep my mortal terror out of my

WRITERS voice" and later to "control my fear." He feels his "bowels loosen and lock—for fear." After intercourse with another white woman, Barbara, whom he loves, he is "a little frightened," and on another occasion, on a mountaintop with her, he is "terribly afraid." As they descend, "my fear began to return, like the throb of a remembered toothache." Back in New York, living precariously, Leo notes that "terror and trouble" are the constants of his experience, but in his triumphant professional acting debut he decides that "all the years of terror and trembling . . . were worth it at that moment." Later, famous, he takes the young black Christopher into his apartment to live, and becomes "a little frightened." Such all-pervasive, endlessly repeated pusillanimity finally becomes so tiresomely banal as to forfeit the reader's sympathy. It also tends to diminish the racial anger that Baldwin wishes to generate, for Leo's fear is clearly more personal than typical, even when he is being grilled by racist cops. Moreover, his dwelling on his fear is self-indulgent and self-pitying—and related to his racial self-hatred. If one compares Baldwin's use of fear in this novel with Wright's use of the same emotion in Native Son, one understands how poorly it serves Baldwin's purpose of racial protest. Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone contains some effective scenes, especially in the Harlem sections, but the reader of Baldwin has encountered it all before: fear, bisexuality, the father figure, polemics against Christianity. That archetypal Baldwinian theme, the quest for love, naturally appears, both in memorable aphoristic form ("Everyone wishes to be loved, but, in the event, nearly no one can bear it. Everyone desires love but also finds it impossible to believe that he deserves it.") and in the most self-indulgently sentimentalized expression: "my terrible need to lie down, to breathe deep, to weep long and loud, to be held in human arms, almost

JAMES BALDWIN I 65 any human arms, to hide my face in any human breast, to tell it all, to let it out, to be brought into the world, and, out of human affection, to be born again." On one occasion the protagonist chides himself, "Ah, Leo, what a child you are!" Precisely. The reader may be willing to give love to a frightened child, but he tends to withhold it from a childishly narcissistic middleaged actor who so clearly serves as a surrogate for the author himself. A much tougher and more successful book is No Name in the Street, in which autobiography serves to reinforce rather than diminish the racial and social themes. Here Baldwin's personal tone is almost devoid of self-pity. He can even state that he must seem to an old childhood friend and to his mother "an aging, lonely, sexually dubious, politically outrageous, unspeakably erratic freak.'' Almost invariably he explores self in this book not to elicit compassion or to indulge his egocentricity, but to illuminate the situations of other individuals, to provide a personal context for social analysis, or to intensify emotionally his historical judgments. Thus his portrayal of his stepfather emphasizes his suffering and his efforts to maintain his dignity against overwhelming odds, not the pain he inflicted on his stepson. His account of his visit to his childhood friend to give him the suit he could no longer wear after Martin Luther King's funeral dwells on their estrangement, not in self-congratulation at his own comparative enlightenment but in rueful recognition of the moral and intellectual victimization inherent in his friend's struggle for economic position. His personal contacts with Malcolm X and his response to the assassination lead not into Baldwin's private sensibility, but to a charged indictment of the moral failure of the West. Kaleidoscopically, No Name in the Street shifts back and forth between past and present, between personal experience and public significance. It is a method ideally suited to Baldwin's

talents as a polemicist. Always an emotional writer, he must make his historical arguments not with logically sequential development of a large body of evidence leading to carefully stated conclusions, but with powerful generalizations authenticated by the eloquence and intensity of feeling of their utterance and by the revelatory anecdote of vignette. The dangers of subjectivity so damaging to Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone are here avoided by careful control of tone and by using more mature self-knowledge as a way of understanding others. In No Name in the Street Baldwin is no longer imploring his white readers to change their ways in order to avert the fire next time. No longer does he appeal to white liberals. His statement to a New York Times interviewer concerning his work in progress in the spring of 1972 applies equally to No Name in the Street: ' There will be no moral appeals on my part to this country's moral conscience. It has none." Instead of moral exhortation, Baldwin now relies on more restrained rhetoric, on flatter statement. His mood is embittered, pessimistic, sad, somewhat tired. There is a terrible finality about his denunciations, whether of French oppression of the Algerians, the shameful compromises of American intellectuals with McCarthyism, the racist and sex-obsessed South, the unremitting international legal persecution of his friend Tony Maynard, the degradation of Watts, in Los Angeles, the war of the police against the Black Panthers, and, above all, the assassinations of his three friends—Medgar, Malcolm, Martin—dooming any hope of racial reconciliation in America. All of these public issues receive extended discussion, but Baldwin also uses quick sketches of private madness to exemplify the public sickness, such as that of "a young white man, beautiful, Jewish, American, who ate his wife's afterbirth , frying it in a frying pan'' or that of a young black American believing himself to be a "Prince of Abyssinia" and asking the author for

66 I AMERICAN WRITERS a contribution of ten thousand dollars. Along with Malcolm X and Huey Newton and Angela Davis and George Jackson, all of whom he mentions approvingly, Baldwin takes the position that the evil of the West—its imperialism and racism—has irretrievably doomed it. "Above the thoughtless American head" he sees "the shape of the wrath to come." Of all the statements by black nationalists of the late 1960's and early 1970's, No Name in the Street is surely one of the most impressive. Baldwin's remaining four books having race as the central theme are slighter works. One Day, When I Was Lost is a film scenario based on The Autobiography of Malcolm X. The Devil Finds Work examines American movies as they reveal racial attitudes. A Rap on Race (1971) and A Dialogue (1973) are transcripts of conversations with Margaret Mead in 1970 and with Nikki Giovanni in 1971. These conversations are provocative and spontaneous, but they add little to what has been said better elsewhere, especially in No Name in the Street. Baldwin's reliance on emotion and intuition in authenticating his historical judgments fares rather badly in comparison with Margaret Mead's ample and precise scholarly knowledge of apposite historical and anthropological facts. Her understanding of racism as a cross-cultural phenomenon makes Baldwin's attribution of it to the white West seem naive. Deeply affected by the assassination of Malcolm X, Baldwin had first planned to write a play about him with Elia Kazan. Despite strong skepticism about Hollywood's ability to do justice to such a theme, Baldwin agreed to write a scenario instead of a stage play. Unable to adapt himself to life in southern California and unable to accept either the collaborative nature of writing for the movies or the specific changes in his script proposed by the studio, which he believed would seriously distort his sense of the meaning of Malcolm's life and death, he left Hollywood and the

film was never produced. But Baldwin did publish the scenario, first in 1972 in a British edition and in the following year with his American publisher. If Hollywood took indecent liberties with Baldwin's scenario, it can also be fairly said that One Day, When I Was Lost itself distorts in numerous ways the life story that Malcolm told to Alex Haley. Some of the changes were clearly dictated by the need to select episodes from a long and detailed biography to fit a cinematic format, and others resulted from legal complications arising from the dispute between the Nation of Islam and Malcolm's estate; but as Patsy Brewington Perry has demonstrated (O'Daniel, 1977), the effect is to oversimplify a complex personality and to narrow his message in a misleading way. By the use of recurring images, especially of fire, Baldwin emphasizes violence in American race relations and shames the white perpetrators of it. Nothing seems to have changed, the scenarist suggests, from the 1920's when Malcolm's Garveyite father was persecuted by the Ku Klux Klan, to the 1960's, when Malcolm's house was fire-bombed. One Day, When I Was Lost thus becomes yet another statement of despairing Baldwinian protest instead of the more optimistic and more complex testament produced by Malcolm and Haley. In The Devil Finds Work Baldwin relinquishes the role of film writer for that of film critic, resuming that scrutiny of Hollywood's effort to deal with racial matters earlier undertaken in essays on Carmen Jones and Porgy and Bess. His concern is with cultural values and vacuities in films ranging from The Birth of a Nation to The Exorcist. The first of the three sections of The Devil Finds Work takes us back to the familiar ground of the author's childhood, when his extreme subjectivity made his moviegoing a means both of escaping from his stepfather's assaults on his personality and of coping with them. Ridiculed for protruding eyes, he took

JAMES BALDWIN I 67 comfort in their similarity to those of Bette Davis. Indeed, young Baldwin's response to white stars depended on their approximation to blackness. Davis, Joan Crawford, Blanche Yurka (in A Tale of Two Cities), Sylvia Sidney, and Henry Fonda all appealed to him by confirming his sense of reality, by reminding him of people he knew or had seen on the streets of Harlem. Somewhat later, he saw his first play, the allblack Macbeth of Orson Welles, and later still Native Son. The stage confronted reality, Baldwin recognized, far more directly than the screen, for "the language of the camera is the language of our dreams." In the first section Baldwin relates the films he saw as a child to the issues of self and race even though most of them are not overtly concerned with these matters. In the second section he analyzes films dealing explicitly with race relations: / Shall Spit on Your Graves, The Birth of a Nation, In the Heat of the Night, In This, Our Life, The Defiant Ones, and Guess Who's Coming to Dinner. In them he shows the unspoken assumptions, overt or covert racism, moral evasions, latent homosexuality, distortions of reality—a dispiriting but revealing analysis of the failure of film as a medium to treat the relation of whites and blacks seriously and honestly. In the third section Baldwin offers another example of the same failure in an extended analysis of Lady Sings the Blues. Not that Hollywood does much better on other serious themes, as he demonstrates in examining the refusal of Lawrence of Arabia to confront the ethnocentric violence of British imperialism, the viciously chauvinistic anti-communism of My Son, John, and "the mindless and hysterical banality of the evil presented in The Exorcist." As a film critic Baldwin lacks great technical expertise, although his working experience in Hollywood did provide him with a basic knowledge of the way movies are made. His main concern is with film as cultural expression and re-

flection rather than as artistic medium. Subjective, selective, digressive, and reductive as it often is, The Devil Finds Work offers a trenchant moral critique of the treatment of race in the movies. James Baldwin can look back on a substantial literary career. He has written fifteen books and collaborated on three others. He is one of the best-known and most widely read of living American writers. He has been the subject of considerable critical attention: a biography, two serious critical studies, two collections of critical essays, and numerous articles in the scholarly and critical journals. Although he has not yet won a major literary prize, by most objective standards his work has earned him a secure, if not yet major, place in American literary history. One feels, however, that Baldwin has not quite realized his full potential. His novels Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone and // Beale Street Could Talk lack the scope and power of Another Country and the literary finesse of Go Tell It on the Mountain or even Giovanni's Room. No subsequent short story has surpassed "Sonny's Blues," published in 1957. One Day, When I Was Lost, The Devil Finds Work, and Little Man, Little Man (1976—a children's book) are interesting minor efforts, but in them Baldwin seems to be marking time. Indeed, of his work in 1968-1978, only No Name in the Street can be said to equal the best work of the early phase of his career. The pattern of Baldwin's literary development has been one of expanding perspectives as he has moved from the storefront church and the search for self to issues of life in the modern city and American race relations. In his essays he characteristically moves in the same direction, so that the concluding paragraph often enlarges the topic to global dimensions. He typically reveals the general significance of personal experience and infuses social or historical generalizations with

68 I AMERICAN intense individual feeling. His style has a capacity for genuine eloquence and elegance that recall William Faulkner and Henry James. Mark Schorer wrote that "we have hardly a more accomplished prose stylist in the United States today." With his thematic range, his intensity of feeling, his stylistic resources, the sense of structure apparent in his early fiction, he may yet write a truly major American novel. Whether he does or not, Baldwin must already be counted among our masters of the personal essay, a genre he has regenerated for our time. And beyond any strictly literary estimate, James Baldwin must be reckoned one of the most urgent and inescapable of the twentieth-century witnesses to the racial agony that has been so tragic and so constant a factor in our national history.

Selected Bibliography WORKS OF JAMES BALDWIN BOOKS

Go Tell It on the Mountain. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1953. Notes of a Native Son. Boston: Beacon Press, 1955. Giovanni's Room. New York: Dial Press, 1956. Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of a Native Son. New York: Dial Press, 1961. Another Country. New York: Dial Press, 1962. The Fire Next Time. New York: Dial Press, 1963. Blues for Mister Charlie. New York: Dial Press, 1964. Nothing Personal. New York: Atheneum, 1964. (With Richard Avedon.) Going to Meet the Man. New York: Dial Press, 1965. The Amen Corner. New York: Dial Press, 1968. (First produced in 1956.) Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone. New York: Dial Press, 1968.

WRITERS

A Rap on Race. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1971. (With Margaret Mead.) No Name in the Street. New York: Dial Press, 1972. One Day, When I Was Lost. London: Michael Joseph, 1972. A Dialogue. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1973. (With Nikki Giovanni.) // Beale Street Could Talk. New York: Dial Press, 1974. The Devil Finds Work. New York: Dial Press, 1976. Little Man, Little Man: A Story of Childhood. London: Michael Joseph, 1976.

UNCOLLECTED ESSAYS

"The Image of the Negro." Commentary, 5:378-80 (1948). 'Too Late, Too Late." Commentary, 7:96-99 (1949). "Preservation of Innocence." Zero, no. 2:14-22 (Summer 1949). ' The Death of the Prophet.'' Commentary, 9:257-61 (1950). 4 The Negro at Home and Abroad." The Reporter, 27:36-37 (November 1951). "The Crusade of Indignation." The Nation, 7:18-22 (July 1956). "On Catfish Row. "Commentary, 28:246-48(1959). "Mass Culture and the Creative Artist: Some Personal Notes." Daedalus, 89:373-76 (1960). "They Can't Turn Back." Mademoiselle, 51:324-25, 351-58 (August 1960). "The Dangerous Road Before Martin Luther King." Harper's Magazine, 222:33-42 (February 1961). "Theatre: On the Negro Actor." The Urbanite, 1:6, 29 (April 1961). "The New Lost Generation." Esquire, 56:113-15 (July 1961). "Views of a j Near-sighted Cannoneer." Village Voice, July 13, 1961, pp. 5-6. "As Much Truth as One Can Bear. "New York Times Book Review, January 14, 1962, pp. 1, 38. "Color." Esquire, 58:225, 2 (December 1962). "Not 100 Years of Freedom. "Liberator, 3:7, 16, 18 (January 1963). "Letters from a Journey," Harper's Magazine, 226:48-52 (May 1963). "James Baldwin Statement—Political Murder in Birmingham." New America, September 24, 1963, pp. 1,4.

JAMES BALDWIN "The Creative Dilemma." Saturday Review, 8:14-15, 58 (February 1964). 4 'Why I Stopped Hating Shakespeare," Observer, April 19, 1964, p. 21. "The White Man's Guilt." Ebony, 20:47^8 (August 1965). 'To Whom It May Concern: A Report from Occupied Territory." The Nation, July 11, 1966, pp. 39-43. "Anti-Semitism and Black Power." Freedomways, 7:75-77(1967). "God's Country." New York Review of Books, March 23, 1967, pp. 17-20. "Negroes Are Anti-Semitic Because They're AntiWhite." New York Times Magazine, April 9, 1967, pp. 26-27, 135-37, 139^-40. "The War Crimes Tribunal." Freedomways, 7:242-^4(1967). "Sidney Poitier." Look, July 23, 1968, pp. 50-52, 54, 56, 58. "White Racism or World Community?" Ecumenical Review, 20:371-76(1968). "Can Black and White Artists Still Work Together? The Price May Be Too High.' " New York Times, February 2, 1969, sec. 2, p. 9. "Sweet Lorraine." Esquire, 72:139-40 (November 1969). "Foreword." In Louise Meriwether, Daddy Was a Number Runner. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: PrenticeHall, 1970. Pp. 5-7. "An Open Letter to My Sister, Miss Angela Davis." New York Review of Books, January 7, 1971, pp. 15-16. "An Open Letter to Mr. Carter." New York Times, January 23, 1977, sec. 4, p. 17. "Every Good-bye Ain't Gone." New York, December 19, 1977, pp. 64-65, 68, 70, 72, 74. "James Baldwin Has a Dream." Morning Courier (Champaign-Urbana), April 27, 1978, p. 28. CRITICAL AND BIOGRAPHICAL

STUDIES

BIOGRAPHY

Eckman, Fern Marja. The Furious Passage of James Baldwin. New York: M. Evans, 1966. CRITICAL STUDIES

Alexander, Charlotte A. James Baldwin's Go Tell It on the Mountain and Another Country, The Fire

I 69

Next Time, Giovanni's Room, Notes of a Native Son. New York: Monarch Press, 1966. Kinnamon, Keneth, ed. James Baldwin: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1974. Macebuh, Stanley. James Baldwin: A Critical Study. New York: Third Press, 1973. Moller, Karin. The Theme of Identity in the Essays of James Baldwin; an Interpretation. Gothenburg Studies in English series, 32. Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1975. O'Daniel, Therman B., ed. James Baldwin: A Critical Evaluation. Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1977. Weatherby, W. J. Squaring Off: Mailer vs. Baldwin. New York: Mason/Charter, 1977. UNCOLLECTED ARTICLES

Allen, Shirley S. "Religious Symbolism and Psychic Reality in Baldwin's Go Tell It on the Mountain." CLA Journal, 19:173-99(1975). Barksdale, Richard K. " Temple of the Fire Baptized.' "Phylon, 14:326-27(1953). Bell, George E. "The Dilemma of Love in Go Tell It on the Mountain and Giovanni's Room." CLA Journal, 17:397-406(1974). Bigsby, C. W. E. "The Committed Writer: James Baldwin as Dramatist." Twentieth Century Literature, 13:39-48 (1967). Bogle, Donald. "A Look at the Movies by Baldwin." Freedomways, 16:103-08 (1976). Breit, Harvey. "James Baldwin and Two Footnotes. '' In The Creative Present: Notes on Contemporary American Fiction. Edited by Nona Balakian and Charles Simmons. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1963. Pp. 5-24. Bryant, Jerry H. "Wright, Ellison, Baldwin—Exorcising the Demon." Phylon, 37:174-88 (1976). Burks, Mary Fair. "James Baldwin's Protest Novel: // Beale Street Could Talk.'' Negro American Literature Forum, 10: 83-87, 95 (1976). Charney, Maurice. "James Baldwin's Quarrel with Richard Wright." American Quarterly, 15:63-75 (1963). Coles, Robert. "James Baldwin Back Home." Atew York Times Book Review, July 31, 1977, pp. 1, 22-24. Cox, C. B., and A. R. Jones. "After the Tranquilized Fifties: Notes on Sylvia Plath and James Baldwin." Critical Quarterly, 6:107-22 (1964).

70 I AMERICAN

Dance, Daryl C. "You Can't Go Home Again: James Baldwin and the South." CLA Journal, 18:81-90 (1974). Daniels, Mark R. "Estrangement, Betrayal & Atonement: The Political Theory of James Baldwin." Studies in Black Literature, 7:10-13 (Autumn 1976). Dickstein, Morris. "The Black Aesthetic in White America." Partisan Review, 38:376-95 (1971). Finn, James. "The Identity of James Baldwin." Commonweal, October 26, 1962, pp. 113-16. Fischer, Russell G. "James Baldwin: A Bibliography, 1947-1962." Bulletin of Bibliography, 24:127-30(1965). Foster, David E. " 'Cause My House Fell Down': The Theme of the Fall in Baldwin's Novels." Critique, 13, no. 2:50-62(1971). Gayle, Addison, Jr. "A Defense of James Baldwin." CLA Journal, 10:201-08 (1967). . "The Dialectic of The Fire Next Time.' " Negro History Bulletin, 30:15-16 (April 1967). Gross, Barry. "The 'Uninhabitable Darkness' of Baldwin'8 Another Country: Image and Theme." Negro American Literature Forum, 6:113-21 (1972). Gross, Theodore L. The Heroic Ideal in American Literature. New York: Free Press, 1971. Pp. 166-79. Hagopian, John V. "James Baldwin: The Black and the Red-White-and-Blue." CLA Journal, 7: 133-40(1963). Harper, Howard M., Jr. Desperate Faith: A Study of Bellow, Salinger, Mailer, Baldwin, and Updike. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1967. Pp. 137-^61. Howe, Irving. "Black Boys and Native Sons."Dissent, 10:353-68(1963). Jacobson, Dan. "James Baldwin as Spokesman." Commentary, 32:497-502(1961). Kim, Kichung. "Wright, the Protest Novel, and Baldwin's Faith." CLA Journal, 17:387-96 (1974). Kindt, Kathleen A. "James Baldwin: A Checklist, 1947-1962. "Bulletin of Bibliography, 24:123-26 (1965). Klein, Marcus. "James Baldwin: A Question of Identity." In his After Alienation: American Novels in Mid-Century. Cleveland: World, 1964. Pp. 147-95.

WRITERS

Leaks, Sylvester. "James Baldwin—I Know His Name." Freedomways, 3:102—05 (1963). Lee, Brian. "James Baldwin: Caliban to Prospero." In The Black American Writer. Edited by C. W. E. Bigsby. Volume 1. Deland, Fla.: Everett/Edwards, 1969. Pp. 169-79. Levin, David. "Baldwin's Autobiographical Essays: The Problem of Negro Identity." Massachusetts Review, 5:239-47 (1964). Maclnnes, Colin. "Dark Angel: The Writings of James Baldwin." Encounter, 21:22-23 (August 1963). Marcus, Steven. "The American Negro in Search of Identity." Commentary, 16:456-63 (1953). Margolies, Edward. "The Negro Church: James Baldwin and the Christian Vision." In his Native Sons: A Critical Study of Twentieth-Century Negro American Authors. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1968. Pp. 102-26. May field, Julian. "And Then Came Baldwin." Freedomways, 3:143-55 (1963). McCarthy, Harold T. "James Baldwin: The View from Another Country." In his The Expatriate Perspective: American Novelists and the Idea of America. Rutherford-Madison-Teaneck, N. J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1974. Pp. 197-213. McCluskey, John. "If Beale Street Could Talk." Black World, 24:51-52, 88-91 (December 1974). Meserve, Walter. "James Baldwin's 'Agony Way.' " In The Black American Writer. Edited by C. W. E. Bigsby. Volume 2. Deland, Fla.: Everett/Edwards, 1969. Pp. 171-86. Moore, John Rees. "An Embarrassment of Riches: Baldwin's Going to Meet the Man." Hollins Critic, 2:1-12 (December 1965). Neal, Lawrence P. "The Black Writers' Role: James Baldwin." Liberator, 6:10-11 (April 1966). Noble, David W. The Eternal Adam and the New World Garden: The Central Myth in the American Novel Since 1830. New York: George Braziller, 1968. Pp. 20^-17. O'Brien, Conor Cruise. "White Gods and Black Americans." New Statesman, May 1, 1964, pp. 681-82. Pratt, Louis, H. "James Baldwin and 'the Literary Ghetto.' "CLA Journal, 20:262-72(1976). Roth, Philip. "Channel X: Two Plays on the Race

JAMES BALDWIN I 71 Conflict." New York Review of Books, May 28, 1964, pp. 10-13. Sayre, Robert F. "James Baldwin's Other Country." In Contemporary American Novelists. Edited by Harry T. Moore. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1964. Pp. 158-69. Scott, Nathan A., Jr. "Judgement Marked by a Cellar: The American Negro Writer and the Dialectic of Despair." Denver Quarterly, 2:5-35 (Summer 1967). Simmons, Harvery G. "James Baldwin and the Negro Conundrum." Antioch Review, 23:250-55 (1963). Spender, Stephen. "James Baldwin: Voice of a Revolution." Partisan Review, 30:256-60 (1963). Strandley, Fred L. "James Baldwin: The Crucial Sit-

uation." South Atlantic Quarterly, 65:371-81 (1966). . "James Baldwin: A Checklist, 1963-1967." Bulletin of Bibliography, 25:135 (1968). . "James Baldwin: The Artist as Incorrigible Disturber of the Peace." Southern Humanities Review, 4:18-30(1970). . "Another Country, Another Time." Studies in the Novel, 4:504-12 (1972). Thelwell, Mike. "Another Country: Baldwin's New York Novel." In The Black American Writer. Edited by C. W. E. Bigsby. Volume 1. Deland, Fla.: Everett/Edwards, 1969. Pp. 181-98. Wills, Garry. "What Color Is God?" National Review, 14:408-14, 416-17 (1963). kenethkinnamonkinnoam

Elizabeth Bishop 1911-1979

L

t is an obvious and easy thing to say that 'The Map," the first poem in Elizabeth Bishop's mistitled Complete Poems, anticipates the way her work will go—North & South, Questions of Travel, and Geography HI neatly ticking off the principal way-stops in a body of work that is variously set in Nova Scotia, New England, New York, France, Key West, Mexico, and Brazil. This is no great news. As she herself noted in the spring of 1976, when—at the age of sixtyfive—she was awarded the Neustadt International Prize for Literature: "I know, and it has been pointed out to me, that my poems are geographical, or about coasts, beaches and rivers running to the sea and most of the titles of my books are geographical too." On that occasion Bishop saw herself as in some ways like the sandpiper she had once used as the subject for a poem: "I begin to think: Yes, all my life I have lived and behaved very much like that sandpiper—just running along the edges of different countries and continents, 'looking for something.' " She went into no detail, however, as to what that something was that she had spent a lifetime looking for; and it is tempting for an admirer to assign it a conventional label: "the meaning of life," say, or "wisdom" or "truth" or "affection" or something as mundane as "a home." Any of these guesses might do; but most likely

the "something" one spends a lifetime looking for is more intricate and human than any abstraction: perhaps, in terms of a later poem, something one can—and must—learn, barely, to accept the loss of: I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or next-to-last, of three loved houses went. The art of losing isn't hard to master. I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster, some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent. I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster. —Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident the art of losing's not too hard to master though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster. Quoted out of context, as they are here, lines like these from "One Art" seem extravagant. But in the body both of the poem and of the rest of Bishop's work, they take on great precision. For the geographies she travels best are simultaneously geographies of earth and of the human heart; their poems have the breathing quality of life itself. They are tentative, yet patterned: hesitant when it comes to final answers, yet totally assured in the variations of repetition—sounds, themes, rhythms, words themselves—that distinguish living poetry from mechanical verse. If places have accounted for much of Bishop's

72

ELIZABETH BISHOP / 73 poetry, her New England birthplace and her mother's Nova Scotia home have to be credited as of central importance among them. Over and over she returns to the landscapes, houses, persons who shaped her childhood. It wasn't really an easy childhood. It started with a pair of losses that she does not catalog in "One Art" but that were losses men and women more sentimental than she would certainly have cataloged as "disasters." Eight months after she was born, her father died. Her mother's mental state deteriorated over the next few years and she was hospitalized at various times. The final breakdown occurred when Elizabeth was five and she was staying with her mother's parents. "I was there the day she was taken away," Miss Bishop told me. And although her mother was to live on nearly twenty more years in a mental hospital at Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, that day in 1916 was to be the last time her daughter saw her. Elizabeth Bishop was born in Worcester, Massachusetts, on February 8, 1911. But it was the area in and around Great Village, Nova Scotia, a quiet country settlement at the head of the Bay of Fundy, that constituted "home." Here, her grandfather Bulmer had been a tanner until chemicals replaced tanbark and the ancient trade of tanning became industrialized. Her grandmother was the daughter of the captain—or part owner—of a small ship that had been lost at sea off Cape Sable, with all hands, when she was nine years old. Three of her grandmother's brothers became Baptist missionaries in India. (One of them was later president of Acadia College, in Nova Scotia.) A fourth brother, George, left home at fourteen as a cabin boy, then later sailed for England, where eventually he became a painter whose childish work is commemorated in the poem "Large Bad Picture" and late work in "Poem" from Geography HI. At home, there was Bishop's grandmother ("laughing and talking to hide her tears" in the

poem "Sestina"). And, of course, her Grandfather Bulmer, recollected in the poem "Manners" for his politeness to man and crow alike and in the short story "Memories of Uncle Neddy" for his uncomplaining gentleness. In the outdoor world there were wagon rides with grandfather, out into the farm country or down along the Bay of Fundy, where extraordinary tides—the second-highest in the world— twice a day race threateningly across the mudflats. People drowned in those tides. But closer to home there were also deaths, among them the "First Death in Nova Scotia," that of "little cousin Arthur," who, "very small" in his coffin, seemed "all white, like a doll/ that hadn't been painted yet." He had been "laid out" beneath chromographs of the ruling family of England: "my mother laid out Arthur." This Nova Scotia childhood, full of laughter and tears, tugged toward the crisis point that is the heart of the short story "In the Village." It is important, of course, to realize that none of Elizabeth Bishop's "autobiographical" poems and stories—although they have been called that—are in any literal sense autobiographies. They are works of art, not histories. The "facts" in them are adjusted to the needs of poem and story. "Arthur," for example, in "First Death in Nova Scotia," is an invented name. And the conversations in the stories, as many of the names of townspeople and relatives, are by and large inventions. The sequence of dreamlike events that take place in the story ' 'In the Village" are not in exact chronology; the words spoken in "The Moose" are, obviously, not literal transcripts of conversations on a bus. What the "autobiographical" works do project is not, therefore, private anecdote but rather a remembered lost world: the vivid yet timeblurred world that all readers trying to reconstruct the feel of childhood are likely to share. If we are to read these poems and stories ac-

74 I AMERICAN WRITERS curately, we must consequently read them as if they were indeed true; yet at the same time we must realize that it is the quality of the past, the quality of an experience, that is being offered us, not "reality." Although what I have called the 4 'crisis point" of 4 'In the Village'' clearly relates to Elizabeth Bishop's experiences shortly before and soon after her mother was taken away from her grandparents' home, the story itself fictionalizes such "real" events as are touched on. The story—like several of the poems—interweaves adult and child viewpoints. Distanced by brilliantly manipulated images, it gives us the illusion of being participants in a dream of childhood that is part nightmare and part idyllic pastoral romance. Because the story is fictionalized so well, we accept it as truth. Because it is a story, we are able to extract from it some sense of the rich complexity of experience—not so much Elizabeth Bishop's as our own. For every successful first-person fiction demands the reader's collaboration, the projection of his own remembered past onto the fictionalized past of the author. Out of the semblance of Elizabeth Bishop's childhood, we are—if we are lucky—better able to deal with our own early years. Perhaps the best approach to "In the Village" is a structural one. The story—in many ways more poem than story—is suspended from three sounds: a mother's sudden scream during a dress fitting; the lovely, pure clang of a blacksmith's hammer during a different fitting—that of a horseshoe; and a Presbyterian church bell that maddingly, mercilessly clangs during a fire ("Noise! I can't hear myself think, with that bell!"). These sounds balance and counterbalance each other, and echo in strange places. The pitch of the scream is "the pitch of my village," yet it can be apprehended best through the steeple of the church: "Flick the lightning rod on top of the church steeple with your fingernail and you

will hear it." The "pure and angelic" note of the blacksmith's hammer shapes red-hot metal into horseshoes that "sail through the dark like bloody little moons." In the middle of the night, the church bell "is in the room with me; red flames are burning the wallpaper beside the bed. I suppose I shriek." Like a mother's scream, like the blacksmith's lovely clanging hammer and the pounding of a harsh church bell, the flames that seem to burn wallpaper are echoes: reflections of a burning barn that in its own destructive way echoes the blacksmith's lovely forge. Other echoes: "It's probably somebody's barn full of hay, from heat lightning." But the lightning rod above the Presbyterian church protects from fire the clanging bell in the steeple that is "like one hand of a clock pointing straight up." Despite the warning bell and the horsedrawn wagons hauling water, "All the hay was lost." In the morning, the child visits the burned barn, "but the smell of burned hay is awful, sickening." On the day that the mother had been fitted for a new dress, "The dressmaker was crawling around and around on her knees eating pins. . . . The wallpaper glinted and the elm trees outside hung heavy and green, and the straw matting smelled like the ghost of hay." The smell of hay—and in other places of horse manure and "cow flops"—roots the story in the rural earth of the village. On the other hand, water reminds us that this is a tidal world—"the long green marshes, so fresh, so salt," "the Minas Basin, with the tide halfway in or out," the "wet red mud," "the lavender-red water": "We are in the 'Maritimes' but all that means is that we live by the sea." Other water imagery serves a different but related function: the blacksmith's tub of "nightblack water," a big kitchen dipper full of rusty, icy water, a mint-bordered brook, the backyard watering trough, the morning dew gray on the

ELIZABETH BISHOP I 75 village grass, swampy places in the fields, the town's river and the bridge that crosses it, the barrels of river water pumped onto the burning barn, the gurgle of the river, even the cow flops "watery at the edges" all bind water to earth. But water also appears in the pathos of tears: "Now the dressmaker is at home, basting, but in tears." " 'Don't cry!' my aunt almost shouts at me, 'It's just a fire. Way up the road. It isn't going to hurt you. Don't cry/' " "My grandmother is crying somewhere, not in her room." "My grandmother is sitting in the kitchen stirring potato mash for tomorrow's bread and crying into it. She gives me a spoonful and it tastes wonderful but wrong. In it I think I taste my grandmother's tears; then I kiss her and taste them on her cheek." Fire, earth, water, and, of course, air: "those pure blue skies, skies that travellers compare to those of Switzerland, too dark, too blue, so that they seem to keep on darkening a little more around the horizon"; air that on hot summer afternoons carries the odor of honeysuckle and horse and cow, the odor of straw matting in a mother's bedroom or the sickening odor of burned hay after a fire, the odor of brown perfume spilled among the unpacked mourning clothes of a mother now sent permanently off to a sanatorium; air that once vibrated to the sound of a hammering church bell and a scream that hangs over the village "forever" but that becomes entangled in memory with the beautiful pure sound of a hammer shaping a horseshoe: Clang. And everything except the river holds its breath. Now there is no scream. Once there was one and it settled slowly down to earth one hot summer afternoon; or did it float up, into that dark, too dark, blue sky? But surely it has gone away, forever.

Clang. It sounds like a bell buoy out at sea. It is the elements speaking: earth, air, fire, water. All those other things—clothes, crumbling postcards, broken china; things damaged and lost, sickened or destroyed; even the frail almostlost scream—are they too frail for us to hear their voices long, too mortal? Much of the art of Elizabeth Bishop's writing is in her shaping of frail, "almost-lost" things into works of extraordinary power. Never "confessional," her poems and stories are sensitive arrangements of significant life. I want to pause on that notion, for, although the phrase is not hers, I think she would accept its validity. Let me put it this way: Each of us, I think, recognizes the paradox that, as a consequence of our being alive only from moment to moment, we cannot be alive last week, yesterday, or even five seconds ago; similarly, none of us can, this second, be alive both now and a few seconds from now, now and tomorrow, or now and sometime next week. There is no way for any man literally to live either in the past or in the future. Your beingness, my beingness, exists only in the fraction of a second that it takes to get from this now to the immediately following one. My "being" ceases constantly, constantly comes into existence. And it ceases and comes into existence only on the treadmill of time. I run from now to now to now in order not to be swept back into was. My "progress" can never move me further forward than is, no matter how fast I run. Yet we also all have the illusion, except in moments when we are bludgeoned with passion or with mortality, that from minute to minute we exist without change. So long as the body stays alive, the thousands and thousands of little births and deaths of being seem inconsequential.

76 I AMERICAN But there is another equally important paradox. Although the body is alive only in the moment, almost all of it is still left over from what it had been a moment before. The bit of skin that sloughs off is already replaced by new skin. Our leftover body knows very well how to keep going, surviving second by second thanks to habits imprinted during the course of a lifetime. The miracle of our staying alive is almost entirely a consequence of the imprint circuitry within our minds and the ingenious chemistry of our bodies that lets it operate effectively. The circuitry, prodded by that chemistry, tells us what to do without "thinking." But it also lets us think, marvelously, as all of the little synapses go on testing out connections while we move from this now to that now. Consequently, although I lose being, I do not lose memories or ideas—at least not readily. The circuitry of the brain stays fundamentally unchanged as I slide through being; it even allows, instant by instant, new, tentative material to be manipulated by the clicking dendrons that say "put on hold," "retrieve," "cancel," and sometimes "add." One final paradox: Though our experience is that of living only in a continually evolving now, everything we think or imagine seems ultimately to come out of the great kitchen midden of memory: the dump of our own past. Those memories that we must have if we are to function are nothing more than an echoing substratum of images and words: images glimpsed, forgotten, and retrieved by a habit or an accidental overlap of pattern. A name or place name overheard in a bar or a classroom or on a street corner triggers a retrieval system more ingenious than IBM's. Bishop's story resounds to a scream and the clang of a bell and a hammer. I hear the word "elm," and I am offered a bedroom, a street, two houses, a family, a place at a kitchen table, a fork in my hand, a glint of recognition in an eye across the table, a word hesitating in my mouth.

WRITERS And, of course, I am simultaneously offered loss, a house vanished, the trees diseased and broken, nothing left where hands touched real hands but bare lawn and a flagstone: the stone in front of three vanished steps that had once led to a kitchen door. Absence calls me by my name. Such significant moments from the evoked, almost-lost world feed art. For one of our most basic drives is the effort to rescue—to "understand"—the past. Some of us content ourselves with faded photographs and time-yellowed letters. An artist like Elizabeth Bishop, on the other hand, shapes "almost-lost" memories into satisfying forms. She manipulates them until private value is transformed into something that has value for the reader as well. The significant past of one writer—the "almost- lost "now as intense as a scream—abruptly becomes part of your constantly changing present, and of mine. It becomes the is of literature that holds out against slippery years. Consider, for example, "Poem" from the collection Geography III. A response to one of her Great-Uncle George's paintings ("about the size of an old-style dollar bill"), it projects a minor drama in which Elizabeth Bishop and the reader jointly discover that the landscape of the much earlier painting is the landscape of Bishop's own childhood. Integrated by an imagery borrowed from the old-style "American or Canadian" dollar bill itself ("Mostly the same whites, gray greens, and steel grays"), the painting and poem gain power because they are "free" yet "collateral." (The painting, which "has never earned any money in its life," has "spent" seventy years, "useless and free," in being handed along "collaterally" from one owner to the other.) Perhaps because their real values cannot be measured in terms of cold cash, both painting and poem, by the end of the poem, represent "the little that we get for free,/ the little of our earthly trust. Not much." Their real value—like that of the landscapes they

ELIZABETH BISHOP I 77 display—has to be calculated in terms not of the dollar bills they resemble (if the painting is the size of one of them, the poem—not much bigger—is a bit over the size of three) but in terms of "life itself," the "memory" of life, and "love"—the fact that both life and the memory of it are ' loved" enough to make two artists seventy years apart feel compelled to "compress" what they have seen and experienced into art. Part of that compression—as in a great deal of Elizabeth Bishop's poetry—is accomplished by sheer repetition. The "steel grays" of the dollar bill reappear as ' 'steel-gray'' storm clouds. "(They were the artist's specialty.)" Its dollarbill whites show up in terms of white houses, white geese, a white and yellow wild iris, and a farmer's white barn. ("There it is,/ titanium white, one dab.") Houses, the Presbyterian church steeple, cows, the iris, elm trees, and the geese interlace the sixty-four lines of the poem. Repetitions of this sort assert the "reality" of a scene, but they also account for the drama of discovery that is at its core. For this is not just an observed scene but a shared one. And we are made aware of its shared nature as uncertainties become certain. At first the painting is something that its various owners "looked at ... sometimes, or didn't bother to." Bishop herself at first approaches it casually. It's a painting all right, but maybe it's less than what it might have been. (Is it "a sketch for a larger one?") In being (perhaps) a sketch, it's a little like the poem itself. "I had begun the poem some years earlier," Miss Bishop told me. "It started out much less serious." By mid-poem, the painting that might be a sketch for a larger one is definitely a sketch: "a sketch done in an hour, 4in one breath.' " The quoted phrase is a key to the freshness, the momentary freshness, of both poem and painting. But by this time, the scene of the painting has

been far more accurately defined. In the second stanza, it is located in a rough geography: It must be Nova Scotia; only there does one see gabled wooden houses painted that awful shade of brown. In the third, although we aren't given the name of Great Village, we are clearly in Elizabeth Bishop's childhood world: Heavens, I recognize the place, I know it! It's behind—I can almost remember the farmer's name. His barn backed on that meadow. There it is, titanium white, one dab. The hint of steeple, filaments of brush-hairs, barely there, must be the Presbyterian church. By now, however, another kind of repetition has taken place, for we have no choice but to remember the Presbyterian church steeple that in the story "In the Village" threatens to echo an insane mother's scream, the same steeple from which the raw hammering of the bell has roused a frightened child to the burning of a neighbor's barn. These kinds of overlap add power both to story and to poem. They force us to acknowledge that places are valuable not just for the beauty they can offer but for the intensity of experience that they carry. Both poem and story, of course, stand alone. Each also reinforces and complicates the other. In a most sensitive essay, Helen Vendler comments on Elizabeth Bishop's almost habitual linkage of "the domestic and the strange." And though Vendler never pinpoints "the strange," she makes clear that it frequently has something to do with a disconcerting peculiarity in the domestic world. "The fact that one's house always is inscrutable," Vendler says, "that nothing is more enigmatic than the heart of the domestic scene, offers Bishop one of her recurrent subjects." The overlap linkage between "In

78 I AMERICAN the Village" and "Poem"—although Vendler does not point it out—is a first-rate example of what she is talking about. Vendler does talk of some of the strangeness of "Poem," but, oddly, not about the appearance of the word "strange" itself. It occurs when Bishop realizes that she and her greatuncle, despite their "years apart," had looked at a common landscape "long enough to memorize it." The landscape that they each saw, she realizes, "must have changed a lot" between the time one stopped looking and the other started ("I never knew him")—and a lot more between the time she memorized the landscape as a child and the now in which, as a middle-aged woman, she tries to reconstruct an "almost-lost" child's world out of a dead relative's pictured world that, except for the luck of his being a painter, would have been totally lost. These nows, separated from each other by two generations (and from us by three or more), are by the strange miracle of art superimposed—and coincide! They coincide because life, love, and the memory of life—despite superficial changes—are trapped into art: "How strange," Bishop says. And we, of course, add, "how significant." The whole passage is worth looking at, both for its precision and for its very serious consideration of the relationship between art and what I've chosen to call "significant life": I never knew him. We both knew this place, apparently, this literal small backwater, looked at it long enough to memorize it, our years apart. How strange. And it's still loved, or its memory is (it must have changed a lot). Our visions coincided—"visions" is too serious a word—our looks, two looks: art "copying from life" and life itself, life and the memory of it so compressed they've turned into each other. Which is which? Life and the memory of it cramped,

WRITERS dim, on a piece of Bristol board, dim, but how live, how touching in detail —the little that we get for free, the little of our earthly trust. Not much. We notice, of course, the familiar echoing language: "knew"/ "knew"; "memorize"/ "memory"/ "memory"/ "memory"; "visions"/ "visions"; "looks"/ "looks"; "life"/ "life"/ "life"/ "Life"/ "live"; "dim"/ "dim"; "little"/ "little"—all in fifteen lines. But we notice more: that art is validated by "detail" that "touches" us into feeling, a feeling different from but related to the "love" both painter and poet felt for a "literal small backwater" named Great Village. The meticulous detail that love imprinted once on mind is translated into technique: the painter's handling of his materials (a "gray-blue wisp" of paint, "two brushstrokes" that become "confidently cows," a wild iris "fresh-squiggled from the tube," the "titanium white" barn) and the writer's handling of the words that constitute her own materials: speck

like

bird

fly

fljr"

speck

like

bird

inconspicuous but efficient in the role of statement and question: A specklike bird is flying to the left. Or is it a flyspeck looking like a bird? As "fly" flies left and the other repeated words drift right, we feel, if we are reasonably sensitive to language, a tingle of amused admiration. For flecks of color and line, patterns of repeated words and of rhyme and partial rhyme are what we call art. What art accomplishes, however, is totally different from its materials. Out of art's technical compression of "life and the memory of it" into "dim" paint "on a piece of Bristol board," into

ELIZABETH BISHOP I 79 words disposed ingeniously on a page, something refreshing emerges. On the "dim" board, "almost-lost" life emerges into present life: seventy-year-dead cows and iris, water long since dried up, and broken elms are not just vivid but vividly alive—even animate. At the end of the poem, in the last lines, they are "munching cows," iris that is "crisp and shivering," water "still standing from spring freshets," and "yetto-be-dismantled" elms (emphasis added). They come to life because, given vitality through technique, they move us emotionally; "touching in detail," they offer us "the little that we get for free, the little of our earthly trust." If that little is 4 'Not much," it is what we have and can live by. In speaking of Elizabeth Bishop's life, I have tried so far to be chronological. In speaking of her work, I've chosen to roam freely from old material to new and back again, in no particular order. My choice has been deliberate, for it seems to me that, unlike many poets, she found her literary voice early. Her developments are not primarily in the areas of style and technique but, rather, in areas that have to do with theme and, perhaps, wisdom. It has been unpopular until very recent years to ask poets to be concerned with such matters as wisdom and truth, but it seems evident that wisdom and truth are of interest to most writers (and their real audiences) and that despite a criticism focused largely on manner rather than matter— on decorative effects rather than on poetic statements—major poets have always, in fact, wanted to say something. Here, it seems to me, chronology is useful in examining Bishop's work. But before I talk about the kind of developments I'm especially interested in, let me briefly dispose of a few stylistic matters. I said that Bishop's dominant style is established very early—and it is. I've already

talked exhaustively about her use of repetition and at least mentioned in passing her interest in rhyme and partial rhyme. All of these matters are part of the aspect of style that is usually labeled "form." And Bishop, it seems to me, is a "formal" poet. But she is a formal poet with a difference. That is, she recognized early in her career what many other poets waited until early middle age to discover: that form is most interesting when stretched, when pulled almost (but not quite) out of shape. It is as if our ears are not always content with such neat structures as the endlessly symmetrical lines of Hiawatha, for instance, or the metronome regularity of Shakespeare's earliest work or the first version of The Wanderings ofOisin. Not that there are not fine passages to be found in such places. There are. But Yeats, who spent years in cleaning up his poem by roughening rhythms and varying rhymes, learned late what luckier poets—Gerard Manley Hopkins among them—recognized near the beginnings of their careers: You can do almost anything to a poem so long as you satisfy the ear's complex and contradictory need for order and diversity. I think it was this that Bishop initially responded to when she first read the second edition of Hopkins, in 1928, whom she found fascinating not just for his sound effects but also for his strategy of abrupt self-address ("Fancy, come faster.") and his complex handling of tense. At approximately age twelve, she had begun to read Emily Dickinson, whom she did not much care for (probably because she was reading an inadequate early edition) and Walt Whitman, whom she did like. ("I also went through a Shelley phase, a Browning phase, and a brief Swinburne phase," she told Ashley Brown in an especially informative 1966 interview for the winter issue of the magazine Shenandoah.) She learned from a great many poets, but the last thing Elizabeth Bishop should be called is an

80 I AMERICAN "influenced" poet, if by "influenced" we mean that she sounds like somebody else. It is possible, of course, to pick out parallels. Once in a while her special kind of repetitions, as we shall soon see, seem a little like those of Wallace Stevens, who, in Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction, had defined the master poet as "he that of repetition is most master." A phrase in "Wading at Wellfleet" sounds to my ear not far from one by Robert Frost, and a phrase in "Chemin de Per" ("The pet hen went chookchook") could perhaps have been written by John Crowe Ransom, although Miss Bishop says she was at the time ignorant of his work. The third poem of "Songs for a Colored Singer" seems to me similar to Yeats's "Lover's Song" (from the "Three Bushes" sequence); and none of them, as Bishop has several times observed, might have been written at all had she not heard Billie Holiday sing "Strange Fruit," in fact all her early songs. (Actually, the fourth song echoes a bit of William Blake's "Tiger" as well.) Bishop has learned a good deal from the metaphysical poets. "Conceits" that remind one of John Donne and Andrew Marvell show up frequently in the early poetry and, somewhat more toned down, all through her work. George Herbert, she told Ashley Brown, was particularly important to her (for poems that seemed "almost surrealistic"); and she mentioned that her poem "The Weed" was "modelled somewhat on 'Love-Unkown.' " It is equally important, however, to remember that she praises Herbert for his "absolute naturalness of tone," a much less conspicuous characteristic that she also shares with him. But minor echoes of line or manner never extend far beyond the phrases.in which they appear. No whole poem of Bishop's really resembles a whole poem by anyone else. Her "voice" is as authentic a voice as can be found anywhere in American poetry.

WRITERS Since I have been focusing on poetry associated with her family and particularly on the very late poem about her great-uncle's little painting, it might be worth turning to her very early poem on his "Large Bad Picture" for some examples of what I mean by "form stretched almost out of shape." (I do not, needless to say, want to suggest that she is incapable—when she wants to—of structuring tight conventional patterns.) Even a glance at the poem identifies it as ' 'formal"—eight rhymed quatrains in lines that are neither extraordinarily short nor extraordinarily long. The "stretch" shows up on the second glance, when one tries to calculate the rhythm and the rhyme. Rhymes are more conspicuous, so almost immediately one becomes aware of a glaring oddity. The rhyme scheme of each stanza is in one way or another different from every other stanza—although often, because of slant rhymes, a scheme is difficult to detect. Look at stanza 1: Remembering the Strait of Belle Isle or some northerly harbor of Labrador, before he became a schoolteacher a great-uncle painted a big picture. Do we, paying attention to heavily accented sounds only, call the "rhymes" a/b/c/d, or do we plot the rhyme as a repeated full sound in the unaccented last syllables of lines one and two (a/a) and as a slant rhyme in the unaccented last syllables of lines three and four (b/b')—or do we throw caution to the wind and say that all four lines end in an r sound and therefore should be heard as a/a/a'/a'? But then internal rhymes come leaping in as we notice a whole family of 0r's and er's: or, northerly, harbor, Labrador, before; Remembering, northerly, teacher, picture. By this time we have probably heard the internal a rhymes in Strait and great and the slant rhyme in painted—and the even more conspicu-

ELIZABETH BISHOP I 81 ous chiming pattern of terminal /'s in the first line's Belle Isle that goes echoing on through the entire poem (schoo/, miles, still, pale, little, level, small, sails, tall, occasion^/, animal, small, ro//ing, ro//ing, perpetiw/, conso/ing). Dizzying! Every stanza a different rhyme scheme and the whole poem a construct of echoing sound. Rhythms are complex. The poem can be scanned, no question of it—but with line lengths that range from four syllables to fourteen (both in stanza 7), a rhythmic pattern shows up that is even more variable than the sound pattern we have just looked at. Why is it all going on? One answer, I think, is a variant on Hopkins' answer when he tried to explain the function of sprung rhythm. Our ear, as I suggested earlier, really wants two different things at once: a "poetic" rhythm (all the variations on ta turn, ta ta turn, turn ta, turn ta ta, turn turn, ta ta, ad nauseam) and, opposing it, running against it in a counterpointing way, a proselike "sentence" rhythm (the irregular rhythm of ordinary talk). Similarly, our ears like full rhyme (sky/high), but we like it best when it is accompanied by a very strict meter. A mix of full and partial rhyme (sky/high in areas of regular rhythm and, to a turn ta ta final beat in lines of loose rhythm, Belle Isle of/ Labrador/ schoolteachef/big picture) can, in a poem as light and amusing as "Large Bad Picture," startle us into careful attention both to what the poem is saying and to what it is doing. What we get from this sort of rhyme and rhythm is a flexibility, a range of effects, that can go from the extraordinarily songlike regularity of the fifth stanza's And high above them, over the tall cliffs' semi-translucent ranks, are scribbled hundreds of fine black birds hanging in n 's in banks.

to the vast, thudding shift in the sixth stanza's rhyme and rhythm when the "huge aquatic animal '' of the last line comes gasping to the surface: One can hear their crying, crying, the only sound there is except for occasional sighing as a large aquatic animal breathes. (It is impossible not to digress for a moment to comment on the fine, funny effect of that string of six n's in the line that sees the birds as n's in the sky or to remark on the fact that the birds are as lyrical as they are because they have picked up the sound of their "crying, crying" from stanza five's buried i rhymes of high and fine, which in turn go back most conspicuously to stanza two's end rhymes of high and sky and slant rhymes of miles and side.) But a poem—particularly a poem as cheerful, ironic, tender, ingenious, and complex as this one—can explain itself only by the reader's getting used to it. A few notes, however, might be helpful. We are, of course, once again back in Elizabeth Bishop's childhood world and, as Lloyd Schwartz points out in his excellent commentary, "One Art: The Poetry of Elizabeth Bishop, 1971-1976," the poetic version of that world is almost always immensely intricate: ' 'Changes in levels of diction shift the point of view. There is the child's naivete and candidness. . . .And yet there are perceptions about the child's reactions only an adult could articulate." He is speaking of "In the Waiting Room," but he might well have been considering this slighter, more casual poem. The voice in that^rrstrstanza is pretty much a little girl's voice. She's not quite sure where the "picture" (not painting) is supposed to be set, but she knows it's either on the Strait of Belle Isle or at some northerly harbor of Labrador; she

82 I AMERICAN also knows that her great-uncle must have seen it "before he became a schoolteacher." (He had, in fact, painted several large works on his return from his first cabin-boy voyage to the north. "I loved them," Bishop told Ashley Brown. "They're not very good as painting." Years after he had become a fairly successful painter in England, he came back to Great Village for a summer's visit—several years before Elizabeth's birth—and conducted art classes for his nieces and their friends. It was, indeed, during this time that the sketch was done that Bishop uses in "Poem.") If the first stanza of "Large Bad Picture" belongs primarily to the child, by the second stanza the child's admiration for the "big picture" begins to mingle with an adult's analysis of it. (Its cliffs, seen with a child's enlarging eye, are "hundreds of feet high"; but the bases of the cliffs, "fretted by little arches," are described in the diction of an adult.) From this point on, the adult and child voices are intermingled. Only in the last stanza does the adult voice become totally dominant. Often there are transformations in a Bishop poem, and some of the most interesting in this one occur when the child/adult observer shifts stance in order literally to enter the scene. In the beginning of the poem, she is looking at the painting. Suddenly the painting fills with sound. She is no longer the observer, but a participant in the action of the painting. She is able really to hear the crying of the birds and the sighing of an invisible "large aquatic animal." But precisely as the painting comes to life, time stops! A "perpetual sunset" begins, a stopped now, that, something like a few of the stopped-time actions in Wallace Stevens, involves everything in fixed action. The sun goes "rolling, rolling,/ round and round and round." But for all its rolling, it isn't going anywhere. This sunset, trapped just before it disappears, is literally perpetual; and the ships—which now join the child and adult

WRITERS and adult/child as observers—"consider it," presumably forever. Meaning—any meaning—is, however, ambiguous; and no one knows that better than Elizabeth Bishop. If she is a poet of echoes, she is also a poet of options. Her favorite word must be or. It dominates her poetry. The scene here (that is either the Strait of Belle Isle or a Labrador harbor) achieves, finally, a stasis. But even then doubt arises. The ships are fixed in a fixed harbor under a permanently fixed, permanently setting sun. But the most one can say of them is that "Apparently they have reached their destination" (emphasis added). No one can really know the destination of anyone or anything. And not only can we not know destinations, we have no way of determining motives. Why have these ships come to this harbor? They're ships, so perhaps they have come for "commerce." They're in a work of art; and, like us, they "consider" this sun that cannot set. Perhaps they have come, therefore, for ' 'contemplation.'' Options, even in a work of art (especially in a work of art), tease us, like Keats's Grecian urn, out of thought. I said earlier that I saw little "development" in Elizabeth Bishop's technique. "The Map," which was written in 1934 or 1935 and opens her first book and Complete Poems, is as assured as "One Art," the villanelle with which, she told me, she had hoped to end her 1976 collection, Geography III. The "voice" that asserts "Land lies in water; it is shadowed green" anticipates the very similar "voice" that asserts "The art of losing isn't hard to master." On the other hand, the late poetry has changed, it seems to me, considerably in tone. It is far more willing to risk statement than the early poetry. And though many of its assertions are still tentative, they seem driven by more open feeling than Bishop allowed herself to display in the earliest work. To put it another way, though almost all of

ELIZABETH BISHOP / 83 Bishop's best poems are shot through with both strong personal feeling and strong intellectual conviction, in the early poems style is used to mask feeling and conviction and in the later works to uncover them. This is certainly no novel idea. Most critics of Bishop's early work praised it for its immaculately "cool" surface, its wit, and its meticulous attention to detail. Selden Rodman, for example, writing in the New York Times of October 27, 1946, said: "If the author of the thirty-two remarkable poems in this book used paint she would undoubtedly paint 'abstractions.' Yet so sure is her feeling for poetry that in building up her over-all watercolor arrangements she never strays far from the concrete and the particular." When her second book of poems was published, Richard Eberhart, also writing in the Times (July 17, 1955), said that he found "the same detached, deliberate, unmoved qualities in the new work as in her old. . . . She is devoted to honest announcements of what she knows, to purity of the poem, to subtle changes in scope and intention." But not until Questions of Travel was published were many critics ready to notice, as Lisel Mueller did in an August 1966 review in Poetry, that she still has the eye for detail, the capacity for detachment, the sense for the right word and the uncanny image, and the mental habit that imposes order, balance, and clarity on everything she sees. But this third book holds more yet: a greater richness of language, a grasp of proportion and progression that makes every poem appear flawless, and an increased involvement between the "I" of the traveler and the "it" and "thou" of landscape and stranger. I like Mueller's adaptation of Martin Buber's analysis of the I/Thou relationship in art to the poetry of Elizabeth Bishop. But, as I've just sug-

gested, it seems to me that that relationship exists in all of Bishop's poetry. It does not so much "increase" in the later work as simply become more visible. In order to trace the evolution of what might be called gradually unmasked feeling and conviction, chronology is useful. And so is a bit more in the way of biographical information. All of the work I've focused on so far is associated with Bishop's mother's family in Great Village. But from the age of seven until she was ready to enter college, she lived—except for summer visits to Great Village—in Boston suburbs with her mother's older sister. At thirteen, she started going to summer camp at Wellfleet. At sixteen, she went to boarding school outside Boston. These were essentially Boston/Cape Cod years. For a very brief interval, however, for half a year just after she left Great Village, she lived with her paternal grandparents. John W. Bishop, her grandfather, had originally come with his family from White Sands, Prince Edward Island (off the coast of Nova Scotia), first to Providence, Rhode Island, and then to Worcester, where he founded the firm of J. W. Bishop and Son. He was an ambitious and most successful man. By the time Elizabeth was born, his firm of builders was responsible for constructing many public buildings in Boston and college and university buildings in other parts of the country. Her father, William Thomas Bishop, joined the firm soon after his high school graduation. He remained single almost all of his life, not marrying until he was thirty-seven. (Elizabeth's mother was twenty-seven.) About two years later, Elizabeth was born. If her Canadian years were, in retrospect, full of a tangle of joy and anxiety, her return to Massachusetts and the years before her admission to Vassar were, on the whole, complicated by illness and some loneliness. Her abrupt transfer from the warmth and generosity of her Canadian

84 I AMERICAN grandparents to the very different world and life of her father's parents was hard on the six-yearold, and a sudden onslaught of ailments— bronchitis, eczema, severe chronic asthma, and what was diagnosed as early symptoms of chorea—made her brief time in Worcester a dismal one. Although her illnesses moderated when Bishop was sent to Boston to live with her Aunt Maud, most of the next eight years were relatively lonely. She had a playmate or two, but she was too ill to attend school with any regularity. Instead, she devoted her time to piano lessons and reading—a good deal of the reading done while propped up in bed, wheezing with asthma. Summers, however, were frequently pleasant. Bishop regularly visited her grandparents in Great Village until she was in her late teens—until her grandfather died and her grandmother went to live with a daughter in Montreal. (Through her entire life, she has continued to return to Nova Scotia to visit an aunt.) Another activity was also important to her, for between her twelfth and sixteenth years, she was enrolled for two months each summer at the Nautical Camp for Girls in Wellfleet, where she discovered sailing and, meeting other girls who were interested in books and poetry, began to break down the shyness that had characterized her childhood. Finally, in 1927, she had her first real school experience. She was sent to a boarding school, Walnut Hill, in Natick, Massachusetts. Here, studying Latin and English under very good teachers, she continued to write the poetry that she had first begun at the age of eight. She also, however, had real opportunities to talk about writing. "The teaching was of very good quality," she told Ashley Brown: I only studied Latin then. 1 didn't take up Greek till I went to Vassar. I now wish I'd studied nothing but Latin and Greek in college. In fact I consider myself badly educated. Writing Latin

WRITERS prose and verse is still probably the best possible exercise for a poet. After Walnut Hill, she entered Vassar where, with Mary McCarthy and other friends, she started a literary magazine. (It was started because the college literary magazine refused to print their work. After three numbers had appeared, the college magazine gave in and some of the group were asked to become its editors.) Toward the end of her college career, her poetry was beginning to appear in little magazines. But perhaps the most significant event of that time was her meeting with Marianne Moore, who became a lifelong friend. The winter following her graduation was spent alone in Greenwich Village in New York. In 1935^36 and again in 1937-38, she lived some months in Paris and later traveled in Italy; but for the ten years from 1938 on—except for nine months in Mexico in 1943—Bishop lived principally in Key West, Florida. She wrote much and published less (much less), so that it was not until 1946, when she was thirty-five, that her first book, North & South, was published as the winner of the Houghton Mifflin Poetry Award. Many of the themes and preoccupations, as well as much of the imagery, of Bishop's later work show up in that first book. When I spoke to her in the summer of 1977,1 mentioned that I'd been particularly struck by the quantity of water imagery, the number of poems set at a time of divided light (dawns and dusks), the frequent appearances of birds in the poems. "I don't think I notice things like that," Miss Bishop said. "After North & South was published, an aunt remarked that there was a lot of water in my poems; until then, I hadn't been conscious of it." Nevertheless, more than two-thirds of the thirty poems in the present version of that first book have explicit water references and most of those that don't—all but two, in fact—offer either mud, mermaids, snow, spit, tears, dew, or

ELIZABETH BISHOP I 85 washing. There are precious few deserts in Elizabeth Bishop's early poetry. One might expect a lot of water and birds— and even sunrises and sunsets—in a poetry that moves this way and that on the map of the world. On the other hand, in view of the later strong focus on the landscapes of childhood, it is a little surprising that in her first book there is no explicit reference to Nova Scotia—not one that I can locate—and only one direct reference to Massachusetts ("Wading at Wellfleet," which, with its "back shore" location, is founded on memories not of early childhood but of summer camp and later, and which is certainly dominated by an adult point of view). It is as if the places and persons of childhood are still too painfully close to be tackled as subject matter or as if not quite enough perspective has yet been gained to value them accurately. But if Nova Scotia does not show up at all, and Massachusetts appears only once, that does not mean childhood has been neglected. The child and the child's point of view (and the child's extreme sensitivity to wonder and to pain) are still very much with us. The place names are missing. Sometimes even the child is superficially missing (as in "Large Bad Picture," which, I suppose, should properly be called a Nova Scotia poem, since the painting, if not its subject or its painter, was in Nova Scotia when Bishop was there). Yet the literary function of the child's wide-eyed approach to reality is demanded in much of this poetry, and Elizabeth Bishop finds a variety of ways to provide it. What happens most often is that the child puts on an adult's disguise (as in "From the Country to the City"), or peeps out from behind poetry read in childhood and "revised" from an adult's point of view (as in "The Gentleman of Shalott"), or tells—with neither place nor time specified—an anecdote that could or should have been experienced in childhood (as in the walk along the railroad track in "Chemin de Per"—in

fact, a summer camp "adolescence" memory— when, "with pounding heart" the protagonist discovers "the ties were too close together/ or maybe too far apart"), or suddenly finds herself dragged abruptly into an adult world (her "childish snow-forts, built in flashier winters" suddenly intruding on "Paris, 7 A.M."), or discovers herself reflected in the echoing mirror of a remembered fairy tale ("the crumbs . . . clever children placed by day/ and followed to their door/ one night, at least" in "Sleeping Standing Up"), or seems to show something like a lost child's face in a homemade fairy tale ("The Man-Moth," for example), or is forced on us in a child's toy observed by an adult ("Cirque d'Hiver"), or is terribly, universally with us in the third of the "Songs for a Colored Singer," the "Lullaby" that lets "Adult and child/ sink to their rest" in precisely the same way "the big ship sinks and dies" during a war, and that announces with casual matter-of-factness, "The shadow of the crib makes an enormous cage." We are, of course, all entrapped—all caged— by the secret child who is caged within us, whose tear, like that of the Man-Moth, is "his only possession '' and, ' like the bee's sting," the defense that keeps him alive: Slyly he palms it, and if you're not paying attention he'll swallow it. However, if you watch, he'll hand it over, cool as from underground springs and pure enough to drink. If we see this moving poem as having something to do with the secret child, the shy self we all carry with us, some of its mystery disappears but none of its mysterious power. In order to talk about this poem, however, it is useful to put it into the context of its book. It is the tenth poem in North & South. "The Map," which opens the book with water (and to which I want to turn next), sets up the geography image

86 I AMERICAN that dominates not just this first book but all of Bishop's poetry. "The Imaginary Iceberg" sails us from the literal North Atlantic of "The Map" to the North Atlantic of the imagination, and we have a chance to study a natural object that reminds us a little of the soul ("both being selfmade from elements least visible"). We see the imaginary iceberg from the deck of a ship; "Casabianca" sets that lonely ship of the soul burning ("Love's the boy stood on the burning deck"). "The Colder the Air," in direct opposition to the "burning boy" of love, presents a winter huntress whose shooting gallery freezes not just birds and boats but time as well ("ticking loud/ on one stalled second"). When this ' 'clock'' later falls ' 'in wheels and chimes of leaf and cloud," we are prepared for the central image of "Wading at Wellfleet," which offers waves that are like the "sharp blades" around the wheels of an Assyrian war chariot. "Chemin de Per" reduces the waves of Cape Cod Bay to ripples on a "little pond." The subject, like the subject of "Casabianca," is love; but here it is the incomplete love of an old hermit who keeps people away from him while shooting his shotgun and screaming, ' 'Love should be put into action!" (That this is an incomplete love is insisted on in the last lines, where we learn that "across the pond an echo/ tried and tried to confirm it" (emphasis added). If the hermit has an incomplete love, "The Gentleman of Shalott," who follows, is incompleteness itself, a man who is half mirror: If the glass slips he's in a fix— only one leg, etc. But while it stays put he can walk and run and his hands can clasp one another. . . . The mirror-moral of the poem is, perhaps, contained in the last line and may apply to many of these poems: "Half is enough." "Large Bad

WRITERS Picture" offers a mirror of a different kind: the mirror of art that reflects a natural landscape in such a way as to stop time and invite us to enter the painted world for the sake, possibly, of "contemplation." The "perpetual sunset" of "Large Bad Picture" moves us quickly on to the not-quite-darkness of "From the Country to the City.'' Here, too, there are mirrors not altogether unlike those in "The Gentleman of Shalott," who had worried about the effect on thought ' 'if half his head's reflected." In "From the Country to the City,'' the ' 'glittering arrangement'' of the city's brain consists of "mermaid like,/ seated, ravishing sirens, each waving her hand-mirror," the glitter flashing out toward the country as "vibrations of the tuning-fork" that the city holds and strikes "against the mirror frames." This ominous, dark, and glittering city leads directly to the nighttime subway world of "The Man-Moth." Threading such a diagram of interconnected images and themes distorts the poems; but it does, I think, suggest something of the workings of what Hart Crane liked to call "the logic of metaphor." Neither logical nor illogical, such alogical linkages work like those synapses in the brain that make metaphor, and so poetry, possible. "Resemblance" leads us to a shock of insight as unrelated things put on mirroring costumes. Certainly the title of "The Man-Moth," the lucky newspaper misprint for "mammoth" that had offered Elizabeth Bishop a way into her poem, is a lovely illustration of the process I'm talking about. What happens in that poem, however, is of far more interest. We are again in a world where the principal viewpoint seems to be that of a most precocious child who adopts an adult's vocabulary while at the same time retaining her own myth-making way of looking at things. Under a full moon, she notices, "The whole shadow of Man is only as big as his hat./ It lies at his feet like a circle for a doll to stand on." But we soon learn that the poem is not about

ELIZABETH BISHOP I 87 Man but, rather, about a fabulous, if timid, creature, the "Man-Moth," whose appearances in the light are "rare." (I'm suggesting, of course, that he bears in many ways a speaking likeness to that secret child I mentioned earlier. He is both timid and brave. He is filled with illusions that are more satisfying than reality. And the tear that is "his one possession" is "pure enough to drink." Since he lives in a subway, he is also literally the underground man.) One thing that the secret child notices is that Man, though he feels the "queer light" of the moon on his hands, "does not see the moon." The Man-Moth, on the other hand, sees it but doesn't know what it is. (He thinks it is a hole at the top of the sky; "Man, standing below him, has no such illusions.") Despite his fears, the Man-Moth "nervously," "fearfully" must climb the facades of the buildings in order to "push his small head through that round clean opening." What Bishop stresses is what every sensitive child has always known: "what the Man-Moth fears most he must do." We call this compulsion "growing up," I suppose, or perhaps "education." Like any child, however, who never quite learns to cope with failure, the Man-Moth "fails, of course, and falls back scared but quite unhurt." Immediately, he returns underground, "to the pale subways of cement he calls his home." He rides backward on those subways, each night forced to "dream recurrent dreams." As I've said, this Man-Moth seems to me another version of the secret child, here apprehended in a mix of adult and child diction by the secret child from the past. It is as if the author looks into her own eye at the end of the poem to discover that the mirroring Man-Moth's eye is "all dark pupil,/ an entire night itself." He is, as it were, not only himself/herself but also the recurrent dream as well as its dreamer. The tear that is forced from his eye, "his only possession," is both his life (the bee sting analogy insists on it) and his innocence, "pure enough to

drink," that we—as observers—are perpetually forcing him to give up. That loss of innocence is central to many poems by Elizabeth Bishop, and I'd like to track it through several of them. Because I want to see that loss in terms of geographies, it is important to begin with "The Map," where it is not especially prominent but where geographies certainly are. I've spoken of Miss Bishop as a poet of options and echoes; and the echoing lands, waters, weeds, names, shadows, and maps of this poem are as conspicuous as the five ors that keep us suspended until the final line's statement: "More delicate than the historians' are the map-makers' colors." The mapmakers' colors are more delicate, of course, because historians—inevitably distorting the tangled maps of love and fear and friendship—force us away from 4 'shadows'' into the glare of bare red, yellow, and blue: the fictions that result from oversimplified biography. I think for most readers that last line comes as a considerable surprise. The "subject" of the poem, after all, is the map, not "history." Yet once we realize that it is a most subjective world that Bishop is mapping (no one more emphatically denies the validity of John Ruskin's "pathetic fallacy" than she), the surprise disappears and admiration replaces it. For it is the world's body she is interested in and its analogous relationship with the human one. As a result the land can ' 'lean down to lift the sea from under,/ drawing it unperturbed around itself" (emphasis added), as if the sea were a kind of live shawl. "Is the land tugging at the sea from under?" she asks herself. Similarly, when we see the map's materials as living ones, we have no difficulty with the notion that we can "stroke" a bay, not just by rowing on it but by petting it as well. Living peninsulas, in such a world, are able to "take the water between thumb and finger/ like women feeling for the smoothness of yard-goods." A poet who translates feeling into topography

88 I AMERICAN deals metaphorically with primitive emotions, the emotions that govern the child/adult; and it is right, therefore, that the map offer us both ''agitation" and "quiet," and that its most telling pronouncement has to do with the "excitement" we all experience "when emotion too far exceeds its cause." (We remember the extravagant tears of a grandmother.) The kind of analysis that occurs in this statement (even if it is attributed to the printer of the map rather than to the author or the reader of the poem) is, it seems to me, the kind that comes not from innocence but from experience—that comes, indeed, precisely from loss of innocence. But because we are apprehending the world in many of these poems with the bifocal vision of the child/adult, it is important that we recognize that such answers can come only because the innocent questioner in us asks the right questions: "Are they assigned?" for example, "Or can the countries pick their colors?" Lurking behind the naive question is the much larger one of determinism and free will. But it takes the innocent questioner to insist that we cope with problems of this sort. Though Bishop makes no explicit answer to the question of how a country's "color," its personality, is achieved, she does, in the last line, manage to say that the historian's notion of reality is different from that of the mapmaker (the evolving individual, if we see this as a poem about the "delicate" ways in which the individual self is achieved; the artist, if we see the poem as about the differences between the artist's "delicate" way of presenting truth and the gross, heavyhandedness of historian, biographer, or—in an essay like this one—critic). If "The Map" concerns itself obliquely (via free will and determinism) with the nature of the soul, "The Imaginary Iceberg"—another North Alantic poem—deals explicitly with that question. Like the iceberg, "self-made" and cutting its facets from within, the soul "saves itself perpetually and adorns only itself.'' Although iso-

WRITERS lated and perhaps lonely, the iceberg/soul is valuable: "We'd rather have the iceberg than the ship." Behind the poem and important to all of Bishop's work is another complex relationship— what Mueller, paraphrasing Buber, had called the "I/Thou" relationship. In this poem, although "we" and the ship sail off to a "warmer sky," it is not before acknowledging the importance of that separate "breathing plain of snow," the * 'other" we would like to, and cannot, "own." "Good-bye, we say, good-bye" to any important "other." Another variant on the I/Thou relationship is worked out in Bishop's "metaphysical" poem 'The Weed." A dream poem, its opening reminds us a little of "The Imaginary Iceberg," for from the cold heart of the "dead" speaker a "frozen" final thought extends "stiff and idle" as the body under it. Suddenly, a weed begins its growth within the heart and awakens the sleeper. Eventually, the "rooted heart" splits apart and produces a double river. The weed is almost swept away. However, as it struggles to lift its leaves out of the water, a few drops are splashed on the eyes of the speaker, who thinks that each drop is a ' 'small, illuminated scene" and that the "weed-deflected stream" is made up of "racing images." In place of frozen thought, the weed now stands in "the severed heart." Its role, it explains, is "but to divide your heart again." Once more—as in "Sestina," "In the Village," and "The Man-Moth," to mention only those works I have focused on—tears are of central importance. For the stream that springs from the heart is, of course, a stream of tears that are occasioned both by lost love and by new love. We learn to cry early; but when childhood innocence is gone, our tears—like our loves—are more desperate and more necessary than in childhood. Though there are no children in "The Weed" (unless we count the "slight young weed" itself

ELIZABETH BISHOP I 89 with its "graceful head," who seems more adolescent than child and more "young adult" than adolescent), nevertheless the poem does manage to make its statement about the continuity of life from earliest childhood on; for the "racing images" of the drops of water/blood/tears that constitute the stream flowing from the heart are explained in terms of such continuity: (As if a river should carry all the scenes that it had once reflected shut in its waters, and not floating on momentary surfaces.) These are—to use a phrase from the beginning of this essay—images of "significant life," the stopped nows that can be drawn from childhood, from adolescence, from maturity, the /tows that memory must constantly retrieve and that we must examine, reexamine, and evaluate if we are to be able to function in any useful present. Here we are offered only the process itself abstracted into an image: the "frozen" thought above a "cold" heart giving way to the weed of feeling and love that brings both tears and an insight into the meaning of life. As in many other early poems, the example of brokenheartedness is not offered nor really needed. For beneath the witty surface, private pain, we know, powers the poem. The roots of such pain are important not to us but to Elizabeth Bishop. The preoccupations of North & South, despite its superficial focus on travel, have to do with the sense of an isolated self and that self's relationships to various "others," whether those relationships (as in ' The Weed " and ' 'Late Air'') deal with love, or (as in "Quai d'Orleans") shared experience, or (as in "Roosters") "unwanted love," denial, and "forgiveness." But there are also several poems (particularly "The Monument" and, of course, "Large Bad Picture") that concern themselves with the nature and value of art and still others (often dream poems like "Sleeping Standing Up" or dawn

poems like "Paris, 7 A.M.") that draw on reveries of childhood to project a sense of meaningless, undefined loss. During the nine years between her first book and her second, Elizabeth Bishop accumulated honors but not a wide readership. Literary friends such as Randall Jarrell, Robert Lowell, Marianne Moore, and Pablo Neruda admired and praised her work; but despite the fact that she was granted a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1947 (and another in 1978), in 1949 acted as consultant in poetry at the Library of Congress, in 1950 was given the American Academy of Letters Award, in 1951 was awarded the first Lucy Martin Donnelly fellowship from Bryn Mawr College, and in 1952 was granted the Shelley Memorial Award, she was neither widely anthologized nor really widely acclaimed. Part of the reason for her delayed popularity has to do, I suspect, with her travels; for during much of her life she has been abroad. For fifteen years, beginning in 1951 and interrupted by infrequent visits to New York and a summer's travel in 1964 to Italy and Spain, she shared a house in the mountains of Brazil (near Petropolis) and an apartment in Rio de Janeiro with Lota Costellat de Macedo Soares, a Brazilian friend whom she had met in New York in 1942. Not even the publication in 1955 of Poems: North & South—A Cold Spring, although it won her the 1956 Pulitzer Prize for poetry and a Partisan Review fellowship, made Bishop a "popular" poet. For one thing, of course, her new book added only nineteen poems to the previously published thirty of North & South—giving her an average production of a little more than one poem for each year of her life! But, more importantly, the poems made no aggressive claims, not even to their own chiselled elegance. What the new poems did do, however, was to explore somewhat more openly than before

90 I AMERICAN both "real" landscapes (New York's "Varick Street," for example) and recollected but "fictionalized" ones ("The Prodigal") for areas of private feeling or, in poems like "Over 2000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance," to contrast the significant landscapes of history with the jumbled—even more significant—ones of memory. Their major opening out, however, comes in a set of four "Nova Scotia" poems that not only are set firmly on the landscape of Miss Bishop's childhood but that very delicately—almost imperceptibly—contrast what is with what was (especially "At the Fishhouses"). One of the principal accomplishments of all of these poems, however, is their steady, unsentimental insistence that we see reality not as it ought to be but as it is. Literature, history, theology, she suggests, are always deceiving us by promising more than they can deliver. We read the Great Book—it really doesn't matter which—and we are offered a coherent universe. We contrast that with experience, and we discover that in the real world everything is "only connected by 'and' and 'and.' " Reality never gives us—as a book subtitled ' 'Over 2000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance" cheerfully does—the happy miracle of domesticity crossed on virgin birth: Open the heavy book. Why couldn't we have seen this old Nativity while we were at it? —the dark ajar, the rocks breaking with light, an undisturbed, unbreathing flame, colorless, sparkless, freely fed on straw, and, lulled within, a family with pets, —and looked and looked our infant sight away. This is, of course, how the poem ends: with our "infant" sight focused on the Nativity's infant and his "family," the Bethlehem cattle reduced to "pets," and the miracle made casual yet still properly miraculous (the dark come "ajar" and the rocks "breaking with light").

WRITERS What the 2,000 illustrations offer is reassurance that the world, for all its sadness and strangeness, makes sense. Bishop's strategy is to begin and end with the illustrations, sandwiching reality between them. The initial illustrations are not quite so grand as the final one, but all of them testify to a world that has meaning built into it: a group of Arabs, "plotting, probably,/ against our Christian Empire,/ while one apart, with outstretched arm and hand/ points to the Tomb, the Pit, the Sepulcher." All of the engravings "when dwelt upon . . . resolve themselves." The transition to reality—Elizabeth Bishop's own reality, her own travels—is accomplished by water. The reader's eye "drops, weighted, through the lines/ the burin made" until "painfully, finally," it reaches lines "that ignite/ in watery prismatic white-and-blue." Suddenly— in much the same way that she steps into the scene in "Large Bad Picture"—she steps out of the engraving and onto the deck of a ship that is passing along the coast of Newfoundland: Entering the Narrows at St. Johns the touching bleat of goats reached to the ship. We glimpsed them, reddish, leaping up the cliffs among the fog-soaked weeds and butter-andeggs. What may be worth a moment's thought is that when we leave the concordance, we enter reality to the touching bleat of goats. We are moved by the real world and its lovely, fragile landscapes, the free leap of animals that will die (that are not, as those in the biblical landscapes, everlasting "pets" and that do not inhabit the silence— "always the silence"—of the engravings). As opposed to the ordered, labeled "significance" of the engravings—the outstretched arms and hands that point to Tomb, Pit, and Sepulcher— the real world, connected by ands ("And at St. Peter's . . . And at Volubilis . . . And in the brothels of Marrakesh") seems filled instead

ELIZABETH BISHOP I 91 with significant but frightening disorder. (The poem, of course, reorders it to make its own satisfactions: it is no accident that our travels take us to St. Peter's after St. John's, for example, or that the concordance sepulcher is echoed in the Mexican Easter lilies.) Reality offers a jumble of meaningless life and death: In Mexico the dead man lay in a blue arcade; the dead volcanoes glistened like Easter lilies. The jukebox went on playing "Ay, Jalisco!" The dead man, the dead volcano, and the noisy jukebox coexist. Similarly, "a golden length of evening" in Ireland illuminates "rotting hulks" while an Englishwoman, pouring tea, explains that "the Duchess" is going to have a baby. ("Nativity" chimes in our minds!) Prostitutes in Marrakesh do belly dances and fling themselves "naked and giggling against our knees,/ asking for cigarettes." But "somewhere near there" a grave "open to every wind from the pink desert" is more frightening than anything previously cataloged: . . . It was somewhere near there I saw what frightened me most of all: A holy grave, not looking particularly holy, one of a group under a keyhole-arched stone baldaquin open to every wind from the pink desert. An open, gritty, marble trough, carved solid with exhortation, yellowed as scattered cattle-teeth; half-filled with dust, not even the dust of the poor prophet paynim who once lay there. In a smart burnoose Khadour looked on amused. It is frightening, not because its holiness has been violated, or even because the guide "in a smart burnoose" finds the whole scene amusing; it is not even especially frightening because, open-mouthed in silent "exhortation," its yellowed trough is the color of scattered cattle teeth

(our minds leap forward to the peaceful cattle of the Nativity scene). Its real cause for terror, it seems to me, is that it means nothing. And suddenly we realize that this scene is not the only frightening one, but only the one that "frightened me most of all." For all of the travels have been frightening: the travels to Newfoundland, to Rome, to Mexico, to Volubilis, to Ireland, to Marrakesh: the "beautiful poppies," the "touching bleat of goats," the giggling little prostitutes, the Englishwoman pouring tea are all frightening. They are alive, vulnerable, trapped in mortality. No wonder the concordance attracts and repels us! It offers us innocence regained. But innocence is what we have all lost. In a frightening and beautiful world, we must make do with the tangible real: the goats, some "fogsoaked weeds and butter-and-eggs," a fat old guide who makes eyes at us—even an amused guide to the empty graves. When "infant sight" is gone, we look out on and accept frightening reality. What satisfies us in a poem of this sort is a double integrity: an honesty of feeling and— something I have not especially stressed here— an honesty of craft. (I mentioned a few of the image links, but the links of sound are brilliant: the hidden rhymes, for example, in "somewhere near there" or—after a grand total of eleven ands in the long first stanza—the casual comment that everything is connected by " 'and' and 'and' " ironically adding three more, or the remarkable design that places "a holy grave, not looking particularly holy" under a "keyholearched" baldaquin, or the ingenious use of open to link the grave ' 'open to every wind''—a grave that is nothing more than "an open . . . trough"—to the command that we reexamine the concordance: "Open the book," "Open the heavy book." The poem is not just a moral but also a technical triumph.) The Nova Scotia poems, although I do not want to examine them here, show the same qua-

92 / AMERICAN lities. "At the Fishhouses" concludes that the sea, "cold dark deep and absolutely clear," "is like what we imagine knowledge to be:/ dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free,/ drawn from the cold hard mouth/ of the world, derived from the rocky breasts/forever, flowing and drawn, and since/ our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown." In "Cape Breton," a man carrying a baby gets off a bus to enter a landscape indifferent both to life and to death. ("Whatever the landscape had of meaning appears to have been abandoned,/ unless the road is holding it back, in the interior,/ where we cannot see." What we can see—and sense—is that ' 'an ancient chill is rippling the dark brooks.") To accept, as I think Elizabeth Bishop does, a world that in point of fact is not disordered but that is certainly nontheologically ordered—that is indifferent not only to man but to everything else as well—does not mean that one feels life is without value. In fact, it means exactly the opposite: life is the only value there is. The function of the artist is to see it honestly, to record its intensity, to find a way—for a while at least—to preserve its unique fragile/tough, tearful/comic, tender/brutal qualities. This is the area of "knowledge"—and, I'm inclined to add, of "wisdom"—that Bishop drives toward in her later poetry. It is a cold knowledge, but it is inevitably shot through with intense feeling. (What poet wouldn't give his eye teeth to have written the superb love sequence "Four Poems" and the related lyrics "Varick Street" and "Insomnia," or the delicate lyric "The Shampoo"?) "The Prodigal," a central poem in the 1955 volume, concerns the exile who takes "a long time/ finally to make his mind up to go home." The title poem in Questions of Travel (1965) questions where home is and, implicitly, what it is. Between the two books lies much work: the

WRITERS 1956 assistance in the translation of Henrique Mindlin's Modern Brazilian Architecture; the 1957 translation and publication of The Diary of "Helena Morley" (Alice Brandt); the 1962 publication of Brazil, a book commissioned by Time-Life and rather heavily revised by its editors ("Maybe two-thirds of it is mine," Miss Bishop once ironically remarked); and the translation of a number of poems by major Brazilian poets. There were also more honors: the 1957 Amy Lowell traveling fellowship, the 1962 Chapelbrook fellowship, the 1964 Academy of American Poets fellowship. And there were important travels—including a 1961 trip down the Amazon that, along with a 1972 trip to the Galapagos Islands and Peru, remains in Bishop's mind as among the most satisfying of her life. But "travels" during the Brazilian years take on a different quality from the travels that preceded them. Almost all of the "short" trips are within the huge country of Brazil. And Bishop's work itself takes on a different quality—not a difference in tone or technique so much as in an attitude toward herself as "subject" of her own poetry—a quality that isn't easy to define but that has something to do, I think, with that "strange" domesticity Vendler notices. Perhaps, like anyone who writes from a congenial but very foreign country, Bishop during these years settles down, as if—granted a home, friends, and an occupation—she is freed by her foreignness to be most herself. The important qualifications in the last statement are, of course, "granted a home, friends, and an occupation." In Brazil, Bishop was lucky: for more than fifteen years, she found all three. Her literary occupation needs no further documentation. The apartment in the Leme section of Rio and the home above Petropolis have been well described by Ashley Brown; but we already know a good deal about the apartment, its neigh-

ELIZABETH BISHOP I 93 borhood, and one of its views onto the steep hill or peak of Babilonia (with its climbing slums) from the poems "House Guest," "Going to the Bakery," and, particularly, "The Burglar of Babylon." As far as the home near Petropolis is concerned, it has for years been radiantly with us in "Electrical Storm," "Rainy Season; SubTropics," "The Armadillo," and "Song for the Rainy Season," the last of which I wish to discuss not because I think it is one of Bishop's major works but because it is one of three poems (the other two, both from Geography III, both stronger poems and both in subtle ways related to this one, are "One Art" and "Crusoe in England") for which I feel unqualified love. It is difficult for a reader—any reader, but perhaps most difficult for a reader pretending to be a literary critic—to say in all honesty just why he not only admires but loves one poem more than another. Maybe it is all accident—private resonance that has nothing to do with the craft he can sometimes seem ingeniously to account for, syllable by interwoven syllable. Or maybe, more accurately, the love for a particular poem is a consequence of private resonance (my own memories of three lost houses) and the way a poem catches fire in the larger context of an author's work, or perhaps even in the still larger context of a whole genre. A single poem simultaneously lights up a blaze of totally public and totally private "meaning." For me "Song for the Rainy Season" does just that. It is a song, of course, and a brilliant one: six intricately rhymed ten-line stanzas. The short lines sing to us and to each other a love song not to a person or even to a home (though I 've called it that) but to a "house" that, like everything valuable that we know, is doomed to eventual destruction. (I think of the lost elms of "Poem," the lost elms of my own childhood, perhaps of yours; I think of the lost houses—surely this is one of them—of "One Art.") Though it is an "open" house, it is also "hid-

den, oh hidden." (I think of the early nightmare poem "Sleeping Standing Up" in which, unlike Hansel and Gretel, the dreamer—searching all night—never finds out "where the cottage [is]." But this house is hidden only from the world, not from its proper inhabitants. It is "the house we live in.") It is hidden in high fog. Even the fog is homemade, a "private cloud" invented by an almost-human brook that ' 'sings loud/from a rib cage/of giant fern." Vapor climbs up the fern and then turns back to achieve the hidden privacy of a house in a fog cloud, a house beneath a magnetic rock that is "rain-, rainbow-ridden," and where, "familiar, unbidden," the natural world's owls, lichens, and bromeliads cling—not precariously—but at ease. (Even the vapor climbs the fern's rib cage "effortlessly.") For the house is open to everything—"white dew," "silver fish, mouse,/ bookworms,/ big moths," even "the mildew's/ ignorant map." (Phrases and memories of other works echo, not just conspicuous ones like the opening scene of "Memories of Uncle Neddy,'' where the related molds and mildews of Rio return us to the child world of Nova Scotia, or "The Map" itself that fails to anticipate Brazil, but memories of poems that touch on the animal world threatened by man, a world that is still almost miraculously—just barely—able to refresh us and momentarily give us the illusion of freedom. "The Moose" is the most vivid example of such a poem but, pointing a more painful moral, "The Armadillo" comes also to mind.) Hidden, private, open, the house is "cherished," for it has been "darkened and tarnished/ by the warm touch/ of the warm breath'' of its inhabitants. Surrounded by "the forgiving air," serenaded by "the fat frogs that,/ shrilling for love,/ clamber and mount" (despite the brown owl that will pursue them), the house lives in a balance of life where even the "milk-white sunrise" can be "kind to the eyes."

94 I AMERICAN Open, private, and hidden, the house, like the poem—like its author—is full of a generosity of spirit that reminds one of the phrase from Luis de Camoes, the sixteenth-century Portuguese poettraveler-adventurer, that is used to dedicate Questions of Travel to Lota de Macedo Soares: ". . . O dar-vos quanto tenho e quanto posso,/ Que quanto mais vos pago, mais vos devo." (I give you everything I have and everything I can,/ As much as I give you, I owe you.) If the poem celebrates a beautiful place where friendship is possible, a place in casual harmony with the natural world, it also acknowledges how fragile such a place is. (One thinks here of other poets—particularly Hopkins, who, in "Binsey Poplars," makes a parallel observation, that "country is so tender/ To touch, her being so slender,/ That, like this sleek and seeing ball/ But a prick will make no eye at all,/ Where we, even where we mean/ To mend her, we end her.") The fact of joy does not abolish loss. Our project—and the project of the house we can save only in a work of art—is therefore to "rejoice" in the face of certain—absolutely certain—destruction: darkened and tarnished by the warm touch of the warm breath, maculate, cherished, rejoice! For a later era will differ. (O difference that kills, or intimidates, much of all our small shadowy life!) Without water the great rock will stare unmagnetized, bare, no longer wearing rainbows or rain, the forgiving air and the high fog gone; the owls will move on

WRITERS and the several waterfalls shrivel in the steady sun. In 1966, shortly before her fifty-fifth birthday, Elizabeth Bishop's teaching career began: two short semesters at the University of Washington in Seattle. (Later she would teach for seven years at Harvard and for a semester at New York University.) In 1967, she began restoring a colonial house in Ouro Preto, Minas Gerais, and for a number of years spent parts of each year at it. In 1969, The Complete Poems earned her the National Book Award. In the same year she was given the Order of Rio Branco by the Brazilian government. In 1972, her Anthology of Twentieth-Century Brazilian Poetry (coedited with Emanuel Brasil) was published. In 1974, she moved most of her possessions from Brazil to an apartment on the Boston waterfront. In 1976, Geography III, her most brilliant book, was published. Themes that in earlier works are obscured by shimmering technique are in Geography III boldly highlighted by it. "In the Waiting Room" stops time on the now of a single instant of "the fifth/ of February, 1918," three days before Bishop's seventh birthday, the instant of her discovery in a Worcester dentist's office that she is a part of humanity—simultaneously an "I," an "Elizabeth," and a "them" that includes not just the aunt whose cry of pain seems to come from Elizabeth's mouth, but also the people in the waiting room and the strange natives in a 1918 issue of the National Geographic. Another poem, "The Moose," captures a different hallucinatory moment from the other side of her childhood's split Boston/Nova Scotia world, a confrontation between a busload of travelers headed south toward Boston and a free life from the woods, a moose that has wandered onto a New Brunswick road to stop, inspect, and finally ignore the machine full of people. Some of these remarkable poems—"One

ELIZABETH BISHOP I 95 Art," "Poem"—I have already discussed. 'The Moose," "In the Waiting Room," and "Crusoe in England" are so rich and so rewarding as each to deserve a separate essay. To try to compress them into a few paragraphs would be a pointless exercise. I felt, when I agreed to write this essay, that it was important for me to talk to Elizabeth Bishop. And it was important, but not in ways that I could possibly have anticipated. I had planned to ask her a little about her working methods. We did talk about them—the quantity of poems that never reach print, the kinds of revision that go into those that do, the processes by which finished poems are sequenced into a book. She corrected a few biographical facts that had previously been misreported. It was all information that I might have gathered—probably more accurately—in a letter. My visit must have complicated her life, slowed down her work in one way or another, for I was traveling with a friend, the poet Roger Conover. Our afternoon arrival on the Maine island where she had rented a summer house meant that we had to be not just fed but housed overnight. I saw firsthand a little of the domesticity Helen Vendler talks about. "I'm considered a good cook," Miss Bishop told me, as I helped make a salad while she assembled a dinner that seemed effortless but that was superb. There were five of us there that evening, and our conversation was almost wholly about life on the island. Earlier, we had walked some of the beaches, studying seabirds through binoculars. I had brought along a tape recorder and two cameras. I didn't use the tape recorder at all. I used one of the cameras only to photograph dried seaweed on two beach pebbles. When, several months later, I read Helen Vendler's remarks about the relationship between the domestic and the strange in Bishop's work, I made a note to myself:

—the domestic and the strange and the civilized, —a careful writer who is a good cook and a meticulously accurate observer of nature, —a woman who sees life as a balance between loneliness and communion (see "The Moose"), —a poet able to accept the jumble of cruelty and affection in the natural world (see the prose poems in Geography ///). That didn't seem good enough to me, and on another day I tried again: Civilized: Try to see Bishop as the changing, valued, and valuing person. The element of integrity has everything and nothing to do with her biography and her poetry: her remarks about Latin ("I'm not a 'Latinist.' I wish I were. But I have forgotten a lot of it"), her modesty about being a good cook ("I'm not proud of my cooking; I know lots of people equally good or better at it"), the loyalty and richness of her friendships, her "shyness," her reticence about religious "problems." The facts of her life account in part for her poetry and her personality—the childhood that is at first evaded but used and later literally studied. But there has to be a point in her life when the half-created person takes over and begins shaping her own life. The integrity comes in at this point: the sense of responsibility as the half-created personality becomes both selfcreating and a contributor to the personalities of other people. It is the same thing with her writing: the debts not so much of style as of insight picked up from others; the gift of her own writing, her own private insights extended toward others. Her sense of self/other/the indifferent natural world: the separate value of that insight to me and each one of her other readers who is receptive to it. Her value not to "the public" but to each reader separately: "I/Thou" relationship. For me, her great gift is her capacity to love and be frightened of and moved by an alien "outside" world that has no responsibility to love her in return. The special excellence of

96 I AMERICAN "Crusoe in England" and "Song for the Rainy Season" and "One Art" is in their acknowledgment of a significant "other" in a world that must, not because it wants to but because it is caught up in time and so has to, destroy that "other." At its best, her art is almost always an art of stopped time: an art that acknowledges loss but that uses loss to define the power of love, a love that forces the artist to commemorate the loved and lost ("almost-lost") person, place, thing: in the largest sense, my own loss —yours—as well as hers. Perhaps, finally, her integrity can be measured by her accuracy and that accuracy by its function in creating a stoical, joyous, valuing and—major element—modest wisdom. She is at once responsive to the domestic and the strange, as well as one of our most civilized and—in the heart of her work—most civilizing poets.

Selected Bibliography WORKS OF ELIZABETH

BISHOP

BOOKS

North & South. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1946. Poems: North & South—A Cold Spring. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1955. Poems. London: Chatto and Windus, 1956. The Diary of "Helena Morley." Translated and edited by Elizabeth Bishop. New York: Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1957; reprinted with new forward, New York: Ecco Press, 1977. Brazil. New York: Time Inc., 1962. (In Life World Library.) Questions of Travel. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1965. Selected Poems. London: Chatto anu Windus, 1967. The Complete Poems. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969. An Anthology of Twentieth-Century Brazilian Poetry. Edited, with introduction, by Elizabeth Bishop and

WRITERS Emanuel Brasil. Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan, 1972. Geography HI. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1976. PRINCIPAL UNCOLLECTED PROSE

"Gerard Manley Hopkins: Notes on Timing in His Poetry," Vassar Review, 23:5-7 (February 1934). "The Sea and Its Shore," Life and Letters To-day, 17, no. 10:103-08 (Winter 1937). "In Prison,"Partisan Review, 4, no. 4:4-10 (March 1938); reprinted in The Poet's Story, edited by Howard Moss. New York: Macmillan, 1973. Pp. 9-16. "Gregorio Valdes, 1879-1939,"PartisanReview, 6, no. 4:91-97 (Summer 1939). "The Housekeeper" (by ' 'Sarah Foster"), New Yorker, 24, no. 29:56-60 (September 11, 1948). "Gwendolyn,"New Yorker, 29, no. 19:26-31 (June 27, 1953). "On the Railroad Named Delight," New York Times Magazine, March 7, 1965, pp. 30-31, 84-86. 4 'Memories of Uncle Neddy,'' Southern Review, 13, no. 4:11-29 (Autumn 1977). INTERVIEWS

Brown, Ashley. "An Interview with Elizabeth Bishop," Shenandoah, 17, no. 2:3-19 (Winter 1966). Starbuck, George. " 'The Work!'A Conversation with Elizabeth Bishop," edited by Elizabeth Bishop, Ploughshares, 3, no. 3-4:11-29(1977). CRITICAL AND BIOGRAPHICAL

STUDIES

Ashbery, John. "The Complete Poems," New York Times Book Review, June 1, 1969, pp. 8, 25. Bloom, Harold. "Books Considered," New Republic, 176, no. 6:29-30 (February 5, 1977). Brown, Ashley. ' 'Elizabeth Bishop in Brazil,'' Southern Review, 13, no. 4:688-704 (Autumn 1977). "Elizabeth Bishop," Current Biography, 38, no. 9:15-17 (September 1977). Hollander, John. "Questions of Geography," Parnassus, 5, no. 2:359^-66 (Spring/Summer 1977). Ivask, Ivar, ed. "Homage to Elizabeth Bishop," World Literature Today, 61, no. 1:3-52 (Winter 1977). Jarrell, Randall. "The Poet and His Public," Partisan Review, 13, no. 4:488-500 (September-

ELIZABETH BISHOP I 97 October 1946); reprinted in his Poetry and the Age. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1972. Pp. 234-35. Kalstone, David. Five Temperaments. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977. Lowell, Robert. ''Thomas, Bishop, and Williams," Sewanee Review, 55:493-503 (Summer 1947). . "For Elizabeth Bishop," in his History. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1973. Pp. 196-98. McClatchy, J. D. 'The Other Bishop," Canto, 1, no. 4:165-74 (Winter 1977). Mizener, Arthur. "New Verse," Furioso, 2, no. 3:72-75 (Spring 1947). Moore, Marianne. "Archaically New," in her Trial Balances. New York: Macmillan, 1935. Pp. 82-83. . "A Modest Expert," The Nation, 163, no. 12:354 (September 28, 1946).

Paz, Octavio. "Elizabeth Bishop, or the Power of Reticence," World Literature Today, 61, no. 1:15-16 (Winter 1977). Schwartz, Lloyd. "One Art: The Poetry of Elizabeth Bishop, 1971-1976," Ploughshares, 3, no. 34:30-52 (1977). Spiegelman, Willard. "Elizabeth Bishop's 'Natural Heroism/ " Centennial Review, 22, no. 1:28-44 (Winter 1978). Stevenson, Anne. Elizabeth Bishop. New York: Twayne, 1966. (Twayne's United States Authors Series 105.) Vendler, Helen. "Domestication, Domesticity and the Otherworldly," World Literature Today, 61, no. 1:23-28 (Winter 1977). The author wishes to extend thanks to Lloyd Schwartz for his work in compiling this bibliography. —JOHN

UNTERECKER

Anne Bradstreet c. 1612-1672

A

NNE BRADSTREET was a Puritan, an American, a woman, and a poet—four facts that greatly affect the way we read her work. As the Puritan struggled with her worldliness, the American took a lively interest in the contemporary scene; as the woman argued against the aspersions cast upon her sex, the poet transcended them and made her craft her glory. There can be no doubt that the tension generated by these conflicting roles is present in her work. But one should not overvalue the tension at the expense of acknowledging that her best poetry achieves at least a literary resolution of the conflict. As a Puritan, American, woman poet, Anne Bradstreet remains one of the two most interesting seventeenth-century verse writers in America. It is not surprising, therefore, that her successor Edward Taylor is said to have kept only one book of poetry in his library: hers. Anne Dudley was born in England, not America, which had important consequences for her life as a writer. It was not unusual for wellborn young women in seventeenth-century England to be given an advanced education that was generally unavailable to their American sisters a generation or two later. Anne was the daughter of Thomas Dudley, who traced his lineage back through an old and aristocratic family that included Sir Philip Sidney (and his talented sister,

Mary). Although at the time Anne was born, in 1612 or 1613, Dudley was living in Northamptonshire, he moved to the estate of the earl of Lincoln at Sempringham, Lincolnshire, when she was about seven. Here he served as steward to the earl's estate; and his daughter grew up among progressive, enlightened people who took pleasure in intellectual activities and had the leisure to enjoy them. Anne was allowed to explore the earl's library, where she obviously delved into a number of authors who later came to influence her poetry: Edmund Spenser, Sir Philip Sidney, Dr. Helkiah Crooke, Sir Walter Ralegh, William Browne, Joshua Sylvester, and Guillaume du Bartas. The community was a breeding ground for Nonconformists, as the Puritans were called. John Cotton, later an important figure in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, was preaching in the area. Lord Saye and Sele was the earl's father-inlaw and a leading proponent of Nonconformist views. Dudley himself had been won to the Puritan cause. And Simon Bradstreet, recently graduated from Emmanuel College, Cambridge, joined the earl's staff as Dudley's assistant. He added his own sympathies to the prevailing views of the dissenters, became a highly respected young man in the community, and married Anne Dudley before she was seventeen

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ANNE BRADSTREET I 99 years old. It is hard to imagine Anne not lending her imagination to the cause that was fomenting so much activity around her. But it is also quite clear that she had much to lose when her husband and her father made the decision to join the Great Migration to the New World in 1630. Both men held prominent positions in the company that obtained the Massachusetts Bay charter. They had cast their lot with the emigrants, and she had to follow. Instead of the leisure and opportunities for intellectual pursuits that might have been hers if she had remained in England, she faced a rugged life in a country with few amenities, where servants were scarce and women were expected to do their share of the work to make life bearable. Of course, this was not entirely clear when the idealistic group set sail. Promise of economic advantages as well as religious freedom had drawn the Puritans to seek their fortunes in the New World. But even Bradstreet's father was stunned when he landed and saw what the winter had done to the communities at Salem and Charlestown. Bradstreet was to record her own feelings much later in a manuscript book addressed to her children: After a short time I changed my condition and was marryed, and came into this Country, where I found a new world and new manners, at which my heart rose. But after I was convinced it was the way of God, I submitted to it and joined to the church at Boston. One cannot help noticing the sense of passivity here. Compared with the fervent soteriological language in which other Puritans describe their migration, Bradstreet's sounds curiously lifeless. Sacvan Bercovitch has argued in The Puritan Origins of the American Self that for the Puritans, autobiography often merged with national biography, that personal experience was interpreted in the typological context of prophecy, so that the individual began to see his

own life in the pattern of a divinely legitimated national mission: the foundation of a "city on a hill" to be a model to the world. However, none of this is true of Bradstreet's autobiographical statement. Even looking back on it twenty-five years later, she portrayed the Great Migration as a spiritual struggle to which she had to submit. She was married, and so she left England. But she did not see herself as having escaped from a den of iniquity. Rather, she found acceptance of the New World one of the trials sent by God to humiliate her pride. Nonetheless, compared with a number of people who came to America as indentured servants, Bradstreet occupied a privileged position. After several moves in the first few years from Salem to Charlestown to Newtown (or Cambridge, as we know it), the Dudleys and the Bradstreets settled in 1635 at Ipswich, an outlying community some thirty miles from Boston. Ann Stanford has done an excellent job of indicating the level of intellectual talent this town boasted. Many of its male leaders were college-educated. Puritans like John Winthrop and Thomas Dudley had brought extensive libraries from England. Bradstreet's connections must have put her often in the company of people like the eminent scholar John Norton, witty and learned Nathaniel Ward, and even John Winthrop. Furthermore, Ipswich grew to be the second largest town in the colony, and it offered access to merchandise— furniture, clothing, tools—that had to be made by hand in less convenient locations. Finally, until 1639 the Bradstreet and Dudley houses adjoined. Thomas Dudley was a man who possessed not only mental talents but material wealth as well; and the Bradstreets no doubt continued to benefit from his secure financial status, even after he moved to Roxbury in 1639. Charles Ellis' History of Roxbury Town makes this comment about Dudley: "Having had £500 left to him when he was very young, he had always been prosperous, being the wealthiest man in

100 I AMERICAN Roxbury, where the people were generally wellto-do." Although Bradstreet shared the material privations, the lack of housing and proper food, that afflicted the colonists in their first years, her autobiographical account of this period emphasizes psychological and spiritual afflictions instead. For the Puritan, of course, every personal trial had its theological significance. And from a human point of view, it is much easier to endure communally shared trials than those for which one seems personally singled out. Thus, illnesses cut much closer to the bone than did hunger, for instance, and they often carried with them extreme mental anguish. Bradstreet records a number of such illnesses that, like the smallpox she suffered at the age of sixteen, seemed sent specifically to make her aware of her own sinfulness. Nevertheless, as Stanford has argued, illness was common in the colony and Bradstreet was certainly luckier and probably physically stronger than the great numbers who died from diseases related to the difficult living conditions. Probably equally disturbing to her were other aspects of her life. Where, for instance, were women like herself to whom she could look for intellectual models? It is not surprising that her elegy celebrating Queen Elizabeth comes relatively early in her canon. Colonial annals record few examples of distinguished women, although apparently the colony abounded with intelligent and cultured men. In England the earl of Lincoln's mother had been such a woman. She had even published a book containing her views on child care. Notorious women in the Massachusetts Bay Colony were more apt to be known for their transgressions: Anne Hutchinson's heresies; Anne Yale Hopkins' attempts at writing, which had led her, according to John Winthrop, into insanity; and Sarah Keane, Bradstreet's own sister, who, according to Elizabeth Wade White, was cast off by her husband and fi-

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nally excommunicated for irregular prophesying and "gross immorality." Bradstreet must have wondered what her role as a woman was to be when for three years she did not bear a child. She described this anguished period years later: "It pleased God to keep me a long time without a child, which was a great greif to me, and cost mee many prayers and tears before I obtaind one." Childbearing was a particularly important activity in the colony. After the initial privations, food was plentiful and labor scarce. Puritans had large families, and every child was seen as an acknowledgment by God that the community was under His special care. Bradstreet survived this anguished period and eventually bore eight children, all of whom grew to adulthood; but she always believed that her own guilt had produced barrenness for a time. Throughout her life Bradstreet recorded intense periods of self-examination with regard to her religious shortcomings. In order to understand the urgency with which she felt these spiritual tensions, it is necessary to reconstruct not only Puritan sentiments in general but also Bradstreet's particular relationship to the sociopolitical system under which she lived. Self-scrutiny was part and parcel of Puritan existence; and there is certainly no evidence that Bradstreet was any less a Puritan because she had periods of internal debate concerning such matters as atheism, the Trinity, and the legitimacy of Puritanism itself. Her renowned contemporaries Increase Mather, John Winthrop, and Samuel Sewall were also plagued by doubts. As John Barth has written in the twentieth century, "Into no cause, resolve, or philosophy can we cram so much of ourselves that there is no part of us left over to wonder and be lonely." In fact, many Puritans learned that enforced adherence to any set of fixed beliefs is bound to create the very doubts it seeks to suppress. It has been argued by Stephen Foster, for in-

ANNE BRADSTREET I 101 stance, that the structure of civil and ecclesiastical government was flexible enough to accommodate a number of contradictory stances. Only those who insisted upon directly and visibly attacking the authorized beliefs would be excommunicated or exiled. Since the structure of church and state had developed out of the family (Abraham's tribe being seen as the original church), it was natural to suppose that disagreements with authority would arise. In fact, the road to regeneration involved a continuing process of sin, realization, and repentance. Thus when Anne Bradstreet recorded in her journal, "I have often been perplexed that I have not found that constant Joy in my Pilgrimage and refreshing which I supposed most of the servants of God have," she was expressing fears that any good Puritan was bound to have. The essence of Puritanism was intense scrutiny, not only of the self but also of those institutions that were to be a macrocosm of the regenerate soul: the family, the church, and the state. John Cotton rumbled in one sermon: "Oh get you home to search into your own hearts. See what evils they be that hang upon you, and whatsoever you see in family, church or commonwealth. And go into your chambers moved for them." Some have wanted to see Bradstreet as a woman fundamentally unresigned to the Puritan God; but a thorough knowledge of Puritanism and of Bradstreet does not render this conclusion inevitable. Certainly her public image and her private manuscript book left for her children show no evidence of real heresy. Furthermore, her kinship ties, upon which she placed enormous value, all served to reinforce a sense that the Puritans were God's chosen people. As Edmund Morgan has pointed out in the Puritan Family, in the Massachusetts Bay Colony it was common to consider those relations acquired by marriage as dear as blood relatives because husband and wife were "one flesh." This view even extended to the wives and husbands of one's

siblings and children. Anne's brother was married to John Winthrop's daughter. Her brotherin-law, John Woodbridge, was the minister of the church in Andover, where she finally settled. Her daughter married Seaborn Cotton. Her father was a committed Puritan who spent his life denouncing heretics, for which she praised him. And she once wrote, "My Fathers God, be God of me and mine." She describes her mother as "religious in all her words and wayes." Certainly the pressure against any divergent opinions would have been great. One might speculate that Bradstreet would have been happier following in Anne Hutchinson's antinomian footsteps. She longs in her journal entries for a direct revelation of God's presence, whereas the Puritans felt that fallen man could make contact with God only through the mediation of the church. Bradstreet's emphasis on experiences of the heart might have led to an attraction to Hutchinson's belief that the individual soul is the only real temple of the Holy Ghost. On the other hand, Bradstreet accepted the Puritan emphasis on the Bible, whereas Hutchinson accorded it relatively minor importance. Bradstreet's poetry shows this, as does her own statement: "If ever this God hath revealed himself, it must bee in his word, and this must bee it or none. Have I not found that operation by it that no humane Invention can work upon the Soul? hath not Judgments befallen Diverse who have scorned and contemd it?" Of course, the argument against her total acceptance of Puritanism claims that because of social and familial pressures, Bradstreet reveals her lack of resignation only in subtle ways, through her poetry. It seems, however, that her poetry was always written with a public in mind and that the very poems used to indicate rebellion can be read in a very different context that is completely consistent with Puritanism. It is true that the poems written during Bradstreet's residence in Ipswich are not so intensely

102 I AMERICAN religious as the later work; and certainly this indicates a level of worldly preoccupation. Ann Stanford has made a compelling argument that when the Bradstreet family moved to Andover, around 1645, the different style of life in this frontier area turned the poet inward and increased her concern with domestic problems and the state of her own soul. Andover, unlike Ipswich, was a loose federation of plantations with nothing like a village to provide a commercial and social center. Families were more dependent upon themselves, and undoubtedly less time was spent in social intercourse because the distances to be traveled were greater. Therefore, an individual like Bradstreet might well turn inward. It was about this time that she wrote "The Vanity of All Worldly Things." In fact, most of the poems for which Bradstreet is admired today were written in Andover. Three children were born there, but already the older ones were leaving home; and the end of Bradstreet's poem "I Had Eight Birds Hatcht in One Nest" indicates that poetry may have functioned as a replacement for parental nurturing. However, it is quite unlikely that the isolation we often associate with the western frontier was characteristic of her life. Her husband was becoming an important personage in the colony; his home must have attracted many visitors. Friends and relatives made periodic journeys to England, bringing back news from abroad and important books unavailable in the colony. John Woodbridge, Bradstreet's brother-inlaw, left on one of these journeys in 1647, taking with him a copy of her poems; and in 1650 she herself became the focus of considerable interest when, through Woodbridge's efforts, The Tenth Muse was published in London. Although there is no surviving record of how the news of this book was received in New England, her work eventually brought her respect. Nathaniel Ward had written a very appreciative poem that was published, along with a number of commenda-

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tory verses, in the front of the volume. (There are indications that The Tenth Muse was still remembered in England in the eighteenth century—it was reportedly found in George Ill's library.) When Cotton Mather wrote his Magnalia some fifty years later, he mentioned "Madame Ann Bradstreet, the daughter of our Governor Dudley and the consort of our Governor Bradstreet, whose poems, divers times printed, have afforded a grateful entertainment unto the ingenious, and a monument for her memory beyond the stateliest marbles." However, there were some in Massachusetts who must have reacted negatively to the idea of a woman taking herself seriously as a poet. Bradstreet's often-quoted lines, I am obnoxious to each carping tongue Who says my hand a needle better fits, should not be taken lightly. She must have endured painful reproaches from some quarters. That women were considered intellectually weaker than men, and thus unfit for strenuous mental labors, is evidenced by the famous case of Anne Hopkins, who, John Winthrop felt, might have saved her wits if she had not attempted to be a serious intellectual, "giving herself wholly to reading and writing." As another example of this attitude, Edmund Morgan mentions Thomas Parker, who told his sister in a public letter, "Your printing of a Book beyond the custom of your sex, doth rankly smell." However, Bradstreet's immediate family seems to have supported her in her role as a poet. Luckily, her husband was a generous and liberal man with whom she was, by all accounts, supremely happy: her sincere sorrow at his absences on public business is conveyed through a number of her poems. In all, Bradstreet felt that the Lord had preserved her more "with sugar than brine." She continued to write, took pleasure in her children's successes, and found satisfaction in the natural beauties Andover afforded.

ANNE BRADSTREET I 103 There were moments of anguish for Bradstreet, however. The death of her father; deaths of grandchildren, a daughter-in-law, and a daughter; and illnesses of her own brought suffering into her life. In 1666 the Bradstreet house burned to the ground, and she lost not only many prized possessions but also a rewritten version of her poem on the four monarchies. In addition the entire Bradstreet library—some 800 books, according to her son's estimate—was destroyed. This must have been a severe trial. Her poem on the burning of the house forcefully conveys her mental anguish. In the last years of her life, Bradstreet wrote few poems, most of them elegies. However, "As Weary Pilgrim" is among the loveliest she ever composed. Her mind is settled with regard to her own death. The poem displays none of the internal tensions of earlier works; and yet, compared with verses found in her father's pocket at the time of his death, it is a masterpiece of achieved literary effects. Elizabeth Wade White suggests that Bradstreet may have been seriously ill as early as February 1672, although she did not die until September 16. Her son mourned his absence, which lost him the opportunity of "committing to memory her pious & memorable xpressions uttered in her sicknesse." The description of her malady sounds very much like tuberculosis, although it is hard to be certain without more details. In any case, she seems to have died peacefully. Simon Bradstreet survived to marry again and become governor of Massachusetts (as his father-in-law had been). Anne Bradstreet had 53 grandchildren, and her descendants continued the tradition of family renown. Among them are Oliver Wendell Holmes, Richard Henry Dana, William Ellery Channing, Wendell Phillips, and Charles Eliot Norton. A second edition of Bradstreet's poems was brought out in 1678; and this edition, rather than

the first, is considered the definitive text. Upon it John Harvard Ellis based his 1867 edition of the poetry that became the standard for all subsequent editors. The 1678 edition added poems not included in The Tenth Muse and reflected the changes in the earlier manuscript that Bradstreet wished to make. Ellis added a number of religious prose and poetic meditations that had not been published before. Several more recent editions of Anne Bradstreet's work diverge slightly from the Ellis text; their differences are based on preferences for earlier versions of specific lines, on the discovery of an errata leaf to the 1678 text, or on the perceived need for an updated orthography. Anne Bradstreet's life was complicated by her Puritan beliefs, her American residence, her role as a woman, and her need to be an artist. In some ways these factors agreed with one anothei, in others they conflicted. Her poetry also needs to be examined from the perspective of its preoccupation with Puritanism, America, womanhood, and poetry itself. The results of such an examination help to locate the poetry critically and contextually. Most of the recent criticism of Bradstreet's poetry argues for or against the proposition that it is a product of its time, consistent with Puritanism and with Puritan models. Some have denied this, interpreting certain poems as pre-Romantic. Others have found evidence in her work that Bradstreet was a rebel, and thus in conflict with her time and milieu. The most extensive works on Bradstreet are those by Josephine Piercy, Elizabeth Wade White, and Ann Stanford. Each provides excellent readings of certain poems, although Stanford emphasizes Bradstreet's fundamental rebelliousness more than does White, who believes the poet conquered her misgivings. What does it mean to read the poetry in a Puritan context? In the first place, it is important to understand that New England Puritanism was not

104 I AMERICAN only a set of theological beliefs but also a political, social, and educational philosophy. Every facet of life came under the scrutiny of Puritans; and therefore it seemed not in the least incongruous for ministers and magistrates to concern themselves with such questions as the best books for the public to read, how one should bring up one's children, how a young man should choose his career, and so on. The seriousness with which they took the Bible meant that even the most trivial problems were referred to biblical interpretation for solution. The Puritans would have been horrified at the way we compartmentalize our lives. They sought a unified perspective. Their religion affected the entire spectrum of human activities. Central to this perspective was, as Perry Miller has pointed out, a Ramist logic of hierarchical order. Petrus Ramus, a sixteenth-century French logician who took his cue from Aristotle, organized the world into levels of opposing categories. It was possible to see each piece as a metaphorical version of every other piece in its category. Even history was interpreted this way by the Puritans. The Old Testament foreshadowed, and was retranslated by, the New Testament. And for American Puritans, their exodus from England was an antitype of the exodus from Egypt and Christ's journey into the wilderness. Of course, since history was an upward spiral, the seeds of the Old Testament and the New Testament were to come to fruition in the establishment of a true theocracy in America, the founding of the New Jerusalem, and the ushering in of the chiliad—Christ's reign that had been biblically foretold. One can see the essentials of the Puritans' insistence on an orderly universe in Bradstreet's lengthy early poems, called the quaternions. These are organized into debates by the four elements, the four humors, the four ages of man, and the four seasons. The quaternions are now considered among Bradstreet's least interesting

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poems, but they locate her in her own time and sphere. Her father, who inspired her early attempts at poetry, had written a quaternion describing the four parts of the Renaissance world as four sisters. Furthermore, Guillaume du Bartas, a French poet highly respected by the Puritans, had undertaken to categorize the universe in his Divine Weekes and Workes, of which the Joshua Sylvester translation of 1605 was a favorite. Anne read and admired Du Bartas's work. The Literary History of the United States, edited by Robert Spiller (et al.), claims that these long poems are mere versifications of ideas current at the time. And it is certainly true that not only the Puritans but the Renaissance world in general accepted the idea that the universe is made up of orderly hierarchies that are interrelated. Bradstreet structured her works around the premise that the elements, the humors, the ages of man, and the seasons are reflected in one another. Thus, fire belonged with choler, middle age, and summer; earth with melancholy, old age, and autumn; water with phlegm, childhood, and winter; air with blood, youth, and spring. The quaternions do, however, give us quite a bit of information about Bradstreet herself as a developing poet. To begin with, she never used either Du Bartas's or her father's poetic voice (if his surviving verse is any indication). Second, we learn a great deal from these poems about the poet's reading. We know she read Aristotle, Dr. Helkiah Crooke on the body, numerous histories, and science texts. Although the debate mode was not her own invention, she invested the debate with a good deal of liveliness and wit. Here is choler dispensing with the claims of her sister blood and asserting her own preeminence in battle: Here's sister ruddy, worth the other two, Who much will talk, but little dares to do, Unless to Court and claw, to dice and drink,

ANNE BRADSTREET I 105 And there she will out-bid us all, I think, She loves a fiddle better than a drum, A chamber well, in field she dares not come, She'l ride a horse as bravely as the best, And break a staff, provided 'be in jest; But shuns to look on wounds, and blood that's spilt, She loves her sword only because its gilt. After each of the humors boasts of her superiority, she ends her speech with an ironic disclaimer, as in this one of blood's: No braggs I've us'd, to you I dare appeal, If modesty my worth do not conceal. I've us'd no bitternesse nor taxt your name, As I to you, to me do ye the same. And of course turnabout is then fair play. Only phlegm shows real magnanimity and therefore is "judg'd for kindness to excell." A portrait of Bradstreet is deducible from these poems. Instead of the pious, modest, unassuming gentlewoman—as one sometimes sees her portrayed—she emerges as a woman of considerable learning, witty, spirited, valuing conciliatory kindness but not insensible to the Ramist idea that "objects best appear by contraries." These poems are thoroughly Puritan, not because they express any particular theological doctrine but because they reflect a devotion to learning. Puritans were intensely interested in education. They founded Harvard College in 1636, only six years after the arrival of Winthrop and Bradstreet. Despite their suspicions about Scholasticism and their emphasis on a strict interpretation of the Bible, the Puritans loved the classics; and Bradstreet's poetry reflects this. Since ignorance was seen as one of the greatest hindrances to a true understanding of the Word, Puritans emphasized reading and reflection, even incorporating the recent scientific discoveries into their world view.

The quaternions are filled with Renaissance lore of all sorts, but perhaps what readers often fail to identify as particularly Puritan is the way they introduce the "Dialogue between Old England and New" and the "Four Monarchyes." We can quite readily accept the fact that the structural progression of the quaternions was based on ideas of universal order common in the seventeenth century. Thus, a discussion of the nature of being leads from the elements to man's constitution. Then a shift from being to time carries us to the four ages of man's life and finally to the rotation of the seasons. But what is particularly characteristic of American Puritanism is the preoccupation with the meaning of time, time understood not in the abstract sense but in terms of geography. Bradstreet went on to extend the quaternions into the dialogue between Old England and New England and the four monarchies. Two of the Puritans' favorite books in the Bible were Daniel and Revelation. These they pored over to elucidate the significance, in biblical terms, of their errand into the wilderness. The "Dialogue between Old England and New" will be discussed at greater length below. One may say that the vision supplied by New England is typically Puritan in its eschatology. Although New England is not seen here as the location of New Jerusalem, it is New England that elucidates the meaning of England's trials: those trials shall be merely the appropriate chastening that will introduce the victory of the Church of England over Catholicism and Islam, ushering in the millennium of peace. We must remind ourselves that, unlike the Pilgrims, the Puritans considered themselves Anglicans, however much they felt the Anglican Church needed reform. Bradstreet avoids locating the New Jerusalem in America; but she articulates at length what is presently wrong with England, a tendency characteristic of American Puritans. Furthermore, there is a clear preoccupation with geography in

106 I AMERICAN the structure of the dialogue. The very title implies that the issue is to be understood in terms of place. The meaning of time is translatable into the meaning of location. New England, although implicated in past guilt because of its relationship with the mother country ("My guilty hands in part, hold up with you"), is now on a better footing and its vision is clearer than that of the mother country. The American Puritans' preoccupation with geography—where are the saved to be located?—is further reflected in the "Four Monarchyes." The quaternions probably were written in 1642, the "Dialogue between Old England and New" in 1642-1643, and the "Monarchyes" sometime between 1643 and 1647. The first three monarchies—Assyrian, Persian, and Greek—were completed, but the fourth, which concerned the Roman Empire, was not. In each, time periods are characterized in terms of specific locations. Each is overthrown by its own iniquity, and in the Belshazzar section Daniel, a New England favorite, makes his appearance: Daniel in haste is brought before the King, Who doth not flatter, nor once cloak the thing; Reminds him of his Grand-Sires height and fall, And of his own notorious sins withall: His drunkenness, and his profaneness high, His pride and sottish gross Idolatry. This sounds very much like the catalog of sins for which Old England is reprimanded. It is quite possible that the "Four Monarchyes" was written to provide the background to understanding the present period, to justify the Great Migration by indicating the way it had been foreshadowed by the failures of the past. Bradstreet speaking impersonally could have undertaken such a project. Of course, it is generally acknowledged now that the four "Monarchyes" are very poor poetry. Bradstreet herself apologized for them: "weary lines (though lanke) I many pen'd." But

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Ann Stanford reminds us that they were popular in her day, and they certainly coincide with the Puritan interest in typology. Bradstreet not only shows herself a good Puritan in her concern with interpreting history via the Old and New Testaments, she also does so in her strictly religious poetry, which includes several poems based on the meters of the Bay Psalm Book. A poem like "What God Is Like to Him I Serve" seems almost too straightforward for consideration. Yet without some knowledge of Puritanism, many of its specific references are lost. The poet begins: What God is like to him I serve, What Savior like to mine? O, never let me from thee swerve, For truly I am thine. In this stanza the word "swerve" has a particularly loaded meaning. Puritan sermons often concerned themselves with the sinful nature of man. Since Adam's fall, man by his own efforts could no longer keep to the path of righteousness. He would inevitably "swerve" and, without God's help, fall by the way. But "swerve" has a secondary meaning as well. Heretics were often referred to as those who had swerved. Thus, "What God Is Like to Him I Serve" is meant to be an affirmation of the Puritan faith itself and a rejection of heresy. Further on, the poet says: My God he is not like to yours, Your selves shall Judges bee; I find his love, I know his Pow'r, A succourer of mee. Here Bradstreet refers to the conversion experience that was required as evidence by Puritan Congregationalists that an individual was saved. Only through personal testimony of God's love and power could one be admitted into the visible church of the saints. Evidence of such an experience was an assurance of salvation. Of course, it

ANNE BRADSTREET I 107 was hard to hold on to a belief in one's own salvation, but here Bradstreet is boldly proclaiming her membership among the elect. He is not man that he should lye, Nor son of man to unsay; His word he plighted hath on high, And I shall live for aye. In this stanza Bradstreet pulls together the Puritan conceptions in the previous stanzas. She refers to the Covenant of Grace. According to Calvinism, upon which Puritanism was based, God originally made an agreement with Adam to give him eternal life if he would live without sin. This was called the Covenant of Works. With Adam's fall this contract was broken, and since that time it was decreed that most men would be damned. Only the elect, with whom God made the Covenant of Grace, could truly believe in Christ and therefore attain immortality. The rest, by their own free will, would choose sin and therefore fulfill God's predetermination that they should be damned. Covenant theology was one of the central tenets of Puritanism. Here Bradstreet is asking God not to let her choose sin, because she has experienced His grace and therefore knows that she belongs among the saved. The reasoning may be circular from our point of view. We may wonder why she has to ask for God's help if she already knows she has it. But it is characteristic of covenant theology that the soul must always seek God as a petitioner even though He is bound through an almost legalistic contract to take care of those to whom He has promised salvation: "His word he plighted hath on high." Despite the complexities of Puritan theology upon which this poem is built, the voice remains consistent. Once its ideas are grasped, it seems simple. Those who argue that Bradstreet never fully accepted Puritanism do not base their assertions on interpretations of these religious exer-

cises but choose instead poems like "Upon the Burning of Our House, July 10th, 1666." In order to understand this poem, one must acknowledge that a different process is going on from that in ''What God Is Like to Him I Serve.'' Instead of an intellectual linking of ideas, we have in this poem a meditational experience leading to self-surrender. This new interpretation of the poem develops further a hypothesis suggested by Kenneth Requa in his article "Anne Bradstreet's Poetic Voices." Bradstreet was certainly familiar with the process of meditation as it was understood in the seventeenth century. In the process, memory, a storehouse of images recorded by the senses, was to present a * 'composition of place,'' a vivid portrayal of an object or event in its setting. Then the understanding, regarding this image as a kind of emblem, was to elucidate its nature and theological significance. Finally, the will was to be brought into motion through moral injunctions recommending virtuous thoughts or actions. In his Poetry of Meditation Louis Martz quotes Richard Gibbons as writing in 1614: "Meditation is an attentive thought iterated, or voluntarily intertained in the mynd, to excite the will to holy affections and resolutions." One of the meditative poets most often read and most enjoyed by the Puritans was George Herbert; and there are abundant indications that Bradstreet was influenced by his work. Herbert often wrote narrative poems in which doubts and fallings away from Christ are deliberately invoked, only to be transcended by the poetic experience. The result is a triumph over the self. In the poem on the house burning, Bradstreet begins by invoking the composition of place. The memory gives a vivid account of the night of the fire. I, starting up, the light did spye, And to my God my heart did cry To strengthen me in my Distresse

108 I AMERICAN And not to leave me succourlesse. Then coming out beheld a space, The flames consume my dwelling place. Several readers, including Ann Stanford, have very rightly noted that the next stanza sounds like an unconvincing attempt to stifle the voice of discontent. And, when I could not longer look, I blest his Name that gave and took, That layd my goods now in the dust: Yea so it was, and so 'twas just. It was his own: it was not mine; Far be it that I should repine. Here the understanding is attempting to place the event in its proper context, but the unruly passions will not so easily surrender. In the next stanzas they force the memory to supply other images, images of past delight in the house itself. Although these stanzas end with the attempt to regain self-control, In silence ever shalt thou lye; Adieu, Adieu; All's vanity, it is clear that the poet has no intention of letting us believe in the sincerity of this effort, since she begins the next stanza with "Then streight I gin my heart to chide." The poem ends with an implied comparison, made by the understanding, between the poet's earthly house and the heavenly house, "Fram'd by that mighty Architect," which awaits. Because of this comparison, the address to the will that concludes the poem can be made legitimately: The world no longer let me love, My hope and Treasure lyes Above. What the poem has accomplished is an exorcism of unruly passions and a convincing selfsurrender that would have been impossible if the poet had not dealt honestly with her feelings. It

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was an important tenet of Puritanism that acceptance of God's will by the mind without the compliance of the heart was worthless. Although Bradstreet's poems are not as rich or as complex as Herbert's, we should be willing to accord the Puritan as much attention as we do the Anglican. We must be ready to acknowledge that she also knew how to use poetry to bring herself to Christ. It is unthinkable to consider Herbert unreconciled; and Bradstreet's human temptation is no reason to consider her so. Another poem that needs reconsideration because it has been interpreted as indicating an unruly heart is her elegy to her "dear grandchild Elizabeth Bradstreet." In both of these poems, Bradstreet experienced the emotions of confusion, anger, and distrust when objects of her affection were suddenly taken away. But through her poetry she managed to transcend these experiences and achieve artistically successful linguistic moments of reconciliation. Since most of the attempts to argue heresy have been based upon her poetry, it would seem that another reading of the poems is in order, so that the real questions remaining about Bradstreet's beliefs may be acknowledged as ones to which we have no answers. The evidence seems to lead in the direction of accepting Bradstreet's Puritanism as a strain as pure as that of most of the intense, selfscrutinizing figures of her day. The elegy that begins "Farewell dear babe, my heart's too much content" undoubtedly reveals sincere anguish at the death of a grandchild a year and a half old. After the first four lines of sorrowful farewells, the last three lines of the first stanza attempt a theological perspective on the experience. The poet asks why she should bewail the fate of this child, "sith thou art settled in an Everlasting state." It is the next stanza that has caused readers so many problems, however: By nature Trees do rot when they are grown. And Plumbs and Apples thoroughly ripe do fall,

ANNE BRADSTREET I 109 And Corn and grass are in their season mown, And time brings down what is both strong and tall.

But plants new set to be eradicate, And buds new blown, to have so short a date, Is by his hand alone that guides nature and fate. It is clear that the structure of the stanzas is meant to be symmetrical. In both, the first four lines capture human confusion and sorrow. The last three locate the spiritual essence that provides consolation. Those who read this poem as expressive of Bradstreet's unreconciled anger at God argue that the logic of the last stanza leads to a very different conclusion than the one the last line attempts to convey. This is, however, precisely the point of the poem and the source of its peculiar power. Once again, the too quick and easy reconciliation of the first conclusion is rejected. In the second stanza we move painfully, tortuously through the human attempt to reason out death. What makes the last three lines so powerful is that in them the poet acknowledges her human frailty. One cannot reason from experience to God. Although the Puritans' God was not capricious, at times His acts were beyond human logic; and it was at these times that human beings were given the opportunity for great spiritual growth. In the last line Bradstreet brings her readers face to face with the irreducible power of the deity. Like the naive persona of the poet, we too have been hoping for some easy logical conclusion. But, like her, we are stunned with the awesome fact that it is God, not faulty human reason, who both guides and comprehends nature and fate. Furthermore, the internal rhyme of "blown" and "alone," as well as the hexameter last line, emphasize the superiority of God's will to human will. He alone can comprehend buds new-blown being plucked early, and this vision is larger (and longer) than ours. It is obvious from this brief survey of Puritan

elements in Bradstreet's poetry that the cultural and theological context of Puritanism informs many aspects of her work. A modern reader with no knowledge of Puritanism simply cannot comprehend much of what makes her poetry meaningful. One of the factors that distinguishes her work from that of other Puritan poets, however, is her range of images, poetic styles, literary voices, and themes. The dramatic form of selfsubjugation is one she used in moments of severe trial. By the last years of her life, this form was no longer appropriate. "As Weary Pilgrim," written three years before Bradstreet's death, provides incontrovertible testimony of at least a final reconciliation with God. The poem is consistent with Puritan theology. The Christ of the Canticles, the Bridegroom Christ so familiar to the Puritans, is addressed in the last line. Revelation, with its echoed "I come quickly," is subtly recalled. But, more than this, the poem has what Stanford has called "an onrushing quality that is accented by the fact that the second line of the couplet most frequently is not capitalized." Peace and joy pervade the lines, and the poem achieves a kind of apotheosis of sentiment in its last verses. Anne Bradstreet was surely a Puritan at her death. And when a few yeares shall be gone this mortall shall be cloth'd upon A corrupt Carcasse downe it lyes a glorious body it shall rise In weaknes and dishonour sowne in power 'tis raised by Christ alone Then soule and body shall unite and of their maker have the sight Such lasting joyes shall there behold as eare ne'r heard nor tongue e'er told Lord make me ready for that day then Come deare bridgrome Come away. As an American Puritan, we would expect Anne Bradstreet to have written about her vision

110 I AMERICAN of the significance of the New England venture. Many Puritans did so, which is not surprising, considering the seriousness with which the new theocratic state was taken. Michael Wigglesworth, Edward Johnson, Benjamin Tompson, Samuel Sewall, John Cotton, and William Bradford all composed verses on New England. Bradstreet must also have pondered the meaning of the New World. Her poetry indicates a concern with politics. She attended sermons in which American ministers, using all their exegetical and hermeneutical skill, extracted from the Bible justifications for the American experience. Thus, when Bradstreet expresses her belief that God brought his chosen people to the wilderness, we are not surprised. Her poem "Upon My Dear and Loving Husband His Going into England, Jan. 16, 1661" is one example of this belief. Simon Bradstreet had been sent to England with John Norton to pacify Charles II and to obtain a new charter extending the privileges New England had enjoyed as a colony. In this poem Bradstreet says: At thy command, O Lord, he went, Nor nought could keep him back; Then let thy promis joy his heart: O help, and bee not slack. She accepts the Puritan idea that Simon was "called" to perform this function because God had ordained New England as His chosen sphere. Further on in the poem, this idea is reinforced: Remember, Lord, thy folk whom thou To wildernesse has brought; Let not thine own Inheritance Bee sold away for Nought. Here we find the commonly held view that the New England Puritans were God's particular heirs, his "own Inheritance." We also see Bradstreet's hope that the New England charter will be renewed.

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In her elegy on her father, Thomas Dudley, we again find Bradstreet acknowledging the importance of New England. She includes in the list of her father's accomplishments six lines about his role in establishing the colony. In fact, this achievement is chosen to head the list, which then proceeds to include his commitment to religion, his lack of ostentation, his humility and cheerfulness in the face of death. Obviously his performance of his duty as a governor and magistrate did him honor in her eyes. One of thy Founders, him New-England know, Who staid thy feeble sides when thou wast low, Who spent his state, his strength, and years with care That After-comers in them might have share. True Patriot of this little Commonweal, Who is't can tax thee ought, but for thy zeal? Upon closer inspection, however, there is one element in the geographically preoccupied writings of other Puritans that is absent from Bradstreet's verse: she never identifies herself personally with the new colony. One finds nowhere in her work lines comparable with these, for instance, written by Michael Wigglesworth: Cheer on, sweet souls, my heart is with you all, And shall be with you, maugre sathan's might: And whereso'ere this body be a Thrall, Still in New-England shall be my delight. In the previous section we considered the "Dialogue between Old England and New" in terms of the superiority of New England's position. Here let us remind ourselves, however, that the vision supplied is one of triumph for the mother country rather than of advancement for the New World. At no point does New England describe her own nature or suggest the superiority of her own moral state, although Old England does say rather competitively: If I decease, dost think thou shalt survive? Or by my wasting state dost think to thrive?

ANNE BRADSTREET I 111 New England's subsequent speeches seem carefully aimed at quieting the mother country's fears of being passed by. They are dutiful expressions of filial support and love: Dear mother cease complaints and wipe your eyes, Shake off your dust, chear up, and now arise, You are my Mother Nurse, and I your flesh, Your sunken bowels gladly would refresh, Your griefs I pity, but soon hope to see, Out of your troubles much good fruit to be. We cannot say that Bradstreet disliked New England or refused her allegiance to its cause. But it is true that she never identifies herself personally with New England in her poetry. She appears, on the whole, much more concerned with Old England. One of the most common types of poetry written in the colonies was the elegy mourning the death of a famous leader. Bradstreet did write elegies, but most were in honor of members of her family. Only her memorial on her father combines the image of a family member with that of a great New England leader. All of her other elegies, written in honor of famous persons, deal with English or European figures: Du Bartas, Queen Elizabeth, and Sir Philip Sidney. In the tribute to Sidney, she writes: Then let none disallow of these my straines Whilst English blood yet runs within my veins. Of course, the Puritans continued to think of themselves as English throughout the seventeenth century. But it is peculiarly characteristic of Bradstreet that she passes up the opportunity to commemorate the lives of even the great New Englanders whom she knew well, such as John Cotton and Nathaniel Ward, both of whom died in 1652. Her refusal to take the opportunity to eulogize them seems, therefore, a conscious choice not to involve herself with American politics, not to discuss Ward's formulation of Ameri-

can law or Cotton's spiritual leadership in the New World. Bradstreet's silence on the subject of American political life must also be contrasted with her obvious interest in English politics, indicated not only in "A Dialogue between Old England and New" but also in the elegy for Queen Elizabeth, which is a kind of political history of the queen's campaigns and her skill in statecraft. Elizabeth Wade White has argued that "Lament for Saul and Jonathan" is in fact a veiled lament at the beheading of King Charles in 1649. It is also true that in the revised version, which dates from 1666, the speech of Old Age in "The Four Ages of Man" makes reference to Oliver Cromwell's ascent to power: I've seen a King by force thrust from his throne, And an Usurper subt'ly mount thereon. So are we, then, to think that Bradstreet was actually a transplanted English poet? Are we to take her lively interest in English politics and her curious silence on the subject of American political life as a sign that she closed her eyes to what was going on around her or lacked the poetic presence to reflect an American view? This is, in fact, what Roy Harvey Pearce suggests in The Continuity of American Poetry when he compares Bradstreet with other Puritan poets: Wigglesworth and Tompson are crude, over-insistent, even vulgar. Mrs. Bradstreet is, above all, gentle, genteel. What they have, however, and what she lacks is a characteristic Puritan insistence on fixing once and for all the meaning of an event as that meaning is somehow bound up in a communal experience. What, then, is to be gained by looking at Bradstreet's work in an American context? First of all, it is not true that Bradstreet never fixed the meaning of an event in the context of a communal experience. Certainly she did so in her poem about her husband's trip to England in

112 I AMERICAN 1661. But it is true that few of her poems are concerned with events taking place on the national stage. A more subtle reading of the poetry, however, reveals that she was very much alive to the poetic potential of a particular aspect of the American scene: the land. To rephrase John Norton's elegy, in her heart nature had taken such hold that other people's love of it seemed narrow by comparison. In Bradstreet's manuscript book, she records her response to the natural world: That there is a God my Reason would soon tell me by the wondrous workes that I see, the vast frame of the Heaven and the Earth, the order of all things, night and day, Summer and Winter, Spring and Autumne, the dayly providing for this great houshold upon the Earth, the preserving and directing of all to its proper end. The consideration of these things would with amazement certainly resolve me that there is an Eternall Being. Bradstreet has been wrongly criticized by a number of writers for failing to capture the American landscape. Harold Jantz, for instance, says: "Her references to nature pertain more to the English countryside which she had left so early, than to the American countryside which she must have known so well." However, her appreciation of God's handiwork in arranging "Summer and Winter, Spring and Autumne" is reflected in her poem on the four seasons and her "Contemplations." Here she is forthrightly an American poet, although at times she weaves in pictorial elements from other traditions as well. It is important to remember that Bradstreet had never lived in close proximity to people who worked the soil until she came to America. In England her life, although spent partly in the country, was not spent on a farm. American agrarian life also creeps into the homely imagery of her prose meditations, which are filled with metaphors about the

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milling of corn and the growing of wheat, as in her poem on spring: Now goes the Plow-man to his merry toyle, He might unloose his winter locked soyl: The Seeds-man too, doth lavish out his grain, In hope the more he casts, the more to gain: The Gardner now superfluous branches lops, And poles erects for his young climbing hops. Now digs then sowes his herbs, his flowers and roots And carefully manures his trees of fruits. In this section the poet catalogs somewhat romantically the homely tasks performed by the new colonists struggling to establish a footing on foreign soil. She also mentions May as a hot month. The colonist must lay aside winter clothing and be careful of the sun, "lest by his fervor we be torrifi'd." May is not generally a hot month in England. But Bradstreet records in her American journal on a May 11: "The first of this month I had a feaver . . . lasting 4 dayes, and the weather being very hott made it the more tedious." In the summer section of the ' Tour Seasons,'' the poet describes the harvesting of the farmer's crops: With sickles now the bending Reapers goe The russling trees of terra down to mowe; And bundling up in sheaves, the weighty wheat, Which after Manchet makes for Kings to eat: the Barly, Rye, and Pease should first had place, Although their bread have not so white a face. Governor Bradford also wrote a poem on the husbandry of New England providing a very similar list of crops: All sorts of grain which our own land doth yield, Was hither brought, and sown in every field: As wheat and rye, barley, oats, beans, and pease. Here all thrive, and they profit from them raise.

ANNE BRADSTREET I 113 Although Bradstreet is American in her choice of crops, it is true that the fruits listed in autumn—orange, lemon, pomegranate, and fig— are exotic; but they occur in the poem because the season reminds Bradstreet of Eden, "which shews nor Summer, Winter, nor the Spring." Here she departs briefly from her portrayal of the seasons in New England terms. However, late autumn and winter are very clearly reflections of the hardships the New Englanders endured, and not at all descriptive of the much milder climate of England. Winter is portrayed "Bound up with frosts, and furr'd with hail and snows." Bradstreet here, and again in her "Contemplations," captures the American landscape. The "Four Seasons" provides an American view of time understood in terms of the agricultural efforts the Americans were undertaking in the Massachusetts Bay colony. Thus she reflects American writers' concern with the land and illustrates one type of "communal experience" that was certainly American. Ann Stanford quite rightly sees in these poems "a growing interest in the world of nature, for in the last of the quaternions, the New England landscape has become the landscape of home." However, the question still remains of why Bradstreet neglected the communal experience of America as a colonial theocracy. Why didn't she write more, and more personally, about the matters that preoccupied her husband and her father to such an extent? Was she simply not interested? In her prose meditations there are a number of indications that she thought about these issues. Take, for instance, meditation number 26, "A sore finger may disquiet the whole body, but an ulcer within destroys it: so an enemy without may disturb a Commonwealth, but dissentions within over throw it." Or number 77, "God hath by his providence so ordered, that no one Country hath all Commoditys within it self, but what it wants, another shall supply, that

so there may be a mutuall Commerce through the world." These indicate that she lacked neither the perspective nor the language to describe America's political experiences. It therefore seems that she chose not to do so. Why? The answer to this question, it seems, lies in a fuller understanding of what it meant for Bradstreet to be a woman poet. Although it is not true that the Puritans disliked women, it is true that they distrusted them. Puritan theology traced the fall of man to Eve's defection and principally to the fact that Eve reversed the traditional order by making an independent and sinful decision to which Adam acquiesced. Thus, woman's nature was judged to be fundamentally unstable and in need of careful watching. The witch trials that occurred at the end of the century and numerous reports of supernatural happenings written throughout the period reveal that, although men could be witches, women were more inclined to receive visitations from the devil. Women who distinguished themselves by virtue of intellectual prowess were especially subject to severe reprimands. Anne Hutchinson could interpret the Bible as ingeniously as her prosecutors, which obviously upset them. The tradition in which the Puritans worked proclaimed the mental inferiority of women, and husbands were exhorted to teach their wives theology in a simple fashion so as not to overtax their minds. George Puttenham's>l/te of English Poesie (1589), a favorite among seventeenthcentury writers, makes this revealing comment about the anagram: he saw it as ' 'a thing if it be done for pasttime and exercise of wit without superstition commendable inough and a meete study for Ladies, neither bringing them any great gayne nor any great losse, vnlesse it be of idle time." Bradstreet, unlike many of her contemporaries, avoided the anagram. But she must have seen that Ann Hopkins, Thomas Parker's sister, and other women were criticized for their attempts to take too much upon themselves by

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writing or even reading beyond "the custom of [their] sex." Thus, John Woodbridge feels it incumbent upon him to address the issue of Bradstreet's sex when he writes his Note to the Reader in The Tenth Muse:

"Beneath her feet, pale envy bites her chain." What did Bradstreet do in response to such comments? One thing is clear: she did not stop writing. In one of her early elegies, she argued for a more enlightened view of women by eulogizing Queen Elizabeth:

I doubt not but the Reader will quickly find more than I can say, and the worst effect of his reading will be unbelief, which will make him question whether it be a womans work, and aske, Is it possible? If any do, take this as an answer from him that dares avow it; It is the Work of a Woman, honoured, and esteemed where she lives, for her gracious demeanor, her eminent parts, her pious conversation, her courteous disposition, her exact diligence in her place, and discreet managing of her Family occasions, and more than so, these Poems are the fruit but of some few houres, curtailed from her sleep and other refreshments.

She hath wip'd off th'aspersions of her Sex, That women wisdome lack to play the Rex.

Obviously Woodbridge expected criticism of Bradstreet for lacking "exact diligence in her place." One cannot read Bradstreet's poetry without noticing her defensiveness about her role as a woman poet. In the often-quoted Prologue for the quaternion poems, she says: A poet's pen all scorn I thus should wrong, For such despite they cast on Female wits: If what I do prove well, it won't advance, They'l say it's stoln, or else it was by chance. In fact, Martha Brewster, a later Puritan poet, was accused of plagiarism and was forced to paraphrase a psalm extemporaneously in front of witnesses in order to prove that she had the mental powers to be the author of her poetry. People undoubtedly also said that Bradstreet's poetry was stolen, although we no longer have any way of finding out who these people were. John Norton's elegy for Bradstreet substantiates her claim that her work spawned malicious comments:

She also places Elizabeth in a catalog of great women, thus turning to her own use the common tendency to place a great figure in the context of past heroes. Here Elizabeth is listed side by side with Semiramis, Tomris, Dido, Cleopatra, and Zenobia. Elizabeth, however, is seen to be superior to them all, a "Phoenix Queen," as Bradstreet calls her. (Sylvester had called James I a phoenix king.) Bradstreet turns the patriarchal vision into a new one that elevates what is female and strong. Her high spirit is shown further on in the poem, where she asks: Now say, have women worth? or have they none? Or had they some, but with our Queen is't gone? Nay masculines, you have thus taxt us long, But she, though dead, will vindicate our wrong. Let such as say our Sex is void of Reason, Know tis a Slander now, but once was Treason. This is quite strong stuff for a Puritan woman to write. It both reinforces our sense that Bradstreet was independent-spirited and makes us question summations like Pearce's that characterize her as "above all, gentle, genteel." Bradstreet ends her poem with the usual Puritan eschatology; but she pulls no punches in saying that after the "heavens great revolution," she expects that "Eliza shall rule Albion once again." Bradstreet was aware that she was a woman poet, not just a poet. But since her poetry follows many of the same forms as the men's poetry that influenced her, how is the female content illumi-

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nating to her work? For one thing, she wrote many more domestic poems than the male Puritans who surrounded her. She wrote of her family and of the issues that touched her closely at home. In her poem on her children, "I Had Eight Birds Hacht in One Nest," she uses a witty and occasionally humorous conceit based on the metaphorical connection between young children and young birds leaving the nest. There is also a reflection of the genuine trials she had suffered as a mother: I nurst them up with pain and care, Nor cost, nor labour, did I spare. That taking care of eight children was often difficult is a fact that contemporary readers, familiar with the tendency toward smaller families, can easily believe. Bradstreet repeats her sense of strain in the manuscript book she left for her children, saying that God granted her wish, giving her the children she asked for, and now she wants to take care of their spiritual well-being. "As I have brought you into the world, and with great paines, weaknes, cares, and feares brought you to this, I now travail in birth again of you till Christ bee formed in you." As has been previously noted by writers such as Emily Stipes Watts, Bradstreet's picture of motherhood is not a particularly pleasant one. In "The Four Ages of Man," Childhood says: To shew her bearing pains, I should do wrong, To tell those pangs which can't be told by tongue: With tears into the world I did arrive, My mother still did waste as I did thrive, Who yet with love and all alacrity, Spending, was willing to be spent for me. With wayward cries I did disturb her rest, Who sought still to appease me with the breast: With weary arms she danc'd and By By sung, When wretched I ingrate had done the wrong.

We must recognize, of course, that in this poem each age is duty-bound to reveal his own iniquity; and Childhood may be emphasizing its negative aspects here. However, one cannot take lightly that chilling line about the pain of pregnancy and childbirth, "those pangs which can't be told by tongue." Bradstreet seems to have been devoted to her children, and her delightful image of them as eight birds shows that she was able to find great satisfaction and even humor in watching them develop. But she also knew the struggle of motherhood and did not choose to deny its painful aspects in her poetry. To say that Bradstreet concentrated more on domestic scenes than other Puritan poets did is not to say that there were no others who wrote domestic verse. John Saffin, for instance, left a number of appealing poems on his wife and son. The vision of Bradstreet as a woman poet must therefore concentrate on her sense of herself as a poet and the way it related to the fact of her being female. Thus, the Prologue and elegy for Queen Elizabeth reveal her anger at being criticized for overstepping the bounds assigned to women. Her domestic poems reveal a firsthand perspective on the joys and sorrows women experienced in the early colonial period. But finally her sense of herself as a woman had as much to do with the poems she did not write as with the poems she did. The answer to the question of why Bradstreet did not write much poetry about American political life seems to lie in her role as a woman poet. This does not imply that she was incapable of such expressions. It is likely that because of her close relationship to her husband and father, both highly visible figures in the government, she avoided becoming vocal on these issues. But not entirely for the reason one might first assign— not because she wished to avoid political controversy. It would have been perfectly possible for her to write a poem like Edward Johnson's "Good News from New-England" without plac-

116 I AMERICAN ing her relatives in political jeopardy. Her refusal may have had more to do with her desire to create a body of poetry that reflected her own experiences and poetically distinguished her interests from those of her husband and father. It may also have been true that since she was a woman, an expression of her views on the theocracy—no matter how conventional—might have been regarded as presumptuous. This would explain the curious argumentative tone in which she presents her father's elegy—she begins by apologizing: By duty bound, and not by custome led To celebrate the praises of the dead . . . . One could argue that it was her father's eminence that disquieted her. Should a woman try to eulogize a governor? Let malice bite, and envy knaw its fill, He was my Father, and He praise him still. In fact, the first 22 lines are an argument for why Bradstreet should be allowed to add her memorial to the rest. "While others tell his worth, He not be dumb." None of this kind of argument is used to justify her epitaph for her mother. Thus there is some reason to believe she avoided writing elegies for Ward and Cotton because such poems would have been looked upon as arrogant, coming from a woman. But Bradstreet was not willing to allow criticism to silence her in other places. Her elegy for Queen Elizabeth, for instance, must have offended many because of its overt feminism. What is interesting about the two most extensive poems on issues of state—the elegy for the queen and the "Dialogue between Old England and New"—is that both are created in a matriarchal, not a patriarchal, context. Old and New England are discussing politics in their roles as mother and daughter. England, in the queen's elegy, is seen as most successfully ruled by a woman. The true phoenix monarch is Elizabeth, not, as Syl-

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vester had said, James I. Thus, it may well be out of Bradstreet's determination to create a body of work distinctly her own, and appropriate to herself as a woman, that she rejected the context of American political life. In addition to the independence of spirit some of her dramatic poems convey, there are other indications that Bradstreet had a strong desire to make her writings reflect her own mind rather than simply the temper of the times. In her written address to her son Simon concerning the prose meditations, she says: "Such as they are I bequeath to you: small legacys are accepted by true friends, much more by duty full children. I have avoyded incroaching upon other conceptions because I would leave you nothing but myne owne." "Nothing but myne owne" is the poet's creed. For all that much of her poetry may seem conventional to us, she looked upon it as an expression of her own spirit. Thus, her religious poems are addressed to her children, that they might know "what was your liveing mother's mind." As Henry David Thoreau was to write two centuries later, "The poem is drawn out from under the feet of the poet, his whole weight has rested on this ground." This may explain Bradstreet's seemingly peculiar reticence on the subject of America's national image. So her legacy to us is one that must be understood not only in a Puritan and an American context, but also in a female one. Although she continued to revise the ' 'Four Monarchyes'' until 1666, most of her poetry in later life moved away from political questions. Knowledge of these topics came to her secondhand, from her father, her husband, and her husband's friends. In Puritan New England, women could not hold political office, vote, or own property after marriage. It could be that because American politics was so exclusively patriarchal, Bradstreet's female pride manifested itself in her refusal to devote her poetry to its consideration. It is not at all clear, of course, that this was a conscious

ANNE BRADSTREET I 117 decision. What does seem evident is that this choice was consistent with her nature. She had personal ambitions as well as spiritual ones. It is interesting that many metaphors for the American conquest of the land saw the New World as a young virgin who must be taught to submit to a manly conqueror. In Bradstreet's mind this metaphorical construction could well have produced at least unconscious hostility. Although she was a good Puritan, she was also a staunch advocate of respect for women. She surely knew Ephesians 5:18-19, which was used through the period as a justification for writing poetry: "Be filled with the Spirit; speaking to yourselves in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody in your heart to the Lord." She must also have known that only three short verses later begins the famous Pauline injunction: "Wives, submit yourselves to your own husbands, as unto the Lord." There is no reason to believe that Bradstreet wanted to oppose her husband, but she may well have wanted to find an area in which her own strengths were not overshadowed by his. She obviously opposed the view of women as inferiors that was based in large part on Pauline theology. Thus, her vision of poetry should be accurately considered in the context of her "singing and making melody" as a Puritan American woman who occasionally bridled at the strictures placed upon her sex and chose to write poems that would preserve a feminine vision.

Poetry was for Bradstreet a way of asserting herself when such an assertion was considered almost sinful in a woman. But poetry had several functions for her. It was not only self-assertion but also self-transcendence and at the same time, peculiarly, self-justification. She offered some poems to her children for their spiritual use. In others, like the eight birds poem, she indicated that poetry would function

as a personal consolation when all her young ones had fled. O to your safety have an eye, So happy may you live and die: Mean while my dayes in tunes He spend, Till my weak layes with me shall end. But there is ample support for the idea that, although Bradstreet knew her composing would end with her death, she hoped what she had written would live on after her. All of the tensions she experienced in her roles as Puritan, American, and woman can be understood in the final context, which is that of Bradstreet's relation to poetry itself. Cotton Mather's statement that her work had erected monuments to her memory "beyond the stateliest marbles" would have pleased her. The paradox of Bradstreet is that she was, in Ann Stanford's words, a "worldly Puritan." In her poetry she found a way to transcend this paradox by creating expressions of the fragility of worldly concerns that would give her a solid place in the world she sought to reject. The most basic tension for Bradstreet's poetry is not the one between her sense of God's injustice and her desire to believe Him just, but between her longing for worldly immortality and her sense of the futility of all but spiritual hopes. As a Puritan she found the world a ' 'vanity of vanities." As an American she rejected the concept of inherited superiority and found individual effort worth "more than noble bloud." As a woman she moved away from the brightly lit stage of worldly politics and toward more private, domestic concerns. But as a poet she made claims upon that public world and asked that it not forget her. These claims extended even to a suggestion that heritage should be considered, as in the first version of her tribute to Sidney, where she wrote:

118 I AMERICAN Then let none disallow of these my straines Which have the self-same blood yet in my veines. This revealing last line was later changed to 4 'Whilst English blood yet runs within my veins"; but in the earlier version we find Bradstreet proudly proclaiming her family's ancestral heritage, which linked her to Sidney and thus to poetry itself. A list of the poems that include discussions of honor, fame, and/or immortality would cover almost all the poems Bradstreet ever wrote. In one category we can place the poems that provide a positive view of earthly immortality. These include particularly the formal elegies to Queen Elizabeth, Sidney, and Du Bartas, but also some of the poems to her husband. In the elegy for the queen, the poet begins: Although great Queen thou now in silence lye Yet thy loud Herald Fame doth to the sky Thy wondrous worth proclaim in every Clime, And so hath vow'd while there is world or time. We are asked to respect the queen not for her lack of worldliness but precisely because "The World's the Theatre where she did act." Sidney is also seen as particularly lucky because he distinguished himself on earth: But yet impartial Fate this boon did give, Though Sidney di 'd his valiant name should live: And live it doth in spight of death through fame, Thus being overcome, he overcame. Even in a poem such as the one written "Before the Birth of one of her children,'' Bradstreet seems to aim at earthly immortality, for she suggests that after her death, If any worth or virtue live in me, Let that live freshly in thy memory. This poem is especially interesting because the poet, on the verge of an experience that might

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well translate her to that divine presence to which she has previously looked forward with expectation, now seems primarily concerned with keeping her image alive in her husband's memory. She recommends her lines to her husband so that "when that knot's unty'd that made us one, I may seem thine, who in effect am none." Of course, there are abundant references to honor and fame in Bradstreet's poetry that give them a negative connotation or at least provide a chastening context for their consideration. In her prose meditations she says: "Ambitious men are like hops that never rest climbing soe long as they have anything to stay upon; but take away their props and they are, of all, the most dejected." Bradstreet herself struggled with worldly ambition: "The Lord knowes I dare not desire that health that sometimes I have had, least my heart should bee drawn from him, and sett upon the world." It is notable that in the dialogue between Flesh and Spirit, Flesh suggests: Dost honour like? acquire the same, As some to their immortal fame; And trophyes to thy name erect Which wearing time shall ne're deject. Spirit in her response admits: How oft thy slave, hast thou me made, When I believ'd, what thou hast said. The temptations of wealth (or the lust and gluttony that Flesh does not mention) are much less prominent in Bradstreet's total body of work than is ambition, honor, or worldly immortality. Much of Bradstreet's poetry seems written to subdue her own desire to seek such glory. Thus, she makes the struggle for achievement and eminence the central preoccupation of Middle Age, which she sees as the period of man's greatest flowering. In his own self-critical statement, Middle Age admits:

ANNE BRADSTREET I 119 Greater than was the great'st was my desire, And thirst for honour, set my heart on fire: And by Ambition's sails I was so carried, That over Rats and sands, and Rocks I hurried, Opprest and sunk, and stav'd all in my way That did oppose me, to my longed Bay. And further on, he adds: Sometimes vain glory is the only baite Whereby my empty Soul is lur'd and caught. Be I of wit, of learning, and of parts, I judge I should have room in all men's hearts. Bradstreet herself had wit, learning, and parts; and it is obvious that she hoped to triumph over time and condition through her poetry. But poems like 'The Vanity of All Worldly Things" warn the proud: What is't in honour to be set on high? No, they like Beasts and Sons of men shall dye. Principally her spiritual pilgrimage seemed to be an effort to wean her hopes away from this world and set them on divine immortality. How do we know that Bradstreet saw poetry as an earthly means to immortality? A number of poems state this desire, like the eight birds poem: Thus gone, amongst you I may live, And dead, yet speak, and counsel give. Furthermore, she seems unusually concerned that her work may not be good enough. Although it was common for poets to apologize for the quality of their work, Bradstreet does this so often and so desperately that one must suspect that she had ambitions beyond what she felt her talents could achieve. The poem that prefaced the 1678 edition, "The Author to Her Book," wittily manipulates the conceit that her book is a child snatched from her side too early; but it betrays a rather disturbing intensity about the blemishes evident in her first appearance in print. She makes plain that she desires the book to be successful:

In Criticks hands, beware thou does not come; And take thy way where yet thou art not known. She also insists that this is her own work, not the work of a man or a masculine influence: * 'If for thy Father askt, say, thou hadst none." Here she is not using the capitalized "Father" to indicate God. Bradstreet repeats her reminder that her work is her own in her dedicatory verse to her father. She tells him that she . . . fear'd you'Id judge Du Bartas was my friend, I honour him, but dare not wear his wealth My goods are true (though poor) I love no stealth. She ends the prologue that follows with these words: And oh ye high flown quills that soar the skies, And ever with your prey still catch your praise, If e'er you daigne these lowly lines your eyes Give Thyme or Parsley wreath, I ask no bayes. She may not have been ready to ask for the bay wreath, but she was not willing to give up the wreath entirely. Bradstreet's "Contemplations" shows her at her best. The poem handles the tensions between earthly and heavenly hopes for immortality; and it considers the theme of poetry itself, offering an effective resolution in favor of spiritual consolation. The first seven stanzas establish what will be the major theme of the poem, a comparison between earthly delights, which are time-bound, and eternal satisfactions in the world beyond. The form of Bradstreet's "Contemplations" shows the same dramatic, progressive quality that is at the core of works such as the poem on the house burning; but here the dramatic structure is much more fully worked out. The persona first examines the beauties of a New England autumn and finds her senses

720 / AMERICAN "rapt" at the view. The second stanza reveals the poet's confusion about where to place her loyalties: "I wist not what to wish." Yet she can only presume by inference that the next world is greater. She is not yet fully satisfied. The third stanza begins the theme of time. The oak tree seems like an eternal figure. Perhaps it has endured a hundred or a thousand winters; but "if so, all these as nought, Eternity doth scorn." In the next four stanzas the persona surveys the sun and suggests its power. "No wonder, some made thee a Deity." According to Alvin Rosenfeld, the emotional currents of this section run counter to orthodoxy. Rosenfeld feels that Bradstreet comes close to making the natural sun more important than God; but throughout this section Bradstreet has in mind the pun on sun and Son, for she uses Christological imagery: "Thou as a Bridegroom from thy Chamber rushes." By the seventh stanza, the image of the sun and God have been intentionally merged. And is thy splendid Throne erect so high? As to approach it, can no earthly mould. How full of glory then must thy Creator be? Stanzas 8 and 9 provide an interlude in which the poet shifts attention back to herself and her art. She wants to elevate her poetry to the level of celebrating God, but her ambitious pride leaves her unsatisfied: "Ah, and Ah, again, my imbecility!" In stanza 9 the material world of cricket and grasshopper reprimands her for her pride. These creatures seem "to glory in their little art"; and although their music is but humble praise of their creator, they (and presumably God) are satisfied. This interlude is not a complete aside, however, for it takes us back to the beginning and the "trees all richly clad, yet void of pride." The preoccupation with the theme of pride is also nicely interwoven into the stanza that introduces the next section, stanzas 10-17. Bradstreet suggests that imaginative human beings

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may have reason to feel proud because (unlike the cricket and grasshopper) they can re-create great figures of the past. Thus imagination is able to transcend the limits of time: It makes a man more aged in conceit, Than was Methuselah, or's grand-sire great: While of their persons and their acts his mind doth treat. The stanzas following this statement revive history through a portrayal of biblical scenes as though they were occurring in the present. Bradstreet has carefully selected three figures for consideration: Adam, Eve, and Cain. Each story has the same message. Man through pride betrays his higher nature by trading heavenly delights for earthly gains. Adam "turn'd his Sovereign to a naked thral" by eating the apple. Eve "sighs, to think of Paradise, / And how she lost her bliss to be more wise." Cain murders his brother and thinks to protect himself with an earthly fortress: "A city builds, that wals might him secure from foes." Obviously a vain belief: The human legacy is one of prideful sin. Moving down through time, Bradstreet encounters the present generation, which, even compared with our sinful ancestors', cannot hope to live very long on earth: Our life compare we with their length of dayes Who to the tenth of theirs doth now arrive? And though thus short, we shorten many wayes, Living so little while we are alive. In eating, drinking, sleeping, vain delight So unawares comes on perpetual night, And puts all pleasures vain unto eternal flight. The next three stanzas, 18-20, summarize what the poet has discovered up to this point. Natural works of God seem blessed. The earth, stones, trees, and seasons are perennial, "But man grows old, lies down, remains where once he's laid." Once again the naive speaker takes a position that we know later stanzas will reverse.

ANNE BRADSTREET I 121 She tells us in stanza 19 that man seems cursed when he is observed in an earthly, natural frame: Nor youth, nor strength, nor wisdom spring again Nor habitations long their names retain, But in oblivion to the final day remain. But in stanza 20 the poet/persona questions whether this means she should praise natural works because they seem to live longer than man does: Nay, they shall darken, perish, fade and dye, And when unmade, so ever shall they lye, But man was made for endless immortality. Stanzas 21-25 are the most often misunderstood because few critics have attended to the way Bradstreet uses nature metaphorically here. Just as the sun/Son carries spiritual overtones of Christ, the river is meant to be both a natural and a mental river. The break at the beginning of stanza 21—"Under the cooling shadow of a stately Elm"—is not as much of a shift as has often been thought. The poet is still considering the obstacles to a complete commitment to the spiritual realm. The river's side "where gliding streams the Rocks did overwhelm" appeals to her imagination because it implies a comparison with her own thought, which continues to encounter rocklike obstructions. In stanza 22, she apostrophizes: O happy Flood, quoth I, that holds thy race Till thou arrive at thy beloved place, Nor is it rocks or shoals that can obstruct thy pace. The river is an emblem of faith, as she tells us in the next stanza, and is sustained by numerous small channels of thought: Thou Emblem true, of what I count the best, O could I lead my Rivolets to rest, So may we press to that vast mansion, ever blest.

The poet wishes that her mind, her faith, might carry her over earthly temptations to God. However, the fish remind her of the snares and temptations of the world again. They have immortality through their offspring, their "numerous fry." They taste the air and then dive to the bottom, seeking "the great ones." And they have a degree of safety here on earth, * 'whose armour is their scales, their spreading fins their shield." Stanzas 26-28 concern Philomel. The temptations toward metaphorical earthly delights that the fish represent culminate in the image of the mythological female poet Philomel. Here Bradstreet reveals the kind of honor, wealth, and safety to which she is most attracted, that which comes from her own poetic voice. She rejects the fish as an image of temptation and turns instead to the bird: I judg'd my hearing better than my sight, And wish't me wings with her a while to take my flight.

But the last section of the poem, stanzas 29-33, indicates Bradstreet's view, often repeated in the prose meditations, that it takes a thorough disillusionment with honor, wealth, and safety to make human beings appreciate the earth for what it is: good, but a pale reflection of spiritual delight. Meditation 38 summarizes this idea: Some children are hardly weaned, although the teat is rub'd with wormwood or mustard, they wil either wipe it off, or else suck down sweet and bitter together; so it is with some Christians, let God imbitter all the sweets of this life, that so they might feed upon more substantiall food, yet they are so childishly sottish that they are still huging and sucking these empty brests, that God is forced to hedg up their way with thornes, or lay affliction on their loynes, that so they might shake hands with the world before it bid them farewell.

722 / AMERICAN This meditation clarifies what might seem a contradiction in the *'Contemplations." Stanzas 29-30 say that despite all "losses, crosses, and vexation," human beings will refuse to "deeply groan for that divine Translation." This, of course, is directly related to what has happened to the poet/persona in the course of the poem. Despite all the rocks and obstructions that her river of thought has encountered, she has continued to watch its "rivolets" take divergent paths toward earthly temptations. The mariner who is described in stanzas 32-33, however, does learn from his reprimand. We return to the water image. The mariner "sings merrily and steers his Barque with ease," as the poet has done in several dramatic moments of the poem, most recently when she followed another singer, Philomel, into airy regions of imaginative felicity. Only a storm that overwhelms the human creature entirely and "spoiles all the sport" will bring the erring human (and the female poet) to the final realization. The storm that confounds the poet is the storm of time. Ultimately, she sees in the final stanza that earthly fame, even the engraved words of her own poetry, are nothing compared with eternity and the heavenly realm: O Time the fatal wrack of mortal things, That draws oblivions curtains over kings, Their sumptuous monuments, men know them not, Their parts, their ports, their pomp's all laid in th'dust Nor wit nor gold, nor buildings scape times-rust; But he whose name is grav'd in the white stone Shall last and shine when all of these are gone. Fame is paltry compared with divine immortality, but this bald statement has nothing of the lyrical power Bradstreet achieves in her last lines. The tension between the hexameter last line and the pentameter first six has been re-

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solved so that now all seven lines are in one mode. Of course, the paradox of this poem is that what it renounces—earthly immortality—it has been granted. Writers from the nineteenth century on have acclaimed the "Contemplations" as Bradstreet's best poem. In it she interweaves Puritanism, the American landscape, and her aspirations as a female poet. There is tension here, but the tension is part of the intentional fabric of the poem. If poetry is implicitly rejected as an earthly temptation along with the rest, it is still the means by which the poet has achieved transcendence here. This "simple mite," as Bradstreet called her poetry, is still the most precious gift she could give her Creator, herself, and her readers. In the nineteenth century, Bradstreet was regarded as an important Puritan poet but a fundamentally careless crafts woman. The Duyckincks wrote of her in 1855: "When we come upon any level ground in these poems, and are looking around to enjoy the prospect, we may prepare ourselves for a neighboring pitfall." There is some truth in this statement, but recent criticism has tended to move away from discussing Bradstreet's weaknesses as a stylist and toward an appreciation of her originality in synthesizing traditional materials. This seems a more fruitful path to take. It is quite true that she was influenced by other writers. But her strength lies not in what she used but in the way she used it. She was clearly a weaker poet than either Sir Philip Sidney or George Herbert. Her poetry is full of flaws, but it is also full of surprising and lovely moments. Her best poems seem to be the poem on the house burning, the elegy on her granddaughter Elizabeth, the Prologue, "As Weary Pilgrim,' 'and the * 'Contemplations.'' But even the less interesting poems such as the quaternions are sometimes delightful in the way they reveal Bradstreet's humor and spirit. She was neither prudish nor docile; she was both

ANNE BRADSTREET I 123 learned and inspired. She was the best poet of her generation because of her range and ability to achieve masterful lyrical moments. Edward Taylor surpassed her in the vividness of his language and the complexity of his spiritual vision. His view was more intense; but hers was wider in scope, combining Puritanism, American life, feminine insight, and a concern for artistic unity. Her work is not as rich as the Elizabethans', but it is richer than it has been thought in the past.

Selected Bibliography

Press (Belknap), 1967. Foreword by Adrienne Rich. Poems of Anne Bradstreet, edited by Robert Hutchinson. New York: Dover, 1969. CRITICAL

STUDIES

BOOKS

Piercy, Josephine K. Anne Bradstreet. New Haven: College & University Press, 1965. (In Twayne's United States Authors Series.) Stanford, Ann. Anne Bradstreet: The Worldly Puritan. New York: Burt Franklin, 1974. White, Elizabeth Wade. Anne Bradstreet: "The Tenth Muse." New York: Oxford University Press, 1971. ARTICLES

WORKS OF ANNE BRADSTREET SELECTED COLLECTED

EDITIONS

The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung up in America. By a Gentlewoman in Those Parts. London: Stephen Bowtell, 1650. Several Poems, etc. By a Gentlewoman in New England. The Second Edition, Corrected by the Author, and Enlarged by an Addition of Several Other Poems Found Amongst Her Papers After Her Death, edited by John Rogers. Boston: John Foster, 1678.

The Works of Anne Bradstreet in Prose and Verse, edited by John Harvard Ellis. Charlestown, Mass.: Abram E. Cutter, 1867; New York: Peter Smith, 1932; Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1962. The Poems of Mrs. Anne Bradstreet (1612-1672). Together with Her Prose Remains, edited by Frank E. Hopkins. New York: The Duodecimos, 1897. Introduction by Charles Eliot Norton. The Tenth Muse, etc., edited by Josephine K. Piercy. Gainesville, Fla.: Scholars' Facsimiles & Reprints, 1965. The Works of Anne Bradstreet, edited by Jeannine Hensley. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University

Irvin, William J. "Allegory and Typology 'Embrace and Greet': Anne Bradstreet's Contemplations," Early American Literature, 10:30-46 (1975). Jantz, Harold S. The First Century of New England Verse. New York: Russell and Russell, 1962. Section on Anne Bradstreet. Morison, Samuel Eliot. Builders of the Bay Colony. Boston and New York: Cornell Paperbacks, 1930. ("Mistress Anne Bradstreet/') Requa, Kenneth A. "Anne Bradstreet's Poetic Voices," Early American Literature, 9:3-18 (1974). Richardson, Robert D., Jr. "The Puritan Poetry of Anne Bradstreet/' in The American Puritan Imagination, edited by Sacvan Bercovitch. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1974. Rosenfeld, Alvin H. "Anne Bradstreet's 'Contemplations': Patterns of Form and Meaning," New England Quarterly, 43:79-% (1970). Warren, Austin. New England Saints. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1956. ("The Puritan Poets.") Watts, Emily Stipes. The Poetry of American Women from 1632-1945. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1977. ("Anne Dudley Bradstreet and Other Puritan Poets.") —CHERYL WALKER

Charles Brockden Brown 1JJ1-181O

/

N 1771, the year in which Charles Brockden Brown was born, the aspiring young poets Philip Freneau and Hugh Henry Brackenridge wrote their ecstatic prophecy of the rising political and artistic glories of America. Reading their poem The Rising Glory of America at commencement ceremonies at the College of New Jersey (now Princeton), Brackenridge declared:

Milton. Certainly Brown's career constituted a remarkable effort to become a writer of popular and critical success. Although his strivings did not always result in "glorious works" of ' 'wond 'rous art," at least four of his novels have withstood the "ravages of time"; and he still deserves the distinction as the first professional man of letters in America. Brown's attempt to fashion a literary vocation in late eighteenth-century America is representative of the experience of a generation of writers that included Freneau and Brackenridge as well as Joel Barlow and Timothy Dwight. During the closing decades of the eighteenth century, these men responsed to the call for a native American literature, and they eagerly set out to win the attention and respect of their countrymen. The importance of the clergy was declining, and it seemed that the literary man was to be the intellectual and moral leader in the new republic. Accordingly, these writers embraced the common tenet that the duty of the writer was to improve the taste and morals of his society through works that instructed as they entertained. During the 1770's and 1780's, the epic seemed to be the fitting form for expressing the aspirations of the new nation. But such epics as Dwight's Conquest of Canaan (1785) and Barlow's Vision of Columbus (1787) collected dust in the bookstores, so the writers turned to the

Tis but the morning of the world with us ... I see the age, the happy age roll on ... I see a Homer and a Milton rise In all the pomp and majesty of song, . . . The final stage where time shall introduce Renowned characters, and glorious works Of high invention and of wond'rous art Which not the ravages of time shall waste. If such poetry and rhetoric might be believed, the situation in America held forth the greatest opportunities for men of literary talent. The stage was set for the birth of the republic, and the world was waiting for the emergence of a literary genius to inspire the awe of the intellectual world. Growing up in Philadelphia during these years, Brown witnessed the tumult and confusion of war and heard the declarations of America's promises and ideals. As he began to recognize his literary talent, he might well have believed that he could become that American

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CHARLES BROCKDEN BROWN I 125 magazine and the prose essay as vehicles for reaching the people. Assuming a variety of personae, such as Joseph Dennie's "Lay Preacher" and Freneau's "Pilgrim," the writers of this period experimented with fictional voices that would appear unpretentious and familiar, thereby moving the prose essay closer to becoming a form of fiction. Finally, in the 1790's the public's growing interest in novels from abroad suggested that the American writer who wanted to support himself while following the vocation of letters would have to exploit this new form. The career of Charles Brockden Brown constitutes the final chapter in the tale of the failure of this generation of writers to achieve the elusive goal of winning both popular acclaim and critical praise in literature. Born in Philadelphia on January 17, 1771, Brown was the son of Elijah and Mary Armitt Brown. His father made a suitable income as a conveyancer, and both parents were active members of the Society of Friends. Embracing pacifist principles, which Brown himself held most of his life, the family remained loyal to the American cause but was not involved in the fighting during the Revolution. Still, during his early years the war raged around the Browns' home in Philadelphia, and it is not surprising that Brown developed an acute awareness of the potential for violence and irrationality in human nature. As a child Brown showed signs of unusual intelligence and interests. Frail and physically inactive, he gave his time to the study of geography and architecture; and his enormous curiosity led him to read widely in the arts and sciences. At the Friends Public School, which he entered at the age of eleven, Charles was fortunate to be instructed by one of Philadelphia's finest teachers, Robert Proud. Proud had been an opponent of the Revolutionary War and a professed Tory; and it is likely that this spirit of opposition to accepted opinions pervaded his teaching.

Brown's tendency to question the commonly held beliefs of his society may have been nurtured under Proud's guidance. When Brown left the school in 1787, there was no chance of his continuing formal study, due to the Quaker prejudice against higher education. Thus, at the age of sixteen he was apprenticed to Alexander Wilcocks to prepare for a career in law, although the drudgery of his legal duties left him dissatisfied. In his spare time Brown planned epic poems on the discovery of America and the conquests of Mexico and Peru; and he composed imitations of the Psalms, the book of Job, and the Ossian poems. Of his work in the law office he wrote, "The task assigned me was perpetually encumbered with the rubbish of the law. . . . It was one tedious round of scrawling and jargon. . . . When my task is finished for the day, it leaves me listless and melancholy." At the invitation of a friend, Brown joined a literary society, the Belles Lettres Club; and he pondered leaving the legal profession. Inclined toward a pessimistic temperament, Brown enjoyed the club members' discussions of the validity of suicide, the imperfections of government, and the repressions of the human spirit and freedom. These meetings encouraged his growing philosophical skepticism and his study of the idealistic and radical doctrines that he would explore in his essays and novels. To please his parents and brothers, he continued in the study of law until 1792, but devoted much of his energy to literary endeavors. In 1789, a series of his essays appeared in the Columbian Magazine (Philadelphia) under the title of "The Rhapsodist." In these rather undistinguished essays Brown followed other American writers of his day by using a seminarrative essay form as a way of attracting a larger audience for their moral instruction. Brown created a persona who had spent many months alone in the Ohio wilderness, meditating on human nature. The essays show his

126 I AMERICAN inclination to separate himself from the political squabbling and rhetoric of urban America in the 1780's in order to reflect upon the complexities of the human situation and the many options that Americans might explore to create a just and liberal system of government. The general insincerity of political orations; the seeming hypocrisy of the moral expressions from the pulpit; and the contrast between the promises of the Revolution and the actuality of government policies prompted Brown to consider new schemes of social order. He became increasingly dissatisfied with the legal profession and the scorn for real justice that it seemed to symbolize. He wrote to a friend during this period: "Our intellectual ore is apparently of no value except as it is capable of being transmuted into gold, and learning and eloquence are desirable only as the means of more expeditiously filling our coffers." In this bitter frame of mind, Brown studied Rousseau and the German sentimentalists, and began to question the systems of thought that he had inherited from Puritanism, Quakerism, and Enlightenment rationalism. In 1790 Brown formed a new friendship that would have a significant impact upon his intellectual development. The arrival in Philadelphia of Elihu Hubbard Smith, a medical student with literary talent and radical philosophical views, was an important stimulus for Brown. After Smith completed his medical studies, he invited Brown to visit him in Connecticut. Informing his family of his decision to abandon the legal profession, Brown accepted Smith's invitation, and thus escaped the yellow fever epidemic that was raging in Philadelphia in 1793. Brown's visit led to his association with the circle of New York intellectuals who were Smith's colleagues in the Friendly Club, including William Dunlap, the writer and artist who became Brown's first biographer. The members of this group helped Brown to define important philosophical issues and nourished his con-

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fidence in his literary abilities. Brown said of himself at the time: "I am conscious of a double mental existence—'my imaginative being' and 'my social one.' " His friends warned him that he must keep these two beings clearly separated, so that he might arrive at social and philosophical truth through rational thinking, and then use these insights to inform and deepen his imaginative work. It was also at this time that he came under the influence of Godwin's The Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793) and Mary Wollstonecraft's Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress cf the French Revolution (1794) and Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792), which is reflected in his thought and writing. Accompanying the French Revolution was an outpouring of literature on humanitarian themes. The exploration of such issues as political reform, women's rights, and universal benevolence prompted American intellectuals to consider the contrast between the ideals of the American Revolution and the social realities of the 1790's. Brown was stirred to compose a work that is part Utopian romance and part tract on women's rights. Alcuin: A Dialogue, his first published volume, appeared in 1798 and was immediately reprinted in the Weekly Magazine (Philadelphia) as "The Rights of Women." A dialogue between the male Alcuin and a Mrs. Carter, this work is of undistinguished literary quality; but it provides interesting insights into Brown's thinking during this period. In opposition to Alcuin's traditional attitudes, Mrs. Carter argues for equal education and equal political opportunities for women. A second volume of this dialogue, which is more speculative and radical, portrays a visionary society in which marriage and all social distinctions between the sexes have been eliminated. This volume seems to have been suppressed, for it was not printed until Dunlap included it in his biography in 1815. One critic saw Alcuin as Brown's con-

CHARLES BROCKDEN BROWN I 127 tribution to the debates of the 1790's between the Federalists and Republicans; it shows Brown's disappointment that the framers of the Constitution failed to remain true to the principles of the Declaration of Independence. For all of the political force of these works, however, they are not an accurate representation of the direction of Brown's thought at this time. As his friends were quite aware, his views were too unsettled, and he was too much of a philosophical skeptic to be so certain about any set of beliefs. At the risk of oversimplification, a summary of the issues that most troubled him in this period is very useful to an examination of his novels. First, he questioned the confidence of his age in the rational faculties of man. From his recognition of his own emotional complexity and from his serious study of human psychology (a professional interest of Smith's), Brown came to believe that it is absurd to think that people are always guided by reason and that sense experience is completely valid. The workings of passions and illusions upon the mind from within, and the operations of unfamiliar elements of the external world, could deceive humans, leading them to build elaborate logical systems and make seemingly rational decisions based upon mistaken assumptions. In addition, for all their scientific knowledge, thinkers had yet to explain the forces that people refer to as fate or chance or God. Also, Brown recognized that the unconscious remained a mysterious and misunderstood aspect of experience that challenged the notion of reasonable action. In regard to social and political systems, therefore, Brown had serious doubts that human drives and passions could be controlled and guided by moral principles, or even by legal restraints. His work within the American legal system had shown him how legal procedures and terminology could be manipulated to serve those with power and money. The yearning for hierarchy and privilege among the crafty, and the igno-

rance and gullibility of the poor, impeded genuine social revolution. The rhetoric of equality allowed unscrupulous confidence men superb opportunities to exploit the weak. In America, where rank and title and the trappings of social division had been abolished, a cunning individual could use imposture and duplicity to deceive both the rich and the poor. On the larger scale Brown saw a situation in which the rhetoric of opportunity and freedom existed simultaneously with subtle social restraints designed to maintain the status quo. He was deeply troubled by this pattern; and he believed that, from this grand deception, tensions and repeated upheavals within and between nations would result. Despite his brilliant but pessimistic insights, Brown never relinquished his belief in the duty of all intelligent men of good will to encourage their fellow men to live up to their articulated ideals and to strive toward social improvement. For all of his private physical and psychological burdens, Brown accepted the responsibility to be a moral preceptor of society—the role of a writer in the late eighteenth century. Thus, the problem that was most pressing throughout his artistic career had also troubled Freneau and Brackenridge during their faltering literary efforts: how to reach the diversified audience of the republic with works of literature that would have artistic merit and would be popular enough to instruct the greatest number. In 1797 Brown wrote an announcement for the book that would have been his first novel, SkyWalk; or the Man Unknown to Himself, in which he postulated a key element of his literary doctrine. Unfortunately the novel was lost, but Brown's advertisement expressed this important perspective: The popular tales have their merit, but there is one thing in which they are deficient. They are generally adapted to one class of readers only . . . [they] are spurned at by those who are sat-

728 / AMERICAN isfied with nothing but strains of lofty eloquence, the exhibition of powerful motives, and a sort of audaciousness of character. The world is governed not by the simpleton but by the man of soaring passions and intellectual energy. By the display of such only can we hope to enchain the attention and ravish the souls of those who study and reflect. Even though Brown aimed high at the sophisticated reader, he also believed that "to gain their homage it is not needful to forgo the approbation of those whose circumstances have hindered them from making the same progress." But reaching these two audiences at once, as other American writers before and after Brown have learned, is no simple task. Each of Brown's major literary works represented another stage in his continual effort to modify and alter his fictional designs in order to win a popular audience while pleasing his demanding intellectual peers. Despite the speed with which he sometimes wrote his novels and the flaws in composition that resulted, he never lost sight of his aim of finding a way of addressing his works to two audiences simultaneously; and it was partly this effort that led to the powerful ambiguity and intriguing complexity of his narrative point of view that can still hold the attention of learned readers. Brown's first published novel, Wieland; or, The Transformation. An American Tale, appeared in September 1798. It is still recognized as the first important novel written by an American, and it is certainly his most famous and his best work of fiction. Adapting the formulas of the Gothic horror tale and the sentimental seduction novel, Brown constructed a fast-paced, suspenseful narrative containing supernatural elements, insanity, and mass murder. Perhaps to add to the appeal of the novel for those women readers who had made Susanna Rowson's Charlotte: A Tale of Truth and other such English

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novels of sentiment so popular in America, he chose to cast the narrative in the epistolary form and to have a woman narrator, Clara Wieland. The fairly simple plot and the enormity of Theodore Wieland's crimes should have also attracted a large reading audience. On the surface, Brown's first novel would not seem to have taxed the intellect of the average eighteenth-century reader of fiction. After protesting to the truth and objectivity of her narrative in the introduction, which contains titillating promises of "incredible horror," Clara Wielaiid recounts the background of her family. The elder Wieland, the father of Clara and Theodore, comes to America after undergoing a religious conversion in England that gives his life purpose and direction, but leaves him forever introspective, watchful, and morally rigorous. He believes it his duty to "disseminate the truths of the gospel among the unbelieving nations," and thus he departs for America with the aim of preaching Christianity to the Indians. For fourteen years, however, worldly affairs distract him. Through his industry and the opportunities of a new land, he prospers, marries, and acquires wealth and leisure. Finally he labors at his spiritual calling, but derision, sickness, and the "license of savage passion" of the Indians defeats his efforts. He therefore builds a temple on the land near his farm on the Schuylkill, where daily he engages in private worship. When Clara is six years old, the sadness that always has shadowed her father seems to deepen; he becomes convinced that a command has been laid upon him that he has failed to obey, an omission for which he must pay a penalty. After suffering great mental agonies, he goes to his temple for midnight worship; while there, a mysterious flash of light and explosion reduce his clothes to ashes and fatally injure him. Shortly afterward Clara's mother dies, and the orphaned children are left to ponder the cause of this catastrophe—whether their father's death is

CHARLES BROCKDEN BROWN I 129 "a fresh proof that the Divine Ruler interferes in human affairs" or, as a learned uncle suggests, the death is the result of the natural cause of spontaneous combustion, such as had been documented in similar cases. The unresolved question lingers over the young people and contributes to more disastrous events. Financially secure and nurtured in the enlightened thought of the last half of the eighteenth century, Clara and Theodore grow up in a cheerful atmosphere and hold rational religious attitudes that focus upon "the grandeur of external nature." With a bust of Cicero and a harpsichord they transform their father's temple into a setting for lively conversation and mirth. Theodore marries their childhood friend Catherine Pleyel, and her brother Henry arrives from Europe to add to the delightful company. Although they feel no antagonism for each other, the discussions between Henry and Theodore define philosophical and religious convictions that are quite opposite. A "champion of intellectual liberty," Pleyel places his complete faith in the testimony of the senses and the guidance of reason. Wieland admits to a fundamental belief in religious truth and the operation of the supernatural in human affairs. Suddenly the confidence of these characters in the security of their wealth and intellectual positions is undermined by the introduction of a new natural phenomenon that is outside their experience, and thus beyond their understanding. One night, when returning to the temple to retrieve a letter, Wieland hears what seems to be his wife's voice, warning him of impending danger. He later learns that she was too far away for him to have heard her voice, so there is no explanation for,the mystery, which begins to play upon Wieland's mind. Soon afterward, as Henry is trying to persuade Theodore to accompany him to Europe, where he intends to court a recently widowed baroness, they both hear a voice like Catherine's announce that the baroness is dead.

When her death is confirmed a few days later, Wieland is persuaded that the voice is supernatural, and Pleyel is forced to admit that his rationalist theories cannot account for the event. A stranger named Carwin soon appears on the scene in the trappings of a common vagabond. Despite his seeming social inferiority, he becomes a member of the little group, charming them with his wit and lively conversation. Clara is soon frightened by voices in her closet that seem to be those of two men planning her murder; and Wieland and Pleyel are summoned to her rescue by another voice. Carwin dismisses all of this as the result of pranks. When Clara begins to fall in love with Pleyel, he rejects her because he has overheard a conversation between her and Carwin that revealed her to be promiscuous. Clara returns home to question Carwin about these charges, but finds a note from him warning her of a horrible sight. With that she discovers the body of the murdered Catherine Wieland and meets her deranged, "transformed" brother. Pleading with heaven that he not be required to offer another sacrifice, he advances to murder Clara, who is saved only by the arrival of neighbors. They later inform her that Wieland also has murdered his children. As she is pondering the fate of her father, Clara learns that her brother believes himself commanded to perform the deeds by the voice of God and that he is still under divine obligation to kill Henry and herself. At this point Carwin confesses to Clara that he had been using his powers of ventriloquism to play tricks on the two couples and that his infatuation for her caused him to turn Henry against her. As Carwin is swearing his innocence regarding the voice Wieland hears, the madman, who has escaped from prison, arrives to murder Clara. Carwin uses his skill to create another voice from heaven that tells Wieland that he has deceived himself. Wieland suddenly realizes the horror of his acts and commits suicide. Carwin's confession clears Clara of

130 I AMERICAN guilt, and three years later she and Henry are married. She attains enough peace of mind to recount the ghastly details in the narrative. Carwin, who is the victim of a mysterious plot started abroad, flees into the countryside to become a farmer. For most of Brown's readers, the lessons to be drawn from this narrative are fairly obvious. Clearly the tale points to the dangers of religious enthusiasm and superstition. With the Puritan spirit still strong in the land and the signs of another religious revival already evident, the rationalist Brown was warning his readers against unbridled indulgence of religious emotions, which could have dire consequences, even into future generations. The burden of the sins, or saintly delusions, of the fathers is a theme that would recur in American letters. Wieland also offers warnings against selfish jealousy, such as Carwin's, and rash judgments, such as Henry's. Some might view the catastrophic results of Carwin's intrusion as proof of the folly of admitting vulgar types, no matter how seemingly refined, into the circles of the educated and wealthy. Read in any of these ways, Wieland would seem to have a satisfactory conclusion with a central meaning that might bring practical or moral benefit to Brown's readers. For Brown's perceptive readers, however, the novel poses many complex philosophical and social problems that none of these interpretations resolves. It is a book of questions—indeed, at one point Clara presents a series of rhetorical questions that runs to three pages. The central question is: how can man know that he knows anything to be true? The answer seems to be that he cannot. This dilemma leads to the moral question of how, then, may a man perform moral actions when he must act on deficient knowledge? As his friends Smith and Dunlap would have recognized, Brown's novel presented a direct challenge to the accepted optimistic psychology of his age. Derived from John Locke, this psychology placed great faith upon the validity of

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sensory evidence and the ability of the mind to reason from such evidence to sound conclusions that could then serve as the basis of virtuous action. To readers who trusted in the power of human reason and the principles of divine benevolence, Brown presented a chaotic world of irrational experience and inexplicable events. The experiences of each of the four main characters in the novel constituted a denial of the Enlightenment epistemology. Although Theodore Wieland has been educated in Enlightenment ideas and appears to be a normal individual, the unexplained death of his father secretly haunts him; and his brooding fears place him on the precarious verge of insanity. His emotional state allows the tricks of Carwin to set his mind on a course of tragic self-delusion. But unlike his father, Wieland is not a victim of religious fanaticism. It is not religious enthusiasm that destroys him; it is his overconfidence in the validity of his sensory experience that leads him to believe that the voices he hears are genuine and must have a supernatural source. Nor does he doubt his senses when he hears the voice of Carwin or when he hears the voice of his own unconscious. If he had been capable of admitting that there may be natural phenomena that men have not yet understood, or that his own senses might sometimes deceive him, he might have questioned the source of his divine guidance. But his intellectual position precludes such doubts and makes him vulnerable to the tendency toward irrational behavior that he inherited from his father. The combination of Puritan pietism and Enlightenment optimism seals his fate. In Henry Pleyel, Brown presented a case study of the folly of formulating conclusions strictly upon sensory evidence, without testing them against previous knowledge. Because he has such faith in the validity of his impressions, Henry simply adds up the facts as he receives them from his senses, and concludes that Clara and Carwin are lovers. His former awareness of Clara's virtue does not give him pause when his

CHARLES BROCKDEN BROWN I 131 eyes and ears provide evidence, however circumstantial, of a new truth. The most intriguing intellectual problems of the novel involve the characters of Clara and Carwin. As the narrator, Clara has it in her power to affect the reader's perception of events and motives. At one point she even warns that she has necessarily transformed her experiences in the account she has written: "My narrative may be invaded by inaccuracy and confusion; . . . What but ambiguities, abruptnesses, and dark transitions, can be expected from the historian who is, at the same time, the sufferer of these disasters?" In addition, she says that these events have driven her to a mental breakdown and that her writing has served as therapy that saved her from becoming lost in the "wild and fantastical incongruities" that threatened to destroy her mind. Indeed, a close reading of her narrative reveals that Clara is not always fully conscious of her own motives and impulses. Use of this narrative point of view allows the reader to engage in a rigorous analysis of the thought process by which Clara interprets her own sense impressions and draws her conclusions. Brown thereby raises philosophical and artistic questions about the validity of historical evidence, as opposed to the deeper truths of imaginative literature. Unlike Pleyel and Wieland, Clara is not satisfied with either rationalist or religious answers to the epistemological questions that her experience raises: "Which of my senses was the prey of a fatal illusion?" she wonders. Quite early in her account, she states her belief that the senses cannot be trusted and that human actions based on sensory impressions may be in error: "The will is the tool of the understanding, which must fashion its conclusion on the notices of sense. If the senses be depraved, it is impossible to calculate the evils that may flow from the consequent deduction of the understanding." Aware of the possible defect of the senses, Clara is not ready to jump to conclusions, as her

brother and her lover do. Faced by mysterious events, she tends to remain passive and rely upon her courage. Because Clara suspends judgments, she is able to be more intuitive than those around her. While she has no conscious reason to distrust Carwin, her first contact with him rouses an inexplicable impression that he is somehow the cause of the voices and delusions. Similarly, despite her love for her brother and her trust in him, her dreams warn her that there is reason to fear him. She cannot consciously act upon these forebodings because intuition provides no factual evidence, and her education has taught her to trust only in sensory evidence. Therefore, Clara is unable to follow the more self-assured courses of Wieland and Pleyel, and she is left to ponder her premonitions. Significantly, Clara's fears are turned inward and transformed into a form of self-torture and longing for martyrdom, tendencies that gradually appear as the novel progresses. Although she finds Carwin physically unattractive and fears him, she is drawn to him and sensually aroused by the sound of his voice. She admits at one point that the mysterious incidents deeply troubling her companions produce in her "a sentiment not unallied to pleasure." Clara seems to want to reach out and embrace the catastrophe she feels looming in her future. When she hears a potential ravisher lurking in her closet, she even struggles to open the door, in order to confront him and her fate. Brown was greatly interested in the latest theories of abnormal psychology, and his portraits of Clara and Theodore contain evidence of his awareness of oedipal and incestuous impulses. Clearly, he wanted to convince his educated readers of the truth of Clara's observation that "Ideas exist in our minds that can be accounted for by no established laws." For Brown the most interesting character in his first novel was surely Carwin. In the "advertisement" for Wieland, he promised his readers a sequel that would tell the full story of Carwin;

132 I AMERICAN and he did compose several chapters of the 4 'Memoirs of Carwin, the Biloquist" in 1798 before he put it aside. He later published the pieces as installments in The Literary Magazine and American Register in 1803-04, but the work remained unfinished. Although there is enough information about Carwin in Wieland itself to enable the reader to formulate an interpretation of his character and his relationship to the overall meaning of the book, the Carwin fragment is useful, for in it Brown filled out his background. Besides being the catalyst who triggers the lunacy of Theodore and the villain who causes Clara distress and torment, Carwin provides another level to the social and philosophical meaning of Wieland. He is an outsider who lacks the educational and financial advantages of the Wieland group. But because he is audacious, clever, and skillful, he is able to move freely into the upper level of society and threaten their security. His rootlessness and his poverty have bred in him a form of irresponsibility that causes him to indulge his curiosity by probing into the lives of the Wielands for mere thrills. The immorality of his behavior is emphasized when he engages in an illicit affair with Clara's servant Judith at the same time that he claims to love Clara. While he constantly tells himself that he means no harm and that he uses his power only for benevolent ends, it becomes evident that he little cares what the consequences of his actions may be. He is gradually exposed as a satanic intruder, a "double-tongued deceiver" in the Wieland garden who creates havoc among the unwary. By introducing phenomena that can beguile the senses, this perverse impostor undermines the eighteenth-century confidence in Lockean epistemology and in the fundamental goodness of human nature. In the Carwin fragment Brown gives this portrayal even greater social implications. It seems that Carwin is a penniless but shrewd son of an American farmer who headed to Philadelphia to

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make his fortune, an end that, for him, justified any means. A political radical named Ludloe, who is a ranking member of a Utopian organization called the Illuminati, discovers Carwin to be a fine candidate for the secret society and takes him to Europe to prepare him for his political role. Ludloe believes that he and his brotherhood act from purely benevolent and rational motives. But for all of the idealism of Ludloe's statements about the present social and economic injustices of the world, it is clear that he is motivated by selfish desires. The rules of the secret society, which dictate instant death for infractions, alert the reader to the dangers of misguided benevolence. Thus, in "Carwin the Biloquist" Brown explores a theme that is also present in Wieland— the persistent conflict between the established society and individuals who are frustrated by existing political systems. These works seem to suggest that if the Wielands are to be protected against men like Carwin, they must either construct a new way to foster social equality or they must strengthen their defenses against the ruthless and unprincipled. Brown was deeply affected by the radical thinkers of his time, but in his fiction he struck a balance: his reformers are justified in their complaints about their societies, but they often become selfishly motivated villains; at the same time the insulation and naivete of his affluent characters shield them from real knowledge of the world, making them easy prey for sharpers. At first glance a novel of gothic horror and sentimental romance, Wieland is also a serious intellectual document in which Brown questions some of the fundamental assumptions of his time. Although the initial sales of Wieland were modest, Brown was encouraged by the warm critical acclaim he received, and continued the extraordinary burst of productivity that led him to publish his four major novels in less than a year. After false starts in the "Memoirs of Carwin"

CHARLES BROCKDEN BROWN I 133 and the "Memoirs of Stephen Calvert," Brown completed Ormond; or, The Secret Witness early in 1799. During this same period he was also contributing short stories and reviews to The Monthly Magazine and American Review. Bestknown of his stories is "Thessalonica: A Roman Story" (1799), which illustrates the social lesson that "no diligence or moderation can fully restrain the passions of the multitude." Also appearing at this time was his * 'Lesson on Concealment" (1800), which Warner Berthoff finds to be a paradigm of Brown's narrative method. In Ormond, Brown again chose to work with a female narrator, but Sophia Westwyn Courtland is not so deeply involved in the action, and thereby appears to be a more objective and reliable narrator than Clara Wieland. Sophia recounts the story of her friend Constantia Dudley, whose great courage and virtue have enabled her to survive a series of financial and physical calamities and to triumph over disease and villainy. In fact, through the eyes of Sophia, Constantia is such an exemplar that the work may be read as a feminist novel, an illustration in fiction of the female competency that Brown explored mAlcuin. But again there are at least two levels on which the novel can be interpreted; and the apparent moral of female virtue rewarded must be viewed in the context of the deeper meanings of the novel, which are evident on close reading. The action of the tale and the general descriptions of the major characters reveal several similarities between Ormond and Wieland. Constantia's father, Stephen Dudley, is something of a dilettante who lives well on the proceeds of the stocks and the apothecary shop he inherited from his father. To devote more time to his painting, however, he places his business in the hands of a seemingly honest young man, Thomas Craig, under whose hand the business flourishes. Out of admiration for Craig, Dudley makes the penniless young man his partner. While Dudley enjoys his leisure, Craig embezzles funds and, before

vanishing, cheats Dudley of his entire fortune. Dudley's wife dies, and his despondency leads to drunkenness and blindness. Constantia and her father are plagued by creditors and driven to the depths of poverty. Before going blind, Dudley tries to work as a legal scrivener, but "he was perpetually encumbered with the rubbish of law, . . . its lying assertions and hateful artifices." Of the several attacks upon the legal profession in Ormond, the most severe is the assertion that the wheels of the courts turn only for those who oil them with cash. With no place to turn for aid, Constantia assumes the support of herself and her father. Although her education has hardly prepared her to cope with the practical affairs of the world, she learns to be assertive in dealing with parsimonious landlords; and she teaches herself how to survive, as a seamstress. She shows courage during the yellow fever plague that strikes her Philadelphia neighborhood, and because of her cleverness she and her father survive the epidemic. Her strength wins her admirers. A rich businessman offers her marriage and security, but she rejects him because of "the poverty of his discourse and ideas." When Constantia finally turns for help to Melbourne, one of her father's former associates, his recognition of her virtue sets in motion a series of events that enables her to rise again in the world—but to come close to destruction in the process. When Melbourne tells his friend Ormond about the plight and charm of Constantia, Ormond takes a special interest in her, a circumstance that leads the narrator into a long account of the character of Ormond. A complex character similar to Carwin, Ormond, says Sophia, "was of all mankind, the being most difficult and most deserving to be studied." Although she hints that Ormond will be exposed as a villain, Sophia reveals his nature gradually. On the surface he is a man of great benevolence and liberality. At some time in the past he was the victim of deceit

134 I AMERICAN and false appearances, and thus he values sincerity and honesty above all human qualities. In order to test the integrity of his associates, he has often used his extraordinary talent for imitating voices and creating disguises "to gain access, as if by supernatural means, to the privacy of others." He takes pleasure in the God-like power that this ability gives him, but he believes that his rare skills can be used for the purposes of social progress. Convinced that "a mortal poison pervaded the whole system" of society and that "the principles of the social machine must be rectified," Ormond once became a member of a secret revolutionary organization called the "Perfectibilists." In short, Sophia says, "no one was more impenetrable than Ormond, though no one's real character seems more easily discerned." From Sophia's point of view, Ormond's greatest flaw is his wrongheaded attitude toward women. Because he holds women to be by nature intellectually inferior to men, he has no use for marriage, which would only shackle him to a dull-witted sexual partner. He maintains a mistress named Helena Cleves, whose lack of intellect and training make her proof of his maxim. The reports about Constantia's mental powers cause Ormond to arrange for her hire as Helena's seamstress so that she can work in the fashionable home he provides for his mistress. Helena's weakness and her errors serve to highlight the merits of her rival, and Ormond falls in love with Constantia. When Ormond cruelly and suddenly informs Helena of his new love and abandons her, Helena takes her own life. Hints that Ormond calculated this effect are reinforced when he pronounces over her corpse: "Thou has't saved thyself and me from a thousand evils. Thou has't acted as seemed to thee best, and I am satisfied." Also as Ormond wishes, Helena, who had developed a strong affection for her poor but proud seamstress, bequeaths to Constantia the house and furniture that Ormond had given her. Mo-

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mentarily reluctant to prosper from Helena's tragedy, Constantia then "justly regarded the leisure and independence thus conferred upon her as inestimable benefits." Her new wealth enables her father to undergo an eye operation that restores his sight, and the two of them live comfortably again. Ormond considers that Constantia now possesses the social position befitting his new mistress, and he suggests that she take Helena's place. For the narrator, the struggle between them over the question of marriage constitutes the central conflict. Although Constantia is a formidable adversary in the debates over marriage versus promiscuity, Sophia fears that she will eventually succumb to Ormond's wiles because she lacks formal religious training and faith. Were she not indifferent to religion, Constantia could simply present her religious convictions as an impenetrable wall to Ormond's intellectual attacks on her reasoning. But for all of Sophia's declarations of the necessity of religious beliefs, Constantia seems to resist Ormond quite well without them. She consults her father on the matter, and he reveals his antipathy to Ormond's principles. Apparently not burning with overpowering love for Ormond, Constantia cools the relationship; and for a time Ormond withdraws from the scene. Meanwhile, she makes plans to accompany her father on a European tour. In the swift action of the closing chapters, Constantia's fatal flaw is her underestimation of the extremes to which Ormond might go to gain his victory over her. So rational and considerate on the surface, he is really a madman whose enormous pride and thirst for power drive him to violent acts. Just as they are preparing to leave for Europe, Constantia finds her father in his bed, shot through the heart. Although her instincts tell her that Thomas Craig is somehow responsible, there is no evidence to connect the murder to anyone. In the weeks that follow, Constantia is reunited with her old friend Sophia,

CHARLES BROCKDEN BROWN I 135 who had known Ormond under another guise in Europe during his early years. In the privacy of the room they share in Constantia's house, Sophia warns her friend about Ormond. Constantia agrees to terminate the relationship and to accompany Sophia to England, but in her final interview with Ormond he acts strangely and warns her that she will soon undergo a terrible experience. During the time required to prepare for the voyage, Sophia returns to the city; but Constantia is drawn back to her house in New Jersey to spend some time alone. One night Ormond arrives and lays at her feet the body of Thomas Craig. Ormond confesses that he arranged for Craig to kill Stephen Dudley and that he has just murdered Craig. Having frequently hidden himself in secret compartments of the house he once owned, he had overheard her father's objections to him and their plans to leave the country. He had also listened when Sophia exposed his true nature, and he realized that the only way he could possess Constantia would be to take her by force. At this point Sophia recalls for the reader that when Ormond was a young soldier in the Russian army, he had brutally raped and murdered a Tatar girl and had killed his friend who challenged him for this prize. Concluding that Constantia's life might be in danger, Sophia decides to visit her. Upon arriving, she finds the body of Ormond with a "smile of disdain still upon his features" and a terrified Constantia who has stabbed him in the heart with a fortunate blow of her penknife. The two friends depart for England, where time and change of scene may help Constantia to recover from her catastrophes. The lessons that Sophia Courtland would have her readers discover in these events are fairly obvious. Women should have a greater opportunity to develop their mental faculties and personalities as fully as men. The example of Constantia shows that a woman may live independently, and even challenge the intellectual faculties of a mad

genius like Ormond. The social restrictions that create helpless females such as Helena also lead men like Ormond to hold women in contempt, and can even lead to acts of violence and brutality. For the established classes there is an additional lesson. The experience of the Dudleys is a warning against irresponsibility and pretentiousness. Dudley's self-indulgence and sloth lead to his fall; and his failure to give his daughter a modern education cause her to be poorly prepared to understand men like Ormond, who are at large in a world of political and social turmoil. Sophia, whose education included a tour of Europe, had become familiar with types like Ormond. Brown is, however, too serious a writer to leave all of the implications of his novel in the hands of his narrator. Throughout the book there are hints that there are other ways of viewing these events and other possible interpretations of the motives of the characters. Some of Brown's critics have argued that Ormond fails as a novel because the intellectual conflict between the beliefs of Constantia and the principles of Ormond are not allowed to develop. The moral and intellectual victory over Ormond that Constantia should be able to attain is denied her in the physical struggle ending in his death. It is possible, however, that having set up the conflict of opposing wills and convictions that these characters symbolize, Brown may have felt that at that point in history, there could be no peaceful resolution. Just as senseless violence had resulted from ideological conflicts in America and France, so it would continue to be the last resort of volatile, frustrated reformers and their threatened opponents. Another view of the trouble with the ending in Ormond is that Brown does not want to award an intellectual victory to Constantia, for her position is neither more sincere nor more selfless than Ormond's. In a comment that appears to be refuted by her effusive praise of her friend, So-

136 I AMERICAN phia warns the reader that Constantia, like all people, is not *'uninfluenced by sinister and selfish motives," for "sinister considerations flow in upon us through imperceptible channels and modify our thoughts in numberless ways, without our being truly conscious of their presence." This remark may seem only to explain Constantia's initial reluctance to encourage Ormond to marry Helena when she has become interested in him herself. Yet, it also may provide grounds for viewing Constantia's rejecting him as her desire to broaden her own horizons. Sophia's comment about Constantia's earlier rejection of the wealthy businessman's offer of marriage also emphasizes Constantia's tendency to act in her own best interest: "She administered her little property in what manner she pleased. Marriage would annihilate this power. Henceforth, she would be bereft even of personal freedom. So far from possessing property, she herself would become the property of another." This focus upon the freedom that property affords takes on special importance when Constantia acquires Helena's property and achieves an independence that is enhanced by the death of her father. All the debate over marriage may be a convenient ploy to put Ormond off. Even though Sophia raises no objections, it does seem somewhat surprising that Constantia has no scruples about accepting Helena's property even though it carries the taint of having been Ormond's payment for his illicit relationship with Helena. The fact that Helena commits suicide because of Ormond's love for Constantia herself also does not much disturb Constantia. It would be ironic indeed if Ormond's arranging of Constantia's financial security assured the ruin of his chances to have her as a lover or wife, for it would also mean that Helena might have inadvertently frustrated Ormond's designs by giving the property to Constantia. Beneath the contest of intellectual arguments, then, the real battle may be one of

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economic survival, which Constantia had learned so well in her days of poverty. It is a deadly conflict in which she wins her final victory over Ormond. This reading accounts for the uneasy sympathy that many readers feel for Ormond. To deepen the reader's appreciation of Ormond's character, Brown goes to great lengths to portray another female character, Martinette de Beauvais, who is revealed in the closing pages to be Ormond's sister. During the period when Constantia is preparing for her trip abroad with her father, she meets the brilliant and mysterious Martinette, whose independence and sophistication make Constantia look and feel like a timid girl. Although her classical and mathematical training is not very different from that of Constantia, Martinette possesses firsthand knowledge of "political and military transactions in Europe during the present age." This astounds Constantia, "who could not but derive humiliation from comparing her own slender acquirements with those of her companion." Because she is Ormond's sister, Martinette's account of her early life provides additional information for understanding his nature as well. It seems that Martinette and Ormond lost their father and his fortune when they were children. They grew up together in several countries in Europe and learned many languages, but were separated when Ormond was fifteen. Through a "wild series of adventures" Martinette learned political theories and married a political enthusiast "who esteemed nothing more graceful or glorious than to die for the liberties of mankind." Assuming male dress and acquiring skill with the sword, she fought by his side in the American Revolution and tended his wounds at Germantown before he was taken prisoner to die. After her experiences in war, she "felt as if imbued by a soul that was a stranger to the sexual distinction," and returned to Europe to participate in the French Revolution. As Martinette

CHARLES BROCKDEN BROWN I 137 depicts scenes of massacre and tumult in which she had a direct hand, Constantia feels an aversion to her passionate nature. This tale of the intrigue and violence in which many young men and women participated makes Constantia conscious of how provincial and naive she is, and increases her desire to tour Europe. For the perceptive reader who is not easily influenced by the narrator's conservative bias against Martinette and Ormond, there are important insights in this digression regarding the state of world affairs that make the radicalism of Ormond and his sister more understandable, although certainly not justified in Brown's view. Ormond's impatience, his willingness to use any means to get his way, and his irrational anger over the ideological objections that both Stephen Dudley and Sophia use against him make more sense when we consider the amorality of political affairs in which he has been involved during his life. The conclusion of the novel, which pits Constantia and Ormond against one another in physical combat, does, to a degree, follow logically from the larger conflict between conventional social attitudes and the radical ideology they represent. On the one hand, the climax serves as a warning to Brown's conservative readers of the dangers of radicalism; on the other, the defeat of Ormond demonstrates how the passions of such romantics make them vulnerable to the formidable opposition of the established forces symbolized in the self-interested resistance of Constantia. In view of the backdrop of international affairs, it is interesting that Brown gives to Sophia an observation on the fundamental difference between Europe and America that anticipates Tocqueville's later insight and provides a further explanation of the incompatibility of Constantia and Ormond: I found that the differences between Europe and America lay chiefly in this:—that in the former

all things tended to extremes, whereas in the latter, all things tended to the same level. Genius, and virtue, and happiness on these shores, were distinguished by a sort of mediocrity. Conditions were less unequal, and men were strangers to the heights of enjoyment and the depths of misery to which the inhabitants of Europe are accustomed. Constantia, who follows a middle course between the passionate Martinette and the spiritless Helena, proves too strong for the European extremist. Although Brown had begun the early chapters of his next novel, Arthur Mervyn; or, Memoirs of the Year 1793, before he finished Ormond, he put it aside until early 1799, when Part I of Ormond was published. The second part appeared in the summer of 1800. When considered as a single novel of two parts, Arthur Mervyn lacks the narrative unity, the force and clarity of style, and the logical character development of Wieland. In many ways, however, it is more intriguing and exciting, for the density that makes it obscure and difficult was the result of Brown's effort to put so much into this book. Directed less toward the popular audience, Mervyn seems to have pleased Brown's intellectual peers. William Dunlap had special praise for "this interesting and eloquent narrative." Calling its faults "venial" and its beauties "splendid," he said it was "entitled to more than the common attention bestowed upon novels." Recent critics have applauded the realism of Brown's descriptions of Philadelphia during the yellow fever plague and the characterization of Mervyn as an early example of the initiation of an American innocent. One indication that, in Arthur Mervyn, Brown set out to write a different kind of book is his experimentation with the narrative point of view. He uses a male narrator, Doctor Stevens, who is both a participant in the action and the interrogator of Mervyn, who becomes the principal

138 I AMERICAN narrator when he tells Stevens his life story. This shift in technique allows the reader to make a closer examination of the mind of Mervyn, who has many things in common with Carwin and Ormond. Like them, he is a young man cast on his own in a chaotic, rapacious world in which he must use all his skills to survive. Despite Mervyn's protests of his sincerity, close study reveals him to be Brown's most successful dissembler. In addition, Brown presents in Mervyn another orphaned outcast, Welbeck, who survives by exploiting the weaknesses of others. Brown arranges for this villain to recount his own history, also. These devices put the reader into the position of feeling that he can make judgments about Mervyn and Welbeck that are as accurate as those of the narrator Stevens. Brown may have felt that in his earlier books, readers had been inclined to take the analyses of Clara Wieland and Sophia Courtland at face value. In Arthur Mervyn, he provides a more complete and penetrating study of the underlying motives and psychological impulses of the Mervyn type. The plot of Mervyn is extremely intricate, but it is essential to understand the tangled events that shape the main characters and reveal their motives. When the story opens, Mervyn is sick and leaning against a wall of a house in Philadelphia, expecting to die. He is saved by Dr. Stevens, who takes him into his home where he eventually recovers. Stevens is a benevolent man inclined to think the better of people, and Mervyn pleases him by declaring that he yearns to be a simple yeoman with some time for study. Reluctant at first to talk about his life, Mervyn launches into his narrative when one of Eh*. Stevens' friends accuses him of being an associate of a swindler named Welbeck. As in Brown's earlier works, the difference between the surface meaning of the narrator's tale and the deeper meaning of the novel hinges upon the reader's perception of how the speaker

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may slant his life story. Throughout the book Mervyn protests his innocence, his total sincerity, and the absolute benevolence and selflessness of his intentions. Thus, on first examination the story appears to present a struggle of a virtuous country boy against the corruption of the city. This is what Mervyn would have Stevens believe and what Stevens wishes to believe, since it is not in his nature to be distrustful. Indeed, he even says that were he to discover that a man who appears to be as honest as Mervyn is really a deceiver, he would become a cynic for life. This significant self-evaluation of Stevens is key to the narrative, for it alerts the reader to be aware of possible false appearances in Mervyn. The son of a Pennsylvania farmer, Mervyn left home to make his fortune after his brothers and sisters died successively as each of them neared the age of nineteen and after his mother followed them to the grave. When a servant girl enticed his father into marriage, Mervyn's hopes of inheriting the farm were destroyed. Upon arriving in Philadelphia, he was hired by Welbeck, who took him into his magnificent house. In the fine clothes that Welbeck provided him, Mervyn resembled a youth named Clavering whom Mervyn had known briefly and who had recently disappeared from Philadelphia. Mysteriously, Welbeck made Mervyn promise to reveal nothing of his real history. When Mervyn learned that Clavering was the son of the man who owned the house in which Welbeck lived, he began to worry that he might be involved in a plot. He protests vehemently to Stevens that he was preparing to extricate himself from Welbeck, but his benevolent nature drew him in further. By accident he learned that Welbeck was to be the victim of a local intrigue, and he delayed his departure in order to warn him. Just then, he discovered his employer in his study, with the body of a man he had just shot. At this point Welbeck told Mervyn his own tale of passion, dissimulation, and deceit. Like

CHARLES BROCKDEN BROWN I 139 Carwin and Ormond, Welbeck was left with nothing by his father, and his humiliation and strong "love of independence" made him willing to use any means to attain financial security. He declared to Mervyn, "My virtuous theories and comprehensive erudition would not have saved me from the basest of crimes." Befriended by an American who brought him from England, Welbeck proceeded to ruin the man's married sister. With a burning need to win the "esteem of mankind," he tried forgery and counterfeiting before falling into a rare chance to steal a fortune from a young man who had died of yellow fever and had entrusted Welbeck with the sum of $20,000, to be delivered to his sister, Clemenza Lodi. Welbeck of course kept the money and then seduced Clemenza, who remained virtually his prisoner. Welbeck confessed that he was planning a new scheme in which Mervyn was to play an unsuspecting part; but he was stopped by the arrival of Watson, the American whose sister Welbeck had ruined and driven to an anguished death. In a pistol duel Welbeck killed Watson. Despite his shock at the * 'scene of guilt and ignominy disclosed where my rash and inexperienced youth had suspected nothing but loftiness and magnanimity," Mervyn helped Welbeck bury Watson in the basement and aided his escape to New Jersey. In the middle of the Delaware River, however, Welbeck jumped out of the boat; and Mervyn assumed he had died. After returning to Welbeck's house to resume his rustic dress, he departed for the country. He tells Stevens that he had had enough of the false appearances and corruption of the city, and he now sought the honest rural life. Mervyn hopes that this narrative has satisfied the insinuations of the doctor's friend, but other questions cause him to continue his tale. Back in the country, Mervyn found employment in the home of the Hadwins, a simple Quaker family, and courted their daughter Eliza. He had taken from Welbeck's house a manu-

script that he knew to have been the property of the dead brother of Clemenza Lodi; and one day he discovered in its pages $20,000 in banknotes, which he decided to take to Clemenza. But on an errand to disease-racked Philadelphia he contracted yellow fever and went to rest at Weibeck's house, where he discovered Welbeck himself madly searching for the missing manuscript. An argument ensued in which Welbeck deceived Mervyn into believing that the money was counterfeit; and before Welbeck could stop him, Mervyn set fire to the notes. The enraged Welbeck escaped and Mervyn wandered the streets to the place where Stevens found him. With declarations that there is "nothing which I more detest than equivocation and mystery," Mervyn ends the first part of his tale. Even without the sequel, the first part of the novel could stand as a unified narrative. It is a tale of virtue versus villainy, with the egocentric Welbeck serving as a foil to the well-meaning Mervyn. Unredeemed by any Utopian social purpose, Welbeck appears in the first part as the total scoundrel who confesses to an "incurable depravity" that has made him "the slave of sensual impulses" and ambition. For the experienced reader of Brown, however, there are hints that Mervyn may not be so pure as he wishes to appear, although the evidence against him in the first part is slim. It may be that Brown originally intended this work to illustrate the lesson of virtue rewarded; but during the year that elapsed between the appearance of parts I and II, he decided to expose the other side of Mervyn's character. When the second part is added to complete the novel, it casts a shadow of doubt over all of Mervyn's professed motives. He appears to be a calculating opportunist who masks his real motives and self-interest by fashioning his rhetoric to strike the most responsive chords in his listeners. At the same time Brown shows Welbeck to be a pathetic victim of passions generated by his early

140 I AMERICAN impoverishment and humiliation. In the second part Welbeck is a broken and penitent man whose final punishment is to have Mervyn moralizing over him as he breathes his last in debtor's prison. Brown even balances the theme of the city versus the country by showing the darker side of rural life. Most interesting of all the shifts in the second part, however, is Mervyn's rise to wealth and leisure through a series of actions that he says are the results of chance, but that the attentive reader may see as the result of his shrewd calculations and smooth dealings. In this difficult and divided novel, then, Brown portrays in depth a character type with which he was especially fascinated. Like Carwin and Ormond, Mervyn combines the qualities of the American Adam and the American confidence man. Making his way in the social environment of the new republic, where ruthless miscreants like Welbeck exploit innocent victims and the courts of law seem indifferent, Mervyn knows instinctively that the key to success can be an impressive false front. As he says at one point, "An honest face and a straight story will be sufficient." Welbeck constitutes an example of the failure that can result when a clever dissembler lets his passions ruin his game, a game that, in his bitter final word, he admits Mervyn has won. Artistically, what Brown has achieved with the point of view and structure of this novel is to make its reading a test for those who might be taken in by the seeming sincerity of Mervyn. While some readers may accept Stevens' defenses of Mervyn's honesty, Brown devises his work to enable the reader to look behind some of Mervyn's statements and to arrive at a different view of his nature. In this novel Brown is most successful in simultaneously presenting both a moral and a deeper meaning that stand in direct opposition to each other: virtue, the common theme of popular novels, may seem to be the lesson of Arthur Mervyn but, in fact, that very

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belief is called into question by the subtle insinuations of the book. Between the completion of the first part of Arthur Mervyn in early 1799 and the second part in the summer of 1800, Brown continued his startling burst of literary activity with two other major projects. Having won the recognition of the New York intellectuals, he became editor of a new literary journal, The Monthly Magazine and American Review. With promises from his friends to submit articles, Brown launched the journal with great optimism. His friends, however, were slow to finish their contributions; and Brown ended up writing most of the pieces himself. Brown's brothers had always advised him to judge his success on the basis of financial gain, and he hoped to impress his merchant-class family by making money from his writing pursuits. After he had bragged to his brothers about this venture, his embarrassment when the magazine failed in December 1800 must have caused him to reconsider a literary career. During the same period in 1799 Brown also completed his fourth major novel, Edgar Huntly; or, Memoirs of a Sleep-Walker. Although it is not as intellectually challenging as Arthur Mervyn because the central character is not as complex, Edgar Huntly is a fascinating book. In Huntly, Brown retreated to some of the devices of the Gothic that he had used in Wieland. Huntly is a character tormented by psychological impulses that are often beyond his control, and the mysterious Clithero is a dangerous madman whose motives and actions defy explanation. Brown used the phenomenon of sleepwalking, as he had used ventriloquism and spontaneous combustion in Wieland, to achieve thrilling effects. In Edgar Huntly, Brown also manipulated the elements of the Indian captivity narrative, with superb results. Borrowing elements of these narratives that were popular for over a century with American readers, he became the first American novelist to appeal to fears and fantasies about In-

CHARLES BROCKDEN BROWN I 141 dians. His use of the wilderness setting and his portraits of struggles between Huntly and his Indian enemies stand at the pivotal point in American literature between the firsthand accounts and the later tales of western adventure and frontier violence. James Fenimore Cooper acknowledged his debt to Brown's innovations. That Brown was more successful in reaching a larger audience with these devices than he had been with his earlier works is acknowledged by the fact that Edgar Huntly was his only work to go into a second edition during his lifetime. To say that he strained for popular appeal with this novel is not to deny its intellectual importance, for Brown was a brilliant writer at the height of his powers when he composed this work. The reader who looks behind the veneer of titillating details for Brown's familiar philosophical and social questioning will not be disappointed. Brown's central interest again is the development of his main character and the forces that shape his experience; and he clearly meant to subordinate the thrilling elements of his tale to the character study. As his friend and critic William Dunlap said of his works, "None of Mr. Brown's novels are of that class which pretends merely to amuse, and is therefore addressed to 'popular feelings and credulity.' His aim was much higher." Thus, again there are two ways of reading this book: the reader who focuses only upon the events of Huntly's narrative will see that he is deeply affected by external occurrences that lead him into a maze of terrifying adventures in the forest, from which he emerges with a greater awareness of his physical prowess and courage. The experienced reader of Brown will begin immediately to question the deeper motives of Huntly's thoughts and actions, and will recognize Huntly's quest as a psychological search from which he emerges as bewildered as ever. The central question of what factors set Huntly on his strange course leads to answers more

frightening and consequential for American society than the bloodthirsty savages that Huntly conquers. Once again Brown chose a male narrator; and this time the main character addresses the story to a silent correspondent, and thereby more directly to the reader. Huntly writes to his fiancee, Mary Waldegrave. When the account begins, Huntly is walking at night toward his home in Solesbury after visiting Mary, whose brother has recently been murdered beneath a large elm, which Huntly decides to visit on his way. As a good friend of the dead man, Huntly has been troubled by his death almost to the point of insanity. Searching the area for clues, he discovers a strange man weeping and digging in the earth beneath the tree. During the next few days Huntly learns that the man is a local servant named Clithero, whose nocturnal visits to the tree and to a nearby wilderness cave occur while he is sleepwalking. Huntly believes these actions to be the result of his guilt over Waldegrave's murder. When he accuses Clithero, however, the servant confesses his guilt in a different crime, which he committed in Europe and which he fled to America to forget. The complicated story that Clithero tells Huntly is a key to the meaning of the novel. It forms the basis for Huntly's irrational empathy with the man and for his commitment to saving the servant from his self-torture. As with other characters in Brown's novels, Clithero's early poverty led him to use wit and charm to win the support of a wealthy person who rewarded him with responsibility and money. His benefactress was an attractive widow named Mrs. Lorimer, who adopted him, educated him, and made him her son's companion. After Clithero had given evidence of moral righteousness by reporting to his patroness on her son's illicit activities, she decided to arrange a union between Clithero and her niece, Clarice. Clithero's fortune seemed assured.

142 I AMERICAN Unfortunately, Mrs. Lorimer had a wicked twin brother who had driven off her lover, Saresfield, and had been exiled, with her approval, for various crimes. Her conviction that she and her brother would die at the same time led her to dismiss reports of his death at sea. When the brother reappeared one night and attacked Clithero on a dark street, Clithero killed him without realizing who he was. When he learned the dead man's identity, Clithero became convinced that he must murder Mrs. Lorimer to protect her from the news, since the report of her brother's death would surely kill her. He entered her bedroom to perform this deluded act of mercy. As he prepared to stab the person in her bed (who was actually Clarice), Mrs. Lorimer entered the room and discovered him. He immediately confessed his killing of the brother and his intention to murder Mrs. Lorimer. When the woman fainted, Clithero mistakenly thought he had caused her death, and fled to America to brood over his guilt. After relating this tale to Huntly, Clithero vanishes into the wilderness. Huntly is convinced that Clithero is blaming himself unduly for these events: the killing of the brother was obviously in self-defense, and the intended murder of Mrs. Lorimer, according to Huntly, was due to momentary insanity that could be forgiven because it resulted from benevolent intentions. On the basis of this spurious reasoning, Huntly decides that it is his mission in life to save Clithero; and he sets out into the wilderness to redeem this deluded soul. During the series of hair-raising adventures that follow, Huntly's increasingly apparent identification with Clithero raises for the alert reader important questions about his deeper motives. While Brown emphasized this irrational attachment, he left the essential reasons for the relationship unclear until later in the novel. Before Huntly begins his pursuit in the wilderness, however, Brown provides some clues for deciphering his motivations. Huntly's examination

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of Clithero's belongings reveals that the servant had buried beneath the elm a manuscript that Mrs. Lorimer had written about her relationship to her brother. This discovery provides an important connection between the experiences of Huntly and Clithero. As Huntly ponders Clithero's situation, he remembers that he, too, possesses some secret letters of Waldegrave that he had promised to destroy. At this point another critical event occurs to jar Huntly's mind. The hopes that he and Mary have had for marriage rest upon a large sum of money that Mary found in her brother's possession when he died. Just as Huntly is contemplating Clithero's situation, a man named Weymouth arrives to prove that the money is actually his and had only been left with Waldegrave for safekeeping. This news leaves Huntly and Mary penniless, and their plans for future happiness dashed. After this shock Huntly, too, begins to walk in his sleep, and in that condition he hides Waldegrave's letters, just as he had seen Clithero bury Mrs. Lorimer's manuscript. Unaware that he himself has hidden the letters, Huntly becomes panicked about their disappearance. It is only after the personal catastrophe that he embarks on his pursuit of Clithero. In the forest Huntly encounters the perils of the wilderness: trapped inside a dark cave at one point, cornered on a cliff by a vicious panther at another. He also happens upon a band of Indians who have captured a young white woman. While protesting throughout that he has always been a man of reason and gentleness, Huntly kills five of the savages, rescues the girl, and performs tremendous feats of strength and daring in his efforts to return home from his extraordinary journey in the forest. The psychological implications of this quest become evident when Huntly recalls that his parents were killed by Indians when he was a child. As Brown again explores the passions that lie beneath the surface of enlightened reason, he shows how Huntly's fear of the In-

CHARLES BROCKDEN BROWN I 143 dians and his. latent desire for vengeance are transformed into acts of violent aggression. Although parallels between the experiences of Clithero and Huntly are vague at first, it becomes evident that underlying their strange actions are the similar economic factors in their lives. While Huntly is reluctant to expose this element of his character to his fiancee, to whom his narrative is addressed, he identifies with Clithero as another victim of poverty whose hopes for happiness through the financial resources of another are suddenly destroyed. Unlike the resilient Arthur Mervyn, who is capable of gliding from one patron to another, Huntly despairs over his own situation and approximates the insane plight of Clithero. In both characters their dependent conditions have bred deep-seated resentments of those they have had to rely upon and irrational guilt feelings about the events that have caused them to lose their tenuous holds on economic security. Capricious acts of life—the chance attack by Mrs. Lorimer's brother on Clithero and, as we later learn, the random attack of an Indian upon Waldegrave—destroy their opportunities and throw them into states of psychological confusion. Brown adds an important dimension to this social theme when he makes the Indian uprising, of which Waldegrave is an early victim, the result of economic and social problems. The onceloyal old Indian woman whom they call Queen Mab incites the raid after she becomes disillusioned with white rule, and it is one of the braves she inspired who strikes down Waldegrave. The puzzling end of this novel, which has dissatisfied many readers, results from the complex interweaving of economic and social motivations that unite Clithero and Huntly. When Huntly finally emerges from the wilderness, he discovers Saresfield, who, besides being the former lover of Mrs. Lorimer, was a friend of his at an earlier time. Saresfield tells Huntly that Mrs. Lorimer is not dead but is now Saresfield's wife,

and that Waldegrave's letters were not stolen, but have been recovered from the spot where Huntly hid them. He also reveals to Huntly that his errors and impetuous actions have endangered others: members of Huntly's search party had faced perils, and Saresfield himself had nearly been shot in the dark by Huntly. Thus, Huntly is forced to recognize his capacity for self-delusion and the risk of meddling in the affairs of others. As the book draws near its conclusion, it would appear that he has reached greater self-awareness. At this point, however, a disturbing new conflict occurs. While Saresfield insisted that Clithero was still insane and that his attempted murder of Mrs. Lorimer remained an unforgivable crime, Huntly continued to support Clithero. When Saresfield departs, Huntly finds Clithero and informs him that his former benefactress is still alive. Huntly hoped that this news would comfort him, but to his astonishment, the madman sets out again to kill her and to close his circle of fate. Huntly's response is rather disturbing. Instead of pursuing Clithero again, this time to save his friend's wife, Huntly sends Saresfield two letters—the first a short note alerting him to the danger and a second long letter in which he laments, "I have erred, not through sinister or malignant intentions, but from the impulse of misguided, indeed, but powerful benevolence." As it turns out, the first letter alerts Saresfield, who stops the villain and transports him out of the city. On the ship to the insane asylum, Clithero jumps overboard to his death. In Saresfield's absence his wife receives the second letter, which so shocks her that she miscarries her expected child and is "imminently endangered." The book ends with an angry letter from Saresfield to Huntly in which he blames him for "an untimely birth [which] has blasted my fondest hope" because Huntly not only played the fool with Clithero, but stupidly sent his letter to Saresfield's home instead of to his office: "You

144 I AMERICAN acted in direct opposition to my counsel and to the plainest dictates of propriety." Thus, Huntly's hopes for the future have been permanently altered by Mary's loss of her fortune and by the events that have cut him off from his only other possible source of support, Saresfield, whose generous wife had once bestowed her financial blessing on Clithero. The questions remain, then, of why Huntly disregarded Saresfield's orders and why he did not take more deliberate action to protect Saresfield's wife from harm. Some critics have suggested that at the end Huntly is also insane. However, Brown's emphasis upon the entanglement of the lives and drives of Clithero and Huntly provides a more satisfactory answer— that Huntly acted out of the same kind of unconscious motive that led him to destroy the Indians and avenge the deaths of his parents. Huntly's humiliation and financial impotence may be driven on the unconscious level to unleash the danger of Clithero upon the Saresfields as a perverted effort to strike back at the financial elite. The pompous tone of Saresfield's letter to Huntly that ends the book certainly stresses the social chasm separating Huntly and Saresfield: "You acted in direct opposition to my counsel and to the plainest dictates of propriety. Be more circumspect and more obsequious for the future. . . . May this be the last arrow in the quiver of adversity! Farewell." When Huntly claims that he has acted by the impulse of "powerful benevolence," he is aping the rhetoric of the emerging benevolent empire in America, which Brown saw replacing the ideal of social equality with a system of charitable organizations to keep the poor indebted and confined. Brown's novel suggests that without being aware of his own deeper motives, Huntly sides with Clithero against the privileged Saresfields. Just as he has taken his revenge upon the Indians for depriving him of his parents, he joins

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with Clithero in bitter resentment over their economic deprivation. While they are certainly vehicles for the propagation of radical theories, all of Brown's major novels have social and economic themes at heart. His most interesting and oddly sympathetic characters are those whose poverty turns them into villains or into deluded seekers of wealth or comfort. At the most fundamental level, the philosophical attitudes, the political notions, and even the psychological compulsions of Brown's major characters are rooted in the imbalance of wealth in Western civilization. Brown's own feeling of financial failure, of possessing a talent that was not rewarded in his society, surely reinforced his view of economic injustice in the new republic. But whatever the ultimate source of his convictions, his intellectual position in his four major novels emphasizes the dangers of a political system that protects the interests of the wealthy while proclaiming the equality of opportunity. Such false promises create tensions in the society that can lead some to use their wits to defraud the unsuspecting and can lead others to despair, violence, and insanity. Brown recognized that while some, like the Wielands and the Saresfields, insulate themselves in their wealth and social position, there will be mad and tragic figures such as Ormond, Carwin, and Huntly roaming the land to make social upheaval or irrational violence an ever-present danger. After the publication of Edgar Huntly in the summer of 1799, Brown devoted the rest of the year to editing the Monthly Magazine and to work on "Stephen Calvert," which was to be the first part of a five-part book that he never completed. (Dunlap later included the "Calvert" fragment in his biography of Brown.) As the turn of the century was nearing, Brown seemed to alter his direction. He put "Stephen Calvert" aside and took up Arthur Mervyn again, completing the second part of that work before the sum-

CHARLES BROCKDEN BROWN I 145 mer of 1800. Brown's novels were not selling well, his friends were not submitting manuscripts for the magazine as they had promised, and his brothers were strongly urging him to abandon writing and enter business with them. Approaching thirty and unmarried, he must have wondered, as had Freneau and Brackenridge before him, if the American republic was capable of supporting its writers and men of letters. In a letter to Dunlap, Brown made this telling speculation: Does it not appear to you, that to give poetry a popular currency and universal reputation, a particular cast of manners and state of civilization is necessary? I have sometimes thought so; but perhaps an error, and the want of popular poems argues only the demerit of those who have already written, or some defect in their works which unfits them for every taste and understanding. By poems Brown meant all imaginative works of serious literary intention. At this point he decided not to abandon his literary efforts, but he did attempt to lessen the philosophical and psychological complexity of his works in order to gain wider popularity among American readers. It is impossible to gauge the impact upon Brown's writing career of another event in his personal life. About this time he began his long courtship of Elizabeth Linn, the sister of the important Presbyterian minister and writer John Blair Linn. During the four years before their marriage in 1804, Brown met continued resistance from his parents, who forbade his marriage to a non-Quaker, and from Elizabeth and her family, who had doubts about Brown's temperament, his ideas, and his income. Elizabeth may even have agreed with Brown's brothers that her lover's novels were too gloomy and obscure. Whether in response to these influences or not, Brown's philosophical and political views

moved during these months toward the conservative attitudes that characterized his political pamphleteering after 1806. And the last two novels that Brown wrote, Clara Howard; or, The Enthusiasm of Love and Jane Talbot: A Novel, completed before the end of 1801, reflect a significant change in his work. Lacking the elements that characterized his major works—the supernatural, abnormal psychology, violence, and insanity—these novels contained nothing that would have offended polite readers; and Jane Talbot appears almost to represent the resolution of Brown's intellectual conflicts into a compromise between rational skepticism and religious sentiment. For such reasons these works are of less interest to modern readers than are the four major novels. Even in these lesser works, however, there are still hints of the Brown who cannot resist a sly wink at the alert reader and an undercurrent of ironic questioning. Philip Stanley, the hero in Clara Howard, shares with Arthur Mervyn a tendency to gauge the level of his affection for a woman according to the size of her fortune. Perhaps with tongue in cheek Brown also repeats some of the situations he had used in Edgar Huntly, with none of the terrible consequences. For example, whereas Huntly's dreams for happiness with Mary Waldegrave are ruined when a claim is made against her fortune, the happiness of Philip and Clara is assured when a similar claim against her money proves groundless. Even in this sentimental tale there is a suggestion that the prime movers behind such "enthusiasms of love" are the cold forces of social desires and economic necessities. In Jane Talbot, Brown seems to have been consciously composing his farewell to the writing of fiction; and in the trials that frustrate the love relationship between Jane Talbot and Henry Golden, he seems to have been depicting the

146 I AMERICAN kind of problems he was having in his relationship with Elizabeth Linn. Because Golden has radical ideas derived from his readings of such works as Godwin's Political Justice, his reputation is attacked on various points by Jane's guardian, Mrs. Fielder. During the conflicts that ensue, Brown gives serious treatment to the importance of religious belief as an essential element in a person's philosophy. A religious skeptic, Golden recognizes that a rationalist philosophy leaves many profound questions unanswered. Jane has religious sentiments but lacks an intellectual structure for her feelings. Over time Golden submits himself to faith in a "Divine Parent and Judge," and he and Jane are joined in a marriage that seems to symbolize Brown's own compromise between his early questioning and the later acquiescence that paved the way for his own marriage. With the publication of Jane Talbot, Brown turned his life toward new pursuits. He joined his brothers in their business for a time, and tried different kinds of writing. In 1803 he published two important political pamphlets that attracted more public attention than anything he had previously written. In An Address to the Government of the United States on the Cession of Louisiana to the French, Brown attacked the policy of the Jefferson administration, which he and his merchant brothers believed to be too soft on France. Shortly thereafter, he followed with Monroe's Embassy; or, the Conduct of the Government in Relation to Our Claims to the Navigation of the Mississippi, in which he advocated war as the only way to open the West to American economic interests. Despite the evolution of Brown's philosophy toward a more conventional view, it is still surprising that he would resort to such inflammatory positions as those expressed in these pamphlets. With these essays he was suddenly regarded as an important thinker, and his ideas were debated on the floor of Congress. At the end of 1803 Brown also began to pub-

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lish The Literary Magazine and American Register, which he edited until 1807. As he introduced this new journal, he looked back over his career and wrote a bitter statement indicating that he felt his years as a novelist in America had been wasted: "I should enjoy a large share of my own respect at the present moment if nothing had ever flowed from my pen, the production of which could be traced to me." While continuing to work on this journal, Brown completed a translation of Volney's A View of the Soil and Climate of the United States, in 1804; and in November of that year the respectable editor, translator, and political sage was married to Elizabeth Linn. His parents refused to attend the Presbyterian wedding, and shortly thereafter he was quietly excommunicated from his Quaker meeting in Philadelphia. In the six years of marriage that followed, Brown was able to support his wife and their four children despite his continually failing health. Between 1807 and 1810 he edited a serious semiannual journal, The American Register, or General Repository of History, Politics, and Science, and he began an ambitious work, A System of General Geography. He had completed a substantial amount of work on this project, of which only the prospectus survives, when he died of tuberculosis on February 22, 1810. The career of Charles Brockden Brown is in many ways a reflection of the history of American letters during his time. Just as Brown had begun his literary life with high hopes of capturing the attention and affecting the minds of the new democratic republic, so his whole generation of writers sought ways of appealing to their countrymen and opening their eyes to the truths of their society. By the time Brown abandoned fiction, the other writers of his generation also had ceased their literary efforts. But despite the unresponsiveness of his own generation, Brown produced a series of major

CHARLES BROCKDEN BROWN I 147 works that show him to be far ahead of any other American writer of his time in theme and in literary experimentation. His importance as a forerunner of Cooper, Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville was obscured by literary histories that treated Emerson's American Scholar as the start of American letters. Critics have only now begun to explore the literary merits of his works.

Selected Bibliography

WORKS OF CHARLES BROCKDEN BROWN Alcuin: A Dialogue. Parts I and II. New York: T. and J. Swords, 1798. Parts III and IV in William Dunlap, The Life of Charles Brockden Brown. Philadelphia: James P. Parke, 1815. Wieland; or, The Transformation. An American Tale. New York: T. and J. Swords, 1798. Ormond; or, The Secret Witness. New York: G. Forman, 1799. Arthur Mervyn; or. Memoirs of the Year 1793. Philadelphia: H. Maxwell, 1799. Edgar Huntly; or, Memoirs of a Sleep-Walker. Philadelphia: H. Maxwell, 1799. Arthur Mervyn; or, Memoirs of the Year 1793. Part II. New York: George F. Hopkins, 1800. Clara Howard; In a Series of Letters. Philadelphia: Asbury Dickins, 1801. (Published in England as Philip Stanley; or, The Enthusiasm of Love. London: Lane, Newman, 1807. In the American eds. of Brown's collected novels, it is entitled Clara Howard; or, The Enthusiasm of Love.) Jane Talbot: A Novel. Philadelphia: John Conrad; Baltimore: M. and J. Conrad; Washington City: Rapin, Conrad, 1801. Carwin, the Biloquist, and Other American Tales and Pieces. London: Henry Colburn, 1822. (Also printed with Memoirs of Stephen Calvert in William Dunlap, op. cit., II, 200-63, 274-472.)

COLLECTED WORKS

The Novels of Charles Brockden Brown. 1 vols. Boston: S. G. Goodrich, 1827. The Novels of Charles Brockden Brown. 6 vols. Philadelphia: M. Polock, 1857. Charles Brockden Brown's Novels. 6 vols. Philadelphia: David McKay, 1887; reprinted Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1963. MODERN EDITIONS

Alcuin: A Dialogue. Intro, by LeRoy Elwood Kimball. New Haven: Carl and Margaret Rollins, 1935. Arthur Mervyn; or, Memoirs of the Year 1793. Edited with intro. by Wrrner Berthoff. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1962. Edgar Huntly; or, Memoirs of a Sleep-Walker. Edited with intro. by David Lee Clark. New York: Macmillan, 1928. More recently edited with intro. by David Stineback. New Haven: College and University Press, 1973. The Novels and Related Works of Charles Brockden Brown, Sidney J. Krause, gen. ed. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1977. Vol. I, Wieland and Memoirs of Carwin. Five vols. projected. Ormond. Edited with intro., chronology, and bibliography by Ernest Marchand. New York: American, 1937. Reprinted New York: Hafner, 1962. The Rhapsodist and Other Uncollected Writings. Edited with intro. by Harry R. Warfel. New York: Scholars' Facsimiles and Reprints, 1943. Sketches of the History of Carsol. Facs. ed. Washington, D.C.: 1972. Wieland; or, The Transformation, Together with Memoirs of Carwin, the Biloquist, a Fragment. Edited with intro. by Fred Lewis Pattee. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1926. Reprinted New York: Hafner, 1958; Harcourt, Brace and World, 1969. A new editing from the original with an intro. in Three Early American Novels, edited by William S. Kable. Columbus, Ohio: Charles E. Merrill, 1970. Dolphin paperback of Wieland. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1962. BIBLIOGRAPHIES Hemenway, Robert E., and Dean H. Keller. 1 'Charles Brockden Brown, America's First Important Novelist: A Checklist of Biography and Criticism." Bibliographical Society of America. Papers, 60 (1966), pp. 349-362.

148 I AMERICAN Krause, Sydney J. "A Census of the Works of Charles Brockden Brown." Serif, 3:27-55 (1966). Spiller, Robert E., et al. Literary History of the United States: Bibliography. New York and London: Macmillan, 1974. Pp. 417-19; 879; 1153. Witherton, Paul. "Charles Brockden Brown: A Bibliographical Essay." Early American Literature, 9 (1974), pp. 164-87.

BIOGRAPHIES Clark, David Lee. Charles Brockden Brown: Pioneer Voice of America. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1952. Dunlap, William. The Life of Charles Brockden Brown; Together with Selections from the Rarest of His Printed Works, from His Original Letters, and from His Manuscripts Before Unpublished. Philadelphia: James P. Parke, 1815. (Also Dunlap's abridgment, Memoirs of Charles Brockden Brown, the American Novelist. London: Henry Colburn, 1822.) Prescott, William H. "Life of Charles Brockden Brown,'' in Jared Sparks, ed., Library of American Biography. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1834. Warfel, Harry R. Charles Brockden Brown: American Gothic Novelist. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1949. Supplemented by his Footnotes to Charles Brockden Brown: American Gothic Novelist (1949). Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1953.

CRITICAL STUDIES Bell, Michael D. " The Double-Tongued Deceiver': Sincerity and Duplicity in the Novels of Charles Brockden Brown." Early American Literature, 9:143-63 (1974). Berthoff, W. B. "Charles Brockden Brown's Historical 'Sketches': A Consideration." American Literature, 28:147-54(1956). . "Adventures of the Young Man: An Approach to Charles Brockden Brown." American Quarterly, 9:421-34(1957). . " 'A Lesson on Concealment': Brockden Brown's Method in Fiction." Philological Quarterly, 37:45-57 (1958).

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Brancaccio, Patrick. "Studied Ambiguities: Arthur Mervyn and the Problem of the Unreliable Narrator. " American Literature, 42:18-27 (1970). Hedges, William. "Charles Brockden Brown and the Culture of Contradictions." Early American Literature, 9:107-42(1974). Hirsh, David H. "Charles Brockden Brown as a Novelist of Ideas." Books at Brown, 20:164-84 (1965). Hoyt, Charles A. Minor American Novelists. Carbondale, 111.: University of Southern Illinois Press, 1970. Kimball, Arthur. Rational Fictions: A Study of Charles Brockden Brown. McMinnville, Ore.: Linfield Research Institute, 1968. Manly, William M. "The Importance of Point of View in Brockden Brown's Wieland." American Literature, 35:311-21 (1963). Marchand, Ernest. "The Literary Opinions of Charles Brockden Brown." Studies in Philology, 31:541-66(1934). Ringe, Donald A. Charles Brockden Brown. New York: Twayne, 1966. . "Charles Brockden Brown," in Major Writers of Early American Literature, edited by Everett Emerson. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1972. Snell, George. The Shapers of American Fiction, 1798-1947. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1947. Vilas, Martin S. Charles Brockden Brown: A Study of Early American Fiction. Burlington, Vt.: Free Press Association, 1904. Witherington, Paul. "Image and Idea in Wieland and Edgar Huntly." Serif, 3:19-26 (1966). Ziff, Larzer. "A Reading of Wieland." PMLA, 77:51-57 (1962).

BACKGROUND READING Charvat, William. The Profession of Authorship in America, 1800-1870: The Papers of William Charvat, edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1968. Chase, Richard. The American Novel and Its Tradition. New York: Doubleday, 1957. Howard, Leon. The Connecticut Wits. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1943. Martin, Terrence. The Instructed Vision: Scottish

CHARLES BROCKDEN BROWN I 149 Common Sense Philosophy and the Origins of American Fiction. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1961. Nye, Russel B. The Cultural Life of the New Nation, 1776-1830. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1960. Silverman, Kenneth. A Cultural History of the Ameri-

can Revolution. New York: T. Y. Crowell, 1976. Simpson, Lewis P. The Man of Letters in New England and the South: Essays on the History of the Literary Vocation in America. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1973. —EMORY ELLIOTT

William Cullen Bryant 1J94-18J8

TLmHE poetry of William Cullen Bryant has

he was especially fortunate to have had at his disposal the volumes of English poetry that his father, Peter Bryant, himself the author of Augustan verse, had brought to their isolated home in western Massachusetts. They ranged from William Shakespeare, John Milton, and John Dryden through the major and minor poets of the eighteenth century—including such "graveyard" figures as Robert Blair, Beilby Porteus, and Henry Kirke White—to Wordsworth and the early Byron. The aspiring poet read much of it. We know from both his critical essays and his poetry that the range of Bryant's knowledge was broad. Illustrations and examples in his critical prose are drawn from Shakespeare and Milton, and certain lines in his verse echo familiar ones by Alexander Pope, Thomas Gray, and William Cowper. There are verses in "Thanatopsis" that resemble Blair's The Grave, and some in "A Winter Piece" that are unmistakably Wordsworthian. The point is not, however, that such passages exist. They are always to be expected, and too much must not be made of them. Although they illustrate well the range of verse from which, under his father's tutelage, the young Bryant learned his craft, they are merely the last vestiges of those poetic masters from whom the young man quickly established his independence. Bryant was no imitator. Whatever he learned from his predecessors, the content and form of

always been difficult to place in an appropriate context. Because he was a poet of nature who found in the commonplace things of the natural world a source for reflection, critics often have sought to compare him with earlier poets who, like him, had developed their themes in descriptive poems of a philosophic cast. When his mature poetry was first published in pamphlet form in 1821, it was compared at once with that of William Cowper and, when a much enlarged edition was printed in 1832, with that of, among others, James Thomson and William Wordsworth. In the early nineteenth century this attitude was perhaps understandable. No poet of Bryant's stature had yet appeared in America, and critics were unsure of how to judge him. The persistence of this view into the twentieth century, however, does Bryant a serious injustice. Aside from the fact that no one poet could possibly bear close resemblance to writers so different as those with whom he has been compared, Bryant deserves to be seen on his own terms and valued for his accomplishments, however limited they may sometimes seem to be. Every poet learns from the works of his predecessors. He imitates what he has read as he learns to write; and even when he has achieved his distinctive voice, he sometimes echoes lines or images from other poets that have stuck in his mind. Bryant is no exception. As a young man

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WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT I 151 his poems are unmistakably his own. If he affirms an ordered world in his verse, it is not the deistic order of Thomson's The Seasons; if his poetic vision is fundamentally religious, it is not the evangelical Christianity of Cowper; if he maintains a close relation to nature and to nature's God, the two never merge into the pantheistic system of Wordsworth. Although Bryant no doubt learned to handle the blank verse form from reading the works of these and other poets who had made it an effective vehicle for contemplative poetry, his own blank verse does not resemble theirs in either movement or tone. Eclectic in his taste, he developed a point of view and mode of expression only partially conditioned by the poets he read. At least as important were other elements in Bryant's education and training, especially the beliefs of two strong men who left an indelible impression upon him. One was his maternal grandfather, Ebenezer Snell, the stern Calvinist with whom the Bryant family lived for a number of years. The religious training the young boy received at his hands left such a mark upon him that Bryant the mature poet has sometimes been called a Puritan. This influence was strongly countered, however, by that of the poet's father. Peter Bryant, a medical man, was a much more liberal thinker and strongly influenced the boy toward the Unitarian thought that the poet eventually accepted. Both men, moreover, influenced his reading and writing. Bryant read the Scriptures and, at his grandfather's prompting, attempted to turn parts of the Old Testament into English verse. But he also read the classics, and under his father's guidance he began at an early age to write a kind of Augustan verse. It is almost as if, in the village of Cummington, Massachusetts, the budding poet was undergoing in small something of the intellectual experience of American society as a whole in the opening years of the nineteenth century. As Bryant prepared to enter Williams College in 1810, he encountered yet another important

intellectual system, Scottish associationist philosophy. Among the books he read were three by members of that "common sense" school: Dugald Stewart, Thomas Reid, and, most important, Archibald Alison, the aesthetician of the group. Unlike some earlier eighteenth-century thinkers, these philosophers accepted the external world as both real and knowable by the human mind. Because of its constitution, the mind, acting upon the impressions that came to it through the senses, could discern the qualities of that world and exert upon it the various modifications of thought. When disposed in the proper fashion, moreover, the mind could also perceive and be moved by the beauty and sublimity of the material world. The philosophy did not, of course, limit itself to nature; but examples drawn from the natural scene, from landscape gardening, and from landscape art are so important in Alison's Essays on the Nature and Principles of Taste as to make quite clear the aesthetician's deep interest in that aspect of material reality. Because the aesthetic laid such stress not solely on the beauty and sublimity of the material world, but also on the essential truth to be found in it, the poet had of necessity to be a close observer of the external scene. The representation of nature in his verse had to be accurate. In no other way could he be sure that the meaning he perceived was true, or that he had been able to communicate it effectively to his reader. Since knowledge comes to the mind through sensory experience—primarily through sight and secondarily through hearing—visual and, to a lesser extent, auditory images must make up the bulk of the poem. The mind of the poet, then, acting upon the landscape, re-creates his vision in the poem; and if his sight be true and if his mind interpret the sensory images properly, he will draw from the natural scene a meaning that he will embody in his poem. Readers of that poem, moreover, will have the description before them expressed in suggestive language. If the poet has done his work well, they will perceive both the

752 / AMERICAN beauty and the truth he has discovered for them. Such an aesthetic quite naturally had a profound effect on Bryant's poetry. The theory demanded that his material be drawn not from the poets he had read, but from what he had personally experienced among the hills and valleys of western Massachusetts. It gave him a point of view, that of a sensitive observer who consciously sought the beauty and truth to be found in the natural scene; and it gave him a source for his imagery in the sights and sounds he had witnessed in his rambles around his native countryside. Not all of Bryant's subjects, of course, are drawn from the natural landscape. His poems supporting the struggle for freedom in Greece and his long philosophic poem "The Ages" are obvious exceptions. But these and a few similar ones aside, the bulk of Bryant's poetry does indeed record his direct and continuing encounter with the natural world; and these are the poems by which his accomplishment must be judged today. In the best of this verse, he frees himself from his poetic masters, creates a vision of reality that bears little resemblance to theirs, and speaks in a poetic voice that is unmistakably his own. Born November 3, 1794, in Cummington, Massachusetts, a village that had been settled for only some twenty-five years, William Cullen Bryant grew up in much the same fashion as most other boys in America. With his older brother, Austin, he attended the district school, where he received an education of the most elementary kind; and, although somewhat frail, he learned to work in his grandfather's fields as soon as he was able to handle the farm tools. Both winter and summer he rambled among the neighboring hills, and became from his earliest days, he later wrote, a keen observer of nature in all its various forms. During the stormy days and long evenings of winter, Bryant and his brother read the books in their father's well-chosen li-

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brary, especially the Iliad in Pope's edition and, when they tired of Pope, the works of Sir Edmund Spenser, Cowper, and other English writers of verse and prose. Cullen, as he was called, was different from most boys, however, in showing signs of a strong intellectual bent. He began to compose verse as early as 1802, and wrote a poem for declamation at school in 1804 that attained such currency in the neighborhood that it was published in the Hampshire Gazette on March 18, 1807. By that time the budding poet had written a goodly amount of juvenile verse—some, like his poem "On the Late Eclipse," in pentameter couplets, but at least one, a version of David's lament over Saul and Jonathan, in blank verse. His skill increased markedly; and when his father saw some satiric lines of his on Thomas Jefferson, occasioned by the Embargo Act of 1807—an act that particularly hurt the commerce of New England—he encouraged his son to write more. The result was Bryant's first book, The Embargo, a satiric poem of 244 lines in heroic couplets, "By a Youth of Thirteen." Peter Bryant arranged for its publication at Boston in 1808. The pamphlet was favorably reviewed by Alexander Hill Everett in the Monthly Anthology in June; and since the uproar over the embargo continued as supplementary acts were passed, the book quickly sold out. At his father's direction Cullen prepared a second edition, enlarged to 420 lines and including seven additional poems that he had written in 1807 and 1808. The new edition was published in February 1809, and this time the young man's name appeared on the title page. Although only a piece of juvenile verse that Bryant never included in any collected edition of his poems, The Embargo merits at least a glance for what it tells us about its author in 1809. While the original poem was retouched by his father and another gentleman in Boston, it remains nonetheless a remarkable performance for so

WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT I 153 young a poet and illustrates well both the native talent he possessed and the degree to which it had already been disciplined. Its Federalist politics and Augustan style reveal the bent of mind and poetic taste of the young man, attitudes he would abandon during the period of intellectual and artistic growth that quickly ensued. And the revised edition clearly shows the skill with which Bryant was already able to criticize and improve his verse. The second edition smooths or removes some infelicities of language, expands his treatment of the sufferings of New England workers under the embargo, and sharpens and extends the satire on Jefferson and his supporters. Both versions attack Napoleon and France as the enemies of freedom, but in the second edition the title poem is followed by another, "The Spanish Revolution," that makes an additional attack on the French. Because his son had shown such intellectual and artistic talent, Peter Bryant decided, despite his limited means, to give Cullen a college education. From November 1808 to October 1809, the young man studied the classics, first Latin with his uncle, Thomas Snell, in North Brookfield, and then Greek with Rev. Moses Hallock in Plainfield, Massachusetts. Cullen was a ready scholar and prepared himself so well in these languages, in mathematics, and in more general studies that he entered the sophomore class at Williams College in October 1810. He did not stay the year. Although he seemed to have enjoyed the literary society—the Philotechnian—to which he belonged, he was disappointed at the level of instruction; and, following the lead of his roommate, John Avery, he obtained an honorable dismissal during his third quarter so that he might prepare himself to enter Yale. His father's finances, however, would not permit the transfer. Although Austin was committed to farming, there were three boys and two girls younger than Cullen; and Peter Bryant had also to think of them. Instead of attending Yale,

therefore, the young poet was put to the study of the law, first with Samuel Howe at Worthington and later with William Baylies at West Bridgewater. As always, Bryant worked diligently, completed his studies in four years, and was admitted to practice law in August 1815. He settled in Plainfield in December of that year but, a better opportunity presenting itself, he formed a partnership with George H. Ives at Great Barrington the following fall. Bryant remained there for almost nine years, pursuing a career that he did not really like. Yet he seems to have been successful. By May 1817 he was able to buy out his partner; his solitary practice succeeded; and over the next few years he held a number of elected or appointed offices, including town clerk and justice of the peace. It was in Great Barrington, too, that he met and courted Frances Fairchild. They were married on January 11, 1821; and the first of their two daughters, Frances, was born the following year. Bryant felt isolated in western Massachusetts, however; and although he met and associated with the Sedgwick family in nearby Stockbridge, he longed for more literary company than was available in Berkshire villages. What made its absence the more keenly felt was the rapid development of his poetic career. Throughout the years of his education and legal training, Bryant had never stopped writing verse. As he mastered Latin and Greek, he tried his hand at translating Virgil, and later Sophocles and the Greek lyric poets. Indeed, the earliest of his poems, much reworked, that he included in his collected editions was "Version of a Fragment of Simonides," written while he was at Williams College. Bryant wrote a number of verse letters: to his brother Austin, to the Philotechnian Society at Williams, and later to his friend Jacob Porter (on the occasion of his marriage and, shortly thereafter, on the death of his wife). Most interesting of all, however, is a

154 I AMERICAN group of poems written while he was studying law. Many seem to record the vicissitudes of a romance between Bryant and a young lady from Rhode Island who had visited Cummington, while others, probably composed under the influence of the "graveyard" poets, show the young man's concern with and fear of death. Bryant was gradually freeing himself from his Augustan models. Under the influence of the associationist philosophers and of the Romantic poets, especially Wordsworth, that he had begun to read, he soon developed the mature voice of his best-known poetry. The dates of Bryant's first important poems cannot be established precisely. The writing of "Thanatopsis" has been placed as early as 1811 and as late as 1815, and both the date and the occasion for the writing of "To a Waterfowl" have been the subject of some discussion. But if William Cullen Bryant II is correct in his arguments, we may reasonably consider 1814-1815 as the period of the poet's coming of age. During this time he composed initial versions of some of his best-known poems: the central section of "Thanatopsis," "The Yellow Violet," "To a Waterfowl," "Inscription for the Entrance to a Wood," and "I Cannot Forget with What Fervid Devotion." The difference between these and his earlier verses is marked. They clearly indicate the relation he had discovered between the mind of the poet and the natural world he observes, and they record the meanings that the discerning eye can discover in the external scene. Both "The Yellow Violet" and "To a Waterfowl" illustrate the analogical method by which, according to the Scottish philosophers, the mind could discover meaning through the impressions it received from the external world; and ' Thanatopsis" and "Inscription" show the reflective mind deriving knowledge and comfort from its contemplation of nature. In language and imagery, too, these poems mark a real advance over the juvenile verse. Al-

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though some of the poems were later much revised to clarify the thought and remove some roughness in movement and tone, even the earliest versions indicate the progress Bryant had made in poetic diction. Never colloquial in his poetry, Bryant writes with an idiomatic freedom that does no violence to the natural patterns of educated language. Words like "russet," "illimitable," "primal," or "dissembled" sound natural in his verse; but he did learn from the new Romantic poets—especially Wordsworth and Robert Southey—to be, for the most part, precise and concrete in his imagery. Thus, although he may be guilty of such eighteenth-century diction as "the winged plunderer" in "Inscription," he also includes, in the early version of the poem, some sharply detailed descriptions of the external scene: here from tree to tree And through the rustling branches flit the birds In wantonness of spirit;—theirs are strains Of no dissembled rapture—while below The squirrel with rais 'd paws and form erect Chirps merrily. Once he had achieved his characteristic voice, the way was open for him to develop his vision of the world in language well suited to its expression. Bryant matured as a poet just at the time he was admitted to the practice of law; and at first he did nothing to advance his literary career, preferring to establish himself as a lawyer in Great Barrington. His father, however, acting upon the request of Willard Phillips, sent several of Bryant's poems to the North American Review. In September 1817 there appeared in the journal a four-stanza poem and a blank-verse fragment under the title "Thanatopsis," a name coined by one of the editors, and a "Fragment" that was later to become "Inscription for the Entrance to a Wood." These poems created a stir. Richard Henry Dana, who became Bryant's life-

WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT I 155 long friend, could not believe that they had been written in America; and through some mistake "Thanatopsis" was attributed for a time to the poet's father. Early the next year Cullen sent the Simonides fragment and "To a Waterfowl" to the magazine, and the two appeared in March 1818. Although all the poems were published anonymously, Bryant had been introduced to some of the literati of Boston; and during the next few years he contributed some prose pieces to the review. Despite this initial success, Bryant published no more poems at this time in the North American Review. He had also sent them 'The Yellow Violet," but the poetry section was discontinued for lack of verse of sufficient quality and the poem was not printed. During the next few years, however, literary opportunities opened up for him. At Catharine Sedgwick's request Bryant contributed a group of five hymns to a Unitarian collection, in 1820, and he continued to write a few new poems. In the spring of 1821, he was surprised to learn that he had been elected to Phi Beta Kappa four years earlier, and was now invited to deliver the Phi Beta Kappa poem at the Harvard commencement in August. While he was writing this poem, moreover, he learned from Edward T. Channing that Dana was about to publish his own journal, The Idle Man. During the summer of 1821, Bryant completed and delivered a poem, "The Ages," on the cyclical vision of history; and during the summer and fall he sent Dana four poems for his journal: "Green River," "A Walk at Sunset," "A Winter Piece" (then called "Winter Scenes"), and "The West Wind." But, most important of all, his friends in Boston—Channing, Dana, and Phillips—helped Bryant to publish a collection of his poems. The book is hardly more than a pamphlet, containing only eight poems in its forty-four pages: "The Ages," "To a Waterfowl," "Translation of a Fragment of Simonides," "Inscription for the

Entrance to a Wood," "The Yellow Violet," "Song" (later entitled "The Hunter of the West"), "Green River," and "Thanatopsis." This is the version of "Thanatopsis" that everyone knows, for while he was in Boston, Bryant wrote the introduction and conclusion that surround the now-revised section that had appeared in the North American Review. Slight as the book is, however, the publication of Poems (1821) was as significant an event in American literature as the appearance of Washington Irving 's The Sketch Book (1819-1820) and James Fenimore Cooper's The Spy (1821). A truly American poetic voice joined theirs in prose; and if the book did not receive a wide circulation outside Boston, it was well reviewed by Willard Phillips in the North American Review and by Gulian C. Verplanck in the New York American. Bryant's reputation was spreading not only in America but also in England, where the eight poems were reprinted in Specimens of the American Poets (1822) and reviewed in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine. Although Bryant had thus received considerable recognition both in the United States and abroad, he did not immediately pursue his poetic career. Quite the contrary. He remained in Great Barrington, practicing law. He may even have attempted, as he wrote in one of his poems, to break the spell of poetry and devote himself entirely to his profession. He did begin a satirical farce and a long narrative poem, but his output of poetry over the next two years was very slight. Late in 1823, however, yet another unexpected opportunity opened for him. In December of that year, Theophilus Parsons, editor of the United States Literary Gazette, asked him to contribute poetry on a regular basis. Since the payment offered—$200 a year—would increase his income substantially, Bryant readily accepted; and over the next two years he published some two dozen poems in that journal, including such important pieces as "The Rivulet," "An Indian at the

756 / AMERICAN Burial-Place of His Fathers," "Monument Mountain," and "A Forest Hymn." In January 1826, moreover, a volume of poems selected from the pages of the Gazette and including Bryant's verses was published in Boston, thereby giving the poet added visibility in the literary world. These years, 1824-1826, were a very important period in Bryant's life. They were undoubtedly the most productive that Bryant the poet ever had, but they also marked a crucial turning point for Bryant the man. Although well-established in Great Barrington, Bryant disliked the narrow community and was restive in his—to him—distasteful profession. He needed a larger arena for his talents, and his friends the Sedgwick brothers helped him find one. In April 1824 he visited Henry and Robert Sedgwick in New York, where he met James Fenimore Cooper, Fitz-Greene Halleck, Robert Sands, and Jared Sparks. During the following months, he considered the possibility of moving to that city. In January, Henry Sedgwick urged him to come down since a new literary review was under discussion and the owners wanted Bryant to be associated with it. Bryant made two trips, in February and March, but the negotiations took time; and it was not until May that he moved permanently to New York to be editor, with Henry J. Anderson, of the newly organized New-York Review and Atheneum Magazine. The first issue was dated June 1825. Like most contemporary journals, the NewYork Review was short-lived, lasting only a year. By the spring of 1826, Bryant was already making plans to merge it with the United States Literary Gazette. But before negotiations were complete, he took, in July, what he thought was to be a temporary job as editorial assistant on the New York Evening Post, an important city newspaper. Even after the merger of the magazines, which resulted in the United States Review and Literary Gazette, he divided his time between

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newspaper and magazine. Bryant was responsible for only half of the literary journal. He selected the poetry and supplied the reviews of books from New York and points south, while Charles Folsom, in Boston, handled the material from New England. The United States Review was thus an attempt to establish a national magazine, published simultaneously in the two cities; but it, too, failed, the last issue appearing in September 1827. Thereafter, Bryant cast his lot with the Evening Post. He became joint editor in December, bought a one-eighth share in the firm, and began an editorial career that ended at his death, more than half a century later. Bryant's first years in New York broadened his experience in ways that he could not have foreseen. He was soon caught up in the intellectual life of the city and began to associate with its leading writers and painters. In November 1825 he was elected to membership in Fenimore Cooper's Bread and Cheese Club, where he joined such writers as Halleck, Verplanck, and Sands, and such painters as Samuel F. B. Morse, Asher B. Durand, and Thomas Cole. Bryant was quick to support the young painters in their attempt to establish the National Academy of Design, where he later lectured on mythology. In the spring of 1826, moreover, he delivered a series of four lectures on poetry at the New York Athenaeum. Bryant had long been interested in the criticism of poetry. He had criticized Solyman Brown's Essay on American Poetry in 1818; he had published his famous essay "On the Use of Trisyllabic Feet in Iambic Verse" in 1819; and he had reviewed books of poetry. The lectures, however, gave him the opportunity to make a comprehensive aesthetic statement based on his knowledge of the Scottish philosophers, his wide reading in poetry, and his own poetic practice. These years also provided Bryant with additional publishing opportunities. The two literary journals required a large amount of material; and in addition to his reviews, Bryant printed a

WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT I 157 number of poems, both old and new, in them. He even tried his hand at fiction, publishing three of his thirteen prose tales in these magazines. The journals were not, however, his only outlets. He joined his friends in a number of cooperative ventures. With Verplanck and Sands he helped to write a series of Christmas annuals, called The Talisman, published under the pseudonym Francis Herbert, in December 1827, 1828, and 1829. Bryant contributed poetry and prose, including short fiction, to all three, printing such well-known poems as "The Past" and "To Cole, the Painter, Departing for Europe." In 1830 he contributed to The American Landscape, a book of paintings by his artist friends, engraved by Durand and with letterpress by the poet; and in 1832 he joined with Sands, William Leggett, Catharine Sedgwick, and James Kirke Paulding to publish Tales of Glauber-Spa, for which Bryant wrote two stories, "The Skeleton's Cave" and "Medfield," his last attempts in the genre. By far the most important event of these years, however, was the publication of the first collected edition of Bryant's works. The 1821 Poems had been merely a pamphlet. Now, ten years later, he selected eighty-nine poems, most of which had already appeared in print; revised them carefully, although not extensively; and published them in January 1832, in a book of 240 pages. Readers and critics were thus for the first time given the opportunity to read all of Bryant's mature poetry in one collection, and the book confirmed his position as the leading American poet of his time. Bryant wanted his book to be published in England and wrote to Washington Irving, then still living abroad, to enlist his help. Irving placed the work with a London publisher, added his own name as editor, and dedicated it to Samuel Rogers, the well-known British poet— all necessary, Irving wrote to Bryant, to call attention to the book in a depressed literary market. Bryant was pleased, and grateful to Irving

for what he had done. Poems (1832) was now before the entire English-speaking literary world, and the reviews on both sides of the Atlantic were generally favorable. The publication of this volume marked the culmination of Bryant's career as a poet. Although the last edition of his works in 1876 contained more than double the number of poems of the 1832 volume, most of his best work was already behind him. An occasional later poem is worthy of note. "The Prairies," written after his visit to Illinois in the spring of 1832 and published the following year, is probably the best. But poems like "Earth" and "To the Apennines," written in Europe during his first trip abroad, and three blank-verse poems of the late 1830's and early 1840's—"The Fountain," "Noon," and "A Hymn of the Sea"—are also significant and should be mentioned. There were few years after 1832, however, in which Bryant wrote as many as six or eight poems; and as time passed, his annual production became very small. As new editions of his works appeared, Bryant incorporated into them the poems of the intervening years—four new poems in 1834, twelve in 1836, and only one in 1839—but since the bulk of each volume was essentially the same as that of 1832, there was little more to be said about his verse as a whole than had been elicited by the appearance of that volume. Bryant did publish three completely new books of poetry: The Fountain and Other Poems (1842), a small collection of poems including parts of an unfinished long work; The WhiteFooted Deer and Other Poems (1844), ten new poems including both "Noon" and "A Hymn of the Sea"; and Thirty Poems (1864), a small gathering that includes some of his Civil War verse. The poems from these volumes were also collected in the enlarged editions of his poetical works that appeared in 1847, 1855, 1858, 1871, and 1876, the last that Bryant himself brought out. None of these collections, it is fair to say, is

158 I AMERICAN so important as that of 1832, for none of them added appreciably to a poetic reputation that had peaked around then and was soon to be surpassed by that of the extraordinarily popular Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. The later books, including Thirty Poems, were well received; but it was Bryant the well-known, established figure who was being praised. He made no new departures in these books, remaining a poet of the early nineteenth century who lived to become an important newspaper editor who also occasionally wrote verse. By 1832, Bryant was firmly established on the Evening Post. Editor in chief since 1829, he bought an increasing share in the business over the years, and soon found himself in comfortable circumstances. Bryant was not always happy in the editorial profession, but it supported him well and eventually brought him wealth. It also drew him deeply into politics. He had long since given up his youthful Federalist views to become an outspoken advocate of liberal causes, first among the Jacksonian Democrats and later, as the Civil War approached, with the newly founded Republican Party; and he wrote vigorous editorials in support of the positions that, under his guidance, the paper advocated. Moreover, Bryant's success on the Evening Post gave him the opportunity to indulge his love for travel. Over a period of some forty years, he made six voyages to Europe and the Near East; he traveled in the United States, to Illinois and the South; and he went to Cuba and Mexico. On most of these trips he wrote letters back to the Evening Post, many of which were collected in three volumes: Letters of a Traveller (1850), Letters of a Traveller, Second Series (1859), and Letters from the East (1869). His position as editor of an important daily kept Bryant much in the public eye and, especially in his later years, he was frequently asked to deliver speeches on public occasions of both literary and civic importance. As well-known

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members of his generation died, Bryant was called upon to deliver memorial addresses for them: for Cole in 1848, Cooper in 1852, Irving in 1860, Halleck in 1869, and Verplanck in 1870; and he spoke on such occasions as the Burns centennial celebration in 1859, the laying of the cornerstone at the National Academy of Design in 1863, and the fiftieth anniversary of the Mercantile Library in 1870. A small collection of his speeches was published in 1873 as Orations and Addresses, a volume noteworthy mainly for gathering in one place the five major addresses on his friends in literature and the arts. Those on Cole, Cooper, and Irving are undoubtedly the most important. The poet felt called upon to comment on their works as well as their lives, and his critical judgments are of value both for what they say about the subjects themselves and for what they reveal about the poet's critical standards. In his last years, too, Bryant engaged in several large projects. He wrote the introduction and helped select the material for a massive anthology of poetry, The Library of Poetry and Song. Bryant had earlier published a smaller collection, Selections from the American Poets (1840); but the new volume, published in 1871, included British as well as American works and soon attained a wide popularity. He also wrote introductions for both Picturesque America; or, the Land We Live In, published in two volumes (1872 , 1874), and the multivolume Popular History of the United States (1878), written by Sydney Howard Gay. The most important work of Bryant's last years, however, was translation. From his earliest days he had translated Greek and Latin poetry, and his collected works contain a number of poems translated mainly from Spanish and German. In his old age he turned to Homer, making blank-verse translations of the Iliad (1870) and the Odyssey (1871-1872). Bryant found he could do this work without the strain that original composition entailed, and he

WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT I 159 sought in it a means to occupy himself after the death of his wife in 1866 had left him feeling like "one cast out of paradise." Bryant remained active until the last weeks of his life. Strong of body and alert in mind, he kept busy not only with his newspaper work but also with his many other activities. Occasionally he would write poetry; and it is a testimony to his intellectual vigor that one of his last poems, 'The Flood of Years," an imaginative treatment of life and death written in 1876, remains memorable. Bryant had lived a long and productive life. Although forced to earn his living by what he considered the drudgery of both law and journalism, he managed to keep his poetic fire alive and contributed both to the intellectual life of his city and to American literature as a whole. In his later years, of course, the exigencies of his profession forced him to mute his poetic voice; and he never completed the long poem he apparently attempted in the early 1840's. His accomplishment in poetry, however, is nonetheless significant. When Bryant died on June 12, 1878, in his eighty-fourth year, an important American poetic voice was stilled, one that had spoken truly of native things and, in its quiet way, had demonstrated to the English-speaking world that a distinctively American poetry had been born. What is there in Bryant's verse that can be called specifically American? Certainly not the form. Although in his later years he experimented successfully with a number of lyric stanzas, Bryant was never an innovator in verse. He believed, as he wrote in his "Lectures on Poetry," that every apprentice in the art learns his craft from reading the works of those who have gone before him. Like the mathematician, the poet takes up his art at just the place where his predecessors left off; and if he has genius enough, he advances it just as far as he is able. Such a theory places great emphasis on both tradition and continuity in poetry. It leaves little

room for the kind of originality that breaks with the past and launches the art in a new direction. Those critics were right, therefore, who in the early reviews of his poems observed his relation to the English poets of the immediate past; and even though more perceptive ones also made it clear that he did not imitate those poets, knowledgeable readers have always recognized that Bryant's roots lie deep in the British poetry he had read and loved as a young man. Both Bryant's philosophic stance and his aesthetic theory derive from a foreign source: Scottish associationist philosophy. Works by Dugald Stewart and Archibald Alison were extremely popular in the United States in those days: they were used as textbooks in the colleges, and they helped to form the aesthetic views of the first generation of American Romantic artists and writers. Along with other members of that generation, Bryant accepted as a matter of course both their realistic philosophy and its aesthetic corollaries. Their sensationalist view provided him with an epistemology that he never questioned, and he followed them in the moral and religious aspects of their belief. He found in Alison's treatment of the sublimity and beauty of nature an adequate explanation of the human response to the natural world, and he formed his taste around those aesthetic categories as they were illustrated and explained by Alison's treatment of both descriptive poetry and landscape art. Bryant even constructed his poems in accordance with those intellectual processes that the Scottish school had shown to be the means by which one learned from his impressions of external reality. One finds the influence of these beliefs throughout Bryant's poetry. The sensationalist basis of his thought is apparent in the numerous images of sight, sound, and even smell that are everywhere in his verse. Most, of course, are visual. But the sounds of birds and insects, of rippling water and rustling trees are also present, as is the fragrance of those flowers that oc-

160 / AMERICAN casionally appear. Like the philosophers, Bryant believed that through the senses, the sympathetic observer could establish a proper relation with external reality. Not everyone, of course, would react in the same way to the natural scene, nor would the individual relate to it in the same fashion on different occasions. Although nature answers to the requirements of the mind, the mind itself, as Bryant wrote in "An Invitation to the Country," must actively participate in the process. The sights and sounds of the springtime are beautiful only when the observer "fondly" looks and listens. One must gaze at the world with "a loving eye" and breathe "with joy" the fragrance of April breezes, or the beauty and glory of nature will not be perceived. On the properly disposed mind, therefore, the beauty and sublimity of the external world could have a salutary effect, answering, as the need might arise, to the gay or solemn mood with which one viewed the landscape. This was not, however, the only function of nature. Through correct perception of the external scene, the healthy rational mind could be led to an understanding of its meaning. Like the philosophers, of course, Bryant knew that sense impressions could sometimes be deceptive; and he occasionally included in his poems such phenomena as the delusive images of glittering light that so attract the dreamy youth in "Catterskill Falls" that he almost perishes, or the dim and misty landscape that leads the weary hunter to misinterpret reality and plunge to his death in "The Hunter's Vision." Indeed, the poet even plays fancifully with the concept in "A DayDream," where, gazing at rays of light quivering across the ocean floor, he imagines that sea nymphs rise from the waves and, in the murmuring of the waters, speak to him of the times when men believed in their existence. In all three poems, deceptive visual images, playing upon the imagination, influence the mind to perceive what is not actually there.

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Such incidents are rare in Bryant's poetry. He more usually bases his themes on the philosopher's fundamental position that the objects of the world are both real and knowable. He can perceive the yellow violet and the fringed gentian, for example, not only as ephemeral flowers but also as entities that have certain specific and verifiable characteristics. In his part of the world, the yellow violet is a flower of April, blooming alone in the woods before the other flowers of spring appear; the fringed gentian is the last flower of autumn, blossoming when all others have died. Each has certain demonstrable qualities that help the poet to identify and place it in the general order of things. Bryant was an accomplished botanist, and sought to be scientifically exact in his descriptions of such plants. He saw no conflict between his scientific and poetic approaches to nature. Both were premised upon the belief that the natural world was real, that it could be reached and understood by the minds of men, and that reliable knowledge could be drawn from it of the utmost value to both the physical and the moral well-being of men. It is precisely because he acted upon such beliefs that Bryant developed into a truly American poet. Once he had accepted the epistemological and aesthetic views of the Scottish philosophers, he found himself in a complex relation with nature; and the interaction between his mind and the objects that he perceived formed the intellectual and aesthetic basis for his poetry. The world Bryant observed could not be anything but American, for before his first trip to Europe in 1836, he had experienced no other; and the mind with which he perceived it, though necessarily influenced by the education he had received in Scripture, in classical and English poetry, and in Scottish philosophy, remained fundamentally American in its view both of external nature and of men and their institutions. This is not to say that Bryant and other Americans of his generation were totally different from

WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT I 161 their British contemporaries. But the process of change that had begun to work on the American character with the arrival of the first colonists had proceeded so far by the beginning of the nineteenth century that a distinctly American cast of mind had formed, and men born on these shores saw things through American eyes. What they saw, moreover, was uniquely their own. The American landscape of the 1820's was markedly different from that of Europe, and Bryant sought to catch its quality and meaning in his art. The point is not that he wished to be nationalistic. He was willing to include European views in his work after he had experienced them, but his heart and mind were always with American nature because of what he had felt and learned in its presence. As he wrote in his sonnet "To Cole, the Painter, Departing for Europe," there is a brightness and a wildness in the American landscape, an expansiveness in its wide savannas and boundless groves, a solemnity in the uninhabited reaches of the wilderness that cannot be matched in Europe, where the hand of man, working through time, is seen in the houses, graves, and ruins of a thoroughly domesticated landscape. Bryant does not insist on the superiority of either; he stresses only the difference. But a man whose mind and art were formed in response to the wild, bright nature of his expansive country must always create an art that will reflect the values he derived from his experience. This view of nature was not, of course, his only one, nor did Bryant rule out the presence of man in the American landscape. Most often, however, the human agents include such typically American characters as hunter, Indian, or independent farmer—there are no Wordsworthian leech gatherers or old Cumberland beggars in his verse—and his less expansive scenes frequently include some specific American locality or precisely described flora that the poet had observed. Yet it is not so much the presence of American things as the broad vision of real-

ity that is important in Bryant's verse. Each poem presents some aspect of it, but no poem contains it all. No one could, since each records an individual perception, a unique encounter between the mind of the poet and the external world. What Bryant might perceive one day was necessarily different from what he might see the next, for his mood would inevitably change and different aspects of the material world would catch his attention. Nonetheless, his fundamentally American bent of mind gave him a point of view that enabled him to maintain a consistent moral vision throughout his many poems. To understand that vision, we must begin where Bryant did, with man's relation to nature. In composing his poems he sought, as he writes in his "Lectures on Poetry," "to shape the creations of the mind into perfect forms according to those laws which man learns from observing the works of his Maker," and to reveal to his readers "those analogies and correspondences which [poetry] beholds between the things of the moral and of the natural world.'' From the poet's point of view, he stands in a complex relation to nature and, through it, to God. Nature thus stands between the poet and the Deity, reveals to the former the moral truths of God, and provides the means through which the poet communicates those truths to his readers. The poet must first perceive those qualities in the natural landscape that have led him to his belief, and then re-create in his verse not merely a detailed description of the scene, but an evocation of its meaning. This he does by presenting a few suggestive touches and glimpses to awaken the imagination of the reader and fill his mind with delight. By this means the poet leads him to a perception of those truths that God has instilled in the natural scene. Such a process must be premised upon a fundamentally innocent nature that does not itself deceive, and Bryant goes out of his way to establish the point. Though he believes in a fallen world, he writes, in "Inscription for the

762 / AMERICAN Entrance to a Wood," that "the primal curse / Fell" on an "unsinning earth," which, since it remains guiltless, still contains qualities that can ease the mind and heart of those who come to it from the "sorrows, crimes, and cares" of the world of guilty men. "The calm shade" brings "a kindred calm, and the sweet breeze" carries a balm to the "sick heart." Bryant is seldom so explicit in developing the basis for his view. More usually he simply asserts the fact of an innocent nature. In "A Summer Ramble," for example, he describes the beautiful calm of a summer day, leaves his desk, and goes out amid "the sinless, peaceful works of God" to share the season's calm; and in "The Firmament" he carries the theme one step further by looking away from the earth to the "calm pure sphere" of the skies, where he perceives "seats of innocence and rest." An innocent nature is a reliable one that can be depended upon in its communication of moral truth. It teaches, at times, by analogy. Simple flowers like the yellow violet and the fringed gentian, or birds like the waterfowl, lead the poet to an understanding of human behavior or to a perception of his place in the cosmos. Although he welcomes the yellow violet when he sees it blooming alone in the April woods, he ignores it when the gorgeous flowers of May appear; and the poet recognizes in this experience the sin of pride, which makes one forget his early friends when he climbs to wealth and social position. In a similar fashion the fringed gentian, blooming late in the year, when the woods are bare and the frost has come, makes him wish that when death draws near to him, he will similarly find hope blossoming in his heart. The famous "To a Waterfowl" illustrates the same relation. The poet, like the bird, is moving through space to a new destination; and, perceiving his own situation reflected in its flight, he draws the moral conclusion that the God who directs the waterfowl unerringly to its destination will lead his steps aright.

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Nature teaches in other ways as well. It is, for example, the measure of man and his accomplishments. Bryant does not always describe such small natural phenomena as wildflowers and birds. Sometimes he stresses the expansiveness of nature in both space and time. The opening lines of "Monument Mountain" depict a spacious scene of rocky precipice and beautiful valley where the habitations of men are dwarfed to insignificance; those of "The Prairies" describe a vast landscape that, stretching to the horizon, makes the lone man on horseback seem small indeed. "The Rivulet," on the other hand, measures man on a scale of time, for the little stream dances along its way unchanged, while the poet who played as a child along its banks already finds himself a grave man whose youthful visions have faded, and can foresee the day when he, "trembling, weak, and gray," will be an aged man. Indeed, after his death other children will mature and age near the spot, while the unchanging stream, "singing down [its] narrow glen, / Shall mock the fading race of men." In the presence of nature, man should perceive how small he is and how short his existence. Man may react to this knowledge in a number of different ways. His initial response may be one of humility. The poet who feels "almost annihilated" when he stands beside a "mighty oak" in "A Forest Hymn" reacts in a perfectly appropriate fashion, for the size and density of the centuries-old trees can only convince him of his own weakness and mortality and the vanity of human striving. On other occasions, however, the opposite response is proper. When the poet stands for the first time on the Illinois prairies and his "dilated sight / Takes in the encircling vastness," his "heart swells" with the experience; when one looks out over the landscape from a lofty peak, as in "Monument Mountain," his "expanding heart" feels kindred to the higher world to which he has been translated; and he experiences an "enlargement of [his] vision." All these reactions occur because the

WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT I 163 sensitive observer recognizes in nature the presence of an enormous power that, from one point of view, threatens to overwhelm him yet, from another, raises his spirit above the physical and gives him a glimpse of a brighter, happier sphere. Both responses to nature derive from the poet's recognition that behind the spacious world lies the source of those truths to be discerned in it. Bryant's conception of God has always been the subject of some discussion. The poet's relation to Wordsworth might lead one to expect that he, like the English poet, would take a pantheistic view. But what one finds in his poems is something quite different. To be sure, in "A Forest Hymn" there is a brief passage that seems to imply that the forest flower may be An emanation of the indwelling Life, A visible token of the upholding Love, That are the soul of this great universe. But lines like these are rare in Bryant's poetry. His typical vision of God is that of a Creator who stands somewhat apart from His creation and reveals Himself not in, but through, it. The opening lines of the second section of "A Forest Hymn" are more typical. Here he addresses God as the "Father" who reared the massive trunks and wove the verdant roof above them, who looked "upon the naked earth" and raised forthwith all the "fair ranks of trees." Precisely the same view appears in "The Prairies." As the poet looks across the "boundless and beautiful" unshorn fields, his mind turns to their Creator: The hand that built the firmament hath heaved And smoothed these verdant swells, and sown their slopes With herbage, planted them with island-groves, And hedged them round with forests. Even when Bryant considers the physical world in terms of the geological processes that have formed its various features over eons of time, he

sees as the ultimate cause of physical change that same God who initially created it. Thus, he begins "A Hymn of the Sea" with the lines: The sea is mighty, but a mightier sways His restless billows. Thou, whose hands have scooped His boundless gulfs and built his shore, thy breath, That moved in the beginning o'er his face Moves o'er it evermore. Bryant goes on to describe the changes that occur as the shores are worn away by waves and both coral reefs and volcanic islands form new land. Here too the hand of God is at work; and in a second echo of Genesis, Bryant writes: "Thou dost look / On thy creation and pronounce it good." In Bryant's vision of reality, nature is both separate from and dependent upon a still-creating, still-sustaining Deity; but because the Creator may be known through His creation, God's qualities can be discerned in the physical world. The broad sweep of both space and time to be perceivedMn the universe bespeaks the infinity and eternity of Him who created it; the beauty and majesty of the natural landscape suggest the similar, though greater, qualities that He possesses. The light of God is revealed through the stars of the firmament, in "Song of the Stars," and His majesty in the mountains in "To the River Arve." The "grandeur, strength, and grace" of the trees, in "A Forest Hymn," suggest in small the similar qualities of God; and man, perceiving God's greatness in the surrounding forest, feels his spirit bowed "with the thought of boundless power / And inaccessible majesty." Indeed, once Bryant had established in his verse this fundamental vision of the external world as revealing the nature of God, any description of beauty or grandeur would carry with it the suggestion that the infinitely greater qualities of God were also being revealed. But if the nature of God is made manifest in the external world, so too is His will, which, per-

164 I AMERICAN ceived by men, should lead them to moral action. For Bryant this is a crucial function of nature. He believes that fallen man, left to himself, is an easy prey to his passions, and that man as a whole in society creates endless conflict. While still a young man in Great Barrington, he had complained, in "Green River," that his occupation as lawyer had forced him to "mingle among the jostling crowd, / Where the sons of strife are subtle and loud"; and in "Autumn Woods" he longed to leave the vain low strife That makes men mad—the tug for wealth and power— The passions and the cares that wither life, And waste its little hour. Later, in New York, Bryant returned to the same idea. His heart is oppressed with sadness, in "A Rain-Dream," because of the strifes and "tumults of the noisy world" where Fraud deceives and Strength overpowers his adversary. Evil, in Bryant's view, derives from the passions of men, which, if left unchecked, cause untold misery. On a larger scale the same cause leads to war. As an early nineteenth-century American, Bryant was inclined to attribute aggressive war to the passions and greed of kings; and his poems on Europe frequently stress the horror of war and oppression that have characterized the past. Thus, in "Earth" he surveys the valleys of Italy that since early times have been the fields of war, where nations vanished, "driven out by mightier," and where free men fought each other until "strange lords" placed the yoke of servitude on all. To point up the folly of such struggles, and to affirm the peace that God wills for the world, Bryant sometimes juxtaposes a description of violent conflict and one of peaceful nature. In "To the Apennines" he recapitulates the long history of violence that has besei the Italian peninsula and pictures the shouting armies that have rushed together at the base of the Apennines. Be-

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leaguered cities were destroyed, realms were torn in two, and commonwealths rose against each other and engaged in fratricidal war. Meanwhile, "in the noiseless air and light that flowed" around the mountain peaks, "eternal Peace abode." The point of the contrast is not lost on some men. The poet recognizes, and tries to communicate to others, not only the folly of conflict but also its cure. He returns to the woods, in "A Forest Hymn," to reassure his "feeble virtue" in the presence of God; and he steals "an hour from study and care," in * 'Green River,'' to reestablish his peace of mind. In the peaceful stream he finds once again "an image of that calm life" he had previously found in his experience with nature. Many elements in the natural landscape can serve the same function. In "A Summer Ramble" the poet seeks peace in the calm of a summer day, while in "Lines on Revisiting the Country" he finds in the mountain wind a kind of "health and refreshment" that seems to come from heaven's own gates. Nature is thus an appropriate retreat from the conflicts of the world; but it is not merely an escape, nor does the poet seek only some vague influence from the natural scene. While it does provide an emotional calm, it also has a higher function in affirming the moral order that, in Bryant's view, is everywhere apparent in the harmony of nature. Bryant was well aware that to most observers, the world did not appear to be a place of order and harmony. Even nature, unchanging as it may seem to be in comparison with human life, has undergone convulsive alterations in the geologic past; and wherever one looks in the present world, "eternal change," as Bryant wrote in "The Evening Wind," is clearly the law of nature. Like many another thinking man in the early nineteenth century, Bryant was fascinated with the problem of time and change, illustrated wherever he turned by the cycles of days, seasons, and years. And like many others, too, he

WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT I 165 sought some principle by which he might reconcile the endless manifestations of mutability that he perceived around him. He turned in one poem to the North Star as an apparently fixed element that could be read as a sign of "that bright eternal beacon" by which man might guide his life; but he needed some more general principle than this, some aspect of the external scene that, discernible throughout the natural world, could serve as an effective restraint on the passionate actions of men. Bryant found that principle in the concept of ordered change. However mutable the world may be, change moves through constant patterns. The evening wind blows from sea to shore, but later returns from shore to sea; and the perceptive man will emphasize not the change, but the stable principle according to which change occurs. Thus, in "The Fountain" the poet writes of the many changes that have taken place around a woodland spring, itself a symbol of constant change. Yet something more than mutability may be seen in the flowing water. "Here the sage," Bryant writes, Gazing into [the] self-replenished depth, Has seen eternal order circumscribe And bound the motions of eternal change, And from the gushing of [the] simple fount Has reasoned to the mighty universe. Universal order is as apparent in the world as is the principle of mutability, and is more significant in that it reflects the unchanging nature of God. The lesson for man is obvious. He must learn to conform the order of his life to the order that lies at the heart of nature. Some men, however, fail to perceive or heed the lesson that is writ large on the natural landscape. They continue their passionate struggle, unmindful of God or the message of peace and harmony He imparts to them through the ordered calm of nature. But if they will not learn from the milder aspects of the natural world, they may be

influenced by the harsher. Bryant knew full well that nature could be frightening as well as reassuring, and he occasionally included its violent aspects in his work. In "A Forest Hymn" he depicts a tempestuous scene of thunder and lightning, of whirlwinds, and of pounding tidal waves that inundate the shore and destroy the cities. In scenes like these, he continues, prideful man lays by "his strifes and follies," recognizes his own incapacity, and acknowledges the power of God, Who rules the elements. The sublime aspects of the natural world are as important as the beautiful ones in leading men to a knowledge of how they should act, and the poet prays at the end of the poem that he may be spared the sterner aspects of God's power and learn from His "milder majesty" to order his life properly. Yet even such warnings, Bryant believed, were sometimes not enough. In "A Hymn of the Sea" he carries the theme one step further by making a storm at sea the instrument of God's justice. Here an armed fleet is royally sailing to carry aggressive war to some unsuspecting realm, when "the fierce tornado" descends upon it. In a highly evocative passage filled with discord and violence, Bryant describes the destruction of the fleet, the vast ships whirled like chaff, sails rent, masts snapped, cannon thrust overboard, and the invading army "whelmed / By whirlpools or dashed dead upon the rocks." The instruments of power, violence, and oppression are utterly destroyed by the overwhelming force of the storm at sea; but the elements themselves are, after all, merely the instruments of a yet greater Power, who, in Bryant's view, may use them to teach a lesson to erring men. It ought to be a salutary one, and for a time it may be effective. But the poet offers scant hope that nations will change because of it. Although they stand in awe of what has happened to the invading fleet, they pause for only "a moment, from the bloody work of war." The history of the world, as Bryant understood

766 / AMERICAN it, certainly justified his conclusion. The record of the past was for the most part only a long series of wars and conflicts, as states and empires rose and fell, leaving only their ruins scattered across the landscape. His Phi Beta Kappa poem, "The Ages," recapitulates much of the record. He describes the ancient despotisms that flourished in the East, only to fall and leave behind a few monuments and tombs in the desert; he includes the decay of Rome as it sank, under the empire, into a state of guilt and misery; and he mentions the many nations that were "blotted out from earth, to pay / The forfeit of deep guilt." In "The Ruins of Italica," moreover, a poem Bryant translated from the Spanish of Francisco de Rioja, he presents the remains of the Roman city in Spain as an eloquent testimony to the emptiness of past glory. The palaces and gardens were all swept away with the Caesars, and Roman grandeur vanished from the earth as Trojan and Greek had disappeared before it. Such a record ought to be doubly instructive to men, to convince them that the glories of the world have always been, and still are, perishable, and to teach them that they should place their trust in other things. This "ruins of empire" theme was a favorite among nineteenth-century writers and painters, both in the United States and abroad; and it so fascinated Bryant that he even developed it in an American context. The clearing of the forest and the supplanting of the Indian may have left no decaying monuments to past glories; but the historical process was, in a sense, little different from that recorded in Europe. The present American civilization was rising from the destruction of an earlier culture; and those involved in the process ought to be aware not only of what had happened in the past, but also of what might develop in the future. Bryant wrote several important poems on this theme. He imagines, in "The Fountain," the unrecorded history that has taken place around a woodland spring that once

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flourished in the virgin forest. The Indian waged war in its vicinity, and hunters built their lodges near the spot. Then, after centuries passed, the white man came, cut the trees and plowed the ground; since that time a whole society has grown up around it. But change does not end with the present, and the poet muses on what additional changes—caused by man or nature— might lurk in the future. Bryant depicts an even grander history, one more closely approximating the European version of the theme, in "The Prairies," where he tells of yet a third race, supplanted during the historical process in America—the Mound Builders, whom contemporary historians took to be a pre-Indian race. The mounds they left scattered across a large number of the eastern states were thus considered to be true ruins of a great historical past. Bryant describes their builders as "a disciplined and populous race" who constructed the mounds while the Greeks were erecting the Parthenon. He depicts their civilization as a relatively high one, brought down by the "warlike and fierce" redmen, who attacked and destroyed them. Now the Indians, too, have been driven away; and the white man is about to cultivate the fields where two previous cultures had once flourished. "Thus change the forms of being," Bryant writes: Thus arise Races of living things, glorious in strength, And perish, as the quickening breath of God Fills them, or is withdrawn. The course of history in America resembles that in Europe, and contemporary men should heed the lesson it teaches. That lesson involves both the present and the future. Men should not take pride today in what they know, from history, must eventually perish; but since men are by no means helpless in the world, what they do today can have some effect

WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT I 167 on the future. The basic question, of course, is whether the pattern must be continued unendingly, whether men must always succumb to their passions and forever repeat, as Bryant states in ' 'Earth,'' ' 'the horrid tale of perjury and strife, / Murder and spoil, which men call history." To Americans in the early nineteenth century, this question was crucial, for they saw their country as a young democratic state standing almost alone in a despotic world; and poets from Bryant to Walt Whitman viewed the United States as the hope of the future. America could serve that function only if it learned to avoid the mistakes of the past; but since, in Bryant's view, those mistakes had derived from the passionate nature of man, it remained an open question whether men in his day could acquire the selfcontrol that would enable them to live in harmony, avoid conflict, and escape the age-old process of war and desolation that had overtaken all former people. In his early poem "The Ages" (1821), Bryant had seemed hopeful that man in his time could change. "He who has tamed the elements," he writes, will not remain "the slave of his own passions"; he who can trace the course of celestial bodies will see God's will in His "magnificent works . . . / And love and peace shall make their paradise with man." Indeed, he ends the poem with the vision of a free and progressive America throwing off the last fetters of mankind and looking forward to a happy future. In later poems, however, Bryant sometimes appears to be less optimistic. In "Earth," for example, written in Europe some thirteen years later, he considers all the horrors that men have perpetrated and asks the obvious question of his "native Land of Groves" across the sea: a newer page In the great record of the world is thine; Shall it be fairer? Fear, and friendly Hope, And Envy, watch the issue, while the lines,

By which thou shalt be judged, are written down. There is an ominous tone to these last lines that contrasts sharply with the optimism of the earlier poem. Bryant's uneasiness about the future derived, apparently, from his perception of what the historical process in America entailed. He knew, of course, that men of affairs in law and commerce were bound to be aggressive and contentious; and he always prescribed the untouched natural scene as the cure for passionate involvement in what are essentially trivial matters. But change in America involved the destruction of the wilderness; and by the early nineteenth century, American writers were beginning to warn their countrymen of the possible consequences of their actions. In "An Indian at the Burial-Place of His Fathers,'' Bryant makes a telling commentary on what had been happening. The Indian, who speaks the poem, visits the ancient burial ground of his tribe, from which they have long been driven; and in a series of contrasted pictures, he reveals the changes that the white man has made. In the first part of the poem, the contrast seems merely to indicate the two ways of life that the cultures created, the white man preferring the domesticated landscape of wheat fields and pasturage, while the Indian longs for the woods in which the warriors hunted. But there is more to the contrast than this. The Indian sees a sign that the white man cannot perceive, and he predicts a future that resembles the European past: Their race may vanish hence, like mine, And leave no trace behind, Save ruins o'er the region spread, And the white stones above the dead. Because the white men have cut the trees and farmed the soil, the springs have dried up, and the rivers run "with lessening current." Hence,

768 / AMERICAN if the process continues, the lands for which the Indians were crushed may one day become "a barren desert." Although the words are placed in the mouth of an Indian, there can be no doubt that Bryant himself was aware of the danger. Toward the end of "The Fountain," after he has depicted all the changes that have taken place around the woodland spring, he considers the future and wonders whether, in historic time, men will not "seek out strange arts to wither and deform / The pleasant landscape which [the spring makes] green." If they do, the very aspect of the natural scene that could preserve them from their follies will have been destroyed. Bryant thus faced a dilemma. Like many in his generation, he found value both in the untouched wilderness and in the strong democratic society that must come from its destruction; he lamented the passing of the Indian and foresaw the consequences that the despoliation of nature might entail, yet he could not condemn the rapid process of change that his generation of Americans, perhaps more than any other, was destined to experience. Bryant was well aware that the historical process could not be reversed. The continent would be settled and the face of the landscape would change. Yet, in the final analysis, his faith in America's future was so strong that he could face it with confidence. Even in "The Crowded Street," a poem that depicts the tide of humanity in all of its various aspects flowing through the city, he ends with the belief that however selfconcerned these people may be and however aimless and wayward their course of action may seem, God holds them in His boundless love and guides "the mighty stream," of which they are but eddies, "to its appointed end." The providential view of history, in other words, informs Bryant's vision and gives him the faith that the process of change works ultimately for good. For Bryant, as for many in his generation, the progress of history was toward human freedom; and since the United States was in the forefront

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of that movement, he could indeed look forward with confidence toward a time when God's will for man would be fulfilled. The basis for this belief was manifest in nature. Bryant saw in the unrestrained movement of the winds that spirit of freedom that must one day inspire the multitudes of Europe to throw off their chains, and he found in the mountains—both Alps and Apennines—an image of the liberty that had freed the Switzerland of William Tell and that would someday liberate Italy. Indeed, in "The Antiquity of Freedom," the poet finds in the peaceful woods of his native land a sign that the natural condition of man was originally freedom. Tyranny is laterborn and, though powerful, "shall fade into a feebler age" while freedom waxes stronger. The battle is not yet over, for tyranny has become more subtle as it weakens; but the poet never doubts that the time will come when freedom shall triumph and a "new earth and heaven" be born. Throughout his life Bryant supported the cause of freedom in his verse. He had celebrated the Spanish victory over the invading French in "The Spanish Revolution" (1808); and in "The Massacre at Scio," "Song of the Greek Amazon," "The Greek Partisan," and "The Greek Boy," he supported, like many a poet in his generation, the Greek struggle for independence. Although, unlike John Greenleaf Whittier and James Russell Lowell, he wrote little verse in support of the antislavery cause, there is "The African Chief," which details the destruction of the proud black man when he is captured and sold into slavery. The Civil War, of course, elicited Bryant's support of the federal government, "the gentlest sway / That Time in all his course has seen"; and he celebrated the emancipation of the slaves with an ode, "The Death of Slavery." The God "who marks the bounds of guilty power" had struck the shackles from the slave, who now "stands in his native manhood, disenthralled," while slavery itself, in

WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT I 169 these "better years that hasten by," is buried in the "shadowy past," with all those former wrongs of suffering and oppression from which so much of the world has been freed. Bryant also counted on the ties of free trade to destroy the barriers that had arisen between men, and thus to unite the earth in one brotherhood. In "The Path" he imagines how a simple woodland path is linked to other paths and roads to make a vast network that binds all men together, and he praises the "mighty instinct, that dost thus unite/ Earth's neighborhoods and tribes with friendly bands." Like many another American in the nineteenth century, he sees in the physical links between men a sign of the higher association that will follow from them. Further, in "The Song of the Sower" Bryant pictures all the types of men who look to the sower's work for sustenance, and ends his poem with a vision of the grain going across the earth wherever "roads wind and rivers flow," to fill the marts of the ancient East and the tropical South. The image of peace and plenty that Bryant creates in this poem suggests the benefits that will flow when all men enjoy the blessings of liberty and neither barriers nor strife, caused by pride or spite, stand in the way of the peaceful interchange of goods between nations. Bryant's philosophy of nature thus provided him with a comprehensive vision of reality that enabled him to write significantly about the American experience. Since close observation of nature could provide fallen man with the knowledge he needed to live successfully in the world, and since America was particularly blessed with broad expanses of forested hills and valleys that embodied the meanings that God intended for men to discern, Americans could learn from their native landscape the self-discipline necessary to control the pride and passions of their fallen nature and, thus, to live in freedom and peace. In building their country, of course, Americans incurred some risk that the result might differ little

from the experience of the past; and that prospect had to be faced. Time and change, however, could not be stopped. The westward expansion would go on at the expense of the Indian and of that wild, bright nature that Bryant valued so highly. Nonetheless, the poet found reason to hope that the change was being directed in such a way that a free American society would result and lead the world to that liberty and peace that he discerned in the natural landscape. Bryant was not always so broadly philosophical in his verse. Although most of his important poems do develop one aspect or another of his vision, in a very few poems he wrote on highly personal subjects. Bryant was a man of strong emotions who kept them so firmly in check as to appear rather cold and severe, but he sometimes allowed his personal feelings to show through the medium of his verse. Of the several poems he wrote recording his youthful love for Frances Fairchild, he published only "Oh, Fairest of the Rural Maids,'' a poem in which he associates the beauty and innocence of the young girl with the analogous qualities of the natural scene in which she has lived. He also composed a few poems about her during his later years. In "The Life That Is," for example, written at Castellammare, Italy, in 1858, Bryant rejoices in her recovery from a serious illness that had threatened to take her life; and in ' 'October, 1866,'' he expresses his grief and sense of loss at her death, which had occurred in July. Bryant also treats the deaths of several members of his family. While composing "Hymn to Death" in 1820, he was shocked to learn of the death of his beloved father; he ended the poem with a tribute to the man who had taught him the art of writing verse and who had read and criticized all of his previous attempts at poetry. A few years later, in 1824-1825, he wrote two poems on his favorite sister, Sarah Bryant Shaw. In the first, "Consumption," he reconciles himself to the fact that his sister is

770 / AMERICAN dying; and in the very popular poem ' The Death of the Flowers," he pays tribute to her after her death. Finally, in 1849, Bryant wrote 'The May Sun Sheds an Amber Light" to commemorate his mother, who had died two years before in Illinois. In most of these poems—"Hymn to Death" may be an exception—Bryant exerts a firm control over the emotion he has experienced; and one feels that he published them not because of the personal meaning they had for him, but because he was satisfied that in each poem, the emotion had been given proper poetic expression. The poems on the deaths of his wife and beloved members of his family are, moreover, important contributions to a subject that had fascinated the poet since his youth. Bryant had apparently had a real fear of death as a young man, had written a number of juvenile poems on the subject, and had read the British "graveyard" poets, who had dealt with it. One of his earliest poems—4 Thanatopsis "—and one of his later—"The Flood of Years"—discuss the problem; and between these two there are many that, in one way or another, touch upon it. Poems on death, therefore, represent a significant part of Bryant's poetic output and deserve consideration both for themselves and for what they contribute to an understanding of his philosophy. From the latter point of view, the subject of death presented him with something of a problem. Because he based his philosophic position on the direct observation of nature and constructed his system of belief around it, Bryant would necessarily turn first to the material world for an understanding of the meaning of death. This he did, of course, in "Thanatopsis," where the voice of nature gives one aspect of that meaning. What nature can say of death, however, must be limited to the physical. Since death is the natural end of all living things, it must simply be accepted as a matter of course. Beyond that, nature can say nothing about the ultimate significance

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of death; and the only comfort it can give is that all who have ever lived lie together equally in the common grave of earth. Critics have made much of the fact that no hint of immortality is given in the poem, and the omission is sometimes taken as a sign of Bryant's religious position at the time. It may well be. But Bryant himself had trouble identifying the voice that speaks the central section of the poem. In an early manuscript version of the introductory lines, he had made it his "better genius"; but this he rejected in favor of the present reading, in which the "still voice" comes from nature. The effect is to give a partial treatment of the subject, as if the poet would say: Here is the view that nature takes of the common fate of man, one that should give the observer courage to accept his personal end. Seen from other points of view, however, death appears quite different. In human terms, as Bryant writes in "Hymn to Death," it can be seen as a deliverer who frees the oppressed and crushes the oppressor, or as the great leveler without whom the powerful of the earth would have enslaved the weak forever. Seen in yet other terms, as Bryant has it in "A Forest Hymn," death is not so triumphant as it sometimes appears to be. Though "all grow old and die," youth, "ever-gay and beautiful youth / In all its beautiful forms," perpetually presses "on the faltering footsteps of decay." Life mocks at death because it comes from God, Who has no end. From this intellectual position it is but a step to the affirmation of human immortality. Belief in an afterlife appears in some of the earliest of Bryant's poems—"Hymn to Death," for example—and is repeated in such later works as "Consumption," "The Past," and "The Future Life." In all of these poems, Bryant looks forward to another life, in which he hopes to meet again those whom he loved on earth. As Bryant grew older, he turned increasingly to allegory to express his view of death and the afterlife, most frequently using the rather conventional image of passage down a road or

WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT I 171 stream into the unknown. In "The Cloud on the Way" he suggests the mystery of death by an image of mist into which all travelers disappear, and in "Waiting by the Gate" he depicts death as a portal through which everyone must pass. Both of these poems, moreover, show the strong Christian affirmation that appeared in Bryant's work as he grew older, for both suggest that on the other side one shall meet not only his departed loved ones but also "the Sinless Teacher" who died for men. In one of his last poems, "The Flood of Years," Bryant gave his final thoughts on death. The passing generations rise and fall on the crest of the flood of time, only to be overwhelmed and disappear in the ocean of the past. But all that is good and valuable shall be restored in an eternal present in which the process of change so familiar on earth will at last be reconciled in everlasting harmony. Bryant, of course, was not alone in his intellectual position, nor was his mode of expression unique. Other writers and painters of his generation—James Fenimore Cooper and Thomas Cole are but two important examples—shared his religious vision of nature and expressed their related themes in strikingly similar ways. Both Cooper and Cole depict the beauty and sublimity of the American scene and suggest the moral meaning to be derived from its observation; they also take precisely the same view of human history and include the "ruins of empire" theme in their works. Bryant may thus be seen as both drawing upon a body of thought generally accepted by literate Americans in his generation, and addressing his works to an audience who shared many of his assumptions, approved the themes of his poetry, and took pleasure in their expression. From the historical point of view, therefore, Bryant must be considered an important member of the first generation of American Romantic artists; and his poetry may profitably be read as a significant statement of those intellectual, artistic, and moral values that character-

ized the cultural life of early nineteenth-century America.The success that Bryant achieved as a spokesman for his generation, however, may stand in the way of a proper appreciation of his poetic achievement today. His vision of nature was rapidly superseded by those of the transcendentalists, the symbolists, and the realists—for all of whom he had helped to pave the way—and to many readers of poetry in the twentieth century, both the themes he develops and his mode of expression may seem old-fashioned. Some will object, for example, to the touches of sentimentality that appear in a number of Bryant's poems or to the use of analogy in the development of his themes. To many readers today the analogies he draws will seem like moral tags appended to his verse, and it must be admitted that some of his analogies do not derive so closely from the descriptions that inspired them as one might wish. Finally, we may also note that Bryant's range was narrow and his development relatively slight. Once he had established his intellectual position and found his poetic voice, he wrote a body of verse that explored that position fully; but he did not often venture onto new ground. Bryant's limitations as a poet are real, and cannot be gainsaid. He is not a major poet, but a very good minor one who can still be read with pleasure. In his favorite forms, the short lyric and reflective blank-verse poem, he is quite effective. At their best, as in "To a Waterfowl," his poems of analogy develop naturally and convincingly from observed phenomenon to philosophical conclusion; and his rolling blank-verse rhythms often strike the ear as most appropriate for his reflections upon the natural scene. These poems record the play of the mind across the external landscape; and as we read, we can watch the theme develop as the poet considers the meaning he finds in his observation. Bryant's mood changes, moreover, from poem to poem; and he evokes both gaiety and awe, peace and exhilaration in the movement of his verse, de-

772 / AMERICAN pending upon his bent of mind at the moment. Each poem is, after all, a new experience of nature; and since both he and the landscape change, it is natural that the tone of the poetry should vary. To Bryant's credit, he was often able to capture these changing moods well in his verse. In content, too, Bryant remains a poet of some significance. Although his celebration of untouched nature comes from the preindustrial age of America, many of his themes are by no means out of date. He knew the cost that the settlement of the continent would entail—the destruction of the Indian and the despoliation of nature that would come with the westward expansion; and while he celebrated the democratic society that should result from the process, his knowledge of history and of the universal destruction of past civilizations made him aware that this nation, too, could perish. He depicted the passion, greed, and strife that he saw developing in the American cities; and he stressed the horrors that come from the selfishness and pride of human beings, especially in the form of war. He knew that the only cure was for men to recognize a power beyond their reach and strength, and he wrote of the need for humility if men were to lay by their follies. These are not minor themes. They were pertinent to the age in which he was writing and, considering what has happened since then, they cannot be considered irrelevant today.

Selected Bibliography WORKS OF WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT

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Poems. Cambridge, Mass.: Milliard and Metcalf, 1821. Miscellaneous Poems Selected from the United States Literary Gazette. Boston: Cummings, Milliard and Co., and Harrison Gray, 1826. (Contains twentythree poems by Bryant.) Poems. New York: Elam Bliss, 1832. (Republished, with new poems added, in 1834, 1836, 1839, 1847, 1855, 1858, 1871.) The Fountain and Other Poems. New York: Wiley and Putnam, 1842. The White-Footed Deer and Other Poems. New York: I. S. Platt, 1844. Thirty Poems. New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1864. Hymns. No place: no publisher, 1864. Poems. New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1876. (The final collection in Bryant's lifetime.) PROSE Tales of Glauber-Spa. 2 vols. New York: J. and J. Harper, 1832. (Contains two stories by Bryant; other contributors were Robert Sands, William Leggett, Catharine Sedgwick, and James Kirke Paulding.) Letters of a Traveller. New York: George P. Putnam, 1850. Letters of a Traveller, Second Series. New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1859. Letters from the East. New York: G. P. Putnam and Son, 1869. Orations and Addresses. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1873. MISCELLANIES

The Talisman for MDCCCXXVHI. New York: Elam Bliss, 1827. The Talisman for MDCCCXXIX. New York: Elam Bliss, 1828. The Talisman for MDCCCXXX. New York: Elam Bliss, 1829. (Bryant contributed poetry and prose to all three.) TRANSLATIONS

POETRY

The Embargo. Boston: printed for the purchasers, 1808. (Enlarged version with additional poems published 1809.)

The Iliad of Homer. 2 vols. Boston: Fields, Osgood and Co., 1870. The Odyssey of Homer. 2 vols. New York: James R. Osgood and Co., 1871-1872,

WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT / 173 COLLECTED EDITIONS

The Poetical Works of William Cullen Bryant, edited by Parke Godwin. 2 vols. New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1883; Russell and Russell, 1967. Prose Writings of William Cullen Bryant, edited by Parke Godwin. 2 vols. New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1884. The Poetical Works of William Cullen Bryant. New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1903. (The Roslyn ed.) LETTERS

The Letters of William Cullen Bryant, edited by William Cullen Bryant II and Thomas G. Voss. Vol. 1: 1809-1836. New York: Fordham University Press, 1975. (Other volumes in progress.)

BIBLIOGRAPHIES Blanck, Jacob. "William Cullen Bryant," inBibliography of American Literature. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1955. Phair, Judith T. A Bibliography of William Cullen Bryant and His Critics, 1808-1972. Troy, N.Y.: Whitston Publishing Co., 1975. Rocks, James E. "William Cullen Bryant," in Fifteen American Authors Before 1900, edited by Robert A. Rees and Earl N. Harbert. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1971. Sturges, Henry C. Chronologies of the Life and Writings of William Cullen Bryant, with a Bibliography of His Works in Prose and Verse. New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1903. (Printed also in the Roslyn edition of the Poetical Works.)

CRITICAL AND BIOGRAPHICAL STUDIES Allen, Gay Wilson. American Prosody. New York: American Book Co., 1935. Arms, George W. The Fields Were Green. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1953. Bigelow, John. William Cullen Bryant. American Men of Letters Series. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1890.

Bradley, William A. William Cullen Bryant. English Men of Letters Series. New York: Macmillan, 1905. Brown, Charles H. William Cullen Bryant. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1971. Callow, James T. Kindred Spirits: Knickerbocker Writers and American Artists, 1807-1855. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1967. Conner, Frederick W. Cosmic Optimism: A Study of the Interpretation of Evolution by American Poets from Emerson to Robinson. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1949. Duffey, Bernard. "Romantic Coherence and Romantic Incoherence in American Poetry," Centennial Review, 7:219-36 (Spring 1963); 8:453-64 (Fall 1964). Godwin, Parke. A Biography of William Cullen Bryant, with Extracts from His Private Correspondence. 2 vols. New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1883; Russell and Russell, 1967. Johnson, Curtiss S. Politics and a Belly-Full. New York: Vantage Press, 1962. McDowell, Tremaine. William Cullen Bryant: Representative Selections. American Writers Series. New York: American Book Co., 1935. McLean, Albert F., Jr. William Cullen Bryant. Twayne's United States Authors Series. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1964. Nevins, Allan. The Evening Post: A Century of Journalism. New York: Boni and Liveright, 1922. Pearce, Roy Harvey. The Continuity of American Poetry. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961. Pritchard, John P. Return to the Fountains: Some Classical Sources of American Criticism. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1942. Ringe, Donald A. The Pictorial Mode: Space and Time in the Art of Bryant, Irving and Cooper. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1971. Waggoner, Hyatt H. American Poets from the Puritans to the Present. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1968. Williams, Stanley T. The Spanish Background of American Literature. 2 vols. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1955. -DONALD A. RINGE

John Cheever 1912-1982

J

OHN CHEEVER was born May 27, 1912, in Quincy, Massachusetts, the son of Frederick L. and Mary Liley Cheever. His father's family traced their origins to Ezekiel Cheever, who came to Boston in 1637 and made so distinguished a career as an educator and a politician that Cotton Mather preached a funeral sermon in his praise. Cheever's father, a shoe salesman, was hit hard by the depression; but the diminutive Mary Cheever, an Englishwoman, salvaged the family finances by putting down her copy of Middlemarch (a book she claimed to have read thirteen times) and opening a gift shop. Soon after, Cheever left home in company with his older brother Fred. "I'd be damned," he recalled, "if I'd be supported by a gift shop." He was further spurred toward early independence by being expelled from Thayer Academy, for smoking and laziness, when he was seventeen. That was the end of John Cheever's formal education but the beginning of his literary career, for it led to his first story, "Expelled," a jaundiced look at the illiberalism and hypocrisy of prep school life, which Malcolm Cowley accepted for the New Republic in 1930. Here he retells his own tale from behind the thinnest of fictional veneers; and many subsequent stories and novels also refer back, with more or less exactitude, to his own experience and to his family and its origins in New England. The Wapshot Chron-

icle, for example, draws directly on that heritage. Yet Cheever rightly insists that his "fiction is not cryptoautobiography," for a remarkable inventiveness distinguishes his writing from the merely documentary."invention is a gift he has always had, rather, as he puts it, "like having a good baritone voice." In grade school his teacher would call on him to concoct tales for the entertainment of the other pupils, and young John learned to spin out his stories at length to avoid returning to classroom routine. He decided early to cultivate this gift and was ready to follow his muse when he was expelled from Thayer and family tensions became insufferable. He could go ahead and be a writer, his parents decided in their quirky moralistic way, so long as he promised never to think of becoming rich or famous. Cheever moved first to Boston, and then to New York, where he lived in grubby surroundings and took odd jobs—doing book synopses for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, teaching writing at Barnard—to keep himself alive. As the 1930's wore on, he started to place his spare, tightly structured stories in Atlantic, Hound and Horn, Story, Yale Review, and, beginning in May 1935, the New Yorker. Harold Ross's young magazine was then looking for fresh material, and made a lasting find in Cheever. Of his more than 200 stories, half appeared originally in the 774

JOHN CHEEVER I 175 New Yorker. William Maxwell, another New Yorker hand, once described Cheever as a 4 'story-making machine"; and it was through his repeated appearances in the magazine that he became known as a writer worth watching. In March 1941 Cheever married Mary Winternitz, the daughter of a Yale medical school dean; they had three children: Susan, Benjamin Hale, and Federico. Cheever's first book of stories, The Way Some People Live, came out in the spring of 1943, while he was serving in the army. There are thirty stories in the collection, most of them only a few pages long. The prose is plain-spoken and straightforward, lacking the rhetorical flourishes that characterize his longer fiction. At times the endings seem pat and the ironies come too easily; but there are brilliant moments that serve as talismans of his developing talent. Here as later Cheever invariably manages to be interesting. Here as always he possesses an uncanny ability to capture place, the furnishings and landscape and customs and talk that make a particular environment come alive. The actual settings range from down Maine, along the Northeast corridor to Washington, D.C., with most of the action centered in Boston, Newburyport, New York, and Westchester County. In theme the stories fall into three nondiscrete groupings: love—the struggle between the sexes conducted by young marrieds and unmarrieds; money—the bitterness and caution of parents and grandparents fallen on evil times after relative affluence; and war—the ambiguous feelings of young men confronted with an unpleasant and unavoidable challenge. More narrowly, Cheever reveals some of his private preoccupations. Husbands are uxorious: one poor lead-footed chap takes dance lessons to please his wife, who may not be home when he gets there. Brothers are close, perhaps too close: two brothers separate upon realizing that they can only confront life directly if they go their separate ways. And emo-

tions are communicated through the senses: "Where have I seen you before? he wanted to ask her. . . . And yet he knew that he had never seen her before. It was like being thrown back to a forgotten afternoon by the taste of an apple or the odor of woodsmoke." But there is no going back to the past, for the idyllic locations of one's youth have become tearooms and boardinghouses. With the publication of The Enormous Radio and Other Stones, in 1953, Cheever fulfilled the promise he had demonstrated in his first book. It is the best of his six collections of stories. Nearly all of the fourteen stories are brilliantly honed; and two of them—"Goodbye, My Brother" and "The Enormous Radio"—rank with the best short fiction of this century. Cheever continued to delineate the difficulties of married couples and to evoke the agony of reduced circumstances; he also included stories that persuasively render the life, upstairs and downstairs, of another environment, the Upper East Side apartment building. The stories are much longer, the characters more fully realized; and for the first time he invaded the world of the mysterious and miraculous that his later work was increasingly to inhabit. Superficially, "Goodbye, My Brother" concerns the family reunion of the Pommeroys at Laud's Head, their summer place on the Atlantic. There are Mrs. Pommeroy and her four grown children: Chaddy, the eldest and favorite; Diana, who has had a series of lovers; the unnamed narrator, who teaches at prep school; and the youngest, the universally disliked Lawrence. Lawrence is afflicted with a baleful view of life. His sister used to call him "Little Jesus," his mother "The Croaker." He looks rather like the Puritan cleric they had all descended from, and derives his dourness from grandparents and great-grandparents "who seemed to hark back to the dark days of the ministry and to be animated by perpetual guilt and the deification of the

776 / AMERICAN scourge." Throwing off this mantle of "guilt, self-denial, taciturnity, and penitence" has been a trial of the spirit for all the Pommeroy siblings, but only Lawrence has failed. His life has consisted of a series of departures from people and places that did not measure up to his standards of probity. His mother, he concludes, is an alcoholic. Diana is promiscuous, and so is Chaddy's wife. Chaddy is dishonest. The narrator is a fool. The house will fall into the sea within five years. The cook should join a union. He has only come back to say goodbye to his family. While Lawrence goes about morosely criticizing everyone, his wife ruins her days washing clothes with "expiatory passion," and his children stay inside because they have spied a snake under the doorstep. Lawrence's piety and capacity for being judgmental make life especially miserable for the narrator, whose own cheerful frame of mind is in exact opposition to his younger brother's. Lawrence does not like the sea; to the narrator, it represents "the rich green soup of life." Where Lawrence detects decay, the narrator finds beauty. Lawrence lives in the country of morbidity, the narrator in that of joy. Finally, during a walk on the beach the narrator confronts his saturnine brother, and in exasperation bloodies his head with a blow—a foreshadowing of Ezekiel Farragut's murder of his similarly awful brother in Falconer. Lawrence is not badly hurt, but packs up and decamps with his unhappy brood, leaving the others to swim in the purifying waters of the Atlantic, "naked, unshy, beautiful, and ftill of grace." Cheever relies on the consciousness of the narrator throughout, so that many of Lawrence's most odious thoughts are not articulated by him, but instead, are attributed to him by the narrator. It is as if the two brothers, in their total opposition, formed two halves of the same mind, and Cheever were setting down the story as a way of exorcising the dark spirit within. The narrator

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knows that his mother and sister and older brother have their faults, but refuses to let that realization dim his own joyous response to the world. "Oh, what can you do with a man like that?" he asks of Lawrence. "What can you do? How can you dissuade his eye in a crowd from seeking out the cheek with acne, the infirm hand; how can you teach him to respond to the inestimable greatness of the race, the harsh surface beauty of life . . . ?" But Cheever is no Polly anna. In "The Enormous Radio,'' he cuts beneath that gleaming surface to reveal the festering decay. Jim and Irene Westcott meet the statistical average reported in alumni magazines of the better Eastern colleges. They have been married for nine years, have two young children, and go to the theater 10.3 times a year. They live in an apartment house near Sutton Place and have a maid; and someday they hope to move to Westchester. The vicissitudes of life seem to have barely touched them. Irene is 4 'a pleasant, rather plain girl with soft brown hair and a wide, fine forehead upon which nothing at all had been written." Although Jim's hair is graying, he still wears the same kind of clothes he wore at Andover, and cultivates an "intentionally naive" manner. But when Jim brings home a new, ugly, enormous radio to fill Irene's idle hours, he introduces a serpent into their apparent Eden. The radio has magical powers, and instead of playing Beethoven quartets, it picks up the conversation emanating from the other flats in the apartment building. Together the Westcotts listen in on a nanny reading to her charge, an uproarious cocktail party, "a monologue on salmon fishing in Canada, a bridge game, running comments on home movies of what had apparently been a fortnight at Sea Island, and a bitter family quarrel about an overdraft at the bank." At first this is amusing, but when Irene overhears demonstrations, in brutal language, "of indigestion, carnal love, abysmal vanity,

JOHN CHEEVER I 177 faith, and despair," she is astonished and troubled. In the elevator, she stares at her fellow tenants, wondering which one had overdrawn, which one was worried about her health, which one had told her maid not to serve the best Scotch to anyone who does not have white hair. The members of the Salvation Army band on the street corner, playing "Jesus Is Sweeter," now seem "much nicer" to her than most of the people she knows. Irene eavesdrops on increasingly more unpleasant matters, until one night Jim comes home to find her crying and disheveled. "Go on up to 16-C, Jim!" she screams. "Mr. Osborn's beating his wife." Jim arranges to have the radio fixed instead, and they go to bed reassured that their own life is not as terrible and sordid and awful as the lives of their neighbors. But the next day they have a quarrel—about money, of course—and in an access of rage Jim shouts a litany of her secret sins: "Why are you so Christly all of a sudden? What's turned you overnight into a convent girl? You stole your mother's jewelry before they probated her will. You never gave your sister a cent of that money that was intended for her— not even when she needed it. You made Grace Rowland's life miserable, and where was all your piety and your virtue when you went to that abortionist?" Together these two stories represent the poles of Cheever's dual vision. On the one hand he detests hypocrisy and repudiates attempts such as that of the Westcotts to shut out evil through calculated naivete. On the other, he equally detests the lugubrious, and celebrates both "the abundance of created things" and the human capacity for love. In an interview shortly after publication of The Enormous Radio and Other Stories, Cheever argued for the contemporary appropriateness of the short story form. The vigorous nineteenth-

century novel, he remarked, had been based "on parish life and lack of communications." The short story, by comparison, was "determined by moving around from place to place, by the interrupted event," and so was ideally suited to an era of perpetual wanderings and communications bombardment. Cheever's next book, however, was his first novel, The Wapshot Chronicle (1957). Its opening evocation of St. Botolphs, a decaying Massachusetts town, focuses on the kind of oldfashioned organic community that characteristically served as the background for the nineteenth-century novel. But the characters soon scatter; and Cheever follows them about, producing an episodic quality that offended more than one reviewer. Read The Wapshot Chronicle for its comic flavor, they advised, or for its luminous style, its brilliant scenes, its "inexhaustible flow of inventiveness"—but do not expect coherence, for, as one critic charged, the book was "held together largely by spit and wire." In fact, the novel is organized, although loosely, around its two finest creations: the town of St. Botolphs and the character of Leander Wapshot. The first chapter paints the old New England seaport, no longer the thriving village it once was, against the backdrop of the annual Fourth of July parade. St. Botolphs is populated largely by eccentrics: Cousin Honora Wapshot, who burns her mail unread; the exhibitionist Uncle Peepee Marshmallow; Doris, the male prostitute; Reba Heaslip, the antivivisectionist spinster; and banker Theophilus Gates, who keeps a "For Sale" sign on his front lawn as a poormouth gesture, although he has no intention of selling his home. Sarah Wapshot, wife of Leander and mother of two sons, Moses and Coverly (whose own adventures are later to be told), rides at the lectern on the Women's Club float during the parade, a symbol of prominence earned by her devotion to good works. She is the sort of

778 / AMERICAN woman who manages to retain her dignity even when small boys throw firecrackers and the horses bolt, turning the parade into a shambles. Meanwhile her husband, Leander, does "not mind missing his wife's appearance in the parade." St. Botolphs is not heaven; but it tolerates and cares for its own. It is a fictional place, Cheever insists, made up of fragments from Quincy, Newburyport, and elsewhere that obviously lie close to the author's heart. Odors carry its nostalgic appeal. The downtown offices smell of dental preparations, floor oil, spittoons, and coal gas; the beach evokes the scent of lemons, wood smoke, roses, and dust. Cheever skirts sentimentality in establishing the town and its inhabitants through the device, common for him, of descending from the marvelous to the mundane, as for example, in the catalog of Sarah's civic accomplishments: It was she who had organized a committee to raise money for a new parish home for Christ Church. It was she who had raised a fund for the granite horse trough at the corner and who, when the' horse trough became obsolete, had had it planted with geraniums and petunias. The new high school on the hill, the new firehouse, the new traffic lights, the war memorial—yes, yes— even the clean public toilets in the railroad station were the fruit of Mrs. Wapshot's genius. When the Wapshot boys leave to seek their fortunes ("Why do the young want to go away?"), the narrative shifts repeatedly from Moses to Coverly to the pithy journal of Leander; but St. Botolphs serves as a reference point throughout. The well-favored Moses lands a top secret job in Washington, where he is exposed to the social-political pecking order. At an embassy concert he sees three bedraggled old women sneak in at intermission to seize abandoned concert programs and sneak out triumphantly. "You

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wouldn't see anything like that in St. Botolphs." A man in Moses' boardinghouse has kept a graph of his social progress during his two years in Washington. He has been to dinner in Georgetown eighteen times, to the Pan-American Union four times, to the X embassy three times, to the B embassy once, to the White House once. "You wouldn't find anything like that in St. Botolphs." Moses ventures to his cousin Justina's mansion in Clear Haven, a marvel of eclectic ostentation, in order to court the beautiful and unpredictable Melissa. To reach his lover at night, he must traverse the roofs of the castle. You wouldn't find anything like that in St. Botolphs, either. The travels of the worrisome Coverly take him first to New York, where he is exposed to a myriad of new sights: high buildings, dachshunds, parking meters, a man in suede shoes, a woman blowing her nose on Kleenex. But he is most startled by the fineness of the sky above the caverns of Manhattan, for he had come to feel "that the beauties of heaven centered above" his home. In a funny scene, Coverly flunks his interview with a company psychiatrist and loses the job he had been promised. He studies computers, instead, and goes off to serve at a missile base near Remsen Park. Instead of softball games or band concerts, the administration sponsors rocket launchings on Saturday afternoons; whole families eat sandwiches, drink beer, and "sit in bleachers to hear the noise of doom crack and see a fire that seemed to lick at the vitals of the earth." Remsen Park is a new community established for those who work at the missile base; and life there is both orderly and unfriendly. But Coverly sometimes feels homesick for St. Botolphs, "for a place whose streets were as excursive and crooked as the human mind." Both Moses and Coverly marry and produce male heirs, thus ensuring themselves a bequest from rich Cousin Honora. The real hero of the novel, however, is their father, Leander Wap-

JOHN CHEEVER I 179 shot. Descended from sea captains, he is reduced to piloting a decrepit excursion launch from St. Botolphs to the amusement park across the bay at Nangasakit. Leander loses even that dubious eminence when his boat founders in a storm and, dredged up, is turned into "The Only Floating Gift Shoppe in New England" by Sarah. Bereft of occupation and desperate for esteem, he issues calls for help; but only the maid and Coverly respond. (Leander loves his older son Moses more, and had wanted Coverly aborted.) In the end he wets his wrists and temples, a gesture that might look like a man making the sign of the cross, and swims ritually to his death in the sea he loves. Leander is no ordinary failure. Some of his ancestors had been schoolteachers instead of shipmasters, and he has inherited their talent for instruction. He has taught his sons such manly skills as how "to fell a tree, pluck and dress a chicken, sow, cultivate and harvest, catch a fish, save money, countersink a nail, make cider with a hand press, clean a gun, sail a boat, etc." As a rite of initiation, he takes each of his boys on fishing trips in the wilds of Canada. He attempts to instill in Moses and Coverly his own deep respect for ceremony as a stay against contemporary chaos: He would like them to grasp that the unobserved ceremoniousness of his life was a gesture or sacrament toward the excellence and continuousness of things. . . . The coat he wore at dinner, the grace he said at table, the fishing trip he took each spring, the bourbon he drank at dark and the flower in his buttonhole were all forms that he hoped his sons might understand and perhaps copy. The most important lesson Leander teaches, however, has to do with love. When Coverly's wife Betsey runs home to Georgia, he feels his maleness compromised by homosexual stirrings. In distress he writes his fa-

ther for reassurance, and the old man responds with a Chaucerian tale of how he himself had disposed of a homosexual pursuer by dumping the contents of a chamberpot on his head. "All in love," he reminds Coverly, "is not larky and fractious." Coverly imagines attending a school of love that would include classes on the moment of recognition; symposia on indiscriminate erotic impulses; courses on the hazards of uxoriousness; and lectures on that hairline boundary where lovers cease to nourish and begin to devour one another. "It would be a hard course for Coverly . . . and he would be on probation most of the time, but he would graduate.'' Love might immensely complicate life—women make things difficult for all the Wapshot men—but the alternative is unthinkable. Leander's life has been touched with tragedy, but he faces his fortune with an attitude of joyous acceptance. Appropriately the novel ends not with his watery suicide, but with Coverly's discovery, in a copy of Shakespeare, of his father's final note of instruction to his sons: Never put whisky into hot water bottle crossing borders of dry states or countries. Rubber will spoil taste. Never make love with pants on. Beer on whisky, very risky. Whisky on beer, never fear. Never eat apples, peaches, pears, etc. while drinking whisky except long French-style dinners, terminating with fruit. Other viands have mollifying effect. Never sleep in moonlight. Known by scientists to induce madness. Should bed stand beside window on clear night draw shades before retiring. Never hold cigar at right-angles to fingers. Hayseed. Hold cigar at diagonal. Remove band or not as you prefer. Never wear red necktie. Provide light snorts for ladies if entertaining. Effects of harder stuff on frail sex sometimes disastrous. Bathe in cold water every morning. Painful but exhilarating. Also reduces horniness. Have haircut once a week. Wear dark clothes after 6 P.M. Eat fresh

180 I AMERICAN fish for breakfast when available. Avoid kneeling in unheated stone churches. Ecclesiastical dampness causes prematurely gray hair. Fear tastes like a rusty knife and do not let her into your house. Courage tastes of blood. Stand up straight. Admire the world. Relish the love of a gentle woman. Trust in the Lord. Leander's catalog, which begins with such subjects as liquor, sex, clothes, and sleep, rises to a triple command to his sons: to love the natural creation, to love a good woman, and to love God. With its blend of gusto and nostalgia, ribaldry and acceptance, The Wapshot Chronicle may strike some as not serious enough, basically an entertainment. That charge cannot be brought against Cheever's sequel, The Wapshot Scandal (1964), for here the presiding spirit is demonic. In "Homage to Shakespeare," one of Cheever's early uncollected stories, the narrator's grandfather detects "gleaming through the vanity of every incident . . . the phallus and the skull." Similarly it is degrading lust and the fear of death that dominate The Wapshot Scandal. But the difference between the two novels, as George Garrett has observed, may be measured in olfactory terms, for those smells that so often provide sensuous enjoyment in Chronicle have virtually disappeared in Scandal. Cheever's second novel opens like the first with an idyllic small-town scene. It is snowing in St. Botolphs on Christmas eve. The carolers make their rounds, stopping along the way for hospitable sustenance. Honora Wapshot provides them with hot buttered rum and her customary recitation by heart of Emerson's "SnowStorm." All is neighborly, it seems to Mr. Jowett the stationmaster, who, despite his railroad pass, has never wanted to travel far. In St. Botolphs, he thinks, "everybody was going home, and everybody had a home to go to. It was one place in a million. . . ."

WRITERS

Cheever finds ways to blur this idealized picture, however. Not everyone is motivated by the Christmas spirit alone. Trees are being trimmed by the decorously clad all over town, but the widow Wilston and Alby Hooper, an itinerant carpenter, have been drinking bourbon for two days and wear nothing at all while decorating theirs. The minister, Mr. Applegate, has also been tippling, and hearing the singing of the carolers, he "felt his faith renewed, felt that an infinity of unrealized possibilities lay ahead of them, a tremendous richness of peace, a renaissance without brigands, an ecstacy of light and color, a kingdom! Or was this gin!" Foreboding death also casts its shadow over the holiday celebration. The reclusive Mr. Spofford, unable to give his kittens away, tries to drown them but, instead, falls into the river himself. No one hears his cries for help, and "it would be weeks before he was missed." In addition the tone of the narrator undercuts the rosiness of the scene, as Cheever adopts the disinterested voice of a social historian. Twice in the first three pages he insists on his distance from his subject by referring casually to ' 'the time of which I'm writing." But the time is manifestly the present, or rather, only last year, for the novel ends on the following Christmas, when Coverly comes back to a diminished St. Botolphs: Mr. Jowett is nowhere to be found, and only four worshippers attend Mr. Applegate's Christmas eve service. Yet, for the moment, the town stands as a beacon of hope and love against which the historian assesses the ills of modern life. A young girl who has left home calls her parents from Prescott's drugstore in St. Botolphs, assuring her mother that she is not drunk. Outside the carolers sing "Good King Wenceslas," but the voice of the wandering girl, "with its prophecy of gas stations and motels, freeways and all-night supermarkets, had more to do with the world to come than the singing on the green."

JOHN CHEEVER I 181 St. Botolphs, although it has not ceased to exist, represents our better past. But the inescapable present takes over, for the chief character of the novel, as one reviewer has observed, is the twentieth century itself—or more precisely the post-World War II years. In an anthology published in 1959, Cheever indicated his disenchantment with the age. The decade, he wrote, had begun with great promise, but halfway through the 1950's . . . something went terribly wrong. The most useful image I have . . . is of a man in a quagmire, looking into a tear in the sky. I am not speaking here of despair, but of confusion. I fully expected the trout streams of my youth to fill up with beer cans and the meadows to be covered with houses; I may even have expected to be separated from most of my moral and ethical heritage; but the forceful absurdities of life today find me unprepared. Something has gone very wrong, and I do not have the language, the imagery, or the concepts to describe my apprehensions. I come back again to the quagmire and the torn sky. In The Wapshot Scandal, he tried to put those inchoate apprehensions down on paper. Once again Moses and Coverly go out into the world, but the attack on modernity implied in The Wapshot Chronicle now takes an overt form. Cheever castigates the surface absurdities of the way we live: wearing wash and wear shirts to the drive-in movie, uttering debased language, and being pursued by the demons of avarice and lust. But the malaise lies still deeper. Coverly is assigned to the missile base at Talifer, most of which is concealed beneath the cow pasture of what once was a farm. There remain a house, a barn, a clump of trees and a split-rail fence, and the abandoned buildings with the gantries behind them had a nostalgic charm. They

were signs of the past, and whatever the truth may have been, they appeared to be signs of a rich and a natural way of life. Talifer, by contrast, epitomizes artificiality. For reasons of security the place is never mentioned in the newspapers; it has no public existence. As in Remsen Park, the resident scientists and technicians are persistently unfriendly. Betsey Wapshot plans an elaborate cocktail party, sending out dozens of invitations, but only four people attend: she and Coverly, and the bartender and maid she has hired. Talifer seems to her as "hostile, incomprehensible and threatening as the gantry lines on the horizon." In charge of operations is the brilliant Dr. Cameron. He is perceptive enough to realize that a "highly advanced civilization might well destroy itself with luxury, alcoholism, sexual license, sloth, greed and corruption." Civilization, he feels, "is seriously threatened by biological and mental degeneration." But he is unperturbed by the danger of nuclear holocaust; and he dispassionately carries out his task, which is to plot the end of the world. At a congressional hearing, Cameron is confronted by an old senator who speaks from the past on behalf of the future. "We possess Promethean powers," he reminds the scientist, "but don't we lack the awe, the humility, that primitive man brought to the sacred fire? . . . If I should have to make some final statement, and I shall very soon for I am nearing the end of my journey, it would be in the nature of a thanksgiving for stout-hearted friends, lovely women, blue skies, the bread and wine of life. Please don't destroy the earth, Dr. Cameron," he sobbed. "Oh, please, please don't destroy the earth." Moses and Melissa inhabit another environment entirely, the New York suburb of Proxmire Manor. But even in this comfortable and predictable suburb, technology prevails. Gertrude

182 I AMERICAN Lockhart is driven to drink, adultery, and suicide by her inability to cope with the persistent breakdown of the modern conveniences—plumbing, heating, washing machine, and refrigerator—that presumably are intended to make existence less rather than more complicated. And Melissa, bored by the empty round of social life, and suddenly obsessed by intimations of mortality, commits the unpardonable sin of taking the grocery boy Emile for a lover. It is appropriate that Emile should be so employed, for a supermarket motif runs through the novel. All across America people feed on frozen meat, frozen french fried potatoes, and frozen peas; but when blindfolded they cannot identify the peas, and the potatoes taste of soap. The supermarket where these viands are sold seems, in "A Vision of the World" (a story written at about the same time), to be the product of another civilization entirely. You would need a camera, the narrator of that story suspects, "to record a supermarket on a Saturday afternoon," for our language, which was based on "the accrual of centuries of intercourse," was traditional and except for "the shapes of the pastry, there was nothing traditional to be seen at the bakery counter. . . . " Promotional jargon substitutes for the language we've inherited. In The Wapshot Scandal, an entire family converses in advertising slogans while lunching at an airport restaurant: "My!" the mother exclaimed. "Taste those bite-sized chunks of white Idaho turkey meat, reinforced with riboflavin, for added zest." "I like the crispy, crunchy potato chips," the boy said. "Toasted to a golden brown in healthgiving infrared ovens and topped with imported salt." "I like the spotless rest rooms," said the girl, "operated under the supervision of a trained nurse and hygienically sealed for our comfort, convenience and peace of mind."

WRITERS

"Winstons taste good," piped the baby in his high chair, "like a cigarette should. Winstons have flavor." This is amusing, but it also serves as a foreshadowing of our last glimpse of Melissa, reduced to unhappy exile. She travels to Rome through the intervention of Emile. As an employee of a supermarket, he is charged with the distribution of plastic eggs containing prizes. There are five golden eggs worth vacations in European capitals, and he places the egg for the trip to Rome on Melissa's lawn. Later he comes to Europe himself, where Melissa "purchases" him during a slave auction on the island of Ladros. They live together in Rome, but are snubbed by even the dregs of expatriate society. Melissa is last seen with her hair dyed red, bewilderedly seeking some solace from the blows life has dealt her while shopping at the American supermarket on the Via delle Sagiturius: No willow grows aslant this stream of men and women and yet it is Ophelia she most resembles, gathering her fantastic garland not of cornflowers, nettles and long purples, but of salt, pepper, Bab-o, Kleenex, frozen codfish balls, lamb patties, hamburger, bread, butter, dressing, an American comic book for her son and for herself a bunch of carnations. She chants, like Ophelia, snatches of old tunes. "Winstons taste good like a cigarette should. Mr. Clean, Mr. Clean/' and when her coronet or fantastic garland seems completed she pays her bill and carries her trophies away, no less dignified a figure of grief than any other. The force driving Melissa to moral degradation is the fear of death. Indeed, the imminence of death pervades The Wapshot Scandal. Cheever ingeniously states the theme by way of an experiment in scientific approaches to literature. To while away his time at Talifer, Coverly

JOHN CHEEVER I 183 feeds the poetry of John Keats into a computer, and in violation of all laws of probability (the author announced in front matter that all the characters in his book were fictitious, as was much of the science) the most frequent words in Keats's vocabulary spell out a message in verse for 1960, not 1820: "Silence blendeth grief's awakened fall/ The golden realms of death take all/ Love's bitterness exceeds its grace/ That bestial scar on the angelic face/ Marks heaven with gall." The beautiful Melissa succumbs to her own bestiality after encountering a series of harbingers of death. A despicable old man, "craning his neck like an adder," follows her home. The doorbell rings, and when it is the grocery boy and not her frightening pursuer, she feels her first stirrings of desire for Emile. Later she goes to town for a glimpse of Emile's mother, who works in a florist shop. A man comes in to order flowers for his deceased sister, and Melissa is visited by a premonition of her own death: The image, hackneyed and poignant, that came to her was of life as a diversion, a festival from which she was summoned by the secret police of extinction, when the dancing and the music were at their best. I do not want to leave, she thought. I do not ever want to leave. She learns that Gertrude Lockhart has hanged herself. She is afraid of the ubiquitous modern killer, cancer. (One of Coverly's co-workers has twenty-seven friends who are dying of cancer, none having more than a year to live.) And so Melissa determines to dance, drink, and fornicate while she may. Sex makes her feel alive. (It serves a similar function for Dr. Cameron, for only in the arms of his mistress, a Roman tart, can he feel "the chill of death go off his bones.") So Melissa drifts in the current of her lust. At the end she walks in the Borghese Gardens, "feeling the weight of habit a woman of her age or any other age carries from one country to another; habits of eating, drinking, dress, rest,

anxiety, hope and, in her case, the fear of death." But there are better ways of facing death. About to board an airplane, Coverly reads in the afternoon paper of a jet crash in which seventythree persons died. His own flight is delayed because of engine trouble. When he finally boards, the lady sitting next to him is obviously terrified; and with good reason, as it turns out. The plane is robbed by skyjackers, who announce over the intercom that the passengers are "helpless." Everyone sits silent with fear, "sixty-five or seventy strangers, their noses pressed against the turmoil of death." But then a woman sitting forward begins to sing "Nearer, My God, to Thee" in her common church soprano; others join in, and even those not knowing the words come in strong on the refrain. "They sang more in rebelliousness than in piety; they sang because it was something to do. And merely in having found something to do they had confounded the claim that they were helpless." The fear of death need not conquer all. Love—unlike the carnal urgings of Melissa or Dr. Cameron—provides an alternative to lust. Young Miles Rowland and Mary Perkins of St. Botolphs have become lovers, but they plan to marry in the spring. Miles, an innocent choir boy, cannot believe that he has sinned, since he can "at the same moment praise his Saviour and see the shape of his lady's foot." Another way of confronting death is offered by Cousin Honora, whose fate is contrasted to Melissa's. (Far more than any other Cheever novel, The Wapshot Scandal devotes itself to women.) The eccentric old lady refuses to pay bus fares, but sends the bus company a check once a year. To the government, however, she sends nothing; and when the Internal Revenue's computer finally catches up with her, she flees to Italy. Although she and Melissa are in Rome at the same time, they do not see each other and, indeed, would not have much to say if they did.

184 / AMERICAN Honora has a place she belongs to, and finds permanent expatriation inconceivable. She cheerfully accepts extradition and returns to St. Botolphs, where she drinks whiskey, refuses food, and manages to die a happy though impoverished death. Her scandal is more forgivable than Melissa's, for her tax delinquencies have not been motivated by self-concern. Always the resident philanthropist of St. Botolphs, Honora's last request is that Coverly provide Christmas dinner for the residents of the Home for the Blind. He does so after rescuing Moses, now totally alcoholic, from the widow Wilston. Coverly's problem, articulated in the first novel, is "to build some kind of bridge between Leander's world and that world where he sought a fortune." In the sequel the problem becomes more acute—and it is clearly Cheever's problem as well. The dignity of the blind at their Christmas feast helps somewhat, for despite their cruel handicap they "seemed to be advocates for those in pain; for the taste of misery as fulsome as rapture, for the losers, the goners, the flops, . . . for all those who fear death." So does the ghost of Leander, for he once more issues his benediction from beyond the grave, this time through a note found in his wallet: "Let us consider that the soul of a man is immortal, able to endure every sort of good and every sort of evil." That final grace note comes hard after the novel's evocation of evil. Cheever is on record that writing The Wapshot Scandal cost him some pain: "I never much liked the book and when it was done I was in a bad way." And despite its dark power, the novel is Cheever's least successful, being flawed by certain inconsistencies of character and tone: Dr. Cameron is sympathetic in one scene, despicable in the next; one is not sure whether the downfall of Gertrude Lockhart is to be taken comically or seriously; a character's name unaccountably changes; and St. Botolphs sometimes takes on an improbably rosy hue.

WRITERS

In The Wapshot Scandal, the suburb of Proxmire Manor functions as setting less than one third of the time. In Cheever's stories of this period, however, the suburb is the preeminent point of focus. The Housebreaker of Shady Hill and Other Stories (1958) consists of eight stories about the inhabitants of Shady Hill. This commuter suburb is a kind of Winesburg, Ohio, a gallery of grotesques living amid the manicured lawns and impeccable interiors. Money and drink are the worms in the apple. Johnny Hake falls on hard times and steals $900 from a neighbor. Cash Bentley, longing for his youth, breaks a leg hurdling furniture at a party, and then is killed in midhurdle when his wife Louise misaims the starting gun. Francis Weed, survivor of a plane crash in "The Country Husband"—the best of the stories—falls in love with the babysitter, before being restored to his normal lack of emotion by woodworking and common sense. Young Amy, worried about her parents' excessive drinking, empties gin bottles in the sink. The Crutchmans lead a compulsively frenetic social life. Mean Mr. Baker gets his comeuppance from a secretary he seduced and then fired. Will Pym, sure that his wife is deceiving him, knocks down her suspected lover. Marcie Flint, a neglected housewife, takes up civic affairs, including one with a socially unacceptable fellow from the much-scorned "development" nearby. Some People, Places & Things That Will Not Appear in My Next Novel (1961) and The Brigadier and the Golf Widow (1964) are two other story collections containing penetrating depictions of suburban life. "The Death of Justina," in the first, provides a link between the two Wapshot novels. The setting is Proxmire Manor, whence Moses commutes to the city to write commercials for a tonic called Elixircol. Justina comes for a visit and dies quietly after a luncheon party. The trouble is that Proxmire Manor, in its unsuccessful attempt to eliminate "the thorny side of human nature," has decreed that

JOHN CHEEVER I 185 no one may die in Zone B. To obtain an exemption to this idiotic rule and have the old lady buried, Moses is forced to summon up the most vigorous arguments. Meanwhile, at the office his tyrannical boss insists on more and more copy praising the virtues of Elixircol. Moses composes black comedy, instead ("You have been inhaling lethal atomic waste for the last twentyfive years and only Elixircol can save you"), then turns out a Madison Avenue version of the 23rd Psalm and goes home, presumably jobless, to start drinking again. Afflicted with a strong sense of his heritage, Moses cannot accommodate himself to the contemporary: There are some Americans who, although their fathers emigrated from the Old World three centuries ago, never seem to have quite completed the voyage and I am one of these. I stand, figuratively, with one wet foot on Plymouth Rock, looking with some delicacy, not into a formidable and challenging wilderness but onto a half-finished civilization embracing glass towers, oil derricks, suburban continents and abandoned movie houses and wondering why, in this most prosperous, equitable, and accomplished world—where even the cleaning women practice the Chopin preludes in their spare time— everyone should seem to be so disappointed. The note Moses strikes is one of sadness. Like Cheever himself, he might be criticized for not getting angry enough. A more ambitious story, and one of the author's best, is "The Swimmer" from The Brigadier and the Golf Widow. It was "a terribly difficult story to write," taking Cheever many times longer than his usual three-day gestation period. The narrative itself is deceptively simple. Neddy Merrill, apparently in the prime of a prosperous and attractive life, sets out one Sunday to cross eight miles of suburban space by water— or, more specifically, by way of "that string of swimming pools, that quasi-subterranean stream

that curved across the county." He decides to name this stream after his wife Lucinda. The journey becomes for him a quest undertaken in the spirit of "a pilgrim, an explorer, a man with a destiny." But reality—the whistle of a train, the main highway that must be crossed on foot— keeps intruding. As his trip proceeds, Neddy becomes increasingly weak and cold with fatigue, and the neighbors whose pools he swims in become progressively more insulting. Finally he arrives home, exhausted, to find that his house is boarded up and his wife and four daughters have moved on. So artfully has Cheever wrought this story that one is liable on first reading to miss the implied progression from day to night, summer to winter, vigorous manhood to old age. Neddy Merrill's Sunday swim thus represents the downward course of his life, as he falls victim to financial and alcoholic problems. But the story takes on mythic overtones as well, with its timeless themes of journey and discovery (as Frederick Bracher has observed) combining the patterns of the Odyssey and "Rip Van Winkle." Upon finishing "The Swimmer," Cheever did not write another short story for a long time; but he began work on Bullet Park (1969), his most pervasive examination of suburbia. His concentration on suburban settings came naturally enough, following his move from New York City to Ossining on the east bank of the Hudson, a move he, like many another, made to ensure better schools for the children. Certain critics of an urban cast of mind did not easily forgive Cheever's shifting his fictional milieu from Manhattan to suburbia. Suburbia and its denizens, they maintained, were too dull and bland to constitute fit subjects for fiction, although Cheever himself finds Ossining in some ways "wilder than the East Village." Since 1945, American fiction has been prone to demographic lag, with most major writers concerning themselves with the city while the out-migration to the suburbs reached and passed

786 / AMERICAN WRITERS its peak. Cheever is one of the few good writers (John Updike and Philip Roth are others) who have dealt with suburbia seriously and without sneering. The woman who saves Plaid Stamps and dreams of the prizes they will someday bring her may be mistaken to do so, but she is indisputably real; and Cheever refuses to dismiss her as a figure of farce. Not that he glorifies suburban life-styles; quite the reverse. "God preserve me," the narrator of "The Trouble of Marcie Flint" comments, from women who dress like toreros to go to the supermarket, and from cowhide dispatch cases, and from flannels and gabardines. Preserve me from word games and adulterers, from basset hounds and swimming pools and frozen canapes and Bloody Marys and smugness and syringa bushes and P.T.A. meetings. But Cheever has always insisted that his purpose is not to be a social critic or a defender of suburbia. "It goes without saying that the people in my stories and the things that happen to them could take place anywhere." He aims, instead, for accurate and interesting portrayals of the way we live now, and seeks the universal in the particular. If not a social critic, Cheever is clearly distressed by the continued trashing of America. From the beginning his writing has bespoken his delight in the creation, his sensuous rapport with nature. One of the reasons he left prep school, according to his first published story, was that he was tired of seeing spring "with walls and awnings to intercept the sweet sun and the hard fruit." He wanted to go outdoors "to feel and taste the air and be among the shadows." This boyhood yearning has lasted all his life. Now in his sixties, he still cuts firewood, bicycles, skates, skis, walks, sails, and swims. Indeed, he invests nature with religious correspondences reminiscent of the Transcendentalists. "The trout streams open for the resurrection. The

crimson cloths at Pentecost and the miracle of the tongues meant swimming.'' One trouble with southern California, in his view, is that the trees there are not indigenous but imported. In his fiction since 1960 Cheever has frequently warned against the hazards presented in the unequal struggle between nature and technological progress. The symbols that stand for such heedless progress are almost invariably associated with transportation. One excellent story, "The Angel of the Bridge," specifically focuses on the relationship between modern means of travel and the dispiriting quality of contemporary existence. The story is built around three phobias. The first is that of the narrator's seventy-four-year-old mother, who came from St. Botolphs and who insists on skating on the Rockefeller Center rink at the lunch hour, "dressed like a hat-check girl." She used to skate in St. Botolphs, and she continues to waltz around the ice in New York City "as an expression of her attachment to the past." For all her seeming bravado, however, she panics and is unable to board an airplane. The second phobia is that of the narrator's successful older brother, who because of his fear of elevators (' Tm afraid the building will fall down") is reduced to changing jobs and apartments. Finally, the narrator himself, who had felt superior to both his mother and his brother, finds that he is quite unable to drive across the George Washington Bridge because of an unreasonable, unshakable conviction that the bridge will collapse. On a trip to Los Angeles (for he does not mind flying), it comes to him that this terror of bridges was an expression of my clumsily concealed horror of what is becoming of the world. . . . The truth is, I hate freeways and Buffalo Burgers. Expatriated palm trees and monotonous housing developments depress me. The continuous music on special-fare trains exacerbates my feeling. I detest the destruction of fa-

JOHN CHEEVER I 187 miliar landmarks, I am deeply troubled by the misery and drunkenness I find among my friends, I abhor the dishonest practices. And it was at the highest point in the arc of a bridge that I became aware suddenly of the depth and bitterness of my feelings about modern life, and of the profoundness of my yearning for a more vivid, simple, and peaceable world. His problem is temporarily resolved when a young girl hitchhiker, carrying a small harp, sings him across a bridge with "folk music, mostly." "I gave my love a cherry that had no stone,'' she sings, and he can for the moment negotiate the trip across the Hudson, the sweetness and innocence of the music from the past restoring him to "blue-sky courage, the high spirits of lustiness, and ecstatic sereneness." In Bullet Park the principal characters seek a similar angel to restore them to spiritual and psychological health. Once more, the dominant symbol for their ills comes from the world of transportation. Railroads, airlines, and freeways—which shrink space, distort time, and confuse perceptions—stand for a deep psychological alienation. Cheever's contemporary suburbanites are terrified by the hurtling freeway automobiles, high-speed trains, and jet airplanes that make it possible for them to sleep in Bullet Park, work in New York, and fly across the continent on a business call. This emphasis grows naturally out of the concentration on the journey motif in "The Swimmer." The concept of life as a journey dates to the earliest legends; but in Cheever's work the theme is obsessive. His characters are forever in transit. The dominant metaphor is that of the risky journey that modern man takes each day. There are some who manage to miss the "planes, trains, boats and opportunities," but such derelicts are the exception. Normally, the Cheever protagonist has, in the eyes of the world, "made it." The house in Bullet Park

stands as emblem of his success, as does the daily trip into the city. Although his plight may be extreme, Neddy Merrill is symptomatic of the restless and rootless denizens who inhabit Cheever's suburbs. "The people of Bullet Park," for instance, "intend not so much to have arrived there as to have been planted and grown there," but there is nothing organic or indigenous or lasting about their transplantation. The evenings call them back to 4 'the blood-memory of travel and migration," and in due time they will be on their way once more, accompanied by "disorder, moving vans, bank loans at high interest, tears and desperation." They are, almost all of them, only temporary visitors, and they find themselves, most of them, in the same commuter train every morning. To underline the rootless quality of Bullet Park, the narrator once more, as in The Wapshot Scandal, adopts the pose of an anthropologist looking back on what is, in fact, current American society. Although it is not raining, Eliot Nailles turns on his windshield wipers. "The reason for this was that (at the time of which I'm writing) society had become so automative and nomadic that nomadic signals or means of communication had been established by the use of headlights, parking lights, signal lights and windshield wipers." For the power of speech, for face-to-face communication, contemporary society substitutes mechanical symbols. One character in the book is convinced that her windshield wipers give her "sage and coherent advice" on the stock market; Nailles is urged by the diocesan bishop "to turn on [his] windshield wipers to communicate [his] faith in the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come." The technology of rapid movement (which is both a cause and effect of the development of places like Bullet Park) attempts, in short, to provide a convenient, painless substitute for the

188 I AMERICAN true affirmation of one's spiritual faith. Lent passes; and only Nailles remembers the terrible journey of Paul of Tarsus: "Thrice was I beaten with rods, once was I stoned, thrice I suffered shipwreck, a night and a day I have been in the deep; in journeyings often, in perils of waters, in perils of robbers, in perils by mine own countrymen, in perils by the heathen, in perils in the city, in perils in the wilderness, in perils in the sea, in perils among false brethren; in weariness and painfulness, in watchings often, in hunger and thirst, in fastings often, in cold and nakedness." But what possible analogy can be drawn between the trials of Saint Paul and the seemingly placid lives of Eliot and Nellie Nailles in Bullet Park? Eliot Nailles, the principal figure in the novel, is a middle-aged businessman with a job he would rather not talk about. Educated as a chemist, he is employed to merchandise a mouth wash called Spang. He is kind and uxorious; a conventional family man with old-fashioned values. If he had the talent, he would write poems celebrating his wife Nellie's thighs. He loves her, as he loves their only child, Tony, possessively and protectively; his love is "like some limitless discharge of a clear amber fluid that would surround them, cover them, preserve them and leave them insulated but visible like the contents of an aspic.'' He thinks ' 'of pain and suffering as a principality, lying somewhere beyond the legitimate borders of western Europe," and hardly expects any distressing foreign bodies to penetrate his protective fluid. But suburbia offers only false security. Neither Nailles nor Nellie nor their son Tony, a high school senior, can escape the ills of modern society. Nellie goes to New York to see a matinee in which a male actor casually displays his penis; outside the theater college youngsters carry placards proclaiming four-letter words; on a bus one young man kisses another on the ear. She returns

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from her disconcerting afternoon "bewildered and miserable." In an hour, she thinks during the train ride home, she will be herself again, "honest, conscientious, intelligent, chaste, etc. But if her composure depended upon shutting doors, wasn't her composure contemptible?" She decides not to tell Nailles about her experience, and it is just as well; absolutely monogamous and faithful himself, he is shocked and disturbed by promiscuity or homosexuality. Thus, nothing much to trouble Eliot Nailles comes of Nellie's day in the city. The case is quite different when Tony, suffering through a prolonged spell of depression, refuses to get out of bed or to eat normally. Physically, there is nothing wrong with the boy; psychologically, he is consumed by a sadness that is impervious to the ministrations of the family doctor, a psychiatrist, and a specialist on somnambulatory phenomena. After Tony has been in bed for seventeen days and it appears he will not survive his depression, Nailles also breaks down and finds himself unable to ride the commuter train without a massive tranquilizer. The locomotive, screaming across the countryside, was the preeminent machine invading the nineteenth-century American Garden of Eden. We have constructed an Atropos, a fate that will soon slip beyond our control, as Thoreau warned. Do we ride upon the railroad or the railroad upon us? Emerson wondered. Dickinson's iron horse, paradoxically "docile and omnipotent," stuffed itself on nature as it hooted its way to its stable door. And Hawthorne, in "The Celestial Railroad," made it clear (as the folk song affirmed) that you can't get to heaven in a railroad car. But the railroad has been supplanted in the mid-twentieth century by other, more frightening technological monsters. Take, for example, the jet airplane, which enables one "to have supper in Paris and, God willing, breakfast at home, and

JOHN CHEEVER I 189 here is a whole new creation of self-knowledge, new images for love and death and the insubstantiality and the importance of our affairs." This is no conventional paean to the wonders of progress, for "God willing" emphasizes the risk attendant upon jet travel, and if the "affairs" that send us hurtling across oceans and continents are truly insubstantial, without body, they are hardly important enough to justify the trip. Just how trivial these affairs are, in fact, is emphasized in Cheever's much anthologized "The Country Husband." Francis Weed survives a crash landing on a flight from Minneapolis to New York, and later that same evening he attempts, unsuccessfully, to interest someone—his wife, children, neighbors, friends—in what happened. Nothing in his suburb of Shady Hill "was neglected; nothing had not been burnished"—and the residents want things to stay that way. They do not wish to hear of disasters, much less disasters narrowly averted; they shut tragedy, especially potential tragedy, out of their consciousness. Cheever's fiction tries to wake them up, to point to the thorns on the rosebushes, to call attention to the hazards of the journey. Trains play a somewhat ambiguous role in Cheever's gallery of horrors. To the extent that they are reminiscent of a quieter past, they summon up a certain nostalgia. "Paint me a small railroad station then," Bullet Park begins, and not by accident, for the "setting seems to be in some way at the heart of the matter. We travel by plane, oftener than not, and yet the spirit of our country seems to have remained a country of railroads." The train mistily evokes loneliness and promise, loss and reassurance: You wake in a pullman bedroom at three a.m. in a city the name of which you do not know and may never discover. A man stands on the platform with a child on his shoulders. They are waving goodbye to some traveler, but what is the

child doing up so late and why is the man crying? On a siding beyond the platform there is a lighted dining car where a waiter sits alone at a table, adding up his accounts. Beyond this is a water tower and beyond this a well-lighted and empty street. Then you think happily that this is your country—unique, mysterious and vast. One has no such feelings in airplanes, airports and the trains of other nations. A romantic aura envelops any journey, by night, along the tracks of the continent. But in the small railway station at Bullet Park, designed by an architect "with some sense of the erotic and romantic essence of travel," the windows have been broken, the clock face smashed, the waiting room transformed into a "warlike ruin." The train trip is one thing; commutation is something else. The commuter station is the site of the sudden death, one morning, of Harry Shinglehouse, who is introduced and disposed of within a few sentences. Shinglehouse stands on the Bullet Park platform with Nailles and Paul Hammer (who has determined, in his madness, to crucify Tony Nailles), waiting for th$ 7:56, when "down the tracks came the Chicago express, two hours behind schedule and going about ninety miles an hour." The train rips past, its noise and commotion like "the vortex of some dirty wind tunnel," and tears off into the distance. Then Nailles notices one "highly polished brown loafer" lying amid the cinders, and realizes that Shinglehouse has been sucked under the train. The next day, troubled by his memory of this incident and by Tony's refusal to get out of bed, Nailles misses his usual connection, takes a local that makes twenty-two stops between Bullet Park and Grand Central Station, and finds that he has to get off the train every few stops to summon up the courage to go on. "Nailles's sense of being alive was to bridge or link the disparate environments and rhythms of his world, and one of his

790 / AMERICAN WRITERS principal bridges—that between his white house and his office—had collapsed." To restore this sense of continuity and to alleviate his commutation hysteria, Nailles begins taking a massive tranquilizer every morning that floats him into the city like Zeus upon a cloud. When the pills run out, however, he discovers that the doctor who prescribed them has been closed down by the county medical society and desperately turns to a pusher to get a supply of the gray and yellow capsules. Even after Tony is miraculously restored to health by the unlikely savior, Swami Rutuola, Nailles continues each Monday morning, ' 'to meet his pusher in the supermarket parking lot, the public toilet, the laundromat, and a variety of cemeteries." And even after Nailles, with the help of the Swami, manages to rescue Tony from crucifixion, 'Tony went back to school on Monday [these are the final words of the novel] and Nailles—drugged—went off to work and everything was as wonderful, wonderful, wonderful, wonderful as it had been." Cheever's suburbanites drink, smoke, and party a great deal, while their children stare fixedly at television. Clearly, they stay drugged to ward off reality. After having a few drinks with the neighbors who come to commiserate with her over her husband's suicide, Mrs. Heathcup "almost forgot what had happened. I mean it didn't seem as though anything had happened." On his way to Europe to see his mother, Paul Hammer drinks martinis to cross the Atlantic in a drunken haze, and then goes directly to a pub when he is delayed in London. He is a victim of the economy that his mad mother, once a militant socialist, characterizes as having degenerated "into the manufacture of drugs and ways of life that make reflection—any sort of thoughtfulness or emotional depth—impossible." It is advertising, she maintains, that carries the pernicious message: "I see American magazines in the cafe and the bulk of their text is adveitising for tobacco,

alcohol and absurd motor cars that promise— quite literally promise—to enable you to forget the squalor, spiritual poverty and monotony of selfishness. Never, in the history of civilization, has one seen a great nation singlemindedly bent on drugging itself.'' If she were to go back to the States, she tells her son, she would crucify an advertising man in some place like Bullet Park in an attempt to "wake that world." Hammer takes over her mission, changes his victim from Eliot Nailles to his son, and fails only because he pauses for a cigarette before immolating Tony on a church altar. The use of drugs also facilitates driving on the freeways and turnpikes that represent, in Cheever's fiction, the most damnable pathways of contemporary civilization. Despairingly he watched the construction work on Route 9 obliterate the landscape near his Ossining home, and determined to "write about that, too." In Bullet Park and later stories, he did. Among the machines in his garden, none is so cruel or so terrifying as the bulldozers and road builders that have gouged out unnatural and inhuman roads. Dora Emmison, for example, cannot negotiate the New Jersey turnpike unless she is drunk: "That road and all the rest of the freeways and thruways were engineered for clowns and drunks. If you're not a nerveless clown then you have to get drunk. No sensitive or intelligent man or woman can drive on those roads. Why I have a friend in California who smokes pot before he goes on the freeway. He's a great driver, a marvelous driver, and if the traffic's bad he uses heroin. They ought to sell pot and bourbon at the gas stations. Then there wouldn't be so many accidents." Fifteen minutes after this speech, well fortified with bourbon, Dora is killed in a crash on the turnpike. The suicide rate aside, the most shocking statistic in Bullet Park has to do with casualties on

JOHN CHEEVER I 191 the highway; these "averaged twenty-two a year because of a winding highway that seemed to have been drawn on the map by a child with a grease pencil." A story in The World of Apples (1973) vividly portrays the cost of that technological wonder, Route 64. One Saturday morning Marge Littleton loses her husband and children when their automobile is demolished by a gigantic car carrier. She begins an unsuccessful campaign against widening the highway. Then, upon recovering from her bereavement, she marries a "handsome, witty, and substantial'' Italian who is decapitated by a crane as he drives down Route 64 in his convertible. Subsequent to these tragedies, curious accidents begin to occur on the highway. Three weeks after his death "a twentyfour wheel, eighty-ton truck, northbound on Route 64 ... veered into the southbound lane demolishing two cars and killing their four passengers." Two weeks later another truck "went out of control at the same place" and struck an abutment; the two drivers "were so badly crushed by the collision that they had to be identified by their dental work." Twice more trucks swerve out of control at the same spot; in the last case the truck comes to rest peacefully in a narrow valley. When the police get to the oversized vehicle, they discover that the driver has been shot dead; but they do not find out that Marge did the shooting. Finally, in December "Marge married a rich widower and moved to North Salem, where there is only one two-lane highway and where the sound of traffic is as faint as the roaring of a shell." Marge Littleton's personal vendetta hardly provides the harried suburban traveler with a practical way of expressing his objections against heedless technological progress. Nor is there consolation in the prayers of the drunken Mr. Applegate, in The Wapshot Scandal, for "all those killed or cruelly wounded on thruways, expressways, freeways and turnpikes . . . for all those burned to death in faulty plane landings, mid-air collisions, and mountainside

crashes . . . for all those wounded by rotary lawn-mowers, chain saws, electric hedge clippers, and other power tools." Cheever seems to suggest that progress will not only kill large numbers of human beings but will also destroy the quality of life for those who survive. The world that Moses and Coverly Wapshot leave St. Botolphs to conquer is symbolized by the vast Northern Expressway that takes them south, "engorging in its clover leaves and brilliantly engineered gradings the green playing fields, rose gardens, barns, farms, meadows, trout streams, forests, homesteads and churches of a golden past." Similarly, Bullet Park's Route 61, "one of the most dangerous and in appearance one of the most inhuman of the new highways," is a road that has "basically changed the nature of the Eastern landscape like some seismological disturbance," a freeway on which there are at least fifty deaths each year. The simple Saturday drive on Route 61 becomes warlike, and Nailles fondly recalls the roads of his young manhood: They followed the contours of the land. It was cool in the valleys, warm on the hilltops. One could measure distances with one's nose. There was the smell of eucalyptus, maples, sweet grass, manure from a cow barn and, as one got into the mountains, the smell of pine. . . . He remembered it all as intimate, human and pleasant, compared to this anxious wasteland through which one raced the barbarians. Significantly, it is the mountains that Nailles's son inchoately longs for as he lies in deep depression. Nailles rouses him from bed one morning, takes him to the window, shows him how beautiful it is outside, and tells him that "everything's ahead of you. Everything. You'll go to college and get an interesting job and get married and have children." But Tony sinks to the floor and then howls out, "Give me back the mountains." What mountains? The White Mountains in New Hampshire that he and his father climbed

792 / AMERICAN together one summer? The Tirol where, Nailles later remembers, he had been so happy climbing the Grand Kaiser and the Pengelstein? Tony does not know (and will not know until the Swami Rutuola's cure) that the mountains are symbolic. The Swami had first discovered his ability as a healer while employed to clean the washrooms at Grand Central Station. There he had been accosted very early one morning by a desperate man who was certain he was going to die momentarily. The Swami took him up to the concourse where they gazed at the ''great big colored picture that advertises cameras" and which showed a man and a woman and two children on a beach, "and behind them, way off in the distance, were all these mountains covered with snow." Then he had asked the dying man "to look at the mountains to see if he could get his mind off his troubles," and the therapy had worked. As part of his treatment for Tony, Rutuola recites "cheers of place" for pleasant, unspoiled places: "I'm in a house by the sea at four in the afternoon and it's raining and I'm sitting in a ladderback chair with a book in my lap and I 'm waiting for a girl I love who has gone on an errand but who will return." These cheers, and others, miraculously restore Tony to health. In a malaise similar to Tony's, Paul Hammer is overtaken "on trains and planes" by a personal cafard, or carrier of the blues, whom he can escape only by summoning up images that represent to him "the excellence and beauty" he has lost. The first and most frequent of the images that counterpoint the realities of Bullet Park is that of a perfect, snow-covered mountain, obviously Kilimanjaro. In attempting to ward off the cafard, Hammer also calls up a vision of a fortified medieval town that, "like the snow-covered mountain, seemed to represent beauty, enthusiasm and love." Occasionally he glimpses a river with grassy banks—the Elysian fields perhaps—though he finds them difficult to reach and though it seems ' 'that a railroad track

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or a thruway [has] destroyed the beauty of the place." In Tony's malaise, in Rutuola's cheers, in Hammer's visions, Cheever expresses his yearning after unspoiled nature and his conviction that mankind can stand only so much technological progress. Now that the walls of the medieval town have been breached, the Elysian fields invaded by freeways, space obliterated and time brought very nearly to a stop, Cheever joins Mark Twain in lamentation that "there are no remotenesses, anymore.'' Bullet Park takes chances with the reader's willingness to suspend disbelief. As always Cheever observes the sorry emblems of our actual world with minute faithfulness. No one understands the surfaces of suburbia better than he. But then he whisks us off to the surreal, where Paul Hammer casually plans his homicide ("Have you ever committed a murder?" one chapter innocently begins) and the Swami Rutuola cures arthritis and sadness by means of chants. The plot of the novel, one reviewer complained in exasperation, could only be described as Gothic, for on "nearly every page, someone is doing something highly improbable for a remarkably obscure reason." Cheever recognizes the tendency toward the incredible in his later work. But he argues that if the reader "truly believes he is standing on a rug you can pull it out from under him." Furthermore, he knows that no such rug is secure, that at any moment it could mysteriously ascend. In a 1960 article, "Writing American Fiction," Philip Roth maintained that in times like ours literature could not compete with the craziness of life. Cheever takes the opposite position and attempts to set down the mad things that do happen, without explanation or apology. The creative power of the Swami Rutuola had been prefigured in "A Vision of the World," one of the stories in The Brigadier and the Golf Widow. The quotidian world here presented is

JOHN CHEEVER I 193 chaotic, but a succession of characters find solace through a dream in which someone utters the magical eight-word phrase, "porpozec ciebie nie prosze dorzanin albo zyolpocz ciwego." These nonsense syllables are associated with the good things in life; and among the good things are those that the Swami and Tony Nailles had celebrated by chanting: not merely places, but such abstractions as love and honor. At the end of the story the dejected narrator travels to Florida where a pretty woman appears to him in a dream. The ghost seems absolutely real to him, "more real than the Tamiami Trail four miles to the east, with its Smorgorama and Giganticburger stands, more real than the back streets of Sarasota." She speaks the mysterious eight words, and he awakes to speak eight words in his own tongue: " 'Valor! Love! Virtue! Compassion! Splendor! Kindness! Wisdom! Beauty!' The words seem to have the colors of the earth,'' and as he recites them he feels his hopefulness mount until he is ' 'contented and at peace with the night." Cheever's belief in the magical power of dreams and chants stems from his heritage. He was brought up on mythology, which he calls "the easiest way to parse the world." And his Episcopalianism provides him with "a metaphor for ecstasy" and an opportunity, once a week, to get down on his knees and thank God "for the coming wonder and glory of life.'' From the first his work has carried resonances from Greek myth and the Bible. But these resonances penetrate deepest into his most recent fiction—Bullet Park, the stories in The World of Apples, and most of all his novel Falconer (1977). Even Bullet Park is, as John Gardner observed, "a religious book, affirmation out of ashes," for Tony Nailles is saved from death and restored to health. Falconer offers a still more powerful affirmation, achieved from still less promising materials. Gone are the brilliantly evoked backgrounds—New York apartment,

Yankee village, exurban retreat—that characterized Cheever's earlier fiction. The action of Falconer takes place, instead, within the prison of that name, and within the confused but entirely human head of forty-eight-year-old former professor Ezekiel Farragut, a heroin addict who has known those other environments—before his incarceration he lived in Indian Hill, South wick, Connecticut, a place undescribed in the novel but surely resembling Bullet Park, Shady Hill, and Proxmire Manor—yet ends up behind walls ("fratricide, zip to ten, #734-508-32"). The name Ezekiel—Zeke for short—reminds us of Ezekiel Cheever, who founded the family line in New England. There are other echoes as well. The potential for fratricide underlay "Goodbye, My Brother." And the immediate cause of Zeke's murderous attack on his brother Eben—who had twice tried surreptitiously to dispose of Zeke—was Eben's insistence that their father had wanted Zeke aborted. This charge turns out to be true, just as it was true of Leander Wapshot. But the Captain Leander of the Wapshot books is diminished in Falconer to a ne 'er-do-well father who ' 'neglected his son and spent most of his time tacking around Travertine harbor in a little catboat." Similarly, Farragut's mother represents a rather jaundiced version of Sarah Wapshot. In her salad days, Zeke thinks, she might easily have interrupted his breast-feeding to play a rubber of bridge. Mrs. Farragut like Mrs. Wapshot is eventually forced into trade, although she runs a gas station rather than a gift shop. Thus the word "mother" evokes for Farragut "the image of a woman pumping gas, curtsying at the Assemblies and banging a lectern with her gavel." Another part of his mind calls up the Degas painting of a woman with a bowl of chrysanthemums that symbolized the serenity of "mother." Try as he will, Zeke cannot reconcile the two images. His beautiful and intolerable wife Marcia stands at the end of a line of similar women in

194 I AMERICAN Cheever's fiction that traces back to Melissa Wapshot, and includes the chilling portrait of Jill CHIDCHESTER Madison—as she reports herself to the alumnae magazine of her alma mater, one of the Seven Sisters—in "An Educated American Woman." Determined to fulfill herself in travel, civic works, and a biography of Flaubert, Jill ignores her nice but bewildered exhalfback husband and neglects her son Bibber, who dies of pneumonia. Farragut is bound in matrimony to the still more monstrous Marcia. She is narcissistic and prefers her Italian lesbian lover to him. When she comes to visit Farragut in prison, she pulls her hand away from his touch. During their brief conversation she remarks that "it's nice to have a dry toilet seat" in his absence; comments that prison has turned his hair becomingly snow white in less than a year; tells him that he has ruined her life; and explains that it would be unwise to let their son come to see him. Such is the background that leads Farragut to drugs—his addiction carries to a logical conclusion the drugging motif in Bullet Park and other stories of suburbia—and to the final degradation of prison. Cheever taught writing for a couple of years to inmates at Sing Sing prison, in Ossining. That exposure helped him bring his mastery of place to bear on Cellblock F, where the bars "had been enameled white many years ago, but . . . worn back to iron at the chest level, where men instinctively held them." He also brings to life such inmates as Chicken Number Two, a tattooed folk-singing former jewel thief; Tennis, an airplane hijacker who expects, any week now, to "leap the net" to freedom; and Cuckold, who insists on telling in excruciating detail how often his wife betrayed him before he "iced her" one night, "by mistake." Presiding over them is the obese guard Tiny, who slaughters dozens of cats—prison population: two thousand inmates, four thousand cats—after one makes off with his London broil. Farragut himself provides the en-

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tertainment on another day when the guards decide to withhold his methadone fix and watch the "withdrawal show." Bestiality and sadism flourish in Falconer Prison, yet Farragut manages to achieve redemption there: he works off his self-pity in a series of indignant letters; he kicks his drug habit; and he manages to find love, both carnal and caring. His physical lover is Jody, a young prisoner who casually seduces him. Although Farragut does not understand why, there is no doubt that he feels the same passion for Jody that he had felt, on the outside, for dozens of women. He waits for the squeak of his basketball sneakers just as he had waited for the sound of Jane's heels on the cobbles in Boston, waited for the sound of the elevator that would bring Virginia up to the eleventh floor, waited for Dodie to open the rusty gate on Thrace Street, waited for Roberta to get off the C bus in some Roman piazza, waited for Lucy to install her diaphragm and appear naked in the bathroom door, . . . waited for the end of the thunderstorm that was frightening Helen. When Jody escapes, Farragut is temporarily bereft. But the urgings of the flesh are transformed into a more humane and compassionate love. In a moving scene, Chicken Number Two is revealed as the most desperately solitary of all the prisoners. The authorities decide to ameliorate tensions behind the walls by arranging to have pictures of the inmates taken before a large decorated tree and sent for Christmas to whatever address they designate. When his turn comes, Chicken Number Two opts to send his picture to Mr. and Mrs. Santa Claus. Icicle Street. The North Pole. Later, when Chicken falls ill, Farragut takes him into his cell and cares for him until he dies, a final act of charity that leads to his own escape. Farragut gets away (after a priest mysteriously comes to bless him in

JOHN CHE EVER I 195 his cell) by zipping himself into the death sack intended for Chicken Number Two. Once outside he meets a stranger on a bus who presents him with a raincoat. All of this is deeply implausible, as are the circumstances of Jody 's escape. Confinement is the theme of the novel, and the prison serves as a metaphor for the confinements we visit upon ourselves. Yet Cheever, who has said that he knows "what it feels like inside a strait jacket," attempts in Falconer to express his "conviction of the boundlessness of possibility." What he asks us—persuades us—to believe is that miracles can and do happen. The greatest miracle of all, and the one most taken for granted, is the wonder of the natural world. In prison Farragut yearns for the blessing of blue skies, now virtually denied him. "The simple phenomenon of light—brightness angling across the air—struck him as a transcendent piece of good news." He gains a sense of oneness with the earth when permitted to mow the prison lawn. Why, he wonders, do people on television "all stay in one room, quarreling, when they could walk to the store or eat a picnic in the woods or go for a swim in the sea?" The drug he finds in the ecstacy of release from confinement is "a distillate of earth, air, water and fire.'' What this novel demonstrates is that Cheever, for all his skill at realistic evocation of person and place, has become essentially a spiritual writer—worshipful toward the creation, unafraid to believe in the unbelievable things that may occur once we learn to love one another. Zeke Farragut ends Falconer unequivocally: "Rejoice, he thought, rejoice." The radiance shining through the gloom of Falconer is characteristic of the mixture of light and dark in Cheever's works. "Oh, what a beautiful story, it's so sad," his agent once told him about a new piece of fiction. "All right," Cheever answered. "So I'm a sad man"—and not merely sad, but at times almost apocalyptically so in nightmare stories such as "The

Enormous Radio" and novels like Bullet Park. Yet he remains a writer with double vision, as keenly aware of the promise and the beauty of life as of its disappointment and degradation. In fact, it is that sense of promise, the celebration of hope amid the ruins, that ordinarily prevails in his fiction. Essentially, he is a comic writer, one who celebrates and affirms the rapture of existence. Cheever's comedy is fully capable of making his readers laugh out loud. And it may be that to some extent Cheever's "marvelous brightness," as Alfred Kazin wrote, represents an effort to cheer himself up. Certainly he derives affirmation from unprepossessing materials. But the author himself attributes his fictional attitude to another motive. "One has an impulse to bring glad tidings to someone. My sense of literature is a sense of giving, not a diminishment." He has aimed, in his writing, "to make some link between the light in the sky and the taste of death.'' Death will intrude, but light remains the goal. "Man's inclination toward light, toward brightness, is very nearly botanical—and I mean spiritual light. One not only needs it, one struggles for it." This set of mind suits ill with the lugubrious tone of much modernist writing, with what Gardner calls "the tiresome modern fashion of always viewing the universe with alarm, either groaning or cynically sneering." Nor has Cheever's critical reputation benefited from the periodical company he has kept. Despite his novels, he is still regarded by many as the quintessential New Yorker story writer. The stories in that most successful of middle-class, middlebrow magazines are supposed to run to a pattern: they focus on a single incident, but in the telling suggest echoes from the past and omens for the future. The settings are regional, most often New York or its suburbs—"The Connecticut Story," William Van O'Connor called it. The hero—or rather protagonist, for there are no heroes in New Yorker stories—is characterized

796 / AMERICAN WRITERS by his sensitivity; he is a man of feeling, not of action. Plot is unimportant; and readers sometimes complain that "nothing happens" in these stories. Certainly little happens at the end; and it is said that to get a New Yorker ending, one need only cut off the last paragraph of a more conventional one. The stories in the magazine may instruct, but they must entertain. The New Yorker has served as patron to John Cheever for four decades, although he has rarely written "aNew Yorker story"—elegant, charming, inconsequential—since his first book was published in 1943. In the later stories characters are fully fleshed out, plots are more complicated, violence smolders or erupts, and the setting shifts at times to overseas locations, particularly to Rome. Yet so pervasive is the power of the stereotype and so well known Cheever's connection with the magazine that as recently as 1973 Kazin remarked that' 'The New Yorker column is still the inch of ivory on which he writes." Furthermore, Cheever suffered temporary critical ostracism when Time magazine, that still more pervasive voice of middle-class values, proclaimed his virtues in a March 1964 cover story. The story was headed "Ovid in Ossining," but it "offered Cheever to the world"— in John W. Aldridge's phrase—"as a kind of crew-cut, Ivy League Faulkner of the New York exurbs, who could be both artistically sincere and piously right-thinking about the eternal verities": a Faulkner one could count on, for one knew the territory. What was good enough for Time tended to alienate critics such as the one who observed, accurately enough, that "if Cheever were Swift, Time would be more worried about him." By sticking to his desk (or rather a series of desks, for he habitually works on each new book in a different room of his house), Cheever has managed to write his way out of the ill effects of such middlebrow praise. He tries to avoid taking the issue of critical acceptance too seriously; he often arranges to be

out of the country when a book is scheduled to appear. Only in the case of Falconer has he submitted to the invasion of the writer's privacy so hungrily sought by the practitioners of publicity. In any case, he has earned his share of more meaningful recognition. The Wapshot Chronicle won the National Book Award for fiction in 1958. The Wapshot Scandal was awarded in 1965 the still more prestigious Howells medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters for the best work of fiction published during the previous five years. (In accepting, Cheever wondered with characteristic acuity about the wisdom of dividing American fiction into half-decade periods.) All along he has been a writer's writer, admired by such fellow craftsmen as John Gardner, John Hersey, Joan Didion, George Garrett, and Joseph Heller. Someone once referred to John Updike as his disciple, a classification that ignores both the independent achievements of each man and the real friendship between them. Cheever's work refuses to fit comfortably into any critical pigeonhole, a fact that is demonstrated by the variety of writers to whom he has been compared. He has reminded some, for example, of such social observers as Marquand and O'Hara, a categorization he repudiates: "The fact that I can count the olives in a dish just as quick as John O'Hara doesn't mean that I am O'Hara." He has been likened to Nabokov for their mutual capacity to turn the cultural artifacts of contemporary life to artistic purposes. He resembles Fitzgerald, it has been asserted, for the luminosity of his prose and for that "extraordinary gift for hope," that "romantic readiness" that he shares with Jay Gatsby. In the best work of both writers, one always knows "what time it is, precisely where you are, the kind of country." "If he has a master," Elizabeth Hard wick observed, "it is probably F. Scott Fitzgerald." Cheever has been called the "Chekhov of the suburbs," and is most like the Russian master, perhaps, in his knack for making patently ridicu-

JOHN CHEEVER I 197 lous characters seem somehow winning. He has been compared to Hawthorne for possessing a sense of history—an awareness not merely of the pastness of the past, but of the pastness in the present. He is like Faulkner, it has been observed, in bringing to life a particular plot of American ground—the New York suburb, rather than the Mississippi county. And he seems like Kafka to yet another reader, for in their fiction the shadow of the sinister can fall across the outwardly commonplace landscape in the blink of an eye. Indeed, the multiplicity of such comparisons suggests that Cheever is right in denying that he belongs to any particular American literary tradition, other than the abiding one of individuality. There is general agreement about Cheever's shortcomings. He is better at the particular scene than at stringing scenes together. His tightly wrought short stories are generally superior to the novels, which tend toward the episodic in their looseness of structure; and perhaps because of Yankee reticence, he has not always plumbed the depths of his characters. He inveighs against contemporary ills—the standardization of culture, the decline in sexual mores that tends to confuse love with lust, the obliteration of nature by the engines of technology—but blurs his outrage with blue-sky endings. Cheever's merits far outweigh such shortcomings, however. He has achieved an "amazing precision of style and language," and is capable of lyrical moments reminiscent, once again, of Fitzgerald. He possesses "a remarkably acute nose" for the fascinating situation, "a remarkably acute ear" for the thing said in context. Memory and imagination are blended into a remarkable comic inventiveness. His genius is the "genius of place." His greatest gift is "for entering the minds of men and women at crucial moments." No other writer "tells us so much"—this from Didion—"about the way we live now." Furthermore, he is not for nothing a

descendant of the Puritans, and his writing is invariably grounded on firm moral bedrock. Cheever knows that fiction is not meant to provide lessons, but "to illuminate, to explode, to refresh.'' Still, the journeys his characters undertake are fraught with moral perils, and he judges those who fall by the wayside according to conventional and traditional standards. Those led astray are inflexibly punished, banished from enjoyment of the natural world that lies around them. But he is an "enlightened Puritan" of the twentieth century; and for him the greatest, most saving virtues are those he wishes for in himself and his children: love and usefulness. Cheever finds solace in his work; and his greatest pleasure comes in shutting himself off in a room to get a story down on paper. At such moments he feels he is practicing his rightful calling. For when writing, he is invested by a . . . sense of total usefulness. We all have a power of control, it's part of our lives; we have it in love, in work that we love doing. It's a sense of ecstasy, as simple as that. The sense is that "this is my usefulness, and I can do it all the way through."

Selected Bibliography WORKS OF JOHN CHEEVER The Way Some People Live. New York: Random House, 1943. The Enormous Radio and Other Stories. New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1953.

The Wapshot Chronicle. New York: Harper, 1957. The Housebreaker of Shady Hill and Other Stories. New York: Harper, 1958. Some People, Places & Things That Will Not Appear in My Next Novel. New York: Harper, 1961.

198american writers

The Wapshot Scandal. New York: Harper & Row, 1964. The Brigadier and the Golf Widow. New York: Harper & Row, 1964. Bullet Park. New York: Knopf, 1969. The World of Apples. New York: Knopf, 1973. Falconer. New York: Knopf, 1977. The Stories of John Cheever. New York: Knopf, 1978.

CRITICAL AND BIOGRAPHICAL STUDIES Aldridge, John W. "John Cheever and the Soft Sell of Disaster," in Time to Murder and Create. New York: David McKay, 1966. Pp. 171-77. Auser, Cortland P. "John Cheever's Myth of Men and Time: 'The Swimmer,' " CEA Critic, 29:18-19 (March 1967). Baker, Carlos. "Yankee Gallimaufry,"Saturday Review, 40:14 (23 March 1957). Bracher, Frederick. "John Cheever and Comedy," Critique: Studies in Modern Fiction, 6:66-78 (1963). . "John Cheever: A Vision of the World," Claremont Quarterly, 11:47-57 (1964). Breit, Harvey. "In and Out of Books," New York Times Book Review (10 May 1953), p. 8. Broyard, Anatole. "You Wouldn't Believe It," Afew Republic, 160:36-37 (26 April 1969). Burhans, Clinton S., Jr. "John Cheever and the Grave of Social Coherence," Twentieth Century Literature, 14:187-98 (1969). Burt, Struthers. "John Cheever's Sense of Drama," Saturday Review of Literature, 26:9 (24 April 1943). demons, Walter. ' 'Cheever's Triumph,'' Newsweek, 89:61-62, 64 (14 March 1977). Corke, Hilary. "Sugary Days in St. Botolphs," Afew Republic, 150:1^-21 (25 January 1964). Cowley, Susan Cheever. "A Duet of Cheevers," Newsweek, 89:68-70, 73 (14 March 1977). DeMott, Benjamin. "The Way We Feel Now,"/forper's, 228:111-12 (February 1964). Didion, Joan. "The Way We Live Now," National Review, 16:237-38, 240 (24 March 1964). . "Falconer, "New York Times Book Review (8 March 1977), pp. 1, 22, 24.

Donaldson, Scott. "The Machines in Cheever's Garden, '' in The Changing Face of the Suburbs, edited by Barry Schwartz. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975. Pp. 309-22. Esty, William. "Out of an Abundant Love of Created Things," Commonweal, 66:187-88 (17 May 1957). Fiction of the Fifties: A Decade of American Writing, edited by Herbert Gold. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1959. Firth, John. "Talking with John Cheever," Saturday Review, 4:22-23 (2 April 1977). Gardner, John. "Witchcraft in Bullet Park," New York Times Book Review (24 October 1971), pp. 2, 24. . "On Miracle Row," Saturday Review, 4:20-24 (2 April 1977). Garrett, George. "John Cheever and the Charms of Innocence: The Craft of The Wapshot Scandal,11 Hollins Critic, 1:1-4, 6-12 (1964). Gaunt, Marcia E. "Imagination and Reality in the Fiction of Katherine Anne Porter and John Cheever: Implications for Curriculum." Ph.D dissertation, Purdue University, 1972. Geismar, Maxwell. "End of the Line," New York Times Book Review (24 March 1957), p. 5. Oilman, Richard. "Dante of Suburbia," Commonweal 64:320 (19 December 1958). Grant, Annette. "John Cheever: The Art of Fiction LXII," Paris Review, 17:39-66 (Fall 1976). Greene, Beatrice. "Icarus at St. Botolphs: A Descent to 'Unwonted Otherness,' "Style, 5:119-37 (1971). Hard wick, Elizabeth. "The Family Way," Afen> York Review of Books, 1:4-5 (6 February 1964). Hassan, Ihab. Radical Innocence: Studies in the Contemporary American Novel. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1961. Pp. 187-94. Hersey, John. "Talk with John Cheever," New York Times Book Review (6 March 1977), pp. 1, 24, 26-28. Hicks, Granville. "Literary Horizons: Cheever and Others," Saturday Review, 41:33, 47 (13 September 1958). Hyman, Stanley Edgar. "John Cheever's Golden Egg," in Standards: A Chronicle of Books for Our Time. New York: Horizon, 1966. Pp. 199-203. Janeway, Elizabeth. "Things Aren't What They Seem," New York Times Book Review (5 January 1964), pp. 1, 28.

JOHN CHEEVER Kazin, Alfred. Bright Book of Life. Boston: AtlanticLittle, Brown, 1973. Pp. 110-14. Kees, Weldon. "John Cheever's Stories," New Republic, 108:516-17 (19 April 1943). Kendle, Burton. 4'Cheever's Use of Mythology in 4 The Enormous Radio,' " Studies in Short Fiction, 4:262-64(1967). Malcolm, Donald. "John Cheever's Photograph Album,'' New Republic, 136:17-18 (3 June 1957). McPherson, William. "Lives in a Cell," Washington Post Book World (20 March 1977), pp. 111-12. Nichols, Lewis. "A Visit with John Cheever," New York Times Book Review (5 January 1964), p. 28. Nicol, Charles. "Salvation in the Suburbs, "Atlantic, 223:96, 98 (May 1969). Gates, Joyce Carol. "The Style of the 70's: The Novel," New York Times Book Review (5 June 1977), pp. 7,40-41. "One Man's Hell," Time, 77:103-04 (28 April 1961). "Ovid in Ossining," Time, 83:66-70, 72 (27 March 1964). Ozick, Cynthia. "America Aglow," Commentary, 38:66-67 (July 1964). Peden, William. The American Short Story: Front Line in the National Defense of Literature. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1964. Pp. 45-55. Ray, David. "The Weeding Out Process," Saturday Review, 44:20 (24 May 1961). Rupp, Richard H. "Living in the Present: American Fiction Since 1945," in Celebration in Modern

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American Fiction. Coral Gables, Fla.: University of Miami Press, 1970. Pp. 16-25. -. "John Cheever: The Upshot of Wapshot," Celebration. Pp. 27-39. Schorer, Mark. "Outstanding Novels," Yale Review, n.s., 32:xii, xiv (Summer 1943). Scott, Winfield Townley. "John Cheever's Country," New York Herald Tribune Book Review (24 March 1957), pp. 1, 9. Scully, James. "Oracle of Subocracy," Nation, 200:144-45 (8 February 1965). Segal, David. "Change Is Always for the Worse," Commonweal, 81:362-63 (4 December 1964). Shapiro, Charles. "This Familiar and Lifeless Scene," Nation, 208:836-37 (30 June 1969). Sheed, Wilfrid. "Novelist of Suburbia: Mr. Saturday, Mr. Monday and Mr. Cheever," Life, 66:39-40, 44, 46 (18 April 1969). Ten Harmsel, Henrietta. " 'Young Goodman Brown' and * The Enormous Radio,' '' Studies in Short Fiction, 9:407-08 (1972). Valhouli, James N. "John Cheever: The Dual Vision of His Art." Ph.D. dissertation, University of Wisconsin (Madison), 1973. Warnke, Frank J. "Cheever's Inferno," New Republic, 144:18 (15 May 1961). Wink, John H. "John Cheever and the Broken World." Ph.D. dissertation, University of Arkansas, 1974.

—SCOTT DONALDSON

Kate Chopin 1851-1904

K

.ATE CHOPIN published her first short story in December 1889—her first collection of short stories, Bayou Folk, in 1894. Initially, her work received high praise: "A writer needs only the art to let these stories tell themselves," the New York Times wrote of Bayou Folk. * 'It is not an art easily acquired, but Kate Chopin has practiced it with force and charm in the several stories of her agreeable book." The St. Louis Post-Dispatch was even more emphatic: "There is not a weak line, or a page which will not improve with every new reading." Subsequent short stories and a second collection of them, A Night in Acadie (1897), elicited a similarly positive reception. However, when Chopin published her second novel, The Awakening, in 1899—a poignant masterpiece that traces its heroine's nascent stirrings of sensuality—public opinion turned against her. "It is not a healthy book," the St. Louis Daily Globe-Democrat lamented; "if it points any particular moral or teaches any lesson the fact is not apparent." The Chicago TimesHerald protested more stridently: "It was not necessary for a writer of so great refinement and poetic grace to enter the over-worked field of sex-fiction. . . . This is not a pleasant story." And the "Books and Authors" column in Outlook capped the generally negative view: the story is not worth recounting; "its disagreeable glimpses of sensuality are repellent."

Chopin tried to shrug off the sometimes vituperative responses; but they took their toll. In Saint Louis, where she lived for most of her life, the Fine Arts Club denied membership to her; The Awakening was removed from circulation by express order of the librarian in the Saint Louis Mercantile Library; her third collection of short stories, tentatively entitled "A Vocation and a Voice," never found a publisher; and several of her strongest late short stories were never printed at all during her lifetime. Public morality had been protected, and Kate Chopin was effectively silenced. After her death in 1904, her work was almost entirely lost sight of—often literally impossible to obtain. Bayou Folk was republished in 1911; thereafter, nothing was printed save an occasional short sketch in anthologies. In 1932 Daniel S. Rankin published Kate Chopin and Her Creole Stories, an anecdotal biography to which eleven short stories were appended. As the title suggests, Rankin's interest in Chopin's work was principally regional: he compared her fictions to those of George Washington Cable, whose work he saw almost entirely as an emanation of Southern local color. This view is not completely inappropriate. Kate Chopin's maternal great-grandmother, Victoria Verdon Charleville (1780-1863), had been a contemporary of the first settlers of Saint Louis, and she spent

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KATE CHOPIN I 201 many hours telling her granddaughter tales of their French ancestors. As a child, Kate spoke French more fluently than she spoke English; and when she wrote adult fictions, she usually dealt with those Americans of French descent who lived in New Orleans or in Saint Louis. Yet to be "placed" with the reputation as an interesting but definitely minor "regional writer" is an obscuring curse: the damning, diminishing label stuck for many years and successfully concealed the real merits of Kate Chopin's work. Given this background, we might find a kind of supreme irony in the fact that serious reconsideration of Chopin's writing should have been begun by French critics, not Americanists. The first extended critical interpretation of her work did not appear until 1952, and then it appeared in Paris. Cyrille Arnavon had translated The Awakening into French (under the title Edna), and in a twenty-two page introductory essay he hailed the novel as a neglected masterpiece—not because of its local color, but because of its superb, sustained psychological analysis. Subsequent commentators began to review Chopin's work and to discover its evident merit. In 1956 Kenneth Eble published a seminal American essay on The Awakening in Western Humanities Review. When he succeeded in having it reprinted in 1964, the novel finally acquired the generous popular accord that had been so long denied to it. Meanwhile, in 1969 Per E. Seyersted, who had studied under Arnavon at Harvard, published a critical biography of Chopin and a two-volume collection of the complete works, including her first novel—until this time virtually unobtainable—and a significant number of major short stories previously unpublished. With the evidence available, the condescending view that had dominated critical judgments of Chopin's work could be discarded. And two generations after her death, she has been accepted into the canon of major American writers. The posthumous success that Kate Chopin

achieved was by no means unmitigated. Praised and then vilified in her lifetime, then forgotten for half a century, she remains a figure to stir strong feelings—even controversy. The Awakening is not a minor masterpiece, circumscribed in its aim, graceful but limited in its achievement. Quite the opposite, it is one of the most powerfully unsettling novels written by an American. If it had been a conventional, sentimental novel, differing only in its somewhat daring use of feminine sexuality, it would never have been so thoroughly quashed; by the same token, if it had been merely a surprisingly deft performance by an underrated author, it would never have burst upon the intellectual world with such meteoric brilliance once it reappeared. The Awakening is disruptive in its effect upon the reader; it coerces attention, unsettles the attempt to establish a comfortable distance from it, and taunts any attempt to moralize its conclusion. The very innate quality of the work must account for both its initial failure and its eventual triumph. The fact that Kate Chopin was an American woman has contributed, too, to the peculiar vicissitudes of her reputation. Seyersted notes the special animosity of her contemporary reviewers: In St. Louis, we recall, William Schuyler clamored for a French openness in American letters, and W. M. Reedy published shocking stories by Maupassant and his European successors in his Mirror. Reedy did not object to sinful Continental heroines. . . . But that Edna Pontellier, a real American lady, should be allowed to disrupt the sacred institutions of marriage and American womanhood and to disregard moral concepts even without repenting it, was totally unacceptable to him. A woman should devote herself to her "holy office" of a wife and a mother. Kate Chopin, a wife and mother herself—and a Southern lady in one of Saint Louis' oldest fami-

202 / AMERICAN lies—ought to have known better; this was the unwavering conclusion. The attitudes implicit in The Awakening would not have been altogether acceptable in a male writer of 1899, but at least they might have been understandable; however, in a woman, such fictionalizing went beyond indelicacy. It was damnable. Such a woman must be silenced. Today, the vagaries of fortune being what they are, Chopin's sex again influences her reputation, this time much to her benefit. The emergence of her reputation has coincided with the rise of feminist criticism in the American academy; female scholars and students, alert to discover unjustly ignored American women writers, have seized Chopin's work with an eagerness that almost compensates for the years of neglect. The literary undergraduates' familiarity with The Awakening may be now as universal as their ignorance of it was as recently as 1960, and the promulgation of the novel must in some measure be attributed to the zealous efforts of women critics. One supposes that Chopin herself might have derived a kind of wry amusement from these convolutions of fate. She was, after all, a woman with a complex, ironic comprehension of the intellectual and emotional implications of ordinary situations. Altogether, she was a remarkable woman; and for a woman in nineteenth-century America, she led a remarkable life. Kate O'Flaherty Chopin was born into a thriving, expanding metropolis of 75,000 inhabitants: Saint Louis, Missouri, in mid-nineteenth-century America—a city unique in its combination of frontier bravado and genteel, Creole aristocracy. An old river city (founded in 1764), its ties were more with the Southern states than with any other part of the nation. Still, with the rest of America, it had begun to look hopefully toward the new riches of the West—"Gateway to the West" was the name the city had recently given itself. This was the age of riverboat trading, and

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steamboats would line up along the levee in a proud display of commercial energy. Kate O'Flaherty's father was a part of that bustling world. Born in County Gal way, Ireland, in 1805, Thomas O'Raherty determined not to remain in the old country and follow his own father's profession as land agent. Consequently, in 1823, he immigrated to America, stopping for several years in New York City and then moving on to Saint Louis, where he established a wholesale grocery business, a boat store, and a commission house. Thomas O'Flaherty prospered in his new home. He was a charming, energetic, well-mannered, educated man who spoke fluent French and thus moved comfortably among the city's Creole elite. His name soon began to appear in lists of Saint Louis' "well-known citizens." After he had been in Missouri for more than ten years, Thomas O'Flaherty married young Catherine de Reilhe, the daughter of a distinguished Creole family. The marriage was short-lived, however, for Catherine died the following year in childbirth, leaving a son, George O'Flaherty, who was to become Kate's beloved halfbrother. Thomas O'Flaherty waited four more years before taking a second wife in 1844. Again he chose a member of Saint Louis' Creole aristocracy, Eliza Paris, whose family traced its lineage back to French Huguenot origins. The couple had three children: Thomas O'Flaherty, Jr., born in 1848; Kate, born in 1851; and a second daughter, born soon afterward, who died in early infancy, leaving Kate as the only surviving girl. From all accounts, the family was happy and close-knit. Both Kate O'Flaherty's mother and her maternal great-grandmother had a powerful influence upon the girl's development; however, Kate's son Felix Chopin would always claim that her earliest recollections were preoccupied with her

KATE CHOPIN I 203 father. By the time the girl reached the age of four or five, her nascent imagination had built him into a figure of romance and mystery. Rankin recounts the story as it has been preserved in family lore: Did he not go away every morning in the family carriage? She stood at the window, often on the steps, to watch him. Morning after morning during the week at the same hour those jet black horses, restless and proud; the negro footman, courteous and colorfully clad; the carriage, black and decorated with gold, were there to take her father away. Before long the carriage would return without him. Why did it return without him? Day after day she wondered and said nothing. Horses and carriage would come clattering up the cobbled street. The mystery and question were—where did her father go? Why did he not return? For the first time in her life her attention was aroused by a sense of concern. One day she asked her father where he went and why the carriage came home without him. He enjoyed the questioning. It indicated that she was aware of things; was interested in life about her. Against the mild protests of Mother and Grandmother, but with the approval of the Greatgrandmother, he promised to solve the mystery. Next day she could go with him. Excited and elated, she did drive away with him the next morning. The jet black horses moved away from the house over the cobbled streets. Before she realized it, she and her father were helped out of the carriage by the carefully dressed footman. They were at the Cathedral. The mystery was solved. Her father went to church every morning. She was somewhat disappointed, and in later life she could never tell why. As the carriage drove away from the church, father and little daughter walked through the iron gates, up the stone steps, and into the church. It was dim within. Quietly taking holy water—her father held her up so her finger tips could reach the

font—she blessed herself, and held his hand as he walked quickly to his pew. How different this week-day church service from the Sunday Mass she had already attended. Today there were just a few people, just a few lights, just a few decorations. On Sundays how different; how crowded; how exciting! The little red light burned before the altar. She looked for that. It was there. She had noticed it on Sundays, and liked it—the color. Today the dimmer lights of the church hid the pictures on the wall. On Sundays she could trace the figures on them, and wonder about them. While she was peering at the wall the Mass was over. The priest had left the altar, the two pale candles had been put out, and her father, who had prayed devoutly, took her hand and led her out. In the clear morning sunlight he asked his little daughter a question. She did not hear it at first, because she was wondering about the difference between Church on Sunday and today. Again her father asked her the question. Did she want to go to the levee? Before she could answer, the negro coachman, the jet black horses, and the carriage drove up to the church. Down Walnut Street it took them, carefully now. The way was more difficult and confused. At last the astonished child, more excited than perhaps she had ever been, clung to her father as he lifted her out of the carriage that had stopped in a narrow street, ugly and unpleasant. Church had been quiet. Here was confusion. It was the difference between business and religion. She wondered about that later on. The store was built on a sloping street on the waterfront. The rear entrance was actually the second story, and as father and child moved through the building they came out in front on a balcony or gallery that looked over the levee and the busy river with its boats and its water traffic. The child never forgot that first sight from the balcony of her father's business establishment. And when they went carefully down the bare narrow stairs to the Front Street entrance, and

204 I AMERICAN across the street and over to the levee that sloped down, well graded, to the shining river, there she saw more details of ships and shipping. The sheds on the levee were full of smells—of tar, fish, mud, hay, hides. Casks and ropes and chains and boxes were scattered about. Huge dark bargemen with great beards, many singing negroes walked over planks leading into the river steamers lying head up-stream. She remembered well she was not allowed to cross the plank or go on the steamers. That hardly mattered. The adventure of that day was an enchanting experience. These were her earliest impressions. The mystery that had surrounded the return of the empty carriage each morning was no longer to puzzle her young mind and imagination. To her came a certainty of her father's importance, and an affectionate regard for the localities associated with him. She remained fascinated by the details of life along the levee and the business of boats and water-front of St. Louis. Perhaps the most important thing about the incident (remembered at such length and in such loving detail by the little girl and taking its place among the family's most familiar anecdotes) is the indication of Thomas O'Raherty's willingness to accept and encourage his daughter's intelligent curiosity. This is a sort of initiation, a permission to share in the "secret" world of grown-up men; it allowed the little girl to think of herself as someone capable of becoming a meaningful part of such a world. The lesson was fully realized in Kate's own adult life. She was married and performed the social offices of wife and mother, bearing six children whom she loved deeply. Yet there is no evidence to suggest that she ever thought of herself as anything but her husband's equal: she enjoyed an unprecedented degree of freedom to determine her own role in marriage while he was alive; and when he died, leaving her a widow at the age of thirty-

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one, she managed his business quite successfully for more than a year. Ironically, Thomas O'Raherty's vigor and business acumen were indirectly responsible for his early death. Quick to see the financial potential in the burgeoning railroad industry, he became one of the original stockholders of the Pacific Railroad of Missouri. In 1855 he was a passenger, along with a number of other directors, on a special train that crossed the Gasconade River on a newly built bridge. The bridge collapsed, and Thomas O'Flaherty was killed. Afterward, his daughter was overwhelmed with painful puzzlement. In later years, she would tell her children about the funeral where she sat and "wondered." Thomas O'Flaherty left the house one final time; once more she accompanied him to a dim and solemn church. But then, no more to follow. He was gone, and he had left only an agonizing, unanswerable mystery. A question of terrible dimensions: the explosive, capricious whims of human existence; our tortured emotional responses as we try to confront this destiny. Thomas O'Flaherty left his family well off: neither wife nor daughter had to worry about money after his death. Yet the menage was in other ways unusual. There were no adult males in residence to exert dominance or to supervise, and four generations of females lived under the same roof. Eliza Paris had been only fifteen in 1844 when she married Thomas O'Raherty. As Seyersted observes, "Early marriages were common among the Creoles, and in Eliza's family it had for generations been usual for the girls to marry at about the age of fifteen.'' Mrs. O'Raherty was a young widow in 1855—only twenty-six years old. Her own mother, Athenaise Charleville Paris, had shared in the family tradition, marrying when she was only sixteen; and when Thomas O'Raherty died, his mother-in-law (who was four years younger than he) was only

KATE CHOPIN I 205 forty-six. To complete the list, there was the great-grandmother, Madame Victoria Verdon Charleville. All of these women took up residence together after the tragedy, and Kate O'Flaherty's girlhood and young womanhood were passed in the genial atmosphere of a Creole matriarchy. An air of seclusion settled over the formerly lighthearted home. Mrs. O'Flaherty turned to religion for comfort after the first shock of loss; and although she did not grow morbid, she became quiet and thoughtful. The tragedy brought her closer to her daughter, and the two remained intimate friends and confidantes until the mother's death. The grandmother, who may have been preoccupied in helping her own daughter through this grief, seems not to have played a significant role in Kate's life; but the great-grandmother, Victoria Charleville, decided to become the child's companion and mentor. It was a special vocation to the elderly woman—a way of responding to God's will. Madame Charleville spoke only French to her great-granddaughter, training her ear to hear its inflections and cadences precisely. Also, she undertook to supervise the young girl's piano playing, sitting patiently through the long, monotonous hours of exercises and scales so that the child might learn the importance of discipline and technique. Most important of all, Madame Charleville stirred the child's deeply imaginative nature, for she herself was a repository of the tales and legends of old Saint Louis. Thus, while she enforced the importance of discipline, she leavened the task by telling tales—vivid accounts of the French who had come to found this city upon the banks of the Mississippi. Not all of these stories were entirely proper (and many were not true, of course, being no more than the scandals of another day). There was the rumored affair of Marie Therese Chouteau, for instance, who was said to have left her husband after the birth of their first child and lived in an unlawful

union with Pierre Laclede, the founder of Saint Louis, by whom she had four children. The old woman told her tales robustly, but with no hint of moralizing: they were interesting because people did interesting things and had interesting feelings; however, one must not attempt to extract an adage from them. Indeed, Madame Charleville had a favorite saying: "One may know a great deal about people without judging them. God does that." In the end, the girl received an altogether unconventional education from her great-grandmother. Victoria Charleville undertook to teach Kate how to face life honestly, without false consciousness and without embarrassment. She encouraged her to remember and revere Thomas O'Flaherty's self-reliance and strength. Above all, she cautioned against easy condemnation and hasty judgment, and counseled instead a habit of inquiry and sustained analysis. In 1860 Kate started school with the Madame s of the Sacred Heart; and while her formal education was entirely usual for a girl of her class, much of it must have enforced the lessons of Victoria Charleville. The nuns taught the importance of discipline, just as her great-grandmother had. They taught, also, a respectable academic curriculum, and Kate became thoroughly familiar with both French and English literature. Finally, they encouraged the girl to continue with her music; and by the time she had reached adolescence, Kate O'Flaherty was an accomplished musician. It is doubtful that young Kate was able to grasp the significance of the Civil War when it broke out: her entire family (along with most of the city) were sympathetic to the Confederacy, and her half-brother George, then in his early twenties, enlisted in the Confederate army. Tenyear-old Kate had developed a case of hero worship for this big brother, and the eruption of conflict seems to have meant no more at first than the chance to shout anti-Union sentiments and

206 / AMERICAN wait for her brother's triumphant return. However, life was not so accommodating: once again she would be forced to confront that unanswerable mystery. George was captured and imprisoned; he contracted typhoid fever and died in February 1863. The blow was a bitter one to the young girl, for just the month before, Greatgrandmother Charleville had also died. In the wake of these losses, the twelve-yearold girl seems to have collapsed. Often she stayed home from school, brooding and faintly ill. In fact, it appears to have taken two or three years for Kate to recover from these reverses, and the experience left her permanently changed. Hereafter she would be wary. She had discovered great strengths in her nature—the capacity to rebound from loss and the discipline to deal with harsh realities. Although she always preserved a hearty sense of humor, some of her spontaneous joy and optimism would be lost forever. When she did emerge from this dark period, Kate O'Flaherty became a popular young woman. She was interested in the "woman question" and very independent in her own attitudes (on a trip to New Orleans in 1869 she learned to smoke—a faintly scandalous thing for a lady in those days), but she was impatient with tidy abstractions and professional reformers. Not attracted to causes or movements, she followed instead the strong pull of personal emotion. She met a twenty-five-year-old New Orleans businessman named Oscar Chopin and fell in love; in 1870, at the age of nineteen, she married him. It was a supremely happy match. Descended from a French-Creole family, Oscar Chopin seemed in many ways a typical Southern gentleman: he had lived on his father's plantation; he made his living as a cotton factor; and he supported the reactionary political position of the majority of white Southerners during the Reconstruction. Yet Oscar Chopin was significantly different from many of his peers, for

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when he saw savagery and personal tyranny at first hand, he recoiled from it. In 1852 his father had bought the notorious McAlpin plantation— reputed to be the model for Harriet Beecher Stowe's Legree plantation. The elder Chopin operated his farm with remarkable cruelty, and when he tried to enlist his young son as overseer, the boy rebelled and chained himself to work with the slaves in the fields. When he was old enough, he ran away to live with relatives. The father seems to have been cruel as a husband, too—so cruel, in fact, that his wife left him for some years while Oscar was still a boy. Oscar Chopin consciously repudiated this heritage of brutality and sadistic dominance. He always looked upon his young wife as an equal, encouraging her to plan an interesting and independent life for herself and treating her as a valued, intelligent friend as well as his beloved Kate. His relatives often rebuked him for allowing her to forget her "duty" (that is, for failing to force her into conformity with the strict rules devised for Southern "ladies"); but Oscar and Kate merely laughed together over this display of consternation. Kate had a winning gift for mimicry; she told a story well; and in the end, she was much liked, despite her headstrong, unconventional ways. This was certainly the happiest period of Kate Chopin's life. She was deeply and passionately in love with her husband; and as each of their six children arrived, she found motherhood to be profoundly moving as well. Marriage was intellectually satisfying; but it was even more rewarding at a primitive level. Kate recollects the birth of her son Jean: "The sensation with which I touched my lips and my finger tips to his soft flesh only comes once to a mother. It must be the pure animal sensation; nothing spiritual could be so real—so poignant." At first the couple lived in New Orleans. Later, in 1879 when Oscar Chopin's business faltered, they moved to Qoutierville of Natchi-

KATE CHOPIN I 207 toches parish in the lush Cane River section of central Louisiana. Here Oscar ran the general store, and the family continued to live in comfort and prosperity. Kate was immensely popular with the local gentry, and life seemed serene. However, in 1882 tragedy struck again. Oscar came down with a sudden, violent attack of swamp fever; within days he was dead. Scarcely thirty-one and still flushed with youth, Kate Chopin was left a widow. She was inconsolable. But for more than a year, she carried on the business that her husband had run, capably managing his affairs. Yet she was desperately lonely, and in 1884 she sold most of their belongings and removed to Saint Louis to join her mother. The reunion was joyful, but tragically brief. In June 1885, Mrs. O'Flaherty died and Kate Chopin was "literally prostrate with grief." In later years, Chopin's daughter would sum up the effect upon her mother's character: When I speak of my mother's keen sense of humor and of her habit of looking on the amusing side of everything, I don't want to give the impression of her being joyous, for she was on the contrary rather a sad nature. . . . I think the tragic death of her father early in her life, of her much beloved brothers, the loss of her young husband and her mother, left a stamp of sadness on her which was never lost. Never had Chopin needed her accumulated strengths more than she did now; her penetrating keenness of intellect and her habit of discipline were to prove invaluable in coming to terms with these losses. Certainly she turned to writing, at least in part (since she did not require the money) as a vehicle for examining life's emotional complexities. She was encouraged in her rather timid first attempts by Dr. Frederick Kolbenheyer, who had been her obstetrician and who became a close family friend. Dr. Kolbenheyer had an agile mind, well-versed in continental literature and philosophy. He persuaded her to question

(and later to discard) the Catholic dogmas of her youth; he urged her to study science and to read the new French writers—Maupassant and Zola. Most of all, he convinced her to do some writing of her own. Tentatively at first, and then with growing pleasure and confidence, she began to think of herself as an artist. Thus in 1889 when she was thirty-eight years of age—a widow with six children—Kate Chopin finally took up her vocation as an author. Chopin's writing career was relatively short, spanning only the years between 1889 and 1904, when she died of a stroke. She worked almost entirely in fiction, writing two novels, one at the very beginning of her career and one near its conclusion, and a few trivial poems. The middle years were marked by a substantial body of short stories (between 1889 and 1899 she wrote more than sixty of them), and to some degree these measure her development as an artist. The first novel, At Fault, is an interesting failure; the second shows her at the height of her powers. The earliest extant piece of Chopin's fiction (it was never published during her life) is an interestingly ambiguous piece entitled "Emancipation: A Life Fable," written in 1869 or 1870. It runs only one printed page and deals with the fate of an animal who "was born in a cage." Carefully tended, wanting for no physical comforts, he grows in strength and beauty. One day, accidentally, the door of his cage is left open; slowly, fearfully, "did he approach the door, dreading the unaccustomed." Suddenly, with one daring leap he is outside, running and "tearing his sleek sides, seeing, smelling, touching of all things"; often he is hungry, often injured. "So does he live, seeking, finding, joying and suffering. The door which accident had opened is open still, but the cage remains forever empty!" Commentators have frequently understood this story to represent the trials of a woman who must leave the cage of a sheltered, stifling Victo-

208 I AMERICAN rian existence to dare the dangers of a world in which she might lead a meaningful life. Certainly that is a plausible reading. However, Chopin might just as well have had the newly emancipated Southern blacks in mind (the title ineluctably suggests this association). And a reflective reader might well conclude that the most interesting thing about the story, a juvenile first effort to be sure, is precisely the fact that one cannot particularize its meaning into a timely lesson: the story is patently not about woman suffrage or black suffrage, or any other specific social problem. Rather, it is about the perversities and complexities of human existence. This interest in looking beyond the particularities of any situation and striving for insight into the changeless forces that shape human experience is characteristic of all of Chopin's best work. It is especially ironic, then, that for so long her work was pigeon-holed with the "merely" regional; for her ambition was to use "regional" problems as a vehicle for discovering general truths. At first, Chopin had difficulty finding an effective level at which to write, and the early fictions, including her first novel, all suffer somewhat from overly schematic plots. Two early short stories, * 'Wiser Than a God " and ' 'A Point at Issue!," illustrate this difficulty rather clearly. Both are about a woman's attitude toward marriage, and at a glance they appear to take opposite sides of the question. In the first, Paula van Stolz, an extraordinarily talented pianist, is courted ardently by a devoted young man. He wants to marry her, and he assures her that he does not expect her to give up anything in her life. "I only beg you to let me share it with you," he declares. Nevertheless, she refuses him—not because she does not love him, but because marriage "doesn't enter into the purpose of [her] life." The young man leaves, dejected, and marries another girl; Paula continues with her music and fulfills herself by becoming a world-renowned pianist. "A Point at Issue!" is

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also about marriage; in fact, it begins by announcing the marriage of its two main characters. However, this is to be a modern arrangement: "In entering upon their new life they decided to be governed by no precedential methods. Marriage was to be a form, that while fixing legally their relation to each other, was in no wise to touch the individuality of either." Thus when the newly married couple discover that their aspirations lead them to long separations—she going to Paris where she can improve her command of spoken French and he remaining in America where he must teach—they readily agree to the arrangement. After all, is not theirs to be an unfettered alliance? Yet separation is simpler in principle than in reality: both grow jealous and lonely. Thus, the story concludes with the couple's relinquishing their idealistic notions of married freedom for the more tangible pleasures of compromised coexistence. It is clear that Chopin has an interest in the kinds of problems women confront and, more particularly, in the many implications of marriage, especially for women. Yet it would be a patent error to read either of these tales as a parable of society's attitude toward women or wifehood. Rather, Chopin is trying to say something much broader and more complex: any vocation (marriage, music, etc.) will carry its particular freight of commitments and renunciations; each will give pleasure, yes, but each will inescapably bring pain as well; no meaningful state in life can ever be "free"—as youths or idealists envision freedom. Twenty years after writing the short fable "Emancipation," Chopin began her mature writing career with much the same message outlined in that early parable. Yet this is a clumsy beginning. The stories are too neatly constructed, symmetrical, and sterile; they do not convey the texture of their characters' lives. Chopin is not concerned to argue questions of social reform, and she is not yet able to infuse her tales with the vibrancy of particu-

KATE CHOPIN I 209 larized personal conflict; hence there is as yet no power in her fictions. A similar sort of failure marks the first novel, At Fault. Kate Chopin was eager to see a substantial piece of her fiction in print. Partly this was a matter of professional pride (once she began to write in earnest, she regarded her writing very much as a serious occupation); even more, however, it was a matter of being able to evaluate the development of her skills. She remarked once that during the early years of her apprenticeship she learned a great deal from seeing her work in cold type. And then, perhaps most important of all, there was the matter of expanding her reputation. Chopin was beginning to be ambitious for her fictions: she yearned after a national reputation, and she hoped to bring a full-length novel to the attention of important critics. Thus, she worked with great intensity upon this first long work and completed it in the ten-month period between July 5, 1889, and April 20, 1890. At Fault was rejected by the first publisher whom Chopin solicited; but, unwilling to wait for the tiresome rounds of reading and evaluation that commercial publication would demand, she had a Saint Louis company publish the novel at her own expense. To some extent, Chopin achieved her various purposes. The novel was extensively reviewed in Saint Louis and New Orleans, and these notices were generally favorable; moreover, she received some wider notice—a largely negative review in the Nation, which nevertheless was admiring of Chopin's skill in perceiving and defining character. At Fault suffers from an awkwardness of plot. The principal story is concerned with the romance between a young widow, Therese Lafirme, who has remained on her husband's Cane River plantation and taken over the management of it, and David Hosmer, a Saint Louis man who has come down to Louisiana to manage a local lumber mill. The attachment between them develops smoothly until Therese discovers that

David has divorced his first wife, Fanny, because of her incorrigibly heavy drinking. Suddenly, Therese becomes cold, not from any religious scruples (she is a Catholic, but sufficiently lax in her practice of religion not to have any objections to marrying a divorced man), but because of her belief that he still has some obligation to this woman. "I have learned one thing through your story, which appears very plain to me. . . . You married a woman of weak character. You furnished her with every means to increase that weakness, and shut her out absolutely from your life and yourself from hers. You left her then as practically without moral support as you have certainly done now, in deserting her. It was the act of a coward." Her rejection becomes a moral imperative to him; he returns to Saint Louis, finds his first wife, remarries her and brings her back with him to his home in Louisiana. Although David and Fanny have nothing whatever in common. Therese nevertheless approves of the alliance (on abstract principles), and she does everything within her power to make the resumed marriage a success. However, both her best efforts and David's considerate behavior are doomed to fail: Fanny resumes her heavy drinking; the disaster of the match becomes ever more apparent; and in a fortunate stroke of fate, Fanny is killed in a flash flood, leaving the way open for David and Therese to marry in the end. Thus, the underlying fault, perhaps the one identified in the novel's title, is Therese's cold-blooded attempt to govern human relationships according to purely intellectualized notions of what is right. And in this respect, David, too, is at fault for following her wrongheaded injunctions rather than heeding the dictates of his own emotions. A second plot, subsidiary to the first but nevertheless a major one, recounts the unsuccessful

210 I AMERICAN courtship of David's sister, Melicent, by Gregoire Santien, Therese's nephew. Melicent is a flirt, a pert Northern girl whose daring manner reveals nothing quite so much as her abysmal innocence. Transplanted to this tropical climate, she understands very little of the violence that is barely concealed in Southern chivalries. Thus, the affair with Gregoire seems a casual thing to her; certainly it does not stir her passions—she has been engaged five times already with no lasting mark upon the naivete of her nature. She is flattered by Gregoire's attendveness: it relieves her boredom, and for a while (she knows it will be only a while) she fancies herself taken with him. Finally, whilst indulging in a little introspection; making a diagnosis of various symptoms, indicative by no means of a deep-seated malady, she decided that she was in love with Gregoire. But the admission embraced the understanding with herself, that nothing could come of it. She accepted it as a phase of that relentless fate which in pessimistic moments she was inclined to believe pursued her. For his part, Gregoire is hopelessly in love. A man of untempered and disruptive passions, he has tied the full force of his emotions to Melicent with a recklessness characteristic of his general nature. And she will not—cannot—reciprocate. She is not open to real passion, and his assaults upon her virginal indifference remain utterly useless. "With his undisciplined desires and hotblooded eagerness, her half-hearted acknowledgments and inadequate concessions closed her about with a chilling barrier that staggered him with its problematic nature." After a while, Melicent tires of the South and leaves. Gregoire quits the plantation in a fury; and the news filters back that he has been killed in a casual gunfight. This plot line is potentially far more interesting than the first, which dominates the book. The

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fault here is more elusive, hence more interesting. Perhaps we are meant to censure the random and destructive intensity of the Southern inclination to indulge passion; perhaps we are meant to recoil from Melicent's inhuman coldness as she archly plays her role of "American girl." And perhaps we are merely meant to wonder at the perverse and ultimately catastrophic juxtaposition of these two ill-matched lives. Great-grandmother Charleville had said that only God could judge human behavior. Kate Chopin had begun to incorporate that insight into her fiction. Thus, while judgment is meted with heavy-handed predictability in the principal plot of At Fault, in this subplot there is something much less overt, but more arresting. Interestingly, the regional elements in the novel (much praised in its reviews) are more intimately related to the affair between Melicent and Gregoire than to the dilemma confronted by Therese and David. Chopin set the novel on a plantation named Place-du-Bois; it is a fictional rendering of her father-in-law's plantation. In At Fault, the McAlpin name is altered to McFarlane, but the plantation retains its ominous history. " 'Who was old McFarlane?' " Melicent asks Gregoire. " The meanest w'ite man thet ever lived, seems like. Used to own this place long befo' the Lafirmes got it. They say he's the person that Mrs. W'at's her name wrote about in Uncle Tom's Cabin.' " Nor has the blood-cruelty of the plantation entirely exhausted itself: midway through the novel, Gregoire shoots a black man who bears an unreasoning grudge against the mill owners and sets fire to the building. The black man is clearly a criminal, and no one thinks to punish Gregoire for his self-appointed enactment of primitive justice. But there may well be fault here, too, although Chopin wisely does not attempt to spell out the lesson for us. The atmosphere is used to great thematic advantage throughout the novel as it plays upon Melicent's sensibilities.

KATE CHOPIN I 211 The wildness of the scene caught upon her erratic fancy, speeding it for a quick moment into the realms of romance. . . . Here and there, a grim cypress lifted its head above the water, and spread wide its moss covered arms inviting refuge to the great black-winged buzzards that circled over and about it in mid-air. Nameless voices—weird sounds that awake in a Southern forest at twilight's approach—were crying a sinister welcome to the settling gloom. Such evocations affect readers, too, in preparing them to accept the drama of strange passions that erupt fitfully throughout the novel. Seyersted has remarked upon several important ways in which Kate Chopin's work was unlike that of "other" local colorists: "Her art was not retrospective, and she was no antiquarian. . . . She never emphasized background and manners for their own sake." We might go even further. The Cane River valley, Natchitoches parish, Grand Isle, even New Orleans became, in Chopin's fictional rendering of them, virtually timeless. Set outside the realm of ordinary social problems, they provided a backdrop that was entirely removed from the interrupting clamor of a bustling America moving into the twentieth century. Gradually, as she came more fully to master the creation of these fictional worlds, Chopin was able to summon them as the arena in which to stage poignant dramas of the human soul, dilemmas of relentless interiority and supreme moral dispassion. Stimulated and encouraged by the favorable notice given to At Fault, Chopin began a second novel, "Young Dr. Gosse"; by January, 1891, the novel was completed and sent on its rounds to the publishers. Unfortunately, no one was interested in the work, and the author herself eventually destroyed it, probably in 1896. We have no way of knowing why publishers were so reluctant to publish "Young Dr. Gosse." In writing of Chopin in 1894, William Schuyler de-

scribed the novel as "her very strongest work." Perhaps she was already beginning to touch upon subjects that were considered indelicate for a woman. In any case, for some years—until beginning work on The Awakening in June 1897—Chopin devoted herself principally to short fiction, where her commercial success had already been established. With increasing consistency, Chopin began to fashion a world for her fictions; a world generally peopled by Acadians and Creoles. Undoubtedly, these people seemed "picturesque" to the national audience that was becoming acquainted with her work in such magazines as Vogue and Harper s Young People. Some of the earliest sketches, especially, lend themselves to such a reading, for Chopin was careful to be correct in her delineation of these people. There were the Creoles (aristocratic descendants of the original Spanish and French settlers—sometimes still wealthy and always bearing an air of elegance and ease); and then there were the Acadians, or Cajuns (working-class descendants of those French pioneers who had been forced to leave Nova Scotia in 1755 when the French lost to the British and who had relocated in the Mississippi Valley—seldom wealthy or highly educated, but having a demeanor of stubborn honesty). Her renderings of Southern blacks were sometimes quite superficial. Nevertheless, she had a superb ear for dialect speech. Thus, one might settle back with a little sketch like ' 'Boulot and Boulotte,'' an unpretentious tale of two children who go to town for new shoes and walk back barefoot—carrying the precious purchase so that it might not be soiled—and find it no more than comfortably "quaint." Yet if Chopin was pleased by her increasing reputation, even as a regional writer, there is good evidence that she wanted to persuade her readers to take a more carefully discerning look at her characters. In November 1893 she wrote a revealing tale entitled "A Gentleman of Bayou

2/2 / AMERICAN Teche." It tells of an artist who visits a Louisiana plantation and becomes fascinated with an Acadian native named Evariste. "The 'Cadian' was rather a picturesque subject in his way," the painter muses, "and a tempting one to an artist looking for bits of local color' along the Teche." At first Evariste seems willing to sit for a picture, but then his sense of dignity becomes offended: he does not want to be identified as no more than one of the "Cajuns o' Bayeh Teche!" Several days pass and Evariste has occasion to pull the artist's son out of a lake in which the boy's boat has overturned. Surely now he will be willing to sit, the painter urges, for a picture to be called A Hero of Bayou Teche. However, the Acadian still demurs. Finally, the artist offers to let Evariste himself entitle the sketch; and only then does the man consent. " 'You will put on 'neat' de picture,' he said, deliberately, 'Dis is one picture of Mista Evariste Anatole Bonamour, a gent'man of de Bayou Teche.' " There is a deceptive casualness in some of Chopin's stories, a lightness of touch and an almost reckless spareness of material. And yet the artistry is as insistent as Evariste Anatole Bonamour himself: look at the complexity of human nature; do not be misled into resting with mere local color. Many of Chopin's stories have to do with marriage. Yet it is impossible to tease a theory out of them: rather, when taken together, they seem some shifting assemblage of mirrors specifically designed to reflect the variety of individual behavior. "The Story of an Hour" (April 1894—here, as elsewhere, the date indicates the date of composition as determined by Per Seyersted in Works}, one of her most powerful efforts, offers a provocative glimpse of the complexities in marriage. Running to a scant three pages, it tells of Mrs. Mallard's reaction to the sudden and unexpected news that her husband has been

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killed in a railroad disaster. At first, there is grief—"sudden, wild abandonment"; but when that brief storm is spent and she is alone, a young woman "with a fair, calm face, whose lines bespoke repression and even a certain strength," Mrs. Mallard begins to experience something quite different. Her husband had been kind, exemplary, and tender. Yet her bosom rose and fell tumultuously. She was beginning to recognize this thing that was approaching to possess her, and she was striving to beat it back with her will. . . . When she abandoned herself a little whispered word escaped her slightly parted lips. She said it over and over under her breath: "free, free, free!" . . . She did not stop to ask if it were or were not a monstrous joy that held her. A clear and exalted perception enabled her to dismiss the suggestion as trivial. . . . There would be no one to live for her during those coming years; she would live for herself. There would be no powerful will bending hers in that blind persistence with which men and women believe they have a right to impose a private will upon a fellow-creature. And yet she had loved him—sometimes. Often she had not. What did it matter! What could love, the unsolved mystery, count for in face of this possession of self-assertion which she suddenly recognized as the strongest impulse of her being! "Free! Body and soul free!" she kept whispering. Her thoughts run wildly, and she tells herself that it is the very elixir of life that she is drinking from this moment of tragic death. And then, abruptly, she is interrupted. The front door opens, and her husband enters. He had not caught the train, after all; he has been spared. But his wife has not. "When the doctors came they said she had died of heart disease—of joy

KATE CHOPIN I 213 that kills." The story concludes upon just that note. There is no omniscient voice to explain or moralize Mrs. Mallard's hysteric joy. It merely stands, stark and matter-of-fact. Another brief tale, "Madame Celestin's Divorce" (May 1893), offers a different perspective into a woman's impulses and desires and may be seen as an interesting contrast to the first story. Madame Celestin, an abused young wife, leans over the banister to confide her troubles to lawyer Paxton. " 'Really, madame,' he told her once, in his deliberate, calculating, lawyer-tone, 'it's more than human nature—woman's nature—should be called upon to endure. . . . He has practically deserted you; fails to support you. It wouldn't surprise me a bit to learn that he has ill treated you.' " Madame Celestin receives this sympathy readily, with a graceful, outstretched movement of her plump, pretty hands. Yes, she confides, it is difficult, caring for two small children, taking in sewing, and giving music lessons. Her eyes flutter delicately as she allows lawyer Paxton to convince her of the wisdom of divorce. The legal matter becomes the occasion for many meetings between them, and lawyer Paxton grows certain that Madame Celestin will permit him to compensate her for all the indignities she has endured at the hands of her scoundrel husband. "Old Natchitoches would not hold them comfortably, perhaps; but the world was surely wide enough to live in, outside of Natchitoches town." One day he passes her home as usual, but suddenly some different mood has unaccountably overtaken her. "You know, Judge, about that divo'ce. I been thinking,—I reckon you betta neva mine about that divo'ce." She was making deep rings in the palm of her gloved hand with the end of the broomhandle, and looking at them critically. Her face seemed to the lawyer to be unusually rosy; but maybe it was only the reflection of the pink bow at the throat. "Yes, I reckon you need n'

mine. You see, Judge, Celestin came home las' night. An' he's promise me on his word an' honor he's going to turn ova a new leaf." Thus the story ends; again, without any comment from the author. The lady has simply changed her mind. There are numerous variations on this theme of marriage. Sometimes in Chopin's stories, outsiders will suppose that marriage must be a bitter prison for the helpless wife, while the wife apparently feels otherwise and steadfastly refuses all offers to help her leave and make a better life (see "A Visit to Avoyelles," January 1893). Sometimes an unmistakably abused wife will seize happily upon her chance for freedom, and depart without a hint of conflict or regret (see "In Sabine," November 1893). And sometimes, the miracle of affection and marriage brings nothing less than the gift of life and hope to a girl who has very nearly lost both (see "Love on the Bon Dieu," October 1891). Reading a domestic tale by Kate Chopin is very much like opening a window and peering into a house picked at random. She gives us nothing less than the chance to examine uncompromised reality. These are austere glimpses into the intimacies of life, and more than anything else, they reveal the perversity, the unpredictability, and the unfailing fascination of individual emotional behavior. Until very recently, Kate Chopin's bestknown work—it is still her most often anthologized piece of fiction—was one of these domestic sketches, a brief story entitled ' 'Desiree's Baby." Desiree is a girl who had been found when she was just a toddler by the well-to-do Valmonde family. Nothing was known of her origins; however, the belief was wide that she had been left accidentally behind by a party of Texasbound pioneers. The Valmondes have reared her with great affection (having no children of their own); and when the time comes, Desiree marries well. Armand Aubigny, a passionate, aristo-

214 I AMERICAN cratic youth—himself bereft of a mother from youth—sweeps the young girl off her feet. The story opens with the fact of Desiree's recent accouchement. At first, everything is blissful; Desiree has never been happier, and her husband is overjoyed finally to have a complete family of his own blood. Yet, as the days pass, some peculiar pall descends over the nursery: the servants speak in whispers; Madame Valmonde grows wary and reticent; and Armand begins to behave with relentless and random cruelty. At last, Desiree, still so much a child herself, turns tearfully to the husband whom she has trusted: " Tell me what it means!' she cried despairingly. 'It means,' he answered lightly, 'that the child is not white; it means that you are not white.' " Afterward, Armand cannot endure her presence. In her misery, Desiree writes to Madame Valmonde, and the kind woman welcomes her adopted daughter and grandson to come home. Desiree goes to take her leave of the still-beloved husband, but he will not speak to her nor even glance in her direction. Desolated, Desiree departs, carrying her son: She did not take the broad, beaten road which led to the far-off plantation of Valmonde. She walked across a deserted field, where the stubble bruised her tender feet, so delicately shod, and tore her thin gown to shreds. She disappeared among the reeds and willows that grew thick along the banks of the deep, sluggish bayou; and she did not come back again. Several weeks later, Armand is burning all of their personal effects so that he might obliterate the memory of that shameful union. Quite by accident he comes upon a letter from his own mother—a woman whom he scarcely remembers. He read it. She was thanking God for the blessing of her husband's love:—

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"But, above all," she wrote, "night and day, I thank the good God for having so arranged our lives that our dear Armand will never know that his mother, who adores him, belongs to the race that is cursed with the brand of slavery." And with these words, the story ends. Early critics saw this sketch as an interesting study of the evils of slavery and identified Chopin's own interest as that of exposing the wickedness inherent in such a system; thus did they define the regional elements in the tale. Chopin's rejection of the slave system is scarcely to be questioned. Yet the impact of this story derives from a different source: this is not a plea for social reform. We might say, instead, that it focuses upon the boundaries—the demarcating limits—of human experience. At the most superficial level, there are the distinctions that attend coloration: the distinctions of pigment that carry implications of social caste. At first glance, these seem to be the obvious distinctions to make, but as the convolutions of the tale suggest, even these are deceptive. Next, there is the border between hatred and love: Desiree, the child who was so deeply desired and loved by her adoptive parents— never knowing anything but love, unable to comprehend any other emotion; Armand, equally beloved, it would seem, by the mother whose heritage he must despise. And beneath these parental affections, there is the passion between husband and wife—a furious force that may swerve from love into a loathing that devastates its object. Finally, there is that shadow line between sanity and madness; and this is the most dangerous bourne of all. Sanity is to be found in the order of nourishing ties of affection; indeed, it depends upon such sustenance. For just beyond, like the greedy tropical growth along the bayou—menacing, always threatening encroachment—violence and loneliness and madness await. In the end, it is perhaps quite appropriate that

KATE CHOPIN I 215 "Desiree's Baby" should be so widely accepted as representative of Chopin's work. In some sense it is, not for its regional qualities, but because it captures so economically her preoccupation with those life experiences that bring us to the margins of emotional reality. Marriage is one such experience, with its necessary and potentially destructive relinquishment of personal freedom—affection and replenishment balanced always against the threat of pain—and surely this is one reason for her continuing interest in marriage as a subject for her fictions. Other situations prove equally susceptible to such investigation: the relationship between mother and child or (somewhat later in Chopin's career) the convulsive effect of emergent sexuality. But always in the most powerful stories, human existence is conjured as a precarious thing: we have moments of happiness, even ecstasy; but just beyond, there is the patient specter of annihilation. From the very beginning of her fictional career, Chopin's stories hover about the subject of madness. In "Beyond the Bayou" (November 1891), she treats the case of La Folle, a Negro woman who was shocked in childhood by the bloody apparition of her young master, mortally wounded in a hunting accident. From that day on, La Folle has refused to leave her cabin: "Through the woods that spread back into unknown regions the woman had drawn an imaginary line, and past this circle she never stepped. This was the form of her only mania." If the form of La Folle's "only mania" is isolation, we can see that Chopin wishes us to understand how such emotional withdrawal, in turn, can become a perpetuator of insanity. Thus, La Folle's madness is cured only when her affection for the youthful son of her master causes her to cross that imaginary line in order to carry him home one day when he has been injured. The most impressive of the early stories, one which brings together many of Chopin's favorite themes, is the tragic tale recounted by old

Manna-Loulou of a young slave girl, "La Belle Zoraide" (September 1893). Zoraide was as dainty as the finest white lady, with skin the color of cafe-au-lait and a slender, graceful body that was clearly never intended for rough labor. Madame was Zoraide's godmother as well as her mistress, and she raised the girl to hold the highest standards of virtue. "Remember, Zoraide, when you are ready to marry, it must be in a way to do honor to your bringing up. It will be at the Cathedral. Your wedding gown, your corbeille, all will be of the best; I shall see to that myself." What is more, Madame has made careful plans for Zoraide's future: she is to marry advantageously—M'sieur Ambroise, the little mulatto who is the body-servant of Doctor Langle. Such a match for the girl, and such a convenience for the two families! But Zoraide's heart cannot be so passively governed; she has caught sight of Mezor, who dances the Bamboula in Congo Square. He is no more than a field hand, with a splendid black body; yet he is gentle, too, and has only kindness for la belle Zoraide, whom he has grown to love with desperation. Eventually, Zoraide summons the courage to ask her mistress to allow a marriage between them; but Madame is aghast. "I am not white," persisted Zoraide, respectfully and gently. "Doctor Langle gives me his slave to marry, but he would not give me his son. Then, since I am not white, let me have from out of my own race the one whom my heart has chosen." Nonetheless, Madame is adamant. She will not hear of a match between Zoraide and the hateful black savage (as she styles him); Zoraide and Mezor are forbidden even to speak to each other. Yet the lovers will not accept this prohibition; they meet secretly, and soon Zoraide must confess that she is carrying Mezor's child. Now

2/6 / AMERICAN truly enraged, Madame persuades Doctor Langle to sell Mezor far away where he will never again hear "the Creole tongue" nor see la belle Zoraide. The poor girl is heartbroken, but at least she takes comfort in knowing that her baby will forever signify a union with the beloved. When the agony of labor is upon her—even, momentarily, the shadow of death—Zoraide endures all with hope for the love that will begin with birth. There is no agony that a mother will not forget when she holds her first-born to her heart, and presses her lips upon the baby flesh that is her own, yet far more precious than her own. So, instinctively, when Zoraide came out of the awful shadow, she gazed questioningly about her and felt with her trembling hands upon either side of her. "Ou li, mo piti a moin? (Where is my little one?)" she asked imploringly. Madame who was there and the nurse who was there both told her in turn, 'To piti a toi, li mouri" (" 'Your little one is dead' "), which was a wicked falsehood. . . . For the baby was living and well and strong. It had at once been removed from its mother's side, to be sent away to Madame's plantation far up the coast. Zoraide could only moan in reply, "Li mouri, li mouri," and she turned her face to the wall. Madame had hoped by this measure to have her young maid at her side again, happy and carefree, but Zoraide cannot recover from the blow. The young girl has become a sad-eyed woman. "Li mouri, li mouri," she would sigh over and over again to those about her. . . . One day, a black servant entered a little noisily the room in which Zoraide sat sewing. With a look of strange and vacuous happiness upon her face, Zoraide arose hastily. . . . Upon the bed was a senseless bundle of rags shaped like an infant. . . . She was sitting contentedly beside it. In short, from that day Zoraide

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was demented. Night nor day did she lose sight of the doll that lay in her bed or in her arms. At last, Madame is stricken with sorrow and remorse; to remove the affliction, she decides to bring the real baby back to its mother. Yet when the plump little girl is led in, Zoraide merely looks at her with sullen suspicion. With one hand, she pushes the baby away, and with the other, she hugs her ragged bundle ever more tightly, fearful that someone is trying to steal the precious "baby." She was never known again as la belle Zoraide, but ever after as Zoraide la folle, whom no one ever wanted to marry—not even M'sieur Ambroise. She lived to be an old woman, whom some people pitied and others laughed at— always clasping her bundle of rags—her "piti." By 1893, Chopin had published more than thirty stories in addition to her first novel, and she was growing eager to assert herself more forcefully. In May of that year, she went East and tried to interest several publishers in "Young Dr. Gosse," and in a collection of short stories. She had no success with the novel and (as we have noted) eventually destroyed it. The stories were a different matter: in 1894, Houghton Mifflin brought out a collection entitled Bayou Folk, containing twenty-three tales, including many of the previously published works. Bayou Folk was widely reviewed (Chopin saw more than a hundred press notices of the work), and the response was virtually uniform in its praise. At last she was receiving the national acclaim that she so longed for, and there seems no doubt that it greatly boosted her confidence. Seyersted notes, for instance, that the tale "The Story of an Hour" was written "at the exact moment when the first reviews of [Bayou Folk] had both satisfied and increased her secret ambitions"; and he sees here "an extreme example of the theme of self-assertion" that was being felt ever more strongly in Chopin's own life.

KATE CHOPIN / 217 It is, of course, dangerous to make a direct correlation between any work of fiction and its author's life; however, other, more reliable clues suggest that by the middle of 1894, Chopin was beginning to think of herself as an established professional author. For the first time, she undertook to write some essays defining her own literary position. The initial piece, entitled 'The Western Association of Writers" (June 1894), was an explicit reaction to the reviews of her collection, many of which had praised it for following in the tradition of Hamlin Garland's veritism. Chopin was happy to receive the praise, but she was incensed to have the subject of her fictions so thoroughly misunderstood. Thus, this essay is a rather direct attack upon what she termed the "provincialism " of a certain kind of ' 'sentimental'' celebration of regional culture. "It is human existence in its subtle, complex, true meaning, stripped of the veil with which ethical and conventional standards have draped it" that should be the artist's focus of interest, she asserts. In a second essay, " 'Crumbling Idols' by Hamlin Garland," she is even more vehement: a genuine artist cannot make a mere region his subject, for "social environments, local color and the rest of it are not of themselves motives to insure the survival of a writer who employs them"; nor will any attempt to address particular social problems be in the least conducive to the production of great literature, for "social problems [are] by their very nature . . . mutable." Her contention that fiction should not be constructed in order to deal with particular injustices is reiterated in a series of essays published in 1897 under the title "As You Like It." In perhaps the most interesting of these essays, she excoriates Hardy's novel Jude the Obscure precisely because it seems too overtly preoccupied with general social evils and too little concerned with the nuances of emotion in its principal players. "The characters are so plainly constructed with the intention of illustrat-

ing the purposes of the author, that they do not for a moment convey any impression of reality. . . . The book is detestably bad; it is unpardonably dull; and immoral, chiefly because it is not true." We have more information about the practices Chopin disapproved of than those that she embraced; however, a late essay, "In the Confidence of a Story-Teller" (written in 1896 and published in 1899)—together with the rough draft that has only recently been discovered—gives substantial intimations. Maupassant was Chopin's avowed master. By 1894 she had begun to translate his work into English; in all, she translated more than half a dozen of his stories and was patently influenced by many more. About eight years ago there fell accidentally into my hands a volume of Maupassant's tales. These were new to me. . . . 1 read his stories and marvelled at them. Here was life, not fiction; for where were the plots, the old fashioned mechanism and stage trapping that in a vague, unthinking way I had fancied were essential to the art of story making. Here was a man who had escaped from tradition and authority, who had entered into himself and looked out upon life through his own being and with his own eyes; and who, in a direct and simple way, told us what he saw. When a man does this, he gives us the best that he can; something valuable for it is genuine and spontaneous. He gives us his impressions. In this French writer, Chopin found an alternative to the American "regionalism" of a Hamlin Garland or the Victorian social conscience of a Thomas Hardy. "Some wise man has promulgated an eleventh commandment," Chopin tells us. " Thou shalt not preach,' which interpreted means 'thou shalt not instruct thy neighbor.' " Quite conscious now of casting off the impeding baggage of the nineteenth-century

218 I AMERICAN novel as moral instrument, Chopin was preparing to move on to her strongest work. After the publication of Bayou Folk, a new subject enters with increasing insistence into Chopin's tales—the theme of sexual awakening. Now even more confidently than before, she creates fiction without a constricting, moralizing framework; hence, her treatment of sexuality is superbly distanced. For Chopin, sexual passion was best defined as a force, a natural phenomenon, and the identification seems to have been quite explicit in her own imagination—see, for example, the late, unpublished story 'The Storm" (July 1898). Like many violent wonders of nature, it may destroy. And yet, perversely, it may equally well exhilarate or invigorate. Most important of all, Chopin seems clearly to have believed that sexuality itself should not be subject to moral interpretation. It might affect human relationships in some way that had clear moral consequences; Chopin would never have denied as much. Nonetheless, she rarely chose to focus primarily upon the ethical contingencies of sexuality. Rather, she was interested in the emotional process itself as an independent, psychological entity. She saw perfectly well that her characters were fully realized people who existed necessarily within a complex social nexus; yet for the purpose of locating her own work, she looked inward to a dissection of character rather than outward to a definition of moral responsibility. More than ever, Chopin undertook to anatomize the creatures of her fictions: her narrative tone becomes brutally and brilliantly dispassionate. By 1895 she was in full command of her skills, and her best tales are relentless dramas of consummate interiority. Chopin continued to achieve telling effects with great economy, as in "Two Portraits" (August 1895), which runs to no more than four pages. Never published in her lifetime, perhaps because of its unapologetically frank manner, the story tells of two possible outcomes for the same

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"case." Brief as it is, the tale is divided into two parts, and each begins with the same words: Alberta having looked not very long into life, had not looked very far. She put out her hands to touch things that pleased her and her lips to kiss them. Her eyes were deep brown wells that were drinking, drinking impressions and treasuring them in her soul. They were mysterious eyes and love looked out of them. In the first account, Alberta is abused, raised by a harlot and given an early initiation into the degradations of sexual congress as a form of commerce; this version concludes violently. "Since Alberta has added much wine to her wantonness she is apt to be vixenish; and she carries a knife." In the second, Alberta is reared in the quiet coolness of a convent; and she becomes a saint. "It is said that certain afflicted persons have been helped by her prayers," the story concludes. "And others having abounding faith, have been cured of bodily ailments by the touch of her beautiful hands." Yet the supreme irony of the tale rests in its suggestion that neither way of managing sexuality will produce a fully formed human nature. One might suppose that the two accounts give a bad and a good moral; one might even rest with such an assumption if the two accounts had been given separately. Yet by juxtaposing them, Chopin displays (but does not allow her narrator to point out) the crucial element that is missing in each way of life: the prostitute has sexuality without spiritual coherence; the nun has so thoroughly sublimated her passion that it has very nearly atrophied. There is a conclusion in this story; however, it is entirely a psychological one, outside traditional notions of social morality and totally independent of them. This became Chopin's course in most of her strong fictions. Another sign of Chopin's increased artistic maturity is the fact that she was able to vary the

KATE CHOPIN I 219 length and complexity of her stories with great success. Still a master of the vignette, she began at last to write sustained pieces of fiction. In 1897 Chopin published a second collection of short stories, A Night in Acadie; and several pieces in it are quite substantial. Perhaps the most distinguished is "Athenai'se" (April 1895). Recollecting that Athenaise was the name of Chopin's maternal grandmother and that it was the family custom for girls to marry very young, we might well wonder whether this tale did not have personal origins. If it did, then the manner of its telling may be all the more remarkable, for the narrator maintains an attitude of consistent moral disengagement. The story introduces the girl-woman Athenaise, who is much dissatisfied with her recent marriage to the much older Cazeau and has fled to her parents' home for a protracted visit. Once there, Athenaise sullenly resists returning; yet she does not know why. "Cazeau, she knew, would make life . . . comfortable for her; and again, she had liked him, and had even been rather flustered when he pressed her hands and kissed them, and kissed her lips and cheeks and eyes." Her parents question her sympathetically: does he drink? does he abuse her in any way? does she hate him now? But the girl merely shakes her head impatiently. "It's jus' being married that I detes' an' despise. I hate being Mrs. Cazeau, an' would want to be Athenaise Miche again. I can't stan' to live with a man; to have him always there; his coats an' pantaloons hanging in my room; his ugly bare feet—washing them in my tub befo' my very eyes, ugh!" She shuddered with recollections, and resumed, with a sigh that was almost a sob: "Mon Dieu, mon Dieu! Sister Marie Angelique knew w'at she was saying; she knew me better than myse'f w'en she said God had sent me a vocation an' I was turning deaf ears. W'en I think of a blessed life in the convent, at peace!

Oh, w'at was I dreaming of!" and then the tears came. But there is little tolerance for Athenaise's tearful complaints. Most horrifying of all, her mother and father seem to think that Cazeau himself is the one to put some sense into her head— although the husband utterly rejects such a barbaric notion. Only Monteclin, the girl's gallant, hot-blooded young brother, seems to sympathize with her distress; and like two lovelorn figures out of a melodramatic novel, the brother and sister plot her escape. The emotional configuration of the situation is highly complex, and Chopin outlines it with tactful clarity. On the one hand, marriage is susceptible to tyranny: a wife may become no more than a slave to her husband's bullying. This prospect is touched upon when Cazeau, on his way home from fetching Athenaise from her parents, passes a live oak under which a runaway slave had been repossessed by his master, Cazeau's father. Yet the suggestion is no more than a tantalizing possibility here; for Cazeau explicitly and consciously rejects the option of exercising his authority, and the motif of the live oak might just as well suggest life and renewal. Athena'ise's generalized dissatisfactions are never clearly focused; however, the relationship with Monteclin, drawn with graceful delicacy, hints of a naive and infantine incestuous attraction. Not yet ready for full sexual commitment to a husband and lover, perhaps, Athenaise clings to this earlier and ultimately safer emotional tie. Monteclin "elopes" with Athenaise, taking her down to New Orleans and installing her in a respectable residential hotel where he leaves her to spend a secluded month by herself. Feeling lofty in her honesty, Athenaise reveals her plans (but not her whereabouts) to Cazeau; but she is not there to see his puzzlement over her needlessly conspiratorial behavior. "The absurdity of going during the night," he muses to himself,

220 / AMERICAN "as if she had been a prisoner, and he the keeper of a dungeon! So much secrecy and mystery, to go sojourning out on the Bon Dieu!" But Cazeau is a patient man. He will wait for his child-bride: if she is to return, it must be of her own free will; if not, he will relinquish her without further ado. At first Athenaise is lonely in her retreat, but after a while she makes the acquaintance of a fellow lodger, Mr. Gouvernail, a well-to-do Creole businessman who is immensely taken with her fresh beauty. For almost a month they meet daily—for meals and for innocent explorations in the city. Gouvernail suspects that the lady might be seeking a divorce by and by, and he fancies that she will be receptive to a declaration once she has settled herself. For her part, Athenaise is unaware of Gouvernail's plans; however, something else begins to claim her attention. She is very ignorant and must consult Sylvie, the aged black serving woman, to explain her symptoms. But once explained, they seem monumental. Her whole being was steeped in a wave of ecstasy. . . . In the mirror, a face met hers which she seemed to see for the first time, so transfigured was it with wonder and rapture. Her mother must know at once. . . . And Cazeau must know. As she thought of him, the first purely sensuous tremor of her life swept over her. She half whispered his name, and the sound of it brought red blotches into her cheeks. . . . She was impatient to be with him. Her whole passionate nature was aroused as if by a miracle. Pregnancy. It is the trigger for her initiation into full, sensual womanhood. Eager now to be with her husband, Athenaise seems to have forgotten her earlier, unformulated woes. When she meets Cazeau, it is with new possibilities before them: "As he clasped her in his arms, he felt the yielding of her whole body against him.

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He felt her lips for the first time respond to the passion of his own.'' Athenaise has come of age. The story ends. Other short stories of this period also treat the theme of sexuality. "Fedora" (November 1895) captures the conflicts of an ugly old woman in her unrequited yearning for another woman's husband. "A Vocation and a Voice" (November 1896), which was to have been the title story for a third volume of short fictions, treats the violent explosion of passion in an adolescent boy who leaves the monastery to run away with a gypsy girl. These efforts display Chopin in an increasingly daring and forthright mood. Yet she was beginning to tire of short stories. The editor, H. E. Scudder, to whom she had sent the manuscript of A Night in Acadie, wrote a provocative letter in reply. "Have you never felt moved to write a downright novel? The chance of success in such a case is much greater than with a collection of short stories.'' Both her desire for literary reputation and the pressures of this new and demanding subject must have exerted no little influence upon Chopin. Thus, in June 1897, shortly before A Night in Acadie appeared in print, Chopin began to work on another novel.lt was to be her masterpiece: The Awakening. The Awakening begins on Grand Isle, a seabound resort fifty miles south of New Orleans on the Gulf of Mexico and the setting for only one other of Chopin's fictions, "At Cheniere Caminada" (October 1893). As early as the first novel, At Fault, Chopin had used setting to externalize a state of mind—portentous violence or brooding, incipient madness. Now, employing atmosphere more skillfully than ever, she expands the languid aura of Grand Isle into a representation of emotional crisis. It is a sun-bleached world, thrown open to the ravages of heat; a world where the safe boundaries of conventional prudery have been cast aside; a world surrounded by the insistent, invasive beat of an endless ocean, "melting hazily into the blue of the hori-

KATE CHOPIN I 221 zon." It is the scene of Edna Pontellier's fatal awakening to sensuality. When the novel opens, Edna is twenty-nine; married to a staid and rather insensitive Creole businessman, Leonce Pontellier; and the mother of two small children. Born in Kentucky and reared a Presbyterian, she is alien to this tropical world where she is the only Northerner in the Catholic society that has so casually substituted old-world tolerances for the more usual American habits of Puritan severity. At the beginning of the novel, she is quite unable to voice her dissatisfactions, yet she is persistently uncomfortable. On the one hand, she finds the ambiance of Grand Isle faintly "shocking," for she little comprehends the "lofty chastity which in the Creole woman seems to be inborn" and which is consonant, somehow, with the free promulgation of a "daring" French novel among the ladies. On the other hand, her own sensuous appetites have been deeply stirred by the intrusive powers of sun and sea that call irresistibly to her own still-slumbering sentient self. And the dull, conventional marriage that had seemed so acceptable is now becoming unaccountably irritating and constricting. The novel, then, is an account of Edna's rite de passage—her movement out of ignorance into knowledge—the account of her quest to discover self; the moment when she begins to loosen and unfetter all her repressed desires. But the beginning of things, of a world especially, is necessarily vague, tangled, chaotic, and exceedingly disturbing. How few of us ever emerge from such a beginning! How many souls perish in its tumult! The voice of the sea is seductive; never ceasing, whispering, clamoring, murmuring, inviting the soul to wander for a spell in abysses of solitude; to lose itself in mazes of inward contemplation. The voice of the sea speaks to the soul. The

touch of the sea is sensuous, enfolding the body in its soft, close embrace. It is a quest for fulfillment that may lead perilously close to annihilation. Many people figure in Edna's problem. First and perhaps most significant is her intimate friend Adele Ratignolle, happily married and in the early stages of pregnancy when the novel begins. It is certain that Adele's plump, maternal body and her affectionate, mothering nature call deeply to Edna. "Pauvre cherie" Adele murmurs reassuringly to her disconsolate friend as they sit in the sand. And Edna is moved to an outpouring of emotion—tangled thoughts and memories reappearing for the first time since childhood. Above all, she longs for benign fusion with some oceanic feeling beyond the limitations of self. But Edna is puzzled by her affection for Adele: Adele's happiness, the prosaic bliss of a 4 'mother-woman" in love with her husband and content in the world of her children seems insufficient, finally, to Edna. Another friend, Madame Reisz, seems to offer a different alternative. Madame Reisz is a pianist of marvelous capabilities: her music penetrates into Edna's most secret self and calls forth an overwhelming sea of feeling. In some measure, Edna seeks to emulate Madame Reisz and begins to dabble in painting. However, the older woman cautions Madame Pontellier: "To be an artist includes much; one must possess many gifts— absolute gifts—which have not been acquired by one's own effort. And, moreover, to succeed, the artist must possess the courageous soul." Edna would like to have courage, but her own art often falters. Sometimes she seems possessed by creative joy; sometimes she feels empty and dejected, and then she cannot sustain the productive mood. Yet Madame Reisz's life inspires an even grander design in Edna: she resolves to be independent, totally "free." And here, too, the older woman offers less hope than caution:

222 / AMERICAN "The bird that would soar above the level plain of tradition and prejudice must have strong wings. It is a sad spectacle to see the weaklings bruised, exhausted, fluttering back to earth." If Adele Ratignolle and Madame Reisz offer at least two sympathetic images of the feminine possibility, the men whom Edna meets in her sojourn call more explicitly to her nascent sexual self. Most important, there is Robert Lebrun, the twenty-six-year-old son of the hotel proprietress. Robert has for some years been a fixture of sorts at Grand Isle: every year he attaches himself dutifully to some attractive older woman; this year, it is Edna. As those first days extend into sultry late summer, the pleasing image of Robert merges with sensations of the warm, buoyant sea—with the diffuse and seductive satisfactions of innumerable creature comforts. Edna cannot say, yet, that she is in love; but her own husband is too preoccupied with business to attend to her, and Robert's company seems infinitely attractive. Deep within a hunger grows, but Edna can formulate no means for satiating it. Robert and Edna grow even more intimate, although not a caress has passed between them; then suddenly, just as the infatuation seems about to mature into something more, Robert becomes alarmed by the turn of events and leaves precipitately for Mexico on business. After a while, Edna returns to New Orleans with her husband. However, everything has changed. Sometimes she thinks that it is Robert whom she misses, and she looks vainly to see his face as she walks along the street. Sometimes it seems merely the dreary duty of a stifling marriage and motherhood that so dismally oppresses her. She falters for an explanation one day while talking with Adele. "I would give up the unessential; I would give my money, I would give my life for my children; but I wouldn't give myself. I can't make it more clear; it's only something which I am beginning to comprehend, which is revealing itself to me."

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Still seeking "freedom," Edna sends the children for a protracted visit to their paternal grandmother, and she discontinues her social obligations (curtailing the weekly receptions which New Orleans matrons are accustomed to holding). Eventually, she moves out of her husband's house altogether, establishing herself in a tiny house which she names her "pigeon house"— unaware, certainly, that the very name reveals the precariousness of her enterprise. To employ Madame Reisz's image, the pigeon is a bird with very weak wings; one that can fly swiftly, but for only short distances. Leonce shows a conventional perturbation about his wife's behavior and consults a physician; however, he is counseled to let the emotional fit simply run its course, and so he does not interfere. Ever more restless, discomfited now to the point of feverish uncertainty, Edna encounters Alcee Arobin, a careless trifler with whom she enters into a sexual liaison. Yet it is not Alcee she wants, but Robert; Robert, who is absent. He dominates her imagination, and she continues to keep in contact with him via a correspondence carried on through their mutual friend, Madame Reisz. At last Robert returns. Reticent at first, he becomes inflamed as Edna awakens him with a kiss, and their union seems ready finally to be consummated. Just at this moment—anticipated so vividly and with such satisfactions in Edna's imagination—word comes that Adele has gone into labor. Edna protests that she must leave to be with her friend, and over Robert's amazed protestations, she rushes to the accouchement. In the end she does not know why she has fled. She is of no help to Adele; and when she returns, Robert has left her forever. At first despondent in the wakeful night that follows, eventually Edna reaches a desolate, central truth about her plight. "To-day it is Arobin; to-morrow it will be some one else. It makes no difference to me." . . .

KATE CHOPIN I 223 There was no human being whom she wanted near her except Robert; and she even realized that the day would come when he, too, and the thought of him would melt out of her existence, leaving her alone. It is more than Edna can bear: finally, to confront the specter of inevitable, mortal solitude. Adele had cautioned her: "Think of the children, Edna. Oh think of the children! Remember them!" Perhaps these frail creatures offer protection of sorts against the terrible incursions of solitude. Adele seems comforted by her mother role. But it is more than Edna can piece together, now. The children seem no more than antagonists, ready to pull her into eternal bondage. Robert is only a memory, floating aimlessly in her consciousness, fading already in poignancy. There are no real and lasting ties for her; she sees that now. Only the years stretching drearily forward—an immeasurable journey. And always, alone. Single-mindedly, Edna returns to Grand Isle, retreats to the murmuring sea. The water of the Gulf stretched out before her, gleaming with the million lights of the sun. The voice of the sea is seductive, never ceasing, whispering, clamoring, murmuring, inviting the soul to wander in abysses of solitude. . . . A bird with a broken wing was beating the air above, reeling, fluttering, circling disabled down, down to the water. With deliberation, she removes all of her clothes and stands upon the deserted beach. Then slowly, Edna swims out to greet the sea and be engulfed by the sensuous water. Originally, Chopin's novel was to have been entitled "A Solitary Soul": almost certainly both this name and the problem that it identifies had been suggested by Maupassant's short story 4 'Solitude.'' This brief tale is the monologue of a madman who rambles in frustrated fury.

"For some time, I have endured this abominable pain of having understood, of having discovered the frightful solitude in which I live, and I know that nothing can make it cease—nothing. . . . When one falls in love it seems as though one expands. . . . It is simply because one imagines himself no longer alone. Isolation, the abandonment of the human being, seems to cease. What an error! . . . What illusion carries us away! Does it not seem that presently our souls shall form but one? . . . And then—good-by. It is over. One hardly recognizes the woman who has been everything to us for a moment of life." Maupassant's sketch is no more than a minute dramatization of this inescapable woe: that each of us is locked in solitude, unable ever to find genuine union with another. It is the germ, nothing more, of a lengthy fiction. Many feel that Chopin, in The Awakening, definitively surpasses her master. Beyond merely the statement of a psychological problem, she unfolds the sensations, the longings, and the confusion of this woman who lacks a sufficiently courageous soul to confront and endure the inescapable solitude of human existence. In the end, Edna must "conquer" the destructive element by willfully embracing it: this is, for her, a more satisfactory consummation than the imperfect and fragile unions that constitute life. Many themes from the earlier stories appear here: the fact of marriage and childbirth as potentially replenishing (as they had been for Athenai'se, in whom adult sensuality was awakened by her first pregnancy) and the equally inescapable fact that marriage is limiting, binding, perhaps even mutilating of one's need for freedom. Here, more than in any other of Chopin's works, the full violence of irrational impulses is acknowledged—not sexual impulses, merely, but the more primitive longings for comfort and a totality of union with the beloved object. There is a delicately poised, immensely intimate recognition of a woman's involvement

224 / AMERICAN with the process of childbirth—that mysterious ritual by which one part of her "self" becomes "not-self" through an ecstasy of deliverance. Giving birth may be a woman's greatest loss at the same time that it can prove to be her greatest gain: madness can result from the interruption of that process, as the fate of la belle Zorai'de suggests; and yet children, too, are mutilating of their mother's need for freedom. Above all, the artistry of this novel lies in the control and distance that Chopin maintains over her dispassionate narrative vantage. Nineteenthcentury critics excoriated her for refusing to draw the obvious lesson from this errant wife's deserved destruction; some modern feminist critics have been almost equally dissatisfied with Chopin's failure to condemn explicitly the slavery of conventional marriage and the bondage of a wife to husband and children. Yet both objections neglect Chopin's intention. As she so often stated, social problems were not an appropriate subject for great fiction; only timeless emotional dilemmas would endure to sustain an audience's interest. She wished to understand character—to make a reader/
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cate subject matter, no doubt, she never sought to publish this story. Still, it demonstrates the unmistakable direction her creative impulse was taking and helps to explain the intensity of crisis that was visited upon her by the public hostility over her second novel. Way & Williams went out of business in 1898; as a result, the works Chopin had entrusted to them (there were three by now: A Night in Acadie, The Awakening, and "A Vocation and a Voice") were all sent over to Herbert S. Stone & Co. The progress of the novel was thus delayed; and it was not published until April 22, 1899. Yet perhaps the interval was a blessing, after all. Reviews began to appear little more than a week later, and they were violently, sometimes viciously condemning. By August, The Awakening had received nationwide reprobation. Ironically, it did not even profit from this notoriety: it was deemed "morbid and unwholesome" reading because it presented a married woman's casual sexual liaisons without providing an uplifting lesson to purify the tale; thus, all moral people were enjoined to avoid it. Yet it was in no way sexually explicit or prurient; thus anyone seeking mild pornographic literature would have had to look elsewhere. Within six months of its publication, The Awakening brought its author a full measure of public scorn; and then, almost quietly, it slipped out of view. People were through discussing it, and Kate Chopin's life seemed to resume its regular course. However, at base, something had changed. Chopin was probably not capable of altering very much the direction of her creativity: she had consciously perfected the narrative method used with such devastating effect in The Awakening, and she could scarcely have reverted, then, to a pious Victorian tone. In the matter of subject, too, there was a sense of genuine achievement, and although she might have toned down her frank approach, she could not willfully have

KATE CHOPIN i 225 transformed it. But the public would not accept the products of her labor. She had reached an impasse. Her dilemma must have intensified in early 1900 when the Atlantic returned a short story, "Ti Demon" (November 1899), which was found "too somber." The story is in no way shocking, although it does turn upon a man's spontaneous outburst of murderous rage when he thinks his fiancee has been unfaithful to him; but the rejection may have seemed prophetic. Further discouragement came when Herbert S. Stone returned the manuscript of "A Vocation and a Voice." The house had decided to shorten its list, and the return of Chopin's manuscript had nothing whatsoever to do with the upheaval that had followed the publication of The Awakening; but Chopin did not know these facts, and the rebuff was a staggering blow to her self-esteem. She wrote only seven more short stories between 1900 and 1904. It must have been especially difficult for Chopin to absorb these setbacks because of her failing health. Only in her early fifties, she began to have spells of disabling weakness, a form of circulatory trouble that may have been hereditary (her mother died at an early age). Family business occupied more of her energies, and a large, affectionate band of children and grandchildren sustained her spirits. In 1904 the Saint Louis World's Fair opened, and Chopin was so entranced by it that she fell into the habit of strolling through it each day. On August 20, 1904, Kate Chopin suffered a stroke. Two days later she died. Deeply mourned by her family and friends, she was virtually forgotten as a novelist.

Selected Bibliography Per Seyersted has done more than anyone else to make Kate Chopin's life and work available to a modern audience. His biography of her, Kate Chopin: A Critical Biography, is the most reliable source of information, and I have relied heavily upon it in my accounts of her life—although the Rankin biography does add some anecdotal material that has not been included by Seyersted. More important, Seyersted has completed the significant task of carefully sorting through the published works and unpublished manuscripts in order to bring together the material in his invaluable two-volume collection, The Complete Works of Kate Chopin. A Chopin library consists, essentially, of these two volumes.

WORKS OF KATE CHOPIN At Fault. Saint Louis: Published for the author by Nixon-Jones Printing Co., 1890. Bayou Folk. Boston: Houghton Mifflin & Co., 1894. A Night in Acadie. Chicago: Way & Williams, 1897. The Awakening. Chicago and New York: Herbert S. Stone, 1899. COLLECTED WORKS

The Complete Works of Kate Chopin, edited by Per Seyersted. 2 vols. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1969. (Contains many previously unpublished works, with complete information about original publication and composition dates.)

BIBLIOGRAPHY Springer, Marlene. Kate Chopin and Edith Wharton: An Annotated Bibliographical Guide to Secondary Materials. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1976.

BIOGRAPHY Arms, George. "Kate Chopin'sThe Awakening in the Perspective of Her Literary Career," in Essays on American Literature in Honor of Jay B. Hubbell,

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edited by Clarence Gohdes. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1967. Pp. 215-28. Arnavon, Cyrille. "Les debuts du roman realiste americain et I'influence frangaise," mRomanciers americains contemporains, edited by Henri Kerst. Cahiers des Langues Modernes, 1, Paris, 1946, 9-35. . Introduction to Edna. Paris: Le Club bibliophile de France, 1952. Arner, Robert. "Kate Chopin's Realism: 'At the 'Cadian Ball' and The Storm,' " in Markham Review, 2 (February 1970), n.p. . "Landscape Symbolism in Kate Chopin's 4 At Fault,' " in Louisiana Studies, 9:142-53 (Fall 1970). Culley, Margaret, ed. The Awakening: A Norton Critical Edition. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1976. Deyo, C. L. "Mrs. Kate Chopin," in St. Louis Life, 9:11-12 (June 9, 1894). Eble, Kenneth. "A Forgotten Novel: Kate Chopin's The Awakening, " in Western Humanities Review, 10:261-69 (Summer 1956). Fletcher, Marie. "The Southern Woman in the Fiction of Kate Chopin," in Louisiana History, 7:117-32 (Spring 1966). Forrey, Carolyn. "The New Woman Revisited," in Women s Studies, 2:37-56 (1974). Leary, Lewis. Southern Excursions: Essay on Mark Twain and Others. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1971. May, John R. "Local Color in The Awakening," in Southern Review, 6:1031^0 (Fall 1970).

Rankin, Daniel S. Kate Chopin and Her Creole Stories. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1932. Ringe, Donald A. "Romantic Imagery in Kate Chopin's The Awakening," in American Literature, 43:580-88 (January 1972). Rocks, James E. "Kate Chopin's Ironic Vision," in Revue de Louisiana/Louisiana Review, 1:110-20 (Winter 1972). Schuyler, William. "Kate Chopin," in Writer, 7:115-17 (August 1894). Seyersted, Per. Kate Chopin: A Critical Biography. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1969. Skaggs, Merrill Maguire. The Folk of Southern Fiction. Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 1972. Spangler, George. "Kate Chopin's The Awakening: A Partial Dissent," in Novel: A Forum on Fiction, 3:249-155 (Spring 1970). Sullivan, Ruth, and Smith, Stewart. "Narrative Stance in Kate Chopin's The Awakening, " in Studies in American Fiction, 1:62-75 (Spring 1973). Wheeler, Otis B. "The Five Awakenings of Edna Pontellier," in Southern Review, 11:118-28 (January 1975). Wolff, Cynthia Griffin. "Thanatos and Eros: Kate Chopin's The Awakening," in American Quarterly, 25:449^-71 (October 1973). Zlotnick, Joan. "A Woman's Will: Kate Chopin on Selfhood, Wifehood, and Motherhood," in Markham Review, 3 (October 1968), n.p. —CYNTHIA GRIFFIN WOLFF

Michel-GuillaumeJean de Crevecoeur 1735-1^13

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tetters from an American Farmer was published in 1782, as the American Revolution was drawing to a close. The author was a Frenchman, Michel-Guillaume Jean de Crevecoeur, who had long thought of himself as an American, had written the book in English, published it in London, and signed it with the name he had used for twenty years as a resident and naturalized citizen of the state of New York, J. Hector St. John. It is an uneven book, haphazardly composed. But it is nevertheless a book of the first importance, a classic of American literature, as D. H. Lawrence rightly called it. It is important in its own right. It is important because it contains in embryo many of the central themes of later American literature. And it is important because at the very moment in history when America was about to become independent, Crevecoeur asked the question "What is an American?" and gave an extraordinarily evocative answer. He thought the American was "a new man," quite literally a new race, a new kind of human being. Crevecoeur's American is a new man in part simply because he is free of the accumulated social ills and inequalities of Europe. "Here are no aristocratical families, no courts, no kings, no bishops, no ecclesiastical dominion, no invisible

power giving to a few a very visible one. . . . " The American is not only free from the domination of king and bishop; he is in the process of shedding his old national and religious identity. National identity still functions in the first generation and has a stereotypical effect upon the new immigrant's chances of success: Whence the difference arises I know not, but out of twelve families of emigrants of each country, generally seven Scotch will succeed, nine German, and four Irish. The Scotch are frugal and laborious, but their wives cannot work so hard as German women. . . . The Irish do not prosper so well; they love to drink and to quarrel; . . . perhaps it is that their industry had less scope and was less exercised at home. . . . The poor are worse lodged there than anywhere else in Europe; their potatoes, which are easily raised, are perhaps an inducement to laziness; their wages are too low and their whisky too cheap. But in the following generations occurs "that strange mixture of blood, which you will find in no other country. I could point out to you," Crevecoeur's Farmer tells us, "a family whose grandfather was an Englishman, whose wife was Dutch, whose son married a French woman, and

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228 I AMERICAN WRITERS whose present four sons have now four wives of different nations. . . . Here individuals of all nations are melted into a new race of men. . . . " For twentieth-century Americans the idea of the melting pot is so familiar, even so trite, that we may easily fail to appreciate the full force of what the Farmer is telling us. He is saying that Americans are literally, biologically, a new race. For the Farmer the idea of melting the nations of the world into a new race has limits that are not immediately apparent; but as we shall discover, he finds the notion of marriage between whites and Indians, genuinely interracial marriage, to be repulsive, even unnatural; and therefore his pot melts only persons of European ancestry. Despite its triteness the melting pot is a moving idea, and one that we have put at least partly into practice; in spite of our remaining enclaves of ethnicity, there is an extraordinary number of Americans of multinational ancestry. There are, of course, other countries in which people of different national origins have managed to live together, however abrasively, over a long period: one thinks of the French and the Flemish in Belgium, or the English and French in Canada. And in Switzerland people of four different ethnic groups have lived together amicably for a very long time. But in Switzerland and Canada and Belgium there has been virtually no melting of ethnic identities; each group keeps its own language and customs, and ordinarily people do not marry outside their own group. Whatever reservations one may have, then, one has to acknowledge that the Farmer was right; a salient characteristic of the American is "that strange mixture of blood, which you will find in no other country." Crevecoeur's American is losing his sectarian as well as his ethnic identity. Says the Fanner: Let us suppose you and I to be travelling; we observe that in this house, to the right, lives a

Catholic. . . . About one mile farther on the same road, his next neighbour may be a good, honest, plodding German Lutheran. . . . Next to him lives a [S]eceder. . . . Next, again, lives a low Dutchman. . . . Since the Seceder and the Low Dutchman would be Calvinists, these four men represent the three main branches of Christianity: Catholic, Lutheran, and Calvinist. All of them are prosperous farmers and good and sober citizens. The Seceder, a member of the sect that seceded from the established church of Scotland (Presbyterian) is overly zealous; Seceders are, according to Crevecoeur, "the most enthusiastic of all sectaries." However, . . . if the sectaries are not settled close together, if they are mixed with other denominations, their zeal will cool for want of fuel, and will be extinguished in a little time. Then, the Americans become as to religion what they are as to country, allied to all. In them the name of Englishman, Frenchman, and European is lost, and in like manner, the strict modes of Christianity as practised in Europe are lost also. . . . [I]n a few years this mixed neighbourhood will exhibit a strange religious medley that will be neither pure Catholicism nor pure Calvinism. A very perceptible indifference, even in the first generation, will become apparent; and it may happen that the daughter of the Catholic will marry the son of the [SJeceder and settle by themselves at a distance from their parents. What religious education will they give their children? A very imperfect one. If there happens to be in the neighbourhood any place of worship, we will suppose a Quaker's meeting; rather than not show their fine clothes, they will go to it, and some of them may perhaps attach themselves to that society. Others will remain in a perfect state of indifference. . . . Again one may doubt Crevecoeur's Farmer in matters of detail. How often, one wonders, have

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JEAN DE CREVECOEUR I 229

the children of Catholics married the children of radical Protestants? And, yet, again it is clear that he has hit upon an important generalization. America has been a country in which people have gone to a church because it was in their neighborhood, or because they liked the minister, or because their best friend went there, or for other, equally nonsectarian, reasons. In shedding his nationalism and his sectarianism Crevecoeur's American is, of course, shedding the parochial burdens and hatreds of the European past, shedding everything that made him a Dutch Calvinist or a German Lutheran or a French Catholic rather than a human being; and as a consequence America is both a nation of nations and an "asylum" for the harried and oppressed of Europe. Therefore the American is hospitable. "A traveller in Europe becomes a stranger as soon as he quits his own kingdom; but it is otherwise here. We know, properly speaking, no strangers; this is every person's country. . . . " One encounters that American hospitality again and again in Crevecoeur. Indeed, it is a condition of his narrative strategy. Crevecoeur's persona in Letters from an American Farmer is a third-generation American named James. He has no last name, perhaps because Crevecoeur does not want to remind us of a specific nationality, although we are told that his paternal grandfather was English. He works a family farm in the middle colonies that he inherited from his father, who had carved it out of the wilderness. For five weeks he had entertained as his guest an "enlightened" European, Mr. F. B., who has traveled through Italy, France, and Russia, as well as through English North America, and who, as James's wife puts it, " 'hath lived abundance of time in that big house called Cambridge, where, they say, that worldly learning is so abundant that people get it only by breathing the air of the place.' " The two men had enjoyed each other's company; Mr.

F. B. had entertained James by telling him about the Old World; now he has asked James to tell him about the New World by correspondence. James is not at all sure that anything he may write will be of interest to so sophisticated an acquaintance; and his wife, like an eighteenthcentury version of a situation-comedy wife, reinforces his doubts. But his clergyman reassures him: Although he is a man of learning and taste, yet I am sure he will read your letters with pleasure; if they be not elegant, they will smell of the woods and be a little wild; I know your turn, they will contain some matters which he never knew before. Thus encouraged, James proceeds to write of himself and his country. To begin with, James, like the majority of his countrymen, is a farmer. More important, he is the freehold owner of the land he farms; and on that ownership are founded his livelihood, his economic independence, his citizenship, and ultimately his personal freedom. That is to say that Crevecoeur insists upon a necessary connection between property and political rights, and therefore personal freedom, as had all philosophers of natural rights and natural law from John Locke to Thomas Jefferson: The instant I enter on my own land, the bright idea[s] of property, of exclusive right, of independence, exalt my mind. Precious soil, I say to myself, by what singular custom of law is it that thou wast made to constitute the riches of the freeholder? What should we American farmers be without the distinct possession of that soil? It feeds, it clothes us; from it we draw even a great exuberancy, our best meat, our richest drink; the very honey of our bees comes from this privileged spot. No wonder we should thus cherish its possession; no wonder that so many Europeans who have never been able to say that such por-

230 I AMERICAN tion of land was theirs cross the Atlantic to realize that happiness. This formerly rude soil has been converted by my father into a pleasant farm, and in return, it has established all our rights; on it is founded our rank, our freedom, our power as citizens, our importance as inhabitants of such a district. These images, I must confess, I always behold with pleasure and extend them as far as my imagination can reach; for this is what may be called the true and only philosophy of an American farmer. In spite of this clear connection between freehold land ownership and economic and political independence, Crevecoeur is not to be considered a member of the natural law and natural rights school of thought; as we shall see, his conception of law is entirely alien to that school and would have been rejected out of hand by a Locke or a Jefferson. But he and his Farmer are clearly agrarians, committed to the family farm as the source of economic, moral, and political independence in the community, and to the domesticity that the ideal of the family farm implies. James has a wife and children, although none of them is given a name—again, perhaps, because Crevecoeur wants us to think of them as typical rather than individual. James's agrarianism and domesticity are united in a charming if sentimental image: Often when I plow my low ground, I place my little boy on a chair which screws to the beam of the plow—its motion and that of the horses please him; he is perfectly happy and begins to chat. As I lean over the handle, various are the thoughts which crowd into my mind. I am now doing for him, I say, what my father formerly did for me; may God enable him to live that he may perform the same operations for the same purposes when I am worn out and old! I relieve his mother of some trouble while I have him with me; the odoriferous furrow exhilarates his spirits and seems to do the child a great deal of good,

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for he looks more blooming since I have adopted that practice; can more pleasure, more dignity be adopted to that primary occupation? The father thus plowing with his child, and to feed his family, is inferior only to the emperor of China ploughing as an example to his kingdom. Besides being agrarian and domestic, Crevecoeur 's American is resolutely middle-class; and the three qualities are intimately related. Crevecoeur thinks of Europe as a society of extremes, inhabited only by the very powerful and the powerless, by the very rich and the very poor, and of America as a single-class society peopled by contented and moderate family farmers. If an enlightened European visitor "travels through our rural districts," the Farmer tells his correspondent (forgetting for the moment that his correspondent is an enlightened European who has traveled in rural America, and therefore does not need to have his recent experience imagined for him): . . . he views not the hostile castle and the haughty mansion, contrasted with the clay-built hut and miserable cabin, where cattle and men help to keep each other warm and dwell in meanness, smoke, and indigence. A pleasing uniformity of decent competence appears throughout our habitations. "The hostile castle and the haughty mansion": a trite image, of course; but its fundamental lightness will be recognized immediately by any American who has driven through Europe and seen how, in that Old World where every eminence that is not crowned by a castle seems to be surmounted by a church, the ruins of antique authority still dominate the landscape. Crevecoeur is a great image maker, as D. H. Lawrence recognized; he can put a whole realm of natural or cultural experience into a single image. He is not a bad phrase maker, either, particularly when the phrase contains a partially rea-

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lized image. Consider "a pleasing uniformity of decent competence," for instance, as a description of American housing. It applies very nicely to the comfortable farmhouses of eighteenth-century New York and Pennsylvania; and with a little less stress on the "pleasing," it will do equally well as a description of the tract houses of twentieth-century American suburbia. It is something of a surprise to find how far in time Crevecoeur's vision extends, a surprise because his wisdom is so very conventional. And yet the conventionality is part and parcel of his essence as an American artist: over and over again he brings us face to face with a part of ourselves that we had almost forgotten because we had been taking it for granted, and that is as true of his description of American housing as of his description of our religious indifference and of our "strange mixture of blood" as products of the melting pot. Perhaps Crevecoeur's most basic image for the American is that of transplantation. For example: "Every industrious European who transports himself here may be compared to a sprout growing at the foot of a great tree; it enjoys and draws but a little portion of sap; wrench it from the parent roots, transplant it, and it will become a tree bearing fruit also." (We might take particular note of the parent-child relationship in this image. Family imagery was common in the literature of the American Revolution; Thomas Paine, for example, in Common Sense compared England to a mother who devours the colonies, her young. But in Crevecoeur's comparison of the colonist to a sprout wrenched "from the parent roots" and transplanted to a more nourishing soil there may be an autobiographical element, as we shall see.) Or consider this more celebrated, if somewhat mixed, image: In this great American asylum, the poor of Europe have by some means met together, and in consequence of various causes; to what purpose

should they ask one another what countrymen they are? Alas, two thirds of them had no country. Can a wretch who wanders about, who works and starves, whose life is a continual scene of sore affliction or pinching penury—can that man call England or any other kingdom his country? A country that had no bread for him, whose fields procured him no harvest, who met with nothing but the frowns of the rich, the severity of the laws, with jails and punishments, who owned not a single foot of the extensive surface of this planet? No! Urged by a variety of motives, here they came. Everything has tended to regenerate them: new laws, a new mode of living, a new social system; here they are become men: in Europe they were as so many useless plants, wanting vegetative mould and refreshing showers; they withered, and were mowed down by want, hunger, and war; but now, by the power of transplantation, like all other plants they have taken root and flourished. Both images have a certain raw power depending on their primary meaning of the uprooted European having taken new and more secure root in American soil. Yet on closer examination there are difficulties with both of them. To begin with, there is a historical inaccuracy; it seems to have been less the poor of Europe who came to America, at least in the colonial period, than the middle class; and one would expect the middle class to react differently from the poor to the discovery that there was no longer a power above them. Putting that major difficulty aside, however, there is an even larger problem implicit in the first image, of the European shoot that had been overshadowed by the parent tree and that, torn from its parent root and replanted in new and sparsely planted soil, is now able to flourish. The problem is this: What happens when the transplanted shoot reaches its full height? If the powerful overshadow the powerless in Europe, won't the same thing happen in America? One passage in the Letters suggests that pre-

232 / AMERICAN cisely this will happen, that, intoxicated by the sheer scale of opportunity in the New World, the immigrant will cherish ambitions of a size undreamed of in the Old World: An European, when he first arrives, seems limited in his intentions, as well as in his views; but he very suddenly alters his scale; two hundred miles formerly appeared a very great distance, it is now but a trifle; he no sooner breathes our air than he forms schemes and embarks in designs he never would have thought of in his own country. Again one is struck by Crevecoeur's capacity for concise definition of the major attributes of a culture. Here, deftly sketched, are the roots of the American love of bigness for its own sake, of the taste for the grandiose that we share with the Russians, and that may well be related to the huge scale and the vast empty spaces of the two countries. But we must keep this passage in proportion by remembering that it is unusual. Crevecoeur's American Farmer does not cherish large ambitions; he wants land enough to support his family in comfort and contentment, and perhaps even in abundance, but he has no landhunger for its own sake. He never thinks of accumulating a great estate; it never occurs to him that land might be a source of power as well as of self-sufficiency. This is so very obviously a contradiction of the actual history of American attitudes toward the land that we need to examine it with some care. One reason that Crevecoeur's American Farmer has no desire for power is that he is himself a refugee from European power; and as a refugee, the object of his middle-class industriousness is security rather than selfaggrandizement. What he wants most in the world is to be left alone. A second reason is that Crevecoeur attaches an almost magical virtue to the process of working one's own land. As the American Farmer tills his land, with his child

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seated on the plow, "the odoriferous furrow exhilarates his spirits and seems to do the child a great deal of good.'' This experience is not available to the aristocratic absentee landlords of Europe, who spend their time at court and have other people plow their odoriferous furrows for them. But if a main object of your life is to inhale virtue from the plowing of odoriferous fiirrows, you are never going to want to own much more land than you can work yourself. An even more important reason for the moderateness of the American Farmer's ambitions is that excess is foreign to his very being: Crevecoeur conceived of him as being in the middle of a series of continua. He is middle-class, equally removed from the depravity and desperation of poverty and the self-indulgence and luxuriousness of wealth and power. He is a resident of the middle colonies, which puts him in the middle of two geographical continua, one running from north to south and the other from east to west. Finally, and most important, he is in the middle of a continuum that is both temporal and developmental, running from man's beginnings in primitive savagery to the decadence of his most advanced civilization. In both of the two main sources of Western civilization—the classical and the Judeo-Christian traditions—we find a myth of the beginning of mankind in a state of innocence, happiness, ease, plenty, and perfection, in the classical Golden Age and the Judeo-Christian Garden of Eden. In both, mankind has declined from its original state: in the classical myth the Golden Age has been followed by the Silver, the Bronze, and the Iron Age (the present), each progressively worse; in the Judeo-Christian myth mankind has been expelled from the Garden of Eden. In both myths, however, in spite of the decline, there is the promise of an eventual return to the original state of happiness and perfection: in the classical myth, history is cyclical, and the unhappy and violent Iron Age will eventually be

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succeeded by a new Golden Age; in the JudeoChristian myth, history is linear, but just before the end of the world there will be a thousandyear period of earthly happiness and perfection, the Millennium, and after the world's end the blessed will enter Heaven, the celestial equivalent of the Earthly Paradise. Given the character of these myths, it is not surprising that there have been many periods in Western history when human beings have thought themselves on the verge of a return to their original state of perfection. One such time was in Augustan Rome, where intellectuals, at least, thought of themselves as living in a new Golden Age. Another was at the discovery of America. When Europeans first encountered the New World—a fertile continent, sparsely settled, the inhabitants of which went naked, or nearly so, like Adam and Eve in the Garden—an idea that irresistibly suggested itself to them was that they had found a new Eden, untouched by all the evils of the European past, where mankind could begin its history all over again, and maybe do it right this second time. Columbus believed that the lands he had discovered were adjacent to the Earthly Paradise; the leaders of colonial New England commonly believed that they were living through the Millennium or, at least, ushering it in. And one could multiply instances almost indefinitely. As a number of scholars (most notably Henry Nash Smith, Leo Marx, and R. W. B. Lewis) have demonstrated, the theme of America as a new Garden of Eden and of the American as a new Adam may well be the most basic in American literature. Crevecoeur was not unaffected by these myths. There is much that is Edenic in the Letters, and there are a number of occasions on which Crevecoeur refers specifically to one myth or the other: in Sketches of Eighteenth Century America, for example, he calls the middle colonies "these shores of Eden"; and in the Letters he happily points out that since rights to graze

sheep were agreed upon by the first settlers of Nantucket, "their first establishment . . . may be truly and literally called a pastoral one." (The reference here, of course, is to the Golden Age; Eden was an orchard, but herding sheep was the occupation of the people of the Golden Age.) Yet his view of history and of America's place in it owes much less to the myths of the Garden and the Golden Age than it does to an idea commonly held in his time, the idea that all civilizations develop through a clearly defined set of social and cultural stages. Nowhere in his writings does Crevecoeur give a full definition of these stages; but since they are so fundamental that he probably was unaware of any need to define them, it is easy to reconstruct them. There are three, which we might call the savage, the agrarian, and the decadent. In the savage stage man is a hunter. His occupation is violent, and the eating of meat makes him more so. As a result he is also a warrior, and his hand is raised against all other men. Since hunting takes less time and work than farming does, he also is lazy; and violence and sloth are therefore his two chief attributes. In the farming stage life becomes both more peaceful and more permanent. Men work a specific tract of land rather than ranging the woods for their food, and they intend to pass their land on to their descendants. Because the almost universal occupation is subsistence agriculture on a family farm, society is egalitarian and manners are simple. Because the relationship between man and nature is nonviolent and empathetic, life is imbued with a natural piety. Peaceful, domestic, industrious, egalitarian, and pious, man in the farming stage is man at his best. In the decadent stage a few men have amassed extraordinary power and in the process have reduced the mass of humanity to poverty. For the poor, life has become as uncertain and as savage as it was in the savage stage. The manners of the rich are refined and luxurious, and the price of

234 I AMERICAN that luxury is the continual oppression of the poor and the bad health of all classes, from overindulgence on the one hand and from want on the other. Because the powerful are proud, they are also warlike; and the decadent stage is therefore as violent in its own way as the savage stage had been. It was commonly believed that if one traveled from Europe westward toward the American frontier, one would pass spatially through all the stages of history, from the refined decadence of Europe to the simple virtue of agrarian America to the savagery of the frontier. Crevecoeur shared this belief. Asks the Farmer: Is it not better to contemplate under these humble roofs the rudiments of future wealth and population than to behold the accumulated bundles of litigious papers in the office of a lawyer? To examine how the world is gradually settled, how the howling swamp is converted into a pleasing meadow, the rough ridge into a fine field; and to hear the cheerful whistling, the rural song, where there was no sound heard before, save the yell of the savage, the screech of the owl or the hissing of the snake? Here an European, fatigued with luxury, riches, and pleasures, may find a sweet relaxation in a series of interesting scenes, as affecting as they are new. England, which now contains so many domes, so many castles, was once a place like this: a place woody and marshy; its inhabitants, now the favourite nation for arts and commerce, were once painted like our neighbours. This country will flourish in its turn, and the same observations will be made which I have just delineated. Posterity will look back with avidity and pleasure to trace, if possible, the era of this or that particular settlement. The implication is clear: America is a curiously temporary Garden of Eden. It will be a paradise so long as there is still uncultivated land beyond the frontier; and since that land stretches westward for thousands of miles, it will be a very

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long time before it is filled up. But eventually, of course, it will fill up; and then the New World will repeat the history of the decadent Old World. Therefore there is an elegiac tone perceptible even in the Farmer's proudest boasts: We are the most perfect society now existing in the world. Here man is free as he ought to be, nor is this pleasing equality so transitory as many others are. Many ages will not see the shores of our great lakes replenished with inland nations, nor the unknown bounds of North America entirely peopled. Jefferson would later offer a virtually identical picture of America's place in history to his fellow countrymen in his First Inaugural Address: Kindly separated by nature and a wide ocean from the exterminating havoc of one quarter of the globe; too high-minded to endure the degradations of the others; possessing a chosen country, with room enough for our descendants to the hundredth and thousandth generation. . . . But what happens after the thousandth generation, when America finally fills up? What happens after the Millennium? In this view of history, which is both temporal and spatial, America is an era or an island of peace, contentment, and happiness, bounded on both sides by misery, insecurity, and savagery. To the west lay the savagery of the primitive frontier; to the east lay the savagery of decadent Europe, from which Americans had fled. But the flight was, in the nature of things, temporary; and Europe offered to the American eye an image of what America would become when it, too, was overcrowded. ' 'Don't look back,'' as Satchel Paige once put it. "Something may be gaining on you." This vision of America as a temporary paradise is strengthened, for Crevecoeur, by his view of nature, in which all forms of life are inherently aggressive and competitive because life is ultimately cannibalistic; all forms of life feed

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on other forms of life. "I never see an egg brought on my table," the Farmer reflects, "but I feel penetrated with the wonderful change it would have undergone but for my gluttony; it might have been a gentle, useful hen leading her chicken with a care and vigilance which speaks shame to many women." Contemplating his bees, he is . . . astonished to see that nothing exists but what has its enemy; one species pursues and lives upon the other: unfortunately our king-birds are the destroyers of those industrious insects, but on the other hand, these birds preserve our fields from the depredation of crows, which they pursue on the wing with great vigilance and astonishing dexterity. Farming, then, becomes a process of balancing the aggressive forces of nature in ways useful to human beings. The Farmer resists his inclination to kill kingbirds until "they increased too much." Then, observing a combat between a kingbird and a swarm of his bees, he kills the kingbird and "immediately opened his craw, from which I took 171 bees; I laid them all on a blanket in the sun, and to my great surprise, 54 returned to life, licked themselves clean, and joyfully went back to the hive. . . . " The Farmer draws an explicit analogy between his own government of his farm and the operation of the law in human society, and in the process suggests that human beings are as aggressive and as potentially violent as any animal. The law is to us precisely what I am in my barnyard, a bridle and check to prevent the strong and greedy from oppressing the timid and weak. Conscious of superiority, they always strive to encroach on their neighbours; unsatisfied with their portion, they eagerly swallow it in order to have an opportunity of taking what is given to others, except they are prevented. Some I chide; others, unmindful of my admonitions, receive

some blows. Could victuals thus be given to men without the assistance of any language, I am sure they would not behave better to one another, nor more philosophically than my cattle do. ... Thus, by superior knowledge I govern all my cattle, as wise men are obliged to govern fools and the ignorant. Although Crevecoeur shared with Jefferson the view of America as a new Garden of Eden, he differed radically from him in his view of human nature and of law. For Jefferson, as for other believers in natural law and natural rights, human nature is inherently virtuous and lawful, and the natural state of man is Edenic. All of the violence and social evils of historical experience are attributable to the "unnatural" acts of a few aristocrats, who have corrupted themselves by their own lust for power and have corrupted the European lower classes by oppressing them. Crevecoeur tends, as we have seen, to accept the natural-law view of European history. But he has a far darker view of nature and of human nature and, as a consequence, a view of law itself as being not inherent in nature, but a means of restraining it. Many of the Farmer's attitudes toward law, government, and nature are summed up in a remarkable picture he constructs of a hornet's nest in his living room. In the middle of my parlour, I have, you may remember, a curious republic of industrious hornets; their nest hangs to the ceiling by the same twig on which it was so admirably built and contrived in the woods. Its removal did not displease them, for they find in my house plenty of food; and I have left a hole open in one of the panes of the window, which answers all their purposes. By this kind usage they are becfome quite harmless; they live on the flies, which are very troublesome to us throughout the summer; they are constantly busy in catching them, even on the eyelids of my children. It is surprising how

236 I AMERICAN quickly they smear them with a sort of glue, lest they might escape; and when thus prepared, they carry them to their nests as food for their young ones. Compare that with the similarly millennial images of domesticated violence in Isaiah 11:6-9. The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the falling together; and a little child shall lead them. And the cow and the bear shall feed; and their young ones shall lie down together: and the lion shall eat straw like the ox. And the sucking child shall play on the hole of the asp, and the weaned child shall put his hand on the cockatrice' den. They shall not hurt nor destroy in all my holy mountain: for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the LORD, as the waters cover the sea. It is the knowledge of the Lord that has pacified the wolf and the leopard, the lion and the bear; and the lion has become a vegetarian, eating straw like the ox. But it is only the Farmer's kind treatment that has domesticated the hornets, and they are tame only in their behavior toward human beings. They have not become vegetarians. They eat flies—live ones. One hopes for the sake of the Farmer's children that nobody will say a harsh word to the hornets while they are hunting flies on the children's eyelids, because the hornets have not changed their essential nature; and that is what chiefly distinguishes Cievecoeur's New Eden from Isaiah's. For Cnevecoeur paradise is a temporary condition, won by decency and kindness from a nature that remains fundamentally violent. We might also note that in Crevecoeur, peace and order are achievable only when they are imposed by a single, wise, and benevolent power. On the farm that power is the Farmer; in colonial North America it is the government, including, of course, the English home government.

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The Farmer's American paradise, then, is very precariously balanced. On one side of it lie the decadence and inequality of Europe, and European violence exhibited both in the oppression of the poor and in European wars. On the other side lies the frontier, where human beings . . . are often in a perfect state of war; that of man against man, sometimes decided by blows, sometimes by means of the law; that of man against every wild inhabitant of these venerable woods, of which they are come to dispossess them. There men appear to be no better than carnivorous animals of a superior rank, living on the flesh of wild animals when they can catch them, and when they are not able, they subsist on grain. He who would wish to see America in its proper light and have a true idea of its feeble beginnings and barbarous rudiments must visit our extended line of frontiers, where the last settlers dwell and where he may see the first labours of settlement, the mode of clearing the earth, in all their different appearances, where men are wholly left dependent on their native tempers and on the spur of uncertain industry, which often fails when not sanctified by the efficacy of a few moral rules. There, remote from the power of example and check of shame, many families exhibit the most hideous parts of our society. They are a kind of forlorn hope, preceding by ten or twelve years the most respectable army of veterans which come after them. In that space, prosperity will polish some, vice and the law will drive off the rest, who, uniting again with others like themselves, will recede still farther, making room for more industrious people, who will finish their improvements, convert the log-house into a convenient habitation, and rejoicing that the first heavy labours are finished, will change in a few years that hitherto barbarous country into a fine, fertile, well-regulated district. Such is our progress; such is the march of the Europeans toward the interior parts of this continent. In all societies there are off-casts; this impure

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part serves as our precursors or pioneers; my father himself was one of that class, but he came upon honest principles and was therefore one of the few who held fast; by good conduct and temperance, he transmitted to me his fair inheritance, when not above one in fourteen of his contemporaries had the same good fortune. Forty years ago, this smiling country was thus inhabited; it is now purged, a general decency of manners prevails throughout, and such has been the fate of our best countries. It is a remarkable passage, especially for the approval and even excitement with which the Fanner uses military imagery when talking about the frontier: ' 'army of veterans,'' ' 'march of the Europeans." Apparently he sees the violence of the frontier as the necessary precondition for his middle-class, middle-landscape, pastoral paradise. Again we are in the presence of one of the central themes of American culture. The idea that violence on a massive scale is necessary to the establishment and maintenance of peaceful civilization is still very much with us, as one can tell by watching virtually any western or detective television show, in which the justification for the most appalling violence is always that it is necessary to civilization. That is to suggest, of course, that what is true of the television western's view of the frontier is also true of the Farmer's view; although on the surface of his discourse he deplores violence, at a deeper level he is strongly drawn to it. We shall see that attraction to violence in Crevecoeur again. First, however, we should examine his other geographical continuum, which runs not from east to west but from north to south. At the northern end we find the islands of Nantucket and Martha's Vineyard. The Farmer devotes five of his twelve letters to describing them; and while they are relatively brief, they nevertheless make up more than one-quarter of the book. Furthermore, since they are grouped together, they provide a more systematic de-

scription of these two small islands off the New England coast than we ever get of the middle colonies of Pennsylvania and New York, which are the Farmer's home territory. In part, the disproportionate attention paid to Nantucket and Martha's Vineyard may be a function of the haste and carelessness with which the book seems to have been put together, but in part they are justified by the peculiar nature of island society. In much of his writing, Crevecoeur seems drawn to a simple, even simpleminded, geographical determinism, in which human character is merely the product of the environment. In one of his most celebrated passages, the Farmer says: Men are like plants; the goodness and flavour of the fruit proceeds from the peculiar soil and exposition in which they grow. We are nothing but what we derive from the air we breathe, the climate we inhabit, the government we obey, the system of religion we profess, and the nature of our employment. And on another occasion he tells us that Americans, although they may in his own time be classed as members of a single culture, "will hereafter become distinct by the power of the different climates they inhabit." That sort of determinism is quite suited to everything that is timid and conservative in Crevecoeur; there is, however, another part of him that will not rest there, but admires the people of Nantucket and Martha's Vineyard, especially the former, precisely because they have imposed their own character on an alien environment. Moreover, he insists that this capacity to triumph over the environment is peculiarly American. The people of Nantucket inhabit * 'a sandy spot of about twenty-three thousand acres, affording neither stones nor timber, meadows nor arable.'' If the island had been "contiguous to the shores of some ancient monarchy," the Farmer tells us, "it would only have been occupied by a few

238 I AMERICAN wretched fishermen, who, oppressed by poverty, would hardly have been able to purchase or build little fishing barks, always dreading the weight of taxes or the servitude of men-of-war." In place of those few wretched fishermen, we find on Nantucket a population of "5,000 hardy souls" who, after making their barren island support what little agriculture it could, have turned to the surrounding ocean for their livelihood and have become the most expert whale hunters in the world. Their achievements, in the face of considerable odds, inspire the Farmer to a lyrical celebration of their free enterprise and a prophecy of similar achievements wherever human enterprise is similarly free: What has happened here has and will happen everywhere else. Give mankind the full rewards of their industry, allow them to enjoy the fruit of their labour under the peaceable shade of their vines and fig-trees, leave their native activity unshackled and free, like a fair stream without dams or other obstacles; the first will fertilize the very sand on which they tread, the other exhibit a navigable river, spreading plenty and cheerfulness wherever the declivity of the ground leads it. If these people are not famous for tracing the fragrant furrow on the plain, they plough the rougher ocean, they gather from its surface, at an immense distance and with Herculean labours, the riches it affords; they go to hunt and catch that huge fish which by its strength and velocity one would imagine ought to be beyond the reach of man. The hunters of the American frontier had seemed to the Farmer a savage and uncivil lot, and he attributed much of their character to their occupation; "the chase," he announced, "renders them ferocious, gloomy, and unsocial." Yet here are the Nantucketers, hunters of the largest creature in the world, going about their fearsome trade as though they were harvesting the south forty acres rather than the wild ocean:

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The motives that lead them to the sea are very different from those of most other sea-faring men; it is neither idleness nor profligacy that sends them to that element; it is a settled plan of life, a well-founded hope of earning a livelihood; it is because their soil is bad, that they are early initiated to this profession; and were they to stay at home, what could they do? The sea therefore becomes to them a kind of patrimony; they go to whaling with as much pleasure and tranquil indifference, with as strong an expectation of success, as a landsman undertakes to clear a piece of swamp. Most Nantucketers were Quakers, a fact in which Herman Melville found much irony as he watched these peaceful and industrious citizens go soberly about their horrendous business. Crevecoeur's imagination is almost too simple for irony, but he admires the Society of Friends. He likes their pacifism and points out that Nantucket, like Pennsylvania, has a record of peaceful and relatively just relationships with the native Indians. He likes their industry and their sobriety. He likes their egalitarianism and praises them especially for their early opposition to slavery. Above all he likes the simplicity of their manners and the serene contentment of their everyday lives. And when one compares the character of these people's society with the character of their occupation, one begins to see why Crevecoeur spends so much time on them: they have created an Edenic society under the most un-Edenic of circumstances. A sign of Nantucket's near perfection is that "there are but two medical professors on the island; for of what service can physic be in a primitive society, where the excesses of inebriation are so rare?" There is only one lawyer, and there is not business enough to sustain him; his financial support comes chiefly "from having married one of the wealthiest heiresses of the island," although occasionally he finds a little legal business "in recovering money lent on the

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main or in preventing those accidents to which the contentious propensity of its inhabitants may sometimes expose them." And there are no slaves, at least among the Quakers, who, 4 'lamenting that shocking insult offered to humanity, have given the world a singular example of moderation, disinterestedness, and Christian charity in emancipating their Negroes." Nantucket society seems to the Farmer so very perfect that he reports with some surprise that the women, and some of the men, "have adopted . . . the Asiatic custom of taking a dose of opium every morning." Another writer might have seen that opium habit as evidence that there is a serpent in every Eden; the Farmer shrugs it off as best he can:

most pleasing, the most bewitching country which the continent affords.

It is hard to conceive how a people always happy and healthy, in consequence of the exercise and labour they undergo, never oppressed with the vapours of idleness, yet should want the fictitious effects of opium to preserve that cheerfulness to which their temperance, their climate, their happy situation, so justly entitle them. But where is the society perfectly free from error and folly; the least imperfect is undoubtedly that where the greatest good preponderates; and agreeable to this rule, I can truly say, that I never was acquainted with a less vicious or more harmless one.

The luxuriance of New Garden, and its sorry effects on human beings, offer a foretaste of what we find at the other end of the Farmer's north— south continuum from Nantucket, in Charles Town (the present Charleston), South Carolina. Crevecoeur's Nantucket is as simple in its tastes as in its manners: "inebriation is unknown, and music, singing, and dancing are holden in equal detestation"; the chief social amusements are storytelling and sharing "puddings, pies, and custards." There are "few books" and little worth notice in the arts. The Farmer is afraid that "learned travellers, returned from seeing the paintings and antiquities of Rome and Italy" would be bored by it, but protests, more than a little defensively: "I, having never seen the beauties which Europe contains, cheerfully satisfy myself with attentively examining what my native country exhibits; if we have neither ancient amphitheatres, gilded palaces, nor elevated spires, we enjoy in our woods a substantial happiness which the wonders of art cannot communicate." But the "learned traveller" would not be bored by Charles Town.

There is at least one other suggestion that Nantucket's idyllic society may not be without its imperfections or at least may not be proof against all circumstances. In 1766 a group of Nantucketers bought a large tract of land in Orange County, North Carolina, land far more promising than their own sandy island: No spot of earth can be more beautiful; it is composed of gentle hills, of easy declivities, excellent lowlands, accompanied by different brooks which traverse this settlement. I never saw a soil that rewards men so early for their labours and disbursements. . . . It is perhaps the

They called their settlement New Garden, appropriately enough, but all is not well there. Everything flourishes in that paradisiacal landscape except human beings, who cannot, apparently, stand so much easy prosperity, and go to seed. If New Garden exceeds this settlement by the softness of its climate, the fecundity of its soil, and a greater variety of produce from less labour, it does not breed men equally hardy, nor capable to encounter dangers and fatigues. It leads too much to idleness and effeminacy, for great is the luxuriance of that part of America and the ease with which the earth is cultivated.

The inhabitants are the gayest in America; it is called the centre of our beau monde and is

240 I AMERICAN always filled with the richest planters in the province, who resort hither in quest of health and pleasure. Here is always to be seen a great number of valetudinarians from the West Indies, seeking for the renovation of health, exhausted by the debilitating nature of their sun, air, and modes of living. Many of these West Indians have I seen, at thirty, loaded with the infirmities of old age; for nothing is more common in those countries of wealth than for persons to lose the abilities of enjoying the comforts of life at a time when we northern men just begin to taste the fruits of our labour and prudence. The round of pleasure and the expenses of those citizens' tables are much superior to what you would imagine. . . .An European at his first arrival must be greatly surprised when he sees the elegance of their houses, their sumptuous furniture, as well as the magnificence of their tables. The pleasures of the Charles Town planters, of course, are paid for by the labors and the miseries of their slaves, beings to whom the planters' "ears by habit are become deaf, their hearts . . . hardened." The Farmer says a good deal about the general miseries of slavery but provides only one fully realized scene from slave life. That scene, however, is unforgettable. The Farmer is on his way to dine with a planter, walking through "a pleasant wood." Alarmed by signs of an alien presence, he looks about him and perceives . . . a cage, suspended to the limbs of a tree, all the branches of which appeared covered with large birds of prey, fluttering about and anxiously endeavouring to perch on the cage. Actuated by an involuntary motion of my hands more than by any design of my mind, I fired at them; they all flew to a short distance, with a most hideous noise, when, horrid to think and painful to repeat, I perceived a Negro, suspended in the cage and left there to expire! I shudder when I recollect that the birds had already picked

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out his eyes; his cheek-bones were bare; his arms had been attacked in several places; and his body seemed covered with a multitude of wounds. From the edges of the hollow sockets and from the lacerations with which he was disfigured, the blood slowly dropped and tinged the ground beneath. No sooner were the birds flown than swarms of insects covered the whole body of this unfortunate wretch, eager to feed on his mangled flesh and to drink his blood. I found myself suddenly arrested by the power of affright and terror; my nerves were convulsed; I trembled; I stood motionless, involuntarily contemplating the fate of this Negro in all its dismal latitude. The Negro asks for water, which the Farmer gives him, reflecting that "had I had a ball in my gun, I certainly should have dispatched him." The Negro thanks him and asks for poison. The Fanner asks how long he has been hanging there. "Two days," says the Negro, "and me no die; the birds, the birds; aaah me!" It is the most memorable scene in Crevecoeur, and it is probably the product of his imagination rather than of experience. Crevecoeur traveled widely in North America; but so far as is known, he never visited South Carolina. The incident might have been reported to him, of course; but, however he learned of it, he used the basic situation on more than one occasion. In Sketches of Eighteenth-Century America he describes a series of American pests, including the mosquito, and tells the story of a farmer who, to punish his Negro slave, ties him naked to a stake in a salt meadow. The farmer goes home, stays there only twenty-three minutes, and returns to find his slave "prodigiously swelled" as a result of the millions of mosquito bites he has received. Although the farmer takes him back to the house and cares for him, the slave dies of "an inflammatory fever." On that occasion Crevecoeur was interested simply in the viciousness of American insects, so

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he provides no reflections on slavery, nor on man's general inhumanity to man. He does not even bother to tell us how the farmer feels about what has happened. But with the man in the cage, much of the meaning of the incident resides in how people feel about it. For the slave it is all summed up in "Two days, and me no die; the birds, the birds; aaah me!" The Farmer's emotions are characteristic of the eighteenth-century "man of feeling:" "I found myself suddenly arrested by the power of affright and terror; my nerves were convulsed; I trembled; I stood motionless. . . ." It is only when one recognizes that the Farmer is paying more attention to his own feelings than to the slave's that one sees how sentimental and excessive the thrust of the passage has become. But the Farmer saves it, finally, by concluding with a chilling, if somewhat oblique, glimpse of the feelings of the slave's owners. When he reaches the plantation house he learns . . . that the reason for this slave's being thus punished was on account of his having killed the overseer of the plantation. They told me that the laws of self-preservation rendered such executions necessary, and supported the doctrine of slavery with the arguments generally made use of to justify the practice, with the repetition of which I shall not trouble you at present. The man in the cage presents the Farmer with the opportunity for a series of reflections on the nature of man and on the nature of the universe. "Slavery," he opines, "cannot be as repugnant to human nature as we at first imagine because it has been practised in all ages and in all nations." He proceeds to an emotional condemnation of all of human history. Doth it present anything but crimes of the most heinous nature, committed from one end of the world to the other? We observe avarice, rapine, and murder, equally prevailing in all parts. His-

tory perpetually tells us of millions of people abandoned to the caprice of the maddest princes, and of whole nations devoted to the blind fury of tyrants. Countries destroyed, nations alternately buried in ruins by other nations, some parts of the world beautifully cultivated, returned again into their pristine state, the fruits of ages of industry, the toil of thousands in a short time destroyed by a few! If one corner breathes in peace for a few years, it is in turn subjected, torn, and levelled; one would almost believe the principles of action in man, considered as the first agent of this planet, to be poisoned in their most essential parts. . . . If nature has given us a fruitful soil to inhabit, she has refused us such inclinations and propensities as would afford us the full enjoyment of it. . . . Everything is submitted to the power of the strongest; men, like the elements, are always at war; the weakest yield to the most potent; force, subtlety and malice always triumph over unguarded honesty and simplicity. . . . Such is the perverseness of human nature; who can describe it in all its latitude? It seems a very humanitarian tirade. The Farmer is against all of the right things: tyrants, warfare, slavery. And to his considerable credit he seems to understand that economic exploitation, of which slavery is the most extreme example, is a kind of warfare. And yet one cannot help suspecting that he enjoys his grotesque vision of human violence, degradation, and misery. Although he is in favor of all the right things— peace, justice, moderation—one cannot help feeling that he enjoys them less than he enjoys having a good cry over the prevalence of their opposites. It is all terribly self-indulgent. The self-indulgence becomes even more apparent when the Farmer turns from human nature to examine nature itself. If we attentively view this globe, will it not appear rather a place of punishment than of delight? . . . View the arctic and antarctic

242 I AMERICAN regions, those huge voids where nothing lives, regions of eternal snow where winter in all his horrors has established his throne and arrested every creative power of nature. Will you call the miserable stragglers in these countries by the name of men? Now contrast this frigid power of the north and south with that of the sun; examine the parched lands of the torrid zone, replete with sulphureous exhalations; view those countries of Asia subject to pestilential infections which lay nature waste. . . . Look at the poisonous soil of the equator, at those putrid slimy tracks, teeming with horrid monsters, the enemies of the human race; look next at the sandy continent, scorched perhaps by the fatal approach of some ancient comet, now the abode of desolation. Examine the rains, the convulsive storms of those climates, where masses of sulphur, bitumen, and electrical fire, combining their dreadful powers, are incessantly hovering and bursting over a globe threatened with dissolution. On this little shell, how very few are the spots where man can live and flourish? Even under those mild climates which seem to breathe peace and happiness, the poison of slavery, the fury of despotism, and the rage of superstition are all combined against man. There you have it. The universe is a conspiracy against mankind. With this metaphysical paranoia we are again in the presence of one of the major themes of later American literature. It is not a very long distance from the Farmer's "huge voids where nothing lives" to Melville's "heartless immensities"; and we are reminded that if the American continent has sometimes appeared to us as a new Garden of Eden, the other face it has presented to the American imagination has been alien and hostile, most easily personified as a wild and dangerous animal: Melville's white whale, or Frost's great buck, or Faulkner's bear. The Farmer saw both faces of it.

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Letters I through HI of Letters from an American Farmer have to do primarily with the middle colonies of Pennsylvania and New York. Letters IV through VIII describe the island societies of Nantucket and Martha's Vineyard. Letter IX is on Charles Town and slavery. Before leaving the South, and the cosmic pessimism it has inspired, the Farmer remarks, "The southern provinces are the countries where Nature has formed the greatest variety of alligators, snakes, serpents, and scorpions from the smallest size up to the pine barren, the largest species known here.'' He then gives us a short letter, number X, "On Snakes and on the Humming-bird." In it he permits himself to express openly his fascination and admiration for the violent and barbaric side of nature. We don't see much of the hummingbird, but what little we do see is striking: On this little bird Nature has profusely lavished her most splendid colours. . . . Its bill is as long and as sharp as a coarse sewing needle. . . . When it feeds, it appears as if immovable, though continually on the wing; and sometimes, from what motives I know not, it will tear and lacerate flowers into a hundred pieces, for, strange to tell, they are the most irascible of the feathered tribe. Where do passions find room in so diminutive a body? They often fight with the fury of lions until one of the combatants falls a sacrifice and dies. When fatigued, it has often perched within a few feet of me, and on such favourable opportunities I have surveyed it with the most minute attention. Its little eyes appear like diamonds, reflecting light on every side; most elegantly finished in all its parts, it is a miniature work of our Great Parent, who seems to have formed it the smallest, and at the same time the most beautiful of the winged species. "A miniature work of our Great Parent"? This little terror that shreds flowers in a diminutive and gratuitous rage? It seems less the product of

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the imagination of God the Father than of someone like D. H. Lawrence, who admired this pasage extravagantly. But the hummingbird, fittingly, makes only a cameo appearance in a chapter that is mostly devoted to snakes. At first the Farmer maintains that he would prefer not to write on the subject and is doing so only at the specific request of his anonymous European correspondent. But as he proceeds, it is clear that he finds snakes a far more attractive subject than he is at first prepared to admit. He begins with America's two common poisonous snakes, the copperhead and the rattlesnake; and his description of a man bitten by a copperhead will strike most modern readers as more comical than horrendous, if only because it is so clearly a product of superstitions related to imitative magic: The poor wretch instantly swelled in a most dreadful manner; a multitude of spots of different hues alternately appeared and vanished on different parts of his body; his eyes were filled with madness and rage; he cast them on all present with the most vindictive looks; he thrust out his tongue as the snakes do; he hissed through his teeth with inconceivable strength and became an object of terror to all bystanders. To the lividness of a corpse he united the desperate force of a maniac; they hardly were able to fasten him so as to guard themselves from his attacks, when in the space of two hours death relieved the poor wretch from his struggles and the spectators from their apprehensions. These curious beliefs about snakebite were not, apparently, peculiar to Crevecoeur, but were common in his time and survived well into the nineteenth century. In Oliver Wendell Holmes's novel Elsie Venner, for example, the heroine has a snakelike nature that is attributable to the prenatal influence of a snakebite received by her mother. And Holmes was an eminent physician.

In any case, the Farmer turns from the copperhead to the rattlesnake, the bite of which, he tells us, "is not mortal in so short a space, and for which there are several antidotes." He reports correctly that the flesh is edible, that "the Indians often regale on them," and the meat is "extremely sweet and white." Once, he tells us, he saw a tame one that had been defanged. It liked to swim, and when the boys who were its owners called it back, it obeyed like a dog. They would often stroke it "with a soft brush, and this friction seemed to cause the most pleasing sensations, for it would turn on its back to enjoy it, as a cat does before the fire." Maybe so. But herpetology aside, one suspects that the Farmer's tame rattlesnake that likes to have its stomach scratched has more than a little in common with those domesticated hornets in his parlor. However snakes actually behave, this particular one seems to be as much literary device as reptile. But the snake that interests the Farmer most is the black snake, which, he reports, is able to "fascinate" (hypnotize) its victims: On some occasions they present themselves half in the reptile state, half erect; their eyes and their heads in the erect posture appear to great advantage; the former display a fire which I have often admired, and it is by these they are enabled to fascinate birds and squirrels. When they have fixed their eyes on an animal, they become immovable, only turning their head sometimes to the right and sometimes to the left, but still with their sight invariably directed to the object. The distracted victim, instead of flying its enemy, seems to be arrested by some invincible power; it screams; now approaches and then recedes; and after skipping about with unaccountable agitation, finally rushes into the jaws of the snake and is swallowed, as soon as it is covered with a slime or glue to make it slide easily down the throat of the devourer.

244 I AMERICAN It is a black snake that provides the Fanner with his most memorable experience of reptiles. He encounters the scene, as he had encountered the scene of the man in the cage, when he is idly solitary, alone in nature. In his lowlands, he tells us, there grow "natural arbours" of hemp plants covered with vines; and it is from such an arbor that he made most of his observations of hummingbirds. He is sitting in it one day, "solitary and pensive," when he hears a rustling noise. I looked all around without distinguishing anything, until I climbed one of my great hemp stalks, when to my astonishment I beheld two snakes of considerable length, the one pursuing the other with great celerity through a hempstubble field. The aggressor was of the black kind, six feet long; the fugitive was a water snake, nearly of equal dimensions. They soon met, and in the fury of their first encounter, they appeared in an instant firmly twisted together; and whilst their united tails beat the ground, they mutually tried with open jaws to lacerate each other. What a fell aspect did they present! Their heads were compressed to a very small size, their eyes flashed fire. ... The scene was uncommon and beautiful; for thus opposed, they fought with their jaws, biting each other with the utmost rage. . . . The water snake, in the midst of this combat, tries to retreat toward a ditch containing water, its "natural element." This was no sooner perceived by the keen-eyed black one, than, twisting its tail twice round a stalk of hemp and seizing its adversary by the throat, not by means of its jaws but by twisting its own neck twice round that of the water snake, pulled it back from the ditch. To prevent a defeat, the latter took hold likewise of a stalk on the bank, and by the acquisition of that point of resistance, became a match for its fierce antagonist.

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There ensues a desperate and protracted tug of war, until at last the stalk to which the black snake fastened suddenly gave way, and in consequence of this accident they both soon plunged into the ditch. The water did not extinguish their vindictive rage; for by their agitations I could trace, though not distinguish, their mutual attacks. They soon reappeared on the surface twisted together, as in their first onset; but the black snake seemed to retain its wonted superiority, for its head was exactly fixed above that of the other, which it incessantly pressed down under the water, until it was stifled and sunk. The victor no sooner perceived its enemy incapable of farther resistance than, abandoning it to the current, it returned on shore and disappeared. The black snake, appearing out of nature with no more than a rustling sound, and vanishing silently, is Crevecoeur's equivalent of the white whale or, if you like, the serpent in his New World Garden. It is worth noting that although the Farmer calls the serpents' combat "beautiful," there is no more explanation for the rage of the black snake than for that of the hummingbird. Both are simply there, a part of nature at its most essential: elemental, awe-inspiring, ultimately metaphysical as well as physical. After giving us these brief but striking images of nature at its most savage and most beautiful, Crevecoeur returns, in letter XI, to his earlier view of American nature, at least in the middle colonies, as a new Garden of Eden. His speaker in this letter is not the Farmer, but "Mr. Iw-n Al-z, a Russian gentleman," who is describing a visit he paid, at the Farmer's request, "to Mr. John Bertram [actually Bartram] the celebrated Pennsylvania botanist." His opening words have a familiar ring: Examine this flourishing province in whatever light you will, the eyes as well as the mind of an

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European traveller are equally delighted because a diffusive happiness appears in every part, happiness which is established on the broadest basis. The wisdom of Lycurgus and Solon never conferred on man one half of the blessings and uninterrupted prosperity which the Pennsylvanians now possess; the name of Penn, that simple but illustrious citizen, does more honour to the English nation than those of many of their kings. Al-z goes on to assert that * 'either nature or the climate seems to be more favourable here to the arts and sciences than to any other American province;" and as proof he offers the example of John Bartram, who, although self-trained, was one of the most eminent scientists of his time; Linnaeus called him the greatest natural botanist in the world. As Crevecoeur tells it, Bartram had been a simple farmer until one day, plowing his fields, he had rested under a tree and his eye had lit on a daisy. "I plucked it mechanically and viewed it with more curiosity than common country farmers are wont to do, and observed therein many distinct parts, some perpendicular, some horizontal. 'What a shame,' said my mind, or something that inspired my mind, 'that thee shouldest have employed so many years in tilling the earth and destroying so many flowers and plants without being acquainted with their structures and their uses!' This seeming inspiration suddenly awakened my curiosity, for these were not thoughts to which I had been accustomed." The following week Bartram hires a man to plow for him while he goes to Philadelphia to buy books. A local schoolmaster teaches him "enough Latin to understand Linnaeus." Thus instructed, he begins "to botanize all over" his farm. As soon as he has become acquainted with all of the local plants, he explores the other provinces, until eventually he acquires "a pretty gen-

eral knowledge of every plant and tree to be found in our continent" and finds himself an internationally known botanist. Bartram is now in easy circumstances, although whether this is from his scientific endeavors or his application of them to his own farm is never made entirely clear. The Russian visitor is impressed both by his friendly and informal manner and by the patriarchal table that he sets. "At the lowest part sat his Negroes; his hired men were next, then the family and myself; and at the head the venerable father and his wife presided." When the visitor asks Bartram why his slaves "seem to do their work with the cheerfulness of white men," Bartram replies: "Though our erroneous prejudices and opinions once induced us to look upon them as fit only for slavery . . . our society treats them now as the companions of our labours; and by this management, as well as by means of the education we have given them, they are in general become a new set of beings. Those whom I admit to my table I have found to be good, trusty, moral men; when they do not what we think they should do, we dismiss them, which is all the punishment we inflict." Of course this is more humane treatment than the plantation owner had administered to the man in the cage. And yet one is irresistibly reminded by these slaves grown respectable through good treatment of the hornets in the parlor, domesticated through equally kind treatment, and the tame rattlesnake that, when scratched, would roll over like a cat. The visitor tells Bartram: "I view the present Americans as the seed of future nations, which will replenish this boundless continent; the Russians may be in some respects compared to you; we likewise are a new people, new, I mean, in knowledge, arts, and improvements. Who knows what revolutions Russia and

246 I AMERICAN America may one day bring about; we are perhaps nearer neighbours than we imagine." And yet the visitor feels that the social system of his own country will inevitably hold it back. "Our lands are so unequally divided and so few of our farmers are possessors of the soil they till that they cannot execute plans of husbandry with the same vigour as you do, who hold yours, as it were, from the Master of Nature, unencumbered and free. Oh America! . . . Thou knowest not as yet the whole extent of thy happiness: the foundation of thy civil polity must lead thee in a few years to a degree of population and power which Europe little thinks of!" But this brave prophecy is shattered in letter XII—the last, the Farmer says, that he will ever write—by the events of the American Revolution. For the Farmer, the central meaning of the Revolution is that his society has come apart at the seams. Once happiness was our portion; now it is gone from us, and I am afraid not to be enjoyed again by the present generation. Whichever way I look, nothing but the most frightful precipices present themselves to my view, in which hundreds of my friends and acquaintances have already perished; of all animals that live on the surface of this planet, what is man when no longer connected with society, or when he finds himself surrounded by a convulsed and half-dissolved one? . . . So much is everything subverted among us that the very word misery, with which we were hardly acquainted before, no longer conveys the same ideas, or, rather, tired with feeling for the miseries of others, every one feels now for himself alone. The division is deeper than the social level. The Farmer is divided within himself by the Revolution. Although he inclines to the Tory, he cannot wholeheartedly espouse either the Tory or the Rebel side.

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Shall I discard all my ancient principles, shall I renounce that name, that nation which I held once so respectable? I feel the powerful attraction; the sentiments they inspired grew with my earliest knowledge and were grafted upon the first rudiments of my education. On the other hand, shall I arm myself against that country where I first drew breath, against the playmates of my youth, my bosom friends, my acquaintance? The idea makes me shudder. It is not only on matters of principle that the Farmer is divided. Somewhat discreditably, he seems as much concerned about matters of policy as of principle. If I attach myself to the mother country, which is 3,000 miles from me, I become what is called an enemy to my own region; if I follow the rest of my countrymen, I become opposed to our ancient masters: both extremes appear equally dangerous to a person of so little weight and consequence as I am. . . . And after all, who will be the really guilty? Those most certainly who fail of success. That last sentence is genuinely perceptive, but for the most part the Farmer is unable to account for the American Revolution. He had attributed Europe's wars to the ambitions of its great men; and he tries, unconvincingly, to attribute the Revolution to the same cause. "It is for the sake of the great leaders on both sides that so much blood must be spilt," he says, forgetting for the moment that he had described America as a society free of both the great and their ambitions. Although inclined to the Tory side, the Farmer has several reasons for not espousing it actively. Besides his reluctance to side against his fellow countrymen, and his fear that Britain may be too far away to protect him if he does so, there is his outrage at the British policy of provoking Indian attacks on inland settlements. Must I then, in order to be called a faithful subject, coolly and philosophically say it is neces-

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sary for the good of Britain that my children's brains should be dashed against the walls of the house in which they were reared; that my wife should be stabbed and scalped before my face; that I should be either murthered or captivated; or that for greater expedition we should all be locked up and burnt to ashes as the family of the B n was? Must I with meekness wait for that last pitch of desolation and receive with perfect resignation so hard a fate from ruffians acting at such a distance from the eyes of any superior, monsters left to the wild impulses of the wildest nature? In such a situation, distrusted by both Tory and Rebel, and so fearful of Indian attacks that he spends many of his nights awake and armed, watching at his door for fear that the noise someone has heard may be a skulking savage, what is the Fanner to do? Unless you have read the Letters, you would never guess. He is going to live with the Indians—not with the frontier Indians who have been attacking the settlements, of course, but far in the interior of the continent, with Indians uncorrupted by the white man. I resemble, methinks, one of the stones of a ruined arch. . . . I can be nothing until I am replaced, either in the former circle or in some stronger one. I see one on a smaller scale, and at a considerable distance, but it is within my power to reach it; and since I have ceased to consider myself as a member of the ancient state now convulsed, I willingly descend into an inferior one. I will revert into a state approaching nearer to that of nature, unencumbered either with voluminous laws or contradictory codes, often galling the very necks of those whom they protect, and at the same time sufficiently remote from the brutality of unconnected savage nature. Do you, my friend, perceive the path I have found out? It is that which leads to the tenants of the great village of , where, far removed from the accursed neighbourhood of Europeans, its inhabitants live with more ease,

decency, and peace than you can imagine; who, though governed by no laws, yet find in uncontaminated simple manners all that laws can afford. Their system is sufficiently complete to answer all the primary wants of man and to constitute him a social being such as he ought to be in the great forest of Nature. There it is that I have resolved at any rate to transport myself and family. . . . Put in that Rousseauistic fashion, the Farmer's decision begins to make sense; and the action he plans takes the form of a familiar gesture, and a splendid one. It is, very probably, the most characteristic of American gestures, this turning of one's back on a convulsed civilization and striking out into the unspoiled wilderness. Behind it lies the impulse that first sent Englishmen across the Atlantic into North America, and that same impulse has echoed and reechoed through our history. Its most famous formulation is in the ending of Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, where Huck says, "I reckon I got to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she's going to adopt me and sivilize me and I can't stand it. I been there before." MichelGuillaume Jean de Crevecoeur and his persona, the American Farmer, had been there too; and they couldn't stand it either. The Farmer tries very hard to convince himself that all will be well for him in Indian society. He points to the example of European children who, after capture and adoption by the Indians, have refused to return, when given the choice, to their own culture and their true parents. Forgetting Pocahontas, if he had ever heard of her, he says, "thousands of Europeans are Indians, and we have no examples of even one of those aborigines having from choice become Europeans! . . . There must be something very bewitching in their manners, something very indelible and marked by the very hands of Nature." And yet he feels the "keenest regret" at leaving his cherished farm: "If in Europe it is praiseworthy

248 I AMERICAN to be attached to paternal inheritances, how much more natural, how much more powerful must be the tie with us, who . . . are the founders, the creators, of our own farms!" And when it comes right down to it, he plans to prevent his children's full acculturation to Indian society by keeping them farmers. I dread lest the imperceptible charm of Indian education may seize my younger children and give them such a propensity to that mode of life as may preclude their returning to the manners and customs of their parents. I have but one remedy to prevent this great evil, and that is to employ them in the labour of the fields as much as I can; I have even resolved to make their daily subsistence depend altogether on it. As long as we keep ourselves busy in tilling the earth, there is no fear of any of us becoming wild; it is the chase and the food it procures that have this strange effect. As an additional motive for keeping his children at the plow, he intends to work out a system of future payment for their crops. I will keep an exact account of all that shall be gathered and give each of them a regular credit for the amount of it, to be paid them in real property at the return of peace. Thus, though seemingly toiling for bare subsistence on a foreign land, they shall entertain the pleasing prospect of seeing the sum of their labours one day realized either in legacies or gifts, equal if not superior to it. And thus, by importing agriculture and capitalism into the wilderness, the Farmer plans to prevent his children from growing wild. But he has an even deeper fear than that of wildness. He does not want his daughter to marry an Indian; and so the son of a neighbor, who is in love with her, is to accompany the family as a suitable mate. The Farmer says:

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Had it not been for this fortunate circumstance, there would have been the greatest danger; for however I respect the simple, the inoffensive society of these people in their villages, the strongest prejudices would make me abhor any alliance with them in blood, disagreeable no doubt to Nature's intentions, which have strongly divided us by so many indelible characters. Given this basic fear of miscegenation, it is a little surprising to find the Fanner continuing, in the very same paragraph: Thus shall we metamorphose ourselves from neat, decent, opulent planters, surrounded with every conveniency which our external labour and internal industry could give, into a still simpler people divested of everything beside hope, food, and the raiment of the woods: abandoning the large framed house to dwell under the wigwam, and the featherbed to lie on the mat or bear's skin. There shall we sleep undisturbed by frightful dreams and apprehensions. . . . I would cheerfully go even to the Mississippi to find that repose to which we have been so long strangers. My heart sometimes seems tired with beating; it wants rest like my eyelids, which feel oppressed with so many watchings. The Farmer's plans for his wife are in some ways even more impractical than those for his children. She will have to become partly acculturated. "Like the other squaws, she must cook for us the nasaump, the ninchicke, and such other preparations of corn as are customary among these people." But since she also "understands inoculation," the Farmer hopes that if she practices it among the Indians, "it will raise her into some degree of consideration, for whoever is useful in any society will always be respected." It is absurd, of course. The Farmer's wife is not going to become half squaw and half medical technician; and the Farmer must be at

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JEAN DE CREVECOEUR I 249

least partially aware of that, because he has not told his wife his plans. He adds, "Nor do I know how to do it; I tremble lest she should refuse to follow me." The whole enterprise is absurd; and the Farmer must be partially aware of that, too, because at the same time that he is planning to light out for the territory and live among the Indians, he is entertaining other possibilities. One of them, the idea of abandoning his family and making his way alone, is considered only briefly. "Am I to proceed on my voyage and leave them? That I never could submit to." But another possibility keeps recurring: that the war might end, and that he might return to his farm and resume his idyllic rural existence. The last letter ends with a prayer for precisely that possibility: Permit, I beseech thee, O Father of nature, that our ancient virtues and our industry may not be totally lost and that as a reward for the great toils we have made on this new land, we may be restored to our ancient tranquility and enabled to fill it with successive generations that will constantly thank thee for the ample subsistence thou hast given them. But when the war does end, the country will never again be quite the same. The Farmer's new American Garden of Eden has been far more temporary than he had thought. It is gone forever. At the bottom of his being the Farmer knows that, and it is this knowledge that gives the Letters from an American Farmer their special pathos. Like all true pastorals, they celebrate a vanished happiness. The relationship between James, the American Farmer, and his creator is not unlike that between Ishmael, in Moby Dick, and Herman Melville. Although persona and author differ radically in the particular circumstances of their careers, there are, at the deepest level, many

similarities between the two. And when it comes to matters of opinion, there often seems such unanimity that it is probably justifiable to use "the Farmer" and "Crevecoeur" interchangeably in discussing most of the opinions presented in the Letters. Michel-Guillaume Jean de Crevecoeur was born into the petty nobility of France, on January 31, 1735, at Caen. Raised there and educated in a Jesuit school, which he hated, he left in 1754, perhaps because of a quarrel with his father, to live with distant relatives in Salisbury, England. There he fell in love and became engaged to be married. But his fiancee died; and he left England in 1755, perhaps in an attempt to escape the memory of her death. He sailed for Canada, where he enlisted in the militia and served as a surveyor and cartographer during the French and Indian War. In 1758, on the recommendation of influential friends of his family, he was commissioned a lieutenant in the regular army. The following year he took part in the unsuccessful French defense of Quebec and was wounded there, under circumstances that are not known but that were apparently discreditable to him, since there was speculation in official dispatches as to whether his brother officers would want him to return to France with the regiment. In October 1759 he sold his commission, and that December he arrived in New York City on board a British transport. We have seen enough, by now, to recognize a recurrent pattern in Crevecoeur's life. He was a person to whom things happen; he was prone to unpleasant accidents, and his method of dealing with unpleasantness was to put a large amount of distance between it and himself. In British North America he adopted a new name, James Hector St. John (James was the name of the American Farmer, and the Letters were signed "J. Hector St. John"), and for a time followed his profession of surveyor on the New York and Vermont frontiers, also trading

250 / AMERICAN with the Indians and being adopted into the Oneida tribe. (It is that adoption that may provide the basis for the Farmer's plans to live with the Indians in letter XII.) In 1765 he became a citizen of New York; and in 1769 he married, bought land in Orange County, and settled down to the one extended period of contentment he was to know, fanning, raising a family of two boys and a girl, visiting his friends (the latter included Cadwallader Golden), and writing the manuscripts that would become the Letters and the Sketches of Eighteenth Century America. By 1772 he had so completely forged a new identity and severed all contacts with the old that his father, who had not heard from him since 1767 and was uncertain as to how to arrange the estate, had to write to the British government for aid in locating him. Crevecoeur's period of happiness, like the American Farmer's, was shattered by the American Revolution. Leaning toward the Tory side, but not openly so, he seems to have been distrusted by both parties. In 1779, for reasons that are not entirely known, but one of which seems to have been to establish his elder son's claim to the family estate in Normandy, he left his wife and younger children on the farm and took his elder son to New York City, intending to take ship for France. The British, thinking Crevecoeur an American spy, imprisoned him for three months, and it was not until September 1780 that he was able to sail. In 1781 he contracted with a London publisher to bring out an edition of some of his manuscripts. Perhaps his mistreatment by the British had altered his sympathies, or perhaps he or his publishers simply exercised good editorial judgment. In any case, although the manuscripts contained much inferior material, including some very heavy-handed satire directed at New England ' 'Patriots," what was published as the Letters from an American Farmer in 1782 presented Crevecoeur's most coherent and idyllic visions of American rural life. They were very well received.

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In the meantime Crevecoeur had arrived in France, not knowing that his American farm had been burned by the Indians, that his wife was dead, and that his younger children had been taken in, first by a neighbor and then by a stranger. Sponsored by Turgot and by Mme. d'Houdetot, he fashioned a new role for himself, based on his authorship of the Letters. He permitted his French friends to see him as an American "Patriot" rather than as a refugee Tory; and it was in that role that he was appointed French consul to New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut in 1783. In America he was reunited with his younger children. Crevecoeur accomplished a number of useful things as a consul, and he brought out a French edition of the Letters in 1784 and an expanded French edition in 1787. But he had been intermittently ill ever since his imprisonment by the British, and had to return to France in 1790. His illness and the abrupt shifts in politics during the French Revolution caused his separation from the consular service in 1792. During the Terror he tried unsuccessfully to flee to America but eventually reached his elder son in Germany. Thereafter Crevecoeur lived relatively peacefully, sometimes with his father and sometimes with his son-in-law, a French diplomat. There was one more flight. In 1809, while living with his son-in-law in Munich, he returned to France in order to avoid the advancing Austrian army. There he lived in his son-in-law's house at Sarcelles, until his death in 1813. The two French versions of the Letters are both expansions of the English editions. The added materials are of some interest to the scholar, but they detract from the coherence of what was never a very tightly organized book. In 1800 Crevecoeur tried to put together a new book on America, on a much larger and more comprehensive scale than the Letters. He was unsuccessful in finding an English publisher, but in 1801 Voyage dans la Haute Pensylvanie et dans I'etat de New-York was published in Paris. It was a failure, and it is not hard to see why. Re-

MICHEL-GUILLAUME

JEAN DE CREVECOEUR

petitive, padded with borrowings from other authors, and extremely disorganized, it purports to be a translation of the travel journal of one "S.J.D.C.," made from a manuscript washed ashore from a shipwreck. This literary frame enables Crevecoeur to cover many otherwise unco verable transitions by announcing, at convenient points in the manuscript, that pages have been rendered illegible by seawater. But such a comprehensive excuse for disorganization cannot disguise the fact that the book does not have even an underlying chronology. In its hundreds of pages it contains a few effective sketches, but even these will be of interest chiefly to the specialist. In 1925 Henri L. Bourdin, Ralph H. Gabriel, and Stanley T. Williams put together selections from Crevecoeur's unpublished English manuscripts and published them as Sketches of Eighteenth Century America: More "Letters from an American Farmer/' Primarily because they took a more jaundiced view of American life than did the original Letters, these pieces were at first praised for their "realism"; but it is now generally recognized that they are much inferior. The editors assembled five letters on rural American experience; some of them, especially "A Snowstorm as It Affects the American Farmer,'' have passages of considerable charm; but they suffer from the absence of a single point of view and are of less imaginative scope than the original Letters. A sixth letter tries briefly and rather unconvincingly to make of French Canadian culture before the American Revolution a culture lying, like Crevecoeur's middle colonies, in idyllic simplicity, halfway between savagery and civilization. The last six letters are on the suffering caused by the American Revolution. They are strongly Tory in point of view; unhappily, they are also melodramatic and sentimental. They are peopled by stereotypes who are either insufferably virtuous or unbelievably malignant, so that, as Mark Twain said of The Deerslayer, the reader "dislikes the good people . . . , is

I 251

indifferent to the others, and wishes they would all get drowned together." Crevecoeur, then, is likely to remain a onebook author for most readers. That is just as well. He played many roles during his long and eventful life, but the only one in which he seems to have been genuinely content is that of the American Farmer.

Selected Bibliography WORKS OF MICHEL-GUILLAUME JEAN DE CREVECOEUR Letters from an American Farmer. London: Davies and Davis, 1782; second edition, "with an accurate index," London: Davies and Davis, 1783. Reprint, edited by W. B. Blake. New York: Dutton, 1957. Lettres d'un Cultivateur Americain. 2 vols. Paris: Cuchet, 1784; enlarged edition, 3 vols. Paris: Cuchet, 1787. Voyage dans la Haute Pensylvanie et dans Vetat de New-York. 3 vols. Paris: Maradan, 1801. Sketches of Eighteenth Century America. Edited by H. L. Bourdin, R. H. Gabriel, and S. T. Williams. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1925. Journey into Northern Pennsylvania and the State of New York. Translated by Clarissa S. Bostelmann. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1964.

CRITICAL AND BIOGRAPHICAL STUDIES Adams, Percy G. "The Historical Value of Crevecoeur's Voyage , . . ," American Literature 25:150-68 (1953). . Introduction to Crevecoeur's EighteenthCentury Travels in Pennsylvania and New York. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1961. Bewley, Marius. "The Cage and the Prairie: Two Notes on Symbolism," Hudson Review 10:403-14 (1957).

252 / AMERICAN WRITERS Crevecoeur, Robert de. Saint John de Crevecoeur: Sa vie et ses ouvrages. Paris: Librairie des Bibliophiles, 1883. Lawrence, D. H. Studies in Classic American Literature. New York: Doubleday, 1953. Pp. 31-43. Marx, Leo. The Machine in the Garden. New York: Oxford University Press, 1964. Pp. 107-18. Mitchell, Julia P. St. Jean de Crevecoeur. New York: Columbia University Press, 1916. Rapping, Elayne A. 'Theory and Experience in

Crevecoeur's America,'' American Quarterly 19:707-18 (1967). Rice, Howard C. Le cultivateur americain: Etude sur Voeuvre de Saint John de Crevecoeur. Paris: Champion, 1932. Stone, Albert E., Jr. ' 'Crevecoeur's Letters and the Beginnings of an American Literature," Emory University Quarterly 18:197-213 (1962). —CHADWICK

HANSEN

Hilda Doolittle 1886-1961

So I may say *I died of living, having lived one hour';

So they may say, 'Greek flower; Greek ecstasy reclaims forever One who died following intricate songs' lost measure.' (from Red Roses for Bronze) H.D.—or Hilda Doolittle, as she was known before Ezra Pound urged her to use her initials instead—was born in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, on September 10, 1886, the daughter of Charles Leander Doolittle, then director of the Sayre Observatory and professor of mathematics and astronomy at Lehigh University, and Helen Eugenia Wolle. When H.D. was nearly nine, the family moved to Philadelphia, where her father joined the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania and where he later became the first director of the Flower Observatory. As H.D. was to remark much later, in Tribute to Freud (1956), her early life had been ordered in multiples of two: two sets of "parents" (her own and her mother's), two sets of brothers and sisters (two half and two full), two "Biblical" towns in which she lived (Bethlehem and Philadelphia),

253

and two national and religious strains in her background (the New England Puritanical origins of her father and the German mystical Protestantism of her mother). The insistent dualism of her childhood years had a lasting effect on her as an adult and, more obliquely, as a poet. Even though Tribute to Freud is characteristically reticent about the precise nature of her psychiatric treatment, with H.D. suggesting that she was more of a student of Freud's than a patient, it is nonetheless possible to perceive that H.D. suffered intensely as a child from feelings of insecurity and sibling rivalry. By turning to Freud for help she knew that she was returning belatedly to her father—to that other "professor" in her life, in whose study, "provided you do not speak to him when he is sitting at his table, or disturb him when he is lying down, you are free to come and go." This time it was she who was lying down in the study, able to speak uninhibitedly to a father who would listen attentively and tell her (how else to explain this astonishing remark than oedipally?): " 'The trouble is—I am an old man—you do not think it worth your while to love me.' " What Freud says here, or is made to say, is of course what H.D. would have wished her father to say but what he could never be made to say, protected as he was by his study and by the chilly traditions of "those Puritan fathers who wear high peaked

254 I AMERICAN hats in the Thanksgiving numbers of magazines." William Carlos Williams, who got to know H.D. when she was in her late teens, was later to remember in his Autobiography (1951) how Prof. Doolittle would preside solemnly and silently over the dinner table; and, in 1911, when Williams went down to the New York docks to see H.D. off to Europe, he found her "sitting on a trunk, her father, the old astronomer beside her, uncommunicative as always." That was the last time H.D. saw her father, whom, according to Williams, she resembled so much physically and with whom she was perhaps to be fully reconciled only in that strange and sometimes moving document, Tribute to Freud. With her mother, H.D.'s relation was quite different. "About her, " she says, "there is no question." There was no question, that is, of reticence or lack of warmth; even so there was, as it were, too little answer. 'The trouble is," H.D. confessed, "she knows so many people and they come and interrupt. And besides that, she likes my brother better." With her father she could share a study that he never completely inhabited; with her mother, she was forced to share with others the space she filled too fully: ". . . one can never get near enough," she complained, "or if one gets near, it is because one has measles or scarlet fever. If one could stay near her always, there would be no break in consciousness. . . . " But for H.D. consciousness was continually being broken, although she never could resign herself to living in fragments. Indeed, her lifelong preoccupation with Greece can be traced, in part at least, to this search for wholeness and security, to a Nietzschean sense of emotional, intellectual, and physical unity. In "A Note on Poetry,' ' which she wrote for the Oxford Anthology of American Literature (1939), she makes a connection between an idyllic Greece that never was and an idyllic childhood that might have been:

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It is nostalgia for a lost land. I call it Hellas. I might, psychologically just as well, have listed the Casco Bay islands off the coast of Maine, but I called my islands Rhodos, Samos and Cos. They are symbols. And, symbolically, the first island of memory was dredged away or lost, like a miniature Atlantis. It was a thickly wooded island in the Lehigh river, and, believe it or not, was actually named Calypso's island. The isles of Greece here come perilously close to that isle in Neverland to which Wendy repaired with Peter Pan; or, for that matter, to that isle in Loch Gill where Yeats yearned for the peace that comes dropping so slow as virtually to stop time altogether. These are the Happy Isles, those Utopian places of womblike security where Mother Nature takes care of everything. It is not surprising, then, that H.D. spent nearly all of her adult life in Britain and Switzerland, the latter her haven of peaceful security. The quest for unbroken consciousness led H.D. far back into time as well as a considerable distance in space; and in her work, this quest was often accompanied by a search for a mother or father figure. Freud's diagnosis, after all, had been "in the very beginning that I had come to Vienna hoping to find my mother." She did not succeed in Vienna, but as the increasing preoccupation with mother deities and with Helen (also her mother's name) indicates, she did not give up trying throughout her life. The lonely study of her childhood years became symbolic of her father's rejection of her; but it may also represent H.D.'s turning inward to books (her father's intellectual world), a surrogate world that could be expanded at will to suit her psychological requirements, much as in a poem she learned by heart at this time, Holmes's "Chambered Nautilus." Whatever her emotional deprivations, however, her father certainly saw to it that she received the best training:

HILDA DOOLITTLE I 255 at the Gordon School, at the Friends' Preparatory School, and then at Bryn Mawr, which she entered in 1904 with Marianne Moore as a classmate. From about this time date H.D. 's first real attempts at poetical translation and composition; and at about this time, too, she began to sample the excitement of Ezra Pound's company. The insecure girl, whose father ignored her and whose mother preferred her brother, was growing into a somewhat unstable, highly gifted young woman—and an attractive one. William Carlos Williams described the H.D. of this period as tall, blond, and with a long jaw but gay blue eyes. . . . She had a young girl's giggle and shrug which somehow in one so tall and angular seemed a little absurd. She fascinated me, not for her beauty, which was unquestioned if bizarre to my sense, but for a provocative indifference to rule and order which I liked. She dressed indifferently, almost sloppily and looked to a young man, not inviting—she had nothing of that—but irritating, with a smile. This irritating, high-spirited aspect of her personality was what Lawrence was later to focus on in his portrait of her in Aaron s Rod; and it is well to remember this trait because (except for her unpublished correspondence) it is utterly absent from her work. This is the H.D. with whom Pound fell in love, for whom, as Hugh Kenner remarks, he wrote "sonnets and verses ateem with labile archaisms and gave her twenty-six of them in a blue type-script, bound with thongs into a little four-by-five wide parchment chapbook: 'Hilda's Book.' One still heads off Personae: still called 'The Tree.' " "Dryad" is the name Pound chose for her, perhaps as much for her nymphlike personality as for her love of the classics and the woods. In the evenings they would sometimes neck in dark corners of the Doolittle house,

where they were once surprised by the disconcerted professor; and when they announced their engagement, her parents were not pleased. No doubt they shared the prevailing view of H.D.'s schoolgirl contemporaries that "Ezra Pound's crazy." But if Pound was crazy, then by the same standards H.D. was not altogether sane. Her erratic behavior did not quite withstand the scrutiny of bourgeois Paterson; once out on a walk with Williams, she strode uncovered into the rain: " 'Come, beautiful rain,' she said, holding out her arms. 'Beautiful rain, welcome.' And I behind her feeling not inclined to join in her mood. And let me tell you it rained plenty. It didn't improve her beauty or my opinion of her. . . Another time Williams watched as H.D. deliberately taunted fate by swimming out into heavy surf, with nearly fatal results. Here was a dryad indeed, a being not quite of this world, in love with nature and tempting its deities to violence with melodramatic gestures. The engagement to Pound came to nothing, although they continued to write and remained friends for life; but the period of Pound's greatest influence was still several years in the future. In the meantime H.D. withdrew from Bryn Mawr in her sophomore year, apparently for reasons of health. College life does not seem to have left much of a mark on her; while there she did not even attempt to publish any of her translations in the literary magazine. The only event she never forgot, as she wrote to Glenn Hughes, was "how somewhat shocked I was at Bryn Mawr to be flunked quite frankly in English," an experience that, however disturbing, she did not interpret as a sign of intellectual incapacity. On the contrary, H.D. now began to take up the study of Greek, work seriously on translations, and write stories—mostly for children—for Philadelphia and New York newspapers. Nonetheless, although she may have needed this relatively fal-

256 / AMERICAN low period to recoup physically and mentally, she did not continue her formal education. Because she failed to do so, her knowledge of Greek never became really adequate to the uses she wished to put it to, and her general education was too severely limited and scattered to permit her to tackle major poetic themes with confidence. It is here, perhaps, that we should look for the reason why, despite her ability to make her poetry shine with a high degree of surface gloss, too often there remains a sense of vacuity underneath her writing. In the summer of 1911, H.D. accompanied some friends on a tour of Europe. She was twenty-five and for her it was a kind of epiphany. She was to recall it in The Little Review (May 1929): The happiest moment in my life was when I stood on the deck of a second class boat called the Floride and saw the beauty of New York above me and knew the beauty of New York was part of all beauty and that I was part of all beauty being free . . . free, my first trip to what we then called "Europe" in 1911, going with a friend I loved and going straight with little luggage and a Dante (that was hers) and a few old dresses. They toured the Continent in the proper Jamesian manner—stopping at museums and other noteworthy sights—and when the tour ended, she decided to stay. Her parents, perhaps unsure of what to do with this odd, gangly dryad anyway, agreed and provided her with a suitable allowance. Thus, in this inauspicious fashion, began the career of the poet who would, only two years later, become the leading feminine exponent of the Imagist movement. Through Pound, H.D. was introduced to the avant-garde of literary London and soon became intimately involved with one of its most promising members, an English poet six years her junior, Richard Aldington. In December 1911, she

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went with him to Paris, where, among other things, she visited the galleries and began a diary (now in the Beinecke Library at Yale) full of detailed artistic commentary and drafts of rather conventional, rhymed poems. From Paris they continued on to Italy—both were "ardent Hellenists," although they never visited Greece together—and returned to London in 1912. Imagism, in the person of Ezra Pound, was waiting for them. "The Imagist mouvemong was born in a teashop—in the Royal Borough of Kensington," Richard Aldington was to recall in his autobiography, Life for Life's Sake (1940): For some time Ezra had been butting in on our studies and poetic productions, with alternate encouragements and the reverse, according to his mood. H.D. produced some poems which I thought excellent, and she either handed or mailed them to Ezra. Presently each of us received a ukase to attend the Kensington bunshop. Ezra was so much worked up by these poems of H.D. 's that he removed his pince-nez and informed us we were Imagists. . . .H.D. looked very much pleased by the praise Ezra generously gave her poems. I didn't like his insistence that the poems should be signed: "H.D. Imagist [sic]," because it sounded a little ridiculous. And I think H.D. disliked it too. But Ezra was a bit of a czar in a small but irritating way, and he had the bulge on us, because it was only through him that we could get our poems into Harriet Monroe Js Poetry, and nobody else at that time would look at them. With a flair rivaling that of a Madison Avenue advertising agent, Pound immediately proceeded to publicize the new movement by means of strategically placed hints about the imagistes. Already in the second issue of Poetry (November 1912), Aldington was identified as "a young English poet, one of the 'Imagistes/ a group of ardent Hellenists who are pursuing interesting ex-

HILDA DOOLITTLE I 257 periments in vers libre. . . ." Then in the January 1913 issue, immediately following the celebrated "H.D., Imagiste" poems, Pound published an essay entitled "Status Rerum" that gave the first, deliberately vague account of the new school. By this time Amy Lowell—the blue-blooded Hippopoetess from Boston who was eventually to replace Pound as the generalissimo of imagism—had become so worked up by Pound's campaign that she exclaimed, on reading H.D.'s poems, "Why, I, too, am an Imagiste!" and prepared to leave for London. Without going into detail about imagism and H.D.'s involvement with it, it needs to be said that H.D. as an artist was born with imagism and that Pound, if not her poetical father, was at least her midwife. As H.D. says in "Compassionate Friendship," written in 1955 and now at the Beinecke: "I think, however, that I, like T. S. Eliot, have always credited Ezra with my own first awakening." This is certainly true, although perhaps it should be modified a little by adding that Aldington, while also strongly under the influence of Pound, was a kind of spiritual husband to H.D.'s poetry, especially with respect to its Hellenistic and archaic qualities. Poems such as Aldington's "To a Greek Marble" and "Au Vieux Jardin"—the first to be explicitly associated with imagism in Poetry—are closer to H.D.'s early poetry than anything that Pound was writing at the time. H.D. and Aldington were married in October 1913 and moved into rooms at Holland Place Chambers, where they were joined not long afterward by Ezra Pound and his new bride, Dorothy Shakespeare, who took a flat in the same building. Nearby lived Mrs. Olivia Shakespeare, Pound's mother-in-law and Yeats's great friend, and Ford Madox Hueffer, another future imagiste. In these surroundings and in the year or two before World War I began to transform everything into a terrible ugliness, H.D. spent perhaps the happiest time of her life, producing

some of her most remarkable and memorable poems. This was the age, not only of imagism, but of Postimpressionism; of the Georgian poetical "reawakening" under the direction of that "tame" Pound, Edward Marsh; of Diaghilev's Ballets Russes; of futurism and vorticism, and— above all—of Bloomsbury. London was rapidly replacing Paris as the artistic capital of the civilized world. With the publication of her first poems in Poetry, H.D. began to attract the attention of other poets. It was H.D.'s poetry above all that convinced Amy Lowell that she was herself an imagiste. When Pound published his oddly eclectic but high-spirited and influential anthology, Des Imagistes, in 1914—with poems by himself, H.D., Aldington, Amy Lowell, James Joyce, Hueffer, and others—it was H.D.'s contribution that earned special praise in Harriet Monroe's review in Poetry (June 1915) as representing "perhaps the very essence of imagism." And a year and a half later D. H. Lawrence— who had meanwhile joined the reorganized imagists (or "Amygists")—in Lowell's first anthology, Some Imagist Poets (1915), wrote in a letter to A. W. McLeod that "I think H.D. is good: none of the others worth anything." With the publication of her first volume of poems, Sea Garden, that year, along with the translation of Choruses from Iphigenia in Aulis, and her appointment as temporary assistant editor of The Egoist, H.D. was quietly but quickly establishing herself as one of the most promising of the new generation of American poets. By 1917 Maxwell Bodenheim could credibly claim, in an essay attacking Pound in The Little Review, that his (Pound's) claim that "Eliot is the only really creative poet brought forth during recent times is absurd. H.D., Flecker, Marianne Moore, Williamson [sic], Michelson at his best, Carl Sandburg, and Wallace Stevens are certainly not inevitably below Eliot in quality of work." The "mysterious American lady resident abroad,

258 I AMERICAN whose identity is unknown to the editor"—as Harriet Monroe described H.D. on the occasion of her first appearance in Poetry—was still mysterious, but with a mystery that was beginning to haunt the contemporary literary imagination. As H.D. 's reputation as a poet began to solidify and increase, however, her personal life deteriorated with corresponding speed. In 1915 she lost her first child by miscarriage, "from shock and repercussions of war news broken to me in a rather brutal fashion," as she wrote in Tribute to Freud. She spent three weeks in a poorly run nursing home and, on leaving, was told by the matron there not to have sex "until the war is over." Something of this fear of sexual contact must have played a role in the ensuing breakdown of her marriage. Aldington, by now in the army and on regular leave, was obviously in no mood to wait until the cessation of hostilities; and his insistence on his marital rights and his preoccupation with sex made him seem more and more "coarse" to the sensitive, suffering H.D. It was inevitable that Aldington should turn elsewhere for physical satisfaction, which H.D., if she did not actually deny him, certainly did not encourage. Something of this sense of personal failure and insecurity emerges clearly from the emotional postscript to an unpublished letter to John Cournos, written in September 1916 (now at the Hough ton Library, Harvard): "I have all faith in my work. What I want at times is to feel faith in myself, in my mere physical presence in the world, in my personality. I feel my work is beautiful, I have deep faith in it, an absolute faith. But sometimes I have no faith in my own self." H.D. now became entangled in a complicated and psychologically tortuous relationship with her husband and Dorothy ("Arabella") Yorke— the Bella of Bid Me to Live. It was an experience she was to return to again and again, under a variety of guises, in her fiction and, to a lesser extent, in her poetry. It became an obsession that

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she had to relive fictively in order to exorcise her demons, in order to justify herself to herself and to the world, and in order to overcome the sense of rejection that overwhelmed her now even more than when she was a child. The complicated, "eternally triangular" story of the destruction of her marriage, the brief, abortive affair with D. H. Lawrence, and her escape with the musician Cecil Gray is too involved to recount here, but what must be remembered is that H.D. emerged from this experience a deeply wounded personality, whose feelings of rejection sometimes amounted to paranoia. H.D. was heading for what looked like a collapse. On top of her present misery came the news of the death, first of her brother in military action in France, then of her father at home. At the same time she was pregnant with her second child; and, to add to her difficulties, she fell ill with double pneumonia, and neither she nor the child were expected to live. That she did survive and her daughter Perdita was born was due principally to the efficient care of Winifred Ellerman, whom H.D. had met the previous year and who, as it were, took the place of the husband who had abandoned her. Not that she was utterly alone: Ezra Pound came to see her just before the child was to be born and, as H.D. writes in "Compassionate Friendship," lamented that "my only real criticism is that this is not my child." And Lawrence, writing to Amy Lowell in April 1919, informed her that "Hilda also had pneumonia some weeks ago, & it left her weak. I hear her baby, a girl, was born last Sunday, and that both are doing well. We shall be going to London soon, & may see her." If he did visit her, that was probably the last occasion that they met. With Winifred Ellerman, a new stability entered H.D.'s life. Although Ellerman would make a reputation for herself as a novelist under the pseudonym of "Bryher" (after an island in the Scillies), she always deferred to H.D. as the

HILDA DOOLITTLE I 259 older, wiser, and superior artist; indeed, she attributed her own spiritual awakening to Sea Garden. "There will always be one book among all others that makes us aware of ourselves," she writes in her autobiography, The Heart to Artemis (1962), "for me, it is Sea Garden by H.D. I learned it by heart from cover to cover." Whether Bryher literally believed this may be doubted—after all, she had written an effusively laudatory study of Amy Lowell in 1917, a year before she met H.D.—but what cannot be doubted is Bryher's unswerving loyalty to H.D. after they did meet. She identified with her even to the point of discovering that they were related by way of some remote Puritan ancestor. Bryher persuaded H.D. to go with her to Greece and to visit some of the islands that were still in postwar turmoil and not altogether safe for two unaccompanied young women. It was in Corfu that H.D. had her most dramatic supernatural experience, which she relates in detail in Tribute to Freud and which convinced her that another war was in the offing. Bryher also joined H.D. on her first return trip to the United States in 1922. She took advantage of the opportunity to contract a celebrated (or notorious) marriage of convenience with one of William Carlos Williams' friends, the "lost generationist" Robert McAlmon. Ironically, Bryher was now free to leave her parents—her father was an immensely wealthy shipowner—and join H.D. in moving permanently to Switzerland. There they spent quiet days, interrupted only by occasional spiritual forays to Paris, London, and especially Berlin (for films and psychoanalysis), but always returning to their refuge in the mountains. As H.D. remarked in her charming children's story, The Hedgehog (1936), the choice of Switzerland was deliberate: Bett [H.D.'s fictional self] loved Switzerland, and wanted Madge [Perdita] to love it. Bett said, "Other people made wicked wars, but here peo-

ple waited in their hills." Bett wanted to forget a wicked war, and that is why she stayed here out of England, out of America, with Madge. Compared with what she went through in the latter half of World War I, those interwar years in Switzerland may seem, and probably were, dull. But this period was for H.D. relatively happy and productive. She wrote a series of "novels"—experimental narratives would describe them better—of which the best known are Palimpsest (1926) and Hedylus (1928); continued to compose and publish poetry; adapted and translated Greek drama; and, under the tutelage of Kenneth MacPherson, did some film acting as well as camera work. She also underwent psychiatric treatment, first in Berlin under Hanns Sachs, then beginning in 1933 and with Sachs's recommendation, under Freud in Vienna. This was a profound experience for H.D., leading to one of her best books, Tribute to Freud (begun in 1939). All of this was interrupted by the outbreak of war in 1939. Feeling that she owed something to the nation that had first appreciated and fostered her poetic talent, H.D. returned to Britain for the duration of the war; Bryher followed, but only after France had fallen. Now there was a mellower and—for all that this war came much closer to home—less frightening replay of her life in the previous war. Again she became involved with a small group of artists and intellectuals, although this time they were a little staid and middle-aged, including the Sitwells and Norman Holmes Pearson. Again she was inspired to write poetry: the trilogy that deals with the war. Again she felt a revulsion, although only temporary, against Aldington, who had caused her so much suffering: they had been reconciled in 1929 but were divorced eight years later. "I had my own experience," she wrote in "Compassionate Friendship" in 1955, "while this author of Lawrence of Arabia was basking

260 / AMERICAN on Sun-set Boulevarde." Once more she underwent a kind of amatory crisis, this time with a high-ranking RAF officer. And again—as in Corfu and Karnak after World War I—she had visions: this time the messages came to her via raps on a table that had once belonged to William Morris; and the "communicators" were not, as previously, the gods of ancient Greece but a series of young RAF pilots who had died in the Battle of Britain. But now there was no Freud to turn to, no authoritative father figure to warn her that that way madness lay. During analysis, Freud had at once isolated the "writing-on-the-wall" experience at Corfu and focused on it as a potential danger sign. H.D. writes in Tribute to Freud: This spring of 1920 held for me many unresolved terrors, perils, heart-aches, dangers, physical as well as spiritual or intellectual. If I had been a little maladjusted or even mildly deranged, it would have been no small wonder. But of a series of strange experiences, the Professor picked out only one as being dangerous, or hinting of danger or a dangerous tendency or symptom. I do not yet quite see why he picked on the writing-on-the-wall as the danger-signal, and omitted what to my mind were tendencies or events that were equally important or equally ''dangerous." This failure to appreciate what Freud meant or to heed his warning now led H.D. into a virtually unrestrained indulgence of her strong occultist tendencies. She delved into her own past to dredge up, via her mother's ancestors, connections with Count Zinzendorf and a mystic "Church of Love"; her messages from Morris' table "seemed in the end, as natural as receiving a letter or telegram," as she noted in "Compassionate Friendship." After her return to Switzerland, she began to suspect that one of the doctors at Hirslanden was part of a vast spy ring, plotting to overthrow the West. She read and

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started to incorporate into her work—especially her poetry—the occultist doctrine of such writers as Robert Ambelain, Jean Chaboseau, and Camille Flammarion. After reading an occultist novel by Elizabeth Butler, the well-known British professor of German, she began a correspondence with her and eventually "put her" into Helen in Egypt (1961). She engaged—as her unpublished notes and Tribute to Freud testify— in weird games of numerology, suggesting hidden "fated" patterns in her life. The danger Freud had foreseen had come to pass: H.D. developed a kind of religious mania, creating and taking refuge in a secret spiritual world that threatened to become more real to her than the actual world. To the strange question she had asked herself in Tribute to Freud: "Do I wish myself, in the deepest unconscious or subconscious layers of my being, to be the founder of a new religion?" Freud almost certainly and rather sadly would have answered yes. In addition to composing her mystical poetry and novels (still unpublished), H.D. spent her last years putting her papers in order, rearranging and revising her unpublished work, commenting on it and seeing to it that Norman Holmes Pearson found a suitable home for her Nachlass at Yale. And if her latest poetry was received with a noticeable lack of enthusiasm, she was pleased by the warm critical reception given her two quasi-autobiographical works, Tribute to Freud and Bid Me to Live. Richard Aldington looked on from the sidelines with a mixture of envy and admiration. "Have the English papers had any news of this beatification of H.D. in America?" he asked Alan Bird in September 1956: She has been feted and flattered at Yale where they have on show a whole series of her books, MSS, photographs and so forth. The papers have carried most fulsome reviews of her "Tribute to Freud." And she writes me that she will probably move to New England!! Yale needs an

HILDA DOOLITTLE I 261 American poet to set against Harvard [a reference presumably to Archibald MacLeish], and no doubt they will build a "shrine." The trouble is that her good work is far too good for this kind of ballyhoo. A few belated honors also came her way: in 1959 the Brandeis University Creative Arts Award for Poetry, and in 1960 the Award of Merit Medal for Poetry of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, which H.D. was the first woman ever to receive. This official recognition had come just in time: a year later, on September 28, 1961, she died in Zurich, Switzerland. In order to define H.D.'s place in the imagist movement and to remove possible misconceptions about her role in it, it needs to be understood that there was not one imagist movement but three: the imagism of T. E. Hulme (1909-1910), chiefly a theoretical movement emphasizing, in a manner reminiscent of the metaphysical poets, the surprise of a juxtaposition of divergent images, but also prescribing precision and spareness of diction; Pound's imagisme (1912-1914)—or imagism proper—of which more later; and Amy Lowell's "Amygism" (1915-1917), which sought to democratize, regularize, and institutionalize what Lowell deemed to be Pound's chaotic program, and which produced three separate anthologies entitled Some Imagist Poets. H.D. 's poems were integral parts of both imagisme and Amygism. Pound's imagisme was born in 1912 and was directly based on H.D.'s poetical practice. But despite the seemingly casual origins of the movement, the name he chose suggests not only a connection with Hulme but also with more or less contemporary French literary developments, especially symbolism. The biographical note (evidently from Pound) that accompanied Aldington's (and imagisme''s) first appearance in Poetry described the group as consisting of ar-

dent Hellenistic vers libristes, seeking to attain subtle cadences similar to those of "Mallarme and his followers." The French influence is made even more explicit in Pound's first relatively detailed account of the new school in Poetry (January 1913), where he pronounces that "the important work of the last twenty-five years has been done in Paris." In this essay he also makes clear that he is no rigid dogmatist: To belong to a school does not in the least mean that one writes poetry to a theory. One writes poetry when, where, because, and as one feels like writing it. A school exists when two or three young men agree, more or less, to call certain things good; when they prefer such of their verses as have certain qualities to such of their verses as do not have them. This pragmatic aspect of Pound's imagisme makes it quite different from its more programmatic Hulmean predecessor, as Pound was quite aware when he wrote to F. S. Flint in 1915: ". . . when on a certain evening in, I think 1912, I coined the word Imagisme, I certainly intended it to mean something which was the poetry of H.D. and most emphatically NOT the poetry of friend [Edward] Storer. . . . " (Storer had been a member of the first imagist "cenacle of 1909," as Pound was to call it in Des Imagistes.} In the essay on imagisme that Flint wrote (obviously under Pound's supervision) for the March 1913 issue of Poetry, the imagistes are explicitly described as "not a revolutionary school" whose "only endeavor was to write in accordance with the best tradition, as they found it in the best writers of all time,—in Sappho, Catullus, Villon." They did have some rules, but as Pound warned in his follow-up essay (' 'A Few Don'ts by an Imagiste"), "consider the rules recorded by Mr. Flint, not as dogma—never consider anything dogma—but as the result of

262 / AMERICAN WRITERS long contemplation, which . . . may be worth consideration.'' These rules were: 1. Direct treatment of the "thing," whether subjective or objective. 2. To use absolutely no word that did not contribute to the presentation. 3. As regarding rhythm: to compose in sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of a metronome. And because the obtuse reader might still take these rules or Pound's "Don'ts" too literally, there was a note from the editor attached to Flint's essay, remarking that "it will be seen from these [Flint's and Pound's essays] that Imagism is not necessarily associated with Hellenic subjects, or with vers libre as a prescribed form." It is clear, then, that Pound and the first imagistes, including H.D., were not writing in conformity with, or in illustration of, a fixed program. They were writing the kind of poetry they liked to write; and they recognized that this poetry had certain affinities that might—more for practical reasons than anything else—be advertised as a kind of school. This is precisely why Pound objected to Amy Lowell's edging him out of the movement, as appears from a letter to her in August 1914: . . . that would deprive me of my machinery for gathering stray good poems and presenting them to the public in more or less permanent form and of discovering new talent . . . or poems which could not be presented to the public in other ways, poems that would be lost in magazines. As for example "H.D.'s" would have been, for some years at least. It was this machinery of Pound's that, for instance, had also gathered Joyce's poem, "I Hear an Army," into the imagiste fold, at a time (December 1913) when Pound knew nothing of Joyce except what little Yeats had told him. And this is how Allen Upward reacted poetically to the "machine":

After many years I sent them [his poems] to Chicago, and they were printed by Harriet Monroe. (They also were printed in The Egoist.) Thereupon Ezra Pound the generous rose up and called me an Imagist. (I had no idea what he meant.) And he included me in an anthology of Imagists. And thou unborn literary historian (if you ever mention my name) Write me down an imitator of Po Li and Shakespeare As well as of Edward Storer and T.E. Hulme. Pound's eccentrically titled anthology, Des Imagistes, was an inspired hodgepodge produced by his machine. It was a breathtakingly highspirited, irreverent book, full of self-contradictions and elaborate in-jokes. The section entitled 4 'Documents'' contains self-conscious spoofs by Pound, Aldington, and Hueffer. By contrast, Lowell's later and better organized anthologies were lifeless and dull. Whatever else it was, Pound's machine was not a humorless steamroller. From all this it should be clear that H.D.'s early poetry—traditionally viewed as the very essence of Pound's imagiste movement—cannot be read fairly as exemplifying anything except itself. Pound undoubtedly "made" the imagists in the sense of having them talked and written about and, in a small way initially, sought after and imitated. But, in his capacity of imagiste generalissimo, Pound did not really "make" H.D., although he did a great deal to promote her. She made herself and made her own poems, which, while they show traces of Pound's theories, reveal other sources of influence even more. The celebrated three rules of imagisme— or the more numerous rules of Amygism—have their uses in suggesting where some of the emphases may lie, but they must not be applied dogmatically. If they are, it will soon be found—

HILDA DOOL1TTLE I 263 as later critics have found—that H.D. regularly violates the first rule of ' 'direct" treatment of objects, sometimes violates the second rule of not using unnecessary words, and only invariably observes the final rule enjoining cadence over meter (vers libre). It is now, some sixty years after the first appearance of H.D.'s poems, easier to see how they relate to the general development of modern poetry rather than serve as illustrations for a particular imagist doctrine. "These poems are revolutionary because they lack the exaggeration of rhetoric, and even at first sight appear to lack the poetic intensity of which rhetoric is an imitation. Their language is free from the poetical words and forms that are the chief material of secondary poets." These are the words of Edward Thomas, reviewing Robert Frost's second volume of poetry, North of Boston (1914), but they could, with only a few changes, apply as well to the very best of H.D. 's early poems, despite the feeling current among some imagists (and virtually all subsequent critics of imagism) that their movement was inexorably opposed to the Georgians or to poets like Thomas and Frost who were closely identified with the Georgians. They tend to forget that the only reason Pound did not become a Georgian was because he and Marsh could not agree on which poems should be included; and they forget too that Lawrence, whom Lowell included in her "purified" anthology, had already appeared in one of the Georgian anthologies. If we are to believe John Gould Fletcher, H.D. was "very keen on this idea of an anthology of all the writers who don't belong to the Georgians," but, if so, she failed to see that both trees, as it were, were part of the same forest. ' 'Orchard,'' for instance, is one of the original three poems that Pound sent Harriet Monroe in late 1912, and that she published in Poetry (January 1913). In his accompanying letter Pound had written that "this is the sort of American stuff that I can show here and in Paris with-

out its being ridiculed. Objective—no slither; direct—no excessive use of adjectives, no metaphors that won't permit examination. It's straight talk, straight as the Greek!" I saw the first pear as it fell— the honey-seeking, golden-banded, the yellow swarm was not more fleet than I, (spare us from loveliness) and I fell prostrate crying: you have flayed us with your blossoms spare us the beauty of fruit-trees. The honey-seeking paused not, the air thundered their song, and I alone was prostrate. 0 rough-hewn god of the orchard, 1 bring you an offering— do you, alone unbeautiful, son of the god, spare us from loveliness: these fallen hazel-nuts, stripped late of their green sheaths, grapes, red purple, their berries dripping with wine, pomegranates already broken, and shrunken figs and quinces untouched I bring you as offering. The opening and last lines of this poem could easily have been written by Frost, and some of the others by Thomas: there is the same deliberate, nonrhetorical "casual" stance, which focuses on simple, direct statement and detailed description. What makes the rest of the poem

264 I AMERICAN differ from one by a poet like Frost is not the hardness or precision of the images—which, in fact, are quite traditional and even conventional ("honey-seeking, golden-banded, the yellow swarm" instead of plain "bees")—but the open expression of emotion at a high pitch, as well as the personification of an aspect of nature (here, its fertility) in the figure of Priapus—again a conventional poetic technique that Frost would have avoided. Like Frost's early poems, however, there is a very lucid surface here, one that brilliantly covers and even canceals a rather cloudy substance. The poem has usually been read as one in which the excessive beauty of nature hurts the hypersensitive beholder, much as in Rainer Maria Rilke's first Duino elegy, where "das Schone ist nur des Schrecklichen Anfang" (beauty is only the beginning of terror). The problem with this sort of interpretation, however, is that it inevitably leads to self-contradiction: if the speaker's prayer is to be spared from a vision of excessive natural beauty, then why bring to the "unbeautiful son of the god" natural objects as an offering which, if anything, exceed the "first" pear in beauty? What makes more sense is a reading that acknowledges the overt priapic aspect of the poem; which recognizes that the tree in the fertile orchard (as a more prudent H.D. retitled the work for Collected Poems— its original title was "Priapus, Keeper-ofOrchards") is giving birth to the pear; which takes up the suggestion of swarming bees as a symbolic rendering of priapic impregnation (the swarming seed of the god seeking the nectar); which sees in the offering of nuts "stripped" of "their green sheaths" and the broken pomegranate, barely veiled sexual symbols; and which perceives frankly that what is happening here is a rape of both the orchard and of the speaker, who falls, like the pear, ripe and "prostrate," waiting for the "rough-hewn" god to take his pleasure, which is both desired and feared (hence the

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seemingly paradoxical "spare us from loveliness"). "Orchard," then, is not really an imagist poem, at least in the sense of conforming to imagiste rules. It is, rather, a symbolic poem, as were many Georgian or quasi-Georgian poems, such as Frost's. In this context it is worth remembering that, along with H.D. and T. S. Eliot, Pound also "discovered" Frost. Two other short poems by H.D. illustrate the point further, as well as characterize the qualities of her early verse. "The Pool" was to come in for hostile criticism in I. A. Richards 'Principles of Literary Criticism: Are you alive? I touch you with my thumb. You quiver like a sea-fish. I cover you with my net. What are you—banded-one? This is the version that H.D. published in Poetry (March 1915). When she reprinted it in her Collected Poems ten years later, she omitted "with my thumb" in the second line and the hyphen connecting "banded" and "one." These revisions suggest what Richards' criticism partly confirms: that the poem is only a qualified success. The omission in the second line makes the image (pool equals fish) reek a little less of the fishwife fingering a potential supper, and in that sense it is an improvement; but it also makes the poem less precise. So too with the hyphenated "banded-one," which evokes a non-English original, since this is a type of construction that we are, generally speaking, accustomed to seeing only in translations. But even with these later improvements, the poem still fails to satisfy completely. Why "sea-fish," for instance? Do sea fish quiver differently from lake fish? Possibly what H.D. means to suggest is that this "pool" is formed by the ebbing of the sea; but the construction is awkward, and the idea could have been stated more simply and elegantly by

HILDA DOOLITTLE I 265 calling the poem "Sea Pool." Richards' objection that the poem is too short and too insubstantial may be subjective and idiosyncratic, but he is right about "the experience evoked in the reader not [being] sufficiently specific." This pool is simply too vague for us to know where to cast our critical net into it. The second poem, "Oread," is the most celebrated imagist poem after Pound's "In a Station of the Metro." It is truly extraordinary, as the fact that it was reprinted thirty-eight times between 1914 and 1969 may indicate. Whirl up, sea— Whirl your pointed pines, Splash your great pines on our rocks, hurl your green over us, cover us with your pools of fir. This, too, appears to be a simple poem based on a superposition or fusion of two images: pine trees and waves. Part of its success is certainly attributable to its sound-sense correlation, to its ability to evoke the actual sound of surf when read aloud. Its lovely music repays all of the noise the imagists made about replacing syllablecounting with cadence, although one must remain skeptical about Amy Lowell's "experiments," in conjunction with Dr. William M. Patterson of Columbia University, to provide a scientific basis for vers libre by reading "Oread" into "a sound-photographing machine." But the music is not merely in the "song"; it is also in the sounds of the words themselves. The words, collectively, do not merely evoke the sea; individually, they evoke other words. If one listens carefully, in the progression of imperatives, whirl-splash-hurl-cover, there is an embedded metaphor that is only fully uncovered in the final command: the metaphor of the sea as a drape or blanket; a metaphor revealed in the final word by substituting "fir" for "pines," thereby allowing the pun on "fur"—a

pun that works backward via "hurl" ("furl") to the very beginning of the poem. Interesting, too, is the curious you/us opposition of the poem (one of H.D.'s favorite structural devices). Here the "we" implicit in "our rocks" and in "hurl your green over us" and "cover us" are clearly the rocks themselves or, more broadly, the seashore, which invites the raging sea to "cover" it. There is the same kind of combination of gentleness and violence as in "Orchard"; and, again, there are suggestions that the violence is intended to be understood as sexual. The passive, submissive (feminine) earth calls for the active, dominating (masculine) sea. The pines, after all, are "pointed" and "great"; and as they are "hurled" upon the land, and "cover" it, they will penetrate as well. "Oread" remains a satisfying poem without the psychological interpretation. However, it is suggestive that H.D.'s early poems should seem to invite an application of Freudian principles; and they yield easily to such an application (especially, as we have seen, as veiled expressions of sexual desire but also as—openly stated—expressions of the death wish). In this connection it is instructive to compare "Oread" with that other cornerstone of imagisme, Pound's "In a Station of the Metro": The apparition of these faces in the crowd : Petals on a wet, black bough (The spacing and punctuation are those of the poem's first printing, in Poetry for April 1913.) What strikes us immediately—and what is emphasized by the "staccato" spacing—is that here H.D.'s music is missing. This is, within very narrow confines, a poetry of statement: two images, each occupying a line, juxtaposed, without any obvious attempt to guide the reader's response. There is none of the narrative structure that dominates even so short a poem as "The Pool"; and none of the commanding emotional editorializing of "Oread." This poem works

266 / AMERICAN WRITERS precisely because there is no emotional urgency about it; it is distant and evokes a beauty that is utterly aesthetic and without hint of sexuality. Here, indeed, is the hard (although not direct) poetry that Pound so often called for but so rarely got—even from himself. The difference in approach between Pound and H.D. is well put in the first two (of three) stanzas of William Carlos Williams' poem, "Aux Imagistes": I think I have never been so exalted As I am now by you, O frost-bitten blossoms, That are unfolding your wings From out the envious black branches. Bloom quickly and make much of the sunshine The twigs conspire against you! Hear them! They hold you from behind. The first of these stanzas contains a clear reference to Pound's "In a Station of the Metro," with its "frost-bitten blossoms" and "black branches"; the second stanza alludes, a little less obviously, to H.D., with her frequent, emotionally urgent imperatives (as in the well-known "The Helmsman," with its refrain: "O be swift—/ we have always known you wanted us"). Williams overdoes both Pound and H.D. 's manner, making the former a little more pompous than he normally is, and using exclamation marks with a more generous hand even than H.D. Nevertheless, Williams clearly sensed that the imagistes—or the movement's two leading exponents, anyway—were very different kinds of poets. The H.D. of Sea Garden and of the subsequent two volumes, Hymen (1921) andHeliodora (1924)—all three combined into Collected Poems (1925)—is a very consistent, not to say uniform, poet, but not because of any rigid adherence to imagist doctrine, whether of Pound's

or Lowell's making. Almost all of her poems are relatively short. Those that are not short are divided into short sections and are composed in free verse, with an occasional rhyme creeping into the later poems of this period. In revising some of these poems for book publication, H.D. wisely removed some but not all of the self-conscious archaisms. So, for example, in the third stanza of "Hermes of the Ways" (her first published poem) the "Hermes / who awaiteth" becomes a "Hermes / who awaits.'' Also, the original version of "Orchard," besides having a different title, had a somewhat different third stanza as well: "I bring thee an offering; / Do thou, alone unbeautiful," etc. Only a very few of these archaisms remain in Collected Poems; a "Thou" opening "Sitalkas" or an "aye" in "Sea Lily"; these admittedly irritate, but not fatally. However, even though H.D. evidently came to realize that there was something contradictory about a supposedly modern poet using this kind of outdated diction, she was unable to remove the impulse that had caused her to use archaisms in the first place. The "thou's," "thee's," "aye's," and "awaiteth's" do not derive from her early Quaker education; they spring directly from the conventional "antiquing" of the English romantics, with their "Thou wild West Wind" and "Thou wast not born for death" and "Hail to thee, blithe spirit." Collected Poems, after revision as much as before, remains full of the typical romantic stance of "after I'm gone, you'll still be there," with the "you" usually being some conventional natural object or animal (like Keats's nightingale). The concluding stanza of "Mid-Day" reads: O poplar, you are great Among the hill-stones, while I perish on the path among the crevices of the rocks.

HILDA DOOLITTLE I 267 There is here the same typically romantic view of the self as victim, a kind of analogue to Christ, forced into suffering by a harsh, cruel life. So, in "The Gift" we are told: Life is a scavenger's pit—I escape— I only, rejecting it, lying here on this couch. This may not exactly be falling upon the thorns of life and bleeding, but it is not far removed from it. There is also in H.D., perhaps strongest of all, the cult of the worship of beauty, especially of the beauty of nature and of the struggle for survival of that beauty in adversity. For H.D., as much as for Keats, a thing of beauty is a joy forever, even though—or because—it is hateful to the multitude: Could beauty be done to death they had struck her dead in ages and ages past, could beauty be withered from earth, they had cast her forth, root and stalk scattered and flailed— Thus, the tenth part of "The Tribute." But one could choose almost at will in Collected Poems and find similar passages. The flowers of the garden by the sea—the sea rose, the sea lily, the poppies, the violet, the iris—are all cherished because they assert, against the brute strength of wind and sea, the fragile force of the utterly beautiful: The greater blue violets flutter on the hill but who would change for these who would change for these one root of the white sort? Yes, who would, as H.D. so urgently inquires? Certainly not the romantic poet—the poet H.D.

so essentially is, despite all the imagiste trappings and brouhaha. The range of Collected Poems is severely circumscribed: the subject is always either classical (preferably Greek) or some timeless, placeless aspect of nature, as in the flower poems. While this focus undoubtedly gives H.D.'s poems a valuable unity, it also represents something peculiar in a poet who was, in the early stages of her career, advertised as being in the forefront of the "new" poetry. At a time when Western European civilization seemed to be in the throes of a death struggle; when traditional values looked as if they were about to collapse; when her own apartment in London was a potential daily target for German bombs, H.D. was writing about Greek temples and gods, and rocks and flowers, with not a single reference of an unambiguous sort (and with virtually no ambiguous ones) to the tremendous events taking place all around her. This colossal disregard of (and indifference to?) contemporary life makes Jane Austen's refusal to recognize the Napoleonic wars seem almost understandable by comparison. After all, Austen did not have the war enter her own sitting room, as H.D. literally did when her apartment was bombed. Even Harriet Monroe, by no means an antitraditionalist despite her loyal support for Pound, found H.D.'s reticence about her own times surprising. H.D. so resented the letter Monroe sent her on this subject that, more than twenty years later, she was still furious. "The letter suggested with really staggeringly inept solicitude," she writes in "A Note on Poetry," "that H.D. would do so well,—maybe, finally [sic],—if she could get into 'life,' into the rhythm of our time, in touch with events, and so on and so on and so on. . . ." H.D.'s anger was, of course, not intended for Monroe alone; she was lashing out at all those who had seen the same limitations but commented on them more publicly. And H.D. was all the more resentful

265 / AMERICAN and defensive about such criticism, one suspects, because she knew it was true. "Ivory tower?" she asks in the same essay. "That was and is still, I believe with many, the final indictment of this sort of poetry." H.D. was later to attempt to refute this line of criticism more successfully in her prose, especially in works like Palimpsest, Tribute to Freud, and Bid Me to Live, but also to a lesser extent (as well as less convincingly) in her poetry, especially Red Roses for Bronze (1929). However, the basic difficulty, as far as her early poetry was concerned, still remained, as she knew full well and admitted frankly in "Note on Poetry": her poetry is an escapist poetry; its strength resides precisely in the fact that it seeks to replace the ugly, real world with a far more beautiful and, in a Platonic sense, more "real" world of ancient Greece. What she did not fully admit, however, was that hers was a romanticized, even sentimentalized Greece. It is therefore difficult to disagree with Yvor Winters' forceful criticism in his In Defense of Reason (1947): Frequently the ecstasy (the quality of feeling assumed is nearly identical in most of her poems) is evoked merely by rocks, sea, and islands. But it would not be evoked by any rock, sea, or islands: they must be Greek. But why must they be Greek? Because of Athenian civilization? There is some wholly obscure attachment on the poet's part to anything Greek, regardless of its value: the mention of anything Greek is sufficient to release her very intense feeling. But since the relationship between the feeling and the Greek landscape has no comprehensible source and is very strong, one must call it sentimental. There is only one version of H.D.'s Greece that is wholly exempt from Winters' criticism: the Greece that appears in her translations. These translations have often been praised—but by no means universally—as some of the best transla-

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tions of ancient Greek poetry and drama into modern English. Some of them were, in fact, adaptations; and, indeed, H.D.'s first appearance in print as a poet (in Poetry) was under the rubric of "Verses, Translations and Reflections from 'The Anthology' " (that is, The Greek Anthology). Some of her translations first appeared separately, such as the Choruses from Iphigenia in Aulis and the Hippolytus of Euripides (1919) in the Egoist Press "Poets' Translations Series"; others were included only in her collections. For H.D., the activity of the translator seems not to have differed greatly, in a conceptual sense, from that of the poet. Her impact as a translator, in the early stages of her career, was at least equal to if not greater than her fame as a poet. She had already been favorably noticed by the well-known classicist, John William Mackail, in The Times, but it was a brief aside of T. S. Eliot's in his essay on "Euripides and Professor Murray" in The Sacred Wood (1920) that first attracted the attention of the world to the existence of a major new force in translation. "The choruses from Euripides by H.D.," Eliot wrote, "are, allowing for errors and even occasional omissions of difficult passages, much nearer to both Greek and English than Mr. Murray's." Despite occasional later protests from the scholarly world—notably Douglas Bush, who, in Mythology and the Romantic Tradition in English Poetry (1937), judged that "if there is one thing certain in the realm of poetry it is that Euripides was not like H.D.," and Gilbert Highet, who omitted her from consideration in his massive The Classical Tradition because of her "eccentricity"—even so, Eliot's verdict has been confirmed by most subsequent critics. The well-known English classicist, D. S. Carne-Ross, for example, writes in a general theoretical essay, "Translation and Transposition" (1961), that in the field of Greek translation . . . the most interesting work was done not by Pound but by

HILDA DOOLITTLE I 269 H.D., most successfully in her fragmentary sketches from the Iphigenia inAulis. . . .Here, to my mind, she suggested certain elements in the Greek lyric better than they have ever been suggested before or since. She leaves out an enormous amount. She is not interested in the syntax, in the elaborate weave of the Greek lyric; and she shows little dramatic feeling. She is hardly concerned with the "sense", it is the picture—the "image"—that she is after, and that is what she presents, a sequence of images as fresh and unexposed as though they had just been disinterred from the sands of Egypt. If H.D. had never written a line of original verse, her translations would have been enough to make her an important figure in modern poetry. Her Greek was not little, nor was it less than her Latin; but it was still imperfect. Even so she managed, through pure poetic intuition and re-creation, to capture the feel of Greek in English. "You cannot learn Greek, only, with a dictionary," she wrote in one of the connecting prose passages in her translation of Euripides' Ion. "You can learn it with your hands and your feet and especially with your lungs." One has to be in Greece, in other words, even when one is not there; one has to live Greece. And in Bid Me to Live, she shows her heroine, Julia, doing what she must often have done herself: She brooded over each word, as if to hatch it. Then she tried to forget each word, for "translations" enough existed and she was no scholar. She did not want to * 'know" Greek in that sense. She was like one blind, reading the texture of incised letters, rejoicing like one blind who knows an inner light, a reality that the outer eye cannot grasp. She was arrogant and she was intrinsically humble before this discovery. Her own. Translation was an act of tremendous significance. It was a way of showing the decadent modern world what it had lost, and how immea-

surably the poorer it was for that loss. For H.D., it was a way of justifying her own escape in (and into) her poetry, away from that modern world toward a glorious Hellas. Just how overwhelmingly important she considered the act of translation to be is apparent in a scene from Palimpsest, where one of the three heroines—a Greek hetaera named Hipparchia—refuses to translate Sappho into that barbaric tongue, Latin: It was desecration to translate it. She decided not to re-render the hyacinth on the mountain side. She would let that rest flawless. She would quote it entire in Greek. The Greek words, inset in her manuscript, would work terrific damage. She almost saw the Dictator's palace overpowered by it. She saw her Greek poets as images not as intellects [as Carne-Ross realized]; at least she saw the mind so diabolic in its cunning that long dead poems could yet remake a universe. Remaking the universe—nothing less—was H.D.'s aim in her translations; and while it cannot be doubted that she fell a little short of that ambition, she certainly succeeded in reshaping at least a part of the modern consciousness of the glory that was Greece. H.D. never stopped being productive. With the possible exception of those "missing" five years from 1906 to 1911—about which so little is known—there was no period in her adult life when she was not writing or engaged in some artistic project. However, after the early imagiste poems, after Sea Garden, and certainly after Collected Poems, she seemed to drift out of the ken and perhaps even the memory of mainstream literary reviewers and critics. In the literary histories and especially in studies concerned with the origins and nature of imagism (in all its varieties), there was a place for H.D., but as imagism receded, the more surely H.D.'s place was fixed in the past. H.D. was partly responsible herself for this

270 / AMERICAN neglect. By going to Switzerland, by deliberately eschewing social contacts, she cut herself off from the new postwar literary generation. Partly it was that until the 1940's, H.D. did not write anything that was as exciting and new as her first poems had been. She did continue to write; but her audience was dwindling at the time in her career when it should have been increasing. Did H.D.'s talent simply give out—at least temporarily? One might be tempted too quickly to that conclusion. Her reworking of Euripides' Hippolytus into Hippolytus Temporizes (1927) is, despite some eccentricities, successful at least as closet drama. While the chaste sensuality of Hippolytus, the strange absence of Theseus, the passionate simplicity of Phaedra, and the culminating scene of debate between Helios, Artemis, and Eros are all somewhat absurd, the play contains some grand poetry, enough certainly to justify her efforts and to make the play worth reading today. H.D. always had problems putting her essentially lyric genius into a suitable narrative vehicle; and, although intimately and personally concerned with Freudian psychoanalytic theory, she only rarely succeeded in creating psychologically credible characters. Her literary psychology is usually of the medieval, allegorical type, as in Hippolytus Temporizes, where Artemis stands for idealism/sexual sublimation/superego; Helios for reason/consciousness/ego; and Eros for passion/lust/id. The final act is evidently intended to be read as an externalization of Hippolytus' warring psyche; but, even if construed in this more modern way, the psychological motivation is mechanical and inadequate. Nonetheless, Hippolytus Temporizes is significant in itself: it stands at the forefront of the great revival of interest in the verse drama in the late 1920's and early 1930's. In this respect, H.D. 's sense for what was really modern in the classics did not betray her, although the faults of her technique and the limitations of her subject

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matter prevented her from reaching the wide audience of other verse dramatists such as T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, and Christopher Fry. The novels of the interwar period are another matter. Of the five that were published (Palimpsest in 1926; Hedylus in 1928; Kora and Ka in 1934; The Usual Star in 1934; and Nights in 1935), only the first can still be read with any pleasure. It is also the only one based on a genuinely interesting literary idea, namely that of presenting the parallel lives of three intellectual women: Hipparchia in "War Rome" (ca. 75 B.C.); Raymonde Ransome in "War and postWar London" (ca. 1916-1926); and Helen Fairwood in "Excavator's Egypt" (ca. 1925). The obvious parallelism in the lives of these three women—and the parallels to H.D.'s own life—is intentional and implicit in the title: a palimpsest being, as the subtitle explains somewhat condescendingly, "a parchment from which one writing has been erased to make room for another." Part of the reason for this technique appears to be "experimental," as in the literary "experiments" of James Joyce, whose name is mentioned several times in the middle section. But another part surely stems from a similar psychological source as the dialogue of the gods in Hippolytus Temporizes: that is, each woman is a facet of a total personality that is ultimately H.D.'s. The first two sections of the novel are strongly autobiographical; but even in the more fictive third part, the "common" British officer is a restrained portrait of Richard Aldington (as his name, Rafton, suggests). Occasionally, one has the sense of reading a rough but pretentious first draft of Bid Me to Live, but—as Vincent Quinn has perceptively remarked—in Palimpsest the woman always triumphs over the man, whether or not the logic of the narrative justifies such a triumph. This may have been gratifying to H.D. 's wounded ego, but it did not help to create a genuine work of art. Occasionally, however,

HILDA DOOLITTLE I 271 there are flashes of acute insight to reward the patient reader, as in this remark about Raymonde Ransome: "Reactionary Puritan, she had found in the undeviating laws of Delphi a more straight-laced puritanism than even Cotton Mather's. " But, alas, the flashes are too occasional to relieve a fearfully dark night haunted by that most horrifying of Baudelaire's monsters, ennui. H.D. was not unaware of her problem. In Nights, the editor of the "novel" that Natalia Saunderson had completed but left unpublished before plunging to her death in an icy Swiss lake remarks rather defensively and preciously: If I, who could follow the intricacy and daring of the sheer technique of her writing, found it impossible, how could she ever hope to reach, not the ordinary common-or-garden reader (that obviously was out of the question), but even the more or less affable intellectual? Her battery was surcharged. She was presenting truth, or what she saw as truth, in other words, not as a photographer, a journalist, or even a portrait-painter or a dramatist, but in some other medium. She seemed to work actually in radium or electricity. Is that, I ask you, the medium for a novel? The answer that the passage of years has forced us to give to this oddly phrased question is no, radium is not a medium for a novel. Radium kills too slowly and too painfully. Toward the end of her life, H.D. came to see these fictions, including the contemporaneous short stories, more realistically. In "Compassionate Friendship" (May 1955), she observed, after rereading some of these pieces, that "the stories do not confuse me as they did. I find beauty and occasional revealing comment . . . but it is brain-spun, as someone [Edith Sitwell] called my first Palimpsest" The poetry of the interwar years also shows a similar kind of wispiness and an inability to fuse successfully idea and emotion into a work of art. It too is either brain-spun, or, what is worse,

heart-gushed. Red Roses for Bronze (1929) still has some of the old, hard surface polish, but the insides have gone soft. Now and again the old H.D. still shines through in such poems as "Triplex" and "All Mountains," but too often these bronzed roses are poems of such utter triviality that we are certain the old H.D. could never have written them, or, if by some fluke she had, would have burned them at once. "Chance," for instance. Chance says, come here, chance says, can you bear to part? chance says, sweetheart, we haven't loved for almost a year can you bear this loneliness? I can't; Here chance says far too much and shows far too little. Vanished, among this waste of vague, discursive, too slickly rhymed verse, are the startling, brilliant images of an earlier period. Red Roses for Bronze is, fortunately, an aberration in the corpus of H.D. 's published work, as she may have wished to suggest herself when she quoted briefly from one of these poems in Hermetic Definition (1972), applying the lines to Rafer Johnson, the 1960 Olympic decathlon champion: The Red-Roses-for-Bronze roses were for an abstraction; now with like fervour, with fever, I offer them to reality; With the publication of the first part of Trilogy in 1944, entitled The Walls Do Not Fall, fol-

272 / AMERICAN lowed by Tribute to the Angels in 1945 and The Flowering of the Rod in 1946, H.D. was poetically reborn. Although very different from the classical, "hard" poetry of Sea Garden, these three volumes (forming, mystically, one volume) approach it in quality. Here H.D. becomes fully the modern poet—in terms of her subject and scope—that she failed to be before, but without losing touch with the old sources of her inspiration in the ancient world. In this cycle of poems—based immediately on her experience of wartime London, its near destruction and heroism—H.D. fuses reflection with exhortation; ancient Egypt with modern London; hermetic , * 'mystic'' lore with the equivalent of news bulletins; the love of man with the love of God; private experiences (her dream-vision of the Mother of God, for instance) with public experiences such as the sight of ruined walls that, despite repeated bombings, refuse to fall. While the progress of the poem is sometimes hard to follow in its details, the general outline of a quest for God, followed by a final discovery and confession of faith, is clear. The progression in Trilogy echoes (consciously, it seems) that of The Waste Land, which also contrasts a modern London that is only a heap of broken images with an ancient world that was whole. As far as Trilogy is concerned, at least, one feels L. S. Dembo is absolutely right when, in Conceptions of Reality in Modern American Poetry (1966), he calls it one of "H.D.'s two major works" and goes on to argue that this "poetic vision [is] in all ways comparable to those found in the major neoepics,'' such as The Waste Land or Pound's Cantos. Perhaps the thirty-eighth poem in The Walls Do Not Fall will offer some sense of how H.D. herself perceived what she was doing in Trilogy: This search for historical parallels research into psychic affinities, has been done to death before, will be done again;

WRITERS no comment can alter spiritual realities (you say) or again, what new light can you possibly throw upon them? my mind (yours), your way of thought (mine), each has its peculiar intricate map, threads weave over and under the jungle-growth of biographical aptitudes, inherited tendencies, the intellectual effort of the whole race, its tide and ebb; but my mind (yours) has its peculiar ego-centric personal approach to the eternal realities, and differs from every other in minute particulars, as the vein-paths on any leaf differ from those of every other leaf in the forest, as every snow-flake has its peculiar star, coral or prism shape.

With Helen in Egypt (1961) and especially with the posthumously published Hermetic Definition (1972), however, H.D. abandoned the relatively clear and hence accessible style and matter of Trilogy and of By Avon River (1949), that jeu d'esprit that combines literary history and poetical bardolatry into an odd but palatable mixture. Now she was heading for some very obscure and visionary territory indeed. To be sure, even in Trilogy she had yielded to the temptation to play games with names and numbers, games that were saved from being grave irritations only because they were not taken too seriously:

HILDA DOOLITTLE I 273 For example: Osiris equates O-sir-is or O-Sire-is; Osiris, The star Sirius About this sort of thing one can still agree with Norman Holmes Pearson, when in his foreword to Trilogy he relates H.D.'s number symbolism to that of the Book of Revelations: "Both her book and Saint John's are filled with cited sevens. Even the 43 sections of each third of H.D. 's Trilogy add up to seven. Half-concealed links are everywhere. This is wit, this is a sense of oneness." But when we reach passages such as the following in Hermetic Definition, we are less likely to be amused than annoyed by H.D. 's playing a cabalistic, etymological game gone wild and utterly disregardful of the most welldisposed reader of her poetry: Isis, Iris fleur-de-lis,

Bar-Isis is son of Isis, (bar ou her ou ben, signifiant fils). so Bar-Isis is Par-Isis? Paris, anyway; In this quest for "one-ness," everything turns out to be everything else, as the final poetical epiphany in Helen in Egypt teaches us: Paris before Egypt, Paris after, is Eros, even as Thetis, the sea-mother, is Paphos; so the dart of Love is the dart of Death, and the secret is no secret; there is no before and no after, there is one finite moment that no infinite joy can disperse or thought of past happiness tempt from or dissipate;

The ultimate aim of this game is to demonstrate the survival and unity of all religions in an Ur-Vater and an Ur-Mutter; it is something for which H.D. certainly found confirmation in her wide reading of hermetic literature. For example, in Robert Ambelain's La kabbale pratique (1951)—one of the works of Ambelain to which her unpublished notes refer—we are told of the existence of a "syncretic religion spread out through the whole of Western Asia in the centuries preceding the Christian era" that brought forth numerous religious groupings with particular tendencies. This ismandaism oradonaism. This syncretic religion represents an esoteric revelation, a "gnosis" (manda is synonymous with gnosis), brought by a god named Ado ("Lord"). We rediscover in this name the root which presided over the formation of numerous divine names in these regions: Ado, Ada, Adonai, Adonis, Adam, Atem, Atoum. [author's translation] And in Ambelain's Dans Vombre des cathedrales (1939), we read: As far as the hermetic cabala is concerned, it might be an immediate cause for objection that these puns and etymological effects are applicable to French alone. But we would like to draw the attention of these critics to the fact that it is not without reason that the hermeticists call our cabala' 'the Universal Language,'' because it consists indeed of all languages and climates. Any language—no matter which—is able to provide puns, etymologies, double entendres. It is possible to "cabal" in German as well as English, in Italian as well as French, in Hebrew as well as in Greek or Latin. . . . And it is a cabalistic tradition to maintain that in the "world of sounds," two words or two sentences which are related in tonality (and not merely in assonance . . .), are unquestionably related in "the world of images." [author's translation]

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The same is true of number symbolism. Why, we may wish to know for instance, are there precisely ten Sephiroth in the cabala? The answer, according to Ambelain (who cites Spinoza), is that the three dimensions, multiplied by themselves, plus the dimension of space by itself, equal ten. For specialists in the history of religion—or for convinced cabalists—the considerable time and effort necessary to understand the complex symbolism of Helen in Egypt and Hermetic Definition may be worthwhile. For lovers of poetry, the question is debatable. In the former work, to be sure, H.D. does at least attempt to assist the puzzled reader with a prose commentary to each poem (and, in doing so, borrows a technique she had employed earlier in her translation of the Ion)', but these explanations are often so obscure that they require commentaries themselves. By this time, an always esoteric H.D. had grown hermetic indeed; and her initials came to stand less for the Hilda Doolittle who one day decided she did not much like her last name than for the opening letters of the Hermetic Definition that would unlock an alleged world of mysteries. H.D. 's place in the history of modern American poetry is secure. It is not, as it were, at the literary plutocrats' breakfast table, alongside T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound; but it is a genuine and an honored place nevertheless. H.D. is a translator of the first rank, flawed as her translations may sometimes be. And she will always be remembered in conjunction with the imagist movement, which with all its staginess and eccentricity, still remains one of the major, innovative movements of this century.

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Selected Bibliography WORKS OF

H.D.

POETRY

Sea Garden. London: Constable, 1916. Hymen. London: Egoist Press, 1921. Heliodora and Other Poems. London: Cape, 1924. Collected Poems of H.D. New York: Boni & Liveright, 1925. H.D., edited by Hughes Mearns. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1926. Hippolytus Temporizes. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1927. Red Roses for Bronze. New York: Random, 1929. The Walls Do Not Fall. London: Oxford, 1944. Tribute to the Angels. London: Oxford, 1945. The Flowering of the Rod. London: Oxford, 1946. By Avon River. New York: Macmillan, 1949. Helen in Egypt. New York: Grove Press, 1961. Hermetic Definition. New York: New Directions, 1972. Trilogy. New York: New Directions, 1973. NOVELS Palimpsest. Paris: Contact Editions, 1926. Hedylus. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1928. Kora and Ka. Dijon: Imprimerie Darantiere, 1934. The Usual Star. Dijon: Imprimerie Darantiere, 1934. Nights. Dijon: Imprimerie Darantiere, 1935. The Hedgehog. London: Brendin, 1936. Bid Me to Live (A Madrigal). New York: Grove Press, 1960. TRANSLATIONS AND OTHER WORKS

Choruses from Iphigenia in Aulis. London: Egoist Press, 1916. Choruses from Iphigenia in Aulis and the Hippolytus of Euripides. London: Egoist Ltd., 1919. Borderline—A Pool Film with Paul Robeson. London: Mercury Press, 1930. Euripides' Ion. London: Chatto & Windus, 1937. Tribute to Freud. New York: Pantheon Books, 1956.

HILDA DOOLITTLE I 275 BIBLIOGRAPHY Bryer, Jackson R., and Pamela Roblyer. "H.D.: A Preliminary Checklist," Contemporary Literature, 10:622-77 (Autumn 1969). CRITICAL AND BIOGRAPHICAL

STUDIES

Aldington, Richard. Life for Life's Sake: A Book of Reminiscences. New York: Viking, 1941. . A Passionate Prodigality: Letters to Alan Bird, 1949-1962, edited by Miriam J. Benkovitz. New York: New York Public Library, 1975. Ambelain, Robert. Dans Vombre des cathedrales. Paris: Editions Adyar, 1939. . La kabbale pratique. Paris: Editions Niclaus, 1951. Berti, Luigi. Imagismo. Padua: Cedam, 1944. Bryer, Jackson R. "H.D.: A Note on Her Critical Reputation,'' Contemporary Literature, 10:627-31 (Autumn 1969). . The Days of Mars, A Memoir, 1940-46. London: Calder & Boyars, 1972. . The Heart to Artemis. New York: Harcourt, 1962. . Amy Lowell, A Critical Appreciation. London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1917. Bush, Douglas. Mythology and the Romantic Tradition in English Poetry. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1937. Butler, E. M. Paper Boats. London: Collins, 1959. Carne-Ross, D. S. 'Translation and Transposition," in William Arrowsmith and R. Shattuck, eds., The Craft and Context of Translation. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1961. Coffman, Stanley K. Imagism. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1951. Cournos, John. Autobiography. New York: Putnam, 1935. Damon, S. Foster. Amy Lowell: A Chronicle, with Extracts from Her Correspondence. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1935; Hamden, Conn.: Archon, 1966. Delavaney, Emile. D. H. Lawrence, The Man and His Work: The Formative Years: 1885-1919.

Translated by K. M. Delavaney. Carbondale: Southern Illinois Press, 1972. Dembo, L. S. Conceptions of Reality in Modern American Poetry. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966. Eliot, T. S. The Sacred Wood. London: Methuen, 1920; 1972. Fletcher, John Gould. Life Is My Song. New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1937. Gould, Jean. Amy. New York: Dodd, Mead, & Co., 1975. Harmer, J. B. Victory in Limbo: Imagism 1908-1917. London: Seeker & Warburg, 1975. Hughes, Glenn. Imagism and the Imagists: A Study in Modern Poetry. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1931. Kenner, Hugh. The Pound Era. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971; 1974. Lawrence, D. H. Collected Letters, edited by H. T. Moore. New York: Viking, 1962. Lowell, Amy. Tendencies in Modern American Poetry. New York: Macmillan, 1917. Pound, Ezra. Letters, edited by T. D. D. Paige. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1950. Quinn, Vincent. Hilda Doolittle (H.D.). New York: Twayne, 1967. . "H.D.'s 'Hermetic Definition': The Poet as Archetypal Mother," Contemporary Literature, 18:51-61 (Winter 1977). Read, Forrest, ed., Pound/Joyce: The Letters of Ezra Pound to James Joyce. London: Faber & Faber, 1968. Richards, I. A., Principles of Literary Criticism. New York: Harcourt, 1928. Smoller, Stanford. Adrift Among Geniuses: Robert McAlmon. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1975. Swann, Thomas B. The Classical World of H.D. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1962. Taupin, Rene. L'influence du symbolisme frangais sur la poesie americaine (de 1910 a 1920). Paris: Champion, 1929. Williams, William Carlos. Autobiography. London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1968. Winters, Yvor. In Defense of Reason. Denver: Swallow, n.d. [1947]. —PETER FIRCHOW

Lillian Hellman 1906-

L

ries of those days," or "I have very little memory of that winter.'' Apparently there are times when a diary does not suffice. However, a playwright need not worry about physical details as much as details of character, which can be conveyed through dialogue. If the ability to strip a character down to his words is the mark of a true playwright, Hellman was indeed meant for the theater. Her first play, The Children's Hour (1934), is a paradigm of the well-crafted, as opposed to the merely well-made, play. It is unusually gripping because Hellman takes the act of lying and links it with one of our deepest fears—total loss. By joining them as cause and effect, Hellman makes the lie more pernicious than it actually is. Yet it is not simply a lie that destroys two careers and claims one life. It is a lie told by a child; not an ordinary lie but an accusation of lesbianism made by a student, Mary Tilford, against her two teachers, Karen Wright and Martha Dobie. In many Hellman plays, the plot hinges on a trivial object: a pen knife (Days to Come), a medicine bottle (The Little Foxes), a briefcase (Watch on the Rhine). In The Children's Hour, it is a bracelet. At first, Karen's reference to a missing bracelet seems almost gratuitous. Then when Karen and Martha have almost succeeded in refuting the charge, Mary claims it was not she who saw them together but Rosalie Wells,

< ILLIAN Hellman was the only child of a shoe merchant from New Orleans, where she was born in 1906, and a woman from a rich middleclass Alabama family. She was only six when, because of her father's job, she began spending half of each year in New York and the other half in New Orleans. She was thus exposed to two worlds, which often merged in her plays: the money-conscious world of her maternal grandmother whose Sunday dinners in her New York apartment resembled corporation meetings; and her native New Orleans with its quaint veneer of fluttery spinsters and kindly black servants and its violent underside of Mafia victims interred in gardens. That melodrama should become her forte and money a favorite theme is not surprising; she already had her cast for The Little Foxes. Hellman always knew she would be a writer and kept a diary, realizing that an adolescent's firsthand judgment was preferable to the tortured queries of old age. It might seem odd that she would write for the stage, for there is nothing theatrical about the tough-minded liberal image she projects. In a sense, the theater was her sole option. She lacked the eye for detail that fiction required, as she must have realized after she failed at the short story. In her autobiographical works, poor memory often jams the lock of the past, and the writing becomes vague and elliptical with admissions such as "I have no memo276

LILLIAN HELLMAN I 277 stressing the fact that it was on the same day that a student's bracelet disappeared. Rosalie, who stole the bracelet, corroborates the lie. A bracelet leads a frightened child to testify against her teachers; it is the same bracelet that provides the ironic denouement when Rosalie's mother discovers it among her daughter's possessions. But it is too late for redress: Martha has committed suicide, and Karen has lost her fiance. Because of its plot, the play was banned in Boston and Chicago, but it is not a drama about lesbians like Trio or The Killing of Sister George. The accusation is double-edged: it is a plot device and the means of making Martha realize her own nature. Thus Martha experiences the self-knowledge that traditionally comes before the catastrophe. In fact, there is a strange union of self-knowledge, catastrophe, and denouement. Martha admits the truth about herself: "I have loved you the way they said." No sooner does the young teacher commit suicide than Mary's grandmother arrives as destiny's unraveller. But the accusation also forces the audience to reflect on the accuser: a spoiled girl who bullies her peers into being her vassals. Mary also has some interesting reading habits that include Gautier's Mademoiselle de Maupin, in which the hero turns out to be a woman and not a man. One wonders if Mary is not an overt lesbian, Martha being only a latent one. It is interesting that in two American plays where characters are charged with homosexuality, The Children's Hour and Robert Anderson's Tea and Sympathy, the accusers are a girl who reads homosexual novels and a headmaster who prefers the company of boys to being with his wife. Hellman's next play, Days to Come (1936), was a failure. Her mistake was to make her subject a strike in an Ohio city; it was not material she could handle well. Days to Come lacks the passion of Clifford Odets' Waiting for Lefty and the militancy of Marc Blitzstein's The Cradle

Will Rock. Unlike Sidney Kingsley's Dead End, Days to Come shows no feeling for the strikers. It is an unsatisfying play because Hellman intellectualizes her material. Unable to construct the drama in terms of labor versus management, she instead analyzes the origins of the strike—locating them in the idealism of Andrew Rodman, a factory owner whose lack of business sense precipitates a strike when he cuts wages to prevent his own ruin. Manipulated by his lawyer, he agrees to import strikebreakers, thinking naively that there will be no violence even though two of the strikebreakers move into his house as bodyguards. Hellman has placed her characters in a nightmarish situation, a refining fire to test their integrity. Thus, Days to Come is no more about strikes than The Children's Hour is about private education. The theme of the play is one that is explored at length in The Searching Wing (1944): idealism weakened by lack of principles leads to appeasement. There are two main problems with Days to Come. The first is that it has the armature of tragedy without the inner complexity. In Rodman, Hellman had her greatest problem: how to make an interesting character out of an idealist who is on the verge of bankruptcy because he played the Good Samaritan to his wife's family. Since she cannot make Rodman interesting, she overburdens him with virtues: his love for his town, for his wife Julie, for his business, and for his men. He therefore pays for loving all of them neither wisely nor well. The second problem is that Hellman's liberal conscience dictates a fair hearing for everybody. Thus Rodman's bodyguards are atypical thugs; they are restless because they are not doing what they have been trained to do. Their restlessness creates an unhealthy tension that leads one of them to kill the other. Julie is not the bored aristocrat slumming with a labor organizer because she is a closet socialist. She believes there are people who learn from others, and she is a learner.

278 I AMERICAN WRITERS Hellman does not seem to understand the basic premise behind the strike play: the author's sympathies, and therefore the audience's, must be with the strikers. This should mean a spare, lean play with clear-cut issues as in The Cradle Will Rock, where a galvanic performance will compensate for the playwright's bias. Hellman cannot be simplistic. Unable to write tragedy and unwilling to settle for melodrama, she writes both: a tragedy in a melodramatic setting where an individual brings ruin on himself and others because he does not understand the nature of man. Rodman sounds like a gentleman farmer when he speaks of his love for his town and for his men; but the gentleman farmer never understood the peasant any more than the industrialist on the hill understood the workers in the valley. In 1937 Hellman was invited to the Moscow theater festival; in the autumn of that year she travelled to Spain where civil war was raging. Her hatred of fascism, which she witnessed in Bonn during the summer of 1929, brought her to Spain during one of the bloodiest moments in its history. It was then that her political convictions, which she later admitted were not radical (although they were undeniably human), were formed. It would have seemed natural for her next play to be about fascism; and eventually she would write two such plays, Watch on the Rhine and The Searching Wind. But to Hellman, the family and the group are microcosms of the state; thus fascism begins on the domestic level before reaching national proportions. On the eve of World War II, her third and most popular play, The Little Foxes (1939), opened. Set in 1900, it suggests that the ills of society could be traced to the beginning of the century—to families like the Hubbards who survived by defrauding each other. Fascism begins as the family circle that encloses its own is transformed through rivalry and ambition into a rectangle with members positioned like opposing armies at each point. The enemy then becomes the Other.

The Hubbards are a nouveau riche Southern family whose fortune was made by cheating blacks and exploiting cheap labor. Contemptuous of the antebellum aristocracy that cannot adjust to the industrial age, the Hubbards assimilate any vestiges of the old order into their dynasty. They acquire the plantation Lionnet through the marriage of Oscar Hubbard to Birdie Bagtry, whose gentility, wearisome as it is, is at odds with their boorishness. On the surface it may seem that Hellman is extolling the old order at the expense of the new, but issues are rarely that sharply defined in her plays. Actually, no one in The Little Foxes is especially admirable, including the three characters who may appear so. One sympathizes with Horace Giddens, whose wife Regina has him brought home from Baltimore, despite his ill health, because the Hubbards need his money for a business deal. Yet Horace is willing to allow the theft of his bonds to go unreported in the hope that Regina will be punished. Throughout the play, their daughter Alexandra is the ingenue; but at the end she adopts the Hubbard code: to make the other pay for his misdeeds. Not without spite, Alexandra rejects her mother's bid for reconciliation, knowing it will be difficult for her to sleep alone after causing her husband's death. When Regina's brother Ben remarks that Alexandra is turning out to be a "right interesting girl," the compliment is undercut by innuendo. Birdie is incapable of evil because she is incapable of action; constantly pining for Lionnet, she embodies the worst defect of her social class: a sickly innocence that lapses into nostalgia. Although Hellman may have decried the Hubbards, she makes the family Everyman. As Ben observes, "There are hundreds of Hubbards sitting in rooms like this throughout the country." Since the time is 1900, it will be the century of the Hubbards. Yet their machinations are so grimly comical that one cannot feel any revulsion toward them; in fact, there is something chillingly fascinating about the way they score

LILLIAN HELLMAN I 279 points against each other. In an attempt to keep everything in the family, including their schemes, they practice a perverse form of Christianity: each does to the other what he expects the other to do to him. As they go into partnership with a Chicago businessman to build cotton mills, it becomes obvious they need Horace's money. Regina will have Horace brought home if Ben raises her share; Ben reduces Oscar's share to raise Regina's. When Oscar learns his son Leo can gain access to Horace's bonds, he encourages Leo to take them so he can even the score. Just when it seems Regina has been defeated, she retaliates by threatening to expose Oscar and Leo. Each is the other's fury, punishing misdeeds with paradoxical righteousness. When amoral people punish each other for immoral behavior, a strange form of moral justice results. While the Hubbards practice fraud, they also punish it—the crime neutralizing the punishment. The Little Foxes is justly admired because it conforms so perfectly to the nature of theater. Although one may never have seen the play performed, one knows how it would look and sound onstage. Hellman has an instinctive sense of rhythm, knowing when to accelerate the action and when to let it subside. She excels at group scenes which intimidate most playwrights because they find it difficult to achieve the multiple rhythms that such scenes require. The first act begins with an exchange between two domestics; then the rhythm accelerates as Birdie enters, babbling excitedly. When her husband checks her effusions, the pace slackens. As Regina enters with her brothers and their guest, the conversation proceeds evenly for the purpose of exposition. Gradually the pace quickens as Ben describes the rise of the Hubbards in the rhetoric of conquest, boasting that his family wrested Lionnet from its owners—taking "their land, their cotton, and their daughter." To divert sympathy to Birdie, who has just been described as chattel, Hellman balances Ben's swinish oratory with a

gesture of courtesy from Marshall: "May I bring you a glass of port, Mrs. Hubbard?" The Little Foxes is so carefully constructed that nothing in it is gratuitous. Leo's theft of the bonds comes as no surprise; Regina had alluded earlier to his petty thievery. When Oscar slaps Birdie's face, it is not merely to stun the audience; a man who wantonly kills animals could easily mistreat his wife, especially when there are no witnesses. When Alexandra remarks that her father's medicine bottle must not break, the question in the audience's mind is not "Will it break?" but "How will it break?" In melodrama, what seem to be chance events must be motivated dramatically so that the accidental becomes an extension of character. Crucial to the plot are the bonds Leo steals from Horace's safe deposit box. Horace must learn of the theft, as he does, in a perfectly natural way: he sends for the box because he wishes to draw up a new will. The medicine bottle must break, and Regina must make no effort to replace it. Horace drops it immediately after Regina tells him that she despises him. And for the coup de theatre, Hellman has Regina remain completely immobile as Horace struggles up the stairs to get the other bottle. Of all Hellman's plays, Watch on the Rhine (1941) comes closest to being melodrama of the monochromatic school where the villain is unspeakably black and the hero angelically white. Written in 1940 and produced eight months before Pearl Harbor, the play was understandably more patriotic than eloquent. Sara Miiller returns to America after a twenty-year absence. The daughter of a famous Washington couple, she is now the wife of underground freedom fighter Kurt Miiller, who goes by several aliases and combats fascism wherever it appears—Spain, Germany, even Washington, D.C. As chance would have it, her mother's house guest is a Rumanian count, Teck de Brancovis, who spends his time trading secrets with high-ranking Nazis at embassy parties. When de Brancovis

280 I AMERICAN threatens to reveal Miiller's identity, Miiller kills him and flies off to Europe to continue his work. If Watch on the Rhine sounds familiar, it is because it reads like a conflation of all the espionage films of the 1940's that portrayed an America infected with Nazi spies and fifth columnists, secrets being exchanged at embassy balls, and revolvers being whipped out of trenchcoat pockets. Yet for all its familiarity, Watch on the Rhine was partly inspired by Hellman's own experiences. The late 1930's were a difficult time for her. In "Julia," one of the sketches in Pentimento (1973), she describes how in 1937, at the request of a girlhood friend who had become an ardent socialist, she transported $50,000 in a hat and a box of candy to Berlin to aid the victims of fascism. How Hellman avoided detection is worthy of a Graham Greene entertainment, yet it is factual. A contact on the train handed her a hatbox and a box of candy. In her compartment were two girls, one heavy and the other thin. The heavier girl encouraged her to try on the new hat; and Hellman obliged, unaware that both girls were part of the smuggling scheme. When the customs officers entered the compartment, the thin girl opened the box of candy and offered some to the inspectors to divert their attention from the empty hatbox. When the train arrived in Berlin, a middle-aged man and woman whom Hellman had never seen before greeted her by name. The woman took the box of candy from her, and the man told her cryptically where she might find Julia. When Hellman finally met Julia, her friend took the fur hat and pinned it inside her coat; and the intrigue was thus completed. Julia herself was a saintly woman who shared her wealth with the poor and lost a leg, and finally her life, in the fight against fascism. She was the model for Kurt Miiller; his hands broken, his face scarred (Julia's face had been

WRITERS

slashed when her body was discovered), Miiller bore the insignia of his profession; and like the playwright, he too carried money for the cause. However, "Julia" is more satisfying as literature than Watch on the Rhine because experience supplied the drama which had only to be recast as narrative. In Watch on the Rhine, experience supplied only the rudiments of drama with Hellman filling in the rest with crucial objects (an unlocked briefcase) and coincidences (villain and hero staying in the same house); and when neither the objects nor the coincidences command attention, she turns to sermonizing. After Miiller kills de Brancovis, he delivers an apologia to his children, reminding them that murder is always evil. However, he prefaces it with a reference toLes Miserables, inviting comparison between himself and Jean Valjean and between the theft of bread and the murder of a fascist. Thus Miiller indicts himself and pardons himself at the same time. One can respect Hellman's sincerity without liking her play. Since it was written for antifascists, it is preaching to the converted. Only an inflexible moralist would find the count's murder reprehensible. In the real order, society punishes the guilty; in the theater, the hero acts on society's behalf. In Lillian Hellman: Playwright, Richard Moody writes: "We fear for the Miillers; we cherish their courage" (p. 127). One may pity Sara, who, in a brief but poignant speech, describes the loneliness she will experience at bedtime. But actually there is little to fear. Presumably Miiller will be able to dispose of the body and leave the country without involving his family in "bad trouble," a favorite Hellman phrase. The fact that he may never return is unimportant since the playwright has made him a symbol from the outset, and symbols return in other forms. The 1940's were an especially prolific decade for Hellman. Watch on the Rhine received the

LILLIAN HELLMAN I 281 New York Drama Critics' Circle Award in 1941, and the following year was produced successfully in London; a film version was done in 1943 as well. The North Star, Hellman's only original screenplay, was released in 1943. As a screenwriter, she has adapted either her own work or that of others. These Three (1936) was her screen adaptation of The Children's Hour in which she placated the Hays Office by having Martha in love with Karen's beau rather than with Karen. However, Miriam Hopkins's psychologically shrewd performance as Martha left little doubt about the real object of the character's affection. When Hollywood purchased The Little Foxes and The Searching Wind, Hellman wrote the screenplays. She also adapted Guy Bolton's The Dark Angel (1935), Sidney Kingsley's Dead End (1937), and Horton Foote's The Chase (1966) for the movies. On paper, The North Star must have looked impressive: produced by Samuel Goldwyn and directed by Lewis Milestone with music by Aaron Copland, lyrics by Ira Gershwin, cinematography by James Wong Howe, and, of course, script by Lillian Hellman. The subject was timely: the German invasion of a Russian village in June 1941. But the movie itself is a curious mixture of the naive, the propagandistic, and the horrifying. The first third of it is devoted to removing any prejudices American audiences might have against the Russians by portraying the villagers as ordinary people: a fat girl laments her turned-up nose, a mother lovingly braids her daughter's hair, and a family eats a breakfast of pancakes while listening to the radio. With the German invasion, the atrocities begin: a woman screams in agony as her arm and leg are broken; and children are bled to death to supply plasma for German soldiers. These scenes are genuinely horrifying, although they typify the sort of brutality Hollywood always imputed to the Nazis. The Russians triumph, at least in spirit; the heroine delivers the "Earth belongs to the people"

speech as the villagers sing a tribute to Mother Russia. Hellman has never actually disowned the script; however, she and Goldwyn parted company during the shooting because Milestone had changed her sturdy peasants into soundstage mannequins. She has also noted with some amusement that when she visited the Soviet Union on a cultural mission in 1944-1945, the Russians thought The North Star was a joke. Regardless, it was a historically important joke. Intended as anti-Nazi propaganda, The North Star was denounced during the Cold War, along with Mission to Moscow (1943) and Song of Russia (1943), as proof of Communist infiltration of the motion picture industry. Acquired for television in 1957, it was retitled Armored Attack, reedited, and given a prologue that not only criticized the Soviet Union for not preparing its people for the invasion but also informed those who did not know that the film had been made when the Soviet Union was an American ally. Although Hellman never held the movie industry in high esteem, she learned its techniques well enough to use them in her most ambitious play, The Searching Wind (1944). Told through flashbacks, The Searching Wind is the kind of play that puts great demands on the cast: Act I moves from 1944 to 1922 and back to 1944; Act II from 1923 to 1938 and full circle to 1944. Hellman has always been fond of the trio: in this case an American diplomat, Alex; his socialite wife, Emily; and his former mistress, Cassie, who are reunited after twenty years for an evening of reminiscence. Unlike Watch on the Rhine, The Searching Wind manages to be patriotic and believable because the characters are more vulnerable than the superhuman Miillers. This time Hellman has painted her characters on a historical canvas. In the first flashback, Alex, Emily, and Cassie are in Rome when Mussolini's black^hirts occupy the capital; significantly, they will be in

282 / AMERICAN Munich, Berlin, and Paris at equally critical times. When Mussolini marched on Rome, Emily and Cassie were still callow, although Cassie at least realized the importance of the occasion. She would like the American ambassador to "do something about it," not knowing what or how, but expecting more than State Department neutrality. However, Hellman's anti-fascism has not blinded her to the role of the State Department, although she may not accept it. As Alex says of the ambassador: "He's here to represent the United States, not to fight in civil wars." In The Searching Wind, Hellman conveys the helplessness of individuals in responsible positions when they cannot take their own stand. She also creates a microcosm-macrocosm relationship between the trio and their times: the compromises that Alex, Emily, and Cassie made in their own lives were repeated on an international scale. Alex becomes an ambassador, thereby choosing a life of appeasement; in Emily, he finds the ideal ambassador's wife— apolitical and affluent. Cassie bemoans her generation: "We are an ignorant generation." Yet she spends her summers in Europe to be near Alex, whose weakness she condemns but whose company she needs. Even in 1933, as Jews are being harassed in the streets of Berlin, Cassie and Emily enjoy the security of a cafe where they argue about Alex. On the eve of World War II, Count von Stammer visits Alex, trying to convince him that Hitler will be satisfied if he gets the Sudetenland. To his credit, Alex does not fall for the line, although it was a fairly common belief at the time. When von Stammer leaves, Cassie enters; and although the conversation now seems to be about love, it is really political. Unable to decide between his mistress and his wife, he can hardly choose between truth and appeasement. Alex is one of Hellman's most complex characters. With his son Sam approaching draft age,

WRITERS

he agonizes over the language he will use to report the Munich conference. The language is a model of equivocation; Alex protests German aggression but rejects the notion that the Munich conference is a prelude to world war. It is Alex' desire to spare a generation from a second world war, although he himself fought in the first, that prompts him to modify his tone. But Alex' dilemma goes deeper: "What the hell has one man got to do with history?" he asks. It is his belief that the protest of the individual is useless that makes him so weak. Cassie called the trio "frivolous people" who created, as Sam Hazen put it, the "shit" in which his generation sat as they surveyed life from muddy foxholes. As it happens, Sam will soon lose a leg as a result of the war from which he was to have been saved. While Hellman might have liked to make Alex responsible for his son's condition, she avoids cheap irony. Even Sam knows that "history is made by the masses of people," not by one or two men; and he can only hope that the loss of a leg will make people less frivolous. It would have been easy for Hellman to indict Alex' generation, but a close reading of the play reveals that she is really attacking a way of life practiced by a minority who made their values— or lack of them—the keynote of their age. The 1920's were a time of debased epicureanism; when it came time for history to test the convictions of the 1920's, it turned out that there were none. The endless parties inThe Searching Wind are spin-offs of Jay Gatsby 's extravaganzas where it made no difference who attended. Such lack of discrimination may have been acceptable then; but the carelessness of the 1920's spilled over into the next decade when frivolous Emilies sat next to Nazis and fascists at soirees, making small talk and never challenging their political beliefs for fear of a breach of etiquette. For her sixth play, Another Part of the Forest (1946), Hellman returned to the Hubbards,

LILLIAN HELLMAN I 283 showing them as they were twenty years before they became the little foxes. It is doubtful that she could have written Another Part of the Forest immediately after The Little Foxes: too committed to the present, she could not return to the past until she had made the necessary connection between materialism and compromise. That immediately after World War II she chose to write about the Hubbards again suggests that she had found the connection between the good life and the means by which it is sustained. The Hubbards represent the dawn of the twentieth century, and World War II is its apocalyptic noon; linking them are expediency that disregards morality, compromise that destroys convictions, and appeasement that demands a civilized veneer no matter how barbaric the times may be. The Searching Wind chronicled the legacy of the Hubbards' materialism. But materialists are made, not born; Another Part of the Forest dramatizes the process, illustrating the Greek principle that fate is character. Regina was not always a ruthless manipulator. Before she was Mrs. Horace Giddens, she was Regina Hubbard, the spoiled but not yet predatory daughter of Marcus and Lavinia Hubbard. When she was twenty, she saw her brother Ben beat their father at his own game and gain control of the family business. On becoming head of the family, Ben decreed that she marry Horace Giddens, not John Bagtry, whom she loved. There is a connection between the denatured creature Regina became and the love she never received. Regina knew only a paternalism that masked her father's incestuous longing for her—a longing that Ben also reveals when he expects Regina to behave as coquettishly toward him as she did toward their father. To despise Regina is to despise a typhoon. Nowhere in Hellman is there a monologue in which a character confesses his sins, thereby absolving himself of them. Hellman merely presents her characters within the environment that shaped

them, leaving the inferences to the audience. While it might be tempting to consider the Hubbards as an ill-starred family like the House of Atreus, the text would not support such an interpretation. It is true that there are mythic motifs operating in the play (reversals of fortune within the same family; father supplanted by his son) and that the Hubbards behave like Homer's Olympians, embroiled in domestic intrigue. But Hellman is only using the trappings of tragedy, not the tragic form. She has the unusual ability to choose themes ordinarily associated with tragedy (the ancient secret; the tyrant's downfall; a son's usurping his father) and fit them into a familial context where the facts of tragedy are really the facts of life. Another Part of the Forest is melodrama employing a time-honored combination: the family secret and the object by which it is revealed. In this case it is the family Bible in which Lavinia Hubbard recorded the "sin" her husband committed thirty-seven years previously when, on one of his salt-running expeditions, he led a contingent of Union soldiers to a Confederate training camp, thus causing the deaths of twenty-seven recruits. Therefore, there is nothing doom-ridden about the Hubbards, nor is Marcus Hubbard's "sin" an ancestral curse; it is merely the result of his avarice. In the fall of 1948, Hellman saw the Paris production of Emmanuel Robles's Montserrat, which impressed her so favorably that she adapted it for Broadway. While Montserrat was a hit in Paris, it languished on Broadway; it ran for only sixty-five performances in 1949. One could understand why Hellman would be attracted to a play in which a Spanish captain's refusal to divulge Simon Bolivar's hiding place results in his own death and the execution of six hostages. Lillian Hellman is a moral dramatist concerned with the ethical implications of human acts. However, the chief danger in being a moral dramatist is that one's morality may get in the way of one's dramaturgy. Watch on the Rhine is

284 I AMERICAN an example of such a conflict; it poses the eternal question: Can one take a life for a cause? In Watch on the Rhine, there is no debating the question or disputing the answer, especially when the family of liberals agrees that Miiller's cause was worth de Brancovis' life. As a theatergoer, one might accept the play's solution; but theatergoing is an activity of the moment, and one might endorse for the moment what one would not endorse for life. The issue is not that human life is sacrosanct, but rather that its worth is determined by an individual's acts. There is nothing heroic about killing a fascist blackmailer; it is a petty act that Hellman raises to the level of heroism by making an entire underground movement dependent on it. The count's murder solves nothing except the dilemma in which the playwright has found herself. It was precisely for moral reasons that Hellman was attracted to Montserrat, not for the drama, of which there is little, or for the persons of the drama who are stereotypes; but for the ethics of the drama. While Watch on the Rhine asks if one can kill for just cause, Montserrat poses a question that is considerably more complex: Can one sacrifice the lives of six people to save the man who can liberate their country? When Montserrat refuses to disclose Boli'var's hiding place, General Izquierdo has six hostages rounded up and gives them an hour alone with Montserrat to convince him that their lives are more important than Bolivar's. Four of the hostages are ordinary people who are not eager for martyrdom: the merchant wishes to return to his business; the woodcarver to his statues; the actor to his troupe; the unwed mother to her children. The other two, Ricardo and Felisa, say little about their situation; they are undeveloped as characters, perhaps intentionally because they have no great commitment to life and therefore are willing to accept death. Montserrat tries to justify his position to the

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hostages, but each time one of them deflates his argument. When Montserrat claims he speaks for God, a hostage answers that he speaks for himself. When Montserrat pleads that only Bolfvar can save Venezuela, a hostage replies; "There's always another man, and another day." His arguments are ineffective because people in trouble—"bad trouble"—find no consolation in being told that in the fulness of time the scales of justice will be balanced, especially when they will not be around to marvel at the equilibrium. One by one the hostages are executed. When it is Ricardo's turn, Montserrat almost weakens; but Felisa, Montserrat's alter ego and perhaps a partisan herself, announces her readiness to die and takes the distraught Matilde with her before Montserrat has a chance to divulge the information. It is a devastating scene not because Montserrat abandons heroics at the sight of a boy, old before his time, who is willing to die; but because Felisa hastens her own death and Matilde's by doing what rebels have always done—imposing their will upon others. John Gassner once commented that we know what Lillian Hellman is against, "But what is she for?" One might ask the same of Sophocles: in Antigone, is he for the heroine and against Creon? The truth is that Antigone and Creon are both wrong and right. As a ruler, Creon must insist upon obedience; as a rebel, Antigone must disobey. When two brothers kill each other for a throne, both cannot be guiltless. The people must have their heroes and their villains, and Creon decides that one brother was a hero, the other a traitor. But Antigone will not accept his distinction: Creon's traitor is her patriot. Montserrat is as morally convoluted as Antigone. Izquierdo can hardly let Bolfvar escape. Since military ethics is based in part on expediency, he does what is expedient. But so does Montserrat, who pushes Christianity to its limits, making the end justify the means because the end is liberation. Montserrat is an inadequate spokes-

LILLIAN HELLMAN I 285 man for Christianity, which is based on one man's dying for many, not on many dying for one. Furthermore, like Antigone, Montserrat has a martyr complex. A world of Montserrats would be as unthinkable as a world of Antigones; for in their eagerness to die, both characters would inflict their death wish on others. Montserrat is an elusive play because it admits of two vastly different interpretations: as a drama of heroism or as a drama of ambiguous heroics. The playwright's commitment suggests the former, but the text supports the latter. When Izquierdo threatens to take six more hostages, Montserrat begins to speak; but when Montserrat hears that Bolivar is out of danger, he admits he has been stalling for time. Such an admission undermines Montserrat's heroism, and the fact that he is dragged to his death shrieking God's name robs him of a dignified end. Thus the play can be read as a critique of the heroic gesture made by one who was not born to the role of hero. Hellman's next play, The Autumn Garden (1951), was also unsuccessful, although important revivals during the 1976-1977 season at the Long Wharf Theatre in New Haven, and the Arena Stage in Washington, D.C., have prompted a reevaluation of a work the critics originally termed Chekhovian, meaning much talk and little action. The Autumn Garden is now emerging as Hellman's masterpiece; certainly it is her most mature play, for she has never dealt more perceptively with the self-deception of middle age. The situation is one at which Hellman excels: a reunion of old friends after an absence of twenty-three years, at a Gulf Coast guesthouse. It is a reunion that leaves everyone changed, including those outside the immediate circle. Since Hellman was portraying characters in the autumn of their lives as she was moving into her own, she dealt more gently with their foibles. While there is~ no hero in the play, there is no villain either. One person's weakness becomes

another's strength; a character sometimes capitalizes on a weakness and turns it into a strength such as when Rose Griggs persuades her husband to remain with her one more year after she tells him about her heart condition. In The Autumn Garden, Hellman makes money a determinant of personal morality and deemphasizes its powers of corruption. Thus, it is not an irradiating force but just another aspect of character. Nina Denery's wealth allows her husband Nick to dabble in painting; Mary Ellis' fortune enables her to manipulate her daughter and grandson; and a homosexual author's discovery that his protege's allowance has been cut causes him to terminate their relationship. It is Sophie's desire to return to Europe that leads her to blackmail Nick Denery. She believes that money can restore integrity and guarantee freedom; thus one applauds her scheme, for, as she admits, it is girls like herself who keep the Denerys together by guaranteeing them an unlimited number of second honeymoons. Hellman has always been interested in showing how two people can be encumbered, often tragically, by another's presence. Thus in The Autumn Garden, duos grow into trios, and it is only with the departure of the third party that there is some hope for the couple. Trios are unstable; they come into existence when people cannot find the support they need in each other. Benjamin and Rose Griggs, an army general and his wife, are on the verge of divorce; Nick Denery enters their lives, flirting outrageously with Rose, who is foolish enough to mistake his oily charm for affection. When Nick rejoins his childhood friends, Contance Tuckerman and Ned Grossman, his wife Nina remains outside their circle; because her wealth allows her a certain aloofness as well as the feeling that she has the right to make such remarks as "I never answer to my first name until after midnight," she joins no group. The Ellises comprise mother, son, and grand-

286 I AMERICAN mother; the grandmother wishes to be in and out of the trio, making it clear it is her money that gives her that privilege. After a drunken evening, Nick falls asleep on the couch where Sophie was to sleep; as a result, a trio is formed consisting of Sophie and the Denerys. With Sophie's departure for Europe, the Denerys are a couple again. At the end of The Autumn Garden, the childhood trio is reduced to a duo, Constance and Ned, the owner of the summer guesthouse and her wise but sullen companion. As they prepare for a literal and symbolic autumn, one knows there is little likelihood they will marry. But at least they can face each other without the barrier of a third party. Ned can admit the truth about himself—that he has wasted his life—and Constance can offer the consolation that such candor deserves. The 1950's did not begin auspiciously for Hellman. The Autumn Garden lasted only three months on Broadway, closing on June 2, 1951. The following February she was subpoenaed to appear before the House Un-American Activities Committee, on May 21, 1952. It was not surprising that the committee would be interested in Hellman. Her relationship with Dashiell Hammett, whom she met in 1930 and with whom she lived intermittently until his death in 1961, was well known. Hammett had joined the Communist party in the late 1930's; in June 1951 he was cited for contempt and sentenced to six months in prison because he refused to name the contributors to a civil rights bail bond fund. In the early 1950's, being anti-fascist was often synonymous with being pro-Communist; campaigning for Henry Wallace, as Hellman did in 1948, and supporting certain liberal causes were considered subversive. Perhaps the ultimate irony is that Hellman's loyalty to America was questioned by a committee whose onetime head, J. Parnell Thomas, saw no difference between being loyal to his government and embezzling money from it.

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On May 19, 1952, Hellman wrote to the House committee, stating that she would answer questions about herself but not about others; what she actually said was that she would not bring ' 'bad trouble," a recurring phrase in her plays, to innocent people. The committee would not accept her terms although the letter, which her lawyer Joseph Raugh circulated among the press, became part of the official proceedings. One usually reads that at the hearing Hellman took the Fifth Amendment; however, the matter is somewhat more complicated. Naturally Hellman invoked the Fifth when questioned about others. When asked if she were presently a member of the Communist party, she replied, "No, sir." However, she took the Fifth when asked if she had ever belonged to the party; if she had belonged to the party three years previously; if she was a member in the middle of June 1937; and if she was a member on February 12, 1948. On the other hand, she testified that she was not a member the previous year (1951) or two years previously (1950). Hellman often wondered why she was not jailed for contempt; perhaps it was because the letter in which she expressed her willingness to answer questions about herself had been distributed at the hearing and had become part of the testimony. Hellman had only two theatrical successes in the 1950's. The Children's Hour was brought back to Broadway in the winter of 1952 with Patricia Neal as Martha and Kim Hunter as Karen; and the revival had a respectable run. More important was The Lark (1955), her adaptation of L'Alouette, Jean Anouilh's version of the story of Joan of Arc. While Anouilh 's theme (the rebel who refuses to accept a world of mediocrity) appealed to her, his concept of theater did not. The stage is such an obsessive metaphor with Anouilh that his plays often become exercises in pure theater. In L'Alouette, the characters are extensions of the actors, who at times will play their roles and at other times will step out of them, commenting on what they have said or

LILLIAN HELLMAN I 287 done as characters. LAlouette is not naturalistic theater, nor is it a dramatization of Joan's life; it is a reenactment of her life performed by actors who are conscious of themselves as performers. Anouilh took an approach to Saint Joan that was midway between Pirandellian drama and the classic historical play that requires that the basic facts of the subject's life be dramatized. Accordingly, Anouilh shows respect for tradition: his Joan hears voices, crowns the Dauphin, is deserted, and tried—but not burned. In history Anouilh does not find drama that demands an adherence to the rules of verisimilitude; on the other hand, he finds that theater generates excitement from the tension between the artist's imagination and his material. In theater effects exist for their own sake; in drama they are caused. Since people make history, they also make theater. The historical figures tfLAlouette have made history; and having made it, they can stand apart and view it, replying to the verdict of the past and settling old scores. LAlouette is ajeu, a game not in the sense of a put-on but in the sense of a double acrostic. Anouilh invites us to participate in the Game of Joan, reminding us by an occasional blast of reality that we are in that atemporal realm between truth and illusion: the realm of theater. Anouilh's agent assumed that a poet would adapt LAlouette for Broadway. Hellman was hardly a poet, but she played the Game of Joan as well as a realistic playwright given an anti-realistic play could. From her Hollywood days she learned that the rest of adaptation consists of keeping the essence of the work intact as the work changes hands. She made no attempt to change Anouilh's conception of Joan's life as a historical event refracted through the prism of theater. However, as a practical playwright, she knew that Anouilh's art was too rarefied for New Yorkers. Thus Hellman made the dialogue realistic, sometimes even slangy. Although Anouilh violated illusion constantly, Hellman kept such violations to a minimum. In Anouilh, when Joan

talks of her voices, someone asks, "Who is going to be the voice?" Joan replies, "I am, of course." Hellman cut that exchange because it was too early in the play to break verisimilitude. There is also an awkward speech in LAlouette in which Joan quotes a conversation between herself and Saint Michael. Hellman shortens the speech and recasts Michael's words as indirect discourse. Hellman's most significant reworking of LAlouette occurs in the difficult second act which takes the form of a raisonnement or abstract debate. The Inquisitor argues for the Idea, a Platonic form of authority of which the Church is the earthly representative; Joan argues for Man who is the representative of God. Hellman's version of the debate is an improvement on Anouilh. By shortening the Inquisitor's panegyric to the Idea, which is too metaphysical to be dramatically interesting, Hellman in effect strengthens Anouilh's thesis that Joan was executed because she was Man in all of his contradictions: lover of life and taker of life; saint and warrior; illiterate yet knowing. It is because Joan is Man that she dies as Man. She will not live without the voices that have given her life meaning and kindled the spark of the divine within her. Furthermore, she will not compromise with mediocrity; and, after having led armies, to spend one's days growing old and fat in a church prison would constitute such a compromise. LAlouette begins as a jeu and ends as one. And although Hellman could not accept Anouilh's ending, she could not discard it either; thus she adapts it. In Anouilh, Beaudricourt bursts in like a deus ex machina and interrupts the burning so the cast can enact the coronation of Charles which has been omitted. Anouilh is reminding the audience of the play's theatrical origins; the playwright, like the puppeteer, can pull the strings of tragedy and comedy at will. To end the play on a note of victory, Anouilh must transpose events and disrupt chronology; but it is

288 I AMERICAN a spurious victory. L'Alouette concludes cynically with Anouilh's rearranging the heroine's life so that her triumph on earth will follow her defeat in death and by his shattering dramatic illusion to do so—the ultimate blow to realism coming when Joan is released to perform the coronation. Hellman ends with Joan's coronation of the Dauphin, but only after Joan has been burned. She dispenses with the deus ex machina; yet in a sense, she, the adapter, becomes the deus ex machina: Lillian Hellman who knows what audiences want and stretches the text to give it to them and in the process chides playwrights who jolt playgoers because they loathe realism. Hellman motivates the coronation by having La Hire demand it; it was, after all, Joan's happiest moment. An omission has occurred at the hands of clumsy intellectuals and church men who were so obsessed with punishment and death that they forgot that the climax of Joan's life was not the burning at the stake (a common end for heretics) but the crowning of the Dauphin. Joan relives the coronation. Forthright beyond the grave, she admits that her happiness had nothing to do with the Dauphin but with the restoration of France. Hellman concludes, on a human note, with a girl's joyful pride, supplying as realistic an ending as she could, given the material. The Lark was Hellman's only successful Broadway adaptation. Montserrat was a failure as was Candide (1956), the Leonard Bernstein operetta for which she wrote the book, but not the lyrics. In some respects, Hellman would seem to have been the ideal librettist for Candide. The prospect of adapting the work could release the satirist within her, allowing her to flail away at those who isolated themselves in cocoons of bovine goodness, oblivious to the evils around them. There was also the possibility of forging analogies between Candide's optimistic belief in the best of all possible worlds and the mindless 1950's, which was thought to be the

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best of all possible decades. Yet Hellman was not up to the task. While Voltaire could toss off his ideas with absurdist nonchalance, Hellman had to turn those ideas into dialogue. Furthermore, she was facing the same problem she had with Anouilh: how to adapt a work that not only violated the laws of mimesis but also the laws of credibility. Writing the book was not a pleasant experience for her; it was rather like designing the shell of a building that others would finish. Yet she fulfilled her commitment and adapted Voltaire for the musical stage. When Hellman adapts, she blasts away at the surface until she finds the bedrock. What she discovered in her excavation is that there is a steady progression in Candide from froth and flippancy, from transvaluated values and Jesuitical logic, to a realization that all philosophies not founded on a knowledge of human nature are useless. Hellman had an easier time with L'Alouette because it was less formidable as literature than Candide; but the essence of Candide is not easily dramatized. How does one adapt a work that is definitive in its own genre? The ironies in Voltaire's Candide are crepuscular; in Hellman, they are unalterably dark. In the final scene of the operetta, which is the best written in the entire work, Hellman leads into the great chorale, "Make Our Garden Grow," with Candide's sober rejection of man's inherent goodness and an existential acceptance of his nothingness: "We will not think noble because we are not noble. We will not live in beautiful harmony because there is no such thing in this world, nor should there be. We promise only to do our best and live out our lives." Voltaire's satire ends with the impatient hero taking up agriculture and the practical life, emancipated from Dr. Pangloss but not at odds with him. Hellman has the characters return to a ruined Westphalia that evokes an image of Europe rebuilding itself. Thus when the company sings, "We'll build our house, and chop

LILLIAN HELLMAN I 289 our wood, / And make our garden grow," one must envision plant life springing out of rubble. Hellman cannot help but place Candide in a contemporary context in which optimism, and its twin, apathy, lead only to befuddlement in the face of danger and war.It is only when optimism has been tested and fails that man can discern his true nature. Fortunately, man has been able to plant a garden in the ruins of a civilization because his instinct for survival makes reconstruction possible. Hellman's libretto is usually singled out as the reason for Candide's failure. In all fairness to Hellman, she was asked to supply the episodes that would lead into the musical numbers. Consequently, she was forced to condense the material. Voltaire's satire defies the laws of verisimilitude as characters who have been disemboweled suddenly reappear, explaining their recovery with hilariously compelling logic. Hellman had to sacrifice these stories in which illogicalities multiply so rapidly that the tales take on a mad logic of their own. In Voltaire, the old woman tells a story filled with bizarre coincidences about the way she survived her mother's butchery, her own rape, and various forms of debauchery. In rfie operetta, the old woman catalogues her miseries in a song. Occasionally Hellman's pruning of the text produces some interesting results. In Voltaire, Candide meets Martin, a skeptic who ridicules optimists. In the musical, Martin is Dr. Pangloss ' double and thus negativism is the underside of optimism. Hellman's Martin was born in Eldorado from which he was expelled because of his warped view of man; ironically, it is Martin who tells Candide how to reach Eldorado. Later, when Martin falls overboard into the sea, Dr. Pangloss emerges from the water to take his place—the alternating cycles of pessimism and optimism. The ideas that were germinating in Hellman's libretto could have never reached fruition in a

musical form like operetta. Hellman did not seem to understand characters in musicals. Always the realist, demanding that even the characters in an operetta must undergo change, Hellman tried to parallel Candide's conversion from optimism to realism with Cunegonde's continual (for it is not gradual) degeneration so that her admission, *Tm not good, I'm not pure," is believable in the final act. Unfortunately, musical comedy audiences are generally not attuned to such subtleties of characterization. Hellman could not resist injecting a personal note into the libretto. In a short and easily passedover scene, Hellman compares the Spanish Inquisition to one with which she was quite familiar: that of the House Un-American Activities Committee. An old man, accused of reading too much, turns friendly witness and names his associates, two of whom are Lilybelle and Lionel. "Lilybelle" is self-explanatory, and Lionel is Lionel Stander, the raspy-voiced actor who appeared before the committee in 1953. It was Stander who made the immortal comparison between the Inquisition and the House investigation: "You may not be burned, but you can't help coming away a little singed." Candide was revived successfully in 1973, although it would be more accurate to call it a revamping of Hellman's work. Leonard Bernstein's score remained intact, but Hellman's name was not listed in the credits. This later Candide had nothing to do with prewar optimism leading to postwar cynicism; the exuberant and youthful cast made it clear that Candide was about the triumph of love in a turbulent world. The success of Toys in the Attic (1960) came at the right time for Hellman. What Hammett had thought was rheumatism was inoperable lung cancer, and a commercial success made it possible for Hellman to give the man whom she called "my closest, my most beloved friend" the comforts of the dying. Although it won the Critics' Circle award for best play, Toys in the

290 / AMERICAN WRITERS Attic is not vintage Hellman. It is an overwrought Southern play, and Hellman is not really a Southern dramatist in the way that Tennessee Williams is. The Hubbards would thrive anywhere, and while the scent of magnolia lingers in The Autumn Garden, the foliage is not indigenous to the South. Yet Toys in the Attic is reminiscent of Williams with its primitive sexuality and violent denouement. Money is again the villain, this time in the form of the sudden wealth that Julian Berniers acquires and lavishes on his two unmarried sisters, Carrie and Anna. In the Hubbard plays, Hellman dramatized the effects of wealth on the strong; in Toys in the Attic, she portrays its impact on the weak—a wastrel brother and his doting sisters. The weak lack the cunning of the strong; when they succumb to the lure of money, they do not resort to machinations but instead commit acts that are petty, rash, and ultimately stupid. Carrie does not know how to react to the windfall that has polarized the Berniers household to the extent that amenities collapse amid accusations of incest and denials of love. Resentful of Julian's childlike bride, Lily, Carrie does not stop her from phoning Mr. Warkins, a shady lawyer whose wife had been having an affair with Julian. In fact, Carrie tells Lily where Mrs. Warkins and Julian can be found. Lily blurts out this information to Warkins, bringing groans of anger and disbelief from the audience. Her neurotic candor is infuriating, and her pitiful naivete is simply incredible. Lily's ignorance abetted by Carrie's vindictiveness parts the fool from his money. It is money, both the love and hatred of it, that causes the characters to destroy each other. When Lily admits her hatred of money, her mother replies: 4 Then be very careful. Same thing as loving it." Her contempt for wealth leads to her betrayal of Julian; Julian's love of it endangers Mrs. Warkins, leaving her with a slashed face over which he can grieve for the rest of his life. Order re-

turns to the Berniers house only after Julian is penniless. Carrie again finds him loveable, and Lily washes his face like a Magdalene, The Bernierses are together again, and there is little likelihood that the trio will become a quartet after Carrie tells Julian the truth about his wife's role in the disfigurement of Mrs. Warkins. Hellman has usually been able to suggest a character's complexity through his actions, but in Toys in the Attic she leaves areas of her two most interesting figures, Lily and her mother, Albertine Prine, totally unilluminated. At times Albertine behaves like a grande dame, speaking such lines as "There are many ways of loving. I'm sure yours must be among them" with epigrammatic hauteur. At other times she all but wrings her hands because she does not know how to handle Lily. If Albertine cannot manage Lily, neither can Hellman. She is more like one of Flannery O'Connor's grotesques and, therefore, better suited to Southern gothic than to steamy melodrama. Intoxicated with the love of truth, she searches for it in a world of mendacity; yet it is not truth, as opposed to deception, that she wants, but rather truth as a combined religious and sexual experience that will bring her the profoundest knowledge. In her quest for truth, Lily phones Cy Warkins, begging him to ask his wife to give her one more year with Julian. Hellman, who has always championed truth, is now ambivalent toward it; and it is her ambivalence that leaves the play unresolved. Which is worse: the unvarnished truth which hurts others or selfdeception? Does one destroy the toys of childhood or store them in the attic for a rainy afternoon of regression? In Toys in the Attic, money corrupts the middle class; in My Mother, My Father and Me (1963), which Hellman freely adapted from Burt Blechman's novel How Much?, it corrupts everybody. The trio of the title is a New York family, the Halperns; the mother is a compulsive

LILLIAN HELLMAN I 291 buyer, the father an inveterate penny-pincher, and the son a youth of the 1960's who is trying to find himself and his social conscience by identifying with minorities and playing the guitar. My Mother, My Father and Me is more of a series of satirical sketches about American life than a conventional play. The loose structure, which reminds one of a vaudeville or a musical revue, reveals a quality Hellman has always possessed but has never fully exploited: a wicked sense of humor. She fires off lines with the aplomb of a stand-up comic, leaving no one unscathed: the Kennedy charisma that overtook the White House after the Eisenhower years; the Dashiell Hammett imitators to whom tough writing means "ain't" and "gunsel"; the white liberals who wish they were black; and nursing home residents who spend their time devising ways to keep their children from collecting their inheritance. Nor does Hellman hold out hope for the young. Berney, whose goal is to help the Indians return to their ancestral ways, is last seen on a reservation beating a tom-tom as the locals, eager for a dollar as anyone, set up their wares for the impressionable tourists. What blunts the nasty edge of My Mother, My Father and Me is Hellman's refusal, or inability, to offer a solution to the perennial pursuit of wealth. Peace is war by other means: peace creates leisure which requires money to enjoy it; war provides money for the leisure to be enjoyed. Because Herman Halpern is almost bankrupt, he is delighted at the prospect of war. When the war scare is over, he recovers his losses by designing a line of cheap shoes for corpses. War tests man's instinct for advancement; peace, his instinct for survival. It is unfortunate that Hellman attempted topical satire so late in her career. Although My Mother, My Father and Me ran only two weeks, it accurately characterized the early years of the decade as a time of transition between the somnolence of the 1950's and the militancy of the

middle and late 1960's. Although the setting is a comic strip culture, one knows it is the time of the Kennedys, when ancient beliefs (war as a means of economic prosperity) were so ingrained in the American consciousness that they cropped up whenever a crisis—and the period abounded in them—occurred. One wonders if Hellman felt the winds of change that would blow in the middle of the decade. Although Lillian Hellman has not written a play since 1962 when she completed My Mother, My Father and Me, she has a larger following today than she did during her most productive years. Strangely enough, her current reputation is not based on her work in the theater but on her emergence as a personality. Hellman has always been academically respectable as opposed to Tennessee Williams, who was admired more for his ability to define character than for his intellectual acumen. As early as 1948 she conducted a playwrighting seminar at Indiana University. The lecture circuit and the classroom exposed her to a younger audience that preferred drama in films because the theater was either financially or geographically inaccessible. It was also a ready-made audience for autobiography; one generally reads the memoirs of a teacher under whom one has studied or a lecturer whom one has heard. It seems natural, then, that Hellman turned from the theater to a more personal form of writing. The 1960's were a peculiar time in American letters. By 1962 Hellman had soured on the theater, which had changed so radically since the 1930's that it was barely recognizable to her. The public's preference had changed from fiction to nonfiction. Television was the mass medium. The cinema became what the theater had been twenty-five years earlier: the intellectual's art form. It was during this time that writers such as Norman Mailer and Truman Capote, who began as novelists, found that nonfiction is more lucrative. Somehow reading novels or attending

292 / AMERICAN plays in an age of televised war and political assassinations, campus unrest and black rage, seemed "frivolous," to use Cassie's term in The Searching Wind. Hellman did not join the young at the barricades; instead, she taught them, winning converts to Gertrude Stein, Joseph Conrad, Bertolt Brecht, and ultimately to herself. By the end of the decade the new Lillian Hellman appeared: a chronicler of her own life and times. Her first autobiographical work, An Unfinished Woman (1969), was highly successful and won the National Book Award. It might be more accurate to call it an autobiographical collage of diary entries, memories, previously published pieces (the Hammett memoir formed the introduction to The Big Knockover, a collection of Hammett's selected short fiction edited by Hellman and published in 1966), and reflections. But the work is sadly asymmetrical; in no way does it bear the Hellman trademark of drum-tight structure found in her plays. The first third of An Unfinished Woman presents her unadored vita: patrician mother, plebeian father, bookish childhood, attachment ta the black servant Sophronia (to whom she pays homage in The Searching Wind and Candide by naming characters after her), the publishing world, marriage to Arthur Kober, an abortion in Coney Island by a doctor whose assistant was his mother, Hollywood, a Broadway triumph, Spain during the Civil War. The Spanish Civil War made Hellman such a hater of fascism that when she adapted The Searching Wind for the screen, she changed Cassie into a journalist and placed her in Spain during the height of the conflict. In the midst of a bombardment, Cassie meets Alex; in a powerful speech, she rages at the bloodshed that nations sanction by their neutrality. However, in discussing the Civil War, Hellman's quotes of diary entries from 1937 are followed by rueful admissions about her lack of a true radical spirit. In the section on the Soviet

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Union, she uses the same technique of interspersing the narrative with material from the diary, creating a kind of parallelism between an eyewitness account and subsequent reflection. This technique, which resembles crosscutting in film, might have been more exciting had Hellman dramatized her diary instead of transcribing it. The style of An Unfinished Woman helps to explain why Hellman never pursued a career in fiction. She has difficulty in evoking a sense of place: the New Orleans of her childhood; New York in the 1920's; Spain in the 1930's; Russia in the 1940's; and Harvard in the 1960's; all are described in the same cold prose that prevents our seeing them as actual places. Time and place exist for Hellman as a hyphenated concept in which each loses its individuality and together they become a dateline. Hellman's reckoning with the past was far from finished; in the fourth edition of John Gassner's/1 Treasury of the Theatre (Vol. II), An Unfinished Woman is erroneously called An Unfinished Memoir, a title that would have been more to the point. Her second autobiographical work, Pentimento (1973), turned out much better, perhaps because she freed herself from the strictures of chronology in order to pursue her memories. The result is a curious form of nonfiction in which figures from her past—a cousin brought from Germany to marry a man she has never seen, a racketeer uncle who meets with a strange end, an enigmatic lawyer who enters her life like a dynamo and blusters in and out of it until his death—take on the features of characters in fiction. If In Cold Blood is Truman Capote's nonfiction novel, Pentimento is Lillian Hellman's novelistic memoir. The title refers to the way artists change their minds or "repent" when they decide to paint one object over another. In time, the paint becomes transparent, and one can discern the artist's original intentions—how a tree was to have been a

LILLIAN HELLMAN I 293 dress or a child a dog. In Pentimento, Hellman looks back at the past to see what it was before it mellowed under the soft focus of time. But to see the original lines before time obscured them demands great humility in a writer. He must suppress his own personality so that the personalities of others may emerge. Hellman has never been a self-revealing writer; she writes in an austere and often anti-literary style which enables her to check her ego in order to understand ''what was'' before it became ' 'what has been.'' It is Hellman's ability to peel away the encrustations of time that makes Pentimento superior to An Unfinished Woman. As has been noted, "Julia" is the most famous of these stories. Inevitably it became a film (which was released under the same title in 1977), since within it is a scenario for an oldfashioned espionage film as well as a pair of dauntless heroines—the eponymous character and Hellman herself. While one can understand Hellman's reasons for writing "Julia," the circumstances surrounding "Bethe" are more complex. As an adolescent, Hellman took up her pursuit of knowledge. She gradually learned that people are the sum of their actions. At sixteen, she discovered her grandfather's notebooks and letters and copied them out for her "writer's book." But a sixteen-year-old is limited; and when Hellman looked back at her journal from the vantage point of a mature woman, she could not find the coherence she had thought was there. As she was approaching her threescore and ten, an age when most of us think of retirement, Hellman was thinking of repentance. For example, there was the desire to know why after ten years a visit with her slatternly, uneducated cousin Bethe had made her ill. The reason was that at twenty-five, Hellman had discovered something about human relationships that she would incorporate into her plays: an individual's destiny is linked with the destinies of

others. Bethe's destiny became part of hers; and the fact that she told Hammett about her cousin the first time they slept together implies that what Bethe did had something to do with the two of them. What exactly did an uneducated woman who took a gangster lover have to do with two literary people who were about to make love for the first time? Bethe's affair was the young Hellman's first exposure to love—or what she thought was love. No adolescent involved in a clandestine affair between adults is ever the same; the classic example from literature is Leo in L. P. Hartley's The Go-Between. Hellman wanted to be part of Bethe's mysterious romance but could not; she could only encourage her cousin with a literary quote: "Stendhal said love makes people brave, dear Bethe." Yet Hellman is ambivalent about Bethe's relationship with her lover, although she never expresses her feelings as openly as one would like. Hellman's emotions are confused: love, fear, and finally a sense of betrayal. She discovers that Bethe, however misguided, is following her heart and, therefore, could proclaim that she is no longer German but * 'woman.'' She admits she was jealous of Bethe, a woman who without benefit of books had evolved a theory of independence; a woman who proudly announced that she had found a man. The sketches in Pentimento reveal that Hellman found in life what she depicted in her plays: the truth that finally comes to light. Art imitates life, often with a vengeance. She constructs each sketch carefully, reserving the climax for the right occasion and juxtaposing popular opinion with fact: the uncle who could never have died in an automobile accident because, on the day of the so-called crash, he was too drunk to walk; the lawyer who hated Germans but who had a German girl in the car with him the day he was killed. Hellman always has known how to end a drama and how to say more with less. In "Pen-

294 I AMERICAN timento," the final sketch, she recalls a meeting with a former student, a black chemistry major from Harvard who became a gentle rebel of the 1960's. One evening in 1961 he heard her say, "Pentimento." She had been thinking of Hammett and the Cambridge nursing home in which she intended to place him (had he lived). Ten years later, Hellman and the young man met for dinner; they spoke of Helen, her housekeeper whom they both had loved: He said, "I loved Helen." 'Too bad you never told her so. Too late now.'' 4 'I told it to her," he said, "the night I looked up your word, pentimento." And with these words, Pentimento ends. Hellman's latest memoir, Scoundrel Time (1976), is her most controversial. If this rather slender book makes readers think of her as an American martyr, it is not entirely her fault. Scoundrel Time's point of departure is Hellman's appearance before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1952. Her letter to the committee, which contained the frequently quoted "I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year's fabric," was a battle cry unto itself. Her refusal to name names was laudable; and the fact that she had to sell her farm in Pleasantville, New York, made her a victim of fortune's wheel. These factors, plus Gary Wills's introduction with its homage to Hellman and pictures of the author with the caption "An American Heroine," programs the reader into thinking of the early 1950's as the "Time of the Great Persecution," and Lillian Hellman as one of the persecuted. The truth of the matter is that Hellman did not achieve her purpose in Scoundrel Time, which was "to write my own history of the time." Although she is not a historian, she has a theory of history; but she has never been particularly good at reconstructing an era. Hellman makes her encounter with the House Un-American Activities

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Committee the central episode of the narrative, buttressing it with an introduction and a conclusion and variegating it with reflections and flashbacks. Indeed, Alfred Kazin compared Scoundrel Time with a film. The value of the book does not lie in Hellman's account of the hearing. Perhaps an autobiographical writer like Mailer could have made drama out of it, but Hellman records the event with dispassionate prose. As was the case with An Unfinished Woman, her reflections are more interesting than her reconstructions. Thus the significance of Scoundrel Time derives from the insights interspersed with the narrative. To Hellman, the Nixon era was the end product of the cold war anti-Communism which led to Vietnam and finally to Watergate. The silence during the McCarthy period allowed the fear of Communism—a nonexistent one, she believes—to increase, forcing America to rescue Southeast Asia from a bogeyman. But the bogeymen of nightmare depart with the dawn, and with the new morning comes the Nixon years. Hellman can appreciate the ironies of history, having witnessed them; thus she finds it both incongruous and tragic that the intellectual minority that did not protest McCarthyism found their voice during the Vietnam war—a war their silence in part created. Hellman generalizes, perhaps, but her explanation of the Vietnam war is finely reasoned and compelling. Scoundrel Time has its virtues, one of which is the author's refusal to attack the vulnerable. It would have been easy to single out Robert Taylor and Ayn Rand who protested MGM's innocuous Song of Russia (1943) as subversive because it portrayed Russian peasants as happy under Communism. It is always easy to deflate ignorance because it fills its own void. Instead, Hellman, who can analyze the essence of an event without quite being able to describe the accidents surrounding it, turns to McCarthyism itself in an attempt to understand how one man's

LILLIAN HELLMAN I 295 name could typify an era. Hellman believes the red menace was dreamed up by a few people who made the rest of America share their nightmare. In her view, McCarthy and his followers were overage children who exaggerated their fears to gain attention. Like the Chinese poet who wondered if he was a man dreaming he was a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming he was a man, one also wonders if the House committee dreamed up Communism or if Communism dreamed up the committee. One can will a dream to keep returning as long as it continues to give pleasure; when it has exhausted its potential, one tires of it and moves on to another fantasy. To Hellman, this is exactly what happened with McCarthyism. Never a true nightmare, it became less and less satisfying as dream material: "We were bored with them (i.e., the McCarthyites). That and nothing more." Hellman is uncannily accurate. To many Americans, the McCarthy hearings seemed farcical; and it made little difference that Larry Parks would never make another movie or that Dalton Trumbo would have to write filmscripts under a pseudonym. Another merit of Scoundrel Time is its equanimity which was not appreciated by its critics, especially Hilton Kramer and Alfred Kazin. In September 1976, Hilton Kramer's "The Blacklist and the Cold War" appeared in the Sunday New York Times. Kramer was highly critical of Scoundrel Time and the films The Front and Hollywood on Trial as revisionist attempts to distort the 1950's through a liberal perspective that was common in the 1960's, a perspective the preceding decade never had. Kramer further objected to the one-sided approach he claimed these three works shared: an incontestable line of demarcation between the heroes (the Rosenbergs, the Hollywood Ten) and the villains (Nixon, McCarthy, HUAC). Such bias, he felt, resulted in sins of omission. There is no mention, for example, of "the other blacklist," which prevented anti-Communist liberals who

protested Stalinism from publishing in certain journals and from being considered for certain teaching positions. Kazin in his Esquire column (August 1977) was downright damning: "Scoundrel Time is historically a fraud, artistically a put-up job and emotionally packed with meanness." What particularly disturbed him was Hellman's "snobbishness," a word that is rarely used in regard to her. One might see how Kazin came to that conclusion: Hellman's style is so depersonalized that it can seem self-effacing and even sanctimonious. An author writing about herself as dispassionately as Hellman does appears more admirable than one who has been pricked by the thorns of life and bleeds on every page. In Scoundrel Time, Hellman is on the side of the angels; and while her adversaries are not satanic (she does not think in terms of heroes and villains, despite Kramer's allegation), they fail to live up to the standards set by herself or by Hammett. Hellman did not intend to make Clifford Odets and Elia Kazan seem inadequate; she merely recorded incidents that did not show them at their best: Odets announcing at a restaurant that he would tell the members of HUAC to "go fuck themselves," which, of course, he did not and, instead, recanted and named names; Kazan commenting that Hellman could do what she wanted at the hearing because she had probably spent whatever money she had earned. Kazin also objects to Hellman's portrait of Dashiell Hammett. Whether one considers Hammett the hero of her trilogy (he plays a major role in each memoir) depends on the degree of heroism one finds in: managing to enlist in the service at the age of forty-eight; willingly going to jail; telling Howard Fast he would get more out of his jail sentence if he took off his crown of thorns. With academe's official recognition of detective fiction as a literary genre, Hammett's position seems secure. How much Hellman has actually done for his reputation, aside from edit-

296 / AMERICAN ing a collection of his works, is another matter. She writes about him with a natural bias, and therefore those qualities and attitudes that others might find ordinary become exemplary in her eyes. What Kramer and Kazin failed to realize is that, as a playwright, Hellman was following the Aristotelian principle of selecting one episode for dramatization and having the others revolve around it or be subordinate to it. However, Aristotle was speaking of myth, not history; and the dramatization of each of these should not be treated in the same manner. A myth can be selfcontained, but the roots of history are constantly subdividing. In Scoundrel Time Hellman centered an era around herself, invariably incurring the wrath of those who think the individual is too inconsequential to be a spokesman for the age in which he is living. Calling the book a "history" (by which she really meant a historical memoir) would make a true historian bristle. That so slight a book could cause such rabid controversy only proves that the agon between liberals and conservatives, the right wing and the left, is as perennial—perhaps even as archetypal—as the ageless conflict between Apollo and Dionysus. One who writes about a period in which one has played an actual part will win the applause of those who believe the author's experiences epitomize the age and the condemnation of those who believe the author has sold the age short. A moderate assessment of Scoundrel Time would simply be that it is a record of the author's role in a specific historical event which she considers representative of an entire era, assuming even greater importance because of its consequences (Vietnam and Watergate). Much of the book is well reasoned, although the writing is undistinguished (often the problem with Hellman's nondramatic prose style). Despite its stylistic defects, there is an integrity about Scoundrel Time that is often saddening because it conjures up the image of Cassie Bow-

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man, Hellman's persona and in many respects a self-portrait, who wants a world that has been traditionally apathetic to "do something." And so Hellman speaks out and signs petitions. Yet throughout her memoirs, she calls herself apolitical and denies she is a radical, although she secretly wishes she were. An "aimless rebel" is how she describes herself; a woman whose "political convictions were never very radical, in the true, best, serious sense." Hellman admits she had her blind spots over the years, one of which was Stalinism. Like many liberals of the 1930's, she had great hopes for Russia after the Revolution; but her initial sympathy changed to disillusionment when she saw how the state curtailed the freedom of the people. She also confesses to political naivete; when she was in the Soviet Union in 1937, she was unaware of the purges that were taking place. She does not repent of her views on communism; Scoundrel Time is notPentimento. Most of the Communists she knew wanted "to make a better world." Her main objection to American Communism was that it was imitative: "American Communists accepted Russian theory and practice with the enthusiasm of a lover whose mistress cannot complain because she speaks few words of his language: that may be the mistress many men dream about, but it is for bed and not for politics." To admit that one is neither radical nor political at a time when waves of nostalgia have made martyrs of those who were blacklisted or who survived with their reputations—and sometimes their incomes—intact is a mark of integrity. Hellman will not capitalize on America's bad memory. That liberals have nearly regarded her book as holy writ and conservatives as her own white paper suggest that neither has really read it. By representing the victims of one blacklist, she aroused the indignation of the victims of "the other blacklist." Such is the price one pays

LILLIAN HELLMAN I 297 for being, as the cliche goes, a mirror of the age. Like many minor works that assume major proportions, Scoundrel Time made Lillian Hellman a force to be reckoned with. She has become so formidable that Little, Brown and Company asked that Diana Trilling remove some anti-Hellman references from her book We Must March My Darlings, or they could not publish it. Trilling refused and the book was published elsewhere. The passages are hardly damning; and Hellman was correct in saying it would make no difference if they were printed. Trilling thought Hellman's intellect had seen better days and accused her of being unable to understand the Russian mind. Hellman had also received a fair share of adulation from feminists who include her in their pantheon and from the motion picture industry which gave her a standing ovation as she walked onstage at the 1977 Academy Awards presentations. Hellman has no need of an entourage, particularly one that knows her only as the strong woman who stood up to HUAC. Scoundrel Time makes it clear that she was nervous, and the transcript of the hearing hardly reads like courtroom melodrama. Hellman's reputation does not rest on three easy-to-read memoirs which make no great intellectual demands, but on twelve plays, the best of which (The Children's Hour, The Little Foxes, The Searching Wind, Another Part of the Forest, and The Lark, which can be thought of as hers rather than Anouilh's) are models of dramaturgy and worthy of revival. Because she respects her art, she constructs a play as if it were a temple, working slowly from foundation to roof. It is art in the Aristotelian sense of the word (techne)—skill, craft, technique—that characterizes Hellman's work.

Selected Bibliography WORKS OF ULUAN HELLMAN PLAYS

The Children's Hour. New York: Random House, 1934. Days to Come. New York: Random House, 1936. The Little Foxes. New York: Random House, 1939. Watch on the Rhine. New York: Random House, 1941. The North Star. New York: Viking, 1943. The Searching Wind. New York: Viking, 1944. Another Part of the Forest. New York: Viking, 1947. Montserrat. New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1950. The Autumn Garden. Boston: Little, Brown, 1951. The Lark. New York: Random House, 1956. Candide. New York: Random House, 1957. Toys in the Attic. New York: Random House, 1960. My Mother, My Father and Me. New York: Random House, 1961. PROSE

An Unfinished Woman. Boston: Little, Brown, 1969. Pentimento: A Book of Portraits. Boston: Little, Brown, 1973. Scoundrel Time. Boston: Little, Brown, 1976. COLLECTED

EDITIONS

The Collected Plays. Boston: Little, Brown, 1972.

CRITICAL AND BIOGRAPHICAL STUDIES Adler, Jacob H. Lillian Hellman. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1969. Bentley, Eric. Thirty Years of Treason. New York: Viking, 1971. Falk, Doris V. Lillian Hellman. New York: Ungar, 1977. Felheim, Marvin. "The Autumn Garden: Mechanics and Dialectics," Modern Drama, 3:191-95 (1960). Kazin, Alfred. "The Legend of Lillian Hellman," in Esquire, 88:2&-30, 34 (August 1977).

298 I AMERICAN WRITERS Kramer, Hilton. 'The Blacklist and the Cold War," in New York Times, 28 September 1976. Moody, Richard. Lillian Hellman: Playwright. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1972. Phillips, Elizabeth C. "Command of Human Destiny as Exemplified in Two Plays: Lillian Hellman's

The Little Foxes and Lorraine Hansberry *sA Raisin in the Sun" Interpretations, 4:29-39 (1972). Stern, Richard G. "Lillian Hellman on her Plays," Contact, 3:113-19(1959). —BERNARD F. DICK

Oliver Wendell Holmes 1809-1894

PHHYSICIAN, professor of anatomy and physiol-

and farthest away, at least in spirit, was the gentle John Greenleaf Whittier, at home ' 'among the hills," not on Beacon Street. Holmes was of Boston, and his achievement must largely be measured in terms of that city; in very striking ways its virtues were his, and so were its faults. The problem of Boston, to use Martin Green's apt phrase, must fascinate any student of American life. In the minds of many, the name designates not so much a place as an idea to be revered, to be rejected, or, perhaps most wisely, to be wondered at. The values of Boston are those Friedrich Nietzsche asked us to associate with the Apollonian aspects of culture: order, goodwill, reason, education, culture, decorum. Here, literature too easily became an art, music was too much of the concert hall, painting and the plastic arts merely decorative. This excessive institutionalizing of culture led T. S. Eliot to describe Boston society as "quite uncivilized—but refined beyond the point of civilization." And it was to this that Henry Adams had earlier objected with none too subtle irony:

ogy, psychologist, author, conversationalist, wit, and, not least, occupant of the BreakfastTable, Oliver Wendell Holmes, when remembered at all today, is remembered as the laureate of Boston. Recalling the customary tribute of the British court to its official poet, the historian John Lothrop Motley declared that Boston should vote Holmes a yearly butt of sack. It was a post Holmes desired, worked hard to get, performed admirably, and greatly enjoyed. Of the New England men of letters in the nineteenth century, Holmes was preeminently the Bostonian. Although born in Boston, Ralph Waldo Emerson was ambivalent in his feelings toward the city; and the most creative years of his life were spent in Concord. Henry David Thoreau passed some months of his early youth in Boston; but, as he writes in his Journals, it was at Walden Pond that his "youthful spirit . . . found its proper nursery," not in the "tumultuous and varied city" of Boston. Long associated with Boston in the minds of some earnest readers, James Russell Lowell was always careful to point out that his Cambridge was not the trolley car extension of Boston it became in the last decades of the nineteenth century, but the rural village of the 1820's and 1830's. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was of Portland, Maine, "the beautiful town / That is seated by the sea";

Viewed from Mount Vernon Street, the problem of life was as simple as it was classic. Politics offered no difficulties, for there the moral law was a sure guide. Social perfection was also sure, because human nature worked for Good, and three instruments were all she asked—Suffrage,

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300 I AMERICAN Common Schools, and Press. On these points doubt was forbidden. Education was divine, and man needed only a correct knowledge of facts to reach perfection. . . . Nothing quieted doubt so completely as the mental calm of the Unitarian clergy. In uniform excellence of life and character, moral and intellectual, the score of Unitarian clergymen about Boston, who controlled society and Harvard College, were never excelled. They proclaimed as their merit that they insisted on no doctrine, but taught, or tried to teach, the means of leading a virtuous, useful, unselfish life, which they held to be sufficient for salvation. For them, difficulties might be ignored; doubts were waste of thought; nothing exacted solution. Boston had solved the universe, or had offered and realized the best solution yet tried. The problem was worked out. Whether or not Adams' description is true to the reality, it is true to the idea of Boston as represented in the life and writings of Holmes. For Holmes, Boston was the symbol of the New World and its virtues; it was a God-ordained city, the city on the hill envisioned by its founders. It carried the banners of progress, of freedom, and of enlightenment. In Urania: A Rhymed Lesson (1846), Holmes declared the city to be the victorious result of mankind's long struggle against barbarism and ignorance: An Angel, floating o'er the waste of snow That clad our Western desert, long ago, (The same fair spirit who, unseen by day, Shone as a star along the Mayflower's way,)— Sent, the first herald of the Heavenly plan, To choose on earth a resting-place for man,— Tired with his flight along the unvaried field, Turned to soar upwards, when his glance revealed A calm, bright bay enclosed in rocky bounds, And at its entrance stood three sister mounds. The Angel spake: "This threefold hill shall be The home of Arts, the nurse of Liberty!

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One stately summit from its shaft shall pour Its deep-red blaze along the darkened shore; Emblem of thoughts that, kindling far and wide, In danger's night shall be a nation's guide. At times, Holmes could show self-irony, as in this letter to James Russell Lowell: We Boston people are so bright and wide-awake, and have been really so much in advance of our fellow-barbarians with our Monthly Anthologies, and Atlantic Monthlies, and North American Reviews, that we have been in danger of thinking our local scale was the absolute one of excellence—forgetting that 212 Fahrenheit is but 100 Centigrade. But, in the end, one realizes that Boston was indeed for Holmes the "hub of the solar-system, '' * 'the centre of the universe.'' The point of view it offered was sufficient; from his library window he could "look out on all creation, Bunker Hill, and the spires of Cambridge, and Mount Auburn, and the wide estuary commonly called Charles River,—we poor Bostonians come to think at last that there is nothing like it in the orbis terrarum." What redeems Holmes from smugness and complacency, the penalty of a provincial mind, are his wit and intelligence, and the character of a man whom the elder Henry James addressed as "intellectually the most alive man I know." Holmes was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on August 29, 1809, the son of the Rev. Abiel Holmes, historian and Congregational minister, and Sarah Wendell, through whom Holmes could trace his ancestry to the Puritan poet Anne Bradstreet. Family was important to Holmes, and his was particularly good—even aristocratic in New England terms—priestly and mercantile. He had, in his own words, "a right to be grateful for a probable inheritance of good instincts, a good name, and a bringing up in a library where he bumped about among books

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES I 301 from the time when he was hardly taller than one of his father's or grandfather's folios." Cambridge was an unusual place for the son of a conservative, orthodox minister to be reared. The religion of the environs of Boston was, as Adams' observations indicate, liberal, Unitarian; that professed by the elder Holmes was Calvinism of the Jonathan Edwards sort. But Abiel Holmes was a scholar, a good one for the time and place; and while his religious teachings might have been more widely accepted in the rural areas of New England, his temperament suited him for the intellectual atmosphere of Harvard. For his son the conditions of youth "were quite exceptional": the harshness of the Calvinistic creed on the one hand, and the softening influence of Unitarianism on the other. The conflicts in Holmes's psyche caused by his father's religion were profound, and did much to shape both the substance and the style of his life and thought. Though "the presumption is that [children of clergymen] will adhere to the general beliefs professed by their fathers," Holmes was too keen an observer of human life to have failed to see how rare such adherence is. By the time he enrolled at Harvard in 1825, at the age of sixteen, Holmes had abandoned the religious dogmas taught by his father from the pulpit of the First Church in Cambridge; but the cost was high. As he confessed to Harriet Beecher Stowe, another minister's child, "I do not believe you or I can ever get the iron of Calvinism out of our souls." A religious system that offered "no warmth of feeling, no joy in believing, no love of religious exercises, no disposition to praise and glorify God, no assurance of faith" will "render every humble Christian so doubtful of his own state that 'the peace which passeth all understanding' becomes a phrase without meaning." Reprobation, total depravity, eternal suffering: "What heathenism," Holmes asked, "has ever approached the horrors of this conception of human destiny?" In his "Autobiographical Notes"

written shortly before his death, Holmes took care to analyze his youthful religious experience, and there gave a key to many of the essential features of his life and personality: No child can overcome these early impressions without doing violence to the whole mental and moral machinery of his being. He may conquer them in after years, but the wrenches and strains which his victory has cost him leave him a cripple as compared with a child trained in sound and reasonable beliefs. Holmes's father was by all accounts a good, even a kind, man who in his preaching avoided as much as he could the harsh doctrines of the Calvinistic system; his son, hurt and angered by his father's professed beliefs, nevertheless felt the father's gentleness and his love for his children. He increasingly came to transfer the rage against his father to the greatest spokesman of the New England church, Jonathan Edwards, the theologian who saw man as "competent to commit an infinite amount of sin" but unable to "perform the least good action." Edwards' writings became an obsession with Holmes, and his condemnation of them was total. When [Edwards] presents us a God, in whose sight children, with certain not too frequent exceptions, "are young vipers, and are infinitely more hateful than vipers;" when he gives the most frightful detailed description of infinite and endless tortures which it drives men and women mad to think of prepared for ' 'the bulk of mankind; '' when he cruelly pictures a future in which parents are to sing hallelujahs of praise as they see their children driven into the furnace, where they are to lie "roasting" forever,—we have a right to say that the man who held such beliefs and indulged in such imaginations and expressions is a burden and not a support in reference to the creed with which his name is associated. Holmes's attack on his father's religion was the most impassioned and prolonged gesture of

302 I AMERICAN his life. Essays like "Jonathan Edwards" (1880) and "The Pulpit and the Pew" (1881) are diatribes rarely relieved by Holmes's customary wit and genial humor. The fictional characters in his novels who support orthodox Calvinism are presented in such a manner as to elicit no sympathy, no understanding from the reader. Such poems as "The Moral Bully" (1850) and "The Deacon's Masterpiece," even when one recognizes that they are directed against more than Calvinism, possess in their satirical vigor an intensity rarely found, and not belonging, in Holmes's other verse. In every important aspect of life, Holmes revolted against what his father stood for, at least as the son's imagination conceived his father's life; the younger Holmes chose a career in science rather than religion; a life in the world, not of the spirit; the celebration of civilized man, not the acknowledgment of mankind's depravity. But, in the end, Holmes's position on the question that has nagged philosophers and poets from the beginning of our common history was not greatly different from his father's and Edwards': To what degree does the individual determine his actions and the pattern those actions make? The answer from all three was "very little.'' The difference is, of course, the method each pursued; for Edwards and the elder Holmes it was through the writings of certain of the Church Fathers, while for the younger Holmes it was modern science, especially the insights of medicine. After graduating from Harvard in 1829, having distinguished himself academically and enjoying great popularity, Holmes turned to the study of law, but soon abandoned it for medicine. Medical education in the United States in the 1830rs was still in a primitive stage, but the training in Boston under the tutelage of such physicians as James Jackson and Jacob Bigelow was good. During his three years of study at Harvard Medical School, Holmes was excellently prepared according to the standards of the day.

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It was at this time that Holmes's poetry began attracting public recognition; but since the young poet refused to sign his name to the pieces that were widely reprinted in newspapers, few outside Boston knew them to be his. "The Height of the Ridiculous" (1830), "The Spectre Pig" (1830), "My Aunt" (1831), and "The Last Leaf" (1831) were enthusiastically welcomed by their first readers and enjoy popularity among those who encounter them today. But Holmes's most popular poem from these years is "Old Ironsides" (1830). Written to protest the threatened dismantling of the frigate Constitution, perhaps the most famous vessel in the United States Navy, the poem became one of the great declamatory pieces in nineteenth-century schoolrooms. A raised arm was the standard gesture for the recitation of the first stanza: Ay, tear her tattered ensign down! Long has it waved on high, And many an eye has danced to see That banner in the sky; Beneath it rung the battle shout, And burst the cannon's roar;— The meteor of the ocean air Shall sweep the clouds no more. These patriotic lines helped save the ship in 1831, and their fame since has assured its preservation. But, just as in later life, Holmes considered poetry during these early years as merely a pastime. If one remembers the original meaning of the term "amateur," the sense it still retains in French, then that word describes Holmes's career as a poet well; he was a lover of poetry, but it was not the passion of his life. In 1833 Holmes sailed for France, where he continued his study of medicine under the eminent teachers Pierre Charles Alexandre Louis, Frangois Broussais, Gabriel Andral, and JeanNicolas Marjolin. Paris offered the best medical training in the world; Holmes found the scientific atmosphere there electrifying, especially when

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES I 303 contrasted with the languid one of America. He wrote home several months after his arrival: "Merely to have breathed a concentrated scientific atmosphere like that of Paris must have an effect upon anyone who has lived where stupidity is tolerated, where mediocrity is applauded, and where excellence is deified." During his two years in Paris, Holmes devoted himself to his studies with an intense dedication he would never again experience. The years were well spent; from Louis, of whom Holmes became a disciple, he learned the principles that would characterize his own teaching and medical writings: "not to take authority when I can have facts; not to guess when I can know; not to think a man must take physic because he is sick." After his return to America, Holmes received the M.D. degree from Harvard in 1836 and established a private practice in Boston. The same year he brought out the collection Poems, thereby publicly acknowledging his previously unsigned verse. Perhaps it was not the wisest thing for a young physician to call attention to himself as a poet, at least in New England, where, James Russell Lowell observed, a new ventilation system was valued more than a great poem. Holmes must have realized this, for in the preface to the little volume he made his farewell to his audience: I now willingly retire to more quiet labors, which, if less exciting, are more certain to be acknowledged as useful and received with gratitude; thankful that, not having staked all my hopes upon a single throw, I can sleep quietly after closing the last leaf of my little volume. But medicine would not prove so engrossing as Holmes imagined, and after a short time he was again amusing his readers with verse. Winning the Boylston Prize for medical essays in both 1836 and 1837—the 1836 essay, "Facts and Traditions Respecting the Existence of Indigenous Intermittent Fever in New England,"

was considered by one authority in 1944 as "still the best regional history of malaria thus far written"—Holmes attracted the attention of the trustees of Dartmouth College, who appointed him professor of anatomy and physiology in 1838. Holmes had never been happy with a practice (he finally gave his up in 1849), preferring not only the security that a professorship offered but also its scholarly basis. It is also true that his indefatigable humor made him an undesirable physician for patients who took their ailments with vigorous seriousness. In "Nux Postcoenatica"(1848) Holmes wrote: Besides—my prospects—don't you know that people won't employ A man that wrongs his manliness by laughing like a boy? And suspects the azure blossom that unfolds upon a shoot, As if wisdom's old potato could not flourish its root? . . . It's a vastly pleasing prospect, when you're screwing out a laugh, That your very next year's income is diminished by a half, And a little boy trips barefoot that Pegasus may go, And the baby's milk is watered that your Helicon may flow! Though the position at Dartmouth required Holmes to be absent from Boston only fourteen weeks a year, he resigned his post in 1840; on June 15 of that year he married Amelia Jackson, daughter of Judge Charles Jackson of Boston and niece of James Jackson, Holmes's teacher at Harvard Medical School. Between 1840 and 1847, Holmes pursued his private practice, lectured on the lyceum platform, dabbled in verse, and wrote medical essays, two of which won him both fame and notoriety: "Homoeopathy and Its Kindred Delusions" (1842) and "The Contagiousness of Puerperal Fever" (1843).

304 I AMERICAN Throughout his life Holmes attacked the scientific pretensions of homeopathy, a system of medical treatment popular in the nineteenth century; it taught that diseases are cured by minute doses of an agent that in healthy persons would produce symptoms resembling the diseases being treated. Viewing homeopathy as merely another form of medical quackery, Holmes showed in "Homoeopathy and Its Kindred Delusions," not by ridicule but by the argument of factual evidence, that the system had no scientific basis. Its very impossibility, he asserted, was the reason for its popularity: 'There is a class of minds much more ready to believe that which is at first sight incredible, and because it is incredible, than what is generally thought reasonable." The absurd pretensions of homeopathy were not so much the object of Holmes's opposition; it was, rather, the fact that the well-being of a patient was jeopardized: "I cannot treat as insignificant any opinions bearing on life." Holmes's greatest contribution to medicine, and one that involved him in controversy for nearly two decades, was his work in proving that puerperal fever, commonly known as childbed fever, was a contagious disease "frequently carried from patient to patient by physicians and nurses." Holmes was not alone in his position— European doctors, most notably Ignaz Semmelweiss in Vienna, were at the same time arguing the disease's contagion; but his persuasive presentation of evidence and his temperate tone in argument were responsible for saving thousands of lives in America. He realized that his opponents based their case not so much on a scientific evaluation of facts as on the human necessity for self-justification, self-defense; physicians, generally good men who chose to dedicate their lives to healing, were told they unwittingly brought death to their patients. The essay succeeds at a high rhetorical level; excessive sentiment is eschewed, and only at the end does Holmes appeal to his listeners' emotions:

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It is as a lesson rather than as a reproach that I call up the memory of these irreparable errors and wrongs. No tongue can tell the heart-breaking calamity they have caused; they have closed the eyes just opened upon a new world of love and happiness; they have bowed the strength of manhood into the dust; they have cast the helplessness of infancy into the stranger's arms, or bequeathed it, with less cruelty, the death of its dying parent. There is no tone deep enough for regret, and no voice loud enough for warning. In 1847 Holmes was appointed Parkman professor of anatomy and physiology at Harvard Medical School, a chair—he referred to it as a settee—he held until his retirement in 1882 (the title was changed to Parkman professor of anatomy in 1871, a separate chair for physiology being established several years later). Holmes was an extremely popular teacher during his thirty-five years at Harvard, and he was also a highly effective one. He alone of the faculty was certain to draw full classes, even at the most unpopular hour of the day (and classes were large, with as many as 300 students). His published lectures, especially the introductory ones he gave to the newly arrived medical classes, and the accounts of his students also testify to and illustrate the reasons for his popularity. Typical of the praise are the remarks of David W. Cheever, Holmes's student and for many years afterward his demonstrator in the classroom: As a lecturer he was accurate, punctual, precise, unvarying in patience over detail, and though not an original anatomist in the sense of a discoverer, yet a most exact descriptive lecturer; while the wealth of illustration, comparison, and simile he used was unequalled. Hence his charm; you received information, and you were amused at the same time. He was always simple and rudimentary in his instruction. His flights of fancy never shot over his hearers' heads. "Iteration and reiteration" was his favorite motto in teach-

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES I 305 ing. . . .If witty, he could also be serious and pathetic; and he possessed the high power of holding and controlling his rough auditors. Holmes's metaphors, epigrams, and striking analogies were soon well known throughout the profession. Typical is this description of the deltoid: "that powerful muscle that comes down on the shoulder like a constable's fist." His characterization of the catalytic agency is as sound as it is clever: "this priestly office of chemical nature which gives to one body the power of marrying innumerable pairs of loving atoms, itself standing apart in elemental celibacy." Apt comparisons abound: "Medication without insuring favorable hygienic conditions is like amputation without ligatures." And there were the inevitable puns: "It entered into my original plan to treat of the [homeopathic] doctrine relating to Psora, or itch,—an almost insane conception, which I am glad to get rid of, for this is a subject one does not care to handle without gloves." It must be admitted that the more serious and earnest students, eager for knowledge, were sometimes irritated by Holmes's classroom performances; but this was inevitable, and its occurrence was deliberate on Holmes's part. He was educating doctors, not scientists. He said in his 1867 lecture, "Scholastic and Bedside Teaching": "The business of a school like this is to make useful working physicians, and to succeed in this it is almost as important not to overcrowd the mind of the pupil with merely curious knowledge as it is to store it with useful information." One has to remember who Holmes's students were. Less than one-fourth had graduated from college, and many were only half-educated country boys. They came to his lectures to learn the essentials of two subjects—anatomy and physiology—in less than four months. Holmes had the pedagogical wisdom to realize that the right epigram, the right illustration, the right analogy were better than the technical language

of a medical treatise to fix in the minds of his students the vitally important facts they would need in their practices; and he had both the literary talent and the medical knowledge to be able to say it properly. One must not exaggerate Holmes's contribution to science; he was not a discoverer but an interpreter, a teacher. What impresses the nonprofessional reader of his medical essays a century after their original appearance is not only their charm, infectious wil, and eloquence but also their sanity and pervading good sense. Of the score or so of essays, two—"Homoeopathy and Its Kindred Delusions" and "Currents and Counter-Currents in Medical Science" (1860)—are still timely, and will remain so until medicine is rid of charlatanism and people stop poisoning themselves with unnecessary drugs, whether they be prescription or over-the-counter. "I firmly believe," he said in the 1860 essay, "that if the whole materia medica, as now used, could be sunk to the bottom of the sea, it would be all the better for mankind,—and all the worse for the fishes." The italicized words are important; the stinger at the end is an inspiration. Holmes's talent as a lecturer made him a successful figure on the lyceum circuit, and between 1850 and 1856 he lectured throughout the northeastern states. It was a rigorous life, lecturing to his medical classes five days a week in Boston, then boarding a train for some little town whose citizens he would address in the evening on subjects not only medical but also literary and of a general nature. The lyceum lectures, a system of adult education as well as a form of entertainment for residents of isolated villages, had begun in the 1820's and by the 1850's were a lucrative business for the more popular speakers. Holmes was in his element; as a schoolboy he had been an "inveterate whisperer," and now in maturity people paid to hear him talk. Nineteenth-century America loved good talk; "The first material production of America," Holmes told one audi-

306 I AMERICAN WRITERS ence, "is not a church, or children, or a jackknife, but a stump. And the first intellectual product is a man to get upon it and make a speech." An essential part of any educational curriculum in Holmes's time was declamation, and no public ceremony was complete without orations of a length that staggers the modern imagination. Holmes's greatest triumph as lecturer was achieved when, invited by the Lowell Institute of Boston, he gave a series of twelve lectures in 1853 entitled "The British Poets." So popular were these talks on nineteenth-century poets that Holmes was obliged to give each lecture twice so that all who had purchased tickets could hear. The lectures as criticism are slight, but as platform performances they were extraordinary. One reporter was moved to write: The brilliant little doctor is a great favorite with Boston—she considers him, so to speak, one of her crown jewels. . . . The Holmes diamond had no sooner appeared upon the crimson velvet of the Lowell pulpitum, than a jocular feeling took possession of the audience. His peculiar magnetism makes itself felt before his voice is heard. Boston was indeed proud of Holmes. In a place where conversation—perhaps monologue is the more appropriate term—was taken as seriously as the other arts, Holmes achieved the reputation, along with James Russell Lowell and Longfellow's brother-in-law, Thomas Gold Appleton, of being a master. The adjectives that his admirers repeatedly used to describe his talk were "inventive," "witty," "spontaneous," and "elegant." Above all, it was fun; the British writer, Sir Leslie Stephen, said that Holmes's "sole aim was to hit the mark if possible, but, if a shot hit a head also, he showed a childlike pride in the achievement." As an inventor of epigrammatic witticisms, Holmes has few equals in American letters—perhaps only Benjamin

Franklin. Fortunately, many have found their way from his conversation into print: Put not your trust in money, but put your money in trust. Man has his will,—but woman has her way. Habit is a labor saving device which enables man to get along with less fuel. Sin has many tools, but a lie is the handle that fits them all. It is the province of knowledge to speak and it is the privilege of wisdom to listen. Knowledge and timber shouldn't be much used till they are seasoned. The young man knows the rules, but the old man knows the exceptions. To be seventy years young is sometimes far more cheerful and hopeful than to be forty years old. Insanity is often the logic of an accurate mind overtaxed. In 1857 Holmes's fame still was mostly in New England; but with the founding that year of the Atlantic Monthly, which immediately surpassed in quality all of its competitors, Holmes's name became known on both sides of the Atlantic. It was he who gave the journal its title and, to some extent, influenced its outlook. Others had suggested calling the magazine Orient, hoping it would respond to the westward spirit of America at mid-century; but it was many years before the Atlantic escaped the intellectual confines of Boston, and even during the editorship of the midwesterner William Dean Howells in the 1870's, the magazine hardly became national in any strict sense of that term. More important, Holmes contributed to the new venture a series of papers he called "The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table"; and while they did not by themselves make the success of the Atlantic, as some of his overly enthusiastic admirers have insisted, they were an important factor. Meeting one of Holmes's friends at a dinner party in Lon-

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES I 307 don, William Makepeace Thackeray asked if he had read the "Autocrat" papers, observing "that no man in England could now write with the charming mixture of wit, pathos and imagination" one found in Holmes; he thought the papers the best thing in the magazine, and many others agreed. Holmes's achievement in The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table is remarkable; few with a talent so limited in range as his have managed to use it so splendidly. The personal style he had developed over the years in his lectures and conversation found a form that is unique in literature. One may be reminded of the table talks of earlier centuries or of Thomas Love Peacock's Headlong Hall (1816), but such comparisons do more to obscure the book's nature than to illuminate it. The characters are the residents of a boardinghouse in Boston who come together at the breakfast table; the plot is their conversation, though toward the end some love interest between the Autocrat and the Schoolmistress is introduced. It is the apparent spontaneity and casualness of the papers that are most appealing. Though finally it escapes classification, if one were to determine the proper literary genre in which to include the work, it would have to be autobiography. Of the book Holmes said: "The series of papers was not the result of an express premeditation, but was, as I may say, dipped from the running stream of my thoughts." Perhaps the best description of the book is that by George William Curtis: The index of The Autocrat is in itself a unique work. It reveals the whimsical discursiveness of the book, the restless hovering of that brilliant talk over every topic, fancy, feeling, fact; a humming-bird sipping the one honeyed drop from every flower, or a huma, to use its own droll and capital symbol of the lyceum-lecturer, the bird that never lights. There are few books that leave more distinctly the impression of a mind teeming

with riches of many kinds. It is, in the Yankee phrase, thoroughly wide-awake. There is no languor, and it permits none in the reader, who must move along the page warily, lest in the gay profusion of the grove, unwittingly defrauding himself of delight, he miss some flower half-hidden, some gem chance-dropped, some darting bird. Throughout Holmes plays on his favorite topics: the New England character, pseudo science, the folly of logic, human behavior, and religion. Interspersed in these papers are some of his best poems: "Latter-Day Warnings," "The Chambered Nautilus," "The Deacon's Masterpiece ,'' and ' 'Contentment.'' During his life Holmes published nearly 400 poems, the great majority written "to order." No one in American literature surpasses him as an occasional poet. He was called on, mostly by fellow Bostonians, to celebrate almost everything; as he complained to Thomas Wentworth Higginson in 1872: "I have . . . so belabored my own countrymen of every degree with occasional verses that I must have coupled 'name' and 'fame' together scores of times, and made 'story' and 'glory' as intimate as if they had been born twins." He greeted foreign visitors, dedicated libraries, opened jubilees, entertained the American Medical Association, celebrated birthdays, eulogized the dead. He even produced some medicated verses "For the Meeting of the National Sanitary Association, 1860," of which these two stanzas are typical: What though our tempered poisons save Some wrecks of life from aches and ails; Those grand specifics Nature gave Were never poised by weights or scales! God lent his creatures light and air, And waters open to the skies; Man locks him in a stifling lair, And wonders why his brother dies!

308 I AMERICAN This is not good poetry, not even poetry in the sense critics use the word today; but for the occasion the verses were eminently appropriate. Holmes's taste was always sure, as in these stanzas from the poem "For the Dedication of the New City Library, Boston" (1888): These chosen precincts, set apart For learned toil and holy shrines, Yield willing homes to every art That trains, or strengthens, or refines. Here shall the sceptred mistress reign Who heeds her meanest subject's call, Sovereign of all their vast domain, The queen, the handmaid of them all! The largest group of Holmes's occasional verses is the series of forty-four poems he wrote between 1851 and 1889 as poet of the Harvard class of 1829 for its annual reunions. At first the verses were festive in a humorous way, celebrating the bonds of fellowship that existed among "The Boys of '29"; later they became more meditative, memorializing the years and the companions that had departed. Only three of the original fifty-nine members of the class were present at the gathering in 1889, and for that final reunion Holmes wrote "After the Curfew." Knowing his listeners would easily recall Jaques' lines from As You Like It—"All the world's a stage, / And all the men and women merely players: / They have their exits and their entrances"—Holmes begins his valedictory: The Play is over. While the light Yet lingers in the darkening hall, I come to say a last Good-night Before the final Exeunt all. We gathered once, a joyous throng: The jovial toasts went gayly round; With jest, and laugh, and shout, and song, We made the floors and walls resound.

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We come with feeble steps and slow, A little band of four or five, Left from the wrecks of long ago, Still pleased to find ourselves alive. Then follow several stanzas paying tribute to a classmate who had recently died, and the tone they strike is that of pathos: The air seems darkened by his loss, Earth's shadowed features look less fair, And heavier weighs the daily cross His willing shoulders helped us bear. But for the occasion this would have been an inappropriate way to end, and Holmes knows well to return to the mood of the beginning: Why mourn that we, the favored few Whom grasping Time so long has spared Life's sweet illusions to pursue, The common lot of age have shared? In every pulse of Friendship's heart There breeds unfelt a throb of pain,— One hour must rend its links apart, Though years on years have forged the chain. The manuscript indicates that here Holmes paused briefly before reading the final stanza: So ends "The Boys,"—a lifelong play. We too must hear the Prompter's call To fairer scenes and brighter day: Farewell! I let the curtain fall. Until the twentieth century, poetry performed an important social function; as a public event it gave expression to the values, the aspirations, and the pride of the community. As ritual it dignified the proceedings occasioning the poem; as language it had the power to inspire and entertain. Attempts to revivify this ancient tradition have been unsuccessful, and it is difficult for modern man even to appreciate its values. But Holmes's great contemporary did. Long an admirer of Holmes, Emerson considered in his

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES I 309 Journal what it was that brought Holmes success as a public poet: The security with which I read every new poem of Holmes is always justified by its wit, force, and perfect good taste. Dr. Holmes is the best example I have seen of a man of as much genius, who had entire control of his powers, so that he could always write or speak to order: partly from the abundance of the stream, which can fill indifferently any provided channel. Holmes's reputation as a poet is founded today not on his occasional verse but on a dozen or so poems written in the comic mode and on two or three religious poems. His comic stance is positioned midway between sentimental humor and satire; it is genial, sprightly, and witty. It is never profound; rather, it is civilized and refreshing. "The Last Leaf," a favorite of both Edgar Allan Poe and Abraham Lincoln, was written when Holmes was a young man. It is not important, though Holmes is happy to tell us in a note to the poem that the piece "was suggested by the sight of a figure well known to Bostonians," that of Major Thomas Melville, grandfather of Herman Melville, who was "often pointed at as one of the Indians' of the famous 'Boston TeaParty.' " The aspect of the old man reminded Holmes ' 'of a withered leaf which has held to its stem through the storms of autumn and winter, and finds itself still clinging to its bough while the new growths of spring are bursting their buds and spreading their foliage all around it." The portrait is generalized, however; Thomas Melville is lost in the picture of an old man: I saw him once before, As he passed by the door, And again The pavement stones resound, As he totters o'er the ground With his cane

The metrical form immediately strikes the reader as appropriate to the subject, an achievement in which Holmes rightly took much pride. He said that the stanzaic measure was suggested by the short terminal lines of Thomas Campbell's "The Battle of the Baltic" (1802); but the effect is entirely different, and Holmes's handling of the short line is far superior to Campbell's. The drop in tone or the downward lilt effected by the three-syllable third and sixth lines of each stanza not only suggests the unsteady gait of the old gentleman, but also prevents the poem from becoming a pathetic portrait of a man who has survived into a world that has no use for him. Instead, it is human nature itself that is being satirized, but in a loving and gentle way: My grandmamma has said— Poor old lady, she is dead Long ago— That he had a Roman nose, And his cheek was like a rose In the snow; But now his nose is thin, And it rests upon his chin Like a staff, And a crook is in his back, And a melancholy crack In his laugh. I know it is a sin For me to sit and grin At him there; But the old three-cornered hat, And the breeches, and all that, Are so queer! And if I should live to be That last leaf upon the tree In the spring, Let them smile, as I do now, At the old forsaken bough Where I cling.

310 I AMERICAN Similar in its effect is "My Aunt," another poem from the same period. Again it does not matter whether the poem is a portrait of a real person. Its merits are literary, not biographical; and as a literary performance it is exquisite. Holmes was a master of punning or, as he called it, the crime of "verbicide." In its baser use, Holmes thought the pun suited only for casual conversation, the sort he enjoyed every other week at the gatherings of the intellectual pride of Boston, the famous Saturday Club; but in the last line of the first stanza, the common pun is raised to the level of brilliant comic art: My aunt! my dear unmarried aunt! Long years have o'er her flown; Yet still she strains the aching clasp That binds her virgin zone; I know it hurts her,—though she looks As cheerful as she can; Her waist is ampler than her life, For life is but a span. Horace in one of his odes refers to "vitae summa brevis," life's brief span; and during the Renaissance the words became a common catch phrase associated with the vanity of human existence. One finds it in the works of William Shakespeare, Francis Bacon, and other English writers of the seventeenth century; but the phrase would have been more familiarly known to Holmes's contemporaries through its appearance in the New England Primer, the first book read by children in New England for many generations, at least in religiously orthodox households like that of Abiel Holmes: Our days begin with trouble here, Our life is but a span, And cruel death is always near, So frail a thing is man. Holmes's "aunt" was sent by her father, who "Vowed she should make the finest girl / Within

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a hundred miles," to a stylish academy for young ladies, where she was refined into spinsterhood: They braced my aunt against a board, To make her straight and tall; They laced her up, they starved her down, To make her light and small; They pinched her feet, they singed her hair, They screwed it up with pins;— Oh, never mortal suffered more In penance for her sins. The balance in the poem between a satirical cruelty and the pathos of the lonely woman is remarkable. The expected beaux who would have torn "from the trembling father's arms / His allaccomplished maid" did not come, and Holmes ends the poem by making one of the commonest cliches an entirely new thing. Had she married, she would have been happy, And Heaven had spared to me To see one sad, ungathered rose On my ancestral tree. Holmes's poetics, both in theory and in practice, changed little during his life; his tastes were firmly rooted in the conventions of the neoclassical aesthetics of the eighteenth century. In a note to "Poetry: A Metrical Essay," a Phi Beta Kappa poem written in 1836, Holmes confessed that his were the "views of a young person trained after the schools of classical English verse as represented by Pope, Goldsmith, and Campbell, with whose lines his memory was early stocked." A half-century later he wrote in "Poem Read at the Dinner Given to the Author by the Medical Profession" (1883): Friends of the Muse, to you of right belong The first staid footsteps of my square-toed song; Full well I know the strong heroic line Has lost its fashion since I made it mine;

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES I 311 But there are tricks old singers will not learn, And this grave measure still must serve my turn. And so the hand that takes the lyre for you Plays the old tune on strings that once were new. Nor let the rhymester of the hour deride The straight-backed measure with its stately stride; It gave the mighty voice of Dryden scope; It sheathed the steel-bright epigrams of Pope; In Goldsmith's verse it learned a sweeter strain; Byron and Campbell wore its clanking chain; I smile to listen while the critic's scorn Flouts the proud purple kings have nobly worn. The formal symmetry of the heroic couplet that rang so grandly in Holmes's ears and stimulated his imagination from childhood on was, he knew, "hateful to the lawless versificators who find anthems in the clash of blacksmiths' hammers, and fugues in the jangle of the sleigh bells." Holmes found authority for the neoclassical poetic conventions not only in tradition but in science as well. He argues in "The Physiology of Versification: Harmonies of Organic and Animal Life" (1875) that the rhythmical action of respiration "has an intimate relation with the structure of metrical compositions. That the form of verse is conditioned by economy of those muscular movements which insure the oxygenation of the blood is a fact which many have acted on the strength of without knowing why they did so." Observing that the great majority of individuals breathe from sixteen to twenty-four times a minute, the average number being twenty, Holmes advances his argument ingeniously, if not entirely convincingly: The ' 'fatal facility'' of the octosyllabic measure has often been spoken of, without any reference to its real cause. The reason why eight syllable verse is so singularly easy to read aloud is that it

follows more exactly than any other measure the natural rhythm of respiration. . . . It is plain that if one reads twenty lines in a minute, and naturally breathes the same number of times during that minute, he will pronounce one line to each expiration, taking advantage of the pause at its close for inspiration. The danger of octosyllabic lines, Holmes admits, is that "they slip away too fluently, and run easily into a monotonous sing-song." Holmes showed little sympathy for experimentation with verse forms. Having received a copy of Lowell's The Vision of Sir Launfal (1848), he could not refrain from chiding the younger poet: You laugh at the old square-toed heroic sometimes, and I must retort upon the rattlety-bang sort of verse in which you have indulged. I read a good deal of it as I used to go over the kittle-ybenders when a boy, horribly afraid of a slump every time I cross one of its up-and-down humpbacked lines. When later he encountered the poetry of Walt Whitman, Holmes jotted in his notebook "Walt Whitman—mush-bag," and elsewhere referred to Whitman's poetry as literature "camping out." In "To James Russell Lowell" (1889), Holmes asked, with obvious reference to Whitman, "Who is the poet?" . . . is it he whose random venture throws His lawless whimseys into moonstruck prose, Where they who worship the barbarian's creed Will find a rhythmic cadence as they read, As the pleased rustic hears a tune, or thinks He hears a tune, in every bell that clinks? It would be an error to suppose that Holmes completely rejected the Romantic literature of his time; he liked Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Robert Browning, some

312 I AMERICAN of Lord Byron, and John Keats he considered the ''most truly poetic poet of the century." But first and last Holmes was a scientist; and as one commentator has reminded us, we must not forget that when William Cullen Bryant and Lowell were discovering William Wordsworth, Holmes was dissecting cadavers in Paris. As Holmes later confessed when asked to contribute to the Atlantic Monthly: "I . . . felt myself outside of the charmed circle drawn around the scholars and poets of Cambridge and Concord, having given myself to other studies and duties." He was impervious to the Romantic concern with the noumenal or spiritual world. The closest he ever came to a transcendental utterance was the declaration "God wills, and the universe articulates His power, wisdom, and goodness. That is all I know. There is no bridge my mind can throw from the 'immaterial' cause to the 'material' effect." "The Chambered Nautilus" is not only one of Holmes's best poems; it is also one of his most religious, and the religion it professes is deism. The Autocrat, in whose book the poem first appeared, introduces the poem by referring the reader to an illustration in Peter Mark Roget's Animal and Vegetable Physiology Considered with Reference to Natural Theology (1834). Describing the picture of a nautilus shell that shows "the series of enlarging compartments successively dwelt in by the animal that inhabits the shell," the Autocrat asks: "Can you find no lesson in this?" The last chapter of Roget's treatise is titled ' 'Unity of Design,'' the doctrine that had informed the work throughout: The inquiries on Animal and Vegetable Physiology in which we have been engaged, lead to the general conclusion that unity of design and identity of operation pervade the whole of nature; and they clearly point to one Great and only Cause of all things, arrayed in the attributes of infinite power, wisdom, and benevolence, whose mighty

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works extend throughout the boundless regions of space, and whose comprehensive plans embrace eternity. The most popular of the eighteenth-century proofs for the existence of God, the Ideological or design argument, saw in the regularity and order of nature a revelation that the world was created by a supremely intelligent being. The basis of scientific deism, this proof continued in the nineteenth century to be the basis of belief for many. Holmes's friend and Harvard colleague, the zoologist and geologist Louis Agassiz, held as one of his Principles of Zoology (1851) "To study . . . the succession of animals in time, and their distribution in space, is therefore to become acquainted with the idea of God himself." Holmes begins the poem by rejecting the "poetic" point of view based on the Greek myth that the nautilus was equipped with a membrane that could serve as a sail: This is the ship of pearl, which, poets feign, Sails the unshadowed main,— The venturous bark that flings On the sweet summer wind its purpled wings In gulfs enchanted, where the Siren sings, And coral reefs lie bare, Where the cold sea-maids rise to sun their streaming hair. For Holmes, a modernist as well as a scientist, the fact is sufficient; his mind is awed by the material beauty, the architectural perfection of the shell that once encased a living organism. From its "dead lips a clearer note is born / Than ever Triton blew from wreathed horn!" Even today, no one will miss the allusion to Wordsworth's famous sonnet "The World Is too Much with Us" (1807). The great Romantic poet depicts in the octet the materialism he sees characterizing the modern world, a materialism that prevents man from perceiving the beautiful. In the sestet he declares that he would rather be

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES I 313 A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn; So might I, standing on this pleasant lea, Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn; Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea; Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn. What threatens Wordsworth's faith is the very basis of Holmes's (though their understandings of modern materialism were strikingly different), and the lesson of material nature—not even organic nature, since the nautilus is dead—is both positive and progressive: Thanks for the heavenly message brought by thee, Child of the wandering sea, Cast from her lap, forlorn! From thy dead lips a clearer note is born Than ever Triton blew from wreathed horn! While on mine ear it rings, Through the deep caves of thought I hear a voice that sings:— Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul, As the swift seasons roll! Leave thy low-vaulted past! Let each new temple, nobler than the last, Shut thee from heaven with a dome more vast, Till thou at length art free, Leaving thine outgrown shell by life's unresting sea! Impressive as the sentiments are, the poem is even more remarkable for its technical success. The combination in the stanzaic arrangement of the pentameter lines, whose reading is slow and stately because of the frequent occurrence of anapests; the short, trimeter lines; and the final alexandrine line in each stanza produces a rhythm that led one critic to wonder if the rhythm of the poem were not meant "to symbolize the crenulated and scalloped shell of the chambered nautilus.'' Holmes was aware of the unusual and impressive rhythm and, as he wrote to George Ticknor, was "as willing to submit this to criti-

cism as any I have written." The poem has worn well (in spite of Mark Twain's wonderful fun with it in his "Whittier Birthday Speech," 1877), and Whittier's remark upon first reading the poem—that it was "booked for immortality"—appears to have been sound prophecy. Holmes, both by his scientific training and by his temperament, was able to accept the limitations of man's knowledge and the relativity of truth with an ease, almost an enjoyment, that was not characteristic of his time. In the great debate between "science" and "religion" that consumed the emotions of so many in the late nineteenth century, the controversy that centered primarily on the implications of Darwin's investigations into biological evolution, Holmes's role was that of a mediator. He realized better than most of his contemporaries that science, as opposed to the sciences, is not a set of laws but merely a method, an attitude toward reality, a method that is empirical and inductive; his explanation is excellent as usual: "Where facts are numerous, and unquestionable, and unequivocal in their significance, theory must follow them as it best may, keeping time with their step, and not go before them, marching to the sound of its own drum and trumpet." The book in which Holmes the scientist emerges most clearly is The Poet at the Breakfast-Table (1872), the third and last of the "Breakfast-Table" series (The Professor at the Breakfast-Table had been published in 1860). The Poet is the best of the three, a fact that would be commonly recognized had it introduced the breakfast-table characters to the Atlantic Monthly audience. The book is informed throughout by the new thought of the day, the ideas then believed by many to be not only radical but also destructive, and in its quiet, genial way, is an iconoclastic work. In it Holmes attempts to explain to a popular audience Darwin's theory of evolution, the findings of modern psychology, the principles of heredity, the nebular hypothesis

314 I AMERICAN WRITERS of Sir John Herschel—advances in knowledge that were expanding man's world beyond its comfortable confines. Just as he had urged in his essay "Mechanism in Thought and Morals" that since "the study of man has been so completely subject to our preconceived opinions, . . . we have got to begin all over again," Holmes tried in The Poet at the Breakfast-Table to persuade his readers that they need not fear science or knowledge, even though it disturbs old beliefs: "For what is science but the piecemeal revelation,—uncovering,—of the plan of creation, by the agency of those chosen prophets of nature whom God has illuminated from the central light of truth for that single purpose?" The old beliefs, the prejudices that brought misery rather than peace of mind, would in time vanish; and mankind would be the better. For instance, in The Poet at the Breakfast-Table Holmes asks: "What is the secret of the profound interest which 'Darwinism' has excited in the minds and hearts of more persons than dare to confess their doubts and hopes?" His answer must have proven tonic to many of his readers: It is because it restores ' 'Nature'' to its place as a true divine manifestation. It is that it removes the traditional curse from the helpless infant lying in its mother's arms. It is that it lifts from the shoulders of man the responsibility for the fact of death. It is that, if it is true, woman can no longer be taunted with having brought down on herself the pangs which make her sex a martyrdom. If development upward is the general law of the race; if we have grown by natural evolution out of the cave-man, and even less human forms of life, we have everything to hope from the future. That the question can be discussed without offence shows that we are entering on a new era, a Revival greater than that of Letters, the Revival of Humanity. The optimistic basis of Holmes's belief in the essential beauty and benevolence of the universe

was something later generations found difficult to share. Holmes had been born and reared in a world that was to younger writers like Henry Adams and Stephen Crane as distant as the faraway stars. But this should not lead one to underestimate his point of view; it was shared in his time by John Fiske and Walt Whitman and in the twentieth century by the eminent scientistphilosophers Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and Ashley Montagu. Though not nearly so well known as "The Chambered Nautilus," Holmes's 1850 poem "Our Limitations" is in many respects superior to the later composition. Written in heroic couplets, of which Holmes was a master, the poem profoundly illustrates the scientific basis of his religious faith: We trust and fear, we question and believe, From life's dark threads a trembling faith to weave, Frail as the web that misty night has spun, Whose dew-gemmed awnings glitter in the sun. While the calm centuries spell their lessons out, Each truth we conquer spreads the realm of doubt. . . . Eternal Truth! beyond our hopes and fears Sweep the vast orbits of thy myriad spheres! From age to age, while History carves sublime On her waste rock the flaming curves of time, How the wild swayings of our planet show That worlds unseen surround the world we know. The thoughts are strikingly modern; realizing that man is diminished without a God, Holmes tried to keep open the possibility of belief in an age of increasing doubt. Even accepting "our limitations'' to perceive or understand the absolute, he tells man that he need not despair. The discoveries of science were for Holmes liberating, opening new vistas and freedoms for mankind long imprisoned in anachronistic systems; yet, as mentioned earlier, on the question

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES I 315 of the individual's freedom in determining his destiny, Holmes's position in its cruder outlines was almost as deterministic as that of the Calvinism he had rejected as a young man. For many years he hesitated to accept a thoroughgoing psychological deterministic explanation of man's life, and he rejected completely any "mechanical doctrine which makes me a slave of outside influences," especially the predestination dogma of Edwardian Calvinism. But analytic studies of the workings of the will increasingly convinced him that the will is "determined by the infinitely varied conditions of the individual." The more we examine the mechanism of thought, the more we shall see that the automatic, unconscious action of the mind enters largely into all its processes. Our definite ideas are stepping-stones; how we get from one to the other, we do not know: something carries us; we do not take the step. In his essay "Jonathan Edwards" (1880), Holmes proposed that individuals are self-determining and responsible agents in proportion as they feel themselves to be so—"we do certainly have a feeling, amounting to a working belief, that we are free to choose before we have made our choice." But in what was perhaps his last public statement on the freedom of the will, he leaves no doubt as to his position: The more I have observed and reflected, the more limited seems to me the field of action of the human will. Every act of choice involves a special relation between the ego and the conditions before it. But no man knows what forces are at work in the determination of his ego. The bias which decides his choice between two or more motives may come from some unsuspected ancestral source, of which he knows nothing at all. He is automatic in virtue of that hidden spring of reflex action, all the time having the feeling that he is self-determining.

Holmes's determinism was a hopeful one, however, especially in that it removed from mankind the burden of heritable guilt and viewed the "sinner" as one to be cured, not punished. For him human responsibility for sin was, in the words of S. I. Hayakawa, "limited by the accidents of hereditary deficiencies or predispositions, by training, and by what we now call environment." In other words, Holmes's position was very much like that of leading criminologists and social psychologists in the twentieth century. ' 'Treat bad men exactly as if they were insane, Holmes has a medical professor advise his student in Elsie Venner. "They are in-sane, out of health, morally." In order to illustrate and also to popularize these principles, Holmes wrote three novels the central characters of which do not act freely but in response to forces beyond their conscious control: Elsie Venner (1861), The Guardian Angel (1867), and A Mortal Antipathy (1885). As works of fiction, they are failures; his imagination was analytic rather than dramatic, and his grasp of character was superficial. What makes the novels readable are the frequent digressions where Holmes speaks to the reader in the voice of one of his "Breakfast-Table" characters or in the voice of a physician, and the occasional glimpses of New England local color. The fictional schemata are so slight that they can be eliminated with no harm to what is good in the three works; a psychiatrist, Clarence P. Oberndorf, did just this when he excerpted passages from the novels dealing with psychology and, together with his own extensive commentary, made an interesting book, The Psychiatric Novels of Oliver Wendell Holmes, the thesis of which was that Holmes was a notable precursor of Freud. The force of the novels is polemical, so much so that an old lady described one of them to Holmes as 4 'a medicated novel.'' Perhaps they served humanity well at the time of their publication, but today one cannot help regretting that

316 I AMERICAN Holmes expended his special talents in such an uncongenial form. Material that would have worked effectively in a "Breakfast-Table" book is lost in novels that now are of only historical interest. Elsie Venner, if not the best, is at least the best-known of the three, primarily through the frequent reprinting of its first chapter in textbook anthologies. Here Holmes gave his famous definition of "the Brahmin Caste of New England," those "races of scholars among us ... in which aptitude for learning . . . are congenital and hereditary." Holmes's name for this 4 'harmless, inoffensive, untitled aristocracy'' came to be used to describe members of socially prominent, wealthy Bostonian families— Cleveland Amory's "Proper Bostonians"—an error Holmes himself several times pointed out. But clever and sociologically accurate as Holmes's analysis of the Brahmin caste is, it has little relation to the rest of the novel. The story, subtitled A Romance of Destiny, is fantastic, assuming to the utmost the latitude or liberties of romantic fiction. Elsie Venner is a young New England woman born with snakelike qualities as a result of her mother's having been bitten by a snake. She falls in love with Bernard Langdon, a young schoolmaster, and even saves his life when he is bitten by a rattlesnake. But Bernard does not return her love; and after, he rejects her, Elsie dies, having lost in her final illness the ophidian characteristics that have made her life one of grief and misfortune. Many readers were confused by the story; was it, they asked, based on "well-ascertained physiological fact?" to which Holmes answered "no." His intention was, he explained in a preface written for the 1883 revised edition, "to test the doctrine of 'original sin' and human responsibility for the disordered volition coming under that technical denomination." Was Elsie Venner, poisoned by the venom of a crotalus before she was born, morally responsi-

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ble for the "volitional" aberrations, which translated into acts become what is known as sin, and, it may be, what is punished as crime? If, on presentation of the evidence, she becomes by the verdict of the human conscience a proper object of divine pity and not of divine wrath, as a subject of moral poisoning, wherein lies the difference between her position at the bar of judgment, human or divine, and that of the unfortunate victim who received a moral poison from a remote ancestor before he drew his first breath? Such inquiries were bound to offend religious readers of a Calvinistic bent, the ones who had been outraged by the "heresy" and "blasphemy" of The Professor at the Breakfast-Table the year before, and would be with Holmes's later writings. Holmes clipped and pasted in a scrapbook their frequent attacks in the religious press. The plots of the other two novels are more reasonable, but hardly more successful in their working out. Myrtle Hazard, the heroine of The Guardian Angel, is torn by hereditary and environmental forces, but is rescued in the end by a sympathetic guardian; and in A Mortal Antipathy, Maurice Kirkwood suffers from an overwhelming fear of beautiful women, an antipathy that originated when, as a child, he was dropped by his lovely young cousin. He too is saved from the fate of a wretched life by the intervention of love and understanding, not censure and rejection. One hesitates to call these works novels, but that was the genre Holmes was attempting. In the several technical aspects of fiction, Holmes succeeds in only one: setting. His descriptions of New England villages and their people are usually well done, the humorous observations kindly. One hesitates to be too harsh or analytical in judgment of Holmes's attempts at fiction; the humanitarianism of the author, the physician's concern for the well-being of mankind,

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES I 317 and the religious reformer's passionate desire that man live at peace with his soul diminish, at least in human terms, the artistic lack. After his retirement from Harvard in 1882, Holmes continued to write for a faithful audience that had come to accept uncritically anything he would give them. The most interesting work of these final years was the biography of Emerson (1885) that the poet-philosopher's family asked Holmes to write. Except for the chapter on Emerson's poetry, the book is of little use to Emersonians today. While it is friendly, portraying a more personable Emerson than his critics usually picture, Holmes had little understanding of Emerson's thought; the idealism of the one awed and confused the skeptical mind of the other. But, as Eleanor Tilton has pointed out, the family's choice of Holmes as the biographer was for the moment "probably the wisest choice; there was no one who could better play the mediator between Emerson and a scientific generation ready to repudiate him and all his works." In 1886, accompanied by his daughter, Holmes returned to Europe for the first time since his student days in Paris fifty years earlier. His account of the trip, Our Hundred Days in Europe (1887), reads more like a long travel letter to family at home, cataloging people met, sights seen, and honors received, most important being the degrees bestowed on Holmes by the universities of Cambridge, Oxford, and Edinburgh. Holmes enjoyed, perhaps too comfortably, his fame; but he did not overestimate his worth. He desired praise, but it did not make him vain. When he died on October 7, 1894, there were few old friends to mourn his departure. He had become "the last leaf" of his generation, and one cannot imagine he regretted leaving the world in which he had lived so successfully and so happily. On August 5, 1850, a group of picnickers set out for a day's pleasure in the mountainous countryside of the Berkshires in western Mas-

sachusetts. In the party were Evert Duyckinck and Cornelius Mathews, literary figures of New York, the Boston publisher James T. Fields and his wife Annie, and, unlikely as it may seem to us today, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Holmes. As the day drew on, the excursionists scattered over the cliffs, Melville, in the words of Duyckinck, "to seat himself, the boldest of all, astride a projecting low stick of rock while Dr. Holmes peeped about the cliffs and protested it affected him like ipecac." The humor of the observation is rich, and so is its significance. The question of Holmes's importance to us today cannot, and should not, be avoided. He had neither the vision nor the profundity of his great contemporaries; as he wrote to Emerson in 1846, "I have nothing to do with thoughts that roll beyond a certain width or orbit—I know them only by the perturbations their influence occasions in my own narrower range—but my sight is not strong enough to make out their substance." As a prose stylist, Holmes does not begin to measure up to either Washington Irving or James Russell Lowell; his writing too often shows the signs of hurried composition, and his sense of prose structure rarely strikes one as more than rudimentary. His poetry is competent, but Longfellow's and Whittier's are vastly more interesting. Even as a humorist, Holmes is thought by readers to be too old-fashioned, rather "Victorian," lacking the underlying seriousness and sense of the absurd that make Mark Twain one of our contemporaries. Holmes is found wanting not only on literary grounds, but in the ethical quality of his life as well. Modern critics have viewed his political opinions with reproach and disdain. With liberalism the twentieth-century orthodoxy, Holmes's conservative, Federalist sympathies are characterized as naive or, even worse, reactionary, and his refusal to join the abolitionists in their struggle against slavery as a sign of moral insensitivity, even obtuseness. His self-defense when

318 I AMERICAN Lowell rebuked him in 1846 for remaining apart from the reformers—whom Holmes once characterized as "Nature's sanitary commission"—and for not contributing to current reform movements sounds hollow in a time grown accustomed to its writers being engage not only existentially but also politically: I am an out-and-out republican in politics, a firm believer in the omnipotence of truth, in the constant onward struggle of the race, in the growing influence and blessed agency of the great moral principles now at work in the midst of all the errors and excesses with which they are attended . . . . The idea of my belonging to the party that resists all change is an entire misconception. I may be lazy, or indifferent, or timid, but I am by no means one of those (such as a few of my friends) who are wedded for better or for worse to the status quo, with an iron ring that Reason cannot get away unless it takes the finger with it. Only when the Civil War became a common-day reality did Holmes join the cause of Right, True, and Good; and even then his contribution was unexciting, pedestrian: a Fourth of July oration^ "The Inevitable Trial" (1863), and a few, quickly forgotten patriotic verses. Without denying these charges, a case can still be made for the importance of Holmes: he is one of the truly civilized figures in our literature. William Dean Howells recognized this when shortly after Holmes's death he came to summarize his older friend's character in a chapter on Holmes in Literary Friends and Acquaintance (1900): He was not a man who cared to transcend; he liked bounds, he liked horizons, the constancy of shores. If he put to sea, he kept in sight of land, like the ancient navigators. He did not discover new continents; and I will own that I, for my part, should not have liked to sail with Columbus. I think one can safely affirm that as great

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and as useful men staid behind, and found an America of the mind without stirring from their thresholds. It is well for us to be reminded that civilization can have its contented as well as discontented, that to know how to live well at home is as important as to explore the unknown.

Selected Bibliography WORKS OF OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES A complete list of titles of separate publications of Holmes would run to several hundred items. Listed below are the most important titles; omitted are separately printed lectures, public addresses, pamphlets, poems, and broadsides. Also excluded are titles of books by other authors to which Holmes contributed original material. These items can be found in the Currier-Tilton Bibliography listed below. Poems. Boston: Otis, Broaders, 1836. Boylston Prize Dissertations for the Years 1836 and 1837. Boston: Little and Brown, 1838. Urania: A Rhymed Lesson. Boston: Ticknor, 1846. Astraea: The Balance of Illusions. Ticknor, Reed, and Fields, 1850. The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table. Boston: Phillips, Sampson, 1858. The Professor at the Breakfast-Table. Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1860. Currents and Counter-Currents in Medical Science. Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1861. Elsie Venner: A Romance of Destiny. Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1861; rev. ed., Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1883. Songs in Many Keys. Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1862. Soundings from the Atlantic. Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1864. The Guardian Angel. Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1867.

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES / 319 The Poet at the Breakfast-Table. Boston: Osgood, 1872. Songs of Many Seasons. 1862-1874. Boston: Osgood, 1875. John Lothrop Motley. A Memoir. Boston: Houghton, Osgood, 1879. The Iron Gate, and Other Poems. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1880. Medical Essays 1842-1882. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1883. Pages from an Old Volume of Life. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1883. A Mortal Antipathy. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1885. Ralph Waldo Emerson. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1885. Our Hundred Days in Europe. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1887. Before the Curfew and Other Poems. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1888. Over the Teacups. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1891. SELECTED AND COLLECTED EDITIONS

The Writings of Oliver Wendell Holmes. Riverside edition. 13 vols. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1891. The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, edited by H. E. Scudder. Cambridge Edition. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1895. Oliver Wendell Holmes: Representative Selections, edited by S. I. Hayakawa and Howard Mumford Jones. American Writers Series. New York: American Book Company, 1939. The Autocrat's Miscellanies, edited by Albert Mordell. New York: Twayne, 1959.

BIBLIOGRAPHIES Currier, Thomas Franklin. A Bibliography of Oliver Wendell Holmes, edited by Eleanor M. Tilton.

New York: New York University Press, 1953. Menikoff, Barry. "Oliver Wendell Holmes." In Fifteen American Authors Before 1900: Bibliographical Essays on Research and Criticism, edited by Robert A. Rees and Earl N. Harbert. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1971, pp. 207-28.

CRITICAL AND BIOGRAPHICAL STUDIES Arms, George. The Fields Were Green. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1953. Pp. 97-114. Clark, Harry Hayden. "Dr. Holmes: A Reinterpretation." New England Quarterly, 12:19-34 (1939). Howe, M. A. DeWolfe. Holmes of the BreakfastTable. London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1939. Leary, Lewis. "Oliver Wendell Holmes." In The Comic Imagination in American Literature, edited by Louis D. Rubin, Jr. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1973. Pp. 113-26. Martin, John Stephen. "The Novels of Oliver Wendell Holmes: A Re-Interpretation." In Literature and Ideas in America: Essays in Memory of Harry Hayden Clark, edited by Robert Falk. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1975. Pp. 111-27. Morse, John T. Life and Letters of Oliver Wendell Holmes. 2 vols. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1896. Oberndorf, Clarence P. The Psychiatric Novels of Oliver Wendell Holmes. Revised edition. New York: Columbia University Press, 1946. Small, Miriam Rossiter. Oliver Wendell Holmes. New York: Twayne, 1962. Tilton, Eleanor M. Amiable Autocrat: A Biography of Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes. New York: Schuman, 1947.

—THOMAS

WORTHAM

Langston Hughes 1902-1967

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/ANGSTON HUGHES is one of the major black American literary figures of the twentieth century. His writing comprises poetry, fiction, the short story, autobiography, and criticism. It also includes stories for children and young people, black history, translation, and a variety of editorial undertakings. All of Hughes's writing concentrates on the story of the black man in America; his joys, sorrows, and hopes. The story is told with a sadness for the events that have oppressed him but with a sense of optimism for the better world that Hughes knows will come someday. This basic philosophy is well expressed in the closing lines of "I, Too," one of his early poems:

with relatives and family friends in Lawrence, Kansas, following his parents' separation. Money was never plentiful and Hughes was often lonely. But he learned lessons in endurance and pride from his grandmother; the stories she told were full of respect for the Negro race and for people who worked, schemed, and fought. From this experience, as Hughes said in his autobiography, he learned the uselessness of crying. In 1915 Hughes rejoined his mother in Lincoln, Illinois, where he was elected class poet in the grammar school. The honor was conferred, as Hughes explains, because white people think Negroes have rhythm and since a poem has rhythm, Negroes must be able to write poetry. The following year Hughes moved to Cleveland, where his stepfather worked in the steel mills and his mother worked as a waitress. Here Hughes wrote poems in the manner of Paul Laurence Dunbar and Carl Sandburg and contributed them to the school literary magazine, the Belfry Owl. He worked on the school newspaper, joined the track team, and read Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Theodore Dreiser. He was strongly influenced at this time by reading Guy de Maupassant, who, he remembered, inspired him to want to write stories about the Negro so true that they would be understood by people all over the world. At Central High School, Hughes was again elected class poet and in his senior year became editor of the yearbook. The years at Cen-

Tomorrow, I'll be at the table When company comes. Nobody'11 dare Say to me, "Eat in the kitchen," Then. Besides, They'll see How beautiful I am And be ashamed— I, too, am America. James Mercer Langston Hughes was born in Joplin, Missouri, on Feb. 1, 1902, and grew up

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LANGSTON HUGHES I 321 tral High were important in forming his conception of race and literature. He was fortunate in having teachers who taught him that the only way to get a thing done is to keep on doing it until you finish. He was also influenced by a lively mixture of Jewish and Polish friends who introduced him to the political ideas in the Liberator. At this time, Hughes was placed in a very difficult relationship with his father, who had moved to Mexico and become a prosperous landowner. James Nathaniel Hughes hated white supremacy in the United States but hated even more what he perceived to be the lazy, backward people he referred to as niggers. Although the two summers that Hughes spent with his authoritarian father in Mexico were difficult and frustrating, they were also productive. As Hughes said, when he felt bad he wrote a great deal of poetry; when he was happy he didn't write anything. In his autobiography, Hughes describes his second trip to Mexico (1920) and how it felt to roll toward Texas on the train, looking out the window at the Mississippi River and thinking about what that river and others had meant to the Negro people. From these musings came one of his most famous and frequently reprinted poems, "The Negro Speaks of Rivers": I've known rivers: I've known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins. My soul has grown deep like the rivers. I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young. I built my hut near the Congo, and it lulled me to sleep. I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it. I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln went down to New Orleans, and

I've seen its muddy bosom turn all golden in the sunset. I've known rivers: Ancient, dusky rivers. My soul has grown deep like the rivers. The poem tells the proud story of the race, from earliest times to the present, identifying the Negro as important in the history of civilization. The Negro, like the majestic rivers, has a deep and significant place in world culture; and the poem is a hymn to the beauty and endurance of the race. Hughes spent 1920-1921 in Mexico as an English teacher. The bullfights, children's games, and exotic dress of the people on fiesta day all impressed his lively mind. These images resulted in a series of short articles and poems, which he sent to The Brownies' Book, a children's magazine that had just been started in New York by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. These short descriptions of Mexican culture were published early in 1921 and resulted in encouraging letters from the managing editor, Jessie Fauset. With this publication source established, Hughes forwarded her a copy of ' 'The Negro Speaks of Rivers.'' In June 1921, the poem appeared in The Crisis, the official journal of the NAACP, and launched a long aijd fruitful connection with that magazine. Its appearance opened the door to a series of publications that would identify Hughes as one of the young and articulate spokesmen for the Negro race. A number of these early poems, like "Negro," "My People," "Mother to Son," and "The South," describe the historic role of the Negro and his unending struggle against hate and oppression. In "Negro," for example, Hughes describes what it has meant to be a black man down through the ages: I am a Negro; Black as the night is black, Black like the depths of my Africa.

322 I AMERICAN WRITERS I 've been a slave: Caesar told me to keep his door-steps clean. I brushed the boots of Washington. I 've been a worker: Under my hand the pyramids arose. I made mortar for the Woolworth Building. I've been a singer: All the way from Africa to Georgia I carried my sorrow songs. I made ragtime. I 've been a victim: The Belgians cut off my hands in the Congo, They lynch me still in Mississippi. I am a Negro: Black as the night is black, Black like the depths of my Africa. Identifying the race with its proud African heritage, Hughes presents a deep feeling of racial pride in "My People": The night is beautiful, So the faces of my people. The stars are beautiful, So the eyes of my people. Beautiful, also, is the sun. Beautiful, also, are the souls of my people. Throughout his career Hughes often praised the strength and dignity of Negro women who struggle on despite life's obstacles. Nowhere is this belief better expressed than in ' 'Mother to Son,'' first published in The Crisis in December 1922: Well, son, I'll tell you: Life for me ain't been no crystal stair. It's had tacks in it, And splinters, And boards torn up, And places with no carpet on the floor— Bare. But all the time

I'se been a-climbin' on, And reachin' landin's, And turnin' corners, And sometimes goin' in the dark Where there ain't been no light. So boy, don't you turn back. Don't you set down on the steps 'Cause you finds it's kinder hard. Don't you fall now— For I'se still goin', honey, I'se still climbin', And life for me ain't been no crystal stair. Here, as in much of his writing, Hughes speaks from a sincere conviction that being black is a matter of pride. Life is not easy, he says, but with determination and hard work progress can be made. It was this kind of uplifting theme that appealed to the editors and readers of The Crisis and made Hughes a frequent and welcome contributor. Hughes's early publication success did not impress his father. Neither journal paid for contributions, and the elder Hughes regarded everything in relation to the money it brought in. After a lengthy argument with his father over schooling, Hughes was finally allowed to enroll at Columbia University in the fall of 1921. The curriculum was of less interest to the young poet than the proximity of Harlem and Florence Mills singing in Shuffle Along. As might have been expected, Hughes failed most of his classes and fell in love with the streets and people of Harlem. After the first year, he left Columbia and took a variety of jobs—office boy, clerk, waiter, busboy, flower boy—in and around the city, finally shipping out in June 1923 as a cabin boy on a freighter to West Africa. This was a turning point for Hughes, and with one dramatic gesture he rejected the literary life. In The Big Sea he tells how he took all his books to the rail of the S.S. Malone and threw them into the sea. It was a time of growth for Hughes, a time when he

LANGSTON HUGHES I 323 wanted to be free of Columbia, free of the world of books: "I was a seaman going to sea for the first time. . . . And I felt that nothing would happen to me again that I didn't want to happen. I felt grown, a man inside and out." During the next year and a half Hughes led a nomadic life, shipping out on freighters to Europe and Africa, and settling down briefly in Paris. Although he had thrown away all of his books, he was not able to give up writing entirely. He continued to send poems to The Crisis, and at the invitation of the critic Alain Locke submitted a number of verses for publication in a special Harlem issue (March 1925) of the Survey Graphic. The samples that he sent included a number of short poems describing the beauty and freedom that Hughes identified with the ancient and exotic African homeland. In "Dream Variations" the poet longs for the freedom of a less complicated world: To fling my arms wide In some place of the sun, To whirl and to dance Till the bright day is done. Then rest at cool evening Beneath a tall tree While night comes on gently Black like me. That is my dream! This nostalgic look at Africa was typical of the work of many writers of that time. Hughes tried his hand at this theme in a number of poems, but as he later explained, primitivism was not an essential part of his makeup: "I did not feel the rhythms of the primitive surging through me and could not live and write as though I did." More in line with Hughes's optimistic philosophy was "Youth," another short verse published in the Survey Graphic: We have tomorrow Bright before us

Like a flame Yesterday, a night-gone thing A sun-down name. And dawn today Broad arch above the world we came, We march. In this, as in many of his poems, Hughes declares that victory will be achieved only by those who are willing to work for it, to repudiate the past, and to march. It is the same basic message presented in "Mother to Son," "My People," and "I, Too." After returning to the United States, Hughes lived with his mother and brother in Washington, D.C., where he observed all the petty prejudice of that city's black society. The upper-class blacks shunned the lower classes as embarrassingly vulgar. Hughes pointed out, however, that it is these people who can provide authentic and almost unlimited folk material for the Negro artist. They are not well-fed or sophisticated, but they know how to be themselves and to enjoy life as it comes. If the Negro artist will look closely, Hughes says, these "unimportant" people can furnish "a great field of unused material because they still hold their own individuality in the face of American standardization." Hughes took his own advice and in a wide variety of poems, stories, plays, and essays portrayed the common people with all their joys and sorrows. In "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain" (1926), which has become a major statement of the aspiring Negro writers of the time, Hughes claimed that "the younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark skinned selves without fear or shame. . . . We build our temples for tomorrow strong as we know how and we stand on top of the mountain, free within ourselves." Things were going badly for Hughes—and as a result he did a great deal of writing. He did not know what was going to happen next; he did not like his job

324 I AMERICAN WRITERS (working in a laundry for twelve dollars a week), and he was often cold and hungry. The only joy in Washington for Hughes was to be found on 7th Street, in the rhythms of the blues, the shouts of street vendors, and the pulse of black church music. Hughes listened and wrote, transcribing the moods of the people into a series of poems in the manner of the Negro spirituals and blues. One of the trademarks of the blues, as adapted by Hughes, is the ability to see humor in life's serious moments. It is all right to despair for a few minutes, say the blues, but life goes on: I'm goin' down to de railroad, baby, Lay ma head on de track. I'm goin' down to de railroad, babe, Lay ma head down on de track— But if I see de train a-comin', I'm gonna jerk it back. Several events in Hughes's life at this time had a profound influence on his writing. First, he gained public support from two important literary figures, the poet Vachel Lindsay and the critic Carl Van Vechten, and he won first prize in a national poetry competition sponsored by Opportunity magazine. The meeting with Lindsay took place in December 1925 while Hughes was working as a busboy at the Wardman Park Hotel in Washington. Lindsay was dining at the hotel, and the situation gave Hughes the chance to place three of his poems, "Jazzonia," 4 'Negro Dancers," and "The Weary Blues," under the author's plate. Lindsay liked the poems and read them that night to his audience in the hotel theater. The next morning Hughes was interviewed by the Washington press and found that he had been discovered—a Negro busboy poet. Lindsay sent Hughes a note in which he advised him: Do not let any lionizers stampede you. Hide and write and study and think. I know what factions do. Beware of them. I know what flatterers do.

Beware of them. I know what lionizers do. Beware of them. Good wishes to you indeed. While Lindsay's attention was flattering, it was the Opportunity competition that had established Hughes as a recognized writer. The official publication of the National Urban League, Opportunity had sponsored its first literary contest earlier that year with prizes for poetry, short stories, and essays. Hughes submitted several poems and at the last moment decided to include 'The Weary Blues," which he had worked on for a number of years without being completely satisfied. It tells the story of a black musician who sings the blues all night and sleeps off his weariness during the day. The poem is in the traditional blues form, and the first verse is a beautiful invocation of the spirit of the blues— "songs folks make up when their heart hurts. . . . Sad funny songs—too sad to be funny, and too funny to be sad: Droning a drowsy syncopated tune, Rocking back and forth to a mellow croon, I heard a Negro play. Down on Lenox Avenue the other night By the pale dull pallor of an old gas light He did a lazy sway. . . . He did a lazy sway. . . . To the tune o' those Weary Blues. The first prize for the contest was forty dollars, and Hughes spent most of it going to the New York banquet to hear his poem read by James Weldon Johnson, executive director of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. After the banquet Hughes met the theater critic Carl Van Vechten, who said he liked "The Weary Blues" and asked to see more. Van Vechten was well known, and his friends included Blanche and Alfred Knopf, directors of a new publishing firm that was beginning to achieve a strong reputation with well-printed books on literature and the arts. Van Vechten supplied "innumerable editorial

LANGSTON HUGHES I 325 suggestions" to the company; in the case of Negro authors Knopf said, "We relied entirely on Mr. Van Vechten's judgment on James Weidon Johnson, Nella Larsen, Chester Himes, and Langston Hughes." This connection with Van Vechten worked well for Hughes, and the Knopfs published his first book of poetry under the title of his prizewinning poem, "The Weary Blues." In a three-page introduction, Van Vechten pointed out that the author represented a rising group of black artists who had a serious contribution to make to American letters. The book received good reviews from both black and white critics, and one reviewer commented: "If he can go on as he has begun, America bids fair to have a poet worthy of far more than passing mention." Hughes continued to receive prizes and recognition. In 1925 Amy Spingarn, wife of the literary critic Joel Spingarn, provided funds for a series of prizes to be awarded through The Crisis. This time Hughes took second prize for his essay "The Fascination of Cities," based on his European travels, and third prize for a series of jazz poems including "Minstrel Man," "Summer Night," "To a Negro Jazz Band in a Parisian Cabaret," and "Cross." Certainly the most controversial peom and one that continued to disturb critics of both races was the outspoken "Cross," dealing with a mulatto theme: My old Man's a white old man And my old mother's black, If ever I cursed my white old man I take my curses back. If ever I cursed my black old mother And wished she were in hell, I 'm sorry for that evil wish And now I wish her well. My old man died in a fine big house. My ma died in a shack. I wonder where I'm gonna die, Being neither white nor black?

This sentiment was not pleasing to the blacks since it focused attention on a highly explosive situation. For many whites, especially Southern whites, the poem could hardly have been more provocative. The time was right for Hughes and other young Negro writers. There was a rising interest in the black man as an artist, a growing readership for journals like The Crisis and Opportunity, and a social complex in New York City that provided an environment in which blacks could meet influential white reviewers and publishers. It was the time referred to as the Harlem Renaissance or the New Negro Movement. The Negro who wrote, sang, or painted was looked upon as a spokesman for the long-oppressed race. The Negro had a heritage from ancient Africa, he had slave songs to sing and stories of degradation and violence to tell. From the point of view of the whites, some of the support for the Harlem Renaissance came from a sense of guilt. From the point of view of the blacks, the renaissance was truly a rebirth, a chance to enjoy their own culture for the first time. In "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain" Hughes spoke for all black artists when he declared that the young Negro writers, in the spirit of Whitman, intended to celebrate themselves and their culture without fear or shame and without subservience to white or black critics. By the age of twenty-four Hughes had established an enviable record of publication, won two important prizes, published his first book, and become friends with influential reviewers and critics. In assessing the forces at work during this time, he said, "Jessie Fauset at the Crisis, Charles Johnson at Opportunity and Alain Locke in Washington were the three people who midwifed the so called New Negro literature into being." These three were "kind and critical, but not too critical for the young, they nursed us along until our books were born, Countee Cullen, Zora Neale Hurston, Arna Bontemps, Rudolph Fisher, Wallace Thurman, Jean Toomer,

326 I AMERICAN Nella Larsen, all of us came along about the same time." In February 1926, with a scholarship from Amy Spingarn, Hughes enrolled at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania. In contrast to his unhappy year at Columbia, Hughes found the students and faculty much to his liking. That summer he and Wallace Thurman, Zora Hurston, and the illustrator Aaron Douglas planned and issued a "quarterly devoted to the younger Negro artists," called Fire. Designed to rival The Crisis and Opportunity, the new journal was to cast new light on Negro-white ideas and to serve as a vehicle for younger, more radical writers and artists. In "Elevator Boy," one of Hughes's poems published in Fire, there is a resounding note of anger and desperation that would not have been accepted in the more respectable Negro journals. All the elevator boy has to claim as his own is, Two new suits an' A woman to sleep with. Maybe no luck for a long time. Only the elevators Goin' up an' down, Up an' down, Or somebody else's shoes To shine, Or greasy pots in a dirty kitchen. I been runnin' this Elevator too long. Guess I'll quit now. The only published issue of Fire was sold door to door, but the market was not encouraging and black critics like Rean Graves in the Baltimore Afro-American ridiculed the avant-garde material. It was ironic that the entire unsold printing was destroyed within a year in a fire that consumed a Harlem warehouse. "Elevator Boy" was characteristic of a new mood in Hughes's writing and one that appeared frequently in Fine Clothes to the Jew, his second

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book of poetry. By 1927 Hughes had shifted his attention from the imagery of Africa to an examination of the often frustrating lives of common urban blacks. The degrading aspects of racism are forcefully stated in poems like "Brass Spittoons," Clean the spittoons, boy. Detroit, Chicago, Atlantic City, Palm Beach. Clean the spittoons. The steam in hotel kitchens, And the smoke in hotel lobbies, And the slime in hotel spittoons: Part of my life. Hey, boy! A nickel, A dime, A dollar, Two dollars a day. Hey, boy! A nickel, A dime, A dollar, Two dollars Buys shoes for the baby. House rent to pay. Gin on Saturday, Church on Sunday. My God! Babies and gin and church and women and Sunday all mixed up with dimes and dollars and clean spittoons and house rent to pay. Hey, boy! A bright bowl of brass is beautiful to the Lord. Bright polished brass like the cymbals Of King David's dancers, Like the wine cups of Solomon. Hey, boy! A clean spittoon on the altar of the Lord,

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A clean bright spittoon all newly polished— At least I can offer that. Com'mere, boy! Although Hughes considered his second book better than the first because it was more impersonal and made greater use of Negro folk songs, the volume was not well received by black critics. Many, like Benjamin Brawley, felt that it did the race a great disservice and should never have been published. How could blacks, these conservatives argued, make any progress if white people read about boys who cleaned spittoons and about prostitutes like "Ruby Brown": But the white men, Habitues of the high shuttered houses, Pay more money to her now Then they ever did before, When she worked in their kitchens. The Pittsburgh Courier called Fine Clothes to the Jew a book of trash, and the New York Amsterdam News labeled Hughes a "sewer dweller." In a bitter comment in The Crisis, Allison Davis claimed that a career that had promised to be long and distinguished had been corrupted by the influence of Carl Van Vechten. Hughes replied that many of the poems had been written in Washington before he met Van Vechten—and to please no one but himself. Explaining that the critic had introduced him to the Knopfs and had given his name to a few magazine publishers, Hughes denied that Van Vechten had suggested themes or subjects or in any way influenced his work. He closed his reply with a pointed comment: "I have never pretended to keep a literary grazing pasture with food to suit all breeds of cattle." In Fine Clothes to the Jew, Hughes escaped from the traditional mold of presenting the smiling Negro and began to show the race realistically. His portraits of the tired and lonely, as in "Porter," are devastating:

I must say Yes, sir, To you all the time. Yes, sir! Yes, sir! All my days Climbing up a great big mountain Of yes, sirs! And in "Po' Boy Blues" we hear the lament for a distant homeland: When I was home de Sunshine seemed like gold. When I was home de Sunshine seemed like gold. Since I come up North de Whole damn world's turned cold. Again, the steady rhythm of the blues gives special feeling to the cry in "Homesick Blues": De railroad bridge's A sad song in de air. De railroad bridge's A sad song in de air. Ever' time de trains pass I wants to go somewhere. In a final section Hughes concentrates on Negro spirituals. Poems like "Fire," based on the shouts and rhythms of the Negro church, are deeply moving: Fire, Fire, Lord! Fire gonna burn my soul! I ain't been good, I ain't been clean— I been stinkin', low-down, mean. Hughes concludes Fine Clothes to the Jew with a happier view of the world in "Hey! Hey!" presenting his ever present hope for the future:

328 I AMERICAN Sun's a risin' This is gonna be ma song. Sun's a risin' This is gonna be ma song. I could be blue but I been blue all night long. Although these poems did not attract immediate praise from the blacks, they did draw support from white reviewers Babette Deutsch and Julia Peterkin. They later became popular in anthologies and in translation and represent some of Hughes's best-known work. While continuing to publish poetry, Hughes began to experiment with prose in a series of short stories written in the African mood, which were published in two liberal journals, the Messenger and Harlem. In "Luani of the Jungle" (1928) he describes the unhappy alliance between a black princess and her tragically weak white husband. At the end of the story, Luani walks off into the jungle with a handsome black prince, leaving her husband to the dubious joys of the seaport bars. This kind of naive propaganda was not in keeping with Hughes's usual high standards. He himself admits that Wallace Thurman, editor of the Messenger, thought the stories were bad and printed them only because they were better than anything else available. Hughes's first novel, Not Without Laughter, was written during his last two years (1928-1929) at Lincoln University and is a welldone portrait of a Negro family in Kansas, based on people ».iiom Hughes had known as a boy. The novel describes the adolescent years of Sandy and his relationships with his family and friends. The contrast between the life of joy and the serious life is well-illustrated through the behavior of Sandy's happy-go-lucky father and his religious, hard-working mother and grandmother. Sandy is drawn to both values and in the end decides that it is possible to make a contribution to the world—and not without laughter. The

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tone of the novel suggests that the forces of conservatism and hard work will ultimately triumph. Although the book begins with Sandy as the central character, as the plot unfolds his grandmother and father assume the stronger roles. Critics have pointed out this failing, saying that if Hughes had focused on Sandy he would have produced a more strongly unified work. The pictures of everyday experience are authentic and moving. A particularly evocative section describes a neighborhood dance: Like a blare from hell, the second encore of Easy Rider filled every cubic inch of the little hall with hip-rocking notes. Benbow himself was leading and the crowd moved like jelly-fish dancing on individual sea-shells with Mingo and Harriett somewhere among the shakers. But they were not of them, since each couple shook in a world of its own, as, with a weary wail, the music abruptly ceased. Recalling the novel's characters Sandy, Jimboy, Aunt Hager, Harriett, and Benbow, Hughes later wrote: "I wanted to make you as wonderful as you really are," he said, "but it takes a lot of skill in words. And I don't know how." In spite of this modest assessment, the novel is a successful description of the incidents in the life of a typical Negro family in the Midwest. In the 1930's Hughes's writing was to take several new directions. Although he continued to publish poetry, he limited his output to four pamphlets, Dear Lovely Death, The Negro Mother, Scottsboro Limited, and A New Song, and a volume of children's verse, The Dream Keeper. In addition, he began to devote more time to fiction and drama, including Mulatto, Troubled Island, Soul Gone Home, When the Jack Hollers, Little Ham, and other plays for the New Negro Theatre of Los Angeles, the Gilpin Players of Cleveland, and the Harlem Suitcase Theatre. In 1937 Hughes explained his lack of publishable material to Blanche Knopf by saying

LANGSTON HUGHES I 329 that the Gilpin Players were ready to produce anything he wrote—a rather satisfactory situation, he commented, for an aspiring playwright. In 1932 Hughes spent a year in the Soviet Union, having been invited to collaborate on a film tentatively entitled "Black and White," about race relations in the South. The film was never produced, but Hughes grew to appreciate what he considered the freedom available to all races in Russia and the high regard and good pay afforded to writers. While traveling in Russia, he became interested in the short stories of D. H. Lawrence, and this interest led him to produce a number of stories about blacks in Lawrence's style. In the second volume of his autobiography, / Wonder As I Wander, Hughes recalls: I had never read anything of Lawrence's before, and was particularly taken with [The Lovely Lady] and with "The Rocking Horse Winner." Both tales made my hair stand on end. . . . A night or two after I had read the Lawrence stories, I sat down to write an Izvestia article on Tashkent when, instead, I began to write a short story. . . . If D. H. Lawrence can write such psychologically powerful accounts of folks in England . . . maybe I could write stories like his about folks in America. Stories like "Cora Unashamed" and "Little Old Spy" from this period were immediately published in American Mercury and Esquire. After returning to the United States, Hughes lived in a house provided by Noel Sullivan, a wealthy San Francisco businessman, and completed at least one story or article every week. A collection of stories from this productive period was published as The Ways of White Folks (1934). The title is taken from dialogue in the story "Berry," an account of a young Negro who gets a job as general handyman in a home for crippled children. Berry is exploited and expected to do more than his share of the work for a paltry salary. This is all very difficult to under-

stand, for as he says, "The ways of white folks, I mean some white folks, is too much for me. I rekon they must be a few good ones, but most of 'em ain't good—least wise they don't treat me good. And Lawd knows, I ain't never done nothin' to them, nothin' a-tall." Most of the stories comment on the condition of the black man who finds his humanity consistently denied by white society. In "Home," for example, an elderly black musician returning to his birthplace after a successful career is murdered by local rowdies when he attempts to strike up a friendship with a white woman. In "Slave on the Block" a white couple takes advantage of a Negro boy whom they wish to force into their own artistic mold. The story has an amusing ending as the young man rebels and runs away with Mattie, the cook. A more melodramatic incident occurs in "Father and Son," where Bert, a college student, returns to the South determined to be independent. His parents warn him to show respect for whites—but to no avail. Bert refuses to listen and in the end kills his father and then himself as the lynch mob approaches. In "Little Dog," one of the most moving stories, a lonely white spinster becomes attracted to her Negro janitor, a man with a "beautifully heavy body . . . and big broad shoulders." The situation resolves itself when Miss Briggs decides that her emotions have gotten out of control and moves to another neighborhood. In this story Hughes demonstrates a sympathetic regard for whites, particularly those forced into a dilemma for which they are not to blame. All of the stories underline the essential dishonesty that often characterizes black-white relationships. Hughes says that blacks are never treated as individuals but always as objects of mindless hate or hypocritical admiration. In two later collections of short stories, Laughing to Keep From Crying (1952) and Something in Common (1963), Hughes underlines his sense of despair at the absurdities of

330 I AMERICAN WRITERS race relations. Often the themes concentrate on the injustice of "the system" that keeps Negroes from obtaining their share of the world's goods and satisfactions. In "One Friday Morning," for example, Hughes describes the pleasure with which Nancy Lee Johnson learns that her picture has been chosen as first-prize winner in the Artist Club scholarship competition—but her pleasure turns sour when the award is withdrawn because of her color. At the end, although the benefits of democracy have been denied her, she joins the other students in saluting the flag, with the thought "that is the land we must make." The same note of hope is sounded in the amusing "Something in Common," in which two elderly men, one white and the other black, meet in a Hong Kong bar and despite their backgrounds join forces against the common enemy, a tough British bartender. In several stories, Hughes describes black behavior with a wry chuckle. "Who's Passing for Who?" is a delightful parody of the naive behavior of several young Negro intellectuals during the Harlem Renaissance. With many unexpected twists, Hughes describes a nightclub scene in which a white couple tease the blacks into thinking they are also black but finally tell them it was only a joke, that they wanted to try "passing." The astonished blacks are left wondering "Who's Passing for Who?" In "Professor," Hughes describes a respected Negro educator who sells his soul to white philanthropists for the price of a vacation. Dr. Walton Brown bows and nods as he reassures his white dinner hosts that the Negro will never fall prey to communism. In the back of his mind, he knows that he is playing Uncle Tom, but for the price of a small grant he can take his family for three months to South America, where they will not have to feel like Negroes. A number of stories in Laughing to Keep From Crying are in a lighter mood and somewhat in the style of Hughes's own character, the barstool

philosopher, Jesse B. Semple. "Name in the Papers" and "Never Room with a Couple," for example, describe the ludicrous results of pursuing married women; while the sketches "Pushcart Man," "Tain't So," and "Rouge High," are amusing vignettes of Harlem street life. Although many of the short stories are moving and effective in their use of sensitive racial situations, the characters often lack full development and plots remain contrived and melodramatic. It is easy to criticize Hughes's short stories as uneven, although his best works, such as "Berry," "Home," "One Friday Morning," and "Cora Unashamed," provide sharp insights into the needless cruelty of racial prejudice. In the stories Hughes has laid out one more avenue for examining the often puzzling tensions between whites and blacks. Although certain stories are strong, the content of the book is somewhat weaker than The Ways of White Folks because it centers less on the delineation of black experience. Hughes was always at his best when he could deal with the many facets of this experience. As Hughes's chief literary form changed in the 1930's from poetry to prose, so did his treatment of racial conflict. In general, the poems of the 1920's concentrated on the appreciation of the black man's African heritage and the joys of the Harlem jazz age; and most of them were set to the rhythms of the blues and to Negro spirituals. In response to the worsening racial situation, Hughes's writing in the 1930's became more abrasive. His most eloquent statement of indignation came in 1931 in response to the Scottsboro Case in Alabama. This case, which attracted world attention, concerned the alleged rape of two white girls by nine Negro teenagers. After visiting the boys in Kilby prison, Hughes came away with a sense of shame that the American legal system could be so brutally disregarded. In the four poems and the play in his pamphlet, Scottsboro Limited, published to raise

LANGSTON HUGHES I 331 money for their defense, Hughes questions the entire system of Southern justice and morality. One poem, ' 'Justice,'' states the case forcefully: Justice is a blind goddess To this we blacks are wise Her bandage hides two festering sores That once perhaps were eyes. Part of Hughes's plea was directed to the white majority in America, but as with many other writers discouraged by capitalistic society, part was directed to the communist world. With the end of the Harlem Renaissance in 1930 and the disappearance of a major publication market, many writers and artists began contributing to the journals of the communist and socialist parties. Hughes was no exception, and he found it easy to place poems like "Tired" in New Masses: I am so tired of waiting, Aren't you, For the world to become good And beautiful and kind? Let us take a knife And cut the world in two— And see what worms are eating At the rind. In 1937 Hughes spent six months in Spain covering the civil war for the Baltimore AfroAmerican, where he wrote poems in praise of the International Brigade and the Spanish workers' movement. A most representative sample of his work at this time is the collection A New Song, published the following year by the International Workers Order of New York. In the introduction by Michael Gold, Hughes was characterized as speaking for the underprivileged workers of all races. The titles of the poems—"Chant for May Day," "Ballads of Lenin," "Lynching Song," "Negro Ghetto"—tell a great deal about the subject matter. In "Let America Be America

Again," Hughes places the responsibility for the future in the hands of the people: We, the people, must redeem The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers, The mountains and the endless plain— All, all the stretch of these great green states— And make America again. And reflecting a traditional political theme of the time, Hughes suggests in "Union" that black and white workers band together to get their share of the world's goods: Not me alone I know now— But all the whole oppressed Poor world, White and Black Must put their hands with mine To shake the pillars of those temples Wherein the false gods dwell And worn out altars stand Too well defended, And the rule of greed's upheld That must be ended. A number of the poems suggest that change in the social order may have to be brought about by force. In "Pride" the overtones of violence are explicit: For honest work You proffer me poor pay, For honest dreams Your spit is in my face, And so my fist is clenched— Today— To strike your face. The same threat is expressed in milder terms in "Park Bench": I beg a dime for dinner— You got a butler and a maid. But I'm wakin up! Say, ain't you afraid

332 I AMERICAN That I might, just maybe, In a year or two, Move on over To Park Avenue? In this militant verse Hughes was simply following the communist ideological line; the poems themselves were not distinguished by original sentiments or sharply defined ideas. One may wonder if they were created from deep feelings or if they were simply developed as a part of the social and political rhetoric of the times. Major black critics such as Benjamin Brawley and Saunders Redding paid little attention toHughes's writing of this period, as if to indicate that it was something of an embarrassment; certainly, Hughes had strayed far from the blues and jazz. It is easy to interpret this period as one in which his major literary contributions followed a political rather than an aesthetic direction. As a result of this orientation, and because of his work in the theater and his travels to Russia and Spain, his reputation as a poet suffered. Although the decade opened with the successful reception of Not Without Laughter and The Dream Keeper, both were products of the 1920's. One must look toScottsboro Limited, The Ways of White Folks, and A New Song to find works truly indicative of the temper of Hughes's writing during the Great Depression. Apart from a number of stories in The Ways of White Folks, the product is not impressive. The vision of the man who at one time called himself "dream keeper" seemed less sure. Hughes's first autobiography, The Big Sea (1940), marked a change from the bitter despair that had characterized his writing of the previous decade. Chronicling his first twenty-seven years, he depicts an appealing human figure, sometimes full of fears and doubts but more often optimistic, who decides to make his way in the world through writing. By the end of the book, the reader feels that it was a wise choice. The book

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is full of Hughes's friends and acquaintances, so much so, in fact, that Blanche Knopf questioned the excessive references to Van Vechten, Thurman, Toomer, and Hurston. Hughes felt that the people involved were important, particularly in the Harlem Renaissance. He finally won approval and left them in. The autobiography offers the best description in print of the gaiety and charm of the Harlem Renaissance. Hughes is honest about his difficulties with his father, the place of Van Vechten in his career, his quarrel with Zora Hurston, and the tangled relationship with his patron. The book ends with the close of the Harlem Renaissance when, as Hughes says, Sophisticated New Yorkers turned to Noel Coward. ... Colored actors began to go hungry, publishers politely rejected new manuscripts, and patrons found other uses for their money. The final sentence offers a concise statement of Hughes's writing philosophy: Shortly poetry became bread; prose, shelter and raiment. Words turned into songs, plays, scenarios, articles, and stories. Literature is a big sea full of many fish. I let down my nets and pulled. I'm still pulling. The Big Sea received good reviews from all of the major journals and a particularly pleasing comment from Richard Wright in the New Republic and Oswald Villard in the Saturday Review of Literature. Hughes's second volume of autobiography, / Wonder As I Wander (1956), covers his life from 1929 to 1950 and includes his travels to Haiti, Russia, Japan, and Spain. The manuscript was rejected by Blanche Knopf because it was, as she said to Hughes in a conciliatory letter, "pretty weighted . . . and not a book in my opinion." More than half of it is taken up with an account of Hughes's trip in 1932 to the Soviet Union, and another long section recounts his adventures in Spain. In writing of his middle years, Hughes

LANGSTON HUGHES I 333 spent less time describing his literary activities than on providing a sort of travelogue with political overtones. The two most interesting portions describe his 1931 poetry reading tours in the South with Mary McLeod Bethune, president of the Daytona Normal and Industrial Institute for Negro Girls, and his productive writing period in Carmel, California, under the patronage of Noel Sullivan. Although the brief sections dealing with his literary work are pleasing, they do not save the entire work from being a rather conventional traveler's view of the world. Reviewers found / Wonder As I Wander less satisfactory than The Big Sea, and Saunders Redding commented that neither people nor events were seen with any deep perception. With the difficult times of the 1930 's behind him, Hughes returned to the successful subject matter that had occupied him in earlier days, and in Shakespeare in Harlem (1942) the familiar sounds of urban blues and street jazz predominate. Hughes characterized these poems as: . . . light verse. Afro-American in the blues mood. Poems syncopated and variegated in the colors of Harlem, Beale Street, West Dallas, and Chicago's South Side. Blues, ballads, and reels to be read aloud, crooned, shouted, recited and sung. Shakespeare in Harlem is largely a book of poetry for fun, and the fun is often frolicking and unconfined, as in "Free Man": You can catch the wind, You can catch the sea, But, you can't, pretty mama, Ever catch me. You can tame a rabbit Even tame a bear, But you'll never, pretty mama, Keep me caged up here. However, Hughes had not abandoned racial concerns. In one of his most memorable poems,

"Merry-Go-Round," he points out the old racial dilemma, highlighting it with the account of a little girl at a carnival: Where is the Jim Crow section On this merry-go-round Mister, cause I want to ride? Down South where I come from White and colored Can't sit side by side. Down south on the train There's a Jim Crow car. On the bus We're put in the back— But there ain't no back To a merry-go-round! Where's the horse For a kid that's black? The publication of Shakespeare in Harlem marks the beginning of another decade in which poetry was Hughes's chief literary vehicle. Following this book he published Fields of Wonder, One-Way Ticket, and Montage of a Dream Deferred. The poems in these volumes vary greatly, from the delicate lyrics of Fields of Wonder to the brassy jazz poems in Montage of a Dream Deferred. Between these styles are the amusing and bouncy rhythms of One-Way Ticket. These volumes provide an excellent means for examining Hughes's literary production since they include the melodies of both jazz and the blues as well as his lifelong concern with race. Both Shakespeare in Harlem and One-Way Ticket include light verse in the blues mood— with laughter never far from the surface. Montage of a Dream Deferred presents a poetry full of jazz, ragtime, bebop, and boogie-woogie rhythms, the familiar kaleidoscope of Hughes's best work. Fields of Wonder, which is essentially a book of poems about nature, contains a number of serious poems like "Trumpet Player" and "Dimout in Harlem" that capture the cold

334 I AMERICAN despair of ghetto life. Although Hughes's writing of this period also included other genres, between 1940 and 1967 he continued to portray the world with ironic humor mixed with a deep concern for the black race. Humor, always a significant feature of Hughes's writing, began to assume a more important role in the years following World War II. This characteristic came naturally as he adapted the blues and jazz to stories, poems, and plays. The blues come in a variety of forms, according to Hughes: loneliness blues, left-lonesome blues, broke-and-hungry blues, and family blues; but in all, some form of humor exists, although very often it is laughing to keep from crying. In The Dream Keeper Hughes had given his own definition of the blues: The Blues, unlike the spirituals have a strict poetic pattern: one long line repeated and a third line to rhyme with the first two. Sometimes the second line in repetition is slightly changed and sometimes but very seldom it is omitted. . . . When they are sung, under natural circumstances they are usually sung by one man or one woman alone. . . . The Blues are songs about being in the midst of trouble, friendless, hungry, disappointed in love right here on earth (whereas the Spirituals are often songs about escaping from trouble, going to heaven and living happily ever after). The mood of the blues is almost always despondence, but when they are sung people laugh. Jazz motifs also are frequently surrounded by elements of humor. In 1926 Hughes had characterized jazz as one of the basic expressions of Negro life, as a beat of joy and laughter, and an antidote to the weariness and pain of the white world. Both the blues and jazz forms as developed by Hughes carry hope for the future. This optimistic philosophy is well expressed in the short poem, "Life Is Fine":

WRITERS You may hear me holler, You may see me cry— But I'll be dogged, sweet baby, If you gonna see me die. Life is fine! Fine as wine! Life is fine!

As if to underline this basic affirmation, an entire section of One-Way Ticket, including "Mama and Daughter," "Sunday Morning Prophecy," "Honey Babe," and "Stranger in Town," was entitled "Life Is Fine." Hughes continued to write poems with a twist of delightful humor throughout his career. In "Little Lyric," published in Shakespeare in Harlem, he condensed one of life's persistent problems into seven words: I wish the rent Was heaven sent. And in "Me and the Mule" humor is combined with a statement on race: My old mule He's got a grin on his face, He's been a mule so long He's forgot about his race. I'm like that old mule— Black—and don't give a damn! You got to take me Like I am. In the 1940's and the 1950's Hughes ability to see the racial picture with humor was amply demonstrated by the creation of two wonderfully appealing characters, Madam Alberta K. Johnson and Jesse B. Semple. The first published poems describing Madam Johnson appeared in 1943 in Poetry and Common Ground and were later collected in a long section in One-Way Ticket. The charm of Madam Johnson is imbedded in her realistic and often ironic view of life,

LANGSTON HUGHES I 335 her determination to be herself despite the powerful social forces working against her, and her ability to puncture humbug with earthy candor. When Madam Johnson is faced with the awesome protocol of the United States census, she refuses to surrender one inch of her precious individuality: The census man, The day he came round, Wanted my name To put it down. I said JOHNSON, ALBERTA K. But he hated to write The K that way. He said, What Does K stand for? I said, K— And nothing more. He said, I'm gonna put it K—A—Y. I said, If you do, You lie. In "Madam and the Minister" the same integrity is expressed against the solemnity of the church and its duly appointed representative Reverend Butler: Reverend Butler came by My house last week. He said, Have you got A little time to speak? He said, I am interested In your soul. Has it been saved, Or is your heart stone-cold? I said, Reverend, I'll have you know I was baptized Long ago.

He said, What have you Done since then? I said, None of your Business, friend. Madam Johnson speaks from a strength made up of street wisdom and self-belief. She knows all about the tricks and troubles of the world, since life for her ''ain't been no golden stair.'' She has had two husbands and a "might have been," but he was too generous for his own good * 'always giving and never taking," and Madam knows "nobody loves nobody for yourself alone." In "Madam and the Wrong Visitor," Old Death comes to see if Madam is ready to take a trip, but in response to the question, "You're Johnson, Madam Alberta K.?" she answers "Yes—but Alberta ain't goin' with you today!" When the doctor prescribes some chicken, Alberta is ready, ''I said 'better buy two cause I'm still here kickin.' " Again, Hughes expresses his feeling that life is fine and worth fighting for. It is the same theme heard in many of his poems, the Simple stories, and described with deep feeling in The Sweet Flypaper of Life, a photo essay about Harlem with accompanying text by Hughes. In The Sweet Flypaper of Life Hughes describes how the messenger of the Lord rides up on his bicycle to deliver a telegram to Sister Mary Bradley. Since Sister Bradley is no more ready to "go home" than was Madam Johnson, she tells the messenger to "take that wire right on back to St. Peter because I am not prepared to go. I might be a little sick, but as yet I ain't no ways tired." The people presented in the book combine their joys and sorrows with a healthy curiosity about tomorrow. Sister Mary refuses to accept the message from the Lord because she wants to ' 'see what this integration the Supreme Court has done decreed is going to be like" and what her sons and daughters will do next. Each page is illustrated by dramatic black-and-white

336 I AMERICAN photographs of the streets, homelife, and faces of Harlem. A particularly appealing section shows a Saturday night family party with "just neighbors and home folks. But they balls back and stomps down." Another section shows street scenes where there are "Some folks selling, other folks buying. Somebody always passing. . . . And at night the street meetings on the corner—talking about 'Buy Black': . . . And 'Ethiopia shall stretch forth her hand': And some joker in the crowd always says, 'And draw back a nub!' " The photographs and text present a realistic slice of Harlem life where everyday worries are met with courage and laughter. Sister Mary's daughter wants to reform her husband, but her mother tells her ' 'reforming some folks is like trying to boil a pig in a coffeepot—the possibilities just ain't there. . . ." At the end of the book, Sister Mary expresses the Hughes philosophy of survival: "I done got my feet caught in the sweet flypaper of life—and I '11 be dogged if I want to get loose.'' The work is one of Hughes's most successful attempts at expressing the realities of black life in America. While The Sweet Flypaper of Life focused attention on the adult black world, Black Misery, published posthumously, examined the effects on children of growing up black. Although the definitions of misery often are treated with wry humor, many of them go beneath the surface of humor to describe situations that are far from amusing. It is not funny, for example, "when you find that your bosom buddy can go in the swimming pool but you can't," or "when your white teacher tells the class that all Negroes can sing and you can't even carry a tune." In this book, children are shown to be particularly vulnerable to the evils of the American race system. Why, Hughes asks, should a child be subjected to the misery of knowing that it may take the National Guard to get him into a new school? Misery is a familiar problem for most black adults, but it is particularly insidious, as Hughes com-

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ments, when it affects children who must also have their dreams deferred. Hughes's best-known character is the delightful, street-wise, barstool philosopher, Jesse B. Semple, better known as Simple. Simple is a Harlem prototype, born in the South, who grew up without a father or mother, was "passed around," married young, divorced, and eventually came to New York. His story could be duplicated over and over in any northern city. As Hughes says, it is impossible to live in Harlem very long and not run into hundreds of Simples or reasonable facsimiles. Simple's companions are as typical of the city as the hero himself. Zarita, his drinking girl friend, Joyce, his true love, Cousin Minnie, "with knees farther apart than necessary," the landlady who locks up his trunk when he is behind in the rent—all are part of the Harlem scene. The creation of Simple came about in a Harlem bar as Hughes chatted with a couple he knew. Hughes asked the man what he did for a living and learned that he made cranks. "What kind of cranks?" Hughes asked. "Oh, man, I don't know what kind of cranks." Whereupon his girl friend, a little annoyed at his ignorance of his job said, "You've been working there long enough. Looks like by now you ought to know what them cranks crank." "Aw, woman," the man answered, "you know white folks don't tell colored folks what cranks crank." This incident tells much about Simple, life in Harlem, and about Hughes himself. First published in November 1942 in the Chicago Defender, the stories are typically set in Paddy's bar where Simple expounds his musings to his ever-present "colleged" friend Boyd. Simple's thoughts encompass a multitude of topics from death to taxes: "I want my passing to be a main event" and "It's hell to pay taxes when I can't even vote down home." When Boyd teases Simple about his stream of conversation saying, "You ought to be an orator,"

LANGSTON HUGHES I 337 Simple replies that he is afraid of the public and is more at home at the bar. "Of justice?" Boyd asks, to which Simple replies "Justice don't run no bar." In the four published volumes of Simple stories, Simple Speaks His Mind, Simple Takes a Wife, Simple Stakes a Claim, and Simple's Uncle Sam, Hughes conducts the reader through the fun and sorrow of Harlem. Although humor predominates, some of the stories are serious. In "Empty Room" Simple laments the death of an acquaintance who had no one to mourn him, saying "I want somebody to cry real loud, scream and let the neighbors know I am no longer here. . . . When I go, I would not like to die like that fellow in Baltimore with nobody to claim his body . . . nobody to come and cry. . . ."As Harry Jones has said, the serious passages reveal another side of Simple and enlarge his character from one that is merely comic to one that sets him forth as someone with deep feelings for his fellow man. Ely den Jackson writes that Simple is important because he is average, neither a freak nor a neurotic. He speaks from his barstool for the man in the street who has his share of such universal problems as money, friendship, and security. Of course Simple sees a great deal of the world through black-tinted glasses, but he is far removed from the bitterness of Bigger Thomas in Richard Wright's Native Son or the scarred and battered Rufus in James Baldwin's Another Country. In all of the Simple stories, Hughes makes full use of his extraordinary talents in transcribing the Harlem argot. Simple's speech is a mixture of jive talk, rhyme, alliteration, malapropisms, and wordplay. Simple can sometimes combine a number of these devices in a smashing crescendo of feeling, for example, as he says, "In this life, I been underfed, underpaid, undernourished and everything but undertaken . . . and that ain't all, I been abused, confused, misused and accused." In an even lighter mood Simple

creates a melody of words and images as he watches a parade of women passing by outside the bar, "Girl, where did you get them baby doll clothes? Wheee-ee-ooo! Hey Miss Claudy! Or might your name be Cleopatara? Wheee-ee-oo! Baby, if you must walk that way, walk straight, and don't shake your tail gate." The rhyming device always inserts a note of fun into the conversation, as when Simple says to Boyd, "If you're corn bread, don't try to be angel food cake! That's a mistake." This is followed by a pungent bit of Simple's philosophy, "Midsummer madness brings winter sadness, so curb your badness." Sometimes Simple's words come out accurately, but often they have twists and turns that toy with the original meaning. When income-tax time comes around, Simple takes his forms to a "noteriety republican," and in the summer he finds that he dislikes the "violent rays" of the sun. When Simple listens carefully he listens fluently, and when he is only partly interested he listens somewhatly. Another wordplay device used in the stories give Simple a chance to provide bantering responses to Boyd's "high style" vocabulary. When Simple wants to read a book, Boyd comments pedantically, "They say, knowledge cannot be assimilated overnight," to which Simple replies, "I don't care what they say, it can be laying there ready to assimilate in the morning." Again, when Boyd tells Simple that Joyce is a "little piqued," Simple wishes he could peek in on her wherever she is. At the end of many stories, whether humorous or serious, Simple has the final word in a brief flash of wit. In "Sometimes I Wonder" Boyd wonders what makes Simple so race conscious, to which Simple replies realistically, "Sometimes I wonder what made me so black." When Simple explains the intricacies of bebop to Boyd he is compelled to give the explanation in racial terms. "A dark man shall see dark days. Bop comes out of them dark days. That's why real

338 I AMERICAN Bop is mad, wild, frantic, crazy—and not to be dug unless you've seen dark days, too. ... Them young colored kids who started it, they know what Bop is." This lecture provides Boyd the chance to say "Your explanation depresses me," to which Simple shoots back flatly, "Your nonsense depresses me." In "A Toast to Harlem,' ' Boyd maintains that what Harlem needs to "hold out to the world from its windows is a friendly hand, not a belligerent attitude.'' Simple answers, "It will not be my attitude I will have out of my window." Many stories express a deep love of Harlem, the homeland, a spot for Simple to call his own, where he can be himself, black and beautiful, and "thumb his nose at the world." When Boyd asks Simple what he likes about Harlem, Simple replies "It's so full of Negroes." When Simple expresses his feelings about the future, it is in this same never-say-die mood. Perhaps the best example of this outlook is found in "Final Fear," in which he explains to Boyd: I have been fired, laid off, and last week given an indefinite vacation, also Jim Crowed, segregated, barred out, insulted, eliminated, called black, yellow, and red, locked in, locked out, locked up, also left holding the bag. I have been caught in the rain, caught in raids, caught short with my rent, and caught with another man's wife. In my time, I have been caught—but I am still here! One of Simple's most appealing characteristics is this determination to survive and work things out. Simple is neither lazy nor dumb; he understands, as he says in "Morals Is Her Middle Name," that it "takes a whole lot of not having what you want, to get what you want most." In this case, what Simple wants most is Joyce, and he is willing to give up gambling, limit himself to one glass of beer a day, open a savings account, and even forgo the price of tickets to see his hero Jackie Robinson play with the Dodgers. Simple gets his reward, marries Joyce, and in

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Simply Heavenly can say happily, "Love is as near heaven as man gets on earth.'' Hughes's optimistic faith in human nature finds a clear voice in the Simple stories, in which we can almost hear the resounding optimism of "Life Is Fine." Hughes himself identified the stories as a means of using humor as a weapon. The race problem in America is serious but, according to Hughes, nothing is wrong with occasionally looking at race with tongue in cheek. Simple obviously provides the appropriate spokesman for this approach. As other writers have commented, Simple is a universal folk hero, a gentle man who speaks from a lifetime of careful observation. Those who read the stories are able to laugh along with him at life's absurdities and cry at life's tragedies—and try again. In Simple, Hughes has drawn a wonderfully warm and human personality, one that illuminates the everyday world of American blacks. Less successful examples of Hughes's use of the Harlem scene are found in his second novel, Tambourines to Glory, and in his plays. In Tambourines to Glory, Laura and Essie, two downand-out Harlem women, start a streetcorner church with a Bible, a campstool and a tambourine. Laura, a female counterpart to Simple, does the preaching and shakes the tambourine, while Essie sings the gospel songs. As the plot develops, a number of Harlem hustlers like BigEyed Buddy Lomax and Chicken-Crow-For Day join them to share the profits of their highly successful business, where "holy water" is sold for a dollar a bottle and Bible verses provide tips on the numbers racket. The sweet promised land turns sour in the hands of the crooks and shysters. By the end of the novel, Laura kills Buddy in a fit of jealous rage and tries to put the blame on her friend Essie. Everything ends happily however when Laura confesses and Essie returns to Tambourine Temple to announce the marriage of her daughter to a college boy. Although like Simple in certain ways, Laura

LANGSTON HUGHES I 339 has none of the humor or pathos that made Hughes's major folk hero so attractive. The melodramatic murder of Buddy seems less like a tragedy than a contrived device to conclude the story. It is difficult to feel sorry for Laura or Buddy or to feel joy for Essie, since none of them has been developed as a real person. The only redeeming feature is the transcriptions of the gospel chants, as sung by Essie, and Laura's hellfire preaching. They are not enough, however, to rescue a poor novel and apparently were not enough to save the musical version, which ran for only three weeks in 1963. The critics praised the jubilant music by Jobe Huntley, but attacked what they saw as a predictable and melodramatic plot. Hughes's talent for capturing the joy and color of Harlem life failed him in the case of Tambourines to Glory. Hughes's specific work for the theater includes nine full-length plays, two one-act plays, four gospel musicals, four opera librettos, and one screen-play. Despite this rather extensive production, he is not known as an outstanding dramatist. His best-known play, Mulatto, based on the short story "Father and Son," is full of emotionally charged language and stereotyped pleading for racial understanding. Darwin Turner, writing on Hughes as a playwright, criticizes this play as artistically weak in plot, thought, and language. In Little Ham (1936) Hughes attempted unsuccessfully to capture the fun of the Harlem Renaissance by presenting a confusing array of gangsters, Charleston dancers, and numbers runners. In his historical plays, Don't You Want to Be Free?, The Sun Do Move, and Emperor of Haiti, Hughes is somewhat more effective as he writes about the development and aspirations of black people. It is curious that in Hughes's works for the theater he was unable to transmit the same kind of power that came forth from his best poetry and fiction. Even Simply Heavenly, the 1957 musical adaptation of the Simple stories, lacks the luster and excitement of the original. As Turner points out, the chief vic-

tim of the transition from prose to drama is Simple. In the stories he exudes an unpretentious dignity and personal grandeur; in the musical he is reduced to an overtalkative and ludicrous barfly constantly trying to cadge drinks from his more affluent friends. It is doubtful that Simple was ever intended to be examined in a two-act play where whimsy and humor must be translated into action. The imposition of plot on the stories served to dilute the original. In his last two books of poetry published before his death, Montage of a Dream Deferred (1951) and Ask Your Mama (1961), Hughes concentrated even more on the rhythms of jazz and the blues to deliver his message. As he said in the introduction to Montage of a Dream Deferred, "This poem on contemporary Harlem, like be-bop, is marked by conflicting changes, sudden nuances, sharp and impudent interjections, broken rhythms . . . punctuated by riffs, runs, breaks, and disc-tortions [sic] of the music of a community in transition." In effect, Hughes says, the discordant, violent, impish, sometimes abrasive notes of the book match the moods of Harlem. Montage of a Dream Deferred is a long poem centered on the dubious future of the black man's hopes. The ninety individual poems are divided into six sections, each revealing a different aspect of the dream that may never come true. The first poem, "Dream Boogie," establishes the mood for those whose dreams are necessarily deferred: beneath the surface of joy lurk the realities of fear, uncertainty, and despair: Good morning, daddy! Ain't you heard The boogie-woogie rumble Of a dream deferred? Listen closely: You'll hear their feet Beating out and beating out a— You think It's a happy beat?

340 I AMERICAN Listen to it closely: Ain't you heard Something underneath like a — What did I say? Sure, I'm happy! Take it away! Hey, pop! Re-bop! Mop! Y-e-a-h! In "Children's Rhymes," Hughes points out that even children are not immune from the intricacies of a dream deferred: By what sends The white kids I ain't sent: I know I can't be President. In the five succeeding sections Hughes presents a variety of reasons why Harlem's dream must be deferred. The landlord, the police, and the white storekeepers all work to keep dreams just out of reach. And what, Hughes asks in "Harlem" is the result of all this delay: What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun? Or fester like a sore— And then run? Does it stink like rotten meat? Or crust and sugar over— like a syrupy sweet? Maybe it just sags like a heavy load. Or does it explode? This poem suggests the potential for violence that had characterized Hughes's poetry and prose of the 1930's. Hughes is not oblivious to the fact

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that other downtrodden people have troubles with their dreams, but as he explains in "Comment on Curb," From river to river Up town and down Ther's libel to be confusion When a dream gets kicked around. You talk like they don't kick dreams around downtown. / expect they do— But I'm talking about Harlem to you! In "Island," the concluding poem, Hughes depicts Harlem as a blend of color and beauty—but with the dream still deferred: Between two rivers, North of the park, Like darker rivers The streets are dark. Black and white, Gold and brown— Chocolate-custard Pie of a town. Dream within a dream, Our dream deferred. Good morning, daddy! Ain't you heard? Many of the poems in Montage of a Dream Deferred, as Hughes indicated in his foreword, make use of the "broken rhythms" of the jazz and bebop styles of the 1950's. This music is characterized by intricate solos, improvisation, and a lack of specific melody lines. The bebop musician was free of the big-band group discipline and was able to create his own stylistic world. Thus, in the poems of jazz and bebop, the

LANGSTON HUGHES I 341 author is less confined by traditional literary elements and takes pride in experimental wordplay and improvisation. The use of these contemporary musical elements seems somewhat less satisfactory, however, than Hughes's earlier poems that incorporated the rhythms of the blues. In the latter, the meaning of the verse itself was important, but in the bebop poetry the meaning often seems secondary to the rhythms. The brief "Tag," for example, can only be taken as a light piece of jive talk: Little cullud boys with fears, frantic, nudge their draftee years. Pop-a-da! Since Hughes indicated that Montage of a Dream Deferred should be treated as a unified work, it may be unfair to criticize individual pieces. Nevertheless, it is difficult to accept most of the content as a meaningful interpretation of Harlem life. Richard Barksdale, however, feels that critics like Alain Locke and Babette Deutsch misread the book and overcriticized the material since they were not sensitive enough to understand Hughes's point of view. Locke's harsh judgment was apparently shared by Blanche Knopf, who rejected the manuscript. Later, however, when Knopf published Hughes's Selected Poems, a long section of the jazz verse was included. This portion elicited a highly negative review from James Baldwin, who said that although he was continually amazed at Hughes's gifts he was depressed that the poet had done so little with them. The last section, Baldwin said, would have been thrown in the wastebasket by a more disciplined poet. Hughes raised an important question in Montage of a Dream Deferred and viewed it from a number of directions. Because the question is so serious, Hughes can be criticized for his somewhat unsatisfactory treatment. Jean Wagner in his analysis of the book

touches on the central issue by noting that the combination of poetry and jazz, while technically interesting, may weaken both art forms. With a few notable exceptions, the poetry in Montage of a Dream Deferred is less moving and strong than in Hughes's previous work. In Ask Your Mama the blending of words and music is even more pronounced than in Montage of a Dream Deferred. This is a book of twelve verse "moods" to be read aloud to a jazz background. To ensure that the reader understands the importance of the musical element, a suggested accompaniment appears beside the verse itself. In some sections, Hughes calls for the piano to supply a "soft lyrical calypso joined with a flute," while other parts demand "an Afro-Arabic theme with flutes and steady drum beat." For those who may have trouble with the many nuances of the poem, Hughes has supplied "liner notes for the poetically unhep" for each of the moods, providing a brief explanation of the rather esoteric and topical verse. Although the theme of Ask Your Mama is similar to that in Montage of a Dream Deferred, the meanings are more difficult since the stream of consciousness technique predominates. Constant reference is made to the'' quarter of the Negroes,'' where the worldwide isolation and segregation that the black man faces are made explicit. The first section of the poem, "Cultural Exchange," explains that in the quarter of the Negroes the black man has no protection against violence: IN THE

IN THE QUARTER IN THE QUARTER OF THE NEGROES WHERE THE DOORS ARE DOORS OF PAPER DUST OF DINGY ATOMS BLOWS A SCRATCHY SOUND AMORPHOUS JACK-O'-LANTERNS CAPER AND THE WIND WON'T WAIT FOR MIDNIGHT FOR FUN TO BLOW DOORS DOWN.

In "Jazztet Muted," the black problem is examined in a different way:

342 I AMERICAN IN THE NEGROES OF THE QUARTER PRESSURE OF THE BLOOD IS SLIGHTLY HIGHER IN THE QUARTER OF THE NEGROES WHERE BLACK SHADOWS MOVE LIKE SHADOWS

According to Hughes, life moves faster in the quarter of the Negroes because people must learn to live twenty years in ten, "before the present becomes when." The answer to every question is the pithy jive response "Ask Your Mama." In a segment entitled "Is It True?" Hughes furnishes an example of the use of the expression: THEY ASKED ME AT THE PTA IS IT TRUE THAT NEGROES ? I SAID, ASK YOUR MAMA.

This earthy phrase has a sting that goes back to the familiar Negro word game called the dozzens. The object of the dozzens is to destroy an opponent with insults hurled at his female relatives. Hughes hurls back the dozzens in the face of a symbol of middle-class conformity, the parent-teacher association. As Hughes explains in a liner note, "everybody thinks that Negroes have the most fun, but, of course, secretly hopes they do not—although curious to find out if they do." This is the basis of the often repeated question that begins "Is it true that . . . ?" When the suburban black is asked to recommend a maid, the answer is appropriate to the question, "yes, your Mama." According to Hughes there is not much joy in being black when your TV needs a new antenna and you can't afford to buy one. Images and names flow through the work at an astonishing rate, with obscure passages referring to Negro writers, politicians, and singers. In "Horn of Plenty," we hear: SINGERS SINGERS LIKE OSINGERS LIKE ODETTA—AND THAT STATUE ON BEDLOE'S ISLAND MANAGED BY SOL HUROK DANCERS BOJ ANGLES LATE LAMENTED $ $ $ $ $ $ KATHERINE DUNHAM AL AND LEON $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ ARTHUR CARMEN ALVIN MARY $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $

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JAZZERS DUKE AND DIZZY ERIC DOLPHY $ $ $ $ $ MILES AND ELLA AND MISS NINA $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ STRAYHORN HID BACKSTAGE WITH LUTHER $ $ $

This kind of verse may be successful when read to jazz accompaniment, but by itself it lacks meaning and substance and seems to be only a kind of puckish doggerel reserved for the initiated. In the introduction to Ask Your Mama Hughes explains that the "traditional folk melody of the 'Hesitation Blues' is the leitmotif for this poem. In and around it, along with the other recognizable melodies employed, there is room for spontaneous jazz improvisation, particularly between verses, where the voice pauses." Because of its structure and esoteric frame of reference the poem is difficult to understand. Perhaps it was Hughes's intention for readers to come away from it with a distorted picture of Negro life, since distortion itself is one of its major components. Ask Your Mama provides no solution to the problems of race but does highlight again the dilemma of a dream deferred. As Dudley Fitts observed, much of the content is lost in ambiguity and seems less poetry than a vehicle for the jazz framework. Wagner, on the other hand, praises the poem for its depth and ' 'symphonic unity." Whatever view one takes, this volume is clearly an experiment in rhythms and words and yet another attempt to depict Negro life in the urban ghetto. While humor finds its way into some of the Simple stories, the general mood of Hughes's writing in the last decade of his life in serious and searching. His last book of poetry, The Panther and the Lash (1967), published posthumously, is dedicated to Rosa Parks of Montgomery, Alabama, who challenged segregation in public transportation by refusing to stand at the back of the bus. The poems, written in her spirit, are angry and militant, as if to say that the dream has been deferred long enough. Significantly, The Panther and the Lash is subtitled

LANGSTON HUGHES I 343 "Poems of Our Times" and is evidence that Hughes's mood was attuned to the protest of the 1960's. Onwuchekwa Jemie points out accurately that these poems contain the same threat of violence that Hughes had employed in the 1930's. In the last verse of 'The Backlash Blues," for example, Hughes concludes an indictment of the white world with the challenge: Mister Backlash, Mister Backlash, What do you think I got to lose? Tell me, Mister Backlash, What you think I got to lose? I'm gonna leave you, Mister Backlash, Singing your mean old backlash blues.

You re the one, Yes, you're the one Will have the blues. And in ' 'Birmingham Sunday,'' about four black girls killed in a church bombing in 1963, the poet warns that the Chinese people may be the ones to avenge the needless deaths: Four little girls Might be awakened someday soon By songs upon the breeze As yet unfelt among magnolia trees. The brief "Warning" is even more explicit: Negroes, Sweet and docile, Meek, humble, and kind: Beware the day They change their mind! Wind In the cotton fields, Gentle breeze: Beware the hour It uproots trees! Since the dream continues to be deferred, Hughes suggests that American blacks look to

Africa and the other third-world powers for solutions. In "Junior Addict" he describes the tragedy in store for those who seek the sunrise and other dreams with a needle and a spoon. Because the sunrise for blacks is not imminent in America the poet pleads: Quick, sunrise, come! Sunrise out of Africa, Quick, come! Sunrise, please come! Come! Come! Although Harlem still appears in the poems, it is no longer the laughing, happy place of brownskinned steppers and cabarets. Hughes now speaks of a Harlem ' 'on the edge of hell,'' where it is possible to love Ralph Bunche but not possible to "eat him for lunch." Hughes expressed considerable doubt about the immediate possibility of change, but he does not compromise black individuality. In "Impasse" the basic idea of independence is again made clear: I could tell you, If I wanted to, What makes me What I am. But I don't Really want to— And you don't Give a damn. As for solutions, Hughes criticizes those provided by the so-called "elderly leaders" as too cautious and overwise. Further, since the white race does not wish to make the changes necessary for equality, the black man, Hughes says in "Down Where I Am," might just as well take direct action himself: I'm gonna plant my feet On solid ground. If you want to see me, Come down.

344 I AMERICAN The Panther and the Lash is not a happy book, but neither is it hopeless. Hughes has great faith in people and in their ability to solve abiding problems. The solutions may come slowly and be accompanied by violence—but they will come. The best solution, of course, would be to work together. This encouraging philosophy is stated in "Daybreak in Alabama," the concluding poem, in a description of white and black hands working with yellow and brown hands in the red clay earth: Touching everybody with kind fingers And touching each other natural as dew The day when that happens, Hughes states, the black man will begin to realize the dream, and the future will then be better than the past, as contemplated in "History": The past has been a mint Of blood and sorrow. That must not be True of tomorrow. Although these poems are somewhat more serious than Hughes's earlier verses, they continue to hold out hope and for that reason are essentially in keeping with the general tone of the rest of his work. Another phase of Hughes's writing in the 1960's, reflecting an earlier interest, was his attraction to Africa. While his poems and stories of the 1920's portrayed Africa as an exotic land of sunshine and freedom, his later writing was attuned to the political and economic realities of the developing continent. Poems like "Lumumba's Grave" and "Angola Question Mark," published in The Panther and the Lash, comment on the evils of the South African system of apartheid. Some of Hughes's poems, on the other hand, hold out the hope that Africa may still provide the sunrise for the rest of the black world. Seemingly contradictory, these two

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themes, the evils of the system and the hope of the future, recur in much of Hughes's work. Since Africa had long been of interest to Hughes, it was appropriate that in his mature years he should produce a number of volumes on that subject. His most significant contributions to the understanding of African culture were issued in two anthologies, An African Treasury and Poems From Black Africa, and in a book for young people, The First Book of Africa. Hughes began to collect material for The African Treasury from native African authors when he was asked to judge a short-story contest for the Johannesburg magazine Drum. The quality of the offerings so pleased him that he felt they would be of interest to a general readership. The book includes articles, essays, stories, and poems by black Africans all attempting to describe their homeland. The result is a lively, readable collection of writing drawn from such diverse points as Senegal, Kenya, and the Union of South Africa. Here, and in Poems From Black Africa, Hughes found expression of a healthy pride in country that African authors call "African personality" or "Negritude." These terms, which refer to the love of the African heritage in all of its physical, spiritual, and cultural aspects, are very much in keeping with Hughes's own ideology. The First Book of Africa, for which Hughes won the Saturday Review's Anisfield-Wolf Award for the best book of the year on race relations, is an illustrated introduction for young people. The land, people, and politics of Africa are presented in clear and accurate writing, with straightforward discussion of racism and apartheid. Hughes's pleasing style for younger readers led to a number of subsequent publications in the First Book series published by Franklin Watts, including The First Book of Rhythms, The First Book of Jazz, and The First Book of the West Indies. Probably more important than Hughes's volumes on Africa were those he did in the late

LANGSTON HUGHES / 345 1950's and early 1960's on Negro history and music. Hughes's interest in the history of the race continued in many of his poems written between 1920 and 1960 dealing with such important figures as John Brown and Frederick Douglass. In The First Book of Negroes, Famous American Negroes, and A Pictorial History of the Negro in America, Hughes produced a series of readable and factual books that defined the role of the black American in his historical context. Hughes's interest in black music and theater was also reflected in the publication of two popular and well-illustrated volumes Famous Negro Music Makers and Black Magic, A Pictorial History of the Negro in American Entertainment. Both combine a lively text with a handsome collection of photographs of major black artists. The books on black history and black music proved to be of great interest abroad as interpretations of black America and were translated into several languages. In a final effort to record the major events of the black liberation movement, Hughes published Fight for Freedom (1962), the story of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. In this volume he describes its origin and the role played by such leaders as W. E. B. DuBois, Roy Wilkins, and Walter White. The book is a readable description of the organization that for many years was central to all phases of black life. As a longtime advocate of Negro rights, it was appropriate for Hughes to produce a history of the leading organization involved in that field. Having known many of the black writers of his own day and highly respected by them, Hughes was the ideal choice for editor of The Poetry of the Negro 1746-1949, The Book of Negro Folklore and The Best Short Stories by Negro Writers. These three volumes provide an excellent survey of black writing in America and in many cases offer the only access to authors

who would otherwise have remained unknown. Hughes spent considerable time in later years on translation. In 1948 he produced an English version of the work of the Cuban poet Nicolas Guillen, and in 1951 Beloit College brought out his admirable translation of Garcia Lorca's Gypsy Ballads. In his anthology of Latin American poetry, Dudley Fitts mentions Hughes's creative interest in Guillen and Lorca and praises him as an outstanding interpreter. Hughes's chief translating project appeared as Selected Poems of Gabriela Mistral (1957), the only English version of her poetry. As a further indication of Hughes's status, two volumes of his collected writing appeared in the late 1950's. In 1958 Braziller brought out The Langston Hughes Reader, containing poetry, prose, and drama; and in March 1959, the long promised Selected Poems was published by Knopf. Together these volumes attest to the great popularity of the man who identified himself as "the poet laureate of Harlem." Hughes's writing was a product of its time. The early blues poems, the African laments, and the Harlem verse of the 1920's reflected the emerging interest in black folk culture. The protest poems of the 1930's were in keeping with the economic depression and worldwide political upheaval, while in the 1940's the lighthearted Simple stories and the poetry in Shakespeare in Harlem indicated a return to optimism. From 1950 to 1967 Hughes followed a number of literary paths, most of which were devoted to explaining the history of the Negro race. The call for equality and justice that predominates in The Panther and the Lash is completely in focus with the protest movements of the 1960's. Hughes's writing has always been an excellent gauge of the condition of American blacks. Some critics have said that Hughes's writing was too topical in nature and therefore not to be taken seriously, while others have complained that he produced too great a body of unrefined work. While some

346 I AMERICAN of these comments may be true, Hughes must be taken seriously as one of the most sensitive commentators on black Americans. He did not obscure his message with complicated symbols or erudite academic arguments, remaining content to let simple words come from the mouths of simple people. Hughes's place in American literature has always been a source of consternation to his admirers. Black critics disliked his early work for not presenting the race in an uplifting manner, and white critics often termed his writing superficial. It has been difficult until recently to find serious consideration of Hughes's work. This is unfortunate since Hughes has become, in spite of the critics, a recognized spokesman for American blacks. It is ironic that this reputation is in some cases stronger abroad than in America. The first full-length study of Hughes, by Rene Piquion, appeared in French in 1940; and in 1963 Jean Wagner published one of the most perceptive studies of his poetry in the same language. A number of serious commentaries were published in the Soviet Union as early as 1933, and a comprehensive bibliography appeared in Russian in 1964. The Simple stories have been enjoyed in translation all over the world, and it is no exaggeration to say that much of the world's understanding of American blacks comes from reading Hughes's works. That he is denied appropriate attention in his own country would seem to be an incident that Simple himself might have found amusing. Recent studies by such critics as James Emanuel and Richard Barksdale have improved our ability to approach Hughes's writing, but much remains to be done. Hughes should be studied in context with other black writers of his time, and there is a need for further works on his fiction. Certainly, a long critical overview of his use of humor would be useful.

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Probably Hughes's greatest contributions to American literature are his blues and jazz poems and his astute reflections on urban Negro life in the Simple stories. The basic ingredient of all these works is the essential honesty and optimism with which Hughes viewed the world. The tragedies of black life are never denied, but the basic tragedy underlined in all his writing is the grievious condition of the poor and downtrodden everywhere. As a spokesman for the lowly, Hughes wrote in a number of genres and moods, but the message of optimism was always strong and clear. In "Freedom's Plow," the last of the Selected Poems, he believes that Into that furrow the freedom seed was dropped. From that seed a tree grew, is growing, will ever grow. That tree is for everybody, For all America, for all the world. May its branches spread and its shelter grow Until all races and all peoples know its shade. KEEP YOUR HAND ON THE PLOW! HOLD ON!

In a lighter mood, and writing about himself, Hughes sums up his philosophy: I play it cool And dig all jive. That's the reason I stay alive. Hughes stayed alive—and made his mark on American literature over a fifty-year period. As he says, at the end of his autobiography, he cast his nets into the sea of literature and pulled and pulled. The product of his labor is an illuminating and realistic portrait of the American black.

LANGSTON HUGHES I 347

Selected Bibliography WORKS OF LANGSTON HUGHES BOOKS AND PAMPHLETS

The Weary Blues. New York: Knopf, 1926. Fine Clothes to the Jew. New York: Knopf, 1927. Not Without Laughter. New York: Knopf, 1930. Dear Lovely Death. Amenia, N.Y.: Troutbeck Press, 1931. The Negro Mother. New York: Golden Stair, 1931. The Dream Keeper and Other Poems. New York: Knopf, 1932. Scottsboro Limited. New York: Golden Stair, 1932. The Ways of White Folks. New York: Knopf, 1934. A New Song. New York: International Workers Order, 1938. The Big Sea. New York: Knopf, 1940. Shakespeare in Harlem. New York: Knopf, 1942. Jim Crow's Last Stand. Atlanta: Negro Publication Society, 1943. Fields of Wonder. New York: Knopf, 1947. OneWay Ticket. New York: Knopf, 1949. Simple Speaks His Mind. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1950. Montage of a Dream Deferred. New York: Holt, 1951. Laughing to Keep From Crying. New York: Holt, 1952. The First Book of Negroes. New York: Watts, 1952. Simple Takes a Wife. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1953. Famous American Negroes. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1954. The First Book of Rhythms. New York: Watts, 1954. The First Book of Jazz. New York: Watts, 1955. Famous Negro Music Makers. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1955. The Sweet Flypaper of Life. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1955. (Written with Roy DeCarava.) / Wonder As I Wander. New York: Rinehart, 1956. A Pictorial History of the Negro in America. New York: Crown, 1956. The First Book of the West Indies. New York: Watts, 1956.

Simple Stakes a Claim. New York: Rinehart, 1957. Famous Negro Heroes of America. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1958. Tambourines to Glory. New York: Day, 1958. The Langston Hughes Reader. New York: Braziller, 1958. Selected Poems. New York: Knopf, 1959. The First Book of Africa. New York: Watts, 1960. Ask Your Mama: 12 Moods for Jazz. New York: Knopf, 1961. Fight for Freedom: the Story of the NAACP. New York: Norton, 1962. Five Plays. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1963. Something in Common and Other Stories. New York: Hill and Wang, 1963. Simple's Uncle Sam. New York: Hill and Wang, 1965. Black Magic, a Pictorial History of the Negro in American Entertainment. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1967. (Written with Milton Meltzer.) The Panther and the Lash. New York: Knopf, 1967. Black Misery. New York: P. S. Eriksson, 1969. Don't You Turn Back. New York: Knopf, 1969. WORKS EDITED BY LANGSTON HUGHES

The Poetry of the Negro 1746-1949. New York: Doubleday, 1949. (With Arna Bontemps.) Revised edition, 1970. The Book of Negro Folklore. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1958. (With Arna Bontemps.) An African Treasury. New York: Crown, 1960. Poems From Black Africa. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1963. New Negro Poets U.S.A. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1964. The Book of Negro Humor. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1965. The Best Short Stories by Negro Writers. Boston: Little, Brown, 1967. BOOK-LENGTH TRANSLATIONS BY LANGSTON HUGHES

Roumain, Jacques. Masters of the Dew. New York: Reynal and Hitchcock, 1947. (With Mercer Cook.) Guillen, Nicolas. Cuba Libre. Los Angeles: Anderson and Ritchie, 1948. Garcia Lorca, Federico. Gypsy Ballads. Beloit, Wis.: Beloit College, 1951.

348 I AMERICAN Mistral, Gabriela. Selected Poems. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1957. UNCOLLECTfeD ESSAYS

"The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain." Nation, 122:692-94 (June 23, 1926). "Our Wonderful Society: Washington." Opportunity, 5:226-27 (August 1927). "Harlem Literati in the Twenties." Saturday Review of Literature, 22:13-14 (June 22, 1940). "Songs Called the Blues."Phylon, 2:143-45 (Summer 1941). "The Future of the Negro." New World, August 1943, pp. 21-23. "What Shall We Do About the South?" Common Ground, 3, no. 2:3-6 (Winter 1943). "My Adventures as a Social Poet." Phylon, 8:205-12 (Fall 1947). "How to Be a Bad Writer." Harlem Quarterly, Spring 1950, pp. 13-14.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Dickinson, Donald C. A Bio-Bibliography of Lang ston Hughes, 1902-1967. 2nded. Hamden, Conn.: Archon, 1972. O'Daniel, Therman B. "A Selected Classified Bibliography." CLA Journal, 11, no. 4:349-66 (June 1968).

CRITICAL AND BIOGRAPHICAL STUDIES Carey, Julian C. "Jesse B. Semple Revisited and Revised." Phylon, 32:158-63 (Summer 1971). Davis, Arthur. "Jesse B. Semple: Negro American." Phylon, 15:21-28 (Spring 1954). . ' 'The Tragic Mulatto Theme in Six Works of Langston Hughes." Phylon, 16:195-204 (Winter 1955). . "Langston Hughes, Cool Poet." CLA Journal, 11, no. 4:280-% (June 1968).

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Emanuel, James. Langston Hughes. New York: Twayne, 1967. Gibson, Donald B. Five Black Writers: Essays on Wright, Ellison, Baldwin, Hughes and Le Roi Jones. New York: New York University Press, 1970. Jackson, Blyden. "A Word About Simple." CLA Journal, 11, no. 4:310-18 (June 1968). Jemie, Onwuchekwa. Langston Hughes, an Introduction to His Poetry. New York: Columbia University Press, 1976. Kearns, Francis. "The Un-Angry Langston Hughes." Yale Review, 60:154-60 (Autumn 1970). Klotman, Phillis. "Langston Hughes's Jess B. Semple and the Blues." Phylon, 36:68-77 (Spring 1975). Meltzer, Milton. Langston Hughes, a Biography. New York: Crowell, 1968. Miller, R. B. "Done Made Us Leave Our Home: Langston Hughes9sNot Without Laughter—Unifying Image and Three Dimensions." Phylon, 37:362-69 (Winter 1976). O'Daniel, Therman B. "Lincoln's Man of Letters." Lincoln University Bulletin, July 1964, pp. 9-12. . Langston Hughes, Black Genius. New York: Morrow, 1971. Patterson, Lindsay. "Locating Langston Hughes." New Leader, 57, no. 24:17-18 (December 9, 1974). Rollins, Charlemae. Black Troubadour: Langston Hughes. Chicago: Rand McNally, 1970. (A biography for young readers.) Spencer, T. J. "Langston Hughes, His Style and His Optimism." Drama Critique, Spring 1964, pp. 99^102. Turner, Darwin. "Langston Hughes as Playwright." CLA Journal, 11, no. 4:297-309 (June 1968). Wagner, Jean. Les poetes negres des Etats-Unis. Paris: Istra, 1962. Waldron, Edward. "The Blues Poetry of Langston Hughes." Negro American Literature Forum, 5, no. 4:140-49 (Winter 1971). -DONALD C. DICKINSON

Sidney Lanier 1842-1881

B

suppress this fondness for music—because his father thought it no proper profession for a young man to enter—he gave much thought to the possibility of a career in music, for he believed he had an extraordinary musical talent and felt he could rise "as high as any composer." While Lanier was trying to decide whether he should do graduate study in Germany in science or devote a major portion of his time to music and poetry, war was declared; and in June 1861, he volunteered for service. After a few months in the Confederate infantry, Sidney and Clifford volunteered for the Mounted Signal Corps, the branch in which Sidney served until he was captured, on November 2, 1864, and placed in the Union prison at Point Lookout, Maryland. At best the conditions at Point Lookout were barely tolerable. There was little food, no clothing, unsanitary living and toilet facilities. The guards were blacks who, Lanier said later, would stop "at nothing to insult and torture" the prisoners. Although he attempted to face an almost unbearable situation with stoical courage—he never complained and did his best to entertain his fellow prisoners by playing for hours on his flute—he subsequently was convinced that the disease of which he died fifteen years later was contracted in prison. After four months Lanier was released, more dead than alive, and, as he later wrote, made his

ORN on February 3, 1842, in Macon, Georgia, Sidney Lanier was the son of Mary Jane Anderson and Robert Sampson Lanier. His father, a lawyer, sent Sidney and his younger brother Clifford to a local academy and then to Oglethorpe University. In college Lanier's literary tastes tended to the quaint and the curious, the romantic and the verbally musical: Robert Burton, Jeremy Taylor, John Keats, Thomas Chatterton, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, James Hogg, Lord Tennyson (his favorite), Thomas Carlyle, Lord Byron, John Ruskin, and William Wordsworth. Thomas Carlyle's greatest service was in introducing Lanier to the German Romantic writers, who quickly became his spiritual and aesthetic inspiration. During his senior year and the year following his graduation, when he was employed by the college as a tutor, Lanier studied with James Woodrow, professor of natural science, who awakened in him a deep love of science without weakening his religious faith. At about this time Lanier first turned seriously to the writing of poetry. Although none of this early verse survives, Clifford characterized it as "Byronesque, if not Wertheresque, at least tinged with gloominess.'' One of Lanier's favorite childhood pastimes was to imitate the call of the mockingbird on his flute, an instrument he had played ever since he could remember. Although Lanier tried to

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350 I AMERICAN way home "by a long and painful journey." That is almost an understatement, for the trip home nearly killed him. He almost certainly would have died, had he not been discovered on the icy deck of a ship, where he and his fellow prisoners were huddled together, shivering with cold, by a friend, who took him to her mother's cabin. After several attempts they got enough brandy down his throat to revive him. His first words were "Am I dead? Is this heaven?" His friends gave Lanier food and blankets, and placed him near the heater. About midnight he asked for his flute, and began to play. "From the shivering prisoners," Aubrey Harrison Starke writes, "there came a yell of joy. For the first time they were sure that their comrade lived." He reached home March 15, 1865, dangerously ill. In September 1865, Lanier took a position as tutor on a large plantation nine miles from Macon. He overexerted himself, often teaching thirty classes a day, and his health broke down. He visited an uncle briefly in Mobile, Alabama, before going to Montgomery to become desk clerk in his grandfather's hotel, where his brother Clifford was already working. At about this time Lanier began subscribing to Round Table, a New York magazine that not only published his first poetry but also helped him to adopt a more conciliatory position toward the North. After his first poems appeared, he filled his notebooks with verse. Lanier also continued his devotion to music, playing his flute on many public occasions. Once when the regular organist at his church was unavailable, he was asked to play for the Sunday services. Although he had had no instruction in playing the organ and little practice on that instrument, he did well enough to be invited to take the position permanently. Life in the South was dreary in the years following the war. Lanier wrote to Bayard Taylor that his life was much like living death. His let-

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ters to Cyrus Northrup and his other literary friends in the North were hardly less pessimistic. He wrote of the "mortal stagnation which paralyzes all business," of his plans to go North as soon as he could, of the abject poverty to which the once wealthy of the region were now subjected, many being reduced to plowing with their own hands the "little patch of land which the war had left them." Lanier was ill again in the midsummer of 1866; but his spirits were lifted the following spring, when Scoffs Monthly Magazine took his long narrative entitled "The Three Waterfalls." In April 1867 he went to New York to find a publisher for the only novel he ever wrote, TigerLilies. Just as he was despairing of finding a firm willing to undertake the considerable financial risk of bringing out a first novel by a virtually unknown Southern writer, a wealthy cousin of his, James F. D. Lanier, agreed to underwrite the project, and Hurd and Houghton, to publish it. The book received little attention when it appeared, although the Atlantic Monthly gave it a brief and mixed review, and the Round Table was more generous both in space and in praise, saying that when Mr. Lanier learns to "bridle in his struggling muse" with whatever pain it may cost him, or at least to confine her curvetings to her legitimate province of verse, we hope to have from his pen a better novel than Tiger-Lilies—a better one, in foct than any Southern writer has hitherto blessed us with. Although Starke calls the book "an artistic failure," he argues that it is valuable to the student of Lanier because it is a . . . sort of spiritual autobiography, a continued journal of personal experiences, and the plot was determined by the events of Lanier's own life. . . . Lanier wrote Tiger-Lilies as most first novels are written—out of a burning desire to

SIDNEY LANIER / 351 express in one book all that an aspiring author has to say. In this book Lanier first expressed convictions that he never abandoned: all that poetry and science have to say can best be said in music. And since poetry and science both attempt to reveal the existence and benevolence of God, music should always be regarded as an act of worship. The book is so full of such naive and overt theorizing that most modern readers find it almost unreadable. Lanier married Mary Day, daughter of a Macon jeweler, on December 19, 1867. After a brief honeymoon in Macon, the young couple went to Prattville, Alabama, where Lanier had taught in the academy there since September. The winter of 1867-1868 was a severe one, and the worst years of reconstruction in the South were just getting under way. As a result, Lanier's mood was melancholic, and his usual optimism often was severely strained. The white leadership in the South, he thought, was paralyzed into inaction. His verse, much of which was not published until years later, reflects the mood of the times: the difficulty of being brave and persevering when spring brings no warmth. A representative poem of this period is 'The Raven Days," in which Lanier comments on the near-disaster of living and attempting to work in the South immediately after the Civil War. "Our hearths are gone out,'' he begins, "and our hearts are broken." Only the "ghosts" of our homes remain, and everywhere one can read in the eyes of those he meets the pain that fills their hearts. These "Raven days of sorrow," the poet hopes, will bring in their "whetted ivory beaks" some hope of better days to come, "Some strip of sea-green dawn, some orange streaks." Life everywhere is so dreary and so chilling that one lies "in chains, too weak to be afraid." He concludes with a poignant plea for some tangible reason to hope for a better future:

O Raven days, dark Raven days of sorrow, Will ever any warm light come again? Will ever the lit mountains of To-morrow Begin to gleam athwart the mournful plain? There is no doubt that the poet is trying to shock the reader into an awareness of the miserable conditions under which any Southerner had to live, and to gain a sympathetic understanding of the plight of the Southern artist in the period following the Civil War. The extent to which Lanier accomplished this objective must be judged by how well he is able to let his readers share with him the experience he is delineating. The triteness of his language—"broken hearts," "ghastly eyes," and "hollow sighs"—and the vagueness of his light-dark metaphor detract from the poem's effectiveness. For the reader to share the poet's feeling, he has to rely heavily on information not included in the poem. Lanier later learned to exert more control over both his language and his tropes. In January 1868, Lanier suffered his first hemorrhage, and became sure of what he had suspected for a long time: he had tuberculosis. The remainder of his life was a constant struggle against the most dreaded disease of his time. Knowing his health would not allow him to continue teaching in the academy, where his duties often required him to work seventy or more hours a week, he returned to Macon at the end of the 1867-1868 school session to enter his father's law office, wishing, however, that he could earn his living as a musician or a writer. Although he thought his literary career might be over—he had published a novel, a short narrative, and ten poems—he began his study of law determined to fight the apparently inevitable. "I shall go to work on my essays," he wrote to his father on June 1, 1868, "and on a course of study in German and in the Latin works of Lucretius, whom I have long desired to study." He was soon so absorbed in his music, too, that he

352 I AMERICAN often thought that this should be his profession—and well he might, for he was an unusually gifted flutist. In a letter to his brother written in April 1868, Joel Chandler Harris proclaimed: "Sidney Lanier is the most accomplished flute player in America. There is something weird and mysterious, ravishing and entrancing in his manner of playing." During the late 1860's Lanier planned and wrote a book of essays that was not published until after his death, although some of the individual pieces appeared separately. The most representative of these, perhaps, is "Retrospects and Prospects," which appeared in ^Southern Magazine during the spring of 1871. Following an attempt to survey the state of all the arts and sciences, Lanier comments on those with which he is virtually unfamiliar (this category would include everything except music and poetry), as well as on the two upon which he can write with some degree of authority. Fortunately, most of his attention is devoted to music, the art which he expected to bring about an inevitable spiritual renaissance. His discussion of the political situation, although somewhat naive and excessively romanticized, is interesting because it announces the arousal of the social consciousness that later produced such works as "Corn," "The Symphony," and "The New South." The demoralized Southern soldier has not, as expected, become a menace to those who would revitalize the economy of the region; instead, he has returned quietly to the farm or factory and gone to work, in an attempt to restore economic prosperity to the region. In the light of the former rebel soldiers' actions, who, Lanier asks, can understand or justify the attitude toward the defeated South that "has resulted in those hundreds of laws recently promulgated by the reigning body in the United States?" The essay closes with a renunciation of war as a barbaric institution that must be banished from the Christian world. While Lanier was composing "Retrospects

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and Prospects," "Nature-Metaphors," and the other essays intended for the proposed collection, he was serving in the family law firm, first as clerk and later, after passing the bar, as a junior partner. He never practiced in the courts; but he quickly established a reputation as a careful and thorough researcher, giving invaluable assistance to those who would represent the firm's clients in the courts. He also became known, by the senior members of the firm, as the person who could be trusted to handle the most involved and complicated cases dealing with property titles and estate settlements. In April 1869 the firm sent Lanier to New York for almost a month. While there he renewed his acquaintance with his wealthy cousins, attended to the business on which the firm had sent him, and heard as much good music as his crowded schedule would permit. During the late 1860's and early 1870's, Lanier wrote some poetry but published little—less than a half dozen poems frotn 1869 to 1874. He did conduct a regular correspondence with Paul Hamilton Hayne, mostly about literary matters; Hayne was the first man of any literary importance to encourage him to write poetry. (Later quotations from these letters will demonstrate that Lanier confided his literary hopes and plans to Hayne.) It was also during this period that Lanier met Lawrence Turnbull, co-editor of the New Eclectic (later the Southern Magazine), in which some of his early poems were published. One of the poems of this period is "Nirvana," which Starke thinks is "one of Lanier's finest." Most modern readers, however, seem to prefer the dialect poems, which also belong to the period: "Thar's More in the Man Than Thar Is in the Land," "Jones's Private Argyment," and "Nine from Eight." They resemble their prose counterpart, Augustus B. Longstreet's Georgia Scenes, and other, better-known poems in the same vein, John Hay's The Pike County Ballads. Of even more importance, perhaps, they demon-

SIDNEY LANIER I 353 strate that Lanier was moving closer to the argument advanced in "Corn," his first poem to bring him national attention. The first of the dialect poems, written by Clifford and Sidney Lanier and published in Scribner's Monthly in 1876, is "Uncle Jim's Baptist Revival Hymn." Uncle Jim, the Laniers reveal in an explanatory note, discovers that his Baptist church is being destroyed by the materialism of its members, as the farmer's cotton is by the condition commonly known as "being in the grass." The plight of his church-people is compared to that of the lazy freedmen who are losing their fight with the grass that is threatening to "choke out" and destroy their cotton: Solo.—Sin's rooster's crowed, Ole Mahster's riz, De sleepin' time is pas'; Wake up dem lazy Baptissis, Chorus.—Dey's mightily in de grass, grass Dey's mightily in de grass. The song continues with the preacher pleading for more diligent effort from his parishioners, until we reach this final stanza:

moved to Texas, where "the land was rich." As he left, he and his son let everyone know their opinion of anyone who would stay in Georgia: So him and Tom they hitched up the mules, Pertestin' that folks was mighty big fools That 'ud stay in Georgy ther lifetime out, Just scratchin' a livin' when all of 'em mought Git places in Texas whar cotton would sprout By the time you could plant it in the land. On his way out of the county, Jones passed the home of a man named Brown, to whom he sold his land for $1.50 an acre. Then he left for Texas, "Which it tuck/ His entire pile, with the best of luck, /to git thar and git him a little land." As soon as Jones had left, Brown moved out to Jones's place "And he rolled up his breeches and bared his arm." He silently and quickly converted the cotton farm to one that grew corn and wheat. After five years Brown had "got so fat he wouldn't weigh" and was sitting down "To the bulliest dinner you ever see," when up drove Jones. His years in Texas had been a disaster.

Lord, thunder us up to de plowin-match, Lord, peerten de hoein' fas' Yea, Lord, hab mussy on de Baptis patch Dey's mightily in de grass, grass, Dey's mightily in de grass.

And thar was Jones, standin' out at the fence, And he hadn't no waggin, nor mules, nor tents, Fur he had left Texas afoot and cum To Georgy to see if he couldn't git sum Employment, and he was a looking as humBle as ef he had never owned any land.

The best of these dialect poems—and the ones closest in theme to "Corn"—are "Thar's More in the Man Than Thar Is in the Land" (1869) and "Nine from Eight" (1870). In the first of these, a narrator tells the story of a hill farmer from Jones County who lived "pretty much by gittin of loans." His land was made up of "red hills and stones," his mules were little more than "skin and bones," and his hogs were as "flat as corn bread pones." Although he had a thousand acres of land, this man, whose name was Jones, could not make a living growing cotton, so he

Brown asks Jones to share his ample meal, after which Brown expresses the moral of the little narrative: "That, 'whether men's land was rich or poor/ Thar was more in the man than thar was in the land.' " Few readers of Lanier's poem could miss his strong reaction to farmers depending upon cotton as their single cash crop. In the postwar South the only salvation for the farmer, he believed, was a live-at-home economy based on his growing as much of his food as he could. The other part of the theme that Lanier later

354 I AMERICAN developed in "Corn" and 'The New South"— that the farmer should resist the temptation to mortgage his land in order to get the money he needed to make his crop—is presented in "Nine from Eight." In this poem the narrator is driving toward Macon with some surplus food for sale when he sees, a little way from the main highway: A man squattin' down, like a big bull-toad, On the ground, a-figgerin' thar in the sand With his finger, and motionin' with his hand, And he looked like Ellick Garry. And as I driv up, I heerd him bleat To hisself, like a lamb: "Hauh? nine from eight Leaves nuthin'—and none to carry?" The man was indeed Ellick, the narrator's neighbor, who had just been into Macon to settle his account at the bank and had stopped in this isolated spot to see if he could comprehend what had happened to him. He had received a $900 "furnish" from the bank, but his cotton had yielded only $804. The narrator, who has abandoned cotton for subsistence fanning, continues: Then I says "Hello, here, Garry! However you star' and frown Thare's somethin' fur you to carry, Fur you've worked it upside down!" Then he riz and walked to his little bull-cart, And made like he neither had seen nor heerd Nor knowed that I knowed of his raskilly part, And he tried to look as if he wa'nt feared, And gathered his lines like he never keered, And he driv down the road 'bout a quarter or so, And then looked around, and I hollered "Hello, Look here, Mister Ellick Garry! You may git up soon and lie down late, But you'll always find that nine from eight Leaves nuthin'—and none to carry." Lanier's intention in this and his other dialect poems is obvious. The Southern farmer cannot

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solve the problems confronting him by labor alone, regardless of how hard he works, nor can he improve his situation by moving away and trying to get a new start elsewhere. As Lanier urged later in his prose essay "The New South" and in the better-known poem "Corn," the postwar farmer in the South must recognize the changes that have occurred and move as completely and rapidly as possible away from the old system of a bank-financed, one-crop economy and toward subsistence farming. Lanier's unerring ear for the Georgia dialect, his knowledge of the way these farmers thought, and his ability to express succinctly and concretely their motivations for their often irrational actions give these poems a ring of authenticity. They are, therefore, effective vehicles to accomplish their author's objective—to make the Southern farmer realize the seriousness of his condition and to point out the means by which it could be improved. Lanier's years as a lawyer, however, were not a time of much literary activity. "I have not put pen to paper in a long time,'' he wrote to Hayne. "How I thirst to do so, how I long to sing . . .—a thousand various songs oppress me unsung—, is inexpressible. Yet the mere work that brings bread gives me no time." Perhaps the most significant development during these years was that the ideas from which his later prose and poetry would come were slowly maturing. His letters, particularly those to Hayne, reveal that his thoughts were never far from literature and that through a carefully organized program of reading he was attempting to keep up with what was going on in the literary world and to form a more reliable awareness of the literary tradition of western European civilization. Despite Lanier's best efforts, however, his health continued to deteriorate. In the spring of 1870 he developed a deep-seated cough that persisted even after an extended vacation in the Lookout Mountains of Tennessee. In August he

SIDNEY LANIER I 355 returned to New York for medical treatment and remained for two months. While there he was too ill to write, but he listened to music and was particularly impressed by a performance by Christine Nilsson, to whom he later addressed a poem. "Mile. Nilsson singeth as thou and I love," he wrote to his wife. "She openeth her sweet mouth, and turneth her head o' one side like a mockingbird in the moonlight, and straight-away come forth the purest silver tones that ever mortal voice made." Lanier responded well to the treatments and returned to Macon, only to have to leave again. First he went with his family to Marietta, Georgia, but the slight change in climate brought little relief. In the fall, therefore, he returned to New York. Again he found the music stimulating, and the treatments seemed to alleviate his condition somewhat. No sooner did he return to Macon, however, than he had a serious relapse. Unable to carry on his legal practice, Lanier went, in July 1872, to Alleghany Spring, Virginia. As soon as he returned to Macon, he followed the advice of his brother Clifford and in the early autumn he set out for Texas to establish more or less permanent residence. The air in San Antonio seemed beneficial, and Lanier wrote to his father and sister that he felt better than he had in many months. He took long walks morning and afternoon, and on several occasions rode horseback on the "undulating prairie that surrounded the city." Although he planned a series of articles for the Eastern press, using Frederick Law Olmstead's travel books as a model, Lanier finished only one slight piece. He did, however, join the Alamo Literary Society, and in its library continued his research for "The Jacquerie." His principal artistic activity was the composition of music for the flute; "Field-larks and Blackbirds" belongs to this period. He also played the flute at several local functions, and after each performance members of the audience came forward to proclaim him a

genius. Once Lanier played before a German society; and when he sat down "amid a storm of applause," he wrote to his wife on Janury 30, 1873, "Herr Thielpape [the leader of the orchestra] arose and ran" to him, declaring "that he hat never hurt de flude accompany itself before!" Despite his reception in San Antonio and the still precarious condition of his health, Lanier was determined to try to earn his living from his music and his poetry; and the only place he could reasonably hope for any possibility of success in these endeavors was New York City. "When Life, Health, Passion, Bent of Nature, and Necessity all grasp me with simultaneous hands and turn my face in one direction," he wrote to his brother Clifford, "why should I hesitate?" Fortunately, Clifford approved of the plan and promised to help support his brother and his family while Lanier devoted his few remaining years to poetry and music. Lanier died relatively young; and his artistic career was even briefer, for he did not decide to make art his career until seven or eight years before his death. Even then his primary interest was music, not poetry. On May 16, 1873, he wrote to Hayne: "I don't know that I've even told you, that whatever turn I have for art is purely musical; poetry being, with me, a mere tangent into which I shoot sometimes." On his way to New York, he stopped in Baltimore and played the flute for the director of the Peabody Conservatory of Music, who was trying to organize a full-time symphony orchestra. Lanier played some of the music he had composed in Texas, and made such a favorable impression that he was offered the position of first flutist in the orchestra, if one were formed, at a salary of $120 a month and enough private students to increase this amount to $200. There was a possibility, he wrote to his wife, soon after he arrived in Baltimore, that "we might dwell in the beautiful city, among the great libraries, and midst of the music, the re-

356 I AMERICAN ligion, and the art that we love." He left for New York better pleased with his prospects than he had ever been. His reputation as a musician followed Lanier to New York, where some of the city's most prestigious "critics gave him private audiences and musicians of reputation spent whole afternoons playing duets with him." One musician, widely known at that time, proclaimed him the "founder of American Music"; and A. G. Badger, a manufacturer of flutes, wrote: "Lanier is astonishing. . . . If he could travel with a concert troupe, and play solos on the bass-flute, I would have orders for fifty in a month." In late November he was offered the position in the Peabody Orchestra, though at a salary half the amount he had been promised; he accepted, despite his obvious disappointment, because he hoped this appointment would lead to something higher. Above all, Lanier wanted to have his family with him; but, as he wrote to his wife, he was grateful to have access to the Peabody Library, then one of the best research libraries in the country, in order that he might continue work on "The Jacquerie." At first his father tried to persuade Lanier to return to the financial security of the law office; but when he was convinced that his son was determined to give his life to the arts, he relented and assisted Clifford in providing financial support for Sidney and his family. During his first few months in Baltimore, Lanier played one concert each week and quickly gained a devoted following. One who heard him play is quoted by Starke as saying: "He dispensed with accompanist, yet avoided the meagerness of a bare melody by weaving with it a wonderfully rich and varied sequence of harmonies, conveyed either by a running accompaniment of broken chords or by cadenzas as free and unexpected as those of a song bird." His greatest compliment as a flutist, however, probably came from his director, Asger Hamerik:

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In his hands the flute no longer remained a mere material instrument, but was transformed into a voice that set heavenly harmonies into vibration. Its tones developed colors, warmth, and a low sweetness of unspeakable poetry; they were not only true and pure, but poetic, allegoric as it were, suggestive of the depths and heights of being and of the delights which the earthy ear never hears and the earthy eye never sees. . . . He was the master, the genius. In May he returned to Macon, where he visited his father briefly before taking his wife and family for a leisurely summer in Sunnyside, Georgia. Here Lanier played his flute for hours at a time and took long walks, sometimes through the fields of ripening corn. His views of those fields, where cotton was once raised, undoubtedly stimulated his creative imagination, for during this summer he wrote a draft of 4 'Corn,'' the poem that first brought him to the attention of a national audience. In fact, as Charles R. Anderson points out in the Centennial edition of Lanier's works, Lanier's career as a poet really began with "Corn." Although at the time of its composition he was thirty-two years old and had fewer than eight years of life remaining, he had published only twenty poems—he had written many more—and those he had published had either been privately printed or had appeared in magazines of small and local circulation. A few poems had been published in journals outside the South, but no poem of his had appeared in a magazine of national circulation. Luckily, Lanier had learned something of his craft in the fifteen years he had been writing verse; and, of even more importance, during the past two or three years he had read the English poets of the Renaissance and earlier. Now his models were not Tennyson and William Morris, but William Shakespeare and Geoffrey Chaucer. His visit to Georgia, after his year in Texas

SIDNEY LANIER I 357 and Baltimore, made Lanier aware for the first time of the changes that were coming to the state. He was alarmed to see the numbers of deserted homesteads and gullied hills in the older counties. Although he had dealt with this development in his earlier dialect poems, Lanier was now determined to move these "matters to a loftier plane." In the earlier poems he had concentrated on the small hill farmer, and the tone had been comic. To look now at the ruined plantation owner would put him, he knew, dangerously near sentimentality, so he wisely chose to emphasize the land; and for his poetic form he elected to use the irregular ode in the manner of Abraham Cowley. While Lanier was waiting for this poem to come to an acceptable form in his mind, however, its theme of social protest—the advisability of growing corn rather than cotton in the South— caused him to think of the economic conditions of the people of his region. This attitude led him to compose a new series of dialect poems, including "The Power of Prayer" and "Civil Rights," both poems that complement the theme of "Corn." Meanwhile, he had finished a second draft of "Corn" and gave it to a friend for criticism. Encouraged by his friend's opinion, he sent it to M. M. Hurd, of Hurd and Houghton, the firm that published Tiger-Lilies, with the hope he could place it in a New York magazine. Hurd sent it to William Dean Howells, editor of the Atlantic Monthly, who immediately rejected it, calling it unsuccessful because readers would be mystified by the lack of "connection between the apostrophe in the beginning and the bit of narrative at the close." Although "Corn" was accepted for immediate publication by Lippincott's Magazine, Lanier was deeply disappointed by the reception it had received from Howells and the best-known literary magazine in America. When he received Howells' letter, he wrote to his friend Edward Spencer, he took it to his room and "there, dur-

ing a day whose intensity was of that sort that one only attempts to communicate to one's God, I led myself to an infinite height above myself and meditated." At the conclusion of this experience, he was convinced that "my business in life was to make poems. Since then, it has not occurred to me to doubt about my sort of work." Obviously Lanier's faith in his poetic talent, though severely tried, was not destroyed. To his wife he wrote: "Know . . . that disappointments were inevitable . . . this . . . is clear as the sun to me now that I know through the fiercest tests of life, that I am in soul, and shall be in life and utterance, a great poet." Despite some obvious faults—the principal one being its lack of structural unity—"Corn" must be considered one of Lanier's major poems because it brings together the several elements of the social protest theme that lie near the surface in much of his verse. For years he had agonized over the economic plight of the postwar South and had frequently offered the possibility of diversified farming on small farms as a solution to some of the problems resulting from the collapse of the old plantation system. In the dialect poems in which he had treated this theme, despite the seriousness of his intentions, the effect had often been comic. In those poems Lanier had concentrated on the small hill farmer; now he chose to attempt to give his theme universal significance and a tone of high seriousness by concentrating on neither the ruined plantation owner nor the small farmer, but on the land itself. The poem is composed of three parts. Its structure, in fact, is so loose that the poem almost falls into three separate poetic fragments. The strongest structural device holding the parts together is their relation by a carefully delineated narrator, but his role decreases in importance as the poem progresses and the poet focuses more directly upon the misused and ill-kept land. In the first section, which contains some of the most evocative, sensuous imagery Lanier ever wrote,

358 I AMERICAN the narrator wanders through the woods near the edge of a corn field, and his every sense is attuned to the natural wonders around him. The woods are * 'trembling through and through/ With shimmering forms." The leaves that wave against his cheeks are like the caresses of a woman's hands. "The embracing boughs express/ A subtlety of mighty tenderness"; in the small cluster of trees in which he finds himself, little noises start: That sound anon like beatings of a heart, Anon like talk 'twixt lips not far apart. The beech dreams balm, as a dreamer hums a song; Through that vague wafture, expirations strong Throb from young hickories breathing deep and long With stress and urgence bold of prisoned spring And ecstasy of burgeoning. The narrator not only hears the "beatings of a heart," "an ecstasy of burgeoning"; he also feels the caresses of leaves upon his cheeks, sees "Long muscadines/ Rich-wreathe the spacious foreheads of great pines, And breathe ambrosial passion from their vines." Finally he prays with "mosses, ferns and flowers shy" and hears "faint bridal-sighs of brown and green/ Dying to silent hints of kisses keen." In few places in literature, perhaps, is there a clearer expression of how one may follow Ralph Waldo Emerson's advice that he go into the woods and let the Universal Being flow through him. The narrator of this poem has done just that; therefore, as he wanders from the woods to the fence corner of the field where the corn grows, he has become the "transparent eyeball" and is prepared to make the philosophical pronouncements contained in the middle section of the poem. As he pauses to gaze upon the field of corn, his eyes, like those of Henry David Thoreau a few years earlier, "take harvests"; and "without

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theft" he reaps someone else's field. Suddenly among the rows of corn he sees "one tall corncaptain" standing high above the other stalks. As the narrator ponders the position the tall "corn-captain" occupies among its fellows, he likens it to the place of the poet in society: Soul calm, like thee, yet fain, like thee, to grow By double increment, above, below; Soul homely, as thou art, yet rich in grace like thee, Teaching the yeoman selfish chivalry. . . . Although the poet, like the stalk of corn, is the tallest of his fellows and can breathe the rarefied air of pure sublimity, he is always aware of the physical world in which he must live and work: Thou lift'st more stature than a mortal man's, Yet ever piercest downward in the mould And keepest hold Upon the reverend and steadfast earth That gave thee birth; . . . The comparison of the "tall corn-captain" and the poet continues: As poets should, Thou has built up thy hardihood With universal food, Drawn in select proportions fair From honest mould and vagabond air; From darkness of the dreadful night, And joyful light; From antique ashes, whose departed flame In thee has finer life and longer fame; From wounds and balms, From storms and calms, From potsherds and dry bones And ruin-stones. In short, the poet, like the "corn-captain," must combine "strength of earth with grace of heaven." He must "marry new and old"; he must "reconcile heat and cold," the "dark and bright," and "many a heart-perplexing op-

SIDNEY LAN1ER I 359 posite." He has taken from all, that he might give to all. Then, after devoting more than half the poem to describing the process by which the individual may become interfused into nature and explaining at some length the function of the poet in society, the narrator comes to the subject he had originally intended to discuss: the effect on the land of planting only the traditional money crop, cotton. O steadfast dweller on the selfsame spot Where thou wast born, that still repinest not— Type of the home-fond heart, the happy lot!— Deeply thy mild content rebukes the land Whose flimsy homes, built on the shifting sand Of trade, forever rise and fall With alternation whimsical, Enduring scarce a day, Then swept away By swift engulfments of incalculable tides Whereon capricious Commerce rides. He calls upon this "substantial spirit of content" to look across to where "Yon deserted Georgian hill/ Bares to the sun his piteous aged crest/ And seamy breast." This abandoned land, thought worthless by its heartless and mercenary exploiters, has been left to die. This hillside is scarred by erosion because of neglect by its owners; like too much of the land around it, this is the victim of man's greed. It has been sacrificed by one "who played at toil,/ And gave to coquette Cotton soul and soil." Like many other landowners, the owner of this property "sailed in borrowed ships of usury—/ A foolish Jason on a treacherous sea,/ Seeking the Reece and finding misery." These farmers, unmindful of the wonderful bounty nature has provided, have sold out to Trade and staked their lives on "games of Buy-and-Sell." Each year this kind of fanner must go back to the banker and try to invent an acceptable excuse for not

being able to repay the money he has borrowed: "the drought, the worm, the rust, the grass." At last He woke to find his foolish dreaming past, And all his best-of-life the easy prey Of squandering scamps and quacks that lined his way With vile array, From rascal statesman down to petty knave; Himself, at best, for all his bragging brave, A gamester's catspaw and a banker's slave. Then, worn and gray, and sick with deep unrest, He fled away into the oblivious West, Unmourned, unblest. Like so many of Robert Penn Warren's characters, this money-crazed farmer misuses what nature has provided and seeks a new start in the West. But we may suspect that he will be as displeased with the opportunities to solve his problems there as were Warren's characters Jack Burden and Willie Proudfit, and the protagonist of Lanier's poem "Thar's More in the Man Than Thar Is in the Land." The last stanza of the poem is characteristic of Lanier near the height of his art: Old hill! old hill! thou gashed and hairy Lear Whom the divine Cordelia of the year, E'en pitying Spring, will vainly strive to cheer— King, that no subject man nor beast may own, Discrowned, undaughtered and alone— Yet shall the great God turn thy fate, And bring thee back into thy monarch state And majesty immaculate. Lo, through hot waverings of the August morn, Thou givest from thy vasty sides forlorn Visions of golden treasuries of corn— Ripe largesse lingering for some bolder heart That manfully shall take thy part,

360 I AMERICAN And tend thee, And defend thee, With antique sinew and with modern art. Any reader of this poem can sense Lanier's deep distress at what he observes happening to the naturally beautiful countryside and the productive soil of his native Georgia. There is no doubt, either, that Lanier is convinced that the villain is Trade; America has lost its sense of purpose and has become a money-worshipping domain. Some of the opening imagery of the poem comes as close as Lanier ever will to demonstrating what he meant by "etherealization"—a theory through which he expressed his belief in an eventual "union of human nature with physical nature." In the middle portion of the poem, and also in the final stanza, one can also observe the process by which Lanier would broaden man's love of the universe. But one can also see why Howells rejected the poem: the connection between "the apostrophe in the beginning and the bit of narrative at the close" is not strong enough to prevent the poem from falling into three separate and loosely related parts. Finally, Lanier's solution to the problem he presents so vividly is at best vague. Nevertheless, "Corn" was widely and favorably reviewed in the popular press. The Philadelphia Evening Bulletin called it ' 'the most American of American poems." Others found Lanier's protest against the growing materialism in America pleasing, so for the first time the young Southern poet felt he was receiving the sort of recognition he needed to establish a national reputation. This kind of attention led him to begin composing a more ambitious poem on the same theme. This poem, Lanier wrote to Hayne, was to be on the evils of national life, just as "Corn" had emphasized those of Georgia life. His protest against Trade was really a protest against American industrial capitalism, but he attempted to in-

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corporate within the poem a complementary theme. "In my 'Symphony,' " he wrote to Edward Spencer, "Love's fine wit—the love of one's fellow-men attempts (not to hear with but precisely the reverse) to see with ears." He would attempt through music to make his fellow Americans aware of the social injustices of modern industrialism. The poem includes, Aubrey Starke claims, the core of Lanier's philosophy: The final definition is a spiritual gloss on Mme. De Stael's famous definition, which Lanier had read as a youth: "Music is love's only interpreter"; but it is religious as well. It recalls Lanier's assertion, made nine years earlier, that "Music . . . is utterly unconscious of aught but Love." It recalls, too, the declaration of Felix Sterling in Tiger-Lilies that "Music means harmony, harmony means love and love means— God." . . . "The Symphony," though certainly not the most effective nor the most beautiful of Lanier's poems, is, for the revelation it makes of his philosophy, without doubt the most significant. According to Charles R. Anderson, "The Symphony" is a revision of "The Jacquerie"; and when he wrote to [Gibson] Peacock (March 24, 1875) that a new poem in which he discussed "various deep social questions of the times" had taken hold of him "like a real James River Ague," this must not be thought of as a spontaneous growth of the two months that had passed since the publication of "Corn" (Anderson, p. xliii). The poem was long maturing, and it came directly out of the thought and reading Lanier had been doing for more than ten years in preparation for "The Jacquerie." In both poems the evil effects of trade and commercialism are to be overcome by chivalry, Lanier's word for unselfish Christian service, and not by any definite program of economic reform. His failure to express

SIDNEY LANIER I 361 directly the process through which a fairer distribution of the world's goods would be effected has displeased modern critics of such vastly different persuasions as Granville Hicks and John Crowe Ransom. 'The Symphony" appeared in the June 1875 number of Lippincott's Magazine. It was highly praised in letters to Lanier by Bayard Taylor and by many of his other friends. George H. Calvert, a critic of national reputation in the late nineteenth century, wrote a lengthy review of it in Golden Age for June 12, 1875: What immediately seizes and holds the reader in new poetry (and little of that printed is new even when first uttered) are fresh aspects of old things, glimpses into heretofore undivulged vistas, new affinities flashed in view by a stroke of genius. . . . "Corn" . . . [and] 'The Symphony," alike in spirit and execution are a deep basis upon which may be built up a great reputation. After the appearance of "The Symphony," Lanier, always pressed for money, accepted a commission from the Atlantic Coast Line Railroad to write a book on Florida. After it was completed, and two chapters sold to Lippincott's Magazine, he returned to Georgia, where he found a long letter from Bayard Taylor intelligently criticizing 'The Symphony." In response to Taylor's letter, Lanier gave his often-quoted description of life in the South following the Civil War: I could never describe to you what a mere drought and famine my life has been, as regards that multitude of matters which I fancy one absorbs when one is in an atmosphere of art, or when \one is in conversational relations with men of letters, with travelers, with persons who have either seen, or written, or done large things. Perhaps you know that, with us of the younger generation in the South since the War, pretty much the whole of life has been merely not dying.

The friendship with Taylor was the most important of Lanier's artistic alliances, he believed, because it brought him to know "literary people and literary ways." On November 26, 1877, Lanier returned to Baltimore to resume his duties with the Peabody Orchestra. His national reputation was now such that he thought he could secure a chair in the "Physics and Metaphysics of Music." He submitted an official application to the University of Alabama and expressed his desire in a letter to Daniel Coit Oilman, president of the Johns Hopkins University. Although Oilman was sufficiently persuaded by Lanier's argument to recommend the establishment of a professorship in music, the reaction of his board of trustees was not positive enough for the position to be approved. Lanier was naturally disappointed; but his financial condition was better than it had ever been, so he was less concerned about money. For the first time since leaving his father's law office, Lanier thought he could support his family. He was selling poetry fairly regularly to Scribner's Monthly and Lippincott's Magazine. The revenue from this source, added to that received from his position with the Peabody Orchestra, his private music students, and special musical engagements, led him to consider seriously moving his family to Baltimore. All he needed to make this long-held dream come true, he wrote to his wife, was for the travel book on Florida to sell well and for his series of articles on India, which Lippincott's had commissioned him to do, to lead to similar projects. The latter assignment resulted in Lanier's being asked to do a series of boys' books, which he produced over the next three or four years: The Boy s Froissart (1879), The Boy's King Arthur (1880), The Boy's Mabinogion (1881), and The Boy's Percy (1882). The first of these books was so popular, and the prospects of the others doing equally well (although none did) were so bright, that Lanier brought his wife and children to Bal-

362 I AMERICAN timore, first to a crowded four-room flat and later to a large eight-room house at 33 Denmead Street, on the outskirts of the city. In the meantime Lanier, after William Cullen Bryant, Henry Wads worth Longfellow, and James Russell Lowell had refused the invitation, was asked to write an ode for the centennial celebration at Philadelphia in May 1876. He was delighted. "This is very pleasing to me," he wrote to his wife, "for I am chosen as representative of our dear South; and the matter puts my name by the side of very delightful and honorable ones, besides bringing me in contact with many people I would desire to know." On January 15, 1876, Lanier sent the complete text of "The Centennial Meditation of Columbia," after it had been carefully read and criticized by Bayard Taylor, to Dudley Buck, who was to write the music. Although Lanier was confident enough in his composition to ignore most of the suggestions made by Taylor, he was not prepared for the reception his ode received from the popular press. The critic for the New YorkTribune wrote that Lanier's language was "somewhat obscure" and that the poem was ' 'totally lacking in historical fidelity." The writer for the Atlantic Monthly accused Lanier of saturating "his mind with a theory" and then waiting "for the poem to come. He would have done better to keep his mind clear from theories and to have gone ardently and without prejudice in search of his poem.'' Lanier's reaction to this adverse and justified criticism—modern readers also find the language trite and stilted, the images merely decorative, and the tone sentimental—was predictable to anyone who knew him. "My experience in the varying judgments given about poetry," he wrote to his father, "has all converged upon one solitary principle. . . . that principle is, that the artist shall put forth, humbly and lovingly, and without bitterness against opposition, the very best and highest that is within him, utterly

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regardless of contemporary criticism." For the only claim criticism can make is that it "crucified Christ," "stoned Stephen," "hooted Paul for a madman," "drove Dante into a hell of exile," and "killed Keats." Despite unfavorable criticism, publication of the ode made Lanier known throughout the country. This national prominence persuaded the editor of Lippincott's to publish more of Lanier's poetry; when he requested a poem, Lanier responded with "Psalm of the West," which appeared as the featured poem of the July 1876 issue. Although one of the most ambitious of Lanier's poems, "Psalm of the West" is also one of the weakest. The poet's natural tendencies toward abstraction, allegory, didacticism, and vague generalities appear in an extreme form. There are also too many compound words, and the imagery often seems to bear no relation to the experience Lanier is attempting to delineate. Despite its obvious weaknesses, Edwin Mims insists that the poem is important because the fact that a Southern poet, writing in 1876, "came forward . . . to express his passionate faith in the future of the American Union" helped to create a united nation for the future. Aubrey Harrison Starke argues that Lanier was "a poet of democracy, singing in new measures to new music the song of the new nation and the nascent national spirit." Some more recent critics are convinced that Lanier's "pursuit of a national voice led him to some questionable optimisms.'' While the stings of the adverse reaction to the ode were still present, Lanier wrote a poem that he always considered among his best. At the time of his death, in fact, he was trying to bring out an edition of his poetry under the title Clover and Other Poems. The central problem with which the poem is concerned, the reactions a serious artist receives from the critics and the public at large, is not presented immediately (although it is suggested by the poem's subtitle: "inscribed to the memory of John Keats"). First

SIDNEY LANIER I 363 the poet attempts to create a mood appropriate for the "thought" of the poem. The narrator sits in a field of clover on a "fluent autumn day" at "a perfect hour" "Half-way to noon." He can barely hear the clock in a distant village striking the hour of eight. It is a moment of complete serenity: . . . Reigns that mild surcease That stills the middle of each rural morn— When nimble noises that with sunrise ran About the farms that have sunk again to rest; When Tom no more across the horse-lot calls To sleepy Dick, nor Dick husk-voiced upbraids The sway-back'd roan for stamping on his foot With sulphurous oath and kick in flank, what time The cart-chain clinks across the slanting shaft, And, kitchenward, the rattling bucket plumps Souse down the well, where quivering ducks quack loud And Susan Cook is singing. As he lies there, it seems that some "divine sweet irritants" have made the narrator aware "Of inmost Nature's secret autumn-thought"; and he senses an intimate relationship with the field of clover. Tell me, dear Clover (since my soul is thine, Since I am fain give study all the day, To make thy ways my ways, thy service mine, To seek me out thy God, my God to be, And die from out myself to live in thee)— Now, Cousin Clover, tell me in mine ear: Go'st thou to market with thy pink and green? Of what avail, this color and this grace? The narrator contemplates the question he has asked, and concludes that the clover is a poet. He then poses another query: "What worth, what worth, the whole of all thine art?" The fields of clover seem to take on even greater significance as he gazes across them and begins to suspect they conceal an answer he needs and wants. The

clover stems seem now to bear the "stately heads of men / With poet's faces heartsome, dear and pale." Sweet visages of all the souls of time Whose loving service to the world has been In the artists' way expressed and bodied. Oh, In arms' reach, here be Dante, Keats, Chopin, Raphael, Lucretius, Omar, Angelo, Beethoven, Chaucer, Schubert, Shakespeare, Bach, And Buddha. . . . As the narrator lies there, wanting to embrace all of these artists, these "sweetness masters," "workers worshipful" in the "Court of Gentle Service," there is an unexpected and unwelcome intrusion. It is the "Course-of-things, shaped like an Ox," that begins to graze across the field of clover, oblivious of the beauty and the ' 'means of truth " he is destroying. He must have "his grass, if earth be round or flat, / And hath his grass, if empires plunge in pain / Or faiths lash out." . . . This cool unasking Ox Comes brousing o'er my hills and vales of Time, And thrusts me out his tongue, and curls it, sharp, And sickle wise, about my poets' heads, And twists them in, all— After he has devoured them, the ox advances "futureward" but one inch; and so, the narrator concludes, the greatest of the world's artists have played their part. But is it right and just, he protests, that these masters have worked and "wept, and sweated blood, / And burned and loved, and ached with public shame" only to feed this ox? "Nay," quoth a sum of voices in mine ear, "God's clover, we, and feed His Course-ofthings; The pasture is God's pasture; systems strange Of food and fiberment He hath, whereby

364 I AMERICAN The general brawn is built for plans of His To quality precise. Kinsman, learn this: The artist's market is the heart of man; The artist's price, some little good of man. Tease not thy vision with vain search for ends. The End of Means is art that works by love, The End of Ends . . . in God's Beginning's lost." Although Edwin Mims finds in "Clover" some of Lanier's characteristic ideas—particularly his conviction that the function of the poet is to suggest the supernal beauty and truth that lie beyond the physical world—he admits that the poem is not among Lanier's best, and attributes its failure to the poet's use of the ' 'metaphysical conceit of Ox as the Course-of-things." It would seem, however, that Allen Tate is nearer the truth when he says the central figure in the poem is not a metaphysical conceit, that the poem is simply an allegory. If Lander had attempted to exhaust the implications of the idea for which the central symbol stands, as Donne and his contemporaries did, he might have written an important poem. He had a significant subject, but his failure to develop his central metaphor resulted in a "blurring of images in a random sort of verbiage." Although one can perceive Lanier's attempt to give some laxity and some variety to the metrical structure of the poem, it is not one of his most successful efforts. In fact, the poem contains the sentimentality, the abstract rhetoric, and the didacticism that one associates with Lanier's worst verse. Perhaps the poet was too close to the events that motivated this poem, the circumstances surrounding the reception of his centennial ode. Or perhaps he could not achieve an appropriate aesthetic distance to place the details of the poem in proper perspective. For whatever reasons, the poem is weak and ineffective; and the reader of Lanier's later poetry is impressed with how much the poet learned about the nature

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of poetic discourse in the last three or four years of his life. Lanier's reputation as a poet was now widely enough known that Lippincott agreed to bring out a collection of his verse. The volume, which appeared in October or November 1876, under the title Poems by Sidney Lanier, is a small quarto of ninety-four pages and contains only the ten poems he had published in Lippincott's Magazine (by this time he had published almost forty): "Corn," "The Symphony," "Psalm of the West," "In Absence," "Acknowledgment," "Betrayal," "Special Pleading," "To Charlotte Cushman," "Rose-Morals," and "To , with a Rose." The volume attracted little notice in the press, but the reviews it received were generally favorable. In the spring of 1877 Lanier's health became so bad that he had to go to Florida. Though he was gravely ill for some weeks, the Florida sunshine and his wife's constant attention had him feeling well enough to take long walks on the beach almost every day and occasionally to ride horseback into the countryside around Tampa. With the improvement in his health came a renewal of interest in writing, and several of Lanier's poems belong to this period: "To Beethoven," "TheStirrup-Cup," "Redbreast in Tampa," "The Crystal," "The Bee," "Under the Cedarcroft Chestnut," "From the Flats," and "A Florida Sunday." He continued to work on "The Jacquerie," despite his use of the basic attitudes expressed in that poem in "The Symphony"; and during a late summer visit to his wife's family in Brunswick, Georgia, he explored the nearby marshes and began to plan "Hymns of the Marshes," and to write an early draft of his best poem, "The Marshes of Glynn." Because of the precarious state of his health and his concern about supporting his family, Lanier wrote little poetry during the latter part of

SIDNEY LANIER I 365 1877. In the May issue of St. Nicholas magazine he published a slight narrative for children, "The Story of a Proverb"; and in September Lippincott's carried a sequel, "The Story of a Proverb: A Fairy Tale for Grown People." These two prose pieces were followed by "The Hard Times in Elfland," his most successful children's poem, which appeared in the Christmas issue of Every Saturday. The best-known of the poems written in 1877 is "Song of the Chattahoochee." Despite the fact that for months he wrote practically nothing, 1877 was the poet's most prolific year; he produced a total of eleven poems. Lanier's constant need to supplement the small and irregular income he received from his writing compelled him to seek other means to support his family. Since there was no "constant work" available (Lanier wrote to Bayard Taylor, who had tried to get him regular employment as a reviewer for the Baltimore Sun), he had begun a series of lectures on Elizabethan poetry. These lectures were attended, according to Edwin Mims, ' 'by many of the most prominent men and women of the city.'' The popularity of these conversational discussions—the form in which the lectures were given—undoubtedly assisted Lanier in his efforts to obtain a permanent position at Johns Hopkins University. In late January 1878, Lanier first read Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass; and the discovery of this new and different kind of poetry was to influence his future poetry, particularly "The Marshes of Glynn,'' more than he would ever realize. Although, as he wrote to Whitman after he read the book, he disagreed with him "in all points connected with artistic form," he was impressed with "the bigness and bravery" of Whitman's "ways and thoughts." Many of the poem outlines Lanier wrote after reading Whitman show how deeply impressed he was by Leaves of Grass. But his acquaintance with his fellow poet had little effect upon the poetry produced before "Marshes." "The Harlequin of

Dreams," published in 1878, is a sonnet highly derivative from Shakespeare; and "The Revenge of Hamish,'' one of his most successful narrative pieces, though based on a contemporary novel, suggests his continued interest in medieval culture. Lanier's "Marshes of Glynn" first appeared unsigned in a volume entitled A Masque of Poets, edited by George Parsons Lathrop. (None of the verses is signed, although the book contains contributions by several well-established poets of the time.) Lanier's contribution is clearly the best in the volume; for one of the few times in his career, he is successful in delineating experience. Not only does he describe the forest and the marshes concretely and vividly, but he conveys to the reader the impressions the place makes on him. As Starke points out, Lanier not only describes the emotions he feels; he creates these emotions in the reader. As happened all too seldom, then, Lanier is not content merely to tell the reader how he should feel; he evokes the feelings themselves. The "thought" of the poem is patently derivative, showing obvious influences of Wordsworth, Emerson, and Keats. Its meter, though similar to that employed by Lanier in "The Revenge of Hamish," shows some indications of experimentation with the freer rhythmic patterns of Leaves of Grass. In both structure and texture the poem reveals that Lanier's poetic career has taken a new turn. In 1875 and again in 1877 Lanier had visited the marshes in Glynn County, not far from Brunswick. As always, he had to let first impressions mature before they could produce a poem. Like Wordsworth, his best poems are the "overflow of powerful emotions recollected" long after the event that evoked the original perceptions. Unlike Wordsworth, unfortunately, his "recollection" seldom occurred in "tranquillity." In fact, when Lanier came to write this poem, after it had incubated for three years in the "well of unconscious cerebration," he was in

366 I AMERICAN the final stages of tuberculosis. As he contrasted the "clamberous and twining things" he had observed in the Glynn marshes with the "gloomy pines" of Pennsylvania, Jack de Bellis points out, he began to detect "secrets" in the leaves. He referred to this strange phenomenon in a letter to Bayard Taylor: "God help the world, when this now-hatching brook of my Ephemerae shall take flight and darken the air." In the "Mystic Vision in 'The Marshes of Glynn,' " Harry Warfel argues that the structure of the poem is that of the mystical vision. Its basic movement, then, is from purgation (1-17) through union (79-94) to ecstasy (95-98). Although Warfel was certainly near the truth, it appears that he did not go far enough to identify the particular kind of mystical vision Lanier is attempting to present. Like Captain Ahab, the poet is trying to strike through the mask of perceptual phenomena and conceptual meditation to discover the nature of metaphysical reality. The basic concerns of the poem are the paradoxical feelings surrounding religious conversion: the body of man that clings to the phenomenal reality of the sensuous, material world and the spirit that hungers to be as one with God. The poem continues the search for God that Lanier had begun in "Florida Sunday," in which, fresh from his reading of Emerson, he details the sights and sounds that have become merged in his own being. In that poem "the Grace of God," which he now refers to as the All-One, is "made manifest in curves." No doubt, as demonstrated in the opening section of "Corn," Emerson had made Lanier deeply aware of the spiritual values in nature, and at the same time had led him further away from the orthodox view of metaphysical reality. Since his friendship with James Woodrow at Oglethorpe, he had believed that evolution was "a noble and beautiful and true theory" for whatever "can be proved to have evolved"; but much, including man, does not fall in that cate-

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gory. Though Lanier had been stimulated by Emerson's insistence upon the potential divinity of every individual, he was not able to conclude, with the transcendentalists, that there is an inevitable unity of the one and the many. He could not believe that the- individual personality would "die away into the first cause." In "The Marshes of Glynn" Lanier is concerned with the universal theme of man's insatiable desire to know his fundamental nature. Unlike many of his other poems, "Marshes" is not a comment about an experience; it attempts to delineate the experience itself—man in the throes of a conflict produced by the deepest state of his moral feelings. In the first stanza the narrator, much like the persona in the opening section of "Corn," demonstrates how one properly motivated can feel the presence of God in nature. He walks into the woods and intuitively knows the goodness of God. This awareness is not the result of knowledge that can be logically demonstrated; therefore it is connoted impressionistically. Emerald twilights,— Virginal shy lights, Wrought of the leaves to allure to the whisper of vows, When lovers pace timidly down the green colonnades Of the dim sweet woods, of the dear dark woods, Of the heavenly woods and glades, . . . Although he would remain in this pleasant setting, the narrator is drawn deeper into the woods to discover the secrets of nature and of himself. He must know the healing power of nature, for it serves as a means of placing man in the presence of the All-One: Beautiful glooms, soft dusks in the noon-day fire,— Wildwood privacies, closets of lone desire, Chamber from chamber parted with wavering arras of leaves,—

SIDNEY LANIER I 367 Cells for the passionate pleasure of prayer to the soul that grieves, Pure with a sense of the passing of saints through the wood, Cool for the dutiful weighing of ill with good;— . . . In the light of the midday June sun, the narrator moves further into the dark of the wood, pulled toward the marshes by some unseen force. But he stops to absorb the feeling of oneness with nature that dominates him ("Ye held me fast in your heart and I held you fast in mine"). Just at sunset (when "the slant yellow beam down the wood-aisle doth seem / Like a lane into heaven that leads from a dream,—") he enters the marshes. Suddenly he feels a change come over him: And my heart is at ease from men, and the wearisome sound of the stroke Of the scythe of time and the trowel of trade is low, And belief overmasters doubt, and I know that I know, And my spirit is grown to a lordly great compass within, . . . No longer afraid of the marshes, as he had previously been, the, narrator is prepared to face the unknown. He stands "On the firm-packed sand, / Free / By a world of marsh that borders a world of sea." In Christian terminology Faith has brought him to the edge of the marsh, and Grace must carry him across the great ocean. The marsh is fastened to the "folds of the land" by the "shimmering band / Of the sand beach." As he gazes along the lines of beach connecting the marsh and the sea, the narrator notices that the "beach-lines linger and curl / As a silverwrought garment that clings to and follows the firm sweet limbs of a girl." Thus, like John Donne in his Holy Sonnets, Lanier is using the imagery of profane love to

make vivid and evocative his feeling toward the Divine Being. His heart filled with this ardor of devotion, he feels freed of the forces that have bound him to the earth, "the weighing of fate and the sad discussion of sin." The marshes seem to encompass all that is the sky and the sea. They have provided him with the knowledge that "catholic man" has won: "God out of knowledge and good out of infinite pain/ And sight out of blindness and purity out of stain." As he contemplates these paradoxes that lie at the heart of Christian conversion, he sees the marsh hen: As the marsh-hen secretly builds on the watery sod, Behold I will build me a nest on the greatness of God: I will fly in the greatness of God as the marsh-hen flies In the freedom that fills all the space 'twixt the marsh and the skies: By so many roots as the marsh-grass sends in the sod I will heartily lay me a-hold of the greatness of God: Oh, like to the greatness of God is the greatness within The range of the marshes, the liberal marshes of Glynn. It would seem that the essential conflict of the poem has been solved at this point. The narrator has been convinced of the greatness of God and is willing to surrender himself to His merciful goodness. His fear has become trust. But the fact that the poem does not end here is a mark of its greatness. There is a final stanza: And now from the Vast of the Lord will the waters of sleep Roll in on the souls of men, But who will reveal to our waking ken The forms that swim and the shapes that creep Under the waters of sleep?

368 I AMERICAN And I would I could know what swimmeth below, when the tide comes in On the length and breadth of the marvellous marshes of Glynn. There are no easy answers to fundamental questions. This world is one of inexhaustible ambiguities, and man can know no immortal truths. The mortality of man, that which makes him human, will struggle to maintain the life he has because despite his faith, he can never know with absolute certainty what fate holds for him. As Jack de Bellis points out, " 'The Marshes of Glynn' explores the human limitations which define man's spiritual quest." The Masque of Poets was widely reviewed in the magazines. Ho wells, who had refused Lanier's poetry more than once, clearly thought 'The Marshes of Glynn" the superior poem in the volume, though he gave no evidence of knowing the identity of its author. "There is a fine Swinburnian study," he wrote, "called The Marshes of Glynn,' in which the poet has almost bettered, in some passages, his master's instructions." Longfellow used the poem in his collection Poems of Places, the first of many times it has been anthologized. With the possible exception of "The Song of the Chattahoochee," it has been reprinted more often than any other of Lanier's poems. As Charles R. Anderson and others have pointed out, Lanier's reading of Emerson, Whitman, Charles Darwin, Herbert Spencer, and Thomas Henry Huxley during the last years of his life seemed to give him a new spark and to turn his career in a different direction. Although its meter and rhyme scheme are much more restrictive than those of some of the poems written after his reading of Whitman, "Opposition," composed in the last years of his life, reveals Lanier's appreciative reading of Herbert Spencer's First Principles. The poem is a fairly adequate summary of a chapter from The Science of

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English Verse; in it Lanier paraphrases Spencer's theory that when "opposing forces act, rhythm appears." Although it has seldom been anthologized, and thus is not very well known, "Opposition" merits full quotation, for like "The Marshes of Glynn,'' it seems to form a fair demonstration of the kind of poetry Lanier would have written if he could have prolonged his struggle with tuberculosis a few more years: Of fret, of dark, of thorn, of chill, Complain no more; for these, O heart, Direct the random of the will As rhymes direct the rage of art. The lute's fixt fret, that runs athwart The strain and purpose of the string, For governance and nice consort Doth bar his wilful wavering. The dark hath many dear avails; The dark distills divinest dews; The dark is rich with nightingales, With dreams, and with the heavenly Muse. Bleeding with thorns of petty strife, I'll ease (as lovers do) my smart With sonnets to my lady Life Writ red in issues from the heart. What grace may lie within the chill Of favors frozen fast in scorn! When Good's a-freeze, we call it 111! This rosy Time is glacier-born. Of fret, of dark, of thorn, of chill, Complain thou not, O heart; for these Bank-in the current of the will To uses, arts, and charities. In the spring of 1878 Oilman, still unable to get Lanier an appointment at Johns Hopkins, arranged for him to join a number of professors from the university in giving a series of lectures on Shakespeare. Lanier was to present twentyfour of the thirty-eight lectures, the remaining

SIDNEY LANIER I 369 ones—on the background of the plays—to be given by Basil Gildersleeve, Ira Remsen, Henry B. Adams, E. G. Daves, and Robert M. Johnston. The course of lectures, which Lanier introduced with a general discussion of literary form, took a shape different from the original plan. The number of lectures was drastically reduced, primarily as a result of the withdrawal of all the Johns Hopkins professors from the project. Lanier considered the lectures a success, as well he might, for they were repeated the next year, at the invitation of Oilman, as Lanier's first offering as lecturer in English, a position to which he was appointed on February 4, 1879. Lanier's lectures on poetry at Johns Hopkins helped him to organize some ideas on the nature of poetry that he had held for many years. During the summer of 1879 he and his family went to Rockingham Springs, where he worked six hours a day on the book that became The Science of English Verse (1880). When he returned to Baltimore in early September, he had a manuscript of more than 200 pages; and he completed the book within the next three months, often working with a temperature of 102 degrees and higher. He was, he realized, losing his battle with tuberculosis, and must do as much as he could as quickly as possible. Although The Science of English Verse is a highly uneven book, it is an interesting and valuable study of prosody. Lanier's entire argument is based upon his conviction that poetry is "a set of specially related sounds" and that when "repeated aloud, it impresses itself upon the ear only by means of certain relations existing among its component words considered purely as sounds, without reference to their associated ideas. . . . The ear accepts as perfect verse a series of words from which ideas are wholly absent, that is to say, a series of sounds." One can see that this statement, taken to its logical conclusion, could result in a poetry of nonsense sounds like that advocated by some of the Da-

daists. It is also far removed from Lanier's own practice of packing his lines with meaning, even to the degree that many of his poems can be reduced to didactic statements. His interest in the sound of poetry and his knowledge of music, however, allowed him to point up the similarities between the two arts as convincingly and as systematically as any American critic ever has. The lectures that Lanier gave at the Peabody Institute and repeated at Johns Hopkins were later published as Shakespeare and His Forerunners (1902). Among the "forerunners" whom Lanier discussed with enthusiasm were Thomas Wyatt, Bartholomew Griffin, John Lyly, Phineas Fletcher, Samuel Daniel, Edmund Spenser, and William Drummond. These poets, Lanier insisted, merited more serious attention. In fact, he informed his audience, "after you have read the Bible and Shakespeare you have no time to read anything until you have read these." Like many poets of the twentieth century, Lanier was reaching beyond the Romantic limits of his own time and milieu. But his primary aim in the lecture was to show Shakespeare as a hero, humankind at the height of its development. Lanier's approach to the plays is oblique. Hamlet is used to demonstrate man's increasing knowledge of the supernatural, and A Midsummer Night's Dream illustrates his changing attitude toward nature: Day by day, we find that the mystic influence of nature on our human personality grows more intense and individual. Who can walk alone in your beautiful Druid Hill Park, among those dear and companionable oaks, without a certain sense of being in the midst of a sweet and noble company of friends? . . . For to him who rightly understands Nature she is even more than Ariel and Ceres to Prospero; she is even more than a servant conquered, like Caliban, to fetch wood for us: she is a friend and comforter; and to that man the cares of the world are but a troublous Mid-

370 I AMERICAN summer Night's Dream, to smile at—he is ever in sight of the morning and in hand-reach of God. This is obviously a statement of the substance of 'The Marshes of Glynn" and "A Ballad of Trees and the Master." Lanier was extremely pleased to be a member of the faculty of a prestigious university. But his duties there were time-consuming, as was the preparation of the boys' books, so he had neither time nor energy for poetry. He continued to work, as he could, on "The Jacquerie," which he always regarded as potentially his best poem but which remained unfinished at his death. From the fragment we have, we can judge Lanier's narrative skill, as we can observe his reaction to the growing commercialism of America. Somehow in his last years he found time for his most significant prose essay, "The New South," which appeared in Scribner's Monthly for October 1880. In this essay Lanier shows his agreement with the conversion in the postbellum South from the plantation system, in which cotton was the principal crop, to a small-farm economy, in which there was more emphasis on subsistence farming, with corn gradually emerging as the basic source of income. He commented, too, on the growth of amateur dramatic clubs in rural districts, and on the development of a system of free public education. He emphasized that for black and white alike, intellectual and social progress depends upon economic progress. Unlike his fellow Southerners, primarily Henry W. Grady and Walter Hines Page, he did not advocate industrialism as the panacea for the problems confronting the South in the years following the Civil War. The poems of the period are chiefly occasional pieces—'To My Class, on Certain Fruits and Flowers Sent Me in Sickness" (written while he was dangerously ill in the winter of 1880), "Ode

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to the Johns Hopkins University," and "To Dr. Thomas Shearer.'' But Lanier also wrote three of his best-known poems—"The Crystal," "Sunrise," and "A Ballad of Trees and the Master," the latter two among his best. These were composed when Lanier must have been convinced that he had lost his fifteen-year struggle with tuberculosis. He wrote to Haynes: For the six months past, a ghostly fever has been taking possession of me each day at 12M., and holding my head under the surface of indescribable distress for the next twenty hours, subsiding only long enough each morning to let me get on my working harness, but never intermitting. In this condition Lanier wrote "A Ballad of Trees and the Master," his wife noting some years later that it was composed in about fifteen minutes. "Sunrise" was written while he had a temperature of 104 degrees and "so little strength in his arms that he could not lift food to his lips, and his hand had to be propped to the level of his adjustable writing desk." Even under these almost intolerable conditions he wrote a poem that, Starke claims, is "as great as any in our American literature, and like Milton's 'Lycidas' a poem to serve as a test by which to distinguish the true lover of poetry." Lanier was, then, a dying man as he prepared his last series of lectures at Johns Hopkins, "The Development of the Modern English Novel." He had originally planned to give twenty lectures; but when Oilman saw how badly his physical condition had deteriorated, he suggested that the number be decreased to twelve. Lanier devoted half of his lectures on the development of the novel to the work of George Eliot, whom he ranked as the greatest of the English artists, including Shakespeare. More than any other English writer, he insisted, Eliot understood "the infinite variety of the human and believed in the possibility of remolding and completely changing human personality." This contention is in

SIDNEY LANIER I 371 complete agreement, Starke concludes, with the basic thesis underlying Lanier's work since Tiger-Lilies: "In love, and love only," he had asserted, "can great work that not only pulls down but that builds be done; it is love and love only that is truly constructive in art." "And in life," he would have added. In the last lecture of his last lecture course Lanier asserts once more, as he had in Tiger-Lilies, his faith in love as the source of all happiness. Through the entire body of Lanier's work we can trace this idea of the necessity to love, but the meaning of love has now become spiritualized and extended greatly. It is not earthly love, no longer even the love of Christ's commandment, nor Pauline charity. Nor is it . . . love that denies the existence of evil. Rather it is love as the culmination of his theory of etherealization constantly taking place in man, love as understanding tolerance, scientific truth, the solution of opposites, the one sure expression of the divine will, Christian love made into a philosophy and offered as a rational system for the solution of all problems that confront the individual and society. After these lectures, which were published as The English Novel (1883), Lanier's health was so bad that he was able to do little except stay alive. In fact, he was barely able to complete the lectures, many of which were delivered sitting and in a voice barely above a whisper. Some of his students later reported their fear, when each lecture began, that it would not be finished. As soon as he was able to travel, Lanier tried to go to New York to consult his publisher about the series of boys' books in which he was involved. He found after reaching the city, however, that he was too feeble to leave his hotel room. As soon as he could, he returned to Baltimore. His wife canceled their plans to spend another summer at Rockingham Springs, Virginia, and informed Clifford Lanier of his brother's condi-

tion, asking him to meet them at Lynn, a mountain resort near Asheville, North Carolina. There, on September 7, 1881, Sidney Lanier died. His body was taken to Baltimore, where funeral services were conducted at the Church of St. Michael and All Angels, and was interred in Greenwood Cemetery. At his death Lanier was proclaimed by some of the leading American critics—William Hayes Ward and Thomas W. Higginson among them—as one of the foremost American poets. For many reasons his reputation has declined in the twentieth century. Both of his biographers—Edwin Mims and Aubrey Starke—gave detailed accounts of the life, but wrote little about the poetry and criticism. Starke insisted that we need to know Lanier; and "so long as he becomes known to us," it matters little how we learn of him: "whether we find him in his poetry or in his letters or in the tradition that lingers," it is essential only that we know him. The personality that emerges from these studies is an attractive one: a man whose optimistic view of life remained unshaken in the face of chronic poverty and ill health; an artist who gave all his wit and all his strength to art, despite neglect by local readers and critics and antagonism from some of those of the North. One can well understand why Charles R. Anderson would proclaim in the mid1940's: "The life and song of Sidney Lanier are so intimately related, and the frustrations that beset his ambition as an artist so poignant, that the tendency has been to lose the poems in the poet." In a review of Starke's biography, Allen Tate lamented that much of Lanier's verse had not been subjected to the intense scrutiny essential to determining its precise quality. In an article entitled "The Blind Poet: Sidney Lanier," Robert Penn Warren analyzes some of the poems and indicates that the reader who expects to receive from Lanier's poetry the kind of knowledge that

372 I AMERICAN only art can reveal—the qualitative particularity of experience—is too often disappointed. Lanier just "could not realize an idea artistically"; and this fact accounts for his diffuse style, for his fragmentary allegory with a series of arbitrarily assigned equivalents, for his vagueness and his fondness for abstract diction. Warren's summary of Lanier's contributions is the most critical he has received: "What he had to say has been said by better men in a better way." There is some evidence to suggest that Warren might have been too much influenced by agrarian doctrine when he wrote this essay, and today he might find in Lanier's poetry some qualities to which he could give his approval. For a minor poet like John Greenleaf Whittier, for example, Warren found a place in American literary history. Whittier's "star," he wrote, belongs in the "constellation" of James Fenimore Cooper, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and William Faulkner. If it is less commanding than any of theirs, "it yet shines with a clear and authentic light." Whittier is not so much the superior artist that we cannot believe Warren could not now find a place for Lanier in the company of definitely minor writers like Whittier. This is not to say that Warren's is not one of the most convincing essays on Lanier's poetry or that it has not influenced most of the commentary on Lanier since its appearance. Charles Anderson's much-quoted statement is not essentially different from Warren's conclusions: "Many a lyric poet dying at Lanier's age or earlier has left behind a fuller measure of his worth, but few have been faced with so many obstacles in a life of less than forty years." Even most of the reviewers of the centennial edition of Lanier's writings seem to lose the poet and the critic in the man. Writing in the New York Times Book Review, Henry Steele Commager noted that Lanier's "affected and archaic style was less unsuited for religious and nature than for other forms of poetry" but, he in-

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sisted, "each generation will admire anew the fortitude with which he met illness and poverty, the consecrated devotion to art, the lyrical sense of beauty, the deep integrity, the gentleness and magnanimity of the man." Most of Edmund Wilson's review in The New Yorker was devoted to describing this "first-rate job of bookmaking and editing," and to reiterating his conviction that many other American writers deserved the same kind of treatment: a complete edition of their work in a text as reliable as modern scholarship can make it. Only Jay B. Hubbell's brief notice in American Literature seemed to concern itself primarily with Lanier's contribution to American letters, and few modern readers would accept his assessment. After Whitman, he wrote, Lanier "is the best and most representative poet of his period." (Where, one wonders, would Hubbell place Emily Dickinson? And after Whitman and Dickinson, who is left? Bayard Taylor? Paul Hamilton Hayne? Edmund Stedman? Richard Stoddard?) Jack de Bellis thinks Lanier's reputation has been too much affected by Warren's evaluation, and attempts to prove his point by giving the best of Lanier's poetry the detailed analytical readings demanded by the New Critics. He believes that Lanier's "unique talent propelled certain aspects of the Southern Renaissance and thus helped to shape a specific identity for American literature." Although Lanier was not strong enough physically or sufficiently dedicated to his art to overcome the indifference of his age, he followed "his own inner gleam." Most of the poems written in the last years of his life demonstrate that he had discovered the unique nature of poetic discourse, that he had learned "to realize an idea artistically," and that he sought to delineate experience, not to comment on it. Much of the early poetry can be reduced to a prose statement; and too often in this verse the image is mere decoration, used only to illustrate an idea. But Lanier's reading of Whitman en-

SIDNEY LANIER I 373 couraged him to employ freer and looser metrical patterns, as his reading of Emerson, Spencer, Darwin, and Huxley allowed him to give his verse more compelling structural interest. The twenty or so years he devoted to his craft gave him the confidence not only to experiment with his poetic structures but also to infuse them with textural richness. The later poems are less sentimental and didactic; and some of them, particularly "Opposition," anticipate the nuanced ambiguities of the best modern poetry. Lanier's place in American literature is not that of a major poet, but it is secure. For at his best, in "The Marshes of Glynn," he explores a significant human experience with great effectiveness. In that poem he extends and deepens our awareness of one of our most fundamental human concerns, the nature and substance of our mortality.

Selected Bibliography WORKS OF SIDNEY

LANIER

Centennial Edition of the Works of Sidney Lanier, edited by Charles R. Anderson. 10 vols. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1945. Associate editors and contents of each volume are as follows: I, Poems and Poem Outlines, edited by Charles R. Anderson; II, The Science of English Verse and Essays on Music, edited by Paull F. Baum; III, Shakespeare and His Forerunners, edited by Kemp Malone; IV, The English Novel and Essays on Literature, edited by Clarence Gohdes and Kemp Malone; V, TigerLilies and Southern Prose, edited by Garland Greever; VI, Florida and Miscellaneous Prose and Bibliography, edited by Philip Graham; VII-X, Letters, edited by Charles R. Anderson and Aubrey Starke. Poems of Sidney Lanier, edited by Mary Day Lanier, with a memorial by William Hayes Ward. New

York: Charles Scribner's and Sons, 1916; facs. ed., Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1967. CRITICAL AND BIOGRAPHICAL STUDIES Beaver, Joseph. "Lanier's Use of Science for Poetic Imagery.'' American Literature, 24:520-33 (1953). de Bellis, Jack. Sidney Lanier. New York: Twayne, 1972. Fletcher, John G. ''Sidney Lanier." University of Kansas City Review, 16:97-102 (1949). Graham, Phillip. "A Note on Lanier's Music,"Studies in English, 17:107-11 (1937). . "Lanier's Reading." University of Texas Studies in English, no. 11:63-89(1931). Kent, Charles W. "A Study of Lanier's Poems." PMLA, 7:33-63 (1892). Leary, Lewis. "The Forlorn Hope of Sidney Lanier. "South Atlantic Quarterly, 46:263-71 (1947). Mims, Edwin. Sidney Lanier. American Men of Letters Series. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1905. Parks, Edd Winfield. "Lanier as Poet," in Essays on American Literature in Honor of Jay B. Hubbell, edited by Clarence Gohdes. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1967. Pp. 183-201. Pearce, Roy Harvey. The Continuity of American Poetry. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961. Pp. 236-46. Ransom, John Crowe. "Hearts and Heads." American Review, 2:554-71 (1934). Ross, Robert H. " 'The Marshes of Glynn': A Study in Symbolic Obscurity." American Literature, 32:403-16(1961). Starke, Aubrey Harrison. Sidney Lanier: A Biographical and Critical Study. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1933. Stedman, E. C. "The Late Sidney Lanier." The Critic, 1:289(1881). Tate, Allen. ' 4 A Southern Romantic.'' New Republic, 76:67-70 (August 30, 1933). Warfel, Harry R. "Mystic Vision in The Marshes of Glynn.' " Mississippi Quarterly, 19:34-40 (1965). Warren, Robert Penn. "The Blind Poet: Sidney Lanier. "American Review, 2:27-45 (1933). —THOMAS DANIEL YOUNG

Vachel Lindsay 1879-1931 W

RITING home from the railroad station at Tipton, Missouri, on Sunday morning, June 9, 1912, Vachel Lindsay describes the opportune moment he chooses for seizing the attention of his hosts. "After the kindling is split and the meal eaten and they lean back in their chairs, a-weary of their mirth, by one means or another I show them how I am knocking at the door of the world with a dream in my hand." Tramping across the Midwest, begging and exchanging his labor and rhymes for meals and lodging during the summer of 1912, Lindsay did not realize that the door of the world would soon swing open and enable him to carry his dream to thousands across the country instead of to a few farm families and hands sitting around a kitchen table. In 1912, a year that marks the opening of a new era in American poetry, Harriet Monroe began publication of Poetry: A Magazine of Verse. Lindsay was propelled to national recognition when she printed "General William Booth Enters into Heaven" as the lead poem in the January 1913 number. Lindsay composed this poem at the end of his summer trek west, described in Adventures While Preaching the Gospel of Beauty, during a week of writing and rewriting at his uncle Johnson Lindsay's home in Los Angeles. Like his bardic forebear Walt Whitman, Lindsay did not publish and become well known until fairly late in his life. Lindsay, too, as Ralph

Waldo Emerson said of Whitman, "must have had a long foreground somewhere, for such a start." It began on November 10, 1879, in the very house where it was to end, by his own hand, on December 5, 1931: 603 South Fifth Street, Springfield, Illinois. A substantial white frame house on a corner next to the governor's mansion, it was always home for Lindsay, the center of his universe and the source of the values expressed in his writing. These values, primarily religious, were instilled in Lindsay by his mother, Esther Catherine Frazee Lindsay. His father, Vachel Thomas Lindsay, was a physician. Vachel was the second of six children, born two years after his sister Olive. Three younger sisters died of scarlet fever within three weeks of each other. Although a naturally spiritual woman, the mother's religious ardor was intensified by the sudden deaths of her daughters. She immersed herself in the activities of the First Christian Church, consoled by the faith that permeated the Lindsay household and shaped the lives of her remaining children. During his first eighteen years in Springfield, Lindsay gave evidence of being talented, but not necessarily remarkable. He did well enough in his subjects and graduated from Springfield High School in 1897. His interest in literature and writing was well developed by then, and indi-

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VACHEL LINDSAY I 375 cated his inability to become sufficiently attracted to medicine to follow in his father's footsteps. Both of his parents strongly encouraged Lindsay to become a physician, but even though young Vachel sometimes accompanied his father on his rounds, he never became enthusiastic about tending man's physical infirmities. He dreamed, instead, of healing man's diseased spirit. What Lindsay appreciated in his father was not a technical or scientific professional skill but, rather, the warm humanity in his care and caring for patients. In high school he was more proficient in science courses than in Latin, but his real interest was not in the subject matter at hand. For example, in biology he lavished effort upon his drawings. They anticipate the emblems of the butterfly and the spider that represent, in Lindsay's imaginative world, beauty and the evil of Mammon. Throughout his life Lindsay remained skeptical of progress in the name of science; his attitude was much like William Wordsworth's "they murder to dissect." A clever poem entitled " The Spider and the Ghost of the Fly" illustrates his fascination with the deadly spider. Once I loved a spider When I was born a fly, A velvet-footed spider With a gown of rainbow-dye. She ate my wings and gloated. She bound me with a hair She drove me to her parlor Above her winding stair. To educate young spiders She took me all apart. My ghost came back to haunt her. I saw her eat my heart. Lindsay's attraction to the spider relates him to at least two other American poets. Although he could not have known Edward Taylor's work, the heritage of Puritanism in America is as strong in his work as it was in that of Emily Dickinson.

The playfulness in this poem, with its undercurrent of horror and its frightful final line, also is reminiscent of Dickinson. His parents sent Lindsay and his sister Olive to Hiram College, a Campbellite institution in Ohio, in the fall of 1897. He was to study medicine. He did in fact attend the prescribed lectures; but neither his heart nor his mind was in them, and his performance was desultory at best. Because he was affable, his professors tolerated him. Finally, however, Lindsay persuaded his parents that his lack of success in his courses and his lack of desire made him unsuited for the responsibilities of a career in medicine. He left Hiram in the spring of 1900, but he remained fond of this small Christian college and always regarded it as a model of collegiate experience and education. Thirty years later Hiram recognized the achievement of its erstwhile student when Lindsay returned to receive an honorary degree. While at Hiram, Lindsay kept extensive diaries in which he explored the question of his own identity. In these soul-searchings he came more and more to regard art as his natural calling. In following this course, Lindsay was fulfilling the wishes of his mother, whose advocacy of medical studies was not as strong as her husband's. Her own art work and reverence for the European masters provided Lindsay with the role that he wished—consciously or unconsciously—to emulate. To this end, he enrolled at the Art Institute of Chicago in January 1901, and remained there until the summer of 1903. In Chicago, Lindsay drew, kept his diary, and read. The latter two activities were more enriching for the future poet, since his highly individualistic talent for the imaginative and dreamlike in drawing was not appreciated by the staff of the Art Institute, which emphasized realistic depiction and technical proficiency. Never lacking confidence in his artistic talent, Lindsay next moved to New York City, where he

376 I AMERICAN enrolled at the New York School of Art. Although he was to remain in New York, off and on, for the next five years, his art studies lasted for only about one year. The New York School of Art was less conservative than the Art Institute and Lindsay received some encouragement. However, he had been writing poetry; and when he confronted his art teacher Robert Henri with an impassioned recitation of his poem "The Tree of Laughing Bells," Henri immediately advised Lindsay to turn his efforts from drawing to poetry. During these years in New York, Lindsay had to find some means of support. He was in his mid-twenties and grateful for the indulgence of his parents, but he also wanted to ease their financial burden. To this end he lectured on art at the YMCA and guided tours at the Metropolitan Museum; but his most ingenious effort was inaugurated in March 1905, when he sallied forth to peddle his rhymes on the streets of New York. This venture probably cost him more in printing expenses than he earned; and even though he was scoffed at by many, the experience convinced him that there were many ordinary people who, if given the chance, would respond to poetry and be receptive to the message it carried. In March 1906, Lindsay sailed with a friend to Florida, from which they intended to walk back to New York; but his friend returned by steamer after only a week and left Lindsay on his own. Although he carried no money, Lindsay did take along some decoratively printed copies of "The Tree of Laughing Bells," which he hoped to exchange for food and lodging along the way. "The Tree of Laughing Bells" describes how a hero is sent to a distant galaxy by an Indian maiden, to procure two bells from the Tree of Laughing Bells. She fashions the hero Wings of the Morning from flowers; and he flies on his perilous mission to the galaxy in Chaos-land, from which he successfully returns with the bells

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that "will quench our memory, / Our hope, / Our borrowed sorrow; / We will have no thirst for yesterday, / No thought for to-morrow." This poem's echoes of Edgar Allan Poe and Samuel Taylor Coleridge are worked into a fable expressing Lindsay's desire to "save" Springfield. The setting is "Beside the Sangamon— Rude stream of Dreamland Town." The Sangamon River, which flows through Springfield, is the present-day reality that Lindsay's hero will transform into Dreamland Town through the magic of beauty. This poem is subtitled "A Poem for Aviators" and is a tribute to all those who would overcome the perils of flight in order to weave beauty "From all things fragile, faint and fair," so that chaos can be transformed into the work of art that brings tranquillity in transcending time. It was this ethereal poem that Lindsay bartered with the backcountry folk of the South. He recounted this experience ten years later in A Handy Guide for Beggars (1916). Lindsay's stature as a writer has always rested upon the dozen or so poems that made him famous; and the nature of this fame has, unfortunately, tended to obscure his other works. He published five volumes of prose: Adventures While Preaching the Gospel of Beauty (1914), The Art of the Moving Picture (1915), A Handy Guide for Beggars (1916), The Golden Book of Springfield (1920), and The Litany of Washington Street (1929). A Handy Guide for Beggars describes the tramps Lindsay made in 1906 and 1908. The first half relates his "vagrant adventures in the south" during March and April of 1906, while walking from Florida through Georgia, North Carolina, and Tennessee to Kentucky, where he stopped at an aunt's house. The second half, "A Mendicant Pilgrimage in the East," describes a trip from New York to Hiram, Ohio, in 1908. A Handy Guide begins with a two-page

VACHEL LINDSAY I 377 preface dedicating the book to the "one hundred new poets in the villages of the land," and setting forth Lindsay's rules of the road: (1) Keep away from the Cities; (2) Keep away from the railroads; (3) Have nothing to do with money and carry no baggage; (4) Ask for dinner about quarter after eleven; (5) Ask for supper, lodging and breakfast about quarter of five; (6) Travel alone; (7) Be neat, deliberate, chaste and civil; (8) Preach the Gospel of Beauty. Lindsay's rules, to which he was not always faithful, suggest the Populist point of view that was at the heart of his philosophy: an agrarian distrust of industrialism and finance. Even in their practicality there is a quaintness about the rules, the source of which in Lindsay's character made him an engaging beggar as he appeared at backcountry doors. A Handy Guide does not attempt to present a day-by-day account of Lindsay's travels. He composed it from notebook entries made at the time of the actual experiences, which are distilled into discrete stories of his adventures with little in the way of transitional material. The placing of poems between prose episodes suggests that Lindsay's real intention in this work is to evoke and sing the qualities inherent in the land and its people. "Make me to voice the tall men in the corn," he petitions "In the Immaculate Conception Church," and keep "my springtime cornland thought in flower.'' He knows that the expressions of human sympathy he is seeking are not indigenous to the modern city, so he takes to the country to find the genuine expression of the human spirit necessary to confirm and bolster his beliefs. These prose pieces are in the tradition of American sketchbooks popularized by Washington Irving. If Lindsay's artistic talent had been in realistic depiction, he no doubt would have accompanied his written impressions with appro-

priate pen-and-ink drawings. His prose sketches, like Irving's, dwell more on the romantic and picturesque. They focus upon the unself-conscious expression of human sentiment in places that time has passed by. The celebration of those qualities carries with it the denial of the modern—even in the case of tramps: "The modern tramp is not a tramp, he is a speed-maniac. . . . he is sure to be shallow and artificial, the grotesque, nervous victim of machinery." The appeal and charm of A Handy Guide lie in the very fact that the experiences and observations of a beggar are not those of a gentleman. The reader relishes poet-Lindsay's narration of beggar-Lindsay's encounters with ordinary folk. He is such an indisputably odd amalgam that people most often do not know what to make of him. Humor frequently results from these meetings. In his role as beggar, Lindsay retains certain "higher" values; for example, consider his comment on "a soup of hike-warm water, tallow, half-raw fat pork and wilted greens" he was served in a shanty in Florida: "This dish was innocent of any enhancing condiment.'' But Lindsay is not overly pious; his humor is often selfeffacing, as in the case of an Asheville gentleman who suspected Lindsay "was neither artist nor literary man. I assured him my friends were often of the same opinion." Sometimes Lindsay's observations carry a bite reminiscent of Mark Twain. A moonshiner in the Blue Ridge whom Lindsay calls The Gnome "was like a third-rate Sunday-school teacher in a frock coat in the presence of the infant class." Nor does the humor of situation escape Lindsay's eye in a northern Florida cabin, where at family prayers he "peeped and observed the Patriarch with his chair almost in the fireplace. He ignored the fire. . . . The father prayed twenty minutes, while the chair smoked." The appeal of the narrative voice in A Handy Guide is not—in spite of its title—found in a

378 I AMERICAN voice of experience authoritatively explaining how to travel the open road; it is found in the quality of the innocent or naif making his way as best he can. The Gnome tells our adventurer: "You are just a run-away boy, that's what you are." At one point, about to give up his tramping, Lindsay is in a railway station wanting to telegraph home for train fare, but discovers he has only thirteen cents—not enough for a telegram. Instead, he buys gingersnaps. That kind of frivolity ameliorates a tone that is potentially too pious. His unbeggarly appreciation of household amenities—"But how ingenious is a white iron bed, how subtle are pillows, how overwhelming is sleep!"—has the same effect, as does his homesickness "for that great civilized camp, New York, and the sober-minded pursuit of knowledge there." Though Lindsay reworked the notebooks of his trips of 1906 and 1908 for publication in 1916, the prose retains the immediacy of the jottings that served to record the experiences. It is plain and matter-of-fact, consisting primarily of short, simple, declarative sentences dependent upon simile for expressive character. At times the prose becomes ungainly, but this quality merely reinforces the somewhat awkward figure the beggar-poet cuts. Repetitive and staccato rhythms in other passages—"He was cadaverous. He had a beak nose. He had a retreating chin."—echo the beat of Lindsay's heavily accented verses. In the final episode of A Handy Guide, the grandmother of an industrious farm family admonishes Lindsay for not looking for work. He retorts, "I wanted to paint rainbows and gild sidewalks and blow bubbles for a living. But no one wanted me to. It is about all I am fit for." At the end of his tramp in the spring of 1906, Lindsay was still uncertain about what he was best fitted for; a trip to Europe that summer with his parents was as suitable a diversion as any. In the fall he returned to New York, where he remained

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until the spring of 1908, when he made his second walking trip. Eventually reaching home, he took up quarters in his old room and stayed in Springfield until 1912. Those four years were an important period for Lindsay. He came home an apparent twenty-eight-year-old failure; he had tried, without success, to make his mark in the world as an artist and a writer. Four years later he would start another walking trip; but this time, after an additional period of apprenticeship, he would have a substantial amount of verse to his credit and a plan to spread the Gospel of Beauty. He was on the threshold of poetic success. After a year in the "city of his discontent," Lindsay declared war on the philistines. In the lead paragraph of War Bulletin no. 1, July 19, 1909, he explained how he felt he had compromised himself in "taking counsel to please the stupid, the bigoted, the conservative, the impatient, the cheap''; but' 'the things that go into the War Bulletin please me only. To the Devil with you, average reader. To Gehenna with your stupidity, your bigotry, your conservatism, your cheapness and your impatience." Four additional War Bulletins appeared in 1909. Except for no. 4, they were pamphlets of a few pages printed on inexpensive paper. Lindsay initially tried to sell them for five cents each; but when that failed, he gave them away on the streets of Springfield. They are the utterances of a writer and idealist frustrated by the lack of attention he is able to command, and lashing out at what he feels are the sources of a corrupt, materialistic society. Lindsay's protest pamphlets are thus thematically linked to the revolt against the village that manifested itself in works by such American writers as Sherwood Anderson, Sinclair Lewis, and Edgar Lee Masters. There was not much reaction to the first two War Bulletins; but the third, directed at religion, hit home—earning Lindsay the scorn of Springfield's sanctimonious burghers. In their eyes his

VACHEL LINDSAY I 379 transgression was not blasphemy, but the radicalism of taking religious injunctions literally and seriously. In "The Creed of a Beggar" Lindsay declared, "I believe in God, the creeping fire . . . in Christ the Socialist" and "in that perilous maddening flower, the Holy Ghost." Lindsay's Christianity was not the packaged version delivered once a week, but a vital, lifedirecting force. "Heaven is no goal for me. The Kingdom of God on earth is vastly more significant." Feeling the spirit move him toward the cleansing of the excrescences of money, he exhorted: "Let us enter the great offices and shut the desk lids and cut the telephone wires. Let us see that the skyscrapers are empty and locked, and the keys thrown into the river. Let us break up the cities." Lindsay's attack on Springfield, his sacred city, derived, of course, from his love for it. His reverence for this holy city of Lincoln and the aspirations he held for it (described in the apocalyptic Golden Book of Springfield) were expressed in terms of a lifelong lover's quarrel with his birthplace. He could not remain angry with his townsmen for long, however; and at Christmas, 1909, he announced a truce in The Sangamon County Peace Advocate. This broadside contained nine of his poems, including "Springfield Magical," which begins "In this, the City of my Discontent," and continues: . . . No Citadel of Brass By Sinbad found, held half such love and hate; No picture-palace in a picture-book Such webs of Friendship, Beauty, Greed and Fate! The last paragraph of War Bulletin no. 3 announced the availability of The Tramp's Excuse (WarBulletin no. 4), "abookof abouteighty pages which I will give with both hands to anyone who will write to me and confess that he reads poetry." This first book of Lindsay's poems was an

inchoate collection from which he was to cull many of the finer poems for inclusion in General William Booth. All in all, The Tramp's Excuse, with its dozen or so illustrations by the author and the ethereal quality of the poems populated with fairies and other imaginary characters, resembles many of the books of the previous decade. There was little suggestion of novelty in either subject matter or technique. One of the more exquisitely wrought poems, "I Heard Immanuel Singing," stands last in the volume and was later printed in The Congo. Lindsay said he wanted ' 'to plant the Tramp's Excuse where it will take root and grow." Though the 300 copies of The Tramp's Excuse generally failed to take root, one seed germinated in the mind of a fellow Illinoisan. The critic Floyd Dell wrote in the Chicago Evening Post that "Nicholas Vachel Lindsay is something of an artist; after a fashion, a socialist; more certainly, a religious mystic; and for present purposes it must be added that he is indubitably a poet!" Another product of this period was The Village Magazine. Lindsay regarded magazines as especially important vehicles for the presentation of his work. While he desired the large audiences they reached, he valued the idea of a magazine even more for its framework, upon which he could hang and display his various talents as rhymer, designer, editorialist, and artist, and yet achieve the coherence of a single vision: It seems to me the magazine as a unit is as justified as the novel. The magazine idea has a tremendous grip on me, but not in the commercial sense. That is, one collection of pictures, poems and editorials and end-page ornaments, issued by one man, and dominated by his ideas, and as definitely his, as though it were his novel. Only in this way can I unify all my activities in balanced proportion, and introduce what might be called my genuine public self to my little public.

380 I AMERICAN The Village Magazine, first issued in 1910, was an interesting collection of Lindsay's poems, drawings, and articles. Of the two dozen or so poems, several were new but many were taken fromThe Tramp's Excuse. It was characteristic of Lindsay to reuse and reshape his own material in his unflagging effort to find the ideal form to convey his ideas effectively. His Collected Poems is a good example of how he reordered his poetry from several different volumes into a new arrangement. This practice is also seen in his conception of The Village Magazine as a permanent but evolving form. It was reissued in 1920 and 1925 with additional prose and poetry selections. After four years at home, Lindsay was ready to take to the road again. It had been a productive period of apprenticeship and accomplishment, but he felt chagrined at the failure of his writing to achieve ready acceptance by the popular magazines and at his continuing financial dependence, at the age of thirty-two, upon his parents. Lindsay's evangelical background and crusading spirit brought him ten dollars and the opportunity to address audiences whenever he spoke in favor of prohibition for the Anti-Saloon League of Illinois. His speeches rang with the conviction of his personal abstinence and the evidence of the squalid life he had witnessed among miners who squandered their wages on alcohol. And Lindsay was not completely without success in having some of his prose and poetry published. Sketches that were later included in A Handy Guide appeared in The Outlook, and a few poems were published in The Independent and American Magazine. Before leaving on his westward journey, he had two works printed to serve as his currency. 'The Gospel of Beauty" and Rhymes to Be Traded for Bread contain the creed Lindsay was preaching in 1912. A broadside of three paragraphs, "The Gospel of Beauty" capsulizes Lindsay's philosophy. The first point is expressed as a prologue:

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I come to you penniless and afoot, to bring a message. I am starting a new religious idea. The idea does not say "no" to any creed that you have heard. * * * After this, let the denomination to which you now belong be called in your heart "the church of beauty" or "the church of the open sky." * * * The church of beauty has two sides: the love of beauty and the love of God. Lindsay's new religious idea is hardly what it professes to be. It is not religious in the conventional sense; it is nondoctrinaire and nonsectarian. It asks for an internal transformation that is nothing less than a rebirth or reawakening to beauty. This idea is perhaps more properly considered as a cultural attitude, since the love of God is seen as manifesting itself in the temporal world through the creation of beauty. Ultimately, beauty creates a culture of beauty, from the local to the national level, that for Lindsay was the achievement of a Utopian heaven on earth. The second aspect of * 'The Gospel of Beauty'' Lindsay terms "the New Localism." This doctrine asserts that "the things most worthwhile are one's own hearth and neighborhood," and admonishes us to "make our own home and neighborhood the most democratic, the most beautiful and the holiest in the world." This is a platform emphasizing individual self-reform and advocating a country of beauty achieved through the aggregation of its beautiful parts. An aesthetic outlook ought to be nurtured in children, who "should believe in every possible application to art-theory of the thoughts of the Declaration of Independence and Lincoln's Getysburg [sic] Address." These artist-children should "wander over the whole nation in search of the secret of democratic beauty," then return to their homes to make them "more beautiful and democratic and holy." Lindsay was faithful to his trinity of values— beauty, democracy, God—throughout his life

VACHEL LINDSAY I 381 and witnessed for his own gospel by returning to his family home in 1929, at the age of forty-nine, after having lived for five years in Spokane, Washington (following ten years of intermittent sojourns in Springfield). Lindsay obviously used himself as the model for the wandering child-artist, an Ishmael cast out by a profit-dominated society, who in his "darkest hours" was "made strong by the vision of a completely beautiful neighborhood and the passion for a completely democratic art." This was Lindsay's vision and since, as he observed in Adventures, "there has been as yet no accredited, accepted way for establishing Beauty in the heart of the average American," he could be pardoned for trying his own experiment. Beauty lays a "healing hand" on the ills of American enterprise; and though it "is not directly pious," it "does more civilizing in its proper hour than many sermons and laws." If Lindsay's program were to be successful, he would, as he said, have to establish "beauty in the heart of the average American" by means of "a completely democratic art." Lindsay had faith not only in the essential goodness of man but also in man's capacity, if given the chance, to respond to beauty in the form of poetry. He attests to his own success in reading his poems to families and other small groups on his early tramps; but we wonder, as he occasionally did, whether his listeners were responding to the beauty of the poems or simply being courteous to a strange but entertaining pilgrim. These doubts plagued Lindsay even more in his polished poetry readings to large audiences. Was their enthusiasm an appreciation of poetic beauty or a response to a performer making a spectacle of himself in a circuslike atmosphere? On his mendicant journey in 1912, Lindsay supplemented his broadside gospel with the reading of three poems that, a year later, appeared as the last selection in General William Booth under the heading "A Gospel of Beauty": 'The Proud

Farmer," "The Illinois Village," and "On the Building of Springfield." He prefaced these poems with the statement that "taken as a triad, they hold in solution my theory of American civilization." The first achieves greater poetic success than the other two through its more controlled, objective, and concrete idealization of subject matter. This is perhaps because "The Proud Farmer" is written, as its subtitle indicates, "In memory of E. S. Frazee, Rush County, Indiana." Frazee was Lindsay's maternal grandfather, and during his youth Lindsay had frequently visited the farm of this imposing pioneer who adhered to the doctrines of Alexander Campbell and for forty years had "preached and plowed and wrought." Frazee is an example of one who practiced the new localism. He strove to make his own home and neighborhood "the most democratic, the most beautiful and the holiest in the world." If "The Proud Farmer" outlines the qualities of character necessary to implement the new localism, "The Illinois Village" argues the superiority of "clean prairie lands" to the city ' 'Whose sidewalks are but stones of fear.'' Hope and "Spirit-power" emanate from the village church, "Rural in form, foursquare and plain," with "The whiteness it reflects from God." "On the Building of Springfield" lays more stress on the importance of creating an environment of beauty to provide "food for the spirit" and to nourish the artists and leaders needed in every generation to "start our blood athrill / With living language, words that set us free." And because "A city is not builded in a day," the opening line of the final stanza proclaims that "We must have many Lincoln-hearted men." Though Lindsay spread his gospel by reading these three poems, they were not included in the printed pamphlet that he carried with him in place of money. Rhymes to Be Traded for Bread squeezes forty-six poems into double columns on sixteen

382 I AMERICAN pages of cheap paper. Lindsay referred to them as "new verses," which suggests that most of them had been written during 1910-1912 or since The Tramp's Excuse and The Village Magazine. These poems reveal the maturity of expression Lindsay acquired during the preceding four years. More than half of them found their way into General William Booth and The Congo in the next two years. Perhaps the finest of these rhymes was one directly inspired by a former governor whom Lindsay had observed from his bedroom window. John Peter Altgeld, governor of Illinois (1892-1896), won the sympathy of the downtrodden among his constituents for his zeal in reforming conditions in which the lower classes lived and worked, and the enmity of the power brokers, who saw to it that he was turned out of office after only one term. He displayed progressive views by advocating penal reform and the compulsory arbitration of labor disputes. Conservative forces never forgave him for pardoning the "anarchists"—following an investigation that demonstrated they had been railroaded into jail—who allegedly sparked the Chicago Haymarket Riot of 1886. Lindsay was obviously attracted by Altgeld's political philosophy; moreover, his deeper, mystical bond with that courageous governor was forged by the fact that Altgeld had resided in the city of Lincoln and had trod the ground hallowed by that hero. * 'The Eagle That Is Forgotten" is a quiet elegiac poem lamenting that only a few years after Altgeld's death, those "that should have remembered forever, * * * remember no more." Nonetheless, there is consolation in the fact that the flame kindled by Altgeld is being kept alive by those following in his steps, and thus "to live in mankind is far more than to live in a name." Since Lindsay was suffering at this time the obscurity not of the forgotten, but of the undiscovered, he must have shared in the consolation of that sentiment.

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Lindsay begins Rhymes to Be Traded for Bread with a reference to his previous trips in a poem entitled "Upon Returning to the Country Road." He recollects that "Those were his days of glory, / Of faith in his fellow-men. / Therefore, today the singer / Turns beggar once again." The experiences of this return to the country road to restore his faith in man are recorded in Adventures While Preaching the Gospel of Beauty (1914). Lindsay's best prose work, it has an immediacy, freshness, and excitement that are not always felt in A Handy Guide. This stems from the fact that Lindsay was writing closer in time to the events themselves, and using the letters that he wrote home as the basis for his text. Thus, the prose has some of the brusqueness of telegraphic dispatches and the spontaneity of vivid impressions recorded on the spot. Adventures, lite A Handy Guide, is Lindsay's unique synthesis of prose narrative, description, and gospelizing—interspersed with poems, a series of five proclamations, and, of course, the text of "The Gospel of Beauty" incorporated into the first chapter. Lindsay's letters home, with their dated entries, form, as he observed, "a sort of diary of the trip" that begins in Springfield and traces his steps westward through Illinois, Missouri, Kansas, Colorado, and into New Mexico; then he rides a Pullman to Los Angeles and the composition of "General William Booth." Despite that format, Adventures is not a daily log devoting equal attention to every experience; more than half of the text focuses upon Kansas. Indeed, Adventures may be regarded as an ode to Kansas. For Lindsay it represents "the Ideal American Community! Kansas, nearer than any other to the kind of a land our fathers took for granted! Kansas, practically free from cities and industrialism, the real last refuge of the constitution, since it maintains the type of agricultural civilization the constitution had in mind!" He ignores the grandeur of

VACHEL LINDSAY I 383 Colorado's Rockies in order to celebrate the virtues of an 4'Ideal American Community1' through his encomium of Kansas, "the most interminable plain that ever expanded and made glorious the heart of Man." Some might deem Lindsay's praise fulsome, but it must be realized that Lindsay's perception transcends everyday realities and is colored by his vision of what the true America should be. While sitting out a rain shower in a railway station, he writes: I have crossed the mystic border. I have left earth. I have entered Wonderland. Though I am still east of the geographic centre of the United States, in every spiritual sense I am in the West. This morning I passed the stone mile-post that marks the beginning of Kansas. Though the last sentence brings the reader abruptly down to earth, the initial short, breathless sentences of the passage seem to echo the ecstasy of the famous ' 'transparent eyeball'' passage in Emerson's "Nature." Like Henry David Thoreau's experiment in the woods, Lindsay's journey is a spiritual exploration of the American landscape: overly romantic at times and less vividly concrete than some other depictions of nature in America, but nonetheless a truly evocative portrait of the drama of wheat harvesting as it was done in western Kansas in 1912. Lindsay's utterly transparent prose registers his impressions with just enough detail to authenticate the emotional ambience of his experiences. As in a journal, narrative structure resides in individual episodes. One of the finest of these is the story of a bronco named Dick. Dick, a high-spirited colt that became obstreperous while being broken, was beaten and hitched to a reaper to curb his rebelliousness. However, he fought the harness all day, went mad under the hot sun, and died in a last effort to break free. Lindsay renames Dick "Richard the Lion-Hearted," for his indomitable spirit in continuing to "dance"

until his death, and for refusing to be broken by the beating administered by two drunken men. Lindsay's witnessing of the cruel death of the colt made an indelible impression on his mind, and was later forged into the touching poem "The Broncho That Would Not Be Broken." Lindsay identified with the heroic spirit exemplified by Dick ("I think I want on my coat of arms a broncho, rampant"), both in continuing to dance his own poetry despite a disinterested public and in proving to himself that he could endure—within reasonable bounds—the physical hardships of wheat harvesting. In a long description of a typical wheat-harvesting day, Lindsay gives his material the epic proportions it demands—"There is nothing small in the panorama. All the lines of the scene are epic"—and memorializes the lore of an American calling much as Herman Melville had done for whaling. Fortunately, the success of Adventures is not dependent upon our empathizing with the arcane yet prosaic subject of wheat harvesting. It succeeds by virtue of the extraordinary character of the perceiver of these events: a foolish mendicant, an American original. Lindsay's innocence has the attraction of a grown-up Huckleberry Finn with just enough self-consciousness to keep the devout beggar from appearing smug. He concedes that an automobile ride can be a convenience: "I still maintain that the auto is a carnal institution, to be shunned by the truly spiritual, but there are times when I, for one, get tired of being spiritual." Such humor conveys the sense of a likable character (far less austere and self-righteous than a Thoreau), whose realistic yearning—"Oh, for a hot bath and a clean shirt!"—we appreciate. When Lindsay is invited into a shack after a long tramp in the rain, he observes: "And so my heart was made suddenly light after a day and a half of hard whistling." One has to respond positively to a person like that. The five "Proclamations" that conclude Ad-

384 I AMERICAN ventures expand the ideas of "The Gospel of Beauty": they tout the healing power of rural life for the afflictions of modern urban civilization; the cultural blossoming of the old New England spirit in the West and South; the new village as a self-sufficient cultural center; the artists who will spring from fertile rural lands; and the perfected democracy of equality, beauty, and holiness wrought by the statesman, artist, and priest. About ten years after these proclamations appeared, Lindsay averred that "the great virtue of these proclamations is that they map out my private life for a lifetime, and in none of them is it hinted that recitation is to be my fate!" When Lindsay wrote that statement, he was recuperating at a small junior college in Gulf port, Mississippi, from the accumulated toil of several years of touring to recite his poetry. But in 1912 he could not envision the disenchantment he later experienced in spreading his message, even though his commitment to his gospel never wavered. Adventures concludes with some final impressions of the "distinctive institution" of harvest time in Kansas—a sympathetic portrait of the men who participate ("the harvester is indeed harvested") and a description of how their presence temporarily transforms "whole villages that are dead any other season." Lindsay, however, does not carry his narrative as far as his journey actually went. He continued to Colorado, where he stayed for several weeks at a camp with his parents before walking to New Mexico. There he reluctantly gave up his original intention of walking to the West Coast. He rationalized that it was no failure to decline to go on foot across more than a thousand miles of desert; moreover, a passing reference in the last chapter of Adventures suggests that he was anxious to embark "upon a certain spiritual enterprise, namely, the writing of certain new poems that have taken possession of me." It is not clear when the idea of a poem on Gen-

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eral William Booth took possession of Lindsay. The leader of the Salvation Army had died in London in August 1912, and Lindsay may have heard the news then, or possibly not until he reached Los Angeles about a month later. Whatever the case, a week after his arrival in California, Lindsay had, in a burst of frantic activity, completed "General William Booth Enters into Heaven." This poem was unlike anything he had written before, and its publication caused a sensation because it was so different from the bulk of poetry then appearing in America. What was new for Lindsay was the successful presentation of poetic tendencies that had long been simmering within him. "General William Booth" is more obviously democratic than his earlier verse in both its theme and its form. His conception of poetry is avowedly democratic, but his own problematic poetic identity and much of his poetry obscure his fervent faith in a democratic poetry. Lindsay's long apprenticeship might be attributed to his divided allegiance to the two mainstreams of American poetry: the aesthetic craftsmanship of Poe and the democratic idealism of Whitman. In fact, he seems never to have resolved the problem of his identity as a poet. He often claimed and, indeed, wrote to a friend in 1929, "I have never called myself a poet." In the poem "Twenty Years Ago" (from Every Soul Is a Circus, 1929) Lindsay protests that "You call me 'a troubadour,' / But I am an adventurer, in hieroglyphics, buildings, and designs." Of course, these disclaimers late in his life may be regarded as a way of escaping the criticism that increasingly came his way after 1920, but they are also consistent with the problems of self-definition that beleaguered Lindsay during his formative years. Lindsay's mother provided the source for these models. It was her insistence that led him to study art and her ardor for the "classics" of

VACHEL LINDSAY I 385 European art—especially poet-artists, such as William Blake and the Pre-Raphaelites—that made Lindsay so open to the conception of the artist as craftsman and accounted for the years he persisted in his art training. At the same time, the devotion of Lindsay's mother to religious and social causes instilled in her son a zealous commitment to the egalitarian principles and democratic Utopian ism that he expressed in the social formulation of "The Gospel of Beauty." Between the extremes of art for art's sake and art as propaganda, he clearly emphasized the latter. When Lindsay argues in "The Gospel of Beauty" that future generations will be made strong by "a completely democratic art," he means not merely a nonelitist art but also an art that nourishes and fosters "the thoughts of the Declaration of Independence and Lincoln's Getysburg Address." Indeed, he subscribes to the notion that poets should be legislators: "It is far more important that artists and poets should be in power, and displace the present business caste, than their particular views would be right. The unwritten law should be 'only artists should hold high office.' " For Lindsay, then, "the issues of Poetry are political issues"; and to be effective, they must be made accessible to the common man, for "in a democracy, the arts, like the political parties, are not founded till they have touched the county chairman, the ward leader, the individual voter.'' Considering all of these factors, it is not surprising that Lindsay's definition of the ideal American poet—the poet he aspired to be—incorporates elements of Poe and Whitman, but is modeled on a Populist politician: Bryan is really the American poet, till we can take the Chautauqua platform, and sing to as many. I suppose the ideal American poet would have the tang of Mark Twain, the music of Poe, the sweep and mysticism of Whitman, and the

platform power of Bryan, and a career in verse similar to his in Politics. Prior to the publication of "General William Booth," Lindsay had been ruminating on the problems of how to sing to the many. In the accounts of his walking tours, he frequently reveals the satisfaction gained from reading his verse to the generally unlettered people who shared food and shelter with him. His desire to make his poetry accessible to common folk led him to the idea of incorporating folk elements—in both subject matter and technique—into his poetry. Lindsay felt that if he based a poem on an already familiar subject or rhythm, the work was at least one step closer to the common reader. A familiar theme or rhythm also provided him with an established emotional base that he could refashion, in conjunction with his own feelings, into a powerful new synthesis. But at this stage in his career, Lindsay's aspirations were frustrated by the limited publication and circulation of his poetry. Driven by a sense of destiny and the urge to reform society, he yearned to make an impact: "I would go through most any contortion, even a conventional one, to grip the vitals of the ultimate consumer of song." Whitman had not achieved this end; he had only "brought the idea of democracy to our sophisticated literati, but did not persuade the democracy itself to read his democratic poems." Exploiting folk materials such as popular songs and gospel hymns would prove to be one means to that end; and in August 1912, Lindsay was ready to begin. "General William Booth" is to be sung to the tune of "The Blood of the Lamb," with instrumental accompaniment as indicated by Lindsay. The first line, "Booth led boldly with his big bass drum," plunges the reader into a palpitating rhythmic alliance with the flow of Booth's parade. It is not the meter or employment of traditional poetic feet that sustains involvement in the poem; it is rhythm broadly construed as it

386 I AMERICAN emerges from alliteration, assonance, and the flow of feeling within the work. Lindsay's directions for the accompaniment of bass drum, banjo, flute, and tambourine are not meant to be prescriptive, but to suggest the voice qualities appropriate for the intended effect in reading and reciting the poem. (Lindsay's phonograph recordings are instructive in this matter.) Edgar Lee Masters, Lindsay's biographer and fellow poet from Illinois, noted that "music is at the bottom of his poetry." In one sense, of course, the primary appeal of Lindsay's verse is to the ear—rather than the eye or mind—and to the sentiments of the heart beating out the physiology of being. In another sense, music is the core of Lindsay's verse. It is not an overlay. Lindsay objected vociferously to attempts by composers to set his poetry to music, because it would violate the internal music of the poems. The musical quality was to emerge from the phonetic qualities of speech itself. If an existing tune was suitable for his purpose, he would utilize it as part of a new synthesis; however, his verses were not to be fitted arbitrarily to new tunes after the fact. Lindsay once wrote to George Armstrong, his tour manager and friend, that Percy Grainger (whose musical compositions incorporated American folk tunes) . . . is about the only musician I ever struck who has the remotest notion of the elaborateness of the musical construction of my pieces, just as they stand. Most of the literati are utterly deaf to music, though great scrappers as to "methods of versification.'' That is ' 'methods'' of embalming the corpse of poetry. Lindsay specified that the distinctive musical effects of his poetry—for purposes of dancing or public reciting—were to be achieved through exaggerating the inherent phonetic qualities and by emphasizing every onomatopoeic feature of the verse. The effect of Lindsay's throbbing rhythms is

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to involve the reader in the process of the poem itself. If, as Robert Penn Warren claims, "the basic fact about poetry is that it demands participation," then Lindsay is successful not only in making the poem accessible but also in compelling participation in it. Once we are marching in step with Booth, the refrain—"Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?"—interrogates us individually. The emphasis, however, is not upon the self as a simple, separate person; it is upon the collective, en masse. Lindsay, as poet, does not use his own life as a model to celebrate himself or the concept of selfhood. He sings of the self as the essential unit of democracy, but reserves his highest praise for the self working selflessly for the establishment of heaven on earth. Lindsay's heroes—and he is a heroworshipper—are those who contribute to achieving mankind's millennial aspirations. "General William Booth" is a social view of salvation. Just as Edward Taylor domesticates the process of personal salvation in the images of "Huswifery," Lindsay socializes the process of salvation in the images of community government. "Jesus came from out the court-house door, . . . And blind eyes opened on a new, sweet world." Booth is the truly democratic and Christian general who leads "unwashed legions" of lepers, drabs, and drug fiends from the slums to be washed in the blood of the Lamb. His faith advanced the millennial cause, and his Master came "for Booth the soldier." Lindsay felt that the Utopian vision of a golden Springfield was "worth working toward," for "if we are millennialists, we must be patient millennialists. Yet let us begin to-day as though the Millennium were to-morrow, and start our 'Village Improvement Parade' down Main Street, and turn the corner east toward the rising sun to a land of clear pictures and young hearts." Thus the special power of "General William Booth" resides in its hopeful egalitarian vision—we may all be

VACHEL LINDSAY I 387 washed in the blood of the Lamb—fused to a comparably egalitarian vehicle the upbeat tempo of which sweeps the reader involuntarily into participating in the ecstatic process of entering heaven: "O, shout Salvation!" Today, our taste having been refined by modernist poetry, we may feel somewhat cool toward what one critic has called the "crude pietism" of "General William Booth"; but the power of the poem has remained remarkably intact since the time when it was felt as a fresh, new force in American poetry. The poetry of the previous two or three decades in America was singularly undistinguished. After Whitman there was no major poet who dominated the American scene, only the legacy of the New England Fireside Poets. Edgar Lee Masters' acerbic characterization of this "interregnum" period, though perhaps overstated, suggests how intensely a new group of poets, who were to become very well known, felt about the plight of the verse they had to redeem: "The magazine poetry of America for more than twenty years before 1912 I believe to be the most dreadful piffle, the most emasculated trash, the most obvious wax fruit that the world has ever seen." Harriet Monroe, who inaugurated Poetry magazine in October 1912, dubbed the work of these young writers "the new poetry," the title of an anthology of contemporary verse she and Alice Corbin Henderson published in 1917. Though the designation has little usefulness—it includes such disparate talents as Robert Frost, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Carl Sandburg, and Joyce Kilmer—it does suggest that this poetry was at least self-consciously new. "General William Booth" exemplifies this newness in its subject matter, a realistic look at the underside of urban life—a new theme for poetry at the time—and in its use of the language of everyday speech instead of a conventionalized poetic diction. What made Lindsay's verse seem like the newest of the new was its vitality. Compared with the typically

genteel magazine verse of the day, "General William Booth" astounded readers with its driving, insistent rhythms that were akin to the syncopated beats of the era's popular ragtime and jazz. Lindsay had triumphed in "making it new"—to borrow Pound's dictum—and had gained the audience he so earnestly desired. Little did he imagine how well known he was to become and how this achievement sealed his fate in a manner he was to regret. Though "General William Booth" revealed a new dimension in Lindsay's poetry, the other poems in the volume by that name represent his work of the preceding five years, including "The Eagle That Is Forgotten" and three poems collectively called "A Gospel of Beauty." More than one-third of the poems were grouped in a section headed "Fantasies and Whims." Among these deftly composed, dreamy works are several "moon-poems" (reprinted with others in a section by that name in Collected Poems) that describe how different people and different animals find their own essences reflected in the light of the moon. Related to these is "A Net to Snare the Moonlight," subtitled "What the Man of Faith Said." This delicate sixteen-line poem subtly expresses Lindsay's belief in the necessity of man's imaginative life as well as man's dependence upon the sustenance of the workaday world. Since God has blessed man with nature's bounty, the Man of Faith, sounding like a Populist, desires that "all men / Have land to catch the rain" and "Ripe wheat and poppies red." The poppies signify for Lindsay an Oriental, mystical restfulness. They are allied to the lotus in "The Wedding of the Rose and Lotus" (a poem commemorating the opening of the Panama Canal in 1911—a joining of the East and West), in which "The lotus is Nirvana" whose genius "Shall heal earth's too-much fret." Thus, man needs "dreams when toil is done" as well as "A place of toil by day time." General William Booth Enters into Heaven

388 I AMERICAN and Other Poems was very favorably reviewed and Lindsay's achievement celebrated. In March 1914, at a banquet in Chicago given by Harriet Monroe for W. B. Yeats, the guest of honor, directing his remarks to Lindsay, praised "General William Booth": "This poem is stripped bare of ornament. It has an earnest simplicity, a strange beauty, and you know Bacon said, 'there is no excellent beauty without strangeness.' " Lindsay rose to acknowledge Yeats's remarks* and then stunned the diners by reciting a poem only recently completed—"The Congo." Before the end of the year, this work became the title for another collection of poems. The renown of "The Congo" rests upon its panoply of sound, somewhat like Poe's "The Bells." It is a poem read with the pulse rather than the mind. As in "General William Booth," Lindsay orchestrates its sound effects through copious marginal directions. "The Congo" was to become the poem that his audiences most frequently and insistently requested. The length of the poem—it takes more than seven minutes to recite—allowed for a complete display of Lindsay's declamatory and dramatic talents in reading lines ranging from a light to a terrified whisper, and from the sound of the "wind in the chimney" to the "literal imitation of campmeeting racket, and trance." The most extraordinary aspect of the poem, however, was its syncopated rhythms, which Lindsay delivered in a singsong fashion much like musical chant. His recitation of this poem was guaranteed to enthrall audiences, who became swept up in the multipaced cadences, the rising and falling dynamics of crescendo and decrescendo, and, cast over all, the aura of witchcraft and voodoo. "The Congo," subtitled "A Study of the Negro Race," is divided into three sections: "Their Basic Savagery," "Their Irrepressible High Spirits," and "The Hope of Their Religion." Today this view of blacks is tawdry and racially offensive. Unquestionably, Lindsay's

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poem exploits a stereotyped view of blacks in his day and capitalizes upon a black mystique, which perhaps was originally associated with the mystery of the impenetrable, dark recesses of the jungle. That aspect is, however, conveyed primarily through the overlay of sound and description, and is not the intent of the poem, which clearly envisions the salvation of the black race through its faith in the Bible. This theme may carry a distasteful sense trf cultural and religious superiority, but it is not willfully racist. Lindsay's end note to "The Congo" states that the poem was suggested by an allusion, in a sermon delivered by his pastor, to the death of a Disciples of Christ missionary who drowned in the Congo River. That reference was apparently the catalyst for Lindsay's reflection upon blacks. Blacks composed one-fifth of Springfield's population while Lindsay was growing up, and his family employed blacks in the household. Lindsay was aware of their disadvantaged condition, and was deeply disturbed by the lynching of two blacks at Springfield in 1908, which he protested in letters to the editor of the newspaper. On another occasion, in reference to World War I, Lindsay remarked that it was easier to be a martyr for France than for blacks; but he would prefer to die in the cause of the latter. "The Congo," however, seems to be less "A Study of the Negro Race" than another version of Lindsay's "The Village Improvement Parade." The depiction of blacks is a mishmash of American and African characteristics. Each of its three sections opens with an American scene and then jumps to the Congo. One effect of this commingling is to recall the dignity and pride of the American blacks' tribal origins; but another, of opposite import, is to present Congolese villages as similar in their needs to American villages. Repentance brings the death of MumboJumbo in the jungle, and "Pioneer angels cleared the way / For sacred capitals, for temples clean." As a result " Twas a land transfigured,

VACHEL LINDSAY I 389 'twas a new creation," which is, of course, Lindsay's Utopian goal for the villages of America. The Congo needs to kill its false god, Mumbo-Jumbo, just as America needs to kill its false god, money. One of the banners from Lindsay's drawings of "The Village Improvement Parade" proclaims "A hasty prosperity may be raw and absurd, a well-considered poverty may be exquisite." Thus, "Redeemed were the forests, the beasts and the men"; and "The Congo" brings us back to the Midwest. The poetry revival originating in the Midwest at this time was championing new themes—or a return to the common man and everyday life— and introducing new rhythms into American poetry. Sandburg rediscovered Whitman's free verse, mid Lindsay showed how the rhythms and sounds emanating from the kaleidoscope of American life could be incorporated into verse. "The Congo" was an important illustration of how new rhythms could infuse verse with new life and redeem poetry from its status as magazine filler. Lindsay's chanting of "The Congo" inoculated it with a primitive vitality drawn from folk origins. Using folk materials as a source of poetic inspiration opened up poetry to a public who could identify with the themes and participate in the rhythms with which they were familiar. The poem that follows "The Congo," in the volume of the same title, is an even better demonstration of the use of everyday American sound in poetry. * 'The Santa Fe Trail" is a Whitmanesque recording of the sounds of the open road as America moves westward. Its subtitle, "A Humoresque," indicates that it is to be regarded as a playful musical composition; and its marginal notes direct how its lively spirit is to be achieved. Walking across Kansas on the Santa Fe Trail, the poet records the novelty of the intrusive sound of the automobile in American life. "Hark to the calm-horn, balm-horn, psalm-horn. I Hark to the /aim-horn, quaint-

horn, saint-horn." On each car is a "snapping pennant" naming its place of origin. The catalog of cities is to be read "like a train-caller in a Union Depot." As the poet watches, "The United States / Goes by." The noises of the racing autos "Blasting the whispers of the morning dumb" and American life passing westward is contrasted with the sounds of nature. "I find in the stubble of the new-cut weeds / A whisper and a feasting, all one needs: / The whisper of the strawberries, white and red / Here where the new-cut weeds lie dead." Those lines have their origin in an experience that Lindsay relates in Adventures (for which this poem is an excellent gloss). The epigraph for this poem, also taken from that book, is a brief passage describing how an old black man, in answer to Lindsay's question, tells him that a bird he has heard singing so sweetly is called the Rachel-Jane. The Rachel-Jane is the spirit of nature; it epitomizes the rural life, and its lines are to be sung. "Far away the RachelJane / Not defeated by the horns / Sings amid a hedge of thorns:— / Love and life, / Eternal youth, / Sweet, sweet, sweet, sweet." Even though the theme of this poem argues that "fair dreams fade / When the raw horns blow," it is the sound effects of the raw horns that attract and fascinate the reader. The varying tempos and tonal levels, in imitation of contemporary life, engaged the attention of Lindsay's auditors for his rejuvenation of an old Jeffersonian message. "General William Booth," "The Congo," and "The Santa Fe Trail" all demonstrate what L'indsay called the "Higher Vaudeville imagination." In a note entitled "Primitive Singing," in Poetry magazine, he explains the term as he had formulated it in response to a question that Yeats had asked him: "What are we going to do to restore the primitive singing of poetry?" Lindsay's solution in the form of the Higher Vaudeville was to carry the method of the American vaudeville stage ("where every line may be two-thirds

390 I AMERICAN spoken and one-third sung, the entire rendering, musical and elocutionary, depending largely upon the improvising power and sure instinct of the performer") "back towards the old Greek precedent of the half-chanted lyric." Lindsay had read that "music was the handmaid of verse" in all Greek lyrics, and he wanted to create a form, accordingly, in which the verses would contain an inherent musical component that could be exploited in reading or performing. The reader is to use his imagination and follow his instincts in bringing out the melody that each line suggests. Elsewhere Lindsay wrote that the Higher Vaudeville "exaggerates musical effects"; it is "an exaggeration of the phonetic qualities and the metrical form," and in reciting "the chanter should bring out every hint of assonance and alliteration." There is an ambivalence, though, in Lindsay's attitude toward vaudeville. He embraced its technique, but with reluctance. He wanted to reach the common man, yet felt that vaudeville in itself might be too common for the art of poetry: thus his specious link with Greek poetry and his attempt to dignify his endeavors with the adjective "Higher." There is a reference to vaudeville in his poem "The Knight in Disguise," a tribute to the writer O. Henry. Lindsay's own desire to be a knight in disguise accounts for his adoption of the vaudeville method, in which the characters 4 'over-act each part. But at the height / Of banter and of canter and delight / The masks fall off for one queer instant there / And show real faces: faces full of care / And desperate longing: love that's hot or cold; / And subtle thoughts, and countenances bold." Similarly, Lindsay yearned to convey his thoughts and feelings to his audience through vaudeville; but as he painfully learned, they relished the overacted show and did not appreciate the apocalyptic seriousness that was behind the mask. Lindsay was more successful in transmitting his thematic concerns to ordinary readers

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through mythic images. He had the gift of being able to endow figures and events from the American past with legendary significance. One of the best examples of this is the poem "Abraham Lincoln Walks at Midnight," one of six antiwar poems that make up the final section of The Congo. The outbreak of World War I in August 1914 shocked Americans, and Lindsay immediately responded with his poetic statements against the war. Lincoln "cannot sleep upon his hillside now" because "The sins of all the warlords burn his heart." He paces the streets of Springfield near the old courthouse, moving past his homestead and through the market. Lindsay recalls the image of the brooding Lincoln stalking the streets of a divided nation's capital: A bronzed, lank man! His suit of ancient black, A famous high top-hat and plain worn shawl Make him the quaint great figure that men love, The prairie-lawyer, master of us all. Lindsay invokes the spirit of Lincoln; domesticates his appearance, locale, and actions; and then transforms him into a god who becomes a source of comfort, pride, and support for future Americans. Like a mythic hero, Lincoln assumes our burdens in sorrow "That all his hours of travail here for men / Seem yet in vain." He answers our call for aid, and in turn we must allow him to "sleep upon his hill again" by restoring peace. Characteristically, Lindsay incorporates into this pattern—in the next-to-last stanza—a vision having its source in the mythic belief in American destiny and in a future peace, international in scope and socialistic in nature. World War I is the crisis that calls forth from the American pantheon the model of Lincoln to remind us that we, too, cannot rest from the national mission to which we are compelled by our cultural identity: He cannot rest until a spirit-dawn Shall come;—the shining hope of Europe free:

VACHEL LINDSAY I 391 The league of sober folk, the Workers' Earth, Bringing long peace to Cornland, Alp and Sea. Lindsay's next book was a study of film, surprising in its subject matter yet a natural consequence of his desire to reach the people and convert them to the visionary prospects of his version of American ideals and destiny that he enunciated in the' 'Gospel of Beauty.'' The Art of the Moving Picture (1915) is the final phase of Lindsay's creative surge during the middle years of the decade. A new work was published every year from 1913 to 1917, but after General William Booth (1913) and The Congo (1914) his poetry did not significantly change or develop. Hence, The Art of the Moving Picture, appearing one year after Adventures, may be regarded as the capstone to Lindsay's creative ferment. The critic Stanley Kauffmann believes that "out of the mass of Lindsay's poetry and prose, this may be the work most worthy of survival. And in the field of film aesthetics, it is the first important American work, still important." Though Kauffmann's estimate of The Art of the Moving Picture in the Lindsay canon seems overly favorable, it does point up the stature of Lindsay's pioneering contribution to American film criticism. In addition, that contribution may be regarded as a fortuitous by-product, or natural consequence, of his social and artistic beliefs. Lindsay had a prophetic faith in film; indeed, of all his visions, those about film have come to pass in the greatest number. In the 1922 revision of The Art of the Moving Picture he even adds an introductory chapter in which, somewhat gloatingly, he acknowledges that his theories of film have been adopted throughout the country. Lindsay was attracted to film because he derived immense personal enjoyment from it, and because he discerned its usefulness as a means of disseminating ideas and information in a democracy. Lindsay's fondness for film derives from his

interest in drawing and the visual arts. He regarded film as more closely allied to painting than to drama, and saw it as a means of capturing and reflecting the rich images of American life. He thought Americans were visually impoverished and believed that film would contribute significantly to their visual awareness and cultivate a demand for an art and architecture of beauty. His enjoyment was, nevertheless, also on the visceral level. "I am the one poet who has a right to claim for his muses Blanche Sweet, Mary Pickford, and Mae Marsh," he wrote about those early screen heroines, each of whom had inspired a poem, and added that the two things to be said for those poems was "first, they were heartfelt. Second, any one could improve on them." Lindsay's unabashed Midwestern character enabled him to be one of the first intellectuals to appreciate film as a serious artistic medium. Other critics also enjoyed film, but would not deign to consider that a popular form of entertainment, so appealing to the crossroads taste, could be art. Exactly, however, because it appealed to all social classes, for Lindsay film was a powerful force in a democracy. It "goes almost as far as journalism into the social fabric in some ways, further in others"; and since "it is scattered like the newspaper," it "penetrates in our land to the haunts of the wildest or the dullest. The isolated prospector rides twenty miles to see the same film that is displayed on Broadway. There is not a civilized or half-civilized land but may read the Whitmanesque message in time, if once it is put on the films with power.'' Not only does the film serve democratic ideals; it promotes religion and brotherhood, and even reunites lower-class families by striking at alcoholism, the root of their dissolution. The movie theater "offers a substitute for many of the lines of pleasure in the groggery." Once, it seems, Lindsay adopted a cause, he was able to adapt it to his personal program. Notwithstanding its idiosyncrasies, The

392 I AMERICAN Art of the Moving Picture goes beyond them to present an argument for film as art. The standards for judging film, Lindsay maintained, are those "which are taken for granted in art histories and schools." He consciously dignified film by frequently comparing the frames of particular movies to famous paintings, and analyzing the film from a pictorial point of view. His insistence on the efficacy of this approach compelled respect for the legitimacy of film as art and for film aesthetics as practical criticism. In judging film, Lindsay contended that "it must first be good picture, then good motion." His emphasis upon the pictorial quality of film blinded him to the future dominance of the ' 'talkies." He thought films should remain silent, and disliked even the musical accompaniment provided by local theaters. On the other hand, he was one of the first to recognize the uniqueness and significance of film, proclaiming that 6 "Edison is the new Gutenberg. He has invented the new printing." In an especially valuable chapter, "Thirty Differences Between the Photoplays and the Stage," Lindsay further defines the properties of film in contrast with those of drama. "The successful motion picture expresses itself through mechanical devices that are being evolved every hour. Upon those many new bits of machinery are founded novel methods of combination in another field of logic, not dramatic logic, but tableau logic." In the same year (1915) that The Art of the Moving Picture was published, Lindsay employed "tableau logic" in "The Chinese Nightingale/ ' a poem that appeared in Poetry and won that magazine's Levinson prize of $250 for the best contribution of the year. It was to be the title poem of a volume of verses published two years later; and because it was Lindsay's favorite long poem, he placed it first in his Collected Poems. After the success of "General William Booth" and "The Congo," Lindsay was apprehensive about being typed exclusively as a "Higher

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Vaudeville" poet. He considered that to be only one of his veins, and not the richest one. "The Chinese Nightingale" was an endeavor to throw off his dramatic mantle and establish his proficiency in a sustained fantasy. Lindsay's imagination had frequently been haunted by the Orient through his reading and through the direct link of his sister Olive, who had gone to China in 1905 with her husband, a medical missionary. There were Chinese in Lindsay's native Springfield, and he had been through the Chinatowns of both New York and San Francisco. Probably the immediate catalyst was his parents' visit to China in the summer of 1914. The tableau logic of "The Chinese Nightingale" is suggested by its subtitle, "A Song in Chinese Tapestries." The bird's song of love and hope weaves reality and fantasy together in an exotic picture given unity as the dream of a Chinese laundry man, Chang. The poet asks Chang why he irons while the rest of San Francisco sleeps. Chang reveals his secret: "My breast with vision is satisfied, / And I see green trees and fluttering wings, / And my deathless bird from Shanghai sings." The lighting of incense creates a dream-vision atmosphere in which figurines come to life, and a dog conjures up a noble Chinese lady who had been Chang's lover when he was king in a pre-Confucian age. Chang and his sweetheart live in a stately palace by the sea, their love enhanced by magical powers that can charm a dragon upon whose back they are borne to their "secret ivory house." Meanwhile, stony-faced Chang "ironed away in that bower dim" and the bird gives vent to his soul. Chang reflects upon the course of human existence: "Man is a torch, then ashes soon, / May and June, then December, / Dead December, then again June." There is "Sorrow and love, glory and love"; but the poem's final affirmation is that "Spring came on forever, / Spring came on forever." Chang's succor in dream that sustains his daily toil is a frequent theme in Lind-

VACHEL LINDSAY I 393 say's poetry, which in this case, with a nod to Coleridge and Poe, is more fantastic than usual. Though this poem is rich in bizarre imagery, it ultimately seems thin. It is a tableau—not a moving picture—and thus it lacks the movement that gives life to Lindsay's other poems. Further, it lacks the American context against which Lindsay's best poems resonate. Just as parts of "The Chinese Nightingale" were inspired by Lindsay's courtship of the poet Sara Teasdale, so other lines seem to be veiled references to the outbreak of World War I, "When all the world was drinking blood / From the skulls of men and bulls.'' There are two sections of poems about the war in The Chinese Nightingale and Other Poems. They reveal Lindsay's own soul-searching about his noninvolvement and his pacifist persuasion. Probably the best of these twelve poems is "Our Mother Pocahontas." From her grave in England, Pocahontas returns to America to remind us that our roots are native and honorable, and that we should stay free of entangling foreign alliances. "We here renounce our Saxon blood. . . . We here renounce our Teuton pride." We are "The newest race . . . born of her resilient grace." Wherefore, "She sings of lilacs, maples, wheat, / Her own soil sings beneath her feet, / Of springtime / And Virginia, / Our Mother, Pocahontas." The remaining noteworthy poems in this volume all, like "Our Mother Pocahontas," derive richness from their American setting. "The Ghost of the Buffaloes" evokes the awesome presence of those beasts that darkened the vast American plains and then almost disappeared. "The lords of the prairie" and their Indian hunters, coming to a boy in a dream, represent the terrible power of primitive American nature as it impresses itself like "A scourge and amazement" upon the national psyche. In "The Raft," Mark Twain is eulogized for describing a republic upon a raft; "All praise to Emerson

and Whitman, yet / The best they have to say, their sons forget. / But who can dodge this genius of the stream, / The Mississippi Valley's laughing dream?" The creation of another American author is recalled in the poem "A Negro Sermon:—Simon Legree," which is the first part of "The Booker Washington Trilogy: A Memorial to Booker T. Washington." The other two sections are "John Brown" and "King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba." The portrait of Simon Legree emphasizes his alliances with the devil, and his seemingly supernatural power over his slaves as seen from the slaves' point of view. It is to be read "in your own variety of negro dialect." The poem is meant to portray the superstitious nature of the slave, for whom Legree "was surely a witch-man in disguise," but just as convincingly establishes his abasement under the white master. "John Brown" is a tribute to the abolitionist leader whose "shot-gun lies / Across his knees." A sense of black racial pride is underscored when the poem is sung, according to Lindsay's direction, by a leader with choral response. Lindsay described "King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba" as "an Afro-American jubilee song." It is a celebration of a future millennium, a time when the black "shall feel goads nomore. / Walk dreadful roads no more, / Free from your loads / For ten thousand years." Of additional interest is the fact that this is an example of what Lindsay called a "poem game." The fifth and last section of The Chinese Nightingale is called "The Poem Games" and begins with Lindsay's five-page explanation of what they are. Essentially, a poem gathie is the acting out of a poem's statement and spirit. An actor may mime while someone else reads the poem, in which case it resembles pantomime, or the reader may act out the poem as he recites, and make it resemble drama. Dancing to the poem as it is read is a third option. Although the poem game is a hybrid form, Lindsay insists that

394 I AMERICAN "the English word is still first in importance, the dancer comes second, the chanter third." The "game" element is further reinforced by involving the audience as a chorus in the recitation of given lines. Lindsay was very successful in coaxing unsuspecting audiences into participating in the performance. He would take a few minutes to teach them their lines; and as he declaimed the principal part, they would respond with a refrain. The poem games began in the summer of 1916 in Chicago and flourished through the interest of Mrs. William Vaughn Moody, the Chicago Little Theater, the University of Chicago, and Poetry magazine. They represent one outgrowth of Lindsay's belief in taking poetry to the people. He even read "The Potatoes' Dance" to a kindergarten class while the children danced and acted to the words. These poem games were a successful venture for arousing interest and participation in poetry, and Lindsay continued to write them for the remainder of his career. His last book of verse, Every Soul Is a Circus, contains several that may have been inspired by his own children, who were then quite small. The poem games were an extension of the Higher Vaudeville but did not lead in new directions of poetic development for Lindsay, whose next book of verse, The Golden Whales of California and Other Rhymes in the American Language (1920), displays a stagnation of his poetic genius. The few memorable poems, such as "Bryan, Bryan, Bryan, Bryan" and "John L. Sullivan," possess the energy of his earlier achievement and exploit memories of the American past for their effectiveness. The title poem is a curiously bland description of California that views the physical features of the state through a veil of partial fantasy, but far less masterfully than in "The Chinese Nightingale." The chanting of the whales proclaims California's abundance of which they partake, fed each day by the "sun-struck." When St. Francis comes to his

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city at night, however, he "shades his face in his cowl / And stands in the street like a lost gray owl." Finally, with the audience instructed to join in the refrain of "gold, gold, gold," the voice of the earthquake makes St. Francis aghast: "Oh the flashing cornucopia of haughty California / Is gold, gold, gold. I Their brittle speech and their clutching reach / Is gold, gold, gold" The cynicism of this poem is indicative of a prevailing weariness and loss of spirit that had settled over Lindsay, and it is instructive to contrast it with Lindsay's comments on California made five years earlier in The Art of the Moving Picture. The Golden Whales of California begins with an introduction entitled "California, Photoplays, and Saint Francis," which consists almost entirely of excerpts taken from his chapter "California and America" in The Art of the Moving Picture. This is an extremely prescient and insightful work on the phenomenon that was and is California. Even the title of the chapter recognizes California's distinctness and separateness from America, while simultaneously implying that the state epitomizes and foreshadows what America is to become. An especially telling passage from the earlier chapter that Lindsay does not reprint in the later introduction is the following: California is a gilded state. It has not the sordidness of gold, as has Wall Street, but it is the embodiment of the natural ore that the ragged prospector finds. The gold of California is the color of the orange, the glitter of dawn in the Yosemite, the hue of the golden gate that opens the sunset way to mystic and terrible Cathay and Hindustan. Whalt happened in five years to tarnish this golden glow? The change in Lindsay's perception of California is not tied directly to California itself, but is symptomatic of changes in his view of his own work. During these years, as his pop-

VACHEL LINDSAY I 395 ularity increased, Lindsay began to feel more and more harassed. He was experiencing the dark side of the classic American success story: once he became popular, he became the captive of his audiences. In the beginning Lindsay found his new status satisfying, but soon his recital tours became monotonous and tedious. He was trapped. He was dependent upon the recitals for income and emotional sustenance. His audiences became a narcotic; and even though he began to dislike them, he could not give them up. Lindsay would send the local organizing committees for his recitals elaborate instructions concerning their preparation for his visit; but he would always be disappointed to find that all they wanted was a "show," which meant a performance of the same old vaudeville pieces that tired him to death. Lindsay even grew to hate "The Congo." Lacking financial stability, however, and the strength of will to define himself and determine his own destiny, he continued to gratify the wishes of his audiences while begrudging their pleasure. Consequently, he became soured on this system that made money the common denominator of human transactions. He needed it but felt tainted by it. As a result of this growing personal unhappiness, Lindsay sought solace either in the past or in the future. The latter manifested itself in the labor he devoted to what he considered his magnum opus, the visionary Golden Book of Springfield; the former, in poems that looked back to a happier time. Indeed, the only poems that really come alive in The Golden Whales of California are those that recall a lost innocence and a brighter day. "In simple sheltered 1889," the poet remembers, "John L. Sullivan, the strong boy of Boston" (as the poem is entitled), "Fought seventyfive red rounds with Jake Kilrain." That was the year "The baseball rules were changed" and "We heard not of Louvain nor of Lorraine, / Or a million heroes for their freedom slain." It is a

nostalgic catalog description of the pre-World War I landscape as viewed from the poet's ninth year. In the first part of the "Alexander Campbell" trilogy, Lindsay looks back to the even more distant past in "My Fathers Came From Kentucky." This forceful, moving poem, Lindsay's favorite short piece, celebrates the Southern roots of the fires he felt burning within a Northern exterior: "Why do I faint with love / Till the prairies dip and reel? / My heart is a kicking horse / Shod with Kentucky steel." Lindsay's greatest triumph, though, in transforming personal reminiscence into myth is "Bryan, Bryan, Bryan, Bryan." This poem about the election of 1896, composed in 1919, provided a means for the release of Lindsay's personal frustrations by identifying them with the defeat of egalitarian cultural aspirations. The poem is conceived as a Manichaean drama between the forces of evil and good, east and west. "There were real lines drawn: / Not the silver and the gold, / But Nebraska's cry went eastward against the dour and old, / The mean and cold." The Midwest and West are described as a mythic, Paul Bunyanesque land where the men are of heroic stature and the animals larger than life, "The fawn, prodactyl and thing-a-ma-jig, / The rakaboor, the hellangone, / The whangdoodle, a batfowl and pig"; and "These creatures were defending things Mark Hanna never dreamed." In the election of 1896, thirty-six-year-old William Jennings Bryan ran on the Democratic ticket, endorsed by the Populists, against William McKinley, who became the Republican nominee through the influence of the power broker Mark Hanna. "The ultimate fantastics / Of the far western slope" were oppressed by the "dour East" until Bryan came striding out of the West, "The bard and the prophet of them all. / Prairie avenger, mountain lion, / Bryan, Bryan, Bryan, Bryan." When Bryan brought his battle against gold to Springfield, Lindsay, then six-

396 I AMERICAN teen, stood with his best girl amid the festivities that seemed to embody the "Hopes of all mankind." Bryan's support grew until Hanna, "Rallying the roller-tops," rescued McKinley by "Pouring out the long green to a million workers." For Lindsay, McKinley's victory was the "Defeat of my boyhood, defeat of my dream." The poem ends by using the ubi sunt formula to ask where the participants in that epic struggle have gone. The sustained power of this work derives from Lindsay's masterful dramatization of the issues of a national election into a dialectic of cultural values, and his identifying the whole with the American dream of success—an innocent, pluralistic optimism—defeated by an elitist establishment. Lindsay's other avenue of escape from the discontent of the present was into the future, through the fabrication of the Utopia he created in The Golden Book of Springfield. He had so much of himself invested in this work that he was unable to objectify his material in a satisfactory form. Its final shape as a prose narrative with a semblance of plot lacks the vitality of Lindsay's poetry and earlier prose. The narrative describes the visions of a group of prognosticates in 1918 concerning the Springfield of 2018. Springfield has realized the objectives of the "Gospel of Beauty" and represents the spirit of a world government binding nations through love and brotherhood. Without the leavening of Lindsay's humor and the color of concrete imagery, however, his prose is vapid. What he had intended to be his masterpiece proved to be more than 300 pages of almost unreadable prose. The Golden Book of Springfield was published in November 1920, and Lindsay soon became depressed by the generally negative reception from reviewers. He said that it would "always be dull and unpopular," but expected it to help "form the minds of my most intimate friends as to my real intentions and direction." Though Lindsay's commitment to his beliefs never wavered, he

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could not ignore the fact that neither The Golden Book of Springfield nor The Golden Whales of California, published earlier the same year, had sold well or received enthusiastic reviews. Nevertheless, he was still in popular demand as an interpreter of his own work. During the next several years Lindsay recited extensively throughout the United States and Canada. This was a demanding and tiring enterprise in which he invested a total effort. He charged a flat fee for an appearance in a single location, but he would speak to as many groups in one day as he was invited to address. Frequently this would amount to three or four appearances, each of which would be a demanding dramatic performance. Lindsay was celebrated for his dynamic presentations, which gave such force to his poetry that many listeners felt that his poetry could be fully experienced and appreciated only when it was heard in performance, from his own lips. The rigors of traveling and reciting, however, inevitably took their toll of Lindsay's psychic and physical energy; and he collapsed from the strain in the winter of 1922-1923. In January he was taken into the home of a former Hiram College friend who was president of Gulfport Junior College in Gulfport, Mississippi. Lindsay stayed there as poet in residence and remained throughout the following school year, 1923-1924. During that time he gathered his verses together into a volume of Collected Poems. The Collected Poems (1923) contains almost all of the verse that had appeared in the four commercially published volumes. Lindsay reorganized his works and placed them in nine sections: Nightingales; Orations, College WarCries, and Olympic Games; Litany of the Heroes; Verses of an Especially Inscriptional Character; Moon-Poems; Incense, and Praise, and Whim, and Glory; Runes of the Road; Home Town; and Politics. This 390-page work was introduced by an autobiographical foreword, "Ad-

VACHEL LINDSAY I 397 ventures While Singing These Songs," which declared that "this whole book is a weapon in a strenuous battlefield." Two years later Lindsay brought out a revised and illustrated edition of the Collected Poems. This edition, which has remained the standard collection of his poems, is still in print. The revised edition swelled the original by more than 100 pages with its added illustrations (all by Lindsay), second preface, and two new sections of poems. Lindsay's new preface, "Adventures While Preaching Hieroglyphic Sermons," is a polemical defense of his work, with a few new poems on Johnny Appleseed; but otherwise the new material of the revised edition adds little of merit to the original version. Actually, the best of more than half a dozen poems on Johnny Appleseed had appeared in the 1923 edition. "In Praise of Johnny Appleseed" recapitulates the career of John Chapman as he led the way for settlers "Over the Appalachian Barricade"; became the friend of Indians and all forest creatures; and, in his old age, saw the fruition of his labor: "All America in each apple." (This poem was the basis for the title of Johnny Appleseed and Other Poems, a selection of verse from Collected Poems suitable for children, published in 1928.) Lindsay was particularly enamored of Johnny Appleseed because he identified with his work and his vision: "I am for Johnny Appleseed's United States." Lindsay agreed with Chapman's faith in the future, symbolized by the planting of seeds "Till he saw our wide nation, each State a flower." Chapman's concern with the beauty of the states, as well as their prosperity, made him an artist in "trees that would march and train / On, in his name to the great Pacific." In addition to these reasons, Lindsay revered Chapman because he was the ideal American folk hero. He provided the kind of material that Lindsay's genius utilized to endow cultural heroes with mythic stature. In Collected Poems, Lindsay pays tribute to

other men he admired in the "Litany of the Heroes." This long poem combines a number of previously published short verses on such figures as St. Francis, Buddha, Shakespeare, and Titian into a new format that traces man's history from the ancient to the modern world. This poem, written in the subjunctive, celebrates the subjunctive—probably the dominant mood of Lindsay's writing. "Would that we had the fortunes of Columbus," he wishes for us collectively, and for himself, in his role as poet and evangelist: "Would I might rouse the Lincoln in you all." A man of such grandiose aspirations is not, however, immune to the pricks of indicative reality. Lindsay was especially sensitive to the charge that he was a jazz poet, signifying that he was crass, low-class, and trivial. Thus, rearranging his verses on heroes for his Collected Poems was not only a personal action against that charge, but also a means of offering his heroes as his intellectual credentials in order to defend himself against those who claimed he lacked culture. In 1923, the year that his Collected Poems appeared, Lindsay published a new volume of verse called Going-to-the-Sun. The introduction states that i t ' 4is a sequel and a reply to a book by Stephen Graham, explorer-poet, and Vernon Hill, artist." In the summer of 1921 Lindsay tramped for six weeks with Graham, a British friend, through Glacier National Park in Montana and over the border into the Canadian Rockies. It was such a marvelous trip that two books resulted: Graham's Tramping With a Poet in the Rockies (1922) and Lindsay's slim volume of poems and illustrations named after Going-tothe-Sun Mountain. This work and Lindsay's three subsequent volumes of new verse were profusely illustrated in his distinctly linear and pictographic style. Lindsay had been interested in Egyptology for many years and had spent hours poring over grammars of hieroglyphics. His goal was to develop a

398 I AMERICAN United States hieroglyphics, and many of his drawings are efforts toward that end. His renewed interest in drawing at this time may also reflect his disenchantment with public recitals and the waning popularity of his latest books of verse. He returned to the endeavors of his art student days as an alternative means of expressing his visions and conveying them to his audience in a new form. He even included this warning in the introduction: "I serve notice on the critics—the verses are most incidental, merely to explain the pictures." Lindsay's lifelong fondness for the West and his later hostility toward the arbiters of taste in the East resulted in the only noteworthy poem in Going-to-the-Sun. "So Much the Worse for Boston" records the satiric observations of a saucy mountain cat on Bostonian pretensions. Lindsay's memories of his splendid trip in the Rockies drew him back to Spokane, Washington, in June 1924. When the time came for him to return to his teaching duties, he found his new surroundings so agreeable that he decided to stay in Spokane, where he was to remain for the next five years. Within a year Lindsay ended his protracted celibacy at the age of forty-five and married Elizabeth Conners, a high school English and Latin teacher twenty-two years his junior. They had two children. Lindsay had felt homeless and dispirited since the death of his mother in 1922, but his marriage produced the spark his creative powers needed. In 1926 he published two volumes of verse. The first of these, Goingto-the-Stars, "attempts," Lindsay says, "to be a souvenir" of Glacier National Park. He and his wife spent the better part of August and September 1925 hiking in the park, and this book amounts to a transcript of their observations. They renamed St. Mary's Lake "Going-to-theStars" because its waters reflected the sun and nine mountain peaks by day and all the stars by night. However, the three most memorable poems from this souvenir of Glacier National

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Park are ones that recall the American past. "Old, Old, Old, Old Andrew Jackson" resembles "Bryan, Bryan, Bryan, Bryan"; and "Virginia" celebrates the heroes of the Old Dominion and catalogs the westward migration of their descendants. The effectiveness of these two poems is achieved through the accumulation of emotive detail about the subjects. In contrast, the fifteen lines of "The Flower-Fed Buffaloes" are an incisive, lyrical remembrance of the days when the buffalo and the Indian ranged the prairies. Following the publication of Going-to-theStars by just three months, The Candle in the Cabin continues to explore poetically and graphically, in "A Weaving Together of Script and Singing," subjects occasioned by the experiences of Lindsay and his wife in the mountains. Since there is little of poetic merit in these verses, they are most interestingly viewed as subtle reflections of the ecstasy of sexual release. There is a sense in which these poems, grouped in such sections as "The Forest-Ranger's Courtship," purify the act of love for Lindsay and make it mountain-clean. Lindsay's last two books were published in 1929, the year that he returned to Springfield. The Litany of Washington Street came out in March, and the following month he moved his family back to his home town and the house of his birth. While in Spokane, Lindsay had continued to tour and recite; but as his debts grew, so did his unhappiness. He felt that he had not been entirely accepted by the people of Spokane, and signed his weekly column in the local newspaper "Vachel Lindsay, Citizen of Springfield, Illinois—Guest of Spokane." He wished to return to the city where he felt the people really knew him, and where his spirit was most at ease. These feelings are evident in the prosy chapters of The Litany of Washington Street. Placed in a larger cultural context, they reveal Lindsay's view of himself as the perpetual guest or alien-

VACHEL LINDSAY I 399 ated artist in a grossly commercial society. The chapter "Washington Street Is Forever Against Main Street" explains that Washington Street is the "song and poetry street of every United States town." It is "the rival of Main Street" and crosses it "at a right angle." Lindsay attributed the plummeting of his poetic fortunes to Main Street's total concern with what would sell. Likewise, he attacks the "relentless realists" whose aim is to debunk the mythic conceptions that Americans hold of the founding fathers. Lindsay vents his personal frustrations, as an artist in America, in the form of Fourth of July orations on Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and Whitman, with verses from the last interspersed between chapters. The result is a work that conveys an unpleasant argumentativeness in stilted and sterile prose. Moreover, the abstractness of such notions as "The Mystical Johnny Appleseed Highway" are far less interesting than the real highways Lindsay described in Adventures and A Handy Guide. A poetic summary of The Litany of Washington Street appeared six months later in Lindsay's final volume of verse, Every Soul Is a Circus. "The Virginians Are Coming Again," the most compelling poem in this volume, opens with the ringing declaration that "Babbitt, your tribe is passing away. / This is the end of your infamous day. / The Virginians are coming again." With the vigor characteristic of his earlier verse, Lindsay presents his vision of a younger generation, following in the spirit of Virginia's preeminent leaders, making war on the moneychangers of contemporary society. Two autobiographical poems, "The Song of My Fiftieth Birthday" and "Twenty Years Ago," are the only other verses of interest in this volume. Both reveal how Lindsay identified his mental depression and financial problems with Spokane, and how he looked to Springfield as "A Sangamon palace of the soul." He felt that he had been insulted by Spokane, and that in Springfield his eccentricities

would be tolerated. At the least, he considered he would be more at home among those who knew him. Lindsay's sensitivity to his alleged ill-treatment by Spokane was symptomatic of the gradual deterioration of his physical and mental health. This became apparent with his breakdown in 1923, and was diagnosed the following year at the Mayo Clinic as epilepsy, or, as he told his wife, "nocturnal seizures." Consequently, it was not realistic to expect that Springfield would prove to be the balm for Lindsay 's agitated soul. His expectations of what Springfield owed him for his service and devotion were unrealistic. He continued to be financially pressed, and could expect little improvement in that area after the stock market crash of 1929. Not only were his last books not selling well and their critical reception negative, but the prospect for sales of existing or future works was dim. Beset by these problems and suffering from poor health and mental instability, he finally lost faith in his own talent and took his life, in December 1931, by drinking Lysol. "Everything begins and ends there for me," he had prophetically written about his Springfield home. Lindsay had left Springfield on his tramp west in 1912 as an obscure poet, was catapulted to fame the following year by "General William Booth," enjoyed the adulation of critics and the general public for over a decade, suffered neglect for several years, and returned to his home in relative obscurity as a "has-been." Certainly, a factor in both Lindsay's decline in popularity and his mental depression was the adverse criticism his work had received. His last four volumes of verse, published between 1923 and 1929, contained hardly a memorable poem; and the reviewers noted the fact. By that time Lindsay also knew as much—although a justifiable charge frequently brought against him was his incapacity for self-criticism. Most of the late

400 I AMERICAN verse simply lacks substance, a stricture from which his earlier verse is not altogether free. Lindsay's poetry is uneven, as a glance at the Collected Poems makes abundantly clear; and a goodly share of it is rather thin and uninteresting in both form and content. This deficiency results in part from the lack of a strongly felt presence of mind in many of Lindsay's poems, a quality consistently observed by those writing critically on his verse. But good poetry is not limited to the poetry of ideas, nor was Lindsay short of ideas. The weakness of his poetry in this respect may lie, rather, in the fact that he had a few key ideas that he regarded as a panacea for all problems. In addition, he lacked the probing intelligence that explores the multifarious complexities of the human predicament, seeking original answers. As a result, much of Lindsay's poetry may strike a reader as slight and trivial when other compensating features, such as concrete imagery, rhythm, and significant content, are absent. This lack of complexity is, on the other hand, Lindsay's strength in his best poems, where it manifests itself as an elemental force of pure conviction innocently and simply stated. Today, Lindsay's critical fortunes are down. A few anthologies of American poetry even exclude him from their pages, but that is too harsh a judgment. He gave us a few splendid moments in American poetry, and those moments deserve to be remembered and preserved. The conventional critical wisdom maintains that a poet's stature rests upon his best poems. By that standard Lindsay earns a place in the anthologies, but it is a place diminished by the critical act of detaching those poems from the enterprise of his life. In the era of modernism, Lindsay's ideals and the figure they make in his poetry have been out of fashion; but if we can see his individual works as part of a whole that represents a unique and compelling expression of American culture,

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then we may begin to appreciate his total achievement. Like Thoreau, Lindsay wanted to wake up his neighbors. His avowed purpose—'To waken world-weary men"—contributed to the poetry revival of the twentieth century's second decade, a development of historical significance for the course of American poetry. Lindsay helped to open up poetry by infusing it with the language, subjects, and rhythms of everyday life. He was also instrumental in moving this rejuvenated poetry from the back pages of magazines and bringing it before the public. A poetry exhibiting new life and vigor appealed to a larger audience, and Lindsay was one of those primarily responsible for revitalizing the craft of poetry and thus enlarging this audience. During his lifetime Lindsay's poetry so overshadowed his prose that we have tended ever since to regard him only as a poet. This is unfortunate, for the three earliest of his five prose works are enchanting and valuable pieces of Americana. They fit into the strong tradition of nonfiction prose in American literature, and two of them are fine examples of the perennial genre of * 'adventures on the road.'' For a complete understanding of Lindsay, one must read his prose to discern the man in his work. He once wrote, in reference to his poetry: "I want to be mixed up with my work. I cannot bear to have my verses just so much print." Those prose works are the prerequisites that enable us to perceive the poet in his verses and that explicitly elucidate his ideas. In "One More Song," the wistful epilogue to The Candle in the Cabin, Lindsay summarizes the bittersweet mission of his life: "I would set right the old world's wrong; / 1 would outbuild New York and Rome. / But all /1 can bring home / Is one / More / Song.'' This poem expresses his claim on our imagination. It recalls the Puritan origins of the American desire to "set right the

VACHEL LINDSAY I 401 old world's wrong" and to establish the City of God in this new land. Indeed, Lindsay is a representative American Jeremiah who calls his countrymen to task for forgetting the principles of the founders in the hope of advancing the visionary cause. The American way of establishing a golden Springfield is to evoke the heroic efforts of the past as a goad to the present generation. In another poem Lindsay contends that "The soul of (he U.S.A.—that is my life-quest." It is the measure of his achievement that we still respond to his quest and to the accuracy and power of his portrayal of the national soul. He bequeathed his vision to us in the form of his songs, which will remain interesting, for when Lindsay comes knocking at our door with a dream in his hand, it is the dream of American culture.

Selected Bibliography WORKS OF VACHEL

LINDSAY

(In print works are indicated by an asterisk.) VERSE General William Booth Enters into Heaven and Other Poems. New York: Mitchell Kennerley, 1913. The Congo and Other Poems. New York: Mitchell Kennerley, 1914. The Chinese Nightingale and Other Poems. New York: Macmillan, 1917. The Golden Whales of California and Other Rhymes in the American Language. New York: Macmillan, 1920. Collected Poems. New York: Macmillan, 1923; revised and illustrated edition, 1925.* Going-to-the-Sun. New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1923. Going-to-the-Stars. New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1926. The Candle in the Cabin: A Weaving Together of

Script and Singing. New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1926. Every Soul Is a Circus. New York: Macmillan, 1929. PROSE Adventures While Preaching the Gospel of Beauty. New York: Mitchell Kennerley, 1914. The Art cf the Moving Picture. New York: Macmillan, 1915; revised ed., 1922. A Handy Guide for Beggars, Especially Those of the Poetic Fraternity. New York: Macmillan, 1916. The Golden Book cf Springfield. New York: Macmillan, 1920. The Litany cf Washington Street. New York: Macmillan, 1929. SELECTED EDITIONS

Lindsay, Vachel. The Daniel Jazz and Other Poems. London: G. Bell & Sons, 1920. Lindsay, Vachel. Johnny Appleseed and Other Poems. New York: Macmillan, 1928.* Spencer, Hazelton, ed. Selected Poems of Vachel Lindsay. New York: Macmillan, 1931. Harris, Mark, ed. Selected Poems of Vachel Lindsay. New York: Macmillan, 1963.* Sayre, Robert F., ed. Adventures, Rhymes & Designs. New York: Eakins Press, 1968. * (Includes Adventures, Rhymes to Be Traded for Bread, and selections fromThe Village Magazine.) Lindsay, Vachel. Springfield Town Is Butterfly Town and Other Poems for Children, edited by Pierre Dussert. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1969. (Previously unpublished poems). Kauffmann, Stanley, ed. The Art of the Moving Picture. By Vachel Lindsay. New York: Liveright, 1970.* BIBLIOGRAPHY Byrd, Cecil K. *'Checklist of the Melcher Lindsay Collection," Indiana University Bookman, 5:64106 (December 1960). White, William. "Vachel Lindsay-iana: A Bibliographical Note," Serif, 8:9-11 (June 1971). . "Lindsay/Masters/Sandburg: Criticism from 1950-75," in The Vision of This Land, edited by John E. Hallwas and Dennis J. Reader, Macomb: Western Illinois University, 1976. Pp. 114-28.

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CRITICAL AND BIOGRAPHICAL STUDIES BOOKS

Armstrong, A. Joseph, ed. Letters of Nicholas Vachel Lindsay to A. Joseph Armstrong. Waco, Texas: Baylor University Press, 1940. Flanagan, John T., ed. Profile of Vachel Lindsay. Columbus, Ohio: Charles E. Merrill, 1970. Graham, Stephen. Tramping with a Poet in the Rockies. London: Mac mill an, 1922. Harris, Mark. City of Discontent. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1952. Massa, Ann. Vachel Lindsay: Fieldworker for the American Dream. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1970. Masters, Edgar Lee. Vachel Lindsay: A Poet in America. New York: Scribner's, 1935. Ruggles, Eleanor. The West-Going Heart: A Life of Vachel Lindsay. New York: Norton, 1959. Trombly, Albert Edmund. Vachel Lindsay, Adventurer. Columbia, Mo.: Lucas Brothers, 1929. Wolfe, Glenn Joseph. Vachel Lindsay: The Poet as Film Theorist. New York: Arno Press, 1973. BOOKS DEVOTING CHAPTERS TO LINDSAY

Duffey, Bernard. The Chicago Renaissance in American Letters: A Critical History. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1954. Hall was, John E., and Dennis J. Reader, eds. The Vision of This Land. Macomb: Western Illinois University, 1976. Kramer, Dale. Chicago Renaissance: The Literary Life in the Midwest, 1900-1930. New York: Appleton-Century, 1966. Putzel, Max. The Man in the Mirror: William Marion Reedy and His Magazine. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1963. Untermeyer, Louis. The New Era in American Poetry. New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1919. Whipple, Thomas K. Spokesmen. New York: D. Appletonand Co., 1928; reprinted Berkeley: University of California Press, 1963. Yatron, Michael. America's Literary Revolt. New York: Philosophical Library, 1959. ARTICLES

The best place to begin is with the representative selection of fourteen articles compiled by John T. Flanagan in his Profile of Vachel Lindsay. (They are

not listed below.) The fifth number of the Indiana University Bookman (December 1960) is devoted to Lindsay and contains, besides Cecil K. Byrd's descriptive bibliography, an assessment by Edwin H. Cady, a reminiscence by Frederic G. Melcher, and the texts of Lindsay's letters that are held by the Lilly Library. The Shane Quarterly (vol. 5, April-June 1944) also devoted an entire number of ten items to Lindsay. Aiken, Conrad. "A Letter from Vachel Lindsay," Bookman, 74:598-601 (March 1932). Ames, Van Meter. "Vachel Lindsay—or, My Heart Is a Kicking Horse" Midway, 8, 4:63-79 (Spring 1968). Armstrong, A. J. "Vachel Lindsay as I Knew Him," Mark Twain Quarterly, 5:6-11 (Fall-Winter 1942-43). Bradbury, David L. "Vachel Lindsay and His Heroes," Illinois State University Journal, 32:22-57 (April 1970). Chenetier, Marc. "Knights in Disguise: Lindsay and Maiakovski as Poets of the People," MidAmerica, 2:47-62 (1975). Edwards, Davis. "The Real Source of Vachel Lindsay's Poetic Technique," Quarterly Journal of Speech, 33:182-95 (April 1947). Kreymborg, Alfred. "Exit Vachel Lindsay—Enter Ernest Hemingway," Literary Review, 1:208-19 (Winter 1957-58). Lee, C. P. "Adulation and the Artist," Saturday Review of Literature, 22:7, 18-19 (August 10, 1940). Massa, Ann. "The Artistic Conscience of Vachel Lindsay," Journal of American Studies, 2:239-52 (1968). Masters, Edgar Lee. "Vachel Lindsay," Bookman, 64:156-60 (October 1926). . "Vachel Lindsay and America," Saturday Review of Literature 12:3-4, 15 (August 10, 1935). Orel, Harold. "Lindsay and the Blood of the Lamb," University of Kansas City Review, 25:1J-17 (August 1958). Rittenhouse, Jessie B. "Vachel Lindsay," South Atlantic Quarterly, 32:266-82 (July 1933). Sayre, Robert F. "Vachel Lindsay," introduction to Lindsay's Adventures, Rhymes & Designs. New York: Eakins Press, 1968. Pp. 7-41. Tanselle, G. Thomas. "Lindsay's General William Booth: A Bibliographical and Textual Note," Bib-

VACHEL LINDSAY I 403 liographical Society of America Papers, 55:371-80 (4th Quarter 1961). . "Vachel Lindsay Writes to Floyd Dell," Illinois State Historical Society Journal 57:366-79 (Winter 1964). Trembly, Albert Edmund. *'Listeners and Readers: The Unforgetting of Vachel Lindsay," Southwest Review, 47:294-302 (August 1962).

Viereck, Peter. "The Crack-up of American Optimism: Vachel Lindsay, the Dante of the Fundamentalists," Modern Age, 4:269-84 (Summer 1960). Whitney, Blair. "Vachel Lindsay: The Midwest as Utopia, "MidAmerica, 1:46-51(1974). -,JAYR. BALDERSON

James Russell Lowell 181Q-18Q1

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>LTHOUGH today's appraisals would be very different, during the years immediately after James Russell^Lowell's death, obituary writers and critics spoke of his life and achievements as being admirable in almost every way. Extravagant eulogies were then customary, but this author's background, his achievements, and his contemporary reputation provided unusually convincing evidence. If traditions, family, and learning outfitted a man for a successful career, Lowell got off to a perfect start. A Cambridge, Massachusetts, mansion, Elmwood—his birthplace (February 22, 1819) and his deathplace (August 12, 1891)—was built in 1767 on Tory Row by an appointee of George III; was seized by village freemen in 1774; was used as a hospital during the Revolutionary War; and was the home of a signer of the Declaration of Independence. The Washington Elm and crucial battlefields were strolls away. Nearby every year, a horseplayful muster—"a Cornwallis"—burlesqued the Yorktown surrender. Each Independence Day, Lowell's grandmother, dressed in black, "loudly lamented our late unhappy difference with His Most Gracious Majesty." Lowell felt that just living in the big Georgian frame building with its tall pilasters, old-fashioned garden, and wide meadows tethered one to the past. He warned a temporary renter: "It will make a

frightful conservative of you before you know it; it was born a Tory and will die so." Harvard College was a mile to the east. Family history strengthened vital ties. Ever since Percival Lowle had moved from England to Newbury in 1639, Lowells had lived in Massachusetts. A Lowell had served in the Continental Congress and the state's constitutional convention. Another had established relationships with three leading families by marrying a Higginson, a Russell, and—still more impressive—a Cabot. Three generations had been Harvard-trained lawyers and clergymen. An uncle, as a founder of New England's textile industry, gave a factory town the family name; another founded Lowell Institute. Lowell's mother traced her ancestry to Sir Patrick Spens in the medieval ballad; and for her children she often recited traditional Scottish tales and sang old Orkney Islands folksongs. In Cambridge, where learning almost had the look of being catching, Lowell had as a superb live-in teacher a sister who spoke twelve languages. He began to read before his third birthday. At three and a half he toddled off to a private school, and soon was absorbing Latin; at nine he could read French. By the time he was fifteen, he had acquired enough Latin, Greek, and mathematics to pass Harvard's formidable entrance examinations.

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JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL I 405 At Harvard, Lowell bragged, he completely avoided anything "in the way of college study" for four years. True, he ranked only in the middle of his class, spent much time forming friendships, fell "hopelessly in love" frequently, and often was scolded for breaking college rules. But he did much independent reading (Herodotus, Cicero, Terence, and a dozen unrequired and unanointed British authors), and in an unguarded moment found Italian "enchanting." Lowell helped edit the college literary magazine and won election as class poet. Although he could not read his class poem at commencement because he had been suspended (for, it was rumored, being disorderly in chapel), the poem proved he had learned to comment rhythmically and wittily on the controversies of the day. Lowell's reading, his facile scribbling, and his favorite studies helped him to decide that he would "love to be able to sit down and do something literary for the rest of my natural life." Other New Englanders, on emerging from college with similar bents, had firmly been told by elders—as Lowell was—that writing in America simply did not pay. Postponing literary careers, others prepared for and carried on more remunerative work before edging into successful authorship: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, for instance, became a librarian and a professor, Oliver Wendell Holmes—after a brief foray into law—a physician. Lowell gave thought to the ministry, decided against it, tried business briefly and scurried away from it, then at his father's urging had a go at law. Desultory application led to a degree, admission to the bar, and a few clients. But eager to fulfill what he called his "blind presentiment of becoming independent in some other way," he chiefly busied himself with a literary career. This started well. Lowell contributed to newspapers and magazines, and collected his verses in A Year's Life (1841) and in Poems, published in December 1843. Also in 1843 he served as an

editor of The Pioneer: A Literary and Critical Magazine during its three-month life span. Gossips, some of them college classmates, spread the rumor that here was a comer, and reviewers added support, with the result, journalist N. P. Willis remarked, that Lowell was "the best launched man of his time." A review of A Year's Life said that here was the future writer of a great American poem "that shall silence the sneers of foreigners, and write his name among the stars of heaven." Poems did even better: "Now he has done it!" a New York commentator exclaimed, and Edgar Allan Poe announced that the book would put an author with possibly "a loftier genius than any . . . at the very head of the poets of America." For the era, the book had a large sale—three editions, each of 500 copies. Although The Pioneer (like most magazines then) died young, it garnered praise. At its debut there was "only one prophecy and that, success," and Poe called its demise "a most severe blow to . . . the cause of Pure Taste.'' Other magazines commissioned articles from Lowell; one bid for his exclusive services; a series that he expanded and slightly revised in Conversations on Some of the Old Poets had large sales, and was praised extravagantly by three revered Harvard professors. Both Poems and Conversations touched on what would be a major theme of Lowell's for two decades—abolitionism. In his class poem, the young man had sniped at contemporary zealots, including antislavery crusaders. But his father's stand against slavery and his own natural inclinations encouraged him to join the cause. Probably an even greater influence was Maria White, a beautiful, frail, and impassioned young activist whom Lowell met in 1839, and whom he married in 1843. With her eager support, he wrote copiously in behalf of abolition for antislavery magazines, as well as for some conservative ones, and became a regular contributor to the Pennsylvania Freeman.

406 I AMERICAN Initially his stand alienated some readers, and of course it never pleased many Southerners. But Northern public opinion moved Lowell's way. In 1842, Longfellow, who usually avoided controversy, published Poems on Slavery. Disputes about Texas and the war with Mexico led many Northerners to reassess their positions. Lowell's first widely popular success was a series of poems in Yankee dialect satirizing the Mexican War as "a national crime committed in behalf of Slavery." The Biglow Papers, published in newspapers beginning in 1846 and as a book in 1848, were, as he said, "copied everywhere; I saw them pinned up in workshops; I heard them quoted and the authorship debated.'' Poems by James Russell Lowell, Second Series (1848), and two long poems of the same year—:A Fable for Critics, which wittily praised and pilloried the era's writers, and a moralizing Round Table tale, The Vision of Sir Launfal—added to his reputation. The death of Maria in 1853 hit Lowell hard and, as he said, broke his life in two. During the 1850's, he lovingly edited a memorial edition of her poems; with less enthusiasm, he published essays in magazines and edited or wrote introductions for several editions of British poets. His activity was sluggish until he was asked to give the prestigious Lowell Institute lectures for 1855, an assignment that pushed him into making a new and beneficial start. Having decided to speak on "The English Poets," and becoming aware that the catch-as-catch-can critical methods he had been using were too simpleminded to hold the attention of sophisticated Bostonians for twelve long hours of talk, Lowell prepared himself by a thorough reading of half a dozen critics. New approaches and perceptions, and a graceful and often witty style, made the lectures a success. Impressed by the praise the lectures received in the press and faculty gatherings, Harvard asked the thirty-six-year-old critic to succeed Longfellow, who had just resigned, as Smith

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professor of French and Spanish and professor of belles-lettres. After a year of study abroad, Lowell served from 1857 to 1872. He was not, by most accounts, very good in the classroom: at times he yawned as he entered, and students had to struggle not to yawn back. But from informal evening seminars in his private study, he gained a high reputation. Named the first editor of toe Atlantic Monthly, Lowell got it off to a rushing start between 1857 and 1861. Later he served with Charles Eliot Norton as joint editor of the North American Review (1863-1872). Both his editorial skill and his lavish contributions were much admired. The respected English author of Tom Brown's School Days, Thomas Hughes, discovered The Biglow Papers for his countrymen in 1859, and blithely placed Lowell way up there with Aristophanes, Cervantes, Moliere, and Swift in his fulsome introduction—and, incidentally, boomed the author in an America that still put British approval above that of domestic critics. When The Biglow Papers, Second Series came out in the Atlantic Monthly in 1862, 1865, and 1866, a London publisher issued them in pamphlet form and combined some of them with the first series in hardback—before the initial American edition came out in 1867; and although American critics were generally kind, British reviewers were for the most part even kinder. In addition to his writings, his prestigious professorship, and the clout of his influential editorships, Lowell's personality helped his career. As a young man, despite some preciousness, he had been idolized—along with Maria—by a "Band" of intellectual contemporaries who thought he was a charming genius. By middle age he had shucked off affectations and had acquired a great many close (and, as it happened, influential) friends—social, academic, and literary. Barrel-chested, heavily bearded, and shipshape physically, he was untouched by any illness—except for gout—until his mid-fifties. "He had," wrote an intimate, "a power of en-

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL I 407 joyment both mental and physical. He liked good food, drink and tobacco, and was altogether fond of the earth." He went for good company, too: there is much testimony that his ebullience, his wit, his delight in horseplay and in good talk, were most attractive. Fredrika Bremer, the Swedish feminist, wrote after a visit to Elmwood: "He seems to me occasionally brilliant, witty, gay, especially in the evening, when he has what he calls his "evening fever,' and his talk is then like an incessant play of fireworks." And despite the fact that he had black periods of deep depression, hundreds of his letters—highly informal, droll, informative, and affectionate—attest to great personal charm. Some of this quality enlivened a collection of familiar essays, Fireside Travels (1864). Various other books—a long philosophical poem The Cathedral (1870), books of shorter poems, prose works including Democracy and Other Addresses (1887), Political Essays (1888)—as well as works of literary criticism—Among My Books (in two series, 1870 and 1876), My Study Windows (1871), The English Poets: Lessing, Rousseau (1888), Latest Literary Essays and Addresses (1891)—led to frequent statements that Lowell was one of the nation's most versatile writers and the leading man in American letters. As such a figure, Lowell was roughly the nineteenth-century approximation, in general American esteem, of the twentieth century's Edmund Wilson. Some honors that Lowell won, in fact, Wilson could not possibly have duplicated: he served as ambassador to Spain from 1877 to 1880, then as ambassador to England between 1880 and 1885, retiring from diplomacy after the death of his second wife of twenty-seven years. He received honorary degrees from Oxford, Cambridge, Edinburgh, and Harvard; and he was the president of an organization with which Wilson feuded, the Modern Language Association, from 1887 to 1891. Throughout many years after Lowell's death in 1891, a large share of the estimates by reputa-

ble critics of his place in American literature were most impressive: "He wrote the finest single poem yet produced in the country and was our foremost critic. . . . No American author, unless it be Emerson, has achieved a securer hold upon lasting fame" (1891). "Nowhere in literature is there a more magnificent and majestic impersonation of a country . . . " (1892). "As The Biglow Papers is the firmest and the finest political satire yet written in the United States, so is the Fable for Critics the clearest and most truthful literary satire" (1896). "Our acknowledged foremost man of letters [and] the greatest satiric poet in the English language since the days of Pope" (1899). "His patriotic poetry is unmatched—even unrivalled" (1909). "We surely need not despair of our democracy so long as it can produce men of letters like Lowell and utilize them in the service of the common weal" (1918). "Our most distinguished critic, [he had] a comprehensive vision of the task of the critic . . . sensitiveness to impressions, historical understanding, and an aesthetic-ethical judgment" (1928). With such hosannas ringing in one's ears, it is startling to come across remarks that this admired critic himself made about his achievements. As an old man he wrote: "I feel that my life has been mainly wasted—that I have thrown away more than most men ever had." This cannot be written off as merely a product of a passing fit of depression; habitually, over the years, Lowell talked about either his failure ("I myself am never pleased with what I do") or reasons for it. Maybe, he said more than once, he was too enslaved by a habit for which he scolded himself in A Fable for Critics: There is Lowell, who's striving Parnassus to climb With a whole bale of isms tied together with rhyme, He might get on alone, spite of brambles and boulders,

408 I AMERICAN But he can't with that bundle he has on his shoulders, The top of the hill he will ne'er come nigh reaching Till he learns the distinction 'twixt singing and preaching. . . . Perhaps, he thought another time, he was too fluent—had "too many thoughts and too little thought." On the contrary, maybe he was too analytical: "I know so well how certain things are done that I can't do them." On other occasions he wondered (with some reason) whether he was just too indolent to realize his potential. Lowell's stern judgments were not unique during his lifetime or the years when most critics were praising him. During the period when the above encomiums appeared, some commentators noticed serious flaws in Lowell's essays, critical works, and poems. As early as 1872, for instance, a writer for Scribner's Monthly did a neat hatchet job on the criticism; in 1893 a British critic who had been a close friend confessed that he could not in good conscience call the poems "first-rate"; and in 1905 a knowledgeable historian of American poetry found "something lacking in most of his work . . . which he seems always striving after." As time passed, respect for Lowell's writings declined until it almost vanished. Concluding estimates by three recent students and biographers clearly show this diminution. Leon Howard decided that Lowell lacked "a coherent personality" such as "is required to give words a vital relationship that makes them endure." Martin Duberman, in his superb biography (1966), honors Lowell's "multiple attainments" as "a fine editor, a successful teacher, an admired diplomat, an honest public commentator." But he does not deny that "his achievement as a writer (in which, after all, he invested his greatest energy and his highest hopes) can command only limited admiration. I have found no reason to

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revise the long-standing consensus which denied him the first rank." Duberman's purpose, he therefore admits, was not "to restore Lowell's stature as a Renaissance figure or a literary giant" but to "restore him as a man. It is Lowell's qualities as a human being which have most attracted me. . . ," Edward Wagenknecht, who has found college students agreeing with those who downgrade Lowell's writings, in 1971 made a less sweeping concession but ended with a similar estimate: He attempted less ambitious enterprises than Longfellow, and often brought off what he tackled with less complete success, and he seldom achieved the autochthonism which will always keep Whittier alive as an American poet until the character of America shall have fundamentally changed. But he was a more "stylish" poet than either of these others, and in a way he carries an air of greater distinction. In every age, and in every line of human endeavor, there are human beings who impress us in some way more important than the sum of what they do, and it is clear that Lowell was one of them. . . . he was a many-sided man personally as well as professionally. Wagenknecht says, in conclusion, that although Lowell did not have literary power that achieves the great conquests of the imagination, he was a sterling character, and "What he saw, what he expressed . . . had been passed through the alembic of his own personality and verified, for him, in his own experience." A discussion of any author's writings does well, of course, to indicate what they are like— their aim (when it can be learned), their content and manner, their qualities and values. Because the appeal of Lowell's work has changed so much, a discussion of the values of his writing must consider, in addition, two questions: Why did his writing seem so obviously praiseworthy

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL I 409 in the past? And why is it no longer attractive to modern readers? For seventy years, it has been almost compulsive for writers about Lowell to call 1848 his annus mirabilis. During that year four of his books worked together to bring him a solid reputation before he was thirty years old—Poems, Second Series (actually published in late December 1847); The Vision of Sir Launfal; Meliboeus-Hipponax (which happily became better known as The Biglow Papers); and A Fable for Critics. All of these quite different works were alike in an additional and even more important way: they revealed lifelong interests and procedures of the author. And so, more than most of his early works, they repay a very close look. As Martin Duberman has said, Poems, a garnering of verses written since 1845, develops topics that already had established themselves as Lowell's favorites: the beauty of Nature and its revelation of God's benevolent purpose; the need to rely on individual conscience above man-made laws and institutions; a deep sympathy for the poor and oppressed; the superiority of the "simple human heart" over the subtleties of intellect; the necessity of striving toward the Ideal; the desirability of subordinating the traditions of the past to the needs of the present. These were not themes that Lowell alone cherished: they were developed in scores of poems and sketches in magazines and fashionable gift books of the 1840's. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, by all odds America's—and probably England's—most popular nineteenth-century poet, treated the first of the six concepts in dozens of poems, for instance in "Hymn to the Night" (1839). He developed no fewer than four of the themes—the second, fourth, fifth, and sixth—in the prodigiously popular "A Psalm of Life: What the Heart of the Young Man Said to the Psalmist" (1838). His "The Village Black-

smith" (1841) and "The Slave's Dream" (1842) had as their burdens the third. And he gave the fourth a classic expression: "It is the heart, and not the brain,/ That to the highest doth attain. . . . " Longfellow, a Cambridge neighbor and friend, and Lowell occasionally commented on mutual beliefs expressed in their poems. Moreover, the two shared a liking for a structure that they and other poets of the day often used in organizing brief lyrics: (1) An object, scene, legend, or event was described. (2) An analogy was drawn. (3) A spiritual connotation or a moral based upon the analogy was presented. Thus, after telling how the village smith has lived, Longfellow thanks his ' 'worthy friend/ For the lesson thou hast taught"—and he sets it down. And Lowell, in "On the Death of a Friend's Child," tells about the effect of the death upon himself and his friend, then draws a Wordsworthian moral: "Children are God's apostles, day by day/ Sent forth to preach of love, and hope, and/ peace. . . . " Because of such resemblances and others in thought and form, given many a short poem by either Lowell or Longfellow without a name attached to it, even perceptive readers familiar with the writings of both often will not, with confidence, be able to assign authorship. Some midcentury poems of Lowell that stirred readers of the day memorialized personal experiences; for example, "On the Death of a Friend's Child.''''The Changeling," and ' 'She Came and Went" followed the death of Lowell's daughter Blanche. "After the Burial" (1850) was written following the death of another infant daughter, Rose. Unquestionably these losses deeply stirred the poet. But the period when they were written was one when many readers found elegies for children heartrending. Since 1841, the death of Little Nell in Dickens' Old Curiosity Shop had been moving large audiences to tears on both sides of the Atlantic. Since 1843, Scrooge's dream that Tiny Tim had died had decimated

410 I AMERICAN readers of A Christmas Carol. American newspapers, magazines, and gift books featured numerous poems about dead or dying children, often adorned with mournful illustrations. (When Mark Twain had Huck Finn visit a representative Kentucky family about 1845, he endowed them with a sentimental daughter, Emmeline, whose chief pastime was writing obituary poems, one of which—on a child's drowning— Huck quotes at length.) The year 1852 would bring the most mourned little girl's death in American literature—that of Little Eva in Uncle Tom's Cabin. So the matter of these serious poems by Lowell was very popular indeed among writers and readers. The poem that during Lowell's lifetime became his most widely known and respected, A Vision of Sir Launfal, also dealt with popular matter. Long preludes, one to each of its two parts, featured lush descriptions of natural American scenes such as those that had charmed readers of poetry and fiction for several decades. The parable that these preludes introduced was set in a period that had become increasingly popular over the years since eighteenth-century authors such as James Gray, Horace Walpole, and Thomas Chatterton exploited the Gothic tradition. Keats in 1820 (the year of Ivanhoe) and Tennyson in the 1840's had told medieval stories in poems that American readers greatly admired. (Tennyson's "Sir Galahad" seems to have triggered Lowell's use of the Arthurian legend, and The Princess probably suggested the general outline of A Vision.) Thomas Carlyle overpraised medieval monastic life in Past and Present (1843); John Ruskin was preparing to glorify Gothic architecture; and soon Idylls of the King would delight readers on both sides of the Atlantic. As Tennyson did in his Idylls, Lowell used portions of the Arthurian story to point a nineteenth-century moral. At the start of Launfal's quest for the Holy Grail, he meets a begging

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leper, loathes him, and scornfully flips & piece of gold at him. When, long after, the knight returns from his wanderings, he again encounters the beggar. Now, seeing in "the grewsome thing . . . an image of Him who died on the tree," Launfal shares water from a brook and his last crust. The leper, transformed—"shining and tall and fair and straight"—puts into a moralizing speech a belief that long had been one of Lowell's favorites: "Lo, it is I, be not afraid! In many climes, without avail, Thou hast spent thy life for the Holy Grail; Behold, it is here,—the cup which thou Didst fill at the streamlet for me but now; This crust is my body broken for thee, This water his blood that died on the tree; The Holy Supper is kept, indeed, In whatso we share with another's need; Not what we give, but what we share, For the gift without the giver is bare; Who gives himself and his alms feeds three, Himself, his hungering neighbor, and me." In this instructive tale, as Horace Elisha Scudder says, Lowell thus "in the broadest interpretation of democracy, sang of the levelling of all ranks in a common divine humanity. . . . " Did the Cambridge writer just happen to put together a poem that conformed so well to current patterns? It hardly seems so. His very first written mention of it described it to a correspondent as "a sort of story . . . more likely to be popular than what I write generally.'' There is even better evidence that when he wrote The Biglow Papers in Yankee dialect he deliberately fashioned them to fetch the readers of the day. Lowell in 1842 wrote a poem about a discovery he made when, on a railway car, he watched some "men rude and rough" who were talking about Bobby Burns and listening to a reading of some of the Scottish poet's verse. Their responses showed that the homespun songs,

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL I 411 couched in dialect, got to them as high-toned poetry never could. Charles F. Briggs, a friendly editor, in a blunt critique of a long poem that Lowell wrote in 1843, told him that the thing was just too bookish and arty: It is too warm, rich, and full of sweet sounds and sights; the incense overpowers me. . . . I am too much of a clod of earth to mingle well in such elements. I feel while reading it as if I were on a bed of down with a canopy of rose-colored silk above me. . . . To this same editor Lowell sent a prose satire written in the style of a hayseed, signing himself Matthew Trueman. The editor advised the use of more wit and versification: "Put all your abolitionism into rhyme; everybody will read it in that shape, and it will do good." It would have been hard for anybody who read newspapers in the years 1825-1846 not to notice that American satire and humor couched in colloquial language was all the go. George W. Arnold, writing under the pseudonym Joe Strickland, Thomas Chandler Haliburton (Sam Slick), Seba Smith (Major Jack Downing), David Crockett (Davy Crockett), William T. Thompson (Major Jones), and many others were popular practitioners. Lowell referred to one of them in the Biglow Papers and stated the formula that all of them followed in a couplet: Then you can call me "Timbertoes,"—thet's wut the people likes; Sutthin' combinin' morril truth with phrases sech ez strikes. . . . Lowell on several occasions gave details about the origins of The Biglow Papers. He had been sadly aware, he admitted, that although he was eager to channel public opinion, his articles and poems for periodicals, let alone his books, were "almost unread" by mass audiences. He thought the Mexican War was "a national crime committed in behoof of slavery," and he wanted to "put

the feeling" he had "in a way that would tell." He was aware that "uneducated men (selfeducated they are called) are all the rage." Therefore, he "put on the cap and bells, and made himself one of the court fools of King Demos . . . less to make his Majesty laugh than to win a passage to his royal ears for certain serious things which he had deeply at heart." He proceeded to write in the role of an imagined, unread rustic—"an upcountry man . . . capable of district school English, but always instinctively falling back into the natural stronghold of his homely dialect when heated to the point of self-forgetfulness.'' Hosea Biglow—"homely common-sense vivified and heated by conscience," as his creator described him—fell in with a parade of men of gumption who either had little learning or could shuck off learning when they had a mind to. The highly American procession of such characters, stretching back to Ben Franklin, had been popular among the masses because folk on farms and in factories or offices thought better of practical men and women who learned to solve problems by absorbing experience than they did of theoreticians who collected what they knew in lecture halls and libraries. Hosea could base what he said on what, as a worker in fields and barnyards, he figured out for himself. His rusticity and hardwon horse sense were standard equipment for the common man type. Lowell added some less shopworn traits to make his portrait of a bumpkin more individual and more lifelike than most other comic Yankees, and therefore quite persuasive. Having woiked and nooned with farmhands in his youth, Lowell could throw in details that smelled of cattle and haymows. For instance, he could have Hosea jeer at recruiting sergeants for "afollerin' their bell-weathers," or he could offer as a clinching argument against going to war the simple statement "The hay's to mow." Again, Lowell had heard much countrified

412 I AMERICAN talk; he was an apt and trained linguist; and he believed "our popular idiom is racy with life and vigor and originality, bucksome (as Milton used the word) to our new occasions.'' And so he was eager and able to make Hosea's word choices and phrasings authentic. Also, since he was a son of a Unitarian minister, Lowell had often heard artless parishioners talk much as naive medieval mystery playwrights had written, showing homely familiarity with the Deity and sacred revelations. Showing the same comic chumminess, Hosea writes: Ez fer war, I call it murder,— There you hev it plain an' flat; I don't want to go no furder Than my Testyment fer that; God hez sed so plump an' fairly, It's ez long ez it is broad, An' you've gut to git up airly Ef you want to take in God. What in other admired humorous writings was incongruity born of irreverence was in the Papers, therefore, a characterizing touch born of innocence, piety, or—possibly—of bigotry. A final peculiarity of Hosea is his skill as a verse writer. This enables him to concoct striking rhythms, unusual rhyme schemes, and ingenious rhymes (for example, to vote, oilers and teetotallers; refuse to be and used to be; distracted andattackted; come on't, thum on't, and sum on't). In addition to writing pieces in the first person, Hosea writes dramatic monologues in which he impersonates various characters and translates their speeches or letters into lively verses. The best drawn of these figures is Birdofredum Sawin, a Yankee ignoramus who lets himself be conned into enlisting and who is corrupted by his army experiences. Sawin (whose name puns on "bird of freedom soaring") becomes a charming reprobate whose frank letters expose rascality so thoroughgoing that it is comical.

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When he was preparing Papers for book publication, Lowell became pleased and fascinated with a character who, in original printings, had played a very small role—Hosea's pastor and sponsor, Parson Homer Wilbur. By building up this character and assigning him the job of editing the book, Lowell changed the nature of the collection and turned a minor character into a major one. Wilbur's few commentaries were plumped out until they actually took up threefifths of the volume. In part this was justified because the chief index of the personality of this self-important, bookish old coot was his talkativeness. Lowell had him spout, with reckless abandon and at length, vapid sermonizings, academic jokes, Latin quotations, and sesquipedalian words. The enlargement of Wilbur's role made it possible, as Lowell claimed, "on occasion to rise above the level of mere patois" in order to treat matters "beyond the horizon" of the uneducated Biglow and Sawin. Also, the parson's pedantry and highfalutin prose "complemented" the picture of Hosea, and set up an incongruous contrast with the farmer's lively verses. Lowell's first mention, in a letter, of A Fable for Critics, his fourth book in 1848, indicated that it would somewhat resemble Parson Wilbur's maunderings: "It is a rambling, disjointed affair, and I may alter the form of it." He went on to say that he had high hopes for it anyhow: 4 'But if I can get it ready I know it will take.'' He was correct on both counts. Although The Biglow Papers did well in book form, Fable was a greater success, especially in areas at a distance from the author's home territory. Within twelve months, it went through four editions; and outside of New England it appears to have sold more copies than all of Lowell's previous volumes of poetry combined. Typically, Lowell never experimented with the form, and the long poem tends to wander. In the fable, Apollo, at a gathering of gods on Olympus, asks a crit? ;-:KP supply him with a lily.

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL I 413 The critic reviews the personal traits and works of the leading American authors; then, as his survey ends, he comes up with a thistle. Disgusted, Apollo makes a speech recalling the good old days before there were critics, and the gods adjourn. About the narrative, Lowell said: "My plot, like an icicle's, slender and slippery,/ Every moment more slender, and likely to slip awry." In addition to setting down this simple, loosely built, and remotely relevant story, Lowell occasionally threw in a playful digression, sometimes without warning and sometimes with a mocking apology. Readers lacking humor or unfamiliar with the authors being discussed must have found the work annoying. But readers with a fondness for ebullient wit and pithy summaries, provided they were up-to-date in their reading of the era's native literature, were likely to share the reaction of critic Francis Bowen of the North American Review. "The author's extraordinary command of Hudibrastic rhymes," he said, "and the easy flow of versification" made it a plausible guess that Fable came from the pen of Biglow's creator. Bowen called the book "a very pleasant and sparkling poem abounding in flashes of brilliant satire, edged with wit enough to delight even its victims." Well, some victims were anything but "delighted." Even a less touchy author than Edgar Allan Poe, for instance, might find less than enchanting the comment: "There comes Poe, with his raven, like Barnaby Rudge, Three fifths of him genius and two fifths sheer fudge, Who talks like a book of iambs and pentameters, In a way to make people of common sense damn metres, Who has written some things quite the best of their kind, But the heart somehow seems all squeezed out by the mind. . . . "

Despite some jabs and puffs that were not entirely impersonal or in fact justifiable, the young critic managed to tick off the fatal flaws of scribblers who quite properly would be forgotten, and to hit off the weaknesses and credit the strengths of those who were to endure. James Fenimore Cooper, he saw, made his stiff heroes "clothes upon sticks" figures and his heroines "all sappy as maples and flat as a prairie." All the same, "He has drawn you one character, though, that is new, One wildflower he's picked that is wet with the dew Of this fresh Western world, and, the thing not to mince, He has done naught but copy it ill ever since. . . . " Bryant he called "as quiet, as cool, and as dignified,/ As a smooth, silent iceberg, that never is ignified"; but he also mentioned that Bryant achieved grandeur and was "almost the one of your poets that knows/ How much grace, strength and dignity lie in Repose." He saw Emerson as a rare combination of the mystic and the pragmatist—"a Greek head on right Yankee shoulders." Sometimes Emerson was too esoteric to be understandable; but "some poems have welled/ From those rare depths of soul that have ne'er been excelled." The impressive quartet of books published in a single year, then, made a name for Lowell as a poet, political commentator, humorist, and critic. Contemporaries quite understandably believed that these highly varied and outstanding works of a twenty-nine-year-old guaranteed greater things to come; and Lowell continued to perform in every one of his different roles. After 1848 Lowell for more than a decade and a half limited himself to editing or introducing collected poems by other authors and writing magazine pieces, lyrics, and reviews. He did not

414 I AMERICAN publish another book of his own writings until 1864. In the interval, vital changes in his circumstances, his occupations, and his interests worked to bring several modifications in what he wrote. Maria Lowell's death had a traumatic effect, and, as he saw later and as his biographers agree, cut a gash between eras of his life. The assignment in 1855 to deliver the Lowell Institute lectures stirred him out of his lethargy and started a chain reaction: he immersed himself as he never had before in reading criticism and literature; he spoke for the first time before large, intelligent audiences whose reactions he could watch; his handling of these lectures led to a Harvard professorship and serious study abroad and at home; long years of living, teaching, and writing in an exclusive academic atmosphere; new and different associations. Also, without leaving Cambridge, he served as the first editor of fas Atlantic Monthly, which through his guidance became the country's most respected literary magazine. Never one of hoi polloi except in theory, for a brief period, and then largely because of Maria's influence, Lowell became increasingly skeptical about common men and more of an elitist Brahmin. Like his colleague Oliver Wendell Holmes, but with less ingratiating self-satire, he overestimated the importance of belonging to an old and esteemed family and the virtues of his corner of the country. His conviction grew that New Englanders were the best Americans and that Cambridge folk were the best New Englanders. His ties with his "dear native town" became closer than ever; he was sure that it held the world's best society and that its inhabitants used the finest English spoken anywhere. In a lyrical poem, he rejoiced because "what colleging was mine I had" in an institution that by the greatest good luck was located in his beloved Cambridge. Like many professors Lowell was led into temptation by having captive audiences in classrooms and lecture halls. To the annoyance

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of some students and the delight of others, he often wandered away from the subject of his lectures. If a student mistranslated a line, Lowell would do the job correctly, then drift into chitchat about European scenery, architecture, and baptismal fonts until the hour ended. In his essay on Lowell in Stelligery and Other Essays, Barrett Wendell, who went on to become a Harvard professor himself, explained: Now and again some word or some passage would suggest to him a line of thought—sometimes very earnest, sometimes paradoxically comical—that it never would have suggested to any one else; and he would lean back in his chair, and talk away across country till he felt like stopping; or he would thrust his hands into the pockets of his rather shabby sack-coat, and pace the end of the room with his heavy laced boots, and look at nothing in particular, and discourse of things in general. As his official biographer, Horace Scudder, put it,' 'He turned the lecture and recitation hour into a causerie." Outside the halls of learning, social gatherings encouraged similar talk. As the founding editor of, and frequent contributor to, fat Atlantic Monthly, Lowell was on friendly terms with many leading authors. His chief associates were contributors, especially those who were neighbors, and fellow faculty members, many of whom belonged to the august Saturday Club— Holmes, Longfellow, Richard Henry Dana, William Hickling Prescott, William Dean Howells, and Henry James—"scholars, poets, wits, all choice," as Lowell said in the ode "Agassiz," on the death of a member: Such company as wisest moods befits, Yet with no pedant blindness to the worth Of undeliberate mirth, Natures benignly mixed of air and earth, Now with the stars and now with equal zest Tracing the eccentric orbit of a jest.

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL I 415 On the basis of his long study of New England life and literature, Percy Holmes Boynton suggested in Literature and American Life that there was a causal relationship between Lowell's associations and his later writings: More and more he inclined to write for this group [of friends], who liked good talk as a sort of intellectual steeplechase and who enjoyed a recondite allusion for their consciousness that it was caviar to the general. Writing for this audience, which was very much less than a reading public . . . [ he let] his essays and longer poems meander along . . . with the casual sequence of afterdinner talk uttered in the challenging presence of Oliver Wendell Holmes and his brother John and Tom Appleton and Tom Aldrich, who have a long evening ahead of them and do not care where the talk drifts, so long as it contains plenty of "good things." Boynton considered it typical of Lowell that the Civil War and controversies about it affected his writing of the second series of Biglow Papers. The role of Parson Wilbur, already inordinately expanded, continued to grow. The wordy pedant (who now, ironically, read more and more like an unconscious parody of his professorial creator) delivered long commentaries in the periodical versions (1862-1866); then, in the book, he—and for a good many pages Lowell himself, with his mask removed—engaged in digressions and redundancies. In comparison with the foreword, preface, prologue, introduction, explanations of individual poems, postscript, and glossary, Hosea's poems were dwarfed. Hosea, who at times shared his creator's verbosity, did not completely exaggerate the process when he summarized "the argyment" of his final paper: Interducshin, w'ich may be skipt. Begins by talkin' about himself. . . . Nex' comes the git-

tin' the goodwill of the orjunce by lettin' 'em gether from wut you kind of ex'dentally let drop thet they air about East, A one. . . . Spring interdooced with a few approput flours. Speach finally begins. . . . Subjick staked; expanded; delay ted; extended. . . . Ginnle remarks; continooed; kerried on; pushed furder; kind o' gin out. . . . Gits back to whare he sot out. Can't seem to stay thair. . . . Argoos with an imedginary bean thet ain't aloud to say nothin' in repleye. . . . Concloods. Concloods more. . . . Finely concloods to conclood. Yeels the flore. One poem included in the Second Series is, by general agreement, the finest of all those in The Biglow Papers—"The Courtin'." Since six stanzas of this had been dashed off to fill a blank page in the First Series, it was not entirely new; but six stanzas were added in 1857 and twelve more in 1866 or 1867, so that most of it was. It vividly evokes a chilly outdoor landscape and then a firelit indoor scene in wintry New England. In amusing detail it tells how bashful bumpkin Ezekiel was maneuvered into popping the question to mischievous and canny Hilda. Graphic, lighthearted, and straightforward, it is among the best of hosts of comic accounts of rustic wooings that appeared during the nineteenth century in all parts of the United States. "The Courtin'," Lowell testified, was the result "almost of pure accident"; and it well may be that the rather unusual way (for him) it came into being helped it achieve a more unified form than did Second Series as a whole and other individual poems in it. The collective volume is episodic and disjunctive. "Sunthin' in the Pastoral Line," a long and tenuously connected monologue, is more representative of the book than "The Courtin'." Hosea starts this unit by scolding American poets for not doing right by the scenery of their homeland. Next, he drifts into a description of a Mas-

416 I AMERICAN sachusetts spring, which is the most praised and most frequently quoted portion of the poem: Fust come the black birds clatt'rin' in tall trees, An' settlin' things in windy Congresses,— Queer politicians, though, for I'll be skinned Ef all on 'em don't head aginst the wind, 'fore long the trees begin to show belief,— The maple crimsons to a coral-reef, Then saffern swarms swing off from all the willers So plump they look like yaller caterpillars, Then gray hossches'nuts leetle hands unfold Softer 'n a baby's be at three days old: Thet's robin-redbreast's almanick; he knows Thet arter this ther' 's only blossom-snows; So, choosin' out a handy crotch an' spouse, He goes to plast'rin' his adobe house. Then seems to come a hitch,—things lag behind, Till some fine morniiT Spring makes up her mind, An' ez, when snow-swelled rivers cresh their dams Heaped-up with ice thet dovetails in an' jams, A leak comes spirtin' thru some pin-hole cleft, Grows stronger, fercer, tears out right an' left, Then all the waters bow themselves an' come, Suddin, in one gret slope o' shedderin' foam, Jes' so our Spring gits everythin' in tune An' gives one leap from Aperl into June. . . . Having concluded this leisurely description in twenty-two additional lines, Hosea tells about his enjoyment of a spring walk. He next describes a particular stroll past the school he attended as a boy—the sight of which leads him to cuss out contemporary education and reminisce about his boyhood. He makes some remarks about his habit of having dreams. At last, getting to the message by an indirect route, he recounts a particular dream he had during which a Cromwellian ancestor compared seventeenth-century Great Britain with the United States of the 1860's and made prophecies about the future of

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the nation that Lowell endorsed. In covering this varied ground at great length (324 lines) as it does, this poem is typical not only of the book but also of longer poems of Lowell's later period. Another tendency in the longer poems—one carried over from the earlier period—was to disregard the advice Lowell gave himself in Fable to make "the distinction 'twixt singing and preaching." And of course the writing of long poems with hefty messages was a predictable activity for a poet who followed the fashions, for the most admired lengthy poems of the period were highly philosophical ones. To cite a few instances, such greatly varied ones as the following were alike in this particular: Emerson's Threnody (1847), Wordsworth'sPrelude (1850), Tennyson's In Memoriam (1850), Whitman's Leaves of Grass (1855-1892), Matthew Arnold's Rugby Chapel (1857), Edward FitzGerald's Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (185^-1868), Browning 'sTheRing andtheBook (1868-1869), Lanier's The Symphony (1875), Longfellow's Morituri Salutaiws (1875), and Bryant's The Flood of Years (1876). Critics, looking for ways to describe the forms of the best of Lowell's longer poems, see resemblances between them and his prose compositions. "A Familiar Epistle to a Friend" and 4 'Epistle to George William Curtis," as their titles suggest, were predictable productions of a man whose personal letters showed him at his best and charmed the recipients. Other long poems had the look of compositions of a kindred sort—familiar essays: "Agassiz," "Under the Willows," The Cathedral, and Ode Recited at the Harvard Commemoration. George Arms, the critic who has looked most carefully and sympathetically at this group of poems, generalizes: All these poems have in common a similarity of structure and language. Upon the surface they appear as awkward in their ordering as many of

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL I 417 Lowell's poems are in essence. In language they also may first seem to be less than satisfactory, for certainly they do not cultivate the native idiom to the extent that The Big low Papers do. But these later poems draw together with a final sense of wholeness, and they exhibit a learnedcolloquial style, easy and efficient, that has little trace of the archaic poetical. . . . Lowell admitted the colloquial when it was of good blood, and though we may think his standard of family too high, in these poems we can enjoy the liberated result. . . . Consciously wayward in structure and language, Lowell reveals a new kind of unity. . . . Not only in the whole but in the parts he now displays finish. Even the metaphor shows control. . . . Arms's analyses of individual poems plausibly support his generalizations. The Cathedral, which he believes deserves to be the best known, he shows to be well ordered to develop its thought and notable for its use of homely images. And although in theme it resembles "Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse" by Matthew Arnold, and suffers when contrasted with Henry Adams' Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres (1904), it proceeds in its own way and reaches quite a different resolution: O Power, more near my life than life itself (Or what seems life to us in sense immured), Even as the roots, shut in the darksome earth, Share in the tree-top's joyance, and conceive Of sunshine and wide air and winged things By sympathy of nature, so do I Have evidence of Thee so far above, Yet in and of me! Rather Thou the root Invisibly sustaining, hid in light, Not darkness, or in darkness made by us. If sometimes I must hear good men debate Of other witness of Thyself than Thou, As if there needed any help of ours To nurse Thy flickering life, that else must cease, Blown out, as 't were a candle, by men's breath,

My soul shall not be taken in their snare, To change her inward surety for their doubt Muffled from sight in formal robes of proof: While she can only feel herself through Thee, I fear not Thy withdrawal; more I fear, Seeing, to know Thee not, hoodwinked with dreams Of signs and wonders, while, unnoticed, Thou, Walking Thy garden still, commun'st with men, Missed in the commonplace of miracle. Arms calls Ode Recited at the Harvard Commemoration the long poem "most closely akin to the familiar verse essay at its best" but dealing effectively, often in colloquial language, with "a subject surely proper for poetry": "He mediates between absolutes and particulars: in a structure in which beneath the haphazardness is a unity that produces pleasure out of the disparateness of the material." The poem, read to a group of friends and alumni who had gathered on July 21, 1865, to pay tribute to the Harvard men who had served during the Civil War, posed and confronted a question raised about all wars: "What possible justification is there for (he sacrifices of the men who serve?" Lowell had an emotional interest in the question since he himself had lost three beloved nephews. And whether or not one accepts Lowell's answer, it expresses a passionate belief worthy of respect. A remarkable aspect of the Ode, which was nearly four hundred lines long as it was read, is that although it was composed literally in one night, its form was consciously adapted to the way it was presented. This was not an accident, as Lowell's account of his discovery of the form shows: A long series of uniform stanzas (I am always speaking of public recitation) with regularly recurring rhymes produces somnolence among the men and a desperate resort to their fans on the part of the women. . . . Now, my problem was to contrive a measure which should not be tedious by uniformity, but which should vary with

418 I AMERICAN varying moods, in which the transitions . . . should be managed without a jar. I at first thought of mixed rhymed and blank verses leaving some verses without a rhyme to match. But my ear was better pleased with the rhyme, coming at a longer interval, as a far-off echo rather than instant reverberation, produced the same effect almost, and yet was grateful by unexpectedly recalling an association and faint reminiscence of consonance. The detailed discussion and Lowell's practice in other poems as well as this one indicate why Gay Wilson Allen, a leading historian of American prosody, has argued that this poet's handling of rhyme and metrics "introduced into American poetry the freedom that we find in the first two or three decades of nineteenth-century English poetry"—"a more varied placing of accents and the combination of different kinds of feet to produce suggestiveness of tone and cadence." The sixth stanza of the Ode, written and inserted soon after the public reading, is the one most often quoted and remembered. It paid an eloquent tribute to "our Martyr Chief," who had been assassinated on April 14. "Nature," wrote Lowell, For him her Old-World moulds aside she threw, And, choosing sweet clay from the breast Of the unexhausted West, With stuff untainted shaped a hero new, Wise, steadfast in the strength of God, and true. How beautiful to see Once more a shepherd of mankind indeed, Who loved his charge, but never loved to lead; One whose meek flock the people joyed to be, Not lured by any cheat of birth, But by his clear-grained human worth, And brave old wisdom of sincerity! . . . Our children shall behold his fame. The kindly-earnest, brave, foreseeing man, Sagacious, patient, dreading praise, not blame, New birth of our new soil, the first American.

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In the forty-eight-line stanza, as Richard Watson Gilder, editor of the Century, noted in 1887, the author "was the first of the leading American writers to see . . .and clearly and fully and enthusiastically proclaim the greatness of Abraham Lincoln." Lowell therefore had an important role in creating one of the most enduring American legends. The concern of the later lengthy poems with current events, personalities, and pressing controversies; their embodiment of arguments, emotional appeals, and prescriptions for action; and their tailoring for immediate audiences have led several critics to argue that they are more rhetorical and declamatory than they are poetic. "The famous 'Commemoration Ode,' " wrote Odell Shepard, for instance, "is superb versified oratory designed for a solemn public occasion." Not only Lowell's tendency to preach in his poetry but also his magazine commitments encouraged his involvement with current affairs. Among his skills was a journalistic ability to gauge public attitudes well enough to make periodicals appeal to potential subscribers. After the Atlantic Monthly was founded to foster literature and to editorialize for a particular group of readers, Lowell as its first editor wrote and accepted articles on elections, policies, abolitionism, women's rights, juvenile delinquency, and the treatment of the mentally handicapped. Even after resigning from the editorship, Lowell often contributed to the magazine—Hosea Biglow's controversial poems, for instance. As coeditor of the North American Review, he backed Lincoln's wartime policies and urged his reelection; and he was generous with comments on postbellum legislation. For a time after retiring from editorial work in 1872, Lowell was relatively quiet about politics. But the scandals of the second Grant administration—and, it may well have been, advancing age and galloping respectability—led him to become increasingly vocal and conservative. A change in his feelings becomes evident when one contrasts

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL I 419 the 1869 essay "On a Certain Condescension in Foreigners" with later statements. The essay, published in the Atlantic, reproved Europeans for commenting adversely on the American— especially the Cambridge—lack of urbanity, and played up merits and fine achievements of the author's countrymen. A poem for the nation's centennial, by contrast, ironically suggested that Columbia might celebrate by proudly putting on display quite different attractions: "Show 'em your Civil Service, and explain How all men's loss is everybody's gain. . . . Show your short cut to cure financial ills By making paper-collars current bills; Show your State legislatures; show your Rings; And challenge Europe to produce such things As high officials sitting half in sight To share the plunder and to fix things right. ..." Lowell's service to the Republican party and his rhetorical skills brought him diplomatic appointments by President Rutherford B. Hayes. In the England of a kindred spirit, Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone, he was an especially appealing ambassador—"the pet," as a friend said, "of countesses, the habitue of palaces, the intimate of dukes." Happy in this congenial atmosphere, he was remarkably effective as a graceful and polished speaker on public occasions. A major address in 1884, "Democracy," had wide circulation and provided a summary of a final attitude. A revealing fact about it: it was best in discussing the defects of a democratic system, notably its tendency to vulgarity, its way of equating truth with statistical majorities, and its leaning toward collectivism. When Lowell turned to ways and means of dealing with these trends, he did not do as well: The true way is to discover and to extirpate the germs. As society is now constituted these are in

the air it breathes, the water it drinks, in the things that seem, and which it has always believed, to be the most innocent and healthful. The evil elements it neglects corrupt these in their springs and pollute them in their courses. Let us be of good cheer, however, remembering that the misfortunes hardest to bear are those which never come. The world has outlived much, and will outlive a great deal more, and men have contrived to be happy in it. It has shown the strength of its constitution in nothing more than in surviving the quack medicines it has tried. In the scales of the destinies brawn will never weigh so much as brain. Our healing is not in the storm or in the whirlwind, it is not in monarchies, or aristocracies, or democracies, but will be revealed by the still small voice that speaks to the conscience and the heart, prompting us to a wider and wiser humanity. "Full of good things," Matthew Arnold thought the speech, "but lacking in body and current." Several of Lowell's essays, like the diplomatic occasional speeches, resemble personal letters to friends and have similar appeals. The volume marking the end of the sixteen-year interval between books, Fireside Travels (1864), collected some of them. The epigraph by "Richard Lassels, Gent.," which justifies the title, is felicitous: "Travelling makes a man sit still in his old age with satisfaction and travel over the world again in his chair and bed by discourse and thoughts." Reminiscent essays take the author and his readers to Maine and to various parts of Italy, and one—the best—journeys back in time to "Cambridge Thirty Years Ago." Here, directly addressing a Roman friend, "my dear Storg," the author reflects at leisure and at length (14,000 words) on the town as it was in his youth—its geography and its townspeople: "loafers, topers, proverb-mongers, barber, parson, postmaster, whose tenure was for life," the black brewer, grocers, constables, Scottish gardeners, an artist, lawyers, college professors, ad-

420 I AMERICAN ministrators, philosophers, and eccentrics. "My dear Storg" also is told about old Cambridge's festivities, such as the Muster and Commencement Day; and the Cornwallis masquerade, recalled with amusement, when "Silas and Ezra and Jonas were not only disguised as Redcoats, Continentals, and Indians, but not infrequently disguised in drink also." A small part of the character sketch of a jolly professor imported to teach foreign languages indicates the genial tone: Perpetual childhood dwelt in him, the childhood of his native Southern France, and its fixed air was all the time bubbling up and sparkling and winking in his eyes. . . . The world to him . . . was like a medal, on the obverse of which is stamped the image of Joy, and on the reverse that of Care. S. never took the foolish pains to look at that other side, even if he knew its existence; much less would it have occurred to him to turn it into view. . . . Nor was this a mere outside good humor; its source was deeper, in a true Christian kindliness and amenity. Once, when he had been knocked down by a tipsily driven sleigh, and was urged to prosecute the offenders, "No, no," he said, his wounds still fresh, "young blood! young blood! it must have its way! I was young myself." Was! few men come into life so young as S. went out.. . . What was there ever like his bow? It was as if you had received a decoration, and could write yourself gentleman from that day forth. His hat rose, regreeting your own, and, having sailed through the stately curve of the old regime, sank gently back over that placid brain, which harbored no thought less white than the powder which covered it. Reading this essay and similar ones that came later (such as "My Garden Acquaintance" and "A Good Word for Winter"), one easily sees not only why Lowell was able to people Hosea Biglow's hometown with lifelike quirky Yankees but also why, as an editor, he was hospitable to local-color fiction and did much to es-

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tablish the school of writers who helped prepare the way for realism. "Emerson the Lecturer," "Thoreau," and several similar pieces combine the stuff of such personal essays with literary criticism. In the former, Lowell concretely describes his own excited response to a lecture by Emerson that he heard as a young man; and he also characterizes and criticizes Emerson's writings. "Thoreau" begins with an amusing evocation of America's 1840's, when transcendentalism flourished and an army of "wild-eyed enthusiasts . . . stood ready at a moment's notice to reform everything but themselves." Lowell next recalls the rise of Emerson and the earthshaking lecture, "The American Scholar," that he gave at Harvard in 1837 when Lowell was a junior: "What enthusiasm of approval, what grim silence of foreign dissent! It was our Yankee version of a lecture by Abelard. . . . " He then turns to Thoreau as "the most remarkable pistillate plant kindled to fruitage by the Emerson pollen," and proceeds to evaluate this disciple's writings by weighing his best qualities against what Lowell felt were quite damning ones. (An effect, historians agree, was "to defer the beginnings of the Thoreau cult for twenty years.") Although A Fable for Critics contains the best-known of Lowell's discussions of contemporary American authors, it was by no means his last word on the subject. In 1849 he reviewed Longfellow's Kavanagh for the North American Review and Thoreau's A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers for the Massachusetts Quarterly Review. Over the years he reviewed current books by an impressive list of American authors—Sylvester Judd, Josiah Holland, Richard Henry Dana, Nathaniel Hawthorne, John Greenleaf Whittier, William Cullen Bryant, Rose Terry, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Francis Parkman, William Dean Howells, James Piatt, and others. Many of his assessments are of interest because they state informed attitudes of the period; some, such as the brief comment on

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL I 421 Hawthorne's career in general and The Marble Faun in particular in the April 1860 issue of Atlantic, are concise and illuminating. This review (fortunately space limitations kept him from digressing) illustrates some of Lowell's procedures. It starts with a quick overview of Hawthorne's career, not book by book but in broad terms that help place him in context. The keynote: "With just enough encouragement to confirm his faith in his own powers, those powers had time to ripen and to toughen themselves before the gales of popularity could twist them from the balance of a healthy and normal development." Lowell further defines Hawthorne's unique achievements by making some comparisons. He contrasts his "thorough conception of a world of moral realities [that causes] Art [to] become the interpreter of something profounder than herself" with Poe's "masterly adaptation of the world of sense and appearance to the purposes of Art." In at least this perception, Lowell finds that Hawthorne resembles Shakespeare. On the other hand,' 'that breadth of nature which made Shakespeare incapable of alienation from common human nature and actual life is wanting to Hawthorne." So Hawthorne shows a certain remoteness—like that, say, of John Donne, "but with such a difference that we should call the one super- and the other subter-sensual.'' The American, ' 'psychological and metaphysical . . . does not draw characters" as Shakespeare, Fielding, and Thackeray do, by representing idiosyncrasies, but subtly and "with what truth to as much of human nature as is included in a diseased consciousness" because he "traces all the finest nerves of impulse and motive [and] compels every trivial circumstance into an accomplice of his art." So Hawthorne's works are acclimated to the New World by their moral purpose, "and perhaps their sadness [which] mark him as the son of New England and the Puritans.'' Next Lowell generalizes about a common practice of his fellow New Englander that is

related to such a moral purpose, and he does so in terms that look forward to many of the twentieth-century critiques of Hawthorne: "It is commonly true . . . that the interest centres in one strongly defined protagonist, to whom the other characters are accessory and subordinate,—perhaps we should rather say a ruling Idea, of which all the characters are fragmentary embodiments . . . the actors and incidents seem but vistas through which we see the moral from different points of view. . . . " The application of these generalizations to The Marble Faun is perceptive, graceful, and clear: Nothing could be more imaginative than the conception of the character of Donatello. . . . His likeness to the lovely statue of Praxiteles, his happy animal temperament, and the dim legend of his pedigree are combined with wonderful art to reconcile us to the notion of a Greek myth embodied in an Italian of the nineteenth century; and when at length a soul is created in this primeval pagan, this child of earth, this creature of mere instinct, awakened through sin to the necessity of atonement, we feel that while we looked to be entertained with the airiest of fictions, we were dealing with the most august truths of psychology, with the most pregnant facts of modern history, and studying a profound parable of the development of the Christian Idea. Everything suffers a sea-change in the depths of Mr. Hawthorne's mind, gets rimmed with an impalpable fringe of melancholy moss, and there is a tone of sadness in this book as in the rest, but it does not leave us sad. In a series of remarkable and characteristic works, it is perhaps the most remarkable and characteristic. But for the most part the lengthy literary criticisms that Lowell gathered in his books concerned foreign authors of the past. And despite the fact that he said something about many specific works, ranging all the way from 700 B.C. to 1889, his thirty major essays featured earlier—and British—writers and woiks between

422 I AMERICAN Dante and Thoreau. In the order of their appearance (in the world and not in the capricious order of the essays) these included Dante, Chaucer, Don Quixote, Spenser, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Shakespeare's Richard III and Hamlet, Beaumont and Fletcher, Webster, Chapman, Massinger and Ford, Milton, Milton's Areopagitica, Walton, Dryden, Pope, Rousseau, Fielding, Gray, Lessing, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Lander's Letters, Carlyle, Swinburne's Tragedies, Life and Letters of James Gates Percival, "Emerson the Lecturer," and "Thoreau." Putting these essays side by side with Lowell's early critical writings helps describe them. For the callow young critic, what fouled up both creative works and discussions of them was anything that was not instinctive. The best writers were those who wrote before and after "the French Apollo, with powdered wig and gold snuff-box . . . set foot in England and established the reign of hollowness and taste.'' The reason? Because "the poets of those days" and of the period after the neoclassicists were deposed "knew nothing of 'established principles,' " or disregarded them: "Freedom is the only law which genius knows." The best critics, just as scornful of rules, were the sensitive readers who instinctively recognized fine literature for what it was. And since comments "gather clouds rather than dispel them," what such critics had to do was avoid many comments and "cull out and give . . . the most striking and beautiful passages.'' The young Lowell's articles on authors were made up mostly of quotations, interspersed with brief encomiums. The expectation was that sensitive readers with superb taste (like Lowell's) would fall in love with quoted passages at first sight. Less perceptive readers were simply out of luck. This approach, and witty comments based upon it, as well as puns, topicalities, ingenious rhymes, and tricky metrics insured the success of A Fable for Critics. But in 1855, eager to make the Lowell Institute lectures systematic and in-

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structive, as his notebooks show, the thirty-sixyear-old apprentice put himself through a home study course in criticism. He certainly read Gray, Johnson, Coleridge, and Schelling. Probably, too, he either recalled or reread Emerson, a favorite former teacher, Edward Tyrrel Channing, and Harvard textbook writers Hugh Blair and Dugald Stewart. The lectures showed that after intensive preparation Lowell had learned new ways to read and discuss literature and, as Leon Howard says, he was able to "make his entrance into the brotherhood of critics" as "both a diagnostician and a judge": His arrangement of ideas did not constitute a formal critical system so much as it represented a series of definitions, a formality of relationships, and a hierarchy of values which could guide his thoughts toward fresh critical opinions even though he might not directly apply them. They referred primarily to the capabilities of a writer, who was required to possess such fundamental qualities as an active ' "fancy" and a factual "understanding" in order to collect and use the materials from which literature was formed. These materials might be shaped by the structural "poetic faculty'' or informed by the * 'poetic sense,'' but before they could be turned into the highest form of literature they had to be transformed by an "imagination" which could be either "narrative '' or, at its best, ' 'dramatic.'' No single work of literature could be characterized by a display of all six of these qualities, but a consideration of any piece of writing with reference to them would enable the critic to make a thorough diagnosis of its merits and shortcomings. These terms and the various synonyms which Lowell used for them, in short, formed what the older rhetoricians would have called the "commonplaces" which enabled him to achieve copiousness without chaos as a lecturer in 1855 and also during his later years as a space-filling editor or as a contributor paid at journalistic space rates.

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL I 423 A valuable perception, as Howard says, was that the qualities of an author might be classified and the writings praised and condemned "within the limits of that classification." These basic distinctions between the differing ways (hat writers collect, use, and shape materials were supplemented in due course by other distinctions and ways of looking at works. Helped by classical critics, especially Aristotle and Horace, and by such later figures as Ben Jonson and Goethe, Lowell made illuminating statements about "images," "types," and "actualities"—about historical milieus and (with a special bow to Goethe) about "teleology, or the argument from means to end, the argument of adaptation." When Lowell, as was his admirable habit, saturated himself in one of his authors, responded with sensitivity to that author's appeal, and used such distinctions between kinds and procedures in vivacious reports, he convinced a great many contemporaries that he was the best of all American critics. What is more, vastly different twentieth-century critics and schools have found—or could have found if they had tried—that he anticipated their approaches, methods, and happiest perceptions. Richard Altick, a student of historical contexts, for instance, wrote an article, "Was Lowell an Historical Critic?" and presented much evidence of "his awareness of the power exerted by contemporary circumstance upon the literature of a given era." Van Wyck Brooks, after he deserted the iconoclastic party of his youth and rhapsodized over American writers whenever possible, admired Lowell's "felicitous insights and luckier phrases, . . . the tone and texture of his style." He also found that Lowell (like Brooks) was a great appreciator: "Enthusiasm, gusto, relish; it was in these that Lowell excelled. . . . What joy, what shy delights this man revealed when he wrote of the authors he loved! And even, let us add, what judgment!" Members of the most cohesive critical school

of the 1920's, the new humanists, read Lowell with approval and implied or announced that they accepted him as an ancestor. Norman Foerster, for instance, a highly respected new humanist, said he had "the sanest and most comprehensive conception of literature formed in America prior to the twentieth century." Lowell's acceptance of Hellenistic tenets, his stress on reason, grace, and ethical values, and his belief in dualism appealed to Foerster's fellow believers such as Irving Babbitt, Paul Elmer More, Harry H. Clark, Austin Warren, and Stuart Pratt Sherman. Preachments in an 1889 address to the Modern Language Association anticipate those of John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, Cleanth Brooks, and Robert Penn Warren. Herbert F. Smith points to still other affiliations: [Lowell's] feeling for myth, his organic ism, his catholicity of taste, align him with other schools of modern criticism. Many of his remarks on myth, tradition, and the artist's need for roots generally precede T. S. Eliot's ideas on these subjects. His organicism and particularly his emphasis on the need for total design in art ally him with R. S. Crane and the Chicago critics generally. Perhaps strangest of all, his insistence on the need to experience a work of art fully and his unwillingness to explicate any part at the expense of total experience, his absolute certainty that matter and manner in art are inextricably combined, find curious echoes in the writings of Susan Sontag and other recent critics who have reacted against the New Criticism and the assumption by the academic world that criticism is their province only. Smith, who made a fine anthology of some of Lowell's most interesting critical passages, therefore believes that his man is not "entirely dead as a critic." Despite these acknowledged and unacknowledged kinships, practically nobody reads Lowell's critical volumes nowadays except a few scholars; and even fewer readers think well of

424 I AMERICAN them. The same is true of Lowell's other writings. Why? Both his admirers and the man himself have proffered some answers. Van Wyck Brooks thought he went along too amiably with the establishment, showing himself a master only "when he felt behind him the stream of tradition, when he did not have to judge for himself.'' Although Lowell now and then was daring enough to praise an unfashionable John Donne or a John Keats, Brooks's claim has merit. Again, Foerster, who greatly admired Lowell's "Poetics," in the end decided that "he leaves an impression of superficiality and futility." The reason—and the point is well taken—is that . . . it is not his creed that is weak, but the man himself. . . . Lowell stood forth among his contemporaries because of his accomplished versatility rather than because of his high attainment. Once or twice, . . . he was able to fuse most of his powers in adequate expression, but the rest of the time he was a man of parts, a man of shreds. Capable of growth . . . he was unhappily incapable of self-mastery. Short on inner assurance, he constantly was guided by outside forces. His first wife, Maria White, made him an active reformer. A democratic audience that went for crackerbox satire nudged him into writing The Biglow Papers. He responded so well not only to this audience but to others that, at the youthful age of twenty-nine, when the imitation characteristic of a beginner was healthy and a young man's zest might take some of the curse off of it, he did the best creative work of his whole career. Later, Cambridge, Harvard, the Saturday Club, and overawed audiences—some overseas—just led him on. And some of the qualities that helped Lowell forge ahead in his era have become today's roadblocks. Except in a few lucky instances ("To the Dandelion" and "Auspex" come to mind) his

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lyrics, lacking the conviction and control of personal emotion to make them memorable, succumbed to banality. What he himself said about his 1869 collection of poems applied to others: "They seem to me just like all the verses I read in the papers—and I suppose they are." Instead of Under the Willows, he groaned, perhaps the forthcoming book should be called "Under the Billows or dredgings from the Atlantic." Except for portions (for example, the Lincoln eulogy in "Commemoration Ode"), the longer poems discourage moderns by being too discursive, too topical, or too oratorical. The Biglow Papers, the author's finest achievement, suffer because they have similar traits and, in addition, because too much painstaking dialect and too many of Parson Wilbur's erudite maunderings are now considered barriers. And few of today's readers of criticism find it worthwhile to mine page after page of diffuse critical essays for nuggets of insight that once delighted more patient and respectful readers. For these reasons, this giant that the Victorian era revered as a poet, professor, editor, essayist, critic, and public servant now seems much smaller. Lowell's present reputation offers eloquent evidence that self-discipline, coherence, and economy can help to ensure literary survival.

Selected Bibliography WORKS OF

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL The 16-volume Elm wood Edition of The Complete Writings of James Russell Lowell, edited by Charles Eliot Norton (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1904), is the most comprehensive collection. It includes Letters (reedited and expanded to 3 volumes) and Horace E. Scudder's 2-volume biography. It has been supple-

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL I 425

mented by volumes listed at the end of this section. The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell, edited by Horace E. Scudder (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1897, 1917), contains useful headnotes and a chronology. A Year's Life. Boston: C. C. Little and J. Brown, 1841. Poems. Cambridge: John Owen, 1844. Conversations on Some of the Old Poets. Cambridge: John Owen, 1845. Poems. Second Series. Boston: B. B. Mussey and Company, 1848. A Fable for Critics. New York: G. P. Putnam, 1848. Meliboeus-Hipponax. The Biglow Papers. Cambridge: George Nichols, 1848. The Vision of Sir Launfal. Cambridge: George Nichols, 1848. Fireside Travels. Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1864. Ode Recited at the Commemoration of the Living and Dead Soldiers of Harvard University. Cambridge: Privately printed, 1865. Meliboeus-Hipponax. The Biglow Papers. Second Series. Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1867. Under the Willows and Other Poems. Boston: Fields, Osgood, &Co., 1869. Among My Books. Boston: Fields, Osgood, & Co., 1870. The Cathedral. Boston: Fields, Osgood, & Co., 1870. My Study Windows. Boston: James R. Osgood and Company, 1871. Among My Books. Second Series. Boston: James R. Osgood and Company, 1876. Three Memorial Poems. Boston: James R. Osgood and Company, 1877. Democracy and Other Addresses. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1887. Political Essays. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1888. Heartsease and Rue. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1888. The English Poets: Lessing, Rousseau. London: Walter Scott, 1888. Latest Literary Essays and Addresses. Cambridge: Riverside Press, 1891. The Old English Dramatists. Cambridge: Riverside Press, 1892. Letters, edited by Charles Eliot Norton. 2 vols. New Yoik: Harper & Brothers, 1894. Two volumes and

several articles supplement these. The ^volumes: New Letters, edited by M. A. DeWolfe Howe (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1932), and The Scholar-Friends, edited by M. A. DeWolfe Howe and G. W. Cottrell, Jr. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1952). Smaller collections in periodicals are listed in biographies by Duberman and Wagenknecht cited below. Last Poems. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1895. Lectures on English Poets [Lowell Institute lectures of 1855]. Cleveland: The Rowfant Club, 1897. Early Prose Writings. London and New York: John Lane, 1902. Anti-Slavery Papers. 2 vols. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1902. The Round Table. Boston: Richard G. Badger, 1913. (Early essays.) James Russell Lowell, Representative Selections, edited by Harry Hayden Clark and Norman Foerster (New York: American Book Co., 1947).

BIBLIOGRAPHIES Cooke, G. W. A Bibliography of James Russell Lowell. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1906. (Alphabetical and chronological lists of separate works and editions.) Livingston, Luther S. A Bibliography of the First Editions in Book Form of James Russell Lowell. New York: Privately printed, 1914; New York: Burt Franklin, 1968. Rees, Robert A. "James Russell Lowell," in Fifteen American Authors Before 1900: Bibliographic Essays on Research and Criticism. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1971. Pp. 285-305. [Articles correcting and supplementing these are listed in biographies by Duberman and Wagenknecht cited below.]

BIOGRAPHIES Beatty, R. C. James Russell Lowell. Nashville, Tennessee: Vanderbilt University Press, 1942. Duberman, Martin. James Russell Lowell. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1966. Hale, Edward Everett. James Russell Lowell and His Friends. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1899.

426 I AMERICAN Howard, Leon. Victorian Knight-Errant: A Study of the Early Literary Career of James Russell Lowell. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1952. Scudder, Horace E. James Russell Lowell. 2 vols. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1901. Wagenknecht, Edward. James Russell Lowell: Portrait of a Many-Sided Man. New York: Oxford University Press, 1971.

CRITICAL STUDIES Arms, George. The Fields Were Green: A New View of Bryant, Whittier, Holmes, Lowell & Longfellow, with a Selection of Their Poems. Palo Alto, California: Stanford University Press, 1953. Blair, Walter. "A Brahmin Dons Homespun," in Horse Sense in American Humor, from Benjamin Franklin to Ogden Nash. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1942. Pp. 77-101. . "Down East Humor (1830-1867)," in Native American Humor. San Francisco: Chandler, 1960. Pp. 38-62. Brooks, Van Wyck. The Flowering of New England. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1936. Pp. 311-22, 512-25 et passim. Brownell, W. C. "Lowell," in American Prose Masters. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1909. Pp. 271-335. Clark, Harry H., and Norman Foerster. "Introduction" and "Notes" in James Russell Lowell, Representative Selections. New York: American Book Company, 1947. Pp. xi-cxxxix, 467-98.

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James, Henry. "James Russell Lowell," in The American Essays of Henry James, edited by Leon Edel. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1950. McGlinchee, Claire. James Russell Lowell. New York: Twayne, 1967. Pritchard, J. P. Return to the Fountains: Some Classical Sources of American Criticism. Durham, N. C.: Duke University Press, 1942; New York: Octagon, 1966. Pp. 99-118. . "Lowell and Longinus," in Transactions of the American Philological Association, 1945. . "A Glance at Lowell's Classical Reading," American Literature, 21:442-55 (1950). Riviere, Jean. Le courant abolitioniste dans la litterature americaine de 1808 a 1861. Lille: Universite de Lille III, 1974. Robertson, J. M. "Lowell as Critic" and "Criticism as Science," North American Review, 209:246-62, 690-96 (1919). Smith, Herbert F. "Introduction" to Literary Criticism of James Russell Lowell. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1969. Pp. ix-xxviii. Stewart, Charles Oran. Lowell and France. Nashville, Tennessee: Vanderbilt University Press, 1951. Tanselle, G. Thomas. "The Craftsmanship of Lowell: Revisions in The Cathedral,' "Bulletin of the New York Public Library, 70:60^63 (1966). Voss, Arthur. "Backgrounds of Lowell's Satire in The Biglow Papers,' '" New York Quarterly, 23:47-64 (1950). Warren, Austin. "Lowell on Thoreau," Studies in Philology, 21:422-62 (1930). —WALTER BLAIR

Bernard Malamud 1914-

JimHE CLAIM that our spiritual lives are being vi-

is "a skeleton with haunted eyes," whose office, his embittered wife tells us, is " 'in the air ... in his socks.' " The even more embittered widow in the "graveyard" grocery in 'Take Pity" can feed her daughters only from the stock; when that is gone, the bones in their faces show. In "The Bill," a janitor who hates his life of shoveling out ashes and mopping up urine is so overwhelmed by an Italian storekeeper's offer of credit (for "if you were really a human being you gave credit to somebody else and he gave credit to you") that he misuses the new sense of worth that the evaluation gives him and runs up a bill he cannot pay. If the little businesses in the stories are finally going fairly well, Malamud finds other ways to keep the proprietors from straying very far beyond their painful limits. In "The Loan," for example, "the sweet, the heady smell of Lieb's white bread drew customers in droves." But as the baker, his eyes clouded with cataracts, the button of his truss pressing into his stomach, explains, "For thirty years . . . he was never with a penny to his name. One day, out of misery, he had wept into the dough. Thereafter his bread was such it brought customers in from everywhere." To an extraordinary degree, then, Malamud's characters are prisoners who are driven to sharp apprehension of the walls that enclose them. Not

tiated by our attachment to material goods and physical comforts is at least as old as the Old Testament. But in America these complaints probably were never so pervasively and variously made as in the late 1950 's. To the expected attacks upon the shifts in values, a number of social critics added a line of reasoning that helps to explain the novelists' complaints about the difficulty of getting a fictional hold on post-World War II America. Since one of the primary human realities, if not the dominant one, has been material want, our sense of reality is being diminished to the degree that the new prosperity seems to be lessening our sharp responses to want. Surely one of the ingredients of the powerful fiction that, with the publication of The Assistant in 1957 and The Magic Barrel the following year, propelled Bernard Malamud to the foreground of the American fiction scene was his ability to create characters whose privations keep them in dramatically painful contact with their desires and frustrations. Often, material want largely shapes their distressing world. In The Assistant, Malamud's second novel, Morris Bober actually feels hopeful when his grocery takes in $150 during a typical workweek of seven days, sixteen hours a day. Pinye Salzman, the marriage broker in the title story The Magic Barrel, 427

428 I AMERICAN all of the walls are the metaphorical ones of economic or physical distress. The cells might be the quite literal ones in Kiev in which Yakov Bok (the protagonist of Malamud's fourth novel, The Fixer) is for two and a half years beaten, chained, poisoned, isolated, and steadily humiliated. Usually, however, the antecedent for the confinement is not, say, the actual 1911 arrest of Mendel Beiliss on the charge of ritual murder, but the recurrent motif of the prison house of the tormented self that runs through modern literature. Some of the enclosing walls are built by forces the inmate could not control: an economic depression, the persecution of Jews, illness, unsatisfactory parents, accidents, the death of loved ones, bad luck. But usually the sufferer is driven to the following perceptions: through one failing or another, he has contributed to his immurement; freedom and possibility exist within the painful limits; the need to acknowledge this possibility is as great as the need to acknowledge his complicity in his undoing. None of this is particularly new. In fact, most literature worth reading dramatizes possibilities within limitations and the relationship of responsibility to both. Even in the god-driven world of Oedipus Rex, when the chorus asks the protagonist which god put out his eyes, Oedipus replies, "the god was Apollo. . . . But the blinding hand was mine." For all of the fervor that Malamud can generate, he never really suggests the literal existence of a God of judgment or salvation: God's in the outhouse during a pogrom, Yakov Bok bitterly observes. There is all the more reason, then, to take full responsibility for the control of our own working out of our human condition: lyrical in its essence, tragic in its fate, and comic in its existence, in George Santayana's haunting words. Bound as Malamud's characters are to their tragic and comic limitations, many of them accept that necessity, which is lyrical in its possi-

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bility, of maintaining or finding their way to true, moral identity. We might call this ultimate center the nourishing heart; Tommy Wilhelm, in Saul Bellow's Seize the Day, thinks of it as the realm of the * 'real soul,'' from which we can say "plain and understandable things to everyone," where "truth for everybody may be found and confusion is only—only temporary." In his 1959 acceptance speech upon receiving the National Book Award for The Magic Barrel, Malamud said: I am quite tired of the colossally deceitful devaluation of man in this day. . . . Whatever the reason, his fall from grace in his eyes is betrayed by the words he has invented to describe himself as he is now: fragmented, abbreviated, otherdirected, organizational. . . . The devaluation exists because he accepts it without protest. By creating in his best fiction a realm knowable within all of us, where—however fleetingly— truth, beauty, and goodness meet, Malamud has most successfully protested against all of the contemporary assertions of the collapse or disintegration of moral values. To be sure, most of us would, in our lives, flee the apparent fate some of his transformed characters choose. If Frank Alpine is, by the end of The Assistant, so transformed that he probably will never rob or rape again, his future is grim. In "The Magic Barrel," the sheltered Leo Finkle finally immerses himself in the actualities of experience, but doing so by falling in love with a prostitute could prove suicidal. Correspondingly, Malamud's characters sometimes are unable to transcend their limitations. For example, the baker's wife in "The Loan" has had so anguished a past and sees so uncertain a future that she will not permit her husband to lend $200. But the generosity of the baker, hopelessly misguided by "worldly" standards, is powerfully convincing. Malamud's ability to blend grinding actuality with lifting

BERNARD MALAMUD I 429 possibility, and concrete detail with sudden emergences of the uncanny, lends such moral urgency to the "optimistic fictions" that we feel Frank's and Finkle's commitments to be both right and necessary, even while part of us rebels against these "solutions." Malamud was born in Brooklyn on April 26, 1914, and spent most of his first thirty years there. Information about his early years is sparse, but there is enough to suggest that his positive commitment to discipline and community did not develop in an experiential vacuum. In his entry for the 1958 Current Biography, Dean Cadle wrote of Malamud: His mother, who died young, came from a theatrical family. His father was a storekeeper, "a good man" to whom he owes a lot. . . . "My parents worked late and I was allowed to stay out and wander in the neighborhood. We skated, sledded, climbed trees, and played running games. . . . We gypped the 'El' and rode to Coney Island—the ocean, especially at night, moved me. . . . There was adventure and a sense that one was a boy. One got to know people all over the neighborhood. This is important." As readers of The Assistant, "The Cost of Living," and 'Take Pity" might suspect, the store was a poor grocery. The neighborhood people Malamud got to know were seldom Jews: as with the grim, nameless milieu of The Assistant, the Gravesend area was, in the years Malamud lived there, one of the relatively few in Brooklyn with almost no Jews in it. Malamud has jokingly said that he was "discovered" at Erasmus Hall High School "where my compositions received high grades and my work appeared in the high school magazine." Although he always wanted to be a writer, he did not commit himself to ' 'sit down . . . in a rooming house in Brooklyn, and ... write, write,

write and write" until he was twenty-seven. In the intervening years he attended the College of the City of New York, from which he received the B.A. in 1936, and, for the next two years, Columbia University. After writing his thesis on another writer obsessed with determining limitations—Thomas Hardy—Malamud received the M.A. in 1942. From 1940 to 1949 he taught evening classes in high schools, for the first eight years largely to immigrants in Brooklyn and, in the last year, in Harlem. Like S. Levin, the protagonist of his third novel, A New Life, he was in his thirties when, in 1949, he accepted a position at Oregon State College, the school after which Cascadia College in that novel is so obviously modeled. For most of the time at Oregon State, Malamud was, as Richard Astro tells us, "assigned four sections of English Composition in a rigid and closely supervised program." Because "there was a department policy stating that only members of the faculty with Ph.D. 's might teach literature classes . . . Malamud was annually given large doses of composition with only an occasional section of an introductory literature course and a short-story writing class to break the monotony"—even though he published three books and received a number of prestigious awards and grants during his twelve years at Oregon State. In 1961 Malamud gained more agreeable working conditions when he joined the division of language and literature at Bennington College, where he has taught, except for 1966-68, when he was a visiting lecturer at Harvard. Aside from his resentment of the working conditions at Oregon State, we know little of how much Malamud's studies of hunger and desperation spring from his lived, and not imagined, experience. We do know that while in Oregon he wrote four books and a number of stories by exerting almost as much discipline as he has demanded from any of his characters. His Mon-

430 I AMERICAN days, Wednesdays, and Fridays were for classes, office hours, paper grading; Tuesdays, Thursdays, Saturdays—"and I sneak parts of Sundays"—for . . . novels and short stories. Malamud said in 1971 of his creative tenacity, "I have a terrifying will that way." We find the first wholly satisfying fruits of Malamud's creative and moral tenacity in the best stories of his first collection, The Magic Barrel. Apart from necessary glimpses at the novels, we would do well to consider a fair number of the stories before turning to the longer works. Taken as a whole, the stories are, more than the novels, cleanly structured around Malamud's abiding moral concerns: the need for and possibilities of love, generosity, understanding, discipline, responsibility, suffering; the damaging power of ignorance, compulsion, hatred, suffering. Many of the locales of these moral dramas are abstracted, so that the struggle to remain or to become "really a human" (to quote from "The Bill") stands out all the more sharply. Of the nine stories in The Magic Barrel that are, or could be, set in New York, seven have a strangely timeless, placeless quality. They manifest what is perhaps Malamud's most impressive imaginative achievement: the ability to set down in New York much of the felt world of the shtetl (a Jewish village within the tsar's Pale of Settlement), particularly the shell's sense of miraculous possibility within the most painful constraints. To get some sense of the "realistic" ground from which Malamud's more uncanny works will rise, we might begin with "A Summer's Reading." This is the only story in The Magic Barrel that takes place in anything like the nourishing, tangible neighborhood in which Malamud grew up. George Stoyonovich, "a neighborhood boy who had quit high school on an impulse when he was sixteen, run out of patience," is, by the time he is almost twenty, ashamed of

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not having graduated, but rationalizes in various ways his unwillingness to return to summer or night school. Clearly, he fears both the negative evaluations he might receive in school and the new demands to which completing his education might subject him. Still, he thinks of "a better life for himself," and he wants "people to like and respect him." Consequently he is ashamed simply to tell his kindly neighbor, Mr. Cattanzara, that he is out of work this summer and instead announces that he is reading a lot of books, "maybe around a hundred . . . to pick up my education." Cattanzara spreads the lie around the neighborhood; and George enjoys unearned respect from both neighbors and family, who generously see in his supposed project a disciplined realization of their own desires for a better life. After a superbly rendered scene in which Cattanzara challenges George to name one book he has read, the latter begins, with the anxiety and self-loathing that follow his loose act, his Malamudian education in suffering. Malamud has listed Sherwood Anderson as one of the short story writers who influenced him. This story, centering on a lie told by a nineteen-year-old who tends to rationalize and has a low opinion of himself, is reminiscent of Anderson's "I'm a Fool." But, unlike Anderson, Malamud ends "A Summer's Reading" happily by bringing a moral development to his protagonist. For, although Cattanzara lets George off the public griddle by spreading the rumor that he has completed his book list, George finally makes the only saving gesture he can: he confronts the frightening possibility of accepting a more elevated conception of himself by running to the library one night; "and though he was struggling to control an inward trembling, he easily counted off a hundred, then sat down at a table to read.'' All of this occurs in a neighborhood in which George had, as a boy, played punchball and been given nickels for lemon ices, in which storekeepers and their wives "sat in chairs on the

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thick, broken sidewalks in front of their shops, fanning themselves," and where Nights, during the hot weather [Cattanzara] sat on his stoop in an undershirt, reading the New York Times in the light of the shoemaker's window. . . . And all the time he was reading the paper, his wife, a fat woman with a white face, leaned out of the window, gazing into the street, her thick white arms folded under her loose breast, on the window ledge. No other locale in all of the Malamud fictions set in the United States provides such communal moral support. In "The Prison," Malamud does render the manners of Greenwich Village, seen by its Italian, not bohemian, inhabitants, with considerable fidelity. The milieu, however, is anything but nourishing. Tommy Castelli's neighborhood involvements lead him to a holdup, to a forced marriage to an unlovable woman, and to working seventeen hours a day in a candy store where "usually the whole day stank and he along with it. Time rotted in him." In this story there is neither the urban poetry of "A Summer's Reading" nor Cattanzara's paternal success: Tommy fails in his attempts to keep a girl from making his own mistake of stealing. Significantly, the protagonists and settings of these two stories—the only ones in The Magic Barrel in which New York neighborhoods are "realistically" rendered—are gentile. The starkly abstracted milieus of the Jewish characters in "The First Seven Years," "The Mourners," "The Loan," "Angel Levine," "The Magic Barrel," and The Assistant both invoke the characters' likely shtetl origins and lend credence to Philip Roth's claim that Malamud's "people live in a timeless depression and a placeless Lower East Side." That some very close readers have set Morris Bober's store in the Bronx or Manhattan when there are enough hints to place it in Brooklyn merely emphasizes Malamud's characteristic strategy of blending precise

details—the way the potato salad is made or the weight of the milk cases—with a strange placelessness. Roth's observation came in his 1961 essay "Writing American Fiction," in a context surrounding his convincing assertion that "the American writer in the middle of the 20th century has his hands full in trying to understand, and then describe, and then make credible much of the American reality." Often Malamud's fictive solution has been to disregard much of this reality: the effects of affluence, the cold war, the struggle for integration, and so on. Thus it is even more irrelevant to try to set the time of The Assistant than the place. Morris had installed a new display case a while back, "after the depression." Yet the prices—eight to ten dollars for a good pair of shoes, three cents for a hard roll— are those of the 1930's. In 1958 Malamud said that he writes about Jews because "I know them. But more important, I write about them because the Jews are absolutely the very stuff of drama.'' No headlines, news reports, or radio or television programs intrude to distract Morris, the novel's other characters, or the reader from the theater of the self that they fill with their vivid emotions. (Interestingly, the protagonist of Malamud's first published story, "Benefit Performance" [1943], is an aging actor on the Yiddish stage. The performance he puts on is for himself.) If the external world intrudes, it does so as a menace that manifests itself in the store or nearby: the opening of a rival grocery; the rape of Morris' daughter Helen in the park. Further, the parties in robbery and rape are Ward Minogue, a neighborhood boy returned, and Frank Alpine, who will become as much of a fixture in store and neighborhood as Morris. We never learn what Morris and Breitbart, the bulb salesman, read in the Yiddish paper; not even Hitler and the death camps are mentioned, although they are, tellingly, in four of the stories in The

432 I AMERICAN Magic Barrel. So rigorous is Malamud's selection that, save for a reference in * 'Angel Levine'' to a boy dying "in the war," the rest of contemporary history is silence. The characters in these works do not have the ' 'conscious sense of being at a distance from history, from history as such and history as a conception in the western world." These words, written by Irving Howe and Eliezer Greenberg in A Treasury of Yiddish Stories, refer to the inhabitants of the shtetl before such historically insistent forces as Zionism and socialism began to fragment the inhabitants' view of the world. Their historical dislocation followed from the "permanent precariousness" of their condition (for a conclusive pogrom might descend upon them at any time), which bound them all the more firmly to their history, . . . an almost timeless proximity with the mythical past and the redeeming future, with Abraham's sacrifice of his beloved son to a still more beloved God and the certain appearance of a cleansing Messiah—for heaven was real, not a useful myth, and each day that passed brought one nearer to redemption. Often Malamud has brought to his quasitimeless, quasi-placeless, quasi-legendary New York much of the shtetl situation: the sense of enclosure and limited worldly possibility; the expert knowledge of hunger and suffering but the possibility of transcending both, whether with sudden moral fervor or with prolonged discipline. His characters' recollections of their mythical pasts generally add to their pathos—for example, Morris Bober's memories of running in Polish fields as a boy or of the poem he learned at night school. There is no Messiah, and Malamud's heaven is emphatically unreal, peopled as it might be in "Angel Levine" by Jewish Negroes who, once back on earth, can give way to boozing, wenching, and anti-Semitism. Yet the shtetl affinity to the miraculous asserts itself in

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what Marcus Klein has called Malamud's "special note . . . a mysticism which compels discrete actualities of life to extremes" and "hurries reality into myth, or into parable or exemplum or allegory, and its typical process has been a sudden transition of particularities." In 1973, Malamud said, "I don't believe in the supernatural except as I can invent it. . . .1 write fantasy because when I do I am imaginative and funny and having a good time." Often much of the imaginative pleasure that comes from his sudden or prolonged surges into the uncanny would seem to follow from his sense that he is capturing with arresting metaphors both the ultimate unknowability of things and the possibilities for moral assertions within that unknowability . For example, Klein offers Salzman 's improbable appearances in "The Magic Barrel" as instances of the sudden transition of particularities. But the marriage broker's ultimate mutability derives from a much more complicated blend than, say, the one caused by his explaining an impossibly prompt appearance in Leo Finkle's room with "I hurried." At first reading, Salzman has his complexities but is still the "commercial cupid" who, with the enthusiasm and style of a used-car salesman, overpraises his male clients to his female ones and vice versa. If his eyes are mournful, it may be because, for all his enthusiasm, he does not do well; because his profession is no longer honored; or because his daughter Stella reminds him that he is merely a peddler of flesh when she begins peddling her own. Perhaps he intentionally leaves his daughter's picture with Pinkie because the approval he feels for the rabbinical student's face, both ascetically innocent and latently sensual, is his approval of a manageable victim. Whether or not he intentionally leaves the picture, he is in the placement business—and finally places his daughter. Are the prayers for the dead that he chants, while Leo rushes forward to meet Stella, for his own moral self? For Leo's future? Other

BERNARD MALAMUD I 433 readings offer themselves but, within this line of reasoning, all lead to Frederick the Great's comment about the sympathy that Catherine II of Russia showed during the third partition of Poland: "She wept but took." Yet, as Yakov Bok sighs when he learns how he is being framed, "So that's how it is. . . . Behind the world lies another world." Behind the world of Salzman the endearing but scheming pimp lies the world of Salzman the holy spirit, placed on earth to bring Leo Finkle from an arid knowledge of the Law to the perception that he can fulfill the spirit of the Law only by loving in this world. Thus Salzman arranges the meeting between Leo and Lily Hirschorn because he knows it will drive Leo to the shattering admission that '1 came to God not because I loved Him but because I did not." As Leo becomes stronger in his resolution to save himself by saving Stella, his need for Salzman grows less. By the time the latter agrees to arrange the meeting, he is "transparent to the point of vanishing," for his work in this world is almost finished. Leo has learned of the universality of suffering, manifested by the terrible pain in the eyes of Salzman and his daughter, and he is determined to do what he can about it. And so, for the first time in the story, Salzman stops eating his fish before he has finished it—one must eat to survive—and it remains only for him to chant the death of the old man and the birth of the new. With Salzman as spirit, his improbable manifestations become a matter of course. His wife's accusation of her luftmensch husband with his office "in the air . . . in his socks" becomes a happy metaphor for the way the spiritual must be grounded in the physical. Correspondingly, the fish that Salzman devours could, as the early Christians believed, symbolize immortality of the spirit. Yet the fishy odors that cling to him and to his pictures of unfulfilled women could, and certainly seem to, come from the magic barrel of life itself, with all its sad experience, des-

perate innocence, improbable hopes, and teeming, sexual odors. But, in a way that reminds us of Malamud's frequent mirror images, or optical confusions, or characters whose separate eyes do separate things, each reading keeps swimming back into the other. For example, the story is crowded with biblical allusions or unintentional recastings (for Malamud's imagination is strongly folkloristic), but do these reinforce or ironically undercut Salzman as improbable but intentionally redeeming angel? In the face of irresolvable ambiguity, Leo makes his decision. The reader can choose a "majority reading" of the story; but, like life itself, its "reality" is likely to shift in a way that inspires delight and frustration as we regard it. Because the fictional terms of "Angel Levine" are more consistently those of fantasy— which is to say they partake somewhat less dizzyingly of the world's ambiguity—the terms of the choice that the afflicted tailor Manischevitz must make are, though complex, much more clear-cut: Tears blinded the tailor's eyes. Was ever man so tried? Should he say he believed a halfdrunken Negro to be an angel? . . . a wheel in his mind whirred: believe, do not, yes, no, yes, no. The pointer pointed to yes, to between yes and no, to no, no it was yes. He sighed. It moved but one had still to make a choice. "I think you are an angel from God." He said it in a broken voice, thinking, If you said it it was said. If you believed it you must say it. If you believed, you believed. Levine burst into tears. "How you have humiliated me." Since twice before this climactic scene Manischevitz has been unable to believe that the Negro is an assisting angel, several nodes of meaning

434 I AMERICAN cluster here. In terms of interdependency, the tailor's inability to "be human and extend credit" (to reach back to "The Bill") drives Levine into the stereotypes of a shvarzah (Negro) joke: from a worried if somewhat sententious correctness to a heavy Negro dialect; from shabbily dressed dignity to lust and drunkenness in a sort of Sporting Life costume. In terms of the workings of faith, the inability to make a difficult assertion only renders it yet more difficult; since Manischevitz cannot accept a sober Levine in his apartment, he has to accept the stage Negro while they are surrounded by anti-Semites in a Harlem dive. But as with the Jews of the shtetl, catastrophe may make the impossible possible, the irrational reasonable. With his wife "at death's door," the irrational has spoken as the tailor dreams of Levine preening his wings. From this follows the final trip to Harlem, the leap of faith, Fanny's recovery, and Levine's winged ascension. The shtetl dynamics that inform so much of Malamud's fiction could be described as a simultaneous holding on and letting go. One clings to the possibility of the miraculous, to the value of the morally developed self, to the value of the other. But to make any of these assertions, one might have to relinquish the rational; one might even have to turn one's back on commonsense empiricism. We might better understand the workings of this process if we move beyond the stories of The Magic Barrel and turn to "The Silver Crown," a story published in 1972, seventeen years after "Angel Levine" first appeared. Here the petitioner is Albert Gans, a biology teacher whose father is dying of a disease so diversely and unsuccessfully diagnosed and treated that Gans finally goes to a faith healer, Rabbi Jonas Lifshitz. Although Gans has given up on the rational empiricism of the doctors, he still tells the rabbi that his "cast of mind" is "naturally empiric and objective—you might say non-mystical." He therefore wants to know

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just how his father will be saved by the silver crown (wonderfully priced at $401 or $986) that the rabbi will have cast and then will pray over. Empiricist that he is, Gans demands to see a crown before he pays, and later threatens to go to the police if he does not see the one for which he has paid $986. Although the story is grounded much more in the tradition of realism than of fantasy, it characteristically swerves toward the allegorical. For Lifshitz and Rifkele, his lumpish, retarded daughter, embody the nonrational or irrational that Gans can only partially embrace. The rabbi cannot permit Gans to see a finished crown because "a miracle is a miracle." Most important to him is not whether Gans doubts, for "doubts we all got," but whether he loves his father. Certainly Gans cares enough to have sorrow, to feel frantic over his father's state, and finally to pay $986. But his strongest emotion toward his father seems to be gratitude—a good distance fr jm consuming, suprarational love—and self-interest undercuts this: he will feel guilty if he does not buy the crown and his father dies. All of this is still further undercut when, near the end of the story, Gans cries out to Lifshitz and Rifkele that he "was mesmerized, suckered" with "freaking fake magic, with an idiot girl for a come-on and hypnotic mirrors." To suggest that Manischevitz in "Angel Levine" is less than human is, by most standards, unfair. The tailor is most humanly endearing with his complaint to God that suffering is wasted on him, and with his fearful bewilderment as he pushes himself through a Harlem of trousers with a razor slit in the seat or a group of blacks comically, uncannily, engaged in Talmudic exegesis. But the pressure of his need, which in this case derives from his love for his dying wife, drives him to be still more human and give still more credit. In "Idiots First" Mendel must, on the last night of his life, raise money to send his idiot son

BERNARD MALAMUD I 435 to the improbable care of an eighty-one-year-old uncle in California. But the minute that he needs to put his son on the train is denied in the name of "the cosmic universal law, goddamit, the one I got to follow myself." The speaker is Ginzburg, the angel of death, who remains unmoved by Mendel's pleas that his life of suffering has earned him the minute's respite. "You bastard, don't you understand what it means human?" Mendel incongruously cries as he tries to choke Ginzburg. What follows, as each sees himself mirrored in the other's eyes and Ginzburg gives Mendel the minute, is intentionally evasive. But, like the nineteenth-century Russian and Yiddish writers he loves, Malamud seems to be asking us to believe, for an instant, that even universal law must, for an instant, bend and recognize "what means human"—if the petitioner has suffered enough and is desperately enough committed to his just cause. Manischevitz lunges into irrationality, Mendel into violence; but each release is actually a clinging, a heightened commitment to otherness. "The Silver Crown" also leads to an explosion that is a holding fast; but here the commitment is to love of self, not of other. For it is Gans's concern for his self-image—that he, the rational empiricist, has been tricked—that leads to his cruel accusations. The epiphany comes when Gans responds to the rabbi's pleading "Be kind. . . . Be merciful to an old man. Think of my poor child. Think of your father who loves you" with "He hates me, the son-of-a-bitch, I hope he croaks.'' The terms of the story are such that we cannot tell whether the elder Gans, who dies an hour later, could have been saved. But Malamud sharply emphasizes how inappropriate in a situation where love is required is any tangle of feeling less than love. In good part, Gans's final outburst follows from his fury over the situation into which he has been led by what positive filial affection he possesses. Malamud also wryly suggests how impractical practicality or half

measures can be in ultimate situations: Gans loses the $986, his self-esteem, and the chance to see whether the crown will work. Ironically, he finally does receive a crown he can feel—the "massive, spike-laden headache" he wears as he rushes out of Lifshitz's. We have mainly considered stories that emphasize possibility; indeed, with "Idiots First," the farthest extreme of possibility that Malamud can dramatize. However, a large number of fine stories emphasize the need to recognize limits, particularly the limits or compulsions of others. These implacable needs can be assertions of some force, and often the motif expands into another recurrent theme of Yiddish and Russian fiction: the power a victim can exert over his victimizer. So strong is the hold of this interrelationship on Malamud's imagination that it explicitly informs his two best novels, The Assistant and The Fixer, and some very good stories: 'The Mourners," "Take Pity," "A Pimp's Revenge," "An Exorcism," "Rembrandt's Hat," "Talking Horse," and "The Jewbird." In "An Apology" a policeman named Walter unwillingly lets his younger partner arrest a light-bulb peddler who has, instead of a license, a sense of how heavily his misery can bear down upon others. Walter easily convinces the partner to let the peddler go after he breaks out of the police car and tries to jump off the Brooklyn Bridge, but nothing—not the money to replace a carton of bulbs lost in the arrest, not the purchase of new bulbs—can free Walter from the uncanny peddler's accusing presence. The policeman must finally leave his bed in the early morning hours and bend to the peddler's wordless demand that his sense of dignity, stiffened by all he has suffered, be recognized by an apology. Sometimes one must bow to the imperatives of literal madness. In "The Letter," all of Newman's dutiful attempts to communicate with his insane, institutionalized father fail. Malamud

436 I AMERICAN implicitly suggests that he would have more luck if he could, for example, perceive that another inmate and his father (Teddy and Ralph) both recognize as an act of communication the blank pages Teddy repeatedly and unsuccessfully tries to get Newman to mail. In terms of this kind of insight, there is a grain of truth in Ralph's telling Newman that he is crazy and should "come back here and hang around with the rest of us." Cans's total inability to respond sympathetically to Lifshitz' claim that Rifkele is "not perfect, though God who made her in his image is Himself perfection. . . . In her way she is also perfect" emphasizes his shallowness. With "Take Pity" we move to the dangers of trying to act generously toward someone who could probably pass a clinical test for sanity but is acting out the doctrine of self-reliance with a near-mad vengeance. In a grim, sparsely furnished room in some gray, embittered afterworld (a locale that is a distillation of many of Malamud's already stylized locales), Rosen tells Davidov, a "census-taker," of his attempts to help two orphaned children and their mother. But she will not accept help, out of what combination of twisted pride, self-hatred, death wish, and sense of fatality we can never know. The ambivalent possibilities of the title, with the assertion of ' Take'' and the sympathetic merging of * 'Pity,'' seem to have exhausted themselves by the time Rosen recounts how he said to himself, " 'Here . . . is a very strange thing—a person that you can never give her anything.—But I will give.' " He gives his possessions by willing them to the widow and her children, his life by putting his head in the oven. But he only drives her deeper into her compulsion: she kills herself, probably kills her children, and the story ends as they continue their struggle—but with the new twist that she now seeks him out. Davidov writes in "an old-fashioned language that they don't use it nowadays," which is to say that a tale of the amount of damage that two people of strong,

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conflicting wills can inflict on each other is a very old tale indeed. That one can leave "Take Pity," surely one of Malamud's best stories, thinking of Ugolino and Ruggieri, near the bottom of the Inferno, gnawing each other's heads until Judgment Day, suggests its force. But disaster can follow from too low a designation of another's moral limits. In "The German Refugee,'' a superb rendering of the culture shock the educated, previously successful Jews encountered when they fled Hitler to America, we are made to feel that Oskar Gassner is on his way to acculturation, first when he sufficiently overcomes his hatred of the language of the Nazis to write a lecture in German, and then when he apparently demonstrates his acceptance of his new state by so improving his pronunciation that he delivers the lecture successfully in English. But Oskar has not lived, only written and spoken about, his topic—Brudermensch (brotherhood) in Whitman. He has threatened to commit suicide if he does not write the lecture. Instead, he takes gas when he learns that his gentile wife, to whom he has been married for twenty-seven years but whom he abandoned in Germany as a part of the hated country, had converted to Judaism and was arrested and shot. She undergoes more of the hideous brotherhood of victimization that characterizes so much of twentieth-century life when she topples "into an open tank ditch, with the naked Jewish men, their wives and children, some Polish soldiers, and a handful of gypsies." It follows that sometimes the overvaluing of another's inner life can have salutary effects. Toward the end of "The Mourners," Kessler, a disagreeable old man who has been threatened with eviction, sits rocking in his stinking apartment, mourning the hardheartedness of his past. But Gruber, the landlord whose name suggests his apparently intractable physical and psychic grossness, mistakenly thinks that Kessler is mourning his, Gruber's, spiritual death. His

BERNARD MALAMUD I 437 distress is followed by the sense that "the room . . . was clean, drenched in [the] daylight and fragrance" of moral rebirth. In a conversion too tricky and hasty to be fully convincing, Gruber suffers "unbearable remorse for the way he had treated the old man" and becomes a mourner himself. It is not too clear whom he is mourning, but Malamud wants us to feel that he has been reborn. Since Malamud's fiction is so frequently ordered around the moral dispositions of the characters and the directions these dispositions take, we might briefly consider some stories treating these aspects before we turn to the novels. The groupings are admittedly partial and constricting, but they should add to our sense of an overview. With "Angel Levine," "Idiots First," and "An Apology," we have touched upon stories in which more or less admirable or acceptable men do nothing to diminish before our eyes. We can add to this kind, with all reservations for Arkin's clumsiness and Harvitz's tightness, "Rembrandt's Hat" and "The Man in the Drawer." In the first story, Arkin ends a feud and achieves a new otherness by putting himself in the position of an unhappy sculptor; in "The Man in the Drawer," Harvitz must project a Russian writer's plight upon himself before he will agree to smuggle out stories too "negative" to be published in Russia. Then there are a fair number of understandably painful stories—"The Death of Me," "TheLoan," 'TakePity," "My Son, the Murderer," "The Prison," "Black Is My Favorite Color," "In Retirement," and "The Cost of Living"—in which the generous, or at least justifiable, intentions of decent people are frustrated, sometimes by racial or political upheavals, sometimes by the weight of suffering about them, sometimes by cruel business competition. "The Silver Crown" and "The German Refu-

gee" lead toward the revelation of the deficiencies of the protagonist, as does "Behold the Key," in which, with disastrous results, an American studying in Italy refuses to take any responsibility for American involvement there. And in "The Maid's Shoes" a withdrawn American professor makes a few timid attempts to assist his maid, but the chaos of Italian life is finally too much for him and he fires her. With all of the qualities that make the stories of the preceding groups characteristic Malamud works, most are still in what might be called the tradition of the Joycean epiphanic story, in which everything moves toward the revelation of the essence of the protagonist or his situation. But the attempt to find a new life, truly to change, is a dominant concern in some of the stories as well as in four of the novels. When the protagonist seeks a new life from the outset, the story works to reveal the failings that make true transcendence impossible. In "The Lady of the Lake," Henry Levin travels under the ironically unsuccessful pseudonym of Freeman in order to escape the limitations of Judaism, only to lose a beautiful and redeeming woman because he cannot accept his Jewish past. Cronin, in "A Choice of Profession," attempts to escape the anguish that follows the discovery that his wife is two-timing him with a friend by leaving Chicago and a wellpaying job to become a teacher. However, his inability to put in the past the sexual victimization of a student, abused by a pimping husband and an incestuous brother, forces him to the realization that he has not learned from his experience and that "it's not easy to be moral." But when an older man jars a younger one out of an identity and forces him into a new one, Malamud grants both character and reader intimations of transcendence: Cattanzara forces George, Salzman drives Finkle, and in "The Last Mohican" Susskind torments Fidelman into the kind of emotions and acts that might permit a critic to

438 I AMERICAN capture the spirit of Giotto. Of course the tenacity of Malamud's moral imagination has driven him beyond hints of transcendence to full-scale studies of successful or abortive initiations into a new spiritual life. We turn, then, to his first novel, The Natural. The visiting New York Knights are losing to the Cubs by only a run and have a man on second, but there are two outs in the ninth inning. In the stands "Mike Barney, a picture of despair, was doing exercises of grief. He stretched forth his long, hairy arms, his knobby hands clasped, pleading." Down on the field Roy Hobbs, the thirty-four-year-old rookie who has been sent in to pinch-hit, takes the first pitch for a strike, then swings so hard at a bad ball that "the umpire sneezed in the breeze. . . . Wonderboy resembled a sagging baloney. Pop cursed the b a t . . . Mike Barney's harrowed puss looked yellow"; Roy feels "sick with remorse that he had traded a kid's life away out of loyalty to a hunk of wood." Then he realizes that the good-looking, dark-haired woman in the stands has stood up to show confidence in him: At the same time he became aware that the night had spread out in all directions and was filled with an unbelievable fragrance. A pitch streaked toward him . . . With a sob Roy fell back and swung. Part of the crowd broke for the exits. Mike Barney wept freely now, and the lady who had stood up for Roy absently pulled on her white gloves and left. The ball shot through Toomey 's [the pitcher's] astounded legs and began to climb. The second baseman, laying back on the grass on a hunch, stabbed high for it but it leaped over his straining fingers, sailed through the light and up into the dark, like a white star seeking an old constellation. Toomey, shrunk to a pygmy, stared into the vast sky.

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Roy circled the bases like a Mississippi steamboat, lights lit, flags fluttering, whistle banging, coming around the bend. . . . everybody knew it was Roy alone who had saved the boy's life. All of this happened in Chicago, where, as a nineteen-year-old pitcher of phenomenal promise, Roy had been shot with a silver bullet by the beautiful Harriet Bird. Chicago was also the city where, in what we like to think of as the real world, Eddie Waitkus, a good-looking first baseman, had in 1949 been shot by a girl at the Edgewater Beach Hotel, and where, when asked in 1958 whether he consciously injected the materials of Arthurian romance into The Natural, Malamud replied, "I threw everything in." And so it would seem. At the most simple level of plot development Roy, with the assistance of Iris Lemon, breaks out of the slump that has followed his record-breaking hitting streak and fulfills his responsibility to Mike Barney and his dying son Pete. Beneath this, and beneath about a dozen other tales or incidents in the novel, is the popular mythology of baseball history; in this case the account of how Babe Ruth hit a home run to save the life of a boy named Johnny Sylvester. Here the "historical" content is itself an expression of the ability of a hero to rejuvenate life; and appropriately so, for beneath the level of the specific historical allusions, beneath the level of the literary ones to Achilles, Calypso, Thersites, Circe, and Charybdis, and informing the whole of the novel are the medieval legends and romances that incorporate the death and resurrection of the seasons. In these tales a questing knight who is selfless and pure enough to ask or answer correctly certain questions about the lance or the Grail—the male and female reproductive organs, respectively—can cure the ailing, or resurrect the dead, Fisher King and restore fertility to his lands and subjects. Still further beneath, as Jessie Weston argues in

BERNARD MALAMUD I 439 From Ritual to Romance, is "an ancient ritual, having for its ultimate object initiation into the sources of Life, physical and spiritual." This arresting subject is a particularly appropriate one for a writer who has said, as Malamud did in 1958, that "the primal problem is that of man seeking to escape the tragedy of the past.'' In his brilliant essay "The Natural: Malamud's World Ceres," Earl Wasserman observes that Roy "at bat is every quester who has had to shape his own character to fulfill his goal, whether it be the grail or the league pennant." So loose and powerful on the mound or at bat, so innately aware when playing left field of the effects of uneven terrain, wind currents, or carom angles off the wall, Roy would seem supremely well qualified to fulfill his quest. As a boy he had fashioned Wonderboy, his animistic bat, from a tree split by lightning, from mana-charged natural life itself. It is with this talisman, the new Excalibur, glittering golden in the sunlight, creating thunder, lightning, and rain, that Roy brings the rejuvenating power of nature to the ailing Knights. To repeat to anyone who has read both The Natural and "The Waste Land": although the novel spans fifteen years, the dramatized parts begin in early spring and end with winter in the air (the birth and death of the year and the baseball season). The Knights' manager, selflessly committed to the well-being of the team, is Pop Fisher; and the affliction of this Fisher King—athlete's foot of the hands—is eased by Roy's presence in the lineup. Correspondingly, the drought that had reduced Knights Field to dust comes to an end when Roy first comes to bat, and on and on But Roy needs more than physical gifts to complete his spiritual initiation. Beyond all the wacky collisions of popular culture and medieval romance, then, The Natural is not at all the usual sports novel of the rookie who carries his team and their lovable, long-frustrated manager to the championship. Roy would have it that a freak ac-

cident got him shot at nineteen, from which followed his loss of confidence and fifteen years of a "sickening procession of jobs—as cook, welldriller, mechanic, logger, beanpicker." But, as Wasserman, with his application of Jungian models, has convincingly argued, the women of the story—Harriet, Iris, and Memo Francis—are all aspects of the dual nature of the psychic mother. The tweaking of Harriet's nipple emphatically suggests Roy's infantilism, and his failure to show through his answers to her questions that he understands the communal responsibilities of his gifts further expresses his immaturity. On the Arthurian level, before the ultimate challenge of the Grail, symbolized by Harriet's hat, Roy proves himself to be an unworthy quester. In the Jungian psychomachy, his immature behavior has turned Harriet into the Terrible Mother (mater saeva), who will dam up our energies and engulf us if we do not wean ourselves by propelling ourselves out into the harsh world. The train on which Roy meets Harriet, and which he hopes is carrying him to his triumph, is also the train of developmental necessity that either brings us from sheltered infantilism to communal commitment, or reminds us of the damage that has followed our inability to make the trip. The opening image of the novel is of Roy on the train: he looks out but, significantly, sees only himself. On the last page, Roy—having tried to throw the last, pennant-deciding game of the season—is fighting overwhelming self-hatred, and thinking, "I never did learn anything out of my past life, now I have to suffer again." Since he has never learned to accept the imperative of the train he feels churning within him (or thinks he hears)—"When will you grow up, Roy?" Iris asks—he succumbs to the temptation of the other Terrible Mother in the novel, Memo (memory) Francis. Her affinity for stagnant water, her "sick" breast, and her suicidal nature all reinforce her allegorical role as vitiating

440 I AMERICAN memory. So does the scene in which the image of her, as the Terrible Mother demanding incest, combines with her Circean overfeeding of Roy until "a rush of dirty water got a good grip and sucked him under"—Memo as mater saeva in her Charybdis archetype. Even during his glory months, a regressive infantilism belies the primal appeal of Roy's aggressive domination of the external. For example, "He was like a hunter stalking a bear, a whale. . . . Often, for no accountable reason he hated the pill, which represented more of himself than he was willing to give away." But the rejection of the mother as engulfment frees us for the other maternal imago, for the mother as the source of all vitality. This acceptance permits our vital energies to flow, unimpeded, into the world. On the Arthurian level she is the Lady of the Lake, who assists worthy knights, just as Memo is an obvious Morgan le Fay- figure. In the more literal terms of the novel she is Iris Lemon, who accepts the burdens of motherhood and grandmotherhood and is in general associated with the life-giving fluids that come from accepting one's interpersonal burden. She also embodies a level of mature articulation so different from anything else in the book that its weight is distractingly palpable. All that has followed the quotation of Roy at bat perhaps makes The Natural sound more coherent than it actually is. It might be, as Wasserman claims, that Roy cannot marry Iris because that would make him a grandfather, "which is to say the responsible hero-father who completely possesses his miraculous psychic strength and unselfishly directs it to his human community." But to have Iris tell Roy during intercourse that she is a grandmother or, after she has been felled by a foul ball that has bounced off the head of a heckling dwarf, that she is pregnant with Roy's child is as wacky as a clock at Ebbets Field scattering minutes over the field after one of Roy's drives shatters it.

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To return to Roy at bat, he has fallen into a slump the day after succumbing to Memo's unhealthy magic of fog, stagnant water, and sick breasts. Benched because of his unwillingness to try a different bat, he is finally enough moved by Mike Barney's agony to offer to switch bats if Pop will send him in. This is Roy's first moment of otherness. All his goals have smacked of the hubris of selfishness: to break all the records; to be known as the best the game ever saw. Yet most of the community of fans for whom Roy should sacrifice are grotesques, and Mike Barney is described here as a gorilla. Perhaps this will cohere with the emphasis on Roy's responsibility if we remember Rabbi Lifshitz's admonition that even Rifkele is perfect in her own way. And perhaps we can appreciate the descriptions of Mike Barney's ' 'harrowed puss'' or Wonderboy, declined from his usual erect puissance into a * 'sagging baloney," if we see it all as a kind of comic transformation of sportscasterese: banal, matter-of-fact, and fantastic all at once. But the fragrance emanating from Iris and the coolness with which, her miracle done, she calmly pulls on her gloves and departs, belong to much different worlds of emotion and authorial tone. As with what follows—the quick cuts from the cosmic zoom of the ball to Toomey shrunken to a dwarf to Roy as a steamboat out of Life on the Mississippi—these colliding worlds can give us the pleasures of comic surrealism, the literary equivalent of the grotesque combinations of food that drive Roy to his Babe Ruth stomachache. But so much of Malamud's work has given us reason to expect a great deal more. In his discussion of a fully successful fantasy, * 'Idiots Rrst,'' Theodore Solotaroff wrote, "A dying man in search of money for his idiot son, the malach-hamoves [angel of death] who pursues and frustrates him, the bitter city streets, and the iron gates of Pennsylvania Station all come to belong, through the sustained unity of writing, to the

BERNARD MALAMUD I 441 same order of things." The stylistic and referential collisions bring a centrifugal effect to the whole of The Natural; but Malamud's failure or unwillingness somehow to unify his tones and viewpoints appears most tellingly at the novel's end, which deals with Roy's decline. From a moral perspective his immaturity pulls him under; from that of the vegetation myths, the decline of the year-god is inevitable. Since Roy would not have thrown the game if he had not known he was washed up, the two levels of motivation are reconcilable. But the comic intrusions of the final game and the behavior of Judge Banner, Gus the Supreme Bookie, and Memo vitiate the considerable emotional leverage Malamud might have gotten from the account of Roy's fall. And on the last page of the book, Malamud explodes the pathos of Roy, feeling old and grimy, realizing that he will have to suffer all over again, by having a boy distractingly ask him what a newsboy was supposed to have asked Shoeless Joe Jackson after that great athlete threw the 1919 World Series. Malamud's second novel, like his first, is structured around the passage of the seasons; but unlike The Natural, The Assistant dramatizes a successful initiation into a new spiritual life. Correspondingly, the movement is from winter to spring. We begin in the dark of a November morning, the wintry wind clawing at Morris Bober's face and blowing his apron up into it as he drags heavy milk cases into the store. We leave the novel eighteen months later, just after Frank Alpine has himself circumcised: "For a couple of days he dragged himself around with a pain between his legs. The pain enraged and inspired him. After Passover he became a Jew.'' Having entered Morns' store to rob it that November day and having in February more or less raped Helen, Frank stays on to expiate, first as The Assistant and then, after Moms' death early in the first April, as The Grocer himself. For

Morris, the shlimazel (inept) to whom everything happens, the imminence of the yearly rebirth has been, like so much of his life, a bitterly ironic joke: in this case it kills him. Banished from the store after Morris realized that he had been one of the robbers, Frank views the grocer's death as a chance to continue his atonement—and this gives Malamud twelve more months to convince us of the tenacity of Frank's desire to become a different, better person. There is no suggestion that the circumcision and conversion mean that Frank will follow the forms of Jewish ritual any more strictly than Morris did. Instead, they serve as symbols of his passage into moral adulthood. In the same way, Malamud generally uses acceptance of one's Jewishness as a metaphor for the acceptance of the responsibilities of the human condition. Or, to put his metaphorical use of Jewishness in a recognizable historical context, when Israel was threatened with extinction in 1966, Malamud said, "All men are Jews except they don't know it." That is, unified as we are by the agonies of the past and the threats of the present and future, we must still struggle to keep in our minds and instill in our acts "what means human." With all of the St. Francis imagery in the novel—from Frank's memories of the appeal the stories of the saint had for him in childhood to the fantasy in the next-to-last paragraph in the book, in which the transformed Frank identifies with the transforming powers of St. Francis—Malamud clearly tries to dispel the notion that saintly * 'Jewishness" is limited to Jews. Still, there is a good deal of truth in Philip Roth's 1974 claim that while "the Jew in the post-holocaust decades has been identified in American fiction with righteousness and restraint . . . rather than with those libidinous activities that border on the socially acceptable and may even constitute criminal transgression," it is possible to see the transformation of an Italian drifter who robbed and raped not so much as "a

442 I AMERICAN sign of moral improvement but as the cruel realization of Bober's revenge: 'Now suffer, you goy bastard, the way I did.' " And for Malamud, "writing out of a fury all his own," the pain of the circumcision is a just punishment to the organ with which Frank had attacked Helen. All of these readings—Judaism as the punishing religion of instinctual restraint, Jewishness as the mystical, saving element in all religions, Frank as the schlemiel (well-meaning bungler) who falls into Morris' grave in more ways than one, and Frank as the hero of spiritual rebirth— can be found in the novel. The vitality, which persists after repeated readings, follows from Malamud's ability to hold in balanced tension the poles of his psyche and his literary preferences: the optimism and the pessimism; the sadism and the gentleness, under which are subsumed the beliefs that suffering humanizes and that it deadens; the respect for realistic detail and the fondness for fantasy. Like Roy Hobbs, come east from Montana to become the greatest baseball player in history, Frank journeys into the rising sun, in this case from San Francisco to Brooklyn (by way of Boston), to become a prince of crime. That this glittering new life should supposedly begin in Morris' poor store serves as an ironic commentary on the hopelessness of that conception of himself. The mirror in the back room shows Frank no glittering czar of lawlessness, but Morris and the bum, Ward Minogue: the two aspects of himself, the two directions his life could take after this act. In a passage that reverberates through much of the fiction that follows it, Iris Lemon says, "We have two lives, Roy, the life we learn with and the life we live after that. Suffering is what brings us toward happiness. . . . It teaches us to want the right things.'' Even during the holdup, Frank's partial knowledge of the right things makes itself felt in his fear, his attempts to get Ward out, and, above all, his bringing Morris a

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cup of water. The washing and replacing of the cup (an act repeated a few days later with a cup and saucer) serve as more than an anticipation of Frank's eventual transformation into The Grocer. It suggests that even as he is making his "worst mistake yet," he intuitively feels that the store is somehow a place where—not having, as he says about St. Francis, the talent to be bom good—he can learn sympathy, generosity, and discipline from Morris, Helen, the nonhuman, inhuman store, and all who come into it. The sometimes cruel irony with which Malamud treats Helen and, paiticularly, Morris is a crucial component of their successful characterizations, for it keeps them from becoming sentimentalized stereotypes. Still, the weight of their injuries, of Helen's beauty, and of Morris' deadly endurance, proves too much for Frank: he climbs out of Morris' grave, returns to Brooklyn, and reopens the store. Before this, Malamud has shrewdly kept Frank's objections to Morris from being as telling as Helen's at her father's funeral. Here we know the rabbi's praise of Morris as a good provider to be as false as we know Helen's judgments of his weakness and lack of imagination to be true. But, to take one example, Frank's resistance to Morris' capacity for pity is as psychologically explainable as the relief he experiences when he resumes stealing: as George Stoyonovitch discovered in "A Summer's Reading," accepting a new conception of oneself is frightening. Of course many of Morris' acts have a force of their own, and his most articulate expression of his beliefs has about it the power of mystery and the mystery of power. After Morris says, "If a Jew don't suffer for the Law, he will suffer for nothing," Frank asks: "What do you suffer for, Morris?" "I suffer for you," Morris said calmly. Frank laid his knife down on the table. His mouth ached. "What do you mean?"

BERNARD MALAMUD I 443 "I mean you suffer for me." The clerk let it go at that. In part the power is that of a victim over his victimizer, but it still accrues to Morris' moral force. So does Frank's relationship to Helen, for as victims and punishers of Frank, father and daughter flow into each other, as so many of the novel's characters serve in different ways as doubles for each other. But apart from his absolute control of Frank's compulsions, Malamud most convinces us of the tightness and inevitability of his behavior in the latter part of the book through the flat precision with which his purgatorial existence is rendered. Here the narrative authority is so strong that it girds the moral authority. If we look from a highly saturated red surface to a complementary green one, the effect is to rest the eye so that when it returns to the first surface, the red is just as bright as before. In the same way, our minds can wander away from the reading Malamud largely insists upon. We can consider, for instance, Roth's reading. Or we can decide that with a growing rapprochement with Helen, with his youth, and with much more imagination and toughness than Morris ever had, there's no particular reason why Frank should stay in the store. Then we return to face that last paragraph and all that has led up to it. Something of this strange mixture of rude force and flickering precariousness informs the whole of the novel and strongly contributes to the arresting doubleness of almost every aspect. Malamud said that after The Natural, he ''wanted to do a more serious, deeper, perhaps realistic piece of work." From the first paragraph, in which Moms' choices are graphically limited to the wind that punishes and the prison of a store, Malamud fuses thought, event, symbol, dialogue, and social detail to command our respect for the reality of the gray Brooklyn block and its inhabitants. It would seem that the lyricism of the novel never really leaves the pave-

ment from which it tries to rise: the rose that Frank carves for Helen ends up in a garbage can. But it is a *'perhaps realism." Through a sudden trompe Voeil the pavement seems to lift or, at least in Frank's vivid fantasy, St. Francis transforms the wood into a true flower and presents it to Helen. The realistic surface is further stretched by the characters' surrealistic dreams, and even the pace of the book has an uncanny doubleness to it. So much of The Assistant dramatizes Frank's, Helen's, and Morris' sense of overwhelming stagnation, yet Malamud manages to bring an urgent swiftness to the novel with the ingenious plot complications that propel events forward while so much stays the same, with movements from one center of consciousness to another, with his ability to keep surprising us by showing us new but convincing aspects of the same character, and with his talent for creating characters whose psyches are clearly bounded yet contain aspects of other characters. Everything that combines to make the novel Malamud's most impressively sustained stylistic achievement brings great energy into the "open grave" of the store. Each voice is distinctive, yet fades into the others through the emotions—the fear, hope, self-hatred, hunger—straining within it; and the most characteristic accents cohere to create a music of pathos: the melodrama of Morris' "I go to my grave!" or the awkwardness belying the assertiveness of "You are afraid of even which it don't exist"; Frank's Lardneresque, earnest clumsiness, "I love you Helen, you are my girl"; Helen's touchingly hopeless attempts to control her life through maxims: "First mutual love, then loving, harder maybe on the nerves but easier in memory.'' The narrator's range of tones is deceptively wide: from the dislocated, immigrant syntax when he is close to Moms' sensibility, to the colloquial lyricism of Frank spying on the naked Helen. Almost all of this is gathered into the grocery, the dominant symbol of the book. It is what it is,

444 I AMERICAN so convincingly a dying store that we feel in our bones the enervation of entering such a place to face its desperate but resigned proprietor. It is more than what it is. Described as a tomb, an open grave, it is clearly an emblem of the burden of the past, of our existences, of the palpable weight of our bodies, of the nearness of the deaths of these bodies. Appropriately, it is in this tomb that resurrection takes place. That Malamud is able to find a place in its grinding confines for such wraithlike beings as Breitbart, Al Marcus, and, above all, the gnomelike "macher" again testifies to the "perhaps realism" that he has brought off. A reader of Malamud's first two novels has seen, in one form or another, most of the experiential baggage that S. Levin carries off the train with him at the beginning of A New Life: inadequate, damaging parents; the plunge into a derelict's existence; the electrifying perception that lifts him out of sleeping in cellars; the eventual trip across the country to realize that perception, as with Frank Alpine, or to realize true potential, as with Roy Hobbs. Unlike the two earlier protagonists, however, Levin reaches his destination wanting the right things. "Order, value, accomplishment, love," he tells Pauline Gilley, who is the wife of one of his superiors and who will soon become his mistress. Like the older Roy, but unlike the Frank who first enters the store, Levin is usually on frantic guard to keep the destructive patterns of his past from repeating themselves. With this, Malamud has already excluded from his novel the two moral orderings that largely shaped his preceding ones; he can no longer write a book about a hero who moves or fails to move from anarchic desires to moral discipline. But he has left a good many ingredients for a coherent patterning. Levin's values can be tested and then either deepened or dissolved; or he can either remember, forget, or act in defiance of them as his unconscious or his secret

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self destroys or nourishes his moral disposition—to varying degrees, for Malamud will never relinquish his insistence upon the force of moral freedom. To simplify a vast number of possibilities, values can be convincingly tested only in a milieu that is clearly moral and/or immoral enough to serve either as a foil or as a sponge, against which the hero's efforts either stand out in visible relief or are absorbed. Roy fails in a largely "bad" world; Frank succeeds in a paradoxically good one. Although each world has rich associations with the one in which we live, neither immediately derives from quotidian, contemporary reality. Roy's derives much more from the mythology of the present and the past; and in the cloistral store, Malamud has created a quasitimeless milieu in which the values Morris brought with him from the shtetl still obtain, and a unified moral self can survive, however painfully. This is clearly not the case during the horrific day that Morris journeys off his block, into a specifically demarcated New York, to look for a job. But in A New Life, Levin takes his moral baggage off the train at a particular time, the last Sunday in August 1950, in a particular political climate: "the cold war blew on the world like an approaching glacier. . . . Senator McCarthy held in his hairy fist everyone's name." Levin has to add to his own "backlog of personal insecurity his portion of the fear that presently overwhelmed America." Even if we did not know from Malamud's life or the geographic and academic details that Eastchester, Cascadia, "is" Corvallis, Oregon, we can recognize the setting easily enough: a mediocre English department of the state agricultural college, in an attractive small town, in beautiful natural surroundings. We can also quickly recognize the frustrations Malamud experienced as he tried to dramatize his abiding moral concerns in this representative slice of post-World War n America. In The Assistant's charged, underground

BERNARD MALAMUD I 445 world, the doubling, the coalescence of saint and sinner, and the blending of crime and punishment with salvation through suffering—Frank even identifies with Raskolnikov at one point— the presence of Fedor Dostoevski is strong indeed. In 1958, during an early stage of writing A New Life, Malamud said that the dominant literary influence was much different—Stendhal. This is not the place to begin comparing Julien Sorel or Fabrizio del Dongo with Levin, but we might consider for a moment the world that finally crushes Julien: the aristocratic one of the de La Mole household with all of its historically anointed objects, its lucid cynicism, style, force, self-love, and ambition. And if Mayor de Renal, Julien's employer and sexual rival in the provinces, lacks aristocratic grace, the bourgeois ideals and rising social force he so perfectly embodies buttress his own gross palpability. But at Cascadia College, where, by and large, the faculty are so concerned to be thought "normal" and avoid disagreement and demonstration of what education they possess, where their wives are not "without a suggestion of experience in the world and glad to be done with it," and where for both * 'saving money was a serious entertainment," Malamud has neither assertive force to dramatize, nor the richness of decadence, nor even—in this state that resisted the New Deal and federal aid to education—the sense of decay from a vital past. Since faculty and students seem unaware of the hunger and despair that have served as the lifeblood of so much of Malamud's fiction, and seek above all the contentedness that accompanies normalcy, they are easygoing enough until the contentedness is threatened. Determined as Levin is not to fail again, his ideals, his foolishness, and the consequence of his sexual liaisons drive him from the college and from all college teaching. If the authorities have enough strength to push Levin out, they nevertheless are best characterized by their impotence and inanity. Inasmuch as Levin has brought his ghetto or

shtetl economics with him, and is able to think of teaching four sections of composition for $3,000 a year as work with short hours and good pay, he is partaking of the new prosperity. Although he is booted out of the morally flabby culture, Malamud was not so lucky. He decided upon a highly qualified but still morally assertive conclusion: Levin saddles himself with a neurotic woman he no longer loves, her two unlovable children, and a promise never to teach again. The assertion has none of the weight of those in The Assistant or The Fixer, however. Malamud's attempt to test moral value against the prevailing shallowness of manner and emotion is in large part swallowed by the triviality of the milieu. Levin's fear of failure is supposed to be a real issue in the novel, but it is impossible to visualize significant success in Eastchester. Of course Malamud chose to create characters and setting in this way, but Richard Astro's detailing of the similarities between the English departments of Cascadia and Oregon State College is telling. For Malamud in the late 1950's, this was the contemporary experience that best lent itself to extended fictionalizing. His decision was, of course, to play the resident academic community for laughs. This part of the book is wholly successful, for Malamud sprinkles wonderfully appropriate epiphanies of the collective banality among his depictions of the smugly earnest mediocrities. For example, the fact that Purtzer, "formerly a track star," distributes the grading curve in the idiotic race to finish marking a departmental exam, sets off the ludicrous inappropriateness of the whole enterprise. But Malamud also clings to his master theme, moral rebirth from an agonizing past. Since the distance between the imperatives of desperation and the banality of the setting is so great, he in effect creates two Levins: in Theodore Solotaroff's words, " 4Sy' the solemn faculty screwball and radical naif . . . and 'Sam'—the hard case with his last chance' who emerges hamstrung but healed at the end." Although

446 I AMERICAN most of Malamud's heroes are schlemels—to commit oneself in an imperfect world is to be forced into ludicrous postures—the Sy figure exists only to have one protestation after another punctured. The hostess he is trying to please ladles hot casserole onto his lap; the sight of the smiling, welcoming faces in his first class moves him to eloquence and affection, and only after class does he discover his fly has been open the whole time; his protestations to his sodden colleagues of the value of liberalism achieve nothing. Since the milieu offers so little opportunity for coherent opposition to the Sam figure, usually he surfaces only in his room, where he is plagued by guilt, dread, and loneliness. Sometimes the puncturings of the academic novel seep into the moral assertions or ponderings. Not long after Levin tells Pauline what he prizes, she falls asleep, her stomach gurgling. And as a part of the need to provide the moral opposition his characters cannot offer, Malamud often parodies what he normally celebrates: the struggle for insight, the importance of freedom and responsibility, the relationship of art, morality, love, and individual rights are sometimes ruminated over for hundreds of words. Malamud's uncertainty about what to do with one of his underground men out there in SuperAmerica sometimes results in a verbosity and repetitiveness unlike anything else in his fiction. Malamud uses all the possible moral patternings suggested above. Whether or not he intends parody, this is what it amounts to, for Levin "enjoys" deaths and resurrections at least three times in the novel. Yet we are supposed to regard his assumption of his burden at novel's end as a genuine moral triumph. With all of this, A New Life has some fine things in addition to the academic parody; in particular, the lyrical evocations of natural beauty, and the humor of Levin, rabbinically bearded and black-hatted, offering a Lifesaver to a balky mule or worrying whether he can fight off nonexistent bears and

WRITERS

cougars with his umbrella. Still, what relief Malamud must have experienced during the three years he wrote The Fixer, as he immersed himself in the world of pre-World War I Russia, with its color, intensity, and undeniable injustice. It is a tribute to Malamud's tenacity that after he completed A New Life, he was "sniffing for an idea in the direction of injustice on the American scene." Such plights as those of the civil rights workers in the South, Sacco and Vanzetti, and Caryl Chessman had more dramatic potential than Levin in Cascadia; but the novelist rejected these, as he did the Dreyfus affair. Then he remembered the story of Mendel Beiliss, arrested in 1911, on a charge of murdering a Russian boy so that his blood could be used in the making of matzos, by a government eager to renege on liberal concessions and to distract the populace from the country's real problems. After about eight months of intensive research and three drafts, Malamud completed the novel that gained him the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for writing the best novel published in 1966. Here are some of his comments about the process: I use some of his [Beiliss'] experiences, though not basically the man, partly because his life came to less than he had paid for by his suffering and endurance, and because I had to have room to invent. To his trials in prison I added something of Dreyfus's and Vanzetti's, shaping the whole to suggest the quality of the afflictions of the Jews under Hitler. These I dumped on the head of poor Yakov Bok. . . . So a novel that began as an idea concerned with injustice in America today became one set in Russia fifty years ago, dealing with anti-Semitism. Injustice is injustice. We never find out what Yakov's life comes to in terms of gaining his literal freedom, for the

BERNARD MALAMUD I 447

novel ends with him on his way to trial. Although Beiliss was acquitted, the creator of The Fixer (or handyman) said, "What happens to Yakov Bok after I leave him I don't know.'' But we follow his path from the shtetl, which he left to seek new opportunities for work and education in Kiev, to the opportunities he seizes upon during his ride to court. The most important of these are the fantasized dialogue with Tsar Nicholas II, which concludes with Yakov's shooting the "Little Father" for not being a true father to his people, and The Fixer's ensuing conclusions: injustice inevitably politicizes its victims and forces upon them the imperatives of trying to change history through the attempt to overthrow an unjust government by force. All of this constitutes the conclusion of Yakov's long movement to symbolic fatherhood, for Malamud the highest expression of moral adulthood. Before history cracks down upon him in the form of a monstrously unjust arrest, prosecution, and incarceration, he has been able to think of himself as outside historical process— even though he has suffered the privations of shtetl life and his father has been murdered by a cossack. After his arrest Yakov tells Bibikov, the prosecuting attorney who dies because of his belief in Yakov's innocence, that he is neither a theoretical nor an active revolutionary: "It's not my nature. If I 'm anything I'm a peaceful man.'' Thirty months later, he says in an imaginary conversation with the dead Bibikov the night before his trial, "Something in myself has changed. I'm not the same man I was. I fear less and hate more." Yakov's changing emotions, perceptions, and commitments are more than the empty gestures of a powerless captive. While in the shtetl he sees himself as the victim of his wife's barrenness—as a man without a child he is "alive but dead"—and then of her unfaithfulness: "A black cholera on her!" is his bitter sentence. But when she visits him in prison some eight months

before his trial, he moves from calling her a whore, to admitting that he was as much at fault as she, to attempting to end her ostracism in the shtetl by assuming the parenthood of her illegitimate child. He scribbles his claim to fatherhood on an envelope containing a document that, if signed, would presumably give him his freedom by blaming the murder on other Jews. On the document he asserts his protective role to the Jews, as he has to the child, by writing, instead of his signature, "Every word is a lie." As with his other commitments, that is a part of Yakov's convenant with man, not with the redeeming God of Judaism in Whom he cannot believe. Though, as he tells his devout father-in-law, " . . . take my word for it, it's not easy to be a freethinker in this terrible cell." Before and after the interview with his wife, Yakov must resist offers to set him free if he will confess. He refuses, partly from a sense of communal responsibility, partly from distrust of the authorities, and partly from his unwillingness to grant them any success. The unwillingness follows from his hatred, which constantly increases as he suffers new brutalities; yet he realizes his rights and strengths, and despotism's fears and weaknesses. All of this enables him to fight the temptation to escape his miseries through suicide. With characteristic earthiness he says of the tsar, who would feel relief at his death, * 'Let him jig on his polished floor. I shit my death on him." Malamud has said, "If this book isn't about freedom, I don't know what it is about. Every man must be political or where is your freedom?" While celebrating the possibilities of freedom and moral stamina, Malamud preserves enough complexity of attitude to keep the novel from collapsing into simplistic affirmations. Although Yakov's suffering makes him a better man, he tells the tsar in his last fantasy that "suffering has taught me the uselessness of suffering." Here he is referring to misery needlessly

448 I AMERICAN inflicted by the state, which should never occur; but the author is also asking if what Yakov has gone through is worth what he has gained. And although one of the great struggles of this largely uneducated man is to make sense of what is happening to him, he says toward the end of the novel that he has learned an extraordinary amount, but "what good will it do me? Will it open the prison doors?" "Still," he finally reflects, with the authority earned by his survival, "it was better than not knowing. A man had to learn, it was his nature." The many excellences of the writing give Malamud the right to make through Yakov such large generalizations about individual and collective experience. With his vivid, concrete re-creation of the stances and styles of a milieu he has never seen, he achieves his goal and creates imaginatively ordered experience, not the fiction that is "historical fact," or the usual, partially imagined historical novel. That most of what happens to Yakov did not happen to Beiliss testifies to the dominance of the imagined, not of the researched fact. For all of the book's considerable length, more than 130,000 words, we are never in any center of consciousness but Yakov's; and for three-fourths of the novel Yakov is in prison, for half of it in solitary confinement, so that there can be almost no communication with other prisoners. Yet the degrees of desperation, misery, hatred, self-hatred, terror, confusion, perception, and longing that emerge in his conscious moments, dreams, hallucinations, and reveries when he is alone, and in his confrontations with authorities and with his few friendly visitors, are so subtly and variously depicted that Malamud brings powerful narrative movement to the book—even while we are experiencing from the inside a particularly painful wasting away of a life. Perhaps The Fixer's greatest strength is the thoroughness with which this common man is realized. Then, again, as Bok reflects before

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his arrest, "few people know who is really common." About the time The Fixer was published, Malamud said to Haskel Frankel: One of the things I think of now is the Negro, the Negroes who lead lives of second class citizens. Their story is one leading up to a situation that is revolutionary—call it Black Power if you wish. Our country is lucky if this slow bloodletting, these riots that come and disappear, are all we have to pay for what has happened to the Negro. If the Negroes' story today is revolutionary, Yakov's is pre-revolutionary. With The Tenants, which he brought out five years later (1971), Malamud tried to make literary capital from this bloodletting and finally refute the many critics who have argued that he cannot successfully confront contemporary America at novel length. Along with the antiSemitism that he saw as one of the aspects of Black Power, Malamud wove into the novel another of the dominant concerns of his fiction of the 1960's, the relationship of the artist to his art and to his experience. In a "decaying brownpainted tenement, once a decent house," Harry Lesser sits, as he has for the last nine years, writing his third novel, the one that will redeem him from his poor second one. Late in The Tenants we learn that the protagonist of Lesser's book is a novelist who, because he cannot love, is writing a novel about a character who . . . will in a sense love for him . . . if he brings it off in imagination [he] will extend self and spirit; and so with good fortune may love his real girl as he would like to love her, and whoever else in a mad world is human. . . . Thus Lesser writes his book and his book writes Lesser. That's what's taking so long. For most of The Tenants, Lesser wrestles with the last section, in which he presumably drama-

BERNARD MALAMUD I 449 tizes the essence and consequences of this love. But, as he tells his landlord, Irving Levenspiel, ' 'something essential is missing that it takes time to find." Clearly the missing ingredient is the kind of largeness that would force Lesser to give in to the pleas of the beleaguered and generally likable landlord by moving out, as all the other tenants have. Then Levenspiel can tear down the building and put up a structure that is both profitable and "comfortable to [his] nature." A fair part of the novel, often couched in Lesser's fantasies, deals with these pleas and Lesser's rejoinders that a change of locale would upset his creative flow—which, to the reader, seems thin enough already. Even if the protagonist of Lesser's novel is not himself a novelist, the novel about a man who can love, inside a novel by a man who cannot, inside a novel by a man who mistakenly thinks he can, certainly seems claustrophobic enough to be a typical Malamud performance. But its excessively cerebral quality, with all the life driven out by sterile ingenuity, reminds us, by contrast, of the immediateness of Malamud's writing. He tries to drive a steadily widening wedge of conflict into his novel by bringing Willie Spearmint into the building to write yet another novel. Willie is a black ex-convict uneasily straddling the gap between his commitments to social revolution and to writing. Malamud can now pit Willie's concern for the * 'brothers," his fiction of brutality and self-hatred, and his own barely suppressed violence against Lesser's finicky, isolate self, his pallid subject matter, and his sense of the need to subordinate life and subject matter to the demands of form. To Lesser's "If we're talking about art, form demands its rights, or there's no order and maybe no meaning," Malamud can have Willie reply, "Art can kiss my juicy ass. You want to know what's really art?/ am art. Willie Spearmint, black man. My form is myself"

Malamud stirs the broth even faster by having Lesser fall in love with Willie's white "bitch," Irene. Their grudging friendship comes to an abrupt end when Lesser idiotically tells Willie that he and Irene are in love and thinking about getting married. Willie's response is to try to heave Lesser out of a fifth-story window, to burn both copies of Lesser's almost completed novel, and to disappear. About eight months later the two are together again: Lesser struggling to rewrite his novel, Willie birthing stories in which blacks kill Jewish landlords and storekeepers. Black and Jew whirl faster in their dance of death until, in a part of the building surrealistically and appropriately transformed into a jungle of monstrous, primal growths, Willie castrates Lesser as the Jew drives a hatchet into the black's brain. Malamud's cultural conclusion is imbedded within his grim novelistic one. So much damage has been done that we can hope only that one of the adversaries will show extraordinary mercy, the last word of the novel, said 113 consecutive times by Levenspiel. Clearly, Malamud attempts to make the tenement as enveloping a symbolic presence as Morris' grocery. By the time Willie returns, rats, roaches, and new debris from other falling buildings are streaming into the tenement, already defaced by the filth, obscene drawings, and shattered windows that are the gifts of visiting bums—as opposed to the resident fanatics. Lesser can only make a gesture of reconciliation and later fantasize a double wedding in an African village between himself and a black girl, and between Willie and Irene. Total extrication from his "normal" narrowness, symbolized by his obsessions with his novel and Willie, is beyond him. He cannot move out of the house of collapsing race relations; Levenspiel's alternative structure, which would, one hopes, blend black and white as reasonably as it would apartment and store, cannot be built in the world of this novel. Indeed, the landlord's closing plea for mercy is

450 I AMERICAN not sufficient proof that he has been cured of his animosity toward blacks. At one point in The Tenants, Willie claims that Lesser cannot understand him or his writing because black and white "feeling chemistry is different." Whether or not Willie is right, his characterization is convincing, with a nice rendering of his different idioms and with his stereotypical militant stances softened by occasional displays of affection and vulnerability (although one does wish that Malamud had occasionally used him instead of Lesser as his reflector). What most robs the book of the kind of force and inevitability Malamud sought is the unmotivated, flat, and altogether unconvincing way he develops the sexual competition. We first realize that the author has somehow gone wrong when Lesser makes love to a black girl with a group of hostile blacks, including her boyfriend, waiting for them across the hall—an absolutely unbelievable act for a man as guarded and careful as Lesser is until his manuscript is destroyed. In a rather silly scene Willie saves him from a mauling by playing the dozens (exchanging insults) with him. But two pages later, out of nowhere, Lesser—whose life is his writing— "realizes" that he may never write again if he does not tell Irene that he loves her. The affair that develops between the two is as flat as anything Malamud has ever done, in part because Irene is totally unrealized, transparently a convenience for plotting. It was also convenient but ultimately damaging for Malamud that Lesser is so imperceptive of Willie's likely response to the news that a Jew has thrown him out of Irene's bed. Admittedly, Lesser is no giant of insight. But since he has, for example, read a story by Willie in which a black kills a white to eat his heart, it is dizzying to hear this reasonably shrewd man reflect with no irony that Willie "might not want a white man to be in love with Irene."

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A much more believable victim of the urge for instant sexual surrender is Arthur Fidel man, Malamud 's inept Jew in Italy, "ever a sucker for strange beauty and strange experiences." In the late 1960's Malamud took a holiday from the sense of high social responsibility so evident in The Fixer and The Tenants, and added three playful Fidelman stories to the three he had already written, all of which were published in 1969 as Pictures of Fidelman: An Exhibition. The only Malamud bibliography to include the book lists it both as a novel and as a collection of stories. What makes difficult its classification as a novel, at least in the sense that the gathered stories in William Faulkner's The Unvanquished constitute a novel, is the distracting presence of two Fidelmans. The first is the tremulous, fussy art historian of "The Last Mohican," the prisoner of love in "Still Life," the prisoner in a brothel in "Naked Nude," and the pauper who stays alive by charging for piggyback rides over puddles in "Glass Blower of Venice." The second Fidelman is the assured pimp with a sword in his cane in "A Pimp's Revenge" and the con man of art in "Pictures of the Artist," who tells a peasant whom he has swindled, "Tough titty if you can't comprehend Art. ... Fuck off now.'' The gap between the soft passivity of the first Fidelman and the toughness of the second is too great, although Malamud tries in two ways to bridge the distance: the toughness is a shell the second Fidelman has developed to contain the hopeless yearning to recapture mother and sister, both dead; and "Pictures of the Artist" is written in such a fantastic style, a sort of clowning, surrealistic recasting of Giorgio Vasari'sL/ves of the Artists, that it might seem irrelevant to apply any conventional criteria of characterization to it. And if there is no way that the first Fidelman could become the second, the stories are unified by his comic relations to Italians and to art. More important, the level of the stories is generally so

BERNARD MALAMUD I 451 high (with "The Last Mohican" one of Malamud's best) and the entertainment so substantial that such carpings seem beside the point. Malamud has said that his 1945 marriage to a gentile, Ann de Chiara, both caused him "to be concerned with Jewish subject matter," for "it made me ask myself what it is I'm entitled to in Jewish experience," and "through her family . . . opened Italian life to me. Her background is richly Italo-American. When we lived in Rome [in 1956-57], I fell into Italian family life there." His Italian connection has proved to be a profitable one. In good part Malamud has been able to work with success the familiar theme of American gullibility and enthusiasm confronting Old World high culture, toughened cynicism, cunning, and opportunism because he has been able, with the Italians, to bring Fidelman into contact with a people who have at least as strong a histrionic impulse as the Jews. Further, a fair number of the Italians in the stories have bizarre, enlivening relations to art: a woman who has drowned her child; the proprietor of a brothel and his majordomo; a pimp; Beppo Fassoli, a glassblower who converts Fidelman from enslavement to women who will not love him and art he cannot create to bisexuality and a useful craft. Thus the book ends happily, with the sentence "In America he worked as a craftsman in glass and loved men and women." Even in a relatively lightweight story like "A Pimp's Revenge," Malamud's need to see Italy with a painter's eye as well as with his sharp, novelist's one produces vivid results. For example: The painter . . . gazed for a reflective hour at the Tuscan hills in September haze. Otherwise, sunlight on the terraced silver-trunked olive trees, and San Miniato, sparkling, framed in the distance by black cypresses. Make an interesting

impressionist oil, green and gold mosaics and those black trees of death, but that's been done. Not to mention Van Gogh's tormented cypresses. In 1973 Malamud announced that he had begun a difficult novel about a man named William Dubin "which may not see the light of day." Since 1976 came and passed without the book's appearance, Malamud's string of having brought out a novel every four or five years since 1952 came to an end. One long section of "Dubin's Lives" (about 17,000 words) appeared in 1977, another section early in 1978. While it is impossible to predict with any confidence the success of the completed novel, what has appeared is in several ways a real advance over anything Malamud has attempted before. With Dubin, a first-rate biographer in his late fifties, the author has a protagonist much less circumscribed by history or his own ineptitude or narrowness, much more like himself. At times one is reminded of Bellow at his best, whether Dubin's sensibility expresses itself ii) ponderings over transience, incompletion, or death, or in his wonderfully open responses to nature, or in such overflowings of his heart as his apostrophes to the mirror while shaving, or such a lovely attempt to arrest the passage of the seasons as "Beating his chest, he flails at time. Time dances on. 'Now I am ice, now I am sorrel.' He shakes his useless fist." The use of the rich, new stylistic mode reminds us of Malamud's Emergence in the 1950's. How new his voice and locale were, with the blendings of realism, fantasy, sktetl, New York City, blunt prose, and the gnarled poetry of immigrant syntax and diction; how vivid the sense of life in this and much of the later work has remained. How much works like The Assistant, The Fixer, and perhaps fifteen stories have led us to expect. If he has not brought nar-

452 I AMERICAN rative and moral force to every paragraph he has published—and what writer has?—Bernard Malamud has brought to them enough to justify inclusion among the outstanding writers of fiction of his generation.

WRITERS Giroux, 1973. "The Silver Crown," "Man in the Drawer,' * ' 'The Letter," "In Retirement,''' 'Rembrandt's Hat," "Notes from a Lady at a Dinner Party," "My Son the Murderer," "Talking Horse."

UNCOLLECTED STORIES

Selected Bibliography WORKS OF

BERNARD MALAMUD NOVELS

The Natural. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1952. The Assistant. New York: Farrar, Straus & Cudahy, 1957. A New Life. New York: Farrar, Straus & Cudahy, 1961. The Fixer. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1966. Pictures ofFidelman: An Exhibition. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 1969. The Tenants. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1971. COLLECTIONS OF SHORT STORIES

The Magic Barrel. New York: Farrar, Straus & Cudahy, 1958. 'The First Seven Years," "The Mourners," "The Girl of My Dreams," "Angel Levine," "Behold the Key," "Take Pity," "The Prison," "The Lady of the Lake," "A Summer's Reading," "The Bill," "The Last Mohican," "The Loan," 'The Magic Barrel." Idiots First. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1963. "Idiots First," "Black Is My Favorite Color," "Still Life," "The Death of Me," "A Choice of Profession," "Life Is Better than Death," "The Jewbird," "Naked Nude," "The Cost of Living," "The Maid's Shoes," "Suppose a Wedding," "The German Refugee." Pictures ofFidelman: An Exhibition. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1969. "The Last Mohican," "Still Life," "Naked Nude," "A Pimp's Revenge," "Pictures of the Artist," "Glass Blower of Venice." Rembrandt's Hat. New York: Farrar, Straus &

"Benefit Performance," Threshold, 3:20-22 (February 1943). "The Place Is Different Now," American Preface, 8:230-42 (Spring 1943). "A Long Ticket for Isaac," in Creative Writing and Rewriting: Contemporary American Novelists at Work, edited by John Kuehl. New York: Appleton, 1967, pp. 71-91. "An Exorcism," Harper's, 237:63-70 (December 1968). "God's Wrath," Atlantic, 229:59-62 (February 1972). "Dubin's Lives," New Yorker, 53:38-50 (April 18, 1977); 53:36-47 (April 25, 1977). "Home Is the Hero," Atlantic, 241, no. 1:42-57 (January 1978).

BIBLIOGRAPHY Bernard Malamud: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Leslie A. and Joyce W. Field. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1974. Pp. 170-79. Kosofsky, Rita Nathalie. Bernard Malamud: An Annotated Check List. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1970.

CRITICAL STUDIES, INTERVIEWS, AND BIOGRAPHICAL MATERIAL Alter, Robert. "Malamud as Jewish Writer," Commentary, 42, no. 3:71-76 (September 1966). Astro, Richard. "In the Heart of the Valley: Bernard Malamud's A New Life,'' in Bernard Malamud: A Collection of Critical Essays. Pp. 143-55. Baumbach, Jonathan. "The Economy of Love: The Novels of Bernard Malamud," Kenyon Review, 25:438-57 (Summer 1963). Cadle, Dean. "Bernard Malamud," Wilson Library Bulletin, 32:266 (December 1958). Dupee, F. W. "Malamud: The Uses and Abuses of

BERNARD MALAMUD I 453 Commitment," in his The King of the Cats and Other Remarks on Writers and Writing. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1965, Pp. 156-63. Fiedler, Leslie A. "Malamud: The Commonplace as Absurd," in his No! in Thunder. Boston: Beacon Press, 1960. Pp. 101-10. Field, Leslie A. and Joyce W., eds. Bernard Malamud and the Critics. New York: New York University Press, 1970. . "An Interview with Bernard Malamud," in Bernard Malamud: A Collection of Critical Essays. Pp. 8-17. Frankel, Haskel. "Interview with Bernard Malamud," Saturday Review, 49, no. 37:39-40 (September 10, 1966). Freedman, William. "From Bernard Malamud, with Discipline and Love," in The Fifties: Fiction, Poetry, Drama, edited by Warren French. Deland, Ha.: Everett-Edwards, 1971. Pp. 133-43. Hicks, Granville. "His Hopes on the Human Heart," Saturday Review, 46, no. 41:31-32 (October 12, 1963). . "One Man to Stand for Six Million,'' Saturday Review, 49, no. 37:37-39 (September 10, 1966). Kazin, Alfred. "Bernard Malamud: The Magic and the Dread," in his Contemporaries. Boston: Atlantic-Little, Brown, 1962. Pp. 202-07. Klein, Marcus. "Bernard Malamud: The Sadness of

Goodness," in his After Alienation: American Novels in Mid-Century. Cleveland: World, 1962. Pp. 247-93. Podhoretz, Norman. "Achilles in Left Field," Commentary, 15, no. 3:321-26 (March 1953). Richman, Sidney. Bernard Malamud. New York: Twayne, 1966. Roth, Philip, "Writing American Fiction," Commentary, 32:223-33 (March 1961). . "Imagining Jews," New York Review of Books, 21, no. 15:22-28 (October 3, 1974). Rovit, Earl. "Bernard Malamud and the Jewish Literary Tradition," Critique, 3, no. 2:3-10 (WinterSpring 1960). Shenker, Israel. "For Malamud It's Story," New York Times, October 3, 1971, sec. 7, pp. 20-22. Solotaroff, Theodore. "Bernard Malamud's Fiction: The Old and the New," Commentary, 33, no. 3: 197-204 (March 1962). Tanner, Tony. "Bernard Malamud and the New Life," Critical Quarterly, 10:151-68 (SpringSummer 1968). Wasserman, Earl R. "The Natural: Malamud's World Ceres," Centennial Review, 9, no. 4: 438-60 (Fall 1965). Wershba, Joseph. "Not Horror but 'Sadness,' " New York Port, September 14, 1958, p. M2.

—ROBERT SOLOTAROFF

Edgar Lee Masters 1868-19SO

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N 1915, with the publication of Spoon River Anthology, Edgar Lee Masters found himself the center of an American literary controversy. A forty-seven-year-old Illinois lawyer who had longed since boyhood to be a writer, he was delighted: "My strength and my weakness have been that I have lived in the imagination. . . . imagination has been the controlling influence of my life. . . . all the while my heart was on poetry and the literary life." Hailed by John Cowper Powys as "the most original work . . . that American genius had produced since the death of Henry James," Spoon River Anthology was not the first of Masters' books nor the most typical. A study of the fifty-two others reveals that instead of exhibiting stylistic originality, Masters was inclined to follow the better popular trends, in whatever genre; and rather than craft and technique (the fascination of many modern writers, particularly poets), he tended to emphasize subject matter and theme. In fact, as Gorham Munson reminisced about the division in writers at a party given for Masters after the collection appeared, "The younger people were as usual discussing the everlasting topic of form, the older people aired their views on antireligion." If this dichotomy holds, then Masters was in some ways more akin to the "older writers" than to the new writers whose obsession was innovative form.

The pervasive and continuing themes throughout his work would also suggest this kind of categorization. Masters revered poetry and literature because they could better the human condition; they were vehicles to raise the common consciousness. (Many of the wasted lives he depicted in his work could have been improved through some artistic influence.) And the themes that he chose to write about, and from, for the larger part of his life were those of national consciousness—the aims and identity of the American culture—approached from a liberal, altruistic point of view; the middle-class values of honor, beauty, virtue (which might or might not include chastity), personal freedom, industry, and success; and a stubborn insistence on the possibility—even the necessity—of romantic love. This uneven mixture of popular concepts and ideality is evident throughout Masters9 writing and life, and leads—at least so far as his writing is concerned—to unpredictable combinations of bathos and effectiveness, drama and melodrama. John Hallwas and Dennis Reader identify these attitudes with the influence of the American heartland at the turn of the century (and link Masters with Carl Sandburg and Vachel Lindsay in absorbing them): "the midwestern landscape itself, the pioneer history of Illinois, the developing myth of Abraham Lincoln (later rejected by

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EDGAR LEE MASTERS I 455 Masters), the democratic idealism of William Jennings Bryan, the social consciousness of Governor John Peter Altgeld, and the Mississippi River fiction of Mark Twain.'' Masters was thus established in the varied patterns of a strong populist tradition; and even though Spoon River Anthology marked the world of contemporary poetry as decidedly as did T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land (1922), the two books were speaking for opposing attitudes toward the state of American culture. In Across Spoon River, the 1936 autobiography that describes his life only to 1917 (two years after the publication of the Anthology), Masters frequently laments his father's coercing him to study law rather than continue his academic program, which included Greek, literature, and rhetoric. Since his last years in public school, Masters had considered himself a writer; and the influence of a teacher, Mary Fisher, and a supportive friend, Anne, had already given him some appreciation for the great writers. His high school valedictory address was on Robert Burns; later that year he presented a paper on Whitman's poetry for the Scientific Association. The enthusiasm he felt for a literary career is evident years later, when he speaks of his life as lawyer: I was under heavy living expenses. I was not pursuing the life of a contemplating poet, but the life of a drudging lawyer. I had got into this while doing my best to free myself for what I believed was the exercise of my gifts. I wanted to write, but I had to live. Although Masters felt himself coerced into a legal career, he did learn important things during his thirty years as a lawyer. At first practicing independently and then, for eight years, as a partner of Clarence Danow, he gained insight into government, social structures, and, most important, people. The abuses of the legal system gave Masters ammunition for his own progressive social and political attitudes; the people

he came to know gave him characters for his writing, especially when dialogue and the approximation of natural speech were important. His legal career did, however, make writing difficult; he describes in detail having to write late at night, at lunch, or early in the morning. His first commercial play, Althea (1907), was an attempt to make enough money so that he could retire from the law. Several of his early works (the 1910 and 1912 collections of love poems, Songs and Sonnets, and the early single poems of Spoon River Anthology) were published under the pseudonym Webster Ford, because he was afraid that people would not do business with a lawyer who wrote about clients. Reticent as Masters was about his literary leanings, he was adamant that he would not relinquish them; his first collection of essays, The New Star Chamber and Other Essays (1904), was one of his first books to be published (in contrast with others, which were only printed but not distributed commercially) under his name. Masters the attorney could write the anti-imperialist essays included here (they had been printed previously in the Chicago Chronicle and the pro-Bryan Jeffersonian Magazine); they were palatable to his friends and clients, who were also experiencing the enthusiasms of liberal and progressive politics. The New Star Chamber reflects Masters' insistence that a moral commitment is necessary in whatever career a person pursues. Theodore Roosevelt, in the essay of that title, is an erratic leader because he acts from whim rather than from a firm ethical center; such leaders "lead men into the ways of vulgarity and violence." Most of the essays in this collection are wistful; writing on John Marshall, Masters wishes for politicians who will help improve the average person's condition, politicians who are "devoted to the rights of men instead of the powers of government . . . were stirred by the principles of liberty instead of the glory of the state."

456 I AMERICAN Masters is suspicious of ' 'those thinkers who place the State on a higher plane than men." He is also an and-imperial 1st, and his anger about the United States' involvement in the Philippines is evident both in these early essays and poems and in his verse drama Maximilian (1902), the theme of which, he said, was chosen to underscore the Philippine travesty. What is most interesting about Masters' use of this political situation is that he consistently imbues it with moralistic implications, as when he insists, in "The Philippine Conquest": "The constitution and the declaration have been duly ravished. . . . The people at large are paying the taxes and undergoing the obvious moral decline which has set in. ... The whole of society has been shaken. . . ." In these essays, as in the early poems, Masters' concern, whether he writes about Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, William Jennings Bryan, or the whole of democracy, is to maintain the "moral lights" of a culture that had, a hundred years earlier, evinced only promise. In a tone much darker than that of Whitman's Democratic Vistas, Masters mourns the country that was so filled with vigor and affirmation during his boyhood. (Corollary themes that become important in his later works are the waste of the Civil War and the duplicity of Abraham Lincoln, and the resulting blight on the United States. Whether it be his own boyhood or the country's pristine state a century past, Masters enjoys lamenting the Eden that he insists on visualizing there.) Most of Masters' views in The New Star Chamber essays are conventional populist expressions and, as such, need little elaboration. What is significant, for his later writing as well, is his tendency to find moral equations in seemingly unrelated social patterns. For example, his censure of Mark Twain, in the 1938 biography of that author, depends on Twain's lack of a firm ethical center: "His principles were vacillating

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and unheroic. . . . His mind did not rise to issues that concerned measures of historical moment. He had sympathy, he did not have large moral devotions." Part of Masters' method throughout the portrait is to contrast the real anguish that Whitman experienced at the corruption of his country with Twain's small laughter at the frivolity of nineteenth-century America. His palliative name, meaning "safe water," comes to image his ability—for Masters; and the great promise that surfaced briefly, in Tom Sawyer at least, never came to fruition. The cause, according to Masters, lay not in technical weaknesses but, rather, in Twain's self-satisfied, narrow vision. The vision that Masters ascribes to Whitman, of America as "a republic, a great venture in liberty toward a new day, a higher and purer liberty, a better chance for the poor and the oppressed, the cheated, and the wronged," "meant very little to [Twain], certainly nothing compared to what it meant to Whitman." For Masters, great men—Whitman, Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, William Marion Reedy, himself—had, and maintained, that vision; inferior people, no matter what their public reputation, lacked it. Among the latter would be Mark Twain, Hamilton, Lincoln, Bryan, and Theodore Roosevelt (although once Roosevelt admired Spoon River, Masters began to relent in his criticism of him); and one of the major qualities that they held in common was denial of their origin. The greatest people explored and revered their childhood, and especially the country from which they came: Masters wrote nearly a dozen books that emphasized his intrigue with the Sangamon Valley in Illinois, books ranging from the impressionistic novel Mitch Miller, to the Petersburg-Lewistown-based Spoon River poems, to the geographic account of the valley itself. His interest in both Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas, evident in many poems and in the drama Jack Kelso, stems also from his fascination with

EDGAR LEE MASTERS I 457 place, for both men lived in that part of Illinois during their formative years. Masters was convinced that moral integrity somehow accompanied a person's acknowledgment of, and pride in, place; and he frequently attributed moral decline to rootlessness: in Twain's case "he lost his home, and in a sense became a wanderer for life." Somber as Masters' portrait of Twain is, the latter's one redeeming quality is his complete devotion to his wife, Olivia. Fascinated throughout his career with romantic (and usually sexual) relationships, Masters saw a person's capacity for love as an important index of character—or lack of it. His image of the feminine, drawn in part from Arthur Schopenhauer, is that will, passion, and emotion are often at odds with the apparently more masculine faculties of reason, intellect, and control. Often, in Masters' poetry and fiction, woman's will overcomes man's intellect, with disastrous results. But, at its most affirmative, people's willingness to follow their passion is a strength; and in Mark Twain's case, only his love for his wife kept him sane. Masters' near-obsession with the female principle, the woman as muse, surfaces repeatedly, particularly in his autobiography, where he frequently comments on his early romantic experiences and concludes with several lengthy discussions of "the eternal-womanly." Pointing out the dominance of this figure in every literate culture, Masters emphasizes that Her image is in every shrine. . . . the mother of all things. She was originally a male saint and became a woman saint. . . . Look how the eternal-womanly emerges to the heightened imagination everywhere: to Faust as Marguerite, to Christians as Mary of Nazareth, to the Chinese as Kuanyin P'usa. . . . to Goethe [in celebrating] love as the all-uplifting and all-redeeming power on earth and in heaven; and to man it is

revealed in its purest and most perfect form through woman. He continues, candidly: I dwell upon this subject because I feel that a good deal of my secret is contained in it, and I would be glad if I could fully express it. For myself I divine the operation of the cosmic mind in the love of men and women, and hence I have identified a beloved woman with the mysteries of creative b e a u t y . . . . I have placed all the women in whom I was deeply interested in a role that flesh and blood cannot often fulfill. . . . The male-female relationship is a dominant theme in most of Masters' writing, both poetry and drama. In Maximilian: A Play in Five Acts, he distorts historical events so that the love between Carlotta and her husband can be shown repeatedly. Rather than having Carlotta return to Europe to seek help for Maximilian, he keeps her in Mexico (and borrows much of her mad scene from both Macbeth and Hamlet) so that she can appear in Maximilian's prison cell just before his execution. The early scenes between them, when they have just arrived in Chapultepec, are drawn with believable love; she enters his room and he says, " Tis you, I thought the sun was shining." A few pages later, she speaks in fear as he describes the political chicanery that traps them: But save me from this shadow, fold me to you— This ghostly nothing which you pictured so— Freezes my blood (I would not have you leave— Once mad, Carlotta continues to lament the fortunes of their brilliant love: Oh what a love my heart has given you— All heaven can't contain it. Maximilian mourns for her sanity, describing her as "some bright planet buffeted with clouds": Oh, had it been the will of heaven only To sacrifice my heart, my mind, my life

458 I AMERICAN In this inscrutable struggle. But for her, This little girl, this princess without fault To waste her spirit on the barren air. . . . In this tragedy, Masters does work at presenting political ideas, of course, in keeping with his insistence that the Philippine situation had prompted the drama. His interest as dramatist, however, appears to lie in the personal relationships and in the characterization of Maximilian as hero. Going nobly to his death after he has refused an escape plan, Maximilian reads to his cohorts about Socrates and compares himself to that great figure. The last act of the play sounds, in fact, as if it might have been written in 1933, in the midst of the poem "The Serpent in the Wilderness," in which Masters compares Jesus Christ with Socrates and finds Socrates far superior. The strain of Hellenism that runs through Masters' writing is partly the result of his interest in the great figures of Greek culture (countless references to Aeschylus, for example, or to Socrates or Sappho) but more pervasively of his belief in the supremacy of the intellect, and in his character (according to Willis Barnstone) as an "inconsolable pessimist: not because of facile skepticism, but because he wanted more; he was profoundly wounded because life ran out on him, and, like an arrested adolescent, he was forced to live with his dreams." Many of these themes are present in A Book of Verses (1898), a collection that, for all its derivative form and imitative parlor-poetry titles, still expresses Masters' basic tenets: Knowledge, thought, philosophy Our attendant angels be.. One of the least formal poems, "An Etching," foreshadows some of the characteristics of the later imagists' work, but its subject is still the abstract duality of intellect-emotion:

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The dull sky and the yellow meads; And the stripped trees moaning in the blast. The mind that thinks, and the heart that bleeds, The unborn day and the buried past, And this gray Sphynx called Life. Many other poems repeat Masters' interest in this dichotomy, but in traditional forms and language. Their titles suggest their sources: "Ode to Autumn," "A Dream of Italy," "Ode to Night," "A Song of Courage," "On Reading Eckerman's Conversations With Goethe." Romantic and literary models gave Masters his early education in poetry; it was only after his experience writing essays and plays, and reading more widely in other kinds of poetry, that he began to write more original poems. There are some traces of that originality in this early collection, but they are slight. Masters' interest in native country and its fertile environment begins in "Illinois," but his emotion is quickly lost in cliches: "Illinois, an empire is thine of billowy fields of glory . . ."; as does his idea that a person must acknowledge and explore that environment: "The flower of Art is the child of the soil and sun." Sappho ("deathless") is one example of that kind of firmly anchored strength; Whitman, whom he compares with both Job and Aeschylus, is another. "The guardian of the land he made divine,'' Whitman is remarkable for his soul, his knowledge, and his "eagle eye." But even though Masters' sentiment is genuine, his choice of figurative language and diction remains embarrassing, not only in its imitative patterns but also in its clumsy rhythms. The eulogy "Walt Whitman," for example, closes He was our truest child, Our Western world beguiled And heaven bestowed. Bernard Duffey notes the improvement of Masters' poetry as early as The Blood of the

EDGAR LEE MASTERS I 459 Prophets (1905), choosing as strong poems "A Ballad of Jesus of Nazareth'' and his exploration of love, "Samson and Delilah." Although many readers see the poems in this collection as extensions of the political themes expressed in The New Star Chamber—which, to some extent, they are—they also show much evidence that Masters had left certain confining tendencies of formal verse and was moving toward the medium he often chose throughout his career, a long-line stanza resembling blank verse. He used that form for what he called verse drama, poems, plays, and even sections of his fiction. It seemed related in his aesthetic at this time to narrative, regardless of genre; love poems, such as those included in Songs and Sonnets (1910), were still written in quatrains, sonnets, or other conventional patterns. These had a lyric identity, as opposed to the storytelling function of much of Masters' other writing. David Perkins writes convincingly of the impact of prose traditions on the new poetry; and Masters' tendency to write narrative verse, using many conventions of prose, is only one of many instances of Perkins' belief. Masters' greatest opportunity to use prose devices during these early years lay not in poetry but in drama. Although he had high hopes for the commercial success of Althea, that play provided only experience. The second of his popular plays, The Trifler, was considered by the Harrison Grey Fiskes, who eventually chose not to produce it because it dealt with adultery. Masters was clearly mining the "domestic melodrama" vein—plays descended from East Lynne that posed moral problems, rewarded virtue, and often appealed to a feminine audience. Altheat a study of the "double standard," has as heroine a wife (Althea Hardcastle) whose husband asks her to promise never to remarry if he should die. If she does, she will lose his comparatively large estate. The irony lies in the fact that the husband, Lucian, has had numerous affairs

during his marriage; his wife, none. Yet when she asks for time to consider his demand, he grows angry and they separate. Masters complicates the plot needlessly; the play does not, however, gravitate as simply as it might toward sympathy for Althea, because Masters also emphasizes the man's role as breadwinner and its accompanying social pressures. The image of woman "sucking" the man dry is set against the argument for various feminine freedoms. One cannot help but feel that Masters' chafing under financial pressure is reflected in that particular development of his theme. The Trifler also begins with a sympathetic heroine, the widowed Isabel Sedgwick, but shifts during its three acts to a definite hostility toward her. This is the first of Masters' fictional use of the cousin's wife—also called Isabel in his autobiography—in his work; the plot of the first act parallels his account of their romance as he gives it in other sources. This seems to be an earlier romance than the poignant situation with Deirdre (Tennessee Mitchell, who later became Sherwood Anderson's wife); but there are places where Masters uses the episodes interchangeably: both women are indiscreet, provocative, and challenging. This situation, and the longer involvement with the woman known as Deirdre, dominate such books as Skeeters Kirby and Mirage, novels from the 1920's; and, as Lois Hartley comments, "one wonders if the effect [of the affair] was ever extirpated, for the episode permeates [all his later writing]." In the play, as in Songs and Sonnets, the theme is unrequited love; the woman is at fault because her love is insincere (she is the trifler). Adding all the elements of melodrama that will fit, Masters includes a suicide pact, an arrest, some debauched characters who try to save Isabel and Laflin (pictured as a harmless romantic, despite his being responsible for his wife's death; his rallying cry is "Nothing is wrong where love is"); Isabel finally cannot marry Laflin even to

460 I AMERICAN save him from arrest. He goes off to punishment, and we surmise—from her tears and bowed head—that she has learned how dangerous a flirtation can be. By the time of The Leaves of the Tree (1909), Masters had found a way through his personal dilemma, so that his heroine, Julia McFall, and the idealized stockbroker, Robert Reid, can marry and find equality in the relationship. "I'm for the double code or nothing," swears Reid, and marries Julia although her name has been linked with the wealthy playboy Tracy Bradley. Tracy, in turn, is so brokenhearted by Julia's engagement that he kills himself. Masters' next two plays, Eileen and The Locket, return to the Tennessee Mitchell story. The heroine, Eileen, has a lover, Hamilton Townsend, who has been found in her apartment. The character of Carl Crittenden, the male protagonist, is based on Masters himself. Eileen once again tells the story of the lovers' visit. The Locket is a complicated sequel in which Eileen's husband, a traditional druggist and churchgoer appropriately named John Church, discovers her affair with Carl and forgives her. Carl reappears and wants Eileen to run away with him. The plot is the by-now stale romantic triangle, less melodramatic than the ending of The Trifter but no more innovative. As Masters was to emphasize in The Nuptial Flight, men and women are driven to marriage, to sexual and social stability; but often such arrangements are wrong. The Locket studies four marriages, none of which is fulfilling. As Hamilton Townsend says, "Marriage—a citadel of refuge for deserters from the glorious cause of freedom." The Locket leaves the audience with the dilemma of a passionless society, unhappy because of its passionless relationships. But in The Bread of Idleness (1911) Masters attempts to analyze what he sees as the chasm between women and men in the social roles they are forced to play. Still melodramatic and fantastic in places, this

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play does have sections of convincing dialogue in its four acts; and because it is longer, the changes in character that enable the lovers to reunite seem plausible. When Herbert Drury goes bankrupt because of the frivolous spending of his young wife Gertrude, his anger causes him to abuse her. Masters builds to this climactic scene by having Gertrude and four of her friends discuss their lives—their spending, pastimes, attitudes toward husbands and society—so that we understand their total ignorance of the business world and adult pressures, and their completely parasitic existence. Gertrude has a sense of her worthlessness and expresses it to her mother: "I am nothing in the scheme of things. . . . I have not fulfilled my mission." She questions the parasitic relationship, even though she is furious when Herbert angrily blames her for his difficulty, by comparing herself with a prostitute: . . . everything she said was just what I have thought, only she was justifying a life lived against the rules, while I walk in the sunshine of a life lived according to the rules. But we were essentially the same. She made herself attractive; so did 1.1 got money from a man; so did she. She had no children; neither have 1.1 took her hand in parting. She was as good as I. Masters gives enough description of both Herbert and Gertrude so that, as they separate and learn to support themselves through physical labor, their development seems likely. Their final reunion in the new life of personal industry is much less fantastic than the denouements of his other plays. In drama, as in his other kinds of writing, Masters held out for a realism that he could recognize and work toward. As he wrote in his autobiography, this was the period of a new concept of art, one much less dependent on literary antecedents; and he was soon to be—in the writing of Spoon River Anthology—"exhausted. . . . I

EDGAR LEE MASTERS I 461 would experience a sensation of lightness of body. . . . theflamehad become so intense that it could not be seen, and I wrote with such ease that I did not realize the sapping of my life forces that was going on." The quality and innovation of Spoon River Anthology stemmed not only from this great release of Masters' psychic energy, but also from his having found a satisfying poetic model for his interest in narrative. As late as 1910 and 1912, in the two collections Songs and Sonnets, his concept of love poetry was conventional. (In his earlier book, The Blood of the Prophets, he had already experimented with freer forms; but his innovation occurred largely in poetry that was narrative or political.) While many of the poems in these two books are effective (nearly all of them seem to relate to the Deirdre romance of 1908-09), they suggest that Masters was not easy with the freely measured line that the imagists, Sandburg, and Robert Frost would use a bit later. In 1913, however, his friend William Marion Reedy (who had never encouraged him to write poetry) gave Masters a copy of J. W. Mackail's Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology, praising its ''ironic, sardonic, epigraphic" qualities. Earlier that year Masters had become friends with Sandburg and had witnessed the reception of Sandburg's nine ''Chicago Poems" in Poetry—he was, in short, aware that new kinds of poems were afoot. Soon Masters was trying the epitaph form (in free verse) in a poem for Dreiser, "Theodore the Poet/' The experiment was a success, and before long his epitaphs were almost writing themselves. The concentration on present-day and common subject matter was an important change for Masters, but even more important was the parallel between the Greek epitaph and Masters' use of the scene in his drama. The Greek poets' ability to focus on a salient moment or situation, and through that focus to depict essential character,

resembled Masters' own aim in both the early plays and in Dramatic Duologues (1934). Each of the four short plays in the latter collection conveys the turning point in a romantic relationship (Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, Andrew Jackson and Peggy Eaton, Aaron Burr and Mme. Jumel, and Rabelais and the Queen of Whims). They range from tragic to comic, with Masters reaching his poetic best in the first, with the imagery of Anne Boleyn's slender neck. This selection of the core motivation, with the author pruning description so that nothing remains but that core, is Masters' method in the successful epitaphs. The poems of both Spoon River Anthology and the 1924 sequel, The New Spoon River, follow one of three general patterns, all of which can be found in the Greek Anthology. Of these patterns one is less successful, because it cannot avoid being heavily didactic. The two more vivid forms depend for their impact upon the specific character's revelation of crucial—and often intimate—biographical information early in the poem, and on that character's use of vernacular speech in telling his or her story (many of the poems are spoken by the character presented, in first person). We know the person in the epitaph from both event and speech pattern. Masters, as more than a fledgling dramatist, was comfortable with both of these devices. The dominant pattern for the best Spoon River poems is event-elaboration-meditation, seen in some of the most famous of the poems: 64LucindaMatlock," "Hannah Armstrong," "Isaiah Beethoven," "Archibald Higbie," "Nancy Knapp," "Nellie Clark," "Julia Miller," and "Benjamin Pantier." "Flossie Cabanis" shows the pattern clearly, with its informative opening: From Bindle's opera house in the village To Broadway is a great step. But I tried to take it, my ambition fired This is followed quickly by further detail and event:

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When sixteen years of age, Seeing "East Lynne" played here in the village By Ralph Barrett, the coming Romantic actor, who enthralled my soul. True, I trailed back home, a broken failure, When Ralph disappeared in New York, Leaving me alone in the city— But life broke him also.

lead to the character's death: Willard Fluke's confession of adultery foiled by his daughter's presence; Eugene Carman's anger at being "Rhodes' slave!" leading to his stroke; Tom Merritt's murder by his wife's lover. Another effective use is to change the reader's opinion of the person, as in the impressive "Elsa Wertman"

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I was a peasant girl from Germany, Blue-eyed, rosy, happy and strong. And the first place I worked was at Thomas Greene's. On a summer's day when she was away He stole into the kitchen and took me Right in his arms and kissed me on my throat, I turning my head. Then neither of us Seemed to know what happened. And I cried for what would become of me. And cried and cried as my secret began to show.

'But life broke him also'' is the beginning of the last section, the meditation, in which the character makes use of the insight that the sequence of events has provided. The poem closes: In all this place of silence There are no kindred spirits. How I wish Duse could stand amid the pathos Of these quiet fields And read these words. In the case of Lucinda Matlock, Masters9 grandmother, the meditation is even more didactic: What is this I hear of sorrow and weariness, Anger, discontent and drooping hopes? Degenerate sons and daughters, Life is too strong for you— It takes life to love Life. It also serves as further "event" in the sequence that Masters has already established, from the opening occasion—"I went to the dances at Chandlerville"—through the rapid recounting of her life's vigorous chronology. Again, as in many of the Spoon River Anthology poems, the first-person point of view and the candid subject matter cannot help but be effective. A second successful pattern for the epitaphs deviates from this basic structure only in that its ending is a kind of reversal; either Masters gives us a surprising event, as did O. Henry, or the character's "meditation" is so ironic, vehement, or violent that its intensity is startling. At its simplest, Masters uses the surprising event to

The ' 'story'' and event leave little to the imagination, but Masters begins to vary the expected pattern in the second section: One day Mrs. Greene said she understood, And would make no trouble for me, And, being childless, would adopt it. (He had given her a farm to be still.) So she hid in the house and sent out rumors, As if it were going to happen to her. And all went well and the child was born—They were so kind to me. The closing section reveals even more of a variance on our expectations: Later I married Gus Wertman, and years passed. But—at political rallies when sitters-by thought I was crying At the eloquence of Hamilton Greene— That was not it. No! I wanted to say: That's my son! That's my son! A dimension not often emphasized in the fiction and drama dealing with this situation is the feel-

EDGAR LEE MASTERS I 463 ing of the unknown mother. Masters avoids the overt sentimentalism that might easily attach itself to the subject by using the change-of-direction development. In addition to the surprising event, Masters enjoyed turning the meditation toward irony, often very heavy irony: "Rev. Freemont Deadman" giving up the ministry for public lecturing (' 'You see I needed money") or the disillusion of Robert Southey Burke over his allegiance to Mayor Blood. These endings are symptomatic of the much greater irony of situation, when a person's acts are consistently misinterpreted, to that person's detriment (the situation of Doctor Meyers and Minerva, "Butch" Weldy, Knowlt Hoheimer, and many of Spoon River's inhabitants). The sense of great honesty or even impropriety in many of the epitaphs stems from another facet of Masters' surprise-ending device. He frequently uses a sexual or physically violent ending to create fresh impact, as when "Editor Whedon" speaks about abortions or "Belle Dollinger" shouts proudly, "An honest whore's the noblest work of God!" The most striking example of this technique occurs in a poem from The New Spoon River: that of Dick Sapper, a liberal outcast jailed for twenty years because of socalled traitorous statements made during World War I. The last section reads: So they put me in prison for twenty years, Where my body broke, and my spirit broke, And where in vain I tried to be pardoned. And I coughed and cursed to that awful moment When the blood of my body shot from my mouth Like a gushing hose, and I was dead. And some of you call this a republic! Well, some of you be damned, And God damned! Because so few of the epitaphs in The New Spoon River are written in the event-elaborationmeditation (or surprise variation on the meditation), this poem is more impressive, by contrast,

than it would have been if it had appeared in Spoon River Anthology. The third pattern of epitaphs—occurring in both collections, but much more frequently in The New Spoon River—is the least effective because, in it, event has almost disappeared. The heart of the poem is the meditation. While Masters does leave the voice of the poem with its persona, each speaker's identity depends—in some cases, depends entirely—on his or her morality. There is little mention of specific event, place, or person; there is only attitude. Marshall Carpenter Remember not your Creator In the days of your youth, But remember your Youth in the days of your creator: Remember how you felt, aspired, loved; Remember your visions and faiths, And the beliefs in yourself and others. Remember whom you chose, And whom you rejected, and why. Remember how you looked to others, And for what you were taken by others. Remember your house and its trees, And the village. Remember the subtle ways of air Which blew aside intangible curtains, And showed you what you could not report. Thus hold to yourself and grow To yourself as an oak, Turning never to an alder bush, Or sand grass! "Marshall Carpenter" has no memorable self; there is no event with which we may connect his realizations. While a reader may be inclined to follow his advice, as art or as poetry his words mean nothing more than any other platitudinous injunction. "Bertrand Hume" is another of the many poems that concentrate on message to the nearomission of event and personality:

464 I AMERICAN To recall and revision blue skies; To imagine the summer's clouds; To remember mountains and wooded slopes, And the blue of October water Moving in this vein, the poem closes with a plea for more life, more chance to live a full life; but that plea is equally bland. Even in the later poems that attempt to use an event as the substitute for the didactic message, Masters has changed proportion. Meditation is the dominant element. The poem "Ambrose Seyffert" stems from a woman's sacrifice of home and children for love of a man; but the account of that concrete situation occupies only a small section of the poem: Oh! The years we waste, and the souls we waste In learning one simple thing— And what it takes to teach us! Not until after her lonely sojourn In Buenos Ayres, leaving her children, Who had to be left to leave her husband— All in devotion to me. Not until after her hopeless return To the door of dishonor, the roof of remorse, Did the meaning of that devotion to me Stare like the blinded eyes of a friend On my poor heart gifted with vision at last To know devotion—but when it is lost. To know devotion! Like one who knows the good of a lamp, When the lamp is out, and he stumbles in darkness, And falls to a fate of endless pain— Lamenting the absent lamp forever! This is one of the stronger poems of New Spoon River. Masters' increasing turn toward stentorian writing, which taught more openly than it entertained, deadened the lengthy collection of epitaphs to the extent that few readers who had enjoyed Spoon River Anthology could feel that this collection was really a sequel. Be-

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cause of each character's absorption with making philosophical points, New Spoon River is less a connected series of portraits; there are few related plot lines or tangled character relationships. Part of the fun of reading Spoon River Anthology lies in sorting through the names and events, and tracing this person to that event in later poems. In New Spoon River the narrative sense of discovery is almost completely missing. Whether or not it was gratuitous self-justification, Masters' own comments about New Spoon River indicate that the differences in style were intentional. He wrote to Horace Liveright, his publisher, in 1924 about the new collection, "It cuts deeper philosophically than Spoon River Anthology . . . it gets into the skin and flesh of this our America, on religion, politics, sex, everything. It is a son of a bitch, and I want it to be.'' In somewhat gentler language he explained to Harriet Monroe, "I think it a richer and profounder book than the old one, not so episodical of external things, but as much so as to soul experiences." He continued that it was to deal with "the external evidences of the country's transformation after World War I and a new set of feelings, ideals, and convictions." For all Masters' personal defense, critical opinion has long held that the second collection is less dynamic and has fewer strong poems. As John T. Flanagan notes summarily, "In 1924 Masters published The New Spoon River, admittedly an inferior work which nevertheless added over three hundred individual portraits to his gallery and included occupational types like the miller, barber, cobbler, tailor, and garage mechanic which previously had been omitted." For Lois Hartley, the second collection "has more unity, more purpose." It is, however, "more speculative, abstract, philosophical, and political. Hatred of industrialism and materialism, hatred of what he considered narrow morality and bigoted religion, and other hatreds that were incidentally evident in the earlier book are now

EDGAR LEE MASTERS I 465 dominant motifs." For all Masters' clarity, Hartley concludes that "Too many voices belong to Masters alone, not to the persons speaking, and there are more shadowy, undefined persons. Few poems from The New Spoon River stay in the memory as do 'Lucinda Matlock' and others from Spoon River Anthology." Masters' career between the 1915 publication of the original Anthology and The New Spoon River in 1924 was so explosive, so filled with the rewards and problems that followed his becoming an important literary figure, that one can hardly wonder that he seemed to move in half a dozen directions simultaneously. In that period he battled through a divorce to a second marriage, moved from Chicago to New York, and published eleven books—five thick collections of poetry, one novel in poem form (Domesday Book), and five substantial novels. None of these publications received either the interest or the praise that Spoon River Anthology had provoked; perhaps Masters' return to his Illinois characters and the epitaph method was an appeal for the varied, but at least partly favorable, response of 1915. Few writers would have been displeased with the kind of attention that the Anthology had received. John Flanagan points to a "vast number of reviews" in all kinds of publications. Amy Lowell commented in 1917 that "no book, in the memory of the present generation, has had such a general effect upon the reading community as has this. Every one who reads at all has read it." The book went into countless printings and was quickly translated into at least six languages. Decried for its licentiousness, its overt and unnecessary use of sexual material, and its free verse form, Spoon River Anthology was just as loudly touted for its candid view of American life (particularly village life) and its psychological reality. Masters was hauled from the populist camp to the realist, from the imagist to the naturalist. Spoon River Anthology became a

staple in the critical battle over "the revolt from the village"—even though Masters said repeatedly that the book was an expression of his admiration for the Midwestern town: " . . . If I had any conscious purpose in writing it and the New Spoon River it was to awaken that American vision, that love of liberty which the best men of the Republic strove to win for us, and to bequeath to time." Somewhat later, after the critics had coined their phrases, Masters spoke to August Derleth about the matter: There never was anything to this revolt from the village business. We didn't do any such thing. Maybe Lewis backed away from something that hurt him, but he wasn't rebelling against the American small town any more than I was, and my guess is he'd have stayed there if the people had accepted him as he was. Sure, there's plenty of meanness and narrowness in the American small town; there always was. But there's nobility and courage and comedy, too—I said it all in Petit—"Life all around me here in the village: Tragedy, comedy, valor and truth, courage, constancy, heroism, failure—All in the loom. . . ."We weren't rebelling against the village. We were seeing it without blinders. Especially since so much of Masters' later work does stress positive elements about the Sangamon Valley and its people, his view of his aims in these Spoon River portrayals should at least be heard; until Reedy dissuaded him, he had planned to title the 1915 collection, innocuously, Pleasant Plains Anthology. That title would have been even less appropriate for any of his next four collections of poetry—Songs and Satires and The Great Valley (1916), Toward the Gulf (1918), and Starved Rock (1919)—for, as Herb Russell insists, these are bitter books, many of the poems hardly more than "personal invective," vehicles "for the poet to revenge himself on his enemies." Aside

466 I AMERICAN from the love poems in Songs and Satires, many of which had been published in Songs and Sonnets (1910), over half of the work in the other three collections is in some way a working through of philosophical issues that Masters felt had trapped him in unfulfilling circumstances. Constricted religious views, commonplace attitudes about romantic love, materialism that leads innocent people into war—all the cultural evils readers thought had been suggested in Spoon River Anthology are here paraded in full panoply, unfortunately for the artistry of the poems. The apparent depression that followed the exhilarating reception of the Anthology—for much about these poems cannot be explained unless Masters was depressed—colored his views about people, locale, and the importance of his art. By 1917, when he had moved to what was to be his writer's retreat in Spring Lake, Michigan, he was set to write the significant work that his previously harried schedule, with its innumerable interruptions, had never allowed. Instead, at Spring Lake he experienced the antipathy of the local residents, the suspicion of being pro-German, a debilitating romance, and, in September, the end of his nineteen-year marriage. Herb Russell concludes about Toward the Gulf, the poetry collection written during that year: His troubles may have been his own fault, but in his mind he was certain he had been driven out by religious fundamentalists and political conservatives. . . . Put together during these trying circumstances, Toward the Gulf is a record of losses. No fewer than fifteen of the forty-six poems discuss a romantic ideal which has in some way failed, and, significantly, the poems are more visibly subjective than in the previous volume.

All the idealistic people in these poems suffer a loss of hope. . . . Masters' own despair during this period is suggested by the fact that he ends his autobiography, Across Spoon River (1936), at the year

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1917 with his recognition that "the world had become insane, and Chicago was insane." While he admitted that many of his problems "were the spawn of my own nature in part," his defensiveness about the events of these years— and his genuine anger that the poems in these four books had been ignored—is clearly revealed in his choice of poems for a selected volume in 1925; more than two-thirds of all the works were from these four neglected collections. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of Masters' debacle during the period beginning in 1917—when, he writes, "I lost everything except my health and my concentration of mind" —was that he continued his prodigious production and published two of his best-written books in 1920. Domesday Book is a psychological novel in poem form, proving Amy Lowell right in her description of Masters as "Dostoevsky in vers libre"; and Mitch Miller is a boys' novel that manages to convey Masters' overwhelming nostalgia and reverence for his Illinois past, with some very well-handled touches of humor and literary satire. The technical challenge of Domesday Book was partially responsible for Masters' fondness for it (and for his choosing to write a long sequel to it nine years later, The Fate of the Jury). In his 1933 essay about Spoon River, he stated, "I think . . . that I have written many poems better than anything in either Spoon River, and that both 'Domesday Book' and its epilogue, 'The Fate of the Jury,' surpass them." But in his description of that technical challenge, Masters also allows that the attempt he was making in the novel-in-poetry form, to show all facets of a character who might otherwise be misjudged, was personally important to him. Had he not been, in his view, misjudged and misinterpreted throughout his life? Quite deliberately I set out to tell the story of a life from as many angles as possible. . . . every one has many sides to his nature, and that

EDGAR LEE MASTERS I 467 perhaps when the eyes of many are used to appraise him that a completer judgment is arrived at. . . . 1 have felt urged to show in my poems that it is the understanding of any character that leads to compassion, and that it is almost fated to do so. Masters' use of the masculine pronoun here may be more than a grammatical convention, for even though the heroine of Domesday Book is Elenor Murray, her life has many correspondences to that of Masters—her asking her grandfather for money for college and his refusal, for example. As he often did with those of his feminine characters whom he considered admirable, Masters placed his traits in their characters, thereby achieving a partial disguise while still expressing themes that were personally interesting to him. The themes tit Domesday Book are the familiar ones of illusion/reality, morality/evil, and the differences in the male and female psyches, themes with which Masters had worked for the past twenty years. In telling the story of Elenor Murray, Masters was able to show all the social prejudices he hated so vehemently: judging on appearance; convicting on circumstantial evidence; making decisions from rigid and often irrelevant moral concepts, with no understanding of the individual circumstances; acting only from self-interest and, often, financial self-interest. Elenor is a typical Masters heroine. Careless of her sexual purity, she has followed great loves and shaped her life without self-interest around them. The cultural reaction to her is censure, condemnation; even her family is relieved when she dies. As he did in so many of his plays, Masters uses the highly visible moral dilemma of the heroine as a focus for varying responses by others in the drama—not only principal characters but also some that are very remotely connected with Elenor and her life (the chief flaw of the 400-page poem is that it includes too many characters about whom we care little). Masters'

thematic point is that the ''riffles" from one person's life, as well as death itself, are countless; and that, rather than each life being a discrete entity, it is a part of the common soul, the common national complex. For even though Domesday Book is primarily about a woman's existence in turn-of-the-century America, Masters insisted that it is also about that America: "a census spiritual/ Taken of our America . . . . For William Merivale, the coroner,/ Who probed the death of Elenor Murray goes/ As far as may be, and beyond his power,/ In diagnosis of America,/ While finding out the cause of death.'' Domesday Book thus becomes a continuation of Masters' understanding in Spoon River, in which he had realized that the passions and attitudes of people in his small Illinois towns are no different from those of the people in Chicago; for all the attention given to urban and rural differences, the human heart is everywhere the same. Similarly, Elenor Murray's life, for all its origin in a rural area, touches people all over the country, as well as abroad (through her wartime experiences). If Masters' blank verse contained some pretentious echoes of John Donne's sentiments, it was more than accidental. Coroner Merivale is also a character who interested Masters. His need to investigate the death—and life—of the woman so as to understand the culture surrounding her, and himself, is commendatory. Masters uses all his knowledge of law, all his feeling for altruistic ventures, to make Merivale more than a dull man whom life has passed by. Merivale is the key character of the group that Masters had conceived years before, men gathered in his father's law office in Lewistown discussing logic and philosophy, trying to find truth, knowledge, and understanding through intelligent comradeship. As Masters planned to use the characters, one of the group was to commit suicide, and the others were to report their recollections as witnesses; the variance in testimony intrigued Masters but on more than a simple recollection-of-detail level.

468 I AMERICAN The kinds of details that people emphasize tell much about their own characters: They also gave varying and contradictory analyses of the suicide's character, and even of his physical appearance. I have observed that few people can remember the color of the eyes of their friends and acquaintances, something that I always take note of with particular care. John Flanagan points out similarities between Masters' Domesday Book and Robert Browning 's The Ring and the Book, the long poetic narrative about a Roman murder case. Perhaps a more natural source (or complex of sources) for the story would be Masters' desire to tackle the men in discussion (as his sequel, The Fate of the Jury, finally does); the somewhat autobiographical characters of both Merivale (for at this stage in his life, Masters felt bereft of romantic love) and Elenor (who had, in essence, sacrificed her life to the pursuit of the perfect relationship); and an event from his father's law practice, the death of Cora Peters. Masters helped to prepare the brief for his father (the defense attorney), so in some ways, even in 1899, he was involved in the case. Cora Peters, a twenty-four-year-old prostitute, was found dead on Christmas Day, 1899, beneath a train trestle at the Spoon River crossing. She had left a tavern the previous night with John Hellyer, a sixty-year-old farmer. Hellyer claimed that Cora had been struck by a train, and her injuries were consistent with that explanation; but he was charged with murder. He was convicted and sentenced to twenty-five years in prison; but Hardin Masters won an appeal freeing him. Masters had already used some of the details of the case in the poems "Jennie M'Grew" and "Steam Shovel Cut," so the case had stayed in his mind. Only in basic respects is Elenor Murray's situation similar: the kind of reputation the women carry threatens to influence the "justice" that

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their deaths warrant (and the opinion of the town, and the jury, as influenced by this "reputation"); the responsibility of the man involved with the woman—should he be charged with murder because she meets her death after a tryst with him? (in Domesday Book, Elenor's death from syncope is much more directly caused by her lover's charge that she is a whore); what becomes of the woman's "name" as a result of her scandalous death? They are important respects, however, especially when one considers that Masters' primary interest in choosing the incident and its connecting themes was not to write an American tragedy—Dreiser was to begin work on that a few years later—but to record those endless riffles spreading to "the utmost shores." Implicit in this purpose is the definition of "Domesday Book," which Masters makes clear early in the poem: A word now on the Domesday book of old: Remember not a book of doom, but a book Of houses; domus, house, so domus book. And this book of the death of Elenor Murray Is not a book of doom, though showing too How fate was woven round her, and the souls That touched her soul; but is a house book too Of riches, poverty, and weakness, strength Of this our country. Many of the stylistic peculiarities of the book, for which Masters was criticized, relate to this purpose. The ostensible story could have been told much more quickly, but he thought it important, whenever a new witness or speaker was introduced, to explain that person's background as well; judging his or her reaction was impossible unless more than the immediate facts were known. The story is not only that of Elenor Murray, but also that of everyone touched in any way by her life and death. The chief quality in which Masters was interested was somewhat difficult to depict—that of spirit, soul, the presence of which sometimes had to be written about very

EDGAR LEE MASTERS I 469 indirectly. As Merivale mourned, the culture needed to create a system "For saving and for using wasting spirits,/ So wasted in the chaos, in the senseless/ Turmoil and madness of this reckless life,/ Which treats the spirit as the cheapest thing." Elenor is emblematic of that spirit, not only in the descriptions of her and her life throughout the poem, but also in her use of the words from Joan of Arc, "To be brave and not to flinch.'' Caught in the stifling social conventions of which her mother speaks so bitterly at the inquest, Elenor has little choice, once she discovers that the men to whom she looks for love are as frail and narrow as the people she had known in her childhood. Mrs. Murray demands:

once more to his theme of personal freedom and conscience—usually imaged in a romantic relationship—but in a narrative that, because of its speed and reach, remains interesting throughout its extreme length and, in places, verbosity. The character of Elenor Murray is not sacrificed to his message, and she remains a vivid, complex persona to the end of the book. (The same statement cannot be made about Coroner Merivale, who becomes much more clearly the hero in The Fate of the Jury [1927].) Masters works very hard at the end of the novel/poem to return to his theme of America as feminine, maternal. In the concluding testimony of Elenor's final lover, Barrett Bays, she is cursed precisely because she is America:

Then make the main thing inner growth, take rules, Conventions and religion (save it be The worship of God in spirit without hands And without temples sacraments) the babble Of moralists, the rant and flummery Of preachers and of priests, and chuck them out. These things produce your waste and suffering. You tell a soul it sins and make it suffer, Spend years in impotence and twilight thought. You punish where no punishment should be, Weaken and break the soul. You weight the soul With idols and with symbols meaningless, When God gave but three things: the earth and air And mind to know them, live in freedom by them. Well, I would have America become As free as any soul has ever dreamed her, And if America does not get strength To free herself, now that the war is over, Then Elenor Murray's spirit has not won The thing she died for.

Corrupt, deceived, deceiving, self-deceived, Half-disciplined, half-lettered, crude and smart, Enslaved yet wanting freedom, brave and coarse

Mrs. Murray's overstatement of purpose in the death of her daughter does not undercut the intensity of her earlier words, and Masters returns

This leads to Merivale's "defense" of Elenor by reading her hundred unanswered letters to Bays, in which she explains her love with great clarity. Her letters exonerate her; the jury plans a park and monument to her and her experience; and Merivale concludes that Elenor is, like America, the pearl to be found only after the decay and mud have been pierced: "the soul maternal, out of which/ All goodness, beauty, and benevolence/ . . . Mother Mary of all tenderness.'' His last words are surely Masters': The tragedy Is that this Elenor for her mother gift Is cursed and tortured, sent a wanderer; And in her death must find much clinging mud Around the pearl of her. Perhaps it is the intensity of Masters' feeling about the needless deaths of both Elenor Murray and Mitch Miller that makes Domesday Book and Mitch Miller parallel, for all their obvious differences. The poison of social opinion leads

470 I AMERICAN each to an unexpected death; each represents the waste that Masters lamented throughout his career. Mitch Miller is ostensibly a boys' book, a nostalgic adventure on sunny summer days that leads to the sharp reality not only of adulthood, as in most initiation stories, but also of death. Its plot is so derivative that many critics have noticed its resemblances to Tom Sawyer: the rural setting near a major river; the dual protagonists, Mitch and the narrator, Skeeters Kirby (a Tom and Huck Finn parallel); the story told in a first-person voice with a strangely vernacular diction; the treasure hunt and courtroom scenes; and the running warfare with adults and their authority. Yet Masters9 means of telling his ordinary story is so effective that one reviewer said the novel comes close to being a masterpiece. In Mitch Miller, Masters establishes and maintains a rolling narrative pace that continues throughout the story (except for the poignant scenes of Billie's and Mitch's deaths and mourning). Skeeters9 idiom, with its unexpected contractions and elisions, re-creates the events from the participants' perspective—and does so succinctly. There is no time for the moralizing or digressing so common in Masters' poetry. The opening section is an intimate, open monologue: And then supposin' one day all the things in the house was loaded on a wagon and you rode with your ma up the hill to a better house and a bigger yard with oak trees, and the things were put in the house and you began to live here, . . . and then supposin9 you began to hear your pa and ma talk of Mr. Miller and what a wonderful man he was, and Mrs. Miller and what a good woman she was, and about the Miller girls, how funny and smart they was, and about Mitch Miller, the wonderfulest boy in town. . . . It not only establishes the place of veneration that Mitch Miller holds in everyone's eyes; it

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also—in its entirety—plays on the theme of illusion/reality by having Skeeters cast his reminiscence as if he had just awakened ("you kind of knew things was goin' on around you, but still you was way off in your sleep and belonged to yourself as a sleeper"). Once into the monologue, Masters uses Shakespeare's "Our little life is rounded by a sleep," both as repetition of imagery and as foreshadowing. Spoken in Skeeters' idiom, even though the sleep/illusion image occurs repeatedly, it seems natural rather than literary. Mitch and Skeeters' life is an illusion, a believable and innocent one, as they pattern their fun on Tom Sawyer's and long for the romance of the Mississippi River. The climax of their boyish adventure comes when Mitch writes to Tom Sawyer and receives an answer (from the butcher so named). But the reality of the hard rural life begins to break through: people lose jobs, Mitch is separated from his sweetheart, Little Billie dies, and Skeeters is ill. The search for adventure, which is also the search for a hero—if not Tom Sawyer, then "Linkern"— modulates into the search for understanding. That Skeeters finds this quality only after Mitch's death in a train accident is the price that Masters asks from the sentient person who lives in the modern world. "No book that I have written is closer to my heart, or pleases me more," Masters said, not only because Mitch Miller did re-create boyhood events and atmosphere, but also because his writing itself carried that recreation. This novel was the first of what Masters termed his "trilogy" of semiautobiographical prose; the second and third were Skeeters Kirby and Mirage. The novel is important for that reason, and also because it marks the beginning of Masters9 career as novelist. Even though he was fifty-one when Mitch Miller was published, he wrote six others (and six verse dramas almost simultaneously) between 1922 and 1937. His in-

EDGAR LEE MASTERS I 471 terest had turned increasingly toward the narrative; and since critics had complained so loudly about the blank-verse form of Domesday Book, Masters had little choice but to write in prose. Besides Mitch Miller three other novels are set in the Sangamon Valley and are drawn heavily from Masters' own experiences. Sheeters Kirby (1923), Mirage (1924), and Kit O'Brien (1927) continue the Miller story in various ways, the two earlier novels completing Skeeters' life to his forties and focusing more intently than is interesting on his later love affair, the disappointing romance with Becky Morris (Pamela). Kit O'Brien is a thin Huck Finn kind of story about a sadistic religious fanatic and Kit's part in righting the wrongs he has created. The other three of Masters' seven novels are historical; and while they all are set in Illinois, they are, to a certain extent, thesis novels. The Nuptial Flight (1923) and The Tide of Time (1937) both question the validity of love and marriage, as does Children of the Market Place (1922), which has Stephen A. Douglas as hero. While it is unreasonable to dismiss everything Masters wrote after the Spoon River collections, Domesday Book, and Mitch Miller as worthless, many of his later books are either thesis-ridden or repeat materials and characters presented more successfully earlier. Bernard Duffey goes so far as to say: The general level of those books [written from 1915 to 1942] did not vary widely. Until his last three collections of verse, where he turned to sentimental recollection of the Spoon River country, his argument remained what it had been in Spoon River itself—the evils of inhibition, the virtues of freedom and self-fulfillment, and the villainous roles of banker and preacher in American life. But with the exception of a few individual poems, perhaps a dozen in all, Masters' work was dull, tremendously garrulous, and wholly

unenlightened by the imaginative and dramatic resilience which had marked Spoon River. While Masters could have used a good editor, particularly during his later years, there are clear patterns and interests during this late writing that deserve to be described. In keeping with his constant fascination with America and its people, Masters turned increasingly to studies of national heroes, both present and past. Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas are important because of their origin in his section of Illinois; Robert E. Lee because he too is a victim of a cultural catastrophe, the Civil War. Nearly all of Masters' books written during the 1920's deal in some way with one or another of these men: The Open Sea (1921) parallels Brutus with Lincoln; Children of the Market Place (1922) emphasizes Douglas but also touches on Lincoln; Lee (1926) is a verse drama depicting Lee as Hamletlike (and foreshadows Gettysburg, Manila, Aconta [1930] and Richmond [1934]); JackKelso (1928) is Lincoln's companion, and in that verse drama Masters features the romance of Anne Rutledge and Lincoln. By exploring the Lincoln legend—first through the sensibility of the boys' novel and then through more intimate psychological accounts—Masters arrived at the 1931 biography, Lincoln: The Man. So pervasive is Masters' interest in locale, however, in his last books as well as in all his work after 1920 (when he had moved to New York), that it seems almost as if he chose the Illinois heroes as a way of understanding place rather than through having been in search of heroes per se. He said of Kit O'Brien, "I love the town of my boyhood, its people and its ways too deeply to dispraise them." More important, the understanding of locale was a means to fathom the American character. For instance, he spoke of the verse drama Jack Kelso as being an appraisal of the theories and beliefs which are the enemies of the American programs. My work

472 / AMERICAN . . . which began with the Spoon River Anthology . . . enlarges and more profoundly defines its interpretations in ... this comprehensive study of America through the eyes of Jack Kelso, who in real life was the chum of Lincoln. In 1931 Masters completed the Kelso story in a strange dramatic poem titled Godbey, which has as refrain ''One's youth again and yet again is ended. . . . " Whether one views Masters' repeated return to the subjects of boyhood experience, or the re-creation of boyhood heroes and legends, as simple nostalgia or as poverty of subject matter, its presence is striking and a little frightening. It is as if those sweeping aims that he chanted so gleefully had dwindled to the kind of study a small-bodied old lady would undertake at the county records office—even though in 1933 he proclaimed: There is a vast task for the singer of America, And it will be the work of a great singer to find the soul of America . . . One can only set against them these more somber lines from "Brutus and Antony": Wine, weariness, much living, early age Made fall for Antony. October's clouds In man's life, like October, have no sun To lift the mists of doubt, distortion, fear. Aside from his dramatic verse, much of Masters' late poetry mines the same themes. Of the eight collections published between 1930 and 1942, nearly all include many poems about Illinois, Michigan, rural themes and characters; the last two books, in fact, Illinois Poems (1941) and Along the Illinois (1942), have these focuses exclusively in their largely reprinted selections. Masters' tone is that of lament: "All the good, beloved people, those/ Who drove the plow near the ford of Mussel Shells,/ Are gone. . . . " Or, as he had written earlier, "All the old hotels are vanished from America,/ All the frame hotels

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in a white-housed town. . . ." His blatant oversimplification leads Masters from one exaggeration to another, blaming cities for modern evil ("Give Us Back Our Country") or blaming steamboats and railroads for America's misunderstanding of its heroes ("Andrew Jackson"). His 1936 poem "The House Where Mark Twain Was Born" clearly illustrates his simplification of ideas and of the poetry expressing them: Are there any more old villages Like Florida anywhere In Missouri or Illinois, As when Mark Twain was a boy, And life was purest bliss, . . . For now that we are rich in Cities and sculptured squares Is there now no Mark Twain kitchen With its three or four old chairs, Its table and cooking stove, Where patience, laughter and love In the humble family throve, Where poverty had no pride, And hence was without a fear; Where the heart was fortified By eyes that were calm and clear? There are souls, if they knew enough, Who would barter their country seat For a cottage with such a roof, For a hearth so humble and sweet; Where a wonder boy might sleep, Or dream by the kitchen stove, And grow and laugh and keep A simple heart through youth For earth and life and love, For people and for truth. Masters' return to end rhyme and conventional form may have been symptomatic of his need to establish firm control: the dichotomy of black/white, urban/rural, good/bad is undeniable. His angry retort to August Derleth that "Anderson can't write, never could" because

EDGAR LEE MASTERS I 473 "He's always groping for what he wants to say" suggests that by the last years of his life, he needed those clear directions and that any natural ambivalence or ambiguity—the basis for most of the great writing of history—was threatening to him. This was a different stance from Masters' attitude while writing the Spoon River works and Domesday Bookf when he was curious to see whether he could present those ambivalences. In the late poems, as in his memoirs of the Sangamon Valley and Chicago, his only desire was to return; by then his only means of returning was through memory. He says in "River Towns," in comparatively effective verse: Far from New York by the ship-traveled sea Stand the river-towns I knew Changeless as memory. . . . They speak but quiet words around the square. . . . The town is memory longing for the places Far up the river, never found By the river's winding spaces Which the heart forever follows. Before his turn to retrospection was complete, Masters devoted much of his energy during the last decade of his writing career to biography. At his most cantankerous was Lincoln: The Man (1931); at his most worshipful, Whitman (1937). In 1935 he undertook a biography of Vachel Lindsay as a personal favor to Lindsay's widow; the portrait of Mark Twain (1938) he saw as an opportunity to "diagnose and cauterize . . . the American diseases which attack writers and idealists." Masters brought to biography an ability to locate character in salient and economical details; to express character in relation to larger concerns—national well-being and promise, philosophical satisfactions; and to tell an interesting story. Sections of all four biographies show his abilities to good advantage (his first bi-

ography , Levy Mayer and the New Industrial Era [1927], is not included here because Masters dictated the book rather than writing it himself). On the whole, however, Masters' biographies are marred by the idiosyncratic convictions evident in his later poems. As he slants his accounts (unfavorably in the cases of Lincoln and Twain), his narratives suffer from lack of proportion and continuity. Masters emphasizes some traits, and scenes that illustrate them, and omits others. At their most critical, reviewers accused him of outright misrepresentation of evidence, intense prejudice, and diatribe. Historians who reviewed the biographies were consistently troubled by Masters' incomplete research. He wrote without documentation, so there was no way of knowing the factual bases for his assumptions. Often, evidence that had been available for years was not included. Masters also tended to be inaccurate about dates and chronology, relying on his impressionistic prose to be convincing. In the books about Whitman and Twain, he quoted at length from material that was already accessible, and he evidently had not read any prior scholarship. The result was very little new insight, and reviewers often questioned the need for the biography. The need for a particular book was, of course, Masters' own, and his turn to biography was part of the search for America's heroes that had dominated his fiction and verse drama during the 1920's and early 1930's. (In addition to the published work, he also wrote a verse drama about Andrew Jackson, which was performed in 1934 at the University of Chicago, and another about the Mormons, performed in 1936 at Schenectady, New York.) He had written in American Mercury in 1935 that it was essential "that there should be an understanding of the country's principal heroes. Not otherwise can a country have its true character." The biography of Lincoln, coming after the many novels touching on his life and legend, is

474 I AMERICAN the only one of Masters' four biographies that deals with a person who is important historically rather than literarily. Written from April 29 to June 14, 1930, in Room 312 of the Chelsea Hotel in New York City, the 520-page book again illustrates Masters9 prodigious ability to concentrate on the project at hand and devote himself to days of sheer physical work in completing it. One might suggest that such application may not have resulted in superior quality, but the Spoon River poems were also written in this way; it seemed to be Masters' habitual pattern. The first sign that Lincoln: The Man was not intended to be complimentary was its dedication to "the memory of Thomas Jefferson, the preeminent philosopher-statesman of the United States, and their greatest president; whose universal genius through a long life was devoted to the peace, enlightenment and liberty of the union created by the Constitution of 1787." Masters is already maligning Lincoln for his unconstitutional assumption of powers, his power-seeking, as he does on page 5 of the text, where he compares him negatively with both Jefferson and Andrew Jackson (and, later, with Ralph Waldo Emerson and Whitman). The person Lincoln can be compared with, unfortunately, is Woodrow Wilson: Our greatest Americans are Jefferson, Whitman and Emerson; and the praise that has been bestowed on Lincoln is a robbery of these, his superiors. Armed with the theology of a rural Methodist, Lincoln crushed the principles of free government. Masters, in his return to the prairie years and his adolescent values, seems also to have returned to his grandfather's views of Lincoln; but the biography lays Lincoln's faults to his "neverchanging mind" and a "lack of a real passional nature." Lincoln's quiet romantic life—whether or not relevant to his performance as president— puzzled and even angered his biographer.

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That Masters' last biographies—and his last major writings—were about America's great writers is indicative of a further change in direction. Just as his comparisons of Lincoln with Emerson and Whitman had indicated, Masters' hierarchies of greatness knew no categorical boundaries—Lincoln became president partly because of his ability with language; as a thinker and a writer he (like Jefferson) should therefore be judged with other men of that profession. For, Masters had finally decided, it was not military acumen or public interest that identified the American hero. He wrote in 1936, ' 'It is possible that this life veils something deeper and truer. Poetry can penetrate this veil if any human expression can; for poetry is the most articulate, it is the profoundest, art of man." Following this conviction, Masters wrote Vachel Lindsay: A Poet in America, "one of his best books." Masters' emphasis on Lindsay's search for truly American "traditions and stories of wonder" and his understanding of his friend's background made the book an important study of the development of an American poet. An emphasis new to Masters was his interest in Lindsay's mysticism (an interest that colors his subsequent biography of Whitman), the search for a "deeper reality." Whether or not this was sufficient reason to consider Lindsay a greater poet than Edgar Allan Poe, as Masters does, the book does describe the problems that the non-Eastern American writer faces in the established literary community. Ill 1936 Masters wrote perhaps his most important life story, his own, filled with almost successful rationalizations presented in a blend of simple narrative and philosophical bombast that tends to disarm the reader through its candor. Across Spoon River has the same kind of charm that carried Mitch Miller. Whether or not the book establishes many truths, it conveys the author's conviction that it does. Even Carl Van Doren, who noted that Masters failed to reconcile the most apparent intellectual contradictions,

EDGAR LEE MASTERS I 475 praised its vitality as being "the blunt, ardent story of a troubled man finding out he was a poet." In 1937 Masters published his most sympathetic biography, Whitman. Partly because Whitman echoed Jefferson's principles, partly because he was compassionate, partly because he "put into his long lines the rise and fall of his own spiritual diaphragm," partly because he revered the Greek dramatists—and there seems to be no division among those qualities in Masters'judgment—Whitman was perhaps the greatest of America's poets. Not that he reached the highest kind of poetry, for he "sang the seen— not the unseen." Although he did make "a spiritual survey of America" and saw the direction American poetry had to take, "The distinctive American poetry which Whitman wanted sung required a genius that he did not possess." Whitman's greatness, for Masters in the 1930's, rested in his being "a lover," "a prophet of democracy," "a voice raising itself in behalf of comradeship and against that spirit which withdraws, stands aside, is ashamed of tenderness, communion, fellowship." After Whitman the Twain biography—which Masters was careful to distinguish as "portrait," no doubt to protect himself legally—seems anticlimactic. It is Masters at his petulant worst, comparing Twain, criticizing him solipsistically. The Twain portrait was discussed in the opening pages of this essay; and perhaps it is appropriate to come full circle, as Masters' own sympathies and interests did near the end of his career. In his biographies, instead of Spoon River characters Masters was creating the heroes of America for his readers—but he was still creating them; he was locating their greatness, giving them the life spark through anecdote and detail so that a reader would remember, learn, and follow. No less the moralist at the end of his career than at the beginning, Masters was still the writer as teacher more than he was the writer as craftsman, as artist.

Judged as craftsman, Masters should be praised for his characterization, especially his ability to draw people who are believable psychologically. He should be praised for his attempts to capture speech idioms, although his frequent tendency to write in blank verse made successful patterning difficult (the freshness in the language of Mitch Miller, as in many of the Spoon River portraits, is an example of Masters at his best). Masters was seldom content to be a miniaturist: his range was wide and, like Pieter Brueghel, he created many memorable characters. He was a willing artist—willing to try, perhaps too much; to innovate; and, repeatedly, to risk failure. Some of these same points must also appear in a debit column, especially Masters' great selfconfidence that led him to write so much—the prolix, the undistinguished, the repetitious. His tendency toward pretension paralleled his fondness for overt literary references—Masters seemed always conscious of his role as writer, which to him seemed to mean authority, on matters historical, legal, and moral. And, as authority, he gave his views with an aura of positive knowing that was, however offensively, inarguable. Roy Harvey Pearce, in The Continuity of American Poetry, dismisses all of Masters' work summarily because even the best of it is marked by reductionary sentimentality. More recently David Perkins, in A History of Modern Poetry, considers Masters as a part of the important current in the twentieth century that saw poetry as being "accessible, sympathetic, and deliberately popular." The line between "sentimentality" and "accessibility" has shifted with patterns of literary taste for the past 2,000 years. Generally, however, the use of the word "sentimentality" as derogation suggests an excess of appeal to popular taste and—when applied to the writer's craft—the manipulation of readers by the writer. All writing offers opportunities to sentimentalize, but the great artists are those who reject

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the easy option, who, as Joseph Waldmeir put it, maintain

roots, and more and more a mere voice fleeting and unbeatable. Maybe I'm Tithonus.

the pattern which the story [or poem] itself dictates, leading the reader into no emotional dead ends or sloughs. And as a consequence, the emotion one feels at its end is honest and earned; for one is convinced that the story has gone exactly where it had to go in the only way possible for it to get there.

Tithonus, Aurora's mortal lover, enjoyed the privilege of loving the goddess of dawn; but he enjoyed his privilege too long. Aurora had asked that he be granted immortality, but she neglected to request eternal youth. When Tithonus had begun to age, she left him; and finally, when there was little left of him but a whisper of voice, she changed him into a grasshopper. Maybe. Except that Spoon River Anthology remains more than a whisper; and so, perhaps, do Mitch Miller, Domesday Book, and, in other ways, Whitman and Across Spoon River. The rest, the nearly fifty other books that Masters gave his career to producing, can best be described as popular, as was the aesthetic from which Masters lived and wrote; and, as popular books, they will meet their timely, natural end.

While one could say this about many of the Spoon River portraits, and about parts of Domesday Book and Mitch Miller, there is little other of Masters' work that maintains its own integrity. Masters' late themes unfortunately led him easily into unthinking sentiment—nostalgia for the past is an almost surefire trap, partly because the characters and scenes are gauzed over with a memory that softens any dichotomies that did exist; partly because relatively simple answers did exist half a century earlier, at least in Masters' culture. Masters was increasingly the product of the Protestant, middle-class work ethic of the prairies. In 1936, even returning to that location and culture would not have brought back their viability. During his last twenty years, however, Masters wrote and thought of very little besides that return. In the mid-1930's he wrote in his autobiography, "The prairies are in my blood for all time, and are closer to my heart than the most beautiful part of the Maine coast, or the hills of Columbia County or the mountains of Vermont, all so much more beautiful than anything in Illinois." At about the same time, in a characteristically "literary" statement, he wrote to John Cowper Powys: I just HONE for the prairies, and want to go there with my heart, but my mind wont [sic] let me. I know that everything I loved is gone, and much that I cannot stand has taken its place. The result is I stay here [in New York], growing more and more at the top, and less and less at the

Selected Bibliography WORKS OF EDGAR LEE MASTERS A Book of Verses. Chicago: Way & Williams, 1898. Maximilian: A Play in Five Acts. Boston: Richard G. Badger, 1902. The New Star Chamber and Other Essays. Chicago: Hammersmark, 1904. The Blood of the Prophets. Chicago: Rooks Press, 1905. (Written under pseudonym Dexter Wallace.) Althea: A Play in Four Acts. Chicago: Rooks Press, 1907. The Trifler: A Play. Chicago: Rooks Press, 1908. The Leaves of the Tree: A Play. Chicago: Rooks Press, 1909. Eileen: A Play in Three Acts. Chicago: Rooks Press, 1910. Songs and Sonnets. Chicago: Rooks Press, 1910. (Written under pseudonym Webster Ford.)

EDGAR LEE MASTERS I 477 The Locket: A Play in Three Acts. Chicago: Rooks Press, 1910. The Bread of Idleness: A Play in Four Acts. Chicago: Rooks Press, 1911. Songs and Sonnets: Second Series. Chicago: Rooks Press, 1912. (Written under pseudonym Webster Ford.) Spoon River Anthology. New York: Macmillan, 1915; augmented edition, 1916. Songs and Satires. New York: Macmillan, 1916. The Great Valley. New York: Macmillan, 1916. Toward the Gulf. New York: Macmillan, 1918. Starved Rock. New York: Macmillan, 1919. Mitch Miller. New York: Macmillan, 1920. Domesday Book. New York: Macmillan, 1920. The Open Sea. New York: Macmillan, 1921. Children of the Market Place. New York: Macmillan, 1922. Skeeters Kirby. New York: Macmillan, 1923. The Nuptial Flight. New York: Boni and Liveright, 1923. Mirage. New York: Boni and Liveright, 1924. The New Spoon River. New York: Boni and Liverright, 1924; with introduction by Willis Barnstone, New York: Macmillan, 1968. Selected Poems. New York: Macmillan, 1925. Lee: A Dramatic Poem. New York: Macmillan, 1926. Kit O'Brien. New York: Boni and Liveright, 1927. Levy Mayer and the New Industrial Era. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1927. Jack Kelso: A Dramatic Poem. New York: Appleton, 1928. The Fate of the Jury: An Epilogue to Domesday Book. New York: Appleton, 1929. Gettysburg, Manila, Acoma. New York: Horace Liveright, 1930. Lichee Nuts. New York: Horace Liveright, 1930. Lincoln: The Man. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1931. Godbey: A Dramatic Poem. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1931. The Serpent in the Wilderness. New York: Sheldon Dick, 1933. The Tale of Chicago. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1933. Dramatic Duologues: Four Short Plays in Verse. New York: Samuel French, 1934. Richmond: A Dramatic Poem. New York: Samuel French, 1934. Invisible Landscapes. New York: Macmillan, 1935.

Vachel Lindsay: A Poet in America. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1935. Poems of People. New York: Appleton-Century, 1936. The Golden Fleece of California. Weston, Vermont: Countryman Press, 1936. Across Spoon River: An Autobiography. New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1936. Whitman. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1937. The Tide of Time. New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1937. The New World. New York: Appleton-Century, 1937. Mark Twain: A Portrait. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1938. More People. New York: Appleton-Century, 1939. The Living Thoughts of Emerson. New York: Longmans, Green, 1940. Illinois Poems. Prairie City, Illinois: James A. Decker, 1941. The Sangamon. New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1942. Along the Illinois. Prairie City, Illinois: James A. Decker, 1942. Posthumous Poems of Edgar Lee Masters. Austin: Humanities Research Center, University of Texas, 1969. (Selected and edited, with introduction, by Frank Kee Robinson; preface by Padraic Colum.)

CRITICAL AND BIOGRAPHICAL STUDIES For relatively complete listings, see the chapterend notes in Flanagan (see below) and William White, "Lindsay/Masters/Sandburg: Criticism From 1950-1975" in Hallwas and Reader (see below), pp. 114-28. Barnstone, Willis. "Introduction" to The New Spoon River. New York: Macmillan, 1968. Berthoff, Warner. The Ferment of Realism. New York: Free Press, 1965. Bridgman, Richard. The Colloquial Style in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1966. Brown, Clarence. "Walt Whitman and the 'New Poetry,' " American Literature, 33:33-45 (1961). Burgess, Charles E. "Masters and Whitman: A Second Look," Walt Whitman Review, 17:25-27 (March 1971). Derleth, August. Three Literary Men: A Memoir of Sinclair Lewis, Sherwood Anderson, and Edgar Lee Masters. New York: Candlelight Press, 1963.

478 I AMERICAN WRITERS Duffey, Bernard. The Chicago Renaissance in American Letters: A Critical History. East Lansing: Michigan State College Press, 1954. Flanagan, John T. 'The Novels of Edgar Lee Masters, "South Atlantic Quarterly. 49:82-95 (1950). . Edgar Lee Masters: The Spoon River Poet and His Critics. Metuchen, New Jersey: Scarecrow Press, 1974. Greasley, Philip. American Vernacular Poetry: Studies in Whitman, Sandburg, Anderson, Masters and Lindsay. Ph.D. dissertation, Michigan State University, 1975. Hall was, John E., and Dennis J. Reader, eds. The Vision of This Land. Macomb: Western Illinois University Press, 1976. (Includes Charles E. Burgess, "Edgar Lee Masters: The Lawyer as Writer," pp. 55-73; Herb Russell, "After Spoon River: Masters' Poetic Development 1916-1919," pp. 74-81; and William White, "Lindsay/Masters/Sandburg: Criticism from 1950-1975," pp. 114-28.) Hartley, Lois. "Edgar Lee Masters—Biographer and Historian," Illinois State Historical Society. Journal, 54:56-83 (1961). . Spoon River Revisited. Muncie, Indiana: Ball State University Press, 1963. . "Edgar Lee Masters—Political Essayist," Illinois State Historical Society. Journal, 57: 249-60 (1964). . "The Early Plays of Edgar Lee Masters," Ball State University Forum, 7:26-38 (1966). . "Edgar Lee Masters and the Chinese,"Literature East & West, 10:302-05 (1966). Havighurst, Walter. The Heartland: Ohio, Indiana, Illinois. New York: Harper, 1956; 1974. Herron, Ima Honaker. The Small Town in American Literature. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1939. . The Small Town in American Drama. Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1969. Kramer, Dale. Chicago Renaissance: The Literary Life in the Midwest 1900-1930. New York: Appleton-Century, 1966. Lowell, Amy. Tendencies in Modern American Poetry. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1917. Masters, Ellen Coyne. "Those People of Spoon River," New York Times Book Review, February 12, 1950, pp. 5, 25. Masters, Hardin W. Edgar Lee Masters: A Centenary Memoir-Anthology. South Brunswick, New Jersey: Barnes, for the Poetry Society of America, 1972.

Munson, Gorham. "A Comedy of Exiles," Literary Review, 12, no. 1:47, 49, 56 (Autumn 1968). Nye, Russel B. The Unembarrassed Muse. New York: Dial Press, 1970. Pavese, Cesare. American Literature: Essays and Opinions, translated by Edwin Fussell. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970. Pearce, Roy Harvey. The Continuity of American Poetry. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1961. Perkins, David. A History of Modern Poetry. Vol. I. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1976. Pizer, Donald. Novels of Theodore Dreiser. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1976. Powys, John Cowper. "Edgar Lee Masters," Bookman, 69:650 (August 1929). Putzel, Max. The Man in the Mirror, William Marion Reedy and His Magazine. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1963. Robinson, Frank Kee. The Edgar Lee Masters Collection: Sixty Years of Literary History," Library Chronicle (University of Texas), 8:42-50 (1968). . "Edgar Lee Masters Centenary Exhibition: Catalogue and Checklist of Books," Texas Quarterly, 12, no. 1:4-69(1969). . "The New Spoon River: Fifteen Facsimile Pages," ibid., pp. 116-43. . "Posthumous Poems of Edgar Lee Masters," ibid., pp. 70-115. Schreiber, Georges, ed. Portraits and Self-portraits. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1936. Simone, Salvatore. E. L. Masters. Bari: Tipografia Adriatica, 1973. Stauffer, Donald Barlow. A Short History of American Poetry. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1974. Thomas, Dylan. "Dylan Thomas on Edgar Lee Masters," Harper's Bazaar, June 1963, pp. 68-69, 115. Van Doren, Carl. "Behind Spoon River," Nation, 143:580 (November 14, 1936). Waggoner, Hyatt. American Poetry from the Puritans to the Present. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1968. Waldmeir, Joseph J. "John Steinbeck: No Grapes of Wrath," in A Question ofQuality, edited by Louis Filler. Bowling Green, Ohio: Popular Press, 1976. Pp. 219-28. Yatron, Michael. America's Literary Revolt. New York: Philosophical Library, 1959. -UNDA W. WAGNER

Samuel Eliot Morison 188^-1976

T

Boston's old families, four generations removed from the famous Federalist political leader Harrison Gray Otis. He was raised in the house at the foot of Beacon Hill built by his maternal grandfather; number 44 Brimmer Street would be his residence, except during periods of travel, until his death in 1976. As a boy he took the penny ferry with other boys to nearby East Boston, to climb over the full-rigged sailing ships from distant ports. His parents vacationed each summer at Northeast Harbor, Maine. In his well-traveled life that was nevertheless rooted in New England, Morison made Northeast Harbor his summer home, and wrote that "it was there that I acquired my almost passionate love for the sea and for Mount Desert Island." He was schooled in Greek and Latin at Noble's School in Boston and St. Paul's in Concord, New Hampshire, and grew up in surroundings rich in history. He found manuscript letter books of his great-great-grandfather, who traded in the South Seas and Hawaii, in the library of his grandfather, Samuel Eliot. This side of the family, which included Charles W. Eliot, president of Harvard, and Charles Eliot Norton, had established a place in education and literature. Morison entered Harvard with the intention of becoming a mathematician, but foundered on calculus and was attracted instead to the distinguished history faculty, which included Albert Bushnell Hart, whose assistant he became; Ed-

.HE J LHE

writings of twentieth-century American historians have not matched the literary achievements of the nineteenth-century Boston gentleman-historians: George Bancroft, JohnLothrop Motley, William Hickling Prescott, and Francis Parkman. These historians seized upon grand, romantic themes and developed them in multivolume works that reached a wide public. This method has been extended into the professionalized historical scholarship of the twentieth century in the long and productive career of the naval historian Samuel Eliot Morison. "I have stuck to the antique methods of writing but also the modern idea of trying to get to the bottom of things," he said late in his career, emphasizing that *'history means primarily story." Three themes clearly emerge from his more than fifty books. He wrote, first of all, with a regional interest, about the New England of his ancestors. Second, he combined his lifelong love of the sea with scholarship to write about maritime commerce and naval battles, exploration and discovery—books with the ocean always as subject and as backdrop for the human drama. Third, he wrote of great and successful men in the nation's past: of Christopher Columbus and the discovery of America, of the Puritan founders, and of naval heroes from John Paul Jones down to Admiral Raymond Spruance and the battle of Midway in World War II. Morison was born on July 9,1887, into one of

479

480 I AMERICAN ward Charming, the last historian to write a history of the United States from the original sources; and Frederick Jackson Turner, historian of the West. In Channing, Morison observed an impatience with the ideals and idealists associated with the Concord school and New England's favorite "isms"; a clear business head and the skill to get on in the academic and literary worlds; and the ability as a historian to dismiss preconceived interpretations and to study periods anew, reaching fresh conclusions. These traits were passed on to Morison, as was Channing's course on American history in the colonial period, which Morison began teaching in 1916. Morison's association with Harvard was long. He entered in 1904, received the B.A. in 1908 and the M.A. in 1909, and was awarded the Ph.D. in history in 1913. While an assistant to Hart, he rode to and from the campus on horseback, carrying in saddlebags the papers to be graded. After forty years (1915-55) as lecturer and professor he retired from active teaching as Jonathan Trumbull professor of American history, emeritus. Into the 1970's, as he researched and wrote about the early exploration of the Americas, he retained Channing's old office, number 417 in the Widener Library. Morison's dissertation, The Life and Letters of Harrison Gray Otis, Federalist, 1765-1848, a biography of his famous ancestor, was published in 1913. It was a two-volume biography of the life-and-times variety commonly associated with nineteenth-century letters, except that in addition to detailing political life, it reflected what was then a new interest of the professional historian: social history, the details of how people lived. Thus, there are accounts of society life in Boston, in Philadelphia, and in Washington during the early years, when the capital of the new democratic nation resembled an aristocratic court. (For this Morison was criticized by reviewers, for having chronicled "small beer.") Household family life, real estate speculation, political oratory, literary trends, and the taste for and means

WRITERS

by which wealthy Bostonians acquired Madeira wines are described and blended with accounts from family tradition. The Federalist party declined in influence throughout Harrison Gray Otis' life, and the principal event of his political career was the illfated Hartford Convention at which New England states considered their right to secede during the unpopular War of 1812. Although Otis' political career was not marked by success, Morison wrote of his life: The personality of Harrison Gray Otis was singularly well rounded and attractive. In him were blended all the qualities that make up a man beloved by men; and he was indeed beloved, during and after his lifetime, as few men have been. Sociable without dissipation, clever without affectation, brilliant without hypocrisy, he retained through years of political disappointment and domestic misfortune a genial, sunny nature that shed happiness. The use of antithesis in this assessment is a characteristic of Morison's prose style that appears throughout his works. Normally his emphasis is on the successful—his subsequent biographies were of men of the stamp of Columbus and naval heroes like John Paul Jones. Other traits that appear in this first work are Morison's readiness to enter third-person narrative through personal observations, and his regional loyalty, combined with the ability to state strong opinions forcefully. Thus, he concluded his relation of the Hartford Convention by stating that among the New Englanders of the early nineteenth century, love of Union was stronger than in the South at midcentury, for they endured wrongs "far more real" than those of the eleven states that attempted to break up the Union. Years later, when writing about the theories of pre-Columbian discoveries of America, Morison stated that he was not interested in "dead-end" explorers. His account of the aristocratic tendencies of the New England Federalists, a blind

SAMUEL ELIOT MORISON I 481 alley in the development of American democracy, thus was out of the mainstream of Morison's historical interest. He was no doubt attracted to his ancestor as a subject because of family and regional loyalties. But the biography is also marked with judgment and criticism. Morison was raised in the Brahmin traditions that extended from the values of the aristocratic Federalists, but he was also trained to enter a historical guild that celebrated the dual rise of nationalism and democracy. Whereas Harrison Gray Otis believed democracy would bring the leveling downward of society, and social revolution, Morison, student of Frederick Jackson Turner, who had described the development of democratic institutions on the American frontier, wrote that his ancestor would never have imagined the "self-sacrifice, endurance, and devotion to the Union that the American democracy showed fifteen years after his death." Yet Morison, in light of the corruption and antiintellectualism of Massachusetts administrations following the passing of the Federalists, argued that although Federalist efforts may have ended in futility, they did not end in dishonor. The characteristic here that appears elsewhere in Morison's treatment of American history is that despite his rejection of the narrow view of democracy held by his ancestors, he did not abandon their aristocratic values. Identifiable in this first work of Morison's is a personal code of sociability and compromise. Later he would select balance or mesure as the quality most requisite in a historian. And he would look for humor, entertainment, and satisfaction in achievement in the lives of the people about whom he wrote. He was credited with having some of the traits he admired in his ancestor. Described as a sociable man who shared his pleasures, Morison involved his friends in his sailing and entertained them at his summer home in Maine. It is told that at one dinner, wines from three different centuries were served. This example of the continuity between past and present

in Morison's life was also evident in 1906 when Professor Hart allowed him to build a course around a case of old Federalist correspondence he had found in his grandfather's wine cellar. His tastes, his attitudes, and even the documents of his first book were passed down to him through his family. Morison revised his biography of Harrison Gray Otis for republication in 1969, omitting some of the political matter and footnotes and adding to the chapters describing the social life of the period. However, the scholarship of the fifty-six years intervening between the two editions—including treatment of the Federalists by James Truslow Adams and Charles and Mary Beard—did not lead him to change any of his original conclusions. "The impulse for all my books has come from within myself," Morison wrote, arguing that "you cannot fascinate your readers unless you yourself are in love with the subject." In his second book, The Maritime History cf Massachusetts, 1783-1860, Morison turned to the sea for the subject and theme of an economicsocial history. Although the greatest economicsocial historian, in his opinion, was Richard Henry Tawney, Morison credited Guglielmo Ferreo with teaching him the importance of social history. But since he wished to be a historian of America and the modern age, Morison found inspiration in the career of his grandfather's friend Francis Parkman, who had written a monumental history chronicling the struggle between France and England for the possession of North America. This contest, set against the backdrop of the American wilderness, remains forever young in Parkman's work, Morison wrote: " . . . with the immortal youth of art"; his men and women are alive; they feel, think and act within the framework of a living nature. In Parkman's prose the forests ever murmur, the rapids perpetually foam and roar; the people have parts

482 I AMERICAN and passions. Like that "sylvan historian" on the Grecian urn, he caught the spirit of an age and fixed it for all time, "forever panting and forever young." Parkman's grand theme was the American forest; he was not interested in the sea. Here Morison saw his opportunity. He conceived the idea of writing the maritime history of Massachusetts in 1910, and a decade later it was written in "one swoop on a wave of euphoria." The book is an exuberant presentation of life in the era of sail, and romantic in its evocation of scenes long past. Within the framework of a flourishing maritime trade marked by cycles of depression and doomed to eventual decline, Morison presented the ports of Salem and Boston, tied by commerce to the Sandwich Islands, China, and the East Indies, and the communities of Nantucket and Gloucester, tied to the whale and the cod. Commerce, interrupted by the naval battles of the Revolution and the War of 1812, and by Jefferson's embargo, was revived by venturesome merchants opening new markets, by the ingenuity of ship designers and craftsmen, and by the fortuitous discovery of gold in California that drew the clipper ships of Massachusetts around Cape Horn to link a continental nation. Morison described diverse customs and social issues ranging from the practice of ships' captains taking their wives to sea and the prosperous building mansions in their home ports to the punishments for common sailors, impressment, and exploitation of the foreign proletariat of the sea who manned Yankee ships when the native sons turned to manufacturing or the West for a place in life without economic enslavement. "Was Cape Cod democratic?" Morison asked a Barnstable man who had gone west before the Civil War. "Why, yes; it wasn't like Bostoi>— everyone spoke to everybody else." "But was it democratic like Wisconsin?" Morison asked. "No! by no means!"

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What the seamen ate and wore, how they navigated and rigged their ships, and when changes occurred in catching the cod and designing the boats and ships—such topics, many of them technical in definition and difficult to explain simply, are presented effectively, with the research and scholarly apparatus suppressed. The technical and practical achievements that Morison highlighted reflect his bias for the study of the physical world, the verities of the senses over the ideal and the philosophical. This is best expressed where he points out that it was by virtue of the Mediterranean trade of Boston that Ralph Waldo Emerson was transported to his meeting with Thomas Carlyle and other English transcendentalists, and that a Boston merchant selling shiploads of Massachusetts ice in Asia had built a bridge between "Concord anarchy and Indian philosophy." The heroes of The Maritime History of Massachusetts are practical men. One is Nathaniel Bowditch, author of one of the internationally recognized books written early in the American national history, The Practical Navigator. Foremost is Donald McKay, builder of the Stag Hound, Flying Cloud, Lightning, Westward Ho!, Romance of the Seas, and Great Republic—clipper ships that placed America ahead of all other nations in ship design. The period of the clipper ship, which concluded the maritime history of Massachusetts as unique in the United States, was short-lived economically. ' Tar better had the brains and energy that produced the clipper ships been put into the iron screw steamer," Morison observed, for Massachusetts maritime preeminence succumbed to changes on the national scene. (But parenthetically he questioned whether Phidias would have been better employed in sanitation or Euripides in discovering the printing press.) With the triumph of the clipper ship, Morison capped his history of the maritime development and decline of his native state, for in the clipper

SAMUEL ELIOT MORISON I 483 ship he saw the finest expression of a particular culture—"the long-suppressed artistic impulse of a practical, hard-working race burst into flower." He continued: "TheFlying Cloud was our Rheims, the Sovereign of the Seas our Parthenon, the Lightning our Amiens; but they were monuments carved in snow. For a brief moment of time they flashed their splendor around the world, then disappeared with the sudden completeness of the passenger pigeon." The Maritime History of Massachusetts is filled with the action of the whaling chase and vessels scudding before the wind on record runs, with salty language, snatches from ballads, and sea anecdotes. It contains panoramic word pictures of ports from Salem to Canton. This book was the first Morison wrote with the ocean as his subject, the theme he would develop over a lifetime. For energy and vividness it is an effort he would not surpass. At age thirty-four Morison obtained a leave of absence from Harvard to become Harmsworth professor of American history at Oxford University. With his family (he had married Elizabeth Shaw Greene in 1910) he spent 1922-25 abroad. In England he sought out the villages of Ipswich, Dedham, Groton, and Braintree, whose people had settled Massachusetts Bay Colony. On his return journey to the United States, Morison acquainted himself with the archive materials on Christopher Columbus, and in Toledo he was impressed with the age and continuity of the institutions of Spain. In the United States, where all institutions are relatively young, his alma mater, Harvard College, was the oldest corporation and would shortly celebrate its tercentenary. Why not be the historian of Harvard, he asked; proposed the same to President Abbott Lowell of Harvard; and was forthwith appointed official historian. Morison also contracted to write a history of the United States for a British audience. The Oxford History of the United States, 1783-1917,

published in 1927, was history written as past politics—primarily a political history of the nation, but with considerable emphasis on naval matters. It details American geography, features of the Constitution, and such political institutions as the Supreme Court with which his audience would not be familiar. One of the virtues of this history is the effective use of quotations; Morison blends the general with the particular by assessing the character of statesmen through the words of their contemporaries, drawn from personal letters, and presenting partisan viewpoints from the mouths of their authors. As in all Morison's histories, candid views directly stated are in evidence; for instance, he describes the Federalists, about whom he had written sympathetically before, as being an "oligarchy of wealth and talent" that was not sufficiently "broad or deep" and that "passed into a minority party which contained more talent and virtue, with less practical common sense, than any of their successors." Writing about John Adams, who lacked social grace in almost the same proportion that Harrison Gray Otis possessed it, Morison said: "The Adams family have generally been right, but they are uncommonly disagreeable about it." The history also emphasized political oratory, the Senate debates, and the inaugural addresses that gave definition to the politics of the nineteenth century. And it cast in dramatic form particular episodes in the nation's past. One was the duel between Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr, which in dramatic miniature marked the death of an aristocratic concept of what would become, instead, a democratic America. "So perished one of the greatest men of the age, for his little faith in the government he had formed and in the people he had served so well," Morison wrote of Hamilton. The scene at Appomattox is told in dramatically sketched phrases. Lincoln's assassination breaks upon the pages in numbed passages drawn from the secret diary of

484 I AMERICAN Gideon Welles, who served as Lincoln's secretary of the navy. The material in Morison's Oxford History was the basis for his contribution to a successful collaboration with Henry Steele Commager on a textbook of American history, The Growth of the American Republic. Published in 1930, this book has been read by generations of college students in its six editions. Morison was responsible for the material up to the Civil War; and in later editions, which included more sympathetic pictures of Indians, Mormons, and other minorities, he assumed responsibility for the chapters on World War II. In 1930-36, Morison's scholarship focused on the Puritans of the seventeenth century. In the decade following World War I, it had become fashionable to denigrate the Puritans. Amid changing manners and mores, and liberalized attitudes toward sex and entertainment, the term "puritan" was used as a symbol of the repressive elements in American culture. H. L. Mencken defined puritanism as "the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy." In literary circles it became fashionable to view colonial American literature as particularly barren and to condemn puritanism as the explanation of why particular American artists had been stymied in their careers and why American literature generally had not developed to its potential. James Truslow Adams, then considered the foremost scholar of New England, Brooks Adams, and others accepted the label "glacial period" to describe a century of New England's cultural history. This label was derived from a book by Charles Francis Adams, Massachusetts, Its Historians and Its History (1893), in which he wrote that following the banishment of Anne Hutchinson, "a theological glacier . . . slowly settled down upon Massachusetts." Almost as though he had set out to demonstrate that for once the Adamses were wrong, Morison's study of the Puritan leaders, Harvard

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College, and the education and culture of the colonial period argues that whatever the sins that may be laid to puritanism as a cultural force in the nineteenth century, the seventeenth-century Puritans were courageous people who, within the framework of a theological view of the woild that is no longer shared in the twentieth century, lived intellectually stimulating lives and developed institutions that sustained science and literature. Along with Vernon L. Parrington, whose Main Currents in American Thought: The Colonial Mind, 1620-1800 (1927) reassessed the development of political thought through the letters of colonial America, Morison shared a renewed appreciation of the Puritan mind that scholars such as Perry Miller, Edmund Morgan, and Bernard Bailyn have sustained down to the present. Builders of the Bay Colony, published in 1930, treats biographically a selection of people in the first generation of the Massachusetts Bay Colony whose lives appealed most to Morison. They represented various aspects of life: adventurers, an artist, a lawyer and wit, an educator, the evangelical John Eliot, and the poet Anne Bradstreet. Seeking to describe the Puritans truthfully, yet in modern terms, he defined their moral preciseness and recognized their high sincerity of purpose and integrity in life. Even as he did not often find among them "breadth of mind," Morison did find "a spiritual depth that belongs only to the great ages of religious experience." He recorded an account in John Winthrop's journal in which a man who spoke ill of the colony left it, and was followed by the Lord, whose justice was visited upon him when madness overtook one daughter and two of his children were abused sexually. "That is the kind df statement which flies up in your face when you are beginning to think the Puritans were pretty good fellows," Morison wrote, showing "us what a chasm separates the thoughts of even the best men of that time and persuasion, from ourselves."

SAMUEL EUOT MORISON I 485 As for the allegation that Puritans took a morbid interest in sex, Morison discussed the sexual outbreaks, which Puritan chroniclers frankly detailed and ascribed to the influence of the devil, in terms of the coarse origins of the indentured servants, their hard labor, and the late marriages their indentures necessitated. He concluded that the same troubles occurred in Virginia, and for the same reasons; and with respect to superstition and coarseness, the New England Puritan "was no better nor worse than the average educated Englishman of the time." The emphasis of Builders of the Bay Colony, however, is on those who were not coarsened by the harsh conditions of a frontier colony and were not confined by narrowness of thought. John Winthrop and John Eliot lived long, full lives; and Henry Dunster founded Harvard College, an institution that would grow with New England although he, for the independence of his religious beliefs, was severed from the school. Anne Bradstreet, a housewife and mother, employed the adversity of a new land to her spiritual advantage and in her religion furthered creative art. In 1935 The Founding of Harvard College was published, followed a year later by the twovolume Harvard College in the Seventeenth Century. Unlike the brick-and-mortar variety of institutional history common with universities, Morison attempted to blend social and intellectual history, describing the development of curricula and inaugural pageantry, and the relationship of town and gown, as well as the board and lodging of undergraduates, their spring pranks, and their sports. A separate volume, published in 1936, Three Centuries of Harvard (1636-1936), also was written for Harvard's tercentenary celebration and intended not as a reference book but, rather, to be read and enjoyed by a larger audience, especially the returning alumni. This book emphasizes the role of the great presidents in Harvard's development and

traces the early and faithful adherence of the institution to the principle of academic freedom as one of the reasons for Harvard's twentieth-century attainments and stature. These three books were Morison's first experience in blending three different types of history: official, academic, and popular. Also in 1936 Morison published The Puritan Pronaos: Studies in the Intellectual Life of New England in the Seventeenth Century, a more explicit rebuttal than he had written before to the critics of early Puritanism. Examining the schools, printing, libraries, sermons, histories, and verse of New England Puritans, and specifically excluding the works of those born or schooled in England, Morison asserted that there is evidence of an "early flowering" of New England in the seventeenth century. The attack on Puritanism in the post-World War I period was but one of the literary fashions to which Morison was impervious. Another was the biographical debunking of great men. Historians had long since rejected the "great man" theory of history, as had such nineteenth-century champions as Thomas Carlyle, thus clearing the way for what they took to be the scientific study of economic and social forces. Lytton Strachey set the tone for postwar disillusionment in leadership with his short and brilliant Eminent Victorians and his Queen Victoria. These works, emphasizing brevity of expression and insight into the psychological motivations of their subjects, were the models for a host of American books that more ponderously removed the mother of George Washington from the saintly ranks and distinguished between the "man and the myth" in treatments of Washington and other early national heroes. Morison's view of the debunkers and the dialectical materialists also writing in the 1920's and 1930's was that they would "admit of no high-mindedness, no virtue, no nobility of character . . . ," and that' 'by robbing the people of their heroes, by insulting their folk-

486 I AMERICAN memory of great figures," they drove people away from written history. There were, however, other trends in biography that developed in the 1930's. Morison contributed more than two dozen pieces, some of them lengthy ones on important figures, to the Dictionary of American Biography. Although he felt he was given a choice of secondary New Englanders with whom James Truslow Adams did not choose to bother, some of the interesting figures he did do are Elbridge Gerry (Harrison Gray Otis' counterpart in the Democratic politics of Massachusetts), Fisher Ames, James Otis, William Bradford, and Squanto. Also indicative of the rising interest in the study of American subjects were a number of long biographies published in this period. Douglas Southall Freeman's biography of Robert E. Lee, Carl Van Doren's Benjamin Franklin, and Allan Nevins' biographies of Grover Cleveland, John Charles Fremont, and John D. Rockefeller were examples of a return to a type of biography very much like the life-and-times variety of the nineteenth century, yet combined scholarly diligence with a celebration of important and successful Americans. Morison, researching the voyages of Christopher Columbus in the late 1930's, participated in this nationalistic trend in American letters that extended from the Great Depression through the Cold War of the 1950's. Morison's biography of Columbus, Admiral of the Ocean Sea: A Life of Christopher Columbus, was published in 1942; but as far back as 1916 he had decided that he would sail to the West Indies and check Columbus' landfalls and coastings. Twenty years later he did so, cruising on a racer to the Windward and Leeward Islands. In 1939 Morison organized the Harvard Columbus Expedition, which sailed on the Capitania, a threemasted schooner yacht, and the Mary Otis, a ketch, to Spain and then retraced Columbus' route across the Atlantic to the West Indies. Again in the summer of 1940 he sailed in the Mary Otis to the Bahamas and around Cuba.

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In this activity Morison was following the practice of the historian he so much admired, Francis Parkman. Parkman, fighting against a bodily constitution subject to nervous collapse and the bookish routine of a scholar's life, sought to live a life of action like that of the soldiers and explorers about whom he wrote. Thus, as a historian he made a practice of personally visiting the North American sites—forts, battlegrounds, encampments, and points of discovery—where history was made by the people about whom he would write. His sojourn among the Sioux in 1846, which is described in The California and Oregon Trail, was his attempt personally to realize, among Indians west of the line of settlement, the experience of the Jesuit missionaries whose relations with the Great Lakes tribes he would record in two volumes. Parkman also made expeditions into the New England forests, visited the ruins of Fort Ticonderoga, and lived briefly among the Passionist monks of Rome. As a result the pages of his histories are enriched by vivid scenes and a sense of personal experience, qualities that have made his work endure. Such visits are a romantic activity that bespeaks a strong identification between the historian and the subject upon whose footprints he stands while contemplating the dramatic past. But they are also a practical activity, for the terrain is one of the primary documents on which are etched clues to the campaigns of generals, the routes of explorers. Morison admired Parkman's going into the wilderness before writing about it. The sea was a subject that had not received much attention from American historians. Much land surface, because of growth and technology, was unrecognizable, greatly changed from what it was a century before. The one thing unchanged since Columbus' day was the ocean, and, Morison observed, 4 'I was willing to ask questions of it." On the Harvaid Columbus Expedition 10,000 miles were logged, and all the European ports and islands Columbus visited were examined.

SAMUEL ELIOT MORISON I 487 More than thirty places in the New World touched by Columbus were identified. Rough waters in a section of ocean described in the abstract of Columbus' journal were confirmed when the rudder of one of the vessels of the expedition was disengaged; Columbus' sighting of a mourning dove far out at sea was similarly matched on the expedition, though Morison had previously been told that Columbus was in error. The work of the expedition allowed Morison to make a revaluation of Columbus as a seaman and navigator. Columbus not only showed the way to the New World; but in his four voyages to the West Indies he located, for those who would follow him, the fastest seasonal routes. He successfully navigated the uncharted shallow waters of the Caribbean, where he read and avoided the hurricane winds of the region. The second, third, and fourth voyages "even more than the first," Morison concluded, "proved him to be the greatest navigator of his age." This determination was the directly practical yield of Morison's site visits; and just as Parkman identified with the active life of the forest heroes, Morison identified with Columbus. (He wrote that the "Nina was the Admiral's favorite and so mine.") The result is an exposition of Columbus' character that is as interesting as his examination of the man as a navigator. Morison looked in vain for reminiscent passages in Columbus' writings; Columbus was too much the man of action. He checked the admiral's few celestial observations, found them cockeyed, and concluded that "Columbus was not conscious of the stars." Unlike most sailors—and indeed, like most men until the eighteenth-century Romantic shift in aesthetic sensibilities—Columbus did have an aesthetic appreciation for the landscape around him. Morison celebrated those few remarks that come down to us, such as Columbus' comments on the "savor of the mornings" or fine weather "like April in Andalusia." Columbus was not a celestial navigator, but a dead-reckoning naviga-

tor, sailing with log and line, his eyes trained to messages in the clouds and on the surface of the sea. And so Morison, in tracing Columbus' routes and landfalls, traced also vivid pictorial scenes: for instance, at dawn, approaching an island in the West Indies, the island is a vague shadow, a dark shape against the celestial sphere, that takes substance, form, and color— gray, green, and finally a blue lighter than the sea. Defects in Columbus' character were his pride, strong will, and stubborn persistence, qualities that made him a poor administrator; but he was without defect in his most important quality, his seamanship. A man of vast ambition who was assailed by circumstance both early and late in life, he nonetheless, Morison concluded, had a happy life. In this biography Morison generally removed from the reader's view the scholarship that stands behind his account, except in two respects. At points of unresolved controversy he often presented the contending sides and let the reader judge for himself, or asserted an unequivocal argument of his own based on an appeal to common sense. There is, for instance, the famous anecdote of the egg that Columbus, in a playful contest, stood on end (by crushing it slightly), demonstrating to the critical nobility there assembled that after a discovery is made, such as Columbus' discovery of the New World, people think how easy it is and that anyone might have done it. It is too good a story to pass up; but whereas Washington Irving in his biography of Columbus claimed that "the universal popularity of this anecdote is proof of its merit," Morison noted that "unfortunately the egg story had already done duty in several Italian biographies." Morison also let the "seagoing scholarship," the insights resulting from extensive nautical experience and from the experience of sailing the same waters Columbus sailed, intrude in the narrative. This lends an authenticating stamp, as if to say: 4 'I know; I was there.'' These intrusions keep the

488 I AMERICAN biography personal in tone, as does an informality of organization that admits digressions to reconcile accounts, weave in stories and sea traditions, and describe the routines on a sailing ship. Admiral of the Ocean Sea was one of the two central works of Morison's career. It was preceded by two books that came out of the preliminary research: The Second Voyage of Columbus (1939) and Portuguese Voyages to America in the Fifteenth Century (1940). A scholarly twovolume edition, containing citations and a thorough review of such questions as whether syphilis was of New World or Old World origin, was issued along with the trade edition of Admiral of the Ocean Sea, which has been translated into five European languages. Morison returned to his Columbus material in 1955 to write a simplified life of Columbus for young readers, Christopher Columbus, Mariner; and in 1964, after a photographic reconnaissance flight over the islands discovered by Columbus, he published with Mauricio Obregon an illustrated book, The Caribbean as Columbus Saw It. In 1942 Morison received his first Pulitzer Prize, for his life of Columbus. As his biography of Harrison Gray Otis had served as his introduction into academic circles early in his career, his biography of Columbus opened doors for him during World War II, when he sailed with the United States Navy, taking notes and holding interviews for his multivolume history of the Navy at war. Though to ship commanders, from the point of view of fighting effectiveness, Morison was merely an extra body on the bridge, they welcomed this middle-aged lieutenant commander on their ships; he was the biographer of Columbus. The first door opened by the Columbus biography was that of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Morison enjoyed telling of how he came to be appointed "historian of naval operations." As with his previous appointment as official historian of Harvard, the idea originated with him.

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He could point out that the Navy history of World War I was not begun until after the fighting ended and that it was still not completed as the country, more than twenty years later, was again at war. He was fifty-four years old and in good health, possessed the requisite historical and practical maritime training, and was anxious to apply his "Columbus technique" to naval warfare. He had been an undergraduate at Harvard when Roosevelt was there, though not in the same class, and had served on a committee giving advice on presidential papers. In an interview it took but ten minutes to get the approval of the president; and Morison, who had served for a few months as an Army private during World War I, was commissioned a lieutenant commander in the Naval Reserve attached to the secretary of the navy, Frank Knox. This relatively low rank, linked with high connections, gave him access to records and reports he desired, permitted him to sail in the naval operations of his choice, and allowed him to work with a staff of his own choosing. He extracted from the Navy the agreement that, apart from security regulations, he was not to be censored, nor was he required to publish until the war was over, when the records of the enemy navies would be available. Thus the war years found Morison sailing on the Atlantic and the Pacific, gathering impressions and checking reports, conscious that like Thucydides, the historian of the Peloponnesian War, he was participating in, and would write the history of, a war greater and more memorable than any previous one. Morison crossed the Atlantic on the U.S.S. Buck in the summer of 1942, returned to an antisubmarine patrol out of Boston, and crossed the Atlantic again in October on the U.S.S. Brooklyn for an eyewitness view of the landings in North Africa. Twice more during the war he crossed to Europe, including a reconnaissance, shortly after they had been secured, of the landing beachheads of Provence. In the Pacific he

SAMUEL ELIOT MORISON I 489 coasted Papua in a torpedo boat. Mori son participated in the Solomons campaign, ran "up the slot" at Rabaul, and was present at operations in Guadalcanal, the Gilberts and the Marshalls, the Marianas, Leyte Gulf, and Okinawa. He was on board a vessel struck by a torpedo and eyewitness to night battles at sea, island bombardments, and kamikaze attacks. The model for Morison's historical method during this time was Thucydides, who had written: "Of the events of the war, I have not ventured to speak from any chance information, nor according to any notion of my own; f-have described nothing but what I either saw myself, or learned from others of whom I made the most careful and particular inquiry." Operations in which Morison was unable to participate were covered by several assistants (ensigns, for the most part, who had been his students at Harvard). "My method was to participate in an operation," he wrote, "then settle down at some naval base, read all the action reports I could obtain, write a preliminary draft, file it for future use, and then shove off on another operation." Thucydides observed that "eyewitnesses of the same occurrence gave different accounts of them as they remembered." Morison learned from his experience the importance of oral testimony as opposed to official reports, and the value of visual observation, even though the eye is not always infallible. In a night battle, for instance, he had seen two burning enemy ships where Japanese records available after the war demonstrated that it was one ship blown in half. Thucydides feared that "the strictly historical character" of his narrative "may be disappointing to the ear." Morison, concluding his account of the battles of Savo, Guadalcanal, and Tassafaronga, addresses the reader with the explanation that "if this tale has seemed repetitious with shock and gore, exploding magazines, burning and sinking ships and plummeting planes—that is simply how it was." Thucydides believed that

a "true picture of events which have happened" would prove useful, since similar events "may be expected to happen hereafter in the order of human things." Similarly, Morison believed in the utility of his enterprise and found in it military lessons and examples of the significance of sea power that would remain valid even in a nuclear age. His participation in the war gave him insight, Morison believed, into the military mind, and an appreciation and perspective from which to judge the personalities of naval leaders. There were "fewer duds in the U.S. Navy," he said, "than on the Harvard faculty." Observing the near miss of many torpedoes and the unsought opportunities and problems that presented themselves to commanders at sea, he was impressed with the role that chance played in warfare. A corollary of this was his belief that experienced commanders who suffered defeat in battle would often prove able if given a second chance. Three times during the war Morison had interviews with President Roosevelt, who continued to be interested in the history project. Morison sent his preliminary drafts of the operation against French Morocco and "The Battle of the Atlantic" to the president and Secretary Knox for their comments. In June 1944, Roosevelt wrote to the new secretary of the navy, James Forrestal, suggesting that "the performances of the P.T. squadrons should be made subject of a separate chapter of U.S. Naval history." Forrestal replied that he could not learn of Morison's plans because Morison was in the Pacific for the next month, but told the president that he had instructed Morison to comply with the president's request. Morison's reply to this order to do what he probably had already intended was written mih the complaint attitude of a naval officer to his superior ("I am fully prepared," he wrote), but also with the chary independence of a professional historian ("to give them [P.T. squadrons] their due place in Naval History.").

490 I AMERICAN Believing a large staff would sap his energies, Morison kept his to a minimum during the war. After the war, as the fifteen volumes of the History of United States Naval Operations in World War II came out at the rate of better than one a year from 1947 to 1962, his staff numbered an average of two clerical and two professional assistants. The German and Japanese records were made available in 1946. Officers of enemy navies were interviewed, as were those of the French navy, with whom Morison examined the coast of Normandy in 1951. The beachheads of Sicily and Tokyo Harbor were among the overseas sites that Morison visited after the war; in the United States he divided his time between Boston; the naval station in Newport, Rhode Island; Washington, D.C.; and Northeast Harbor, Maine. The first two volumes, The Battle of the Atlantic and Operations in North African Waters, which came out in 1947, included a description of the jurisdictional rivalry between the Army and Navy in the conduct of antisubmarine warfare. In the subsequent volumes that appeared during the 1950's, the services, including the Air Force, were depicted as engaged in a rivalry sometimes called "the battle of the budget." The lessons shown in Morison's history could be used to support the Navy's push for the construction of an expensive carrier fleet; and the image of the Navy was further enhanced as the result of the production, by Morison's foremost wartime assistant, Henry Solomon, Jr., of the successful documentary television series "Victory at Sea." The official Army history, United States Army in World War //, which has run to more than threescore volumes, and shorter multivolume series by the Air Force and Marines, appeared during this period; but they were written by groups of historians for a professional audience and did not rival Morison's work in popularity. The publication of the third volume, The Rising Sun in the Pacific, describing the attack on

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Pearl Harbor, drew Morison into a vituperative debate over the responsibility for this defeat. He wrote that a few days before the attack, the Chicago Tribune "had 'patriotically' published to the world" the United States' basic war plan, "as evidence of the 'duplicity' and 'war mongering' of the Roosevelt Administration." The Tribune responded with an editorial headlined "A Hired Liar," in which it argued that Roosevelt maneuvered the Japanese into firing the first shot. The editorial concluded with this comment on Morison: "He is doing his job as his patrons would want it done. A hired liar knows what's expected f6r his pay." The Navy's response was that Morison's history was not an "official" history. Morison, no longer on active duty, was writing it under contract, with the royalties going to the Navy for the research and writing of United States naval history. Morison insisted that the opinions and judgments expressed in the history were his own and, unlike the histories of the other armed services, it did not pass before a board of review. He stood by his account of the Pearl Harbor disaster, relying on the massive testimony and findings of the congressional investigation. Moreover, he carried the argument into the ranks of the professional historians, challenging, in an article in the Atlantic Monthly titled "History Through a Beard," Charles A. Beard, the foremost of the revisionist historians who argued that Pearl Harbor was the result of a conscious and deliberate design on the part of the Roosevelt administration. Morison's naval history was, as he claimed, not an official history in the usual sense of the word; but charges that he was writing as a "court historian" were not unfounded either. His characteristic view and sympathies were closely allied with those of the administration. Morison was not indifferent to the perils of writing contemporary history. Each new printing of his Navy volumes included corrections of errors, notice of which he sought from his readers.

SAMUEL ELIOT MORISON I 491 He was, however, proud of those narratives, such as that of Savo Island, which remained virtually unchanged. Morison was aware that he shared in the emotions as well as the scenes of the war. Of Guadalcanal he wrote that he could not "pretend to write of that stinking island" with "detachment and objectivity." Having had a part in the "torment and the passion," he sometimes felt he was "writing not for the present or for posterity" but for the ghosts of those who died on the island. This sense of involvement, although it detracts from Morison's attempt to give a detached assessment of the war leaders, permeates the history and is one of its chief virtues. Battles are viewed from the perspective of the grand strategy, but also through the eyes of a seaman, a submarine skipper on patrol, sailors on deck anticipating the enemy as battle nears. In addition to using point of view to dramatic advantage, Morison employed his descriptive sense, giving the reader grand scenes of the wartime Atlantic and Pacific, as well as night gunfire actions of a kind "that we may never see again." Some of the best of the writing, such as the fast-paced battles he describes in volume XII, Leyte, may simply be described as sea action. The heroes of the series are the principal strategists on the American side, Adm. Ernest King ("best naval strategist and organizer in our history") and Adm. Chester Nimitz. In the early volumes the commander of the German U-boats, Adm. Karl Doenitz, emerges as the most significant personality, and Adm. Isoroku Yamamoto is rated as the most competent adversary. Of the sea admirals Morison found no equal to Raymond Spruance. The completed series was dedicated to Franklin Roosevelt, who gave inspired leadership, in Morison's opinion, and, unlike Winston Churchill, "never imagined himself to be a strategist." Morison regarded his fifteen volumes on the U.S. Navy as his greatest challenge as a histo-

rian, and believed that they were regarded as his most important work. Except for research delegated to his assistants on minor operations such as submarine patrols, and much exacting correspondence and checking of data, he did all the research himself, going directly to the sources. And the writing was his own. His decision, contrary to the practice of the other armed services, to keep a small staff, and the decision of the Navy to commit its history to one man rather than committees of historians, was vindicated by the result. Morison's favorite narratives from these volumes, it is said, were those operations in which he participated. He later chose the action-filled chapter "The Battle off Samar" to be included in a volume of writings selected from his career. As with his history of Harvard and his biography of Columbus, Morison followed his multivolume history of the Navy in World War II with a single-volume condensation in 1963, in order to make his scholarship available to an even wider audience. The Two-Ocean War, as befitted a popular history, was dedicated not to the war leaders, but to the wartime shipmates with whom Morison had sailed on eight different vessels. A naval history containing allusions to the great naval strategist Albert Thayer Mahan, but also to Ossian, John Milton, and Sophocles, it strives, even more than the multivolume version, to include the personalized sentiments of wartime. Morison's history of the U.S. Navy, a labor of twenty years, gave him the opportunity to realize the injunction of Polybius, that a historian should be a man of action. Of all his works it drew the greatest comment and criticism. It confounds the categories into which the separate varieties of history have been divided within the professionalized history writing of the twentieth century. It is an official history that escaped committee authorship and the imprimatur of a review board, and came to command professional re-

492 I AMERICAN spect and have a wide audience. It is contemporary history that draws together official, scholarly, and popular history. While Morison was engaged in writing his Navy volumes, he was author or editor of eight other books. The period following his retirement from teaching in 1955 was especially productive, and was also a time in which he gathered honors. In 1951 he was placed on the Navy's honorary retired list with the rank of rear admiral. The year before, he had been elected president of the American Historical Association. In 1960 he received a second Pulitzer Prize; he traveled to Rome in 1963 to receive, along with Pope John XXIII, the Balzan Award; and he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1964. Morison's presidential address before the American Historical Association, "Faith of an Historian,'' was included in By Land and by Sea, a volume of his selected essays (1953). And his receipt of the Balzan Award occasioned a similar volume, Vistas of History (1964), containing an essay titled "The Experiences and Principles of an Historian." These two works clarify his attitude toward twentieth-century trends in historical writing. Morison claimed to have observed early in his career the frustration of Henry Adams in his search for a law of history, and therefore concentrated on human experience as a historian, not concerning himself overly with a philosophy of history. He relied on Thucydides' definition of history as being without romance, a "true picture of events which have happened," and the dictum of the nineteenth-century German historian Leopold von Ranke, that history should simply explain an event "exactly as it happened." Armed with this intention, he believed, the historian, in his desire to instruct and please, could maintain his professional integrity, giving his work artistic form without falsifying in the manner of popularizers and amateurs determined to prove a thesis or write a best-seller.

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Holding to this view of history writing, Morison spoke out against the progressive thinking among professional historians that reasoned that history writing, reflecting as it does the needs and aspirations of the time in which it is produced, should be consciously enlisted in the struggle for social progress. The relativist view of history, recognized as the "new history" of James Harvey Robinson at the turn of the century and brilliantly articulated by Carl Becker, became dangerous, in Morison's opinion, as practiced by Charles A. Beard. Beard's earlier presidential address to the same body of historians, "Written History as an Act of Faith," argued that a historian should write history with a "frame of reference" consistent with the sort of future America he wanted. Admitting that a historian's own values enter into his selection of facts, and that there is no such thing in history as scientific objectivity, Morison nevertheless insisted that it was the historian's prime duty to present, to the best of his ability, a body of ascertained fact. Morison believed that the historian was obliged to give advice when the past gave insight to which statesmen and the public were blind. In this vein he admonished his fellow historians for ignoring the significance of war in the nation's past, claiming that through the pacifism and disillusionment they reflected in the period after World War I, they shared in responsibility for the country's unpreparedness at the outbreak of World War II. "War does accomplish something . . . is better than servitude,'' and has been ' *an inescapable aspect of the human story," he said; and historians should have known this. Historians, Morison felt, were losing their influence with the public. He ascribed this in part to the abandonment and flouting of tradition by the debunkers, followed by historians attracted to dialectical materialism, with the result that there was * 'the mass murder of historical characters" by those who would acknowledge no great

SAMUEL ELIOT MORISON I 493

men capable of high-mindedness, nobility, or virtue. Though he saw debunking and Marxism as enthusiasms in the profession that reached the greatest influence in the two decades between the wars, Morison counseled historians to pay respect to traditions and to folk memory, "to deal gently with your people's traditions." And though his commitment to biography remained strong from the 1950's to the 1970's, the fashionable interest in psychohistory did not touch him. Neither did the catchwords that indicated shifts in historiographic interest during this period— * 'ambiguity," ' 'complexity," * 'paradox ," ' 'ambivalence," * 'irony''—enter his writings significantly. The relationship of historians to the reading public concerned Morison. During the 1930's, Allan Nevins led a discussion about the status of historical writing, which appeared to him as polarized between books by popularizers and books by pedants. Concerned that good historical scholarship was failing to reach a wide public, Nevins, Carl Becker, Douglas Southall Freeman, and others lent support to the creation of a popular, illustrated history magazine, an effort that resulted in American Heritage magazine. Morison's support of this view was largely by example. He conceded that modern history writing, especially social history, placed additional demands of form and style on the historian. Moreover, he believed it was all the more necessary to write well because the classical education one could once expect of the reading public was gone. "The common knowledge that one could assume in 1901, has slipped away," he wrote, "driven out by the internal-combustion engine, nuclear fission, and Dr. Freud." In the 1940's Morison wrote for the students in his graduate seminar an essay, History as a Literary An, which was published as an Old South pamphlet and as part of his contribution to the Harvard Guide to American History. Clarity, vigor, and objectivity were defined as the three

prime qualities of historical composition. He admitted there were no special rules for writing history, and warned against the fallacy of thinking that facts speak for themselves. "Most of the facts that you excavate from the archives, like all relics of past human activity, are dumb things," Morison counseled, requiring "proper selection, arrangement, and emphasis." His advice was to "assume that you are writing for intelligent people who know nothing about your particular subject but whom you wish to interest and attract.' This was his own practice in the postwar period, following the death of his first wife and his remarriage: he read aloud the drafts of his work to Priscilla Barton Morison, his second wife, who was a generation younger than himself, and relied on her comments and criticism. Morison's advice to young historians was to read the Greek and Latin classics. Better than the science of psychology, he thought, they give insight into the ways of men, and they dispel provincialism. The great historical stylists, such as Parkman, Prescott, and John Fiske, benefited from the study of Latin and Greek as ' 'superb instruments of thought" that enabled them to develop clear and forceful styles in English. The moral laws of ancient Greece are "the creative forces in our own civilization," Morison believed; and education should strive for a vision of excellence instead of conforming to the values of the average. He described the educational philosophy of John Dewey as the ugly duckling "which continues to befoul American education to this day," and said it was hatched out of the anti-intellectualism of Jacksonian democracy—a society "contemptuous of the artist and the scholar." Morison advised historians, in addition to writing on subjects of national and international interest, to write local history, for it served to integrate the historian with the community, so that he would not be viewed as just another professor. In the postwar period three short books by

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Morison were of local interest. The Ropemakers of Plymouth (1950) surveyed the 125-year history of the Plymouth Cordage Company. The Story of Mount Desert Island, Maine (1960) was an affectionate account of the history and people of the island. One Boy's Boston: 1887-1901, published in 1962, describes late nineteenthcentury Boston. It contains Morison's favorite stories from childhood, with anecdotes of old-rip relatives, the Otises (who "did nothing in particular. And did it very well"), Eliots, and personalities from Boston society and Boston streets. During the postwar period Morison edited several books: The Parkman Reader (1955), Prescott's History of the Conquest of Peru (1957), and Journals and Other Documents on the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (1963). Most important of his edited books was William Bradford's Of Plymouth Plantation (1952), which Morison introduced to a much wider audience than had read the previously available editions containing the abbreviations and variant spellings of the original manuscript. Treating Bradford as a modern editor would the plays of Shakespeare or the King James Bible, Morison made the work conform to modern practices of spelling and capitalization, but omitted nothing and gave scrupulous respect to Bradford's actual language. Morison published a small volume of essays titled Spring Tides in 1965. Describing his feeling for the sea, he wrote, was "almost as embarrassing as making a confession of religious faith." The subjects of these discursive essays are the tides, yacht design, people, a summer cruise, and the sea literature of the ancients. Morison brought a unique appreciation to the classical poets of Greece and Rome. Their works were accurate in nautical technique, he argued, in contrast with modern sea poetry, which invariably contains landlubberly mistakes. He rated Aeschylus' description of the battle of Salamis—a battle in which Aeschylus took

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part—as the finest narrative of a naval battle in all literature. Aeschylus knew the sea firsthand better than any Greek poet but Homer, in Morison's opinion. Homer's power to set an ocean scene in a few words was improved on by Virgil, who, with Dante, wrote the best maritime poetry. In contrasting the modern sentiments of the sea life, including his own recreational sailing, with that of the ancients, Morison identified the central motif of the ancients as "the waves of the sea, laden with suffering." In the postwar period Morison wrote two biographies of naval heroes, John Paul Jones: A Sailor's Biography (1959) and Old Bruin: Commodore Matthew C. Perry, 1794-1858 (1961). They make an interesting contrast. On-site research for both was conducted while collecting materials for his World War II Navy history, his travels taking him to London, Scotland, France, Mexico, and twice to Japan and the Far East. As a result both books are scenic, as usual, but are especially rich in dramatic and exotic settings: John Paul Jones 'sBonhomme Richard engaging the H.M.S. Serapis within sight of the chalk cliffs of Flamborough Head, Commodore Perry's black-hulled ships anchored in Tokyo Harbor as the commodore negotiates with officials of the imperial court. These biographies contain comments on personalities and events by use of aphorisms (La Rochefoucauld and Poor Richard), sayings borrowed from sea lore, and terse comments of Morison's own: "The government of the Dutch Republic was a peculiar one which seems to have been devised for the purpose of avoiding decisions." In both biographies there are chapters composed mainly of sea action, told with the tense shifted to the present; and both biographies, near the close, contain an impressionistic summation of past scenes from the hero's life, in the manner of Lytton Strachey's Queen Victoria. In the character of the hero, these two biographies differed greatly. Whereas Perry's life had

SAMUEL ELIOT MORISON I 495 not generated great enthusiasm or controversy, the life of John Paul Jones had inspired fiction by James Fenimore Cooper, Herman Melville, Sarah Orne Jewett, William Thackeray, and a host of biographers who provided Morison with a challenge similar to that of his Columbus biography—approaching freshly a subject that in previous books had assumed conventional forms and the accumulations of legend. At one point in the Jones biography, Morison, using a convention of nineteenth-century history writers, describes and studies the two life portraits of Jones, inferring from them the manner of the man. Elsewhere he declines to look to psychological explanations of the man's character, insisting instead that like many men of action, Jones was not much given to reflection and regretted nothing he had done, only what others had done to him. Morison found Jones a less than amiable character; traced with a historian's care, but also with a bemused interest, Jones's numerous intrigues with the women he attracted; and asserted that Jones was a lonely man. Morison ascribed this to Jones's colossal egotism that put off friendships, and observed it also in Jones's letters written during his travels in Russia and two years in Paris during the French Revolution—letters that are poor in observation of all but himself. Morison assessed the quality of Jones's seamanship by stating only one qualification. A brilliant tactician, Jones never had proper scope for his talents; and although he may have proven himself a great strategist, he was given only opportunities at the tactical level. As if to balance out the qualities of the complete naval leader, Morison's life of Matthew Calbraith Perry is one of an officer who demonstrated sound seamanship but whose achievements were in planning, strategy, and development of the Navy. Whereas the life of Jones was short, dramatic, and romantic, and his legacy to the United States Navy the example of his indomitable will to victory, the most dramatic in-

cident in the Navy during Perry's long, successful career was the Somers mutiny, a tragic affair in which Perry was not centrally concerned. Perry was a family man. His accomplishments were in organization, such as giving logistic support to the Army during the Mexican War. The triumph of his career was his diplomatic mission to Japan, which resulted in the opening of that country to Western trade and culture. For his biography of Jones, Morison received the Pulitzer Prize for 1960. Although he had earlier criticized pacifist historians and lectured the profession not to ignore the significance of war, it is interesting to note that Morison, who believed a historian had an obligation to share with his country what the past can teach about present policy, was writing, during the country's Vietnam involvement, the life of a naval officer who distinguished himself in a peacetime navy and in diplomacy. Morison also shared authorship with two other historians in 1970 of the book Dissent in Three American Wars, an account drawing on history to show that dissent is not necessarily unpatriotic. In it Morison chronicled the War of 1812 as the United States' most unpopular war. At one time Morison planned to write a textbook of American history for high school students. Instead, in 1965 he again published a general history of the United States. The Oxford History of the American People was intended to be his legacy to his fellow citizens of the halfcentury in which he studied, taught, and wrote history; lived through critical times; took part in both world wars; and met and spoke with most of the American presidents in the twentieth century. In this one volume, which begins with preColumbian America and extends down to the 1960's, Morison attempted to give readers a sense of American ways of living in bygone times—the social place of horses, ships, sports, and eating, drinking, and smoking habits. Political history was not ignored; and to his previous treatments of the Civil War and the War of In-

496 I AMERICAN dependence, Morison brought fresh material. He wrote that he was impressed with the continuity, over three centuries, of American habits and institutions. This work was given a popular reception, and also the critical appraisal by Carl Degler that though "brilliantly written" and "clearly organized," Morison's legacy was "written without a philosophy of historical significance" and was, as a result, "arbitrary" and "irrelevant," failing to be "a powerful tool of contemporary thought." Indeed, Morison did not find it worthwhile to concern himself much with a philosophy of history, and The Oxford History of the American People does close somewhat inconclusively with an enthusiastic appraisal of the "Camelot" years of President John Kennedy. But there are assumptions underlying Morison's view of history even though no theory of progress is evidenced, no guiding hand directs the fortunes of the nation as in the nationalistic histories of the nineteenth century, and there is no anticipated inevitability of a socialist future or a decline of the West. In all of Morison's histories, the actions of man have standing alongside the forces of history. In times of stress, leadership counts for something, history assuming the directions it does as the result of the actions of great men. It is almost as though, in the words of Edmund Burke, "The means by which providence raises a nation to greatness are the virtues infused into its great men," except that in the corpus of Morison's work there is no providence or certain destiny in the affairs of men. Rather, there is the occasional flowering of what is truly fine in a culture. Anne Bradstreet's poetry is an example from Puritan America. And the clipper ships, Morison had written, were America's Rheims, its Amiens. The greatest flowering of culture, in his opinion, occurred in the politics, art, and literature of ancient Greece. He saw the Allied victory in World War II, beyond changing the balance of power, as meaning "that eternal values

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and immutable principles, which had come down to us from ancient Hellas, had been reaffirmed and reestablished." Morison invariably measured Western culture, which stemmed from the ancients of Greece and Rome, by the extent to which it carried on and preserved the classical ideals. The 1950's and 1960's were undoubtedly satisfying for Morison. In his global travels of historical reconnaissance during these years he was always accompanied by his wife, who was fondly mentioned in the dedications of the books from this period. He was assisted in his correspondence, editing, and other tasks by Antha E. Card, formerly a member of his small, loyal Navy staff. Until World War II he never taught during the summers, preferring to vacation with his children. But after age seventy time was more precious, and he wrote: "Knowing that death will break my pen, I now work almost the year around, praying to be spared to write what is still in me to write." At this time Morison resolved on an ambitious project. Turning once again, and for the last time, to the sea, he undertook a trilogy of the pre-Columbian and post-Columbian discoveries in the New World. The European Discovery of America: The Northern Voyages appeared in 1971. This subject took him once again into the thicket of contending scholarship of "first discoveries" along the coast of the Americas, causing him to read, he complained, "some of the most tiresome literature in existence." With age his visiting of sites was altered. Unable to retrace under sail the coasts described by John Cabot, Jacques Carrier, and Giovanni da Verrazano, he arranged to view them from an airplane. His intention also to write a volume on the northern voyages of later explorers in the seventeenth century was realized only in part with the publication of Samuel de Champlain: Father of New France in 1972. Again he flew over the terrain explored by his subject. In these two books Morison expanded a theme

SAMUEL ELIOT MORISON / 497 that appeared earlier in his praise of the deadreckoning navigation of Columbus. He extolled the skills of practical seamen who relied on their common sense and feel for the sea, and who were not dependent, as seamen in modern days were, on complex navigational devices. He claimed that the lore passed on to him by fishermen and Maine sailors added greatly to what he had learned from his personal experience; and he repeated the example of Capt. Joshua Slocum, who sailed around the world with only a dollar alarm clock, a sextant, a farmer's almanac, and a copy of Bowditch for navigational aids. The sea, Morison reasoned, "still delights us and fortifies us against a mechanized culture which reduces man to a moron." He saw little comparison between the qualities and achievements of discoverers like Columbus, Cabot, Verrazano, and Cartier, and the achievements of the astronauts who landed on the moon. Amid the events of the early 1970's, Morison was aware that he was writing in times of social upheaval. In the Champlain biography he compared the promiscuity of the Huron Indians with the 1972 life in college dormitories. He hoped his tales of boldness, faith, and resourcefulness illustrated in the stories of the early explorers would serve as models in an apprehensive age. The European Discovery of America: The Southern Voyages (1974) was dedicated to the memory of his wife. This book relates principally the voyages of Columbus, Sir Francis Drake, and Ferdinand Magellan, who stand supreme, among the navigators of the Age of Discovery, in Morison's opinion. As part of the research for the book he flew over coasts of South America and California, and was lent the services of a U.S. Coast Guard cutter to check on one of Drake's landings. Like the sea narratives that preceded it, The Southern Voyages blends scholarship from the libraries of several continents and is an honest attempt to shed light on an early period. Exuberantly told, it was Morison's final history.

"I need rest. Age makes it easy to want to retire," Morison said in 1972, at age eighty-four. Of the four remaining years of his life, much time was spent at his home in Northeast Harbor, Maine, with his wife's garden outside the door, the ocean coast beyond. Morison lived the role of a gentleman-historian, an aristocrat amid the mass society of twentieth-century America. Rear Adm. Ernest Eller, in whose command Morison worked during World War II, described him on board ship "with his crooked London coronas, his Colombo songs, his Scottish thrift, his Boston charm or haughtiness as the mood served, and his indefatigable application." His aristocratic manner was evidenced in his cultivation of social graces and society, including the old ladies of Boston. His haughtiness appeared in the disdain with which he spoke of "armchair navigators" or of historians who entered the profession without the requisite command of the European languages. Democratic society does not admit of the virtue of condescension; but Morison practiced this as well, cultivating the society of Maine fishermen, masters of the Lisbon banker fleet, and others from whom he could learn about the sea. Condescension reflected in the world of scholarship is simply expressed in Morison's statement that it was the duty of scholars and scientists to produce oeuvres de vulgarisation, to impart their knowledge to the public in the simplest terms. In 1977 the American Heritage Publishing Company posthumously established an annual prize in Morison's name for the "best book on American history by an American author that sustains the tradition that good history is literature as well as high scholarship." It is ironic that for all the democratic trends in the historical profession, including recent groupings such as the New Left historians, it was the aristocratic Morison, the "court historian," who was recognized as successful in reaching a large public. He attributed his success as a writer to industry, the "painstaking cultivation of moderate

498 I AMERICAN abilities." He said he could write anywhere, but that historical research such as that on Columbus and other explorers, and on the United States Navy, required access to records, maps, and libraries in Boston, Washington, Europe, and elsewhere, so that a careful use of his time was necessary. Morison normally had several projects going at once. As a writer his style did not change with age, nor did he pioneer new forms in historical literature; but his works always evidenced romantic enthusiasms: for the scenic, the deeds of the great and daring. According to Samuel Johnson, history writing requires application, but "great parts [are] not requisite for a historian" and "imagination is not required in any high degree." Good workmanship was the only quality to which Morison laid claim, and he did not rate himself with the great historians of the past. The three qualities that he recognized in Francis Parkman's work making for good historical literature—research, evaluation, and literary presentation—are apparent in his own writing. And he earned the right to say, as Parkman wrote in his history of Montcalm and Wolfe, "The subject has been studied as much from life and in the open air as at the library table." Morison, believing that "all your experience in life can get into your work one way or another," lived an active life and produced a substantial literature over a long career. He concentrated his energies on his vocation as a historian; and in his commitment to history as literature, he paid respect to a tradition in American letters that has had no more faithful advocate in the twentieth century.

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Selected Bibliography WORKS OF

SAMUEL ELIOT MORISON BIOGRAPHY

The Life and Letters of Harrison Gray Otis, Federalist, 1765-1848. 2 vols. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1913. Builders of the Bay Colony. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1930. London: Heinemann, 1931. Sentry ed., with supp. ch. on William Pynchon, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1964. The Second Voyage of Columbus. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1939. Admiral of the Ocean Sea: A Life of Christopher Columbus. 2 vols. Boston: Atlantic-Little, Brown, 1942. 1-vol. ed., Boston: Little, Brown, 1942. Paperback ed., 2 vols., New York: Time, Inc., 1962; Mentor, 1962. Christopher Columbus, Mariner. Boston: AtlanticLittle, Brown, 1955 (juvenile). British ed., enl. and ill., London: Faber & Faber, 1955. Paperback ed., New York: Mentor, 1956. John Paul Jones: A Sailor's Biography. Boston: Atlantic-Little, Brown, 1959. Paperback ed., London: Faber & Faber, 1959; New York: Time, Inc., 1964. Old Bruin: Commodore Matthew C. Perry, 1794-1858. Boston: Little, Brown, 1967. Harrison Gray Otis, 1765-1848; The Urbane Federalist. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1969. Samuel de Champ lain, Father of New France. Boston: Little, Brown, 1972.

HISTORY The Maritime History of Massachusetts. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1921; rev. ed. with supp., 1941. London: Heinemann, 1923. Sentry ed., 1961. The Oxford History of the United States, 1783-1917. 2 vols. London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1927. With Henry Steele Commager. The Growth of the American Republic. New York: Oxford University Press, 1930; 1936. 2nd ed., 2 vols., 1937. 3rd ed., 2 vols., 1942. 4th ed., 2 vols., 1950. 5th ed., 2 vols., 1962. 6th ed., with Henry Steele Commager and William E. Leuchtenburg, 2 vols., 1969.

SAMUEL EUOT MORISON I 499 The Founding of Harvard College. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1935. Harvard College in the Seventeenth Century. 2 vols. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1936. Three Centuries of Harvard. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1936; 1963. The Puritan Pronaos: Studies in the Intellectual Life of New England in the Seventeenth Century. New York: New York University Press, 1936. 2nd ed., The Intellectual Life of Colonial New England. New York: New York University Press, 1956. Paperback ed., Ithaca, N.Y.: Great Seal Books, 1960. Portuguese Voyages to America in the Fifteenth Century. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1940. New York: Octagon, 1965. The History of United States Naval Operations in World War II. 15 vols. Boston: Atlantic-Little, Brown. I The Battle of the Atlantic. 1947. Rev. ed., 1964. II Operations in North African Waters. 1947. Rev. ed., 1962. III The Rising Sun in the Pacific. 1948. Rev. ed., 1963. IV Coral Seat Midway, and Submarine Actions. 1949. Rev. ed., 1962. V The Struggle for Guadalcanal. 1949. Rev. ed., 1964. VI Breaking the Bismarck's Barrier. 1950. Rev. ed., 1962. VII Aleutians, Gilberts, and Marshalls. 1951. Rev. ed., 1962. VIII New Guinea and the Marianas. 1953. Rev. ed., 1962. IX Sicily-Salerno-Anzio. 1954. Rev. ed., 1964. X The Atlantic Battle Won. 1956. Rev. ed., 1964. XI The Invasion of France and Germany. 1957. Rev. ed., 1964. XII Leyte, June 1944-January 1945. 1958. Rev. ed., 1963. Xin The Liberation of the Philippines. 1963. XIV Victory in the Pacific. 1961. XV Supplement and General Index. 1962. The Ropemakers of Plymouth. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1950. New York: Arno, 1976. The Story of the "Old Colony" of New Plymouth, 1620-1692. New York: Knopf, 1956 (juvenile).

Strategy and Compromise. Boston: Atlantic-Little, Brown, 1958. British ed., American Contributions to Strategy of World War II. London: Faber & Faber, 1958. The Story of Mount Desert Island, Maine. Boston: Atlantic-Little, Brown, 1960. The Two-Ocean War, a Short History cf the U.S. Navy in the Second World War. Boston: AtlanticLittle, Brown, 1963. The Oxford History of the American People. New York: Oxford University Press, 1965. With Frederick Merk and Frank Freidel. Dissent in Three American Wars. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970. The European Discovery of America: The Northern Voyages. New York: Oxford University Press, 1971. The European Discovery cf America: The Southern Voyages. New York: Oxford University Press, 1974. ESSAYS AND MISCELLANEOUS WORKS

History as a Literary Art: An Appeal to Young Historians. Boston: Old South Association, n.d. By Land and by Sea. New York: Knopf, 1953. Freedom in Contemporary Society. Boston: AtlanticLittle, Brown, 1956. The Scholar in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1961 (address delivered at Rockhurst College, Kansas City, Mo., 1960). One Boy's Boston, 1887-1901. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1962. Vistas of History. New York: Knopf, 1964. With Maurice Obregon. The Caribbean as Columbus Saw It. Boston: Little, Brown, 1964. Spring Tides. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965. Vita Nuova: A Memoir ofPriscilla Barton Morison. Northeast Harbor, Me.: Samuel Eliot Morison, 1975. Sailor Historian: A Samuel Eliot Morison Reader, edited by Emily Morison Beck. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977. BOOKS EDITED

The Key ofUbberty [sic], Written in the Year 1798 by William Manning. Billerica, Mass.: The Manning Association, 1922. Repr. in William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 13:202-54 (1956).

Sources and Documents Illustrating the American Revolution and Formation of the Federal Constitu-

500 I AMERICAN tion. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1923. Rev. eds. to 1960. The Development of Harvard University, 1869-1929. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1929. The Log Cabin Myth, a Study of the Early Dwellings of the English Colonists in North America, by Harold R. Shurtleff. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1939. Of Plymouth Plantation, by William Bradford. New York: Knopf, 1952. Parts repr. in Major Writers of America, edited by Perry Miller. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1963. The Parkman Reader. Boston: Atlantic-Little, Brown, 1955. British ed., France and England in North America. London: Faber & Faber, 1955.

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History cfthe Conquest of Peru, by William H. Prescott. New York: Limited Editions Club, 1957; Heritage Press ed., 1957. Journals and Other Documents on the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus. New York: Limited Editions Club, 1963; Heritage Press ed., 1964. CRITICAL STUDIES

Degler, Carl N. "History Without a Beard." TriQuarterly, 6:144-50 (Spring 1966). Herold, David. "Samuel Eliot Morison and the Ocean Sea." Dalhousie Review, 54:741-48 (Winter 1974-75).

—DAVID HEROLD

Thomas Paine 17'37-1809

o o olo homas Paine, the quintessen-

teer—two reasons for his prominent place in American literary history. "It was the cause of America that made me a writer," Paine wrote at the close of the Revolution. But it was the causes of common people—political freedom and economic justice—that determined his career as a literary radical. To an extraordinary degree, Paine's life and writings are one; each is best understood in relationship to the other and to the revolutionary era in which he played a vital part. From the time of his contemporaries until now, Paine's appearance and behavior, as well as his politics, have influenced attitudes toward him. Certain ugly features—the crimson cheeks and nose, the latter drooping and somewhat bulbous—were taken as outward manifestations of his soul's condition, and accounts of his personal behavior were used to justify indictments of his political and religious teachings. Paine's politics, like Milton's, have prejudiced commentators either for or against him to an inordinate degree, and the portrait of the man is often strongly colored by the ideological paintbrush of the artist. Most portraits of Paine, verbal or otherwise, are based upon physical descriptions of him at the end of his life, usually as he appeared in the painting, bust, and death mask by John Wesley Jarvis, a young artist who lived with Paine, in New York City, until shortly before his death.

tial American, shuttling between London and Paris in the early days of the French Revolution, his radical pamphlets in one hand and plans for his iron bridge—with its promise of financial success—in the other. Already famous by 1790 as the author of one of the most brilliant political pamphlets ever written, he refused in his early fifties to settle for a placid and well-deserved fame; instead, after supporting rebellion in America, he turned to France, where he became a central figure in that later revolution. Continuing to publish his radical sentiments in a torrent of political writing to the end of his life, he infuriated almost everyone he knew by his loyalty to libertarian principle and his cavalier attitude toward those in power. Maligned by his contemporaries, often difficult to tolerate personally, but generous to the poor and skeptical toward all tradition, Paine remains a fascinating and problematic figure, a much celebrated but curiously neglected writer. His own description of himself as * 'citizen of the world" rings true through two centuries of harsh criticism by those opposed to his ideas and uncritical admiration by those devoted to his political and religious teachings. Although English by birth and residence for most of his life, he was the author of several all-time best-sellers in America and our first professional pamphle-

507

502 / AMERICAN But these must not be taken as the only views of him or obscure the apparent charm and popularity of the younger Paine. In his early years, Paine is usually remembered for his lively, radiant, blue eyes, and for his uncommonly interesting talk, humorous and full of anecdote. Five feet, nine inches tall, he was described as having a "lofty and unfurrowed" forehead and a ruddy, "thoroughly English" complexion. Regarded initially as shy, even moody, he did not make a strong first impression, but quickly warmed to the company at hand and, with his knowledge of many subjects, delighted everyone. He fancied himself as something of a ladies man, although the testimony of women suggests that they did not regard him as highly as he regarded himself (vanity remained a persistent flaw in his character). Everyone agreed, however, about his powers of conversation, even those who saw him as something of a rascal. By all accounts, he never depended upon vulgar or indecent stories to entertain his audience, and no one spoke derogatorily of his brandy drinking until after he became a famous revolutionary. Even late in life, Paine was remembered as an attractive personality—his eyes "full, brilliant, and singularly piercing." His memory preserved its capacity to recall events and arguments from years before, his mind irresistible in its "obdurate determination to pursue whatever object it embraces." Sometimes, when his reputation for drink and vanity had preceded him, his charm overwhelmed new acquaintances. "In spite of his surprising ugliness, the expression of his countenance is luminous, his manners easy and benevolent, and his conversation remarkably entertaining.' ' Those who expected to find a raving maniac, as the Federalist and Calvinist press described him, found Paine "unaffected, guileless, and good-natured." As a man who moved quickly from obscurity to fame, and almost as quickly back to obscurity,

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Paine suffered from periodic anxiety about the future, even when his financial state appeared reasonably secure. "I have sustained so much loss, by disinterestedness and inattention to money matters, and by accidents, that I am obliged to look closer to my affairs than I have done," he wrote in his late sixties. And his fears increased during the next decade. To some degree, Paine's last escape from England came to be symbolic of his life: people hissing him as he boarded the boat to leave his homeland; people cheering him as he disembarked from the same boat in France. From the very beginning his was neither an easy nor a simple existence. Thomas Pain (he added the "e" only after coming to America) was born in the village of Thetford, seventy miles northeast of London, on January 29, 1737, the only son of Joseph Pain, a staymaker and small farmer who worshipped with the Society of Friends, and Frances Cocke, an attorney's daughter who belonged to the Church of England. In his actions and writing the religious background retained its significance, especially his father's association with the Quakers. Paine's being called an atheist is simply one of several charges by which hostile critics, including Theodore Roosevelt, libeled him. During seven years of formal education in the local schools, Thomas Paine proved to be an intelligent—if unsettled—student, and was taken from his studies at thirteen to serve as an apprentice in his father's shop. He remained there for about three years, helping in the manufacture of whalebone stays for corsets, developing a mechanical skill and dexterity that remained with him throughout his life. At about sixteen, a love of adventure and independence got the better of him, and he left his father's shop. After various attempts at making it on his own, first at sea, as a privateer on the Terrible and the King of Prussia, and then as a staymaker himself, at Sandwich, he returned to

THOMAS PAINE I 503 Thetford in April 1759. His first wife, Mary Lambert, a lady's maid and daughter of an excise officer, died in 1760, within a year after their marriage at Sandwich on September 27, 1759. Having taken the examination for a post in the excise service himself, Paine received an appointment to that office on August 8, 1764, in Alford, Lincolnshire. After being discharged from this job for a minor neglect of duty, he went on to several other temporary assignments as teacher and perhaps as preacher, also unsuccessfully. Eventually reinstated as an excise officer in 1768, at Lewes, a city of 10,000 people in Sussex, he remained there for six years. On March 26, 1771, he married a second time, to Elizabeth Ollive, daughter of Samuel Ollive, a Quaker who owned a tobacco shop where Paine worked after the owner's death. His experience as a merchant and his marriage, never consummated, ended somewhat disastrously. His time in Lewes, a center for disaffection, contributed not only to his immediate fortune but also to his later life as a political journalist. John Wilkes, a radical member of Parliament, was popular in the town and elaborate Guy Fawkes celebrations, with antipopery pageantry, gave evidence of a general discontent with traditional politics and religion, a sentiment that was to characterize much of Paine's later writings. In Lewes, Paine also began an association with several influential persons, including George Lewis Scott—a friend of Edward Gibbon, Samuel Johnson, and Benjamin Franklin— and in 1772 Paine wrote his first important public statement, Case of the Officers of Excise, a plea for better wages. A modest but well-argued case for a salary increase for overworked and underpaid civil employees, it was written in a vigorous plain style, with a sociological sense that contributed to Paine's popularity among workers and fanners in prerevolutionary America and in England. 'The rich, in ease and affluence," he

said, "may think I have drawn an unnatural portrait," but could they "descend to the cold regions of want, the circle of polar poverty, they would find their opinions changing with the climate. There are habits of thinking peculiar to different conditions, and to find them out is truly to study mankind." The pamphlet, which he forwarded to Oliver Goldsmith with a letter of introduction, brought Paine's talent as a writer to the attention of many people; 4,000 copies were printed and privately distributed among members of Parliament, government officials, and the general public. The publication also earned Paine some money, and gave him an entree into London coffeehouses, where he continued his campaign on behalf of his fellow workers and where he eventually met Benjamin Franklin. Through his earlier associations with other "natural philosophers," such as Dr. John Bevis, a distinguished astronomer and later a fellow of the Royal Society; Benjamin Martin, a mathematician; and James Ferguson, an astronomer and an inventor; Paine gathered information about the practical sciences that informed his political and religious pamphlets. Subsequently, he conducted scientific experiments on the causes of yellow fever and developed designs for engines, smokeless candles, and an iron bridge. Although publicly loyal to the Church of England, Paine had begun to breathe the liberating air of the deists, and found it healthful, even invigorating. Twenty years later, in The Age of Reason, the pamphlet that provoked more personal hostility than any other he wrote, Paine would become deism's bestknown proselytizer. In the various English towns where he lived, Paine experienced the inequities of the English social system, which was dominated by the landed aristocracy, the object of numerous attacks in his writings. His first pamphlet suggests his hatred of the rich, whose wealth, he argued, caused the ill fortune of others. In London, food

504 I AMERICAN riots, industrial disputes, and desperate poverty dramatized the failure of the constitutional monarchy. All of these matters provided fuel for his later fiery denunciations of what the English usually regarded as an imperfect but satisfactory system. Paine's campaign for increased salaries for the excise officers ended, like most of his projects during his first forty years, in failure, and in April 1774 he was discharged from his own job in Lewes. Both of these humiliations he associated with the person of George III, that ''hardened, sullen-tempered Pharaoh of the English," as he later described him, who "with pretended title Father of his People can unfeelingly hear of their slaughter, and composedly sleep with their blood upon his soul." Although his fortunes were limited, Thomas Paine's life appears not to have been totally unhappy. The separation from his second wife, agreed to on June 4, 1774, was amicable. Each continued to speak well of the other, and although he never married again, he wrote respectfully of the institution of marriage, and apparently helped his second wife in old age—as he did many people—when she needed money. Near the time of the separation, he began to make plans for events that would change not only his own life but also the course of history. With letters of introduction from Benjamin Franklin to his son-in-law Richard Bache in Philadelphia, and to his son William, royal governor of New Jersey, Paine set sail for the American colonies, with tentative plans for several occupations, including the establishment of an academy for young women. Among his various associates in England, only Franklin, who called him "an ingenious, worthy young man," and George Lewis Scott saw the thirty-seven-year-old "failure" as a man of promise. But their opinion was more important politically than most, and Paine was to fulfill that promise in ways that they could hardly have anticipated. Almost from the mo-

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ment he arrived in Philadelphia, on November 30, 1774, as a cabin passenger on the London Packet, he began to take a central role as an American journalist and man of letters. Despite his former failures, Paine came to the New World enjoying several advantages over other immigrants of the 1770's, most of whom arrived as indentured servants. Almost immediately he joined the staff of a magazine that was to become, with his help, the most popular periodical thus far published in the colonies (over 1,500 subscribers). The editor, a Scot named Robert Aitken, was determined to make the Pennsylvania Magazine; or, American Monthly Museum a distinctly American magazine, and with the help of Paine, John Witherspoon, president of the College of New Jersey (Princeton), and Francis Hopkinson, a lawyer, he eventually succeeded in doing so. An incident at the beginning of Paine's new career in the colonies suggests not only the energy of the man, but also his immediate sympathy with America's move toward independence. Sick abed on arrival, probably from typhus, he had to be carried from the ship and nursed back to health during his first six weeks in Philadelphia. Illness failed to keep him down, however, and by January 1775 local citizens were already reading "A Dialogue Between General Wolfe and General Gage in a Wood near Boston," a brief essay that talked about Parliament's unjust treatment of the colonists, the rightful inheritors of British liberty. Two months later, his poem 'The Death of General Wolfe," later set to music, celebrated the exploits of America's first continental hero, describing contemporary events with references to classical mythology. Although predictable in manner, its execution was competent. Paine took considerable pride in his skill as a poet, and his poems, which he enjoyed declaiming, were among his most popular writings in the colonies. (At the same time, as an eighteenth-century ra-

THOMAS PAINE I 505 tionalist, he remained somewhat skeptical about poetry, repressing rather than encouraging his talent for it, for fear that it might lead ' "too much into the field of imagination.") Paine's essays for the Pennsylvania Magazine indicated his interest in people's struggles for freedom and independence around the world, particularly against the English. In ''Reflections on the Life and Death of Lord Clive," he portrayed Clive in old age, anguished and repentant over his hard rule of India, implying a resemblance between him and the royal governors in America. Contemporary readers could easily substitute "America" for "India," and "General Gage" for "Lord Clive." The magazine's policy of not publishing controversial writings ended with the American and British confrontation at Concord and Lexington in April 1775, and in the next issue Paine spoke directly to the matter of independence. His song "Liberty Tree," printed in the Pennsylvania Evening Post and set to music, attacked "all the tyrannical powers,/ Kings, Commons, and Lords," responsible for the mercantile restrictions imposed on the colonies. In an article signed "Humanus" (October 1775), Paine wrote, "I hesitate not for a moment to believe that the Almighty will finally separate America from Britain. Call it independence or what you will, if it is the cause of God and humanity, it will go on." Earlier that same year, Paine published a blistering attack on slavery, following the example of his distinguished friend and admirer Benjamin Rush, physician and scientist, who had circulated a similar polemic in 1772. Through the efforts of these two men, Pennsylvania was one of the first states to emancipate slaves in the early years of the Revolutionary War. The arguments favoring independence, which he so powerfully presented in Common Sense, appeared in many of Paine's writings during his first year in America, as if he had immediately

assimilated the American ethos and the native mythology from birth. But perhaps the most prophetic statement, relating to imagery and theme in his later American writings, is 'The Dream Interpreted." Appearing in the May 1775 issue of the Pennsylvania Magazine, the essay tells of a traveler who, on a journey through Virginia, falls asleep and dreams about a pleasing landscape that is transformed, by a night storm, from a scene of beauty and tranquillity to one of horror and destruction. Morning, however, brings a new vision lovelier and more felicitous than that of the previous day. After he awakens, the narrator meets another traveler, who interprets his dream: "That beautiful country which you saw is America. The sickly state you beheld her in has been coming on her for these few years past. . . which nothing but a storm can purify. The tempest is the present context, and the event will be the same." In this essay Paine—like many of the Puritan writers before and several Romantic historians after him—implied that the struggle for America's future carried supernatural implications and that, as God's people) Americans had a special destiny: He who guides the natural tempest will regulate the political one, and bring good out of evil. . . . The cause is now before a higher court, the court of Providence, before whom the arrogance of kings, the infidelity of ministers, the general corruption of government, and all the cobweb artifice of courts will fall confounded and ashamed. Like so many of Paine's early essays, "The Dream Interpreted" combined political argument and poetic imagery in a style that brought together the best in eighteenth-century rationalism and nineteenth-century romanticism— a realistic view of the injustices of the past and present and a Utopian vision of the future. Thus did Paine's writings promote a hopeful image of

506 / AMERICAN the New World; a place where individual merit, not social position or inherited wealth, established the limit of one's achievement. For Paine, as for so many later immigrants, America spelled future success. His essays embellished the American dream and showed a deep trust in the democratic process, as represented by the colonial experiment. It showed a firm belief in a new age, free of the burdens of the past. "We have it in our power to begin the world over again," he wrote in Common Sense. "A situation similar to the present has not happened since the days of Noah until now." Through these early journalistic pieces, as well as through his scientific experiments and his witty, polemical conversation, Paine soon became well known among Philadelphia artisans, merchants, and members of the Continental Congress, in session there since September 1774. Congress had sent a number of statements to George III and to Parliament—all ignored— about the deteriorating state of the colonies' relationship with the mother country. Franklin, John Adams, and others had talked about independence, and among several groups of Philadelphians there was warm support for Paine's sentiments. In a city whose fate rested more on the demands of the crowd than it did on the actions of political leaders, his writing had come to exert considerable influence, and it was only natural, in this revolutionary context, that he began to think of a more ambitious literary project. Despite all that went before, Common Sense, slapdash, rambling, and crude, as historian Bernard Bailyn has said, is hardly explainable without explaining genius itself. "My motive and object of all my political works, beginning with Common Sense," Paine wrote in 1803, "have been to rescue man from tyranny and false systems and false principles of government; and enable him to be free." Thus,

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later in life, he recognized that his basic beliefs and principles remained the same, even as the location varied. In general, Paine regarded all political questions as moral questions, directly related to how people lived. He believed in a universal moral order sanctioned and supported by nature; in the equality of people; and in the desirability of establishing that equality by political means. Paine saw no need for ruling aristocracies, traditions, and institutions, trusting that people could bring about a just society on their own and that progress would come through the application of reason to all areas of life, philosophical and practical. Although his hatred of England eventually became something of an obsession, he usually viewed conflicts from an internationalist perspective, as "a citizen of the world.'' He thought that American independence benefited this general ideal, the colonies being, as he said in the introduction to Common Sense, "the cause of all mankind." His first major contribution to American journalism also revealed his skill in sizing up, after only a brief residence in this country, the political situation in the colonies. As late as 1776, the movement for independence was still multivarious and confused, proceeding on several fronts at once and exceeding the grasp of almost anyone native to a particular region. In Common Sense Paine managed to appeal to many different and conflicting groups at once: to Quakers and Germans in one section; to the economic self-interest of fanners and merchants in another; to radicals and artisans in another, to conservative merchants and landowners in another. Standing midway between the crowd and the Founding Fathers, he made the most of the alienation that colonists sometimes felt toward one another and united them, in common cause, against a previously ill-defined foe. He brought everyone together, in theory at least, against England. In the colonies, from Massachusetts to North Caro-

THOMAS PAINE I 507

lina, the lower classes had shown a growing sophistication, through boycotts and demonstrations, in defying upper-class rule. They came to recognize in Paine a spokesman for the distress, confusion, and uncertainty they felt in the New World. As a popular writer, he explained away the past and, in a pseudo-scientific language, elucidated the new politics, the new religion, and the secular city, which they came to recognize as their own. According to Paine, he began forming the outline of Common Sense in October 1775 at Franklin's suggestion. Benjamin Rush and David Rittenhouse saw the first draft, but the author is rightfully credited with the overall scheme. Published anonymously, with Rush's title, rather than Paine's "Plain Talk," it appeared on January 10, 1776, the same day as George Ill's bellicose and intransigent speech to Parliament on the American question. The first thousand copies of Common Sense sold out within two weeks, and by the end of the first year, 150,000 copies, in twenty-five editions, were circulating among three million people in the colonies. According to the American Annual Register for the Year 1796, ' 'the greatest orators of antiquity did not more tyrannically command the conviction of their hearers than the writer of Common Sense" Translated into several languages, it fanned the fires of revolution in France and Spain, as well as in Latin America. "I know not," John Adams later observed, somewhat grudgingly, "whether any man in the world has had more influence on its inhabitants or affairs for the last thirty years than Thomas Paine." Although the power of the document rests not so much in its logic as in its vigorous language, Paine's reasoning deserves more than casual attention. After a brief introduction describing the natural conflict between nature and the people, as against custom and king—between America

and the oppressed, as against Parliament and the usurpers—Paine argued the "common sense" of the colonies' separation from England by reference to four general topics. Part One, "On the Origin and Design of Government in General, With Concise Remarks on the English Constitution," questions the validity of the English constitution and contrasts the naturalness of society and the unnaturalness of government in a way that Henry David Thoreau did seventy years later in Civil Disobedience. Speaking to the people's old suspicion of those in power, it distinguishes between the people and their rulers and sets in motion an argument by which the ruling monarch could be deposed. Paine defines government as that peculiar institution whereby "the palaces of kings are built upon the ruins of the bowers of paradise." In a spirited enumeration of the abuses of power by monarch and Parliament, Paine forced his American readers to confront a set of charges that were crucial to their education as revolutionists and that anticipated Jefferson's list of abuses in the Declaration of Independence six months later. The English system of government, long regarded as workable and generally humane, is in truth, he said, ineffectual and oppressive. Part Two, "Of Monarchy and Hereditary Succession," mercilessly denigrates the concept of the divine right of kings as being both unreasonable and antireligious (this argument appealed especially to religious dissenters). Paine described William the Conqueror, George Ill's ancestor, as a French bastard, "a very paltry rascally original," who landed with armed banditti and established himself as king against the consent of the natives. Such ancestry "certainly hath no divinity in it." Part Three, "Thoughts on the Present State of American Affairs," reviews the arguments for and against separation from Britain, skillfully undermining Britain's claim as parent country by

508 I AMERICAN identifying Americans as "the persecuted lovers of civil and religious liberty from every part of Europe." Reconciliation with Britain, after the long period of harassment during the 1760's, "is now a fallacious dream." The American movement for independence and a constitution is not only reasonable, but natural, in the light of recent events. Nature and Nature's God call for it. Finally, reflecting briefly in Part Four, "On the Present Civility of Americans, With Some Miscellaneous Reflections," and giving a brief outline of structures and programs for the independent country, Paine made this universal plea: O ye that love mankind! Ye that dare oppose not only the tyranny but the tyrant, stand forth! Every spot of the old world is overrun with oppression. Freedom hath been hunted round the globe. Asia and Africa have long expelled her. Europe regards her like a stranger, and England hath given her warning to depart. O receive the fugitive, and prepare in time an asylum for mankind. Paine enjoyed the sudden popularity of his pamphlet and was drawn more and more deeply into the American cause once his authorship became widely known. The frequently reprinted Forester's Letters, replies to an Anglican clergyman who opposed "independence and republicanism," further popularized Paine's revolutionary ideas and arguments. He donated the early profits of Common Sense to the American troops in Quebec, and soon after the adoption of the Declaration of Independence by the Continental Congress he volunteered his services to the army, first at Perth Amboy, New Jersey, and later at Fort Lee, as General Nathanael Greene's aide-de-camp. In an effort to rally the people of Pennsylvania particularly, and to encourage the Continental Army generally, he soon returned to writing, and each of the Crisis papers, signed simply * 'Common Sense,'' addressed a particular

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subject or event in the long war for independence. "These are times that try men's souls." Thus began American Crisis I, published on December 19, 1776, followed by twelve other numbered papers and three supplements, appearing at various intervals over the next seven years. Printed in a variety of forms, often at Paine's own expense, and widely distributed, they were written to inspire a people at war. The following statement, from American Crisis II, accurately describes the extended enterprise, even though Paine did eventually seek payment from Congress after the war: "My writing I have always given away, reserving only the expense of printing and paper, and sometimes not even that. I never courted fame or interest, and my manner of life, to those who know it, will justify what I say. My study is to be useful." The Crisis papers included: extended attacks on American Tories, on Quakers who refused to bear arms, and on those endeavoring to negotiate an early peace with Britain; sympathetic reports about Washington's defeat at the Battle of Brandy wine and about the troops at Valley Forge; appeals to the citizens of England and France for support of the American cause and to the people of the colonies for the acceptance of war taxes imposed during the Revolution. In addition to rallying the soldiers and the people at critical times, the Crisis papers exhibited Paine's changing attitude toward government. Although still bitterly opposed to the English system and the monarchy—an attitude more fully developed in Rights of Man—he became less hostile toward bicameralism than he had been in earlier pamphlets. He also moved gradually toward a justification of centralized government and made every effort to win the support of wealthy merchants for the revolutionary cause through his arguments supporting the Bank of North America and the power of the federal government to levy taxes.

THOMAS PAINE I 509 American Crisis XIII (April 1783), for example, urged a stronger union among the states: the kind of centralized government that Paine had criticized earlier. But as he said at the beginning of the paper, "The times that tried men's souls are over—and the greatest and completest revolution the world ever knew, gloriously and happily accomplished." During the next few years, before going to France, he entered his most conservative phase, withdrawing from active support of the radical and reform movements that characterized most of his life. In the 1780's, Paine spent much of his time attending to his own and the country's commercial interests. George Washington was only one of the many people who acknowledged the "utility of the common cause" of Paine's publications during the Crisis period, and in 1782 Washington suggested a salary of $800 for Paine's help in "informing the people and rousing them to action." In 1777 he had been elected secretary of the Committee for Foreign Affairs by the Continental Congress, a tribute about which he remained very proud; but within two years he was obliged to resign as a result of the furious tempers that boiled up over the infamous Deane affair. Prudence seldom guided Paine in any of his actions or writings on public affairs, and the controversy surrounding Silas Deane, the American commissioner to France, was only one of several instances of his throwing himself into a political fray with vehemence and abandon, alienating powerful politicians and potential allies in the process. France's policy of surreptitiously supplying funds to the American rebels was a scheme providing every opportunity for double-dealing on all sides. Paine regarded Deane as a scoundrel and a schemer, and was one of the few people to say so publicly; but in exposing Deane's crooked dealings, Paine revealed confidential data, betraying the secrecy of his office and endangering

the delicate relationship between France and the colonies. Later revelations—in papers discovered a century after his death—proved Paine right, but the immediate harm had been done, and enemies made as a result of the Deane affair hurt Paine for the rest of his life. Like his attack on traditional religion, his involvement in this conflict seriously prejudiced some early commentators against him. In an age of scurrilous journalism, he was both victim and, occasionally, perpetrator of savage personal attacks. In the case of his contemporaries (Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, even Alexander Hamilton), history often ignored the most outrageous slanders; but with Paine, the libelous remarks became, for over a century, a significant part of his "official" biography. Despite some political difficulties, however, the ten years following the publication of Common Sense were profitable for Paine and brought some recognition for his services to his adopted country. On July 4, 1780, he was awarded an honorary master of arts degree from the University of Pennsylvania and about the same time served as clerk of the Pennsylvania assembly. In 1781 he made a successful trip to France, with Colonel John Laurens, in search of aid for the new country. In 1783 George Washington, as one who entertained "a lively sense" of the importance of Paine's work, invited him to visit his home at Rocky Hill, near Princeton, New Jersey. In 1784 the New York legislature voted to give Paine a 227-acre farm, sequestered from a Tory resident of New Rochelle, for his contributions "to the freedom, sovereignty and independence of the United States." In 1785 Congress, with the direct encouragement of Washington and James Madison and the indirect support of Thomas Jefferson, then in France, paid him $3,000. Paine's writing in this period included Public Good (1780), a pamphlet arguing that the lands to the west claimed by Virginia belonged not to

510 / AMERICAN one colony but to the whole country (this pamphlet probably cost him a pension from this state, after the war); "Letter to Abbe Raynal" (1782), a defense of America against the popular French author's suspicions in regard to the new republic; and Dissertations on Government; the Affairs of the Bank; and Paper Money (1786), an argument favoring Robert Morris' plans for the Bank of North America. In addition he sent numerous letters to his friends in politics on matters relating to public policy; they valued his services as an ally, but frequently wished to avoid too close an association with him, and certain people, including John Adams, regarded him as vain, impetuous, and rowdy. Although still much admired as an author and a patriot, Paine, by 1785, had alienated a number of his old friends by attacking or defending almost every controversial cause during the early days of the republic. One widely circulated verse satire called him Janus-faced, and the response of his political adversaries during his appeals for financial assistance was often less than enthusiastic. But, as before, he remained relatively content, and in semiretirement near Bordentown, New Jersey, he focused his attention on less political matters, giving himself over to a typically American scheme, that of making a fast buck by skillfully applying his scientific knowledge to a couple of practical questions. The return of Benjamin Franklin to America, after almost a decade as minister to France, coincided with Paine's return to various scientific experiments. An interest in natural philosophy, as the physical sciences were called in the eighteenth century, had brought the two men together initially, and Paine now wanted to know what Franklin thought of his smokeless candle and to get his endorsement for an iron bridge he had designed. Christened "a child of Common Sense" and constructed of a single arch uniting thirteen sections—in tribute to the American colonies—the model for the bridge went on display first in Franklin's garden in Philadelphia and, on

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New Year's Day 1787, in the State House yard there. A price tag of $330,330, among other things, kept the iron bridge from being approved by the Pennsylvania Assembly and from being built across the Schuylkill River, near Philadelphia. So Paine decided to return to the Old World in pursuit of endorsements by the Royal Society of London and the Royal Academy of Sciences in Paris. Armed with numerous letters of introduction from Franklin to French politicians and nobles, and a particularly lengthy one to Thomas Jefferson, who had replaced Franklin as the minister to France, Paine left New York on April 26, 1787, planning to return before the end of the year. In twelve and a half years as an American he had gathered some money, numerous friends (and enemies), property, and international fame— considerably more than he had arrived with from England in 1774 and more than he would return with from Europe in 1802. Paine arrived in Paris in May 1787, more interested in getting an endorsement for his iron bridge—from influential scientists and rich noblemen—than in political causes. Lafayette and Rochefoucauld paid tribute to his achievement, and the Royal Academy of Sciences gave its approval. Soon after his arrival he did write one brief pamphlet, Prospects on the Rubicon (1787), criticizing William Pitt's alliance with the king of Prussia against the republican forces in the Netherlands. The pamphlet, addressed to the people of England, called for democratic reform in his native country and for changes that would render war less central to British policy, particularly in responding to democratic reforms in Europe. In addition to showing a precise knowledge of contemporary European affairs, Prospects on the Rubicon contained an eloquent plea against war. Although capable of championing people's wars on behalf of his favorite cause—as in the Crisis papers—Paine lamented, in this essay, the "unforseen and unsupposed circumstances that

THOMAS PAINE I 511 war provokes.'' Despite the fact that * 'the calamities of war and the miseries it inflicts upon the human species, the thousands and tens of thousands of every age and sex who are rendered wretched by the event," any rumor of war is often greeted enthusiastically in London. 'There are thousands who live by it; it is their harvest; and the clamor which these people keep up in newspapers and conversations passes unsuspiciously for the voices of the people/' Yet it is governments, not people, that foster wars, the latter learning of the deception only after the mischief has been done. Following three eventful months in France, Paine traveled to England (where Prospects of the Rubicon was already circulating) to seek the Royal Society's endorsement for his bridge. There he met Edmund Burke, later his antagonist. On first meeting and in several subsequent conversations, they talked, however, as loyal friends of the American Revolution. While in his homeland, Paine took time to arrange a suitable pension for his ninety-year-old mother, who still lived in Thetford; to visit the friends of his youth; and to spend pleasant hours with Benjamin West, American painter and sculptor living in England, and Joel Barlow, American poet and pamphleteer, with whom he associated frequently until Paine's imprisonment in 1793. From 1787 to 1789 Paine remained in England most of the time, serving as an unofficial American envoy (John Adams had returned home by this time), sending important information about the British scene in numerous, lengthy letters to Thomas Jefferson in Paris and to friends in America. He and Jefferson debated the issues raised by news from the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, exchanging letters on the distinction between civil and natural rights, in language that was to influence Jefferson's political philosophy and, in time, the American government. In a letter to Jefferson the day before the fall of the Bastille, Paine said that he looked forward to

his iron bridge being built across the Thames in London. His major preoccupation is further revealed in Edmund Burke's description of him at this time as a person who was * 'not without some attention to politics, but more deeply concerned about mechanical projects." The events in Paris in the fall of 1789—the bread riots, and the forced movement of the king and the National Assembly to Paris during the October Days—convinced Paine that he must return to France, which he did in November. From Paris he wrote Burke enthusiastic letters about the consequences of the Revolution, comparing it to the one in America; but Burke responded coldly. In the words of David Freeman Hawke, "Burke feared that the turbulence in France would contaminate England. Paine hoped it would.'' The fundamental disagreement between the two men eventually spilled over into public debate, in two of the most popular books of the century, Burke'$ Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), written essentially to encourage the English to value things as they were, and Paine's Rights of Man, written expressly to provoke the English to follow France's lead and to revolt. Paine's attitude toward the French Revolution was optimistic from the beginning, since he regarded it as a harbinger of radical social change throughout Europe. Moving back and forth between Paris and London, he became increasingly involved in the affairs of France. Lafayette had honored him by entrusting him with the key to the Bastille, to be sent to George Washington; Paine called the key "an early trophy of the spoils of despotism, and the first ripe fruit of American principles transplanted into Europe." With the help of two aristocrats, Condorcet and Du Castelet, Paine and Brissot, a journalist and member of the National Assembly, founded the Societe Republican and started a journal, published by Nicolas de Bonne ville, to circulate their writings among other intellectuals. Paine's "A Republican Mani-

572 / AMERICAN festo," published in 1791, spoke of Louis XVI for the first time as "simply Louis Capet," and his Declaration of Universal Peace and Liberty urged the French king to join the republican side. In the early 1790's, anxious to further the cause of revolution in England, Paine met frequently with English dissenters friendly to France—William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft, Thomas Hardy, and other radicals who made up the Society for Constitutional Information in London and the Corresponding Society for the Unrepresented Part of the People of Britain. He visited frequently with Gouverneur Morris, United States representative to England and later the official envoy to France. But in the midst of all these activities, Paine devoted his fullest energy to making arrangements for erecting his bridge. The experimental arch in Paine's bridge design, eventually incorporated in a structure built to span the River Ware, at Sunderland in northern England, created something of a stir, as he had predicted. It came to be regarded, in fact, as one of the greatest triumphs of bridge architecture, admired and imitated by many people. It brought him fame, a place in the history of bridge construction, but no money. Thus his financial state—always precarious, since he gave money away when he had it—was little improved. In the midst of promoting his bridge during the fall of 1790, he sent an essay, "Thoughts on the Establishment of a Mint in the United States,'' to Jefferson, who had it published in America. Finally, after months of waiting, Burke's longannounced publication,Reflections on the Revolution in France, appeared in November of that year. Although the two men had agreed previously, if superficially, in supporting the American cause, Burke's attack against the revolution in France challenged everything Paine stood for, and several phrases in Reflections appeared to be

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written with him in mind. Justifiably criticized by Paine (and others) as ill-informed, prejudiced, and even unhistorical, Burke's treatise nevertheless did contest successfully the theoretical basis of the natural rights philosophy and, thus, the foundation of Paine's political writings. Burke argued that all rights are social, rather than universal, inherited from the past and embodied in constitutional precedents and traditional institutions. The implications of his argument were profoundly conservative, calling not only for a reinterpretation of the tradition of the Glorious Revolution of 1688 in England, but also for a vigorous denunciation of the present revolution in France. The basic thrust of Burke's argument was suggested by his general lament about the consequences of the French Revolution when he wrote that "the age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded." He saw the Revolution as a force whereby learning was "trodden under the hoofs of a swinish multitude." In extolling the glories of the past, in the person of the embattled aristocracy, Burke—Paine said—"pities the plumage but forgets the dying bird." Paine understood Burke's pamphlet for what it was: an attack not only on the French Revolution, but also on the radical tradition in England. It threatened the movement for parliamentary reform that the Revolution had encouraged. Having made some arrangements already for the publication of a response, Paine went to work immediately, and within three months, in February 1791, Part I of Rights of Man appeared in England and, shortly afterward, in France. An ode to Paine in a New York newspaper summarized the book's theme in a couplet: "From reason's source a bold reform, he brings./ By raising up mankind he pulls down kings." Rights of Man combined personal indictments of Burke, point-by-point refutations of his criticisms of the new French constitution, historical notes on the sequence of events leading to the

THOMAS PAINE I 513 French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen and the storming of the Bastille, and— particularly in Part II—extended lectures on political theory. In arguing for a written constitution and a popularly elected legislative body, it was, as Paine suggested in his dedication to George Washington, a kind of prayer that the natural rights of man might become universal and that the Old World might be regenerated by the New. Years later, Paine accurately described the principles informing it as "the same as those in Common Sense/' and mentioned that the effects would have been the same in England as they had been in America, ' 'could the vote of the nation be quickly taken." The preface to the French edition of Rights of Man begins in the manner of Common Sense, making a distinction between the people and the government, between those in England who favored the French Revolution and those in government, represented by Burke, who opposed it. In words and phrases similar to those of his earlier statements, Paine argued the right of every age and generation to act for itself: "I am contending for the right of the living, and against their being willed away, and controlled and contracted for, by the manuscript-assessed authority of the dead." In Part I, Paine resorted to direct personal attack, accusing Burke of accepting pay from the crown and of relying on artifice rather than truth in maligning the Revolution. "Accustomed to kiss the aristocratical hand that hath purloined him from himself, he degenerates into a composition of art, and the genuine soul of nature forsakes him." In each case, Paine's charges were partly true. Burke had advocated a constitution, in the English manner, based upon a monarch and determined by tradition. Paine advocated a constitution, in the American manner, based upon the sovereignty of the people and determined by natural rights—those inherited from the original condition of mankind. Burke's Reflections de-

pended upon eloquence as well as logic to defend the glories of the past. Paine9s Rights, although not as consistently skillful as a literary work, used passion as well as reason to justify the revolutionary present: When we survey the wretched condition of man under the monarchical and hereditary systems of government, dragged from their homes by one power, or driven by another, and impoverished by taxes more than enemies, it becomes evident that those systems are bad, and that a general revolution in the principle and construction of governments is necessary. Without fully realizing it, Burke and Paine were waging, in theory, the great political battle of the century, and the outcome would influence English politics for decades to come. The fact that neither author was particularly knowledgeable about the subject that provoked the controversy—the French and their history—troubled them only slightly. The second half of Burke's title, . . . On the Proceedings in Certain Societies in London Relative to That Event, indicated the principal concerns of, and audience for, both books. Future events connected with the Revolution—regicide, terror, war—determined who "won" the argument. Once the Revolution turned to chaos, Paine lost much of his middleclass support in England and even radical Whigs were frightened into conformity. English politics, with the political theories of Burke as a base and the Tories in power, took a different direction from the one Paine advocated, declaring ideological war on him and his friends and imprisoning or arresting those who circulated his books. A personal argument, the controversial nature of Paine's pamphlet, and perhaps government pressure led its original publisher to cancel the initial agreement for printing Rights of Man. Paine turned it over to his friends William God-

514 I AMERICAN win, Thomas Brand Hollis, and Thomas Hoicroft, who fitted it for the press; Part I appearing in England in February 1791, and two months later in Paris, with a new preface. Income from sales, as with several of Paine's other bestsellers, went to support a libertarian cause, the Society for Constitutional Information, an organization of tradesmen, shopkeepers, and mechanics; their principles were consistent with his, and their steady increase in this period is directly attributable to Paine's popularity. He had discovered an audience for inexpensive political literature, and with his writings, working-class politics in England came of age. But his effectiveness in dispersing democratic ideas among the people provoked a strong reaction from his opponents. His popularity, one might say, added to his difficulties. A scurrilous biography by "Francis Oldys" (George Chalmers), commissioned by the English government and entitled Life of Thomas Pain, author of Rights of Men. With a Defence cf his Writings, did much to discredit its subject, by now a national celebrity. Chalmers, a lawyer, had lived in Maryland and hated all friends of the colonies. Well-read and writing on a government subsidy, he brought to light, in a vicious but wellresearched study, all the failures of Paine's early years in England as shopkeeper, husband, and general ne'er-do-well. The biography, which ran through ten editions in two years, exposed him to public ridicule for the rest of his life and helped his political enemies, especially members of the upper class, in their efforts to undermine Paine's influence and integrity. A month after the publication of Part II of Rights of Man, in March 1792, the government ordered Paine into court on charges of sedition. The trial date of June 8 was postponed until December, but he continued to say in speeches what he had already said in print. In danger of being arrested, he decided, on the advice of William Blake, to flee the country—just twenty

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minutes ahead of the arresting authorities, as it turned out—on September 13, 1792. He never saw his homeland again. Just after his escape he was tried in absentia, found guilty, and permanently banished. Prosecutions for publishing or circulating Rights cf Man continued for years. Ironically, the author was jeered in public and burned in effigy, even as his book was becoming the greatest best-seller in English history. The hostility and confusion that attended Paine's escape from one side of the Channel contrasted sharply with the enthusiasm with which he was met on the other. "We arrived at Calais," said one observer, "and as soon as he was known to be on the shore, the people flocked to see him." Having been designated a French citizen by the National Assembly four months earlier, Paine was greeted officially with a salute from the guards. That night his election to the National Convention representing Calais was announced to the townspeople amid shouts of "Vive la Nation! Vive Thomas Paine!" Similar crowds greeted him along the road to Paris. The celebrations ended, however, once he arrived in Paris, just two weeks after the September massacres; he got caught up in the political turmoil that raised a man up one day and brought him down the next. Paine, given to speaking his mind under any circumstances, was not meant for such treacherous political waters; and within months he came near to drowning, with the Jacobins—especially Marat and Robespierre—contributing to his misfortune. One of only two foreigners among the 748 members of the National Convention, Paine was named to a committee of eight to draw up a new constitution. After the trial of Louis XVI, however, Paine risked his reputation as a Mend of the Revolution and, in a very real sense, his life, by a courageous speech before the Convention favoring exile, rather than death, for the king. As Bancal, philosopher and secretary of the Con-

THOMAS PAINE I 515 vention said later, Paine's vote against execution anticipated the vote of posterity. His final defense of this position, during a second vote, was challenged and then shouted down by Marat. "Paine voted against the punishment of death because he is a Quaker," Marat screamed. The king was put to death, and potential allies, horrified by such treachery, declared war on the French regicides. From this time on, Paine lost influence in and commitment to the Convention's deliberations; although continuing to support it he relinquished much of his hope in the Revolution. When Robespierre gained control of the Convention, he and his allies accused "moderates," such as Paine and his associates, the Girondins, of being traitors. Aware of his danger, but remaining in France and writing as usual, Paine turned his full attention to The Age of Reason, Being an Investigation of True and Fabulous Theology. He completed Part I of the book on the eve of his arrest, December 23, 1793, leaving the manuscript with Joel Barlow as soldiers carried him off to Luxembourg prison. Robespierre regarded foreigners and journalists as enemies, so Paine remained in prison during the duration of his reign, expecting to be guillotined any day. Even in those difficult days, with no outside word for months, he impressed those around him by his cheerful philosophy, "his sensibility of heart" and his powers of conversation, as "confidant of the unhappy" and "counselor of the perplexed," as one of his companions described him. In prison he wrote "Essay on Aristocracy," "Essay on the Character of Robespierre," and other essays and poems; he revised and read aloud from The Age of Reason, and expressed his firm belief in its principles to inmates he expected not to see the following day. In the summer of 1794 he lay five weeks in a fever, of which he remembered little. On the day that Robespierre fell and was brought to the same

prison for execution, Paine began to improve. Finally, after ten months, nine days, and numerous pleas for help, he was released, through the intervention of the new American minister to France, James Monroe. Even before Paine got out of jail, The Age of Reason, published in a French edition, with the help of his French translator, Frangois Lanthenas, had created something of a stir and provoked several published responses. Part I, prompted by his fear that unless superstition were abolished, people would turn to atheism, was a generalized attack on the Bible, which Paine said could more consistently be called "the word of a demon than the Word of God." Its principal arguments deal with the unreliability of any word of God, because of the mutability of language; the reliability of creation as a guide, because of its availability and truth; the moral duty of human beings, as manifest in God's beneficence toward His creation. The book is characteristically deist in its commentary on mysteries, miracles, revelations, and stories associated with the Old Testament and with Jesus. Paine believed in "one God, and no more," as he said in the preface, and in "doing justice, loving mercy, and endeavoring to make our fellow creatures happy." He thought these reasonable beliefs needed no support from authority or tradition. These were self-evident truths, while most of the commentary associated with the Bible was unnecessary, idolatrous, and untrue. Paine began writing Part II of The Age of Reason, with a brief note in the preface on his imprisonment, as soon as he took "temporary" residence with Monroe and his wife (he stayed there a year and a half). Part I had been a general indictment of scripture without benefit of a text, Paine said. Part II examined "the authenticity of the Bible" and cited specific books, by chapter and verse. ' 'Moses is not the author of the books ascribed to him.'' The book of Joshua is * 'horrid

516 I AMERICAN . . . a military history of rapine and murder, as savage and brutal as those records of his predecessor in villainy and hypocrisy, Moses." The book of Ruth is "an idle, bungling story." The book of Isaiah is "prose run mad." As history, he said, the Bible is contradictory, disorderly, spurious, erroneous, and obscure. Time spent reading it is better spent on natural philosophy, mathematical and mechanical sciences—"a continual source of tranquil pleasure, and in spite of the gloomy dogmas of priests and of superstition, the study of these things is the study of true theology." Benjamin Franklin—his mind ever young, "his temper ever serene"—rather than Solomon, teaches us how to live. What does one learn from "the pretended thing called revealed religion?" Nothing that is useful to human beings, and everything that is dishonorable to their Maker. The scheme of the Christian Church is "to hold man in ignorance of the Creator, as it is of Governments to hold man in ignorance of rights." What audacity of the church and priestly ignorance to impose such writings upon the world, Paine said of the Old Testament; and the New Testament, "founded upon the prophecies of the old," followed the fate of its foundation. Combining the skepticism of the encyclopedists and the enthusiasm of the dissenters, he shook the foundations of traditional religion, writing in a style that everyone previously excluded from such theological discussions could read. Perhaps no other writer of his time could have performed such a task so successfully, and certainly no person who valued his reputation or his life would have risked doing so in this way. "His awful reverence for God unnerved those who took their religion lightly," wrote Hawke, and neither the elite nor the conventionally religious ever forgave him. For Paine, The Age of Reason folio wed Rights of Man as naturally as the latter had followed Common Sense. In religion, as in politics, he

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sought what was "natural" as opposed to what was "artificial." He regarded his book as constructive, rather than destructive, to religion, written to purge, rather than to abuse, "lest in the general wreck of superstition, of false systems of government, and false theology, we lose sight of morality, of humanity, and of the theology that is true.'' Paine made a similar statement in a letter he wrote to Samuel Adams in 1803. He told Adams that he wrote the book because, living continually in a state of danger, he saw the people of France "running headlong into Atheism" and wanted "to stop them in that career." Clergymen, indeed most religious people, failed to understand Paine's objective, and many of them, including Dr. Richard Watson in England and the Reverend Uzal Ogden in America, wrote replies. The Federalists, including Timothy Dwight, president of Yale, argued that atheists and anarchists were, with Paine's help, endeavoring to undermine American morality. The Age of Reason, in fact, prompted more responses and more vigorous denunciation than any of Paine's previous writings and helped to confirm the opinion of those who had regarded him as dangerous all along. It was partially because of the response to this book that many of his American friends kept him at a distance for the rest of his life. Thomas Jefferson, for example, who generally agreed with Paine's religious teachings, carefully avoided saying so in print. As late as 1813, four years after Paine's death, Jefferson would not allow his letters to Paine to be published, lest they draw on him "renewed molestations from the irreconcilable enemies of republican government.'' Deism had, of course, been a gentleman's religion at least since the time of Alexander Pope's Essay on Man (1733). Paine's major fault lay in making such beliefs available to everyone. Writing them down only stirred up the people. The controversy over Part I of The Age of Reason

THOMAS PAINE I 517 had already gathered steam by 1795, and the publication of Part II, in the fall of that year, brought the controversy in England to a steady boil. Paine had been very ill in early 1796, but through the help of Monroe and his wife, who cared for him faithfully through periods of difficulty and occasional ingratitude, he regained his health. The prison experience had greatly embittered Paine. He blamed his illness partly on Robespierre and partly on George Washington, whom he suspected of treachery in not working for his release from Luxembourg prison but who apparently knew little about his distress. Gouverneur Morris, the American minister prior to Monroe, had not worked as arduously as he might have in order to seek Paine's release (Paine had been made an American citizen some years before). Whether conscious or unconscious, Washington's neglect led to Paine's seventy-page angry list of specific grievances, "Letter to George Washington." The "Letter" reflected also Paine's deep resentment of Jay's Treaty (1796) for being conciliatory to England and unfriendly toward France. But the principal vendetta was aimed at Washington, a man who was "treacherous in private friendship" and "a hypocrite in public life," for abandoning the author of Common Sense. In passing, Paine also settled accounts with his old antagonist, John Adams, and the "prating," pompous Gouverneur Morris. The only thing Paine accomplished by circulating such a letter was to revive interest in himself in America. If attacking the Bible was outrageous, attacking George Washington was worse, prompting William Cobbett, Paine's American biographer, to write, in The Life of Thomas Paine (1797), that "Men will learn to express all that is base, malignant, treacherous, unnatural, and blasphemous by one single monosyllable—Paine." Those wishing to villify the author of The Age

of Reason and "Letter to George Washington" got some help from the man himself, who occasionally horrified observers by his vanity and drinking, perhaps brought on by loneliness, boredom, and neglect. Exaggerated reports of his behavior were encouraged, but Paine, who had no desire to conform to anyone's idea of good or conventional behavior, either ignored them or, by attacking the originators of these tales, spurred them on to further harassment. During this period, Paine periodically made plans to return to America and devoted his attention to religion, joining the Society of Theophilanthropists (a name made up of three Greek words meaning God, love, and man), attending the French National Convention, to which he had been readmitted in 1794, and writing Atheism Refuted: in a Discourse to Prove the Existence of God. The greatest work of these years is, however, Agrarian Justice (1795-1796), written in France as a response to a sermon by the bishop of Llandaff, Dr. Richard Watson, on "The Wisdom and Goodness of God in having made both rich and poor." Paine's response to this thesis was "It is wrong to say that God made Rich and Poor; he made only Male and Female, and He gave them the earth for their inheritance." William Blake, in comparing biblical commentaries by the two men, wrote later, "It appears to me now that Tom Paine is a better Christian than the Bishop." The central argument of Agrarian Justice has to do with land distribution, a system that' 'while it preserves one part of society from wretchedness, shall secure the other from depredation." Seeing land as "the free gift of the Creator in common to the human race," Paine proposed a system whereby the government, as an agency of social welfare, would use taxes to pay pensions of aged persons and to aid unpropertied people according to their need. In doing so he steered a middle course between the position of the anarchists and the traditional aristocrats or, in his

5/5 / AMERICAN terms, between the French communists, led by Francois Babeuf, and the royalists. Paine's moderate stand in regard to the redistribution of property, like his earlier position favoring a national bank and a centralized government, indicated his limitations as a radical theorist. Writing before the industrial revolution and in the early years of state capitalism, he failed to understand the conflict between his position here (earlier he had included the right to property among the inalienable rights) and the rest of his ideology. It was a dilemma that would haunt American radicals and weaken their position for generations to come, leaving them open to ridicule by later socialists, particularly Marxists, who seized upon this inconsistency in order to dismiss their radicalism as reformist rather than revolutionary. As long as inalienable rights excluded the right to property, the poor lived at the mercy of inherited or accumulated wealth, and the practical implications of Paine's radical politics remained vulnerable. Anticipating Karl Marx, Paine wrote in Agrarian Justice that "the accumulation of personal property is, in many instances, the effect of paying too little for the labor that produced it; the consequences of which is that the working hand perishes in old age, and the employer abounds in affluence." A society based upon profit and accumulated property proved to be a more serious threat to the rights of man than Paine realized, and Thomas Spence, an English radical who called Paine's pamphlet "a dire disappointment," exposed its weaknesses in economic theory almost immediately. Nonetheless, Agrarian Justice provided the groundwork for land reforms in language similar to that of Franklin and Jefferson, with an ideological perspective that looked forward to the Chartists and socialists of the nineteenth century rather than backward to the agrarians. And its arguments in favor of a socially responsible gov-

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ernment were borrowed and expanded by later reformers, particularly Theodore Parker and Henry George. By 1797 Paine, at sixty, had few reasons to remain in France, but unfriendly relations between that country and the United States, as a result of Jay's Treaty, and the possibility of his falling into the hands of the English, who persistently stopped American ships on the high seas, caused him to postpone or cancel plans for returning to the United States. Under John Adams, the Federalists, who had reacted against the French Revolution somewhat as the Tories did under William Pitt, initiated a rather repressive era, with the passage of alien and sedition laws and the use of scare tactics limiting traditional liberties. Paine's hatred for the Federalists led him to write numerous attacks on Washington, Adams, and Gouverneur Morris in le Bien Informe, a newspaper edited by Paine's friend Nicolas de Bonne ville, with whose family he stayed during his last five years in Paris, 1797-1802. He continued to involve himself with various revolutionary schemes, particularly those aimed at England. He befriended Irish radicals in Paris, wrote a widely circulated pamphlet on The Decline and Fall of the English System cf Finance (1796), and encouraged Napoleon in his plans to invade Great Britain. * 'When this monster of national fraud and maritime oppression, the government of England, shall be overthrown, the world will be freed from a common enemy," he had written earlier. These and similar sentiments appeared in essays published in America, as well as in France and England, and suggested, particularly to the Federalists and occasionally to the French, that his resentment against his native country had unhinged his reason. By the turn of the century, he had few influential allies in England, France, or the United States. With the election of Jefferson in the fall of 1800, the Republicans gained the advantage over

THOMAS PAINE I 5/9 the Federalists, and Paine now had a friend in power. He encouraged Jefferson's efforts to establish better relations between the United States and France, and his pamphlet, Maritime Compact (1801), sent to Jefferson earlier, received a favorable hearing. When word leaked out that Jefferson might actually provide passage to the United States for Paine on a public vessel, the president's antagonists, the Federalists, reacted indignantly. But Paine had friends among the common people, both those who visited the Bonneville home, in Paris, and those who supported Jefferson's decision, in the United States. Waiting patiently for the necessary arrangements to be completed for his return, he devoted his final days in France to plans for a system of canals and iron bridges that would encourage unity among the French people and further development of their industries. His other preoccupations—politics, religion, and the applied sciences—are reflected in his personal associations at this time. Among the most frequent visitors were Robert Fulton, whose enthusiasm for mechanical inventions, including the steamboat, provided a basis for an immediate friendship with Paine, and Clio Rickman, whom he had lived with in England and who had printed Paine's later work there. Napoleon, who claimed to have been influenced by Rights of Man, visited the author and talked of his plan to invade England. "Common Sense" subsequently wrote two articles for Bonneville's journal which included descriptions of and plans for the use of gunboats. He also sent similar descriptions to Jefferson, in letters to whom he frequently included construction plans and designs for buildings and gadgets. On April 20, 1805, he wrote to Jefferson commenting on his activities at this time: "When I was in France and in England since the year 1787, I carried on my political productions, religious publications, and mechanical operations, without permitting one to disturb or interfere with the others." Obviously, how-

ever, in his friendships and political associations, as well as in his publications, Paine's enthusiasms often overlapped. As his long stay in France came to an end, Paine must have realized that much of what he had devoted his extraordinary energies to in Europe had failed. The constitution ratified by the French resembled only slightly the one based upon The Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, which he advocated; the industrial revolution and a political "counter-revolution," as he called it, made life worse for workers in England than it had been previously, when the party of Wilkes and the writings of Paine signified a move for substantial social change. His iron bridge, though influential, brought no financial rewards. He had become somewhat irascible and physically weaker because of two serious illnesses. Rumors of his death had circulated in the late 1790's, with strong hints of a deathbed conversion (apocryphal stories that continue to circulate to the present day). In this somewhat confused state of affairs, Paine embarked for the United States from Le Havre, on September 1, 1802, and his loyal friend Clio Rickman wrote this valedictory poem about the event: "Thus smooth be the waves, and thus gentle the breeze/ As thou bearest my Paine far away." Arriving in Baltimore on October 30, Paine went to Washington, D.C., to visit the president, bridge models in hand and political advice in tow. Jefferson, to his lasting credit, received Paine courteously, even as the Federalist press ranted about his consorting with a rancorous, obvscene old sinner. Paine responded to them in an open letter, "To the Citizens of the United States," saying that Providence, not "the prayers of priests" or the * 'piety of hypocrites,'' carried him through the dangers of the French Revolution and would take care of him still. Regarding the behavior of the Federalists, he said, "those who abuse liberty when they possess it, would abuse power could they attain

520 I AMERICAN it." His wit had lost none of its bite; his style none of its vigor. He wrote seven additional public letters 'To the Citizens of the United States," repeating his criticisms of Washington and Adams (he attacked the latter man's "consummate vanity" and "shallowness of judgment"); supporting the Louisiana Purchase ("Were I twenty years younger . . . I would contract for a quantity of land . . . and go to Europe and bring over settlers"); encouraging a closer alliance with France; exposing the dangers of a large standing army ("It was for the purpose of destroying the representative system, for it could be employed for no other"); and defending Jefferson's presidency, often anonymously, against his numerous enemies. During this second American period, the last seven years of his life, Paine lived variously in Bordentown, New Jersey, in New York City, and finally on his farm at New Rochelle. In 1804-1805 he began to assemble his writings for a collected edition. In 1806 he published a popular essay on the causes of yellow fever—not wholly accurate in its diagnosis, but reasonably close for a man only periodically engaged in scientific research or study. Occasionally, Paine was asked to speak at public events, and he continued his correspondence with his friends in power, particularly Jefferson. All his life Paine had had friends who looked after him in time of need and during his last days, when he needed care, friends came to assist him. John Fellows, American publisher of The Age of Reason; Elihu Palmer, a deist and publisher of The Prospect, a journal that had published Paine's essays; and John Wesley Jarvis, an artist, all stayed with him at various times. But Mme. Marguerite Bonneville, wife of his French publisher, and her children—one of whom was his namesake—were particularly loyal to the very end. Even in his final days, a brief period when he

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was very ill, Paine was badgered by religious militants bent on his conversion. On at least two occasions they pushed their way into his bedroom and proposed his reconciliation with traditional religion. To one person, who claimed to be God's messenger and threatened him with damnation, Paine reportedly had the strength and wit to respond: "Pshaw, He would not send such a foolish, ugly old woman as you about with His message. Go away." To another set of visitors, two ministers on a similar mission, he was quoted as saying: "Let me have none of your popish stuff. Get away with you. Good morning, good morning." One June 8, 1809, shortly after expressing a firm commitment to his religious beliefs, Thomas Paine died, at 59 Grove Street, in Greenwich Village, New York City. He was buried at his farm in New Rochelle, because the Quakers would not admit him to their burial ground. Before a small group of mourners, Mme. Bonneville gave this final tribute: "O! Mr. Paine! My son stands here as testimony of the gratitude of America, and I, for France." His last will, written six months before his death, began with a brief review of his writings. He bequeathed his principal inheritances to his loyal friends, particularly the Bonnevilles and their children, so that they might "bring them well up, give them good and useful learning, and instruct them in their duty to God, and the practice of morality." His judgment on himself Paine pronounced with calm authority: "I have lived an honest and useful life to mankind; my time has been spent in doing good, and I die in perfect composure and resignation to the will of my Creator, God." The political and religious controversies surrounding Paine during his lifetime did not subside after his death. His obituaries, in fact, raised them anew, and early biographies exploited the exaggerated accounts of his drinking habits and sensational stories about his "blasphemies" and

THOMAS PAINE I 521 "licentiousness." Since the time of the Puritans any critic of the political and religious establishment might expect to be accused of sexual excesses, and Paine had that charge thrown at him as well. Comments by Joel Barlow, published at the time of Paine's death, combined eloquent tribute with the harsh personal judgment of a former friend. Barlow talked of Paine's low, vulgar, and disgusting habits, as well as of his exceptional writings, saying that "the most rational thing he could have done would have been to have died the instant he had finished Common Sense." James Cheetham, a libertarian in England who turned reactionary in America, had the last word on his political enemy, in a revengeful biography. Cheetham's work was so scandalous that Mme. Bonneville sued him for libel and won. Yet Cheetham's work and the earlier biography by George Chalmers fixed an image in the popular mind of Paine as profligate, if not lecherous. That kind of impression dies slowly. Nonetheless, a clear picture of Paine as man and writer begins to emerge as recent biographers and historians make fruitful use of new information about Paine's later years in France and America, about the early days of the industrial revolution and its popular literature, about founding fathers and members of the crowd. Such historical and sociological background is crucial to understanding a figure like Paine, since it helps to explain not only his idiosyncrasies as a person but also his style as a writer. As a pamphleteer he often had to write without benefit of subsidy or of a reliable patron. The fact that his service to the United States brought him little adulation angered him; his letters and statements to public officials after 1802 are characterized by a bravado best understood as the hurt feelings and disappointment of one once celebrated. Paine's detractors have argued that he invited or enjoyed personal harassment and isolation, but nothing in his writing—either his published

works or his extensive correspondence— supports this judgment. He was simply too preoccupied with public affairs and events to give much attention to his own. From his letters he appears to have been a man for whom people and circumstance remained somewhat distant. Although he moved in society among the merchants and political leaders of Philadelphia and among the intellectuals in France, he never gave up certain working class habits, refusing to adopt the manners necessary for easy movement in middle-class society. Accounts of his slovenly living quarters, irregular hours, and occasional rowdiness indicate only that he was as indifferent to social convention as he was to traditional political and religious customs. Rationalist, utilitarian, and humanist in the eighteenth-century tradition, Paine was nonetheless a profoundly religious person, for whom moral questions were the questions of ultimate concern. Although never a member of the Society of Friends and often critical of its pacifism, he revealed in his writings on church and state an indebtedness to that religious persuasion. It provided a point of reference for judging other institutions. His pamphlet, "Worship and Church Bells," published in France in 1797, recommended, for example, that French Catholics do "as the Quakers do": worship without priests, inquire into the truth, value education, and alleviate the deplorable state of the poor. In his impetuous denunciation of Paine during the French Convention, Marat, another kind of radical, claimed that Paine had voted against Louis XVI's execution because of his Quaker background. Marat's accusation was a cynical political trick calculated to confuse the issue and to win a political argument, but the incident calls attention to an important aspect of Paine's life and character: the persistent effect of his religious roots. Quakers, he said, were "deists without knowing it." Paine was at times a Quaker without admitting it; his father's religion

522 / AMERICAN influenced him directly and indirectly, and one of his last requests was to be buried in Quaker ground. Three years before his death, Paine said that the motive of his religious writing was "to bring man to right reason . . . and to excite in him a spirit of trust, confidence and consolation in his Creator, unshackled by the fable and fiction of books, by whatever invented name they may be called." His teachings, influential among a small group after his death, survive principally among free thinkers, and the value systems of later humanists—Bertrand Russell in "A Free Man's Worship" and Why I Am Not a Christian, for example—are consistent with Paine's. The humanitarian values Paine espoused were evident in the affairs of his daily life, according to witnesses during his time in prison and through his last days. Although he justified wars of independence, he was generally appalled by violence, opposing it philosophically and acting practically to protect others against it. "Peace, which costs nothing," he said, "is attended with infinitely more advantage than any victory with all its expense.'' An early American essay of his attacked the "gothic and absurd'9 custom of dueling. The effort to end capital punishment, he wrote, "must find its advocates in every corner where enlightened politicians and lovers of humanity exist." During the French Revolution he intervened to protect an Englishman who struck him (a capital offense, since Paine was a member of the Convention) and even provided money for the man's escape. He acted on behalf of Francisco de Miranda, adventurer and soldier, who narrowly escaped execution at the time of the Terror. Late in life, Paine refused to bring charges against a person who shot out a window in his house and endangered his own life. Jefferson compared the literary style of Paine with that of Benjamin Franklin, but he might more profitably have compared them in personality. Paine had Franklin's wit, intelligence, and

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gregarious nature, but not his natural tolerance and wily political skill. He provoked his enemies, while Franklin charmed them into neutrality or won them to his side. Paine was, like Franklin, a true child of the Enlightenment— deist, skeptic, gadgeteer. It is no wonder that the two men got on famously. Jefferson's loyalty to Paine, even in the face of political harassment, grew from a similar appreciation of their common interests and beliefs. As a writer and thinker, Paine built upon two intellectual traditions and one new social development. The first is the radical political tradition, dating from the time of Milton and the arguments justifying the Commonwealth, the Glorious Revolution of 1688, and the political upheavals in England and America in the later eighteenth century. Paine knew the radical Whigs, his principal allies in England, many of whom remained loyal to him through a period of repression and imprisonment under the Pitt government. By their lives and writings, James Burgh, Joseph Priestley, John Wilkes, Catherine Macaulay, Richard Price, and William Godwin—all pamphleteers of the late eighteenth century—are justifiably linked with Paine. The second is the prophetic and dissenting religious tradition extending from the Puritans of the early seventeenth century and especially from the Quakers of the late seventeenth century. Since the time of their refusal to bear arms under Charles II, the Quakers had maintained a jealous guardianship of the militant nonconformist tradition, risking imprisonment and death in their resistance to any unjust law and enduring the fiercest religious persecution in the private and public fulfillment of their duty to conscience. Paine's persistence in the face of imprisonment, exile, and near death resembles the zeal of these dissenting radicals. To these two major influences, Paine added— or perhaps one should say incorporated—a third: his experience as a worker and his association

THOMAS PAINE I 523 with people lingering on the fringes of society, unsuccessful by most standards, dispossessed, even hopeless. Like Moll Randers or the figures in Hogarth's engravings on city life, they lived out their lives under the threat of debtor's prison, which Paine himself experienced at least once and escaped another time. With this background he gave to his writing a strong sense of "the other England," previously excluded from formal political, religious, and literary debate. In the writings of Daniel Defoe, in John Gay's The Beggar's Opera, and in Samuel Johnson's Life of Savage, poor people played a central role, but in Paine's essays, a writer speaks for them and voices their discontent. In his furious, moralistic attacks on church and state, Paine spoke in the voice of a person victimized by traditional institutions. His vehement denunciation of the rich reflects his close association with poverty before he came to America, when life seemed to promise little. He made out of this anger a literary style—not, like Swift, by transforming anger into cutting irony, but by applying it directly, in order to surround and annihilate his foe. In response, for example, to a royal proclamation issued for the purpose of suppressing Rights of Man and to a charge of libel brought against the book's publishers, Paine said: If, to expose the fraud and imposition of monarchy, and every species of hereditary government—to lessen the oppression of taxes—to propose plans for the education of helpless infancy, and the comfortable support of the aged and distressed—to endeavor to conciliate nations to each other—to extirpate the horrid practise of war—to promote universal peace, and civilization, and the commerce—and to break the chains of political superstition, and raise degraded man to his proper rank—if these things be libellous, let me live the life of a Libeller, and let the name of LIBELLER be engraved on my tomb.

Paine's is the focused rage that one associates with all great revolutionary writers, expressed in language that is outrageous and penetrating. He helped to create, in fact, a language for revolution in which, as Eric Foner has said, "timeless discontents, millennial aspirations and popular traditions were expressed in a strikingly new vocabulary"; and Paine's rhetoric—simple and direct, "his arguments rooted in the common experience of a mass readership"—suggests a great deal about the changing nature of the popular audience for literature in the late eighteenth century. He became for the lower classes what Locke had been for the merchant class in the English revolution of the previous century. Paine regarded himself, however, as a different kind of writer, calling Locke's writings "speculative" rather than "practical," and describing his style as "heavy and tedious." Traditionalists like Burke accurately recognized Paine, popular journalist and Grub Street rabblerouser, as being—in some insidious way—the wave of the future. Although he possessed an incisive mind and is legitimately called a rationalist, Paine operated as much by intuition and feeling as he did by logic. He picked up the political scent in any situation with the skill of a novelist, assuming, rather than demonstrating, the viability of the principles upon which his argument was based. His understanding of the evils of poverty and the perpetual disgrace of hardship give his writings a strong resemblance to Charles Dickens' or George Orwell's in their later descriptions of the urban poor. But Paine had a faulty ear for detail and a poor sense of narrative—one reason, perhaps, why he gave up his plans for writing a history of the American Revolution. He lacked the patience of the careful observer, his mind running quickly toward an abstract concept or a moral truth implicit in a situation rather than toward a detail or image that might recreate it immediately in the mind of the reader.

524 I AMERICAN Randolph Bourne, who first used the term "American literary radical" in 1918, rightfully looked to Paine as progenitor. His unique and lasting contribution to American culture was as a literary radical, being at once its embodiment and a sign of later developments in that tradition. Although Paine's life and ideas were firmly rooted in a preindustrial society, he lived according to the values of and spoke a language similar to later radicals: William Lloyd Garrison, Margaret Fuller, and Wendell Phillips in the nineteenth century; Emma Goldman, Eugene Victor Debs, and Dorothy Day in the twentieth century. Under the pressure of other injustices, they directed themselves to similar libertarian causes: the abolition of slavery, the rights of workers, the emancipation of women. All, as editors and agitators, raised their voices against the established order, advocating a more open society, with something of Paine's anger, frustration, and persistence. Like him, they eventually came to an indictment of the whole social system. Revolutionaries, rather than reformers, working, by choice or accident, outside the centers of political power, they affirmed similar radical principles: that the basis of a just society is a universal good, often self-evident to everyone; that each person has a right to direct his or her own life, as Paul Goodman said, "without being pushed around"; that the purpose of society is to serve people, not property—the living, not the dead; that good citizens have a right to revolt and, in the face of unjust laws, as Mulford Q. Sibley said, an "obligation to disobey"; that people owe allegiance not to one nation, but to all people. Paine's motto, "My country is the world," called attention to the limitations of nationalism just as it gathered strength in Europe as an ideology; Garrison and Debs repeated Paine's saying, and saw internationalism as central to their own radical program. Commentators emphasizing Paine's limita-

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tions as a political theorist often ignore the value of his perspective on public matters; they criticize his failure to influence the established order and to commit himself to conventional political action. Although it is often essential in any movement for social change, compromise does tend to dilute an issue. Discontent among the lower classes and injustice in government, not the structural means for correcting abuses, constituted Paine's lifework. It was characteristic of him that an injudicious disclosure of fact, in the indictment of Silas Deane, led to Paine's dismissal from a major political office. A different mode of behavior is easily defensible on political grounds, but he assumed, like many literary radicals, that a principal means of correcting injustice is to publicize it. Paine never defined himself within the context of legislative politics, and had trouble maintaining his composure during extended parliamentary debate. Franklin and Madison could carry on the tasks of practical politics. As a writer, Paine spoke to a different, but equally important, public need, identifying grievances and clarifying relationships in a time of change. In a malleable society he gave people a libertarian vision of the future and raised their level of expectation about how they might govern themselves. Although he suffered from a common fault of writers—assuming that social change could be carried on through exhortation, rather than by action and reconciliation—he helped to establish a tradition that, in the lives and writings of later literary radicals, continues to inform American culture. During his thirty years as a public figure, Paine repeatedly affirmed his loyalty, in theory and practice, to the lower classes, rather than to the upwardly mobile merchant classes that came to dominate the American scene after the Revolution and the ratification of the Constitution. Many of his contemporaries and compatriots—including John Adams, John Hancock,

THOMAS PAINE I 525 Charles Carroll, and Samuel Adams—were "revolutionary" in regard to American independence, but increasingly "conservative" in regard to the policies of the new nation. Paine, for all his inconsistencies, remained "revolutionary" to the end. Writing forcefully and originally about fundamental social change, he left, in Walt Whitman's words, "a deep, clear-cut impression on the public mind."

Selected Bibliography

BIOGRAPHIES Aldridge, Alfred Owen. Man of Reason: The Life of Thomas Paine. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1959. Conway, Moncure Daniel. The Life of Thomas Paine. 2 vols. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1892. Foner, Eric. Tom Paine and Revolutionary America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1976. Hawke, David Freeman. Paine. New York: Harper and Row, 1974. Williamson, Audrey. Thomas Paine: His Life, Work and Times. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1973; New York: St. Martin's Press, 1973. CRITICAL

WORKS OF THOMAS

PAINE

An authoritative collected edition of Paine's public and private writings is badly needed, but two previous collections are useful. The Complete Writings of Thomas Paine, edited by Philip S. Foner, 2 vols. (New York: The Citadel Press, 1945), is the latest and best. The Writings of Thomas Paine, edited by Moncure Daniel Conway, 4 vols. (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1894-1896), is standard. Common Sense, 1776. The American Crisis, 1776-1783. Rights of Man: Being an Answer to Mr. Burke's Attack on the French Revolution, 1791-1792. The Age of Reason: Being an Investigation of True and of Fabulous Theology, 1794-1796. Agrarian Justice, 1797. CURRENT EDITIONS

Rights of Man. New York: E. P. Button, 1935. Common Sense and Other Political Writings, edited by Nelson F. Adkins. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1953. Age of Reason, Part 1, edited by Alburey Castell. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1957. Thomas Paine: Representative Selections, edited by Harry Hayden Clark. Rev. ed. New York: Hill and Wang, 1961. Common Sense and the Crisis. New York: Doubleday, 1970. Rights of Man, edited by Henry Collins. Baltimore: Pelican, 1970.

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Bailyn, Bernard. "Common Sense," in Fundamental Testaments of the American Revolution. Washington: Library of Congress, 1973. Pp. 7-22. Clark, Harry Hayden. "Thomas Paine—Introduction," in Thomas Paine: Representative Selections, with Introduction, Bibliography, and Notes. Rev. ed. New York: Hill and Wang, 1961. Derry, John. The Radical Tradition: From Tom Paine to Lloyd George. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1967. Fennessy, R. R. Burke, Paine, and the Rights of Man: A Difference of Political Opinions. The Hague, 1963. Gimbel, Richard. Thomas Paine: A Bibliographical Check List of Common Sense, with an Account of Its Publication. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1956. . "Thomas Paine Fights for Freedom in Three Worlds: The New, The Old, The Next . . . Catalog of an Exhibition Commemorating the 150th Anniversary of His Death," Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society, 70, Part II, 397492 (1960). Lynd, Staughton. Intellectual Origins of American Radicalism. New York: Pantheon Books, 1968. Thompson, E. P. The Making of the English Working Class. New York: Pantheon, 1963. Young, Alfred F., ed. The American Revolution: Explorations in the History of American Radicalism. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1976. -MICHAEL TRUE

Sylvia Plath 1932-1963 TJLHIHE publication of Ariel, the volume of poetry

much by the fact of her suicide as by the nature and concerns of the poetry itself. The Bell Jar, Plath's autobiographical novel, also contributed to the view, first presented and later affirmed further by A. Alvarez (who knew Plath), that the poetry and the suicide were inextricably intertwined, that one was essentially the cause of the other. Such observations probably made inevitable the dominance of psychoanalytic criticisms of Plath's work. The debate among the psychoanalytic critics revolves around reconstructing the poetry and interpreting it as the case history of a woman with severe mental illness. These interpretations have produced a variety of diagnoses: exogenous depression; manic depression; schizoid schizophrenia. The strong oedipal themes of some of the works provide added impetus to this style of criticism, a style that persists in David Holbrook's Sylvia Plath: Poetry and Existence and, in a more heavy-handed way, informs Edward Butscher's Sylvia Plath: Method and Madness. Holbrook's study is the most careful and comprehensive, attempting a full explication of the text from this point of view, an explication of great value. Yet the book also illustrates some of the weaknesses of this approach. First, it collapses too completely the distinction between Sylvia Plath, human being and poet, and the personae of the poems that she constructed. To

that Sylvia Plath completed in the week before she committed suicide, precipitated a uniquely intense critical reaction, in part because it is a uniquely intense poetry, strikingly original and deeply troubling to any reader. It is a poetry that shocks by virtue of some of its more sensational thematic concerns: injury, victimization, parasitism, alienation, brutality, war, cannibalism, death in all forms, torture, murder, suicide, patricide, genocide, holocaust, angst, fate, mental illness, paralysis, and anger. They are all there, and in such intensity, embodied in such startling images, that it has taken some time for the discussion to calm. The later publication of both Winter Trees and Crossing the Water, which made some poems available for the first time and reprinted many others that had been scattered in periodicals, has aided in bringing about a more evenhanded approach to this difficult poet. These volumes made more visible the existence in Plath's work of contrasting thematic concerns: of love, of motherhood, of spiritual search, of intense life, of transcendent moment, of tenderness, and, albeit on narrow grounds, of affirmation. This recognition in turn produced a revaluation of similar themes as they occur, if not so emphatically or sensationally, in Ariel itself. Initial reactions were precipitated at least as 526

SYLVIA PLATE I 527 be sure, Plath's extensive use of the autobiographical in her writing irresistibly invites such a collapse. Yet she had very strong notions about the poet's responsibility to move beyond the autobiographical. Second, Plath had read Freud; and one is often uneasy with the feeling that to analyze in this way is to accept at face value a Freudian myth of self that Plath calculatedly constructed. One wonders if such an approach is not closer to paraphrase than to analysis. Finally, the criticism itself raises questions about what need we have to read Plath's poetry as pathological: why do we, who share the twentieth-century culture from which she sprang and to which she addressed her work, feel so powerful a need to see her as deviant? The last question is central when it is recogir^ed that Holbiook's quarrel with Alvarez and, for that matter, with the critics whose essays are collected in Charles Newman's The Art of Sylvia Plath, is fundamentally a quarrel about social responsibility in literary criticism. Holbrook argues that critics must negatively evaluate a poem like "Edge," despite its technical brilliance, because it is an example of moral inversion, of "Evil be thou my good." Thus, too, what he calls the poems of hate and of self-destruction. The fact that these urges are genuine is not sufficient to praise their embodiment in art. Holbiook's argument is also clearly directed at R. D. Laing's view that the schizoid condition is a nonnal one in our world, that since civilization is schizoid, a schizoid personality formation is a predictable survival strategy and suicide is an expectable and often a warranted act. We are involved, then, in the classic "art for art's sake" versus "art for life's sake" argument, and Plath seems to raise this issue in a particularly pressing way. Sylvia Plath, even if discussed only from the psychoanalytic framework that has dominated comment on her work, is an extremely controversial poet. Her work as a whole is coura-

geously honest, surrealistically associational, and, in the individual poems, as concentrated as that of any contemporary poet. Yet Barbara Hardy may be right in suggesting that Plath simply does not have typical poems. Rather, she seems to have fulfilled the desire of Esther Greenwood, the heroine in The Bell Jar, to be an arrow shooting off in all directions. This is not to say that the poetry is random or uncontrolled, although it is certainly obscure at times. Quite the contrary. Plath's poetry is experiential, and takes many directions in the eternal search for human identity and meaning. To enter into this search with Plath is to do so in the company of a poet of great technical skill and original personal voice, a voice forged through a sustained and difficult apprenticeship. Hers is the unmistakable idiom of a midtwentieth-century American woman. And critics have agreed on one thing: at their best, Plath's poetic hooks are as sharp as the experiential "hooks" of which she writes. Sylvia Plath was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on October 27, 1932, to Otto and Aurelia Plath. Otto had emigrated to America from Germany at the age of sixteen to study for the ministry at Northwestern College, a small Lutheran school. By Aurelia's report, Otto's ambitions changed because he did not feel a genuine "call," and after receiving the master of arts from Washington University and the doctor of science from Harvard, he became a professor of biology at Boston University in 1928. Aurelia taught German and English at Brookline High School until January 1932, when she and Otto married, and she "yielded to my husband's wish that I become a full-time homemaker." The Plaths then settled in Winthrop, a seaside town near Boston, where Aurelia's Austrian immigrant parents lived and where Sylvia spent her early childhood. The Plath household, Aurelia reports, was a patriarchal one in the traditional, Old World

525 / AMERICAN sense. And she was consistently and heavily involved in her husband's career: they had planned cooperative scholarly projects before their marriage, and afterward she prepared and updated lecture notes, reviewed current scholarly literature, and jointly researched, wrote, and edited the monographs published by her husband. Indeed, Otto's work was central to the household, which was organized and scheduled, including the routines of Sylvia and her brother Warren, around the needs of a scholar for privacy and work space. The Plaths did not lead active social lives, and Sylvia's earliest associations were largely limited to her parents, her brother, her maternal grandparents, and a few friendly neighbors. These early years in Winthrop were personally and artistically crucial to Plath's development; she came to regard them as "beautiful, inaccessible, obsolete, a fine, white, flying myth." "My childhood landscape," she says in a reminiscence titled "Ocean 1212-W" (her grandmother's phone number at Point Shirley), "was not land but the end of land—the cold, salt, running hills of the Atlantic." She continues: I sometimes think my vision of the sea is the clearest thing I own. I pick it up, exile that I am, like the purple "lucky stones" I used to collect . . . and in one wash of memory, the colors deepen and gleam, the early world draws breath. Plath summons here a nostalgic reminiscence of a childhood Eden, but the memory is structured by the adult consciousness it informs. Like all "flying" myths, this one contains an element of tragedy. For Plath, the sea is ambiguous, mysterious, impenetrable: "Like a deep woman, it hid a good deal; it had many faces, many delicate terrible veils . . . if it could court, it could also kill." She associated the sea with her early life, referring to her "ocean-childhood," and she regarded this childhood as "probably the foun-

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dation of [her] consciousness." There are, therefore, sources for Plath's ambiguity about the sea: her experience of the sea as a changeful and unpredictable natural phenomenon in its own right, as an objective entity, was concrete, and this became, for her, a model of the experience of the self in nature. Her experiences of the sea also are tied subjectively to her mother, father, and grandmother, and to feelings of powerlessness, vulnerability, betrayal, and loss, as well as to "bright mirrors," days of play at the beach and the warmth of her grandmother's home at Point Shirley. "One day," she reports, "the textures of the beach burned themselves on the lens of my eye forever." She discovered, on that day, that her mother had "deserted" her for three weeks in order to return with a baby brother. I, who . . . had been the center of a tender universe felt that axis wrench and a polar chill immobilize my bones. . . . As from a star I saw, coldly and soberly, the separateness of everything. I felt the wall of my skin: I am I. That stone is a stone. My beautiful fusion with the things of this world was over. Plath sought solace from the sea that day, looking for a "sign. . . . A sign of election and specialness. A sign I was not forever to be cast out." Clearly, this is the classic birth of selfconsciousness, coupled with a child's powerful need for affirmation, for continuity, for community, and, above all, for specialness; in the language of a historic New England, for "election." The tension between the desire for fusion and the desire for specialness in face of inevitable otherness, which was stimulated first by the birth of her brother, eventually became one of the major themes Plath explored in her later works. She sought in her early childhood to assuage this sense of otherness by establishing a strong relationship with her father. He took pride in her

SYLVIA PLATH I 529 childhood accomplishments, and Sylvia, apparently, idolized him. But in 1940 he became ill from a neglected case of diabetes, and died in November, of complications from the disease. This second loss, also associated with early childhood, as another traumatic demonstration of separateness, became a major turning point in Plath's life, and later she wrote of it, in "Lady Lazarus," as her own first death. It was certainly one of the events in her life that continued to haunt her. After her first suicide attempt, at the age of nineteen, she reported to her friend Nancy Steiner one of her reactions to her father's death: "He was an a u t o c r a t . . . I adored and despised him, and I probably wished many times that he were dead. When he obliged me and died, I imagined that I had killed him/ 9 The personae of many of her poems, including perhaps the most famous, "Daddy," work through the effects and implications of the father-daughter relationship; and in The Bell Jar Esther Greenwood's visit to her father's grave is an important event. In dealing with these matters artistically, water imagery, most often sea imagery, is employed either for purposes of thematic development and enrichment or as the direct means of thematic expression. For Plath, then, the seascape is fused with memories of her father, more so because his death occasioned the family's move inland to Wellesley, "whereon," she says, "those nine years of my life sealed themselves off like a ship in a bottle." Her last memories of the sea, Plath states, were memories of violence, "a still unhealthy day in 1939, the sea molten, steely slick, heaving at its leash like a broody animal." A hurricane was due, and when it came, it spread all the devastation a child "might wish." "The only sound was a howl, jazzed up by the bangs, slams, groans, and splintering of objects tossed like crockery in a giant's quarrel. The house rocked on its root." Land's end is, for Plath, the tangled bank of "Pbint Shirley," the scene of

the eternal natural drama of life and death, as in "Suicide off Egg Rock," and a primary symbol of alienation from nature, as in "Mussel Hunter at Rock Harbor." Yet this early experience was not quite as "sealed off" as Plath suggests, for the seascape became one of the major metaphoric resources of her poetry; and it was a sea poem that introduced her to poetry itself. She recalls her mother reading to her and her brother from Matthew Arnold's "Forsaken Merman." Her response, she says, was immediate: "I saw the gooseflesh on my skin. I did not know what made it. I was not cold. . . . It was the poetry. A spark flew off Arnold and shook me, like a chill. I wanted to cry; I felt very odd. I had fallen into a new way of being happy." At the age of eight, Sylvia Plath had her first poem published, in the Boston Sunday Herald: Hear the cricket chirping In the dewy grass. Bright little fireflies Twinkle as they pass. With this Plath began an apprenticeship that culminated in the publication of her first collection of poems, The Colossus (1960), by William Heinemann, Ltd., in England. For nearly twenty years she worked at poetry, developing and honing a technique, moving toward a mature voice and style that were unmistakably hers, a voice that has since been much imitated but never duplicated. Writing became one route to the specialness she sought—to "election." As she put it, she wanted to become "a woman poet . . . the world will gape at." It was not, however, the only route. Those who admire the figure of the alienated writer look with considerable astonishment at the normalcy of Plath's girlhood; at least it was normal for a very bright, highly motivated middle-class girl in post-World War II America. As a student, Plath was consistently a high achiever. She was

530 I AMERICAN recognized by her teachers as especially gifted in writing; she served as editor of the school newspaper, participated in student theatrical productions, and persistently submitted her writing for commercial publication, finally placing a story in Seventeen after forty-five rejections. She was elected to the National Honor Society, and among the many other honors she received was a scholarship to Smith College. She listed her intended profession as 4'writer," but during her college years she vacillated between writing and the graphic arts as professional concerns. In each case, she thought of both commercial and artistic success, the "slick" and the serious, as compatible pursuits, seeing one as possible support for the other. Long after her decisive turn toward poetry and serious fiction, Plath continued to work on fiction slanted toward the slick magazine, describing publication in the Ladies Home Journal as an aim even during the last year of her life. In the fall of 1950 Plath entered Smith College, supported by money from the Olive Higgins Prouty Fund, the Nielson Scholarship, and the Wellesley Smith Club. Her letters home are full of the typical concerns of a Smith coed in the 1950's: clothes, Ivy League men, creamcolored convertibles, friends, blind dates, grades, and the need to be "versatile." She became well known at Smith through the stories she had published, and won third place in Seventeen 's writing contest during her freshman year. Plath's first three years at Smith were, with few exceptions, the logical extension of her high school career. She was known as a brilliant, energetic, and highly motivated student. Her essential intellectuality extended to active involvement in the cultural events of the college; especially, she sought out visiting writers, often commenting critically on their personalities and presentations. During this time, too, she wrote almost constantly, producing a large volume of poetry (often reflecting the influence of poets she was reading in her classes) and persisting in her

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efforts to be published. Some of the poems and short stories of this period are still available in back issues of such periodicals as Seventeen, Christian Science Monitor, Mademoiselle, The National Poetry Association Anthology, and Harper's. (Some have also appeared in limited editions published after her death by Rainbow Press.) Along with commercial publication, contribution to Smith College periodicals brought Plath wider recognition both at school and in a wider literary world. Eventually she received all of Smith's poetry prizes and was elected to Alpha, the Smith honorary society for the arts. In 1953 she was one of two national winners of the Mademoiselle fiction contest and was selected as managing editor for the August issue. She commented that the Atlantic and the New Yorker remained her "unclimbed Annapurnas." Plath's activity as a student, an aspiring writer, and a "versatile" coed must have been frenetic. And there were signs, especially during her third year, that the intense pressure of such activity was beginning to have its effect: she had periodic bouts with sinus colds that physically and mentally exhausted her, and she chafed at any academic difficulty. She was a perfectionist, and could not abide the fact that she was receiving B's in German. She resented, to an irrational degree, the science requirement of the college. She wrote to her mother in the fall of 1952: . . . I have practically considered committing suicide to get out of it [a science c o u r s e ] . . . . It just seems that I am running on a purposeless treadmill. . . dreading every day of the horrible year ahead. . . . I have become really frantic: small choices and events seem insurmountable obstacles, the core of life has fallen apart. I am obsessed by wanting to escape from that course. . . . When one feels like leaving college and killing oneself over one course . . . it is a rather serious thing. . . . . . . I have built it up to a devouring, mali-

SYLVIA PLATH I 531

cious monster. . . . I know I am driving myself to distraction. Everything is empty, meaningless. This is not education. It is hell. . . . Clearly, Plath had fixated on this particular course as the focus of frustrations and anxieties that were much deeper than a single course could possibly engender. The letter in its entirety (dated November 19, 1952) is an indicator of things to come. Still, at this time Plath recognized the problem as stemming from her own psychological state, recognized that she herself had made the course a "monster." To the credit of her advisers at Smith, Plath was able to resolve her problems with science in a scheduling compromise, but the larger anxieties so evident here surfaced in extremely destructive ways in the summer of 1953. Three days after the completion of her final examinations, Plath found herself in New York at the editorial offices of Mademoiselle, engaged in a nonstop series of activities planned for the group of college students chosen to edit the August issue of the magazine. At first hand, she saw the world of slick publication and flashy commercial fashion. Plath worked hard at her magazine assignments and, on the surface at least, enthusiastically engaged in even the most superficial of the activities. Her letters indicate very unstable attitudes toward her experience: "I have been very ecstatic, horribly depressed, shocked, elated, enlightened, and enervated—. . . I want to come home and vegetate in peace . . . with the people I love around me for a change." New York apparently came as a shock to her, and she desired retreat from "these slick admen, these hucksters" and the "breathless wasteland of the cliffdwellers." Her retreat was to be far more complete than her letters suggest, for other bad news awaited her at home. Plath had not been accepted for Frank O'Connor's short story class, which she had planned to attend that summer. Her mother

was surprised at the intensity of her daughter's reaction to this news. Disillusionment in New York and rejection for a chance at serious work under respected guidance struck at Plath's twin professional ambitions and psychologically combined to invoke the earlier and unresolved losses of "specialness" and her father to produce the downward spiral of clinical depression. On August 24, 1953, she nearly succeeded in a carefully planned and executed suicide attempt. Plath later spoke of this period as the blackest in her life, and says in "A Birthday Present": "I would have killed myself gladly that time any possible way." Yet the most significant testimony we have about Plath's condition at this time is embodied in her most significant work of fiction, The Bell Jar. Probably written prior to the publication of The Colossus (but published only a month before her death), The Bell Jar is a work of imaginative transformation of experience. The temptation to read it as straight autobiography is great, for its details are taken so literally from Plath's life. But the book was written by a woman a full decade older, one who had matured enormously as an artist and whose artistic aim was directly to make use of personal experience in a larger and more encompassing mission—a mission of relevance. The testimony here is significant in a twofold way: as it fixes in perusable form the life experience that partly lies behind the driving force of Plath's poetic vision, and as it represents the more mature Plath assessing that experience and connecting it to themes that personally, socially, and culturally transcend "cries from the heart that are informed by nothing except the needle or the knife." The novel is presented from the single point of view of its central character, Esther Greenwood. Esther, like Plath, is a college student who has been selected to be a guest editor of a major New York-based women's magazine for part of a summer. The narrative opens with a set of asso-

552 / AMERICAN ciations of both public and private "historical" significance: It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn't know what I was doing in New York. I'm stupid about executions. . . . but I couldn't help wondering what it would be like, being burned alive all along your nerves. I thought it must be the worst thing in the world. . . . I kept hearing about the Rosenbergs. . . . It was like the first time I saw a cadaver. . . . pretty soon I felt as though I were carrying that cadaver's head around with me on a string, like some black, noseless balloon stinking of vinegar. . . . I was supposed to be having the time of my life. From the opening lines of the novel, the reader is aware that there is something wrong with Esther. And very shortly the narrator reveals that she, too, is aware that there is something wrong: "I felt very still and very empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel, moving dully along in the middle of the surrounding hullabaloo." The novel is designed to convey a psychological frame of mind, the mental condition to which the novel's title gives metaphoric embodiment. Events are not reported chronologically, but associationally, as the narrative present gives way to the narrative past in a modified stream-of-consciousness structure. Esther's consciousness is characterized by increasing patterns of dissociation, fragmentation, alienation and, finally, psychological paralysis. Plath provides relief for the reader only by means of the narrator's apparent objectivity, technically achieved through a strong sense of irony, in this context an irony amounting to black humor. Esther Greenwood's essential problem is one of choice, of identity. Up to this point in her life,

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like Plath herself, Esther has steered a relatively straight course, winning scholarships and prizes, preparing herself for success in the standard middle-class way. She has arrived at a turning point, sees an * 'era coming to an end,'' and finds herself unable to choose a future: I saw my life branching out before me like [a] green fig tree. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs... I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind. . . . I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black. . . . Esther's inability to choose results largely from her own perception of the choices as mutually exclusive, a perception that finds its source in the internalized cultural expectations of her society, coupled with her own distorted vision of her abilities and experience. Indeed, she is greenwood, and she is about to face "realities" that she can neither imagine as escapable nor deal with realistically. Esther's severest conflicts revolve around her identity as a woman, or, rather, her evolving identity as an autonomous person, clashing directly with the socially defined ideals of womanhood. She sees no way in which she can manage to achieve social acceptance, which she badly

SYLVIA PLATH I 533 wants, as well as pursue the other things she judges valuable and important. She observes and imaginatively (not actually) tries out a variety of female identity types. Indeed, that is the function of the other female characters in the novel: they remain flat products of Esther's projections and do not take on individually compelling characters, precisely because they are hypothetical models, personae in an internal drama. Esther explores the culturally standard varieties of the wife-mother combination through three characters: Dodo Conway, Mrs. Willard, and her own mother. In no case do the cliched versions of happy wife and mother seem to fit the realities of the lives of these three women as Esther sees them. Dodo Conway is woman as reproductive machine, with six children and the "sprawling paraphernalia of suburban childhood. " Assured by religious conviction (Dodo is Catholic), she wades through Rice Krispies and peanut butter, daily walking her * 'smudgy'' children with cowlike serenity. Esther is interested in Dodo 4
as precisely analogous to Mrs. Willard's position in marriage: And I knew that in spite of all the roses and kisses and restaurant dinners a man showered on a woman before he married her, what he secretly wanted when the wedding service ended was for her to flatten out underneath his feet like Mrs. Willard's kitchen mat. Like Mrs. Willard, Esther's mother soon had confronted the realities of marriage when, shortly after the ceremony, Mr. Greenwood remarked: "Whew, that's a relief, now we can stop pretending and be ourselves." "From that day on," Esther comments, "my mother never had a minute's peace." Like Plath's own father, Esther's father died when she was nine ("I had never been happy since I was nine"), and Mrs. Greenwood was faced with the prospect of raising a family and providing an income. Esther remembers that her mother never grieved over her father's death and never forgave him for not having had enough insurance. Both Mrs. Willard and Mrs. Greenwood have continuous, sentimental, moralistic, and prosaic advice to offer about relations between men and women (women should keep themselves pure) and about the future (get secretarial skills; even the apostles had to have a trade). Neither offers Esther any alternative that might prove hopeful. Esther's considerable anxiety about sex roles in conflict with identity is explored as well through her relationships with a series of men: Buddy Willard, Constantin, Marco, and Irwin. Her relationship with Buddy is one of long standing but little reward. He becomes the means through which she discovers male refusal to take female aspirations seriously, her own deep fears about motherhood, and the hypocrisy of the double standard. Fully taken with his own mother's pronouncements about the nature of men and women, Buddy is smug: he tells Esther, in a "sinister and knowing way," that after she has

534 I AMERICAN children, she won't want to write poems anymore. "So I began to think," reports Esther, 4 'maybe it was true that when you were married and had children it was like being brainwashed, and afterward you went about numb as a slave in some private, totalitarian state/9 At one point Buddy, who is a medical student, takes her to see the birth of a baby in the hospital where he works. Although she comments casually that she could "see something like that every day," it is clear that she has been deeply affected by the "torture" chamber atmosphere, the drugging of the women ("just like the sort of drug a man would invent"), the pain of the birth, and the impersonality of the event. Esther confronts the double standard when Buddy confesses that he had an affair with a waitress. Buddy's hypocrisy is complete for Esther; and she later wonders, as she considers the Reader's Digest article "In Defense of Chastity," given to her by her mother, whether it might be worth considering "how a girl felt." Purity was a big issue for her generation; she thought her whole life would change with the loss of her virginity. But it seemed intolerable to her that women should be pure while men could "have a double life, one pure and one not." Esther's efforts to lose her virginity are sparked by this insight, and she seeks sexual encounter, first with Constantly a United Nations interpreter she meets during her month in New York. She romanticizes this relationship, imagining after just meeting him what it would be like to be married to him. Ironically, she has met Constantin through Mrs. Willard, and although they enjoy an evening together, none of Esther's obvious efforts bring about the desired seduction. Even Marco, a sadistic misogynist who violently threatens Esther as the representative of all hated womanhood and accomplishes her total effacement before men, leaves her a virgin. She waits until after her attempted suicide and consequent hospitalization to discover, in

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the company of an unscrupulous visiting professor named Irwin, that the loss of her virginity does not transform her into a being of some other order. There are, then, no positive male figures in the novel, with the possible exception of Esther's father, who is dead. Even Dr. Gordon, a psychiatrist to whom Esther is initially referred when her mental and physical condition noticeably deteriorates, is a negative figure—smug, self-satisfied, and uncaring rather than vicious. Esther is not so much fearful of relationships, however, as she is fearful that relationships are, or necessarily become, empty and meaningless ("I wondered if as soon as he came to like me, he would sink into ordinariness. . . . I would find fault after fault"). She is not so much afraid of being a woman as she is resentful of the role that threatened to wipe out all other aspects of her identity, reducing her to a mere biological function or social and sexual object: "the trouble was, I hated the idea of serving men in any way." After Esther's self-esteem has been eroded in other ways as well, she comes to mistrust her own intellectual ability and her ability to function in the day-to-day world: "there were so many things I couldn't do." And she feels that she is a sham, that she will be discovered for the stupid and shallow person she "really" is. This is, of course, life in the bell jar. She fears all those to whom she might turn, because they are potentially the penetrators of her mask, the discoverers of her vile and unworthy nature. It is crucial to point out that her guilt and anxiety are not so much the result of her own behavior or the application of the standards of others to it, as of her own perfectionism, which produces a distorted view of her "sins" and incompetencies. She takes wishes or possibilities as behaviors. For example, she wishes that she could be like Doreen, "a secret voice speaking out of her bones," confronting the male world as a shallow, predatory, and cynically manipulative

SYLVIA PLATH I 535

woman; then, for merely imagining herself as Doreen, she feels "dirty" and bathes in ritual purification. Periodically, she wistfully turns toward religion, thinking she should become a Catholic so that she might confess her own despicable nature. Esther can imagine no future in the world and perceives herself as split, disassociated. When asked about her future plans: " 'I don't really know,' I heard myself say. I felt a deep shock, hearing myself say that, because the minute I said it, I knew it was true." Like Plath, Esther returns home to discover her rejection from a summer writing seminar. Thereafter she is almost totally sleepless, falling into the patterns of extreme depression. She sees * 'the years of [her] life spaced along a road in the form of telephone poles, threaded together by wires. . . . [and can't] see a single pole beyond the nineteenth." She concludes that she wants "to do everything once and for all and be through with it." She wanders aimlessly, contemplating various methods of suicide. She makes a ritual visit to her father's grave, howling her "loss to the cold salt rain." She then, after carefully deceiving her mother, takes an overdose of sleeping pills and secrets herself in a crawl space underneath her house. Esther's next awareness finds her in a hospital, in terrible physical and mental condition, and it is here that her recovery begins. She is subjected to most of the standard therapeutic devices: electroshock, drug treatment, and psychoanalysis. She develops a good relationship with her psychiatrist, a woman with compassion and skill. As she grows stronger, as the bell jar lifts, she is gradually moved outward from the institution into the world from which she fled. Her competence is tested by the suicide of an acquaintance (regarded as another double), which leads her eventually to affirm her freedom and "the old brag of [her] heart. I am. I am. I am." She leaves the sanatorium for an uncertain future,

feeling the need of some kind of ritual' 'for being born twice—patched, retreaded and approved for the road." The novel is so consistently autobiographical that Esther's fear that the bell jar eventually might lower again must be read as Plath's own. Moreover, the basic themes of the novel are to be seen time and again in the stronger voice of Plath the poet, directly in poems like "The Stones," "Lady Lazarus," and "The Applicant," more subtly in others. Plath herself is said to have referred to the novel as a "pot-boiler," and she first published it in England under the pseudonym of Victoria Lucas. The pseudonym is itself a revealing one. Victoria is an obvious reference, given the nature of the novel, to the repressed sexuality attributed to Victorian England; Lucas is a variant on Luke, the disciple-physician. The name, then, contains reference to the specific illness and to the writer as self-healer; Plath also later saw the novel as an exercise in psychological catharsis. Given its autobiographical qualities, however, there was clearly more than one reason for the pseudonym; indeed, after Plath's death her mother attempted to prevent American publication of the novel, believing it would cause unnecessary pain to many who had been Plath's friends. The Bell Jar is not a great novel. Yet it is a better novel than Plath herself recognized. It is technically sound, if not in the forefront of narrative technique or of style. It is a comic, if painful, .comment on American life during what one critic has called the Tranquilized Fifties, a female version of The Catcher in The Rye. The degree to which the personal and idiosyncratic have been transcended in the novel is directly to be measured by the ironic social comment represented in Esther Greenwood's internalized cultural landscape. Her dilemmas are plausible precisely because, through Esther, Plath has connected her private history to the relevant social history of her time. And no amount of liter-

536 I AMERICAN ary or philosophical sophistication had prepared her for the experiences that led her to the isolation of the bell jar, most particularly those experiences connected with a specifically female identity search. For reasons that are by now obvious, the novel has become a staple in the study of women's fiction. More interesting, perhaps, is the fact that it is read outside academic circles, beyond the tight world where literature is an all-encompassing professional concern. Such popularity will not serve the novel well in certain critical circles. It surely would not have bothered Plath, however, who sought vindication of her work from both quarters. In any case, The Bell Jar is certainly the best of Plath's fiction and an invaluable key to an examination of her far more difficult and aesthetically superior poetry, for in the novel Plath employed an approach to reality and style that prepared her for the poetic achievement of the last two years of her life. Sylvia Plath's own return from "symbolic death and . . . the agony of slow rebirth" was to Smith College, in February 1954, where she rapidly reestablished her academic and creative reputation. During the year and a half following her illness, she studied German on a scholarship at Harvard; worked on creative writing with Alfred Kazin; published a number of poems, including "Two Lovers and a Beachcomber by the Real Sea" and "Circus in Three Rings"; and, in addition to the Academy of American Poets and Christopher's prizes, won at least two more Smith poetry prizes. During this time, too, she completed her honors thesis, "The Magic Mirror: A Study of the Double in Two of Doestoevsky's Novels," and earned the bachelor of arts summa cum laude in June 1955. And in the spring of that year, Plath was notified that she had won a Fulbright Fellowship to Newnham College, Cambridge. While at Cambridge, Plath met and admired a number of British and American poets and intel-

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lectuals, including T. S. Eliot, David Daiches, C. P. Snow, F. R. Leavis, Stephen Spender, and Philip Larkin. If her letters home are any indication, she faced the intellectual rigor of Cambridge with confidence and skill. Her tutors, while at times amused and baffled by her ^allAmerican girl" demeanor, found her to be a gifted student; and it is clear that Plath matured significantly during her two years of graduate work. Her association with older women scholars apparently prompted further exploration of her own female identity; this exploration is recorded in letters to her mother, and it provided the material for at least two of the poems Plath included in The Colossus, "Spinster" and "Strumpet Song." Together the poems reject a withdrawn and orderly life of "discipline/ Exact as a snowflake" without love and sexuality, as well as a life of mere sexuality that might be dictated by the lustful self looking "out from black tarn, ditch and cup/ Into my most chaste own eyes." In February 1956, Plath met Ted Hughes, who was becoming known as a promising young British poet, and on June 16 they were "secretly" married in London. After their marriage they spent time in the town of Benidorm, Spain, where they each did some writing and studied languages. Plath began to serve as literary agent for both of them, which she apparently did for as long as they were married. In the fall they moved into a flat near Grantchester; Plath returned for her second year at Newnham (her Fulbright having been renewed); and Hughes took a teaching position at a day school in Cambridge. For Plath the combination of emotional and professional life in marriage seemed ideal. Her letters to her mother during this first year with Hughes are full of hope and joy. She saw him as her ideal male counterpart, "always just that many steps ahead of me intellectually and creatively so that I feel very feminine and admiring." According to Hughes, the year produced, in addition to

SYLVIA PLATE I 537 4

*Wieath for a Bridal" and 4 'Epitaph for Fire and Flower," several poems that Plath later retained for inclusion in her first collection. In all of these poems, the predominant themes lay down fundamental attitudes toward nature and the individual's role in natural drama. Nature is seen as alternately overwhelming, hostile, and indifferent in "Hardcastle Crags" and "Departure"; as bizarre and unruly in "Faun" and "Sow"; as deceptive, even crafty, in "Watercolor of Grantchester Meadows." Individuals are seen as unwilling and often unwitting or naive participants in nature's patterns, as for example in "All the Dead Dears" and "Faun." That Plath's model for nature is taken from her earlier intimacy with the sea is metaphorically clear in "Hardcastle Crags"; and death as the ultimate fact of nature and the controlling feature of human destiny emerges strongly in "All the Dead Dears." For Plath, death combines with urges for survival and rebirth to produce the "gross eating game." "All the Dead Dears" addresses itself to themes of kinship within the human condition, placing the individual within a long continuum of past and future deaths that ultimately assert the poet's own relation to the fourth-century woman whose coffin, on display at a museum, occasioned the poem. The poem also presents a first glimpse of what becomes a major concern in the late poetry, the fatherdaughter relationship. During the first half of 1957, a number of events prepared the way for Plath's return and Hughes's first visit to the United States. Hughes's first volume, The Hawk in the Rain, was published simultaneously in England and America and was subsequently awarded the Poetry Center Award. Plath completed her degree at Cambridge and accepted a position at Smith for the next school year. In June the Hugheses arrived at Wellesley and within days were settled at Cape Cod, where Plath prepared for fall classes and wrote.

She apparently retained only one poem from this period, but it is a fine one. "Mussel Hunter at Rock Harbor" was, according to Hughes, her first exploration in syllables; and, as such, it marks the beginning of a transition to a poetic style that is distinctively Plath's. The poem also represents an imaginative effort by the persona to take on the identities of other sentient beings. In the poem, the mussel hunter meets with a microcosmic universe, the universe of the tide pool, which is wholly foreign to her. In the fourth stanza, the inhabitants of this universe have become available for observation. The mussel hunter is particularly attracted by one of them, the fiddler crab, who wears a "Claw swollen to a shield large/As itself—no fiddlers arm/Grown Gargantuan by trade,/But grown grimly, and grimly/Borne, for use beyond my/Guessing of it." Speculation proves futile; the worlds of the mussel hunter and the sea are "absolutely alien." Yet in a single "strayed" crab rivets the hunter's attention: "There was no telling if he'd/Died recluse or suicide/Or headstrong Columbus crab." Yet this crab signifies possible postures toward nature and establishes, if not kinship, at least analogy, for "this relic saved/Face, to face the bald-faced sun." In this poem, too, the colloquial voice that characterizes the late poetry begins to emerge, although some of the academic qualities of the earlier poems remain. The view of nature remains consistent, characterized by cycles of life and death, hostility and wars of survival, arid a stoic beauty and fundamental mystery. But here it is observed in less grand and panoramic terms. Nature has become less a gross landscape and more a metaphoric microcosm, in this case a microcosm of alienation. Plath continued to write throughout the year, while teaching at Smith, but found academic life in deep conflict with her writing. Not only did she find high-quality teaching (which she certainly did) demanding of time and emotional

538 I AMERICAN energy, but she also realized that the posture of teacher and analyst of literature was inimical to her as yet embryonic method of composition. Nonetheless, the poems from this period included in The Colossus exhibit not only technical development but also a more clear focusing on the thematic material that recurs in the later works. "Full Fathom Five" (as well as "Electra on Azalea Path." which was not included) confronts the Electra theme more directly than anything previous and, along with * 'Lorelei," begins the panoply of poems dedicated to the direct exploration of the faces of death, here seen as a desirable pursuit of peace. The role of the artist is taken up in "Snakecharmer" and "Sculptor"; both poems offer the artist a priestly role, as mediator between society, self, and forces essentially spiritual and irrational. "The Disquieting Muses" declares a new poetic voice to come as imminent, severing it from the patterns of artistic development fostered by a genteel and well-intentioned upbringing, an upbringing informed by a world "never, never found anywhere." Two other poems from this period are important in that they signal the emergence of a socialcritical dimension of the poetry. In "Night Shift," Plath first uses the machine as a metaphor for modern life, a machine that "stunned the marrow" and was accepted as matter-offactly as the beating of a heart. Modern man is reduced to "Tending, without stop, the blunt/Indefatigable fact." In "The Thin People," Plath first turns to the Holocaust as a central event of the modern world. The poem is restrained, still dominated by an objective and public persona; but the significance of this monumental victimization, despite the strategies employed to repress it ("It was only in a movie, it was only/In a war making evil headlines when we/Were small"), is asserted as blighting all life force, the victims' "withering kingship. . . . Making the world go thin as a wasp's nest." Apparently Plath experienced a rather fallow

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period after her decision to leave teaching so that she could write less hindered by intellectual obligations. Yet she did continue to explore death themes and Oedipal themes in such poems as "Man in Black," "Two Views of a Cadaver Room," "Suicide off Egg Rock," and "Point Shirley" (a poem that Hughes says was a deliberate exercise in Robert Lowell's early style). She worked part-time at Massachusetts General Hospital writing case histories, which in part may explain the metaphors of physical injury, violation, and modern medicine that take on greater significance in the later works. She also attended Robert Lowell's poetry seminar at Boston University, and there met Anne Sexton and George Starbuck. Lowell's influence was decisive; and later in an interview with Peter Orr, she cited both Lowell's and Sexton's work: Robert Lowell's poems about his experience in a mental hospital . . . interested me very much. These peculiar, private and taboo subjects, I feel, have been explored in recent American poetry. I think particularly the poetess Anne Sexton who writes about her experiences as a mother . . . who has had a nervous breakdown, is an extremely emotional and feeling young woman and her poems are wonderfully craftsman-like poems and yet they have a kind of emotional and psychological depth which I think is perhaps quite new, quite exciting. In summer 1959, Plath and Hughes toured the Western United States; none of the poems occasioned by the trip were included in The Colossus, but some were published posthumously in Crossing the Water, a collection described by the publishers as transitional poems. Plath became pregnant, a condition Hughes says (and the later poetry confirms) she regarded "in a deeply symbolic way." When they returned from the trip, they were invited as writers-in-residence to Yaddo, in Saratoga Springs, where they lived and worked for approximately two months. It was here that Plath completed the poems col-

SYLVIA PLATH I 539 lected in The Colossus, taking decisive steps toward the poetic voice and exploratory method of the poems in Ariel and Winter Trees. At the time, she was reading both Paul Radin's collection of African folktales and Theodore Roethke's poems. Hughes reports that at this time she deliberately began to improvise. As she worked at Yaddo, a number of simultaneous changes occurred. In a series of poems jointly titled "Pbem for a Birthday" (published in its entirety only in the British edition of The Colossus), she draws directly on her experience of mental illness for the first time. In the total sequence, the reader is drawn into the disintegration and reintegration of a personality (the same process recorded in The Bell Jar), and here the process takes on both archetypal and social dimensions. In the final poem of the series, "The Stones," the persona finds herself emerging (purged and purified by fire in "Witch Buming") from what can only be called the dark night of the soul. Yet she emerges not to ecstatic life affirmation, but into the mechanistic institutional setting of a modern hospital, "the city of spare parts." Ironies abound as her "pebble" self is worked upon: she lies on "a great anvil"; is worked over by "pincers," "delicate hammers"; her eyes opened as the "jewel-master drives his chisel"; "Volt upon volt" is applied; and "catgut stitches [her] fissures." This is the city where they can doctor * 'heads or any limb,'' even provide new hearts. Despite all of this, reintegration occurs, "the vase" is reconstructed and again "houses the elusive rose." "Love is the bone and sinew of [her] curse," the fact that will not permit her to remain a "still pebble." Certainly the * 'elusive rose " is a reference to her own life force, as well as to the child she was carrying at the time the poem was written. But the triumph is a qualified one: "My mendings itch. There is nothing to do ./I shall be good as new." Society and institutions play their roles here, but certainly they are seen as mechanistic and effective virtually despite themselves. Re-

generation comes through identification with love, with the life force. In addition to tapping the most painful and personal of experience, the poems from Yaddo signal a new strategy and posture toward nature. "The Stones" makes use of the rose in an emblematic way, while "Mushrooms" and "Blue Moles" move the persona toward a complete identification with the subjects. This poetic stance is the equivalent of Keats's "negative capability" and clearly shows the influence of Theodore Roethke. This is the imaginative projection of self that Marjorie Perloff, working with Northrop Frye 's taxonomy, sees as animism and that, coupled with angst, places Plath within the oracular tradition of William Cowper, Christopher Smart, and William Blake. Perloff also suggests that this ^identification with nature characterizes the best of the later poems and contrasts them to others centered primarily on human consciousness. Yet it seems clear that the basic projection of self into other holds as well for poems such as "Mystic," "Insomniac," "Three Women," and "Getting There"; and to suggest that these poems are just Plath herself speaking directly is to violate her careful construction of persona, even when Plath speaks, as she always does in the Ariel poems, in the first person. This view also deemphasizes the other common technique of using objects of nature in an emblematic way. Plath's approach often has been misread as a drive to turn everything into an aspect of herself, to create a universe that is embraced wholly by her own sensibility, rather than as a search to understand other in order to define self. Actually Plath's technique is linked to a change in the way she experienced herself as a poet. Hughes reports that her method of composition changed dramatically between the completion of the Colossus poems and the writing of those in Ariel. Throughout her apprenticeship (she regarded everything prior to "The Stones" as juvenilia) she composed laboriously, working

540 I AMERICAN always with a thesaurus, * 'as if she were working out a mathematical problem." However, by the time she wrote "Tulips" (1961), the thesaurus was discarded and she wrote "at top speed, as one might write an urgent letter." She spoke interestingly about the experience of composition itself in the Orr interview: I don't think I could live without it. It's like water or bread, or something absolutely essential to me. I find myself absolutely fulfilled when I've written a poem, when I'm writing one. Having written one, then you fall away very rapidly from having been a poet to becoming a sort of poet at rest, which isn't the same thing at all . . . the actual experience of writing a poem is a magnificent one. The act of composition itself, then, becomes a kind of epiphany, similar to what Abraham Maslow has called a "peak" experience. For Plath, the writing of poems became a means of empathetically experiencing alternate identities and modes of consciousness, a means of vicarious experience. There is a quality of experience here that is simply not embraced by the notion of the creation of a persona, one that seems to resemble more what "method" actors must experience, and one that at least in part accounts for the peculiar intensity of her late work. Finally, the last of the poems in The Colossus represent a shift to a poetic voice that embraces, almost entirely, the colloquial. In diction, rhythm, and sound, Plath began to move to the patterns of oral discourse, of natural, even casual, speech. Plath herself emphasized the importance of this change, noting in 1962 that she had not been so attentive to the sound of the poems she wrote until after The Colossus: These ones [poems] that I have just read, the ones that are very recent, I've got to say them, I speak them to myself, and I think this in my own writing development is quite a new thing with

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me, and whatever lucidity they may have comes from the fact that I say them to myself, I say them aloud. This move into the colloquial, as Alicia Ostriker has observed, places her squarely in the American tradition of Walt Whitman and Henry David Thoreau. And with the inclusion of private and taboo materials, it has also placed her, perhaps mistakenly, in the so-called "confessional school." In December 1959, Plath and Hughes returned to England and settled in a flat in London, awaiting the birth of their first child. Each of them was receiving small but regular payment for poems published in periodicals. (That winter Lupercal, Hughes's second book of poems, was published; he later received the Somerset Maugham Award for Hawk in the Rain.) In February 1960 Plath signed a contract with William Heine man n, Ltd., for the publication of The Colossus. Apparently, she also was at work on The Bell Jar. On April 1, 1960, Plath gave birth at home, with the help of a midwife, to their first child, Frieda. It was not long until a comfortable routine permitted Plath to continue with her writing. Her letters home at this time indicate that she and Hughes were regularly involved in the social life of London's literary circle and that she had taken a heightened interest in the political issues of the time, an interest markedly absent from her earlier correspondence. Early in 1961 Plath had a miscarriage, which was shortly followed by an appendectomy. Her hospitalization was the occasion that brought forth two of her best-known and most controversial poems, "Tulips" and "to Plaster." While still in the hospital, Plath received a first-reading contract from Alfred A. Knopf in New York, a clear recognition of her rising reputation; in May, the formal agreement was made for the American publication of The Colossus. At about the same time, clearly recovered from her health

SYLVIA PLATH I 541 crises, Plath described herself to her mother as "working fiendishly." In early summer Plath discovered that she was pregnant again; she and Hughes looked for and purchased a house in Devon. That summer, too, Plath was awarded first prize in the Cheltenham Festival Poetry Contest. In November she received a Eugene F. Saxton Fellowship to work on her novel, although it appears from a letter to her mother that The Bell Jar probably was already completed. After moving to Devon, Hughes and Plath resumed their habit of splitting the day between writing and work on the house and in the garden, each caring for Frieda while the other wrote. On January 17, 1962, their second child, Nicholas, was born, and for a period of time Plath's writing became a matter of secondary importance. In letters home she had begun to report a renewed interest in religion (reflected, too, in some of the late poems: "Mary's Song"; "Mystic"; "Lyonnesse"), and in March, despite some reservations about rural Anglicanism, the Hugheses had both of their children baptized. In June the adjustment of the new baby seemed well accomplished, and, according to Lois Ames, Plath told a friend that she was "writing again. Really writing." Undoubtedly these are the poems that eventually were published in Ariel and Winter Trees, described by Hughes as roughly contemporaneous. In addition, "Three Women" already had been accepted for broadcast early that summer by the British Broadcasting Company. By the end of July, however, it became evident that the marriage was in serious difficulty. Hughes had been seeing another woman; and at the end of August, Plath wrote her mother that they were seeking a legal separation. Hughes moved to London immediately; Plath remained in Devon until December, when she, too, moved to London with the children. The letters to her mother at this time, although heavily edited, do indicate a high level of emotional stress related to the breakup of the mar-

riage; yet they also indicate a strong determination to put her life back together as an independent person. Despite difficulties of physical health and persistent problems in obtaining adequate help with the care of the children, Plath continued to work. In London Magazine she said of this work: These new poems of mine have one thing in common. They were all written at about four in the morning—that still blue, almost eternal hour before cockcrow, before the baby's cry, before the glassy music of the milkman settling his bottles. Of course they do have more in common, yet it is important to understand that the late poetry was written under extreme personal stress. Probably the best-researched work on this to date is Judith Knoll's Chapters in a Mythology: The Poetry of Sylvia Plath. Kroll, too, emphasizes that the poem as experience itself is a chief characteristic of this late work. More importantly, however, she established Robert Graves and Sir James Frazier as primary sources for Plath. Following out a statement made by Hughes that the poems should be viewed mythically, Kroll delineates a system of myth that serves as the ground of meaning in Plath's late work. She argues that to understand these poems, one must understand that within Plath's system there coexists a paradox of true and false selves. The true self, often associated with childhood, is loyal to Graves's White Goddess (moon goddess), who is Plath's mythic muse. The true self is also genuinely powerful and free. The false self, on the other hand, is helpless and trapped, but it coexists with the true self to form the persona of the poems. The false self, however, has the power to be reborn as the true self by means of suicide, reunion by proxy, and exorcism by ritual killing. Life is promised through "transcendence, purgation, and purification," as in "Stings" and "Fever 103°." For Plath, then,

542 I AMERICAN "Dionysian or muse-inspired poetry and not Apollonian poetry is true poetry." Kroll gives an explication from this point of view of many of the most puzzling and previously obscure images of these poems. The moon muse is not a smiling one, but is demanding of perfection unto death. The heroine-persona of the poems resolves her status as a life force with her loyalty to the moon muse by becoming a "dying and reviving goddess" who mourns or celebrates "the death of her god" (husband, father), which is necessary to her resurrection, to the rebirth of the true self. All of this, Kroll argues, is summarized in "Daddy" and * 'Lady Lazarus.'' And * 'Ariel'' stands as the poem of mystic transcendence. Plath's real search, then, is not for death but, rather, first for the death of the false self, and finally for a state of transcendent selflessness. Kroll's approach to Plath's work is remaikably compatible with that of Marjorie Perloff: both emphasize the qualities of Plath's poetry that stem from a view of the artist as a kind of priest or oracle. A mythic sensibility, moreover, is quite often accompanied by an animistic view of nature. Yet each, for different reasons, underestimates the importance of a social vision that is also present in the late poems. Kroll seeks to rescue Plath from the critical view that constructs the poems as case history; Perloff seeks to rescue the work from those who would reduce it to political ideology. Perloff, in her discussion of "Tulips," insists on divorcing that poem from anything that resembles an intention to critique agreed-upon American values. In fact, she states that she fails to see such a critique "anywhere in her ... poems." She cites a statement of Plath's in support of her contention: For me, the real issues of our time are the issues of everytime—the hurt and wonder of loving; making in all its forms, children, loaves of

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bread, paintings, building; and the conservation of life of all people in all places. . . . Surely the great use of poetry is its pleasure—not its influence as religious or political propaganda. Yet the phrase omitted from the quotation is significant indeed: "the jeopardizing of which no abstract double-talk of 'peace' or 'implacable foes' can excuse." As Margaret D. Uroff has noted, Plath was quite "aware that making in all its forms was an imperilled issue in our time." The mistake in emphasis seems to be a result of Pferloff 's own formalist stance, which tends to regard any taint of social criticism as somehow disqualifying a poem as art. And Perloff certainly means to defend Plath as artist, in her discussion of the poems and of The Bell Jar. Yet this is to misunderstand the social and cultural roots of art, to turn such roots into ideology or to construe comment that has to do with negatively evaluated cultural assumptions as crass didacticism. No poet—certainly not Plath—stands pristine and removed from the culture that informs and is embodied in the very language each seeks to transform. Most good poets are in fact subversive of those assumptions, and it was clearly Plath's intention to be so, to offer her own alternative construction of reality both through the poems that Kroll shows us are directly concerned in the presentation of a mythology, and in the others that explore the human identity as it is formed in and related to nature and civilization. However Plath might have wished it, and Kroll's work suggests that at least in part she did, she could not be a poet and at the same time be that pure selfless baby stepping from the "black car of Lethe" at the end of "Getting There." Isn't that, in the end, why words fail her? Kroll's work, on the other hand, does not so much deny as fail to emphasize the social vision, primarily because her aim is to get at a grounded explication of some of those most difficult and

SYLVIA PLATH I 543 apparently obscure late poems. Yet the construction of a mythology has a purpose that goes far beyond the presentation of a fantasy. It is a fiction in the sense of a making, but its urge is to create an explanation and to connect the human being in some meaningful way to nature and society, which seem so overwhelming. It is informed by the desire that Henry Adams recognized when he stated, "Chaos is the law of nature, order is the dream of man." Adams is more relevant here than it might at first seem, for he had made it the task of his life to find the truth through science, a search that he regarded as a failure. And it is science, the most encompassing contemporary myth of Western civilization, that Plath rejects so totally in constructing her own myth. In an interview with Peter Orr four months before her suicide, Plath talked of her poetic aims. Recall that in that interview she began by asserting that Robert Lowell's Life Studies and Anne Sexton's poems were important to her because Lowell and Sexton had moved into an exploration of very private and taboo subjects, and had managed to achieve a new kind of emotional and psychological depth. The exploration of the taboo is in its very nature a critique of the common understandings of reality, and Plath's own poetry seeks the same end. She goes on to say: I think my poems immediately come out of the sensuous and emotional experiences I have, but I must say I cannot sympathize with these cries from the heart that are informed by nothing except a needle or a knife, or whatever it is. I believe that one should be able to control and manipulate experiences, even the most terrifying, like madness, being tortured, this sort of experience . . . with an informed and intelligent mind. I think that personal experience is very important, but certainly it shouldn't be a kind of shut-box and mirror-looking, narcissistic experi-

ence. I believe it should be relevant, and relevant to the larger things, the bigger things such as Hiroshima and Dachau and so on. Addressed directly on the question of her poems that use thematic material derived from the Holocaust, she responds: My background is, may I say, German and Austrian . . . and so my concern with concentration c a m p s . . . is uniquely intense. And then again, I'm rather a political person as well, so I suppose that's what part of it comes from . . . and I think that as I age I am becoming more and more historical. Indeed, Plath takes for herself a considerable task: to create poems in which the microcosm and the macrocosm become one. Perhaps that is why she regarded poetry as a "tyrannical discipline." "You've got to go so far, so fast, in such a small space that you've just got to turn away all the peripherals," she said. In the poems written between 1960 and her death, Plath is still shooting off in all directions. But the emphasis and the landscape in which these poems are set have changed dramatically. As we have seen, nature in its broad and panoramic aspect has dropped away; it remains in the late poems in an animistic or emblematic way. In large, Plath seems to have resolved her view of nature as the eating game. But in microcosm there is the affirmation that one finds in the earlier "Black Rook in Rainy Weather." . . . I only know that a rook Ordering its black feathers can so shine As to seize my senses, haul My eyelids up, and grant A brief respite from fear Of total neutrality. . . . The wait's begun again, The long wait for the angel, For that rare, random descent.

544 I AMERICAN Carried over into poems like "Tulips," "Poppies in July,'' and ' 'Poppies in October,'' nature in microcosm becomes a life force as well as a death force, the attitude of the personae alternating situationally. Nature now appears more strongly embodied in the biological ground of sexual identity and procieative activity, as in "Three Women" and the bee poems. Both in the poems mythically grounded and in others, Plath's clear concern is an exploration of female identity, no longer cast so strictly in the terms of conflicting social role dominant in The Bell Jar (although there is some remnant of this in "The Applicant" and "Three Women"), but now embracing the total reality of female biological existence. From the mythic point of view delineated by Kroll, this exploration has implications that increasingly place women in absolute opposition, if not to individual men then to the male principle that is determined by a different biology and a different relation to both nature and society. Women are seen as the true creators of life. Yet they are forever subject to the psychological tragedy inherent in the biological cycle; they are continuously subject to loss: of blood and potential life in menstruation and spontaneous abortion; of self-realization through infertility; of vitality by virtue of the demands of pregnancy and childbirth. Should the biological cycle complete itself, they do have the rewards of creation, yet these are threatened by society by virtue of the severence of the mother-child relation that civilization demands ("Three Women," "Childless Woman," "Brasilia"). Over this seeming squandering of life force presides the moon muse and it is, therefore, no accident that Plath refers to poetry as "the blood jet," and an earlier poem, "Stillborn," is about poems that lack life despite their apparent technical quality. As in the more generalized nature poems, the ground for affirmation is narrow and threatened always by the forces of nature and civilization, which are not seen as life enhancing. Yet affir-

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mation is there, and the poems of motherhood often embody the "rare random descent" of "Black Rook." In "Nick and the Candlestick": The blood blooms clean In you,ruby. . . . Love, love, I have hung our cave with roses. . . .

You are the one Solid the spaces lean on, envious. You are the baby in the barn. In "Child:" Your clear eye is the one absolutely beautiful thing. I want to fill it with colors and ducks, The zoo of the new Whose names you meditate— In "The Night Dances:" Surely they travel The world forever, I shall not entirely Sit emptied of beauties, the gift Of your small breath, the drenched grass Smell of your sleeps, lilies, lilies. Others of the poems on children lead directly to the examination of the forces that Plath sees as threatening this fundamental relation. In "Nick and the Candlestick" the persona asks, "And how will your night dances lose themselves. In mathematics?" And in "Magi" the significance of "mathematics" is made clear: The abstracts hover like dull angels: Nothing so vulgar as a nose or an eye Bossing the ethereal blanks of their face-ovals. Their whiteness bears no relation to laundry, Snow, chalk or suchlike. They're The real thing, all right: the Good, the True— . . .

SYLVIA PLATH I 545 Loveless as the multiplication table. . . . They want the crib of some lampheaded Plato. . . . What girl ever flourished in such company? Mathematics and abstractions are the enemy, and they are invariably associated with civilization and the male principle. The secretary (second voice) in *'Three Women" makes the connections when she realizes that she has just lost a baby: I watched the men walk around me in the office. They were so flat! There was something about them like cardboard, and now I had caught it, That flat, flat flatness from which ideas, destructions, Bulldozers, guillotines, white chambers of shrieks proceed, Endlessly proceed—and the cold angels, the abstractions. Later in the poem she returns to make larger connections; she has tried, she says, to be natural and not to think too hard, not to see other 4 'faces." But the faces were still there: . . . The faces of nations, Governments, parliaments, societies, The faceless faces of important men. It is these men I mind: They are so jealous of anything that is not flat! They are jealous gods That would have the whole world flat because they are. I see the Father conversing with the Son. Such flatness cannot but be holy. "Let us make a heaven," they say. "Let us flatten and launder the grossness from these souls." Flatness, mathematics, abstraction, ideas, mechanism, perfection, "the cold light of the mind," and the male principle become conjoined in Plath's work (such as "Brasilia") and appear

simultaneously in a poem set in the institution of "health" that "civilization" has created. In "The Surgeon at 2 A.M." we see the principles perfectly conjoined to produce a persona who, although in awe of the organic garden in which he works, sees his patients as things, "statues," which he perfects with "pink plastic" limbs. The surgeon walks through the ward at the end of the poem: I am the sun, in my white coat, Grey faces, shuttered by drugs, follow me like flowers. Nathaniel Hawthorne would certainly have appreciated the deep sense of violation that Plath places at the heart of modern science. But Plath does not stop here. She comes to condemn even self-consciousness itself ("Brasilia"), and asks that her child be left "mirror safe, unredeemed." For it is only by virtue of self-consciousness (remember her early perception of her otherness precipitated by the birth of her brother) that it becomes possible to speak of truth as divorced from point of view, as being beyond situation, context, or time. The subject-object dichotomy, which is the essence of Western science, is also seen as the principle that attacks the proper balance of the male and female principles. "The Applicant" joins mechanistic images directly to the ironic vision of the female as A living doll everywhere you look. It can sew, it can cook, It can talk, talk, talk. It works, there is nothing wrong with it. ... Will you marry it, marry it, marry it? In "Daddy" and "Lady Lazarus" the principle is seen to underlie the fascism and monumental victimization of modern war, for it is possible to perpetrate mass annihilation on the scale of Hiroshima only by regarding people as objects. Viewed in this light, our fiction or myth of the objective and of science is rationality to the point of madness. Plath recognizes that the coopera-

546 I AMERICAN tion of the victim is part of the pattern ("every woman loves a fascist"), but these poems promise that there is another dynamic at work as well: victims will remain victims for only so long and, then, as in both "Daddy" and "Purdah," they will turn to revenge. The male figures in these poems are not persons, autobiographical or otherwise. They are types, and the female persona has turned to the very viciousness (of abstraction) decried in order to find freedom, to find what Kroll has called the true self. Total transformation of being, death and rebirth, seems to be the only answer, since "every little word [is] hooked into every little word, and act to act" ("Three Women"). And death and transfiguration are the central themes of at least a dozen of Plath's poems, and recurrent lesser themes or motifs in many more. This is one of the features of Plath's poetry that is so troubling to readers. Yet as Charles Newman has pointed out, other poets have insisted that "the imaginative realization of dying is the determining, climactic experience of living." In this, her kinship with New England is clear, for such a view informed the work of Anne Bradstreet, Edward Taylor, and Emily Dickinson as well. But, we respond, this is a twentieth-century woman. In saying that, we reveal our problem. The poetry somehow seems so atavistic, especially in its mythic preoccupation with death. Death and dying are taboo in our society; they are unAmerican activities. And suicide is worst of all, for it, by choice, denies the future, and we are a future-oriented people if we are anything. Even when the imaginative face of death that Plath presents can only be seen as a triumphant achievement of transcendent wholeness, as in 4 'Ariel,'' we feel the need to see the poet as mentally ill. Here Plath confronts our greatest taboo, and her view is coupled with a view of modern medicine and science (surely doctors are the priests of America) that denies its ability to transcend death and attacks our fundamental myths.

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It is probably the power of these myths that assured that poets would emerge who would face our denial. As D. H. Lawrence, James Joyce, and Henry Miller spoke to the repressed sexuality of their time, Plath, Sexton, and Berryman speak to the repressed voice of death in ours. But to admit that her poetic voice is often more sane than mad is to be forced to admit that we may need to face the irrational in ourselves. This is not to say that we should follow Plath's example and seek suicide. Surely, as Holbrook has argued, Plath is at her best when she manages to see that life in the here and now offers a kind of transcendence. And she has left us her work, a creative and communicative achievement that affirms human community and stands witness to her own creative life. Plath has also left us a poetry that specifically explores female identity in a thoroughly courageous way. This particular aspect of her work has led to interpretation that makes use of her search in specifically political ways. Yet it has also led to a misevaluation of her work as dismissable because it comes from a hysterical woman. Plath herself was not an ideologue, but the evaluation of her work does challenge canons of literary evaluation that have tended to regard the female experience and the forms of its embodiment in art as inferior versions of the male. Since the late 1960's women artists and critics have moved toward a critique of those canons and have begun a reevaluation not only of the art that explores women's experience but also of the art that women have produced, much of which has suffered in evaluation because the male experience has been taken as the "universal" in our culture. The work of Adrienne Rich, in particular, is of great significance here, since Rich is steadily creating a body of poetry, as well as a body of criticism, directly aimed at forging an art that comprehends and includes women's experience

SYLVIA PLATH I 547 in all of its complexities. Moreover, this effort will, in the long run, have significant effect on what we have taken to be "objective" standards of criticism. Art itself is not objective; neither is criticism. Both are in culture, and therefore require us to move with considerable caution when we claim some transcendent set of evaluative standards, for more often than we would like to admit, those standards are culturally solipsistic. Sylvia Plath did, indeed, find herself in the middle of a paradox, for as a poet she had to work, and even loved to work, in abstractions; yet it was abstraction she opposed. She was, however, capable of making words work against the tendency of language to reduce and distort experience by abstraction. Some of the poems are clearly poems of derangement. Yet we need not suggest that derangement is justified or desirable in a poet or in a society in order to insist that it may well be produced in part by the conditions of alienation and brutality of the modern world that, if not different from the past in kind, surely at times seem different in degree. How does one actually come to grips with the human meaning of Hiroshima and Dachau? Plath's answer was to project the poetic persona empathetically into the victim's role and to take us with her. With her, we also see the dynamic that eventually transforms the victim into the persecutor. "The Thin People" indeed continue to haunt our own lives, but Plath's search for identity in poetry, which was experience for her, testifies to an honesty and courage that is called for in the search for meaning in our time. Sylvia Plath, having left out milk and bread for her children, who were still asleep, committed suicide on February 11, 1963. Lois Ames reports that she had, at the time, sought medical help both for her recurrent sinus infection and for a depression that threatened to produce again the descent of the bell jar "with its stifling distortions." The very late poetry is dominated by a

feeling of meaninglessness, to be sure. Yet what is thought to be her last poem is a testimony to the power of "Words": Axes After whose stroke the wood rings, And the echoes! Echoes travelling Off from the center like horses. The sap Wells like tears, like the Water striving To re-establish its mirror Over the rock

That drops and turns, A white skull, Eaten by weedy greens. Years later I Encounter them on the road— Words dry and riderless, The indefatigable hoof-taps. While From the bottom of the pool, fixed stars Govern a life. Plath herself succumbed to what she called the "illusion of a Greek necessity" ("Edge"). Words, the most sustaining feature of Plath's life, had failed her. Yet there is that "I" encountering the "indefatigable hoof-taps" that continue to break through the "mirror," the narcissism that she so clearly escapes in the best of her work. Certainly, although encounter with her work is nearly always painful, it accomplishes what all good poetry does: it subverts our commonsensical stabilities, confronts our social and cultural complacencies, reminds us that we are irrational beings and that rationality is both hardwon and humanly costly, whatever its gains. Sylvia Plath calls us back to the universal in the particular, and reorders and renames that we may see.

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Selected Bibliography WORKS OF SYLVIA PLATE The Colossus. London: William Heineman, Ltd., 1960; New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1962; London: Faber and Faber, 1967. The Bell Jar. London: Faber and Faber, 1963; New York: Harper and Row, 1971. "Ocean 1212-W." Listener, 70:312-13 (August 29, 1963). Ariel. London: Faber and Faber, 1965; New York:

Harper and Row, 1966. Three Women: A Monologue for Three Voices. Lpn-

don: Turret Press, 1968. Crossing the Water. London: Faber and Faber, 1971; New York: Harper and Row, 1971. Crystal Gazer and Other Poems. London: Rainbow

Press, 1971. Lyonnesse: Poems by Sylvia Plath. London: Rainbow Press, 1971.

Pursuit. London: Rainbow Press, 1973. Letters Home: Correspondence 1950-1963, edited by Aurelia Schober Plath. New York: Harper and Row, 1975.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Hornberger, Eric. A Chronological Checklist of the Periodical Publications of Sylvia Plath. Exeter: University of Exeter, 1970. Northouse, Cameron and Thomas P. Walsh. Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton: A Reference Guide. Boston: G. K. Hall and Co., 1974.

BIOGRAPHY AND CRITICISM Aird, Eileen M. Sylvia Plath: Her Life and Work. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1973. Alvarez, A. The Savage God: A Study of Suicide. New York: Random House, 1971. Ashford, Deborah. "Sylvia Plath's Poetry: A Complex of Irreconcilable Antagonisms," Concerning Poetry, 7:62-69 (Spring 1974).

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Butscher, Edward. Sylvia Plath: Method and Madness. New York: Seabury Press, 1976. Cox, C. B. and A. R. Jones, "After the Tranquilized Fifties: Notes on Sylvia Plath and James Baldwin," Critical Quarterly, 6:107-22 (Summer 1964). Hardy, Barbara. "The Poetry of Sylvia Plath: Enlargement and Derangement," in The Survival of Poetry: A Contemporary Survey, edited by Martha Dodsworth. London: Faber and Faber, 1970. Pp. 164-87. Holbrook, David. Sylvia Plath: Poetry and Existence. London: Athlone Press, 1976. Hoyle, James F. "Sylvia Plath: A Poetry of Suicidal Mania," Literature and Psychology, 18:187-203 (1968). Hughes, Ted. "Sylvia Plath's Crossing the Water: Some Reflections," Critical Quarterly, 13: 165-72 (Summer 1971). Jones, A. R. "Necessity and Freedom: The Poetry of Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton," Critical Quarterly, 7:11-30 (1965). Kroll, Judith. Chapters in a Mythology: The Poetry of Sylvia Plath. New York: Harper and Row, 1976. Melander, Ingrid. The Poetry of Sylvia Plath: A Study of Themes. Stockholm: Almqvist and Wiksell, 1972. Newman, Charles, ed. The Art of Sylvia Plath: A Symposium. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1970. Gates, Joyce Carol. "The Death Throes of Romanticism: The Poetry of Sylvia Plath," in New Heaven, New Earth: The Visionary Experience in Literature. New York: The Vanguard Press. Pp. 113-40. Ostriker, Alicia. " Tact' as Style: The Americanization of Sylvia," Language and Style, 1:201-12 (Summer 1968). Perloff, Marjorie, "Angst and Animism in the Poetry of Sylvia Plath,'' Journal of Modern Literature, 1, no. 1:57-74(1970). " *A Ritual for Being Born Twice/: Sylvia

Plath's The Bell Jar,'1 Contemporary Literature, 13:507-22 (Autumn 1973).

Phillips, Robert. The Confessional Poets. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1973. . "The Dark Funnel: A Reading of Sylvia

Plath," Modern Poetry Studies, 3 (1972), pp. 49-74. Rosen thai, M. L. The New Poets: American and Brit-

SYLVIA PLATH I 549 ish Poetry Since World War Two. New York: Oxford University Press, 1967. Steiner, Nancy. A Closer Look at Ariel. New York: Harper's Magazine Press, 1973. "Sylvia Plath's 'Tulips': A Festival." Paunch, 42-43 (December 1975), pp. 65-122. Uroff, Margaret D. "Sylvia Plath on Motherhood," Midwest Quarterly, 15:70-90 (October 1973).

. "Sylvia Plath's Women," Concerning Poetry, 7:45-56 (Spring 1974). INTERVIEWS

In Peter Orr, The Poet Speaks. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966. -LONNA M.

MALMSHEIMER

Adrienne Rich 1929-

A

DRIENNE RICH'S poetry provides a chronicle of the evolving consciousness of the modern woman. Written in a period of rapid and dramatic social change, her work explores the experience of women who reject patriarchal definitions of femininity by separating themselves from the political and social reality that trivializes and subordinates females. As Rich observes in her New York Review of Books essay "The Anti-Feminist Woman," published on November 3, 1972, a patriarchal society is one in 4 'which males are dominant and determine what part females shall and shall not play, and in which capabilities assigned to women are relegated generally to the mystic and aesthetic and excluded from the practical and political realms." As a feminist poet Rich insists on the importance of the "Imaginative identification with all women (and with the ghostly woman in all men)" and commits herself to the re-creation of a female community that is dedicated to a nurturing ethos and a reverence for life. In a statement written with Audre Lorde and Alice Walker, which Rich read at the ceremony when she was presented the National Book Award for Diving into the Wreck (April 18, 1974), she dedicated the occasion to the community of women that transcends race and class: "the poet, the housewife, the lesbian, the mathematician, the mother, the dishwasher, the preg-

nant teenager, the teacher, the grandmother, the prostitute, the philosopher, the waitress. . . . " This community of women, Rich hopes, will not only resist the damaging and crippling effects of patriarchy but will also create a culture in which women have equal economic, social, and political rights with men. In a concluding prophetic stanza of Snapshots of a Daughter-in-law, her first volume of poems about herself as a twentieth-century woman, Rich envisions a heroine who will emerge from the collective feminist struggle: Well, she's long about her coming, who must be more merciless to herself than history. Her mind full to the wind, I see her plunge breasted and glancing through the currents, taking the light upon her at least as beautiful as any boy or helicopter, poised, still coming, her fine blades making the air wince but her cargo no promise then: delivered palpable ours Rich's heroine celebrates the ancient chthonic mysteries of blood and birth, but no longer will

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ADRIENNE RICH I 551 she be defined solely by her reproductive functions; her understanding and experience of life will give her vision as effective and as commanding as history has known. Here is a generative vision that transcends the imperatives of biology; the future heroine will be in command of her body, her erotic and creative energies, and she will celebrate life, not death. No longer will she be an ornamental servant but autonomous, self-directing, and free from the patriarchal edict that anatomy is destiny. This new woman will not spring full-grown from the head of Zeus, or from Adam's side; she must pass through the dangers of this life: she must survive and transcend a culture that can wound or kill her. Her strength and commanding power will depend on her capacity successfully to pass through or turn away from patriarchal domination. Rich's poetry weaves a cultural and emotional tapestry that is bold, sometimes uneven, but always innovative and profoundly original and powerful. Certain strands persist throughout—a commitment to lucidity, authentic communication, community and social change; other threads —revolutionary anger, political activism—are more obvious in her later volumes, such as Leaflets (1969) and The Will to Change (1971), than in the early volumes, A Change of World (1951), The Diamond Cutters (1955), and Snapshots of a Daughter-in-law (1963). The increasing political urgency of Rich's recent volumes has disturbed some critics and readers because they fear that activism destroys art. However, Rich's poetry has been galvanized by her commitment to re-visioning our lives. Poetry, for her, has become more than an aesthetic rendering of experience; it is a way of changing the world. Her work has immense power because it crystallizes the perceptions of modern American women and, by naming their experience, gives shape to their lives. Rich is a major American poet because the breadth of her vision and the range of her experience are compellingly

expressed in carefully crafted language and original forms. The centrality of female experience and the collective struggle of women have become increasingly important in Rich's poetry. From Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law to The Dream of a Common Language, her poetry has evolved from the perceptions of a woman dependent on men for social and sexual identity, as well as economic support, to the discoveries and difficulties of a woman who has taken hold of her own life. The language and form of her poems have changed from the traditional rhymed stanzas of the reflective, meditative earlier verse of A Change of World and The Diamond Cutters to intense, lyrical, searching lines that are punctuated by silences as weighted as her words. In the later poems the forms are stretched, altered to convey the intensity of her struggle to understand her own life. The language of the later poems is less cautiously precise than that of the early work, as her powerful words name our deepest emotions and her commanding images ring with the intensity of feeling that results from describing the discovered rather than the known. In these poems even familiar objects and events are seen with new vision: these rusted screws, this empty vial useless, this box of watercolor paints dried to insolubility— but this— this pack of cards with no card missing still playable and three good fuses and this toy: a little truck scarred red, yet all its wheels still turn The humble tenacity of things waiting for people, waiting for months, for years ("From an Old House in America," 1974)

552 / AMERICAN Much of the time Rich's language blazes a trail, sears the darkness of repressed experience and possibilities denied: The fugue sutures

Blood in my eyes

The careful

ripped-open The hands that touch me Shall it be said I am not alone ("Not Somewhere Else, but Here," 1974) Adrienne Rich was born in Baltimore, Maryland, on May 16, 1929. As a child she was encouraged to write poetry by her father, Dr. Arnold Rich. Under his tutelage she read mostly Victorian writers: 'Tennyson, Keats, Arnold, Blake, Rossetti, Swinburne, Carlyle, and Pater." In 1951 she graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Radcliffe College and published/I Change of World, which was chosen by W. H. Auden for the Yale Younger Poets series. In his foreword to this volume, Auden wrote: Miss Rich, who is, I understand, twenty-one years old, displays a modesty not so common at that age, which disclaims any extraordinary vision, and love for her medium, a determination to ensure that whatever she writes shall, at least, at last, not be shoddily made. He goes on to praise her "talent for versification," her "ear and an intuitive grasp of much subtler and more difficult matters like proportion, consistency of diction and tone, and the matching these with the subject at hand." He is pleased by her modesty: "The poems . . . are neatly and modestly dressed, speak quietly but do not mumble, respect their elders but are not cowed by them, and do not tell fibs." Thus, her first poems are, according to Auden, noteworthy for their competent craftsmanship, elegant order, exquisite proportion, and good manners. Rich herself observed, years later, that being praised for meeting traditional standards

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gave her the courage to be innovative and to break the rules in her mature work. However, as Albert Gelpi points out in his essay on Rich, her first poems do contain the seeds of her later work: the relationship between men and women, the difficulty of and necessity for communication. Instead of the retiring modesty praised by Auden, Gelpi understands that Rich "sees shelter as self-preservation," and wonders if "the artifice no matter how skillfully wrought, may serve as a partial evasion of ... conflicts. " Perhaps her artifice is not an evasion but, rather, a quiet, persistent building of her own vision while mastering her craft. In 1952-53, Rich traveled in Europe and England on a Guggenheim fellowship. In the latter year she married Alfred H. Conrad, a Harvard economist; and they lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts, until 1966. Her first son, David, was born in 1955; in the same year The Diamond Cutters and Other Poems was published and received the Ridgely Torrence Memorial Award of the Poetry Society of America. In an essay praising this volume, Randall Jarrell calls her "an enchanting poet," "a sort of princess in a fairy tale." Like Jonathan Edwards commending the virtuous and lovely Sarah Pierpont, Randall Jarrell approves of Rich's feminine, graceful style. Describing her scansion as "easy, limpid, close to water, close to air," he exclaims that "she lives nearer to perfection . . . than ordinary poets do." Again she is praised for poetic decorum and captivating style. In 1957 and 1959, Rich gave birth to her sons Paul and Jacob. Describing these years of childbearing and child rearing in her essay "When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision" (1971), Rich wrote that she felt that she had "either to consider myself a failed woman or a failed poet, or to try to find some synthesis by which to understand what was happening to me." She was frightened by the sense that she

ADRIENNE RICH I 553 had lost touch with her own energy and was passively drifting "on a current which called itself my destiny." Later, in her fourth volume of poems, Necessities of Life (1966), which was nominated for the National Book Award, she included "Halfway," a poem that was partly a lament for the death of her active self: * 'A young girl, thought sleeping, is certified dead." Rich observed that she was writing very little in these years of child rearing, "partly from fatigue, that female fatigue of suppressed anger and the loss of contact with her own being; partly from the discontinuity of female life with its attention to small chores, errands, work that others constantly undo, small children's constant needs." Nevertheless, her experiences during these years provided the foundation for later work; the pain and deprivation of her life as a young mother gave her the basis for understanding the lives of a wide range of women. It was eight years from the publication of The Diamond Cutters to that of Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law, which won the Hokin Prize of Poetry Magazine, in 1963. During these years awards continued to come in recognition of her work: in 1960 she was Phi Beta Kappa poet at the College of William and Mary; in 1961 she received the National Institute of Arts and Letters award for poetry; she lived in the Netherlands while on a Guggenheim fellowship in 1961-62; in 1962 she won a Bolligen Foundation grant for the translation of Dutch poetry; in 1962-63 she received an Amy Lowell traveling fellowship. During these years she was "reading in fierce snatches, scribbling in notebooks, writing poetry in fragments." A section from her notebook of these years is included in "When We Dead Awaken" (1971): Paralyzed by the sense that there exists a mesh of relationships—e.g. between my anger at the children, my sensual life, pacifism, (I mean sex

in its broadest sense, not merely sexual desire)— an inter-connectedness which if I could see it, make it valid, would give me back myself, make it possible to function lucidly and passionately. Yet I grope in and out among these dark webs. Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law was the first volume of poetry in which Rich wrote consistently about her experiences as a woman whose energy was directed to meeting the needs of other people, especially men. Rich observes that until this volume she "tried not to identify myself as a female poet." These poems are written from the perspective of Virginia Woolf 's selfsacrificing "angel in the house," and the title poem explores the legacy of self-hate and wasted energy experienced by a woman in a society that demands her subordination to men. Trapped in the feminine ethic of selflessness, the woman in these poems is a midwife to men: "Nursingsyour nerves / to rest, I've roused my own; well, / now for a few bad hours!" ("The Afterwake," 1961). The energy of this woman has been mobilized to meet the demands of her man: she has succeeded in soothing him by absorbing his anxiety and pain; he is asleep, and she is alone, too tense and exhausted to sleep. The title poem, "Snapshots of a Daughter-inLaw," written during 1958-60, explores the depression of many middle-class women in the 1950's for whom success was defined by the feminine mystique, the "sweetly laughing; sweetly singing" woman who must attract and hold a man who cares for her, that is, "takes care" of her. Rich laments the waste of energy in a society that values women not for experience but for beauty: "Sigh no more, ladies / Time is male / and in his cups drinks to the fair." Time, which should enrich by adding fullness and complexity to life, becomes an enemy: "has Nature shown /her household books to you, daughter-inlaw, / that her sons never saw?" The middleaged and older woman is mired in anxiety, just

554 I AMERICAN as the independent woman is hounded by guilt or the fear of being unfeminine; anger is denied, converted into despair and even madness or suicide: "A thinking woman sleeps with monsters. / The beak that grips her, she becomes.'' The poet struggles with these cultural traps, insisting on the primacy of her perceptions as did Mary Wollstonecraft, in spite of being labeled "harpy, shrew and whore"; but for many women authentic selfhood is impossible in a culture that holds them captive to male needs. Rich observes that this . . . poem was written in a longer, looser mode than I'd ever trusted myself with before. . . . it strikes me now as too literary, too dependent on illusion; I hadn't found the courage yet to do without authorities, or even to use the pronoun "I"—the woman in the poem always says 4 'she." However, the gentle cadences and carefully rhymed stanzas of her earlier poems disappear in Snapshots, and the modern use of language and form connects her to the tradition of Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell, and T. S. Eliot. Other poems in Snapshots of a Daughter-inLaw protest the pragmatic basis for relationships that define men as providers and women as nurturers. In "Merely to Know" (1959) Rich articulates a desire to relinquish economic and psychological dependency, to know the man for his own sake rather than to use him: 'Til give you back / yourself at last to the last part. / I take nothing, only look. / Change nothing. Have no need to change. / Merely to know and let you go." In 1961, Rich appended a third section to the poem in which she spurns cultural norms and resolves to follow her inner direction: spirit like water molded by unseen stone and sandbar, pleats and funnels according to its own submerged necessity—

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This resolution to follow her own path, to understand her own experience in her own terms, is articulated again and again in Rich's poetry: the commitment to spiritual autonomy and psychological authenticity—to lucidity—is renewed in each phase of her development. Albert Gelpi observed in his essay "Adrienne Rich: The Poetics of Change" that this volume marks her "penetration into experience that makes for a distinguishing style. Her themes . . . begin to find their clarifying focus and center." In Snapshots, Rich makes the transition from dependence to independence, and rejects the traditional dichotomy between private and public, domestic and political, agency and passivity. This refusal to bifurcate experience becomes increasingly evident in her later work, especially in the prose work Of Woman Born (1976) and in the volume of poems The Dream of a Common Language. "I too have lived in history," she writes in "Readings of History" (1960). When the poet takes responsibility for her own life, she confronts the existential loneliness that replaces the illusions of romantic love: Two strangers, thrust for life upon a rock, may have at last the perfect hour of talk that language aches for; still— two minds, two messages. ("A Marriage in the 'Sixties," 1961) With this poem, Rich embarks on a modern path that eschews Cartesian dualisms that divide the world into active and passive spheres; instead of passively orbiting her mate, she accepts her intrinsic energy and begins to interact with the world on her own terms. The Cartesian bifurcations that were the basis for the social roles of the traditional couple—"I knew beyond all doubt how dead that couple was"—give way to Alfred North Whitehead's process in which relationships are governed by laws of mutual appreciation and bonding is based on responsiveness to others as individuals rather than as actors in social and economic roles. This is a new journey

ADRIENNE RICH I 555 involving change and frightening risks; there are no guides, no certainties, no rules to subdue the terror of the unknown, and no guarantees to ward off the risks. The poet begins to understand that she must accept risk and anxiety as part of discovery, that she must be strong to survive and to make sense of the ambiguity and confusion that are inherent in her journey. She is in uncharted territory: "Things look at you doubly / and you must look back / and let them happen" ("Prospective Immigrants Please Note," 1962). In Necessities of Life (Poems 1962-65) Rich explores the fundamental truths of her own life. In the title poem, history threatens to consume her—"whole biographies swam up and / swallowed me like Jonah"—but she resists its influence and forms: "I used myself, let nothing use me. . . . What life was there, was mine." Her experience is unmediated by cultural edicts; and as she separates herself from the sociohistorical context, her own personal reality emerges: "now and again to name / over the bare necessities." Many of the poems of this volume articulate physical sensations, the truths of the body; and the central images reveal a psyche stripped bare of social encrustation. Is it in the sun that truth begins? Lying under that battering light the first few hours of summer I felt scraped clean, washed down to ignorance. ("The Corpse Plant," 1963) The poet affirms her connection to nature— "The night is fresh, the whole moon shines / in a sky still open" ("The Trees," 1963)—but avoids romantic escapism. Nature is not a pastoral idyll, but is intertwined with her deepest feelings and perceptions: "In the heart of the queen anne's lace, a knot of blood. / For years I never saw it" ("The Knot," 1965). The arbitrary separation of mind and body, spirit and matter, subject and object that results in the loss of reso-

nance in language, metaphoric richness, and personal identification with the cosmos is one of the themes of this book of poems. Throughout the volume Rich laments the loss of the capacity for fusion with nature that is the result of the need to objectify, dominate, and control the environment. The price of mastery is alienation; the natural world that is suffused with radiance for the poet is threatened by the man who must objectify it in order to control it. She asks: how save the eggshell world from his reaching hands, how shield ourselves from the disintegrating blaze of his wide pure eye? ("The Stranger," 1964) Necessities of Life was published in 1966 and nominated for a National Book Award; in the same year Rich was Phi Beta Kappa poet at Harvard and then moved to New York City, where her husband taught at the City College of New York. In 1966-68 she taught at Swarthmore College, at the graduate school of Columbia University (1967-69), and then in the SEEK and open admissions program at the City College of the City University of New York (1968-72). She subsequently taught at Brandeis University (1972-73), and the City College of the City University of New York (1974-75). The range of institutions at which Rich has taught reflects the breadth of her concerns and abilities; she has been able to function effectively in the elite educational institutions of Harvard and Columbia and also to be deeply involved with complex educational and social needs of working-class students at City College. Perhaps the contrasting environments of Harvard and City College, Cambridge and New York City, gave her a more personal and complete understanding of the need for social reform. During these years she was also increasingly active in the protest against the Vietnam War. Her activism has had a profound effect on her poetry, which has become increasingly concerned with social and political issues.

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In 1969, Leaflets was published. Written from 1965 to 1968, these poems represent another major shift in Rich's vision. No longer does she differentiate her personal experiences from political reality; her life is part of a larger social reality, and the poems in this volume explore the possibilities for reweaving the fabric of our private and public lives. "A new / era is coming in," she writes, "Gauche as we are, it seems / we have to play our part" ("The Demon Lover," 1966). Since culture is created by people, and social reality is an elaborate network of agreed-upon perceptions, it is time for her to try to shape the world, even if the monolithic patriarchy threatens to render such efforts ftitile. In the same poem, the ambiguity of the phrase "we have to make it" conveys the sense of possibility coupled with precariousness of survival:

I want this to reach you who told me once that poetry is nothing sacred —no more sacred that is than other things in your life—

The world, we have to make it, my coexistent friend said, leaning back in his cell. Siberia vastly hulks behind him, which he did not make.

In the bed the pieces fly together and the rifts fill or else my body is a list of wounds

Rich has developed from being a sensitive observer of her life to a woman intent on coming to grips with the political sources of her pain: her mission as a poet is to break down existing social reality to create, or re-create, a new world. Her poetry becomes a record of this transforming process, and for this reason it is intensely political; for Rich poetic language does not simply involve reflections about cultural experience, but can be a means for changing consciousness and for creating social change. In Leaflets Rich again blurs the traditional distinction between art and life, aesthetics and politics. She is writing poetry with the intention of changing people's lives: "I wanted to choose words that even you / would have to be changed by" ("Implosions," 1968). In the title poem she writes:

For Rich poetry reconnects the personal and the political, permitting a reintegration of feeling in order to re-create the forms of civilization. The impulse to write poetry, then, is linked to the desire to create a good civilization. Art and life are not distinct—aesthetics and politics are intertwined. In these poems there is openly expressed rage that comes from having to live in a world in which she does not have a voice, as well as a refusal to be a victim of history. Insisting on the fundamental connection between all people, Rich makes it clear that she no longer writes as an isolated individual, but as part of the human family:

symmetrically placed a village blown open that did not

by planes finish the job ("Nightbreak," 1968)

The gaps between the words of this poem suggest a groping for understanding; the contrapuntal lines and tension between phrases reveal the intensity of effort required to overcome the arbitrary cultural barriers that divide human consciousness from itself. Leaflets documents the political upheavals of the 19609s: the turmoil of the Vietnam War, Algeria, the student revolution in France. At this time Rich feels sympathy toward the revolutionary male because theirs is a common struggle: "I am thinking how we can use what we have / to invent what we need"; later she separates herself from his vision and begins to create a female community with priorities and goals that reflect the needs of women.

ADRIENNE RICH I 557 In part 3 of Leaflets, "Ghazals: Homage to Ghalib," Rich chooses a poetic form that is sufficiently flexible and experimental to permit her to capture the texture of social dislocation. A ghazal contains five couplets; and in her introduction to this section, Rich says, "each couplet [is] autonomous and independent of the others. The continuity and unity flow from the associations and images playing back and forth among the couplets in any single ghazal/9 The couplets evoke a disordered and discordant world: In Central Park we talked of our own cowardice. How many times a day, in this city, are those words spoken? Did you think I was talking about my life? I was trying to drive a tradition up against the wall. I can't live at the hems of that tradition— will I last to try the beginning of the next? Although the ghazals evoke the fragmentation and isolation of modern life, connections, however subjective or tenuous, can be made: "How frail we are, and yet, dispersed, always returning, / the barnacles they keep scraping from the warship's hull." And there is always continuity in simple biological existence: "The hairs on your breast curl so lightly as you lie there, / while the strong heart goes on pounding in its sleep." In general, in many of the poems in Leaflets, Rich projects the active, forceful part of herself onto the man: Today again the hair streams to his shoulders

the eyes reflect something like a lost country or so I think . . . he isn't giving or taking any shit ("Gabriel," 1968)

Her vision is entwined in his; he is at the center of her political dream, but soon there will be a parting of their lives: I get your message Gabriel just will you stay looking straight at me awhile longer A few years earlier Rich had tried to reclaim the active part of herself, her animus: A man reaches behind my eyes and finds them empty a woman's head turns away from my head in the mirror children are dying my death and eating the crumbs of my life. ("Orion," 1965) However, the poet is uneasy with the resolution. In her essay "When We Dead Awaken," Rich says that the choice for her at the time of writing "Orion" still seemed to be between love and ambition, nurturing and work; given this duality, she wanted to claim her right to be as "cold and egotistical"—as self-centered and creative—as any man. Nevertheless, she adds that these dichotomies, these rigid and exclusive alternatives, are false and unnecessary. Three years later she tried to fuse the need to love and work in "Planetarium" (1968), which appears in The Will to Change, Poems 1968-70: I am an instrument in the shape of a woman trying to translate pulsations into images for the relief of the body and the reconstruction of the mind. In The Will to Change Rich once again protests the culture of greed and repression in which she lives, and her rage about this waste of human resources, especially the energies of women, increases: I am a woman in the prime of life, with certain powers

558 I AMERICAN and those powers severely limited by authorities whose faces I rarely see. a woman feeling the fullness of her powers at the precise moment when she must not use them a woman sworn to lucidity ("I Dream I'm the Death of Orpheus," 1968) Her pursuit of lucidity is made more difficult by the fact that the modes of thought, the habits of communication, the language she uses are not her own: "This is the oppressor's language / yet I need it to talk to you." But the poet has no choice but to try to express herself in the language that has no names for her experience; and, in doing so, perhaps she will find a new language. She must have courage and determination to repair the failures of communication: "The fracture of order / the repair of speech / to overcome this suffering." Rich's concern about the need for authentic communication becomes increasingly central in her poetry. The failure of communication between women and men, between oppressors and the oppressed, is, in part, the consequence of the consistent denial of human feeling: Some of the suffering are: it is hard to tell the truth; this is America; I cannot touch you now. In America we have only the present tense. I am in danger. You are in danger. The burning of a book arouses no sensation in me. I know it hurts to burn. ("The Burning of Paper Instead of Children," 1968) The lines of this poem, set as prose, are unusually long for Rich; the phrases within each line are fragmentary, expressing the confusion and dislocation of political and emotional upheaval. The task of the poet is to reclaim feeling, to forge poems in which language and feeling are fused. As Rich explores the possibilities for the

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transformation of language, she experiments with cinematic techniques and uses a series of visual images in "Images for Godard." Like JeanLuc Godard she is committed to capturing the reality behind the official image, but she discovers that poetry is perhaps more effective as a medium for creating social change than are cinematic images in photography or film: "In a flash I understand / how poems are unlike photographs / (the one saying This could be I the other This was" ("Photograph of the Unmade Bed," 1969). In 1970 Adrienne Rich left her marriage, and perhaps fragmentary lines of "Shooting Script" reflect the splintered emotions following her separation: in a montage of images capturing a series of interrelated feelings that are not logically connected, the poem reflects a shattered life: Now to give up the temptations of the projector; to see instead the web of cracks filtering across the plaster. To read there the map of the future, the roads radiating from the initial split, the filaments thrown out from that impasse. To reread the instructions on your palm; to find there how the lifeline, broken, keeps its direction. To read the etched rays of the bullet-hole left years ago in the glass; to know in every distortion of the light what fracture is. To put the prism in your pocket, the thin glass lens, the map of the inner city, the little book with gridded pages. To pull yourself up by your own roots; to eat the last meal in your old neighborhood. The tension between cracks, split, broken lifeline, fracture, and web, filaments, directions, and rays conveys the need for repair of the torn fabric of a life—but not before the damage is analyzed and understood. As the old patterns change, new ones emerge. In subsequent vol-

ADRIENNE RICH I 559 umes of poetry, new combinations of chance, necessity, and free will in the poet's life are expressed in new poetic forms. In The Will to Change, Rich for the first time asserts herself and expresses her vision in language and forms that are stretched to reach the perimeter of her broadened experience. This volume marks the beginning of a major phase of bold experimentation and testing of the limits of her life and art. The poetic journey in this book has required great courage. The poems demonstrate Rich's capacity for risk-taking as well as her exceptional artistry. In the early 1970's feminism became increasingly significant as a force for social change; and Rich became more and more active as a radical feminist. Diving into the Wreck: Poems 7977-7972, published in 1973, reveals the depth of her commitment to getting to the root of personal and political pain; she chooses George Eliot's observation "There is no private life which is not determined by a wider public life" as one of the quotations to preface part I of the volume. The first poem in the volume, "Trying to Talk with a Man" (1971), explores the consequences of the blind need for dominance, the thoughtless drive for mastery, the reflexive effort to control that results in the breakdown of communication between men and women. The mechanistic, objective perspective of the patriarchal male, based on the repression of feeling, makes emotional or true intellectual exchange impossible: "Out here I feel more helpless/ with you than without you." In "Waking in the Dark" (1971) she laments: "The tragedy of sex / lies around us, a woodlot / the axes are sharpened for." The rape of the earth by industrial society, the oppression of women and children by men are part of this tragedy: "A man's world. But finished. / They themselves have sold it to the machines." And she wonders "what on earth it all might have become."

The poet begins to spin her own web of experience, her own version of reality: to know the composing of the thread inside the spider's body first atoms of the web visible tomorrow ("Incipience," 1971) The internal resonances of assonance and consonance signal a new beginning, an emerging life. In the second part of the poem, the women separate themselves from a man who fears their independence and who turns them into monsters rather than face his own fears: We are his dreams We have the heads and breasts of women the bodies of birds of prey Sometimes we turn into silver serpents His terror of the power of women must be resolutely ignored; the poet must step out of the limitations of his vision, out of his social and emotional myopia: Outside the frame of his dream we are stumbling up the hill hand in hand, stumbling and guiding each other over the scarred volcanic rock Now it is necessary for women to return to the origins of social and psychic life, haltingly to traverse the primordial obstacles, and to help each other find their original power, which lies submerged like the volcano dormant beneath the lava. In this volume Rich emphasizes the need for sisterhood, for a community of women to counteract the isolation of women's lives, and she marvels at the possibilities of collective female energy: It is strange to be so many women, eating and drinking at the same table,

560 I AMERICAN those who bathed their children in the same basin who kept their secrets from each other walked the floors of their lives in separate rooms and flow into history now as the woman of their time ("After Twenty Years," 1971) In order to correct the patriarchal distortions in the cultural lens, women must return to prehistory, to the shrouded early matriarchy of which J. J. Bachofen and Robert Briffault write: even you, fellow-creature, sister, sitting across from me, dark with love, working like me to pick apart working with me to remake this trailing knitted thing, this cloth of darkness, this women's garment, trying to save the skein. ("When We Dead Awaken," 1971) Here is an intricate pattern of interlocking assonance and consonance; the letter "k" appears eight times, for example. The skein of language is as tangled as the task. Anger and the tenderness that follows its release become sources of energy indicating the direction in which she must go: my visionary anger cleansing my sight and detailed perceptions of mercy flowering from that anger ("The Stranger," 1972) As Rich observed in a conversation with Albert and Barbara Gelpi, "I think anger can be a kind of genius if it's acted on." In this volume Rich's anger ignites her imagination and frees her from social bonds she does not respect. Anger is an energizing force releasing the poet from forms that no longer fit her experience. The purifying rage sustains the effort to create an independent reality, allowing the poet to proceed and to face the loneliness of her solitary journey and her search for a community:

WRITERS If I'm lonely it's with the rowboat ice-fast on the shore in the last red light of the year that knows what it is, that knows it's neither ice nor mud nor winter light but wood, with a gift for burning ("Song," 1971)

The taut, terse diction of the poem moves the reader swiftly from the last light of winter to the prosaic wood with its potential for transformation into a blazing fire. The image of wood or logs occurs frequently in Rich's poetry; in her early poems the logs are "half rotten" or dead, while in her later work, as she comes to understand and act on her anger, the logs burn with a fierce, illuminating intensity. Sometimes anger makes lucid vision possible, as Rich observed in her conversations with the Gelpis: Women's survival and self-respect have been so terribly dependent on male approval, I almost think that we have a history of centuries of women in depression: really angry women who could have been using their anger converted into creation. . . . And therefore it's not only that there are unwritten books, but many of the books that were written were subdued, they're like banked fires—they're not what they might have been. The commitment to use this anger as a guide requires that the past be reviewed—re-visioned —which often throws doubt on the meaning of basic experiences—marriage, motherhood, love, and sex: / do not know who I was when I did those things or who I said I was or whether I willed to feel what I had read about or who in fact was there with me or whether I knew, even then that there was doubt about these things

("Dialogue," 1972)

ADRIENNE RICH I 561 Not only must the poet confront the meaning of experiences she thought she understood, she must finally return to the primal origins of psychic and cultural life. "Diving into the Wreck" is the poem that most graphically imagines the undertaking: diving into the sea, the origin of life, Rich explores the wreck, the remnants of Western culture. She brings with her the artifacts of this civilization that might help her survive and understand her journey: the "book of myths," or cultural constructs commonly used to mediate experience, to give structure to what is essentially a miasma of perceptions; the loaded camera to record what she sees; the sharpened knife blade to defend herself from dangers of the sea—sharks, seaweed; the diving suit, "armor of black rubber," and "the grave and awkward mask," the protective physical and psychic layer shielding her from terrors of the primal deep. This is an extraordinary visual poem; the clearly elaborated metaphor of the diver gives shape to an otherwise amorphous experience. As she descends alone, like an "insect down the ladder," there is no one to make distinctions for the poet, to tell her where the land ends and water begins: "there is no one / to tell me when the ocean / will begin." There is no one to categorize her experience, to separate day from night, dawn from dusk, order from chaos, love from hate. Because she is alone, she need not make the arbitrary separations that characterize the Western psyche. "I have to learn alone / to turn my body without force / in the deep element." She makes this journey in order to see for herself, to make up her own mind, ' 'the thing I came for: / the wreck and not the story of the wreck / the thing itself and not the myth." Returning to the center, to these primal beginnings, the poet recovers the wholeness, the circle of life before dualities, distinctions, divisions occurred. In the sea the tensions between subject and object, mind and matter, male and female are dissolved:

This is the place. And I am here, the mermaid whose dark hair streams black, the merman in his armored body We circle silently about the wreck we dive into the hold. I am she: I am he Finding the cargo of the wrecked ship—rotting barrels of "silver, copper, vermeil," "half-destroyed" instruments, "water-eaten log," the "fouled compass"—the poet ironically observes that she returns to this scene "by cowardice or courage," bearing the artifacts and implements of her culture that she did not invent or devise and "a book of myths / in which / our names do not appear." There is no historical connection between women and this civilization or its wreck; nevertheless, the poet has made the journey, to reclaim her energy and to begin again— this time as the namer of her own experience. In addition to the striking visual imagery in the poem, the rhythms of the short declarative sentences describe the matter-of-fact procedures of preparing for the dive as well as the actual dive itself: "I put on / the body-armor of black rubber," and "I go down./Rung after rung." These abrupt, almost utilitarian phrases are a dramatic contrast to the more lyrical cadences and flowing rhythms of the second half of the poem, which describes what she actually sees, "the wreck and not the story of the wreck": the drowned face always staring toward the sun the evidence of damage worn by salt and spray into this threadbare beauty So Rich discovers where "the split began" in our Judeo-Christian heritage of a world divided, a world in which light is separated from darkness, earth from water, the creatures of air, land, and water from each other. Often there are elaborate hierarchies that further divide forms of life,

562 / AMERICAN as in the Western cosmologies that separate cherubim, seraphim, powers and dominions, virtues, archangels, planets, elements from each other and from human life. These divisions breed other divisions between subconscious and conscious, sacred and profane, being and nothing, inside and outside. These arbitrary splits diminish the metaphoric resonance of our lives, and the loss of ambiguity and multivalence reduces the mythic dimensions of our experience. In this desiccated, objectified, externalized world, the world within is lost. Parts II and III of Diving into the Wreck excavate emotions that are often repressed; because they are not experienced or understood, these submerged feelings are expressed in distorted, destructive ways. Anger, hate, despair denied become madness, murderous rage, or suicidal self-hate. The complex interrelationships of these feelings are traced out in detail; no simplistic resolutions are permitted as the poet insists on comprehending the origins and effects of feelings that are the source and antithesis of humanity. 'The Phenomenology of Anger" (1972), a ten-part poem, creates the textures and tonality of rage—the poet's own barely controlled anger and its effects on herself as well as collective anger and its effects on civilization. Rich does not retreat into sentimental solutions or escape into Utopian visions; she is not afraid to face her own anger and, unlike the patriarchal male, does not project it onto others in the name of courage. She realizes, finally, that in order to love, she must be able to feel and understand hate, that hatred repressed causes aridity, a numbness that creates a deadness at the center. The first two sections of the poem explore the differences between confinement and freedom, measured boundaries and limitlessness, letting go and holding back: "The freedom of the wholly mad / to smear & play with her madness" is contrasted with the damage done by a functional, utilitarian approach to life: "How does a pile of rags the machinist wiped his hands

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on / feel in its cupboard, hour upon hour?" She experiences the loss of eros resulting from feeling denied: "I huddled fugitive / in the warm sweet simmer of the hay / muttering: Come." The next three sections connect the consequences of rage denied—numbness, emotional aridity, loss of sensuality—with geopolitical events: "The moonmen come back from the moon / the firemen come out of the fire." In public form, repressed emotion is expressed as the masculine attempt to dominate the elements, to colonize the moon. The poet asks, "Madness. Suicide. Murder. / Is there no way out but these?" In the declarative fragments of section 7, Rich acknowledges her hatred for the death carrier, this man who feels nothing, who destroys everything around him, including himself, in the name of mastery. She shouts: I hate you. I hate the mask you wear, your eyes assuming a depth they do not possess, drawing me into the grotto of your skull into the landscape of bone Metaphorically using his own weapons on him, not to kill but to transform him, the poet becomes the modern Amazon doing battle with the monster "gunning down the babies at My Lai / vanishing in the face of confrontation," and "burning the crops with some new sublimate." When I dream of meeting the enemy, this is my dream: white acetylene ripples from my body effortlessly released perfectly trained on the true enemy raking his body down to the thread of existence

ADRIENNE RICH I 563 burning away his lie leaving him in a new world; a changed man There is longing for community in harmony with nature in this poem, for the possibility of a diverse and many-aspected world: I would have loved to live in a world of women and men gaily in collusion with green leaves, stalks, building mineral cities, transparent domes, little huts of woven grass each with its own pattern— a conspiracy to coexist with the Crab Nebula, the exploding universe, the Mind— But this is a fantasy in a technological society that levels forests, paves over the plains and wetlands, erects monolithic buildings of concrete and steel, where the roar of machines is heard everywhere—in the sky, on the ground, under the ground. The last part of the poem documents this reality in fierce, driving phrases. The reader is hurled into the inferno of the grinding everyday lives of the captives of technological / industrial society: 10. how we are burning up our lives testimony: the subway hurtling to Brooklyn her head on her knees asleep or drugged la via del tren subterraneo es peligrosa Italics and colons, alternating assertions and evidence, convey the force of Rich's observations, her sense of apocalypse: many sleep the whole way others sit starring holes of fire into the air

others plan rebellion: night after night awake in prison, my mind licked at the mattress like a flame till the cellblock went up roaring Part III of Diving into the Wreck continues to explore anger that fuels the poet's drive to recreate the denatured world: "For weeks now a rage / has possessed my body, driving / now out upon men and women / now inward upon myself" ("Merced," 1972). In contrast with the fragrant pine forest and "cold quick river Merced," Rich rails against the prefabricated, chemically flavored world "masculinity made / unfit for women or men.'' Again, in "A Primary Ground" (1972) Rich maps the psychic ground of many male/female relationships in our society: "And this is how you live: a woman, children / protect you from the abyss." And in "Translations" (1972) she observes, "she's a woman of my time / obsessed / with Love, our subject: / we've trained it like ivy to our walls." She laments the loss of mutuality, of love that transcends the barriers of individuality, possessiveness, jealousy, and competitiveness: The pact that we made was the ordinary pact of men & women in those days I don't know who we thought we were that our personalities could resist the failures of the race ("From a Survivor," 1972) With this acknowledgment of the distortions of romantic love, and the impossibility of effortless fusion of two psyches, she mourns her dead husband and the mutuality based on genuine independence they might have created: Next year it would have been 20 years and you are wastefully dead who might have made the leap we talked, too late, of making

564 I AMERICAN In "August" (1972) Rich turns from past failures to face her powers and their destructive potential. In a series of fluid, coupled lines, she spins out the inevitable question: If I am flesh sunning on rock If I am brain burning in fluorescent light if I am dream like a wire with fire throbbing along it if I am death to man I have to know it In the same poem she gropes toward the understanding of the chthonic mysteries of prehistory, when mother-right yielded to father-right. The poem concludes with an emphasis on the destruction resulting from male possessiveness and territoriality: His mind is too simple, I cannot go on sharing his nightmares My own are becoming clearer, they open into prehistory which looks like a village lit with blood where all the fathers are crying: My son is mine! In "Mediations for a Savage Child" (part IV of Diving into the Wreck), a series of poetic reflections based on The Wild Boy of Aveyron (De I*education d'un homme sauvage) by JeanMarc Gaspard Itard, Rich deplores the hubris of scientists who focus so excessively on a limited range of logical behavior that they ignore truths of the body; their efforts to extinguish or subdue deep-rooted responses to nature that humans share with other creatures is the kind of narrow masculinity that has poisoned our civilization. De V education d'un homme sauvage is a record of the efforts of Itard, an eighteenth-century rationalist, to socialize a child who was discovered in 1799 wandering naked in the woods, looking for acorns and roots to eat. Although the

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child had never lived in society and spoke no human language, Itard was convinced that he could stamp out all primitive habits through systematic training. Itard's account of the training of the child reveals the profound depth of the connection between people and the natural world. In her poem Rich expresses horror at Itard's relentless efforts to stamp out the child's extraordinary vitality and sensitivity to nature. For example, Itard is distressed because the child does not readily adopt "our sober and measured gait . . . because of his constant tendency to trot and gallop." Rich deplores Itard's ethnocentricity as he tries to teach the boy "names / for things / you did not need." The child does not care about the artifacts of European society: "muslin shirred against the sun / linen on a sack of feathers / locks, keys / boxes with coins inside." Instead, Itard's account makes it clear that the boy longed to be outdoors: If ... a stormy wind chanced to blow, if the sun behind the clouds showed itself suddenly illuminating the atmosphere more brightly, there were loud bursts of laughter, an almost convulsive joy, during which all his movements backwards and forwards very much resembled a kind of leap he would like to take, in order to break through the window and dash into the garden. Observing that Itard never saw the child weep until one day, while trying to discipline him, he drew near him with every appearance of anger and seizing him forcibly by the haunches held him out the window, his head directly turned towards the bottom of the chasm . . . afterwards he went and threw himself on his bed and wept copiously. Rich asks, "why should the wild child / weep / weep for the scientists / why.'' For the poet there is a parallel between Itard's efforts to subdue and

ADRIENNE RICH I 565 discipline the boy from the woods and the efforts of men to control women: At the end of the distinguished doctor's lecture a young woman raised her hand: You have the power in your hands, you control our lives— why do you want our pity too? With this question Rich underscores her conviction that it is self-destructive for women to feel sympathy for the men who control their lives, often by physical coercion, who deny them even the freedom of their bodies. The emotional and artistic power of Diving into the Wreck has been recognized by critics and readers. In "Ghostlier Demarcations, Keener Sounds," Helen Vendler observes: "The forcefulness of Diving into the Wreck comes from the wish not to huddle wounded, but to explore the caverns, scars, and depths of the wreckage. At first these explorations must reactivate all the old wounds, inflame the old scar tissue, awaken all the suppressed anger, and inactivate the old language invented for dealing with the older self. But I find no betrayal of continuity in these later books, only courage in the refusal to write in forms felt to be outgrown." The volume received the National Book Award, and marks Rich's command over her voice and material. "From an Old House in America" (1974) is a sixteen-part poem in which Rich scans the past in search of lost women whose traces can still be discerned in an old country house. The house is a metaphor for history itself, and the poet wonders about its former inhabitants: the woman whose flowerbeds still grow; the woman who gazed at postcards from distant lands—Norway, Corsica. She ponders the complexities of their relationships with their men: "wife and husband em-

battled." When their relationship was based on necessity, the nineteenth-century couple represented an economic paradigm; their respective spheres, public and private, professional and domestic, were carefully mapped-out areas of activity that were required for survival. The poet reaches back in time and thinks about the first women who came to America, across the Bering Strait, and later with the Massachusetts Bay Company. The New World mission was not theirs: "I never chose this place / yet I am of it now." Rich recalls the African women brought to the American South as enslaved laborers and child breeders, and the women of the mining camps and frontier settlements of the West, isolated from each other. These women were not without power, but it was "brief and local"; their influence was very real, but not farreaching—their vision did not shape the world in which they were forced to live and in which they somehow survived. The dreams of these captive women—"her hand unconscious on the cradle, her mind with the wild geese"—create a counterpoint to the harsh edicts of the fathers. Rich contrasts the generative, nurturing, holistic ethos of these women with the divisive, rigid, legalistic systems of the men: "It was made over-simple all along / the separation of powers / the allotment of sufferings." The male drive for mastery, to clear and cultivate the forests of the New World, to consecrate their settlements to God, was sustained by women's sacrifices. While the men focused on their goals—perceived as divine calling—the women lived with the harsh realities: "her spine cracking in labor / his plow driving across the Indian graves." In the final sections of the poem, Rich goes beyond American or Western European history, to prehistory, to the time when men's fear of women's reproductive capacity drove them to suppress female power: "their lust and fear of our deep places." The poet returns to primal scenes of fear of females, of mother-hatred:

566 / AMERICAN "their terror of blinding / by the look of her who bore them"; she sees "the fathers in their ceremonies / the genital contests,'' and comprehends the ancient contest between female fecundity and the sterile order of masculine systems, between the gift of life and the compulsion to dominate experience. She understands that this struggle continues. In section 14 of the poem the old dialogue is given modern form: will you punish me for history he said what will you undertake she said The italicized exchanges are blunt, direct. There is no evasion as the woman in the poem makes it clear that this time she will not join him in his destructive mission; this time he must join forces with the women. Section 15 of the poem declares that the time has come for judgment—not the judgment of the patriarchal fathers but of "The Erinyes," the female Furies who punished crimes against kin in ancient Greek society. The angry God is superseded by "the Mother of reparations," who does not punish wantonly, but corrects imbalances in an attempt to reverse the destructive direction of patriarchal culture. This Mother calls out from ancient recesses of civilization to women to recognize and honor the ancient female powers: if you have not come to terms with the inscription

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Section 16 of the poem explains the need for female community: to undo the old order, "groping through spines of nightmare," to find and mark out "the line dividing / lucidity from darkness." The experience of all women is needed for this mission; they must resist the temptations of isolation and have faith in their collective resources. The network of sisterhood must be preserved so that women can name and create their experience and their future: "Any woman's death diminishes me." This poem blends a variety of styles from portraiture ("in my decent collar, in the daguerrotype") to historical documentary ("I am an American woman: / 1 turn that over") to fragments of monologue (' 7 will live for others, asking nothing 11 will ask nothing, ever, for myself'). From this patchwork of American women's faces, voices, stories a pattern can be discerned: yet something hangs between us older and stranger than ourselves like a translucent curtain, a sheet of water a dusty window the irreducible, incomplete connection between the dead and the living or between man and woman in this savagely fathered and unmothered world The images in the poem are vivid and concrete, creating a highly textured surface; the language is often clear and musical, a lyrical mesh of assonance and consonance:

the terms of the ordeal the discipline the verdict

Tonight in this northeast kingdom striated iris stand in a jar with daisies

if still you are on your way still She awaits your coming

the porcupine gnaws in the shed fireflies beat and simmer

The insistent, driving rhythm of the lines impels the reader toward the inevitable confrontation with the great Mother. The chthonic mysteries of birth and blood replace patriarchal law.

caterpillars begin again their long, innocent climb the length of leaves of burdock or webbing of a garden chair

ADRIENNE RICH I 567 This complex network of images gives depth to the historical narratives and individual portraits unifying the separate stories in a tapestry that encompasses prehistory as well as the present moment. Weaving back and forth between past and present, the poem binds opposites together: lucidity and darkness, isolation and community, suffering and reparations, primal power and terrors, finally forging "the irreducible, incomplete connection / between the dead and living." This weaving together of disparate parts of personal and historical experience creates the new ground on which women will recreate their lives. Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (1976) is a historical and political analysis and personal exploration of some of the themes expressed in lyrical form in "From An Old House in America.' * This book considers the ways in which patriarchal social institutions deny women control over their lives (as Rich implies in her chapter headings), a world in which "the Kingdom of the Fathers'' eclipses 4 'The Primacy of the Mother." Rich summarizes the archaeological, anthropological, and mythical theories of James Mellaart, Erich Neumann, Robert Briffault, and J. J. Bachofen as well as of G. Rachel Levy and Elizabeth Gould Davis, which suggest that women were of primary importance in these early societies; the "Neolithic, pre-Columbian, Cypriot, Cycladic Minoan, predynastic Egyptian" goddess cults placed women at the center of experience as bearers and nourishers of life. The great Mother had magical powers—her ability to conceive and give birth to children was viewed as a magical phenomenon—as having mana. Linguistic evidence of the female power exists in many languages. The words for mother and matter are close in many languages: "mutter, madre, mater, materia, moeder, modder." Rich explores the associations regarding women and nature: the connection of the menstrual cycle

with the lunar cycle, and the fertility cults. She emphasizes the transformative power of childbearing; menstrual blood and mother's milk are physical proof of the female power to create and sustain life. Rich also reviews archaeological and anthropological evidence that suggests the existence of a considerable male fear of female power, resulting in the splitting of the "good," nurturing mother from the terrible mother. This division is the genesis of the devaluation of the mother by the monolithic, patriarchal cultures. The ancient desire to control female reproduction is traced through time to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, where it is expressed in the usurpation by the doctors of the midwife's role in child delivery. The elaborate skills of the midwife, based on centuries of tradition and experience, are acquired by the obstetrician, a male medical specialist in childbearing. Rich observes that the invention of the forceps, a tool that replaced the midwife's hands, reinforced male hegemony in the field of midwifery. In the eighteenth century the Chamberlen forceps generally were not available to women; and since women were not admitted to medical school, they were replaced by doctors in the maternity wards. In a chapter titled "Alienated Labor," Rich explores the gradual control of all phases of female reproduction by male doctors. Pregnant women were expected to wait passively for directions from doctors, and to suffer in silence. Pain in childbirth was the curse of Eve, and considered to be the lot of women. Since maternity wards were now located in hospitals rather than at home or a lying-in hospital, puerperal fever was a great danger; physicians, failing to wash their hands after operating on patients with infectious diseases, often went directly to the delivery room. Midwives did not dissect corpses or perform other operations, so the infection rate among their patients was much lower. Rich observes that the current controversy about abor-

568 I AMERICAN tion and contraception focuses on the issue of control of body, and she notes that women are still cut off from their sexual and procreative process and powers. Rich explores the contemporary bifurcation of women into good and bad, normal and deviant, self-sacrificing and self-centered, which is an extension of the ancient split between the nurturing and terrible mothers. She postulates that deep fear and resentment of mothers by their sons sustains modern patriarchy; that is, these sons oppress women out of the need to contain the power of their mothers. At the same time the sons long to be comforted and nurtured by women. Patriarchy ensures maternal benevolence while eliminating the aspects of female power that men fear. Feminism is threatening because it reintroduces the fear of abandonment by their mothers. In her chapter "Motherhood and Daughterhood," Rich traces the legacy of self-hate and repression that is passed down from mother to daughter: "This cathexis between mother and daughter—essential, distorted, misused—is the great unwritten story." Exploring the maternal legacy of self-hatred and the subsequent matrophobia, she says: Matrophobia can be seen as a womanly splitting of the self, in the desire to become purged once and for all of our mothers' bondage, to become individuated and free. The mother stands for the victim in ourselves, the unfree woman, the martyr. Our personalities seem dangerously to blur and overlap with our mothers'; and, in a desperate attempt to know where mother ends and daughter begins, we perform radical surgery. Rich suggests that an antidote to this damaging separation of mother and daughter is found in the Eleusinian mysteries, which celebrate the reunion of Demeter with her daughter Kore (Per-

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sephone). The initiates to this cult are depicted as carrying an ear of corn, a symbol of the fertility and growth with which Demeter blesses the earth in celebration of the return of her daughter. Pointing out the necessity of "courageous mothering," Rich emphasizes the importance of a mother's "struggle to create livable space around her, demonstrating to her daughter that these possibilities exist," and calls for a female bonding that will recognize the strength and diversity of women's abilities and powers. Neither self-sacrificial nor terrible, neither a madonna nor a whore, a woman has emotions and capacities that are many and varied; and Rich wants a community that permits women to break free of confining, even crippling, dualisms. Rich's concluding chapter explores the violence frequently experienced by women who bear children in a culture that curtails their sexuality and places the burden of caretaking primarily on them. Since the mother/child dyad is a central relationship—even the essential core— of society, it is tragic that our culture makes it so difficult for good parenting to occur in this context. In her "Afterword," Rich observes, "The repossession by women of our bodies will bring far more essential change to human society than the seizing of the means of production by workers." She urges women to honor the truths of their bodies, to resist the "death-culture of quantification, abstraction," to create "a new relationship to the universe." Like much of her recent poetry, this is a visionary book that outlines future possibilities. Throughout Of Woman Born Rich refers to her own experience as a daughter and a mother. She cites specific events in her own life, and she talks openly of her complicated feelings about her own mother and children. Sometimes she quotes from her diaries and journals: "I write this as the early rays of the sun light up our hillside and eastern windows. Rose with [the baby] at 5:30

ADRIENNE RICH I 569 A.M. and have fed him and breakfasted. This is one of the few mornings on which I haven't felt terrible mental depression and physical exhaustion." Although these observations from her personal experience create an unusual blend of subjective insights and objective analysis, some critics felt that the book lacked scholarly rigor; others, that it was inappropriate for a poet to write on a political subject. By using the pronoun "I" in a straightforward manner rather than veiling her personal experience with the impersonal "it," Rich frankly admits that value-free scholarship is an illusion; that all her analysis depends on a subjective response. At present the issue of value-free scholarship is controversial; but many scholars insist that all theory is based on the perceptions and feelings of individuals, that all interpretations of the past require imaginative leaps. By writing a book on a historical and political topic, Rich brings her power and sensitivity to bear on one of the most crucial problems of our time. In a conversation with Robin Morgan about poetry and women's culture that appeared in The New Woman's Survival Sourcebook (1975), Rich observes that the women's movement has had a profound effect on modern art: "What is happening here is not only a feminist renaissance, but because of t h a t . . . a renaissance of art. Art has the possibility of becoming alive again, relevant to people's needs, to suffering, to human emotion and possibility." She also says that her life as a twentieth-century American woman and feminist is inseparable from her poetry. Much of her work through Diving into the Wreck explores the pain and anger of a creative, thinking woman in a culture that denies the most essential aspects of her experience. As she becomes increasingly conscious of this pain and the need to understand its psychic and historical origins, her poetry reflects the need to name her own experience for

herself and to reweave the fabric of her life; this personal perspective is broadened in Of Woman Born, which concludes with a discussion of the need for women collectively to re-vision their lives. Rich says, in her conversation with Robin Morgan, 4 'It is not as interesting to me to explore the condition of alienation as a woman as it is to explore the connectedness as a woman." The Dream of a Common Language, Poems 1974-77 reflects this interest in exploring and expressing the "connectedness" Rich feels with other women. Part I of this volume is called "Power"; and many of the poems in it, written in 1974-75, parallel the material in Of Woman Born: the suffering of women separated from community, the joys of collective effort, the need for mutual understanding among women, the desire to name her own experience and to share this knowledge, the danger of permitting cultural myths to obscure personality. The title poem, "Power," explores the paradox of the woman who fails to understand the truths of her experience as Marie Curie's life becomes a metaphor for women's lives in patriarchal society: Today I was reading about Marie Curie: she must have known she suffered from radiation sickness her body bombarded for years by the element she had purified She died a famous woman denying her wounds denying her wounds came from the same source as her power The long caesuras between phrases underscore the difficulty of Marie Curie's alienated struggle to isolate radium, which, paradoxically, kills her. This implosion of female energy exists in

570 / AMERICAN direct contrast with the joyful explosion in "Phantasia for Elvira Shatayev," the next poem in this section. Elvira Shatayev was the leader of the women's team that climbed Lenin Peak in August 1974; all of the women were killed in a storm. Although, like Marie Curie, these women die in their effort to understand the elements, there is exhilaration in the collective struggle, the communal effort: into the unfinished the possible

we stream the unbegun

In this poem there is commitment to struggle, to process, to collective effort; this time the caesuras signal not rigid isolation but possibility. The phrases are not isolated from each other, indicative of resistance to be overcome. Instead, the silences play back and forth between phrases, permitting sharing of syntactic resources and meanings. The pauses are meditative, indicating possibilities, not limitations: "We could have stitched that blueness together like a quilt." Together the women confront the sky and the mountain, simultaneously bringing their separate experience to each other to be stitched into a common fabric. "Origins and History of Consciousness," written over a two-year period (1972-74), again focuses on a common language that is the title for the desire to be related, connected but not dependent, to another human. The desire for relatedness and for genuine communication is the genesis of the human community:

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ualized consciousness; she describes the terror and exhilaration of the meshed and validating awareness of two autonomous beings: Trusting, untrusting we lowered ourselves into this, let ourselves downward hand over hand as on a rope that quivered over the unsearched. . . . We did this. Conceived of each other, conceived each other in a darkness I remember as drenched in light I want to call this, life. No longer is Rich diving into the wreck of civilization, but into the psychic abyss that is illuminated by recognition of another human being—a recognition that is mutual. Hannah Arendt writes, in Reflections: Thinking Part I, that human beings exist to display or reveal themselves to each other and to receive impressions from each other—to impress and be impressed by. Rich expresses this need for lovers to recognize each other and to be recognized by others, by the large community: But I can't call it life until we start to move beyond this secret circle of fire where our bodies are giant shadows flung on a wall where the night becomes our inner darkness, and sleeps like a dumb beast, head on her paws, in the corner.

No one sleeps in this room without the dream of a common language

"Splittings" (1974) is a three-part poem exploring isolation and intimacy, the pain of being separated from a lover and the consequences of separation. The poet recognizes that, in many respects, her pain is self-generated, that absence of a loved one does not necessarily mean loss. Pain stalks her as a predatory animal would:

Rich explores the difficulty of relationships in which there are no roles signaling the limits of awareness, or that mark out boundaries of rit-

It is not separation calls me forth but I who am separation And remember I have no existence apart from you

yet the warm animal dreams on of another animal

ADRIENNE RICH I 571 The poet struggles with loss, a sense of forlorn helplessness, and commits herself to do battle with it: I choose not to suffer uselessly to detect primordial pain as it stalks towards me flashing its bleak torch in my eyes She vows to be courageous, "not to suffer uselessly": "I choose to love this time for once / with all my intelligence." This poem is a personal record of the refusal to be a victim of masochistic self-torture, to internalize norms of feminine helplessness. The poet is thrown back on herself, her own resources, and vows to do her best to combat the regressive and potentially annihilating forces that rage within. The internal monologue that takes the form of dialogue with a personified form of pain underscores the poet's conflict, the sense of being divided from within, as well as the need to struggle with a selfgenerated pain so powerful that it is experienced as an external assault. "Hunger. . . ." (1974-75), dedicated to the black poet Audre Lorde, takes the personal suffering and struggle expressed in "Splittings" and extends its scope to include the division of one nation from another, of men from women and women from women: huts strung across a drought-stretched land not mine, dried breasts, mine and not mine, a mother watching my children shrink with hunger . . . Quantify suffering, you could rule the world In the concluding lines of this poem, Rich imagines what it would be like if a community of women vowed to live intelligently—this is the transformative power of the great goddess who represents the energy of collective commitment: of what it could be to take and use our love, hose it on a city, on a world, to wield and guide its spray, destroying

poisons, parasites, rats, viruses— like the terrible mothers we long and dread to be. The image of love as a force to be used has appeared in earlier poems, such as "The Phenomenology of Anger"; in this poem, however, revolutionary love is not envisioned as the resolute heroic effort of one woman, but as a collective commitment. "To a Poet" (1974) is concerned with the institutional failures of modern domestic life and with the agony of a deeply suffering woman, mother, and poet—probably Sylvia Plath—who is trapped and wounded by the domestic scenario: Scraping eggcrust from the child's dried dish skimming the skin from cooled milk wringing diapers Language floats at the vanishing-point "Cartographies of Silence" (1975) is a phenomenological map of communication and its failures. It is an eight-part poem composed of couplets that create a montage of impressions and feelings. Silences true and false are explored: the first four sections include silences of omission, manipulation, lies that obscure or destroy truth; the following section, silences that leave space for truth, for richer possibilities, more complex truths. The isolating, fragmenting effects of silence affect all of us: A conversation begins with a lie. And each speaker of the so-called common language feels the ice-floe split, the drift apart This alienated separation exists in direct contrast with the shared quiet after talking all night: If there were a poetry where this could happen not as blank spaces or as words stretched like a skin over meanings but as silence falls at the end

572 / AMERICAN of a night through which two people have talked until dawn But, finally, it is words that give authentic shape to the silences: what in fact I keep choosing are these words, these whispers, conversations from which time after time the truth breaks moist and green In "Part II: Twenty-one Love Poems," love is not hidden, but made visible in lines that are declarative, often flat and unadorned. The tone of these poems is sometimes conversational, even colloquial; the images focus on simple details of everyday experience: I wake up in your bed. I know I have been dreaming. Much earlier, the alarm broke us from each other, You've been at your desk for hours. The mood is often lyrical, but there is no yearning for escape. Instead, there is an affirmation of the here and now. Even the garbage-strewn streets celebrate ordinary, daily life. These are sonnets of ecstasy, but not of flight. But behind the simple, proselike stanzas is Rich's courageous commitment to reveal her erotic relationship with another woman. These poems represent a leap of faith, a desire to trust her love enough to affirm it publicly: / dreamed you were a poem I say, a poem I wanted to show someone . . . and I laugh and fall dreaming again of the desire to show you to everyone I love, to move openly together in the pull of gravity, which is not simple, Which carries the feathered grass a long way down the upbreathing air Moving "openly together" is complicated and dangerous in a culture that, in spite of its pen-

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chant for social experimentation, is not fundamentally accepting of nontraditional sexual involvements. In publishing these poems, Rich risks the irrational response of her readers and critics. By making herself vulnerable to their homophobic fears, she asserts the primacy of her experience. The poet marvels at the power of her love for someone very much like her, yet different: "Your small hands, precisely equal to my own— / only the thumb is larger, longer" (poem VI). There is no need to construct a myth of the mysterious other, an inaccessible stranger. Instead, she finds deep pleasure and joy in the similarities and differences of herself and her lover: But we have different voices, even in sleep, and our bodies, so alike, are yet so different and the past echoing through our bloodstreams is freighted with different language, different meanings— though in any chronicle of the world we share it could be written with new meaning we were two lovers of one gender, we were two women of one generation, (poem XII) The unadorned statement "we were two lovers of one gender, / we were two women of one generation" is not obscured by an opaque metaphor or image; instead, its direct simplicity is an unflinching declaration. The eros that suffuses all of the poems is concentrated in' 'The Floating Poem, Unnumbered,'' a lyrical celebration of their lovemaking: Your travelled, generous thighs between which my whole face has come and come— the innocence and wisdom of the place my tongue has found there— the live, insatiate dance of your nipples in my mouth—

ADR1ENNE RICH I 573 your touch on me, firm, protective, searching me out, your strong tongue and slender fingers reaching where I had been waiting years for you in my rose-wet cave—whatever happens, this is. The play on "travelled, generous thighs" and "come" conveys the physical and emotional power of their passion. This is not an easy love—few loves are; there are obstacles both external and self-generated, particularly for two people who are committed to equality. Authentic human relationships require work and careful attention. The poet does not indulge in the illusion that her passionate involvement will eliminate the need for struggle in daily life. Here is no romantic escapism, but the acceptance of ordinary life. If I could let you know— two women together is a work nothing in civilization has made simple, two people together is a work heroic in its ordinariness. (poem XIX) The intricacy of two sets of feelings, two sets of responses, requires "fierce attention" in order to make possible mutuality without sacrificing independence. And there is inevitably pain and loneliness that even the most powerful love cannot eradicate: and I discern a woman I loved, drowning in secrets, fear wound round her throat and choking her like hair. And this is she with whom I tried to speak, whose hurt, expressive head turning aside from pain, is dragged down deeper where it cannot hear me, and soon I shall know I was talking to my own soul. (poem XX) The poet's lover cannot "move / beyond this secret circle of fire"; mired in her fears, she is

unable publicly to acknowledge the relationship. Nevertheless, the poems are an affirmation of the will to live and an acceptance of the fact that pain, anger, and fear cannot be escaped, but must be lived with as part of the circle of human emotions. In the final poem in the series, Rich acknowledges that she lives in this circle, and as a poet she will continue to trace the intricate and variegated emotional patterns within it: "I choose to walk here. And to draw this circle.' * In this poem the circle is literally Stonehenge, an ancient site of religious and magical rituals. For the poet the circle keeps power concentrated, permitting her to pull her energies back into herself. The ancient site of Stonehenge, then, provides a metaphor for the centering of her energies. "Part in. Not Somewhere Else, but Here" also contains poems written over the three-year period 1974-77. It is interesting to note that Rich does not organize the material in this volume chronologically or even thematically. In each section the same concerns, themes, images appear and reappear; and the effect of this repetition is to create ever-widening spirals of intensified meaning. As in other poems, caesuras are used in this section to indicate resistance and to underscore the difficulty of communication. In the title poem Rich writes: Spilt love seeking its level flooding other lives that must be lived not somewhere else but here seeing through blood nothing is lost The form of historical monologue and portrait is used again in "Paula Becker to Clara Westhoff"; these two women met at an artists' colony near Bremen, Germany, in 1899. Becker was a painter and Westhoff a sculptor. In 1901, Clara Westhoff married Rainer Maria Rilke and Paula Becker married Otto Modersohn; the women continued to be close friends until Paula Becker died in childbirth. She is said to have murmured:

574 I AMERICAN "What a pity!" In the poem Becker speaks of their pledge "to create according to our plan / that we'd bring against all odds, our full power / to every subject. Hold back nothing / because we were women." Using fragments of Paula Modersohn's diaries, Rich creates a portrait of two women artists who have been largely ignored until their recent rediscovery by feminist art historians. "Nights and Days" centers on the friendship of two twentieth-century women who are also lovers; like Westhoff and Becker, their lives are conditioned by everyday truths: "We have been together so many nights and days / this day is not unusual." But in addition to friendship and shared commitment, there is the added dimension of sexual desire and love: someone who saw us far-off would say we were two old women Nonis, perhaps, or sisters of the spray but our breasts are beginning to sing together your eyes are on my mouth. In many respects this poem begins where * 'Paula Becker to Clara Westhoff" ends: it is concerned with the shared lives of two women and the possibilities that emerge from their commitment to each other. "Sibling Mysteries" (1976) is a six-part tour de force using themes that have deepening importance for Rich: chthonic mysteries, the primordial power of the great Mother, denial by patriarchs of this power, the longing to return to the mother; these mythic elements are intertwined in the lives of two sisters who live today. The first section of the poem calls up ancient rituals: Remind me how the stream wetted the clay between our palms and how the flame licked it to mineral colors how we traced our signs by torchlight in the deep chambers of the caves

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In section 2 these memories of the primitive landscape are associated with their mother's body and her healing powers: our faces dreaming hour on hour in the salt smell of her lap Remind me how her touch melted childgrief The two sisters share the common bond of their connection of their mother, and their mutual gaze reaches "through mirrored pupils / back to the mother." The daughters never were true brides of the father the daughters were to begin with brides of the mother then brides of each other under a different law The emphasis in this poem is on shared understanding as sisters that transcends the limitations of their experiences as individuals; a shared effort to penetrate mysteries, familial and primordial, replaces the competition of rivalrous siblings. In this beautiful and powerful poem the rhythms move easily; the lines are graceful and controlled: "Remind me how we loved our mother's body/ our mouths drawing the first / thin sweetness from her nipples." The images are vivid and resonant, appealing to sight and touch: "smelling the rains before they came/ feeling the fullness of the moon / before moonrise." The rich blend of assonance and consonance creates a complex texture of sound and sense: * 'and how we drew the quills / or porcupines between our teeth / to a keen thinness.'' This is a poem that stands out as a landmark in an often obscure and treacherous psychological landscape. "A Woman Dead in Her Forties," an eightpart poem written in 1974-77, focuses on the evolution of a friendship; the friend's influence touches all aspects of the poet's life, and the

ADRIENNE RICH I 575 death of this woman from breast cancer is a tragic loss. The poem is both a tribute to the friend and a statement of unspoken love—"In plain language: I never told you how I loved you"—as well as an acceptance of death unacknowledged: "We never talked at your deathbed of your death." "Natural Resources" (1977) recapitulates all of the themes and controlling images of the poems in this volume. Yonic images such as "The core of the strong hill: not understood: the mulch-heat of the underwood" suggest the still unexcavated terrain of the female landscape; the insistent repetition of the vowel "o" sounds the depth of the unexplored caverns. The metaphor of the miner is used to describe the effort of a woman exploring the crevices of her mind; this psychological excavation is likened to the physical tasks that confront a mountain laborer. There is much work yet to be done, and the poet expresses anger about those men who threaten to interfere with the process of female discovery— men who misuse words like "humanism" and "androgyny" to conceal smoldering violence: "children picking up guns / for that is what it is to be a man." She warns against "a passivity we mistake / —in the desperation of our search— / for gentleness," and calls forth the active nurturing power in women to "help the earth deliver." This is a visionary poem that reaffirms the poet's desire to remake the world. The energy for this recreation comes from generations of women who bring forth and sustain life. My heart is moved by all I cannot save: so much has been destroyed I have to cast my lot with those who age after age, perversely, with no extraordinary power, reconstitute the world. If "Natural Resources" extends our horizons by reaching out for meaning, "Toward the Sol-

stice" compresses our vision by focusing on the past: "I am trying to hold in one steady glance/ all the parts of my life." The poet looks back, reviewing the past before letting it go—"to ease the hold of the past / upon the rest of my life/ and ease my hold on the past." She searches for the rite of separation that will finally set her free, and she longs for some external validation of her desire to leave the past behind. At the same time, she realizes that freedom must come from within herself: It seems I am still waiting for them to make some clear demand some articulate sound or gesture, for release to come from anywhere but from inside myself. Reviewing the textures and patterns of her life, Rich sees a parallel between her efforts to understand her experience and the loving humdrum acts of attention to this house transplanting lilac suckers, washing the panes, scrubbing wood-smoke from splitting paint, sweeping stairs, brushing the thread of the spider aside, and so much yet undone a woman's work Again, an internal physical space represents her psychic life; the effort she expends in caring for the house parallels her efforts to understand and heal her emotional wounds: A decade of cutting away dead flesh, cauterizing old scars ripped open over and over and still it is not enough. The play on the phrase "a woman's work is never done" and the cataloging of household tasks convey the understanding and acceptance of life as process, as effort repeated and renewed

576 / AMERICAN as the spider's web that she uses as a metaphor for history in this poem: "If history is a spiderthread / spun over and over though brushed away." ' Transcendental Etude/' thefinalpoem in this volume, is a sustained vision of a woman whose energies are balanced between the self and the world around her. There is immense strength in this poem—strength based on the capacity for quiet observation as well as for sensitive responsiveness: "Later I stood in the dooiyard, / my nerves singing the immense fragility of all this sweetness.'' The poet has come to a physical and emotional space that permits her to absorb life's varied forms, to appreciate and respond to the plenitude of nature: I've sat on a stone fence above a great, soft, sloping field of musing heifers, a farmstead slanting its planes calmly in the calm light, a dead elm raising bleached arms above a green so dense with life, minute, momentary life—slugs, moles, pheasants, gnats, spiders, moths, hummingbirds, groundhogs, butterflies— a lifetime is too narrow to understand it all, beginning with the huge rockshelves that underlie all that life. This long poem is not broken into sections or parts; the language is lyrical and flows without pause or interruption. Here Rich expresses the intensity of her feelings with her full voice: "a whole new poetry beginning here / Vision begins to happen in such a life." The poem focuses on the experiences of daily life, and Rich uses the example of a woman sitting in the kitchen, making patterns out of "bits of yarn, calico, and velvet scraps," to underscore, once again, her commitment to the commonplace circumstances of ordinary existence. In "Transcendental Etude" Rich is not concerned with mastery or product, "the striving for

WRITERS

greatness, brilliance," but "only with the musing of a mind/ one with her body.'' In this poem she does not separate herself from her actual experience, but finds a ftision of mind and body in everyday events. Like many of her other poems, "Etude" uses the metaphor of spinning and weaving: experienced fingers quietly pushing dark against bright, silk against roughness, pulling the tenets of a life together with no more will to mastery, only care for the many-lived, unending forms in which she finds herself For more than twenty years, Adrienne Rich's poetry has spun the tapestry of her experience as an American woman, tracing the intricate pattern of our lives.

Selected Bibliography WORKS OF

ADRIENNE RICH POEMS

A Change of World. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1951. The Diamond Cutters and Other Poems. New York: Haiper, 1955. Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law. New York: Harper and Row, 1963; reissued, New York: W. W. Norton, 1967; London: Chatto and Windus, 1971. Necessities of Life. New York: W. W. Norton, 1966. Selected Poems. London: Chatto and Windus, 1967. Leaflets. New York: W. W. Norton, 1969: Chatto and Windus, 1972. The Will to Change. New York: W. W. Norton, 1971. London: Chatto and Windus, 1973. Diving into the Wreck. New York: W. W. Norton, 1973. Poems: Selected and New. New York: W. W. Norton, 1975. The Dream of a Common Language. New York: W. W. Norton, 1978.

ADRIENNE RICH I 577 BOOKS

Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and /nstitution. New York: W. W. Norton, 1976.

ESSAYS, REVIEWS, INTRODUCTIONS, FOREWORDS

"Review of The Lordly Hudson by Paul Goodman," New York Review of Books, 1, no. 1:27 (undated, 1963). "Beyond the Heirlooms of Tradition: Review of Found Objects by Louis Zukofsky," Poetry, 105, no. 2: 128-29 (November 1964). "Mr. Bones, He Lives: Review of 77 Dream Songs by John Berryman," Nation, 198, no. 22:538 (May 25, 1964). "On Karl Shapiro's The Bourgeois Poet" in The Contemporary Poet as Artist and Critic, edited by Anthony Ostroff. Boston: Little, Brown, 1964. Pp. 192-94. "Reflections on Lawrence: Review of The Complete Poems of D. H. Lawrence," Poetry, 106, no. 3: 218-25 (June 1965). "For Randall Jarrell," mRandall Jarrell 1914-1965, edited by Robert Lowell, Peter Taylor, and Robert Penn Warren. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1967. Pp. 182-83. ' 'Foreword: Anne Bradstreet and Her Poetry," in The Works of Anne Bradstreet, edited by Jeannine Hensley. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1967. Pp. ix-xx. "Living with Henry: Review of His Toy, His Dream, His Rest by John Berryman," Harvard Advocate (John Berryman Issue), 103, no. 1: 10-11 (Spring 1969). "Review of Pilgrims by Jean Valentine," Chicago Review, 22, no. 1: 128-30 (Autumn 1970). "Introduction to 'Poems from Prison' by Luis Talamantez," Liberation, 16, no. 16: 10 (November 1971). "A Tool or a Weapon: Review of For You and The Clay Hill Anthology by Hayden Carruth," Nation, 213, no. 13: 408-10 (October 25, 1971). "The Anti-Feminist Woman: Review Essay on The New Chastity and Other Arguments Against Women's Liberation by Midge Decter," New York Review of Books, 19, no. 9: 34-40 (November 30, 1972). "Poetry, Personality, and Wholeness: A Response to Gal way Kinnell," Field: Contemporary Poetry and Poetics, 7: 11-18 (Fall 1972). "Review of Welcome Eumenides by Eleanor Ross

Taylor," New York Times Book Review, July 2, 1972, p. 3. "Review of Women and Madness by Phyllis Chester," New York Times Book Review, December 31, 1972, pp. 1,20-21. "Voices in the Wilderness: Review of Monster by Robin Morgan," Washington Post Book World, December 31, 1972, p. 3. "Caryatid: A Column," American Poetry Review, 2, no. 1: 16-17 (January-February 1973); 2, no. 3: 10-11 (May-June 1973); 2, no. 5: 42-43 (September-October 1973). "Jane Eyre: The Temptations of a Motherless Woman," Ms, 2, no. 4: 68-72, 98, 106-07 (October 1973). ' 'Review of The Women Poets in English: An Anthology edited by Ann Stanford," New York Times Book Review, April 15, 1973, p. 6. "The Sisterhood of Man: Review of Beyond God the Father: Toward a Philosophy of Women's Liberation by Mary Daly," Washington Post Book World, November 11, 1973, pp. 2-3. "Teaching Language in Open Admissions: A Look at the Context," in The Uses of Literature, edited by Monroe Engel (Harvard English Studies, 4). Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1973. Adrienne Rich's Poetry, edited by Barbara and Albert Gelpi. New York: W. W. Norton, 1975. In addition to a selection of poetry and essays by Rich, this Norton Critical Edition contains the following essays on Rich's work: W. H. Auden, "Foreword to A Change of World"; Randall Jarrell, "Review of The Diamond Cutters and Other Poems''; Albert Gelpi, "Adrienne Rich: The Poetics of Change"; Robert Boyers, "On Adrienne Rich: Intelligence and Will"; Helen Vendler, "Ghostlier Demarcations, Keener Sounds"; Erica Jong, "Visionary Anger"; Wendy Martin, "From Patriarchy to the Female Principle: A Chronological Reading of Adrienne Rich's Poems"; and Nancy Milford, "This Woman's Movement." "Susan Sontag and Adrienne Rich: Exchange on Feminism, "New York Review of Books, 22, no. 4: 31-32 (March 20, 1975). "Toward a Woman-Centered University," in Women and the Power to Change, edited by Florence Howe. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1975. Pp. 15-46. '' Vesuvius at Home: The Power of Emily Dickinson,'' Parnassus, 5, no. 1: 49-74 (Fall-Winter 1976).

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'When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision," in American Poets in 1976, edited by William Heyen. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1976. Pp. 278-83. "Women's Studies—Renaissance or Revolution," Women's Studies, 3: 121-26(1976). Foreword to The Other Voice, edited by Joanna Bankier et al. New York: W. W. Norton, 1976. Foreword to Working It Out, edited by Sara Ruddick and Pamela Daniels. New York: Pantheon, 1977.

INTERVIEWS WITH ADRIENNE RICH "Adrienne Rich and Robin Morgan Talk About Poetry and Women's Culture," in The New Woman's

Survival Sourcebook, edited by Susan Rennie and Karen Grimstead. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1975. Pp. 106-11. Boyd, Blanche. "An Interview with Adrienne Rich," Christopher Street, 1, no. 7: 9-16 (January 1977). Bulkin, Elly, "An Interview with Adrienne Rich," Conditions, 1, no. 1: 50-65 (Spring 1977). Kalstone, David. "Talking with Adrienne Rich," Saturday Review: The Arts, 4, no. 17:56-59 (April 22, 1972). Plumly, Stanley, Wayne Dodd, and Walter Tevis. "Talking with Adrienne Rich," Ohio Review, 13, no. 1:29-46(1971). Shaw, Robert, and Joan Plotz. "An Interview with Adrienne Rich,91 Island, 1, no. 3: 2-8 (May 1966). —WENDY MARTIN

Harriet Beecher Stowe 1811-1896

A one point during the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln is supposed to have greeted the diminutive, bird-like Mrs. Stowe, who was visiting him in the White House, with the words, "So this is the little lady whose book started this big war." Lincoln was referring to her size, not to her remarkable sensibility, which had impressed him. Fundamentally, she was a broadminded religious writer who was able to unite conservative religious thinking with progressive social action. She believed and helped her countrymen to believe that in blacks, in women, and in certain regional characteristics and aesthetic sensibilities there were ways of being and feeling that an expansive and aggressive nation badly needed to incorporate into its spiritual identity, if it were to survive the nineteenth century with its soul intact. In her writing she unconsciously transformed Sir Walter Scott's dialectic sense of history as a struggle between religious, social, and political forces into a Christian drama in which her characters struggle in ambiguous circumstances with cosmic issues. And she wrote in a language that sparkles with the tension of the issues and the immediacy of the characters. In the development of American realism, she is a key figure between James Fenimore Cooper and Mark Twain, loosening plot structure in favor of character development and dialogue. She is also an American humorist. When Haley,

the slavetrader in Uncle Tom's Cabin, talks about his respectability, we know that his speech belongs in the same tradition as Ben Franklin's justification for eating cod and Huck and Jim's debate over the morality of stealing watermelons. She was also a sentimentalist, but she knew how to use sentimentalism in her novels to show how others could find in their feelings patterns for their lives. Bom in Litchfield, Connecticut on June 14, 1811, Harriet Beecher was a contemporary of a group of authors who published much of their best work during the "American Renaissance" (1850-55). She was seven years younger than Nathaniel Hawthorne and six years older than Henry David Thoreau, and she outlived Herman Melville and Walt Whitman. Uncle Tom's Cabin, her most famous but not her only good book, began to appear serially in 1851—the same year that saw publication of Moby Dick and House of the Seven Gables. Her story became a best seller in book form the next year, while Melville's Pierre and Hawthorne's Blithedale Romance were setting unsold on bookstore shelves. Walden and Leaves of Grass were only two and three years away. She may seem to have more in common with her British contemporaries: with the humor and dialogue of Dickens or the breadth of Thackeray; with the moralistic George Eliot, whom she

579

580 I AMERICAN deeply admired and to whom she frequently wrote; and even with the reformist realism of Mrs. Elizabeth Gaskell and Charles Reade, who used the documentary method of Mrs. Stowe's/1 Key to Uncle Tom1 s Cabin for his own novels. But a second look at the patterns by which her characters move reveals a strikingly orthodox version of her fellow American transcendentalists' beliefs. With Ralph Waldo Emerson, Whitman, and Hawthorne, she shares a strong sense of the transcendent qualities of historical forces—forces that she sees as a Christian order realizing itself in the secular world. She came to agree with Emerson, Hawthorne, and Thoreau that it is an order that is resisted, not so much because of original sin but because one generation passed on to the next its own social systems and ways of being, acting, and feeling, legacies that blocked God's unfolding plan by insisting that the future follow the past. Hawthorne's magnetic chain of humanity has an orthodox counterpart in her sense of a community transcending racial, sexual, and regional boundaries and centered in a brotherhood and sisterhood of the heart deeper than any bond of the mind. She changed the old Calvinist demand that the believer be willing to be damned for the glory of God into a prescription for acting and suffering with Christ on behalf of the oppressed. She preached, thereby, a harder gospel of social action than most of her fellow American romantics. She felt, with Melville, that the self realizes itself only by confronting the world; with Hawthorne, that sin can be educative; and with Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman, that the individual is not a sleepwalker between two worlds but a nexus of history—of God's plan—and that waking to this fact transforms the individual's relation to his world. Her family first taught her to see the connections between the imminent and the transcendent. The daughter of the Reverend Lyman

WRITERS

Beecher and Roxanna Foote, she was the seventh of nine children in a remarkable theological family. Later, there would be two stepmothers and more children. Lyman Beecher, a Presbyterian, lived intensely with his children and his God. His mother had died in giving him birth, and his father, a blacksmith, shipped him off to be brought up by relatives. Later, Beecher went to Timothy Dwight's conservative Yale to fight liberalism, unitarianism, and republicanism. Perhaps his early disappointment with his earthly father later led him to modify his ideas of the believer's relationship with his heavenly one. Through the influence of a more liberal friend, the clergyman Nathaniel W. Taylor, he came to believe that freedom of choice was compatible with God's purposes. His stress on man's possibilities later brought upon him a series of heresy trials from old-school Presbyterians. At Yale he also learned the revival methods that orthodox ministers were using to harvest souls and to fight the "blight" of notional and ethical Christianity sweeping Harvard. Later, Lyman's doctrinal tinkering to widen the gates for church members helped his children in further tinkering of their own, to broaden and apply orthodox doctrine. Lyman Beecher was colorful. Craving intimate family relationships, he shared his exaltations and depressions freely. When he was wound up from worship or duties, he could relax in the middle of the family playing a violin— badly—and dancing. Harriet Beecher later remembered one tune, "Go to the Devil and Shake Yourself." He loved reading Byron and wished the poet had swept his harp for Christ. He came to approve of Scott's tales and lightened kitchen chores by urging the children to retell the plots. He had a good sense of humor and a lively sense of the ridiculous, even when he was its object. While he was leading a temperance crusade in Boston, his church caught fire. The church basement was leased to a liquor dealer, and when the firemen brought the hoses they howled with de-

HARRIET BEECHER STOWE I 581 light as they saw the blue flames licking up from the building, which they promptly nicknamed Beecher's Jug. The next morning, Beecher broke the austerity of his church council by announcing "My jug is broke!" His congregation got him a new one. Harriet Beecher's mother was more polished and more retiring. She came from a "better" family, read widely, and spoke French—at that time the language of atheism and republicanism. She was Episcopalian, but she permitted her husband to bring her—as he was later to bring many of his own children—to a lively sense of her inadequacy and to a hope for grace. Harriet Beecher recalled her mother as "one of those strong, restful, yet widely sympathetic natures in whom all around seem to find comfort and repose." Her death when Harriet was five left an enormous emotional vacuum in both Harriet and her younger brother Henry Ward. Shortly before Roxanna Beecher died, she told her husband of premonitions and visions of heavenly splendor, adding, while shivering lightly, that she would not be much longer for this world. Shortly afterward, she died of galloping consumption, her devoted family standing by. Lyman said he felt like a child, terrified and shut out in the dark. We can imagine what Harriet felt. Her older sister Catharine, her father's favorite, replaced her mother in the household, serving Harriet as surrogate mother and later, with Harriet's older brother Edward, as spiritual midwife. A life is shaped by the pattern of responses to events that are chosen as significant. The death of Harriet's mother, her separation from her childhood home at the age of thirteen, and her subsequent need to accept and give mothering play a central part in her books and life. In these events lie the beginnings of her emotional strategy to remake the world around her to yield her the mothering—the emotional support—she needed. Still later, her background gave her insight into the consequences of the lack of social

mothering—of feminine nurture—in American culture. Harriet Beecher was born to a religious generation that stressed the differences between the individual and the godhead and that bred strong, torturing doubts about the individual's acceptability as a person. Her own life at first confirmed this sense of cosmic separation, which became the framework upon which subsequent losses would weave themselves into her life. In later years, she made her son Charles begin his biography of her with the account of her mother's death—a memory that stayed with her through her life "as the tenderest, saddest, and most sacred memory of her childhood." Henry Ward Beecher later improved upon this idealization by analogizing their mother's role in their family with that of the Virgin Mary for Catholics. Harriet's sensitivity to death was sharpened throughout her life. Her parents had given her the name, room, crib, and bedding of another little girl who had died three years before Harriet was born. Her sense of vicarious participation in death was severe. When she was nine her little stepbrother Freddy died from scarlet fever. She also came down with the disease and nearly died. Later, she was to lose two of her own sons. In Poganuc People, a rather thinly veiled autobiography of her youth, we see some of Harriet's childhood through the eyes of Dolly Gushing, whose girlhood lot it was "to enter the family at a period when babies were no longer a novelty'' and consequently to be ' 'disposed of as she grew up in all those short-hand methods by which children were taught to be the least possible trouble to their elders." Lively at times, at times abstracted, Harriet seemed to those around her melancholy, even depressed. In 1824 Catharine brought her to live in Hartford, where she had set up a woman's seminary. She hoped that meeting girls her own age would lighten Harriet's depression.

582 I AMERICAN It is possible to make both too much and too little out of Harriet Beecher's childhood. The death of her mother, which awakened her spiritually; the physical separation from her childhood home; and, later, the regional separation from her native New England were experiences personal to her yet widely shared by a whole generation of Americans and American writers. (Consider how different the work of Emerson, and Hawthorne, Melville, and Whitman might have been had any of them experienced paternal continuity. What would have happened to Hawthorne's preoccupation with the theme of filial disloyalty? to Emerson's gently iconoclastic transcendentalism? to Melville's concern with capricious deities, and to Whitman's trying on of male masks?) Harriet's spiritual solution, her sentimentalism, is one complemental and feminine response to a dilemma that we have been more trained to recognize in our male authors as furnishing much of the energy behind their Romantic iconoclasm. A sense of exile from the patent's world (often underscored by the absence in the writer's family of one parent) is a feeling that occurs repeatedly in nineteenth-century literature and finds expression in that standard figure of fiction, the orphan or bachelor who must make his world anew. Luckily for Harriet, she had older brothers and sisters, and it was Catharine and Edward who bridged for her the gaps between her parents' world and her own. Catharine and Edward, the two older children, were, according to her son, Charles, her closest spiritual advisors and, significantly, they were present while she wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin. Their own adjustments to their father's world helped Harriet's own development. Temperamentally and spiritually closest to her father, Catharine was curious and energetic, but she was precluded by her sex from training for the ministry. Unable, perhaps, to accept her exclusion from a cultural role that claimed all her younger brothers, she resisted the conversion ex-

WRITERS

perience—the first stage of which usually demanded that the believer express a strong conviction of personal depravity. When Lyman Beecher brought in his sons to help his favorite child through this stage, he only frightened Catharine, making her more resistant. While she struggled, she became engaged to Alexander Metcalf Fisher, a brilliant young Yale mathematician who had taught her brother Edward. After their engagement, in 1822, Fisher sailed for Europe to gather books and equipment for a promising career. But his boat foundered off the Irish coast, and he was drowned. Grief-stricken, Catharine fled the home where her father and brothers lost no time in urging her to see in Fisher's untimely death a warning for her own spiritual estate. She spent the next year living with Fisher's parents where, reading her fiance's diary, she found to her horror that he too had remained technically unconverted because, much like herself, he had not experienced lively feelings of his own depravity. At the end of this trying period, Catharine opened a new spiritual ledger with her God and started a new system of accounting. She could not imagine that God had cast out Fisher and her from heaven; this would be to imagine a cruel and vengeful deity utterly incompatible with the spirit of suffering love revealed in Jesus Christ. Since the path of conversion seemed closed to her as a means of salvation, she decided to make a life of sacrifice her path to sanctification. She would remain single and devote herself to the spiritual uplift of American women. She began the project by setting up the Hartford Female Academy, which drew upon the daughters of the prominent and taught them to become not just ornaments in the drawing room but useful in society. Under Edward Beecher's spiritual guidance Catharine Beecher shifted her intellectual and emotional allegiance from God the Father to God the Son, in whose life of redemptive suffering she found values that spoke particularly to women. She took those values of self-sacrifice

HARRIET BEECHER STOWE I 583 and submission and made them the cornerstone of a new religion of feminine domesticity that elevated the home and the school into secular churches, with the woman ministering a still center of spiritual and cultural uplift to her family. Eventually, her feminine ideal modeled on the compassion and sufferings of Christ, the Man of Sorrows, became one pole of the nineteenthcentury feminist movement to help heal the growing social, racial, and geographic antagonisms in an aggressive and expansive maledominated culture. She spent her life with the help of others—Harriet included—putting her ideals to work by setting up normal schools to train women to educate the rising generations in the Midwest. Catharine's role let Harriet identify her unresolved grief for her mother with the grief expressed by Christ and led her to see the tie between her own lack of mothering and a general lack of social mothering in a masculine culture. Through Catharine's presence and thinking, Harriet found her needs confirmed and her talents legitimized, first in her role as a teacher at Catharine's school and later as a fiercely devoted mother and as the harassed wife of an intelligent but impractical and underpaid seminary professor. The summer that Catharine began to resolve her conversion struggles found Harriet still unregenerate. A year later, at the age of fourteen, Harriet Beecher felt sad during a sermon preached by her father as she thought 4 4that when all the good people should take the sanctified bread and wine I should be left out. . . . " Lyman Beecher had abandoned his usual notes and was speaking from his heart about God's patience and love in the figure of Christ. Harriet, who called her father's usual preaching "as intelligible as Choctaw," felt at that moment warm and accepted, and when she related her feelings to her father after the service he tearfully (perhaps overeagerly) accepted her as the latest flower sprung forth in the Kingdom of God. The experience did not last, however, and it did not change her ideas of God or of herself.

Her God quickly regained old-fashioned proportions, and a year later she was still dreamy, peevish, and depressed. When she came to Hartford, Catharine pressed her to write Edward, who urged her to see in Christ the primary revelation in history of God and to take him as a friend. Depressed, she could not at first frame for herself a god other than a judging Jehovah. But Edward urged her to draw closer and to address God as a familiar friend. Still, to the girl who was not yet friends with herself, to use "easy and familiar expressions of attachment and that sort of confidential communication which I should address to papa or you would be improper for a subject to address to a King, much less for us to address the King of Kings. The language of prayer is of necessity stately and formal, and we cannot clothe all the little minutiae of our wants and troubles in it." But Edward's steady urging to find in Christ's acceptance of her, her own acceptance of herself wins through, and her resistance dissolves into playfulness. A year later she shared her excitement of their mutual feelings about Jesus: Oh, Edward, you can feel as I do; you can speak of Him! There are few, very few who can. Christians in general [and Harriet, for most of her youth] do not seem to look to him as their best friend, or realize anything of His unutterable love. They speak with a cold, vague, reverential awe, but do not speak as if in the habit of close and near communion; as if they confided to Him every joy and sorrow and constantly looked to Him for direction and guidance. . . . Edward helped Harriet find an accepting savior in the figure of a suffering and compassionate Christ, and Harriet went on to connect her brother's figure of the biblical Christ with her sister Catharine's feminine ideal of a motherly, self-sacrificing teacher. In the same letter to Edward she writes: "I love most to look on Christ as my teacher, as one who, knowing the utmost of my sinfulness, my waywardness, my failing,

584 I AMERICAN can still have patience; can reform; purify and daily make me more like myself." Her new insight was not won without backsliding, but by 1832 we find her writing a close friend: ''Well, there is a heaven, —a heaven, —a world of love, and love after all is the life blood, the existence, the all in all of mind." Edward helped mediate for her a new kind of God and also a new sense that God was making history all around her. The opening of Western lands that promised economic growth brought with it a feeling of national expansiveness. Lyman and Edward Beecher, too canny to shut up their God in their Bibles, saw in the great national movement West and in the accompanying ferment of spiritual uplift, God visibly writing history all about them. They decided to move West as a vanguard, reaping for orthodoxy and their God a harvest of souls in the Mississippi River valley, which would counter their waning cultural influence back East. Edward went first, and when Lyman was offered the presidency of the newly founded Lane Theological Seminary at Walnut Hills, near Cincinnati, he came back with a glowing report of the city and its possibilities. In 1832 the Beechers set out overland. They liked to recall themselves as a noisy hymn-singing caravan, passing out tracts and preaching in pulpits along the way. Perhaps they were whistling in the dark for courage. When they finally arrived in Cincinnati, they congratulated themselves on their decision by admiring the city's elegance and prosperity, its religious tone, and the number of settlers from New England. Harriet helped Catharine set up the Western Female Institute, modeled upon the Hartford seminary, and she assisted her father and stepmother with the household. There were pleasures as well as duties. On Monday nights, she visited the literary SemiColon Club in the company of Cincinnati's cul-

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tural spokesmen. Here she and other family members would hear the news and listen to essays, stories, and poetry being read and discussed. Guiding spirits at the club were Samuel Foote, her mother's brother and a former captain; the prominent Cincinnatians Dr. Daniel Drake and his brother Benjamin, who had published accounts of the city; the lawyer Salmon P. Chase; Caroline Lee Hentz, a nationally recognized author; and the enterprising Judge James Hall, who had founded the West's first literary periodical, The Western Monthly Magazine. With his program of cheerfulness, uplift, and regionalism, he gave direction to the literary soirees. As a child, Harriet Beecher had read most of the literary figures of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as well as childhood favorites such as nursery tales, The Arabian Nights, and even Cotton Mather's fascinatingly repellent Magnalia. But, for her, reading and writing were not only pastimes but a separate world both visited and created. Edward Wagenknecht's biography has rescued for us Edward Everett Hale's memory of her engrossment as an adult: I have seen her come into the house to make a friendly visit, and take up a book within the first half-hour of that visit and interest herself in it, and then sit absorbed in nothing else, till it was time for her to go home in the evening. I have known her, simply because she had an interesting book in her hand . . . take a streetcar going out of town and ride three or four miles without observing that she should have been going in the other direction. She never lost the child's habit of visualizing the scenes on the page. As a writer, she drew upon her talent for visualization to guide her composition. She would not write until she had a clear and living picture in her mind from which she could literally sketch. This made her art

HARRIET BEECHER STOWE I 585 seem like a succession of tableaux, but it gave both characters and dialogue a reality missing from the pages of James Fenimore Cooper, who built his characters slowly and laboriously by amassing external details. Haniet Beecher, supported by the reality of the picture she visualized while she wrote, dispensed with Cooper-like long narrative introductions. With a few bold strokes, she set her characters talking in the parlor, knowing that their life was confirmed every step of the way in the next move she had visualized for them. "You don't know," Harriet Beecher wrote to her childhood friend Georgiana Day back East, "how coming away from New England has sentimentalized us all." Harriet discovered her past after she had broken with it, sensing for the first time the human geography of her native region across the gulf of intervening states. At the Semi-Colon Club she shared her recollections with other New England members just as Washington Irving had shared, scarcely ten years earlier, an older New York and a lost England. In the spring of 1834, she won first prize for her story "Uncle Lot" in a competition to exemplify Judge Hall's literary program. It is a New England sketch that Hall had probably heard read at the club in another version the previous fall. "Uncle Lot" and another early story, "Love versus Law," were printed together with other stories arguing for temperance, charity, and uplift in her first collection, The Mayflower, in 1843. "Uncle Lot" and "Love versus Law" are especially interesting because they illustrate the typical way that she sizes up and resolves human dilemmas, and because she catches a regional consciousness with the eye and the ear. They show her to be a sentimental realist. Uncle Lot is a "chestnut burr, abounding with briers without and with substantial goodness within. . . ."He has, too, "a kindly heart; but

all the strata of his character were crossed by a vein of surly petulance, that, half way between joke and earnest, colored every thing that he said and did." He is father to Grace, the heroine, who is being courted by young James. But James has "too much of the boy and the rogue in his composition" to please Uncle Lot. At meeting, James leads the singing with a flute rather than a pitchpipe. His freedom, energy, and amplitude of spirit anger Uncle Lot, who marches more to the dead beat of convention. It takes George Griswold, Uncle Lot's son who has come home from seminary, to mediate their differences. Around George, all wrangling seems out of place. Even the disputatious congregation "dispersed with the air of people who had felt rather than heard." James makes George's acquaintance, which deepens with time and with George's failing health. When George lies bedridden, Uncle Lot, who dismissed James as a callow youth, is moved by his care. When George dies, the bereft Uncle Lot adopts James and gives him money for college. So sentimental a death is yet touched with the comic pathos of Uncle Lot's petulant agony in a corner of the death room: "I suppose the Lord's will must be done, but it'll kill me." Haniet Beecher's concern with the sensibility of her region extends into the setting. The relationship of the houses to each other—each has a different color and is planted every which way— tells us about the inhabitants. They in turn are described in terms of their houses: "The natives grew old till they could not grow any older, and then they stood still, and lasted from generation to generation." Character is sketched dramatically and with an ear cocked to regional dialect. A boy comes to borrow Uncle Lot's hoe: "Why don't your father use his own hoe?" "Ours is broke." "Broke! How came it broke?"

"I broke it yesterday, trying to hit a squirrel."

586 / AMERICAN "What business had you to be hittin' squirrels with a hoe? say!" "But father wants to borrow yours." "Why don't you have that mended? It's a great pester to have every body usin' a body's things." "Well, I can borrow one some where else, I suppose," says the suppliant. After the boy has stumbled across the ploughed ground, and is fairly over the fence, Uncle Lot calls,— "Halloo, there, you little rascal! what are you goin' off without the hoe for?" "I didn't know as you meant to lend it." "I didn't say I wouldn't, did I? Here, come and take it—stay, I'll bring it; and do tell your father not to be a lettin' you hunt squirrels with his hoes next time." In "Love versus Law" Deacon Enos mediates between the quarreling factions. "That God was great and good, and that we were all sinners, were truths that seemed to have melted into the heart of Deacon Enos, so that his very soul and spirit were bowed down with them." It is Uncle Jaw, Deacon Enos' neighbor, who is the problem in this story. He is "tall and hard-favored, with an expression of countenance much resembling a northeast rain storm—a drizzling, settled sulkiness, that seemed to defy all prospect of clearing off, and to take comfort in its own disagreeableness." Jaw has a long-standing dispute with Jones over an old rail fence that might have set his property lines "a leetle more to the left hand. . . . " When Jones dies he tries to prosecute his case on the elder daughter, Silence jonesr—a "tall, strong, black-eyed, hard-featured woman, verging upon forty, with a good, loud, resolute voice, and what the Irishman would call 'a dacent notion of using it.' " Since the Deacon has been cheated by Jones in another matter, Jaw tries to pull him into his case, but the good Deacon refuses—with good reason. He is quietly matchmaking between Uncle Jaw's son,

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Joseph, and Jones's youngest daughter, Susan. He marries off the couple and settles his own disputed portion of the land on the newlyweds. Jaw, who always judges things by their price, is so staggered by this act of magnanimity as to be "materially changed for the better." He is heard to declare at the funeral of the old Deacon: "after all, a man got as much, and may be more, to go along as the deacon did, than to be all the time fisting and jawing; though I tell you what it is," he said afterward, " 'tain't every one that has the deacon '$ faculty, anyhow." What surprises in these stories is the amplitude of Harriet Beecher's religious vision. Jaw and Lot are genuine sensibilities seen with a sharp but accepting eye. After their conversion, they still have streaks of their former selves. Sin is not the usual array of melodramatic vices—cards, rum, truancy—but is reinterpreted as spiritual repression. Grace says of her father, Uncle Lot: "He is the kindest man that ever was . . . and he always acts as if he was ashamed of it." Conversion is to be freed from repression and to experience a greater freedom in living out one's better impulses, rather than to demonstrate obsessively pious behavior. Deacon Enos and George Griswold work their cures through acceptance rather than by playing on guilt. The stories published in The Mayflower are examples of Harriet Beecher's apprenticeship work; "The Old Meeting House" and "Old Father Morris" also explore New England's religious sensibilities. The largest group of stories has women and children and their roles as its focus. "Earthly Care a Heavenly Discipline" shows in womanly suffering the same kind of road to salvation that Longfellow was painting in Evangeline, while "Christmas, or the Good Fairy" and "The Coral Ring" rouse the daughters of the wealthy from their vapors on the ottoman and send them scampering down the streets on errands of mercy. These exhibit Catharine's spell on her younger sister. "The Minis-

HARRIET BEECHER STOWE I 587 tration of Our Departed Friends" depicts a dead mother's influence over the living, and "A Scene in Jerusalem" forges an emotional connection between the suffering of Jesus and maternal suffering. * 'Children," 'The New Year's Gift," "Little Fred, the Canal Boy," "Aunt Mary,'' and * 'Little Edward'' deal in sentimental fashion with children; while "The Sabbath" and "Conversation on Conversation" take up the role of Sunday schools for debate. Harriet Beecher's life in Cincinnati from 1832 to 1850 was drab, punctuated by poverty and illness in the home, violence and pestilence in the city, and dissension and controversy in the seminary. Eventually problems with health and financial security drove Harriet and her family back to New England. In 1836—only four years after leaving New England—she had married Calvin Stowe, a seminary professor whose wife Eliza—a close friend of Harriet's—had died in 1833. Stocky and gregarious, Calvin had been a class ahead of Hawthorne and Longfellow at Bowdoin. He was trusted and liked by his peers; and he enjoyed posing, as did Lyman, as a yankee hick, telling stories in dialect that his wife would later use in Oldtown Folks and Sam Lawson's Oldtown Fireside Stories. An eminent Biblical historian, he adjusted to his wife's subsequent fame, taking advantage of the financial freedom it offered to do research. Their letters show much exasperated cameraderie, exhortations, consolations, teasings, pleadings, and humor. With marriage came shabby gentility, bearing and rearing of children, and supervision of the household—with its close, hard, mean work leading to overwork, exhaustion, depression, and breakdowns. If in an occasional letter Harriet Beecher Stowe strikes the pose of the harried housewife who wouldn't give it up for the world, a letter to Calvin in 1845 reveals: "I'm sick of the smell of sour milk, and sour meat, and sour

everything, and then the clothes will not dry, and no wet thing does, and everything smells mouldy . . . I feel no life, no energy, no appetite." In following years both she and Calvin took yearlong rests and water cures at Brattleborough, Vermont; yet back in Cincinnati, psychosomatic illnesses would recur. Meanwhile, Cincinnati, the Queen City of the West, was showing an uglier side. When James G. Bimey brought out the Philanthropist, an abolitionist newspaper, in 1836, prominent citizens had their sons lead a mob against him and his assistant, Dr. Gamaliel Bailey. Not content with dumping Bimey's press in the Ohio, the mob "lost control" and burned down the black district. Another, bloodier race riot broke out in 1841; and the mob ravaged in 1842,1843,1844, and 1845. Then, cholera struck—lightly in 1848 and severely in the summer of 1849 when, during the Fourth of July weekend alone, more than a thousand people died. On July 20 Harriet Beecher Stowe's son Samuel Charles succumbed. To Calvin, who was back East, Harriet Stowe wrote: "Many an anxious night have I held him to my bosom and felt the sorrow and loneliness pass out of me with the touch of his little warm hands. Yet I have just seen him in his death agony, looked on his imploring face when I could not help nor soothe nor do one thing, not one, to mitigate his cruel suffering, do nothing but pray in my anguish that he might die soon." Impoverished, with one child dead, several others to be tended, and Harriet pregnant again, Calvin returned to Cincinnati. The offer he had received of the most poorly paid post at Bowdoin must have felt to both of them like a deliverance out of Egypt. Looking back, the Beechers barely endured. Conservative trustees at Lane Seminary brought upon Lyman a series of heresy trials to discredit him and regain control of the seminary. Between trials, Lane was besieged by liberals as well. Theodore Weld, an older evangelical student

588 I AMERICAN who had recruited other students to Lane, had been converted to William Lloyd Garrison's brand of abolitionism and tried to focus the seminarians ' religious energies by holding debates on abolition—a delicate matter in 1834 in the border town of Cincinnati with its commercial ties to the South. Lyman Beecher, a gradualist at best, resisted the idea of the debates; but while he was off East, the acting president forbade the discussion, and the angry students held their debate and scandalized the citizens by fraternizing with blacks on the streets. Weld wrote to Arthur Tappan, a wealthy New York philanthropist whom he had converted to Garrisonism and who was also Lane's financial backer, asking for Tappan 's support. Weld then took a good part of Lane's student body and enrolled himself and them at Oberlin with Tappan's backing. In 1835, Garrison's Liberator issued a statement from the seceding students calling Lane "a Bastille of oppression." Lyman, who disliked Garrison's denunciatory tactics, denounced the abolitionists as "a mixture of vinegar, aqua fortis, and oil of vitriol, with brimstone, saltpetre, and charcoal to explode and scatter the corrosive matter." But Weld's successful coup debilitated the seminary, and Lyman Beecher lived to see Oberlin rather than Lane fill Western pastorates. "It may not be clear why slavery and theology should go hand in hand,'' Charles Beecher wrote to explain his older brother Edward's commitment to antislavery—a commitment that was to engage all the family members— But if we reflect that theology is but another name for the politics of the universe, or the kingdom of God, the problem becomes simple. Two systems or schools of theology were contending at that time Old School and New School. The former enthrones absolutism, the latter constitutionalism. According to the one things are right because God wills them, according to others,

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God wills them because they are right. The Old School theology enthrones a Great Slaveholder over the Universe; New School enthrones a Great Emancipator. The Beechers simply applied consistently for their democratic times the social consequences of their theological stance. Having found in Christ's suffering love the historical pattern for human relationships in God's universe, they saw that the old master-slave relationship had to be discarded along with other signs of an outworn dispensation: God's arbitrary Lordship, which propped up the absolute monarchies and kept the people servile. Contrary to popular belief, the Beechers' familiarity with abolition was of long standing. William Lloyd Garrison had been a member of Lyman's Boston congregation in 1829, and James G. Birney had heard Lyman preach in Boston in 1830 while he visited Catharine Beecher's Hartford seminary. Birney later reprinted several stories by Harriet Beecher Stowe. In November 1837, Edward's friend and former congregational member, Elijah P. Lovejoy, who had helped Edward form the Illinois AntiSlavery Society, was killed and his press destroyed by a mob at Alton, Illinois. Edward wrote the nationally distributed Narrative of the scandal in 1838, while Calvin preached the sermon at Lane on Lovejoy's death. By 1837 all of Lyman's sons by Roxanna had become committed to the antislaveiy movement with the exception of young Henry Ward, who later electrified the country by introducing black women during services in his elegant Plymouth Church in Brooklyn and making his congregation buy the women's freedom by passing the plate. One more event in Cincinnati deserves mention. In 1837 and 1838 Alexander Kinmont, a midwestern proponent of Swedenborgianism, gave a series of twelve lectures ' 'on the natural history of man," which spun a new racial my-

HARRIET BEECHER STOWE I 589 thology about blacks and whites. Pointing out intellectual development and material expansion as dominant characteristics of an evolving white race, Kinmont urged that blacks also had a role in the progress of mankind perhaps more important than whites: to illustrate the Christian ideal of service and to create in Africa a far nobler civilization than the hardheaded and aggressive Anglo-Saxon race had achieved in America—a civilization that would show the divine attributes of Christianity: compassion and mercy. It is quite probable that Harriet Beecher Stowe attended the series or read Kinmont's lectures, which were published in 1839, or later came in touch with his widely propagated ideas through William Ellery Channing. George M. Fredrickson suggests a meeting of minds in The Black Image in the White Mind and shows that she drew on his ideas for Uncle Tom's Cabin. His ideas would be all the more attractive to her because blacks assumed in Kinmont's thinking the same countercultural function as women did in Catharine Beecher's feminism. Both Kinmont and Catharine Beecher saw as the dominant threat to a Christian civilization a ruthlessly hardheaded and aggressively expansionist culture. American culture, Harriet believed, would need to be complemented by softer qualities— black and female—in order to be spiritually fulfilled. Strictly speaking, it is the public, not the author, that makes a best seller. Uncle Tom's Cabin did not so much cause a sensation as confirm the existence of it and focus it so dramatically that many generations have found it impossible to think about slavery outside the pictures it created. The inspiration for the book came, Harriet Stowe later liked to recall, during a Sunday communion service in Brunswick as she tried to imagine the death of a pious black man at the hands of a white master. We may only guess that what happened during this mo-

ment was that her perception of her black victim fused with her prior thinking about feminine and Christian self-sacrifice and that she saw suddenly that she could treat the issue of race in the same way that she and Catharine had celebrated women: as a redemptive, countercultural, and Christian force. She rushed home in tears and wrote the incident down before it faded away. The white master in her reverie took the shape of a burly white whom her brother Charles had met years back in New Orleans. He had flexed his muscles and bragged that he got them from "knocking down niggers." In her fiction, he became a transplanted Vermont yankee running a plantation as if it were a northern factory. Hardhearted as well as hardheaded, he has rejected the social graces of the plantation way of life to pursue his lonely profit. He is the son of a drunkard and has spurned his mother and suppressed his softer side in order to conquer the world. He is calculating and brutal, but not stupid. He stands for the darker side of a "go-ahead" ideology and has sensed in Tom qualities that would fit him for a spot in his hierarchy—if only he'd forget that nonsense about the Bible: "Come, Tom, don't you think you'd better be reasonable?—heave that 'ar old pack of trash in the fire, and join my church!" "The Lord forbid!" said Tom fervently. "You see the Lord an't going to help you: if he had been, he wouldn't have let me get you! This yer religion is all a mess of lying trumpery, Tom. I know all about it. Ye'd better hold to me I'm somebody, and can do something!" "Father" Josiah Henson, a well-known, pious, fugitive slave whom Stowe knew, filled out the dim figure of Uncle Tom. In this black figure, who was to be torn from his family and sold down the Mississippi to meet a martyr's death, she invested her accumulated feelings about separation, victimization, and motherly self-sacrifice. At the opening of the novel, he is

590 / AMERICAN stroking young George Shelby's hair and speaking to him in a voice "gentle as a woman's." When Calvin Stowe read his wife's description of Uncle Tom's death, he wept over it much as leaders had wept over the passing of Dickens' Little Nell a decade earlier. Most of all, he urged her to continue it, and with his encouragement Harriet Stowe committed herself to a serial for Gamaliel Bailey's antislavery weekly, the National Era. The book simply "grew up" around the scene that occurs late in the finished novel. Here, the characters step out of their naturalistic roles to become, momentarily, figures in a cosmic drama and a cultural debate: Legree drew in a long breath; and, suppressing his rage, took Tom by the arm, and, approaching his face almost to his, said in a terrible voice, "Hark 'e, Tom!—ye think, 'cause I've let you off before, I don't mean what I say; but, this time, I've made up my mind, and counted the cost. You've always stood it out agin' me: now 111 conquer ye or kill ye!—one or t'other. I'll count every drop of blood there is in you, and take 'em, one by one, till ye give up!" Tom looked up to his master, and answered, "Mas'r, if you was sick, or in trouble, or dying, and I could save ye, I'd give ye my heart's blood; and, if taking every drop of blood in this poor old body would save your precious soul, I'd give 'em freely, as the Lord gave his for me. O, Mas'r! don't bring this great sin on your soul! It will hurt you more than 't will me! Do the worst you can, my troubles'11 be over soon; but, if ye don't repent, yours won't ever end!" Like a strange snatch of heavenly music, heard in the lull of a tempest, this burst of feeling made a moment's blank pause. Legree stood aghast, and looked at Tom; and there was such a silence that the tick of the old clock could be heard, measuring, with silent touch, the last moments of mercy and probation to that hardened heart.

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It was but a moment. There was one hesitating pause,—one irresolute, relenting thrill,—and the spirit of evil came back, with sevenfold vehemence; and Legree, foaming with rage, smote his victim to the ground. Legree overreacts because Tom reminds him of the side of himself that he has suppressed. Tom's offer of a qualitatively new life has caught Legree off guard by the sheer genius of its insight into his condition. The blank pause during which the clock ticks off those last minutes of grace extended to a hardened sinner captures those moments of self-despair in which a figure from a dominant and aggressive culture is tempted by the vision of a better way in the culture he has just subjugated—only to follow up his insight with an even more desperate betrayal. What amazes about the dramatic climax is that Legree is damned to hell, not just that Tom is sent to heaven. It is Legree, then, and not the South who is the national demon. Twenty years of thinking about the repressed and calculating Uncle Jaw led Harriet Stowe to sense the connection between her regional stereotype and a national characteristic: the pursuit of profit without a motive. It is natural for Legree to ' "make up his mind'' and * 'to conquer.'' That he has * 'counted the cost" to "count every drop of blood" is simply an extreme case of business as usual in an economic system that transforms human beings into property. As a representative of the system that gave him birth, Legree is as American as apple pie, and Harriet Stowe saw that the American sin was his state of mind. He is the symptom of a fundamental cultural malaise in what she saw as the Anglo-Saxon race. The contours of earlier debates between the head and the heart, and between law and grace, yield her, tentatively, to a racial conflict between a hard, masculine Anglo-Saxon race bent upon domination and the values represented by women, children, and blacks acting out visibly God's love in history.

HARRIET BEECHER STOWE I 591 This conflict of values touches nearly every character and relationship in the novel. It splits the personality of George Harris, a mulatto modeled upon Frederick Douglass, whose character and career counterpoint Uncle Tom's. From a white father he inherits allegedly white qualities—an excellent mind and a proud and independent spirit; but from his black mother, his legacy is that of bondage and sensitivity. His militancy and atheism (alienated "white" values) must be redeemed by complemental feminine and "black" values in the Quaker home of Rachel Halliday, who presides over a domestic life centered around Christian charity. Harriet Stowe shared with her brother Edward the perception that slavery was an organic sin, a state of society into which one was born, and not the personal sin that Garrison was denouncing. This insight allowed her to create a rich and complex group of characters, neither very wicked nor very good, whose efforts to struggle with the issues are undercut by the economic system in which they are trapped. The cultured and kindhearted Mrs. Shelby could have graduated from Catharine Beecher's Hartford seminary. When her husband's finances require him to sell Uncle Tom and Eliza's son, she sees their economic base turning into a moral abyss: "How," she asks her husband—who will absent himself on the day of the sale to spare his feelings—"can I bear to have this open acknowledgement that we care for no tie, no duty, no relation, however sacred, compared with money?" Worse, she realizes her false position: "It is a sin to hold a slave under laws like ours . . . but I thought I could gild it over,—I thought, by kindness, and care, and instruction, I could make the condition of mine better than freedom,—fool that I was!" Tom's next master is already so demoralized that he has refused to play any role at all. Augustine St. Clare is a Byronic figure alienated from his slave-holding father, brother, and society.

From his willful and autocratic father he has inherited all the perquisites of noblesse, but from his mother, a deeply sensitive nature, an abhorrence of slavery, and a frustrated sense of oblige. Pursuing a course of indulgent anarchy, he cannot bring himself to discipline the servants—they have not been taught better—nor to free them— they would simply be outcasts in a society that has not taught them anything useful. "Some how or other," he explains to his northern Aunt Ophelia, "instead of being actor and regenerator in society, I became a piece of driftwood, and have been floating and eddying about, ever since." But Ophelia has herself lost her soul. She is a bondslave to her sense of moral obligation; for her the word love has been transmuted by a New England alembic into duty. Her energetic determination to set things right doesn't fool Topsy, who spots the truth about her chill virtue: "she can't bar me, 'cause I'm a nigger!— she'd 's soon have a toad touch her!" For these broken figures Harriet Beecher Stowe affirms a possible cosmic destiny: of awakening to the power of God's transforming love in history, a love represented by Little Eva, trailing clouds of glory with her; in the suffering sacrifice of women such as Rachel Halliday and Mrs. Bird; and in the racial character of Uncle Tom, who is the culminating example of a new Christian consciousness to which Africa is the key: If ever Africa shall show an elevated and cultivated race,—and come it must, some time, her turn to figure in the great drama of human improvement—life will awaken there with a gorgeousness and splendor of which our cold western tribes faintly have conceived. In that faroff mystic land of gold, and gems, and spices, and waving palms, and wondrous flowers, and miraculous fertility, will awake new forms of art . . . and the negro race . . . will, perhaps, show forth some of the latest and most magnifi-

592 / AMERICAN cent revelations of human life. Certainly they will in their gentleness, their lowly docility of heart, their aptitude to repose on a superior mind and to rest on a higher power, their childlike simplicity of affection, and facility of forgiveness . . . they will exhibit the highest form of the peculiarly Christian life. . . . Readers who reject this pastoral racial mythology should realize the needs that it satisfied and the cultural functions that it served: to awaken whites to the necessity of recovering their humanity. In this function, American attitudes toward race have not significantly advanced beyond that of Mrs. Stowe. For the figure of Uncle Tom, our times have unfairly substituted the figure of the black hipster, or performer, or radical to carry the burden of our own liberation. In Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp (1856), Mrs. Stowe tried to develop a further scenario: what might happen to a religious black figure tortured beyond endurance? The result is the character of Dred, an impressive achievement. He is a full black of magnificent stature and high intellectual demeanor modeled upon Denmark Vesey. He is a biblical prophet of wrath and judgment, who has assembled a group of fugitives in a swamp retreat to strike out in vengeance when God shall give the sign: The large eyes had that peculiar and solemn effect of unfathomable blackness and darkness which is often a striking characteristic of the African eye. But there burned in them, like tongues of flame in a black pool of naphtha a subtle and restless fire that betokened habitual excitement to the verge of insanity. If any organs were predominant in the head, they were those of ideality, wonder, veneration, and firmness; and the whole combination was such as might have formed one of the wild old warrior prophets of the heroic ages. Dred's counterpoint is Milly, a black woman who warns the wavering mulatto hero, Harry

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Gordon, away from Dred: "He han't come to de heavenly Jerusalem. Oh! Oh! honey! dere's a blood of sprinkling dat speaketh better things dan dat of Abel. Jerusalem above is free,—is free, honey; so don't you mind, now, what happens in dis yer time." But Harriet Stowe was unable to reconcile Milly's gospel of grace with Dred's gospel of judgment. Horrified by the possibility of race war, she uses the female figure of Milly to head it off. As the fugitives wait for the signal to strike at the community, a wild and mournful tune is warbled through the trees, and Milly steps forth singing "Alas! and Did My Savior Bleed." "When Dred saw her, he gave a kind of groan, and said, putting his hand out before his face:— 'Woman, thy prayers withstand me!' " The pie remains in the sky; the chief characters flee North; and religious femininity rather than racial solidarity wins the hour. In the end, Mrs. Stowe came to focus on gender rather than race to help balance her cultural equation. Three succeeding novels explore the feminine sensibility suggested by Milly more thoroughly and with a greater understanding of its limitations. The Minister's Wooing (1859), The Pearl of Orr's Island (1862), and Agnes of Sorrento (1862) show through the differing cultural restraints of New England and Italy the limitations placed on feminine development. Although the religious motive remains a central factor, Stowe focuses on the imaginative qualities necessary for religious empathy and forges a bond between the aesthetic and the religious that gave a Christian legitimacy to her function as artist and redirected her ideas of her mission in the world. The Pearl of Orr's Island, begun in 1853, is a study in contrasting male and female sensibilities. The story of the two orphans, Mara and Moses, is framed by two New England "fates": the haidnosed, realistic Aunt Roxy and the softhearted, sentimental Aunt Ruey, who both superintend at the births and deaths on the island.

HARRIET BEECHER STOWE I 593 The physical settings repeat the opposing sensibilities. The rocky island is a bastion against a deep and mysterious sea; the outcropping granite headlands confront sandy inlets that invite to play; and the outdoors calls to action and adventure, while the indoors suggests a hoped-for sociality that yields as often to withdrawal and reverie. And so the children. We catch Moses shinny ing up a tree to steal eagles' eggs, while Mara sits below copying a cluster of scarlet rock columbine: All that there was developed of him, at present, was a fund of energy, self-esteem, hope, courage, and daring, the love of action, life, and adventure; his life was in the outward and present, not in the inward and reflective . . . she was, the small pearl with the golden hair, with her frail and high-strung organization, her sensitive nerves, her half-spiritual fibres, her ponderings, and marvels, and dreams, her power of love, and yearning for self-devotion. . . . Mara is hemmed in and wants to expand her world; Moses himself comes to realize his limitations and senses in Mara a different kind of strength won through suffering, experience, and insight. After long periods of studied neglect he proposes to her, but it is too late and she dies slowly from consumption. Her insight, "I may have more power over you, when Ijeem to be gone, than I should have had living," is confirmed in Moses' marriage to Sally Kittridge, a robust flirt and Mara's friend. "We have been trained in another life,—educated by a great sorrow,—is it not so?" Moses asks Sally as they recall Mara. Sally replies: "I know it." The Minister's Wooing, published in installments in 1859 to help out Oliver Wendell Holmes's financially beleaguered Atlantic Monthly, deepens Harriet Beecher Stowe's study of the captive sensibility by exploring the repressive effect of late eighteenth-century High Calvinism on Mary Scudder's and Mrs. Marvyn's human needs.

We are looking at New England character and society at a time when Puritan fervor has congealed into dogma and ritual piety. Mrs. Stowe's metaphor for the culture is the crystal. James Marvyn's father has "one of the clearly cut minds which New England forms among her farmers, as she forms quartz crystals in her mountains.. . ." The sensibility of the culture is locked in granite and ice, emerging sporadically in congregational song, "those wild, pleading tunes" bom in "the rocky hollows of its mountains, and whose notes have a kind of grand and mournful triumph in their warbling wail. . . ."At the center of the religious sensibility is the Reverend Hopkins' crystalline Calvinism, which presents salvation in the famous image of the ladder, at the very top of which: . . . blazes dazzling and crystalline that celestial grade where the soul knows self no more . . . this Ultima Thule of virtue had been seized upon by our sage as the all of religion. He knocked out every rung of the ladder but the highest, and then, pointing to its hopeless splendor, said to the world, "Go up thither and be saved!" The spiritual carnage is visible all around in the worst as well as in the best. It is reflected in Aaron Burr's recoil, which turns Hopkins' icy dogmatics upside down into a chill and opportunistic hedonism. And it is implicit in the plainspoken cynicism of Cerinthy Ann, who "come out, declarin'. . . that the best folk never had no comfort in religion; and for her part she didn't mean to trouble her head about it, but have jest as good a time as she could while she's young, 'cause if she was 'lected to be saved she should be, and if she wa'n't she couldn't help it, anyhow." At the teas, everything is admired but little is enjoyed. The china, the silver, the linen, hopes for husbands and hopes for heaven—each has to be picked over, fingered, and laid aside only after the cost has been calculated. Life amidst the spotless linens is a little thin. Mary Scudder's is the predicament of a heart-

594 I AMERICAN felt obligation to a New England past that cannot satisfy her needs, while she yearns inarticulately for a future represented by a group of "outsiders" who understand her far better than she does herself. Her predicament sums up the plot. She loves the dashing but unconverted James Marvyn, and he manages to extract a marriage vow before disappearing on an ocean voyage. He is thought drowned, and Mary's mother makes her give herself to the Reverend Hopkins, a benign man whose personality contradicts his theology, and who is old enough to be her father. When James does return—and freshly regenerate at that—he is eager for Mary, who refuses to break her vow to the good Hopkins. Those who come to her aid by interceding with the minister are more worldly, or exotic: Miss Prissy, the milliner, who knows about Parisian fashions; Mme. de Frontignac, who is pursuing an affair with Aaron Burr behind the back of her French diplomat husband; and Candace, Mrs. Marvyn's black cook. They manage the minister and he releases her from her vow and blesses her marriage with James. Neither Hopkins nor his theology is meant for the human heart. When Mrs. Marvyn thinks that James has drowned unconverted, Hopkins urges her to submit and affirm her horrified vision of her son's eternal damnation. This is too much for Candace, who brushes aside the emotional cripples standing around: "Come, ye poor little lamb," she said, walking straight up to Mrs. Marvyn, "come to ole Candace!" and with that she gathered the pale form to her bosom, and sat down and began rocking her, as if she had been a babe. "Honey, darlin', ye ain't right,—dar's a dreffiil mistake somewhar," she said. "Why, de Lord ain't what ye tink,—He loves ye, honey! Why, jes' feel how / loves ye,—poor old black Candace,—an' I ain't bettern' Him as made me! Who was it wore de crown of thorns, lamb? —who was it sweat great

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drops o' blood?—who was it said, 'Father, forgive dem'? . . . Dar, dar, now ye'r crying'! —cry away, and ease yer poor little heart! He died for Mass'r Jim, —loved him and died for him, —jes' give up his sweet, precious body and soul for him on de cross! Laws, jes' leave him in Jesus's hands!" Candace's gospel of the heart suggests a new religious sensibility in the book; while Prissy, Mme. de Frontignac, and James Marvyn, through their greater experience in the world and the broader sweep and livelier play of their imaginations, introduce an aesthetic sensibility that balances the sad earnestness of Mary Scudder. James sees in Mary "a picture he had once seen in a European cathedral, where the youthful Mother of Sorrows is represented." Aboard ship he has had a vision of a ladder, not Hopkins' but Jacobs': Well, there [Jacob] was as lonesome as I upon the deck of my ship. And so, lying with the stone under his head, he saw a ladder in his sleep between him and heaven, and angels going up and down. . . . He saw that there was a way between him and God, and that there were those above who did care for him, and who could come to him to help him. James's trust in a descent from above, in incarnation, gives him his ability to see God's presence in the things of this world, to see where God's light is playing and to see what Hopkins has forgotten: that the base of the ladder to God is planted "in human affections, tender instincts, symbolic feelings" and "sacraments of love." Such vision, Jonathan Edwards had pointed out a generation earlier, was religious. Harriet Beecher Stowe did not lose the chance to appropriate the insight to her conception of the artist's vocation. To find romance in a prose world was both a way of redeeming it and a way of tracing the hand of the Creator in His works:

HARRIET BEECHER STOWE I 595 All prosaic, and all bitter, disenchanted people talk as if poets and novelists made romance. They do,—just as much as craters make volcanoes,—no more. What is romance? whence comes it? Plato spoke to the subject wisely . . . when he said, Man's soul, in a former state, was winged and soared among the gods; and so it comes to pass that, in this life, when the soul, by the power of music or poetry, or the sight of beauty, hath her remembrance quickened, forthwith there is a struggling and a pricking pain as of wings trying to come forth. . . . The Reverend Theophilus Sewall, with the skeleton of romance in his closet, and storytelling Captain Kittridge are the two figures in The Pearl ofOrr's Island whose sensibilities can comprehend both Mara's and Moses'. In The Minister's Wooing this function is performed by Candace, Prissy, Mme. de Frontignac and by Mary's lover, James. In Agnes of Sorrento, which she began in 1859 as an entertainment for her own daughters while traveling in Italy, Harriet Beecher Stowe continued exploring the aesthetic dimension in the figure of the Italian artist monk, Father Antonio. It is he who brings about a marriage between the saintly Agnes and the proud and atheistic Agostino Sarelli (note the resemblance to Augustine St. Clare). An Italian nobleman whose patrimony has been robbed by a corrupt Catholic church, Sarelli is led to a state of grace by Father Antonio. The scenery of Agnes of Sorrento is the antithesis of rocky New England. The fertile Italian landscape suggests overripe human development; an abundance of brilliant flowers, lush foliage, and colorful birds veil black charnel chasms and smoldering volcanoes. Italy suggests a garden much like that of Hawthorne's Rappaccini, but one where decay and hidden passion are the poisons. Agnes shrinks from contact with this world. Her mother has been debauched and abandoned

by an Italian nobleman, and she has left Agnes in the hands of her own mother, Elsie, who seems like a New England import with a strongly practical streak. She wants to marry off Agnes to a rough but honest tradesman. And when Sarelli spots Agnes in the marketplace and falls in love with her, Agnes and her grandmother see little before them but the melodramatic alternatives of Giulietta's whoredom or Mother Theresa's nunnery. The church is sunk in sloth and sin and proves wholly incapable of dealing with her problem. Her confessor, Father Francesco, is a voluptuary who frightens her away from Sarelli by persuading her she will accomplish her own and his eternal perdition if she encourages him. Mother Theresa is ignorant not only of the times and of the church, but of a young girl's heart as well. Father Antonio steps in to untangle these motives. He is Elsie's brother and has been searching for a pure original from which to paint a saint's portrait and is thrilled when he sees that Sarelli's motives for a portrait of Agnes match his own. In Sarelli's aesthetic sensibility, Father Antonio discovers veiled religious feelings, and he sets about to win Sarelli over for Savonarola and his God, while assuring Agnes that her lover's impulses are honorable. Agnes' faith in her church is finally shaken when she is kidnapped by church officials eager for some fun during her pilgrimage to Rome. Through Father Antonio's sensibility, then, Agnes forges a relationship with the world. When she exclaims to Antonio how happy he must be, he replies: "Happy! . . . Do I not walk the earth in a dream of bliss, and see the footsteps of my blessed Lord and his dear Mother on every rock and hill?" In him, Harriet Beecher Stowe justifies the creation of artistic symbols. It is "one of the first offices of every saint whose preaching stirred the heart of the people, to devise symbolic forms, signs, and observances, by which the mobile and fluid heart of the multitude

596 / AMERICAN might crystalize into habits of devout remembrance." Here, she is thinking not only of rosaries, crucifixes, shrines, banners, and processions but also of the artist's task of fitting rungs in the ladder that will lead believers to their God. Ev>en Agnes, who is often as severe as Hilda in Hawthorne's The Marble Faun, cannot help but exclaim as Father Antonio delineates the death of a saint: "How great a grace must come from such pictures! It seems to me that the making of such holy things is one of the most blessed of good works." Each novel in this group marks a development in the heroine by showing her fascination with a progressively more worldly male figure: the robust Moses; the dashing, wealthy James; and finally Agostino Saielli, a worldly prince. Most important, however, is the reformist Father Antonio, whose religious aesthetics sum up Mara's devotional sketching of flowers and James Marvyn's habit of seeing Mary Scudder in terms of old-world religious portraits. Father Antonio's capacity for seeing is matched by his ability to turn his vision into art. The artist's involvement with the world does not mean to surrender to its values but to consecrate its moments of love and suffering. Through Mara Lincoln, Mary Scudder, and Agnes, Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote herself out of her fascination with girlish martyrs and into the figure of the artist. It is through these eyes that she takes a final, broader look at New England. Harriet Beecher Stowe continued to write of New England—Oldtown Folks (1869), Sam Lawsoris Oldtown Fireside Stories (1872), and Poganuc People (1878)—not because of a narrow interest in regionalism, but because she rediscovered her region's significance for the growth of the nation, and because she found a fresh perspective. In this, her final group of novels, the New England story becomes an opening chapter in an unwritten book about the national character. New England is seen as a cradle of the

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republic disclosing the problems and possibilities of life in America. Looking closer, she also discovered a new perspective from which to tell her story—the perspective offered by native, Down East humor. It is a dry, comic point of view that allows her to tell grimmer truths than before about the weight of her region's past while dissipating the anguish of some of that past in humor. In Oldtown Folks, we listen to the story of a generation of children through whose sensibilities a New England town is able to recover its capacity for enjoyment. In Sam Lawson's Oldtown Fireside Stories, the village do-nothing, mentor to the children in Oldtown Folks, tells humorous stories that unlock the grim incidents and frozen personalities that Harriet Beecher Stowe saw as typical of her region. Pferhaps by telling these stories first through the medium of her husband's personality (Calvin is Horace Hoiyoke in Oldtown Folks) and then through the comic perspective offered by Sam Lawson, she found the breathing space that she needed before she put herself on stage as Dolly Gushing in Poganuc People to tell about her own growth. Mrs. Stowe based the theme of Oldtown Folks on the tale of Hansel and Gretel, children cast out in the world by their impoverished parents and who must free themselves from the spell of a witch. In her New England version of Grimm, the witch is a Calvinist hag who lives in the granite mountains and her spell is melancholy. She has crippled the children's parents and threatens the children as well. There are, in other words, strong gothic shadows in a book otherwise noted for its sunlight. Oldtown with a relative sufficiency of grace is contrasted with the town of Needmore, where joy shivers at the door; the benign grandparents who first take in Horace, then Harry and Tina, are the pleasant aspect of a regional character that includes Crab Smith and his sister Miss Asphyxia, witches themselves who have squeezed grace dry and turned life into a tortuous round of work. Against

HARRIET BEECHER STOWE I 597 the strong, melancholy groundswell of High Calvinism, Parson Lothrup's Arminianism and Lady Widgery's Episcopalianism ripple ineffectually. In the parents' generation, Horace's father has died in poverty as a broken-down schoolmaster; and his mother, once a pert socialite, has been worn down to a shadow and later disappears under the merciless wing of her sister Lois, a scolding old maid. Uncle Fly and Aunt Keziah are more softhearted—but also quite softheaded. Harry and Tina's father is the alcoholic son of a minor British nobleman and has abandoned his consumptive wife. The Rossiters, a third major family group, carry the psychic scars of a Calvinism against which their hearts rebel. Outwardly wise, they inwardly bleed. Parson Avery's family dilemma derives from his inability to widen the Calvinist sheepfold fast enough to prevent the spiritual ulceration of his daughter, Esther, of whom we are told "her body thought." Finally, we have those whose nerves have snapped: the brilliant lost ones, Ellery Davenport and Emily Rossiter, who skim life's surface, hoping by speed to escape the terror that drives them on and, in the end, claims them. Horace, Harry, and Tina, the central characters in Oldtown Folks, are spiritual as well as literal orphans to the world of their parents and find more comfortable guardians in their grandparents. Harriet Beecher Stowe took the main features of Horace's story from her husband's childhood. Calvin Stowe had been orphaned under similar circumstances; he was adopted by his grandparents; and he experienced the same spiritualist longings for the alter ego playmate that Harry becomes in the story. Horace's nighttime vision of a boy like Harry standing before him in his jbedroom matches exactly Calvin Stowe's own account of a childhood reverie. Horace's tale may, then, be twice-told: first, literally, in his adoption and his achieving his father's lost dream of an education; then, symbolically, through the figure of Harry, whose story

seems to develop the darker side of Horace's own. Harry and his sister, Tina, have been abandoned by their father and brought by their dying mother to the village of Needmore where they are taken in by Crab and Sphyxy Smith who act out in New England fashion the witch's role in Hansel and Gretel. The children are fattened— not for eating (there is no joy in food in Needmore), but for work. Fleeing from a house in which Calvinist grace has been debased in work, the children take refuge in an abandoned mansion the former notoriety of which suggests the degeneracy of a British heritage. Here the children are found by Sam Lawson and he brings them to Oldtown, where they come as if in response to the starved hearts of Horace and Mehitable Rossiter and where they win the affection of the town. Tina's spirit is elemental fizz. She is bubbly and irrepressible, and her effervescence takes the grandparents by storm. A natural mimic, she sends the adults into stitches with her comic renditions of themselves and their neighbors. Her adoption by Mehitable Rossiter brings joy to the life of the childless old widow and her drab maid. Tina's brother, Harry, is more serious, but equally resistant to attempts, such as Parson Avery's, to scare him into orthodoxy. In short, the children subvert the overly serious adult world through humor and play, and in their presence the village of Oldtown recovers its youth. Before graduating from school at Cloudland, the children put on two plays for the adults, "Jephtha's Daughter," and a New England farce, which further displace the values of the parents' orthodox world. The central scene in their version of "Jephtha's Daughter" is a procession of the town's young men and women who carry out and bury the corpses of Jephtha's daughter (played by Tina) and her lover (Harry) under the remorseful eyes of Jephtha (Horace). What we are seeing is a mock-tragic represen-

598 I AMERICAN tation of New England sacrificing her best sons and daughters on the altar of the past. In the farce that follows, the children exorcise the twin community demons: workaholism and do-nothingism. Tina becomes Hepzibah, the scold; Harry, the ineffectual Uncle Riakim. These comic performances, which invite the community's symbolic participation and elicit its laughter, break the spell of the hag. And, as the community joins them in laughing at itself, we know at least that Horace, Tina, and Harry will be able to leave those roles behind and escape the fate of their parents' generation. Tracing the theme of comic displacement brings us to Sam Law son, the talented village do-nothing who is married, like Rip Van Winkle, to a nagging wife. He spreads Aunt Lois' clock over her kitchen floor while fixing it but walks quite calmly away from the pieces— and Aunt Lois' rage—to return when another fit of work shall strike him. In a community of overwork, Sam Lawson is dangerous and badly needed. Only he can take time out to find and comfort Horace after his father's death and to discover Harry and Tina and bring them to Oldtown. His leisure allows him to father the children on expeditions to the countryside. He is the village's source of knowledge about the entire country, and he is given the central place at the family fireside to tell his stories. Oldtown Folks closes with his hoping for an easy missionary job in the South Seas. Luckily, Harriet Beecher Stowe brought him back as the central figure in his own book, Sam Lawson9 s Fireside Stories, where his comedy transfigures both the people in his tales and his listeners. In Fireside Stories, Sam Lawson says to Horace, ". . .you look at the folks that's allus tellin' you what they don't believe,—they don't believe this, and they don't believe that,—and what sort o' folks is they? Why, like yer Aunt Lois, sort o' stringy and dry. There ain't no 'sorbtion got out o' not belivin' nothin'." Whether his stories are told at the winter hearth-

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side, in a Thanksgiving kitchen, or (as they mostly are) on rambles for berries and on troutfishing expeditions, his tales always manage to hook the children and yield their own wild fruits. In this no-nonsense world, they supply more than community and continuity between the generations: they are the antidote to Aunt Lois' terrible rationalism. They offer the thirsting soul homegrown marvels capable of rousing its capacity for imagination and wonder. We relax in the company of Sam Lawson, who has made success out of failure. He has seen the world on ship; he has had a love affair; and he likes to leave us with the impression that, had he wanted to, he could have done better for himself. But, he concludes with unselfconscious irony, after telling the tales of other people's misbegotten wealth, "this 'ere hastenin' to be rich is sich a drefful temptation." Sam Lawson tells us about people suffering the agonies of a haunting, or caught in the spell of greed, or gripped by the dead hand of formalism—and they become transfigured through his dry, gothic humor. Humor unlocks the parson, for example, whose Sunday meeting is broken up by a sheep that spots a wig and knocks down the deacon wearing it. His shocked parishioners report him to the session for laughing in church; but the session itself dissolves with laughter when he tells the story. A groom working for another parson runs his master's horse in races behind his back during meeting. When the parson gathers a group of his parishioners to put an end to Sabbath racing, his own horse abandons caution and plunges into a race with the parson on his back. A third parson marries his chambermaid after his wife's death despite the town's rumors. Ghost stories, spiritualist tales, folk tales, tales from the Revolution, and funny stories alike are told in leisurely fashion: "He would take his time for it and proceed by easy stages. It was like the course of a dreamy, slowmoving river through a tangled meadowflat,— not a rush nor a bush but was reflected in it; in

HARRIET BEECHER STOWE I 599 short, Sam gave his philosophy of matters and things in general as he went along, and was especially careful to impress an edifying moral." The yearning to escape the routines of Oldtown is satisfied through more direct means than stories in Harriet Beecher Stowe's last novel, Poganuc People. Here, the central character falls for a world of pearls, purples, and Episcopalians. Her book pays tribute to her father's orthodox world but leaves it behind. We may see in Dolly Gushing's flight from the Presbyterians to the Episcopalians a justification for Harriet Beecher Stowe's own return to her mother's and grandmother's childhood religion. She cut her religious ties with her father's church when she left "dour" Andover in 1867. Now, she was a nationally recognized figure with a fine home in Hartford, Connecticut, a pew in the local Episcopalian church, and a winter home in Florida. From this vantage point, she came to see that her bleak childhood world had nourished a fugitive beauty but that it had also vexed the soul. Her memories of her father's austere world set her to create the childhood that she might have had had her mother lived. Poganuc People opens on little Dolly Gushing standing outside the newly built Episcopalian meeting house, which is being decorated with greens and gilt for a Christmas illumination. Longing for its promise of beauty and glory, Dolly tiptoes out of her empty house at night and enters. There she discovers some of her brothers, as well, drinking in the Episcopalian splendors while their own meeting house is shut up in darkness. Dolly's growing up, Nabby's love affair with Kiel, and Zepheniah's reconciliation with his God and his church come, as did the Christmas illumination, as treasured moments of transcendence in an otherwise tedious life. Colonel Davenport recalls the moment when George Washington broke propriety and swore furiously at officers and troops for disobeying an order. Zepheniah Higgins shocks and delights his town

when he pulls a schoolhouse down from the top of a hill into the village. Even Dolly's father breaks the routine of parish duties to organize nutting expeditions. Inside the Gushing house, small surprises vary the monotony. The children delight in exploring the basement with its possibility of terror. Dolly finds a copy of The Arabian Nights. Atop the kitchen stairs is an alcove that opens into a smokehouse. Young eyes transform the smokehouse into the byway to hell in/4 Pilgrim's Progress. The Parson's attic study with its copy of Mather's "Magnilly" and its bins of old sermons serves as home for several generations of theological kittens. New England abhors a holiday as nature abhors a vacuum, yet the citizens turn out and transform the Fourth of July into a festive display. Much of the description is from Harriet Beecher Stowe's childhood home. The capable Mrs. Gushing resembles Catharine, and Harriet's mother reappears as the wife of Zepheniah. Her father is sympathetically sketched in the figure of Parson Gushing, whose fine words to Dolly after her conversion match Lyman Beecher's own words to his daughter on the same occasion. At times obtuse, at times sensitive, he gains a literal truth at the expense of an imaginative one when he warns Dolly that celebrating Christmas without a firm date is unscriptural, popish, and heathenish; but his refusal to meddle during Zepheniah Higgins' mental crisis is a study in pastoral tact. Her father's world, though, offers little for her development. It seems to turn in on itself, to become ingrown. Again she finds its typical expression in church song: The wild warble of St. Martins, the appointed tune whose wings bore these words, swelled and billowed and reverberated through the house, carrying with it that indefineable thrill which always fills the house when deep emotions are touched—deepest among people habitually reserved and reticent of outward demonstration. It

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was a solemn undertone, this mysterious, throbbing subbass of repressed emotion, which gave the power and effect to the Puritan music. But it is precisely "outward demonstration" that Dolly wants. She wants to be able to show her feelings and to find in the world around her such images of beauty, love, excitement, and surprise as she yearns for. The austerity of her father's faith simply demands too great a sacrifice. Perhaps Parson Gushing has sensed this, for when he readies Dolly, at the end of the novel, for a visit to her Episcopalian relatives in Boston, he urges her kindly to attend the Episcopalian services. Her visit fulfills even extravagantly the wishes of this daughter of the Puritans. It brings her the gift of a beautiful prayeibook bound in purple velvet, a pearl necklace from Uncle Israel, a scarlet cloak trimmed with lace from an aunt, and the offer of marriage from an Episcopalian Englishman who shares her evangelical piety. Later, more toughminded generations would dismiss such endings—indeed most of Harriet Beecher Stowe's work—as sentimental. But she would probably have found material for comedy in knowing that a generation trained on existentialism and Marxism should so despise the dialectics of the bittersweet. Tenderminded as she was, she would probably have told us that ours are, as hers proved to be, historical attitudes.

Selected Bibliography WORKS OF HARRIET BEECHER STOWE SEPARATE WORKS

Prize Tale. A New England Sketch ["Uncle Lot" ]. Lowell, Mass.: Alfred Oilman, 1834. The Mayflower; or, Sketches of Scenes and Characters Among the Descendants of the Pilgrims. New York: Harper, 1843. Uncle Tom's Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly.

2 vols. Boston: John P. Jewett, 1852. Kenneth S. Lynn in the 1962 Harvard University Press edition and Russel B. Nye in the 1963 Washington Square Press edition have written excellent introductions. A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin. Boston: John P. Jewett, 1853. Uncle Sam's Emancipation . . . and Other Sketches. Philadelphia: Willis P. Hazard, 1853. Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands. 2 vols. Boston: Phillips, Sampson, 1854. Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp. 2 vols. Boston: Phillips, Sampson, 1856. Our Charley and What to Do With Him. Boston: Phillips, Sampson, 1858. The Minister's Wooing. New York: Derby and Jackson, 1859. The Pearl of Orr's Island: A Story of the Coast of Maine. Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1862. Agnes of Sorrento. Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1862. A Reply . . . of American Women. London: S. Low, 1863. House and Home Papers. By Christopher Crowfield [pseud.]. Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1865. Little Foxes. By Christopher Crowfield [pseud.]. Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1866. Religious Poems. Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1867. Queer Little People. Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1867. Daisy's First Winter and Other Stories. Boston: Fields, Osgood, 1867. The Chimney-Corner. By Christopher Crowfield [pseud.]. Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1868. Men of Our Times; or, Leading Patriots of the Day. Hartford: Hartford Publishing, 1868. Oldtown Folks. Boston: Fields, Osgood, 1869. The American Woman's Home. New York: J. B. Ford, 1869. Lady Byron Vindicated: A History of the Byron Controversy. Boston: Fields, Osgood, 1870. Little Pussy Willow. Boston: Fields, Osgood, 1870. My Wife and I; or, Harry Henderson's History. New York: J. B. Ford, 1871. Pink and White Tyranny: A Society Novel. Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1871. Sam Lawsoris Oldtown Fireside Stories. Boston: James R. Osgood, 1872. Palmetto-Leaves. Boston: James R. Osgood, 1873. Woman in Sacred History. New York: J. B. Ford, 1873. We and Our Neighbors; or, The Records of an Unfashionable Street. New York: J. B. Ford, 1875.

HARRIET BEECHER STOWE I 601 Betty's Bright Idea and Other Stories. New York: J. B. Ford, 1876. Footsteps of the Master. New York: J. B. Ford, 1877. Poganuc People: Their Loves and Lives. New York: Fords, Howard, and Hulbert, 1878. Our Famous Women. Hartford: A. D. Worthington, 1884. COLLECTED EDITIONS

The Writings of Harriet Beecher Stowe. Riverside Edition. 16 vols. Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin, 1896.

BIBLIOGRAPHY John R. Adams. Harriet Beecher Stowe. New York: Twayne, 1963. Lists uncollected writings. Joseph Sabin. Bibliotheca Americana. 29 vols. New York: Bibliographical Society of America, 1868-1936. Volume 24 lists works published up to 1860. Robert E. Spiller, et al. Literary History of the United States. 4th ed., rev. New York: Macmillan, 1974. The bibliography volume has the most generally useful list of primary and secondary sources.

BIOGRAPHIES Annie Fields. Life and Letters of Harriet Beecher Stowe. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1897. Charles Edward Stowe. The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1889. Good for establishing emphases. Charles Edward Stowe and Lyman Beecher Stowe. Harriet Beecher Stowe: The Story of Her Life. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1911. Edward Wagenknecht. Harriet Beecher Stowe: The Known and the Unknown. New York: Oxford University Press, 1965. Forrest Wilson. Crusader in Crinoline: The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1941. The best and most comprehensive.

CRITICAL STUDIES John R. Adams. Harriet Beecher Stowe. New York: Twayne, 1963. Emphasizes magazine fiction.

Harry Birdoff. The World's Greatest Hit: Uncle Tom's Cabin. New York: S. F. Vanni, 1947. The fascinating story of Uncle Tom's Cabin on stage. Herbert Ross Brown. The Sentimental Novel in America, 1789-1860. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1940. Good for understanding sentimentalism. Alice C. Crozier. The Novels of Harriet Beecher Stowe. New York: Oxford University Press, 1969. Emphasizes her two slavery novels. Leslie Fiedler. Love and Death in the American Novel. Meridian Books. New York: Criterion Books, 1960; rev. ed., New York: Stein and Day, 1966. The cultural psychology behind the sentimental tradition. Charles H. Foster. The Rungless Ladder: Harriet Beecher Stowe and New England Puritanism. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1954. The best study and excellent intellectual and cultural history. George M. Fredrickson. The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817-1914. New York: Harper and Row, 1971. Excellent study of the development of and changes in American racial thinking. Edwin Bruce Kirkham. The Building of Unce Tom's Cabin. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1977. Traces the Beechers' involvement with antislavery and tracks down the origins in life of the incidents in Uncle Tom's Cabin. Robert Merideth. The Politics of the Universe: Edward Beecher, Abolition, and Orthodoxy. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1968. Excellent cultural and intellectual history of her brother's thought which clarifies much of Harriet Beecher Stowe's intellectual origins. Kathryn Kish Sklar. Catharine Beecher: A Study in American Domesticity. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973. An excellent cultural and intellectual study of Catharine Beecher's evolving feminism, a strong influence upon Harriet Beecher Stowe. Lyman Beecher Stowe. Saints, Sinners, and Beechers. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1934. Colorful anecdotes about the Beecher clan. William Robert Taylor. Cavalier and Yankee: The Old South and American National Character. New York: G. Braziller, 1961. Places regional typologies such as Mrs. Stowe's in a cultural perspective. —PAUL DAVID JOHNSON

James Thurber 1894-1961 Wr FHEJ 'HEW Punch invited James Thurber to attend

of nineteenth-century frontier humor. But as he moved farther into the twentieth century, his work became increasingly inspired by "the damp hand of melancholy"; and his writing, he explained, was "not a joyous form of self expression but the manifestation of a twitchiness at once cosmic and mundane." The twitchiness was partly personal, partly philosophical. Thurber's innate nervousness and high-strung temperament were intensified by blindness. When he was six years old, his older brother William accidentally shot him in the left eye with an arrow during a game of William Tell. Following the faulty advice of a local doctor, his parents failed to have the injured eye removed promptly. By the time they got around to it, sympathetic ophthalmia attacked the right eye. Miraculously, the disease arrested itself, giving him nearly forty more years of sight; but his vision started to blur in the late 1930's, and in 1940-41 he underwent five operations, after which he was legally blind. During his boyhood the eye injury made Thurber feel inferior at sports, turned him into a spectator, and drove him deeper into fantasy. After he lost the sight in his remaining eye, he reacted to the frustration with sporadic fits of depression or outbursts of rage. The cosmic aspect of Thurber's melancholy was an acute perception of human weakness and perversity. Despite the tragic awareness of most

its Wednesday lunch and carve his initials on the table, he was the first American to be so honored since Mark Twain. He has been universally acclaimed as the greatest American humorist since Twain; indeed, E. B. White says he prefers Thuiber. Yet just as Twain had to contend with the attitude that he was merely a "phunny phellow," not meriting serious consideration as an equal of Whittier, Longfellow, or Emerson, so Thurber has tended to get short shrift in American literature, at least in the groves of academe, where he usually is passed over in favor of more ponderous and pretentious writers who have what Matthew Arnold called "high seriousness." Humor also is handicapped by the fact that it soon becomes dated if it reflects only passing fads or follies, and the work of any prolific humorist is bound to contain a fair amount of forgettable trivia. Yet the great humorists are not merely amusing; they use laughter to expose the deeper predicaments and perplexities of mankind. In this sense, Thurber has diagnosed the twentieth-century condition more perceptively and memorably than many of his contemporaries have. Born in Columbus, Ohio, in 1894, Thurber grew up in the twilight of the Victorian era; his narratives of Columbus life and the colorful characters of his boyhood retain the exuberance

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JAMES THURBER I 603 of its artists, the official nineteenth-century ideology was optimism, a bland faith in progress and human perfectibility. Thurber rediscovered mankind's fallibility and would have agreed with Herman Melville that "in certain moods, no man can weigh this world without throwing in something, somehow like Original Sin, to strike the uneven balance." Maintaining that "The closest thing to humor is tragedy," Thurber portrayed people distressed by domestic discord, humiliated by the hazards of technology, and made to feel impotent under the complex pressures of modern times. In his revolt against the gospel of reason and the glorification of man, Thuiber resembles many modern thinkers, for the psychological discovery of the unconscious, the nightmare of total war, the spread of dictatorship, the unnerving growth of technological and bureaucratic complexities, and the widespread loss of faith in religious or moral certainties have undermined the facile optimism that reason is sufficient to keep man from acting irrationally. In "Interview With a Lemming" (1941), a lemming being interviewed by a scientist calls mankind "murderous, maladjusted, maleficent, malicious and muffle-headed. . . . You kill, you mangle, you torture, you imprison, you starve each other. I know that you are cruel, cunning and carnivorous, sly, sensual and selfish, greedy, gullible and guileful—" The scientist agrees with the catalogue of "our sins and our shames." He has been studying lemmings and knows all about them, except why they rush to the sea and drown themselves. "How curious," the lemming replies. "The one thing I don't understand is why you humans don't." Similarly, a Thurber dinosaur who is sneered at by a supposedly superior human responds, "There are worse things than being extinct, and one of them is being you." Two centuries earlier, Jonathan Swift wrote that our exaltation of ourselves as reasoning beings is unjustified, since we use reason pri-

marily "to aggravate our natural corruptions, and to acquire new ones which nature had not given us." Thurber agreed. In his words, "Abstract reasoning, in itself, has not benefited Man so much as instinct has benefited the lower animals. In moving into the alien and complicated sphere of Thought and Imagination he has become the least well-adjusted of all creatures on the earth, and, hence, the most bewildered." At the beginning of World War II, Thurber said that no human power has . . . ever moved naturally and inevitably in the direction of the benign. It has, as a matter of fact, almost always tended in the direction of the malignant. . . . This tendency, it seems to me, would be especially true of the power of the mind, since it is that very power which is behind all the deviltry Man is now up to and always has been up to. . . . Man, as pacifist and economist, has gone steadily from bad to worse with the development of his brain power through the ages. Yet Thurber was far from being anti-intellectual; deploring mindless conformity and the unreasoning appeal of demagoguery, he championed learning and called art "the one achievement of Man which has made the long trip up from all fours seem well advised." In contrast with man's folly and cruelty, Thurber admired the instinctive wisdom of animals: It may be that the finer mysteries of life and death can be comprehended only through pure instinct; the cat, for example, appears to Know. . . . Man, on the other hand, is surely further away from the Answer than any other animal this side of the ladybug. His mistaken selection of reasoning as an instrument of perception has put him into a fine quandary. Thurber's animals, particularly the ubiquitous dogs in his drawings, have a placid innocence and a harmony with the world that his more

604 I AMERICAN alarming humans have long since lost. In Thurber's art, nature has not fallen along with man; and his whimsical wildlife often appear in a still Edenic garden. In 1961, the year of his death, Thurber hoped that with their superior mental powers, dolphins, "all gaiety, charm, and intelligence . . . might one day come out of the boundless deep and show us how a world can be run by creatures dedicated not to the destruction of their species but to its preservation." Three years earlier he told Henry Brandon, "I often think it would be fine if the French poodles would take over the world because they've certainly been more intelligent in the last few years than the human being." The domesticated dog, which Thurber worked into his drawings "as a sound creature in a crazy world," has found life with man laughable; but "His sensitive nose . . . has caught at one and the same time the bewildering smells of the hospitals and the munitions factory. He has seen men raise up great cities to heaven and then blow them to hell." By contrast, the amusing implausibility of many birds and beasts helped Thurber to believe in a divine creative force; there must be, he said, an amiable God to make such a creature as Bosman's potto. Although not doctrinal, Thurber retained a religious attitude, a sense of reverence, which he found too often lacking in his fellow humans. In 1935 he stated: "If I have any beliefs at all about immortality, it is that certain dogs I have known will go to heaven, and very, very few persons will be there. I am pretty sure that heaven will be densely populated with bloodhounds, for one thing." For all his insistence on the thin line between humor and tragedy, Thurber insisted that he was an optimist; and despite his rages, he was not a misanthrope. Like Mark Twain, who in his later years denounced "the damned human race," Thurber had a great capacity for friendship. His anger came from an awareness of man's inhu-

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manity to man; British cartoonist Ronald Searle noted that Thurber's "exasperation and occasional bitterness arose more out of concern for humans than out of his dislike for them." When in his cups, Thurber was often vituperative; but everyone agreed with Wolcott Gibbs that he "was the nicest guy in the world up to five o'clock in the afternoon," and some, like Peter De Vries, would draw the line at a much later hour, if at all. Mark Van Doren, a friend and neighbor, thought that Thurber's explosions of irritability were attributable partly to his drinking and partly to "his rage at everyone who could see— because he was not a malevolent man, God knows." Following his eye surgery, Thurber asked Van Doren whether his blindness . . . was not a punishment for the kind of writing he had done. "I have done nothing," he said, "but make fun of weakness and folly; wisdom, strength, goodness have never been my subjects as they ought to be for anybody—as they are for you. I have been pitiless, trivial, destructive. And now this trouble comes." Van Doren replied that Thurber's satire was motivated by concern, not scorn, for the human condition. He observed that Thurber . . . has never pitied himself for being blind, though his rages—terrible, fantastic—could be traced to that condition. In my own opinion they are a satirist's indignations: savage, like Swift's, and with as deep a source. These rages end as suddenly as they begin, and a great sweetness follows. Thurber is tiger, then is turtle dove. Despite Thurber's explosive temper, many writers praised his intense interest in people and his sympathy and help during times of trouble. John Duncan Miller, an English friend, admitted that Thurber drank too much and liked to monopolize the conversation, but called him "An utterly charming man—witty, refreshing, gener-

JAMES THURBER I 605 ous. His one consistency was his loyalty to his best friends." As Ronald Searte put it, "Thurber was no kindly old charmer, and his exasperation and occasional bitterness arose more out of concern for humans than out of dislike for them." Thurber summed it up by observing: The human species is both horrible and wonderful. Occasionally, I get very mad at human beings, but there's nothing you can do about it. I like people and hate them at the same time. I wouldn't draw them in cartoons, if I didn't think they were horrible, and I wouldn't write about them if I didn't think they were wonderful. This statement is too simple; the cartoon figures are often amiable, and the prose portraits arc sometimes savage. But as he said when dedicating Denney Hall at Ohio State University to his former English professor, Joseph Villiers Denney, 'The heart in which there is no fighting is as barren as the soul without conflict or the mind without anxiety or the spirit without struggle." Thuiber struggled a good deal in his own life. Lonely as a boy, he was gangling, gawky, shy, and disheveled. His eyesight kept him from participating in athletics, which he enjoyed as a spectator; despite his portraits of dumb football stars in "University Days" (1933) and77*? Male Animal (1940), he was a sports enthusiast and football fan, and wrote a good deal about tennis under the pseudonym * * Foot Fault.'' That he was a teacher's pet did not endear him to his classmates—or to himself, for that matter. These tensions surfaced more than forty years later in a harrowing short story, 'Teacher's Pet" (1949). Its protagonist is Willber Kelby, a middle-aged scholar forced to endure a lifetime of abuse by bullies. As the smartest boy in grade school, he had become the unwilling but official teacher's pet and accordingly was hated by his dim-witted but brawny classmates, such as Zeke Leonard, a boy with "the brains of a pole vaulter," who resented Willber "for his intelligence, his name,

his frail body, and his inability, according to Zeke, to do anything except study." Thirtyseven years later, Kelby still suffers from the memory of the day when Zeke trapped him after school and slapped him around while the other boys jeercd at his impotent attempts to defend himself. When a woman at a cocktail party asks him why he is brooding, Kelby tells her about the incident. She is incredulous and asks, "What had you done?" "A teacher's pet doesn't have to do anything, '' Kelby said. ' It is the mere fact of his existence that makes the stupid and the strong want to beat him up. There is a type of man that wants to destroy the weaker, the more sensitive, the more intelligent." The woman replies that her son Elbert has similar problems and is constantly bullied by the arrogant athletes in his class; the chief tormentor is Bob Stevenson, son of their host. Nursing his trauma, Kelby is bitter; he hates the bullies but also despises the weakness of their victims. "But they arc not cowards," said the woman defensively. . . . "At least I know Elbert is not a coward." . . . "There are a lot of comforting euphemisms," he [Kelby] said. "Hypersensitive, nonaggressive, peace-loving, introverted—take your choice." Two days later, Kelby comes across the two boys and sees a reenactment of his childhood, for Bob is making cruel fun of Elbert and insolently roughing him up. In a fury, Kelby intervenes and orders Bob to leave his victim alone. But when the rescued Elbert sniffles and whimpers, Kelby turns on him with self-hatred, slaps him, and calls him a coward and a crybaby. At this crucial point, Elbert's father comes on the scene. Thurber's concluding irony is devastating. " 'I've seen some bullies in my time,' Mr. Reynolds told the elder Stevenson later, 'but I never saw

606 I AMERICAN anything to match that.' '' Stevenson replies that Kelby has threatened his son too. *' 'You never know about a man, Reynolds,' he said. 'You just never know.' " Thurber was never a sissy, but he was vulnerable to attack until defended by one of the toughest boys in the class. Willber Kelby and Elbert Reynolds fail, not because they are ineffectual at fistfights but because they lack fortitude, break down, and snivel under attack. By equating weakness with cowardice, Kelby comes to accept the values of the bullies he resents; and his anger is not so much against aggression itself as against the fact that he has been on the receiving end. His defeat is not that he has lost the fight with others, but that he has lost it with himself. Thurber, on the other hand, always denounced aggression; and in his fairy tales, the heroes are not warriors but seemingly unheroic toymakers, jesters, poets, and musicians. As an old man tells Prince Jorn in The White Deer (1945), "The peril and the labor, Prince, lie not in dreadful monsters or in mighty deeds, but in the keeping of the heart a man has won." This is the difficulty confronting the spouses in Thurber's stories of marital stress. In The Male Animal, when the protagonist, a thin, nervous professor, finds his marriage endangered by his wife's flirtation with a former football star, he challenges his rival to a fistfight and is knocked out. He wins his wife back not by pugilism, but by his quixotic courage in standing up for his principles and defying a tyrannical trustee. In high school Thurber overcame his initial unpopularity and ended up as president of the senior class. But at Ohio State University he was again out of step. He could never pass the obligatory military drill and infuriated Captain Converse with his seemingly perverse ineptness; and he exasperated his science teachers by his inability to see through a microscope. Socially, he seemed an outcast. Thurber felt so forlorn that he unofficially dropped out of school for a year, not

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telling his parents that he was spending his days drifting around town. Reinstated, he impressed a fellow student, Elliott Nugent, with his literary skills. Nugent was a big man on campus—an athlete, dramatic star, fraternity man, and president of the junior class. Under his tutelage Thurber spruced himself up, joined The Strollers (the dramatic society), wrote for the campus newspaper, and became editor of it and of the Sundial, Ohio State's humor and literary magazine. When World War I broke out, Thurber left college without a degree and became a code cleric for the United States embassy in Paris. On his return home, he got a job as reporter for the Columbus Dispatch; but his ambition was to be a creative writer rather than a journalist. He found an outlet in writing a Sunday column called "Credos and Curios" and in creating the libretto and lyrics for some musical productions of The Strollers and of Columbus' Scarlet Mask Club. But little of this work gives promise of the artist to come; Thuiber later called it "practice and spadework by a man of 28 who sometimes sounds 19. . . . " A late bloomer, Thurber did not publish his first story, "Josephine Has Her Day," until 1926, when he was thirty-one. He resigned from the Dispatch in the summer of 1924 and made an unsuccessful attempt to support himself by writing fiction on a free-lance basis. After another brief stint in Columbus, the thirty-year-old writer manque went to France in the spring of 1925 to complete a novel about Ohio college life. As with several subsequent attempts at novels, he aborted it as a hopeless failure. Instead, he got a job as translator and rewrite man for the Paris, and later the Riviera, editions of the Chicago Tribune. Back in New York in 1926, he was again unsuccessful at selling stories and a satiric book called Why We Behave Like Microbe Hunters. Once more Thurber turned to journalism, as a reporter for the New York Evening Post. He

JAMES THURBER I 607 began sending short pieces to the newly founded New Yorker, but not until 1927 was one of them accepted. In February of that year he met E. B. White; White introduced Thurber to the New Yorker's editor, Harold Ross, who instantly hired him as an editor. It took Thurber several months to get "demoted" to writer; but once he succeeded, he had found his niche. The New Yorker * 'casual'' was the ideal form for a humorist who was unable to sustain a long work. As Thurber put it: I am afraid all of my novels would be complete in one chapter, from force of habit in writing short pieces and also from a natural incapability of what Billy Graves [one of his Ohio State English professors] would call "Larger flight." . . . Of course I could never do a novel seriously; it would slowly begin to kid itself, and God knows what it would turn out to be like. He seems to have assumed that a novel must have high seriousness, although two of his favorites were Evelyn Waugh's bizarre satires Vile Bodies and Decline and Fall. With the publication of his illustrations for Is Sex Necessary? in 1929, Thurber's second career as a cartoonist was launched; and he found himself, in his mid-thirties, belatedly acclaimed as a visual and verbal artist. The subject of his art was the predicaments and perplexities of Domesticus americanus. Echoing Wordsworth's definition of poetry, Thurber called his humor "emotional chaos told about calmly and quietly in retrospect." His characters (some of them a persona of Thurber himself) are not engaged in heroic conflicts but are preoccupied with "the smaller enormities of life''; they are badgered by bureaucrats and are unable to master machinery or to cope with technological trivia. The gestures of such a humorist, he explained, "are the ludicrous reflexes of the maladjusted; his repose is the momentary inertia of the nonplussed." Thurber's burlesque autobiography, My Life

and Hard Times (1933), is a mock-heroic account of the chaos caused by imaginary disasters. The Thurbers and their neighbors are prone to panic when they think the dam has broken in the 1913 Ohio flood, when they believe Father has been killed by a falling bed, when they imagine a ghost is haunting the house. Their comic anxieties are caused by nonexistent menaces: Briggs Beall, a visiting cousin, fears that he will suffocate in his sleep, Aunt Sarah Shoaf has a nightly dread that a burglar will blow chloroform under her door; Mother worries that the Victrola will blow up; and the servants are invariably paranoid—Dora Gedd shoots at her lover, Vashti thinks she is desired by an imaginary stepfather, Mrs. Doody believes Mr. Thurber is the Antichrist and attacks him with a bread knife, and Edda Millmoss accuses Mr. Thurber of having swindled her out of her rights to the land under Trinity Church in New York. Elsewhere in his fiction, people worry about electricity leaking through the house from empty wall sockets and about causing a short circuit by dropping needles down a sink drain. "I know nothing about electricity and I don't want to have it explained to me," Thurber wrote. His men are menaced by the innate malignancy of automobiles. "Every person," wrote Thurber, "carries on his consciousness the old scar, or the fresh wound, of some harrowing misadventure with a contraption of some sort"; and people must practice " a natural caution in a world made up of gadgets that whir and whine and whiz and shriek and sometimes explode." Most of the great film comedians from Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, and Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy down to Woody Allen specialize, like Thurber, in humiliation; and often the visual humor comes from their inability to cope with machinery run amok. Audiences are amused, not because of sadism but because of the absurd implausibility of the situations that, though outlandish, are still close enough to the familiar for

608 I AMERICAN empathy; they can imagine themselves being equally flabbergasted and frustrated. Moreover, Thurber felt that the dilemmas his characters encounter help the reader to endure his own problems through "the comfortable feeling that one has had, after all, a pretty sensible and peaceful life, by comparison." Furthermore, the perspective his art gives to past moments of ineffectuality provides a comic catharsis. As Thurber put it, "The things we laugh at are awful while they are going on, but get funny when we look back. And other people laugh because they've been through it too." Thurber's first book came out in 1929; and his characteristic accounts of failure and frustration were written during the Great Depression, under the threat of an impending world war. Although his characters, like those of his favorite novelist, Henry James, seem to have no financial worries, they are not aggressive businessmen; and whatever ambition they may have had has been replaced by apprehension. An unconscious irony of the success books that Thurber satirized in Let Your Mind Alone! (1937) is the fact that they ignored the economic realities of the 1930's, when victims of the Great Depression could not pull themselves out of the economic quagmire by means of inspirational slogans. As the wife says in one Thurber cartoon, "We're all disenchanted." Thurber wrote to E. B. White in 1938: Our lives become, right after college, as unworkable as a Ford in a vat of molasses, but nobody is giving this frightful problem any thought. Everybody is monkeying with the superstructure of economics, politics, distribution, etc. which stick up out of the vat also covered with molasses. I know damn well, of course, that nobody will ever get the superstructure cleaned off, let alone the Ford out of the vat. A world in which there are millions of people, hundreds of millions, can have no possible chance of working. If you get more than six people together in a room, it won't work.

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Certainly he had no faith in the "strive and succeed" philosophy that flourished during the 1930's in such books as Dale Carnegie'sHow to Win Friends and Influence People and Dorothea Brande's Wake Up and Live! Irritated by their facile psychic panaceas and concerned about their exhortations to conformity, Thurber immersed himself in the genre and came up with an antidote in Let Your Mind Alone! Besides Carnegie and Brande, he read "the most incredible crap" (as he put it to a friend), "but filled with such a walking into my spider trap as you wouldn't believe." Among them were David Seabury's/fow to Worry Successfully, Dr. James L. Mursell's Streamline Your Mind, Sadie Myers Shellow's How to Develop Your Personality, and Dr. Louis E. Bisch's Be Glad You're Neurotic. Thurber found that these mental disciplinarians and advocates of masterful adjustment would ignore or suppress personal idiosyncrasies that, if they often result in confusion, also enhance life by keeping the imagination free and the individual irrepressible. He maintained that "The undisciplined mind runs far less chance of having its purposes thwarted, its plans distorted, its whole scheme and system wrenched out of line. The undisciplined mind, in short, is far better adapted to the confused world in which we live today than the streamlined mind." Thurber preferred the free association of thoughts and fought against minds "of the guardian type." Another group that will not let your mind alone are political extremists, the most sinister of all, because their way of streamlining your mind is to brainwash, censor, straitjacket, and regiment it—to perform, in effect, an ideological lobotomy. Thurber was almost entirely detached from politics; his main political interest was in being left alone, and he contended "that my stories and my pictures were about relationships between men and women which are entirely apart from any consideration of economics, politics, or anything of the sort." To E. B. White he wrote: "It's the personal and intimate that really

JAMES THURBER I 609 affect one's life. All this concern about political forms is nonsense. No government in the world is as big as a man's liver." In the preface to My Life and Hard Times, he observed: Your short-piece writer's time is not Walter Lippmann's time, or Stuart Chase's time, or Professor Einstein's time. It is his own personal time, circumscribed by the short boundaries of his pain and his embarrassment, in which what happens to his digestion, the rear axle of his car, and the confused flow of his relationships with six or eight persons and two or three buildings is of greater importance than what goes on in the nation or in the universe. Accordingly, Thurber was enraged when, at a party given by Malcolm Cowley, the militant Communist critic Mike Gold called him and his fellow New Yorker writers a bunch of "college punks" who had lost their virility. Thurber practically came to blows with Gold; later, he responded with a fifteen-page letter to Cowley in which he stated his reasons for disliking "literary communists.'' One of his objections was that the proletariat literati are not members of the proletariat but are middle-class intellectuals who show a pathetic ignorance of real working people: "I have never yet seen one of them quote, directly, a worker or a leader of workers." Thurber could find no clear statement of what the Communists wanted in order to save the working class; they merely expressed their hatreds. Thurber was annoyed by their "warnings, threats, and ominous announcements and prophecies." One of their hatreds was artists who did not share their dogmas and dialectic. Gold had denounced Ring Lardner and had called traditionalists like Willa Gather (a Thurber favorite) and Thornton Wilder cowards. Granville Hicks earned Thurber's ire for condemning Emily Dickinson and Henry James as failures for not coming to grips with social evils. "It's incredible in this so-called enlightened age," said Thurber. "Am I to believe that before Commu-

nism can get anywhere all writers must cease to write anything that isn't proletarian?" The specter of thought control loomed behind the intellectual arrogance, intolerance, and self-righteousness that Thurber found characteristic of the Communists, whose inference was that the sort of writing published in the New Yorker . . . no matter how funny or well done or, in its way, right—should be stopped. If these men, who write such attacks, should ever get in control, do you think there wouldn't be a commissar of literature who would be appointed and commissioned to stop it, who would set us at work writing either poems in praise of the American Lenin or getting up time tables for work trains? If you do, [he wrote to Cowley] you're missing a low, faint, distant rumbling. Thurber's response was a thoughtful one, not the hysteria of a Red-baiter. He was well aware that in the Great Depression capitalism was sick and might need drastic cures. He wanted to engage in dialogue with the Communists in order to learn more about them, but he found that they turned a deaf ear to anyone not subscribing to their orthodoxy. "They won't compromise, they won't debate, they won't listen, they just annoy and disturb people. . . . Does no Communist writer listen to any other?" he asked. "Don't they give advice, don't they ever come out with 'horse's ass' and 'god damn fool' [to each other]? Well, they should. In mere unthinking solidarity . . . there is nothing but the grain of ruin." He predicted that if they should take over, they would not bring freedom, but would "subject the individual to the political body, to the economic structure," and would "put the artist in a uniform. . . . It is this desire to regiment and discipline art—the art of writing and the art of living—that some of us are afraid of. . . . " Cowley responded by inviting Thurber to review Granville Hicks' anthology, Proletarian Literature in the United States (1936) for the New Republic. Thurber took the assignment con-

610 I AMERICAN scientiously and slaved for weeks to produce a fair and objective analysis. He praised some selections but protested that too many degenerated into irrelevant invective against "bourgeois" writers. (To Cowley, he wrote that "bourgeois" is "a hell of a goddam loose word to apply to all Americans who are not proletarians.") He was particularly incensed by Joseph Freeman's sweeping generalization that love is confined to the proletariat and that the middle class consists entirely of lechers and narcissists. Thurber demanded evidence for this and asked, "Just what . . . makes the proletarian unlecherous, fine, spiritual . . . ?" On artistic grounds he did not object to the subject matter of the book, but to their predominantly poor style and syntax; "I grant the importance of the scenes on which all these stories are based, but they cannot have reality, they cannot be literature, if they are slovenly done.. . . Art does not rush to the barricades." The ultimate and fatal weakness was the anthology's total lack of humor. In the late 1930's, Thurber was convinced that the real menace came neither from Communism nor from capitalism, but from fascism. "I also firmly believe," he wrote to Cowley, "that it is the clumsy and whining and arrogant attitude of the proletarian writers which is making that menace bigger and bigger every day." Thurber saw something of this menace at close range when he and his wife went to Europe in 1937-38. His casuals from France, later collected as Part 2 of My World—and Welcome to It (1942), contain a wistful sense that its Gallic charm is threatened, that war looming over the horizon may black out the city of light. Feeling that artists, as well as art, should not rush to the barricades, he forebore to cross the Pyrenees into Spain. "I decided I would only get in Spain's way," he confessed to Katharine White. "I am somewhat convinced that Spain-politics-war, etc. is not Precisely My Field." Thuiber's way of attacking fascism was

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through fables and parables. The Last Flower (1939) shows the mindless destruction of civilization in a war brought about by "liberators," militarists, and their legions of goose-stepping soldiers. Only when love returns to the world is there some hope for rebirth. As W. H. Auden, who reviewed Thurber's book, wrote in the same year, "We must love one another or die." In 1940, Thurber published Fables for Our Time, several of which deal with fascist oppression. ' 'The Rabbits Who Caused All the Trouble,'' according to the devouring wolves, is an allegory of the Nazis' anti-Semitism; and * 'The Owl Who Was God," although himself innocent, is an emblem of the blind worship of a blind leader, a fiihrer who leads his followers to destruction. On the other hand, "The Very Proper Gander," in which the barnyard creatures persecute a harmless gander when they mistake the praise "a very proper gander" for rumors about "propaganda," is a fable about witch-hunting that could apply equally well to homegrown fascism of the radical right. At that time the Dies Committee, allegedly investigating subversion, was harassing liberals on the assumption that liberalism was Communism; and right-wingers were denouncing the New Deal as treasonable. Thurber responded with a play, The Male Animal, a defense of intellectual and academic freedom. The work has two interacting plots: a comedy of domestic discord in the tradition of Thurber's stories of matrimonial misunderstandings, and a conflict over academic freedom. The latter occurs when Tommy Turner, a professor of English at Midwestern University, plans to read a passage by Bartolomeo Vanzetti as one of several examples of ungrammatical eloquence. Somehow, word of his intention reaches Ed Keller, a boorish right-wing trustee, who has been directing the university's inquisition into faculty politics in order to purge alleged Communists. Described as a Neanderthal man who "rolls like the juggernaut over the careers of young profes-

JAMES THURBER I 611 sors," Keller is intolerant of any opinion differing from his own. In conjuring up a wave of antiRed paranoia, he has not uncovered any authentic Communists but has fired several perfectly loyal liberals in an ordeal by slander. Turner, a mild-mannered scholar, wants to avoid trouble; but a radical student journalist publishes an editorial in the campus magazine calling the trustees fascists and praising Turner's integrity. Keller demands that Turner not read the Vanzetti letter and that he denounce the editorial. Turner's wife wants him to back down; and Dean Damon, head of the English department, advises appeasement but indicates that he will be disappointed if Turner does not stand up for academic freedom. "We don't want anything Red—or even Pink—taught here," insists Keller. When Turner asks, ' 'But who's to decide what is Red and what is Pink?" Keller snarls that the trustees are to judge. The faculty are a bunch of weaklings who insist on weighing all the evidence and are thus unfit to determine curriculum. Nothing but Americanism should be taught, insists Keller, who cannot define it except in terms of his own prejudices. Turner, driven to the wall, maintains "that a college should be concerned with ideas. Not just your ideas or my ideas, but all ideas." Threatened with the loss of his job, Turner finds that he must take a stand if he is to retain his self-respect. * 'If I can't read this letter today, tomorrow none of us will be able to teach anything except what Mr. Keller here and the Legislature permit us to teach. . . . We 're holding the last fortress of free thought, and if we surrender to prejudice and dictation, we're cowards." Maintaining his integrity costs Turner his job but wins back his wife, who had been tempted to leave him for an old flame and former football star back in town for the homecoming weekend. Thurber wrote The Male Animal in collaboration with his Ohio State friend Elliott Nugent, who had become a successful playwright, stage and screen actor, and film director. Originally

the matrimonial comedy was Thurber's idea, and Nugent added the issue of academic freedom; but by the time the play was finished, it was impossible to separate the elements of the collaboration. Ironically, Nugent, a friend of the militantly conservative actor Robert Montgomery, later turned right-wing during the early 1950's; and it was Thurber who continued the fight for freedom of thought and expression. Several times that fight involved combating attempts at censorship by Ohio State University. As the Cold War paranoia persisted, Ohio State caught the contagion and in 1951 passed a gag rule for visiting speakers, requiring them and their speeches to be screened for possible subversion. It was The Male Animal come to life. Just as Tommy Turner sacrificed his job for his principles, so Thurber declined an honorary Litt.D. from Ohio State, writing to President Howard L. Bevis: I have faith that Ohio State will restore freedom of speech and freedom of research, but until it does I do not want to seem to approve of its recent action. The acceptance of an honorary degree right now would certainly be construed as such approval, or as indifference to the situation. As an antidote to McCarthyism, Thurber turned back to the placid years of his childhood, "the age of innocence, when trust flowered as readily as suspicion does today. . . . " The result was The Thurber Album (1952), a collection of idealized prose portraits of his family and friends in turn-of-the-century Columbus . . . when there wasn't this fear and hysteria. I wanted to write the story of some solid American characters, more or less as an example of how Americans started out and what they should go back to. To sanity and soundness and away from this jumpiness. It's hard to write humor in the mental weather we've had, and that's likely to take you into reminiscence.

612 I AMERICAN As early as 1948, Thurber had pointed out the pitfalls of political witch-hunts, "In the present Era of Suspicion, it is a wise citizen who disproves any dark rumors and reports of his secret thoughts and activities before they can be twisted into charges of disloyalty by the alert and skillful minds now dedicated to that high-minded and patriotic practice." His deepest outrage was directed at the fact that the inquisitors were particularly suspicious of artists. "If we don't stop suspecting all writers," he said in 1952, "it will be a severe blow to our culture. I think all writers, even the innocent ones, are scared. There's guilt by association, guilt by excoriation, there's guilt by everything the politicians invent." Thurber counterattacked with Further Fables for Our Time (1956), which won the American Library Association's Liberty and Justice Award, and with an adult fantasy, The Wonderful O (1957), an elaborate piece of wordplay in which a pirate tries to ban the letter o because his mother had been pushed through a porthole; the moral is that words with o are essential to civilization, and the most indispensable one is "freedom." Looking back in 1958, when McCarthy had been discredited, Thurber told Henry Brandon: The six or eight years that went by—those terrible years—when all the American Congress seemed to do was to investigate writers, artists, and painters—to me were the dreadful years. All this time Russia was getting ahead of us, all this time we were fighting a new cold civil war— suspecting neighbors, suspecting the very nature of writing, of academic intellectualism, anything—that was a very bad moment in our history—perhaps the darkest we've ever had. In the last decade of his life, Thurber became increasingly pessimistic, preoccupied with what he thought was the decline of comedy and of civilized values in general. A major reason was his concern with the Oppressive political atmosphere; and he lost no opportunity to strike back

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at the heresy hunters, insisting: "Our comedy should deal, in its own immemorial manner, with the American scene and the American people, without fear or favor, without guilt or grovelling." Despite his discontent, he remained ultimately hopeful that reason would prevail, largely through the saving sanity of humor. He wrote in his reply to receiving the Sesquicentennial Medal of the Ohioana Library Association in 1953: As a matter of fact, comedy, in all of its forms, including the rusty art of political satire, is used to surviving eras of stress and strain, even of fear and trembling, but it sickens in the weather of intimidation and suppression, and such a sickness could infect a whole nation. The only rules comedy should tolerate are those of taste and the only limitations those of libel. A major reason for the melancholy of Thurber's males is the dominant nature of the Thurberian female. The war between men and women was declared in his first book, Is Sex Necessary?, written in collaboration with E. B. White. In its satire of the inhibitions and false delicacy of the genteel tradition, and of the Victorian veneration of women as mysterious creatures made of finer substance than man's coarse clay (burlesqued in such mock misconceptions as the belief that pregnancy is induced by bringing bluebirds into a room filled with lilies), Thurber was declaring independence from his own upbringing. One thinks of the typical Thuiber woman as a dowdy nag oppressing an intimidated spouse. In his drawings her shapeless figure is sheathed in a long gown resembling a gunnysack; she is endowed with stringy hair, a receding chin, and a sharply pointed nose. Her expression shows either a manic gleam in her eyes or a look of frowning disapproval or grim determination. Often larger than the male, she is as physically formidable as a runaway rhinoceros. Yet the youthful Thurber was steeped in the romantic attitude toward women and liked to visualize them as Henry

JAMES THURBER I 613 James heroines. Although later, until his second marriage, he had a reputation as a womanizer, he was a prudish young man whose sexual-initiation came comparatively late. Not until after Elliott Nugent introduced him to college social life did Thurber start dating in earnest; he was then twenty-two years old. From Paris during and after World War I, he wrote interminable adolescent letters gushing about the glory of the American girl: Nugey, she is a Princess of Youth, and the Apotheosis of the American Beauty. . . . And there is nowhere in all the world their equal. . . . The A.E.F. in France has learned to respect American womanhood, to revere,—to worship the clean, fine morals of American womanhood, and to idealize American girls,—and to worship them with a fire that burns brighter and steadier than ever before,—and that will never die down. In the spring of 1919, he wrote Nugent a prudish testament about the purity of American sexual morality and the wholesomeness of the American girl, worship of whom keeps the American soldier free from the seductions of Parisiennes. But in that same year he lost his virginity to a Folies Bergeres dancer named Ninette. Trying to talk himself out of a consequent nervous collapse, he wrote to Nugent, "I have no regrets, fortunately, but I will say that I can't see it except as a passing experience once in—or twice in—a life-time, providing there is no One Girl." The One Girl seemed to him to be Althea Adams, an Ohio State "Rosebud," whom he married on May 20, 1922. He wrote to Nugent that she was not only "more beautiful than new snow with the light of stars upon it, or than cool flowers in the soft of dawning" but also was "ravishingly intelligent, with characteristics so much like mine in many directions you would of course find her fetching." But later, he admitted, "She always scared me." His friends described her as Amazonian, "both physically and mentally," and noted that she did her best to domi-

nate her husband. Thurber's second wife later said, "Althea was strong, like her father, the Army officer. Jamie ended up marrying Captain Converse in drag." Thurber's brother Robert called her "the domineering type, bossy and pushy, always wanting her own way"; and she and Thuiber's mother instantly disliked each other. The forbidding Thurber woman of the cartoons and stories is a blend of the two. Thurber's family was matriarchal; his father was mild and comparatively passive, while his mother was strong-willed, an antic comedienne, and addicted to practical jokes. She is the model for the more manic women in her son's art. Although he later made much of her, Thurber was not very close to his mother when young and spent considerable time living away from home with "Aunt" Margery Albright (no relative), whom he idolized. Despite the unsuitability of his marriage, Thurber continued to idealize women and love in his "Credos and Curios" column for the Columbus Dispatch, denouncing the "sordid" treatment of sex in the works of James Joyce, Sinclair Lewis, Sherwood Anderson, and D. H. Lawrence, and complaining of "Jurgen's endless, sly and sneaking philanderings" in the works of James Branch Cabell. He preferred Zona Gale's Faint Perfume for ' 'its note of idealistic love . . . flung like a fresh rose among the sordid sex stuff that prevails in present day novels," and for its "fine fragrance of a sensitive, clean love which permeates and changes everything." In view of the frumpy long gowns of his cartoon women, it is curious to find the romantic young Thurber objecting to the short skirts of 1923: There was no loveliness in them, no rhythmic music, nothing to suggest a lady in a garden or a girl on a river when it is summer and afternoon. They suggested, rather, stout ladies bowling duck pins. . . . The long dress breathes of

614 I AMERICAN muted harpsichord music, of old colonnades under the moon, of lilacs at twilight, of romance on wide shining stairways, of figures posed in tall palace windows, of lovers' heads against the blue night. Within six years Thurber was demolishing this sort of mooning in Is Sex Necessary? But that volume, a lighthearted spoof of the sex books then current, is merely an opening skirmish in the war between the sexes. The first major battle occurs in the eight stories about Mr. and Mrs. Monroe in The Owl in the Attic (1931). His most extended character studies, they present marriage at its most maddening. Thurber wrote to his friend Herman Miller, "The Monroe stories were transcripts, one or two of them varying less than an inch from the actual happenings." This may be true of the basic situations, but Thurber gives them a sardonic twist. Certainly he would not claim that Mr. Monroe is a self-portrait, for he is Thurber's extreme example of the helpless, ineffectual male. In Thurber's description, "Mr. Monroe didn't really have any character. He had a certain charm, yes; but not character. He evaded difficult situations; he had no talent for firm resolution; he immolated badly; and he wasn't even very good at renunciation, except when he was tired or a little sick." Like Walter Mitty, Monroe daydreamed of himself as a masterful individual, "giving the impression of a strong, silent man wrapped in meditation." But we never see his dreams, nor do they offer anything comparable to Mitty's world of derring-do. Instead, we find him afraid of customs inspectors, terrified by a bat, fearful of imaginary burglars, and perpetually indecisive. His wife is forceful and (from his frustrated point of view) infuriatingly competent. To an extent they represent Thurber and his wife; he was inept with machinery and had a tendency to stumble over things, while, according to his agent, John Gude, "Althea had the bad habit of

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doing everything as well as a man could, which infuriated Jim." But whereas Mr. Monroe was cowed to the point of tears by his nervous inability to cope, Thurber never lacked aggressiveness. Quite the contrary. Mr. Monroe's "helpless despair" was not that of his creator, who had formidable powers of survival. Mr. Monroe is Thurber's contribution to the several portraits of impotent modern man in the literature of the 1920's and early 1930's; and the fact that his is a domesticated situation in which anyone might occasionally find himself brings him closer to home than the remote Fisher King of The Waste Land, the perverted Popeye of Sanctuary, or the expatriate Jake Barnes of The Sun Also Rises. They are enveloped in legend, Gothic horror, or Continental glamour, whereas Monroe is uncomfortably familiar. A comparable but more whimsical relationship between the sexes appeared a year later in Thurber's picture parable, "The Race of Life" (1932). At the outset of this journey, in which a man, woman, and child traverse a varied landscape to reach a heavenly gate on a high hill, the woman sets out with a hopeful look in her eye, while her mate slumps behind her looking perplexed and the child grimly carries a banner on which is written "Excelsior." For a while they travel neck and neck; but after the man trips over a rock and the woman takes the lead in leaping over a stream, she consistently sets the pace. Her look is always cheerful or resolute, while he appears hesitant or apprehensive. When he becomes winded, she carries him under her arm. She dashes boldly downhill, while he timidly descends backward. While he cowers behind, sheltering the child, she advances to fight an eerie figure labeled "Menace" and an angry bear. She sits guard at night while the others sleep, and at the climax she dashes toward the celestial gate, exhorting the man, who collapses behind her in a rainstorm. The satiric situation of Thurber's drawings

JAMES THURBER I 615 was taken seriously in many radio soap operas. In a lengthy study of soap opera included in The Beast in Me (1948), Thurber observed that the men were regularly stricken with such melodramatic afflictions as amnesia, temporary blindness, and paralysis, thus becoming "symbols that the listening women demand." When their men are incapacitated, "the good women become nobler than ever." Even when the men of soapland are not crippled by disease, the heroines try to keep them subordinate and emotionally dependent: Suitors in Soapland are usually weak and Helen [Trent]'s frustration of them is aimed to gratify the listening housewives, brought up in the great American tradition of female domination. . . . The weak men continually confess their weaknesses to the good women, who usually manage to turn them into stable citizens by some vague and soapy magic. The weak men and the good men often confess to one another their dependence on the good woman. In the era of women's liberation, one might conclude that soap opera situations were a compensation for the dependent, bored-housewife syndrome, that they were the women's version of Walter Mitty's wish projections. Thurber revolted against female domination, but he had a grudging admiration for women's vitality and exuberance, shown more often among his Ohio eccentrics than among his New York sophisticates. Although he wrote a satiric obituary that "Socially, economically, physically and intellectually, Man is slowly going . . . to hell. . . . Man's day is indeed done; the epoch of Woman is upon us," he was amiably amused by the spectacle of women going on forever, singing, dancing, playing kettledrums, and chinning themselves at 114 years of age, while their men are prematurely played out. His cartoon men are usually diminutive, bald, flabby, and myopic (wearing pince-nez), whereas the

women are physically formidable and quite capable of outwrestling their mates. ("Two Best Falls Out of Three—Okay, Mr. Montague?" says an oversized woman in one cartoon.) They wield Ping-Pong paddles and tennis rackets like battle-axes, swing croquet mallets like scythes, have a vicious backhand at polo, and hurl bowling balls as if they were anarchist bombs. Uninhibited, they make love to other women's husbands, pick fights in bars, and pass out drunk at parties. At the same time, they continually deflate their husbands when the latter try to imagine themselves as heroic. "Who are you today— Ronald Colman?" sneers a wife as her husband, imitating the dueling scene of The Prisoner of Zenda, lunges with a cane at a floor lamp. Mrs. Malcolm Cowley said that Althea Thurber had no sense of fantasy; and that is a fatal defect in Thurber's women, who are unable to acknowledge unicorns in their gardens. Overwhelmed by domineering wives, Thurber's men, like Walter Mitty, seek escape in their imaginations, where they are adventurers and swashbucklers; but their spoilsport spouses try to correct even their fantasy lives. As for home, it is seen by an apprehensive husband in one cartoon as the personification of a glowering wife. When the situation reaches the breaking point, some of the men attempt to do their wives in. A number of cartoons feature an enraged male trying to strangle a female. In "Mr. Preble Gets Rid of His Wife" (July 8, 1933), Mr. Preble attempts to lure his wife into the cellar so that he can bash her over the head with a coal shovel and bury her. In "The War Between Men and Women" (1934), it is a man who commits the overt act, tossing a highball in a woman's face. On the other hand, the spouses of numerous Thurber women have died mysteriously or gone out of their minds; and when one husband asks, "Have you seen my pistol, Honeybun?" she is holding it behind a newspaper and aimed at him. None of this violence is to be taken seriously; it

616 I AMERICAN is no more deadly than the feud between Tom and Jerry or the roadrunner and the coyote in animated cartoons. One story, 'The Whip-poorwill" (1941), is grimly realistic, proceeding by gradual steps from matrimonial quarreling to madness and murder as the irritable Mr. Kinstrey, writhing under his wife's smug superiority, his frayed nerves tortured by the incessant shrieking of a whippoorwill, kills his wife, servants, and himself with a carving knife. Thurber wrote this story (along with two other macabre ones, "A Friend to Alexander" [1942] and 'The Cane in the Corridor" [1943]) to work off his pain and frustration after five eye operations had left him blind; but he was thoroughly in control of his material and was not indulging in Freudian wish fulfillment. Aside from the fairy tales, none of Thurber's stories deals with courtship; and sex is rarely a factor in his accounts of marital antagonisms. In "The Interview" (1950), Mrs. Lockhorn repeatedly corrects her husband and tries to restrain his drinking, while he sneers sarcasms at her; we see only negative emotions, and Lockhorn complains to the interviewer that sexual intercourse is only for holidays. In "Smashup" (1935), Tommy Trinway, belittled by his bossy wife because of his fear of driving the family car, regains his confidence by skillfully avoiding an accident when her sprained wrist forces him to drive through a metropolis, and then asserts his newfound independence by ordering separate bedrooms at their hotel. But ordinarily Thurber concentrates on the repartee between a highstrung couple whose conversation consists almost entirely of verbal thrusts, parries, and ripostes. (It is significant that many of Thurber's drawings are of fencers crossing blades or of sparring partners.) Thurber usually presents marriage in medias res, showing neither the courtship nor the conclusion but some point at which the constant friction of minute irritants is wearing the relationship through. "It is a com-

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monplace that the small annoyances of the marriage relationship slowly build up its insupportabilities, as particles of sediment build up great deltas," Thuiber observed. Often the source of friction is trivial or absurd. "The Breaking Up of the Winships" (January 11, 1936) is caused by a quarrel over the comparative acting abilities of Greta Garbo and Donald Duck; the unnamed couple in "A Couple of Hamburgers" (1935) reach the combustible stage over a disagreement on where to stop for a meal; and Mrs. Bidwell divorces her husband because he amused himself by seeing how long he could hold his breath. Clearly, the surface tension is only the tip of the iceberg; the stories imply that a great deal has gone on before. "Take more'n a whip-poor-will to cause a mess like that," comments a state trooper on observing the bodies of Mr. Kinstrey and his victims in "The Whip-poor-will." After numerous separations and attempts at reconciliation (during one of which Thurber's only child, Rosemary, was born), Thurber's first marriage ended in May 1935. At that time he published two serious stories about the emptiness of solitude. In "The Evening's at Seven" (1932), the protagonist finds that an attempt to relieve the monotony of a loveless marriage by a visit to an old flame is merely frustrating. Yet divorce is no better, as the autobiographical story "One Is a Wanderer" (1935) shows. Rejecting the idea of visiting his married friends, Mr. Kiik realizes that he would only be an intruder. "It isn't because I'm so damned unhappy—I'm not so damned unhappy—It's because they're so damned happy, damn them. Why don't they know that? Why don't they do something about it?" If marriage was difficult, solitude was worse. To a friend Thurber wrote: ' 'Life alone to me is a barren and selfish and pointless thing." He had been alone for some time before his divorce; shortly afterward (June 25, 1935) he married

JAMES THURBER I 617 again, this time very happily. If he continued to have periods of cantankerousness and depression, it was not the fault of his second wife, Helen Muriel Wismer. She had edited several minor magazines and possessed great intelligence, charm, and a wit to match Thurber's own. His friends and family instantly liked her; and his agent said, "Helen was the best possible woman for him in the whole world." Robert Thuiber added, "She couldn't have been a better wife for Jamie. . . . My parents loved her, especially as compared to Althea." Thurber observed that Helen delighted Herman Miller "because he saw she was made to order for me—and a tough order that is.'' After Thurber's blindness and other illnesses, friends observed that although he had to endure a good deal of suffering, he was at least spared the ordeal of marriage to a "Thurber woman." His English publisher, Hamish Hamilton, wrote: "For many years Helen took the place of his eyes. His writing was made possible by her infinite patience in copying, reading, and re-reading and helped by her critical comments. His burden was lightened by her stimulating company and her affectionate teasing. . . . Helen turned Jamie's night into day." Thurber fondly called her his seeing-eye wife. Although Harold Ross instantly liked Helen Thurber, he worried that a happy marriage would defuse Thurber's battle of the sexes; he was relieved to see that the antagonism did not abate in Thurber's cartoons and prose. But after 1935 the shrews appear much less frequently, and the quarrels are more often touched off by an irascible husband. In the first-person pieces the second Mrs. Thurber is not a nagger, but the voice of moderation and reason. From the perspective of women's liberation, what is the reader to make of Thurber's prolonged war between men and women? Is it merely a more literary version of the comic-strip spats between Jiggs and Maggie or Blondie and Dagwood, or does it have more meaningful sub-

stance? Was Thurber a misogynist, or was he making some valid interpretations of personal relationships? There is, of course, an ancient literary tradition of antifeminism, as seen in the "book of wikked wyves" owned by one of the husbands of Chaucer's Wife of Bath (who by her sheer vitality overwhelms any antifeminism in her own portrait), and of sexual skirmishing (the essence of Restoration comedy); but the existence of a tradition is not enough to validate it. Some of Thurber's acquaintances thought he really did dislike women; he was nasty to most of them on occasion. But he also raged at most of his friends, and many of his closest friends were women. "Women have always come to my rescue," he admitted. Those who fare badly in Thurber's work are the insensitive and intolerant ones like Mrs. Bidwell, Mrs. Mitty, and Mrs. Lockhorn. Thurber particularly objected to women's supposed intellectual inadequacy and limited powers of imagination. To the extent that there is any truth in this, it may be the result of sexual chauvinism, the pressures that told girls not to get good grades and that kept most women away from careers and confined to "Kinder, Kirche, Kiichen." Thurber's women compensate by domineering their spouses, repressing their romantic and creative instincts, and trying to mold the men into conformists. Like the female hares and guinea pigs in the fable "The Bragdowdy and the Busybody" and the female chipmunk in the fable "The Shrike and the Chipmunks,'' they often pressure their men to produce more, to get ahead by applying themselves more diligently. Denied careers, they show all the aggression of businessmen and try to advance themselves vicariously through their husbands. But as Henry Bamford Parkes points out in The American Experience, "Insofar as the American people were committed to the American ideology of personal success, they were attempting something that for most of them was impossible. Judged by the

618 I AMERICAN prevalent standards of American society, most Americans were compelled to regard themselves as having failed and to attribute their failure to some shortcoming within themselves." Thus the man of the industrial age felt vulnerable to impotent failure and was "apt to have a neurotic dependence, first upon his mother and afterwards upon his wife, owing to his own insecurity and lack of masculine self-assurance." Thurber's healthiest males, whether human or animal, tell their spouses to let their minds alone; and his most vital females are the exuberant eccentrics. At heart, Thurber wanted both sexes to be liberated. He objected to sexual stereotyping and observed, "The wife who keeps saying, Isn't that just like a man?9 and the husband who keeps saying, 'Oh, well, you know how women are,' are likely to grow farther and farther apart through the years. These famous generalizations have the effect of reducing an individual to the anonymous status of a mere unit in a mass." He preferred the reciprocal respect of Hemy James's men and women, who "were capable of friendship." Thurber liked intelligent women and told Eddy Gilmore, "When I get mad at women it's usually because they fall below my standard." Wives should, he insisted, be helpmates to their husbands; and he praised Helen Thurber as a Mount Holyoke graduate and a great proofreader and editor. He frequently observed that American women did not care much about knowledge, and stated that they would not become less feminine from studying science, history, or politics. Considering man's political perversions and warlike aggressions, Thurber came increasingly to see woman as the sane hope for peace: The most frightening study of mankind is man. I think he has failed to run the world, and that Woman must take over if the species is to survive. Almost any century now Woman may lose her patience with black politics and red war and let fly. I wish I could be on earth then to witness

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the saving of our self-destructive species by its greatest creative force. If I have sometimes seemed to make fun of Woman, I assure you it has only been for the purpose of egging her on. Thurber often presented himself as the protagonist of his casuals, but the characterization is far from authentic autobiography. Although he was indeed high-strung and nervous, he was anything but the timorous, ineffectual character of his fiction. The literary character is a persona, like the imbecilic role that Samuel Clemens sometimes assumed. Among Thurber's drawings are a few self-portraits; but he bore no resemblance to the quintessential male of his cartoons, even those for casuals in which Thurber is the central character. In the drawings the adult male is diminutive and bald, and wears a pince-nez; the real Thurber was six feet, one and a half inches tall, with a short, trimmed moustache and a thick head of often disheveled hair. Although handicapped by blindness in his later years, he was by no means the incompetent and intimidated figure of his art that some critics found comparable to J. Alfred Prufrock. Rather, Henry Brandon found that "Thurber's gaunt figure and his flat, commanding voice were a little intimidating at first. This was not the 'little-man-what-now' type trapped between the 'hard covers' of life, this was a man who knew what he wanted, who had learned and obviously succeeded in overcoming many vicissitudes of life.'' The Paris Review interviewers expected to find in person "the shy, trapped little man in the Thurber cartoons'' and the ' 'confused and bewildered" fumbler of his fiction; they were surprised to meet an assured and confident individual. Wolcott Gibbs, who knew Thurber for more than a generation, was vastly amused by . . . the idea that he would be helpless in the face of any known social situation. . . . There have been times when I thought that he dealt a little more erratically with life than most of the

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men I know, but I have certainly never seen him defeated, or even perceptibly disconcerted by it. The essence of Mitty and Monroe is that they are, so to speak, driven underground by more confident personalities; the essence of Thurber is such that in any real contest of personalities, everybody else would be well advised to take to the hills. Thurber did have bouts of depression and suffered a nervous breakdown after he became blind. As he put it, "I went into a tailspin, crashed, and burst into flames." But with the help of his wife and of two women doctors, he made a quick recovery. ''God knows I have been down in the bowels of terror," he wrote to E. B. White, "but I have climbed out of it with what Dr. [Ruth] Fox thinks is remarkable speed." Blindness, of course, forced him to find new techniques for writing and drawing. Although legally blind, he could still perceive shapes and colors for a number of years anad managed, through magnification, to see sufficiently to scrawl about twenty words, in large writing, on a page of yellow copy paper. With the aid of a Zeiss loop—a magnifying helmet used by precision craftsmen in defense plants that made him look "like a welder from Mars"—Thurber was able to resume drawing in 1943, although doctors set a daily limit of five minutes apiece on two drawings. From then until 1947, when he did his last original drawing for the New Yorker, he produced some of his best sketches, particularly the quite realistic if whimsical animals in "A Gallery of Real Creatures" (1948) and the fantastic birds, beasts, and bugs of "A New Natural History," in which he fused his interest in animals with his addiction to wordplay and created a series of such zoological puns as "A Garble with an Utter in its claws," "A Trochee encountering a Spondee," "The Whited Sepulchre," "The Common Blackguard," and "a female Volt with all her Ergs in one Gasket."

Thurber objected to having his cartoons taken as seriously as his writing. Although he was a meticulous prose stylist who rewrote most of his work a dozen times or more, he dashed off his drawings in a few minutes. He always claimed that his drawing was mere doodling and meant little more than "tossing cards in a hat," yet he was gratified, if surprised, at the success that his pictures had in gallery exhibitions at home and abroad, and he was pleasantly amused to find himself compared to Henri Matisse. They probably meant more to him than he admitted, and he lost some of his zest when he had to give them up. The blind writer turned to dictation, aided by the possession of nearly total recall that enabled him to hold several complete versions of a piece in his mind at once. "Soapland" (1948), The Thurber Album (1952), and The Years with Ross (1959) required extensive research; but although he had assistants to do the legwork, Thurber had to synthesize all the details. He found that "the imagination doesn't go blind," and in fact all of the fairy tales came after his blindness; but the loss of his sight did make his subsequent work more aural. Increasingly he turned away from the visual humor of eccentric catastrophes and toward conversation pieces, in which the narrator engages in verbal fencing with fellow partygoers or with nuisances harassing him with unwelcome visits, bad jokes, unwanted accounts of their lives, or reflections on the state of the world. In this work Thurber ceased writing about his bewildered little man of the 1930's; instead, his protagonist was a witty cosmopolitan, no longer frustrated by gadgetry or a domineering spouse, but badgered by social and political imbecilities against which he defended himself with caustic repartee. The humor does not depend upon situation but comes from Thurber's verbal wit and dazzling wordplay with puns, palindromes, literary allusions, coinages, alliteration and assonance, and often startling metaphors.

620 / AMERICAN The prose of Thurber's earlier work relied upon the carefully polished simplicity characteristic of the best Ateu> Yorker writing. Before joining the magazine, Thurber had perpetrated a mixture of journalese, echoes of his favorite novelist Henry James, and a touch of the lush style of Joseph Hergesheimer. He credited E. B. White with teaching him discipline: 'The precision and clarity of White's writing helped me a lot, slowed me down from the dogtrot of newspaper tempo and made me realize a writer turns on his mind, not a faucet." To Malcolm Cowley he wrote: "Humor cannot afford the ornaments and indulgences of fine writing. . . . " Yet although he never lost his clarity, the fairy tales, word-game essays, and conversation pieces are fall of linguistic innovations that at times resemble the jabberwocky of Finnegan's Wake by James Joyce, another nearly blind writer. Part of this verbal virtuosity was Thurber's way of turning the tables on what he called "carcinomenclature," the debasement of the language into jargon, gobbledygook, or slovenly garble. As a psychosemanticist, Thurber made many of the points that George Orwell stressed in "Politics and the English Language." He satirized the moribund diction of political terminologists, "smoke-screen" euphemisms, the linguistic muddle of Madison Avenue, "the tendency of tired American businessmen and statesmen to use slang and slogan," and the degeneration of meaning through perverse pejorations. "My most intense dedication," he stated, "is the defense of the English language against the decline it has suffered in this century and particularly since the end of the last war." As a blind man's main contact with the world, language became for Thurber a symbol of integrity; and he increasingly complained of "the awful price of continuous cacophony." His answer at times was to turn the tables by inventing even madder garblings. During his final years Thurber became pro-

WRITERS

gressively more disturbed at what he considered the growing morbidity and degenerate subject matter of writers "more interested in the sordid corners of life than in the human heart" and at "The trend of the modern temper . . . toward gloom,resignation,and even surrender. . . . " He lamented the decline of humor and considered that even comedy was going crazy, identifying itself "with the very tension and terror it once did so much to alleviate." As the menace of the machine and the nagging wife were replaced by the H-bomb, McCarthyism, and a ubiquitous Angst, Thurber caught the fallout. Although he hated the decline of comedy into "terror, horror, moribidity, ghastliness, and decadence," he conceded that "it fits the Zeitgeist" and harped upon it or parodied it so much that some of his own work communicated the very quality he wished to exorcise. In interview after interview, he protested too much; and the comedy of such late (1961-62) pieces as "The Manic in the Moon," "The Future, if Any, of Comedy," "Afternoon of a Playwright," and "Carpe Noctem, if You Can" is more depressing than amusing. The .gloom that Thurber fought, although internal as well as external, was not an ingrained pessimism but the sorrow of a disillusioned idealist who still held to his ideals. Although he frequently found it impossible to accept "The Dignity of Man and the Divine Destiny of Man . . . with whole-hearted enthusiasm," he had an intense zest for life that was not diminished by blindness; he continued to travel, maintained an active social life, and even acted on Broadway in A Thurber Carnival for threfe months in 1960. "I salute any man who can cany into his middle years, untarnished and undiminished, those first fine affections of his youth," he wrote; and he was not about to abandon them. Although they were dreams and illusions—"The fine brave fragile stuff that men live by ... gofes] to pieces so easily"—he still believed in them and continued

JAMES THURBER I 621 to yearn, like the moth, for the star. Cried a querulous conversationalist to him: Great God! Are you looking for the bluebird of happiness? Do you think there are actually hinges on chimneys so the stars can get by? Do you believe Love will slay the dragon and live happily ever after? "I believe in the sudden deep greenness of summer," I said. In the fifteen years I have known Charles, his skepticism has always shattered against my affirmation, and he knows it. Like William Faulkner, who in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech said that man must rise above fear by lifting his heart, by relearning the old verities of pity, pride, compassion, sacrifice, and endurance, Thurber maintained at the end of his life that we can overcome Angst "By the lifting of the spirit. . . . It takes guts to be happy, make no mistake about it; and I don't mean slaphappy, or drink-happy, or drug-happy." If he did not always succeed in his final years, it was in part because, unknown to himself, he had a series of undiagnosed minor strokes in the twenty-four months prior to the major one that led to his death on November 8, 1961. Although Thurber's tragic awareness could be as deep as Faulkner's, he also (like Faulkner and such writers as Joseph Conrad, Ernest Hemingway, and Albert Camus) would not have us capitulate to despair but, rather, counter it with courage. He recognized that "The sentimental pure heart of Galahad is gone with the knightly years, but I still believe in the heart of the George Meredith character that was not made of the stuff that breaks." However, his characters often need a temporary escape, for "Who flies afar from the sphere of our sorrow is here today and here tomorrow.'' Just as today's readers turn to heroic fantasy or period romance as a refuge from the pressures of reality, so Thuiber stressed the need for the free flight of the romantic imagination, whether in his

fairy tales or through his delight in the idiosyncratic speech of his hired man Barney Haller or his maid Delia, whose mispronunciations in such statements as "They are here with the reeves" enabled him to conjure up a world of fantastic images. "I share with Delia a form of escapism that is the most mystic and satisfying flight from actuality I have ever known," he wrote. When Barney Haller spoke of hunting grotches in the woods or announced, ' 'We go to the garrick now and become waits," his imagination was ignited. "If you are susceptible to such things, it is not difficult to visualize grotches. They fluttered into my mind: ugly little creatures about the size of whippoorwills, only covered with blood and honey and the scrapings of church bells." Thurber found his spirit enriched by such "cherished transfiguring of meanings" as "Our Father, who are in Heaven, Halloween by thy Name," which provided "a thrill, a delight, and an exaltation that the exact sense of the line could not possibly have created." Like many Romantics, Thurber often found his imagination stimulated by what Wordsworth called "the ministry of fear," which arouses a sense of mystery and the capacity for wonder. "Both my poodles and I myself believed . . . in fiends, and still do," Thurber wrote. "Fiends who materialize out of nothing and nowhere, like winged pigweed or Russian thistle." Among his other alleged fears he listed * 'the bears under the bed, the green men from Mars, the cats sealed up in the walls, the hearts beating under the floor boards, the faces of laughing girls that recede, float past, and come back again." If his characters often feel stalked by menace and wait for some lurking, unknown doom, they are at least liberated from dullness. In an essay on the Oz books, Thurber faulted L. Frank Baum's intention of keeping heartaches and nightmares out of his fantasies—and was glad he failed to do so. Thurber was impatient with the militant realists who, like the mind controllers in Ray Brad-

622 / AMERICAN bury's "Usher II," would prohibit fantasy. When Dr. Paul Schilder diagnosed Alice in Wonderland as full of "cruelty, destruction, and annihilation/' Thurber was incensed, for such views were hostile to the very nature of imaginative literature. Dr. Schilder's work . . . is cut out for him. He has the evil nature of Charles Perrault to dip into, surely as black and devious and unwholesome as Lewis Carroll's. He has the Grimms and Hans Christian Andersen. He has Mother Goose, or much of it. He can spend at least a year on the Legend of Childe Rowland, which is filled with perfectly swell sexual symbols. . . . This one piece of research will lead him into the myth of Proserpine and into Browning and Shakespeare and Milton's Comus and even into the dark and perilous kingdom of Arthurian legend. . . . When he is through with all this, Dr. Schilder should be pretty well persuaded that behind the imaginative works of all the cruel writing men . . . lies the destructive and unstable, the fearful and unwholesome. . . . Thurber would have agreed with Bruno Bettelheim that the element of enchantment in fairy tales and fantasy, fables and parables, is therapeutic in reaching for truth on a deeper, mythic level than is offered by didactic realism, and in intimating "that a rewarding, good life is within one's reach despite adversity." A Romantic at heart, Thurber scoffed at "scientists, statisticians, actuaries, all those men who place numbers above hunches, figures above feelings, facts above possibilities, the normal above the phenomenal. . . . with their eyes on the average, they fail to discern the significant. " From Wordsworth to F. Scott Fitzgerald and E. E. Gummings, Romantics have disliked the analytical reasoning of scientists, who insist upon verifiable fact. Just as Wordsworth argued that "All science which waged war with and wished to extinguish Imagination in the mind of

WRITERS

man, and to leave it nothing of any kind but the naked knowledge of facts, was . . . much worse than useless," Thurber satirized those scientists, the heirs of Dickens' Gradgrind, who would have us ' 'get a precise and dogmatic meaning out of everything they read, thus leaving nothing to the fantasy and the imagination." As Cummings put it, "I'd rather learn from one bird how to sing/ than teach ten thousand stars how not to dance." Thurber recalled that when he was eight, he thought that " Tost No Bills' meant that the walls on which it appeared belonged to one Post No Bill, a man of the same heroic proportions as Buffalo Bill. Some suspiciousminded investigator cleared this up for me, and a part of the glamour of life was gone." "It is respectable to have no illusions—and safe—and profitable—and dull," wrote Joseph Conrad. "Yet you, too, in your time must have known the intensity of life, that light of glamour in the shock of trifles, as amazing as the glow of sparks struck from a cold stone—and as shortlived, alas!" For Thurber, Lord Jim was the recurring symbol of romantic escapism; and in self-mockery he often compared himself to Conrad's hero, finding himself unable to achieve a comparable high adventure. Harassed by the demands of humdrum living, he thought of wandering around the South Seas like a character out of Conrad, silent and inscrutable. But the necessity for frequent visits to my oculist and dentist has prevented this. . . . Furthermore, my horn-rimmed glasses and my Ohio accent betray me, even when I sit on the terrasses of little tropical cafes, wearing a pith helmet, staring straight ahead, and twitching a muscle in my jaw. His own adventures were anticlimactic, for when he spent a summer in the West Indies, no exotic girl like Tondelaya in White Cargo offered to go to pieces with him; instead, the native women

JAMES THURBER I 623 tried to sell him trinkets, and someone stole the pants to his dinner jacket. He realized that There was, of course, even for Conrad's Lord Jim, no running away. . . . In the pathways between office and home and the houses of settled people there are always, ready to snap at you, the little perils of routine living, but there is no escape in the unplanned tangent, the sudden turn. Many of Thurber's men find at least a temporary escape in the realms of imagination, but none does so as triumphantly as Walter Mitty. First published in 1939, "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty" has become one of the bestknown stories of the century. The name has entered the language in endless allusions to him, and Lance's nomenclature includes the "Walter Mitty syndrome." Like many of Thurber's henpecked husbands, Mitty represents the modern male's sense of inadequacy, of being superfluous in a complex world with which he is unable to cope. Mitty is tyrannized by the trivia of shopping lists and the incomprehensibility of automobiles. But unlike Mr. Monroe, Mr. Preble, Mr. Pfendley, Mr. Bidwell, and Thurber's other hapless antiheroes, Mitty transcends his frustrations by daydreaming himself into the regions of heroic romance. As a supremely cool daredevil, he commands a Navy hydroplane through a hurricane, performs miracles of surgery, is the dashing hero of courtroom drama, and flies on a suicide mission as a dauntless member of the Dawn Patrol, whistling "Aupres de ma blonde" as he jauntily prepares to take off for 4 'forty kilometers through hell." At the end, in a close parallel to Lord Jim, he faces the firing squad without flinching, "proud and disdainful." Among other things, * 'Mitty " is a masterpiece of popular culture; just as the humor in "The Catbird Seat" (1942) derives in part from the cliches of gangster fiction, in which Mr. Martin, a prissy and proper clerk, formulates his plans to do in the braying Mrs. Ulgine Barrows, who

threatens his orderly routine, so Mitty's daydreams are full of cliches from popular melodrama. As a boy, Thurber was addicted to nickel novels and was always a great movie fan; and he incorporated the spirit of Hollywood heroics into Mitty's secret life. During World War II the troops found in Mitty a kindred spirit and formed fan clubs in honor of the daredevil who was not afraid of hell. Mitty is both timely and timeless, with literary antecedents at least as old as Don Quixote. He has the panache of Cyrano and d'Artagnan. Tom Sawyer's adventurous fantasies of playing Robin Hood, pirate, and the hero of a Dumas novel are in Mitty's ancestry; and his progeny include Snoopy in his Sopwith Camel fighting the Red Baron and Woody Allen wishing he were Humphrey Bogart. He is also, of course, the James Thurber who wrote the eighth-grade class prophecy in which he rescues his classmates from possible disaster as their Seairoplane approaches Mars. "Unless that rope is gotten out of the curobator we will all be killed," cried one of the students; but he need not have feared, for James Thurber, who had been a tightrope walker for Barnsell's and Ringbailey's circus, nonchalantly walked out on the beam and extricated the rope. Mitty is, in fact, a universal figure; and his wistful gallantry elevates him above the forlorn and frustrated figures in Thurber's art whom he otherwise resembles. Our ultimate impression of him is not of the browbeaten spouse but of the dashing and undaunted swashbuckler—"Walter Mitty the Undefeated, inscrutable to the last." Like the work of other humorists, a good deal of Thurber's art consists of trivia—word games, clever but forgettable conversation pieces, minor skirmishes in the war between men and women—but in the best of his stories, essays, and drawings, he laid a finger upon a nerve and touched something basic. The menace of modernity, the anxiety of being overwhelmed by baffling complexities, the threat of technology out

624 I AMERICAN of control, the feeling of futility, the sense of individual impotence have intensified since Thurber's death. From our perspective the Thurber years were comparatively tranquil; they now nurture nostalgia. The reasons for despair in the 1930's, 1940's, and 1950's have deepened in the 1970's; we are now afflicted with social, economic, political, and environmental turmoils. Thurber's birds and beasts are now an endangered species, and so are we. Things arc doom-shaped with a vengeance, and humor is far more of the gallows variety. Urban alienation has become more extreme; New York is no longer "the Big Apple" but closer to 'The City of Dreadful Night," as the cocktail party and the lonely crowd have given way to the multi-lock door and the fear of muggers. We are all far more disenchanted as we try to avoid being paralyzed by future shock. The "ministry of fear" finds expression in disaster epics, an obsession with the occult, and fictions of Satanic possession. In its more innocent way, Thurber's art anticipates these tensions and terrors. We can recognize ourselves in his baffled and bewildered protagonists, and can appreciate their predicaments and perplexities. Thurber not only has diagnosed our diseases but also has offered a remedy—the innocence of animals, the lessons of love, the creative force and discipline of ait, and the saving grace of humor. His humor, noted T. S. Eliot, contains . . . a criticism of life at the bottom of it. It is serious and even somber. Unlike so much humor, it is not merely a criticism of manners— that is, of the superficial aspects of society at a given moment—but something more profound. His writings and also his illustrations are capable of surviving the immediate environment and time out of which they spring. To some extent they will be a document of the age they belong to.

WRITERS

Selected Bibliography WORKS OF JAMES THURBER BOOKS

Is Sex Necessary? or Why You Feel the Way You Do. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1929. (Written with E. B. White.) The Owl in the Attic and Other Perplexities. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1931. The Seal in the Bedroom and Other Predicaments. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1932. The Middle-Aged Man on the Flying Trapeze. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1935. Let Your Mind Alone! New York: Harper and Brothers, 1937. Cream of Thurber. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1939. The Last Flower. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1939. The Male Animal. New York: Random House, 1940. (Written with Elliott Nugent.) Fables for Our Time and Famous Poems Illustrated. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1940. My World—and Welcome to It. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1942. Many Moons. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1943. Men, W,dmen and Dogs. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1943. The Great Quillow. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1944. The Thurber Carnival. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1945. The White Deer. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1945. The Beast in Me and Other Animals. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1948. The 13 Clocks. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1950. The Thurber Album. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1952. Thurber Country. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1953. Thurber's Dogs. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1955. A Thurber Garland. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1955. Further Fables for Our Time. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1956.

JAMES THURBER I 625 Alarms and Diversions. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1957. The Wonderful O. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1957. The Years With Ross. Boston-Toronto: Atlantic, Little, Brown, 1959. Lanterns and Lances. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1961. Credos and Curios. New York: Harper and Row, 1962. A Thurber Carnival. New York: Samuel French, 1962. Vintage Thurber. 2 vols. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1963. Thurber and Company. New York: Harper and Row, 1966. BOOKS ILLUSTRATED OR INTRODUCED BY THURBER

Hawes, Elizabeth. Men Can Take It. New York: Random House, 1939. (Illustrated by Thurber.) Kinney, James R., V.M.D., and Ann Honeycutt. How to Raise a Dog in the City and in the Suburbs. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1938; 2nd edition, revised, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1953. (Illustrated by Thurber.) Mian, Mary. My Country-in-Law. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1946. (Introduction by Thurber.) Moates, Alice Leone. No Nice Girl Swears. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1933. (Illustrated by Thurber.) Petty, Mary. This Petty Pace, a Book of Drawings. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1945. (Preface by Thurber.) Samuels, Margaret. In a Word. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1933. (Illustrated by Thurber.) Sayre, Joel. Persian Gulf Command. New York: Random House, 1945. (Introduction by Thurber.) INTERVIEWS Interview with Harvey Breit, "Mr. Thurber Observes a Serene Birthday," New York Times Magazine, December 4, 1949, p. 17. Interview with R. T. Allen, "Women Have No Sense of Humor, but They Don't Seem to Know It," MacLearis Magazine, 64:18, 19 ff. (June 1, 1951). Interview with Harvey Breit,' 'Talk with James Thurber," New York Times Book Review, June 29, 1952, p. 19. Reprinted in Harvey Breit, The Writer

Observed. Cleveland-New York: World, 1956. Pp. 255-57. Interview, "Says Superwoman Will Force Peace," AP News, August 22, 1953. Reprinted in Columbus Dispatch, August 23, 1953, p. 7. Interview with George Plimpton and Max Steele, "The Art of Fiction," Paris Review, 10:35-49 (Fall 1955). Reprinted in Writers at Work, edited by Malcolm Cowley. New York: Viking Press, 1959. Pp. 82-98. "James Thurber in Conversation with Alistair Coote," Atlantic, 198:36-40 (August 1956). Interview with Maurice Dolbier, "A Sunday Afternoon with Mr. Thurber," New York Herald Tribune Book Review, November 3, 1957, p. 2. Interview with Henry Brandon, "Everybody Is Getting Very Serious," New Republic, 138:11-16 (May 26, 1958). Reprinted more fully as "The Tulle and Taffeta Rut" in Henry Brandon, As We Are. Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1961. Pp. 257-82. Interview with Eddy Gilmore, "James Thurber Isn't Sure He's Funny." (London, August 2, 1958). Reprinted as AP News in Cincinnati Enquirer, August 3, 1958, p. 47 (and in other papers that day). Interview with Carol Illig, "Hear Your Heroes," Seventeen, January, 1960, pp. 88-89. Interview with Arthur Gelb, "Thurber Intends to Relax Till '61," New York Times, March 28, 1960, p. 35. Interview with Virginia Haufe, "Thurber Gives Advice to American Women," Ohioana, 3:34-36 (Summer 1960). Interview with J. B. Weatherby, "A Man of Words," Manchester Guardian Weekly, February 9, 1961, p. 13. Interview with Eddy Gilmore, "American Male No Panther, He's a Pouncer" (London, May 6, 1961). Reprinted as AP News in the Salt Lake Tribune, May 7, 1961, p. W-19 (and in other papers that day). UNCOLLECTED PIECES

It is impractical to list the hundreds of uncollected stories, essays, drawings, and cartoons. Most of the uncollected prose is listed in Robert E. Morsberger, James Thurber (New York: Twayne, 1964); all of the prose and drawings are listed in the definitive bibliography by Edwin T. Bowden, James Thurber: A Bibli-

626 / AMERICAN ography (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1968).

CRITICAL AND BIOGRAPHICAL STUDIES

WRITERS

Updike, John. Picked-up Pieces. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1975. Van Doren, Mark. The Autobiography of Mark Van Doren. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1958. Yates, Norris W. The American Humorist. Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1964.

BOOKS

Baker, Samuel Bernard. "James Thurber: The Columbus Years." (Unpublished M.A. thesis, Ohio State University, 1962.) Bernstein, Burton. Thurber: A Biography. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1975. Black, Stephen A. James Thurber: His Masquerades, a Critical Study. The Hague: Mouton, 1970. Blair, Walter. Horse Sense in American Humor. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1942. . "The Urbanization of Humor," A Time of Harvest, edited by Robert E. Spiller. New York: Hill and Wang, 1962. Bohn, William E. / Remember America. New York: Macmillan, 1962. Cowley, Malcolm. The Literary Situation. New York: Viking, 1954. Eastman, Max. Enjoyment of Laughter. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1936. Gill, Brendan. Here at the New Yorker. New York: Random House, 1975. Hackett, Francis. On Judging Books in General and Particular. New York: John Day, 1947. Holmes, Charles. The Clocks of Columbus. New York: Atheneum, 1972. , ed. Thurber, a Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1974. Kramer, Dale. Ross and The New Yorker. New York: Doubleday, 1952. Morsberger, Robert E. James Thurber. New York: Twayne, 1964. Murrell, William. A History of American Graphic Humor (1865-1938). 2 vols. New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1934; New York: Macmillan, 1938. Nugent, Elliott. Events Leading up to the Comedy. New York: Trident, 1965. Pollard, James E. ''James Thurber," Ohio Authors and Their Books, 1796-1950, edited by William Coyle. Cleveland-New York: World, 1962. Stone, Edward. The Battle and the Books. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1964. Tobias, Richard C. The Art of James Thurber. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1970.

PERIODICALS AND NEWSPAPERS

Albertini, V. R. "James Thurber and the Short Story,'' Northwest Missouri State College Studies, 28:3-15 (1964). Arnold, Olga. " James Thurber, Humorist/' Amerika, 7:1-18 (December 4, 1956). Auden, W. H. "The Icon and the Portrait," Nation, 150:48 (January 13, 1940). Baldwin, Alice. "James Thurber's Compounds," Language and Style, 3:185-96 (1970). Benchley, Nathaniel. "If There Is No Human Comedy, It Will Be Necessary to Create One," New York Herald Tribune Book Review, November 25, 1962, p. 3. Benet, Stephen Vincent, and Rosemary Benet, "Thurber: As Unmistakable as a Kangaroo," New York Herald Tribune Book Review, December 29, 1940, p. 6. Benet, William Rose. "Carnival with Spectres,"Saturday Review of Literature, 28:9 (February 3, 1945). Bernard, F. V. "A Thurber Letter," English Language Notes, 8:300-01 (1971). Black, Stephen A. "The Claw of the Sea-Puss: James Thurber's Sense of Experience," Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature, 5:222-36 (August 1964). Brady, Charles. "What Thurber Saw," Commonweal, 75:274-76 (December 8, 1961). Brandon, Henry. "Thurber Used Humor to Camouflage His Exasperations with the Human Race," Washington Post, November 3, 1961, p. B-4. Branscomb, Lewis. * 'James Thurber and Oral History at Ohio State University," Lost Generation Journal, 3:16-19 (1975). Braunlich, Phyllis. "Hot Times in the Catbird Seat," Lost Generation Journal, 3:10-11 (1975). Budd, Nelson H. "Personal Reminiscences of James Thurber," Ohio State University Monthly, 54:12-14 (January 1962). Coates, Robert M. "Thurber, Inc.," Saturday Review of Literature, 21:10-11 ff. (December 2, 1939).

JAMES THURBER I 627 Cowley, Malcolm. "James Thurber's Dream Book," New Republic, 112:262-63 (March 12, 1945). . "Lions and Lemmings, Toads and Tigers," Reporter, 15:42-44 (December 13, 1956). De Vries, Peter. "James Thurber: The Comic Prufrock," Poetry, 63:150-59 (December 1943). Eckler, A. Ross. "The Wordplay of James Thurber," Word Ways, 6:241-47 (1973). Elias, Robert H. "James Thurber. The Primitive, the Innocent, and the Individual," American Scholar, 27:355-63 (Summer 1958). Friedrich, Otto. "James Thurber: A Critical Study," Discovery (New York), 5:158-92 (January 1955). Geddes, Virgil. "Not Everyone Liked Thurber," Lost Generation Journal, 3:7 (1975). Gilder, Rosamund. "Brain and Brawn, Broadway in Review," Theatre Arts, 24:158-62 (March 1940). Hasley, Louis. "James Thurber: Artist in Humor," South Atlantic Quarterly, 73:404-15 (1974). Hawley, Michael. "Quintet Honors Thurber Fables," Lost Generation Journal, 3:21-22 (1975). "James Thurber, Aphorist for an Anxious Age," Time, November 10, 1961, p. 81. Krutch, Joseph Wood. Review of The Male Animal, Nation, 150:81-82 (January 20, 1940). Lindner, Carl M. "Thurber's Walter Mitty—the Underground American Hero," Georgia Review, 28-.28J-89 (1974). MacLean, Kenneth. "James Thurber—a Portrait of the Dog-Artist," Acta Victoriana, 68:5-6 (Spring 1944). . "The Imagination of James Thurber," Canadian Forum, 33:193, 200-01 (December 1953). "Men, Women, and Thurber, "Time, November 15, 1943, p. 38. Moynihan, Julian. "No Nonsense," New Statesman, 64:872 (December 14, 1962). Nugent, Elliott. "Notes on James Thurber the Man or Men," New York Times, February 25, 1940, p. 10-3.

. * 'James Thurber of Columbus,'' Ohio Valley Folk Publications, new series, no. 95 (April 1962). "Priceless Gift of Laughter, "Time, July 9, 1951, pp. 88^-90 ff. "Salute to Thurber," Saturday Review, 44:14-18 ff. (November 25, 1961). Schlamm, William S. "The Secret Lives of James Thurber," Freeman, 2:736-38 (July 28, 1952). School, Peter A. "Thurber's Walter Ego: The Little Man Hero," Lost Generation Journal, 3:&-9 (1975). Soellner, Rolf. "James Thurber as a Shakespeare Critic," Kansas Quarterly, 7:55-65 (1975). Sundell, Carl. "The Architecture of Walter Mitty's Secret Life," English Journal, 56:1284-87 (December 1967). "That Thurber Woman," Newsweek, November 22, 1943, pp. 84-86. "Thurber Amuses People by Making Them Squirm," Life, February 19, 1945, pp. 12-14. "Thurber—an Old Hand at Humor with Two Hits on Hand,"L/fr March 14, 1960, pp. 103-08. "Thurber and His Humor. . . . Up with the Chuckle, Down with the Yuk," Newsweek, February 4, 1957, pp. 52-56. Updike, John. "Indignations of a Senior Citizen," New York Times Book Review, November 25, 1962, p. 5. Walker, C. L. "The Legendary Mr. Thurber," Ladies Home Journal, 53:26-27 ff. (July 1946). Weales, Gerald. "The World in Thurber's Fables," Commonweal, 55:409-11 (January 18, 1957). White, E. B. "James Thurber," New Yorker, 37:247 (November 11, 1961). White, Ruth Y. "Early Thurber," Life, April 22, 1940, pp. 108-09. Wilson, Edmund. Review of The White Deer, New Yorker, 21:91-94 (October 27, 1945). —ROBERT E. MORSBERGER

Thorstein Veblen 1857-1929

TJLHO .HORSTEIN VEBLEN may well be described as

so strong that, at a critical juncture, it will even set aside the instinct of self-preservation. So, for instance, we are told of certain Polynesian chiefs, who, under the stress of good form, preferred to starve rather than carry food to their mouths with their own hands. It is true, this conduct may have been due, at least in part, to an excessive sanctity or tabu attaching to the chief's person. The tabu would have been communicated by the contact of his hands, and so would have made anything touched by him unfit for human food. But the tabu is itself a derivative of the unworthiness or moral incompatibility of labor; so that even when construed in this sense the conduct of the Polynesian chiefs is truer to the canon of honorific leisure than would at first appear. A better illustration, or at least a more unmistakable one, is afforded by a certain king of France, who is said to have lost his life through an excess of moral stamina in the observance of good form. In the absence of the functionary whose office it was to shift his master's seat, the king sat uncomplaining before the fire and suffered his royal person to be toasted beyond recovery. But in so doing he saved his Most Christian Majesty from mental contamination. Summum crede nefas animam praeferre pudori, Et propter vitam vivendi perdere causas.

the first social theorist to give the "dismal science" of economics a long-needed comic relief. After Veblen the idea of "economic man" became something more than a creature of rational interests and something less than an agent of social virtue. Against the prevalent interpretations of his day, including the Marxist as well as the conservative neoclassical, Veblen depicted capitalism as irrational and essentially hedonistic; an atavistic phenomenon that could be grasped not by studying charts and statistics but by probing the behavior of archaic men and women living in primitive, tribal communities. The genius of Veblen lies in his combining an anthropologist's sensitivity to the noneconomic motives of human behavior and a literary artist's sensitivity to the strategy of irony and satire. He remains, above all, a masterful parodist of playful solemnity. Is human labor, as both Marx and Ricardo insisted, the source of value? Veblen, despite his own belief in the "instinct of workmanship," explains, in an observation that can be appreciated for its wit as well as its wisdom, why the idea of the "nobility of labor" is a fiction: In persons of delicate sensibility, who have long been habituated to gentle manners, the sense of the shamefulness of manual labor may become 625

THORSTEIN

The passage is from The Theory of the Leisure Class, Veblen's best-known work. This classic may be read as social satire (in this instance the inanities of status and social roles that render rational consumer behavior a quaint fixation of orthodox economic theory). But Veblen could be equally sardonic in his numerous scholarly papers that appeared in such academic publications as the Journal of American Sociology and the Journal of Political Economy. In these articles, which were later collected and reprinted in his two most theoretical works, The Place of Science in Modern Civilization and Other Essays and Essays in Our Changing Order, Veblen often could not resist letting slip a sardonic aside that drove home his point far more effectively than had he used the traditional mode of scholarly discourse. Criticizing neoclassical theorists for treating economic phenomena as a static exercise in taxonomy, and for building abstract models in order to invoke the "normal case" and thereby ignore the abnormalities of real, everyday behavior, Veblen questioned whether the mystique of a "hypothetically perfect competitive system" could actually explain what it purported to describe. He also suggested, in his playfully exaggerated prose, that the very vocabulary of orthodox theory cannot represent reality realistically and, therefore, may be linguistically bankrupt: But what does all this signify? If we are getting restless under the taxonomy of a monocotyledonous wage-system and cryptogamic theory of interest, with involute loculicidal, tomentous and monoloform variants, what is the cytoplasm, centrosome, or karyokinetic process to which we may turn, and in which we may find surcease from the metaphysics of normality and controlling principles? The passage is a specimen, albeit an exaggerated one, of Veblenese. Veblen was as unique a literary artist as he was an economist. He wrote

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by indirection, in a style designed to disguise his own thoughts. His humor could often be deadpan, reminiscent of the comic spirit of writers like Mark Twain; the slow, dense, and repetitive manner of his writing reflects the apparent stolid impassivity of his outlook. Veblen's prose style has been the subject of considerable discussion and much debate among social scientists, literary scholars, and even analytic philosophers. The continuing interest in his expository style is further indication that much of Veblen's appeal lies in his power as a writer and rhetorician. While his economic ideas have long been assimilated by social scientists, his literary craftsmanship cannot be fully appropriated or imitated. One remains fascinated as well as occasionally frustrated by an overlabored prose that combines ponderous academic solemnity with witty and arresting epigrams as well as brilliant insights that are often relegated to asides or footnotes. Some scholars are upset by Veblen's long, convoluted descriptions that leave one with the sense, as Max Lerner put it, "of endlessly chugging polysyllables, as if his sentences were a long string of freight cars rolling on forever." Others complain of Veblen's masking his own moral stance behind a coldly objective prose that purports to be scientifically neutral. Still others are put off by Veblen's use of the mode of the academic monograph and the scholarly treatise to poke fun at the "higher learning" of the brain merchants of the status quo. Above all, it is Veblen's repetitiveness, his weakness for tautologies and circumlocution, that leaves many readers weary. H. L. Mencken, Veblen's ideological nemesis and severest literary critic, believed that Veblen's writings should be excommunicated from the English language: It is as if the practice of that incredibly obscure and malodorous style were a relentless disease, a sort of progressive intellectual diabetes, a lep-

630 I AMERICAN rosy of the horse sense. Words are flung upon words until all recollection that there must be a meaning in them, a ground and excuse for them, is lost. One wanders in a labyrinth of nouns, adjectives, verbs, pronouns, adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions and participles, most of them swollen and nearly all of them unable to walk. It is difficult to imagine worse English within the limits of intelligible grammar. It is clumsy, affected, opaque, bombastic, windy, empty. It is without grace or distinction and it is often without the most elementary order. The learned professor gets himself enmeshed in his gnarled sentences like a bull trapped by barbed wire, and his efforts to extricate himself are quite as furious and quite as spectacular. Before one fully accepts Mencken's critique, two things must be kept in mind. First, Mencken's essay in Prejudices on "Professor Veblen" (1919) was directed more at the substance than at the style of his adversary's thought, especially at Veblen's satires on capitalist behavior, his defense of women, and his treatment of the rugged American male individual as the finest flower of primitive barbarism. Second, Mencken would not allow himself to perceive that Veblen's ponderous style may have been deliberate, not so much a failure of proportion as an artful attempt to engage the serious feelings of people in order better to expose the silliness of conventional wisdom. In the "invisible world" of sociology, in which the implications of customs, habits, and values remain hidden from the ordinary reaches of consciousness, what better style could be employed to sensitize human awareness? In his perceptive introduction to The Portable Veblen (1948), Max Lerner explains why there is an ingenious method behind Veblen's seemingly maddening redundancy. There is about this early style an air of quaintness, but it is a controlled quaintness. It never becomes eccentric or hopelessly obscure or

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turgid. Nor does the irony . . . become a frozen attitude of ill-humor and indignation. Veblen uses here the long probing approach, followed by the quick turn of the knife. His manner is outwardly academic, and he invests the analysis with the appearance of a deliberate and detached gravity which is intended to put the reader off his guard. Then suddenly the coupling of competitive sports with "lower-class delinquents" and "atavistic elements," and you get the juxtaposition that Kenneth Burke has well called the method of "perspective by incongruity." But Veblen is never content to achieve his effect and let it go at that. He keeps turning the knife in the wound. Affecting a sustained gravity throughout, he works out a protracted parallel between leisure-class sportsmen and lower-class delinquents, introducing a running sequence of phrases whittled down to dagger effectiveness which impale his meaning forever in the reader's memory. Then, at the end of the paragraph, the clinching sentence, with the sudden stripping away of the academic ornateness he has affected, and the introduction of a homegrown phrase from the common speech. It would perhaps be facile to suggest that how one responds to Veblen's style depends upon how one responds to his analysis of modern American society. Yet Veblen's liberal and radical champions do tend to see in his prose further evidence for the dictum that truth is approximated by satiric technique, by unmasking cant and debunking reigning misconceptions. In this enterprise Veblen employed various literary devices of satire and irony and in the process created some of his own. One example is his creation of symbolic types, like the hapless university president parodied in The Higher Learning in America; another is his use of invented phrases that have a cunning twist—such memorable expressions as "conspicuous consumption," "trained inability," "resolute con-

THORSTEIN VEBLEN I 631 viviality," "pecuniary emulation," "imbecile institutions," "conscientious withdrawal of efficiency," "naive brutality," "honorific waste," "invidious distinction," and "gifted with ferocity." Veblen's prose is weighed down with cumbersome sentence structures and heavy lines that often sag from sheer erudition. But his diffuse style is always relieved by a touch of playfulness, a casual insight, an ironic twist, or a wicked sense of humor that occasionally rises to epigrammatic brilliance. "Plato's scheme of folly," wrote Veblen in The Higher Learning, "which would have the philosophers take over the management of affairs, has been turned on its head; the men of affairs have taken over the direction of the pursuit of knowledge." Despite the criticisms of conservatives like Mencken, and even the reservations of liberal admirers like Lerner and Alfred Kazin, Veblen remains one of the great writers in American social thought. A keen observer of manners and morals, he elevated social science to the level of literary art; and if he tended to conceal his own purposes behind a dense prose style, he also illuminated the deeper meaning of social behavior with imperishable perceptions. Veblen's strangely esoteric prose reflected an author who was himself a stranger to Victorian America and its genteel manners. Indeed, Veblen stands out as one of the most baffling writers in American cultural history. Eccentric, reticent, detached, unfathomable, he struggled to sustain personal obscurity even as he gained academic notoriety. To the frustration of all those who have attempted to study his mind and career, Veblen requested in his will that all letters and remaining materials pertaining to his life be destroyed. Fortunately his contemporaries were willing to tell what they knew of him to Joseph Dorfman, who published the definitive biography, Thorstein Veblen and His America (1934). Veblen had the physical appearance of a Nor-

wegian peasant. A stolid, lean face with shrewd eyes, a shaggy beard and bristling mustache, long limbs and large hands, and a lethargic and seemingly slow-moving body that led some of his students to believe he was half asleep—such is the image remembered by contemporaries. His clothes were generally rumpled, his collars usually several sizes too large, his trousers baggy, and his thick woolen stockings invariably supported by pins clipped to his pant legs. Scornful of ostentation—and this should not surprise us—he wore no jewelry or any kind of mark of status; he carried his watch on a piece of black ribbon hooked to his vest by a large safety pin. Veblen led a bizarre life that scandalized the academic world of his time. Much of his continuing troubles stemmed from his blatant philandering, which led to his dismissal from the University of Chicago and from Stanford. Although his love life is one of the most discussed and least documented aspects of his career, there can be no doubt that he was involved in one affair after another—once with a colleague's wife who later became the mistress of Anatole France. Veblen made no attempt to conceal his life-style, and no doubt he delighted in shocking the sensibilities of Victorian America. When the chancellor at the University of Chicago, William Rainey Harper, expressed to Veblen his paternal concern for the "moral health" of his colleagues' wives, Veblen readily obliged. Legend has it that he replied slowly, in a low voice, slouching before the chancellor's desk, "I've tried them all. They are no good." If Veblen's erotic exploits were intolerable to authorities, his teaching methods were no less insulting. He gave all his students the grade C, regardless of their work. To a student who complained that his mark was the lowest he had ever received, Veblen explained: "My grades are like lightning. They are liable to strike anywhere." But when another student needed a higher score to qualify for a scholarship, Veblen raised the

632 I AMERICAN evaluation from "medium" to "superior," and when that failed to do the trick, to "excellent," leaving the dean's office utterly bewildered. Veblen might be described as a failure as a teacher and a genius as an educator. His lectures were delivered in a low monotone, so mumbled that his sly humor and learned insights were often lost to the audience. One pupil, sedulously taking notes, requested that a sentence be repeated, only to be told that it was not worth repeating. Sarcastic, Veblen once asked a devout student of religion to explain to him the value of her church in terms of beer kegs. Yet he was also reticent, and replied to a student who asked him if he ever took anything seriously: "Yes, but don't tell anyone." It is almost painful to contemplate what ratings Veblen might have received had student evaluations been used in his era. Enrollments in his classes continued to dwindle as he continued to ramble. His very erudition and vastness of knowledge—economics, philosophy, anthropology, sociology, history, Cretan archaeology, Norse literature, and Icelandic mythology—handicapped him as an instructor, even though students could not help but be impressed. Yet the genius of Veblen as an educator was in his ability to excite the minds of those select few who understood him—such former students and disciples as Wesley C. Mitchell, James Hay den Tufts, C. E. Ayres, Walton Hamilton, Isidor Lubin, and Lewis Mumford, all of whom became distinguished scholars and public servants. If a teacher's contribution is measured more by lasting impact than by ephemeral popularity, Veblen certainly deserves to be ranked among the outstanding educators in American social science. Harold Laski, the British political scientist and colleague of Veblen at the New School for Social Research, explains why his intellectual mentor deserved to be so judged: I first met Professor Veblen shortly after the opening of the New School. . . . He was very

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shy, and, in the first weeks of our acquaintance, it was difficult to get on intimate terms with him. But, once the initial barriers had been overcome, he was an entrancing companion. He delivered himself, in a half-oracular, half-ironical way, of extraordinary pungent judgments upon men and things. I remember particularly his admiration for Marx . . . his praise of F. J. Turner and Charles Beard. . . . He used to insist that we had entered upon an epoch of revolution and he doubted whether any American of his time would see again the kind of social peace characteristic of America in his youth. . . . He impressed me greatly both by his sudden flashes of insight—a streak of lightning which revealed unexpected vistas—and the amazing range both of his general knowledge and his memory for almost esoteric facts. It would have been easy to describe much of his talk as cynical; but one saw quite early that this was in fact merely a protective colouring beneath which he concealed deep emotions he did not like to bring to the surface. I was moved by his patience, his willingness to consider difficulties, his tenacity in discussion, and his anxiety, in matters he regarded as important, to discover common ground. When I first met him, he was beginning to get the recognition he deserved; and it was profoundly moving to watch his shy delight in realising that his long struggle was at last beginning to bear fruit. . . . I do not remember discussing anything with him without receiving illumination; and his kindness to a much younger teacher remains one of the abiding memories of my years in America. What did Veblen have to say about modern society that made him so compelling an intellect to Laski and numerous other contemporaries? One of the problems in answering this question is that Veblen's writings did not usher in a distinct school of thought—although "institutional economics" has often been associated with his name—nor did his ideas add up to a systematic social theory or a definite methodology of social

THORSTEIN VEBLEN I 633 inquiry. Another difficulty in ascertaining the ultimate significance of his thought is the ambiguous nature of his own ideological legacy. Marxists, for example, praise his critique of capitalist ideology but are upset by his rejection of Hegel and dialectical materialism. Liberals admire his attack on big business but are troubled by his skepticism about historical progress. Conservatives may rejoice in his exposure of the foibles of mass society but are shocked by his disrespect for the rich and the powerful. And feminists esteem his understanding of the archaic basis of masculine domination but are puzzled by his own relationships with women. Veblen seems to delight everyone and satisfy no one. Although Veblen remains an ideological enigma, one can note briefly the main features of his writings that have done so much to influence our understanding not only of the world of economics in particular but also of social relations in general. Veblen was perhaps the first professionally trained economist to draw upon the findings of contemporary anthropology in order to illuminate better not only past experience but also present realities. Indeed, he was convinced that in the study of archaic society lies the key to the structure of human relationships in modern industrial life. Veblen quoted M. G. Lapouge: 4 'Anthropology is destined to revolutionize the political and social sciences as radically as bacteriology has revolutionized the science of medicine." Like Marx, Veblen came to the study of economics by way of an early training in classical philosophy; but Veblen extended his analysis of economic behavior into the relatively pioneering disciplines of ethnology and sociology. By rediscovering the ways in which men and women related to one another in early archaic communities, he uncovered new ways of looking at contemporary social relations. Thus Veblen focused on such modern rituals as competitive sports, extravagant dress, and

wasteful feasts to draw parallels between archaic traits and contemporary customs. The rituals of potlatch and kula discussed so much today by anthropologists, the symbolic practice among primitive tribes of exchanging gifts to demonstrate through ceremony the superiority of the giver to the receiver, were perceived by Veblen as a form of conspicuous consumption with its roots in archaic man and extending to the prodigal habits of the affluent in modern industrial society. For the tribal chief as well as for the modern business tycoon, a common behavior could be found in the dictum "What is wasteful is reputable." "Costly entertainments, such as the potlatch or ball," wrote Veblen in the Leisure Class, are peculiarly adapted to serve this end [ostentation]. The competitor with whom the entertainer wishes to institute a comparison is, by this method, made to serve as a means to an end. He consumes vicariously for his host at the same time he is a witness to the consumption of that excess of good things which his host is unable to dispose of singlehanded, and he is also made to witness his host's facility in etiquette. Before Veblen gained a reputation as a satirist of leisure-class habits, he had already become well known, at least in academic circles, as the bete noire of neoclassical economics. This late nineteenth-century school of thought had its roots in the laissez-faire doctrines of Adam Smith and his disciples. In America, classical economic theory found one of its staunchest defenders in John Bates Clark, whose writings Veblen mercilessly criticized. Orthodox economics assumed that competition was the rule of life and reflected man's "natural" tendency toward self-assertion. Accordingly, the economy operated within the laws of supply and demand, a self-regulating mechanism that governed price and wage levels to the benefits of the buyer and the seller. And since self-interest was and always would be the mainspring of human action, the

634 I AMERICAN behavior of "economic man" was rational, and thus capable of empirical analysis and, perhaps eventually, scientific predictability. Veblen addressed his early writings to the reigning orthodox system of economics in three specific articles: "The Preconceptions of Economic Science"; "Why Is Economics Not an Evolutionary Science?"; and "Professor Clark's Economics." In an attempt to expose the shaky foundations of neoclassical thought, Veblen pointed out that orthodox economists were mired in the "metaphysics of normality." That is, they constructed models based on unreal hypotheses ("if perfect competition prevailed," "if consumers and sellers were guided by one motive," and so on) that at best could yield only logically consistent propositions but could tell us little about the real forces at work in everyday economic behavior. Consider, for example, the issue of money, which orthodox economists had treated as a medium of exchange, a standard of value, and a store of wealth. To Veblen this approach seemed too rational, confined as it was to the psychology of self-interest and economic calculation that prevailed in neoclassical theory. Veblen was more interested in exploring the context in which money circulates, a social-cultural dimension that enables us to perceive money not primarily as a means of exchange but as an expression of power in its conspicuous display. The real motive behind the acquisition of money is seen as a deeper desire to achieve power over men and women by possessing the symbols of wealth. Hence Veblen attempted to demystify the authority of wealth by exposing an economic system that runs on noneconomic motives. Although Adam Smith would not have been disturbed by such subjective explorations, which he himself had probed in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Veblen wanted to expand the scope of neoclassical thought to take into account the new data of anthropology and sociology, and

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thereby view economic behavior in more than one dimension. So expanded, Veblen's perspective enabled him to question a traditional body of economic theory that focused on land, labor, and capital on the one side, and on rent, wages, and profits on the other. Among the preconceptions that Veblen questioned was the "theorem of equivalence," the presumed equity between aggregate output and individual reward. This implied that workers get as much as they produce, and produce as much as they earn; and that consumers pay as much as the commodity is worth and give what they are willing to pay. Veblen observed that such a theorem presupposed free competition, when in reality the absence of even a measure of consumer sovereignty and worker's control points up not the beauties of competition but the power of coercion that characterizes the marketplace. It should not be assumed that because Veblen was critical of the theoretical foundations of capitalism, he remained favorably disposed to the philosophical foundations of socialism. Indeed, he tended to see the economic theories of socialism and capitalism as both having grown out of the background of Ricardian economics, which stressed the factors of production and the role of labor as essential to the creation of value. Such objective considerations did not fully analyze the subjective attitudes of individual consumers toward commodities that satisfied human desires. Although Veblen remained critical of Marx's labor theory of value (he himself never worked out a persuasive theory of value), he was quick to defend Marx against critics who accused him of identifying the concept of value solely with "exchange value." Veblen also admired the "boldness of conception" and "great logical consistency" in Marx's writings. He tried to distinguish Ricardo's view of human labor as an "irksome" necessity from Marx's homo faber, a

THORSTEIN VEBLEN I 635 principle of labor based on the intrinsic value of work, "surplus" value (hat becomes the quantum of congealed labor in the commodity produced for exchange. Beyond that, however, Veblen took his departure from Marx. He could not accept the "law of capitalist accumulation," in which Marx insisted that profits would be jeopardized to the extent that capitalists introduced labor-saving technology. Nor could he accept the "law of increasing misery," the assumption of progressive distress of the working class, an assumption that fits into the scheme of the Hegelian dialectic, in which the proletariat arises to "negate" capitalism. It is, however, a scheme of history that has no basis in the actual facts of human experience. Veblen believed that Marx's theories were faulty primarily because they derived from two incompatible sources: Hegelian philosophy and its materialist interpretation by Marx and the English system of natural rights from which Marx supposedly derived his notion that the worker was entitled to the full product of his labor. The former source postulates historical development as self-actualizing— a Ideological movement unfolding by "innernecessity." The latter proceeds on the "motives of interests" and on the basis of "class struggle," and not on metaphysical ideals. Indeed, the doctrine of class is of "utilitarian origin and of English pedigree, and it belongs to Marx by virtue of his having borrowed its elements from the system of self-interest. It is in fact a piece of hedonism, and it is related to Bentham rather than to Hegel." Thus stripped of the spell of Hegelian dialectics—a logic of contradiction that assumes that a historical tendency in one direction will produce its own negation— the idea of class struggle could not, Veblen argued, produce the historical reality of a classless society. Whereas Marxists generally looked to the working class for the solution to modern capitalism, Veblen saw that class as part of the prob-

lem. Much of Veblen's work focused on the lifestyle of the affluent leisure classes and on the behavioral traits that related the activities of modern capitalists to their forebears. But in "Some Neglected Points in the Theory of Socialism" (1892), Veblen addressed himself to the issue of the working class. He questioned both Herbert Spencer's claim that the discontent of the workers lies in "ennui" and the liberal reformer's belief that workers were dissatisfied because they realized that the rich were getting richer and the poor poorer. The true source of labor's restlessness, Veblen observed, may be found in a sense of envy and injured dignity—what present-day sociologists would call "relative deprivation." The existing economic system may not necessarily make the poor poorer in absolute terms, but it evokes feelings of "slighted manhood" and other status anxieties. Desiring to climb into the middle class, and influenced by the culture of the nouveaux riches, the worker seeks the elusive respect of those classes above him. And to the extent that the worker compares himself to his image of the people in upper-class strata, he concedes the right of his "superiors" to judge him. Veblen was less interested in the "exploitation" of the working class than in its gradual integration and socializing through the process of "invidious comparison." Where Marxists were inspired by the radical potential of the labor movement, Veblen was appalled by its conservative direction. Why does the working class seemingly collaborate in its own subordination? To answer this question one must consider a Veblenian insight that was rare in late nineteenth-century America. Whereas the dominant Victorian culture preached the "gospel of work" and the Protestant virtues of industry and thrift, Veblen was the first social scientist to point out that work was actually held in disesteem and that leisure, not

636 I AMERICAN labor, represented the goal of those who identified the "pursuit of happiness" with the acquisition of commodities. Again Veblen traced this attitude to the activities of early archaic societies; the advent of hunting and warfare as the dominant economic mode of life elevated predation and exploit to an honorable status as it brought about the dishonor of productive and socially useful employments. What is admired in advanced societies, no less than in ancient communities, is not so much the productions of the leisure class as its possessions. Such goods can be appropriated with the full approval of the community because the skills of the hunter and warrior, often the techniques of "force and fraud," are esteemed as evidence of "preeminent force." The masses in modern society, including the working class (which Veblen called the "underlying populations"), crave the symbols of success displayed by the leisure class—items of consumption that advertise the relative freedom of the possessor from the mundane demands of work. The stigma of work in modern society can best be seen in the situation of the contemporary woman. In the 1890's, when the feminist movement in America was beginning to assert itself, Veblen published two illuminating essays, "The Barbarian Status of Women" and "The Economic Theory of Women's Dress." A half-century before the anthropologist Claude LeviStrauss described women as the first form of "currency," Veblen not only had depicted them in similar terms of economic exchange, but had gone so far as to suggest that private property originated in the capture of women; that marriage evolved from a system of "coercion-ownership" that had been sustained by the ritual of "mock seizure"; and that the status of the modern woman remained almost what it was when her forebears were being abducted—that of a "chattel." Veblen's anthropological specula-

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tions are difficult to verify—though present writings on such phenomena as "bride-price" transactions among African tribes seem to bear out some of his insights—but his observations on the status of women in contemporary America are still worth pondering. Veblen traced the stigma attached to women's domestic work to the early advent of property and male prowess, which marked the passing of "peaceable savagery" and the emergence of the "barbarian" era of predatory activity. Now women, who were once esteemed as the source of knowledge about the soil and seasons and the rhythms of growth and fertility, were relegated to a subordinate status as they were forced to labor relentlessly, digging roots, drawing water, milking cattle, and doing other household chores that seemed to men so "ceremoniously unclean." Similarly, middle- and upper-class wives and daughters in contemporary America are influenced by the leisure-class scheme of values, which has become stronger with each generation that inherits the habit of conspicuous idleness. Thus, modern industrial work, like earlier agricultural and manual labor, is seen as degrading; and even professional work related to the useful production of goods and services becomes "vulgar" and "unwomanly." Married women especially are excluded from the industrial work force by those husbands who have fallen under the influence of the canons of reputability. The wife remains an appendage to the husband, whose interests she serves and whose image of the good life she replicates in her role as consumer. That the wife remains a victim of the ceremony of consumption may be seen in her dress habits. Her attire, Veblen noted, is designed not only to advertise wasteful expenditure but also to dramatize her freedom from productive employment. The dangerously high "French heel," the ankle-length skirt, and the tight-squeezing corset indicate that the wives have incapacitated them-

THORSTEIN VEBLEN I 637 selves for work, demonstrating in their social lives the same disdain for productive occupations that their husbands display in their white-collar professions. In Veblen's analysis of the "barbarian status of women," the affluent wife, the debutante, and the young girl at finishing school are culturally conditioned to believe that they are the objects upon which husbands, suitors, and fathers should lavish their wealth. Their "calling" in life is "to honor, love, and obey"; not to produce, but to consume (as Charlotte Perkins Oilman wrote in Women and Economics [1898]: "She is forbidden to make, but encouraged to take."). Veblen may have exaggerated the social motive (in contrast with the sexual) in changing dress styles; one wonders what he would have made of the mini-skirt as evidence of women's physical incapacity!); and he may have exaggerated the continuity between primitive and modern patterns of apparel. Yet Veblen shrewdly demonstrated the element of class emulation in the sociology of clothing styles, and thus cultural critics like Quentin Bell, author of On Human Finery (1949), can develop a whole treatise on fashion based in large part on Veblen's enduring insights. Veblen's perception of the social foundations of economics has many ramifications—the vicissitudes of fashion and the status of women, the esteem of wealth and leisure, the fate of workmanship and the Protestant ethic, and so on. But the most revealing aspect of Veblen's analysis of the cultural hegemony of capitalism and the cultural stigma of labor is his sensitivity to the sociological dimension of human existence. Like Emile Durkheim and Max Weber, Veblen saw society as a power that stands over and against the individual, whose every thought and gesture is shaped by the external forces of social interaction. Thus, in seizing upon the idea of 4'emulation" as a key to motivation, Veblen proved to be an

early student of what came to be known in social science as "role-playing." In Veblen's economic writings, the portrait of the atomistic, self-reliant individual, so prevalent in British utilitarian thought, disappears from the picture. Instead, Veblen depicts the completely socialized man whose entire life is absorbed in his social role; a life that is driven, if not determined, by the instinct of "emulation/' The desire for esteem and approbation, a part of human nature as described by many Enlightenment philosophers, Veblen saw as a universal trait having its roots in archaic society (there are similarities here between Veblen and Rousseau). And the craving for respect and social acceptance characterizes all classes, a tendency that may help explain why "class consciousness" is deflected in a social order where there is a measure of upward mobility, or the appearance of such possibility. The crucial feature of Veblen's theory of emulation is its conservative implications. Although an uncompromising radical himself, Veblen conceded what most other social critics were reluctant to acknowledge: that the hegemony of capitalism is perpetuated by the masses' emulating the culture and life-styles of the classes immediately above them. Thus, the norms that organize and provide cohesion to a society's value system originate at the top of the social structure and permeate downward, affecting or "contaminating" the populations of the various strata below. And this is true however repugnant or fallacious may be the values of the upper classes, particularly those of the leisure class. In Veblen's sociological insights one may find a key to a problem that has troubled many social scientists: how does a ruling class in a democratic society legitimate itself if not by force? Veblen was able to see America as a class society without a class conflict precisely because of his appreciation of the conservative function of emulation. In a mass democratic society, the

638 I AMERICAN phenomenon of power, the ability to command obedience by the threat of coercion, gives way to the phenomenon of influence, the ability to command respect by the tendency to emulation. And it is this persuasive tendency that explains why men and women seemingly consent to their own domination. In contrast with Marx, who was too quick to dismiss all ideologies as a form of "false consciousness," Veblen was closer to Durkheim and other twentieth-century scholars who stressed the ways in which consciousness is conditioned by the ideas that society, and not only the marketplace, imposes on its members; the "invisible" values and attitudes that arise from the inexorable socializing processes of human existence. Against the power of culture and the relentless force of society that repress the individual, Veblen looked to science as the source of enlightenment and liberation. Veblen believed that science would eventually extirpate animism and anthropomorphism, those psychological tendencies that led man to attribute human qualities to natural phenomena and thereby to see in nature the fetish of an "invisible hand," the presumed sanctity of existing institutions, and the lawful character of a social order supposedly ordained as an unalterable fact of the structure of the natural universe or of God's inscrutable will. Science, in short, could penetrate the phenomenon of reification. The emphasis in scientific analysis on cause-and-effect relationships could eliminate animism and reification. Thus modern science, especially a mode of inquiry inspired by "idle curiosity" and wonder, emancipated historical man from superstition, myth, lore, magic, and all the animistic forces of authority and tradition that render what is natural and changeable sacred and immutable. With Veblen's faith in the liberating power of science, it is not difficult to understand why he looked to the engineers and technicians as the

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last hope for radical social change. This theme, implicit in The Theory of Business Enterprise (1904), is fully articulated in The Engineers and the Price System (1921). Disciplined by "the machine process," the scientifically trained engineers were the one class that would see things in terms of cause and effect rather than of good and evil; of "weight, tale, and measure" rather than of merit or demerit; of evolving natural processes rather than of unchangeable precedent and convention. Veblen's hope that the scientists and technicians would be the political redeemers of modern industrial society is easy to ridicule (as his critics are well aware); and it is hardly necessary to remind oneself that the first professionally trained engineer to reach the pinnacle of power, President Herbert Hoover, proved something less than a revolutionary, or that the present chief executive, Jimmy Carter, can combine his background in nuclear engineering with his devotion to Protestant theology. But one must ask what other force in modern society can bring about that objectivization of human relationships that will eliminate the subjective factors of status and prestige, the "invidious comparisons" of wealth and power? What, after all, is more threatening to false social distinctions than a "machine process" that makes no cultural distinctions and has as its goal the practical and useful? Science may have turned out to be an instrument of domination instead of liberation, but it contained the potential for being an agency of human emancipation, as Lewis Mumford, one of Veblen's admiring disciples, has persuasively argued in Technics and Civilization (1934) and in Technics and Human Development (1967). However misplaced Veblen's faith in science and engineering may have been, it enabled him to perceive a truth of modern economic theory that seems to have escaped generations of social scientists: that there is a profound distinction be-

THORSTEIN VEBLEN I 639 tween business and industry and that the respective aims of each activity are so different that these two dimensions of economic life may be incompatible. According to capitalist ideology, or at least its popular expression under the rubric of Andrew Carnegie's "gospel of wealth" or Ben Franklin's alleged "Protestant ethic," possession of goods was somehow related to the moral worth of the possessor, the assumption being that capitalist man had created wealth by virtue of his labor and superior intelligence and character. Thus, to appreciate fully Veblen's efforts, one must keep in mind that he was writing against a dense background of tendentious economic theory that placed the businessman at the forefront of historical progress. Every major economist from the time of Adam Smith had regarded the capitalist as the driving force in the process of industrialization; even Marx hailed the capitalist as the demiurge of history. The businessman was the prime mover, the entrepreneurial genius who sensed the right opportunities, applied his great organizational talents, drew upon his imagination and vision, and thereby initiated the various processes of modernization that created the "wealth of nations." Veblen, the masterful ironist, completely reversed this picture. It was not businessmen, much less "pure" capitalists, Veblen argued, but men of industry—inventors, engineers, technical experts—who did the actual intellectual work, devised'the blueprints, developed the techniques, and even provided the expectations for economic gain that made the modern industrial system possible. The scientist and technician must first create the mechanical possibility of new and more efficient methods of producing before the businessman's eyes are opened to new investment opportunities. But is the businessman at all interested in productivity? Not always. Veblen drew a sharp distinction between the engineer

and the capitalist, between those engaged in what he called the "industrial and the pecuniary employments," between those who made goods and those who made money. The engineer, according to Veblen, is primarily concerned with productivity, serviceability, and efficiency; and his calling differs from that of the businessman, whose chief interest is in optimum prices and maximum profits. At certain junctures in history, particularly during the early stages of industrialization, the two activities may coincide. But as the craftsman and merchant allow themselves to become absorbed solely in trade, commerce, and investment, and relegate the technical aspects of production to subordinates, the respective activities come into conflict and the interests of capital take precedence over the interests of science. Whenever there is a cleavage, the businessman may curtail supply in order to maintain high prices, transfer funds from productive operations to speculative investment, deceive consumers as well as competitors, and generally engage in a number of unconscionable activities that Veblen described, with characteristic irony, as a "conscientious withdrawal of efficiency." Accordingly, the profit system had little or nothing to do with achieving and sustaining maximum industrial productivity in the interests of getting the largest amount of goods to the greatest number of people at the lowest possible price. In a pecuniary culture devoted to the rule of commodities, the power of money triumphs over the logic of machinery. It should be obvious by now that only an intellectual as eccentric as Veblen, an outsider who observed the normal habits of American society as an anthropologist studies the strange customs of a tribal village, would be able to discern the incongruities, not to say the "contradictions," of capitalism. Veblen remains one of the great critics of capitalism, but not because he foretold its decline and fall. On the contrary, he perceived that the culture and ideology of capital-

640 I AMERICAN ism, insofar as it represented a modified continuation of, and not a definitive break with, the feudal tradition of status and glory and the "barbarian" survivals of prowess and esteem, would continue to enjoy hegemony in the twentieth century. The brilliance of Veblen's critique lies in the fact that he assaulted capitalism on its own terms: efficiency, productivity, and utility. Who was this odd figure whose writings trouble capitalists as much as they puzzle socialists? Thorstein Bunde Veblen was born on a frontier farm in Wisconsin in 1857. He came from the same Midwest border region that produced such giant contemporaries as Charles Beard, Vernon L. Parrington, Simon Patten, Frederick Jackson Turner, and Lester Ward—historians and sociologists who would mount a far-reaching assault on the economic and cultural values of the East. Veblen, however, was a stranger not merely to the Eastern establishment but to the country as a whole; and this more profound alienation was mirrored in his harsher and more thoroughgoing critique of American society. Veblen was the fourth son and sixth child of an immigrant Norwegian family. His parents had arrived in the United States ten years before his birth, bringing with them bitter memories of the old country, where they had suffered the loss of family land and with it the loss of status as property owners. In Minnesota the Veblens encountered similar troubles with land speculators and moneylenders. Yet Veblen's animus against capitalism cannot simply be traced to the deprivations of his childhood. Although his household was characterized by austerity in the early years, by the time he was a teenager, his father had managed to become a relatively prosperous farmer; and he expected his sons to enter a profession and surpass his own status in an American society that rewarded the industrious. Thus one day in 1874, young Veblen was simply called from the field, put on the family buggy

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along with his packed bags, and sent to Carleton College, a Congregational oasis of New England culture on the Minnesota prairies. Although sent to Carleton in the hope that he would enter the Lutheran ministry, Veblen proved to be too irreverent, impish, and even lazy to benefit from the pious atmosphere there. After shocking the missionary-oriented faculty by writing essays on the virtues of alcohol and cannibalism, Veblen graduated in 1880. Veblen tried teaching for a year at a small college and then decided to follow his brother Andrew (father of the mathematician Oswald Veblen) to Johns Hopkins to study philosophy. He took courses from the Hegelian philosopher George Sylvester Morris and from the liberal political economist Richard T. Ely. He also audited the lectures in logic given by Charles Sanders Peirce; and it is possible that Veblen's interest in semeiology, the study of signs and the symbolic aspects of communication (gesture, manners, and so on), derived from Peirce's early explorations in this field. Veblen maintained an interest in the epistemological dimensions of social knowledge, and he later wrote his doctoral dissertation on Kant. But at Hopkins, Veblen's application for a scholarship was rejected, despite glowing recommendations from former teachers. Veblen then transferred to Yale and continued his study of philosophy under its president, Rev. Noah Porter. He soon became drawn to the Olympian figure of William Graham Sumner, the conservative Social Darwinist who was struggling to radicalize the religious-centered curriculum by introducing more courses on modern society. Veblen could accept the biological foundations of Darwinism, but not its spurious political conclusions formed by conservative apologists. The "survival of the fittest" proved not that "the best" survived in the course of evolutionary development but that the more brutish species triumphed, and did so possibly be-

THORSTEIN VEBLEN I 641 cause each preceding extinct species was less aggressive; hence, at the dawn of human history man may have indeed been a "peaceable savage." Veblen left Yale with a Ph.D. in philosophy in 1884, but without any prospects of academic employment. He returned home to Minnesota depressed and lethargic, and less inclined than ever toTrarcUfarm work. He insisted he was not well; his family suspected laziness. "He read and loafed," wrote a brother, "and then the next day he loafed and read." Actually, the seven years spent on the farm were a period of great reflection for Veblen, who steeped himself in a curious selection of reading materials: political tracts, botanical studies, treatises on anthropology, economics, and sociology, and even Lutheran hymnbooks. In the meantime Veblen married Ellen Rolfe, the niece of the president of Carleton College and the daughter of one of the leading families in the Middle West. Despite his Ph.D., his wife's connections, and his letters of recommendation, Veblen remained unsuccessful in obtaining an academic post or even employment as a railroad bookkeeper. Meanwhile he and his wife read about the Populist movement that was sweeping through the Middle West and pored over Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward, "the turning point of our lives," Ellen later wrote. Stirred by the wave of agrarian unrest, Veblen began to study economics seriously and to consider resuming his graduate studies. At the age of 34, after seven years of premature retirement, he was encouraged by his family to return to school and to make one more attempt to break into the academic world. In 1891, Veblen entered Cornell University to study economics. There the radical and irreverent misfit somehow impressed J. Laurence Laughlin, a pillar of conservative economic doctrine. Laughlin immediately secured Veblen a fellowship and encouraged him to write theoreti-

cal articles for the Quarterly Journal of Economics. When the University of Chicago opened the following year and hired Laughlin to head the economics department, he invited Veblen to join him. Thus, in his thirty-fifth year, Veblen finally acquired his first job, at a salary of $520 a year. Veblen stayed at the University of Chicago for fourteen years, a difficult period for both the school and the scholar. His unorthodox manners and ideas, his uninspired teaching, and his inspired love life led to frequent clashes with university officials. But notwithstanding his bouts with administrative bureaucrats and entrepreneurs—which he later satirized in The Higher Learning in America—Veblen was fortunate in having a stimulating intellectual environment peopled by such distinguished scholars as John Dewey in philosophy, William I. Thomas and George Herbert Mead in sociology, Jacques Loeb in psychology, and Franz Boas in anthropology. When The Theory of the Leisure Class appeared in 1898, Veblen suddenly became famous and such phrases as "conspicuous consumption" became the topic of conversation as "Veblenism" came to connote wickedly sardonic observations on all that had once been safe and sacred. Veblen's second book, The Theory of Business Enterprise (1904), failed to arouse the popular reception enjoyed by his first. Although a skillful dissection of the structural flaws in capitalism, the work pleased neither radicals expecting a recipe for revolution nor conservatives hoping for a refutation of socialism. Officials at the University of Chicago could take pride in Veblen's scholarly achievements, but his unconcealed private life was another matter. When pressure was exerted on him to conform to academic propriety, Veblen chose to look for another position. In 1906 he went to Stanford University; but his libertine habits confirmed the notorious reputation he had brought with him, and within three years he was asked to resign. Veblen applied for posts at a number of

642 I AMERICAN schools and finally was offered a job at the University of Missouri in 1911, owing to the support of Herbert J. Davenport, a former student and an enduring friend and admirer. Veblen felt isolated in the town of Columbia, where he lived as a recluse among the Rotarians and philistines. Lonely (his wife divorced him in 1911), seemingly dejected, a bitter man writing in Davenport's cellar, Veblen nevertheless had a productive period at Missouri. He finished two of his most important books, The Instinct of Workmanship and the State of the Industrial Arts (1914) and Imperial Germany and the Industrial Revolution (1915). By 1918 he had published two more books, An Inquiry into the Nature of Peace and The Higher Learning in America, the latter having been conceived and partially written during his Chicago years. His subsequent books were either collections of previous essays, such as The Vested Interests and the Common Man (1919) and The Place of Science in Modern Civilization (1919); restatements of previous theses, as in The Engineers and the Price System (1921) and Absentee Ownership (1923); or posthumous publications like Essays in Our Changing Order (1934). He wrote, in all, 11 books and more than 150 articles and essays. When America entered the war in 1917, Veblen decided to leave Missouri for Washington, D.C., to offer his service to the American cause. His support of the war offended many of his radical admirers; but a few years later, when he moved to New York and wrote favorably on the Bolshevik Revolution in the Dial, he once again became something of a celebrity intellectual among liberals, pacifists, and radicals. Yet Veblen's book The Nature of Peace and his essays on the Russian Revolution have not worn well. In the former work he underestimated the power of patriotism, and in the latter he completely misperceived the nature of Bolshevism, likening the "soviet" to a New England town meeting. Veblen also referred to a "soviet of engineers" emerging in the industrial West to overthrow the

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old order, but his skepticism of the technical intelligentsia posing a radical counterforce was too strong for him to entertain the illusion for long. By the time he wrote Absentee Ownership in 1923, Veblen was certain that the forces of order in the West had survived both war and revolution. The single document of Veblen's war writings that has enduring value is Imperial Germany and the Industrial Revolution. In this work, which is often cited by social scientists who are coming to grips with the problem of modernization, Veblen explained why Germany was able to overtake England in industrialization, and suggested why Japan would do likewise, vis-a-vis Western nations, in the near future: England, where the industrial revolution began, suffers "the penalty for taking the lead" as its technological equipment deteriorates, while Germany and Japan, unencumbered by democratic institutions, can move rapidly through the stages of industrialization because machine technology can more easily be harnessed to a dynastic state steeped in authoritarian traditions. Because Veblen foresaw the danger of a nation combining technical efficiency with national power, and assimilating a modern economy with a medieval mentality, he supported the Allied nations, to the consternation of the noninterventionist Left, against the threat of German militarism. Veblen's writings go far toward explaining why England has fallen behind in the twentieth century; other "latecomers" like Germany, Russia, and Japan have become leading industrial powers because their "take-off" began at a later, and therefore higher, technological level. Veblen may have underestimated the real benefits gained by the German working class under the imperial regime; but scholars have remained impressed by his pioneering efforts to explain Germany's history in terms of objective forces rather than the variables of personality, national character, or realpolitik. Indeed, Veblen was the first scholar, in Europe as well as America, to

THORSTEIN VEBLEN I 643 play down the role of Otto von Bismarck and to approach modern German history from what today would be called a "structuralist" point of view, stressing not the dramatic actions of statesmen but the inexorable processes of industrialization. Although Imperial Germany has come to be esteemed as a minor classic, it had little impact during the war years and was, in fact, banned from the mails, possibly because it appeared to a zealous postmaster general as insufficiently proBritish. During the war Veblen worked for the government in Washington. His duties included preparing several memoranda for Col. Edward House's "Inquiry," a study group of intellectuals that President Woodrow Wilson had asked to explore the terms of a possible peace settlement. Walter Lippmann, who headed the committee, requested a report from Veblen advising what steps might be taken in the aftermath of war to prevent the exploitation of underdeveloped countries in Asia and Africa by the victorious powers. However, most of Veblen's reports were lost in the Washington labyrinth. Toward the end of the war, when Veblen moved to New York, he became a star among the luminaries associated with theDia/. In the aftermath of the war, his cynical writings found sympathy among liberal intellectuals disillusioned with Wilsonianism, while his positive response to the Bolshevik Revolution pleased the Marxist Left. But interest in Veblen rapidly declined once the war was over and the intellectual community concerned itself more with cultural matters and less with political causes. For a few years he taught at the New School for Social Research, where he was in the company of such eminent colleagues as Charles Beard, Harold Laski, Wesley Mitchell, and Horace Kallen. But Veblen was also a tired man; and his lectures, at first packed with curious students, turned out to be boring ordeals. By the mid-1920's, Veblen was nearly seventy; and the years had begun to take their toll.

He felt increasingly lonely in New York. His second wife, whom he married in 1914, had suffered a mental breakdown and had been committed. Yet Veblen still had many admirers, and a number of academic economists signed a petition recommending him for president of the American Economic Association. But Veblen declined, commenting, "They didn't offer it to me when I needed it." He returned to Palo Alto and settled in his small cabin on the outskirts of town, living in almost total isolation yet hungering for companionship and conversation. In the two years before his death (on August 3, 1929), he lived in his shack, where, according to a neighbor, he settled himself on a handmade chair, dressed in Sears Roebuck work clothes, and sat passively, lost in distant thoughts, while a wood rat explored the cabin or a skunk brushed up against his pants. The British social scientist Graham Wallas once pleaded for someone to write "a 'Secret of Veblen,' summoning up (with an index!)" his mischievous books and possibly his mysterious mind and personality as well. Actually, Veblen himself provided the best clue to his character in a curiously revealing essay written in 1918, "The Intellectual Pre-Eminence of Jews in Modern Europe." In this essay, which may be regarded as a selfportrait, Veblen expressed great admiration for the Jewish intellectuals and, indeed, envied their alienated status in modern culture. Like such Jewish savants as Spinoza, Marx, Freud, and Einstein (who greatly admired Veblen's writings on Germany and Japan), he hailed science as the benign destroyer of pernicious illusions and the harbinger of modern consciousness. Like the Jews, with whom he identified, Veblen felt himself a marginal man, an eternal outsider with no firm ties to the existing culture or to prevalent institutions, a stranger in the land. But while some Jewish writers might lament this rootless, lonely existence, Veblen saw in it certain advantages. For one thing, estrangement created a question-

644 I AMERICAN ing frame of mind that kept the Jew in the "vanguard of modern inquiry"; and Veblen was convinced that new knowledge arises from the independent intellectual who is exempt from preconceptions, endowed with a "skeptical animus, Unbefangenheit, released from the dead hand of finality." In a certain sense Veblen's portrait of the Jew resembles Georg Simmers description of "The Stranger" and Karl Mannheim's treatment of the "free-floating" intelligentsia. All three social scientists believed that the deracinated intellectual enjoyed a privileged "objectivity" because he remained uncommitted to values that would prejudice his perceptions. But Veblen seemed to enjoy his unassimilated status perhaps even more than the Jew, and in spite of the fact that it meant eternal ostracism. "The intellectually gifted Jew," wrote Veblen, is in a peculiarly fortunate position in respect of this requisite immunity from the inhibitions of intellectual quietism. But he can come in for such immunity only at the cost of losing his secure place in the scheme of conventions into which he has been born, and at the cost, also, of finding no similarly secure place in that scheme of gentile conventions into which he is thrown. For him as for other men in the like case, the skepticism that goes to make him an effectual factor in the increase and diffusion of knowledge among men involves a loss of that peace of mind that is the birthright of the safe and sane pietist. He becomes a disturber of the intellectual peace, but only at the cost of becoming an intellectual wayfaring man, a wanderer in the intellectual noman's land, seeking another place to rest, farther along the road, somewhere over the horizon. They are neither a complaisant nor a contented lot, these aliens of uneasy feet. Thorstein Vebien remains an important figure in American intellectual history; and while some of his ideas are relevant to life in advanced in-

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dustrial society, others may be quietly forgotten—the fate that awaits all great minds who are at once influential and controversial. Consider his two major contributions to modern social theory: his rejection of the popular assumption that wealth and virtue go hand in hand, and his denial of the constructive role assigned to the capitalist in the march of industrial progress. Had these negations been nothing more than fanciful assaults, one might dismiss Veblen as a Utopian daydreamer or a malcontent ideologue. Actually there was some substance to Veblen's attacks on capitalist ideology. His Theory of Business Enterprise drew upon the nineteenvolume Report of the Industrial Commission, the result of a government investigation into illegal business practices designed to eliminate competition. Charles and Henry Adams' Chapters on Erie offered ample evidence that financiers did indeed conspire against the interests of production, a pattern of sabotage against railroad engineering that repeated itself in the building of the great transcontinental s. No doubt there were some production-minded capitalists who might have agreed with Veblen—James J. Hill and Andrew Carnegie, and later, Henry Ford and Henry Kaiser, proved themselves honest spokesmen for hard work and industrial efficiency. But the Goulds, Fisks, Drews, Morgans, Rockefellers, Vanderbilts, and Stanfords were more interested in the exciting maneuver of huge piles of intangible wealth than in the boring task of turning out useful goods—a point effectively made in Robert Heilbroner's brilliant chapter on Veblen in The Worldly Philosophers. It was Veblen's desire to bring science to the service of industry that attracted his small following around the turn of the century. It is unclear whether Frederick Winslow Taylor, the socalled father of "scientific management," was influenced directly by Veblen; but both shared a disgust for the waste and inefficiency of the in-

THORSTEIN VEBLEN I 645 dustrial system. Around 1901 the phrase "efficiency expert" became increasingly common, and a few groups emerged to echo Veblen's critiques and even to call upon the engineer to prepare to take the place of the businessman. Nothing came of these plans during the war years; but in the 1920's, Howard Scott organized the Technical Alliance, which went unnoticed until the depression, when Scott's name appeared in the news as the leader of what was now called "technocracy." This organization continues to exist in our time, and it claims Veblen as one of its patron saints. Another group influenced by Veblen's writings were the "institutional economists." Established at the University of Wisconsin in the late nineteenth century, the institutionalists followed Veblen's mode of analysis; but some, such as John Commons and Richard T. Ely, departed from his anarcho-syndicalist suspicion of the state when they looked to government as a positive agency of social reform. Several scholars influenced by both Veblen and the institutionalists—Rexford Guy Tug well, Thurman Arnold, Jerome Frank, Henry Wallace, and Mordecai Ezekiel—were important in the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt and saw in the New Deal the possibility of experimenting with the Veblenian idea of production-for-use. American Marxists have also been influenced by Veblen's writings. Although they tend to overlook his criticisms of dialectical materialism and the doctrine of class struggle, they are impressed by his trenchant analysis of economic orthodoxy and his mordant satire of the capitalist ethic of rugged individualism. In 1905, in the midst of the "golden era" of American socialism, William English Walling informed readers of the International Socialist Review that Veblen's analysis of business enterprise was not only more evolutionary, but also more "revolutionary," than that of Karl Marx. Three decades later, during the depression, another generation

of radicals could read the sophisticated Marxist Quarterly and find reassurance in Lewis Corey's exhortation: "All that is vital in Thorstein Veblen may fulfill itself in Marxism and socialism.'' During this era of the "Old Left," only the German emigres in America—philosophers and sociologists like Herbert Marcuse, Theodpr Adorno, and Max Horkheimer—seemed to be aware of the difficulties of assimilating Veblen into the Hegelian tradition that had shaped Marx's thought. Impressed by the richness of his cultural criticism, they nonetheless lamented Veblen's alleged "positivism," his capitulation to the factual as the normative, and his yearning for the restoration of the wholesomeness of primitive man. After World War II, American Marxist economists such as Douglas Dowd and Paul Sweezy continued the effort to incorporate Veblen, while in Europe radical scholars like Georges Friedmann still appear to be seeking ways to reconcile his ideas with the Left and to regard him as a socialist malgre lui. Such efforts at assimilation created more problems than they solved, as this writer has pointed out. In the field of American literature, Veblen's writings have had some influence. After the turn of the century, the vocabulary and witticisms of The Theory of the Leisure Class entered the idiom of social criticism. When William Dean Howells reviewed Veblen's book in 1899, he titled his two-part essay "An Opportunity for American Fiction." Although Howells doubted that an "aristocraticisation of society" can take place in America, he believed that the writer could find a promising subject in the dilemmas of a leisure class whose destiny is problematic in a native culture without monarchical conditions and aristocratic traditions. "It is," Howells observed in reference to what he believed would be the increasing displacement of the leisure class, "the most dramatic social fact of our time, and if some man of creative imagination were to seize upon it, he would find in it the material of that

646 I AMERICAN great American novel which after so much travail has not yet seen the light/9 In America, Howells continued, interest in the social culture of the elite is widespread among democratic citizens, for "our appetite for everything that relates to the life removed from the life of work, from the simple republican ideal, is almost insatiable." Any attempt to deal with the life of fashion, luxury, and leisure can be done successfully, Howells advised, only by one who takes it seriously but remains outside its milieu. Veblen offers such a perspective, and it is now time for a novelist to translate into dramatic terms his account of the evolution of a European leisure class in America's democratic society. 4 'Is not this a phenomenon worthy of the highest fiction?" One might think that Howells had in mind Henry James; but there is no evidence that James, who was deeply concerned about the fate of social elites, ever read Veblen. It is doubtful that American writers followed Howells' advice, though there are Veblenian (as well as Nietzschean) overtones in the Chicago-based novels of Robert Herrick and Ben Hecht. Indeed, the one important American novelist deeply influenced by Veblen, John Dos Passos, chose to dramatize not the plight of a moneyed aristocracy but an even more telling subject: the conflict between science and business, and the defeat of the industrialist at the hands of the capitalist. In the 1920's, Dos Passos became interested in the technocrats, and while working on his great trilogy, USA, he compiled a folder of " Vebleniana." After reading several of Veblen's works, Dos Passos became convinced that this eccentric social scientist was "the only man of genius who put his mind critically to work on American capitalism." "I admire his delicate surgical analysis more and more," Dos Passos wrote to Edmund Wilson in 1934. "I shouldn't wonder if he were the only American economist

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whose work had any lasting value. His work is a sort of anthropological footnote to Marx." Dos Passos never reconsidered his high estimate of Veblen even as he underwent a political conversion to conservatism and capitalism in his later years. Thus in both the radical and pro-socialist The Big Money (1936) and in the conservative and pro-free enterprise Midcentury (1961), Dos Passos revealed his admiration for the technician and craftsman and his scorn for the men of money and power, the "saboteurs" of the economy. As the grandson of a Portuguese immigrant, Dos Passos also identified with the Norwegian immigrant's son, the thinker who asked "too many questions" and "couldn't get his mouth around the essential yes," the estranged scholar who established a new diagram of a society dominated by monopoly capital, etched in irony the sabotage of production by business the sabotage of life by blind need for money profits, pointed out the alternatives: a warlike society strangled by the bureaucracies of the monopolies forced by the law of diminishing returns to grind down more and more the common man for profits, or a new matter-of-fact commonsense society dominated by the needs of the men and women who did the work and the incredibly vast possibilities for peace and plenty offered by the progress of technology. The vogue of Veblen has fluctuated throughout the twentieth century, reflecting, no doubt, the shifting political moods of different generations of intellectuals. Veblen's disdain for gradual, piecemeal reform found little sympathy among the liberals and humanitarians who forged the Progressive movement around the

THORSTE1N VEBLEN I 647 turn of the century. Not until the years immediately before the war did he become a cultural hero. The rebels of Greenwich Village looked to Veblen as an intellectual ally. His theory of the "instinct of workmanship" struck a response in their own value system, conditioned, as it was, by their various Protestant backgrounds; and in turn they could use his anthropology of "tribal customs" to attack the respectability of the starched-collar class represented by their parents' values. As a critic of the pretensions of class society, Veblen became a valuable resource in intergenerational conflicts. No one was more aware of this than H. L. Mencken. "All over the Nation, the Dial, the New Republic/' complained Mencken, Veblen's "books and pamphlets began to pour from the presses, and the newspapers reported his every wink and whisper, and everybody who was anybody began gabbling about him." Throughout 1918, Veblen virtually "dominated the American scene," moaned Mencken: All the reviews were full of his ideas. A hundred lesser sages reflected them. Everyone of intellectual pretensions read his books. Veblenism was shining in full brilliance. There were Veblenists, Veblen clubs, Veblen remedies for the sorrows of the world. There were even, in Chicago, Veblen girls—perhaps Gibson girls grown middle-aged and despairing. Veblen's reputation suffered an eclipse during the 1920's, when the "New Era" economics of Calvin Coolidge promised increasing prosperity for the flappers as well as the financiers. In the following decade Veblen reemerged as the sage who presumably had foretold Wall Street's crash and the world depression. The once-forgotten Veblen "now . . . shines like a star of the first magnitude," wrote John Chamberlain in Farewell to Reform. To writers like Chamberlain,

Max Lerner, and Alfred Kazin, Veblen was the anatomist as well as the satirist of the vested interests; and to a young radical student of literature like Harry Levin, who was looking for a non-Marxist perspective, Veblen could be read as the Balzac of sociology. It was during this period that some of Veblen's uncollected essays were published by admiring students, as was Joseph Dorfman's biography, a monumental study that caused even the jaded Mencken to have second thoughts about Veblen. When Mencken wrote on Veblen in 1919, he claimed that his nemesis had briefly overtaken philosopher John Dewey as the leading intellectual of the generation. In the late 1930's, Malcolm Cowley conducted a survey for the New Republic on "Books That Changed Our Minds." Veblen came in way ahead with 16 mentions, followed by Charles Beard (11), John Dewey (10), Sigmund Freud (9), Oswald Spengler and Alfred North Whitehead (7 each), and V.I. Lenin and L A . Richards (6 each). Yet in the desperate years of the depression, Veblen's social criticism seemed only to negate everything and affirm nothing. Even so admiring a disciple as Dos Passos titled his portrait of Veblen in The Big Money "The Bitter Drink." After World War II, Veblen's reputation suffered another decline, partly due to the spectacular performance of the American economy during the war and the positive reappraisal of American society in the "silent" 1950's. Yet his legacy remained vital to Max Lerner, who regarded Veblen as "America's greatest social scientist," a nearly forgotten cultural critic whose writings presaged not only the collapse of Wall Street but also the rise of Fascism. Veblen's melancholy wisdom also appealed to a number of academic scholars during the postwar years. Intellectual historians like Daniel Aaron, Henry Steele Commager, and Morton White assessed Veblen's thought in the light of

648 I AMERICAN America's liberal tradition, while the economists Robert Heilbroner and Robert Lekachman praised his devastating critiques of neoclassical orthodoxy (now enjoying a revival in the writings of Milton Friedman), and sociologist C. Wright Mills resurrected Veblen as the "comic" thorn in the side of the complacency of the 1950's. Of all the postwar scholars who participated in the effort to revive Veblen's stature, economist John Kenneth Galbraith deserves special mention. Galbraith found himself personally attracted to Veblen; he too was raised by hardworking immigrants (Scottish Canadians) who derided, not with envy but with "amiable contempt," the haughty manners of the wealthy classes. He also shared Veblen's conviction that the study of economics is as much a matter of literary persuasion as of statistics; hence he too became the rhetorician, coining new phrases like "conventional wisdom" to update what Veblen once described as the "ceremonial adequacy" of orthodox economic ideas. In The Affluent Society and The New Industrial State, Galbraith continued his Veblenian critique of America's culture of consumption, stressing the priority of socially useful production and calling for the recognition of the "technostructure," a new economic order run by an empirical intelligentsia interested in maximum output and technical virtuosity. By no means was there unanimity about Veblen in the postwar era. Talcott Parsons, one of the most influential social scientists of that period, maintained that Veblen's social theory was "essentially very simple" and that a "quite adequate comprehension of all Veblen's real contributions could be found in Max Weber's work." Parson's dismissal completely misses Veblen's and Weber's profoundly different attitudes toward religion, capitalism, bourgeois culture, and the work ethic. Parsons, for example, likened Veblen's "instinct of workmanship" to

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Weber's Protestant idea of "the calling," thereby equating a biological endowment with a religious imperative. If Veblen could be dismissed for being intellectually derivative, he could also be falsely attacked for being morally devious, the charge made by the conservative Catholic Lev Dobriansky, whose Veblenism: A New Critique (1957) indicted the social scientist for his ethical nihilism. For a more balanced treatment, one should consult Morton White's chapter on Veblen in Social Thought in America (1949), revealingly titled "The Amoral Moralist." Similarly, Veblen could be attacked for his alleged political naivete and irresponsibility regarding the nature of power. Thus Daniel Bell, in his introduction to The Engineers and the Price System (1952), claimed that Veblen's ultimate aim, like that of all technoauthoritarians from Saint-Simon to James Burnham, was to become the "active political force" of a "new class" capable of overthrowing the existing order. Bell's argument that Veblen "must be ranked on the side of the elitists" should be qualified. It may be true that Veblen's syndicalist dream leaves unresolved the dilemma confronting all technocrats—the autonomy of the producing organizations. Yet it does not follow that because Veblen's faith in the engineering class contained elitist implications, he must be judged a closet elitist who secretly sought power as a result of the frustrations in his own personal and professional life. Such an interpretation ignores Veblen's own maverick personality, which functioned incompatibly with the demands of any organized movement. Surely a man who sympathized with the Wobblies, scorned academic entrepreneurship, and declined an offer to become president of the American Economic Association was not simply lusting after power. Nor did Veblen's sarcastic disposition give much encouragement to the technicians and engineers, the one class possessing the expertise that would enable it to control

THORSTEIN VEBLEN I 649 the productive operations of society. Indeed, the history of the engineering profession in America, and its subordination to corporate capitalism, suggests that the power of knowledge does not necessarily lead to the knowledge of power. If Veblen was not an elitist with an urge for social control, what then motivated him? It is revealing that this question was raised in the early 1950's during the period of "consensus" scholarship. In the context of a school of thought that stresses the wholesome stability and continuity of American values, it was natural that some scholars would be inclined to dismiss Veblen as something of an intellectual deviant. The state of his mental health was discussed not only in the American Quarterly, the leading journal of American studies; it also became the central question of David Riesman's Thorstein Veblen: A Critical Interpretation (1953). Here the Harvard sociologist presented a provocative but impressionistic Freudian analysis of the childhood determinants that supposedly influenced Veblen's antipathy toward class society. Riesman's book helps us better understand Veblen; but it also helps us understand why "consensus" scholars were puzzled by Veblen's hostility to capitalism, and why they were inclined to trace his ideas to individual pathology rather than to social reality. Although Veblen may have had his share of "neuroses," not all neurotics shared his insights. Veblen was an idiosyncratic personality, to be sure; but in intellectual history, if not in psychohistory, it is the man's work, and not his life, that poses the most compelling questions for social philosophy. And Veblen, more than any other modern social scientist, proved himself an uncanny genius in showing why a culture supposedly devoted to the ethic of work and the value of efficiency actually esteems unearned wealth and wasteful consumption. In so doing, he uncovered two problems that remain with us in contemporary social thought—the cultural

hegemony of capitalism and the social stigma of labor.

Selected Bibliography WORKS OF

THORSTEIN

VEBLEN

The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions. New York, 1898; Mentor ed: New York, 1953. The Theory of Business Enterprise. New York, 1904; Augustus Kelley ed: Clifton, N.J., 1964. The Instinct of Workmanship and the State of the Industrial Arts. New York, 1914; Norton ed: New York, 1964. Imperial Germany and the Industrial Revolution. New York, 1915; University of Michigan Press ed: Ann Arbor, 1966. An Inquiry into the Nature of Peace and the Terms of Its Perpetuation. New York, 1917. The Higher Learning in America: A Memorandum on the Conduct of Universities by Business Men. New York, 1918; Hill & Wang ed: New York, 1957. The Place of Science in Modern Civilization and Other Essays. New York, 1919; Capricorn ed: New York, 1969, (Capricorn ed. bears the new title, Veblen on Marx, Race, Science and Economics.) The Vested Interests and the Common Man. New York, 1919; Capricorn ed: New York, 1969. The Engineers and the Price System. New York, 1921; Harcourt ed: New York, 1963. Absentee Ownership and Business Enterprise in Recent Times. New York, 1923; Beacon ed: Boston, 1967. Essays in Our Changing Order. New York, 1934; Augustus Kelley ed: Clifton, N.J., 1964.

CRITICAL AND BIOGRAPHICAL STUDIES Daugert, Stanley. The Philosophy of Thorstein Veblen. New York, 1950.

650 I AMERICAN Dobriansky, Lev E. Veblenism: A New Critique. Washington, D.C., 1957. Dorfman, Joseph. Thorstein Veblen and His America. New York, 1934; Augustus Kelley ed: Clifton, N.J., 1972. Dorfman, Joseph. "New Light on Veblen" in Thorstein Veblen: Essays, Reviews and Reports: Previously Uncollected Writings. Clifton, N.J., 1973. Dowd, Douglas. Thorstein Veblen. New York, 1964. Dowd, Douglas, ed. Thorstein Veblen: A Critical Reappraisal. Ithaca, N.Y., 1958. Duffus, R. L. The Innocents at Cedro: A Memoir of Thorstein Veblen and Some Others. New York, 1944. Hobson, John A. Veblen. New York, 1937. Qualey, Carlton C, ed. Thorstein Veblen. New York, 1968. Riesman, David. Thorstein Veblen: A Critical Interpretation. New York, 1953. Rosenberg, Bernard. The Values of Veblen: A Critical Appraisal. Washington, D.C., 1956. Schneider, Louis. The Freudian Psychology and Veblen's Social Theory. New York, 1948. Seckler, David. Thorstein Veblen and the Institutionalists: A Study in the Social Philosophy of Economics. Boulder, Colo., 1975. Teggart, Richard. Thorstein Veblen: A Chapter in American Economic Thought. Berkeley, Calif., 1932. Some of the best writing on Veblen has appeared in the form of articles or introductions to his works. Among the most illuminating commentaries are the following: Adorno, Theodor. "Veblen's Attack on Culture," Studies in Philosophy and Social Science 9, no. 3 (1941), 389-413. This brilliant essay has been reprinted in Adorno's Prisms.

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Galbraith, John Kenneth. "A New Theory of Thorstein Veblen," American Heritage 24 (1973), 32-40. Galbraith's essay also appears as the introduction to the Houghton Mifflin ed. of The Theory cfthe Leisure Class (Boston, 1973). Lerner, Max. Introduction to The Portable Veblen. New York, 1948. Mills, C. Wright. Introduction to Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class. New York, 1953.

BACKGROUND

READING

Aaron, Daniel. Men cf Good Hope: A Story of American Progressives. New York, 1951. Brooks, Van Wyck. The Confident Years: 1885-1915. New York, 1957. Commager, Henry Steele. The American Mind. New Haven, 1950. Coser, Lewis. Masters of Sociological Thought. New York, 1971. Diggins, John P. The Bard cf Savagery: Thorstein Veblen and Modern Social Theory. New York, 1977. Heilbroner, Robert. The Worldly Philosophers. New York, 1961. Kazin, Alfred. On Native Grounds: An Interpretation of Modern American Prose Literature. New York, 1942. Noble, David. The Paradox cf Progressive Thought. Minneapolis, Minn., 1958. White, Morton. Social Thought in America: The Revolt Against Formalism. New York, 1949. —JOHN P. DIGGINS

E. E. White 1899-

E . B. WHITE'S life is almost coextensive with the twentieth century, a significant coincidence in view of his role as an interpreter of American experience. Throughout his literary career, White has been a spokesman for freedom of the press and privacy of the individual. Like Mark Twain and H. L. Mencken, he is a smiling moralist, the most endurable kind. The moralism perhaps sprang from the middle-class, turn-ofthe-century culture in which he grew up; but the smile was his own. Although his childhood in Mt. Vernon, New York, was so happy that he feared it might disqualify him as a serious writer, it had enough bad moments that it cannot of itself explain the good humor and optimism that later became characteristic of his tone. The youngest of six children, Elwyn Brooks White was born after his family's early years of financial insecurity; and he was able to enjoy such benefits as regular summer vacations in the Maine woods. He regarded himself as lucky from the day of his birth, July 11, 1899, in Mt. Vernon, N.Y., and with good reason. His parents were well-to-do and loving; his brother Stanley taught him to read and fish; his sister Lillian, concerned about his bashfulness, tried to teach him the one-step. His sister's help came too late to forestall a moment of awkwardness in his mid-teens when he invited a girl to a tea dance in New York City. In the languor of day657

dreaming about the arrangements and the frenzy of making them, he had forgotten that he could not dance. It was this pattern of expectation and disappointment that became the mark of White's self-deprecating anecdotes for the New Yorker. As a child, White was a brooder, responding with all he had to the ordinary troubles of childhood. One reason that he began to write was his loneliness in being the youngest of a large family. He suffered for years from the fear of having to speak in the school assembly, although he was saved by the terminal alphabetic position of his name from having to speak more than once. His self-consciousness later was the subject of several widely anthologized pieces—"The Door" and "Second Tree From the Corner"—and the need to overcome it was perhaps the source and end of his offhand, self-mocking humor. For a man who regarded himself as lucky, White went through his share of failures. Throughout his high school years he admired girls, but he felt that his accomplishments— playing the piano, writing poems, and riding his bicycle while sitting backward—were not what it took to win them. His only romantic triumph during these years was ice-skating "hundreds of miles" with a girl who said nothing but had strong ankles. Of that event he wrote in the introduction to his Letters: "I remember what it was like to be in love before any of love's com-

652 / AMERICAN plexities or realities or disturbances had entered in, to dilute its splendor and challenge its perfection." This vein of idealistic melancholy, which he later remarked was an essential of good clowning, opened up in him early. To Alice Burchfield, whom he courted, lost, won, and finally broke off with, White wrote in April 1922: "I'm a born idealist, Alice, and when I sometimes seem blue it's because the pictures that I paint in my mind are often disappointing when they appear in the bald cold colors of everyday life." At Cornell University, White belonged to the Manuscript Club, guided by Professor Martin Sampson, who gave the members the following motto: 'To be frank, to use one's brains, to write what is in one to write, and never to take oneself too damned seriously or too damned lightly." It was some time before White managed to balance his style or his life between these two poles. White's misadventures in seeking and holding jobs could not have added to his self-esteem. Although he studied English under Professor William Strunk, whose textbook on writing style White later revised, and was editor in chief of the Cornell Sun, he had the usual hard time breaking into the newspaper business after college. He wrote to his friend Luella Adams in December 1921: "I am the person at whom the city editors shy their paper weights and other missiles. I sneak into their office when the desk-boy isn't looking and hand them stories that they don't like." Apparently the stories were thrown away, swept up from the floor by the janitors: * 'If it wasn 't for me there would be thousands of janitors out of work in New York City." White gave it more of his time than he liked. After failing to establish himself in the aggressive world of New York newspapers, White tried doing publicity work, despite his distaste for it. An editor of his acquaintance was shocked to find such an idealist in a "tainted profession." White wrote to Alice Burchfield: " . . . nice pleasant way to start the

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day having a person like that inform you that you're tainted. I had a mental picture of Mother sniffing me when I came home at night, the way she does butter to see if it is all right. . . ." At this point in a career that was going nowhere, White made the first of several abrupt and risky changes in the way he was managing his affairs. In his life as well as in his prose, his greatest asset was his ability to imagine the unexpected and then to do it. Uncomfortable with publicity writing, White set off in March 1922 with Howard Cushman, a college friend, on a car trip west, a journey he described in his essay "Years of Wonder." The American pattern of striking out for the frontier when discontented with the civilization and commercialism of the East is as old as James Fenimore Cooper's Natty Bumppo and as rich in possibilities as the unwritten life of Huckleberry Finn after he lit "out for the Territories." White's Model T was romantically named Hotspur, as if to underscore the young man's intention to live the spontaneous, insouciant life. (Significantly, when he settled for a while In Seattle to write for the Times, he sold Hotspur and bought a coupe.) Traveling on poorly mapped roads that were even more poorly constructed, White and Cushman intended to confront life and to assert their mobility and capacity for change, much as the American entrepreneur of the 1920's was risking investment in business and the stock market. After the end of World War I, America was itself in a mobile and restless state, of which the continuing rise and spread of the automobile emerged as an appropriate metaphor. Social changes were in the air; and radio was just beginning to obsess Americans, shortening distances between them with its disembodied voices. As space was being challenged by the automobile and the radio, so was the sense of rootedness in old places and old pieties. Moral experiment, economic speculation, and radical changes in the worn-out imperatives of work and family were the order of the day. White found it

E. B. WHITE I 653 difficult to be a rebel in America, where there was nothing to rebel against except one's own stupidity in electing incompetent public officers and paying taxes on a standard of living far above the simple needs of life. Still, rebellion was part of the American tradition, as was self-reliance, and White, now in his mid-twenties, embraced them both. After a short and financially marginal existence working for the Seattle Times—a destiny to which he felt "doomed" in view of his inability to do anything else—White was laid off in June 1923. He was sure that the discharge occurred because he was "almost useless" as a reporter, yet he was relieved that he was once again his own man. Instead of using his savings for a trip home, he bought a first-class ticket on a boat bound for Alaska and Siberia, although he had only enough money to travel to Skagway. He envied the successful businessmen with whom he was traveling, even while he despised them from behind his Menckenesque pose. His descent from first-class passenger to mess boy, when he ran out of money at Skagway, was a shock to the comfortable Babbitts who had taken him for one of their own, and White enjoyed their consternation. He appreciated the metaphoric fitness of his situation: a writer in a floating world of capitalists, in appearance and manner like them, but in fact a card-carrying member of the working poor. He saw that they were bored and that they wanted what he knew he had—the capacity to live at firsthand, to risk exposure to the unfamiliar. Describing the voyage in his essay "Years of Wonder," he wrote that he was then at that youthful point in life "when he has little to cling to except his unmanageable dream, little to support him except good health, and nowhere to go but all over the place.'' It was a state of mind he seemed determined to preserve long past the delirious decade that was its initial context and justification. Through his "exalted footlessness" he observed what went on around him without partici-

pating in it, imitating other writers rather than speaking in his own voice: "My prose style at this time was a stomach-twisting blend of the Bible, Carl Sandburg, H. L. Mencken, Jeffrey Farnol, Christopher Morley, Samuel Pepys, and Franklin Pierce Adams imitating Samuel Pepys." Indeed, his style was as unsettled as his life, for he had not yet discovered "the eloquence of facts'' or faced their consequences as a grown man. After returning to New York in the fall of 1923, White liyed first with family, then with friends, while working in the advertising business. By 1926 he had sold some pieces to the recently founded New Yorker and was invited by the editor, Harold Ross, to join the staff. White recounted, in the introduction to chapter 3 of his Letters, how he sat in Katharine Sergeant Angell's office, " . . . gazing at the classic features of my future wife without, as usual, knowing what I was doing." Before making a commitment to the magazine, White drifted for another year, to Washington, D.C., Ithaca, N. Y., and Europe, and was absorbed in a largely literary love affair with a southern girl who eventually married someone else. Even after he went to work full time for the magazine in 1927, he put in erratic hours, disappearing from the office while other writers worked from morning until night; but wherever he went, he met his deadline, and Ross had no reason to complain. In 1929 White was busy publishing his first two books, The Lady Is Cold, a collection of poems, and Is Sex Necessary? (written with James Thurber), marrying Katharine Angell, and again trying to decide whether or not to quit his job. The New Yorker did not force him to write against the grain; and White admitted that he was not rebelling against excessive interference with his style or matter. Still, something was wrong. He went to the Canadian woods on an unauthorized vacation and wrote to Ross that good as his life was at the New Yorker, it was not complete. He preferred the life at an Ontario camp where he had worked as a young man, and found

654 I AMERICAN it a place that did not change, one "door" that did not close and lock on him. The birth of his son Joel, in December 1930, brought him satisfaction enough to put aside for a few years the idea of giving up New York and his job, for he was now engaged in "peopling the earth." He and his wife shared the prosperity of the New Yorker; and they survived the Great Depression well enough to purchase a Maine farmhouse in 1934. Offered the editorship of the Saturday Review early in 1936, White preferred to stay clear of offices, commitments, and power and to be an "office boy de-luxe" at the New Yorker. He added that he was a "literary defective," reading "so slowly & so infrequently that it causes talk even here in my own family. . . ." The idea that the Saturday Review, "casting about for someone who wasn't 'literary,' " had chosen him, gave White obvious pleasure. But he had already become enamored of broody hens, sailboats, and the absence of deadlines; and two years later, he persuaded his wife to leave New York and live the year round in North BrookMn, Maine. The move was preceded by a nervous crisis that sent White on a vacation from both woric and marriage—"sort of a delayed sabbatical." He hoped to write a long autobiographical poem during this year of freedom, in a last resurgence of self-concern, but the poem never got off the ground. (Fragments of it are embedded in "Zoo Revisited," in Second Tree From the Corner.) "A person afflicted with poetic longings of one sort or another," he wrote to his wife (May 31, 1937), "searches for a kihd of intellectual and spiritual privacy in which to indulge his strange excesses." To do so, one has "to forswear certain easy rituals, such as earning a living and running the world's errands. . . . " and to escape the increasingly artificial atmosphere of the city. . . . I long to recapture something which everyone loses when he agrees to perform certain creative miracles on specified dates for a particular sum.

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I realize, too, that the whole plan [of dropping out] sounds selfish and not much fun for you; but that's the way art goes. He will probably be irregular about meals, he warns her, for he means to take up "a new allegiance—to a routine of my own spirit rather than to a fixed household & office routine." After a little experience of the free life, White gave up even the restrictions of his nine-to-one writing schedule, remembering that he "had never written anything between nine and one anyway." Instead, he went fishing, made an ax handle, raised vegetables, and talked to the locals, describing himself to Thurber (October 1937) as "the second most inactive writer living, and the third most discouraged." When the year's sabbatical was up, White wrote again to Thurber (January 8, 1938) that he had made a mess of his experiment, his wife's health, and his "own spirit." Despite his complaints White continued to produce the half-comic, halfmelancholy essays for Harper's that were later collected in One Man's Meat (1942). During World War II, White turned down an offer to cover the events in Europe for the New Yorker. "The war is so damn near," he wrote Harold Ross in June 1941, "that it is no longer possible to use printer's ink in place of blood in a man's circulatory system . . . " But White returned to the magazine when the general mobilization left it understaffed. Caught up in the spirit of patriotism and unity, White turned to serious essays on world government, which were collected in The Wild Flag (1946). Another project engaged him during these years: with Malcolm Cowley, Reinhold Niebuhr, Max Lerner, and Archibald MacLeish, White wrote a pamphlet based on Roosevelt's "Four Freedoms" speech. Soon after he arrived in Washington, White was given the job of rewriting the whole pamphlet. But the prospect of writing a book divorced from facts and ordinary human experience disturbed him. He felt that the

E. B. WHITE I 655 committee was preoccupied with abstractions and paralyzed with talk, and he had a hard time getting the members to put anything down on paper. He wrote to his wife (February 4, 1942): * 'I always write a thing first and think about it afterward, . . . because the easiest way to have consecutive thoughts is to start putting them down." White also felt that the best way to find out what President Roosevelt meant by his "Four Freedoms" speech was to ask him—and no one would. After the project was finished, he continued to wonder what it had all been about. He suffered another spell of restlessness in 1943, perhaps because he was dissatisfied with his role as no more than a publicity agent for America; at the age of forty-four, he had even less respect for advertising than he had had at twenty-five. After the peak of enthusiasm had been reached in the middle of the war, White felt depressed and wrote to Ross that the war was making him "lose my perspective, or grip. Writing any sort of editorial stuff about this universal jam that everyone is in, is for me a gruelling and rather frightening job." He spent his time collecting brown eggs, conducting local air raid drills, and waiting to be drafted. Despite the gift of a new Underwood typewriter from his wife some months before, White again wrote Ross that he had ". . .not been able to make it spell out a single god damn word." By March 1943, he had to write Frederick Lewis Allen, his editor at Harper's, that he could no longer do the "One Man's Meat" column: "The desire is very strong in me to rid myself of any writing commitment. It is not simply that I want a vacation or a rest . . . but rather that I want to change my state of mind, and there is no other way to do it." His doctor, he explained, ". . . i s feeding me strychnine, which is what I always thought they fed dogs when they didn't want the dogs." A month later he was in the midst of a "nervous crack-up," and the final installment of "One Man's Meat" was published in the May 1943 issue. White re-

turned to the New Yorker, believing he could do the most good for the war effort from his "old editorial perch." By 1945 the end of the war was suddenly in sight. Instead of gloomy letters on his stuffed sinuses, which he called the "Bronx Concourse of the head," White wrote light complaints to Ross asking that the New Yorker stop sending stapled "Newsbreaks" to him, because removal of the staples bloodied the fingers. He was also making light of his own depression, caused by the "mice in the subconscious. . . . The whole key to the neurotic life is simple," he wrote to his brother Stanley in January 1945, "in fact the simplicity of it is the greatest hurdle, because it tends to make it impossible or unacceptable to highly complex natures, who insist on meeting their troubles with suitably devious devices and cures." After a year and a half of falling apart, he reminded himself of the goal he had drawn from Thoreau's Walden and his own experience, "simplicity, simplicity, simplicity," and he began to work and sleep again. When the war was over, White and his wife settled into a duplex apartment at Turtle Bay Gardens, on East 48th Street, and resumed steady work at the New Yorker. White had begun his first children's book, Stuart Little, in the early 1930's, but he continued to rework it for nine years, and it was finally published in 1945. Discussing it in the context of White's work, Annie Parson wrote with more insight than tact: "It is quite possible to believe that Stuart Little is E. B. White. Indeed in real life, Mr. White physically resembles a mouse. He is about five feet six inches tall, with a little pointed face and sharp ears.'' This analysis, White wrote to Carol and Roger Angell on July 15, 1968, "puts a new light on my passion for cheese." Autobiographical or not, Stuart Little, like the later Charlotte's Web, contains themes consistent with those of all of White's work. Both children's books could be called minia-

656 / AMERICAN turizations in the manner of Gulliver's Travels. Having first postulated something beyond the bounds of reason—that a mouse can be born to a human mother, or that a girl can talk to a pig— White proceeds to treat these absurd situations with delicate realism, as Swift might be said to have treated the Gulliver stories with indelicate realism. The charm in both cases lies in the cleverness with which the writers solve the problems posed by their initial postulates. What kind of life can a talking mouse have in a middle-class Manhattan household in the 1930's? He must, of course, learn to make himself useful and pleasing to those around him, like any member of a family. The socialization of Stuart, not the protection of his individual uniqueness, is the chief concern of his parents. Like the reader, the Littles accept the fantastic given, as they do the realistic details of their lives. Stuart has ice skates made from paper clips. He must offer a tiny foil coin to the trolley conductor, as if he took up a seat just like anyone else. And in Charlotte's Web, White employs a realistic style to portray a fantastic, talking spider. The style of both stories echoes that of "Dick Whittington and His Cat," Gulliver's Travels, and the Life of Samuel Johnson. The formality of Stuart's speech is that of the Anglo-Saxon young man of history and legend going out into the world to seek his fortune. Stuart's letter to Harriet Ames could have been written by the amorous James Boswell: "Yesterday the keeper of your local store, who has an honest face and an open manner, gave me a most favorable report of your character and appearance." The gentle humor here could not exist without the tradition of formal exposition and diction preserved through Samuel Johnson, Henry Fielding, and Jane Austen. Clearly, White regards himself as part of that tradition, even while he mocks it lightly by incorporating it into the genre of the English "dressed animal tale," as it was developed by Lewis Carroll and Beatrix Potter. Such stories were largely the creation of Victorian

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writers and were concerned with teaching children about adult motives and conduct while satisfying their need to people the universe with congenial and surprising figures of fantasy. Stuart Little is a novel of growing up, as is Charlotte's Web. In one case, it is the animal hero who outgrows his home, senses his differentness, and moves on. In the other, it is the girl Fern who grows away from life in the barnyard and toward adulthood. Why, in writing the only extended fiction of his long career, did he choose the form of the children's novel? For one thing, it allowed him to explore the natural world, which had always fascinated him, from the fresh and immediate viewpoint of a child. For another, he was not being held to the serious and self-conscious standards proper to the novelist writing for adults. His novels were written as play, not as art, and for love, not for money, as White always wished he could have been free to do. It is characteristic of him to have couched the tragic themes of lost love, alienation, and ultimate frustration of desire in the comic, lighthearted terms of animal stories, distancing his own pain through the lens of innocent laughter. Perhaps the librarian to whom Katharine White submitted Stuart Little was more right than she or the Whites knew, when she distrusted the suitability of the book for children. It is a tale of loss and sorrow, and does not attempt to decorate life with a hope that ignores sadness. The story begins with an outrageous untruth, under which lies a truth too awful to bear: "When Mrs. Frederick C. Little's second son was born, everybody noticed that he was not much bigger than a mouse." Although his older brother has reservations about the new "child," "his parents preferred to keep him rather than send him away. . . . " The pathos of Stuart's condition is balanced by its humor. White writes crisply and unsentimentally about Stuart's usefulness in finding small, lost objects and unsticking piano keys. On each occasion, however, Stuart must suffer miseries that his family cannot imagine: he

E. B. WHITE I 657 is covered with slime in a trip down a drain to retrieve a lost ring and is temporarily deafened after a session inside the piano. His parents are worried about Stuart's identifying himself as a mouse instead of as a human being, and they take steps to draw him into their world long before he is aware of what or who he is. He must, for instance, use a tiny hammer to turn the faucet so he can brush his teeth. In such an episode, White captures the strangeness that he and all sensitive children have felt when obliged to carry out the alien rituals of those who launch us into life—a life defined and maintained independently of the child's needs or wishes. From his earliest days, Stuart is threatened by tight places: drains, a rolled-up shade, a pounding piano hammer. Relief is offered only by solitary flight. He is entranced by a modest ship on the Central Park pond, and his joy in the adventure of sailing is expressed in terms too large for the occasion: Stuart " . . . loved the feel of the breeze in his face and the cry of the gulls overhead and the heave of the great swell under him.'' Characteristically, White connects the trivial to the grand without giving the reader time to adjust himself to the discrepancy between subject and language. The technique establishes Stuart's dual role as the animal hero of a picaresque frolic and White's own projection of himself as an unsettled, lonely drifter, mysterious even to his family. After the triumphant sailboat race, when his brother asks him where he was, Stuart answers only, "Oh, knocking around town." His parents have such trouble locating him that he must wear a hunter's cap, an ironic touch in view of the fact that it is Stuart who is hunted by the Littles' vicious house cat. From the start, Stuart seems on the verge of disappearance. The coming of the bird Margalo, halfway through the book, only confirms what Stuart has always sensed: a longing for freedom and a belief that he is different from everyone around him. Margalo is a mystery, just as Stuart is. No one knows what kind of bird she is, although Stuart's

brother tries to assign her a scientific name. She appears when Stuart is very sick, and she herself is almost dead when the family finds her. Together the two regain their health and find that they share a world beyond that of Stuart's family. Their intimacy is sealed by Stuart's rescue of Margalo from the Littles' cat and her rescue of him from a garbage scow, which he has gloomily observed will probably bear him out of this world. After the adventure, Mr. Little, who has never been outside of New York, wants to know what the sea is like..When he hears, he sighs that someday he may get away from his business long enough to find out for himself. His is the sort of life that Stuart, like White, had to reject. During his search for Margalo, who has disappeared after being threatened by the cat, Stuart goes through the motions of the life that he has been taught. He gets a car, takes a job as a substitute teacher, and even tries to court Harriet, who is as tiny as he. But Harriet has been completely assimilated into human society, and she leaves him lonelier than before. And so, Stuart heads north, alone, without prospects or leads, but sure, somehow, that he is headed in the right direction. As he had instructed the schoolchildren in his charge, the only thing worth doing or even worth talking about is "what's important." For Stuart, this means breaking the rules of the world that has been made for him, because that world does not fit with what he is or what he suspects he might become. Stuart quickly forgets Harriet. He invites her to go for a paddle and makes elaborate plans, but his one great romantic occasion is ruined by the wreck of his canoe. He does not renew his suit, for he is a young mouse on the move. He is a wayfarer, for whom romance is only an interlude—and not a very happy one at that. What he does well is to explore, defend the weak, and pursue the plenitude of nature. What lures him on is partially expressed by the telephone lineman at the end of the book: " 'Swamps where cedars grow and turtles wait on logs but not for

658 I AMERICAN anything in particular; fields bordered by crooked fences broken by years of standing still; orchards so old they have forgotten where the farmhouse is.' "He and Stuart agree that north is the direction, if, like White himself, one wants to go home to Eden, to the farm. In Charlotte's Web, White gives a classic description of what he saw, or rather experienced, in life on the farm. The barn was very large. It was very old. It smelled of hay and it smelted of manure. It smelled of the perspiration of tired horses and the wonderful sweet breath of patient cows. It often had a sort of peaceful smell—as though nothing bad could happen ever again in the world. White describing a barn sounds like Hemingway describing a woman. Their common delight in the repetition of human patterns suggests that the life we have always known does not end. When Fern Arable is more interested in sitting in a ferris wheel with a boy than in talking to Wilbur, her pet pig, we need not be told explicitly that only children talk to animals, and that love makes men and women of us. When Charlotte the spider dies accepting death, as Wilbur must accept it, we are reading a sermon on the continuity of the generations, preached, as Sir Philip Sidney would have it preached, through an engaging fiction. When Mr. Arable wants to sell the pig because it will be expensive to feed, and Fern's desire to mother it prevails, we know that he is being practical, as is his responsibility, and she is being motherly, as is hers. Charlotte's Web, also, has a hero who is almost too small to survive, who is born, threatened, and saved. Initially Wilbur, the runt of his litter, is saved by the farmer's little girl Fern; ultimately, when Fern has grown up too much to care about him anymore, Wilbur is saved by the motherly spider, who has taken Fern's place in his lonely life. The saving of a pig, as White well knew, was a larger issue than merely preserving

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the barnyard economy. When Fern saves Wilbur, her father acknowledges that she was "trying to rid the world of injustice.'' She acts out of childish love and nourishes Wilbur in that spirit. But Fern is only playing at love, pushing Wilbur in a carriage, as he lies beside her doll. In time, when Wilbur is moved to a neighboring farm, she loses interest in him. Wilbur, like Stuart, becomes lonely. He craves freedom and tries to escape the confines of the barnyard, only to return ignominiously for the treasures of the trough. Despite his security, he lacks companionship, and only Charlotte's kindness brightens his life. As Margalo was of a different species from Stuart, so is Charlotte from Wilbur. He is at first horrified by her sucking of blood, but learns that life is a matter both of construction and destruction, finding and losing. The lesson is confirmed for him at the end when Charlotte saves him, only to die herself after laying her eggs. Wilbur befriends her children, seeing her in them, as White later described, in "Once More to the Lake," seeing himself in his son. The generations continue without a break, although individuals are lost between them. Perhaps Charlotte's Web has less appeal than Stuart Little because in the later novel White has two foci: Fern's growth to young womanhood and Wilbur's relationship with the wise old spider. Stuart, on the other hand, with his adventures, suffering, and maturity, is the only focus of the first novel, and his small, restless consciousness dominates the book in a way that neither Fern's nor Wilbur's is strong enough to do. Wilbur is too dependent and Fern is too fickle to unify the later novel as Stuart did the earlier one. If Charlotte had been the "reflector" of the action, as Stuart was, White might have given the second novel more depth and significance. Although White objected to symbolic interpretations of his work, he acknowledged that in looking for the lost bird Margalo, Stuart Little

E. B. WHITE I 659 was looking for what he could not find or even give a name to—the beautiful and the good. To Dorothy Nielson he wrote in April 1946: "I think many readers find the end inconclusive but I have always found life inconclusive, and I guess it shows up in my work." Stuart did not find the bird; and White, resisting the demands of his young readers, did not write a sequel. It is a curious paradox that White's deliberate and classical effacement of himself from his work has resulted in a distinctly personal voice in his writing. He is more powerfully and unmistakably present in his work than are contemporary confessional poets, who pride themselves on their tragic uniqueness. T. S. Eliot explained this intersection of personal and impersonal in modern literature: "Poetry is not the expression of personality but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotion know what it means to want to escape from these things." Brendan Gill has given a sensitive description of White as he knew him later in life: At seventy-five, White is small and wiry, with an unexpectedly large nose, speckled eyes, and an air of being just about to turn away, not on an errand of any importance but as a means of remaining free to cut and run without the nuisance of prolonged goodbyes.. . . what he achieves must cost him a considerable effort and appears to cost him very little. His speaking voice, like his writing voice, is clear, resonant, and wary. He wanders over the pastures of his Maine farm, or, for that matter, along the labyrinthine corridors of The New Yorker with the offhand grace of a dancer making up a sequence of steps that the eye follows with delight and that defies any but his own notation. Clues to the bold and delicate nature of those steps are to be discovered in every line he writes, but the man and his work are so closely mingled that try as we will, we cannot tell the dancer from the dance.

What appears to be romantic individualism in White should be viewed against the tradition in American literature to see the individual self as a member of the collective democratic body. In his withdrawal to the Maine farm, White does not break his connection with the American democratic process; he affirms it. He does not set himself up as a misanthrope, rebuking the sins of society in isolation, like Rousseau or Mencken; he joins the farmers, lobster fishermen, and attenders of town meetings as a man no different from them. "The self he sought was not only his, but America's," Sacvan Bercovitch writes, 4 'or rather his as America's and America as his." White joked, for instance, that his allergic cough was like the pollinosis of Daniel Webster, which was important enough to influence the Compromise of 1850. He rejected the collective of the socialists for the one he shares with Emerson and Thoreau, convinced, as he explained in his essay "Freedom" (1940), of the "vitally important pact which a man has with himself, to be all things to himself, and to be identified with all things. . . ." He declares that his love of freedom began in childhood, with a sense of "mystical inner life; of God in man; of nature publishing herself through the *!.' " Freedom for him does not exist independently from the selves of others but rather in voluntary cooperation with them; and the inspiration for that union is the land itself. White treats the individual as a microcosm of the whole country. He is concerned as much with the moral life of America as with the details of his immediate surroundings. Tocqueville once remarked that Americans are interested in either the grand abstraction or the petty detail. It might be fairer to say that they are concerned with the relationship between the grand and the petty, and are establishing correspondences between them. For White, as for Emerson and Thoreau, the individual is the microcosmic laboratory in which public events can be personally investigated and

660 I AMERICAN understood. As Thoreau put it, "I should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well." The view that self and America are mystically one entity vindicates the American principle that individualism is the proper basis for a national order, and even, White felt, for a world order. He wrote to Alison Marks (April 20, 1956) that the "problem is to establish communication with one's self, and, that being done, everyone else is tuned in." Indeed, White's style has a quality that Richard Poirier describes as "the speaker's capacity to relinquish his particular identity and assume an ever more inclusively general one." The individual in a democracy, if he intends to stay free, must have discipline from within, a condition also necessary, in White's view, for writing literature. He objected to the free-thinking, innovative "descriptivists" in college English departments, and years later he complained about verbal and written expression to Kellogg Smith (February 3, 1961), that ". . . what is lacking today is discipline. . . ."It might appear from White's own desire to leave journalism for freelance writing, and his pain at having to order his words on a page, on time, and for money, that he was a careless rhapsodist who wrote only from his heart when the wind stirred his strings. But his success at the New Yorker indicates that he was an attentive craftsman who drove himself hard. Passed under Harold Ross's editorial eye, White's work had to withstand the scrutinizing of every phrase for factual and grammatical accuracy, logic, clarity, grace, and wit. Ross was much struck by Mark Twain's attack on Cooper's diction: "Use the right word, never its second cousin, never omit a necessary detail. Employ a simple and straightforward style." According to Brendan Gill, Ross's attention to the details of his writers' prose might "prompt as many as one hundred and fifty . . . ruminations and challenges" on a single "Profile" piece. Ross armed himself for his

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editorial labors with Webster's dictionary in one hand and Fowler's English Usage in the other, apparently in the belief that if the Lord had wanted him to read any other book, He would have given him more than two hands. Although Ross himself played the English language only by ear, having had little formal instruction, he evidently possessed the literary equivalent of perfect pitch, and White's style profited from his guidance. Ross did not so much tell him what to write as help him say what he wanted in the most natural way. Whatever was left of the extravagances and posturings of the adolescent prose of White's early letters and "Journal" seems to have been pruned by Ross's sharp critiques. White became impatient with the New Yorker policy of boiling every word before it was presumed safe for consumption. He wrote Ross on July 10, 1945: "I am not as sure of myself as I used to be, and write rather timidly, staring at each word as it comes out, and wondering what is wrong with //." It was characteristic of him to resist situations that made him self-conscious, a state of mind that he found destructive both of personal happiness and creative effort. When as a college student he was rejected by Alice Burchfield, he wrote to her in April 1922, "I suppose you wonder why I don't act like a normal person. I wonder too. Instead, I wait on bridges for people and when they don't come, I pack up and go on to Geneva. I hope I may get over it someday." The classical style that distances and controls his romantic content was the chief means he chose toward that end. As he sought to retain the initial freshness and power of his personal relationships in the face of time's corrosive effect, White sought in his prose to relay immediate experience in a form that would give it a classical permanence. His concern for permanence in a world of flux also informs his social and political values. Like Tocqueville, White often pointed out the dangers of mediocrity and apathy to which de-

E. B. WHITE I 661

mocracies are especially liable and which can lead them into tyranny if they are not vigilant in guarding their liberty. People who had come to tolerate a car inferior to the original Model T, he feared, might in time come to tolerate a government inferior to the one they began with. In the essay 'The Motor Car," White describes his fascination with "the anatomy of decline, by the spectacle of a people passively accepting a degenerating process which is against their own interests." His essay ''Farewell, My Lovely!" (1936) links the simple, responsive Model T to nature by means of an organic metaphor: the driver "broods the engine," as a hen would brood her eggs. His car was as personal and living a thing to him as a horse. To break such an organic bond between man and what he uses seems to White a sign of decline, a slipping into mechanical, cold, inhuman manipulation of nature and of other men. "Farewell, My Lovely!" combines the language of conversation with the language of elegy. The initial sentences establish this improbable conjunction: "I see by the new Sears Roebuck catalogue that it is still possible to buy an axle for a 1909 Model T Ford, but I am not deceived. The great days have faded, the end is in sight." White's continual lament over our fall from some original, half-remembered state of grace is both the theme and the structural principle of the essay. "Everyone remembers springtimes," he writes in the next line, remembering his own springtime as the young owner of a Model T. Two time lines, past and present, run simultaneously through the narrative, converging in the mind of the narrator, who obliges us to live in both by an implicit comparison of the Model T's machinery to our own contemporary state of mind. At the same time, he makes the Ford and our relationship to it a metaphor of a lost America ("the old Ford practically was the American scene") and of ourselves, trying to find our place in a world traveling at a frighten-

ing velocity toward an unknown destination. For White, the destination is always unknown, and he must resist aloud the impulse to expect the worst. This reluctance to pin down the future one way or another is in accord with his refusal to write an essay on the metaphysical problem of human identity or security in the midst of unstoppable process. He refuses to talk of significant matters except in terms of insignificant ones. The creation of the Ford is rhetorically linked with the creation of man: "It was the miracle God had wrought. And it was patently the sort of thing that could happen only once. Mechanically uncanny, it was like nothing that had ever come to the world before." The machine is indistinguishable from its owner and becomes, in White's carefully constructed series of comparisons, an extension of man's spirit into the world: "A Ford was born naked as a baby," "My own generation identifies it with youth," a reflector was bought so "your posterior would glow in another car's brilliance." He does not have to make the linkage between man and machine explicit, nor does he ever do so. As always, his method is to speak of the concrete without reference to the metaphysical. The Model T is itself and no more, unless we choose to make it so. White does not insist on the connection. The Ford's engine is also a metaphor of the earth's movement through space, its transmission being "half metaphysics, half sheer fiction." White assigns the engineer's adjective "planetary" to the Ford's transmission, meaning it in both the epicyclic or mechanical sense as well as in the sense of "wandering" and "erratic." It is characteristic of White to give both a commonplace, literal meaning to a word and at the same time to imply a moral or metaphysical significance beyond anything he would be willing to state by itself, apart from the concrete instance. After suggesting a link between the car and its owner, for instance, White writes: "It was hard-working, commonplace, heroic. . . .

662 / AMERICAN Its most remarkable quality was its rate of acceleration. '' He does not mean only the Ford but the driver, the twentieth-century man who is himself driven by forces he cannot control except when "enthroned" in his Model T. In a new car, White writes, "Letting in a clutch is a negative, hesitant motion," while "pushing down the Ford pedal was a simple, country motion—an expansive act, which came as natural as kicking an old door to make it budge." In this sentence, White forgets Strunk's grammar and reverts to country diction, as he does to a country simile: not "naturally" but "natural." In the same spirit, White is not making a point about the machine as an extension of the modern psyche, but demonstrating the union of the "commonplace and heroic." The very ignition of the Ford is made a significant action; typically White dramatizes the central noun, "abruptness": "the car, possessed of only two forward speeds, catapulted directly into high with a series of ugly jerks and was off on its glorious errand. The abruptness of this departure was never equalled in other cars of the period." Like the irregularity of its response, another feature of the Ford revealed a relationship to the nature of the men who operated it: the car began its career in an incomplete form. When White says the Model T was "a vibrant, spirited framework to which could be screwed an almost limitless assortment of decorative and functional hardware," he is describing one thing with the intention of describing another, leaving the reader to link a concrete material object to an abstraction. The car, and by extension the men it represents, are for White more curious and beautiful than they are useful. Both defy the laws of physics; the Pegasus attached to the hood does "something godlike to the owner." Ultimately the Model T is not an object owned but a state of mind; to refuel it "the driver had to unbend, whether he wanted to or not." What a man was in his heart could be determined by his

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attitude toward his Model T. Some men were suspicious enough to buy a rearview mirror; others bought a newfangled foot accelerator. There were those who wanted luxuries like lavender perfume dispensed in their cars; these esthetes, White writes, echoing the scriptures, "builded along different lines." If you wanted your touring car turned into a sedan, Sears Roebuck would do it and "you went forth renewed." As in all accounts of conversion, the landscape of the senses becomes that of the imagination. The soft, collapsible fenders of the Ford "wilted with the years and permitted the driver to squeeze in and out of tight places.'' The metal took on the malleability of skin and the adaptability of the vulnerable and physically threatened men who owned them. The Ford machine was no mere distanced object to be used and discarded but an emblem of the universe's mystery, not to be controlled or solved. White joins the mechanical problems of the Ford to the lore and legend of the way "old women discuss rheumatism." He associates the operation of this erratic and mysterious machine with a life of faith, of dependence on the unexpected and random element in human life. Here, as nowhere else, White acknowledges mystery and spontaneity where modern men ordinarily endorse only common sense and rationality. He claims the new Ford models are "effete" emblems of a declining civilization. Their owners rely on instruments for success, while White remembers the failed timers on his "sick Ford" (a locution that suggests that he is as closely identified with it as he was with his dying pig in another essay), and his need for "showing off before God" by setting matters right. Repairing the car, then, was rhetorically transformed into a metaphysical gesture. White treated the car as an animist does his totem: "I remember once spitting into a timer; not in anger, but in a spirit of research. You see, the Model T driver moved in the realm of meta-

E. B. WHITE I 663 physics. He believed his car could be hexed." For White, a strong and precise connection existed between an inanimate object and the man engaged in manipulating it: "The oil used to recede and leave Number One dry as a clam flat; you had to watch that bearing like a hawk. It was like a weak heart—you could hear it start knocking, and that was when you stopped and let her cool off.'' No amount of good will or mechanical ingenuity would keep Number One alive. Her survival depended on continual acts of faith, as do the connections between White's sentences, where the unsaid must be imagined. Both created a hunger in the eyes that distinguished the "fixers" from all other men. The "fixers" were White's metaphor for modern artists; they knew the Model T's were "conceived in madness." The machine was "bound to be a mighty challenging thing to the human imagination." It was the bridge between the self-conscious, introverted dreamer and the world he was obliged to live in. As such, it was celebrated by White, who had no desire to sever his connection with the world as it was, even if that commitment meant he must keep one tentative foot in a New York City changing for the worse. As living products of the imagination, Fords were the poetry of technological man possessed. They went from forward into reverse without any perceptible mechanical hiatus. As with all events that take place more in the imagination than in the physical world, White's affair with the Model T was part of his night life that still remained with him: "The days were golden, the nights were dim and strange. I still recall with trembling those loud, nocturnal crises when you drew up to a signpost and raced the engine so the lights would be bright enough to read destinations by. I have never been really planetary since." The Ford represented that night which White largely set aside in his maturity, seldom allowing it to disturb his lucid Apollonian day. Still, he never ceased to lament the "dim degeneracy of prog-

ress" and to regret the imaginative loss that modern men suffered with the passing of the temperamental Model T. For him, it was a decline from the natural and humane order that he was trying to construct for himself and his family in Maine. In the story "The Morning of the Day They Did It" (1950) White describes a society so mechanized that shots are required to prevent death from chronically contaminated food; almost all pay is withheld to finance a welfare state. Men in a new military satellite cease to feel any commitment to the earth and destroy it. To abandon personal relationships with natural objects, White seems to be saying, is to take the first step toward dictatorship, which will manipulate men as soullessly as men have manipulated nature. White was saddened by the passage of the farmer's land into the hands of speculators, seeing in the ominous exchange a sign of America's decline into irreverent commercialism. White feared that man's arrogance toward nature, the cause of "declension," would lead to the destruction of both. "Petulance, coupled with insatiable curiosity, and the will to dominate" mark man's attitude toward his own environment. At the 1939 World's Fair, White had been particularly struck by an outsized mechanical man feeling the real girls in his lap. He wrote in "The World of Tomorrow": "the heroic man, bloodless and perfect and enormous, created in his own image, and in his hand (rubber, aseptic) the literal desire, the warm and living breast." The monstrous image represents the modern split between man's analytical powers and his intuition of what is good for him, a condition White made his central literary concern. White was as disturbed over the erosion of artistic integrity as he was over the decline of man's relationship to nature. Both were linked in his mind to modern commercialism, especially to the prostitution of the mass media to manipulative advertisers. In a letter he had written in

664 I AMERICAN 1936 to Alexander Woollcott, White protested Woollcott's selling of his sophisticated image to support Seagram's whiskey. He objected on several grounds. One was the matter of snobbery: Woollcott's choice of this particular brand seemed to infer that the common man, if he wished to be a similarly superior being, should accept on Woollcott's authority the superiority of Seagram's. Another objection was more serious: as a journalist, Woollcott's views on public matters now had to be suspect, for he was being supported by a certain segment of the economy. Almost forty years later, White had had similar doubts about Xerox's sponsorship of an Esquire travel article by Harrison Salisbury, believing that such support would ultimately erode the freedom of the press (January 30, 1976), and with it, the basis of American democracy. (The company agreed and promised not to sponsor such articles in the future.) Television posed a new threat to the free dissemination of opinion, White felt. In a magazine or newspaper, the advertisement and the news column compete for the reader's attention; he has a free choice of which of them he will look at. The television ad, however, "preempts" his attention against his will. A means must be found for supporting television programming from a general advertising fund, so that no program is identified with a particular sponsor, who inevitably would interfere with program content if he could. The economy must be simplified, White believed; advertising and consumerism are lesser priorities than the freedom of the press. As Edward Sampson points out, White had been a simplifier long before he encountered Thoreau; and Walden, which he bought in 1927, confirmed all his own best intuitions and experiences, as well as his intention to find a Walden of his own. The work was both a celebration of Thoreau's transcendental "higher laws," which White had never much regarded, "and a practical enterprise." Rural life was not for White

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the beachhead of eternity that it was for Thoreau but, rather, the place where one was obliged to confront the indifference of the higher laws to one's own welfare. In the late 1930's, while Chamberlain, Hitler, and Mussolini were swapping promises and countries like horsetraders at a fair, White had been shingling his barn roof against the elements, taking the "long view," and seeing grand designs—a Patton of the pumpkin patch. In a single sentence of the essay "Clear Days" (1938), White links world leadership to rural life: " . . . the barn is tight, and the peace is preserved." But he knows Chamberlain's ugly peace is as ephemeral as his own truce with the elements. He sits on the barn roof, like Ishmael on the masthead of the Pequod, comprehending the anarchic details of events with an artist's instant, ordering glance. Implied in the lone sentinel's preeminence over natural things is the conviction that the individual has a wisdom and honesty not to be found in groups, particularly in groups of leaders, and that the only way ' 'higher laws " can be recognized or upheld is by a man alone upon a barn roof. White puts a high premium on independence. While appearing to promote an alternative to the American materialist's dream, he in fact confirms the political-economic principles that make it work. In keeping with the sober American pattern of controlled or institutionalized revolution, White affirms the values of individual initiative, responsibility to a set of agreed upon and unquestioned principles, and a faith that if this initiative and responsibility are maintained, a better world will result. On occasion, White said that yesterday's world was much like today's, in the face of evidence he himself knew better than to ignore. In "Removal" (1938), for instance, he was prophetically aware that television would tempt us to ". . . forget the primary and the near in favor of the secondary and remote." He felt that he stood at the fork of two worlds as they parted

E. B. WHITE I 665 direction, "when the solid world becomes make-believe," rejecting the course Poirier believes the greatest American writers have followed: the creation of an imaginative environment out of whole cloth, rather than an imitation of the actual one. The manufactured, artificial world in which White felt Americans were beginning to live had to be corrected by the world of the artist's experience, where the appearance and feel of things were celebrated. Reality was being disintegrated by mechanical processes, broken up into small dots on a cathode-ray tube as it is in comic books or a Lichtenstein painting. The artist's responsibility was not to make his own private world, apart from the real one, but to preserve the link between art and reality. In the passage from "Clear Days" where he sees a likeness between himself and the leaders of the world, he makes a symbolic gesture that justifies their contiguity: he sets up a weather vane, so he will know which way the wind is blowing. As a journalist, he has an obligation to find out, and he thinks the roof of his barn is as good a place as any to start. As always, his action, however brave and positive, has an aspect of futility, underlined by its juxtaposition with the * 'horsetraders" who think they have achieved world peace. Writing of young soldiers in the essay "First World War" (1939), White soberly examines the young man he was at the time and reflects that every man who does not keep what he can of his childhood is a fool. His determination to write about the land is part of his conviction that one must keep in touch with the sources of life in order to stay alive; this is of a piece with his belief that one must not despise the young, including one's own youthful self, with their posturing and idealism. And it seems to be for this reason that he wrote endless kind, interested letters to fifth-graders who wanted to know if Stuart Little ever found Margalo and to gloomy young writers in college who doubted their own powers.

For a similar reason, White felt an obligation to put back into the soil the strength he took from it. This obligation was rooted in his belief that he and the land were an inseparable unity and that it was possible to experience the world unmediated by language or calculation. Moments arose, even in the deliberately ordered life of his Maine farm, when events seemed to take place as much in White's imagination as in the physical world; the form in which he chose to write often acknowledges this double reality. In his essay "Death of a Pig" (1948) he gives a running account of his own spiritual state along with the barnyard event that is his ostensible subject. As in "Farewell, My Lovely!" decline is the central concern of the essay. The same pattern of elevated expectation and trivial conclusion is followed, much as Swiftian satire puts high diction in the service of low subjects. Thus, White is telling two stories: his own sense of confusion and despair at an untidy universe is made into a humble comedy, while the sorry death of a "plugged-up pig" is given the dignity of tragedy. In the first paragraph of the essay, White suggests his own consternation at the event, preparing the reader for a blurring of lines between sorrow and laughter. The time spent with his sick pig has passed as a dream, and he is no longer in charge of the world he had thought he controlled. He no longer knows on which night of his vigil the pig died and assigns his uncertainty to "personal deterioration." Not only has he failed to raise his pig properly, but he has failed to grasp the outside world in the assertive and omnipotent manner that he had been taught was desirable. The second paragraph is a foil to the first; uncertainty and "personal deterioration" are followed by the clear, well-defined "scheme" that was to be expected in the management of pigs: they were bought, fed, and slaughtered according to the order established by the seasons. An "original script" exists for the death of pigs, and

666 / AMERICAN the tragedy is ". . . enacted on most farms with perfect fidelity to the original script." A ceremonial ending, the eating of smoked bacon and ham, assures a "fitness" in the order of things, both in the pig's proper cycle from birth to death and in the farmer's control over that cycle. Early in the essay, the neat, abstract pattern established by the pride and omnipotence of the fanner goes awry. As always in White's work, the planned performance collapses when it must be enacted in real life: "Once in a while something slips—one of the actors goes up in his lines and the whole performance stumbles and halts. . . . The classic outline of the tragedy was lost." White, the innocent narrator and participant, was suddenly no longer the creator of his drama but a character suffering in it. He had lost his sense of omnipotent objectivity. No longer a mere producer of hams, he cares only that he is losing the animal that has become an extension of himself. At this point White switches from his own perspective to that of the pig, as if acknowledging the bonds that this sickness has created between them. He no longer separates his own story from that of the animal. After hearing from a skilled neighboring farmer that he must purge the pig, White delays a bit, unwilling to do the deed that would " . . . officially recognize the collapse of the performance of raising a pig. . . ." The diction makes it unclear whether it is White whose performance has collapsed, or the animal, and for the purposes of the essay the distinction is unimportant. A few lines after he says that he wanted only to raise his pig "full meal after full meal," he remembers that it is time for him to go out to dinner and that he must dose his plugged pig with castor oil, pouring the stuff down its 4 'pink, corrugated throat.'' The screaming and writhing of the indignant animal is not allowed to dominate the scene; White distances the violence with a typically laconic and almost heartless objectivity: "I had

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just time to read the label while the neck of the bottle was in his mouth. It said Puretest." No merely sentimental bond between himself and the animal exists here. White understands his role as "friend and physician," while the pig is only a pig: ". . .his wicked eyes, shaded by their coy little lashes, turned on me in disgust and hatred." The humanity and wisdom of animals, which is the source of the comedy in his children's books, never intrudes into the realism of White's essays. If anything, he means to intensify the sorrow and loneliness of both man and animal by presuming no tangible communion between them. The good will is all on the part of the man, who comes out to the barn late at night to feel the pig's ears, "as you might put your hand on the forehead of a child." Only when the pig is asleep can the illusion of solidarity between man and beast be maintained. White broadens the landscape beyond himself and the animal, setting them both against a backdrop of their common misery: We had been having an unseasonable spell of weather—hot, close days, with the fog shutting in every night, scaling for a few hours in midday, then creeping back again at dark, drifting in first over the trees on the point, then suddenly blowing across the fields, blotting out the world and taking possession of houses, men, and animals. Everyone kept hoping for a break, but the break failed to come. The words carry a double burden. "Unseasonable" suggests White's earlier hope that the seasons would be observed with the regularity proper to the life cycle of a pig. More than the weather is "unseasonable" here. The desperate condition of the plugged pig and the anxious man, over whom * 'a depression had settled,'' are suggested by the words "close days" and by the fog that drifts back "at dark . . . taking possession of houses, men, and animals." In just this short description of the scene, then, White es-

E. B. WHITE I 667 tablishes the themes of irregularity, chance, entrapment, and ultimate loss. Only at the conclusion of the first section does he give a brief, overt statement that makes the conjunction of his life and the pig's explicit: ". . . the pig's imbalance becomes the man's, vicariously, and life seems insecure, displaced, transitory." In keeping with White's custom, however, no single mood is allowed to prevail. He begins the second section: "As my own spirits declined, along with the pig's, the spirits of my vile old dachshund rose." The graphlines of life on the farm, here, follow compensating patterns, as they do in Charlotte's Web, where the spider dies so that her children may be born. For White, tragedy in the abstract is always mitigated by the comedy of the concrete, as loss of a sweetheart in youth was made bearable by the singing of frogs. The delight of Fred the dachshund at the enema of the wretched, dying pig obliges the reader to contend with two conflicting graphlines, one ascending, one descending. Only in a single sentence does White suggest where they converge: ". . . Fred will feverishly consume any substance that is associated with trouble —the bitter flavor is to his liking." Yet Fred goes on to preside over the pig's interment, looking down from his eminence above the grave, unsentimental as always, but "possessed of the vital spark" that makes it harder to drag him from the grave than to drag the pig to it. The intimate incident of the enema has closed the conventional distance between farmer and beast: "The pig's lot and mine were inextricably bound now, as though the rubber tube were the silver cord. From then until the time of his death I held the pig steadily in the bowl of my mind. . . . His suffering soon became the embodiment of all earthly wretchedness." White carefully avoids mentioning his own wretchedness, skipping the personal term to move to mankind in general, relying instead on the specific link between tube and cord in the "bowl" of his mind

to indicate indirectly his own involvement with the fate of the pig. At precisely the point when this involvement is absolute, he must surrender the care of his animal to a third party. Even his language here becomes deliberately detached: he "phoned the veterinary . . . and placed the case formally in his hands." The dialogue over the telephone is punctuated by the operator's anxious, disembodied interruptions: " 'Have they answered?' " They have, but she is right to be concerned about the connection. Little enough passes between the veterinary and White, and in fact the doctor can do the pig no good. He is late in coming because he has been picnicking with his fiancee, who had exclaimed coyly, " Toorpiggledy-wiggledy!' " Nobody really cares about White's pig except White; and he knows it. His alienation from those around him and his union with the dying pig are confirmed by the carelessness of the doctor and the conviction that he himself has erysipelas, as he fears the pig does. The animal's premature death, a violation of the scheme of the farmer in control, has severely shaken the fanner's certainty about his own fate: I had assumed that there could be nothing much wrong with a pig during the months it was being groomed for murder; my confidence in the essential health and endurance of pigs had been strong and deep, particularly in the health of pigs . . . that were part of my proud scheme. The awakening had been violent and I minded it all the more because I knew that what could be true of my pig could be true also of the rest of my tidy world. He had thought that his powers of command put him beyond loss and death, but his pig's illness had taught him the extent of his own vulnerability and the depth of his empathy for the animal. When the pig comes out of his pen to die, White mentions that he himself was just going to bed. The pig ' 'had suffered a good deal." And ' 'I

668 I AMERICAN went back up to the house and to bed, and cried internally—deep hemorrhagic intears." The language he had applied to the pig is now indiscriminately applied to himself. * 'Never send to know for whom the grave is dug, I said to myself, it's dug for thee." As he watches the digging, he observes that an earthworm ("legendary bedfellow of the dead") and an apple ("conventional garnish of a pig") are in the grave. These two emblems, of decay and of nourishment, set the seal on his removal from the animal to the human world; he is himself again, ready to receive the calls of the community, resulting from "a sorrow in which it feels fully involved," and to write his penitential account, explaining "my deviation from the classic course of so many raised pigs." Even here the diction is ambiguous, leaving the reader in doubt as to who, ultimately, is the farmer, who the animal. The only way to tell is by the tale itself, for as White said at the beginning, ". . .the pig died at last, and I lived, and things might easily have gone the other way round and none left to do the accounting." The distance between the pig and himself is, in the end, established by his own capacity for self-knowledge and grief. The pig will be remembered, on the "flagless memorial days of our own choosing." But the pig could not even recall so much as the "satisfaction of being scratched when in health." White parts with his animal as if he were being left alone in the world, having lost through pride and incompetence what it was his duty and his happiness to hold securely. His sorrow for himself is inseparable from his sorrow for the lost animal, and his language does not allow us to decide, at any moment, for which it is he grieves. As White attempted to break free of personality, he also moved outside time, establishing a chronology drawn from nature, not history. The basic unifying device in his works is the season. Events are related not by cause and effect but by

WRITERS

association. "You remember one thing," he remarks in "Once More to the Lake" (1941), "and that suddenly reminds you of another thing." The answer to the problem posed by a language that drains the life from experience is the creation of a living tissue of images and paragraphs. No part can be excised from the organic whole without leaving an open wound; no detail is so small that it can be sacrificed. In translating the opus that is yourself, White explained to a student in 1951, you are to write not an advertisement but an objective, accurate description of what you see; the more faithful your description of what is not yourself, the more fully and honestly that self is ultimately revealed. The writer who uses devices and ornaments in order to impress, White seems to suggest, is probably mislabeling his product and himself, committing an advertising fraud to fool the public. The self-effacing writer, on the other hand, is so perfectly united with the subject that it inspires the language and style appropriate to itself. Language thus becomes a transparent window between the writer and the reader, not a wall plastered with posters. From his early years, White tried to keep his emotions from interfering with the effect of a total situation upon him. In his preface to A Subtreasury of American Humor (1941), he describes the moment at which the emotional writer shaping his art with an eye to high seriousness and complex architecture, is stopped by an "uninvited snicker (which may closely resemble a sob, at that)" and becomes, irrevocably a humorist. What he approved in the author and playwright Don Marquis he tried to cultivate in himself, an ability "to be profound without sounding selfimportant, or even self-conscious." White always kept modesty in mind, hoping to give the impression of spontaneity and effortlessness. He wrote to Cass Canfield, in 1964, that a writer has to get rid of tricks and formulas before he gets good. To James Thurber, who thought he ought

E. B. WHITE I 669 to take drawing lessons to improve his cartoons, White said no: "if you ever got good, you'd be mediocre." The essays collected in One Man's Meat are apparently tossed off as by-products of everyday experience and seem as casual as if written without a line being blotted; to White, though, writing them had been "like trying to tend the furnace in a dinner jacket." As his life in Maine was a counterweight to his life in New York, so nature was to be balanced against culture in his writing. Both art and science are dangerous preoccupations because they separate a man from his own experience, making him alienated and self-conscious. If he could not manage art and life at once, White clearly preferred to sacrifice art. Perhaps the reason he found work on the early New Yorker so congenial was that, as he later explained in a letter to Dale Kramer (August 25, 1950), for the first ten years at the magazine "fact and fiction lived together in sin." He was assigned to cover both, for the lines between editorial departments had not yet been drawn. In such a situation, he did not need to impose arbitrary meanings on imaginative constructs; the facts provided the meaning, and the "little pieces" that he built on those facts were their own meaning. No symbolic apparatus was presumed or desired. Unencumbered by artificial "meanings," things had a clear and satisfying meaning of their own. "I have had an entirely new feeling about life," White wrote to his wife in 1937, "ever since making an ax handle." By taking things as they are and offering no interpretation of them, White broke cleanly with the twentieth-century symbolist writers. Unlike them, he was not on the track of pure art but of firsthand experience. He wanted that experience processed as little as possible by language or ideology. As a believer in the "eloquence of facts," he suspected the capacity of literature to imitate it, a paralyzing fear for a writer and one that brought him many unhappy hours at the

typewriter. Words made it too easy to forget the thing they described, setting it at a comfortable distance requiring no immediate response. It was, for instance, hard to stay worked up about the war, White remarked in 1941. One heard the words "occupied France" so often that they expressed only a token outrage rather than the real thing. Throughout his writing, especially about farm life, White's method is to revive the original freshness of an experience, stripping it of its accumulated symbolic deadweight and restoring to it the original simplicity and power to move. Writing in "Coon Hunt" (1941) of an event that he was experiencing for the first time, White describes how the ' 'stars leaned close, and some lost their hold and fell." White's success as a writer of children's books owed much to his own capacity for astonishment at the obvious. He was aware that adults usually compensate with affected innocence for their loss of childlike directness and freshness of response. He describes himself in the essay "Speaking of Counterweights," as being afraid of a fragile little railcar that moved around the top of the Seattle Times building. Every experience moves, scares, amazes him, as if he had stumbled suddenly and for the first time into society, like Voltaire's Candide or Jakob Wassermann's Caspar Hauser. White does not write without structure, any more than he would try to hatch eggs without heat or hen. To enjoy the freedom of creation, one must submit to the laws of the world as it is, otherwise any structure, be it a henhouse or a sentence, will collapse. His style expresses the classicist's concern for structure, discipline, and simplicity, qualities that are exemplified in "Maine Speech": Country talk is alive and accurate, and contains more pictures and images than city talk. It usually has an unmistakable sincerity which gives it distinction. I think there is less talking merely for the sound which it makes. At any

670 / AMERICAN rate, I seldom tire listening to even the most commonplace stuff, directly and sincerely spoken; and I still recall with dread the feeling that occasionally used to come over me at parties in town when the air was crowded with loud intellectual formulations—the feeling that there wasn't a remark in the room that couldn't be brought down with a common pin. The classic reserve, understatement, and vigor of Maine speech show respect both for the facts and for the audience, characteristics that mark White's own prose. The purpose of writing, White believes, is "to break through the barriers that separate [the writer] from other minds." One reason that White objected to advertising jargon was for its use of language in order to manipulate and mislead; the genuine writer's purpose, according to Elements of Style, "is to engage, not paralyze, the reader's senses." A style of writing is no mere adornment to an idea, but rather, is inseparable from it and from the pian: "Style has no . . . separate entity; it is nondetachable, unfilterable. The beginner should approach style warily, realizing that it is himself that he is approaching, no other." White's practice is to eliminate needless connective words and to use punctuation marks instead. In doing so, he allows relationships between things to emerge of themselves, without being forced out by his own linguistic manipulation. Words must not be played with; they have a life of their own, and a careless style can drain the reality out of them. One reason, perhaps, for White's adherence to the spare, classical style that Strunk had taught him was that it allowed, even forced, him to forget himself and concentrate on what was before him. This concentration took several stylistic forms, all of which mark his most successful writing: the reduction of connective and qualifying words in order to increase the importance of nouns and verbs; sharpened outlines that are

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achieved by the device of the quick stop and the quick switch, as well as by the precise choice of nouns; the positive attack, which goes straight to the matter at hand rather than attracting attention to the doubts, opinions, and hedgings of the selfconscious writer; thematic parallels that cannot be made to converge as an abstract idea except in the mind of the determined reader. In a letter (February 1954) to students who doubted the relevance of Latin to their education, White testified to its formative influence on him: "When you know Latin, you know enough to say 'guts' instead of "intestinal fortitude.' " He associates classical style with condensation and simplicity, and prefers the use of one suggestive word, conveying "toughness and color," to the abstract and discursive explanatory phrase. He loves "the clear, the brief, and the bold." The use of unnecessary words, and of overwriting in general, is a form of egotism, to which White objects in art, as he does in life. As Strunk had taught: the reader's attention should be drawn to the matter, not to the author. White wanted his audience to look not at him or at some idea that was a projection of himself, but directly at persons, events, and objects. In a letter to E. J. McDonald (January 14, 1948), he warned: "Thirty years of being a writer have convinced me that people are always trying to read something into a man's motives, and are finding hidden meanings that exist only in the eye of the beholder." Referring to Charlotte's Web, he wrote John Detmold in February 1953: "Any attempt to find allegorical meanings is bound to end disastrously, for no meanings are in there. I ought to know." Instead of finding a correspondence between what was in his own head and what was outside it, as the symbolist vogue of his day prescribed, White effaced himself and assumed the protective coloration of the natural landscape. For White, the pruning of such qualifiers as very, pretty (as in "pretty much"), rather, and

E. B. WHITE / 671 little, serves several related purposes. First, the writer gives up the nervous habit of questioning his own capacity to relay what he perceives, and lets the reader observe what is being described through a clear glass. And second, such a writer emphasizes verbs and nouns, which can move freely through the uncluttered sentence. A paragraph from the essay "Sootfall and Fallout" (1956) illustrates both the spareness and vividness of White's classical style: If a candidate were to appear on the scene and come out for the dignity of mud turtles, I suppose people would hesitate to support him, for fear he had lost his reason. But he would have my vote, on the theory that in losing his reason he had kept his head. It is time men allowed their imagination to infect their intellect, time we all rushed headlong into the wilder regions of thought where the earth again revolves around the sun instead of around the Suez, regions where no individual and no group can blithely assume the right to sow the sky with seeds of mischief . . . Like nudes on a Greek vase, the bare, startling nouns and verbs of this passage capture the reader's undistracted attention. It is a case of the plain being more elegant than the ornate and of omitting connectives for the sake of clarity, simplicity, immediacy, and grace. Adjectives and adverbs, and qualifiers in general, should be used sparingly, White believes, for it is nouns and verbs that are the strength and the beauty of good writing. He chooses his adjectives for their precision ("a frail soprano voice," and "small ungerminated thoughts") just as he selects his nouns. White uses adverbs more for comic effect than for objective descriptiveness. A choir struggles "tentatively''; one does not sail a thirty-foot boat ' 'expertly " but 4 'courageously.'' The verb in the following sentence, from "Sabbath Morn" (1939) carries the entire burden of the humor, as

well as reminding the reader of the title and theme of the essay: "one of the dogs has sinned under the piano. . . ." A scarcity of adjectives and a plethora of pictorial nouns mark this descriptive passage from the essay: the "seams in the floor have opened wide from the dry heat of the furnace, revealing the accumulation of a century of dust and crumbs and trouble, and giving quite a good view of the cellar." Conjunctions, not often used by White, are here marshaled in force. He uses them to move from the specific to the general, and then, with a crash, to the "view of the cellar." When he undercuts a sentence, dropping from a rhetorical flight, he often ends on an apologetic, deprecatory troche, as he does with "cellar." More often, he ends his sentences, especially those that conclude paragraphs, with a firm monosyllable, perhaps following Strunk's advice to put the strongest words at the end, rather than burying them in the middle of the sentence. Some ringing, mock-solemn sentences from "Sabbath Morn" illustrate the technique: "I hear the bells, calling me to share God's grace." "This house, this house now held in Sunday's fearful grip, is a hundred and twenty years old. ... My retriever comes in, from outdoors, full of greeting on a grand scale.'' The quick stop is intended to give people who are too active for their own good the "sense of something being wrong, when, in point of fact, it may be the beginning of something being right." In addition to abrupt stops, made more abrupt by the omission of conjunctions to ease the jolt, White uses what Arthur Koestler calls "biosociation": "the perceiving of a situation or idea . . . in two self-consistent but habitually incompatible frames of reference." That is to say, White associates two orders of reality, usually the social and the natural (or personal), in order to reveal their unexpected and usually ludicrous similarities. "Sabbath Morn" offers some particularly happy examples of this juxtaposition.

672 / AMERICAN White sets to work on his writing and turns on the radio to the local Sunday church service: "I sit down, opening the work folder. An organ prelude! The organ makes a curious whine, sentimental, grandiose—half cello, half bagpipes." He and the service are both engaged in beginnings, are their beginnings, and so, can be taken as one in intention. Later, hearing the radio voice read Psalm 66, he wonders, "where have I heard this voice before? was it the voice saying good night for Canada Dry, saying hello for Pels Naphtha? if mine eye follows down now to the twelfth verse, can I win a Buick by writing twenty-five words?" His child is on the floor, reading a book about subways, by Grof Conklin, having created a world for himself independent of his father's wireless Sunday: "On the child's face now a look of complete absorption, Grof Conklin triumphs over a terrible God, subways over the kingdom on high." Here White's use of commas instead of the expected conjunctions or periods creates a series of parallel phenomena. Strunk may have advised writers to use parallel constructions for expressions "similar in content," but White often stands the admonition on its head for comic effect. At the heart of comedy lies the potential for pain. Conventional conjunctions of events are designed to fit logical expectations and to create a pleasing order in the anarchy of experience; the humorist must break up the pattern, risking the shock of unfamiliarity and the reminder of helplessness. If he has no new order of his own, he may leave us "stupefied and incapacitated," as Daniel E. Berlyne says. White takes this risk, for himself and for his reader. To Thurber, his closest collaborator in comedy, he wrote in October 1937: I, too, know that the individual plight is the thing. . . . You spend your days chuckling . . . but always knowing that much of life is insupportable and that no individual play can have a

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happy ending. . . . your own inarticulateness only hastens the final heart attack. . . . Today with the radio yammering at you and the movies turning all human emotions into cup custard, the going is tough. Or I find it tough." Humorists, like clowns, learn to mine the "deep vein of melancholy running through everyone's life. . . ." White writes in the essay "Some Remarks on Humor," and are perhaps more sensible of it than some others, . . . . . . there is often a rather fine line between laughing and crying, and if a humorous piece of writing brings a person to the point where his emotional responses are untrustworthy and seem likely to break over into the opposite realm, it is because humor, like poetry, has an extra content. It plays close to the big hot fire which is Truth, and sometimes the reader feels the heat. At times it is difficult to say whether White wants us to laugh or cry, but perhaps he offers us the only way out of a bad situation: to cry at the general condition and to laugh at the individual one that is all we have to call our own. Louis Rubin may be right to observe that a Puritan grimness remains in American humor, blending despair with "idealist hope." White advised, in a letter to a serious young writer, "I should not try to learn to write without learning first to be frivolous." What he seems to mean by frivolity is taking oneself lightly and seeing that experience, however terrible, does not make one pompous, self-pitying, or tragic. In the face of events, one must remain eager, naive, and perpetually capable of astonishment. To maintain this attitude, a writer must not think he is being funny. Although Walden was the most humorous of books, White writes in "A Slight Sound at Evening," " . . . its humor is almost continuously subsurface and there is nothing deliberately funny anywhere. . . . " Much the same can be said of many of White's pieces; the humor is offhand, or throwaway, as

E. B. WHITE I 673 much a surprise to the author as to the reader. White admitted to Thuiber, in his letter of June 14, 1951, "I haven't got any idea about humor except that I seldom think of anything funny to write. . . . " White's refusal to maintain any "idea about humor" is of a piece with his rejection of theory in any form, political, literary, or personal. He relies instead on seeing a situation clearly and without preconceptions or conventions, as a child does, and on using language that conveys his astonishment and pleasure as precisely as possible. It is this shock of using the accurate word where one expects to see a commonplace one, as well as the impact of the concrete and real instead of the easy and familiar abstraction, that makes White funny. As his quick stops and juxtapositions put one "face-to-fact" with the unexpected, Rubin remarks, so do his "irrelevant asides and non-sequiturs," as for instance in the essay "Garter Motif" (1926): "Let a man's leg be never so shapely, sooner or later his garters wear out." When White begins a sentence with a formula, he is sure to end it with a shock, although often such a gentle one that the inattentive reader may miss it altogether. Let a man's leg be never so shapely, for sooner or later White will pull it. As Rubin suggests, White's deadpan use of bogus authority and of "funny names, ludicrous juxtaposition, abrupt irrelevancy," repetition, and recounting of unnecessary details are particularly telling devices in his takeoffs on society, such as the mock gossip column "Fin de Saison—Palm Beach." The "correspondent" is in the resort town with a "CWA project for diverting the effluvia of the proletariat from Lake Worth," and he observes the social activities of such notables as Sir Horace Elsinore ("a charter member of the Automobile Club of Rangoon"), Serge Aspirin and Madame Aspirinskaya, Lady Herman Schulte ("descended from a band of Seminole Indians on her mother's side"), and

Baron Temple Irksome, who was bitten by a dog at the races. "The dog was sent away for examination but the veterinary reported that there was nothing much the matter with him. The Baron was given the Schick test." The whole piece is little more than a list of names, irrelevant details, stories that begin and end nowhere, the pointless activities of the decadent leisure class, interrupted from time to time by references to labor agitators, the fate of a "lady from the lower middle classes,'' and the proletariat whose effluvia makes the lake smell. Where Mencken mocked viciously, dissociating himself from a public scene that he found irredeemably vulgar, White, like Thurber, typically shared the condition of the victims. They created not just a scene but the narrative voice of a participant rather than of a judgmental onlooker. The writer's solidarity with the victim in his delusions, pretensions, and anxieties was characteristic of the tone of the New Yorker in Thurber's and White's time and was, as Rubin says, ' 'an implicit recognition that only a fine line separates the satirist from his target, the humorist from his subject." Whether White was writing personal anecdotes or impersonal parables, his humor was neither the vulgar farce and slapstick of popular humor, nor the heavy sarcasm of elitists such as Mencken. Rubin calls it a humor turned "gentle, ruminative, even somber on occasion." A change came over White's humor in the middle of his career, perhaps as part of his recognition that the world he had known was on its way out. Edward Sampson writes that "his humor becomes more and more a means to an end, not an end in itself," and that it supports "serious themes." "Once More to the Lake" (1941) marks this shift in style. The humor of the essay is muted, replaced by meaning, coherence, and unity of tone. "Once More" was for E. B. White what Immortality Ode and Tintern Abbey were for Wordsworth, a prose poem in celebration of memory, childhood, and a na-

674 / AMERICAN tion's past. The mood set in the very first sentence is partly that of a children's story, partly that of a fable, and rightly so, since in this essay White is defining one of the most compelling myths of America: "One summer, along about 1904, my father rented a camp on a lake in Maine and took us all there for the month of August." It is the "along about" that defines the atmosphere, the "once upon a time" world of father, family, and past. That world is now an interior one, because it no longer exists literally. But in "Once More" the world is not that of make-believe but of genuine myth. As he returns to the lake with his own son, almost forty years later, White wonders how it will have changed and whether "the tarred road," symbol of progress, will have found it out. He remembers places that to a child had seemed "infinitely remote and primeval" and refers to the lake as "this holy spot." It is the world of childhood, the lake of beginnings. It is also the world of the inner man. White tells us he has been more a man of the ocean than a man of the lakes, but that inclement weather sent him to the placidity of a lake in the woods. The ocean, in myth and dream, is a symbol of the exterior world of action and event; the lake is a symbol of the contemplative mind. The literal story line is reinforced by the reverberation of these symbols; and as we follow the ripples from a rock thrown in water until they disappear against the shore, so we follow the shades of meaning to the understanding that life is not limited to a particular generation, and that there is an enormous satisfaction in seeing our children repeat the pattern that we ourselves repeated a generation before. Our satisfaction is not lessened, but made more acute, by the knowledge of our own inevitable death. This tragedy is made bearable by the knowledge that we and our children participate in a scheme of life that transcends the individual. White fears the lake will have changed, but it has not, except in relatively unimportant details.

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The bass are still there, as are the bathers and the American flags on the docks: "there having been no passage of time, only the illusion of it as in a dropped curtain. . . ." The absence of change is disconcerting. He seems to become his own father and his child becomes him, as the two leave the world of individuation and personality and enter that of myth. When he says ' 'I was my father," he echoes Wordsworth's "The child is father of the man," although he intends a somewhat different meaning. For Wordsworth the child was wiser, in his "natural piety," than the man and passed on to the man the experience of that piety to strengthen him in dark days. For White the child becomes his own father by acting his father's role on the very stage where his father once acted it, thus partially losing his individual identity in the world of archetypes: "Everywhere I went I had trouble making out which was I." Since there is no place in the world of archetypes for individuality, upon entering this timeless world, "personality" is lost and the "self" is in confusion. At night White and his son go to sleep with the smell of the swamp drifting in through the screened porch. The return is not only to childhood but also to "the infinitely remote and primeval," to prehistoric and subconscious origins of the self. There are, however, disconcerting changes in the landscape that do not allow White to leave the world of history altogether. He walks with his son up to the farm for dinner, but the road is not the same. The middle track was missing, the one with the marks of the hooves and the splotches of dried, flaky manure. There had always been three tracks to choose from in choosing which track to walk in; now the choice was narrowed down to two. For a moment I missed terribly the middle alternative. The vanished middle way was the old way of the self-sufficient dairy farm out of the rural past, suggested by the hooves and dried dung. That

E. B. WHITE I 675 tradition and the living experience of that tradition defined the native populsim that lay at the mythic base of the Republic. In its absence one must choose either the left or the right. The political implications of such a dilemma are clear enough; the psychological implications are no less important but far less immediately clear. In being precipitated so abruptly out of its manorial and pastoral tradition by the Civil War and the Industrial Revolution, the American has lost contact with his mythic origins, with the Eden that White sought to regain in Maine, at the lake. The road, as well as "the petulant, irritable sound" of the outboard motors, is forgotten in the thunderstorm that concludes the essay, which links the present and the past as the rainbow does for Wordsworth. In Tintern Abbey, Wordsworth forces the returned wanderer to admit that it is he who has changed and not the place. In "Once More," White's returned wanderer is forced by a dramatic epiphany to admit that although the place does not seem to have changed, and he himself seems to be the same, he must expect dissolution in time. That knowledge comes like cold to the groin. The pattern will continue: fathers will take their sons back to the lake, and in so doing will link the generations. But the finality of death is absolute for the individual. The distinctly modern drama in the essay is that of an individual who participates in a pattern larger than himself, but who in the end cannot give himself up to that pattern. Like Keats, White is tolled back from the nightingale to his "sole self," which must face sickness, age, and death, alone. Although the lake is "holy," its holiness is conferred by man, by American man working, playing, and dreaming. It is a natural and not a supernatural consecration that renders the lake "holy"; the lake has been consecrated by activity, not by contemplation. Death ultimately does not bring White closer to coats, bathing children, and bass but, rather, removes them from him forever. He is driven by his own

self-consciousness and agnosticism out of Eden. As he watches his son pull on a wet bathing suit, he feels the chill of mortality. In a letter written in December 1951, about the essay, White explains to a young reader: "A child, by his very existence, makes a parent feel older, nearer death. . . . At your age this is perhaps hard to understand. It will become clearer to you later on. Meantime, be thankful that a wet bathing suit is just a wet bathing suit." In the 1950's, White was not so quick to claim that his work had no meaning. Perhaps he no longer needed humor as a means of effacing himself, for self-consciousness was no longer the demon that it had been in his youth. Even in the Letters, the change is noticeable; the selfdeprecatory humor and the ludicrous situations in which he plays the victim become scarcer, while a philosophical reflectiveness that is more cheerful than comic becomes increasingly evident. A new seriousness had become noticeable as early as "The Door" (1939), White's most anthologized piece. A story about a man alienated by modern industrial technology, "The Door" is for the twentieth century what Charles Dickens' Hard Times was for the nineteenth. Instead of being infuriated by the steam-driven mills and the brutalized workers of the early industrial revolution, the author strikes out at the smooth, plasticized life of a modern city completely cut off from anything natural that would take man out of himself. The style of the story is cryptic. White, as is his custom, does not give the reader a code breaker, but the message and matter are clear. As the story opens, a man wanders through an environment that is kept purposely vague. He is in a city and does not feel well. The names of things disturb him because they suggest a reality with which he is familiar, yet a reality that has passed away. "The names were tex and frequently koid . . . and the thing that you touched (the surface, washable, crease-resistent) was

676 / AMERICAN rubber, only it wasn't quite rubber and you didn't quite touch it. . . ."The hero of 'The Door" is seeking a way not only out of the artificial environment constructed by modern technology but a way into meaning for his life. The rats in a maze provide the controlling metaphor; White drew the language of the rat maze from a Life article on the behavior of frustrated laboratory animals. They were trained to jump at cards to get food, but the professor changed the rules. Jumping at the correct card no longer produced the food, and the rats became first confused, then apathetic. The hero of "The Door" reacts the same way, having been * 'trained " by a different professor. First the man was taught to jump at the door which attracted him by prayers and psalms, and "long sweet words with the holy sound." Then one day he jumps, and the door does not give way. Different doors are substituted. One door, displaying a picture of an amoeba reproducing itself, is obviously the door of science; another has a check for $32.50 on it, representing economic life. Both fail to provide a meaning that is worth jumping for. But the door with a picture of a girl was the hardest to give up on: The time they changed that door on me, my nose bled for a hundred hours—how do you like that, Madam? Or would you prefer to show me further through this so strange house . . . although my heart has followed all my days something I cannot name, I am tired of the jumping and I do not know which way to go. ... He is a prime candidate for what Life magazine, in an article on lobotomy, called the operation that could correct "the disease of civilization." It is the solution White feared modern man would adopt, whether by surgery or by some more subtle surrender to social pressure. The story ends with the man leaving the house and the exhibit. He has escaped, for the time being.

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But the implication is that society is building an artificial house—and White will not live in it. The style of the essay reinforces the content. The sentences are made jumpy and chaotic by the use of parentheses. "Everything (he kept saying) is something it isn't." Dashes are used to similar effect. The resulting texture suggests a constant swinging between widely varied mental processes. Such instability, for White, is the mark of the modern mind at work in a Crystal Palace of confusion. The character in the story is no«more mad than White himself, and his perceptions are only slightly more complex than is common for the narrative voice that is heard in all White's prose. White's poetry is decidedly simple and has little of the deliberate mystery that gives such pieces as "The Door" their resonance. Morris Bishop, in his introduction to One Man's Meat, credits White for making poetry accessible to those who find themselves "rebuffed by the hermeneutics of our time" and for creating a "new mid-form between Light Verse and Heavy Verse." The poems are slight, as one would expect of a writer who was essentially a journalist. As White was no ordinary journalist, however, his verse is also clever and lucid, sometimes taking literary forms seriously, sometimes mocking them and the culture that had already largely abandoned them. The titles in The Fox of Peapack speak well enough of White's acquaintance with English poetry. He had read Lyric Forms From France by the time he was twenty-three and had made those forms his own, as in "Rondel for a September Day" and "Ballade of Meaty Inversions." Although he modestly claims not to have been a reader, he was obviously familiar with classics of his own literary tradition. "Poet-or the Growth of a Lit'ry Figure" is obviously a takeoff on Wordsworth's Prelude: Or, Growth of a Poet's Mind, which was first made available to modern readers in Ernest de Selincourt's edition (1926). In the early

E. B. WHITE I 677 1930's there was considerable talk about the poem in academic circles, and White's familiarity with Wordsworth certainly suggested a more than ordinary acquaintance with serious literary affairs. If certain titles suggest White's knowledge of European forms, many others are purely American in content: "H. L. Mencken Meets a Poet in the West Side Y.M.C.A.," "A Connecticut Lad," "Spain in Fifty-Ninth Street." White's literary consciousness was trained in the AngloAmerican tradition. He feared that the tradition and the society upon which it was based were passing away in his own time. Essentially an alien in the twentieth century, White's poems comment humorously and caustically on manners that he regarded as foreign and on events he deplored. At all times, however, his poetry is formal and his consciousness controlled. 'The Fox of Peapack," the title poem of the volume, is subtitled "A Ballad of Somerset County." The title, meter, and rhyme scheme make it clear that White's manner of proceeding is suggested by the medieval ballads. The poem is in twenty stanzas of four tetrametric lines rhyming abab, with an extra syllable in the second line of each stanza. The medieval ballads often rhymed abab, and tetrameter was the preferred meter. In using it in "Fox," White matches the form of the poem to its mockmedieval content. The falling meter of the second and fourth lines is exploited for humor, a trick he may well have learned from Byron. He then went home, athwart with life, To wash and do a little fixin', "I'm back from town," he told his wife. "I see you are," replied the vixen. They ate a bit of sobel stew And read a page or so from Genesis, They carried out a threat or two And certain harmless little menaces.

To derive humor from outrageous rhymes is certainly Byronic, and much of the humor in White's poems comes from a similar manipulation. The actions and dialogues in the poem contain much to suggest the tradition of the English 4 'dressed animal'' tale and the Anglo-Saxon animal folk tale. The fox concludes that people neither smell nor act in an acceptable manner, and he and his wife set out for the hills, a conclusion that recalls White's own removal. White uses the traditional ballad form and folk content to reinforce his theme: the failure in modern life to retain the humanity and naturalness of an earlier age. White could, however, be entirely original in form. He wrote a series of poems as book reviews. The conception alone is original; the execution is equally so. In his review of John Dewey's Individualism, Old and New, he wrote: Our grandsires bred, in pushing back frontiers, The individual. They were contented— (One can relax, with an ax). Today, with Nature cowed, we engineers Should utilize the things we have invented. We don't, says Mr. Dewey, do we? He also reviewed the Shaw-Terry Letters: Wrote G.B.S. to Ellen Terry: "I am an intelligent person, very." Wrote Ellen T. to G.B.S.: "You certainly are, I must confess." "H. L. Mencken Meets a Poet in the West Side Y.M.C.A." is arranged as a conversation between the poet, Mencken, and a bishop. It is clear that White, while preferring to rebound off traditionally accepted poetic forms, took pleasure in creating his own forms for particular, and especially for satiric, purposes. The organization of The Fox of Peapack reveals much about the pattern of White's perceptions. The poems are collected in five sections:

675 / AMERICAN "Ballads and Songs of an Eventful Nature," 'Songs Having to Do With Greater New York,'' "Songs of Childbirth, Paternity, and Routine Domestic Disturbance," "Book Reviews," and "Love Songs. Also Two or Three Poems of a Cosmic Character." One senses that the light, whimsical touch throughout the book would with one more turn of the screw become serious and profound insight. In "Complicated Thoughts About a Small Son" he wrote: 4

And that, to give you breath and blood Was trick beyond my simple scope, Is everything I know of good And everything I see of hope. And since, to write in blood and breath Was fairer than my fairest dream, The manuscript I leave for death Is you, whose life supplied its theme. These lines are both a confession—that he did not believe himself capable of writing in "blood and breath"—and a testimony—to his commitment to elemental life (whether or not he was capable of writing about it passionately or profoundly). If White is ever serious, it is in writing about his wife and child, although he is certainly not always serious when he writes about them. He could joke, even about pregnancy, but the joking in "An Expectant Father Compares His Wife to a Rabbit" is prompted by love: The doe rabbit, Acting on impulse, Pulls the soft fur out of her belly And delivers her young into it, So they won't be cold suddenly. My wife, I am pleased to say, Acting more reasonably, Buys ten yards of McCutcheon's best nainsook To receive warmly the baby We so anxiously await.

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Both the emotion and the humor are centered on "the baby/ We so anxiously await," and the domestic event is seen as an event in nature, also. In "Apostrophe to a Pram Rider" he addresses his young son Joel, in tetrametric couplets: Some day when I'm out of sight Travel far but travel light! Stalk the turtle on the log, Watch the heron spear the frog, Find the things you only find When you leave your bag behind; Raise the sail your old man furled, Hang your hat upon the world! What White takes to be the world is clearly not the world of society but rather Thoreau's world of nature-out-the-back-door. White's nature is not quite Thoreau's, however, because it is always at one remove from home, wife, and children. If there is any society in the world of White's poetry, it is the society of the family. Yet nature is here more than anywhere else: as an Anglo-Saxon ideal and myth, which for many others was not a myth but a reality. Wife and children to love and care for and to love him back; the great world of nature just beyond the back door. It is that world that has a life of its own and not one that is simply mirrored in literature. In deeding the world of nature to his son, he gives what he himself values most. White wrote in the age of the socialist ideologue, whose radicalism had been vindicated by the Great Depression and the apparent collapse of American capitalism. The rebels of the 1920's, Ernest Hemingway, e. e. cummings, Edmund Wilson, and Malcolm Cowley, had broken with their own class; those of the 1930's, as Alfred Kazin remarked, came from nowhere. They were immigrants without a stake in the American past, who had little reason to support American institutions. They no longer battled for a reform of art alone but were dedicated to a reform of society, drawing on other than Ameri-

E. B. WHITE I 679 can traditions to achieve their goals. James T. Farrell, Clifford Odets, and Kazin did what William Saroyan said he wanted to do: "escape from meaninglessness, unimportance . . . poverty . . . and all manner of other unattractive, natural, and inevitable things." By and large, the writers of the 1930's took one of two directions. The socialists and communists submerged themselves in the historical process, while men such as White submerged themselves in the natural process, the old America of family and Emersonian idealism. In both cases, the movement was away from romantic assertions of independent power and identity. Both groups had a contempt for the merely literary and affirmed the need for firsthand experience. In April 1942, White wrote to Harry Lyford of small-town life: "I am a decentralist, at heart; I think the business of making the earth produce and bear fruit should be participated in by almost everybody. . . . " The artist of the 1930 's in general lost himself in a subjective pursuit of his art or in a social cause; either he left society or he united himself with some kind of community. White, on the other hand, did both. By withdrawing to a private, rural life, he believed that he became a more representative American by being more thoroughly himself. Even before the Great Depression, the New Yorker had caught the tone that was to characterize American humor after the Crash and to mark American fiction in the years after World War II. Its writers took the world lightly, making fun of the pretensions to permanence in social attitudes and structures, of the attempts of ideologues to impose their monolithic truths and institutions on others, and of the belief that men can discern a pattern and purpose behind the chaos of events. White and James Thurber, more than any of the other writers for the magazine, established its characteristic subject matter, rejecting large and heavy issues for the small and commonplace. They specialized in reporting the indignities suffered by the ordinary man, making private events

carry an implicit social comment. With his 'little pieces," in which the narrator survives the collapse of his illusions, White added what Marc Connelly called the "steel and the music to the magazine." Humor had traditionally allowed the writer a detachment from the constraints of the real world and, as Rubin points out, a flight into "dream, fantasy, and non-sense." White's humor, on the other hand, comes out of a total engagement with the real world instead of a flight from it. White's tone is that of a man who takes on faith as little as possible and who has a temperamental preference for letting facts speak for themselves, not for his own mental state or some metaphysical truth. No given structure of ideas establishes priority and order among the parts of a poem or story; they are instead yoked in improbable juxtaposition, obliging the reader to stand like a conjunction between them. "Next thing that's going to happen is my birthday, then the total eclipse of the sun," White wrote to Beuiah Hagen (June 1, 1963). Between the two terms, one prosaic and one apocalyptic, the reader learns to live along with White. His prose invites participation in the life it describes. Remove from White's reticent style his taste, good will, and decency, and it becomes that of the current cosmopolitan cynic—coarse, debunking, and manipulative, bearing the mark of what sociologist Pitirim Sorokin called "late sensate" culture, a phenomenon that White himself condemned. White's stylistic revolution depended on the sense that a secure social and ideological structure existed in America. The disorder of his absurdities rebounds off the order of these given structures, against which the absurdities can be measured and appreciated. Both poles are necessary for full effect. Establishing relationships between opposites implies equal respect for both terms of the equation. When White's New Yorker style is revised by contemporary artists of the cool, it suffers in its humanity from the omission

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of accepted values. White's light touch assumes that some things are funny and some are not. The only sort of humorist he would consider worth laughing at is one who understands how to be melancholy on the appropriate occasion. In the third decade of the twentieth century, the antiromantic neohumanists saw science as the great threat to civilization. They rejected the vestiges of romantic sentimentality, yet retained traditional moral values. If White belongs to any school, it is to this one. Religion, art, and ideas all were suspect, which is perhaps what kept this artist of the common and the small from creating any sustained work in which the subject is worthy of the style. Even so human and reflective a writer as White cannot omit absolute values from his work without making it seem to be all surface and no substance. The limitation is perhaps not White's but a weakness of the culture and century he so faithfully reflects. Was it being a journalist, paid by the word, that made White prefer shingling his barn roof to writing? His Letters and children's books, written for love, not money, show signs of the life he might have given to the language had he found a tale worthy of the telling. White himself felt that a goal he could not name had always eluded him, that he remained an unfinished man. It may be that this was his choice, for as he once wrote, "An unhatched egg is to me the greatest challenge of life."

Selected Bibliography WORKS OF E. B. WHITE The Lady Is Cold. New York: Harper and Bros., 1929. Is Sex Necessary? Or Why You Feel the Way You Do,

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with James Thurber. New York: Harper and Bros., 1929. Every Day Is Saturday. New York: Harper and Bros., 1934. Farewell to Model T. New York: Putnam, 1936. Published under the pseudonym Lee Strout White. The Fox of Peapack and Other Poems. New York: Harper and Bros., 1938. Quo Vadimus? Or the Case for the Bicycle. New York: Harper and Bros., 1939. A Subtreasury of American Humor, with Katharine S. White. New York: Coward-McCann, 1941. One Man's Meat. New York: Harper and Bros., 1942. Stuart Little. New York: Harper and Row, 1945. The Wild Flag. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1946. Here Is New York. New York: Harper and Bros., 1949. Charlotte's Web. New York: Harper and Bros., 1952. The Second Tree From the Corner. New York: Harper and Bros., 1954. Elements of Style, with William Strunk, Jr. New York: Macmillan, 1959. The Points of My Compass. New York: Harper and Row, 1962. E. B. White Reader, edited by William W. Watt and Robert W. Bradford. New York: Harper and Row, 1966. Trumpet of the Swan. New York: Harper and Row, 1970. Letters, ed. Dorothy L. Guth. New York: Harper and Row, 1976. Essays ofE. B. White. New York: Harper and Row, 1977. UNCOLLECTED WORKS

"Where Do the New Eras Go?" Magazine cf Business, 54:505 (November 1928). "What Should Children Tell Parents?" Harper's Magazine, 160:120-22 (December 1929). 4 'Urgency of an Agency,'' New Republic, 66:180-81 (April 1, 1931). "A Blessed Event—I,"New Yorker, 11:32-34 (January 25, 1936). "A Blessed Event—II," New Yorker, 11:31-35 (February 1, 1936). "You Can't Resettle Me," Saturday Evening Post, 209:8 (October 10, 1936). "How the Automobile Got into Bermuda," New Yorker, 14:22-23 (April 2, 1938).

E. B. WHITE / 681 "Huntsman, I'm in a Quarry!" Country Life, 77:45 (April 1940). "Preaching Humorist" (with Katharine S. White), Saturday Review of Literature, 24:16 (October 18, 1941). "I Accept with Pleasure," New Yorker, 19:16 (March 1943). "Home Song," New Yorker, 19:30 (February 5, 1944). "Breakfast on Quaker Hill/'Atew Yorker, 20:27 (October 28, 1944). "A Reporter at Large: The Eve of St. Francis,"New Yorker 21:44 (May 5, 1945). "A Reporter at Large: Beautiful Upon a Hill," New Yorker, 21:42 (May 12, 1945). "Love Among the Foreign Offices," New Yorker, 22:24 (February 1, 1947). "Noontime of an Advertising Man," New Yorker, 25:25-26 (June 25, 1949). "Visitors to the Pond," New Yorker, 29:28-31 (May 23, 1953). "A Stratagem for Retirement," Holiday, 19:84-87 (March 1956). "Seven Steps to Heaven," New Yorker, 33:32-37 (September 7, 1957). "Fred on Space,"New Yorker, 33:46-47 (November 6, 1957). "Khrushchev and I," New Yorker, 35:39^41 (September 26, 1959). "Department of Amplification," New Yorker, 37:42 (August 5, 1961). "Was Lifted by Ears as Boy, No Harm Done," New Yorker, 40:38 (May 9, 1964). "Annals of Bird Watching: Mr. Forbush's Friends," New Yorker, 42:42-66 (February 26, 1966). "Following Our Instincts," Writer, 79:22-23 (July 1966). 4 The Deserted Nation,"New Yorker, 42:53 (October 8, 1966). "The Browning-off of Pelham Manor," New Yorker, 46:49 (November 14, 1970). "Letter From the East," New Yorker, 47:35-37 (March 27, 1971). 44 Letter From the East,'' New Yorker, 47:27-29 (July 24, 1971). "Faith of a Writer: Remarks," Publisher's Weekly, 200:29 (December 2, 1971). "Letter From the East," New Yorker, 51:36-40 (February 24, 1975).

SECONDARY SOURCES Allen, Frederick L. Only Yesterday. New York: Blue Ribbon Books, 1931. . Since Yesterday. New York: Harper and Bros., 1939. Beck, Warren. "E. B. White," College English, 7:367-73 (April 1946). Bishop, Morris. Introduction to One Mans Meat. New York: Harper and Bros., 1950. Fuller, J. W. "Prose Style in the Essays of E. B. White." University of Washington, 1959. Unpublished dissertation. Gill, Brendan. Here at the New Yorker. New York: Random House. 1975. Hall, Donald. "E. B. White on the Exercycle." Atational Review, 29:671-72 (June 10, 1977). Hasley, Louis. "The Talk of the Town and the Country: E. B. White," Connecticut Review, 5:37-45 (October 1971). Kramer, Dale. Ross and the New Yorker. Garden City: Doubleday and Co., 1951. Krutch, Joseph Wood. "Profession of a New Yorker." Saturday Review, 37:15-16 (January 30, 1954). Maloney, Russell. "Tilley the Toiler." Saturday Review of Literature, 30:7 (August 30, 1947). Poirier, Richard. A World Elsewhere: The Place of Style in American Literature. New York: Oxford University Press, 1966. Rubin, Louis D., ed. Comic Imagination in American Literature. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1973. Sampson, Edward C. E. B. White. Twayne Publishers: Boston, 1974. Steinhoff, William R. " 'The Door,' The Professor/ 'My Friend the Poet (Deceased)/ " College English, 23:229-32 (December 1961). Thurber, James. "E.B.W." Saturday Review, 18:8-9 (October 15, 1938). . The Years With Ross. Boston: Little, Brown, and Co., 1959. "Typewriter Man." Newsweek, 55:72 (February 22, 1960). "Updike Lauds National Medalist E. B. White." Wilson Library Bulletin, 46:489 (February 1972). -BARBARA J. ROGERS

John Greenleaf Whittier 1807-1892 KEAR the end of his life, John Greenleaf

nial times. And in certain of these poems he can pass as a very fine poet indeed. The farmhouse near Haverhill, Massachusetts, in which Whittier was born in 1807 was typical of the thousands of similar homesteads scattered throughout rural New England. Solidly constructed of hand-hewn logs, it was nearly 120 years old. The farm was set in a valley almost surrounded by hills, with the nearest neighbor a half-mile distant. This isolation made the Whittiers dependent on one another for companionship, entertainment, and even education. Strong links with the past also united the family, which had come to New England in 1638 and since then had been continuously associated with the Merrimack River valley of northeastern Massachusetts. Over the years the region's spirit of personal independence, belief in rigorous work, closeness to nature, and confidence in the natural rights of man had become Whittier characteristics. Whittier's Quaker background was intimately connected with this New England heritage. His parents were devout Quakers who held daily worship at home and who attended First Day meetings in Amesbury, regardless of weather or the discomfort of the nine-mile trip. Whittier also read and literally made a part of his being the Quaker books in his father's small library.

Whittier characterized his work by remarking: * 'I am not one of the master singers and don't pose as one. By the grace of God I am only what I am and don't wish to pass for more." Most readers and critics would agree with the first statement, for measured against such great nineteenth-century American poets as Edgar Allan Poe, Walt Whitman, or Emily Dickinson, Whittier is clearly a minor figure. Perhaps he and the other schoolroom poets have been justly criticized for their sentimentality, pietism, diffuse rhetoric— even their popular appeal now seems a devaluation of artistic worth. Whittier's own biographers often have answered the question of what he was by emphasizing his role as an abolitionist, a practical politician, or a religious humanist. They have taken Whittier at his word when he insisted that he was first of all a man, not a versemaker. But poet he was, and so he must be judged. In a casual critical aside, his official biographer Samuel T. Pickard noted that Whittier's verse was written first of all for the neighbors, a remark that illuminates the essence of Whittier's achievement. His poems preserve what was most particularly his and his neighbors': his Quaker heritage, his Haverhill boyhood, his Merrimack scenery, his love of local superstitions and legend, and his interest in colo-

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JOHN GREENLEAF WHITT1ER I 683 The writings of William Penn and Richard Baxter schooled Whittier in the necessity of individual striving for personal perfection; the failure of outward rules and formalized creeds; the love, not the wrath, of Christ; and the humanitarian practice of social equality and individual rights. These basic ideas directly influenced his life by causing his enlistment in the abolitionist cause and by occasioning some of his finest religious lyrics. Whittier's farm experiences also formed the man. The property was never free from debt, and only the strictest economy and husbandry kept it a going concern. Under such conditions Whittier's youth was hardly an idyllic one. The mansize tasks of planting, harvesting, and milking overtaxed his physical strength and permanently impaired his health. Unfit for heavy farm labor and temperamentally unsuited to the life of a farmer, he complained in his earliest verses (untitled and undated): And must I always swing the flail And help to fill the milking pail? I wish to go away to school; I do not wish to be a fool. Whittier was attracted to the beauty hidden beneath the austerity of his family's life and the plain landscape around him. Although he responded to the old legends, the rural landscape, and the simple Quaker life, his realization of its inherent poetic value did not come until he was introduced, at the age of fourteen, to the poetry of Robert Burns. When a visiting schoolmaster read some of Burns's poetry to Whittier, the effect was instantaneous and lasting. In Bums he found one of his own: a farm boy like himself who had ruined his health on a farm, and who hated intolerance and hypocrisy. Burns's poetry appealed to ordinary people, and he wrote of their thoughts and feelings. The themes of his poems reflected Burns's dislike of harsh Calvinistic church rule, disdain for ostentation, love

of nature, belief in the innate dignity of man, and hope for social equality. Primarily this introduction to Burns initiated Whittier's rhyme-making and dreams of literary fame. In his early works, praise for William Penn and early Quaker martyrs was mingled with admiration for Lord Byron and the Marquis de Lafayette; and romantic glimpses of distant lands were contrasted with nationalistic boasting about New England's Nahant beach. By 1826 Whittier had written manuscripts of nearly thirty poems. His sister Mary launched the hesitant author by appropriating "The Exile's Daparture" and sending it in June to the Newburyport Free Press. The editor of the Press was William Lloyd Garrison, who was just starting his turbulent career as a humanitarian and reformer. He printed the piece and asked for more. In fact, Garrison was so impressed with the verses that he rode out to the Haverhill farm and pleaded with Whittier's parents to encourage the boy's ability by allowing him further education. As the year went on, Whittier's poems also were published in the Haverhill Gazette; and the persuasive urgings of its editor influenced Whittier's father to allow his son to attend the newly opened Haverhill Academy. Undoubtedly the next two years in Haverhill broadened Whittier's intellectual range, allowing him to measure his poetic ambitions against the established masters of English literature. Having been publicly praised as a "genius of a high order" in a prospectus for his poems, Whittier must have envisioned poetic fame within his grasp. He earned his tuition by shoemaking and schoolteaching, frugally calculating his firstterm expenses to within twenty-five cents. A collected edition of his poems did not materialize, however; and this failure, coupled with romantic disappointments and economic necessities, drove Whittier into posturing and gloom. From personal experience he viewed schoolteaching as a nightmare, and without further edu-

684 I AMERICAN cation the professions were closed to him. Consequently he turned to newspaper work, obtaining his first position as editor of the American Manufacturer in Boston from January to July 1829. The editorship was a complete education in itself, for Whittier served as his own proofreader, book reviewer, news analyst, poetry writer, and office boy. During his sevenmonth apprenticeship he brought this relatively obscure journal admiration for its lead articles and selection of news. After a brief period as editor of the Essex Gazette in Haverhill, Whittier assumed editorship of the influential New England Weekly Review at Hartford in July 1830. He later recalled the eighteen months there as one of the happiest periods of his young life. Living at a congenial boardinghouse with attractive and admiring young female boarders, Whittier was entertained by their social gossip and flirtations, and his position as editor of the Review brought him into intimate contact with the leading men of the city. He entered fully into the literary circle that centered around Lydia Sigourney and included Willis Gaylord Clark and Frederick Barnard (later president of Columbia College). During his editorship Whittier published more than fifty poems and much fiction; had his first book, Legends of New England, published (1831); wrote most of "Moll Pitcher" (1832); carried on a feud with a rival newspaper editor; vigorously backed the protective tariff system of Henry Clay; and, between bouts of illness, traveled to New York and New Haven. Still, his vacillating and impulsive emotional nature led him to make declarations like the following in a letter to Louisa Cavolne Tuthill (April 16, 1831): Disappointment in a thousand ways has gone over my heart and left it dust. Yet I still look forward with high anticipation. I have placed the goal of my ambition high—but with the blessing of God, it shall be reached. The world has at last

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breathed into my bosom a portion of its own bitterness and I now feel as if I could wrestle manfully in the strife of men. If my life is spared, the world shall know me in a loftier capacity than as a writer of rhymes. After resigning from the Review because of ill health, Whittier stayed at the Haverhill farm during the winter of 1831-32. There he daydreamed of publishing a novel to reconcile the North and South, projected a history of the Society of Friends, and planned a sketchbook dealing with local superstitions. However, the excitement and reality of an Essex County political race soon dispelled these airy literary dreams. Prose articles and political letters became Whittier's literary staples, and he plunged headlong into the maelstrom of a congressional race that pitted Caleb Gushing against two rivals. Whittier's letters to various Essex County politicians demonstrated his quick grasp of the political situation and his shrewd manipulation of events and people to mold public opinion. Unable to obtain majority support, Gushing withdrew, and for a time in the summer of 1832 Whittier was considered a possible candidate. Since he was underage (he would not be twenty-five until December), Whittier tried to foster a stalemate and prolong the contest until he could accept a nomination. For once, personal ambition dominated his Quaker conscience. The stratagem failed, however, and a substitute candidate was elected. With the defeat of his political hopes, Whittier reached the bleak end of a journey that had begun so auspiciously when he left Haverhill Academy in 1828. Editorial positions had brought new friendships but no financial security; his poverty and Quaker background rendered him ineligible for the marriages he wanted; his poetry had achieved an ephemeral journalistic fame but not the national reputation he had envisioned. Now, burdened with ill health, he undertook the management of a large farm and

JOHN GREENLEAF WH1TTIER I 685 the support of his family. The winter months of 1832-33 must have been depressing ones for Whittier, once again faced with the question of what to do with his life. The answer, which galvanized his entire being for the next twenty years, came in the spring of 1833: enlistment in the abolitionist cause. By early 1833 Whittier had written more than 280 poems, a number equal to his entire output in the next thirty years. He disparaged his early verses as "wretched first appearances" and fought bitterly to have them excluded from his collected works. Still, they afford a valuable glimpse into the development of the young writer. Many of these poems teach moral lessons by paraphrasing familiar psalms or dramatizing crucial moments from Scripture. Others reflect his religious background, dealing with the customs, traditions, and martyrs of the Quaker faith. But in the main, the English Romantics and their American counterparts furnished the themes and literary models for Whittier. The lure of the exotic and the mysterious captured his young imagination and, like thousands of Americans, Whittier responded to the excitement aroused by Sir Walter Scott's stirring tales. Scores of his poems imitated Scott's historical approach with its emphasis on battles, romantic interludes, thrilling rescues, and virtuous heroes. Although Whittier imitated Scott, Lord Byron, the symbol of the Romantic ego and the adventurous spirit, became his literary idol. He criticized Byron's immoral life and feared his ''licentious" poetry, but was fascinated by Byron's investigation of the passions and psychological handling of sin and rebellion. For more than ten years Whittier's prose and poetry mirrored aspects of the Byronic hero's cynicism and disillusionment. Since these pieces drew on sentiments quite foreign to Whittier's Quaker simplicity and common sense, their posturing and attempted sophistication rendered them artificial and unconvinc-

ing. Such poems show how impressionable and uncertain his taste was. The lack of revision, careless use of language, and uneven versification and rhyme of these early poems continued to plague his mature work; and the themes of lost love, melancholy, and poetic fame indicate how far Whittier had come from the homespun songs of Burns and the Quaker belief that art must be practical and moral. One of the main tensions in his literary career is here placed in focus: the lure of beauty in its own sphere and a moralistic view of literature that relegates beauty to a secondary position. In the main, Whittier's writing up to 1833, when he entered the abolitionist movement, reveals three formative influences: his religious training, which led him to consider literature from an ethical viewpoint; his isolated rural background and Burns's poetry, which influenced him to seek poetic material within his own environment and experience; and the Romantic verse of Scott and Byron, which taught him the value of affections while the sentimental traits of their American imitators fashioned his literary style. The catalyst needed to transform Whittier's melancholy arid chastened ambitions came with Garrison's emotional appeal in March 1833: 'This then, is a time for the philanthropist—any friend of his country, to put forth his energies, in order to let the oppressed go free and to sustain the republic. Whittier enlist!—Your talents, zeal, influence—all are needed." Garrison's plea quickened Whittier's latent reform interests, strengthened his still uncertain temperament, and touched the core of his Quaker humanitarian beliefs. For the next twenty years the events of his life were written on the pages of American reform history along with those of John Quincy Adams, John Parker Hale, and Charles Sumner. During the few months following Garrison's letter, Whittier studied all the available publications on colonisation and slavery, then printed in

686 I AMERICAN June, at his own expense, Justice and Expediency. The pamphlet's relentlessly phrased logic and blunt style exposed the failure of the American Colonization Society and argued not only that immediate emancipation would be a safe, peaceable remedy, but also that the resulting free labor would be more productive than slave labor. Its publication had a profound and lasting effect on Whittier's life. It severely limited his hopes of political preferment, sharply curtailed the number of journals that would publish his verse, and earned him a notoriety second only to that of Garrison and a few other abolitionists. For distributing this pamphlet in Washington, Dr. Reuben Crandall, an abolitionist sympathizer, was arrested and imprisoned for eight months. In December 1833, Whittier attended the first meeting of the American Anti-Slavery Society and helped to draft its declaration of sentiments that sounded the death knell for slavery. He soon recognized that political skill and editorial experience would be effective weapons in molding public opinion. He organized antislavery societies throughout Essex County, often served as secretary for local groups, attended conventions, reported on meetings, and even served in the Massachusetts legislature (1834-35). His correspondence broadened to include such nationally known figures as Henry Clay and John Quincy Adams, all the leading abolitionists, and numerous local politicians. Nothing was too insignificant for Whittier to handle as he traveled to the small towns of Massachusetts and New Hampshire, canvassing voters and contacting abolitionist leaders. Whittier often was caught in mob action. In September 1835, while traveling with George Thompson, the eloquent and fiery British abolitionist, he was assaulted with rocks and debris by a Concord, New Hampshire, mob trying to tar and feather Thompson. Both escaped under the cover of darkness, with only minor injuries. Weeks later Whittier witnessed the near lynching of Garrison in Boston and, while attending an

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antislavery meeting in neighboring Newburyport, he was pelted with stones and rotten eggs. Even Whittier's editorships were affected. In 1838 he became editor of the Pennsylvania Freeman and helped shape it into one of the leading antislavery papers in the North. His actual editorship began with the sacking and burning of Pennsylvania Hall, Philadelphia, in May 1838. Erected by the abolitionists as a temple for free speech, the $40,000 building was destroyed by a proslavery mob a few days after its dedication. To save personal papers that were in the hall, Whittier adopted a disguise, mingled with the crowd, and entered the building. Outside, he could hear the shout "Hang Whittier!" Whittier's maneuvering with Congressman Caleb Cushing is a classic example of political skill. Cushing's election in 1834 hinged on Whittier's antislavery support, and Whittier never let him abandon his pledge to support the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia and to honor abolitionist petitions. When Cushing tried to repudiate his promise, Whittier so effectively controlled the votes in the district that Cushing was forced to write an open letter indicating his continued support of abolitionist aims. Whittier prodded Cushing and other congressmen to defend the constitutional rights of petition and to fight against the gag rules. The strategy of submitting abolitionist petitions reaped enormous dividends, for former president John Quincy Adams took up the fight in Congress against the gag rules. The struggle over the "gag" broadened the abolition appeal; instead of being viewed as a few fanatics trying to free the slaves, abolitionists now represented the majority of Americans in their attempts to secure freedom of press and of speech. Popular national support was further secured by the formation of the Liberty party in 1840 and its merger into the powerful Free-Soil party, which formed the nucleus for the Republican party by the mid1850's. Whittier's turn to open political action caused

JOHN GREENLEAF WH1TTIER I 687 an irreconcilable and bitter break with Garrison; but it also led to editorships of the Middlesex Standard (the Liberty party organ in Lowell) and of the National Era in Washington. Throughout the 1840's Whittier remained the poet laureate of the Liberty party, and he ringingly expressed his indignation at the annexation of Texas and the Mexican War. His outstanding political feat was, however, his drafting of Charles Sumner as candidate for the United States Senate in 1850. Sumner's election diminished Whittier's active participation in the abolitionist cause; but he was not immune to the violent passions swirling about him and repeatedly expressed his indignation over the North's compromises in stirring political verse that belied his Quaker hope for peace. From Daniel Webster's "Seventh of March" (1850) speech for conciliation came Whittier's denunciation of the betrayal, "Ichabod" (1850); the bloody fighting in Kansas occasioned "The Kansas Emigrants" (1854), "Le marais du cygne" (1858), and "Letter . . ." (1854); and the arrest of fugitive slaves and his hatred for church hypocrisy brought forth "Moloch in State Street" (1857) and "Official Piety" (1853). When war became inevitable, Whittier sadly perceived the bitter end of his reform efforts and wondered if perhaps disunion were not better than a civil war. Yet, when war came, he defended President Abraham Lincoln's position. By the mid-1850's Whittier gradually turned to writing home legends and ballads. The twenty years of political activism had taken their toll, and he sought mental rest, saying, "I have crowded into a few years what should have been given to many." His experiences had farreaching personal effects and important literary consequences. The vilification and mob abuse, the ostracism from literary life, and the bitter break with Garrison had toughened Whittier's mild Quaker soul and had given him hard-won knowledge of human nature. His dedicated absorption in a moral cause had refined the dross of earlier posturing, and the swirl of practical poli-

tics and unscrupulous ambition about him had intensified his regard for eternal standards and the consolation of the Inner Light. The abolitionist movement drew Whittier away from a love of poetry by itself to a universal awareness of man's spiritual significance, his need for love and respect, and his hunger for freedom. Expressing the writer's innermost belief in the power of the human will to overcome evil and his emotional response to slavery as a symbol of all oppression—physical, economic, or spiritual—Whittier's poems aroused an immediate popular response by substituting emotional feeling for the logic and dryness of political appeal. Whittier recognized the shortcomings of his abolitionist poems, saying that they were all "written with no expectation that they would survive the occasions which called them forth: they were protests, alarm signals, trumpet calls to action, words wrung from the writer's heart, forged at white heat." A typical verse from "The Slave-Ships" illustrates his poetic difficulty in transforming his emotional and moral indignation at the barbarism of slavery into poetry. An early stanza reads: Hark! from the ship's dark bosom, The very sounds of hell! The ringing clank of iron, The maniac's short, sharp yell! The hoarse, low curse, throat-stifled; The starving infant's moan, The horror of a breaking heart Poured through a mother's groan. This brief survey of the slaves imprisoned on the ship maintains them as abstractions without any real characterization, and consequently they are not perceived as human beings. Types, not individuals, are presented: a maniac, a starving child, a heartbroken mother. The threadbare, unimaginative phrasing fails to provide the concrete dramatization necessary to endow the idea with an emotional life. The imagery, rife with cliche and hampered by the rhetorical pattern,

688 I AMERICAN forces the emotion into bathos. Whittier editorializes, telling the reader that the scene is a "hell" and filled with "honor"; but there has been no tangible development of these emotions. Basically the appeal remains on a crude level of propaganda: the issue is starkly presented in terms of good and evil, and stereotyped images elicit desired emotional responses. Whittier's most successful abolitionist poems depended on these propaganda elements and utilized all the available media for disseminating their message. They were printed in Northern newspapers, circulated in broadsides throughout the country, declaimed by orators and schoolchildren, set to music, and even presented as memorials to the state legislatures. Because of their topical interest, broad emotional appeal, and moral intensity, they affected thousands of readers who were rarely touched by sermons or newspaper editorials. "Our Countrymen in Chains!" typifies Whittier's standard approach and in turn reveals another underlying conflict in his nature, the tension between the Quaker pacifist and the radical abolitionist. Originally printed in the Liberator in 1834, this poem was reissued as an antislavery broadside during the next six years. The top half of the broadside contained a cut of a kneeling black man who raised his manacled hands while crying, 4 'Am I not a man and a Brother?'' Below was Whittier's poem, consisting of a long series of rhetorical questions contrasting America and Europe that climaxed in the demand for the destruction of slavery. The poem opens with an incredulous tone, as Whittier contrasts the sordid reality of slave-dominated America with the bright dreams of the revolution. Stock phrases seek conventional emotional responses as the familiar "falling lash, the fetter's clank" lead into a depiction of the black mother whipped and driven from her child. In the long central section of the poem, Whittier exhorts his audience, in the name of liberty,

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to "break the chain . . . And smite to earth Oppression's rod." Although his condemnation of war and plea to rise for freedom "not in strife" qualify this call to action, his hopes for peace sound hollow; and within the context of the poem they remain unconvincing. His emotional and moral outrage and the controlling images of bloodshed and war force the conclusion that slavery must be abolished immediately. A similar theme guides "Massachusetts to Virginia" (1843), but here propaganda becomes art. The carefully controlled structure balances defiance with reconciliation. The opening five stanzas categorize the Northern man and briefly survey his individual occupations, while the next nine stanzas plead with Virginia to recollect its revolutionary heritage of freedom. The concluding ten stanzas return to the imagery and tone of the opening. Here Whittier's presentation of Northern power expands from individuals to a panoramic survey of the united strength of all Massachusetts communities—an overwhelming Northern "blast" to Virginia. While the poem offers some hope for a peaceful solution, its heaviest stress falls on the North's determination to resist any renewed assaults on its basic freedoms. The opening lines exemplify this contrast as a warlike defiance breathes through the surface posture of peace and reconciliation. The blast from Freedom's Northern hills, upon its Southern way, Bears greeting to Virginia from Massachusetts Bay: No word of haughty challenging, nor battle bugle's peal, Nor steady tread of marching files, nor clang of horsemen's steel. No trains of deep-mouthed cannon along our highways go; Around our silent arsenals untrodden lies the snow;

JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER Whittier's greeting, a "blast" of icy Northern resolution, is hardly a message of peace; and the following images all stress challenge, battle, soldiers, steel, and guns. The very term "blast" connotes destruction and annihilation, while its later associations with nature's storms and God's just anger imply both a physical and a moral sanction for the North's attitude. Although Whittier asserts the North's unwillingness to employ such force, the bleak picture of the "deepmouthed cannon" and the silent arsenals in the snow emphasize the industrial might of the North and its military potential. The next three stanzas develop these ideas by a definition of Northern manhood and a survey of its occupations. Significantly, the first images are of a worker's "brown, hard hand" and of a lumberman's swinging his axe against mountain oaks, an association of manhood with primitive natural forces. The "brown, hard hand" aptly conveys the strength of Northern free labor while suggesting the darker brown hand of the Southern slave, whose forced labor supported the South and whose potential freedom terrified. Coupled with this looms the image of the man with the axe, demolishing giant oaks. Countinuing his portrayal, Whittier emphasizes the Northern man's daily struggle with the natural forces around him—the wind, ice, fog, cold, storm; they toughen his character, develop an inner selfreliance, and foster an independent attitude that "laugh[s] to scorn the slaver's threat against their rocky home." The underlying pattern of images in these five introductory stanzas presents a defiant posture of natural strength that can well destroy any Southern opposition. The ending stanzas repeat this martial pattern; and the final image in the poem, that of a firedamp ready to be exploded by a Northern torch, underscores exactly what this poem urged and ultimately obtained: it ignited and coalesced a divided North into a vigorous force that would defy, and finally destroy, slavery. Perhaps some

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of these effects were unconscious, but the pattern of images and the emotional movement of the poem lead to this conclusion. The incongruous mixture of poet, abolitionist, and Quaker produced poetry as well as powerful propaganda. In Whittier's most successful abolitionist poems an openly religious tone and sense of moral indignation help purge their topical and journalistic nature. At times extensive biblical allusions and a prophetic manner fuse with structure and imagery to develop wider spiritual dimensions. The assaults on the basic principles of free speech, free press, and free assembly occurring throughout the pre-Civil War period inspired Whittier's utterances as Israel's crises had moved its ancient prophets. Repeatedly Whittier describes his abolitionist poems as a "voice and vision" passing before his soul. In the classical manner of Amos or Isaiah, he interprets the North-South slavery conflict in terms of Israel's apostasy from God's law, uttering his vision of God's coming judgment and doom. As he surveys North (Israel) and South (Judah), Whittier curses them both and specifies the advent of God's wrathful anger on His chosen people. In the traditional prophetic manner he extends the hope that a response to the word of God might avert destruction. Such future salvation, reserved for a small "remnant," will come only after a "long night silence" and a purging holocaust. On the ruins of the old will arise a new Jerusalem, heralding an era of paradisiacal glory. "Ichabod," Whittier's one antislavery poem that claims poetic immortality, fits into this biblical prophetic category. The work was occasioned by Whittier's grief, surprise, and prescience of evil when he read of Daniel Webster's speech in support of the Fugitive Slave Law. As a terse, tightly knit phillipic the poem perfectly blends biblical allusions, light-dark imagery, and a modulated elegiac tone to mourn the loss of freedom's defender. Its very title, which signifies "inglorious one," becomes the controlling

690 / AMERICAN image for the poem, the loss of the inner spiritual light that is contrasted with a fall into the dark world of sin and pride. The biblical allusions that open and close the poem link Webster's fall with defamation of the sacred aiic by the high priest Eli and Noah's terrible, drunken betrayal of God's will. These two allusions suggest the vast, eternal moral dimensions of Webster's act, while Whittier and the nation perform the rites of burial for a living corpse, a formal ceremony that transcends personal rancor or vilification. Only a new high priest can restore the glory to Israel and America. Whittier's poetic maturity came late—in his fifties and sixties—and only after his main reform efforts were completed. His ill-paid, physically exhausting dedication to moral principles yielded the proverbial hundredfold return. The death of the reformer marked the birth of the poet. Whittier once remarked, "My vehicles have been of the humbler sort—merely the farm wagon and buckboard of verse." This was his achievement: to have represented the common thoughts and feelings of a mainly agrarian society. Whittier wrote with the strong moral sense of his age and its complete confidence in progress and democratic concepts. Hardly a profound thinker, he remained, like his readers, strikingly unaware of the vast social and economic changes in the nineteenth century and only superficially understood that abolition alone was no panacea for the ills of his age. Nevertheless, he did have a tenacious grasp of a few fundamentals: farm life, nature, moral principles, freedom, and the Inner Light. If these realities were a narrow vein of poetic ore and mined nearly to exhaustion, their constant sifting and refining did produce a few finished poems. In his mature poetry Whittier drew heavily on nature and his farm experience for imagery and pictorial description, but this background furnished him mainly with certain basic concepts— the value of hard work and rural simplicity, and

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nature's role as a teacher of moral virtues—that were never absent from his work. Perhaps no other American poet has been so extremely devoted to the concept of freedom and the basic principles of democracy. In his better poems these basic moral beliefs are neither platitudinous nor sentimental, but refreshingly direct and certain in a relativistic age. Another aspect of Whittier's mature poetry was his use of history and legend to vitalize his ideas on intolerance, moral courage, and reform. He once said that his tales often were written to give "far faint glimpses of the dual life of old/ Inward, grand with awe and reverence; outward, mean and coarse and cold." Whittier's nostalgic recalling of these past times in his ballads and genre pieces was an attempt to save a tradition and to record the passing of a social order. Tardily, he found in the ordinary things of life, his boyhood memories, local Haverhill scenery, and Essex County legends, the factual images that could be transmuted by personal associations and imaginative effort into authentic materials for poetry. The romance that he found in these familiar things was based on an awareness that humble experiences and simple feelings possessed as much wonder and beauty as any dream of loving knight and lady. Of course theory is one thing, while practice is another. Whittier had more than the usual difficulty in properly organizing his material, and his mature method of composition reflects his early formative influences. Most noticeable is the didactic bent of certain recurring themes. The value of domestic emotions, the rewards of true love, the innocence of childhood, the necessity of social equality, and the nobility of ethical action repeat the stock ideas of the nineteenth century. In presenting these moral lessons Whittier often took the nucleus of the story from another source—an old legend, an account from history, or even a contemporary event. This was recast in

JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER a realistic narrative with a concluding discussion of the moral application of the tale. This technique is found in such widely divergent ventures as the nature poem "The Vanishers" (1864), in which an Indian legend of the dead returning for their loved ones leads to the consolation that all the losses will be reclaimed in heaven; the ballad "The Garrison of Cape Ann" (1857), in which the colonial legend of specter warriors teaches the value of prayer; and the philosophic "Miriam" (1870), in which the Islamic concept of God affirms the universality of truth as Miriam uses Christian doctrine to quell the rage of Shah Akbar. The tagged-on moral is a serious aesthetic failing that plagued Whittier throughout his life. In his best poems, however, such as "Skipper Ireson's Ride" (1857) or "The Trailing Arbutus" (1879), the lesson achieves an organic harmony and artistically develops the implications of the narrative. Whittier's mastery of local-color techniques and his painterly ability to describe accurately the native scene characterize his finest poems. In them the natural scene remains unchanged, for he transcribed rather than created, and represented rather than arranged. The artistic value of this approach depended on the skill and selectivity of his recording. The following lines from "The Countess" (1863) are a close literal picture of Rocks Village on the Merrimack River: Over the wooded northern ridge, Between its houses brown, To the dark tunnel of the bridge The street comes straggling down. With salt sea-scents along its shores The heavy hay-boats crawl, The long antennae of their oars In lazy rise and fall. Yet its salient characteristics are exaggerated and heightened to create an atmosphere of drow-

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siness and the "stranded" quality of a bypassed town. Closely connected with his pictorial cast of mind is Whittier's use of decorative imagery. Usually associated with his rural background, these images evoke a mild sensory response lacking the richness and complexity of the expansive imagery used by Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson. The visual presentation of his ideas draws heavily on common farm images— planting, growth of crops, harvesting, husking, change of seasons—and on biblical analogues. Thus an old teacher's antiquarian interests are described as "threshing time's neglected sheaves," and a girl's mind is seen as "dewmoist and bright . . ./Unfolding like a morning flower." Another characteristic of Whittier's style is the neoclassic bent of his versification, diction, and imagery. His poems use the simplest of meters, the ballad and octosyllabic, while eighteenthcentury rhyming couplet and alternate rhyme are his usual stanzaic forms. Rhetorical balance and set parallelisms, such as appear in "The Barefoot Boy" (1855), dated his poems even in his own day. Similar devices that made his art somewhat old-fashioned are his pairing of adjectives and his characteristic inversions, which tend to create a slow, halting rhythm. These technical inadequacies, however, do not always detract from his artistic achievement. Whittier's realistic genre pieces and ballads show his art at its best, as a natural and intimate part of his own experience, for in them he firmly heeded the essential truth that he had first recognized in Burns's poems: that within the most commonplace objects lie rich poetic materials. These poems convey his inner love for the environment that molded him and the traditions that inspired him, and reveal his extensive knowledge of local scenery, custom, and history. Here his style is direct and sincere, purged of its glaring rhetorical and sentimental flaws; the descriptions are graphic and picturesque; and the materials of home, na-

692 / AMERICAN ture, and the affections are fashioned into enduring poetry. Whittier's ballads probably represent his finest poetic achievement and the best re-creation of native folklore and legend written in the nineteenth century. They especially express his lifelong interest in New England history and wide knowledge of local customs and superstitions. Still, the formation of these ballads was a tortuous process that reveals how slowly Whittier's artistry matured and how tardily he recognized his own abilities. Only when dealing with material that was intimately associated with his Quaker beliefs, rural background, humanitarian interests, and Essex County region could he produce poetry of artistic merit. In general, Whittier's ballads remain remarkably true to the characteristics of traditional folk balladry. Like Sir Walter Scott, he was genuinely responsive to the spirit of folk narrative, having the background knowledge necessary to embody popular feeling and legend in narrative song. His best ballads are realistic and direct, centering on dramatic action and developing one main theme. As in traditional ballads, the tragic overtones of the theme evolve from the basic emotions of love, hate, loyalty, and betrayal, with particular emphasis on individual rebellion against society. Whittier's diction usually is sparse and simple, his images commonplace and filled with folk expressions. Even so, lyric and pastoral effects often hinder dramatic action and mar the objectivity so necessary for good balladry. Nor do the ballads escape his habitual "moral squint." Fortunately for Whittier, his earliest literary influences were the poems of Burns, which glorih fied rural life and local customs, and the romances of Scott, which centered on the heroism of Scottish warriors. His imitations of them, or at least his use of their themes as he saw them reflected in his own life, were the most promising verses of his early years. His first collection

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of poems and tales, Legends of New England, dealt entirely with local traditions and superstitions. The verses are marred by digressions and extravagant romantic phrasing, and employ the typical Gothic devices of doomed lovers, ghostly ships, and hidden horrors. However, one ballad, "The Black Fox," has a sure poetic beat and adapts its subject and content to the ballad tradition of simplicity. The introduction to the poem re-creates the atmosphere of a winter's evening in rural New England with a clearness of language and simplicity of diction that indicate Whittier's ballad capabilities. The grandmother, with her homespun descriptions and superstitious nature, is an excellent choice as narrator; and her account of the mysterious activities of the black fox effectively conveys a rural delight in the supernatural. Another early ballad is "The Song of the Vermonters" (1833). Its theme, a rallying cry for all patriotic Vermonters to defend their state during the Revolutionary War, imitates Scott's border romances; its form, rhyming couplets with a basic anapestic beat, gives a martial ring to the whole: Ho—all to the borders! Vermonters, come down, With your breeches of deerskin and jackets of brown; With your red woollen caps, and your moccasins, come, To the gathering summons of trumpet and drum. One of Whittier's first real ballads is "The Exiles," written in 1841. It shows how a decade of abolitionist work had matured him and, conversely, how far he had to go to achieve poetic maturity. The plot of "The Exiles" is suited to ballad demands for an exciting, realistic narrative, since it tells of Thomas Macy's flight down the Merrimack River to escape persecution for harboring a Quaker. Its theme, the dramatic struggle of one man against existing injustice,

JOHN GREENLEAF WHITT1ER I 693 stresses the value of inner principle over outward law. Everything was within the range of Whittier's talents and interests, for he had grown up in the Merrimack Valley and had spent the greater part of his life fighting for freedom and resisting intolerance. Yet he failed to develop the poem artistically. It is overly long (sixty stanzas) and greatly weakened by numerous digressions and pious interjections; and its labored comparisons and sentimental tone ignore the realism of good balladry. "Cassandra Southwick," written in 1843, shows a considerable advance in dramatic structure and presentation. Here, too, the incident is culled from the history of Quaker persecutions; but instead of relating the complete story behind Cassandra's imprisonment, Whittier concentrates on her fears and doubts as she waits to be sold into slavery. The early section of the poem probes Cassandra's fears and near despair. Her simple, trusting spirit is prey to all the distorted visions that the night and the unknown can bring. Fearfully she imagines the insults and pain to which her gentle nature will soon be subject. Once dawn breaks and Cassandra is led to the wharves, the movement is swift and dramatic. Though overly long and didactic, the poem is considerably better than the discursive and dramatically weak "The Exiles." During the next ten years Whittier wrote mainly prose, but two ballads of this period merit attention. "Barclay of Ury" (1847) expands the general theme of "Cassandra Southwick" in dealing with the indignities heaped upon an old warrior for joining the Quakers. Again the story turns on the conflict of inner conviction versus outward ridicule, as Barclay's quiet reliance on the Inner Light is contrasted with the outbursts of the jeering mob. The slow, deliberate beat of the verse echoes the measured pace of Barclay's horse and conveys his unflinching religious confidence. At the climax of the poem, Barclay movingly tells an old warrior comrade that he

will not fight the mob, and goes his own way, enduring alone. This portrait of Barclay is Whittier's first successful investigation of those reserved, dignified figures whose utter simplicity and tenacious faith capture one's imagination. The other ballad, "Kathleen" (1849), shows Whittier's complete mastery of ballad techniques. The story relates the selling of a beautiful Irish girl into slavery in the colonies by her cruel stepmother and a safe return to her sorrowing father. In traditional ballad fashion, dialogue conveys the feeling and action. No motivation is given for the stepmother's decision to sell Kathleen, nor is there an explanation for her triumph over the old lord's love for his daughter. Also noticeable is the absence of sophisticated imagery; only the most conventional descriptions are given as the ballad moves swiftly along. This ballad readily illustrates the progress Whittier had made from his early uneven, discursive efforts. At the height of his poetic powers, Whittier wrote his best ballads during the 1850's and 1860's. While studying at Haverhill Academy, he had heard the song of Captain Ireson's being tarred and feathered by the women of Marblehead. It was a typical folk song familiar to all the inhabitants of the town—perfect material for a poet who knew the locale and understood the mentality of the people. At that time Whittier tried writing it down, but it was not finished until thirty years later. The gestation period proved valuable. The ballad opens slowly, almost incongruously, as the strangeness of Ireson's ride is compared with other famous rides of story and rhyme. These outlandish references give a grotesque, grimly humorous tone to the opening. The refrain, repeated with slight variations in every stanza, contains the essence of the story, though it does not reveal why the skipper is being punished. In the next stanzas Ireson's disheveled condition is mocked as "Body of tur-

694 / AMERICAN key, head of owl/ Wings a-droop like a rained on fowl," while the crowd, consisting of women, responds to his plight with raucous cries and violent jostling. Their wildness creates a half-mad, half-comic mood that catches the confusion and chaos of mob action. The tone changes in the middle stanzas as the reasons for Ire son's shame are revealed: he sailed away from a sinking ship filled with his townspeople, betraying his own kin. We never know his motivation, nor is the event further elaborated; but the honor of his act is enlarged upon by the pathetic descriptions of the women of Marblehead wreaking revenge for their lost loved ones. All these things are but touched upon as the poem returns to the savage humor of the opening with this description: Sea-worn grandsires, cripple-bound, Hulks of old sailors run aground, Shook head, and fist, and hat, and cane, And cracked with curses the hoarse refrain: Part of Whittier's achievement is seen in these lines. The shipwreck images echo Ireson's betrayal and ridicule the pitiful attempts of the old sailors to obtain revenge, and their feeble, cracking voices make the refrain childish and meaningless. The crippled quality of their acts and the female character of the mob indicate the utter failure of the townspeople to obtain any measure of satisfaction equal to their loss. Suddenly the mood shifts; and in contrast with the harsh voices of the turbulent mob in the narrow, winding streets is the peace and serenity of the road leading to nearby Salem. As the physical setting changes for artistic contrast, so does the psychological tone. For the first time the skipper dominates the scene as he cries out: What to me is this noisy ride? What is the shame that clothes the skin To the nameless honor that lives within?

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The transition is sudden and complete, surprising the reader, who is engrossed in the outward narrative, and making him startlingly aware of the poem's chief theme—the torture ^nd remorse of a man after his crime. Although the hate of the mob and his present physical disfigurement will pass with time, his own terrible awareness of the sin will not. Ireson's unexpected admission of guilt is perhaps unmotivated; but the change from hate to remorse is in keeping with the shifting pattern of the poem, its mixture of humor, pathos, and cruelty. The crowd's vengeance is now muted, and in "half scorn, half pity" they turn Ireson loose. The final refrain changes "old" Floyd Ireson to "poor" Floyd Ireson, and so becomes a mournful dirge forever accusing and dooming the man, as well as emphasizing the emptiness remaining in the lives of the townspeople. The ballad makes Ireson live as an essentially tragic figure, who has betrayed the loyalties of his home and the traditions of the sea. He towers over the drama, coming from the sea, acting without apparent justification, and then vanishing to live alone with his shame. At last Whittier had attained the artistry to express his feelings for the New England scene, its history, customs, and deeper psychological traditions. There followed the gems of his maturity: the lyric drama "Telling the Bees" (1858); the pastoral romance ballads "Amy Wentworth" (1862), "The Countess" (1863), and 'The Witch of Wenham" (1877); the hardier ballads of history and superstition "The Garrison of Cape Ann" (1857), "The Wreck of Rivermouth" (1864), and "The Palatine" (1867); and his later dramatic ballads of Quaker persecution "The King's Missive" (1880) and "How the Women Went from Dover" (1883). "Telling the Bees" hinges on an Essex County superstition that a death in the family would drive away the bees and, to prevent this,

JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER the hives must be draped in mourning. The narrative records the delayed visit of a young man to the farmhouse of his beloved Mary. The tone of the poem is informal, almost conversational; and Whittier relates the tale as if he and the reader were rewalking the ground on which it took place. In the first lines, directly addressing this reader and insisting that he follow the scene closely, Whittier says: Here is the place; right over the hill Runs the path I took; You can see the gap in the old wall still, And the stepping-stones in the shallow brook. There is the house, with the gate red-barred, And the poplars tall; And the barn's brown length, and the cattleyard, And the white horns tossing above the wall. The details are plain and unelaborated, and a series of "ands" connects one detail to the next in almost childlike fashion. Then, as if pausing in his trip, the poet notes that, although a year has passed, the same rose blows, the same sun glows, and the same brook sings. This emphasis on the "sameness" of the previous visits and the scenery unifies the poem, giving assurance that the lover's previous meetings with Mary will be repeated. But the mood shifts when the poet recalls, almost casually, that upon coming closer to the house he noticed "Nothing changed but the hives of bees." This one small detail breaks the continuity, and with increasing tension we hear with him again the drearily singing chore girl and see the ominous shreds of black on the hives. The warm June sun of the moment before now chills like snow as the eventual discovery is foreshadowed. Still, the boy refuses to abandon his former confidence and assumes that Mary's grandfather must be dead. But then he sees the

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old man sitting on the porch, "and the chore-girl still/ Sung to the bees. . . . " Finally he is close enough to understand the song of the chore girl: "Stay at home, pretty bees, fly not hence! Mistress Mary is dead and gone!" With effective absence of comment, Whittier concludes the poem with this revelation of Mary's death, allowing the reader to supply the resulting horror and impact of the loss. Only then is the reader aware of the skillful manipulation of theme, for the careful development of the attractiveness and assurance of external nature hides the inevitable destruction of human beauty and earthly love. The ironic contrast of the boy's trust and expectation with the true situation offers a psychological insight into the problem of death and man's inability to prepare for its shocking occurrence. Whittier's mature ballads show many interesting variations. His most famous, "Barbara Frietchie" (1863), the story of an old woman waving a Union flag before the conquering Southern troops, was supposedly a true one. For Whittier she symbolized all who loved and fought for the Union, and the poem was his spontaneous expression of that feeling. The story is told in simple rhyming couplets of four beats to a line. The stage for the drama is set by a few suggestive details evoking the environs of Frederick town and the luxuriant land, ripe both for the actual corn harvest and for the harvest of blood and destruction. A continuing economy of detail sweeps the ballad along to its melodramatic climax: Barbara's defiant "Shoot, if you must, this old gray head" causes Stonewall Jackson to blush and to save her life. The poem's lack of subtlety and highly emotional presentation are in keeping with the manner of old ballads, while its final couplets bind the drama together as the stars shine over the graves of the protagonist, the town, and the Union itself, suggesting nature's

696 / AMERICAN full approval of the battle for "peace and order and beauty" represented in the flag. Few Civil War poems were so definitely the product of the hour and so quickly recognized by the people as an expression of their feelings. * 'Amy Wentworth,'' like many other of Whittier 's romantic ballads, lacks dramatic action as it portrays an aristocratic Amy disregarding her rank to marry a sea captain. Its sentimental theme, the power of true love, is developed by fine images as it contrasts the physical confinement of Amy's ancestral home with the freedom and love of the sea. The ballad opens with a graceful image of her fragile, delicate appearance, then presents an evocative sea image: Her heart is like an outbound ship That at its anchor swings; The murmur of the stranded shell Is in the song she sings. Sections of "The Witch of Wenham" and "How the Women Went from Dover" contain some of Whittier's best rendering of colonial customs and illustrate his complete understanding of the psychology of witchcraft and local superstition. However, overlong digressions and sentimental touches mar the graphic descriptions and rustic phrases—indicating again how badly Whittier's art suffered from a lack of selection. "The Palatine" also catches the grim and foreboding atmosphere of past days in recording the legend of a specter ship. Throughout there is swiftness of narrative, and the ending remarks avoid Whittier's usual moralizing to hint at the complex relationship existing between the physical and spiritual worlds. In the ending conceit Whittier wonders if the return of the ship to haunt those who wrecked it is nature's grim comment on our past actions. Two of Whittier's less well-known ballads also merit attention. "The Sisters" (1871) is based on a traditional ballad theme and in form

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and presentation bears a close resemblance to the original Scottish ballad "The Twa Sisters." The action of the story is concentrated on a single stormy night. The whole narrative is done in dialogue, with none of the "before" or "after" events included. Only one scene is given, the resulting effects of the tragedy; the reader must fill in the details. The presentation is bare, almost harsh, in its simplicity. Another of Whittier's later pieces, "The Henchman" (1877), also demonstrates his mastery of ballad techniques. Like "The Sisters" it has no moral, but it is entirely different in tone and presentation. The poem is a pure love song, chanted joyously by a young lover in praise of his lady. The imagery concentrates on the things of summer— birds, flowers, sun, and wind—and makes the lady superior to them all. This type of ballad is the exception rather than the rule for most of Whittier's later pieces. Some of his mature ballads, such as "The Brown Dwarf of Rtigen" (1888), "King Volmer and Elsie" (1872), and "Kallundborg Church" (1865), also convey the charm of a foreign land and create a fairy-tale atmosphere by the techniques used in "The Henchman." In general, however, Whittier's later ballads tend to take a concrete historical incident or some local tradition and dramatize it, using an actual locale for the setting. These tales fit in perfectly with his critical belief that there is romance underlying the simplest of incidents and that the writer should utilize the materials within his own experience. "The Wreck of Rivermouth" is typical. The story is based on the historical character of Goody Cole of Hampton, New Hampshire, who was persecuted for being a witch in the latter half of the seventeenth century. Many of the deeds attributed to her probably were superstitions based on popular traditions, yet they were common in Whittier's youth. The setting is laid precisely, with an eye for picturesque detail:

JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER And fair are the sunny isles in view East of the grisly Head of the Boar, And Agamenticus lifts its blue Disk of a cloud the woodlands o'er; And southerly, when the tide is down, Twixt white sea-waves and sand-hills brown, The beach-birds dance and the gray gulls wheel Over a floor of burnished steel. The ballad proper begins with the boat full of "goodly company" sailing past the rocks to fish outside the bay. The idyllic atmosphere of the summer's day is conveyed by the picture of the mowers in the Hampton meadows, who listen to the songs coming from the passing boat and who longingly watch the joyous young girls. As the boat rounds the point where Goody Cole lives, the laughing group taunts her and sails on, but only after she answers their gibes with a bitter proverb: * * The broth will be cold that waits at home;/ For it's one to go, but another to come!' " Ironically her prophecy proves true, as a sudden storm sweeps upon the ship, driving it to destruction on Rivermouth Rocks. In one brief moment all are lost, and the next stanzas mournfully reecho the previous happiness. A stunned and broken Goody Cole is left behind, pathetically cursing the sea for fulfilling her wish. Her tragedy, like Skipper Ireson's, is an inner thing—the torment she will have for the rest of her life, wondering if her angry words actually caused the death of the group. The final scene in church highlights the community's silent condemnation of those who dare to live outside its conventions. This scene is overlong and weakened by the heavy moral tone of the conclusion, "Lord, forgive us! we're sinners all!" The poem illustrates Whittier's successes and failures in ballad presentation. The story itself is typical and probable, and Whittier's handling of it realistic. He places it exactly in Hampton, by employing details characteristic of that locale: fishing for haddock and cod, the scent of the

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pines of nearby Rye, the mowing of salt grass, and Goody Cole's use of familiar proverbs. There is a keynote of drama in the situation and a direct narrative appeal that fit ballad presentation, for Whittier allows us to view a most human Goody Cole, an old woman tragically destroyed by a village's narrow hate. Yet, like so many of Whittier's ballads, this one needs more concentration, especially an ending before the dramatic effect is lost. Also, there is a touch here of his overreaching for sentimental and melodramatic effects, a fault clearly seen in "The Changeling" (1865) and "How the Women Went from Dover." Whittier's genre poems differ from his ballads in their lack of drama and objectivity; they are personal and subjective, fully revealing the poet and his ideas. They deal with the life and manners of common people, re-create a past agrarian society, or nostalgically remember boyhood experiences. Often they are longer, employing description and decorative imagery that minimize physical action and narrative pace; and the tone of wistful longing and romantic reminiscence replaces the impersonality and directness of the ballad. The best genre poems realistically portray the particular scenes, customs, traditions, and personages of nineteenth-century rural New England: the fields, drab and bare on a sleety winter day or green and growing under a summer sun; the plain colonial houses with their massive crossbeams, wide fireplaces, and rustic furniture; the barns filled with harvest or the excitement of a husking party; the isolation and narrowness of a small town with its delight in superstitions, eccentric wanderers, and local poets; the emotional effect of evangelical preaching on a farm populace; the traditional folk tales of stern "Yankee" forebears—the list is lengthy, a complete social history of the period. These genre poems most vividly exemplify Whittier's belief that the best materials for poetry lie in the commonplace objects of familiar experience.

695 / AMERICAN "Maud Muller" (1854) shows Whittier's genie art at its most typical. The story is an unpretentious account of the popular American belief in romantic love, set in a quaint rural background; yet Whittier pauses to examine this trust and to question its validity. The poem's narrative sparseness and ironic undertones avoid his usual sentimentality and overelaboration. The occasion for the poem was Whittier's recollection of a trivial event—his meeting with a young farm girl and her shame at her torn attire and bare feet. To this matter-of-fact incident he added an unadorned story of the appearance of a wealthy judge and the effect of this meeting upon their lives. The surface theme illustrates the belief that romantic love is necessary for happiness, but Whittier undercuts the excessive sentiment by developing a series of ironic contrasts: reality versus dream, action versus thought. The opening of the poem prepares for an objective treatment of the romance. A "mockbird" echoes Maud's daydreams; and the town at which she gazes, the symbol of her romantic aspirations, is "far-off" and causes "vague unrest." When the judge appears on his horse, Maud offers him some water. This simple placement of figures quietly indicates their basic irreconcilable differences. After their meeting Maud dreams of becoming his wife and of all its social benefits, while the judge longs for a simple fanner's life. Their dreams disappear in the harsh light of reality, however, and Whittier concludes by sadly musing about the "might have been." Within the context of the poem, the sorrow lies not in their failure to marry, but in their refusal to confront reality. The imaginative hopes of the judge and Maud reflect the sentiments of the "rags to riches" saga and trust in romantic love, yet the poem warns that, although one may believe in and cherish the dream, reality and life usually prove to be different. The ending remarks probe deeper as Whittier points out that only in heaven may our human dreams be real-

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ized (and even here the subjunctive "may" indicates his doubt that heaven would afford such romantic fulfillment), and that only a final spiritual goal provides consolation, not vain regrets. Rather than asking for a sentimental response to the story, he indicates his doubts and wonders who knows what is best after all. Therein lie the pathos and universality of the tale. Just as he captured the naive aspirations of his age, Whittier also preserved the memories of the old order and the history of the local scene. His rustic anecdotes, "Yankee" character sketches, and humorous satires of legends and superstitions rank with his best poetic achievements. His fanciful handling of Cotton Mather's history of a fabled two-headed snake in "The DoubleHeaded Snake of Newbury" (1859) is a comic triumph. Whittier ridicules Mather's credulous account of the wonders worked by God's providence by thoroughly reshaping the tale with appropriate exaggeration and a mock-heroic tone that satirize the Puritan delight in superstition and moralizing. The section on the townspeople describes the ancient gossips "Shaking their heads in their dreary way" to parallel the coiling of the snake. The passage reaches its climax with Whittier's caricature of Mather's entrance: Cotton Mather came galloping down All the way to Newbury town, With his eyes agog and his ears set wide, And his marvellous inkhorn at his side; Stirring the while in the shallow pool Of his brains for the lore he learned at school, To garnish the story, with here a streak Of Latin and there another of Greek: Even the ending preserves the burlesque mood as Whittier records the present-day life of the snake in a native proverb dealing with the quarreling of husband and wife: "One in body and two in will,/ The Amphisbaena is living still." This poem is the best among a group including "The

JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER Preacher" (1859), "Birchbrook Mill" (1884), and "The Prophecy of Samuel Sewall" (1859). Whittier never had notable success with characterization, but in a few anecdotes of historical figures that strikingly foreshadow the work of Robert Frost and Edwin Arlington Robinson he did capture the essential characteristics of the New England mind. "Abraham Davenport" (1866) shows Whittier's genre art at its most realistic and enjoyable. The "old preaching mood" of the poem is at once dryly humorous and honestly respectful. Whittier pictures Davenport's granitelike determination and shrewd common sense as he calmly goes about his legislative duties amid the fear and religious hysteria occasioned by an eclipse of the sun, the famous Dark Day of May 19, 1780. The poem opens with a laconic observation on the slackness of the present age: In the old days (a custom laid aside With breeches and cocked hats) the people sent Their wisest men to make the public laws. The terror of the day, lampooned by the overdrawn setting and the farfetched comparisons, conveys the still strong Calvinist belief in a wrathful God and the presence of the supernatural in physical occurrences. The style, with its salient observations, keeps this formal description from being melodramatic. Birds ceased to sing, and all the barn-yard fowls Roosted; the cattle at the pasture bars Lowed, and looked homeward; bats on leathern wings Flitted abroad; the sounds of labor died; Men prayed, and women wept; . . . The humorous urgency of the verbs and the incongruity of such insignificant detail ridicule the solemnity of the event to make the ending human prayers and tears outrageously anticlimactic. "Cobbler Keezar's Vision" (1861), "The Sycamores" (1857), and "Abram Morrison"

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(1884) also exemplify Whittier's facility in rustic character sketches. Two of the poems contrast wine-loving and hard-drinking immigrant outsiders, a German cobbler and an Irish workman, with the grim, repressed existence of the early Puritans; the third follows the career of an Irish Quaker well-known in Whittier's youth. All three are filled with Whittier's native wit and dry turn of phrase. One other characterization, "A Spiritual Manifestation" (1870), reveals a most human Roger Williams who laconically satirizes the mob of dissenters and religious cranks who have descended upon his colony. Here shrewd social comment, realistic genre touches, and character insight balance the usual didactic passages and digressive material. More and more Whittier turned to the memories of his own youth for poetic material, typifying and idealizing the barefoot days, the district school days, and lost childhood romances. Throughout all these poems run the strains of his sentimental longing for the simplicity of a past social order. "The Barefoot Boy" (1855), "In School-Days" (1870), "My Playmate" (1860), "Memories" (1841), and "A Sea Dream" (1874) captured the romantic aspirations of a wide reading public and were enshrined as part of traditional Americana along with Longfellow's verses and the songs of Stephen Foster. Although "The Barefoot Boy" displays Whittier's most obvious artistic flaws, it also indicates why his verses were so popular. The introduction is sentimental and unreal, depending on hackneyed imagery and conventional poetic diction. The boy is styled "little man," wears "pantaloons," has lips "kissed by strawberries on the hill," and is pompously addressed as "Prince." These generalizations reveal nothing about a real boy or his background; rather, they show how responsive Whittier was to the Currier and Ives approach to local color. The central section of the poem does realistically examine the world and interests of a small boy. Forgetting the ideal-

700 I AMERICAN ized little man, Whittier identifies himself with the scene: I was rich in flowers and trees, Humming-birds and honey-bees; For my sport the squirrel played, Plied the snouted mole his spade; For my taste the blackberry cone Purpled over hedge and stone; All the world I saw or knew Seemed a complex Chinese toy, Fashioned for a barefoot boy! The last stanzas return to the platitudes of the opening as Whittier concludes with the pious hope that the boy's bare feet will never sink in the "Quick and treacherous sands of sin." And yet this poem became a national tradition, symbolizing a romantic phase of America's past. Its companion piece, "In School-Days," is correctly considered a poem for children, although its first four stanzas contain good local color. "My Playmate" is the best of three love lyrics that nostalgically recall the bittersweet pain of young love. Its blend of memory and reality, symbolized by the moaning pines and falling blossoms, artistically portrays an older man's sense of regret and longing. One of Whittier's most neglected poems, "The Pennsylvania Pilgrim" (1872), shows how accurately and realistically he could re-create the past. His portrait of the seventeenth-century Quaker Francis Daniel Pastorius fully explores the varied nature of that settler, while the mood and image development convey Pastorius' quiet, secure personality. Employing a style similar to Jonathan Edwards' Personal Narrative with its insistent repetition of certain phrases, Whittier indicates the presence of the Inner Light in Pastorius. Throughout the poem terms such as "peace," "mild," "meek," "simple," "tender," "sober," and "mystical" are continually enlarged upon and reechoed. Decorative, pasto-

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ral similes pervade the poem and create a quiet, almost dreamlike atmosphere. Rarely did Whittier achieve a more artistic fusion of his own interests and those of the actual story than in the following lines: Fair First-Day mornings, steeped in summer calm, Warm, tender, restful, sweet with woodland balm, Came to him, like some mother-hallowed psalm There, through the gathered stillness multiplied And made intense by sympathy, . . . Balancing these light images are references to planting, sowing, reaping, and blossoming that signify Pastorius' attempts to transplant Old World culture in the New World, his cultivation of religious tolerance, and his work to free the slaves. The portrait leaves the reader with a full impression of a complex, idealistic, and learned Quaker who was at the same time a simple, tolerant, humble man. The most famous of Whittier's genre poems, and undoubtedly his masterpiece, is "SnowBound" (1866). Written a few months after the end of the Civil War, it was his memorial to the two women who were closest to him during his life—his mother, who had died eight years before, and his sister Elizabeth, who had died the previous year. The loss of Elizabeth, his favorite companion, left Whittier a lonely man; and the outcome of the Civil War completed the one great work of his life, the abolition of slavery. In this mood of sorrow and isolation, he turned to the happy past when the family was intact at the Haverhill birthplace, and constructed this winter idyll to express his feelings for the area and family that had produced and molded him. Its theme, the value of family affection, had always been deepest in his heart; and its locale, the homestead during a snowstorm, was one he knew intimately. Nowhere in Whittier's work, outside of

JOHN GREENLEAF WH1TTIER I 701 some of his ballads, had the material so suited his capabilities and interest. The movement of the poem turns on the poet's nostalgic recalling of the love and protection that his family once gave him, thereby emphasizing his painful sense of present loss and hope for spiritual consolation. These emotions are developed primarily by a series of contrasts—of fire and snow, past and present, people and elements—that combine to form the larger theme of love and immortality struggling against pain and death. Perhaps the key to interpreting the poem is the symbolic development of the wood fire. Fire is associated not only with brightness, relaxation, and physical comfort, but also with the emotional and spiritual warmth of family love, with the "genial glow" of community brotherhood, and with divine protection against the evil spirits of nature and time. Artistically delayed by the description of the storm, the initial lighting of the fire introduces the Whittier household, and its blaze symbolizes the reality of family love. Its significance is highlighted as loving hands gather the wood and brush necessary to kindle the fire. The "curious art" displayed in these simple tasks suggests a ritual-like significance in their performance. The first red blaze metamorphoses the kitchen into "rosy bloom," but an even greater miracle occurs as the snowdrifts outside reflect the inner fire with their own "mimic flame." For the first time the fire controls, and the snow receives its burning imprint. Yet the outer elements are not so easily conquered, and the moon reveals an eerie world of "dead white" snows and "pitchy black" hemlocks suffused by an "unwarming" light. Once more the fire's "tropic heat" asserts its power; and the glowing light reveals a mug of simmering cider, a row of apples, and a basket of nuts— objects closely related to the inner world of personality and life. Throughout the poem Whittier associates the

vigor and happiness of family talk, games, and interests with the color and sparkle of the glowing logs, and unites the close bond of family love with the red heat of the fire. For example, the uncle's simple tales cause the listeners to forget "the outside cold,/The bitter wind." Whittier also weaves into the fire pattern the sunny richness, ripe crops, blooming hillsides, and full greenness associated with summer. Finally, the dying fire indicates the end of the evening's activities while also symbolizing the eventual crumbling of the security and protection of the family group. By contrast, the storm evokes sensations of fear and awe, and illustrates the terrible anonymity of nature and death. It dominates the entire first section, transforming its principal antagonist, the sun, into a cheerless, dark, snow-blown wanderer, and enforcing on the family a "savage" isolation that obtains no comfort from "social smoke." The storm's assault on the house is likened to the later attack of death on its individual members as Whittier recalls "the chill weight of the winter snow" on Elizabeth's grave. Conversely, the storm's magical power changes a dull, commonplace farm into a wintry fairyland of beauty and wonder. A second major contrast deals with the past versus the present. Whittier imaginatively recreates the past while echoing his present-day feelings of loneliness. Four main interpolations deal with this problem of time and change, contrasting past happiness with present pain and concluding with the hope for future social progress and spiritual consolation. For example, the first interpolation (lines 175-211) appropriately comes when the fire is lighted and the storm's force seems abated. As if lost in the scene he has recalled, Whittier cries: "What matter how the night behaved?/What matter how the north-wind raved?" But immediately the knowledge of "Time and Change" stops him; for what the elements failed to do that night, death has since ac-

702 / AMERICAN compJished. These stark reflections are contrasted with the strength of Whittier's faith as the section ends with his defiant affirmation that spiritual life is the "lord of Death," for a soul's love remains an eternal force. These major contrasts are further expanded by an increasing depth of images and by a movement from concrete physical description to an investigation of personality and emotions, with a final return to realistic depiction. All these aspects are blended into the total theme—the strength and bond of family love. At the heart of the poem comes Whittier's portrait of his family and the winter visitors. The father, mother, and uncle are characterized by warm summer days, fishing and haying, ripening corn, steaming clambakes, and sunny hillsides. Their plain, childlike natures and interests are perfectly echoed by the quaint couplet rhythm, the rough unpolished lines, and the vernacular "Yankee" rhymes. To follow these innocent characters, Whittier introduces another group of three, the aunt and two sisters, whose more complex natures reflect some measure of life's pain, sacrifice, and loneliness. The tone becomes more introspective and the images more expansive and thoughtful. The aunt's still youthful charm and virgin freshness are expressed in a delicate summer figure of clouds and dew: Before her still a cloud-land lay, The mirage loomed across her way; The morning dew, that dries so soon With others, glistened at her noon. The elder sister's death is described as an entrance "beneath the low green tent/Whose curtain never outward swings!" Significantly, her death is not snow-filled or chilling; rather, it is the lifting of a tent flap, with the later discovery that this light opening has been closed with the heavy weight of green sod. A following passage on Elizabeth introduces the second interpolation. Once again Whittier's faith struggles with the

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brutal reality of death as the chilling snows of the grave cover the summer charm and violet beauty of Elizabeth's nature. Finally the poet asks: Am I not richer than of old? Safe in thy immortality, What change can reach the wealth I hold? At first glance the figure appears paradoxical, for how can Elizabeth's death make the poet "richer" and "safe"? On one level his rich memories of her vibrant personality and spiritual perfection are now "safe," secured forever from realistic tarnish and inexorable change; but also her "immortality" secures him, since it illuminates his final spiritual goal and provides him with a standard for judging all his future acts. The following two characterizations portray the visiting schoolmaster and the "not unfeared, half-welcome guest" (Harriet Livermore) while also introducing the third interpolation. The realistic sketch of the schoolmaster's entertaining knowledge of the classics and of rural games, his boyish humor, and his self-reliant, yet humble, nature is a fine genre portrait that matches the earlier ones of the father and uncle. Indeed, the schoolmaster's intimacy with the family is underscored by the lines that introduce him as one who 4 'Held at the fire his favored place ^Its warm glow lit a laughing face." His further delineation as one of "Freedom's young apostles" completes Whittier's portrait of the fearless young leader whose moral strength will destroy social injustice such as slavery and will open a new era of peace and progress. The final figure, Harriet Livermore, presents an interesting variation of the fire imagery as she combines characteristics of the spirits of light and of blackness. Her warm and lustrous eyes flash light, but also hold "dark languish" and wrath; her brows are "black with night" and shoot out a "dangerous light." This tortured nature warps and twists the "Celestial Fire," for she enters the family group without sharing its

JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER close affection or receiving the warm benefits of love from the wood fire. Her complex characterization is appropriately concluded by the uneasy observation that in some natures "will and fate" form a tangled skein. Structurally these two outsiders represent the contrasting "warm-cold" aspects of a forgotten external world. The schoolmaster offers the warmth of companionship, the balance of learning, and eventual hope for social responsibility; while Harriet Livermore reveals the chill of fanaticism and the failure of personal, emotional efforts to correct injustice. Their intrusion also foreshadows the unavoidable demands that society is soon to make upon the secure family group. The final section of the poem returns briefly to the physical world of the opening stanzas. The teamsters and plows control the effects of the storm; and the children find sport, instead of terror, in the whiteness. Signalizing the larger social union that radiates from the smaller family bond, the visiting doctor utilizes the mother's nursing skill to aid a sick neighbor. With the arrival of the local newspaper, "the chill embargo" of the storm is completely broken; and a joyous Whittier cries out that the world was his once more. While this seems to be the logical conclusion for the poem, it disregards the reality of time's ultimate victory. So in a final interpolation Whittier asks the "Angel of the backward look" to close the volume in which the angel has been writing. With difficulty he shakes off this mood of regret and nostalgia to respond to present-day demands (much as he had pictured the young schoolmaster doing), and employs the image of the century-blooming aloe dramatically to portray the successful flowering of his abolitionist's aim of eradicating slavery. The ending lines further console Whittier with the hope that his "Flemish" artistry has truly re-created "pictures of old days" and that others may gather a similar spiritual and emotional comfort from them by

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stretching the "hands of memory forth/To warm them at the wood-fire's blaze!" A final summer image completes the poem; the thought of future readers enjoying his efforts refreshes the poet as odors blown from unseen meadows or the sight of lilies in some half-hidden pond. These lines reflect the inner serenity and imperturbable peace that offer final solace. The dread of time and change is assuaged by the confidence that social reform will improve the future, by the knowledge that art often outlasts time's ravages, and by the certainty that spiritual immortality does conquer it completely. So the poem moves in artistic transitions from the physical level of storm and fire to the psychological world of death and love, utilizing the wood fire as the dominant symbol. It is for this skillful fusing of form and theme that Whittier deserves to have future readers send him "benedictipn of the air." The publication of "Snow-Bound" in 1866 brought Whittier national fame and financial security, and changed his reputation from that of a reform poet to the "wood thrush" of Essex County. When "The Tent on the Beach" appeared the next year and sold at the rate of a thousand copies a day, a delighted but slightly shocked Whittier remarked that it seemed to be a greater swindle on the public than P. T. Barnum ever perpetrated. A responsive reading public asked for more; and so "Among the Hills" was published in 1868, then "Miriam" in 1870, followed by five new volumes of poetry in the next fifteen years. This late flowering continued unabated and vigorous past Whittier's seventieth year, with the themes of love, peace, and acceptance of God's will pervading these poems. The tumultuous problems of the Reconstruction, of swift westward expansion, and of developing industrial power did not find the emotional response in the poet that contemporary events of pie-Civil War America had aroused. Far removed from actual reform struggle, Whittier had

704 I AMERICAN only mild interest in strikes, woman suffrage, and corruption in government. In these later years Whittier searched poetically for the meaning of life, and the intense spiritual consciousness that had permeated all aspects of his life found its natural outlet in religious lyrics and hymns. Certainly his own age read him primarily as a religious poet; and his verses openly reflect his admiration of spiritual strength, his deep faith in the goodness of God, and his love of fellow man as a sharer in the divine essence. The widespread hymnal use of these lyrics testifies to their worth as expressions of universal religious beliefs. Although few of Whittier's poems were written expressly for that purpose, the adaptations of "The Eternal Goodness" (1865), "Our Master" (1866), "At Last" (1882), and "The Brewing of Soma" (1872) have enshrined his religious verses among the finest expressions of American Protestant thought. Without metaphysical complexities or any dogmatic stance, Whittier simply and directly expressed the age's trust in God's love and captured its innermost hopes in lines like these from "The Eternal Goodness": And so beside the Silent Sea I wait the muffled oar; No harm from Him can come to me On ocean or on shore. I know not where His islands lift Their fronded palms in air; I only know I cannot drift Beyond His love and care. Whittier's popularity in the late nineteenth century surpassed even that of Longfellow, and his later years brought a series of uninterrupted literary and personal triumphs. The popular image of the fiery reformer hammering out incendiary verses softened to the revered portrait of a white-bearded old man gently spinning out rustic tales of long ago. Oliver Wendell Holmes

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was only reflecting the taste of his age when he wrote that Whittier's poems brought him "the morning air of a soul that breathes freely, and always the fragrance of a loving spirit." Under such conditions of religious security, glorification of virtue, and public pride in the abolition of slavery, Whittier became an object of veneration and near awe; and his birthday was a national holiday. As he grew older, Whittier found relaxation and comfort with a restricted group of relatives and friends who sheltered him from an increasingly curious public. After the death of his sister, literary friends like the Claflins and the Fieldses opened their Boston homes to him; and a host of minor women writers, pleased with Whittier's interest in their writings and responsive to his bachelorhood, became frequent visitors. Newspapers continually manufactured romances and engagements for Whittier; but he remained single and, despite the attentions of close friends, his final years were lonely. His humor and tolerance saved him from the worst of isolated old age; but the crowd of interviewers, autograph seekers, and aspiring writers who descended on Amesbury as pilgrims going to Mecca exasperated even the patient Whittier. He invented all sorts of stratagems to escape them; but, as he ruefully remarked, he could lose a "him" but never a "her." In 1876 Whittier left his Amesbuiy home to spend the spring and autumn with relatives at a secluded, beautifully landscaped estate in Danvers that he named Oak Knoll. Severe winters were passed with his Cartland relatives in Newburyport, while the New Hampshire coast and inland mountains drew him in the summer. Whittier remained alert and active throughout the 1880's: he published numerous volumes of new verse, received what he called a "nickname" from Harvard—an LL.D.—edited the definitive collection of his prose and poetry, and had his last volume, At Sundown, privately printed in

JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER 1890. On December 17, 1891, Whittier was eighty-four years old. Shortly afterward he had an almost fatal attack of grippe; but his health improved in the spring, and by summer he was strong enough to visit with friends in Hampton Falls, New Hampshire, near the coast he loved so well. He took excursions around the countryside and even wrote two poems in honor of Oliver Wendell Holmes. However, on September 3 he suffered a severe paralytic stroke and died on September 7, 1892. At his death Whittier seemingly was enshrined as one of America's great poets. Less than fifty years later that opinion was completely reversed. Although he was definitely a minor poet, Whittier's ballads and genre pieces place him midway in the direct line of American poetic expression that stretches from Anne Bradstreet to Robert Frost. Certainly his poems fall short of the richness and imaginative depth of poets like Whitman or Dickinson, but his verses exhibit more spiritual illumination and downright "grit" than the poems of the other schoolroom writers. His place in American literature seems secure. He will continue to be read and enjoyed as long as people respond to their traditions and heritage, and want to find honest expression of their fundamental democratic and religious feelings. Winfield Townley Scott's penetrating poem "Mr. Whittier" aptly characterizes the man and illuminates the lasting quality of Whittier's achievement: It is easier to leave Snow-Bound and a dozen other items in or out of The school curriculum than it is to have written them. Try it and see. It is so much easier to forget than to have been Mr. Whittier. He put the names of our places into his poems and he honored us with himself; And is for us but not altogether, because larger than us.

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Selected Bibliography WORKS OF JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER The Writings of John Greenleaf Whittier, edited by Horace E. Scudder. 7 vols. Boston—New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1888-89. Whittier Correspondence from the Oak Knoll Collections, 1830-1892, edited by John Albree. Salem, Mass.: Essex Book and Print Club, 1911. Cady, Edwin Harrison, and Harry Hayden Clark. Whittier on Writers and Writing: The Uncollected Critical Writings of John Greenleaf Whittier. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1950. The Letters of John Greenleaf Whittier, edited by John B. Pickard. 3 vols. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1975.

BIBLIOGRAPHIES Currier, Thomas Franklin. A Bibliography of John Greenleaf Whittier. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1937. von Frank, Albert J. Whittier: A Comprehensive Annotated Bibliography. New York: Garland, 1976.

CRITICAL AND BIOGRAPHICAL STUDIES BIOGRAPHIES

Bennett, Whitman. Whittier: Bard of Freedom. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1941. Currier, Thomas Franklin, ed. Elizabeth Lloyd and the Whittiers. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1939. Keller, Karl. "John Greenleaf Whittier," Fifteen American Authors Before 1900: Bibliographic Essays on Research and Criticism, edited by Robert A. Rees and Earl N. Harbert. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1971. Kennedy, William Sloane. John G. Whittier: The

706 I AMERICAN Poet of Freedom. New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1892. Mordell, Albert. Quaker Militant: John Greenleaf Whittier. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1933. Perry, Bliss. John Greenleaf Whittier: A Sketch of His Life. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1907. Pickard, Samuel T. Life and Letters of John Greenleaf Whittier. Boston-New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1907. Pollard, John A. John Greenleaf Whittier: Friend of Man. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1949. Wagenknecht, Edward. John Greenleaf Whittier: A Portrait in Paradox. New York: Oxford University Press, 1967. Woodwell, Roland B. 'The Life of John Greenleaf Whittier." (Unpublished manuscript on deposit at the Haverhill Public Library. Completed in 1974, this is the definitive life of Whittier.) CRITICAL STUDIES

Carpenter, George Rice. John Greenleaf Whittier. Boston-New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1903. Leary, Lewis. John Greenleaf Whittier. New York: Twayne, 1961. Pickard, John B. John Greenleaf Whittier: An Introduction and Interpretation. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1961. Warren, Robert Penn. John Greenleaf Whittier s Poetry: An Appraisal and a Selection. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1971. SPECIAL TOPICS Arms, George W. The Fields Were Green: A New View of Bryant, Whittier, Holmes, Lowell, and Longfellow, with a Selection of Their Poems. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1953. Pearce, Roy Harvey. The Continuity of American Poetry. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1961.

WRITERS Pickard, John B., ed. Memorabilia of John Greenleaf Whittier, Hartford, Conn.: Emerson Society, 1968. , and others, eds. Whittier and Whittierland: Portrait of a Poet and His World. North Andover, Mass.: Eagle-Tribune Press, 1976. Pickard, Samuel T. Whittier-Land: A Handbook of North Essex. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1904. Waggoner, Hyatt H. American Poets: From the Puritans to the Present. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1968. Wright, Donald P. John G. Whittier: A Profile in Pictures. Groveland, Mass.: Boyd James Press, 1967. CRITICAL ARTICLES

Hall, Donald. "Whittier," Texas Quarterly, 3:165-74 (Autumn 1960). Jones, Howard Mumford. "Whittier Reconsidered," Essex Institute. Historical Collections, 93:231-46 (October 1957). Jones, Rufiis. "Whittier's Fundamental Religious Faith," Byways of Quaker History, edited by Howard H. Brinton. Wallingford, Conn.: Pendel Hill, 1944. Powell, Desmond. "Whittier," American Literature, 9:335-42 (November 1937). Ringe, Donald. "The Artistry of Whittier *s Margaret Smith's Journal," Essex Institute. Historical Collections, 108:235-43 (July 1972). Scott, Winfield Townley. "Poetry in American: A New Consideration of Whittier's Verse," New England Quarterly, 7:258-75 (June 1934). Trawick, Leonard M. "Whittier's Snow-Bound: A Poem About the Imagination," Essays in Literature, 1:46-53 (Spring 1974). Whittier Newsletter (1966), edited by John B. Pickaid and others, is an annual review of Whittier scholarship and research. —JOHNS. PICKARD

Elinor Wylie 188^-1928 WElinor Wylie first appeared on the liter-

at North East Harbor, Maine. Love of Maine lasted throughout her life, influencing her choice of the Yankee David Butternut as a companion for Shiloh in The Orphan Angel and being reflected in such poems as "Wild Peaches," "Silver Filigree," "Spring Pastoral," "An American in England," and "The Golden Heifer." The Hoyt family moved to Washington, D.C., when Elinor was twelve years old. She attended Mrs. Flint's (later Holton Arms) School and took classes at the Corcoran Gallery of Art; and she was so passionately interested in her schoolwork that she was considered a "bluestocking" by the time she was sixteen. Rosalba Berni, the heroine of The Venetian Glass Nephew who is called the "Infant Sappho," and Rosalie Lillie of The Orphan Angel, who writes poetry and plays the Spanish guitar, must owe something to this period of Wylie's life. Like most girls of her time and class, Elinor left school at eighteen and "came out" as a debutante in Washington society. She and her sister Constance were taken to Europe by her grandfather, to whom, she later told Carl Van Daren, she owed a great deal of her education. Caught up in parties and other social engagements, Elinor Hoyt became engaged to Philip Hichborn, the son of an admiral. Her early married life, during which she spent much time on motor launches and at dinner parties, must have

ary scene in 1921, she was already a public figure. For the next seven years her public life was less glamorous as she applied herself to the task of writing three books of poetry and four novels. But in spite of this serious investment of her time and energy in artistic and intellectual work, her remarkable beauty, her elegance of dress and person, and her exquisite taste made her an almost too perfect embodiment of the "poetess." The 1920's in America was a period when the woman poet flourished: Sara Teasdale, Amy Lowell, Marianne Moore, Hilda Doolittle, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Louise Bog an, Leonie Adams were all writing at the same time as Elinor Wylie. Wylie's earliest years, however, could not have been more respectable and less imbued with poetry than with public service. Elinor Morton Hoyt was born in 1885 at Somerville, New Jersey. The first of five children, she was the greatgranddaughter of Morton McMichael, a mayor of Philadelphia, and the granddaughter of Henry Martyn Hoyt, a governor of Pennsylvania. Her father, Henry Hoyt, was assistant attorney general of the United States under William McKinley and solicitor general under Theodore Roosevelt. For the first two years of her life, Elinor lived in Somerville. Then the family moved to Philadelphia, where she attended Miss Baldwin's School in Bryn Mawr, and spent summers 707

708 I AMERICAN involved a great deal of hidden misery. She said of it more than a decade later, "My marriage was a prison. I felt stifled. There was no room for my mind at all. I had to get away. While my father was alive I had him to turn to. But after he died I was desperate." And so in December 1910 Elinor Hichborn, then twenty-four and the mother of a young son, eloped with Horace Wylie. The scandal was the talk of Washington. Horace, the father of five children, was unable to obtain his wife's consent to a divorce. Under the circumstances, life in the United States seemed impossible for them. Elinor therefore left her two-year-old son with his father and went abroad with Horace Wylie. Calling themselves Mr. and Mrs. Waring, they lived in Burley, a village in the heart of the New Forest, some two hours from London. Horace, who was fifteen years older than Elinor, devoted part of each day to instructing her in literature. He saw himself as Jonathan Swift and Elinor as both Stella and Vanessa. Speaking many years later to Mary Colum, Elinor said that Horace "really opened the world of poetry and literature" to her. Most of the time she was very happy, but there were embarrassing incidents. Once, while visiting an English country house for a weekend, she met a woman who had known Horace in Washington and who told their hostess that Elinor and Horace were not married and were using a false name. Such humiliations made Elinor very wary of people. The haughty and beautiful face of the famous Nicholas Muray photograph that frequently forms the frontispiece for volumes of her poetry reflects great defensiveness. That same defensiveness against a hostile world is central to Black Armour, and perhaps Elinor Wylie is speaking of her personal experience when she writes about Mr. Hazard in her novel Mr. Hodge and Mr. Hazard: Years of the severest lessons of adversity had rendered Mr. Hazard's outward composure so

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nearly flawless that the sharp lancet of his selfcontempt was blunted upon its surface. This superhuman armour was divided by no clumsy cracks and joinings; rather it resembled a coat of flexible mail, a cool marvel of contrived providence, a knitting up of nerves into invulnerable proof. Mr. Hazard's skill had woven it; he might have been proud of its difficult fabric. Yet he disliked the thing. It was a tough and stringent shield against the world, but after all it was only a makeshift. Even if his own skin had been but a beggarly tissue, he missed it sadly. He wished he might have patched and mended its tatters to last him into eternity. Philip Hichborn shot and killed himself in 1912, and Elinor felt hounded by gossip as she and Horace moved from Burley to Merrow Down to Witley. Meanwhile, her mother had paid for the private printing of sixty copies of Incidental Numbers (1912), a volume of her poems modeled upon and inspired by William Blake's Songs of Innocence. In later years Wylie discounted the importance of these poems, and she never wished them to be considered part of her literary production. Elinor and Horace Wylie returned to America in 1915, when, as a war measure, the English government required all persons living under assumed names to report to the police. Horace Wylie's wife agreed to a divorce, and he and Elinor were married in August 1916. They then went first to Bar Harbor, and later to Somesville, Maine, where her eleven-year-old son joined them for a visit. The boy, who had not seen her since he was two, lived with his paternal grandparents. After a short time in Augusta, Georgia, Horace and Elinor Wylie settled in Washington, D.C., in 1919. Horace took a job with the Interstate Commerce Commission and was away a good deal in connection with railroads on the West Coast. Elinor was writing now and meeting some of her brother Henry's friends, particularly

ELINOR WYL1E I 709 Sinclair Lewis and William Rose Benet, with whom she discussed literature. After she published Nets to Catch the Wind (1921) and was invited to read at the New York Poetry Society, Wylie decided to live in New York, where her circle included Edmund Wilson and John Peale Bishop. She was now submitting poetry to Century Magazine, Outlook, New Republic, and Poetry. Her literary career had begun in earnest by the time she became poetry editor of Vanity Fair at a salary of fifty dollars a week. In 1923 she and Horace agreed to a friendly divorce, and she married William Rose Benet. Wylie spent the summer of 1923 writing at the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire. That same year her second volume of poetry, Black Armour, and her first novel, Jennifer Lorn, appeared. Her next three works were novels: The Venetian Glass Nephew (1925), The Orphan Angel (1926), and Mr. Hound and Mr. Hazard (1928). It was unfortunate that Wylie spent so much time writing fiction although it was a more remunerative way of using her talent. The Orphan Angel was a Book of the Month Club selection and earned her $8,000 in an immediate lump sum, $1,800 of which she spent to buy part of an original manuscript by Percy Bysshe Shelley and a signed check from Shelley to William Godwin. Although the public response to Jennifer Lorn was spectacular and the critical acclaim almost irresistible for any author, Wylie's fame as a novelist was clearly the result of a fad for the precious and the exotic. Trivial Breath appeared in 1928. Clearly an advance on all her poetry that had preceded it, this volume announced the advent of a more mature poet. But Wylie had only a short time to live. She spent that time in England, at London and Henley-on-Thames. In the spring of 1928 Wylie fell and hurt her back. The high blood pressure that had threatened her life since 1923 became complicated by incipient Bright's disease. When Carl Van Doren visited her in June of that year at her house in Chelsea, she read him

some of the sonnets from "One Person." She told him that at last she absolutely loved someone; always before she had been loved. There had been three "trysts": "We had met under an oak, an ash, and a thorn." In October she suffered a mild stroke that resulted in partial paralysis of one side of her face. Wylie sailed for America on December 1, 1928. On December 12 she recited her new sonnets to a small group of friends in New York. Mary Colum, to whom she spoke about her love for the man in the sonnets, remarked, "It seemed a simple and rather pathetic relationship where two people with obligations to others were attracted to each other in a romantic and intellectual way." Wylie intended to live near this man, but not to make her life with him. On December 16, after preparing the final manuscript for what would become her posthumous volume of poetry, Angels and Earthly Creatures, she died in her New York apartment. Wylie's life was certainly passionate and romantic. Her poetry, however, is more remarkable for its clarity and discipline than for its emotional content. Writing in 1923 about the craft of poetry, she argues: . . . in the remote possibility that some of us are not geniuses, but only adroit and talented young people with a passion for writing verse, it may be an excellent thing after all that we have cultivated a small clean technique. A number of minor poets are far better employed in being brittle and bright and metallic than in being soft and opulently luscious. It keeps the workshop tidier, and leaves a little elbow-room in which the very great may move their hammers and chisels in serenity. Although Elinor Wylie is frequently thought of as a peculiarly artificial and precious poet, the epitome of the female poet of the American 1920's, she is an amazingly strong and, in some senses, hard poet. Perhaps Mary Colum, a friend as well as a critic, goes too far when she says that

710 I AMERICAN she "brought in a new despair—a despair which seemed to be another name for courage and combat. " But her insight is much truer than the more recent assessment by Thomas Gray, who describes her as "primarily an artificer rather than an interpreter of life." Wylie was thirty-six when her first volume of poetry, Nets to Catch the Wind, appeared. Nevertheless, the book was a very precocious piece of work. There was simply no preparation for it. She had not gone through the usual apprenticeship to develop the musical and rhetorical skills that clearly were there. Her poetry would grow and deepen in the short space of years left to her, but in her first volume she showed herself to be an accomplished poet. Many things that must be said of Wylie's poetry in general can be said of Nets to Catch the Wind. Already some of her most important characteristics are in evidence: extreme contrasts of heat and coolness, of darkness and light, of smoothness and angularity, of height and depth; technical experiments with variations of vowel sounds; a love of close rhyme schemes and set meters; thematic development within a sonnet sequence; subtle handling of couplets; delicate observations of animals, insects, and plants; an intellectual power that strengthens the apparent musical quality of each line. The first three poems in this volume speak on behalf of what is wild, adventuresome, alive—a persistent theme in Wylie's poetry. In "Beauty" she places what is beautiful outside the realm of good and bad, cautioning against any attempt to turn the wild gull of beauty into the tame dove of goodness. In the last two lines of the three-stanza poem she conveys the sense of the absolute integrity, the unrestrainable freedom of beauty. Attaching moral value to beauty means either cursing or enshrining it, in either case vitiating it. By connecting the innocence of beauty with the hard heart of a child, she suggests both the strength and the fragility of beauty's aloofness.

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One of Wy lie's most frequently anthologized poems, "The Eagle and the Mole," is an arrogant statement recommending two ways of retaining an uncorrupted self: the eagle's and the mole's. The poem enjoins us either to live above the clouds or to burrow underground, but in either case to shun the crowd. The advice is given in language full of contempt for the "reeking herd," "the polluted flock," "the huddled warmth of crowds," "the lathered pack," "the steaming sheep." These strong sensory words communicate extreme physical distaste. In the first part of the poem, where she develops the eagle's way, what is sought by avoiding the herd is a heady freedom, a sense of unhampered movement. Security and comfort are disdained by the "stoic bird" that does not fear storm or sun. In the second part, which develops the mole's way, what is sought by avoiding the 4 lathered pack " is a kind of protection. Even the word "pack" suggests pursuit and flight. And whereas the eagle remains alone, the mole holds intercourse With roots of trees and stones, With rivers at their source, And disembodied bones. The two ways, therefore, represent widely different choices. The intense appeal of the poem resides, no doubt, partly in the vivid invective. Denigrating the foe is an exhilarating experience even for spectators. This is particularly true when the anger and contempt become, as they do here, a mode of self-protection. But there is also a peaceful resolution to the poem that is immensely satisfying. The restlessness that continues through the first five stanzas disappears in the final stanza, most of which is quoted above, where a quiet and almost communal haven is found. That harmony is increased if a reader associates the concluding lines with William

ELINOR WYLIE / 711 Wordsworth's description of a dead woman in her grave: Rolled round in earth's diurnal course, With rocks, and stones, and trees. The third poem, "Madman's Song," illustrates Wylie's strengths and weaknesses. The song is mad indeed; the maddening repetition of the sound "o" that imitates the music of the hunting horn resounds obsessively through the three stanzas in all its variations. Except for the central idea that it is better to grow worn and old by living an intense, physical life than to live comfortably unaware of the wild world outside, the sense of individual lines is unimportant. Wylie is intoxicated with the sounds she can create. There is a vacuousness about the poem's content that no amount of technically achieved beauty of sound can dispel. In her justly famous "Velvet Shoes," also in this volume, sound and sense work together in a tight and rigorous discipline. The poem begins with the invitation "Let us walk in the white snow" and ends with the acceptance "We shall walk in the snow." Between these lines the shoes become velvet shoes as details and sounds create a sense of the snow in the air and on the ground and of feet walking upon it. Let us walk in the white snow In a soundless space; With footsteps quiet and slow, At a tranquil pace, Under veils of white lace. I shall go shod in silk, And you in wool, White as a white cow's milk, More beautiful Than the breast of a gull. We shall walk through the still town In a windless peace;

We shall step upon white down, Upon silver fleece, Upon softer than these. We shall walk in velvet shoes: Wherever we go Silence will fall like dews On white silence below. We shall walk in the snow. Here the softly sibilant "s" predominates, creating the monotony and repetition that simulate the snow falling. The main visual, kinetic, tactile sensations cluster around shoes, silence, snow. Numerous other 4 V words support these three, contributing to the effect first of snow falling and then of snow falling upon snow, first of shoes lifting and falling until snow accumulates on the bottom of those shoes, when snow presses upon snow, and the snowy shoes feel like velvet. Like so many of the poems in this volume, "Velvet Shoes" describes a retreat from the vulgar world. Written in the period following Wylie's years of seclusion abroad, when she felt hounded by gossip and newspaper scandalmongering, it is not surprising that this first book of poetry reflects hostility toward the crowd. The longing to be "quit of the cruel cold," to be "under the roots of the balsam tree," as she says in "Winter Sleep," suggests a desire for protection that we have already seen in the description of the mole's way in "The Eagle and the Mole." The poem "Sanctuary," however, indicates that Wylie recognized the danger in her desire to flee to a cell built to contain herself and her cool and quiet dreams. As the last brick is put in place, leaving not even a chink, she asks, "How can I breathe?" and is answered, "You can't, you fool!" Reacting to a cruel and painful world by building a sanctuary in which to hide from its attacks, one is left in a prison. In "Proud Lady" Wylie describes her determination not to be marred and molded by the

7/2 / AMERICAN world's hatred, not to define herself merely by opposition to it, but to turn the "pain to a grace," "the scorn to a charm/' For in addition to her hostility toward the crowd, these first poems express her hunger for experience. The four sonnets of "Wild Peaches" emphasize the one as much as the other. After describing the Baltimore landscape with its short winter and long summer where "spring begins before winter's over," its abundance of squirrels and chestnuts in autumn, its early-summer lush superfluity of strawberries and blue plums, she writes: Down to the Puritan marrow of my bones There's something in this richness that I hate. I love the look, austere, immaculate, Of landscapes drawn in pearly monotones. There's something in my very blood that owns Bare hills, cold silver on a sky of slate, A thread of water, churned to milky spate Streaming through slanted pastures fenced with stones. I love those skies, thin blue or snowy gray, Those fields sparse-planted, rendering meagre sheaves; That spring, briefer than apple-blossom's breath, Summer, so much too beautiful to stay, Swift autumn, like a bonfire of leaves, And sleepy winter, like the sleep of death. The kind of austerity described here does not, of course, exclude sensual delight. But the pleasure is subtle, deep, tinged with mortality. The promise of constantly renewed largess is not here; instead, there is the threat of scarcity. Such meagerness does not decrease hunger; it makes it go beyond a surface appetite, to become a hunger of tjie marrow of the bone, of the very blood. Nets to Catch the Wind introduced a new poet to the world, but one who came already equipped with her particular voice, already in control of the techniques to express that voice and the themes worthy of being expressed. Black Armour: A Book of Poems, Wy lie's sec-

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ond volume of poetry, is an emblem book in which the poet meditates on five pieces of a knight's traditional armament: breastplate, gauntlet, helmet, beaver, plumes. There is an inordinate concentration on the head and face, as the last three divisions indicate. The beaver is the only piece of armor that is more than named; in calling one section of the book "Beaver Up." Wylie suggests a momentary willingness to expose her vulnerable flesh. Poem after poem in "Breastplate" describes the poet's weariness with being brave, her desire to let the wave close over her head. She records in technically brilliant poems her longing to rid herself of her soul, that nuisance that will not stop seductiveness and the horror of drowning, inviting us to look down into the "subaqueous shade" and imagine "a rainbow world," bright sea birds, and "dancing clouds about the sun" flashing before the eyes as we sink. In another she sees herself as dead in a house with back door bolted and front door locked. "Peregrine," the poem that opens "Gauntlet," is doubly welcome, therefore, after the heavily narcissistic and escapist poems of the first section. In throwing down the gauntlet, Wylie begins with moral imperiousness by describing Peregrine as a liar and a bragger without a friend. The poem gallops along with its bright dimeters and their outrageous rhymes. It is a swaggering, bantering, posturing piece that is completely successful. Unlike so many other Elinor Wylie poems of bravado, this one is in the third person. She avoids, consequently, any taint of narcissism, achieving instead an invigorating portrait that turns our attention outward rather than inward. Peregrine's gargantuan drinking of whole vineyards, the extravagance of his traveling to Brittany for its cider, are matched by a regal insouciance concerning food, clothing, his ultimate fate: As a king goes He went, not minding

ELINOR WYLIE I 713 That he lived seeking And never finding. The poem ends with an epigrammatic succinctness that echoes the moral imperiousness of its beginning. "The noose draws tighter; This is the end; I'm a good fighter, But a bad friend: I've played the traitor Over and over; I'm a good hater, But a bad lover." This robust fighting spirit is rarely displayed in Wylie's poetry. Her love of wildness in eagle and antelope, in hounds and foxes and gulls, recurs; but human wildness in the form of a warm participation in the rough-and-tumble physical world does not often appear. Her usual stance is one of cold haughtiness; she proclaims an untamable spirit through her power to endure and reject. "Peregrine" embraces man's lot, rejoicing in the physical pleasures and discomforts of human experience, and discounting the need for conventional and respectable safeguards against their intense proximity. In contrast, the overrefined "Preference," in the same volume, proclaims the value of the "mournful mouth" and "small bones in wrists and ankles." The beautiful people the poet professes to prefer * 'carry a dagger in the heart" and are the antithesis of Peregrine, who carries his in his hand to scare cravens. For one poem like "Peregrine" Wylie wrote a dozen as fastidious as "Preference." Not until she came to her last poems, in Angels and Earthly Creatures, did she write any substantial body of poetry affirming boisterous humanity. But in Black Armour, as "Simon Gerty," her poem about a man "Who Turned Renegade and Lived with the Indians," shows, Wylie fears that wildness is too closely akin to cruelty for com-

fort. Although she can understand what motivated Simon Gerty, for she too can see how clean-muscled Indians could be preferred to tallow, greasy-fat faces, she still thinks he was mistaken in his choice. Perhaps no poem so clearly expresses Wylie's awareness of how beleaguered is the human being as "Let No Charitable Hope." One of her most elegant and simple utterances, it has the power of absolute sincerity and truth. The impeccable diction, the restraint and clarity, make it a classical statement on the human condition. She tempers the advice given in "The Eagle and the Mole," recognizing essential differences between herself and all other animals: Now let no charitable hope Confuse my mind with images Of eagle and of antelope: I am in nature none of these. I was, being human, born alone; I am, being woman, hard beset; I live by squeezing from a stone The little nourishment I get. In masks outrageous and austere The years go by in single file; But none has merited my fear, And none has quite escaped my smile. The first two stanzas have that perfect inevitability of word and rhythm that is the hallmark of great poetry. The last two lines, however, have a slightly pretentious, self-congratulatory air that is perhaps unavoidable when a poet asks us to join her in looking admiringly at herself. "This Hand," the last poem in "Gauntlet," is not so finely wrought; and yet, because Wylie limits herself to a physical description, leaving the emotional response entirely to us, the poem is free of this particular weakness. The last lines of "Let No Charitable Hope" mar an otherwise exquisite poem. It almost persuades us that any stance other than her proud endurance is childish and undignified.

714 I AMERICAN Nothing in the rest of the volume rivals "Peregrine" or "Let No Charitable Hope." At times, as in "Castilian" or "Parting Gift," Wylie does little more than versify a rather uninteresting sentiment or coy feeling. Indulging her pleasures in the macabre, she writes in "Fable" of a raven dipping its bloody beak in the crack of a dead knight's breastbone and sipping his brains from the broken cup of his skull while his eye sockets suck light. Here both her lifelong enjoyment of ballads and the emblem of the helmet have led her astray. This second volume of poetry, although it has been praised by some critics as more warmly passionate, less purely intellectual than Nets to Catch the Wind, is really much less impressive than her first book. Wylie seems to shrink from life, taking refuge behind her black armor as though, as James Branch Cabell said, "the writer has found life to be unendurably ugly." Although Wylie's poetry has not, since her death, received the popular acclaim accorded Edna St. Vincent Millay's or Amy Lowell's, it has continued to be anthologized. At least three of her poems—"Velvet Shoes," "The Eagle and the Mole," and "Let No Charitable Hope"—are still widely known. But her novels have been almost totally neglected. It is difficult to believe that New Yorkers turned out in a twilight procession to celebrate the publication of her first novel or that her next novel was so enthusiastically praised by English critics that she was entertained by the Sitwells and Virginia Woolf when she visited England, and was the only New York writer Aldous Huxley asked to meet when he visited America. One of her novels was even a Book of the Month Club choice in 1926. Cabell said that if her novels did not last, and they probably would not, then posterity was to be pitied. Whether or not his judgment is valid, his prediction has been realized. Wylie wrote four novels: Jennifer Lorn: A Sedate Extravaganza (1923), The Venetian Glass Nephew (1925), The Orphan Angel

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(1926), andA/r. Hodge and Mr. Hazard (1928). Jennifer Lorn was a remarkable first novel, a completely original performance for an American writer that has had no imitators. Zuleika Dobson (1911) is the only English novel of the period remotely comparable, but Max Beerbohm's vein is comic where Wylie's is satiric. The eighteenth-century setting is not fortuitous; the age of Swift and Alexander Pope seems particularly well suited to her intention. Wylie's notebooks, which are now the property of Yale University, reveal how scrupulously she researched the background for this novel. Every page of Jennifer Lorn reflects her knowledge of eighteenth-century literary history. Gerald, we learn, is enamored of Voltaire. When he arrives in France with Jennifer, he remembers having had breakfast with Laurence Sterne once in Calais when the author was writing A Sentimental Journey. Jennifer reads Clarissa, Pope, William Collins, Oliver Goldsmith; Horace Walpole is a friend of the Cleverly-Nevilles, Jennifer's mother's family. Wylie describes in great detail fashionable clothes of the period, jewelry, hairstyles. Her knowledge of incunabula and of bookbinding is extensive. She scatters historical anecdotes connected with painters such as Titian and Jean Baptiste Greuze across the pages. At some points the novel is almost a travel guide to India, particularly the area around Delhi. Wylie describes Humayan's tomb and the private audience hall in Shah Jehan's Red Fort, even quoting the inscription on the wall around one of the chambers: * 'If Paradise be on this earth, it is this, it is this, it is this." The beautiful site of the Taj Mahal at Agra is also mentioned. Her knowledge of Indian food includes not only curries but also favorite Indian sweets such as elephant's ears. As the eighteenth-century author of Robinson Crusoe knew, nothing so completely persuades us that a fictional world is real as quantities of particular details that sound like true facts. Jennifer Lorn was praised for its fantasy, but Wylie built her extravaganza on a solid body of facts.

ELINOR WYLIE I 7/5 The peculiar blend of fact and fancy that so delighted readers of Jennifer Lorn is characteristic of all her novels. Each required tremendous erudition, but the author carried her learning lightly. Her scholarship is there, but so transmogrified that it carries us further into fantasy rather than bringing us back to the real world of brick and mortar. Although Carl Van Vechten was content to see Gerald Poynyard, the hero of this extravaganza, as an irresistibly decorative figure, he functions much more seriously as the main subject of Wylie's satire. The novel opens with his return to England from India in the state that, as Jane Austen noted, makes a male essentially interesting: in need of a wife. At twenty-seven he has amassed a fortune of £50,000. He acquires as a bride Jennifer Lorn, the daughter of the earl of Tarn Linn, "the most beautiful girl in Devonshire," much as he sought and took possession of various pieces of Meissen, enameled snuffboxes, and amethyst signet rings. After a honeymoon in Bath and a short visit to Paris, they travel to India, where, on a trip from Delhi, they are set upon by Turcoman bandits. After romantically engaging his attackers in single combat, Gerald is supposedly killed and buried with a stake through his heart, while Jennifer is seized as booty. At one time the novel was to be entitled The Lady Stuffed with Pistachios, for in the next episode Jennifer's slight figure does not suit the voluptuous taste of the wife of the old Indian khan whose bed she is supposed to grace. While futile attempts are made to fatten her, she is courted by Prince Abbas, a devotee of the art of cooking. Thinking her husband is dead, Jennifer disguises herself as a boy and runs away with him. The young couple wander platonically over the countryside, vaguely in the direction of Europe, until they reach Persepolis, where Jennifer sees Gerald but is not observed by him. She rejects Prince Abbas' pleas that she leave Gerald, and instead follows him to the khan's

palace. Captured once more, she dies of fright when an infernal contraption, the bowstring, encircles her throat. There follows a very melodramatic burial at which an Irish Jesuit, Father O'Donnell, officiates. Prince Abbas flings himself down at the graveside and is expiring in grief when Gerald passes by and takes from the prince's hand a tiny Byzantine ivory bas-relief. Noting the resemblance of the carved face to Jennifer's, Gerald thinks how fortunate he is to have this lovely antique object, "both rare and valuable." At every point in the novel, Wylie stresses Gerald's exquisite taste and his human insensitivity. He is a lover of precious things. Jennifer cowers before his aesthetic standards. She is thoroughly intimidated when he finds fault with hotel furniture that she thinks is magnificent. For a while the little bride is a highly prized ornament. Gerald fancies how lovely she would look transformed into marble, with flying draperies. But then he realizes she "would undoubtedly be the property of the king" and so dispels the vision. But he spares himself the pain of that necessity. Jennifer lives with him as though in a museum. Wylie describes Jennifer as languid, wilting, enervated. At one point Gerald, who has ignored her existence for two days, feels an urge to converse with her; he swoops her from her bed in the middle of the night and carries her about like a lifeless doll. Both before her marriage and during her short domestic life with Gerald, Jennifer lacks any natural vitality or curiosity. She has a dream before their departure for Paris in which a young man offers to save her, but she is so unaware of any possibility of a more vital existence that she asks, "From what?" Sometime before that dream Jennifer lies awake one night for hours. Thoughts drift through her mind: "Dear. Gerald assures me that Paris will restore my spirits," she thought, as she lay watch-

716 I AMERICAN ing the bluish flame of her night-light diffused in a dim radiance beside her bed, spreading thinly, like milk in a muddy pool, through a darkness rendered more brown than black by filiations of fog from without; beyond the window-panes an evil yellow gloom mirrored and magnified the ring of brightness. * 'He is extraordinarily kind to me; I ought not to allow myself to fall into these moods of melancholy. I think the climate of London must be ill-suited to my constitution; I remember that the east wind in Pari$ is said to be decidedly bracing; I must ask Gerald about a new fur pelisse to-morrow, without fail. 'So shines a good deed in a naughty world.'—Shakespeare. The French consider him barbarous. It is a pity that Mr. Gray should have died after all, in spite of the Duke's kindness. I had so wished to meet him; I prefer his 'Country Churchyard' to Mr. Goldsmith's 'Deserted Village'; I believe Mr. Goldsmith to be a little lacking in elegance. 'Out, out, brief candle.' Shakespeare again. Papa admires Shakespeare. How dreadful it would be if the light were actually to be extinguished; this room is very draughty. ' Tis but a night, a long and moonless night. . . .' Blair's Grave . . . my Aunt Susanna's favourite poem. To paint the gloomy horror of the tomb. . . .' I wish I did not remember it so well; my aunt continually read it aloud to me when I was a child. Paris . . . Paris . . . how delightful to see it once more! I trust the good sisters have none of them died; impossible to conceive of Paris without them. La Reve . . . Racine . . . Corneille. 'Ne verse point de pleurs sur cette sepulture passant: ce lit funebre est un lit precieux.' Death; poets are forever writing about death. These purple curtains always turn black at night; they are too sombre a shade. 'My love is dead, gone to his death-bed. . . .' Ah, that unfortunate youth Chatterton . . . dead by his own hand! Dead . . . dead . . . I am becoming excessively morbid; let me resolutely think of something else . . . the beauties of nature . . .

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Devon. . . . Ah, no, not that! Pictures; I have seen many beautiful pictures in London. . . . I wish Sir Joshua had given the Academy's gold medal to young Mr. Flaxman . . . Gerald says he is a most deserving person. I am to have my miniature taken in Paris . . . a Paris . . . Paradis . . ." This passage not only illustrates the elegant, slightly stilted diction, the careful observation, the use of historical allusions so characteristic of the whole novel, but also supplies an unusual example of Wylie's handling of stream of consciousness. The mind she exposes is a very literary one, full of tags of poetry. Jennifer, who has been homesick ever since her marriage, thinks frequently of her family: father, Aunt Susanna; but she cannot bear to think of her beloved Devonshire. She remembers her childhood, her short time with the good sisters in the convent; she anticipates a fur pelisse, having her miniature taken. France and England mingle as she anticipates arrival and departure. That final "a Paris . . . Paradis" that signals the moment of sleep mimics the drifting mind associating sounds in a last effort to establish order and relatedness among its contents. The revery is unified, of course, by the theme of death, which makes her normal languor even more apparent; and yet, in these moments before sleep, Jennifer and her plight are more sharply focused than almost anywhere else in the novel. Here we see most clearly the exhausting attempt to reconcile herself to life with Gerald. Still later, in India, Saint Amond, a Frenchman who reminds Jennifer of her father, offers to provide her with a safe retreat because he thinks a trip with Gerald to Delhi would be unwise and unhealthy. Although she repeatedly asks him to remain with her, she responds apathetically to his suggestion that she go with him. This unnatural lethargy, this congenital laziness, suddenly disappears when Jennifer starts to

ELINOR WYLIE I 717 respond to Prince Abbas. For the first time in her life, she wants to be strong and bold. This change seems to arise from her discovery of a robust emotion and her awareness of extreme danger. She has lived a pampered and conventional life in which the lady has lived at the expense of the woman. After a week of walking through the countryside, she and Prince Abbas are transformed. Abbas is "no longer spoiled and peevish, nor Jennifer vain and melancholy.'' The two "sickly pigeons" have turned into "meadow larks." With the resurrection of Gerald, Jennifer and Prince Abbas resume their old forms. The sight of him revives both her fear and her awe. After the prince has said his last farewell: " 'Good-bye,' Jennifer replied softly; the little word, shorn of every title of endearment or courtesy, fell through the air like a bird without wings." The conventional return to the loveless marriage, here satirized, is foiled, of course, by Jennifer's death. Jennifer Lorn is indeed a novel that turns everyday life into an enchantment. But Wylie's purpose is not to suggest that the world of ideals is more beautiful than the world of reality, that love and marriage are even more beautiful than we realize. On the contrary, as she wrote in 1928: "If you call a spade a diamond some people will think you are frivolous and affected, but other people will understand how much blacker things may be said about spades by the simple trick of pretending that they are diamonds." Jennifer Lorn is a fiercely satirical book. Her next novel is another satire on the institution of marriage. The Venetian Glass Nephew was Wylie's only novel to be serialized. Carl Van Doren, the editor of Century Magazine, wrote, "The first part was in type before there was any second or third." By the time it was published as a book, Wylie was already writing The Orphan Angel and thought the more lively characters of that novel, Shiloh and David, made Virginio seem relatively * 'gutless.''

The story is an unlikely one. The naive Cardinal Peter Innocent Bon, whose heart at eightyone is still a "blue balloon," wishes he had a nephew. Accompanying Pope Pius VI on a visit to Venice, he befriends the glassblower Luna, who takes him to his workshop. There he meets the worldly-wise Chastelneuf and is entertained by a display of animated glass objects. When he tells the pair of his desire for a nephew, Virginio is hand-blown for him by the ingenious Luna and the lecherous Chastelneuf. The beautiful glass figurine falls in love instantly and forever when he meets the notorious bluestocking Rosalba, daughter of Abbe de Bernis and the nun Caterina. Called the Infant Sappho, the beautiful girl, who at twelve had been an intimate friend of Voltaire, is learned and gifted, especially in poetry. Once she falls in love, however, she grows quite wild and flighty, and flaunts an interest in yellow gowns rather than old books. Brought up to be a deist and to feel guilty about her secret preference for fairy tales over the encyclopedists, she is free through Virginio's miraculous birth from sand, holy water, extreme heat, and human breath. "Magic was justified by experiment; it was become a verity, true, rational and possible, like mathematics or the rights of man." Although Virginio is a suitable husband, he cannot, Rosalba learns after marriage, be a playmate because he splinters too easily to engage in her hoydenish games. She is a child of sunshine; he, a creature of moonlight. Unable to bear Virginio's physical fear of living with her, Rosalba flings herself into a bonfire. Chastelneuf, who is modeled on Casanova, saves her; thinking she is worth a million pale Virginios, he offers her human love. Instead of accepting the aged suitor, Rosalba rushes off to Virginio, who, injured earlier in a fall while chasing her during a game, has an arm in a sling. Peter Innocent sees no solution for their dilemma except a convent for Rosalba, a monastery for Virginio. Chastel-

718 I AMERICAN neuf suggests black magic instead. The little fable concludes with Rosalba having successfully submitted to the fiery furnace in order to be turned into a piece of fine Sevres porcelain to match Virginio's Venetian glass. Carl Van Doren said of this novel, "Sympathy is on the side of Nature but skill is on the side of Art." Rosalba is a warm and vibrant girl. When she first meets Virginio, her talk is full of impertinence and self-importance. She has a sharp tongue and an imperious manner. Virginio, on the other hand, begins with some gusto but grows steadily more abject. One weakness in this almost flawless tale is the inexplicable change in his character after marriage. The young man enters life judging a glass of wine as a little too heavy for his taste. He then asks for a viola da gamba and starts humming a tune by Cimarosa. When courting Rosalba he strikes her as rather unbending in his notion of duty. He presses his suit by discouraging her deistic propensities and encouraging her to love him by giving her a ring with the inscription 4 'Fear God and love me." In the last chapters of the book Virginio has no personality at all. Like Jennifer Lorn he is a "person" whose remarkable beauty seems to have replaced all other aspects of selfhood. But in Jennifer Lorn Wylie supplies a psychological explanation for the changes from lassitude to vivacity in Jennifer. Virginio's change is more unbelievable than Rosalba 's fiery transformation—all the more reason, therefore, for a reader's sympathies to be with the natural girl rather than with the artificial boy. And yet the fable is delightfully artificial. Wylie has employed a mass of alchemical facts, topographical data about Venice, details from Casanova's memoirs and ecclesiastical history, and information on glassblowing and porcelain firing. The more factual she becomes, the more fantastic the story grows. This perhaps is her unique contribution to the American novel of the

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period. The British novelist Virginia Woolf makes facts gallop and cavort in Orlando (1928), but it would be difficult to find an American novelist who achieves the same kind of effect through the use of historical facts. James Branch Cabell, for example, constructs his fantasies out of dreams and imaginary creatures. In Jurgen (1919) we are in the world of legend rather than of history. But Wylie uses historical research to turn eighteenth-century Italy and France into a fabulous land. The worlds of art and nature, of fantasy and reality, are brought together in satire. In The Venetian Glass Nephew, as well as in Jennifer Lorn, Wylie is a true disciple of Shelley, among whose many indictments of modern marriage "Epipsychidion" is only the most famous. Here, where Rosalba has exchanged her human warmth and vitality for an aesthetic beauty and purity, the cost of becoming a fit bride is painfully clear. Jennifer never becomes a marble figure, but Gerald would have liked her to be one. She does, however, learn to become a fit bride for him, traveling to Paris and India when her heart longs for Devonshire. A glass man may not be able to share the physical joy of running and playing, but he can fulfill all the physical requirements of the marriage bed. From the very beginning Chastelneuf is concerned that the glass nephew be sexually complete. When Peter Innocent decides to name his nephew Virginio, Chastelneuf responds, "A pretty name, but I trust it may not long be strictly appropriate; I have spared no pains to make our young friend a complete work of art, after the best natural patterns. . . ." The elderly men surrounding the young lovers—Peter Innocent Bon, the happy celibate; Chastelneuf, the confirmed rake; Count Gazzi, the voyeuristic writer of fairy tales—provide a chorus, giving their opinions on love and marriage. It is they who have arranged the marriage; in spite of their expressions of guilt, it is they

ELINOR WYLIE / 719 who will suggest and then execute the plan for turning Rosalba into a Sevres figure. Rosalba goes into the furnace claiming that the choice is freely hers. In this world of men, it is the woman who must be transformed before she can be a proper bride for Virginio. Wylie's prose gifts seem to be those of the satirist rather than of the more ordinary novelist. Unfortunately, her next novel is not a satire. The title that she had chosen for her novel about Shelley was Mortal Image; but Willa Gather published My Mortal Enemy in the same year (1926), and so the American title of Wylie's book was changed to The Orphan Angel. It is the story of what might have happened to Shelley if he had not drowned off Lerici in July 1822, but had been rescued by an American ship. The story begins on board the Witch of the West, where David Butternut, a young seaman from Maine, has recently quarreled with and accidentally killed Jasper Cross, another sailor. In the midst of an ensuing storm, David rescues a beautiful youth who resembles the dead sailor and whom he christens Shiloh (a name Byron had used for Shelley). The two men decide to go in search of Jasper's twin sister, Silver, when the ship docks in Boston. They set off on a series of adventures that has led Alfred Kazin to describe the novel as a "boy's book." They hike all day and sleep out at night, hunting their food and cooking it over campfires in the woods; they bathe in streams, go down the Ohio on a raft, eat quantities of bacon and johnny cake, get captured by Indians and almost burned at the stake, cross the desert (where they run out of water), and manage finally to reach a California mission. Unlike a boy's book, however, the novel is full of romantic incidents. David and Shiloh are constantly rescuing or fleeing from ladies who are overly susceptible to Shiloh's charms: Melissa, the fourteen-year-old girl with a drunken father, who will not accept David as a replacement for Shiloh (as a husband); Rosalie, the

professor's intended bride, who almost ruins her wedding by falling in love with Shiloh; Annie, the daughter of dead Protestant missionaries, who is softened by her love for Shiloh but reveals herself as even more cruel than her Indian captors; and Silver, whose picture Shiloh has often kissed but whom he gives up rather than compromise. David's weakness for whiskey and Shiloh's penchant for poetry also are not the usual ingredients for a boy's book. Unfortunately, neither are they enough to constitute adult characterization. Wylie has settled for the roughest approximations in both instances. Shiloh is the epitome of elegance, grace, beauty, courtesy. David is the embodiment of simplicity, naturalness, generosity. Shiloh is described both by the author and by other characters as an angel. David at one point dons the skin of a bear, which is the animal he most resembles—a nice, friendly one. Neither character achieves human stature. Part of the reason is the language. Shiloh's dialogue is so outrageous that Wylie wrote an essay to defend her judgment against the critics. In "Mr. Shelley Speaking" (1927), she argues that Keats's language was his own London dialect mixed with literary borrowings from Edmund Spenser and the Elizabethans, that Byron's was the language of a Regency wit, but that Shelley's was a slightly inflated version of the eighteenth-century language of his teachers and elders. She notes further that Shelley always affected a stilted and distant vocabulary, that he told Godwin, "I have experienced a decisive pulmonary attack" when he meant his lungs were slightly touched, that he would never say 4 'sailor" when he could say "mariner." In the following passages, therefore, Wylie is attempting to imitate Shelley's ordinary cadence and vocabulary: "If there were any lake or sequestered pool in the neighbourhood, I should be most grateful for

720 / AMERICAN directions which might enable me to find it . . ." (A woman asked him if he would like to wash up.) "I shall go to her to-night, alone, and in the very hush and suspension of mortality I shall give her a single parting kiss, thus mingling for a moment our extremest souls in hallowed chaste communion." "A happy augury of the perfectibility of the human mind!" cried Shiloh. Three hundred pages of such language, no matter on what grounds, remain fairly indefensible. And unfortunately Wylie's own narrative is not very different from Shiloh's dialogue. She describes him as answering questions "with an ambiguous shake of his romantic locks, and a glance of darkling fire." Here she is describing Shiloh as he gives the good-night kiss spoken of in the second passage above: "He leaned above her in the moonlight, and the flood of silver poured from his shoulders in feathery flakes like the bright cataract of archangelic wings." David's dialogue is, of course, different; but his "rustic" speech is as painful as Shiloh's exquisite refinement. At one point he says, "I remember when I first seen you, Shiloh, I thought as how you was sort of an unearthly critter, but now there ain't none of us can touch you for nimbleness and spunk." And at another point, he protests, "Aw, Shiloh, you ain't never done it, and you don't rightly understand how goldamed slow it can be. . . ." Because of such dialogue it is extremely difficult for a reader to accept any kind of conversation between David and Shiloh. The language of the main characters is not the only problem in the novel. Completely free to invent whatever adventures she likes, Wylie roots herself in the factual world of steamboats, American geography, the food and drink, the wildfowl and fish, the flowers and street names of America on the one hand, the people and places, poetry

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and habits of Shelley's life and work and times on the other. The backdrop of this novel is meticulously and vividly realistic. But the characters and actions she introduces into this historical world are absurd and ridiculous. Her seamen, innkeepers, pioneers, and Indians behave like opera buffe characters. A European, an Asian, or an African might be excused for understanding and reflecting so little of American life beyond its physical surface; but The Orphan Angel is an extraordinary book for an American to have written. The cause of this discrepancy between the treatment of characters and setting can perhaps be traced to the subject. Hardly anyone who knew her fails to mention the strength of her attachment to the poet and his works or the breadth of her knowledge of both his poetry and his life. Amy Lowell, whose two-volume critical study of John Keats appeared in the year of her death, had a similar feeling for Keats. Alice Meynell, her daughter Viola says, was so attached to Shakespeare that if a biography of her mother recorded only the history of her feelings and thoughts about him, there would be very few biographical facts left out. Women poets of the period seem to have had a tendency to develop deeply personal relations with a deceased poet. After her death Wylie was to be adopted in a somewhat similar fashion by the British novelist Winifred Holtby, whose poems written to the dead Wylie reveal how often Holtby viewed her own fatal illness within the context of Wylie's chronic high blood pressure. But there is something unique about Wylie's feelings for Shelley. In her essay "Excess of Charity" (1927), she describes her discovery of the poet at the age of eleven, some years after being introduced to "The Cloud" and "To a Skylark" in her Third Reader. It was September in Washington and the air was warm and sweet as if all the grapes and peaches of Maryland and Virginia had flavored it to my

ELINOR WYLIE I 721 taste. I stood before the smallest bookcase in the library, and from its shelves I drew Trelawny's "Recollections." The window was wide open; there was plenty of light and soft autumnal wind in the room. I did not move except to turn the pages. Even the black leather chair was too far away from the scene within the covers of the book. I stood quite still and turned the pages, and the curtains blew in at the window and a few golden leaves blew in between them. So I read for the first time of Shelley's death and burial. I can remember what I felt in that moment of past time, but never what I thought. It is therefore impossible to tell of it except to draw the picture of the room full of light and softer air and the child standing in the center of the room and turning pages of the book, afraid to move, afraid to cry for fear the scene within the pages of the book might be hidden from her eyes, wondering and wondering why the bright creature who had lived within that scene should have died and fallen into dust no stronger than the golden leaves blowing in at the window. Stories, essays, poems, novels all attest to the amazing persistence of this childhood feeling. Emotionally unable to accept the early death of Shelley, Wylie went on resurrecting him in her imagination. In 1927, the year after The Orphan Angel, Shelley was the central figure in two of her essays and a short story. "A Birthday Cake for Lionel" is a light piece in which she permits herself to mock a Shelley, now grown gray, who has come to the end of an educational experiment with two little girls, Artemis and Jezebel. The children mother him as though he were a little boy and they a pair of matrons. Although their adoration of him is too syrupy, Wylie tries to temper it with humor, noting, for example, that the children's noisy expressions of their love for him gives him neuralgia. There is little mockery in The Orphan Angel, in which she adopts an attitude of idolatry. Although David Butternut makes a few disparaging

remarks about Shiloh, Wylie is so painfully uncritical of Shelley in The Orphan Angel that he emerges as the romantic image of an adolescent daydream. In spite of all her erudition, Wylie does not really create or re-create the poet at age thirty, for, to her, Shelley inhabited not a period in history but a place in her emotional life. Her failure to make him or any other of the characters live in the historically accurate world she has provided for them suggests that there is some truth in Morton Zabel's claim that Wylie did not have a grasp of history in the sense that Robert Bridges, Ezra Pound, or T. S. Eliot did. Where her purpose was satire—as in Jennifer Lorn and The Venetian Glass Nephew—this lack in Wylie's ability to grasp the historical dimensions of character and action was not felt. Since the characters were supposed to be fantastic and unreal, there was no need for her to convince us that they belonged to a real eighteenth-century world in England, India, or Italy. Furthermore, she invested the houses, food, furniture, and clothing of those eighteenth-century countries with a dazzling unreality. Her intention had nothing to do with verisimilitude. But in The Orphan Angel both character and setting are presented as stimulants to our historical imagination. The characters, however, elicit incredulity rather than conviction. Few readers would be as harsh as James Branch Cabell, who found The Orphan Angel "one of the most gloomy errors in all literary history" and "a waste of woodpulp." But almost all critics have found Mr. Hodge and Mr. Hazard (1928), Wylie's next novel and her last, considerably more successful. The novel is in three books: "Mr. Hazard," 'The Young Huntings," and "Mr. Hodge." When Mr. Hazard returns to England, he is met by an old friend, Mr. Hartleigh, who takes him to visit his family in Marylebone. Here Mr. Hazard falls ill with influenza and spends a great deal of his time avoiding the doctor and revisiting his old London haunts. In book II, Mr. Hazard,

722 / AMERICAN longing for the country, leaves London and goes in the springtime to Gravelow, where he meets Lady Clara Hunting through her young daughters Allegra and Penserosa. For some time he lives an idyllic life, reading Milton and Job, writing his own poetry, and visiting the Huntings once or twice a week at Lyonnesse, their home. Infatuated with Allegra, Hazard is also much moved by Lady Clara's kindness and sensitivity. In book III, Hodge, the tutor of Lady Clara's two sons, arrives with the boys at Lyonnesse for their holidays. He very much disapproves of Hazard and encourages Lady Clara to break with him. At first she refuses but yields when the emotionally clumsy Hodge refers to the inappropriateness of Hazard's feelings for Allegra. Lady Clara and her daughters therefore fail to appear at a tea party that Hazard has specially arranged for them. Hazard recognizes that he has lost the battle to Hodge and seizes upon an excuse to leave Gravelow. The language of Mr. Hodge and Mr. Hazard is considerably different from The Orphan Angel. The novel opens thus: When Mr. Hazard was forty years old, he decided to revisit England. Having been out of it for precisely fifteen years, he had half forgotten its climate; his memory was incurably romantic, and through veils of far-away mist he saw the blackthorn more clearly than the mud. Also, it was true that he, who so dearly loved the sun, had been rather too much in the sun of late. This language is spare, pointed, fast-paced, eminently more readable. We are in for a very different novel. Some of the poems in Trivial Breath, the volume of poetry published in the same year as this final novel, reveal important changes in Wylie. She has begun to turn from her admiration of 4 'flesh refined to glass'' toward a more earthy approval of the fact that

WRITERS The flesh survives at last Because it is not pure. In Mr. Hodge and Mr. Hazard the figure who embodies the values of Shiloh/Shelley has grown ten years older in two years. The author also seems to have gone through a period of rapid growth, for she now sees the forty-year-old Hazard through the eyes of experience as well as of dream. His conflict and defeat are as much a result of defects in his own character as of inadequacies in the social and natural world. "Malediction upon Myself," one of the poems in Trivial Breath, records a personal experience that went into the writing of the novel. In mounting crescendos of "if" clauses, the poet pronounces a curse to follow her possible denigration of beauty in its baser and eveiyday forms. If her heart is so dull that it says London is no longer fair because all the beautiful people have gone to the country and left it to common men and women, if she can't see beauty in rooftops and a polluted Thames, then the strings of her heart should be loosened, her veins emptied, and her pulses stopped; her eyes should be blinded and her nostrils and mouth stuffed; her ankles should be broken and her legs and throat twisted. This orgy of self-punishment concludes with dismemberment and trampling. In Mr. Hodge and Mr. Hazard, Wylie has written a novel that satirizes both the bathos and dull industriousness of the middle class and the languor and withdrawal of the romantic poet. She does not merely deplore the drab world; she also deplores the airy spirits who are too pure to engage a world of flesh and blood. Mr. Hazard, who has a talent for making himself uncomfortable, rejects every opportunity to enter "the England of the time.'' Such effeteness is not seen as exotic and precious in this novel, but as a malediction upon the self. Mr. Hazard has damned himself to decay. He has come to England seeking his coffin. When offered the possibility of

ELINOR WYLIE I 723 something alive but imperfect—Lady Clara, who is both malicious and amiable—he is content to retreat without making any effort to win her. Mr. Hodge, the representative materialist and opportunist, does not defeat Mr. Hazard through any direct confrontation. There is an enemy within Mr. Hazard who works on Hodge's behalf. As in much of Wylie's poetry, there is a split between mind and spirit in Hazard. The mind "was a scorner, a tyrant, a torturer." The spirit can believe in the enchanting world of Lyonnesse and its place in it only as long as the mind is kept silent. Hodge's arrival has "unlocked the prison and let loose the demoniacal mind" that now speeds "through the high chambers of the soul, splintering the crystal roofs, breaking the looking-glass walls with the vibrations of its laughter. His mind was no friend to Mr. Hazard; his mind was the sworn friend of Mr. Hodge." In "True Vine," another poem in Trivial Breath, Wylie describes the dangers of such dependence of happiness upon the abeyance of the activity of the mind. The kind of heaven that is contrived of * 'immaculate blossoms" that cannot stand "malicious verity" is quick to languish; it has "ruin for its centre." Not so the obdurate and savage lovely Whose roots are set profoundly upon trouble; This flower grows so fiercely and so bravely It does not even know that it is noble. This is the vine of love, whose balsams flourish Upon a living soil corrupt and faulty, Whose leaves have drunk the skies, and stooped to nourish The earth again with honey sweet and salty. Trivial Breath reveals a kind of pagan joy in mortal beauty. Many of the poems describe an acceptance of man's short span of life along with great joy in the physicality of his passage. "The Puritan's Ballad," for example, is a simple,

open statement of love at twenty: the young woman's wedding ring clinks on the pan as she skims the cream, the man's clanks on the knife as he slits the fish's head. The homeliness of their daily tasks is lit up by the physical union. Similarly, "As I Went Down by Havre de Grace" affirms the beauty of this transitory life, taking comfort in what an imperfect world affords despite its hardness: laurel, dogwood, wild strawberries, balsam trees, the mayflower. In "A Strange Story" the poet describes dying in various sections of London: Berners Street, Houndsditch, Holborn, Marylebone, Lincoln's Inn. Finally When I died in Bloomsbury In the bend of your arm, At the end I died merry And comforted and warm. Throughout Wylie's poetry there are references to death. But in this volume death has become a friendly visitor of flesh and blood. She sees the physical signs of approaching death in herself, and The vanishing dust of my heart is proud To watch me wither and grow old. In one of her most compassionate poems, "The Coast Guard's Cottage," she offers to share her bed with a dead man, giving him human warmth and pity with no question about his former beauty and no fear of what the waters have made of him. Sleeping in this house so recently occupied by the coast guard, she experiences a close and physical bond between the living and the dead: No creature flies or swims Which can dismay my heart; you have come home. Mr. Hodge and Mr. Hazard also explores that relationship. Hazard feels as though he is a ghost in England. The author remarks, "The ghost of a

724 I AMERICAN living man must be a poor creature at best; a stuffless thing, projected into sunshine by a sick brain. But the ghosts of the dead are different; they are sustained and animated by spirits whole and entire, they possess their proper souls." By accepting his own view of himself as a ghost, Hazard cuts himself off more completely from life than he could have by actually dying. He thinks of the lovely girls, Allegra and Rosa, and their mother, Clara, as enchanting creatures, and would no more consider stealing them "for mortal employ than to fling a noose around the moon and pull it earthward to be cherished in his breast." In The Orphan Angel, Shiloh has the same attitude toward the women he meets, preferring to gaze at the picture of Silver rather than involve himself with an actual woman. But whereas Wylie asks us to view Shiloh's angelic distance from common humanity as a sign of his superior worth, in Mr. Hodge and Mr. Hazard she suggests that such a romantic view of experience is timid and lazy. Mr. Hodge, of course, has every intention of mortally employing the lovely Lady Clara if he can. Although Wylie sees the inadequacies of Hazard, she by no means endorses the Hodges of the world. "Tragic Dialogue," the last poem in Trivial Breath, gives some idea of what her new attitude involves. She answers a question raised about the hundred years that separate her from Shelley by saying that they would never have been kindred even if they had lived at the same time and in the same place: Ah no, both happily and alas! A clover field, a river, A hawthorn hedge, a pane of glass Had parted us forever. In The Orphan Angel, Wylie attempts to resurrect Shelley by pretending he has not died, that he has walked the streets of Boston and traveled the Camino Real. But this Shelley is the ghost of a living man rather than the ghost of a dead man.

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As she says in her four sonnets "A Red Carpet for Shelley," also in Trivial Breath, the only way the dead Shelley can walk this world now is through her own mortal veins. And in Mr. Hodge and Mr. Hazard, Wylie has given us that Shelley rather than Shelley viewed from the outside. By blending herself and Shelley (and a host of other romantics) in the character of Mr. Hazard, she has replaced her idolatry of Shelley with a more critical—because a more internal— awareness of the dangers of excessive sensibility. The author, therefore, is clearly on the side of Mr. Hazard in this contest with Mr. Hodge. For Mr. Hodge is cruel, petty, unimaginative; in his heart of hearts, he loathes Milton as well as Hazard, although he dares only to sneer at that "horrid apparition" who appears, drenched with rain, at Lady Clara's home. Although Hazard is defeated in the contest for Lady Clara, Wylie allows him a humorous triumph. In our last sight of him, Hazard is seated "in the most comfortable arm-chair that the room afforded," watching Mr. Hodge sweat as he packs up Hazard's books for his departure. Clearly, Wylie has moved a great distance from the saccharine conclusion of The Orphan Angel. The novels of Elinor Wylie are not among the more important literary achievements of the 1920's. Jennifer Lorn and The Venetian Glass Nephew are highly successful, but very minor, fantasies. Mr. Hodge and Mr. Hazard is nothing more than the "brief symbolic romance of the mind" that Wylie said it was. Some of her best poems in Trivial Breath communicate that romance much more effectively. If she had written only her novels, Wylie's reputation would have perished with her death. Fortunately she had one more year to live, and she spent it writing poetry. The nineteen sonnets in the "One Person" section of her last volume of poetry, Angels and Earthly Creatures, are for many critics the apex and triumph of Elinor Wylie's poetry. The first sonnet is not numbered as part of die sequence,

ELINOR WYLIE I 725 for it is an introduction to the whole series. In the purity and restraint of its diction we can hear her long acquaintance with the poetry of John Donne, a volume of whose poems she always carried with her during her last summer in England. Although these words are false, none shall prevail To prove them in translation less than true Or overthrow their dignity, or undo The faith implicit in a fabulous tale; The ashes of this error shall exhale Essential verity, and two by two Lovers devout and loyal shall renew The legend, and refuse to let it fail. Even the betrayer and the fond deceived, Having put off the body of this death, Shall testify with one remaining breath, From sepulchres demand to be believed: These words are true, although at intervals The unfaithful clay contrive to make them false. Wylie, who had spent her life creating fabulous and fantastic worlds from her "jeweled brain," reached in this volume, and particularly in these sonnets, a fabulous world whose truth is beyond contesting. Biographical information only confirms what the unaided reader finds: a voyage of sensual and emotional discovery that is both painful and exhilarating. In sonnet I the poet begins with simple happiness: Now shall the long homesickness have an end Upon your heart. . . . But even here the conclusion of the poem brings us to death and burial. Just as the introductory sonnet calls upon other lovers to testify to the truth of words that the flesh has often made false, this first sonnet unites the "you" and "I" involved in this present love to all those dead lovers, with whom they are coeval, who now lie

bound to "one another's bosom in the ground." The homecoming is to love and death. Sonnet XVII, the next to last in the series, returns to that homecoming and reiterates its connection with death. In both sonnets the "I" finds heaven or paradise, but always this side of the grave. For the lover has but lately discovered this earth and sky; the new land has only now become beloved. In sonnet IX, Wylie renounces the heavenly aid of the protective spirit who, she says, accompanied her throughout life and made her a "woman by an archangel befriended." In ending her archangel's "knightly servitude," she becomes vulnerable to the arrows against which he once defended her. She and her lover "are but perishable things." The sense of imminent death that pervades these poems makes the ecstatic discovery of physical joy quite poignant. The unexpected joy is conveyed with great delicacy. Whereas before, her "flesh was but a fresh-embroidered shroud" and she was blind to "those sharp ecstasies the pulses give," now— although she grieves that time "sets sickle to our Aprils"—she declares: We grow beyond vagaries of the weather And make a summer of our mingled breath. . . . She writes: I have survived to see the heavens fall Into my hands, which on your hands depend. Throughout the sequence Wylie suggests the deepest physical intimacy through simple references to hands. In sonnet III she pleads, "Put forth your hand, put forth your hand to bless." When she wishes that she could make her flesh subliminal and arrive to comfort him in her absence, his letter "cries, 'My hands are cold as ice.' " Just as the lovers in sonnet I lie "side by side and hand in hand," the lovers in the last sonnet wake "and touch each other's hands." In sonnet X, thinking how often her lover has been fretted and wounded by life, she asks:

726 / AMERICAN How is it possible that this hand of clay, Though white as porcelain, can contrive a touch So delicate it shall not hurt too much? All the exquisite and delicate qualities that Wylie had sought in her poetry and fiction now seem to have found a commensurate subject in this record of the awakening of passionate love in the shadow of imminent death. To glimpse beauty as the result of wars between "the upper and the nether stars," to feel happiness as the "cool and chaste, the iridescent sphere" is not to distort or exaggerate the intense physical reality of that fabulous world known only to lovers, or that equally precious and heightened reality seen only by those close to death. The luminous experiences that Wylie writes about in the "One Person" sonnets cannot be separated from their lucid expression. All of the sonnets follow the same Italian rhyme scheme for the octave: abbaabba. The self-imposed limit of two rhymes for the first eight lines requires verbal facility and richness. By the time she wrote these last sonnets, Wylie had made herself master of the form through constant practice. The sestet varies, although most of the sonnets follow the pattern cddcee. The concluding couplet is a favorite sonnet device with Wylie. The last "sonnet" actually has sixteen lines and two concluding couplets. The introductory sonnet has a structural joke because it follows the standard abbaabbacddc and then concludes—since the final word is "false"—with e/instead of ee. Louise Bogan complained about the compulsion that women poets felt to write sonnets, but there is no denying that in the hands of Edna St. Vincent Millay and Elinor Wylie the form was made to advance new and delightful intentions. For example, sonnet XVI does more than employ architectural imagery in ways that suggest Donne's "Batter my heart, three person'd God": I hereby swear that to uphold your house I would lay my bones in quick destroying lime Or turn my flesh to timber for all time;

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Cut down my womanhood; lop off the boughs Of that perpetual ecstasy that grows From the heart's core; condemn it as a crime If it be broader than a beam, or climb Above the stature that your roof allows. I am not the hearthstone nor the cornerstone Within this noble fabric you have builded; Not by my beauty was its cornice gilded; Not by my courage were its arches thrown: My lord, adjudge my strength, and set me where I bear a little more than I can bear. The parts of the house assemble themselves: timber, beam, roof, hearthstone, cornerstone, cornice, arches. Wylie achieves an aesthetically pleasing effect by taking up emotional and ornamental parts of a house in the sestet after describing the more structurally necessary parts in the octave. But what unifies the sonnet as an organic whole is the rhyme established between the last phrase of the final line and the first phrase of the initial line of the poem: "I hereby swear" and "more than I can bear." Since the last line begins "I bear" and ends "I can bear," the thing sworn to becomes not the supposedly extreme offers but the * 'little more'' of the last line. That "little more" assumes a tremendous weight from the context. A caryatid emerges in the last line to uphold the house. But, as in a number of other sonnets in "One Person," the poem embodies more selfabasement than we are altogether comfortable with. Here the poet says she would lay her bones in lime. Elsewhere she would turn her flesh to warm air to wind around his body, or vanish, as even her "body's core and pith dissolves in air." Over and over she claims that she is not good enough for him. He is her lord; she is a child or a faithful hound. He requires a pretense of equality, but she knows that she is the "savage" and he the "fine," that there is "intrinsic difference in our dust." She is so imperfect that she will need an eternity to be made fit to be his bride.

ELINOR WYL1E I 727 In sonnet XV the poet begs forgiveness from a depth of pain that is full of self-abasement: My honoured lord, forgive the unruly tongue That utters blasphemies; forgive the brain Borne on a whirlwind of unhallowed pain: Remember only the intrepid song; The flag defended and the gauntlet flung; The love that speech can never render plain; The mind's resolve to turn and strive again; The fortitude that has endured so long. My cherished lord, in charity forgive A starveling hope that may at times desire To warm its frozen fingers at your fire; Tis by such trifles that your lovers live, And so rise up, and in the starlight cold Frighten the foxes from your loneliest fold. The poem is punctuated by the explosive/: /orgive the tongue its bla^/iemies, /orgive the brain; remember the /lag defended, the gauntlet /lung, the/ortitude;/orgive the hope, the/rozen /ingers at your/ire. The final line not only begins and ends with a word having an initial/ but includes two additional/ words within the line. Although the line scans as a normal line of iambic pentameter, it is so full of initial/ sounds that it suggests an Anglo-Saxon alliterative line. Such an echo is appropriate to the physically elemental situation that is described. The relationship between the speaker and the honored lord is that of a servant and master. The actions of defending a flag and flinging down a gauntlet have a military significance that carries us to the Middle Ages. Warming frozen fingers at another's fire, when juxtaposed with frightening foxes from a fold, introduces the more peaceful idea of a shepherd at a feudal fire. If the poem were not part of this particular sonnet sequence, the religious connotations of such words as 4 'blasphemies," "unhallowed," and "charity" would suggest an address to God rather than to a human lover. In this request for forgiveness, the speaker has

widened the difference between the lovers to the distance between a human suppliant and a divine auditor. Although this may reflect the anguish felt by a lover who wishes to regain a lost esteem and love, the almost frantic and desperate repetition of the word "forgive," which is reinforced by all the other words beginning with an initial/, is related to the extreme self-abasement found in other poems in the sequence. Despite any discomfort we may feel because of this self-abasement, the sonnet sequence remains a moving record of a late and consuming love. Carl Van Doren said of "One Person": "The heart of sixteen spoke with the tongue of forty.'' The range of feeling, the extent to which emotion is permeated by intellect, the passionate simplicity of diction, the musical beauty of many lines and whole sonnets reveal an emotional and poetic growth in Elinor Wylie that suggests she may have been on the verge of crossing over from that special category of minor poet to take her place among the major poets of her period. At last she was ready to use her disciplined craft to re-create in poetry a vision of those fabulous lands opened to men and women through the deepest joys and sorrows. Her argument with the naturalists and realists continued to the end of her life. But in this last volume of poetry, we glimpse the deeper reality that she had always felt resided at the heart of experience. Her exotic world is no longer Persia or Venice: human flesh is now more fragile than glass; the grave yields more voluptuous ease than "silver fleece" or * 'bloom on grape'' ever provided, and more jeweled veins than ever a "deep vault" or "phosphorescent gloom" revealed. The remaining twenty poems in Angels and Earthly Creatures are necessarily less cumulatively effective. Nevertheless, here is more gold per ounce than ever before. At least seven of these poems—"Absent Thee from Felicity Awhile," "Felo de Se," "Hymn to Earth," "This Corruptible," "Bread Alone," "To a Cough in the Street at Midnight," "Farewell

725 / AMERICAN Sweet Dust"—are among the finest she ever wrote. One, "Hymn to Earth," may be her masterpiece. "Hymn to Earth" is imbued with the spirit of Shelley. Julia Cluck has quite rightly noted its resemblance to the opening lines of "Alastor." It leaps to poetry, as Shelley's poems so often do, through scientific awareness. We find here the exactitude in the description of natural phenomena that is so compelling an aspect, for instance, of his "Ode to the West Wind." But in place of Shelley's desire to be a leaf or a cloud, which is laid to rest only by his poetic ambition to be scattered even more widely through the world, Wylie accepts her physical fate by freely choosing to be "a particle of earth" containing the seed that, being consumed in the "embrace of clay," lives again in a cypress grove. By reversing Catullus' "Hail and farewell" uttered over his brother's grave to her own "Farewell and hail," Wylie charts her resignation to death. Man has no part in fire, air, water; but both in life and in death he has sown himself in the earth, in the form of sweat and effort behind the plow and in the form of decomposing matter in the grave. Man says farewell to something immaterial from which he arose, and hails the earth as his urn, in which he will now be consumed as he once consumed the fruits of the earth. Catullus also mingled the four elements in his poem: he speaks of coming over the water (per aequord) to the grave (ad inferias) to speak to his brother's ashes (adloquerer cinerem). The Latin poem concludes with a sense of peace: "and so forever, brother, hail and farewell" (atqueinperpetuum,frater, aveatque vale). Wylie's hymn ends with earth receiving man, who sleeps as her lover for a little while. But rich as the literary echoes of Shelley and Catullus are, the poem has its unique ideas and music. In the second stanza, for example, Wylie speaks of fire in both scientific and mythological terms. Referring to it as "secret at the core" suggests the story of Prometheus, who stole the

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secret of fire from the gods and gave it to man. Then she says man draws the emanation of fire from the skies—as, of course, he does through sun and lightning. The theft now becomes man's use of an element that, she says, he "has no part in." Similarly, in stanza three, which is devoted to air, the poet describes man's coming and going—into and out of the world—in terms of his inhaling and exhaling breath. Air is only borrowed by the lungs. It is an element that man constantly returns to the atmosphere. Fire has been stolen, then, and air borrowed. Water, as the fourth and fifth stanzas declare, is the element that has rejected man. Since man came from the water, he once did have a part in this element; but he was cast forth from it and now retains only the salt of his tears as his gift from the sea. However, when earth receives man in its "kind embrace," he is returned to the elements: in the slow-burning fire of the soil as it is warmed by the sun, the body is devoured and then mingled, at ftill tide, with the sea. The sleep at the end of Wylie's poem is not Catullus' in perpetuum, but only for a little while. As in so much of Wylie's poetry, the music of "Hymn to Earth" is largely the result of carefully controlled assonance and alliteration. Although sometimes the music in her earlier poems has little or no effect on the meaning of a line, here each phrase is a sudden illumination. She refers to the "twin minutes" of birth and death, to the "last ashes" or the "perfect urn," to "harvests . . . sparsely given," to waves that "grow shallow." She describes the sea as casting off man with "his dead weight of burdens nothing worth," and asks the earth to "cherish" at its "charitable breast" this "man, this mongrel beast." Like D. H. Lawrence's "Ship of Death," the "Hymn to Earth" is a modern meditation on dying. The hymn reflects a culmination of the poet's thoughts about man's relation to the elements that support life. At various points in her career she had raised the question of man's rela-

ELINOR WYLIE I 729 tion to other forms of life, particularly to animals. "Cold-blooded Creatures" in Black Armour is a poem that speaks of the "intolerable load" that lies "on all living creatures," and accuses man of being an "egregious egoist" because he lacks the imagination to think of the sentient life of snakes and fish. Man's biological alliance with both animals and the elements recurs in a number of Wylie's poems: "The Eagle and the Mole," "Madman's Song," "Winter Sleep," "Song," "Self-portrait," "Pity Me," "Desolation Is a Delicate Thing," "Address to My Soul." However, "Let No Charitable Hope" is an admonitory poem that sets up clear distinctions between man and eagle and antelope (two of her favorite living things). "Hymn to Earth" does the same for the elements. Although man asks to be received by the earth, he is not really of it any more than he is of fire, air, or water. He is of an "incomparable element" to which, in "Hymn to Earth," there is no return. In another poem, "This Corruptible," Wylie eschews the traditional notion concerning the relation of body to soul. The body, not the soul, is freed by death in this poem in which mortality gives matter an advantage over mind, heart, and soul, which can never slough off their chains. Although the poem does not seriously advance the notion of transmigration of souls any more than Wordsworth's "Intimations of Immortality '' makes a case for the preexistence of souls, it is difficult to see what other explanation there might be for such captivity. But in "Absent Thee from Felicity Awhile" Wylie accepts the traditional idea that in death the spirit puts off the 4 'bonds of body and sense.'' The last stanza even suggests a homecoming for the soul when it will meet other souls after death. Here there is a promise of a return to the "incomparable element." Such thoughts must have preoccupied Wylie in the last months of her life. It is not surprising that she gives more than one view of what death

means for the individual. In "Felo de Se," however, one aspect of dying is incontrovertible: death means taking leave of an earthly lover. Even preparing to do this requires, in the context of this poem, a kind of suicide. In the three stanzas the poet progressively attempts to put him from her heart. She begins by addressing him as "my heart's delight"; then she calls him "my dearest heart"; in the last stanza he is "heart of my heart." In the first two stanzas she repeats the word "must" three times, as she tries to exert her will to do what she must: first, put him out of her mind, forget him; then, eject his image from her soul, cease to "see" him. But in the last stanza there is no "must"; what the will cannot do, the "heart alone has courage" to do. She can relinquish him only when his heart and her heart become identified as one heart, so that it is he himself who helps her let go, stilling himself where he most deeply lives—in her pulse. Only when he is killed in her heart's core can he die in her mind and soul as well. Such a killing of him is suicide, not murder. In such a poem as "Felo de Se" there is a kind of humility that recognizes the limits of one's personal power and accepts another's help. "To a Cough in the Street at Midnight" gives one of the emotional effects of this kind of humility: an immediate compassion for all human beings who share one's own vulnerability. The poem is only six lines long. God rest you if you're dead; And bless, and send you safely home to bed If you are only old: God cure your cold, Whether it be but a cold in the head Or the more bitter cold which binds the dead. The common human fate is death; old age, which is only a temporary alternative, takes its smaller role in the two rhymes that describe the two conditions: old, dead. The cold will be cured one way or another. Nevertheless, the poem takes the form of a prayer, asking for rest, a blessing, a

730 I AMERICAN WRITERS cure. The cough is like Donne's tolling bell. It not only reminds man that he must die; it also arouses in him a sense of shared humanity. Asking for what is going to come in any event is a way of becoming part of the experience of that cough in the street. The poet's personal experience with love and death have been a route to this deeper feeling for others. Caught up in the passion of love and the expectation of death, Wylie continued to write intellectually brilliant poetry. But these last poems blend mind, heart, and soul in the single identity that she had sought, and failed to find, throughout her life. Her reputation as a poet depends on the estimation of a dozen poems from her three earlier volumes and the heights attained in Angels and Earthly Creatures.

Selected Bibliography WORKS OF ELINOR WYLIE Nets to Catch the Wind. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1921. Black Armour: A Book of Poems. New York: Doran, 1923. Jennifer Lorn: A Sedate Extravaganza. New York: Doran, 1923. The Venetian Glass Nephew. New York: Doran, 1925. The Orphan Angel. New York: Knopf, 1926. Mr. Hodge and Mr. Hazard. New York: Knopf, 1928. Trivial Breath. New York: Knopf, 1928. Angels and Earthly Creatures. New York: Knopf, (1929. CWbted Poems of Elinor Wylie. New York: Knopf, ^93i Cottected^Prose of Elinor Wylie. New York: Knopf, 1933.

Last Poems of Elinor Wylie. New York: Knopf, 1943. (Transcribed by Jane D. Wise.) CRITICAL AND BIOGRAPHICAL

STUDIES

Benet, William Rose. The Prose and Poetry of Elinor Wylie. Norton, Mass.: Wheaton College Press, 1934. Cabell, James Branch. Some of Us. New York: McBride, 1930. Pp. 13-26. Cluck, Julia. *'Elinor Wylie's Shelley Obsession," PMLA, 56:841-60 (September 1941). Colum, Mary. Life and the Dream. New York: Doubleday, 1947. Gorman, Herbert S. "Daughter of Donne," North American Review, 219:679-86 (May 1924). Gray, Thomas A. Elinor Wylie. New York: Twayne, 1969, Hoyt, Nancy. Elinor Wylie: The Portrait of an Unknown Lady. New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1935. Kazin, Alfred. "The Exquisites," in On Native Grounds. New York: Reynal and Hitchcock, 1942. Kohler, Dayton. "Elinor Wylie: Heroic Mask," South Atlantic Quarterly, 36:218-28 (April 1937). Moore, Virginia. Distinguished Women Writers. New York: Dutton, 1934. Pp. 221-33. Saul, G. B. Quintet: Essays on Five American Women Poets. The Hague: Mouton, 1967. Sergeant, Elizabeth S. Fire Under the Andes. New York: Knopf, 1927. Pp. 107-21. Tate, Allen. "Elinor Wylie's Poetry," New Republic, 72:107 (September 7, 1932). Untermeyer, Louis. American Poetry Since 1900. New York: Holt, 1923. Pp. 221-26. Van Doren, Carl. Three Worlds. New York: Harper, 1936. Wilson, Edmund. The Shores of Light. New York: Farrar, Straus and Young, 1952. , and Mary Colum. "In Memory of Elinor Wylie," New Republic, 57:316-19 (February 6, 1929). Wright, Celeste T. "Elinor Wylie: The Glass Chimaera and the Minotaur," Twentieth Century Literature, 12:15-26 (April 1966). Zabel, Morton D. "The Pattern of the Atmosphere," Poetry, 40:273-82 (August 1932). —JOSEPHINE O'BRIEN SCHAEFER

Index Arabic numbers printed in bold-face type refer to extended treatment of a subject

A. Branson Alcott: His Life and Philosophy (Sanbom and Harris), 46 Aaron, Daniel, 647, 650 Aaron's Rod (Lawrence), 255 Abbott, Edith, 5 Abbott, Grace, 5 Abbott, Jacob, 38, 39 Abolitionism, 405, 418, 587, 588, 590, 682, 683, 685690, 692, 703 "Abram Morrison" (Whittier), 699 Abraham (biblical person), 101, 432 "Abraham Davenport'* (Whittier), 699 "Abraham Lincoln Walks at Midnight" (Lindsay), 39O391 "Absent Thee from Felicity Awhile" (Wylie), 727, 729 Absentee Ownership (Vebien), 642 "Achilles in Left Field" (Podhoretz), 453 "Acknowledgment" (Lanier), 364 Across Spoon River (Masters), 455, 457, 459, 460, 466, 474-475, 476

Adam (biblical person), 107, 113, 120 Adams, Althea, see Thurber, Mrs. James (Althea Adams) Adams, Brooks, 484 Adams, Charles, 644 Adams, Charles Francis, 484 Adams, Franklin Pierce, 653 Adams, Henry, 29^-300, 301, 314, 417, 492, 543, 644 Adams, Henry B., 369 Adams, James Truslow, 481, 484 486 Adams, John, 483, 506, 507, 509, 510, 511, 517, 518, 520, 524 Adams, John Quincy, 685,686 Adams, John R., 601 Aclams, Leonie, 707 Adams, Luella, 652 Adams, Percy G., 251 Adams, Samuel, 516, 525 Addams, Jane, 1-26 Addams, John Huy, 2 "Address to My Soul" (Wylie), 729 Address to the Government of

the United States on the Cession of Louisiana to the French, An (Brown), 146 Adler, Jacob H., 297 Admiral of the Ocean Sea:A Life of Christopher Columbus (Morison), 486-488 Adomo, Theodor, 645, 650 "Adrienne Rich: The Poetics of Change" (Gelpi), 554 Adrift Among Geniuses: Robert McAlmon (Smoller), 275 "Adulation and the Artist" (Lee), 402 "Adventures of the Young Man: An Approach to Charles Brockden Brown" (Berthoff), 148 Adventures While Preaching the Gospel of Beauty (Lindsay), 374, 376, 381, 382-384, 389, 399 Aeschylus, 458, 494 Affluent Society, The (Galbraith), 648 ' 'African Chief, The'' (Bryant), 168 African Treasury, An (ed. Hughes), 344 "After the Burial" (Lowell), 409 "After the Curfew" (Holmes), 308 "After the Tranquilized Fifties: Notes on Sylvia Plath and James Baldwin" (Cox and Jones), 69, 548 "After Twenty Years" (Rich), 559-560 "Afternoon of a Playwright" (Thurber), 620 "Afterwake, The" (Rich), 553 "Agassiz" (Lowell), 414, 416 Agassiz, Louis, 312 Age of Reason, The (Paine), 503, 515-517, 520 "Ages, The" (Bryant) 152, 155, 166, 167 Agnes of Sorrento (Stowe), 592, 595-596 Agrarian Justice (Paine), 517-518 Aiken, Conrad, 402 Aird, Eileen M., 548 Aitken, Robert, 504 "Alastor" (Shelley), 728 Albertini, V. R.,626 Albright, Margery, 613

Alcott, Abba, see Alcott, Mrs. Amos Bronson (Abigail May) Alcott, Amos Bronson, 28, 2^-32,35,39,41,45 Alcott, Mrs. Amos Bronson (Abigail May), 29, 30, 31, 32,35 Alcott, Anna, see Pratt, Anna Alcott, Louisa May, 2JM6 Alcott, May, 41 Alcotts as I Knew Them, The (Cowing), 46 Alcuin: A Dialogue (Brown), 126-127, 133 Aldington, Pencilta, 258 Aldington Richard, 257-262, 270 Aldington, Mrs. Richard, see Doolittle, Hilda Aldrich, Tom, 415 Aldridge,JohnW., 1%, 198 Alexander, Charlotte A., 69 Alice in Wonderland (Carroll), 622 Alison, Archibald, 151, 159 "All Mountains" (Doolittle), 271 "All the Dead Dears" (Plath), 537 "Allegory and Typology 'Embrace and Greet': Anne Bradstreet's Contemplations" (Irvin), 123 Allen, Frederick Lewis, 655, 681 Allen, Gay Wilson, 173, 418 Allen, Shirley S., 69 Allen, Woody, 607, 623 Along the Illinois (Masters), 472 Alter, Robert, 452 Altgeld, John Peter, 382, 455 Althea (Masters), 455, 459 Altick, Richard, 423 Alvarez, A., 526, 527, 548 Ambelain, Robert, 260, 273, 274, 275 ' 'Ambrose Seyffert'' (Masters), 464 Amen Corner, The (Baldwin), 48, 51, 54, 55, 56 "America Aglow" (Ozick), 199 American Annual Register for the Year 1796, 507 American Crisis I (Paine), 508 American Crisis 11 (Paine), 508 737

American Crisis XIII (Paine), 509 American Diary (Webb), 5 American Experience, The (Parkes), 617-618 American Heritage (magazine), 493 American Heroine: The Life and Legend of Jane Addams (Davis), 1, 27 American Humorist, The (Yates), 626 "American in England, An" (Wylie), 707 American Landscape, The, 157 American Literature (publication), 372 American Literature: Essays and Opinions (Pavese), 478 American Magazine, 380 American Manufacturer (newspaper), 684 American Mercury (magazine), 473 American Mind, The (Commager), 650 "American Negro in Search of Identity, The" (Marcus), 70 American Novel and Its Tradition, The (Chase), 148 American Poetry from the Puritans to the Present (Waggoner), 173, 478 American Poetry Since 1900 (Untermeyer), 730 American Poets: From the Puritans to the Present (Waggoner), 706 American Prosody (Allen), 173 American Quarterly (publication), 649 American Register, or General Repository of History, Politics, and Science, The (ed. Brown), 146 American Revolution, The: Explorations in the History of American Radicalism (ed. Young), 525 ' 'American Scholar, The'' (Emerson), 147, 420 American Short Story, The: Front Line in the National Defense of Literature (Peden), 199 American Vernacular Poetry (Greasley), 478

732 I AMER—BALT America's Literary Revolt (Yatron), 402, 478 Ames, Fisher, 486 Ames, Lois, 541, 547 Ames, Van Meter, 402 Amiable Autocrat: A Biography of Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes (Tilton); 319 Among My Books (Lowell), 407 4 'Among the Hills" (Whittier), 703 "Amoral Moralist, The" (White), 648 Amory, Cleveland, 316 Amos (biblical person), 689 Amy (Gould), 275 Amy Lowell: A Chronicle (Damon), 275 Amy Lowell, A Critical Appreciation (Bryher), 275 "Amy Wentworth" (Whittier), 694,696 "And Then Came Baldwin" (Mayfield), 70 Andersen, Hans Christian, 622 Anderson, Charles R., 356, 360,368,371,372 Anderson, Henry J., 156 Anderson, Mary Jane, see Lanier, Mrs. Robert Sampson (Mary Jane Anderson) Anderson, Robert, 277 Anderson, Sherwood, 378, 430, 459, 472, 613 Anderson, Mrs. Sherwood (Tennessee Mitchell), 459, 460 Andral, Gabriel, 302 "Andrew Jackson" (Masters), 472 "Angel Levine" (Malamud), 431,432,43^-434,437 "Angel of the Bridge, The" (Cheever), 186-187 Angell, Carol, 655 Angel 1, Katharine Serge ant, see White, Mrs. E. B. (Katharine Sergeant Angell) Angell, Roger, 655 Angels and Earthly Creatures (Wyiie), 709, 713, 724-730 ' 'Angola Question Mark'' (Hughes), 344 "Angst and Animism in the Poetry of Sylvia Plath'' (Perloff), 548 Animal and Vegetable Physiology Considered with Reference to Natural Theology (Roget), 312 Anne Bradstreet (Piercy), 123 Anne Bradstreet: "The Tenth Muse" (White), 123 Anne Bradstreet: The Worldly Puritan (Stanford), 123 "Anne Bradstreet's 'Contemplations': Patterns of Form

and Meaning" (Rosenfeld), 123 "Anne Bradstreet's Poetic Voices" (Requa), 107, 123 Another Country (Baldwin), 51, 52, 56-58, 63, 67, 337 "Another Country: Baldwin's New York Novel" (Thelwell), 71 ' 'Another Country, Another Time" (Strandley), 71 Another Part of the Forest (Hellman), 282-283, 297 Anouilh, Jean, 286-288, 297 Anthology of Twentieth-Century Brazilian Poetry (eds. Bishop and Brasil), 94 Anthony, Katharine, 46 "Anti-Feminist Woman, The" (Rich), 550 Antigone (Sophocles), 284 "Antiquity of Freedom, The" (Bryant), 168 "Apology, An" (Malamud), 435, 437 "Apostrophe to a Pram Rider" (White), 678 Appleton, Thomas Gold, 306, 415 Appleseed, Johnny (pseudonym), see Chapman, John (Johnny Appleseed) "Applicant, The" (Plath), 535, ! 544,545 Arabian Nights, The, 584, 599 "Archaically New" (Moore), 97 "Archibald Higbie" (Masters), 461 ' 'Architecture of Walter Mitty 's Secret Life, The" (Sundell), 627 Arendt, Hannah, 570 Areopagitica (Milton), 422 "Ariel" (Plath), 542, 546 Ariel (Plath), 526, 539, 541 Aristophanes, 406 Aristotle, 104, 296, 423 "Armadillo, The" (Bishop), 93 Armored Attack (film), 281 Arms, George, 173, 225, 319, 416-417, 426, 706 Armstrong, A. Joseph, 402 Armstrong, George, 386 Arnavon, Cyrille, 226 Arner, Robert, 226 Arnold, George W., 411 Arnold, Matthew, 416, 417, 419, 529, 552, 602 Arnold, Olga, 626 Arnold, Thurman, 645 Art of James Thurber, The (Tobias), 626 Art of Sylvia Plath, The (Newman), 527, 548 Art of the Moving Picture, The

(Lindsay), 376, 391-392, 394 Arte of English Poesie (Puttenham), 113 Arthur Mervyn; or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 (Brown), 137-140, 144 "Artistic Conscience of Vachel Lindsay, The" (Massa), 402 "Artistry of Whittier's Margaret Smith's Journal, The" (Ringe), 706 "As I Went Down by Havre de Grace" (Wylie), 723 "As Weary Pilgrim" (Bradstreet), 103, 109, 122 "As You Like It" (Chopin), 217 As You Like It (Shakespeare), 308 Ashberg, John, 96 Ashford, Deborah, 548 Ask Your Mama (Hughes), 339, 341-342 Assistant, The (Malamud), 427, 428, 429, 431, 435, 441445, 451 Astro, Richard, 429, 445, 452 "At Cheniere Caminada" (Chopin), 220 At Fault (Chopin), 207, 209211,220 At Sundown (Whittier), 704 "At the Fishhouses" (Bishop), 90,92 Atheism Refuted: in a Discourse to Prove the Existence of God (Paine), 517 "Athenaise" (Chopin), 219220 Atlantic (magazine), 174, 225, 300, 306, 312, 313, 350, 357, 362, 406, 414, 418, 419,421,490,530,593 Atlantic Monthly (magazine), see Atlantic "Au Vieux Jardin" (Aldington), 257 Auden, W. H., 270, 552, 610, 626 Auerbach, Nina, 40, 46 "August" (Rich), 564 Aunt Jo's Scrapbooks (Alcott), 43 "Aunt Mary" (Stowe), 587 Auser, Cortland P., 198 "Auspex" (Lowell), 424 Austen, Jane, 267, 656, 715 "Austen and Alcott on Matriarchy" (Auerbach), 46 "Author to Her Book, The" (Bradstreet), 119 ' 'Autobiographical Notes'' (Baldwin), 54 4 'Autobiographical Notes'' (Holmes), 301 Autobiography (Cournos), 275

Autobiography (Williams), 254, 275 Autobiography of Malcolm X (Little), 66 Autobiography of Mark Van Doren, The (Van Doren), 626 Autocrat of the BreakfastTable, The (Holmes), 306307 Autumn Garden, The (Hellman), 285-286, 290 "Autumn Garden, The: Mechanics and Dialectics" (Felheim), 297 ' 'Autumn Woods'' (Bryant), 164 "Aux Imagistes" (Williams), 266 Avedon, Richard, 58 Avery, John, 153 Awakening, The (Chopin), 200, 201,202,211,220-225 Ayer, Gertrude, 48 Ayres, C. E.,632

Babbit, Irving, 423 Babeuf, Francois, 518 Bach, Johann Sebastian, 363 Bache, Richard, 504 Bachofen, J. J.,560, 567 "Backgrounds of Lowell's Satire in "The Bigelow Papers' " (Voss), 426 "Backlash Blues, The" (Hughes), 343 Bacon, Francis, 310, 388 Badger, A. G., 356 Bailey, Gamaliel, 587, 590 Bailyn, Bernard, 484,506,525 Baker, Carlos, 198 Baker, Samuel Bernard, 626 Balch, Emily Greene, 25 Baldwin, Alice, 626 Baldwin, David, 47,48,49,50, 51, 54, 65, 66 Baldwin, Mrs. David (Emma BerdisJones),47,48,49,65 Baldwin, James, 47-71, 337, 341 Baldwin, Roger, 12 Baldwin, Samuel, 48 "Baldwin's Autobiographical Essays: The Problem of Negro Identity" (Lee), 70 "Ballad of Jesus of Nazareth, A" (Masters), 459 "Ballad of Trees and the Master, A" (Lanier), 370 ' 'Ballade of Meaty Inversions'' (White), 676 "Ballads of Lenin" (Hughes), 331 Baltimore Afro-American (newspaper), 326, 331

BALT—BLAC / 733 Baltimore Sun (newspaper), 365 Balzac, Honore de, 647 Bancal, Jean, 514 Bancroft, George, 479 Baraka, Imamu, 63 "Barbara Frietchie'' (Whittier), 695-6% "Barbarian Status of Women, The" (Veblen), 636-637 "Barclay of Ury" (Whittier), 693 Bard of Savagery, The: Thorstein Veblen and Modern Social Theory (Diggins), 650 "Barefoot Boy, The" (Whittier), 691, 69^-700 Barksdale, Richard, 69, 341, 346 Barlow, Joel, 124, 511, 515, 521 Barnard, Frederick, 684 Barnett, Samuel, 2 Barnstone, Willis, 458, 477 Bamum, P. T., 703 Barren, Ralph, 462 Barth, John, 100 Barton, Priscilla, see Morison, Mrs. Samuel Eliot (Priscilla Barton) Bartram, John, 244 "Batter my heart, three person 'd God'' (Donne), 726 Battle and the Books, The (Stone), 626 Battle of the Atlantic, The (Morison), 490 "Battle of the Baltic, The" (Campbell), 309 Baudelaire, Charles, 271 Baum, L. Frank, 621 Baumbach, Jonathan, 452 Baxter, Richard, 683 Bay Psalm Book, 106 Baylies, William, 153 Bayou Folk (Chopin), 200,216, 218 Be Glad You're Neurotic (Bisch), 608 Beard, Charles, 481, 490, 492, 632,640,643,647 Beard, Mary, 481 Beast inMe, The (Thurber), 615 Beatty, R. C.,425 Beaumont, Francis, 422 "Beauty" (Wylie), 710 Beauvoir, Simone de, 51 Beaver, Joseph, 373 Beck, Warren, 681 Becker, Carl, 492, 493 Becker, Paula, see Modersohn, Mrs. Otto (Paula Becker) "Bee, The" (Lanier), 364 Beecher, Catharine, 581, 582583, 584, 586, 588, 589, 591, 599 Beecher, Charles, 588, 589

Beecher, Edward, 581, 582, 583, 584, 588, 591 Beecher, Harriet, see Stowe, Harriet Beecher Beecher, Henry Ward, 581 Beecher, Lyman, 580-581, 582, 583, 587, 588, 599 Beecher, Mrs. Lyman (Roxanna Foote), 580-581, 582, 588, 599 Beerbohm, Max, 714 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 363 "Before the Birth of one of her children" (Bradstreet), 118 Beggar's Opera, The (Gay), 523 Behind a Mask (Alcott), 36-37, 43-44 "Behind Spoon River" (Van Doren), 478 "Behold the Key" (Malamud), 437 Beiliss, Mendel, 427,446,447, 448 Belfrey Owl (magazine), 320 Bell, Daniel, 648 Bell, George E., 69 Bell, Michael D., 148 Bell, Quentin, 636 BellJar, The (Plath), 526, 527, 529, 531-536, 539, 540, 541, 542, 544 Bellamy, Edward, 641 "Belle Dollinger" (Masters), 463 "Belle Zoraide, La" (Chopin), 215-216 Bellow, Saul, 428, 451 "Bells, The" (Poe), 388 Beloved Lady: A History of Jane Addams' Ideas on Reform and Peace (Fanrell), 24, 27 Benchley, Nathaniel, 626 "Benefit Performance" (Malamud), 431 Benet, Rosemary, 626 Benet, Stephen Vincent, 626 Benet, William Rose, 626,709, 730 Benjamin Franklin (Van Doren), 486 "Benjamin Pantier" (Masters), 461 Bennett, Whitman, 705 Bentham, Jeremy, 635 Bentley, Eric, 297 Bercovitch, Sacvan, 99, 659 Beriyne, Daniel E., 672 Bernard, F. V., 626 Bernard Malamud (Richman), 453 Bernard Malamud: A Collection of Critical Essays (eds. Fields and Fields), 452, 453 Bernard Malamud: An Annotated Check List (Kosofsky), 452

"Bernard Malamud: The Magic and the Dread" (Kazin), 453 "Bernard Malamud: The Sadness of Goodness" (Klein), 453 Bernard Malamud and the Critics (eds. Field and Field), 453 "Bernard Malamud and the Jewish Literary Tradition" (Rovit), 453 "Bernard Malamud and the New Life" (Tanner), 453 "Bernard Malamud's Fiction: The Old and the New" (Solotaroff), 453 Bernstein, Burton, 626 Bernstein, Leonard, 288, 289 "Berry" (Hughes), 329, 330 Berry man, John, 546 Berthoff, Warner, 133, 148, 477 Berti, Luigi, 275 "Bertrand Hume" (Masters), 463-464 Best Short Stories by Negro Writers, The (ed. Hughes), 345 "Bethe" (Hellman), 293 Bethune, Mary McLeod, 333 Bettelheim, Bruno, 622 "Betrayal" (Lanier), 364 Between Myth and Morning: Women Awakening (Janeway), 46 Bevis, Howard L., 611 Bevis, John, 503 Bewley, Marius, 251 ' 'Beyond the Bayou'' (Chopin), 215 Bible, 4, 6, 63, 101, 104, 105, 113, 193, 369, 388, 433, 494, 515, 516, 517, 583, 584, 587, 589, 653, 689, 690, 691; see also New Testament; Old Testament; names of biblical books Bibliography of James Russell Lowell, A (Cooke), 425 Bibliography of John Greenleaf Whittier, A (Currier), 705 Bibliography of Oliver Wendell Holmes, A (Currier), 319 Bibliography of the First Editions in Book Form of James Russell Lowell, A (Livingston), 425 Bibliography of William Cullen Bryant and His Critics, 1808-1972, A (Phair), 173 Bid Me to Live (Doolittle), 258, 260, 268, 269, 270 Big Knockover, The (Hammett), 292 Big Money, The (Dos Passos), 646,647

Big Sea, The (Hughes), 322, 332, 333 Bigelow, Jacob, 302 Bigelow, John, 173 Bigelow Papers, The (Lowell), 406, 407, 408, 410, 411412, 415, 417, 424 Bigelow Papers, Second Series, The (Lowell), 406, 415-416 Bigsby,C W. E., 69 "Bill, The" (Malamud), 427, 430, 434 "Binsey Poplars" (Hopkins), 94 Bio-Bibliography of Langston Hughes, 1902-1967, A (Dickinson), 348 Biography of William Cullen Bryant, with Extracts from His Private Correspondence, A (Godwin), 173 "Birchbrook Mill" (Whittier), 699 Bird, Alan, 260 Birdoff, Harry, 601 "Birmingham Sunday" (Hughes), 343 Bimey, James G., 587, 588 Birth of a Nation, The (film), 66 * 'Birthday Cake for Lionel, A " (Wylie), 721 "Birthday Present, A" (Plath), 531 Bisch, Louis E., 608 Bishop, Elizabeth,79-97 Bishop, John Peale, 709 Bishop, John W., 83 Bishop, Morris, 676, 681 Bishop, William Thomas Bismark, Otto von, 643 "Bitter Drink, The" (Dos Passos), 647 Black, Stephen A., 626 "Black Aesthetic in White America, The" (Daniels), 70 Black Armour (Wylie), 708, 709, 712-714, 729 ' 'Black Boys and Native Sons'' (Howe), 70 "Black Fox, The" (Whittier), 692 Black Image in the White Mind, The (Fredrickson), 589, 601 "Black Is My Favorite Color" (Malamud), 437 Black Magic, A Pictorial History of the Negro in American Entertainment (Hughes), 345 Black Misery (Hughes), 336 "Black Rook in Rainy Weather" (Plath), 543, 544 Black Troubadour: Langston Hughes (Rollins), 348 "Black Writers' Role, The: James Baldwin" (Neal), 70 "Blacklist and the Cold War, The"' (Kramer), 295, 298

734 I BLAC—CARI Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine. 155 Blaine, Anita McCormick, 5 Blair, Hugh, 422 Blair, Robert, 150 Blair, Walter, 426, 626 Blake, William, 80, 385, 514, 517, 539, 552, 708 Blanck, Jacob, 173 Blechman, Bun, 290 "Blind Poet, The: Sidney Lanier" (Warren), 371, 373 Blithedale Romance (Hawthorne), 579 Blitzstein, Marc, 277 "Blood of the Lamb, The*' (hymn), 385 Blood of the Prophets, The (Masters), 458-459, 461 Bloom, Harold, % "Blue Moles" (Plath), 539 Blues for Mister Charlie (Baldwin), 48, 61-62, 63 "Blues Poetry of Langston Hughes, The" (Waldron), 348 Boas, Franz, 641 Bodenheim, Maxwell, 257 Began, Louise, 707, 726 Bogart, Humphrey, 623 Bogle, Donald, 69 Bonn, William E., 626 Boleyn, Anne, 461 Bolivar, Simon, 283, 284, 285 Bolton, Guy, 281 Bonneville, Mme. Marguerite, 520, 521 Bonneville, Nicolas de, 511, 518, 519 Bontemps, Arna, 325 Book of Negro Folklore, The (ed. Hughes), 345 Book of Verses, A (Masters), 458 "Books Considered'* (Bloom), % Booth, Charles, 13 Booth, General William, 384, 386 Boston Sunday Herald (newspaper), 529 Boswell, James, 656 "Boulot and Boulette" (Chopin), 211 Boundin, Henri L., 251 Bourne, Randolph, 524 Bowditch, Nathaniel, 482 Bowen, Francis, 413 Bowen, Louise de Koven, 5 Boyd, Blanche, 578 Boynton, Percy Holmes, 415 Boy's Froissart, The (Lanier), 361 Boy's King Arthur, The (Lanier), 361 Boy's Mabinogion, The (Lanier), 361

"Boys of '29, The" (Holmes), 308 Boy's Percy, The (Lanier), 361 Bracher, Frederick, 185, 198 Brackenridge, Hugh Henry, 124, 127, 145 Bradbury, David L., 402 Bradbury, Ray, 621-622 Braddon, Mary E., 35, 36 Bradford,William, 110, 112, 486, 494 Bradley, William A., 173 Bradstreet, Anne, 9&-123,300, 484, 485, 496, 546, 705 Bradstreet, Elizabeth, 108, 122 Bradstreet, Simon, 98, 103, 110, 116 Bradstreet, Mrs. Simon, see Bradstreet, Anne Brady, Charles, 626 "Bragdowdy and the Busybody, The" (Thurber), 617 "Brahmin Dons Homespun, A" (Blair), 426 "Brain and Brawn, Broadway in Review" (Gilder), 627 Brancaccio, Patrick, 148 Brande, Dorothea, 608 Brandon, Henry, 604, 612, 618, 626 Brandt, Alice, 92 Branscomb, Lewis, 626 Brasil, Emanuel, 94 "Brasilia" (Plath), 544, 545 "Brass Spittoons" (Hughes), 326-327 Braunlich, Phyllis, 626 Brawley, Benjamin, 327, 332 Brazil (Bishop), 92 "Bread Alone" (Wylie), 727 Bread of Idleness, The (Masters), 460 "Breaking Up of the Wins hips, The" (Thurber), 616 Brecht, Bertolt, 292 Breit, Harvey, 69, 198 Bremer, Fredrika, 407 "Brewing of Soma, The" (Whittier), 704 Brewster, Martha, 114 Bridges, Robert, 721 Bridgman, Richard, 477 Bnffault, Robert, 560, 567 Brigadier and the Golf Widow, TMCheever), 184-185,192 Briggs, Charles F., 411 Bright Book of Life (Kazin), 198 Brissot, Jacques Pierre, 511 "British Poets, The" (Holmes), 306 "Broncho That Would Not Be Broken, The" (Lindsay), 383 Brooks, Cleanth, 423 Brooks, Van Wyck, 423, 424, 426, 650 Broussais, Francois, 302

Brown, Ashley, 79,80,82,84, 92,% Brown, Charles Brockden, 124-149 Brown, Mrs. Charles Brockden (Elizabeth Linn), 145, 146 Brown, Charles H., 173 Brown, Clarence, 477 Brown, Elijah, 125 Brown, Herbert Ross, 601 Brown, John, 345 Brown, Mary Armitt, 125 Brown, Solyman, 156 "Brown Dwarf of Rugen, The" (Whittier), 6% Browne, William, 98 Brownell, W. C., 426 Brownies' Book, The (Hughes), 321 Browning, Robert, 2, 6, 79, 311,416,468,622 Broyaid, Anatole, 198 Brueghel, Pieter, 475 Brutus, 471 "Brutus and Antony" (Masters), 472 Bryan, William Jennings, 385, 395-3%, 455, 456 "Bryan, Bryan, Bryan, Bryan" (Lindsay), 394, 395, 398 Bryant, Austin, 152, 153 Bryant, Frances, 153 Bryant, Jerry H., 69 Bryant, Peter, 150, 151, 152, 153 Bryant, William Cullen, 150173, 312, 362, 413, 416, 420 Bryant, Mrs. William Cullen (Frances Fairchild), 153,169 Bryant, William Cullen, II, 154 Bryher, Jackson R. (pseudonym), see Ellerman, Winifred Buber, Martin, 83, 88 Buck, Dudley, 362 Budd, Nelson H., 626 Buddha, 363, 397 Builders of the Bay Colony (Morison), 123, 484-485 Building of Uncle Tom's Cabin, The (Kirkham), oOl Bulkin, Elly, 578 Bullet Park (Cheever), 185, 187-193, 194, 195 Bunche, Ralph, 343 Bunyan, John, 32 Burchfield, Alice, 652, 660 Burgess, Charles E., 477 Burgh, James, 522 "Burglar of Babylon, The" (Bishop), 93 Burhans, Clinton S., Jr., 198 Burke, Edmund, 4%, 511,512, 513, 523 Burke, Kenneth, 630 Burke, Paine, and the Rights of

Man: A Difference of Political Opinions (Fennessy), 525 Burks, Mary Fair, 69 Burnett, Frances Hodgson, 44 Burnham, James, 648 "Burning of Paper Instead of Children, The" (Rich), 558 Burr, Aaron, 461,483 Burt, Struthers, 198 Burton, Robert, 349 Bush, Douglas, 268, 275 Butler, E. M., 275 Butler, Elizabeth, 260 Butler, Nicholas Murray, 23 Butscher, Edward, 526, 548 "Buzz" (Alcott), 43 By Avon River (Doolittle), 272 By Land and by Sea (Morison), 492 Byrd, Cecil K., 401 Burns, Robert, 158, 410, 455, 683,685,691,692 Byron, George Gordon, Lord, 150, 312, 349, 580, 591, 683, 685, 719

Cabell, James Branch, 613, 714,718,721,730 Cable, George Washington, 200 Cabot, John, 4%, 497 Cadle, Dean, 429, 452 Cady, Edwin H., 402 "Cage and the Prairie: Two Notes on Symbolism, The" (Bewley), 251 Cain (biblical person), 120 California and Oregon Trail, The (Parkman), 486 Callow, James T., 173 Calvert, George H., 361 Calvinism, 38, 151, 228, 229, 301, 302, 315, 502, 580, 593, 5%, 683, 699 "Cambridge Thirty Years Ago" (Lowell), 419 Campbell, Alexander, 381,395 Campbell, Thomas, 309, 310 Camus, Albeit, 621 Candide (Hellman), 288-289, 292 Candide (Voltaire), 288-289 Candle in the Cabin, The (Lindsay), 398, 400 "Cane in the Corridor, The" (Thurber), 616 Canfield, Cass, 668 Cantos (Pound), 272 "Cape Breton" (Bishop), 92 Capote, Truman, 291, 292 Capouya, Emile, 50 Card, AnthaE., 496 Carey, Julian C, 348 Caribbean as Columbus Saw It (Morison and Obregon), 488

CARI^-CLOC / 735 Carlotta (empress of Mexico), 457 Carlyle, Thomas, 2, 349, 410, 422, 482, 485, 552 Carmen Jones (film), 66 Carnegie, Andrew, 639, 644 Carnegie, Dale, 608 Carne-Ross, D. S., 268, 269, 275 "Carnival with Spectres'* (Benet), 626 "Carpe Noctem, if You Can" (Thurber), 620 Carpenter, George Rice, 706 Carroll, Charles, 525 Carroll, Lewis, 44, 622, 656 Carter, Jimmy, 638 Cartier, Jacques, 496, 497 "Cartographies of Silence" (Rich), 571-572 "Casablanca" (Bishop), 86 Case of the Officers of Excise (Paine), 503-504 ' 'Cassandra Southwick '' (Whittier), 693 t4 Castilian"(Wylie), 714 ' 'Catbird Seat, The'' vThurber), 623 Catcher in The Rye, The (Salinger), 535 Catharine Beecher: A Study in American Domesticity (Sklar), 601 Cathedral The (Lowell), 407, 416-417 Gather, Willa, 609, 719 Catherine D, 433 "Catterskill Falls" (Bryant), 160 Catullus, 261, 728 14 'Cause My House Fell Down*: The Theme of the Fall in Baldwin's Novels" (Foster), 70 Cavalier and Yankee: The Old South and American National Character (Taylor), 601 "Celestial Railroad, The" (Hawthorne), 188 "Census of the Works of Charles Brockden Brown, A" (Krause), 148 "Centennial Meditation of Columbia, The" (Lanier), 362 Century (magazine), 418, 709, 717 Cervantes, Miguel de, 406 Chaboseau, Jean, 260 Chalmers, George, 514, 521 "Chambered Nautilus, The" (Holmes), 254, 307, 312313, 314 Chamberlain, John, 647 Chamberlain, Neville, 664 "Chance" (Doolittle), 271 "Change Is Always for the Worse" (Segal), 199

Change of World, A (Rich), 551,552 "Changeling, The" (Lowell), 409 "Changeling, The" (Whittier), 697 "Channel X: Two Plays on the Race Conflict" (Roth), 7071 Channing, Edward, 479-480 Channing, Edward Tyrrel, 155, 422 Channing, William Ellery, 103, 589 "Chant for May Day" (Hughes), 331 Chaplin, Charlie, 607 Chapman, George, 422 Chapman, John (Johnny Appleseed), 397 Chapters in a Mythology: The Poetry of Sylvia Plath (Kroll), 541-543, 548 Chapters on Erie (Adams and Adams), 644 Charles II, King, 110, 111, 522 ' 'Charles Brockden Brown'' (Ringe), 148 Charles Brockden Brown (Ringe), 148 "Charles Brockden Brown: A Bibliographical Essay" (Witherton), 148 Charles Brockden Brown: A Study of Early American Fiction (Vilas), 148 Charles Brockden Brown: American Gothic Novelist (Warfel), 148 Charles Brockden Brown: Pioneer Voice of America (dark), 148 "Charles Brockden Brown, America's First Important Novelist: A Checklist of Biography and Criticism" (Hemenway and Keller), 147 ' 'Charles Brockden Brown and the Culture of Contradictions" (Hedges), 148 "Charles Brockden Brown as a Novelist of Ideas" (Hirsh), 148 "Charles Brockden Brown's Historical 'Sketches': A Consideration" (Berthoff), 148 Charleville, Victoria Verdon, 200-201,205,206,210 Charlotte: A Tale of Truth (Rowson), 128 Charlotte's Web (White), 655, 656, 658, 667, 670 Charney, Maurice, 69 Charvat, William, 148 Chase, Richard, 148 Chase, Salmon P., 584

Chase, Stuart, 609 Chase, The (Foote), 281 Chatterton, Thomas, 349, 410, 716 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 356, 363, 422, 617 "Checklist of the Melcher Lindsay Collection" (Byrd), 401 Cheetham, James, 521 Cheever, Benjamin Hale, 175 Cheever, David W., 304 Cheever, Ezekiel, 174, 193 Cheever, Federico, 175 Cheever, Fred, 174 Cheever, Frederick L., 174 Cheever, John, 174-199 Cheever, Mrs. John (Mary Winternitz), 175 Cheever, Mary Liley, 174 Cheever, Susan, see Cowley, Susan Cheever (Susan Cheever) * 'Cheever's Inferno" (Warnke), 199 4 'Cheever's Triumph'' (Clemons), 198 "Cheever's Use of Mythology in 'The Enormous Radio' " (Kendle), 199 Chekhov, Anton, 1% ' 'Chemin de Per'' (Bishop), 80, 85,86 Chenetier, Marc, 402 Cheney, Ednah D.,46 Chessman, Caryl, 446 Chicago Chronicle (newspaper), 455 Chicago Defender (publication), 336 Chicago Evening Post (newspaper), 379 Chicago Times-Herald (newspaper), 200 Chicago Tribune (newspaper), 490,606 Chicago Renaissance: The Literary Life in the Midwest, 1900-1930 (Kramer), 402, 478 Chicago Renaissance in American Letters, The: A Critical History (Duffey), 402, 478 "Child" (Plath), 544 Child Savers, The: The Invention of Delinquency (Platt), 27 "Childless Woman" (Plath), 544 "Children" (Stowe), 587 Children of the Market Place (Masters), 471 Children's Hour, The (Hellman), 276-277, 281, 286, 297 "Children's Rhymes" (Hughes), 340

"Chinese Nightingale, The" (Lindsay), 392-393, 394 Chinese Nightingale and Other Poems, The (Lindsay), 392 "Choice of Profession, A" (Malamud), 437 Chopin, Felix, 202 Chopin, Frederic, 363 Chopin, Jean, 206 Chopin, Kate, 200-226 Chopin, Oscar, 206-207 Chopin, Mrs. Oscar, see Chopin, Kate Choruses from Iphigenia in Aulis (trans. Doolittle), 257, 268, 269 Chovteau, Marie TTierese, 205 Christian Science Monitor (newspaper), 530 Christmas Carol, A (Dickens), 409-410 "Christmas, or the Good Fairy" (Stowe), 586 Christopher Columbus, Mariner (Morison), 488 Chronologies of the Life and Writings of William Cullen Bryant . . . (Sturges), 173 Churchill, Winston, 491 Cicero, 405 "Circus in Three Rings" (Plath), 536 "Cirque d'Hiver" (Bishop), 85 City of Discontent (Harris), 402 Civil Disobedience (Throeau), 507 "Civil Rights" (Lanier), 357 Clara Howard; or, The Enthusiasm of Love (Brown), 145 Clarissa (Richardson), 714 Clark, David Lee, 148 Clark, Harry Hayden, 319,423, 426, 525 Clark, John Bates, 633 Clark, Willis Gaylord, 684 Classical Tradition, The (Highet), 268 Classical World ofH. D., The (Swann), 275 "Claw of the Sea-Puss, The: James Thurber's Sense of Experience" (Black), 626 Clay, Henry, 684, 686 "Clear Days" (White), 664, 665 Clemens, Samuel Langhorne, see Twain, Mark Clemens, Mrs. Samuel Langhome (Olivia Langdon), 457 demons, Walter, 198 Cleopatra, 114 Cleveland, Grover, 486 Clive, Robert, 505 Clocks of Columbus, The (Holmes), 626

736 I CLOS—DAIC Closer Look at Ariel, A (Steiner), 549 "Cloud, The" (Shelley), 720 ''Cloud on the Way, The" (Bryant), 171 4 'Clover" (Lanier), 362-364 Clover and Other Poems (Lanier), 362 Cluck, Julia, 728, 730 ' 'Coast Guard's Cottage, The'' (Wylie), 723 Coates, Robert M., 626 Cobbett, William, 517 "Cobbler Keezar's Vision" (Whittier), 699 Cocke, Frances, see Pain, Mrs. Joseph (Frances Cocke) Coffman, Stanley K., 275 "Cold-blooded Creatures" (Wylie), 729 . Golden, Cadwallader, 250 4 'Colder the Air, The" (Bishop), 86 Cole, Goody, 696-697 Cole, TTiomas, 156, 158, 171 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 31, 311,349,376,393,422 Coles, Robert, 69 Collected Letters (Lawrence), 275 Collected Poems (Doolittle), 264-267, 269 Collected Poems (Lindsay), 380,387,392,396-397,400 Collins, Wilkie, 35, 36 Collins, William, 714 Colloquial Style in America, The (Bridgman), 477 Colossus, The (Plath), 529, 531,536,538,540 Colum, Mary, 708, 709, 730 Columbian Magazine, 125 Columbus, Christopher, 397, 479, 480, 483, 486-488, 491,495,497,498 Columbus Dispatch (newspaper), 606, 613 "Come out the Wilderness" (Baldwin), 63 "Comedy of Exiles, A" (Munson), 478 Comic Imagination in American Literature (ed. Rubin), 681 Comic Tragedies (Alcott), 33 Commager, Henry Steele, 372, 484, 647, 650 "Command of Human Destiny as Exemplified in Two Plays: Lillian Hellman's The Little Foxes and Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun" (Phillips), 298 "Comment on Curb" (Hughes), 340 Commentary (publication), 51 "Committed Writer, The:

James Baldwin as Dramatist" (Bigsby), 69 Common Ground (publication), 334 4 'Common Sense' * (Bailyn), 525 Common Sense (Paine), 231, 505, 506-508, 509, 513, 516, 517, 521 Commons, John, 645 Communities of Women (Auerbach), 46 4 'Compassionate Friendship" (Doolittle), 257, 258, 259, 260, 271 4 'Complete Poems, The'' (Ashberg), 96 Complete Poems, The (Bishop), 72, 82, 94 Complete Works of Kate Chopin, The (ed. Seyersted), 212, 225 4 'Complicated Thoughts About a Small Son" (White), 678 Comus (Milton), 622 Conceptions of Reality in Modern American Poetry (Dembo), 272, 275 Condorcet, Marquis de, 511 Confessional Poets, The (Phillips), 548 Confident Years, The: 1885-1915 (Brooks), 650 4 'Congo, The'' (Lindsay), 388-389, 392, 395 Congo and Other Poems, The (Lindsay), 379, 382, 389, 390, 391 Conklin, Grof, 672 "Connecticut Lad, A" (White), 677 Connecticut Wits, The (Howard), 148 Connelly, Marc, 679 Connor, Frederick W., 173 Connors, Elizabeth, see Lindsay, Mrs. Vachel (Elizabeth Connors) Conover, Roger, 95 Conquest of Canaan (Dwight), 124 Conrad, Alfred H., 552 Conrad, David, 552 Conrad, Jacob, 552 Conrad, Joseph, 292, 621, 622 Conrad, Paul, 552 4 'Consumption'' (Bryant), 169-170 "Contagiousness of Puerperal Fever, The*' (Holmes), 303304 ''Contemplations" (Bradstreet), 112, 113, 119-122 "Contentment" (Holmes), 307 Continuity of American Poetry, 77i* (Pearce), 111,173,373, 475, 478, 706

"Conversation on Conversation" (Stowe), 587 Conversations on Some of the Old Poets (Lowell), 405 Conway, Jill, 19, 27 Cooke, G. W.,425 Coolidge, Calvin, 647 "Coon Hunt" (White), 669 Cooper, James Fenimore, 141, 147, 155, 156, 158, 171, 372, 413, 495, 579, 585, 652,660 Copland, Aaron, 281 "Cora Unashamed" (Hughes), 329, 330 "Coral Ring, The" (Stowe), 586 Corey, Lewis, 645 Corke, Hilary, 198 "Corn" (Lanier), 352, 353, 354,356-361,364,366 Corneille, Pierre, 716 Cornell Sun (newspaper), 652 "Corpse Plant, The" (Rich), 555 Coser, Lewis, 650 Cosmic Optimism: A Study of the Interpretation of Evolution by American Poets from Emerson to Robinson (Conner), 173 "Cost of Living, The" (Malamud), 429, 437 Cotton, John, 98, 101, 110, 111, 116 Cotton, Seaborn, 101 "Countess, The" (Whittier), 691,694 "Country Husband, The" (Cheever), 184, 189 "Couple of Hamburgers, A" (Thurber), 616 Cournos, John, 258, 275 "Courtin', The" (Lowell), 415 Coward, Noel, 332 Cowley, Abraham, 357 Cowley, Malcolm, 174, 609, 610, 620, 626, 627, 647, 654, 678 Cowley, Mrs. Malcolm, 615 Cowley, Susan Cheever (Susan Cheever), 175, 198 Cowper, William, 150, 151, 152, 539 Cox, C. B., 69, 548 "Crack-up of American Optimism, The: Vachel Lindsay, the Dante of the Fundamentalists" (Viereck), 403 Cradle Will Rock, The (Blitzstein), 277, 278 "Craftsmanship of Lowell, The: Revisions in 'The Cathedral' " (Tanselle), 426 Crandall, Reuben, 686 Crane, Hart, 86

Crane, R. S.,423 Crane, Stephen, 314 Crawford, Joan, 67 "Credos and Curios" (Thurber), 606, 613 "Creed of a Beggar, The" (Lindsay), 379 Crevecoeur, Michel-Guillaume Jean de, 227-252 Crevecoeur, Robert de, 252 Crevecoeur's Eighteenth-Century Travels in Pennsylvania and New York (Adams), 251 "Crevecoeur's Letters and the Beginning of an American Literature" (Stone), 252 Crisis, The (publication), 321, 322, 323, 325, 326, 327 Crisis papers (Paine), 508-,509, 510 4 'Criticism as Science" (Robertson), 426 Crockett, David, 411 Cromwell, Oliver, 111 Crooke, Dr. Helkiah, 98, 104 "Cross" (Hughes), 325 Crossing the Water (Plath), 526, 538 "Crowded Street, The" (Bryant), 168 Crozier, Alice C., 601 44 'Crumbling Idols' by Hamlin Garland" (Chopin), 217 ''Crusoe in England'' (Bishop), 93, 95, 96 "Crystal, The" (Lanier), 364, 370 Cullen, Countee, 49, 325 Culley, Margaret, 226 "Cultural Exchange" (Hughes), 341 Cultural History of the American Revolution, A (Silverman), 149 Cultural Life of the New Nation, 1776-1830, The (Nye), 149 Cummings, E. E., 622, 678 Curie, Marie, 569 Current Biography (publication), 429 "Currents and CounterCurrents in Medical Science" (Holmes), 305 Currier, Thomas Franklin, 319, 705 Curti, Merle, 27 Curtis, George William, 307 Cushing, Caleb, 684, 686 Cushman, Howard, 652 D. H. Lawrence, The Man and His Work (Delavaney), 275 Dadaism, 369 "Daddy" (Plath), 529, 542, 545,546 Daiches, David, 536

DAMO—DOWN / 737 Damon, S. Foster, 215 Dana, Richard Henry, 103, 154, 155, 414, 420 Dance, Daryl C, 70 ' 'Dangerous Road Before Martin Luther King" (Baldwin), 52 Daniel (biblical book), 105 Daniel (biblical person), 106 Daniel, Samuel, 369 Daniels, Mark R., 70 Dans I'ombre des cathedrales (Ambelain), 273, 275 Dante Alighieri, 256, 363,422, 494 ' 'Dante of Suburbia'' (Oilman), 198 Dark Angel, The (Bolton), 281 <4 Dark Angel: The Writings of James Baldwin" (MacInnes), 70 "Dark Funnel, The: A Reading of Sylvia Plath" (Phillips), 548 Darrow, Clarence, 5, 455 Darwin, Charles, 368, 373 Darwinism, 313, 314, 640 Daugert, Stanley, 649 "Daughter of Donne" (Gorman), 73(X Davenport, Abraham, 699 Davenport, Herbert J., 642 Daves, E. G., 369 Davis, Allen F., 1,7,27 Davis, Allison, 327 Davis, Angela, 66 Davis, Arthur, 348 Davis, Bette, 67 Davis, Elizabeth Gould, 567 Davis, Rebecca Harding, 45 Day, Dorothy, 524 Day, Georgiana, 585 Day, Mary, see Lanier, Mrs. Sidney (Mary Day) "Daybreak in Alabama" (Hughes), 344 "Day-Dream, A" (Bryant), 160 Days of Mars, The (Bryher), 275 Days to Come (Hellman), 276, 277-278 De Bellis, Jack, 366, 368, 372, 373 De Camoes, Luis, 94 De Chiara, Ann, see Malamud, Mrs. Bernard (Ann de Chiara) De V education d'un homme sauvage (Itard), 564 De Reilhe, Catherine, 202 De Rioja, Francisco, 166 De Vries, Peter, 604, 627 "Deacon's Masterpiece, The" (Holmes), 302, 307 Dead End (Kingsley), 277,281 Deane, Silas, 509, 524

Dear Lovely Death (Hughes), 328 "Death of a Pig" (White), 665-668 "Death of General Wolfe, The" (Paine), 504 "Death of Justina, The" (Cheever), 184-185 "Death of Me, The" (Malamud), 437 "Death of Slavery, The" (Bryant), 168-169 "Death of the Flowers, The" (Bryant), 170 "Death Throes of Romanticism, The: The Poetry of Sylvia Plath" (Gates), 548 Debs, Eugene Victor, 524 "Debuts du roman realiste americain et 1 "influence franchise, Les" (Arnavon), 226 Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, 513, 519 Declaration of Universal Peace and Liberty (Paine), 512 Decline and Fall (Waugh), 607 Decline and Fall of the English System of Finance, The (Paine), 518 Deerslayer, The (Cooper), 251 "Defense of James Baldwin, A"(Gayle), 70 Defiant Ones, The (film), 67 Defoe, Daniel, 523 Degler, Carl, 4%, 500 Deism, 503, 515, 516, 520, 521,717,718 Delavaney, Emile, 275 Dell, Floyd, 379 Dembo,L. S.,272, 275 "Democracy" (Lowell), 419 Democracy and Other Addresses (Lowell), 407 Democracy and Social Ethics (Addams), 8-11 Democratic Vistas (Whitman), 456 "Demon Lover, The" (Rich), 556 DeMott, Benjamin, 198 "Departure" (Plath), 537 Derleth, August, 465, 472,477 Deny, John, 525 Des Imagistes (Pound), 257, 261, 262 "Desiree's Baby" (Chopin), 213-215 "Desolation Is a Delicate Thing" (Wylie), 729 Desperate Faith: A Study of Bellow, Salinger, Mailer, Baldwin, and Updike (Harper), 70 Detmold, John, 670 Deutsch, Babette, 328, 341

"Development of the Modem English Novel, The" (Lanier), 370-371 Devil Finds Work, The (Baldwin), 48, 52, 66-67 Denney, Joseph Villiers, 605 Dennie, Joseph, 125 Dewey, John, 3, 5, 7, 10, 11, 12, 24, 493, 641, 647, 677 Deyo, C. L., 226 D'Houdetot, Madame, 250 Diaghilev, Sergei, 257 Dial (publication), 642, 643, 647 "Dialectic of The Fire Next Time,' The" (Gayle), 70 "Dialogue" (Rich), 560 Dialogue, A (Baldwin and Giovanni), 66 "Dialogue Between General Wolfe and General Gage in a Wood near Boston, A" (Paine), 504 "Dialogue between Old England and New *' (Bradstreet), 105-106, 110-111, 116 Diamond Cutters and Other Poems, The (Rich), 551,552, 553 "Diana and Persis" (Alcort), 32,41 Diary of "Helena Morley," The (trans. Bishop), 92 "Dick Whittington and His Cat, "656 Dickens, Charles, 13, 34, 35, 36, 41, 49, 409, 523, 579, 590, 622, 675 Dickinson, Donald C., 348 Dickinson, Emily, 29, 79, 188, 372, 375, 546, 609, 682, 691,705 Dickstein, Morris, 70 Dictionary of American Biography, 486 Dictionary of Modern English Usage, A (Fowler), 660 Didion, Joan, 1%, 197, 198 Diggins, John P., 650 "Dilemma of Love in Go Tell It on the Mountain and Giovanni's Room, The" (Bell), 69 ' 'Dimout in Harlim'' (Hughes), 333 4 'Discovery of What It Means to Be an American, The" (Baldwin), 54-55 4 "Disquieting Muses, The" (Plath), 538 Dissent in Three American Wars (Morison, Merk and Freidel), 495 Dissertations on Government; the Affairs of the Bank; and Paper Money (Paine), 510

Distinguished Women Writers (Moore), 730 Divine Weekes and Workes (tr. Sylvester), 104 "Diving into the Wreck" (Rich), 561-565 Diving into the Wreck: Poems 1971-1972 (Rich), 550, 559-565, 569 Dobriansky, Lev, 648, 650 Dodd, Wayne, 578 Dodson, Owen, 54 Doenitz, Karl, 491 Domesday Book (Masters), 465,466-469,471,473,476 4 'Domestication, Domesticity and the Otherworldly" (Vendler), 97 Don Quixote (Cervantes), 422 Donaldson, Scott, 198 "Done Made Us Leave Our Home: Langston Hughes's Not Without Laughter—Unifying Image and Three Dimensions" (Miller), 348 Donne, John, 80, 364, 367, 421,424,467,725,726,730 Don't You Want to Be Free? (Hughes), 339 Doolittle, Charles Leander, 253, 254 Doolittle, Mrs. Charles Leander (Helen Eugenia Wolle), 253, 254 Doolittle, Hilda, 253-275,707 "Door, The" (White), 651, 675-676 " 'Door, The,' 'The Professor,' 'My Friend the Poet (Deceased)' " (Steinhoff), 681 Dorfman, Joseph, 631, 647, 650 Dos Passes, John, 646 Dostoevsky, Feodor, 49, 445, 466 "Double-Headed Snake of Newbury, The" (Whittier), 698 " 4Double-Tongued Deceiver, The': Sincerity and Duplicity in the Novels of Charles Brockden Brown" (Bell), 148 Douglas, Aaron, 326 Douglas, Stephen A., 456, 471 Douglass, Frederick, 51, 345, 591 Douglass Pilot, The (ed. Baldwin), 49 Dowd, Douglas, 645, 650 "Down at the Cross" (Baldwin), 60, 61 "Down East Humor (18301867)" (Blair), 426 "Down Where I Am" (Hughes), 344

738 I DOWN—ETER Downing, Major Jack (pseudonym), see Smith, Seba "Dr. Holmes: A Reinterpretation" (Clark), 319 Drake, Benjamin, 584 Drake, Daniel, 584 Drake Sir Francis, 497 Dramatic Duologues (Masters), 461 ' 'Dream Boogie'' (Hughes), 339-340 * 'Dream Interpreted, The'' (Paine), 505 Dream Keeper, The (Hughes), 328, 332, 333, 334 Dream of a Common Language, Poems 1974-77, The (Rich), 551,554,569^576 "Dream of Italy, A" (Masters), 458 * 'Dream Variations'' (Hughes), 323 Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp (Stowe), 592 Dreiser, Theodore, 320, 461, 468 Dreyfus, Alfred, 446 Drum (magazine), 344 Drummond, William, 369 Dryden, John, 150, 422 Du Bartas, Guillaume, 98,104, 111, 118, 119 DuBois, W. E. B.,5, 345 Duberman, Martin, 408, 409, 425 "Dubin's Lives" (Malamud), 451 Dudley, Anne, see Bradstreet, Anne Dudley, ITiomas, 98, 99, 110, 116 "Duet of Cheevers, A" (Cowley), 198 Duffey, Bernard, 173, 402, 458,471,478 Duffus, R. L.,650 Dunbar, Paul Laurence, 320 Dunlap, William, 126, 130, 137, 141, 145, 148 Dunster, Henry, 485 Dupee, F. W.,452 Durand, Asher, B., 156, 157 Durkheim, Emile, 637, 638 Duyckinck, Evert, 122, 317 Duyckinck, George, 122 Dwight, Timothy, 124, 516, 580 "Dylan Thomas on Edgar Lee Masters" (Thomas), 478 "E.B.W."Cniurber), 681 "E. B. White" (Beck), 681 E. B. White (Sampson), 681 "E. B. White on the Exercycle" (Hall), 681 E. L. Masters (Simone), 478

"Eagle and the Mole, The" (Wylie), 710, 711,713, 714, 729 4 'Eagle That Is Forgotten, The'' (Lindsay), 382, 387 ' 'Early Plays of Edgar Lee Masters, The" (Hartley), 478 "Early Thurber" (White), 627 "Earth" (Bryant), 157, 164, 4

167

'Earthly Care a Heavenly Discipline" (Stowe), 586 East Lynne (Wood), 35, 36, 459, 462 Eastman, Max, 626 Eaton, Peggy, 461 Eberhart, Richard, 83 Eble, Kenneth, 201,226 Eckler, A. Ross, 627 Eckman, Fern Marja, 69 "Economic Theory of Women's Dress, The" (Veblen), 636 "Economy of Love, The: The Novels of Bernard Malamud" (Baumbach), 452 Edgar Huntly; or, Memoirs of a Sleep-Walker (Brown), 140144, 145 ' *Edgar Lee Masters *' (Powys), 478 Edgar Lee Masters: A Centenary Memoir-Anthology (Masters), 478 Edgar Lee Masters: The Spoon River Poet and His Critics (Flanagan), 478 "Edgar Lee Masters—Biographer and Historian" (Hartley), 478 "Edgar Lee Masters—Political Essayist" (Hartley), 478 ' 'Edgar Lee Masters and the Chinese" (Hartley), 478 "Edgar Lee Masters Centenary Exhibition: Catalogue and Checklist of Books'' (Robinson), 478 4 'Edgar Lee Masters Collection, The: Sixty Years of Literary History" (Robinson), 478 "Edge" (Plath), 527, 547 Edison, Thomas A., 392 "Editor Whedon" (Masters), 463 "Educated American Woman, An" (Cheever), 194 "Education of Jane Addams, The" (Phillips), 27 Edwards, Davis, 402 Edwards, Jonathan, 301, 302, 552, 594, 700 Egoist, The (publication), 257, 262 Eight Cousins (Alcott), 29, 38, 42,43 Eileen (Masters), 460

Einstein, Albert, 609, 643 Eisenhower, Dwight D., 291 Elbert, Sarah, 34, 41,46 "Electra on Azalea Path" (Plath), 538 4 'Electrical Storm" (Bishop), 93 Elements of Style, The (Strunk), 670 "Elevator Boy" (Hughes), 326 Eli (biblical person), 690 Elias, Robert H., 627 Elinor Wylie (Gray), 730 "Elinor Wylie: The Glass Chimaera and the Minotaur" (Wright), 730 4 'Elinor Wylie: Heroic Mask" (Kohler), 730 Elinor Wylie: The Portrait of an Unknown Lady (Hoyt), 730 ' 'Elinor Wylie's Poetry'' (Tate), 730 ' 'Elinor Wylie's Shelley Obsession" (Cluck), 730 Eliot, Charles W., 479 Eliot, George, 370, 559, 579 Eliot, John, 484, 485 Eliot, Samuel, 479 Eliot, T. S., 257, 264, 268, 270, 274, 275, 299, 387, 423, 455, 536, 554, 624, 659, 721 "Elizabeth Bishop, "96 Elizabeth Bishop (Stevenson), 97 "Elizabeth Bishop in Brazil" (Brown), % "Elizabeth Bishop, or the Power of Reticence" (Paz), 97 "Elizabeth Bishop's 'Natural Heroism* " (Spiegelman), 97 Elizabeth Lloyd and the Whittiers (ed. Currier), 705 Elizabethan literature, 365, 719 Eller, Ernest, 497 Ellerman, Winifred, 258-259, 275 Ellis, Charles, 99 Ellis, John Harvaid, 103 Elizabeth I, Queeti, 100, 111, 114, 115, 116, 118 "Elsa Wertman" (Masters), 462-463 Elsie Venner (Holmes), 243, 315-316 Ely, Richard T., 5, 640, 645 "Emancipation: A Life Fable" (Chopin), 207-208 Emanuel, James, 346, 348 Embargo, The (Bryant), 152153 "Embarrassment of Riches, An: Baldwin 'sGoing to Meet the Man" (Moore), 70 Emerson, Ellen, 33

Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 2, 2&-29, 31, 33, 147, 188, 299, 308-309, 317, 358, 365, 366, 368, 373, 374, 383, 393, 407, 413, 416, 420, 422, 474, 482, 580, 582, 602, 659, 679 ''Emerson the Lecturer" (Lowell), 420, 422 Eminent Victorians (Strachey), 485 Emperor of Haiti (Hughes), 339 "Empty Room" (Hughes), 337 "End of the Line" (Geismar), 198 Engels, Friedrich, 13 Engineers and the Price System, The (Veblen), 638,642, 648 English Novel, The (Lanier), 371 English Poets, The: Lessing, Rousseau (Lowell), 407 Engstrand, Stuart, 51 Enjoyment of Laughter (Eastman), 626 ' 'Enormous Radio, The'' (Cheever), 175-177, 195 Enormous Radio and Other Stories, The (Cheever), 175-177 Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (Godwin), 126, 146 Ephesians (biblical book), 117 "Epipsychidion" (Shelley), 718 "Epistle to George William Curtis" (Lowell), 416 "Epitaph for Fire and Flower" (Plath), 537 "Equal in Paris" (Baldwin), 52 Esquire (magazine), 50, 295, 329,664 Essay on American Poetry (Brown), 156 "Essay on Aristocracy" (Paine), 515 Essay on Man (Pope), 516 "Essay on the Character of Robespierre" (Paine), 515 Essay on Our Changing Order (Veblen), 629, 642 Essays on the Nature and Principles of Taste (Alison), 151 Essex Gazette (newspaper), 683,684 "Estrangement, Betrayal & Atonement: The Political Theory of James Baldwin (Daniels), 70 Esty, William, 198 "Etching, An" (Masters), 458 Eternal Adam and the New World Garden, The (Noble), 70 "Eternal Goodness, The" (Whittier), 704

EURI—FORK / 739 Euripides, 268, 269, 270, 482 "Euripides and Professor Murray" (Eliot), 268 European Discovery of America, The: The Northern Voyages (Morison), 496-497 European Discovery of America, The: The Southern Voyages (Morison), 497 Evangeline (Longfellow), 586 Eve (biblical person), 113,120, 567 Evening Post, The: A Century of Journalism (Nevins), 173 "Evening Wind, The" (Bryant), 164 "Evening's at Seven, The" (Thurber), 616 Events Leading up to the Comedy (Nugent), 626 Everett, Alexander Hill, 152 Evers, Medgar, 52, 65 Every Saturday (publication), 365 Every Soul Is a Circus (Lindsay), 384, 394, 399 "Everybody's Protest Novel" (Baldwin), 50, 51 Excellent Becomes the Permanent, The (Addams), 25 "Excess of Charity" (Wylie), 720 "Exiles, The" (Whittier), 692-693 "Exile's Departure, The" (Whittier), 683 "Exit Vachel Lindsay—Enter Ernest Hemingway'' (Kreymborg), 402 "Exorcism, An" (Malamud), 435 Exorcist, The (film), 66 "Expectant Father Compares His Wife to a Rabbit, An" (White), 678 "Expelled" (Cheever), 174, 186 "Experiences and Principles of an Historian' * (Morison), 492 4 'Exquisites, The'' (Kazin), 730 Ezekiel, Mordecai, 645 "Fable" (Wylie), 714 Fable for Critics, A (Lowell), 406, 407-408, 409, 412413, 416, 420, 422 Fables for Our Time (Thurber), 610 " 'Fact* as Style: The Americanization of Sylvia" (Ostriker), 548 "Facts and Traditions Respecting the Existence of Indigenous Intermittent Fever in New England" (Holmes), 303

Faint Perfume (Gale), 613 Fairchild, Frances, see Bryant, Mrs. William Cullen (Frances Fairchild) Fairfield, Flora (pseudonym), see Alcott, Louisa May "Faith of an Historian" (Morison), 492 Falconer (Cheever), 176, 193-195, 1% "Falconer" (Didion), 198 Falk, Doris V., 297 "Familiar Epistle to a Friend, A" (Lowell), 416 "Family Way, The" (Hardwick), 198 Famous American Negroes (Hughes), 345 Famous Negro Music Makers (Hughes), 345 "Farewell, My Lovely!" (White), 661-663, 665 "Farewell Sweet Dust" (Wylie), 727-728 Farewell to Reform (Chamberlain), 647 Paris, Athenaise Charleville, 204 Paris, Eliza, see O'Flaherty, Mrs. Thomas (Eliza Paris) Farnol, Jeffrey, 653 Farrell, James T., 679 Farrell, John C, 24, 27 "Fascination of Cities, The" (Hughes), 325 Fast, Howard, 295 Fate of the Jury, The (Masters), 466, 468, 469 "Father and Son" (Hughes), 329, 339 Faulkner, William, 68, 196, 197, 242, 372, 450, 621 "Faun" (Plath), 537 Fauset, Jessie, 321,325 "Fedora" (Chopin), 220 Felheim, Marvin, 297 Fellows, John, 520 "Felode Se" (Wylie), 727,729 Female Imagination, The (Spacks), 46 Fennessy, R. R., 525 Ferguson, James, 503 Ferment of Realism, The (Berthoff), 477 Ferreo, Guglielmo, 481 "Fever 103°" (Plath), 541 "Few Don'ts by an Imagiste, A "(Pound), 261-262 Fiction of the Fifties: A Decade of American Writing (ed. Gold), 198 Fiedler, Leslie A., 453, 601 Field, Joyce W., 452, 453 Field, Leslie A., 452, 453 Fielding, Henry, 421,422,656 "Field-larks and Blackbrids" (Lanier), 355

Fields, Annie, see Fields, Mrs. James T. Fields, James T., 317 Fields, Mrs. James T., 317 Fields of Wonder (Hughes), 333-334 Fields Were Green, The (Arms), 173,319,426,706 "Fifth Avenue, Uptown" (Baldwin), 52 Fight for Freedom (Hughes), 345 "Fin de Saison—Palm Beach" (White), 673 "Final Fear" (Hughes), 338 Fine Clothes to the Jew (Hughes), 326-328 Finn, James, 70 Finnegan's Wake (Joyce), 620 "Fire" (Hughes), 327 Fire (publication), 326 Fire Next Time, The (Baldwin), 48, 49, 52, 60-61 Fire Under the Andes (Sergeant), 730 Fireside Travels (Lowell), 407, 419-420 "Firmament, The" (Bryant), 162 First Book of Africa, The (Hughes), 344-345 First Book of Jazz, The (Hughes), 345 First Book of Negroes, The (Hughes), 345 First Book of Rhythms, The (Hughes), 345 First Book of the West Indies, The (Hughes), 345 First Century of New England Verse, The (Jantz), 123 "First Death in Nova Scotia" (Bishop), 73 First Principles (Spencer), 368 "First Seven Years, The" (Malamud), 431 "First World War" (White), 665 Firth, John, 198 Fischer, Russell G., 70 Fisher, Alexander Metcalf, 582 Fisher, Mary, 455 Fisher, Rudolph, 325 Fiske, John, 314, 493 Fitts, Dudley, 342, 345 FitzGerald, Edward, 416 Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 196, 197, 622 "Five Awakenings of Edna Pontellier, The" (Wheeler), 226 Five Black Writers: Essays on Wright, Ellison, Baldwin, Hughes and Le Roi Jones (Gibson), 348 Five Temperaments (Kalstone), 97

Fixer, The (Malamud), 428, 435, 445, 446-448, 450, 451 Flammarion, Camille, 260 Flanagan, John T., 402, 464, 465, 468, 478 Flaxman, Josiah, 716 Flecker, James Elroy, 257 Fletcher, John, 422 Fletcher, John Gould, 263,275, 373 Fletcher, Marie, 226 Fletcher, Phineas, 369 Flint, F. S., 261, 262 "Floating Poem, Unnumbered, The" (Rich), 572-573 "Rood of Years, The" (Bryant), 159,170,171,416 "Florida Sunday, A" (Lanier), 364,366 "Flossie Cabanis" (Masters), 461-462 Flower Fables (Alcott), 33 "Flower-Fed Buffaloes, The" (Lindsay), 398 Flowering of New England, The (Brooks), 426 Flowering of the Rod (Doolittle) 272 Foerster, Norman, 423, 424, 426 Folk of Southern Fiction, The (Skaggs), 226 Folsom, Charles, 156 Fonda, Henry, 67 Foner, Eric, 523 ' 'Foot Fault'' (pseudonym), see Thurber, James Foote, Horton, 281 Foote, Roxanna, see Beecher, Mrs. Lyman (Roxanna Foote) Foote, Samuel, 584 "For Elizabeth Bishop" (Lowell), 97 "For Malamud It's Story" (Shenker), 453 4 'For the Dedication of the New City Library, Boston" (Holmes), 308 "For the Meeting of the National Sanitary Association, 1860" (Holmes), 307 Ford, Henry, 21,644 Ford, John, 422 Ford, Webster (pseudonymn), see Masters, Edgar Lee "Forest Hymn, A" (Bryant), 156,162,163,164,165,170 Forester's Letters (Paine), 508 "Forgotten Novel, A: Kate Chopin's The Awakening" (Eble), 226 "Forlorn Hope of Sidney Lanier, The" (Leary), 373 Forrestal, James, 489 Forrey, Carolyn, 226

740 I FORS—GREA * 'Forsaken Merman'' (Arnold), 529 Foster, Charles H., 601 Foster, David E., 70 Foster, Stephen, 100-101, 699 Founding of Harvard College, The (Morison), 485 4 'Fountain, The" (Bryant), 157, 165, 166, 168 Fountain and Other Poems, The (Bryant), 157 "Four Ages of Man, The" (Bradstreet), 111, 115 * 'Four Monarchyes' * (Bradstreet), 105, 106, 116 "Four Poems" (Bishop), 92 "Four Seasons" (Bradstreet), 112-113 Fowler, Henry Watson, 660 Fox, Ruth, 619 "Fox of Peapack, The" (White), 677 Fox of Peapack, The (White), 676, 677-678 France, Anatole, 631 Francis of Assisi, Saint, 394, 397,441,442,443 ' 'Franconia'' tales (Abbott), 38 Frank, Jerome, 645 Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper (periodical), 35 Frankel, Haskel, 448, 453 Franklin, Benjamin, 306, 411, 503, 504, 506, 507, 510, 516,518,522,524,579,639 Franklin, William, 504 Frazee, E. S., 381 Frazee, Esther Catherine, see Lindsay, Mrs. Vachel Thomas (Esther Catherine Frazee) Frazer, Sir James, 18, 541 Frederick the Great, 433 Fredrickson, George M., 589, 601 "Free Man" (Hughes), 333 "Free Man's Worship, A" (Russell), 522 Freedman, William, 453 "Freedom" (White), 659 "Freedom's Plow" (Hughes), 346 Freeman, Douglas Southall, 486, 493 Freeman, Joseph, 610 Fremont, John Charles, 486 Freneau, Philip, 124, 125, 127, 145 Freud, Sigmund, 13, 43, 253, 254, 259, 260, 265, 270, 315, 493, 527, 616, 643, 647,649 Freudian Psychology and Veblen's Social Theory, The (Schneider), 650 Friedman, Milton, 648 Friedmann, Georges, 645

Friedrich, Otto, 627 "Friend to Alexander, A" (TTiurber), 616 "From a Survivor" (Rich), 563 "From an Old House in America" (Rich), 551, 565-567 "From Bernard Malamud, with Discipline and Love'' (Freedman), 453 From Ritual to Romance (Weston), 439 ' 'From the Country to the City'' (Bishop), 85, 86 ' 'From the Flats'' (Lanier), 364 Front, The (film), 295 Frost, Robert, 80, 242, 263, 264,387,461,699,705 Fry, Christopher, 270 Frye, Northrop, 539 "Full Fathom Five" (Plath), 538 Fuller, J. W., 681 Fuller, Margaret, 524 Fulton, Robert, 519 Furious Passage of James Baldwin, The (Eckman), 69 Further Fables for Our Time (Thurber), 612 "Future, if Any, of Comedy, The" (Thurber), 620 "Future Life, The" (Bryant), 170 Futurism, 257 "Gabriel" (Rich), 557 Gabriel, Ralph H., 251 Galbraith, John Kenneth, 648, 650 Gale, Zona, 613 "Gallery of Real Creatures, A" (Thurber), 619 Garbo, Greta, 616 Gardner, John, 193, 195, 196, 198 Garland, H ami in, 217 Garrett, George, 1%, 198 Garrison, William, Lloyd, 524, 588, 683, 685, 686, 687 "Garrison of Cape Ann, The" (Whittier), 691,694 "Garter Motif" (White), 673 Gaskell, Mrs. Elizabeth, 580 Gassner, John, 284, 292 Gaunt, MarciaE., 198 Gautier, Theophile, 277 Gay, John, 523 Gay, Sydney Howard, 158 Gayle, Addison, Jr., 70 Geddes, Virgil, 627 Geismar, Maxwell, 198 Gelpi, Albert, 552, 554, 560 Gelpi, Barbara, 560 "General William Booth Enters into Heaven" (Lindsay), 374, 382, 384, 385-388, 389, 392, 399

General William Booth Enters into Heaven and Other Poems (Lindsay), 379, 381, 382, 387-388, 391 "Gentleman of Bayou Teche, A" (Chopin), 211-212 "Gentleman of Shalott, The" (Bishop), 85, 86 Geography 111 (Bishop), 72,73, 76, 82, 93, 94, 95 George III, King, 102, 404, 504, 506, 507 George, Henry, 518 Georgia Scenes (Longstreet), 352 ' 'German Refugee, The'' (Malamud), 436, 437 Gerry, Elbridge, 486 Gershwin, Ira, 281 "Getting There" (Plath), 539, 542 Gettysburg, Manila, Acoma (Masters), 471 "Ghazals: Homage to Ghalib" (Rich), 557 "Ghost of the Buffaloes, The" (Lindsay), 393 "Ghostlier Demarcations, Keener Sounds" (Vendler), 565 Gibbon, Edward, 503 Gibbons, Richard, 107 Gibbs, Wolcott, 604, 618 Gibson, Donald B., 348 Gide, Andre, 51 "Gift, The" (Doolittle), 267 Gilder, Richard Watson, 418 Gilder, Rosamund, 627 Gildersleeve, Basil, 369 Gill, Brendan, 626, 659, 660, 681 Oilman, Charlotte Perkins, 637 Oilman, Daniel Coit, 361, 368, 370 Oilman, Richard, 198 Gilmore, Eddy, 618 Gimbel, Peter, 525 Giotto, 438 Giovanni, Nikki, 66 Giovanni's Room (Baldwin), 51,52,55-56,57,60,63,67 "Give Us Back Our Country" (Masters), 472 Gladden, Washington, 5 Gladstone, William Ewart, 419 "Glance at Lowell's Classical Reading, A" (Pritchard), 426 "Glass Blower of Venice" (Malamud), 450 Go Tell It on the Mountain (Baldwin), 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53-54, 55, 56, 57, 59, 61,63,64,67 "Go to the Devil and Shake Yourself" (song), 580 Go-Between, The (Hartley), 293

Godard, Jean-Luc, 558 Godbey (Masters), 472 Godwin, Parke, 173 Godwin, William, 126, 146, 512, 51S-514, 522, 709, 719 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 423,457 "Going to Meet the Man" (Baldwin), 62-63 Going to Meet the Man (Baldwin), 60, 62-63 "Going to the Bakery" (Bishop), 93 Going~to-the-Stars (Lindsay), 398 Going-to-the-Sun (Lindsay), 397-398 Gold, Herbert, 198 Gold, Michael, 331,609 Golden Age (publication), 361 Golden Book of Springfield, The (Lindsay), 376, 379, 395, 396 Golden Bough (Frazer), 18 "Golden Heifer, The'' (Wylie), 707 Golden Whales of California and Other Rhymes in the American Language, The (Lindsay), 394-395, 396 Goldman, Emma, 524 Goldsmith, Oliver, 310, 503, 714, 716 Goldwyn, Samuel, 281 Good Earth, The (Buck), 49 "Good News from NewEngland" (Johnson), 115 "Good Word for Winter, A" (Lowell), 420 "Goodbye, My Brother" (Cheever), 175-177, 193 Goodman, Paul, 524 Goodrich, Samuel G., 38 Gorki, Maxim, 5, 51 Gorman, Herbert S., 730 "Gospel of Beauty, The" (Lindsay), 380, 382, 384, 385, 391, 396 Gould, Jean, 275 Cowing, Clara, 46 Grady, Henry W., 370 Graham, Shirley, 51 Graham, Stephen, 397, 402 Graham, Phillip, 373 Grainger, Percy, 386 Grant, Annette, 198 Grant, Ulysses S., 418 Grave, The (Blair), 150 Graves, Billy, 607 Graves, Rean, 326 Graves, Robert, 541 Gray, Cecil, 258 Gray, James, 410 Gray, Thomas, 150, 422, 716 Gray, TTiomas A., 710, 730 Greasley, Philip, 478

GREA—HOLM / 741 Great Expectations (Dickens), 35 Great Valley, The (Masters), 465 "Greek Boy, The" (Bryant), 168 "Greek Partisan, The" (Bryant), 168 Green, Martin, 299 "Green River" (Bryant), 155, 164 Greenberg, Eliezer, 432 Greene, Beatrice, 198 Greene, Elizabeth Shaw, see Morison, Mrs. Samuel Eliot (Elizabeth Shaw Greene) Greene, Graham, 280 Greene, Nathanael, 508 Greuze, Jean Baptiste, 714 Griffin, Bartholomew, 369 Grimm brothers, 5%, 622 Gross, Barry, 70 Gross, Theodore L., 70 Growth of the American Republic, The (Morison and Commager), 484 Guardian Angel, The (Holmes), 315-316 Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (film), 67 Guillen, Nicolas, 345 Gulliver's Travels (Swift), 656 Gutenberg, Johann, 392 Gutman, Herbert, 47 Gypsy Ballads (trans. Hughes), 345 H.D., **? Doolittle, Hilda "H.D.: A Note on Her Critical Reputation" (Bryher), 275 "H.D.: A Preliminary Checklist" (Bryher and Roblyer), 275 "H.D.'s 'Hermetic Definition* " (Quinn), 275 "H. L. Mencken Meets a Poet in the West Side Y.M.C.A." (White), 677 Hackett, Francis, 626 Hagen, Beulah, 679 Hagopian, John V., 70 Haldeman, Anna, 2 Hale, Edward Everett, 425,584 Hale, John Parker, 685 Haley, Alex, 47, 66 "Halfway" (Rich), 553 Haliburton, Thomas Chandler, 411 Hall, Donald, 681, 706 Hall, James, 584, 585 Halleck, Fitz-Greene, 156, 158 Hallock, Rev. Moses, 153 Hallwas, John E., 402, 454, 478 Hamerik, Asger, 356 Hamilton, Alexander, 456, 483,509

Hamilton, Alice, 5 Hamilton, Hamish, 617 Hamilton, Walton, 632 Hamlet (Shakespeare), 369, 422, 457, 471 Hammett, Dashiell, 286, 289, 291,292,293,294,295 Hampshire Gazette, 152 Hancock, John, 524 Handy Guide for Beggars, A (Lindsay), 376-378, 380, 382, 399 Hanna, Mark, 395 "Hannah Armstrong" (Masters), 461 Hansel and Gretel, 597 Happersberger, Lucien, 51 "Hard Kind of Courage, The" (Baldwin), 52 Hard Times (Dickens), 675 "Hard Times in Elfland, The" (Lanier), 365 "Hardcastle Crags" (Plath), 537 Hardie, Kier, 5 Harding, Warren G., 24 Hardwick, Elizabeth, 1%, 198 Hardy, Barbara, 527, 548 Hardy, Oliver, 607 Hardy, Thomas, 217, 429, 512 "Harlem" (Hughes), 340 Harlem (publication), 328 "Harlequin of Dreams, The" (Lanier), 365 Harmer, J. B.,275 Harper, Howard M., Jr., 70 Harper, William Rainey, 631 Harper's (magazine), 530, 654, 655 Harper's Young People (magazine), 211 Harris, Joel Chandler, 352 Harriet Beecher Stowe (Adams), 601 Harris, Mark, 402 Harris, William T., 46 Hart, Albert Bushnell, 479, 480, 481 Hartley, L. P., 293 Hartley, Lois, 459, 464-465, 478 Harvard College in the Seventeenth Century (Morison), 485 Harvard Guide to American History, 493 Hasley, Louis, 627, 681 Hassan, Ihab, 198 Havighurst, Walter, 478 Hawk in the Rain, The (Hughes), 537, 540 Hawke, David Freeman, 511, 516 Hawley, Michael, 627 Hawthorne, Julian, 38 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 38,147, 188, 197, 317, 372, 420,

421, 545, 579, 580, 582, 587, 595, 5% Hay, John, 352 Hayakawa, S. L, 315 Hayes, Rutherford B., 419 Hayne, Paul Hamilton, 352, 354, 355, 360, 372 Headlong Hall (Peacock), 307 Heart to Artemis, The (Bryher), 259, 275 Heartland, The: Ohio, Indiana, Illinois (Havighurst), 478 ' 'Hearts and Heads'' (Ransom), 373 Hecht, Ben, 646 Hedges, William, 148 Hedylus (Doolittle), 259, 270 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 633, 635, 640, 645 "Height of the Ridiculous, The" (Holmes), 302 Heilbroner, Robert, 644, 648, 650 Helen in Egypt (Doolittle), 260, 272, 273, 274 Heliodora (Doolittle), 266 Heller, Joseph, 1% Hell man, Lillian, 276-298 Hellyer, John, 468 "Helmsman, The" (Doolittle), 266 Hemenway, Robert E., 147 Hemingway, Ernest, 621, 658, 678 "Henchman, The" (Whittier), 6% Henderson, Alice Corbin, 387 Henri, Robert, 376 Henry VIII, King, 461 Henry, O. (pseudonym), see Porter, William Sydney Henson, Josiah, 589 Hentz, Caroline Lee, 584 Herbert, Francis (pseudonym), see Bryant, William Cullen Herbert, George, 80, 107, 108, 122 Here at the New Yorker (Gill), 626, 681 Hergesheimer, Joseph, 620 ' 'Hermes of the Ways'' (Doolittle), 266 Hermetic Definition (Doolittle), 271,272,273, 274 Herodotus, 405 Heroic Ideal in American Literature, The (Gross), 70 Herold, David, 500 Herrick, Robert, 646 Herron, George, 7 Herron, Ima Honaker, 478 Herschel, Sir John, 314 Hersey, John, 1%, 198 "Hey! Hey!" (Hughes), 327328 Hiawatha (Longfellow), 79 Hichborn, Philip, 707, 708

Hichborn, Mrs. Philip, see Wylie, Elinor Hicks, Granville, 198, 361, 453,609 Higginson, Thomas Wentworth, 307, 371 Higher Learning in America, The (Veblen), 630,631,641, 642 Highet, Gilbert, 268 Hilda Doolittle (H.D.) (Quinn), 275 Hill, James J., 644 Hill, Vemon, 397 Hillman, Sidney, 5 Himes, Chester, 51, 325 Hippolytus (Euripides), 270 Hippolytus Temporizes (Doolittle), 270 Hirsh, David H., 148 "His Hopes on the Human Heart" (Hicks), 453 Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution (Wollstonecraft), 126 "Historical Value of Crevecoeur's Voyage . . . ," (Adams), 251 "History" (Hughes), 344 History as a Literary Art (Morison), 493 History of American Graphic Humor, A (Murrell), 626 History of Modern Poetry, A (Perkins), 475, 478 History ofRoxbury town (Ellis), 99 History of the Conquest of Peru (ed. Morison), 494 History of United States Naval Operations in World War II (Morison), 490-492 "History Through a Beard" (Morison), 490 "History Without a Beard" (Degler), 500 Hitler, Adolf, 431, 436, 446, 664 Hobson, John A., 650 Hogg, James, 349 Holbrook, David, 526-527, 546, 548 Holcroft, Thomas, 514 Holiday, Billie, 80 Holland, Josiah, 420 Hollander, John, 96 Hollis, Thomas Brand, 514 Hollywood on Trial (film), 295 Holmes, Abiel, 300, 301, 302, 310 Holmes, Mrs. Abiel (Sarah Wendell), 300 Holmes, Charles, 626 Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 103, 243, 254, 29*-319, 405, 414,415,420,593,704,705

742 I HOLM—INTE Holmes, Mis. Oliver Wendell (Amelia Jackson), 303 Holmes of the Breakfast-Table (Howe), 319 Holtby, Winifred, 720 Holy Sonnets (Donne), 367 "Homage to Elizabeth Bishop " (ed. Ivask), 96 "Homage to Shakespeare" (Cheever), 180 "Home" (Hughes), 329, 330 Homer, 158, 283, 494 "Homesick Blues" (Hughes), 327 "Homoeopathy and Its Kindred Delusions" (Holmes), 303304,305 "Honey Babe" (Hughes), 334 Hoover, Herbert, 638 Hopkins, Anne Yale, 100,102, 113 Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 79, 81,94 Hopkins, Miriam, 281 Hopkinson, Francis, 504 Horace, 423 Horkheimer, Max, 645 Horn, Mother, 49, 54 "Horn of Plenty" (Hughes), 342 Horse Sense in American Humor (Blair), 626 Hospital Sketches (Alcott), 34, 35 "Hot Times in the Catbird Seat" (Braunlich), 626 Hound and Horn (publication), 174 House, Edward, 643 "House Guest" (Bishop), 93 House of the Seven Gables (Hawthorne), 579 "House Where Mark Twain Was Born, The" (Masters), 472 Housebreaker of Shady Hill and Other Stories, The (Cheever), 184 How Much? (Blechman), 290 "How the Women Went from Dover" (Whittier), 694,696, 697 How to Develop Your Personality (Shellow), 608 How to Win Friends and Influence People (Carnegie), 608 How to Worry Successfully (Seabury), 608 Howard, Leon, 148, 408, 422, 423, 426 Howe, Irving, 70, 432 Howe, James Wong, 281 Howe, M. A. DeWolfe, 319 Howe, Samuel, 153 Howells, William Dean, 306, 318, 357, 360, 368, 414, 420, 64S-646

Hoyle, James R, 548 Hoyt, Charles A., 148 Hoyt, Constance, 707 Hoyt, Elinor Morton, see Wylie, Elinor Hoyt, Henry (father), 707 Hoyt, Henry (son), 708 Hoyt, Henry Martyn, 707 Hoyt, Nancy, 730 Hubbell, JayB.,372 Huckleberry Finn (Twain), 247 Hueffer, Ford Madox, 257,262 Hughes, Frieda, 540, 541 Hughes, Glenn, 255, 275 Hughes, James Nathaniel, 321, 332 Hughes, Langston, 320-348 Hughes, Nicholas, 541 Hughes, Ted, 536, 537, 538, 539,540,541,548 Hughes, Mrs. Ted, see Plath, Sylvia Hughes, Thomas, 406 Hull-House Maps and Papers, 7 Hull-House Settlement, 1, 2, 3, 4, 7, 11, 12, 16, 17, 19, 21,22 Hulme,T.E., 261,262 "Hunger. . . ."(Rich), 571 Hunter, Kim, 286 "Hunter of the West, The" (Bryant), 155 "Hunter's Vision, The" (Bryant), 160 Huntley, Jobe, 339 Hurston, Zora Neale, 325, 326, 332 "Huswifery" (Taylor), 386 Hutchinson, Anne, 100, 101, 113,484 Huxley, Aldous, 714 Huxley, Thomas Henry, 368, 373 Hyman, Stanley Edgar, 198 Hymen (Doolittle), 266 "Hymn of the Sea, A" (Bryant), 157, 163, 165 "Hymn to Death" (Bryant), 169, 170 "Hymn to Earth" (Wylie), 727-729 * 'Hymn to the Night'' (Longfellow), 409 "Hymns of the Marshes" (Lanier), 364 "I Cannot Forget with What Fervid Devotion" (Bryant), 154 "I Dream I'm the Death of Orpheus" (Rich), 557-558 "I Had Eight Birds Hatcht in One Nest" (Bradstreet), 102, 115, 117, 119 "I Hear an Army "(Joyce), 262 "I Heard Immanuel Singing" (Lindsay), 379

/ Remember America (Bonn), 626 / Shall Spit on Your Graves (film), 67 "I, Too" (Hughes), 320 / Wonder As I Wander (Hughes), 329, 332-333 "Icarus at St. Botolphs: A Descent to 'Unwonted Otherness' " (Greene), 198 "Ichabod" (Whittier), 687, 689^-690 Ickes, Harold, 5 "Icon and the Portrait, The" (Auden), 626 "Identity of James Baldwin, The" (Finn), 70 Idle Man, The (publication), 155 "Idiots First" (Malamud), 434-435, 437, 44<M41 Idylls of the King (Tennyson), 410 "If Beale Street Could Talk" (McClusky), 70 // Beale Street Could Talk (Baldwin), 48, 59^-60, 67 "If There Is No Human Comedy, It Will Be Necessary to Create One"(Benchley), 626 Iliad (trans. Bryant), 158 Iliad (trans. Pope), 152 4 Illinois "(Masters), 458 Illinois Poems (Masters), 472 "Illinois Village, The" (Lindsay), 381 "I'm a Fool" (Anderson), 430 * Image and Idea in Wieland and Edgar Huntly" (Witherington), 148 "Images for Godard" (Rich), 558 * 'Imaginary Iceberg, The'' (Bishop), 86, 88 ' 'Imagination and Reality in the Fiction of Katherine Anne Porter and John Cheever" (Gaunt), 198 "Imagination of James Thurber, The" (MacLean), 627 "Imagining Jews" (Roth), 453 Imagism, 256, 257, 261-265, 269,274,458,461,465 Imagism (Coffman), 275 Imagism and the Imagists (Hughes), 275 Imagismo (Berti), 275 Immortality Ode (Wordsworth), 673

"Impasse" (Hughes), 343 Imperial Germany and the Industrial Revolution (Veblen), 642,643 "Implosions" (Rich), 556 "Importance of Point of View in Brockden Brown's Wieland, The" (Manly), 148

"In Absence" (Lanier), 364 In Cold Blood (Capote), 292 "In the Confidence of a StoryTeller" (Chopin), 217 In Defense of Reason (Winters), 268, 275 "In the Heart of the Valley: Bernard Malamud's A New Life" (Astro), 452 In the Heat of the Night (film), 67

In Memoriam (Tennyson), 416 "In Memory of Elinor Wylie" (Wilson and Colum), 730 "In and Out of Books" (Breit), 198 "In Plaster" (Plath), 540 "In Praise of Johnny Appleseed" (Lindsay), 397 "In Retirement" (Malamud), 437 "In Sabine" (Chopin), 213 "In School-Days" (Whittier), 69^-700 "In a Station of the Metro" (Pound), 265 In This, Our Life (mm), 67 "In the Village" (Bishop), 73, 74-75, 76, 77, 78, 88 "In the Waiting Room" (Bishop), 81,94, 95 Incidental Numbers (Wylie), 708 "Incipience" (Rich), 559 Independent, The (magazine), 380 "Indian at the Burial-Place of His Fathers, An" (Bryant), 155-156, 167-168 "Indignations of a Senior Citizen" (Updike), 627 Individualism, Old and New (Dewey), 677 "Inevitable Trial, The" (Holmes), 318 Innocents at Cedro, The: A Memoir ofThorstein Veblen and Some Others (Dufftis), 650 Inquiry into the Nature of Peace, An (Veblen), 642 ' Inscription for the Entrance to a Wood" (Bryant), 154,155, 161-162 "Insomnia" (Bishop), 92 "Insomniac" (Plath), 539 Instinct of Workmanship and the State of the Industrial Arts, The (Veblen), 642 Instructed Vision, The: Scottish Common Sense Philosophy and the Origins of American Fiction (Martin), 14&-149 Intellectual Origins of American Radicalism (Lynd), 525 "Intellectual Pre-Eminence of Jews in Modem Europe, The" (Veblen), 643-644

INTE—JOHN / 743 International Socialist Review (publication), 645 "Interview, The" (Thurber), 616 "Interview With a Lemming" (Thurber), 603 ' Interview with Adrienne Rich, An" (Boyd), 578 * Interview with Adrienne Rich, An" (Bulkin), 578 ' Interview with Adrienne Rich, An" (Shaw and Plotz), 578 "Interview with Bernard Maiamud" (Frankel), 453 "Intimations of Immortality" (Wordsworth), 729 4 Invitation to the Country, An " (Bryant), 160 Ion (trans. Doolittle), 269, 274 Irvin, William!., 123 Irving, Washington, 155, 157, 158, 317, 377, 487, 585 44 Is It True? "(Hughes), 342 Is Sex Necessary? (Thurber and White), 607, 612, 614, 653 Isaiah (biblical book), 236,516 Isaiah (biblical person), 20-21, 689 4 'Isaiah Beethoven" (Masters), 461 "Island" (Hughes), 340 hard, Jean-Marc Gaspard, 564 hanhoe (Scott), 410 Ivask, Ivar, % Ives, George H., 153 Izvestia (publication), 329 Jack and Jill (Alcott), 42 Jack Kelso (Masters), 456, 471-^72 Jackson, Amelia, see Holmes, Mrs. Oliver Wendell (Amelia Jackson) Jackson, Andrew, 456, 461, 473, 474, 493, 695 Jackson, Blyden, 337, 348 Jackson, Charles, 303 Jackson, George, 66 Jackson, James, 302, 303 Jackson, Joe, 441 Jacob (biblical person), 594 Jacobson, Dan, 70 "Jacquerie, The" (Lanier), 355, 356, 360, 364, 370 James I, King, 116 James, Henry, 35, 38, 43, 68, 414, 426, 454, 608, 609, 612-613, 618, 620, 646 James, Henry (father), 300 James, William, 3, 7, 11,20 "James Baldwin: The Artist as Incorrigible Disturber of the Peace" (Strandley), 71 "James Baldwin: A Bibliography, 1947-1962" (Fischer), 70

"James Baldwin: The Black and the Red-White-andBlue" (Hagopian), 70 "James Baldwin: Caliban to Prospero" (Lee), 70 "James Baldwin: A Checklist, 1947-1962" (Kindt), 70 44 James Baldwin: A Checklist, 196S-1967" (Strandley), 71 James Baldwin: A Collection of Critical Essays (ed. Kinnamon), 69 James Baldwin: A Critical Evaluation (O'Daniel), 69 James Baldwin: A Critical Study (Macebuh), 69 "James Baldwin: The Crucial Situation" (Strandley), 71 "James Baldwin: A Question of Identity" (Klein), 70 44 James Baldwin: The View from Another Country" (McCarthy), 70 44 James Baldwin: Voice of a Revolution" (Spender), 71 4 'James Baldwin and the 'Literary Ghetto' "(Pratt), 70 "James Baldwin and the Negro Conundrum" (Simmons), 71 "James Baldwin and Two Footnotes" (Breit), 69 4 'James Baldwin as Spokesman" (Jacobson), 70 "James Baldwin Back Home" (Coles), 69 "James Baldwin—I Know His Name" (Leaks), 70 4 'James Baldwin's 'Agony Way' " (Meserve), 70 James Baldwin's Go Tell It on the Mountain and Another Country. The Fire Next Time, Giovanni's Room, Notes of a Native Son (Alexander), 69 4 'James Baldwin's Other Country" (Sayre), 71 44 James Baldwin's Protest Novel: IfBeale Street Could Talk" (Burks), 69 "James Baldwin's Quarrel with Richard Wright" (Charney), 69 "James Russell Lowell" (James), 426 "James Russell Lowell" (Rees), 425 James Russell Lowell (Beatty), 425 James Russell Lowell (Duberman), 425 James Russell Lowell (McGlinchee), 426 James Russell Lowell (Scudder), 426 James Russell Lowell: Portrait of a Many-Sided Man (Wagenknecht), 426

James Russell Lowell and His Friends (Hale), 425 44 James Thurber" (Pollard), 626 "James Thurber" (White), 627 James Thurber (Morsberger), 626 44 James Thurber: Artist in Humor" (Hasley), 627 "James Thurber: The Columbus Years" (Baker), 626 "James Thurber: The Comic Prufrock" (De Vries), 627 44 James Thurber: A Critical Study" (Friedrich), 627 James Thurber: His Masquerades, A Critical Study (Black), 626 4 'James Thurber: The Primitive, the Innocent, and the Individual" (Elias), 627 "James Thurber, Aphorist for an Anxious Age," 627 "James Thurber and Oral History at Ohio State University" (Branscomb), 626 "James Thurber—a Portrait of the Dog-Artist" (MacLean), 627 "James Thurber as a Shakespeare Critic'' (Soellner), 627 4 'James Thurber and the Short Story" (Albertini), 626 "James Thurber, Humorist" (Arnold), 626 ' 'James Thurber of Columbus'' (Nugent), 627 "James Thurber's Compounds" (Baldwin), 626 "James Thurber's Dream Book" (Cowley), 627 "Jane Addams: An American Heroine" (Conway), 27 Jane Addams: A Biography (Linn), 27 4 Jane Addams and the Future" (MacLeish), 27 Jane Addams and the Liberal Tradition (Levine), 27 44 Jane Addams and the Radical Impulse" (Lynd), 27 "Jane Addams on Human Nature" (Curti), 27 Jane Talbot: A Novel (Brown), 145-146 Jane way, Elizabeth, 46, 198 Jantz, HaroldS., 112, 123 Jarrell, Randall, 89, 96, 552 Jarvis, John Wesley, 501, 520 "Jazzonia" (Hughes), 324 4 'Jazztet Muted'' (Hughes), 342 Jefferson, Thomas, 146, 152, 153, 229, 230, 234, 235, 389, 399, 456, 474, 475, 482, 507, 509, 510, 511, 516, 518-519, 520, 522 Jeffersonian Magazine, 455

Jemie, Onwuchekwa, 343, 348 ''Jennie M'Grew" (Masters), 468 Jennifer Lorn (Wylie), 709, 714-717,718,721,724 "Jesse B. Semple: Negro American" (Davis), 348 4 'Jesse B. Semple Revisited and Revised" (Carey), 348 Jesus, 2, 54, 104, 107, 108, 109, 121, 267, 371, 379, 386, 458, 515, 580, 582, 583, 587, 588, 683 "Jewbird, The" (Maiamud), 435 Jewett, Sarah Orne, 495 Joan of Arc, 286-288, 469 Job (biblical book), 125 Job (biblical person), 458, 722 John XXIH, Pope, 492 "John Brown" (Lindsay), 393 4 'John Cheever: The Art of Fiction LXII (Grant), 198 "John Cheever: The Dual Vision of His Art" (Valhouli), 199 "John Cheeven The Upshot of Wapshot" (Rupp), 199 4 'John Cheever: A Vision of the World" (Bracher), 198 "John Cheever and the Broken World" (Wink), 199 "John Cheever and the Charms of Innocence: The Craft of The Wapshot Scandal'' (Garrett), 198 "John Cheever and Comedy" (Bracher), 198 44 John Cheever and the Grave of Social Coherence" (Burhans), 198 44 John Cheever and the Soft Sell of Disaster" (Aldridge), 198 4 'John Cheever's Country" (Scott), 199 "John Cheever's Golden Egg" (Hyman), 198 "John Cheever's Myth of Men and Time: "The Swimmer' "(Auser), 198 "John Cheever's Photograph Album" (Malcolm), 199 "John Cheever's Sense of Drama" (Burt), 198 4 'John Cheever's Stories" (Kees), 199 "John Greenleaf Whittier" (Keller), 705 John Greenleaf Whittier (Carpenter), 706 John Greenleaf Whittier (Leary), 706 John Greenleaf Whittier: Friend of Man (Pollard), 706 John GreenleafWhittier: An Introduction and Interpretation (Pickard), 706

744 I JOHN—LARS John G. Whittier: The Poet of Freedom (Kennedy), 705706 John G. Whittier: A Profile in Pictures (Wright), 706 John Greenleaf Whittier: A Portrait in Paradox (Wagenknecht), 706 John Greenleaf Whittier: A Sketch of His Life (Perry), 706 John Greenleaf Whittier's Poetry: An Appraisal and a Selection (Warren), 706 "John L. Sullivan" (Lindsay), 394, 395 John Paul Jones: A Sailor's Biography (Morison), 494495 "John Steinbeck: No Grapes of Wrath" (Waldmeir), 478 Johnny Appleseed and Other Poems (Lindsay), 397 Johnson, Charles, 325 Johnson, Curtiss S., 173 Johnson, Edward, 110, 115 Johnson, James Weldon, 324, 325 Johnson, Rafer, 271 Johnson, Samuel, 33,422,498, 503, 523, 656 Johnston, Robert M., 369 Jonah (biblical person), 555 4 'Jonathan Edwards" (Holmes), 302, 315 Jones, A. R., 69, 548 Jones, Emma Berdis, see Baldwin, Mrs. David (Emma Berdis Jones) Jones, Harry, 337 Jones, Howard Mumford, 706 Jones, John Paul, 479, 480, 494-495 Jones, Major (pseudonym), see Thompson, William T. Jones, Rufus, 706 ' 'Jones's Private Argyment'' (Lanier), 352 Jonson, Ben, 423 Jo's Boys (Alcott), 32, 35, 40-41,42 "Josephine Has Her Day" (Thurber), 606 Joshua (biblical book), 515 Journal (Emerson), 309 Journal of American Sociology (publication), 629 Journal of Political Economy (publication), 629 Journals (Thoreau), 299 Journals and Other Documents on the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (ed. Morison), 494 Journals ofBronson Alcott, The (ed. Shepard), 46 Joyce, James, 257, 262, 270, 437, 546, 613, 620

Judd, Sylvester, 420 Jude the Obscure (Hardy), 217 "Judgement Marked by a Cellar: The American Negro Writer and the Dialectic of Despair" (Scott), 71 "Julia" (Hellman), 280, 293 "Julia Miller" (Masters), 461 Jumel, Madame, 461 "Junior Addict" (Hughes), 343 Jung, Carl, 439 Jurgen (Cabell), 718 "Justice" (Hughes), 331 Justice and Expediency (Whitter), 686 Kafka, Franz, 197 Kaiser, Henry, 644 Kallen, Horace, 643 "Kallundborg Church" (Whittier), 696 Kalstone, David, 97, 578 "Kansas Emigrants, The" (Whittier), 687 Kant, Immanuel, 640 "Kate Chopin "(Schuyler), 226 Kate Chopin: A Critical Biography (Seyersted), 225, 226 Kate Chopin and Edith Wharton: An Annotated Bibliographical Guide to Secondary Sources (Springer), 225 Kate Chopin and Her Creole Stories (Rankin), 200, 225, 226 "Kate Chopin's Ironic Vision" (Rocks), 226 "Kate Chopin's Realism: 'At the 'Cadian Ball' and 'The Storm' " (Arner), 226 "Kate Chopin 'sThe Awakening: A Partial Dissent" (Spangler), 226 ' 'Kate Chopin's The Awakening in the Perspective of Her Literary Career" (Arms), 225 "Kathleen" (Whittier), 693 Kauffmann, Stanley, 391 Kavanagh (Longfellow), 420 Kazan, Elia, 66, 295 Kazin, Alfred, 195, 196, 198, 294, 295, 2%, 297, 453, 536, 631, 647, 650, 678, 679, 719, 730 Keane, Sarah, 100 Kearns, Francis, 348 Keaton, Buster, 607 Keats, John, 82,183,266,267, 312, 349, 362, 363, 365, 410, 422, 424, 539, 552, 675, 719, 720 Kees, Weldon, 199 Keller, Dean H., 147 Keller, Karl, 705 Kelley, Florence, 5, 7

Kellogg, Paul U., 5, 7, 12 Kendle, Burton, 199 Kennedy, Albert J., 19,27 Kennedy, John F., 291, 496 Kennedy, Robert, 52 Kennedy, William Sloane, 705 Kenner, Hugh, 255, 275 Kent, Charles W., 373 Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin, A (Stowe), 580 Killing of Sister George, The (Marcus), 277 Kilmer, Joyce, 387 Kim, Kichung, 70 Kimball, Arthur, 148 Kindred Spirits: Knickerbocker Writers and American Artists, 1807-1855 (Callow), 173 Kindt, Kathleen A., 70 King, Ernest, 491 King, Martin Luther, 52,60,65 "King Volmer and Elsie" (Whittier), 6% "King's Missive, The" (Whittier), 694 Kingsbury, John, 8 Kingsley, Sidney, 277, 281 Kinmont, Alexander, 588-589 Kinnamon, Keneth, 69 Kirkham, Edwin Bruce, 601 Kit O'Brien (Masters), 471 Klein, Marcus, 70, 432, 453 Klotman, Phillis, 348 "Knight in Disguise, The" (Lindsay), 390 "Knights in Disguise: Lindsay and Maiakovski as Poets of the People" (Chenetier), 402 Knopf, Alfred, 324, 325, 327 Knopf, Blanche, 324,325,327, 328, 332, 341 "Knot, The" (Rich), 555 Knox, Frank, 488, 489 Kober, Arthur, 292 Koestler, Arthur, 671 Kohler, Dayton, 730 Kolbenheyer, Dr. Frederick, 207 Kora and Ka (Doolittle), 270 Kosofsky, Rita Nathalie, 452 Kramer, Dale, 402, 478, 626, 669,681 Kramer, Hilton, 295, 2%, 298 Krause, Sydney J., 148 Kreymborg, Alfred, 402 Kroll, Judith, 541-543, 544, 546,548 Kropotkin, Peter, 5 Krutch, Joseph Wood, 627,681 kabbale pratique (Ambelain), 273, 275 Laclede, Pierre, 205 Ladies' Home Journal (magazine), 530 Lady Audley's Secret (Braddon), 35, 36

La

Lady Is Cold, The (White), 653 "Lady Lazarus" (Plath), 529, 535, 542, 545 "Lady of the Lake, The" (Malamud), 437 Lady Sings the Blues (film), 67 Lafayette, Marquis de, 510, 511,683 Laing,R. D.,527 LAlouette (Anouilh), 286-288 Lambert, Mary, see Paine, Mrs. Thomas (Mary Lambert) "Lament for Saul and Jonathan'' (Bradstreet) ,111 Landor, Walter Savage, 422 "Landscape Symbolism in Kate Chopin's 'At Fault' " (Arner), 226 Langdon, Olivia, see Clemens, Mrs. Samuel Langhome (Olivia Langdon) Langston Hughes (Emanuel), 348 Langston Hughes, a Biography (Meltzer), 348 Langston Hughes, Black Genius (O'Daniel), 348 ' 'Langston Hughes, Cool Poet'' (Hughes), 348 "Langston Hughes, His Style and His Optimism" (Spencer), 348 Langston Hughes, an Introduction to His Poetry (Jemie), 348 "Langston Hughes as Playwright" (Turner), 348 Langston Hughes Reader, The (Hughes), 345 "Langston Hughes's Jesse B. Semple and the Blues" (Klotman), 348 Lanier, Clifford, 349,350,353, 355, 356, 371 Lanier, James F. D., 350 Lanier, Robert Sampson, 349, 351,355,356,361 Lanier, Mrs. Robert Sampson (Mary Jane Anderson), 349 Lanier, Sidney, 349-373, 416 Lanier, Mrs. Sidney (Mary Day), 351, 355, 357, 361, 362, 364, 370, 371 "Lanier as Poet" (Parks), 373 "Lanier's Reading" (Graham), 373 "Lanier's Use of Science for Poetic Imagery" (Beaver), 373 Lanthenas, Francois, 515 Lapouge, M. G., 633 Lardner, Ring, 609 ' 'Large Bad Picture'' (Bishop), 73, 80-82, 85, 86, 89, 90 Lark, The (Hellman), 286-288, 297 Larkin, Philip, 536 Larsen, Nella, 325, 326

LASC—LOCA / 745 Lasch, Christopher, 27 Laski, Harold, 632, 643 Last Flower, The (Thurber), 610 "Last Leaf, The" (Holmes), 302, 309 "Last Mohican, The" (Malamud), 437-438, 450, 451 "Late Air" (Bishop), 89 "Late Sidney Lanier, The" (Stedman), 373 Latest Literary Essays and Addresses (Lowell), 407 Lathrop, George Parsons, 365 Lathrop, Julia, 5 "Latter-Day Warnings" (Holmes), 307 Laughing to Keep From Crying (Hughes), 329-330 Laughlin, J. Laurence, 641 Laurel, Stan, 607 Laurens, John, 509 Lawrence, D. H., 227, 230, 243, 252, 255, 257, 258, 263,275,329,546,613,728 Lawrence, Rhoda, 45 Lawrence of Arabia (Aldington), 259 Lawrence of Arabia (film), 67 "Lay Preacher" (Dennie), 125 Le Bien Informe (newspaper), 518 Le courant aboiitioniste dans la litterature americaine de 1808 a 1861 (Riviere), 426 Le cultivateur americain: Etude sur Voeuvre de Saint John de Crevecoeur (Rice), 252 "Le marais du cygne" (Whittier), 687 Leaflets (Rich), 551, 556-557 Leaks, Sylvester, 70 Leary, Lewis, 226, 319, 373, 706 Leaves of Grass (Whitman), 365, 416, 579 Leaves of the Tree, The (Masters), 460 Leavis, F. R., 536 ' 'Lectures on Poetry'' (Bryant), 159, 161 Lee (Masters), 471 Lee, Brian, 70 Lee, C. P., 402 Lee, Robert E., 471,486 "Legend of Lillian Hell man, The" (Kazin), 297 "Legendary Mr. Thurber, The" (Walker), 627 Legends of New England (Whittier), 684, 692 Leggett, William, 157 Lekachman, Robert, 648 Lenin, V. I., 647 Lerner, Max, 629, 630, 631, 647, 650, 654 Lessing, Gotthold, 422

"Lesson on Concealment, A" (Brown), 133 " 'Lesson on Concealment, A': Brockden Brown's Method in Fiction" (Berthoff), 148 "Let America Be America Again" (Hughes), 331 "Let No Charitable Hope" (Wylie), 713-714, 729 Let Your Mind Alone! (Thurber), 608 "Letter . . ." (Whittier), 687 "Letter, The" (Malamud), 435-436 "Letter from a Region in My Mind" (Baldwin), see "Down at the Cross" "Letter to Abbe Raynal" (Paine), 510 "Letter to George Washington" (Paine), 517 Letters (Landor), 422 Letters (Pound), 275 Letters (White), 651, 653, 675, 680 Letters from an American Farmer (Crevecoeur), 227251 Letters From the East (Bryant), 158 Letters of Nicholas Vachel Lindsay to A. Joseph Armstrong (ed. Armstrong), 402 Letters of a Traveller (Bryant), 158 Letters of a Traveller, Second Series (Bryant), 158 "Letter from Vachel Lindsay, A" (Aiken), 402 Levin, David, 70 Levin, Harry, 647 Levine, Daniel, 27 Levi-Strauss, Claude, 636 Levy, G. Rachel, 567 Levy Mayer and the New Industrial Era (Masters), 473 Lewis, R. W. B., 233 Lewis, Sinclair, 378, 613, 709 Leyte (Morison), 491 Liberator (publication), 321, 588, 688 "Liberty Tree" (Paine), 505 Library of Poetry and Song, The, 158 Lichtenstein, Roy, 665 Life (magazine), 676 "Life of Charles Brockden Brown" (Prescott), 148 Life of Charles Brockden Brown, The (Dunlap), 148 Life and the Dream (Colum), 730 "Life Is Fine" (Hughes), 334, 338 Life Is My Song (Fletcher), 275 "Life of John Greenleaf Whittier, The" (Woodwell), 706

Life and Letters of Harrison Gray Otis, Federalist, 1765-1848, The (Morison), 480-481 Life and Letters of John GreenleafWhittier (Pickard), 706 Life and Letters of Oliver Wendell Holmes (Morse) ,319 Life for Life's Sake (Aldington), 256, 275 Life on the Mississippi (Twain), 440 Life of Samuel Johnson (Boswell), 656 Life of Savage (Johnson), 523 Life of Thomas Pain, author of Rights of Men, With a Defence of his Writings (Chalmers), 514 Life of Thomas Paine, The (Cobbett), 517 Life Studies (Lowell), 543 "Life That Is, The" (Bryant), 169 Lillian Hellman (Adler), 297 Lillian Hellman (Falk), 297 Lillian Hellman: Playwright (Moody), 280, 298 ' 'Lillian Hellman on her Plays" (Stern), 298 Lincoln, Abraham, 2, 8, 26, 309, 321, 379, 380, 382, 385, 390, 397, 399, 418, 424, 454, 456, 471, 472, 473, 474, 483, 579, 687 Lincoln: The Man (Masters), 471,473-474 "Lincoln's Man of Letters" (O'Daniel), 348 Lindner, Carl M., 627 Lindsay, John, 374 Lindsay, Olive, 374, 375, 392 Lindsay, Vachel, 324, 374-403,454,473,474 Lindsay, Mrs. Vachel (Elizabeth Connors), 398, 399, 473 Lindsay, Vachel Thomas, 374, 375 Lindsay, Mrs. Vachel Thomas (Esther Catherine Frazee), 374, 375, 384-385, 398 "Lindsay and the Blood of the Lamb" (Orel), 402 "Lindsay's General William Booth: A Bibliographical and Textual Note" (Tanselle), 402 ' 'Lindsay/Masters/Sandburg: Criticism from 1950-75" (White), 401 "Lines on Revisiting the Country" (Bryant), 164 L'influence du symbolisme francais sur la poesie americaine (Taupin), 275 Linn, Elizabeth, see Brown,

Mrs. Charles Brockden (Elizabeth Linn) Linn, James Weber, 27 Linn, John Blair, 145 Linnaeus, Carolus, 245 "Lions and Lemmings, Toads and Tigers" (Cowley), 627 Lippincott' s Magazine, 357, 361,362,364,365 Lippmann, Walter, 609, 643 "Listeners and Readers: The Unforgetting of Vachel Lindsay" (Trombly), 403 "Litany of the Heroes" (Lindsay), 397 "Litany of Washington Street, The" (Lindsay), 376, 398399 Literary Friends and Acquaintance (Howells), 318 Literary History of the United States (ed. Spilleretal.), 104, 148, 601 "Literary Horizons: Cheever and Others" (Hicks), 198 Literary Magazine and American Register, The, 132, 146 "Literary Opinions of Charles Brockden Brown, The" (Marchand), 148 Literary Situation, The (Cowley),'626 Literary Women: The Great Writers (Moers), 46 Literature and American Life (Boynton), 415 "Little Dog" (Hughes), 329 Little Dorrit (Dickens), 35 "Little Edward" (Stowe), 587 Little Foxes, The (Hellman), 276,278-279,281,283,297 "Little Fred, the Canal Boy" (Stowe), 587 Little Ham (Hughes), 328, 339 "Little Lyric" (Hughes), 334 Little Man, Little Man (Baldwin), 67 Little Men (Alcott), 32, 39, 40 "Little Old Spy" (Hughes), 329 Little Review, The (publication), 256, 257 Little Women (Alcott), 28, 29, 32, 35, 37, 38, 39-40, 41, 43,44 Liveright, Horace, 464 Lives of the Artists (Vasari), 450 ' 'Lives in a Cell'' (McPherson), 199 ' 'Living in the Present: American Fiction Since 1945" (Rupp), 199 Livingston, Luther S., 425 Lloyd, Henry Demarest, 5 "Loan, The" (Malamud), 427, 428,431,437 "Local Color in The Awakening" (May), 226

746 I LOCA—MASQ 4

'Locating Langston Hughes" (Patterson), 348 Locke, Alain, 323, 325, 341 Locke, John, 130, 229, 230, 523 Locket, The (Masters), 460 Loeb, Jacques, 641 London Magazine (Plath), 541 Lonergan, Wayne, 51 Long Road of Woman's Memory, The (Addams), 17-18 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 158, 299, 306, 317, 362, 368, 405, 406, 408, 409, 414, 416, 420, 586, 587, 602, 699, 704 Longstreet, Augustus B., 352 "Look at the Movies by Baldwin, A" (Bogle), 69 Looking Backward (Bellamy), 641 Lorca, Federico Garcia, 345 Lord Jim (Conrad), 623 Lorde, Audre, 550, 571 "Lorelei" (Plath), 538 Louis, Pierre Charles Alexandre, 302, 303 Louis XVI, King, 511, 512, 514, 521 Louisa May Alcott (Anthony), 46 Louisa May Alcott (Saxton), 46 Louisa May Alcott (Stern), 46 Louisa May Alcott: Her Life, Letters, and Journals (Cheney), 46 Louisa May Alcott and the Woman Problem (Elbert), 46 * 'Love on the Bon Dieu'' (Chopin), 213 Love and Death in the American Novel (Fiedler), 601 "Love versus Law" (Stowe), 585-586 Lovejoy, Elijah P., 588 Lovejoy, Owen R., 8 "Lovely Lady, The" (Lawrence), 329 "Lover's Song" (Yeats), 80 * *Love-Unknown *' (Herbert), 80 "Lowell "(Brownell), 426 Lowell, Abbott, 483 Lowell, Amy, 257-259, 261263, 265, 266, 275, 465, 466, 478, 707, 714, 729 Lowell, Blanche, 409 Lowell, James Russell, 168, 299, 300, 303, 306, 311, 312, 317, 318, 362, 404426 Lowell, Mrs. James Russell (Maria White), 405, 406, 414, 424 Lowell, Robert, 89, 97, 538, 543,554 Lowell, Rose, 409

"Lowell as Critic" (Robertson), 426 Lowell and France (Stewart), 426 "Lowell and Longinus" (Pritchard), 426 "Lowell on Thoreau" (Warren), 426 Lowle, Percival, 404 "Luani of the Jungle" (Hughes), 328 Lubin, Isidor, 632 Lucas, Victoria (pseudonym), see Plath, Sylvia "Lucinda Matlock" (Masters), 461,465 Lucretius, 363 "Lullaby" (Bishop), 85 Lulu's Library (Alcott), 43 "Lumumba's Grave" (Hughes), 344 Lupercal (Hughes), 540 "Lycidas" (Milton), 370 Lyford, Harry, 679 Lyly, John, 369 ' 'Lynching, The " (McKay), 63 "Lynching Song" (Hughes), 331 Lynd, Staughton, 27, 525 "Lyonnesse" (Plath), 541 McAlmon, Robert, 259 McAlmon, Mrs. Robert, see Ellerman, Winifred Macaulay, Catherine, 522 Macbeth (Shakespeare), 67, 457 McCarthy, Harold T., 70 McCarthy, Joseph, 294, 295, 444,611,612,620 McCarthy, Mary, 84 McClatchy, J. D.,97 McCluskey, John, 70 McDonald, E. J., 670 McDowell, Mary, 5 McDowell, Tremaine, 173 Macebuh, Stanley, 69 McGlinchee, Claire, 426 Machine in the Garden, The (Marx), 252 "Machines in Cheever's Garden, The" (Donaldson), 198 Maclnnes, Colin, 70 Mackail, John William, 268, 461 McKay, Claude, 63 McKay, Donald, 482 McKinley, William, 395-396, 707 McLean, Albert F., Jr., 173 MacLean, Kenneth, 627 MacLeish, Archibald, 27, 261, 654 McLeod,A.W.,257 McMichael, Morton, 707 MacPherson, Kenneth, 259

McPherson, William, 199 "Madam and the Minister" (Hughes), 335 "Madam and the Wrong Visitor" (Hughes), 335 "Madame Celestin's Divorce" (Chopin), 213 Mademoiselle (magazine), 530, 531 Mademoiselle de Maupin (Gautier), 277 Madison, James, 509, 524 "Madman's Song" (Wylie), 711,729 Magellan, Ferdinand, 497 "Magi" (Plath), 544-545 "Magic Barrel, The" (Malamud), 427, 428, 431, 432433 Magic Barrel, The (Malamud), 427, 428, 43<M34 "Magic Mirror, The: A Study of the Double in Two of Doestoevsky's Novels" (Plath), 536 Magnolia Christi Americana (Mather), 102, 584 Magpie, The (ed. Baldwin), 49 Mahan, Albert Thayer, 491 "Maid's Shoes, The" (Malamud), 437 Mailer, Norman, 291,294 Main Currents in American Thought: The Colonial Mind, 1620-1800 (Parrington), 484 "Maine Speech" (White), 66^-670 Making of the English Working Class, The (Thompson), 525 "Malamud: The Commonplace as Absurd" (Fiedler), 453 "Malamud: The Uses and Abuses of Commitment" (Dupee), 453 Malamud, Bernard, 427-453 Malamund, Mrs. Bernard (Ann de Chiara), 451 "Malamud as Jewish Writer" (Alter), 452 Malcolm, Donald, 199 Malcolm X, 52, 63, 65, 66 Male Animal, The (Thurber), 605,606,610-611 "Malediction upon Myself" (Wylie), 722 Mallarme, Stephane, 261 Maloney, Russell, 681 ' 'Mama and Daughter'' (Hughes), 334 "Man Child, The" (Baldwin), 63 "Man in Black" (Plath), 538 "Man in the Drawer, The" (Malamud), 437 Man of Letters in New England and the South, The (Simpson), 149

Man in the Mirror, The: William Marion Reedy and His Magazine (Putzel), 402,478 Manhattan Transfer (Dos Passos), 57 "Manic in the Moon, The" (Thurber), 620 Manly, William M., 148 "Man-Moth, The" (Bishop), 85-87, 88 * 'Manners'' (Bishop), 73 Mannheim, Karl, 644 "Many Thousands Gone" (Baldwin), 51 "Map, The" (Bishop), 72, 82, 85-88, 93 Marat, Jean Paul, 514,515,521 Marble Farm, The (Hawthorne), 38, 421, 5% Marchand, Ernest, 148 Marcus, Steven, 70 Marcuse, Herbert, 645 Margolies, Edward, 70 Maritime Compact (Paine), 519 Maritime History of Massachusetts, 1783-1860, The (Morison), 481-483 Marjolin, Jean-Nicolas, 302 Marks, Alison, 660 Marlowe, Christopher, 422 Marmee: the Mother of Little Women (Salyer), 46 Marquand, J. P., 1% Marquis, Don, 668 "Marriage in the 'Sixties, A" (Rich), 554 Marsh, Edward, 257, 263 Marsh, Mae, 391 Marshall, John, 455 "Marshall Carpenter" (Masters), 463 "Marshes of Glynn, The" (Lanier), 364,365-368,370, 373 " 'Marshes of Glynn, The': A Study in Symbolic Obscurity" (Ross), 373 Martin, Benjamin, 503 Martin, John Stephen, 319 Martin, Terrence, 148 Martin du Card, Roger, 51 Martz, Louis, 107 Marvell, Andrew, 80 Marx, Karl, 518, 628, 632, 633, 634, 635, 639, 643, 645,646 Marx, Leo, 233, 252 Marxism, 493, 518, 600, 628, 633, 635, 643, 645 Marxist Quarterly (publication), 645 Mary (Jesus' mother), 581 "Mary's Song" (Plath), 541 Maslow, Abraham, 540 Mason, Otis Tufton, 18 Masque of Poets, A (ed. Lathrop), 365, 368

MASS—MY / 747 Massa, Ann, 402 Massachusetts, Its Historians and Its History (Adams), 484 Massachusetts Quarterly Review (publication), 420 "Massachusetts to Virginia" (Whittier), 688-689 "Massacre at Scio, The" (Bryant), 168 Massinger, Philip, 422 Masters, Edgar Lee, 378, 386, 387, 402, 454-478 Masters, Ellen Coyne, 478 Masters, Hardin, 468 Masters, HardinW., 478 Masters of Sociological Thought (Coser), 650 "Masters and Whitman: A Second Look" (Buigess), 477 Mather, Cotton, 102, 117, 174, 271, 584, 599, 698 Mather, Increase, 100 Mathews, Cornelius, 317 Matisse, Henri, 619 Matlock, Luanda, 462 4 'Maud Muller'' (Whittier), 698 Maupassant, Guy de, 207,217, 223, 320 Maximilian (emperor of Mexico), 457-458 Maximilian: A Play in Five Acts (Masters), 456, 457-458 Maxwell, William, 175 May, Abigail (Abba), see Alcott, Mrs. Amos Bronson (Abigail May) May, John R., 226 May Alcott: A Memoir (Ticknor), 46 "May Sun Sheds an Amber Light, The" (Bryant), 170 Mayfield, Julian, 70 Mayflower, The (Stowe), 585, 586 Maynard, Tony, 65 Mazzini, Giuseppe, 2, 8 "Me and the Mule" (Hughes), 334 Mead, George Herbert, 5, 641 Mead, Margaret, 49, 52, 66 "Mechanism in Thought and Morals" (Holmes), 314 "Medfield" (Bryant), 157 "Meditations for a Savage Child" (Rich), 564-565 Melander, Ingrid, 548 Melcher, Frederic G., 402 Meliboeus-Hipponax (Lowell), see Bigelow Papers, The Mellaait, James, 567 Meltzer, Milton, 348 Melville, Herman, 147, 238, 242, 249, 309, 317, 372, 383,495,579,580,582,602 Melville, Thomas, 309 4 'Memoirs of Carwin, the Biloquist" (Brown), 132

44

Memoirs of Stephen Cal vert'' (Brown), 133, 144 Memorabilia of John Greenleaf Whittier (ed. Pickard), 706 4 'Memories" (Whittier), 699 "Memories of Uncle Neddy" (Bishop), 73, 93 Men of Good Hope: A Story of American Progressives (Aaron), 650 44 Men, Women, and Thurber,'' 627 Mencken, H. L., 484,629-630, 631,647,651,653,659,673 Menikoff, Barry, 319 "Merced" (Rich), 563 4 'Merely to Know'' (Rich), 554 Mendeth, Robert, 601 "Merry-Go-Round" (Hughes), 333 Meserve, Walter, 70 Messenger (publication), 328 Metaphysicism, 261, 366,421, 634,635,661,679,704 Meynell, Alice, 720 Michelangelo, 363 Midcentury (Dos Passos), 646 "Mid-Day" (Doolittle), 266267 Middlemarch (Eliot), 174 Middlesex Standard (publication), 687 Midsummer Night's Dream, A, 36^-370 Milestone, Lewis, 281 Millay, Edna St. Vincent, 707, 714, 726 Miller, Henry, 546 Miller, Herman, 614, 617 Miller, John Duncan, 604 Miller, Oil la, 48 Miller, Perry, 31,46, 104,484 Miller, R. B., 348 Mills, C. Wright, 648, 650 Mills, Florence, 322 Milton, John, 124, 150, 370, 412, 422, 491, 501, 522, 622, 722, 724 Mims, Edwin, 362, 364, 365, 371,373 Mindlin, Henrique, 92 Minister's Wooing, The (Stowe), 592-595 ''Ministration of Our Departed Friends, The" (Stowe), 586587 Minor American Novelists (Hoyt), 148 ' 'Minstrel Man'' (Hughes), 325 Mirage (Masters), 459, 470, 471 Miranda, Francisco de, 522 "Miriam" (Whittier), 691,703 Miser ables, Les (Hugo), 280 Mission to Moscow (film), 281 Mitch Miller (Masters), 456, 466,469-471,474,475,476

Mitchell, Julia P., 252 Mitchell, Tennessee, see Anderson, Mrs. Sherwood (Tennessee Mitchell) Mitchell, Wesley C., 632, 643 Mizener, Arthur, 97 Moby Dick (Melville), 249, 579 Modern Brazilian Architecture (trans. Bishop), 92 Modern Mephistopheles, A (Alcott), 37-38 Modersohn, Otto, 573 Modersohn, Mrs. Otto (Paula Becker), 573-574 "Modest Expert, A" (Moore), 97 Moers, Hlen, 46 Moliere, 406 "Moll Pitcher" (Whittier), 684 Moller, Karin, 69 44 Molloch in State Street" (Whittier), 687 Monroe, Harriet, 256, 257, 258, 262, 263, 267, 374, 387, 388, 464 Monroe, James, 515, 517 Monroe's Embassy; or, the Conduct of the Government in Relation to Our Claims to the Navigation of the Mississippi (Brown), 146 Montage of a Dream Deferred (Hughes), 333, 339-341 Montagu, Ashley, 314 Montcalm, Louis Joseph de, 498 Montgomery, Robert, 611 Monthly Anthology (publication), 152, 300 Monthly Magazine and American Review, The, 133, 140, 144 Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres (Adams), 417 Montserrat (Hellman), 283285 Montserrat (Robles), 283-285 "Monument, The" (Bishop), 89 4 "Monument Mountain" (Bryant), 156, 162 Moods (Alcott), 33, 34-35, 43 Moody, Richard, 280, 298 Moody, Mrs. William Vaughn, 394 Moore, Arthur, 49 Moore, John Rees, 70 Moore, Marianne, 84, 89, 97, 255, 257, 707 Moore, Virginia, 730 "Moose, The" (Bishop), 73, 93, 94, 95 "Moral Bully, The" (Holmes), 302 "Moral Equivalent for War, The" (James), 20

"Moral Substitute for War, A" (Addams), 20 "Morals Is Her Middle Name" (Hughes), 338 Mordell, Albert, 706 More, Paul Elmer, 423 Morgan, Edmund, 101, 102, 484 Morgan, Robin, 569, 578 Morison, Samuel Eliot, 123, 479-500 Morison, Mrs. Samuel Eliot (Elizabeth Shaw Greene), 483 Morison, Mrs. Samuel Eliot (Priscilla Barton), 493, 4%, 497 Morituri Salutamus (Longfellow), 416 Morley, Christopher, 653 44 Morning of the Day They Did It, TTie" (White), 663 Morris, George Sylvester, 640 Morris, Gouverneur, 512, 517, 518 Morris, Robert, 510 Morris, William, 260, 356 Morsberger, Robert E., 626 Morse, John T., 319 Morse, Samuel F. B., 156 Mortal Antipathy, A (Holmes), 315-316 Moses (biblical person), 515, 516 "Mother to Son" (Hughes), 321-322, 323 Motley, John Lothrop, 299,479 "Motor Car, The" (White), 661 4 'Mourners, The" (Malamud), 431,435,436-437 Moynihan, Julian, 627 Mr. Hodge and Mr. Hazard (Wylie),708,709,714,721724 "Mr. Shelley Speaking" (Wylie), 719 "Mr. Preble Gets Rid of His Wife" (Thurber), 615 "Mr. Whittier" (Scott), 705 "Mrs. Kate Chopin" (Deyo), 226 Mueller, Lisel, 83, 88 Muhammad, Elijah, 60 Mulatto (Hughes), 328, 339 Mumford, Lewis, 632, 638 Munson, Gorham, 454, 478 Muray, Nicholas, 708 Murrell, William, 626 Mursell, James L., 608 "Mushrooms" (Plath), 539 "Mussel Hunter at Rock Harbor" (Plath), 529, 537 Mussolini, Benito, 281, 282, 664 "My Aunt" (Holmes), 302, 310

748 I MY—NOVE ' 'My Fathers Came From Kentucky" (Lindsay), 395 My Friend, Julia Lathrop (Addams), 25 "My Garden Acquaintance" (Lowell), 420 My Life and Hard Times (Thurber), 607, 609 My Mortal Enemy (Gather), 719 My Mother, My Father and Me (Hellman), 290-291 "My People" (Hughes), 321322, 323 * 'My Playmate'' (Whittier), 69£-700 My Son, John (film), 67 "My Son, the Murderer'5 (Malamud), 437 My Study Windows (Lowell), 407 My World—and Welcome to It (Thurber), 610 "Mystic" (Plath), 539, 541 "Mystic Vision in 'The Marshes of Glynn' " (Warfel), 366, 373 Mythology and the Romantic Tradition in English Poetry (Bush), 268, 275 Nabokov, Vladimir, 1% "Naked Nude" (Malamud), 450 "Name in the Papers" (Hughes), 330 "Nancy Knapp" (Masters), 461 Napoleon, 153, 518, 519 Narrative (publication), 588 "Narrative Stance in Kate Chopin's The Awakening" (Sullivan and Smith), 226 Nation (publication), 50, 209, 647 National Era (publication), 590,687 National Geographic (magazine), 94 National Poetry Association Anthology, The, 530 Native Son (Wright), 51, 64, 67, 337 Natural, The (Malamud), 438441,443 "Natural, The: Malamud's World Ceres" (Wasserman), . 439, 453 "Natural Resources" (Rich), 575 "Nature" (Emerson), 383 Nature of Peace, The (Veblen), 642 "Nature-Metaphors" (Lanier), 352 Neal, Lawrence P., 70 Neal, Patricia, 286

Necessities of Life (Poems 1962-65) (Rich), 553, 555 "Necessity and Freedom: The Poetry of Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton" (Jones), 548 "Negro" (Hughes), 321-322 "Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain, The" (Hughes), 323, 325 "Negro Assays the Negro Mood, A" (Baldwin), 52 "Negro Church, The: James Baldwin and the Christian Vision" (Margolies), 70 "Negro Dancers" (Hughes), 324 ' 'Negro Ghetto'' (Hughes), 331 Negro Mother, The (Hughes), 328 "Negro Sermon, A:—Simon Legree" (Lindsay), 393 ' 'Negro Speaks of Rivers, The'' (Hughes), 321 "Nellie Clark" (Masters), 461 Neruda, Pablo, 89 "Net to Snare the Moonlight, A" (Lindsay), 387 Nets to Catch the Wind (Wylie), 709, 710-712, 714 Neumann, Erich, 567 "Never Room with a Couple" (Hughes), 330 Nevins, Allan, 173, 486, 493 New Conscience and an Ancient Evil, A (Addams), 14-15,16 New Eclectic (magazine), see Southern Magazine New England Primer, 310 New England Saints (Warren), 123 New England Weekly Review (publication), 684 New Era in American Poetry, The (Untermeyer), 402 New Industrial State, The (Galbraith), 648 New Leader (publication), 50 New Life, A (Malamud), 429, 444-446 "New Light on Veblen" (Dorfman), 650 New Masses (publication), 331 "New Natural History, A" (Thurber), 619 New Poetry, The (eds. Monroe and Henderson), 387 New Poets, The: American and British Poetry Since World War Two (Rosenthal), 548549 New Radicalism in America, The (1889-1963): the Intellectual as a Social Type (Lasch), 27 New Republic (magazine), 174, 332, 609, 647, 709

New Song, A (Hughes), 328, 331-332 New Spoon River, The (Masters), 461-465, 473 "New Spoon River, The: Fifteen Facsimile Pages" (Robinson), 478 "New South, The" (Lanier), 352, 354, 370 New Star Chamber and Other Essays, The (Masters), 455456, 459 New Testament, 104, 106, 516 "New Theory of Thorstein Veblen, A" (Galbraith), 650 "New Verse" (Mizener), 97 ' 'New Woman Revisited, Hie " (Forrey), 226 New Woman's Survival Sourcebook, The (eds. Rennie and Grimstead), 569, 578 "New Year's Gift, The" (Stowe), 587 New York American (newspaper), 155 New York Amsterdam News (newspaper), 327 New York Evening Post (newspaper), 156, 158, 606 New-York Review and Atheneum Magazine (eds. Bryant and Anderson), 156 New York Review of Books (publication), 550 New York Times (newspaper), 65, 83, 200, 295, 431 New York Times Book Review, The (publication), 372 New York Tribune (newspaper), 362 New Yorker (magazine), 60, 174, 175, 19S-196, 372, 530, 607, 609, 619, 620, 651, 653, 654, 655, 659, 660, 669, 673, 679 Nev/burypOTt Free Press (newspaper), 683 Newer Ideals of Peace (Addams), 11-12, 15, 16-17, 19, 20-21 Newman, Charles, 527, 546548 Newton, Huey, 66 Nicholas II, Tsar, 447 Nichols, Lewis, 199 "Nick and the Candlestick" (Plath), 544 Niebuhr, Reinhold, 654 Nielson, Dorothy, 659 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 254, 299, 320,646 Night in Acadie, A (Chopin), 200, 219, 220, 224 "Night Dances, The" (Plath), 544 "Night Shift" (Plath), 538 "Nightbreak" (Rich), 556

Nights (Doolittle), 270, 271 ' 'Nights and Days'' (Rich), 574 Niles, Thomas, Jr., 39 Nilsson, Christine, 355 Nimitz, Chester, 491 'TJine from Eight" (Lanier), 352-354 "Nirvana" (Lanier), 352 Nixon, Richard M., 294, 295 No Name in the Street (Baldwin), 47, 48, 52, 65-66, 67 "No Nonsense" (Moynihan), 627 Noah (biblical person), 506, 690 Noble, David W., 70, 650 Nobody Knows My Name (Baldwin), 47, 52, 55 "Nobody Knows My Name: A Letter from the South" {Baldwin), 52 "Noon" (Bryant), 157 Norna; or, The Witch's Curse (Alcott), 33 North American Review (publication), 154, 155, 300, 406, 413, 418, 420 North of Boston (Frost), 263 North & South (Bishop, 72,84, 85,89 North Star, The (Hellman), 281 Northrup, Cyrus, 350 Norton, Charles Eliot, 103, 406,479 Norton, John, 99,110,112,114 ' 'Not Everyone Liked Thurber'' (Geddes), 627 "Not Horror but 'Sadness' " (Wershba), 453 "Not Somewhere Else, but Here" (Rich), 552, 573 Not Without Laughter (Hughes), 328, 332 "Note on Lanier's Music, A" (Graham), 373 "Note on Poetry, A" (Doolittle), 254, 267-268 "Notes on James Thurber the Man or Men" (Nugent), 627 "Notes of a Native Son" (Baldwin), 50, 54 Notes of a Native Son (Baldwin), 50, 52, 54 Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (Stevens), 80 Nothing Personal (Baldwin), 58,60 "Novelist of Suburbia: Mr. Saturday, Mr. Monday and Mr. Cheever" (Sheed), 199 ' 'Novels of Edgar Lee Masters, The" (Flanagan), 478 Novels of Harriet Beecher Stowe, The (Crozier), 601 "Novels of Oliver Wendell Holmes, The: A Re-Interpretation" (Holmes), 319

NOVE—PATH / 749 Novels of Theodore Dreiser (Pizer), 478 Nugent, Elliot, 606, 611,613, 626, 627 Nuptial Flight, The (Masters), 460,471 "Nux Postcoenatica" (Holmes), 303 Nye, RusselB., 149,478 Gates, Joyce Carol, 199, 548 Oberndorf, Clarence P., 315, 319 "Objective Value of a Social Settlement, The'' (Addams), 4 Obregon, Maurice, 488 O'Brien, Conor Cruise, 70 "Ocean 1212-W" (Plath), 528 O'Connor, Flannery, 290 O'Connor, Frank, 531 O'Connor, William Van, 195 "October, 1866 "(Bryant), 169 O'Daniel, Therman B., 69,348 "Ode to Autumn" (Masters), 458 "Ode to the Johns Hopkins University" (Lanier), 370 "Ode to Night" (Masters), 458 Ode Recited at the Harvard Commemoration (Lowell), 416-418, 424 ' 'Ode to the West Wind'' (Shelley), 728 Odets, Clifford, 277, 295, 679 Odyssey (Homer), 185 Odyssey (trans. Bryant), 158 Oedipus Rex (Sophocles), 428 Of Plymouth Plantation (ed. Morison), 494 Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (Rich), 554, 567-569 "Official Piety" (Whittier), 687 O'Raherty, George, 202, 205206 O'Flaherty, Kate, see Chopin, Kate (Kate O'Flaherty) O'Flaherty, Thomas, 202,203204, 205 O'Flaherty, Mrs. Thomas (Eliza Fans), 202, 204, 205, 207 O'Flaherty, Thomas, Jr., 202 Ogden, Uzal, 516 "Oh, Fairest of The Rural Maids" (Bryant), 169 O'Hara, John, 196 Old Bruin: Commodore Matthew C. Perry, 1794-1858 (Morison), 494-495 Old Curiosity Shop, The (Dickens), 409 Old-Fashioned Girl, An (Alcott), 29,41,42 "Old Father Morris" (Stowe), 586

' 'Old Ironsides'' (Holmes), 302 "Old Meeting House, The" (Stowe), 586 "Old, Old, Old, Old Andrew Jackson" (Lindsay), 398 Old Testament, 60, 104, 106, 151,427,515,516 Oldtown Folks (Stowe), 587, 596-598 Oldys, Francis, see Chalmers, George "Oliver Wendell Holmes" (Leary), 319 "Oliver Wendell Holmes" (Menikoff), 319 Oliver Wendell Holmes (Small), 319 Ollive, Elizabeth, see Paine, Mrs. Thomas (Elizabeth Ollive) Ollive, Samuel, 503 Olmstead, Frederick Law, 355 Omar Khayyam, 363 "On the Building of Springfield" (Lindsay), 381 "On a Certain Condescension in Foreigners" (Lowell), 419 "On the Death of a Friend's Child" (Lowell), 409 On Human Finery (Bell), 636 On Judging Books in General and Particular (Hackett), 626 "On the Late Eclipse" (Bryant), 152 "On Miracle Row" (Gardner), 198 On Native Grounds: An Interpretation of Modern American Prose Literature (Kazin), 650 "On Reading Eckerman's Conversations with Goethe" (Masters), 458 "On the Use of Trisyllabic Feet in Iambic Verse" (Bryant), 156 "Once More to the Lake" (White), 658, 668, 673675 "One Art" (Bishop), 72, 73, 82, 93, 94-95, 96 "One Art: The Poetry of Elizabeth Bishop, 19711976" (Schwartz), 81,97 One Boy's Boston, 1887-1901 (Morison), 494 One Day, When I Was Lost (Baldwin), 48, 66, 67 "One Friday Morning" (Hughes), 330 One Hundred Days in Europe (Holmes), 317 "One Is a Wanderer" (Thurber), 616 "One Man to Stand for Six Million" (Hicks), 453

"One Man's Meat" (White), 655 One Mans Meat (White), 654, 669, 676 "One More Song" (Lindsay), 400-401 "One Person" (Wylie), 709, 724-727 One-Way Ticket (Hughes), 333-334 Only Yesterday (Allen), 681 Open Sea, The (Masters), 471 Operations in North African Waters (Morison), 490 Opportunity (magazine), 324, 325, 326 4 'Opportunity for American Fiction, An" (Howells), 645646 "Opposition" (Lanier), 368, 373 "Oracle of Subocracy" (Scully), 199 Orations and Addresses (Bryant), 158 "Orchard" (Doolittle), 263264, 265, 266 "Oread" (Doolittle), 265-266 Orel, Harold, 402 "Origins and History of Consciousness" (Rich), 570 "Orion" (Rich), 557 Orlando (Woolf), 718 Ormond; or, The Secret Witness (Brown), 133-137 Orphan Angel, The (Wylie), 707, 709, 714, 717, 719721,722,724 Orr, Peter, 538, 540, 543, 549 Orwell, George, 523,620 Ossian, 491 Ostriker, Alicia, 540, 548 "Other Bishop, The" (McClatchy), 97 Otis, Harrison Gray, 479^481, 483, 486, 488 Otis, James, 486 "Our Countrymen in Chains!" (Whittier), 688 "Our Limitations" (Holmes), 314 "Our Master" (Whittier), 704 "Our Mother Pochahontas" (Lindsay), 393 "Out of an Abundant Love of Created Things" (Esty), 198 "Outing, The" (Baldwin), 63 Outlook (publication), 200, 380, 709 "Outstanding Novels" (Schorer), 199 "Over 2000 Illusustrations and a Complete Concordance" (Bishop), 90-91 Owl in the Attic, The (Thurber), 614

"Owl Who Was God, The" (Thurber), 610 Oxford Anthology of American Literature, 254 Oxford History of the American People, The (Morison), 495-

4% Oxford History of the United States, 1783-1917, The (Morison, 483-484 Ozick, Cynthia, 199 Page, Walter Hines, 370 Paige, Satchel, 234 Pain, Joseph, 502 Pain, Mrs. Joseph (Frances Cocke), 502 Pain, Thomas, see Paine, Thomas Paine, Thomas, 231, 501-525 Paine, Mrs. Thomas (Elizabeth Ollive), 503 Paine, Mrs. Thomas (Mary Lambert), 503 "Palantine, The" (Whittier), 694,696 Palimpsest (Doolittle), 259, 268, 269, 270-271 Palmer, Elihu, 520 Pantheism, 163 Panther and the Lash, The (Hughes), 342-344,345-346 Paper Boats (Butler), 275 Paradox of Progressive Thought, The (Noble), 650 "Paris, 7 A.M." (Bishop), 85, 89 Paris Review (publication), 618 "Park Bench" (Hughes), 331332 Parker, Charlie, 59 Parker, Theodore, 38, 518 Parker, Thomas, 102 Parkes, Henry Bamford, 617 Parkman, Francis, 420, 479, 481-482,486,487,493,498 Parkman Reader, The (ed. Morison), 494 Parks, Edd Winfield, 373 Parks, Larry, 295 Parks, Rosa, 342 Parrington, Vemon L., 484, 640 Parson, Annie, 655 Parsons, Talcott, 648 Parsons, Theophilus, 155 "Parting Gift" (Wylie), 714 Partisan Review (publication), 58,89 Passionate Prodigality, A (Aldington), 275 "Past, The" (Bryant), 157,170 Past and Present (Carlyle), 410 Pastorius, Francis Daniel, 700 Pater, Walter, 552 "Path, The" (Bryant), 169

750 / PATT—PRAT Patten, Simon, 640 "Pattern of the Atmosphere, The" (Zabel), 730 Patterson, Lindsay, 348 Patterson, William M., 265 Patton, General George, 664 Paul, Saint, 188 "Paula Becker to Clara Westhoff " (Rich), 573-574 Paulding, James Kirke, 157 Pavese, Cesare, 478 Paz, Octayio, 97 Peabody, Elizabeth P., 46 Peabody, Francis G., 5 Peace and Bread in Time of War (Addams), 21, 22-23 Peacock, Gibson, 360 Peacock, Thomas Love, 307 Pearce, Roy Harvey, 111, 114, 173, 373, 475, 478, 706 Pearl of Orr's Island, The (Stowe), 592-593, 595 Pearson, Norman Holmes, 259, 260, 273 Peden, William, 199 Pedlar's Progress: The Life of Bronson Alcott (Shepard), 46 Peirce, Charles Sanders, 640 Perm, William, 683 Pennsylvania Evening Post (newspaper), 505 Pennsylvania Freeman (newspaper), 405, 686 Pennsylvania Magazine, 504, 505 "Pennsylvania Pilgrim, The" (Whittier), 700 Pentimento (Hellman), 280, 292-294, 2% Pepys, Samuel, 653 "Peregrine" (Wylie), 712-713, 714

Perkins, David, 459, 475, 478 Perkins, M. Helen, 26 Perloff, Marjorie, 539, 542, 548 Perrault, Charles, 622 Perry, Bliss, 706 Perry, Matthew C., 494-495 Perry, Patsy Brewington, 66 Personae (Pound), 255 Personal Narrative (Edwards), 700 "Personal Reminiscences of James Thurber" (Budd), 626 "Peter Parley" works (Goodrich), 38 Peterkin, Julia, 328 Peters, Cora, 468 Phair, Judith T., 173 "Phantasia for Elvira Shatayev" (Rich), 570 "Phenomenology of Anger, The" (Rich), 562-563, 571 Phidias, 482 Philadelphia Evening Bulletin (newspaper), 360

"Philippine Conquest, The" (Masters), 456 Phillips, Elizabeth C., 298 Phillips, J. O. C., 19, 27 Phillips, Robert, 548 Phillips, Wendell, 103, 524 Phillips, Willard, 154, 155 Philosophy of Thorstein Veblen, The (Daugert), 649 "Photograph of the Unmade Bed" (Rich), 558 "Physiology of Versification, The: Harmonies of Organic and Animal Life" (Holmes), 311 Piatt, James, 420 Pickard, John B., 706 Pickard, Samuel T., 682, 706 Picked-upPieces (Updike), 626 Pickford, Mary, 391 Pictorial History of the Negro in America, A (Hughes), 345 Pictorial Mode, The: Space and Time in the Art of Bryant, Irving and Cooper (Ringe), 173 Pictures of Fidelman: An Exhibition (Malamud), 450451 "Pictures of the Artist" (Malamud), 450 Picturesque America; or, the Land We Live In (ed. Bryant), 158 Piercy, Josephine K., 103, 123 Pierre (Melville), 579 Philanthropist (newspaper), 587 x Pike County Ballads, The (Hay), 352 "Pilgrim" (Freneau), 125 Pilgrim's Progress (Bunyan), 32, 38, 599 "Pimp's Revenge, A" (Malamud), 435, 450, 451 Pioneer, The: A Literary and Critical Magazine, 405 Piquion, Rene, 346 Pitt, William, 510, 518 Pittsburgh Courier (newspaper), 327 "Pity Me" (Wylie), 729 Pizer, Donald, 478 Place of Science in Modern Civilization and Other Essays, The (Veblen), 629,642 "Plain Talk," see Common Sense (Paine) "Planetarium" (Rich), 557 Plath, Aurelia, 527-528, 529, 530,531,535,536,541 Plath, Otto, 527-529,531,533 Plath, Sylvia, 526-549, 554, 571 Plath, Warren, 528 Plato, 595, 631

Platt, Anthony M., 13-14, 27

Plotz, Joan, 578 Plumly, Stanley, 578 "Po' Boy Blues" (Hughes), 327 Po Li, 262 Podhoretz, Norman, 453 Poe, Edgar Allan, 36,147,309, 376, 384, 385, 388, 393, 405,413,421,474,682 "Poem" (Bishop), 73, 76-79, 82,95 4 'Poem for a Birthday'' (Plath), 539 "Poem Read at the Dinner Given to the Author by the Medical Profession" (Holmes), 310-311 Poems (Bryant), 155, 157 Poems (Holmes), 303 Poems (Lowell), 405 Poems: North & South—A Cold Spring, 83, 89 Poems by James Russell Lowell, Second Series (Lowell), 406, 409 Poems by Sidney Lamer, 364 Poems From Black Africa (ed. Hughes), 344 Poems of Places (ed. Longfellow), 368 Poems on Slavery (Longfellow), 406 Poet at the Breakfast-Table, The (Holmes), 31^-314 "Poet and His Public, The" (Jarrell), 96 1 'Poet-or the Growth of a Lit'ry Figure" (White), 676 Poet Speaks, The (Or), 549 Poetes negres des £tats-Unis, Les (Wagner), 348 Poetry (magazine), 83, 256, 257, 258, 261, 263, 264, 265, 268, 334, 374, 387, 389,392,394,461,553,709 "Poetry: A Metrical Essay" (Holmes), 310 "Poetry in America: A New Consideration of Whittier's" Verse (Scott), 706 Poetry of American Women from 1632-1945, The (Watts), 123 Poetry of Meditation (Martz), 107 Poetry of the Negro 1746-1949, The (ed. Hughes), 345 "Poetry of Sylvia Plath, The: Enlargement and Derangement" (Hardy), 548 Poetry of Sylvia Plath, The: A Study of Themes (Melander), 548 Poganuc People (Stowe), 581, 596,59^-600 "Point at Issue! A" (Chopin), 208

"Point Shirley" (Plath), 529, 538 Poirier, Richard, 660,665,681 Political Essays (Lowell), 407 Politics and a Belly-Full (Johnson), 173 "Politics and the English Language" (Orwell), 620 Politics of the Universe, The: Edward Beecher, Abolition, and Orthodoxy (Merideth), 601

Pollard, James E., 626 Pollard, John A., 706 Polybius, 491 "Pool, The" (Doolittle), 264265 Pope, Alexander, 150, 152, 310, 407, 422, 516, 714 "Poppies in July" (Plath), 544 "Poppies in October" (Plath), 544 Popular History of the United States (Gay), 158 Porgy and Bess (film), 66 Portable Veblen, The (Veblen), 630, 650

Porter, Herman W., 49 Porter, Jacob, 153 Porter, Noah, 640 Porter, William Sydney (O. Henry), 390, 462 "Porter" (Hughes), 327 Porteus, Beilby, 150 Portraits and Self-Portraits (ed. Schreiber), 478 Portuguese Voyages to America in the Fifteenth Century (Morison), 488 "Posthumous Poems of Edgar Lee Masters" (Robinson), 478 Postimpressionism, 257 "Potatoes' Dance, The" (Lindsay), 394 Potter, Beatrix, 656 Pound, Ezra, 253, 255-258, 261-268, 272, 274, 275, 387, 721 Pound, Mrs. Ezra (Dorothy Shakespeare), 257 Pound Era, The (Kenner), 275 Pound/Joyce: The Letters of Ezra Pound to James Joyce (ed. Read), 275 Powell, Desmond, 706 "Power" (Rich), 569 "Power of Prayer, The" (Larder), 357 Powys, John Cowper, 454,476, 478 Practical Navigator, The (Bowditch), 482 "Prairies, The" (Bryant), 157, 162, 163, 166

Pratt, Anna (Anna Alcott), 33 Pratt, Louis H., 70

PREA—RICH / 751 "Preacher, The" (Whittier), 698-699 "Preconceptions of Economic Science,The"(Veblen),634 "Preference" (Wylie), 713 Prejudices (Mencken), 630 Preliminary Checklistfor a Bibliography of Jane Addams (Perkins), 26 Prelude: Or, Growth of a Poet's Mind (Wordsworth), 416, 676 Prescott, William Hickling, 148, 414, 479, 493, 494 "Preservation of Innocence" (Baldwin), 51 "Previous Condition" (Baldwin), 51, 55, 63 Price, Richard, 522 "Priceless Gift of Laughter," 627 "Pride" (Hughes), 331 Priestley, Joseph, 522 "Primary Ground, A" (Rich), 563 4 'Primitive Singing'' (Lindsay), 389-390 Princess, The (Tennyson), 410 Principles of Literary Criticism (Richards), 264, 275 Principles of Zoology (Agassiz), 312 "Prison, The" (Malamud), 431,437 Prisoner ofZenda, The (film), 615 Pritchaixi, JohnP., 173,426 "Prodigal, The" (Bishop), 90, 92 Profession of Authorship in America, 1800-1870, The (Charvat), 148 "Profession of a New Yorker" (Krutch), 681 "Professor" (Hughes), 330 Professor at the BreakfastTable, The (Holmes), 313, 316 "Professor Clark's Economics" (Veblen), 634 "Professor Veblen" (Mencken), 630 Profile of Vachel Undsay (ed. Flanagan), 402 Progressive (publication), 60 Proletarian Literature in the United States (Hicks), 609610 "Prophecy of Samuel Sewall, The" (Whittier), 699 Prose and Poetry of Elinor Wylie, The (Benct), 730 "Prose Style in the Essays of E. B. White" (Fuller), 681 Prospect, The (journal), 520 "Prospective Immigrants Please Note" (Rich), 555

Prospects on the Rubicon (Paine), 510-511 Proud, Robert, 125 "Proud Farmer, The" (Lindsay), 381 "Proud Lady" (Wylie), 711712 "Psalm of Life, A: What the Heart of the Young Man Said to the Psalmist" (Longfellow), 409 "Psalm of the West" (Lanier), 362, 364 Psalms (biblical book), 125 Psychiatric Novels of Oliver Wendell Holmes, The (Oberndorf), 315, 319 Psychoanalysis, in literature, 253, 259, 260, 270, 526, 527, 535 Psychology, in literature, 51, 62,130,131,145,201,218, 223, 254, 265, 270, 421, 439, 440, 442, 465, 466, 471, 475, 485, 493, 495, 531, 532, 535, 538, 543, 544, 554, 574, 602, 675, 685, 694, 695, 703, 718 Public Good (Paine), 509-510 Pullman, George, 9 "Pulpit and the Pew, The" (Holmes), 302 Punch (periodical), 602 "Purdah" (Plath), 546 Puritan Family (Morgan), 101 Puritan Origins of the American Self, The (Bercovitch), 99 4 'Puritan Poetry of Anne Bradstreet, The" (Richardson), 123 Puritan Pronaos, The: Studies in the Intellectual Life of New England in the Seventeenth Century (Morison), 485 Puritanism, 98-101, 103-117, 122, 123, 197, 253, 271, 375, 400, 421, 479, 484, 485, 496, 505, 521, 522, 593, 600, 672, 698, 699 "Puritan's Ballad, The" (Wylie), 723 "Pushcart Man" (Hughes), 330 Puttenham, George, 113 Putzel, Max, 402, 478 "Quai d'Orl&ns" (Bishop), 89 Quaker Militant: John Greenleaf Whittier (Mordell), 706 Qualey, Carlton C., 650 Quarterly Journal of Economics (publication), 641 Quaternions, the (Bradstreet), 104-106, 114, 122 Queen Victoria (Strachey), 485, 494 "Questions of Geography" (Hollander), %

Questions of Travel (Bishop), 72, 83, 92, 94 Quinn, Vincent, 270, 275 Quintet: Essays on Five American Women Poets (Saul), 730 "Quintet Honors Thurber Fables" (Hawley), 627

"Rabbits Who Caused All the Trouble, The" (Thuiber), 610 Rabelais, Francois, 461 "Race of Life, The" (Thurber), 614 Racine, Jean Baptiste, 716 Radical Innocence: Studies in the Contemporary American Novel (Hassan), 198 Radical Tradition, The: From Tom Paine to Lloyd George (Deny), 525 Radkin, Paul, 539 "Raft, The" (Lindsay), 393 "Rain-Dream, A" (Bryant), 164 "Rainy Season; Sub-Tropics" (Bishop), 93 Ralegh, Sir Walter, 98 Ramus, Petrus, 104 Rand, Ayn, 294 Ranke, Leopold von, 492 Rankin, Daniel S., 200, 203, 225, 226 Ransom, John Crowe, 80, 361, 373, 423 Rap on Race, A (Baldwin and Mead), 66 Raphael, 363 Rapping, Elayne A., 252 Rational Fictions: A Study of Charles Brockden Brown (Kimball), 148 Raugh, Joseph, 286 Rauschenbusch, Walter, 7 "Raven Days, The" (Lanier), 351 Ray, David, 199 Read, Foirest, 275 Reade, Charles, 580 Reader, Dennis J., 402, 454, 478 Reader's Digest (magazine), 534 "Reading of Wieland, A" (Ziff), 148 "Readings of History" (Rich), 554 "Real Source of Vachel Lindsay's Poetic Technique, The" (Edwards), 402 Realism, 171,430,431, 443, 444, 451, 460, 465, 467, 505, 536, 579, 580, 585, 621, 622, 656, 666, 691, 692, 693, 697, 720

Record of Mr. Alcott's School (Peabody), 46 "Red Carpet for Shelley, A" (Wylie), 724 Red Roses for Bronze (Doolittle), 253, 268, 271 "Redbreast in Tampa" (Lanier), 364 Redding, Saunders, 332, 333 Reedy, William Marion, 456, 461,465 Rees, Robert A., 425 Reflections: Thinking Part I (Arendt), 570 "Reflections on the Life and Death of Lord Clive" (Paine), 505 Reflections on the Revolution in France (Burke), 511,512 Reid, Thomas, 151 "Religious Symbolism and Psychic Reality in Baldwin's Go Tell It on the Mountain" (Allen), 69 "Rembrandt's Hat" (Malamud), 435, 437 "Removal" (White), 664-665 Remsen, Ira, 369 Report of the Industrial Commission, 644 ' 'Republican Manifesto, A " (Paine), 511 Requa, Kenneth A., 107, 123 "Resemblance" (Bishop), 86 Restoration comedy, 617 "Retrospects and Prospects" (Lanier), 352 Return to the Fountains: Some Classical Sources of American Criticism (Pritchaid), 173, 426 4 'Rev. Freemont Deadman'' (Masters), 463 Revelation (biblical book), 105, 273 "Revenge of Hamish, The" (Lanier), 365 Reynolds, Sir Joshua, 716 "Rhapsodist, The" (Brown), 125-126 Rhymes to Be Traded for Bread (Lindsay), 380, 381-382 Ricardo, David, 628, 634 Rice, HowaidC., 252 Rich, Adrienne, 546-547, 550-578 Rich, Arnold, 552 Richard HI (Shakespeare), 422 Richards, I. A., 264,265,275, $47 Richardson, Robert D., Jr., 123 Richman, Sidney, 453 Richmond (Masters), 471 Rickman, Clio, 519 Riesman, David, 649, 650 Rights of Man (Paine), 508, 511,51^514,516,519,523

752 / RICH—SELE 4

'Rights of Women, The" (Brown), see Alcuin: A Dialogue Riis, Jacob, 13 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 264, 573 Rilke, Mrs. Rainer Maria (Clara Westhoff), 573-574 Ring and the Book, The (Browning), 416, 468 Ringe, Donald A., 148, 173, 226, 706 "Rip Van Winkle*' (Irving), 185 Rising Glory of America, The (Brackenridge and Freneau), 124 Rising Sun in the Pacific, The (Morison), 490 Rittenhouse, David, 507 Rittenhouse, Jessie B., 402 "Ritual for Being Born Twice, A: Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar" (Perloff), 548 "River Towns" (Masters), 473 Riviere, Jean, 426 "Rivulet, The" (Bryant), 155, 162 Robertson, J. M.,426 Robespierre, Maximilien, 514, 515, 517 Robinson, Edwin Arlington, 699 Robinson, Frank Kee, 478 Robinson, Jackie, 338 Robinson, James Harvey, 492 Robinson Crusoe (Defoe), 714 Robles, Emmanuel, 283 Roblyer, Pamela, 275 Rochefoucauld, Louis Alexandre, 510 Rockefeller, John D., 486 "Rocking Horse Winner, The" (Lawrence), 329 ' 'Rockpile, The " (Baldwin), 63 Rocks, James E., 173,226 Rodman, Selden, 83 Roethke, Theodore, 539 Rogers, Samuel, 157 Roget, Peter Mark, 312 Rolfe, Ellen, see Veblen, Mrs. Thorstein (Ellen Rolfe) Rollins, Charlemae, 348 "Rollo" tales (Abbott), 38 "Romantic Coherence and Romantic Incoherence in American Poetry" (Duffey), 173 "Romantic Imagery in Kate Chopin's The Awakening" (Ringe), 226 Romanticism, 4, 10, 15-16, 154, 159, 171, 266, 267, 311, 312, 349, 369, 487, 505, 580, 582, 621, 622, 659, 660, 679, 685, 699, 700, 722, 724 ' 'Rondel for a September Day'' (White), 676

Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 488, 489, 490, 491, 645, 654, 655 Roosevelt, Theodore, 1, 21, 455, 456, 502, 707 "Roosters" (Bishop), 89 Ropemakers of Plymouth, The (Morison), 494 Rose in Bloom (Alcott), 42 Rosenberg, Bernard, 650 Rosenberg, Julius and Ethel, 295, 532 Rosenfeld, Alvin H., 120, 123 Rosenthai, M. L., 548 "Rose-Morals" (Lanier), 364 Ross, Harold, 174, 607, 617, 653, 654, 655, 660 Ross, Robert H., 373 Ross and the New Yorker (Kramer), 626, 681 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 552 Roth, Philip, 70,186,192,431, 441,443,453 "Rouge High" (Hughes), 330 Round Table (magazine), 350 Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 126, 637, 659 Rovit, Earl, 453 Row son, Susanna, 128 Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (FitzGerald), 416 Rubin, Louis, 672, 673, 679, 681 "Ruby Brown" (Hughes), 327 Rugby Chapel (Arnold), 416 Ruggles, Eleanor, 402 "Ruins of Italics, The" (trans. Bryant), 166 Rungless Ladder, The (Foster), 601

Rupp, Richard H., 199 Rush, Benjamin, 505, 507 Ruskin, John, 2, 10, 87, 349, 410 Russell, Bertrand, 522 Russell, Herb, 465-466 Ruth (biblical book), 516 Ruth, George Herman ("Babe"), 438, 440 Rutledge, Anne, 471

"Sabbath, The" (Stowe), 587 "Sabbath Morn" (White), 671672 Sachs, Hanns, 259 Sacco, Nicola, 446 Sacred Wood, The (Eliot), 268, 275 Saffin, John, 115 St. John, James Hector, see Crevecoeur, Michel-Guillaume Jean de St. Jean de Crevecoeur (Mitchell), 252 Saint John de Crevecoeur: Sa

vie et ses ouvrages (Crevecoeur, R.), 252 St. Louis Daily GlobeDemocrat (newspaper), 200 St. Louis Post-Dispatch (newspaper), 200 Saints, Sinners, and Beechers (Stowe), 601 Saint-Simon, Claude Henri, 648 Salisbury, Harrison, 664 "Salute to Thurber," 627 "Salvation in the Suburbs" (Nicol), 199 Salyer, Sandford, 46 Sam Lawson's Oldtown Fireside Stories (Stowe), 587, 596, 598-599 Sampson, Edward, 664, 673, 681 Sampson, Martin, 652 "Samson and Delilah" (Masters), 459 Samuel de Champlain: Father of New France (Morison), 496^97 "Samuel Eliot Morison and the Ocean Sea" (Herald), 500 Sanbom, Franklin B., 46 Sanctuary (Faulkner), 614 "Sanctuary "(Wylie), 711 Sandburg, Cart, 257, 320,387, 389,454,461,653 Sands, Robert, 156, 157 Sangamon County Peace Advocate, The (Lindsay), 379 Sanger, Margaret, 19 "Santa Fe Trail, The" (Lindsay), 389 Santayana, George, 428 Sappho, 261 f 269, 458 Saroyan, William, 679 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 51 Saturday Review of Literature (publication), 332, 344, 654 Saul, G. B., 730 Savage God, The: A Study of Suicide (Alvarez), 548 Saxton, Martha, 46 Saye and Sele, Lord, 98 Sayre, Robert F., 71, 402 Scarlet Letter, The (Hawthorne), 38 "Scene in Jerusalem, A" (Stowe), 587 Schelling, Friedrich, 422 Schilder, Paul, 622 Schlamm, William S., 627 Schneider, Louis, 650 1 'Scholastic and Bedside Teaching" (Holmes), 305 School, Peter A., 627 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 320, 457 Schorer, Mark, 68, 199 Schreiber, Georges, 478 Schubert, Franz Peter, 363

Schuyler, William, 211,226 Schwartz, Lloyd, 81, 97 Science of English Verse, The (Lanier), 368, 369 Scott, Anne Firor, 19, 27 Scott, George Lewis, 503, 504 Scott, Howard, 645 Scott, Nathan A., Jr., 71 Scott, Sir Walter, 579, 580, 685, 692 Scott, Winfield Townley, 199, 705, 706 Scott's Monthly Magazine, 350 Scottsboro boys, 330 Scottsboro Limited (Hughes), 328,330-331,332 Scoundrel Time (Hellman), 294-297 Scribner's Monthly (publication), 353, 361, 370, 408 Scudder, Horace Elisha, 220, 410, 414, 426 Scully, James, 199 "Sculptor" (Plath), 538 "Sea Dream, A" (Whitter), 699 Sea Garden (Doolittle), 257, 259, 266, 269, 272 "Sea Lily" (Doolittle), 266 Seabury, David, 608 Searching Wind, The, 277,278, 281-282, 283, 292, 297 Searle, Ronald, 604, 605 Seasons, The (Thomson), 151 Seattle Times (newspaper), 652, 653, 669 Seckler, David, 650 "Second Tree From the Corner" (White), 651 Second Tree From the Corner (White), 654 Second Twenty Years at HullHouse, The: September 1909 to September 1929, with a Record of a Growing World Consciousness (Addams), 24-25 Second Voyage of Columbus, The (Morison), 488 Secret Garden, The (Burnett), 44 "Secret Life of Walter Mitty, The" Cnmrber), 623 "Secret Lives of James Thurber, The" (Schlamm), 627 Sedgwick, Catharine, 155, 157 Sedgwick, Henry, 156 Sedgwick, Robert, 156 Sedgwick family, 153 Segal, David, 199 Seize the Day (Bellow), 428 Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology (Mackail), 461 "Selected Classified Bibliography, A" (O'Daniel), 348 Selected Poems (Hughes), 341, 345, 346

SELE—SPEN / 753 Selected Poems of Gabriela Mistral (trans. Hughes), 345 Selections from the American Poets, 158 "Self-portrait'* (Wylie), 129 Selincourt, Ernest de, 676 Semmelweiss, Ignaz, 304 Sentimental Journey, A (Sterne), 714 Sentimental Novel in America, The (Brown), 601 Sergeant, Elizabeth S., 730 "Serpent in the Wilderness, The" (Masters), 458 "Sestina" (Bishop), 73, 88 Settlement Horizon, The: A National Estimate (Woods and Kennedy), 19, 27 Seventeen (magazine), 530 4 Seventh of March" (Webster), 687 Sewall, Samuel, 100, 110 Sexton, Anne, 538, 543, 546 Seyersted, Per E., 201, 204, 211,216,225,226 Shakespeare, Dorothy, see Pound, Mrs. Ezra (Dorothy Shakespeare) Shakespeare, Mrs. Olivia, 257 Shakespeare, William, 79,150, 262, 310, 356, 363, 365, 368, 369, 370, 397, 421, 422,470,494,622,716,720 Shakespeare and His Forerunners (Lanier), 369 Shakespeare in Harlem (Hughes), 333, 334, 345 "Shampoo, The" (Bishop), 92 Shapers of American Fiction The (Snell), 148 Shapiro, Charles, 199 Shatayev, Elvira, 570 Shaw, Robert, 578 Shaw, Sarah Bryant, 169 "She Came and Went" (Lowell), 409 Sheed, Wilfrid, 199 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 79,311, 349, 709, 718, 719, 720, 721,722,724,728 Shallow, Sadie Myers, 608 Shenandoah (magazine), 79 Shenker, Israel, 453 Shepard, Odell, 46, 418 Sherman, Stuart Pratt, 423 "Ship of Death" (Lawrence), 728 "Shooting Script" (Rich), 558 Shores of Light, The (Wilson), 730 Short History of American Poetry, A (Stauffer), 478 "Shrike and the Chipmunks, The" Cnmrber), 617 Shuffle Along (musical), 322 Sibley, Mulford Q., 524 "Sibling Mysteries" (Rich), 574

Sidney, Mary, 98 Sidney, Sir Philip, 98, 111, 117-118, 122,658 Sidney, Sylvia, 67 ' 4Sidney Lanier'' (Fletcher), 373 Sidney Lanier (De Bellis), 373 Sidney Lanier (Mims), 373 Sidney Lanier: A Biographical and Critical Study (Starke), 371, 373 Sigourney, Lydia, 684 "Silver Crown, The" (Malamud), 434-435, 437 "Silver Filigree" (Wylie), 707 Silverman, Kenneth, 149 Simmel, Georg, 644 Simmons, Harvey G., 71 "Simon Gerry" (Wylie), 713 Simone, Salvatore, 478 Simple Speaks His Mind (Hughes), 337 Simple Stakes a Claim (Hughes), 337 Simple Takes a Wife (Hughes), 337 Simple's Uncle Sam (Hughes), 337 Simply Heavenly (Hughes), 338, 339 Simpson, Lewis P., 149 Since Yesterday (Allen), 681 "Sir Galahad" (Tennyson), 410 "Sisters, The" (Whittier), 6% "Sitalkas" (Doolittle), 266 Sitwell, Edith, 271 Skaggs, Merrill Maguire, 226 Skeeters Kirby (Masters), 459, 470, 471 ' 'Skeleton's Cave, The'' (Bryant), 157 Sketch Book, The (Irving), 155 Sketches of Eighteenth Century America (Crevecoeur), 233, 240-241, 250, 251 * 'Skipper Ireson 's Ride'' (Whittier), 691, 693-694 Sklar, Kathryn Kish, 601 Sky-Walk; or the Man Unknown to Himself (Brown), 127-128 "Slave on the Block" (Hughes), 329 "Slave's Dream, The" (Longfellow), 409 "Slave-Ships, The" (Whittier), 687-^88 * 'Sleeping Standing Up *' (Bishop), 85, 89, 93 Slick, Sam (pseudonym), see Haliburton, Thomas Chandler "Slight Sound at Evening, A" (White), 672 Slocum, Joshua, 497 Small, Albion, 5 Small, Miriam Rossiter, 319

Small Town in American Drama, The (Herron), 478 Small Town in American Literature, The (Herron), 478 Smart, Christopher, 539 "Smashup" (Thurber), 616 Smith, Adam, 633, 634, 639 Smith, Elihu Hubbard, 126, 127, 130 Smith, Henry Nash, 233 Smith, Herbert F., 423, 426 Smith, Kellogg, 660 Smith, Mary Rozet, 5, 22 Smith, Seba, 411 Smith, Stewart, 226 Smoiler, Stanford, 275 "Snakecharmer" (Plath), 538 ' 'Snapshots of a Daughter-inLaw" (Rich), 553-554 Snapshots of a Daughter-inLaw (Rich), 550-551, 553554 Snell, Ebenezer, 151 Snell, George, 148 Snell, Thomas, 153 Snow, C. P., 536 ' 'Snow-Bound'' (Whittier), 700-703 "Snowstorm as It Affects the American Farmer, A" (Crevecoeur), 251 "So Much the Worse for Boston" (Lindsay), 398 "Soapland" (Thurber), 619 Scares, Lota Costellat de Macedo, 89, 94 Social Thought in America: The Revolt Against Formalism (White), 648, 650 Socialist Call (publication), 321 Socrates, 458 Soellner, Rolf, 627 "Solitude" (Maupassant), 223 Solomon (biblical person), 516 Solomon, Henry, Jr., 490 Solotaroff, Theodore, 440,445, 453. Some Imagist Poets (Lowell), 257, 261 "Some Neglected Points in the Theory of Socialism" (Veblen), 635 Some People, Places, & Things That Will Not Appear in My Next Novel (Cheever), 184-185 "Some Remarks on Humor" (White), 672 S0mtqfto(Cdbdl), 730 Something in Common (Hughes), 329-330 ' 'Sometimes I Wonder'' (Hughes), 337 "Song" (Bryant), see "Hunter of the Woods, The" "Song" (Rich), 560 "Song" (Wylie), 729

"Song of the Chattahoochee, The" (Lanier), 365, 368 "Song of Courage, A" (Masters), 458 "Song of the Greek Amazon" (Bryant), 168 "Song of My Fiftieth Birthday, The" (Lindsay), 399 "Song for the Rainy Season" (Bishop), 93-94, 96 Song of Russia (film), 281, 294 "Song of the Sower, The" (Bryant), 169 "Song of the Stars" (Bryant), 163 "Song of the Vermonters, The" (Whittier), 692 "Songs for a Colored Singer" (Bishop), 80, 85 Songs of Innocence (Blake), 708 Songs and Satires (Masters), 465-466 Songs and Sonnets (Masters), 455,459,461,466 "Sonny's Blues" (Baldwin), 58-59, 63, 67 Sontag, Susan, 423 "Sootfall andFallout"(White), 671 Sophocles, 153, 284, 491 Sorokin, Pitirim, 679 SoulGoneHome (Hughes), 328 "South, The" (Hughes), 321 Southern Excursions: Essay on Mark Twain and Others (Leary), 226 Southern Magazine, 352 * 'Southern Romantic, A " (Tate), 373 "Southern Woman in the Fiction of Kate Chopin, The" (Fletcher), 226 Southey, Robert, 154 "Sow" (Plath), 537 Spacks, Patricia Meyer, 46 "Spain in Fifty-Ninth Street" (White), 677 Spangler, George, 226 Spanish Background of American Literature, The (Williams), 173 "Spanish Revolution, The" (Bryant), 153, 168 Spargo, John, 13 Sparks, Jared, 156 ' 'Speaking of Counterweights'' (White), 669 "Special Pleading" (Lanier), 364 Specimens of the American Poets, 155 "Spectre Pig, The" (Holmes), 302 Spence, Thomas, 518 Spencer, Edward, 357, 360, 373

754 I SPEN—TECH Spencer, Herbert, 368, 635' Spencer, T. J., 348 Spender, Stephen, 71, 536 Spengler, Oswald, 647 Spens, Sir Patrick, 404 Spenser, Sir Edmund, 98, 152, 369, 422, 719 "Spider and the Ghost of the Fly, The" (Lindsay), 375 Spiegelman, Willard, 97 Spiller, Robert E., 104, 148, 601 Spingarn, Amy, 325, 326 Spingarn, Joel, 325 Spinoza, Banich, 274, 643 "Spinster" (Plath), 536 Spirit of Youth and the City Streets, The (Addams), 67, 12-13, 16, 17, 19 "Spiritual Manifestation, A*' (Whittier), 699 "Splittings" (Rich), 57O-571 Spokesmen (Whipple), 402 Spoon River Anthology (Masters), 454, 455, 456, 460-465, 466, 467, 471, 472, 473, 476 Spoon River Revisited (Hartley), 478 ' 'Spring Pastoral' ' (Wylie), 707 Spring Tides (Morison), 494 Springer, Marlene, 225 "Springfield Magical" (Lindsay), 379 Spruance, Raymond, 479, 491 Spy, The (Cooper), 155 Squanto, 486 Squaring Off: Mailer vs. Baldwin (Weatherby), 69 Slander, Lionel, 289 Stanford, Ann, 99, 100, 102, 103, 106, 108, 109, 113, 117, 123 ' 'Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse" (Arnold), 417 Starbuck, George, 538 Starke, Aubrey Harrison, 350, 352, 356, 360, 362, 365, 370,371,373 Starr, Ellen Gates, 4, 5, 11 Starved Rock (Masters), 465 "Status Rerum" (Pound), 257 Stauffer, Donald Barlow, 478 ' 'Steam Shovel Cut*' (Masters), 468 Stedman, Edmund Clarence, 372, 373 Steffens, Lincoln, 7 Stein, Gertrude, 292 Steiner, Nancy, 529, 549 Steinhoff, William R., 681 Stelligery and Other Essays (Wendell), 414 Stendhal, 293, 445 Stephen, Sir Leslie, 306 Stern, Madeleine B., 35, 46 Stern, Richard G., 298

Sterne, Laurence, 714 Stevens, Wallace, 80, 82, 257 Stevenson, Anne, 97 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 49 Stewart, Charles Oran, 426 Stewart, Dugald, 151,159,422 "Still Life" (Malamud), 450 "Stillborn" (Plath), 544 "Stings" (Plath), 541 "Stirrup-Cup, The" (Lanier), 364 Stoddard, Richard, 372 Stone, Albert E., Jr., 252 Stone, Edward, 626 Stone, Wilmer, 49 "Stones, The" (Plath), 535, 539 Storer, Edward, 261,262 "Storm, The" (Chopin), 218, 224 Story (magazine), 174 4 *Story of an Hour, The'' (Chopin), 212-213, 216 Story of Mount Desert Island, Maine, The (Morison), 494 "Story of a Proverb, The" (Lanier), 365 "Story of a Proverb, The: A Fairy Tale for Grown People" (Lanier), 365 Stowe, Calvin, 587, 588, 590, 596, 597 Stowe, Charles, 581, 582 Stowe, Eliza, 587 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 30, 206,301,579-601 Stowe, Lyman Beecher, 601 Stowe, Samuel Charles, 587 Strachey, Lytton, 485, 494 Strandley, FredL.,71 4 'Strange Fruit" (song), 80 "Strange Story, A" (Wylie), 723 "Stranger, The" (Rich), 555, 560 "Stranger in Town" (Hughes), 334 4 'Stranger in the Village" (Baldwin), 54 Streamline Your Mind (Mursell), 608 Strickland, Joe (pseudonym), see Arnold, George W. "Strumpet Song" (Plath), 536 Strunk, William, 652, 662, 670,671,672 Stuart Little (White), 655658 "Studied Ambiguities: Arthur Mervyn and the Problem of the Unreliable Narrator" (Brancaccio), 148 Studies in Classic American Literature (Lawrence), 252 "Study of Lanier's Poems, A" (Kent), 373 Sturges, Henry C, 173

"Style of the 70's, The: The Novel" (Gates), 199 'Subjective Necessity for Social Settlements" (Addams), 4 Subtreasury of American Humor, A (White and White), 668 * 4Sugary Days in St. Botolphs'' (Corke), 198 4 'Suicide off Egg Rock" (Plath), 529, 538 Sullivan, Noel, 329, 333 Sullivan, Ruth, 226 "Summer Night" (Hughes), 325 "Summer Ramble, A" (Bryant), 162, 164 ' 'Summer's Reading, A " (Malamud), 430-431,442 Sumner, Charles, 685, 687 Sumner, William Graham, 640 Sun Also Rises, The (Hemingway), 614 Sun Do Move, The (Hughes), 339 "Sunday Morning Prophecy" (Hughes), 334 Sundell, Carl, 627 Sundial (magazine), 606 "Sunrise" (Lanier), 370 ' 'Sunthin' in the Pastoral Line *' (Lowell), 415-416 "Surgeon at 2 A.M." (Plath), 545 Surrealism, 440, 443, 527 Survey Graphic (publication), 323 Swann, Thomas B., 275 Swedenborgianism, 588 Sweet, Blanche, 391 Sweet Flypaper of Life, The (Hughes), 335-336 Sweezy, Paul, 645 Swift, Jonathan, 406,523,603, 656, 665, 708, 714 "Swimmer, The" (Cheever), 185, 187 Swinburne, Algernon C., 79, 422, 552 "Sycamores, The" (Whittier), 699 Sylvester, Johnny, 438 Sylvester, Joshua, 98, 104, 114, 116 Sylvia Plath: Her Life and Work (Aird), 548 Sylvia Plath: Method and Madness (Butscher), 526, 548 Sylvia Plath: Poetry and Existence (Holbrook), 526-527, 548 "Sylvia Plath: A Poetry of Suicidal Mania" (Hoyle), 548 "Sylvia Plath on Motherhood" (Uroff), 549 4

"Sylvia Plath's Crossing the Water Some Reflections" (Hughes), 548 "Sylvia Plath's Poetry: A Complex of Irreconcilable Antagonisms" (Ashford), 548 "Sylvia Plath's Tulips': A Festival", 549 "Sylvia Plath's Women" (Uroff), 549 Symbolism, 171, 261, 273, 274, 669, 670 ''Symphony, The" (Lanier), 352,360-361,364,416 System of General Geography, A (Brown), 146 'Tag" (Hughes), 341 'Tain't So" (Hughes), 330 'Take Pity" (Malamud), 427, 428, 435, 436, 437 Tale of Two Cities, A (film), 67 Tales of Glauber-Spa (ed. Bryant), 157 Talisman, The (publication), 157 "Talk of the Town and the Country, The: E. B. White" (Hasley), 681 'Talk with John Cheever" (Hersey), 198 "Talking Horse" (Malamud), 435 'Talking with Adrienne Rich" (Kalstone), 578 'Talking with Adrienne Rich" (Plumly, Dodd and Tevis), 578 'Talking with John Cheever" (Firth), 198 Tambourines to Glory (Hughes), 33&-339 Tanner, Tony, 453 Tanselle, G. Thomas, 402,426 Tappan, Arthur, 588 Tate, Allen, 364, 371, 373, 423, 730 Taupin, Rene, 275 Tawney, Richard Henry, 481 Taylor, Bayard, 350, 361,362, 365, 366, 372 Taylor, Edward, 98, 123, 375, 386,546 Taylor, Frederick Winslow, 644 Taylor, Graham, 5 Taylor, Jeremy, 349 Taylor, Nathaniel W., 580 Taylor, Robert, 294 Taylor, William Robert, 601 Tea and Sympathy (Anderson), 277 'Teacher's Pet" (Thurber), 605-606 Teasdale, Sara, 393, 707 Technics and Civilization (Mumford), 638

TECH—TRAN / 755 Technics and Human Development (Mumford), 638 Teggart, Richard, 650 Teilhaid de Chardin, Pierre, 314 Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone (Baldwin), 48, 52, 63-65, 67 "Telling the Bees" (Whittier), 694-^95 " Temple of the Fire Baptized* " (Baiksdale), 69 Ten Harmsel, Henrietta, 199 Tenants, The (Malamud), 448-450 Tendencies in Modern American Poetry (Lowell), 275, 478 Tennyson, Alfred, Lord, 349, 356, 410, 416, 552 'Tent on the Beach, The" (Whittier), 703 Tenth Muse, The (Bradstreet), 102, 103, 114 Terence, 405 Terry, Rose, 420 Tevis, Walter, 578 Thackeray, William Makepeace, 307, 421, 495, 579 "Thanatopsis" (Bryant), 150, 154, 155, 170 "Thanatos and Eros: Kate Chopin's The Awakening" (Wolff), 226 "Thar's More in the Man Than Thar Is in the Land" (Lanier), 352-353, 359^360 ' That Thurber Woman, *' 627 Thelwell, Mike, 71 Theme of Identity in the Essays of James Baldwin, The: an Interpretation (Moller), 69 'Theodore the Poet" (Masters), 461 Theory of Business Enterprise, Tfo (Veblen), 638,641, 644 'Theory and Experience in Crevecoeur's America' * (Rapping), 252 Theory of the Leisure Class, The (Veblen), 629, 633, 641, 645 Theory of Moral Sentiments, The (Smith), 634 These Three (film), 281 "Thessalonica: A Roman Story" (Brown), 133 'They Can't Turn Back" (Baldwin), 52 "TOn People, TTie" (Plath), 538, 547 'Things Aren't What They Seem" (Janeway), 198 Thirty Poems (Bryant), 157, 158 Thirty Years of Treason (Bentley), 297

"This Corruptible" (Wylie), 727, 729 "This Familiar and Lifeless Scene" (Shapiro), 199 "This Hand" (Wylie), 713 "This Morning, This Evening, So Soon" (Baldwin), 63 Thomas, Dylan, 263, 478 Thomas, Edward, 263 Thomas, J. Parnell, 286 Thomas, William I., 641 "Thomas, Bishop, and Williams" (Lowell), 97 Thomas Paine: A Bibliographical Check List of Common Sense, with an Account of Its Publication (Gimbel), 525 "Thomas Paine—Introduction" (Clark), 525 ' Thomas Paine Fights for Freedom in Three Worlds" (Gimbel), 525 Thompson, E. P., 525 Thompson, George, 686 Thompson, William T., 411 Thomson, James, 150, 151 "Thoreau" (Lowell), 420, 422 Thoreau, Henry David, 29, 34, 116, 188, 299, 358, 383, 400, 420, 421, 507, 540, 579, 580, 655, 659, 660, 664,678 Thorstein Veblen (Dowd), 650 Thorstein Veblen (ed. Qualey), 650 Thorstein Veblen: A Chapter in American Economic Thought (Teggart), 650 Thorstein Veblen: A Critical Interpretation (Riesman), 649, 650 Thorstein Veblen: A Critical Reappraisal (ed. Dowd), 650 Thorstein Veblen and His America (Dorfman), 631, 650 Thorstein Veblen and the Institutionalists: A Study in the Social Philosophy of Economics (Seckler), 650 "Those People of Spoon River" (Masters), 478 "Thoughts on the Establishment of a Mint in the United States" (Paine), 512 "Three Bushes" (Yeats), 80 Three Centuries of Harvard (Morison), 485 Three Literary Men: A Memoir of Sinclair Lewis, Sherwood Anderson, and Edgar Lee Masters (Derleth), 477 "Three Waterfalls, The" (Lanier), 350 "Three Women" (Plath), 539, 541, 544, 545, 546 Three Worlds (Van Doren), 730

Threnody (Emerson), 416 ' 'Threshing-Floor, The'' (Baldwin), 50 Thucydides, 488, 489, 492 Thurber, James, 602-627,653, 654,668,672,673,679,681 Thurber, Mrs. James (Althea Adams), 613,615, 617 Thurber, Mrs. James (Helen Muriel Wismer), 613, 617, 618 Thurber, Robert, 613, 617 Thurber, Rosemary, 616 Thurber, William, 602 Thurber: A Biography (Bernstein), 626 "Thurber: As Unmistakable as a Kangaroo" (Benet and Benet), 626 Thurber Album, The (Thurber), 611,619 "Thurber Amuses People by Making Them Squirm,'' 627 Thurber, a Collection of Critical Essays (ed. Holmes), 626 Thurber Carnival, A (Thurber), 620 ' Thurber and His Humor.. . . Up with the Chuckle, Down with the Yuk," 627 "Thurber, Inc." (Coates), 626 ' Thurber Letter, A " (Bernard), 626 "Thurber—an Old Hand at Humor with Two Hits on Hand, "627 'Thurber Used Humor to Camouflage His Exasperations with the Human Race" (Brandon), 626 "Thurber's Walter Ego: The Little Man Hero" (School), 627 "Thurber's Walter Mitty—the Underground American Hero" (Lindner), 627 Thurman, Wallace, 325, 326, 328, 332 'Ti Demon" (Chopin), 225 Ticknor, Caroline, 46 Ticknor, George, 313 Tide of Time, The (Masters), 471 'Tiger" (Blake), 80 Tiger-Lilies (Lanier), 350-351, 357, 360, 371 Till, Einmett, 61 'Tilley the Toiler" (Maloney), 681 Tilton, Heanor, 317, 319 Time (magazine), 52, 1% Tintern Abbey (Wordsworth), 673, 675 "Tired" (Hughes), 331 Titian, 397, 714 'To , with a Rose" (Lanier), 364

"To the Apennines" (Bryant), 157, 164 "To the Citizens of the United States "(Paine), 51^-520 "To a Cough in the Street at Midnight" (Wylie), 727, 729-730 "To the Dandelion" (Lowell), 424 "To a Greek Marble" (Aldington), 257 "To a Negro Jazz Band in a Parisian Cabaret" (Hughes), 325 'To a Poet" (Rich), 571 'To the River Arve" (Bryant), 163 'To a Skylark" (Shelley), 720 'To a Waterfowl" (Bryant), 154, 155, 162, 171 'To Beethoven" (Lanier), 364 'To Charlotte Cushman" (Lanier), 364 'To Cole, the Painter, Departing for Europe" (Bryant), 157, 161 "To Dr. Thomas Shearer" (Lanier), 370 'To James Russell Lowell" (Holmes), 311 "To My Class, on Certain Fruits and Flowers Sent Me in Sickness" (Lanier), 370 'Toast to Harlem, A" (Hughes), 338 Tobias, Richard C, 626 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 137, 659,660 Tolstoy, Leo, 2, 3, 6, 20 Tom Brown's School Days (Hughes), 406 Tom Sawyer (Twain), 456,470 Tompson, Benjamin, 110, 111 Toomer, Jean, 325, 332 Toward the Gulf (Masters), 465-466 "Toward the Solstice" (Rich), 57S-576 Toys in the Attic (Hellman), 289-290 Tragedies, Life and Letters of James Gates Percival (Swinburne), 422 'Tragic Dialogue" (Wylie), 724 "Tragic Mulatto Theme in Six Works of Langston Hughes, The" (Davis), 348 ' Trailing Arbutus, The'' (Whittier), 691 Tramping With a Poet in the Rockies (Graham), 397, 402 Tramp's Excuse, The (Lindsay), 379, 380, 382 ' Transcendental Etude'' (Rich), 576

756 / IRAN—VISI Transcendentalism, 6, 28, 29, 38,171, 186,312,366,420, 482, 580, 582, 664 Transcendentalists, The: An Anthology (ed. Miller), 46 ' Translation and Transposition '' (Carne-Ross), 268269, 275 "Translation of a Fragment of Simonides" (Bryant), 153, 155 'Translations" (Rich), 563 Trawick, Leonard M., 706 Treasury of the Theatre, A (Gassner), 292 Treasury of Yiddish Stories, A (eds. Howe and Greenberg), 432 "Tree, The" (Pound), 255 "Tree of Laughing Bells, The' * (Lindsay), 376 "Trees, The" (Rich), 555 Trelawny, Edward John, 721 "Tribute, The" (Doolittle), 267 Tribute to the Angels (Doolittle), 272 Tribute to Freud (Doolittle), 253,254,258,259,260,268 Trifler, The (Masters), 459-460 Trilling, Diana, 297 Trilogy (Doolittle), 271, 272 Trio (Baker), 277 "Triplex" (Doolittle), 271 Trivial Breath (Wylie), 709, 722-724 Trombly, Albert Edmund, 402, 403 Trouble Island (Hughes), 328 "Trouble of Marcie Flint, The" (Cheever), 186 "True Vine" (Wylie), 723 Trueman, Matthew (pseudonym), see Lowell, James Russell Trumbo, Dal ton, 295 "Trumpet Player" (Hughes), 333 "Trying to Talk with a Man" (Rich), 559 Tufts, James Hayden, 632 Tug well, Rexford Guy, 645 "Tulips" (Plath), 540, 542, 544 Turgot, Anne Robert Jacques, 250 Turnbull, Lawrence, 352 Turner, Darwin, 339, 348 Turner, Frederick Jackson, 480, 481,632,640 Tuthill, Louisa Cavolne, 684 "Twa Sisters, The" (ballad), 696 Twain, Mark, 37, 39, 44, 247, 251, 313, 317, 377, 385, 393, 410, 455, 456, 457, 473, 475, 579, 602, 604, 618,629,651,660

"Twenty Years Ago" (Lindsay), 384, 399 Twenty Years at Hull-House (Addams), 3, 4, 11, 16 'Twenty-one Love Poems" (Rich), 572-573 "Two Lovers and a Beachcomber by the Real Sea" (Plath), 536 Two-Ocean War, The (Morison), 491 ' Two Portraits'' (Chopin), 218 'Two Views of a Cadaver Room" (Plath), 538 "Typewriter Man," 681 Ulysses (Joyce), 57 "Un-Angry Langston Hughes, The" (Keams), 348 "Uncle Jim's Baptist Revival Hymn" (Lanier and Lanier), 353 ' 'Uncle Lot'' (Stowe), 585-586 Uncle Tom's Cabin (Stowe), 49, 410, 579, 582, 589-592 "Under the Cedarcroft Chestnut" (Lanier), 364 Under the Lilacs (Alcott), 42-43, 44 "Under the Willows" (Lowell), 416 Under the Willows and Other Poems (Lowell), 424 Unembarrassed Muse, The (Nye), 478 Unfinished Woman, An (Hellman), 292, 293, 294 " 'Uninhabitable Darkness* of Baldwin's Another Country: Image and Theme, The" (Gross), 70 "Union" (Hughes), 331 United States Army in World War 11, 490 United States Literary Gazette (magazine), 155, 156 United States Review and Literary Gazette (magazine), 156 "University Days" (Thurber), 605 Unloved Wife, The (Alcott), 33 Untermeyer, Louis, 402, 730 Unvanquished, The (Faulkner), 450 Updike, John, 186, 1%, 626, 627 "Updike Lauds National Medalist E. B. White," 681 "Upon the Burning of Our House, July 10th, 1666" (Bradstreet), 107-108, 122 "Upon My Dear and Loving Husband His Going into England, Jan. 16,1661" (Bradstreet), 110 4 'Upon Returning to the Country Road" (Lindsay), 382

Upward, Allen, 262 Urania: A Rhymed Lesson (Holmes), 300 ' 'Urbanization of Humor, The'' (Blair), 626 Uroff, Margaret D., 542, 549 USA (Dos Passos), 646 "Usher II" (Bradbury), 622 Usual Star, The (Doolittle), 270 "V. V." (Alcott), 37 "Vachel Lindsay" (Masters), 402 "Vachei Lindsay" (Rittenhouse), 402 ' 'Vachel Lindsay' * (Sayre), 402 Vachel Lindsay, Adventurer (Trombly), 402 Vachel Lindsay: Fieldworker for the American Dream (Massa), 402 ' 'Vachel Lindsay: The Midwest as Utopia" (Whitney), 403 Vachel Lindsay: A Poet in America (Masters),402,473, 474 Vachel Lindsay: The Poet as Film Theorist (Wolfe), 402 "Vachel Lindsay—or, My Heart Is a Kicking Horse" (Ames), 402 "Vachel Lindsay and America" (Masters), 402 "Vachel Lindsay and His Heroes" (Bradbury), 402 "Vachel Lindsay as I Knew Him" (Armstrong), 402 "Vachel Lindsay Writes to Floyd Dell" (Tanselle), 403 "Vachel Lindsay-iana: A Bibliographical Note" (White), 401 Valhouli, James N., 199 Values of Veblen, The: A Critical Appraisal (Rosenberg), 650 Van Doren, Carl, 474, 478, 486, 707, 709, 717, 718, 727, 730 Van Doren, Mark, 604, 626 Van Gogh, Vincent, 451 Van Vechten, Carl, 324, 327, 332, 715 "Vanisher, The" (Whittier), 691 "Vanity of All Wordly Things, The" (Bradstreet), 102, 119 Vanity Fair (magazine), 709 Vanzetti, Bartolomeo, 446, 610,611 "Varick Street" (Bishop), 90, 92 Vasari, Giorgio, 450 Veblen (Hobson), 650 Veblen, Andrew, 640 Veblen, Oswald, 640 Veblen, Thorstein, 628-650

Veblen, Mrs. Thorstein (Ellen Rolfe), 641 Veblenism: A New Critique (Dobriansky), 648, 650 "Veblen's Attack on Culture" (Adorno), 650 "Velvet Shoes" (Wylie), 711, 714 Vendler, Helen, 77,78,92,95, 97, 565 Venetian Glass Nephew, The (Wylie), 707, 709, 714, 717-719,721,724 Virgil, 153, 494 Verplanck, Gulian C, 155, 156, 157, 158 Verrazano, Giovanni da, 4%, 497 "Version of a Fragment of Simonides" (Bryant), 153, 155 "Very Proper Gander, The" (Thurber), 610 Vesey, Denmark, 592 Vested Interests and the Common Man, The (Veblen), 642 Victorian Knight-Errant: A Study of the Early Literary Career of James Russell Lowell (Howard), 426 Victorian literature, 29, 35-37, 552, 656 Victory in Umbo: Imagism 1908-1917 (Harmer), 275 "Victory at Sea" (television series), 490 Viereck, Peter, 403 View of the Soil and Climate of the United Stales, A (trans. Brown), 146 Vilas, MartinS., 148 Vile Bodies (Waugh), 607 "Village Blacksmith, The" (Longfellow), 409 "Village Improvement Parade, The" (Lindsay), 388, 389 Village Magazine, The (Lindsay), 37^-380, 382 Villard, Oswald, 332 Villon, Francois, 261 Vindication of the Rights of Women (Wollstonecraft), 126 "Virginia" (Lindsay), 398 ' 'Virginians Are Coming Again, The" (Lindsay), 399 Vision of Columbus (Barlow), 124 Vision of Sir Launfal, The (Lowell), 311,406,409,410 Vision of This Land, The (eds. Hallwas and Reader), 402, 478 "Vision of the World, A" (Cheever), 182, 192 "Visit to Avoyelles, A" (Chopin), 213

VISI—WILL / 757 "Visit with John Cheever, A" (Nichols), 199 Vistas of History (Morison), 492 "Vocation and a Voice, A" (Chopin), 200,220,224,225 Vogue (magazine), 211 Volney, Constantin Francois de Chasseboeuf, 146 Voltaire, 28&-2S9, 669, 717 Von Frank, Albert!., 705 Vorticism, 257 Voss, Arthur, 426 Voyage dans la Haute Pensylvanie et dans I'etat de New-York (Crevecoeur), 250-251 "Wading at Wellfleet" (Bishop), 80, 85, 86 Wagenknecht, Edward, 408, 426, 584, 706 Waggoner, Hyatt H., 173,478, 706

Wagner, Jean, 341, 346, 348 "Waiting by the Gate" (Bryant), 171 Waiting for Lefty (Odets), 277 Wake Up and Live! (Brande), 608 "Waking in the Dark" (Rich), 559 Wald, Lillian, 12 Walden (Thoreau), 579, 655, 664,672 Waldmeir, Joseph J., 476, 478 Waldron, Edward, 348 "Walk at Sunset, A" (Bryant), 155 Walker, Alice, 550 Walker, C. L., 627 Wallace, Henry, 286, 645 Wallas, Graham, 643 Walling, William English, 645 Walls Do Not Fall, The (Doolitde), 271,272 Walpole, Horace, 410, 714 "Walt Whitman" (Masters), 458 "Walt Whitman and the 'New Poetry' " (Brown), 477 Walton, Izaak, 422 Wanderings ofOisin (Yeats), 79 Wapshot Chronicle, The (Cheever), 174, 177-180, 181, 196 Wapshot Scandal, The (Cheever), 180-184, 187, 191, 196 "War Between Men and Women, The" (Thurber), 615 War Bulletins (Lindsay), 378-379 Ward, Henry, 588 Ward, Lester, 640

Ward, Nathaniel, 99, 102, 111,

116

Ward, William Hayes, 371 Warfel, Harry R., 148, 366, 373 "Warning" (Hughes), 343 Warnke, Frank J., 199 Warren, Austin, 123, 423, 426 Warren, Robert Penn, 359,371, 373, 386, 423, 706 Warshow, Robert, 51 ' 'Was Lowell an Historical Critic?" (Altick), 423 Washington, Booker T., 393 Washington, George, 399,485, 508, 509, 511, 513, 517, 518, 520, 599 Wasserman, Earl R., 439,440, 453 Wasserman, Jakob, 669 Waste Land, The (Eliot), 272, 439, 455, 614 Watch on the Rhine (Hellman), 276,278,279-281,283-284 "Watercolor of Grantchester Meadows" (Plath), 537 Watson, Richard, 516, 517 Watts, Emily Stipes, 115, 123 Waugh, Evelyn, 607 Way Some People Live, The (Cheever), 175 "Way We Feel Now, The" (DeMott), 198 "Way We Live Now, The" (Didion), 198 Ways of White Folks, The (Hughes), 329, 330, 332 We Must Dance My Darlings (Trilling), 297 Weales, Gerald, 627 "Weary Blues, The" (Hughes), 324, 325 Weary Blues, The (Hughes), 325 Weatherby, W. J.,69 Webb, Beatrice, 5 Webb, Sidney, 5 Weber, Max, 637, 648 Weber, Sarah, 2 Webster, Daniel, 659, 687, 689,690 Webster, John, 422 Webster, Noah, 660 "Wedding of the Rose and Lotus, The" (Lindsay), 387 "Weed, The" (Bishop), 80, 88-89 "Weeding Out Process, The" (Ray), 199 Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, A (Thoreau), 420 Weekly Magazine, 126 Weld, Theodore, 587, 588 Welles, Gideon, 484 Welles, Orson, 67 Wendell, Barrett, 414

Wendell, Sarah, see Holmes, Mrs. Abiel (Sarah Wendell) Wershba, Joseph, 453 West, Benjamin, 511 "West Wind, The" (Bryant), 155 ' 'Western Association of Writers" (Chopin), 217 Western Humanities Review (publication), 201 Western Monthly Magazine, The, 584 West-Going Heart, The: A Life of Vachel Lindsay (Ruggles), 402 Westhoff, Clara, see Rilke, Mrs. Rainer Maria (Clara Westhoff) Weston, Jessie, 438 Whalen, Marcella, 49 "What Color Is God?" (Wills), 71

"What God Is Like to Him I Serve" (Bradstreet), 106107 "What Thurber Saw" (Brady), 626 Wheeler, Otis B., 226 When the Jack Hollers (Hughes), 328 "When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision" (Rich), 552-553, 560 Whipple, Thomas K., 402 "Whip-poor-will, The" (Thurber), 616 White, E. B., 602, 607, 608, 612,619,620,627,651-681 White, Mrs. E. B. (Katharine Sergeant Angell), 610, 653, 655, 656, 669 White, Elizabeth Wade, 100, 103, 111, 123 White, Henry Kirke, 150 White, Joel, 654, 678 White, Lillian, 651 White, Maria,see Lowell, Mrs. James Russell (Maria White) White, Morton, 647, 648, 650 White, Ruth, Y., 627 White, Stanley, 651,655 White, Walter, 345 White, William, 401 White Deer, The (Thurber), 606 White-Footed Deer and Other Poems (Bryant), 157 ' 'White Gods and Black Americans" (O'Brien), 70 Whitehead, Alfred North, 554, 647 Whitman (Masters), 473, 475, 476

Whitman, Walt, 6, 79, 311, 314, 325, 365, 372, 374, 384, 385, 389, 391, 393, 399, 436, 455, 456, 458,

167, 368, 387, 416, 473,

474, 475, 525, 540, 579, 580,582,682,691,705 Whitney, Blair, 403 "Whittier" (Hall), 706 "Whittier" (Powell), 706 Whittier: Bard of Freedom (Bennett), 705 Whittier: A Comprehensive Annotated Bibliography (von Frank), 705 Whittier, Elizabeth, 700, 701, 703 Whittier, John Greenleaf, 168, 299, 313, 317, 372, 420, 602, 682-707 Whittier, Mary, 683 "Whittier Birthday Speech" (Twain), 313 Whittier and Whittierland: Portrait of a Poet and His World (ed. Pickard et al.), 706 Whittier Newsletter, 706 ' 'Whittier Reconsidered'' (Jones), 706 Whittier-Land: A Handbook of North Essex (Pickard), 706 "Whittier's Fundamental Religious Faith" (Jones), 706 " Whittier's Snow-Bound: A Poem About the Imagination" (Trawick), 706 "Who's Passing for Who?" (Hughes), 330 Why I Am Not a Christian (Russell), 522 "Why Is Economics Not an Evolutionary Science?'' (Veblen),634 Why We Behave Like Microbe Hunters (Thurber), 606 Wieland; or, The Transformation. An American Tale (Brown), 128-132,133,137, 140 Wigglesworth, Michael, 110, 111 Wilcocks, Alexander, 125 Wild Boy of Aveyron, The (hard), see De I'education dun homme sauvage Wild Flag, The (White), 654 "Wild Peaches" (Wylie), 707, 712 Wilder, Thornton, 609 Wilkes, John, 503, 519, 522 Wilkins, Roy, 345 Will to Change, Poems 1968-70, The (Rich), 551, 557-559 "William Cullen Bryant" (Blanck), 173 "William Cullen Bryant" (Rocks), 173 William Cullen Bryant (Bigelow), 173 William Cullen Bryant (Bradley), 173

758 / WILL—ZULE William Cullen Bryant (Brown), 173 William Cullen Bryant (McLean), 173 William Cullen Bryant: Representative Selections (McDowell), 173 William the Conqueror, 507 Williams, Roger, 699 Williams, Stanley T., 173,251 Williams, Tennessee, 290,291 Williams, William Carlos, 254, 255, 259, 266, 275 Willis, N. P., 405 Wills, Garry, 71,294 Wilson, Edmund, 372, 407, 627, 646, 678, 709, 730 Wilson, Woodrow, 21, 474, 643 Wink, John H., 199 "Winter Piece, A" (Bryant), 150, 155 "Winter Scenes** (Bryant), see "Winter Piece, A" "Winter Sleep* * (Wylie), 711, 729 Winter Trees (Plath), 526, 539, 541 Wintemitz, Mary, 5*1 Cheever, Mrs. John (Mary Wintemitz) Winters, Yvor, 268, 275 Winthrop, John, 99, 100,101, 102, 105, 484, 485 "Wiser Than a God'* (Chopin), 208 Wismer, Helen Muriel, see Thurber, Mrs. James (Helen Muriel Wismer) "Witch Burning** (Plath), 539 "Witch of Wenham, The** (Whittier), 694, 696 "Witchcraft in Bullet Park** (Gardner), 198

Witherington, Paul, 148 Witherspoon, John, 504 Wolfe, Glenn Joseph, 402 Wolfe, James, 498 Wolfe, Thomas, 29 Wolff, Cynthia Griffin, 226 Wolle, Helen Eugenia,,w?e Doolittle, Mrs. Charles Leander (Helen Eugenia Wolle) Wollstonecraft, Mary, 126, 512, 554 "Woman Dead in Her Ponies, A'* (Rich), 574-575 Woman in White, The (Collins), 35,36 Woman's Share in Primitive Culture (Mason), 18 "Woman's Will, A: Kate Chopin on Selfhood, Wifehood, and Motherhood'* (Zlotnick), 226 Women and Economics (Gilman), 637 "Women Reformers and American Culture, 18701930" (Conway), 19, 27 Wonderful O, The (Thurber), 612 Wood, Mrs. Henry, 35 Woodbridge, John, 101, 102, 114 Woodrow, James, 349, 366 Woods, Robert A., 19,27 Woodwell, Roland B., 706 Woolf, Virginia, 553,714,718 Woollcott, Alexander, 664 "Word About Simple, A** (Jackson), 348 "Wordplay of James Thurber, The** (Eckler), 627 "Words** (Plath), 547 Wordsworth, William, 150, 151, 154, 161, 163, 312,

313, 349, 365, 375, 409, 416, 422, 607, 621, 622, 673, 674, 675, 676, 677, 710-711,729 Work (Alcott), 32-33, 42 World of Apples, The (Cheever), 191, 193 World Elsewhere, A: The Place of Style in American Literature (Poirier), 681 "World Is too Much with Us, The'* (Wordsworth), 312 "World in Thurber*s Fables, Tlie" (Weales), 627 "World of Tomorrow, The" (White), 663 Worldly Philosophers, The (Heilbroner), 644, 650 World's Greatest Hit, The: Uncle Tom's Cabin (Birdoff), 601 "Worship and Church Bells" (Paine), 521 "Wreath for a Bridal" (Plath), 537 "Wreck of Rivermouth, The" (Whittier), 694, 696-697 Wright, Celeste T., 730 Wright, Donald P., 706 Wright, Richard, 51, 52, 64, 332, 337 "Wright, Ellison, Baldwin —Exercising the Demon" (Bryant), 69 "Wright, the Protest Novel, and Baldwin's Faith" (Kim), 70 "Writing American Fiction" (Roth), 192, 431, 453 "Written History as an Act of Faith" (Beard), 492 Wyatt, Thomas, 369 Wylie, Elinor, 707-730 Wylie, Horace, 708, 709

Yale Review (publication), 174 Yamamoto, Isoroku, 491 "Yankee Gallimaufry" (Baker), 198 Yates, Norris W., 626 Yatron, Michael, 402, 478 Year's Life, A (Lowell), 405 "Years of Wonder" (White), 652, 653 Years With Rosst The (Thurber), 619, 681 Yeats, William B., 79, 80, 254, 257, 262, 388, 389 "Yellow Violet, TTie" (Bryant), 154, 155 Yorke, Dorothy, 258 "You Can't Go Home Again: James Baldwin and the South" (Dance), 70 "You Wouldn't Believe It" (Broyard), 198 Young, Alfred F., 525 Young Christian, The (Abbott), 38 "Young Dr. Gosse" (Chopin), 211,216 " 'Young Goodman Brown* and The Enormous Radio* ** (Ten Harmsel), 199 "Youth** (Hughes), 321 Yurka, Blanche, 67 Zabel, Morton, 721, 730 Zlotnick, Joan, 226 Zola, Emile, 207 "Zoo Revisited*' (White), 654 Zuebtin, Chartes, 5 Zuleika Dobson (Beerbohm), 714